In an alternate timeline, a pair of new generation jujutsu monsters grew up feral and fighting curses together in Sendai. I'm sure this will have no major ramifications for the world as a whole. AKA: What if we did Scooby-Doo hijinks with Rika because Itadori is too tough and charming to get murdered by her? (ao3) (okkoita)
When Yuji Itadori is twelve years old, he meets a ghost.
Well, okay, it’s probably not a ghost but it looks like a ghost. It coils malevolently and desperately like he imagines a ghost might—clinging to something human until all its own humanity is gone. He’s too young to have a great vocabulary for what else to call this entity. Usually, he would follow Gramps’ advice and ignore the spooky things he sometimes sees, but the ghost is sitting on a bus-stop bench next to a kid in a West Junior High uniform.
Yuji thinks, this time, it’s kinda on his turf.
It’s the third day of the school year. Yuji struggled only moderately to remember the locations of his classes, and while he forgot where his locker was yesterday, a soft-faced girl named Ozawa helped him out and, with the certainty of a tween with mostly movies for reference, he’s decided she can be his middle-school crush. (You gotta have one of those.)
All and all, not so bad for the first week of middle school and he can safely tell Gramps that his success rate for Not Fighting Sons Of Bitches is at 100%.
But the ghost thing is weird for sure.
It’s like black smoke, coagulated into a sticky clot beside the kid, almost leaning on his shoulder like a big cat on its favorite zookeeper. It’s got physical weight. Yuji can see it where it rubs its face on him, his uniform ripples and deforms. The kid ignores it, but Yuji can see even from here there are bloody scratches along his inner forearms where his uniform is too short on him. He’s been crying.
“Hey,” Yuji says, stepping under the roof of the bus-stop bench. “You go to West Junior, right?”
The kid on the bench, wide-eyed, looks up from his shoes. His uniform doesn’t fit him very well. His sneakers look beat up, like his mom didn’t take him clothes shopping this year and he’s still wearing what he had from last year. His hair sticks up the way iron-filings do under a magnet at the top, grown out shaggy at the front. Yuji thinks he’s maybe a year or two older, but small for his age.
The word ‘underfed’ comes to mind.
Yuji points at him. “Yeah. I saw you at passing period. You’re a grade ahead of me, right?”
“I-I guess,” the kid stammers. “Are you, um, a first year?”
“Yup.” He hooks a thumb and points it at himself. “I’m Yuji Itadori. You wanna ride to school together? I get lost easy.”
“Oh. Okay. I think that would be… that would be fine.” He keeps glancing at the shadow on his shoulder, which ignores Yuji and continues to coil on him like a rotting calico. “If you’re scared of getting lost, I can help. But just for a bit. Okay? We shouldn’t—” he swallows— “shouldn’t be friends.”
“Huh? Why not?”
“I’m, uh, I’m out of school a lot. You’d be better off with another upperclassman to—”
“What’s your name?”
“O-oh. Sorry. Okkotsu. Yuta Okkotsu.”
“Okkotsu-senpai. Got it.” Yuji sits down next to Yuta on the bench, opposite the dead thing that’s latched to him. “You wanna snack?” He digs around in his backpack. “I’ve got extra.” He produces a tuna-mayo onigiri. “Gramps says I shouldn’t leave them in my bag all day. Do you buy snacks from the corner store by the park? I live in an apartment building there. Do you live nearby?”
Okkotsu, shocked to find an onigiri in his hands before he can protest, stammers a little. Now that he’s close to Okkotsu, Yuji can kind of smell him—like he hasn’t bathed in a while and his clothes aren’t washed. Up close, there are bags under Okkotsu’s eyes, his nails are ragged from chewing, and the scratches on his wrists seem fresh.
Stuff his Gramps would say are ‘bad signs’.
“You should come over after school,” Yuji declares, kicking his heels on the sidewalk. “My gramps is always working so he leaves the fridge super stocked and puts lots of movies in the entertainment system for me. It’s awesome.”
“W-What?”
“You live close by.” Yuji beams. “We should be friends.”
“I—” Okkotsu looks over his shoulder again.
Yuji’s starting to suspect the Thing On Okkotsu’s Shoulder is dangerous with how he’s acting. That or it messes with him so bad it makes him seem crazy. Yuji, only then, wonders how smart it is to invite something like that into his house or if Okkotsu is crazy from having something like that glued to him. Yuji wonders if, maybe, he should be more scared. Maybe he should—
“Okay. We’re neighbors. We can be friends.” Okkotsu balls his sleeve up over his hand and uses it to wipe his face. “You should make friends in your own grade though.” A pause. “And don’t tell people your grandpa is working all the time. If you’re home alone sometimes, like, you shouldn’t tell people that.”
“Why?”
“You could get your grandpa in trouble? They could take you away from him?”
“Oh. He’s just out for the week. It’s fine. I haven’t punched anyone at school even once so no parent-teacher conferences!” Yuji flashes a thumbs up.
Okkotsu blinks owlishly. “Huh?
“I don’t like bullies.” Yuji gestures with his food, rolling his eyes. “Gramps says punching people is bad.”
“Uh, yeah—"
“But some people need punching,” Yuji quotes. “Gramps said that too.”
Okkotsu snorts, tries to hide the laugh with his hand. His laugh sounds funny, cracks in his throat and wheezes, like maybe he’s out of practice with it. “Um, aren’t you young to talk that way?”
“Gramps says you’re never too young to learn a hard lesson.”
Okkotsu’s face does something funny. “I… I don’t think that. I think you can be too young for—” He pauses. “Never mind. It’s nice to meet you, Itadori.”
“This is awesome. I have a middle school crush picked out. And I have an upperclassman mentor. I’m killing it.”
My uncle is really into warhammer and would win every miniature painting competition he was in. I have not very steady hands and he saw me messing up my nail polish for prom. He sat with me and carefully painted my nails and that moment meant so much to me all these years later.
there was another post on here about how all the little tiny brushes and tools and such for cosmetics are both comparable to the tools for painting and finishing minis, not to mention WAY cheaper, like the little trimmer clippers and nail files and such
If you ever, and I mean EVER think that you fucked something up royally, remember that the organizers of the 1904 Olympic marathon:
- Had zero stations for water on the 26 mile (42 km) course
- Accidentally gave North American competitor Tom Hicks a cocktail made of egg whites, brandy, and actual fucking rat poison
- Had a guy come into the race late wearing a beret and cutoff slacks, sneak into an apple orchard during the race because no food had been given to him for 40 hours, eat rotten apples, projectile vomit onto the track, fall asleep for hours, and finish in fourth place OVERALL because most of the other runners collapsed of exhaustion or injuries
- Conducted the race on a dusty road, which caused so much dust to be kicked into the air that an American runner somehow inhaled enough to tear his STOMACH LINING open
- Accidentally released feral dogs onto the track
- Fucked the other competitors up SO BADLY that Tom Hicks—the guy who ate RAT POISON and was HALLUCINATING the entire run—came in first place
Actually, no, I don't think that friendships dropping like flies in your late 20s and early 30s because no one has time for that between overwork and family obligations and marriage and kids and partners and the ritual of the time slayer is normal and ok. No I don't think deep conversations and spontaneous adventures being replaced with a tired coffee every six months is a normal part of growing up. I don't think that emotional intimacy and soul bonds disintegrating in the face of practical inconvenience is a fact of life. I think that means something is deeply deeply wrong with our society and I will never forgive it for the friends I've lost
i feel like a big part of the appeal of dungeon crawler carl is that it is fundamentally a story where a man is told "through complex legal and technological processes we have completely fucked over the lives of you and everyone you care about to enrich ourselves" to which the man asks "what if i killed you with bombs" and it turns out the answer is they forgot that was an option
