Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It has been one hour and thirty-seven minutes since The Incident. It ocurred at 8:08 PM, already deep into overtime. You’ve spent every second since crammed into the office breakroom with the three coworkers who were unfortunate enough to be working late with you tonight, staring at the clock on the microwave. 

Beneath your blurry, unfocused stare, it ticks up again. One hour and thirty-eight minutes. You dig the heel of your hand into one aching eye and the digits smear into a red hash. Like the strike of the red pen no doubt someone in HR is wielding right now, marking the end of your time in this office, your future career in data analytics, your one-bedroom flat in Setagaya, your mother’s bragging rights about your flashy big-city corporate job.

One hour and thirty-eight minutes since the most recent incident. Nine years, six months, and two weeks, give or take, since the last. 

You’ve had a good run. You really hoped, for the past decade, that you were cured. That you left your curse behind you in your high school days, along with your ill-fitting uniform jumpers and collection of dorky gachapon rubber band bracelets. That false sense of security is why this happened. That’s why you lost control.

Happy birthday to you.

Your pulse jitters in your temples and the tips of your fingers. Beneath it, keeping erratic countertime, is the rhythm of your curse, battering against the inside of your ribs. You’ve tried all your old tricks, crumpling it and crushing it and shoving it to the back of the top shelf in the closet of your mind. Nothing’s working. 

Your throat and eyes sting and the red digits on the clock shimmer and blur into a haze. You can’t cry, and you can’t puke. Not with Chiba from management holding court in the corner and a security officer poking his helmeted head through the doorway every five minutes to take inventory and mumble something incomprehensible into his walkie. Ruining the breakroom floor and adding insult to injury is not going to help your case.

Chiba sits as far across the room as possible, fisting his tie clip like a talisman, flanked by your two senior coworkers at either hand. Ueno, your cubicle neighbor, is still nursing his left hand with a hank of paper towel. It looks like the bleeding’s stopped now. He didn’t accept the cloth you offered and he didn’t accept any of your profuse apologies.

The three of them hold their shoulders angled towards you to make smaller targets, their backs to the opposing wall. Ueno even used his good hand to shove some of the extra tables into a ramshackle barricade. Although they understand even less about the mechanics of The Incident than you do, they are certain, through some base, primal instinct, that they know who’s at fault.

They think it’s all because of you. And they’re right.

Security confiscated all the phones and there’s nothing left to do but wait out your sentence. You stare at the clock. You stare at the wall. You stare out the window at the accusatory blink of a low-flying plane. You stare at the tips of your leather work shoes, an early birthday gift to yourself, which are coated in a fine sugar crust of broken glass, like the cheap chain-bakery creme brulee you’d been planning to treat yourself to on the walk home. You scrape one shoe clean with the toe of the other, thoughtlessly, before coming to your senses and catching Chiba glaring at you over the rampart of his fort of tables. He looks like he might lunge across the barrier and close his fist around your throat instead.

The door coughs open, granting you a temporary stay of execution and admitting the helmeted security officer, still chanting incomprehensible code into his handheld. This time, he isn’t alone. The man accompanying him looms a full ten centimeters over his helmet, fifteen if you count his slicked-up shock of bleached hair. He’s wearing some kind of dark uniform, close-fitting like a runner’s, and a blindfold cut of similar cloth. 

He doesn’t look like a policeman. He looks like a cosplay waiter from an anime pop-up cafe who got lost on his smoke break.

The cloth must be thin enough to see through, because he makes a finger gun and aims it at Chiba. “No.” Ueno. “Nope.” Yamamoto. “Nah.” 

You’re last in line. He makes a jab in your direction, then snaps his fingers. You jump in your seat. “You.” He twirls his index finger and aims it back over his shoulder. “C’mon. Let’s go clean up your mess.”

He doesn’t look like a policeman, but he arrived with the security officer, who is now making impatient gestures for you to get a move on with the walkie. If there’s one thing that can be said in your employee file, it’s that you’re good at following direct orders. You rise to your feet. The broken glass crackles under your soles.

The blindfolded man sticks his hands in his pockets and lopes down the hallway, slump-shouldered, careless and casual. With his long, lean stature, he could almost knock an elbow on either side of the hall. You shuffle along in his wake, eyes fixed on the industrial grey carpeting. 

You remember your first trip down this hallway, bright-eyed and eager in a stiff new skirt suit, the ink still wet on your master’s degree. The little lurch of excitement you felt when you first laid eyes on the blazing Aoyama skyline through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Nothing between you and the horizon, nothing between you and the bright future all your report cards had been promising since you were four years old. Not a single incident on record since you moved to Tokyo.

It’s going to go the same way it always goes: the others know you’re the one to blame. They won’t see what you see and they won’t remember what you remember, but they’ll do their own calculations in the margins, adding up the damage to your desk and Ueno’s hand and the shattered window, throw in an extra digit and shuffle a decimal point or two to arrive at a likely explanation. The wrong method, but the correct solution: everything is, in fact, your fault. 

You’re going to be given the boot and blacklisted without a reference, and that’s only if you have the enormous good fortune to avoid prosecution. 

You wonder if Fumiya might let you dip into the wedding fund, assuming he doesn’t just ask for the ring back. You’re going to have to go back home and move in with your parents. Maybe they’ll let you have your old part-time job back at the corner grocery, so long as no one asks too many questions about what happened to your salaried post back in the big city.

You’re not from a big town. Everyone’s going to know what happened by Saturday. Probably because your mother’s told them. 

The blindfolded man strolls into the data analytics office and you peer around him, a cold January wind slapping your cheek. Your heart plummets four stories into the crosswalk below. It’s so, so much worse than last time. And it’s not going away.

A jagged-edged puncture has been gouged in one of the full-length windows, admitting frigid gutters of winter air. The glass didn’t shatter outward with the blast. It collapsed inward, and the largest tooth-edged shards hover in midair over the pulped remains of your desk, arranged in a vague rolling swell like the crest of a wave. Smaller needles of glass hover and wheel in a lazy radius in their shadow. 

Last summer, you visited a trendy walk-through art installation composed of fragments of mirror and floating neon lights, reflecting and refracting unto infinity. If you walked around the back of the exhibit, you could see the cleverly hidden fixtures. Even though you know what you’re seeing, even though you know what you’re capable of, there’s a very stubborn couple of centimers of brain cortex that are insisting someone must’ve snuck in behind you with string and wire. Some kind of new prank show, Japan’s hottest primetime slot: I thought a blew a hole in my workplace with my latent freakish supernatural abilities! Cue laugh track.

As you approach, your reflection flickers through each cracked panel, splintering and melding and shattering again. The throbbing in your head crescendoes with a low hum and a sickening roll of your stomach. You have to clamp a hand down on one of the still-intact desks as the edges of your vision flicker to grey static.

The blindfolded man surveys your damage, stretches his arms behind his head, and wolf-whistles. “Somebody really pissed you off today, huh? Women sure are scary!”

You throw an incredulous glance in his direction, but he isn’t looking at you. He’s whipping out his cellphone. “Hiiiiiiiiii, Masamichi!” he all but shouts into the receiver. “So, guess what, you’re never gonna believe this. It was just some office worker! Some random woman! Isn’t that hilarious?”

By the tone and tenor of his speech, his… friend? superior? on the other end of the line does not think this is hilarious. “Yeah, so funny! You shoulda sent Nanami on this one instead!”

You don’t say anything, but he still holds up a finger at you preemptively. “Yeah, it’s still open. Gotta say, I’m kinda impressed! She doesn’t play around! It’s been, like, what, an hour and a half? You wanna see? Hey,” he says, directed at you. “Go stand over there.”

You stand where he indicates. “Is this… for the report?” you ask. 

You know what you look like right now. Can see the twigs of frizzy hair that have escaped from your chignon, closing in on the corners of your vision. Saw your face in the hovering sheets of glass, flushed and blotchy, glassy-eyed and crazed. 

And now it will be immortalized in police record for the rest of your natural life.

“Huh? What report? Scoot, scoot, closer,” he says, sliding his palms together. “Closer…. perfect. Big smile now!” He gives you an enormous thumbs up, holds up his phone, and the camera sound effect pops, maximum volume, like an engine turning over. You flinch. “Okay, one more!”

His turns his back, makes a huge grin and a V-sign, and snaps a selfie. 

You think you might be starting to hate this guy.

“For the police report,” you say as he fiddles with his camera app, humming tunelessly to himself. 

“Police report? You are just a laugh riot, you know that?” A series of clicks as he fires off the photo in what sounds like seven different text chats. “Don’t you know who I am?”

Of course you don’t, but you still rack your brain like a student called out for not paying attention in class. “Here, I’ll give you a hand, since you’ve been living in the walls of this office building for the past twenty years and have never seen a picture.” He snaps both fingers and aims them off somewhere stage left. “The strongest living jujutsu sorcerer? Famed bearer of the Six Eyes? Incidentally also very good-lookin’?” 

You can absolutely not say out loud, to this not-policeman’s face, I don’t know who you are and you look like an anime pop-up cafe waiter who got lost on your smoke break.

His voice rises about ten octaves as he clasps his hands to his cheeks. “Woooooow, it’s really Gojo Satoru, in person! He’s even better looking in real life! Will you show me your technique? Will you sign an autograph? Take a selfie with me? Will you shake my haaaaand?” He pouts at you.

Your head is pounding like the bass line at the idol concert he apparently thinks the two of you are attending, the word sorcerer bounding off the inside of your cracking skull. You stare at him blankly.

“Tough crowd tonight!” He claps and indicates your handiwork. “Alright, go ahead and close it. I’m not even mad, on account of how funny this is, but I got a coupon for a free donut with a regular-sized drink today, and I got until 10:30 to use it.”

You look at him. You look at the Incident. You are going to either start crying or throw up, or the worst possible scenario, both at once. “Excuse me…. I’m really sorry, but…” His lopsided little frown broadens with every syllable. “I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

“Close it. Your little domain, although it’s pretty generous of me to call it that.” He crosses his arms.

Close what? It’s never happened like this before. You’ve smashed windows, walls, tile, concrete, the rear bumper of your father’s 1996 Honda Civic, your neighbor’s thumb, your shot at the high school girls’ softball team. But the damage has never stuck around, frozen in time like this. 

The humming in your skull rises. To your horror, the shards of glass shiver, then expand outward half a meter with a breaking-ice creak. You throw yourself behind the nearest intact desk and raise your arms to protect your head. “I can’t! I don’t know how!”

“You opened it!” He throws up his hands. “Ain’t you done this before?”

“I don’t know! I don’t think so! I don’t know why it’s like this, I was just—“ Pissed off. Just like he’d said, you were pissed off. It was 8:08 PM and you were working overtime on your twenty-eighth birthday, because your coworker Hanae had quit of nowhere and someone had to take on her workload, and if you didn’t pull your weight it reflected badly not only on you, but on Fumiya over in sales.

You’d liked Hanae. She was bubbly and always smiling and wore pink ribbons in her hair, and on Tuesday and Thursday mornings she brought you brown sugar milk bobas from her brother’s shop. She’d looked tired and drawn lately. She’d lost weight. She called in this morning and said she had some kind of health emergency, and couldn’t return to work for the foreseeable future. She was sorry for the position she’d put you all in.

“Emergency,” Ueno was scoffing at 8:07. “Whatever. She just didn’t want to say she can’t hack it. She was always kind of a bimbo, you know?”

“Well, we know management didn’t exactly hire her for her resume,” said Yamamoto, with a lewd twist of his hand over his chest and a snide, sidelong glance in your direction.

They knew you had to just sit there and listen and take it, and they knew you knew you had to just sit there and listen and take it, and all you wanted was for them to shut the fuck up for twenty seconds. For a mute button. For a door to slam. 

Well, you’d gotten what you wanted, all right.

You try your hardest to do what you did then, backwards. You channel various relaxing things: an onsen in winter, a lavender aromatherapy diffuser, a soundtrack of light instrumental jazz. You make eye contact with your feverish reflection in the hovering glass. You concentrate until your eyes cross. “I’m really sorry,” you say. “I’m sorry! I can’t make it stop! I don’t know how!”

“Ugh. Fine, whatever. Didn’t think I was gonna have to break this out twice on a Tuesday. Get over here. Behind me.”

You scuttle behind him with your arms still over your head, emergency-drill style. It’s not like you have any dignity left to lose here. 

He raises his right hand, twists his middle and index fingers together, and your unreliable eyes register a second, complete sphere superimposed onto your half-formed dome of glass, a flat black nothing against the backdrop of the illuminated night sky. A hole in the world, the color of the absence of light. You can feel it, even if you can’t quite see it, like you could feel the impending four-story plunge if you went up to the shattered window and closed your eyes. 

He’s like you, you think. A person like you. In the sense that a puddle and the Pacific are both bodies of water.

It leaves a blinding white afterimage and then the moaning rush of the resuming wind. The glass atomizes to glittering dust, sifting over the ruin of your desk.

Your relief is instantaneous, like breaching the surface after a long, agonizing swim upward. You gasp in heaves of the freezing winter air, one hand fisted on your chest. That awful humming in your ears is gone. That second heartbeat dims and recedes. You still think you might puke all over what’s left of the carpet.

The man—Gojo Satoru, apparently very famous and good-looking—surveys you with his chin in his hand, leaning in for a closer look. He has to fold himself nearly in half to do it. You’re not a particularly short woman, but he’s still got at least a good thirty centimeters on you, not counting the hair. You scoot backwards and nearly take yourself out on a mound of torn and twisted power cords. “First time castin’ an incomplete domain, huh? You must’ve practiced.”

“It wasn’t on purpose!” you say, holding up your hands, on the verge of shrill and hysterical. 

He hooks a finger under his blindfold and lifts it partway. The eye beneath is a blazing, spring-sky blue. Colored contacts? His eyelashes are as pale as his hair. “Your parents teach you? They sorcerers too?”

Your parents are the most normal people alive, and your brother’s finally gotten his life back on track, and this is the last thing any of them need right now. Your mother’s absolute nightmare scenario: both of her children with an arrest record. “No, they don’t… they’re not… Please don’t call them.”

“Anyone else train you, or are you self-taught?” He leans in and that blue eye bores into yours. His voice has dropped register, completely shed the light, mocking tone. He sounds like a different person. “You break more than windows? Use it on people?”

You might be starting to hate this guy and bawling in front of him is maybe the only thing, bar a call to your mother, that could make today worse. “… I cut my coworker’s hand,” you say, in case security didn’t tell him yet. You don’t want to get called out for lying on the record. “And I’ve broken someone’s finger before.”

“Hah!” He lets the blindfold slide back into place, and with it, his grin. “I should be worried you’re a curse user or something, but you obviously don’t got the guts!”

You sense you should be relieved, but also that you are being insulted without knowing the full context, which somehow makes it even worse. He drops into a squat, stretches with his hands on his knees, and springs back up. “Alright, let’s blow this pop stand. I’ll walk you to the station.”

You need to get your purse from your locker. You need to get your phone back. You need a good defense lawyer, even though you think you’ll only be able to afford below-average. Should you have one already? Fumiya would know. “Am—am I being arrested?”

“Yep! You’re slated for execution.” 

You really might cry. He wags his pair of finger guns at you again. “Heh heh, kidding! You should see the look on your face.”

Your first time meeting someone like you in twenty-eight years, and you hate him.

“The answer to that is.. ummmmm, soooort of? I’m taking you into custody, for now. C’mon, let’s see some hustle, I got places to be.”

You scrape up the few intact remnants of your property at your desk—your potted succulent (cracked in half), framed photo of yourself and your childhood best friend Keiko at your twentieth birthday (smashed), and metal water bottle (dented, despite the lifetime guarantee), and leave four years of your life behind.

Chiba is lying in wait by the elevator banks. There’s no point asking if you’re fired. You know you’re fired. You could not be more fired. Instead, you bow and say, “I’m really, really sorry for everything.”

He glares down at you, dispassionate, a lord rejecting a supplicant. “You can clear out your locker sometime this week. Security will escort you.”

There isn’t much to clear out. You get your phone returned and you get your coat. In honor of your birthday, you’d chosen your favorite pink wool overcoat, the one with the wooden toggles and the matching beret, without considering how it doesn’t do much in the way of actually keeping you warm. 

Your escort doesn’t have a coat and doesn’t seem particularly bothered by the cold outside. He sticks his hands back in his pockets and whistles. Even though your breath streams behind you in white ribbons, his leaves no trail at all.

“Soooo,” he says. “Normie parents. You got any other sorcerer relatives in your family?”

Sorcerer. The same word he used back up on the fourth floor. “That’s really what we’re called?” you ask. Maybe he just made it up on the spot.

He stops in his tracks, turns around and lifts the blindfold up so you can see his incredulous expression. “Wow. How old are you?”

It’s your turn to freeze in place, shoulders bristling beneath your too-thin coat. He raises his hands. “Whoops, my bad! Forgot you aren’t supposed to ask a woman that!” Your breath clouds your vision as you sigh, very slowly, through your closed lips. “You’ve really never met another one?”

You’d always figured there were other people like you out there, somewhere. You were a freak and an anomaly, but you couldn’t be only freak and anomaly in the world. But until now, you’d given up on ever meeting one. They were hiding, like you, and they were way better at it. “Not that I know of.”

“Huh. Where’re you from?”

“Around Sendai.” Your hometown’s small enough that no one in the big city recognizes the name. 

“Hrm.” He props his chin on his fist.

“How many of… us are there?”

“Honestly? Not a lot. We’re always shorthanded.”

People like you. Not a lot, but higher than zero. 

Maybe one of them knows how to fix you. 

The hope that bursts through you is so intense as to be painful, warmth returning to a numb, cramped limb after too long in the cold. “Can you get rid of it? Is it possible to be… not a sorcerer anymore?”

“Nope! It’s how your brain’s made. Only way to get rid of it would kill you.”

Oh. 

Your hands really are starting to go numb. You wiggle your arms inside your coat and hug yourself. 

You’ve been tracing the route you would normally take home at the end of the day. You’re gazing longingly at the entrance down to Aoyama-Itchome station when your escort scoots to a halt and indicates the stairwell. “Alright, where’s your stop at?”

“I thought we were going to the station?” you say.

He looks at the entrance, then you, then back at the entrance, and holds out his hands palms-up. 

“The police station. You’re letting me go home?”

Your own bed. Hot shower. The leftover oden in your fridge. You’ve changed your mind. This man may be your favorite person in all the world.

“Sure, why not? You’re not gonna be able to do that twice in one day, not at your cursed energy levels.” He jabs a finger at you. “That said, if you get up to anything else tonight it’s gonna be my problem now, so don’t. Anyway, this is just for tonight.”

You dig your fingers into your upper arms. “So… what happens tomorrow?”

“A huge pain in my ass is what. The higher-ups—that’s the sorcerer higher-ups, the big bosses of people like us—are gonna throw a fit about you.” He waggles his fingers like he’s telling a ghost story.  “They’re big on secrecy and not letting the normies know we exist, so opening a domain in a public building is guaranteed gonna get all their panties in a twist.”

After twenty-eight years, you finally meet people like you, and you’re already in hot water with them. It figures.

“I can swing somethin’ for you, probably, but you’re gonna have to prove you can control yourself. And you’re going to need training for that. So tomorrow… you’re going back to high school!” 

He beams at you. You pray that this is simply a metaphor.

“I gotta get going, because I need to make some more phone calls. Gotta let the principal know we’re coming and all that.”

You’re still just coming around to the idea that people like you have some kind of organized infrastructure to begin with, but a principal? “It’s a real school? Like, a school school?”

“Duh, like a school school. I teach there. First-years. Gimme your phone.”

If you had to guess this man’s day job, “schoolteacher” would not have made the shortlist of attempts one through twenty. He makes an impatient gesture with one hand. You reluctantly surrender your phone. “What’s your name, crazy?” he asks as he fiddles with your cell in one hand, his own in the other.

“Hasegawa,” you bristle. “Hasegawa Risa.”

“I’ll pick you up here tomorrow, Hasegawa Risa. Ten AM. Don’t be late, principal hates it, and we’re gonna have to sweet talk him a little.”

When he hands your phone back, he’s entered himself as a new contact and set his picture to a zoomed-in crop of the selfie he took back in the office, grinning hugely and making a V-sign in front of you and your life-ruining disaster. 

When you glance back up, he’s gone. Completely gone. Not visible down the street in either direction. You wish you could do that too. Sink down through the sidewalk into the sewers and start a new life keeping the books for rodents.

You sleepwalk through the train ride back to your stop in Setagaya and check your phone alerts. Several missed calls from Keiko, followed by a string of texts. Several missed calls from Fumiya. An alert from your farming sim game informing you one of your cows has gotten sick, and then a second alert notifying you that the cow has now died.

You read Keiko’s texts in the elevator up to your apartment. hey bitch haru and i want to do a birthday vc with you

K: ???

K: ricchan what the hell. you better not still be at work

K: whatever have a haru-tan anyway because it’s your birthday (This is followed by a photo of Keiko’s adorable infant daughter, Haru, slumbering in a Sailor Moon onesie.)

K: Hi, Risa! This is Masahiro. Happy Birthday! Please come and visit us soon, we would love to see you :) (Keiko’s husband’s most endearing trait is that he texts like a retired grandfather.)

K: i hope you’re not answering because fumiya finally got off his ass to take you to Cowboy Birthday. yeehaw bitch

Cowboy Birthday is a tradition from back in your college days. You go square-dancing at one of the American West theme bars in matching pastel ten-gallon hats. You haven’t been able to make it happen on either of your birthdays for the past two years, since Keiko moved out of your old place to go to Nagoya with Masahiro, and you moved into this one on your own.

Not a dorm room. Not a shit shoebox studio. Not a shit shoebox studio converted into a two-bedroom with cheap wall dividers. A real bedroom, with a real kitchen, with real natural light. A double closet you get to fill all by yourself and a balcony you only use to hang laundry because you don’t like people being able to look up at you from the street. An apartment for an adult woman who’s got her life together.

After everything that’s happened today, you’re crying over an apartment.

You stand in the doorway and stare at your phone screen until you remember to shuck your shoes off your aching feet. You type. keiko i really fucked up at work toda—You erase. something happened at work—You erase. do you remember that night at the resevoir back in middle scho—Erase.

R: hi girls!!! sorry i missed you. busy day at work. smoochies for haru-taaaaan

She responds immediately. overtime on your birthday? i’ll kill them

K: next time i make it back to tokyo we are doing a super double cowboy birthday so get ready. love you mwah

You collapse onto your bed and yank the covers up to your chin, still fully clothed, pantyhose and all. Your finger hovers over Fumiya’s contact. The last time the two of you spoke was this morning. You’d had a… not a fight. Not a real fight. A spat. He’d called to tell you he hadn’t made reservations or gotten you a gift for your birthday or anything, because he knew neither of you liked to make a big deal out of stuff like that. Besides, the Valentine’s trip you’re taking next month to Okinawa kind of counts anyway, right? 

You had not thought it counted. You’d had a spat, and now this.

He picks up on the first ring. “Risa. Are you all right?”

His voice closes over you like warm water. You love his voice. It’s the reason he’s the rising star of the sales division. It’s the reason why, when he asked you out at a work social three years ago, you said yes. “Yeah. I’m okay. I’m sorry it’s so late. I’m sorry I didn’t call you back sooner. I was… there was… a problem at the office,” you trail off, throat closing up.

“I know, honey. I know. Chiba called me.”

Shit, shit shit. And you’re already crying. Hot tears trickle from the corners of your eyes into your hair. “I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, it was an accident, I—“

“It’s okay, baby,” he soothes. “It was just an accident, right? I’m sure they’ll sort everything out.”

“I got… f-fired,” you sniffle.

“Did he say you were fired?” His voice rises. “That isn’t what he said to me.”

“No, but…. he said I could come pick up my things this week.”

A silence. You can see him in his apartment, tie loosened and top two buttons of his shirt undone, perched sidelong on one of the arms of his sofa with an open beer can in one hand. “I’m sure we can work something out. I’ll go to HR tomorrow. Everyone knows you, sweetheart. They know how reliable you are.”

The stinging in your throat is gone, and in its place is a firm, hard lump. He doesn’t know how easy it is to lose every dreg of goodwill you’ve managed to shore up. All things considered, you really lucked out today, but there’s no handouts coming from upper management. The only reason they’ll ever throw you a rope is so you can hang yourself with it.

He’s going to leave you. You can hear it in the distance like the horn of an oncoming train. What he likes about you is how reliable you are. How dependable. How you’re good with budgeting and you can whip up a mean homemade kinpira. How you’ll make a good mother someday.

Your shared dreams for your future are already as shattered as that window on the fourth floor.

“No! No, that’s… you don’t have to do that.” You grip your phone and squeeze your burning eyes closed. “Not yet, anyway. I have to meet somebody tomorrow. To, uh, talk about it.”

“Someone from HR? From the authorities?”

“… Kind of.” You fantasize about a world in which you told him. A world where he wouldn’t think you were joking, and if he didn’t think you were joking, he wouldn’t believe you, and if he believed you, he’d call the real, ordinary police. 

Maybe you can tell him after tomorrow, at least some of it, when you have something to say. And maybe some of it will even be good news. You only have the word of one person, right? Maybe the blindfolded first-year high school teacher they send to bring in pissed-off salarywomen isn’t completely up on his information. Maybe someone else knows more. Maybe there’s still a chance someone could fix you. 

“I’ll know more tomorrow. I’ll call you back then, okay? I promise.”

Kicking the can down the road. That’s what you’ve always been best at.

“Do you want me to come over?” 

You clamp your teeth down on a yes. If he comes over he’s going to see you bawling your eyes out and stress-ironing a suit to wear to an interview at, you can’t even say it to yourself in your own mind, school for sorcerers. If he comes over he’s going to hold you, and then you’ll spill everything. You’re a good liar, but not under duress. “Not tonight. But thanks.”

“What a birthday, huh?” he says. 

A text alert from Gojo Satoru lights up the screen.

G: HEY

G: REMINDER

G: 10 AM TOMORROW

G: DO NOT BE LATE! 

That stupid selfie is lingering at the top of your screen. You replace it with a stock photo of a daikon radish. The resemblance is uncanny. You feel just a teeny, tiny sliver better.

You roll over and fiddle with the edge of the covers. Probably you should get up and eat. Probably you should take your contacts out and try to sleep. It’ll make an even more dismal first impression if you show up at your interview with eye bags that qualify as checked luggage. You’ll have to pick out something to iron.

What the hell do you wear to an interview at school for sorcerers?

Chapter Text

You are not late in the morning. You arrive at the designated meeting point at 9:35 AM and spend the remaining minutes glaring down at your watch as if you can force it to manifest conspicuously tall men with stupid hair. 

Because it’s still the middle of January, it’s frigid, and even though you wore a good coat today, you have to keep ducking in and out of the nearby chain coffee shop to regain the feeling in your hands, and thus also have to keep purchasing drinks to justify your presence there.

The person who is late is the individual who specifically stressed the importance of timeliness.

“Mornin’! Sorry for the delay!” Gojo Satoru swans up looking nonchalant, well-rested, and completely unapologetic at 10:17 AM, right when you were considering resorting to extreme measures and dialing his cellphone. He raises a hand. “Got caught up with something. Dig the little salarywoman getup, old man Yaga’s gonna love that. You ready?”

You spent half an hour blow-drying your hair this morning, only for it to get clawed by the wind while you paced around the block for an additional half hour. Your bangs are sticking straight out like a doorfront awning. There’s already two runs in your stockings. Concealer is spackled under your eyes to poorly camouflage the shadows you have from only three hours of broken sleep, after stress ironing, stress vacuuming, and stress printing out six copies of your updated resume. In the past forty-five minutes you have consumed two regular coffees, an earl grey tea latte, and a hibiscus coconut milk chiller. 

“Yes. Ready,” you say.

He tilts his head sideways, chin aimed towards the coffee shop bag you’re white-knuckling. “Oooh, what’s in there? Train snacks?”

You thrust it towards him. “It’s for you.” A peace offering. “Donuts,” you say as he peeks inside. “Because you didn’t get to use your coupon last night.”

He laughs. “I did, actually, but thanks! Already suckin’ up to your teacher, huh?”

“I’ll be in your class?” There have to be other teachers, right?

“Heh, don’t look so disappointed!” He grins. “There’s only one class each year. I teach the first years, and you’ll be the equivalent of a first-year. That’s if the principal and the top brass sign off, that is.”

He doesn’t take the stairwell down to the subway, but strolls a few blocks overland to the Shinjuku train station. “How far away is it?” You’d assumed the place would be here, in Tokyo proper.

“‘Bout an hour. We’ll change trains once.” 

All the way out to the distant suburbs, then. You stop panicking about your future and state of your life, and begin panicking about the more immediate problem at hand—making conversation with this man for an entire hour while stuck on a train. 

Luckily for you, he seems completely disinterested in you once the train pulls away from the station. He slouches with one ankle propped on the opposite knee, bouncing his foot, intent on his phone screen. You skim over your set of canned answers for job interviews, which you dug out of your old portfolio in the middle of your unhinged stress vacuuming. It’s a little out of date now that your biggest weakness as a prospective employee is the tendency to inflict property damage with your mind. Your heart is buzzing around in your throat, from nerves and from all the coffee. 

You change trains. Gojo eats both of the donuts you brought. You know that if you wanted a donut, you could have bought one for yourself. But he could’ve asked you if you wanted some of the matcha cream-filled one, at least. In an act of petty vengeance, you sneak a peek at whatever’s got him so glued to his phone. It’s one of those monster trainer games. 

Fair’s fair, then. You open your farming sim to discover that all the sheep have contracted a disease that turns their wool moldy and unsellable, and the only cure is a potion, which must be purchased from the weekly traveling merchant NPC, which you’ll have to set an alarm for on Friday. You cannot afford to replace your prized strawberry milk cow that died yesterday. You consider dipping into your manga app instead, but the thought of Gojo glancing over and getting an eyeful of a splash page from My Boss Is a Ghost (And He’s Handsome?!) would kill you on the spot and render you a ghost yourself, so you return to your interview questions.

You arrive at your stop just before noon. A miserable little drizzle has started to fall, so you are immensely thankful to find a sleek black car idling outside the station. The driver, a spectacled man near your own age with a kindly and incredibly exhausted face, even helps you with your briefcase.

The car swerves outside of the pretty mountainside town and into wooded foothills, and after five minutes of watching the bare trees close in around the road and suppressing the sinking urge that perhaps this was all an elaborate ruse to lure you into an isolated area and then dispose of your body—the tired driver looks too nice to be able to murder someone in the woods with blunt force trauma by shovel, but you can never really tell—when you pull up to the gate to the school.

You aren’t sure what you were expecting from “school for sorcerers,” but it wasn’t an enormous temple-style complex sprawling across kilometers of landscaped grounds. It could make the shrine in your hometown ashamed to go out in public. The bespectacled driver notices your gawping and says something about its official front as a private religious school. 

Sure, the kind of private religious school that people attend to learn about how to aid and abet their future politician husband’s tax fraud. Even if you do get in, you now have a secondary issue: there’s no way in hell you can afford this place. 

Your knees are quaking in your stockings as you climb out of the car at the massive arched gate, trailing Gojo up a wooden-planked pathway to the largest building at the apex of the schoolgrounds. The rain’s paused, but the campus is already ninety percent mud. Your low heels are caked with grime.

“Okay, time to meet the old man….. uh, now!” says Gojo, checking his phone clock. “He might give you a hard time, it’s just how he is. I’d tell you to stay frosty, but…” He makes a gesture encompassing your briefcase, royal blue skirt suit, and sensible pumps. “You seem like you got this.” 

The principal is waiting beyond a set of enormous double doors and an endless pillar-lined hall. “You’re late. Again,” he announces at your approach.

Old Man Yaga isn’t old at all. He’s maybe pushing fifty, highest estimate. His square chin, meticulously maintained fade, and dark sunglasses give the impression of a club bouncer rather than a high school principal. The stormy expression on his face is in direct contrast with the amigurumi felting tool in his hand. You recognize it well from the period in grad school when you thought you might pick up the hobby, only for your supplies to languish at the back of your closet for five years.

The small dais he’s sitting on is covered in plush toys of varying size, some nearly as large as you are. Maybe he runs an online shop as a side hustle? You know from your sister-in-law’s chronic financial woes that it’s hard to save up on a teacher’s salary. Even, perhaps, a swanky private school teacher’s salary. You want to ask about his prices—Haru would love one of these—but you’re already late and, as promised, he hates it. If your knees quake any harder they’re going to knock together and snap like a snare drum.

 “I thought I told you to stop being late, Satoru,” he says, glaring at Gojo. Your knees oscillate at a slightly lower speed. At least he knows you’re not the one to blame.

“C’mon, it’s only been like ten minutes.”

“Seventeen minutes,” Yaga replies, before turning his attention, like the swivel of a police searchlight, onto you. “You must be Hasegawa Risa. That was an interesting series of phone calls I had to take last night regarding you.”

You are very familiar with the next part of the appropriate social script, which is grovel. “I’m very sorry for the trouble. And sorry for being late.” You clasp your hands and bow. “Thank you for taking the time to interview me.”

“You’re very polite, Miss Hasegawa,” he says. “Certain other individuals of your generation could stand to learn something from you.”

The only other nearby individual from your generation mimes clutching his heart with a little “Yowch.”

“Satoru here—“ you can practically feel the heat behind Yaga’s sunglasses—“has told me a little about the difficult situation you’re in. Our governing body, the higher-ups responsible for jujutsu society, takes our secrecy from the public very seriously. They are going to demand proof that you can control your abilities, or they are going to ensure you are incarcerated.”

You clamp a hand down on your briefcase. “Yes. I understand.”

“Satoru has agreed to sponsor you as a student.” In your peripheral vision, Gojo, leaning against one of the pillars with his arms crossed, flashes you a thumbs-up. “However, there are a few things you should know about the requirements for enrollment. I’m assuming he did not explain them to you, because he never bothers.” This he directs at Gojo, who gives an innocent shrug.

“Um… he said this was a school for, uh, people like me? Like us.”

Yaga tucks away his felting needle and adjusts his sunglasses with the tip of one finger. “That’s correct, but you wouldn’t be a conventional student here. Sorcerer education takes place early. Your classmates will be significantly younger than you.”

You don’t like the sound of that. “Um… do you mind if I ask how much younger?”

His mouth is a grim line. “This is a technical college. Right now, we’ve only got first and second years.”

So ‘back to high school’ was neither a joke nor a metaphor. Fantastic.

“Most sorcerers with an innate technique manifest it at ages four to six. Do you remember how old you were when you first became aware of your power?”

Five and a half. Playground at the park down the street from your family’s old apartment. You tried to swing in a loop, fell off the swingset, landed on your right ear, and left a ten-meter crater in the sand. “Around that age,” you say, your small voice rendered even smaller by the cavernous room. “Five.”

“Satoru tells me you have never, to your knowledge, met another jujutsu sorcerer.”

“Yes. Not that I know of.”

“The primary duty of the sorcerers who train here is the exorcism of cursed spirits. Can you see cursed spirits?” 

You know what he’s talking about, though you’ve called them by various other names over the years. Hallucination, nightmare, say anything and they’ll think you’re crazy, ignore ignore ignore. You haven’t seen one since your own high school graduation, since moving to Tokyo, since your vain hope that you were cured. Since age seventeen. 

“I used to. I haven’t for a long time.”

He grunts. “Then you have the ability. My guess is that you have been actively suppressing it.” Well, you’ve certainly been trying. “Have you ever engaged one in combat?”

Eleven years old. Middle school. Rumors were going around about some ghost that your classmates saw reflected in the water of the resevoir at sunset. At a sleepover at Keiko’s house, she thought it’d be cute to sneak out and try to get a look, impress your classmates. You hadn’t wanted to go. You’d complained the whole time. 

When the monster climbed out of the resevoir, water sloughing off it its buckled back and twenty eyes, you put yourself between her and it. You don’t remember much of what happened afterwards, until the part where your mother picked you up from the police station. “Yes.”

“Have you performed a successful exorcism?” When you nod, he asks, “How many?”

“One—no, uh, two, I think.” Seventeen years old. That thing that looped a fleshy noose around your throat in the hotel stairwell on your college tour trip. You aren’t completely sure you got rid of it, but it was mostly in pieces at the end. 

“Most of our incoming first-year students have higher numbers,” he says, bluntly. The fifteen-year-olds. “As a student here, that’s what you’ll spend your time doing. Tuition will be waived—“ Hope soars anew—“in exchange for your providing an essential service to the public by assisting in exorcisms.” The immediate downturn. “It’s dangerous work, as I’m certain you’re aware. And it takes a certain type of person, Miss Hasegawa.” He looks at you expectantly.

So that’s the catch. The top brass don’t have enough people to do the job, and they need the numbers. 

“Why are you here?” asks Yaga. 

You straighten your back and shoulders. You may have graduated high school ten years ago, but your muscle memory hasn’t forgotten what to do when you’re called up in front of the class. “Um… to prove that I’m able to control my curse… uh, sorcery.”

“And after that? A year of education should be sufficient to prove the point, even to the higher-ups.” A year. You inform the sensation settling in your stomach like a gulp of icewater that it could be so much worse. A year isn’t nothing, but you’ve waited out years before. “Is your goal to become a professional jujutsu sorcerer?”

People do that? You wonder what the pay is like. Ultimately irrelevant, because you wouldn’t be any good at it. “May I ask what the options are?”

“At that point, it will be up to you. No one is forced to participate in exorcism at a professional level. Most don’t have what it takes for the long term.” He’s looking at you like he thinks you don’t have it. That’s okay, because he’s right. You don’t have it. You’ve known that since you were seventeen years old, alone in a hotel hallway, dry heaving into a decorative vase. “The assistant managerial staff and the windows—the people responsible for logging curse sightings—are always hiring individuals with curse sight. Or, if you wanted, you could even rejoin society and work a conventional job.”

If any job will take you, with your resume in shreds. He adjusts his glasses again. “You’d start with a clean slate. Your… accident can be stricken from the record. The higher-ups prefer no one asks too many questions about it, anyway.”

Your heart quickens. You risk a sidelong glance at Gojo. “There’s… no way to turn it off, right? There’s no way for me to get rid of it?”

“Not without permanent brain damage.”

A year. It’ll go by fast. It’ll be like getting a second master’s. And at the end, you’ll never have to worry about being dangerous, or crazy, or a freak, ever again. 

You bow your head. “Then that’s my goal. I want to learn how to handle it responsibly and then rejoin society.”

He grunts. “Decisive, I’ll give you that. Let’s see your technique.”

He rests his chin on his steepled fingers. Your heart sinks from your throat back to its natural position and then keeps on going, down to the lacqured floor you really, really don’t want to have to pay to fix. “Any time now.”

You address the no doubt very expensive floor. “I, uh… I wouldn’t want to break anything.”

He folds his steepled fingers together and cracks his knuckles. The sound echoes between the lacquered pillars like a pinball. “Miss Hasegawa. I don’t think you understand what’s at stake here. You have caused a lot of trouble for many people, two of whom are in the room with you right now.”

You hear a loud sigh from somewhere off to your right.

“You have injured a civilian by accident. You may think this is an acceptable risk, since the consequences were minor. You can’t expect to get that lucky a second time. Not to mention that in the field, your comrades’ lives may depend on your ability to utillize your technique.” The cold pit in your stomach rears up and clamps a fist around your throat. “The entire reason you are here is to learn how to properly control your technique. If you will not deploy it, this exercise is pointless. Demonstrate it now or this interview is over.”

You do try. You close your eyes and go inward, into the place where you crumple and bind and shove your curse, to the back of the highest shelf in the closet of your mind. You stand on your toes and grasp it, unravel it, fill your hands with it. The hum of your curse rises and fills your ears. That awful second heartbeat strums beneath your breastbone.

Nothing happens.

“I’m trying,” you say, holding up your hands as Yaga opens his mouth, “I’m trying, I promise, but…” It only activates when you’re stressed or injured or pissed off. You’re not exactly relaxed now, but the results have never been consistent. “Um… I don’t know if I can make it happen on cue. Usually I’m trying to make sure I can turn it off, so…” A bead of sweat trickles down your hairline and into the collar of the blouse you so carefully pressed three times last night.

“She needs a trigger.”

You jerk your chin to your right, where Gojo is lifting his blindfold with a thumb, revealing one jewel-bright eye. “Her technique’s a shield. It absorbs a certain threshold of energy and then reflects it back outward. It’s like if Wargreymon had to take damage to activate Terra Force.”

Incomprehensible metaphor aside, that’s how it works? “Really? How can you tell?” 

“Got real good eyes,” he says, and winks before letting the fabric drop back into place. “Cut her some slack, old man.” Gratitude washes over you in a warm wave. “Even you can see how crap her cursed energy circulation is. It’s worse than the average four-year-old.” The wave immediately evaporates.

Yaga grunts. “It’s active?” 

Gojo makes an okay sign. “Yep. She’ll be fine!”

With a jerk of Yaga’s hand, one of the plush dolls on the dais gets up and moves. You clap your own hands to your mouth, trying to shove your shriek back in.

“Calm down, Miss Hasegawa. This is Cathy.” The plush is roughly your own height, with a crown of triangular hair and beady button eyes. The way it lopes forward is surprisingly natural to witness, even with the way its legs buckle slightly under its own top-heavy weight. You slide back half a meter as it advances towards you. “She’s a cursed corpse animated by my technique. If you enroll here, you’re going to have to get used to seeing sorcery in use.”

“Sorry,” you mumble. “And sorry, Cathy.”

Cathy is not interested in your apologies. Cathy’s stuffed fists are the size of small melons and her button eyes are focused singularly on violence.

“Keep your shield up, Hasegawa,” Gojo calls to you, right before Cathy swings an adorable stuffed fist back for a piston punch.

You cringe with both hands extended in front of you, both for practical reasons and also because you look unbelievably stupid right now, about to get whacked by a walking plush doll. You don’t have to hold position for long. Cathy is fast and, despite the malevolence in her button eyes, polite. She strikes your quivering palms like she’s running drills in a martial arts class. You don’t feel the contact, but the force of each strike tugs at the sleeves of your blazer.

You squeeze your eyes shut as the low hum in your ears rises to a shriek. Your curse detonates, a burst of sharp light and harsh sound and explosive force. 

The lacquered floor is scuffed, but only a little, and there are hairline cracks in the two pillars nearest to you. Cathy is thrown back onto the edge of the dais, her back bent backwards at a queasy angle, but she springs to her floppy legs again without delay. Minimal damage. Your knees nearly buckle in relief.

“Fine,” says Yaga. “You pass.”

You let out a sigh that hisses into a teakettle squeak as Cathy darts towards you again. “Sorry. Forgot to turn her off again. Congratulations on your acceptance, Miss Hasegawa. Satoru will explain security to you and find someone to show you the girls’ dormitory.”

Your dream of keeping your apartment and taking the train to school bursts like a watermelon dropped on the sidewalk. At your no doubt crestfallen expression, he says, “All our students live on campus. So do the assistant managers, teaching staff, and several active professional sorcerers who use the school as a home base. We can’t make an exception for you.”

At least you won’t stand out completely on the grounds. 

A year. You remind yourself again what the alternatives are. You ought to be grateful. You have to show him that you’re grateful. You bow. “Thank you very much, Yaga-sensei. And thank you again for your time.”

Yaga turns to Gojo and points at you. “See? Try that sometime.” Somehow, even with the blindfold, you can tell he’s rolling his eyes.

You sag beneath one of the many symbolic archways as you pass back outside into the weak sunlight. Caught between one world and the next, you think, tilting your head back to look at the wooden barrier overhead. “Not bad, not bad,” says Gojo, sauntering out behind you. He holds one hand upright. It takes you an embarassingly long time to parse that he’s offering you a high five. He doesn’t mess around with it, either. He smacks your hand like it owes him money.

“Kinda tough, huh?” you mumble, shaking out your stinging palm.

He laughs. “Tough? He went way easy on ya! Usually that doll whacks people around for the whole interview, it’s hysterical. I knew he’d like you. Most sorcerers are total whack jobs, so he loves the chance to talk to sombody normal for a change.”

You don’t particularly want to find out what this man considers a whack job. “Thanks,” you say. Credit where credit’s due. His good word at the end probably canceled out making you late.

“What, I don’t get the little thank-you-for-your-time-sensei routine?” 

Might as well start practicing calling him sensei, because that’s going to take some effort to get used to. “Thank you for your help, sensei,” you say, with a stiff little bow.

“Welcome!” He grins. “You won’t be thanking me two weeks in. We’re really gonna make you hustle.” He looks annoyingly cheerful at the prospect. “C’mon, let’s go find somebody who can show you the girls’ dorm.”

“Didn’t Yaga-sensei say something about security?” you ask as you trail him downslope towards a broad, flat practice field, where two distant figures are sparring. Beside the practice field is a huge rent in the earth, roped off with meter after meter of knotted caution tape. It’s filled partway with muddy water.

“Oh, right, security. Um, don’t leave campus during school hours without permission, don’t let anyone else in without permission, and don’t do anything stupid.”

“That’s it?” Why do you suspect Yaga has an itemized forty-point list somewhere?

“Yep, pretty much covers it.” 

Your engagement ring glints in the weak sunlight as you knead your hands together. “Can I… tell people?”

He scratches the back of his head. “Official school stance is no one’s allowed to give intel on jujutsu society to non-sorcerers.” He shifts his hand to his cheek, briefly lifting the edge of his blindfold for a millisecond of eye contact. “Policy’s kinda a pain to enforce, though, because you can only prove the rule’s bein’ broken if somebody snitches. Know what I mean?”

“Right,” you say, eyebrows raising. Intended implication or not, that does give you something to chew over for the rest of the day. How are you supposed to explain any of this to Fumiya? Show him the security footage? Take him to an empty baseball field and ask him to throw things at you until you literally blow up? He wouldn’t even be able to see the explosion, just the ensuing crater.

“Anyway, here’s Maki, let’s bother her,” Gojo says as you near the edge of the practice yard. 

You’re close enough to identify the figures as a pair of high school-aged teenagers, a girl and a boy, sparring with a spear and a sword. The boy’s sporting a mop of unruly hair and looks like he hasn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep since elementary school. The girl has a long ponytail, a pair of round, rimless glasses, and a deep scowl that would put Chiba out of business, maybe because she’s having to fight in a skirt. Gojo cups his hands around his mouth and shouts “MAAAAAAAKIIIIII!” in their direction.

The girl shoulders her spear, puts one hand on her hip, and howls “WHAAAAAAAT” back at double volume. Gojo jerks a thumb in your direction.

The girl rolls her eyes behind her glasses, flips her hair over one shoulder, and holds her spear out to her companion, who accepts it with a few quiet words. She stomps across the yard. “What?” 

At your high school, speaking back to a teacher like this would have meant an instant one-way bullet-train ticket to disciplinary action. But Gojo shrugs her tone right off. “Meet your new classmate!” She gives the pair of you an incredulous look. “Hasegawa here’s joining the first-years. Be a pal and show her the girls’ dorm.”

“Why do I have to do it?”

“‘Cause I’m not allowed in there and Nitta’s out on a mission.”

“Fine, whatever. Come on,” she says over her shoulder at you, already striding off towards the nearest building. 

The girls’ dorm is huge, well-maintained, and totally silent. You were expecting a wall of sound to crash over you the second Maki cracked the front door, like the dorm where you shared a room with Keiko at university, but the only noise is the click of your pumps and the crash of Maki’s heavy boots as she stomps down the polished hallway. 

“Pick whatever room you want,” Maki says. “Except third floor at the west end of the hall. That one’s mine.”

“All the others are empty?”

She lifts one shoulder. “We’re the only girls right now. There’s one more starting with the new first-year class in the spring.” She looks at you expectantly. “I’m going now. See you… in class, I guess.”

“Thanks for your help.” Hesitantly, to her already retreating back, you say,  “Um… you can call me Risa, if you want. Would you mind if I used your given name?”

She glances back towards you, brow furrowed. “Maki is my given name. You’ll hear my family name from somebody at some point. Don’t use it.”

You end up choosing the room closest to the entrance. Less hassle when you have to do laundry, less hassle when you have to bring in groceries, and it’s not like you’re going to be bothered by foot traffic. It’s a decently-sized room, for a dorm, and at least you don’t have to share. The closet is shallower than a casket. The bed is a twin.

You collapse onto the bare mattress facefirst, curl your legs up as you roll onto your side, and think about what you’re going to tell people. 

You can just say you’re going back to school and it will open up new business opportunities. Your mother’s going to hate it, but will also conveniently spread the news through the entire Sendai metropolitan area so you don’t have to tell anyone else at home. You can tell your casual friends back in Tokyo the same thing.

Keiko’s going to be so happy for you. She’s never been shy about how she thinks you’re busting your ass for a black company. She’ll be thrilled when you tell her they’ve shown you the door, that you’re doing literally anything else. She’s going to want to come visit. You’ll have to cook up some bullshit excuse for why she can’t come laugh at the tiny closet with you.

Fumiya calls you while you’re still splayed out on the bare mattress with your eyes squeezed shut, the quilting digging an imprint in your cheek. You let it go to voicemail, but he calls again immediately.

“Hi,” you say, mostly into the mattress.

“Are you home?” 

You sit upright. You drop the phone and have to scramble for it. “No, I’m out. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

“Call me when you are.” He hangs up. 

In the end, you don’t need to, because he’s waiting outside the door to your apartment when you limp back home three hours later.

His tie is loose and his shirt is wrinkled. His hair’s a wreck and he hasn’t shaved. He looks like he got no sleep last night and no sleep for the past week, retroactively. He’s so upset you can almost see it rolling off of him like a heat-haze shimmer. You’d rather go back and do another round with Yaga and the cursed doll instead. 

“I really wish you’d been honest with me yesterday.”

Your shoulders pinch together. You hazard a guess. “About the school?”

He scowls. “What school?”

Second guess. You’re striking out fast. “About getting fired?”

He rolls one arm. “Oh, you definitely got fired. HR was very clear about that when I met with them today. I went in there looking like a total idiot, because I didn’t know that you’d started a fight with Ueno and gotten physical with him.” 

You almost drop your keys. They clatter against each other. “That’s what they said?”

So they’ve already chosen the party line. Chiba picks a story and everyone else will agree they saw the same thing. Maybe the so-called “sorcerer higher-ups” are even twisting their arms. You’re fired, you’re out of the picture, and once the drama dies down no one will ask any more questions. 

You shouldn’t be surprised. You’ve seen all this before, on a smaller scale. “Did he show you the security footage?” 

Fumiya looks down at you, incredulous. “So you’re saying that’s not what happened?” Even when he’s this upset, he never drops the velvet sales-pitch voice. That only happens when he’s sick. But it gains a rough, chafing underside, like you’re running a hand over it in the wrong direction.

You fumble the keys, trying to pluck out the right one. “Can we do this inside? Please?”

“Oh, so now it matters to you who’s around to see,” he sighs, but he shifts a few centimers so you can get at the lock.

You sit on the couch. You ask him if he wants to sit. He does not want to sit. He wants to loom in the doorway with his arms crossed, like he thinks you’re going to make a dash for it. “No, I did not see the security footage. The camera shorted out, starting at eight.” You wonder if that was a side effect of your curse, or if someone went back and conveniently wiped the recording. “But Chiba, Ueno, and Yamamato all gave the same testimony. They said you knocked your desk over and cut Ueno’s hand.”

When it comes down to it, isn’t that true? Freak powers or not, on purpose or not. The details are extraneous. You can’t deny those things are what occurred. 

“It was an accident,” you say, suppressing a shiver as you hug one of your decorative pillows. It’s cold in your apartment in winter. You always keep the heat on low to save on costs. “I got upset, but I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

“Then what the hell did you think would happen?” Fumiya presses his half-fisted hands down on his forehead, clamping one down on the bridge of his nose. “This isn’t like you, Risa! When Chiba told me, I thought he was playing a joke on me! I thought they were, like, hazing me before my promotion! You really picked your goddamn moment, you know that?”

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, your blood running colder than the chilled air. “I really didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”

“But it did! It did happen, and now I’m the guy whose psycho fiance went nuclear in data analytics!” He squeezes his eyes shut and deflates into the doorframe.

“Do you… want to know why?” you say quietly. He looks back up at you, his eyes puffy and red-streaked. It’s the one question he hasn’t asked you. It’s the one question you want him to ask you.

He squints at you. “What?”

“Why I was upset. Why it happened.” You run your thumb over the sharp edges of your square-cut diamond ring. 

It doesn’t matter. Even if your reasons were valid, the normal response would be to go to management, to HR, to Fumiya himself, not completely lose it and break a window. It’s not going to change anything. 

But still. You’re aching for him to ask.

He throws his hands out at his sides. “Who cares why you were mad at him?” You flinch. “It’s Ueno! I know you don’t like him. Guess what? I don’t like him either! We all hate that guy! Every company social I’m thinking about burying my fist in his stupid smug fucking face! But I don’t do it, because I can’t, because it would ruin our lives!”

You recede back into yourself for a few moments, like a wave sinking into sand, and when you rise back to cold awareness you feel nothing but an empty, sharp-edged clarity. “I really am sorry,” you mumble down into the pillow.

His nostrils flare. “I know you are. Sweetheart. I know you are. But what good’s that going to do? You got fired! My promotion’s tanked! What are we going to do?”

And you see, with your new numb, hollow insight, that you’re going to get to take the coward’s way out. You don’t have to explain anything about jujutsu or curses or sorcerers or living a lie or thinking you were cured, because it isn’t going to make any difference. He’s not going to stay. He’s not going to sacrifice his career or his future for you. You’ve known that since last night. You’ve known that since 8:08 PM. 

You say, “Fumiya, I was at an admissions interview today.”

He scrapes a hand over his incredulous expression. “What?”

“I’m going back to school. For a year. I got accepted. At the end, I’ll be able to get a new job. Costs are covered. It’s an hour away in the suburbs.”

His eyes round. “Like… some kind of rehabilitation thing? Community service?”

“Kind of? It’s more like a…. uh, re-skilling.”

He turns his chin from you. “Risa, we had a plan.” 

You know the plan well. You discussed it on only your second date, at the theme park in Odaiba, back when it was still open. It had been such a relief to know you both wanted all the same things. Date for two years, engaged for one, he gets promoted to middle manager, marry when you’ve saved up enough for a nice reception hall. First child after your first anniversary. The plan’s already way off course, because he wanted to wait for that promotion, because it was slower in coming than he expected.

You look up at him. You meet his eyes. “It’s one year. When it’s over, everything can go back to the way it was. Except the company, but they’ll forgive you eventually. Management loves you. You’re their star.” He clenches a fist in his hair. “It’s one year. Would you wait?”

You know the answer. He knows the answer. But he’s not going to say it, not yet. 

“I have to… I can’t do this right now. I can’t talk about this anymore. I’ll call you later. I’ll come back tomorrow. I’ll—“

He holds you before he goes, his arms stiff, his fingers cold and clammy through the thin fabric of your blouse. He doesn’t ask for the ring back. You’ll have to drop it off sometime next Sunday, between his usual grocery trip and gym session. 

After he leaves, you drag your cheap old kotatsu out of storage and lay on the floor with your legs underneath it, chin tilted back to watch the sparkling city hanging in inverse through your window. When the kind-faced Jujutsu High assistant manager—Ijichi, that was his name—gave you a lift back to the train station, he said you’d have a week to get your affairs in order. 

As you lie awake, until the first pearly light of dawn streaks through your half-closed lashes, you suppose you can count this as one down.

Chapter Text

It’s your first day of high school. Again.

You’ve spent the past week breaking the lease on your apartment. Squeezing everything you own into the dorm room and donating or selling the rest. Calling your mother back and explaining that yes, your studies are covered, yes, that means no more loans, yes, you’ve read the fine print. No, you are no longer engaged to be married, no, you don’t want to talk about it, no, you are not having a midlife crisis. Stringing up fairy lights and movie posters in the dorm room, because if you have to go back to high school, may as well lean in. Poring over the student handbook cover to cover, three times, until the word “curse” no longer holds any meaning. 

Having an unscheduled crying episode in the laundry room because the machines only take coins and you haven’t carried any in years, not since your newfangled city apartment got the phone scanners. You and Fumiya used to do each others’ laundry on Sundays. Well, you and Fumiya at the beginning of your relationship, and by the end mostly just you, because he had so much less time on his hands after his career advanced so much earlier than yours, and you didn’t want to ask him to reciprocate with so much on his plate. And you wasted three years of your life on him and everything’s gone to such complete shit and you can’t even have clean sweatpants now.

One of the students wanders in while you’re sputtering and squeaking over your drawstring bag of dirty clothes, a young man with pale, cropped hair and a wide shirt collar pulled up over his mouth. He takes one look at your red cheeks and swollen eyes and turns on his heel and leaves, but he returns a minute later with a handful of coins. 

“Oh, um. Thank you. I really appreciate it.”

“Salmon,” he says, mysteriously, before taking his leave. You still don’t know what that was about. You desperately hope he’s a second-year, so your obligation to make future eye contact with him will be limited.

And now you’re standing outside the door to the first-year classroom, wringing the hem of your uniform skirt. You feel ridiculous, because you are ridiculous. You are going to a convention in shitty bootleg cosplay. All the teenagers are going to point and laugh and sneer at your ancient pores.

They’re a bunch of kids, you remind yourself. Why are you shaking in your surprisingly comfortable uniform over a bunch of kids?

“Come on innnnnn, Hasegawa!” Gojo—Gojo-sensei, you remind yourself—calls through the door. You take another glance at the text Keiko sent you this morning—you are a bad bitch, accompanied by an angry little kaomoji putting up its fists—and square up for your entrance. 

Keiko thinks you’re changing careers and getting a certificate in education, but still. The sentiment stands.

The classroom could fit right in at your old high school in Sendai, except for the fact that over half the room is empty. Like the rest of the school, it was either built to accomodate a student body that used to be a lot larger, or the original architect was an optimist. Only four other students—Maki, her tired-eyed sparring partner, the young man from the laundry room (you will be forced to make eye contact), and… a panda bear. A real panda. They’re impressively large in real life. He’s sitting upright at a desk and he’s holding a ballpoint pen. 

You look at Gojo so you don’t stare down the panda. Everyone probably stares at the panda. If you were the panda, you’d be sick of it. You’re expecting, or perhaps naively hoping, that Gojo will be a bit more professional and subdued in the classroom setting. 

He claps his hands together. “Everyone give a warm welcome to your new classmate! She’s an office worker dropout and a nonconventional student, but you can always pick up new skills at any stage of life! And don’t forget it’s rude to ask a woman how old she is!”

At least he’s consistent.

“None of us were going to ask that,” says the panda, who can talk.

“And she opened a domain in the middle of her office, so you better be nice to her, or else!” He wiggles his fingers for scary emphasis.

“A real one?” says the panda, who can talk. “What’s she doing here, then?”

“Nah, just a crappy incomplete one, but she cut a guy! Hasegawa, say a few words about yourself for the class.”

Off to an excellent start, now that he’s made you sound completely deranged. Maki’s sizing you up with a squint and a frown. The tired-eyed boy stares shyly down at his desk. What a turn of events that the person bullying you is the teacher and the friendliest face belongs to the anthropomorphic bear. 

“Hi there!” you say with an awkward little half-wave. “I’m Hasegawa Risa. I’m, um, originally from the Sendai area—“ The tired-eyed boy shrinks even further into his jacket at this—“but I’ve been living in Tokyo for the past ten years. Um, until now, I worked for a pharmaceutical company doing data analysis.”

“Boooooooring,” interjects Gojo cheerfully. “No wonder you smashed that window!”

“It’s nice to meet you all,” you say, not favoring him with a reaction. “I’m looking forward to working with you.”

“Aw, c’mon, give us something fun!” Gojo intercepts before you can hurry to your seat. “Hobbies? Interests? Dreams and ambitions? Favorite foods?”

You edge a little closer to the empty desk. “Um, I like reading and cooking. And my favorite food is…” You have never eaten a food once in your whole life. Never even laid eyes on one. “Uh, takoya—“

Gojo claps again. “Okay, that’s enough of that. Movin’ on!”

You’re so relieved to finally melt into your seat that you aren’t even bothered by the interruption. From your vantage point at your desk, you can see that he’s written your name on the blackboard, and he’s used the wrong kanji for Risa. 

“I’ll introduce your classmates. Zen’in Maki, cursed tool specialist! Don’t use her family name.” Maki scowls. “Okkotsu Yuta, recently demoted special grade sorcerer! He’s now a grade four, same as you, and he’s also from Sendai, so the two of you should get along!” The tired-eyed boy nods with a little smile. “Inumaki Toge, cursed speech user! He can only speak in rice ball ingredients, so not much of a conversationalist.” The witness to your humiliation in the laundry raises a hand. “And that’s Panda.” He does not elaborate.

The comforting and familiar view from behind a desk is already lulling you into a false sense of security. This is just school. You did perfectly fine in high school the first time around. You can do it again, right? You’re in the middle of arranging your collection of pens and patterned notebooks when you make the critical mistake of glancing up to find your fellow students all staring at you. 

“Um, should we have brought that stuff today too?” mumbles the tired-eyed boy.

“Yuta, you’ve been here for like half a year already,” hisses Maki.

“Don’t get too comfortable, because we’re….” Gojo holds up two fingers. “Doing pairs exorcism practice! Get excited!”

You clamp a hand down on your pen, popping off the cap, which leaps two meters and clinks against a wall. The teenagers are all eyeing you again. So much for the soothing lull of an ordinary high school lecture.

“Again?” Maki mutters, but perks right up when she gets partnered with Okkotsu. 

“Since we have odd numbers now, Panda, you have the afternoon off, uh, do whatever you want I guess.” Panda pumps an arm with a little yesssssss. “Inumaki and Hasegawa, you’re with me.”

As you follow Gojo out of the classroom, which you only occupied for a total elapsed time of three and a half minutes, you say, “Um, sensei, do you mind giving me a copy of the syllabus?”

“You kill me, Hasegawa,” he says. 

Your destination for your first taste of practical fieldwork is a cemetery in a fellow suburb, thankfully only a short ride away in one of the school’s fleet of sleek black sedans. It’s on a quiet, sleepy street tucked between office buildings and a well-maintaned temple. The only visitor is a young woman with a baby carriage. While you wait for her to finish her business and leave, Gojo takes the opportunity to stroll down the street and buy a soda.

Since childhood, you’ve known through repeat exposure that cemeteries have a high chance of housing One Of Those Things. The other girls in middle school mocked you for being a superstitious wimp after word got around that you took alternate routes home to avoid them. Even after you grew up, after you considered yourself cured, you were always looking over your shoulder when you went to visit your grandparents’ niches during your visits home, stomach churning with fear that any second some horrible apparition would ruin your newfound peace, and then with guilt, over spending all your visits just worrying about yourself.

Your sense for cursed spirits is dull and numbed after ten years of purposeful disuse, but you know that something’s here. A low, irregular murmur tingles in your ears, like a television playing in another room. A damp breeze tickles against the back of your neck, like a long, clammy sigh.

“Well, this is it!” says Gojo, popping the tab on his melon Fanta. “There’s been multiple reports of a curse manifesting when visitors show up to make offerings. Hasegawa, think fast! Tell me why cursed spirits are often found in cemeteries.”

Page five of the student handbook. “Cursed spirits manifest and congregate in places that people are afraid of.”

“Ding ding! Correct! I’ll put the curtain down, you kids have fun.”

The curtain was on page ten. “…You’re not coming?”

“Nope.” He holds up both palms in a hands-off gesture. “This is supposed to be a learning experience, so go get learnin’!”

“I, um, thought we’d have a supervisor,” you say, fiddling with the sleeve of your uniform jacket as the early edge of panic sets in.

“You don’t need me. That thing’s super weak! Grade three at best.”

“But I’m a grade four,” you say, digging your student identification badge out of your pocket. “Weaker than a grade three.” Page seven, with illustrative diagrams. 

He shrugs. “They lowballed you a little. You’re probably more of a three.” Then why are you a four? “Anyway, Toge’s a pro. He could crush this one in his sleep.”

“Salmon,” says Inumaki, raising two fingers in a V-sign.

“But what if I do that thing in the office again by accident? That, uh, domain thing?”

“That was a one-off. The odds of you pullin’ that again without trying are—“ Gojo holds up a pinched thumb and forefinger. “Really low.” But not zero. “Just stay close to Inumaki and keep that shield up, and nothing can hit you anyways.” He takes a long draught of the soda and raises a hand. “Emerge from darkness, blacker than darkness. Purify that which is impure.”

You recognize this incantation from page ten—the chant to draw down the curtain. It did not come with illustrative diagrams. The dome of night-dark ink dribbling down over the cemetery, closing over your heads like an inverted bowl lowered to trap a spider, makes you shrink back against the nearest headstone.

The curtain descends in a long billow between yourself and Gojo, who salutes with the half-empty soda can. “Don’t be so uptight! It’ll be fine!”

“Wait—“ The curtain whispers into the grass as it meets the ground.

The handbook informed you that the standard curtains used by sorcerers prevent ordinary people from entering or witnessing an active exorcism site, with the unfortunate side effect of the exorcist also being closed inside until the curse is removed. You extend a hesitant hand and brush your fingers against the barrier. It’s cool to the touch, and it ripples like water.

“Sorry. I thought we’d have someone overseeing,” you say to Inumaki.

“Mustard leaf,” he says flatly. 

“Is it always like this? An unsupervised mission on the first day?”

“Cod roe,” he says flatly.

“I… um, I’ll do my best, but I’m not very good with my technique yet. Also, just so you know, it’s dangerous to stand too close to me. If I get hit, I, um, make an explosion?” And even sometimes when you don’t get hit. Stay close to Inumaki, Gojo says. The one thing you can’t do.

“Fish flakes,” he says flatly.

“What kind of curse do you think is here?” 

“Fish flakes,” he says flatly.

“Um… do you think there’s a way to get it to come to us?”

“Mustard leaf,” he says flatly.

The inflection has barely changed, but you think he’s maybe getting a little annoyed with you. 

Struck by divine inspiration, you dig in your pockets for the miniature notebook you’d brought, which you’d assumed your teacher would give you cause to use. “Can you write?” you ask, extending your pen in his direction.

“Mustard leaf,” he says flatly. Well, so much for that.

With a jerk of his head towards the center of the property, he sticks his hands in his pockets and sets off down the nearest row of gravestones. After a few beats of your jammering pulse, you scuttle after him. You are stressed, overwhelmed, already exhausted, and you really, really want a melon soda.

With the curtain down, the property is so silent you can hear a weak static whine in your ears. There’s still enough light to see by, but it’s weak and thin and casts the white monument stones in a jaundiced glow. Inumaki roves between the rows of stones, skirting around offerings of liquor and flowers, his pace as relaxed and casual as a stroll to the subway. You wonder what grade he is—presumably higher than three. How long he’s been doing this. If his family’s like him. Why rice ball toppings specifically. If he’s going to have to watch you cry a second time.

You pace down one row. You pace down the next row. Each time you pivot on your heel, you flinch, but no horrible apparition lurks between the gravestones. That insistent pressure at the back of your neck hasn’t ceased, but it also hasn’t grown in strength.

Inumaki turns to you and holds out his hands, wiggling his index and middle fingers so they look like a pair of walking figures. He draws them apart and says, “Salted cod roe.”

“You mean… split up?”

“Salmon.”

It isn’t a big property. You’ve covered most of the ground already, and if either of you encountered the curse, it would only be a few seconds’ dash to close the distance. Still. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

He takes in the sickly look on your face, says “Fish flakes” with his little V-sign, and strides off towards the opposite corner from your starting point.

You could chase after him. You ultimately decide not to scurry after the sixteen-year-old who does, in fact, have significantly more experience than you, but it is a close decision.

He’s never far enough away that you can’t spot his pale head bobbing among the paler gravestones. You glance back over your shoulder every pair of steps. Between the two of you, you pace every square meter of the cemetery, but the chill breath on your neck never rises. You don’t catch a single glimpse of movement, even though you hop and squeal at every shadow sliding through the slots between the headstones.

You’re examining one of the grave markers, laid out with a bottle of cut-price sake and a box of cheap biscuits, when Inumaki reappears with a “Salmon.” You jolt and almost kick the bottle flying.

“I didn’t see anything,” you say. He’s standing too close to you, well within the range of your curse. You scoot out of range. “Did you find anything?”

“Mustard leaf,” he says flatly.

“Well, if we can’t find it, what do we do?” Maybe you get to leave and come back later? You cast a hopeful, longing look at the curtain. 

“Salted cod roe,” he says flatly, and reaches for the bottle. With a twist of his wrist, he pops the lid and upends it over a patch of grass.

The liquid that pours out of the bottle is not sake. It’s heavy and viscous and splatters like marinade abandoned too long on the stove. It showers over the shadowed grass, and the curse unfolds itself, towering over the headstones.

You’d forgotten what they look like. The memories have been blunted by ten years’ passing and your own eagerness to stuff them in the back of a drawer and never look at them again.

It’s a big one. Of course they’d all loomed large to you in your childhood memories. But this curse is at least ten meters in height, even folded in half. It’s bulbous and hunched, with arms hooked like a grasshopper’s and clutched close to the bulk of its body, and it totters on at least ten spindly legs of varying length, attached to a chain of lumpy vertebrae. Its head is crowned with a ring of glassy, weeping eyes, framed by long, fanned lashes.

“Not even the good stuff,” it moans, croons, voice cracking like bare branches in a high wind, from no mouth that you can see. “Not, not, not even the good stuff.” 

You scramble backwards, triangulating distance between yourself and the thing and yourself and Inumaki. Inumaki glances at you, gives you a quick thumbs-up with a “Salmon,” and unzips the cowl of his uniform jacket.

The corners of his mouth are marked with a pair of unusual tattoos, shaped like dartboard targets and connected by a bracket of circuitry. He faces the curse and screams at it.

You aren’t sure what he says. It might be “Get back,” or “Fall back,” or “Get away,” but the intended meaning is clear and its grasp on you is immediate. You were already moving backward, and now you’re moving double-time. The curse follows suit, scrambling over the nearest row of headstones, scuttling on its multitude of legs. 

When you catch yourself and skid to a stop in front of a huge bouquet of dried roses, so does the curse. It twitches its head back and forth, its crown of limpid eyes swiveling from Inumaki to you to Inumaki. It settles on you, the weaker target. It unfolds itself and lunges at you, and you barely have enough time to tug at your power and raise your shield. 

Turns out it does have a mouth tucked between its cluster of legs.

Its arms scythe down, one to each side of your head, like a pair of scissors snapping shut. You shriek, caging your arms around your head, before you’re drowned out and deafened by the thunderclap of your shield exploding.

The recoil throws the curse back, but not before one of its hooked arms buckles and bends and bleeds. You didn’t know they could do that, you think blankly, as the curse cracks against a headstone and a smear of its rust-colored blood smatters across the sleeve of your coat. It’s cold as old dishwater. 

It lies there, spinal column bent like a green stick, for only a few spare seconds before Inumaki puts a foot through its jaw and it fades to dust. 

The curtain melts into the grass. You gasp for air above the whine in your ears. The curse’s blood doesn’t disappear with the rest of it. It’s still splashed across your arm, tacky and clammy and seeping through your undershirt against your bare skin.

You don’t puke behind a headstone in front of the sixteen-year-old who is significantly more experienced than you, but it is a close decision.

Said sixteen-year-old offers you a V-sign with a “Salmon!” that nearly verges on enthusiasm. You raise your hand that’s not speckled with curse gunk and return it, dazed and swaying on your heels.

The sound of very loud, rapid clapping pierces through the tinnitus ring in your ears. “Yayyyyyy!” Your alleged instructor slaps one hand against his empty soda can. “Your first real exorcism!” He tilts his head. “Oh, you got the splash zone, huh? Nasty.”

They’re both examining the ruddy splash across your jacket and you want to crawl into the bottle the curse was hiding in. “Why doesn’t it go away?” you mumble to yourself as you peel your sleeve away from your wrist with pinched thumb and forefinger. The curse didn’t leave a corpse. Not even a stain on the marble headstones. And you don’t know why your shield didn’t stop the splash of blood.

“Salted cod roe,” says Inumaki, flatly.

“Thanks,” you mutter to him. “Sorry I wasn’t more useful.”

“Salmon,” he says, flatly.

“Let’s go celebrate Hasegawa’s very, um, third exorcism!” Gojo pumps a fist. “Ice cream! Ice cream!” 

There’s a shop down the block, but you linger by the car, using it as a shield from the street. Ijichi, bless him, has a stock of spare towels in the trunk, which you wind into a sling around your arm. “Don’t you wanna come?” Gojo asks.

“I think I’ll pass this time, thanks,” you say as you dab at the stain with the corner of a towel. 

“It’s fine! They won’t even be able to see the residuals! And even if they could, they’d just think it’s barbecue sauce.”

That seems like it would simply raise a different, but equally concerning, line of questioning. “That’s all right. Thanks.”

“Salted cod roe,” says Inumaki, flatly. The inflection has barely changed, but you think his intention might be to soothe you. Gojo asks if you’re sure you don’t want anything, but if you try to eat right now, while your ears are still ringing and your hands are still shaking, you’ll hurl across the backseat of Ijichi’s car for sure. 

Ijichi lets you huddle back there in your heap of towels, your still-trembling hand fisted in the hem of your skirt. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all if you were a permanent, mandatory resident at the school campus. You could catch up on your dramas and be the girls’ dorm house mother, or something.

“It gets easier.” You startle, catching Ijichi’s gaze in the rearview mirror. 

“I hope so,” you say, moving your hand to clench your knee. You’re going to have to do this for an entire year. And this was an easy one. Only a grade three.

“You did fine. It’s only your first time, you know.”

You didn’t do much of anything. You wandered around, failed to locate the curse, stood there and squealed like a final girl in a horror movie, and let the high schooler finish it off with the double tap. It would’ve helped if you had some practice. Or any practice. Or some direction. Or any direction. “Is he always like this?” you ask.

You don’t have to specify who you mean. “Gojo-sensei?” 

It’s a rude question, putting Ijichi in the position of having to defend his superior, and you regret it immediately. But he appears to take your frustration in good faith. “Most of the time.”

“Sorry,” you say. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It’s all right. You’ve had a bad day, and he, well… he has that kind of effect on people.” He adjusts his square-rimmed glasses. “He may come across as irresponsible, but he’s really a reliable guy, and he’s got a lot going on. He’s our only special grade—well, the only one taking missions—and… wait. Did he explain the grading system to you?”

Of course he didn’t. “It was in the handbook,” you say. The handbook is quickly becoming your most prized possession.

“Right.” He sighs. “He doesn’t need the money or the job. He just bums around Jujutsu High because he wants to.”

Then what’s he getting out of it? It’s not like he’s doing much teaching. Maybe he should take his ego, and his lack of educator skillset, and his kind of weird attitude about women, and stick to his very cool and important special grade workload. Maybe his replacement would actually teach you a class.

You scrub absently at the spreading stain. You’re going to have to do laundry, again, already, and you still don’t have any coins.

Ijichi offers, “I know a great way to get curse stains out.”

You excavate your miniature notebook from your jacket pocket. The edges of the pages are stiff and crinkling, but mostly unharmed. “You’re a lifesaver,” you say as you prepare to take your first actual note of the day. Only three hundred sixty-four days left to go. “I’m going to have to write that down.”

Chapter Text

If you were expecting the rest of the week to contain any structured learning, you were sorely mistaken.

You have yet to experience any kind of lecture or lecture-adjacent scenario, aside from the fifteen minutes on Thursday when Gojo-sensei called everyone into the classroom to pass out a handout “for exams” (further information not provided), followed by a rant about how the closest corner shop to campus isn’t selling parfaits anymore. He punctuated this diatribe by eating a parfait, which he obtained from a different corner shop, an extra two minutes’ journey away and not the flavor he wanted. 

You attempted eye contact with your classmates. Maki and Inumaki stared stoically ahead at the blackboard. Panda was on his phone under his desk (he has a phone). You think Okkotsu might have been sleeping with his eyes open.

The handout for “exams” (unspecified) is a chart detailing the terminology for different aspects of a cursed technique and how they relate to one another. Because no one is teaching you anything, you attempt to look up the definitions in the library. 

You are always the only person in the library. The library is your closest school friend. You have a favorite desk and a favorite cushion where you spend hours staring at old scrolls until your eyes cross, surrounded by the smell of ink and glue and the nebula of a generation’s worth of dust.

When you’re not in the library, you’re occasionally roped into “sparring” with your classmates, if you can’t slink off before they catch you after class and extend a polite, obligatory offer to practice together. You have zero martial arts experience, aside from the one week’s worth of aikido lessons you attended with Keiko in third grade, which came to an abrupt and unceremonious end when you shattered the dojo mirror. 

This means your training begins with the basics. You’ve stalled out at learning how to take a fall without injuring yourself.

At first, you’re cringing at the idea of blocking punches from your teenage classmates, but in short order, you swap to cringing because Maki is incredibly strong, even when she’s pulling her punches, and her blows sting. “You aren’t looking at the right place,” she snaps. “Stop looking at my face. You can’t see how I’m moving that way.”

“We’re going to have to work on your conditioning, Ms. Hasegawa,” says Panda. Shouldn’t that be your teacher’s problem?

“Salted cod roe,” says Inumaki, flatly.

“Don’t worry,” says Okkotsu. “I didn’t have any combat experience either when I started last summer. You’ll learn fast!” It’s a kind sentiment, but you’ve seen him in the practice yard, each sweep of his sword as fluid and composed as a calligrapher’s stroke, and you think that maybe he’s an outlier and shouldn’t be used as a standard of comparison. 

You’re in the library, again, absorbed in a diary recorded by someone from the Kamo clan back in at the dawn of the century (not providing much in the way of useful information, but the interpersonal drama is gripping), when a familiar voice, far too close to your ear, announces “Ha! Se! Ga! Wa!”

You emit a choked squeak, nearly swatting your book across your teacher’s nose. Too late, you realize you’ve bent it in half in your clawed hands, and you attempt in vain to smooth it back out. 

Gojo’s snuck up on you in complete silence, and is now crouching beside you, elbow balanced on one bent knee, smirking face resting in his cupped palm. “Heyo!”

The book is beyond saving. You may have to pay to get it repaired or replaced—although you’ve never seen a librarian in here at any hour. Does the school need one? Could you angle for a position doing that instead?

You rearrange your startled limbs into a normal position. “Good morning, sensei,” you say, in a completely regular way and not strained through your clenched teeth.

“Mornin’! You don’t got a lot of spatial awareness, you know that?” He’s gleeful. “Big startle reflex, though.”

Well, forgive you for not expecting fully grown men to sneak up behind you while you’re studying for a cheap jumpscare. You’d say this is high school bullshit, but that seems like a disservice to your new classmates, none of whom would pull this kind of stunt. “Sorry for ignoring you,” you say, raising your chin with all possible dignity. “I was concentrating.”

“I can see that. You’re workin’ hard!” He taps the cover of the volume you’d been reading with one skeptical finger. “But aren’t you getting bored of all this dusty old junk?”

The dusty old junk, cryptic as it is, is currently your only source of information about the world of curses and sorcery. “No. I’m learning a lot,” you say. 

It’s only mostly a lie.

He rises to his feet, clapping his hands on his thighs. “Take a break! I got a present for ya.”

You perk up, straightening your sore back. “Is it a syllabus?” By all the power of heaven, please, please, please let it be a syllabus.

He slaps his hand on his leg again. “You kill me, Hasegawa! C’mon, it’s in the gym… and it’s a surpriiiiiiiiiiiiise.”

This is your first visit to the school gym, and maybe, just maybe, your very first practical lesson with your teacher, who is allegedly teaching you. You wish you’d worn better shoes today.

You don’t know why you’re so surprised to see an ordinary basketball hoop, ordinary linoleum floor, and set of ordinary bleachers. Apparently sometimes they play sorcerer basketball. What you are also surprised, and dismayed, to see is that cursed doll from your admission interview. She’s in a heap by the door, plush limbs askew in a convincing simulacrum of sleep, aside from her button eyes, which are wide, glossy, and predatory.

“Ta-da!” Gojo exclaims, waving his arms like a game show host revealing a prize. “It’s your best friend, Cathy-chan!”

You avoid making eye-to-button contact with Cathy-chan. “Why… is Cathy-chan here?”

“Waaah, so mean! You’re hurting her feelings. Cathy-chan’s excited to see you. Aren’t you, Cathy-chan?”

He nudges the doll with the toe of one boot. She leaps to attention, standing pillar-straight with her plush hands clamped into fists. “She’s here to help with your training!” He slings an arm around her shoulders, gesticulating broadly with the other. “You need practice takin’ hits and using your shield, and you’re too chicken to do that with your classmates. You can throw her across the room as many times as you want, and she’ll just keep coming!”

With a roll of his arm, he gives her a push in your direction. There’s recognition in her button eyes. Her vaguely ursine mouth splits open to reveal a row of triangular teeth. What the hell are the teeth made of? Why does she even have those?

She’s already swinging. You bring up your shield before she can knock you into the bleachers. At least you have one thing to be thankful for, which is that she isn’t striking as quickly as she did under Yaga’s command. She’s pulling her punches even more than Maki.

“What if I want to turn her off?” you protest as she aims a right hook at your jaw.

“About that! So glad you asked.” Gojo shakes out his shoulder. “You can put her to sleep with a little bit of your cursed energy. Your cursed energy control is crap, so this will help you with that too. Two birds, one stone and all that.” He waves. “Well, have fun!”

“Wait! You’re leaving?” you say, just as your power overloads and catapults Cathy halfway to a three-point shot. Of course he’s leaving. “How long should I do this for?”

“Until you get good,” he says, as if this should be obvious. “I’ll check in on ya later! Byeeeeee!”

As instructed, you remain in the gym and take punches.

And it’s a lot of punches.

Cathy is tireless. Cathy is not experiencing the first descent of the long, slow slide into decrepit old age in her late twenties. Cathy does not have joints, and if she did, they would not get stiff. Cathy does not have to remember to wear her good sports bra for vigorous exercise, or suffer from various pains and strains. Cathy does not need to stop for water breaks. 

Also, Cathy is capable of hatred, and Cathy hates you.

At least you’ve managed to make a centimeter’s worth of progress during your practice sessions with your classmates. You can now activate your technique on command, and you are growing accustomed to the sensation of it, of the tightening in your chest and the second treble pulse in your temples and fingertips. You may or may not be imagining it, but you think you can feel the shield itself when it takes shape and unfurls around you, as soft and light as gauze.

During Cathy’s initial volley of punches, you shrink from her plush fists and from the cataclysmic burst of light and sound when your shield activates, its echo spiraling around the empty gym like phantom applause. But it doesn’t take long to achieve a rhythm that is, if not comfortable, at least tolerable. Cathy hits the shield, the shield pops, Cathy gets thrown across the gym, Cathy gets back up and hits you again because she hates you. That’s not so bad.

Your first problem is that during the handful of seconds between the explosion and your shield reinstating itself—which, thankfully, it does on its own, as long as you don’t switch your technique off—Cathy can hit you. And if she’s in range, because she was lunging in for a jump attack and the burst launches her straight up in the air so she lands on top of you, she will, in fact, hit you. And it will hurt, and you will yell, and you will be glad there are no teenagers or obnoxious teachers in the gym to witness it, and it will leave a grapefruit-sized bruise on your ribcage.

The second is turning her off.

Around noon, your head is pounding, your ears are ringing, your feet are sore and swollen in the leather loafers you should not have worn today, and you want a break. Cathy does not want a break. Cathy wants to keep hitting you until the inevitable heat death of the sun. 

All you have to do to put her back in sleep mode is feed her some of your cursed energy. You think this is meant to be easy, and maybe it should be, if you had any practice touching your cursed energy beyond “don’t.” You can toggle the switch that powers your technique on or off, and that’s it. Your circulation is, as your teacher so helpfully informed you, crap.

And of course, for this to be possible at all, you have to manage to touch her. Any limb you place within a meter of her is getting smacked. If your timing is off, the smack will activate your shield’s burst, propelling her across the gym and out of your reach. If your timing is off in another respect, you get smacked, and it hurts.

It takes thirty minutes of concentrated, red-cheeked, gasping effort to lay a single hand on her. You suppress a shriek of triumph as your fingers clamp down on soft lime-green fur. You reach deep inside yourself, into that dark corner of your mind, into that steady red pulse behind your closed eyes. You pinch it, gingerly, wincing like you’re clutching a live plug with a wet hand. You shove a little of it down your arm. 

Nothing happens.

Cathy whacks you in the solar plexus. 

When Gojo returns, he finds you frantically pounding back a rancid energy drink that you all but ripped from the vending machine at the gym entrance. “Yo, Hasegawa! You look tired.”

“I am tired,” you gasp, too conscious of the film of sweat coating your face and neck and puddling down the front of your uniform. You look gross. You feel gross.

He tilts his head with his lopsided little frown, then points an accusatory finger at you. “Listen, if you killed that doll, we’re gonna have to cook up a story, ‘cause I didn’t exactly ask before I took her out of Yaga’s storer—“

He’s cut off by a clatter from the opposite side of the gym, where the door to one of the equipment rooms is shaking in its frame, rattling against a folding chair shoved at an angle beneath the handle. The sound pauses, replaced by an angry little chitter, then resumes at double time.

Cathy’s fists are tough, but she lacks well-formed opposable thumbs. You’d prayed that when you lured her into the next room, then let your shield overload to bat her away from the door, she wouldn’t be able to open it. The chair was extra insurance. “I needed a break,” you sigh, emptying the last third of the can’s contents down your gullet. 

Gojo brings one hand to his blindfolded forehead and chuckles. “Next time, I’ll make you use the practice yard, so you can’t cheat.”

“…Next time?” you whimper.

“I said until you get good, didn’t I?” 

He taps a finger against his lips, bending down and leaning in towards you, nearly close enough for you to see the fine weave of his blindfold. The hot, exhausted flush on your cheeks creeps upwards into your hairline. 

“Nah!” He announces with a grin. “Still crap.” You crumple the empty can with a defensive little huff. “C’mon, take a break. She’ll be here tomorrow.”

You throw a glance over your shoulder at the equipment room door. As if on cue, something thuds against it. “Um, shouldn’t we put her back, if you took her without asking—“

“Nah.”

You pause as Gojo has to duck his head to get out the gym door. “Shouldn’t we turn her off?”

He flaps an arm. “Naaaahhh.”

Cathy becomes a dreaded fixture of your daily routine at Jujutsu High. You are subjected to another week of her tender mercies before your second field mission arrives. And even after all that, you still can’t turn her off.

For your second outing, you’re tasked with clearing an infestation of curses out of a construction site in Koyama, alongside Maki and Panda. You take the train there, Panda and all. 

“People tend to assume I’m in a mascot suit,” he tells you in response to your obvious curiosity. He carries a set of business cards with a working URL to hand off to anyone who asks. Apparently Ijichi maintains the website. It links to a series of real charities dedicated to the maintenance of panda habitats.

You arrive on site well after dark, when you can only see the vague suggestion of the half-finished building against the night sky, thin brushstrokes of black over a blurry backdrop of city lights. The temperature dropped like a stone after sunset, followed by a heavy, slow breeze carrying the tang of incoming rain. 

“Another easy one, yeah?” says Gojo between bites of mochi. You have no idea where he got those from. He didn’t have them when you boarded the train. “Was an accident on site a few months back. Place has been a hotbed ever since. I brought three of ya since they’ve got numbers. If you finish in—“ He checks his phone. “An hour or less, we can round up Toge and Yuta and get some bullet train sushi, so let’s see some hustle.”

You hope, unlike your first mission, you’ll be able to keep food down afterwards. 

The curtain descends, muting the murmur of street traffic. Maki clicks on a huge industrial flashlight she evidently keeps in her bag with her weapons, throwing the naked struts of the half-finished building into stark contrast, like the broad ribs of some vast carcass. The night beyond the reach of the light is so dense and thick, you could snag your fingers in it.

“You heard that blindfolded idiot,” she says, tossing a pair of spare flashlights to you and Panda. You fumble yours and drop it on the bare concrete foundation with a crack. She levels a flat look at you through her thick glasses and readies her weapon, a long, double-bladed polearm. “If we finish fast, he’s paying. I’m hungry.”

Unlike the last mission, the three of you cover all your ground together, falling into a triangle with Maki at the apex. You ask in a whisper if they want to split up, praying the answer is no, and Maki volleys back “Are you stupid?” 

You’re just grateful it’s a no.

“Maki, be nice,” mutters Panda.

“I’m not being mean!”

“It’s okay,” you say, waving your hands in surrender. Maki reminds you more than a little of the old captain of your middle school softball team, who your classmates would sometimes cross the hallway to avoid. You among them.

“Just pretend Yuta’s here,” Panda continues. “You’re always nicer when he’s around.”

Maki twists her head around, cheeks flaring pink. “And just what is that supposed to mean—“

Something moves in the dark. Maki and Panda are back to business, their flashlight beams sweeping in wide arcs between the solemn rows of steel struts. 

“Don’t worry, Ms. Hasegawa,” says Panda. “Maki and I can take care of—“

Something scuttles around the edge of the beam of his flashlight. It’s less than a meter in height and crawling like a crab. As it approaches, weaving from side to side, it crosses into the light, and an involuntary grunt of disgust escapes your closed mouth. It resembles four feet fused together at the ankle, creeping along on elongated, prehensile toes.

Maki readies her weapon and spears it through. Its cry as it dies is small and awful. As it hisses its death rattle, the construction complex erupts into sound, a rising tide of slow, stuttering hisses and chatters. Like the chirp of cicadas in the summer night, with a sound distortion filter on and the bass cranked all the way up.

“Ugh. How many do you think?” asks Maki, tilting her spear to point at the nearest clump of shadow.

Panda pauses. “Uh, maybe thirty or forty?”

They come at you in a wave—lunging, then receding, creeping back into the dark, with much greater agility than anything with their shape has any right to. A lurch of nausea grips you as Maki spears another, then levers it off her blade with her shoe. 

Panda crushes them with his hands alone. As you edge away to avoid the splash zone—you don’t want a repeat of your last mission—and to make sure you’re out of range if you blow up, your flashlight swings downward to aim at your own left leg. One of the curses crawls in the path of the light. It tilts, revealing its underside, nothing but a thrashing ring of blunt teeth, and launches itself at you. It bounces off your knee once, twice, and you detonate with a squeal. 

Your head is ringing with raw panic as the flash and sound fade, but Maki and Panda are on their feet and thankfully uninjured. Two of the curses were thrown by the blast. One hit a steel strut, and the other is curled on its side in a patch of half-shadow, rising back up on its horrible toes as you watch. 

Maki was just outside the radius of the explosion. Too close. You have to be more careful next time.

“Okay,” she announces with a twirl of her spear. “Now we split up.”

What follows is a nightmarish parody of laser tag. The three of you circle around the complex, flashlight beams flaring into each others’ eyes, the crash of your pulse in your ears muffling the chatter of the curses. 

After that first round of fatalities, they scuttle and cavort around the edges of the beams of light, but dart out of the way whenever Maki and Panda go in for a strike. They don’t come near you, only the shuddering yellow disc cast by your flashlight, shivering in your trembling hand, which you keep aimed well away from your body. 

You lose track of Maki, Panda, and your own erratic path in the dark. You end up back near the entrance, panting and hunched over with your hands on your knees. Panda slides to a stop next to you, tossing a crumpled corpse aside before it crumbles to dust. “No way we’re gonna get this done in time,” he grunts.

You jump as you’re caught in the sweep of Maki’s light, roving across the concrete while she swipes a pair of curses into one of the steel pillars. “It’s going to take forever to chase them all down like this,” she says.

“They like the light,” says Panda, “but if we aim them at ourselves, we’ll get mobbed.”

Maki twirls her flashlight in her hand, giving you a sidelong glance. “Hey, Hasegawa. You’ve got a big range on your technique. If we line things up right, you can make this easy for us.”

You can see where she’s going, and you don’t much like it. “I can’t do it on command,” you say. “I have to store up some hits before it goes off.”

She curls one hand into a fist. “That’s not a problem.”

“Maki!” Panda hisses.

“What? It’s for the mission!” She flings her arms out. “You don’t mind, do you, Hasegawa? I’ll help you charge up your technique, you stay here, Panda and I will round them all up, send them all at you, big boom.” She cracks her knuckles. “And then we all go get sushi.”

Panda is watching your face. “It’ll be fast.”

Your desire to contribute something—anything—of use, combined with your eagerness for the three of you to not be here anymore, tips the scales over your reluctance to use your power and the inherent awkwardness of letting your teenage classmate whack you around. “Sure. It’s okay. Um, it takes about six punches from Gojo-sensei’s training doll to make it go off, but she doesn’t hit as hard as you do during sparring practice.”

“Gojo-sensei’s training what… okay, you know what, don’t care.” Maki stances up. “Let’s get this over with already.”

You assume the position they’ve made you practice during afternoon sparring sessions, blocking punches with one arm crossed over your torso, and hold your breath while Maki’s fist slams into your shield. She’s trying to keep it light, but Maki’s lightest tap is still stronger than Cathy’s best forward jab.

She hits you four times. You can finally inhale again when she unfolds her hand, grips the flashlight, and says “Well, that better do it. You stand here, Hasegawa. Right here. Don’t move.”

“Let’s hope this works!” Panda salutes with his flashlight before the pair split up, each circling around one edge of the complex. They meet in the center at the opposite side, then swerve, together, back towards you. You watch their lights recede, bobbing against the black, then cross, twine, and grow larger again, careening towards you like the headlights of an oncoming bus.

The beams are seething with curses. Crawling over and crashing into each other, chattering and scratching and biting and screeching.

Don’t run, you order yourself, fisting one hand in your uniform jacket, the other clamping down on the flashlight so hard the plastic casing creaks. Don’t run, don’t run, don’t run. If four hits wasn’t enough…

Too late. The wave of monsters rolls over your feet. One of them clamps down on your shoe. No explosion yet.

Panda keeps his light trained on you, then falls back to the nearest metal strut, well out of range of your burst. But Maki’s still coming, not losing momentum, each pound of her boots bringing her closer to your technique’s radius, sweeping a stray curse back into range with her spear. 

Too close. She’s too close, and it’s going to happen right now, any millisecond.

You shimmy backwards a meter and one of the things rakes your leg with its disgusting mouth and your shield expands. And as the detonation whines in your ears, Maki lets out a cry that stops your breath.

She’s still on her feet and still moving when the flash fades, tilting her spear to catch two curses at once. Because you moved position, you didn’t get all of them with the burst. Only most of them. Among the mounds of lumpy little corpses, already melting into the concrete, a handful are still twitching, which Maki and Panda make short work of.

Maki turns on you the second the last curse is crumbling away, before the curtain has lifted. “Hey! What the hell was that? I said don’t move!”

She’s leaning on her spear, favoring her left foot. The ringing in your ears crescendoes when you see the red slash on her shin through a rip in her tights, a rivulet of blood dripping down into her boot. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, how bad it is it—“

“It’s fine! It’s not deep!” she says, with a contemptuous shrug. “What’d you go and move for?”

“I thought you were too close! I thought I was going to hit you!” you babble.

“I told you to stay put! The plan was for you to stay put! I’m a lot faster than you are, you know, I was going to get out of range just fine. Next time, just stick to what we agreed on—“

She’s interrupted by a pair of sharp claps. The curtain has fallen. Gojo is striding towards you with his hands cupped around his mouth. “Hey Maki, cool it, or you’re not gettin’ any sea urchin.”

Maki clutches her spear and aims her glower down at the concrete. 

If you get her in trouble for this, when she’s right—and even if she wasn’t right—it’s going to torpedo what little goodwill you possess among your classmates. You’re having flashbacks to your student council days, mediating disputes over stolen shoes and allegedly stolen boyfriends.

“She’s right. It was my fault,” you say as Gojo inspects her injured leg. Her mouth twists, but she gives you a hard, surprised little nod.

“Can you walk on it, Maki?”

Maki shifts from leg to leg, testing her weight with a grunt. “Yeah, but not for long.”

Gojo pops the knuckles of his right hand. “Okay, rain check on the sushi. I’ll take Maki back to see Shoko. See ya!”

And with another little pop, he and Maki just vanish. Gone. Into thin air.

The train ride back to the school drags on in grim silence, as Panda can’t speak on public transit. He’s attracting enough looks as it is. 

You can’t help but feel as if the sidelong glances of your fellow passengers are directed at you, too. As if they can smell the failure on you. In remedial high school, and even worse, shit at it.

Your brain decides it’s the right time to contribute a helpful slide deck of every fuckup you’ve ever had with your curse, in backwards chronology, from Maki’s injured leg all the way back to age ten. Back to your mother in the car on the way home from the police station, sighing, You’re supposed to be the one I don’t have to worry about.

You’ll have to bring Maki something as an apology present. Something for Panda, too, since you ruined his free sushi dinner. You ask him what sort of things they both like to eat on the walk up the hill from the station, when he can actually respond.

“You don’t have to do that,” he says with a flap of his paw. “But if you really want to make something, I like bread! Maki’s into savory snacks.”

“I really would like to make something,” you say. “I’m sorry to you, too, Panda-senpai.”

His face rearranges itself into what embarrassment must look like on a panda. “Y-you don’t have to call me senpai! We’re both in the same year!”

“But you and Maki are six months ahead of me, though.” And it shows, constantly. You’ve made next to no progress. You aren’t pulling your weight through the missions, which are the only reason you were allowed to come to this school in the first place. And you’re causing nothing but problems for your classmates. 

“It’ll be okay, Ms. Hasegawa.” He flexes an arm. “You’ll catch up!” 

You don’t believe him. 

But he’s a nice young man—er, bear—and it’s not his problem to soothe his much older underclassman. So you force on a tepid smile and force out your tepid thanks, and then trudge the rest of the hill back up to the school in silence.

Chapter Text

Mid-February, you make a lethal mistake.

After a Sunday morning jog around campus, you swing by the lounge to buy one of those rancid energy drinks. Somehow, even though they taste like someone tossed an entire peach and a stick of chalk into raw battery acid, they have an inexplicable addictive quality, and you can’t stop drinking them. 

You’d vainly hoped the lounge would be empty, as it so often is with such a small student population, but the room is already occupied by Gojo and Ijichi. Gojo is hogging the comfy chair and dunking no less than seven sugar cubes into his mug of coffee. Ijichi is wearing a face mask and, beneath it, the most miserable expression you have ever seen in your life. “Good morning, Miss Hasegawa,” he wheezes through his clogged nose.

Poor Ijichi. He always looks like he needs a hug, a massage, and a year’s worth of vacation days, in any order. “Not feeling well?” you ask as you feed the coins you now carry at all times into the drink machine.

“I’ve got a cold,” he sniffles. “Just went to see Dr. Ieiri.”

You would’ve thought a sorcerer doctor could patch that right up. “I hope you feel better soon—wait, if you’re not busy, do you mind waiting here a second? I’ve got some chocolate for you.” 

Valentine’s Day is Wednesday. You spent all of last night making chocolates, because you remembered the trip to Okinawa that Fumiya is now going on by himself, to the all-inclusive resort with the heated beachside infinity pool and the multi-course room service, and it was either distract yourself or binge-watch ten hours of Private Pure Love Train again. You’re mooching off Keiko’s streaming account, and the last time you pulled a marathon, she called you to stage an intervention.

Ijichi brightens under the mask. “You… got me obligation chocolate?”

“Sure! You helped me out a lot getting settled in here. I wanted to say thanks.” The man is looking like this is the nicest thing anyone has said to him in ten years. He waits patiently as you dash back to the dorm to grab one of the two dozen bags of chocolate you spent three hours decorating.

Were you a little overzealous? Maybe. Are you hoping that the way to your classmates’ hearts is through their stomachs? Perhaps. Maki accepted her apology cheese taiyaki with stoic politeness, but you’re still fighting an uphill battle on that front.

Gojo is full-on pouting, arms crossed, as you hand over Ijichi’s chocolate. “And what about your favorite teacher, Gojo Satoru, huh? Where’s his chocolate?”

“He gets his in class on Wednesday, same as everyone else,” you say. You might actually have class, if it means he gets free sweets.

“Thanks,” beams Ijichi, cupping the bag of chocolate hearts like he just caught a winning home run. “I’ll be sure to pay you back on White Day!”

“My White Day game is fire, just so you know,” says Gojo. “It’s way better than his.”

Ignoring this, you say to Ijichi, “I hope you feel better tomorrow.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad. It’s just that I’m causing problems for the other assistant managers. We’re shorthanded, and a lot of sorcerers can’t drive, so it’s interfering with missions.”

“He’s gonna get smacked if he doesn’t recover soon,” says Gojo. 

This is where you commit your fatal error. You are moved to pity. The kinship you feel with Ijichi, as a fellow exhausted adult marooned in an endless sea of energetic teenagers and energetic manchildren, drives you to say, “You know, I have a license.”

Ijichi blinks at you. Gojo slings his arms over the back of the comfy chair. “Why?”

He doesn’t have to make it sound like an accusation. “Same reason most people do. So I can drive a car,” you say as you pop the top on your energy drink. “You don’t have one?”

“Nope!” He shrugs.

“Why not?”

“‘Cause then I’d have to drive,” he says, in his this-should-be-obvious tone of voice.

You raise your drink to Ijichi. “I can take your job for you if you want.”

“Really?” Ijichi squints, disbelieving. 

“Sure. I haven’t driven in a while. I could use the practice.” It’ll give you something else to distract yourself with for a couple more hours.

Gojo whacks Ijichi on the shoulder, and you begin to sense the depths of your mistake. “Y’hear that? Ricchan can drive me! Say thanks, Ijichi!”

“Thank you,” says Ijichi, as you speak over him, hoping you’d misheard, “Sorry, who can drive you?”

“Me and Ricchan, going on a road trip!” You recoil in dismay. The only people on this Earth allowed to hit you with the cutesy nickname are your mother and Keiko. And, of course, your beloved goddaughter Haru, once she learns how to speak. You would’ve allowed Fumiya, but he would never. 

Gojo actually looks delighted at the prospect of being trapped in a car with you for an indeterminate length of time. Probably needs to keep his negging skills sharp. At least one of you is having fun. “You can help with the mission, too. It’ll be a learning opportunity.”

You don’t say, “Well, that would be a first,” and you deserve a medal for your bravery and restraint.

“You’re sure this is fine?” asks Ijichi, shrinking under his mask, hands clasped protectively over his chocolate, as if he’s worried you might change your mind and take it back. It’s not fine, but you’re past the point of no return now. 

It can’t be that long of a drive. It can’t be worse than dissociating on your dorm room bed while classic nineties shojo anime plays on loop for ten hours.

“Sure, it’s fine,” you say through your teeth.

Which is how you end up behind the wheel of one of the sleek black sedans owned by the school. It’s a completely different species of car than your parents’ reliable old Toyota, heir and successor to the car you murdered back in the early aughts. You’re familiarizing yourself with the array of console controls while Ijichi programs the destination into the GPS. “It’s a small lake up by the National Park. Only about an hour and fifteen minutes away,” he sniffles. Your spirits falter. “Thanks again for doing this!”

Gojo graces you with his presence half an hour after your agreed-upon meeting time. He arranges his long limbs in the backseat at various sharp angles as you adjust the mirrors for a seventh time. It’s been a couple months since you’ve been behind a wheel, and you’re what could generously be termed a cautious driver under the best of circumstances, which do not include knowing you could blow up the car if you get into a fender bender. “Okay, Ricchan, floor it!”

You fume in aggrieved silence from the narrow road leading into town to the turn onto the national expressway. “You’re driving really slow,” he says.

“I’m going the speed limit.” You glance at him in the rearview mirror, half-sprawled across the backseat.

“C’mon, punch it! Why not live a little?”

“I don’t want to lose my license.”

“Next time you should wear the assistant manager uniform. Y’know, go for the whole vibe.” As if there’s going to be a next time. You’ll ask Okkotsu if you can borrow his sword, so you can fall on it.

You are gifted a few precious moments of silence as you navigate around a lane closure. “Hey, can you connect the bluetooth to my phone? I wanna put my amazing road trip playlist on.”

“Sorry, I don’t want to mess with that while I’m driving.” You might push the wrong button on the space-age console and eject the both of you from the vehicle. “Why don’t we listen to the radio for now?”

He lasts maybe ten minutes before he leans back with a sigh. “Ricchan, I’m bored! Tell me a funny story!”

Maybe you should have taken that chocolate back from Ijichi and saved it for emergencies. If he was eating, he wouldn’t be talking. “Why don’t you play a game on your phone or something?”

He holds out his phone, still bonelessly melting into the seat, and thumbs through several apps. “I don’t feel like any of these right now. Come onnnn, tell me a joke.”

“Maybe,” you say in vain hope as you veer off the expressway and onto one of the winding roads leading further up into the mountains, “we could talk about the mission?”

He throws his head back over the headrest, martyred. “What’s there to say about it? Curse is eating hikers, we go exorcise the curse, we go back to Jujutsu High and everyone cheers and claps, blah blah blaaaargh.” He sticks out his tongue to punctuate the last blah. 

“How many people has it eaten?” you ask, alarmed. It’s a queasy reminder of the fact that curses have been killing people for as long as you’ve been able to see them. 

He shrugs. “Double digits? Hey, I had an idea, how ‘bout we do car karaoke?”

Your route is taking you deep into parkland territory, empty and desolate under the lead-lined February skies. Only the serious career hikers are out on a day like today, a hair above freezing. The last time you went out this way was with Fumiya, an easy springtime hike early in your relationship. Neither of you are big outdoor people. He held your hand on the scree-lined slope, so you “didn’t slip.”

He’s probably in the beachside heated infinity pool right now with one of the girls from accounting. 

 “That’s okay, I think I’ll pass. But you can sing, if you want.”

“Nah, it’s no fun doing it by myself. Hey, who do you think would win in a fight, me, or Goku from Dragon Ball?”

“Goku,” you answer instantly. “He’s a national treasure.”

“Aw, really? I think I’d win.”

You wring the steering wheel like it’s his neck. “Are you like this when Ijichi drives you, too?”

“Nope!” He grins and crosses his arms behind his head. “I’m worse!”

Ijichi owes you a drink. Or five.

Your destination is a short walk uphill from a parking area next to a little picnic site. The lot’s empty. No one’s out for a picnic near dusk in winter. The ground is coated in grubby frills of snow, like the half-scraped skin of a fish. A long, shallow, ragged slope of rock leads down into the slate-colored water. Just looking at it makes you cold. You’re not unaware of the ironic similarity to your very first exorcism. 

Gojo drops the curtain. It seems to drift and sway in the mountain wind before closing over the shore. “Okay, Hasegawa. You’re up.” He gestures to the water. “Ladies first.” At your protesting look, he says, “Just get in there and see how far you can get. I’m not expecting you to exorcise it. When you have trouble, I’ll tap in.”

The wavelets on the water’s surface are traveling backwards, curling away from the rough, rocky shoreline. If you squint, you can almost make out a dim shape converging in the shallows, a shadow against a shadow. “What grade is it?”

“Don’t worry about that. Grading’s just a number.” 

“So it’s high, then.” Or… low, whatever. Of course it would be, if this was going to be one of his very special cool guy solo missions. The shadow creeps into the shallows, spilling between the jagged rocks in an inky splash.

“Actually, I think it’s a two? I’m gonna be real with you, I don’t remember. But it doesn’t matter.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I’m the strongest. You’re not gonna be in any danger. Just get in there, start the fight, I’ll come in and kill it in one shot, and then we can go home and you can give me my chocolate.”

The curse erupts from the water and beaches itself. The dim dusklight oozes over the oily gloss of its skin. It’s mostly tentacle by weight—and it’s a lot of weight, at least twice your height and twice the girth of the car—a knotted, writhing, seething mess. Each tendril is tipped with an eye. 

Furled within the knotted tangle is a handful of flotsam, lost objects that must have belonged to the slaughtered hikers. A red hoodie, a polka-dot cellphone strap, a chipped water bottle. A yellowed knob with a greasy, old-soap mottle, which you realize, with a belated lurch, is probably bone.

It swivels slowly in place, churning through the rocks to aim its bulk at you. Then it comes at you like a thresher, its wheeling tentacles shredding through the pebbles. A few of them launch at you and plink off your shield. You clamber backwards, stumbling over the shifting rocks, the way you run in a dream—slow, halting, and pointless. You may as well try and outpace an oncoming train. 

There’s not enough time to think, to strategize, to scrabble up some kind of plan. The only thing that flashes through your mind before the curse slams into you is the number eight. Eight punches from Principal Yaga’s stupid stuffed toy to overwhelm your shield. Eight simple strikes, and you’ll be left with nothing.

The flash of whip against shield and then the grey-static flare of detonation. A noise like the blare of a truck horn, which must be the curse, slicing through the whine in your ears. It falls back, shedding pebbles with shrapnel pings.

It takes long enough to regroup that when it clashes against you again, it recoils off the shield, one two three four eight detonation and this time it just keeps coming. You slip on a slick rock and fall hard against the beachside. Not the correct way your classmates have been teaching you to fall. A raw, awkward slam that smacks all the air from your chest.

Above you, the curse glows from the inside with a ruddy light, then shreds to dust. You’re heaving for air, but you can’t hear your own desperate gasps over the ringing in your ears. That red light burns against your closed eyelids, its afterimage a blazing sea-blue starburst.

You push yourself to a half-crouch with the heels of your hands. Starlight glitters on the lakewater and little bursts of dizzy sparks shimmer at the edges of your vision.

Gojo is standing over you, offering you his hand.

“Awwww, c’mon, Ricchan,” he says, his tone mildly scolding. “You didn’t even try.”

You don’t take his hand. Your hands curl into the rocks, scraping your palms, as you fight for breath. They’re shaking. The air is cold enough to see your breath, but you’re flushed and boiling hot, frantic and feverish. 

You shove yourself to your feet. When you open your mouth, your voice comes out strained and harsh. “What do you mean, I didn’t even try?”

“I mean you didn’t try! You literally just stood there and let it toss you around.”

The curtain is descending, revealing a bloody splash of the last light of sunset. You feel like it looks. Red, throbbing, one long bruise. You stride right past Gojo towards the car. You don’t want to be here anymore. You want to go home, back to your apartment in Setagaya, back in time to two months ago. “Then why don’t you tell me what I was supposed to do, sensei.”

You yank open the driver’s side door so hard the car shudders. You slam it behind you and are slapped with a belated rush of guilt. You better not scratch this thing while it’s on rent from Ijichi. 

Your hands are still trembling as you curl them around the wheel. You can’t drive like this. You turn the heat on and blast it, hoping that will help you stop shivering.

Gojo slides into the passenger seat next to you, pulling the door shut with one extended finger. “Well, it was fast-movin’ in a straight line, but slow on turns. Most of the arms were concentrated in the front. The strat would’ve been to get behind it, and then rotate with it when it tried to turn and face you. Take hits from the few tentacles in the back to charge up. If you’d done that, you woulda exorcised it.”

You let out a bark that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of a laugh. “Sure I could’ve. Me and my crap energy against the grade-two monstrosity that’s, quote, ‘Cutting it close with a shotgun’?”

“You could be a grade two,” he says, with a shrug. “You could be a one someday, easy, if you cared. And you ain’t listening to me—I didn’t say your cursed energy is crap. I said your control’s crap. Your reserves ain’t your problem. Your levels are at or above most working grade ones, even the clan people. You got halfway to domain expansion on your own, untrained, by accident, and the only thing you’ve asked about it is how to never do it again—which, heh. Ironic, for me, as a teacher.” 

He folds up his long legs so he can extend them onto the dashboard. “But you don’t care about career advancement or mastering your technique and that’s fine. Whatever. Exorcism ain’t for everybody. Plenty of good, even great, sorcerers can’t hack it as a pro. But if your goal is to be able to rejoin society, if you want control, you gotta actually use jujutsu. You can’t be afraid to touch it. You gotta try.”

You see red. Your hands are still trembling not out of fear, not out of fading adrenaline, but because you’re spitting mad. The last time you were this angry, you ruined your entire life. You have to cool down. You have to be an adult about this. 

You’re so, so tired of having to be the adult. In the end it only ever got you here, in this stupid car, sweating, shaking, miserable, and pissed as all hell. 

“And how would you know,” you say, your own voice a stranger to you, “whether I’ve been trying or not? You haven’t taught me a single thing!“ You’re clamped down so hard on the wheel you might tear it off. “I’m learning how to throw a punch from my sixteen-year-old classmates! I’m spending all my time getting slapped around an empty gym by a stuffed toy! A stuffed toy that hates me! I get sent on these missions with no briefings, no nothing, I don’t even know what half of the words mean!”

At the end of this tirade, the tide of your anger falls back a little, leaving you with a shred more insight and clarity. You are about to prepare your grovel when he laughs, crossing one ankle over the other, and says, “C’mon, Ricchan, don’t get all hysterical on me—“ and it’s water on a grease fire.

“And please stop calling me that! It’s so rude! I’ve had a really, really, really bad month—“ Your voice breaks on month. You conclude your rant with your voice cracking, just to add insult to injury. “And I just think it would be really nice if you’d stop making fun of me to my face for, like, one single day.”

He holds up his hands, and your rampaging temper flares even hotter when you see his grin. “Gonna open your domain on me?”

You frantically clamp down on your power, still smothered and bound and locked up in the back corner of your mind. The effort burns out the last of your anger. The heat rushes out of your limbs and reasserts itself in your face, a deep flush of shame from your neck to your hairline.

“No,” you sniffle. “I can’t afford to wreck the car.” 

You can’t believe you completely lost it, not even a month after the tantrum that landed you here. You dig in your purse for your emergency tissues. You can’t find them. You must be out, on account of all the unscheduled bawling episodes you’ve had over the past four weeks.

You know what happens next. Or, at least, you know what happens next will be one of two options. He also blows his top and screams back at you (bad), or he triples down on mocking you about how useless you are (more likely, also worse). Either way, you’re really going to need those tissues.

Something white wavers in the corner of your blurred vision. Gojo’s holding out a package of tissues from the dashboard compartment, waving them at you. “I can tell you ain’t trying,” he says as you cautiously accept them, “‘cause I got working eyes. You hate using your technique and you barely lay a finger on your reserves. You’d rather hide in the library and go it alone than ask anybody for help. You didn’t wanna be here in the first place, and I get that, but half-assing everything ain’t gonna get you out.”

You focus your attention on the tissue you’re folding, mouth wobbling. You can’t tell him he’s wrong and you sure as hell don’t want to tell him he’s right.

“But that other stuff, well….” He runs a hand through his hair with that lopsided little frown, then raises both palms. “I gotta say, you got a point!”

“Huh?” you say to your meticulously folded tissue. “Um, what part of it?”

“I know I’m not that great a teacher. It’s just not my thing. And I got a bad personality.”

You whip around to face him, hands still up in mock surrender. He’s gone so far off script he’s disappeared into the margin. “A what?”

“A bad personality. Heh, don’t jump to argue or anything.” He snaps his blindfold idly with the tip of one finger. “I’m not cut out for this kinda stuff. But you’re different than the other students, so you’ll need something different. If I’m gonna chew you out for half-assin’ it, I can get myself too while I’m at it, I guess.”

He’s still plucking at the edge of his blindfold. You’re still picking at your tissue. Of all the ways you expected this conversation to go, admitting you were right was the longshot of the century. No one ever admits you’re right. 

Everything feels so absurd—this car, this conversation, the distant drone of the car’s air conditioning system, the hazy glitter of starlight on the lake. For the last four weeks you’ve felt like your life’s become a joke, but this is the first time you’ve actually wanted to laugh about it. You’re wracked by a small shudder of a chuckle. It pulls your ribs where they’re bruised from your spill on the rocks.

“Well,” you say, “at least you have other nice qualities. Like being so humble?”

And he actually throws his head back and chuckles, sharp and surprised.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you.” You’re still smarting with shame.

“Nahhh, c’mon. That was barely yellin’. It was so cute. You were like, oh please sensei, stop being so me-hee-eeeeaaann to me,” he says with a piercing fake sob, clutching his clasped hands beneath his chin.

“Bad personality,” you mutter.

“Ugh. Okay, fine, I get it. I’ll try and go easier on ya. And you can yell at me whenever you want. We got a high-stress line of work, you have to be able to let off steam with people, or you’ll go nuts. And cursed energy is produced by negative emotion, so you gotta be able to practice keeping an even keel when you get pissed. You did that fine, just now.”

“Oh. That’s really how it works?”

“Yeah. Ain’t there anything about that in that student handbook you’re married to?”

“No,” you say as you scrub your nose. And you’d know. You’ve read it forty times.

“Well, there you go. Don’t say I never taught you anything. You feel better now?”

“Yeah,” you say, and you do. You feel like a wrung-out dishrag, but that’s still an improvement over a wet, soggy dishrag. 

“You wanna go home?”

He means back to the school. Back to the dorm. You can’t go back in time, so you’ll have to take what you can get. “Yeah.”

“Then you’re gonna have to get us there, ‘cause I can’t drive this thing.”

You flick on the headlights. “You should probably get your feet off the dash. I don’t want to get in trouble for messing up Ijichi’s car.”

“I’m not touchin’ it!”

You squint at his boots. “What do you mean, you’re not touching it?”

“There is an infinite range of space between my legs and the dash.” He touches his two index fingers together and draws them apart. “Achilles and the tortoise, Hasegawa.”

You’re too tired to parse or argue this right now. If the dash gets scuffed, the dash gets scuffed.

The road’s quiet on the slow slide back down the mountain. Gojo is also quiet. It’s the longest stretch of time he’s kept his mouth shut in your presence, aside from your first train ride to Jujutsu High. He’s got his seat fully reclined, resting his head back on his folded arms. The only sign he’s still awake is the occasional jiggle of one of his boots.

The silent trees and ribbon of empty road scroll on and on. On the drive here, the silence would have been an answered prayer, a gift of divine provenance. But now it’s weird. It’s weird that you think it’s weird. It’s weird that you’re the one who breaks it first. 

“So, how’d you get into teaching?” you ask hesitantly.

He’s silent for long enough you suspect he may actually be sleeping, until he uncrosses his legs and flops them back against the dashboard. “Guess you could say I’m just a guy with a dream!”

“Like… to get promoted? To be principal?”

“Nah, Yaga’s gonna live forever.” He waves a dismissive hand. “Let’s just say I wanna change the way things are run around here. In the sorcery world. Figured I’d start from the ground up, y’know?”

Beneath his perpetually joking tone, he’s uncharacteristically guarded, and this is veering into a very personal line of questioning. You don’t want to make him uncomfortable. You want to bask in this new era of peace for as long as possible. You swerve into what you hope is relatively neutral territory.

“So, this domain expansion thing,” you say. The thing he was so peeved that you never asked about. “Is that some kind of big deal?”

“Hah! Is it a big deal, she says! Is the pinnacle of modern sorcery a big deal?” He stretches out his legs. “Think about it this way. It wasn’t an accident they sent me to bring you in. I am the strongest, you may recall.”

“Are you?” you ask, with affected innocence. “Have you mentioned that?”

He glances at you, the quirk of his eyebrows visible even beneath the blindfold, and lets out another surprised little laugh. In a tiny corner of your heart, you feel a tiny bit smug about it. 

“When we got the window reports about poor little Ricchan throwing her little temper tantrum—“ You pull a face at him— “they thought it was possible that you were capable of domain combat. And if you had been, the number of sorcerers in this country who could’ve taken you on? Low double digits.” He crosses his arms. “Domain expansion’s the button you press to win. You form a barrier of your own cursed technique around your opponent, and you can land a sure-hit on ‘em, every time.”

You all too easily recall the image of the half-formed half-dome of glass hovering over your desk at your old office. You’ve only seen it painted on the inside of your closed eyelids every time you’ve tried to fall asleep for a month. “And you want me to learn how to do it on purpose?”

So much for keeping to safe territory. He laughs so hard he’s going to pull something. “In a year? You wanna stroll on in, learn the hardest technique in applied sorcery, the thing most people won’t ever be able to handle in their entire lifetime, in a year?”

You hunch over the wheel. “Guess that was a stupid question. Sorry I asked.”

“Nah, that would be so funny! Totally hilarious!” He’s still cackling. “To just drop that and then leave forever? Ultimate power move.” He pushes the heel of his hand into his forehead.

You let him laugh himself out. “Your technique’s a natural barrier,” he says, “so it’s easier for you to just modify it than for the people who gotta start from square one. That’s how you got so far with it on your own. Domain expanion in a year is crazy. But if you want to make that your goal, why the hell not? It’ll be good for you to have something concrete to focus on, even if it’s crazy.”

“I’m fine with something I can actually manage.” You’re nearly back to the relatively crowded national expressway, visible as a bleary river of red light. “Maybe just being able to control when the explosion goes off,” you offer hesitantly, “would be nice.”

“That’s easy. You can pull that off no sweat. But even if you want to accomplish something simple like that…“ He wags a stern finger at you. “No more half-assin’ it. You’re gonna have to show up.”

“Well, so will you,” you say. “In, like, a literal sense.”

He dissolves into laughter again, and that smug, traitorous little corner of your heart stakes out a few more meters of space. He’s got a laugh built to fill a bigger space than this car, loud and brash and unapologetic. It’s not so bad when you’re the one making the joke, as opposed to the butt of it.

“You got a deal, Ricchan. Let’s hold each other to it.” He holds up his fist. “Bump it,” he orders, and you tap your own fist against his.

You decide to push your luck while you’re ahead. “You know, I’d really rather you didn’t call me that.”

“Call you what? Sorry, can’t hear you, tunes time!”

And before you have time to protest, far faster than you’re able to properly track in your peripheral vision, he enters a series of rapid-fire commands into the center console and his cellphone.

You eye the speakers with dread. “Relax. You’re gonna love my banger road trip playlist. I got the perfect starter, just for you. You’re a nineties girl, I know this was the ringtone on your flip phone back in 2006.”

When you pull back into the front drive at Jujutsu High, he’s got the windows down and the volume up, and he’s making his curated tracklist absolutely everyone’s problem. He got you to start hesitantly humming along partway through a string of city pop classics. “Of course you’d love shitty pop, Ricchan,” he scoffs, but when he holds his fist out like an imaginary microphone and says “Take it, Takeuchi!” you stumble into a halting rendition of the chorus of Plastic Love while he conducts with his arm. 

Ijichi, still masked, runs out to meet you. You hope he at least got to take a nap or something. “Sorry! Am I interrupting something?”

“No! No, not at all,” you say, mortified he caught the tail end of your Takeuchi Mariya impression.

“Please take your feet off the dashboard,” Ijichi says to Gojo, desperate.

“I’m not touchin’ it,” Gojo says, still waving his hand back and forth. “Can I have my chocolate now, Hasegawa?”

You shoulder your purse and glance down at him, still reclining, directing the music with one extended finger. “Hey, how about this? I’ll bring them to our first training session.” You’re still not totally convinced said training session is actually going to materalize.

A slow grin spreads across his face. “Holding ‘em hostage? Playing hardball? Wow, I love the new Ricchan.”

You straighten your back. “Again, I’d really rather you didn’t call me that.”

“Then have ‘em ready on Sunday. We’re gonna have fun!”

You highly doubt that, but you’re going to have something. Your first real lesson. Which you are not going to half-ass.

“I’m looking forward to it. Sensei.”

Chapter Text

Gojo is good on his word the following Sunday. True to form and character, he’s good on his word in the most obnoxious way possible.

When a loud, incessant banging at your window drags you awake, you thrash your way out of your sheets and shamble across your dorm room in a bleary daze, bracing yourself to make a harried dash for the principal’s building, because the noise has got to be some kind of school warning system and you’re all under attack from a giant curse. 

You yank open the curtains, expecting buildings on fire and a militia of panicked sorcerers trying to subdue an enormous disaster-movie monster. What you see is a very blurry Gojo Satoru, hanging upside down in midair and making a gesture with both hands that you assume is a pair of finger guns. “Yo, Hasegaw—ah…” 

What he sees is your entire sleepwear situation, which consists of two items: an ancient, bedraggled Rakuten Eagles sweatshirt and a pair of daisy-print panties. 

You tear the curtain back into place so fast the friction might spark a fire, which would be just fine by you. The dorm can burn down with you still inside it. You’ve seen Maki’s high jump, she can easily leap from the third floor and make it out okay.

“Sorry! Sorry sorry sorry,” you screech with your back to the window, eyes squeezed shut. “I didn’t know you were out there! Next time, could you please, like, knock or something—“

“I was knockin’! I’ve been knockin’ for the past minute! You’re a real heavy sleeper, you know that?”

“Maybe say something? Sorry! I didn’t expect to find you… floating out there! Why are you upside down?”

“Why not? Wouldn’t you be?”

Yes. You would. If you had to get slapped with a permanent, deadly supernatural power, why couldn’t it be one that lets you float? “Um… why are you out there?”

“I tried callin’, but you didn’t pick up. And I ain’t allowed in the girls’ dorm.” 

Clearly, the ban isn’t fulfilling its intended function. “I put my phone on silent at night!”

“Well, do you want to train today or not? ‘Cause if you want a private session, we gotta do it now. I have to jet to Sapporo in—“ a pause—“six hours. I’m a busy guy, Hasegawa! If you want my time, it has to be on my time.”

“Okay, okay!” You push your heart back down out of your throat. “Just let me, um… change really quick…” 

You dig the heels of your hands into your closed eyes until your vision flashes white, as if that will erase the image of you half-clothed from both of your minds. “I didn’t see anything, Hasegawa,” he says, at lower volume. “I didn’t look. Promise!”

You emit a low, animal groan of despair. You can’t go to this training session because you can’t look him in the face ever again. You have to drop out of this school. You have to live off the grid in the Tokyo subway system and subsist off of foraged vending machine snacks.

“I’ll be waiting for you out front. And don’t forget my chocolate!”

This really isn’t so bad, you assure yourself as you furiously brush your teeth and put in your contacts. It’s the same amount of skin he would’ve seen at the beach in a modest swimsuit. It’s not like you were naked. All the important stuff was covered. He’s probably forgotten already. You can just never speak of it again. It’ll be fine.

This internal monologue does nothing to assuage the fact that you are going to carry this shame to your grave, but you’re still out the door fifteen minutes later, armed with a tracksuit and two bags of strawberry cream-filled white chocolate hearts.

You nearly jog right past Gojo where he waits with one shoulder against the dorm wall. He’s swapped his school uniform for sweatpants and the blindfold for a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses, and he doesn’t have his hair spiked up. It’s the first time you’ve seen him out of uniform, even in the school lounge. You are forced to admit it’s doing much more flattering things for his bone structure.

“Thanks for waiting,” you huff, incredibly conscious of the contour of your legs through your athletic pants.

He holds his hands out impatiently and you clutch the chocolate close to your chest. “Not yet.”

He clicks his tongue. “Hardass Ricchan’s still here! Thought maybe she’d gone back into hiding.”

“Please don’t call me that,” you say as you fall into place beside him on the walking path towards one of the training buildings.

“Oops! Right, sorry. I’ll try not to do it again…” he glances at you around the rims of his dark sunglasses. Without the blindfold, you have an unobstructed view of the way his incredibly smug expression tugs at his face, from his brow to his lips. You know what’s coming next. He’s doubling down and going even cutesier. “… Risacchi.”

You exhale very slowly through your nose. “You know, no one even called me Risacchi back in actual high school.”

“No one woulda dared! I bet you were such a little goody two shoes in high school.” Well, you’d kind of had to be. The deck was stacked against you from day one, what with the curse and the delinquent elder brother. “Let me guess…” He taps a finger against his lips. “Student council secretary.”

You lift your chin in the air. “Treasurer, actually.” 

“‘Course you were. Called it!”

You cross your arms. “What happened to taking it easier on me?”

“This is easier, Risacchi. Or would you rather go with Ricchan after all?”

“Why are those my only two options? What’s wrong with Hasegawa? Even just Risa would be better.”

He freezes in his tracks and affects a gasp with one hand over his mouth. “You’re asking me to call you by your given name? Kinda early for that, dont’cha think?” He shifts the hand to his cheek, flapping the other at you. “Stop, stop, you’re makin’ me embarrassed!”

Your glare of protest is, as usual, ineffective. As you shift the chocolate under your arm, you realize there’s one tactic you haven’t tried yet. You open one of the bags and pop a chocolate heart in your mouth. 

His blue eyes widen behind the sunglasses. “Risacchi. What’re you doing?”

“When you pick on me,” you say around a mouthful of strawberry cream, “it makes me want to eat candy.” You pluck a second heart from the pile. 

“You wouldn’t eat them all just to spite me, would you, Risacchi?” He clasps his hands. “You wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t do that to me.”

You tilt the two bags in either hand, like the tip of a scale. “Actually, I think I’ll give the rest of this bag to Dr. Ieiri. Does she like sweets? Ijichi can have the other one. He really needs it.”

“Okay, okay, I yield! You win, crazy! Hasegawa it is.”

He leads you into one of the outbuildings past the gym. Like the rest of Jujutsu High, it’s vast, echoing, and empty behind the well-maintaned facade. This building consists of multiple large practice rooms with mirrored walls and a tatami floor. It’ll be a softer fall than the gym linoleum, at least.

Gojo dips into a series of stretches, popping every joint in his hands and arms. “You better stretch too,” he says. “I’m not carryin’ your ass to Shoko if you sprain something.” You do as ordered, dropping into a lunge beside him. “I see you running in the morning sometimes. What else you do for exercise?”

“Um… I used to go to dance cardio twice a week, back in the city.” Oh, shit, you forgot to cancel that membership. You’re still paying for dance cardio class. You knew there had to be something you forgot in your frantic move. 

“Keep doin’ that, if you can. You’ll thank me when we start hitting the high-impact missions.” He straightens up and faces you. “Speaking of impact. Let’s get something out of the way first. Shield up, Ri—Hasegawa.”

You unfurl your technique. “I am your ideal sparring matchup, because—“ And he reaches out with pinched thumb and index finger and flicks your forehead. Your power detonates instantly. You don’t even have time to squeal.

When the light fades, he hasn’t moved a centimer. Not even a lock of his loose hair has shifted out of place. He raises his double finger guns and aims them at the ceiling. “You can’t hit me! No matter what you do, you won’t be able to hurt me. So chill out.”

You’re the opposite of chilled out. Your spine scrunches up like an accordion as you clap a hand to your forehead. It doesn’t even sting. What kind of forehead flick was that, to have the blunt force equivalent to multiple punches from Maki? 

“Now that we got that outta the way. Today, I figured we’d work on your cursed energy circulation, since you’re having so much trouble with it.” You brace for the obvious follow-up insult, but apparently he used up all his material for the day on the walk over.  “And to do that, you’re going to focus it in particular areas of your body.” He cracks his knuckles. “At some point, you’re gonna want to deliver a regular hit with your hands or a weapon, without having to rely on your shield’s overload. This is how you’ll reinforce it. And you’re gonna need to defend yourself in the window when your shield’s down. You following me?”

He extends his left hand, palm upright and facing you, and points at it with the opposite index finger. “Put your hand right there.”

You look at his hand. You look at his lopsided frown. “This ain’t an excuse to hold hands, Hasegawa,” he says impatiently, and taps his palm.

This is, after all, technically a martial arts class. It’s expected that you’re going to have to touch each other. It’ll only be weird if you’re the one who makes it weird. 

He’s got big hands, with long, tapered fingers, to match the rest of his frame. Your own full handspan is barely larger than his broad palm. “You feel that?” he asks.

All you feel is a slight hitch in your heartbeat and a faint heat in your cheeks. “Um. I don’t feel anything different.” He can probably hear the waver in your voice. You’re going to be the one making it weird if you don’t get a handle on yourself. It’s normal to find touching someone’s hand like this a little awkward, but you’re a grown woman, and this is a training session, and you don’t even particularly enjoy being around this guy. You have got to keep a lid on it.

“Close your eyes if you gotta. How ‘bout now?”

You squeeze your eyes shut and focus all your attention in your hand. At first, all you notice is the pressure of his palm against yours. The creak of the floor as you shift from foot to foot. A school bell chiming out on the grounds. You don’t know what it could possibly signify, since it’s not like anyone ever changes class periods here. 

You think of relaxing things. The scent of the lavender aromatherapy diffuser you don’t think you’re supposed to have in your dorm room, but smuggled in anyway in a fit of small pique. The warmth of the onsen out by your parents’ place, where your aunt used to take you as a treat when you got good scores on exams.

It may be wishful thinking. It may be the placebo effect. But you can almost feel something charging the air around his hand and yours. A tug like the pull of a weak current when you dip your hand in a river. “Yeah,” you say. “I think I can feel something?”

“Good. I’m focusing my cursed energy in my hand right now. If I hit a curse like this, it reinforces the blow. Now I want you to do it.”

“Okay. I’ll try.” Your hand curls in a little, drawing back from his palm. “But I wasn’t able to do it with Cathy, though.”

“You have an example now. Give it a shot. I’m not gonna slap you one if you can’t do it.”

You close your eyes again, duck your chin, and focus on the arrhythmic stutter of your curse against the inside of your ribs. You can feel the well of power there, rotating in a slow monsoon vortex around your heart. All you have to do is push it up. Up into your shoulder, up your arm, then into your palm.

“I don’t feel you trying, Hasegawa.” 

“I am trying! I just… can’t do it!” Your ears are heating up. He’s not going to want to blow his valuable time one-on-one with you again if you can’t even hack the first and easiest lesson. 

“Try again. I’m gonna watch and tell you what you’re doing wrong.”

Your attempts get exponentially worse. Your shoulders creep up to your ears as you clench your energy in both metaphorical fists and try to shove it into your hand. You feel like you’re trying to eat soup with chopsticks, and you look just as stupid and laughable as if you were.

“Okay. Uh, take a sec.” He drops his hand. “Unclench. You’re too in your own head, Hasegawa.”

“I’m sorry.” You’re getting a failing grade in sorcery. He’s going to make a cutting joke about your energy circulation, never teach you again, and laugh with all two of the other teachers in the lounge about what you looked like in your underwear.

“Don’t apologize to me. This ain’t an exam.” He stretches out his shoulders. “I’m gonna go grab something. Back in five.”

He does that thing he does where he vanishes into a fold in space. You wait obediently in place for a few minutes, but when he doesn’t materialize, you dig your phone out of your jacket to check up on your farm. You’re watering the virtual potato sprouts when he reappears, shouts “Go long!” and lobs a can of energy drink at your face.

Sometimes, your cursed technique really is good for something. The bottle recoils off your cheek and plops down onto the mat. “Good defense!” 

It’s one of those horrible peach energy drinks you’re addicted to. “Oh! Um, thank you!”

He pops the tab on his own can of soda. “The energy drink is a metaphor. Don’t know how you choke those things down, by the way, they’re crazy nasty. Open it up.” You open the lid. “Okay. Now squeeze it.” 

“Um…. do I really have to? It’s going to get all over the floor.” And also your hand.

He takes a long drag of his soda. “That’s exactly what you’re doin’ with all that cursed energy of yours, Hasegawa. You’re squeezing it just like that can. You can get a little out, but you can’t direct it, and you can’t get any real momentum goin’. What you need… is….”

He turns his back to you, rummages around in his pockets, and, making a little fanfare with his mouth, twirls back around and presents you with a blue curly straw in the shape of a heart, still in a plastic wrapper. “Ta-daaaaaaaaa!” He extends the straw in his clasped, cupped hands, head bowed.

“Did you seriously just go to a hundred-yen shop to buy that?”

“That ain’t important right now. Don’t worry about it.” He unwraps the straw, then places in your open drink. “This is what you need to do with your energy. Don’t try and brute force it. Make a path it can follow. Make sense?”

“I… think so?” You take a clarifying sip of your disgusting peach-adjacent beverage through the straw.

He resumes his earlier stance, offering his hand. “Okay then. Hit me.”

You shake out your arms, roll your shoulders, and this time, when you place your palm against his, a burst of your energy flares partway up your arm before fizzling out. It takes you a few more attempts to be able to do it again reliably, but the path is easier to trace every time. The energy rises up to your elbow, then halfway to your wrist. 

“Good. Nice,” he says, when it sparks all the way to the tips of your fingers, and it’s chased by a second rush of pure triumph. 

When you can reliably repeat the feat five times running, he has you try to hit him while you’re focusing your energy in one hand. “Don’t make that face, Hasegawa. I already told you there’s nothing you can do to hurt me. I am so, so much stronger than you. It’s like a Godzilla kinda situation.”

You suppress the urge to roll your eyes as you smack your energy-reinforced fist into his cupped hand. Your hand stops moving, shuddering as it rolls to a stop, but you don’t feel anything. You roll your knuckles and open your hand. Still no contact.

“You’re not gonna touch me. That’s my technique.” He wiggles his fingers at you. It looks like there’s no distance between your fingertips at all, but no matter how you swipe your hand back and forth, you only touch empty air. “Infinite amount of space between your hand and mine. Neat, huh?”

The morning passes quickly. You ease into the rhythm of directing your energy up your hand and into a swing, your fist landing in his outstretched hand—well, in the vicinity of his hand—like a ball in a catcher’s mitt. He has you change hands. He has you switch to your legs, and you have more issues properly executing a roundhouse kick than with directing your energy into your strikes. He has you swap to defense and focus on strengthening your forearms as you tank the world’s slowest, gentlest hits. 

And he’s amazingly restrained the entire time. He does get a good laugh out of your stance when you try to line up your kicks—“Hasegawa, I know you can’t look away from my beautiful baby blues, but my hand is down here”—but you suppose he can have a freebie as the cost of admission. 

When the alarm on his phone goes off, you’re hot, limber, and not unpleasantly exhausted. “Good work today,” he says, and you glow from your toes to the tips of your ears. You are, as always, highly susceptible to praise. “You’re a fast learner, when you actually put some effort in.”

“And you’re not a bad teacher,” you say, presenting the bags of chocolate. “When you actually, you know. Teach.” 

He throws his head back and laughs, and your ears burn a little warmer. “Don’t forget to practice while I’m gone. Sorcery’s pretty much a solo event, and you still gotta put in most of the work yourself. If you want some company, ask Yuta. He’s way too nice to say no.”

“I’ll try,” you say, even though you aren’t exactly looking forward to resuming regularly scheduled ass-whippings by teenagers half your age.

“I know you think it’s weird or whatever to practice with kids, but they’re all way better than you.” Ouch, but true. “You’ll improve faster if you can get over it.”

You’re just going to have to get used to it. “Thanks for taking the time to do this,” you say, and clasp your hands with a formal little bow. 

He waves you off. “Kinda had to, after this chick ripped me a new one in the car last week. She was so pissed. You shoulda been there!”

my instructor saw me in my underwear today, you text Keiko later that evening from your dorm room bed. i want camellias at my funeral

She responds immediately. girl? what? how the fuck???????????? context NOW. WAS HE PEEKING?

R: ACCIDENT

K: HIS FAULT?

my fault, you type, even though he really ought to have announced himself out there.

K: i will stay my blade. he lives to see another sunrise

K: wait this is the guy we hate right? also…….. how??????

You’re tapping a finger against your phone where it rests on one folded knee, editing various permutations of hate’s a strong word and he’s not that bad when you receive a new text alert. You’re puzzled as to why you’re getting communications from a daikon radish, until you remember that’s what you changed Gojo’s contact picture to back on your fateful birthday.

G: RISACCHIIIIIIIIII

sorry, you type. wrong number! no one here by that name.

He sends a snapshot of himself in an airport waiting area with a huge full-cheeked smile, V-sign in one hand, bag of half-eaten candy in the other. He must be making someone else take the picture. these are gooooooood <3 homemade?

R: how else do you think i bought my student council votes?

G: okay new training regimen. you and me, every day, chocolate-based payment plan tbd

G: you take flavor requests?

You’ve just replied depends. risacchi does not. hasegawa might when you’re interrupted by the lightest, gentlest rasp on the door. You ignore it. It’s probably just the building settling. The dorm’s old.

The polite little rasp gains assertiveness and becomes a full-fledged knock. Maki, Okkotsu, and Panda are crowded around your doorway. Maki shoves Okkotsu forward a few centimeters with a light shoulder check. “Um, hi, Ms. Hasegawa,” he says down to his shoes. “Sorry to bother you!”

You lean against the doorframe. “Risa’s fine. You aren’t bothering me. What’s up?”

“Um… are you busy right now?”

“We don’t have time for this!” Panda claps his paws together in desperate prayer. “Please help us!”

“What do you need?” You can’t imagine what they’d need you for. These kids can’t possibly be on the hunt for a corporate statistician. 

“In the kitchen!” says Panda, paws still clasped. “You can cook, right? You said it’s one of your hobbies! And you made Maki that apology food!”

Maki crosses her arms. “It was good.”

“So if you’re not busy, would you mind helping us out?” Okkotsu tears his wide, hopeful eyes from the floor.

Finally, something you know something about. You’re already twisting your hair up into a knot and grabbing your satsuma-patterned apron from its hook by the door. “Of course! No trouble at all!”

The trio hurries you across the schoolyard to the lounge. “Toge’s watching the stove,” says Okkotsu. 

“It’s great that you guys are already getting into cooking,” you say. “It’ll save you a lot of money when you move out on your own.” Maybe you can impress them with some of your secret tricks for flawless omurice. Winter’s not over yet, and it’s still the perfect season for you to make hot pot together. In your mind, you’ve already ascended to the set of a pastel-hued, soft-lit Sunday afternoon cooking show, rolling meatballs before an appreciative audience of four. “So, what are you making?”

“Tsukimi soba,” says Panda. 

“Oh, yum! That sounds great.” A good starter recipe for beginners. Simple, straightforward, seasonally appropriate. “Do you need help with the eggs? You know, if you soak them in cold water at the end, they’re really easy to peel—“

“We did the eggs already,” says Maki. “It’s the noodles.”

Okkotsu twiddles his index fingers. “I can’t get the texture right. They keep breaking apart when I cut them, and then they fall apart in the pot.”

You almost faceplant on the front step of the student lounge. “Wait, you guys are making your own noodles?”

“Uh-huh!” says Okkotsu.

The imaginary staff of Cooking With Risa! immediately pack up the set and head home. The kids have overestimated your ability by several long kilometers. You’re a home hobby cook, not the designated noodle bitch several years into your apprenticeship at Shibuya’s hottest eatery. “Uh… I can’t say I’ve made my own soba at home before.”

Okkotsu’s kneading his hands harder than he must’ve gone at the buckwheat dough. “Oh… you haven’t?” 

“It’s really hard! And it takes such a long time! I’m a working wo—was a working woman, I buy noodles at the store like everybody else!” You attempted homemade udon for your father’s birthday, once, as a special occasion, four years ago. Thus ends your noodle expertise. “It’s no wonder you’re having trouble, that’s a difficult thing to jump right into…”

“Oh, no, we cook all the time,” says Panda. “We got big into it last summer.”

“Yuta’s our noodle guy,” says Maki protectively. “His udon’s the best. She can’t help us, Toge,” she calls into the kitchen, where Inumaki is tending the stovetop. The pasta pot he’s using is three times better than yours. It’s part of a set you’d hinted to your parents that you’d really like for a wedding gift.

And just like that, your one shred of a chance at impressing these kids is boiled off like steam. The staff of your cooking show are demanding breach of contract restitutions.

“Cod roe,” says Inumaki, flatly, with a wave.

“Well, sorry to bother you, then! We’ll manage.” Okkotsu cracks his knuckles and resumes his post at the counter, frowning down at the shreds of his noodle dough.

Subpar noodle bitch skills or no, you can’t just leave them here suffering. Your honor is on the line. “I could still take a look at it, if you want! We could do what I always do when I’m having trouble with a recipe—find a video online of some adorable old woman making it.” 

Okkotsu obediently moves aside so you can inspect the dough. “I was following a video… It’s, uh, this one right here…”

The pair of you hunch over his phone screen while he scrubs his thumb back and forth over the timestamps. You both take turns kneading the dough, in a bowl and across the countertop, in case it needed more time. You help him cut a few slices. It frays like old rope and unravels immediately in the pot when you submerge it. You do, in fact, have the cooking show audience you dreamed of—sort of—as the other three peer over your shoulders and look singularly unimpressed.

At the urging of various videos, message boards, and recipe blogs, you add more water. It becomes sludgy. You add more flour. It becomes plywood-tough and difficult to manage. You add a little bit of tapioca flour to encourage texture. It does not mix evenly and imparts a spackled, moldy appearance. 

“You guys, just give uppppppp,” moans Panda from the floor, where he’s melted into a vague Panda-sized pancake. “It’s not happening! I’m starving!” So he needs to eat. That’s one question answered. 

“Fish flakes,” says Inumaki, flatly.

You unlace your apron and hang it on the back of a chair. “I’ve got box noodles back in my room. I’ll go get them. You already made the soup, right?”

You race to your room, nearly breaking the sound barrier in your enthusiasm to contribute something—you’ve run slower from the actual curses—and return with an armful of box soba that cooks up fast in the pricy, restaurant-quality stovepot. Yuta rinses the noodles—correctly, you note—and doles them out into bowls with the soup broth.

The soup is rich and salty and the eggs are precisely the correct texture. “This is really good,” you say. “You cook all the time? What else do you like to make?”

“Oh, all kinds of things. We like seafood season the best. We can even clean fish!” Panda flexes an arm. 

“Wow. I can’t teach you guys anything, huh?” You cut your self-deprecating laugh short. You don’t want to make them uncomfortable when they’ve gone to the trouble of letting a terminally uncool adult hang around for dinner. “Sorry I couldn’t save your noodles.”

“Salmon,” says Inumaki flatly.

“Blame Gojo-sensei.” Maki slurps up a mouthful of noodles. “I usually do. He’s the one who said we should bother you.”

“Oh. He did?”

“Yeah. Said if we ran into trouble, you’d probably know what to do.”

You whip out your phone and text him, why’d you tell the kids i know how to make homemade noodles?

The response is immediate: you don’t? weaksauce.

“Don’t listen to whatever that idiot’s saying.” Maki raps her fist on the tabletop.

“How did you know I was—“

“Everyone always makes the same face when they’re talking to him.”

“What’s your specialty, Ms. Hasegawa?” asks Panda.

“Um, you really can call me Risa! Stir fries and soups, I guess… and desserts. I used to do a lot of baking when I was in school.”

“You could show us that sometime. We haven’t done many desserts before.” You’ve spent enough time looking at his snout now that you can tell that he’s smiling.

Okkotsu leans forward hopefully. “Maybe we can do taiyaki!”

“Sure. I’ve got a mold for it.”

“That’s your favorite, right, Maki?” 

Maki turns rosy and crosses her arms. “I like it, yeah.” She jerks her chin over to you. “You can be on dessert duty next time, if you want.”

You certainly don’t merit a position of head chef, if the display of skill and ambition here tonight is representative. Same as on the practice field. The kitchen seems like an easier place to start learning how to take a little coaching.

A handful of the crew of Cooking With Risa! shuffle back onto the set and hesitantly turn some lights back on. “You got it. I’ll bring the mold.”

Chapter Text

Gojo returns from his trip to Hokkaido five days later with a spring in his step and seventeen bags of novelty edible souvenirs that he refuses to share with anyone. “Somebody’s been doin’ her homework!” he says, with a thumbs-up, upon spotting you. Now you’ve got a spring in your step, too.

The next week of class, he takes you by the school armory for a look at the weapon stocks. “Don’t take this the wrong way or anything,” he says, “but you don’t really strike me as the bareknuckle brawl type of girl.”

You squint at him. “How am I supposed to take that?”

“I just said! Not the wrong way! Unless you wanna go all in on throwing hands, we should probably get you on something you’ll like. You can pick whatever, Maki knows ‘em all.”

The Jujutsu High armory houses every possible kind of tool ever devised for violence. You wander through rows of swords and axes and spears and knives and nunchaku, lost in a dense and very sharp forest. 

You can’t quite visualize yourself swinging a sword—or any other bladed weapon, for that matter. You’ll spend more time fretting about the possibility of slashing yourself, or a teammate, than using it for its intended purpose. The naginata isn’t so bad, but you don’t have the confidence, unlike Maki, to smuggle one on the subway in a weapons bag. Same problem with a full-length staff.

The only weapon in the arsenal that looks and feels in some way familiar to you is the hanbo, the half-staff. It’s about the same length as a regulation softball bat. When you curl your hands around it, muscle memory kicks in and guides you into a swing.

Gojo cackles. “Why’re you holding it like that? You ain’t first batter for the Hawks!”

“I played softball in middle school, you know,” you say, widening your stance for a second swing.

“Oh, really? What position?”

You whack an imaginary ball into the stands. “Right fielder.”

He throws a pitying glance down at you. “Oh, Risacchi. Didn’t anybody ever tell you? That’s the position for people who’re bad at softball.”

“We were prefecture junior champions! It was a big deal to make the team at all.” You stand the staff upright, bracing it between the floor and your palm. “Someone had to take right field.”

“Uh-huh. Sure. Well, if that’s how you want it. Get out there and give ‘em hell, slugger.”

Maki is already out in the practice field, stancing up with a nunchaku and a thousand-meter stare. Gojo yells her over. “Hasegawa here’s going for the hanbo. Show her the ropes, okay?”

Maki sighs and pushes her glasses up her nose. “Fine.”

The two of you trudge onto the field, the soft, fuzzy carpet of new-growth spring grass—perfect for wiping out on—rustling under your feet. “Gojo-sensei says you know how to use all the weapons in there,” you say as you shake out the tingle in your arm from whacking your staff against her nunchaku. 

She shrugs one shoulder before clashing her weapon against yours. The shock shivers all the way up your neck and chatters your teeth. “Most of them, I guess.”

“That’s really amazing.” She’s only, what, sixteen? She must be some kind of savant. They ought to send her to the summer Olympics when it comes to Tokyo in a couple years.

“Strike like this—no, like this,” she says, grabbing the end of your staff to demonstrate. “Straight forward so you hit me with the end.”

You jab the staff at her chin and she bats it out of the way and taps you across the back of the hand. “Ow!” You examine your bruised knuckles. 

She scowls. “That idiot said you mean business now. If you’re really serious, I’m not going to go easy on you anymore just to make you feel better.”

You salute weakly with the staff. “Understood, boss.”

Maki orders you to also practice with Okkotsu (who insists you call him Yuta, if he’s supposed to be calling you Risa), to get experience fighting a weapon-user with strong cursed energy circulation. “I can’t teach you anything about that,” she snaps, then stomps off to conclude the conversation.

After a few bouts with Yuta, you understand what she meant. Your dedicated homework after your training session with Gojo has made you slightly more sensitive to the currents in your opponents. You can make out just enough with your dull sixth sense to admire how remarkably fluid Yuta’s control is. When he goes in for a swing, his cursed energy shifts and pools in flawless sync with the movement of his arm. 

Maki, you note now that you know what to look for, does not circulate energy at all. 

Yuta is everything Maki isn’t—quiet, patient, and voices all his advice as gentle requests. You may want to change the angle of your swing. You might want to watch how you’re bending your elbow. You could focus more energy into your staff at the point of impact.

His meekness isn’t due whatsoever to a lack of skill. When he raises his sword and wrinkles his forehead in concentration, you know you’re about to get thrashed all the way down the field and back. 

Gojo interrupts one of said thrashings by yelling at you, as is his custom, from across the field. “Hey, you two! Got a mission for ya. Some quality Sendai gang bonding time.” He ruffles Yuta’s mop of hair the second he gets in range. “Hasegawa, I wanna see a hundred and ten percent out there! Take good care of my little cousin, okay?”

“Oh! I didn’t know the two of you were family.”

“We aren’t,” says Yuta, a little abashed.

“Only suuuuuuper distantly! But isn’t real family about what’s in your heart, anyway?”

The mission site is an office block with a strong resemblance to the building where you wasted the vast majority of your waking hours for the past three and a half years. “It’s a gang of low-level curses,” says Ijichi, en route. “Apparently they’ve taken over the third floor and keep tampering with the computer equipment.”

At the front entrance, Ijichi raises a hand to draw down the curtain, but you say, “Wait! Do you mind if I try to do it?” You’ve studied the incantation a few times since your last outing, and you are going to give your promised hundred and ten percent. 

Your little dome of night is slightly misshapen and drips unevenly over the office block, but as it closes against the ground, you can’t help but feel the slightest bit proud of yourself. You shoulder the bat bag that houses your new staff, salute Ijichi, and follow Yuta through the front entrance. 

“Ms. Hasega—I mean, um, Risa,” says Yuta hesitantly as you pass through a double pair of sliding doors into the front lobby, “before we start, do you mind if I borrow it?”

You shift the strap of your bag, confused. “My staff?”

“No, your cursed technique. I have to have your permission.”

“Oh! Uh, sure. No problem.”

He offers a hand. When you hold out yours, he gives it a light little smack, a shy, off-center high-five. You don’t feel any different. 

Even this late on a weeknight, you’d expect at least one person to still be clocking overtime hours, but the staff must have gotten the memo to evacuate, because the halls stand empty, the only sound the tinny buzz of the fluorescent lighting. 

The elevator isn’t working. Yuta presses the buttons on each side of the bank a handful of times, in vain. “Uh, well, looks like we’re taking the stairs!”

With a sharp snap, the lights overhead stutter, then go black. “Looks like we should’ve asked Maki for her flashlights, huh?” you say, with a tight little giggle, but the light flickers back to life a few seconds later, followed by the bulbs down the hall in a rolling wave. 

Yuta grimaces. “At least some of them know we’re here. They’ll be waiting upstairs. Um, these may be low-level, but let’s be careful, okay?” Even his mission banter is mild-mannered. 

You ready your staff, but nothing accosts you in the echoing concrete stairwell, or on the third floor landing. There’s only faceless white walls, industrial carpeting in a washed-out geometric pattern, and blank hallway in either direction. “Can you sense any of them?” Yuta scratches the back of his head. “Sorry. Gojo-sensei said to make you do the residuals. For practice.”

There’s an odd little chirp underneath the persistent hum of the lights, coming from the stretch of hallway to your left. If you squint at the carpet at just the right angle, there’s a patchy, shimmering little streak, leading to one of the office doors. “I think there’s tracks! Going to that door right there.”

“Uh-huh!” he says. “Good job! We’ll do that one first.” You have no doubt this boy knows where every curse on this floor is located, down to the last centimeter.

At his direction, you both take up position on either side of the office door before cracking it open, readying your staff for something to burst out of the dark. You hold your stances for a handful of harrowing seconds, but nothing approaches the door. Inside, there’s a repetitive ticking click, like the toll of an antique clock.

Yuta turns the lights on. On the other side of the room, a small, birdlike curse, the size of your two fists stacked together, is pecking at one of the computer towers with a twisted, helical beak shaped like a drillbit. It quirks its head at you. It has no eyes, only a spiral of round holes in its head. 

“My turn to use the copier,” it chirps. “My turn, my turn!” Then it flies straight at your head.

You smack it out of the air like you’re hitting a fastball. It bounces once off the carpet, then bursts into smoke. “That wasn’t so bad!” you say, swapping a shaky thumbs-ups with Yuta right before a second curse, resembling the first but ten times as large, waddles up behind you and shrieks an enormous shockwave into the room. 

Your shield harmlessly parts the force to either side of you. Yuta tanks the damage head-on by focusing his cursed energy and swipes his sword through the curse, none the worse for wear. The desks and computer banks are pulverized. Someone is about to have a really bad day tomorrow. You hope this company shelled out for good cloud storage. 

“That drew them out. They’re going to try to corner us in here!” says Yuta. “Back out in the hallway—“

The hallway outside is now seething with curses, bearing down on you from both directions. To the right, closer to you, is one of the larger-bodied avian curses, accompanied by a flock of its smaller cousins bouncing along in its wake. To the left, a cluster of the bigger ones surround a yet even taller curse, bobbing along on a pair of stilt-like legs like a heron’s. With a queasy lurch, you realize it’s walking on a pair of unfurled scissors, the tips piercing through the worn carpet.

“Um, if you’re okay taking that side, I’ll get these!” says Yuta, and springs towards the left.

His opening sprint carries him more than far enough out of range for you to safely set off a burst from your shield. You dart to the right to intercept your own flock of curses, your staff quivering in your hands as you tighten your grip. 

Yuta gave himself the harder job. You can’t slip up and make more trouble for him.

 “I should’ve been the one, one, one to get the promotion,” chirps the single large curse from its twisted beak before unleashing another wave of sonic force. 

With the damage that you already absorbed from the first shockwave, you’ve hit overload, but you’re still a few meters out of range from the curses. You let out a grunt of frustration as your shield’s detonation buckles the bland industrial carpeting and flares out before hitting even a single one. One of the little curses darts near you, and you swipe at it with your bat, but it dances back out of range. You whack the second one that tries it. There’s one down.

You glance over your shoulder for a glimpse of Yuta sweeping a clean stroke through two curses at once. He doesn’t need any help at the moment. The larger curse down your end of the hallway shrieks at you again, and once more, it hops out of range of your shield and your weapon. 

You can probably take one more of the sonic shockwaves. The curse keeps bobbing backwards, splitting its beak for another shriek. You charge at it, then slide forward across the carpet like you’re going for home base. Your shins burn, but the shockwave breaks across your shield just as you close enough distance to bring the curse within the radius of your ensuing detonation.

There’s nothing left but ash and wrecked carpet. Heaving for breath, you brace a fist on the wall and twist around to check on Yuta. 

He’s sweeping through the smaller curses counterclockwise with calculated strokes of his sword, orbiting around the largest, long-legged curse and keeping it at range while it swipes at him with its long, bladed legs. His economy of motion, both with his blade and with the currents of his energy, is taut and flawless. Not a single step a centimeter further than necessary, not a single wasted strike when one perfectly angled slice will cleave a curse mid-rush.

Before you can make it halfway to him, he braces himself against one of the sonic shrieks, and then, with a thunderclap that rattles the office walls, he’s haloed in a shining curtain of light.

It’s your own technique, seen from the outside. Instead of expanding in a perfect sphere, like your bursts do, his detonation flares out in front of him in a fanned wave. It engulfs the curses in a tide of brilliance and crumples them like loose sheaves of paper.

He turns back to you, his breathing not the slightest bit labored. “Nice job, Ms. Hasegawa!” he says through the blaring ring in your ears as he gives you another thumbs-up.

“You okay?” you ask as you jog over to him. 

“Fine! You?”

Your legs are scraped raw, but nothing a bag of ice won’t hopefully fix. “All good. Was that, um, my technique?”

He nods. “Yeah! My technique is Copy. I can borrow someone else’s for awhile. Thanks for letting me use it.”

“Oh, sure.” Of course he’s immediately able to do more with it than you can. His sense of timing was perfect, even without practice. The glimmering explosion looked far more impressive in his capable hands than from behind your own eyes.

“What’s it called, anyway?” he asks.

“Oh. It doesn’t have a name. Should I give it one?”

“If you’re the first person on record with the technique, you get to name it,” he says. “I got to name Copy. I didn’t really get that creative with it,” he says with a bashful laugh.

The idea of naming your technique feels like finally bestowing a moniker on a stray cat that’s been hanging around the neighborhood for a decade. You’ve only just come around to calling it your technique, instead of simply your curse. “How did you… uh, change the shape?”

He kneads the back of one hand with the other. “I don’t think I even realized I was trying. Um, if you change your cursed energy output, the shape has some flexibility.” You have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about. “I think you can do it too!”

“Do you think you’d be able to show me sometime?”

He breaks into a relieved smile. “Of course!”

The two of you skip back to school, victorious, and after you manage to stop shaking, you’re riding high all throughout the next day. You contributed to a mission, even if you weren’t the most valuable player. You’re making leaps and bounds with your cursed energy. And you’ve made some noticeable progress with the hanbo, but more importantly, sometimes when you pass Maki out in the morning on your respective jogs, she returns your wave with a brief spasm of her arm. 

Everything’s coming up Risa. So you’re unpleasantly surprised when Gojo asks you to stay after class during one of his rare lecture periods.

You linger by the front desk. “Am I… uh, in trouble?”

“Uh-huh! You’re in huge trouble!” He shakes a thick stack of papers at your face. “Where is my daifuku mochi, huh? I texted you about making some seventy-two hours ago and you said, quote, review the evidence—“ He spins his phone around so you can see the text chat in question, tapping your message with one insistent finger. “Sure I can, that’s easy! Explain yourself.”

“Sorry, I didn’t realize you were placing a time-sensitive order. Next time, use our online shop app for faster service!” He rolls his eyes at you under the blindfold. “Please keep in mind we are a small business run by a full-time student. Whose sensei assigns her a lot of homework.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. Excuses, excuses.” He slaps the wad of paper down on his desk. “Also, you’re gettin’ a promotion! Hooray, congrats, rah-rah Risacchi.”

“Oh! Really?” You lean in for a closer look at the page on top of the stack. 

“Yep. Grade four to three.” He holds up three fingers.

“Um… what does that change?”

“You’ll be able to take on grade three missions.”

“You already make me go on grade three missions.”

He shrugs with an innocent grin. “Also, you get paid more!”

This is vital news. You’ve been watching your bank account balance trickle down every time you buy laundry detergent and dry noodles, with increasing trepidation and dismay, for two months now. It’s slightly offset by the student deposits every two weeks, but the net trend is in the negatives.

You bounce once on your heels and pump a fist. You’re treating yourself to one of those parfaits he complained about from the good corner store tonight. “What kind of mochi did you say you wanted? I’ll do a celebration batch on Sunday!”

“Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!” He shoves the stack of papers over to you. “I want strawberry. Sign on the last page. Also, it’s probationary, so you’ll have to get observed on a mission by whatever crusty old asshole the higher-ups assign before you get the pay raise. Sorry about that.”

You flip through the stack of papers, skimming through overwritten academic jargon on the criteria expected of grade three sorcery until you get to the notes on your “consistent performance, including exemplary performance on the assigned mission dating March 1, 2018 in Shinjuku.”

Gojo sighs. “Shoulda guessed you’d be the type to read all the terms and conditions. Bet you do this every single time you update your phone.”

“Is it, like, promotion season or something?” you ask as you skip to the end of the booklet. The academic year is almost up. The first-years—the rest of them, anyway—will become second-years next month. You won’t be attending class with them anymore, you realize with a regretful little pinch. Although, of course, they’ll still be around on campus. “Are the others getting bumped up, too?” 

They’ve been nagging you to buy them some giant octopus to grill with your so-called ‘office lady money,’ which is pretty audacious of them, considering their cookware is three times pricier than yours. You can’t think of a better reason than a pay raise for everyone.

Gojo leans his hips against his desk, slanting his long legs at a forty-five degree angle to do it. “Nope! Just you. Ain’t you special.”

“Not Maki? Yuta?” The two other grade fours, specifically. No way school admin is going to bump you up and not the boy wonder or the future gold medalist for Japan in single combat martial arts.

Gojo’s broad grin is sloping downwards into his signature asymmetric frown. “Nope!”

That makes zero sense. “But… they’re both way better than me.”

He nods. “Yep! Sure are!”

“Maki’s the one teaching me how to fight! And Yuta’s… well, Yuta’s incredible.”

“He is, ain’t he?” says Gojo, with no small pride. “He’ll be better than me someday.”

“He could use my own technique better than I can on his first try.” You run a fingertip over the paragraph about consistent performance. “But I’m going to be grade three… and they’re not?”

“You’re on a roll today!”

“Why?”

“That is such an excellent question, Risacchi! And the answer is… braindead dumb political bullshit!” he announces with a cheerful wave of his arms. You wait for him to elaborate. He doesn’t look pleased about it. “Look, Maki’s deal’s her own thing.” You can add two and two and figure that has something to do with the family name she won’t use. “I’m the one who scouted Yuta, and that’s…” He spins one hand. “A whole other thing.”

You frown down at the paperwork, rifling back to the start of the packet. “So I’m getting promoted for the mission Yuta did most of the work in, because… they’re trying to spite you?”

“More or less!” He twirls one index finger and stabs it towards you. “But none of that’s got anything to do with you. It’s not like I think you don’t deserve grade three or anything, okay? I woulda made you one to begin with, but I got shot down.”

The paragraph after your performance requirements lists the two professional sorcerers nominating you for promotion. The first name, Ino Takuma, you vaguely recognize as belonging to one of the professional sorcerers who hangs around the school lounge sometimes, though you haven’t exchanged more than five words with him. “Why is Ino nominating me?”

He scoots closer along the edge of the desk and pokes the page with one fingertip. “You can’t get a nom from any of your supervisors. Has to be a working sorcerer who isn’t your teacher.”

The second name is unfamilliar to you. Or, more accurately, halfway unfamiliar to you: the family name is Zen’in. “Um… and who’s this other sorcerer? The one with the same family name as Maki—“

He straightens up and smacks one hand down on the desk. “Don’t worry about him! Not your problem!”

This appears as if there is very much, in fact, some kind of problem, and you ought to be worrying about it. He sighs and sags over at your alarmed expression, scrubbing a hand over his scruff of hair. “Look, there’s some behind the scenes stuff going on, some dumb turf war crap… it’s whatever.”

You can’t help but picture the jujutsu higher-ups as the Board at your old company, gazing down upon you from on high in their lofty perch in the penthouse among the clouds. “You recruited me, too,” you say, “but they’re still promoting me anyway?”

“It’s stupid infighting bullshit! Does it have to make sense?” He waves a hand over his shoulder, as if brushing it off. “You’re just here to learn. You shouldn’t have to worry about all that.”

You should be worrying about all that. You are going to be worrying about all that. But what you’re worrying about right now, in this moment, is how the protective tenor of his voice, and the way his lean body is curling over you, makes a small, faint warmth stir over your skin, like the first breeze of spring.

Avoiding glancing up at him, you flip back to the final page, where there’s a blank field for a signature. You uncap your pen and tap it againt the desktop. “It just doesn’t seem fair,” you say finally. “Yuta was the lead in that mission. He exorcised three times as many curses as I did.”

“You’re a real team player, ain’t’cha, Risacchi? But if you turn it down, they aren’t gonna give it to Yuta. It’s you or nobody.”

You twirl the pen in one hand. Two months ago, you would definitely have just signed and been done with it. Had been done with it. When you got your own minor promotion at your old job because the girl you were replacing had an affair with a married supervisor and they wanted to shuffle her off and keep it quiet, and if you raised your voice, you’d be next on the block. Last time you checked, the supervisor in question was still dead weight in the same position. 

Her name was Akane. You wonder how she’s doing. How Hanae’s doing. 

“Um… so I can turn it down, then?”

Gojo’s eyebrows rise beneath the his blindfold. “You can. They ain’t gonna like it. Next opportunity might be a long time coming, if you spite ‘em. You sure you wanna do that?”

“Next time, if it’s for something I actually deserve, I’ll take it.” You calculate some quick subtractions from your bank account. You have enough to last you a little while longer, on account of all your diligent saving for your wedding that wasn’t. You’ll just have to be careful. “Besides, what do I need a promotion for?” you say to his disbelieving expression as you slide the paperwork back towards him. “I’m going to be out of here for good in two semesters, anyway.”

He pauses for a long second. “O-kay. If that’s how you want it!” And he writes She said no thanks! in heavy, bold script beneath the signature line, along with a tiny doodle of himself shrugging. It’s surprisingly decent. “Now you can spend the rest of the day focusing on the important stuff. Like my daifuku! I’m expecting some when I get back from my next mission, or I’m flunkin’ ya!”

The next day, you are called to see the principal. 

Yaga-sensei has you meet him in the receiving room where he conducted your entrance interview. He’s on the dais, felting a tiny piglet, when you announce yourself. 

“I heard you refused a promotion yesterday,” he says, without taking his eyes off his work. 

“Um, Yaga-sensei… sorry, but am I, uh, in trouble?”

He gives you a hard stare over the rims of his sunglasses, and no answer. “When I asked Satoru to elaborate as to why, his response was, ‘She said suck it, suckers!’ And then he did this.” He holds his hand up in a V-sign. “I am guessing that is not a direct quote.”

You order yourself not to laugh and instead bow your head and bite your lip. “No, sir.”

He puts the finishing touches on the piglet’s tiny looped tail and sets it on the dais beside him. “You aren’t in trouble for refusing a promotion, Ms. Hasegawa, although I doubt Satoru has impressed upon you the consequences. You might think promotion doesn’t matter when you plan on rejoining society, but the professional ties you make as a sorcerer, even if you choose to leave this world permanently, may someday be very important to you. I hope you’ll give this some more thought.”

You bob your bowed head. “Yes, sir.”

He adjusts his glasses. “I actually wanted to speak to you regarding something else. Have the other students—or the working sorcerers, for that matter—mentioned anything to you about the spring fundraiser?” You shake your head. “A little after the start of the new school year, we hold a fundraising event on the school grounds. A large number of professional sorcerers come back to attend. It’s an important networking event for jujutsu society, on top of the financial aspect. Typically, students help run the show. The upperclassmen are supposed to be in charge, but…” He spreads his hands. “There have been some unforeseen circumstances. That leaves the rising first years. Of which I’d like you to take the lead.”

Apparently, everyone’s got you pegged as the student council type. And you know what? They’re right. You’re already giddy over the prospect of a budget spreadsheet. “Of course! I’d be happy to.” If you managed to pull off your much larger high school’s Culture Festival, this will be a stroll in the park. 

He picks up a lump of pink felt and starts to work on a second piglet. “I’m not only asking this of you because of your organizational skills. Having you visible at the event will smooth over some… difficulties regarding the school’s position.” He looks up at you, his nimble hands still darting over the felt. “What has Satoru told you about the situation with the higher-ups?”

Nothing to worry about, Gojo said. Not your problem, Gojo said. “Um.. not very much. Just that there’s some behind the scenes stuff going on?”

He grunts. “That boy chooses the strangest moments to be tactful and circumspect. I am going to be very blunt with you, Miss Hasegawa, and I apologize for that. But you’re something of a curiosity to sorcerer society at large.”

You aren’t quite sure if that’s the cue for sinking dread yet, but it’s already waiting in the wings, backstage left, chilling you even through your snug winter uniform.

Principal Yaga is looking like he’d rather be eating his sunglasses than having this conversation, but still, with his fingers clamped on his felting tool, he forges forward. “Sorcerers joining the fold at your age are very rare. On top of that, you possess a novel, combat-oriented technique—what are you calling it, by the way? We need something for the records.”

In theory, you’d love something poetic and evocative for the name of your technique, maybe even a literary allusion. Put on the spot, you’re about as creative as Yuta. It’s a shield that reflects. “Um… Mirror Shield?”

He nods once. “A technique with good utility, and an impressive cursed energy reserve, both of which you will likely pass on to any family you have of your own.”

Your children will be like you. Of course your children would be like you. You’re the world’s biggest goddamn idiot for not thinking that through, even though you knew that people are born with cursed techniques, that yours is folded up somewhere in your brain and your genes. 

You understand a little more why he wants you to be careful about burning your bridges. 

“When you were discovered, some of the leadership had… conflicting ideas about how best to handle your education. Not everyone agreed it should be conducted at Jujutsu High. Satoru pushing the decision through, without allowing the others to meet and evaluate you, only… escalated matters.”

You clasp your hands, kneading your knuckle where your engagement band used to sit. “I didn’t even realize any of them wanted to meet me.”

“And that was purposeful,” Yaga-sensei says with the bare hint of a smile. “Satoru said he didn’t want those nasty old creeps bullying you, and that is a direct quote.” Despite the annoyance in his voice, there’s an undercurrent of proud, paternal warmth.

You don’t think you properly appreciated the pull Gojo must have in the sorcerer hierarchy, being able to slap down the ruling body on a decision like this. But then again, you don’t properly appreciate much about the sorcerer hierarchy at all. 

“To be clear, I agree with his decision. The best place for you is here.” He folds his hands together and stretches them outwards, knuckles creaking. “However. You can see how that’s put me and the school, between the jujutsu authorities and Satoru, in an unenviable position.”

The sinking dread has heard its cue and entered center stage. “I understand, Yaga-sensei. I’ll be happy to assist. On both fronts.”

“Good. I have to say, I’m looking forward to someone who knows what she’s doing handling the catering this year.” He lets out a gruff chuckle. “Now get back to your training, young lady. You’ve improved quite a bit since your first visit here. You may have turned it down, but that promotion was deserved.”

“Thank you, sir,” you say, a bright little burst of pride punching through your nerves. He goes back to his work. You turn to march back to the massive doors.

You glance over your shoulder at the dais. He’s intent on his work and has dismissed you completely from his attention. “Yaga-sensei… do you mind if I ask you a question? About my coming to the school.”

He grunts. 

“What did the other higher-ups want to do with me instead? As an alternative to my coming here?”

He pauses his felting and removes his sunglasses to inspect them thoroughly for nonexistent smudges. Finally, just when you begin to think he’s ignoring you and this is a dismissal, he says, “The alternative put forth was that an individual chosen by Jujutsu Headquarters would have assumed direct custody of you and your education.” He’s choosing his wording very, very deliberately. Whether he’s trying to imply something or avoid implying something, you don’t know him well enough to guess. “Please trust me when I say that although student life here has its challenges, in my opinion as an educator and as an individual, you are much better off.”

He resumes felting. “And that is the last I’ll say on the matter. I’m looking forward to seeing your plans for the fundraiser. The assistant managers can provide you with information about last year’s.”

You thank him and return to the cool, brittle early-spring sunlight outside, restless and jittery, pacing back and forth in the shadows of the temple arches. Gojo’s out on a three-day mission abroad. Korea, you think he said. You pull up his contact and thumb your screen, chewing the inside of your cheek, unsure what to type. 

Say that you’re frustrated with him for keeping all of this so-called behind the scenes turf-war crap behind your back during the series of major decisions that would determine the course of your life for a year, minimum? You are. That you’re grateful to him for going out of his way to try and make things a little less shitty for you during a week that was, admittedly, a chart topper on the list of worst weeks of your life? You are. That you need him to actually take ten seconds and sit down and explain how sorcerer society actually functions and what place you’re expected to have in it? You do.

You’re shambling around in an unfamiliar house with the lights off, and it’s only a matter of time before you trip and break something valuable. You’ve got to find someone who can—and, most crucially, will—explain the broad strokes of sorcerer society to you, and the major players you’re going to have to deal with, before this fundraiser. Budget spreadsheets will only take you so far. 

You should ask Ijichi. He’ll definitely know.

You shove your phone away and hustle over to the practice yard. You’ve got a busy few days ahead of you. You’ve got drills with the kids, you’ve got to make a trip to a grocery store that sells whole octopus, and you have to track down Ijichi in regards to multiple business matters.

And you absolutely have to make sure you set aside some time to make strawberry daifuku mochi. 

Chapter Text

Your social calendar is unusually cramped the following week. 

To start with, you have several brainstorming sessions with Ijichi in regards to the fundraiser. He comes armed with a decade’s worth of spreadsheets. You get the impression that although the students were technically tasked with the job, Ijichi, as in many other matters at Jujutsu High, ended up doing most of the work. 

In between meal planning, drink menus, and decorations for the main hall, because of course this school has a reception hall tucked away in one of the absurdly large outbuildings, you grill him about sorcerer culture. He’s an excellent sport about it, and he doesn’t even make fun of you when you take notes.

“So when people say the higher-ups… sometimes they mean the whole hierarchy and the Three Great Families, but usually they just mean the Jujutsu Headquarters in Tokyo. They’re technically a branch of the government, and they’re a council of five, led by the Jujutsu Inspector General,” he says. He’s a natural lecturer. You scribble this down. “They’re responsible for all major decisions—they make the laws, pass judgements, everything like that.”

“Do sorcerers have, like… elections?” You’re wondering what a sorcery council campaign would look like. 

“No. The Three Great Families nominate the Inspector General, who appoints the other members.” The sorcerer system of governance is officially less democratic than your high school student council. “And a lot of them also come from the Three Great Families, obviously, so there’s overlap there.”

“And the Three Great Families are…?”

He ticks off three fingers. “The Kamo, Zen’in, and Gojo clans. Yes, Gojo,” he says, laughing a little at the surprise on your face. “Don’t tell him I said this, it’ll only make his ego worse, but he’s the single most important figure in jujutsu society today. Aside from his power and the Six Eyes—that’s genetic, it runs in his family, but only one at a time—“ you jot this down—“he’s the acting clan head.”

Your surprise is because, of all the varied subjects Gojo freely brags about, he’s never once boasted about his family or position therein. “So isn’t he technically… one of the higher-ups himself?”

“In a way, yes. But there’s, ah, a lot of friction between him and the dominant conservative faction at Headquarters.” Now here’s the drama you wanted a front row ticket seat for. You lean forward in your chair. “He can’t go against the Council on major decisions, but he’s gone out of his way to save plenty of sorcerers from unfair judgements. Even stopped Okkotsu’s execution last year.”

Your pen dips and rips a gash in the page of your notebook. “Sorry, Okkotsu’s what?”

Ijichi flaps his hands at you. “Ah, forget I said that! Maybe I wasn’t supposed to tell you, if you don’t already know! But everyone else in sorcerer society does, so… it’s probably fine…”

You can’t imagine what sweet, shy, sixteen-year-old Yuta could possibly have done to merit anyone even remotely considering the possibility. “Were they going to execute me, too?” Is that why Gojo and Yaga have both been so cagey about the process, so they didn’t send you into a panic? Too late now. You’re panicking.

“No, no, Miss Hasegawa, don’t worry! They would never have given you the death sentence… your, ah, your situations are different…” He trails off. 

You stare goggle-eyed down at your notes. “Do you mind saying how?”

“Well, Yuta’s power was a lot more actively dangerous, at the time… and, well… you’re, ah.” He turns the color of a traffic light as he says, in the smallest possible voice, “You’re a woman.”

“Um… I see?” you say, even though you don’t see, to give him an out. 

He shoves his glasses up his nose. “Sorcerer culture is still, ah, very traditional in some ways! Old-fashioned! Backwards, some might say! Would you like to take a look at the options for catering? We assistant managers only work with specific companies that we allow onto the grounds, so there aren’t many options, but I think you’ll still find something you like!”

The poor man’s broken out into a cold sweat. You allow him to safely steer the topic back to event planning. 

As thanks for all his help, and for enduring your third degree, you ask him if he and his fellow assistant manager Nitta (who’s been roped in to help you handle the decor) would like to go out for an after-work drink, on you.

“You want to… hang out with us?” asks Nitta, tilting her head. She’s a kindly, energetic young woman with partially bleached hair who looks fresh out of college. You, too, were once that bright-eyed and indefatigable. 

“Only if you’re not busy!”

“No, no, it’s just that the sorcerers don’t usually invite us out with them!” she says with a self-deprecating little laugh. “But that sounds fun! I know a great place right by my old neighborhood!”

Your little party of three becomes five when Ijichi asks Dr. Ieiri if she’d like to come along, and Dr. Ieiri invites Gojo. Or perhaps Gojo invites himself. You wouldn’t put it past him. He’s already waiting with Dr. Ieiri at the izakaya, having ordered a round of chicken karaage and french fries, like a picky child. 

“It’s not that I don’t like the food here,” he says, wagging a finger at you. “It’s just that I like chicken karaage and fries the best. It’s not the same thing.”

You spend most of the evening chatting with Nitta, who wants you to call her Akari, has a little brother who’s attending the sister jujutsu high school in Kyoto, and is taking some part-time classes in the same program at Tokyo University that you graduated from, with most of the same professors. You share a good laugh over Professor Tanaka’s erratic lecture style while Gojo needles Ijichi across the table, Ijichi tries to chat up Dr. Ieiri, and Dr. Ieiri watches over the proceedings with a cool and enigmatic smile, all while sipping a truly impressive volume of sake. Gojo foregoes any alcoholic drinks in favor of a medley of flavored sodas. 

It’s nice to feel like a regular working adult again, with regular adult friends. The last time you went out for after-work drinks was with Hanae and Yamamoto, a week before The Incident. 

Afterwards, you send Hanae a text.

You aren’t expecting a quick response, if any response at all. You don’t even know if she still has the same number. But she messages back almost immediately, says she’s doing well—and seems to be well, if the abundance of emojis and exclamation points is any indication—and is is enthusiastic about the idea of catching up. 

The next Sunday, you return to the city to meet her. She chooses the place, a trendy bakery not far away from your shared former workplace, in Shibuya.

“It feels so weird to be back here,” she says around a mouthful of cream cake. “I mean, physically, but it feels like I’ve gone back in time, a little. That probably sounds crazy!” 

“No, not at all. That makes perfect sense.” You haven’t gone back to your old neighborhood since the day you broke your lease and carried off your last box, let alone near the office. Sitting here, only a stroll away from your old workplace, a subway stop from your old apartment, it’s like the past two months have melted away. After this, you’ll go back home to Setagaya and hang out the laundry. 

“Are you working at your brother’s place now?” Hanae’s wearing a cheery yellow apron with a smiling cartoon boba cup on the pocket.

“Yeah. This is my lunch break! My dad keeps telling me I’m wasting my degree, but… I’m doing a lot better now.” She smiles hesitantly at you. Her cheeks are round and rosy again, her formerly chipped and bitten nails painted pink and studded with rhinestones. “I wanted to say sorry, again, for putting everything on the rest of you like that.”

“No, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it.” Her smile grows a cautious step bigger. “What happened? Unless you’d rather not say.”

“Oh. Um. No, I don’t mind.” She twists the hem of her apron in one hand. “It wasn’t anything big. I just, um. Was having a hard time with life, for a little while.” She lets out a high, taut little laugh and flushes, averting her eyes.

“I’m just glad you’re doing better now,” you say, and her smile broadens and brightens again in relief.

“You look good, too!” 

Your brows draw together. “Really?” 

“Really! I felt so bad when Ai-chan said you got fired—“ Ai-chan. That would be Sato Aiko, HR representative and incorrigible gossip—“but you look so… I don’t know. You look happier now. I hope you are!”

You are, if anything, in your best physical shape since middle school, thanks to the regularly scheduled ass-whippings from kids half your age. Maybe she’s mistaking your improved cardiovascular conditioning for a glow of contentment. “I am,” you say, because that’s the easy answer, because that’s just what you say in a conversation like this. 

Is it also the real answer? You’re not sure.

She beams. “That uniform’s cute on you, too!” You came in your uniform skirt and blouse, jacket folded in your shoulder bag, because you have to meet Gojo for a mission afterwards. “You work at a school now?”

“Sort of, yeah.”

“I’m glad!” She beams at you. “Looks like we both made it out!”

“Guess we did,” you say, eyeing your own hazy reflection in the shop window. 

The two of you promise to meet up again soon. You invite her to your pop dance cardio class. She hurries back to her next shift, and you’re left with the last crumbs of your cream cake. It still feels like you’re adrift, displaced in time. Any moment now Chiba will call you about putting in overtime tomorrow. Fumiya will text you to ask what you need picked up from the grocery store.

Your phone vibrates in your pocket. It’s a daikon radish.

G: RISACCHI!!! getting coffee what kind you want

G: NEVER MIND I’M GOING TO GUESS

If he guesses, you’re going to end up stuck with some rancid sugar bomb. You reply as quickly as your thumbs will allow. please don’t guess! plain black is fine! thanks!

G: wow okay i see we got a badass on board

G: got your boring coffee don’t be late ~ 

You rejoin the cafe line to request a slice of cake to go before you scurry to the subway.

The address Gojo sent you belongs to a large, bright, and prosperous elementary school for big-city rich kids. He’s waiting by the front steps in his button-up shirt and sunglasses, uniform jacket slung over his shoulder on one hooked finger. He lets out a scandalized gasp when he spots the carryout bag swinging from your wrist. “You went to Petit Paris without me? Traitor! Failing grade!”

“What do you mean, traitor? This cake is for you!”

“My bad! Retracted! You’re my favorite student ever!” 

He takes a picture of the bag and sends it to the first-years group chat, with the caption student of the week is hasegawa. this is what peak performance looks like. the rest of you step up your game

Maki responds, buy your own cake stupid.

“Oh, and take your boring coffee.” He presses a steaming cup into your hand. “Do you really drink it black? You don’t gotta try and impress me, y’know.”

“Not everything’s about you.” You take a hesitant sip. He shelled out for the good stuff all the way from the fancy cafe out in Shinjuku. Easy enough to do when you can teleport at will. “Some of us actually like to taste the coffee in our coffee. And thanks.”

“Better drink up! This mission was originally assigned to me, but now—“ He snaps his fingers and aims them in your direction. “It’s all you!” He beams in response to the level look you shoot him over the rim of your cup. “It’s tough love, Risacchi!”

You salute him with the cup, in imitation of the gesture he keeps making with his soda cans. You are, after all, now giving one hundred and ten percent. “Yes, sensei.”

“There she is! That’s my student council treasurer.”

“I’ll call down the curtain—“

“Nah, not yet. This’s a different kind of mission. You sense a curse here?” 

You expand your cursed energy sense outward, enveloping as much of the vast campus as you’re capable of, which is about half of the first floor. “Um… no?”

“Correct!” He bumps his coffee cup against yours. “But we’re here anyways, because yesterday afternoon, one of the windows in the area noted a massive spike in cursed energy at this location.” He takes a draught of coffee and holds up three fingers. “Potential explanations. Go.”

“Uh… there was a curse, and it, um, moved? Can they do that?”

He folds down one finger. “They can. Usually a curse will haunt a specific, fixed location, but there are some exceptions. Next.”

You ponder. “It was sorcerer, and not a curse?”

He lowers a second finger, leaving his index finger extended. “Good. Could be a curse user, and not a curse. Last one.”

“Uh… one of the kids that goes to school here is an unregistered sorcerer, like me and Yuta, and they exorcised a curse that was here yesterday?”

“You know what, I’ll give you that! Unlikely…” He raps his coffee cup against yours again. “But possible.” He crooks his last remaining finger. “That’s three, and there’s one left you haven’t seen yet. That’s innate domain.” He closes his hand into a fist. “The curse has expanded its own partial, incomplete domain to hide in. There may be special conditions to fulfill to enter.” He points at you, polishing off the last of his drink. “Your mission is to gather info to narrow down these possibilities. It’s all you, Risacchi! Ijichi got us clearance to get in here, so if anyone gives you any crap… just lie! Got it?”

If Ijichi got you clearance, then shouldn’t you not need to lie? “… Got it,” you say, with a second salute.

He follows you into the entrance, already happily munching on his carryout snack. “You’re coming too?” He makes an affirmatory noise around a mouthful of cake. “I thought this mission was all me.”

“‘Course I’m comin’! If I send you in alone you’ll just throw another bitch fit at me.”

This statement should not inspire such a sense of relief in you. “Thanks.”

“I’ll hold your hand for the next few missions, but as a tradeoff, when I say you’re ready to go it alone, you gotta step up and do it. And no whining. Got it?”

“Got it,” you say.

It’s Sunday, so there are no students. The sterile white hallways are awash with noon light. Your regulation uniform shoes squeak on the polished tile floors. 

You scour the school gym. The nurse’s office. The first-floor classrooms, and then up to the third floor, then back down again. Gojo has to bend to fit under every doorframe. You can’t sense a thing, and there’s no evidence of any sign of damage or struggle. You ask Gojo if you’re missing anything, only to be met with an exaggerated shrug. “Dunno! I’m just here as your good-lookin’ moral support.” 

You’re about to snoop around the central courtyard when a voice behind you calls out, “Hey! You two need passes if you’re going to wander around in here, you know!”

It belongs to a teacher about your own age, looking harried and frazzled in a wrinkled pencil skirt and carring a half-open leather portfolio leaking informational brochures. “Sorry!” you say. “We didn’t know! Should we go to the staff office?”

She attempts to rescue some of the brochures abandoning ship. “Just come with me, I’ll take you. I’m going that way anyway.” She gives the pair of you a skeptical eye. “Are you two… doing a parents’ visit?” Skepticism is only to be expected. No way the two of you could actually pass for a couple. 

“Yes!” says Gojo brightly, faster on the draw than your emphatic refusal. 

Her suspicious look melts into an indulgent smile. She’s so focused on his beaming face that she misses your incredulous gape. “Starting first grade?” 

“Yep. Our little guy just turned six! He’s the light of our lives, ain’t he, sweetheart?”

He looks expectantly at you. The teacher looks expectantly at you. The adorable, smiling little faces on the school brochures dangling from her folio look expectantly at you. “Um! Yes! We’re so excited!”

You can’t expect a Film Prize nomination anytime soon, but the teacher generously takes your flustered reaction for simple maternal nerves. “If you want to take a look in the first grade classrooms, they’re down that hall across the courtyard. Mine’s the first on the left. Maybe your son will be in my class. What’s his name?”

“Metalgreymon,” Gojo declares with cheerful and complete sincerity.

The teacher eyes you with a judgemental sidelong slant. You can’t blame her. You’re giving him the same look yourself. “And… how do you write that?”

“Kanji for steel and shining.”

“I… see!” She gestures to the office door at the end of the hallway. “Well, if he’s in my class, I’m sure I’ll remember! It’s an, ah, memorable name!”

“His choice,” you say, crossing your arms. “Obviously, I lost a bet.” Gojo lets out a little snrk.

The overworked on-duty office staffer hands over a pair of plastic badges on lanyards and turns you loose without any further inquisition. You head for the club rooms in the opposite direction from whence you came, mostly to avoid having to look that first-grade teacher in the eye ever again. “Weak lyin’ game, Risacchi!” says Gojo, sauntering past you with his hands in his pockets. “I had to carry that!”

“That’s so unfair. You can’t name our fake child Metalgreymon-written-steel-and-shining and expect me to be able to do anything with that. You’re talking to someone who’s had her completely normal future baby names picked out since middle school—“

“Of course you have,” he says with a roll of his eyes.

“And I’m actually a pretty decent liar! I’ve just got limits!”

“Of course you are.”

“Our poor fake son is going to get so bullied.”

“No way my hypothetical son’s getting bullied. He inherited his father’s incredible talent and good looks.”

“And his bad personality?” You wrench open the door to the art room.

“Nah. Got yours, so he has it all,” he says with a dismissive wave. You dart a glance at him, certain he’s teasing you, but he’s already surveying one of the colored pencil drawings strung up on the wall, chin in hand. You whip your head around to the opposite side of the room, ostensibly searching for residuals.

“So, what are they?” he asks.

“My what?” A very ambitious art teacher is instructing the kids to practice drawing from life. The sketches are scenes from around the school: the rain-slicked courtyard, classmates playing a tennis match, a group of girls eating their lunches in a circle. There’s some surprising talent in the bunch. 

“Your completely normal future kids’ names.”

You hestitate. “Nozomi and Mirai.” Written, as is customary, with the kanji for wish and for future.

He barks out a laugh. “That’s so corny! That’s just like you, Risacchi!” He laces his hands beneath his chin. “Your precious widdle hopes and dreams for the future…”

“They’re perfectly nice names! I’m not taking this from a guy who stuck his imaginary son with an awful kira-kira name,” you fire over your shoulder as you pause at the end of the rows of drawings.

“You mean our beautiful imaginary son! Don’t talk like that in front of him, you’re gonna hurt his feelings!”

At the end of the line is a cluster of sketches depicting the same door: large, heavy, and rust-speckled, with a fist-sized padlock swinging from a thick metal crossbar. They’re rendered by slightly different hands, all drawn by different children, but with the same heavy, grim grey slashes of pencil. 

“Hey, can you come look at these?” He shuffles up behind you. “Sure looks like a shared fear, doesn’t it?” At the corner of one of the images is an analog clock, the hands displaying 1:45 PM. You check the time on your phone. It is currently 1:07 PM. “Could this be the entrance to that innate domain thing? At this time?”

He gives another airy shrug, tilting his chin so you can see his exaggerated wink around the rim of his sunglasses. “This is your show! Good-lookin’ moral support, remember?”

You don’t have to search for long. Backtracking towards the classrooms requires crossing the courtyard, and the door in question sits in one shady corner, padlock creaking in a tepid breeze. Presumably the entrance to a storage closet for maintenance. It is now 1:13 PM. “So… I guess we wait,” you say. 

A minute later, Gojo is sagging against the wall, dragging a hand down his face before he falls back on his familiar refrain: “Risacchi, I’m so boooooooored.”

“Good-lookin’ moral support didn’t last long, I see.”

“You got games on your phone? What’s that plant thing you’re always doing when you think I ain’t lookin’?”

“Oh. Um. My farming sim?” you ask, embarrassed. 

“Yeah! That any good? Can I play?” When you hesitate, he gives you a pleading look, flashing his blue eyes over the rims of his sunglasses and beneath his long, lowered white lashes. It’s a blatantly practiced maneuver. Even recognizing this, you are still, unfortunately, not immune. “C’mon, I’m dying here. I’ll let you pet my Digimons!”

“Okay, okay! Here.” You tap into your farmstead in Serene Valley Farming Life Mobile and and present it to him. “But please be careful, okay?” You’ve got your farm precisely how you like it, down to the last ground tile. If he kills one of your cows, you’ll become the first woman ever to bypass his cursed technique. 

You supervise him as he harvests your ripe yam crop. “If you get it on your phone, we can visit each other’s farms and send each other seeds and stuff.”

“Why’re the cows pink?”

“Because they make strawberry milk.”

“Oh. Duh, of course.” He offers you his phone in trade, opened to Digimon Trainer World Tour. “Here. Take our son Metalgreymon for a walk or something.”

You’ve earned a precious few minutes of peace tapping on his virtual monsters to give them treats and raise their affection. You’re in the middle of taking the infamous Metalgreymon on a stroll when he gives you an alarming sly grin and spins your phone screen around. “Risacchi, who’s thiiiiiiiiis?”

To your horror and dismay, he’s entered into a dialogue with the character you chose as a spouse for your little farming avatar. You’re such a hard worker, honey! Why don’t you take some time to rest today? announces a dialogue box beneath the sprite of a floppy-haired blonde sporting a pair of sunglasses. “He your farm boyfriend or something?” Gojo asks with glee.

“Farm husband, actually,” you grumble.

“Oh, my bad! Congrats on the wedding. Y’know, he looks kinda familiar.” He holds up the phone beside his smirking face and gestures between the two with an upturned palm. “Eh? Eh?”

They look nothing alike. “Am I supposed to be seeing a resemblance?” You return your attention to your beloved son Metalgreymon, who’s found a battle item on your walk. 

“C’mon!” He’s still swiveling his hand beneath his chin and the phone. “Blondes? Shades?”

“Is your hair blonde?”

“What are you talking about, Risacchi? Is your hair blonde? What color do you think it is?”

“Um.” His hair is haloed in the afternoon sunlight with a blue-tinged shine. “White?”

“White? Do I look like an old man to you?” He huffs. “Of course I’m blonde! An all-natural platinum blonde!”

“I see,” you say. “My mistake.”

“Thank you.” He slumps back down against the wall and resumes feeding the strawberry cows. “So what’s his deal?”

“His name’s Toshiro,” you sigh. “He’s a famous actor who, um, came to the countryside to escape the pressures of a life of fame. That’s what the sunglasses are for. To, uh, hide his identity.” Gojo selects a cranky dialogue option. Toshiro’s sprite turns red with a small ticking vein in his forehead. “Please don’t talk to him anymore! If you pick the wrong options you’ll lower his affection—“

“Ugh! Fine, fine, I won’t be a homewrecker. Today.” You set him on the potato crop. “Risacchi, this game is boring! This is really what you do for fun all day?”

“Take your Digimen back, then!”

“Hey, why am I a daikon radish in your contacts?”

“Please don’t look at that!” you shriek, mortified. You knew you should have changed that while you still had the chance. “Why are you in there anyway?”

“I was trying to send myself the friend code!” He tips the phone screen towards his face, squinting. Entirely for effect. You know his vision is flawless. “I had a decent picture of me in here. But you changed it. Why the radish?” 

“No reason!” you chirp, with your sunniest, most customer-service-appropriate smile.

He tilts his head. “Really? None at all?”

“Nope! Just an accident! I’ll change it now.”

“Who told you you were a good liar? They were so full of crap!” His grin’s back as he takes in the way you shrink back against the wall. “C’mon, Risacchi, sensei’s calling on ya. Share with the class.”

“Well,” you start, “I was just having a really, really bad day that day. The day we met, at my old job. And you used that horrible selfie you took with me, and…”

“That ain’t explaining the radish!”

You mumble something incomprehensible into your shirt collar. He cups a hand around his ear. “Louder for the people in the back!”

“I thought you kind of looked like one,” you whisper.

He freezes. Gapes at you over the rims of his sunglasses. “I’m sorry,” you say. “I don’t really think that, I was just—“

He claps a hand to his forehead and erupts into laughter. “Risacchi! I didn’t expect that from ya!”

“I’ll change it back!”

He holds the phone up beside his cackling face again. “Eh? Eh?”

You crack a relieved little smile just as your phone chimes the first few bars of a chiptune city pop remix. “Hey, you’re gettin’ a call!”

“Who is it?” It’s probably Ijichi giving you an update about the catering order for the fundraiser.

You glimpse the caller identification just as he says aloud, “It’s your mom!” His thumb hovers over the icon to accept the call. “Should I answer?”

If he answers that call, forty years from now, on your deathbed, your mother, who will somehow outlive you with the power of pure spite over your never giving her grandchildren, will be asking, Whatever happened to that Gojo fellow who answered the phone for you that time? He sounded handsome! “Please don’t! I’ll take it!”

“What, you don’t want me to talk to her?” He twirls his thumb above the button. “Too bad! I’d like to meet Mrs. Hasegawa Senior!”

“Please, please don’t answer that!”

“This is just payback for the radish thing!”

You make a panicked, desperate lunge for the phone. Your hand trembles in empty space a hairsbreadth from his hand. His technique. Of course. 

Driven by raw fear and primal instinct, you hoist his own phone aloft. “Gojo Satoru, if you answer that call, I’m… I’m going to ring up Yaga and tell him you volunteered to do a speech at the spring fundraiser!”

“Nah, you won’t!” he says, still confidently wriggling his thumb over the screen. “You don’t got the guts for a stunt like that!“

“Thirty minutes. With visual aids. With a slide deck.” He’s making a vaguely disgusted expression at the mere thought. Good. It shouldn’t feel this satisfying to stoop down to his level, and yet, the results speak for themselves. “We’ll see if he thinks I’m a good liar!”

Your ringtone abruptly cuts out, replaced by Gojo dissolving into laughter again. “Woooooow, Risacchi! I’m just screwin’ around with ya! You don’t have to get so worked up!”

“Sorry!” you say, folding back into the wall. “Please just give my phone ba—“

A cloud passes over the sun, dipping the courtyard into monochrome shadow. The rusty padlock on the storage door trembles and pops. The door swings open onto a featureless black scrawl.

Gojo’s phone reads 1:45 PM.

Gojo springs up from his crouch, lacing his fingers and stretching his arms. “Alright! Let’s get this over with!” He folds his sunglasses, pulls his blindfold from a pocket, pushes his hair back with one hand, and ties the blindfold in place. 

His hair’s slicked perfectly upward. He frowns down at you as you stare up at him. “What?”

“How’d you get your hair to just… do that? Don’t you need gel?”

“Nah. I use Limitless.” He smirks. “You’re so jealous right now.”

You are nauseatingly jealous. He gets to fly and have perfect hair, and all you get are friendly fire and property damage. There’s no justice in this world. “Should I call down the curtain now?”

“Don’t bother. Normies can’t see inside the innate domain.”

When you pass through the doorway into the space beyond, the stale, frigid air slithers over your skin like slick oil. The hair on the back of your arms prickles. You click on the flashlight you borrowed from Maki. It illuminates pocked grey concrete walls, a pitted grey concrete floor, and a hallway fading into endless black.

The door swings closed behind you with a pained creak. When you spin the light back behind you, it’s now only another faceless span of wall. You can only move forward.

Ten meters in, you arrive at a fork. The hallway splits into two identically bland branches. “Is it a maze? With the curse hiding in the center?”

“You’ve earned a hint! In a word: yes.”

“What happens to this place if we kill the curse? Do we have to make it back to the exit?”

“Nah, don’t worry about that. When you kill the curse, the innate domain collapses and we’ll be back in whatever original space it was superimposed on.”

You take the branch on the left. You’ve read somewhere that if you keep to the left wall of a maze, you’ll always be able to make it to the exit. Maybe that doesn’t apply to physics-defying curse mazes. Technically, you’re supposed to touch the wall, but you can’t bring yourself to graze your fingers against the grimy concrete.

“Sorry I kind of freaked out a little earlier,” you say, as much to fill the suffocating silence as to actually apologize. 

“Heh heh. Y’mean freaked out a lot. I gotta remember to take a picture next time you lose it, so you can see your face.”

“I take it back.”

He snickers. “You’re so cute when I get a rise out of ya.”

You don’t need the flashlight after all. Your fluorescent blush will light your way forward. 

He can’t possibly imply anything you think he might be implying by that. He’s your teacher. And he’s purposefully irritating at every opportunity. He teases Ijichi and the other assistant managers just as relentlessly. All it means is that he’s trying to get a rise out of you a second time. 

“You don’t get what was at stake back there,” you say. Your own voice in your ears distracts you from the hammer pulse of your heartbeat. “My mother’s even more upset about my engagement being off than I am. She keeps trying to get me to come home to Miyagi to meet her accountant’s brother or my cousin’s friend’s physical therapist.” She even petulantly informed you on a call last week that she’s shocked your brother Daiki managed to settle down before you, which is mean to both of you, but especially to Daiki.

The hallway branches again. You take the left. “She was probably calling about some guy she just met in the grocery store who seems like he’s probably not a serial killer. If she heard a male voice on the phone, I’d never hear the end of it.”

The floor of the hallway slants upward in a gentle ramp, then drops back down again. A twist to the right. “Risacchi, as your sensei, I’m gonna give you some free advice,” says Gojo. “You can do what I do every time the clan gets up my ass about that kinda stuff.” The stale air rustles as he shrugs. “Just say, I ain’t doin’ that! Peace! And then don’t! Easy peasy!”

You wonder what his family is like. As much pestering and pressuring as you’re getting from your mother, an ordinary woman, he must have it exponentially worse as the acting clan head of an old-school influential family. He’s obviously not married, and you’ve never heard him mention a girlfriend, either—or a boyfriend, you don’t know his business. 

You’re not sure why. His boasting is, unfortunately, not baseless, he’s not bad to look at, and you’ve officially arrived at your stop off this train of thought. “Maybe it’s that simple for you—“

“‘Course it’s that simple! What’s the deal? You got no problem giving me backtalk.” Even in the dark, you can tell by the shape of the sound that he’s grinning.

“Not the same thing.”

“Why?”

Because that’s a relatively new development, and he’s an irritating man with a bad personality, and when you snap at him he just laughs and calls you cute. “Because you’re trying to push my buttons.”

“Not my fault you make it so easy!”

The passage abruptly curls back on itself and descends into a steep, sharp spiral, leading down, down, down. Your uniform boots slip and scrape against the sharply angled floor. Your stomach and the ambient temperature both plunge with your descent, the air turning chilled and heavy and thick. You almost slip when your heel collides with a smooth pit in the flooring, but before your legs can whip out from beneath you, you’re jerked backward like there’s a hook caught in the neckline of your jacket, and you steady yourself.

You look over your shoulder at Gojo, who’s too far behind to have grabbed you—at least not with his actual hand—and who whistles a few notes with an innocent smile.

The slide abruptly bottoms out into a wide chamber, slick and dripping with what you can only pray is filthy water. At the center of the room, curled within a divot in the floor, is the curse, born from childrens’ perpetual fear of what might lurk in the dark beyond a big, scary door. It rises and focuses on you with swollen, cloudy eyes as your footsteps rattle around the wide space.

Even for a curse, it’s especially awful to look at. It has the bulbous, big-featured head of a fetus stitched onto a greyish, bloated body resembling a drowned corpse. The rattling sound it emits is even worse.

“All you, Risacchi!” says Gojo, leaning one shoulder against the wall with his arms crossed. “Show me what you got!” You’re about to comment on how gross it is that he’s touching the wall when you recall he is not, in fact, touching the wall.

The curse shambles towards you. You widen your stance and clench your staff in your hands like you’re first up to bat. And due to some incredibly, abundantly stupid short circuit in your instincts, you’re nearly as nervous about him watching you as you are about the curse unfolding its meaty hands in your direction. There’s a malign supernatural entity actively trying to kill you, but heaven forbid you trip and make a fool of yourself in front of your good-lookin’ moral support.

The curse swings its arms at you and recoils off your shield, grunting in frustration as one of its swollen wrists snaps back. You absorb a second swipe and smack the butt of your staff into its chin, just like Maki taught you. 

This curse is a quick study. It doesn’t try to hit you again. Instead, it closes its huge hands around your throat.

You squeak in panic, swatting at it blindly. Stupid, stupid. Maki would mock you to your face for making that kind of mistake in training. And you’d deserve it. It only makes the curse clamp down on you tighter, groaning in frustration. You can still breathe—your shield absorbs force, and the force required to strangle someone thankfully qualifies—but it’s holding you immobilized, and you’re choked by cold fear alone as you realize that if your shield overloads and it doesn’t kill the thing, it might be able to snap your neck in the two-second window when you’re defenseless. 

Well, it won’t because Gojo will kill it. But still. 

You strike at its exposed stomach, desperate to regain some distance. Something tears with a sickening rip and it lets go of you, batting you away with one large hand. You only have a few meters and a few seconds before it tries again. If your shield went off now, you’d be safe until it reformed again. Now would be the time to spark a burst. 

Yuta is able to induce his bursts on command when he copies your technique. He’s been kind enough to help you practice, but he’s a teen prodigy, and he hasn’t quite been able to impart to you how he’s able to do what you can’t. “It’s flexible,” he’s tried to tell you. “It’s, like, um, stretching a rubber band.” Every training session, you’re relentlessly strumming at your cursed energy like you’re trying to learn guitar to impress your crush, to no avail or effect.

You risk a quick glance over your shoulder. Gojo’s right within your radius, but that doesn’t matter. You can’t hurt him. But the reminder that he’s got his eyes on you plucks at the knot of cursed energy pulsing around your heart.

You reach inside yourself and tug. Your technique is flexible. It snaps like a rubber band. Your shield unfurls and blooms and blazes around you.

Turns out, if you’d held position and let the curse keep choking you, you would’ve been fine. One detonation is enough. It’s blasted to ash.

“Yayyyyyyyy!” Gojo claps aggressively. “Good job, Risacchi!” 

You don’t even have time for a sigh of relief before the walls of the maze contort and contract around you with the curse’s death throes. With a lurching, dizzying rush of color, the space around you shrinks, and you’re cozied up between a stack of fertilizer boxes and a rusted rake. The space beyond the door is once again a storage shed for maintenance, and it’s crammed full. 

And you’re pressed up against Gojo’s chest.

Or you would be, anyway, if it were possible for you to touch him. You are abundantly grateful for his cursed technique, the only thing saving you from burying your face in his uniform jacket, your head tucked beneath his chin. You turn your blazing cheek towards the stack of boxes, which unfortunately means you can hear every rustle of his jacket as he shifts himself in the cramped space. “Ugh. Can barely move in here,” he says. “Hate it when this happens.”

You may not be able to touch him, but at this proximity, in this enclosed space, you can smell the scent clinging to his jacket. A very clinical, practical corner of your brain asserts that this makes sense. He’s still breathing, so air molecules have to be able to cross the ever-expanding void of his technique somehow. His jacket smells like the fancy laundry service Ijichi uses for the pro sorcerers.

It must work both ways. You’ve got to be sweaty and rank after trudging through the innate domain and getting the neck of your own jacket wrung out by the curse. Absolutely motifying.

“Why’s it smell like strawberries in here?” he mutters, and you remember you put on some shortcake-scented hand lotion from the hundred-yen shop on your way over from the bakery.

“Gimme a sec here, Hasegawa,” he says, and crumples the metal door with a twist of one hand, crushing it outward. The rusted padlock snaps off and plinks into the grass. You reemerge into the sunny courtyard, brushing dust off your jacket sleeves as an excuse to not have to look at him until your heart rate dips back down.

“Up top, champ,” Gojo demands, and you’re able to look him in the face again and return both his smile and one of his elbow-jolting high fives. You’re going to get nerve damage if you aren’t careful. “You even did something new with your technique! You were struggling with that, weren’t ya? Even with Yuta’s help.”

“Yeah,” you say, surprised. You hadn’t thought he’d noticed. He’s been in and out on solo missions for the past week.

“Let this be a lesson to you, from me, the greatest teacher of all time: growth as a sorcerer ain’t linear. Training’s important, but sometimes, being under pressure in the field can help you accomplish things you could never manage from practice alone.” He points at you. “So I better not hear any more moaning and whining when I give you some of my tough love. Got it?”

He’s only partially right. The reason you were able to finally figure out how to trigger a detonation on purpose wasn’t because of the stress of the mission, but because he was there, watching you. Because you craved that burst of triumph that lights you up when he’s proud of you. Because you wanted him to smile at you, just like this.

But you’re not about to tell him that.

He stretches his arms above his head. “Let’s celebrate! Let’s go get cake!”

“You just had some!” You chase after him as he strides towards the entrance on his unfairly long legs.

“What d’you mean, just? That was like two hours ago! I got an active metabolism!” 

The frazzled first-grade teacher runs into you again on your way out and does a double-take at Gojo’s blindfold and change in hairstyle. “Thanks for the help!” he says with a cheery wave. “We gotta go pick up Metalgreymon from the babysitter!” 

And even though she gives you that slantwise judgmental eye again, the kind of look you’ve spent your whole life striving to avoid, you can’t help but laugh.

Chapter Text

White Day arrives. You receive a box of chocolates from Ijichi, a marshmallow frog from Toge, and a set of white petit fours from Yuta and Panda, who worked on their gifts together. 

Well, most of their gifts, anyway. Yuta shyly asked you if he could borrow your taiyaki mold, and you pretended you didn’t know what he needed it for. When you arrive at the first-years classroom for your surprise lecture period, he and Maki are against opposite walls, tomato-cheeked, twiddling their thumbs and looking everywhere but at each other, but they’re both sporting hesitant little smiles. 

Ah, young love.

The one present notably missing is the one you’re due from the man who boasted, before witnesses, that his White Day game was quote-unquote fire. When Gojo starts the lecture period, giftless, you assume that he probably just forgot. Until he begins rambling at you for an hour straight about reverse cursed technique, throwing significant, smirking looks your way as he sprinkles in non sequiturs like “You know, Valentine’s and White Day gifts are kind of like a binding vow, if you think about it!” and “The real key to sorcery is… patience.”

Somehow, it’s the most coherent lecture you’ve had yet at this school. 

As the school bells are chiming, a confused and distressed-looking man in a deliveryman’s uniform knocks on the door. “Ah, excuse me! I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were in the middle of a class.”

“Nooooooo, it’s no trouble at all! Come on in!” booms Gojo, throwing out his hands in theatric welcome. “Why don’t you tell us what you’ve got there!”

The poor deliveryman blinks. “Um, I got a package for a Miss Hasegawa Risa? I’m not sure if this is the right address? Couldn’t even find it on the map, but my buddy said he does deliveries up here all the time—“

“She’s right over there!” Gojo points at you. You shrink down a little in your seat. “Why don’t you come sign for it, Hasegawa?”

“Where would you like it, ma’am?” asks the deliveryman. 

“H-how big is it?” you ask. He has to wheel the box in on a little trolley.

It’s an enormous bouquet of white chocolate roses in a porcelain pitcher. A closer examination of the pitcher reveals that it is from the limited edition Serene Valley Farming Life kitchenware set, which was only sold at a pop-up cafe event last summer, which you never had time to get over to, because you worked a demanding office job. Every last piece sold out. The ones on the resale market go for exorbitant prices.

“How,” you murmur, tracing a reverent finger over the strawberry cow design around the rim.

“I know a guy,” Gojo says, leaning one elbow on his desk. “Maki, I see you making that face. You may recall you didn’t give me any obligation gift for Valentine’s Day. Some people would use that as an excuse not to get you anything. But not me, though. I wouldn’t do that. Because I’m a nice guy.” He rummages around in his desk. “Got you a new sheath for Stormcaller Blade. Heads up.”

He lobs a shortsword scabbard at Maki, which she easily snatches out of the air. She mutters a quiet “Hell yeah” as she rubs a hand over the smooth, shining leather. 

“Now that we’ve cleared up that I’m the best at White Day, I’d like the two of you to say, in front of the class, We’re so sorry we doubted you, sensei. Your White Day game IS fire.” He waves his hands like a conductor before an orchestra. “Countdown from three. Three, two—“

“I never said I doubted you!” you say, at the same time Maki says, “Not doing that.”

“No fair!” Panda protests. “Those are really expensive presents!”

“I don’t wanna hear any whining from the guys! If you want a pricy gift, find somebody to suck up to next Valentine’s!” 

“Panda’s right,” you say, stopping by Gojo’s desk on your way out of the classroom. “This is too expensive.”

“You don’t know what I paid! Maybe I stole it.”

You hug your potential contraband to your chest. “Did you?”

He wags a hand at you. “Just take it, Risacchi! Triple the return? That’s for chumps! Go big or go home, that’s what I say.”

The pitcher takes pride of place on your side table, in between a photo of Haru-tan in her onesie and your stubborn, spiteful potted succulent, which has only thrived after its rescue from your old cubicle.

As the trees around campus burst into riotous bloom, scattering the route for your morning jogs with a dense carpet of crushed petals, you embark on two more successful missions, one with Panda at a middle school and one with Toge at a defunct amusement park. You even manage to exorcise the distorted mascot curse stalking the park with a good old-fashioned knockout blow.

You’re offered a second promotion to third grade, this time for work that you actually did, and you accept it.

Gojo’s been in and out—and mostly out—on missions lately, some as far as abroad, but during a weekend in town, he swings by to rap on your dorm room window (and you make certain you’re fully clothed before pulling the curtain open). He wants to take you into the city for another training session to hone your hand-eye coordination. Last time, he rented out a private indoor tennis court, lobbed a bunch of balls at you at ludicrous speeds using his cursed technique reversal, then watched you scuttle around after them while he downed a milkshake, read back issues of Jump, and heckled.

You plan to meet up with him after your dance cardio class. You’d thought he was going to wait for you at the Setagaya subway stop, but as you, Hanae, and the other girls from class file out of the studio, you’re halted by a familiar, and very loud, “Yoooooo, Hasegawa!”

Gojo’s in his casual sweats and sunglasses, and he isn’t alone. His companion is a teenage boy with a somber face and hair in need of a trim, around the same age as the first-years, maybe a little younger. He looks like he would rather be anywhere else.

“Risa!” hisses Kaede, your former neighbor in your old office building, clutching at the sleeve of your track top. “Is that your booooooyfriend?”

“Risa’s got a new boyfriend?” 

“Oh, Risa, that’s great!” says Hanae. “He’s really cute!”

“He’s not my boyfriend!” you protest, waving both hands.

“Why is his hair that color?” asks Tsubasa, a kindly grandmother around your own mother’s age. “Does he bleach it?”

“Apparently he’s an all-natural platinum blonde,” you grumble.

Gojo saunters lazily towards the cluster of women still milling outside the studio door. The attention has obviously not escaped his notice. You press a hand against your soon-to-be-aching temple as he whips off his sunglasses and beams the baby blues down on your classmates, lashes lowered and lips pursed in a slight pout. He looks like he’s posing for a cover shoot for Pain In Your Ass Monthly.

You and the dark-haired young man, still strangers, nonetheless swap a sympathetic glance conveying your mutual exasperation.

“What’s the matter, Risacchi?” Gojo asks, batting his eyelashes at you. “Ain’t you gonna introduce me?” Next to you, Yuriko, a stern and mature mother of three, lets out a real, genuine, dreamy little sigh. It’s only because she hasn’t heard him run his mouth yet.

You sigh too. You’re going to be hearing about this for months. 

You shoot Gojo a weighted warning look, a look that begs, please please please don’t tattle and tell the girls at pop cardio dance class that I got sent back to high school, and say, “Everyone, this is my new boss, Gojo Satoru! And his, um—“

“Little nephew!” Gojo settles the sunglasses back on his nose, then pushes his hair off his forehead and lets it sweep back into place like a stage curtain. He can probably control how it falls, you think with a little pinch of jealousy. The young man rolls his eyes.

“Really?” Tsubasa peers curiously up at him. “What kind of industry are you in?”

“Your boss calls you by a nickname?” whispers Kaede with a little giggle.

“He has a very casual managerial style,” you mutter back. “And speaking of work, we’re really busy today! Have to get back to it! See you all on Wednesday!”

“Bye, Ricchan!” says Hanae with an enthusiastic wave as you hustle down the street. You can only pray Gojo decides to follow you rather than hang back and get showered with adulations from his adoring public.

“Oh, you let her call you Ricchan.” Gojo crosses his arms as he easily overtakes you with his long strides. “I see. I see how it is.”

“You say that like I’ve actually been able to stop you from calling me whatever stupid nickname you feel like.”

“Excuse you! I’ve been abiding by your wishes and not calling you Ricchan!” He raises his hands defensively. “You never actually asked me not to call you Risacchi.”

“Okay. Then don’t call me Risacchi.”

He cups his chin in his hand and makes a show of thinking, then announces “Nope!”

“Do I have to stay for this?” mumbles the boy.

“Meeeeeeegumi-chan, stop it! You’re embarrassing me!” Gojo palms the top of the boy’s head and aggressively ruffles his hair. “Introduce yourself to Hasegawa!”

“Hello,” says the boy, scratching irritably at the spot Gojo rubbed. “Fushiguro Megumi.” It’s an unusual name for a boy, but the only thing he seems self-conscious about is, quite understandably, his proximity to Gojo.

“You two are going to be classmates, so you have to get along!”

“Nice to meet you,” says Fushiguro, looking very tired for someone of his tender age. 

“You’re starting Jujutsu High next year?” You glance at Gojo. “Are you, like, tutoring him?”

“Yep! Every morning… I teach him the violin!” Gojo beams benevolently down at Fushiguro. “He’s almost mastered Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star!”

“Now who’s embarrassing who?” hisses Fushiguro. 

“Okay, Megumi-chan, it’s Risacchi’s turn now! Run along home and don’t forget to practice your scales!”

He’s off like a clearance sale, not that you can blame him. “He seems like a nice kid.”

“Oh, Megumi-chan’s great. And I’ll take alllllll the credit. I practically raised that boy, you know!” 

“Really? Doubt he learned his manners from you.”

“Yowch! She’s got the claws out today!” he says, wiggling his fingers. “Maybe some ice cream will make you chill out! Get it? Chill out?”

“I don’t want ice cream. It’s cold! And I’m about to spend another hour bouncing around,” you protest, but you still trail him down the street to a nearby shop. 

Despite the brisk, unseasonal chill, everyone in Setagaya wants ice cream today. Gojo joins the impressively long line at the counter. The shop is packed, so you linger outside on the sidewalk, downing your water bottle, luxuriating in the cooling breeze, and watching your old neighbors drift in and out of your vision like ghosts. None of their faces are familiar to you. You didn’t have a lot of time to make friends in your old building.

Then you see a face you do recognize, and you duck behind a traffic signal pole like you’re taking cover from enemy fire.

Fumiya and a young woman, strolling with her hands tucked in his crooked arm. He’s wearing the coat you bought him last Christmas. She’s saying something, and he’s bending his head towards her lips. They’re veering in your direction.

When you can’t sleep at night or you’re spacing out on public transit, you roll footage on fantasies of someday running into Fumiya again in the city, on the street or in the grocery store or at a restaurant. Two or three or ten years from now. You’ve graduated and gotten a new job and been, for all intents and purposes, cured. You’re in a tailored suit and your hair’s cooperating. Maybe you have a new ring on your finger. Maybe you’re pushing a stroller. If you’re feeling generous, he also looks well-fed, well-rested, well-paid. Maybe he’s got a new ring, too. On takes when you’re feeling uncharitable, he’s in yesterday’s work suit with charcoal smears under each eye, alone.

The cameras are rolling and you’ve got sweat stains in the armpits of your shirt and your hair’s falling out of its bun and you’re wearing a pair of old gym pants decorated with smiling rainclouds, and you’re outside an ice cream shop waiting on your high school teacher to finish ordering chocolate fudge drizzle on his double scoop cone.

Fumiya and his companion drift closer, closer, still closer. Closer to a line-of-sight angle that will reveal you behind the lightpost. The ice cream shop is packed to the rafters, and Gojo’s nearly up at the counter—easy to spot sticking up out of the crowd like a dandelion tuft—so you’d have to elbow past the entire line if you ducked inside to hide. Even more noticeable. You whip out your phone and open the app closest to your thumb—your budget tracker, informing you you’ve overspent this month on fancy take-home ramen. No, second app. Your manga reader.

You are engrossed in the new chapter of My Boss Is a Ghost. Katarina’s winning the interior design contest. That’s really nice for her, she’s worked so hard. Fumiya’s going to stroll right on by without noticing you and you can finally exhale.

You look up to make sure their backs are drifting away, right into Fumiya’s disbelieving eyes.

On the movie screen inside your mind, your gazes lock across the produce section and there’s no need for words. You read each other’s eyes haltingly, hesitatingly, like a foreign language you’re out of practice with: a spark of belated regonition. A fleeting sense of loss. The bittersweet joy of acknowledging each other’s separate happiness. You each go your own way, a comma rather than a period, a quiet denouement.

Now, in real life, on March 24, 2018, two months and change after the dissolution of your engagement, he stares at you and his mouth hangs open. He clicks it shut, then moves towards you.

Don’t come over here, you project, praying your desperation shows in your eyes. Please, please, please do not come over here and do not talk to me. 

He comes over and he talks to you.

“Risa!” he says, smiling and bashfully rubbing the back of his neck. “I thought you’d moved!”

Fumiya doesn’t even live here. His apartment is out in Nakano. You swallow down a mouthful of the bracing spring air, which is now cold and sour in your throat. “I, I did, yeah!” you say, and a small, distant part of you is amazed at how closely your voice approximates regular human speech. “Just came back for a visit. You look good!”

“Thanks! So do you,” he says, with his sales-pitch smile. You wish you knew what he was trying to sell you. “New job going well?”

“Yes! Going great, thanks!”

You smile at him. He smiles at you. The woman on his arm shoots him a confused glance. Her chestnut hair falls in perfect, glossy helices over the shoulders of her pink jacket. It’s such a cute jacket. You want to know where she bought it. “How do you two know each other?”

“Oh! I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself,” your mouth says, entirely of its own accord. It’s speaking for you, and you’re grateful, because it’s read the script. “I’m Hasegawa Risa. Fumiya and I, we…” Scratch that. It’s a traitorous usurper and hasn’t read shit.

“Oh, Risa and I used to see each other,” Fumiya says, patting the woman’s hand.

Her lovely mouth thins and her eyes flare slightly in recognition, as if to say, ah, that Risa. “It’s very nice to meet you!”

“This is my, ah, my girlfriend,” says Fumiya, and you knew it was coming, but you take it like it a smack of Maki’s polearm to the ribs anyway. “Imai Naomi.”

“Riiiiiiiisacchi!” announces a voice behind you. You’ve never been so glad to hear your stupid nickname. “They gave me extra toppings no charge! Ain’t that nice?” 

Gojo steps out onto the sidewalk beside you, hunching over his ice cream and vacuuming half of it into his mouth. Who eats ice cream like that? You’ve never been so glad to see someone eat ice cream like that. “What’d I miss?”

“Fumiya, Naomi, this is my, um. My new boss, Gojo Satoru.”

“Heyo!” He obliterates another mouthful of the ice cream like a black hole absorbing a planetoid. “Nice to meetcha! You Risacchi’s old coworkers or something?”

Every single grating use of that stupid nickname has been completely worth it, to get to watch it rake furrows in Fumiya’s brow. “Ah, not exactly…”

You look up at Gojo so you don’t have to look at Fumiya or Fumiya’s girlfriend. Just for a millisecond, his famous eyes flicker over your face, which is no doubt crumpled like an old takeout bag, and then he turns to Fumiya with his big grin. “Well, fun running into you and all, but Risacchi and I got urgent business. We’re busy people! International espionage and all that. Catch you some other time!” 

He strolls off down the street, gesturing for you to follow with broad waves. “C’mon, Risacchi! Assassination prevention duty waits for no one! We got a helicopter chase to get to!”

You’ve never been so glad to hear him talk complete nonsense. “Good to see you!” you lie through your teeth to Fumiya, and you’re off after him, dogging his long shadow.

He leads you around the corner and out of sight. “Risacchi! You gotta stay with it, or you’re not gonna be able to fly the helicopter!” He waves a hand in front of your face. “You good?”

Your eyes are welling up and blurring the passersby into monochrome smears, Gojo’s long silhouette into a tall grey smudge. You don’t sob—you are grateful for small mercies—but you know he can hear your breathing grating erratically in your throat. You sound like the consumptive heroine of a Victorian-era period romance anime.

You scrape at your wet cheeks with a thumb. “I’m fine! I’m good!” You put up your fists. “I’m ready to train!”

“You know what?” says the Gojo-shaped blur in front of you. “That ice cream didn’t really do it for me. I’m still hungry. No way we can train like this.” And he reaches out one of his big hands and ruffles your hair, just like he did to Fushiguro Megumi. You’re too shocked to do anything but freeze like a prey animal and wait for him to be done with it.  “Y’wanna go get some pancakes?”

“Yeah,” you sniffle. “That sounds really nice.”

“I know the best pancake joint in the city. C’mon. My treat.”

You let him lead you back to the subway stop. “I should’ve just gotten ice cream.”

“Duh, you should’ve! Always get ice cream.”

“Who are we protecting in the helicopter chase?”

“Foreign dignitary. Some European country with the serial number filed off. It isn’t named so the movie doesn’t get dated.”

“Why am I the one flying the helicopter?”

He says, as if this should be obvious, “Because you can drive.”

He leads the way to Akihabara, and you, like a fool, like a naive idiot, start to get excited. Akihabara should have been your first warning. But you scuttle cheerfully past arcades and capsule toy stores and secondhand electronics shops, because you are a little hungry after dance class and it’s really considerate of Gojo to try and distract you like this.

Until you clap eyes on the establishment that is allegedly the best pancake joint in the city.

It’s above a secondhand shop. Certainly, there are poster advertisements with photos of pancakes and other breakfast sweets. There’s a Sunday two meal deal, only 1000 yen, what a steal. French-style pancakes to make even a patissier’s mouth water, the advertisement brags. 

The name of the restaurant is Angel Maid Cafe Mischievous ⭐️Cupid. Star and all. 

“Sensei,” you say through a clamped jaw. “This is a maid cafe.”

“Yep!” he says.

“You brought me to a maid cafe.”

“Best pancakes in the city!”

You are not doing this right now. “Okay. No. I’m going home.” And you turn on your heel to march back to the subway entrance. 

“Nooooo, Risacchi, don’t go!” 

There’s a tug on the strap of your gym bag and it hauls you back in place. He hasn’t moved, but he’s got one hand out in a jujutsu hand sign. You realize he’s using his technique on you and you twist your torso back around, seething. “They really are the best in the city! Maybe even all Japan!”

“No, they’re not.” If he’s trying to distract you from your sorrows and woes by pissing you the hell off instead, it’s working.

“I swear!” He presses his palms together and looks contrite. “Would I lie to you?”

You shove the strap of your gym bag back up your shoulder. “You literally bragged to me about how much better of a liar you are, like, last week.”

“I swear on the name of our beautiful son Metalgreymon! It’ll be my treat!”

“Nice try. A free thousand-yen two meal deal is not enough to make me set foot in that place.”

“Okay, okay, fine! Let’s make a bet. If you try the pancakes, and you don’t agree they’re the best pancakes in the city…” He pauses for dramatic effect. “I, Gojo Satoru, solemnly swear to never, ever call you by a nickname ever again.”

You shouldn’t be entertaining this. You should turn right around and march back to the subway, double-time. He presses a hand to his heart. “It’ll be only Hasegawa, from here on out, until the end of time. Or one of us dies!”

You tap a finger against the strap of your bag. You can pause for dramatic effect, too. “No. No way. That’s not good enough.”

“Fine! Name your price!” 

You think about what could possibly make it worth it to you to endure cringing through the next hour hard enough to cause permanent muscle damage. You could ask him for money—he certainly seems to have enough of it—but that seems crass, and the last thing you want is to look crass on the doorstep of a maid cafe. Time off training? No, you want the training. You begged for the training. Unlimited supply of peach energy drinks? Vows of silence whenever you have to drive him someplace? A promise to stop knocking on your window and text like a normal person?

Your window. Your dorm room. You know exactly what you want.

You clamp an emphatic fist down on the strap of your bag. “No more stupid nicknames, and I want you to help me convince Yaga-sensei to let me move into the staff apartments.”

He scratches the back of his head. “You’re high maintenance, Risacchi. He doesn’t like to make exceptions for that kinda stuff.”

“He bent the rules to let me come here!”

“Yeah, and that’s the point I’m making. He saves it for the big, important things.”

“This is a big important thing! I’m a grown woman and I want a closet!” Half your clothes are in storage bins under your bed. Do you have any place or time to wear them? No. But this isn’t about that. “I’ll even give you the talking points! If you can convince the higher-ups to let me go to school, you can convince Yaga to give me a living space with its own bathroom!”

“You get your own bathroom anyways! There’s like, no girls in that dorm!”

You cross your arms and raise your nose in the air. “I want one that’s attached.”

“Ugh. Okay, fine. I can’t promise anything, but if that’s what you want, you got yourself a deal.”

You regret it the instant you pass through the door and the costumed hostess cries, “Kyaaa! Master’s back!” She clasps her hands to her cheeks. “Welcome home, Master!” She peers at you curiously. “And you brought Mistress with you this time, too!”

“It’s okay! You really don’t have to call me that!” you say. 

“‘Course she does!” says Gojo. “You don’t want her to get in trouble if the manager overhears, do ya? Now put your wings on, angel.”

The hostess offers you both a pair of angel wings and a plastic halo headband. “So you can have a little taste of heaven, Mistress!” she chirps.

You’re going to have to drown yourself in a vat of antibacterial spray at the end of this. Hopefully in your new private bathroom. 

You would have said five minutes ago that you’d rather endure a routine dental procedure than set foot in an establishment of this nature, but with the way you’re grinding your teeth as your server leads to a corner table, you might shatter a molar and get to have it both ways. The waitress takes Gojo’s order for two pancake meals with a cheery “Your wish is our karma!” and you don’t even know what that means.

Gojo, completely at ease in his own silly halo, raises his phone to take a picture of you while you attempt to shield your burning face with your hands. “The group chat has got to get an eyeful of this.”

“Don’t send that to people!”

“Come on, give us a smile! You look way too cranky for an angel.” You flinch as his camera sound effect pops, then cringe again as he taps his phone and your own chimes with a new text alert. He hasn’t shown the kids, but Ijichi, Akari, and Dr. Ieiri now have access to the incriminating evidence. You also have a text from Mariko-sensei, your dance class instructor, asking, Do you know if your boss is single?

You moan into your hands.

“Awww, Risacchi, I’ll make us even. Here’s one of me too.” He whips off his sunglasses and takes a selfie of himself winking at the camera, then inflicts it on the same group chat. “You can use that as my new contact picture! I’m changing yours!” You glare at him through the lattice of your fingers.

Your pancake meals emerge, covered in whipped cream and halved strawberries and drizzled with melted butter and syrup. They look like any other ordinary set of reasonably priced pancakes. Your stomach perks up at the smell, but the server makes you chant “Heartful!” with her, which kills all of your remaining appetite. 

As you dig a fork in for your fist bite, Gojo slings an arm over his chair and leans back, taking a long, smug sip of his coffee. “I hope this was worth it for you,” you say. “You can put Yaga-sensei on speakerphone on the way out.”

You shove the pancake in your mouth. The pastry melts into a river of honeyed butter, the fluffy sweetness perfectly complemented by a sparkly little zip of citrus. For a second, your vision blots out, filled with golden, radiant, heavenly light.

When you come to, Gojo is wearing an enormously smug smirk that clashes with his cheap plastic halo. “How,” you mumble, already digging for another bite. You make sure to scoop up a strawberry this time. 

“I wanna hear you say it, Risacchi.” He sweeps his hand like he did before the class on White Day. “Say it’s the best pancake you’ve ever had.”

There’s no even attempting to pretend to deny it, not when you’re shoveling pancake into your mouth and staring glassy-eyed into the middle distance like you’re receiving a divine visitation. The strawberries have some kind of sugared nectar glaze on them. “How? How is it this good?”

“Told ya so, told ya so—“

“There’s some kind of…” You wolf down another bite. “Like, citrus zest in the batter. There’s citrus zest in the batter. At the maid cafe.”

“Let this be a life lesson to you,” says Gojo, spreading his hands benevolently. “I’m right, all the time, about everything.”

“Are you enjoying your meal, Mist—“ Your unfortunate server finds herself on the receiving end of your intent stare.

You stab a fingertip at your plate. “Excuse me… can you tell me what’s in this? What they put in the batter? There’s some kind of citrus zest.” 

“Um… does Mistress not like it? We can send it back to the kitchen—“

“No, I love it!” The kids are going to go wild for it, and you can never, ever bring any of them here or tell them about this place.

“I’m very sorry, I’m not sure! I can ask the kitchen for Mistress, if it makes you smile!”

She returns a few minutes later. “It’s orange zest,” she says. “He also said to tell you he adds ricotta, for the texture.”

“Ricotta,” you mumble to yourself, dazed. Your entire worldview is undergoing a tectonic rearrangement. 

Half your plate disappears in a honey butter-drenched sunlit daydream. As concession, you sigh, “Well. Looks like I don’t get my closet after all.”

Gojo flicks a lazy hand. “Eh, I’ll put in a word for you later.”

“Really?” you squeak, leaning over the table in delight. 

“Yeah, yeah, really. But only as a reward for doing an exorcism all by your lonesome. You gotta work for it.”

“Okay,” you say before a mouthful of whipped cream, then wash it down with coffee. You watch the dregs spiral, head bowed with the embarrassment that’s been running to catch up with you since the ice cream shop. “Um, I just wanted to say thanks. This was nice.”

“Of course it was! I’m a nice guy! And you doubted me.”

“I’m just sorry you had to deal with… that.” That being you in tears on a public sidewalk.

He takes a swig of his coffee. “So that was the guy, huh? Good on ya for kicking him to the curb. Seemed like a total chump.”

Your fork scrapes against your plate like a record scratch. “What are you talking about?”

“What are you talking about?” he volleys back, puzzled.

“I didn’t dump Fumiya, he dumped me!” And you’d known he’d move on. Expected he’d move on. Could even have guessed that he’d probably have done it relatively quickly. He’s a man with a five-year plan and a ten-year plan, after all, which is what you’d liked best about him. 

But you were vain enough to expect it would maybe take him longer than two and a half months. 

“Why would you think it was the other way around?”

“Dunno! Just the vibe I got! Seemed like you were outta his league.”

“Out of his league?” To most of the girls at your old office, it had been indisputably the other way around. You do just fine for yourself, but Fumiya could’ve had anyone he wanted on the fourth floor. You wonder if he’d liked that a little, that you felt grateful to be chosen. 

Gojo raises his hands helplessly. “He looked like a boring guy with a dumb face!”

You crow with pained laugher that draws a faint, concerned look from your server, who sees the tears shining in your eyes and must mistake it for a sob. You muffle yourself with a hand. “A dumb face? I almost married that guy! That was my almost husband!”

“Yeah, and his face is dumb! Don’t try and deny it!”

You heave desperate gasps for air. “No, it is. His face is so—“ You wheeze. “Dumb. It’s super dumb.” His face is incredibly dumb. You hate his incredibly dumb, generically handsome, corporate catalogue-ready face. They actually did use him as a model in the company brochure for job fairs a couple years back. “He kicked me to the curb over the public assault and property damage. Obviously.”

Gojo actually looks surprised. “Wait, for real? What a wuss!”

“I got fired! From the company we both worked at! For criminal activity because I lost control over my freak supernatural powers and got sent back to high school!” You’ve backed yourself into the bizarre corner of having to fight on Fumiya’s behalf, even though he does have an incredibly dumb face and didn’t even wait until your shared streaming service membership expired before shacking up with somebody else. 

“I was right! He is boring! He’s just like those assholes at Jujutsu HQ.”

“Fumiya isn’t that bad!” you protest, wondering if you’re defending him, or yourself, for blowing three years of your life on him. 

“He’s not as bad, but it’s all the same kinda bullshit. One mistake, one toe outta line, anything that messes with their image, and it’s—“ He draws his hand across his throat and makes a cartoonish slashing sound. “Guys like that piss me off.”

“I mean, I probably would’ve dumped me over it, too,” you say. 

For the past two and a half months, you’ve sympathized with Fumiya’s position, because it’s also, when it comes down to it, your own position. Why would he choose to stay with you after you’d taken a sledgehammer to the life you’d both agreed you’d wanted? Of course his love was conditional. All love is conditional. Why should he forgive you? It’s not like you’d forgiven yourself.

And if you had controlled yourself that night? If you’d stayed firmly within the boundaries of the orderly spreadsheet column the two of you had co-authored to organize the rest of your lives? You would have finally used up that joint wedding savings account on a nice hotel reception hall, and then a few months later, you would’ve started trying for your first child.

A child who would have been like you. And Fumiya would never have been able to handle it.

For the first time, your accident really does seem like something of a birthday gift.

“What was it that got you so steamed that night, anyways?” Gojo leans in over the table towards you and stage-whispers, mockingly, “Were you on the rag that week?”

“You’re the worst,” you say, but you’re still quaking with laughter and it undercuts the venom. “I was not!”

“One of those guys screwed around with your date planner?”

You toss a strawberry at him using your fork as a ballista. It hovers in midair in front of chin until he plucks it out of the air and eats it. “Of course not. If they’d messed with the date planner, I would’ve just killed them.” 

He guffaws around the mouthful of strawberry. “Well, what was it then?”

You stare down the coffee mug again, self-conscious. “Why are you suddenly so interested?”

“Because I’m trying to figure out how hard I gotta dunk on that guy.”

Your face warms. “Okay. You want to know? It’s because it was my birthday and I was working overtime and the asshole in the cubicle next door was implying Hanae—you just met her, by the way, she’s the one who’s got Ricchan privileges—was only hired for her…” You bite your tongue on the word tits. “Um, physical assets, and got fired for being a bimbo. And that I’d be next.”

“No way! That’s total loser shit!” Gojo bangs his coffee mug down on the table like a judge’s gavel. “A real man wouldn’t give his girl any crap for not takin’ that lying down. He would’ve wiped the floor with those guys himself, so she wouldn’t’ve had to worry about it in the first place.” He takes a sanctimonious sip of his coffee. “He’s dead weight, Risacchi. You’re way better off.”

The heat from your cheeks spreads downward, like sinking into a bath at the end of a long day.  “Well, my mother has plenty of arguments for the opposition.”

“What’s she so worried about? You’ll rebound, easy. You got a good personality.” You burst into another round of hiccuppy laughter and he glares at you. “Why are you laughin’ at me like that? I’m being nice!”

You swipe a tear from beneath your eye with a thumb. “No, no, it’s just that’s what people usually say when they’re just trying to be polite and they can’t think of anything else. You have a nice personality.”

“C’mon, Risacchi, it’s me! When do I ever say anything just to be polite?” He throws out his hands. “Take it from somebody with a bad personality! What d’you want me to say, huh? That you got a cute face and a bangin’ bod?”

You snort and nearly aspirate a strawberry. “Bangin’ bod? Really?” And your heartbeat blares like a hurricane siren in your ears. He didn’t mean it like that, you lecture yourself. It’s a hypothetical. It’s a joke. It’s a hypothetical joke.

“And you don’t have a bad personality,” you mutter.

He gasps emphatically and claps a hand to his cheek. “You liiiiiiiike me! You really like me!” He holds up his phone. “I think we should commemorate this. Say it into the camera, so I can send it to everybody I know. Say, ‘I think Gojo Satoru is funny and charming and and nice and he’s my favorite teacher.’”

“I think Gojo Satoru is really pushing his luck,” you enunciate into the recording, even as your heartbeat still stutters like a skipped stone.

He tips extravagantly on the way out and the staff all cheer and call after him, “Kyaaaa! Master is too good to us! Come back soon, Master!”

“And bring Mistress again, too!” says your server.

“‘Y’hear that, Risacchi? They liked ya!” He beams down at you. “Let’s come back next week!”

“Hard pass,” you say, quietly enough that the staff and other patrons don’t hear you. “I’m going to try the recipe at home, where I don’t have to wear a pair of plastic wings that have been manhandled by hordes of tourists.”

“Make some for me, too!” He palms your head with his broad hand and scuffs your hair. You swat ineffectually at his untouchable arm. Apparently you can just expect this kind of treatment on a regular basis now. 

When he lifts his hand, your cheeks glow hot enough to use as a cooktop. Warmth spreads through you again, from your face to your chest, and then rolling down your limbs in a long, slow wave.

And you think, Oh, no. 

You’ve been pretending you don’t recognize what it is you’re feeling. But even though you’re a practiced hand at repression, self-deception, and running from your own emotions, you’re a grown woman, and you can only dodge the truth for so long. 

You are the ultimate high school cliche, again, because once wasn’t enough for your lifetime and your subconscious has decreed that you have to relive the mortifying experience of squirming in your chair every time Maeda-sensei called on you in second-year English class. 

You’re hot for teacher.

Gojo blinks down at you, no doubt wondering if you’re going to burst into public tears a third time. “You still good to train, crazy?”

There’s a small, sensible part of your brain that’s still saying, Really? That guy? And she’s the only part of your grey matter that’s got a scrap of common sense on the doorstop of this maid cafe. She should be the one in charge. 

You can only pray she’s capable of stepping up and taking the helm for what’s sure to be an especially excruciating training session.

You’re a normal, adult woman, you order yourself. Act like it. 

“Yep! All good!” you lie through your teeth.

Chapter Text

The school year inches towards the finish line. The air heats and thickens like broth on a stove, the trees on campus burst into blazing, riotous greenery, and you have a foolproof plan for how you’re going to deal with your enormous, mortifying crush on your sensei.

Naturally, the same way you deal with everything else in your life that’s inconvenient or uncomfortable: ignore it.

This is only happening because you’re on the rebound and seeing Fumiya with his new girlfriend is hitting you like a full bottle of sake on an empty stomach. It’s only happening because you’ve been spending so much time in such close physical proximity to a nice-looking man your own age. It’s natural. It’s understandable. You can be forgiven for briefly succumbing to your hormones. It doesn’t actually mean anything.

All that matters is that you don’t act on it. And you’re not going to act on it. He’s obviously not going to act on it. You’re going to gather up these feelings and crumple them up and and shove them to the back of the top shelf in the closet of your mind.

And thus far, you are deploying your strategy flawlessly. 

You are completely normal during your weekly training session, where Gojo has you tank increasingly more powerful hits, then purposefully discharge your shield during the relatively safe periods between strikes, and you don’t think at all about how the twin thin barriers of your techniques are the only things keeping his hands from grazing your arms, your waist, your cheek. 

You are completely normal during the mission you are assigned to with Maki to exorcise a haunted shopping mall, and you don’t think at all about what Gojo could possibly mean when he jerks his head towards one of the display mannequins and quips that the outfit in question—a slinky evening number—would look “real cute on ya.”

You are so, so normal when Gojo crashes one of your weekend dorm dinners with the kids with a pack of soda and a bottle of nice sake he picked up on his last mission to Osaka, just for you, because the kids can’t drink and neither does he. And you’re incredibly normal when he ruffles your hair and says, “Missed ya, Risacchi!”

Your toughest trial to date arrives in short order: Beach Day.

Beach Day is Gojo’s bright idea for the last day of the academic year. He ropes in Ijichi and a school van and drags you all down to Kamakura. The upside is that it’s still too cold to swim, and the air’s still chilly enough that everyone bundles up in sweatpants and jackets. The downside is that Gojo’s broad shoulders and long, lean frame look better in plain grey sweats than any human being alive has any right to look. You keep your eyes to yourself and focused on the book you brought while he and the kids splash around in the shallows. There’s a curtain down so Panda can romp around in the daylight. Gojo made you all swear not to snitch about “abuse of barrier techniques.”

“Whatcha reading, Risacchi?” Your book is snatched from your hands as Gojo blots out the sun. 

In an effort to keep your subconscious sticking to the agenda, you’ve left all your romances at home and brought some Great Literature that you’ve dragged from bookshelf to bookshelf for years, but never actually read. It’s a staid political drama and it’s backfiring on you spectacularly, because it’s dry as stale cake and you wish the buttoned-up lead and his estranged wife would just kiss already to alleviate your boredom. 

Gojo skims over a page and evidently shares your assessment, because he tosses the book sideways into the sand. “Hey!” You dive after its rescue.

“Stop being boring over here and pair up with me!”

“Huh?” you mumble, cheeks flaring, and he jerks a thumb over his shoulder at Yuta and Maki, waiting on the opposite end of a volleyball net.

Oh. For a doubles’ game. Obviously.

He didn’t need a partner at all. When it’s his turn to serve, he lines up one hand, swipes it, and the ball smacks into the sand between Yuta’s feet faster than your mere mortal eyes can follow.

“Shouldn’t we go easy on the kids?” you ask as he whacks another ball over the net, showering sand in a wide radius.

“Hell nah. They ain’t gonna learn anything if I pull my punches. Show some hustle!” he calls across the net with his hands cupped around his mouth. 

After three rounds, you decide you aren’t contributing anything and wander off to help Panda and Toge in the construction of a sand fortress.

At lunch, you all huddle in a circle against the cutting wind off the water and eat the bentos you brought. “Go ahead, Yuta,” says Gojo around a mouthful of octopus hotdog. “Tell ‘em the news.”

Yuta looks down at his folded hands. “I’m, um… I’m studying abroad this semester!” he says, with a guilty, furtive glance at Maki. She shoves her chin into her hand and glares into the sand.

“Wow, Yuta! Where are you going?” asks Panda. Toge offers a congratulatory “Salmon!”

“Kenya. Sensei knows some sorcerers there. I know it’s really sudden! But we just got everything sorted out.” He’s got a little flush of excitement.

“Bet the food there’s amazing,” you say as congratulations. “You’ll have to bring back some souvenirs for everyone to try!” Maki glowers down at the ground. Panda and Toge are both visibly bummed out. If you’re being honest, you’re also a little bummed out. You’re losing one of your favorite sparring partners.

You’ve been reminding yourself that the kids aren’t really going anywhere, just swapping classrooms, but this lends a sense of real finality to the end of the school year. Whether it’s now or later, these kids are going places. And so, not that long from now, are you. You’re nearly a third of the way through your year-long sentence. 

You ought to remind yourself of that every time you catch yourself glancing at your teacher’s lips.

“They have their own framework for understanding cursed energy there,” says Yuta. “Miguel—he’s the one who’s going to be my teacher—said I might even be able to get something pretty close to Rika back.”

Panda eyes your confused expression. “Oh, yeah, Ms. Hasegawa wasn’t there for all that,” he says. “Rika was Yuta’s cursed spirit familiar. Her soul got freed and moved on to the next life after those curse users attacked the school last December.”

Who? When? “What?” you ask. The school was attacked?

“That’s how we got that big crater in the center of campus. You remember when they were fixing that, right?” The school was attacked?

“Happens every so often,” says Panda. Toge agrees with a solemn. “Salmon.”

You’ve got a new fear to add to your list.

Maki, still glowering into the sand, offers a terse “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” says Yuta shyly. 

“C’mon, it’s Beach Day! Don’t look so gloomy!” says Gojo. “He’ll be back next semester.”

The lot of you hold a farewell dinner for him at the dorm, piling the counters with all the food he might miss while he’s away from Japan—udon, grilled eel, takoyaki. And the morning after he takes off for the airport, Maki raps on your door with no glasses, damp hair, and a towel looped around her neck like a noose.

“Hasegawa,” she says, in an accusatory tone, “you cut your own bangs, right?”

“Um. Yes?”

“Can you do mine.” It’s not voiced like a request. There’s a few tattered, uneven scraps of hair plastered to her forehead. She obviously got halfway through on her own and gave up.

You settle her down at your vanity mirror. “How do you want them?”

“Straight across.” She makes a slashing motion with her thumb across her brow.

“Just felt like a change, huh?”

She flushes, biting hard on the inside of her lip as you snap the scissors closed. She doesn’t quite flinch, but her line of sight never leaves the dull blade. “My mom taught me how to do this when I was in elementary school, to save money,” you say, looping a strand of hair you want to leave long around her ear. She does flinch in earnest when your damp finger brushes her cheek, then obvously fumes at herself about it.

“My mother never taught me anything,” she snaps. “Me or my sister.”

You almost drop the scissors. She never volunteers information about herself, least of all regarding her family. “You’ve got a sister?” 

“Twin. She goes to the Kyoto school. Name’s Mai.”

“Are you identical?” you ask, to make conversation and try to put her more at ease, but her shoulders are working up towards her ears.

“Yeah. We look the same. But she has a little bit of cursed energy, and I don’t.” She glares at you from under her shrinking curtain of hair. “You must’ve noticed by now. I don’t have any at all. And Mai’s weak. That’s why we’re the family failures.”

She looks achingly young like this, with her shoulders curled in and her face ruddy with a deep, smoldering anger, a crusade against the entire world. It sucks enough to be a sixteen-year-old girl under the best of circumstances. You wouldn’t relive those years of your life even if you got paid, your current circumstances thus being especially ironic.

And you were one of the lucky ones. Sure, you had your curse, and a family that had no idea how to deal with it when they weren’t too busy dealing with Daiki. But you never doubted that they loved you. That they wanted you. That your happiness mattered to them, still matters to them, even if sometimes you have conflicting ideas about what it ought to look like.

“If your family thinks you’re a failure,” you say, closing the scissors in one final cut, “then they’re idiots.”

“Yeah. They are,” she says, and offers you a quick, sharp-edged smile. “Anyway, I’m giving you a heads-up, because my douchebag cousin is your age. If anyone tries to set you up with him, don’t.”

You laugh and she gives you a hard look. “I’m not kidding.”

You smother your last giggle. That’s a very specific warning, and unusual for her to go out of her way to give, you reflect uneasily. You recall Ijichi’s flustered speech about sorcerer culture being very traditionalist. “Got it. I appreciate it. No douchebag cousins for me.” 

You spin her around so she can face the mirror. “What do you think? Do you like it?” She blinks at her new reflection. “I think it’s cute!”

“Yeah. I do,” she says, tilting her chin. 

She, Panda, and Toge move up to the second-year class, and the new year and your new set of trials begin. You are filled with undeserved hubris for how you navigated the end of the year and Beach Day, and will suffer your tragic fall in due order.

The first-year class is now comprised of only you and somber, intense Fushiguro Megumi. There was supposed to be another girl, family name Kugisaki, but her start date got delayed. Fushiguro, you learn, is a generational prodigy who’s already a grade two upon entering school—“It’s ‘cause of all the quality time with yours truly!” Gojo brags—which means he can already take missions alone, and often does.

That leaves Gojo with the duty of supervising you, one-on-one.

You and Gojo go on a mission to a cursed convenience store. You and Gojo go on a mission to a cursed hospital ward. You and Gojo investigate rumors about a cursed arcade, which turns out to be a normal arcade where a disgruntled former employee is pretending to be a ghost to get revenge on his old manager. 

This is good, you inform yourself. The more practice you’re forced into interacting with him in a professional setting, the faster you’ll be able to smother your little crush. Rather than evicting itself when politely asked, it’s now staked out a permanent spot on the couch and it’s leaving its stuff out all over the bathroom counter, but still. You hold out hope.

Towards the end of April, your sparring match with Maki is interrupted by a Gojo so excited he’s nearly vibrating.

“What, did the corner shop bring back your favorite parfait?” you ask.

“Riiiiiiiisachiiiiiiii, I got great news for ya,” he singsongs, spinning in place. “Guess where we’re going on our mission today. Guess, guess!”

It’s hard not to get caught up in his obvious enthusiasm. “Cursed bakery.”

He makes a buzzer sound with his mouth. “Nope! Try again.”

“Uh… cursed beach resort?”

“Clooooose!” 

If cursed beach resort is close… You laugh helplessly as you line up your next guess. “Cursed hot spring.”

“Ding ding ding ding! We got a winner!” 

Oh, no. 

The universe—or maybe just someone at jujutsu mission headquarters—is having a good, hard laugh at your expense.

“C’mon, Risacchi! I thought you’d be into this. You were moaning just the other day about how you ain’t been to one of these things in forever.”

“I—I do! I love them!” In fact, during your last mission, when you’d questioned the fake ghost about how the incidents had briefly halted the weekend he took his girlfriend to a hot spring inn, you’d had some choice words to say about how you were getting less vacation than the guy whose current state of employment is “faking a haunting.” “But it’s for a mission. We probably won’t even have time to use it.”

And that’s probably for the best. As much as you’d rather be in an onsen than doing literally anything else, if the cosmic tradeoff is spending every second you enjoy in there having to absolutely not think about your sorcery teacher, wet and unclothed, lounging just over a fence on the mens’ side, you’re going to have to take the hit.

“No way we’re driving all the way to Nagano and not soaking in there ‘til we’re pruny,” he says with an emphatic stab of his finger. “And by us driving I mean you’re driving, because Ijichi snitched to the lead assistant manager and now they’re putting you in rotation. I’ll smack him for you later.”

“Don’t smack him at all,” you say. “It’s okay. I’m getting a day trip out of it.” He’s right. It’ll be fun. You love an onsen weekend, and you haven’t gotten one since the brief girls’ trip you took with Keiko early in her pregnancy with Haru. A good long soak ‘til you’re pruny might be just what you need.

You’ll just have to make sure the two of you use the spring at different times.

“Yay! Say it with me, Risacchi! Hot spring, hot spring, hot spring—“

You add your voice to the chant while Maki makes vague noises of disgust in your direction.

Ijichi, who remains thankfully smackless, texts with the promise he’ll bring the car around for you in the afternoon. Because you know Gojo is going to be heinously late, you take your sweet time getting to the meeting point, trudging down the school walk and into town to the nearest coffee shop. You get a “caramel cookie crunch white chocolate explosion” off the special menu for him, and a plain black coffee for you.

When you return to the school drive, only five minutes past the time you’d agreed to meet, you almost drop the drinks in your shock to see him already in the passenger seat of the car, giving you an accusatory glare over his sunglasses. He leans over and rests an elbow against the wheel, making the horn shriek until flocks of birds lift off from the nearby treetops.

“You’re late!” he says.

“You’re early!” you say.

“I was on time!”

“You’re never on time!”

“Well, excuuuuuuse me for not wanting to miss a single minute with my favorite student.”

“I’m not your favorite student.” You slide into the driver’s seat and offer him his drink. “Yuta’s your favorite student.”

“You’re all my favorite student, ‘cause I’m a nice guy and I don’t play favorites. Whatcha get me?”

“Caramel cookie crunch white chocolate explosion.”

“Aww, how’d you know my order?”

“I didn’t. I just asked for the biggest sugar bomb on the menu.” You turn the ignition. “Be careful, it smells like burning plastic.”

“Hell yeah. That’s how you know it’s good.” He downs half of it in one chug with a satisfied smack of his lips. “That’s the stuff.”

It’s about three hours’ drive from Jujutsu High to the hotel in the outskirts of Nagano. Gojo insists on keeping all the windows down as you cruise along the expressway to his Banger Road Trip Playlist. The fishtail braid you spent an embarrassing length of time on this morning is shredded to ribbons within the first twenty minutes of the trip, but the late spring air is dense and sweet as milk bread, and laces comforting fingers through your now-loose hair.

Gojo sings along to the playlist for the first hour of the trip, occasionally grilling you about your favorite movie trivia or begging you to pull over so he can get some fries (you do, and you both get some fries). But as you veer away from the suburbs and skirt around Isesaki, he keeps dozing off and shaking himself awake with a few hard blinks. 

He just got back from another mission abroad the day before yesterday, and he’s already back out in the field again. He must be completely wiped. “You can take a nap if you want, you know,” you shout over the wind. “I don’t mind.”

He glances your way between fiddling with the playlist order. “But won’t you get lo-o-onely without your favorite sensei to keep you company?”

You pat the center console. “I’ll be fine. I’ve got Celine.” The speakers are wailing Celine Dion’s To Love You More at max volume. 

“What if we get attacked by some freaky curse? What will you do without me?”

“If we get attacked you’ll know right away, because I’ll scream.”

“Heh heh. Like that girly scream you did last mission?” 

You’d been fighting a curse twice your size with incisors the length of your forearm. You think you deserved to scream a little. “I am a girl. I don’t know how else you expect me to scream.” You hold up a hand in salute. “If we get attacked en route I promise to wake you up with my deepest, most masculine yell.”

“Okay, now I really wanna hear that.”

“Go to sleep so I don’t have to listen to you anymore.”

“Ouch!” he says, brows quirking, and settles back against his reclined seat, head pillowed on his crossed arms. 

He’s out like a light for the rest of the trip. When you roll into the hotel parking lot, he’s still dozing, and he keeps on dozing while you fix your braid.

“Um… sensei?” you ask. He doesn’t stir. His soft lips are slightly parted and his brow slightly furrowed in sleep. He’s got a scar on his forehead, a nick just above his left eyebrow, that you’ve never noticed before. His hair or blindfold are usually in the way.

You resist the urge to brush your thumb against it. “Sensei?” you ask again, louder. You reach out to give him a gentle nudge on the shoulder, but your hand trembles and freezes to a stop in empty space two millimeters from his sleeve. He’s got the infinity on in his sleep. 

Finally you clap your hands in front of his nose. He jerks awake, blinking up at you. “Hey,” he says with a drowsy smile. 

Your heart flops over. “Hey, yourself,” you say. “We’re here.”

“Ugh. I really napped the whole time, huh?” He stretches his long legs and lets them drop back onto the dashboard. “My bad, Risacchi.”

Your heart somersaults again. “You don’t have to apologize. You were tired.” You fumble for your purse. “Maybe we both need a good long soak in the hot spring.” You frantically shove down the images that float to the surface of your mind—the two of you, naked, dripping, entwined. 

It’s a high-class place, way nicer than any hotel you’ve ever been able to afford on girls’ trips with Keiko and your college friends. Or with Fumiya, who didn’t believe in blowing hard-earned money on something as friviolous as a weekend trip. And at the time, you’d agreed with him. It had seemed so much more important to plan for your future. The one exception had been the Valentine’s vacation to Okinawa you’d had to beg for, and you didn’t even get to go.

Gojo whistles as he takes in the packed lobby, swarming with foreign tourists, honeymooning couples, and kids on school trips. “Swanky joint, huh?” he says as he saunters up to the front desk. 

“We’re here for the Historical Society meeting,” he says, tipping his sunglasses down his nose so he can sparkle down at the young woman on duty. “Hasegawa Risa and Gojo Satoru.”

She looks fresh out of high school, with freckled cheeks and wide eyes that round even further at your names. “R-right! The Historical Society! Of course!” She gives an exaggerated wink. “Let me just, um…” She taps frantically away at her keyboard. “We’ve got your rooms set up! Separate rooms, right?”

“Right!” you say, perhaps a little too forcefully. 

“I’ll take you there now!” She leads you into a back stairwell, dimly lit but fastidiously clean. “I’m Kikuchi Ikuyo!” she whispers out of earshot of the lobby. “I’m the window here.”

“Nice to meetcha, Ikuyo,” says Gojo, and she almost trips on the stairs. It’s your dance cardio class all over again.

“I was the one who called in the curse—I’ve been a window for a few years now, since I was a student. But I never thought we’d have one here, at the family business.” She twines a strand of hair around her finger.

“How long ago did you notice?” asks Gojo, for once all business. 

“Just a couple days ago. I filed the report right away. And I tried to get them to close the hotel, but my grandmother wouldn’t listen to me—“

“It’s okay. You did a good job calling it in so quick,” says Gojo, shoving his hands in his pockets, and Ikuyo struggles to keep an enormous smile from overtaking her face as she motions for you to get off the stairs at the second floor. 

“It’s peak tourist season, so we’re booked up. But I got the onsen closed down for you to do the exorcism. Said we had a little accident.” She gives the two of you another exaggerated wink. 

“The curse is out in the onsen?”

“Yeah. A few months back, we had… this is really sad, but an older guest had a medical problem while she was out there, using it. I don’t want to sound cold, but it happens sometimes, working in a hotel. But it really spooked everybody. We just started to get fully booked again, but then… three days ago, there she was. The curse, I mean.”

“She stay out there all the time?”

“Yes. She hasn’t tried to come inside yet. During the daytime, she just watches, but after dark… we’ve had a couple near misses.” She lowers her voice. “She tries to pull people under.”

“Got it. You don’t have to worry anymore. We’ll take care of it!” says Gojo, with an emphatic thumbs-up, and Ikuyo’s freckles vanish in a spill of bright red.

“T-thanks for coming to help so fast! Um, this is your room here, sir. If you and, um, the lady want to freshen up… I’ll be back down at the front to show you the curse site and answer any other questions you may have.”

“Meet you at the front in twenty, Risacchi,” says Gojo, with a wink, a click of his tongue, and a tap of his fingers against his temple, before he braces one hand on the doorframe and swings into his room. The nickname earns a saucer-eyed stare from Ikuyo.

She leads you back to the stairwell. Your room’s another couple of floors up. “Is that really him?” she whispers to you as you ascend the next flight. “The Gojo Satoru?” 

“Uh-huh. Unless there’s two of him.” You don’t think you, or Japan at large, are prepared to handle that.

She giggles. “I can’t believe it! All the other girls in our window branch are going to be sooooo jealous!” So this was the reaction he’d been expecting when he met you. 

A guilty expression crosses her face. “Um, are you his…” She trails off, which makes it even worse. Are you his, full stop. 

“Oh, no, no,” you say, because whatever it was she was asking, the answer’s an emphatic negative. “I’m his student! I’m, um re-skilling in sorcery,” you say, to head off any questions about your age.

“Really?” She smiles at you, warm and genuine. “That’s so cool! To get to learn from the strongest sorcerer in the world…”

“He’s a good teacher,” you say, and, in a move that would shock yourself two months ago, you mean it. “I’m lucky.”

Ikuyo chatters at you the walk up the stairwell, asking about what it’s like to spar with him and if you’ve ever seen him “do a blue,” before she drops you off at your room on the fourth floor with a hesitant, “Do you think he’d sign something for me? I don’t want to be annoying, or anything!”

You want nothing more than to sink into the plush-looking bed until you merge with it permanently and become one object, but you’re on the clock. You stow your travel bag, brew a cup of tea to choke down, gaze at the pillows with a deep, sensual longing, and head back downstairs.

Gojo runs into you on the stairwell. “What’s with that face, Risacchi? You look so gloomy!”

The tea somehow only made it worse. You rub at the smudge beneath one eye. “I can’t believe this. I let you sleep out of the kindness of my heart and this is the thanks that I get.”

“You’re gonna scare off men, looking like that!” He grins.

“Good. Too bad it’s not working on you,” you say, more mildly than the comment warrants, and his grin grows. 

You can’t believe that this is the guy your traitorous heart has decided to pin its attentions on. Even worse, you can’t believe that you kind of look forward to when he’s rude now, because it means you’re allowed to immediately fire back with whatever the hell you feel like saying, instead of passing it through the seven or so filters of social acceptability you run every scrap of dialogue through before it’s allowed to leave your mouth.

“Aww, cheer up! After we get this done, it’s rest and relaxation for the rest of the night,” he says as he slips his blindfold on. “I’ll take you out to eat!”

You perk right up. “Nagano street food greatest hits?”

“If that’s what my favorite student wants, then that’s what she’s gettin’!”

The turnaround in your mood is immediate. You’re downright sunny. “Before we go down there, can you sign this?” You tear a page out of your miniature notebook and offer it to him.

“What, you trying to forge my signature for a leave of absence?”

“The window. Ikuyo. She really, really wanted your autograph.”

“Well, whaddaya know. I am famous. That’s how girls usually react.”

Ikuyo beams like she’s first in line to shake hands with an idol when presented with the small sheet of paper bearing his bold, emphatic signature, creasing it carefully to hide away in her uniform before she leads you past the caution tape blocking off the way to the onsen. They’ll have to do a deep clean before anyone else can get in there. Again, you remind yourself, probably for the best, though you can’t help but feel a little disappointment.

You linger at the door from the changing rooms. The women’s side of the onsen is empty, the springwater chirping a deceptively cheerful burble as it tumbles from a spout into the pool, the surface opposite the stream as smooth and bright as mirror. “I tried to start draining it, but it made her mad. She’s under the water now,” says Ikuyo, “but you can sense her, right?”

It’s like a tug beneath your breastbone, a lodestone pointing towards the deeper end of the spring, between a cluster of rocks. This curse is significantly stronger than the one you fought at the elementary school. You’re still a bad judge based on curse sense alone, but probably on par with the one in the mountainside lake.

Ikuyo twines her index fingers together. “Um, if it’s not too much of a problem, do you think I could… w-watch you? I’ve never actually seen one done before.”

“Nah, sorry, but it ain’t safe,” says Gojo. “You can hang out outside the curtain with me while Hasegawa does it.”

“I’m doing it?” you ask.

“You’re doin’ it!”

“She’s doing it?” asks Ikuyo, audibly a little disappointed.

“Inside the curtain by myself?”

“Hasegawa. You agreed no whining,” says Gojo with a wag of his finger. His uncharacteristically stern tone of voice sends a little frission shivering down your spine. You’re as bad as Ikuyo.

“I’m not whining!” you say, it and does, unfortunately, sound kind of a little whine-adjacent. “I’m just nervous.” It’ll be your first time on the inside of a curtain entirely by yourself. 

“Hasegawaaaaaa,” he says, dragging the last syllable outside and halfway down the road. “We’ve been over this. As your sensei, you gotta put your trust in me to keep you safe. If I say you’re ready, then you’re ready.”

“Sorry. Okay,” you say, and swallow hard.

“Say it. Say you’re ready.”

“I’m ready.” You’re not fooling anyone. You sound like an anemic housecat.

“C’mon, with feeling! Like you mean it! You did the last three basically by yourself! I was just there to look good!”

You make a fist. “I’m ready!”

“Good!” he says, and taps his index finger against your nose.

You clap a hand over it. “What was that?”

“For good luck!” He beams proudly down at you. “I’ll do the curtain for ya. Knock ‘em dead.”

The curtain descends, muting the ripples of voices from the hotel, the soft breeze, the distant murmur of street traffic. The only sound comes from your own throat as you swallow a hard knot of air.

There’s not a lot of solid ground to fight on—just the little skirt of flat stone where you’re currently standing, sloping into a shallow slide into the water. The edge of the pool opposite you, against the far fence, is nothing but decorative rock formations that would be a real bitch to fall on. You’re going to have to try and lure her to this side. And you’re going to have to get in the water, because the curse is showing no signs of coming to you, although a few dark, slick bubbles are breaching the glassy surface.

You unbutton your jacket, fold and place it by the door to the changing rooms, roll the sleeves of your blouse up to your elbows, and clamp a fist down on your staff, then shove one foot into the spring.

It’s lusciously silken and hot, seeping through your tights and pooling in your loafers, and you really, really wish you could have the soak of your life after this without thinking about the curse corpse that’s about to melt into the water. That can’t be good for your pores. 

You wade in up to your knees. The water is a warm, heavy caress. The soft spring wind sighs and drags gentle fingers through your hair. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to lie down right here? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to stay here forever?

Wait, why is there a breeze inside the curtain?

Gojo’s warned you about cursed spirits with abilities like this, to influence your mood and emotions. The sensation is strange now that you know that it’s happening, like squinting at yourself in the mirror without your contacts. As you shake off the urge, a firm, cold hand clamps down on your ankle.

You make your girly scream and strike downward with the butt of your staff.

It cracks against something with a snap, and the curse knots her claws in the dragging hem of your wet skirt and hauls her torso out of the pool. Water trickles from her knotted hair, from the papery folds of her face, stretched thin over her exaggerated skull, and from the yawning void of her mouth.

Looking down at her, you find a little surge of pity welling up beneath the expected fear. Like all curses, she was born from fear, but not the fear you’re feeling right now—only the familiar fear of ordinary human misfortune. You’re a bit sorry for the curse, but mostly you’re sorry for the woman whose life ended abruptly here, leaving only this clawing, howling, empty shell. 

You can’t help her now, but you can exorcise this thing and protect the rest of the guests and staff. You raise your staff and crack it across her head, slapping the surface of the water at the end of the swing. She digs her claws tighter into your skirt and tries to close her jaw around your off arm, teeth scraping against your shield. You swat at her again, across the face, and then brace the edge of the staff against the side of her skull and push. 

She comes loose from your skirt, taking long ribbons of fabric with her, and flops into the water like a corpse. You back up a step, bracing your feet against the rough stone floor of the pool, and ready your staff and shield. 

She breaks the surface a few meters away. Her throat swells like a bullfrog’s and she spits something dark, sharp, and whistling at you. You bat it out of the way and it hits the water. Gojo’s “projectile training” was good for something after all. Before it sinks, you catch a glimpse of it, a fist-sized, jagged-edged knot of dark thorns. 

It’s followed by three more. Two bounce off your shield and splat into the water. Your shield detonates, making the surface of the water shiver like a drum, and the third bites into your arm. You tried to reinforce it with cursed energy, but you were a few seconds too late. A trickle of blood follows the thorns into the water.

She stumbles away from you, spitting more projectiles as she hauls herself onto the rocks at the far end of the pool with her clawed hands. You wince as the edge of your foot nudges one, the thorn points so lethally sharp they sink into your leather shoe and bump off your shield. You can’t lure her after you if she can hang out ten meters away and spit knives at you, and you don’t have any distance attacks besides your burst phase. And the more projectiles fall into the water, the more dangerous it will become to move around. You can’t fight at all if your legs and feet get shredded.

You’ll have to go to her.

Gojo would be proud of you for going all in. He’s always encouraging you to press your advantages more, to take the offensive role instead of relying on distance and defense to control the pace of a fight. Or, as he likes to say, “stop being such a freaking wuss.”

You wade into the deeper water, thrashing into an ungainly dog-paddle when you hit the far end of the pool, jerking in frantic one-armed circles to avoid as many of the thorn balls as you can. She might run out of ammo eventually, but you can’t hope for it. 

You clamber after her onto the rough, slick rock, staff at the ready. Your shield isn’t ready to discharge yet, even if you try to trigger it on purpose. She swipes at you and you catch it on the staff; bring it up for a counterattack that nearly tears off her jaw. It wobbles, hanging, as her throat swells again to spit another round of thorns at you.

Not at your face and torso this time, but down at your feet. You shift instinctively to shunt your heel aside, slip on the slick rock, and your legs are out from under you and your left hip is cracking against the rock, your staff thrown from your hand into the water.

The fall’s enough to trigger your shield. Your power fans out in front of you in a narrow arc, the way Yuta taught you. You have to concentrate to aim the blast at a specific angle, but it’s stronger if you do. That’s the tradeoff. A binding vow in miniature.

When the light and sound fade, the curse has dissolved into the heaving water, and the curtain is following suit with a soft sigh. You sigh along with it in relief, sagging with your forehead braced against the rock as adrenaline seeps out of your limbs like the water dripping from your skirt.

“You good, Risacchi?” calls Gojo across the water.

You make a thumbs-up over your head. “Uh-huh!”

You brace one forearm on the rock, grit your teeth, try to rise to your knees, and fold like wet cardboard when you put a single gram of weight on your right ankle.

“That doesn’t look all good.”

“I’m okay,” you moan, wiggling onto your knees again with your right leg stuck out in the air. Even the minute shivers of movement are sending jolts of pain ricocheting back up your leg. “I’m okay! Just, um… give me a sec!”

A pause. “Can you walk?”

“No,” you admit.

“Then stay put. I’m coming to you.” 

“Be careful! There’s a bunch of sharp stuff in the water—“ As you watch through the stringy curtain of your wet hair, he strides towards you across the surface of the water. 

Of course he can do that too. There’s really no justice in this world.

“Where’re ya hurt?” he asks as he alights on the rock, unfolding himself over you.

“Just my ankle. The right one,” you say, and he reaches down and brushes your hair off your face with a graze of his fingertips. A rush of heat follows in the path of his touch. “I think it’s just sprained.”

“Just stay still,” he says, shifting his hand to pat your forehead. “I got you.”

You obediently brace yourself, preparing for another tear of pain. He grips you around the shoulders and hauls you upward, lightly, easily, weightlessly. You float in the air as easily as water. The arm he hooks beneath your knees is entirely for your own comfort. If he wanted, he could sling you around with one hand and zero effort.

This is information your hindbrain is going to use against you when you’re lying awake in your dorm room. 

He settles you in his arms and against his chest, and can no doubt feel your dismayed gasp as you realize your white blouse, and the pink sports bra beneath, are soaked completely through, translucent and clinging, revealing the contour of your breasts to any and all onlookers. Specifically onlookers with perfect magic vision.

“Don’t look at my shirt, please,” you mumble, shielding your chest with your hands.

“I ain’t looking!” he says, a little testily. “My eyes are closed!”

“Okay! Sorry! I couldn’t tell with the blindfold!”

You squeak as he steadies you with one arm, your legs hovering in midair, so he can hook a thumb under the blindfold and flip it to reveal his closed eyes. “There. Y’see? Happy now?”

“… You can’t see through your eyelids, can you?”

“Not all that good!” he says cheerfully as he strides out over the water with you folded in his arms. It’s strange and more than a little queasy. You’re falling—you inner ear knows you’re falling—but your position in relative space above the water’s surface stays the same. It must be enormously difficult to keep a smooth, steady gait over the pool’s surface. You’re getting airsick. 

“It’s kinda weird the first time,” he says.

You can’t help but close your fist in his jacket, already flinching in preparation for the strike against the water your body is convinced is coming. 

“Hah! You don’t like it, do ya?” His laughter rumbles against your shoulder.

“It’s really disorienting,” you say, squeezing your eyes closed in the hopes that will help. It doesn’t. Now you’re falling slowly and endlessly into a black hole. “You make it look so easy.”

“That’s because it is easy when you’re me!”

When you arrive at the other end of the spring, he steadies you with one arm, reaches down with the other to scoop up your folded jacket, and drapes it across your chest. Beneath it, your heart constricts.

Ikuyo gazes at you with a volcanic jealousy. You get the sense that she is contemplating a list of increasingly more violent crimes she would hypothetically commit to swap places with you at the moment. “Thank you so much for all your help,” she says with a bow. “We owe the safety of our guests and our livelihood to you.”

“Y’hear that? That was all you, Risacchi. You did good,” says Gojo. Then, to Ikuyo, “She’s my favorite student, y’know.” In real time, you watch her add arson and manslaughter to her list of hypothetical crimes.

And you know what? At the moment, you can’t blame her. 

But you have to cut this off, now. You have to quit while you’re ahead. With your body nestled up against his, you’re giving a hundred tells. Your quickened heartbeat, pattering against the arm he’s braced beneath your bent knees. Your rapid, shallow breathing, expanding the ribs pressing against his chest. Your blazing, scarlet blush, trailing all the way down beneath the jacket he’s draped over your cleavage.

“You can put me down now,” you say, clearing your throat. “I think I can manage.”

“What, you gonna hop around on one foot?” He simply arranges you more comfortably in his arms. “That’d be hilarious, but I’ll feel kinda bad when you fall over.”

“We have a spare folding wheelchair we keep for guests!” Ikuyo offers. 

“Bring it around front for us. We’re going to the hospital.”

“The hospital?” you ask. “I don’t think it’s that bad. It’s just a sprain.”

“You could’ve broken it! I can’t use reverse cursed technique on other people. You’re stuck with it ‘til we get ya back to Shoko, so let’s go get it looked at.” He glances at Ikuyo again. “Better call a cab.”

Your brain limps to catch up with him. He’s already realized what you haven’t—your right ankle is attached to your driving foot. You can’t drive like this. And he can’t drive at all.

Which means that you’re both stranded at the hot spring hotel.

Chapter Text

You were right. Your ankle isn’t broken, just badly sprained. The physician on duty at the emergency room, a merry middle-aged man who reminds you of your favorite uncle, instructs you to keep it iced and keep weight off of it for a few days. “Be sure to take excellent care of her, young man!” he orders Gojo with a twinkle in his eye. 

You flush scarlet, but Gojo replies, “Sure thing, old guy!” and rolls you out of the hospital with a bounce in his step, twirling your borrowed wheelchair in a circle in the parking lot while you wait for your cab back to the hotel.

“Sooooo, Risacchi. I got news,” he says. “Called Ijichi while you were getting the x-rays done. The assistant managers are all booked up tomorrow. No cars! They can’t come pick us up until day after tomorrow, at the earliest.”

Of course they’re all booked up. That’s how you got into this situation in the first place. “Well…” you say hesitantly. “If we were supposed to be back at school tomorrow… I guess we could take the train, and come back for the car later?”

He makes a derisive sound. “Y’hear that old geezer, Risacchi? I’m supposed to be taking excellent care of you! No way I’m dragging you around on public transit for half a day with a busted foot!”

“Geezer? He was, like, fifty, tops.” 

“It’d just be irresponsible for me to make you travel in this state. Which means you have to wait for one of the assistant managers.” He pats the top of your head. “Which means you’ve gotta take the day off tomorrow! Just rest! Y’hear me? That’s orders from sensei.”

A day off. You haven’t had a real day off in months. Even on the weekends and spare days between missions, you’re either training, or working out so you can survive the training. You don’t think you can bring yourself to use the curse-infested hot spring, even after it’s been cleaned, but still. You can commune with that plush hotel bed for twenty-four straight hours. The prospect is sweeter than cream cake. Sweeter even than pancakes with honey butter and orange zest.

“What about you?” you ask.

He’s fiddling with his phone. “They want me to take the train back tomorrow.”

“Another mission already?”

“Nah, just to be on standby.”

“When was the last time you had a day off?” you ask. He was so exhausted on the drive here. 

He chuckles. “Awww, are ya worried about me? That’s cute!” He pats the top of your head again. “But nah, I’m good. I can take it.”

“You aren’t tired, too?” you ask hesitantly.

“‘Course not. I got killer stamina,” he scoffs, attention already back on his phone screen. Like you didn’t watch him battle to keep his eyes open through Celine’s greatest international hits this afternoon.

You know he also hasn’t had a real day off in months, because he’s constantly shuttling from mission to mission, and on the off days, when you’re training, he’s also training. Training you. 

You can’t believe you ever gave him shit about not taking enough time to teach you. 

“You shouldn’t go back tomorrow,” you say.

He glances down at you, pushing his sunglasses up his nose. “What are you saying, Hasegawa? You want me to stick around?” 

“Well, I mean… what if I get attacked by some freaky curse?” You wiggle your wrapped ankle at him. “I’m injured. What will I do?” His eyebrows quirk up. “I’m only a grade three! I can’t do exorcisms unsupervised! It’s school policy! It’d be against the rules!”

He cracks a little smile. “You gonna call admin and throw one of your little bitch fits?”

“The only person I throw bitch fits at is you,” you say, flushing, and study your folded hands in your lap as his broad, genuine smile uncurls across his face. “If there was a real emergency, and they for sure needed you, that’s different. But if it’s just to be on standby… shouldn’t you be on standby with your injured student? You can always get on a train from here when you have to.”

He drops to one bent knee, bringing the two of you as close as you’ll ever get to eye level. “You want me to stay here with you?”

“Yes,” you say. “I want you to stay here.” You omit the obvious with me, but it still hangs in the air between you.

A silent pause. And then he shoves a thumbs-up at you, gliding back to his feet. “Well, who am I to ignore a precious student’s request?”

He clutches the grips of your wheelchair and spins you into a series of loops and doughnuts while you shriek and clutch the armrests. “You and me! Soaking ‘til we’re pruny! Say it with me, Risacchi! Hot spring, hot spring, hot spring!”

When you’re back in the lobby, instead of wheeling you to the rickety old elevator in the back, he veers into the first-floor guest rooms. “Um, my room’s up the stairs,” you remind him.

“Not anymore it ain’t! Got ‘em swapped before we left.”

The first-floor suites have larger beds, a small sitting area, and most vitally, a sliding door leading onto a fenced patio with a small spring-fed tub. One of the private miniature onsens, for people who can’t or won’t use the large public bath.

You think you might cry.

“Ikuyo said the deep clean’s gonna take a few days, but she could get us this,” he says, a little proudly, upon seeing your reaction. Your travel bag is already set up in the closet.

“Is the school going to pay for this?” It has to be at least twice the cost of your smaller room. Not to mention that it’s tourist season. 

“Risacchi. Stop worrying. I’ll take care of it.” There’s a small step past the threshold, but he easily hoists the wheelchair up and over it. “Take that stick out of your ass for one day.”

“That’s really nice,” you say, scrubbing at one stinging eye. “And you don’t have to say it like that.” He sticks his tongue out at you and your heart swoops and plummets and keeps falling, like how you’d felt out over the surface of the onsen when he used his technique.

“What about you?” you ask. You ought to offer to let him use it—naked dripping entwined—in shifts. Any second now, steam is going to start whisling out of your ears. 

“Me? I’ll use the public one. The men’s side didn’t have a curse in it, so it should be fine.”

“Right! Of course.” You’re saved.

The next morning, after the best sleep you’ve had since last New Year’s, you’ve thankfully, and quite literally, dragged yourself out of bed by the time room service arrives with your breakfast. Gojo swings by shortly after with two cups of coffee from a boutique shop down the street.

He sprawls in the spare low-set chair, which looks laughably small with his long frame folded over it. You push the sugar bowl across the table at him so he can begin his usual daily routine of dropping in fifteen cubes to make coffee-flavored sugar sludge.

“Sooo, I’m gonna get out and do some touristy stuff today,” he says. “See the sights, get some souvenirs. You wanna come with?”

You eye the wheelchair folded up at the entrance to the room. “I’m fine with pushing you around,” he adds. 

“Aren’t you always fine with pushing me around?” you ask teasingly as you shove your extra breakfast across the table after the sugar.

“I’m serious! I can lift you in that thing one-handed!” He gulps down a handful of your leftovers. “It’s easy.”

On a different day, you’d love to get out and visit some Nagano hot spots. Today, your ankle is still throbbing, your cuts are still tight and itchy, and when you checked on the bruise over your left hipbone this morning, it had turned a virulent grey-violet and staked out even more territory across your leg. “I really appreciate the offer, but I was planning on spending literally all day in and out of the hot spring, boiling like the world’s happiest meatball.”

His eyebrows raise. “You sure? I’d go totally nuts if I was stuck in this room all day.”

“I’m sure! Sightseeing’s fun, but I’m still pretty achy. I think I’d just get cranky on you.”

“When are you not getting cranky on me?” He grins.

“And sometimes it’s just really, really nice to just do nothing.” You’ve been trying to remember your last real day entirely off, no chores, no overtime, no training, no exercise class. Maybe when Fumiya went on that weekend sales conference trip a couple months ago—half a year ago? A year ago?

He crosses his arms, still smiling. “And here I thought you wanted to hang out with me.”

“No, I do!” And you really do. And that’s fine, right? It’s fine and normal for the two of you to hang out in a casual setting. You’ve been acing being normal in his presence. If you can handle getting bridal-carried across a hot spring, you’ve got to be able to handle anything. “We can hang out after. Go do your thing first and have fun.”

“If that’s how you want it,” he says around a final mouthful of omurice. “I know exactly what we can do without leaving this room!”

You hope he doesn’t notice how your breath hitches. How for two seconds, you’re knocked out of this chair and entirely out of your body, and are four meters away on the bed, the weight of his hips pressing you into the mattress, his hot mouth crushing down on yours. You give yourself a metaphorical firm smack on the wrist. “What?”

He pushes his sunglasses up and onto his forehead, giving you a full, unobstructed view of his boyish smile. “Movie night!”

When he’s in his shades and casualwear, his smiles are softer than the wide, shiny grins he puts on with the blindfold. You wonder if he exaggerates his expressions more so his half-obstructed face is easier to read, or if it’s just another layer to his uniform. “I’ll bring the DVDs! You just bring yourself and that busted ankle.”

Movie night. Obviously.

It’ll be fun. Movie night is a completely normal, platonic, teacher-student appropriate activity. You’ve even already had a couple back in the school common room, although, of course, with the rest of the class in attendance.

You wiggle said busted ankle at him. “You got it, sensei.”

He heads off to see the sights and you, as promised, spend literally all day in and out of the onsen, marinating. At first the heat of the water exaggerates the throb of your aches and bruises, but as you adjust to the change in temperature and every muscle in your body slackens, the pain boils off. 

In between simmers, you read an entire manga, front to back, about a pair of high school students who attempt increasingly escalating hijinks to get the other to confess their love first, and laugh so hard you nearly reinjure yourself. You ring up Keiko and listen to her dish about Masahiro’s office drama and the other parents at Haru’s daycare. You nap for two precious hours, drunk on the honeyed sunlight and the thick, luscious spring air. 

And every hour or so, Gojo sends you a text. A selfie at a local shrine, where he’s drawn fortunes for both of you (yours is grim). A message asking what kind of custard donuts you want, because he’s getting you five (matcha, all five). A picture of himself at the front desk surrounded by an adoring cluster of what has to be Ikuyo’s starstruck window friends (you ask him if he needs more of your stationary for autographs). A u good? partway through your nap.

Good! you respond as you rinse yourself off and change into one of the hotel yukatas. hope you’re having fun! 

He sends back another picture of himself eating two parfaits at once and omw back. gonna soak til im pruny and then come see you. get hyped for movies.

He raps on your door two hours later in his own borrowed hotel yukata, the tips of his hair still dewy with moisture from the spring, arms laden with twenty shopping bags.

“Whoa, big spender,” you say as you hop-hobble out of the way.

“You know it!” He sweeps in and arranges half the bags on and around your small table. “Sit down before you twist something else.”

He fills out the shoulders of his yukata nicely, but the hem is at least five centimeters too short, exposing a pair of pale shins and skinny, knobbly, and honestly kind of adorable ankles. He notices your line of sight and whips off his sunglasses to strike a pose, the tip of one of the arms pressed against his pursed lips, one of his exposed legs extended, and you laugh.

“I present to you…” His voice rises like a game show announcer’s as he drops the last of the bags. “An assortment of Nagano’s finest street foods! You can clap now.”

You clap politely as you peer into the nearest bag. “Oooh, takoyaki!” Your applause becomes genuine and enthusiastic. “You’re going to laugh, but I actually ordered room service already.”

“Oh? Whatcha get?”

“Chicken karaage,” you say, waiting for his reaction. “And fries.”

“Yesssssssss!” He pumps both fists. “Don’t worry, Risacchi, I won’t let any of this go to waste. Dig in while I get the blu-ray set up.”

“You went out and bought a blu-ray player?” You pluck up a toothpick and spear a ball of steaming takoyaki. “The TV has a DVD player over there, you know.”

He spares you a pitying glance. “Movies ain’t worth watching if they ain’t in high def.”

Maybe for him, they really aren’t. “I guess it probably does make a big difference for you. With your eyes.”

“Finally somebody gets it.” He kneels by the TV, wrangling input cords.

“What are you going to do with it later? Return it?”

“Oh, nah. Figured I’d take it home and let the students have at it. Put it in the common room or something.” He flicks the television on. “Go on, eat up. It’s gonna get cold.”

You pop the takoyaki in your mouth. It’s hot and gooey and melts on your tongue. You make a sound of strangled delight. He gives you a smug glance over his shoulder that warms you quicker than the hot spring. “Good, ain’t it?’

“Mmhmm,” you say around your second mouthful. “How’s it still so hot? Don’t tell me you did that teleport thing back out into the city after you got out of the hot spring.”

“‘Course I did! Not gonna bring my poor, precious, incapacitated favorite student soggy food, am I?”

He’s just gotten the blu-ray player functional—the hotel television screen is prize-sticker tiny and you can’t imagine it will make that much of a difference, even to his superhuman eyes, but hey, if it makes him happy—when there’s a knock at the door. He adds a heap of fried chicken, a mountain of fries, and two drinks with a pair of tiny porcelain cups to your feast. Lychee sake for you, and a Fanta for him. He scoops one of the cups off the table and holds it out to you expectantly. 

You laugh and pour him a thimbleful of liquid into the little cup, and he pours for you in exchange, casual and one-handed.

“Why don’t you drink?” you ask. “Um, you don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to.”

“Nah, it’s fine.” He presents the cup back to you for a refill. “Gives me a headache! And I don’t wanna have to deal with it if I get called in for a mission after knocking a couple back.”

The way he says it, you figure that must’ve been a problem at some point. “And you could get called… anytime at all?”

“Yep! Them’s the breaks when you’re the greatest!”

You can guess what would happen if he refused—they’d simply dispatch someone else. You eye his cellphone, face up on the table next to the bags of food, and will it not to buzz for at least another twelve hours.

Gojo interrupts your concentration by waving two fanned handfuls of DVDs in front of your nose. “Okay. Pick your poison. We’re doing one for me, one for you. We each get to pick a movie, and the other person has to watch it, no matter what!”

It’s an eclectic set of movies: Film Prize-winning political dramas next to animated romcoms next to shlocky horror flicks next to sleepy slice-of-life. You want to choose something you’ll both like. “Which one do you want to watch?” you ask as you swivel your index finger from one end of the stack to the other like a metronome.

“I have already chosen my film,” he says with solemn gravitas. “We will be viewing towering achievement in cinema… certified cult classic Car Explosion 2!”

He sets down half of the DVDs to free a hand and whip an additional case out from behind him. The cover is a lurid black-and-red and features a racecar engulfed in flames and a scantily-clad actress falling out of the top of her dress. The title is in English and in Impact font.

You break the rules of propriety and pluck the bottle of sake from the tabletop to pour yourself another round. Maybe you should just start drinking from the bottle.

“I see that cranky face, Risacchi. As your sensei and as a cinephile with amazing taste, you need to know that I’d never pick a crap movie.”

“I think your definition of a crap movie and my definition of a crap movie,” you say, tapping one of the DVDs, “may not be the same thing. I want The Moon In Water.”

You’d been thinking you’d spare him, but if he’s forcing you to endure a movie called Car Explosion 2, you’re going to use your choice to please only yourself. The Moon In Water won a Film Prize last year. It’s a dignified, respectable drama about the lifelong forbidden love between a wandering swordsman and his childhood friend, set against the backdrop of a lush and period-accurate Heian era setting. You’ve been meaning to watch it for months and never had the time. It’s the kind of thing Fumiya would never sit through with you.

“Ugh! Okay, fine, whatever. First person to say curse gets to watch theirs first. Curse!”

“No fair!” you complain to his back as he stuffs his disc into the blu-ray player.

You arrange your right leg on a precarious stack of cushions while you polish off the last of the takoyaki and the thunderous opening credits crash off of the hotel room walls, punctuated by tire screech sound effects. This is going to be painful, both literally and figuratively. “Will it mattter that I haven’t seen the original cult classic Car Explosion 1?”

“Nah, the first one sucks. Had a different director. I can summarize it for ya: the cars explode.”

You’d think you’d have already learned your lesson with the maid cafe pancakes, but somehow, beyond all reason, certified cult classic Car Explosion 2 is actually kind of gripping. In the grim, stylized Los Angeles of the near future, the wealthy get their kicks by pitting street kids against each other in deadly drag racing competitions. Enter the protagonist, an amateur who purposefully gains the attention of a scout to earn money for his ill sister’s medical treatment. The scantily clad actress on the cover is the best drawn character in the film, an escort torn between her wealthy patron and her affection for her best friend, the protagonist’s sister. 

It would be easier to follow the kinetic and brutally paced cinematography if Gojo didn’t burst into hearty laughter every time someone died in a fiery car crash. “Could you pipe down a little, please?” you say, waving the soda can at him as you pour his next round. “I’m trying to pay attention to towering achievement in cinema Car Explosion 2.”

“Can’t wait for the sister to go next!” he cackles. “Can’t take any more of her whining!”

“What’s wrong with you? Missy’s an angel!” You uncover the bag of custard donuts. “Wait, is that really what happens?”

“Yep!”

“Spoilers,” you mutter, knocking back another swig from the bottle.

“You gonna eat those?” He points at the remaining four custard donuts.

“I just opened them! I thought these were my custard donuts. That you got for me.”

“Well, you ain’t eating ‘em! What am I supposed to do, let them go to waste?”

“Sorry I can’t destroy five donuts at once! Why don’t you finish the rest of your picky baby food for picky babies?”

“It’s not because I don’t like other food!” he protests. “It’s—“

“Because you like it the best,” you say, pushing the remaining donuts over to him with a sigh. “It’s not the same.”

You don’t cry at the end of Car Explosion 2 (when the car, naturally, explodes), but you do have to sniffle into a napkin and pretend it’s seasonal allergies. While Gojo swaps out the discs, you shift yourself away from the low-set table and onto a cushion on the floor, bracing your back against the foot of the bed. You leave your ankle suspended on her throne.

Gojo folds himself beside you as your movie opens, his long legs splayed less than half a meter from yours, one of his tapered, graceful hands braced against the floor mere centimers from your own. You take heart knowing that the visible distance between the two of you will simply increase if you attempt to move any closer. There’s no way you’ll brush fingers with him by accident. You’ve talked your heart rate down to a target figure suitable for low-impact cardio as the title card appears onscreen.

You’re going to need that sense of security, because The Moon In Water features an extended sex scene halfway in.

When the heroine faces her lover—and the camera—and peels off the many layers of her formal kimono, you’re blissfully certain the scene will end there, truncated by an artful cut. But the camera keeps rolling. Keeps rolling as she helps her love interest, the wandering swordsman, out of his own robe. Keeps rolling as she moves to straddle him, her hips undulating, their mingling moans rising in harmony.

You don’t look at Gojo. You can’t look at Gojo. If you’re going to survive this, no matter what you do, you absolutely cannot look at Gojo. 

You look at Gojo. 

His bright eyes are focused, with extreme, superhuman intent, on a divot in the ceiling in the distant corner of the room. You shift your own line of vision back to the edge of the screen, your face tight and flushed.

After two minutes and two millenia, the scene concludes, cut with a brutal battlefield sequence. You’ll gladly take any number of severed limbs at the moment. You’ll also gladly accept the resumption of Gojo’s lightly mocking commentary, as even the sound of renowned leading man Otsuka Akira faking an orgasm only had the power to shut him up for a couple of minutes, tops.

The movie ends as it began, on a mud-smeared, blood-splattered battlefield, the camera lens panning up the hero’s broken, brutalized body. The heroine wails over him, too late to do anything but weep.

Gojo throws up his hands. “I can’t believe he died like that! We’re supposed to buy he’s some kind of master fighter?”

“He was distracted!” you say, rubbing at your eyes as they well with sympathetic tears. You’ve always been a big movie crier. You weep at advertisements with small animals in them. “He was worried about Nagiko!”

“Anyone could’ve seen that attack coming! It makes him look like an idiot! Who’d they have directing? Obviously somebody who’s never been in a real fight.”

“Maybe you should pick up a side hustle as a fight choreographer,” you sniffle, wiping your cheek with a napkin.

“Maybe I should!” He tilts his head to study your face. “Wait, are you crying? For real?” He snickers. “You’re all blotchy—“

You grab one of the cushions and swat it at him. 

Instead of shivering and shuddering to a halt in midair two centimeters in front of his chest, like it’s supposed to, it smacks into his center of mass like a fastball into a catcher’s mitt. He lets out a surprised little oof, muffled by your shocked gasp.

You toss the cushion aside. “Crap! I’m so sorry!”

He holds up his hands in laughing surrender. “Damn, crazy! I’m just teasing! Didn’t think you’d get violent on me!”

“It didn’t stop! It was supposed to stop!” You lean forward on your hands to inspect his yukata in a desperate, apologetic little half-bow. “I didn’t think it was actually going to hit you! Sorry!”

“I can turn it off, y’know!” He must be fine. He’s still laughing. “It ain’t like you’ve never touched me before!’

But whenever you have, it’s always been purposeful. Opt-in, on his part. “But I didn’t think it would be off right now! I couldn’t even touch you in your sleep earlier!”

He shrugs. “What do ya want me to say? Sometimes a guy just wants a break!”

“You just wanted a relaxing movie night, and I had to smack you and ruin it,” you say, even sorrier.

“Aww, c’mon, Risacchi, you didn’t ruin anything. You got a super weak arm.” You mime grabbing the cushion again, and he holds up his arms in mocking defense. 

You consider what it would feel like to have your cursed energy circulating and your shield active, all the time, every single day. Just thinking about it is making you exhausted. “It is hard to do that? Keep your technique on basically all the time?”

“For me? Nah.” Of course it isn’t. “Don’t you try it, though.”

“Why? What would happen?”

“With your reserves you could go for a couple hours, no sweat. But without reverse cursed energy you’ll start burning your own brain up. Give yourself permanent damage. So don’t!”

The concern on your face must be obvious. “Don’t worry, Risacchi, I got plenty of practice. And my reserves are basically bottomless. Haven’t fried my own cortex in ten years and I ain’t about to start now!”

“Ten years?” You take a long chug of the sake on his behalf. No wonder he wanted a break.

“It’s really super easy! For me,” he adds as a necessary qualifier. “Plus it can do this!” 

He swipes a discarded toothpick and the empty soda can from the table and presents them to you. “Go on, chuck those at me.” You hesitate. “Oh, now you don’t wanna get violent.”

You sigh and lob them in a gentle underhand at his shoulder. The toothpick quivers suspended in the air, frozen in place. The soda can bounces harmlessly off his arm. 

He raises his hands with a flourish. “Eh? I don’t even have to think! It’s automatic!”

“Handy!” you say, your brow still bunched. 

“My targeting system does all kinds of stuff—takes into account level of cursed energy, speed, shape.” He raises one shoulder at you. “Try going fast and going slow.”

You feel like you really are back in high school, on an overnight school trip and playing the world’s weirdest sleepover game. Where to touch him? A tap on the shoulder, like you tried to give him in the car yesterday afternoon, has to be safe enough. 

You reach out just as you did then, and your hand once again parts only empty space. “Okay. Now slower.”

You go slower. You’re still endlessly reaching out across an invisible gap. “Slooooooooooower, Risacchi.”

“I can’t go any slower than this! I’m barely moving!”

“And repress your cursed energy a litte. You used to be good at that, remember?”

You pout at him in frustration as you dampen your cursed energy circulation. The sensation is odd and uncomfortable now, like trying to stuff yourself into a shrunken, too-small sweater. It’s strange to think that you used to live like this all the time. “There y’go,” he says. “Try now.”

As your fingertips briefly tap his shoulder, one of the cushions in the little tower you’ve built to house your injured ankle slides a few centimeters, destabilizing the entire structure. The cushions collapse. Your wrapped heel knocks against the tatami floor with a dull jolt of pain. You flail forward, bracing one hand on the edge of the bed. The other lands on Gojo’s chest.

He encircles your wrist with one of his large hands, binding it in place as you shift your bent knee to a safe position. “You good?” he murmurs.

You nod hard, biting your lip as his thumb brushes against the hammering pulse point in your wrist. “Did you turn it off again?” you ask, feeling his slow intake of breath beneath your spread palm.

He must have turned it off. You were actively flailing, moving way too quickly and erratically to avoid triggering his technique. Your hand is still fanned across his chest, his own braceleted around your wrist, and he isn’t pushing you off or pulling away or even switching his power back on. 

A dangerous little thought surges through you with a hot thrill. You wonder if this entire game was just a pretense, an excuse for plausible deniability, because both of you wanted to end up here, like this. Because he wanted you to touch him. Because he wanted you to touch him as badly as you wanted to. You’re vaguely aware of the swelling orchestral soundtrack to the DVD player’s idling menu screen, drifting in from far away, muffled by the roaring wind in your ears and the thrumming thunderclap of your pulse.

If he isn’t going to be the one to pull away, then you have to be the one do do it. You should do it right now. You have to be sensible. You have to be responsible, reliable Risa, who never makes enormous mistakes like feeling up her sorcery teacher in a hot spring hotel room. 

What did the responsible, reliable routine ever get you but a job that gave you years of miserable overtime and then the axe? A defaulted lease on apartment you never owned, with neighbors whose faces you don’t remember and names you didn’t know? A fiance who dropped you like a hot skillet the second he had to deal with one mistake, one toe out of line, anything that messed with his image?

It got you here. It got you here, and you don’t want to pull away.

You fan your fingers out across his firm chest, savoring his soft intake of breath. He strokes his thumb down the hollow of your wrist, a divot between his brows, just to the side of his little scar. “Hasegawa,” he says. “Are you really tryin’ to…”

And then the space between you is collapsed, erased, and his hand is cupping your chin and his mouth presses down on yours. The rim of his sunglasses bumps into your cheek. After a few shocked, frozen milliseconds, you return his kiss, tilting your face upwards towards him, into him, the hand you’d laid on his chest crushed between your bodies, the other clutching for the sleeve of his robe.

Your heart clatters a final warning—you shouldn’t be doing this. You need to pull away, leave the room, maybe flee the country. The time to stop was five seconds ago.

But when he draws back in a brief pause for breath, you follow in his orbit, your mouth still seeking his. His lips curl beneath yours as they meet once more, in that silly little lopsided smirk of his, and you glow with a molten warmth that blots out the final echo of your own protests, clinging to his sleeve with a desperate grip.

He braces one hand at the back of your head, deepening your next kiss, and slides the other down your cheek, down the curve of your neck, to cup your breast in a gentle, experimental roll of his his palm. His thumb grazes your pert nipple and you gasp, your lips open and yielding as he slips his tongue into your mouth. He tastes of salt and torched sugar, matcha custard, melon candy, and he swipes his tongue along your lower lip as if you’re just as sweet to him.

His broad hand skims lower, against your bruised, aching hipbone, drawing your body up, flush against his, and you moan again, this time in surprised pain.

He pulls back from you. The climactic crescendo of the soundtrack crashes over you like cold monsoon rain.

“Sorry,” you say in a hoarse mutter. “It hurts there. I’ve got a bad bruise—“

The space between you dilates, expands, and he’s one meter from you, two meters, running a hand through his hair.

“That was my bad, Hasegawa,” he says, with his rare stern frown. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

All the heat leaches from your body at once, as if you’ve stepped outside into the winter cold without a jacket and let the door slap shut behind you. You nod, once. This is the sensible thing to say. He’s being sensible. He’s being the reliable, responsible one on both of your behalf. 

“It’s okay,” you say, brittle and too-loud.

“It’s not gonna happen again,” he says.

“Okay,” you say. After all, it was a mistake. It shouldn’t happen again.

You clamber back across the floor to the little table, still heaped with desserts and soda and chicken in various states. Why did he get so much food? Now you have nothing to do with it all. 

He settles his sunglasses back in place over his nose. “Are you mad?”

“No!” you say in your customer service chirp. You aren’t mad. Why would you be mad? He’s being sensible. 

“Okay, but you sound kinda mad.”

“I’m not mad.” You’re not anything. Your hands reach out and begin rearranging the leftovers, just so they have something to do. “Why don’t you take some of this back to your room? In case you get hungry again later?”

He comes to the table and reaches down to scoop up some of the leftovers. You flinch back, jolted like you’ve touched a live subway line, but there’s no need. His power’s back on again. If you reached out now, you know you wouldn’t be able to touch him at all, no matter how fast or slow you move your hand. 

He lingers by the door as the DVD player keeps idling on the menu selection screen. The music, which had been so dim and distant, now overfills the room to the point of spilling over.

“I’ll come by tomorrow,” he says, scratching the back of his head again. “Let you know when our ride’s here.”

After he leaves, you sit blinking at the empty room while the movie restarts itself. Once again, you’re back on the battlefield, blinking into cool, flinty winter sunlight.

It rolls for twenty minutes before you can bring yourself to scoot across the room and turn it off. 

Chapter Text

You don’t sleep a second until Ijichi and Akari arrive at just before noon the next morning, because you have a packed schedule consisting of lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, and counting your throbbing pulse in every trembling limb. You sweat through the sheets like a woman in fever.

How could you ever have been so fucking stupid?

Is Gojo going to lose his job? Are you going to get kicked out of school? If you get kicked out of sorcery school, where’s left for you to go? Yaga-sensei’s disappointed face swims in and out of your mind’s eye like a grim omen.

It’s at least a reprieve from the relentless loop of reliving Gojo’s breath stirring against your lips. His tongue brushing yours. His hand cupping your heavy breast. You can’t believe how hot and ready you were after only some brief over-the-clothes action. How hot and ready and aching you are now at only the memory, with no hope of release.

Maybe either or both of you would get away with just a suspension. Maybe they’d give some leeway since you’re an adult and a nonconventional student and Gojo’s own age. But how would school admin find out? Not from him, and definitely not from you, and not from anyone else, because it’s never going to happen again.

It must not have been that great of a kiss.

By the time the thin, grey dawn light dribbles into your room like spilled dishwater, you’ve managed to sway the jury of your own mind around to the verdict that everything is completely and totally fine. You’re not going to get kicked out of sorcery school for getting to second base with your teacher, because no one is going to find out, because it’s never going to happen again. This is getting crumpled up and shoved to the back of that handy shelf in the closet of your mind. 

You don’t even message Keiko about it, because that would make it a real thing that really happened, which it wasn’t, and it didn’t.

Gojo texts ride’s gonna be here in an hour, then ride’s almost here, then gives your door an uncharacteristically sedate knock and wheels you out to the parking lot. He looks fine. He doesn’t look like he’s spent the last twelve hours listening to his own heartbeat reverberating in his skull. He’s brought you a plain black coffee.

“You want me to get you transferred to Atsuya’s class with the second-years?” he asks as you wait in the parking lot.

“No! That’s fine,” you say. Even though that would be the sensible thing to do, and you really ought to consider it. 

“You sure? That guy’s got a syllabus,” he says, without cracking a smile.

“No. But thank you.” 

Three months ago, you would’ve leaped at the chance. And now, you don’t want anything less, because if you transferred classes you’d miss him.

It occurs to you that you might end up missing him anyway. He hasn’t called you by a single stupid nickname yet this morning. He hasn’t teased you about your drained, exhausted face. He isn’t twirling your chair in circles while you wait for the Jujutsu High sedan to pull up to the curb.

It’ll be fine, you tell yourself. You both just need some adjustment time to remember how to behave around each other in the post-kiss landscape.

He rides back to campus with Ijichi, and you ride with Akari. So you’re already both on the same page.

“You look totally wiped out!” says Akari as she merges onto the crowded expressway. “Hard time sleeping?”

You wince. “Yeah. Ankle’s killing me.”

Your first stop upon returning to campus is Dr. Ieiri’s office. She uses her cursed technique reversal on you, but it’s still a solid minute before your ankle is able to take your weight again. 

“You’re a slow healer,” she observes with a snap of her disposable latex gloves. “Not very receptive to reverse cursed energy.”

Great. You can’t even hack being injured correctly.

Before you leave the infirmary, she asks you to get a drink with her sometime next week, just the two of you. Maybe your efforts to befriend her are finally paying off. At least one thing’s going right for you today.

You slump through the next week of lectures and practice sessions and missions. Gojo doesn’t so much as glance your way during classroom hours, and he’s absent for your one assigned mission, and he doesn’t show up to heckle your sparring matches with Maki, where you make dumb mistake after dumb mistake, to the point where she asks what the hell is wrong with you.

But you don’t have time to think about all that, because you still have to finalize the plans for the school fundraiser. You’re balancing spreadsheets and calling the caterers and stringing up crepe banners in the banquet hall until you black out at night from sheer exhaustion. 

There’s no Sunday training session. Gojo’s off in Fukuoka. 

With Ijichi’s dedicated help, you’ve just managed to get everything sorted, down to the last place setting, a few days before the big event. He begs to come along to your meeting with Dr. Ieiri, but when you text her to ask permission to bring him, she responds with a single, simple No. Ouch. 

“Sorry! She just wants it to be a girls’ night!” you say, guilt-stricken over being forced to kill the wild hope shining in his eyes. “We’ll have to get everybody together after the fundraiser!”

When you arrive at the address she sent you, a hole-in-the-wall izakaya all the way in Asakusabashi, she’s already downed most of a mug of beer and started in on a round of appetizers. She looks as exhausted as always, the dark smears beneath her eyes deep enough to admit a cargo ship. You can relate.

“Hey,” she says, pushing some kinpira in your direction. “Get yourself a drink. My friend here needs a beer!” she hollers after your passing server.

The young woman waves. “You got it, Shoko.”

You’re as jittery as a transfer student joining a new club. Dr. Ieiri is, to be honest, way too cool for you. “Do you come here often?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m a regular at this place.” She downs the rest of her beer. “Do you eat skipjack entrails?”

“I’ll try them!”

She gives you a glimpse of her small, enigmatic smile. “It’s nice to come here with someone with an adult palate. Gojo turns his nose up at anything that isn’t sweet or fried.”

The memory of the taste of Gojo’s mouth, torched sugar and melon candy, sparks across your tongue. You’re not much of a beer drinker, but you take a strong glug of the glass she’s ordered for you. “Have you two been friends a long time?” you ask, hoping your voice comes out at a normal pitch.

“We were high school classmates together.” You wonder if they were ever together-together at any point in their long acquaintance. Dr. Ieiri is beautiful, talented, and, to reiterate, way cooler than you. You shrug off an unkind little stab of jealousy.

She twirls a strand of her hair around one finger. “I actually asked you here as a favor to him. He wanted me to talk to you.”

Your eyes round. “He did? About what?”

“School fundraiser next week.”

“Oh,” you say. Relieved. Disappointed. You gag yourself on another gulp of beer.

Her little smile quirks into the smallest, teasing little point. “Were you expecting something else?”

You shake your head, schooling your face into an expression of bland innocence. “Why the fundraiser?”

“To make sure you know what you’re in for. And he thought you’d take it better coming from me.” She flags your server down again. “Sake for both of us.”

“Better from you?” Ijichi’s red-cheeked ramble about sorcerer culture rises in your mind, just as your spirits sink. 

“Woman to woman.” She snorts. “Most of the time he’s a brainless idiot, but he gets these random episodes of tact and good sense every couple of years.”

Your server pours you each a tall glass full of sake in a box atop a dish. The glass fills and overflows, then spills into the box, which then splashes into the waiting dish. It’s a comical amount of liquor. “This is why I keep coming back to this place. The double waterfall. Go on, drink up. You’re going to need it.”

The sake is crisp and almost sharp. Ieiri downs half her glass in her first long sip, then slaps it down. “So. Anyone else give you a warning yet?”

“Um.” You fiddle your folded hands on the tabletop. “Yaga-sensei said that the other sorcerers would be curious about me.” 

“Oh, they’ll be curious all right. Expect to get a lot of attention. And at least a couple invitations for matchmaking meetings afterward.”

You choke out an awkward little laugh. She finishes off the glass and goes in on the box. “Not a joke.” 

You shut the laugh off and polish off your own glass.

“Ijichi did say that sorcerer culture was a little, um, traditionalist?” You think you’d lowballed just how much. You had those veiled warnings from Yaga about the reserves and abilities you’d give your children—had assumed the higher-ups would be interested in any family you might have someday, to bolster their low numbers. And then there was Maki’s heads-up about the potential setup with her douchebag cousin. 

But you were still too naive to solve the obvious equation and expect they’d get quite so… Edo era in their methods.

“You could say that. Most clan marriages are formally arranged. The hierarchy’s obsessed with preserving bloodlines and bringing in powerful new techniques.” Her fish entrails arrive and she gives them an emphatic poke of her chopsticks. “By their standards, you’re top-shelf material.”

You nod, cheeks burning, head spinning. You think about having to have this talk with Gojo and are overwhelmed with the urge to book a one-way international flight and live out the rest of your life as a beach hermit. No wonder he pawned this conversation off on someone else.

Dr. Ieiri is as relaxed and nonchalant as always, despite the subject matter. “It’s still a public school event, so it shouldn’t get too crazy. Gojo’s going to be there breathing down everyone’s necks. He just wanted to make sure someone spelled it out for you.”

And you’re desperately grateful she did. You blabber your flushed, flustered thanks while she orders a second double waterfall for the both of you.

“Okay, now that’s over with. Let’s have some fun! Try the nimono, you’ll love it!”

She doesn’t like to talk about herself—any questions about her personal life are met with a flat look and a monosyllabic answer—but she’s friendly with the waitstaff, who keep stopping by to make idle chat while you polish off another round of drinks, and she snorts into her sake when you try to address her as Ieiri. You sip your drink and smile through the revolving door of new faces, drifting on a warm, dreamy tide of alcohol. 

You don’t often indulge this much, and you feel deceptively clearheaded until you try to stand at closing time and nearly buckle under a dizzy wave.

“Looks like we’re getting kicked out, and I’ve got places to be,” says Shoko, stretching her arms above her head. “You need a ride home?”

You’d thought you’d both walk to the station together. There’s a steady drizzle coming down outside, and it’s after midnight in a part of town you aren’t too familiar with. “Good idea,” you say, embarrassed even through the rosy shine of the liquor. “I’ll get a rideshare—“

“No, don’t bother. I can get you something better. And it’s free.” She turns her back to you, cell tucked between her ear and shoulder. “Hey. Yeah. She needs an escort home. How soon can you get—yeah, the usual place.”

When she turns back to you, she says, “Your ride’s here.”

You say, “That was so fas—“

Gojo ducks into the entrance, hands stuffed in his pockets, wearing his blindfold and his lopsided scowl. 

It’s not too late to get on your phone right now and book that one-way international flight.

“I thought you were in Fukuoka,” you blurt.

“I was in Fukuoka! Barely off the train and Shoko’s already ridin’ my ass.”

“It’s after midnight, it’s raining, and she’s been drinking,” says Shoko, pointing at you with her cellphone. “Take her home, idiot.”

He sighs with a little psssssh, but gestures for you to follow him with a flick of his hand over his shoulder. Shoko gives you one of her small, cool little smiles, unfurls her umbrella, and strides out into the dark, the liquor she pounded not even denting her easy stride.

“She didn’t tell me she was calling you,” you mumble to Gojo after she’s left earshot. “It’s fine if you’re busy. I’ll just call a rideshare.”

“Hell nah. What kinda guy would I be if I abandoned you, drunk and alone at night?”

“Not that drunk,” you say. The doorway wavers before you. “It’ll be fine.”

“C’mon, crazy, let’s go home. Shoko hit you with the double waterfalls?”

“Yeah,” you mutter.

“Rookie mistake.”

You ride the night train in silence so thick you’d have to saw at it with a machete. Gojo plays his Digimon game. You watch the city lights slide past through your own ghostly reflection, too drunk and tired and wrung out even to tend to your pixel parsnips.

You’ve sobered up a fair bit by the time you hit the platform and are facing the winding walk up to Jujutsu High, the rain still falling in a hazy, billowing curtain, shining silver in the moonlight. Your foldout umbrella is waiting in your purse, because you’d checked the weather alerts before you went to meet Shoko, because you always check the weather alerts. 

Gojo’s barehanded.

“Um… there’s… if you don’t want to get wet, you can…” You’re going to make such an amazing beach hermit. You can hand out shells and detritus to tourists.

“Don’t need it,” he says.

Right. Right, right. Of course. If you’d thought about it for more than two seconds, you’d obviously know he doesn’t need an umbrella.

The two of you trudge along through the rain and the muck, you hunkering beneath your plastic pink umbrella, Gojo striding untouched through the downpour. He must never have to worry about getting stains out of the laundry, you reflect glumly. There really is no justice in this world.

“Shoko give you the heads-up for this weekend?” he asks as you veer onto the path winding up to the school gate. 

“Uh-huh,” you mumble, cheeks brighter than your umbrella. 

“Don’t let any of those gross old idiots push you around, okay?” he says, glaring into the dark. “You don’t owe ‘em anything.”

“Got it. Thanks.”

Neither of you spend any more time on that subject.

He tilts his head back to examine the half moon through his blindfold, then says, “You sure you don’t want that transfer?”

“I don’t want the transfer.” You grip the umbrella handle like you’re going in for a strike. “Do you want me to take the transfer?”

“If that’ll make you happy! I’m only asking ‘cause you’re still pissed!”

“I’m not pissed! I wasn’t mad at you to begin with!”

“Yeah, you are! You’re doin’ that voice you do when you’re pissed!” 

“I’m not doing a voice!” you say, your pitch and volume climbing.

He jabs a finger at you. “You’re doin’ it right now! Your bitch fit voice!”

“I’m not—,” you say, in your bitch fit voice.

“Look, I’m sorry I planted one on ya! It was my mistake!“

“You already said that last time!” You cut him off with a swipe of the umbrella, shaking droplets of cold rain all over your skirt. 

“See? Freakin’ pissed!” He fiddles with the knot of his blindfold. “I’ll talk to Yaga tomorrow.”

“No! I don’t want you to do that!” You clasp the umbrella handle to your chest, shoulders curling in, instinctively protecting your raw, bruised heart. 

He throws his arms out helplessly. “What do you want me to do if you don’t want the transfer? It was my bad, Hasegawa! It’s never gonna happen again!”

“I want you to stop saying that!” Before you met him, you never raised your voice at another person like this, not once in two decades. And now it happens once a week. “It wasn’t your bad! I came onto you first! It was both of our mistake! I was there too, I wanted it, and I didn’t want you to stop!”

That stops him in his tracks. He turns to face you, takes one long step towards you, nearly closing the distance between you. You can’t read his face, can’t meet his eyes, but you can see little dark blots speckling his jacket from where raindrops have begun to strike.

For a few heartbeats of helpless hope, you’re convinced he’s going to take your chin in his hands and do what he just said he’ll never do again, and plant one on you. You tilt back the umbrella and tip your chin to meet him partway. You wet your lips with the tip of your tongue.

“Risacchi,” he says finally, turning away to keep trudging up the mountain road, “I know I’m not the kinda guy who’s big on rules and regulations. But messing around with a student is…. even I know that’s outta line.”

This is responsible. This is sensible. The one, singular time in your twenty-eight years of life you want to feed the student handbook to a paper shredder, and he’s being sensible and responsible. It figures.

You pass beneath the shadow of the school gate.

“Thanks for taking me home,” you say before you part ways. “Please don’t put in the transfer. I want to stay in your class. If that’s okay.”

“If that’s how you want it,” he says. 

“It is. I think Gojo Satoru is funny and charming and nice, and he’s my favorite teacher.” That gets a little smile out of him. “And besides. I’m going to be out of here in half a year anyway.”

You go back to the dorm. He goes back to the staff apartments. You wake up hungry, hungover, and alone.

Three days later, the annual Jujutsu High school fundraiser takes place.

It’s the culmination of weeks’ worth of work, and you wish you had more of a sense of triumph about it. But from your vantage point behind the bar, you’re all nerves. 

Ijichi’s certainly in high spirits, giving you a thumbs up and a pat of his walkie-talkie from across the assembly hall. He even insisted on codenames. His is “Sparrowhawk.” The kids are on appetizer duty, milling around the hall in adorable little waitstaff outfits. The room is already beginning to churn with well—and eccentrically—dressed sorcerers, and several of them are, just as Shoko threatened, looking straight at you.

Shoko is your first patron at the bar. She orders a double scotch, neat, and sucks most of it down before she’s managed to move two meters away. You’d suspected he’d try to avoid you, but to your surprise and relief, Gojo is your second.

He’s looking heinously dapper in a tailored grey suit, blue bowtie dangling undone around his neck and sunglasses pushed down his nose. “Hey, Hasegawa,” he says. “You put yourself on bar duty?”

You tick off your fingers. “The kids can’t handle liquor, it was cheaper than hiring someone, I didn’t want to do it to Ijichi, and I used to bartend part-time in grad school.”

“Oh, really? Can you do any shaker tricks?”

“It wasn’t that kind of establishment.” It was a mid-rate hotel bar in the center of Tokyo. Most of your patrons were harried salarymen on work trips who nodded off over their scotches.

“Weaksauce.” Gojo drapes himself across the bartop. “What you got for something non-alcoholic?”

“Coffee, tea, soda, and juice. Do you want a melon Fanta?” You hold up a can. 

He squints. “What you got that’s exciting? Like a mocktail, or something?”

“Um, I could make you a Cinderella, or a ginger melon fizz?” He makes an unimpressed sound. “Or if neither of those sound good, I could just mix all the alcohol-free drinks together in the worst beverage known to man?”

He slaps the table. “Hell yes. I’ll take two of ‘em. I’m gonna go spill the other one on Principal Gakuganji.”

You swill all the sodas and juices together into a malevolent-looking potion while he mopes with his head in the crook of his folded arm. “You look miserable,” you say. 

He gags. “I’m havin’ the wooooooorst time, Hasegawa. I hate these things.”

“I helped organize this, you know!” you protest good-naturedly as you pour two glasses of his cocktail.

“No burn on your party-plannin’ skills, but it’s a roomful of people I think about killing every few months.” That’s a joke. Maybe. Probably. You think.

You push two full glasses of opaque cocktail across the bar. “Well, maybe this’ll take the edge off. Two God’s Mistakes for the gentleman.”

He takes an experimental sip. “Y’know, that ain’t bad! Try one later if you’re bored.” He adjusts the hang of his loose tie before he picks up the drinks. “And listen. Anybody bother you, just give a shout. I’m right over there.”

“And I’ll be right here,” you say, “so everyone can get a good look at the world’s oldest high schooler.”

“That ain’t why anyone would want to stare at ya, Risacchi,” he says quietly.

You salute, ducking your burning face. He tips his glass at you and drifts off to be intercepted by a tall, statuesque woman with her face half-concealed by long, pale braids. You aren’t gripped by a hot surge of jealousy. You don’t follow their trajectory out of the corner of your eye as they swan across the room.

“Ms. Hasegawa!” Panda and Toge nearly crash into the bartop. “Problem! There’s a problem!”

“Bonito flakes,” says Toge grimly.

Panda leans in. “It’s Maki’s uncle! He’s here! He never comes to stuff like this!”

“He’s technically Megumi’s uncle, too, you know,” says Maki, stomping up behind them. This is news to you. You had no idea they were related. “Did I ask you to tell her?”

Panda says, “No, but—“

“Which one is he?” you ask.

“The mustache,” Panda whispers with his paws cupped around his snout.

He doesn’t need to specify any further. There’s an elderly gentleman with a pricy-looking formal kimono and a long, thin, sharp mustache that could split bamboo stalks veering straight towards the bar.

You say to Maki, “Do you want to go to the back? Be on plating duty?”

She crosses her arms and tosses her ponytail. “No. He can be the one to leave if he wants.”

You wish you’d been half as brave as she is when you were in high school. Hell, you wish you were half as brave now. Even though she doesn’t need it, you give the asshole who’s been blocking all her promotions your brightest, most distracting smile as he approaches the bar.

He orders sake and doesn’t look his niece’s way at all. 

“Remember what I said earlier,” says Maki grimly before she heads back to appetizer duty with the other students. 

Her uncle returns for several more visits during the social period before the program, but even he can’t keep up with Shoko. You may as well just hand her off the whole bottle and save time. 

In between your two regulars, you make the acquaintance of a variety of other professional sorcerers. Cheerful young Ino Takuma wants the most complicated mixed cocktail on your limited menu, and then makes a face at the first sip. He’s accompanied by a handsome blonde man with a pair of pince-nez and a spotted tie, who orders neat whiskey. The woman with the pale braids who’d spoken to Gojo earlier stops by to ask you what your price to funnel information about him would be, worded as a plausibly deniable joke, and doesn’t order anything.

Halfway through your first round of visitors, a bearded elderly gentleman in the center of the hall gives a shout and blots at a dark stain blooming across his robe. Gojo shoots you a wink over his sunglasses.

As the social period stretches on, tongues get looser, and the curious stares get a little more obvious. You get some nosy questions from the next batch of patrons to belly up to the bar—where you grew up, why you’re just now pursuing a formal sorcerer education, whether you’ve got someone waiting at home. You repeat “Sendai,” “Just felt like a career change!” and “Not at the moment!” with a smile tight enough to bounce coins off of. 

“So you were the one responsible for that Aoyama incident, eh?” asks a middle-aged, ruddy-cheeked sorcerer. “I don’t believe it! You look way too sweet for that!” Across the hall, Yaga-sensei, who’s taken to the stage, gives you a firm, respectful nod.

Maybe you can finally leverage this into that staff apartment. All you have to do is just keep thinking of the closet.

You’re holding fast against the final wave when Maki’s uncle returns for another round. He can certainly hold his liquor, but from the way he’s starting to shuffle and slur his words, he’s approaching his limit.

“No ring, eh?” he asks as you pour. “You don’t have a husband?”

“Not yet!” you say, with brittle cheer.

“No fiance? No boyfriend?” You shake your head as he grips his cup and throws it back in one swallow. “Really? A pretty thing like you?”

Why didn’t you just lie? Just nodded and made up a long-distance boyfriend all the way in Okinawa. Or, hell, pretended you’re still engaged to Fumiya. “Oh, don’t look so afraid, girl. I’m not asking for myself. Although, if I were a younger man…”

He pushes his cup back across the bar. “Another.” You obediently oblige. “My favorite son is about your age. He’s my heir. He’ll be Zen’in clan head someday.” Your hand twitches as you empty out the last of a bottle. This has to be the douchebag cousin. “And if you ask me, it’s high time he welcomed a wife into the household. You two are past the age to be messing around, eh?”

Messing around. The memory of Gojo saying messing around with a student rattles between your ears like a capsule toy dispenser while Lord Zen’in accepts the cup and tosses it back, again, in one clean gulp. “Is your son here tonight, sir?”

“No. He’s on security detail back at the family estate, outside of Kyoto. We’d be happy to host you sometime. I could have my people arrange everything. It would involve a meeting, of course, but just to see where things go. What do you say to that? The gardens are beautiful this time of year.”

You buy time selecting another bottle of sake from your reserves while you wrack your brain for the politest possible method of refusal. “That’s a very flattering offer,” you begin as he presents his glass again.

You’re interrupted—or saved—by a pair of hard, loud claps. Gojo is bearing down on the bar with a wide, predatory grin. “Time’s up, old man! You’re cut off. Leave some for everyone else.”

Maki’s uncle lets out a scoffing chuckle. “I’m almost finished here anyway.” He pushes his cup across the bar again, and his movement is steady and sure. The drunk old man routine has to be at least partially an exaggeration. “Get me one more for the road, why don’t you?”

Gojo leans a casual arm on the bar and flicks his other hand. “Go on, Gramps. Go be someplace else. Ain’t there some other girl you can hit on for your creep son?”

His broad smile doesn’t drop a centimeter, but the temperature in your corner of the room certainly does. Lord Zen’in’s lips peel back from his teeth. “We’re only enjoying some conversation. Aren’t we, Miss Hasegawa?”

You bite your lip, glancing up at Yaga-sensei at the podium. “I—“

“Oh, really?” Gojo throws up his hands. “My bad! Looked to me like you were pervin’ on my student!”

“Your student, eh? I see how it is.” 

He leans in and attempts to give Gojo an avuncular pat on the arm, only to swat empty air a full handspan away. “Don’t worry. I was a young man once, too. Can’t blame you for wanting to keep her all for yourself.”

You nearly splatter a full bottle of sake all over the bar.

Gojo’s eyes are blue slits behind his sunglasses, his smile still pinned to his face. “Your top speed still only mach two, Gramps?”

Lord Zen’in leers with a flick of invisible dust from his sleeve. “Speaking of your students, how have their promotion submissions been going? There’s a lot of talent in the current class. I’m eagerly following their progress.”

Bad. This is bad. The protective glare on Gojo’s face might be making your bruised heart stutter, but if the two of them get into it right here in the banquet hall, that’s going to be dire for profits and you’ll die of mortification. Not to mention the danger to your classmates’ promotions.

Your hand shakes as you push a full cup back across the bar and bow. “Here’s your drink! Thank you very much for coming tonight, Lord Zen’in. Principal Yaga is about to begin the program, so you may want to find your way to your seat, but I’d be happy to speak with you again another time.”

By the time you reach the end of this screed, it’s all one slurred word, but to your relief, Lord Zen’in clasps the glass and moves on, though not without a final sidelong, slit-eyed glance at Gojo. “What a well-mannered young lady you are. You and Naoya would suit each other very well.”

Gojo glowers at his back as he departs. You busy your trembling hands with tossing juices together in another tall glass and offer it to him. “What, for me?” he asks as you set it by his elbow.

“For you to spill on him,” you say, face burning as you study your clasped hands on the bar. Could Lord Zen’in have known? No, that’s not possible. There’s no way. He was just aiming for a low blow. “Thanks for, um. For that.”

Lord Zen’in was wrong. It’s not because Gojo’s jealous. 

It’s definitely not because he wants to keep you all for himself.

Gojo picks up the glass and rolls it in his long fingers. “Listen, Hasegawa. It ain’t really any of my business who you pal around with.” You flinch, chin still tucked in to your chest like a boxer on defense. “But I can tell ya you’d be better off taking a long stroll on a bullet train track than gettin’ involved with Zen’in Naoya.”

“Maki already warned me,” you say to your clenched hands. 

Up on the podium at the far end of the hall, Yaga taps his microphone, making the entire room echo with a piercing ring. “He’s about to start the slide deck. You’d better get to your seat.”

Gojo slips in near the front of the room, next to the handsome bespectacled blonde, with a couple light jabs of his elbow to the other man’s shoulder. The blonde adopts a long-suffering expression.

You sag against the bar, fan your heated cheeks with a program, and listen to Yaga-sensei’s speech. He’s sharing the numbers Ijichi ran about successful exorcisms performed by students over the past decade (high), number of grade two or higher sorcerers produced by the school (low), and total number of graduates (shockingly low, even lower than you’d expect considering the miniscule class size). 

In the end, the school rakes in enough yen to finally replace the building that had been leveled in the creation of the giant hole that recently occupied the center of campus, and you receive two formal invitations for matchmaking interviews: one on behalf of a nephew of the Kamo clan, and one from, as expected, the Zen’in clan, on behalf of their heir apparent. 

Ijichi has to deliver them, and does so looking like he’s contemplating his own career swap to beach hermitdom. It’s a good thing they weren’t sent to your parents, or your mother would be calling you ten times a day.

“Let’s see ‘em!” Akari insists with a teasing smile over your promised celebratory round of drinks.

“I’m not carrying them around with me!” They’re facedown in your desk where you don’t have to look at them. 

Both included photographs. Maki’s (and Fushiguro’s) cousin isn’t bad-looking, with his elevated cheekbones and long-lashed eyes. But his bleach-blonde hair and abundance of earrings give him the air of a boy-band B-lister, and it’s obvious from the smarmy way he’s eyeing up the camera that he is, fact, a total douchebag.

“Two for three on the great clans!” Akari elbows you. “If you’d just had someone from the Gojo clan, you could’ve gone for the full sweep.”

You choke briefly on your glass of yuzu sake.

“I expected more, honestly,” says Shoko with a sip of her double waterfall.

“Hey!” you protest.

“It’s because the Great Clans have shown their hand. A working sorcerer wouldn’t try to compete on their level.”

“The Zen’in are crazy rich!” says Akari. “You could go live it up in their huge estate. Never lift a finger again.”

“And never leave the estate again, either.” Shoko takes another emphatic swig of her liquor. “They don’t like to let their women outside.”

“Really?” You glance at her, thinking about Maki and what she said about her mother. Shoko gives you a nod. That gives you a little more context for Gojo’s comment about a long stroll on the bullet train track.

You invited him along for drinks tonight too, but he’s out on another mission.

Afterward, you break out your best stationary for your gentle refusals. No point in entertaining anything, even under better circumstances and for non-douchebags.

After all, you’re going to be out of here in half a year.

Chapter Text

It’s the beginning of June. Cicadas are droning in the lush greenery closing in around campus. Puffy clouds chase each other across the lustrous blue sky. And you’re not enjoying any of the beauty of early summer, because you’re avoiding your teacher by spending almost as much time in the library as you did during your first month as a student here. Your only occasional company is Fushiguro. The two of you exchange solemn nods and carry on with your silent business.

Your vigil of solitude is broken when you’re summoned out for your next mission. Ijichi drives. Gojo rides shotgun with his arms crossed and his blindfolded face inscrutable. You sit on your hands in the backseat. 

Two hundred and four days to go.

“So what’s the mission briefing, Ijichi?” you ask, in the high-pitched, affected voice you use to answer work-related phone calls.

“Um…” Ijichi takes a hand off the wheel to rattle his glasses up and down the bridge of his nose, his face coloring lychee-peel pink. “Well, the location is…”

Gojo raises the back of one hand. “Spit it out.”

You aren’t in the mood to watch him torment Ijichi today. “Leave him alone,” you murmur.

To everyone’s surprise, including his own, Gojo drops his hand. Ijichi throws you a grateful look in the rearview mirror. “The mission site is…” He puffs a flustered little cough. “A rest hotel for couples.”

A love hotel. The mission’s at a love hotel.

You once read somewhere that fifty kilometers per hour is the highest speed at which it’s possible to jump from a moving car and reliably survive. You peek over Ijichi’s shoulder at the odometer. If you focused your cursed energy, you could probably raise that ceiling by at least fifty percent.

Having choked out the worst of the news, Ijichi continues his pre-mission spiel, his voice gaining strength and speed. “It’s only a grade three by power ranking, but the window reports say it’s showing signs of sentience and intelligence. When manifesting, it’s taken the form of a… ah, an attractive young woman—“ His voice flags and falters again. “And there’s a potential hostage. The building was evacuated, but there’s one man not accounted for. It’s possible he made it out and ran to protect his identity, but he may still be on the premises. Attempt to extract him if it’s safe for you to do so.”

Your hands curl into fists beneath your pooled skirt. You’ve never had to deal with a civilian hostage before. 

The car rumbles to a stop at your destination. You glance up at the building through the window and wish you hadn’t. Not only is it a love hotel, it isn’t one of the sleek, discreet modern models, but a cheesy antique styled to resemble a European castle. A pair of cheery red flags flap and snap atop twin turrets decorating the facade. 

“Hasegawa,” says Gojo, in his stern teacher voice, as Ijichi readies the curtain. “This mission’s gonna be some firsts for ya. You’ve never had to deal with a hostage, and you’ve never had to deal with a curse that’s capable of planning or foresight before.”

“Maybe there isn’t a hostage,” you say with hesitant optimism, even though there’s no way you can expect to get off that easy.

“You gotta go in prepared for the worst. And you’ve racked up some big wins, but your biggest hurdle is your own mental state. You don’t got killer instinct, and making tough calls is gonna be hard for you.”

You stand there and take it, staff clutched in your fists, like you’re getting a reprimand in a performance review at your old job. You could show more initiative, your budget reports need work, and you have no killer instinct.

He’s right. You don’t have killer instinct. You don’t belong here at all. You knew that right from the start.

“Do your best to get the guy out safely, but if it comes down to him or you, don’t get crazy.”

“Yes, sensei,” you say with a firm, polite salute.

Even now, after your handful of successful solo missions, you’re still gripped by a chill wave of fear as the curtain closes behind you. Just get in and do your job, you order yourself. Make it through these next seven months okay and you’ll never have to do any of this ever again.

Two hundred and four days to go.

The lobby is all faux marble, fake gilt, and an enormous false fireplace decorated with cheap prints of famous oil portraits. It’s the kind of hotel that doesn’t have an on-site concierge, only a dispensary kiosk, where you can scroll through pictures of available rooms and pay to receive a key.

If you’re sensing the residuals correctly, there’s more than one curse here, with the largest several floors above you. You flip through the rooms in the kiosk to try to get a sense of the layout. The standard floor plan involves an enormous canopied four-poster bed. The penthouse on the fifth floor is simply a larger, more luxurious model, and you’d bet most of your dwindling savings that that’s where the biggest curse has shacked up.

The basement, also available for rent, is an honest-to-god sex dungeon. You’re grateful Gojo didn’t accompany you inside for this one. You have to be thankful for small miracles.

You begin your ascent up to the fifth floor. Imitation suits of armor line the hallways, studded with paste gems and bristling with polymer clay weaponry. On the second-floor hallway, a few of the fake jewels open into glowing violet eyes and the suits aim their spears at you. You run circles in the wide hallway, make short work of them with your technique, and hit the next flight of spiraling marble stairs, panting and shaking out your arms. 

As expected, the residuals are all pointing at the penthouse. You take careful, padding, silent steps, like you’re back in your parents’ house in Miyagi trying to grab a midnight snack from the kitchen without waking anyone else, but you don’t know why you bothered when your only entry point is going to be battering down the door. 

You focus your cursed energy in your legs and whack the door with a kick that would do Mariko-sensei proud. With a shattering crack, it caves in on a black, jagged maw.

The only light inside is dim and sickly, emitted from the enormous canopied bed in vague loops and whorls that you mistake at first glance, as your vision adjusts, for a chain of glow necklaces. You flick the lightswitch, which, of course, doesn’t work. You click Maki’s flashlight on instead and sweep it from corner to corner.

No curse. Maybe it’s hiding in the hot tub—the residuals appear to slip into the bathroom. More tacky decor, mirrors framed in enormous fake gilt roses which reflect your wan face, a vintage armoir that no one checking in to this hotel will ever need to use. And on the bed, wearing a sweat-soaked shirt, striped boxers, and cotton socks, is the missing salaryman, anchored to the bed by a glowing chain fixed to each bedpost.

You ford cautiously into the room, eyeing the shut bathroom door. “It’s okay,” you murmur to him. “It’s going to be all right. I’m going to get you out of this, okay?”

He turns his chin towards you, a feverish, vacant look in his bloodshot eyes. He reminds you vaguely of someone—your old manager at the corner grocery, maybe. There are ugly violet streaks on his bare skin where it’s made contact with his bindings. Cursed energy rolls off the chains in hot, sour waves. 

You need something to break them. You’re hoping a firm blow from your staff to the loops braced against the bedposts will do the trick. You dig in your heels and line up a swing at the nearest link.

The man turns his chin towards you, a slow, labored movement, and the skin of his face flakes away like old paint, revealing a second mouth hidden beneath the first. It splits his face, brimming with shining needles.

The plush red carpet liquefies beneath you and you fall.

A plunge, a sickening crack against the side of your head, a rattling echo, blurred light. You sway, right arm hanging above your head, knuckles dragging against cold stone.

Your vision trembles, shudders, and tries to fold back on itself, blurred and distorted in a ruddy half-light.

You’re hanging suspended in a knot of soft, fleshy red ropes lined with tranlucent frills, like the trailing tentacles of a jellyfish. You fell through the floor in the most stupid, obvious trap portal ever, like the world’s biggest idiot you are, and when you landed in this hanging mass of curse tentacles it bent and dipped like a safety net catching an acrobat and you cracked your head on the fake flagstone floor. One of your contact lenses must’ve popped out. When you close your left eye, your vision sharpens.

Your ears are still ringing. You thought you’d raised your shield at the last possible second, but you must not have been fast enough. Stupid, stupid.

The cursed tentacles sting where they brush against the exposed skin of the backs of your hands, and when you yank your arm back against your side, they stick to you like construction tape. Your hands hurt and your head hurts and it’s so, so gross and you swallow back a dizzy wave of tears. You have to be practical. You have to get yourself out of this. 

You aren’t going to see the end of the two hundred and four days if you don’t get yourself out of this.

The only flickering light is from a set of red glass imitation torches. You fell all the way down into the for-rent sex dungeon, because of fucking course you did. 

Wriggling against the cursed tentacles only gets you wound up tighter. The light sting in your wrists is getting worse, deepening into a prickling itch. You can feel it in your legs now, too, the thin fabric of your stockings next to no protection, and beneath the faint pain, your cursed energy pools under your skin. When you try to activate your technique, it fizzles out like a wet firework. 

So you did activate your shield during your fall, and that’s what happened. That’s why your head is still clanging like a struck gong.

The curse must be messing with your circulation. Absorbing your reserves.

Bad. This is bad. In a moment of breathless, overwhelming terror, you thrash, and one of the tentacles ends up knotted around your wrist. You’ve got no weapon. Your staff fell somewhere on the ground.

If you concentrate, focus hard, shoulder through the pain in your skull and the steady drip of your cursed energy, you can bring your technique up for a handful of precious seconds. But you can’t charge it. Because it absorbs force, and whatever the hell is going on here apparently does not count. 

No weapon. No technique. Cursed energy dropping like profits in a bad quarter. Your head hurts so much—

Your head hurts. From when you hit the floor.

You suck in a breath through your gritted teeth and wiggle, swaying back and forth in the grip of the tendrils. Back and forth, up and down. Enough momentum bouncing towards the ceiling that when you swing back downward, you dip low enough that your elbow thwacks against the floor.

Good enough.

It takes a lot of strained, sweaty wriggling. You whack an ear, your other elbow, your forehead against the floor. And finally, just when you’re about to collapse, spent, into the embrace of the ropes, you scrape against the floor one last time and set off your shield. You blast free of the tendrils and fold onto the ground.

You curl in on yourself on the cool stone and lie like that for a little bit. The cold against your cheek dulls the throbbing pain in your head. But eventually one of the tentacles brushes against your back through your jacket and you scramble up on your elbows and knees and fumble for your staff in the dark, stumbling towards the enormous, tacky exit, a metal door engraved with scenes of medieval torture that you’re pretty sure are just wholesale traced from a famous seinen manga.

Beside the door is a man. It’s the man you thought you’d seen chained to the bed in the penthouse. The same striped boxers. The same out-of-style haircut, like your old manager’s. His throat’s been sawed open and leaked rivulets of rusty dried blood over his naked chest. More dried blood crusts his nostrils and his earlobes. His eyes are half-lidded, one hand clenched on the flagstones. The other’s gone.

It’s the first time you’ve seen a corpse on a mission. A fresh one, not clean-picked bone. And even though you know he’s dead, a primal little kernel of your brain rejects that information as it floods your body with sheer, numbing panic. He looks like a person. He’s shaped like a person. You have to help him. You have to get him out of here. 

You dry heave a little with your hands on your knees before you go through the doors. 

You climb the stairs back into the tasteless, tacky lobby, bright and winking with gilt. You feel weak, floppy, boneless, and trying to do anything with your cursed energy is like trying to scrape up the last thimbleful of broth at the bottom of a bowl of soup. 

The smart play would be to wait out the curtain. It won’t last forever. You can hole up here in the lobby, collapse in one of the plush chaise lounges, and hold out until you can leave, then get backup. Gojo’s still out there. If you can just wait it out, you’ll make it. You’re going to see that timer tick down to two hundred and three days.

You’ve barely set foot to the tile when one of the imitation oil paintings peels back from the wall. The tip of one of the cursed tendrils noses out like a shy eel at the aquarium.

They’re in the lobby. They’re in the hallway. They’re twining around the banister of the stairwell. The entire building is crawling and seething with them.

There isn’t going to be any waiting it out. You’re going to have to fight the curse and exorcise it, or you’re never getting out of here. 

On the ascent back up to the penthouse, you don’t feel afraid. It’s a strange and novel sensation for you. You should be, but the part of you responsible for the feeling is dim and faraway, muffled behind a thick pane of typhoon glass. There’s only the pound of your heels on the hard marble floor. The swing of your arms as you swat tentacles out of your path. The frantic, heaving bellows of your ribs. You’ve been here forever, and you’re going to be here forever, the scope of the world narrowed to only a chain of ugly spiral staircases.

You miscount and think you’re one floor off when you hit the penthouse again. The door is still yawning open. When you stumble through, the curse is lounging naked and recumbent on the mounded pillows, one leg bent, the other braced against it and bouncing restlessly. 

She’s dropped the salaryman disguise. Looks like any young woman you might pass on the subway commute now, aside from the too-wide, ear-to-ear mouth full of needles. The dull, ruddy glow of her eyes. The tentacles fanning outward from each shoulderblade like a pair of grotesque wings.

Her cursed energy fills the room, presses against the inside of your head like deep water. You raise your staff just as she lifts her hand and gives a careless, airy little flick of her fingers.

A tide of shadow flows outward and curls around and over you. You shuffle your feet, glancing down at the carpet, worried she’s trying the same trick on you as before.

It’s not that. It’s worse. In the wake of the black wave, folds of ruddy, veined flesh unfurl and then clasp around you in a broad-walled dome, like a flower closing. 

You’ve never been inside one before, barring your own shitty, incomplete half-baked attempt back in Aoyama. But you’re sure this is a domain expansion. 

The wall of glass holding back your fear shatters to bits. 

You once asked Gojo what you should do if you if a curse ever tried to use a domain against you. He replied cheerfully, “Well, there are some things you can try—you can break out, but it’s difficult, since most domains are reinforced. Or counter the sure-hit attack with your own cursed technique. But you’ll probably die, so try not to get in that situation to begin with!” Said with a thumbs-up.

You clutch your staff in your sweat-slicked hands and turn on the wall of the domain. Raise the tattered remnants of your shield. It won’t last ten seconds. Your only shred of hope is to try to break out before the sure-hit attack gets you.

You wish you’d gone to visit Keiko in Nagoya some long weekend last spring. You wish you’d returned your mother’s call last night and listened to her yammer on about some guy from the corner store who’s probably not a serial killer. You wish you’d told Fumiya to go screw off in Setagaya that day.

You wish you hadn’t let Gojo walk away after your kiss.

You howl out an incoherent wail and strike. Swat against nothing. The domain dissolves, pooling into a spill of ink, then melting into the floor. Something brushes your shoulder and you scream and swing at that, and your staff shivers, held and trembling, in midair. Shaking as badly as you are.

“Cool it, Risacchi, it’s just me.” Gojo squeezes your shoulder, then raises his hand to pat your head. “This won’t take long, okay? Don’t move.”

He drops his hand and rests it gently against your back. Uses the other to hook a finger under his blindfold and yank it down around his neck, then raises it, twining his index and middle fingers. A second wave of darkness curls around you, catching the curse—who’s now sitting upright, braced on her bent knees, head tilted in a confused, curious, chillingly human expression—in its grip.

You sway on your feet as the darkness blinks awake. You’re lost and adrift in a sweeping swathe of stars, boundless and brilliant. Gojo makes another gesture with his hand, his silhouette a blank void against the shining tide, and then the gleaming dark draws back and away.

Gojo drops his hand, his lips peeled back in a feral snarl you’ve never seen on his face before. He looks like a man possessed. You stumble back a half-step.

The enormous four-poster bed’s gone now, atomized to dust, and the curse is on the floor, twisted in on itself twice, neck snapped, spine shattered. It sags against the shredded remains of the tassel-fringed pillows and erupts into dust. 

You drop your staff. It lands on the carpeted floor with a muffled thud.

“Hasegawa,” Gojo says, turning to you, his sneer melting into an expression of grim concern. “Your reserves are gone. Turn your technique off, now, or you’re gonna hurt yourself.”

You turn it off. 

He pinches his blindfold and draws it back over his eyes. Looks down at you, weak and shaking, barely upright. “Did I scare ya, baby?”

You throw your arms around him. Hang suspended for a spare second before he lets you touch him, before he lays gentle hands on your back and draws you in close. You clutch at him with your quivering hands and press your face into his jacket, listening to the soft rise and fall of his breath until you don’t feel like you’re going to vibrate out of your own skin.

“No,” you mumble into his chest. “Just startled. That’s all.” He smells so good. You know for a fact that Ijichi buys the same brand of laundry detergent for him that you use, because you asked. But it’s so much better on his clothes than it is on yours. “How’d you get in here?”

“Busted the curtain. Duh.”

“You can do that?”

“‘Course I can. Ijichi’s barrier techniques are super weak.”

“Why?”

He strokes a light hand over your hair. “Because you were taking forever! Thought you had to be holed up somewhere cryin’. Boo hoo hoo, I wish my big strong sensei would come and save me.”

He’s warm and solid and real and he saved you and you want to stay like this forever. “It was taking so long,” you say, “because I was busy getting smacked around in the stupid sex dungeon.”

“Woah, for real? You’re kinkier than I would’ve thought, Risacchi!”

It’s such a dumb fucking thing to say right now and you laugh helplessly into his jacket. You tilt your chin against his chest and look up at him, grinning his huge, stupid grin, a little dimple tugging at the corner of his mouth. You want to kiss the smile right off his face. 

And why shouldn’t you? You’re alive. You’re alive, and the relief is as boundless and shining as the beautiful, glittering expanse of his domain, the vital, joyful thud of your heart trembling in every limb.

You try. But he’s just too tall. Even if you stand on your toes, you can’t quite reach his face. You sink back onto your heels, fingers clamped in his jacket, letting out a little huff of frustration. 

He dips his chin downward and brushes his mouth lightly against yours. 

You melt into him, hooking your arms over his shoulders. He cups your chin and neck with gentle hands, tilting your face upwards to receive a harder, hungrier kiss, before his power rushes in between you and separates you again and your hands are clenching on empty air.

“We gotta get you to Shoko,” he says.

“Right,” you mumble, running the tip of your tongue over your lips. Your teeth chatter together. With nothing to hold onto, you’re trembling again.

You stumble down the stairs into the waiting car. Babble something about the man in the basement, how his family is going to want to know. Kind, blessed Ijichi pats your hand and assures you it’ll all be taken care of. Endure the long ride back to campus wadded up in a shock blanket Ijichi manifested out of the trunk.

Gojo hustles you straight to the infirmary, where Shoko patches up your aches and bruises, your minor skull fracture, and your enormous concussion. You leave with orders not to use your technique, or any jujutsu at all, until your cursed energy reserves have had a change to replenish, with the looming threat of permanent brain damage if you don’t comply.

Gojo’s waiting outside with a bottle of white peach juice. “Drink up,” he says. “Heavy-duty RCT healing tanks your blood sugar. You’re gonna feel like shit for a couple days.”

You suck it down while he walks you back to the dorm. You have a new appreciation for the beauty of the school grounds. The sunlight through the trees dapples the walkways and courtyards like a spill of sweet cream. The velvet shadows of the woodland trill with insects and birdsong. Somewhere in the distance, the kids are shouting and laughing, sparring or playing together.

You touch an idle hand to your lips, thinking about the gentle press of Gojo’s mouth. Glance up at him strolling beside you, stoic and silent, shortening his long stride so you can keep pace.

“It was so strong,” you finally say. “Why was it that strong?” You’ve fought plenty of grade threes by now. No way that thing was a grade three. The ability to use domain expansion alone should put it at at least grade one. Maybe even special. 

“‘Cause it sucked up all your cursed energy like a cheese-and-milk-twist soft serve ice cream cone.”

You squint. “Why cheese-and-milk-twist?”

“That’s what kinda ice cream you’d be,” he says patiently.

“Why?”

“‘Cause it’s the best flavor,” he says. You duck your chin and focus on the placement of your school loafers on the paved walk.

“I was so stupid to fall for that trap like that.” If you’d gone in slower. If you hadn’t been so focused on the idea of getting a victim out the second you saw the disguise. “The curse disguised itself into the missing civilian and dropped me right through the floor.”

“Yeah, that was dumb,” he says with a roll of his shoulders. You cringe. “You coulda bounced back from that if you didn’t have the crap luck to get hit with cursed energy transfer. We go in all the time with bad or incomplete info, because the windows can’t fight, so we’ve only got what they can get observing from a distance. Sometimes they way lowball a threat level. Like now.”

Crap luck. A shit roll of the dice. It could happen again. “How’d you know to come in after me?”

He shrugs one shoulder. “You get an instinct for it when you’ve seen enough missions go bad. Just a feeling you get.”

You halt in your tracks. The songbirds chime around you, reckless and careless. If things had gone a slightly different way this afternoon, you wouldn’t be hearing them now. “You’ve lost students before?”

‘’Course I have. Everyone has. Students, comrades, teachers.”

“That’s horrible,” you murmur. On the other side of the classroom buildings, you recognize Panda and Toge’s laughter, wheeling up into the cloudless sky with the summer birds.

“That’s the job, Hasegawa,” he says.

You trudge back along the dorm path. “You doin’ okay?” he asks. “You’ve had a lucky run up ‘til now, to be honest. Dispatch has been going easy because the higher-ups wanna make sure you pull through. Not because they give a shit about you or anyone else, but because—“

Because they want you to pop out some powerful baby sorcerers before kicking the bucket, ideally with some clan scion. You aren’t going to make him say it. “I get it,” you interrupt.

“And I’ve been letting ‘em, because you don’t wanna be an exorcist long-term. But no mission ain’t dangerous.”

And you’d known that. Known exorcism was a dangerous business. Had it hammered into you during your entrance interview. Have seen the damage curses can do. Have feared for your life at various points for the past five months.

But it’s one thing to know something, and another thing to have to turn your back on a freshly slaughtered corpse. It’s one thing to know something, and another thing to watch a curse’s domain close over your head and wish you’d lived a little more freely, a little more recklessly, if this was how it was all going to end anyway.

“Thanks for saving me,” you say, looking up at Gojo’s face. 

“That’s the job, Risacchi,” he says, with a light ruffle of your hair. You want to catch his hand and thread your fingers through it, but you know he’s got his technique on right now.

“Why’s your domain so pretty?” you ask. That beautiful, glimmering sweep of stars. Yours hadn’t looked anything like that, even incomplete.

He lets out a light, snorting little laugh. “It ain’t on purpose! Expansion’s just manifesting your natural innate domain. It looks like what it looks like. You don’t get to pick.”

“Well, yours is pretty,” you say. “Better than the planetarium.”

“Had to be good-lookin’ to match the rest of me,” he says. 

You’re nearing the entrance to the girls’ dorm. “And um, sorry about what happened at the end there,” you say quietly. For planting one on him.

Although you might’ve had some help. So much for never again. 

Even if this really was the last time, at least you know now that he still wants you. Wants you at least a fraction as much as you want him.

“Um… I guess… we should talk about that?” Somewhere that’s not the front stoop of your dorm building in the middle of campus. You brush your hair over your ear and off your blazing face.

He’s quiet for a few beats. “You oughta cool off, Risacchi,” he says finally. “You had a shit day today and your adrenaline’s still goin’ haywire. Take a sec. I got some things to take care of, and then I got a flight to catch tomorrow. Early. I’ll be back in a couple days.”

“Okay,” you say. “I guess I’ll see you then.”

“I’ll get ya a souvenir.”

You pause with the door halfway open. “I’m going to go stress bake. Come get some later if you want.”

“You know it,” he says, with another gentle ruffle of your hair. “Whatcha makin’?”

“Pain au chocolat.” Because it’s complicated and it takes forever and it’s going to give your hands something to do so you don’t have to think too hard about how you almost died today. About how you kissed your teacher today. Again. 

“Hell yes,” he says. He swings by after you’ve prepared a triple batch and swipes what hasn’t already been devoured by starving teenagers. He brings you another white peach juice.

He’ll be abroad for two days. Two days before, presumably, you’re moved to Kusakabe-sensei’s class. Two days before, presumably, you’ll have to go back in the field again, if you’re lucky.

You have no idea what you’re going to do in two days. The inside of your head’s as empty as a bargain bin at closing time. No amount of frantic whisking, folding, or kneading brings you any closer to enlightenment.

You put Keiko on speaker while you flour the counter for your next batch. “Ricchan!” she all but screams. “You called at the perfect time. Listen! Listen to this!” A rustle, followed by, “C’mon, say it for Auntie! Say it for Auntie, Haru-tan!” 

Haru giggles and says, in her tiny, self-important baby voice, “Juice.” 

Keiko yells like an umpire after a game-ending third strike. You laugh with her, wiping at the tears trailing down your cheeks that you’re glad she can’t see. “That’s amazing, Haru-tan!”

“She’s still working up to, ‘When is Auntie coming to see me?’ But as her mother, I can read her mind with my psychic powers, and that’s what she’s thinking.”

You pat the dough and watch the heavy summer sunlight slant between the trees outside. Summer’s busy season, but you should be able to get time off in fall. Yaga-sensei still owes you for the fundraiser, after all. “Soon, I promise. I think I can get some break time in September.”

“I’ll hold you to it! The hell kind of school is this, that doesn’t give you a summer break?”

“It’ll be Haru’s first Cowboy Birthday,” you say, scrubbing the last of your tears from your burning eyes. 

“Holy shit! It will! Haru, say ‘Cowboy Birthday’!”

“Juice,” announces Haru. 

The waterworks start back up all over again, but at least now you feel like you can make it through the next two days.

Chapter Text

The day Gojo’s supposed to come back from overseas, Maki interrupts you in the middle of folding laundry by bashing on your door like it showed a moment’s hesitation in a training exercise.

“We’re going to a summer festival today,” she says when you crack it open. “Panda and Toge found one nearby. You in?”

“A summer festival? Now?” It’s barely June.

“Summer’s busy season! Sometimes we get slammed the whole time, and then we never make it to one! We have to do stuff when we can. Who knows what could happen?” 

And she’s right. After your last mission, you really ought to know that by now.

“I was supposed to do something with Gojo-sensei today,” you say. “When he gets back.” Finalizing your course transfer paperwork, you assume.

Maki shrugs. “Okay, don’t come then. Or bring him along. Whatever.”

“No, I’ll come!” You haven’t been to a festival in a couple years, and you used to love them. Went religiously with Keiko and your school friends. Even dragged Fumiya to a few. He was weirdly good at yo-yo fishing.

You ask Maki if she wants to borrow one of your yukata and are answered with a flat “no.” She’s in her track shorts and a varsity jacket with a giant embroidered tiger on it, which you have to concede looks cool as hell. 

You break out your favorite yukata, the pink one with the waterlily pattern, and struggle into it without help, praying the fabric sashes and towels you wound around your waist will hold. You’re used to having Keiko, or Fumiya, around to help you. 

Your idle mind supplies the idea of Gojo helping you put it on—or stripping it off—and you’re glad you don’t have any company to witness your guilty blush. 

You chew the inside of your cheek while you draft a text message. back in japan yet? hope you had a good trip! going to summer festival w the kids today. you’re welcome to come too! 

Crafting the final draft of this message takes longer than donning the yukata.

The response is instantaneous. on the train back. you wearing a yukata? 

Your blush creeps down your neck. it’s a summer festival. obviously yes.

G: then i’m def comin

You hide your phone under your pillow like a lovesick schoolgirl, like it can witness and judge you for your inappropriate infatuation with your sorcery teacher. Soon-to-be-ex-sorcery-teacher.

The thought that’s been tailing you for the past two days crosses your mind again, like a winking fishing lure bobbing along on a stream. If he’s not your teacher anymore, then maybe it wouldn’t be against the rules to get involved with him. 

If he wanted to get involved with you, that is.

You have to excavate your phone when it vibrates. i’ll stop by the school and then meet you there later. save some takoyaki for me ;p

It may be barely June, but the air is thick and sticky as bubbling caramel, and the trains are packed. You listen to one half of Panda and Toge’s good-natured squabble on the ride. You think they’re arguing about classroom chores, but with access to only half the dialogue, you can’t quite be sure. Maki and Fushiguro ride side by side with the same stony, stoic set to their chins, making their familial resemblance suddenly obvious.

The festival’s just as crowded. Everyone else in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area must’ve had the same idea as your classmates. Despite the packed crush of people and the long, sweaty wait for space to form in the crowd, you can’t help but feel lighter just listening to the crash of laughing voices, the blare of reed-flute folk music layered over eighties rock from restaurant speakers, the creak and sway of lanterns in the hot breeze.

The kids had the right idea. You should enjoy this while you can. 

You start off with melon shaved ice and move on to the takoyaki right away, just so you don’t have to worry about saving room for the best part. Panda and Toge are locked in some kind of championship ice cream-eating competition. Panda, ever the good sportsman, has to order for Toge. 

Maki absolutely kills at target shooter, to the point that the stall proprieter has to chase her off before she can clear out all the prizes, and then she just moves down the lane to super ball scoop and resumes her reign of conquest. 

Fushiguro is even more somber and self-contained than usual. You catch him glancing off into the hazy sky during quiet moments, wandering about in a memory. 

Your phone chimes in your fabric clutch as Maki cleans up at another round of yo-yo fishing. omw! with a selfie of Gojo giving a V-sign on the train.

“The parade’s starting soon!” says Panda, examining the schedule pasted on the makeshift walls of every food stall. “We should try to get down there before it gets too busy.”

“Gojo-sensei’s almost here,” you say, waving your phone. “I’ll go meet him at the entrance.”

“We’ll go stake out a good spot!” says Panda. “We’ll see you later, okay?”

“Salmon,” says Toge cheerfully.

You wait by the roadblock in the afternoon brick-oven bake, watching young couples and clusters of schoolgirls drift by. Families pass, towing their adorable small children along by the hand.

Gojo saunters up in sunglasses and a short-sleeved blue button-up, and your heart rate jumps like rice dropped in a hot skillet. 

“Heyo!” To your dismay, he slides his sunglasses down his nose, looks you up and down, and sighs with a slump of his shoulders.

You brace a hand on your hip. “Nice to see you, too.”

“It’s no freakin’ fair,” he mutters, his dangling arms flopping. “I’m supposed to have to shoot you down looking like that?”

You cross your arms over the giddy glow in your chest. “You’re the one who wanted to come!” 

“A guy can enjoy lookin’, can’t he?” 

“You don’t sound like you’re enjoying looking!”

“Of course I am! You’re a total babe! Cute face, bangin’ bod, the whole works!” He sighs again and scrapes a hand through his hair. “Where’re the others at?”

“They wanted to see the parade. Ran off and ditched the uncool adult already.”

He smiles. “Good. I’m glad they’re doin’ stuff like this together. This is the best time of their lives. They should be having fun.”

“You really think high school is the best time of somebody’s life?” you ask as you reenter the festival grounds together. You’re not even going to touch on the extra hardships piled on the sorcery students, on top of all the typical trials that go along with being a teenager.

Gojo grants you a downward glance that is both pitying and baffled. “Risacchi. I thought you paid attention in school. How are you the only person in this country unfamiliar with the concept of ‘the blue spring of youth’?”

“Obviously I know about it!” you say. “I just… never really bought into it.”

He crosses his arms behind his head with a chuckle. “I know you’ve always been a prissy little goody two shoes, but I hope even you still had a little fun.”

“It’s not that I didn’t have any fun!” you say, on the defensive. “It’s just… I don’t know. It definitely wasn’t the best time of my life!” 

You’d had some fun. You’d had some friends. But mostly it was work. Schoolwork, part-time work, the desperate, endless, uphill slog of working to be liked. To be likeable. To convince everyone you weren’t a freak with a hallucination problem who was just as unstable as her brother. To set yourself up for a successful adulthood that you’d assumed would be the best part of your life, some distant someday. 

“Was high school the best time of your life?” you ask.

He shrugs. “‘Course it was.”

That makes you a little sad, that he thinks the best time of his life is behind him. You wonder what kind of person he was back then. After all, you would’ve been classmates, in a different world, in a different time, where you were discovered as a sorcerer at a normal age. That’s strange to think about.

“Ooooh, shave ice!” You pause while he gets himself a double order of flavored shave ice, then a soft serve ice cream cone. Cheese and milk twist, naturally, the best flavor. “You wanna play target shooter?” he asks around a mouthful.

“Did you want to try to find the kids?”

“Nah, let ‘em have their fun without the uncool adults for a little bit.” He winks at you over the rim of his sunglasses. “Unless you don’t wanna hang out with me.”

It’s said jokingly, but it’s an easy out for you if you really would be uncomfortable strolling around the festival with him one-on-one, looking like any other young couple sharing bobas and winning each other cheap prizes. 

As it stands, you like the idea a little too much.

He obliterates you at target shooter. Even the stall proprieter looks sorry for you. “Wow, that was sad,” Gojo says as he hands off his prize to you, a stuffed keychain of the town’s dolphin mascot, Nami-chan. “Kinda felt like I was bullying you. Here’s your consolation prize, so you don’t cry!”

“Oh, really? How did it feel different from the rest of the time when you’re bullying me?” You clip Nami-chan onto your bag.

He grins. “We can do batting cage next. Give ya a fighting chance.”

The batting cages are down the lane of stalls and through a gauntlet of pedestrians. “Did your mission go okay?” you ask as you sidestep around a gaggle of laughing college guys. 

“Huh? Oh, yeah, went fine.”

You clutch at the wrist tie of your drawstring purse. “Are you going to have me transferred to Kusakabe-sensei’s class?”

He adjusts his sunglasses, almost pouting. “You really wanna do this here? Right now?”

“We don’t have to,” you say.

“You don’t just wanna enjoy the festival?”

“I haven’t really been able to stop thinking about it,” you say quietly. Every minute of the past two days.

“Ugh. Okay. Shoulda guessed you’d be like that.” He pushes the glasses back up his nose and says, “I’m still thinkin’ it over. I really oughta. Are you asking for it?”

“I like being in your class, but… if I was in his class, and not yours…” You loop the drawstring around your index finger and draw it tight as a noose. “Then, could we…”

He sighs again and scratches a fingertip against his temple like he wants to flick a nonexistent blindfold. “Nah. Masamichi’d send me straight to hell, my student or Atsuya’s.”

“Oh,” you say.

For a delusional, hubris-soaked half-day that peaked the second he saw you in your yukata, you’d kind of thought maybe you had a shot here.

“Would you lose your job?” you ask hesitantly. You may be more willing to bend a rule for yourself, thanks to your new near-death lease on life, but you’d never want to get him in trouble.

“Over you? I dunno. You being a special case and all.” He cracks his knuckles. “He’d beat the shit outta me for sure.”

The only way Yaga-sensei would ever be able to accomplish that is if Gojo allowed him, and by his tone of voice, it seems like he would. 

“But the higher-ups’d probably use it as an excuse to try and start something. They’re all huge hypocrites who already think I’m givin’ you the business, but they’d loooove an excuse to get you booted outta school and into one of their laps. Not to mention cause problems for me.”

You almost crash into a passing schoolchild and ruin their shave ice. “They think you’re what?”

“Keep up, Hasegawa, I thought you knew this already! Weren’t you listening to what that Zen’in geezer was jawin’ about?”

“I thought he was just being rude! Taking cheap shots!”

“Every last one of those crusty pervs is assuming I’m just doing what they’d do. And I mean, just look at ya.” He flaps a hand at you. “They’d never be able to keep their hands off of you.”

Heat blooms across your cheeks and inside your ribs. And the formerly small voice in the back of your mind that’s been hard at work constructing a podium over the past two days announces: if everyone is already assuming you’re sleeping with him, then what do you lose by proving them right?

“If you hadn’t gotten me enrolled in school, then… I would’ve been in one of their custody, right?” Bullied into a clan marriage, or worse. He’s making a confirmatory expression of vague disgust. “I never really thanked you properly for that,” you say softly.

“You shouldn’t have to thank me! None of this should be your problem! It ain’t your fault the jujutsu world is rotten all the way down and run by a bunch of greedy old bastards!”

You shouldn’t be enjoying watching him get angry on your behalf so much. “Still. You went out of your way to help me, and I’m grateful for that.”

He makes a soft tch and throws you a sidelong glance. “Not like I can keep my hands off you, either.”

The heat in your face and chest rises until you think it must be visible rolling off of you, a shine and shimmer in the air. “You’re not the same as them at all!” you protest. “You never tried to pressure me into anything or make me feel like I owed you. You never even told me you had to go up against the higher-ups to get me into school!”

“Yeah, and you weren’t supposed to find out, either! Masamichi told me he wasn’t gonna blab! Still pissed at Ijichi for running his mouth, too.”

“They only admitted to it because I’m the one who kept asking! You can blame me!” you say. “And you can blame me for everything else, too, because I’m the one who keeps coming onto you first! I’m the one who doesn’t want you to keep your hands off me!”

He stops in his tracks and tilts his broad shoulders back towards you. You drop your eyes to the sidewalk, and when you’re able to make yourself look at him again, his soft lips are pursing into that adorable slanted frown of his. “You don’t know what you’re asking. You, Risacchi? Screwin’ around against school regs? Sneakin’ around behind the principal’s back? If you cheated on an exam, you’d die.”

“It’s not the same! And we don’t even have exams at this school!”

“What are you talkin’ about? Of course we do! I gave you guys the handouts! You’re exempt ‘cause you’re on special curriculum and not moving up to second year.”

“Are you kidding me?” You dig your sandals into the scorching asphalt. “You’re making me go through all of this and you won’t even let me take the final exam?”

He squints at you around his sunglasses. “What, you want to take it?”

“Of course I want to take it!” If there’s one thing you’ve ever been good at, it’s taking exams. “I want my S! I want my spot in the class ranking! I want my transcript that says good grade in sorcery!”

“Assuming you’d get an S,” he snickers.

“Are you saying I wouldn’t?”

“Nah, you would.” He sighs and shoves his hands in his pockets. “That’s no freakin’ fair, either. You know how cute you are when you get all worked up.”

“No one thinks that but you!” you say, your heart flipping over.

He runs a hand through his hair. “It ain’t just about me being your teacher, either, Hasegawa,” he says, and your heart flops again at the slightly husky rasp in his voice. 

You arrive at the batting cages. He checks out a pair of bats and you claim a free lane, between a pair of girlfriends posing for selfies and a father and his tiny son.

“I ain’t really a relationship kinda guy,” he says, stancing up for his first swing. You admire the line of his body as he lunges into a graceful strike. The ball slaps directly into the target at the far end of the lane. Home run!!!! chants the scorekeeper screen with a jaunty little jingle. “Not my thing.”

You chew this over as the pitching machine lets out a little whine and you square up for your own ball, remembering what he’s said about bloodline-obsessed old perverts and his clan being up his ass. “Is it because your family and the higher-ups would give you a hard time?”

There’d be no winning for him. If he picked a so-called normie, he’d be betraying sorcerer culture and letting down the clan. If he chose someone with a valuable technique and high cursed energy—someone like you, you think—he’d be playing into the hands of a system he’s never shown much respect for.

You always were a better hitter than a catcher. You strike the target just a smidge off-center, but the cheerful home-run tune plays anyway.

“They’d be up my ass for sure, even more than they already are. And hers, too. If I had a wife, or even just a girlfriend, she’d never know a single second’s damn peace.” 

“Well, of course she wouldn’t,” you say. “She’d be with you, wouldn’t she?”

“Yowch!” He swats a second homer with a casual flick of his bat and then grins at you. “Lucky for me I ain’t interested in any of that!” 

His smile and tone might be flippant, but you wonder just how close you brushed to the truth. “So you… don’t have girlfriends at all?” You hit a neat strike right into the target and feel a little smug about it.

“Not serious ones! Casual stuff only. No long-term commitments, no big feelings.” His bat cracks against the ball and nearly shatters the target. The adorable little boy a few lanes down makes an amazed sound. “Don’t need a steady girlfriend. And I ain’t ever gettin’ married and I ain’t ever going to give the clan the heir they want soooooo bad. That’s their problem.”

You wiggle your fingers and smile at the child, who’s still gazing at him with starstruck awe. “So no beloved son Metalgreymon for you, then.”

“Nope! It’s for the best. My kid would give all the other kids a complex.” He adjusts his shades. “And don’t take this the wrong way, Risacchi, but you seem like the kind of girl who only goes steady.”

You squint at him. “How am I supposed to take that?”

“What it sounds like! Not the wrong kinda way! You don’t seem like the no-strings-attached, just messin’ around kinda girl! Bet you’ve never had a friend with benefits. Bet you’ve never even had a one-night stand.” 

“You’re making a lot of very rude and uncalled for assumptions,” you snap, cheeks coloring, as you line up your next shot. You’re slightly off balance. You get to third base, but now you’re lagging behind.

“I‘m just sayin’! You were all ready to get hitched to that boring guy with the dumb face and have his boring babies—“

“Don’t bring him into this!” you say, turning to glare at him, and your ball swoops past you and into the safety net. A buzzer sounds. “And you have no idea if I’ve ever had a one-night stand or not!”

He shoots you a coy, curious smirk. “Well. Have ya?”

Your ears burn. “No,” you say shortly, turning back to the batting lane. You’ve never even slept with any of your handful of long-term boyfriends earlier than the fourth date.

“I’m not tryin’ to insult you or hurt your feelings or anything,” he says with a shrug.

“Well, it’s a little late for that!”

 “I’m just pointing out the obvious! Which is that you’re looking for a diamond ring, a house in the ‘burbs, and one-point-three beautiful children named Nozomi and Mirai.”

“I can’t believe you’re using my perfect kids’ names against me like this.” Your next swing goes a little off-center and, in an obvious joke setup, only gets you to second base. “Which one’s the point-three of a child?”

“Mirai, for coming in second. Anyway, what I’m sayin’ here is, you won’t get what you want from a guy like me.”

“You don’t know that’s what I want!”

He shrugs. “Then tell me I’m wrong.” 

Is that what you want?

You can’t tell him he’s wrong.

Your final score is seven. His is ten. He picks out another stupid mascot keychain from the prize kiosk and offers it to you. It’s followed in short order by the silver dolphin charm he wins from thrashing you at ring toss, the mini plush he wins from thrashing you at yo-yo fishing, and the coupon for dango he wins from thrashing you at super ball scoop.

His luck finally runs out at the prize drawing kiosk, where he pulls the worst possible outcome and gets nothing. You get the second-worst outcome, but that means you win a tiny bag of chewy sour candies.

You wave the lucky slip of paper beneath his nose. “Well, will you look at that. Finally a win for me.”

“It doesn’t count!” he says with a pout. “It’s just random chance!”

“Spoken like a sore loser.” You offer him the bag of candies. “Here, why don’t you take these? You know, as your consolation prize. So you don’t cry.” He sticks his tongue out at you, then downs the entire bag and goes back for a second round of ice cream.

He gets matcha swirl and eats it the same way he always eats it, by hunching over it and slurping it up like a complete weirdo, and you’re far gone enough that you find it kind of cute. You get a second round of takoyaki and poke at them with a toothpick. 

Fushiguro manifests out of the crowd and you nearly jump out of your yukata. “Hey,” he says.

“Megumi-chaaaaaaaaaaaaan!” Gojo leans forward with his hands on his knees. “Look at you outside of your room! I’m so proud I could shed a tear.” He sniffles and wipes a fake tear from his cheek. “You having fun? You enjoying your youth? You win at super ball? Any chicks hit on ya?”

Once again, you and Fushiguro are immediate, wordless allies in your resolve not to respond to any of this. “Do you have any sunscreen, Ms. Hasegawa?” he asks. 

It’s the longest sentence he’s directed at you since he started at Jujutsu High. “I do.” You open your drawstring bag. “I’ve got SPF face lotion, an emergency travel spray, and a heavy-duty rescue cream, but it smells like peach and coconut. Will any of those work?”

“Inumaki-senpai ran out and he’s burning to a crisp. He can deal with the peach one.”

You hand over the bottle. “Don’t worry about getting it back to me. I’ve got spares at home.”

“Thanks.” And he doesn’t smile at you, but he isn’t frowning, either, which is the closest he ever comes to an expression of joy or contentment. “We’re going to go get spots for the fireworks. See you later, I guess.”

“Byeeeeeeeeee, Megumi-chan! Have fun! Cut loose! Get some digits, do me proud!” 

Gojo sweeps an enormous wave at Fushiguro’s back, then turns to you with his chin in his hand. “Of course you’d have all that stuff on ya, Risacchi.”

You secure your bag back around your wrist, ducking from the unexpected warmth in his expression, from his smiling eyes over the rims of his shades. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“A guy can enjoy lookin’,” he repeats.

And maybe looking’s all he wants to do. All he wanted from the start. It’s the responsible thing. The sensible thing. He’s right that you’ve never been the casual kind of girl, for all the good that’s done you.

You say, “I had the two-carat diamond ring, you know, and you saw how well that worked out for me.” 

Your whole life, since well before high school, you’ve been striving for that distant someday, that far-off, shining country of your future. The day when you’d have everything you wanted. The day when you’d be happy. Good degree, good job, good salary, diamond ring, three-bedroom house in the ‘burbs, one-point-three kids, rounded up. And you hadn’t had it all, exactly, but you’d been getting there. It was all within your reach. 

And you hadn’t been happy. You know that now, although it’s taken you an embarrassing length of time for you to solve it all out, for a twenty-eight-year-old woman. 

You’d hated your job. Every day you woke up and simply waited for the day to be over. But didn’t everyone you know hate their jobs? 

You hadn’t loved Fumiya. You were fond of him, obviously. Liked having someone to come home to. You’d been good allies, until you weren’t. You can’t say you never miss him, never miss the easy, dependable routine of chores together on Sundays, lunch breaks at the coffee shop across the street from the office, perfectly decent sex once a week. But you don’t long to tell him about the best parts of your day. Don’t yearn to run home to fall into bed with him. When you saw him with his new girlfriend that day, it wounded your pride, but it didn’t break your heart.

But weren’t most ordinary marriages like that? Sure, some people got lucky, like Keiko and Masahiro. But you couldn’t ever expect that to be you. 

You hadn’t been happy. But wasn’t it enough just to be ordinary? To be safe, steady, secure. To take sure bets.

In the end, you lost every bet you’d made, even the safest odds. And now you’re here. Back in high school, the so-called best time of anyone’s life. And you almost died, and you could die at any point in the next half year, and the barest brush of Gojo’s thigh against your own, through his slacks and your cotton robe, makes your entire body stir awake with a hot, insistent, ravenous throb.

“I do still want those things,” you say. “The diamond and the house and the kids. Ideally a whole number. Maybe I’ll get some of them when I’m graduated and out of here for good.”

Just thinking about how you’re going to have to start over from scratch makes you so tired. But you’re not going to think about that right now. You have to just focus on the next seven months ahead. 

The next seven months, where maybe you want to break a few rules. Maybe you want to take a few risks. Maybe you want what he’s willing to give you.

Everything he’s said so far has been about what he thinks you can’t handle. But not once has he said that he’s not interested. Not a single word about how he doesn’t want you.

“I’m not going to be able to look for any of that until after I can leave. But I’m stuck here for another half a year, and I almost died two days ago, and—“

Your voice breaks and you swallow hard against a sharp sting in your throat. Of course you’d end up on the verge of tears when you’re trying to seduce your sorcery teacher.

Gojo lays a gentle hand on your head. “C’mon, baby, cheer up. Don’t make that face.” He swipes your sweaty bangs out of your eyes with his thumb. “You’re gonna scare off men.”

You’re doing a good enough job of that already. You pull a sour face at him and he chuckles and pats your head, then goes in for one of your takoyaki. You shield them with a protective hand.

“I shoulda guessed this would happen! Every time I save a woman’s life she gets all horned up.” He clasps his hands to his heart and raises his voice seven octaves. “Ohhh, Satoru, how can I ever thank you for saving me! You’re so strong and sexy! I need your cock, now!”

The obscenity brings a hard, furious blush to your face like a slap, followed by a shameful pattering of excitement. “Give me some credit! Obviously, I was interested in your cock way before that!”

He’s equally as shocked to hear you swear. And honestly, so are you.

He tilts his sunglasses down so you can see the surprise in his eyes, see his intent look upon your face, the dark wells of his pupils. It’s funny his eyes still do that, even though there’s no benefit for his always-flawless vision. “You gotta stop talking like that, Risacchi,” he says. “I got good self-control, but I’m a man. There’s only so many times I can take a total babe throwin’ herself at me and be able to shoot her down.”

A little shred of hope lifts you up, up into the pearly, cloudless summer sky. “Then don’t,” you say, barely louder than a whisper. “Don’t shoot me down.”

“Took all of it to walk away from you in that hotel—“

“Don’t tell me that now!” you say, your voice rising as you ball your hands into fists. “I wish you hadn’t! I wish I’d stopped you! I would’ve let you—“

You would’ve let him take anything he wanted. You’d let him take anything he wanted right now.

He tips his chin down to face you, and you can see his eyes shining beneath his lowered lashes. There’s no way he’d ever kiss you here, in public, surrounded by a crowd full of strangers in the middle of a summer festival, but his bright eyes linger on your lips. Your own gaze drops right to his soft, slightly parted mouth.

He lays a gentle hand over your wrist, stroking the hollow with his thumb, the same way he’d touched you before your first kiss on the hotel floor. You shiver and swallow hard. “You wanna get out of here?” he mumurs.

The scope of the world narrows to just the gentle brush of his fingers. You want those hands all over you. 

“Yeah,” you whisper. “Yeah, I do.”

Chapter Text

Gojo leads you around a corner into a cramped, narrow alleyway, hidden from the eyes of passing festivalgoers, then laces his hands together and closes them shut.

He’s never used his teleportation technique on you before, and you don’t know what you expected it to feel like, but it isn’t this. The two of you stand still and the rest of the world bends and swoops around you in folds of stretched and blurred and bleeding color. It leaves you dizzy and reeling, the hand he reaches out to place on your shoulder the only thing keeping you anchored and upright.

You blink the brilliant afterimage from your eyes. 

You’re in the living room of an apartment, glowing and golden in the honeyed light of near-sunset. His staff apartment, you assume, since the floor plan is the same as Ijichi’s and Akari’s places when you’ve stopped by to pick up fundraiser supplies. It smells like him.

Unlike their units, he’s brought in his own furniture, a handful of sleek, minimalist, quietly expensive pieces. A huge leather couch with a glass-topped coffee table, half-buried beneath an avalanche of magazines, receipts, and what looks to be dismally late paperwork. An abandoned coffee mug on a Digimon coaster. An entire wall is taken up by an enormous flatscreen television boasting the square meterage of an average city apartment for a family of four, obstructing several windows. 

You lick your lips. “Are we back at school?”

“Yep. My happenin’ bachelor pad.”

He resumes where he left off, closing his hand around your forearm and rubbing his thumb over your skin, and you give up on snooping, because you forget what you were thinking about at all. “You wanna go back?”

You shake your head.

He bends down and brushes a soft kiss against your waiting, willing lips. Braces one of his hands in the small of your back, and it scorches you even through two layers of fabric and the towel you wound around your waist.

“Tell me you want this, baby,” he murmurs, his mouth smeared and shiny with the strawberry lipgloss you’d reapplied after the batting cage. “Tell me you want it, ‘cause I ain’t gonna be able to hold back anymore—“

“I want it,” you say, standing on your toes to muffle yourself with another kiss. “Please, I want… I want you to…”

And he’s finally, finally touching you, his hands roving over your waist, tangling in your obi and unwinding the bow you agonized over this morning with a quick twist of his fingers. It whispers off your hips and puddles around your ankles. You yank at your two loyal fabric sashes to help him along, going only by fumbling feel as he grips your chin and yanks it upward for another kiss, and they follow your obi onto the floor, along with your security towel. The bare skin of your stomach prickles as your yukata hangs open.

You desperately wish you’d had the confidence and optimism to wear cuter underwear today. You’re in your battered, beaten old pink sports bra and a pair of plain white cotton panties. It’s not cute. It’s not enticing. You’re sticky, sweaty, and flushed from the hot summer air and romping around the festival all afternoon.

But his eyes rake desperately, greedily, hungrily over every curve and fold of your body, lingering on the swell of your breasts, the soft flange of your hips, the apex of your thighs.

“Well!” he announces cheerfully. “Guess I’m goin’ straight to hell!”

And then his mouth is on you and his hands are on you and he’s pinned you with your back to the nearest wall, his knee braced between your naked thighs, his fingers laced through your hair, his lips sealed to yours. One of your hairpins slips loose and clatters on the carpet. He breaks the kiss just long enough to whip off his sunglasses and toss them in the direction of the couch, then crushes his mouth back down on yours.

Your soft little moan of encouragement is all the invitation he needs to thrust his tongue into your mouth, nip at your lower lip, dig his fingers into your hair. “You like that?” he asks, breath hot against your swelling lips. 

You show your appreciation with another small, wordless moan and an answering kiss. It’s all you can do to try to match his frantic pace, trace your tongue against his lips. His muffled groan, smothered by your joined mouths, shoots a bolt of fire down your body like a launched arrow. 

He breaks away from your mouth to trail a line of kisses up your jawline, trapping your earlobe between his teeth, and you raise your hands to mirror the path of his lips, tracing his firm, slim jaw, the strong line of his neck.

He draws in a soft, ragged breath and then pulls back, gathering up your hands. “Not yet, baby,” he says, “not yet. I’ll lose it.”

You let him grip your crossed wrists in one broad hand and pin them to the wall above your head, his eyes never leaving your face, even as your chest heaves and trembles.

You’ve never played around with being tied up or restrained in bed, could never have dreamed of confessing to Fumiya you might like to try. But you can’t deny the erratic sprint and thrill of your pulse as you shift your wrists against the iron grip of his strong fingers.

“This good?” he asks, punctuated by another soft kiss. You nod your assent, tilting your face back up to meet his, and he rewards you with a slow lap of his tongue before his free hand strokes its way down your collarbone and dips toward your breasts. 

You’re pinned and at his mercy as he kneads and teases and fondles, your nipples painfully peaked even through the thick fabric, your fingers twitching, aching to hold him. If you tilt and dip your hips, your clothed pussy brushes against his bent knee, and even only this whisper of pressure sends a surge of heat through your core. You clamp your lips down on a soft whine.

As he slips his hand under the tight hem of your bra and slowly exposes one aching breast, you rub hesitantly against him, shyly grinding on his leg.

“Wow,” he says softly, a smirk playing on his lips, “you want it bad, don’t ya?” And he traces his lips down your chest and takes your nipple into his mouth.

You moan his name and his eyes widen before he releases you and rests his head against your chest, helpless with laughter. “Risacchi,” he says, grinning up at you, “only you would use my clan name when I’m playin’ with your tits.”

“Y-you haven’t give me permission to call you anything else!” you say.

He smothers your protests with a hard kiss, and when he draws back, his breath fanning across your cheek, he says, “I ain’t giving you permission, baby, I’m giving you an order.”

With your bodies joined, your faces centimeters apart, there’s no hiding the flare of arousal that trembles through you. He traces your lower lip with his thumb. “Oh. You like that, huh? C’mon, say it with me: Satoru.”

You squirm forward to kiss his obnoxious, adorable cocky grin. “You don’t want me to call you sensei?” you say, and even though you meant to say it jokingly, teasingly, that traitorous, guilty shudder wracks you again.

His grip on your wrists clamps tighter. “You wanna play teacher’s pet, huh? You wanna play slut for sensei?” He pinches your nipple and you gasp. “Y’know, underneath that prissy little goody two shoes routine… you’re kind of a freak.”

You swallow against your dry, hot throat. “I can’t believe you’re picking on me when you’re playing with my tits.”

“Not my fault you’re so cute when I get a rise out of ya,” he snickers. “You turn pink… all the way…” He trails kisses down your breastbone. “Down here.” His tongue laves over your nipple and you arch your back with a helpless moan that draws him back to your lips.

“You do want it bad, don’t’cha?” he murmurs between kisses. “Tell me you want it, baby. Tell me what you want.”

“Satoru,” you say, the shape of it unfamiliar in your mouth, and you wish you’d drawn it out more, for the obvious pleasure on his face hearing it from your lips. “Please.”

“Tell me what you want,” he repeats, his bright eyes locked on yours.

You suck in a deep breath. “Please. Take me to bed.”

“Well,” he says. “Since you asked so nice.”

The wall’s gone. The living room’s gone. In a blink, you’re collapsing backwards onto a rumpled and unmade bed, Gojo—Satoru—pinning you with an arm to either side.  

He presses you down into the mattress with a hard kiss before yanking your bra up over your other breast, over your arms and head. It’s tossed unceremoniously over his shoulder. He pauses to admire your naked breasts, heaving and trembling with the effort of your strained breath, before reaching for your cotton panties.

“Not the cute flower ones today, huh?” he says, jiggling the waistband on his hooked finger.

You briefly clasp your burning face in your hands. “You remember that?”

“‘Course I do! How could I not?”

“You said you didn’t see anything!”

“Obviously that was a lie! I got better vision than a pro-grade telescope! You really thought I wasn’t gonna get an eyeful?” He leans in to say, “Went right in the spank bank.”

“Don’t say it like that!” you protest, laughing, your body aflame with arousal at the thought of him pleasuring himself to you. 

You shift your knees to let him shuck off your stockings. He kisses your bare inner thigh, then sucks at the soft, sensitive skin there, and you hiss in pleased pain, in anticipation of the bruise you’ll be wearing there tomorrow.

He finally lets you touch him. Lets you help him out of his shirt, lets you appreciate and explore the firm plane of his chest, his broad shoulders, his tapered waist. Lets you brush delicate kisses to his neck and throat, his breathing growing heavy and labored beneath your gentle lips. He only bats your hands away when you reach for the button of his pants.

“Not yet, baby,” he says again as he lowers you back down onto his bed. “Gonna take care of you first.”

If he tries, you’re both going to be here forever. And not in the fun way.

“You don’t have to do that,” you say as he parts your knees, baring your sensitive sex to the chilly air of his bedroom and his languid, delighted inspection.

“Just as pretty as the rest of ya,” he says, and you feel yourself tighten. “You first. Want you all wet and ready for me—you’re so wet already, baby,” he says with admiration as he lays two long fingers to either side of your folds and spreads you open. You make a tiny, helpless noise at this gentle touch alone, at the lewd noise from your soaking, achingly aroused pussy. “Want to see your face when you come.”

“Y-you don’t have to,” you repeat as he grips your inner thighs and splays you wider. “If you want me to come first… we’re going to be here a while.”

He pauses. “You don’t think I can make you?” he asks, eyes alight with challenge.

“That’s not what I said! It just… takes a really long time,” you mumble.

It’s been a problem with past boyfriends. With Fumiya. They get tired and they get bored, and you get tired and bored and anxious and ashamed watching them get tired and bored, and that makes it even more difficult for you to climb to your peak.

“Why’s that a problem for ya? You busy, baby? You got places to be? Got an appointment in your cute little date planner?”

You let out a surprised little giggle, half-smothered as he rolls his thumb against the swollen pearl between your legs. 

“Oh, I get it. You think we’re not gonna make the fireworks show. Don’t worry, I’ll set you right way before then. Tell me when you’re about to come.” 

You can’t say his confidence isn’t a little bit infectious. He rolls his thumb against your clit again and your breath and protests catch in your throat. “You have trouble by yourself, too? When you’re playin’ around?”

You bite your lip hard and look up at his ceiling, too embarrassed to admit to any of your private habits, even with his hand between your legs. 

He tilts his head. “Or do you not ever touch yourself? Would explain why you’re so cranky all the time.”

“I’m only cranky around you!” you laugh. 

“And you know how cute it is!” His fingers twitch. “Can you get there on your own?” You give a hesitant, abashed nod. “And it’s not that hard?” You bob your chin again. Let out a little sigh as he quivers his thumb. “Figured. You’re too in your head, same as everything else.”

You blink up at him, dazed. “What is this, a training session?”

“You wanted to play slut for sensei, didn’t’cha?” He grins a cocky, lopsided, wicked grin. “It’s a teachable moment, Risacchi.” 

He slips one finger into your slick, yielding channel, his thumb still working your clit, and you almost arch your back off the bed. “I love thinkin’ about you like that,” he says, “Thinkin’ about you spreading your legs and coming on your own hand. About what cute little faces you make. Cute little noises. Yeah, just like that,” he says as you let out a soft, strangled moan. “What d’you think about when you do it? You think about me?”

There’s no hiding the guilty flush that pools across your face. The way you gnaw your lower lip. You’ve tried not to, obviously.

“C’mon, Risacchi, sensei’s callin’ on ya,” he says, his grin now enormous and enormously self-satisfied. He begins working you in earnest, both inside and out. You let out another moan and your legs try to scissor closed of their own accord, but his free hand digs into one thigh to keep you spread. His long fingers are going to leave bruises in the soft flesh there. The thought of wearing the imprint of his hand, the imprint of his mouth, sends another surge of heat lancing through you, and you clench around his finger.

“Good,” he murmurs softly. “That’s good. Just like that, sweetheart. You haven’t answered the question, though.”

“Yes!” you gasp, screwing your eyes shut. “Yes, I think about you.”

“Knew it!” Even with your eyes closed, you can hear his smug smile. You open them so you can see it, too. You clench and flutter around him again, and he basks in it. “Why do you look so guilty about it, baby? Why would you think I’d mind? I love that you think about me. Think it’s fuckin’ hot you think about me. You already know I think about you.” 

He slips in a second finger to join the first. You keen softly as your slick walls stretch to accomodate his hand to the knuckle, nearly see stars as he draws them back, curling them to rub at a hidden spot in your pussy that sends flares of hot pleasure rolling out from your core to the tip of every limb.

“Think about you just like this every time I fist my dick,” he says. “Spread and dripping, taking my fingers, then my cock.”

You whimper on his fingers as he plunges them into you once more, whimper at the loud, slick noise of it. “You think I’m doin’ ya a favor, letting you come first? No, baby, this is for me. It’s all goin’ straight in the spank bank. So the next time I’m away on some mission and it’s just me and my hand—“

With the hand that isn’t fucking you, he reaches up and fondles one of your bare breasts, pinching your nipple between thumb and forefinger. “I can think about the way your tits bounce and how your cute little pussy feels around my hand. Can think about making you come and know exactly what it looks like. What it sounds like. You’re gonna show me, aren’t’cha?”

And you are. The heat and pressure between your legs is suddenly building to a wild, trembling, nearly painful crescendo, upon you so fast and hard you barely have the time and presence of mind to heed his earlier warning and gasp, “I’m… I’m g—going to—“

“You comin’ for me, baby? That’s right. Knew you could do it.”

“Coming, S-satoru,” you manage to choke out, just before your vision blurs under a dark wave of pure pleasure, blotting out the way he smiles when you moan his name.

You swim back into awareness, dazed and gasping, blinking blearily up at the ceiling of his bedroom as if you’ve just hauled yourself ashore after a long swim up from drowning.

“See?” Satoru rolls his eyes and slides his fingers into his mouth, sucking your slick off his fingertips with a swirl of his tongue. “That was so easy!” 

It really was so easy, you think, amazed. It’s never happened like that for you before. So fast, and so hard. 

“Bet that other guy didn’t even talk to you,” he scoffs, positioning himself back between your legs. “So easy, think I’ll do it again!”

“You don’t h—“

“Oh, I have to,” he assures you. “Wanna see it again. Shoulda guessed even your come noises would be adorable. All cute and polite.”

“Do you… want me to be louder?” you ask hesitantly. That’s been a problem with past boyfriends, too. You trail off with a gasp as he slips his middle finger back inside you.

“Y’mean fake it? Hell nah. Like it just the way you did it. And when I make you scream, it’s gonna be because I earned it.”

He sounds so entirely convinced of his own chances of success that in this moment, you believe him entirely. He’s already proven you wrong once tonight.

“This time, you can beg for it a little,” he says. “You wanna try that?” 

Your pussy answers for you with a hard, fluttering clench, and he laughs.

He coaxes you to a second peak while you choke and gasp and keen his name, your floating, weightless body borne up by rolling waves of scarlet heat, your vision popping with bright little firework flares.

“See? Told ya,” he says, unbearably smug.

You struggle to raise yourself up on your bent elbows, basking in his pleased, self-satisfied smile. “Will you let me touch you now?”

He leaps to drape himself over you, thrusting a kiss into your pliant mouth before wrenching open one of the drawers of his bedside table. “Think I got some rubbers in here,” he says.

He allows you to unbuckle and unzip his pants and slide them off his hips, cup his sizable erection gently through his boxers with a hiss. He’s so painfully hard, and he waited for you to come twice before letting you touch him at all, let alone please him.

“You were so patient,” you say, stroking him softly through the fabric. 

He grasps your wrist and pulls it away with a wry little smile. “And I gotta wait a little longer,” he rasps.

You rock backwards to sit on your heels and watch as he removes his boxers himself. His cock springs free to stand at attention against his stomach, long and thick and throbbing, the tip rosy and flushed and smeared with the evidence of his arousal. And you’d guessed at the size through the bulge in his underwear, but faced with its impressive length, you can’t help but breathe a soft gasp.

He cups a hand around his ear. “Sorry, what was that?”

You squeeze your eyes shut and bury your blazing face in your hands. “No, go on,” he says, nudging you with his knee. “Sounded like ya had something you wanted to share with the class.”

You mumble something incoherent into your hands, laughing helplessly. 

“Didn’t quite catch that! Use your words, baby.”

“You’re never going to let me live this down, are you?” you say, watching him preen through your latticed fingers.

“Nope! No way.” He folds your wrists away from your face. “Go on. You wanted to touch, didn’t ya?”

You help him unwrap the condom and slide it down his length, closing your fist around the shaft with a few gentle pumps, and the raw, primal groan he makes is enough to stir your body back to attention even after two hard climaxes at his hands. He’s been so good to you, and you want to please him even half as much in exchange. 

You bend forward and take the sheathed tip of his cock in your mouth. He moans again, fisting his hands in your hair, and you lave your tongue gently over his slit, taking a few more centimeters and closing your lips around his shaft. His hips twitch, driving a little more of his length into your willing mouth.

“Baby. You’re gonna kill me,” he groans, his hands tightening in your hair. You swirl your tongue, tracing a handful of katakana characters, and get halfway through the a glyphs before he orders “Stop” and pulls back from you.

You lick your lips, blinking and anxious. “Do you want me to do something else…?” That’s always done the trick before.

“You’re gonna kill me,” he repeats with a sharp chuckle. “Next time, sweetheart. But I don’t have much more in me, and I wanna fuck you. I have to fuck you.”

He doesn’t have to ask twice. You settle yourself back against his pillows and spread your legs for him, wrap your thighs around his slim hips as he positions himself over you, let out a sharp moan as he rubs his hard length against your still-damp folds. You understand now why he insisted on being able to see your face when you came the first time, because with the dramatic difference between your heights, when his sex is aligned with yours, you’re at eye level with his collarbones. 

You rise up to brush kisses against them, to his throat, to the curve of his shoulder, as he aligns himself against you. “Ready?” he murmurs, and you hum your assent.

You knew it would be a stretch, a tight fit, between his size and your half-year dry spell, and you chew your lip and gasp at the pressure as he slowly pushes into you. “All good, baby?” he asks, and you nod, the sharp sting already blooming into taut pleasure. 

He slides in centimeter by centimeter until he’s fully seated inside you and holds himself there, his erratic, labored breathing the only evidence of his effort not to keep moving, to use you to satisfy himself. You struggle for your own small, shallow breaths as you adjust. You’ve never felt so full.

“You’re so tight, baby,” he gasps. “You feel so good. Knew—knew you would. Knew you’d be so good, so good for me.” He strokes a hand over your hair. “Gonna move, okay? You ready?”

You hum your wordless assent and curl your fingers into his back, flinching in anticipation as the head of his cock brushes against the entrance to your womb. But he’s gentle and he’s careful, even as his thrusts accelerate into a hard, steady rhythm. 

Of course he never stops talking, even when he’s deep inside you, his hips snapping against your ass. A litany of murmured praises for your hot, tight pussy—“So good, baby, you got no idea how good you feel around me.” For how well you’re taking him. For how long he wants to stay like this, fucking you. You’re borne up and soaring on his groans of satisfaction, at the pleasing ache of him filling you.

With every thrust, his thick cock rubs and presses and teases you from within, and you feel a final, impossible flare of molten heat building within you, surging and overtaking you, making you pulse around him, your back arcing off his bed. 

“You comin’ again, baby? You comin’ on my cock?” he groans, delighted, and it’s not long after that he reaches his own climax, fully sheathed within you, rigid and trembling in your clasped arms. 

He’s gentle as he withdraws from you, gentle as he ruffles your hair and kisses the top of your head, and you’re flooded with a deep, dangerous tide of glowing warmth. 

You let it sweep you up and bear you away while he slips off to his bathroom. You feel like you felt when he carried you with his technique, floating and falling, drifting slowly downward through an endless sky.

He saunters back over to the bedside to stroke a hand over your hair and beam down at you, his dimple tugging at the corner of his mouth. You’ve never seen him like this before, even after a long training session—cheeks flushed, hair rumpled, a gleam of sweat on his brow.

He floats over you and back down onto the bed with an effortless little bounce—there really is no justice in this world—and pats the mattress beside him. “C’mon, Risacchi, no way you ain’t a cuddler. Get in here.”

You blink at him, surprised. “Casual cuddling’s allowed?”

“I said I didn’t want a girlfriend, not that I was just gonna hit it and quit it!” he says indignantly.

You wiggle up beside him with a grateful sigh and rest your head in the crook of his shoulder. He curls his arm around you. You let your eyes drift closed, luxuriating in the solid heat of him against you, of the weightless warmth of your own limbs.

Somewhere out on the school grounds, a bell chimes. What it signifies, you still have no idea. No one ever changes classes at this school. But your limbs clamp up as the last dregs of your haze of lust slowly fade.

You’ve just slept with your teacher. Who is still your teacher. Who is absolutely not interested in anything serious or long-term, and who at the moment is tracing a gentle pattern over the naked skin of your back with his knuckles.

The way you stiffen against him doesn’t go unnoticed. He unfolds his hand and splays it across your back. “You okay, baby?”

The Risa of six months ago would be spiraling into a panicked freefall right now. Not that she would ever have gotten herself into this situation in the first place. 

The Risa of today isn’t quite panicking, exactly. But she is thinking hard about what it’s going to look like when she has to go back to class tomorrow.

“I know you don’t want a girlfriend,” you say hesitantly. “You were very clear about that. But, um… are we going to keep doing this, or…”

“Well, I was countin’ on it,” he says, jiggling you against his side. “But if you wanna back out, if you ain’t having fun, or you don’t wanna have to sneak around…”

“I’m actually a pretty decent liar, you know,” you say, curling back against him. “I had to hide my technique for years.” And you’ll have to again, once you graduate. You hope it’ll be easier.

Are you going to endure a guilty flinch every time you make eye contact with Yaga-sensei out on the school grounds? Of course. Is this going to stop you? Apparently not. 

As for the rest of school admin and the higher-ups… the idea of sneaking around shouldn’t excite you, but you can’t deny the secret, shameful little thrill that trills down your spine.

The Risa from six months ago wouldn’t recognize you in line at the coffee shop.

“Well, if you change your mind, you can back out whenever. No hard feelings.”

“The same goes for you, too,” you assure him. 

“As if I’m gonna want to,” he says, poking your ribs, and then your blushing cheek. “Hey, what’s your high score? I’m gonna aim for it next time.”

“I’m not an arcade machine!” you say with an indignant laugh.

“Oh, did I hit it already? Really?” He raises himself up on one elbow so you can see his incredulous, pitying expression. You’re a pretty decent liar, but not under duress. “We have gotta fix that, baby.”

“You achieved a new personal best,” you say through helpless giggles.

“I’ll lap myself next round,” he says, tickling your naked ribs, and you shriek and whack him with one of his pillows. It smacks him lightly across the chest.

The ambered light outside his bedroom windows is dipping into a slow dusk. You settle yourself back against him and let your eyelids flutter closed. “We still got some time to hit that fireworks show if you wanna,” he says. “Or did I already give ya enough of a light show?”

Your eyes snap back open. “The kids! They’re going to think we ditched them!” Your phone is still in your bag, somewhere on the floor in the living room. 

“Well, we kinda did, didn’t we?” He strokes his hand down your thigh. “So desperate for it you dropped ‘em the second you got a dick appointment.”

“I’m not the one who didn’t even want to wait for the train,” you huff. 

He snickers. “It’s not too late. We could go back and meet up with ‘em.”

You sigh and wriggle back into the mattress with a whoosh of your spent ribs. “I want to, but I literally don’t think I can.” You’re so tired. But it’s the good kind of tired, hot and sore and supple.

He taps your nose. “I gotta work you on your stamina more.”

“Give me a break! I’m off the clock here!”

He taps your nose again. “You feel like watchin’ a movie?”

You don’t know what you expected the downtime for a casual arrangement would look like, but it definitely wasn’t cuddling and movie night. You’ve had actual boyfriends want to spend less time with you after sex. “I don’t know... Do you have blu-ray? Otherwise, what’s the point?”

“I have three different options for a blu-ray player,” he says serenely. “I’ll even let you pick the movie, since you let me smash.”

You laugh into his shoulder. “I came three times and you got one! If anyone gets to pick the movie, it should be you!”

“You’re gonna make it up to me later,” he says. “But if you insist… Car Explosion 3, subtitle: Plane Explosion it is! I got the limited edition disc!”

He loans you a pair of his old sweats so you don’t have to struggle back into your yukata. They’re hilariously baggy in the shoulders, long in the legs, and taut around your ass and hips, but when you shuffle into the living room, he wolf-whistles and says, “You look hot in that,” and you do a little twirl and almost trip on the trailing hem of his pants before joining him where he’s spawled on the couch. He slings an arm over the backrest and around your shoulders.

As the opening credits swoop in with an overloud, obnoxious jet-engine whine, you feel so light and limber that if you sprang up and tried to walk on air like he does, you might actually be able to do it. You haven’t felt this happy, this relaxed, since… well, since your day off with him at the hot spring inn.

And this one ended so much better. 

“You payin’ attention, baby?” Satoru murmurs, tapping your shoulder with the hand he’s got draped around you. “You’re missing the plot.”

“What plot?” you ask, setting down the blueberry soda he let you steal from his fridge as he pulls you in closer to set his lips on your neck. “The plane explodes.”

In half a year—if you make it half a year—you’ll be out of jujutsu society forever. You’ll be starting over from scratch. And just the thought of it makes you tired. But for now, why shouldn’t you bend a few rules? Why shouldn’t you take a few risks? Why shouldn’t you both have some fun together?

“This next part’s important,” he says, tilting your chin up on his thumb and forefinger. 

“Maybe you can summarize it for me,” you say, scooting forward to meet his lips. His other hand dips down to rest on your thigh. 

There’s no way the two of you are making it through this movie. Cult classic or not, you’re not going to mind.

You’re embracing your second, belated blue spring of youth. 

Or something.

Chapter Text

You’d assumed finally sleeping with Satoru would kick your raging lust down a few notches. You’d been delusional.

You’ve splashed water onto a stovetop fire, cranked the burner up to high, and then dropped a lit match in the center of the conflagration. When you’re not underneath him, you’re daydreaming about the next time you can get underneath him. When he’s not out on a mission, he’s knocking on your window or blowing up your phone or, inexplicably and hilariously, slipping you a folded-up note in the lounge that just contains a tiny drawing of a penis. You’re still laughing when he enters you, after distorting space to carry the two of you straight to his bed.

You feel like you’re losing your mind, like you’re burning alive from the inside. You’d say you feel like a horny teenager again, if only you hadn’t completely bypassed that phase of development in your own youth. You didn’t even know you had it in you to be this needy, this insatiable, and he’s right there blazing with you—bouncing you in his lap on his couch, bending you over the counter in his kitchen, fucking you up against the wall of his shower. When he’s through, he switches his infinity on and pelts you with water until you shriek with giggles.

The official rules of your arrangement are thus: you’re messing around for the next half-year until you graduate, a natural expiration date, or until either of you decides to call it off. You’re obviously keeping it private. You can see other people if you want to, as long as you give him a heads-up about it first.

You don’t want to see other people. You ask him if he’s planning on seeing other people, and he says, “Baby, when would I find the time?” To which, fair enough. 

You ask him if you can tell Keiko about the two of you. He says, “You wanna brag about how good you’re gettin’ it, huh?” and you whack him with a cushion.

When you inform her about this new development in your personal life, you say, “You have to promise not to laugh at me.”

“I would never laugh at you,” she says. She’s silent for a solid minute, then she laughs at you for another straight three.

“Makkun!” She yells when she finally catches her breath. “Makkun, get in here, Ricchan’s screwing her professor!”

“Hi, Risa!” says Masahiro, then, ever-mellow: “It’s nice you’re seeing someone new!”

“It isn’t really that kind of relationship,” you say, pressing your free hand over your eyes. “It’s just a casual, temporary thing—“

“A casual thing? A temporary thing? You? Sorry, who the fuck is this? Is this a scammer with voice changing software?”

“Please stop laughing at me!”

“This is happy laughter! I can’t believe this! I’m so proud!”

You sag against your dorm room mattress, your limp, boneless legs dragging on the floor behind you. “This isn’t supposed to be the part where you congratulate me, it’s the part when you tell me how overwhelmingly stupid I’m being and about how I’m having a midlife crisis.” 

“I would never say that! You’d say that! I don’t think you’re being fucking stupid,” she says, just as Haru shrieks in the background.

“Kei, we talked about this,” says Masahiro gently. This meaning swearing in front of Haru now that she’s begun to learn to speak.

“Oh shit! We did! I mean, uh… sorry.”

“Haru-tan, don’t grow up to be like me,” you groan, digging the heel of your hand into your forehead.

“Noooooo, Haru-tan, don’t listen to Auntie! She’s a role model!” Haru giggles. Keiko’s probably tickling her. “I don’t think you’re being stupid, Ricchan. Maybe you’re having a teeny, teeny, tiiiiiny little midlife crisis—“ You make an inarticulate noise into the receiver. “After years of being stuck in that sh—terrible job. And with your ex.”

You sit up. “I thought you liked Fumiya!”

“Fumiya was fine,” she says. “Wasn’t Fumiya fine, Makkun?”

“He was fine,” says Masahiro, loyally and just a little bit sadly. Masahiro and Fumiya had always gotten on well. They’d shack up in a corner and swap stock market tips whenever the four of you used to go out together.

“But he wasn’t a lot of fun. And he didn’t… put in a lot of effort.”

A boring guy with a dumb face. “Why didn’t you tell me that when we were together?”

“Girl, I did! You told me it was fine, that you liked him, that you were happy!” And that does sound maybe a little bit familiar. A few dropped hints over brunch. A quiet conversation at the back of your engagement party. 

“But you’ve always, I guess, been so sure about what you wanted.” Boring had been aspirational for you. Until now. “You’ve had a lot of shhh—-stuff go down this year.” And does she only know the half of it. “It makes perfect sense you’d want to cut loose a little. Have some fun for a change. Are you having fun?”

“Yeah,” you say, flushing as you recall how Satoru teased you with his hand while taking you from behind last night. Afterwards he turned on an action movie and you helped him set up his Serene Valley Farming Life Mobile homestead, which looks like a natural disaster zone and yet is still somehow already turning a profit.

“Well, there you go. I’d tell you to be careful, but it’s you, so of course you’re being careful. Apart from the whole, y’know, sleeping with your professor part of it—“

“You mean the biggest part of it—“

“Is he handsome? What’s he like?”

“I’ll send you a picture, if he doesn’t mind.”

“What does he teach?” asks Masahiro.

“Applied physics,” you say, which is, technically speaking, not a lie.

You ask Satoru for a picture while you’re both warming up in one of the practice rooms. “Up and at ‘em!” he’d insisted after knocking on your window. “I’ve been neglectin’ your training!” Said with a huge, lascivious grin.

“Let me take it,” he orders. “You’re not gonna get my best angle.” He removes his sunglasses to smolder for the camera. Snorting, you send the picture off to Keiko.

Your phone rings and vibrates mere seconds after you send the picture, nearly leaping from your hand, and then it actually does jump from your grasp when Satoru twitches a finger. “Hey!” you say, flailing against the barrier of infinity as he answers the call.

“Ricchan, are you fucking kidding me?” Keiko shrieks. “That’s what he looks like?”

“Heyo, Keiko-chan!” Satoru announces, holding the phone at the limit of his ridiculous height and out of your grasping reach. “You’re talkin’ to him right now!”

“Give that back!”

“Oh, gosh, wow, hi! It’s really nice to meet you! Feels like I’m backstage at a concert!”

“Please don’t tell him that!” you say. “I already have to rearrange the furniture every time he walks into a room, to make space for his ego.”

“But I thought you love how big it is,” says Satoru, batting his eyes at you over the rims of his sunglasses. “My ego, I mean.”

“When you said your teacher, I was picturing, like, that dweeby guy you had the hots for in high school English. What was his name?”

She means Maeda-sensei. And he wasn’t dweeby. “I don’t remember! That was so long ago!”

“Makkun!” Keiko shouts. “Come over here and get a look at this guy!”

“That’s a very good-looking man, honey,” says Masahiro, slightly muffled. “Is he from one of your shows?”

Satoru cackles, finally allowing you to leap up and snatch back your phone. “Goodbye,” you snap.

“Byyyeeeeee! This explains everything, thanks for clearing it up—“ You end the call.

He’s still chortling as he finishes his lunges. He’s wearing a wrinkled old long-sleeved shirt that’s baggy around the neckline and exposes the long, graceful wings of his collarbones, and when he notices you ogling, the way he stretches his arm behind his head is entirely for your appreciation. “Am I allowed to call you Ricchan now, too? Since we’re, y’know…” He waggles his eyebrows.

“Yes,” you say, with a polite, formal bow and an extension of your cupped hands, as if you offer him a gift. “You may call me Ricchan.”

“Yesssssssssssss!” He pumps his fist. “Okay, my sweet, adorable, precious Ricchan…” You mime taking the gift back. “Since it’s been a minute since I’ve had you do anything but cardio—“ He snickers at his own innuendo. “Let’s get some sparring in.”

“Actually, I’ve got a special request today.”

“Really? Okay. Hit me.”

“I want to learn an anti-domain safeguard,” you say as you bend to touch your toes. “In case. You know, it happens again.” You’re still shaky at the thought of going back into the field, but it’ll be a huge reassurance to have even a single timestall in your back pocket. “I want to learn New Shadow Style’s simple domain.”

He shrugs. “Can’t teach you that.”

“Well, what good are you then?”

“Aww, really? Seemed like ya had plenty of uses for me last night,” he says with a grin and a wiggle of his fingers. 

Undeterred, you say, “Okay, then I want to learn Falling Blossom Emotion.”

His brows shoot up. “Who told you about Falling Blossom Emotion?”

“Kusakabe-sensei,” you say. You’d run into him after sparring practice last week, while Satoru was out on a mission, and grilled him for pointers.

He pouts. “You’ve been cheating on me with another sensei?”

“I was not!” You cross your arms. “I was just asking him for ideas for lessons for us!”

“Hmph,” he says, puffing his cheeks. “Who told him about Falling Blossom Emotion? That one’s supposed to be a clan secret.”

“Well? Can you teach it to me?”

“It’s against clan rules,” he says, still pouting.

“Since when do you care about clan rules?”

“I don’t! Which is why I’m gonna teach it to ya!” He wags a finger in front of your nose. “Just don’t snitch and be careful where you whip it out!”

“You know I can keep a secret,” you say, noting how he eyes the way your breasts bounce when you bend over to stretch your arms behind your back. “And I would never whip anything out in public.”

“Good girl,” he says, and grins at the way your face colors. “Okay. Falling Blossom Emotion. Been a minute since I had to whip it out. Let’s see if I still got it!” 

He shifts one foot forward into a shallow lunge and extends a hand, palm facing the ceiling. Even from your position a meter away, you can feel the cursed energy rolling off his body like you’ve just opened an oven door. “The idea is that you surround yourself in a shroud of your own cursed energy and automatically strike back at anything that enters your orbit with equal and opposite force. It’s got better utility than simple domain, ‘cause you can use it in a regular fight as a counter, but it’s tougher to learn.”

He straightens out of his stance and taps your nose. “This is kinda advanced for where you’re at now, but you asked, and I just can’t say no to that face.”

“I’ll do my best.” You have to live up to his trust and faith. You are going to get a good grade in Hidden Art: Falling Blossom Emotion if it kills you.

“Step one is being able to maintain the shroud. If you can manage that, I’ll show you how to set up the counter. Stance up now.”

You mimic his posture, one hand outstretched. “Don’t try to do your whole body at once on your first try. Just focus on one thing at a time. Start with your hand.”

Even with all the improvements you’ve made to your circulation, you still can’t quite manage to push your cursed energy outside your body. Satoru lets you struggle for a few minutes before he circles around you and holds his arms out alongside yours, taking your outstretched hands in his. Your skin tingles, and it’s not from the cursed energy rising off of him, rotating around the pair of you like a slow typhoon. “You feel what I’m doin’ here?”

You feel his firm chest against your shoulderblades, his thigh pressing against your ass, his big hands cupping your own. You’re at the perfect level with his bare collarbones when you turn your chin around. 

“Mm-hmm,” you mumble as you press a soft kiss against one.

His breath quickens. “Focus, baby,” he says, closing his hands over yours, but there’s no way you can focus like this, and neither can he after you twist around in his arms to face him, your breasts pushed up against his chest. He bends down for a few slow kisses before he gives your ass a light, playful squeeze and pulls back. 

“Okay, you horny little slut,” he says, and then snickers at the flush of ashamed arousal that flares across your face and neck. “Wo-oww, that really does it for ya, huh?” 

Apparently, it does. You’re never too old to learn new things about yourself.

“Infinity’s goin’ back on until you can manage a partial shroud. Do it five times and sensei’ll give you a real nice reward later.” He winks at you over his shades, as if his tone of voice leaves any doubt as to what kind of reward it’ll be.

After an hour’s intense concentration, you are able to vent your cursed energy around yourself in a short-lived, intense burst that evaporates instantly, like steam though a sidewalk vent. 

“I got an idea,” says Satoru, snapping his fingers before vanishing. You settle cross-legged on the tatami floor, open your mobile farm, and fret because your turnips have withered and died. Because the last time you tried to water them Satoru slipped his hand up your shirt and made you forget what you were doing. You’re going to have to buy an entirely new crop off the town marketboard.

“Ri! Sa! Chan!” exclaims a voice way too close to your ear. He’s now squatting beside you. You squeak and swat your phone at his nose.

“You still startle soooo easy!” he says, winding his arm around your neck and silencing your squeal with a quick kiss. “Got you a treat!”

He presents a pair of cotton candy tufts from behind his back. “I think you mean you got you a treat,” you say as you rise to your feet.

He cracks one open and gulps an enormous bite. “The stick is you,” he says around his full mouth, twirling it in one hand, “and the fluff is your cursed energy. Think about the guys who wind ‘em up at the stall. Too fast and it’s like a ball of yarn. Too slow and it doesn’t stick. Right now, you’re going wayyyyyy too slow. Make sense?”

“I think so,” you say. 

He shakes the candy at you. “Eat it. It’ll help.”

And you know what? He’s right. It does help.

For the next week, you live and breathe Falling Blossom Emotion. During downtime in the classroom, you’re twirling your cursed energy like a middle schooler who’s just learned a yo-yo trick. You’re weaving a shroud during the driving time to missions (thankfully easy, straightforward, and against actual grade threes). You’re venting cursed energy on your morning jogs, during sparring matches, while you’re standing at the stove. You’re never able to maintain it for more than a few seconds at a time.

To add to your frustration, Satoru laughs at your facial expressions during your practice sessions. “I don’t know how you think that’s going to help,” you grouse at him.

“You just make the cutest faces when you’re concentratin’, is all!” He ruffles your hair. “C’mon, take a break! Your face is gonna get stuck like that! Let’s go on a field trip tomorrow!”

“Really?” you ask, interest and spirits piqued. Maybe it’s to get snacks. “What kind of field trip?”

“It’s a secret surprise,” he says with his shit-eating grin. “Don’t wear your uniform.”

“What should I wear, then? How long will we be out?”

“Risacchi, what part of ‘surprise’ was confusing to ya?”

“Can I at least have a hint?”

“Okay, fine. It’s a day trip and it’s out in Tochigi. Wear whatever you want.”

You wrack your brain and several internet searches for any idea of what he might want to show you in Tochigi. Kegon Falls in Nikko Park? Maybe somewhere in the park is an important site for jujutsu culture. The botanical garden? The aquarium?

Either of those things might be too similar to a date. Best not to get your hopes up. 

And it’s good you didn’t, because when you get off the train, he escorts you to a decrepit-looking parking garage. 

You keep shooting him looks, but he’s whistling under his breath, unflappable and unconcerned. Even when an enormous man with the stature of a concrete pillar stops you with a gruff “Who the hell are you?” and you almost leap out of your beribboned straw hat.

“My name’s on the list!” he says cheerfully. “Gojo Satoru. Don’t be scared, baby,” he says as the two of you pass into the shadow beyond the rusted ticketing gate. “Just stay close to me.”

“This had better,” you say to him under your breath, “be some wacky avant-garde trendy new restaurant or club or something.”

It isn’t a restaurant, but it is a club, of sorts, by some definitions. It’s an honest-to-god fight club.

They’ve torn out the floor of the second level of the parking garage to make a central pit surrounded by a raised tier, like makeshift, secondhand stadium bleachers. No seats, no railings. If you plunge over the edge of the crumbling hole into the pit, that’s now your problem. In the center of the pit, two large, sweaty men are wailing on each other with bare fists and bursts of cursed energy.

Satoru beams at you and gestures to the pit like a game show host presenting a gift certficate. “Surprise!” he says in singsong.

You cross your arms. “I thought you said we were going on a field trip.”

“This is a field trip, baby!” He edges closer to the lip of the pit for a better look down at the fighters. “This’ll be good for you. You’re always holding back in combat. Thought I’d take you to see how some real crazies do it.”

One of the men in the pit smacks the other across the jaw with a brutal knockout of a punch. His opponent staggers, chin snapping back, but he whips his head around and charges his attacker, grappling him by the waist.

“Okay, fine, whatever, it’s educational! Why didn’t you tell me this is what we were doing? We’re at some underground fight club and I’m wearing a gingham sundress and a hat with a frilly ribbon on it!” You bat at his arm with the aforementioned straw hat. “I look like a complete idiot! People are staring!” At least you wore good shoes.

“Nooooo, you don’t! You look cute!”

“I thought we were going to Nikko Park,” you sigh, sagging over like a shrimp.

He chuckles. “How did you get that from what I said?”

“It’s Tochigi’s most beloved attraction!” You wave your sun hat underneath his nose. “You didn’t tell me because you thought it’d be hilarious to see the look on my face, didn’t you?” 

He grins his shit-eating grin down at you. You suppress the urge to whack it off his face with your hat and instead swirl your palm in front of your own. “Well, get a good look. I hope it’s everything you wanted.”

“It is,” he says, with an appreciative look over his sunglasses, and you blush a little despite yourself. “How ‘bout this. I’ll take you to see the waterfall when we’re done. That make ya happy?”

“Maybe a little,” you say, clutching your hat in both hands by the brim. 

“People are still staring,” you mumble mulishly as he turns his attention back to the fights, sliding his sunglasses down his nose. You’re one of maybe three women here, and the other two understood the assignment and showed up in dark suits. The audience of bored old men, bloodthirsty office workers, and leather-clad toughs are all goggling at you. Or maybe that’s just because you’re getting into it with your companion in public. 

“They’re staring ‘cause you’re cute,” he says.

You throw up your hands. “Great! That makes me feel so much better!”

“I’m not gonna let anybody lay a finger on ya.” He drapes his arm over you, curling his hand protectively around your shoulder and tucking you against his side. “Happy now?” he murmurs as he strokes your bare arm with his thumb.

“Yes,” you admit. You can’t help but shiver at his touch. “But what about you? We’re in public. Somebody might see.”

“Here? Nah. The audience is all normies, and the sorcerers are a totally different crowd than the pros who pal around the school. No one’s gonna be like, ‘I saw Gojo Satoru and his girlfriend at the illegal underground jujutsu fight club!’ It’s like, what were you doing at the illegal underground jujutsu fight club? Y’know?”

His thumb continues its slow, lazy path, and your heart somersaults at the sound of his girlfriend. 

You can’t get used to that, because you aren’t actually his girlfriend. And you won’t be his anything after your six months are up or after he gets bored, whichever happens first.

You lean into Satoru’s side as the fighters square up once more at the center of the pit. They put their all into one final pass and whack each other across the face and in the center of the chest, both crumpling onto the concrete. The first to struggle back to his feet raises his fists above his head and howls, and the crowd screams and stomps and jeers down at him, the din rattling the structure’s exposed, rusted old support struts.

Satoru tilts his head down towards you. “You payin’ attention?” His breath stirs your hair.

“It’s two guys pounding the crap out of each other in a parking garage. It’s kind of hard to look away.” As if you aren’t completely entranced by the trace of his fingertip over your bare skin.

“Maybe I’ll sign you up for a round!” he says.

“Try it and you’ll be sleeping on the couch. Metaphorically.” You never spend the night at his place, which is only for the best. No way he wants your hairdryer and lotion supply taking up high-value real estate on his cramped countertop. His bathroom’s messy enough as it is.

The winner limps offstage and the loser is carried off by a pair of heavies, replaced by an announcer in a headset, bowtie, and rumpled dress shirt. “Put your hands together for another heart-pounding match at our Gachinko Fighting Tournament! A great showing from Thunder Taizo, who’ll be moving on up in the bracket next week! Get your tickets now!”

Satoru jiggles your arm. “Wanna come back for the finale?”

“I think this’ll be enough for me, thanks.” You suppress the urge to rest your head against his shoulder.

“And now for our next match! In the left corner… a fan favorite and your favorite middle manager! He’s punching the clock and punching off the clock! Iiiiiiiiit’s… Taniguchi Gin!”

Taniguchi takes to the pit beneath a torrent of cheers and wails. He’s in a torn and tattered button-up shirt with a pocket protector and a dotted tie, and his mouth is a thin gash in his square chin. His quarterly performance reviews have got to be brutal.

“And on the other side, in his Gachinko debut, your underdog, your dark horse! He’s a rookie with everything to prove and everything to lose! Show some love forrrrrrr…… Sakurai “The Stomp” Shun!” 

Sakurai is starting off on the back foot with a bandage across his bruised cheekbone and one black eye. You can’t resist the urge to root for the underdog. Is it because Taniguchi reminds you a little bit of your old manager Chiba? Maybe just a little.

You pay attention to your lesson and focus on the fighters as they close in for their first round of blows. Taniguchi gets Sakurai in his injured eye and shoves him into the nearest concrete pillar with a nauseating crack. Your hand flies to your mouth to cover your gasp.

Satoru chuckles at you, giving your shoulder a light tickle. “These’re all scripted! You know that, right?”

“How was I supposed to know that? This is my first time here! My first time at a fight club, ever!” You rest your chin on your fist and hooked thumb as Sakurai limps back into the fight, barreling Taniguchi with a series of piston-quick punches to the chest. “If it’s all fake, then what am I supposed to be learning here?”

“I didn’t say fake. I said scripted. When you think about it, all real fights are also kinda scripted, more or less.” You frown up at him, confused. “You got a limited set of reactions to draw from in any situation. So does your opponent. High-level fighting’s as much about predicting everyone’s next move as it is about skill.” 

He points down at the arena, where Sakurai is going for a risky uppercut from a low crouch. It connects. Taniguchi’s head snaps back and he falls hard, and you wince in sympathy. “The guy who writes these has a great instinct for movesets and how they fit together. Sure, he’s caterin’ to an audience, but watch how he lines everything up. And it’ll also give you some moves you’ll never get from nice, polite practice sessions at school. Some ideas for when you really wanna get mean.”

It’s difficult for you to visualize a scenario where you might really want to get mean, but once you know what to look for, you think you understand what he meant about the scriptwriter having the right mind for this sort of thing. It doesn’t look, to your admittedly not very experienced eye, like a fake fight. It looks like two men in the throes of a desperate rage giving it their all, throwing their whole weight behind nasty right hooks, ugly grapples, and even a dick shot, which earns an echoing gasp even louder than your own from around the arena, followed by a series of raucous boos. Even Satoru lets out a little urk. 

“I-it’s not against the rules, folks!” says the announcer, hooking a finger under his shirt collar.

Satoru nudges you. “In a serious fight, don’t forget you’re allowed to get nasty. No one’s gonna get on your case for goin’ below the belt.”

“But I thought I was supposed to tell you first if I was going below the belt,” you say, and he throws his head back and laughs. You lean into the sound.

At the end of the match, the underdog pulls through and Shun The Stomp earns his first victory. As he smiles a wide mouthful of blood to the crowd, a tall, slim man in a close-tailored suit approaches the two of you from behind. He tries to tap Satoru on the shoulder and fails.

“‘Scuse me,” he says, baffled but on the recovery. “Boss says he’s got some time during the break.”

“Oh, yeah. C’mon,” says Satoru, jostling your arm. “Let’s go see the bossman.”

“You know him?”

“Sure I do. He’s a student of mine.”

Your escort takes you up a set of crumbling old stairs to the roof of the garage and a small concrete brick of a building that must’ve once housed security. It’s now occupied by a bank of television screens and a plush-looking couch. On the couch is a young woman with a crop top, piercings, and partially dyed hair, practically draped across the lap of a stocky man of indeterminate, but presumably young, age, with a patchy peach-fuzz mustache, an enormous dark fur coat, and a mane of bleached hair.

You’d say the young man reminds you of your brother Daiki during his delinquent phase, but Daiki could never quite manage this level of brash, unfeigned confidence. This guy reminds you of the kind of guy Daiki would try to copy his entire personality off of.

“Hey, my man!” He leaps up to exchange a hard slap of a high-five with Satoru.

Satoru whistles. “You’ve really cleaned up since the last time I came around.”

“I know, right? We’re rakin’ it in!” The young man pumps his arms through the enormous coat. “How’s little man Yuta and the rest of the crew?”

If his time at school overlapped with Yuta, he has to be under twenty. His attention turns to you and an enormous, congratulatory grin splits his face. “Wow, Boss! You finally caught the fever, huh? She’s a hottie!”

You aren’t sure whether getting deemed a hottie by a teenage fight club manager is a boost, a hit, or a net zero to your self-esteem. “It’s, ah, not really like that!” you say with a wave of your hands. “I’m here for… educational purposes?” 

The young man narrows his eyes at the two of you, then bursts out laughing. “Really? Two of you seemed pretty damn cozy out there!”

You eye the bank of television screens behind him, which are displaying footage from security cameras scattered all over the arena. And the premises.

And the audience. 

“He was helping me stand out less,” you say. There’s no way Satoru and his magic eyes missed the cameras. If he was okay with letting this pair see his arm around you, he must not be worried. Still, you needle him with a glance that suggests he’d better pitch in, right now.

“Poor little Ricchan was beggin’ for my protection out there!” He clasps his hands under his chin. “She was soooooooo scared of the big tough audience.”

Maybe he can pitch in a little less.

He makes a broad gesture towards the couch. “Ricchan, meet Hakari Kinji and Hoshi Kirara.” He flops his arms back towards you. “Kin and Kira-chan, Risacchi.”

“Hasegawa Risa,” you correct with a bow. “It’s nice to meet you both.”

The young man—Hakari—barks out another laugh. “Where’d you pick her up, Boss?”

“Don’t be mean, Kin,” says the girl, with a little nudge of her elbow. You feel an immediate rush of affection for her. 

“I’m not!” he protests.

“Gojo-sensei is teaching me sorcery this year,” you say. 

“Dang, for real? Of course the school gets more cute girls after we get the boot.”

“Right in front of me, Kin?” asks Kirara, a little testily, but it sounds more like the well-worn material of a familiar dynamic than real annoyance.

“Speakin’ of,” says Satoru, “not that long until the crusty asshole ban lifts.”

Hakari scowls and throws his arms over the back of the couch. “The hell would I want to come back for? The club’s really taken off. Kira and I are rolling in it.” Kirara looks at him with a proud, catlike smile.

Satoru shrugs. “Somebody needs to come take Yuta down a few pegs. Got no one on his level to challenge him anymore.”

Hakari’s scowl deepends. “You can do that yourself. Whatever. I don’t want to talk about that shit right now. I’m burning hot today and I don’t want to bring down the vibe.”

Satoru shrugs again. “Why don’t ya show me your new rig?”

Hakari’s face brightens again as he shows off, with excitement and pride, how the surveillance system works, how much his employee roster’s grown, how he had to beat back the local crime family to stake out this territory, and his plans for his next series of matches.

You ask Kirara where she bought her frilly crop top. Not that you could pull it off, but it looks great on her. “I made it,” she says, striking a little pose. “That dress is cute, too.” You think you might be willing to die for her.

Hakari’s walkie-talkie system crackles as the next pair of fighters enter the pit. “Catch you next time!” he says, signing off with another ear-splitting smack of the hand with Satoru. “You better get off your ass and make a move on her, dude!” Your ears burn as you hurry back to your spot in the audience, where Satoru laughs at you when you shield your eyes during particularly brutal beatdowns.

Afterwards, you’re too tired to hike all the way to Kegon Falls. You’re happy enough to collapse on the train.

“So. What’d ya think of Kin and Kira-chan?” Satoru asks as the distant Tokyo suburbs flicker by.

Kira-chan seemed nice. Hakari seemed nice too, though you have a pamphlet’s worth of concerns about his welfare, both physical and psychological. “They’re very enterprising young people,” you say, after a moment of diplomatic thought. 

Satoru throws his head back and laughs. “Kin’s got some screws loose! But he’s got a ton of potential. He’ll be great someday. And Kira-chan’s got a good head on her shoulders. Keeps him from goin’ off the deep end.”

“Why are they not in school now?” you ask, tilting your phone to show him the Digimon you just caught. “Is this one good? Should I keep it?”

“Wizardmon? Hell yeah. Put him in your starter lineup.” He taps a long finger against the edge of your screen. “Kin got suspended, Kira-chan dropped out to stay with him.”

Your eyes widen. “What happened?”

He waves a hand. “Typical crap. Kin caught some flack from some clan asshole during the Summer Exchange Event—that’s comin’ up this year, you’ll get to watch—and he didn’t take it lyin’ down. Beat the guy’s ass and got hit with a year suspension.” He grins. “Really wasted the dude, though. Did me proud.”

“I can see why he wouldn’t want to come back anytime soon.” Another new Digimon wanders across your screen. “Is this one good?”

“Nah. Ditch it.”

You delete the unfortunate little monster. “They seemed really happy to see you,” you say. “It’s nice you’re looking out for them a little.”

“It ain’t charity, baby. I’m not gonna not check in on the guy who’ll be a real powerhouse someday.”

“Right. Of course,” you say, glancing up at his furrowed brow with your own small smile, remembering what he’d said to you all those months ago, about having a dream. About wanting to change jujutsu society from the ground up. “You’re a really good teacher, you know that?”

He nudges you with his elbow. “You’re just butterin’ me up ‘cause you want that special grade dickdown when we get home.” You roll your eyes, still smiling.

Back at school, the usual demands on his time close in. He’s sent out on three missions back to back. You’re left practicing on your own, and the two of you barely have time to squeeze in an eager, frantic coupling on his couch before he has to turn right around and get back on a train, this time heading up to, of all places, Sendai.

“Don’t be sad, baby, but I’m takin’ Megumi-chan with me on this one,” he says. 

“Why would I be sad? It’s for the best! There’s a non-zero chance we’d run into my mother or aunties at the train station, coming into the city to go shopping,” you say. And then forty years from now, on your deathbed, your mother, who will somehow outlive you due to the power of pure spite over your never giving her grandchildren, will be asking, Whatever happened to that Gojo fellow we met that one time? He was so handsome!

Of course your breakthrough happens the evening after he leaves. You trot over to the training building, peach energy drink in hand, and tell yourself you’re not allowed to watch the new episode of the My Boss Is A Ghost anime adaptation until you can manage a fully-fledged shroud, even though Keiko is already texting you about the latest wild revelations.

When it happens, it’s almost by accident. You’re stretching your arms behind your head and thinking about what you’ll make for dinner. You’d gotten all the supplies to make the Mischievous Cupid pancakes as a special post-mission treat for Satoru and the kids, but that’ll have to wait now. You’ve still got some eggs left you ought to use up—and when you let your arms drop back to your sides, your cursed energy blooms around them and rises to surround you, twirling like a spring blossom falling from a high branch.

You call Satoru. He answers on the second ring. “I did it!” you say. “I’m doing it right now!”

“Hey, baby. Which assignment?” You can hear him grinning.

You press a hand to your blushing face and almost lose the shroud. He gave you two homework assignments while he’s gone: to practice Falling Blossom Emotion, and to touch yourself and think about him while you do it. “The first one! The first one,” you say. “I did the shroud.”

“Knew you could,” he says proudly, and you grin giddily at the empty room. “I’ll show you how to set up the counter when I get back.”

“Are you at the hotel right now?” You keep your cursed energy spinning. Now that you’ve gotten the hang of it, it’s almost kind of fun, like twirling a hoop on a stick.

“Nah. I’m out shoppin’. Megumi can handle this one himself. You want some Kikufuku mochi?”

“Of course I do! But are you just going to eat it all on the train again?”

“That was a one-time thing!” he huffs defensively. “Hey, if I bought you something cute, would you wear it for me?”

You drop into a lunge, triumphant in the way your cursed energy surges around your every movement. “Like a regular outfit, or like lingerie?”

“Like lingerie! Wanna see you in something really slutty.”

Your heart patters in your ears. “What, are my daisy panties not good enough for you anymore?”

“They’ll always be special to me!” he says. You can picture him clasping a hand to his heart. “But a guy likes a little variety!”

“I do already own some, you know.”

“Yeah, that that loser bought you! Bet his taste’s as boring as the rest of him!”

Actually, it’s some you’d bought yourself, which is probably even more boring by his standards. “Well, if that’s what you want to spend money on.”

“Yesssssssss!” He pauses. “And how ‘bout a maid outfit?”

“You’re really pushing your luck.”

“Not hearing a no-ooooo,” he says in singsong.

You hang up on him. He follows up with a text reading gonna need your measurements :p

You receive another text from him shortly after, addressed not only to you but the entire group chat of current and former first-years: HEYYYYY CHECK IT OUT MEGUMI GOT THE CRAP KICKED OUT OF HIM followed by a heart emoji and a picture of Fushiguro looking sweaty, bloody, and mean.

Is Fushiguro okay???? you type back. It’s another forty-five minutes before Fushiguro himself answers i’m fine, no elaboration. At least you know he’s all right.

They don’t return the next day as planned. Satoru texts, sorry baby still hung up back soon xoxoxo don’t forget the rest of ur homework!!! 

You don’t hear from him again until later that night, when you’re brushing your teeth and about to settle in for a nice, long shojo marathon. RICCHAN, his text reads. got a surprise for u

You type back, it better not be another fight club.

S: noooooooo silly

S: guess!

R: is it fancy underwear?

S: maaaaaaybe. but also something else!

R: is it mochi?

S: maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe

S: and it’s also… your new classmate!

He sends you a grinning selfie beside a young man around Fushiguro’s age, with close-cut reddish hair, a baggy hoodie, and a bashful smile. That explains what’s been taking up all the extra time. You’re relieved it’s not bad news. what’s his name? you ask.

itadori yuji. you’ll like him! nice kid

You expect that you will. He’s got a friendly face.

S: bringing him round tomorrow. i’ll explain the vessel thing when we get there

the what? you reply, but he’s already signed off with see u soooooooon babes

Well, you can make him finish explaining tomorrow.

It’ll be good for Fushiguro to have some company his own age, and it’ll be nice for the classroom to be a little livelier. You’d kind of missed all the current second-years’ noise. 

looking forward to meeting him, you say.

Chapter Text

Itadori Yuji is a sunny-faced, smiling young man who greets you on the walk to the boys’ dorm with a bow and a “Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am!”

“Likewise,” you say, charmed.

“I’m into girls like Jennifer Lawrence!” he announces.

“She was great in Silver Linings Playbook,” you say, still charmed but now a little confused. Maybe that’s how all the kids are introducing themselves these days. “Looking forward to working with you!”

And then a second mouth, teeth and all, opens in the boy’s cheek and says, with a deep, sinous rasp that doesn’t resemble Itadori’s cheerful, youthful voice in the least, “A woman sorcerer, eh?””

Itadori smacks his hand across his own face. “So sorry about that! I haven’t figured out how to make him stop doing that yet—“

The mouth reopens on the back of his hand. Behind the clicking teeth, it appears nauseatingly fully formed, with a meaty flapping tongue. “Your cursed energy tastes sweet. After I take control of this brat’s body and kill him—“ Itadori’s other hand sprouts an extra finger from the wrist, which aims at Satoru, who shrugs with an expression of exaggerated innocence. “You’ll make a fine first meal.”

“Never gonna happen!” says Satoru cheerfully as Itadori swats at the back of his hand like he’s caught a mosquito.

“Really, really sorry about that!” Itadori says again, with a chagrined grimace and a second bow. 

“That’s all right,” you say, shooting a significant look at Satoru, who simply reprises his shrug and Who, me? expression. “Nice to meet you.”

“So, what was that all about?” you ask him later over a B-movie and two bowls of takeout ramen from your favorite shop. This is his apology, because he ate all the mochi on the train. Again.

“He’s really into Jennifer Lawrence,” says Satoru around a mouthful of noodles.

“Who isn’t! She deserved that Oscar!” You jab your chopsticks at him. “You said you were going to explain ‘the vessel thing.’”

He makes you wait while he slurps up a huge knot of noodles. “As of two days ago, Yuji’s possessed by an ancient sorcerer thanks to interactin’ with a cursed object. In his case, one of twenty fingers.” He holds up both hands, fingers splayed. “Gave him an interesting body.”

“Wait, twenty—“ Twenty fingers. Four arms. Ancient sorcerer. “You don’t mean Ryomen Sukuna?”

“Shoulda figured you’d read about him on your little library trips,” he says, tilting his head back and downing the broth at the bottom of his bowl.

Ryomen Sukuna. The most powerful sorcerer to ever live, allegedly. Scourge of the Heian era. Infamous serial cannibal. There’s not a ton of records regarding him to have survived intact, probably because he killed and ate a significant number of the historians.

“Poor Itadori,” you say, frowning down into your half-empty bowl of noodles. Your appetite’s vanished like it’s skipping out on back rent.

“Itadori’s still the dominant personality. In most cases, the host would get suppressed and the incarnated sorcerer would be flyin’ the plane.”

“Well, that’s good, right?” you say, with hesitant optimism. 

“Yes, Risacchi,” he says. “That is good. It’s a super rare ability. One in a thousand, or less.”

“He was really lucky, then.” You don’t like thinking about the statistically likelier alternative.

“Yeah, he was.” He pops the tab on a second can of melon soda, scowling. “Higher-ups don’t see it that way, though. Three guesses what they wanna do with him, and the first two don’t count.”

Yuta had been slated for execution. “I’m glad you were there with him,” you say, lifting your hand to lay on his arm before you think the better of it. You curl it back around your still-warm bowl, a little embarrassed. 

“Really pisses me off,” he says finally. “Such a damn waste. I couldn’t get ‘em to agree to lay off entirely. Best I could do was a stay of execution. He’s on the hook until he’s absorbed the other nineteen fingers, and then he gets the axe.”

“Oh.” You blink. “How does he…”

“Eats ‘em,” he says.

You’re definitely going to need a minute before you’re able to finish the rest of your dinner. “How long will that take?”

“Years and years,” he says with a flick of his hand. “Only some of ‘em are in known locations. We might not even be able to find all twenty at all! Wouldn’t that be a pain in the ass?”

You bite your lip on a smile at his shit-eating grin. You wouldn’t put it past him to know exactly where at least some of them are, and to get there first.

“Y’know, Ricchan, I thought you’d be kinda freaked out!” He wiggles his fingers at you before pulling your unfinished bowl of ramen towards himself.

“Hey! I wasn’t done!”

 “Like, ooooh, sharing the classroom with an ancient killer! How scary!”

You drag the bowl back to your side of the coffee table. “I mean, I don’t love the idea of sharing classroom time with a thousand-year-old cannibal ghost, but that’s not really Itadori’s fault, is it?”

“Most of the higher-ups wouldn’t agree with ya—“

“And Yaga-sensei let him in. I trust his judgment.”

“Nothin’ about my judgment, huh?” He tickles your arm and you giggle and swat at his hand.

“I hope he and Fushiguro get along. It’ll be nice for him to have someone his own age around.”

“Megumi’s the one who put in a good word for him,” Satoru says proudly. “And it’s about to get even livelier around here, ‘cause we’re pickin’ up another new first-year tomorrow!”

“Oh, really? Is that girl—Kugisaki?—finally able to start?”

“Got it in one. We’ll go pick her up at the station tomorrow. Give her a warm Tokyo welcome.”

Maybe the ghost of Ryomen Sukuna is just in a good mood, or maybe Itadori has successfully managed to suppress him, but no second mouths have anything to say on the journey into the city to Harajuku Station. Itadori’s happy to chatter in the direction of Fushiguro, who tolerates it with better spirit than you’ve seen from him yet, and spends the train ride explaining the merits of the various entries in the Human Earthworm film franchise. You exit the station with a nigh-encyclopedic knowledge of every frame of Human Earthworm Five.

“Why are we here in Harajuku, anyway?” Itadori asks.

“She asked us to meet her here,” replies Satoru.

You don’t have to search for very long. The last member of the first-year class is accosting one of those street hawkers who’s always trying to pressure passing girls into a “modeling” job with a shitty contract. You can’t blame her. Two seconds off the train and some stranger’s already on her case.

“You’re looking for a model, right?” she says as you drift into earshot. “I’m asking about myself!” Well, never mind that, then. Still serves him right.

“We’re gonna talk to her?” Itadori asks around a mouthful of popcorn. “How embarrassing.”

“Look who’s talking,” hisses Fushiguro.

Satoru nudges you. “Hey, maybe you should go see if that guy wants to give you a contract.”

“I aged out of the modeling industry, like, a full decade ago,” you say as he cups his hands around his mouth to call out, “Hey! Over here!”

It doesn’t escape your notice—or his own, you’re certain—how much attention he’s getting from various nearby young women. When he shouts, a flurry of giggles and whispers flicker through the surrounding passerby, like a lightning strike starting a brushfire.

Nobara Kugisaki has chin-length auburn hair, a full face of painstakingly applied makeup, and a hundred-meter stare exceeded only by Maki’s. “Lucky you, getting to hang out with a girl like me,” she says, one hand braced on her hip, and lets out a pained sigh after the boys introduce themselves. Poor Itadori is sweating.

“And who’re you?” she says, turning towards you. “Another teacher?”

“No, not at all!” you say with a self-deprecating laugh. “I’m also a student! I’m re-skilling.”

“Oh,” she says flatly, tilting her head. You’re starting to feel Itadori’s pain.

“Where are we going?” asks Fushiguro, presumably in an effort to steer this conversation anywhere else.

Satoru tilts his head back. “Heh heh… we finally have all three of you together, plus Hasegawa. And two of you are new to Tokyo. So let’s do it…a Tokyo tour!”

The two newcomers hop all over him, squealing the names of various tourist destinations—Chinatown, Tokyo Tower, Disneyland. You exchange flat glances with Fushiguro. There’s no way you’re going to Disneyland.

“Silence!” Satoru raises a hand. “I shall now announce the destination!” He pauses for dramatic effect. “Roppongi!”

It’s a crumbling-down old warehouse next to a cemetery. Kugisaki and Itadori go through all five stages of grief before they’re sent inside on their first field mission. You’re left on a bench outside with Satoru and Fushiguro, who’s none too pleased to be excluded.

“That kid Yuji,” says Satoru, tapping one temple, “is crazy up here. Even though they’re obviously different, curses still take the form of living things, and they’re trying to kill him. Up against that, he doesn’t hesitate to fight. He’s not familiar with curses from a young age like you. We’re talkin’ about a guy who was your average high school student.”

Crazy in the head or not, that can’t be easy for him. You had a difficult enough transfer period, even as someone familiar with curses from your youth.

“There are jujutsu sorcerers with great potential, but if they can’t get over their fear or disgust of curses, they won’t be able to hack it. You’ve seen it before, right, Megumi? Just look at Ricchan here,” he says, nudging you with his elbow.

“Hey!” you say, glaring at him.

“Hey what! You’re putting in your year and you’re dropping out! And there ain’t nothin’ wrong with that. It’s not for everybody.”

You don’t know why your lips are pursing and your brow is crinkling with displeasure. He isn’t saying anything you haven’t said yourself, both in the privacy of your own mind and in public, before various witnesses, multiple times. You want to leave sorcery. You want to rejoin society as soon as possible.

You don’t have what it takes.

Still, you fold your hands in your lap and twiddle your thumbs, chewing the inside of your cheek, as he says, “Today, I wanna see how crazy she can get.”

“But she’s experienced,” says Fushiguro. “Isn’t that enough?”

“Curses are born from people. The number and strength depend on an area’s population. Compared to the country, the curses in Tokyo are on a whole other level.”

A worrying series of bangs and crashes erupts from the upper floors of the warehouse. You think maybe someone ought to have put a curtain down. You absolutely think someone ought to have put a curtain down when the furry silhouette of a bug-eyed curse leaps from one of the upper windows and blots out the sun.

“I’m gonna exorcise it,” says Fushiguro, jumping to his feet.

“Hold on,” says Satoru.

The curse smokes and crumbles to dust before it strikes the pavement. “Good,” he says. “She’s plenty crazy.” 

Itadori and Kugisaki exit the building with an elementary-school-aged boy, thankfully unharmed, and Satoru sends him on his way home before treating the entire lot of you to bullet train sushi. Itadori and Kugisaki squabble over passing plates while Fushiguro reads manga on his phone and Satoru surveys his small kingdom with a proud, generous smile.

Back on campus at the girls’ dorm, Kugisaki has some choice words for you. “I can’t believe you took the good room!” she says, throwing an accusatory glare and extended finger at you as you try to sidle around her with your laundry basket.

“It was only me and Maki at the time,” you say apologetically. “The whole rest of the first floor is open. I promise I don’t make a lot of noise!”

“I know, but I wanted a whole floor to myself!”

“The second floor is—“

“I don’t want to have to drag my shopping up the stairs every time!” she says through gritted teeth, which is, naturally, the same reason you chose your room by the entrance. 

“Should you even be in here?” she asks, bracing her hands on her hips as you struggle with the door. “I mean, you’re an adult.”

“You know, it’s funny you should say that,” you say, thinking about your application for a staff apartment, which at the moment is presumably still sitting on Yaga-sensei’s desk. 

In the end, she takes the room closest to the stairs on the second floor, having evidently decided an entire floor to herself was worth the price of the hike. Some mornings you can hear her loud pop music drifting down the staircase and feel absolutely ancient.

As fellow grade threes, you’re expecting you’ll be paired with her for your first mission of July, but Satoru wakes you up with a tap on your window. Even without your contacts, it’s easy to see the wide white gleam of his grin. “Goooood moooooooorning, my sweet Ricchan! Guess what?”

“What?” you ask, rubbing at one bleary eye. 

“I got good news and bad news!” He claps his hands together. “Which one do you want first? Wait, let me guess! Bad.”

“Uh-huh,” you say, still blinking. “Give me the bad.”

“We’re on a mission together—“

“And what’s the good news?” you interrupt.

He sticks out his tongue at you. “You’re on car duty.”

“Blegh,” you say. It was only a matter of time before the lead assistant manager—a frankly terrifying woman named Ishikawa who could scatter the scariest senior staff in your old HR department like bowling pins—expected you to start substituting in again.

“You’ll be on car duty…” He claps a drumroll against his own thigh. “In Kagoshima.”

You cautiously shuck your curtain the rest of the way open. “Really? Weekend trip?”

“Really really! Me and Ricchan, on a weekend vacation!” He snaps his fingers. “Got Ijichi reservin’ the hotel right now!”

You clap your hands and hop up on your toes. “I want to go swimming after the mission!”

“You know we’re gonna hit the pool!”

“I want to see Sakurajima!”

“Mountain vistas for days!”

“I want to soak in a hot spring!”

“You and me! Soakin’ ‘til we’re pruny!” He snaps his fingers at you again. “Flight goes out this afternoon, so you better get your bag packed. Bring a cute swimsuit.”

“I’ll start packing right now!” you squeal, yanking the curtain into place. You flick it back open to beam at him before sliding it closed again.

The last time you flew anywhere was your grad school graduation trip to Hawaii. Satoru’s made Ijichi spring for first class, which he “needs” on account of his “stature.” You have to admit, if you had his long legs, attempting to fold yourself into an economy seat like an origami project would be a miserable prospect. 

You play rock, paper, scissors to determine who gets the window seat. His paper beats your rock, and he smirks unbearably as he gently covers your fist with his broad palm, only to break out his complimentary eye mask seconds after takeoff. 

You swill your cup of black coffee at him. “Did you seriously cheat me out of the window seat, only to sleep the whole time?”

He passes you an earbud from his headphones so you can both enjoy his Banger Road Trip Playlist in the air. “You can have your turn on the way back, babe.”

“Ugh! Fine.” You dig the book you brought for in-flight entertainment out of your carryon. “Do you want to use my neck pillow?”

He slings your pink traveler’s pillow around his neck and spends the entire two-hour flight from Haneda dozing, and you can’t really bring yourself to be annoyed. He’s as sleep-deprived as usual, and you can see the view out the window well enough from your aisle seat. You watch the rumpled, shining surface of the ocean slide by and listen to the city pop he’s curated for you.

Ijichi already reserved a rental car for the two of you at Kagoshima airport, and he also has fantastic taste. Your hotel is a beautiful bayside ryokan with its own private springs and views of the Sakurajima volcano from every room on the east side. You have to stop yourself from skipping through the airy, sun-drenched lobby in front of the smiling middle-aged woman handling the desk. 

“On your honeymoon?” she asks, before her brow furrows as she double-checks the reservation. “Oh, separate rooms?”

“Business trip!” you correct her cheerfully, briefly meeting Satoru’s smirk as she turns away to grab your keys.

You visit your room just long enough to stow your bag and then scoot right down the hall to Satoru’s, already spinning fantasies of the two of you making up for missed opportunities and spending the evening naked, dripping, and entwined in your own private spring. 

He greets you at the door in an unbuttoned flower-print shirt and shimmies his shoulders as you duck around him, laughing. He has to change again into his mission gear, and you perch at the foot of the bed, beside a gift box tied with a frilly red ribbon, and flip through the hotel literature while you wait. 

“Where’s the mission going to be at?”

“Old abandoned vacation house south around the bay.”

“How’d that get a grade one?” As he’d emphasized to Fushiguro, curses are born from people’s anxieties. The kind of sustained, widespread fear capable of producing a grade one isn’t common.

He holds up a finger. “Excellent question, star student! Some corny ghost hunters did a webshow in there, and they hit it big on social media. Bunch of fake crap, but got the kids all freaked out and riled up. Made a real curse.”

You set the brochure aside. “Am I going in first?”

He ties his blindfold over his raised eyebrows. “You’re askin’ to?” He tilts his head. “What’d you do with my Risacchi?” He makes a show of bending over and looking under the bed.

You raise your hands. “I assumed you’d make me!”

“You can if you wanna, but this is one of my my missions.” He wags a single finger. “Estimated at a grade one. I was gonna let you sit back and be my sexy cheerleader for a change.”

You cross your arms, the words he’d said to Fushiguro rattling around between your ears. 

They’re still bothering you just because you don’t like feeling like you’re failing at something. That’s all. “I want to try. I’m here to learn, aren’t I?”

“That’s my little honor student. Guess I’m just gonna have to be your sexy cheerleader this time, huh?” He leans down for a kiss and tweaks your chin with his thumb, then leads in to murmur in your ear, “I’m gonna give you a real nice reward for volunteering later,” and chuckles when your cheeks flare before tapping the box. “Speakin’ of presents. Go on, open it up.”

Inside, nestled in red tissue paper and strung with tags you think are in French, is a set of delicate black lingerie, garterbelt and all. “I hope you didn’t spend too much money,” you say. It’s obviously far more expensive—and far more daring—than anything from your own wardrobe. He was not kidding about something really slutty.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s a present for me, too, y’know,” he says, lifting his blindfold up for a wink.

You hold up the tiny lace thong on your index fingers. You’re happy to wear something he chose for you, but you’re not convinced you won’t look ridiculous. You’re going to come in dead last in the costume contest, the theme being “first shift on duty at the sex club.” Not that you’d know. You’ve never been to one.

“You got a killer figure, baby,” he says. “You really oughta show it off more.”

“I have heard it said that it’s bangin’,” you say as you tuck the silk and lace back beneath the tissue paper.

“Who said that? He was so right!” He swats a light, playful smack to your ass. “C’mon, let’s get movin’! We’re burning hot spring time!”

The coordinates provided by Ijichi take you through the crush of Kagoshima evening traffic and onto the expressway curling south, along the bay towards Ibusuki. The summer air is soupy and sticky and floods the car with the tang of sea spray, since Satoru cranks the windows down.

Satoru directs you off the expressway and into a series of hairpin turns and rolling hills, the riotous, lush forest closing around you in a verdant tunnel. “Turn right at the bottom of the hill here,” he says, reading off Ijichi’s directions.

You squint into the glare of sunset, mottled by the dense trees. “Is there really a road here?”

There is a road, a crumbling mess that your car lurches onto with grumbles of protest from the tires. You creep along, flinching every time you strike so much as a root, fearing for the state of the rental car. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Satoru whines, jiggling your elbow. “Hot spring time! We’re burning it!”

“If you want to decide how fast the car goes, you can learn to drive,” you grumble as you navigate around a fallen log that nearly obstructs the road.

The forest finally retreats as you pull onto the crumpled remains of a circular drive around a decorative fountain, clotted with rainwater and algae. The house doesn’t look that old—the minimalist concrete-and-glass style dates it after the turn of the century, and there was obviously plenty of money shoveled into its construction—but it’s just as obviously stood empty for most of that time, the glass walls cloudy with sea grit and mossy grime, like a dirty aquarium. 

“I got an idea, baby,” Satoru says as you try the front door. “Ain’t you going to ask me what it is?”

You inspect the rusty lock. “What is it?”

“Well, I was thinking—you already deserve a nice treat from sensei for volunteering for classroom duty—“ He grins as you glance at him over your shoulder. “But depending on how you handle this mission, I might add on somethin’ extra special.”

You shoulder check the door. It rattles in the frame. “Is it pork tonkatsu?” You’re already hungry.

“Nah. You’re already gettin’ that for sure.” He sidles up beside you and pops the door open with a causal twist of his wrist, then leans down to murmur in your ear, “And if you get a good grade tonight, I’ll go down on you.”

The door creaks open, muffled by the sudden rush and thump of blood in your ears.

He’s used his mouth on you before, but not often, presumably because he likes having it free to talk. You can’t complain, since It isn’t like he hasn’t been putting in the work to get you off through various other methods.

But you’d like to try it again tonight. And apparently, judging by the surge of heat between your legs, you like the idea of earning it.

He gestures to the open doorway with a smirk. “Ladies first.”

The living room beyond is as broad as a museum gallery, the obvious pride of the house, and smeared with murky brightness, the vague outline of the distant volcano smudged through the filthy glass. The floors are veined white marble. The only furniture is a moth-eaten old couch draped in a translucent tarp and a stained, battered coffee table beside a yawning fireplace. 

There’s a creaking noise from somewhere above you. You crane your neck back. A decorative steel light fixture dangles from the high, vaulted ceiling, and swinging from the light fixture is a cheap plastic sandal, twitching in a breeze you don’t feel. Maybe one of the ghost-hunting kids tossed it up there.

The door slams shut behind you and locks with a click. 

Satoru slumps against it with his arms crossed. “Go get ‘em, baby!” You salute. “You need me to tap in, just yell.”

“Oh, I’ll yell all right,” you say, warmed by your gratitude as you shift into a combat stance. “I’ll throw a whole bitch fit.”

The curse pours out of the fireplace like the last sluggish dregs from a bottle of oil. It’s around Satoru’s height and the grey-green color of the gunk caking the glass walls, with a massive slotted eye where its mouth should be and a cross-shaped mouth where its eyes should be. It’s gnawing on the other matching sandal.

It knuckles itself forward on the sturdier of its two sets of arms like a primate, dragging its vestigial legs behind it on the grimy floor. It looks slow. You’ll have the advantage if you strike first. You move to close the gap.

After all, Satoru’s watching, and you’ve got something to prove.

Not only for his so-called special reward, and not only to him, but to yourself. That your decision to leave sorcery is due entirely to your own preference. That you could hack the job. That if you wanted to, you could choose to stay. 

You line up for your first swing, reinforced by a flare of cursed energy that you think, in a fit of vanity, could rival even Yuta. But before you can brace yourself in front of the curse, your loafers lift up off the dirty floor and you rocket up towards the ceiling, falling headfirst.

You take the impact on your shield and right yourself out of a handstand, grateful for every single miserable gymnastics drill Maki and her springy, youthful joints have put you through. The sandal slaps onto the ceiling beside you, followed by the thud of the couch, its ragged tarp crackling. And then the curse slams into you fistfirst, its blow reinforced by the altered gravity.

You could roll to dodge, but you take the hit and counter by setting off your shield. The curse wails, a strange, discordant multitone, like a child smacking a hand against a piano, and falls backward out of your reach. 

It lands hard against the floor, surveying you with its head wrenched to one side in a curious tilt. You’re sure Satoru’s fine, but you check in on him anyway. He’s still in the same position at the door, one hand up in the sign he uses for his Limitless, still and unmovable as he watches you through his blindfold. Well, you’ll give him something to watch. 

The curse tilts its head back and forth before the room wheels around you again, your head whirling along with it, and you unpeel from the ceiling and fall down towards it. Its cross-shaped mouth unzips like the rind of a grapefruit, splitting its head into four thrashing flaps lined with gleaming steel.

You curl your knees up against your chest to control your fall, jarring your arm as you slot your staff between its jaws like a stick into the mouth of a dog, and punch its wagging chin before you drop onto the floor. The curse swats at you with its tandem arms, and just to show off, just to show Satoru that you can, you switch off your technique and surround yourself with the shroud of Falling Blossom Emotion. The net of cursed energy catches both blows and turns them back on the curse with a shriek.

When you throw a glance over your shoulder at Satoru, he’s smiling.

The curse regroups and comes at you swinging, lifting the both of you into the air, loose and weightless, like the footage you’ve seen of astronauts in flight. You take a punch, swing at with your staff, but the lack of friction is messing with your muscle memory and you give it a light swat on the shoulder instead of a deathblow to the head.

“I got the best seat in the house down here!” calls Satoru with a snicker.

From this angle, he’s got a perfect line of sight up your billowing skirt. You’re giving him something to watch, all right.

“You’ve seen it all already!” you snap as you block a heavy punch from the curse with your staff, then counter with a kick and a strike. The momentum of your own blows drives you backwards. 

“But it’s my favorite show, baby!”

“Stop distracting me!” 

The curse winds up for a punch that will send you crashing back towards the couch, which is drifting in slow orbit near one of the cracked glass walls. You bring up your shield and let it. It’s a hard strike, and you slam into the couch at a bad angle, your thigh against the exposed wooden frame. But that works out in your favor, because you discharge your shield in a narrow ray behind you, sending the couch flying into the glass with a creaking thump, and you in the opposite direction, right towards the curse.

As you close the distance, you jerk your elbow back to line up your strike, and for a single shining moment, you can see the path it’s about to take through the air, a flawless arc that will meet the center of the curse’s skull. The same way you used to sometimes know, in the seconds before it was going to happen, that you would hit a home run, like you were already watching the ball sail free across the bleachers even before you heard the crack of the bat.

Your arm is moving, tracing that perfect, effortless curve, and then your staff smacks against the curse’s thick head and erupts with a flurry of blazing dark sparks, the crackling afterimage of a lightning strike.

That strange charge surges through you like the rush of liquid heat in your blood after a shot of liquor. The curse shrieks, staggers, thrashing its final throes. The recoil of your strike sends you careening at at a diagonal towards a corner of the room. 

The curse is going to use its gravity power again. You can feel it the millisecond it begins to shift, a twinge in your skull, a tiny lurch like an airplane veering into descent. You catch the toe of your loafer on the chain of the chandelier and slingshot yourself back at the curse, flinging yourself against the new surge of gravity.

Your arm rises again, as if by its own volition, for another clean, perfect strike. Your staff pops against the curse’s skull. This time, it dies.

As soon as the curse dissolves, gravity rights itself, but you don’t fall. Instead, you drift gently down into Satoru’s waiting arms. He spins you over his head like a helicopter blade with a whoop and you shriek, and you squeal as he tosses you up in the air, free and weightless. “I have not been motivating you right!” he says as he gathers you in his arms and sets you on the ground, his arms still twined around you. “If I’d been giving it to you from the start, you’d be grade one right now.”

“Please don’t credit both of our hard work to your dick,” you sigh, smiling, as he tucks your hair behind your ear, then bends down for a kiss. “What was that? That wasn’t Black Flash, was it?” You’ve never seen one performed in real life before, but you’ve looked at pictures. Read descriptions in textbooks. 

You didn’t expect to ever hit one before leaving school. After all, some career sorcerers never get that lucky in their lifetime.

“Duh! Of course that was Black Flash, baby! Your first ever!” He pumps his fist, grinning widely.

You can still feel that dark tide surging through your blood, your cursed energy galloping in time with your racing heart. “I don’t even know how it happened!”

He taps your nose. “It’s ‘cause my little star student’s been busting her ass! You did so good.”

You survey your clenched fist, laughing, drunk on heady triumph. “It feels amazing!”

You’d wanted your proof. You think you’ve gotten it.

You aren’t due back in Tokyo for another day and a half. Ijichi scheduled your return flight for the morning after next, to give you plenty of time to carry out the mission, and now you can enjoy a day and night of vacation. It’s full dark by the time you return to the hotel.

Satoru tweaks the strap of your bra through your blouse the second the door’s closed. “Why don’t you go slip into somethin’ a little more comfortable, and then you can have your reward from sensei.”

“If you think that getup’s going to be comfortable, you’re out of your mind,” you say on your way to his bathroom.

He must have used the measurements he demanded you send him, because everything fits perfectly, but you have to work up your courage in front of the pitiless bathroom mirror before you come out to show him. You still feel like you’re attempting to cosplay someone far more sexy and interesting.

“Baby, what’s the holdup?” he calls through the door. “I coulda watched a whole movie!”

You strike a hesitant pose in the doorway, a little abashed. But the appreciation that glows in his eyes when he gets his first glimpse of you is genuine and obvious, flaring into lust as his gaze traces down your figure. Your nipples tighten beneath the translucent black lace. 

“Knew you’d look so fucking hot in that.” He twirls his index finger. “C’mon. Show it all off for me.”

“Maybe next time you should wear the slutty underwear,” you say as you turn in a hesitant, self-conscious circle.

“Ooooh, you gonna pick it out for me?”

“Sure, but I don’t have your budget, so don’t expect too much.”

He crooks his finger towards himself. “C’mere, sweetheart. Time for your gold star.”

You get halfway across the carpet before his finger twitches again and you glide across the room to land, giggling, in his lap. He gives your thong a playful tweak as he arranges your spread thighs, fondling your breasts through the thin lace between long, slow kisses.

“Don’t forget, baby,” he says as he reclines backwards, easily repositioning your knees to either side of his head and shifting your thong out of the way, “you earned this.”

“Y-you want to do it like this?” you ask, bracing yourself on your knees. Every other time he’s eaten your pussy, you’ve been the one reclining. You’ve never sat on his face before. You’ve never sat on anyone’s face before.

“Relax. I’m gonna do all the work.” He plucks at one of your garters as he slides his hands into place to grip your hips. “And stop worryin’. I can make you weightless.”

When you finally relax your thighs, you marvel at how you float in space as if in water, pinned by his firm grip on your hips. “That’s it, baby. Just like that,” he says before he lowers you onto his mouth.

Your breath flutters in your throat as he teases your clit with his tongue. You’re not sure what to do with your hands. You thread them through his hair, then lace them tighter at his groan of approval, clamping down in earnest with a spasm of your hips and a low moan when he slips his tongue inside you. 

He lifts you off his mouth just long enough to murmur, “You taste sweet,” and you figure, coming from a man who adds sugar to everything, you’ll just have to take his word for it.

Just like he promised during your first encounter, he makes you scream.

When you ask if you can return the favor, he says, with his lopsided grin, “Ain’t like I’m gonna say no,” and gives you a long, deep kiss, making you taste yourself on his lips, before cupping your chin in one hand, stroking your cheek with his thumb, and saying, “You ever let that boring dude give you a facial?”

You’ve never done that before, either, and it ain’t like you’re gonna say no.

You return to your own hotel room to sleep. For the sake of plausible deniability, and for the sake of the unspoken rule that you don’t actually spend the night in his bed. But you have breakfast together the next morning, followed by a long soak in the hot spring like the world’s happiest meatball, and when you return to his room to change back into your street clothes, you end up falling right back between the sheets.

“We still have the whole afternoon,” you say as you brace your head on his shoulder. “Pool or ferris wheel? Oooh, or we could do the stamp rally!”

“Of course you’d love stamp rallies, Risacchi,” he says, stroking your arm. 

“I do love stamp rallies.” You like anything that makes you feel like you’re getting a good grade.

“We can do the stamp rally if you wanna. How ‘bout this—loser has to do everything the winner wants for the whole rest of the day.” He pinches your arm.

“Deal.” If you win, you wonder if you can demand a rain check so you can make him use his technique to run errands back in Tokyo. “You better not use jujutsu to cheat, though.”

“I would never!” He holds up his hands. “Don’t need to! You’re gonna eat my dust.”

His phone chimes on the nightstand. You recognize the ringtone he’s assigned to calls from Ijichi. “Gimme a sec, baby,” Satoru says, and rolling over to grab it.

“I hope they’re not assigning you to another mission already,” you say. “I can run outside and twist my ankle really fast if you need it.” He nudges you with his elbow and a grin.

“Yo,” he says into the receiver. Ijichi’s voice is raised on the other end of the line. As you watch, propped up on your elbow, the grin slides off his face, replaced by a stony expression and utter silence. You’ve never seen him sit so still.

“Why would you send first years on—Yeah. Yeah,” he says, voice low and flat. “Yeah. Tell Shoko to wait for me.” He hangs up with a jab of his finger and sits in place, eyes locked on the milky afternoon light sifting through the latticed windows, staring through the sweeping shoulder of the mountain, across the open sea, all the way back to Tokyo.

You reach out to stroke his back and get trapped by his infinity. “What is it?” you ask, withdrawing your hand. “What’s wrong?”

He turns his chin back towards you, his eyes the bleak, empty blue of a cloudless winter sky.

“Itadori Yuji’s dead.”

Chapter Text

You jerk up onto your knees, fists clamping in the rumpled bedclothes. 

Just before you’d left school, Itadori had been teaching Fushiguro how to make meatballs. You heard them laughing together in the kitchen—well, Itadori was laughing, you’ve still never heard Fushiguro laugh—when you went to stash some groceries in the shared fridge. He had a sweet laugh. A sweet laugh for a sweet-tempered kid.

He isn’t going to get to watch the new Human Earthworm movie. You saw a trailer for it the other day. You don’t know why that, of all things, brings you to the edge of tears.

“I’ll drive us to the airport now,” you say, scrambling off the bed and darting to the bathroom for your clothes. The air conditioning in this room is unbearably cold, and you’re naked. “Did Ijichi change our flights?”

“He’s tryin’. Doesn’t make a difference now, anyways,” Satoru says, his gaze swiveling to the blank screen of his phone. “Shoko’s gonna wait on me for the autopsy.”

You take too long to dress yourself, your fingers chilled and clumsy, but when you return to the bed, he’s still in the same place, utterly bleak and still, the sunlight falling on his hair as white as a snowdrift. 

“I’ll drive us there anyway and we can try talking to the ticketing agent,” you say. “Unless you want to wait for word from Ijichi.”

He finally glances over at you, a quick dart of the eyes, not seeing you at all. “This ain’t your problem, Risacchi,” he says. “I’ll get a cab. You can go back tomorrow.”

“Why would I do that?” you ask, your own voice suddenly very loud in your ears.

“There ain’t nothing either of us can do now. You might as well get some rest.” Before he yanks his blindfold on, you catch a glimpse of the hollows beneath his eyes. 

The same principle applies to him, too, but there’s no way he’d ever stay. “If you’re going back early, I’ll go with you,” you say, fisting your hands. “Unless… if you could just use your technique, then you should go ahead.”

“Nah. Doesn’t work like that.” He stretches out his shoulders. Paces around you to retrieve his own clothes. You can almost feel a plunge in the air pressure around him when he nearly brushes against you. Would have brushed against you, if he didn’t have his technique active. “We’re way out of range. That was the whole damn point.”

“The whole p—“ Your numbed, too-slow brain limps to catch up with his implication. “It wasn’t an accident.”

“Nah, baby.” He yanks his shirt over his shoulders. “It wasn’t an accident.”

Kagoshima airport is an hour up the expressway from the city proper. It was a long drive down after your flight from Tokyo, and it’s a longer drive now, trapped between bumpers in weekend traffic. Satoru keeps the windows down, but you’re shivering even in the hot, thick summer air, as warm as breath. 

“Did Ijichi tell you what happened?” you ask, your eyes on the expressway creeping by, meter by meter, in front of you. 

“The first-years,” he says, “all got slapped with some bullshit mission in a juvenile detention center. Cursed womb manifestation. Potential special-grade.” He braces his elbow on the car door and sets his scowling chin in his cupped hand. “‘Course it woke up during the mission.”

You switch on your turn signal as you veer north with the expressway past Aira. Its click makes you flinch, like the safety coming off a handgun. “If I wasn’t here, driving,” you say, “I would’ve been with them too.” 

Maybe you could have done something. Maybe one more pair of hands, one more set of fists, would have made the difference. Instead, you were here, frolicking in a hot spring, romping around in the hotel sheets with your teacher, being utterly fucking useless.

“Nah, you wouldn’t have.”

You glance over at him snapping his blindfold. “I dunno if they planned to send you here with me or just got lucky, but either way, they never woulda sent you on that mission.” He lifts his chin, curls his hand into a fist, and smacks it into the opposite palm. “Crusty old bastards ain’t takin’ no for an answer. Maybe I should go straight to HQ and finally off ‘em.”

He says this so easily, so casually, betrayed only by his white-knuckled grip on his own hand. “Would you?” you ask, barely more than a whisper, fighting to keep your focus on the road.

“Been thinkin’ about it for years,” he says, his voice rising before he reins it back under control. “Every time they pull some shit like this. Only thing that stops me is that it wouldn’t work. They’d just replace ‘em with new ones. And no one would stand with me afterwards. People don’t like massacres.”

You let that sit for a moment, because you can’t think about that and drive at the same time, and the traffic on the expressway is picking up. The hot wind grabs your hair in fistfuls and slaps at your cheeks. For a second, you’re clutched by a pounding wave of fury, your head ringing with that killer instinct he’s always telling you that you lack. Maybe he should pay a visit to HQ. Maybe you like the idea of going with him. 

The rage passes through you, a quick, hard rain down a storm drain, and you’re left hollow and numb again.

“Nothing you could’ve done, Risacchi,” he says, and you feel the weight of his eyes on you even without looking, even through his blindfold.

“It’s not your fault either,” you say quietly around your tight throat, against the howling wind. 

For a moment you think he didn’t hear you, until his fist claps down on his knee and he says, “Hell yes, it’s my fault. My fault for thinking they wouldn’t go this far!” 

You flinch. “But what about Fushiguro? Kugisaki?” That’s a steep price to pay for getting rid of Itadori, even for people accustomed to the idea of executing children.

“They ain’t big fans of Megumi either. His dad was Zen’in. Left the clan, but Megumi was supposed to go to them. He’s in the line of succession, and they hate it.” He slumps back in his seat and flicks his blindfold. “Nobara, I guess they didn’t give a shit. More where she came from. Got a family technique.”

“Are they okay?” 

“They’ll pull through. Both in the infirmary.” Your ribs contract in a slow sigh of relief. 

Ijichi calls when you’re fifteen minutes out from the airport. He’s found an alternate flight, but you’ll have to hurry. You just barely manage to hustle through security in time to board.

It’s your turn for the window seat. You stare out over the blank slate of the water. Satoru puts his earbuds in, but you don’t think he’s actually listening to anything. The two hours crawl by, second by aching second.

Ijichi’s waiting with the car when you land in Tokyo, and the drive back to school flickers by like a presenter skipping through half a slide deck. The sky through the temple gates is golden by the time you get home.

“Get some rest, Risacchi,” says Satoru, flicking a hand over his shoulder as he and Ijichi head for the infirmary. “I’ll see ya later.”

You don’t go rest. You also head for the infirmary, after stopping by the dorm to pick up some snacks for Fushiguro and Kugisaki. You’ve already gotten accustomed to Kugisaki’s loud pop music. Without it, the dorm is silent as a catacomb.

Fushiguro’s bed is empty. Kugisaki is sitting upright with her head swaddled in a helmet of bandages, sucking down a strawberry milk and flicking through a beauty magazine. She’s a little perplexed by the snacks, but she thanks you.

“Of course I’m fine,” she says, scrubbing at one red eye with the heel of her hand. “I barely knew him.”

You glimpse Fushiguro by accident on the way out. He’s in a private room on the first floor with the door cracked open, sitting vigil by the bedside of a young woman around his own age, maybe slightly older. Her hands are clasped on her chest like a corpse arranged for funeral, her long dark hair loose across her pillows, her pale, drawn face adrift across it like the moon. 

Fushiguro doesn’t look up when he hears your footsteps, if he hears them. You don’t interrupt their privacy. But you pass Ijichi on the way out. “His elder sister,” he says. “She’s been here long-term.”

If it’s something Shoko can’t fix, it must be serious.

You don’t know how long an autopsy ought to take. You’ve never seen one in real life. The ones on television are always quick, efficient, bloodless. You don’t want to think about Itadori’s ribs splayed open on a metal table, so you don’t. You take your sweet time in the dorm kitchen—not difficult, considering that every movement takes three times as long as it should—before you head for Satoru’s apartment, foil-covered dish in tow.

He’s home. He’s still in his mission gear and blindfold. “Ricchan,” he says quietly, opening the door a little wider, but not wide enough to admit you.

He seems, paradoxically, more composed than he did earlier today. He’s lost that bleak, hollow scowl. He’s tapping a restless finger against the doorframe. 

But then again, he’s accustomed to this sort of thing.

He’s lost teachers, comrades, students. That’s the job.

You hoist the covered dish off your hip. “I made you chicken karaage,” you say, “and fries.” There’s an air fryer in the lounge that the kids bought on one of their kitchenware binges.

He eyes the dish, his blindfold crinkling as his brow furrows. “It’s okay if you’re not hungry,” you say down to the dish. “I just thought, since you need to eat anyway, you might want…”

He just wants to be alone right now. This was such a stupid idea. “I can just leave it, if you want,” you finish, still addressing the dish.

He throws the door the rest of the way open. “You wanna eat, sweetheart?”

You aren’t hungry, but you’d rather be here, picking over cold fried chicken, than anywhere else right now. “Yeah,” you mumble, shuffling in after him.

You make up plates and eat them on his couch while he turns a movie on. You couldn’t say what it is or what it’s about or who’s in it. Images flicker by across the screen, empty, static, and meaningless.

“You doin’ okay, Ricchan?” Satoru asks. He’s slipped his blindfold down around his neck and slid on his sunglasses. 

“I don’t know why you’re asking me that,” you say, setting your still-full plate down on the coffee table. “I should be the one asking you.”

“‘Cause you got a nice personality, and I know you’re busted up,” he says.

The second he gives you permission, you’re blinking sightlessly through a veil of hot tears. “I’m okay,” you say, scrubbing your cheeks with your sleeves drawn up over your hands. 

You’ve got to get control of yourself. Kugisaki had the right of it. You did barely know him.

“Are we going to have a wake?” you ask, your voice trembling. “I’d like to burn some incense for him.”

“Nah. We sent the body back to Sendai. He’s still got some relatives there.”

Itadori had said he was raised by his now-deceased grandfather, but he must have had some cousins kicking around. “Do you have their address?” you sniffle, still scrubbing at your cheeks. “I’ll send them some condolence money.”

“You give it to me, I’ll make sure it gets to them,” he says.

“Okay.” You let your hands drop to your sides and shove yourself back into the couch. Satoru drapes his arm over your shoulders and you rest the back of your head against it as you finish the movie, whatever the hell it is.

Afterward, his mission schedule is grueling and merciless. Maybe the higher-ups want to add insult to injury. Maybe they really are just that short-staffed. But you barely catch a glimpse of him for a week and a half. 

There’s no lecture period or group missions without your teacher and with your two remaining classmates confined to the infirmary. You study in the library alone, watch drama reruns in your dorm room alone, go for jogs outside alone, the summer air close and stifling and stale.

Someone sets up a tiny shrine for Itadori in the dorm common room with a black-framed photograph of him smiling in front of an arcade machine. You burn a handful of candles for him. 

On one of your runs, you see Fushiguro and Kugisaki together on the day they’re released from the infirmary, sitting on the steps of one of the classroom buildings. Kugisaki looks like she’s on the brink of tears, but she turns her cheek from Fushiguro so he won’t see. 

The next morning, the kids are all out in the practice yard, shouting and laughing. The noise cuts through the stifling summer swelter like a blast of air conditioning through a open door. 

Panda has Kugisaki by the ankles and is twirling her around. “We’re training for the Exchange Event!” she says, trailing off into a squeal as he chucks her halfway down the pitch.

The Exchange Event. You vaguely remember Satoru mentioning something about that. “It’s a friendly competition we have with the sister school in Kyoto,” says Maki, in between attempts to bash Fushiguro’s skull in with a quarterstaff. He’s blocking, but just barely, and you guess not for long. “You missed the one last summer. Yuta still had Rika, so it didn’t last long.”

“Sorry, Ms. Hasegawa, but there’s only so many spots for first-years, and you’re on special curriculum,” says Panda apologetically. “Otherwise we would’ve asked you, too.”

“No, it’s fine! I’ll be happy to watch.” Far be it from you to steal fun from the kids. You’re not eager to show off how comparatively brittle your tendons are in front of a live studio audience. 

And Fushiguro and Kugisaki have smiles on their faces—well, Kugisaki does, anyway—for the first time since that awful mission. They could really use the distraction.

“I’ll be cheering for you from the sidelines!” 

“Salmon!” says Toge, flexing an arm. 

“You can still hang out and practice if you want!” says Panda. 

You take him up on the offer and work up a hard sweat. The classroom gossip is that Gojo-sensei got attacked by a novel special-grade curse, the likeness of which is now pinned up in the lounge. You stop by to take a look. The drawing’s surprisingly decent.

When you message him are you okay? he responds with, all good busy rn sweetheart. catch u soon <3

Maybe his getting bored with you is happening sooner rather than later. 

A few days later, you return from an exorcism at a cursed train station and wash off the mission funk only to find that Fushiguro has been beaten to a bloody pulp, again, by a visiting Kyoto student. That young man just cannot catch a break. 

You also receive a new text from Satoru. need you right now, is all it reads.

You barely have time to reply welcome back! should i come to your apartment? before there’s an insistent rap at your window, and when you draw back your curtain, there’s a brief flicker of black, and then you squeak as his arms twine around your waist from behind.

“You startle so easy,” Satoru murmurs as he rests his cheek against your hair. “I scare ya, baby?”

“Yes, you did!” you say, wrapping your arms over his. “And you were trying to do it on purpose, and it worked!”

“It works every time! You make it so easy!” He squeezes your ribs, and beneath them, your heart contracts with a painful throb. “You get lonely without me, baby? You miss your favorite sensei?”

It’s only been a week and a half, but you have. You’ve missed him. 

“Yes,” you say, twisting around in his arms to meet his mouth. “I did.”

It’s obvious from the firm pressure jutting into your hip that he missed you, too. Or at least certain parts of his anatomy did. Seems like he isn’t bored quite just yet.

“You wanna show me how bad?” he asks. 

You could really use the distraction right now. And you think maybe he could, too.

You nod, your murmurs of enthusiasm already muffled by his lips. He lifts you off your feet and spins you, spins the room around you, and you’re in his apartment, head still reeling, ready and yielding as he grips you with one firm hand on your shoulder, the other in the small of your back, bending you over the back of his couch. He hikes your skirt up around your waist, slides your panties down around your knees, and you whimper as he easily slips a finger inside you. “So wet,” he says. “And I ain’t even done anything yet!”

“What, grinding your dick against my ass doesn’t count?” you say, betrayed by the slight pant in your voice.

“Week and a half without me got you all riled up, huh?” His finger twitches inside you as he winds his other hand in your unbound hair, still damp from your shower. “Who woulda guessed my prissy little honor student would be such a needy whore?”

You squirm on his hand, surrendering to a torrent of shameful heat at his words, squirm again as he chuckles when your pussy twitches. You feel warm and solid and real for the first time in a week, and you need him to keep touching you as much as you need him inside you.

“You miss my cock, baby? Tell me you did, and you can have it.”

“I m-missed your cock,” you mumble.

His hand tightens in your hair. “Sorry, can’t hear ya! You gotta speak up when you’re called on!”

“I missed your cock!” you say, raising your voice as your hands dig into the couch cushions, and he doesn’t waste any time in unzipping his pants, unwrapping a condom, and sinking into you. Your hips buck backwards against him, desperate and eager to take all of him.

You hold yourself, trembling, up on the couch after he finishes. He remains draped over you even after withdrawing, pressing a kiss against your damp neck where it meets your shoulder. You’ve worked up a sweat against just as soon as you’ve rinsed it off. “Missed you too, Risacchi,” he murmurs into your hair.

“Missed my pussy, I think you mean,” you say, light and teasing.

“Nah. Missed the rest of ya, too,” he says, punctuating this declaration with a second kiss, and your heart responds with another painful, clenching jolt.

It’s okay that you’ve missed him, and that he missed you. Of course you’d miss him. You like being around him, or you wouldn’t be doing this. 

It’s fine as long as you don’t forget that you’ve got a set graduation date.

“Did your mission go okay?” you ask.

“Yeah. Went fine. It’s so cute how you always ask that. Like I’m ever gonna lose!”

“You can still have a bad workday!” you protest. “You can get tired, have your time wasted, have to do things you don’t want to do!” An understatement, considering how badly things went with Itadori Yuji.

He looks tired right now. The shadows under his eyes have lengthened, stark against his pale eyelashes.

He gives you a puzzled, indulgent look. “Well, this one went fine,” he says, patting your hair. “You hungry?”

You’re starving. “I was going to make some cold soba for dinner.”

“It’s gettin’ late. I was just gonna get takeout from that izakaya we like.” Your heart trips again at his use of we. “You want some of that?”

“I’d love some.”

He lets you hang around in his apartment while he hops off to pick up the order. Way more work to teleport two people, he says. You watch part of the new episode of My Boss Is A Ghost on your phone, which you drop and lose to the heap of old paperwork marked with ring-shaped coffee mug stains on his table when he says, right next to your ear, “What’s the deal with that guy with the hat?”

“Argh,” you protest incoherently as he pecks your cheek. 

“I was watchin’ that!” he says when you retrieve your phone and stuff it safely away in your pocket. He shoves the ice cream popsicle he’s holding in his mouth and mumbles around it, “Put it back on!”

“You don’t really want to watch My Boss Is A Ghost,” you say, accepting the second popsicle he’s brought you, along with the actual meal. 

“It was just gettin’ juicy! Is the guy with the hat the ghost, who’s also a boss? Eat your ice cream first or it’s gonna melt!”

“No, that’s the love rival,” you say, accepting the remote so you can set the episode up on his enormous television. “That guy’s the boss, who’s also a ghost.” You start in on your ice cream.

“How can she see him if he’s a ghost?” he asks around another mouthful of dessert.

“She was born like that. She’s like a jujutsu sorcerer, kind of.”

His stream of questions don’t let up for the remainder of the episode, but he pays attention, and to your shock, he wants to watch the next episode. But halfway through Katarina’s fight with Henry about the villains closing in on the haunted manor, his chin bobs as his shadowed eyes start to droop closed. 

You wish there was a way you could help him relax a little. Aside from the usual, obvious method.

“Are your shoulders tense?” You lay a hand on his back. His infinity’s not on. “I give a pretty mean massage, you know,” you say as you stroke your thumb down the edge of his shoulderblade. “I used to do it for my dad all the time.” 

Your father had worked such long and irregular hours growing up that you only saw him when you were both awake about twice a week, but the nights he was home for dinner, you’d always work out the knots in his shoulders while you watched a gameshow together.

Satoru rolls his shoulders. “You gonna call me Daddy too, babe?” he asks with a sidelong smirk.

“Maybe if you ask nicely.”

He turns his long legs sideways to allow you to slide in behind him on your knees and brace your hands beside his neck. You knead your fingers against the taut, toned flesh at the curve of his shoulders, bracing your thumbs against his spine. “You’re really tight,” you say as you roll your hands, meeting firm resistance.

“Hey! That’s my line!”

You snort. “You’re so tight, baby,” you purr in a cut-rate imitation of his bedroom voice.

“I don’t say it like that,” he says primly. “It’s sexy when I say it.”

“It is sexy when you say it.” You dig your thumbs into the knotted muscle above his shoulderblades, indulging in a little scratch of the close-shorn hair at the back of his scalp every now and again. You find yourself relaxing, too, your own shoulders unpinching as he leans into your touch.

When you snag your thumb against a particularly tender spot, he lets loose a grinding, guttural groan, as loud and uninhibited as any sound he’s ever made in the bedroom, and you burst into giggles. He wastes no time in yanking you into his lap, silencing you with his mouth, and sweeping you off to his bed for a second round. 

You’re content to simply lie with him afterwards, your flushed, spent body tucked up against his lean frame, his arm slung over your waist, his cheek resting atop your head.

“I guess I should probably go home soon,” you say softly, shifting in his arms. He rubs his cheek against your hair. “Satoru?”

His head dips to rest in the crook of your neck. “I should probably go home soon,” you repeat, attempting to wiggle out from beneath his arm. It tightens around your waist, his hand settling on your ribcage, right beneath your breast.

“Satoru?” you whisper again, twisting your chin around to look at his face. 

His breathing is deep, slow, and even, his expanding ribs pushing against your back. His lips are slightly parted, his warm breath tickling your cheek and plucking at the hair plastered to your neck. The shadows of his pale eyelashes deepen the slight bruise-darkness beneath his eyes. 

You really ought to wake him up. You never spend the night here. You should just wriggle out of his grasp, and if he wakes up, then he wakes up. He can go right back to sleep afterwards.

He’s been so tired lately. And that’s saying something, considering that he’s always tired. And he’s had such an awful, relentless week, and that’s not even touching on what happened with poor Itadori. 

He needs the rest. You don’t want to interrupt it for even a second.

You’ll just lie here until he wakes up. In an hour or two when he comes to, you can explain yourself, extricate yourself from his grip, and scuttle on home to the dorm. He’ll wake up at some point. After all, you never spend the night here. He’s not used to sleeping beside you. It’ll be sooner rather than later.

And until he does, you can close your eyes and nestle closer against him, lacing your fingers through the hand he’s resting on your ribs. His hand tightens around yours, his breath fluttering against your hair.

You’re just resting your eyes for a few moments. You’ll definitely wake up when he wakes up.

The next time you open them, his bedroom is flooded with buttery midmorning light.

You’ve both shifted in the night. He’s starfished out with his long limbs slung carelessly across the mattress, one arm splayed across your stomach. You’re curled up on your side, the sheet knotted around your naked waist. 

You blink yourself back into awareness, shielding your face with your cupped hands against the merciless daylight. 

Well, so much for that.

He’ll understand, you tell yourself as the first twinges of anxiety twist in your stomach. It’s not like you’re officially barred from spending the night, as part of the terms of your arrangement. You can explain yourself when he wakes up. He’s not going to be upset.

As you unwind yourself from the sheets and slowly peel his arm away from your midriff, one bleary blue eye cracks open, blinking at you.

“It’s just me,” you whisper, slipping your fingers around his wrist to lower his arm back down on the mattress. “Go back to sleep.” 

And he does. His eyes slide closed and he exhales in a soft rush, going limp in his mounded heap of bedclothes. The wash of golden morning light gleams off his hair in a shining halo, gilding his long eyelashes and the strong curve of his neck.

You set your hand on his forehead and brush his hair out of his eyes. He bumps his head against your hand, his lips falling open in a soft sigh.

And the time to stop watching him sleep like some kind of pervert weirdo is right now. 

You force yourself to perform a ritual chant of impending graduation date and he’s not your boyfriend and nothing long-term while you slip into the pair of old sweats he lets you borrow sometimes and pad barefoot into his kitchen, stretching your arms above your head with a jaw-creaking yawn. You left your contacts in all night, and you’re blinking sandy grit from your eyes as you stare down his stovetop. 

If you’re still here, you might as well make the two of you some breakfast. Maybe an offering of hot food will take the edge off any potential annoyance.

He doesn’t have a well-stocked fridge or pantry, but you do find eggs and milk, and you do find rice. The rice cooker looks like it’s capable of rocketing into low orbit if you press the wrong button sequence, but you manage to crack the cipher to bring it to rumbling life, followed by the coffee maker. You sip from a faded Tokyo Jujutsu High Class of 2008 mug as you unearth a skillet that’s lain unused since the Showa era and wait for the stove to heat up. You brew up a cup for him, too, with his customary eight cubes of sugar.

Satoru doesn’t wake, even when the rice hisses and pops in the skillet. He really was completely drained. You move on to the egg mix, and if your clattering around as you smack your chopsticks on the edge of the pan doesn’t rouse him, nothing will. 

Because you’re slapping and tapping away at the skillet like it’s your first time druming onstage at Fuji Rock, you miss the door creaking open, and you miss the timid knocks that most likely preceded it. You’ve just brought your coffee mug to your lips when Itadori Yuji slides the door shut behind him with an, “Um… Gojo-sen…sei?”

You spray your mouthful of coffee across the countertop and your borrowed hoodie. 

“I-itadori?” you mumble, your coffee mug tilting at a dangerous angle in your slack hand. Maybe you’ve just slipped and cracked your head open on the stove, and now you’re hallucinating. Maybe this is a cursed technique. Maybe someone is attacking the school again.

“Um, hi there, Ms. Hasegawa!” says Itadori with a shy smile, adjusting the hood on his jacket. He looks real, solid, healthy. Ruddy-cheeked from jogging across the school grounds. “Really sorry to bother you!”

“You’re not bothering me,” you say faintly, rescuing the coffee mug with your other hand before it can shatter all over Satoru’s kitchen floor. “Are you, um…” How do you ask someone if they’re a ghost? You see curses all the time. You’d think this would’ve come up before. 

Wait, curses. If a sorcerer isn’t killed with cursed energy, they’ll come back to life a cursed spirit. But he doesn’t feel like a cursed spirit. To your curse sense, as well as your eyes, he appears to be an ordinary, flesh-and-blood human.

“Um, yeah! Guess now you know, too,” he says with a bashful grin.

“You’re… really okay?”

“Uh-huh!” He grins at you. “It was going to be a surprise, but, uh… surprise!”

He’s real and solid and healthy and alive and smiling. You’re shoving your mug on the countertop as your hands tremble and your eyes sting. It would be too forward to hug him, but you give him a tentative pat on his real, warm, solid shoulder, and then clasp it when he grins. “I’m so glad,” you sniffle. 

“Um, is Gojo-sensei home?”

“Mornin’!” announces the man himself, strutting in—thankfully—fully clothed. He’s in his casual slacks and that loose-necked shirt that shows off his shoulders. “Heyo, Yuji!” He raises one hand.

He’s not surprised. Not surprised to see Itadori, and not surprised to see Itadori here.

The person he is surprised to see is you. His eyes flicker briefly over your face and down your body before he pins his smile back on.

“Good morning!” says Yuji. “Sorry to butt in!”

“Nah, you’re good. Ricchan’s just here for—“

“Sensei got up early to do a sunrise training session with me,” you interrupt with a flourish of your chopsticks, “and I’m making him some breakfast as a thank-you!”

Satoru raises one finger aloft. “Your cursed energy circulation varies naturally throughout the day, so it’s important to practice at different times!” Is he just making that up? It sounds like he’s just making it up. Itadori tilts his head like he thinks he’s just making it up.

You pray Itadori doesn’t notice how the pants of your borrowed sweats are rolled up five times so they don’t drag on the floor. You’d finger-combed your hair after you came out to the kitchen, but did you do a decent enough job? Do you still look like you rolled right out of your teacher’s bed?

“Are you hungry, Itadori?” you ask, wiping your cheeks and hurrying back to the stovetop before the omelet burns.

“Yes, ma’am!” he says with a hop and a salute. “I’m always hungry!”

“Do you like demiglace sauce on your omurice?”

“Yes, ma’am! I’ll eat anything!”

“Leave it off of mine,” says Satoru. “I’ll just have plain ketchup.”

“You can make your own with just plain ketchup, because I’m giving him your portion,” you say over your shoulder as you plate the finished omelet for Itadori. “Please go ahead and eat,” you say, setting his breakfast down at the kitchen counter with a smile that twists into a glare as you swivel to face Satoru. “I’ve just got to speak with Gojo-sensei for a moment. We’ll be right back!”

You try to keep your shoulders from meeting behind your neck as you stomp back down the hallway to his bedroom, coffee mug clamped in both hands. 

“Why are you here?” he asks, brow furrowed above his sunglasses, as he shuts the door behind him.

“What do you mean, why am I here?” You attempt to flatten your voice down to a whisper, but the pressure makes it comes out as high-pitched and whistling as a boiling teakettle. “Why is he here?” You swipe your arm out from your side and point in the direction of the kitchen and Itadori. “Why isn’t he dead?”

“Oh, yeah. Um, about that.” He scratches the back of his head. “He came back. Guess the cat’s outta the bag.”

“He came back?”

“Back from the dead,” he says with a casual shrug, as if this happens every day. Maybe, for him, it does. “He doesn’t remember, but I think he must’ve made a binding vow with Sukuna or something. We’ve been keepin’ it under wraps so the higher-ups don’t target him again before I can train him up a little.”

You glare down into the opaque, trembling surface of the coffee mug. “That makes sense, I guess, but… why not tell Fushiguro? Kugisaki?” You think of Kugisaki’s wrecked face as she pressed her mouth against her hand, turning her cheek from Fushiguro. “They’re going through a really hard time right now!”

“You trust a couple of high schoolers not to spill the beans?” He clasps his hands together. “Please don’t snitch, sweetness. It’s gonna ruin the whole surpriiiiiiiiise!”

“I cannot believe you right now,” you murmur, dragging a hand down your face. You feel like the camera crew is going to pop out of his closet at any moment.

“Please?” He bats his eyelashes at you over the rims of his sunglasses. “If you tattle, the higher-ups’ll get wind of it and start targeting him again! You’ll be putting him in danger! You wouldn’t do that, would you, baby? You wouldn’t do that to him.”

“He’s here at school, on campus!” you hiss. “Someone’s bound to notice!”

“Nah! The school’s huge! Most of it’s empty! And I gave him some keys so he can sneak around.” That explains how he got into this locked apartment. An apartment that you, yourself, do not possess a key to. 

“If Itadori wants me not to tell,” you say, once again jabbing a finger in his direction. “Then I won’t tell. We’ll see.” You have a sinking suspicion a certain teacher may have already persuaded him through sheer force of personality. But you’re still going to ask.

“Good enough!” He taps his finger against your nose and leans in for a kiss, but you shield your mouth with your hand. 

“I haven’t brushed my teeth yet!” you say. “And I’m still mad at you!” 

He tilts his head. “You stayed over last night?”

A flush creeps up to your hairline. “You fell asleep last night,” you mumble to the coffee. “You don’t remember?”

The little divot between his brows accentuates. “For real? I never fall asleep that early. Never sleep this late, either.”

“My secret massage techniques are just that good, I guess,” you say. “When do you normally go to bed?”

“Four,” he says casually. 

“Four AM?” And on school days, he’d have to be awake by seven. Your shoulders are winching back up around your ears. You knew he was chronically sleep-deprived, but the situation is more dire than you ever could’ve guessed. “You sleep like three hours a night?”

“I’m a busy guy! Why’re you looking at me like that,” he says to your expression of bug-eyed horror.

The hairpin swerves in this conversation are starting to give you a headache. “No wonder you’re always so tired! That can’t be good for you!”

“Plenty of pros at the top of their game have a schedule like I do! Heart surgeons, successful mangaka…”

“And it’s bad for them when they do it, too!” 

“Just how it is!” he says, his voice rising.

“I just wanted to give you a chance to get a little extra rest,” you say, then directed down at your bare feet, “I didn’t want to wake you up. I’m sorry.”

“Why’re you sorry? Ain’t a big deal,” he says. You’re relieved, and then annoyed that you’re relieved, because you shouldn’t be relieved, not when he’s pulling stunts like faking your classmate’s death.  

You shove the mug towards him like a declaration of war. “Here. This is for you.”

He takes a tiny, experimental sip. “You put the right amount of sugar in it,” he says, blinking in amazement.

“There’s nothing right about the amount of sugar you use.” You cross your arms. “I used to watch you in the lounge and keep count. Every time I’d think you were done, you’d just keep adding more. I couldn’t look away.”

“Heh. Don’t think that’s why you couldn’t look away, babes.” He takes a second satisfied sip.

You pinch the hem of his sweatshirt between thumb and forefinger and inspect the splatter down the front. “And I ruined your shirt. I’ll buy you another one if I can’t get the stain out—“

You inspect the tag just inside the hem. It’s a high-end designer label. High-end designer label plain grey sweats. “Why do you own this?”

“Risacchi, as your sensei, I’m about to lay some wisdom on ya.” He takes a long, serene swig off his mug. “Sometimes things cost more ‘cause they’re better.”

“It’s plain grey sweats! How much of a difference in quality can there be?”

“You’re wearin ‘em, ain’t ya? Ain’t they comfy? Nice fabric? Breathe good?” You are forced to concede that they are, indeed, incredibly comfy. “Don’t worry about ‘em. Tell you what, you can just blow me and we’ll call it even.”

“That’s a really expensive blowjob,” you sigh, patting the overpriced fabric back into place. You can’t afford to add any further damage to your tab.

“Make it two then, since you wanna argue!” He taps your nose again. You give him a flat glare through your lowered eyelashes. He beams down at you.

Wait, speaking of money. “What the hell did you do with my condolence money?” You’d wrapped it up all nice and proper in an envelope with a looped black-and-silver cord. If he spent it on corner shop parfaits, you’re going to kill him.

“It’s in my nightstand! It’s still in the envelope! I was gonna give it back to you after we told everyone he’s still kickin’ at the exchange event.”

“I can’t believe you right now,” you repeat, cracking the door and striding down the hall to witness Itadori wolfing down the last of his breakfast.

“Itadori,” you say, knotting your hands together. “I’m really glad you’re okay.” He smiles at you around a mouthful of rice. “Do you want me to keep it a secret that you’re alive?”

“Yeah, don’t tell the others yet, please, ma’am! Sensei says they’re all going to go nuts at the Exchange Event.”

“Oh, he does, does he,” you say, glaring sidelong at Satoru.

“They are gonna love it!” Satoru insists. “They’re gonna laugh and cry so hard somebody pukes!”

You pinch the bridge of your nose and close your eyes. “Itadori,” you say, enunciating so your full concentration is on forming each syllable and not on flying off the handle at Satoru in front of your teenage classmate, “I think maybe that isn’t necessarily how this is going to work out.”

“What are you talkin’ about, Risacchi? You just spat your drink and cried!”

“I don’t think you should use me as a standard of comparison!” Kugisaki’s going to kill him, and then he’s going to stay dead for real. “What would you have thought, if someone had done this to you when you were a second-year, and it was your friend?” 

“I would’ve loved it! I would’ve laughed, cried and puked!”

Itadori’s line of sight is flicking back and forth between the two of you like he’s refereeing a ping-pong match. “Please don’t tell them, Ms. Hasegawa,” he says. “I want to keep it a surprise!”

“I can’t believe you right now,” you mutter at Satoru one final time, digging your thumbs into your closed eyelids. “If that’s what you want,” you say to Itadori. You’ll make a binding vow to hold your I-told-you-so’s until the big reveal, at which point they’ll be three times as powerful. 

“Yessssssss,” says Satoru. He and Itadori exchange a high-five. You hide your face in your hands and count, slowly, to ten before returning to the stove to finish breakfast.

You make an omelet for yourself. Satoru pouts at you until you make him an omelet, too, and you give in because you’re spineless and highly susceptible to the power of his baby blues, and the memory of that awful, hollow look you’d seen behind them when he thought Itadori was dead is still fresh in your memory. “Would you like seconds, Itadori?” you ask, and he answers in the affirmative with enthusiasm. Of course he would. He’s still a growing boy. You’re so glad that now he’ll get the chance to finish growing.

Satoru points his spoon at you as you clear your own plate. “So now that the beans are spilled for Hasegawa, y’know what that means?”

“Wha’?” asks Itadori around a huge mouthful of his second heaping helping. You narrow your eyes at Satoru over the rim of your coffee mug.

He slides his sunglasses up on his forehead with a huge, infectious grin. “Group training! Let’s all hit the practice rooms after this!”

“On a full stomach?” you say.

He shakes a finger in your face. “It’s important to practice with your cursed energy at different times!”

You sigh into your coffee mug. You can’t believe him right now, but Itadori needs you. Needs the both of you. 

At least the rest of your classmates are so busy and preoccupied, you probably won’t have to spend much time keeping a straight face.

Chapter Text

Satoru heads off on a fresh batch of missions, leaving Yuji to fend for himself, and you to check in on him every once in a while and bring him a soda. He seems content enough hiding away in various forgotten basements, unused storerooms, and back passageways, watching the extended edition Lord of the Rings trilogy with rapt attention. You don’t know how this is supposed to help him learn sorcery, but far be it from you to question your all-knowing sensei’s methods. 

You do have to say you’re truly impressed at the amount of secret hideaways on campus. You feel like you’re in the labyrinth mansion arc of My Boss Is A Ghost. 

Your own training has been progressing at a rapid pace ever since you hit Black Flash. The flow of your cursed energy is as easy and effortless as a mountain waterfall cascading off a cliffside. It’s like you’ve been jogging with weights on all this time, and now you’ve finally torn them off. You take to your training exercises with renewed enthusiasm—enough enthuiasm even to wade into your classmates’ practice for the exchange event, sometimes, on a good day. 

With their help, you’re experimenting with changing the shape of your shield and expanding it beyond the contours of your own skin. So far, all you can manage is pushing the border to about a half-meter diameter, but you’re hoping with more practice, you might even be able to make it large enough to cover and protect another person.

Satoru texts you at 12:30 AM on his second night of a mission to Hokkaido. It reads: u up

You laugh to yourself. did you really just send me a u up?

S: u are up!

S: what u wearing

With your lover—can you even call him your lover? Medium-term booty call? Teacher with benefits?—missing in action, you’re in your coziest possible sleepwear, which consists of, of course, that infamous Rakuten Eagles sweatshirt you’ve owned since middle school.

raggedy old baseball sweatshirt :p, you reply.

S: with the flower panties??

R: they’ve got pink dots on them today!

hottttttt, he says, with a little blazing heart emoji, and then, can i see.

It takes some fiddling in the unforgiving glare of your phone’s flash function to get an acceptable pose and angle. You still aren’t completely pleased with the results, but he replies, after several more blazing hearts, imagination not doing it for me tonight. need to see you

take the panties off for me.

Your nerves spike like Maki is closing in on you with nunchaku swinging. You’ve never done this before—not when Fumiya went on weekend sales trips, not even when you and your college boyfriend were long-distance for a semester while he studied abroad. One of the girls at your high school got her nudes leaked during senior year, and bearing witness to the fallout made you swear off sending anything of the kind for a full decade.

You take long enough to respond that he may as well be able to see you through the screen, staring down your phone in front of your face, the tip of your thumb trapped between your teeth. you feelin shy baby? thats ok. ill go first to inspire u

You fumble and nearly drop your phone when his next text arrives. A picture of himself, shirtless, his work slacks unbuttoned and boxers twisted down around his thighs, his free hand wrapped around the shaft of his thick, erect cock.

You’ve certainly seen it—and handled it, and taken it, and sucked it—in real life enough times by now. A picture through a screen shouldn’t feel this lewd. It shouldn’t give you the squeaking, blushing urge to hide your phone under your pillow.

ok now u, he says. need to see that sweet pussy.

You manage to slide your panties off and position yourself on your bed, recumbent with your thighs slightly parted. You manage to hold up the phone. You manage to open the camera function. You manage to open the selfie setting. You manage to aim it at the upper half of your torso.

It’s not going to happen. You can’t even look at yourself. You want to shrivel up like a discarded melon rind left in the sun.

You roll over like your sweatshirt’s caught fire, then type a small, defeated, i can’t do it. i really can’t do it. i’m sorry

He responds with a heart emoji. its fine babe

gonna tug rope and then go to sleep. gnight!

don’t say it like that, you reply, pressing a hand to your rosy, throbbing forehead. 

He replies with a selfie blowing you a kiss, then a miss you, baby.

And you miss him too. You miss him now and you already miss him later, the ache you know you’re going to feel clenching your heart a full six months ahead of schedule.

Squinting and gritting your teeth, you open your legs, snap a quick selfie, and send it to him through half-lidded eyes, then delete the picture, your heart hammering like you’re fleeing a special-grade.

let me know if it’s actually in there, you say, after sending ten lines of single periods to spare yourself. i couldn’t actually look

oh its here all right! he says, and then a wild barrage of heart and angel emojis. You laugh into your hand as you slip your underwear back on. A few minutes later, it’s followed by a selfie of him giving a huge thumbs-up with a grin. mission accomplished! 

You muffle your yips of laughter so you don’t wake up the other girls on the upper floors. go to SLEEP, mister three hours a night.

He makes his triumphant return to Jujutsu High the following evening and immediately makes his presence known with a series of insistent text alert chimes. You’re in the student lounge, working through a batch of Ijichi’s expense report summaries. The man nearly wept when you offered to help him with the metadata analysis. You would’ve used your own dorm room, but Maki and Kugisaki are playing Smash Bros at max volume in the lobby again, and Kugisaki’s a loud trash-talker. 

It’s nice they’re getting on so well. It must’ve been lonely for Maki, being the only girl her own age for a year.

When you don’t respond within the minute, your phone continues to ding and buzz. Satoru’s added a string of random emojis onto the end of his messages.

S: risacchi

S: babycakes

S: sugar tits

S: where are you i need to put my butter potatoes in your mouth

You respond, now that you’ve said it like that, i don’t want anything in my mouth ever again, and he sends you a selfie in an apron, squatting in front of his open oven, posing with his ass towards the camera and his index finger pressed beneath his pursed lips. k i’ll just eat these all by myself then ;)

S: wait, did u think i was talking about… something else??? get ur mind out of the gutter nasty

“I didn’t know you cooked,” you say in his kitchen as you watch him dole out potatoes.

“I’m a grown man, Risacchi! Of course I can cook!”

“I’ve just never seen you do it before, that’s all,” you say. When it’s his turn to provide dinner, he usually teleports out for takeaway. Not to mention every appliance in his kitchen looked like it hadn’t been touched in this millenium.

“Just ‘cause I don’t, don’t mean I can’t!” He hands you a plate heaped with steaming spuds. “The street stalls in Sapporo make ‘em with shiokara! Go on, try it, it’s good!”

You allow him to ladle out some of the fermented squid paste onto your buttered potato. “You like shiokara?” An incredibly acquired taste for the pickiest adult eater you’ve ever met.

“That ain’t no way to talk to somebody who’s givin’ ya a baked potato.” He pushes your plate accross the counter. 

He’s right. It’s delicious. “It’s so good!” you exclaim around the last of your mouthful, digging your fork in for a bigger bite.

“Don’t sound all surprised!”

After dinner, you insist on a few moments of silence while you finish the last of your pro bono budget work on his couch. You get zero moments of silence.

“Come onnnnnnnnnn, baby,” Satoru whines, twining his arms around your shoulders as he leans over the back of the couch. “Why are you wasting time in those spreadsheets when you could be spread in my sheets?”

You laugh as you adjust your glasses. “Come on, let me finish.”

“That’s what she said,” he snickers. “The glasses are hot, by the way. You look like my sexy secretary. Maybe you can leave ‘em on.” He wiggles his eyebrows.

You’re out of contact lenses and your new shipment got delayed, probably because the deliveryman can’t find Jujutsu High again, so you’re wearing the thick plastic-framed spectacles you save for emergencies. “If I was your secretary, you’d have to pay me.” You copy a formula into a handful of cells. “Just give me one more minute, all I have left to do is—“

All you have left to do is a simple analysis of variance. Easy stuff. Intro to stats freshman year of undergrad type of stuff.

Your mind’s turning up nothing but static. Your entire memory of descriptive statistics is tuned to a dead channel. The cursor blinks up at you, confused. 

“What’s the matter, baby?” Satoru nips at your earlobe.

“I forgot,” you say, collapsing backwards into the couch and his embrace. “I forgot how to do a two-way ANOVA.”

First semester of undergrad stuff. It’s been just shy of seven months, and every last crumb of your professional skills are down the sink.

“I can’t believe I forgot.” You clamp your eyes shut and blot out the mocking wink of the cursor. “This is so stupid.”

You should have been practicing more. You should have been keeping your skills polished up. How are you ever going to get a new job if you’ve jettisoned every single skill on your resume?

Satoru plants a kiss beneath your ear. “You can relearn it. You’re a fast learner.” He scatters a few more kisses down your neck. “It’ll be easy.”

You don’t share his level of faith in you, but still, it’s nice to hear. You tilt back into his arms, his inverted head swinging into view. He’s smiling. “You’re just buttering me up because you want to give me that special-grade dickdown.”

“Got it in one!” He drops another kiss on your lips. “Oh, that reminds me! I lined up a new mentor for Yuji. He’ll be comin’ by the school soon. I’ll introduce ya.”

“How does that relate?” you ask.

“You’ll see when you meet the guy! Now c’mon, you got a private performance review in my office, and you’re late!”

You meet the new mentor in one of the basements Satoru’s set Yuji up in a few days later, when you’re taking a break from your frantic haze of beginner stats tutorial videos, trying to sweep up every skill you’ve dropped. It’s the tall, sturdily-built blonde with the spotted tie and the pince-nez glasses from the fundraiser gala.

“This is Nanami Kento!” says Satoru, slinging his arm around the other man’s neck. “He’s an office worker dropout, just like you!”

“I believe I asked you to stop introducing me like that,” says the blonde with a familiar aggrieved expression.

“Nice to meet you!” you say with a bow and a smile. “What company were you with?”

“Likewise. Lotus Financial,” he says, returning your bow.

“Oh, I’ve heard they’re a tough crowd.” One of your former classmates ended up there after school. “Well, unless you quit by blasting a hole in the wall of your office, I think only one of us is the real dropout here.”

“I’ve seen the pictures,” Nanami says, pushing his pince-nez goggles up his nose with his thumb. “They were impressive.”

You throw an accusatory stare at Satoru, who’s shrugging. “What! Ain’t every day you see some random woman break out a partial domain! Nanami here’s gonna be looking after Yuji for a while, so help ‘em out if they need to fly under the radar, okay?”

“Just so you’re aware,” says Nanami, “I don’t approve of this plan of flouting regulations and keeping Itadori’s survival a secret.”

“Neither do I!” you say with another stare at Satoru, who sticks out his tongue. “That’s another thing we’ve got in common!” 

Somehow, your schedules align, and you keep running into each other in the lounge when he’s on breaks in between his missions with Itadori, smiling awkwardly as you dance around each other for your turn at the coffee maker and the vending machines. He likes to enjoy a midafternoon cup of strongly brewed black tea over the paper. 

“Good afternoon, Miss Hasegawa,” he says one afternoon, creasing his newspaper as his rises from his chair. “I was just getting up.”

“Oh, don’t get up on my account! I’m just here to get a drink and head back out.” You’ve almost, almost managed to expand your shield to cover Fushiguro when he’s standing right beside you. It twangs back into place after a count of three, and increasing the area you cover sends the amount of damage you can take before hitting overload into a nosedive, but you’re cautiously excited about the prospects. “How are your missions going?”

“Work is work,” he says, with all the inflection of a brick wall. You’re starting to see what Satoru meant when he referred to Nanami in passing the other day as kind of a bummer. Just when you’re certain this is a gentle shutdown of any more casual chatter and you’re about to make your quick exit, he says, “I hope your studies are progressing well.”

“They are, thank you!” You halt your sideways scuttle to the door.

“Going from the business environment to jujutsu sorcery is a difficult transition.”

And he would know. “Were you also discovered late? Is that why you had an office job first, too?”

“I was not. I was educated here at Jujutsu High, and I left for a period after graduation. You see, having spent my youth here, I learned that jujutsu sorcerers are shit.”

You almost choke on your energy drink. 

“I see,” you say, unsure how else to respond.

“And what I learned from a typical company is that working is shit, so I returned to the lesser of two evils.”

You laugh. “I can’t say you’re wrong there! I definitely don’t miss clocking in to my old job.”

You can only hope your next employment situation will be better. You’re a little more senior. You can look at companies outside of Tokyo—maybe you could even consider moving to Nagoya or Osaka, to be closer to Keiko and her family. And you’ll have your handily doctored resume, courtesy of jujutsu HQ… if they decide to abide by their agreement with Yaga-sensei and Satoru. As long as you can remember how to perform half the skills you’re claiming on it.

“What company did you work for before?”

“Mori Pharmaceuticals,” you say.

“I have heard,” he says with a hint of a smile, “that they’re a very tough crowd.”

You salute each other with teacup and drink can, fellow veterans of the cubicle.

Nanami tags along for drinks night on the weekend with Satoru, Shoko, and Ijichi. “He was my adorable little junior, you know,” says Shoko. Ijichi casts a miffed, jealous look in his direction. “Just look at him now!”

“I would prefer you looked at something else,” says Nanami, without glancing up from his menu.

“Let’s all play a game!” says Satoru. You’re across the table from him—you’d both wordlessly decided that sitting next to each other would be too obvious—but every so often he nudges his knee against yours. “Strongest anime character you think I could beat in a fight. Go.”

“Not Goku,” you say. He pouts at you.

“Games are supposed to be amusing,” says Nanami, still squinting down at his menu, and you laugh a little. Satoru pouts harder and bumps your knee.

The next time you run into Nanami, it’s after one of your private training sessions. You’ve just shown off your new shiny new cursed technique lapse for Satoru. Nanami’s exiting the infirmary, looking haggard and exhausted. “Are you all right?” you ask.

“Fine, thank you.”

“And…” There’s no one in earshot, but you’d better not take chances. “The package?”

He muffles a soft chuckle. “It is currently secure.”

When you stop by to give Itadori some mochi, he’s just a little bit subdued, his typical sunny energy obscured behind a cloud. “Had a real hard time on a mission,” says Satoru. “Not really what I meant by tough training. Gettin’ some hard lessons early.”

You take him some extra mochi. 

Both he and Nanami seem to be in better spirits and health the next day, when you almost shoulder-check Nanami on the way into the lounge. “Good to see you’re doing better,” you say. “Funny how we keep running into each other like this!”

“Quite,” he says, pushing his spectacles up his nose. “Miss Hasegawa, if you aren’t busy right now, I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

“Oh, sure! Go ahead!” 

“If you have some time tomorrow evening, I was wondering if you’d like to come out for drinks.”

You really ought to get the after-works drinks crowd together more often. It’s always so refreshing to get off campus and feel like a regular person again. “Sure! I’d love to.”

You exchange phone numbers and the name of the izakaya he’s got in mind. It’s out in Shibuya. You can get some shopping done too while you’re at it.

“What are you up to tonight?” you ask Satoru in the middle of a brief training session the next day.

“Got a mission with Nobara and Megumi-chan. Told ‘em I’d take ‘em out for sushi afterwards.”

“I hope that cheers Fushiguro up a little.” You drop into a lunge. “I’d join you, but I’m going out for drinks. Nanami invited me.”

“You two are gonna have so much fun. You can swap office stories, talk about your favorite rules and regulations, compare the size of the sticks up your asses—“

“Don’t go getting jealous of the stick, now,” you say.

“Oh, I won’t! I’m bigger.”

The weather’s going to be nice, a brief, gasping reprieve from the summer heatwave that’s been sweating its way through Tokyo this August. It’s too bad the target audience for your favorite frilly little sundress won’t be in attendance, but maybe you’ll get the chance to show it off for him later—and if you’re lucky, the lingerie set you have on underneath, another gift from him. 

You even tell Kugisaki she can help you with your makeup. She’s all too ready to take over duties at your vanity. “You should invest in better stuff,” she says, casting a critical eye over your foundation and concealer. “You know you can actually get quality supplies for cheap, so there’s no excuse.”

Ouch. But she does let you borrow some of her brand-name mascara.

You’re in a buoyant mood and feeling pretty high on yourself when you arrive at your destination, which is not, in fact, a friendly neighborhood izakaya, but a busy and popular full-course restaurant, dimly lit and buzzing with well-dressed couples. Weird choice for an after-work drinks joint, but okay.

You give Nanami’s name at the host stand. “The gentleman’s already here,” says the hostess with a polite smile, leading you to a small, intimate table near one of the front windows. Two seats. Nanami’s in one of them, flicking through the paper. 

He glances up, rising to his feet so he can pull out the opposite chair for you. “Miss Hasegawa. You look very nice.” Unless you’re mistaken—and you very well could be, as the mood lighting in this place is as dim as a haunted house ride at an amusement park—there are faint spots of pink on his cheekbones.

“Thank you. So do you.” He’s swapped out his khaki work suit for a charcoal number with a red tie, but he’s still got the goggles on. “Thanks for inviting me! Um, do you think we should go ahead and ask for a bigger table?”

He halts in the motion of swiveling your chair towards you. “Would you prefer a bigger table?”

“Well, it’s just, I don’t know how we’re going to fit everyone else here when they show up. We might be able to pull up one chair, but—“

His eyelashes flicker behind his goggles. “There won’t be anyone else in attendance.”

A beat. He blinks. You blink. The hostess who showed you to your table has wisely and sensibly retreated to the safety of the podium at the entrance.

You should have known the second you stepped foot in this place and saw the fifty couples snapping cute posed photos for their social media pages. You aren’t up on the most popular date-restaurant trends anymore, ever since Fumiya proposed to you in an establishment much like this one. 

This is a date. 

“Oh,” you say. You feel like every adorable couple in the restaurant is staring you down through the lens of their cameras, caught in every flash function. You have to go the way of the hostess before you melt into mortified slurry, like shave ice at the bottom of the paper cone. “I’m so sorry, it was a long walk from the station. Do you mind if I go freshen up a little?”

“Not at all.” He slides back into his seat. “Please take your time.”

You hit the restroom door like you’re besieging a castle gate, and thank every merciful deity in the world, one of the stalls is open. You slip inside and yank out your phone.

satoru, you text frantically. are you there?

yea baby what’s up? he stand you up? if he did ill kick his ass

You glare at the words he stand you up until they swim faintly in your vision, the letters wavering like they’re attempting to rearrange themselves into an order that might, perhaps, make logical sense.

You type the words THIS IS A DATE, and almost dig your thumb into your closed eyelid before pausing just in time. You’ll ruin your makeup. i’m so sorry i didn’t tell you first. i didn’t know!

You can’t believe it’s come to this. How couldn’t you have known? Why didn’t you look up what kind of establishment it was first? That should’ve clued you right in from the start. Then again, it didn’t even clue you in when you were right on the doorstep.

In your defense, you used to grab after-work drinks with your male coworkers all the time. That sort of thing is completely normal in corporate culture. And Nanami, like you, has had his fair share of experience with corporate culture. He’d know the implications. Wouldn’t he?

Your phone buzzes. duh babes of course its a date, Satoru says. You huddle closer into the corner of the stall, as if you can take shelter there. he better take you someplace classy

WHAT DO YOU MEAN DUH BABES? Your thumbs fly frantically over the keyboard. YOU KNEW?

course i did. u didnt? And he sends you a picture of himself laughing into the back of his hand, like a prissy rich woman in an anime. 

I THOUGHT IT WAS AFTER WORK DRINKS! LIKE LAST WEEK! why didn’t you say something yesterday?????

cuz i thought u knew, he says, and you can imagine the exact inflection he’s using, his this-should-be-obvious voice. well there u go u have my blessing <3 get urself somethin nice on his yen

A second photo of him blowing a kiss. Instead of making your heart twirl, it just makes you vaguely airsick. How did he know and you didn’t? Did Nanami discuss it with him, or did he just manage to infer what you couldn’t, using his functional brain?

Why isn’t he jealous?

Why do you want him to be jealous? He’s made it clear he isn’t your boyfriend. 

You brace your forehead against the bathroom stall, makeup be damned. You still have to go back out there. As much as every instinct in your body is screaming at you to slip out the kitchen entrance, then take a sharp turn on the way home and stake out a new home in the subway tunnels, Nanami is a nice man and he doesn’t deserve to be stood up. 

What if you did stay? What if you not only stayed, but made a real go of it? He’s nice, and he’s nice-looking, and he’s easy to talk to. Good with Itadori. Seems like the type of man who’s interested in a serious relationship, if the quality of this restaurant is any metric to judge by. You bet he’d remember your birthday. He probably has everyone’s birthday programmed into his phone calendar, just like you do. He probably has a savings account and separate retirement account. A five-year plan, and also a ten-year plan.

Isn’t this everything you’d hoped for for yourself, in that distant someday when you graduate? That far-off shining country of your future? What if you’ve simply had the good fortune to have it dropped in your lap a little bit early? 

You chew your lip and thumb your phone, looking down at Satoru’s idiotic kissy-face selfie, wishing you were back at home with him right now, curled up on the couch with some greasy takeout heaped on his coffee table, watching a crappy action movie for his half of One For Me, One For You while you lean your head on his shoulder and he rests his arm around you.

And then you think, oh, shit.

Home.

You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing and you know you can’t hope for anything beyond next January. 

But you don’t want to see other people. Not now, and not next year, either.

You have to go back and tell Nanami.

You march to your fate back through the dark aisles of tables, just narrowly missing catching a chair leg with one of your wedge heels and wiping out on the carpet, although maybe that would’ve been a mercy kill.

You shove the strap of your purse back up onto your shoulder. “Um, Nanami….”

“Kento,” he says with a gentle inclination of his head, setting down his glass of scotch on the rocks. 

You suck in a bracing breath through your nose. “Kento. I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid I had the wrong impression coming here tonight. I thought this was going to be a group thing, with other coworkers. It was my mistake! All my misunderstanding.” You bow over your clasped hands and take another deep breath. “I’m happy to stay and have a drink with you, but it would only be as friends.” 

His eyebrows peak over his goggles. “Ah. I see.” He gestures to the seat opposite, the chair still pushed back. “I’m happy to stay for just after work-drinks.”

You collapse into the seat, now a shave-ice slurry of relief. “I’m really very sorry.”

“I could’ve been clearer, as well.” He pushes his spectacles up his nose. “Allow me to say just one thing, though. I’m aware of your desire to leave jujutsu society and return to a conventional job. If it’s that you’re worried about, please know that I would have no expectations that you remain in the jujutsu world. It would be refreshing for me to have a partner who’s aware of my life as a sorcerer, but you could have as little involvement with it as you like.”

You fold your hands in your lap. He’s evidently a very direct sort of man. “I appreciate that, but… I’m not really looking for anyone right now.”

“Ah. My apologies, then.” He takes a sip from his scotch. “I was informed that you were single.”

Your brow knits. “By who?” Shoko? Ijichi? 

“Gojo,” he says. “I believe he also used the words ‘Ready to mingle.’”

Your hands dig into the frilly skirt of your cute little sundress. “Oh, he said that?” You manage to keep your tight smile, but your voice comes out strained through your clenched teeth. 

You are single. You’d both agreed that you were technically single. 

Still. You’d thought he was having as much fun as you are. Maybe he’s bored. Maybe that’s what this is. He’s bored and thinks if you’ve got someone else lined up on the horizon, you won’t be upset if he cuts you loose.

“I see he was misinformed.” Kento tips back another sip of his drink. “I shouldn’t be surprised. Typical of him.” 

Your server circles around to take your drink order, and you gratefully accept a glass of fruity, fizzy wine that won’t do anything for your suddenly sour stomach, but will take the edge off your mounting headache. Your conversation also circles back into the familiar territory of harmless small talk. His grade one missions, his terrible boss at his old job, his neighbors in his apartment building. You tell him the story of your birthday in Aoyama, and he laughs at the appropriate places. When you tell that story now, there are appropriate places to laugh. That part’s nice. 

“What was it like going to school with Gojo and Shoko?” you ask, patting your lips after dessert.

“Ieiri is much the same as she is now. So, for that matter, is Gojo. Insufferable, pompous, and self-involved.”

You clamp your mouth closed on a laugh. “At least he’s grown out of one of those things!” He gives you a level, disbelieving look. “I’ll give you insufferable and pompous, but… he isn’t self-involved.”

His level look becomes thoughtful. Your cheeks heat and turn the shade of your half-finished glass of rosé. You’re sure he can see right through you, as easily as through the wineglass.

“I enjoyed myself, Miss Hasegawa,” he says, rising from his chair. “If you change your mind in the near future, please let me know.”

“Risa is fine,” you say, hauling your purse back onto your shoulder. “And thank you. I enjoyed myself, too. And I appreciate you being so understanding.”

You swing by your favorite stationary store afterwards, just like you’d planned, but you aren’t even in the mood to appreciate the cute new flower-patterned notebooks or stacks of sticky notes shaped like Mt. Fuji. You take the train home and feel your temper banking with each meter of track. When you arrive back on campus, you stomp straight to Satoru’s staff apartment. You don’t even check to see if he’s home yet.

He’s home. He answers the door in that stupid baggy-necklined shirt that shows off his shoulders. “Hey, baby! You’re back early.” He lopes back over to the couch and sprawls across it with his long legs splayed. He’s got the Central League baseball game on. The Yomiuri Giants versus the Hanshin Tigers. “Wait, of course you’re back early. A girl like you doesn’t put out on the first date.” 

He smirks in the face of your jagged-edged glare. Kento was right. He is insufferable. “How far’d you let him get? Give him a goodnight kiss?”

You drop your bag by the door. It slaps onto the floor. “This isn’t funny,” you say. “Maybe it’ll be funny in a month, but right now, this was really embarrassing for me, and really embarrassing for Kento.”

“Kento, huh?” His eyebrows disappear behind his bangs. “Oooh, he got the doorstep smooch for sure!” His tilts his chin to show you his laughing blue eyes over the rims of his sunglasses. “With tongue?”

“It’s not funny,” you repeat as you stomp your way into his living room, stancing up between him and the television with your arms crossed. Behind your back, Hanshin strikes out. “You’re being really awful right now.”

“C’mon, baby, it’s a little funny! I can’t believe you didn’t know!” He flings his arm out over the backrest. “At least tell me where he took ya.”

“Salieri,” you snap. The fancy foreign name should’ve clued you in from the start.

“Weak!” he pronounces with his hands cupped around his mouth like a megaphone. “What a tightwad! Couldn’t he have manned up and shelled out for L’Effervescence or something? That’s what I woulda done.”

This is the tossed match that finally lights you up like a pyre. “No, you wouldn’t have!” you say, dropping your hands to fist them by your sides. “You would never have taken me anywhere! You don’t take me anywhere, because I’m not your girlfriend!”

The snide smirk slips off his face. “Baby—“

“Why’d you tell him I was single?” You hate how your voice breaks and trembles. You came here to yell. “And ready to mingle?”

“Baby,” he repeats, shifting forward. “I told him you were single ‘cause you are single.”

You heave a deep, shuddering breath. “I know I’m not your girlfriend. I know I can’t expect anything from you after I get my diploma and leave here for good. But do you really want me out of your way so badly, you’ll go to the trouble of setting me up with another man?”

His mouth’s already open for a retort, but in a lifetime first for him, he claps it shut without saying anything, blinking up at you. He says, “It ain’t like that, baby.”

“Then tell me what way it is!”

“I told him you were single ‘cause I got no claim on you! You can see other people if you want! I told you that!” He flicks out a hand, the careless and casual gesture betrayed by the ragged edge to his voice. “I told him you were single so he could ask you out if he could find his balls, and he did, and I thought you said yes! You were actin’ all excited telling me about it, you got all dolled up in that cute little number with your tits out, even before you knew it was a real date—“

He makes an up-and-down gesture encompassing your frilly little sundress and heeled sandals, his palms flexing, almost involuntarily, when they’re at a level with your breasts. 

“First of all,” you seethe, holding up one finger. “I do not have my tits out. This is a perfectly appropriate dress for an evening out with coworkers.” Maybe there’s a tiny, teasing little hint of cleavage. Just a hint. Nothing that would ever get you dinged by HR or talked about in the office hallways. “I was just excited to get dressed up for a night out on the town! It was never about him at all!”

“I’m just sayin’… ” he says, his voice rising to match yours. “They’re really…” He cups his hands. “You look hot!” 

You brace your hands on your hips. “Well, good, I’m so glad you think so, because I wore this dress for you, because I wanted to show you afterwards! I even have that damn lingerie set you bought for me on underneath it, because I wanted to show you that too!”

“Oh, really?” He leans forward a few more centimeters, that smirk rearing back out to play at the edges of his lips. “The new one?”

“The new one,” you say. There’s a familiar spark of lust in his eyes, even behind his sunglasses, and you can tell just from a quick glance down at his sweatpants that he’s hard. You’re screaming at him in his living room, and he’s hard.

Of course he’d be hard. He thinks you’re fucking hot when you’re mad.

You slide one of the straps of your sundress down your shoulder, watching his glimmering blue eyes trace every twitch of your fingers. You move to the other shoulder. Reach around and unzip the back, so the fabric bunches around your waist, exposing your midriff, the cute little front-clasping white bra he’d bought for you, and the slopes of your breasts, flushed and trembling with anger and your own heated arousal. Because you can’t help but think it’s fucking hot that he thinks you’re fucking hot when you’re mad.

You feel feverish and crazed, like you’re losing your mind, like you’re burning up from the inside, and a surge of victory flares through you as his lips part. He taps his knee. “C’mere, sweetheart.”

“Really?” You tilt your head, cross your arms beneath your exposed cleavage, and press your advantage. “You’ve decided you want me here after all?”

He pouts, letting his legs splay wider. “Now you’re just bein’ mean.”

“My sensei says I should be more aggressive and take advantage of openings in combat.” You flash him an angelic smile as he scowls. “And you have a lot of nerve calling me mean, after the things that were just coming out of your mouth.”

“I wasn’t tryin’ to be mean to you!” He rests his elbows on his spread thighs. “I thought you might be into it! Into him! ‘Cause Nanami can give you all that stuff that you want! All that shit I can never give you! The wedding bells and the house in the ‘burbs and the one-point-three kids named Nozomi and Mirai! I wasn’t gonna hold you back!”

Against your will and better judgment, your heart aches at the flash in his narrowed eyes, obscured by his sunglasses when he lifts his chin. You want to ask, can’t, or won’t? But you barricade the words behind your pinched lips. That’s too much. That’s too far. He’s said what he’s willing to give you, and you agreed.

Instead, you settle for, “Are you being awful because you’re jealous?”

“‘Course I’m jealous!” he barks. “Just thinking about you with some other guy makes me…” His right hand tightens into a fist braced on his thigh.

“Then why did you set it up?” 

“Because he’s a good guy, and he woulda treated you right, and you should have all that stuff if you want it! You should have everything that you want!”

You take a swaying step in towards him, just close enough to brush his knee with the hem of your dress. His pale eyelashes flutter, but he doesn’t reach for you. Not yet. “I want to be here,” you say. “Here, with you! Not anywhere else. Not with anyone else.” Your voice quakes again on the last word. 

You think, again, treacherously: home. 

“I want to be here with you. I don’t want anyone else,” you repeat, and force yourself to add, meeting his luminous eyes, “right now. Do you want me to be here?”

“What kinda question is that, baby?”

You slide backwards, pulling your skirt out of the reach of his outstretched hand. “I want to hear you say it,” you say. “I want to hear it!”

“Yes!” He raises his hands, voice rough and ragged. “Yes, I want you here! I want you here, with me. Ya happy now?”

“Yeah,” you say, a wave of warmth surging within your ribs, and you step in between his legs, resting your hand on his knee. 

He pinches the fabric between thumb and forefinger, hiking the skirt up over your thigh and revealing the matching lace panties.

“Baby,” he says reverently, sliding one fingertip beneath the strap over your hip, “you were wearing this at the restaurant? On the damn train?”

“I wanted to surprise you!” They’re not exactly comfortable, but the round-trip train ride was worth it just to see the look on his face. 

He slides his fingertips down the soft skin of your inner thigh, and you sway in closer, leaning into his touch. “That guy has no idea how fuckin’ lucky he almost got.”

“The whole point of this entire conversation is that he was never going to get lucky! You don’t know how fucking lucky you’re getting,” you say.

“Trust me, baby,” he says, “I know exactly how fuckin’ lucky I am right now.”

You launch yourself straight into his lap. He brackets his arms around your waist, steadying you as he clasps you close, and your mouths crash together, your teeth nearly clashing in your haste to taste one another. His sunglasses dig into your cheek and you flick them off his face and onto the coffee table. His hands clamp down on your hips and ass, yanking you against him, and you moan, looping your arms around his neck for desperate balance, as he grinds his cock against your barely clothed pussy.

He loosens his grip for just long enough to unclasp your bra and free his cock from his sweatpants. He doesn’t even bother removing your panties, simply swiping them to the side and out of the way, groaning as he grinds his cock against your wet, puffy folds.

“C-condom…” you murmur, with your very last millimeter of sense that’s not preoccupied with the urge to guide him inside your throbbing pussy, right now, raw.

“Got ‘em in your purse?” he asks. When you nod, he flings out an arm, and in between blinks, your handbag is suddenly in his grip. You don’t even have the brainpower left to be jealous.

He holds it out to you. “You gotta find ‘em, baby, I can’t—“

It’s an agonizing wait as you dig one out of the hidden zippered pocket at the back of your purse, fumble with the wrapping, and cover him, and he’s no goddamn help at all, still tormenting you as he rubs the head of his cock against your pussy, head thrown back in bliss.

You moan in relief when you can finally sink onto him. You’re so wet and ready you take all of his length easily, heaving for breath and bracing yourself with your hands twisted and clamped in his sweatshirt. He lets out a rough sigh, resting his chin atop your head for a few heartbeats before he sinks his hands into your hips and thrusts up into you, setting a punishing rhythm. You’re racing to match each frantic, desperate stroke until you crash into a hard climax that leaves you limp and spasming on his cock, his grip on your hips the only thing holding you upright. You finally collapse against his chest as he reaches his own peak, his fingers clawing into the flesh of your ass.

He sprawls out sideways on the couch afterwards, holding you against his chest. You lean your cheek against his breastbone and listen to the strum of his heart, sway with the gentle rise and fall of his breath. On the television, Sugano Tomiyuki pitches another strike for Yomiuri.

“That was straight outta a porno on the sorcerer dark web,” Satoru says, pinching your arm. “I oughta set you up on dates with other guys more often.”

“Try it and see if I ever wear this for you again.” You lift your ear off his chest. “Wait, there’s dark web sorcerer porn?”

He gives you an incredulous squint. “Ummm….”

“Of course there’s sorcerer porn. That was a stupid question.” You don’t know why you asked. “But how would it work with… you know, cursed energy and techniques not showing up on camera?”

“Why’re you askin’, huh? You wanna star in our own little home movie?” He tickles your ribs until you writhe and giggle. “We’d do numbers!”

For tonight, you can watch Yomiuri continue their reign of domination while you rest your head against Satoru’s shoulder, his arm curled around you.

And you can pretend that you didn’t notice that, even for a single second, you thought of him and your mind supplied the word home.

But it’ll only be a temporary reprieve.

Chapter Text

You’re going to have to do something. Say something. You can’t spend the next four months pretending you aren’t attached, don’t mind the idea of him seeing someone else, will be able to walk away in January. 

It was so stupid of you to ever think that you could make it to graduation without falling in love with him.

But if you’re going to blow up your non-relationship with your teacher and have to pick up the shrapnel, you’re doing it after the Exchange Event. You aren’t going to make it any of the kids’ problem. Or Satoru’s problem, since their performance will be reflecting directly on him.

You’re back to your old standby: kicking the can down the road.

Satoru’s already going to have plenty of problems, as Itadori Yuji is about to rejoin society at large for the first time in a month and a half.

He still thinks that’s going to go well.

You’re in the faculty lounge with him and Kento, awaiting Itadori’s big entrance. Kento is flipping through the morning paper, you’re yanking virtual weeds in Serene Valley Farming Life Mobile, and Satoru has both legs up on the coffee table and is, of course, running his mouth.

“Let’s film us throwing old rice balls at each other while talking about the separation of church and state! It’ll go viral!”

“What are you talking about?” asks Kento.

“Why old rice balls, in particular?” you ask.

“So they keep their shape when they’re bein’ tossed,” Satoru says patiently.

“But wouldn’t it be more exciting if you used fresh ones, so they burst apart when you hit each other?”

He snaps his fingers. “That’s genius, Ricchan. That’s why you’re gonna be our producer-slash-camerawoman—“ He snaps his fingers a second time. “No, wait. We gotta get you onscreen. A cutie like you’ll boost our views.”

You till a plot of soil with your virtual hoe. “Okay, but I want a third of the ad revenue.”

“You can have my share too. I do it for love of the game!”

Kento shakes his head. “Gojo, your nonsense is contagious.”

“Fine, fine! Let’s play a drinking game instead!” He claps his hands. “What do you like best about Gojo Satoru?” He claps again. “I’ll go first! I like everything!”

“His dignified silences are my favorite thing about him, personally,” you say. Kento snorts into his coffee. Satoru pouts at you. You beam at him.

“On a related note,” says Kento with a flick of his newspaper, “some lighthearted joking could do some good for Itadori right now.”

Satoru flops backwards in his chair and flicks at his blindfold with a thumb. “By the way, that wasn’t what I had in mind when I said ‘tough missions.’ Did you tell Yuji about the finger at Yoshino’s hou—“

You eye Kento, sitting at stern attention in his chair. “No. He would most likely feel unnecessarily responsible for it.”

“That’s why you’re the man,” says Satoru, and Kento’s spine, impossibly, straightens even further.

“Where’s the finger now?”

“I turned it in. If I gave it to you, you would’ve just made Itadori eat it,” says Kento, and Satoru lets out an annoyed little tch. 

You wonder what they taste like. Itadori claims he’ll eat anything, but still. 

“Hey, Gojo-sensei!” says Itadori, exploding through the nearest door with a wave. “Hey, Nanamin’s here too! And Miss Hasegawa!” 

You and Kento exchange a skeptical eye as an excited Itadori takes dubious direction from your teacher about how he should handle the big reveal for your classmates.

They still think that’s going to go well.

In the end, they go with a box.

A box on wheels, like they use to cart things around in warehouses.

“I see you givin’ me that look, Risacchi,” says Satoru as he wags a finger in front of your nose. “Just you wait.” 

“I said I’d table my objections, didn’t I?”

“That face of yours sure ain’t tabling your objections!”

“I’m just saying, if I supported this, which I do not, I wouldn’t go with having him pop out of a box—“ You drop your voice so Itadori doesn’t overhear you.

Because you’re arriving with Satoru, you’re naturally showing up late. Your classmates are already clustered at the school gate with their counterparts from Kyoto. They’re an eclectic group of kids, much like your own schoolmates—there’s a little witch with a broom, a girl in a tailored suit who looks like she’s cosplaying a hitwoman, and a robot. Or maybe he just has an exoskeleton? You never know with jujutsu sorcerers.

You don’t stare at the robot. Everyone probably always stares at the robot.

The girl in the suit is giving Satoru a sparkling, moon-eyed look, the kind often given to him by teenage girls. Her supervising teacher, on the other hand—a pretty and kindly-faced woman around your own age with a scar on her cheek and a shrine maiden’s uniform—is giving him the look often given by reasonable adults past their mid-twenties: glaring like she wants to close her hands around his throat.

Maybe she wants to hang out and grab a drink later. You could always use more adult woman friends. 

“Everyone’s here, I see,” says Satoru, in his lecture-hall voice that’s more suited to a stadium. “I was actually on a business trip overseas.” 

“Uh, he’s saying something,” says Panda, with a panicked undertone. 

You move to cover your eyes with your hand, then your mouth, then settle it on the collar of your uniform blouse, over the nerves in your throat, when you realize almost too late that clapping a hand over your face is going to give away the game. You’re as jittery as if you’re about to stride onstage at the school drama performance at the culture festival, and this wasn’t even your terrible idea.

“Souvenirs. Tribal charms for the Kyoto kids,” says Satoru, flinging out a handful of gifts. “Utahime, that’s not for you,” he says to the Kyoto teacher.

“Like I care,” she barks.

“And for the Tokyo kids!” he says, twirling the box into a spin. You squeeze your eyes closed, as if that will spare you. “It’s the dearly departed Itadori Yujiiiiiii!”

“Hah! Gotcha!” says Itadori, springing out of the box like a a cheap low-budget jumpscare in the kind of movie Satoru likes to make you watch. You can only wish this was all playing out safely on the other side of a screen.

Fushiguro and Kugisaki gape like they’ve just swerved out of the way of an oncoming bus. They gape like two grief-stricken high schoolers who’ve thought their new friend was dead for the past two months. Panda, who you’re not certain has ever met Itadori, nevertheless gapes along with them, in solidarity and as a display of his good sense. You approve, until his ponderous snout swings towards you and you shuffle back a step. 

“You aren’t acting surprised, Ms. Hasegawa,” he says. He doesn’t even need to sound accusatory. The implication does that for him.

“You were right, Miss Hasegawa,” whispers Itadori frantically. There’s real sweat glimmering on his brow, the poor kid. He looks deflated, crushed, like he just bombed a comedy set. Just for once, you wish you hadn’t been right.

“You knew?” asks Kugisaki, aiming an accusatory finger at you.

“I did know! I’m so sorry, I was asked to keep it a secret! I told him this was a bad idea—“ You cast panicked looks over your shoulder for Satoru, who, rather than deal with any of the fallout of his own enormously bad decision, has already gotten himself distracted by the elderly principal of the Kyoto school, who you recognize as the old man he spilled his drink on at the charity event. 

It figures.

“If you knew and didn’t say anything,” says Kugisaki, bracing her hands on her hips, “then you’re just as bad as he is!”

You clutch a guilty hand down on the handle of the wheeled box, deflating like a failed souffle pancake. The box doesn’t have brakes, so you almost faceplant at the front entrance in front of both schools, which would just be divine retribution, because she’s right. You should never have let yourself get dragged along with this scheme. “You’re right, Kugisaki, I’m so sorry—“

“Lay off Risa,” says Maki. “We all know whose fault it really is.”

She jerks her chin with a sway of her ponytail at Satoru, who’s looming at his full height over the stooped Kyoto principal. “Heh heh. Good thing the shock didn’t kill you. I was so worried!” 

His tone and his mocking chuckle might be flippant, but his lips are curled back in a true snarl. He’s not joking. That’s real hatred in his voice.

You turn aside from Itadori as he stutters his apologies to a still-glowering Kugisaki and sidle closer to Satoru, but after another volley of glares and insults, the two men appear to cover the coals for the time being. Both schools launch into a slow parade up the main walk to the steps of Yaga-sensei’s receiving hall.

Satoru falls into step beside you, hands in his pockets, bent arms swinging, whistling a jaunty tune. “What are you so happy about?” you whisper.

“Think that went pretty good!” he says. 

“What are you talking about?” you mutter, glancing sidelong at the Kyoto students, all occupied with their souvenirs. The young lady in the suit keeps shyly bumping in your direction, then thinking the better of it and slipping back into the orbit of her teacher. She probably wants Satoru to sign her souvenir. “Nothing about that went well! They’re all really upset!”

He flops a hand. “They’re gonna forgive him. It’s fine.”

“Not a single person laughed, cried, or puked!” Although Kugisaki is still on the verge of tears. Even Fushiguro seems surprised by the intensity of her reaction.

“Gakuganji might still puke, if we get real lucky!” Satoru says, then trails off into a bitter chuckle.

Yaga-sensei’s waiting on the steps leading up to the principal’s building. His jaw swivels from Itadori to Satoru back to Itadori back to Satoru and finally to the enraged Gakuganji, like a cruise missile twisting during its descent. 

“Satoru,” he says, and his voice cuts a swathe through the hundred meters between you.

“Step back and look innocent,” Satoru says, nudging you in the ribs. “He’s gonna be so pissed—“

“I am innocent! This was all your idea!” you hiss, even though Kugisaki’s point still stands, and you’ll fall on your sword and incriminate yourself at a single skeptical glance from behind Yaga-sensei’s sunglasses.

“Hiiiiiiiiii, Masamichiiiiiii!” Satoru says, skipping along ahead of you with his unfairly long stride. With a sigh, you fall back beside the Kyoto teacher.

“You’re stuck with him all the time, huh,” she says, bracing her chin on one fist. “Tough break.”

“Oh, it isn’t so bad,” you say, eyeing his back as he struts towards his own certain doom. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Hasegawa Risa.”

“Iori Utahime,” she says, then raises a hand beside her mouth. “Listen. Do you want a transfer to the Kyoto campus? I can put in a word for you while we’re here. I’ll discuss it with Principal Gakuganji tonight.”

You laugh. “A transfer month might be fun sometime!”

She wasn’t kidding. “You don’t have to fake it around me,” she says, her voice dropping to an urgent whisper. “I’ve known him for years, I know what he’s like.” 

She glares a dagger into Satoru’s retreating back, and there’s real hatred in her voice. There’s real glee, too, when Yaga-sensei announces the commencement of the Exchange Event while clamping Satoru in a brutal shoulder lock while Satoru grunts and taps his back for mercy.

You’re desperate to know what the history is there.

The first day of the two-day event is going to be a team battle competition. “First day’s always team battle,” says Satoru, pulling back up beside you with a cheerful little cough while the students file to their respective preparation areas for team meetings. “Day two’s individual battles.”

“Are you… okay?” Your right hand hovers in the vague region of his chest, but you’re all too aware of the prying eyes of both principals and curious glances from Iori-sensei.

He cracks his neck. “I’m good! Gotta set a good example for the students and all that. Can’t be usin’ Limitless to dodge Masamichi’s ass-beatings.”

“If you’re sure you’re all right…”

“Hey, Utahime!” he yells across the courtyard. “Gotta talk to you later!”

“What could you possibly have to talk to me about?” she says, whirling on him in the middle of her friendly chat with Kusakabe-sensei. You can practically see a vein thudding in her forehead.

“C’mon, it’s school biz! It’s impooooooortant!”

“Argh! Fine.”

A little twinge hits you between the fourth and fifth ribs. “Um, would the two of you like some privacy?”

“Nah. You come too, Risacchi!”

You trail him to one of the unused faculty rooms shortly before the start time at noon, clay mugs of tea in hand. “You wanted to talk?” asks Iori after she settles herself into one of the chairs, her voice still flinty with her obvious distaste.

“You mad at me?” asks Satoru with a small twist of his chin.

“No, I’m not angry,” says Iori, only a little testily.

“That’s what I thought! I haven’t done anything!” 

Iori’s eyes narrow, one fingernail tapping her arm in the shadow of her wide sleeve. Satoru leans forward in his chair, resting his forearms on his thighs. “Someone in the schools is working with a curse user. Or maybe a cursed spirit.”

You pause with your mug halfway to her lips. This is news to you.

Iori lunges forward in her seat. “That’s impossible! A curse user, maybe, but a cursed spirit?”

“There are quite a few unusual ones these days. The person in question might be only talking to the curse user, though.” He picks up his mug. “Can you investigate the Kyoto school, Utahime?”

He must have a lot of trust and faith in her, to ask this. Of course there’d be no reason to tell you. You’re only a student yourself. You wouldn’t be very useful, in terms of either school access or administrative connections. 

There’s nothing you could have done, aside from listen to him. You suppose it’s a mark of his trust that you’re even present for this conversation at all, but you wish, with a faint ache, that he’d told you before.

Iori falls back in her chair. “How do you know I’m not the mole?”

“As if! You’re too weak, and you don’t have the guts!”

“Hey—“ you protest.

Iori doesn’t need your help, though. She launches her mug of tea straight at his face.

With a quick handsign, the scalding liquid parts around him like a wave breaking on a promontory. You scoot backward out of range of the spray, although the few stray droplets fleck harmlessly on the floor, well away from your skirt.

“Oooh, scary!” Satoru says. “Men don’t like hysterical girls, you know!” 

“Hey!” you say again, at the same time Iori shouts, “That’s enough! Respect your elders!” She’s one centimeter away from lunging for his throat, and you’re not inclined to step between them at the moment.

You’re starting to understand the basis for her intense dislike.

“Why did you talk to her like that?” you ask, after she’s flounced from the room in an understandable huff.

“Like what?”

You narrow your eyes. “Like, super rude for no reason?” 

“I’m just teasin’!” he says. “It’s part of our dynamic! Why’s it got your panties all up in a twist, huh?” He leans towards you, lips quirking into a smirk. “Could it be because… you’re jealous?”

“It’s because you’re making me embarrassed to be associated with you!” you say.

And maybe you’re also a little jealous. Because he teases everyone around him, but you haven’t seen him poke fun at an attractive woman, your own age, in the quite the same way he does to you. Until now. 

“Jealous, you’re jea-loussssss,” he croons, clasping his hands beside his cheek. “My sweet Ricchan doesn’t like it when I tease other womennnn…”

“I’m just asking you to tone it down a little with her, that’s all! She obviously doesn’t like it—“ She’d slammed the conference room door closed like she was trying to rack up some fresh property damage for the next fundraiser event. 

He tilts his head. “She ain’t actually mad, baby! It’s just a thing we do! It’s a bit we’ve been doing since our school days!”

“Are you sure?” you ask. The sheen of malice in her eyes when he was tapping Yaga-sensei’s back for mercy had you convinced.

“Did you fall for it! Awwww, you did, didn’t you?” He sways mockingly back and forth. “‘Cause you’re jealous, jea-loussss…” He pokes your shoulder. “C’mon, sweetness. You can’t get all up my ass for being jealous of you and another guy, and then turn around and act like you ain’t doing the same thing.”

You sag against one of the comfortable lecture hall chairs, a souffle pancake once more. He’s right. “You’re right. I’m sorry, that’s not fair.”

He pats your hair. “It’s okay. I forgive you, ‘cause you’re making that really cute face you make when you get all worked up.” He leans in closer, his breath tickling your cheek. “And because you liiiiiike it when I tease you.”

Your sigh hitches up into a giggle when he tweaks the collar of your blouse. “C’mon, baby. Admit it.” 

“I do. A little,” you whisper, your lips only a few centimeters from his own. There’s no accounting for your own taste.

You know you shouldn’t be doing this here and now, where Iori might change her mind and burst back in at any moment, when you have to march back out to face his boss and your principal in only a few minutes. But it takes a handful of hard breaths and blinks to wrestle back your self-control and draw back from his smiling lips.

“I’ll cut her some slack,” he says, leaning one elbow against a desk. “There ya go. Happy now?”

“Yes,” you say, and before he has a chance to escape down the hallway, you say, “Why didn’t you tell me about the mole investigation?”

“”Cause I didn’t want you to worry, baby,” he says, patting your head again. “I still don’t! But I let you tag along ‘cause I could tell from your cute face that you were just gonna nag me about it later!”

You return his fond grin with a sigh, despite yourself, despite all your better judgment.

You like him so much, and you want him all to yourself, for way longer than next January.

You kick the can down the road and settle in for a long and tortuous afternoon of spectator sports.

You’re allowed in the faculty observation room, where one of the grade one sorcerers—the woman with the long, pale braids obscuring her face, who you were also, come to think of it, bitterly jealous of at the fundraiser event—is using her cursed technique to broadcast a literal bird’s-eye view on a handful of screens. 

Officially, you’re on tea duty. You’re seated in the middle of three rows of chairs, beside the pale-haired woman, behind Satoru and Iori, and directly in front of Yaga-sensei. You sit with your hands clasped in your lap and on your best behavior when you’re not refilling cups.

Less than ten minutes after he promised to go easy, Satoru sticks the announcer’s microphone in Iori’s face and puts her on the spot for an improvised speech, then cuts her off halfway in.

“Whatever happened to letting up on her?” you whisper as you brush shoulders with him on your way to a refill. 

“C’mon! That was funny!” he protests.

Her flustered ramble included a mention of “some inevitable casualties,” so you’re not in the mood to laugh.

Officially, the objective of the team battle event is to see which school can hunt down the cursed spirits set loose in the enclosed forest around the school faster. There’s a wall of paper talismans designed to burn with colored fire when a student exorcises each curse. Not ten seconds after both groups of students enter the arena, it becomes obvious that no one’s fighting the curses.

The Kyoto group arrows straight for your Tokyo classmates, with the burliest, most aggressive-looking young man far out in front. You flinch and gasp when he slams into Itadori with the speed and force of a derailed bullet train.

If you were out there, you could’ve used your cursed technique lapse to cover Itadori and tank the hit. But you aren’t, and if you were, you’d just be slowing your classmates down and making things awkward by being the only adult on the field.

But if you were, you could’ve defended him from the next brutal headshot that sends him careening into a tree.

You knot your hands in your lap like a snarl of yarn, digging your thumbnail into a white knuckle, and watch the back of Satoru’s shock of hair. He doesn’t seem worried. He’d been confident in Itadori’s honed abilities. You tell yourself that if he’s not worried, you don’t have to be worried. 

You edge a little closer to the edge of your seat, your tea curdling in your stomach.

The camera footage is erratic and unfocused. Each time the view of the fight cuts back in, poor Itadori is even more bloodied, battered, and bruised, like a grotesque flipbook. You lob an underhanded glance around your chair at the principals sitting behind you. Yaga-sensei and Principal Gakuganji are both leaning forward in their chairs, invested for, you’re afraid, opposing reasons.

In one of the rapid-fire flickers across the arena, the students splinter off into a series of scattered one-on-one matchups. Panda and Mechamaru, the maybe-robot maybe-exoskeleton—and you’re nervous for about two seconds before Panda tears into him for scrap metal. You’ve seen Panda in action on combat missions before, and he’s always been perfectly competent, but you haven’t appreciated just how much he’s been holding back.

You sneak another glance at Yaga-sensei when you bring him a fresh cup of tea. He looks proud.

Kugisaki ends up chasing the witch girl with the broom. The audio quality is so dim and fuzzy that you can’t quite catch what she’s saying, and you’re not a practiced hand at lip-reading, but you’re sure each time she opens her mouth, it’s cutting. That girl could make even your most self-involved aunties feel bad about themselves.

Itadori and the brawny, shirtless young man from Kyoto are still sparring, but at some point in between cuts, it twists around from a genuine fight into a pair of guy friends brawling for practice. You have no idea what happened there. From a quick glance around the room, no one else seems to, either.

Fushiguro and one of the Kyoto upperclassmen from the Kamo clan clash in a respectful match, and Maki puts in an incredible performance against the suit-clad young woman who’d been enamored with Satoru, and who, apparently, is only attending school for jujutsu to make money, because she’s poor. Your arms and wallet ache in sympathy.

“What an interesting girl,” says the pale-haired woman, Mei Mei. “Why don’t we just promote her to grade 2 already?”

Satoru tilts back in his chair. “I agree, but her family seems to be getting in the way.” You hope her horrible uncle is having an awful day today. “The Zen’in family should just be honest and acknowledge her skills.”

“Heh. I don’t understand connections not based on money,” says Mei Mei.

“And you’ll always be a cheapskate!” Satoru leans his chin over the back of his chair, glancing at her. “Anyway, can’t help but notice that the video feed around Yuji seems to be a little inconsistent.”

Itadori’s back onscreen now, and getting a lesson from his opponent about… cursed energy circulation? This has to be some kind of masculine bonding ritual that’s incomprehensible to you. 

“Well, what can you do about animals? Besides, it gets tiring looking at things from their point of view after awhile,” says Mei Mei, allowing her braid to swing in front of her face. 

“You sure about that?” asks Satoru. You scoot forward in your chair, hands clamped on your knees, at the familiar bite of anger in his voice. Beside you, Yaga-sensei glances in your direction. You can feel the stinging heat of your blush creeping down your neck. “I got a question for ya… whose side are you on, Mei?”

“Whose side? I’m on the side with the money, of course,” she says, pinching an imaginary coin between thumb and forefinger. “There’s no value in something that can’t be bought.”

“I wonder how much!” Satoru laughs. His line of sight is obscured by his blindfold, but you know he’s glaring at Principal Gakuganji. Principal Gakuganji bristles like a startled tanuki. 

The argument’s cut off by one of the scraps of paper talismans on the wall bursting into scarlet flame and burning to cinder. That means one of your Tokyo classmates has exorcised one of the cursed spirits. “All these one-on-ones…” murmurs Satoru. “Did they forget the main objective?”

“Why can’t they just get along…” mumbles Iori.

“Maybe they get it from you, Utahime.”

“The only person I don’t get along with is you!” Well, doesn’t that sound a little familiar.

The camera cuts back to Kugisaki’s desperate chase, trying to catch the witch on her flying broom. You dig your fingers out of your skirt when Kugisaki knocks her out with a strike from an inflatable hammer, only to squeak and jump in your seat when a rubber bullet from Maki’s twin sister drills her right between the eyes.

At the conclusion of Maki’s fight with her sister, in Maki’s favor—you knew they weren’t on good terms, but the fight is teeth-grittingly brutal—Toge gets ahold of one of the Kyoto students’ cellphones and uses it to send the only opponent who answers—the young lady with the suit and money problems—straight to sleep with cursed speech.

“I’m heading over,” says Iori-sensei, rising from her chair. “It’s dangerous to leave her alone in a forest full of cursed spirits.” 

But before she can exit the room, the wall of talismans roars into crimson flame. The cursed fire burns hot. You can feel it against your cheek, all the way across the room. “Game over?” Iori asks, turning on her heel. “And all Tokyo red?”

“Strange. My crows haven’t seen anything, either,” says Mei Mei.

“I’d like to say that as the Great Teacher Gojo, that it was all my students. But I doubt it,” says Satoru, steepling his fingers. 

“Remember, they also burn red for unregistered cursed energy,” says Yaga-sensei. That’s so Maki’s points will count.

“It must be an outsider… or maybe an intruder?” says Iori.

“Does that mean Master Tengen’s barrier isn’t working?” asks Mei Mei.

You’re aware of Master Tengen’s existence through the texts in the school library, but it’s so odd to think about an immortal living creature at the nidus of every barrier around the school that you’ve had to suppress the knowledge for the sake of your own sanity. “I’m heading over to Master Tengen,” says Yaga-sensei. “Satoru, you go with Principal Gakuganji to rescue the students. Mei will stay here and try to get a lock on where the students are located. Please let Satoru and the others know as soon as you find out.”

There’s urgency in his voice, and it’s not without precedent. You remember what Panda told you at the end of your first term. An attack on the school. Severe injuries. Buildings leveled and destroyed. Happens every so often. 

“Let’s go, Grandpa! Time for your walk!” says Satoru, clapping his hands beside Principal Gakuganji’s head. “You already ate lunch, remember?”

You’re already on your feet, smoothing out your skirt for something to do with your hands. “Sensei… may I come with you?”

Satoru’s crossing his arms, his brows drawn down beneath his blindfold. “You’re a student too, Hasegawa. Sit tight here with Mei.”

Mei’s resumed focus on the set of screens, and it might just be your flawed perception, but it seems like the visuals have sharpened and steadied. “But—“

“But nothin.’ Stay here where I know you’re safe.” His voice has gained the firm, protective edge that always makes your pulse stammer, but you edge closer to him and Iori, bracketing one wrist with the opposite hand. 

He’s being sensible. He’s being responsible. You’ve asked him before to go easy on you, and he has. But you’re going to lose your mind if you have to spend even a single second sitting here with your hands in your lap, watching Mei flicker through various views of the arena. The rest of the event was already bad enough. 

“I can help,” you say. “I can use my lapse.” You straighten your shoulders and try to meet his eyes through the blindfold.

“Ugh! Fine! We’re wastin’ time here.” He jerks his head towards the exit. “But you better be able to keep up.”

Keeping up with an elderly man three times your senior is tougher than you anticipated. Whatever Principal Gakuganji’s been doing for low-impact cardio, you need to start working into your own routine. Or maybe it’s just the power of pure spite and bitterness. You jog alongside Iori and Gakuganji on the cobbled path to the forest, Satoru ten meters above you, dashing across the school rooftops.

He could easily outpace all of you—and Iori shouts up at him that he should when a wave of cool shadow arcs over the forest. A curtain. You almost stumble on the paving stones when you crane your chin up to watch its descent towards the ground. A chill ripples through you, like you’ve extended a hand to touch it. 

“No can do,” Satoru shouts.

“What?!”

“Ricchan, think fast! Tell her why,” he calls down to you. 

“This is a lesson now?”

“You asked for it, didn’t’cha?” Well, you did, didn’t you.

“Why are you calling her that?” yells Iori.

You’ve got no idea why he can’t go ahead. Barrier techniques can have a variety of functions and mechanics—Master Tengen’s shields around the school, for one—but your only practical experience is limited to the curtains designed to keep citizens from seeing curses and interfering with exorcisms. “Um… if it’s designed to trap the students, it’ll be easier to break it from the outside, out here?”

“Not a bad guess, but nope!” He makes a buzzer sound with his mouth that has Principal Gakuganji gritting his teeth. “This curtain’s already complete. The cursed effect was faster than the visual.”

Curtains can do that? You skid to a stop alongside Iori and Gakuganji, right at the edge of the barrier. It’s a solid sheet of night-black slicing across the path.

“But you’re right! We can just tear it apart from out here.” Satoru extends a hand, but when his fingertips brush against the oil-slick surface, it lets off a crackling sizzle like water striking a hot pan. 

Iori, on the other hand, can slide her hand right through. “Why did you get repelled, and I didn’t?”

Satoru shoves his hands in his pockets with a hard grin. “I see. Utahime and Gramps, you two go ahead. This curtain… in exchange for denying Gojo Satoru entrance, it gives everyone else free access!” Curtains can do that?

He taps his thumb to his chin. “There’s a very skilled curse user out there. And they seem to have a fair amount of info on us. C’mon, get goin’ already. I dunno what their goal is, but if even a single person dies, we lose.”

If even a single person dies. If one of your classmates’ lives ends here, today, chopped short at the age of sixteen. One fake funeral was enough. 

“Permission to go with them, sensei?” you ask.

He shrugs one shoulder towards your companions. “Up to them.”

Iori surveys you with a hard look. “What grade are you?”

“Three.”

“Then I’m sorry, but no—“

“On the books, she’s a three,” says Satoru. “Off ‘em, at least a two. Semi-one if I’m feelin’ generous,” says Satoru.

“Really?” you and Iori ask at the same time.

“She’s my student! Don’t act all surprised,” he says, and it’s silly for a little firework of pride to sizzle in your chest right now, but it does. “Now get your ass in gear! All of ya!”

It’s unthinkable right now in front of your audience, and anyway there’s no time, but you wish you could steal a kiss for good luck. Even a brush of the hand. Instead, you give him a nod, steel yourself in front of the barrier with your heart thundering in your throat, and throw yourself through like a diver into cold water, before you can lose your nerve. 

Within the shadow on the other side of the barrier, the forest is alive and awake with the buzz of night-chiming insects, their drone so loud it almost drowns out the sprinting thud of your pulse. You can feel a curse here. The presence is so thick and overwhelming it’s like holding a quilt over your face in the middle of summer. Iori makes a small noise of distress and annoyance, and you know she’s feeling it too. 

“Hey hey hey!” shouts an approaching voice. A man, descending down the stairway leading deeper into the wood. Tall and brawny and wearing only a heavy leather apron over his bare chest, a smear of dark paint over his eyes. That overwhelming pressure doesn’t belong to him. “Hey hey hey hey! Where is Gojo Satoru?”

“Utahime, Miss Hasegawa, leave this to me,” says Principal Gakuganji. “Saving the students is our priority. Don’t fight if you don’t have to.”

You don’t feel good about leaving him behind, even if he is a horrible old man who may have ordered a hit on Itadori, but Iori says, “You’re with me, Hasegawa,” reaching out to lay a hand on your forearm. 

You keep pace with her as she cuts a path to the left, around him, and straight into the woods. Behind you, you hear the axe-wielding man shout, “Wait a minute! At least let me kill one of the women!”

“I’m going to head for Miwa,” huffs Iori without losing speed. “If you’re a semi-one, we’re better off splitting up and working separately. Can you do that?”

You want to argue that you’re not a real semi-one, but she’s right. You’ll be of far more use if you try to find the other student you know is unconscious. “I’ll look for Kugisaki.”

The two of you exchange cell numbers. “Good luck,” she says, with another firm nod, and swerves off along the arc of the river where the young suit-clad swordswoman fell asleep.

You ford into the underbrush alone. You’ve logged plenty of practice hours in this forest, but your wilderness orienteering skills are lacking, and every landmark is made new and strange by the sickly half-dark in the shadow of the curtain. The insects chime around you. Your heart patters in your ears. Your cursed technique trembles against your skin. From behind you, you think you hear the sound of… an electric guitar? No, that can’t be right.

You aim for the little knuckle in the landscape where you think you last saw Kugisaki onscreen. You’re off by a few hundred meters, but you have the good fortune to stumble into the ash-lined path of the enormous laser the Kyoto robot fired at her and Panda, and from there it’s a stumble through the underbrush, tracing the path she careened through chasing the girl on the broom. 

You find the fallen log she collapsed next to when she got sniped, but there’s no one there. You survey the circle of grass, stomped flat, and hug yourself. Maybe she regained consciousness and is on the move now.

Maybe that freak with the hatchet got to her first—but no, there’s no bloodstains, no signs of struggle besides evidence of the fight you saw onscreen. You throttle your pulse.

Your phone chimes with a text alert and you almost scream. It’s just Iori, informing you that she’s recovered Miwa and is escorting her back to the edge of the curtain before she delves back inside. 

As you’re typing a reply, you almost drop the phone. Something is crashing towards you. Something big, and something loud. It’s not the enormous pressure of the powerful curse that’s filling the entire dome under the curtain like deep water, but it’s got a hefty presence, and it’s fast.

You duck to the edge of a tree and reinforce your shield. You’re unarmed. There was no time to grab your staff. You curl your hand into a fist and steep it in cursed energy. The presence is careening towards you, crashing through the foliage, each heavy step quaking the earth beneath your loafers. As it ambles closer, you recognize its edge.

It’s only Panda. Still, you shout in surprise when he breaks into the clearing.

“Aaaaagh!” Panda scoots to a stop, the two classmates he’s carrying slung over his shoulder swaying with the change in momentum. “Miss Hasegawa!”

“Hey, Hasegawa,” croaks Maki. She and Fushiguro are riding shotgun.

“Are you all okay?” They don’t look okay. They look awful. Maki’s lost her glasses, and blood from her hairline is dribbling over her closed right eye. Fushiguro’s unconscious, with a smear of blood on his chin and… something piercing his midriff. A sharp shaft of wood, or a root, with a stale, foul vegetal smell.

“I’m fine!” says Panda, flexing the arm he’s using to cradle Fushiguro. “I’m on medic duty! We’re heading for the edge of the curtain! Where’s Satoru?”

“He’s trapped outside! The curtain was meant to keep him out!” You fall into step with Panda as he picks the pace back up. “I’ll go with you. I can use my lapse if anything tries to attack you.”

“There’s a special grade out there,” huffs Panda as you expand your shield to cover all three of them. It won’t take much damage, stretched like this, but at least it’ll protect Panda from a few spare hits if anything attacks while his arms are full. “Yuji and Todo are fighting it now.”

The curtain still shimmers above you. That deep-water pressure still swims in your skull. Satoru will be as fast as he can. You hope it’s fast enough. 

You escort Panda and your injured schoolmates to the edge of the barrier. You have to grit your teeth and focus to keep your shield stretched around all four of you, like holding an exercise band taut, and it feels like you catch your toe on every stray root in a square kilometer of forest. Fushiguro’s slack face has turned a pale, curdled color, but he’s still breathing. Panda salutes you as he slides through the barrier backwards. 

You turn right back around and limp towards the clearing, hoping you can track Kugisaki. But before you can get halfway there, the curtain shreds apart above you like moth-eaten silk. 

Satoru’s black-clad silhouette is a blot of ink against the blazing blue sky. You know he can see you perfectly, even here on the ground, even partially obscured by the dense foliage. You raise a hand and wave at him. You’re squinting into the sun and your vision’s not a tenth as keen as his, but you think he waves back before he disappears in a blink. 

You don’t see him reappear, but you can feel him, feel his cursed energy rising to a sharp-edged zenith just out of sight and out of reach.

And then all the hair on your arms stands on end and the ground bucks beneath your feet like the first warning shocks of an earthquake, and a smear of violet light cleaves the forest in two, leaving your ears chiming and your vision a blot of gleaming gold.

You shuffle to the edge of the tract it left in the earth. A channel deep enough for a three-lane expressway, kilometers long. 

Iori texts you again to tell you she’s recovered Kugisaki and Maki’s twin. You can already feel the pressure of the distant special grade dwindling and receding, like you’ve swum upward into shallower water. You shamble back to the school, the edges of your vision still dazzled and sparkling.

In the end, you all got lucky. With the help of Todo, the burly Kyoto upperclassman, Itadori was able to hold off the special grade long enough for it to turn tail and flee the second Satoru entered the field. The sorcerers on duty at the cursed tool storehouse, the real target of the attack, weren’t so fortunate. Eleven fatalities, one of them even a semi-grade one sorcerer. A couple of the assistant managers you’ve waved at before in the lounge. Eleven people dead, and you’ve lost.

Maki and Fushiguro are both in the infirmary, but Shoko can make quick work of their recovery and they’ll be back in fighting shape for the second day of the exchange event tomorrow.

The rest of it isn’t canceled, even though you’d been certain Yaga-sensei would call it off. But Satoru asked the students to vote, and they voted to keep going. And because he’s Satoru, he rigged the draw for the activity for the second day—which was already supposed to be rigged, in favor of a one-on-one tournament—so they can all relax and play baseball instead of beating up on each other again.

You’re so fond of him you could scream. 

“Sorry you can’t play, sweetness!” he says, dropping a kiss to your hair before you leave his apartment for the game. He’s not going to be playing either. He’s umpiring. “You gotta be on sexy cheerleader duty!”

“It’s all right. I’ll be on the sidelines, critiquing everyone’s swing.” The one activity you might’ve actually been kind of good at.

You’re on tea detail again, on the sidelines with the two principals, watching the students swat balls and dash around the bases, the air dense and hazy with the last gasp of summer. You shade your eyes against the afternoon glow, admiring the way Satoru fills out his button-up shirt and relaxing in the warm halo of your classmates’ relieved laughter.

They all got very, very lucky. Maybe they won’t the next time, when it happens again. It’s definitely going to happen again. There are still multiple special grade curses on the loose, and they were willing to pay a high price to get their hands on whatever they were after from the school stores. They must have some kind of plan to use it. And there’s still a spy in one or both campuses.

It’ll happen again, and if it’s this fall or winter, you’ll be around to see it. And after that, you’ll be… somewhere. Somewhere else. In a new, different high-rise in Tokyo, limping through each day as you wait for it to be over. You’ll be logging overtime hours at work, aggregating consumer data or filing reports or stringing together a last-minute slide deck, and you’ll check your phone and see an alert about a leveled building in a run-down warehouse district, or a smoking crater in some nearby town. 

Or road closures on the way to some rich kid religious school out in the sticks.

And you’ll think, what? That has nothing to do with me anymore? Those people have nothing to do with me anymore? Watch the footage through a screen, just like you did yesterday, and then turn away. Go back to your safe little job in your safe little apartment. Your safe, small, cramped little life. Your empty bed, without Satoru—

Satoru will be here. Satoru is a guy with a dream. He’ll be protecting these kids. Ensuring they have futures. Changing the jujutsu world, a little at a time, from the ground up.

You never really had a dream like that. You’d chosen your career path, like you chose so many other aspects of your life, because it was a sure bet.

You’re starting to think you might not be very good at picking your odds. 

As the game winds down, you eavesdrop on Yaga-sensei and Principal Gakuganji’s conversation about Itadori.

“Whether the decision was about Itadori was correct or not… to be honest, I can’t say for sure,” says Yaga-sensei, just as you hover out of arm’s length. “For now, why don’t we support him while we watch over him?”

Principal Gakuganji is silent for the next few Tokyo base runs. Then he says, “Yaga. How about you do something about Gojo first?”

Satoru strolls by, whistling with his hands in his pockets. He winks at you around the rims of his shades. You raise your hand in a proud little wave.

Tokyo wins two to zero. Afterwards, the adults take pity on you and invite you along to the traditional teacher and staff exchange event afterparty—karaoke night.

You’re planning on sitting in a corner, nursing your drink, and cheering on everyone else—Iori has the kind of voice that would sell tickets at the National Theater, and you don’t want to invite any comparisons—but halfway through your glass of lychee sake, Satoru hops onstage and announces, “The next number will be performed by Ricchan! Everyone clap!” 

He drags you onstage for a hesitant rendition of Takeuchi Mariya’s “Plastic Love”, and then you stick around for an encore, a slightly more confident performance of the ending theme from Private Pure Love Train, “Admiring You.” Satoru claps his hands above his head, swinging and swaying in time to the beat and whooping with a wolf-whistle when you clasp the microphone and bow.

“That song has different lyrics than I remember,” says Iori as you collapse on the plastic bench between her and Kento. 

“Iori,” you ask, emboldened by the drink, the atmosphere, and the lack of oxygen in your brain from singing your lungs out, “would you mind if I used your phone number to keep in touch?”

“Sure, why the hell not?” she says with a smile before standing up to take the mic.

Kento’s sipping a glass of scotch on the rocks and surveying the stage with sleepy, half-lidded eyes. There’s a little lull in the noise while Iori scrolls through Nakamori Akina’s voluminous discography. You fold your hands in your lap. “Kento… I just wanted to say, you’re right. Work is shit.”

He lets out a brief chuckle and tips his glass to you.

“Um… would you mind if I ask you something?”

He inclines his head. “Go ahead.”

“You said you came back to the sorcery world because work was going to be shit either way…” You twine your fingers together. “What was it that made you change your mind?”

“Ah.” He leans forward, bracing his forearms on the edge of the table. “I’m afraid that statement wasn’t completely honest. I said I was simply interested in doing the work that suits me, but what I meant—and what brought me back to the jujutsu world—is that I wanted to do work that was meaningful.” He gives you a sidelong glance through his goggles. “Is that helpful to you?”

“Yes. It is. Thank you.” You sit up a little straighter in your seat, thumbing your near-empty glass, as Satoru crashes Iori’s cover of “Kinku” and she tries to club him with the microphone. You sigh and press your fingertips to your forehead, smiling behind your hand. 

“You know,” says Kento, with a faint curl of his lip, “you could really do much better.”

You laugh, louder this time, and then press your hand over your mouth, flushing a neon scarlet. “Um… I’m not…” He huffs a sigh with a small, pitying shake of his head. “Is it really that obvious?”

“You could also consider wearing a sign,” he says with a prim, sanctimonious sip of his scotch. “You might like to know that after he sent me pictures of you and your domain last winter, he also informed me that you were, to quote directly, ‘babe city.’”

This time, not even your hand can muffle your bark of laughter.

You scrub at one blazing cheek. “You know, if you’re still looking… I have a friend who’s single! She lives here in Tokyo. She’s really nice.” You dig out your phone to look for a selfie with Hanae. “I could give you her number if you’re interested.” She’s already given you permission to hand it out if you meet any ‘single hot teachers.’ You show him a photo of the two of you getting boba after cardio class. 

“Risachiiiiiiiiii!” calls Satoru from the stage, throwing his his hand out to you. “C’mon, get up here! We’re doin’ Morning Musume and we need ya!”

You tilt your phone towards Kento, and he says, “I’ll think about it,” with a little smile.

You hop on stage to join Satoru. He passes you the microphone, and your hands briefly entwine with a jolt of sunlit warmth. You smile up at him, eyes shining, cheeks rosy, mouth aching, and he grins down at you before he spins you around by the shoulders to face your coworkers. Your friends. Shoko, falling asleep in her chair. Ijichi beside her, pushing a cup of water in her direction. Akari with one fingertip jammed in her ear while she tries to have a phone conversation with her brother.

People you care about. People who mean something to you.

It’s time you started betting on new odds.

Chapter Text

Yaga-sensei is the first person you tell about your decision to stay in school. 

You organize the meeting yourself. March to his office yourself. You want to know what your future at Jujutsu High is going to look like before you attempt to navigate the minefield of your impending conversation with Satoru. 

And you want to do it yourself. You’ve been leaning on Satoru since your debut here as a student, since before you even knew the full context of just how much he’s aided and protected you, from the second he stepped foot onto the fourth floor of your old office building. And you’re grateful for all his help. For everything he’s done for you.

But if you’re going to really make a go of it as a professional, you have to stand on your own two feet, starting now. You have to put the work in yourself. After all, as Satoru likes to tell the kids, sorcery is a solo sport.

Yaga-sensei folds his broad-knuckled hands atop his desk and his mouth in a small, satisfied smile. “That’s welcome news, Miss Hasegawa. I think you have a promising career ahead of you as a jujutsu sorcerer. We’ll be lucky to retain you for a full course of study.”

You clasp your hands and bow, to give your arms something to do so you don’t embarrass yourself with a giddy flail and cheer. You love getting a good grade. 

“Your special curriculum will have to be adjusted, and considering you were an off-cycle student… I’ll speak with Satoru about when he thinks would be most appropriate to move you up to the second-year class.”

“Um, sensei… I haven’t had the opportunity to speak to Gojo-sensei yet. Would you mind waiting until I’ve talked to him myself?”

His eyes narrow behind his sunglasses. “You have one week.”

You gulp as you bow again. The clock’s ticking. Now you have to go through with informing Satoru that you want to stick around—both on campus and by his side. If you try to kick the can down the road, you’ll run right out of road.

It occurs to you that, at the mature age of twenty-eight, this will be the first time in your life that you’ve been on the offering end of a love confession. In relationships past—your high school boyfriend Hide, your longest-running college boyfriend Kazuo, Fumiya—you’d always been the recipient. The one who waited, shy and hesitant, for the other to make the first move. 

Yet another new experience that you can add to Satoru’s tally.

You allow yourself three days of procrastination. Satoru’s out on an international mission anyway. He sends you a picture of the souvenir snacks he’s bringing you, and also two pictures of his cock. tell him i miss him too, you reply. 

You nearly buy yourself another day when he texts you about his impending return. You should have one more day with him, right? One more day to welcome him home.

But you’d better line up your shot now. You can’t expect to stay normal and keep a lid on it during what’s become his typical coming-home ritual. If he fucks you over his couch and asks you what you want for takeout. If he holds you while you watch some garbage movie together and falls asleep with his cheek resting atop your head, his gentle breath tickling your hair.

You type back, Have a safe flight! I have something to talk to you about when you get home.

sounds serious babe, he responds. u decided to ditch me for nanami after all?

You sigh and clasp a hand to your forehead. i would never. You don’t want anyone else. Not now, not four months from now, and not ever.

He arrives in Tokyo the following afternoon. You ask him to meet you at the edge of the school woodland, around sunset, when the kids have finished training and packed up. You can’t have this conversation in your dorm room, since it literally isn’t large enough to contain the big feelings he’s claimed he isn’t interested in, and you don’t want to do it at his apartment and potentially ruin all your happy memories there. So you had to seek out neutral ground.

You shouldn’t think about how if things go unexpectedly well—if you’ve somehow done the impossible and changed his mind about a steady girlfriend, long-term commitments, and big feelings—you could always be the one to welcome him home. 

It’s not going to happen. He’s been clear from the beginning about what he wanted and expected from your arrangement.

But you do anyway. 

You’re lost in golden daydreams all through sparring practice, through Ijichi’s substitute classes—he’s actually trying to teach the kids algebra—and through the train ride to meet up with Iori for a quick drink in Akihabara before she heads home to Kyoto. You’re only a millimeter away from doodling Satoru’s name in the margins of all your notebooks.

You agonize over your outfit for two hours before your scheduled meeting. Change twice. Settle on the frilly little sundress you’d worn to your ill-fated date with Nanami that Satoru had liked so much. Redo your hair. Swap out your shoes. As if your choice of shoes is going to make the difference in this conversation, after three months of sleeping together, falling asleep together, training and eating and laughing and texting naked pictures halfway across the world.

But it might, though. So you ask Kugisaki if you can use her fancy mascara again. 

She casts a critical eye over your entire ensemble. “Where’re you going, anyway?” She blinks, round-eyed with a sudden, curious revelation. “Do you… have a boyfriend, Hasegawa?”

“No,” you answer honestly. “I don’t.” And you don’t allow yourself to think that if this conversation goes well—which it won’t—maybe you could.

Before you leave the dorm, you study the text from Keiko that reads, you’re a bad bitch and a hottie with a body and he’d be lucky to have you, followed by that little kaomoji she loves, holding its gloved fists up.

Even though it’s early September, the air is still heady and thick with the last sigh of summer. The sky is flaring orange, the sun a yolk cracking on the edge of the horizon, when you make your way to the small lacquered footbridge at the edge of the school forest. This is one of your favorite stops on your morning jogs, and no one ever comes over to this side of campus, aside from the groundskeeping staff on Thursdays—and Maki, also on her morning jogs.

Satoru’s already there, still in his mission gear, leaning one elbow on the railing. “You’re late!” he says, waving you down. “That’s my thing!”

“You’re on time,” you say, smiling at the sight of him. “That’s my thing.”

He gives you a quick, appreciative up-and-down glance. “Why’re you lookin’ extra cute?” He looks over his shoulder at the quiet, shaded woodland. “This some kink thing? You want me to chase you around the woods? Play slutty hide and seek?” He rests his chin contemplatively on his fist. “Sounds kinda hot. I’m in.”

You cross your arms, laughing with a little shake of your head. It does, unfortunately, sound kinda hot. “It’s good you’re in, since it’s your own idea and you just pulled it out of nowhere.”

His eyebrows quirk beneath the blindfold. “Soooo you don’t want to try it?”

You sigh, still smiling. “Why don’t you listen to what I have to say, and then you can decide if you still want to play slutty hide and seek or not.”

“Oh, I’m gonna,” he interjects. You laugh again.

He shifts closer to you, bumping his elbow against yours as you both brace your forearms on the railing. You look up at him, lips curled in a smile, blindfold bunching around his eyes, and nearly lose your nerve.

“I’m staying,” you blurt.

“Huh?” he says.

“Here. At Jujutsu High. I’m going to graduate. For real, I mean. Get the whole degree and be a sorcerer.” Your heart throbs in your throat. You look up at him, then at your clasped hands, then at the last light of sunset flaring on the water. “And then go pro, I guess.”

Turns out the pros make really good money. Ijichi gave you the salary breakdown. Not that that was the determining factor, but you can’t say it isn’t a nice side benefit.

He tilts his chin. “For real?”

“Uh-huh.” You nod.

“Like, really for real?” His smile’s flipped back over into his crooked frown.

“Yes, really for real!” 

“You’re sure, baby?”

You turn your cheek to look up at him. “Yes, really for real, and I’m sure!” This isn’t how you’d thought he’d react. This half of the conversation was supposed to be the easy part. “I thought you’d be excited. You’re always going on about how I could be a grade one if I wanted—“

“You could be a grade one,” he says. “Easy. You got the skills, the technique, and the reserves. The one thing you’re missing is drive.”

Missing, present tense. “And killer instinct,” you say.

“And killer instinct!” he cheerfully agrees. “You don’t got the right kind of crazy.”

You reel your arms back in towards your body and clutch the railing. “I can learn those things, right? I can change my mind. I can get crazy.” You feel a little crazy right now. To turn your back on the future you’ve been working towards for the past half year. For your past entire lifetime. That has to be a start.

“It’s a tough job,” he says, setting his elbows on the railing, his blindfolded eyes on the shining water. “A tough life. And once you’re really in, it’s gonna be a pain in the ass to get you out if you change your mind, even if I call in some big favors.”

You whip your chin towards him. “You’d do that?”

“Duh,” he says.

You let your hair swing in front of your cheek like a curtain to hide your blush, your stricken expression. Not that that matters. He can see right through it. He can see right through you. “I wouldn’t ask you to.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” he says, nudging his elbow against yours, and if you weren’t already planning on confessing to him within the next five minutes, that would’ve done you in. 

“It’s gonna be braindead dumb political bullshit from here on out,” he says with a warning shake of his finger. “Higher-ups might swerve around and be extra hard on you, to make you wanna drop out and run crying into the arms of some clan douchebag. Or block your promotions, like Maki, or only give you busywork easy crap.”

“If that happens, I’ll deal with it.” You curl one fist on the railing. “Besides, the only clan douchebag I want to run into the arms of is you.” The corner of his mouth quirks up. “I want to stay here. I want to be a part of things here. With everyone here, and… with you.”

It doesn’t come out anything close to subtle. Your words are soft and glowing with affection. With love.

“Ricchan…” he says, blindfold crinkling over his forehead. “You better not be sticking around just ‘cause of me.”

“I’m not!” you say, bracing your fist and turning to face him in earnest. “I’m not sticking around just ‘cause of you. I’m sticking around for the kids, and the assistant managers, and Shoko, and Yaga-sensei. I’m sticking around to do work that means something.” You withdraw your hands in close, fiddling with one knuckle. “But you are part of it. You’re… a really big part of it.”

He doesn’t even crack the obvious dick joke. That’s how seriously he’s taking your little monologue. But his lips twitch and you know he’s thinking about it.

You heave a deep, slow breath before your next words. “I want to help support your dream.”

“My wha’?” His blindfold nearly climbs into his hair. “Risacchi, what’re you talkin’ about?”

“Your dream!” you say, a self-conscious flush burning its way down your face. “You told me you had a dream! To change the jujutsu world from the ground up!”

He cocks his head. “Oh, yeah. You remember that, huh?”

“Of course I remember that! I’m a good student and I pay attention when my sensei talks!” You clasp your hands, threading your thumbs together. “I want to help you protect and look after the kids. Help them with the braindead dumb political bullshit.”

“Is this you gettin’ crazy? ‘Cause I don’t think you know what you’re saying here,” he says. 

“I do know what I’m saying!” You are getting just a tiny bit off course, but whatever. It relates.

“And you’re makin’ me sound like some kind of… I dunno, selfless idealist? It ain’t charity, baby,” he says, repeating his words from the train home from Tochigi. “I do what I do because I need allies. Have to grow my own ‘cause I can’t get them anywhere else.”

“I don’t think you know what you’re saying! Wanting other people you can rely on, too, doesn’t make what you do for the students here any less important! And when have you ever tried to make any of the kids—or me—feel like they owe you anything, anyway?”

“Megumi-chan’d have something to say to you about that,” he says, sticking his hands in his pockets.

“You want allies? Let me be your ally!” you say, throwing out one arm. “I know there isn’t much I can do now, but I want to support you! I want to help you like you’ve helped me! Not because I feel like I owe you, but because you matter to me! Because I care about you!” Your voice trails off, hesitant, tremulous, muffled by the thud of your heartbeat.

He tucks a thumb beneath his blindfold to fiddle it up and down. “Baby, what’re you saying?”

“I know we agreed on keeping it casual. That we were just messing around. But… it isn’t just messing around for me. Not anymore. I really care about you, and I want to really be with you.”

You’d been so nervous. And your heart is pounding, and your palms are sweating, and your face is glowing brighter than the last flare of sunset, but it feels right to say. Natural to say. A relief, like collapsing into his couch after a long day and a hard fuck.

He hooks his blindfold on one finger and draws it down around his neck, exposing his widened eyes, the shallow notch between his brows. You catch a glimpse of his little scar before his hair swings down to conceal it. 

“Argh,” he says, and then flops over the railing, his long arms dangling limply over the water. “C’mon, baby, that’s no freakin’ fair,” he says. “I’m supposed to have to shoot down a total babe when she’s sayin’ stuff like that to me?”

“So don’t,” you mumble. “Don’t shoot me down.”

He hauls himself back over the railing. “Ricchan,” he says, and you know you’ve failed, from the flat, serious line of his mouth. From how he’s stopped fidgeting. From how he doesn’t tease you. “I’m sorry, baby. But you know I can’t be your man.”

“Can’t?” you say down to your hands. “Or won’t?” 

“You got everything going for you. You got a nice personality and a cute face and a bangin’ bod. You’re gonna make some guy out there one lucky bastard.”

“But not you,” you say, blinking away the hot tears already welling up in your eyes.

“Not me,” he says. “Kinda hate the dude. But nah. Not me.”

You scrub beneath your aching eyes and get Kugisaki’s fancy mascara streaked all over the back of your hand. Overpriced brand-name, and it’s not even waterproof. 

“I’m sorry. I know what we agreed on,” you say with a little sniffle, studying the toes of your sandals. You picked the wrong pair after all. Should’ve gone with the pumps. “I know I said I was okay with no strings attached. But I like you so much, and I thought, maybe…”

You’d known what a long shot you were betting on here. But still, there was a quiet, desperate, stubborn little corner of your heart, bright and blooming, that really thought you’d had a fighting chance. That maybe you’d changed his mind, changed his heart, the same way he’s changed yours.

“Baby, think it over for a sec.” He waves one hand, as if to scrub the blackboard clean. He’s using his teacher voice. You’d worried he might be upset, might be angry with you. This is almost worse. “Even if I was a commitment kinda guy—which I ain’t—think about what it would really be like, being my girl. You’d never know a single second’s damn peace.”

“Well, of course I wouldn’t,” you say. “I’d be with you, wouldn’t I?”

Peace isn’t what you want anymore. Boring is no longer aspirational. What you want is all of him, all the time. Every single loud centimeter of him.

“The higher-ups’d use me against you, and you against me. Hold your career, your promotions… even your safety over my head to keep me in line. And they’d do the same to you. I’d never be around, I’d have to drop and leave you with no warning, any time of any day—“

“Your schedule’s already like that,” you interrupt, “and it doesn’t bother me—“

“You’re the kinda girl who only goes steady,” he says. “And you know you can’t get what you want from me. I’m still never getting married. And never giving the clan the heir they want sooooo bad. Any kid of mine, they’d want to raise. Bring ‘em up on clan property, handle their training. Call all the shots.”

You knot your hands together. “Is that how you were brought up?”

“Yeah,” he says with a little roll of his shoulders. “Barely know my parents. They’re fine. See ‘em on big holidays.”

You know he doesn’t have siblings. Doesn’t ever mention his relatives. It must have been lonely, growing up like that. 

“We can talk about all that later,” you say, kneading your hands together. “We don’t have to work through it all right now. Maybe I could compromise on some things—“

You’re rambling now, and revealing just how deeply you want this. It’s too much, too far, too forward, but he’s never had any trouble pushing you to say what you actually think, actually feel. He’s always been able to see right through you.

“Risacchi,” he says, his voice gentle, his luminous eyes firm. “Even if all that wasn’t a problem, I still ain’t the commitment kinda guy. It ain’t gonna work, sweetheart.”

That quiet, desperate, stubborn little corner of your heart that’s still holding out crumples in on itself.

“Okay,” you say, with a little bob of your head, a slantwise approximation of a formal, acquiescent bow. “Okay.”

What else can you do? You can’t make someone love you. You can’t make someone want the things you want. No matter how badly you want them. No matter how badly it aches. 

You swipe at your cheek again. “Guess you probably don’t want to play slutty hide and seek now.”

One side of his mouth lifts up, then drops. “Nah, not when you’re crying. Kinda kills the vibe.”

“It’d be really easy to find me,” you sniffle.

He reaches out and drapes his big hand across the top of your head. “You probably wanna call off what we’ve been doin’, huh?”

You nod against his hand, small and defeated. There’s no way you can go on pretending now. “That’s okay,” he says. “It was just gonna be until the New Year anyways. No hard feelings.”

That’s what you’d agreed on the first time you slept together. No hard feelings. A natural expiration date. The reason both of you were willing to jump into bed in the first place.

He strokes your hair with his thumb. You sway into his touch, just a little. Just a little, for the last time. “I’m gonna talk to Yaga tomorrow. Get you transferred to Atsuya’s class,” he says. And even though he’s threatened that multiple times over the past six months, this time, you know from his tone of voice, like a door sliding closed, that he really means it. 

“Okay,” you say. “Thank you. I’m sorry to cause trouble for you.”

“It’s okay, baby.” He pats your head once. Doesn’t withdraw his hand. “Don’t worry. A girl like you ain’t gonna be lonely for long. You’ll rebound. Easy.”

“You’re being really nice,” you sniffle as you slip back a few centimeters. Just far enough that his hand slides from your hair. 

“I’m a nice guy,” he says, sticking his hands back in his pockets.

“I know.” You tuck in your trembling lips. “I still mean what I said. About wanting to be your ally. And your friend. If you wanted.” 

He shimmies his blindfold back up over his eyes. “Don’t you worry about me, babe. You’re gonna have your hands full, getting serious about going pro.”

You lean on the hand you’ve got clamped down on the railing and look out across the water. There’s only a slim sliver of sun left on the horizon, half-obscured by the trees.

“I’ll walk you back to the dorms,” he says.

You shake your head. “No. It’s fine.” Maki and Kugisaki are probably still playing Smash in the lobby. You can’t handle the walk of the shame past them with your makeup dripping off your face. You’ll stay out here until you calm down. Until you stop crying. Until your heart stops feeling bruised and small in your chest.

“Ain’t safe out here at night anymore, Ricchan.”

“I’ll be okay.” You show him a wan, quivering smile. “Anything happens, you’ll hear me throwing one of my bitch fits.”

The next week, you’re transferred to Kusakabe-sensei’s class. 

Kusakabe-sensei has a syllabus. Kusakabe-sensei has checklists. Kusakabe-sensei has a tailored learning plan he adjusts weekly. He holds regular meetings with you about your progress, goals, weaknesses, and training regimen.

You’re miserable. You’re somehow nostalgic for the days of Cathy-chan beating the shit out of you in the school gym.

When you’re not attending your well-structured lecture periods, you’re lying flat on your dorm room bed, rewatching all of Private Pure Love Train on your phone using Keiko’s account. She texts you halfway through season three. i’m not even mad. you deserve this right now

You respond with a single crying emoji.

sorry babe. sucks, she says. you’re too good for him anyways. we have tp get you on the rebound. go trawling for men at the cowboy bars. probably not another 190cm blonde, but you never know!

You think of Satoru saying, “You’ll rebound, easy,” and roll over onto your stomach so you can stuff your face in your pillow.

September and October sweep past with the fallen maple leaves, a flat grey blur. You throw yourself into your training. You see Satoru sometimes across the practice yard and in the lounge. Not often. His mission schedule’s as brutual as usual. You wave hello, distant and polite. He waves back. He doesn’t text you. He doesn’t bring you souvenirs back from his missions. He doesn’t want to hang out and watch the latest episode of My Boss Is A Ghost. And it’s because you broke the rules and caught feelings and ruined everything.

You try to distract yourself with sparring practice. With trips to the library. With taking on some of Ijichi’s extra work. With your missions, which, so far, are business as usual. 

You sit the first-year final exam for Yaga-sensei, off-cycle, and receive a grade of S. However, your position in the class ranking is second, as Okkotsu Yuta obtained a perfect score before leaving for Kenya. Of course.

You happen to be in the lounge using the vending machine at the same time as Satoru about halfway through October. You nod hello. He nods hello. You feed your change into the machine. Your peach-flavored energy drink thunks against the dispensary window.

On your way out, he says, “You really serious about grade one, Hasegawa?”

“Yes?” you say with a squint. 

“‘Kay,” he says, and pops the top off his can of melon soda before striding off. You shrug to yourself, confused and annoyed. But three days later, Kusakabe-sensei presents you, along with Maki and Panda, the paperwork for your pending promotion to grade one.

“That idiot did something,” says Maki.

“Oh, definitely,” says Panda. 

In the first-year class, Fushiguro, Kugisaki, and Itadori are also up for promotion. They chatter about it in the lounge, excited. Kugisaki’s going to use the increased salary on a killer shopping spree. 

The calendar weeks peel away until October 31, 2018. Halloween Night.

You’re in your dorm room studying when everyone gets the call. Some of the girls in your cardio class invited you out to a big bash at a bar, but Halloween’s on a Wednesday this year, you have lecture in the morning—Kusakabe-sensei lectures every morning—and you’re an exhausted and heartbroken twenty-eight-year-old, and you aren’t leaving the dorm after six PM tonight. You’ll do something on the weekend with whoever’s around. Reuse an old costume.

When you see Akari’s name on your caller ID, you think it’s about Halloween party shenanigans, and you let the call go to voicemail. Figure you’ll text her in a minute when you’re done with this chapter of your reference manual. Kusakabe-sensei has reading lists. But your phone buzzes again, and again, and again—

You pick up. “Finally!” she says. She sounds slightly short of breath. “Risa, there’s an all-call alert. We’re doing emergency dispatch. All acting sorcerers and sorcerers-in-training are required to report to the central courtyard now to mobilize. Active threat in Shibuya, assumed special grade—“

You’re already yanking a clean uniform out of your closet. “Got it. Be right there.”

You jog from the dorm to the courtyard, which is already choked with sorcerers. Even though it’s only seven in the evening, the darkness closing in around the streetlamps is solid and dense. Everyone already looks exhausted, their faces wan smudges in the sickly fluorescent light. Your nerves buzz louder than the lamps.

Ijichi and Akari are running back and forth, directing small groups into cars. There are your second-year classmates, all huddled together under a single light. Itadori, Kugisaki, and Fushiguro, hunched over one of their phone screens. Shoko lighting up a cigarette, the ember at the tip illuminating the hollows of her face. Even Maki’s asshole uncle is here. He must’ve happened to be in the area on business.

You search for Satoru’s bright hair sticking up above the crowd, but you don’t find him.

“Risa! You’re on Kusakabe-sensei’s team,” huffs Akari, jogging up to you and bracing her hands on her knees. “You and Panda are going to meet him at the drop point. Your promotion evaluation’s on hold for tonight, sorry.”

“That’s okay. Hi, Panda,” you say as he shuffles over. “What’s happening, exactly?”

“A curtain came down in Shibuya. It’s trapping civilians inside. That’s all the intel we have for the moment. You’ll get further briefings as we mobilize,” she says.

In Shibuya. Your blood chills. What club were Hanae and Kaede taking the girls to? Is it in the radius? 

Maybe they’re outside.

“Be careful,” Akari says with a salute.

You ride in the backseat, driven by a stern-faced senior assistant manager and squashed up against a very apologetic Panda. You don’t mind. Being crushed between Panda and the door gives you something else to concentrate on besides the snap of cold fear in your veins as you wait for Hanae to respond to your text message. what club were you guys going to tonight?

“Could even be a bigger incident than the Night Parade,” says Panda. “That was the curse user attack last year, Christmas Eve. They hit Shinjuku.”

You’d been at Fumiya’s apartment in Nakano that night. When you rode back to Setagaya the next day, the news reports claimed a storm had caused an unusually high amount of wind damage. You remember the caved-in buildings. The huge gouges in the concrete.

This is the job, you tell yourself. This is what you wanted. This is what it means to be a sorcerer. 

And wouldn’t you rather be here, with everyone else, than out in the city, at some bar or party, wondering what’s going to happen to the kids?

we’re in asagaya!!!!!! Hanae texts you with a heart and a kissy face. you coming out tonight after all???

You heave a deep, relieved breath, warmth seeping back into your fingertips. maybe later if i can! busy with work! have fun!

Your news app is blowing up with alerts about roadblocks, street closures, train schedule downtime. Critical power outages. Regular service will continue as soon as possible. Never mind that the blocks around Shibuya are still blazing with light.

Your escort drops your trio off to your assigned entry point, the Shin-Minami gate of Shibuya Station, where Kusakabe-sensei’s already perched on a railing, the tails of his brown trenchcoat fluttering in a weak wind. You can’t quite see the curtain from here, but you can see the hole it leaves in the sky, empty of stars. 

It’s 8:15 PM.

“It’s got a 400-meter radius,” says Kusakabe-sensei, unwrapping a lollipop and sticking it in his mouth. He and Satoru share precisely one trait in common, and it’s a candy habit. “Centered on the Tokyu store. Only traps non-sorcerers. Everyone inside right now is asking for Gojo Satoru.”

“Why?” The word comes out high and tight. Panda throws you a sidelong glance.

“An advanced barrier technique, and asking for Gojo Satoru… they have to be the same culprits as the Exchange Event incident.” 

“What are our orders, sensei?” You eye the curtain. It’s only a trick of the light, but it seems to ripple, admitting a shred of starlight from the sky on the other side.

“Nothing,” says Kusakabe-sensei, tucking his lollipop inside his cheek. You blink at him. “The authorities are instructing Gojo Satoru to work alone in order to suppress the incident and minimize damages. Us, Nanami, the Zen’in geezer, and Mei Mei. We’re all supposed to just hang out around the perimeter of the curtain and take care of whatever gets past Gojo.”

“Gojo-sensei’s going in alone?”

“Minimize damage. You mean sorcerers, right?” asks Panda cautiously, with a ponderous shift of his snout. “What about civilians?” 

“Calm down,” says Kusakabe-sensei, tilting back his head as he shifts his balance. “Unlike last year’s Christmas incident, we’re already too late. To be honest, I think it’s for the best.”

You and Panda share a wounded, worried glance. Your friends may actually be in Asagaya, but on another night, it could just as easily have been them trapped inside. 

In another life, it could’ve been you.

“Also, I actually went and peeked inside the curtain earlier. Sure, people were panicking, but I didn’t see any curses or curse users running around. Right now, they’re just trapped inside. That said, I’m definitely not going back in there.”

“Why?” asks Panda, snout crinkling.

“I think it was the Shibuya Hikarie building. I’m pretty sure there were a bunch of special grade curses in the basement.”

Your adrenaline spikes, making you stand at strained attention. “With all the people trapped inside, shouldn’t we be—“

“You want to go inside? And do what?” Kusakabe-sensei slides the lollipop through his lips with a smack. “Don’t get me wrong, Hasegawa, you’re a good student. But you’re nothing close to special grade. You just want to head in there, wander around, freak the civilians out even more, and then get eaten by a special grade curse while you get in Gojo’s way?”

You bite your lip, tucking your hands in our sleeves. “No, sensei. I’m sorry. I understand our orders.”

He shifts upright and gives you a comforting clap on the shoulder. “I know you’re new to this. It’s going to take some getting used to. But you have to be smart. If you want to make it as a sorcerer, you have to know your limits, and you can’t run into fights you’ve got zero shot at.”

The irony, that he needs to tell you, of all people, this. You smother a nervous little giggle and it comes out as a whoosh of breath. 

“Besides. This is how it usually goes. Gojo works better by himself. He’s as good as a one-man army.”

You think of him smiling and patting your head and saying, Like I’m ever gonna lose! 

He won’t. He’ll be fine. 

But he could, though. It only has to happen once.

You stare at the vague twitch and tremble of the curtain. You stare at the hard, brittle light from the upper floors of the surrounding buildings. You stare at the accusatory blink of a low-flying plane.

The minutes peel away. 8:30 PM. 8:45 PM. An assistant manager you’ve never met before arrives to give an update. Gojo Satoru has entered the field. One of the other teams has been given the go-ahead to cross within the curtain. Your team’s orders remain unchanged. 

You hide your hands in your sleeves, then blow on them, then hold them between your blouse and your jacket. You feel each second scrape by.

9:15 PM. The curtain shimmers and shivers, its tremors shaking their way down the street. You study the memos composed by Satoru, Itadori, and Kento about their encounters with the special-grade curses. The plant creature from the Exchange Event. A curse with a head shaped like Sakurajima that attacked Satoru on the road to Kyoto. A curse with a stitched-together patchwork face, whose touch transfigures humans into violent monsters. 

There’s no reversal, cure, or treatment. Per the reports, the victims with any awareness left will beg for death.

Your phone buzzes. A selfie from Hanae in a pair of cat ears, making a V-sign over Kaede’s shoulder. ricchan come party with us! we met some guys at the bar and they’re so funnnn!!!!!! they’re single. winkyface emoji. three of them and three of us! winkyface emoji. 

Kusakabe-sensei takes a call. “New orders,” he says, hopping to his feet. “Standby’s off. A second curtain has manifested inside the first to keep sorcerers out of the station.” He rips the wrapper off a fresh lollipop. “We’re going in. So are the two other groups still waiting.”

You hustle to your feet, one hand on your bat bag. “Has something happened? Any word from Gojo-sensei?”

“Nope. Been a while since he entered, too.” He lays one hand on his sword. “Usually doesn’t take him this long.”

Your heart spasms. He’s okay, you tell yourself. He’s fine. He’s just being thorough. Like he’s ever gonna lose.

You pass through the curtain, teeth chattering at the chill, and nearly crash into a pair of college-age girls dressed in European medieval-style robes. “Where did you come from?” one of them barks, clasping her friend’s arm. 

“We’re here for the emergency response,” you say, the script straight out of the student handbook. “Please try to stay here at the edge of the barrier, or take shelter in a nearby building—“

“Is that a costume?” Her friend is squinting at Panda.

A sudden sound cleaves the night, making you jump and whip the zipper on your bat bag open. It’s a human voice, a young man’s voice, howling at the top of his impressive set of lungs.

You have to strain to hear him, even at this volume. But if you concentrate, you can just make out the words. “Nanamin!!!” shouts the voice. “Nanamiiiiiinnnn!! Are you there?!”

Nanamin? Could he mean Kento? Kento’s group is supposed to be moving forward, too.

“Gojo-sensei was sealed!”

You chew the inside of your cheek. You can’t possibly be getting that right. “Panda, can you hear what he’s saying?”

Panda nods. “It’s Yuji. He’s saying, “Gojo-sensei’s been sealed.’”

“What does that mean?” ‘Sealed’ isn’t dead, at least. Maybe. Probably. Your hands are numb and quivering as you struggle to wrench your staff from your bat bag.

Kusakabe-sensei cracks his neck. “There’re some rare cursed tools that can seal a cursed technique. Or, in some cases, the entire sorcerer.”

“So he’s alive?” 

“For now, seems like,” he says. 

You clasp your hands around your staff until they tremble. 

“New orders are to move towards his last known location.” Kusakabe-sensei doesn’t seem happy about it. He bites down on his lollipop. “The station.”

You ready your staff. Assume a forward stance.

You wanted to be Satoru’s ally. Now’s your chance.

Chapter Text

“You’re all fired up, Hasegawa,” says Panda as you march down the street, taking point.

“If his powers are sealed, then he can’t fight, right?”

“Slow down, Hasegawa,” says Kusakabe-sensei. “Our orders are to make our way there and secure any civilians we meet along the way. We aren’t going to rush in with minimal intel.”

Never mind that “rush in with minimal intel” is exactly what Satoru had to do.

They never should have sent him in alone.

Panda keeps stride with you as you make your way towards the main station entrance. To Shibuya Square. 

The streets aren’t as busy as you expected. Not as shoulder-to-shoulder packed as they ought to be on a holiday night in the center of Tokyo. But the closer you get to the station gate, the crowd of costumed partygoers thickens, their panicked voices buzzing and burbling and bouncing off the empty, brightly lit glass facades of the office buildings above. There have to be some people up there—it may be Halloween, but there’s always someone pulling overtime in Tokyo. They might not even know they’re trapped. They might be sweating away in their cubicles, crunching spreadsheet cells, miserably oblivious.

The steady current of panicked voices peaks to a sudden crescendo. “There’s something happening up there!” says a young man dressed like a medic, pointing towards the station square. The crowd’s all young. Only young adults would have the time and energy to be out partying on a Wednesday night.

There’s movement from down the street. A person-shaped thing, a person-sized thing, running on the ground on all fours. As it enters a pool of golden light from the windows above you, you get a good look at its bulbous, distorted head, its eyes sunken deep within, like specks of dried fruit buried in a loaf of bread. 

You move in front of the young man and swat at the swollen head with your staff. You don’t have time to think. Not when you’re shifting into position, not when you’re striking. It’s moving too fast. 

But you have time afterwards, after your staff collides with its skull. It’s soft, like smacking a ripe melon, like the ripe melons Satoru had you hit in practice one afternoon as a joke while you complained about wasting food. It makes a rasping sound, a sputtering wheeze, and it sounds like a person. It sounds like a man with a bad head cold clearing his throat. And then the head comes off and spatters red blood across the asphalt.

Curses don’t bleed, and if they do, they don’t bleed red. You look down at the smear, at the corpse, your gore-plastered staff hanging limp in your hand, and you have to brace your hands on your bent knees. You heave for breath, but the iron tang of blood is thick in your throat.

The corpse is wearing a lanyard with an employee badge on it. There’s a convenience store receipt poking out of the pocket of its torn and shredded slacks.

And then a woman’s scream cuts through the static noise in your head and you shake the blood and chips of bone from your staff. You’re out of time again. You can’t do this right now. 

Your arms move, your legs move, and you’re jogging down the street to slam your staff into the face of the transfigured human chasing her, sinking its distorted canine teeth into her skirt.

The street is a crush of bodies, a writhing mass of flesh and teeth and blood, screams and shrieks layered over one another into one long endless howl. Panda and Kusakabe-sensei are with you in the churn, dashing from enemy to enemy, trying to thin the ranks. 

You crash your staff against limbs and heads and torsos until your arms ache, until your hands sting, until you stop hearing the thunk of wood on flesh, stop feeling the shudder in your wrists and forearms. Stop hearing the long endless howl. Satoru is somewhere beyond this river of thrashing limbs, but you’ll never going to haul yourself up to shore. You’ll be here until the sun rises. You’ll be here until you collapse and drown beneath the endless surging tide.

A voice slices through the keen, amplified by a megaphone, followed by a squeak of feedback. Bouncing between the facades of buildings, echoing from the station square beyond. “Don’t move.”

You freeze. In your peripheral vision, Panda freezes. The fleeing civilians freeze. The transfigured victims are still as statues.

You’re able to move again after a handful of seconds, shaking your cramped arms. Panda flexes his own. “That sounded like Inumaki,” you murmur, your voice shaking.

“That was him,” Panda says, with certainty.

With the battlefield paused, the combatants deathly still, it’s easier work to thin out the ranks of the rampaging transfigured humans. Easier because your enemy isn’t moving and you don’t have to worry about injuries or collateral damage. But your arms still ache. Your feet still ache in your school-issued loafers. Your stomach heaves. You’ve bitten the inside of your cheek bloody.

Inumaki meets you at the end of the street where it opens onto the station square. He hoists his megaphone aloft in one hand. “Salmon!”

You brace an arm against the nearest traffic pole, smacking your staff against the sidewalk to shake off the gore. “Thank you for your help, senpai.”

“Salmon!” he says, before exchanging a rapid-fire shopping list of ingredients with Panda. Kusakabe-sensei trails up behind you, unwrapping a fresh lollipop.

“He says he’s going to circle the perimeter and get any other civilians he can to safe zones,” says Panda.

“Okay. Be careful, Inumaki,” you say.

He salutes you with a cheerful “Salmon!” and raises his megaphone for one last command, “Find safety!” before taking off down the closest alleyway. The remaining civilians scatter towards the edge of the curtain like grains of sand borne up by a rising tide. 

Panda kneads his paws as Inumaki disappears from view. “He also said he made contact with Yuji on his way to the station. Yuji had some intel about Satoru’s sealing. He said he’s inside a cursed artifact, the Prison Realm, and at the moment he can’t be moved.”

You sway against the traffic pole with a too-brief spasm of relief. “Then he’s alive.” They want him imprisoned, and not killed. Or maybe they can’t kill him, and this is their only option. After all, he is the strongest.

He can lose. It only had to happen once.

“Yuji said right now, the Prison Realm’s on the fifth floor basement. At the Fukutoshin line.”

For three years of your life, you rode through Shibuya on the metro express line at least twice a day. You didn’t change trains here. But you’ve come to this stop often enough off the clock—after all, you’ve lived in Tokyo for a decade. You think you know which entrance is closest to the Fukutoshin line.

“It’s this way, sensei,” you say, pointing back the way you came. “I think the Shin-Minami entrance is closest.” 

But Kusakabe-sensei holds up a hand, shifting his lollipop from cheek to cheek. “Not so fast. There might still be civilians hiding in these buildings. We should do a sweep.”

“But—“

“No buts, Hasegawa!” he snaps. “Don’t forget our orders included securing civilians, too! There could be people in danger nearby!”

You’d thought it yourself. There could be office workers on those upper floors, just like you once were, the panic in the streets below blotted out by their productivity playlist at max volume.

After Toge’s emptying of the streets, your little sliver of city on the inside of the curtain is silent in a way that Tokyo is never silent, at any hour of any day. Nothing else moves in the street. The lit windows of the high-rise buildings glare down at you. It looks like a film set, a CG render. A cut-price imitation Shibuya. If you poked the nearest facade, it would crumble beneath your hands, merely cardboard and plaster.

You file into the lobby of the nearest building. Panda breaks the lock on the stairwell so you can ascend to the upper floors. 

Nothing. No one. Not even a single overworked data analyst with her earbuds in.

You check the next building. And the next. A restaurant, a movie theater, a doctor’s office. Your feet ache in your school-issue loafers. “The entrance is this way,” you say, but Kusakabe-sensei directs you back the way you came and into a clothing store.

11:01 PM. 

Panda says, “Kusakabe, haven’t we checked enough of these buildings? Let’s find Satoru already. Where the heck is Fukutoshin Line basement fifth floor anyway?”

“I know where it is,” you say, “the entrance is just up—“

Kusakabe-sensei shouts over you, “Gojo’s not the only person who matters, you know?!”

You recoil as if slapped.

“What if there’s someone scared and hiding somewhere? For instance… a young schoolgirl!! Just think if we didn’t find her! We might as well be accomplices to the ruination of a bright future full of promise!”

“I guess you’re right!” says Panda, with a guilt-stricken expression.

You swipe your baton through empty air with a taut whistle, glaring at Kusakabe-sensei from beneath your sweat-plastered bangs. 

“I’m gonna go look over there!” says Panda, shaking a paw down the shadowed street.

“Gotcha! Look carefully!” says Kusakabe-sensei.

You don’t follow Panda down the sidewalk. Instead, you turn to Kusakabe-sensei, dropping your voice below Panda’s keen earshot. “Sensei,” you say, clutching your baton, “we’ve passed the station entrance a couple times now. I know it’s easy to get turned around in the dark, but since we’ve covered this area, maybe we can pro—“

“You’re real smart, aren’t you, Hasegawa,” he says, arms crossed, teeth gritted around the stick of his lollipop. “A good student. Here’s something for you to think about. If the three of us go up against something that took out Gojo Satoru, what do you think’s going to happen?”

You gape at him, the numb exhaustion in your arms giving way to hot, white-knuckled rage. You’re so angry your head hurts. You’re so angry you feel your heartbeat in your ears. “You did it on purpose, didn’t you?”

“Think about it,” he says, urgently, and you can see he’s afraid. Really, genuinely afraid. For his life. For your life. For Panda’s life.

But mostly for his.

“You’ve been leading us around in circles so we don’t go down there.” You punctuate your words with another swish of your staff. 

“I was going to let you find it eventually! I was just buying some time, that’s all—“

You’re furious with him, but you’re just as furious with yourself. For falling back into the same old pattern of deferring to authority. Of letting him lead you around by the nose at a moment like this, when everyone’s lives are on the line. When Satoru’s life is on the line.

“I’ll go ahead on my own,” you say through your bared teeth. “Panda can come with me if he wants to.”

“Don’t be stupid!” he protests, snatching at the air near your sleeve as you jerk your arm away. “If we get separated, we’re dead even faster! Can’t you see that?”

You turn your back on him to call for Panda, but you’re interrupted by a new voice.

“You’re Jujutsu High sorcerers, right?” A man’s, from behind you.

It’s two figures atop a covered glass footbridge that spans the street, connecting the upper floors of opposing office buildings. A man with a bandaged head and a sleek, fashionable woman with a coat slung over her shoulders, the empty sleeves trailing behind her like the tail of a bird.

“Just give up,” says the man. “I don’t wanna kill a sorcerer.”

You redirect your staff, and your righteous anger, at these two newcomers. You can’t afford to spend any more time here. You’ve already wasted more than enough.

“There’re three behind us,” whispers Panda behind his paw as he ambles up beside you and Kusakabe-sensei. “Probably more hiding.”

“I don’t wanna be killed either, but I can’t really say, ‘Sure!’” Kusakabe-sensei faces the enemy with his hands by his sides. Not reaching for his sheathed sword, but not assuming a pose of surrender. “Please, tell us your story,” he says. “And take as muuuuch time as you want.” 

You glare at his back. If he wants to buy time so badly, maybe he should stay here and hold the line while you and Panda make for Satoru.

“We’ve inherited Master Geto’s will,” says the sleek woman. “Since you’re from Jujutsu High, I imagine I don’t need to say more.” You’re grateful for her brevity, even though you have zero context for whatever the hell she’s talking about. “So, do you surrender? I don’t like indecisive men!”

“I guess I don’t count, since I’m a panda!” says Panda.

Kusakabe-sensei’s mouth clenches in a smile around the stick of his lollipop before he spits it over his shoulder, dropping into a deep crouch with his sword extending in front of him, one hand on the hilt.

Finally. You shift a little lower into your stance and ready your technique. The faster this fight starts, the faster it ends. “So that’s your answer,” says the man, just before the office building over his shoulder detonates in a burst of light and sound and heat.

You feel the blast against your face, against your eyes, even with your eyelids squeezed shut. It’s followed by a second explosion, then a third. The shudders of cataclysmic brilliance shake their way down the street towards you. The ground bucks in a rolling wave, like in footage you’ve seen of earthquakes, of city-killing disasters.

Against the black void of the sky, a falling star, a sphere of heavenly fire, careens toward the street.

Kusakabe-sensei and Panda break and run, and you break with them. If that thing lands near you, if you’re caught in the blast radius—even within a block—it will kill you. 

Mirror Shield can’t protect you from heat. Can’t protect you from fire. You’d learned that the hard way on a mission to exorcise a flame curse. It lit up the hem of your skirt. Satoru had thought that was hilarious. Insisted on doing a full inspection of your uniform afterwards in private, to determine if he needed to file a safety incident report with the assistant managers.

Those three stupid curse users Panda warned you about emerge to block the street in front of you. “You should be running, too!” you yell at the closest to you, his expression unreadable behind a cloth face mask.

Behind you, the polished woman shouts, “Not now! We don’t have time for—“

Your staff cracks into the covered head of the nearest combatant. There’s a quiver and streak of silver in the corner of your vision, a sharp metallic chime, and then the other two fold like cheap hundred-yen store paper. You never even saw Kusakabe-sensei unsheath his sword.

“Listen up, you curse users!” Kusakabe-sensei yells. His sword’s already back in its scabbard. “I dunno what the hell happened, but those two fighting there are special grade!” 

You couldn’t sense it before—you were too distracted by the tips of your hair singeing—but there are two knots of cursed energy wavering atop the glowing sphere, shimmering within the heat-haze. The enormous pressure of their raw strength is almost harder to bear than the blast of heat from the descending meteor. In this moment, with their power crushing down inside your ears, you forgive Kusakabe some of your earlier righteous rage.

He was right. You can’t fight something like that. You’ll die in seconds and accomplish nothing.

“Think of them as elephants tap dancing on ants! To be clear, we’re the ants!! Hurry up and run—“

“I won’t allow that,” announces a new voice from between the two of you.

The force of his cursed energy batters the inside of your skull at the same time his voice reaches you. One of the special-grade combatants. 

It’s a man’s voice. It’s coming from Itadori’s body—you can see it’s him when you turn your head, slowly and with immense effort, the way you turn your head in a dream—but it isn’t his voice. It isn’t the voice of a child. It isn’t the voice of a human being.

The thing in Itadori’s body smiles at you, his lips peeling away from gleaming, too-sharp teeth.

“To all humans in the vicinity… until I say otherwise, you are forbidden from moving. If you break this rule… I will kill you.”

And he will. He could do it right now. He could do it without moving himself.

A bead of sweat tracks its way from your brow, down your cheek, to tremble at the point of your chin. It plops onto the sidewalk below with a hiss and a tiny curl of steam. 

“Itadori?” Panda murmurs softly, his voice small and very young.

You don’t know whether expanding the radius of your shield will count as moving. You can’t afford to misjudge and find out. 

“Hold on! Not yet!” says the thing in Itadori’s body, mouth stretched in that obscene smile, raising his voice with a showman’s flair. “Not yet!’

The star descends. The street glows bright as dawn, brighter than noon, white-hot and all-consuming. You’re desperate to close your eyes against the heat, to blink the hot, ashen dust from your eyes. 

But that would be moving.

“Now!” announces Ryomen Sukuna with a cheerful little clap of his hands. 

You shove your shield out of your body as you take off like a sprinter at the starting pistol. To your maximum range, two meters, encompassing Panda, Kusakabe-sensei, and one of the curse users, if they’re lucky and can keep pace. Why not? It won’t stop the flame, but you’ll get any falling debris.

You run, and run, and run. You run until your chest burns and your arms ache and your legs tremble. You run until your quaking knees give out beneath you, palms smacking against the asphalt. You don’t look behind you to see how close it is, how safe you are, because then you’ll stop. You shove off again, your shield quivering as your palms scrape the roughened concrete.

Panda and Kusakabe-sensei are faster than you. Kusakabe-sensei has a longer stride, and Panda’s is even longer as he shifts into his larger, bulkier battle form, the one you’d seen before during the Exchange Event. When the meteor crashes to earth, you’re the one closest to it, a wall of rolling heat smashing into your back and knocking you onto your knees. The ground bucks against you with the shockwave of impact.

You withdraw your shield. Draw it taut around yourself. They’re too far anyway now for you to protect them, and if you sacrifice a single centimeter’s worth of the amount of damage you can take, you’ll die.

The world shakes, and you fall to your hands. An enormous thunderclap echoes and echoes above you. You curl your arms around yourself as rubble smashes into the street beyond you, behind you, half a meter from you. You look up to see a chunk of concrete sailing through your head, gently, slowly, spinning in a gentle orbit.

You release your shield, and the detonation pulverizes it to dust that patters against your cheeks and into your singed hair. 

With one hand on your still-beating heart, you take stock of all your limbs. You can move them all. Your injuries are superficial—scraped palms, a skinned knee, a bruised thigh. 

The brutal heat from the meteor beats against every centimeter of your exposed skin, making your face and the backs of your hands flare red and raw. The ball of fire didn’t shatter when it hit the ground. It’s stil intact, shining and burning, at the end of the block. As you watch, it shrinks and gutters, then winks out like a burnt-down match.

“Panda?” you call into the empty silence of its wake, whipping your head back and forth across the rubble-strewn street. “Kusakabe-sensei?” Your voice is weak and hoarse. You call out again, even softer, breaking into a ragged cough. 

A slab of concrete that fell against the nearest building shudders and scoots to the side. “I’m here! I’m okay!” says Panda, still in his battle form, climbing over the shifting rubble. “Lost a core, but that’s it.”

“Oh!” You cry out, rubbing at your eyes, stinging with tears—from the heat, from your fear. “Panda! Over here!”

The street is now silent again, a disaster movie set, once more nothing but cardboard and chipped plaster. In the distance, you hear more noise, grinding metal, the creak of falling stone. But it’s moving away from you. Ryomen Sukuna’s presence is moving away from you.

“Kusakabe-sensei!” you call out, brushing grime from your torn stockings. “Kusakabe-sensei! Do you see him?”

“Nope,” says Panda.

You sift through the rubble and debris, shouting his name until it’s only a croak through your abused throat. Panda’s the one who finds him. He’s perfectly intact and whole and well, lying beneath a slab of rubble, pretending he hasn’t been hearing you scream his name for the past twenty minutes.

You’ve lost what little sympathy he’d gained back when Sukuna held you all hostage. You want to break your staff against his jaw. But you still say, “I’m glad you’re okay, sensei,” you say, which is true. You are glad. 

“Panda, Hasegawa, that wasn’t what was discussed,” says Kusakabe-sensei, brushing off his trenchcoat.

You and Panda exchange confused looks. Maybe it’s the head trauma.

“I mean Itadori,” he says.

“No, that was Sukuna,” says Panda patiently. 

“But Itadori has control of the flesh. Isn’t that what they said? I’m telling you right now… if Gojo disappears, no matter what punishment Itadori receives, I won’t side with him.”

He turns his face towards the shattered horizon. “I agree that Itadori Yuji should get the death penalty.”

“You can’t say that now,” you protest. “We don’t know how Itadori lost control, we don’t know what happened—“

“If it can happen at all, under any circumstances,” he says, his mouth and voice hard, “then that’s enough for me.”

You can’t think about this right now. You can’t think about any of this right now. It’s like trying to get a handhold on a flat sheet of glass. You can’t think about a child facing the executioner’s axe for blood on his hands that isn’t his fault. You can’t think about losing Satoru. You can’t think about almost dying, and the people who have just died, and the wound gouged in the city, and the people who are, right now, cowering in some alleyway, afraid they’ll be next. 

Maybe they will be next. It’s not over.

There’s a new commotion the next block over, in the street above the station by the police box. The scrape of falling concrete, the pop of what sounds like gunfire.

“Guys,” says Panda, pointing towards it, but you’re already moving. So is Kusakabe-sensei. 

You have to hand it to him. When it really comes down to it, he doesn’t run away.

You limp towards the sound. You’re tired, but you’re still in decent shape. You’re barely injured. You haven’t really dipped into your reserves. You can keep fighting. You have to keep fighting. That’s the job. That’s what it means to be a sorcerer.

The first faint jolt of a second wind is quivering its way down your legs by the time you make it to the huge crater in the street. Itadori is there—not unharmed, but alive, his face a mask of dried blood. The Kyoto students are there—the young woman with the broom, the archer, the girl in the suit, Iori-sensei. 

Two strange men are there. One has his hair tied up in two bunches with a smear of blood across his nose like an athlete’s grease guard. He’s standing with Itadori. An ally, apparently.

They’re facing down the other. He’s around your age, in monk’s robes, with a handsome, sharp-boned face and a jagged black smudge across his forehead. At first you think it’s a smear of blood, like the blood plastered over everyone else’s faces, but as your party closes with the rest, you’re able to see that it’s actually a line of black stitches. The patchwork cursed spirit? But this man has the cursed energy aura of a human being. Of a sorcerer.

Kusakabe-sensei charges ahead to defend the young girl in black. “Um… Itadori?” asks Panda as the two of you draw up beside him, the archer from Kyoto, and the blood-marked stranger.

“Panda-senpai!” says Itadori, in his own voice, his face creasing with youthful joy beneath the streaks of blood. “Miss Hasegawa! And Kyoto dude!”

“Good,” says Panda. “You’re back. Does that man have Satoru and the Prison Realm?” You curl your free hand into a fist as you take in the cube-shaped object in the monk’s hand. You realize, with a pang, that it’s studded with unlidded, shining blue eyes.

“So it seems,” says the young archer. “But what’s so great about carrying around that public nuisance?” You bite your tongue on your protests. “Who is that?”

“He looks like Geto Suguru,” says Panda. “But I don’t know who’s inside.”

Geto’s will. That’s what the woman in the fancy jacket had said, before the meteor smashed into the city. 

The man with the bunched hair and the bloodstreak is screaming something at the enemy. It sounds like he’s howling something about his beloved little brother, and a name. Kamo Noritoshi. He obviously doesn’t mean the young archer Noritoshi from Kyoto, and it obviously means something to Kusakabe-sensei and Iori. He charges, and is knocked back by the appearance of a second monk, a small, youthful figure with red-stained pale hair. Members of the same religious order, maybe.

Itadori looks a little embarrassed. “I’m just asking, but… you’re not related, right?” asks Panda.

“No way! He almost killed me earlier!” Maybe not allies, then.

“But he has created a disturbance,” says young Kamo. “We must take advantage of it.”

“I’ve still got two cores left, so I’ll go out in front. If we all attack, we can create an opening. No matter what, we must retrieve the Prison Realm.”

Satoru’s still in there. Waiting for you. “I’ll go behind you,” you say, “so my shield will cover everyone.”

Panda drums his huge fists on his chest. You expand your shield to a one-meter radius, then two. It quivers at your maximum range.

The small monk blows a puff of air into their oustretched, open palm, and a sheet of glacial ice rolls over your little party in a slow wave. 

It catches everyone in its broad, shining arc. Kusakabe-sensei, Panda with his arms outstretched, young Kamo, Itadori. And you.

Once, when you were very young, you wandered out into a midwinter blizzard, chasing after a curse that floated past the windows of your childhood home. A maiden in a white kimono, bearing a golden lantern. You were still too young to express what you were seeing, and too young to know that no one else saw what you saw. You toddled after it in your tiny house slippers, hands outstretched to catch that bobbing light.

Your father chased after you, but not before your slippers came off and you toppled over into the snow. You still remember how it felt. How you feel now. A cold so pure it burned.

Mirror Shield doesn’t protect you from cold, either. If you trigger overload now, you’ll shatter the ice, but you’ll also shred all of your allies. You terminate your technique and draw your cursed energy into your limbs instead, strengthening them against the chill. Your fingers are cramping, already numb. A thousand little needle-pricks pierce their way up your arms.

“Don’t kill them,” says Geto Suguru, or Kamo Noritoshi. “I need a messenger.”

“Itadori Yuji will be enough,” says the smaller monk, and at a twist of their hands, a slow exhalation of breath, a sheet of icicles hangs over you and everyone else trapped in the glacier.

You suck in a breath, exhaling a ghostly white cloud. Make yourself think. Pretend Satoru’s here, watching. If you detonate your shield at a narrow angle, right above you, you might be able to survive the attack. You raise your technique again, prepare to snap it like a guitar string—

Another newcomer on the field. At first, you think she might be a divine manifestation in high-waisted jeans.

He knows her. He groans her name through a sneer. Tsukumo Yuki. You know her name, too. The only other living special grade sorcerer, aside from Satoru.

The relief from your side of the battle washes over the biting ice in a warm wave. Itadori watches her back with the reverence reserved for a goddess. She looks the part, her golden hair loose and shining in the cold wind, her cursed energy so full and dense it has its own gravitational field.

They’re talking about the future, the ideal state of cursed energy, the closing arguments to a conversation they must have had before, that they both remember. Cursed technique extraction. Visions of chaos.

You don’t have the context or the presence of mind to follow their volleys of dialogue. But when the dark-haired monk slaps the ground with one palm and it rolls and trembles, and Tsukumo Yuki throws her head back in panic, you know just enough to know that you’re not rescued, you’re not safe, and your surging fear is colder than the ice encasing your legs.

“What have you done?” Tsukumo asks.

“I remotely cast Idle Transfiguration on two types of non-sorcerers who’d already been marked. The people who I had ingest cursed objects like Itadori Yuji, and the people born with cursed techniques whose brains are configured like a non-sorcerer’s. I adjusted their brains for sorcery. To the former, I gave strength as vessels. And to the latter, the capacity to use cursed techniques. And… as of this moment, I have broken the seal on the cursed objects. 

“Some have been deep in slumber since being exposed to my cursed energy at the time of the marking… but they will soon awaken. To deepen their understanding of cursed energy…. I will have them fight each other. Think of it as releasing a thousand malevolent Itadori Yujis.”

The ice clamped around your legs and waist melts into sheeting water and dribbles away down the hole in the ground. The smaller monk is on their knees, gasping, and for a second you hope there might be time for a counterattack. But curses bloom outward from Kamo’s, or Geto’s, body in a riotous smear of gruesome nightmares, a wall of thrasing limbs that he retreats into like a man sinking into fog.

“Goodbye, Itadori Yuji,” he says as he recedes, that grey cube outstretched, tauntingly, in his hand. “I expect great things from you.”

And you’ve lost. 

You’ve lost the fight. You’ve lost Satoru. You’ve lost the lives of countless innocent civilians. The city is shattered and seething with starving curses. Your companions are on the verge of death, scattered, and lost.

And after all that, what else is there to do but go home?

You limp your way through the broken streets back towards Jujutsu High. None of the trains are running, so you have to wait for cars. And they have to go around the roadblocks, and the crush of panicked traffic now that the curtain’s gone, even though there’s still a travel advisory.

The injured are prioritized first. You’re left sitting on a hunk of fallen concrete at the roadside, staring down at your spread skinned palms. In between blinks, Itadori’s gone.

“Wait, where’s Itadori?” you ask, casting frantic looks up and down the street. It’s thick with bodies again. Early shift commuters are trying to make their way to work. Either people who didn’t get the emergency notices, or people whose employers didn’t care. “Itadori!” you shout with your hands cupped around your mouth, raising your hoarse voice above the crowd.

“Stop it,” snaps Kusakabe-sensei around the lollipop stick he’s chewed down to a toothpick, waving his hand in front of your face. And then, dropping his voice: “If he’s smart, he’s somewhere far away.” And you remember what he’d said about supporting Itadori’s execution. About what Ijichi once said about Satoru being the only thing keeping Itadori alive.

You pray he runs far and fast. For a spare second, you’re grateful Yuta is safe on the other side of the world.

As you stumble back through the school gates, the intel from your fragmented forces begins to come together. A complete death toll is assembled. Fatalies incurred on the field include Zen’in Naobito, age seventy-one.

Nanami Kento, age twenty-seven.

Kugisaki Nobara, age sixteen.

Technically still alive, but comatose, with minimal hope of recovery. The Kyoto medics think she’ll pass within the next week. If she ever opens her eyes again, even for ten seconds, it will be a miracle.

You think of Kento smiling at you over a glass of scotch, telling you about how he wanted to do work that means something. About the list of shops Kugisaki had told you she wanted to hit first after she got her first big pay raise.

Maki is also on the verge of death at the school infirmary, but Shoko says she’ll recover. She’s made of tough stuff. Akari was brutalized, but she’s already awake, wan and drawn, forcing a smile at you as she downs a mug of juice. Toge lost both his arms.

Fushiguro is on the mend. He’s in the infirmary too, sitting at the bedside of his sister. She’s awake, her eyes bright and curious.

Every minute your phone chimes with a new alert.

The explosion of curses scattered across the entire country. There are strange barriers and distortions in the center of most major cities. 

Keiko, Masahiro, and Haru are okay. 

They were on a trip visiting Keiko’s parents in your hometown. Their apartment in Nagoya is within the borders of one of the barriers. They got very lucky, Masahiro is sure to emphasize in his text.

Your parents are fine. Your home village is far enough from Sendai proper to not be very interesting to Geto Suguru, or Kamo Noritoshi, or whoever the hell that was, or any of the rampaging curses. Your brother Daiki was on a night shift at his cashier job in the city when the attack hit. His leg was shredded by a passing curse, but he’s alive. Your sister-in-law Eri is alive, and tending to him.

Fumiya texts you to check in. He’s okay. His new fiance is okay. He’s relieved you’ve made it through. A clench of strange tenderness grips your heart when you see his name at the top of your screen.

Hanae is dead.

Even though they were all the way in Asagaya, one of the rampaging curses destroyed the club she and Kaede had gone to. Kaede escaped. Hanae didn’t.

She’d been so happy these past few months. She’d finally gotten back her excitement and joy for living. She thought she’d made it out.

You sink to the floor in the corner of one of the unused classroom buildings and put your head in your hands. Move it down lower, between your knees. Your eyes are open, but you’re not seeing anything. Not hearing anything. For seconds, minutes, the world is nothing but a long blare of static.

Iori and the Kyoto students head back home. They have families there. Friends. The rest of the school to check in on. The trains aren’t running, so they borrow some of the school’s fleet of cars.

Night falls. You go back to the dorm. You lay down on your bed without realizing that you’re streaking ash and dirt and grime and blood all over the sheets that you just washed two days ago. You get up. You go stand in the shower for an hour and that static blur swallows you again. You try to change the bedclothes and end up standing rigid with the sheets clenched in your hands, heaving and shaking.

You don’t sleep. You know you need to sleep. You may as well close your eyes. It’s not like they’re doing you, or anyone else, any good open right now. 

You wonder if Satoru is asleep, in that otherworldly prison, wherever he is. If he’s conscious. If he’s in pain. If he’s suffering. Thinking about it makes your whole body ache, a sympathetic pain that works its way down each of your limbs and settles within your skull as a raw, crimson throb.

You get up, put on a tracksuit, and shamble around campus looking for something to do. Someone to be useful for. Something to look at that isn’t the ceiling of your dorm room or the inside of your eyelids.

Shoko is perched on the steps of the staff lounge, a lit cigarette guttering between two fingers, an open bottle of liquor on the ground between her feet.

She pats the stoop next to her. You sit.

She offers you the bottle and you swig. It’s cheap, nasty bottom-shelf shit, with a taste and a sting like antiseptic. It does the job of one, too. A rush of heat bleeds through you, blunting the edges from your thoughts, dulling your throbbing heartbeat.

She offers you the cigarette, too, but you shake your head. You’ve never smoked. Something about taking care of your lungs for old age. You don’t know why that matters anymore. Maybe you just don’t want to look like an idiot in front of her when you breathe it in the wrong way and choke.

You don’t know why that matters anymore, either.

“I should’ve been the one to get rid of Geto Suguru’s corpse,” she says, before taking a long drag and exhaling a plume of foul grey smoke. “That was my job.”

You take another slow sip off the bottle.

“I would have done it, too. I wanted to do it. But Gojo stopped me. Wanted to spare me.” She lets out a dry chuckle. “He always picks the strangest times to be thoughtful.”

“He must have been special to you,” you say, your hoarse voice creaking. “I’m sorry.”

“We were all in the same year. Back in high school. I was never in love with either of them,” she says, with a weighted glance to you, its significance obvious. In another time, another life, you would have cringed and blushed, but it washes off of you like rain smearing down a windowpane. “That was never going to happen. But yeah. He was special to me. To both of us.”

“What happened to him?” you ask. “The real him.”

Shoko blows a single, perfect ring of smoke. “He became a curse user extremist and attacked the school. Gojo killed him.”

He must have hesitated. He must have stayed his hand, seeing the face of a friend he’s already had to kill once.

You rest your cheek in your hand and turn aside from her, so she doesn’t see the tears in your eyes. The same way Kugisaki turned from Fushiguro on these steps, three months and a lifetime ago.

You don’t fall asleep, and the next day, there’s work to do. You make food to take to Maki and Akari in the infirmary, and then more food for the kids to eat. For Ijichi and Shoko. For Tsukumo Yuki, who meets you in the lounge kitchen in a pair of sweatpants and a sports bra, her eyes bright and lively, shifting her glossy hair over one shoulder. “Damn, smells great,” she says. “How’re you holding up?”

You start bawling immediately. Hard, loud, and ugly. “Oh, shit,” she says, drawing you by the arm to one of the tables. 

She lets you cry yourself out. She makes coffee. She sits with you while you drink the coffee. You think you love her a little.

“Hey, can I ask you something?” she asks when your eyes have run dry. “What kind of man is your type?”

When you give her a blank look, she says, “Think of it like a personality quiz.”

“Oh.” You fold your hands around your coffee mug. “I like nice men, I guess.”

She shakes her head with a twist of her lips. “No, honey. Real answer.”

You eye the sugar bowl. It’s unsually full today. Someone’s not here to use it all. Your eyes sting and well up again. You sniffle, “Tall blondes.”

“My kinda girl,” she says, saluting you with her mug before tipping her head back for a long sip.

You head to Yaga-sensei’s office afterwards. He’ll have some guidance. He’ll know what to do. Satoru trusted him. They probably had contingencies. They probably have a plan.

He’s not there. He’s not at the infirmary either, or patrolling the school grounds, or checking the barrier around the school gates, or felting adorable little plushes in the formal receiving hall. When you ask one of the passing assistant managers if they know where you can find him, she gives you a bleak look and a “Don’t you know?”

A notice from Jujutsu Headquarters is being distributed around the school. A copy is posted up on the message board in the lounge, like exam results or club flyers. It reads thus:

1. Geto Suguru’s survival has been confirmed, and he has been sentenced to death a second time.

2. Gojo Satoru has been deemed an accomplice in the Shibuya Incident and is thus permanently exiled from the jujutsu world. Furthermore, removing his seal will be considered a criminal act.

3. Yaga Masamichi shall receive the death penalty for inciting Gojo Satoru and Geto Suguru and causing the Shibuya Incident.

4. The suspension of Itadori Yuji’s death sentence is revoked and his execution is to be carried out immediately.

5. Special grade sorcerer Okkotsu Yuta is appointed Itadori Yuji’s executioner.

You brace a palm flat against the notice, tracing the text with your finger, like a child learning how to read. As if that will make it make sense. 

Those crusty old assholes really didn’t waste a single second.

Cities destroyed, hundreds dead, hundreds still dying in an ongoing disaster, displaced from their homes, hunted by curses. And this is how the so-called protectors of ordinary humanity are wasting their fucking time. Staging a coup, solidifying their own power base, persecuting an innocent man, and ensuring they’ll never have to deal with Satoru again.

Yaga-sensei. He’s been nothing but generous to you, and to the other students Satoru’s brought in for safekeeping. You hope he’s safe in hiding. You hope you’ll see him again soon.

Yuta. Yuta’s back from Kenya. Fushiguro says he stopped by the school very briefly, overnight, while you were in bed, staring at the ceiling, lying to yourself that you would definitely fall asleep soon. He went straight to HQ. Didn’t even stay an hour.

The Yuta you know would never execute Itadori without cause. Would never execute Itadori even with cause. He must have some kind of plan. He has to. 

You curl the hand you’ve got pressed against the notice into a fist. No way in hell you’re going to waste your time listening to any of this.

The same day the notices are posted, the school weapon storehouse is cleared out by the Three Great Clans. Some of the higher-ups stick around to interrogate you, one by one, in Yaga-sensei’s old office. When asked if you know anything about his whereabouts, you honestly answer no, no, and no. 

You watch the clock while your interrogator scowls at you over Yaga-sensei’s stolen desk, pushing your glasses up your nose. You’ve run out of contacts, on account of the supply chain being in shambles due to the national disaster that they’re ignoring. This is such a waste of time. You could be doing something useful right now.

Tsukumo Yuki ducks into one of the labyrinthine basements whenever an HQ rep passes through the school gate. “Not dealing with any of that!” she says cheerfully. “I’m not even really on your side, anyways!” You don’t know what side is left. Her own, you suppose, but you don’t know what side that is.

The second Fushiguro recovers, he heads out into the city to search for Itadori. There’s a lot of city, and a lot of displaced people, and a lot of places to hide, and no way to make contact. He returns home every night empty-handed.

Apparently, through some bizarre deal by binding vow between his late father and the late Lord Zen’in, he’s next in line for clan head. He’s not interested. “Maki can have it,” he says, pulling a grimace.

He asks you, and everyone else left at the school, to look after his sister Tsumiki. She’s a shy and quiet girl, hobbling around campus on spindly legs made weak and unsteady by years of slumber, raking curious eyes over the buildings, the students, and you. 

She eats ravenously. You would too, if you’d just woken up for the first time in years.

There’s news from the city center and from across the country. The existence of curses has been announced to the populace at large. It’s on every banner on every news station, at the top of every page online. The strange barriers that appeared in every major city are meant to be the site for some kind of war competition, designed by Geto Suguru, or Kamo Noritoshi. It’s already begun within. The sorcerers he awakened when he cast his enormous curse will have to enter within them, and then kill or be killed. 

They’re calling it the Culling Game.

Day melts into night and night bleeds into day. You help search for Itadori, stumbling through a maze of shattered concrete, splintered glass, and melted steel. You hunt curses in the streets, grateful for something to do, some way to be useful, for the crack of your staff and the ache in your arms. And you fall back on your old standby—the school library. Excavating any records you can find about the Prison Realm, about negating cursed techniques and cursed objects. What little sleep you get, you get with moldy old scrolls plastered to your cheek.

During one of the hunts for Itadori, Panda goes missing. So then you have to search for him, too.

Hanae’s wake is delayed for several days because of ongoing power outages, public transit failures, rampaging curse attacks, and a waiting list of victims. It’s finally scheduled for November 8th. Kaede forwards you the invitation.

You dig out a black dress, wrap an envelope of condolence money, and take the nearest working train as close to Kawagoe as you can get, then walk the rest of the way to the temple. The wind is biting. The first chill of winter is on the air.

You sit beside Kaede and Tsubasa for the recitaton of the sutra. Hanae’s brother, seated in front, looks like a half-finished, half-erased sketch of a person, smeared and empty. You can’t look at him or you’ll start crying again. 

Tsubasa’s son is among the dead, too. You can feel the grief rolling off her like a solid thing, like you can feel the winter cold when you hold your hand up to a closed door. He and his wife had just had their second child together. She’d showed you pictures of the baby on her phone after class, round-cheeked and smiling.

When you’re shuffling outside the temple, bracing yourself for a long walk back to the train platform into the wind, you’re stopped by a hand on your arm. You flinch, surprised and affronted.

It’s a stranger. A man of indeterminate age, with only a sliver of face visible between his blunt-cut bangs and cloth mask pulled over his nose. A scar cleaves his left eyelid. He’s a sorcerer. His cursed energy stretches out before you like a concrete wall.

“Hasegawa Risa,” he says. It’s not a question.

“Yes,” you say, shoulders stiffening instinctively at his hard, accusatory tone, “that’s me.”

Maybe he’s with HQ. Maybe they’re looking for Yaga-sensei again. Maybe they’re looking for Itadori. 

You’re wrong on both counts. He’s looking for you.

“By order of the Jujutsu Inspector General, you’re under arrest for attempted treason.”

Chapter Text

Well, to hell with that. You don’t have time to get arrested for stupid fake charges. You’ve got things to do.

You activate your technique. Shift one foot a few centimeters backwards. Your right hand twitches forward, palm outspread. Like Satoru taught you.

This man has a powerful knot of pulsing, sharp-edged cursed energy. You’re a grade one—well, almost—and Satoru’s student. You’ve probably got a decent shot here. But you’re not used to fighting other human beings outside of the sparring ring. And you lack, as Satoru often pointed out to you, killer instinct. 

“Careful now, Miss Hasegawa,” murmurs the stranger. “We’ve got an audience.”

The other guests are drifting out of the temple, fanning around you like a flock of dark, drab birds. You’re surrounded by a crowd of people who’ve already seen a solid lifetime’s share of death and violence in the past week alone. 

Okay. Change of plans. You twist your sensible low-heeled pumps and position yourself to spring around him and make a dash towards the street.

“I have permission from the Jujutsu Inspector General to use force,” he says quietly. “If you run, I will.”

You’re in the center of Kawagoe, hemmed in on all sides by shops and restaurants and a cluster of other temples. “Now, I know what you’re thinking,” he says as you flick desperate glances to either side of the busy street. “We’re in a crowded town, in the middle of the day. But if something happens, I can just say it was your fault.”

“You wouldn’t,” you say, crushing your voice down to a whispered hiss so you don’t scare Kaede and Tsubasa.

Your opponent shrugs one shoulder. “I’m fighting a dangerous curse user resisting arrest. Who’re the Council going to believe, me or you?” The dark cloth of his mask bunches around his smile. “You’ve already got a track record.”

That makes you so angry that for a second it fills up your whole skull, blotting out the mumble of funeralgoers and the chime of the temple bells, the rasp of the heel of your shoe scraping over the pavement. Your open palm twitches.

“Risa, are you all right?” asks Tsubasa, appearing at your side. “Who is this?”

“It’s okay,” you say, raising your right hand from your opening guard into a pose of surrender. “I know him from work.”

Tsubasa is in her late fifties, and she’s giving you a narrow-eyed look that announces she’s not stupid, it’s not her first time around the sun, and there’s no way you know this man from work. 

“The car’s pulling around,” he says. “We’ve got to leave now, or you’ll be late for your appointment.” 

“It’s fine,” you repeat to Tsubasa, who’s fluffing her bob and lifting her chin like she’s about to veer straight for the customer service desk at a department store. You’re grateful, but she’s got her own problems to deal with right now. She doesn’t need any of this. “Really urgent work thing came up. Please take care and be safe.” You crimp your mouth into a smile. “I hope I’ll see you both again soon.”

Your escort gestures for you to precede him to a sleek black sedan lingering at the curb, the same type of car as Jujutsu High’s fleet. You rake anxious eyes over the crowded street, over your friends at the temple entrance, still watching with wide eyes. You’ll play along until it’s safe to unleash your technique. Until it’s safe to fight back.

You have to make it back to the kids. If the higher-ups are arresting you, they may have gone after Fushiguro too. He’s also outside the school barriers, still hunting for Itadori.

“Very good, Miss Hasegawa,” says the stranger, sliding into the backseat after you and snapping the car door shut behind him. “Drop your technique. Now,” he says, and you do, watching Kaede turn to say something to Tsubasa. “Give me your hands.”

He unfurls a strip of paper tape, scrawled with ritual characters on both sides, and loops it around your wrists. It doesn’t cut off your cursed energy circulation, not completely, but it slides a glass door shut between you and your reserves. You can still see them, still press a hand against them, but they slip easily through your spread fingers.

A year ago, you would have prayed for something like this.

As the car veers into the late afternoon commuter traffic—even now, in the current state of the country, the greater Tokyo metropolitan area is still clocking in and out of work—he draws a knife from within his robes and unsheathes it.

You squeak in panic and wriggle away as he lays the flat of the bare blade against your arm, but he doesn’t slice or cut. You meet the gaze of your own wide-eyed reflection, sharp and clear within the steel, blinking behind your glasses, and then there’s a lurch and your vision flickers out and then back in, like an electric bulb stuttering in a hard storm. Your eyes flood with a harsh white light, so bright it overflows in your mind and becomes sound, a sharp, high-pitched whine. You squeeze your eyes closed, flinching away with your whole body, your legs curling up towards your chest.

You’re lying on your side, your knees tucked in, your hands now unbound and clasped protectively over your chest. You crack your eyes open on a blurry, doubled haze.

Four close walls. Three concrete, one glass. A sink in the corner. The glare of the fluorescent light off the glossy white porcelain hammers fresh pinpricks of pain into your eyes. You squeeze them closed again with a little gasp.

That must have been some kind of cursed tool. Maybe even one of the tools they cleared out from the school warehouse before the corpses from the battle in Shibuya were cold. You feel bruised on the inside, like your whole body is a seam that was ripped out and then resewn. 

Of course they wouldn’t want you awake and aware while they brought you in. Wouldn’t want you knowing where HQ is, or how to get in or out.

You run your dry tongue over your cracked lips. Rub at your closed eyelids, sticky with grit, beneath your glasses. Shove yourself into a sitting position. The cot you’re lying on groans, and you groan along with it.

Yuta and Itadori must have passed through this same prison block once. In another time, in another life, you would have ended up right here after you blew a hole in the side of your office. You would have spent the remainder of your birthday here last January, if not for Satoru.

Maybe the inside of that strange cube he’s trapped in is a cell, like yours. Maybe he’s cold. Maybe he’s hungry. Bored and afraid and angry. Maybe he’s thinking about you, too.

Dwelling on this makes your ribs heave with pain, keeping time with your throbbing head. So you think about something else. You’re wasting time, anyway. You have to get out of here. You’ve got things to do.

You can see the cells across from your own through the glass wall. They stand empty. You can only hope that means your classmates are safe. Maybe hiding in the school’s various secret passageways and basements and outbuildings with Tsukumo.

Your room is empty aside from the metal cot, bolted to the floor and covered with a thin, prickly blanket; a sink; and a toilet. The walls of your cell, both concrete and pitted glass, are reinforced with an imbued barrier technique. You test it cautiously with a handful of gentle palm strikes, infusing your arm with larger amounts of cursed energy for each subsequent hit, cringing at the echo of each slap down the hallway and waiting for a guard to come running. You know there’s some here—at least three, the heavy presence of their cursed energy spilling from either end of the hallway like the hiss of a distant pressure leak. 

You don’t know much about how to break a barrier technique. When you’d asked Satoru to teach you after the Exchange Event, he’d fiddled with his blindfold and said, “Umm, that’s really hard! Let’s save that for later!”

Later is now never. The only method you know to get rid of one is beating up the caster. Just thinking about getting into a real fight with one of the guards makes your stomach flip over. They’re trained combatants. So are you, you suppose, but only against curses. 

You have no choice but to wait until one of them comes to you.

And they make you wait. Let you sweat and marinate while the seconds creep by like condensation down a cold glass. That was a classic play from corporate at your old job. Force you to stew in the lobby before a performance review and think about what you’d done.

The boredom isn’t numbing. With nothing to focus on, your stress and fear surges into an endless feedback loop, every nerve in your body alive and awake, adrenaline strumming through your blood. But there’s nothing to do with it and nowhere to put it. They’ve left you your clutch, with your emergency floss and miniature toothbrush and travel-sized sunscreen, but they’ve taken your phone.

You think about all the messages on your phone. The explicit texts shared with Satoru. The pictures of both of you, naked. You may have more pressing, dramatic problems right now, but still, you think about one of the prison guards scrolling through your chat logs and seeing you with your legs spread. All those pictures of Satoru’s cock. Messages like how’s sensei’s little slut this morning ;). And you press the heels of your hands into your eye sockets until you see flashing lights, and you want to die.

After an excruciating mental loop of every intimate, private text or photo or video you had on your phone, a uniformed sorcerer with his face covered, much like the assailant who brought you here, brings you a bento and a water bottle that slot through a slim opening at the bottom of your cell’s glass door. You almost laugh when you open the lid to perfectly steamed rice and surprisingly delicious pickled radish. At least the prison food’s good.

There’s a little privacy curtain in the corner for when you have to use the restroom. You squeeze your eyes closed, pretend you’re back in the girls’ locker room at Sendai West High School, and get it over with as quickly as possible.

You’re in the middle of a paper go game against yourself when the sorcerer who captured you, the one with the scar across his eye, makes you flinch and shudder as he raps on your glass door. “I’ll be escorting you to the Council,” he says. “Your hearing’s about to start.”

He’s brought two friends. A pair of flunkies in the same uniform. Both men. They stand guard outside your door while he binds your hands with the ritual tape, then leads you down the cell block hallway.

You try to memorize the path you take. A right at the end of the hall through an unmarked slab of a door. A winding path up a series of stairs, then through laquered wooden doors into more elevated surroundings. A plush tatami floor. A hallway lined with fine wood and sliding, slatted paper doors, smelling of fresh furniture polish and incense. The rooms on the other side of the paper doors are dark and quiet. You can’t tell which walls might open on to the outside. You don’t know what time of day it is anymore. Your guard doesn’t speak to you, and you don’t speak to him.

At the end of the maze, the sconces of warm electric light lining the hallways dwindle and disappear, giving way to a hushed, velvet darkness, lit only by the guttering glow of candles set into niches in the decorative pillars. It has the thick air of a sacred place, a place that holds years and decades and centuries of reverence like a cup overflowing.

You shuffle after your escort, the heels of your shoes whispering over the tatami floor, a small, childish part of you afraid to be left stranded and fumbling around in the dark.

Your path ends at a tall door of studded black metal. It creaks open at your escort’s touch.

He gestures for you to go first.

You blink, adjusting your eyes to the black, and step cautiously into the room beyond. You walk in the direction you think is forward, away from the entrance, but in the perfect darkness it’s impossible to tell. You could be spinning around in circles. A few spots of light, like the last handful of stubborn stars in the Tokyo night sky holding out against light pollution, waver in front of you.

A ring of five paper screens, lit from behind. Five figures behind them. A central spotlight, shining an empty beam of light onto the unmarked floor. It’s obvious where you’re supposed to stand. 

You can’t say the jujutsu higher-ups don’t have a flair for the dramatic. And you can’t say that it isn’t, on some level, working.

Satoru must have come here often. He would have been able to see straight through the paper screens, see the figures crouching behind them in flawless detail, down to the last wrinkles on their faces. But to you, they’re only faceless monochrome shadows. 

You can’t see them, but you can feel the weight of their cursed energy. In their prime, these men were probably capable sorcerers. But their reserves aren’t particularly impressive. To you, who’s spent extended time in the presence of the strongest sorcerer of the modern age, their auras are small, feeble, dim as the lanterns illuminating their silhouettes. Even Okkotsu Yuta could tear through this room single-handedly. Even you could give at least a couple of them a hard time.

You take your place in the spotlight, adjusting your bound hands. You’re still in your funeral clothes from—how long ago was that? Earlier today? Yesterday? Last week?—your plain, long-sleeved black linen dress and drop-pearl earrings. Your scuffed stockings. Your practical low-heeled pumps. You can feel the hollows under your eyes. Twigs of frizzy hair poke into the corners of your vision.

“Welcome, Miss Hasegawa,” drawls the man behind the nearest screen. His voice is calm and cool, with a low rasp like a long hemline dragging over the tatami floor. “Your hearing begins now.”

Somewhere behind you, that massive door clangs shut. You jump, your flinch illuminated by the harsh spotlight that’s already tracing a prickling line of sweat beneath the neckline of your dress. The instincts that have ruled ruled you your entire life—to duck your head, keep quiet, shut your mouth, and follow the rules—speed your heart rate up to a staggered patter.

“Do you understand the charges against you?” asks the first speaker, his voice gentle. Almost paternal.

“No, sir,” you say, because you don’t.

And you aren’t going to, because there’s nothing to understand. They’ve made all of this up. 

Your interrogator pauses. The hot light beats down on your head. “You are being charged with conspiracy to free the known radical terrorist Gojo Satoru by removing the seal on the Prison Realm. We have evidence that you have researched these topics in the school archive, and we believe you have intent to act.”

You stiffen. “Do you deny these charges, Miss Hasegawa?”

“I don’t understand, sir,” you repeat, a little bite in your voice. You imagine Satoru saying Give ‘em hell, baby, and you stand up a little straighter. “Why don’t you explain to me why that’s a criminal act.”

After a brief pause, he simply moves on. There’s nothing to explain, anyway. “You were aware of the status of the law,” he says, his voice still mild. “You were provided with the official posted notices from Headquarters, and were also informed of the new regulations by the authorities when questioned about the whereabouts of the now deceased Yaga Masamichi. In addition to conspiring to free Gojo Satoru, we have also received reports that you were searching for Itadori Yuji before his death.”

His death. Now deceased. Your heat drums. Your throat closes, choked with dread. “Itadori Yuji was executed this morning, Miss Hasegawa,” the man says. “And Yaga Masamichi the day prior.”

Even with the hot lance of the spotlight bearing down on you, you shake from sudden cold.

“How do you plead, Miss Hasegawa? Do you deny these charges?”

“No,” you say, your voice low and trembling. The light quavers at the corners of your vision.

“Be careful, girl,” scolds a new voice, the man seated behind you. “Are you certain you wish to confess to your guilt?”

You think of Itadori leaning on the kitchen counter, showing Fushiguro how to roll meatballs. Of Yaga-sensei’s broad, hard-knuckled hands, gently cradling a half-made plush penguin.

And suddenly, pricked to life by the sting of the spotlight, your anger rears back to roaring life. It doesn’t matter what you say here. They’ve made up the accusation and they’ve dragged you here under false pretenses and they’ve shown how far they’ll go. Persecuting and killing an innocent man. Innocent children. Without Satoru to stop them, they can do whatever they like. 

You aren’t going to get them to call off the axe by bowing and begging and pleading and crying. That never would have protected you. It won’t protect you now.

“I did try to find out how to free him! He hasn’t done anything wrong!” 

Now that you’ve begun, there’s no way to stop. The words are swelling in your chest like a ravine after a hard rain. “It’s not right to say he’s responsible for what’s going on out there! For any of it!” 

You choke back a dizzying, blurring veil of tears. Hanae’s casket. Closed, because the body was no longer suitable for public display. Tsubasa’s chubby-cheeked little grandson, who will never know his father. Satoru gave his life to—

No. He’s still alive. He’s still alive. There will be a way to save him. You have to believe there will be a way to save him, or you’ll fall to your knees right here and not be able to stagger back to your feet. 

“He risked his life to protect the people in this city. To protect me. Even to protect you. And then you turn around and smear his name and claim he’s responsible for everything that happened, when the only reason he got captured is because you sent him in first, alone!”

“Hold your tongue, girl, or it will be held for you,” cautions the angry voice who’d warned you earlier. “You won’t be asked a second time.”

“It’s not too late to show contrition, young lady,” adds a voice to your left, soothing and avuncular, with a soft little whistle of a sigh. “Your sentence will be lighter if you show remorse for your actions. We are aware that the two of you shared an… intimate relationship, at one time.” Almost by reflex, a flush sweeps over your cheeks, followed by a ruddy ache at the past tense he uses. At one time. “It’s understandable that a young woman like yourself would have fallen prey to his considerable influence.”

If it wasn’t for Satoru, you would have stood here ten months ago and begged for their grace after your accident. Begged them not to throw you in jail. Bowed and scraped for any crumb of mercy they’d be willing to scatter for you. You would’ve gotten pushed around by these useless, nasty old creeps.

A part of you, that part of you that still crouches, low and fearful, at the back of your hindbrain, urges you to do it. To get on your knees and clasp your hands. To bow your head. To plead.

But you can’t do it. Not anymore. Not in front of people like this.

“If I’ve been influenced by him at all, then I’m proud of it,” you say. It doesn’t sound bold or impressive, not with the way your voice comes out as a strangled wheeze through your choked, tear-clogged throat. “I’m proud to have been his student. Proud to have learned anything from him—” The past tense brings a fresh wave of hot tears spilling over your cheeks.

Your escort clamps a hand around your upper arm and hauls you out of the spotlight like a comedian bombing a routine. You’re hustled back through the enormous door, squeaking on its groaning hinges, and it slams closed behind you with a deep, ringing toll.

You try to reinforce the memory of the route back to your cell—the twists of the hallway, how many flights of stairs, which decorative vase is by the correct fork—but it’s difficult to do through your gleaming haze of tears. 

The guard untwines the tape from your wrists when you’re ensconced back in your cell. You curl up facing the wall, wrap your arms around your legs, and press the heels of your hands into your closed eyelids, as if you can stop up the flow.  

You imagine Satoru’s arms around you, his hand ghosting over your hair. He’d think it was so, so funny how you threw one of your certified bitch fits in front of HQ. He’d laugh about it for days. He’d try to find a recording. He’d ask you to recreate the scene in his kitchen, and he’d play the part of every council member and do a different stupid voice for each one.

You don’t even know what your sentence was. 

Time passes. The fluorescent lights buzz. You squeeze your legs to your chest and cry into the stiff pillow. Get up and pace around the confines of your cell. Brush your teeth. Eat the fresh meal the guard drops off. This time it’s convenience store oden. The prison food remains, amazingly, pretty good. 

Your guard returns with a small bag of toiletries and a plain cotton yukata, like you’re a guest at the world’s most awful hotel, along with orders for you to clean yourself up. 

“You have been summoned to attend the Inspector General,” he says, with no elaboration. “You may forego the binding if you behave yourself.”

You change, if only because you’re tired of wearing your creased, wrinkled black dress. You splash water from the sink on your face and comb your fingers through your hair. Might as well try to look less like you got run down by a bus for your official sentencing.

He leads you back along the path you took to the higher-ups’ meeting chamber, into the plush, well-appointed hallways. To your surprise, he slides open one of the doors, gesturing for you to precede him.

It’s nothing like the smoke and mirrors of the council chamber. It’s an ordinary, sun-washed room, with a window opened onto a closed courtyard, where a fountain gently burbles. In the center is a low table is set for tea. 

Already seated are a pair of men. The younger is a good-looking bleach-blonde, probably around your own age, with an abundance of earrings at odds with his old-fashioned hakama. He looks a little famiiar. You’re sure you’ve seen him somewhere in passing, but you can’t remember when or where or why. 

The elder is draped in a haori emblazoned with the Jujutsu HQ seal and wears his still-thick silver hair tied back. He has a kindly, gentle face, with little rivulets of wrinkles fanning from each smiling eye. He looks like an ordinary old man. Like he ought to be showing up at your grandpa’s house for mahjong night in a polo shirt, a bottle of drugstore sake tucked under his arm.

Your guard slides the door closed behind you and takes up a post beside it. The old man coughs gently behind his fist and against his closed lips. An ornate old pendulum clock in the corner rings the hour—apparently, it’s nine o’clock. Presumably the morning. On the ninth? Maybe. Probably.

Something about this polite, domestic little scene is familiar to you, tugging at a nagging little memory in the back of your mind. You can’t remember what, but whatever it is, it’s making your nerves strum at a higher frequency.

The young man rakes his eyes up and down your figure in a long, nakedly lascivious leer, pausing to linger on your chest. “You’re old,” he says, with a Kansai accent broad enough for a six-way crosswalk, “but you’ve got a nice body, for Christmas cake.”

You say, reeling in shock, “Um. Excuse me?”

“Thank you for joining us, Miss Hasegawa,” says the elderly gentleman. His voice belongs to the councilman who’d asked you to show contrition during your hearing yesterday. Or earlier today. Or whenever the hell that was. “Please, take a seat. Have some tea.”

“What is this?” you ask, your unbound arms held stiffly at your sides. 

“Think of it as a negotiation of terms.” He smiles generously at you, the lines around his eyes crinkling. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Why don’t we begin with some introductions, hm?” 

You may have screamed at him yesterday, but decades of ingrained politeness and a face like your grandfather’s best friend still force you to your knees on the nearest cushion, bobbing a polite bow. Your back is stiff from not sleeping on the cot in your cell. Your hips audibly creak. You feel as ancient as the rude bottle-blonde accused you of being. “Hello. It’s nice to meet you. I’m Hasegawa Risa.”

“We know,” drawls the bottle-blonde. 

You associate that accent with your own beloved maternal grandmother, who’d been born and raised in Osaka, but Oba-chan would have fallen on her kitchen knife rather than take that tone of voice under any circumstances. The familarity of his face is still snagging somewhere in your brain, and you can’t shake the queasy suspicion that the person he’s reminding you of might be Satoru. “And may I ask what should I call you?” you ask, your hand digging into your yukata.

“You’ll be calling me ‘Husband,’” he says, looking down his nose at you with his long-lashed eyes narrowed. “If I decide I’ll have you, that is.”

And with a sinking heart and rising panic, you recall three things. 

Ijichi, stammering and blushing, informing you that you would never have gotten the death penalty, as the jujutsu hierarchy is old-fashioned and traditional. 

What this little tableau reminds you of. The last time your mother managed to get you to agree to a matchmaking interview, with the son of one of her coworkers at the department store, when you were twenty-three. Pre-Fumiya. It had been at a stuffy, old-fashioned little teahouse in the next town over from yours. The young man in question had been obsessed with an idol, to the point of blowing his entire salary on merchandise, shows, and meetings, and informed you that you “kind of look like her from the side, in good light.” You’d sent Keiko frantic, desperate texts from the restroom.

And finally, where you’ve seen the young man’s face before. On a glossy full-size photograph, tucked between sheets of expensive stationary, which has lived facedown at the bottom of your desk drawer for the past half year, because throwing it out felt too rude. “You’re Maki’s cousin,” you say.

The one who’s a douchebag.

“That’s right!” He smiles at you lazily. “Dear old Dad picked you out for me before he croaked. You really do have a lot of cursed energy, for a woman. I’ve never seen one with as much as you before.” His nose crinkles. 

He’s living up to his reputation.

“You were not yourself at your hearing yesterday, Miss Hasegawa,” says the Inspector General. As if he knows anything about you or what you’re like, or the frequency with which you throw your little bitch fits. “Under normal circumstances, the Council would sentence you to indefinite confinement. Especially considering that you have been expelled from Jujutsu High, and thus are unable to finish the course of study that it was agreed upon you would complete before being released into society.”

Expelled from sorcerer high school. Two months ago, that would have been your worst nightmare. That would have kept you up awake at night sweating through your sheets. 

“However, I’ve managed to persuade the remainder of the Council to be lenient with you. You are a young woman, under significant stress, fallen sway to Gojo Satoru’s formidable force of personality.” You wince. None of your rant from yesterday—yesterday?—stuck. “And it seems such a waste to keep you here when there are very valuable contributions that you could still make as a sorcerer.” 

He smiles at you, benevolent, paternal. “We will allow you to be released from our custody, provided you are willing to be guided in making said contributions.”

You eye the douchebag cousin, who watches you with a faint, smug little smile, his chin resting in his palm. “So this is a marriage interview.”

“It is vital for the next generation of jujutsu sorcerers that your well of reserves and technique are passed down. The quality of your bloodline is one of our most precious resources, Miss Hasegawa. And to think you were produced by nonsorcerers.” He smiles with a warm, gently puzzled shake of his head.

“This was what it was about the entire time, wasn’t it?” you ask, looking down at your clasped hands. At the white crescent your thumbnail is digging into one of the opposite knuckles. “This is why you brought me in from the start.” The hearing was even more of a sham than you’d thought.

With Satoru out of the picture, they’re now free to proceed to order everything as they would’ve liked it from the beginning. Itadori executed. Yaga-sensei killed and the Tokyo school disbanded. And you and your top-shelf genes bullied into a clan marriage, so you can pop out a few powerful baby sorcerers before kicking the bucket. 

“We cannot allow our edicts to be publicly flaunted, Miss Hasegawa,” he reproaches you mildly. “But you may still redeem yourself and serve as a valued member of jujutsu society.”

He grants you another benevolent smile and a gesture to the douchebag cousin. “Zen’in Naoya wishes to take you for his bride. You will be welcomed into the Zen’in clan, and the clan will see to your safety and education, as well as assume responsibility for you.”

He lets out an amused, avuncular little chuckle at your previous delinquent behavior, the same way your own uncles used to laugh about Daiki getting into fistfights behind the school baseball pitch. 

You twist the skirt of your robe in one fist, chewing the inside of your cheek. “And if I say no?” you say to the Inspector General.

“I do not believe you will,” the Inspector General says mildly. “Aside from your own future to think of, there’s also your family’s. Your brother has a prior arrest record, I believe? And your mother’s earnings are their sole income after your father’s injury left him unable to work, isn’t that right?”

You tighten your twist on your skirt into a knot, casting your red-tinged vision out the window and drowning it in the happily bubbling fountain, before you lose your self-control a second time in front of this man. 

Nine months ago, before Satoru, before Shibuya, this probably would have worked on you.

“You really ought to be more grateful, you know,” interjects the douchebag cousin, his smirk tipping over into a scowl. “You could be rotting in prison, and instead you get to be Lady Zen’in. You should be thanking me on your hands and knees.”

Lady Zen’in. The Zen’in clan head’s wife. Through an arcane legal technicality, the next head of the Zen’in clan is supposed to be your own classmate, Fushiguro Megumi.

“Um… may I have some time to think about it?” you ask, plucking up one of the cups of tea. It sloshes in your shaky hand. Maybe word will get to Megumi somehow. As clan head, he might have the authority to interfere with or forbid the match.

“The hard-to-get routine isn’t cute, you know,” says the douchebag cousin.

“You will accompany Lord Zen’in back to his estate today,” says the Inspector General, with finality. Washing his hands of you. They probably need your cell open for someone else who’s committed a fake crime.

Back to the Zen’in clan estate. Outside of Kyoto. The gardens were apparently beautiful in spring.

The train line to Kyoto is riddled with stops, roadblocks, and zones of dead track. The path by car probably has similar barriers. There would have to be stops. Opportunities for you to slip away into a crowd.

“Not so fast,” scowls the douchebag cousin. “I haven’t made up my mind yet. I only said I’d take a look at her.”

He surveys you a second time, leaning in towards you and jabbing his index finger towards the floor. “You still haven’t thanked me yet. Go ahead. We should begin like we mean to go on, right? A wife who can’t show proper respect to her husband should throw herself into the ocean and die.”

Or take a long walk on the bullet train tracks, like Satoru had once told you was preferable to getting involved with this man. 

You hope he’ll want to take the train to Kyoto.

You don’t quite prostrate yourself before him, but you duck your chin and lower your gaze to the floor and sink into a low, formal bow. “Thank you,” you murmur. 

When you rise and raise your eyes, that little smirk is once again perched on his face. “She’ll do, I guess!”

“You should consider making a binding vow with her,” says the Inspector General.

“With her? No way,” says the douchebag cousin, with an exaggerated, almost comical grimace of disgust. “Not going to need it, anyway. I’ll keep her in line.”

You choke down the angry flush that creeps up your neck and the little flare of relief that flickers beneath your ribs. A binding vow would cause real problems for you. 

You cast your eyes to the floor as you make your final bows to the Inspector General. No one seems to be expecting you to say anything, anyway. Wait politely with your would-be fiance while your guard returns to your cell to collect your things. 

“May I have my phone back?” you ask. He doesn’t give you your phone back. 

What he does have is that cursed tool he used on you earlier. He unsheathes it with his apologies, laughably deferential after hauling you out of the hearing room like you’d gone overtime on an awards ceremony speech, as only approved persons are allowed to be awake and aware during transport to and from Headquarters, and you still aren’t one of them.

A blink. A swapping of scenery, like the transition in a slide deck. A bright, grinding light, a gentle sway, a distant roar.

The gentle sway is the rocking of a car on the expressway. You’re in the backseat, your hands folded in your lap and bound with the ritual tape. Someone has thoughtfully placed a pillow behind your head and your purse beside your feet. It’s the kind of fancy car where the backseat is separated from the driver’s compartment by a privacy panel of darkened glass. You feel dizzy, airsick, and like you’ve been turned inside out and then righted again.

Zen’in Naoya is seated beside you, resting his chin on one arm slung over the backrest, tucking his phone into his robe.

“Oh, good.” He says, inspecting your woozy, airsick face. “We’re almost home.”

The sky outside is the blazing gold of late afternoon. An exit sign slides by, gilded in its gleam. For Otsu.

You’ve already practically in Kyoto. You were unconscious through all six or so hours of the journey. 

Your spirits sink down into the seat with you as you wriggle in panic, adjusting the weight of the belt across your lap, the tape around your hands and wrists. You fumble for a thread of cursed energy and come up with torn shreds.

Zen’in Naoya is watching you with a thoughtful little frown. You turn your pleading eyes on him. “Um,” you say, your dry throat cracking, holding out your bound wrists. “Would you mind…?”

“Do you think I’m stupid?” he asks, one brow quirking. “Not until we’re inside the estate’s barrier. They warned me you’d probably pull something and try to run off.”

You slump back into your seat, fiddling with the edge of the tape with one torn fingernail. You can’t believe you were out for almost the entire journey. The car rockets along a nearly-empty expressway. You thought there’d be traffic, but gas is probably a precious resource right now.

Fifty kilometers is the threshold for leaping from a moving car and surviving. But that’s just surviving. That doesn’t mean without injuries.

“They also told me you got completely hysterical during your hearing,” he adds, and you flinch at the word Satoru had so often used to tease you. “Screamed at the higher-ups about Gojo Satoru.”

You don’t have anything in particular to say to that, so you don’t. You jerk your chin back towards the window, watching the ground on your side of the car buckle and plunge into a sheer cliff.

Naoya shifts his arm across the back of the seat and leans in towards you, uncomfortably close, and your breath catches in your throat, not only because you’ve blown your best shot at giving HQ the slip, but because you’re trapped in a car, alone, with a man who’s under the impression that the two of you are engaged. Who’d eyed you up like a creep on the subway. Who’s eyeing you the same way right now.

The heat of his body raises a prickling flush beneath your hairline. He murmurs with a smirk, “You were his whore, weren’t you? Until he got tired of you, that is.”

You whip your chin back around to face him in shock. His long-lashed eyes narrow, his grin widening, revealing a sliver of teeth. 

You lock your eyes on the tinted window separating the backseat from the driver’s compartment, but he waves his hand in front of your face, then snaps his fingers. “Hey. A man’s speaking to you. Don’t you know how to answer a question?”

“Yes,” you say around your clenched jaw. “Yes, I was.” 

Why should you be ashamed of it? You’d loved him. 

Still love him. Present tense.

Naoya’s brows leap up beneath his hair. “Wow, okay! Didn’t expect you to own up to it, but you know what? That’s good! You know what you’re made for. What a woman’s use is.” 

Your face, reflected in the smoked glass, brightens to a heated-coal red. 

“Were you holding out for him to marry you? That’s why you turned down every matchmaking invitation you got, right? Awww,” he croons with false sympathy. “That’s kind of sad.”

And you had wanted that, hadn’t you? No matter how many times you’d lied to yourself that it was casual. That your relationship came with an expiration date.

For a moment you wonder if you’re ever going to hear Satoru’s voice again, and the bleak blaze of Kyoto midafternoon and this horrible car and the douchebag cousin melt away into a blurry grey fog.

“I won’t hold it against you,” Zen’in Naoya continues. “I’ll be honest, I would’ve rather had a bride who wasn’t used.” You wince. “And you’re a modern woman, so you won’t know how to behave. But I’m going to be clan head, so I need a wife who’ll give me strong heirs.”

“I thought Fushiguro Megumi was going to be clan head,” you say, one fingernail still hooked under the edge of the tape around your wrists. It’s not loosening. There’s got to be some kind of way to make contact with Fushiguro. The family lawyer was communicating with him about the late Lord Zen’in’s will, or something.

Naoya lets out an annoyed little tch, eyelid ticking as he smacks his fisted hand down on the backrest. “Who’s going to back him over me? No one even knows him! Especially now that I’m doing my part to preserve the line of succession.” He rolls his eyes. “Besides. Who knows how much longer he’s going to be in the picture?”

You bite your lip, watching the corner of his phone peek out of his robe. Now you have to get some kind of word to Fushiguro. The lawyer had called him, you think. Or did he send a representative? You weren’t paying enough attention. There’d been so much going on last week, and you were in such a fog after Shibuya.

The car rolls higher into the mountains north of Kyoto, the road narrowing, pinned in by bare branches and dense evergreens. If you try to leave the estate on foot, it’s going to be a long walk to any kind of transportation.

“Satoru and I have a lot in common, you know.” Naoya rests his chin in his cupped hand. For a queasy second, the gesture does have an echo of Satoru in it. “We’re both the heirs to our clan. Both the strongest sorcerers of our generation.”

They do share some superficial similarities. You’d even thought so yourself at your matchmaking interview. They’re close in age, both clan heirs, both respected sorcerers. Both tall, handsome blondes. Both loud, vain, and incredibly rude.

But underneath all that, they’re nothing at all alike.

“Satoru could’ve had any woman he wanted.” Naoya leans further in towards you, and you instinctively slip backwards. “You’re pretty, but you’re not that pretty.”

He slides a hand between the folds of your robe and onto your bare leg, and you clamp up, the same way you did when the regional director of sales put his hand on your ass during the company New Year’s party and you were afraid to make a scene. His fingers creep up your thigh. “So you must really know something about how to satisfy a man.”

You’re still, stiff and frozen, pinned against the car door as he palms you, his other hand twining in your hair at the back of your neck to force your head into position as he presses his mouth against yours.

You let out a panicked squeak, and he slides his tongue between your parted lips. His fingers dig into the flesh of your ass, and by instinct alone, your legs and mouth spring closed, your knees clapping together, your teeth gnashing down on his lip. 

You weren’t even trying to bite him. Not on purpose. But you taste the tinny tang of his blood just before his hand cracks against your cheek. Your glasses shudder askew.

You didn’t even see him move.

He draws back from you, eyes narrowed and glittering, tracing his bloodied upper lip with the tip of his tongue. You hold your bound hands before you in a feeble shield, shuddering and gasping for breath. 

“He may have thought it was cute when you pulled stunts like that, but I don’t,” he says. “You’d better not do that again.”

He grabs a fistful of your robe and leans in again, and you press your bound hands to his chest with a “No, don’t!”, the edge of the car window digging into your back. The car bucks behind you as as the driver banks and brakes into a slow roll.

Outside the window, the gleaming dome of a barrier looms. The car slides through it easily, its glossy surface rearing towards you. You feel for a moment as though you’re plummeting towards dark water, squeezing your eyes closed and waiting for the shock of impact. 

You slip through the barrier. As you pass through to the other side, a little spark of electric charge stings your back, the same way the barrier at the Exchange Event had repelled Satoru.

The car slows and stops. You heave a breath.

“Well, look at that! We’re home,” says Naoya.

There’s a little flicker in the corner of your vision and the bindings around your hands snap and peel away. He dangles the knife he used to cut them, already sheathed, between his forefinger and thumb before slipping it back inside his jacket. 

Showing off his technique. You think you remembered something about him inheriting his father’s. The late Lord Zen’in was one of the fastest sorcerers alive. Second only to, of course, Gojo Satoru.

“Just so you know,” he says, “the barrier’s been tuned to keep you in. Can’t have you wandering around the mountain unchaperoned.” He smiles. “But just in case you’ve still got any ideas…you’re my responsibility now.” He grips your chin in one hand, his bloodied mouth hovering centimeters from yours, his breath tickling your lips. “So even if you did make it out somehow, I’ll come after you. And I’ll drag you back by the hair.” He beams sweetly at you, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “Got it?”

You offer him a single stiff nod, your heart sinking and sliding down the hillside below. You don’t expect you’d have much of a chance against someone who is now, by default, the fastest sorcerer alive.

“Good. Oh, and one more thing—when we get out, you’re going to walk three steps behind me. Like a proper wife should.”

You bob your chin again. He gives you a single soft pat on the cheek he’d slapped, the skin already hot and tight beneath his splayed fingers. “I think we’re going to get along. You seem like you’ll be a fast learner.”

He holds the car door open for you, and you stumble out to behold the front gate of the Zen’in clan mansion. The house where Maki and her sister grew up.

Your hometown boasted a small Edo-period “castle,” the source of a significant portion of tourist income and the site of most of your school outings growing up. Next to the Zen’in estate, it would look like a cheap television set. The mansion sprawls behind a high wall with an enormous roofed gate. There’s multiple outbuildings. The main house is four stories tall. There’s even a guard tower. You blink back tears of frustration as you tilt your head back to take it all in.

Far, far above you, the barrier flickers in a mocking wink.

The door to the estate creaks open on the slim figure of a stern-faced, kimono-clan woman, her hard mouth bracketed by deep, stubborn frown lines. She offers a deep bow to Naoya and a second bow to you, and you’re suddenly acutely aware of how shabby and deranged you look in your prison robe, your hair frizzy and lank. Your face bruised.

“Hi, Auntie!” says Naoya. “Congratulate me! I’m going to be clan head, and I’m getting married!” 

He slings his arm around your shoulders and you flinch into yourself. “I’ve brought home a bride!”

“And Fushiguro Megumi?” asks the woman.

“Still alive, for now. But whatever.” Naoya grimaces. “Say hello to Risa-chan!” You duck your chin at the nickname.

The woman bows a second time. “Welcome, my lady.”

“Risa-chan,” he says, squeezing your shoulder, “this is Auntie. She only gave Uncle Ogi a couple of worthless daughters, so she does a lot of the work around here, since she isn’t good for anything else!”

You flinch again at this casual cruelty, but the woman’s stiff face doesn’t shift a millimeter. Her dark eyes are a pair of dry wells.

An aunt. The mother of two worthless daughters. This has to be Maki’s mother. The one who never taught her anything. Maki doesn’t favor her much.

“I’ll present her to the household tonight. Help her get cleaned up. And also assemble the household.”

“Of course,” says Maki’s mother, without so much as the flicker of an eyelash. “Please come with me, my lady. I’ll fetch you something to eat while your bath is drawn.”

Naoya gives you a firm pat in the small of your back, pushing you in her direction. “Go on! Auntie will take good care of you. I have to check in on the patrols and make sure my uncles didn’t try to take over behind my back while I was gone!” He says this cheerfully, but you don’t think he’s joking. “Don’t get lonely, though. We’ll see each other again soon.”

He runs the tip of his tongue over the gash on his lip, and you shiver as you turn to follow Maki’s mother.

You have to find a way to break through the barrier. Tonight, if you can. You can go down the mountain on foot if you have to. 

You trudge after Maki’s mother across a wide, sun-dappled courtyard and into the main house, through a labyrinth of hallways of fragrant polished wood. To your dismay, the house is a hive of activity. Servants are beating rugs and hanging laundry in the courtyards. Polishing the floors. Dusting the heirlooms.

Maki’s mother doesn’t make introductions and she doesn’t speak to you, walking at a steady clip with her hands clasped before her. She’s a sorcerer too, and with impressive reserves, to boot. Her cursed energy billows out behind her like a pair of furled wings.

“It’s nice to meet you,” you say hesitantly as you round a corner into a plainer, humbler hallway. “I’m Risa. Hasegawa Risa.”

“It is my honor, my lady,” she says.

“What’s your name?” You wonder if she could be convinced to help you. Maybe even just tell you something about how the barrier works. 

She halts briefly. “Chizuru, my lady.”

“Oh, you don’t have to call me that. Just Risa is fine—“

“You are our clan head’s bride. I will address you with respect,” she says without breaking her stride.

“You’re Maki’s mother, right?”

“Maki is my child, yes.” 

“I know her! She’s my friend. From, um, the jujutsu school.”

“Is that so? How nice,” she says, in a voice like the rasp of a kitchen knife down a cutting board.

“She’s doing okay. The last time I saw her, her recovery was going well—“

“How nice,” she repeats. After that, you clap your mouth closed and keep it that way.

At the massive kitchens, she orders a servant girl in a plain cotton robe to draw hot water in one of the guest suites, then watches over you as you inhale a platter of rice balls. You’re not getting out of here if you’re swaying and dizzy from hunger, and even the sweaty air of the kitchen is enough to make you feel woozy.

“I will find you something to wear while you bathe,” Chizuru says when the servant girl scampers back to anounce her task complete. “Sora, you will assist her with her hair and clothing.”

“But I’m so busy! Can’t Mai do it?” says the girl. “She’s been sitting on her ass all day ever since she came back from that school. And she’s good at that kind of thing anyway.”

“Language,” says Chizuru, with the most force you’ve heard behind her voice yet.

“Wait, Mai’s here? I know her, too.” Well, sort of. You didn’t speak two words to her at the Exchange Event. You’d simply watched her and Maki smack each other around on a television screen. “Um, could she do it? It’d be nice to… see a familiar face.” You trail off under Chizuru’s flinty gaze.

“Very well.” She gives you a firm, narrow-eyed nod. 

You’re shown to a truly enormous guest suite that could give the luxury hotel you’d stayed at in Kagoshima self-esteem issues. You could swim laps in the bathtub. 

As it is, you can barely keep your chin above water. You hunch in the bath, moving your creaking, aching limbs slowly, startling at every unfamiliar noise in the house. The enormous house, filled with strange people and dozens of locked doors and a huge gate and a guard tower and an unbreakable barrier, that you’re somehow going to have to find your way out of.

Your limbs hurt. Your head hurts. Your slapped cheek throbs in time with your heartbeat. You want to slip down beneath the water, to the bottom of the tub, and curl up there and let the water shut your eyes and ears. You want Satoru’s arms around you and his low murmur against your hair that everything’s going to be all right.

You’re his student. You can fight if you have to. And you’re going to have to.

You squeeze your eyes closed and your arms around your ribs and focus on the rhythm of your breathing until the weight of the mansion around you becomes dim and distant. Until the worst of your dread drains away with the last dregs of the bathwater.

When you hear a tap on the door to your suite, your shoulders winch up, fearing Naoya come to finish what he started in the car. But it’s only Maki’s twin, armed with a heap of silk and an expression that could iron it flat.

“Oh,” she says, “It’s you. From Tokyo.”

Chapter Text

“You remember me,” you say, your spirits lifting a few centimeters off the tatami floor. 

Mai and Maki may be identical twins, but to you, they look like entirely different people. The depth of contrast goes beyond Mai’s bobbed haircut and painstakingly applied mascara. The way she lifts her chin, the way she narrows her eyes and folds her lips, are nothing like any expression you’ve ever seen on stern-faced Maki.

“You were at Shibuya,” she says. “And at the Exchange Event. Weren’t you Gojo Satoru’s little girlfriend, or something?”

Her voice is nothing like Maki’s, either. Higher-pitched, with a carefully cultivated sneer she can hide behind.

“Kind of,” you say. “Or something.” Your cheeks, still flushed from the bath, deepen a few more shades. Had really everyone known? Even the kids at a different school, hours away?

“So, you’re marrying Naoya now? Really digging for that clan head husband, huh?” 

“I—no,” you say, surprised and, even after everything, a little stung. “It wasn’t my decision to come here.” You don’t miss how her eyes briefly flicker to the red handprint on your cheek. “I thought you’d gone back to the Kyoto school with Iori-sensei. Are you, um, visiting home?”

“It’s not a visit,” she says with a little snap, placing her burden atop the guest room’s vanity, and you can see that she’s dressed in plain cotton garb like the estate’s servants. Even Chizuru had sported a finer kimono. “I got ordered back here. On account of the national emergency, or whatever.”

“Oh. I guess that makes sense,” you say. Moving gently around her, like the deer you’d sometimes see on your morning runs at school. “Are you, ah, going to stay long?”

She shakes out the armful of silk, eyeing it, then you, with a stare that could pin a butterfly. “I’m staying forever. I’m not allowed to leave, either.” Pain flares in her eyes, before she snuffs it out and stuffs it behind her scornful expression. “You’ve worn kimonos before, right?”

“Only for New Year. Coming-of-age. Things like that,” you say. You used to be able to tie a formal obi knot yourself. Your grandmother had made you practice it with her every New Year.

“Walk slow, or there’s a chance you might, like, pop out.” She rolls her eyes skyward. “So be careful, unless you want a wardrobe malfunction in front of the whole clan.”

“I—walk slow. Got it,” you say as she presents you with the underrobe. You tug it on, turning aside for some attempt at modesty, and she rolls her eyes again towards one of the upper corners of the room. “Is… the barrier tuned to keep you in, too?”

“Uh-huh.” Her lips thin as she hands over the formal kimono, spun from heavy, sky-blue silk, with a pattern of peony blossoms. “You’re going to have to get used to these, just so you know. Inner family’s big on traditional fashion.”

“Mai. Listen,” you say, leaning in as you clutch at the silk. “Do you know how the barrier works? How it’s cast?”

She blinks, and then her eyes narrow. In this moment, with her chin tucked in towards her chest, it’s easy to see her resemblance to Maki. “Yes,” she says slowly, considering. “But it’s not going to do you any good.”

“Please. Tell me.” You draw the kimono around yourself with a soft, shuddering breath. 

“It gets recast every twelve hours in the guard tower. Midnight and noon. The Hei take turns. That’s the clan’s elite security force,” she says as she winds the obi around your waist, tossing one of the ends over your shoulder. She’s not hesitant at all about the awkwardness of touching a stranger, and her hands are quick, steady, and sure. 

“Just one? One at a time? Only one caster?”

“Uh-huh,” she says, setting the obi clips in place.

“Do they use amplifiers?” Like the ones the curse users had set up at the Exchange Event and in Shibuya.

“Up in the tower, yeah.”

“That isn’t so bad!” you say, shifting on the balls of your feet and almost lurching into a ready stance. Mai makes an irritated sound. “Sorry! But if there’s only one caster, that makes it easier.” You’d been worried about two, or even three in tandem, on top of scrambling all over the mansion to destroy amplifiers. But you’ll only have to fight one. You can fight one.

“Are you delusional? The Hei are all semi-grade one and up,” she says, tightening your obijime around your waist. “And the high-ranking subordinates are twos.”

“I’m a grade one, too,” you say. You never did pass your promotion evaluation, but whatever. You’re counting it. Satoru would say you could count it.

“They’re, like, good grade ones,” she says, directing you to sit on a cushion at the mirrored vanity. She’s armed with a pincushion of jeweled hairpins and an enormous transparent plastic makeup bag, stuffed withn a mess of products and, you recognize with a pang, mementos. A train ticket. A concert stub. A set of photos from one of those booths in the subway. The other two girl sorcerers from her school are pulling goofy faces beside her faint smile. “And even if you did manage to take out the caster of the day. You know who their leader is? Your fiance. And there’s no way you’re getting past Naoya.”

“Does he have a domain?” That would cause real problems for you. Falling Blossom Emotion can only bail you out for so long. 

“How should I know?” Mai scowls.

“If he doesn’t, then it’s two on one. Our odds aren’t so bad,” you say, and she whirls on you with sparking steel in her eyes.

“Our? What do you mean, our?” She jabs a hairpin dangerously close to the rims of your glasses. “This is your stupid idea. I’m not helping. And you better not tell anyone I told you any of this. I only said anything in the first place so you’d know how dumb it would be to try,” she says, giving the pin a final stab in your direction before she twists it into your hair.

“You don’t want to come with me?” you ask. That bright flash of pain flares in her eyes again, dying just as quickly.

“Even if I thought you’d make it out…” She gives a brief shake of her head, her hair swishing against her cheeks. “I don’t want to leave. I’m staying here.”

“But your friends in Kyoto—“ you start. She’d fought with them in Shibuya. She’d been so brave that night.

“They don’t need me out there. I’m not that strong anyway. And I never cared about being a jujutsu sorcerer. Never wanted it. I only ever had to try because of Maki.” She puts the finishing touches on your hair. Looks away from your face in the mirror, her eyes glinting with tears she blinks away. 

When her reflection turns back to you, they’re dry and slitted with distrust. “Why do you care so much, anyway?”

“We’re in this together! We’re both stuck here—“

“What the hell are you talking about? We’re not in anything together. We aren’t friends. You don’t even know me.”

You take a slow breath. “Maki is my friend.”

Mai cringes like you’d slapped her. “Feeling sorry for me because of Maki? That’s stupid. I’m nothing like her.” Her face smolders a deep, blotchy red, her eyes shining once more, and she tosses her hair. Her voice has shed that affected tinge, and its natural timber is low and throaty, just like her twin. In this moment, they look just alike. Like one person. Achingly young. Smoldering with a crusade against the entire world. “I hate her. I wish she’d died.”

You recoil. She doesn’t mean it. She can’t mean it.

“I don’t care about being a servant. All I ever wanted was an easy life. And now I’m getting it.” She hitches up and lowers one shoulder. “You want my advice? Stay put. Naoya sucks.” Her hand closes, trembling, around the makeup brush she’s priming. “But he’s predictable. Just nod and smile and you’ll have an easy life, too.” 

She meets your eyes in the mirror. Hers are a pair of dry wells, like her mother’s. “Just fall down the hole. That’s what I’m going to do.”

She finishes your makeup in silence, aside from an occasional barked command to close your eyes or purse your lips. The red mark on your cheek is smoothed over. When Chizuru arrives to collect you, Mai’s already long gone, shutting the sliding door behind her with an emphatic clap.

You raise a hand to press to your still-throbbing face and nearly smear all her handiwork. 

You can’t just leave her here. You feel ill at the thought of making your escape and returning to school alone. Of having to tell Maki and Iori-sensei that you left her behind. 

But the flat look in her eyes was a closed door on an empty room. You aren’t friends and you don’t know her. You don’t know how to reach her.

Chizuru leads you to your inspection under Naoya’s wandering eye—“You’ll look good sitting next to me, at least,” he says—and then into your engagement celebration in the inner family’s private dining hall, which makes the restaurant where you and Fumiya held your engagement dinner look like a cluster of plastic tables in the corner of a convenience store.

Your mother had spent that evening sun-dazzled by Fumiya’s family, who were significantly more well-off than yours. You could only imagine her enthusiasm at this moment, at the idea of her only daughter marrying into obscene wealth. At least until she heard Naoya open his mouth for the first time, anyway.

She’s probably filing a missing persons report by now, since you stopped responding to her texts about Daiki’s impending discharge from the hospital. You consider asking to borrow a phone to contact her, but everyone appears to have forgotten about your ordinary non-sorcerer lineage when they’re not threatening your mother’s livelihood, and you’re not keen to give any of them a reminder.

You’re introduced to Naoya’s own mother, the late Lord Zen’in’s widow, Lady Itsumi. A small, serene woman who fixes you with a stern glare until you start to sweat. She’s a sorcerer too, with an aura of cursed energy that’s heavy and dense enough to dent the tatami floor. To her other children, Naoya’s brothers—all elder, all male. To his uncle Ogi, Maki and Mai’s cold-eyed and silent father. “He can’t be clan head because his children are worthless!” supplies Naoya in your ear. Maki and Mai don’t favor him any more than they do Chizuru.

Naobito’s other brother, Jinichi, is a burly bear of a man with an impressive mane of hair. “He isn’t clan head material either,” says Naoya with a nudge of his elbow, “because of his face.”

“I’m sorry?” you murmur. Jinichi bears an impressive cross-shaped scar across his brow. Maybe it’s from a fight he lost, or something? Some shameful family secret?

“Because he’s ugly,” says Naoya, then taps the rim of your glasses with one fingertip. “Don’t these things work?”

Mai is absent. Chizuru, silent and tight-lipped, helps serve the meal.

The family dinner is followed by an audience with the estate retainers and servants. You’re exhausted and swaying on your feet, especially after the cups of sake you raised to your lips for politeness’s sake, but you can’t try to beg off, because this allows you to meet the other two senior members of the Hei present at the estate.

There are five of them in the mansion, counting Jinichi, Ogi, and Naoya himself. The remaining pair consist of a grandfather so old his face is creased in a permanent open-mouthed, toothless smile, and a fresh-faced boy who looks like he’s all of seventeen years old.

You would say that ups your chances, if you hadn’t spent most of the past year getting your ass handed to you by teenagers. Not to mention that with the way the boy blushes and stammers when making his introductory bow, you’d just feel like a bully.

You can’t afford to be squeamish, you scold yourself as you bow your way down the line. These people are holding you prisoner here.

The senior Hei are followed by the Kukuru Unit, the estate’s lower-ranking combat sorcerers and foot soldiers, and then the army of servants, wave after wave of them, an enormous bulk of people propping an estate of this size up and running. Most of the servants possess cursed energy as well, even if it’s only a thimbleful.

Mai arrives with this group, separate from the rest of the immediate family members, still in her plain servants’ uniform. She bows low with her eyes averted.

“She and Maki’ve got the same face. Or they did, anyway, since Maki’s got wrecked! You know Maki,” says Naoya, his hand tightening on your shoulder, “from that school that let you both in. It must be so funny to watch her pretend to be a sorcerer.”

“Maki is very talented,” you say. “She taught me how to fight.”

He laughs. “She taught you? You should count yourself lucky they kicked you out! The only thing she was ever good for was smacking around the training yard when we got bored.”

He’s a good decade or so older than Maki. When she lived in this house, when he was kicking her around, she would have been only a child.

You bite the inside of your cheek so you don’t do or say anything that makes more problems for Mai. She looks at her hands, her head low, her cheeks mottling a blotchy pink.

“Mai’s always been the better twin, anyway. Because she knows how to act like a woman. Isn’t that right, Mai-chan?”

He smirks down at her, and you realize with a queasy lurch and an icy clench in your throat that he isn’t looking at her face, but down her body. The same way he’d looked at you during your marriage interview. She flinches away from it like she’s taking a blow, shoulders curling in around her chest, her clasped hands tightening protectively over her midriff, and there’s no way you can leave her here. You can’t leave her trapped here with these horrible people.

As if she can read your mind—or maybe just your stricken face—she gives you a sharp warning glare over her shoulder as she drifts away down the river of servants. 

The endless parade of clan members wish the pair of you long lives, good health, and many children. And with each passing figure, your panic banks higher in your throat, because that’s the reason you’ve been brought here. To provide heirs. To pop out strong sorcerer babies. 

And from the way Naoya pawed at you in the car—from the way he’s looking at you now, his eyes raking over your chest as the last of the servants vacate the courtyard—you’re afraid he isn’t going to waste any time. 

Your sinking heart strums, your throat dry, as he waves Chizuru back and leans down to whisper in your ear. You’re not going to get to waste any time, either. Should you draw up your technique now? You can still see the servants’ retreating backs, and Chizuru is watching, and the rest of the Hei are within easy shouting distance.

“Auntie will take you back to your room tonight.” He lays a hand on your hip, just beneath your obi, smirking at your obvious twitch of surprise. Your sigh of hesitant relief catches in your dry throat. “Disappointed? So am I. But a clan head has to set a good example. We’ve got to play by the rules for now. And Uncle Jin already thinks I’m being a brute to you,” he says with a little roll of his eyes. “It’s stupid. It’s not like you’re pure.” A hard, hot flush of anger grinds its way through your jaw.

His hand slides lower, cupping the curve of your ass, and you bite down on a gasp and dig your teeth into your lip, casting a desperate look over at Chizuru, who hovers at the edge of the courtyard. Her hands are clasped before her and her eyes are locked on the distant tile roof, a hundred meters away. 

“You’d better rest up now, because you won’t be getting a lot of sleep after the wedding,” he says with a squeeze. “Not if I’m going to get a son with my technique off you, at your age.”

The next morning, he puts a three-carat ring on your finger and you sit with the family lawyer, Furudate, to sign the betrothal papers and draw up a draft of the marriage contract. Your request to speak with him in private about a legal matter is rebuffed politely. The seventeenth of November, a particularly auspicious date by the traditional lunar cycle, is selected as your wedding day. In one week’s time.

For the next two days, you barely have any time to breathe. When you aren’t being hurried and harried between fittings for your new wardrobe and bridal kimono, you’re assisting Chizuru in the kitchen. As the newest and thus lowest-ranking addition to the inner family, you’re expected to assist with chores—“Only until you give me a son,” says Naoya with a dismissive wave of his hand.

Your blood curdles at the thought. Of what it would be like for a child growing up in this house. Of what it was like for Maki and Mai, and for their mother. You watch Chizuru chop and stir and salt and pound and knead, her knuckles raw and red, her eyes dull and distant.

In between fittings and meals, you’re enduring various lessons under the exacting tutelage of Lady Itsumi, meant to keep you from embarrassing the clan at official functions. Everything a girl raised in a proper sorcerer family would know. The major clan members and their familial relationships and roles. The histories of the twenty-six previous clan heads. How to sit and stand and bow. How to walk three steps behind your husband, and how to kneel patiently outside a closed door and await him while he tends to masculine business that doesn’t concern you.

This isn’t all a complete waste of time, because the paper doors in the mansion are thin, and the men speaking on the other side aren’t in the habit of modulating their voices. You learn several interesting things, not the least of which is that there’s a schism between the clan members. Naoya was Zen’in Naobito’s heir, but in order to officially ascend to the seat of clan head, he needs the approval of one of his two uncles.

Both of his uncles despise him. Probably because he keeps calling them useless and ugly to their faces.

Fushiguro Megumi is a controversial alternative. A relative unknown, but with the backing of Gojo Satoru and friendly relations with Kamo Noritoshi, both of which could be useful in the current political climate. He isn’t without support, even inside the clan.

Each morning, Mai helps you dress and pin up your hair. At night, she draws your bath and lays out your futon. And she refuses to entertain any talk about escape plans, most of all ones that involve her. “If you don’t stop asking,” she says on the evening of the eleventh, “I’m going to tell my mother on you.”

You don’t think she actually would. She hates her mother. 

But you’re running out of time. You’re hurtling towards the day of the wedding like a roadblock on the expressway at full speed, which means early guests will start arriving, which means even more people packed into the mansion, which means increased security. Even the Inspector General himself will be in attendance.

After you serve Naoya his breakfast, which you labored over since dawn with Chizuru—which he declares to be “Pretty good! Maybe modern women aren’t completely useless, after all!”—and kneel outside the door to his study, the youngest member of the Hei, fresh-faced little Zen’in Ranta, stops by for a meeting, because he’s going to be taking over a double shift of the barrier tonight. You smile at him as he departs and he flushes crimson to his hairline.

Tonight. It’ll have to be tonight. As close to midnight as you can get. You can climb the tower, give poor Ranta a few good whacks, and leap straight down to the ground from the top. Use your shield to take the force of impact. Go straight for the gate from there. Head right for the treeline.

That only leaves Mai.

You find her in the hall outside the kitchens, waxing the floors on her hands and knees. “It’ll have to be tonight, Mai,” you say in a frantic whisper.

“Okay, whatever,” she hisses with a grimace. “Stop talking about it in the middle of the hall, dumbass.” And she turns her back on you.

Because of this, you’re late for your morning lesson with Lady Itsumi. She makes her disappointment known before quizzing you over the lives and accomplishments of the past five clan heads, and is even more annoyed with you when you answer correctly. On your path back to the kitchens, stomach and hands twisting, you dart around a pair of servant girls clustered by the entrance, gossipping about a visitor to the estate.

Ogi’s firstborn daughter, with her shorn hair and scarred, ugly face.

You scramble back across the main house, stumbling in a halting run in your sandals and earning odd looks from the on-duty guardsmen. You ask where Maki is. You get even odder looks, but they tell you. In one of the sitting rooms with Naoya. 

You clatter open the door like a typhoon wind. Naoya scowls at you, says something scolding, but you aren’t listening. You’re looking at Maki.

She’s tall and solid and strong. Three days ago, she could barely walk ten meters without gasping. She’s out of uniform and wearing the sleeves of her shirt rolled up to expose the raw, red tracts her burns left down both arms. 

She turns to you, a grin splitting her scarred, beautiful face. “Hey, Risa. Glad you aren’t dead.”

You throw your arms around her. She goes stiff and lets you. “I’m glad you aren’t dead,” you say, your eyes already stinging with tears. “It’s so good to see you on your feet.” 

She pulls free after a few heartbeats, scratching at the nape of her close-shorn hair and giving an abashed little frown down at her shoes. She’s wearing a new pair of round-rimmed glasses.  “Why are you here?” you ask.

Her grin cracks her scar-seamed cheeks again as she twirls a heavy, antique keyring around her index finger. “I’m raiding the stash. Clan head gave me the go-ahead. And rescuing you while I’m at it, since you didn’t take my advice.” She jerks her chin in Naoya’s direction.

You’re so grateful you want to hug her again. You refrain for her sake. “Fushiguro’s all right?” you say, your relief bearing you up like a rising tide. The kids are all right, and word got to Fushiguro somehow, and everything’s going to be okay.

“He was two days ago—“

“Hey, Maki,” says Naoya, rising from his chair. He may have said something else, too. You weren’t really listening. You’re sick to death of listening to him. “Before you go running off after Okkotsu and Megumi like some lapdog, why don’t you stick aound for my wedding?” He snares an arm around your shoulders to draw you against his side. “You already know my cute little wife. Weren’t you two classmates, or something?”

“Can’t,” says Maki, with the hint of a smile. “Wedding’s off. Clan head forbids the match.”

And as the official, legal clan head, with his own support within the clan, Fushiguro’s word is law. You and Maki are going to be able to leave here together. Maybe she can even convince Mai to come with you.

You shrug out from beneath Naoya’s arm, but he clamps a possessive hand around your wrist. “So?” he says, his voice dipping into an angry sneer. “The Inspector General gave her to me himself. The betrothal contract’s already been signed.”

“So unsign it. I got a letter from the clan head demanding she be released into his custody instead.”

Naoya’s thumb digs into your trembling pulse point. “Uncle Ogi may be rolling over and letting you in the storehouse, but don’t think you can just stroll in and take what’s mine—“

You wrench your wrist from his grasp and look up at him with the disgust you’ve barely suppressed in his presence for the past three days. “I don’t belong to you. And I’m leaving with Maki.”

He surveys you down his nose, his face darkening with anger. “I told you what I’d do if you ever tried to leave.”

“We must abide by the clan head’s wishes, Naoya,” announces a low voice behind you like the grind of stone on stone. You turn to see Uncle Jinichi filling the doorway. When Naoya opens his mouth in protest, he adds a significant, “For now.”

“If Megumi wants her so bad, he can come here and get her himself, instead of sending scum like this,” says Naoya, his voice edging close to a whine. “The letter could be a fake!”

“Furudate will be able to determine whether it’s legitimate or not.”

“Okay,” you say, “then let’s go and see Furudate.”

“Furudate is meeting with claimants to Lord Naobito’s will at the moment. You’ll have to wait your turn.”

Now that you can see light around the edge of the metaphorical door, you’re  eager to leave this place as soon as possible. But at least it’s better than having to fight your way out. “What did you need to get, Maki?”

“Any decent tool I can get my hands on,” she says. “We’re entering the Culling Game.”

You gape. “Why?”

“To save Fushiguro’s sister. Otherwise she’ll have to enter in a week.”

His sister must be one of the awakened sorcerers Kamo Noritoshi had marked. Your hands twist together over your obi. “Okay. Then we’ll go to the warehouse together, and then go see Furudate and get the engagement dissolved.” And then leave. You’ve both got places to be. 

“You aren’t allowed in the warehouse,” says Naoya. “Only people the clan head approves can go in. Megumi didn’t approve you, and neither do I.” 

Maki’s giving you a considering look, and you force a smile at her. “It’s okay, Maki. Go do what you need to do, and then we’ll all leave together.”

“If you say so.” She spins the key around her finger again with a rattle. “I’ll be fast.”

Jinichi insists he has business with Naoya, and Naoya glowers at you, snaps his fingers, and points at the floor outside the door. You don’t so much kneel as sink to your knees in boneless relief. Maki will come back soon. You’ll all leave together. Everything is going to be all right. It’s almost over.

On the other side of the door, Naoya says, “You and Uncle Ogi are so spineless. Letting her strut in here and take us for everything we’ve got.”

Uncle Jinichi rumbles, “There will be nothing to take.”

You wiggle a little closer to the door and tilt your ear towards it. 

“Ogi and I anticipated the movements of Fushiguro and his allies. We cleared out the storehouse three days ago.”

A soft thunk. Probably Naoya propping his legs up on the table. “You should’ve told me about this.”

“You’re too reckless, Naoya,” says Jinichi. “That’s why Fushiguro Megumi is the better choice.”

Naoya’s responding “Huh?” shakes the door in its frame.

“A good number are backing him for the chance to repair relations with the Gojo clan. But we too cannot accept leaving the entire fortune to him.”

A little pinch of cold creeps its way beneath your ribs. “Then why are you dragging your feet?” asks Naoya.

“Because Megumi is building a good relationship with Kamo Noritoshi, the next leader of the Kamo clan, and not just the Gojo clan. Getting rid of him without a reason will only hurt the Zen’in clan’s standing. Then we would fall behind in the shifting struggle for power that’s come about since Gojo Satoru got sealed.”

Your hands twist in your lap as you bend your ear closer to the door, no longer caring about the incriminating position a passing servant might spot you in. “I know that, but why now?”

“Didn’t you pay attention to the notice from Jujutsu Headquarters?”

The reason you were arrested. Removing Gojo Satoru’s seal will be considered a criminal act. 

“We have to take advantage of this,” Jinichi says. “We must execute Fushiguro Megumi, Maki, and Mai as rebels plotting to free Gojo Satoru.”

Your pulse clashes in your ears as you draw back from the door. Press your palms to the polished wood floor.

You’re sure they can hear the rustle of your kimono and the crinkle of your sandals as you rise to your feet. You’re sure your heartbeat is so loud they can hear its rumble through the door. On the other side, Naoya laughs. “Killing his own daughter would boost credibility.”

Your blood burns hot. That would only boost credibility to someone pretending they don’t know what Maki’s relationship with her father is like. What her relationship with this entire awful family is like. 

“Yes. Even better, it would strengthen Headquarters’ trust in him.”

“But is that all right with Uncle Ogi?”

“It was his idea.”

You limp down the hallway in your stiff sandals, your heart trembling in the space between each step, waiting for the telltale creak of the floor beneath your feet, for the swish of the door sliding open. But the only noise is the soft thud-thud of your muffled footfalls, the voices of the men blurring and fading to a mumble behind you. No one follows you as you head towards—you don’t know where. You don’t even know where Maki is. To warn her, to help her. Whatever you aren’t too late for. You turn towards the entrance of the estate, praying you’ll run into a servant or minor family member who doesn’t know what’s going on and will answer your questions.

After you round a corner, you pick up speed, breaking into a halting run. You make it halfway to the entrance hall before a hand closes around your wrist and jerks it into the small of your back, veering you into a crash against the closest wall. It’s solid wood, not paper, and you smash a palm against it, clipping it with the opposite shoulder. 

“And where do you think you’re going?” Naoya murmurs into your ear with a mocking lilt.

You didn’t even hear him coming, as fast as he must have been moving to overtake you. You shove cursed energy into your arm and buck against him, but he pins you between the wall and his hip with an angry little grunt. “Not to the warehouse. You don’t even know where it is.” His grip tightens hard enough to make the bones in your wrist creak, and you let out a small whimper.

“Let go of me,” you say through your teeth, jerking your shoulder back against his. “I’m not going to let you do this.”

His laugh shudders against your back. “Let me? What do you think you’re going to do? Uncle Ogi could take all three of you together.” His free hand digs into your bruised shoulder, and you hiss. “Besides. Don’t you want to be the mother of the next clan head? To be Lady Zen’in? That’s what you wanted from Gojo Satoru, right? That’s the dream for a whore like you.”

You think of Satoru leaning down to murmur in your ear, Don’t forget you’re allowed to get nasty. And when Naoya shifts his hand from your wrist to grip your other shoulder, you piston a flare of cursed energy down your arm and jab your elbow between his legs, ripping yourself from his grasp when he recoils, hissing in pain. You clip him across the chin with a second strike, your cursed energy throbbing down your arm. 

They’re not good hits. Not at your full power, not properly aimed. But he wasn’t guarding at all.

He counters the third, and you pull back, lifting your hands into a ready guard. You don’t have time for this. Maki needs you. Every second you spend here is wasted.

“You fucking bitch,” he seethes. “I’ll make you pay for that.” His sneer widens as he wags his fist at you. “But don’t worry. I’m not going to ruin your face.”

You’ll never be able to outrun him or outpace him. He’s a hundred times quicker than you. But you trained with Gojo Satoru, the fastest sorcerer alive. Practiced a contingency plan for situations like this.

“Say you’re fightin’ me,” Satoru had said. “I’m way stronger and faster than you.” You’d rolled your eyes. “Also with a great battle IQ. Also incidentally very good-lookin’.” You’d rolled your eyes again, fighting an unwilling smile. “But I’m gonna underestimate ya. Well not, me. I wouldn’t do that.” He tapped one temple, showing you his eyes over the rims of his sunglasses. “But some other chump would. And he won’t know you’ve got Falling Blossom Emotion.”

You barely have time to raise your technique before Naoya crashes into you like a wave against rock. He moves so fast you feel the impact before you see it, nothing more than a smear and a blur, overwhelming your shield with a patter of strikes so quick they melt into one. 

You draw up your shroud of cursed energy in the space between breaths, in the rippling echo between blows, and it catches him. You detonate your shield at the same time, a low bass strum beneath the echo of his blows, and in the spare second he flinches, you slam your fist into his breastbone.

As he falls, you drive your fist into him again, right in the nose, the blow shuddering up your wrist and elbow, and then your knee into his mouth while he folds in on himself. His teeth clip your knee through the thin silk of your kimono. 

You’re already off and running before he crumples against the ruined floor. You don’t have time for this. You don’t have time for any of this.

You sprint to the entrance hall, your panicked pace swaying into a staggering half-jog in your sandals. You don’t know where to run to. The polished, pitiless hallways of the main house stretch out in all directions. Not a servant in sight. The only places you know how to find are Lady Itsumi’s chambers and the kitchen.

The kitchen. Chizuru.

You cry her name as you burst through the doors. Her back is towards you. She’s at the counter chopping a stack of leeks. “Don’t run,” she says, “and don’t yell. It isn’t seemly.”

“Chizuru!” You crash into the counter beside her, desperate and gasping. “I need to know where the cursed warehouse is. Right now—“

“You aren’t allowed in there.” She brings her knife down with a thud.

“Please! It’s your daughter! They’re planning to kill her in there!”

She turns her chin towards you, and you look into her empty eyes and realize she knows. She’s known the whole time. And she’s here in the kitchen, chopping leeks. 

“You knew,” you say, small and shocked, clenching the countertop with one shaking hand to keep yourself upright.

“She knows we aren’t allowed inside,” she says, and brings her knife down again with a hollow thud. “Maki has always been a willfull child.”

You grab for her hand. Pin it between both of your own. She’s still holding the knife, and it quivers in the space between you, centimeters from your pounding heart.

“Please,” you beg. You’re hurting her. Her knuckles are pale and her lips are pressed together in pain. The knife shivers and dips towards your obi. You’re hurting her, but you can’t stop. Maki needs you. You have to make her understand. “I can stop him. I’m Gojo Satoru’s student. But you have to tell me where they are, and you have to tell me right now.”

Her eyes are as awake and alive as you’ve ever seen them, trembling in their sockets like a pair of trapped birds. Her hand slackens in your grip. “Here, beneath the main house,” she says finally, so quietly you have to strain to hear her. “The hallway leading north from the central courtyard. Turn right at the set of stairs and go downwards.”

You gasp out your thanks and fly out the door, almost crashing into a serving girl, and you run and run and run. You run until your sandaled feet ache and your aching ribs clench. You hit the stairs downward running and sprint beneath the earth, your footsteps clashing off the heavy, rough-hewn stone walls of the underground passage beyond, lit only by dim torchlight that blurs in the corner of your vision. 

You run and run and run, and you don’t think about what will happen if you’re too late. Don’t think about anything but the pound of your sandals on the stone floor. Of the pump of your one outstretched fist, the other clamped in the hem of your kimono to hike it above your knees.

You come to a door of heavy black stone lined with broken chains. Sprint into the room beyond, wide and high-ceilinged, hewn of the same rough stone, lined with decorative archways. Empty. 

Empty, except for two figures.

Maki, holding two swords, glasses lost, blood streaming down her cheek from an open cut beneath her eye. 

The body of her father, slumped over by one of the pillars. Or most of it, anyway. The rest of his head’s two meters away. Some of his brain, soft and raw and pink, has spilled out on the stone floor. It doesn’t look like it looks in the movies. It smells like salt water and dirty metal.

You brace a hand on one of the pillars and the other on your aching ribs and retch.

Maki turns to look at you. The tip of one sword dips low in her slack right hand, scraping against the gore-smeared floor. “I didn’t really think he would do it,” she says, and her eyes are dull and dim and distant. Like her mother’s. Like her sister’s. “Even after all this time. I didn’t think he’d really do it.”

“Are you all right, Maki?” you gasp, bracing your hands on your knees and forcing your body upright. The inside of mouth is sour and foul. She stares at you. “Where’s Mai?” She stares at you.

The room beyond the passage is some kind of arena. A pit-like depression in the floor, with notches in the walls leading to small cells beyond. Mai is impossibly small in the center of the floor, curled in on herself like a comma, streaks of half-dried blood flaring out around her like furled wings.

You already know she’s dead. But still, you run to the bottom of the pit anyway. Push the tips of your fingers into the cold, clammy skin of her neck, beneath the curve of her chin. Her head lolls onto your knee. 

You pick her up and move her out of the pit, to the edge of the room. You don’t know why you do it. It just feels wrong to leave her in there somehow. 

When you reemerge into the passageway, Maki is still standing there, sword in each hand, eyes on something faraway that you can’t see. You put your hand on her shoulder. Beneath your palm, her skin is as cold as Mai’s.

In the world above, an alarm bell shrieks and blares. The bell in the watchtower. The first thing you saw when you came to this house.

They’re never going to let the two of you out now, you think, glancing behind you at Maki’s father’s corpse. But they were never going to let her leave to begin with, anyway.

She strides ahead of you, her eyes still locked on something distant. Up the stairs. Up into the sunlight. Into one of the wide, bright ceremonial rooms, echoing with the clang of the alarm bell.

“Maki!” you call, your voice harsh and desperate, shuffling after her. “Where are you going—“

“I have to get started,” she says.

A shout from above. A layered echo of cries, and what looks like the entire Kukuru Unit charges into the room around you. A dozen grown men, swords unsheathed and at the ready.

You grip Maki’s elbow. She doesn’t flinch. Her eyes are focused, forward, locked on the same distant horizon she’s been staring at since she killed her father. You edge out in front of her, a flimsy and pointless shield. They’re around you from all sides.

“Please stand down!” you yell, or try to yell. It’s more of a croak through your aching throat. You don’t know why. There’s no reasoning with these people. There hasn’t been from the start. “It was self-defense! You can’t just—“

“Stand back, Lady Risa,” says one of the men out in front. You try to remember his name. You think it’s Hideya. A face you know. A name you know. But he would know Maki, too. Have known her from childhood. From birth. “It’s Maki we want. Please stand down, and you won’t be harmed.”

You shuffle a single step forward. Raise your hands in a ready position. 

You were too late for Mai. There’s only one path forward now. A ringing whine in your ears drowns out the chime of the alarm bells.

They all come at the both of you, all at once. They move together. They’ve practiced. 

You’ve fought other human beings before. Curse users. Those men back in Shibuya. You’ve never killed another person. 

You always expected that it would be difficult. That you’d flinch or hesitate or cry. You have no killer instinct.

You move into them, and it’s simple. It’s easy. Your body knows what to do. It moves on its own. Your arms, your legs, your cursed energy. Swivel around one outstretched sword, take the next on your shield, counter, sink a fist into the nearest stomach, release your shield. You see it from somewhere else, from far away, like a set of clips in a reel, like someone else’s memory. You’ve gone to that distant place where Maki is. The hum and swish of blood in your ears muffles the sound of blades clashing off your shield. At the low bass throb of detonation. At the crack of a figure being knocked backwards into the wall and then going still. 

Maki moves so quickly you can’t see her. She’s a smudge of black and shining silver. Her sword doesn’t move. Splashes of blood open across the enemy’s chests. Their faces. Blood spurts from ears. A severed head thuds against the tatami floor.

When the room goes still, you fall to one knee, smearing it in a streak of blood, your lungs and stomach heaving. Maki is still and silent. Her eyes are on that distant horizon.

A man appears in the doorway. The Kukuru Unit captain. You don’t remember his name. “Hey! How’d it go!” he calls. Chokes on his next set of words. 

“Hasegawa,” Maki says, shaking droplets of blood from the tip of one sword, and you startle at the flat sound of her voice. Flinch at the streak of red across the floor. “You might want to hang back for this next part.”

And after that, it’s all too fast. 

The wall leading to the central courtyard smashes in and the room vanishes beneath a haze of plaster, a clatter of wood and tile. You gasp on the lungful you choke in when you shout. A huge slab of stone has crashed through the ceiling, and you blink dust from your eyes and realize it’s shaped in a pair of enormous hands, clapping Maki between them like an old man crushing a fly in his palms. You raise your shield against the debris as the roof crumbles and caves in over you. Struggle out from beneath the shattered tiles, rubbing grit from your eyes with the already filthy sleeve of your kimono. 

Maki was too fast. She’s already slipped out from between the huge stone fingers, running down the extended wrists like a causeway, clashing with the elderly Hei and the Kukuru captain. You hobble towards her, but before you’ve closed half the distance you stumble and the air hardens around you, snaring you in an invisible vice. You’re held in place, frozen and trembling. 

“Sorry, Lady Risa!” little Zen’in Ranta calls to you from where he kneels at the edge of the courtyard. “I won’t let you get hurt!”

But Maki flicks the tip of each sword through the throats of her two opponents, easy and careless, and he swaps his technique to her when Master Jinichi shouts at him to hold her. When it’s focused on her, you can see it shining in the air behind her, a pair of wide, lidless eyes.

Jinichi runs at Maki. You run at Ranta. His technique can’t hold her. She strikes at the pair of eyes with her palms and shatters them, and blood erupts from his real eyes, from his real face, and he’s squeezing them shut and pawing at them as you crash your fist against his jaw and he crumples and splays over the steps. Behind you, a clap of roaring thunder, and a buckling shudder of the ground like the tremors in Shibuya.

It throws you off balance. You slide to your knees, one hand clutching at the nearest steps. The world bleeds in around the corners of your vision. Little specks of light dance and shine. You sway. You breathe. 

You’re wrenched upward by the hair and something smashes into your cheek, into your stomach, wrenching up behind the notch of your breastbone. Your vision blurs, your glasses thrown off your face, before your eyes clench shut. Your cry of pain is swallowed by your collapsing ribs, by your desperate heaves for breath, for air. You gasp and heave and shake. Everything clouds over with tears.

Naoya shakes you by the hair, holding your face at a level with his. His broken nose is red and swollen, dripping a thin trickle of blood into his mouth. His eyes are red and swollen with rage. “What the hell was that, you little bitch?” he says, and you’re still choking, clawing at his wrist with your chipped and bleeding fingernails. “That was Falling Blossom Emotion! Who taught you that?”

With tears still squeezing from the corners of your eyes, you spit, “Who do you think?”

He makes a little grunt of disgust and drops you. Your wrist smacks against the pitted rock. You discharge your shield and he flickers out of range, flicking a speck of plaster off one shoulder.

“You stay right there,” he says as he turns to face Maki. “I’ll take care of her, and then I’ll really give you something to choke on.”

You scrub the tears from your stinging eyes. Maki is holding Jinichi’s severed head in one hand, fingers threaded through his shaggy mane of hair, the same way Naoya had held you. You double over, arms curling around your bruised stomach, and vomit, acid and bile stinging a nick on your lip from Naoya’s blow to your face.

You fumble on your hands and knees for your glasses. Close your hand on the frames, the jagged edge of one smashed lens digging into your palm. Shove them back on your face as you push yourself off the ground.

It’s over that fast. That damn fast. By the time you’ve pushed the splintered bridge of your glasses back over your nose, Maki’s grabbed Naoya and slammed his head into the exposed stone of the courtyard.

With your glasses back on, you can see that most of his cheek’s caved in. There’s a thick streak of blood from his mouth. You wipe the rest of the spit and bile from your lip. 

Maki is bleeding from a dozen cuts. One eye swollen shut and caked with the blood dripping down her cheek. But she still has a long, sturdy stride. She walks past you. Gives you a brief, hard pat on the arm. Closer to a swat. Less reassurance, and more like a half-awake dreamer convincing themself that an object is real. 

Keeps on walking. Swaying like a drunk in a back alley.

“Maki!” you croak after her. She keeps walking. You shamble in her wake. You’re both scattering droplets of blood all over the lacquered floors, freshly buffed and polished in preparation for the wedding guests. “Maki! Where are you—“

She’s going to the one place in the house that you know how to find. The kitchens.

Chizuru is still laboring, sweating behind an enormous steaming pot, wringing her chapped hands. She turns and looks at Maki and her eyes grow enormous, black wells shuddering in her skull, clawing at the edge of the stove like a woman on the edge of a precipice. 

“Mother,” says Maki.

“No! Stay back!” Chizuru shrieks, voice tinny with raw panic.

“Mother, please,” says Maki. She doesn’t even seem to notice you lingering in the doorway. She doesn’t seem to notice anything. Not even Chizuru, not really. “Listen to me—“

“Why? Why are you—“ She’s trembling, howling, more animal than woman, and you clench a hand to your bruised chest at the anguish in her voice.

“Back then. Why did you tell me to come back?”

“W-what are you talking about?” Chizuru flattens herself against the stove. It must be hot. It must be burning her hands. Sweat drips down the taut, strained muscles of her neck. 

Maki walks forward. Slowly, silently, her face closed and drawn. Her eyes are a pair of dry wells. 

She reaches for the knife left on the cutting boad, raises it so the tip aims at her mother’s throat, and you cry out her name and crash into her, clamp her wrist in both of your hands. 

She could throw you off if she wanted. She’s so strong. If she wanted, she could snap your arms like matchsticks. 

“Let go,” she says, in that flat voice. The point of the knife trembles centimeters from your chest.

“Stop it,” you beg. It surprises even you. From another world, another time, another you, through another mouth. 

An expression twists across her face before it returns to perfect, cold stillness, like a cloud scudding over the moon. “Why? She deserves it.”

And maybe she does. Maybe this would be justice. Maybe you’re just weak-minded and soft. You’ve got no killer instinct.

But you still can’t stand back and watch.

“You don’t really know what it’s like,” Maki says, and her other hand comes up and closes over yours. Only a little pressure, and your joints crack and creak. “You’ve been here three days. Don’t act like you know.”

Behind you, Chizuru sobs and babbles and screams, and you flinch away from the awful sound towards the tip of the knife. “She told me!” you say. Your voice rising to that same animal shriek as Chiruzu’s. Raw and sharp and shrill with tears. Hysterical. “She told me how to find you! I could have saved her! It was my fault! I was too late!” A few tears slide into your mouth. “I was the one who was too—“

Maki flicks her hand and the knife clashes against the tile on the other side of the room. Turns and walks out. Just like that. Keeps walking. You leave Chizuru shivering against the stovetop.

Maki doesn’t speak to you while you take the keys to one of the cars from the storeroom. No one tries to stop you. One of the servants looks at you, eyes wide as pools, and doesn’t move from his post in the corner of the room.

She doesn’t speak to you while you go back to the storehouse to collect Mai’s body. Doesn’t speak to you as you drive down the hillside into Kyoto proper. Your hands shake around the wheel. 

“Yuta’s gone to Sendai,” she says finally, chin in her hand, elbow on the edge of the backseat door. “Itadori and Fushiguro went to Tochigi, but they’re probably in a game colony by now, too. They’re trying to get the rules changed. When you go home, someone can explain it to you. I’m getting out here.”

You twist your head around to give her an incredulous look. “Here? No! I can’t—“ You can’t just abandon her in the middle of Kyoto. With the corpse of her twin sister in her arms. After everything that happened. “We have to go back to Tokyo together,” you say. “We have to go home.”

“Can’t,” she says. “I have things to do. And then I’m going to do my part in the game. See you later, I guess.”

And she kicks open the door and strides out onto the road. While the car’s still moving. You swerve and skid to a graceless stop, grappling with the seatbelt, shoving your own door open, stumbling out after her. The car alarm clashes on with a shriek.

She’s already gone. You limp around the sleepy residential district where you’ve found yourself for a while, shouting her name above the scream of the car alarm.

The state of the country right now is such that the sight of a woman in a bloodstained kimono shuffling around and yelling herself hoarse doesn’t draw much notice.

Maki doesn’t come back. So you go home.

You stop in the city center and buy a tracksuit, a steel bat, a lens to replace the cracked pane in your glasses, and a new phone. You hawk the engagement ring to do it. They lowball the value of the diamond. You’re lucky you could sell it at all right now, with the city chopped in half by an enormous magic barrier and the bullet train tracks on fire and the streets swarming with curses.

You buy a stall at a net cafe while you set up the phone. Wait for your old cloud data to download. The second it syncs, you get a call from your mother. 

You barely have time to choke out a greeting and a strangled “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” before she’s crying. And then you’re crying too, slumped over a net cafe desk with your cheek pressed into the back of your hand, and in the darkness behind your eyes you can hear the echo of Chizuru’s howl in her low, ragged sobs.

You make something up. Tell her you broke your phone in a train accident and there was a cell tower outage near the school and it took you some time to get a new one. Tell her you’re so, so sorry you ever made her worry. That you’re okay. You’re fine. You’re safe.

Daiki’s out of the hospital. He and his wife are home now, at your parents’ house.

When you end the call you sit, still and silent and staring lifelessly at the sliver of ceiling visible above your rented stall. The dim blue glow from the idling desktop screen falls on your clenched hands like light through deep water.

Maki doesn’t answer when you call her. It goes straight to voicemail. She doesn’t even have a message.

Your new phone rings again. This time, it’s Masahiro.

The lie you spun for your mother is ready and waiting on your tongue, but he interrupts you. “Risa!” he blurts, overloud and short of breath. You’ve never heard him sounds like this. He sounds like a different man. 

You push yourself up straighter in your seat, your overworked heart slowly pattering back into a staccato burst of fear. “I’m so glad you’re all right,” he says.

“I’m okay! I’m fine!” you reassure him. Babble something about the broken phone. “Is Keiko there? What’s going on?”

“She’s not here,” he says, loud and pained, muffled by Haru’s sudden cry. 

You’re already standing, shoving the chair back so violently it smashes into the flimsy wall of the stall. “What’s going on? What happened?”

“She’s one of the people who got marked. On the news.” He raises his voice so it carries over Haru’s sobs. “They both are, Risa. She’s on the other side. In the colony. She’s playing in the Culling Game.”

Chapter Text

You go north. But you go home first.

The drive takes fucking forever. You swap out the car you stole from the Zen’in mansion for a rental, because the last thing you need right now is to get pulled over for grand theft auto. The rental prices are exorbitant. But what are you going to use your savings for now, anyway?

You drive hunched over the dashboard, your white-knuckled hands clenched around the steering wheel until they cramp, every twitch of the seatbelt jolting the bruise across your midriff with a sharp pierce of pain. Halfway to Tokyo, you have to pull over and dry heave on the side of the road. And then knock the head off a rampaging curse with your bat. And doze off half-folded in the seat, your bruises throbbing, a foul taste in your mouth.

When you finally pull in to Jujutsu High, it’s still full dark, the small hours of the morning, near dawn on the thirteenth of November. You feel a hard little wrench beneath your breastbone as you veer beneath the archway gate at the edge of campus. Tengen’s barrier, allowing and admitting you. 

The air is cold and sharp when you crumple out of the car and gasp in a lungful. With the massive power outage in the center of the city, you can see the stars over the campus for the first time, hard and cold and gleaming, beautiful and beyond reach.

The school’s even more of an empty shell than it was before. If you shouted the way you feel like shouting, it would echo and echo and echo and echo down every hollow hall. But the few people left are still awake. Nitta Akari pulls you into a tight hug that makes you cry out when she squeezes your ribs. “Sorry, sorry!” she chants, gripping your shoulders. Ijichi brews you a cup of green tea. 

Shoko’s in her office, bottle of scotch uncorked, blowing a line of even, perfect smoke rings at the ceiling like soldiers in formation. Her eyes barely flicker over to you when you crack the door open.

She fixes your bruises. You slump against the exam table when you can finally breathe again.

“Fushiguro, Itadori, and Okkotsu are trying to get the rules to the Culling Game changed,” she says, peeling off her latex gloves. “Marked participants are required to declare entry by the nineteenth.”

They’re fighting to the death in there to rack up points. Anyone who fails to gain points will be subject to “cursed technique removal,” which Shoko is all but certain just means catastrophic brain damage. If not death, then close enough.

You hunch over the edge of the exam table with your head in your knees, squeezing your eyes closed until the inside of your skull glitters with the same pinpricks of light you saw in the night sky. 

Per Tengen, who’s shoring up the barriers of the school against Geto Suguru or Kamo Noritoshi or Kenjaku—apparently his original name—if you rack up a hundred points from killing other players, you are allowed to add a new rule to the game system, which is now self-governing. That’s what your classmates are trying to do. Change the rules so points can be transferred between players and unwilling players are allowed to leave the game. Change the rules, and track down a player who has the ability to destroy the Prison Realm and free Satoru. 

You know the way you lurch forward and clutch your knees at the sound of his name, heart and mouth trembling, doesn’t escape Shoko’s notice.

The purpose of the colonies and the game is so Kenjaku can send the people of your country to “the other side,” whatever the fuck that means. Merge with and transcend the very substance of cursed energy. Create a new kind of being.

“But why?” you ask Shoko. You aren’t sure if youre just too exhausted to grasp all of this, or if there’s nothing really to understand. Shoko raises one shoulder and blows another perfect ring of smoke.

Tsukumo Yuki and the young man who called himself Itadori’s brother are guarding Tengen in the labyrinth of tunnels deep beneath the school, in the Tomb of the Star. “You can try to go down there, but Tengen probably won’t admit you,” says Shoko. “I couldn’t get in.”

Fushiguro and Itadori went to find Panda and entered the Game colonies with Hakari and Kirara from the fight club. The barriers interfere with cell coverage, so there’s no way to get updates from them. And Yuta went to the colonies up north. Where you’re going to go, too.

“Before you head out,” says Shoko, digging around in her desk, “Yuta passed this along for you.”

It’s an envelope with your name and a little self-portrait sketch of Satoru, blindfolded, giving a thumbs-up. 

You open it in the privacy of your room, after repairing the flimsy bridge of your glasses with a loop of washi tape decorated with strawberries. It reads:

Hey baby!

Gave Yuta this note just in case. He’s only handed it off to you if something happened, so guess I’m dead or something! Followed by a little doodle of him giving a V-sign.

The rest of the message blurs and swims. You swipe at your cheeks with your sleeve so the tears splattering on the page don’t blot out his words.

Key to my staff apartment’s in here. You can have whatever you want in there. Even use it! Take care of my DVD collection!

You clench your fist around the key in the bottom of the envelope until the teeth bite into your palm. You can’t fucking believe this is how you finally get a staff apartment.

Also, you’re in charge of my bank account. Surprise!~ Sorry, but you’re good at that kind of thing and I know you won’t shaft the students. Make one of your spreadsheets or something. And don’t forget yourself! Get something cute with your cut! 

You guys look out for each other. Whatever happens, you’ll be fine.

Stay frosty!

Satoru

In his second drawing below his signature, he’s blowing you a kiss.

You press the page to your trembling mouth and don’t think about what it could mean, what it might never mean, that he’s made you his next of kin. And then you go to his apartment and open it with the key. 

HQ probably shoved their way in and went through his personal effects when they raided the storerooms, but they left no evidence of an intrusion. There’s the same snowdrift of paperwork melting over the coffee table. The same stack of mugs in the sink. When you turn on his television, it starts playing the DVD he was watching when he got the dispatch call on Halloween night. It’s the Dragon Ball Z remaster. The Frieza arc. 

You wash the mugs in the sink while Goku yells in the background.

When you’re finished, you drift into his bedroom like a shy ghost, unsure of where to haunt. The bedside table lamp is on. His casual clothes are sprawled on the bed where he casually tossed them, to be picked up later when he ought to have come home. His pair of overpriced designer grey sweats.

The sweatshirt still smells like him. You’re too tired and numb to be ashamed of the impulse that has you yanking it over your head, hugging it around your ribs. Hilariously baggy in the shoulders. On you, it could be a dress.

His bed still smells like him, too. You curl up sideways, your arms hugging your ribs and your knees tucked into your chest, like you’re rolling into a hard fall, and sleep badly while the Dragon Ball DVD ticks down its runtime and lingers on the menu screen.

You sleep around three hours. You feel like you’ve been clipped by a truck. He lived like this every day, you think.

Maybe you should call his bank today. After all, you might die in the Game. He’d trusted you with this. You and you alone. 

It doesn’t mean what you want it to mean.

And anyway, he’s going to be released. The other students are going to track down this person who can release him and he’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.

You go the rest of the way north.

It still takes fucking forever. You have to pull over and nap on the roadside again when the divider line starts to swim and quiver. You have to haggle for food at a partially ransacked 7-11 between Utsunomiya and Yaita, so you can enter the game barrier with a full backpack of supplies. You have to pull over and wait for some rubble from a building struck by a curse to get cleared outside of Fukushima. You have to chase after the curse through the forest, bare twigs and branches slapping at your chapped hands, the long howl on your breath stolen by whips of cold wind.

You kill it and you get back on the road. 

You make it to Sendai around nightfall in the grim half-light of a static-grey sunset. The colony barrier slices through the glimmer of city lights in a clean sliver of black.

You rest your forehead on the steering wheel and weigh your options. It’s probably stupid to go in now, at night, with no visibility. On the one hand, the longer you drag your feet, the longer Keiko goes without help.

You think about Mai’s small body curled in on itself and you drag yourself out of the car and up to the barrier.

“Hi! I’m a Kogane!” announces a mechanized voice next to your left ear with a little whir. You jump and swat your bat at it.

It’s a floating creature that resembles a beetle with the limbs plucked off, with a pair of stubby wings, a segmented body, and a long tail with a spade-like tip. You don’t like its eyes. They’re just a pair of empty holes in its head. It has the cursed energy signature of a shikigami and, oddest of all, a frilly pink ribbon worn at a jaunty tilt over one hollow eye socket. 

The bat swipes right through it with a staticky fizz. “I’m a liason between players and the Culling Game!” it announces with good cheer, apparently not holding a grudge. “Inside this barrier, a lethal contest called the Culling Game has begun! Step in and you too become a player! Are you willing to enter?”

It’s like a recording on a pachinko machine. Asking you to bet your life in the same tone it would use to ask you to drop in two hundred-yen coins. “Yes,” you say, rolling your shoulder in one hand, gripping your bat in the other. “Sorry I, um, tried to hit you.”

“It’s not a problem!” it says cheerfully. “At your request, I can provide you a list of the game rules!” 

What are you going to do, not ask for the rules? You’ve never not asked for the rules in your life. “Yes, please.”

There are currently ten rules, most of which Shoko already related to you. After awakening a cursed technique, players must declare their participation in the Culling Game at a colony of their choice within nineteen days. Any player who breaks the previous rule will be subject to “cursed technique removal.” Nonplayers who enter the colony become players at the moment of entry and will be considered to have declared participation. 

Civilians were given at least one chance to exit. You know your family are outside the barrier, but still. You think about your old classmates. Your old teachers. Your old coworkers at the corner grocery. 

Players score points by ending the lives of other players. Points are determined by the game master and indicate the value of a player’s life. As a general rule, sorcerers are worth five points, and non-sorcerers are worth one point. The game’s programming is as biased and discriminatory as Jujutsu HQ. 

Excluding the point value of a player’s own life, players may expend a hundred points to negotiate with the game master to add one new rule to the Game. This is the rule that got everyone else’s attention. The rule that will let Fushiguro’s sister—and hopefully Keiko, too—exit the game. The game also has to accept any proposed rule, provided it doesn’t have “marked and long-lasting effects on the Culling Game,” the meaning of which is vague and open to interpretation.

If a player’s score remains the same for nineteen days, that player shall be subject to cursed technique removal.

The Kogane helpfully informs you two new rules have been added since the commencement of the game. The first, instated by one Kashimo Hajime, allows for a database of all available players. The second, instated by a Higuruma Hiromi, allows for transfer of points between players. 

“Can you show me the data for Yamanaka Keiko?” you ask.

The Kogane obligingly pops open like a patterned notepad, unfurling a sheer screen between its head and abdomen. You almost drop your bat.

The shimmering text on the screen reads Yamanaka Keiko. Points 005. Rules 00. Current Colony: Sendai.

She’s still alive. You lean on your bat as you fold over in relief.

You don’t think about what those five points mean.

You ask about the others. Itadori and Fushiguro are in the Tokyo Number 2 colony. Still blessedly alive. 

Yuta is here, in Sendai colony, with a point total of two hundred.

Two hundred. Even when the Kogane screws its head back on you can still the bleak black afterimage of those three digits burned into your vision.  

Maybe he got them through transfer. 

Maybe you can find him inside.

You ford through the barrier. As it closes around you, it chill touch nips at the back of your neck like a set of teeth. 

On the other side, your foot lurches downward into nothing, like you’re stepping into a missing stair, and then you’re falling.

You’re in the sky above the city and it furls out beneath you, a map on a poster, still and shadowed in the last dregs of sunset, wide swathes still glittering with streetlamps and office facades and the windows of empty homes. 

Most of it’s dark. Too flat and glossy to be real. But the cold wind screaming in your ears and slapping your arms and face and ripping at your hair is real. The rolling lurch in your stomach as you somersault in midair, twisting in the wind like laundry left out on the line in a monsoon, is too real. 

Each second you’re falling even faster. An acceleration rate of nine-point-eight meters per second until terminal velocity. You don’t know why you remember that and you don’t know why you remember that now and you’re going to die. You can’t fall from this height and live, it’s too high, anything above five stories and your shield’s overloaded and you get hurt, even stretched to its limits, Satoru made you practice, Yuta made you practice, you twisted an ankle and that was only at fifteen meters—

Binding vow, you think. Or don’t think. It arrives as a whisper from some stray dusty corner in the back of your mind, a stockpiled tidbit from one of Kusakabe-sensei’s thoughtfully planned lectures. Make a binding vow to increase the damage you’re able to take this one time, and pay for it, pay for it with whatever, it doesn’t matter, you don’t even know how close you are to the ground, you have to do it now—

No cursed technique for the next day, you think. Twenty-four hours. 

You hit the ground and it must have worked, because you don’t die.

Your right shoulder takes the impact and it shudders into your shield and it detonates immediately, bright and sparkling, with a roar like the rush of an oncoming train. The rest of your body slumps into the divot you’ve made in the concrete with a hard thump. You make two fists and curl in on yourself, breathing hard.

That drop would have killed most people entering. The rules didn’t say anything about that. 

But of course the death game with the rules made up by some deranged millenium-old walking corpse wouldn’t be fair. That was your first dumb fucking mistake.

When you open your eyes and roll onto your back, you recognize where you are. You’re in the middle of the crossing square right outside Nagamachi Station. Across from the karaoke joint where you went with the girls from student council when you all got your university acceptances. You went on a group date there once with your old boyfriend Hide’s friends from the volleyball team. The streetlight’s still working. As you watch, it flickers from yellow to red.

Over your head, a ringing bolt of golden light sinks into the concrete.

You’re up and crawling out of your impact crater, scraping your hands on the jagged lip, and staggering for the nearest cover, what used to be a ramen joint. A few more of the gleaming projectiles bounce off the building facades after you. One pings off the streetlight and it blows out with a crack and sizzle, throwing the street into hard-edged shadows.

You huddle beneath the counter, but the firing stops. No one tries to break down the door to the shop. The player on the other end must have just been looking for a cheap shot, and isn’t interested in chasing you down with next to no visibility. 

You have a flashlight, but if you use it, it’s going to alert anyone nearby to come and try to rack up some easy points, and you don’t have your cursed technique until sunset tomorrow. You grit your teeth as you flick it on. Keiko’s out there every second you waste. You blink away the afterimage of Mai’s corpse in the pit and start moving. To somewhere. Anywhere. To cover any ground. 

The row of shops around the station is a still and quiet shell. Your flashlight beam sweeps over shattered concrete, broken glass, overturned shop counters, open tills, kitchens strewn with pots and cracked plates. No knives, though. Occasionally, corpses. An old man with a blood-caked cardigan. A middle-aged woman with her eyes closed, her lips upturned in the slightest beatific smile.

It’s like Halloween Night in Shibuya all over again. Open a door, sweep it with your light, stalk through, close door, open next door. A maze from a nightmare. 

You’re attacked once. 

Your assailant is a woman around your own age, in a torn and tattered blazer, with runs in her muddied and bloddied stockings. She’s got a spear in her hands and it’s obvious from her loose grip she has no idea how to use it.

You raise one open palm, your bat at your side. “I’m looking for someone,” you say. “I don’t want to fight.”

“I’m sorry,” she croaks. “I’m sorry, but I need the points.”

She lunges at you and you don’t even need your technique. Swat the spear right of her hands with a flick of your bat. When you try to leave, she makes a run at your turned back, and you duck and sweep her legs out from under her, then flinch at the thud she makes when she falls.

You leave her in the wreckage of a coffee shop, clutching the spear like a planted flag, sobbing and sobbing.

Dawn comes, filtered through the barrier above, cloudless and colorless. By its light, you finally get a good, hard look at the Sendai around you. 

It’s been kneaded and slapped and folded and smeared into a new shape. It’s worse than the horrendous earthquake seven years ago. The splintered husks of shattered buildings bite upwards into the dawn-pale sky.

And it’s empty. Despite all the damage, there’s hardly anyone here. Most of the fighting must have taken place in the first two weeks when the colony first appeared. What if you’re too late, what if Keiko’s already—but her name’s still on the player roster, you remind yourself. Talk yourself down. 

You make the Kogane give you updates on her status every hour. Your phone may not work inside the barrier, but the clock’s still good for something.

You finally come across another human being when the sun’s about halfway through its ascent. He’s behind the grated dispensary window of what used to be a pharmacy, and you think he’s a mannequin or a statuette until he calls out. “Hey you. Got goods for points.”

“How old are you?” you ask. It’s hard to tell through the grate and the darkened shop, and with what little light’s inside gleaming off his thick glasses, but he looks all of twelve years old, and that might be generous.

“One point for food,” he says. “Two points for water.” He’s got a bounty of prepackaged convenience store food laid out on the counter behind the glass.

“I don’t have any points,” you say. “I’m looking for someone.”

“And I’m lookin’ for points,” he says, in a creaky impression of corny dialogue from a yakuza movie. 

“I can trade you some food,” you say, unzipping your backpack. “I’ve got energy bars.”

“I also got energy bars,” he says, gesturing to the spread on the counter. 

“I’ll give you ten.”

He makes a show of thinking, then pops open the dispensary slot. “Put them in first.”

“It’s a woman my age. Late twenties. She’s got shoulder-length hair,” you say, holding up a hand at shoulder-level, “and a beauty mark on her cheek. She’s a couple centimeters taller than me.”

“Civilian?”

“No, sorcerer.” It’s strange to say. “Awakened type.”

He makes a thoughtful hum. “You checked with Okkotsu’s squatters in the University building yet?”

“No, not yet,” you say, your pulse quickening with hope.

“The one up north, by the edge of the barrier. Don’t try to start anything, though. Guy guarding ‘em’s a top player.”

Of course he is. He’s a natural-born prodigy.

“Would you like to come with me?” you ask. “I’m a sorcerer. I can protect you.”

“If I wanted to be up there, I would,” he says, and slides the inner window shutter closed.

You start walking north. 

Your phone’s got no network connectivity. No online maps. No route plots. You have a compass app, but that doesn’t work either. And the sun is weak and strained through the dome of the barrier above you. Too weak to plot a course by its path. 

You end up following the bullet train tracks, then veering alongside the expressway and following the road signs. Weaving between shattered buildings, trudging over broken roadway. The silence is so complete it fills your ears, so complete it becomes its own opposite and chugs along at a low hum. You feel like the last woman at the end of the world.

You’re attacked again, twice. First by a lone sorcerer with a technique that attracts and repels metal. An awakened type. He’s not very practiced at using it. You leave him unconscious at the side of the road, then panic at the thought that someone might come kill him while he’s out, then jog back to drag him into the nearest office building. He wakes up as you’re sprinting off, but he doesn’t follow you. And then by a cluster of civilians, armed with bats and chains and metal poles and whatever else they could rip from the ground. They think you’re a civilian, too.

When they’re trying to wrestle your bat from your hands, you swing a punch at the closest. A weak punch. A pulled punch. A tap on the ribs. He cries out and falls to the ground and lies still. His friends scatter like cockroaches after a light’s switched on. 

He doesn’t move again. “You have gained one point!” trills your Kogane, and makes you crave the awful silence again.

You look at his face for awhile. To try to remember what it looks like. You think you ought to remember the face of a person you’ve killed. You don’t remember any of the men from the Zen’in mansion. It all happened too fast.

The Kogane says his name was Tachibana Yosuke. That’s an easy name to remember. You should be able to remember that, too. For all the good it will do either of you.

It’s close to sunset again, or as close as you can figure by your phone clock and the guttering light above you, by the time you make it to the northermost Tohoku University campus. A girl you’d been friends with on student council went to school here. You’d visited her once in the dorms on a trip home. 

The dorms are empty, and the science building, and the library. But on the way across the courtyard to one of the gyms, an enormous knot of cursed energy veers towards you, fast as the cold autumn wind.

The cused spirit it belongs to blots out what’s left of the weak sunlight. It’s mostly teeth. A bleached-bone skull, a long, tattered night-dark cape. 

You can use your cursed technique again. You raise your shield and raise your bat.

The spirit speaks. Its voice, distorted and shrill through its still-clamped teeth, says, “I won’t let you hurt Yuta!” It sounds like a girl. It sounds young.

“Don’t be rude, Rika-chan,” says a familiar voice from the entrance to the gym, a silhouette outlined in golden light. A young man with stooped shoulders and tired eyes and a white school uniform shirt.

“Yuta!” you cry out, lowering your bat.

“Risa!” he says, a smile brightening his wan face. “I’m glad you’re here. Well, um, not glad you’re here-here, but, you know.”

“I’m glad to see you too.” You return his smile. It strains your cheeks. “Wow, you’ve really grown!” He was only a little taller than you when he left for Kenya last spring. Now he’s just a handspan shy of Satoru’s impressive height.

“Did you get the letter I left for you? From Gojo-sensei?”

“Yes, I did. Thank you for bringing it all the way home.” You lay a hand over it where it sits folded in the pocket of sweatpants.

“Who is she, Yuta?” interrupts the cursed spirit, sounding almost sulky. She’s floating low to the ground, her torn death-shroud dragging on the sidewalk. 

“Miss Hasegawa is a friend from school, Rika-chan,” says Yuta. “Please be nice.”

“I am nice,” she grumbles. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t make introductions!” says Yuta with an embarrassed little scratch of his head. “Rika-chan, this is Hasegawa Risa, my classmate. Risa, this is Rika-chan. She’s my shikigami familiar.”

That dredges up a hint of an old memory. Your classmates telling you that Yuta had once had a cursed spirit familiar, before she moved on to the next life. 

“Nice to meet you, Rika-chan,” you say with a polite incline of your head.

“I’m helping,” says the shikigami, still soft and sulky, through gritted fangs.

“Yes, you are. You’ve been very helpful.” Yuta gives her a pat on the bleached-bone head. 

“Um… Mr. Okkotsu?” calls a voice from around the edge of the half-closed door. “Is everything okay?”

“It’s fine!” Yuta says over his shoulder. “She’s a friend of mine!” Then, to you: “Please come inside! It’s cold out here.”

He’s got around twenty people inside. All nonsorcerers. Young and elderly. A mother cradling her baby. A little girl asleep on her father’s knee.

“You’re protecting all these people?” you ask quietly after he shuts the door. Quietly, so as not to wake the children. 

“With Rika’s help.”

“I’m helping,” insists the shikigami again, this time a little prideful.

“That’s really incredible, Yuta.”

He gives you a shy smile. “Well, I couldn’t let sensei down.”

A quick little twinge behind your ribs. Satoru would be so proud of him. And a second twinge, that he’s had to do all this himself, and you haven’t been able to help him. Haven’t been able to do anything for any of them.

“Um, did you meet up with Maki?” he asks, with a bashful dip of his eyes. “The last time I saw her, she was on her way to rescue you from her family.”

It might be your imagination, but you think you hear the shikigami let out an annoyed little huff with her back turned. 

“Yes, I did,” you say, your hesitant whisper catching at the back of your throat. 

“Did she get the cursed tools she was looking for?”

“Um… no. It didn’t really go as planned,” you say, and then your sentence, and your thought, end there, with all the grace of a derailed train slamming into a station wall. “She lost her sister,” you say, and it feels like someone else saying it, from someone else’s mouth, while behind your eyes you see Mai’s small, crumpled body. Ranta folded over the steps. Chizuru huddled against the stove. “But she went to join the game in another colony. I think.”

Yuta’s always been a thoughtful young man. He doesn’t push you. “Is there a reason you came to Sendai, in particular? We were trying to split up so we avoided accidentally attacking each other…”

“My best friend’s an awakened sorcerer. She’s in here somewhere. I was hoping she’d be with you.” As you glance over the gathered pale and trembling faces, the last shred of that hope flickers out. Even though you’d known the moment you came through the door that none of these people are sorcerers.

A shudder of exhaustion rolls over you, thinking about the enormity of the city center. All those buildings you’d crawled through. All the ground left to cover.

Yuta makes a thoughtful face as he accepts two plastic bowls of instant noodles from one of the older women, who wordlessly begins preparing another before he’s even finished his thanks. He offers the second to you. You hadn’t felt hungry, but after your first sip of warm, savory broth, it’s a battle not to slug it down in one long gulp. 

“If she’s still alive, then she wasn’t in the city center while I was fighting the top-ranked sorcerers here. I’d say most likely she’s found a very good hiding spot.”

An entire city of cupboards and closets. You clutch your warm bowl and try not to sink under the dark, dizzying wave of hopelessness that closes over your head. 

But you know Sendai. Keiko knows Sendai. You’d grown up coming into the city every week. You’d both gone to high school here—

High school. Your old high school, Sendai West.

You’ll try there first. You agree with Yuta that once you find her, you’ll bring her back here and help him protect the civilians until you’re able to take them out of the barrier. 

You spend a few hours sleeping on a bare mattress among the refugees. One of the middle-aged women actually knows your mother. They worked at the same store together for a few years back in the early aughts. You both take turns holding the baby while her mother naps, her trembling, scrunched little face as soft and sweet as mochi dough.

At sunrise, you go back to high school.

It’s a longer walk across the city today. Your legs and shoulders ache. Your thoughts are slow, and they slide uselessly through your grip whenever you try to catch hold of one. By noon you’ve barely made it back to the city center, so you can trace the path of the train tracks out west. 

They’ve done some work on the building since the last time you were here. And then had it undone. The new glass facade around the courtyard is smashed to glittering sand. The door’s been torn off its hinges, the front entrance caved through with debris. You have to detonate your shield to make it into the hallway.

And there’s a curse in here. The air is sauna-thick and stifling with it.

Far beneath it, and beneath you, is a faint flutter of cursed energy. A sorcerer. Not a curse. 

Keiko had been in the broadcasting club all three years of high school. The club room had been stuffed in some weird little bunker of a basement.  Everyone had laughed about it. About how the club sponsor must have had it out for the president or something. But it was quiet down there. Cool in the summers. No one ever came down there to bother them. You’d gone to hang out on your rare breaks from student council or coursework.

You wander there by instinct, without thought, like you’re about to power through your trig homework while Keiko fiddles with the spare camera that’s always broken. Past the courtyard, where you used to eat lunch with Ayu and Chiho from the softball team. Past the student council room. Classroom 1-C, your first-year room.

It’s obvious standing in these rooms, these halls, that even setting aside the shattered walls and the broken glass and the collapsed floors, that you haven’t remembered the layout of this place, and the memories scrolling by within its walls, correctly. In the halls of your mind, you’d lenghtened hallways and shortened rooms. Swapped floors. The reconstructed set in the stage of your memories wasn’t quite built to scale.

The residuals from the curse are leading to the smaller secondary courtyard, just beyond the stairs to the basement. You can tell it’s sensing you, just the same as you’re sensing it. It keeps creeping beyond your reach. 

“I can give you information about other players!” announces the Kogane at your elbow. You swallow a shriek and almost crash into a doorframe.

“Is the curse a player?” you whisper. You don’t know why you bother. The Kogane’s speaking at full volume, and the curse already knows you’re here.

Just as the Kogane uncurls itself to display the curse’s player information, the weak, flickering light from the overhead fluorescent bulb nearest you blots out. Then the next. One by one, with a series of sharp, staccato clicks.

You shove a hand into your backpack and yank out a flashlight. Flick it on. Caught in the pale beam is a long silhouette. The size of a person, on all fours, but with each thin limb stretched and distorted, like blobs of molten sugar. Taut skin over spindly bone. A head covered in stringy dark hair. A smooth white pearl of a face, and a neck that opens into a wide mouth, lined with hard, stubby teeth.

It knocks the flashlight from your hand. The light twirls in midair, flaring over a long, sickly limb, flashing over your own flailing hand, before crashing into the nearest wall and casting a useless yellow circle onto it. 

Fuck it. You’ll go by feel. 

You dig your heels in and line up your bat. It clashes against something and jitters in your hands. The curse has clamped its teeth around it. 

You lunge out with a kick, reinforced with a blunt spike of cursed energy, and the curse shrieks and lets go of your bat. You twirl it into a swing. Hit something—one of the flailing limbs. Another limb swats against your off hand and you guard, step forward into a second blow, and set off your shield.

You drop to your knees to collect the flashlight and sweep it over the curse’s ashes. By your elbow, the Kogane shrieks, “You have gained five points!” and you swear and fumble it. It clatters back onto the floor, its narrow streak of light flaring off the nearest dark window.

You scoop it up with shaking fingers and stumble down the steps to the basement. You pass a torn shirt. What you think are the shreds of a few fingers. A smear of dried dark blood.

The club room door hovers before you in the dark. You rap a knuckle against it. There’s only silence beyond. But when you murmur, “Keiko? Keiko, are you in there?” you hear a soft, strangled cry from the other side.

Chapter Text

“Keiko?” you repeat, pierced between the ribs by a sharp sliver of hope.

“Ricchan,” she gasps. “Why are you here? That better really fucking be you.” A pause. “Tell me something only you would say before I open up.”

“The season four finale of Private Pure Love Train is crap and they should have ended the series on season three.”

“But you still watch all of season four every time—“

“It’s not a complete experience without it,” you say, trailing off into a tired whisper as you rest your forehead against the door.

She laughs. A high, frantic, almost keening little sound. “Give me a second, I’ll open up—“ and then there’s a creak from the room beyond and a small grunt of pain. 

“That’s okay. I’m coming in,” you say, and focus your cursed energy in your knee and smash it against the doorknob. The door splits in half like a brick during a martial arts demonstration. You might’ve been a little overzealous.

Keiko’s in the corner, hunched between blank-screened monitors and boxes of old storage drives, wearing her Ito Manufacturing PR division company appreciation sweatshirt under a battered windbreaker. Her arm is swaddled in a towel that she’s knotted in a makeshift sling around her neck. 

It’s the first time you’ve been in the same room with her, seen her without a screen between you, in over a year. 

It’s been a long year. For both of you. 

Her eyes are wide and lined with creases of exhaustion, her bangs smashed against her forehead, her face wan and shiny with sweat in the weak light of the battery-powered lantern in the corner. She looks like she looked when she got pneumonia your senior year of undergrad. Like she looked after nine hours of labor bringing Haru into the world.

When she looks at you, a little bit of life flares back into her eyes. You kick the door as shut as it will go with one heel and sink to your knees next to her, reaching for her free hand. Her fingers are cramped and cold beneath yours. “Hey,” you say with a squeeze, your rush of relief making your voice small and tight in the back of your burning throat.

“Hey,” she says, clutching your hand back. Squeezing it until your bones creak, like a woman in a fast-moving river grasping a branch on the shoreline. “Why are you here? You haven’t been in here the whole time, have you? Nobody could get you on the phone. We all thought you were—“ Her thin, exhausted mouth folds in on itself. 

“No, I’m okay. I’m all right.” You let go of her hand with one last pinch. “Just got a little kidnapped.” You fumble for the thermos of water in your backpack. 

“You can’t just fucking say that,” she says, with a little more force behind her words, “and not elaborate.” She pauses to take a hard, quick swig off the thermos. 

“I’ll explain in a minute. Are you okay? Your arm hurt?”

“Yeah.” She lets her eyelids flutter closed for a second. “That thing up there got its teeth in me.”

“It’s dead now. Can I see?”

“It’s kind of nasty,” she says apologetically as you help her unwind the towel. There’s a puckered divot in her lower forearm, still weeping clear fluid, lined with a string of hard, pale little lumps. One of them is breaking through the skin. It looks like a molar.

“I know somebody who can fix that.” You think. You hope. You twist the towel back in place. 

“I don’t know why it didn’t follow me down here. I’ve been holed up in here for, like, two days.” She rubs her bangs off her forehead. “I think it was using me as bait or something.”

Letting her draw in other players looking to score some cheap points. “I talked to Masahiro yesterday before I came in. He’s okay,” you reassure her. “He and Haru are both okay. He said you came in on the twelfth.”

She nods. “After the rule change. When we found out you could transfer points.”

“He said Haru—“ you start, and her face blanches pale as bleached linen.

“Yeah,” she says, settling back against the wall. “Yeah. I knew I was marked. Took me a few days to figure it out, but I knew something had changed. That something was different. Like when you know you’re starting to get sick.” You nod. “She still can’t talk much yet. But she could see them, Ricchan. She could see those… those things. The curses, or whatever they’re calling them. I could see her watching them out the window. She’d stretch her hands out like she wanted to play with them.”

She lets out a slow, shuddering breath, her free hand twitching forward, in imitation of her daughter. “Thought I’d try to get her some points. Give her a fighting chance. Before… you know. I knew I’d have to go in anyway, I was just… picking my moment.” She swipes at the sweat on her brow, her face collapsing and caving in on itself. “It’s good to see you. And I hate that you’re here.”

It’s good to see her, too, even though you ought to know by now not to trust the relief warming your chilled hands. You’ve found her and you’re both going to get out. You’re going to go home. Everything’s going to be okay. 

“I came in here to find you. Some of my friends are working on a way to change the rules. So we can swap people out of the game and leave the barriers. We’re going to go home.”

The relief wracks her like she’s taking a punch. She squeezes her eyes closed against it. “Really?” she asks. “Shit. What friends? Ricchan, it’s been, like, two days.”

“Um. Well.” You busy your hands with digging some of the energy bars out of your backpack. “It’s been a little longer than that. You know how some people got their powers awakened last month, and some people are just born that way?”

She nods, her eyes cracking open to narrow slits. 

“Well. You know that school I’ve been going to for the past year?”

She blinks again, her eyes flying open, and then presses her first to her forehead and taps it. “You’ve been going to magic school for the past year?”

You nod. She lets out a shocked laugh. “You bitch. You didn’t invite me, even once.”

“I wanted to!” you protest. “They don’t let outsiders in! It’s against the rules!”

“You couldn’t sneak me in to magic school for one night? This is the thanks that I get, after letting you mooch off my streaming for a year—“

“There was no room to sneak you in! They had me in this tiny dorm room with this shitty little closet. No way you could hide in there. No human adult could hide in there. I don’t even think Haru could fit.”

“Didn’t even invite me for a special sorcerer edition of Cowboy Birthday,” she says with a mournful shake of her head.

“I’ll make up for it when we get out of here! I’ll give you the full tour!” You rock back on your heels. “One of my classmates—my friends—is at the north end of the city, guarding some noncombatants. We have to get back there, but we should probably wait for daylight—“

“Yeah. It gets nasty at night. Sleepover in the club room!” she says with the same wan laugh.

“Better or worse than that time we did the ghost hunt with the girls’ volleyball team and Chiho threw up in the library?”

“Huh? You weren’t there for that part, remember?” she says, tilting her head. “You wimped out halfway in and I told the other girls you got a cold.”

Forget rearranged sets and out-of-order scenes. You’re fabricating entirely new memories now. “You told the story so many times afterwards, it made me feel like I was there.”

You lay down on the hard floor of the club room, side by side, the way you used to push your futons together in her mother’s living room during sleepovers in middle school. Leave the battery lantern burning, in case anything tries to get through the half-closed door with the club room’s last desk shoved across it. 

You swap energy bars. She saves you a cocoa, because she knows it’s the one you think is the least digusting. You give her the cake flavored one, because her birthday is next month. 

“Happy early birthday to me,” she says, humming a few short bars of the birthday song. “As Cowboy Birthdays go, it kind of blows, but…”

But you’re here. You’re both here. “I didn’t bring your present with me,” you say, rolling onto your side to rearrange the emergency blanket from your backpack. “I got you a new attachment for the stand mixer so you can make noodles. Surprise! Oh, and a tiny cowboy hat for Haru that she can wear when we all go out.”

“Yes! What color?”

“Purple. With sequins.”

“She’s going to love it.” She braces her forearm across her tired eyes. “You know, I think after all of this I’m going to have to get her a dog. I don’t really have an excuse anymore. She’s obsessed with Kinkan.”

You laugh. Kinkan is her mother’s slightly deranged shiba, who has an uncomfortably human range of facial expressions and a talent for opening doors. “Your mom would probably give him to you if you asked. How’s she holding up?”

“She’s okay. Last time I checked she was buying paper blessings to plaster over all the windows. Those things don’t actually work, do they?”

“Sometimes,” you say. “Depends on who made them.”

“Some dude she found hawking them on the train platform.”

“Then probably no. But I hope they make her feel a little better.”

“I asked Makkun to move in with her,” she says, drawing a breath through her nose, her voice dissolving into a teary flood. “So they could help each other. If… you know. He said he’d do it.”

“He’s not going to have to,” you say, your own voice tight with unshed tears as you reach out to clasp her arm. 

“I made her all these videos. On his phone. Of, like, all the stuff I would’ve wanted to tell her while she was growing up, you know? Graduation. Engagement. Shit like that.”

A few stinging droplets squeeze out of the corners of your closed eyes. The enormity of her grief curls over both of you like a dark wave at high tide, and for a moment, a second dizzying, black wave of anger, at the man who did all of this. Who did it to her. It’s too enormous for you to feel. It flows through you and out of you, leaving you hard and numb.

“I kept doing it out of order and and having to go back to add stuff. I was like, shit, what about her first school trip? Her first date? Does she even want her mom to say anything about that? Maybe she’d hate it! But what if she does, and I’m not there? And then I started crying, and I’m like, sobbing through the whole back half and I don’t think anyone can even understand what the fuck I’m saying at the end.”

She’s crying again now, her voice hitching and squeaking in little sobs. “You’re going to get to tell her all those things yourself,” you say, your own voice small and soft. “We’re going to go home.”

“We better, so I can delete them, or she’s going to grow up thinking I was fucking nuts.” She lays her hand over yours and squeezes tight, gasping in a few shuddering breaths before she says, “Okay. Tell me about how you got, uh, fucking kidnapped? Don’t think I forgot about that.”

You tell her. In fits and starts and useless, circling asides. Shibuya. Satoru’s capture. Your arrest. Your one-way trip to Kyoto, your almost-wedding, the end of the Zen’in Clan. Your gaze turns inwards, flips itself inside out, and you’re far away and someplace else. Standing over Mai’s small, crumpled body. Ranta folded over the steps. Chizuru huddled against the stove.

“They didn’t downplay how much it sucks to kill somebody,” she says, quiet and strained. “Or to watch someone die.”

“Your points?” you ask, your throat dry.

“I was palling around with this incarnated sorcerer. She was this sweet little granny from Osaki. Seemed as confused about all this as all the rest of us.” She sighs. “The big shots were fighting, and we were trying to get out of range, and a half a building fell on her. And that was it. But she said I should… I should be the one to do it. So I’d get the points.”

An awful silence sweeps in between the two of you. The chill from the floor makes your bones ache. “She wanted you to have them,” you say. “And you stopped her from suffering.”

“Yeah. I did what I had to. But that doesn’t make it feel less like shit.”

You think she falls asleep after that. You lie awake with your eyes closed, listening to the slow sway of her breathing. But then she says, “The resevoir. Back in middle school. That shit was real, huh?”

You unpeel your cracked lips. “Yeah,” you say, a little surprised. You didn’t think she still thought about that. She hasn’t brought it up in over a decade.

“You acted like you didn’t remember any of it,” she says. “I thought I’d dreamed it all.”

The dull gleam of the distant streetlights on the churning water. A shadow blotting out the moon. The thunder of your cursed technique, scattering droplets upwards like rain in reverse. You still don’t remember it well.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asks softly. “Not just about that.”

Not just then, but now. Not only when you were children, but for the past year, too. 

“Would you have believed me?” you ask. 

“Yes,” she says, with complete and absolute conviction. 

She’s always been that way. Had that kind of certainty. She says you’re the one who’s always been so sure about what you wanted, but she’s the only one of the two of you who’s ever been brave. “Just like you would’ve believed me, too. If it was the other way around.”

You think about the weight of all those days and months and years, convinced no would ever believe you. Convinced you wouldn’t believe them, either, if it had been you in their place. All those days and months and years laboring to be liked. To be likable. Flinching from the sidelong glances of your classmates like bared knives.

All of the rationale you’ve dragged along with you all these years seems so small and flimsy now, set against the weight of everything you’ve seen in the past few weeks. None of it matters anymore and none of it really mattered to start with. It’s all just miserable little shreds of fog, melting in the hard light of day. Scraps of shadow cast on the walls by the flickering lantern. 

“I wish I had,” you said. “It was stupid.”

You think about the other life you might’ve had, if you were a little braver, a little sooner.

It’s going to be like that for Haru. You’ll both make make sure of it. 

“I don’t know whether Haru really did get marked, or if it’s just a side effect of you getting marked, or if she was just born that way, too. But she’ll grow up with other people like her. She can even go to the magic school, if they ever get it back up and running.” Looking doubtful at this point, but you never know. “You could, too. Figure out how to use your power. If you wanted.”

“I don’t even know what mine is yet.” She rolls over in her swaddled quilt.

“If we get Satoru back, he’ll be able to take one look at you and tell you what it does.”

When, you think. When.

It’s almost over, and you’re going home.

At sunrise you shamble back towards the north of the city. It’s slow, hard going, and neither of you have much left to say. You’re wrung out and dried like laundry left hanging on the line.

Halfway into your march, your Kogane appears with a cheerful little chime. “A new rule has been added to the Culling Game! A new rule has been added to the Culling Game! It is now possible to expend a hundred points to exit the game by appointing a substitute!”

“Kogane, who added that rule?” you ask.

“Fushiguro Megumi.”

Your weary, trudging steps come a little easier. The rest of the kids in Tokyo are hanging in there.

Maybe they even found the sorcerer who can free Satoru. 

“Hey, yours has a little bow!” Keiko says, tilting her head.

“Yours doesn’t?”

“No, she’s got a tiny monocle.” She summons hers so you can see. They bob alongside each other like a pair of bizarre balloon animal souvenirs at a theme park. 

A few minutes later, a second rule is added, this time by Fushiguro Tsumiki. Players now have the ability to leave the barriers. Your mood buoys a little higher into the veiled, cloudless sky, bouncing along with the two shikigami. It’s almost over. You’re so close. You’re both going to get to go home.

You’re only five kilometers from Yuta’s camp, halfway across a bridge over the sluggish, slate-grey Nanakita River, when a woman falls from the sky.

She trails a streak of white-hot cursed energy like a comet. She lands so close to you that the whole concrete bridge buckles with her impact, making you stumble onto one knee. You reach for Keiko with one hand, grasping the handle of your bat with the other.

A pair of wings, paper-thin and with a glossy sheen like a dragonfly’s, fold up on her back. She looks down her nose at you and says, “Oh, no. You can’t be here.”

You know her face. It takes your tired mind a few turns of the gears to place it. She’d been a shy, sweet-faced girl with a ravenous appetite back at Jujutsu High. Now, Fushiguro Tsumiki is red-cheeked and pouting, bracing her hands on her hips as she leans in to give you a glare. 

You say hesitantly, even though you already know the answer, “Tsumiki?”

A broad, toothy grin splits her face. “Yes, it’s me! Megumi’s big sister, Tsumiki-chan!” 

Her voice is completely different than the soft murmur she’d spoken with in the infirmary. Now, she’s enunciating to reach the cheap balcony seats of a theater.

An incarnated sorcerer. Fushiguro had assumed she’d be the awakened type. And so had you and everyone else.

She tilts her head. “I remember you. You made the pancakes when I woke up.”

“Ricchan,” says Keiko, clamping down on your sleeve, “do you know her?”

“I thought so. Apparently not.”

Not-Tsumiki twists a loose lock of her hair around one index finger. “The pancakes weren’t bad, so I might have let you go. But you can’t be here right now.”

“That’s fine,” you say, your bat still extended towards her, quaking in your trembling hand. “We don’t want to be here, either. We’re just trying to make our way to the barrier.”

“You can’t be here right now!” She stomps one heel against the concrete, cracking it like a pane of glass. “My true love is coming here to fight me, and he’s going to get one taste of your cursed energy and he’s going to want to eat you!” This rant climbs in pitch and volume to crescendo into a manic shriek. “I’m going to make him love me! He can’t be thinking about slicing into the tender flesh of another woman! The only one he’s going to cut from now on is me!”

You wonder if Fushiguro Tsumiki is still in there somewhere, locked somewhere deep beneath her own skin, looking outward through the eyes of a stranger. You hope she isn’t. You hope wherever she is, she’s still asleep and dreaming.

“I’m sure you understand,” she says with an airy shrug. “It’s for the sake of true love! I didn’t want my first fight in a thousand years to be you, but I’m going to say it doesn’t count!”

“It doesn’t have to count at all if you let us go by,” you plead. She’s still wearing Fushiguro’s sister’s face. What if you kill her if you have to fight her? What if you kill her, and there was still a way to fix her? You don’t even know if that’s possible. You don’t even know if there’s anyone else left inside her skull. “We’ll be out of your way long before he gets here—“

“It’s faster just to kill you, to be on the safe side.” She shows you a swaying, dreamy smile, as full of teeth as her leer. “You won’t have heard of me, but you know him. My love. The one who’s going to kill me.”

You don’t ask, but she says, clasping her hands like she’s receiving a divine blessing, “Ryomen Sukuna.”

Ryomen Sukuna’s a thousand kilometers away, trapped inside Itadori Yuji. Or at least he was. 

“So, sorry!” she says. And with a flippant flick of her hand, a razor-edged grey streak flies towards your face. 

You have just enough time to expand your shield around both yourself and Keiko before the grey ribbon shivers to a halt a centimer from your right eye, quivering in midair. You try to swat it out of the way with your bat, but it’s like swinging at raindrops. It drips and dribbles into the concrete in shining globs, the sheen and consistency of liquid mercury. The beads of liquid creep over the ground, back towards the woman who is obviously not Fushiguro Tsukimi.

And you know what? Fuck it.

She’s cracked through the hard shell of your numb exhaustion, and underneath it, you’re so mad your vision blurs and your ears ring. You’re, so, so fucking close to getting home, and she’s the only thing in your way. If she wants a fight so damn bad, then she can have it.

But you have to get Keiko to safety first. She’s not trained in combat, and it’s only a matter of damn time before your shield fails her. 

You might be starting to understand a little about why Satoru always fights alone.

“Keiko,” you say, leaning in to whisper in her ear. “When I start talking, you start running. She’s about to focus on me after what I’m about to say.” Or, at least, you’re pretty sure she will. And if she doesn’t, smashing your bat against her forehead will probably finish the job.

She hesitates. “But what about you?”

“I’ll be okay. I’m trained for this. And I had a really good teacher.” You try to muscle a shred of confidence into your quaking voice. Another wave of sharp-edged ribbons clangs off your shield and melts into the concrete, slithering back towards the incarnated sorcerer. “Keep going north until you hit the Tohoku campus. There’s a sorcerer there named Okkotsu Yuta. He and his shikigami can help you get out of the barrier.”

“Could he get rid of her?” she hisses.

“Yeah. He could.” Yuta could mop the floor with her without even breaking a sweat. Neither you, nor whoever’s riding around in Tsumiki, are anywhere close to his league.

“Okay.” She braces her sneakers against the ground, ready to push off. Trusting you. 

“Then I’ll get him and bring him back here,” she says with a wild grin. “Don’t die until I get back or I’ll kill you.”

She’s always been that brave. 

You stretch your shield out as far as it will go, until it trembles like a rubber band stretched between two fingers, a shallow, narrow bubble encompassing the far end of the bridge. And you say, raising your voice, “Ryomen Sukuna does want to eat me. He told me so himself.”

Keiko breaks north, her battered trainers crunching on the shattered concrete. A single stray grey ribbon streaks after her, hits the very edge of your shield, and melts.

When you detonate it for the first time, the sorcerer’s ruddy-cheeked, scowling face is entirely focused on you.

Keiko’s only a pair of distant thudding footsteps when the sound from your technique has stopped ringing. The incarnated sorcerer reaches up to twirl another lock of scorched hair around her finger. “I knew it! I knew it. You’re just his type.”

“He told me I’d make a fine first meal.” You jerk one foot towards her and swing your bat. She smiles, raising a forearm to block it, and with a shining shiver, the viscous grey metal slides upward and slicks around her arm, coating it like the carapace of a beetle.

“He’s only going to eat me! He’s only going to cut me open! I’m the one who’s going to teach him about love!” 

She swipes her left hand forward, and her hand is coated in that glossy metal, the same shining grey as the river beneath your feet, her fingers tipped in tough, blunt claws. You drop your shield and take the blow on your raised forearm, bracing yourself with cursed energy, your teeth clattering in your skull until your ears ring. 

“I’m the one who’s going to teach him about love, and true strength, and the loneliness it brings,” she says, her voice a soft, reverent chant, as the metal creeps upward to cover her throat, her face, everything but her wild mane of dark hair, streaming in the late November wind. “I’m the only one who ever understood him! No one else but me!”

Her next swipe is full of spite and glee as she rakes her fingers at your face. You take the blow, step into it, swing your bat, and she catches it in one hand and sprays a clump of the shining metal ribbons against your cheek, your shield springing into place with only a centimeter to spare.

She swats at you with her off hand, but it was a feint, and she buries her fingers into your hair when you stumble to block it, jerking you towards the ground and a pool of the shining metal, its surface churning with wriggling spikes. “So you have to understand. I need his full attention,” she says, trailing off into a grunt as you hook your ankle around her shin.

The pair of wings unspooling from her back twitch and she rights herself, her right fist slamming into your ribs. Your shield stretches to capacity and detonates, and she swings into the sound, letting it batter her, her second hit catching you on the chin, bruising you even through your protective shell of cursed energy. “By the time he gets here, there’ll be nothing of you left that’s worth eating.”

And she’s gotten into a rhythm now. Knows the limits of your shield, even when you’re pouring your reserves into it. You have to unfold Falling Blossom Emotion as it explodes a third time.

She knocks you backwards, into a knot of shear-edged metal ribbons from above and below and both sides. You swing your bat and catch the edge of one, let your shroud grab another, but you’re swinging at mist, at fog. Your arm is pierced through by one of the strips of metal, and the liquid trickles off the tip of your bat as it tilts towards the ground.

Another pair of streamers slam into your stomach and you scream. They lace between your ribs like thread through the eye of a needle. You fall hard to one knee, jarring a gasp from your own lungs, and as your mouth opens, hot blood dribbles onto your chin and down your neck. You heave and heave and air whistles uselessly through your pierced lung.

It hurts. There’s no room left in your skull for anything but how much it hurts. No sound, no light, everything blurred and blotted out by a blazing wave of agony. A shudder as you fall onto your other knee, the sky bucking above you.

You strain to move. To run, to grab your bat. You’re pinned to the ground by the shards of metal impaling your torso. Each useless, useless twitch of your weak limbs wracks a wave of pain from the inside of your chest; a pained, choking gasp from your bloodied throat.

The incarnated sorcerer in Fushiguro Tsumiki’s body stands over you, her chin tilted skyward. “When he’s cut me open and seen my love in my flesh,” she says, “he’ll never look so lonely ever again.”

She twists her hand and the last stray drops of liquid metal coalesce into a hard lump, spinning and twirling, until it’s kneaded down like dough into a perfect, glass-faced sphere.

She lets it drop from her hand and it grinds along the ground towards you, trailing a groove of crushed concrete. You can feel the nidus of cursed energy in its core like a typhoon eye. Feel the pressure at all points of its smooth, flawless surface; perfectly equal, perfectly balanced. It’s almost beautiful. Almost mesmerizing. The splintered buildings behind you hang inverted in its gleaming face.

When that thing hits you, you know it’ll shred you to a knot of sinew and bone. 

And fuck it if you’re going to die like this.

Fuck if you’re going to collapse a meter from the finish line. Fuck if you’re going to tap out before getting Keiko home to her family. Before saying goodbye to your mother. Before seeing all the kids get back to Tokyo safe and sound.

Before welcoming Satoru home.

You stumble back onto your heels, clasping the metal ribbons in each hand, letting them shred your fingers through the flesh, slice you clean down to the bone. The pain blurs your vision into a shining haze, but you’re standing, stumbling, tearing free, and something inside you twists in on itself and you can run again.

You rush straight towards her, your mouth open in an animal shriek. Shatter your shield and shatter her shining sphere into a swell of silver metal. Pluck your bat up off the ground and swing it right at her face, crack it over her again, again, again, even as her metal ribbons pierce your ankle, your arm, your hip.  Your bat slams across her skull and blood springs from her temple and her lip and her left eye. 

You skid to a stop, clutching your heaving ribs. They’re whole beneath your spread hand. Your hand is remade, clothed in flesh, your skin unmarked. You lift up your palm and watch it in wonder as you tilt it in the half-light. Had you hallucinated? Was it some kind of illusion? There’s still blood speckled on the cuffs of the sweatshirt you stole.

Shit. You went and ruined Satoru’s sweatshirt.

Fushiguro Tsukimi is crouching, her suit of liquid metal dribbling off her legs into a limp puddle, one hand over her swollen lip, catching the blood dripping from her eye.

She’s still Tsumiki. She’s still Fushiguro’s sister. There might still be a way to save her. 

You can’t kill her here. Not like this.

As you hesitate, as you tilt your bat away from her, she groans and grits her teeth. “I’m saving my domain for him! I can’t waste it on you!”

And with another stomp of her heel into the ground and a moan of frustration, she leaps into the air over the river, her shimmering dragonfly wings unfurling from her back, and she’s gone.

You stand for a minute with your hands braced on the metal railing at the edge of the bridge, catching your breath, your chest still shuddering with the last aftershocks of phantom pain and exhaustion and guilt over Fushiguro’s sister. You stand like that until Keiko’s footsteps drum up beside you. Her hand clasps your shoulder, followed by Yuta’s.

“Hey,” you say, wiping a smear of blood from your lip. “Can you show me your arm? I want to try something.”

You expand your shield as far as it can go, engulfing all three of you, and then flip it inside out. Turn it in on itself. 

The wound on her arm puckers and closes, knitting together without so much as a thin scar. The teeth beneath her skin pop out and tap onto the ground like a cluster of grotesque melon pips.

“Wow, Risa, reverse cursed technique!” says Yuta with a proud beam. 

He tried to explain it to you once. So did Satoru, and so did Shoko. None of them ever gave you a description that made any sense. Now that you can do it too, you can’t say you could come up with anything better. It is like flipping your technique over. It is like singing a song backwards. It is like waving your hand and going, “Fwoosh!”

And after that, you all leave the barrier.

You go and collect Yuta’s followers, and you make an extra stop for the kid in the pharmacy in the city center. By the time you get back to where you left the rental car outside the barrier, someone’s stolen it, so you have to take the train back to your hometown. 

You leave Yuta on the platform with a wave. He’s escorting the last of the civilians back to the outskirts of the suburbs, and then he’s heading to Tokyo. To the others. To Maki. 

The battered, beaten train clamors into the station, and you ride it home like you used to ride this line home six days a week, all three years of high school. You limp to Keiko’s house, the same seven blocks and three turns from the platform. The same small, squat house on the end of the street. The same flickering streetlamp above it. The windows are plastered with paper blessings and spells that definitely don’t work.

Masahiro runs out the front door with Haru in his arms, his breath streaming behind him in a long, pale scarf. He crashes into Keiko, cradles her, their daughter gripped between them, spinning and crying and laughing.

There’s a soft little clench in the secret, shadowed underside of your heart, watching them. But far louder is the swelling rush of your joy, a joy so full and pure that it becomes indistinguishable from the ache. 

“Haru, this is Auntie!” says Keiko, holding her daughter up to your face. “You know Auntie Ricchan!”

“Hi, Haru-tan,” you say, smiling for her. She looks up and down and left and right in deep confusion, searching for her mother’s cellphone.

“I guess I need to come visit more often,” you say, tears pricking your eyes as you laugh, “so she knows I don’t live inside your phone.”

“That’s what we’ve been fucking saying!” cries Keiko, hugging her arms around your neck. 

You sit with them awhile while while Masahiro makes you coffee and lets you use his phone charger. Your phone shrieks in the corner with alert after alert. 

Everyone’s alive. Maki made it home. You have to blink back a swarm of tears before you’re able to read the next series of texts. 

Ryomen Sukuna has now taken over the body of Fushiguro Megumi and absconded, leaving Itadori behind.

They’ve found the Angel, though. They’ve found the sorcerer who can free Satoru.

You’re home, and everything’s going to be all right.

Keiko summons her Kogane over and over again to amuse Haru, who thinks it’s the funniest and most interesting thing in the world and keeps trying to tug on its tiny monocle. Kinkan twines around your feet and barks endlessly. Keiko’s mother tries to get you to take some of the useless paper blessings home to give to your own mother.

You go home to your parents’ house. Not the one you grew up in, but the one they moved to a few years back, right after you started your job in Tokyo. Masahiro walks you. Keiko’s already fallen asleep on the couch with Haru in her arms. Your mother is waiting outside the front door, a knit cap on her head, a steaming thermos of tea in her hand. 

She pulls you into her arms and shudders with her head in the crook of your neck. You stand like that awhile, looking at the milky spill of stars far above you. You can see so many stars in your hometown. You’d forgotten what the night sky looks like, living for so long in the city.

Your father is waiting inside, and your brother Daiki, and his wife Eri. Eri gets you a spare set of yoga pants and a Rakuten Eagles jersey to wear, and your mother makes you a fresh cup of tea in the kitchen. 

“I saw something on the news,” she says, curling her hands around her own steaming mug. “The government did a news briefing on “cursed spirits.” The speaker said most people aren’t able to see them, but some can. And that some people who can are born that way.”

You know what she’s asking. You give her a single small nod. “That’s right.”

She reaches out and clutches your hand on the tabletop. “Oh, Ricchan,” she says, and with a second squeeze, “I’m going to get out the takoyaki mold.”

You make the batter and the five of you make takoyaki. There’s no squid, so you throw in whatever leftovers were in the fridge. Some chunks of hotdog. Some pickled radish. It’s hot and gooey and molten. The best kind. And then you all watch what’s on the television, which isn’t much with most of the broadcasting stations occupied by the ongoing nationwide emergency. It’s mostly just game show reruns and ancient seasons of Wedding Bells.

Your mother lays out a spare futon for you in the living room, and when you stir awake, blinking in the grey morning light, your father is at the window, leaning on his cane as he watches a few fat flurries of snow spin towards the ground.

“You shouldn’t drive while it’s snowing, Risa,” he says. So you stay another two days until the snow melts. You spend most of it sleeping. Watching Haru romp around the pillowy snowdrifts in the empty road. She brings you a rock shaped like a triangle. Playing card games with Daiki, who doesn’t cheat anymore. Or maybe he’s just gotten so good at it you can no longer tell. 

You give Keiko and Masahiro the address of Jujutsu High, so they can join you there later when you know it’s safe. And on the nineteenth, you get another rental car—you have to get Ijichi, bless him, to reserve it for you after what happened to the last one—and take the coastal road south, down past Iwaki. It starts snowing again partway through the journey. You park by the seawall in the empty lot of an abandoned restaurant and watch streams of snowflakes twirl and twist out over the grey ocean, sitting on the hood of the car and sipping the thermos of coffee your mother packed for you.

A voice by your ear announces, “Hey, Risacchi!”

You drop the thermos. It rolls off the hood of the car and spills your coffee in the snow.

Satoru’s next to the car with his hands in his pockets, his blindfold hanging loose around his throat, his hair pushed off his forehead. He beams at you, a wide white grin, his dimple tugging at the corner of his mouth. “What, you ain’t got nothing to say?”

“Hi,” you say, twisting on the hood of the car so you can face him. Really face him. 

He says, “You look good!”

“S-so do you.” He looks healthy. Robust. More bulk on him than the last time you remember seeing him. Thick biceps, broad shoulders. The contours of his neck and chin are stronger. Your fingers ache to trace those fresh lines. But his smile’s the same.

“Is it really you?” you ask, extending a hesitant hand through the cold air to brush against the sleeve of his uniform jacket. 

He lets you. Lets you curl your fingers into his sleeve, brushing melting snow from the fabric. He reaches out and lays his broad hand atop your head, over your snow-dusted pink knit cap your mother placed on your head before you pulled out of her driveway.

“I gotta go care of somethin’ real quick, okay?” he says, patting once. “It’ll be fast. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

“O-okay,” you murmur. 

He vanishes, leaving an empty hole in the softly drifting snow. You finish your bento and blow on your cramped fingers and rescue the thermos from the ground and brush it off, only to drop it again when he reappears with a loud “Back!” 

“Hi again,” you say, your hesitant smile stretching across your face. A smile so full it hurts, to match his own. “Did you do what you needed to do?”

“Nah, gotta leave it for later. For now, let’s just go home.”

He reaches out a hand to you. You reach out and take it. Thread your fingers through his. Tug him in towards you so you can twine your arms around him. Bury your face in his jacket. 

It smells like him. He smells so good, and he’s warm and solid and real and you want to stay like this forever. It hurts to hold him, the hurt of a joy so full and pure it’s indistinguishable from an ache.

“You wanna go home, baby?” he asks, his voice rumbling beneath your ear.

I’m home right now, you think. But what you sniffle aloud into his jacket is, “Yeah.”

The world blurs and shifts around you, and then you’re beneath the archway gate of Jujutsu High, and you’re home.

Chapter Text

Turns out, the little thing he needed to take care of was defeating Kenjaku, ending the Culling Game, and saving Japan and the world.

But Kenjaku has acquired a new bodyguard—Ryomen Sukuna, wearing the body of Fushiguro Megumi. He and Satoru agreed on a scheduled confrontation. 

The 24th of December. Christmas Eve, in what’s left of Shinjuku.

You all have one month to prepare. If you fail, everyone in Japan is merged with Master Tengen into a new being, presumably dying in the process. 

The school, which has been near-empty for as long as you’ve been in attendance, nothing but echoing hallways and vacant dorm rooms, is stuffed to the rafters with sorcerers. They’re everywhere—napping in the lounge, scarfing down snacks in the cafeteria, sparring and wrestling in the gym, chasing each other across the courtyard. All of your fellow students have returned, including Hakari and Kirara, plus a few extra additions they picked up in the Culling Game. The Kyoto students are here, too.  

Hakari and Kirara have managed to snag a damn staff apartment, through either bribery or threats. You guess the assistant managers have other things on their minds than apartment allocation.

You return to your old room in the girls’ dormitory to a stack of back-ordered contact lens deliveries and a new neighbor. Kurusu Hana, a girl with bouncing blonde curls, a shy smile, and the spirit of the ancient sorcerer Angel, has moved in at the end of the hall. She’s the reason Satoru’s free, so you are extremely kindly disposed towards her, and more than willing to share your stockpile of meals, snacks, and extra blankets.

Kugisaki’s door on the second floor is plastered over with wishes and farewell notes, surrounded by offerings of sweets and luxury goods. You buy a tube of that fancy mascara she’d liked to leave for your parting gift.

And Maki’s back in her room on the third floor.

She opens the door at your gentle knock. Looks at you, her eyes flaring wide. Second after second unravels in the raw silence between you.

“I can’t, Hasegawa,” she says finally, nudging the door closed with the edge of one foot.

But the next morning, you hear a timid knock on your own door. It’s Yuta, giving you his bashful smile, and she’s standing beside him, her mouth flat and grim, twitching the shoulder he’s placed one hand on as if adjusting to the weight. 

She’s holding a panful of the most beautiful red bean taiyaki you’ve ever seen in your life. They’re crisped a perfect golden brown, each tail even and symmetric. You could stack them in a bakery window.

“Sorry,” she mutters, thrusting the tray in your direction, and then, “can you not cry,” when your eyes fill up.

“Sorry,” you echo, swiping the back of your hand across your cheeks. “Thank you. They smell really good.” They taste even better.

She’s back the next day, with the same firm mouth and the same stiff shoulders. Without Yuta, but you spied the two of them together across one of the practice yards. Yuta cupped her cheek in one hand and tipped her face up towards him with all the reverence of a man turning a prayer wheel, and you’d scuttled behind the nearest practice building and pretended you hadn’t seen. 

She rubs the back of her neck. “My hair’s getting too long in the back. Will you cut it for me.”

“Yes,” you sniff. “Of course.”

“Are you going to keep it like this, you think,” you ask as you settle her at your vanity, “or grow it long again?”

“Long, I guess.” She shuffles her hips, tossing her head to flick a phantom ponytail over her shoulder. 

“It won’t take long to grow back.”

“Yeah.”

The two of you sit in silence, split only by the occasional snap of your scissors. As you’re sweeping up tufts of hair off the floor, she meets your eyes in the mirror and says, “My mom died.”

You freeze, the dustpan hovering a centimeter off the floor as you heave in a slow, shuddering breath. “Maki, I’m so sorry.”

She gives a one-shouldered shrug. “She used the knife on herself after she stabbed Naoya.”

You drop the dustpan. It claps to the ground with a crack. “She what?”

“Yeah. He was still alive, I guess. Unless he was lying.”

“W-what do you mean?” you say, kneeling to chase the scraps of hair that have scattered in every direction. Now you’ve gone and made a mess.

“He came back as a vengeful cursed spirit. I fought him in Sakurajima Colony.”

“Again?” you say, dismayed.

She raises and dips her shoulder a second time. “Turned out okay. I had some help. And I’m not that sad about my mom. But I’m glad…” She casts her eyes to the floor, her voice soft and hoarse. “I’m glad it wasn’t me.”

You clasp her hand in a brief, white-knuckled squeeze. “I’m so sorry, Maki,” you repeat, “about your mom. And about your sister.”

Your throat closes as you think about how if you’d only been a little faster, just a little fucking faster, Mai could be here at Jujutsu High right now, smiling her secret little smile at her friends in the practice yard. 

If only you’d saved a few seconds fumbling around in the halls. Shaved off some time fighting Naoya in the hallway, arguing with Chizuru in the kitchen. Made better time down to the storeroom. If you’d convinced Mai to leave with you the day before. If, if, if. An equation you’ll scratch out and redo until it spills off the page. An equation you’re never going to solve.

Maki gives you a limp squeeze back.

Mai’s is one of several funerals held your first week home. The girls from Kyoto weep on each others’ shoulders in the front row, and you ache to watch them, ache with a strange, agonizing relief that she’d had them. That even for a handful of moments in her too-short, miserable life, that she’d loved someone, and knew what it felt like to have that love returned.

It’s a busy week. Next up is Kento’s funeral, and then Yaga-sensei’s, and Tsukumo Yuki, who’d died attempting to defend Master Tengen from Kenjaku. Satoru stands at stern attention through the reciting of Yaga-sensei’s sutras. He hasn’t been wearing his blindfold or his sunglasses since his release. His blue eyes are as clear and pitiless as the winter sky above you. 

Panda stands in for the role of family. He’s tiny now after the repairs he’d needed after the Culling Game, barely as high as your knee. 

Fushiguro Tsumiki’s service is delayed until her brother comes home. She died in combat with Sukuna the day after you fought her. 

It should make you feel better that you weren’t the one to kill her. It doesn’t.

Afterwards the battle preparations begin in earnest. The training regimens. The technique matchups. The contingency plans. The combat strategies. The priority order of sorcerers entering the field.

As always, Satoru will go in first. Alone. 

You bite your lip and stare straight ahead when he and Kusakabe-sensei make the announcement. You’re in one of the many auditorium-style formal lecture halls you’ve never once set foot in during your tenure at this school. Everyone’s clustered in the back and left the front rows empty, just like a real university lecture hall, which under different circumstances you would find funny.

Instead, it only ironically emphasizes the distance between Satoru and every other sorcerer present. The distance between him and you.

It’s not like you could stop him. It’s not like you could fight beside him. Anyone else would just hold him back. 

You don’t say a thing. No one else says a thing. The planning moves forward. 

Kusakabe-sensei takes over. Satoru skips out for this part. “I’m not gonna lose,” he says, “but if I do, I’ll be dead and I won’t care, so do it however ya want!”

Kusakabe-sensei says, “If Gojo loses—“ and your whole body seizes up, as cold and stiff as a corpse. 

He could lose. It’s happened before. It only ever had to happen once. 

“Combatants will include anyone with reverse cursed technique,” he says around his lollipop, “and anyone who wants to die or doesn’t mind dying. Everyone else will be backup and sit out.”

‘Everyone with reverse cursed technique’ would normally include you, but as one of only three individuals on the roster who can use it to heal others, you’ll be on the back bench. “You’re way more valuable as a medic supporting Shoko than as a combatant, Hasegawa,” Kusakabe says. “No offense.”

“None taken,” you say down to your clenched hands. 

The order of entrance to the field after Satoru’s hypothetical defeat is hammered out. First an incarnated sorcerer from the Culling Game, Kashimo Hajime, who’s practically panting for a shot at Sukuna. Then Itadori and another friend they dragged back from the game, a stern-faced lawyer around your own age, and then Kusakabe-sensei himself and then Ino and that’s when everyone’s voices become a dull buzz in the back of your skull and you lose count.

Yuta will be fighting Kenjaku at the same time. Hakari’s been tasked with stalling Sukuna’s attendant, the pale-haired young monk from Shibuya. Either of them is allowed to interfere in Satoru’s match if his cursed energy dips too low. 

Them specifically. No one else.

If you’re going to do your part, you need your cursed technique reversal as refined as possible. You spend most of your practice time with Shoko and Yuta. Helping Shoko repair the minor injuries incurred during training—it’s getting easier and easier to flip your shield inside out and power the reverse cursed energy field within, and although you can’t heal and defend at the same time, you can shuffle between the two with decent speed. Working alongside Yuta—not just on healing, but on cursed energy refinement and technique. 

Yuta is as patient and good-natured as ever. Shoko, on the other hand, isn’t a natural mentor, and keeps insisting you should do things differently, but not how. After the fifth, “You know, like, woosh,” followed by a vague hand gesture, you’re ready to throw in the towel. Or maybe throw the towel at her.

They’re long days of work. The sleepless and lonely nights are even longer. You throw yourself into your training until you pray you’ll be so exhausted you’ll melt into your mattress, but you never fall easily asleep, despite the soreness in your limbs, the heaviness of your eyelids. You lie awake on your side in the cramped confines of your dorm room bed, with your empty, reaching arms stretching out before you, aching to wrap around a long, lean, warm frame. To draw Satoru close. 

Since he dropped his arms after you passed beneath the school gate, you haven’t touched one another. There’s always a gym floor or a practice yard or an auditorium between the two of you. There’s always the yawning stretch of his power.

During one afternoon sparring session with Yuta, you’re both half-collapsed at the edge of the training yard, fighting for breath and watching Kusakabe-sensei drill with Itadori. They’re doing replacement training, courtesy of Mei Mei’s little brother’s cursed technique, which means they’ve swapped bodies so Itadori can learn Kusakabe-sensei’s skills through firsthand use. It’s a little funny and a lot bizarre to see Itadori’s boyish, brash grin on Kusakabe-sensei’s face; to see Itadori wearing a jaded scowl with a lollipop tucked into his cheek.

Out of nowhere a large hand comes down atop your head and you almost leap a meter in the air.

“Think fast, Hasegawa!” Satoru says, beaming down at you, hanging inverted in your line of vision, his wide blue eyes half-lidded in a warm smile. It’s still strange for you to be able to meet his eyes at all times.

You want to lace your fingers through his and hold his hand against your heart. You want to draw him into your arms and listen to his heartbeat. To claim your final reassurance that he’s back and he’s real and he’s safe and he’s staying.

But you can’t, because he doesn’t belong to you.

“Looks like you two are crushin’ it over here!” He gives Yuta’s hair a hard scuffing. “Should’ve expected that from my my two star students. You guys ain’t cousins, by the way.”

You exchange a glance with Yuta. “Um… were we ever?”

“I thought the two of you might be distant family! Since you’re both from around the same city, and you both got crazy high reserves. But nope! No relation at all!” He shrugs.

“Oh, okay,” you say, reeling at the whiplash from having suddenly gained and then immediately lost a cousin. 

“Good morning, Gojo-sensei!” announces one of the girls from Kyoto, the young woman with the suit and asymmetric bangs, with a spring in her step and a sparkle in her eye. “C-can I get you something to drink?”

“Sure. I’ll take a soda. Whatever flavor you got. Ricchan wants a Turbo Peach,” he says, giving you a brief pat on your shoulder. You feel like your shirt’s on fire. “Yuta, whatcha want?”

Miwa dutifully returns with a peach energy drink for you, a bottled water for Yuta, and a curated selection of various sodas for Satoru, which she displays for him on a tray, like a flight attendant. 

“You should be charging for that, Miwa,” says Mei Mei, flicking her braid off her cheek as she strides towards you. “Speaking of charging,” she says to Satoru in playful singsong with a coy little tilt of her chin, her thumb and forefinger pinched beside her cheek. “I’m here to collect on the last of your tab.”

He stretches his arms behind his back as he unfolds to his full height, bringing his corded forearms right into your field of vision. You fumble with the lid of your energy drink. 

“I might even throw in a tip for ya,” he says with a smile. A bolt of warmth stops your heart, immediately squeezed back to a hard gallop by a spark of jealousy. “For Miwa, that is. Not you, Mei!”

Mei makes a small huff. Miwa’s glittering eyes shine brightly enough to dim the weak winter sunlight through the windows. “T-thank you, sensei! Useless Miwa here, just trying to do my best, since I can’t fight anymore!”

She salutes and retreats over to Kusakabe-sensei and Itadori. Mei watches her with a pitying sigh. 

Satoru eyes you out of the corner of one exposed blue eye and must see your confusion. Miwa doesn’t have any noticeable injuries, and she’s moving easily and freely. Her cursed energy circulation is the same as it was before. The only thing that’s changed since the Exchange Event is that she no longer wears a katana on her hip.

“Final word of advice from sensei, Risacchi,” he says. “Don’t make a binding vow like that.”

“A binding vow like what?”

“She swore to never swing a sword again if her blade failed to cut Kenjaku,” says Yuta.

“Y’ever wonder why I never taught binding vows in class?”

“There’s a lot of things you never taught in class,” you say mildly. Satoru pouts at you, and you think for too hard and too long about nipping the frown right off his plush lower lip. Yuta chokes back a chuckle.

“It’s cause it ain’t smart. It’s better to just know your own limits and play by ‘em. You never know what’ll happen your next fight.”

“That may be well and good for the strongest,” says Mei Mei, “but the rest of us mere mortals depend on binding vows to be able to survive in an unstable market. Ui Ui, what’s the most powerful type of binding vow one can make?”

“A binding vow putting one’s own life on the line,” says her tiny little brother, who’s popped up out of nowhere by her elbow, looking smug. 

“I’m just sayin’!” Satoru shrugs. “You either can win, or ya can’t!”

He’s interrupted by the opening chords of the ending theme from, of all things, the first season of Private Pure Love Train. For a second, you wonder if you’re hallucinating. “Does anyone else hear that?” you mumble.

“That’s Hakari’s domain,” says Satoru.

“His what?” you stutter. Across the floor, Hakari is moving in for a sidelong strike against Higuruma, the former lawyer Itadori brought back from the Culling Game. A pair of metro station doors flicker around him and slam closed. “It plays music?”

Despite a couple weeks of private practice, you’re no closer to opening a proper domain expansion than you were a year ago. Hakari automatically gets a domain with his technique, and it also plays classic nineties shojo anime ending tracks. There’s truly no justice in this world. 

Speaking of classic nineties shojo, Keiko is still letting you mooch of her streaming subscriptions, and you’ve started a rewatch together. She and Masahiro are planning on coming to visit Jujutsu High, but they’re holding off until after Christmas. When someone will actually have time to train her. If there’s anything of Jujutsu High, or the entire nation of Japan, left at all. 

In the middle of texting her asking how her family’s doing, you get a calendar alert for two days from now. Birthday: Gojo Satoru. December 7. He’s going to be turning twenty-nine.

There’s no official birthday celebration. Everyone’s too busy for that. There’ll be time to throw a party afterwards, if there’s anything to celebrate. But the kids leave him a cake in the lounge, and you see Itadori passing him a present in between practice matches. 

And after practice, with the cake you baked in one hand and your wrapped gifts in the other, you knock on the door of his staff apartment.

He braces one wrist above his head on the doorframe and leans against it, his smirk playing around the corners of his lips and the corners of your heart. “Hey, Risacchi. You got a key, don’tcha? You coulda just let yourself in.”

A little sliver of pain nestles itself inside your ribcage. “Well, you might be busy. Shouldn’t I at least knock first?” You shift the cake box under your arm. “It is your birthday, after all.”

He dips his chin, narrowing his eyes at the present under the other. “Oooh, chewy candies! And… a sweatshirt?” You should’ve guessed there would be no hiding any birthday surprises from his Six Eyes. “It’s just like my favorite one! That happens to’ve mysteeeeeriously gone missin’…” He taps a finger against his chin, smirking in earnest now. 

He leans in to survey your burning face. “You got something to say to sensei, Ricchan? Go on. ‘Fess up.”

He’s always been able to see right through you.

You cast a quick glance down each direction of the hallway before you heave a deep breath. “I borrowed it,” you mutter. “I borrowed your shirt while you were in the Prison Realm and then I got into a fight while I was wearing it and I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t get the bloodstains out.” And you’d tried. You’d scrubbed until your knuckles cracked.

“You stole my dirty sweatshirt?” He’s gleeful, his bright, luminous eyes dancing with amusement. You still can’t look directly at them without feeling like you’ve been socked in the stomach. 

“Yes, I stole your dirty sweatshirt! I took your dirty laundry some kind of weirdo pervert!” Your ears are venting steam.

“What kinda cake you make me?”

“White sponge cake with strawberry jam in the middle.”

“Then get in here, ya nasty little perv,” he says, yanking the door all the way open to admit you.

He rips open the packaging on his gift first thing. “Just like my old one,” he says as he holds the shirt up to his chest.

It’s not quite the same, but it’s as close as you could get. “I washed it for you already.”

He tugs it on over the tight, short-sleeved black muscle shirt he’s taken to wearing to practice, before he cuts you both enormous slices of the cake. You eat on his couch, at his coffee table, cleared of paperwork for the very first time. You actually haven’t ever been able to see the surface before. It’s glass over black-varnished wood. You guess the gradebooks don’t matter so much anymore, not when there might not even be a school three weeks from now.

You eat the cake in near silence. He turns on his television. Switches on some stupid action movie. You avoid looking him in the eyes.

“Cake’s good, Risacchi,” he says between bites.

“Thank you,” you murmur.

As you scrape the last of the buttercream frosting off your plate and lick it off your fork, he says quietly, “Ricchan, I think you oughta go.”

You bite your lower lip, flinching like he’s flicked a bruise. “Oh. Of course. You must be tired. I’m sorry, I’ve taken up too much of your time already—“

“Nah, that ain’t why,” he says, voice a little hoarse, and you catch the way he shifts his legs on the couch. The bulge of his hard cock, visible through his sweatpants.

Your breath catches in your throat, your throbbing heartbeat flaring all the way down your body, every nerve ending along its path awake and alive. He still wants you. He still wants you just as badly as you want him.

“Sorry, baby,” he says, and it might just be your imagination or your sense of vanity, but he sounds just a little bit winded. “Thanks for the cake. I’ll see ya tomorrow.”

You shift a little bit nearer to him until your hip pushes against his thigh. Reach out and place your hand between his legs. His pale eyelashes twitch, his uncovered blue eyes wide. “Will you let me help?” you ask, gently rolling the heel of your hand against his erection. His eyes nearly roll back in his head. 

“Let you help?” he says, punctuated by a groan when you rub against him again. “Sweetheart, you don’t gotta do this—”

“If you don’t want—“

“Baby,” he murmurs gently, one of his large hands settling atop yours. “I ain’t gonna say no to one last night. But you don’t have to do this.”

“I know,” you whisper, your touch stilling as you brace yourself against a rolling wave of cold, pale grief. “I missed you.” Your voice gains volume and strength. “And anyway, it’s your birthday.”

You drop to one knee before him, hemmed in the narrow space between his long legs and the coffee table, and he clasps your wrist and grinds your hand down on his cock, letting out a low, guttural groan. The sound wracks straight through your body in a hot, red shockwave. You’re fumbling with the drawstring of his sweatpants and he’s helping you, batting your hands aside, yanking down the hem of his boxers, and his cock springs free, firm and red-tipped and even longer and thicker than you remember in the memories you’ve worn thin through all your sleepless nights.

“Baby,” he repeats, his cheeks stained pink.

“I want to,” you say. It’s the reason you came here alone, when you could’ve given him his cake and present in the middle of the faculty lounge, and then gone back to your dorm room and ached for him and touched yourself until you finally fell asleep. “I want you,” you say, right before you crouch forward and gag yourself on his cock.

You’re no professional, and even now—especially now, months out of practice—you can’t fit his entire length down your throat. But you suck what you can reach and wrap your hand around what you can’t and use the other to cup and stroke him, wrapping your tongue around the thick, throbbing head, relishing in the taste of him.

He groans again as you tease him, his hips twitching towards your soft, yielding mouth, his hands tangling and twining in your hair. His helpless grunts are almost as sweet as the first droplets of his seed beading on your tongue.

When he finally comes, his hips jerk towards you, his hands clamping tight and yanking at your hair. You expect for a moment that he’ll pull out and spill on your face, like he’d asked for in Kagoshima, but he clamps your head in place, huffing a little sigh of desperate relief as he pumps his release down your throat.

Barely seconds after he’s finished, he’s pulling you back up onto the couch, sprawling you in his lap, melding his mouth against yours and thrusting his tongue between your swollen lips, tasting the last of his seed. “So good, baby,” he murmurs between kisses, and then he’s tearing down the waistband of your skirt and ripping off your panties. “Gonna fuck this sweet little pussy next,” he grunts, sliding a finger easily between your wet folds, making you shiver and gasp. “Or did you think I was done?”

“You’re still hard?” you laugh, amazed.

“I spent weeks in a black hole with nothin’ to look at but skeletons. I got hard the second I saw you. The second I opened the door. One ain’t gonna do it.”

He slides in a second finger to join the first, a teasing undertone creeping into his hoarse voice. “You’re gonna let me, ain’t ya? It’s my birthday.”

“It’s your birthday,” you agree, lacing your arms around his neck. Letting him scoop a hand beneath your knees and the other beneath your shoulders to carry you across the room. Wrap you around him, hooking one leg around his strong thigh, pinning you, hovering and weightless, against the same wall where he once held your arms above his head and took your breast in his mouth. 

A few more hard kisses, a handful of pumps of his long fingers. You’re so ready you’re dripping down his hand. You don’t have the presence of mind left to be embarrassed or ashamed. Your pussy is aching and empty and you need him to fill you, right now, fill you up and make you forget who and where you are and what day it is and long you have until the twenty-fourth of December. Make you forget your own name. 

He aligns himself against you. Pauses with the thick head of his cock just barely nudging your swollen, puffy folds apart. You can feel the question in his gentle grip on your hips. The same question you’re asking yourself with what little brainpower you’ve got left.

You should tell him to put on a condom. You should’ve told him to go get one when he took your clothes off. 

You both know what could happen if you don’t. Even if he pulls out, there’s still a chance he could get you pregnant with his child—and just the thought fills you with a shameful, smoldering want; an even stronger flood of desire. You know he can feel it, too. There’s no hiding from him like this, with your bodies entwined, with his breath on your lips, with the head of his throbbing cock twitching against your pussy. 

And you know what could happen if he doesn’t win—

You can’t force your mind to complete that thought.

“Condom,” you finally murmur, just as he gently lowers you to your feet. 

“One sec,” he mutters.

He’s back in less time than it takes you to draw in one slow, pained, breath, the condom already in place, hoisting you upright and resuming his post between your legs. “Still good?” he asks.

You’re stricken for a few heartbeats. But when you return to your eager, heated body, you nod your wordless approval, your grip tightening in his shirt, and he groans in helpless relief as he enters you.

He pushes in slowly, as much to go gently on you—it has been three months since the last time you took him, and you’re aching with the stretch—as to savor every centimeter of his cock sinking into your throbbing pussy. You let out a mewl of protest halfway, beg and plead for more, but he simply groans, “Wait for it, sweetheart,” and gives you another creeping centimeter. 

You’d forgotten how big he is. How completely he fills you. How wonderful it feels to be stretched to bursting.

He pauses when he’s hilted within you, and you breathe together, gasp and sigh together. “You ready?” he says, resting his chin atop your head, and you’ve barely choked out a helpless, breathy “Yes, please, now” when he starts to move.

Your hands clutch in his shirt as he thrusts into you. “I missed—hah—missed this pussy,” he mutters into your hair. “This tight little pussy. Thought about—“ He cuts himself off with a low groan as he pushes into you again. “Thought about all the things I was gonna do to you… the second… the second I got out—“

“Do them now,” you beg, winding your fingers into the firm flesh of his upper arms. “Do everything you wanted. Do it to me now—“

“Can’t, baby. Can’t do that.” Another hard thrust, and his hips nestle flush to yours. “I’d break ya.”

Your pussy pulses around him at just the words. At just the thought. You want it so badly.

For the past three weeks you’ve been on the verge of shattering to pieces, and now, finally, you can fall apart. You’re safe to fall apart in his arms. 

You clutch with greedy, desperate hands at whatever part of him you can reach. “Do it. Please, I want it, I want you to do it. Break me, Satoru.”

He goes rigid, his pupils spreading blots of dark ink, his cock twitching, still buried deep in your pussy. You strain upwards to kiss the edge of his chin. “Please. I need it.”

“I’m gonna fuck you hard, baby,” he says, withdrawing from you completely. Your hips twitch, your body already missing him. “If I hurt you, you gotta tell me to stop. Okay?”

“You won’t hurt me,” you whisper.

“Baby—“

“Please, I want it, I need it,” you murmur, your pleas fading and melting into a slurred litany as he hoists you higher up on the wall, into a better position, realigning his cock against your entrance.

When he enters you again, he rams into you so hard your head bounces on your neck, your ass jolting against the wall, the head of his thick cock slamming against the entrance to your womb. His hand wraps around the back of your neck, steadying your head, holding you in place. “Good?” he asks, trembling within you.

“Break me,” you demand, twisting your head around to kiss the inside of wrist.

The words unleash him. He fucks into you hard. He fucks you the way he’s never fucked you in your months-long not-relationship, fucks you the way he’s always been so careful to avoid, always been so careful to keep under control. He spears you on his long, thick cock, the head ramming against your throbbing, abused womb with every stroke, his hips slamming against yours, your hips wracked and wrecked against the wall behind you, the slick wet sound of his cock thrusting open your pulsing pussy drowned out by a rising crescendo of hard groans.

It hurts. It hurts in a clean way, in a pure way. It hurts in the way stretching an aching muscle hurts. It hurts in a way that allows you to be simply a body, merely a collection of limbs, merely a heartbeat, merely each desperate intake of breath. A body to be used by him, to be loved by him, and there’s no room left inside you for anything else, and the relief rolls over you in a hot wave and drips from your closed eyes, down your cheeks, sliding into your open, moaning mouth. 

He must feel your shudders and gasps, the soft little sobs that shake your ribs through your joined bodies, because he stops and gathers you in his arms and mutters, “Oh, shit, baby.”

“No, don’t stop! Please don’t stop!” you beg, but he’s already withdrawing, leaving you empty and aching and yearning, sliding you gently back down onto your weak, shaking legs.

“Not while you’re cryin’,” he says, and strokes your hair off your forehead so he can brand it with a gentle kiss. “Kinda kills the vibe.”

He eases you back onto his couch, your knees to your chest, your head to your knees. Folds you in his arms, safe and protected within them, and you cry yourself out. You cry until there’s nothing left in you anymore.

“I’m s-sorry,” you mumble. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, babe. It’s all right.”

“You’re being really nice,” you sob, and nearly start weeping in earnest all over again. 

“I’m a nice guy.” He strokes your hair off your sweat-damp neck. 

You slide a fingertip down his strong, corded forearm and sniffle, ““How come your muscles grew, but not your hair?” He makes an exaggerated shrugging motion and sticks out his tongue. You laugh. You’d missed laughing at him. “I guess your hair did grow a little bit,” you say, brushing your fingers against it. “It’s harder to tell when you aren’t spiking it up.”

“You can give me a trim in the back sometime,” he says, and it shouldn’t be something so small and simple that brings fresh tears springing to your eyes, but you have to swipe them away with the back of your hand. 

“You’re not wearing your sunglasses anymore, either.”

“Nah. Don’t get the headaches anymore.”

You lay your hand on his temple, placing your thumb next to one smiling blue eye. “I’m glad. And it’s nice to be able to see your eyes all the time.” Even if you do have to brace yourself to meet them like you’re squinting straight into the sun. “What did it feel like in there?” That cursed artifact had been so small. Small enough to fit in a hand and light enough to carry. And also, evidently, full of skeletons.

He rolls his wide shoulders. “It was like… a busy week at work. Passes by real fast, and then you can’t remember most of it afterwards.” 

You’re glad, at least, that he hadn’t been suffering. “It was like a long week of work for me, too,” you sniffle. “A shitty one. Felt every second of it.”

He holds you for awhile. Holds you until you stop shaking. Holds you until you can relax against him, your cheek nestled against his shoulder.

“Other students said you were real busy. What’d you get up to while I was in there? ‘Sides from you learning reverse cursed technique, that is.” He nudges you. “I owe ya an S-rank.” 

You smile, weak and wet with tears. “Well… it was a busy few weeks. I’m sorry I did this without you, but… I yelled at the higher-ups.”

He throws his head back and laughs so loud and hard it rattles your spine. “I can’t believe I missed that! How’d it go? What’d ya say? Did you make ‘em cry? They must’ve been sooooo pissed!”

“I don’t remember most of what I said. I just got upset and… yelled.”

“Classic Ricchan Bitch Fit! Argh! You hit the council with the bitch fit and I missed it!” He kisses the top of your head. “I bet it was sexy as hell.”

“I like to think so. They didn’t seem to agree.”

“Were you gettin’ questioned about Masamichi?”

“Not that time. I’d, um, gotten arrested! For trying to free you.” You twine your arms around his waist. “But it was mostly just an excuse to try and marry me off.”

His pale eyelashes flutter open. “Which piece of shit’d they pick?”

“Zen’in Naoya.”

He goes still. “He put his hands on you?” he asks, his voice low and tight.

“N-no. Well, yes,” you say, “but he didn’t get very far—“

He unlatches his arms and pushes off the couch like a sprinter at the starting block, and you tangle a hand in his sweatshirt. “W-wait! He’s already dead.”

He glances down at you. “You do it?”

“Not me. Maki’s mother. And Maki, um, a second time? I think?”

“Lucky bastard,” Satoru mutters, resuming his position on the couch beside you.

You think of Mai, of her still face in death, of her small body curled in on itself, and brace yourself against a fresh wave of sobs. “They ain’t comin’ anywhere near you now, baby. Not while I’m here.”

“No, t-that’s not… while I was there. In the Zen’in household. I really, really messed up.”

“What do you mean, sweetheart?”

“Maki’s sister died.” You squeeze your eyes closed, squeeze out a pair of scalding tears that slide down your cheeks and onto his gentle hand. “Their father killed her and I was too late. I was too late. I’d tried to get her to leave with me, and I couldn’t convince her, and s-she…” 

You’re in the basement again, looking down at her small, still body. You’re back in the margins, scratching out desperate additions and subtractions and multipliers and exponents, trying to balance a ledger that will never be in the black again.

Satoru strokes a hand over your hair. “You learned a tough lesson, baby. You already know, but I’m gonna tell you what Masamichi told me, when it was my turn.” He folds you against him, his hand still cradling the crown of your head. “It ain’t enough to be strong. You can only save the people who are waiting to be saved.”

“Who taught you that lesson?” you ask, tilting your chin up to look at him. His eyes are on someone, somewhere far away. He’s gone somewhere else, too. Tallying up his own debts.

He doesn’t give you an answer. Only a soft kiss on the lips. “You helped Maki, didn’t ya?”

“Y-yeah. I think she could’ve done it without me, but…” But you were there. You’d done something, even if it didn’t change much of anything. You remember the pressure of her hand on yours. 

It’s not nothing. It’s not much of something, but it isn’t nothing.

“And after we got out… then I went to Sendai. To find my friend Keiko. To rescue her from the Culling Game. You know her, kind of. You talked to her on the phone that one time.”

“She’s the one who thinks I look like an idol.”

“Everyone thinks you look like an idol.”

“Not you,” he says, nudging you with an elbow. “You thought I looked like a daikon radish.”

“No,” you protest, covering your face with your hands. He’s laughing. “A daikon radish, or a cosplay waiter who got lost on his smoke break.”

He guffaws. “Yowch! Kinda sexy when you’re mean. Your friend okay?”

“Yeah. She made it out all right.” You exhale a long, slow sigh of relief.

“You guys real close?”

“We’ve been friends as long as I can remember. She’s like a sister to me.” You’re much closer to her than your own brother, who you grew up resenting for making you spend all your time and effort trying to balance out his sins on the scale, and then resenting for having to pretend to not be resentful. You don’t think you’ll ever be close with Daiki, even now, as adults, but you’re glad he’s turned his life around. You don’t begrudge him his happiness. “Maybe I should’ve stayed and tried to help the kids in Tokyo, but—“

“Nah. You were right to do it. Havin’ a friend like that’s rare. Once in a lifetime.”

“Did you ever have a friend like that?” you ask.

You think maybe he’s not going to answer, but he strokes his thumb over your forehead and says, “Yeah. Used to. My one and only.”

You think you can guess who’s talking about. An old friend whose face stunned him so badly in Shibuya that he wasn’t able to fight. An old friend who he couldn’t stop from walking away. Who taught him his own hard lesson.

“I’m sorry,” you say, and kiss his neck where it meets his shoulder. For just a moment, for just a single spare second, he closes his eyes and lets himself be wracked by his grief.

The moment passes and he stretches his arms behind his head with a little shake. “You feel better now?”

“Yeah.” You wipe the last of your tears from your cheeks, your spent, bruised heart heavy and full. 

He turns the stupid action movie back on and you sit propped against him with your cheek pressed to his shoulder, eyes closed, until the last of the explosions have faded from the screen. “You tired, babe? You wanna go home?”

You shake your head. Reach for him. “It’s still your birthday,” you say.

“You wanna go twenty-nine in the bedroom?”

You chuckle. “I think you’ve got the wrong number.”

“Nah. I’ll show ya.”

In his bed, you take it slower. Gentler, easier, for both of you. He takes you from behind, standing, while you brace your hands and knees on the bed, and then when he’s finished—“Still ain’t done, baby,” he admonishes you—he sits you astride him with his fist slotted between you, his knuckle pressed to your clit. You bounce on his cock with slow, rolling undulations of your hips, tracing the new planes of his hard, broad chest with your palms, and when he comes, you come too, your pussy clamping around his twitching cock, your gasps and moans melting into one voice.

“Pretty good present,” he murmurs when you’re both drifting off to sleep, your arms locked around his waist like you can hold him here, hold him with you. 

It doesn’t feel like the goodbye you both know it is. 

The next morning, you make omurice in his kitchen and he ruffles your hair and tells you he’ll see you at training. And it doesn’t happen again. 

As the deadline stalks closer, the atmosphere around campus changes. The winter cold follows you inside every building and sinks into your aching bones when you’re attempting vainly to fall asleep. The voices of your classmates are strained and hushed, their faces like a set of matches burnt down to stubs.

And then Satoru goes to HQ, to do what he’s stopped himself from doing for years. And he doesn’t tell you. 

He doesn’t tell you. He doesn’t invite you along. He doesn’t take Itadori, either. Only the remainder of the second-year class. Maki, Toge, Panda, and Yuta. And none of them tell you, either. 

You don’t find out until after it’s done. Until they’ve returned to campus. Yuta spills the second he sees you in the lounge, where you’re brewing coffee and catching up on the national news on your phone (all bad). You get the sense he was waiting for someone to confess to. Maki grabs at his arm, hard, but it doesn’t stop his flood of hot, angry words. You don’t know who he’s mad at. Himself, Satoru, the entire jujutsu power structure, every and all of the above.

“He made us wait outside,” he says, one clenched fist trembling. “Made us wait outside the door.” You remember that door, enormous and night-black. “He won’t stop trying to be the monster all on his own.”

You march yourself straight to Satoru’s apartment. 

He’s there, but he takes his damn time answering. While you’re waiting in the hallway, you work yourself up to being furious, too. At yourself. At Satoru. At the entire jujutsu power structure. Every and all of the above.

“It’s you,” he says, cracking the door wide enough to show you his face. The flat line of his mouth. His unsmiling blue eyes. A cold twinge of sympathetic pain worms its way beneath your breastbone. “So Yuta snitched, huh?”

You lay one hand on the door and push, but he’s got his shoulder braced against it and it doesn’t shift a millimeter. “Yeah. Yuta snitched. Are you all right?”

“‘Course I’m all good. They knew it was always gonna end this way.” He curls his hand around the doorframe. “And I didn’t let the students see. Not cool to expose them to excessive gore.”

You flinch. You shouldn’t feel any remorse on their behalf, those awful men who’d burned Yaga-sensei’s life like spare kindling, who’d tormented and killed children. Who’d kidnapped and sold you. And you don’t. You’re not sorry for them. 

But you hurt for Satoru. You’ve only ever seen him look like this once before. On the day he thought Itadori was dead. You ache to put your arms around him. 

“I know you wouldn’t do that to them! I’m not here about them, I’m here about you—“

“I’m all good,” he repeats. “Go home, baby. It’s late.”

“No,” you say, raising your voice as you ball your fist against the door.

“I’m serious! Or go practice with Yuta if ya can’t sleep. You both need to work on your cursed energy efficiency. It’s crap.”

He starts to nudge the door closed and you stick your hand in against the edge of the frame. He halts it midswing. “Baby—“

“At least tell me why you didn’t say anything to me!” you say, your voice cracking and tight with tears. “Everyone else, but not me.”

You know why. Because you have no killer instinct. Because you can’t follow where he has to go. 

He looks down at you with his crooked frown for too many bounds of your hammering pulse. Your hand trembles against the doorframe. 

“Not you,” he says finally. “What kinda guy would put that on you?”

He reaches out, clasps your fist in his much larger hand, and slides it out of the doorframe, then slips the door shut. And he doesn’t answer no matter how long you smack your fist against it.

So you go home. What else can you do? He’s not going to open up. He’s not going to let you in. You’ll never close the empty space between you.

Two weeks to go until Christmas Eve.

Satoru and Yuta undergo replacement training for a week, which is a bizarre and uncomfortable experience, both for you and, it seems, for them. You have to cross the hallway to avoid Yuta in Satoru’s body, both for the preservation of your own sanity, and because he’s still getting used to Satoru’s impressive height and sometimes smacks his long limbs against nearby furniture or passerby. 

You wonder what you should tell your friends and family. If you should tell them anything at all. Keiko knows the school is occupied with something very important until Christmas, and nothing more than that. Do you tell her what could happen? Would that be a gift, or a burden, to shadow what could be her final days?

Your mother would probably hop on the bullet train and drag you back to Miyagi by the ear. And she’d also never be able to keep it quiet. You have to assume telling her would be the equivalent of leaking the news to a major broadcasting network.

No one else has said anything. There hasn’t been any kind of national announcement. 

Or at least, there isn’t until three days before the fight.

You wake up to a series of texts from Keiko, the most recent reading WHAT THE FUCK? IS THIS YOUR PROFESSOR EX-BOYFRIEND? It’s followed by a photoshopped image of Satoru, looking tough, focused, very handsome, and also candid—you think someone snapped this during the middle of a sparring session—with the caption DEATHBATTLE LIVESTREAM! PAY-PER-VIEW EXCLUSIVE! They didn’t have a picture of Ryomen Sukuna, so he’s featured in the background as a four-armed dark silhouette.

“What the fuck,” you echo aloud to yourself. 

yes, you say, except he’s not really a professor and he’s also not my ex, because we were never actually together.

K: all of makkun’s office friends are paying for this!!!! they’re all going to get together at the izakaya and watch it over beers! what the fuck! 

Mei Mei must be swimming in a pool of cash right now. You rub your aching eyes and almost pop out a contact. 

K: what’s the deal? is this why everyone at the school is busy? like a real deathmatch?

A year ago—maybe even a month ago—you would have tried to pass it off as nothing. A joke. Some kind of scripted exhibition match. For fun. Not real. Not important. 

But she’d wanted you to trust her. Wanted you to believe that she’d believe you. 

yes, you say, it’s real. 

K: are you fighting too????

R: they have me on back-bench medic duty, but maybe. 

You might have to. If the entire list of combatants ahead of you gets crossed off and there’s nowhere left to run. If Satoru—

You’ve been trying not to think about that for the past month, and you aren’t going to think about it now.

K: then we’ll be rooting for you. and for him. me, makkun, and haru-chan.

It does make you feel a little better. It’s not much of something, but it isn’t nothing. 

K: who’s he fighting???

R: ancient cannibal ghost from the heian era

K: YOU CAN’T JUST SAY THAT AND NOT ELABORATE

So you do elaborate, at least a little. You send her some citations from the school library. And you sleep easier that night than you have been for weeks.

But you don’t sleep at all the night of December 23rd. You lie awake twisting in your sweat-soaked sheets, and when you finally wake up and turn your alarm off, half an hour before it was supposed to ring, you barely even feel the slap of winter air against your clammy skin. 

You dress slowly, your chill fingers numb and cramped and clumsy. Trudge your way to the student building slowly. It’s a sunny day, and it’s been a relatively warm and temperate Tokyo winter, but the morning light is wan and washed-out, the breeze on your cheek as weak and soft as a death-rattle.

You drink a cup of coffee in the lounge. You plop a few extra cubes of sugar into it, for good luck, but the sweetness is thick and stale on your tongue. 

You take your time over your coffee and take your time washing your mug in the sink. Take your time joining your fellow students at the foot of the stairs in the entrance hall. Their hushed, frantic voices buzz with the slightly manic energy of a class right before final exams. 

They’re arguing over what to say to Satoru. And how to say it.

“Good luck?” suggests Hakari, scowling down at the floor. 

“Don’t die?” says Panda, and you know he doesn’t mean it to hurt, know he’s just as young and afraid as everyone else in this room, but still, it slices you right down to the bone, wakes up your sleeping nerves with a sharp spark of pain.

“Nothing sounds quite right.” Hakari crosses his arms. 

“Yeah he’s always won before,” says Panda.

“So why worry or cheer for him?” asks Kirara from her position squatting on the floor. 

“Kelp,” contributes Toge.

“It’ll still be nice to cheer for him,” you say, folding your hands. 

Yuta laughs. “I do think he’d like it!”

“If he’s overconfident, I’ll punch him before Sukuna does,” mutters Maki.

You feel his cursed energy before you hear his footsteps down the stairs. Deep and dense and dark, a cold river closing over your head. He descends silently, trailed by Iori and Principal Gakuganji. Ijichi will go with them, too, as part of the advance guard.

The winter sunlight gleams on his bright hair and settles on the shoulders of his long white robe like a snowdrift. His blue eyes are narrowed, half-lidded, looking straight through you. Looking right through the rest of the students, already trained on the Shinjuku horizon. His mouth is a flat slash in his face. 

Your classmates all clamp up immediately. Their silence is a heavy and solid thing, broken only by the frantic patter of your heartbeat.

Should you go to him? Does he want you to go to him? Maybe he’s trying to focus. Maybe he doesn’t want to have to worry about soothing or comforting you minutes before the fight of his life. Maybe he doesn’t want to have to worry about soothing or comforting you in front of the entire school. Maybe he—

“Hey! Sensei!” shouts Itadori, his loud, brash, youthful voice shattering the deadly quiet. “Your technique’s in the way!”

Satoru blinks at him, his flat mouth turning down into his lopsided frown, before he lets out a short, sharp little laugh, whips off his robe and scarf, and shows Yuji his back, aiming his thumb at it with a “Give it to me!”

Itadori leaps up in the air and slams him with a strike across the shoulder that would have driven most other men, including other sorcerers, to their knees. 

Your classmates line up for a series of pats and slaps and a gentle kick from Toge. When it’s your turn, you put your hand on his upper arm and squeeze. He grins down at you, flashing his teeth, and you smile back, letting your fingers tangle in the hem of his sleeve for just a single second longer. 

He strides to the end of the hall to shouts of “Kick his ass, Gojo!” and “Get ‘im, you blindfolded idiot! Prove you’re more than just a pretty face!” 

“Yeah, I’ve got this,” he says over his shoulder, and in that moment, meeting his smiling eyes, you believe him. But the second he turns aside, a rolling tide of fear closes over your head and you struggle for breath. 

Every nerve in your body pounds with the instinct to run after him. To go to him. To fight beside him. 

Even knowing you’d only get in his way. That there’s no good you could possibly do. 

He strolls out to fight for his life, your life, and the life of every living person in Japan and the world, and you brace yourself to sit back and watch.

Chapter Text

For transport purposes, Yuta’s had his enormous shikigami swallow one of the school’s storage sheds so she can carry the lot of you around in it. In theory, this should allow new combatants entering the fight to get a jump on Sukuna, as he won’t be able to sense everyone’s cursed energy when you’re inside. 

This makes no intuitive sense to you. You try not to think about any of this too hard, which isn’t difficult, as you have plenty of other pressing concerns to occupy your mind.

Mei Mei’s got a whole bank of televisions set up in the center of the room, arranged in a column like some kind of bizarre tree. The screens are positioned outward in every direction, facing each seat in a surrounding ring of low stools. 

You perch yourself on the very edge of a seat between Shoko and Kusakabe-sensei, and are almost shaken to the floor when Rika-chan lifts off like an airplane struggling into a sputtering takeoff. You have to clutch the stool with both hands.

Between your nerves and the motion sickness, you’re not only regretting the coffee you drank in the lounge, you’re regretting everything you’ve eaten for the past week. You get a text from Keiko—you can still get texts inside the shikigami, which also makes no sense, but what would you know?—with a picture of Masahiro and a cluster of thirtysomething salarymen around an izakaya table, staring intently at a blank television, with the caption The boys are ready to go. You choke down a spasm of near-hysterical laughter. 

You lean forward with your elbows digging into your knees and watch the blank grey screens until you see vague shapes and false shadows flickering just below the surface. The bank lights up in a flash of white, then shining blue, each square filled with cloudless sky. “It’s starting!” mumbles one of the girls from Kyoto, young and awed.

You can’t tell if the fight has actually begun or not. The images slowly resolve into various views down into Shinjuku. The abandoned buildings brace against the morning sun like a row of weary fieldworkers, the empty streets a knotted skein of dirty yarn. Nothing moves. 

Just as you mutter sidelong to Yuta, “Has it started yet?” every screen blazes with a burst of violet brilliance that leaves a searing, bruise-yellow afterimage smeared across your vision. A few screens are snuffed into darkness. Presumably because the crows have died. 

When you’ve blinked your vision back, bridges and skyscrapers have crumpled like shredded paper, choking out half the screens with smoke and debris. “Look,” says Panda, and you clasp your hands to your knees and lean forward as Satoru emerges from the screen of dust. 

He’s holding up a single finger and wagging it like he used to do in lessons. The sound isn’t transmitting well and you’ve never been good at reading lips, but he’s flapping his grinning mouth and you know he’s saying something incredibly rude. 

You smile to see him, a hesitant, painful grin that dies as quickly as one of the crows when he and Fushiguro—no, not Fushiguro, you have to remind yourself—close in to exchange a series of whip-fast, brutal strikes. There’s no sound, but your mind supplies the thwack of flesh against flesh, bone against bone, of its own accord.

Sukuna can hit him, and the first blow shocks you like you’ve taken a punch to your own core. “Domain amplification,” explains Yuta. “A special-grade cursed spirit used it in Shibuya. It neutralizes Gojo-sensei’s technique.”

The price being Sukuna’s own cursed technique. With both of their techniques offline, all there is to do is fall back on good old-fashioned fists and feet. 

Satoru had said he wasn’t going to have any problem “smacking Megumi around, because he’d undergone some special trainin’,” whatever that meant. But still, you can’t imagine it’s easy for him to fling the body of one of his students through the nearest glass-fronted office building. 

The combatants are briefly obscured by the face of the building, then outside again, then flinging chunks of bridge and rooftop at each other, the opportunity to use jujutsu briefly back on as Sukuna staggers his domain amplification on and off. Sukuna slices the top off a neighboring apartment building with a swipe of his hand and you hiss in a panicked breath as the chunk of steel and glass careens towards them. Again, they’re out of view, and then the rubble slams into the ground and they both stride out of the cloud of debris, trading what seem to be a few taunting words. 

The others are arguing about why neither of them have used Domain Expansion yet. Their words slide right off your mind like a cracked egg dribbling off the edge of a countertop. Something about Sukuna’s domain not having a proper barrier, which is supposed to be an impossible feat. You’re lacing and relacing your fingers, fruitlessly trying to focus on whatever it is they’re saying, briefly shocked and startled out of your fugue when Miwa splashes an entire bottle of water over Kusakabe-sensei’s face, evidently in a misguided effort to illustrate what it’s like to open a barrierless domain. 

“Here it comes!” announces Higuruma, leaning in slighly towards the nearest screen as both sorcerers flash a handsign. Their mouths move. Satoru’s domain billows around them like a dark curtain.

The dark sphere shimmers slightly, ripples and bends like the surface of a pond struck with a tossed rock. “For real?” Kusakabe-sensei shouts, sweat shining on his brow, as the whole barrier shakes and trembles, the entire street arround it shuddering. 

The trees nearby are shucked of their leaves, bark crumbling and peeling. A row of windows shatter. The sidewalks crack. “It’s weak against attacks from the outside!” cries Itadori.

The domain’s barrier cracks and splinters like an orb of glass. A handful of screens flicker as several more crows are obliterated. Through the eyes of the handful still on the wing, you glimpse Sukuna, standing atop what must be his domain, a grotesque parody of a shrine studded with howling mouths and antlered skulls. And you see Satoru, eyes wide in shock, a thin line of dark blood smearing the side of his neck. 

Your hand flies to your mouth, muffling a small, animal keen. “Sensei!” yells Itadori, standing so quickly he knocks his stool over on the floor with a clatter. 

The wound knits itself closed, leaving only a spray of blood on Satoru’s cheek. You lower your hand from your mouth and fist it against your heart. 

“Reverse cursed technique!” says Kusakabe-sensei.

“Yes, but Sukuna’s slashes won’t stop inside his domain!”

Hakari and Itadori’s brother are both shouting at Satoru to run, get away, but Kusakabe-sensei clamps the stem of his lollipop between two fingers. “No. His instantaneous movement uses his cursed technique to compress space. Gojo’s domain was just destroyed, so he can’t use cursed technique for a while.”

“But that means…” says Miwa, soft and fearful.

Kusakabe-sensei hesitates. “Yeah. Gojo’s in trouble.”

“No, he’ll be okay,” you whisper, pressing your fist into your chest as if you can pound your heart into submission. “He’ll use Falling Blossom Emotion.”

He doesn’t use Falling Blossom Emotion. He keeps throttling reverse cursed technique, his eyes pale and bright against the blood dribbling down his face from a hundred fresh slashes across the forehead, and moves right in and swings his fist at Sukuna’s face. Slams him to the ground and shatters the concrete right beside his skull as Sukuna swivels away from the attack. He cocks his right fist, and a ring of cursed energy shimmers around him, his carving out a tiny circle of safety. New Shadow Style’s Simple Domain.

“Didn’t Gojo-sensei say he can’t do that?!” says Itadori.

“No, he said he can’t teach it,” says Kusakabe-sensei. “Natural geniuses can’t teach for squat.” You let out a litte squeak of a laugh. 

“Then don’t make a guy like that the teacher for first-years!” Itadori shouts.

Another round of blows and grapples. As Satoru shifts his feet to avoid Sukuna’s blows, the ring blinks and breaks, and thin lines of blood streak his face and arms once more.

The ring flares outward a second time. Sukuna’s lips move, most likely in some kind of taunt. 

“What the… he’s stopped healing with reverse cursed technique,” says Kusakabe-sensei. “Does that mean…?”

“No, he wouldn’t run out of cursed energy,” says Yuta, and you take what comfort you can in his confidence.

“Under ordinary circumstances, he wouldn’t, but—“ You stop listening and stop breathing as Satoru surges forward, shattering his circle of protection and hooking his strong thighs around Sukuna’s waist. Aims his second and third fingers at Sukuna’s face like he’s miming pulling the trigger of a gun. The ensuing red blast blots out the screen in a burst of bloody light.

Sukuna’s flung ten meters backward, the shrine that made up the center of his domain shattered. 

“Is that possible?” asks Yuta. “Maybe he couldn’t heal his body because he was using reverse cursed technique to heal his technique burnout?”

Satoru lays one bloodied hand on the opposite shoulder and works it with a little whew! “What a pain in the ass!” he announces. Entirely for the benefit of you, his audience. 

While Yuta and Kusakabe-sensei argue about whether what just occurred is possible or impossible, or if their interpretation is correct, Satoru flings out a hand and opens his domain a second time.

“He’s doing the same thing?”

“No, he’s smarter than that,” murmurs Shoko.

“It’s not breaking away this time!”

“Did he reverse the internal and external conditions?”

“It’s strong against external attacks!” Kusakabe-sensei all but shouts. “How can he change conditions so easily?”

The barrier spins and shimmers. You clutch your own knees, trembling on the edge of your seat, and count your desperate heartbeats. 

When it crackes and crumbles, you let out a whistling wheeze of panic. Itadori shouts with you. “Sukuna must’ve changed domain conditions too!” says Kusakabe-sensei, his voice growing in volume and speed the longer the fight drags on.

“Hey,” says the Culling Game sorcerer who’d been so insistent on taking second point. “I’m up next if he dies. Don’t interfere.”

“Shut up,” you say, your mouth moving before you can stop yourself, your words clipped and harsh. “Don’t say that.”

He looks at you, a little taken aback, this reincarnated sorcerer from some bygone era—maybe the Taisho? You don’t know and you couldn’t care fucking less right now—that you’ve exchanged maybe three words with before now. Your classmates are blinking at you, too, shocked. 

You don’t have any time for them or for this. The image onscreen is resolving into Satoru, hand outstretched in the pose for Falling Blossom Emotion, the one he’d made you practice for hours and hours on end. 

“You were right, Hasegawa,” says Kusakabe-sensei. “That’s Falling Blossom Emotion!”

He’s met by a chorus of “What is that?”s and “Huh?”s. “It’s an antidomain technique known only to the three big families.”

“Then why do you know it?” asks Panda. “And why does Risa know it?”

“Sensei taught it to me,” you say.

“No fair!” he whines. “Satoru always plays favorites!”

Satoru should be able to heal himself now. Shoko’s saying as much around her fourth cigarette. All he needs is time.

He raises his hand and expands his domain a third time.

The dark curtain of his barrier slides over an entire Shibuya block. “It’s gonna be huge!” shouts Hakari.

As quickly as it expanded, the shadow recedes. “Didn’t it work—“

“Wait! The barrier is suuuuuper tiny!”

And it is tiny. You could fit it in your hand. It’s about the diameter of a basketball. 

“Wait. That’s impossible,” says Kusakabe-sensei.

“Yes. You keep saying that,” murmurs Mei Mei. And even beneath your surging fear, alongside your galloping heartbeat, a hot flush of pride warms your face. 

This time, the barrier shivers and shudders, but it remains whole. It creaks as Sukuna’s domain range contracts, still holding, still holding—

The barrier breaks, and this time, when the dust clears, Satoru is whole and smiling, and Sukuna is clutching a dark smear on his chest with blood on his lips.

The room erupts into riotous sound like the Giants just hit a homer. “Sukuna destroyed Gojo’s domain from the outside, and Gojo damaged Sukuna enough that he couldn’t maintain his domain! Time!”

“Huh?” asks Miwa.

“How long did Gojo’s barrier last? No one timed it?”

“Well, you didn’t either—“

“Students should be on top of that stuff!”

“Three minutes, nine seconds,” announces Mei Mei. “Exactly three minutes after the barrier shrunk.”

Satoru wipes a streak of blood from his nose and they do it again. The same elapsed time. Three minutes. Both domains splinter at the same time. And again. A total of five domain expansions in a row. 

Yuta stiffens in his seat. “Hey! Just now… maybe, only maybe… but I think Gojo-sensei’s domain was slightly faster.”

You lean forward with him, drawn towards the stack of screens like there’s a hook in your chest. Less than a second. A fraction of a second. It could be enough. He could win. This could be the end.

The barriers shatter. When they lower, there’s a third combatant on the field.

It’s huge, humanoid, and hideous. Grey-skinned like an old corpse, with an open, grinning mouth and a quartet of strange vestigial wings where its eyes ought to be. A wheel with eight spokes hovers above its head like a halo, or a crown. It’s at least twice the height of Fushiguro’s body. 

“So, that’s Mahoraga!” says Mei Mei, shifting her braid aside for a clear and covetous look. “The Zen’in secret weapon!”

A shikigami, apparently, that can adapt to various attacks. It melts back into Sukuna’s shadow and vanishes from sight. Satoru doesn’t seem surprised. 

He twines his fingers together for a sixth domain expansion. You think you read somewhere the previous world record was three times in a single twenty-four-hour period. It was his record.

Blood sprays from his nostrils, his eyes wide and unfocused. Kusakabe-sensei lets out a surprised, panicked shout.

“… You pushed yourself too far,” says Sukuna through Fushiguro’s mouth. “You were destroying your brain with cursed energy and healing it with reverse cursed technique to reset a burned-out technique.”

Yuta surgers forward. “No way! Even doing that once would be too risky!”

You lean forward in your seat and clutch at your heart when Satoru drops to one knee. Your pulse thunders in your ears and pounds in your throat; your twisted stomach; the tips of your pale, strained fingers.

When Sukuna raises his hands to entwine them in the sign for his domain, Yuta murmurs to you, “You don’t have to watch, Risa.”

And you know he means it as a kindness. He’s always been a thoughtful young man. But you swallow a surge of hot shame at his words. Shame that curdles to sharp, hard anger. 

Of course you have to watch. If you look away now, and he dies while you’re not watching, you’re going to have to hate yourself every second of every day for the rest of your life.

You’re watching without seeing, your vision quivering, your ears buzzing with static, when Sukuna’s domain shatters to pieces behind him and blood dribbles from his eyes and mouth. Your classmates all gasp and sigh in unison like a patter of hard rain. 

Satoru laughs and jerks a finger over his shoulder. “My students are watching, so I gotta look even cooler!”

Your violent flare of relief is short-lived, bursting through you with a sizzle and pop before fading back into cold, churning fear. They’re back to punching and hitting and striking and knocking each other into buildings, so quick their movements leave bright streaks on the screen, the blazing blue light of Satoru’s lapse a ruddy shine on the inside of your eyelids when you blink. 

He looks like he’s having fun. His mouth is stretched in a huge, obscene smile, his eyes thrown wide, showing the whites around each quivering blue iris. The killer instinct he’s always said you don’t got. And he’s right. He’s gone somewhere you can’t follow. Somewhere you can’t understand.

Kusakabe-sensei’s got his lecure voice on. You’re having a hard time following what he’s saying. Swaying like you’re drunk, or feverish, using every last gram of your concentration on staying upright. Something about how the shikigami’s power works and how it needs either time or repeated exposure to adapt to new attacks, which is represented by the turn of the shining wheel hovering over Sukuna’s head like an aureole. Enough turns and it will adapt to Satoru’s infinity. 

The wheel turns, centimeter by creeping centimeter. A complete cycle. Satoru hits Sukuna with his technique reversal, and then a Black Flash, a feat that sends a ripple of murmured ohs through his audience like children at a fireworks show. The enormous shikigami reemerges from Sukuna’s shadow. 

“His healing is slowing down,” says Shoko. Her voice has a low, anxious edge. You’ve never heard her sound afraid before, not even after Shibuya. “His output is plummeting.”

He could lose. He could die. 

It’s already happened once.

And you’d known that could happen. Known that when you saw him off he might never come home. You’d known that, and you’d given him a stupid fucking pat on the shoulder. Like he was nothing to you. Like it won’t be your death too if he breathes his last out there alone. The death of your heart. It’s in its death throes now, on the verge of collapse with each thundering, agonizing pound. 

He could die out there, alone. And he won’t ever know that he’s taking part of you with him. Most of you with him. He won’t ever know. 

Sukuna summons a second shikigami, some huge hideous antlered thing even uglier than the first. Three on one. 

What are you doing here? you think, and it surges you through you like a fever. You stand up with a quick thrash of your spine, like a sleeper woken abruptly from a deep dream. 

Yuta stands at the same time as you, the two of you jerked by the same strings. His hand clamps down on his sword. “I’m going to join the fight,” he says. 

“Don’t interfere,” says the Taisho-or-whatever-era sorcerer with a testy little crackle in the air. “If anyone’s next, it isn’t you.”

“Chill, Okkotsu,” says Hakari. “Boss said he only wants help if he gets weaker than you or me.”

“No, I’m the obvious choice—“ says Maki.

“Do it, Okkotsu-senpai! You have to,” says Itadori.

“Gimme a break, guys! You don’t understand anything!” Kusakabe-sensei groans. 

“Gojo just needs to defeat Sukuna. But even if Sukuna beats Gojo, he still has to fight all of us right after. He must be holding back a killer move,” says Hakari with sudden understanding. “And if we go out, he might unleash it.”

And just like that, no one’s moving anymore. Pinned anxiously in place, swapping pained, guilty, nervous glances. No one’s going to go to Satoru like he’s come to the rescue of basically everyone standing in this room. 

I’m going to fight, you type to Keiko as Kusakabe-sensei says, “Gojo can fight unhindered! This has the best chance of success!” You’ll see me on TV in a second.

She’s typing something back when you sign off with I’m so glad to have known you. 

Then you lock your phone and drop it straight to the floor. Slide your bat out of its case. You could’ve swapped back to your old staff when you came home, but you like the bat. There’s something reassuring about its blunt, angry steel length. You give it a quick test swing through the air with a whistle.

A few heads turn to look at you at the noise. “Actually, I’m going,” you say. 

“Hasegawa,” says Kusakabe-sensei, raising his hands in a gently placating gesture, his voice softening like he’s trying to lure a jumper down from a high ledge. “Don’t be stupid. You know you’ve got no chance out there.”

It’s what he’d said in Shibuya. You’d listened to him then. You won’t make the same mistake twice.

“Risa!” Yuta cries after you as you turn to the door. You think Maki might actually try and tackle you. You wouldn’t put it past her.

You can’t afford to waste any more time. You’ve already wasted so much, and you can never get any of it back.

You know what the cost of a spare handful of seconds could be. You’d learned that hard lesson looking down into the sightless eyes of a corpse that shared Maki’s face. 

“Thank you for everything,” you say to your classmates. Your teachers. Your friends. Your voice breaks on the last syllable. “I’m very glad I got to meet you all.”

And you turn away from the clash of voices and you’re out the door.

There’s a second open doorway beyond the first, lined by Rika’s long needle teeth—you try to cast this from your mind as you hurl yourself through it—and then you’re tumbling through the air and smacking down hard on the concrete hard, your shield denting a two-meter impact crater in the middle of the street.

You push off running the second your feet hit solid ground. You know where Satoru is—the Tokyo metropolitan government offices, a complex of buildings you once visited on a school trip you organized with the Sendai West student council. And if you didn’t know, you could simply follow the dark-winged sweep of crows through the winter sky, follow the crash and bassy boom of walls crumbling, floors collapsing. 

It’s not so cold today in the shattered wreck of Shinjuku. Or maybe that’s just the heat of your blood as your trainers skid over the cracked concrete. You’re flying through Shinjuku station, leaping over the ticket gate—you smack one of the barrier arms with your hip as you soar by—and up the stairs to the elevated train platform. 

You’re gasping for breath, but you don’t feel it. Your breath heaves in your ears, but you don’t hear it. You’re free and you’re flying and you’re nearly where you should have been from the beginning, if only you hadn’t wasted so much fucking time.

Both combatants stop to look at you when you fumble your way onto the top of the elevated, glassed walkway spanning the Tocho road. You had to climb hand over foot on a makeshift ladder of shrapnel, and you haul yourself over the lip of the roof with chapped hands and dust smearing the knees of your old gym pants.

Even the shikigami are staring. Sukuna’s halted them with a twitch of his hand. He’s looking at you with his eyes narrowed and mouth curled up in a slight smile, like the boys in your middle school class used to look before they’d torment the class pet while the disciplinary committee officer’s back was turned. Waiting to see if you’re going to do something interesting. If you’re going to entertain him. 

His cursed energy wracks you in enormous, rolling waves, like the surging black tide that heralds a typhoon. It tastes sharp, tastes cold, like the unseasonal winter air ought to taste. The effort of simply standing in his presence, of breathing in hard lungfuls of that drowning tide, crushes down on your throat.

You’re facing off against the King of Curses, the most powerful sorcerer to ever live, with your hair falling out of its bun and in a pair of old gym pants decorated with smiling rainclouds. 

This is as far from a sure bet as you could ever possibly get. So far from a sure bet that it loops all the way around and becomes all but a guarantee that you’ll die here. You could never survive a fight like this alone.

But you aren’t alone.

You aren’t alone and you aren’t afraid. You’re so far beyond fear that it loops all the way back around and becomes a perfect serenity, like you’re looking down at yourself reflected in a pool of still, shining water. Seeing yourself clearly for the very first time.

Sukuna’s saying something, but you aren’t listening to him. You’re looking at Satoru. Really looking up at him, tilting your chin up to do it. He fills your vision even through the blurry film of your tears. 

He’s standing alone. The way he’s always stood alone. The way he’s stood alone since he had to watch his one and only friend walk away. The peerless strongest living sorcerer. Of all things, you think of the words Fushiguro Tsumiki had chanted at you. About true strength, and the loneliness it brings.

You’ve been lonely for a long time, too. You’ve been lonely in a crowded office. You’ve been lonely lying in bed next to someone else. You’ve been lonely for so long you weren’t able to feel it anymore, were numb to the emptiness and the ache, the way a long-starving woman is numb to the pain of hunger.

But you can feel it again now. You feel it looking at Satoru, a spasmodic burst of it like warmth returning to a cramped limb after too long in the cold. And you see him clearly for the first time, too. 

See the truth of who he really is. The same as you. The same as anyone. Standing alone, waiting to be saved.

“Risa,” he says. 

You smile at him. Beam at him through your veil of hot tears. Swipe them away on your sleeve so you’ll be able to see to fight.

“What’re you doin’ here, baby?” he asks, his voice low and soft.

“Sorry I took so long,” you say to him.

You need to prove your right to stand here. To both of them. Right now. There’s only one way to do it. The pinnacle of jujutsu. The most difficult technique in applied sorcery.

You’ve never done it on cue. But you have done it once before, not even five kilometers from here. 

If you’re ever going to be able to do it again, you can do it now. You’ve never felt so calm, so still, so sure. The world is shining, brimming over with promise. Your heart is full and trembling. Your cursed energy sways with the sigh of your pulse. 

“I wanted to show you something,” you say to Satoru, still smiling. “As my teacher, please watch.”

You close your eyes and think of that brilliant sphere of liquid metal the sorcerer in Fushiguro Tsumiki’s body spun with her hands in Sendai. Its flawless, glossy surface, its perfect radius, cursed energy flowing evenly through every contact point. 

You’ll need a handsign. You don’t have a family technique, so you’ll just have to go by instinct and choose your own. You think of that stupid picture Satoru took with you back in your office and let out a hysterical little snicker. 

May as well have some fun with it.

You grin at Satoru, still beaming and proud and overflowing with everything you were too much of a coward to say, and then face your enemy and flash your hands next to your cheek in a double V-sign. “Domain expansion.”

Your cursed energy flowers from beneath your skin like ink sliding over a blank canvas. Brought forth into the living world, it’s shining and sharp and jagged, a dome of fractured glass, creeping over the chilly winter air around you like frost down a fogged windowpane.

It closes over you, Satoru, and Sukuna with a shivering creak, and you almost lose control and pop it like a soap bubble the moment the two halves slide together. You clamp down on your output, smoothing the barrier into flawless submission. 

It’s easy. It’s so easy that you laugh, and the sound bounces off the walls you’ve made, echoing in an endless bright ring until it becomes one shining chime.

The barrier’s inner wall is faceted with a thousand razor-edged, glossy little mirrors. It’s not like Hakari’s domain, with its peppy music and zingy slot machine, or even like Satoru’s boundless, beautiful spill of stars. It’s a domain made for killing. This is what the inside of your heart really looks like: nothing but sharp edges. You catch the eyes of your own reflection, caught within a fragment. Flushed and blotchy, glassy-eyed and crazed. The face of a woman in fever.

You still don’t know what your own domain does, so you fist a hand in Satoru’s shirt, just in case you have to be touching him to ensure he doesn’t get targeted by your sure-hit attack, the same way you did in his own domain. 

He’s leaning back with his hands in his pockets, surveying the apex of the dome. The brilliant chips of glass reflect his wide white grin as he lets loose a loud, two-tone wolf whistle.

When you face Sukuna, you’re smiling so hard your cheeks ache, your own beaming reflection shining down on you beatifically from a thousand angles. “I’d reveal my hand,” you announce to him, “but this is my first time, and I don’t really know what it does!” 

You have a guess, though. You ready your bat, scraping the tip against the floor of your domain as you swing it high, with a clash like the ring of temple bells. Three reflections gleam around you, repeated and refracted and fractured in a hundred spiraling fractals—your own. Satoru. Sukuna.

You stance up and swing. Your bat slams right into the reflected image of Sukuna’s stolen face. Shards of broken glass explode outward from the domain’s wall, scattering chips of blazing light on and on and onwards unto infinity. 

You glance over your shoulder as you line up your next swing, but it’s only to confirm what you can already sense through the living membrane of your cursed energy. Sukuna’s got a handsign out and he’s surrounded himself by a delicate dome of interlaced strands of cursed energy. An anti-domain safeguard, because of course he’d have one. 

You brush a loose strand of hair out of your mouth and clench your grip on the barrier beneath your feet. It was easy to close the domain, but it’s getting more and more difficult to maintain the integrity of the barrier as your cursed energy bucks and heaves beneath your feet.

It won’t last long. But while it lasts, you’ll have to do what you can.

You grit your teeth and grunt with the effort of smoothing your shivering domain and swing. And swing, and swing, and swing. You swing until your arms ache and your teeth ache from clenching your jaw together. You swing until the inside of your domain is nothing but one endless heaving wave of glittering shrapnel. It smashes on Sukuna’s protective shield like a frothing ocean wave over sand.

For a heartbeat, his shield flickers and unravels—just a few strands, like ragged twine—and the glittering shards filling the air slice through his cheek, through his outstretched hand. Your pulse bounds in excitement, in triumph, and then a cold slap swats you down from your high as Sukuna’s borrowed, youthful face recoils in pain.

Fushiguro’s face. 

Satoru’s right. You still don’t have killer instinct. 

The walls of your domain swell and bursts outward, shedding shards of glass like a blown dandelion, and then finally melts away into air, leaving you spent and shuddering and gasping and still, even now, smiling. “It broke!” you say to Satoru, laughing again a little—really more of a hysterical twitch—with an apologetic shrug. 

“You did so good, baby,” he says, grinning down at you. “That was great. But you shoulda—“ And he lays his hand atop your head, fingertips twining in your hair, and turns your chin to face the hulking grey monstrosity bearing down on you both, blade outstretched. The shikigami called Mahoraga. “Used it on that thing.”

“What are you talking about?” you yell as a swipe of its blade of an arm recoils off your shield. “You’re always supposed to attack the sorcerer, not the shikigami! You taught me that!”

“This’s an obvious exception, babycakes!” he calls over his shoulder as he swivels to aim his fingerip at the second shikigami, the antlered one with the bulging eyes. “Rookie mistake!”

He’s moving out in front of you, assuming a protective stance, fists at the ready. He knows what comes next—they’re all going to gang up on you now, because you’re the weaker combatant, and focusing on protecting you will weaken and distratct him.

Sukuna’s smiling at you, one corner of his mouth peeling up and away from his teeth. “Just as sweet as I remember. You won’t be my first meal, but you’ll still make a decent enough mouthful.”

You wring your bat in your hands and raise your shield as the shikigami pincer in on the two of you from both sides. 

“Baby,” Satoru says, glancing back over his shoulder at you, the faint glow from his blue iris gleaming dully in the hollow beneath his eye. “I’m gonna toss ya around a little, okay? Like in Kagoshima,” and you have only half a second to fumble for his meaning and ready yourself before he casts one of his blue orbs against the glass face of the nearest building and you rocket towards it, tumbling ass over tits, ground and sky inverting.

You right yourself and plant your feet against the glass, letting the last of your momentum drive you down into a crouch. The antlered shikigami is lumbering towards you with a low moan. You grit your teeth, detonate your shield beneath your feet, puncuring the glass beneath you and rocketing towards it, swinging the tip of your bat into a smooth, perfect arc. It cracks against its chest with a flurry of dark sparks.

The glorious tide of Black Flash surges through you and throbs along with your racing blood. If you’d thought you felt good three seconds ago, you feel amazing now, every nerve ending in your body awake and alive and singing. Your mouth stretches in the wide smile you’d seen Satoru wearing on the television screen. You understand what he’d been feeling now. Your blood burns, your blood sings, and you ring with a swell of joy at the overwhelming rightness of the world. 

You search for Satoru as you brace against a blow from the antlered shikigami. Find him as nothing more than a blur in the corner of your eye, a whirl of fists between both Sukuna and Mahoraga. Another hard lurch beneath your breastbone, the world twirling on its axis, and the two of you come together, braced back to back, spinning in and out of each other’s orbit like a pair of passing comets. 

He’s lost a hand. You invert your cursed technique and expand it to push a few hard pulses of reverse cursed technique in his direction. 

“Thanks, sweetheart!” he calls, flapping his whole and remade hand over his shoulder, before he rams into the antlered shikigami with a speed-enhanced punch. 

You’re thrown briefly into Mahoraga’s radius, and you take a blow from its sharp-edged arm that rattles you up to the teeth. You detonate your shield again. It shrugs off the blow, the wheel above its head twitching into a partial spin. You back up and grit your teeth as a brutal slash splits the air where you’d just been standing, your shield snapping into place a millisecond too late. Blood blooms across the back of your forearm with a sharp sting of pain.

As you knit it back together, you’re dragged up into the air, spinning once, twice, then shot towards the end of the footbridge. You land on both feet and your free hand with a grunt.

You’re too close to Sukuna now. The endless black well of his aura closes over your head before he moves in to tap an open-handed blow against your shield, raking it with a dozen razors of needle-sharp cursed energy.

It overwhelms you instantly and slashes your cheek and forehead open. Hot, blinding blood drips into your left eye, and you taste its bitter metal tang as you panic and throw out Falling Blossom Emotion. Sukuna draws back a little, his halting step mocking, his borrowed eyes narrowing in consideration.

He’s still going slow, going easy. For what counts as easy for the greatest sorcerer to ever live. Tasting you. Savoring a starter course.

You can’t make it too simple for him. You do what your sensei is always telling you to do and press the initiative, diving after him with a swing that he blocks with one upraised forearm, Fushiguro’s slim twig of a limb as sturdy as rebar. You fall into a halting, brutal rhythm—take a blow, detonate, Falling Blossom Emotion, duck to take another blow, a punch to your jaw that you feel even through your shield, detonate early so he doesn’t catch on to your limits too fast.

It’s almost fun. A cool thrill surges through you, through your vital, straining limbs.

And then just as quickly the rhythm shifts, evolves. Satoru’s on his other side now, raining a blurry haze of punches on Sukuna’s torso. 

Satoru’s movements are far too fast for you to track with your own weak mortal eyes. But you know the feel of his cursed energy, know its peaks and valleys and surges and rests through hours and hours of practice, of his skin beneath your hands. He moves, and you move with him, a down-tempo counterbeat, and swipe your bat at the back of Sukuna’s neck in between the flash of piston-quick punches.

The antlered shikigami is lumbering up behind you. Another lurch, another spin of the world, and you’re falling upwards against the face of the building, Satoru leaping after you. “Heyo,” he says with a grin, hooking his strong arm around your chest to hold you upright. He smiles down at you, and you smile up at him, and even the shuddering, surging high of Black Flash is a tepid shadow next to the warmth that blooms through your body at his touch.

You can’t believe you ever thought, even for one single second, that you should be anywhere in the world other than here right now. 

When the two shikigami take to the air after you—one floating, the other running up the wall of sheer glass—he tosses you up in the air, out of harm’s way and twenty useless meters up, legs pumping and bat dangling from your fingers. He turns and aims his finger at the antlered shikigami with his smug, snide, arrogant grin, and with a sea-blue flash, blasts it right off the face of the building, glass exploding from beneath his feet and tinkling down onto the street below.

Pinned in midair, forty meters away, the shikigami dies in a shower of black sparks and a ceremonious gush of dark blood, painting the glass-strewn street beneath like some kind of hideous art installation.

Satoru’s looking enormously pleased with himself when he turns his focus and his fists back on Sukuna. They dart around each other against the building’s glass facade, shedding bursts of shattered fragments that mimic the inside of your domain expansion. You’re still hovering in midair, drawn towards the blue orb that killed the antlered shikigami in a steady, lazy orbit. 

Satoru glances back towards you. Adjusts your vector a little bit to make sure you don’t crash into the blue orb. You can feel his cursed energy gathering like the prickling surge before a lightning strike. “Exchange Event, babes,” he shouts up to you. “Don’t worry!” And the rising tide of his power churns the air around you into a thrashing current. He’s readying his strongest attack, that enormous thunderclap of violet light. 

He’ll get you out of the way in time. You’re not afraid. 

He aims his trigger finger behind his head and releases a jet of red light. It’s tracking towards you, towards the shining blue orb, and you’re flipped and dragged out of the way, thrown a hundred meters into the sky with a nauseating lurch, far out of range of the ensuing collision.

Time slows. At Sukuna’s direction, Mahoraga bounds upwards towards the blue sphere. With a shimmer in the air, Satoru appears before it and knocks it backwards with a jerk of his fist. 

Sukuna’s leaping outwards from the building’s face, too, taking aim at the red sphere with flattened palms. You grit your teeth, fire your burst backwards behind you, and ram into him, shoulder-first, sending his ranged shot careening wildly over the street below. 

He rams a fist against your ribs and moves in to grapple you, your bodies so close you can feel his breath stirring your hair. You kick him. The motion propels you backwards, veering back out of his orbit, suspended in midair twenty meters from Satoru and the pair of gleaming spheres.