❝ I WON'T DIE. ❞ THERE'S SOMETHING DARK to her voice that seeps into the delayed retort, and smothers the edge of playfulness meant to feature solo. what is this, a grade two? easy. as infinity shifts forward to pin it underneath the weight of gojo's presence, persephone bares her teeth. thin, sharp-edged grin, more threat than promise as she catches his gaze — always with a lurch of vertigo, like falling into the sky.
i'll tank, then. ❝ don't bother. you won't need to. ❞
when persephone's handler first assigned her this job, she wasn't exactly enthused. years of undercover work with no assassinations or heists or anything else remotely cool, just intel-gathering — and it was school? she had to go to school? jump straight in after a lifetime of self-study without a clue how the hell she was supposed to act? persephone's life has been dedicated to violence since she was ten years old. the only other kids her age that she was allowed to interact with were other killers, and even they were encouraged not to socialize more than what was necessary.
but when you're assigned a job from the leader of the unseen himself, you say yes or your shit's kicked in until you say yes. and, hey — all's well that ends well, right? turns out jujutsu tech is just another way of training kids to be weapons. easy enough to pretend she doesn't know how to fight. lose sparring matches. fall back into the irritable goth role. you know, high school.
and then there was the 'doing her job' part. that meant gathering intel on the white-haired alien and his slightly-less-irritable goth partner-in-all, reporting back every few weeks. in his strength, gojo has managed to gain her begrudging respect. despite the fact that more often than not, he's comparing her to car parts. whatever. he's skilled. and for whatever reason, he's ... actually trying, here. he could have shoved her aside and done the mission himself; instead, here he is, making room. it's things like this. and it's been a little easier to talk to him lately. like he's putting in something that resembles effort.
and sometimes, sometimes, she's gifted a situation like this. shed the human skin for a little while, stretch out your real limbs. he won't give a damn; he's not any more of a person, is he?
it's barely the span of a breath before persephone's skidding to a stop in front of the mouth-thing, and before the inertia from her speed-boosted movement can dissipate, she's twisting, loading a surge of cursed energy into her fist, and swinging a right hook that shatters the curse's teeth from one side to the other like a metal bat through a line of beer bottles.
ouch, sure, but it's really just to get the sharp things out of her way. while it's too disoriented to do anything but scream, persephone steps directly into its jaws, eyes wide, pupils blown out like she's riding a high — and slams a palm into the roof of its mouth to wrench it further open. stop it from clamping down. keep it vulnerable. she's prepared for the head-to-toe burn of a fresh spray of bile when it hits her; lets out an agonized growl; uses it. pain is an excellent conduit. without it, she loses the sense of where her body is and her technique goes haywire — best case, shatters her from the inside out. bad time for everyone involved. with the blistering nerve-hell to ground her, she focuses in on this imminent, hot-stove danger, and lets her body do the rest.
it's like opening a door that's been holding back an entire ocean. with the closing of persephone's unoccupied fist, a torrent of cursed energy explodes outwards. blacklight swell. concert-loud. it rips through the curse's flesh from the ground-zero of her body, shatters its bones, blows it to pieces, blows those pieces into pieces, and the ground rocks beneath her feet, and jagged cracks spread outward in a sunburst pattern under the force of it all —
— until the curse is nothing but dust in the air, drifting, settling atop the tense plane of her shoulders. scorch marks in the dirt.
❝ bummer. thought it'd be stronger. ❞ the mania hasn't quite left their face yet when their gaze cuts back over to gojo. ❝ see? told you you didn't need to do shit. find something stronger and i'll DPS for you, yeah? ❞
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