‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾ welcome to mierin's mind palace, where established lore is a suggestion, crossovers are inevitable, & the writing is, well-- you can be the judge of that yourself.
I write for mostly jujutsu kaisen, but some of my other interests include chainsaw man, the silmarillion, succession, early christian theology, and art history.
reader discretion advised, minors dni
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‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾ NEW RELEASES
did we drink the poison, or just the placebo? // geto x reader; chapter viii
high by the beach // higuruma x reader; oneshot
to him as the sun // choso x reader; LOTR/silmarillion AU oneshot
‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾ UPCOMING PROJECTS
it's hot, and we rot in this oven // nanami x reader; chapter v
‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾ COLLABS
jjk age gap autumn fic collab event
all rights reserved, please do not translate, repost, or copy my works (not that you'd want to idk) without prior written permission. I do not give permission to any entity to use my work for AI training.
I'd lay you badly, but I'd lay you gladly // naoya x reader; chapter i
With a cursed technique better suited for politics than the battlefield, you're sent as the witness by the Jujutsu higher-ups to the reading of Zen'in Naobito's will. Seems like his youngest son is a horrid brat who needs to learn some manners. Seems like you'll enjoy getting to lord this development over him.
Rating: M
Word Count: 3k
Warnings: Naoya-typical misogyny, Yuuji's Execution/Perfect Preparation Arc Spoilers, the reader is also an unmitigated shitty person unfortunately
Additional Notes: This too is Romangerri
Truth be told, mine was an incredibly odd job to have at my age and experience level, but given the prestige it came with in comparison to my actual stores of cursed energy or the efficacy of my cursed technique, I wasn’t exactly going to voice too many complaints about it.
Because, see, there was more than one way to bind someone. Oaths, laws, a sword at one’s neck… or, in some cases-- me.
A walking, talking, binding vow-- I possess the skill of Welding the Word, a kind of offshoot ability of my cousins in the Inumaki clan-- and in the technique, any words displayed, whether in text, or in speech, in my presence, would become binding between two or more parties. Useless in combat, of course-- I’d long been a straggler in the eyes of my upperclassmen, even after the brouhaha with Geto Suguru when I was in my sophomore year. I spent the subsequent years till graduation mostly just commiserating only with my only other classmate, Ijichi Kiyotaka, especially given Gojo Satoru’s brusque advice that the two of us better work on our driving and administrative skills, because being Windows would be all we two were good for.
So when graduation came, and Principal Gakuganji descended upon the Tokyo campus to summon me to Jujutsu headquarters, I can’t exactly help the feeling of smugness at the moment. Not even with Gojo Satoru’s scorn that I’m going to go work for people he hates, not even with Kiyotaka’s crestfallen realization that I was going to leave him behind.
Because even someone like Gojo Satoru, as powerful as he was, was still beholden in a way to the Jujutsu higher-ups. (Trust me, I know-- I’ve had to clean up his messes too in the past few years).
Maybe I’m the asshole for it, to be so willingly to jump into working for the man, as it were, without even considering my only friend (and classmate), and the fact that I’ll be on the other side of the divide-- droning out commands while they bust their asses and risk their lives doing exorcisms.
But the world of Jujutsu sorcerers is a world where if you can’t find a way to be strong, you’re good as dead anyways. In my years, I’ve long figured out the permutations of power. So sue me, for making the best of my situation, I guess.
Gojo Satoru, for example, could get away with being, well, him, because he’s the singular most powerful sorcerer alive today, and he comes from the Gojo clan, one of the Big Three Jujutsu families.
Kusakabe-sensei, on the other hand, had no innate technique, but he was the peak a sorcerer could reach without it, and a practitioner of the New Shadow Style, which had a lineage longer than some Jujutsu clan bloodlines.
I had a pretty paltry technique in the grand scheme of things, but the higher-ups had recognized something in it-- that I wasn’t ever really meant to be powerful in a clash of sorcery-- but instead, that my battleground will be the courts, the meeting-rooms, where the pieces moved behind the board.
As for the Zen’ins, who treated half their potential sorcerers (read closer: I mean their women) so abominably that they were never able to actually develop their techniques, it’s the family name and legacy that keeps them from being pushed lower, though I knew also that the Gojo and Kamo clans were biting at the bit to supplant them somehow-- though history would also prove that a duumvirate was also innately slated for collapse, anyways, so it was never about protecting the Zen’in women, or wasting sorcerers, but just power instead.
Halfway to being country bumpkins despite their snobbery, secluded on an estate in Kyoto, I pull my car in behind Furudate, Zen’in Naobito’s executor of estate, and disembark, nodding my greetings to the diminutive older man as we make our way to the gates. I don’t flatter myself to think that the staff here are so unoccupied as to be astonished by a woman driving despite the reputation of the Zen’in family for being rabid misogynists, but the older aunt who comes to greet us looks at me with a half-frown, as if searching my face, half-quizzical, as the lawyer and I remove our shoes at the threshold of the building, and proceed onwards barefoot.
I scan the rooms we pass by-- servants milling about at their duties, junior clan members training in a courtyard, halls upon endless halls of tatami-matted floor and translucent shoji screened walls.
Aside from the odd carriage of our guide, and the presence of the lawyer, one would almost think it’s any ordinary day, even with their clan head on his deathbed to their knowledge.
I wonder who specifically had been entrusted with the burden of keeping the knowledge concealed from even his own clan, and alerting Jujutsu Headquarters, of old Zen’in’s death.
To say less of the absolute shitstorm awaiting them once the will’s read, too. I think to myself of the addendum to Zen’in’s will, one that I had just reviewed a copy of merely hours beforehand when we’d received the report of his passing-- I don’t even know if Furudate were aware of it, though the man was so composed that I doubt he would react even if it were a shocker to him.
Given the attack on Shibuya City and the sealing of Gojo Satoru mere days before, maybe everyone had worse things to worry about.
But I also couldn’t see a way this wouldn’t hold some hefty complications for the entirety of Jujutsu society either, given that the Gojo clan now had no vanguard, and the Zen’in clan’s head just died with a last-second addition to the inheritance, and the Kamo clan now being in God-knows what state given that the worst blot on their clan history is now revealed to have been apparently still alive, and at large.
Then again, part of my job is to prevent Jujutsu society from speedrunning its own downfall-- though some days I suspect I’m just a piece of duct tape that’s meant to prevent the cracks from widening into canyons.
Yikes, that was a bad thought. I promptly push it away as we’re announced at another room-- an audience chamber, by the looks of the size and decor-- though the men inside seem intent upon turning it into a sparring-dojo instead, from their postures at each other’s necks.
The woman stays outside, sliding the door shut behind us.
Furudate takes the lead-- and I’m vaguely grateful, given, Zen’ins and all-- because I’ll just be, best case scenario, the witness for their approval of the will-- and realistic case scenario, the person fielding all their complaints and questions and trying to make them agree to a will that will definitely piss them off.
“I see everyone’s here.” he clears his throat. “Master Naobito Zen’in, the head of the Zen’in clan, has passed away.”
I follow him in inclining my head in condolences, before we take our seated positions on the tatami and Furudate opens his briefcase to continue on with the proceedings.
Grim realization of an older man with eyes so shadowed that it nearly looked like he had no sclera, face so hard it looked like he were hewn from stone. Lack of surprise on a dour burly wrestler-type with tousled hair and thick brows.
And a grin on the youngest of the trio, a white-toothed grin that’s boyish in the quality of its cruelty.
I come to a sudden shock of recognition.
September 2006, Tokyo-Kyoto Jujutsu Sister School Exchange Event.
We’d been wiping the floor with Kyoto’s asses in the last few events, though that was more thanks to the Dynamic Duo themselves dominating the games than any sorry contribution from Kiyotaka and I-- but because of some stink or another about the unfairness, Principal Gakuganji had somehow managed to pull the strings in such a way to get some of the clans’ homegrown sorcerers to come also compete under the banner of Kyoto Jujutsu Tech. Even out the playing field a little. Make it more of a competitive spirit. Clan sorcerers against the most ragtag team being hard-carried by brute force imaginable, even if I doubted our competitors’ skill level in Jujutsu outstripped their privilege.
Enter what seemed to be an almost endless string of teenaged boys, some tall, some short, some thin, some burly, but all with stiff black hair and sharp hazel eyes-- the enduring feature of the Zen’in clan. And at the head of the pack, a smirking, bottle-blonde boy by the name of Zen’in Naoya.
It was pretty much etched into my memory, the close brush with loss that Tokyo had that year-- and the fact that it was thanks to him, having surgically led his little posse of cousins on sneak attacks that took out all of us except for the two special-grades. Foul as he was, given that he’d tried to get both Ieri Shoko and I eliminated from the games altogether on the basis of wanting worthy opponents, because women shouldn’t be sorcerers in the first place-- he was talented with his abilities, and not a total loss as a tactician either, which didn’t help my pride at all.
From the smugness that emanated from him, and the golden eyes that scoured me in a way that not even Gojo’s Six Eyes had done, he hasn’t changed a bit despite the dozen years or so. Grown taller, maybe, filled out some, definitely had some new piercings done, but otherwise…
Furudate’s voice breaks me out of my reverie. “The 27th Head of the Zen’in clan is to be Zen’in Naoya, who is to inherit all assets of the clan, including the cursed tools stored in the Tokyo and Kyoto Prefectural Jujutsu High Schools, as well as all the Zen’in cursed warehouses. Upon approval by both Zen’in Ogi and Zen’in Jinichi, Zen’in Naoya may take over all the duties of the clan.”
I hear him scoff, see him roll his eyes-- as if it were all going to plan, as if it were all expected. For a man like him, that title of clan head was as good as his birthright. “Whatever.”
I bite the inside of my cheek to hold in the smile that’s threatening to split my face as Furudate flips through the pages-- inventory, assets, the likes-- because, oh, now this is power-- the knowing.
You’ve got a big storm coming, Zen’in.
“However,”
One word.
That’s all it took.
A special grade one sorcerer, one of the fastest alive, de-facto heir to one of the most powerful Jujutsu clans, with a lineage going back to the Heian era, who’s able to freeze his targets into rough, glitching frames-- entitled as he were, so self-assured in his own power and infallibility-- felled by one single, solitary word.
The smile slips off his face like the snow sloughs off a thawing roof. I keep that moment in my head, capture it to treasure for later, the widening of his eyes, the way his face goes slack.
“If Gojo Satoru has died, or become mentally incapacitated for any reason, a written agreement concluded with Fushiguro Toji will welcome Fushiguro Megumi into the Zen’in clan… whereupon he shall become the head of the Zen’in clan, and all assets shall pass to him.”
A beat of silence,
And then, Zen’in Naoya explodes.
“WHAT?”
Furudate, bless his soul, packs his suitcase up, stands, and bows to the trio, quintessentially unflappable-- before he’s backing out the door with, “The young miss can handle your questions.”
Three pairs of eyes turn to me, and the feeling is equal parts intimidating, and almost tantamount to drunkenness.
Who’s the weak one now, Zen’in?
I open my briefcase as well, producing another a copy of the will and testament, as well as a copy of the signed (and witnessed) (and headquarter-approved) agreement between Zen’in Naobito and Fushiguro Toji, as if Furudate hadn’t done the approximate equivalent of dropping an anvil on their heads, and the air weren’t electric with some kind of odd desperation.
I function better than most people in discomfort, apparently. The Jujutsu sorcerers have the prerequisite of being all crazy, and I, working as general liaison for Headquarters, am apparently also required to be crazy, given that three of the Zen’in clan’s most dangerous men weren’t all massively pissed at the tidings with which I swept in.
Being a woman, no less.
“Before we begin, I’d caution you all to watch your words-- because with my innate technique, what you say in response to this document will thereby become binding not just legally, but spiritually as well,” I say, and I’m almost impressed at how level I’ve managed to keep my voice, even with the amount of schadenfreude I’m feeling inside.
“With that out of the way, are there any questions for me?” I asked.
Zen’in Ogi looks a bit disgusted, as if he can’t exactly believe a woman’s now in charge of debriefing him on how things are going to run around here from this point onwards. He looks like he’s about to open his mouth, but I can see the moment when my caution hits, and he looks over at Zen’in Jinichi, exchanging wordless glances.
The two older men leave, not even a single word, or acknowledgement towards me-- I might as well have been a large porcelain vase-- mostly in the background, there only to be walked around on the way out the door.
A schemer and a soldier, I think to myself, watching their silent exchange. Hopefully, they won’t spread the news of this upheaval in inheritance too soon-- but I doubt it, because whatever has happened in this room, they’ll want to keep it under wraps until they have a plan.
I think the only reason Zen’in Naoya hasn’t followed suit yet, is because:
1. He’s absolutely catatonic with the shock of revelation.
2. If he stands to leave now, it looks like he’s running to chase after his uncles, and I’m willing to bet he’d rather die than look like a little boy, let alone in front of me.
Now that it’s just the two of us, I let myself gloat a little.
“What’s the matter, Zen’in?”
He scowls. “Why do you keep talking? Y’know, women should be seen and not heard.”
I casually answer, as if I hadn’t overstepped official capacity the second the door closed behind his uncles by visibly signalling my intent to taunt him. “I’m here on behalf of the Jujutsu headquarters--”
To his credit, he begins to absolutely tear into me “--I thought you were one of those traditional girls back in school. Shame you’ve got such a good-for-nothing attitude now.”
My smile, oh-- I’ve been holding my smile in for so long that it’s hurting my cheeks when I let myself actually grin now, almost masochistic in the face of his debasements. “Mind your words, Zen’in.”
Because, in some weird way, I do enjoy this part of my job-- where I’m there to field the protests-- they could be older, they could be stronger, their names could be better-- and yet, every one of them, I would be able to impose my own will, and that of the Jujutsu headquarters, upon.
“Oh, shut up, you absolute bitch,” he’d snarled, and in the span of a few seconds he’s across the room, right up in my personal space as he’s tearing the pages like a child in a tantrum, the paper scraps raining down around my head like flower petals in the spring.
“It was supposed to be me,” he fumes, face flushing. “Not some brat that no one knows.”
Look, I can tolerate the verbal abuse-- the higher-ups aren’t the easiest to talk to, given that they mostly just hide behind screens when talking for a touch of the mysterious and the foreboding, and before then there was Gojo who seemed to think I was mostly useless or a weakling. I have thick skin, I can give as good as I get.
So that’s not what pisses me off.
“Fucking stupid bitch, stupid old man,” he’s ranting, “I’m the clan head!”
It’s the fact that he’s tearing up my things (not really my things, but for the purpose of this mission I have proprietary ownership over it, at least)-- even though there’s multiple copies of the document, and it’s all so stupid and childish, and so I make the executive decision to escalate the situation further, yanking at his wrists in trying to get him to stop his tantrum, and hauling myself to my feet.
“For fuck’s sake, Zen’in Naoya, I am not here as a random woman you can push around, no matter what your clan thinks,” I shout. The abrupt force with which I stood tugs his arms up, half-way over his head, and his gaze snaps up to me from where he’s half-stooped, the remnants of the copy of his father’s will scattered around us.
I don’t really quite care if he wants to mouth off even more, because I talk over him till the retorts die on his lips, “I’m not some Zen’in wife or cousin to bully, I’m here on the behalf of the Jujutsu Headquarters. And if you want any whisper of a hope of keeping the Zen’in clan status intact, or your own status within the clan and as a sorcerer, I’d suggest you watch your cursed fucking mouth and your actions-- or I can go back and report to the higher-ups about what a miserable waste of air you were, and why we should demote the Zen’in clan due to their disobedience.”
His face is still red, ostensibly from being put in such a humiliating posture-- but he yanks his hands away, averting his eyes.
“Is that clear?”
He’s still fuming, lips pressed together in a pout that was far too infantile for him being a grown man.
I repeat myself. “Is. That. Clear?”
“Yes,” he finally forces out through gritted teeth.
A/N:
I want to Romangerri Naoya so bad ugh. Also sorry reader is like, kinda an unmitigated piece of shit in this one ALSKJLFJSFJKS
Comments n feedback n asks fuel my writing <333
Start from the beginning:
Gojo Satoru is sealed. Shibuya is a disaster zone. Zen'in Naobito is dead. When the higher-ups send you to the Zen'in estate to carry out the terms of his final will and testament, an unexpected clause puts you in the collision course of the once-heir, Naoya.
Tropes:
ENEMIES to lovers, MORALLY DUBIOUS MC, "I can't fix him but I can make him worse", Succession/Romangerri inspired, no one is a good person except for the kids, political intrigue, eroticism as metaphor for corruption/control, power plays
Investigative Report on the Murder Incident Regarding Our School's Student
I will report about the subject matter as follows.
Subject of Investigation: Tokyo School 3rd Year, Suguru Geto
1. Incident Case Record
Date and Time of Occurrence: September 23, 2007 around 9:00 PM
Place of Occurrence: ██ City, ██ Prefecture (former ██ village)
Discovery of Occurrence: Discovered due to the assistant manager traveling to the target site when the mission operative (Geto) was late. Five days had passed since Geto was dispatched.
Damage Status: Confirmed deaths of 112 residents of former ██ village.
2. Summary of Geto's Mission
Investigate former ██ village
In the village, getting spirited away has been passed down from generation to generation as a folklore.
However, in reality, incidents of strange deaths of villagers frequently occur-- according to the client's information and can otherwise be understood through research. Since it was surmised that 80% of the cases were caused by a Cursed Spirit, Geto was ordered to conduct a more detailed on-site investigation and to exorcise the Cursed Spirit in question.
3. Behavior / Conjecture
On September 18, Geto entered the former ██ village alone.
The mission's outline was provided by the assistant manager a week before departure.
There was no prior request regarding this matter from the person himself and it was the Technical College that ordered him to act alone. The reason is, it was judged in deference to Geto's own experience points, and that it was feasible for him to work alone. In addition, the target Curse was surmised to be about a Grade 1; lower than Geto’s. In addition, there is a shortage of jujutsu sorcerers.
Presumably at this time, there were no deviations from a usual mission. He didn't display any behavior at the time that he was scheming something.
9:00 am on the appointed day, we departed from the Tokyo school by car.
Geto and the assistant manager (Shokinji), just the two, moved together.
The target village is a village without any public transportation. It's impossible to approach the village by car, as entry is via a single narrow road. About a kilometer away from the village, near Kamiya intersection, Geto was dropped off and we parted ways.
Around 4:00 p.m., Geto started to act alone.
The duration of completion of the mission this time is from September 18th~September 19th; at most three days. Upon completion, I was supposed to be contacted as usual. (However, it was not a strict promise. Because of that, it's believed the discovery of this incident was delayed. Matters Requiring Improvement)
With the assumption he'll be staying in the village, we'd made arrangements with the client belonging to the fire brigade (Kiyotaka Kagetani, 43 years old, living with mother) to rent a room in his house. However, details such as if he actually lodged with them, remain unknown, as both the client and his mother have died.
The following is the mission's investigative report that was conveyed by the assistant manager from inside a moving car.
In the village, there is folklore about being "spirited away."
There is even literature that remains. Passed down from the Edo period... It's a common enough legend. However, even aside recent years, It's characterized by how it continues to feel like a natural happening.
There have been five cases in the last ten years.
March 19, 1998, A 26-year-old woman disappeared.
May 7, 2001, A 67-year-old man died abnormally.
July 24, 2002, A 4-year-old girl disappeared.
August 4, 2005, A 57-year-old man and a 46-year-old woman were found to have died abnormally.
September 13, 2007, A 46-year-old man died abnormally.
As features,
・Both disappearances and abnormal deaths occurred within a 50-meter radius of a limestone cave, which is considered to be a sacred area to the village.
・Young women and children → Disappeared、Middle-aged and older or men → Found died abnormally.
・The ones who died abnormally have no heads.
From these and other such commonalities, it was conjectured that it is the action of a Cursed Spirit inhabiting the vicinity of the limestone cave. So, in order to confirm the truth from the legend, it is believed Geto investigated from inside the village.
It is estimated that from the time he began to act alone, around 4:00 p.m. on September 18th, he opened the case, investigated, and collected the target Cursed Spirit. However, since all the villagers involved have died, there is no one left to testify.
Only, if this matter was caused by a Cursed Spirit, it is certain Geto achieved destroying--
[–cut off]
On September 19th (time unknown), a village massacre incident occurred.
112 Villagers died. In the subsequent arson, 70% of the village was burned down.
(On September 23rd, when the College headed to the site, there was not a single living person left in the village. There is no eyewitness testimony.)
An investigation into the cause of death determined they were all victims of Cursed Spirits.
In addition, according to an inspection of the residuals, it was concluded to be that of Suguru Geto's Curse Manipulation.
It is believed that after killing the villagers, Geto set fire to the village and fled.
Regarding this incident, Geto's motives remain unknown.
Village resident registration information did not reveal anyone who had a blood relation with Geto, nor anyone with personal involvement with him prior to the mission.
Note that, since there is information that there was a lineage of jujutsu sorcerers in this village, it is being further investigated to see if they share any attributes with Geto and whether that had anything to do with his motives.
4. Punishment Here On, etc.
Suguru Geto is even now at large.
In accordance to Article 9 of Jujutsu Regulations, he is subject to execution as a Curse User.
did we drink the poison, or just the placebo? // geto x reader; chapter vii
How to be a human being.
⋆｡°✩ ⋆⁺｡˚⋆˙‧₊✩₊‧˙⋆˚｡⁺⋆ ✩°｡⋆
.・゜゜・ ・゜゜・．
｡･ﾟﾟ･ ･ﾟﾟ･｡
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ao3 link ☾ masterlist ☾ playlist ☾ art credit: arekushisu_11
Rating: M
Word Count: 4.1k
Warnings: Hidden Inventory Spoilers, depictions of PTSD and depression, mentions of Geto-typical fantastical racism
There’s a look that Suguru’s parents exchange with each other as Mr. Geto parks the car, and as soon as Mrs. Geto is out of her seat, she’s opening up my door for me, all but herding me out from the backseat-- not in some way that implies a wrangling, but a kind of insistent curiosity. I can’t blame her. I’m rather an oddity where things are concerned-- not a sorcerer, not exactly a civilian either. Somewhere straddling the in-between, and perhaps suddenly I had been joined to her son, her only child, in mind, body, and soul.
She loops her arm around mine-- the same kind of firm hold I’d been familiar with from Suguru, but from a woman who’s a whole head or thereabouts shorter.
Across the car’s roof, Suguru bangs his head on the door as he gets out with less elegance and a lot more nerves, wincing slightly. His father chuckles and claps him on the back. “I’d like to see the library here, son. I wonder if they’ve archived the original Michizane manuscripts.”
And just like that, I’m alone with his mother as the men disappear ahead through the gates, their voices fading under the glow of the setting sun.
She leads us slowly through the classroom wing, and I’m struck all at once by it-- her familiarity, as if she’s paced these halls before.
I wonder at it-- envision Suguru, a handful of years younger, hair shorter and eyes wider. His father’s voice rings in my head-- He used to have nightmares. Before he came here-- to Jujutsu High. And he would cry, too, about monsters in the closet, around the shoulders of people we met, hiding in the corners of the alleys. But then-- he’s brought to this school, and I picture a younger Suguru taking his mother’s hand, showing her around the classrooms-- excited to show off the campus, and how well he’s settling into this new life, where the creatures that once haunted the edges of his consciousness fell under his dominion instead.
The halls are quiet, the chatter of the usual day-to-day replaced with the silence of empty classrooms and last twinkles of golden evening light slanting across the floor. Somewhere in the distance, I think I can hear the rest of our friends returning from the restaurant-- Gojo’s loud voice filtering through the distance and walls till it’s a low buzz in the distance.
“I’m glad I could get you alone,” Suguru’s mother says, her tone light, conversational. But when I glance at her, there’s something sharper in her gaze-- attentive concern, the way that I’d imagined a mother might hypothetically approach someone their child is close to-- trying to gauge if I were truly good for Suguru or not.
By god, I hope I was. I straighten almost instinctively, dipping my head in deference. “Of course, Mrs. Geto.”
“Shiori’s fine!” she insists with a lopsided grin that reminds me of Suguru’s rare smiles, with the same wry overlap of her canine tooth, squeezing my arm-- and the tension dissipates somewhat at her casual nature. “You’re my son’s Warder now. There’s no need for formalities.”
Then, without missing a beat, she continues-- “I just want to know your intentions with him.”
I blink, momentarily thrown. “Intentions?”
It echoes in my mind like a word I’ve never had to define before, ricocheting around like a pinball machine. What were my intentions?
Suguru was my partner. My keeper, as I was his. Bound by will, by ceremony, by vows, by threads of cursed energy and something that went even deeper but that we couldn’t put the words to. But the moment stretches too long, and I feel the expectant weight lingering.
I try to ease my stance, forcing myself to sweep my expression into something neutral. I can feel Suguru through the bond now, a faint flicker of concern reaching for me, checking if I’m all right after being whisked away for what might still turn into a shovel talk with the woman who’d brought him into this world.
I swallow, smooth the surface of my roiling mind over until it becomes like an unperturbed pool, gently nudging his inquiry to the side.
“I know you care for him,” Shiori adds, sensing my hesitation. “That much was clear-- or we wouldn’t be here right now.”
My breath catches slightly, and I flush-- not with embarrassment, but with the sense that I’m being put on the spot. “I do care for him,” I say, quieter now. “I care for him, a lot.”
I don’t say how often I think of his hands, steady on my face when I shattered after the first mission. Of how our bodies moved together on the training pitch, like two neat cogs in a perpetual motion machine. Or the quiet companionship of shared meals, of shoulders brushing, of wordless understanding.
“His eyes follow you. Like a sunflower always turns its face to the sun,” she says kindly, her pace unchanging.
Something tender and vulnerable bubbles in my chest, like a million butterflies fluttering south for winter.
“I want to be good for him,” I reply, voice almost a whisper.
She beams, and it’s like watching Suguru through a veil of years-- the same eyes, creasing into crescent moons, the same press of their lips into an arc, but there’s crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. Delicate, paper-thin folds by her mouth. Silver shot through her dark hair.
I look at her, and hope against all hope that Suguru will live to develop that same grey streaking through his hair.
“I think you already are,” she says.
I can feel him.
It was strange at first-- uncanny, even. Everything came through-- all the guilt, concern, tension, hunger, pain, fatigue. It was disorienting, like trying to navigate the day-to-day while handcuffed to someone else-- even though distance would provide a bit of a buffer to the full brunt of our collective emotions, and the notion of shielding at least some of our less pleasant moments had occurred in some degree to both of us-- whether it was the embarrassment of what essentially amounted as my declaration of love for him in front of his mother, or trying to slough off the dust from the cursed warehouse after he’d been assigned to inventory the weaponry with Kento-kun and Yuu-kun.
The first time he tried to absorb a curse after a mission, I nearly threw up. I retched so hard I had to lean over the roof of the industrial plant we’d been dispatched to, gripping the railing like a lifeline while the acrid taste of something rotten, something wrong clawed its way up the back of my throat. I felt him sense my nausea, and when I finally gathered myself enough to look up, his expression was stricken, cheeks pale, eyes wide with guilt.
He looked mortified-- and I could feel all of it, like a pot of scalding water poured over my head that makes my face flush and ears heat. Embarrassment mingled with self-loathing, his thoughts sinking lower and lower into the black hole in his mind-- She thinks I’m disgusting. I should’ve warned her. I should’ve done it when she’s somewhere else--
I cut him off before he could keep spiralling.
“‘M fine,” I mutter, wiping my mouth and forcing myself upright, even though the taste of rot still lingered in the back of my throat. “Let’s go.”
I grab onto his hand-- half anchor, half comfort.
His ears were red for the rest of the afternoon-- still flushed as we disembarked from the car, as we walked stiffly out of the debrief with Principal Yaga. Still burning as we trudged through the courtyard toward the dorms, the dusk light rose-tinted and soft against the cobblestone. Stubbornly ruddy even as he’d fumbled through the pockets of his pants, pulling out a box of cigarettes.
I wondered if that was why he smoked so much-- why the scent of tobacco perpetually clung to his uniform and the stray wisps of his hair. If it were some kind of effort to scrub the lingering taste of curses from his mouth. To dull the edge of the burden and the monstrosity he had been forced to carry within himself.
He glances at me then, as if the thought had burrowed into his consciousness at the same time it had bloomed into my mind, with the striking of a flint that produces the flame at the tip of his lighter.
“Yeah,” he murmurs, “I guess it is.”
I blink, hunching slightly in semi-bashfulness. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to.” He offers a faint, crooked smile-- no censure, just a kind of wry self-debasement that I myself felt all too familiar with. “I could feel it.”
Then, almost as a reassurance, he’d reached back into the pocket of his pants, producing a cigarette that he held out towards me, an offering tucked between two fingers. I glance up at him-- and then take it. Not to smoke-- instead, I tuck it into the breast pocket of my uniform. A souvenir, a keepsake, a kind of odd totem.
After that, the missions changed in nature. More recon, more auxiliary support, more civilian aid, fewer exorcisms.
I hadn’t said a word about it, too afraid of being branded as weak by everyone again-- what kind of Warder wasn’t even able to hack it through her partner being the one who had to swallow down curses?
But part of me suspects Suguru did-- casually, offhandedly, maybe, some mention to Kusakabe-sensei or Principal Yaga, or somebody, or someone with the authority to shuffle assignments around.
Not for himself. For me.
And something feels like a dry swallowed pill that just wouldn’t go down my throat when the suspicion began to coalesce in my mind.
Because I could feel it, in a way-- the hum of protectprotectprotectprotect from his brain like a backdrop of white noise.
Just as I could feel the pits he sank into on those nights when even the moon’s hidden its face away.
And the guilt. Sharp and burning. He didn’t think he deserved the lenience. The lighter missions. But I did, in his eyes-- and I wanted-- no, needed-- to prove myself so he wouldn’t have to.
The irony wasn’t lost on me-- now that we were bonded, our emotions were even harder to parse, harder to navigate, like walking through a hall of mirrors while drunk, when before, I felt at least the ability to gather my nerves up and ask-- a kind of boldness that had all but vanished in the face of my worry-- would he take it as me prying, disrespecting his privacy and boundaries?
We were still fumbling through it all-- trying to navigate what it meant to be among the first sorcerer-warder bond pairs. It was so experimental that even the elders who’d degreed the program implemented hadn’t anticipated half the side effects.
Like the fact that when I snuck a few drinks with Shoko on Saturday night, Suguru woke up hungover on Sunday morning halfway across campus, groaning and irate, with no clue why his head was pounding. Or the hunger that bound the two of us together in lightheaded deliriousness if Suguru had forgotten to eat.
And the steady fire behind it all that never burned out-- protectprotectprotectprotect that became one core, one thought shared between our two consciousnesses.
It all blurs together, in a way-- classes, missions, exams, debriefs. And now, graduation looms.
But it doesn’t hit with the weight I expected-- no clean break or freedom or a closing chapter, like I’d always imagined finishing high school would feel like.
Because we’re informed-- gently, bureaucratically-- of the option for an additional post-grad year. A sort of bridge program. We weren’t being ordered to take it on-- but we were strongly encouraged to take it, in order to properly train us for field work as professional sorcerers, especially those who were going to be assigned mostly “high-risk” cases.
As if that decision had already been locked in. But it must have been since the day Suguru set foot on campus-- there was no way they would loose their grasp on a special grade like him. Not even as his psyche tore at the edges from the weight of what they asked.
And yet, he doesn’t ask it for himself. No-- he never does. But he would, for me.
His fingerprints are all over this. I don’t even need to prod into the bubble of his thoughts to know he had something to do with it-- some tense conversation with Yaga or one of the elders. Maybe even Gojo, if things got desperate enough. There’s that same trickle of protectprotectprotectprotect humming through our bond, and I have to actively shove it away, clenching my jaw to keep my wounded pride from bleeding into the room.
He notices, of course. He always does.
We leave the conference with Kusakabe-sensei in a stilted kind of silence. His hands are shoved deep into his pants pockets, and his expression is unreadable-- neutral, but expectant, as if my displeasure has already bled over into the bond.
I break first.
“You don’t need to baby me,” I interject abruptly.
He slows his stride a little, not quite looking at me. “It’s not about-- ”
“Yes, it is,” I interrupt, spinning to face him just outside the dorm building. “You asked Yaga-sensei for that extra year. Don’t lie.”
A pause. Then-- “I asked if it was possible to defer a year after graduation. I didn’t demand anything.”
“So you did bring it up,” I scowled.
He sighs through his nose. “I brought it up because I don’t think you’re ready.”
It hits harder than I expect-- like a mallet over the head. I blink, as if that’ll stop the hurt from showing in my expression. “You don’t think I’m strong enough.”
“That’s not what I said,” he sighs.
“It’s what you meant,” I retort.
He finally meets my eyes. “I meant that you’re too important to risk.”
I laugh-- an exhale that surprises even me with the bitterness laced through it. “So now I’m just a liability?”
He flinches, just slightly. “No. You’re my-- ” He stops. Doesn’t finish the sentence. Doesn’t even try to, hands shoved deep into his pockets, a myriad of emotions flashing across his face.
I turn my face away. It’s too much. I’m tired.
And I hate how much of my self-worth is wrapped up in proving I can do this-- that I deserve to be here, that I’m not just an experiment waiting to fail. Like I failed to protect those kids from the first mission. Like I failed to stand strong by Suguru’s side.
Like I’m failing him even now, unable to reach into the walls of self-degradation and sacrifice he’d put up.
“I like a girl who eats a lot!” I can hear the voice ringing out down the hallway as I pace the campus-- looking for him, ostensibly. I huff out a quiet laugh as I continue towards the source. It seemed very like him-- aficionado for good eats as he was. And undoubtedly, he’d wanted someone who’d also appreciate Rei-san’s recipes and cooking as much as he and Kento-kun both did.
The murmurs continue before an unfamiliar feminine laugh resounds-- “That was sarcasm, y’know!”
“Yuu-kun!” I call, rounding the corner, only to be met by the odd triangulation of the boy I’d been seeking, Suguru, and a statuesque blonde woman who must have been source of the laughter.
“Senpai!” he’d perked up, like an overeager puppy at the ready as he’d noticed my presence. “What’s up?”
I smile at him-- casting a glance over at Suguru in the meanwhile-- mussed in that way that indicated a lazy afternoon with his hair falling in locks around his shoulders.
I hadn’t quite forgiven him for the way that he’d steamrolled on ahead without me-- made the decision with the higher-ups to hold us back a year. I don’t know if my pride could take the hit of the fact that he still felt I was more someone who he would fight to protect, rather than someone he would fight alongside.
His gaze flickers over to me as well, and somehow, I’m aware of the woman’s cheshire grin widening in the background with a soft, “Oh?” as if she knew something we two did not.
“Yaga-sensei has a mission for you and Kento-kun,” I tell him, and the boy springs up out of his seat, posture at the ready and just short of a salute. “He wants to brief you both before you guys leave.”
“‘F’course! You can count on me!” Collecting the can of soda next to him, he waves to us, the remaining trio, and heads off, leaving me with the older blonde and Suguru.
I shove my hands into my pockets as the silence weighs for a few moments before the woman sighs, settling down into the seat where Yuu-kun had been occupying moments prior. “Cute kid,” she comments. “Honest one, too.”
I’m about to murmur an assent when Suguru cuts in with-- “I still think he should be more wary of people as a sorcerer.”
She crosses her arms and shrugs. “Well, that stands to be seen. You don’t need to answer my question anymore, though, Geto-kun. I’ve seen enough.”
What question? I wondered privately to myself, just as Suguru bristles slightly, voice blunt. “Answer mine, then. Who are you?”
“Special-Grade Sorcerer Tsukumo Yuki.” Turning to me, I’m suddenly faced with the full brunt of her attention-- nearly as scintillating as Gojo’s, with this type of weight behind it I’d only ever witnessed in degrees in the face of something like a skyscraper. “What’s your type, kiddo?”
I glance over helplessly at Suguru, the shame welling up inside me-- surely she can’t know or see-- not that I’m ashamed of Suguru-- no, I could never be ashamed of him-- but I just don’t know.
“You’re her.” Suguru states incredulously instead.
The focus breaks, and she grins in this kind of expectant glee, almost, again, like Gojo would have. “Oh?! What do they say?”
Suguru sighs instead. “That you’re a good-for-nothing who wanders abroad instead of accepting any missions, even though you’re a Special-Grade,” he replies flatly, as her face sags in disappointment.
Tsukumo-san rolls her eyes. “Ugh. I hate Jujutsu High,” she drawls, flopping herself back on the bench.
A beat, and she sits back up. “Joking, of course, for legal reasons. But you can say I’ve never agreed with the policies here.”
I cross my arms from my perch by the corner of the wall, the metal of the vending machine radiating coolness that proved a welcome balm against the summer heat. “Why?” the words fall from my mouth before I could stop myself.
She props her chin on her fist in imitation of a sculpture. “They treat symptoms, and I want to treat the root cause.”
“The cause?” I think it, and yet it is Suguru who voices it.
“Rather than hunt cursed spirits, I’d like to create a world in which they’re no longer created.”
Something in the back of my mind recalls the taste of waste and vomit and misery, and a young girl whose face I’d only ever seen in my nightmares with her blood seeping into ancient brickwork.
“Care for a little lesson?”
It’s too late. She’s reeled me in. I unfurl myself from my stance, and settle on the edge of the bench-- perpendicular to Suguru himself. A gap between us the breadth of his arms wide, humming with tension.
“What are cursed spirits, to begin with?”
I raise my hand, as if we were in a lecture with Kusakabe-sensei instead of listening to a Special-Grade renegade. “They’re beings that form when cursed energy from humans builds up over time from negative emotions. The stronger the negative emotion, the stronger the cursed spirit will be.”
“Excellent work, newbie,” Tsukumo-san snaps her fingers in approval.
I barely have time to be processing the fact that apparently, she knows of me before she continues on,
“Now, this means there’s two ways to make a world that doesn’t create new cursed spirits. One: Eliminate cursed energy from mankind. Two: Make it possible for all of humanity to control their cursed energy.”
“Which would be easier?” Suguru asks idly, voice deceptively light, but his eyes are rapt on her as she gesticulates through her theorems. I don’t blame him. I am too, even without the fascination that bleeds through both ends of our bond.
“I thought number one had a good chance of working-- there was a case study for it too. Someone you’d know pretty well. Zen’in Toji.”
The shudder I suddenly feel at the mention of the name defies all sensation I’ve ever felt before-- just a sickening twist of the stomach as if the bottom had dropped out of it, and just kept on dropping. Gojo with a blade arcing through his chest-- the perpetual imperviousness, gone in an instant. The bright grin of the same young girl I keep seeing in our shared nightmares, always interrupted by the sudden blast of a bullet.
Suguru was afraid. Of this Zen’in Toji.
Of this Sorcerer Killer, ghost or no.
I reach out, fumble, scoot closer, and grasp his limp hand in mine-- and thankfully, Tsukumo-san’s too preoccupied in her musings to notice, or care about something like two fourth years doing public PDA. He doesn’t push me away. But he doesn’t reciprocate either.
“I’ve seen plenty of cases where a Heavenly Restriction brings a person’s cursed energy levels down to the benchmarks for a non-sorcerer, and even newbie there has, if not something exactly like him, then that delicate balance the higher-ups wanted, of just enough cursed energy to perceive curses and reinforce her body, but not enough to channel into a technique.”
Suddenly, Suguru’s vehement reaction to me when we first met that one cloudy day, when winter was still stubbornly trying to hold ground against the ongoing encroachment of spring, makes a lot more sense. Hateful, yes. Angry, yes.
But most of all, scared.
Of me, despite the fact that he outpaced me in all else-- experience, skill, power level, everything.
His hand flips over, and grabs onto mine, our calloused palms rubbing together.
“But you could search the whole world and never find another case like his, where the total cursed energy output dropped to zero. That’s wasn’t the only thing about him either. Because even though he had zero cursed energy, he could still perceive cursed spirits with his own five senses. By completely forgoing cursed energy, it’s like his body eventually built up a resistance to curses completely. He was truly superhuman. You shouldn’t be ashamed of losing to him.”
But that didn’t matter to Suguru. Not when it cost him people he’d loved, cared for, and wanted to protect.
“I wanted to study him, but he turned me down. Shame. At least there’s the Warders implemented now. He must’ve scared the geezers at the top more than I realized. But with him gone, option 1’s looking pretty farfetched.”
She sighs slightly, sitting up a bit more. “For all that they gave me shit for it, I guess the higher-ups just might agree about option 2 to some extent, given her,” she waves a hand over at me. “They practically stole my thesis anyways to create the Goei-shi,” she scoffs.
My lips twist. “Which is?” I ask.
“Making it possible for all humanity to control their cursed energy. Did you know that cursed spirits aren’t born from Jujutsu Sorcerers? Excluding cases where the sorcerer becomes a curse after death, of course. Compared to non-sorcerers, Jujutsu Sorcerers leak extremely little cursed energy. There’s some variance based on the sorcerer’s capacity and the amount of cursed energy their technique expends, of course, but the main reason’s the flow. Jujutsu Sorcerers can circulate cursed energy through their bodies well. To put it in rough, general terms, if all mankind became sorcerers, no more curses would be born.”
A pregnant pause permeated the air.
“So, to force the evolution--” I began carefully, the questions racing through my mind. The implication of a world without curses. No more dead kids tucked away in abandoned auditoriums. No more taste of ash and rot in the back of my tongue, mirrored from a soul bonded next to mine. No more monsters in the closet, crying on a cold shoulder that could never understand/
What kind of future would that be?
Somewhere in that insurmountable hypothesis, I can almost taste the freedom.
“-- You’d have to kill all the non-sorcerers.”
“Suguru!” I interject, aghast, at the same time Tsukumo-san cuts in sharply with, “Geto-kun.”
Half reprimand, half musing.
Outside, the rain begins to patter down, as it were often wont to do in the summertime. Lightly, at first, and then in a thunderous roar, like applause in a stadium, though that analogy felt foreign even to my own mind.
“It’s possible. It could even be the easiest way to go about things,” Tsukumo-san replies instead. “Forced evolution through becoming sorcerers as a survival strategy, the same way birds gained wings.”
Ice sinks into the pit of my belly. A world without non-sorcerers? I wasn’t even considered a proper sorcerer myself. I look over at Suguru, only to find his gaze turned resolutely forward. Hand in a white-knuckled grip around my own fingers, absently drumming his thumb along the ligaments of my own hand, but seemingly heedless of the alarm that crept in at the edges of my own consciousness.
But then again, I think of the nights spent in a dark bathroom. Of the welts across my body. Of nightmares of creatures crawling all over my room, my bed, my chest.
Curses were curses. But the hatred and indifference of people was a curse in and of itself as well.
“Do you hate non-sorcerers, Suguru?” I whisper, and my voice sounds small even to myself.
I see him inhale, sharp, trembling, the press of his lips shaky.
“I don’t know.”
The swirl of conflict in him-- that much was real, at least. The cocktail of uncertainty, of shattered ideals.
“I thought you were supposed to protect the weak.”
“I did too,” he retorts bitterly. “And you made me able to look at non-sorcerers without resentment again. I was able to focus on the admirability of the weak again.”
I clench my jaw. So that was why he felt such a need to protect me, to the point of being a juggernaut, an unstoppable motion to save me-- from this life? From myself? Or from him?
And from him-- the stubborn insistence that he wants to reject the part of him that hates the non-sorcerers, the weak that preyed on the weak for the sake of feeling powerful. That his vision for what the endgame of being a sorcerer would entail was so vague now-- with the Star Plasma Vessel. With the Sorcerer Killer. With the Warders-- that he couldn’t put a thought to a feeling, let alone a voice to a thought.
“So you’ve got options,” Tsukumo-san’s voice cuts through the tense standoff we hold against each other in our bonded thoughts. “You’re not defined by your feelings on the matter. Not right now, at least. But one day in the future, you’re going to be faced with two choices.”
She points down the corridor to the glowing exit sign. “Either you give into the part of you that hates the non-sorcerers. Or you continue on with protecting them.” she then points to the corridor from whence I’d come.
Sickened, I get to my feet. “Why are you telling us this?” I demand, my shoulders shaking with the burden of knowledge.
Tsukumo-san’s gaze scans over me. “Because like it or not, what the two of you have represents a kind of future. Whether that’s a good one, or a bad one-- that part’s up to you.”
“So, it’s just some kind of sick thought exercise to you??” I spit out.
“No.” Suguru’s hand comes up to grasp at my wrist now, anchoring me. “She’s right. I will have to choose.”
“No, it’s not some case of-- you either hate them or you protect them,” I mutter. “I hate my parents, but not all non-sorcerers. You don’t hate me, only the people who deserve it. Only an idiot deals in absolutes.”
“Maybe so,” Tsukumo-san drawls, some kind of realization dawning across her face as she looks between the two of us.
“But you’ve already made your choice, haven’t you, Geto-kun?”
A/N
Hiiiii I'm so so sorry I haven't posted in like 2 months for this fic-- life really came at me super hard, between all the holidays and work and everything-- but here I am, back now!
A bit of a filler chapter-- but I kind of wanted to write the conversation with Yuki from MC's perspective, especially as an outsider to the Jujutsu world.
God I'm so excited for S3 and Mojuro!!!
I hope you enjoy reading!
did we drink the poison, or just the placebo? // geto x reader; chapter vii
How to be a human being.
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.・゜゜・ ・゜゜・．
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ao3 link ☾ masterlist ☾ playlist ☾ art credit: arekushisu_11
Rating: M
Word Count: 4.1k
Warnings: Hidden Inventory Spoilers, depictions of PTSD and depression, mentions of Geto-typical fantastical racism
There’s a look that Suguru’s parents exchange with each other as Mr. Geto parks the car, and as soon as Mrs. Geto is out of her seat, she’s opening up my door for me, all but herding me out from the backseat-- not in some way that implies a wrangling, but a kind of insistent curiosity. I can’t blame her. I’m rather an oddity where things are concerned-- not a sorcerer, not exactly a civilian either. Somewhere straddling the in-between, and perhaps suddenly I had been joined to her son, her only child, in mind, body, and soul.
She loops her arm around mine-- the same kind of firm hold I’d been familiar with from Suguru, but from a woman who’s a whole head or thereabouts shorter.
Across the car’s roof, Suguru bangs his head on the door as he gets out with less elegance and a lot more nerves, wincing slightly. His father chuckles and claps him on the back. “I’d like to see the library here, son. I wonder if they’ve archived the original Michizane manuscripts.”
And just like that, I’m alone with his mother as the men disappear ahead through the gates, their voices fading under the glow of the setting sun.
She leads us slowly through the classroom wing, and I’m struck all at once by it-- her familiarity, as if she’s paced these halls before.
I wonder at it-- envision Suguru, a handful of years younger, hair shorter and eyes wider. His father’s voice rings in my head-- He used to have nightmares. Before he came here-- to Jujutsu High. And he would cry, too, about monsters in the closet, around the shoulders of people we met, hiding in the corners of the alleys. But then-- he’s brought to this school, and I picture a younger Suguru taking his mother’s hand, showing her around the classrooms-- excited to show off the campus, and how well he’s settling into this new life, where the creatures that once haunted the edges of his consciousness fell under his dominion instead.
The halls are quiet, the chatter of the usual day-to-day replaced with the silence of empty classrooms and last twinkles of golden evening light slanting across the floor. Somewhere in the distance, I think I can hear the rest of our friends returning from the restaurant-- Gojo’s loud voice filtering through the distance and walls till it’s a low buzz in the distance.
“I’m glad I could get you alone,” Suguru’s mother says, her tone light, conversational. But when I glance at her, there’s something sharper in her gaze-- attentive concern, the way that I’d imagined a mother might hypothetically approach someone their child is close to-- trying to gauge if I were truly good for Suguru or not.
By god, I hope I was. I straighten almost instinctively, dipping my head in deference. “Of course, Mrs. Geto.”
“Shiori’s fine!” she insists with a lopsided grin that reminds me of Suguru’s rare smiles, with the same wry overlap of her canine tooth, squeezing my arm-- and the tension dissipates somewhat at her casual nature. “You’re my son’s Warder now. There’s no need for formalities.”
Then, without missing a beat, she continues-- “I just want to know your intentions with him.”
I blink, momentarily thrown. “Intentions?”
It echoes in my mind like a word I’ve never had to define before, ricocheting around like a pinball machine. What were my intentions?
Suguru was my partner. My keeper, as I was his. Bound by will, by ceremony, by vows, by threads of cursed energy and something that went even deeper but that we couldn’t put the words to. But the moment stretches too long, and I feel the expectant weight lingering.
I try to ease my stance, forcing myself to sweep my expression into something neutral. I can feel Suguru through the bond now, a faint flicker of concern reaching for me, checking if I’m all right after being whisked away for what might still turn into a shovel talk with the woman who’d brought him into this world.
I swallow, smooth the surface of my roiling mind over until it becomes like an unperturbed pool, gently nudging his inquiry to the side.
“I know you care for him,” Shiori adds, sensing my hesitation. “That much was clear-- or we wouldn’t be here right now.”
My breath catches slightly, and I flush-- not with embarrassment, but with the sense that I’m being put on the spot. “I do care for him,” I say, quieter now. “I care for him, a lot.”
I don’t say how often I think of his hands, steady on my face when I shattered after the first mission. Of how our bodies moved together on the training pitch, like two neat cogs in a perpetual motion machine. Or the quiet companionship of shared meals, of shoulders brushing, of wordless understanding.
“His eyes follow you. Like a sunflower always turns its face to the sun,” she says kindly, her pace unchanging.
Something tender and vulnerable bubbles in my chest, like a million butterflies fluttering south for winter.
“I want to be good for him,” I reply, voice almost a whisper.
She beams, and it’s like watching Suguru through a veil of years-- the same eyes, creasing into crescent moons, the same press of their lips into an arc, but there’s crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. Delicate, paper-thin folds by her mouth. Silver shot through her dark hair.
I look at her, and hope against all hope that Suguru will live to develop that same grey streaking through his hair.
“I think you already are,” she says.
I can feel him.
It was strange at first-- uncanny, even. Everything came through-- all the guilt, concern, tension, hunger, pain, fatigue. It was disorienting, like trying to navigate the day-to-day while handcuffed to someone else-- even though distance would provide a bit of a buffer to the full brunt of our collective emotions, and the notion of shielding at least some of our less pleasant moments had occurred in some degree to both of us-- whether it was the embarrassment of what essentially amounted as my declaration of love for him in front of his mother, or trying to slough off the dust from the cursed warehouse after he’d been assigned to inventory the weaponry with Kento-kun and Yuu-kun.
The first time he tried to absorb a curse after a mission, I nearly threw up. I retched so hard I had to lean over the roof of the industrial plant we’d been dispatched to, gripping the railing like a lifeline while the acrid taste of something rotten, something wrong clawed its way up the back of my throat. I felt him sense my nausea, and when I finally gathered myself enough to look up, his expression was stricken, cheeks pale, eyes wide with guilt.
He looked mortified-- and I could feel all of it, like a pot of scalding water poured over my head that makes my face flush and ears heat. Embarrassment mingled with self-loathing, his thoughts sinking lower and lower into the black hole in his mind-- She thinks I’m disgusting. I should’ve warned her. I should’ve done it when she’s somewhere else--
I cut him off before he could keep spiralling.
“‘M fine,” I mutter, wiping my mouth and forcing myself upright, even though the taste of rot still lingered in the back of my throat. “Let’s go.”
I grab onto his hand-- half anchor, half comfort.
His ears were red for the rest of the afternoon-- still flushed as we disembarked from the car, as we walked stiffly out of the debrief with Principal Yaga. Still burning as we trudged through the courtyard toward the dorms, the dusk light rose-tinted and soft against the cobblestone. Stubbornly ruddy even as he’d fumbled through the pockets of his pants, pulling out a box of cigarettes.
I wondered if that was why he smoked so much-- why the scent of tobacco perpetually clung to his uniform and the stray wisps of his hair. If it were some kind of effort to scrub the lingering taste of curses from his mouth. To dull the edge of the burden and the monstrosity he had been forced to carry within himself.
He glances at me then, as if the thought had burrowed into his consciousness at the same time it had bloomed into my mind, with the striking of a flint that produces the flame at the tip of his lighter.
“Yeah,” he murmurs, “I guess it is.”
I blink, hunching slightly in semi-bashfulness. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to.” He offers a faint, crooked smile-- no censure, just a kind of wry self-debasement that I myself felt all too familiar with. “I could feel it.”
Then, almost as a reassurance, he’d reached back into the pocket of his pants, producing a cigarette that he held out towards me, an offering tucked between two fingers. I glance up at him-- and then take it. Not to smoke-- instead, I tuck it into the breast pocket of my uniform. A souvenir, a keepsake, a kind of odd totem.
After that, the missions changed in nature. More recon, more auxiliary support, more civilian aid, fewer exorcisms.
I hadn’t said a word about it, too afraid of being branded as weak by everyone again-- what kind of Warder wasn’t even able to hack it through her partner being the one who had to swallow down curses?
But part of me suspects Suguru did-- casually, offhandedly, maybe, some mention to Kusakabe-sensei or Principal Yaga, or somebody, or someone with the authority to shuffle assignments around.
Not for himself. For me.
And something feels like a dry swallowed pill that just wouldn’t go down my throat when the suspicion began to coalesce in my mind.
Because I could feel it, in a way-- the hum of protectprotectprotectprotect from his brain like a backdrop of white noise.
Just as I could feel the pits he sank into on those nights when even the moon’s hidden its face away.
And the guilt. Sharp and burning. He didn’t think he deserved the lenience. The lighter missions. But I did, in his eyes-- and I wanted-- no, needed-- to prove myself so he wouldn’t have to.
The irony wasn’t lost on me-- now that we were bonded, our emotions were even harder to parse, harder to navigate, like walking through a hall of mirrors while drunk, when before, I felt at least the ability to gather my nerves up and ask-- a kind of boldness that had all but vanished in the face of my worry-- would he take it as me prying, disrespecting his privacy and boundaries?
We were still fumbling through it all-- trying to navigate what it meant to be among the first sorcerer-warder bond pairs. It was so experimental that even the elders who’d degreed the program implemented hadn’t anticipated half the side effects.
Like the fact that when I snuck a few drinks with Shoko on Saturday night, Suguru woke up hungover on Sunday morning halfway across campus, groaning and irate, with no clue why his head was pounding. Or the hunger that bound the two of us together in lightheaded deliriousness if Suguru had forgotten to eat.
And the steady fire behind it all that never burned out-- protectprotectprotectprotect that became one core, one thought shared between our two consciousnesses.
It all blurs together, in a way-- classes, missions, exams, debriefs. And now, graduation looms.
But it doesn’t hit with the weight I expected-- no clean break or freedom or a closing chapter, like I’d always imagined finishing high school would feel like.
Because we’re informed-- gently, bureaucratically-- of the option for an additional post-grad year. A sort of bridge program. We weren’t being ordered to take it on-- but we were strongly encouraged to take it, in order to properly train us for field work as professional sorcerers, especially those who were going to be assigned mostly “high-risk” cases.
As if that decision had already been locked in. But it must have been since the day Suguru set foot on campus-- there was no way they would loose their grasp on a special grade like him. Not even as his psyche tore at the edges from the weight of what they asked.
And yet, he doesn’t ask it for himself. No-- he never does. But he would, for me.
His fingerprints are all over this. I don’t even need to prod into the bubble of his thoughts to know he had something to do with it-- some tense conversation with Yaga or one of the elders. Maybe even Gojo, if things got desperate enough. There’s that same trickle of protectprotectprotectprotect humming through our bond, and I have to actively shove it away, clenching my jaw to keep my wounded pride from bleeding into the room.
He notices, of course. He always does.
We leave the conference with Kusakabe-sensei in a stilted kind of silence. His hands are shoved deep into his pants pockets, and his expression is unreadable-- neutral, but expectant, as if my displeasure has already bled over into the bond.
I break first.
“You don’t need to baby me,” I interject abruptly.
He slows his stride a little, not quite looking at me. “It’s not about-- ”
“Yes, it is,” I interrupt, spinning to face him just outside the dorm building. “You asked Yaga-sensei for that extra year. Don’t lie.”
A pause. Then-- “I asked if it was possible to defer a year after graduation. I didn’t demand anything.”
“So you did bring it up,” I scowled.
He sighs through his nose. “I brought it up because I don’t think you’re ready.”
It hits harder than I expect-- like a mallet over the head. I blink, as if that’ll stop the hurt from showing in my expression. “You don’t think I’m strong enough.”
“That’s not what I said,” he sighs.
“It’s what you meant,” I retort.
He finally meets my eyes. “I meant that you’re too important to risk.”
I laugh-- an exhale that surprises even me with the bitterness laced through it. “So now I’m just a liability?”
He flinches, just slightly. “No. You’re my-- ” He stops. Doesn’t finish the sentence. Doesn’t even try to, hands shoved deep into his pockets, a myriad of emotions flashing across his face.
I turn my face away. It’s too much. I’m tired.
And I hate how much of my self-worth is wrapped up in proving I can do this-- that I deserve to be here, that I’m not just an experiment waiting to fail. Like I failed to protect those kids from the first mission. Like I failed to stand strong by Suguru’s side.
Like I’m failing him even now, unable to reach into the walls of self-degradation and sacrifice he’d put up.
“I like a girl who eats a lot!” I can hear the voice ringing out down the hallway as I pace the campus-- looking for him, ostensibly. I huff out a quiet laugh as I continue towards the source. It seemed very like him-- aficionado for good eats as he was. And undoubtedly, he’d wanted someone who’d also appreciate Rei-san’s recipes and cooking as much as he and Kento-kun both did.
The murmurs continue before an unfamiliar feminine laugh resounds-- “That was sarcasm, y’know!”
“Yuu-kun!” I call, rounding the corner, only to be met by the odd triangulation of the boy I’d been seeking, Suguru, and a statuesque blonde woman who must have been source of the laughter.
“Senpai!” he’d perked up, like an overeager puppy at the ready as he’d noticed my presence. “What’s up?”
I smile at him-- casting a glance over at Suguru in the meanwhile-- mussed in that way that indicated a lazy afternoon with his hair falling in locks around his shoulders.
I hadn’t quite forgiven him for the way that he’d steamrolled on ahead without me-- made the decision with the higher-ups to hold us back a year. I don’t know if my pride could take the hit of the fact that he still felt I was more someone who he would fight to protect, rather than someone he would fight alongside.
His gaze flickers over to me as well, and somehow, I’m aware of the woman’s cheshire grin widening in the background with a soft, “Oh?” as if she knew something we two did not.
“Yaga-sensei has a mission for you and Kento-kun,” I tell him, and the boy springs up out of his seat, posture at the ready and just short of a salute. “He wants to brief you both before you guys leave.”
“‘F’course! You can count on me!” Collecting the can of soda next to him, he waves to us, the remaining trio, and heads off, leaving me with the older blonde and Suguru.
I shove my hands into my pockets as the silence weighs for a few moments before the woman sighs, settling down into the seat where Yuu-kun had been occupying moments prior. “Cute kid,” she comments. “Honest one, too.”
I’m about to murmur an assent when Suguru cuts in with-- “I still think he should be more wary of people as a sorcerer.”
She crosses her arms and shrugs. “Well, that stands to be seen. You don’t need to answer my question anymore, though, Geto-kun. I’ve seen enough.”
What question? I wondered privately to myself, just as Suguru bristles slightly, voice blunt. “Answer mine, then. Who are you?”
“Special-Grade Sorcerer Tsukumo Yuki.” Turning to me, I’m suddenly faced with the full brunt of her attention-- nearly as scintillating as Gojo’s, with this type of weight behind it I’d only ever witnessed in degrees in the face of something like a skyscraper. “What’s your type, kiddo?”
I glance over helplessly at Suguru, the shame welling up inside me-- surely she can’t know or see-- not that I’m ashamed of Suguru-- no, I could never be ashamed of him-- but I just don’t know.
“You’re her.” Suguru states incredulously instead.
The focus breaks, and she grins in this kind of expectant glee, almost, again, like Gojo would have. “Oh?! What do they say?”
Suguru sighs instead. “That you’re a good-for-nothing who wanders abroad instead of accepting any missions, even though you’re a Special-Grade,” he replies flatly, as her face sags in disappointment.
Tsukumo-san rolls her eyes. “Ugh. I hate Jujutsu High,” she drawls, flopping herself back on the bench.
A beat, and she sits back up. “Joking, of course, for legal reasons. But you can say I’ve never agreed with the policies here.”
I cross my arms from my perch by the corner of the wall, the metal of the vending machine radiating coolness that proved a welcome balm against the summer heat. “Why?” the words fall from my mouth before I could stop myself.
She props her chin on her fist in imitation of a sculpture. “They treat symptoms, and I want to treat the root cause.”
“The cause?” I think it, and yet it is Suguru who voices it.
“Rather than hunt cursed spirits, I’d like to create a world in which they’re no longer created.”
Something in the back of my mind recalls the taste of waste and vomit and misery, and a young girl whose face I’d only ever seen in my nightmares with her blood seeping into ancient brickwork.
“Care for a little lesson?”
It’s too late. She’s reeled me in. I unfurl myself from my stance, and settle on the edge of the bench-- perpendicular to Suguru himself. A gap between us the breadth of his arms wide, humming with tension.
“What are cursed spirits, to begin with?”
I raise my hand, as if we were in a lecture with Kusakabe-sensei instead of listening to a Special-Grade renegade. “They’re beings that form when cursed energy from humans builds up over time from negative emotions. The stronger the negative emotion, the stronger the cursed spirit will be.”
“Excellent work, newbie,” Tsukumo-san snaps her fingers in approval.
I barely have time to be processing the fact that apparently, she knows of me before she continues on,
“Now, this means there’s two ways to make a world that doesn’t create new cursed spirits. One: Eliminate cursed energy from mankind. Two: Make it possible for all of humanity to control their cursed energy.”
“Which would be easier?” Suguru asks idly, voice deceptively light, but his eyes are rapt on her as she gesticulates through her theorems. I don’t blame him. I am too, even without the fascination that bleeds through both ends of our bond.
“I thought number one had a good chance of working-- there was a case study for it too. Someone you’d know pretty well. Zen’in Toji.”
The shudder I suddenly feel at the mention of the name defies all sensation I’ve ever felt before-- just a sickening twist of the stomach as if the bottom had dropped out of it, and just kept on dropping. Gojo with a blade arcing through his chest-- the perpetual imperviousness, gone in an instant. The bright grin of the same young girl I keep seeing in our shared nightmares, always interrupted by the sudden blast of a bullet.
Suguru was afraid. Of this Zen’in Toji.
Of this Sorcerer Killer, ghost or no.
I reach out, fumble, scoot closer, and grasp his limp hand in mine-- and thankfully, Tsukumo-san’s too preoccupied in her musings to notice, or care about something like two fourth years doing public PDA. He doesn’t push me away. But he doesn’t reciprocate either.
“I’ve seen plenty of cases where a Heavenly Restriction brings a person’s cursed energy levels down to the benchmarks for a non-sorcerer, and even newbie there has, if not something exactly like him, then that delicate balance the higher-ups wanted, of just enough cursed energy to perceive curses and reinforce her body, but not enough to channel into a technique.”
Suddenly, Suguru’s vehement reaction to me when we first met that one cloudy day, when winter was still stubbornly trying to hold ground against the ongoing encroachment of spring, makes a lot more sense. Hateful, yes. Angry, yes.
But most of all, scared.
Of me, despite the fact that he outpaced me in all else-- experience, skill, power level, everything.
His hand flips over, and grabs onto mine, our calloused palms rubbing together.
“But you could search the whole world and never find another case like his, where the total cursed energy output dropped to zero. That’s wasn’t the only thing about him either. Because even though he had zero cursed energy, he could still perceive cursed spirits with his own five senses. By completely forgoing cursed energy, it’s like his body eventually built up a resistance to curses completely. He was truly superhuman. You shouldn’t be ashamed of losing to him.”
But that didn’t matter to Suguru. Not when it cost him people he’d loved, cared for, and wanted to protect.
“I wanted to study him, but he turned me down. Shame. At least there’s the Warders implemented now. He must’ve scared the geezers at the top more than I realized. But with him gone, option 1’s looking pretty farfetched.”
She sighs slightly, sitting up a bit more. “For all that they gave me shit for it, I guess the higher-ups just might agree about option 2 to some extent, given her,” she waves a hand over at me. “They practically stole my thesis anyways to create the Goei-shi,” she scoffs.
My lips twist. “Which is?” I ask.
“Making it possible for all humanity to control their cursed energy. Did you know that cursed spirits aren’t born from Jujutsu Sorcerers? Excluding cases where the sorcerer becomes a curse after death, of course. Compared to non-sorcerers, Jujutsu Sorcerers leak extremely little cursed energy. There’s some variance based on the sorcerer’s capacity and the amount of cursed energy their technique expends, of course, but the main reason’s the flow. Jujutsu Sorcerers can circulate cursed energy through their bodies well. To put it in rough, general terms, if all mankind became sorcerers, no more curses would be born.”
A pregnant pause permeated the air.
“So, to force the evolution--” I began carefully, the questions racing through my mind. The implication of a world without curses. No more dead kids tucked away in abandoned auditoriums. No more taste of ash and rot in the back of my tongue, mirrored from a soul bonded next to mine. No more monsters in the closet, crying on a cold shoulder that could never understand/
What kind of future would that be?
Somewhere in that insurmountable hypothesis, I can almost taste the freedom.
“-- You’d have to kill all the non-sorcerers.”
“Suguru!” I interject, aghast, at the same time Tsukumo-san cuts in sharply with, “Geto-kun.”
Half reprimand, half musing.
Outside, the rain begins to patter down, as it were often wont to do in the summertime. Lightly, at first, and then in a thunderous roar, like applause in a stadium, though that analogy felt foreign even to my own mind.
“It’s possible. It could even be the easiest way to go about things,” Tsukumo-san replies instead. “Forced evolution through becoming sorcerers as a survival strategy, the same way birds gained wings.”
Ice sinks into the pit of my belly. A world without non-sorcerers? I wasn’t even considered a proper sorcerer myself. I look over at Suguru, only to find his gaze turned resolutely forward. Hand in a white-knuckled grip around my own fingers, absently drumming his thumb along the ligaments of my own hand, but seemingly heedless of the alarm that crept in at the edges of my own consciousness.
But then again, I think of the nights spent in a dark bathroom. Of the welts across my body. Of nightmares of creatures crawling all over my room, my bed, my chest.
Curses were curses. But the hatred and indifference of people was a curse in and of itself as well.
“Do you hate non-sorcerers, Suguru?” I whisper, and my voice sounds small even to myself.
I see him inhale, sharp, trembling, the press of his lips shaky.
“I don’t know.”
The swirl of conflict in him-- that much was real, at least. The cocktail of uncertainty, of shattered ideals.
“I thought you were supposed to protect the weak.”
“I did too,” he retorts bitterly. “And you made me able to look at non-sorcerers without resentment again. I was able to focus on the admirability of the weak again.”
I clench my jaw. So that was why he felt such a need to protect me, to the point of being a juggernaut, an unstoppable motion to save me-- from this life? From myself? Or from him?
And from him-- the stubborn insistence that he wants to reject the part of him that hates the non-sorcerers, the weak that preyed on the weak for the sake of feeling powerful. That his vision for what the endgame of being a sorcerer would entail was so vague now-- with the Star Plasma Vessel. With the Sorcerer Killer. With the Warders-- that he couldn’t put a thought to a feeling, let alone a voice to a thought.
“So you’ve got options,” Tsukumo-san’s voice cuts through the tense standoff we hold against each other in our bonded thoughts. “You’re not defined by your feelings on the matter. Not right now, at least. But one day in the future, you’re going to be faced with two choices.”
She points down the corridor to the glowing exit sign. “Either you give into the part of you that hates the non-sorcerers. Or you continue on with protecting them.” she then points to the corridor from whence I’d come.
Sickened, I get to my feet. “Why are you telling us this?” I demand, my shoulders shaking with the burden of knowledge.
Tsukumo-san’s gaze scans over me. “Because like it or not, what the two of you have represents a kind of future. Whether that’s a good one, or a bad one-- that part’s up to you.”
“So, it’s just some kind of sick thought exercise to you??” I spit out.
“No.” Suguru’s hand comes up to grasp at my wrist now, anchoring me. “She’s right. I will have to choose.”
“No, it’s not some case of-- you either hate them or you protect them,” I mutter. “I hate my parents, but not all non-sorcerers. You don’t hate me, only the people who deserve it. Only an idiot deals in absolutes.”
“Maybe so,” Tsukumo-san drawls, some kind of realization dawning across her face as she looks between the two of us.
“But you’ve already made your choice, haven’t you, Geto-kun?”
A/N
Hiiiii I'm so so sorry I haven't posted in like 2 months for this fic-- life really came at me super hard, between all the holidays and work and everything-- but here I am, back now!
A bit of a filler chapter-- but I kind of wanted to write the conversation with Yuki from MC's perspective, especially as an outsider to the Jujutsu world.
God I'm so excited for S3 and Mojuro!!!
I hope you enjoy reading!
ao3 link ☾ masterlist ☾ playlist ☾ art credit: arekushisu_11
Rating: M
Word Count: 3.1k
Warnings: Hidden Inventory Spoilers, depictions of PTSD and depression, mentions of Geto-typical fantastical racism
He hadn’t really anticipated them showing up-- obviously, there had been the paperwork that Kusakabe-sensei had promised to pass onto them to sign, but then here they are, in the flesh, and he can’t help but feel like a little boy again-- even before he’d knelt down before the altar with her by his side.
From the moment he’d stepped over the threshold of the shrine-- seeing flashes of their faces, somehow an island in a sea of jujutsu sorcerers, a steady cove to the vibrant whirlwind of cursed energy emanating from all his schoolmates, till now, the ceremony complete.
“Mom? Dad?” his voice cracks slightly, and he swallows-- before he’s buried in a flurry of arms.
“Suguru!” Geto Shiori, always exuberant, wraps him up, and suddenly, it feels like every ailment, pain, and ghost of the past year has been exorcised through the grasp of her hands around him. Suguru feels his arms come up around him too, and he lets himself deflate slightly, in a way he hadn’t been able to for the past year.
“You’ve grown,” Geto Daisuke notes-- pride in his eyes as he takes stock of Suguru-- now surpassing him in height, broader shoulders too. He had always more the reserved one, mirroring his own son’s introverted personality, but he too clasps Suguru on the back, nestling his wife’s head under his chin-- the three of them, as it always had been.
His mother swatted playfully at his father’s shoulder, and the trio ebb apart a bit more as she takes hold of his shoulders, turning him to and fro-- Suguru prays to whatever is out there listening that he doesn’t look as world-weary as the last year had made him feel. “You were tall before,” she told Suguru firmly, straightening his uniform collar and shining the button with her thumb. “But now you look like a proper grown-up. I’m proud of you.”
Suguru laughed weakly. There was something almost painfully breathtaking in the simplicity of it-- the way their joy folded around him like nothing had ever gone wrong. Like he hadn’t spent the last year trying to put himself back together, piece by piece, only to come up a few shards short. Like he hadn’t spent the last year sending terse, one-word responses to their texts and ignoring their calls or requests to bring his friends over for dinner again.
“I didn’t want to make it a big deal,” he said, scratching the back of his neck. “It’s such a new thing being implemented in the Jujutsu world.”
Shiori shakes her head, brushing an errant bang out of his face, and Suguru wrinkles his nose slightly-- though he towers over her now, she still treats him like her little boy. “We wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she mother insists. “Kusakabe-san said this Warder ceremony was important when we had him over for tea.”
“I didn’t understand half of what he explained,” Daisuke admits, mirroring his son with a sheepish hand to the nape of his neck. “But it sounded formal. You didn’t tell us you’d be kneeling in front of the shrine and sharing sake like you were getting married.”
Unwillingly, he feels himself flush. “It’s not… marriage.” He continues babbling slightly, feeling flustered. “Besides, the yakuza do that in the movies too-- it’s about trust, and--”
“Mm-hm,” his mother hummed, an implication in her tone and a glint in her eyes.
He opens his mouth to protest-- and then there’s--
Nervousness. Reticence. Hesitation, maybe. A glimmer of a stream of consciousness-- Am I intruding?
And so he turns around.
She’s standing just a few paces off, hands clasped neatly in front of her, all prim and proper, so at-odds with her usually proud demeanour, a half-smile on her face-- and all of a sudden, he hates the ceremony, hates the formality, just wants that devil-may-care attitude back, where she tries to face the world with her shoulders squared and fists up.
He reached a hand toward her instinctively, closing around her wrist-- a casual, possessive point of contact he felt all the more conscious of given his parents’ presence.
“Mom, Dad-- this is my Warder,” he says, pulling her into their throng.
She steps forward smartly, as if on a choreographed beat, bowing her head in greeting. “It’s an honor to meet you,” she said, offering her hand. “I’m glad you both were here to witness Suguru’s ceremony.”
“Ours,” he corrects, feeling a tug of fondness at his heartstrings-- who did it belong to? he wonders.
Shiori grins-- forgoing the formal handshake for a full-on hug. “She’s pretty,” his mother notes to him, once she pulls away, and he can sense the frisson of shock through both the bond, and the dumbfounded expression on his Warder’s face. Beneath it, bashfulness-- and he knows it’s doubly amplified given that his own ears have begun to redden.
His father matches the energy a bit more, inclining his head in a slight bow to her in turn. “Thank you for vowing to watch over our son,” he’d said.
“He watches over me, too,” she responds back.
Blame it on the shine in her eyes, the earnestness. But Suguru’s mind blanks, and suddenly there’s--
Oh.
If his heart felt merely fond just moments before, it feels fit to explode by now, and he wonders vaguely if he’d been afflicted with arrhythmia.
If he’d told the himself of last year that he’d be willingly binding himself to a girl with barely any cursed energy control and no cursed technique, he’d have laughed himself off of this mortal coil.
Thank goodness for Satoru, who at that moment seized the opportunity to sweep into an overdramatic bow in front of his parents, and-- ew, yuck, cringe-- pressed a smacking kiss to his mother’s hand and then complimented his father on his good taste.
Brought out of his reverie, Suguru can only kick halfheartedly at Satoru’s shins, prompting a loud, indignant squawk from the white-haired boy, whilst his parents crack matching smiles at their antics.
Despite the physical retaliation, though-- Suguru privately thanks Satoru in his head for bailing him out. He definitely doesn’t tuck that particular feeling into his head for later interrogation.
Definitely not.
Fuck.
Dinner’s at a nearby izakaya in town.
“Our treat,” his mother had insisted, just as his father rounded the corner out of the school gates to call for reservations.
Satoru, seeing the opportunity and jumping decisively upon it, says, “Great! We’ll all come!” while throwing an arm over Suguru and his warder’s shoulders-- what with his freakishly long limbs and all.
“Ma,” Suguru says instead, somewhat alarmed.
“Don’t worry about it,” Shiori laughs. “We haven’t seen any of you in so long-- let them come, son.” He, regrettably, can tell why she got along so well with Satoru-- they were practically the same person in different bodies. And given how his father was basically an older version of himself, he can also see why he put up with Satoru as well, by the same math.
Satoru grins, unrepentant, and Suguru shakes his arm off with mock disgust. “Ugh. Weren’t you guys supposed to give me some alone time with my parents?” he’d demanded of his friends, hands propped upon his hips. She, of course, wasn’t included in the reprimand.
“And miss out on some good food? No way!” Rei-san shot back, and Suguru can obviously see her elbowing Yu-kun with no subtlety at all.
On cue, the younger boy deploys the puppy eyes. “Please, Geto-senpai?”
Halfheartedly, Suguru flips them off-- Satoru in particular, who blows a kiss to him in response. “Fine,” he sighs.
“See, there’s being a good sport,” his mother coos, thumbing at his cheek, and at the ensuing, slightly mocking, awww from Shoko, he almost feels tempted to walk into traffic.
They’re idiots, but they’re our idiots, he feels through the bond, and glances over at her. She raises a brow, bumping her shoulder up against his arm.
He finds himself smiling back as well, just before his father returns, slipping his phone into the pocket of his trousers. He throws his wife a thumbs-up, which she responds with in kind. “The reservation’s set-- we have a table and a booth, and there’s unlimited first-come, first-serve seats at the bar. We’ll see the rest of you there, Suguru and his Warder can ride with us--”
It’s like the floodgates are thrown wide open, as half a dozen hungry teenagers scramble for any mode of transport whatsoever-- Shoko peeling out of the parking lot with Satoru clinging to her back like an insistent lichen, Rei-san booting up her old sedan whilst Yu-kun throws himself into the passenger seat, leaving Nanami to climb into the back.
The lights are warm and golden inside, and so is the feeling awakening in his chest.
It’s one of those nights where the breeze carries on the scent of the mountain greenery, more than the grease of the city, where the sun’s barely begun its descent to brush the sky with a rose-tinted lens.
At the bar, his mother is nursing a bottle of beer and trading embarrassing stories about him-- he knows, because Satoru’s cackling too loudly for it to be anything else, tossing the occasional (and yet still too frequent) sly commentary over his shoulder towards their booth.
“Remember how he used to write haikus,” Shiori says with a proud-but-wicked grin, “and tack them up around the house? About heartbreak, and the burden of greatness, I think?”
“Don’t forget the one about the futility of time,” Satoru supplies, leaning on the bar next to her with all the smugness of a cat that’s caught the cream, expertly recalling Suguru’s peculiar decorational choices that he’d never gotten the chance to take down. He takes a sip of his soda and then calls over his shoulder, “Hey, Suguru-- what rhymes with ‘dark night of the soul’ again?”
“Your funeral,” Suguru mutters from the booth, not even looking up.
Satoru laughs so hard he’s nearly falling out of his stool, and next to him, his Warder giggles before shoving the takoyaki plate towards him as penance.
Shoko has returned from her smoke break, bringing in a scent of tobacco and night breeze with her, with Utahime-senpai tagging along as well this time, the older girl making a beeline for his booth.
“Congratulations to you both,” she whispers under the ambience of Satoru’s mirth (Suguru swears the two of them sync up briefly in that moment with the twice of their eyes). “I can’t stay long-- I have a recon mission with Mei Mei in an hour and a half, but I wanted to come grab some drinks and appetizers before I disappear.”
Nanami and Yu-kun and Rei-san are seated at one of the tables, digging into their kushiyaki skewers with gusto. Suguru’s grateful they’ve opted out of the humiliation ritual. Nanami, he suspects, avoids it on principle-- seldom one to humor Satoru’s antics. The Haibaras, bless their souls, are probably just too focused on the food to notice anything else.
The air inside the restaurant feels mundane, full of life and possibility-- no curses, no jujutsu, no death. And a booth, in their alcove of calm, he sits with her, his father across the table from the two of them.
They’re not plastered together-- not like he’s seen couples do on occasion, but somehow, Suguru thinks to himself, the few centimeters of distance they’re keeping between themselves for modesty’s sake feels even more supercharged with electricity.
Daisuke has the same violet eyes as his son, though the years have paired his with a kind of weight and wisdom, and laugh lines at the corners of his eyes to match his wife’s. Suguru almost starts shifting in his seat on her behalf, as his father takes measure of her. Geto Daisuke isn’t a cold, or particularly strict parent, but he had a way of seeing people-- in a way that meant Suguru never was able to really hide anything from the older man.
“Suguru’s been through a lot,” Daisuke begins, his voice even.
She glances at him-- a bit startled at first, a bit unsure of who’s being addressed-- and then she nods. “I know,” she murmurs.
One hand is braced around a cup of tea, the other, on the table-- finds Suguru’s, laying over his. Not quite lacing their fingers together-- that would leave too many implications (and might just put him into cardiac arrest)-- but a kind of steadying anchor.
“He’s always been quiet, almost shy. Sensitive, too,” his father continues. Suguru knows better than to interject or interrupt-- he knows this is more for her, not him-- he’s just here to bear witness. “Since he was a kid, even though he doesn’t like showing it at all.”
She offers Daisuke a small smile. “That’s still him.”
“I know,” Daisuke responds with a nod. “He gets the introversion from me. The stubbornness from his mother.”
His eyes glance back toward the bar, to where, to his horror, Shiori is starting to produce a camera-- and from the way Satoru’s wiping at his eyes and doubling over, it’s definitely embarrassing baby photos. Next to them, even Shoko’s peering over curiously, occasionally dipping her fingers into the bowl of edamame that Utahime-senpai’s nibbling at, the older girl half-heartedly flicking at Shoko’s hand before allowing a pod to be plucked from the bowl anyways.
Daisuke lets out a sigh, as if sinking into the cushions of the booth, lacing his hands in front of him. “I don’t pretend to understand the world you live in. Jujutsu sorcery, exorcisms, curses. Your bond with him. We’re just civilians, after all. But we raised our boy hoping he’ll always do right by people, and by himself as well.”
He flushes. Pretends to continue surveying the other patrons of the izakaya. The date that seems incredibly taken aback by the descent of high schoolers upon their dinner spot. The old cook behind the bar, being waved over by his mother to look at the pictures on her camera. Rei-san shoving more food into her little brother’s mouth.
Satoru might have the Six Eyes, but no one could piece Suguru together with more discernment than his father did, even if he didn’t know the full extent of it-- the nightmares, the despair, the dark thoughts that crept up into his consciousness until they were choking his very brain. The thud of a small body, and the kick of a shoe. The refrain, monkeys.
“He used to have nightmares,” Daisuke continues, more softly now. “Before he came here-- to Jujutsu High. And he would cry, too, about monsters in the closet, around the shoulders of people we met, hiding in the corners of the alleys”
“I did the same,” she offers up-- a sliver of her childhood, in exchange for the honesty of his, through his father’s mouth.
“We couldn’t do anything about it, not really-- we took him to specialists, to doctors, to psychiatrists. They suggested he was-- unwell-- schizophrenic, or something of the sort. But we knew it couldn’t be that-- or not just that, at least. We didn’t know what it was. We just knew we had to do something to help our son.”
He can feel her swallow down a shaky breath next to him, and he flips his palm over. Lets the heat of his hand find hers. As much comfort for himself as for her, at the mirror of her own childhood, and the way the two outcomes seemed like polar opposites of the other.
“He’s found something special here,” Daisuke says at last. “People who understand.”
How much did one really understand? Satoru’s so far ahead of him. Shoko’s on a completely different path.
And then there’s his shadow, his Warder. Who tasted the unwilling bitterness in a wholly different manner, who threw herself in after him, and--
“Thank you for taking care of my son,” Daisuke repeats his sentiment from after their bonding ceremony.
She looks down at the depths of her teacup, cooling down by now, the strands of leaves drifting idly around in the glassy surface. “I’ll try my best. He takes care of me, too, Daisuke-sama. I need him as much as he needs me.”
“What do you think of her?” he asks later-- his father’s gone to pull the car around to the front, and now it’s just him and his mother, pacing through the campus grounds. “My Warder.”
She laughs, and in the moonlight, for the first time, Suguru realizes that the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes when she smiles have etched themselves permanently into her skin. That there’s more grey hairs on her head than the last time he’s seen her, over a year ago, just before that fateful summer. “I got to talk with her a little, too,” she’d said.
Suguru had suspected that much at least-- on the way back, Shiori had looped her arm around his Warder’s, and he felt the pulse of nerves through the bond, so potent he nearly tripped over his own two feet as he was getting out of the car, before it was muted completely into the vague sense of his Warder’s presence wandering the hallways of the school, as if she’d tamped down on the full extent of what she had been feeling during the conversation.
“Hm?” Suguru tilts his head at her, keeping his voice deceptively light-- trying not to sound too desperate for the information, or for approval. “And how did that go?”
He wonders briefly if she just spent the time sharing the baby pictures again, as she mulls over her words, before his mother nods. “She’s good for you.”
Not just in battle, or in jujutsu, he could tell from her tone. Not just as a shield or sword-arm. No, it was more than that.
Suguru exhales through his nose. Good, he thinks in relief. He’d wanted his mother to approve of her. For all his mother loved embarrassing him in front of friends, Shiori loved effusively, as if she were simply bleeding it out over everyone and everything-- and to her, he would always just be her baby boy, who she still went to light temple incense for every other month. And if his mother approved, then that meant he made the right choice.
They pass by the stone bench in companionable silence, only interrupted by the padding of their shoes against the stone paths
“I want to be good for her, too,” he admits, hands in his pockets, gazing up at the moon.
“You will be,” she reassures him. “Because you love her.”
A/N
Yes I had to increase the chapter count because I cannot fit the rest of the plot I wanted to use into just the original ten chapter outline LOL. Yes it's because I felt like it was vital to get some time with Suguru's parents.
Also yes the L bomb has been dropped!!! Now back to the reader next chap and girlie is gonna have NO clue what to do when Suguru starts flipping out (in a totally different way from before)
ao3 link ☾ masterlist ☾ playlist ☾ art credit: arekushisu_11
Rating: M
Word Count: 3k
Warnings: Hidden Inventory/Premature Death Arc Spoilers, depictions of PTSD and depression
When I was a little girl, before-- before everything, really, I had always envisioned something like what my parents had: a fairytale proposal, engagement, wedding, and all of that, two of them against the world-- all so typical of a little girl, before the nightmares started, before the love of those around me grew cold. Before I was just the madwoman in the proverbial attic, to pity at best, to abuse at worst.
I’d already been pretty disavowed of the idea that anyone would love me like that, let alone want anything to do with me, given that not even my own parents were willing-- pity, frustration, resentment, and then nothing at all in their eyes-- so funny that their us against the world attitude still remained, I just became the world, instead of being still part of their us. They just shrugged and let me run off with a mysterious older man (granted, Kusakabe-sensei had noble intent, but still, the way they hadn’t even tried to stop me, make sure I was safe, or anything, stung).
But in my time with the sorcerers, I had found… if not love, at least there was fellowship. A sense of belonging.
Drinking on the roof with Rei and Shoko, training with the rest of the Goei-shi hopefuls, Yu joining us as the token boy of the group-- everyone’s resident little brother. Even the outings with Suguru, even if I couldn’t quite forget that tempestuous first meeting.
An asshole turned, partner, I suppose-- and then a bond, later. Sharing cigarettes in a back alley while our friends are inside the restaurant. Sharing glances instead of words, when my first mission leaves us blood-stained with the imagery of corpses behind our eyelids.
The way he says it, makes it almost sound like a proposal-- if you’ll still have me, that nervous uptick of his voice, and I bite back a giggle at it, even as I have to swallow down my own spit so as to prevent my heart from jumping out my chest.
There’s no ring, no archway of flowers or photographer or anything really, because this is not that kind of offer, nor that kind of bond.
But I can’t exactly ignore the implications (for goodness sake, we’re even supposed to sip sake together in the ritual), the invitation for the two of us to bind ourselves so closely together that we would become one mind, one body, one will in a fight.
But it wasn’t as though we were lucky enough to have anything else, either, because in the Jujutsu world, we fight, and we die, and only those in the clans were lucky enough to have the luxury of attachment to titles, and spouses, and children.
This was it, this was the closest anyone will ever get to us, the closest we’d be ever able to get to anyone else. Because we were a Jujutsu sorcerer and his Warder, and we’d leave no widows, no orphans behind us, barely a funeral to begin with.
I nod, but I don’t think I’ve said anything really-- and I don’t think I’ve even really looked at him since he posed the question. I turn my face to him now, praying that none of my apprehension shows through.
I think he understands what this means for the both of us. I don’t need to say anything, but-- “We should probably head inside, before Gojo-san eats all of the food.”
I see the corner of his lips quirk up slightly, and he drops the cigarette onto the concrete, stamping the ember out with his shoe.
Granted, no one seemed surprised by the decision-- especially given that we had been training together for several months now by this point, and starting to do missions together.
Nonetheless, there was a veritable heap of paperwork to get through-- Kusakabe-sensei to sign off on our training, the higher-ups to approve of the pairing, and--
I pause, pen hovering over the squares that ask for parental names and approval-- and Kusakabe-sensei smiles, shaking his head. “You don’t have to worry about that part,” he’d noted, pulling the sheet across the desk to him, scrawling in some “non-applicable” standard that he signs off again on.
It’s not really pity in his tone, but something bordering on it, mostly since at the time that he’d tracked me down, I’d been about to be locked in the bathroom at home again with a black eye after my latest suspension.
And for a brief moment, I feel a sense of what the wedding industry might call cold feet, because telling Suguru abstractly that my parents used to beat me, and Kusakabe-sensei having witnessed the aftermath of it, were somewhat different things.
How could he stand to know of me as having been that weak?
Suguru never thought of you as a coward.
The first time is always the hardest.
We can’t save everyone.
I couldn’t stand by. I’m supposed to be one of the strong ones-- so why can’t I use it to defend those who deserve it?
I hope I deserve it.
I hope that in another world, if I stayed under the thumb of my parents, stayed ignorant to my abilities, stayed weak, he would still find me deserving of his protection.
I think of quiet comfort in the haze of cigarette smoke, of spring jogs along the riverwalk, of bakery visits that Gojo loudly objected to being excluded from (only to be placated by subsequent treats brought back just for him), of the wooden clash of practice weaponry as we circle each other on a training-yard.
His gaze, with the hue and depth of a sky that was burgeoning with a summer storm, steady hands.
I think of my ghosts. The nights shivering on the cold tile, locked in the bathroom, the welts on my back, the way I still sometimes cringe away from physical touch.
I think of what haunts him too, the incident I still don’t know about, the way he speaks with such finality of a before, and an after, of a bygone foolish idealism, of weakness that doesn’t deserve shelter, of the cynical set to his lips.
I can do this. He can save those who need saving-- and I can safeguard him in turn. I’m not a coward, I’m his Warder. I square my shoulders, taking in deep breaths as if trying to face down a monster-- and not a bureaucratic form, and sign and date my own name.
Another mission, one that goes far easier than the first-- a Grade Three curse exorcised, nothing more, which seemed almost laughably kind of paltry given that Suguru was, obviously, a Special Grade sorcerer. Part of me wonders if Suguru said something to someone about assigning us lower-grade curses during this preliminary mission stage, seeing as our first outing was pretty-- well, traumatizing, for lack of a better word.
“Good work,” he’d said on our drive back to school-- and despite myself, I preen at his praise.
“This one was a lot easier to handle,” I reply lightly.
He’d hummed some kind of agreement, and we fell silent after a while-- the twilight countryside passing us by outside the window as we begin our ascent up the mountain.
“Did you already meet with Kusakabe-sensei to sign our application for the Warder bond?” I ask him-- I had been pulled into the meeting alone, so I didn’t know whether or not Suguru had been approached yet either, assuming either of us had any last-minute reservations we wanted to voice in private.
“Yeah, it went pretty smoothly,” Suguru had nodded, profile cast in sharp, rose-tinted relief from the chiaroscuro of the sunset, and the dimness of the car.
“I’m glad,” I’d said-- at least it went well for one of us, I thought, half-ruefully, as we pull to a stop in front of the school’s gates.
We disembark, and with a bit more haste than usual, I thank Manager Konoe, turn my cursed weapons back over, and, jog a little to try to keep up with Suguru, who’s already heading inside.
“Look,” I’d interjected, cutting almost a bit in front of him, turning up to face him-- “Suguru-- before we go through with the ceremony, you should know more about me.”
His brows furrow-- disturbing a few hairs from his forehead in the process from where they’d been plastered to his skin with sweat. The silence of an implicit, Go on, lingers between the two of us.
“Kusakabe-sensei waived my parental approval forms,” I blurted out-- not sure exactly where to start. I knew we’d briefly discussed this before-- but otherwise, he’d, somehow tactfully, skirted the topic of family life, given that for a good portion of us, it seemed to be something somewhat, well, complex, to say the least. “They probably as good as disowned me when I came here.”
We slowed our pace along the campus paths, coming to a stone bench-- worn kanji inscription probably commemorating some clan member sponsor or another-- but I’d taken a seat, still rather fatigued from the day (or maybe I just wanted something to brace myself against during the conversation).
“They--” I swallowed slightly. “They told me I was better dead than being alive to disgrace them the last time I saw them, right before Kusakabe-sensei knocked on our door. They used to lock me in the bathroom.” My hands are shaking.
“I try not to think about them too much. It was really bad, Suguru.”
I feel like a coward all over again. I feel like a child all over again.
I rub at my face, almost aggressively-- feeling the grime slough off from the training and the mission, before a firm grasp takes hold of my wrists-- arresting my motions.
Suguru had pulled my hands off my face, slowly, carefully. “I try not to think about things, either,” he admits, nearly sotto voce, so softly that if it weren’t for his eyes on mine, I would have almost imagined it.
I didn’t realize I had been crying until he blurs in my vision, until the tears are dripping off my face with an almost rhythmic tap against the stone seat, like a water clock.
“What happened last summer?”
He stills, and for a moment, I think I've gone and done it, ruined everything we were building. The smile he gives in return is pained. “I-- I failed.”
His hand reaches up to cover mine-- for comfort. His, or mine? “I just hope you won’t think any less of me for it.”
“I won’t,” I whisper back.
“I let a girl who wasn’t even Kiyotaka’s age die.”
We can’t save everyone, he’d told me-- or had it been him trying to tell himself?
“Amanai Riko… She was meant to be the Star Plasma Vessel-- Master Tengen’s new body, but several groups had instead put bounties on her head. Curse users, cults, and the likes-- because not everyone wants Master Tengen to be able to retain her barriers technique that protects the Jujutsu world.
“Satoru and I wanted her to have a few final days, before she was to become assimilated with Master Tengen. To-- just be a kid, y’know.”
Like we all were supposed to be. Suguru, visibly cracking under the weight of the guilt. Gojo, fielding off the pressures of his clan honor and obligations. Rei, caring for a brother who had with merry dutifulness thrown himself into an unending fight against curses.
Me, thrown away by my parents, abandoned on a cold tile floor.
“And then there was the Sorcerer Killer,” he swallowed, and I can see the way his grip tightens on my hand somewhat, the way his eyes flick to and fro, as if adrift in a tempest. “A mercenary assassin. But he’s like nothing else-- you can feel, you can sense everything around you, in a way-- even you, I can feel to some extent, but he was just… a void. Nothingness. And the moment Satoru turned off his technique while we were in the school grounds--” he mimes a stabbing motion.
“I should have stayed to help. I should have called for backup. But Satoru told me to go, so I did--”
A tenuous, shaking press of his lips together-- I can see the divots appear in his chin from the force of it. “I should have just taken Riko directly to Master Tengen,” he said. “Then, the Sorcerer Killer wouldn’t have--”
He sighs, and then, leaning forward, lays his face down across my lap-- as if I were the altar upon which he could seek his absolution.
“But then, I would have failed Satoru, who wanted her to be-- a normal teenager for once, and make the choice for herself whether or not to assimilate.”
“And yourself,” I heard myself adding.
He doesn’t respond to that, but I can feel his fingers tighten almost convulsively against mine.
“But now I’ve failed Jujutsu society as a whole-- and Riko died for nothing, because Master Tengen stabilized anyways. Riko died for nothing, and was hunted for nothing,” he concluded bitterly. “The only thing that happened was that I learned that I was weak. For letting Satoru die to the Sorcerer Killer, and Riko, and her guardian too, Kuroi. I have blood on my hands, innocent blood-- and I didn’t even get to avenge their killers.”
I feel dampness atop my thighs-- concealed tears-- and I thread one of my fingers through his hair, ever so gingerly. Comfort, or benediction? I smoothed over the frizz, the stray strands that escaped his neat bun as his shoulders trembled, but pretended not to.
“I can’t protect you. I can’t even protect anyone else.”
“Then I’ll protect you,” I whisper in response.
Our application is approved, and a week later, we’re kneeling beside each other in the campus shrine.
We’re in our usual uniforms-- of course, there was no pretense of formality on that front. We were two commoners who were dragged from mundane lives into a world of curses-- two soldiers, nothing more-- so there was no need for a lavish ceremony to appease whatever clans, or any more attendants. Just Principal Gakuganji as our priest, and Principal Yaga and Kusakabe-sensei as our official witnesses-- though further back in the chamber, all of our classmates were gathered-- the Haibara siblings, Shoko, Gojo, Nanami, Kiyotaka, even two graduated sorcerers-- one dark haired woman, one with white hair, the two of them-- and several others from my Warder training.
And behind them-- a stately-looking woman with hair that was turning silver, and a broad-shouldered older man-- and I realize, passing them by as we were corralled into the temple, from the frission of shock that ran through his body, and from the way he’d looked like a miniature of them both, that these must be Suguru’s parents.
Gakuganji pours out sake for us-- first, into a small, flat cup (there would be two more subsequent cups of these, of increasing size, and each time, we were meant to down the drink in three sips, mirroring a Shinto marriage or sworn brotherhood ceremony.)
(A good way to rat out the underage drinkers, I had quipped to Suguru while we were reviewing our steps for the ceremony-- he had, to his credit, snorted slightly, which I counted as a win, given that our previous conversation had been so grim.)
He drinks before I do-- three measured sips, and then the cup is passed for me to hold steady while it’s refilled. The sake burns pleasantly down my throat, warm like the balmy spring weather that formed the atmosphere for our ceremony. But even despite the cool breeze and the bright sun, I feel jumpy from the nerves, watching everyone else show up for our ceremony-- a streak of guilt lances through me on cup two at the realization that I hadn’t gone to Rei’s ceremony to become Yu’s warder.
By the third cup, my knees ache a little and my ankles are numb from the kneeling, and Suguru reaches out his hand, a steadying support to help me up as we’re handed the scroll for the Binding Vow to read aloud together-- more a formality than anything else, since a Binding Vow would be any kind of thought or statement that was sworn with weight behind it, but this part, apparently, was to appease the higher-ups, so they wouldn’t kick up such a stink about fundamentally restructuring the way Jujutsu sorcerers worked on their missions.
On this day, before the Jujutsu world, we bind ourselves. Henceforth, let us-- here, we said our full names-- become one will, one mind, one mission in battle. To guide and protect one another, and the world at large from curses, from this day, till our last day.
A simple vow-- our voices nearly in harmony as we read along the scroll, after which Suguru could place it back onto the altar, the two of us sinking into a bow.
I feel it settling over me, in a way-- this kind of sensation… next to me, I can feel his presence more so than ever. Not just the warmth radiating from his body, nor the nerves of the ceremony, but somehow, deeper. Impressions of thoughts-- not in the way where people read minds, but somehow, his nerves seem to bloom in my ribcage, too, and I’m aware both of the angle of my own body-- my breaths, the placement of my hands, the way one of my eyes stings slightly from the incense-- as well as his, as if it were also mine-- a perennial itch in the back of his throat, phantom aches of old battle-scars.
I look up from the bow, and his eyes find mine immediately, as if we had turned in sync, the inhales rising in our chests at the same exact time, and polite clapping filters in through my awareness-- grins in the back, and in front of me, a smile from a boy who had been in dire risk of forgetting how.
And so it’s done.
I am his, and he is mine, until we both die.
A/N:
Up next: we meet Suguru's parents!!! (yes this is because of the new Gege art now that I know he's a total momma's boy so of course the Missus has to be introduced to them)
Who else is crying over the new Hidden Inventory content dropping cause I SURE AM! I wish almost that I were able to incorporate a bit of the stuff from that into earlier chapters, but I also get the impression that a lot of those photos were of before Suguru started his depressive spiral, so we'll handwave it that way...
Maybe I can write some spinoff slice-of-life drabbles once I'm complete with the full story though hmmmmm
ao3 link ☾ masterlist ☾ playlist ☾ art credit: arekushisu_11
Rating: M Word Count: 3.5k
Warnings: Hidden Inventory/Premature Death Arc Spoilers, depictions of PTSD and depression, descriptions of blood, gore, and vomit, underage drinking, allusions to Geto-typical fantasy racism
It really was strange, how things could feel so normal sometimes.
He’s had months to cope. There’s stages to grief, and anger, and madness. Despair wasn’t a constant visitor, after all-- it liked to lie in wait, till your guard was down, and then stick a sword in your chest without you ever getting a glimpse of it first and--
He shakes away the thoughts of Fushiguro Toji.
But when Satoru suggested the arcade this morning, it had been as if nothing had ever gone wrong. And Suguru had been all too willing to fall into the pretence as well.
He missed him. He missed this, Satoru hanging off his shoulders, Shoko walking beside them, the blue sky vaulted above them, so full of promise.
Like this, he can almost imagine he’s still part of the strongest duo, still a sorcerer to be admired and looked up to. Like he can still protect the weak.
Like this, he can almost imagine he doesn’t have blood on his hands.
It’s how the warder looks at him sometimes. Waiting for his lead, for his approval. For some inkling that she’s doing things right. The hesitance of someone navigating a new world, like a newborn fawn taking its first, staggering steps. Intermingled with that, self-assuredness of idealism on someone who pretends they’d done away with heroics.
She’s not so above it after all, not as he’d first assumed, back when she was just another-- he can’t even say the word now, not even to himself-- that thought she could save the world with nothing but a few cursed weapons and a well-placed hit where even the strongest had failed.
She had smirked during their first sparring session when she’d managed to sock him on his chin. And despite his fury at being caught off-guard in the moment, after a few other failed sparring sessions, his mind had cycled back to her.
She was strong. The only one who actually landed a blow on him. Was it luck, or was it cleverness? A keen eye, watching for the moment his mind slipped elsewhere? Despite their acidic conversation, there was something there-- potential, he tells himself when he replayed their match in his head; unknowingly the standard against which he compared the duels he had with other Goei-shi.
There was a threshold of cursed energy that the higher-ups demanded of these warders, of course, and also a good deal more physical prowess that could be honed into power through their use of their cursed energy. Not all of them were humans with just enough cursed energy to give themselves nightmares-- (not enough to cure themselves of demons) who were plucked out of their homes into this new life a few years belatedly. There were Grade Fours who could never hope to achieve what the likes of him or Satoru could accomplish on cursed energy alone. And the odd auxiliary manager or window here and there, tired of being relegated to the guy in the chair during missions.
He’d taken to watching her. He gauges the precision of her movements, the swiftness with which she runs the track, the hidden strength coiled beneath her skin, somersaults and hits amplified with the cursed energy Kusakabe-sensei taught the warders to channel.
When he came to his teacher with his choice, he’d clasped his hands together in his pockets, standing tall-- feeling a hint of nerves in his gut, an irregular beat to his heart. A kind of hesitance he thought he’d banished after his first year, after Gojo Satoru had taken him in as a friend. An unsurety, a sense he’s treading into some new territory wholly unfamiliar to him.
But why should he be unsure in the face of a warder who would have made it only to Grade Four as a sorcerer if she were lucky, Grade Three if she’d pushed herself to her very limits?
We’re the strongest, after all, Satoru’s voice rang in his head.
To his surprise, though Kusakabe-sensei should have been the one who handled most of the connections, the meetings, she’d approached him a day after of her own accord, as brash and blunt as she had been in their first meeting on the training-pitch. Words were weapons, and she carried hers openly, like a warrior of old. Not with arrogance, but with confidence. The expectation that the world around her would be as she made it, master of her own fate.
She had demanded his time (his money, too), and later, his attention. Or maybe it had been him who offered his ear first, and somewhere between the bakery and the school, as they sat on a park bench and watched the sunset, he came to realise something else.
It’s not just potential he sensed in her. It’s a state of kindredness.
How ironic, that the person who could give him this feeling was nothing but a product of his failure.
If Fushiguro Toji hadn’t killed the Star Plasma Vessel, she would have never been here. She would have been haunted by ghosts, unloved by her peers, and he?
He doesn’t know what path he would have gone down. To the bitter end, certainly-- whatever path he took there. Death was what waited for him, maybe for her as well. Because that was the way things were for those who were lamb-weak. The world was not kind to them. And he, as one of the strong, would have died to a curse or to his own despair, because he tried so hard to save people like her. And there would be people he couldn’t save. Like-- like Kuroi, and Riko, and the teenagers from the school. All the disappearances and deaths that happened before the Jujutsushi took notice of a curse to root it out.
Exorcise, absorb.
He thought he was above it all.
What was at the end of the tunnel but a mountain of corpses?
Maybe he could have died saving her in another life. That, he muses sometimes, would be such a perfect way to illustrate the inevitability of fate, of a red string. The wheel could turn, and suffering could be in store for him life after life but-- for a little bit, at least, in each one, he’d have the little blessings. Satoru and Shoko. The bliss of a final summer.
And maybe, a sliver of his treacherous mind whispered, her.
In this life, though, she decided to get stronger. She came to him, by whatever grace of fate. The fire of stubbornness that the life of a warder stoked in her… well, she could provide him the flame, and he’d gladly play the moth.
Maybe it’s because she had been so kindred to him, but she broke so easily.
A year ago, he’d never been anything but strong. World at his fingertips. If he had known her then, if he’d been sent on a mission with a Grade Four girl who mostly wielded her power through cursed tools--
He thinks he would have still tried to comfort her. Held her for the spans of a few moments before the wheezing of the curse alerted him.
But in the back of his mind would be pity, would be the idea that he was the strong, and he would protect the weak, such as her. He would have nudged her behind him, would have taken care of the curse, would have handed her off to Shoko or Utahime-senpai. Girls who also couldn’t be as strong as himself or Satoru, girls who would understand her better. He would have said, carelessly, It’s normal to have a tough first mission. And left it at that.
The warder though. She wasn’t strong, not the way that he and Satoru were, but what even was strength? Infinity and Curse Manipulation? Nothing to a man with a grudge and a gun. Strength was the arrogance of youth who never before experienced what it was like to fall.
It bothered him, a little. Seeing her crumble.
But she wasn’t weak either. She was--
It’s not a rescue mission, he’d said to her.
I know, she responded, stubborn, refusing his eyes.
She hears it first-- the telltale click-wheeze of a curse’s voice. She still draws her sword, fingers clenching around the hilt like it were her tether.
And despite her distress, her tears, and vomit pooled on the assembly hall carpet…
He summons a curse to attack along with her, and she encircles him in a broad perimeter as she fights-- she’s vicious, he thinks. Almost-sloppy with her swings in her fury. But the buildup of rage in her system merely serves to amplify her strength, the amount of Cursed Energy available for her output.
In the end, his curse pins the other down between a too-wide maw, and she drags the sword through its aracnidean belly till it bursts into a mist of wine-dark blood that splatters over them both.
She turns back to look at him, and he’s suddenly reminded of Satoru at the cult’s temple.
There’s nothing in her eyes as she looks at him-- the killing calm has not yet faded, nor the despair.
She wipes off the blood from her sword with the sleeve of her uniform, and then sheathes it.
“Let’s go,” she whispers, hoarse.
He summons his curse back, following after her. “The first time is always the hardest,” he says to her, but his voice is too soft, the abandoned school is too cavernous. She doesn’t give any indications of hearing.
How would two drowning souls manage to save each other from the depths?
There is a tense set to her shoulders when she sees him the next day, and he can’t help but feel a sense of unease at that.
But she squares her shoulders, looks up square in his eyes, and he can’t help but feel a sense of-- he doesn’t know what it is, somewhere between fondness and amusement and relief, something he doesn’t want to interrogate. Not yet.
She’s still so brave. Facing down both curses, and the boys who swallow them, with equal dauntlessness.
Then Satoru speaks, and Nanami-kun snips back, and the ice breaks. Laughing and bantering, the cohort makes their way down to the station.
The metro ride into Tokyo is quiet-- it’s the middle of a weekday, and the salarymen have all been holed up in their offices. They sit shoulder-to-shoulder on a bench in a half-empty train compartment, window behind them and window in front, watching the hills flatten and buildings heighten as they travel eastward from the metropolitan outskirts into the city proper, until they’re tucked deep underground.
Satoru talks his ear off on one side, and the girls sit on another-- Shoko, the Haibaras, and in between them, his-- the-- warder. There’s not much to say-- he’s still fatigued somewhat from the mission yesterday, and soon, his head tilts against the glass and his eyes flutter shut.
He wakes up to the noise spilling in from the crowd in the cavernous subterranean platforms of Shibuya Station, and Satoru laughing in his ear, his head resting on his friend’s shoulder, and he can feel, rather than see, Satoru grinning from ear-to-ear.
“We’re here,” he says. “You drool, by the way.”
Suguru scrunches up his nose. “Do not.” He shoves at the other boy as he stands, back popping with the aftereffects of a good nap, and Satoru’s cackle tails after him as they spill out of the train car with only a few seconds to spare before the doors slide shut and the train speeds away.
They catch up to the others at the foot of the stairs, Satoru quickly ascending to the head of the pack. “Let’s go!” he says, as they climb out of the station.
Like this, they just look like a group of high school friends. Like this, everything feels like it’s normal, like the taste of a curse hasn’t lodged itself permanently in his throat.
Like they could laugh about exams, and senior year pressures; colleges or people they liked; idols or new trends.
Suguru wonders what the common people milling about Shibuya Station every day would make of this motley group of teenagers: a group of schoolyard punks cutting class, he hazards. Haibara-kun with his jacket unbuttoned, him with his long hair and piercings, Satoru with his sunglasses, Shoko with a cigarette hanging from her lips, Nanami-kun with his hair ash blonde, Haibara Rei’s platform boots and martial arts shirt, and the warder in a long skirt that made her look for all the world like a sukeban.
They spill into the arcade, and he can’t help the bemused chuckle that bubbles from his lips as Haibara-kun pulls her to a chair, taking a seat on the other side, professions of “No, really, Yu, I can’t play it--!” dancing in the air along with the dings and whistles from the arcade machines and the Mortal Kombat voiceover.
She loses in less than five moves, with Haibara-kun snickering, and Satoru materialises next to her chair, gently prodding her out of her seat and pulling it back for Rei to sit on.
“That’s all well and fun, folks--” Satoru cuts in abruptly, a shit-eating grin on his face-- “Buuuuuut let’s just call that a practice round?” he bumps a mischievous shoulder against Shoko.
“Don’t bully our juniors like this, Satoru,” Suguru finds himself half-scolding, half-banter, in defence of Nanami-kun and Haibara-kun.
“Ah, ah, ah!-- Haibara-chan beat your little friend with no issue,” Satoru waves an index finger at Suguru, and Suguru deeply suspects that he wanted to say another word in place of friend, if only to embarrass Suguru. “So I’m sure they can go up against the likes of Shoko, Rei-san, and I, eh?”
Suguru sighs, rolling his eyes at Satoru, sharing a commiserative moment of eye contact with Shoko. This fuckin’ guy, it said. “Fine, fine,” he laughs.
“Remember-- winners get treated to food by the losers!” Satoru says, clapping his hands together and looking downright smug, like a cat who got into the cat food canister. “So you better get to playing.”
Rei-san lets her younger brother beat her at the arcade, which was pretty predictable as far as match-ups went, but Shoko had pretty much wiped the floor with Nanami-kun in return.
He’s up against Satoru-- we’re the strongest, after all-- and it’s close. Tense. He feels Haibara-kun hanging off the back of his chair, hollering in his ear at every near-hit against Satoru, cheering him on. From the other side of the machines, there’s Haibara-kun’s sister, and Shoko, and… she’s looking up. At him.
The light from the arcade machines dance across her face, and blues and reds make violet. The glint of her eyes in the half-dim lighting. The curve to her lips.
His breath catches in his throat.
On the screen, Satoru lands the killing blow against him.
Haibara-kun’s overdramatic bewailing of their loss against Team Satoru drags his attention back to his team, and Suguru sighs, looking at the two stipend-less underclassmen.
“Just pay me back when you’re being sent on missions,” he says good-naturedly, and Haibara-kun’s face brightens again. Even Nanami-kun looks less sour than usual.
Seven burgers for Satoru (he cackles as he places the order, dramatically swiping Suguru’s card with a flourish, and Suguru flips him off in return, which the poor clerk doesn’t even bat an eye at), a soda float for Shoko, ramen bowls for the Haibara siblings that Rei-san insists on paying for herself, and--
She hesitates whilst peering up at the menu-- as if despite the terms of the bet, she still felt a slight sense of trepidation to put such a strain on his wallet now. Funny, really, considering the fact that she’d had no trouble dragging him out to a noodle stall barely a week prior.
Suguru gently brushes against her shoulder with his elbow. “Rule’s rules. Don’t worry about it-- everyone will just pay me back eventually. Besides,” he can’t help the amusement from seeping into his voice, “Out of all of us here, you’ve been the most trouble for my wallet.”
She stares up at him almost sheepishly. “You should get something to eat, too,” she tells him.
Right--
He looks to his schoolmates with their meals, Satoru scarfing down his burgers with relish, Shoko sprawled out in the booth with her soda float… Nothing tastes good anymore. He used to have a little semblance of appreciation for things like flavour and texture, even if the wires often got crossed in the aftermath of some harder missions, the taste of a curse intermingling with the taste of his food.
But ever since the Star Plasma Vessel mission, since Riko-chan died, since Satoru came back from the dead, anything he’d put into his mouth had tasted like nothing but curses, unless it was a cigarette. Bile and ashes, bitter and sour and venomous.
The fondly pleasant smile on his face freezes for a moment too long, just enough for it to have solidified into a veneer-- “Hm? I guess you’re right, yeah,” he shrugged. “Later. Besides… My team lost, and Haibara-kun only got a meal because Rei-san paid.”
She twists around to look at their classmates. Nanami-kun scowls right back at them. “Well… since we’re all out here, we should all at least eat together, right?” she murmurs.
“Why would I want to gorge myself on junk food like Satoru over there?” he wrinkles up his nose for effect.
“Oi!” Satoru, hearing as keen as ever, mock-scowls for effect, mouth still full of food.
She giggles a little at that, and something spreads through his chest like a sip of cold water on a hot summer’s day. “Then I want forty chicken nuggets, and a side of cheesy corn, fish ball soup, and three waters, Geto. Sharing’s non-negotiable, by the way.”
“Like I said-- nothing but trouble for my wallet,” he mutters at her, but he doesn’t know how much longer he can go, suppressing the inherent fondness in his voice that seemed to bleed out for her.
She takes the tray of food, divides it up between the three of them-- Nanami-kun, Suguru, and herself, and then digs in with relish.
He sips at the water. Watches her as she coaxes Nanami-kun from a state of dourness into begrudgingly eating, as she banters with Rei-san and Shoko across the table, as she expertly parries Satoru’s teasing.
Like this, he can almost pretend they were normal kids. Like curses and techniques and death wasn’t an impending worry that always lingered in the back of one’s mind. Like he was just a boy, looking at a girl charming all their classmates. Charming him, too.
“I need a smoke,” he mumbles to the assembly, and stands up, hand coming out of his pocket to retrieve the pack from Shoko.
He stands, and doesn’t look across the table, because he knows what he’ll find, her face turning up at the scrape of his chair against the linoleum, so attuned to his moods already even with such a low amount of Cursed Energy. The way the worry would etch itself over his face.
The way his own stomach flutters with some kind of unidentifiable thrill, triumph at the burden of proof: there, he was cared-for. Seen.
There’s no use saying anything else, really, because even as he strides out of the shop into the side street, he knew she’d make some excuse to follow him out, anyways. Even with the air conditioning unit droning on behind him, even with the scent of stale oil in the alleyway that mixes with the scent of tar and tobacco as he lights up.
The smoke fills his lungs with a kind of quiet fog that subdues the rest of his brain.
She appears at his elbow out of the mist, with an almost canine kind of fealty. He’s appreciative of the way she doesn’t really say anything, just extends her fingers out-- and he removes the lit cigarette from his own lips, hands it over to her, like an incense offering at a temple-- smoke and all.
She regards the cigarette for a brief moment, before placing it against her own lips, half-hesitant, as if she knew the motions only from observation, and not practice. He notes the rapid flutter of her eyelashes as she inhales, the brief scrunch of her nose as if the scent were distasteful, but she were trying not to show it.
The cigarette is returned with a smudge of pale pink around the base.
Suguru takes it all in for a moment; the stagnant air in the alleyway, the silence. Not something terrible, like the stillness in his head after Riko had been killed. But a comforting hum, the street just beyond them still bustling with shoppers and commuters alike.
At the girl beside him, the smoke rising around her head like a halo, the light sheen of color over her lips that had smudged onto the filter of his cigarette, imparting a vaguely fruitlike scent to his next drag.
How she’d been all too content to lean against a grimy wall in the alley behind a fast-food joint with him, sharing a cigarette she didn’t know how to smoke, because in some way, she knew he needed it.
Certainty wasn’t a look he wore very well. That was more Satoru’s thing.
But he took a deep breath anyways.
“I want to be bonded. To you, if you’ll still have me.”
A/N:
So hi, I started writing again. Not sure the exact update schedule, but I'm going to try to make it work. I do hope the voices of the characters and their actions were kept mostly consistent throughout though since I picked it up halfway through a hiatus!!!
Thank you all for sticking with this story for this long!
ao3 link ☾ masterlist ☾ playlist ☾ art credit: arekushisu_11
Rating: M
Word Count: 3.8k
Warnings: Hidden Inventory/Premature Death Arc Spoilers, depictions of PTSD and depression, descriptions of blood, gore, and vomit, underage drinking
Water slaps against the tile flooring as I stand, shivering, in the shower. The soap has been scrubbed into my skin till it tingled, nearly stung against the pinpricks of hot water staccato-ing against my back; the shampoo has foamed up in my hair and then trickled down the drain. The steam billows around me, nearly hot to suffocating, but to no avail-- my skin remains clammy, chilled to the touch.
This coldness is of the soul, not the body.
There is salt on my lips. Was it the shampoo? Or was it my tears?
Failure and vomit sat bitterly on my tongue.
Because there was no doubt about it-- I’d failed my field test.
Sure, the curse was exorcised through a joint effort between Geto and I--
(My chin was clasped between his insistent thumb and forefinger, but he couldn’t make me look at him, at the truth in his eyes.
“I know,” I had responded to everything he offered in pity, by rote. I was there, Geto, I heard it as clear as day from Yaga, too. It wasn’t a rescue mission.)
-- So why did this feel like a failure? Like a loss.
We’d ridden back from the mission in absolute silence. Even Manager Konoe had taken a look at my demeanour and forwent any attempt to engage, not even to offer me the rice snacks I’d promised to try earlier.
Geto had glanced over at me every now and then-- but I had ignored him after a terse, “I’m fine.”
As soon as I was out of the car, I booked it-- the wakizashi was given over into the keeping of Manager Konoe again. I didn’t want to look at Geto, so assured of the disappointment I was sure I’d find in his eyes. A few minutes was all it took-- between seeing the bodies, the realisation that these were just two kids who, if not loved each other at least cared enough to try to save each other from the curse, and my breakdown.
A few minutes for the bile to lurch up my throat and splatter across the carpet.
A few minutes for sobs to be repressed into the shaking of my shoulders as Geto folded me into his broad frame.
And in one fell swoop, I went from someone who carried an easy rapport with him, someone equally jaded by life as Geto Suguru, someone he could understand and empathise with on a personal level, to a weakling with a saviour complex who thought she could save the world after doing a few months of weapons training, not fit to be the Warder to a Special Grade.
The main thing was, even if I exorcised the curse today-- what happened before it was something that docked off all the goodwill I’d built with him. I was pretty sure of that. No matter if I were the first one to hear the curse’s clicking as it snuck up on us from the stage, no matter if I had turned, marched forwards so that Geto was shielded by my own body, no matter if I had drew first blood on the creature and watched it dissipate into goo and nothingness with my sword in its heart-- I failed, because I was unable to keep my emotions (or my stomach) in check.
What if next time, I weren’t so lucky, and I didn’t hear the curse? What if it happened again? I was supposed to be his protector. Freezing again, my breakdown today-- that could have been fatal. For me, if not for Geto.
Manager Konoe parks the car. I basically hurtle out of my side of the vehicle and make a beeline for the showers, stopping only to press the sword into Manager Konoe’s hands. I didn’t want to go into my room to properly crumble when I felt so dirty-- vomit and cursed blood spattered across my uniform, seeping into my skin and hair. Even in my currently fraught mental state, I knew I’d regret that decision even more if I were to fall asleep, and wake up with the stench of the mission still clinging onto me.
My fingers prune.
The water doesn’t go cold-- likely thanks to some cursed energy utility that I couldn’t wrap my head around. But I’ve been in the shower long enough. I don’t know exactly how long-- but the the skylight from the showers has turned from the brightness of the afternoon to the pale orange of early evening in the meanwhile, and eventually, I give up on any semblance of comfort from the water.
Wrapping a spare towel around my chest, I gather my clothes up and trudge out of the showers. Then I realise my dorm room was a good ways down the hall, and due to my rush, I hadn’t thought of either grabbing my bathrobe, or a change of clothes. I duck back in, wrap another towel around my shoulders, and begin my trek.
“Hey!”
Have you ever ignored someone addressing you because you’re pretty sure they have to be calling someone else? I kept trudging till I hear someone call my name.
“Oh,” I mutter to myself, realising-- I turn around. “Rei-san?”
The older girl grins at me. “Yo !” She was in uniform, ponytail wispy with sweat-- she must have just come from training. “I just wanted to check in on you-- heard you had a hard mission…”
The resentment comes in a crushing, unwarranted wave. I must look like I’m choking again, shoulders convulsing, face twitching, trying to swallow around the anger in my throat. Who told?
It was bad enough to have lost Geto’s regard in a single afternoon, to have reduced myself down to the basics once again-- I wonder how much gruelling training I’d be put through once more, how many more sorcerers I had to give parts of myself before one would accept me. And now everyone had to know I failed?
Distantly, I was aware that Rei’s face fell, but if I wanted to turn an interaction with someone into having a sequel to my breakdown, I wanted the second part of that equation to happen in the comfort of my own room, wearing actual clothes and not just a series of cobbled-together towels.
She reaches out for my shoulder. I snatch my arm away, and perhaps slam the door harder than I should have behind me. In the moment, I am too upset to care-- afterwards, I’ll feel this distinct burn of shame at rejecting someone’s concern so readily because of my own pride.
It is that shame that leads me here: knocking on Rei’s dorm door, a contraband bottle of sake that I’m pretty sure Ieiri-san had stashed and forgotten in the kitchen (only to be rediscovered by me) under my arm.
“Rei-san,” I call, voice catching slightly-- it’s one thing to let the shame of wrongdoing burn through oneself. Maybe repress it, bury it, pretend it didn’t happen. It’s another thing to ask forgiveness.
I persist. “It’s me. I’m sorry for today.”
The door opens to reveal Rei’s broad face, and though her stance is far more guarded than I’d ever seen her at first, she does acquiesce and let me in.
I stand there, just within the threshold, and brandish the bottle at her. “Ieiri-san had this hidden behind the backings on the sink,” I tell her.
“I’m sorry for today, Rei-san. You’re right. It was a hard mission. Still, I shouldn’t have pushed you away like that.” There is a certain catharsis in the apology. Even for someone like me, who keeps her armour up and her posture distant.
She gazes between me and the bottle, raising a brow. “And you thought that you could make up for it by bringing me Shoko-san’s good booze?” she asks.
I flush a little, bringing it back towards my chest almost defensively. “Well, I wanted to prove my sincerity,” I muttered.
Rei-san laughs a little. “By stealing?”
At my wide-eyed denial, she quickly amends, “It’s all okay! I’ll pay Shoko-san back, though I think I’d feel bad about drinking it just by myself,” she muses. “Will you join me then?”
I shrug at her. Why not?
Here is something you should know about me: I am not quite a lightweight, but half of drunkenness is in how you act, and so if you try to act sober when you’re feeling fuzzy around the edges, you’re usually okay barring some lapses in judgement and slowness of speech, but if you’re trying to behave in a really silly manner, that means you’d be about as shitfaced as someone who’s drunk off their rocker but badly pretending not to be.
I have reached a state of beautiful neutrality after a mug of the liquor. The world around me, the cool March air provides a sobering balance, and a light mist, just enough to be refreshing, tickles at the edges of my mind.
Shoko-san, the student medic who’d patched me up that first fateful time Geto had kicked me in the ribs, had joined us at some point here on the patio-- maybe her cursed technique involved discerning when someone had tampered with her booze, maybe Rei-san had called her over-- and just for good measure, handed us some empty soda cans to prop around so the teachers wouldn’t suspect.
We drank, she offered us each a cigarette, and though we both declined, we nodded our assent at her smoking out here with us.
“Why do you do it?” I asked quietly, my usual filter vanished off to who-knows-where. “Smoke, I mean.”
A stream of white billows out of her nose and mouth along with the acrid scent of nicotine as she exhales, shoulders rising and falling in what could be a shrug. I’d only ever seen her at work, and though we were all just engaging in underaged drinking on-campus, there was still the sense of formality between the two of us. “We all cope in different ways.”
“--cept for Gojo,” muttered Rei-san, and I let out a snort at that. She, oldest of the high school track of Goei-shi, hadn’t sparred with him before as she had already been matched to her brother, but she’d definitely received complaints about him from the rest of us.
There’s a wry smile on Shoko-san’s face even beyond the crooked set of her lips hanging onto a cigarette at the corner. “Eh… even you’d be surprised.”
I blink myself back into something bordering on sobriety. On the other side of the wall from sobriety. The untouchable man, needing to cope? It sounded almost fake to me. “Easy for you to say,” I mumbled.
Rei-san and Shoko-san’s heads turned pretty collectively towards me, and I get the sense that I’ve said the wrong thing since the levity seems to almost completely drain from the air. But I can’t stop. It’s like I’m vomiting again, but instead of my scant meals, it’s my words instead. It’s as if by spewing them into the air, I could lessen the burden they carry on my soul.
“I fucked up so bad today.”
I bury my face in my free hand. The burn of the sake slides pleasantly down my throat, into the core of me, makes me feel less like crying.
“It was these neighbourhood kids that vanished, y’know. The last one was a guy and his girlfriend, he probably took her up there to fool around and whatever, which I guess is stupid, right? It’s just stupid stuff that kids would do,” I babbled. “They’re even younger than us.”
“And they’re dead,” my breath shook. “The curse in the school got them, and I saw the bodies, Shoko-san. He died trying to get to her, trying to protect her from the curse.”
It was that little detail that broke me, really. Dumb ass kids with dumb ass dares, and dumb ass ideas to hook up in the haunted school. But at the end of the day, even despite their stupidity… despite their disregard of personal safety and the law, despite that carelessness… he cared about her. Enough to try to save her. No powers, no cursed tools. Would I have been that brave?
I was afraid I wouldn’t. I was afraid that aside from the trauma of seeing my first corpses, this was what made me break down. I was afraid that Geto saw it too when he looked into my eyes: that despite it all, my jadedness, my grandstanding, my walls-- I was just a big fucking coward who was afraid to die, who wouldn’t be able to sacrifice my life to save anyone else. Not even someone I, if not loved, at least cared for.
I was afraid it was that wordless admission that took me from him.
“I just wish--” I hiccuped. A bead of water falls into my mug of sake. My face feels hot. My eyes burn. “Yaga said it wasn’t a rescue, and they were already dead but what if we agreed to take the mission even half a week earlier?”
“You couldn’t have known,” Rei-san cuts in. “And with the curse exorcised, you’ve prevented more people from meeting such a fate.”
“I’m just a coward,” I replied, and finally dropped all pretence. Burst into hysterical tears. “How am I supposed to be his Goei-shi if I’m such a coward?”
A hand finds its way to my back, in-between my shoulderblades. I can tell that even Rei is at a loss for words here-- either because I was all spit and snot and tears and a contraband mug of booze that was losing it with alacrity, or because she privately agreed with my assessment.
“Well--” Shoko-san’s voice cuts through this tableau, soft, punctuated by a sigh and another whiff of smoke. “You’re not a coward. Suguru never thought of you as a coward.”
One part of me wants to say, really?, all teary-faced and hopeful-eyed. Another part wants to put my head down again, and puke up the sake.
I chose a third option instead. Her words only serve to make me cry even harder.
Shoko had graciously used her Reverse Curse Technique to syphon off the effects of the liquor once the night was no longer young, but the next morning I still woke with the feeling that I’d been run over by a truck. It wasn’t a sake hangover, but a crying hangover, my eyelids unevenly puffy and stuck together, my face itchy with dried tears, and my body somehow aching.
I roll over onto my side, tucking my knees into my chest and groaning. Theoretically, according to Kusakabe, we had the day after a mission to recuperate.
I say theoretically, because what wakes me up is not my biological clock, but an insistent knocking at the door.
Yu’s voice comes filtering in through the door with my name. “Are you up? Rei asked me to get you!”
I peer at the digital clock beside my bed, and find, to my surprise, it’s almost ten in the morning. When my day usually starts around 5 or 6 for training, this is a downright luxurious indulgence in sleep.
“A bunch of us are going to the arcade! Wanna come with?”
“When?” I manage to mumble half-into my pillow.
“Right now, come on,” Rei-san’s voice joins her little brother’s.
Now? “Ahh?” My voice pitches up in a quizzical lilt as I roll myself out of bed, barely managing to kick my blankets back on top of the mattress before they all came thumping to the ground. “Okay, okay, give me a few.”
“Okay! We’ll wait for you down by the school gates, meet us there when you’re ready!” Yu was blessed with congenital cheerfulness. Though Rei was less effusive and exuberant with her energy-- it was pretty damn obvious that the two were related, in their wide eyes that practically glowed with idealism.
Rei-san had told me before that ever since their mother had gotten sick and they moved in with their grandfather, she’d been basically in charge of taking care of her younger brother.
(In some ways, he basically is my life, she’d confided. I’d spent so long looking out after him-- so when Kusakabe asked me if I could do this, what other answer could I have given?)
Kindness ran in their veins, compassion. A determination to make all right-- and not just right as they saw it, but really, genuinely, a desire to do the right thing. To do their best, no matter what. I think of the strongest amongst us-- Gojo’s cavalier shows of strength, of Geto’s bitter standoffishness. And of others, of my own jadedness that clashed with my inability not to care.
Dark thoughts for arcade day.
I’m dressed in ten, deciding to simply go in my school uniform, but thankfully, that seemed to have been the thoughts of everyone else-- even Yu is in his uniform still, white shirt and unbuttoned jacket.
To his side stood Nanami Kento, looking as sleep-deprived and dour as ever, to his other was Rei-san, who waves to me first, and then behind them--
I suck in a deep breath. I might have been a coward in front of a curse, but I won’t be a coward in front of a boy, special grade sorcerer or no. A shock of white hair and string bean limbs hang off of his shoulder like a persistent lichen, Shoko-san’s hair swaying merrily with an unlit cigarette poking from the corner of her lips at his other side.
Something I can’t read flickers across his eyes as they fall upon me.
I fit my hands into the openings of my sleeves, just to give them something to do.
A pause, and then he nods. He doesn’t offer a smile-- I doubt he’s offered one to anybody besides his two erstwhile companions-- but despite the inscrutability of his features, he doesn’t look at me in a bad way, I could say that much.
What had Shoko-san said last night?
(Suguru never thought of you as a coward.)
Even if our warder bonding is off, as long as he doesn't go back to looking down his nose at me again… I can only feel relief at that.
“Gang’s all here, huh?” Gojo quips with a grin. “All my minions together.”
“Please don’t call us that,” Nanami grimaces.
The white-haired boy continues on as if he didn’t hear. “Hey, Rei-san-- you’re the only one of us I haven’t ever battled before. Ready to eat dirt in video games?”
“Always playing just to win isn’t that fun, Satoru,” Geto says, before Rei-san could answer, and at once, I’m struck by how though he’s quite decisive and firm with his speech, how polite, how… gentle he could be, talking to others.
We’re walking in groups, almost-- Gojo leading the pack with Geto and Shoko-san following, Rei-san and her brother and Nanami, while I straggle slightly behind, hands wrapped around my opposite wrists. Spring is in full bloom-- all pale green buds and faint sunlight and a lingering bite to the air.
“Blegh!” Gojo says. “What do you play for besides winning, anyways?”
Shoko-san says something up front that I can’t quite hear, and Gojo laughs. “Tell you what… winners team at the arcade gets food paid for by the losers.”
“Hey!” Rei interjects. “Not all of us can afford your eating habits.”
“Better not lose then,” Gojo calls back, smirk on his face.
Like this, pushing and prodding and joking with each other, I can almost believe we’re just normal kids. Normal high school friends. Are we nervous for our university entrance exams? Have we decided what we’re going to study after high school? What jobs to take? Are we in love? Do we still have sleepovers and whisper about our crushes under the cover of darkness? Are we going to all stay in touch after graduation, or will we all scatter as the winds take us, and slowly lose contact over the years?
“Oi! Come catch up!” Yu calls to me, and snapping out of my reverie, I jog a bit to keep up with the group again.
“GET HIM!” I shriek at Gojo-san, hands braced against the back of his chair as the two fighters on the screen wove back and forth. Pixelated attacks volleyed at one another.
Shoko-san had won her round against Nanami. Rei-san let her brother win his round. Now it was down to Gojo and Geto to tiebreak.
(I had never been to an arcade before-- that required friends, which I had a tragic dearth of before coming to Tokyo Jujutsu Tech, and after an initial round in which I mispressed a few buttons and was killed by Yu within the first few seconds, Gojo loudly proclaimed it a practice round instead and pushed Shoko into my seat.)
But if I couldn’t actually play, spectating seemed just as fun.
I peer over at Geto, his face illuminated by the glow of the arcade machine, brow furrowed in concentration. It reminded me of how focused, almost studious he was with all things-- from portioning out the desserts we’d gotten from the bakery that first day, to his focus on our mishap of a mission yesterday.
God, was it only yesterday? Time seemed to pass simultaneously like a singular droplet of water trickling down a pane of glass, as well as in torrents as furious as a river.
“Beat him up, Gojo-san,” I urged, pumping my first in the air. From the other side of the machines comes Yu’s encouragement for Geto, and I grinned over at the opposing team briefly.
For the span of a heartbeat, his eyes drift from their shrewd focus on the screen, towards the sound of my laughter.
Our eyes meet, and I’m laughing, and the squint of his features in concentration smooths out-- if nothing else, I would have thought he were surprised by me.
I don’t get to interrogate it, though-- because in the next minute, Gojo-san lands the killing blow, and WIN! flashes across our screen, and Geto’s gaze flickers back to his game, grimacing and throwing his head back in frustration.
I follow the line of his throat for a moment before turning back to my team.
“Losers treat winners,” Rei laughs, winking at me, though I’m pretty sure she’d be buying Yu his lunch regardless.
Gojo-san leans back in his seat with a self-satisfied smirk on his face, looking for all his life like a cat that caught the canary. “Well, glad you sided with me, huh?” He pushes his glasses further up his nose, but the brilliant aquamarine of them still gleams out at me, even despite the dimness of the arcade. “KFC!” he calls. “Suguru~ won’t you treat us today?”
Geto has stood up, arms crossed and scowling at Gojo, but somehow I didn’t sense too much rancour in the gesture. “You already cram yourself full of sweets as is-- are you trying to give yourself a heart attack?”
“Psh, nonsense, Shoko’s a doctor-- if any of us die of cardiac arrest, she can just bring us back.”
“Hey, don't look at me. I’m off duty,” Shoko-san offers up, holding her hands up.
A/N:
Hi! Long time no see, y'all. Sorry this is a bit of a less Reader x Suguru-focused chapter, but I really wanted to spend at least some time in the chapters trying to go over the general relationships they have with other characters as well, and those characters with one another. Especially since it'll come up more into play in the future.
- Don't be fooled. None of the three girls have good coping mechanisms. The reader is just too much of a mess to really see that Shoko and Rei are both their own type of messes too.
- I apologise if I'm a bit inconsistent with the naming and honorifics-- I tried to follow a system in which surname only denoted a kind of formal unfamiliarity, surname-san is for a more respectable relationship, first name-san is for a close relationship with a senior, and first name is for a close relationship with a junior. I know it's a bit hit or miss (the reader would probably in theory call Haibara Yu-kun or something), but I'll likely go back and edit it all once I'm done to make it more consistent.
- I think this is gradually stepping over into slow burn (but instead of admitting their feelings Geto and Reader aren't popping the "can we be bonded as warder and jujutsushi" question to each other). Especially since my original thought was that by the end of this chapter the question would have been asked. Ah well-- we'll get there next time then!
- Yes, the arcade scene I imagined as what we see in the Akari season 2 ending credits. I imagine them on their off days basically taking a little day trip, all going to either the Takao or Nishi-Hachioji station (I can't tell where the station is from the shots we get of it in Ao no Sumika unfortunately and it's honestly likely somewhere totally outside of where I set Tokyo Jujutsu Tech in Hachioji City), and from there riding into Tokyo proper, since one of the hangout spots (the vending machines) is really close to Shibuya Station.
- Up next: Back to Suguru. Dammit man, stop having relationship-altering conversations outside of fast food joints.
ao3 link ☾ masterlist ☾ playlist ☾ art credit: arekushisu_11
Rating: M
Word Count: 3.1k
Warnings: Hidden Inventory/Premature Death Arc Spoilers, depictions of PTSD and depression, descriptions of blood, gore, and vomit
“Sooooo,” Gojo drawls, sidling into Suguru’s room one evening (without knocking) and grinning from ear to ear. “How was the date?”
“Not a date,” Suguru immediately replies, eyes scanning the page of the book he’s been attempting to read for the last half-hour or so, hunched over his desk.
If anything, Gojo’s cheshire-cat smile widens. “Hah! So you wanted it to be one,” he jabs a finger in the air, pointing accusingly at Suguru. “Really, Suguruuuu, I’m hurt. I leave on a mission for a week and you’re already trying to replace me?”
Suguru gives up on the book. “Who told you this, anyways?” he crosses his arms. Raises a brow at Gojo, who’s made himself right at home on Suguru’s bed in his outside clothes, probably tracking in dirt and germs and the scent of-- he gently pushes that word back into the recesses of his memory. Sunglasses perched on the tip of his nose, hair boyishly tousled.
There is a streak of resentment that burns through Suguru’s chest at the sight of his best friend.
(Were they still best friends, with the distance wedged between them now?)
He folds in the page of his book, sets it down. How could Gojo look so unbothered, so cavalier, about what happened back in August? Why was it that every time Suguru looked in the mirror, he seemed to get older, but Gojo seemed to stay as fresh-faced and bright-eyed as usual, as if all the trauma and scars were shouldered by Suguru himself, leaving Gojo to charge forth into his future unburdened?
“Shoko,” Gojo chirps. “Obviously. She says your new girlfriend--” Gojo draws out the word teasingly, the pencil Suguru throws at him deflected by his Infinity-- “thinks you’re an asshole, by the way. A huge jerk.”
“We were sparring,” Suguru shrugged quickly. “Things happen.”
“Mhm--” he’s being downright melodious by this point. “But she still agreed to go out with you, right?”
“Don’t be asinine about it,” Suguru grimaces. In some ways, it was a bit similar to dating, like the fact that they went to get food and tried to get to know the other person in a way that determined if he were going to be stuck to her forever, but the differences far outstripped the actual similarities. Usually, on the first date, a girl isn’t going to drop that her parents used to beat her for seeing ghosts.
Case in point, the bakery interview with the Goei-shi.
“So? What did you think?” Gojo shrugged. “You gonna bond her?” he grins, somehow turning that formal term into something that sounded almost dirty. “She seems the impatient type, y’know. Gave up on trying to get through Infinity after about half an hour.”
Suguru chucks an eraser at him next. “That’s because you’re purposefully pissing off any and all potential Goei-shi that Kusakabe is trying to match you up with.” he points out with a small scoff of bemusement.
Satoru groans dramatically, throwing his head back against the pillow. “I know, right? It’s the worst. I already have the matchmaking aunties on my ass back at the clan, do you think I need more people trying to find me another,” here, he makes air quotes,”‘better’ half? Come to think of it, why do you need a bodyguard, anyways? We’re the strongest, Suguru.”
Suguru bites at the inside of his cheek with that one-- the strongest. They were the strongest, but couldn’t even save a fourteen year old girl. Couldn’t defend her against-- what was it? A monkey who can’t even use Jujutsu, the Sorcerer Killer’s voice taunts him in his recollections. His fingers twitch subconsciously against his knee.
And sure, Gojo might have overcame the block he needed on his Reverse Curse Technique after his near-death experience with Fushiguro, and ascended to new heights of his ability, but where did that leave Suguru himself?
Falling behind. Second place. A shaky sigh leaves his lips, and he squeezes his eyes shut.
“Suguru?” The amusement has evaporated from Satoru’s voice. “You okay?”
He blinks himself back into the consciousness of the moment. “No. Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine,” he shakes his head, rubbing at his forehead. “I’m just-- tired, is all.”
“Ah,” a light chuckle from his friend, and he slides off of Suguru’s bed. “Well, I don’t wanna give you too much of a headache-- so,” and Satoru saunters towards the door.
“Yeah, no, it’s fine,” Suguru mutters.
Gojo pauses at the doorframe, and for a moment, Suguru feels the intensity of his Six Eyes trained on him-- a keen, nearly probing presence, all-encompassing, surrounding him to the point of near-claustrophobia, akin to a curious pet poking their nose insistently in his face. Then, the sensation dissipates.
“You know, Suguru,” Satoru says haltingly. Hesitantly. As if the words took an effort to even articulate. “I’m here for you, right? Shoko, too. We’re here, if you-- if you need us. Okay?”
“One-all,” Nanami Kento calls from the bleachers, where he’s refereeing the sparring match. Best of three. The Goei-shi scowls up at him from where she’s pinned, but there’s little venom to the expression now, and she still accepts his hand from where he’s offering it and lets him haul her off the ground.
“One more round and I’ll win this,” he murmurs to her, letting a half-smile lift at the corners of his mouth.
She rolls her eyes in response, and throws him the middle finger as they separate the requisite amount of steps for the sparring to commence. “Yeah, but guess who won the first round?”
“Beginner’s luck,” he calls over in response, shifting back into a ready stance.
Nanami counts down, and then strikes the drum to commence the match. Suguru stands his ground as his Goei-shi comes at him, palms out, a flurry of fabric and blows.
He’s become more aware of her movements, more attuned to her, in the weeks since their first sparring match. He’s jogged with her along the Asa River, he’s introduced her to the various weapons that Wormy carries (the curse had called her Papa at first, much to Suguru’s chagrin), he’s gone emptying his wallets at every bakery, ramen-ten, and konbini in Hachioji (an exaggeration, but sometimes he suspects his complaining about her eating and spending habits simply eggs her on even more), and while they haven’t gone on any trial missions together yet, he’s gotten the sense that she has a fairly level head on her shoulders despite her smartassery, she’s obviously not a coward, and while impatient, she can tough it out through pretty much anything.
Something about her determination to face every day on her feet with her fists up, has him feeling less like he’s about to die than he had since the day Fushiguro happened. After their first proper talk the day they visited the bakery, some of the discomfort he’d felt when the concept of the Goei-shi was first broached to him, the overt mental comparisons of her to the Sorcerer Killer, has faded.
(It was something dark he’d voiced aloud to her that day, something he hadn’t dared tell anyone-- not Yaga, not Shoko, or even Gojo-- that not everyone deserves to be saved. The him of a year ago would have been horrified at that. Even Gojo in his arrogance, his belief in the strong at the top of the pyramid (using their powers for good, of course) would have been discomfited at how matter-of-factly he’d stated it.
But she had just rolled her shoulders, taken the statement at face value. “Maybe so,” she’d declared. “For what it’s worth, my bullies? My parents? If I knew they were being targeted by a curse… I think I would have stood by. I wouldn’t have saved them.”
Her words had hung in the air, lingering like the steam from his cup, coaxing his darker thoughts into tangible form for a moment, and then--
-- She’d continued, after chewing on her lower lip and taking in a deep breath, “But at the same time… I can’t help but think about how even letting them fall through the cracks out of hatred or apathy would hurt actually innocent people. Their parents, or partners, or friends, who do deserve saving. Even rotten people have those who love them,” she’d murmured.
He’s wondered to himself more than once since then-- Am I one of the rotten ones? And, who would love me enough for her conscience to spare me?)
He’s overthinking things. Distracted, almost-- letting her take the offence in the sparring match, all clever footwork and graceful hands. He’s gotten used to her fighting style now, not just in hand-to-hand, but in a variety of different weapons, which is how he can defend against her moves with only half his brain on the task at hand, the other caught up in ruminations.
Nonetheless--
She has him pinned, thighs locked around his and a victorious grin on her flushed face, in less than ten minutes.
Somehow, he thinks to himself, as she offers him her hand to help him up, he doesn’t mind the concession of the match at all.
They’re sent on their first mission together in mid-April-- unbonded, but Kusakabe insists that this is all just part of the process, and they have to trust it. They’ve been integrated into each others’ training, they’ve become something resembling friends outside of training as well, and now…
Auxiliary Manager Konoe looks at them both from the rearview mirror. “The cursed spirit in this area currently is registered as a Grade 2, so it’s likely easily handled. But it should be dealt with quickly, since after all, it’s located in a major residential area.”
Setagaya is the most heavily populated ward in all of Tokyo. They’re headed currently to an abandoned middle school in one of the poorer areas of town; back in 2001, it had burned down after a string of controversies over the years-- such as allegations of money laundering, school violence, and child abuse. The chairman of the school board had been since arrested on charges of insurance fraud, and the dilapidated school campus has since become a site for the youngsters in the area to go prove their steel.
The most popular game: stay overnight in the haunted school, or else you’re chicken.
After a series of recent disappearances of teens dating back to the winter, the jujutsu sorcerers have been called in to investigate.
The files are full of young faces-- four boys, two girls. All under the age of eighteen. With the latest, a boy had taken his girlfriend up there, ostensibly to get up to stuff that was honestly better reserved for the backseat of a car parked in a lover’s lane, and then the two kids both never returned home. Despite being a seasoned exorcist, Suguru has to suppress a shiver at this too, at the fact that these kids, not a single one older than him, have already met a gruesome fate.
(It’s not a rescue mission, Yaga had told them bluntly when the assignment was handed out. We’re not focused on getting anyone out. Just trying to prevent more tragedies in this case.)
Konoe lets them out of the car in what was once the main road leading past the school, through which the hollow husk of scaffolding and half-standing walls peers out at them from beyond the mess of bushes that were once part of the school grounds.
“Thank you, Konoe-san,” Suguru says with a shallow bow.
The manager nods at the two of them, and with the requisite hand gestures and the chanting: “Emerge from the darkness, blacker than darkness. Purify that which is impure,” the midday sun takes on a hazy, desaturated dimness as the curtain closes down over the campus grounds.
“Ready?” Suguru asks her.
She nods back at him, fists closed around the wakizashi blade offered to her from Fushiguro’s inventory that had been confiscated by the higher-ups-- definitely of the more pleasant gifts Fushiguro had left the jujutsu world in the aftermath of his death. Even someone with low amounts cursed energy such as her could use it, and she was already familiar with similar weights and hefts in her practice sword, so it proved a weapon she was definitely capable of handling for their first field test.
Gingerly, they pick through the bushes at the gate, and then wade through the overgrown grass that has since overcrowded the sidewalk. A morose wind picks up, whistling through the walls and windows as they make their way inside the building.
The door squeaks shut before them with a tone of finality.
“Light,” she whispers, and Suguru obliges, calling forth one of his curses-- a luminescent jellyfish that casts a pale violent glow against the endlessly dark corridors.
“Where to first?” he asks her.
She pauses, lets the words settle in, before responding-- muttering rapidly really, as if trying to work out the solution to a complex equation out loud. “We should go follow the residuals, right? Track down the cursed spirit and the exorcise.”
She peers up at him, as if looking for tells that she was on the right track, or that he approved of the ideas. He nodded at her, in what he hoped was encouragement.
“Or else-- we should follow the path the neighbourhood couple would take, to make it easier to draw the curse to us…”
“And in the meanwhile, we can observe more of this place as well, to figure out the nature of the curse.”
The jellyfish curse sweeps its tentacles over the ground, and her face brightens at the sight of footsteps in the dust. “Let’s go then,” she says, pointing off, striding forth alongside the jellyfish.
Suguru watches her for several steps, and then comes to accompany her, backing away along the corridor, guarding her six.
“See anything yet?” she asks, as they turn a hallway, past a series of doors with rotting hinges, or burned-away wood.
Suguru shakes his head. “No. No cursed energy or residuals as far as I can tell.”
“Let’s keep going then,” she decides, though she has her wakizashi at the ready at the draw, and the jellyfish is angled diagonally in front of her left side-- both for light, as well as for protection.
Sudden chills up his spine as they pass a classroom door, the same moment that the sickly-sweet stench of rot hits his nose-- “Wait.”
She halts, a few steps ahead of him, turning back at his command.
“What do you see?” he asks her, jerking his head at the door.
“The door’s--” she squints at the pattern of splintering along the wood, then goes across the hallway, tailed by the jellyfish. Compares the two. Returns to his side. “The break looks fresh in contrast to the ones that received the original damage during the fire,” she says. “Dust and ashes buildup, mould-- none of them are found here.”
Suguru nodded, pushing what’s left of the door open, leading them into an auditorium.
“And-- god, what’s that smell?” she muttered, following in after him, suppressing a sneeze as they kick up a layer of dust.
Suguru can see from where they stand, the source of the smell all too well. It was a familiar stench to him, one that lived in the back of his nose, one that he tasted all too often when he would have to swallow down a curse.
Decay.
Behind him, he hears her come to a screeching halt, and then-- a slight whimper at the sight of the corpses. Twisted nearly beyond comprehension, some kind of violent torsion decorated even the vaulted ceiling of the auditorium with speckles of blood. One on the upper steps, as if having just made it out of the seats, one coming up the aisle, barely-recognizable tatters of their school uniforms still visible--
He thinks it’s strange that the approximate angle of the body is positioned away from the exit until--
“He was-- he was running to her,” she whispered in an undertone, aghast. “He was trying to--”
Suguru supposes what was coming next was to be expected; he certainly fared no better during his first mission after seeing (and smelling) the rotting curse-ravaged corpses. Yet the wet splatter of her rapidly vacating stomach against the mildewy carpet still made him wrinkle his nose slightly in distaste, especially since that just added to the stench of the place.
It was over quickly; there wasn’t much to throw up anyways--
(I’m basically too nervous to eat, she’d grinned at Manager Konoe during the car ride this morning when he offered the two of them some rice bars. I’ll have some to treat myself after the mission, though. Thank you, Konoe-san.)
Behind him, she sniffles, and he feels a twinge of sympathy. From experience, the burn of vomit sliding back down one’s nose into the throat wasn’t exactly a pleasant sensation.
“Yaga said this wasn’t a rescue mission,” he reminded her. Gently. Something about her realisation, something about how she stood behind him-- he could sense the corded tension in her limbs-- something in that made him want to tread gently. Something in that made him want to be soft.
“I know,” she mumbles, as if ashamed by her reactions.
He could hear her shaky breaths. “Hey.” He turns around.
She’s not crying, but it’s a near thing. Jaw trembling, shoulders stiff with shaking, the way a hummingbird’s wings seemed just a blur because of how quickly they beat. Eyes wide, rimmed with red. Stubbornly, she wipes her mouth with the back of her right hand, fingers clenched around the wakizashi in her tight fist.
He wondered if she knew how she looked right now-- half mad with the exertion to keep tears at bay. Suguru hesitates only briefly, but then he gathers her to him, enveloping her shoulders in his arms. “Hey,” he says again. “It’s alright.”
“I know it’s not a rescue mission,” she mutters against his uniform. He doesn’t even mind the fact that there’s going to be snot, and drool, and vomit on it-- because at this moment? This was what she needed, he thought. It was what he himself needed on his first mission having to actually witness the casualties. “I know,” she repeats.
Cognitive dissonance, he thinks to himself-- intellectually, he’s pretty sure she knows. She’s a smart girl. She’s more than proven herself right in that aspect here today.
Emotionally, though-- hope was a treacherous thing.
She looks at him with something that makes him almost want to hope, sometimes.
“We can’t save everyone,” he says softly, pulling away and curling a hand around her chin, directing her gaze to his. Her eyes widen, then squeeze shut. He sees the rise and dip of her throat as she swallows.
“I know,” she whispers.
Look at me again. “I need you to remember that.”
A/N:
Suguru: It's not a date stfu Satoru
Also Suguru: admitted to the Reader some of his deepest darkest crises of faith in the Jujutsu world.
- Yes, it matters whether or not Suguru calls him Gojo or Satoru, as it reflects his perception of their closeness-- in chapter 1, he solely calls him Gojo in the midst of his seasonal depression + trauma-induced spiral soooo.... perhaps he /is/ getting a little better here.
- Location of Tokyo Jujutsu High: Since the only really details we get are that it's in the mountains, and it's on the outskirts of Tokyo proper, I had placed it in Hachioji, which is the location of a lot of historical sites and shrines, and at the foothills of the mountains. Not sure if this works or not, but for the purpose of this fic, here's where the characters are located.
- I don't think the reader should have perfect ideals either, since we all struggle with stuff like pettiness or misplaced anger and it would seem unrealistic to write a heroine who's not flawed in some way at least. She's not as extreme as Suguru was becoming post-Toji, of course, but her past experiences have also put her into the mindset that the people who need protecting are divided into "worthy" and "unworthy" camps. It obviously remains to see who pushes who over which ledge, of course.
- As for the scene in the middle school-- the reader says she's not an idealist but I imagine the cognitive dissonance would be pretty strong, especially since she, being from a non-sorcerer family like Nanami or Geto, would be coming into this really trying to look for a meaning to the mission, even subconsciously. Just like Nanami tells himself he's doing it for a check but proves an ample mentor to young sorcerers and really emphasises letting them actually keep their youth, the reader might say she's here just because she doesn't want to go back but still voices a desire to help and save people. After all, the first person you can't save still will haunt you...
- Back to the reader for Chapter 4. I'm on such a roll I'm almost starting to get worried, since I'm not exactly strictly mapping this fic out except for specific plot beats I took from the Wheel of Time lol, like what if this is just me saying really famous last words and I lose all steam and don't update for like 3 years after this? I'm not going to crow's mouth it any further I promise LAKJLSFJLJ
Am I overexplaining myself? I just really like talking I think hahahaha, so comment too if you'd like!!!
I'd lay you badly, but I'd lay you gladly // naoya x reader; masterlist
I hear him scoff, see him roll his eyes-- as if it were all going to plan, as if it were all expected. For a man like him, that title of clan head was as good as his birthright. “Whatever.”
I bite the inside of my cheek to hold in the smile that’s threatening to split my face as Furudate flips through the pages-- inventory, assets, the likes-- because, oh, now this is power-- the knowing.
You’ve got a big storm coming, Zen’in.
“However,”
One word.
That’s all it took.
A special grade one sorcerer, one of the fastest alive, de-facto heir to one of the most powerful Jujutsu clans, with a lineage going back to the Heian era, who’s able to freeze his targets into rough, glitching frames-- entitled as he were, so self-assured in his own power and infallibility-- felled by one single, solitary word.
With a cursed technique better suited for politics than the battlefield, you're sent as the witness by the Jujutsu higher-ups to the reading of Zen'in Naobito's will. Seems like his youngest son is a horrid brat who needs to learn some manners. Seems like you'll enjoy getting to lord this development over him.
‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾ IN PROGRESS
Rating: M
Warnings: Naoya-typical misogyny; spoilers for all post-Shibuya arcs; lore changes
‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾
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chapter i ☾ chapter ii ☾ chapter iii ☾ chapter iv (NEW!)
