An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Yuuta Okkotsu hits the tarmac in Haneda eighteen hours after the Shibuya Incident. There are a few unpleasant things he’s obligated to do in the next seventy-two hours. He’s going to need a little help from his friends to get it all done. AKA: Toge Inumaki tells Yuuta to take his arm and eat it. Everyone agrees it’s the right thing to do. Yuuta might crash out a little about that and a few other things.
Yuuta can’t say that he knew Kokichi Muta very well or that he liked or disliked the other second-year boy any better than the other students at the Kyoto-based satellite school. Mechamaru largely avoided engaging with Yuuta after the Summer Exchange Event, when he faced the full contingent class from Kyoto and (maybe unfairly) beat them all soundly into the dirt. Honestly, Yuuta got the impression that the other jujutsu sorcerer viewed him primarily as a weird unfathomably powerful piece on a gameboard and only secondarily as a living person with feelings or an interior life.
Either way, he can credit a dead curmudgeon (who loved things in secret, in a way Yuuta can empathize with) for his commitment to a contingency plan.
At 9:15PM in Shibuya something terrible happens.
At 3:17PM in Nairobi, Yuuta feels a benign spark of cursed energy pop like a corn kernel near his right ear. It’s familiar; a shoulder-tap. Polite enough that he allows the little curse technique to mold itself into a warm metal earbud and clip to the side of his head. He presses one finger to the fabrication and as he stands at a crosswalk in Toi Market, he hears Mechamaru’s voice say from months now beyond the grave:
“Gojo is sealed in Shibuya. Come home.”
Miguel doesn’t exactly make fun of him for literally throwing himself through the window of his well-appointed office at 120 miles-per-hours, but it’s only because the first words out of Yuuta’s mouth are, “Get me back to Japan! It’s Gojo!”
Miguel’s Japanese is solid. Utilitarian. He doesn’t sweat the pronunciation.
He says it’s on account of ‘Having to put up with you cursed and deranged little bastards for my entire damn life, by God. Your tiny island country is rotten with bad energy,’ which is probably why he handles Yuuta’s outburst with the grace of… well, an adult. He gets up from his desk, brushes a lot of broken glass from the top of his laptop and inspects the wall where the air-pressure from Yuuta’s entrance blasted his dark roast coffee and the mug all over the walls. (Okay, fine, he panicked a little.)
Miguel sighs and says, “Always knew that cocky young killer would finally get bested. Is he dead?”
Yuuta, heartrate coming down under Miguel ’s nonchalance, says, “No. Sealed.”
“That may be worse, depending on the parameters of the technique that did it.” Miguel looks down at Yuuta from his significant Kenyan-born height advantage. His tone, like a weighted blanket, presses Yuuta’s nerves down to something like stillness. He says, “Are you calm? Ready?”
Yuuta would like to say that he’s not scared. He’d like to say garnering a certain level of power removes the human reflex to be afraid, but all it does, in practice, is give him the ability to turn down the volume on the part of him that still stands – frozen, insanity boiling up like blood in the gutter – at a gore-smeared crosswalk when he was ten. But he’s seventeen now. In the average lifespan of special-grade jujutsu sorcerers, that makes him middle-aged.
He turns the volume down.
