i love being bisexual, eating hot chip, and lying 🫶
ᨳ♡₊➳꒰ rules ꒱
₊⊹. i'm only comfortable with writing sfw content and character x reader, specifically crack and fluff!
₊⊹. since i'm currently hyper fixated on jjk, that's the only thing i'm really into writing rn lmao 😭🙏
₊⊹. requests for headcanons and one-shots are open!
ᨳ♡₊➳꒰ my works ꒱
₊⊹. Minimum Wage, Maximum Suffering
₊⊹. Jujutsu Kaisen x Reader
━ "You hate your job. The pay is bad, your manager is worse, and customers are somehow both entitled and clueless. Just as you finish contemplating whether unpaid breaks are a human rights violation, weird new people keep showing up to the café. They all seem to know each other. Sometimes they talk in cryptic phrases. What the hell is this domain and why do they want to expand it? One time, a man with stitches on his forehead walked in, made prolonged eye contact with you, and then left without ordering anything. You’re pretty sure he was a serial killer. Another time, the one with white hair and sunglasses indoors mentioned a "higher mission", and you’re 90% sure this is how cult documentaries start. One of your regulars only speaks in weird food-related phrases. You assume he has some kind of medical condition, but no one explains anything to you. But you are not about to ask questions, because ignorance is bliss and also job security. And unfortunately, they are all weird and they seem very interested in coming back."
₊⊹. Small Talk, Big Damage
₊⊹. Choso x Reader
━ "You're an artist, a recluse, and a freshly heartbroken wreck whose idea of human contact is apologizing to your Amazon delivery guy. Your anxiety is so aggressive it could qualify for its own horror movie. And then your neighbor moves in. He doesn't get people. You don't get people. Somehow, you get each other. You didn't mean to talk to him. You didn't mean to care. But the more you both fumble through shared silences and botched small talk, the harder it is to pretend you're not watching each other heal, inch by awkward inch."
₊⊹. Gently
₊⊹. Nanami x Reader
₊⊹. Set in the Minimum Wage, Maximum Suffering universe.
₊⊹. Love Track
₊⊹. Choso x Reader
₊⊹. Set in the Minimum Wage, Maximum Suffering universe.
₊⊹. Natural Timing
₊⊹. Choso x Reader
₊⊹. Clueless
₊⊹. Choso x Reader
₊⊹. Masquerade
₊⊹. Choso x Reader
₊⊹. Perfect Fit
₊⊹. Choso x Reader
₊⊹. Headcanons
━ how they react to you patting their head
━ how they react to you randomly throwing yourself on the floor and yelling "I CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE!"
i have arrived two business days late to choso week with this drawing of him baking a cherry pie for the chef theme 🥧🍒
traditional art really humbles you btw there are tons of mistakes because unlike digital art, traditional art doesn't let you hit ctrl + z when you accidentally commit crimes 😭 but honestly i still had a lot of fun drawing this one!!
i also finally made a twitter account (devilish_cherry) where i'll be posting the rest of my choso week art if anyone wants to follow along! 🖤
@devilish-cherry HIHIHIHI I hope this isn't too annoying, and if it is, I'll happily delete this. But I mayhaps got a little obsessed with your Minimum Wage, Maximum Suffering series and uh. Listen the creative creature is forcing me to make fan art and I am abiding very happily.
shiu gave them a cigarette as a tip —who knew they don't accept cigarettes as cash anymore? /j— and yknow I think MC deserves to ruin their lungs just this once after what happened in CH 11 (peak). OSHA violation Nanami, and the rest was history
"i hope this isn't too annoying" YOU JUST FED ME A FIVE COURSE MEAL??? THIS IS INSANELY COOL ARE YOU KIDDING ME 😭
i am so serious when i say i feel INCREDIBLY honored like a whole little animation for MWMS is so special and i keep rewatching it like "wow, someone really made art inspired by my silly little series??"
this is SO well done and so funny, thank you for taking the time to make this! i’m seriously so honored!! 🥹🖤
"You hate your job. The pay is bad, your manager is worse, and customers are somehow both entitled and clueless. Just as you finish contemplating whether unpaid breaks are a human rights violation, weird new people keep showing up to the café. They all seem to know each other. Sometimes they talk in cryptic phrases. What the hell is this domain and why do they want to expand it? One time, a man with stitches on his forehead walked in, made prolonged eye contact with you, and then left without ordering anything. You’re pretty sure he was a serial killer. Another time, the one with white hair and sunglasses indoors mentioned a "higher mission", and you’re 90% sure this is how cult documentaries start. One of your regulars only speaks in weird food-related phrases. You assume he has some kind of medical condition, but no one explains anything to you. But you are not about to ask questions, because ignorance is bliss and also job security. And unfortunately, they are all weird and they seem very interested in coming back."
ᨳ♡₊➳ a/n: hi everyone!! so fun fact: this chapter was posted at 4 am on wednesday… HOWEVER… i haven't slept yet, so it is still tuesday in my heart. going forward, i'm planning to update mwms every tuesday! and my choso x reader fic (small talk, big damage) will be updated on saturdays 🫶 thank you all so much for the love on the previous chapter, it really does mean the world to me and motivates me more than you know!! 🥹🖤
also i will never get tired of writing characters interacting who barely (or never) spoke in canon. i just love throwing them in a room together and seeing what happens. it's like playing with dolls lmao hope you all enjoyed this chapter!! what other characters would you guys be interested in seeing interact with eachother?
The café looked brand new.
This was, objectively speaking, a massive red flag.
When you'd locked up last night, the place had been a disaster zone. The counter was shattered. There was a hole in the wall big enough to drive a small sedan through. Every visible surface was coated in a suspicious black residue. The pastry case was completely destroyed and the storage room looked like a bomb had gone off inside a Costco warehouse. The kind of damage that would make an insurance adjuster openly weep and then deny your claim.
You had gone home, stared at the ceiling for three hours while your brain replayed the image of a coffee monster with tamper legs trying to eat you. Eventually, you passed out facedown on your bed like a person who had been emotionally body slammed by the universe.
You did not sleep well. You kept seeing faint, wiggling shapes in the corners of your room that definitely hadn't been there before. The kind of things you desperately wanted to write off as a trick of the light.
They were not a trick of the light. You knew this now. Everything was terrible.
And yet.
When you arrived at the café this morning, key in hand, already mentally composing your resignation letter, you found that the front door was already unlocked.
Inside, the café was immaculate.
The counter was new. Not just repaired, but replaced entirely. It was now a gleaming hardwood with a dark walnut finish, catching the morning light with a soft matte sheen that the old counter had never achieved in its miserable existence.
The pastry display case was new too: tempered glass, internally lit, with elegant script labels where the prices used to be. The sedan sized hole in the wall? Gone. Plastered, painted, and blended flawlessly like it was never there.
The floor had been retiled. The chairs had been reupholstered. The janky, flickering overhead light was replaced by a soft, warm pendant lamp that made the entire café look like it belonged in a home décor magazine instead of wedged between a laundromat and a bookstore that might be a front for money laundering.
You just stood in the doorway, your bag hanging limply from your hand, mouth hanging open. You were trying to mathematically reconcile the gleaming utopia in front of you with the warzone you had left behind twelve hours prior.
And then you saw the espresso machine.
It sat on the new counter like a throne. Massive. Chrome. Polished to a mirror sheen that you could see your own bewildered reflection in. It was easily three times the size of the old one. A hulking monument to Italian engineering and someone's deeply irresponsible spending habits.
Gold lettering was etched across the front: La Monarchia Suprema Edizione Limitata.
Right below that, in smaller text: One of Seven in the World.
It had a built-in touchscreen. A full color LED display. What appeared to be a barometric pressure gauge. There was a dial labeled "EXTRACTION PHILOSOPHY" with settings ranging from "Balanced" to "Aggressive" to "Transcendent"
You opened a small compartment on the side labeled "BEAN VAULT," only to discover a humidity controlled chamber, containing exactly one bag of beans that cost more than your rent.
The steam wand was gold plated.
There was a cup warmer – fine, normal. But also a second cup warmer labeled "RESERVE" a third one labeled "EMERGENCY"
The touchscreen's home screen displayed the current weather, a motivational quote reading "Today's espresso is tomorrow's masterpiece", and, bafflingly, a menu option labeled "GAMES"
You stared at the machine.
The machine stared back, its LED screen cycling through a soft aurora of colors like it was breathing.
"What," you whispered.
The café door exploded open.
Not literally. But it was flung wide open with the energy of a man who had never entered a room at a socially acceptable volume in his entire life.
Satoru Gojo stood in the doorway, arms spread wide, white hair catching the morning light like he was posing for an album cover. His sunglasses sat perched on his nose, and his grin was incredibly wide.
"GOOD MORNING, MY FAVORITE BARISTA!" he announced at a decibel level that practically violated the Geneva Conventions. "DID YOU MISS ME?"
You checked the time. 7:00 AM. The café had been open for fourteen seconds.
"Gojo," you said, your voice entirely devoid of life. "What did you do?"
Gojo strode in with the confidence of a man who had just solved world hunger and was waiting for applause. He gestured grandly at the café, like a real estate agent showing off a property he had way too much emotional investment in.
"I fixed it!" he declared. "You're welcome!"
You opened your mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. The words slowly formed. "You… renovated the entire café. Overnight."
"Yep!"
"The counter. The floor. The walls. The –" You gestured helplessly at the espresso machine, which was now autonomously playing a gentle piano melody from its built-in speakers because apparently it had those. "Everything."
Gojo pulled out one of the newly reupholstered chairs, spun it, and sat backward with lazy grace. "I know some guys."
"You know some guys," you repeated.
"Very efficient guys. Money talks, barista. And I," he said, tapping his sunglasses with one finger, "speak fluent money."
You looked at the god tier espresso machine again. Then at the pendant lighting. Then at the fact that the bathrooms had shiny new fixtures. Then back at Gojo.
And something happened.
Something unexpected. Something deeply uncomfortable and entirely foreign to the ecosystem of your relationship with this man.
You felt… grateful.
Genuinely, sincerely grateful. Your workplace had been destroyed by a literal monster, and this ridiculous, sunglasses wearing, punch card losing agent of chaos had apparently spent a fortune making it better than it had ever been. Without being asked. Without expecting anything in return. Just because he could.
Maybe, you thought, as a warm, unfamiliar sensation bloomed in your chest, you had misjudged Satoru Gojo. Maybe, beneath the showboating and the noise and the relentless campaign to make your life marginally more insane, there was a genuinely decent –
"Also," Gojo added, leaning forward with a grin that radiated pure, concentrated menace, "now that you can see cursed energy, I can finally show you cool stuff without pretending I'm just being weird!"
The warm feeling evaporated so fast it left freezer burn.
"No," you said.
"Yes," Gojo countered.
"Absolutely not."
"Too late!" Gojo was already on his feet, practically vibrating with the energy of a golden retriever who had just been told the word "walk."
"Wait," you said, because you could already feel that this was going to be too much.
Gojo paused, milking the moment. "You ready?"
"I will never be ready for anything you do."
He pulled the sunglasses off.
The eyes underneath were the bluest things you had ever seen in your life. Not blue like the sky. Not blue like the ocean. Blue like the center of a flame. Like neon. They practically glowed in the dim light, vivid and sharp, with an intensity that made you feel like you were being read at a molecular level.
"Six Eyes," Gojo said, framing his face with both hands like a beauty influencer. "Pretty cool, right?"
You stared.
The eyes stared back.
"I can see everything," Gojo continued, tapping the side of his head with one finger. "Cursed energy, flow, technique structure, the works. It's like HD infrared vision but better. And it makes me incredibly, devastatingly handsome."
"Those are two different claims."
"Both true." He grinned, putting the sunglasses back on. "I keep them covered because of the sensory overload. Also, dramatic effect."
"Is that why you wear that blindfold sometimes?"
"Partly. Also it makes my hair look better."
You took a long, centering breath. "Okay. So. You have magic eyes. Great. Can you please not –"
But Gojo was already demonstrating.
He held up an open palm and the air above it compressed. You could see the cursed energy warping around his fingers, drawing inward, collapsing into a ball of vibrating blue light. The tables nearby trembled. Your apron fluttered. A stack of napkins slid three inches to the left.
"This," Gojo announced like a professor delivering a TED Talk to an audience of one very tired barista, "is Blue. It's a technique from my inherited ability, Limitless. Basically, I create a vacuum in space and everything gets pulled toward it. Like a black hole, but cuter."
"Please do not create a black hole inside my newly renovated café."
Gojo dismissed the Blue with a flick of his wrist. The pressure vanished. The napkins settled. Your sanity, however, did not.
"And this–" He switched hands. A red glow materialized, pulsing outward, and you felt it immediately: a wave of force, like standing in front of a giant invisible fan. Your hair blew back. A chair scooted across the floor. The pastry display case rattled. "–is Red. Opposite of Blue. Instead of pulling, it pushes."
"You are pushing my will to live."
"And if you combine them–" He brought both hands together, fingers interlocking, and something purple flickered between his palms. "–you get Purple. Which is basically an imaginary mass that erases things."
"Stop."
Gojo cackled, dismissing all of it. "Man, it's so much more fun when you can actually see it. Before, I'd just be standing here waving my hands like a lunatic and you'd look at me like I needed professional help."
"I still think you need professional help."
Beaming, Gojo flopped into a chair, throwing his long legs over the new counter and crossing them at the ankles. "But wait, there's more."
"No."
"So, you know my Infinity?"
"Your what."
"Infinity." He held up a finger. "Try to touch my hand."
Against every single survival instinct that had been honed by months of dealing with this man, you reached out and pressed a finger toward his outstretched palm.
Your finger stopped. About two inches from his skin. It just… stopped. It felt like pressing against a soft, elastic invisible wall. The harder you pushed, the more resistance you met, without ever making contact.
"That's Infinity," Gojo said, clearly savoring your baffled expression. "Nothing touches me. Ever. The space between us just keeps dividing. Infinite fractions. You'll never reach me. Basically, I'm untouchable." He paused for dramatic effect, then winked. "In every sense of the word."
You withdrew your hand. "That explains so much about your personality."
"Rude."
"You are literally, physically incapable of being touched. No wonder you're like this."
Gojo gasped, hand over his heart. "Like what?"
"Like this," you said, gesturing broadly at his entire existence.
Gojo pouted for exactly two seconds before his attention span redirected itself. "Oh! Almost forgot. The espresso machine."
You turned back toward La Monarchia Suprema Edizione Limitata, which had finished its piano melody and was now displaying "READY TO SERVE" in four languages.
"It's top of the line," Gojo said, clearly proud. "Italian. Handcrafted. One of seven in the world."
"I saw."
"It has forty seven extraction settings."
"Nobody needs forty seven extraction settings."
"It has a milk texturing algorithm."
"A what?"
"The steam wand learns your technique and adjusts accordingly."
You pinched the bridge of your nose. "You bought me a machine that judges my milk skills."
"It also has a built in water filtration system with six stages of purification, a self cleaning cycle that runs every four hours, and – this is the best part–" He leaned forward conspiratorially. "A bean profiling suite that analyzes the origin, roast level, and moisture content of every bean you load and recommends an extraction profile."
"Gojo, I work at a café that was, until yesterday, haunted by an espresso demon. I don't need a machine that psychoanalyzes beans."
Gojo waved a dismissive hand. "Trust me, you'll love it. Oh, also–" He pointed at the touchscreen. "It's got games."
You squinted at the screen. "Why does an espresso machine have games?"
"Why wouldn't it?"
"Because it's an espresso machine."
"Everything should have games. This is a hill I will die on." He reached over and tapped the screen, navigating through menus with the casual familiarity of someone who had already spent an embarrassing amount of time exploring this machine. "Look. Tetris. Snake. Minesweeper. And – oh, this one's great – it has a latte art simulator where you can practice your pour techniques digitally before–"
"Nobody is going to play games on the espresso machine."
As if summoned by the universe's deeply spiteful sense of comedic timing, the back door swung open and Greg the Manager walked in.
Greg the Manager, who had fled the café yesterday at the speed of sound and had not been seen since. Greg the Manager, who had presumably spent the last twenty four hours in a state of blissful ignorance somewhere far, far away from anything resembling responsibility.
He walked in, smoothie in hand and stopped.
He looked at the renovated café. He looked at the new counter. He looked at the espresso machine, which was twice the size of his torso and currently displaying a rotating 3D model of a coffee bean on its LED screen.
"Whoa," Greg said. "Sick."
He didn't ask where it came from. He didn't ask who paid for it. He didn't ask about the supernatural horror that had destroyed the café, the previous hole in the wall, or the literal demon. He just walked up to the espresso machine, tapped "GAMES," found Candy Crush, sat on a stool, and started playing.
The man had ascended to a level of managerial negligence that bordered on performance art.
Gojo watched Greg with something between admiration and disbelief. "Your boss is incredible."
"My boss is a liability."
"He's like a cat. Just doing whatever he wants, completely detached from reality. Respect."
Greg, already deep into a round of Candy Crush on the espresso machine, pumped his fist. "Level five already, baby!"
You turned to Gojo. "You understand that he's never going to stop playing that?"
Gojo shrugged. "I mean, the games were mostly there for me. I figured I'd kill time when I visit. But sure, Greg can have a turn."
"It's not about turns. He is never going to make coffee with that machine. He's going to play Candy Crush on it for the rest of his natural life."
Gojo considered this. "That's kind of beautiful, actually."
"It is not beautiful. It is a workplace tragedy."
The morning dragged by. Gojo had apparently decided that today was the perfect day to loiter and not, as you had naïvely hoped, a quick drop in. He commandeered the largest table, ordered three consecutive Death By Sugars (which the new machine produced with a precision and consistency that was, admittedly, impressive), and proceeded to spend the next two hours using you as a captive audience for his jujutsu parlor tricks.
He made a pencil float using Blue.
He blew a stack of napkins across the room using Red.
He activated Infinity around his coffee cup to demonstrate that it was, in fact, impossible to take it away from him, even though you weren't trying to.
He explained, at length, the mechanics of his Limitless technique using increasingly unhinged analogies. "Think of it like… okay, you know when you try to get to the end of a YouTube video but there's always another ad? That's Infinity. But for punches."
"Please stop comparing cosmic power to ad revenue."
"It's a good analogy!"
"It's the worst analogy I've ever heard."
"Fine. How about this: imagine you're walking toward a pizza, but every time you take a step, the pizza moves half the remaining distance away, so you never actually reach the pizza–"
"I understand the concept. I just want you to stop explaining it."
Gojo leaned back, lacing his fingers behind his head. "You know, most people are way more impressed when I explain this stuff."
"Most people haven't been terrorized by you for months."
"Terrorized is a strong word. I prefer 'enriched.'"
You were aggressively wiping down a totally clean counter just to have a physical outlet for your rage when the bell chimed.
The man walking in paused, scanning the renovated space like an inspector mentally tallying building code violations.
Hiromi Higuruma.
You recognized him immediately. The black suit, sunflower lapel pin, briefcase, and the expression of a man who had been personally wronged by the concept of free time. He looked exactly the same as the last time he'd come in, right down to the haunted eyes of someone who had stared into the abyss of the legal system and discovered that the abyss had very poor representation.
He took in the new counter, the new lighting, the obscenely expensive espresso machine where Greg was currently celebrating his Candy Crush high score with a passionate fist pump.
His eyes landed briefly on Beanie, who stood in his usual corner with black residue still on him. Beanie's stitched smile remained unchanged. His glossy eyes stared forward. He had not moved since yesterday's incident, and you were starting to suspect he didn't actually move unless something required punching.
Higuruma's gaze lingered on Beanie for two full seconds, then looked away with the calm of a man entering data into evidence.
"The renovations are new," he observed, approaching the counter.
"Yesterday," you confirmed. "Long story."
Higuruma nodded, as if "long story" was a perfectly acceptable legal brief. "The previous visit, this place had the structural integrity of a condemned building. This is an improvement."
"Thanks. I think."
"It wasn't a compliment. It was an observation of the minimum standard being met."
You officially decided you liked this man.
"Espresso?" you offered.
"Please."
You turned to the new machine, which Greg had reluctantly surrendered control of after you'd threatened to unplug it. The screen chirped "Welcome, Barista!" and presented you with a menu of options so extensive it looked like a doctoral thesis. You skipped past "EXTRACTION PHILOSOPHY," past "BEAN PROFILE ANALYSIS," past something called "EMOTIONAL TEMPERATURE CALIBRATION" (which you refused to investigate), and found the button for a standard espresso.
The machine purred to life. Not the dying animal shriek of the old machine. An actual purr. Smooth and faintly luxurious, like a sports car idling in a parking garage. It extracted the shot with military precision, forming a textbook golden brown crema.
You placed it in front of Higuruma. He examined it with the clinical scrutiny, then took a sip.
His eyebrows rose. Just barely. A millimeter of grudging approval.
"This is significantly better than last time."
"New machine."
Higuruma glanced at La Monarchia Suprema Edizione Limitata, whose LED screen was currently displaying a screensaver of animated coffee beans falling like snowflakes. "I can tell. That machine costs more than my car."
"It costs more than my life."
"Most things do, given the wages in this industry."
You blinked. "Was that a joke?"
"An observation."
Before you could decide whether to laugh or cry, Gojo materialized. One second he was lounging twenty feet away. Then the next, he was leaning against the counter, grinning with the intensity of a man who had just discovered a new person to bother.
"Hello there," Gojo said, voice dripping with performative friendliness. "I don't think we've met."
Higuruma looked at Gojo. Then at his sunglasses. Then at the sheer, overwhelming quantity of cursed energy that was rolling off the man in waves.
You watched Higuruma process this. His expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes shifted. A rapid, calculated assessment that you recognized from his first visit. The man was evaluating Gojo quickly with the detached precision of someone who had already identified six weaknesses and was deciding which one to exploit first.
"Hiromi Higuruma," he said, extending a hand. "Defense attorney."
Gojo shook it with both hands enthusiastically. "Satoru Gojo! Jujutsu sorcerer, teacher, and the strongest person alive!"
Higuruma did not react to this claim. He just held Gojo's gaze with the unblinking composure of a lawyer used to professional liars.
"Strongest person alive," Higuruma repeated, completely neutral.
"Mmhm."
"Bold claim."
"Bold fact." Gojo leaned against the counter, arms folded. "I haven't seen you around the jujutsu circuit! You new?"
"Relatively." Higuruma picked up his espresso again, utterly unbothered. "I awakened my technique recently. Self-taught from there."
Gojo's eyebrows rose above his sunglasses. "Self-taught? No formal training?"
"I reverse engineered barrier techniques from my own innate ability," Higuruma said, as casually as someone describing their commute.
There was a beat of silence in which Gojo's grin shifted from its default "annoying" setting to something sharper. More interested. The playful veneer stayed, but underneath it, you could sense the currents of Gojo's attention zeroing in on Higuruma like a spotlight finding its mark.
"Oh," Gojo said softly, and for the first time since you'd known him, he sounded impressed without trying to be loud about it. "Oh, I like you."
Higuruma sipped his espresso. "I'm flattered."
"What's your technique?"
"It's called Judgeman." Higuruma set his cup down with a measured click. "I can manifest a shikigami linked to a domain that functions as a courtroom. The defendant is put on trial. If found guilty, Judgeman confiscates their cursed energy. Along with that, I have a cursed tool connected to my innate technique – a gavel that can shapeshift."
Gojo went very still. "You can take away people's cursed energy. Through a trial."
"Through a legal proceeding, yes."
"In a domain."
"A courtroom domain."
"With a literal judge."
"Judgeman, technically."
Gojo clapped his hands together so loudly that Greg flinched in the back and nearly dropped the espresso machine's stylus. "That is the coolest thing I have ever heard."
Higuruma blinked, caught off guard. "It is?"
"A domain expansion that's a COURTROOM? With a TRIAL? And a VERDICT?" Gojo was pacing now, running his hands through his hair like he just been told his birthday was happening twice this year. "That's not just a cursed technique, that's an entire judicial system! You weaponized the law! That's genius! That's insane! Can you sue a curse? Have you sued a curse?"
"That's not how it works."
"But hypothetically–"
"Hypothetically, I'm not answering that."
Gojo wheeled on you, jabbing a finger in Higuruma's direction. "Barista. This man is the most interesting person who has ever entered this café."
You opened your mouth.
"Besides me, obviously," Gojo added.
"Obviously," you said, dead inside.
Higuruma, to your surprise, did not shut Gojo down. He didn't excuse himself. He didn't sigh and leave the way anyone else would have. Instead, he sat back on his stool, crossed one leg over the other, and regarded Gojo with the faintly amused detachment of a man watching a particularly energetic animal at a zoo.
"You're very excitable," Higuruma observed.
Gojo nodded earnestly. "It's part of my charm."
"That's one word for it."
Gojo pulled up a stool and sat down uninvited, leaning on the counter like they were old drinking buddies. "So, defense attorney. What kind of cases?"
"Criminal defense. Wrongful accusations, mostly."
"Like, innocent people?"
"The ones I can help, yes."
"And when they're guilty?"
Higuruma's expression didn't change, but something in the air around him cooled. A weighted pause that carried the specific gravity of someone who had thought about this question far more than was healthy. "Everyone deserves a fair trial."
Gojo tilted his head, clearly scanning and cataloguing the lawyer in a way that went beyond casual observation.
"You know," Gojo said lightly, "I know a kid who would really get along with you. Goes by Yuji. Thinks a lot about what's fair and what isn't."
Higuruma's brow twitched. "Itadori?"
Gojo blinked. "You know him?"
"We've met. Briefly." Higuruma picked up his espresso, gazed into its dwindling surface with quiet intensity. "He's a good kid."
The café went quiet with mutual recognition of two guys caring about the same kid.
Then Gojo grinned, and the moment passed. "So anyway, show me the gavel."
Higuruma raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"
"The gavel! You said you have a cursed tool, right? A gavel that shapeshifts? Come on, you can't just drop that and not show me."
Higuruma considered this, his expression unreadable. Then, in one fluid motion, a gavel materialized in his right hand. Just appeared, solid and real, from nothing.
"Can it turn into a hammer?"
Higuruma rotated his wrist. The gavel elongated, the head broadening, the handle extending until it resembled a war hammer from a medieval painting. Heavy. Brutal. Way too large for the interior of a café.
"Oh my god," Gojo breathed, sounding like a child on Christmas morning.
"Can it do a hook?"
The shape shifted again – curving, tapering, the head bending into a crescent that caught the light.
"A staff?"
The weapon stretched vertically, the head flattening into a capped end, the handle tripling in length until Higuruma was holding a tall polearm.
Gojo clapped like a seal. "This is the greatest thing I've ever seen in this café."
You interjected, because someone had to before the café sustained property damage for the second time in two days. "Can you both please not brandish weapons inside my workplace?"
Higuruma dismissed the gavel. It vanished as cleanly as it had appeared.
Gojo, undeterred, was already leaning forward. "Okay, but have you considered – and hear me out – joining the faculty at Jujutsu High?"
Higuruma stared at him. "I'm a lawyer."
"You'd be a great teacher!"
"I have a practice."
"You'd have students!"
"I have clients."
"Students are basically clients, except the crimes are stupider and no one pays you." Gojo was radiating enthusiasm with the force of a small sun. "Think about it. You've got a domain, a shapeshifting weapon, and the driest sense of humor I've encountered since Nanami. You'd fit right in."
Higuruma took a slow, measured sip of his espresso, letting the silence stretch before responding. "I'll think about it."
Gojo gasped. "Wait, really?"
"No."
"Damn."
Higuruma set down his empty cup with a definitive clink. "Another espresso, please."
You reached for the machine, grateful for something to do that wasn't watching the strongest sorcerer alive fanboy over a lawyer with a magic hammer.
The morning drifted into afternoon. Gojo and Higuruma, against all logical prediction, continued talking.
Despite yourself, you almost smiled. There was something about Higuruma that was similar to Nanami. The composed exhaustion, the quiet competence, the aura of a man who had been ground down by a system that didn't care about him. But different in a way you couldn't quite articulate. Nanami was rigid. Efficient. Nanami looked at the world and saw things that needed fixing. Higuruma looked at the world and saw things that were already broken and was trying to decide if the glue was even worth the effort.
Also, Nanami would have left the café the instant Gojo sat down. Higuruma, inexplicably, seemed to find Gojo interesting. Not in the "I enjoy your company" way, but in the "you are a legal anomaly and I am compelled to observe" way.
Gojo, apparently delighted to have found someone who could match his conversational whiplash without storming off, ramped up. He told stories about teaching, about students, about the time he'd hidden a hundred cursed objects around the school grounds and told the first-years it was a scavenger hunt (it was not a scavenger hunt; it was a survival exercise, and several students did not speak to him for two weeks afterward).
Higuruma listened to each story with attentive patience. Occasionally, he'd make a comment so dry it could have dehydrated a swimming pool. ("That sounds actionable." "In what jurisdiction is that not a crime?" "I'm documenting this for potential future litigation.")
At one point, Greg emerged from behind the espresso machine – he had found a way to play Candy Crush, make a latte, and eat a bagel simultaneously, which you suspected was the first genuinely impressive thing he'd ever accomplished – and wandered over to the table.
"Yo," Greg said, looking at Higuruma. "Suit guy. You a regular now?"
Higuruma glanced at Greg. Then at Greg's GRINDSET shirt. Then at the bagel crumbs on Greg's collar. "Unclear."
"Cool, cool." Greg nodded. Then, with the conversational elegance of a man who had never once read a room, "Hey, do you guys know if that espresso machine has Minecraft? I found Candy Crush and Tetris but I feel like there's more."
Gojo perked up. "It might. Check under 'EXTENDED ENTERTAINMENT SUITE.'"
Greg's eyes widened. He pivoted and speed walked back to the machine with more urgency than he had ever displayed in the entire time you'd known him.
You watched him go. Then you turned to Gojo. "You have cursed this café even more with that machine."
"I've blessed it."
"Greg is never going to work again."
"Was he working before?"
Fair point.
Higuruma checked his watch – a clean, understated piece that probably cost a reasonable amount of money, unlike everything else currently in this café – and stood, straightening his tie.
"I have a meeting," he said. "Thank you for the espresso. It was far superior to the first time."
"Come back anytime," you offered, and meant it, which was unusual. Most customers you endured. Higuruma you could tolerate.
He paused at the door, briefcase in hand, and turned back. His gaze swept the café one last time over the gleaming new counter, the absurd espresso machine, Greg in the corner openly gaming on the professional grade appliance, Gojo sprawled across two chairs looking pleased with himself, Beanie standing sentinel in his corner, and Muffin Guy communing with his pastry.
"This place is profoundly abnormal," Higuruma said.
"Yeah," you agreed. "It is."
The faintest, briefest flicker of a smile crossed his face. So brief you might have imagined it. And then he was gone, the door swinging shut behind him with a soft chime.
Gojo stretched, yawned theatrically, and stood. "I should head out too. Got a meeting as well. Well, not a meeting. More like an obligation I'm going to be late to on purpose because it annoys the higher-ups."
"You're a professional."
"The most professional." He grabbed his sunglasses, spun them once around his finger, and slid them on with the smooth, practiced motion of a man who had done this in front of a mirror ten thousand times. "Take care of my espresso machine, alright? She's delicate."
"She has an emergency cup warmer and a barometric pressure gauge. She's the least delicate thing in this building."
Gojo grinned. "Takes one to know one."
He made it three steps toward the door before stopping, turning back, his voice dropping all theatrics. "Hey. You good?"
You blinked. "What?"
"Yesterday was a lot. The curse, the whole seeing-things-now deal. That's heavy stuff. You doing okay?"
For a moment, behind the grin, behind the relentless, exhausting showmanship, there was something steady that looked a lot like genuine concern. Offered casually enough that you could take it or leave it without either of you having to acknowledge it happened.
You exhaled. "I'm managing."
Gojo nodded once, the grin returning like it had never left. "Good. Because I'm bringing Megumi next time, and he's even worse at socializing than Choso."
"Who is Megumi?"
"My son! Kind of. Legally complicated. Emotionally debatable. Long story."
"Everything with you people is a long story."
Gojo laughed, bright and sharp, and threw the door open with a flourish. "See you next time, my favorite barista!"
The bell chimed. The door swung shut. The café settled into the kind of quiet that only existed after Gojo left a room. A sudden, startling silence, like the moment after a firework explodes and the world is still ringing.
Greg, from behind the espresso machine, raised a fist in triumph. "Found Minecraft."
You closed your eyes.
Beanie, in his corner, tilted his head three degrees to the left. Muffin Guy sat in his chair. The muffin sat on his plate. The two of them continued their eternal, unspoken communion.
You grabbed a rag and started wiping down the counter, because there was always a counter to wipe, and Greg was sure as hell not going to do it.
"You're an artist, a recluse, and a freshly heartbroken wreck whose idea of human contact is apologizing to your Amazon delivery guy. Your anxiety is so aggressive it could qualify for its own horror movie. And then your neighbor moves in. He doesn't get people. You don't get people. Somehow, you get each other. You didn't mean to talk to him. You didn't mean to care. But the more you both fumble through shared silences and botched small talk, the harder it is to pretend you're not watching each other heal, inch by awkward inch."
꒰ chapter 1 ꒱ ₊⊹. ꒰ chapter 2 ꒱ ₊⊹. ꒰ chapter 4 ꒱
ᨳ♡₊➳ a/n: soooo about that extremely long wait… yeah. my bad 😭 thank you for being patient while i fought my brain for basic functionality. BUT we're so back now and i'm aiming to update this every saturday going forward!!
Three days after the dinner, you have been staring at the same half finished panel for forty minutes.
Your protagonist stands at a rain streaked window, one hand on the glass, expression caught between melancholy and constipation. You cannot for the life of you figure out which emotion you were going for when you started this sketch three days ago. The matcha balanced on your knee has gone cold. A skin of green film floats across the surface like a tiny lily pad of personal failure.
Luna is asleep on your chair. Her body splayed out, one paw draped over the corner in a claim of territorial dominance that would make a landlord weep with envy. You've tried to move her twice. She growled both times. A low, guttural vibration that translated roughly to Touch me again and I will remove your hand at the wrist.
So you sit on the floor.
The panel stares back.
Outside, actual rain taps the window in a rhythm that sounds like impatient fingers drumming a desk. Which would be poetic if you weren't also surrounded by a fortress of empty chip bags and one sock you've been too spiritually defeated to retrieve from under the desk.
Your phone buzzes against the floor.
You glance at it.
Mom.
A text that says: "Have you been eating? Your brother says you haven't called." You don't know which brother, but it's probably the one who disguises extortion as concern. Last month it was three thousand for "car insurance." Before that, he needed "just a small loan, I'll pay you back, promise." The promise was as empty as your fridge.
You turn the phone face down.
Knock knock.
You jolt. The matcha sloshes over the rim and hits your knee, warm and vaguely punishing.
You know that knock. You've heard it exactly twice before and both times it rearranged your entire nervous system. Polite. Tentative. But committed. Like someone who read a manual on how to knock on doors and is executing it with full sincerity.
You set the mug down on the floor – a coaster would require a level of domestic organization that your current life trajectory does not support – and wipe your palms on your joggers. You creep toward the door with the stealth of Navy SEAL disarming a bomb.
Luna lifts her head, judges your cowardice with those flat amber eyes, and goes right back to sleep.
Useless.
Absolutely useless.
You could be actively getting murdered and she would simply observe from a comfortable vantage point and then eat your remains on schedule.
You press your eye to the peephole.
Choso.
He stands with his hands at his sides, expression arranged in that permanent neutral, like he's posing for a passport photo he didn't consent to. His hair is in those two messy pigtails again, the black mark stark and deliberate across the bridge of his nose, violet shadows beneath his eyes darker at the inner corners, like someone smudged ink there and forgot to wipe it clean. He's holding – you squint, your brain stalling out – a single sock.
Not a pair. One sock. White. Strawberry pattern.
You open the door before your brain can stop you, which is a first. Normally there's at least a forty five second deliberation period, a pros and cons list, a brief existential crisis, and a moment where you practice five different greetings in the mirror before choosing the wrong one anyway. But curiosity, apparently, outranks anxiety today.
"Hi," you say. Your voice comes out scraped and hollow. A sound that sounds like it was excavated from a cave. You haven't spoken to a human in three days. Luna doesn't count. Luna is a deity who tolerates your existence on a conditional basis.
Choso looks at you. Down at the sock. Back at you. "I found this in the washing machine."
You stare at the sock. The strawberry pattern is kind of cute, actually. Pink berries with little green stems on a white cotton background. Definitely not yours. Your sock aesthetic ranges strictly from "void black" to "void black but with a hole in the heel."
"It's not mine," you say.
"I know." He pauses. "I was asking if it's normal to find other people's clothing in the machines."
You blink. "Oh, um… Yeah. That happens sometimes. People forget stuff."
He processes this with the gravity of a man receiving classified intelligence, like this information requires deeper analysis than the surface suggests. He nods once, slow and solemn. "I see. What do I do with it?"
"You can just… leave it on top of the machine. Whoever it belongs to will probably come back for it."
Another nod. He folds the sock, meticulously, like it's a letter he's preparing for postage and holds it with both hands against his chest. "Thank you."
"Sure."
A pause. The hallway stretches out in both directions, wallpaper peeling in one corner, overhead light flickering with the dedication of a light that wants to die but hasn't been given permission. You can hear the plumbing hum through the walls, and somewhere below, the distant scrape of a door sliding open and shut.
Choso turns to leave. Then he stops and turns back. His shoulders shift, squaring slightly, the way someone's body moves when they're about to say something they've been preparing. "Also. The detergent."
"What about it?"
"How much."
"How much… detergent?"
"Yes." He pauses, and you watch his thumb press into the crease of his opposite palm. A tiny, self soothing motion that's almost invisible but screams overthinking to someone who does the exact same thing. "The instructions are in very small print."
You open your mouth. Close it. Open it again. "There's usually a line on the cap. You fill it to the line."
He stares at you like you've just handed him the Rosetta Stone. His face does the closest thing to surprise you've seen on it – his eyes widen, just slightly, the equivalent of anyone else's jaw dropping. "There's a line."
"Yeah."
"On the cap."
"Yeah."
He stares down at his hands, reevaluating his entire laundry philosophy from the ground up. He gives a single decisive nod. "I appreciate it."
And then he leaves. Just like that. No small talk. No lingering. No "So, how are you?" or "Great weather, huh?" or any of the other conversational landmines that normal people scatter across doorstep encounters. He turns, walks three steps to his own door, and disappears inside with the soft click of a lock engaging.
You stand in your doorway for approximately eleven seconds, barefoot and bewildered, before Luna meows from inside – a sharp, offended meow aimed at the hallway draft currently violating her nap.
You close the door.
"He asked me about detergent," you tell her.
She yawns so wide you can count every fang. A perfect little murder mouth.
"I think I'm his… laundry helpline?"
She does not dignify this with a response. She curls into a tighter ball, one ear flicking backward, and goes right back to sleep.
You slide down the door. Sit on the floor. Hold your cold matcha. Think about the fact that a man just knocked on your door with a strawberry sock and a detergent question which is probably the most meaningful social transaction you've conducted in days.
The bar is underground. The bar is at the Earth's core.
You take a sip of the matcha. It's awful. Cold and grainy in a way that suggests you didn't whisk it enough, just dumped powder and water together then stirred with a fork like a barbarian. But you drink it anyway, because waste is a luxury you can't afford, and because the act of swallowing something is slightly better than the act of doing nothing.
Your phone buzzes again. Mom. "Don't forget to eat."
You don't respond.
─ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──── ♡ ─── ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──
The next day, he knocks again.
This time, it's about the trash.
"There are six categories," he says, posted in your doorway like a man delivering a field report to command. Feet shoulder width apart. Hands clasped at his front. Posture so straight it's practically editorial. "But the schedule posted in the hallway doesn't match the one the landlord gave me."
You lean against the doorframe, still in your sleep hoodie – the black one, oversized, the hem fraying where Luna's claws have been at it – sporting a pillow crease across your face like a battle scar. It is almost noon and this is the earliest you've interacted with another member of your species in months.
You should be panicking.
You are panicking.
Your palms are damp and your heartbeat is doing that fluttery thing it does when you're perceived, but there's something about the way he asks – earnest, methodical, not expecting you to be charming or witty or anything other than exactly what you are – that makes the panic feel more like a low buzz than a full alarm. Like the anxiety is still there, but it's sitting down instead of standing.
"The posted one is outdated," you say. "The landlord's version is the right one. But also, Mrs. Tanaka on the second floor will yell at you if you put your plastics out on the wrong day, so. Just… follow the landlord's paper and avoid Mrs. Tanaka before 9 A.M."
Choso absorbs this. "Mrs. Tanaka."
"Short. Glasses. Floral apron. She has a vendetta against anyone who doesn't rinse their PET bottles. I once saw her leave a passive-aggressive note on someone's door with a diagram."
"A diagram."
"Of how to properly rinse a bottle. Labeled. Color coded."
He files this away with visible concentration. You can almost see the folder being created: BUILDING RESIDENTS – TANAKA – THREAT LEVEL: MODERATE. "Understood."
"Also, you have to write your apartment number on the bags."
His brow furrows. "Why?"
"Because Mrs. Tanaka checks."
He considers this. His head tilts. Left, just slightly, the way a bird does when it's trying to understand something outside its usual frame of reference. You've started noticing he does this for confusion, right for deliberation, and you don't know when you began tracking the tilt directions of your neighbor's skull but here you are, apparently. "She has authority over the trash?"
"She has self-appointed authority over everything. She once told me my slippers were too loud."
Something shifts in his expression. Not a smile. A loosening – the tiniest crack in the marble of his composure, like the concept of a self appointed trash overlord is both confusing and genuinely interesting to him. One corner of his mouth twitches, just barely, and then settles back into neutral.
"Thank you," he says again. Both hands relaxed at his sides this time. A slight incline of his head, almost formal, like you've performed a service of genuine value.
"No problem," you mumble, and then you're alone in your doorway again, wondering how a conversation about garbage disposal protocol just became the most normal you've felt in weeks.
You close the door.
You look at Luna, who is sitting on the kitchen counter, which she is not allowed on, licking her paw with the dignity of a queen on a stolen throne.
"He's going to get absolutely destroyed by Mrs. Tanaka," you whisper.
Luna blinks.
"I should've warned him more."
She licks the other paw, slow and deliberate.
"He doesn't stand a chance."
─ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──── ♡ ─── ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──
Day three. He asks about the hot water.
"It makes a sound," he says. He's standing slightly further back from your door today. Maybe six inches more than yesterday as if he's running A/B tests on the proper distance for a recurring doorstep consultation. His hands are behind his back, posture straight, chin level.
"What kind of sound?"
"A clicking. Then a hum. Then a second clicking."
"That's the boiler. It does that. It's old."
He nods, absorbing. "It's not dangerous?"
"No. I mean. Probably not. It's been doing it since I moved in and I haven't exploded yet."
He looks at you with an expression that suggests he's genuinely, materially relieved that you haven't exploded. "Good."
"Yeah. If it starts making a new sound, though, maybe worry then. But the click-hum-click is just… its personality."
He tilts his head. Right. Deliberation. "The boiler has a personality."
"Everything in this building has a personality. The elevator groans. The third floor window whistles. The hot water boiler clicks. We're all just coexisting with haunted infrastructure."
A pause. Long. His dark eyes study you. Not your face, exactly, but the space around it, the air you occupy, like he's reading something written in a font only he can see.
"You're funny," he says.
The words land without warning. You short circuit. You stand there, barefoot, in a stained sleep shirt, and process them like a computer loading a file format it doesn't recognize. Nobody has called you funny in – you can't produce a date. Your ex used to say "too much" and "kind of exhausting" and "can you just be normal for five minutes?" which occupies a different dictionary entirely.
"I'm not," you weakly manage. "I'm just... anxious and it comes out weird."
Choso considers this with what appears to be genuine philosophical weight. "Being weird is not the opposite of being funny."
And then he leaves. Three steps. Door click.
You stand in the hallway and replay that sentence until it wears grooves into your brain. You go inside.
Being weird is not the opposite of being funny.
You write it on a Post-it note and stick it to the edge of your monitor, next to a faded sticker of Kuromi and a smudged reminder to take your meds.
─ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──── ♡ ─── ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──
Day four. The intercom.
He arrives at the door with his hands slightly raised, like he's approaching something volatile. "The panel by the door. If I press this button, who hears it?"
You lean out and squint at the intercom box mounted on the hallway wall next to his apartment. Yellowed plastic, cracked casing, speaker grille furred with years of accumulated dust. "Nobody. It's been broken since 2019."
"Then why is it there?"
"Because this building runs on denial and hope."
Head tilt. Right. "I see. Does the landlord know?"
"She knows everything. She just… picks what to care about. The intercom didn't make the cut."
He nods. Looks at the broken intercom one more time, then back at you. "What did make the cut?"
"Rent. And making sure no one has pets above ten kilograms."
"How much does Luna weigh?"
"Four point six. She's safe."
His gaze drops, just briefly, toward the gap in your door, as if Luna might be lurking there eavesdropping. Which, knowing Luna, isn't impossible.
"Good," he says.
Three steps. Door click.
─ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──── ♡ ─── ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──
Day five. Rice.
"My rice is dry."
You blink sleep out of your eyes. You napped until 10:30, which is early for you, and the knock pulled you out of a dream about a cat café that was actually a courtroom. You process his words through the fog. "Like… emotionally?"
Nothing. Deadpan. Total deadpan. His face is a wall. A wall with pigtails. "In texture."
"Oh." You scratch the back of your neck. Your sleep shirt has a stain on the collar that might be soy sauce from two nights ago or might be a more existential kind of mark. "Did you rinse it first?"
"Rinse it."
"Yeah. You... You wash the rice before you cook it. In the pot or a bowl – you put it in water and kind of…" You mime the motion with your hand, a circular swishing gesture that looks, you realize too late, incredibly stupid performed in a doorway at noon for an audience of one. "Swish it around until the water runs clear."
He tracks your wrist's rotation like he's memorizing the precise arc, storing the angle for later retrieval.
"I did not rinse the rice," he says, finally.
"That would explain the dryness."
His gaze drops to his own hands, palms up, as if looking for evidence of his failure there. "How many times do you swish?"
"Until the water's clear. Maybe three or four times. You'll see it go from cloudy to – like, you know, clear. Transparent."
Another nod, deeper this time, more committed, like you've imparted a sacred culinary truth passed down through generations. His fingers curl and uncurl at his sides – that same small self-soothing motion. "Thank you."
"You're welcome," you say, and close the door, and stand there with your forehead pressed against the wood, cool against your skin, and whisper to Luna, "He didn't rinse his rice."
She's sitting on top of your Cinnamoroll plushie like it's a throne and she's the deposed monarch of a very small, very pastel kingdom. She blinks once. Judgment incarnate.
"I know," you say. "I know."
─ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──── ♡ ─── ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──
Day six. Quiet.
He doesn't knock. You notice at 11:02 A.M. You don't think about it. You are not counting. You just happen to have a working clock in your peripheral vision and an idle brain that tracks patterns the way other people's brains track sports statistics.
At 3:17, his door opens and shuts. Footsteps cross the hallway. The stairwell door whines on its hinges and bangs closed.
He returns forty minutes later. You know this because the stairwell door whined again and his lock turned. You were right there at your desk with your drawing app open, your stylus in your hand, and your tablet angled coincidentally in the direction of the shared wall. You were working. Definitely working.
That evening, you draw for twenty minutes straight without stopping. It's not good. A half formed sketch of a rooftop at night, the skyline suggested in jagged strokes, a figure leaning against a railing with their back to the viewer. You don't know why you drew it. It just came out. Your hand moved and your brain followed. For twenty minutes the static was quieter than usual.
You save the file. Name it "roof_01.psd." Stare at it. Close the app.
It's the first completed thing you've saved without immediately deleting in over a month.
─ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──── ♡ ─── ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──
Here's the thing nobody tells you about routines: they sneak up on you.
They don't announce themselves. They don't send a calendar invite. They just move in, quietly, like a cat choosing a lap. And by the time you notice, they're already settled and purring and you can't get up without disturbing them.
You don't notice it at first. You don't notice that by day seven, you've started waking up slightly earlier. Not on purpose. Not because you set an alarm or had some grand epiphany about reclaiming your mornings. Just – your body starts anticipating the knock. Like an internal timer you didn't set and can't turn off. Like the world's most low-stakes Pavlovian conditioning.
You catch yourself checking the door around 11 A.M., ears half-tuned to the hallway while you pretend to work, stylus hovering over a panel you haven't touched, heart doing that stupid thing where it beats slightly faster for no reason other than the possibility of a sound.
On day seven, you brush your teeth before noon. This has not happened in three weeks. Not because you expected to see anyone. Obviously. You just… did it. The toothbrush was right there. And your mouth tasted like a biohazard. And the mint toothpaste – cheap, too sweet, that fake peppermint sting – felt almost alive against your gums, a small sharp sensation in a body that's been running on numb for ages.
On day seven, you also, without thinking about it, threw out two of the empty Monster cans from your desk. Not all of them. Not the whole graveyard. Just two. Baby steps. Microscopic steps. The kind of steps that would be invisible to anyone who isn't you, but feel seismic in the geography of your depression.
You carried them to the trash bag and dropped them in and the aluminum clink-clink was the most productive sound you'd made in weeks.
Luna notices, because Luna notices everything. She watches from the desk. Head tracking. Ears forward. Tail still. The expression of a scientist witnessing an anomaly.
"Don't look at me like that," you mutter. "I'm not healing. I'm just… tidying."
She licks her paw. Sure, her face says. Sure you are.
─ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──── ♡ ─── ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──
Day eight. He knocks at 11:03.
You open the door with a speed that horrifies you in retrospect but feels totally justified in the moment.
Choso is standing there. No sock. Hands clasped in front of his body, head tilted left. Confusion mode.
"The bathroom faucet," he begins.
"Does it drip?" you ask, before he finishes.
His eyes go slightly wider, which on his face is the equivalent of a gasp. "Yes. How did you know?"
"Because mine does the same thing. You have to turn the handle past the point where it feels like it's closed. Like, give it an extra quarter turn to the right."
He solemnly nods. "An extra quarter turn."
"Yeah. The washers are old. Everything in this building is old. The pipes, the boiler, the wallpaper, the intercom, the elevator. This building is basically a retirement home for infrastructure."
His head tilts. Right. "You know the building very well."
"I've been here a while." Your hoodie rustles against the doorframe as you shrug. "And... I don't go outside much, so I've had a lot of time to notice things."
He looks at you. Not through you or past you or at the approximate region of your face the way most people do during small talk. He looks at you the way a person looks at a sentence they're reading for the second time because they caught a meaning they missed on the first pass.
"That's useful," he says.
Not sad. Not pitying. Not "Oh, you should get out more!" or "Have you tried going for walks?" Just: useful. Like your knowledge of broken faucets and temperamental boilers has value. Like the hours you've spent memorizing the sounds of this building weren't wasted, just stored.
"Thanks," you say, and it comes out quieter than you intend.
He nods and doesn't turn immediately. Just stands there for an extra beat, like there's something else at the edge of his tongue, waiting. He usually turns by now, three steps, door click, end of transaction. His fingers press together, separate, press together again.
"The curry," he says.
"What about it?"
"From the dinner. You said you liked it."
"I did. It was good." You have no idea where this is going. Your nervous system is on standby.
"I'm making it again tomorrow. There will be…" A pause. He calculates. You can see him actually counting portions behind his eyes. "Extra."
Oh.
Oh.
Is he – did he just –
"If you want some," he adds, and the words come out slightly faster than his usual cadence, like he pushed them out before they could retreat. His gaze drops to a spot on the floor between your feet, and his thumb presses into his palm.
You should say something normal. You should say "Oh, that's nice of you" or "Sure, sounds great" or literally any combination of words that a functioning person would assemble.
"I – yeah. That would be. I mean. If it's not – you don't have to. But. Yeah. I'd like that."
His shoulders drop, a release of tension you didn't know he was holding. He nods. "Tomorrow. Evening."
"Okay."
"Okay."
Three steps. Door click.
You close your door. Lean against it. Slide down until you're sitting on the floor, knees to your chest, heart going at a pace that makes zero sense for a conversation about leftover curry.
Luna appears. She climbs onto your knees and sits there. Her paws tucked, tail wrapped around her body, amber eyes locked on you with the scrutiny of a being who sees everything and is visibly unimpressed by all of it.
"He's making me curry," you whisper.
She blinks.
"I think we're… friends? Is that what this is? I don't remember how friendship works. I've been off the grid so long my social skills have the half life of a mayfly."
She headbutts your chin, hard enough to hurt, and purrs.
"Okay," you tell her. "Okay."
─ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──── ♡ ─── ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──
Day nine. The day before the curry.
You don't know why it feels monumental. It's just food. It's just a neighbor sharing leftovers. People do this all the time. Normal, functional, non-hermit people bring each other meals and it's not a big deal. It's civilization. It's community. It's a completely unremarkable act of human kindness.
So why have you spent the last three hours staring at your closet like it owes you an explanation?
It's not even a closet, really. It's a metal bar wedged between the wall and a stack of manga boxes, sagging in the middle under the weight of hoodies you bought during various emotional crises. You're standing in front of it, Luna watching from the bed, and you're holding up two hoodies like they're evening gowns.
"This one," you say, lifting the black one. "Or this one." The dark grey one.
Luna yawns.
"You're right. They're basically the same hoodie in different fonts."
You drop both and sit on the mattress. My Melody leans against your pillow. Pochacco watches from the nightstand with his eternal, unblinking optimism. The Keroppi keychain you won at a crane game three years ago hangs from the lamp, swinging slightly whenever you move. The bed smells like your shampoo and laundry that should have been washed two days ago and there's the particular warmth of Luna's body from her morning sprawl.
You pick up your phone. No new messages. Your mom's text still sits unanswered, the notification badge an accusation in miniature.
Your editor's latest email – subject line: "Checking in 💕" – waits in your inbox, unread, because you know the body will be kind and patient and that patience will make you feel worse, not better. You haven't delivered. You haven't produced. She's being generous with a person who has given her nothing to be generous about.
Below that, a notification from a social app you haven't opened in weeks. You tap it before your brain can stop you.
The first thing you see is a photo. Someone you followed in college. A girl named Hana who always had perfect nails and never seemed to have a bad day. She posted a picture of herself and her boyfriend in Kyoto. They're standing under cherry blossoms, his arm around her waist, her head tilted against his shoulder. Both smiling.
You close the app.
You set the phone facedown on the bed.
The jealousy comes in whole. Not jealousy of Hana specifically. Not even of the boyfriend. Just of the ease of it. The way some people seem to move through connection like it's breathing, natural and automatic, while you sit here in your apartment surrounded by stuffed animals and dirty clothes, trying to remember the last time someone even just touched your shoulder without it being an accident.
Your ex used to rest his hand on the back of your neck when you sat together. A warm, steady pressure. You used to think it meant I've got you. Now you think it just meant I'm here until I'm not.
You press the heels of your hands into your eyes until you see spots. You will not cry over a social media post. You will not. You've already cried today. Once, at 6 A.M., over a Sanrio short where Cinnamoroll got lost and then found his friends again, which was objectively devastating and you stand by that.
Luna pads across the comforter and pushes her head against your elbow, insistent. You drop your hands. She's staring at you, ears forward, whiskers twitching, and there's something in her expression that isn't judgment for once. Something closer to: I'm here, you disaster, now pet me.
You pull her into your lap and press your face in her fur. She smells like clean cat and the tuna treats you gave her this morning. Her purr vibrates against your chest, low and steady, a frequency that has survived a hundred million years of evolution unchanged because it works.
"I'm fine," you tell her.
She doesn't buy it. She stays anyway.
─ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──── ♡ ─── ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──
Day ten. Curry day.
You wake up at 9 A.M.
You don't realize this is remarkable until you're already standing in the bathroom, staring at yourself in the mirror. The mirror you've been avoiding for weeks. The fluorescent light is merciless. It shows you everything: the circles under your eyes, purple-brown, layered deep like sediment. The dry patch on your cheek from forgetting moisturizer for the third week straight.
You look like someone who has been surviving, not living.
The thought doesn't crush you the way it would have two weeks ago. It just… sits there. An observation. A fact. Your reflection blinks back at you, and you think: I should drink water today. Not a revolutionary thought. Not a breakthrough. Just a thought your mind assembled on its own, without being bullied into it.
You brush your teeth. You wash your face. You put on moisturizer, the tube is almost empty, squeezed and rolled tight from the bottom. You put on the grey hoodie.
And then, because it's curry day and apparently that means something to you now, you do something you haven't done in a month.
You make your bed.
Not well. Not in any way that would satisfy a normal person with normal standards. You just pull the comforter up and arrange the plushies in a vaguely intentional way instead of leaving them strewn across the mattress like casualties. My Melody gets the pillow. Pochacco goes next to her. The Keroppi keychain stays on the lamp.
Luna, on the windowsill, watches you smooth the comforter with the expression of a predator selecting a landing zone.
"Don't," you warn her.
She's already calculating the trajectory.
─ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──── ♡ ─── ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ──
The knock comes at 5:14 P.M.
You've been ready since 4:30, which is humiliating, so you wait nine seconds before opening the door. Dignity. Manufactured dignity, but still.
Choso stands in the hallway holding a pot with both hands. A real, full-sized pot, lid on, steam escaping where the seal doesn't quite close. The smell reaches you first. Cumin, turmeric, the sweetness of coconut milk layered under simmered onions. It fills the hallway like a physical thing, pushing back the usual building smell of old wood and stale air.
The violet shadows over his eyes look softer in the hallway's warm light, or maybe you're just getting used to his face. His expression is neutral – of course it is – but he's gripping the pot handles with both hands, knuckles slightly pale, and his posture is stiffer than usual, shoulders pulled up half an inch.
He's nervous.
Choso – built like a final boss, face like a requiem, the kind of person who could probably end a bar fight just by making eye contact – is nervous about bringing you curry.
"Hi," you say.
"I made extra. For you."
"Thank you. It smells amazing."
His grip on the pot loosens, barely. "I rinsed the rice."
"Good."
"Four times."
"That's… very thorough."
"You said three or four. I chose four."
You press your lips together. Your cheeks hurt from the effort of not smiling too visibly. "Do you want to come in? You can set it down on the counter."
He hesitates. Just a flicker. A tightening of his fingers, a micro shift in his weight from one foot to the other. "If that's okay."
"Yeah. Just – ignore the mess. And the cat. And… everything, basically."
You step aside. He enters your apartment like someone crossing a threshold they're not sure they've earned access to. Careful and each step deliberate. He takes off his boots at the entrance without being asked, lining them up neatly against the wall, and pads in on socked feet.
Your apartment opens before him in all its chaotic glory. The laundry pile claiming the chair. The desk cluttered with snack wrappers, pen, and sticky notes covered in handwriting you can't read yourself. The plushies visible through the bedroom doorway, a pastel army occupying your mattress. The drawing tablet propped against the wall, screen dark, stylus abandoned next to a half empty glass of water you don't remember pouring.
It smells like you live here. Not bad, just lived in. Cat litter from the bathroom (clean, you made sure this morning). The lingering sweetness of those gummy candies you eat at 3 A.M. Your shampoo. The green tea candle on the windowsill with wax dripped down one side in frozen tracks.
Choso walks to the counter. He sets the pot down – centered and precise – then straightens.
He doesn't scan the apartment. Doesn't sweep his gaze over the mess with judgment or pity. He just stands in your kitchen like standing in your kitchen is a normal thing that people do. You are unreasonably grateful for this.
Luna, who has been observing from the top of the bookshelf like a furry surveillance drone, chooses this exact moment to make her entrance. She leaps down to the desk, then the chair, then the floor, and trots directly to Choso's feet with the confidence of a building inspector performing a routine check.
She sniffs his ankle. Circles him once. Sniffs the other ankle.
Choso goes very still. He looks down at her. She looks up at him.
"Hello," he says to the cat. With the exact same polite tone and cadence he uses to greet you.
Luna holds his gaze for three full seconds. Then she sits down, wraps her tail neatly around her paws, and blinks slowly.
You've read every cat behavior article on the internet between the hours of 2 and 5 A.M. during your worst nights. A slow blink means trust and comfort. It means I accept your presence.
Your cat just approved your neighbor faster than she's ever approved anyone. Including your ex, who she hissed at for the first three months.
"She likes you," you say, slightly stunned.
Choso looks at you. "How can you tell?"
"She blinked at you. Slowly. That's… cat for 'you're okay.'"
He looks back at Luna and studies her with the same serious focus he applies to everything. Then, very carefully, very deliberately, he slowly blinks back.
Luna purrs.
Your chest does something complicated that you are going to ignore with every fiber of your being.
"She purred," Choso says. The statement is neutral but his posture has changed. His shoulders lower, hands relaxed at his sides instead of clasped. Like receiving a cat's approval has tangibly reduced his stress levels.
"Yeah. That's… that's a big deal. She doesn't purr for just anyone."
He nods, looking at Luna one more time. Then at you. "I should go. The curry needs to be eaten while it's warm."
"Right. Yeah. Thank you. Seriously."
He walks to the door, steps into his boots then turns.
"Goodnight," he says. It is 5:22 P.M.
"Goodnight, Choso."
The door closes.
You stand in your kitchen with a pot of curry on the counter, a purring cat at your feet, and the warm, spiced smell of someone else's effort filling your apartment like a thing you'd forgotten existed.
You eat the curry sitting on the floor because your table is covered in manga volumes and emotional debris. Luna sits beside you, watching each bite travel from bowl to mouth with predatory focus. The rice is soft, individual grains holding their shape. The curry is rich and warm with chunks of potato that come apart on your tongue, carrots cut into uneven shapes that suggest someone who hasn't quite mastered knife skills but tried very hard anyway.
You eat all of it. Every grain of rice. Every chunk of potato. You run the edge of your spoon along the bowl's curve and scrape up the last of the sauce.
It's the first full meal you've finished in weeks.
After, you wash the bowl. And the pot. And, while you're at it, the other dishes in the sink that have been there since before the dinner at Choso's. The water runs warm over your knuckles. The dish soap smells like fake lemon, the kind of lemon that has never been within a hundred miles of an actual citrus tree. You scrub until the ceramic squeaks. You set everything on the drying rack and wipe the counter.
Your apartment is still a wreck. Laundry mountains. Plushie casualties. The sock on the ceiling fan, swaying gently in the draft from the cracked window. But the counter is clear. The sink is empty. The pot is clean and waiting to be returned.
You sit at your desk and open the drawing app. Luna hops onto the desk and settles beside the tablet.
Your hand moves. Not with confidence – it hasn't earned that back yet – but with willingness. A different thing. A lesser thing that might, given enough time and enough meals and enough knocks on a door, become more.
The stylus touches the screen. A line. Another. The lines become a shape. The shape becomes a figure. Tall, a slight slouch in the shoulders, two messy tufts of hair, both hands wrapped around a pot held at chest height.
You draw for forty five minutes. The longest session in over a month.
The sketch isn't finished. It's rough, proportions slightly off, the hands not quite right. But there's something in it. A warmth in the line weight, a tenderness in the way the figure holds the pot, like it matters. Like what's inside it matters.
You save the file. You don't delete it. You don't name it "Pain5.psd" or "trash.psd" or "why_bother_v2.psd."
You name it "curry.psd."
Luna is asleep on the desk, one paw stretched toward the tablet screen, claws retracted, the tip of her tail twitching. The building is quiet around you. The boiler's click-hum-click, the pipes settling, the soft creak of old wood adjusting to the cold. Through the wall, faintly, is the sound of water running. Choso, at his sink.
You close the app then push back from the desk. You carry Luna to bed, where she immediately claims the warm spot on the pillow and curls into a circle so perfect she looks drawn.
You lie down beside her. The plushies press against your back. Soft and overstuffed. My Melody's bow digs into your shoulder blade.
You don't check your phone. You don't open the social app. You don't scroll through other people's happiness and measure yours against it.
You just lie there, in your messy apartment, in your oversized hoodie, in your bed that you made this morning for the first time in a month. You listen to the rain start up outside the window. Luna's breathing slows into the even, shallow rhythm of a body that trusts its surroundings enough to sleep.
Tomorrow, you'll return the pot.
You'll knock on his door and stand there, hand it back, say "thank you" and mean it. Then retreat to your apartment and tell Luna about it. She won't care, but you'll tell her anyway, because that's what you do, and it's enough, for now, to have someone to tell.
You close your eyes and let the rain fill the spaces between your thoughts until there are no thoughts at all. Just the sound of water on glass and the fading warmth of curry in your chest.
You fall asleep before midnight for the first time in longer than you can remember.
ᨳ♡₊➳ a/n: also!!! Feitaan over on ao3 made fanart and it’s literally so cute i had to stare at it for 10 minutes straight. 🥹🖤
please support them!! link to their deviantart post here!
also ALSO i had to research japanese trash sorting rules for this chapter and it turns out taking out the trash is like a high stakes mission over there. there are so many rules and categories. i was stressed just reading about it.
thank you for being so patient and i hope you enjoyed this chapter!! 🖤
I remember reading Minimum Wage, Maximum Suffering on AO3 months ago and loving it. Ended up also finding and reading Small Talk, Big Damage too. Didn't realize both stories were by the same author until recently when I found your Tumblr, but I guess it makes sense because Choso's characterization is similar in both. Actually, I ended up loving him in MWMS so much that despite not even seeing all of season one, I decided to be him for Halloween.
You're the reason I'm this deep in Jujutsu Kaisen now.
PS: I was worried for a minute there that MWMS would be one of those stories where Choso's mentioned like, three times and then never again, so finding your Tumblr was nice, LOL.
the fact that you didn't even finish season one and still went as choso is killing me 😭 i love that so much, i'm incredibly honored to have contributed to your descent into jjk brainrot. 😌
also yeah choso in mwms was never in danger of disappearing, if anything he was in danger of taking over completely and turning it into "minimum wage, maximum choso screentime" which is why stbd exists lmao i had to contain my favoritism of him somehow 💀
thank you for reading BOTH fics and for this sweet message, it genuinely made me so happy!! 🖤
this is me gently tapping the glass and pointing at small talk, big damage 🥹 (ao3 link here!)
i don't talk about it enough but it's genuinely one of my favorite things i've written! though i am biased since it's a choso x reader and i'm feral about him + i love writing him sm.
new chapter very soon btw she deserves more love and i'm not above gently peer pressuring you 🫵
OMGGG MY DARLING DIVAAA YOURE FINALLY BACK AFTER A WHOLE ASS YEAR I MISSED U AND UR FIC SO MUCH BEEN A WHOLE YEAR YET I KEEP THIKING BOUT IT SAW AN UPDATE TODAY IN THE MIDDLE OF MY LEVTURE N ALMOST FUCKING SCREAMED OUTTA JOY PLIS DO NOT LEAVE AGAIN I BEG U I LOVE U (´°̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥ω°̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥｀)
"MY DARLING DIVA" oh i've peaked. i've reached my final form. thank you for loving my fic this much and thank you for sticking with me through my disappearance! 🖤 i'm actually emotional like that's real loyalty 🥹
dw i'm back and i am clinging to you all like glue 😼
its been so long!! i haven’t been online in so long, i miss you so much!! i miss your writings and your headcanons and GGGHRHRHRHRHAAA
i hope you’re taking care of yourself. i hope life is treating you good! stay safe cherry !!!!!
— your biggest fan
HELLO??? MY BIGGEST FAN HAS RETURNED??? i feel like i've just been blessed by a rare event 😭 i missed you too omg!!! thank you for always being so sweet to me, your messages literally make my day every single time. i hope you're doing well and taking care of yourself too! 🖤
"You hate your job. The pay is bad, your manager is worse, and customers are somehow both entitled and clueless. Just as you finish contemplating whether unpaid breaks are a human rights violation, weird new people keep showing up to the café. They all seem to know each other. Sometimes they talk in cryptic phrases. What the hell is this domain and why do they want to expand it? One time, a man with stitches on his forehead walked in, made prolonged eye contact with you, and then left without ordering anything. You’re pretty sure he was a serial killer. Another time, the one with white hair and sunglasses indoors mentioned a "higher mission", and you’re 90% sure this is how cult documentaries start. One of your regulars only speaks in weird food-related phrases. You assume he has some kind of medical condition, but no one explains anything to you. But you are not about to ask questions, because ignorance is bliss and also job security. And unfortunately, they are all weird and they seem very interested in coming back."
ᨳ♡₊➳ a/n: hi… hello… it’s me… returning from the trenches with an actual mwms update 😭 first of all, happy (very belated) birthday to minimum wage, maximum suffering!! she was born on 2/27/25 and i meant to update for it, i really did… but this chapter has been sitting in my drafts for months because there's some pretty major plot stuff happening, i was worried it wasn't funny enough, and my brain decided it had to be perfect or not exist at all. which led to me staring at it. overthinking it. and then staring some more. but we made it. we're here. she lives!! thank you all so, so much for your patience. i mean that genuinely. waiting from 7/12/25 to now is kind of insane and the fact that people are still here means everything to me 🥹🖤 please know i am never going to abandon mwms. this story is my baby and even if updates take a million years, i will always come back to it. also jjk season 3 being out has rewired my brain again so… we might be so back chat
thank you again for sticking with me. i hope this chapter was worth the wait!! 🖤
You should have called in sick.
Not because you were sick, but because every single cell in your body had developed some kind of sixth sense for disaster, and today, all of them were screaming.
It started small. The overhead light near the pastry case had been flickering since you arrived. Not the usual lazy, half-dead flicker it always did, but a rapid, aggressive strobe that made the display muffins look like they were vibrating at a frequency reserved for government experiments.
Muffin Guy, of course, did not seem disturbed. He sat in his usual corner, communing with his untouched pastry, completely unbothered by the fact that the café's lighting was staging a coup.
The air smelled wrong, too. Not the usual wrong. You'd grown accustomed to the baseline aroma of burnt espresso, industrial cleaning solution, and Greg's body spray (a scent he called "Urban Wolf," which smelled like neither wolves nor anything remotely urban). No, underneath all of that, something else was creeping in: a thick, sour, metallic tang, like pennies left in standing water. Like the inside of a battery.
You rubbed your nose. Chalked it up to the plumbing.
Greg the Manager had arrived twenty minutes late, holding a smoothie and wearing a shirt that said "GRINDSET" in all caps. He took one step inside, stopped, squinted at the flickering light, and said, "Huh. Vibes are off today."
Then he walked into the back and did not return.
Classic Greg.
The espresso machine had been making noises all morning. This, in itself, was not unusual – the thing sounded possessed on a good day. But today it had added new tracks to its repertoire. Low, guttural vibrations that you could feel through the soles of your shoes. Occasional high pitched whines that made the hair on your arms stand up. And once a deep, resonant thrum that rattled every cup on the drying rack and made the milk frother fall off the counter with a sharp clang.
You'd hit it with a wooden spoon. It went quiet for about three minutes, then resumed with renewed vigor, like you'd offended it.
"Okay," you muttered, jabbing the power button. Nothing happened. You jabbed it again, harder.
The machine responded with a noise that sounded disturbingly close to a growl. "Great. Love that. Very normal appliance behavior."
The only customer besides Muffin Guy was Suguru Geto, who had, true to his word, become a lingerer. He sat at the same table he'd claimed during his first visit, sipping green tea with the poised elegance of a man who believed the rest of the world existed solely for his amusement. His robes were immaculate. His posture was flawless. His expression was the kind of serene that made you want to throw something at him.
He'd been coming in every few days for the past couple of weeks, always ordering the same thing, always watching you with that quiet, analytical stare, like you were an ant farm he found mildly diverting. You didn't like him. You didn't trust him. But he tipped well and never caused a scene, which, by the current standards of this café, made him practically a model citizen.
Today, though, something about Geto was different. He kept glancing at the espresso machine. Not the casual, passing glances of a person who happened to notice a loud appliance. These were focused. Attentive. The corners of his lips kept twitching upward, like he was watching a show reach its climax.
It made your skin crawl.
"You're staring at my espresso machine," you said flatly from behind the counter.
Geto's eyes slid to you, slow and deliberate. "Am I?"
"You are."
He lifted his tea to his lips and took a measured sip. "It's been quite vocal today."
"It's always vocal. It's basically got a personality disorder at this point."
Geto set the cup down with a soft clink. His smile widened just a fraction. That same thin, insincere smile that made you feel like he was laughing at a joke only he understood.
"Personality," he repeated. "Yes. That's one word for it."
You didn't like the way he said that. You didn't like the way he was sitting there, calm and composed, while the espresso machine sounded like it was about to give birth to something unholy.
Beanie stood in the corner by the door, as always. Motionless. Enormous. Watching everything and nothing simultaneously through those glossy, dead eyed lenses.
And then the espresso machine stopped.
Not a gradual wind down. Not a sputter into silence. It just stopped. Mid-growl, mid-rattle, mid-everything. Like someone had hit pause on reality.
The sudden quiet was worse than the noise.
You stared at the machine. The machine stared back. Its power light blinked once and then went dark entirely.
"Finally," you breathed. "Thank god."
And then the counter cracked.
A single, sharp fissure split across the surface directly beneath the espresso machine, spreading outward like a vein. The wood groaned. The cups on the shelf above clinked against each other.
You took a step back.
The metallic smell surged. No longer subtle, no longer ignorable. It flooded your senses, coated the back of your throat.
Geto set his tea down.
He did not stand.
He just watched, fingers laced together, chin resting on his knuckles.
The espresso machine shuddered.
Then it cracked open.
Not like a machine breaking. Not a panel popping off or a pipe bursting. The metal warped outward from the center, peeling back like skin, and something black and wet and wrong pushed through the gap with a sound like tearing fabric soaked in oil. Thick, tar-like liquid oozed down the counter, pooling on the floor in streaks that moved against gravity, crawling upward along the walls in slow, deliberate tendrils.
But here's the thing.
You couldn't see what was making it happen. There was nothing there. Just the broken machine, the spreading dark liquid, and a pressure in the air so heavy it felt like the room had shrunk three sizes.
Your body, however, did not need to see it to know. Every nerve ending you possessed had collectively decided that whatever was happening was categorically, fundamentally bad, and that you should be anywhere else.
The lights went out. All of them. Every single one. The café plunged into a dim, grey half-light filtered through the dirty windows. The only illumination came from the faint green glow of the emergency exit sign above the back door and the pale light leaking through the clouds outside.
And then something invisible hit you.
The force slammed into your chest like a freight train. Your feet left the ground. Your back hit the pastry display case with a sickening crack of shattering glass, and you crumpled to the floor among broken shelving and scattered muffins, the wind driven completely out of your lungs.
Pain. Immediate, blinding, real. Your vision whited out at the edges. Glass bit into your palms as you tried to push yourself up. Your ribs ached in a way that suggested at least one of them had a strong opinion about what just happened.
And then –
Terror.
Not the normal kind. Not the "oh no, I'm going to be late for work" kind, or the "Greg just did something stupid" kind, or even the "a strange man with pigtails just tried to rob a bank for me" kind.
This was something primal. Something animal. The ancient horror of a creature that has suddenly realized it is prey.
Your heart hammered so hard it felt like it was trying to break out of your chest. Your vision blurred. Your hands shook. Every thought in your head condensed into a single, screaming imperative: run run run run run–
And then you saw it.
Like someone had ripped a film from your eyes. Like reality had been playing with a filter this entire time and someone had just switched it off. The world shifted. Or rather, your perception of it did, with a nauseating lurch that felt like stepping off a curb you didn't know was there.
The thing that had been living inside your espresso machine was hovering three feet above the counter.
It was enormous.
The shape of it defied easy description. A writhing, asymmetrical mass of dark, oily flesh that pulsed and contracted like a lung. It had too many mouths. They opened and closed across its surface in no discernible pattern, each one ringed with blunt, coffee stained teeth and leaking that same black, tar-like substance. Thick, segmented limbs. Six, eight, you couldn't count because they kept retracting and re-emerging. They jutted from its body at wrong angles, each ending in flat, circular pads that looked disturbingly like the bottom of an espresso tamper.
And at its center, embedded in the swollen flesh, was the remains of the espresso machine's portafilter, fused into the creature's body like a metallic heart.
Your brain, faced with information it had absolutely zero framework for processing, did the only reasonable thing. It stalled.
You knelt there on the floor, glass in your palms, blood on your fingers, staring at a monster made of coffee and malice, and your only coherent thought was: Nanami was right. They were all right. The espresso machine was literally, actually cursed.
The creature's mouths opened in unison and released a shriek. A high, vibrating frequency that shattered the remaining glass in the pastry case and sent a cascade of sugar packets flying off the counter.
You couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't do anything except kneel there and watch as the thing swiveled its bulk toward you with agonizing, predatory slowness.
Several of its mouths smiled.
This was it. This was how you died. Not in a blaze of glory, not saving a puppy from a burning building, not even doing something remotely dignified. You were going to be killed by your own workplace equipment that had somehow achieved sentience and decided to eat you. Your obituary was going to be the worst thing anyone had ever read.
Geto, still seated at his table, tilted his head. His expression hadn't changed. If anything, he looked mildly entertained, the way someone watches a nature documentary about a gazelle and a crocodile. He made no move to stand. No move to help. Just sat there, fingers laced, smile patient, like he was waiting for the credits to roll.
The creature lunged.
You squeezed your eyes shut.
THOOM.
The impact never came.
The sound that filled the café was deep. Not loud, exactly, but heavy.
You opened your eyes.
Beanie stood between you and the creature. He had moved faster than anything that large and that ridiculous looking had any right to move. He stood with one stubby arm extended, palm flat against the creature's bulk, holding it at bay with a force that made the air around his hand distort and ripple like heat off asphalt. The creature writhed against his grip, its many mouths gnashing and screeching, that oily black substance splattering across Beanie's costume in thick, hissing streaks.
Beanie did not flinch.
Beanie did not make a sound.
He just stood there, in his enormous, stained, nightmarish coffee bean costume, holding back a literal monster with one arm, his stitched-on smile still stretched wide and serene, those glossy hollow eyes still staring forward into nothing and everything.
You were going to need therapy. So much therapy. An amount of therapy that probably hadn't been invented yet.
The creature shrieked again and lashed out with several of its tamper tipped limbs, slamming them into Beanie's sides, his head, his torso. The impacts made dull, resonant thuds that sounded like someone hitting a punching bag filled with concrete. Beanie absorbed every single one without moving an inch.
Then Beanie pushed.
One motion. Short, decisive, impossibly powerful. The creature flew backward, crashing through the counter, through the wall behind it, and into the back room with a sound like a building collapsing. Bags of coffee grounds exploded. A shelf of syrups toppled.
Somewhere in the wreckage, you heard Greg scream, "WHAT THE–" followed by the unmistakable sound of the back door slamming as Greg achieved a new land-speed record for fleeing the premises.
Beanie followed the creature into the back room. The sounds that came next were violent and brief. Wet impacts, cracking, more shrieking that cut off abruptly in the middle.
Then silence.
A minute passed. Maybe two.
Beanie reemerged from the storage room, walking at his usual pace. Slow, deliberate, unhurried. His costume was splattered in black residue. One of his stubby arms was slightly bent at an angle that suggested it had been stressed beyond its intended range. But he was intact. Upright. Undamaged in any way that seemed to matter.
He returned to his usual spot by the door. Stood still. Resumed staring at nothing. Like it hadn't happened.
You were breathing so hard you could hear it echoing off the walls. Your hands were shaking. Your vision kept swimming in and out of focus, and the new layer of perception that had been violently stapled to your consciousness was still very much active, showing you things you desperately did not want to see. Faint, shimmering distortions in the air, dark residue clinging to surfaces like oil stains, a thin haze of something that pulsed and ebbed around Beanie's silhouette like a second skin.
And around Geto. A lot of it around Geto. Dense and coiled and wrong.
Geto stood. Finally. He straightened his robes with a precise, practiced motion, adjusted the gold garment draped over his shoulders, and walked – strolled, really, the bastard – toward the back room.
He didn't even glance at you. Just passed by like you were furniture.
You heard him enter the back. There was a pause. Then a soft sound. Something contracting, compressing. Like air being squeezed out of a balloon.
Geto reappeared a moment later, holding something between his thumb and forefinger. A small, round, black orb.
"Weak," he murmured to himself, examining the orb with the clinical detachment of a jeweler appraising a subpar gemstone. "But it had time to grow, I'll give it that. Years of negative emotion in one location. Not bad for a low-grade."
And then –
He put it in his mouth.
And swallowed.
You watched, from the floor, covered in glass and pastry debris and your own blood, as Suguru Geto swallowed a black orb that had previously been a monster that had lived inside your espresso machine.
His throat bobbed once. His expression pinched just briefly, a micro-flinch of disgust that passed almost too quickly to catch. Like someone who'd just taken a shot of something foul.
Then it was gone. And he was smiling again.
"Hm. Burnt," he said mildly, as if commenting on the flavor of a disappointing appetizer.
Your mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"What," you said.
Geto looked at you. Really looked at you, for what felt like the first time. His gaze was assessing, curious and something else. Something almost like surprise.
"Oh," he said, raising an eyebrow. "You can see now."
You stared at him.
"I didn't expect that," he admitted, almost to himself. Then he smiled. That slow, deliberate, deeply fake smile. "How unfortunate for you."
"What," you repeated, because your brain had not yet recovered enough processing power to generate any other word.
Geto tucked a strand of loose hair behind his ear, surveying the devastation of the café. The shattered counter, the broken display case, the black streaks on every surface, the gaping hole in the wall leading to the back room then he let out a small, satisfied sigh.
"Well. This has been mildly entertaining." His gaze flickered to Beanie, lingering for a moment with something that might have been grudging respect. Or annoyance. Hard to tell with him. "I suppose that thing earned its paycheck today."
You were still on the floor. You were still bleeding. The world was still doing that horrible new thing where you could see translucent, shimmering distortions in the air that you were certain had not been there yesterday.
You opened your mouth to say "what" a third time but then –
The café door slammed open.
"Hey, we brought – HOLY SHIT."
Yuji Itadori stood in the doorway, a plastic bag from a convenience store dangling from one hand, the other frozen midwave. His eyes swept the café. The wreckage, the black streaks, you on the floor, Geto standing calmly in the middle of it all like a man at a wine tasting. His face went through approximately nine emotions in two seconds, starting with shock and ending somewhere around existential horror.
Behind him, Choso went rigid. His brown eyes locked onto you – on the floor, in the glass, bleeding, and something in his expression shifted so fast it was like watching a switch flip. The perpetual, lowkey blankness of his face cracked wide open, replaced by something raw and sharp and dangerous.
He moved before Yuji could even finish processing the scene. Three long strides and he was at your side, dropping to a crouch, his hands hovering over you like he was afraid touching you might break something.
"Barista." His voice came out low. Strained. "Who did this to you."
It wasn't a question. It was a demand for a target.
"Nobody – I mean, the espresso machine – it –" You gestured vaguely at the destroyed counter, the hole in the wall, the general state of everything. Words were not cooperating. "It was a – there was a – Choso, what the fuck is happening?"
Choso's gaze snapped to Geto, who was still standing there, still smiling, still looking like a man who had never been inconvenienced by anything in his life.
"You." Choso's voice dropped a full register. "You were here."
Geto tilted his head, the motion almost birdlike. "I was."
"And you did nothing."
Geto's smile did not waver. "The mascot handled it. I simply… cleaned up."
Something pulsed in the air around Choso. It was subtle. You wouldn't have noticed it before. Before, when you couldn't see whatever the hell all this was. But now you could feel it: a pressure, heavy and warm, radiating from him in waves that made the atmosphere crackle.
"Choso," Yuji said carefully, setting the convenience store bag down with the gentle precision of someone trying very hard not to trigger a bomb. "Choso, hey, let's – let's take a breath, okay?"
Choso did not take a breath. Choso looked like he was calculating exactly how many steps it would take to reach Geto and how many of those steps he could eliminate by launching himself directly.
"Enough," you croaked, because your brain had finally rebooted past the Blue Screen of Death and landed on a single priority. You grabbed Choso's sleeve, the fabric of his white robe was rough under your cut fingers, and pulled. Hard. "Enough. Sit down. Nobody is killing anyone. I need someone to explain what the hell is going on."
Choso looked at you. Then at your bleeding hands gripping his sleeve. Something in his expression softened, just a fraction at the edges, and the pressure in the air eased.
"You are injured," he said quietly, as if this was the only thing in the room that mattered.
"I'm aware. I'll live. Sit."
He sat. Right there on the floor next to you, amidst the broken glass and coffee grounds and pastry shrapnel, folding his long legs beneath him like a man settling in for a very serious conversation.
Yuji, across the room, exhaled so hard his cheeks puffed out. He ran both hands through his pink hair, looked at the ceiling like he was appealing to a higher power, and then looked back down at you.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. So. Uh."
"Yuji."
"Yeah?"
"I saw a monster come out of my espresso machine. It was made of coffee and nightmares and it had teeth where teeth should not be. It tried to kill me. Beanie –" you pointed at Beanie, who was standing silently in his corner, still splattered in black residue, still somehow projecting an aura of total, unbothered calm "– punched it into a wall. And then that guy –" you pointed at Geto, who gave a small, mocking wave "– turned it into a marble and ate it. Like a snack."
Yuji's face crumpled. "Yeah. Okay. That's – yeah."
"And now I can see things that I definitely could not see before. There are weird… shimmers. In the air. Around people. Around Beanie. Around him." You jerked your chin toward Geto.
Yuji swallowed visibly. "Right. So. About that."
"Yuji." Your voice was very calm. Dangerously calm. The kind of calm that preceded either a breakthrough or a breakdown, and you honestly weren't sure which one was incoming. "I have worked in this café for years. I have served drinks to a man who speaks exclusively in rice ball ingredients. I have witnessed a fully grown adult lose a psychological war against a guy who stares at muffins. I have been tipped in cursed artifacts and had a man try to rob a bank because I said I was tired. I have dealt with all of this – all of it – without asking a single question, because ignorance is free and therapy is not."
You took a breath.
"But a creature just crawled out of my espresso machine and tried to eat me. So. I am asking now. What. Is. Going. On."
Yuji sat down on the floor across from you, cross-legged, like you were both in kindergarten and he was about to explain why we don't eat glue.
"Okay," he said, rubbing the back of his neck. "So. You know how some people believe in, like, ghosts and stuff?"
"Yuji."
"Right, right, skipping the intro." He took a deep breath. "They're real. Kind of. Not ghosts, exactly, but – they're called cursed spirits. Curses. They're… beings. Made from negative energy. Like, when people feel bad about stuff – fear, anger, sadness, whatever – that energy leaks out and builds up, and eventually it turns into one of those things." He gestured vaguely toward the destroyed back room.
You stared at him. "You're telling me that monster was made of bad vibes."
"Basically, yeah."
You closed your eyes. "Continue."
"They're invisible to normal people. Regular humans can't see them, can't touch them, can't interact with them at all. They just… exist. In the background. Feeding off negative emotions. That's why places like hospitals and schools and –" He glanced around the café. "– workplaces tend to attract them. Lots of negativity in one spot."
You slowly opened your eyes and looked at the shattered remains of your espresso machine.
For years. That thing had been inside the machine for probably longer than you'd worked here, growing fat on the collective misery of every overworked barista, every entitled customer, every soul crushing morning rush, every single one of Greg's management decisions. Feeding on years of bad tips and worse attitudes and underpaid suffering.
"So it was eating my depression," you said flatly.
Yuji winced. "That's… one way to put it."
"And all of you –" You looked between Yuji, Choso, and Geto. Your gaze lingered on Geto, who was listening with the amused patience of a spectator at a mildly interesting lecture. "You can all see these things."
Yuji nodded. "We're, uh. We're jujutsu sorcerers. Kind of. It's – it's like a job. We fight curses, protect people. There's a whole school for it and everything."
The dominoes started falling.
Every single bizarre, inexplicable interaction from the past months rearranged itself in your head with sickening clarity.
Nanami and Ino hadn't been LARPing. They had been genuinely trying to exorcise Beanie. Those invisible attacks, the stances, the "he blocked it" – all of it had been real. You just couldn't see it. Choso's creepy protection charm – the one Yuji had desperately snatched away – wasn't an overpriced trinket from a gift shop. It was an actual protection charm. That actually protected against actual curses.
Every single person who had ever looked at the espresso machine and said it was cursed had been stating a literal fact while you stood there, nodding politely, thinking they were all insane.
"Oh my god," you whispered. "Gojo."
Yuji tensed. "What about him?"
"Is he one too?"
Yuji's expression shifted into something complicated. Half pride, half resignation. "He's, uh. Kind of the strongest one."
Of course he was. Of course the most annoying human being you had ever met in your entire life was the strongest magical warrior or whatever the hell these people called themselves.
"And your alter ego thing. The face tattoos. The red eyes. The four-eyed villain cosplay. That wasn't an alter ego."
Yuji went very quiet. His fingers curled into his knees. "No," he said softly. "That was… something else. A curse that – it's a long story. But no, that wasn't me. That was a very, very bad guy who happens to be, uh, sharing my body."
An actual demon had been possessing Yuji Itadori, golden retriever incarnate, and you had just handed him a black coffee and told him to enjoy it.
You needed to sit down. You were already sitting. You needed to lie down.
Choso, who had been silent through all of this, spoke. "The barista can see now." His voice was measured, careful, but there was an undercurrent to it. Something tight and wound. "This is permanent."
Yuji's jaw worked. "Yeah. Probably. When a normal person – when someone who doesn't usually see curses gets put in a life or death situation, the fear and stuff can, like, force their cursed energy to spike high enough that their perception shifts. And once you can see them…" He trailed off.
"You can't unsee them," you finished.
Yuji looked at the floor. "Yeah."
Geto, who had been leaning against the wall this entire time, arms folded, watching the exposition unfold with the detached pleasure of a theatergoer at an opening night, pushed off and took a step toward the door.
"Delightful," he said lightly. "Truly. A monkey gains a little sight and suddenly the whole world has to stop and hold its hand."
Choso stood so fast the movement barely registered. One second he was seated. The next he was on his feet, angled between you and Geto, that low, heavy pressure radiating from him again.
"Call them that again," Choso said, very quietly.
Geto looked at him. His smile didn't falter, but something in his eyes sharpened – a flash of genuine interest, maybe. Or calculation.
"My," he murmured. "Protective."
"Choso," Yuji warned.
Geto chuckled low, unbothered sound and raised a hand in a casual wave of concession.
"Relax, Death Painting. I'm leaving." He paused at the door, glancing back one last time. Not at Choso, not at Yuji, but at you.
"Welcome to the real world," he said. "I'd tell you it gets easier, but that would be dishonest."
The door swung shut behind him.
Nobody spoke for a long time.
You glance at Choso. "So what are you?"
"I am Choso," he says, like that answers literally anything.
Yuji clears his throat quickly. "He's… complicated," he says, then looks at Choso like he's begging him not to be weird.
Choso, of course, does not help. "I am your ally," he tells you solemnly. "And your patron. I will protect you."
You stare at him, exhausted. "Do you hear yourself."
Choso nods once, serious. "Yes."
Yuji rubs his face with both hands. "We'll explain Choso later," he says, voice strained. "Please. One crisis at a time."
Then Muffin Guy, who had been sitting motionless through the entire ordeal – through the explosion, the creature, the supernatural battle, the revelation that reality was fundamentally different from what anyone had assumed – slowly, methodically, picked his muffin that had fallen off his plate during the chaos, placed it back, and resumed staring at it.
He had not left his seat. He had not flinched.
You looked at Muffin Guy.
Muffin Guy looked at his muffin.
You turned to Yuji. "Is he one too?"
Yuji squinted at Muffin Guy for a long moment. Then shook his head slowly. "Honestly? I have no idea what that guy is."
Choso had not moved from his position in front of you. He stood there, rigid and watchful, scanning the café like he expected another threat to materialize at any moment. His jaw was still tight. His hands were still curled.
"Hey," you said, and your voice came out softer than you intended, hoarse and scraped and tired, but real. "I'm okay."
Choso looked down at you. His expression hadn't fully recovered. The intensity was still there, simmering just below the surface, but when his gaze reached your hands – still bleeding, still embedded with tiny fragments of glass – something in him cracked.
"You are not okay," he said, and for the first time, you heard the anger in his voice direct itself not at Geto, not at the curse, but at himself. "I should have been here."
"Choso, you're a customer. You don't owe me a security detail."
"I owe you everything."
It was too much. Too sincere. Too raw for a destroyed café floor at ten thirty on a Wednesday morning. You looked away first, which you suspected was the first time that had ever happened in the history of your conversations.
Yuji, bless his heart, fumbled with the convenience store bag he'd dropped by the door and produced a pack of bandages, a bottle of green tea, and chips. "Here. I actually came in to bring you snacks, I bought some bandages for training, but you can use them. You need them more than I do."
You took them. Your fingers were shaking, which you noticed with a detached kind of annoyance, like your body was doing something embarrassing in public.
Choso took the bandages from you before you could open them. Without a word, he knelt again, took your right hand in both of his, and began carefully, with a focus that bordered on surgical, picking the glass out of your palm with his fingertips.
His hands were warm. Steady. Larger than yours.
You let him. Because you were too tired to argue, and because, honestly, your hands hurt like hell and he was being impossibly gentle about it.
"So," you said, watching Choso work while Yuji stood nearby looking like someone who wanted to give a pep talk but couldn't figure out where to start. "Sorcerers. Curses. Monsters. My espresso machine was haunted. Beanie is apparently some kind of supernatural bouncer. And that Geto guy just ate a demon."
"Cursed spirit," Yuji corrected gently.
"He ate a cursed spirit."
"It's his... ability. He can absorb them. It's called Cursed Spirit Manipulation."
You looked around the café. Shattered counter. Hole in the wall. Black residue on every surface. Espresso machine in approximately nine hundred pieces. Greg's smoothie, abandoned on a shelf in the back, slowly turning to room temperature.
"I'm going to need a raise," you muttered.
Yuji winced. "Maybe don't mention the curse stuff to your boss? Normal people aren't really supposed to know about –"
"Yuji. My boss put a towel on a smoking machine and hoped it would fix itself. He hired a mascot that just wrestled a demon. He is currently somewhere in the alley behind the building, probably calling his mom. I don't think workplace safety is his priority."
Yuji conceded the point.
Choso finished with your right hand and moved to your left, wrapping the bandages with a precision that suggested he'd done this before. Probably for Yuji. The thought was oddly grounding.
You flexed your bandaged fingers, testing the range of motion. Everything worked. Everything hurt, but everything worked. "Thanks."
And then you stood up.
The café was destroyed. Your espresso machine was dead. Truly dead this time, no coming back, no amount of spoon hitting or Greg's optimistic manifesting was going to resurrect it. The curse that had lived inside it was gone, swallowed by a man who called you a monkey and smiled about it.
And you could see things now. Things that had always been there, lurking in corners, clinging to walls, drifting through the spaces between people. A world layered on top of the one you'd known your entire life, ugly and teeming and very, very real.
Your hands throbbed. Your ribs ached. Your head was pounding. And your apron was shredded beyond repair.
You looked at Choso. At Yuji. At Beanie, still standing by the door, still silent, still smiling his horrible stitched smile.
"I'm going to clean up," you said, and your voice was steady. "And then one of you is going to explain the rest of it. All of it. The sushi words, the exorcism LARPing, the face tattoos, the child support assassin, every single weird thing that has happened in this café since day one."
Yuji swallowed. "That's a lot of explaining."
"Then you better start talking."
You grabbed a broom from behind what was left of the counter, stepped over a puddle of dissolving black residue, and started sweeping glass off the floor, because this café wasn't going to clean itself, and Greg sure as hell wasn't going to do it.
