Chapter Text
"—and therefore, the designated perimeter around the forest must be—"
Satoru’s yawn was loud and stretched on for an offensively long time, drowning out the rest of Principal Gakuganji’s sentence.
He leaned back, tipping his chair onto its two hind legs, and threw his arms over his head, letting his joints pop in the quiet of the meeting room.
Across the low wooden table, Utahime’s teacup hit its saucer with a furious clatter.
"Are we boring you?" she snapped, the scar across her face going taut with irritation.
"Just a bit," Satoru said, settling his chair back onto all four legs. "Though if it makes you feel any better, your presentation on the barrier logistics was definitely the highlight so far. Really good stuff."
"You are so—" Utahime started.
"Enough," Principal Gakuganji interrupted, his gravelly voice dripping with thinly veiled contempt. "Do not let him provoke you, Iori. He behaves like a child because he expects us to indulge him like one. As I was saying..."
Satoru held back a smirk as Utahime fell silent, glaring at her teacup.
He was ninety per cent sure he'd caught her zoning out twenty minutes ago anyway. She looked almost disappointed that the old man had cut her off before they could really get into a shouting match. At least arguing with him would have been stimulating.
To Satoru’s left, Principal Yaga pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a sigh.
They all assumed he was faking the exhaustion to be a nuisance. And to be fair, they were halfway right. He absolutely could have stifled the yawn. But the weariness dragging at his bones was very much real. It was getting tempting to steal a nap, but knowing what would be awaiting him was enough of a deterrent.
Sitting through this bureaucratic nightmare felt like a punishment specifically designed for him.
They were finalising the logistics for the upcoming Kyoto-Tokyo Sister School Exchange Event, but most of the discussion was rather pointless. Principal Gakuganji was using every bureaucratic loophole available to argue over barrier parameters and event formats.
It was a transparent attempt to stack the deck in Kyoto’s favour.
The only actual highlight was knowing that Tokyo was going to sweep the event regardless. Even with Yuta out of the country, everyone in the room knew Satoru's current roster would steamroll Kyoto before the sun went down. All this talk of “equalising the playing field” was just a way to bandage Gakuganji’s pride.
"If we allocate the Grade 1 spirits to the northern quadrant," Gakuganji droned on, tapping a gnarled finger against a map, "we can ensure a more even distribution of points for the weaker participants..."
Satoru propped his chin on his hand and tuned him out.
His own classes would be infinitely more interesting than this. In fact, he was technically supposed to be teaching the second-years right now. He had given them "free training time" instead, which essentially meant he'd authorised Maki to use Panda and Toge as live-action punching bags for two hours. They were definitely having a much better time than he was.
He was half-heartedly calculating how much longer he had to sit here before he could claim a bathroom emergency, when a sharp buzz from his pocket cut through Gakuganji's droning. Utahime glared at him as he pulled it out.
Satoru glanced at the screen.
Special Grade alert. Volatile manifestation. Immediate response required.
"Ah!" Satoru announced, standing up in one fluid motion and cutting Gakuganji off mid-sentence once again. "That’s my cue, try not to miss me too much.”
"Wait!" Utahime called out, pushing back her chair. "We haven't finalised the second-day roster!"
"Just copy last year's!" Satoru called, already stepping away from the table. "Duty calls — unless something here outranks a Special Grade manifestation?"
"Satoru—" Yaga started.
He shot Utahime a smug look that said I'm out, and you're stuck here forever— then let the Limitless fold the space around him.
Ise Bay was not having a good day, and neither, consequently, was anyone near it.
Satoru materialised at the edge of a battered concrete breakwater, the sudden displacement of air completely masked by the roar of the ocean. The sky above was a bruised, churning grey, blocking out the mid-afternoon sun. Suffocating dread had settled over the shoreline.
Through the curtain of rain, the Six Eyes picked out the scattered signatures of auxiliary managers strung along the coastline, keeping civilians back.
Two figures were already waiting for him near the end of the breakwater.
"Gojo-san!"
A young man in a soaking raincoat hurried towards him. The suit jacket visible beneath it and low cursed energy output told Satoru he was an auxiliary manager. Behind him limped an older woman in a heavy raincoat.
Satoru waited for them, unbothered by the hurricane-force winds whipping his hair around. The rain was kept from falling on him by his Limitless.
As they drew near, he noted the desperate relief on both their faces. The heavy air of solemnity around them made Satoru switch tracks.
"Status report," Satoru said.
The man bowed stiffly. "We are incredibly grateful for your arrival. The situation... has escalated beyond what was expected."
The older woman stepped forward without needing prompting, wincing as she shifted her weight. "I cover the neighbouring district," she explained, her voice rough. "There were rumours. Empty fishing boats, undertows appearing out of nowhere in calm water. I thought it was mundane…"
She looked ashamed — not just of her hesitation, Satoru suspected, but of everything that had followed from it.
Satoru couldn't fault her. Of all the places in Japan for a curse—let alone a Special Grade—to manifest, Ise was genuinely the last place anyone would look. The ambient spiritual purity of the nearby shrines should have made it impossible.
The man placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. "You couldn't have known."
"Then a fishing vessel went missing in clear conditions. The coast guard found it drifting with the engine still running and no one aboard. It made the local news." She paused. "I went to investigate the following morning. I couldn't get within two hundred meters of the water before I felt faint. I knew then it was beyond me, so I reported to Kyoto.”
The manager took over, his eyes fixed firmly on the concrete beneath Satoru's shoes.
"A window came down after reviewing her report. He confirmed it was something massive. A full team was assembled overnight, and a Grade 1 came in from Kyoto." He stopped briefly, his throat bobbling. "We arrived at dawn."
"And?" Satoru asked, his eyes narrowing.
"We pulled the Grade 1 out of the water twenty minutes ago. His internal organs were haemorrhaging. The pressure had imploded him from the inside. They rushed him to the trauma ward..." He swallowed hard. "But my senior… Mori-san didn't make it out."
Satoru stared at the dark, roiling water.
Someone had died, and somewhere in a trauma ward, another was dying from a mission that should have triggered an immediate call to Satoru the moment it was confirmed as a Special Grade. But they had sent a single Grade 1 instead.
The Kyoto higher-ups were either catastrophically incompetent, or — much more likely — their pride was so fragile they had deliberately downplayed the severity of the threat rather than admit they needed help.
Talismans were scattered across every surface within fifty meters — lamp posts, benches, the breakwater wall itself. No barriers, though. Either they hadn't been able to locate it precisely enough to contain it, or containing it had already been attempted and failed.
"Have any of you actually seen it?"
Both shook their heads. He'd guessed as much.
Satoru’s Six Eyes cut through the water, locking onto the mass of cursed energy on the seafloor. It was enormous, impossibly dense, and completely still in a way that felt less like dormancy and more like patience.
"Alright," Satoru said, rolling his shoulders. "Keep the perimeter tight. I'll handle it."
"Yes, Gojo-san!" the man said.
Satoru stepped off the edge of the breakwater.
His pristine black shoes met the violent, churning surface of the ocean, and he simply walked forward. The Limitless held him perfectly level, his footsteps silent against the howling wind as he walked toward the epicentre of the storm.
The air grew perceptibly heavier the moment Satoru crossed the fifty-meter threshold.
It wasn't a subtle shift. To a normal sorcerer, it would feel like diving right into the deep. The ambient atmospheric pressure skyrocketed, attempting to compress every inch of his body.
A passive innate domain. The entire area was already its territory.
Satoru didn’t break his stride. The pressure couldn’t reach through his Limitless.
"Nice trick," Satoru said to the churning water beneath his feet.
Down on the seafloor, the mass of cursed energy shifted.
The presence rolling off it was ancient. Curses born from modern fears were sharp and frantic, but this felt slow, heavy, and methodical. It was the manifestation of a very specific kind of panic—not the sharp fear of a shark's teeth, but the slow, suffocating horror of water closing over your head. The light disappearing above you. The freezing dark going on forever…
It definitely had not spent its life in the sacred shallows of Ise Bay. Something had drawn it here.
With his Six Eyes, Satoru watched the entity react to his absolute immunity. It wasn't a standard, mindless curse. It was calculating. It recognised that its passive aura was doing nothing, and it adjusted.
The water beneath Satoru’s feet suddenly erupted in a violent, localised riptide.
Drag Current, Satoru realised, feeling the sudden, immense downward pull of cursed energy. It was a localised undertow meant to yank a target off their feet and drag them into the freezing depths to drown.
Satoru simply reinforced his footing, his cursed energy anchoring him in place.
The curse’s panic spiked.
The water beneath him suddenly went completely still, the dark surface turning as smooth as glass.
The curse focused the entirety of its power directly onto the single point in space Satoru occupied, trying to crush him from all sides. The space around Satoru’s Infinity screamed as the air flash-boiled into steam.
"Oh, you're a heavy hitter," Satoru commented, impressed.
Satoru could have indulged the curse more, but he was tired of playing defence. He raised his hand, pointing a single finger down at the glass-smooth surface of the black water.
"My turn."
A sphere of red light blossomed at his fingertip.
Before Satoru could release the technique, a sudden, blinding pain lanced straight through his chest.
He gasped, his hand dropping as he stumbled back half a step.
It was a wrenching sensation directly behind his sternum, like something had suddenly lurched and gone quiet. A tether snapping in the dark. For a vertiginous moment, the storm around him dissolved.
His cursed energy flared without his permission, a reflex response to something his body understood before his mind did.
The curse? No — the Limitless was intact. Whatever was happening had nothing to do with the thing beneath his feet.
The curse took the moment to strike. Its presence tightened, cursed energy condensing with sudden, overwhelming intent.
The world went black.
The sky, the storm, the violently parted ocean—it all vanished in an instant, replaced by an absolute, freezing void. Satoru was suspended in pitch-black nothingness. The crushing, terrifying silence of the deep ocean pressed in on all sides.
Domain Expansion.
Satoru floated in the dark, entirely untouched, the infinite pressure breaking harmlessly against his infinity.
In any other circumstance, he would have taken a moment to appreciate the construction. He would have analysed the framework, played around, maybe even let it run for a few seconds just to see how it worked.
But Satoru's chest was hollow, his heart pounding against a phantom bruise.
He crossed his middle and index fingers.
Twice today, he had materialised in the rain to find someone dead. At Ise Bay, there had been something to kill afterwards, but the Eishu Detention Centre offered no such consolation.
The perimeter was crawling with auxiliary staff moving with the frantic, hushed efficiency of people managing an unmitigated disaster. Ijichi broke away from a cluster of them near the centre of the courtyard, cutting toward him through the rain with the look of a man who had been dreading this moment.
"Gojo-san," he started, his voice strained.
Satoru walked straight past him.
He was barely registering the people around him; the entire world had narrowed down to a single blue tarp on the courtyard ground, and what was underneath it.
Satoru stopped at the edge of the tarp. For a moment, he didn't move. Then he crouched down and pulled the plastic back.
It was Yuji.
The boy looked smaller than he had any right to. Less than twenty-four hours ago, he had been loud and bright and alive. Now his skin was ashen, his face was slack, and the ground beneath him was dark with rain-diluted blood.
Satoru let the Six Eyes search —looking for cursed energy, for a spark, for the faintest trace of the thing that had made Yuji Itadori so difficult to kill.
There was nothing. Whatever had been there was gone completely, and the hope he hadn't admitted to carrying extinguished so quietly it almost didn't register.
The grief arrived silently, as it always did with him, and settled right alongside the phantom ache that had been sitting behind his sternum since he had been standing on the ocean in Ise Bay.
He could feel eyes on him.
He didn't know what they were waiting for. To see if he'd break, maybe. To see if the untouchable Gojo Satoru would finally act human. He kept his face blank and gave them nothing either way.
"Gojo-san." Ijichi's voice wavered as he finally stepped up beside him. "I am so sorry. I should have—"
A spike of white-hot fury flared in Satoru’s chest. For a fraction of a second, he wanted to turn around and tear into the man. He had trusted Ijichi. He had trusted him to watch his students, and he had allowed the higher-ups to assign three first-years to a mission they were entirely unqualified for, leading directly to one's death.
The anger drained away just as fast as it had spiked, leaving behind a hollow feeling.
It wasn't Ijichi's fault. He didn't have the authority to push back against decisions.
If there was fault to be assigned, it sat squarely with him. He was the one who hadn't pushed harder against the higher-ups. He hadn't protected his students. He had let himself get so emotionally compromised, so preoccupied with thousand-year-old ghosts, that he hadn't seen the trap closing around his own kids.
Satoru’s eyes drifted to the gaping hole in Yuji’s chest.
"Where are the others?" Satoru asked, his voice entirely devoid of inflection.
"Fushiguro and Kugisaki were taken back to the school," Ijichi said quickly, grasping the silent truce Satoru was offering. "They were questioned briefly, but they are physically safe."
He knew exactly what Megumi and Nobara were feeling right now, and the knowledge sat in his chest with edges.
"How did he die?" He already knew. He asked anyway.
Ijichi swallowed hard, adjusting his glasses. "Fushiguro reported that... Ryoumen Sukuna ripped his heart out."
A fresh pang of horror hit him at the implication that Megumi had been there. That Megumi had been forced to stand by and watch his teammate be killed. And beneath it was something else—
Betrayal.
Which made absolutely no sense.
He had exchanged exactly one brief conversation with Sukuna, and it hadn't been the kind that warranted any illusions. Satoru had actively distanced himself from the dreams. He knew better than to allow himself to be deluded by a fractured timeline of memories that didn't even belong to this century.
So why did it feel like Sukuna had just reached into his chest and ripped out his heart, too?
One didn't feel betrayed by a monster doing exactly what monsters did.
What a fool.
What had he expected? This was Ryoumen Sukuna. The King of Curses. His entire historical record was written in other people's blood, and Satoru had known that from the beginning.
At what point had he let the dream-memories soften his perception of the threat? He couldn't even pinpoint it. That was the damning part—there was no single moment of weakness he could identify and correct. It had just happened entirely beneath his notice, dismantling his guard from the inside out with a phantom laugh and the ghost of hands on his skin.
And his student had paid the price for it.
He looked down at Yuji's slack face, the rain hitting the tarp beside them.
I'm sorry.
The strongest sorcerer alive, and that was all he had.
The morgue at Tokyo Jujutsu High smelled of antiseptic.
Satoru sat on the floor with his back against the cold tile wall, his arms resting loosely on his knees, staring at the covered body on the stainless steel table.
It had been one of the worst days in recent memory: An auxiliary manager was dead. The Kyoto Grade 1 pulled from the bay hadn't made it through the afternoon — one more person that had been alive when he left and wasn't anymore. Two of his first-years were in the infirmary. And the third was lying on the table in front of him under a sheet.
He wondered what the higher-ups had to say about it all.
Probably celebrating. At least where this particular death was concerned.
"It was intentional," Satoru said aloud, his voice flat and echoing in the room.
Ijichi, who had been hovering, startled. "Huh? What do you mean, Gojo-san?"
"I mean," Satoru said, his tone conversational, "that sending first-year students into a detention centre to retrieve five people who were almost certainly already dead should have been completely out of the question." He paused, his gaze never leaving the sheet. "Someone made that call anyway."
Ijichi went very still. Then spoke carefully. "But — no one knew it would be a Special Grade when the mission was assigned."
That was true. But the entire sequence of events was far too perfectly timed.
Three first-year students, one of whom was a walking execution order, being suddenly reassigned to a catastrophically misjudged mission involving a newly spawned Special Grade, and at the same time, Satoru had been deployed to the opposite side of the country?
It was suspiciously coincidental. He found himself wondering what the elders would have done if Megumi and Nobara had died in there, too.
No one on the council would have cared about Nobara—to them, she was a nobody from the countryside. It was a damning thing to think about a fifteen-year-old girl currently lying battered in the infirmary, but it was the truth. But Megumi? The Zenin clan would have undoubtedly thrown a massive political fit over the loss of the precious Ten Shadows technique. Or perhaps they wouldn't have. Perhaps they would have just been grateful the technique was dead and buried, rather than growing under a Gojo.
He stopped that line of thinking before it went any further.
Frankly, Satoru didn't think the higher-ups were actually capable of this level of coordinated tactical manoeuvring. They were politicians. Politicians were good at capitalising on disasters, not engineering them. Perhaps he had given them too little credit. Or more likely, they had just gotten incredibly lucky.
Either way, Satoru hated it. He hated that the board had somehow perfectly aligned to give the elders exactly what they wanted, effortlessly wiping out their biggest problem while leaving a trail of collateral damage in their wake.
"Maybe I should just kill all the higher-ups and get it over with," Satoru said, tilting his head back against the tiles.
Ijichi let out a strangled sound, dropping his pen. "Gojo-san, please don't say things like that where people can hear you!"
The heavy metal doors of the morgue hissed open before Satoru could respond.
Shoko walked in, took one look at Satoru on the floor, and the particular shade of pale Ijichi had gone.
"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that," she said, snapping a pair of latex gloves onto her wrists. "You're unusually emotional today."
She caught his eye for just a moment — long enough to say what she wasn't going to say out loud — and then looked away.
"I'm a very caring person, Shoko," Satoru replied lightly, offering a hollow smile. "I contain multitudes."
Shoko turned to Ijichi and held out a hand. He passed her a folder without needing to be told what she wanted.
Satoru tuned them out.
She was right, in the way Shoko was always right about things he'd rather she wasn't. This wasn't the first time he'd lost a student. He knew how this went — you carried it, but you kept moving, because the alternative was stopping and stopping didn't save anyone.
Yuji had been a great kid. Genuinely so. The kind of person who made everyone around him slightly more aware of their own cynicism. Satoru had lost students before who had mattered to him. He knew what that felt like. This didn't feel like that.
Why was this specific death hitting him so differently?
You should be relieved.
The thought made him recoil like he’d swallowed something rotten. He tried to push it to the dark recesses of his mind, but it was too late. It had already taken root.
With Yuji dead, Sukuna was once again a dormant threat. It was incredibly unlikely that another one-in-a-million ideal vessel was just hanging around waiting to eat the remaining fingers. The immediate, apocalyptic threat was neutralised.
And, more selfishly... Satoru was free.
With Sukuna gone, maybe the dreams would quiet. Not stop — they had existed long before Yuji Itadori swallowed a finger — but perhaps without the live current of Sukuna's presence amplifying them, they would recede into something manageable. Something he could almost ignore.
All that was left for him to do was to find and contain the rest of the fingers, then go back to being unburdened by the past.
Something in his chest caved in at the thought. He pressed the back of his head against the tile wall, stared at the ceiling and waited for it to pass.
Was this what he had come to? Justifying the death of a kid for his own benefit?
Across the room, Shoko pulled the tarp back from Yuji’s chest, preparing her instruments for the autopsy.
"So, this is Sukuna's vessel," Shoko said. Her gaze had gone to the jagged, bloodless hole in the centre of the boy's chest — tracing it with the particular focus she reserved for things she hadn't seen before. She picked up a scalpel. "I can open him up, yeah?"
"Go ahead," Satoru said.
She wasn't looking at Itadori Yuji. She was looking at a one-of-a-kind specimen. He understood the necessity of that distance for her.
But what was his excuse?
He had built his entire teaching career on the principle that his students were people first and sorcerers second — that the system's habit of treating them as disposable was the thing he was supposed to be fighting against.
And yet, for the last week, he had looked straight past Yuji Itadori. He had been tracking Sukuna. Waiting for Sukuna.
When was the last time he had looked at Yuji and seen him? The kid had deserved better than that.
Are you actually mourning him? Or are you grieving the fact that Sukuna took everything with him?
A sudden, sickening jolt of revulsion twisted in his gut. Satoru squeezed his eyes shut beneath his blindfold, the self-disgust so sharp he couldn't breathe around it. What kind of monster—
It lasted less than a heartbeat.
A flicker at the very edge of his perception — cursed energy so distinct and so recognisable it hit him somewhere below conscious thought, there and then immediately gone, compressed back down into something that almost passed for human.
Satoru went very still.
On the table, Yuji sat up.
Satoru was fairly certain he had stopped breathing. Beside him, he could hear Ijichi making a sound that hadn't quite decided what it wanted to be yet. The fluorescent lights hummed as Yuji blinked at the ceiling.
Shoko spun around. Satoru had known her since they were fifteen years old, and he could count on one hand the number of times he had seen her face do what it was doing right now.
The sheer, ridiculous absurdity of it cracked something open in Satoru's chest. All that accumulated weight, the grief, the self-loathing, the phantom ache—it all desperately needed somewhere to go.
What came out was laughter that echoed off the morgue tiles in a way some would consider inappropriate.
Ijichi made a sound that was difficult to categorise, and Satoru glanced over at him. The man had gone the specific shade of pale that suggested his entire understanding of mortality had just been shaken.
Yuji blinked against the harsh fluorescent lights, looking up at the woman standing by him, holding a scalpel. He scratched the back of his head, completely nonplussed.
"Uh... this is kind of embarrassing," Yuji said calmly to Shoko. "But who are you?"
Shoko placed the scalpel on the tray and turned on her heel, walking away without a word.
Satoru pushed off the wall and stepped up to the table. Up close, Yuji looked exactly like himself — bright-eyed, slightly confused, entirely untroubled by the fact that he had been dead twenty minutes ago.
"Welcome back, Yuji," Satoru said. The warmth in his voice surprised even him.
Shoko reappeared with a gown and dropped it on the table beside Yuji, who pulled it over his head.
"Thanks, Sensei!" Yuji said with a bright smile.
Satoru hadn't noticed how much his chest had been hurting until it stopped.
They left Yuji sitting on the autopsy table, eating a stolen cup of pudding while Ijichi tried not to fuss. The night air was cool as Satoru walked, his long strides shortened to match Shoko’s slower pace as they crossed the courtyard.
"Leave him dead on the official record," Satoru said softly, breaking the silence.
Shoko didn’t miss a beat. "You're hiding him."
"It’s for the best," Satoru replied, his gaze fixed ahead. "The higher-ups wanted him gone, and as far as they’re concerned, they got what they wanted. If he stays dead on paper, they won't throw anything else at him. It gives him time."
"To get stronger?" she guessed.
"Exactly." Satoru’s mouth curved into a dangerous smile “It will be one hell of a surprise when he goes back.”
"Are you going to tell Megumi and Kugisaki?"
Satoru’s smile vanished. He looked down at the pavement.
"No," he said, the word sitting heavy between them. "It's for the best. That way they can't accidentally tip anyone off."
It was the tactical move, but not a kind one — it meant leaving Megumi and Nobara to grieve someone who was very much alive.
"Right," Shoko said smoothly. "So, where exactly does one hide a dead teenager?"
"My apartment, " Satoru said, shrugging. "Just for a day or two, until I can clear out one of the underground training rooms and set it up for him."
The rhythmic scuff of Shoko’s shoes on the pavement cut out. Satoru drifted three more paces before the absence of her presence at his shoulder finally registered. He paused and turned back.
She was giving him a look.
"What?" Satoru asked, raising an eyebrow.
“You’ve been strange as of late.”
Satoru let out an airy laugh, waving a hand. "It's a strange time. Unprecedented Special Grades popping up, assassination plots, my students temporarily dying... It takes a toll on a guy."
"Satoru."
She didn't raise her voice, but the lack of amusement in it made him stop.
"Is something going on with you concerning Sukuna?"
His heart stuttered. Then he caught himself — if Shoko actually knew, she wouldn't be asking like this. She was casting a net.
He opened his mouth, crafted answer already sitting on his tongue.
"If you're going to lie to me," Shoko cut in, her voice hard, "it's better if you just don't say anything at all."
The lie died in his throat.
Satoru studied her. She was good at hiding it, but he could see she was hurt. She was looking at him like he was drifting away.
Don't shut me out, too.
A wave of exhaustion washed over him. He trusted Shoko more than anyone — she wouldn't judge him, he knew that. But he still couldn't bring himself to tell her.
Not yet. Not when he had hardly figured anything out.
"I'm just... working through a puzzle," Satoru said, his voice stripped of its usual performance. "And when I have all the pieces, you'll be the first one I show the picture to. Deal?"
Shoko studied him for a moment before her shoulders relaxed a fraction.
"Fine," Shoko said, her tone returning to its usual dry cadence. "But you better not leave me a mess to clean up after.."
Satoru grinned, and that was that.
"You are asking me to be rational. That is something that I know I cannot do. Believe me, I wish I could just wish away my feelings, but I can't."
Satoru took a slow sip of his hot chocolate, staring blankly at the screen with dry eyes.
Too real.
Satoru didn’t often get the chance to indulge himself like this, but he desperately needed it after the day he had.
He buried himself under a mountain of plush blankets in his bed, wearing a ridiculously oversized sweatshirt as he nursed a mug of hot chocolate that contained significantly more marshmallows than actual liquid. He had told Yuji to make himself at home and retreated to his bedroom to decompress.
On the massive screen mounted opposite his bed, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was playing on low volume.
One of his favourite movies (for better or worse) to take his mind off things, and yet despite his best attempt, he couldn't fully focus. He couldn’t fully relax either. His mind kept turning the day over, looking for the angle that made it make sense.
He was relieved that Yuji had come back to life, but underneath the relief was a cold, creeping unease.
When Yuji had been dead on that table, the Six Eyes had seen nothing. No trace of Sukuna's cursed energy. No dormant soul waiting in the wings. Sukuna had managed to completely mask his presence, effectively fooling the greatest ocular jujutsu in history.
Then there was the other issue.
Satoru stared into his mug, watching the marshmallows melt.
Earlier, he had thought the events were too well orchestrated to be done by the higher-ups. So what if there was a third party?
It had felt like a reach when he considered it before, but now… What were the chances Yuji would happen to encounter a previously undetected special grade, leading to the consumption of yet another finger? Once is a coincidence, but twice?
Maybe he was overthinking it, but it was hard to ignore the fact that Satoru had conveniently been lured away to Ise Bay to deal with a curse that shouldn't have been there at the same time.
The whole thing made his skin crawl. He felt like a piece on a chessboard, being moved by someone whose endgame he couldn't yet read.
Did this hypothetical orchestrator also predict Sukuna's actions? Or was he as much of a wildcard to them as he was to—
Satoru froze, mug pausing halfway to his mouth.
One second, Satoru could feel the bright, steady hum of Yuji's cursed energy out in the living room. The next second, it vanished and in its place was a presence he had not felt in that way since the rooftop.
Sukuna.
For a man who possessed the ability to teleport instantly, Satoru's reaction was embarrassingly human. He practically scrambled out of the bed, the blankets tangling around his legs as he shoved them aside, his bare feet hitting the hardwood floor with a heavy thud. He hurried out of the bedroom and down the dark hallway, his pulse hammering a frantic rhythm in his throat.
He rounded the corner into the open-plan kitchen and stopped dead.
The main lights were off, the room illuminated only by the refrigerator.
Standing in front of it, bathed in the pale light, was Yuji — except it wasn't.
Sukuna was holding a carton of milk, inspecting the label with disinterest.
He slowly shifted his gaze to Satoru — bare feet, oversized sweatshirt — and smirked.
"Three point four seconds," Sukuna drawled. He tossed the milk carton back onto the shelf and let the fridge door swing shut, plunging the kitchen into shadows. "There’s a lot I could have done in that window."