Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Tombs of the Star Corridor weren’t all that different now compared to how they used to be. 

Yuuji could remember the first time he’d walked through them, following behind Tsukumo and Choso, Fushiguro at his side, Yuuta and Maki behind them. It was hard to believe that it had been over two years since that moment—that so much could change in so little time, and yet…

And yet nothing was really all that different at all. 

The abandoned Tombs of the Star Corridor were just as empty as they had been when Tengen resided in them. The only difference was a coating of dust a year or so thick, now that no one was concerned with keeping the place clean. The place was haunted, in an untraditional sense. There were ghosts here, in the room Yuuji found where two half-drunk cups of tea sat forever untouched, the tea long since dried into a nasty crust on the bottom before being coated likewise in dust. 

He wondered if this was where Tengen and Tsukumo sat while Choso fought Kenjaku. He wondered if this was where they decided they would save his life no matter what, only for him to die later, somewhere else, some other time, for some other person—

Yuuji closed the door softly, pressing his forehead against the grain of the wood. 

Fuck.

He knew he shouldn’t have come here, and yet…he couldn’t resist coming all the same. 

Yuuji took a deep breath, lifted his head, and carried on. Maybe he would find his way out instead of continuing onwards. He had seen everything he really needed to see, anyway. It was a place, just like any other, a remnant of a time long since past of which he was only one of very, very few survivors. Time would move forward, as time did. Things would change, history would forget him, this place would become just as lost as any other grand historical sight. 

He didn’t need to entomb it in his memories—the ever turning wheel of life and death and curses and cursed would do that for him. 

Yuuji turned a corner, then another, working his way vaguely towards the exit. He let himself sink into his thoughts—without Tengen here to change the layout, all paths in the Tombs of the Star Corridor would eventually lead out—which was, perhaps, why it took him so long to notice. 

He was no longer leaving footprints in the dust that trailed after him. 

He hadn’t in a long time, in fact, because there was no dust to leave footprints in. When he turned to look behind him—really look—he saw only sparkling clean floors in the hall stretching behind him. The corridor looked just as pristine as it did the day that Yuuji came down here with the others. It was almost like…

Yuuji turned back forward, feeling the aching throb in his chest that came with having a beating heart, that came with living. That light—was it possible—he had definitely been walking away, not deeper into—

Yuuji rested a hand against the wall, and then pulled it away again quickly. 

Cursed energy.

Tengen’s cursed energy. 

That shouldn’t be—that wasn’t—

Before he could really process that information—before he could even really acknowledge the weight of that information—he heard a soft clicking sound.

Two months in a basement watching movies meant that Yuuji recognized the sound immediately, even if he had never heard it in person before. He lifted his gaze disbelievingly—surely it wasn’t possible that someone else would be here— but it was possible. As sure as the sun would rise, Yuuji’s eye told him that there was a man standing in the abandoned Tombs of the Star Corridor that suddenly didn’t feel so abandoned.

Beyond that, he was holding a gun. 

He was holding a gun, pointed at a girl that Yuuji could only barely see through the twisting branches of the walls—a girl that couldn’t be older than fifteen—and he was about to shoot her. 

Yuuji moved before he could waste any more time thinking about it. It didn’t matter why they were here or weren’t here—he was absolutely not going to sit idle and watch someone die. 

Never again. 

“Or you can turn back,” Suguru said. “And return home with Kuroi.”

“What?” Riko asked, turning to him with blazing eyes. 

She was so innocent, Riko was. It was as refreshing as it was strange—he’d been around Satoru’s uncaring attitude and Shoko’s aloof indifference for so long that most days, he didn’t remember that there were people in the world made out of satin instead of steel. If he was honest with himself—which he rarely was—sometimes he struggled to remember why he was doing this in the first place. He struggled to understand what it meant to use his strength to help someone, instead of merely using his strength to fight. 

“When Satoru and I were given this mission, our teacher described the merger as an ‘erasure,’” Suguru continued. “He beats around the bush a lot, for someone that thinks with his muscles instead of his brain, so it took me a moment to work it out. But he talked about it like it was a bad thing—something that was worth disagreeing with, even if he never would have said so out loud, and he certainly wouldn’t have said so to us.”

“I…” Riko started, eyes wide. “I don’t…”

“We’re the strongest,” Suguru said. It was bragging, but it was true, too. “No matter what choice you make, we will protect your future.”

“It’s always been me,” Riko said, sounding impossibly sad. 

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been special as long as I’ve been alive,” she explained. “It became normal for me after a while. My parents died in a car accident when I was very young. I don’t even remember it, but I’ve always been just…just alone. I thought that if I merged with Tengen, no matter how painful, that sadness and loneliness would go away. I—I still think that—”

She cut off with a sharp gasp, one hand flying to her chest as if she had been stabbed there. Panic lanced through Suguru’s entire body and he reached out to steady her, checking and checking again for wounds even though there were none. 

“Riko?” Suguru asked, tightening his grip on her elbow. She made a small, pained noise. “Riko, what’s going on?”

“I must have started—” she babbled. “The ritual—I can’t control it—Suguru, I—help, I—Kuroi must have—or Satoru, maybe—you need to—”

Suguru wasn’t Satoru, and he didn’t have the Six Eyes, but he was suddenly acutely aware of what Riko’s problem was. 

Her cursed energy was completely depleted, when it had been perfectly normal before they came down here. Not so much so that she would die, but definitely enough that she was liable to pass out. 

That was when he heard a familiar bang—something made familiar by movies and television shows, not real life—and Suguru reflexively flinched, moving as if to cover Riko though he knew he would never move faster than a bullet. 

Except—

No bullet hit him. No bullet hit her. Judging by a second smashing sound, the bullet hadn’t hit any flesh at all, just the surrounding structures. 

Belatedly, Suguru looked in the direction of the first, significantly worse sound. 

The man from earlier was standing there, despite the impossibility of it. He had gotten past Satoru. Which meant Satoru was—

Suguru became devastatingly, horribly aware of two things all at once. 

First—and most startlingly—Satoru must be dead, or pretty damn close to it. 

Second—and most importantly—Amanai Riko’s life had just been saved by someone other than him or Satoru.

There was another man standing beside the one from outside. He was tall and well-built, with short, pink hair and sunglasses. He was wearing a black hoodie and a pair of red shoes that were duct taped together. He was also, notably, covered in scars—small, crisscrossing ones that lined his forearms, one at the corner of his mouth, another stretching above and below a pair of dinged up looking sunglasses resting on the bridge of his nose. 

For a moment, they were frozen, still, as the original man from outside turned, eyes narrowed, to stare at the hands that had pulled his arm to the side, throwing off his shot. 

And then the original man moved, snapping out of the pink-haired guy’s hold and whipping the barrel of the pistol up towards his face. Pink Hair jerked backwards fast enough to avoid the hit, though not far enough to get completely out of range. The reason for this became obvious when he chained his dodge into a disarming maneuver, as swift and as clean as if he had done it a thousand times. Honestly, Suguru wouldn’t be surprised if he had. 

A moment later, reality crashed back into Suguru. 

The man from earlier was good enough to get past Satoru. Suguru didn’t know who Pink Hair was and he didn’t have time to find out, but if he was going to fight that man—he needed help. 

Help that Suguru got one step into giving him before Riko slumped against him, nearly dragging him to the ground with her where he still gripped her elbows. When Suguru glanced down at her, her eyelids were fluttering, her skin pale and flushed. It was exhaustion, simply put—she had used too much of her cursed energy and suffered the consequences for it…though the question kind of was…what the hell had she done?

Suguru warred with himself. The mission was to keep Riko safe until the merger—if Riko never merged with Tengen, then he was responsible for keeping her safe so long as the mission was active, and it was. Logically, he should do everything he could to continue protecting her, which included fighting the man that had nearly killed her. But leaving her laying here while he ran off to fight felt wrong too.

Suguru glanced back up at the pink-haired sorcerer, expecting to see him being overpowered easily and in need of a rescue.

Instead, he had things well in hand with the man they met outside earlier. The gun had disappeared somewhere while Suguru wasn’t looking, but the man from earlier had already replaced it with a sword, long and wicked looking. And, despite how strong and fast he was outside…

The pink-haired sorcerer was somehow just as strong and just as fast, approaching the fight with a kind of single-minded fervor that sent a prickle of fear down Suguru’s spine, even as a mere bystander.

It’s a good thing that guy is on our side, he thought, except he didn’t actually know if that was true.

“Suguru,” Riko murmured, half asleep.

Just like that, the fight between Pink Hair and the assassin seemed hardly a concern of his at all.

Suguru turned his attention back to Riko, checking her over again. She was just as unharmed as before, thankfully, despite how hard that was to believe now. He adjusted his grip on her, wrapping one arm around her waist and pulling her more or less upright so that he could tuck her face against his shoulder. Pink Hair didn’t matter, he decided. He could live or die in that battle for all he cared—Suguru had other priorities. 

She had been seconds away from dying, after all.

“You’re okay,” Suguru murmured, adjusting her so he could hook his elbow under her knees. “You’re going to be fine. I’ll get you to Shoko, she’ll help.”

“I’m sorry,” Riko said. “I didn’t mean to do it, I swear.”

“Shh,” Suguru said, despite the fact that he had no idea what she was talking about. That was probably the exhaustion speaking, anyway. 

“He’ll save Satoru,” Riko murmured, which was strange enough to give Suguru pause. “I shouldn’t have—but at least—”

“Shh,” Suguru said, deciding it didn’t matter. “Shh. I’ve got you. It’s fine.”

He could carry her easily enough. She hardly weighed anything, for being a human being not that much younger than he himself was.

“Don’t carry me like a princess,” Riko muttered, as Suguru got on his knees, testing her weight before he stood. “That would be too embarrassing.”

“Sorry, but I think you’ll just have to deal with it,” Suguru said, and put one foot on the ground, crouching. 

“Take me to Tengen, m’kay? I need to do it while I still can. It’ll be better if I—”

“I’m taking you home, Riko,” Suguru said. “That’s what you said earlier, isn’t it? Or were you just getting my hopes up so you could crush them later, hm?”

“Su—”

“Oh, right,” a rough voice said, and Suguru felt himself stiffening, still half-crouching with Riko in his arms. That voice—that had to be— “I suppose I should probably ask you a few things.”

“Feeling chatty all of a sudden, are you?” the first man spat. 

Suguru looked back at the two of them. In the time it had taken him to talk to Riko, the pink-haired man had managed to land a hit on the dark-haired man—something Suguru only knew because he could see a trickle of blood spilling out of his nose.

“Nah, man,” the pink-haired man said. They seemed to have mutually decided to take a break, even though neither fighter looked particularly relaxed. 

Distantly, Suguru noticed that Pink Hair was missing the smallest finger on his left hand.

“What, then?” the man asked, prowling slowly in a circle. 

“I’d like to know the reason I'm killing you,” Pink Hair said. “That’s all.”

“Hell if I know,” the assassin said, spinning his sword around. “You’re the one that’s doing it.”

“I—” Pink Hair said, while his neck darkened in embarrassment. “Okay, I can’t argue with that, but you’re still the one that broke in here and attempted homicide!”

And just like that, he seemed so…young. Kind of dumb and a little whiny, just like Satoru. Suguru could see the youth in his face now, too—he was hard enough and pointy enough that Suguru wouldn’t call him any younger than seventeen, but he definitely wasn’t older than twenty either.

The man scoffed. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Just how dumb are you?”

“...Asking another question doesn’t really answer the first,” the kid said, and the first guy laughed, bitter and dark, and charged.

At which point, Suguru finally witnessed a cursed technique instead of wild cursed energy. Pink Hair waited for the assassin to get close, looking at first like he was going for another disarming counter. Instead he rushed forwards, fingers reaching as he ducked under a slash, and then grazed the man’s side with just the tips of his fingers. A dotted line appeared, slicing along the man’s ribs, and a pair of scissors followed afterwards. The assassin skittered to the side, but a second was apparently all it took—when he lifted his arm, there was a clean gash in both his black tee and his flank.

“You’re fast, for a sorcerer,” the assassin said, and it almost sounded like a compliment. 

“Shit,” Pink Hair said, but with a strangely good-natured grin. “And you’re strong, for a human. I was trying to do a little more damage than a single scratch, but I guess I underestimated you.”

“Rookie mistake,” the assassin agreed, almost sounding like a proud mentor instead of someone that was trying his hardest to turn Pink Hair into a pincushion. 

He charged Pink Hair with his sword raised. Pink Hair performed a complicated, spinning, acrobatic dodge the likes of which Suguru knew he would never manage himself, sending the assassin stumbling backwards with his finishing kick. Not that the assassin was thrown for long, almost immediately charging again. Pink Hair dodged that too, ducking under the blade and coming up behind his opponent. The assassin stepped forward in pursuit of him, but it was a more calculated move than it had seemed at first—Suguru spotted the dotted lines on the archway Pink Hair’s fingertips had just barely grazed a moment before the whole thing came crashing down after the assassin, sealing them and their fight away from Suguru, Riko, and at the bottom of the tree…Tengen.

“Suguru,” Riko gasped, her hands tightening into fists on Suguru’s jacket. “Suguru, I’m so sorry—I’m not strong enough to go—I’m sorry—”

Suguru reached up as best he could, laying one hand against the back of her head. It was the best he knew to do for comfort, even if he was still a little confused about what Riko meant. Then he shifted their position and stood. Just like he thought—Riko was light.

“I don’t know what you’re apologizing for,” he said, as he started for a random tunnel. It was hard to say where these passages would lead, with the one he had come through blocked off now. 

“Satoru—”

“Satoru will be fine,” Suguru said, even though he was admittedly worried about it himself. “Let’s get you home already. As long as that’s still something you want?”

She was silent for long enough that Suguru started to think she had passed out. 

“Yeah,” Riko said, at the end of the pause. She curled up against him, despite her earlier claim of how embarrassing it was, and hid her face in his shoulder. “Let’s go home.”

With one last look over his shoulder, Suguru took Riko with him and left the distant glow of Tengen’s prepped merger.

In Yuuji’s defense, no one had ever called him particularly smart or particularly observant.

Yeah, he had noticed something was weird in the tombs. Yeah, this guy he was fighting had a face like Fushiguro and a smile like Maki and an outfit like Gojo. Yeah, he had felt Tengen’s presence when Tengen was supposed to be long gone.

Except those things hadn’t felt like they mattered, okay?

At least, not until he stepped out into a very much intact courtyard at Jujutsu High, on a beautiful, sunshine filled day in summer instead of a dreary, snowy day in December.

The fight had kept him plenty busy up to this point, but now, Yuuji was forced to finally acknowledge that some weird shit had to be happening.

Because…

This was not…

“Getting tired?” his opponent asked.

His opponent who looked like Fushiguro and smiled like Maki. Not just that, Yuuji could see Naoya in the way his hair fell across his forehead, Mai in the way he stood.

And the one thing all of these people had in common was—

“You’re a Zen’in,” Yuuji observed. 

Another impossibility, considering all of those were dead.

“I don’t use that name anymore,” he said. “It’s Fushiguro now.”

Fushiguro…?

Like…?

“I wouldn’t normally use this,” the man that was quite possibly Megumi’s father said. “I’ve only got it because of the Gojo brat, anyway, but you seem strong enough to…”

The…who?

Like opposite poles in a magnetic field, Yuuji found his gaze drawn towards a scene he had barely glanced over when he first stepped out. Even as the curse bound to his opponent coughed up the end of a spear, even as every instinct he ever had screamed at him to pay attention to the predator in front of him, Yuuji looked away. Back at…

He wasn’t much more than a shock of white in a sea of red. Strands of hair sticking together as they soaked in blood, turning red as life bled out of him. But he was unmistakable, impossible, incomprehensible, from the white of his hair to the sparkling, sky-like blue of his eyes, even to the school uniform he was wearing—a school uniform Yuuji hadn’t seen in years, and certainly not on him .

He was Gojo Satoru, even if he wasn’t the Gojo Satoru Yuuji had known, and he was dying.

Dead.

Dying again, dead again —

Staring at Yuuji with not so lifeless eyes. Gojo’s lips moved, though Yuuji wasn’t close enough to hear anything he said.

And then it didn’t matter, because it was too late. There was a sharp pain in Yuuji’s stomach, the stuttering out of his cursed energy as the weapon slid into his guts, the tear that came with the spear being jerked back.

Oh, Yuuji thought as he fell forward onto his knees. That must be the Inverted Spear of Heaven. No wonder Gojo-sensei locked that away—this sucks.

“Really?” the man that called himself Fushiguro said. “Only one hit? Pretty pathetic, aren’t you?”

Yuuji wanted to laugh, so he did, the sound harsh and rough as it burst out of his throat. 

“I gotta be real with you, Fushiguro,” he said, and didn’t that feel unnatural—to say that name again after all this time, to say it to someone that wasn’t the Fushiguro he knew. “I’ve got no idea what’s going on, but that’s Gojo Satoru over there.” He pressed one hand to the wound, already feeling the sharp return of his cursed energy to his body. He had always had such quick recovery times. “And you should have left that fucking spear in me.”

Yuuji took the hand that had been coated in his blood away from his body. He could feel it—the blood collecting and pooling, responding to his cursed technique. He could see Fushiguro’s eyes widening, and for good reason. Wherever Yuuji was that he was fighting his old friend’s dad and looking at a teenaged version of his old teacher covered in a blood, he was fairly sure no one outside of the Kamo family would have Blood Manipulation here. 

“Convergence,” Yuuji said, mostly to wig his opponent out more than to announce it, as the blood was obviously already spinning. “Piercing Blood.”

Fushiguro swore as Yuuji formed the funnel with his fingers, only barely managing to bring up the spear to deflect piercing blood with the blade. It pushed him back as it was—heels kicking up dirt from the stone as he tried to recollect his balance. His back smashed against a nearby building, sharp and violent, and then the pre-prepped stream of blood ran out a moment later. 

Fushiguro heaved a rough breath out, and looked up at Yuuji. He looked strikingly like Fushiguro then—the Fushiguro that Yuuji knew—eyes blazing as blood dribbled down his forehead. Yuuji watched him as he circled, not bothering to heal the wound in his side, not yet. The blood was a good thing, now that he could control its flow. Yuuji put his hands in his pockets though—casual, irritatingly so, he knew—as he circled slowly, easily but intentionally putting himself between Fushiguro and younger, heavily bleeding Gojo.

“Alright, that was interesting,” Fushiguro said, flicking Yuuji’s blood off the end of the spear. “I'll give you props for that. What's your name, kid?”

“Yuuji.”

“Kamo Yuuji, I assume? Nice secret-keeping on their part, I guess.”

“No,” Yuuji said. “That’s not my name.”

“Not gonna tell me what it is?”

“Well, it's not like you introduced yourself to me,” Yuuji said, smiling slyly.

Fushiguro barked a laugh. “Fushiguro Toji, then.”

“I would say nice to meet you,” Yuuji said, “but I'm not sure it is.”

Toji—because referring to him as Fushiguro was too weird—laughed again. He laughed and he laughed, voice sharp and manic in all the same ways Fushiguro Megumi’s could be, and Yuuji’s forgotten heart twisted uncomfortably in his chest.

“Any chance of you letting me back into those tombs to kill the girl?” Toji asked, when he was done laughing. He had a grin like a shark, a scar curving over the corner of his mouth. “I’d kind of hate to kill you now. You seem like you’d be more fun as a business partner than as a corpse.”

“Ha,” Yuuji said, taking a moment to glance at Gojo out of the corner of his eye. He was still alive, judging by the wet, gurgling sounds he kept making, but not for very much longer, Yuuji assumed. And Yuuji wasn’t exactly sure what he’d walked into—whether this was real or just some complex hallucination—but all of that blood around Gojo was making him pretty nervous about this whole thing. On the one hand, Gojo could heal himself. On the other hand, Yuuji wasn’t actually so sure about that, considering Gojo hadn’t done so yet.

And it was hard to think about what he could do about it when this man was backing him into a corner like this.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Toji said.

“Take it as a hell no if you’d like,” Yuuji countered. 

Toji barked a laugh, crueler and harsher than Fushiguro had ever really sounded. “Have it your way, then.”

He reached up to the curse perched on his shoulder. The curse opened its jaws wide, consuming the spear and spitting out something else in turn.

Yuuji almost laughed again.

“Playful Cloud?” he asked.

Toji’s grin grew more sharklike. “You know it? I guess I must not he the first to think it's a good way to deal with you.” He swung it once, playfully, and kept on grinning at Yuuji. “It’s a recent acquisition. I’ve been dying to try it out. I needed to find someone strong enough first, though. You’ll do. You’ll do even better if you’ve countered it before.”

Crap, Yuuji thought, with a grin stretching his lips uncomfortably.

He had been fighting Toji for a while now, and he knew two things. One, he was like Maki—no cursed energy in exchange for a superior body. Two, he was faster and stronger than Yuuji. So far, Yuuji had been using either Sukuna’s technique or his brothers’ to make up for it. Toji was right about more than one thing, though—Playful Cloud suppressed both of those rather successfully. For one thing, it was unlikely to draw any more blood. For another, the three sections meant it was exceedingly difficult to dodge already. And last, it made it challenging for Yuuji to get close enough to use Cleave.

Though he had one other option when it came to Sukuna’s residual techniques. Though Yuuji wasn’t positive he would have the guts or the right moment to use it.

(Most of the time, he derived a vindictive pleasure from using Sukuna’s cursed techniques, if only because he knew that Sukuna would hate to know that someone as useless as Yuuji had duplicated them and could use them freely.

But there was a point, a fine line that Yuuji walked constantly, one where Sukuna’s technique stopped being useful and started being deliberately cruel. Yuuji was not a saint—he had learned how to delight in violence since he ate that first finger in June of 2018, but he was human enough still to be scared by that.)

True to his predictions, Playful Cloud wielded by someone more skilled than even Maki was a problem. Toji pressed on him, Playful Cloud snapping around him, radiating with cursed energy like it was a heater. It snapped against Yuuji’s arm and bruised it dutifully, and Yuuji pushed forward in an attempt to get his hands on Toji. Toji—who had seen this trick once before—darted back out of reach. He switched his hold on Playful Cloud, bringing the right end towards Yuuji’s head dangerously quickly. 

Yuuji needed to think. 

He had read enough isekais back in the day to conclude that he had probably been transported to the past, a different dimension, or both—assuming this wasn’t some bizarrely complex hallucination. And considering the presence of Fushiguro’s dad and the random girl he had saved earlier, he doubted it was a hallucination. He wouldn’t put it past himself to hallucinate a dying teenaged Gojo Satoru, but a random girl and Fushiguro’s dad? No. He was not that creative. Besides, he’d seen plenty of weird shit happen because of jujutsu—getting thrown through time didn’t exactly seem unrealistic when he thought about how Hakari turned himself immortal by gambling or how Kenjaku could literally transplant his brain into another body.

He needed to decide if this was the past or if this was a different universe. If it was just the past then he could relax—Gojo had made it to be a lot older than he was now without Yuuji’s help, and he could do it again. If this was a different universe, though, he needed to be worried. Very worried.

Ah…fuck it.

There wasn’t anything he could do anyway if it was some alternate dimension where Gojo couldn’t heal himself. Nothing other than buy time, really.

Buy time and draw Toji away from Gojo.

Yuuji broke away from the fight, already spinning another palm full of his blood into Convergence. He shot it out at Toji as soon as it was formed, forcing him to dodge—forcing him farther away from Gojo. Yuuji ran at a full tilt towards Toji, trying to push him back further. Toji clearly knew what he was doing, judging by the way his grin sharpened. He retaliated, dodging the stream of pressurized blood and snapping Playful Cloud at Yuuji’s heels.

Yuuji jumped, dodging the hit. He rolled, closer to Toji—something Toji clearly wasn’t expecting to happen, considering he swore viciously. Yuuji threw one hand out, fingers just barely grazing his leg with his fingertips. The dashed lines of Cleave chopped across his pants a moment before the technique itself followed, slicing through both the fabric and the skin beneath. Like before, Toji was too naturally strong for any actual dismemberment to occur, but it sure did bleed. Besides, having the bottom half of his pants flopping around his shoe had to be inconvenient. 

“Been a while since anyone landed a hit on me,” Toji said, looking largely unbothered if a little crazy.

“Maybe you’re just getting old,” Yuuji countered with a sharp grin. 

The next second, one end of Playful Cloud clapped him across the cheek, snapping the sunglasses he had been wearing and sending the two different pieces skittering across the ground.

Well, that fucking hurt.

“Ooh,” Toji said, with a falsely sympathetic tone, when Yuuji looked back at him, his face fully exposed. “Now that’s a nasty scar. No eye, huh?”

“Nah,” Yuuji said. “Not for a while. Did you really have to hit me in the face, man? You trying to make me even dumber?”

“Heh,” Toji said, which might as well have been an agreement, and swung Playful Cloud again. 

Yuuji dodged him this time, using his momentum to carry him to his feet. He kicked at Toji, cursed energy rippling, and Toji flipped another section of Playful Cloud up to block him. They collided, sending Yuuji backwards. He swung into a dodge immediately, going to the left in hopes of avoiding another hit. 

It was unfortunate that this was happening on the cusp of another battle, that Yuuji had already expended so much of his energy before coming here. He could fight for a long time—stamina was one of his stronger points—but even he had limits to how much he could do. 

He needed to decide—get out of range from Gojo, expend his remaining energy reserves on the domain, and hopefully save the day, or keep fighting this way, one hit after the other until Yuuji had nothing left to give. He didn’t know which was going to be better against an opponent like this guy. 

Yuuji hadn’t had to fight someone that was tough in this specific way before. 

And then the decision was made for him.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gojo twitch, half sitting up. Maybe not fully healed yet, but healing. Moving. Hopefully able to finish this—but Yuuji needed to give him one last opening.

And Yuuji had gotten Toji plenty far enough away from the school and other casualties that Yuuji could finally risk it.

Toji moved to strike—Yuuji moved at the same time. He caught Playful Cloud with his hand, wincing as he felt one bone in his pointer finger snap from the force. He jerked—borrowing an old trick from Yuuta and reinforcing his body with cursed energy to give himself artificial strength. He was a little surprised it worked—he wasn’t used to having to compensate for his strength, but in a battle of physical prowess with Toji, Yuuji was confident he would lose. As it was, he only barely managed to tug Toji half a step forward.

But it was enough to unsettle him, throwing off his movements, keeping him from immediately launching his next attack.

Long enough for Yuuji to make the seal he needed.

“Domain Expansion,” he said, creating the shrine with his fingers. “Malevolent Shrine.”

Toji’s eyes widened. 

In the fraction of a second it took Yuuji to open the domain, he struck—not with Playful Cloud, but with the Inverted Spear of Heaven, retrieved quicker than Yuuji’s brain could even really process it and now attached to a chain on one end, giving him a lot more reach than he had a second ago. 

Malevolent Shrine slammed into existence, the guaranteed hit already taking effect. 

Less than a second later, the Inverted Spear cut into Yuuji’s gut, slicing him open from naval to shoulder. He gasped, blood already collecting at an alarming rate, but it was done. 

He had beaten Fushiguro Toji in a batlle of speed. The damage he could heal later—the most important thing was that he had put Toji on the defensive and that now, whatever else happened, he had bought someone else enough time to win.

Yuuji slumped to his knees, feeling bloodier and more bruised than he had after a fight in a long time. Despite that he grinned, looking up as he watched Toji parrying the strikes of a thousand cleaves.

He didn’t die—Yuuji suspected he was entirely too formidable for that—and Yuuji couldn’t hold up the domain for longer than a few seconds, but when it dropped…

When it dropped, they were both standing across from each other, eyes bright, smiles sharp, covered in their own blood.

Yuuji knew he had overdone it in the next moment, his energy drained and his body aching. He pitched forward, landing on his knees first and face down on his stomach second, feeling slightly delirious.

What the hell am I doing, anyway, he found himself wondering, as his eyes slipped softly closed. Who just time travels and starts fighting people? This is why Kugisaki used to call me a moron.

And then Yuuji lost his last battle with consciousness, slipping into a heavy, bloody sort of sleep.

It didn’t matter, anyway. Across the courtyard Gojo Satoru was rising to his feet, a god born again, to live again, to fight again. 

After the fact, Satoru returned to look for the pink haired sorcerer. 

He had thought at first that the sorcerer that saved him might have been an illusion. Something conjured up by his mind in his last moments, a handsome savior come to pull him out of the trenches and restore him to his glory. Except the boy was real, and he was lying right where Satoru had left him, looking only slightly better than he had when Satoru had started fighting Toji.

Which was to say he was lying there still, face pointed to the sky. His cursed energy was a mosaic, patently strange, exceedingly rare. For the first time in a long time, Satoru wasn’t able to read someone with the Six Eyes. Or at least, he was so confused about what he was reading that he might as well have not gotten the input at all. The only thing that was clear was that there was a reverse cursed technique at play here somewhere. 

One thing he knew for sure—whatever hole this boy had crawled out of, it didn’t belong to this world. 

Satoru crouched down beside the pink-haired sorcerer. 

He didn’t look like much of a savior. He looked tired, worn down, like he had been fighting for years and years and he was still fighting. He wasn’t pretty—not like Suguru—but he had a rough handsomeness to him. Sharp cheek bones, a strong jaw, slightly shrunken cheeks like he didn’t eat enough. His hair was either dyed pink expertly and recently or naturally that color. Since he was a sorcerer, Satoru was inclined to believe the second. He was muscular and tall, though probably not quite as tall as Satoru. 

He was covered in scars.

Satoru allowed himself to observe them last, because they were the most fascinating aspect of his appearance. There were thinner scars crisscrossing the sorcerer’s arms, visible with how his sleeves were rolled up. Neatly, expertly, like he had put this nondescript black hoodie on this morning with the intention of fighting in it. He was missing a finger on his left hand too, the left behind scar jagged and rough, like the finger had been torn off rather than cut cleanly.

The scars on his face were more noticeable. One at the corner of his mouth, pulling at his lips, like someone had decided to take a bite out of his face. Another over the bridge of his nose, another diagonal between his brows and over his forehead. There was a large, messy one over his cheekbone and the eye socket, right side, though still his eyelashes fluttered softly against his cheekbone on that eye. Long. Almost pretty. 

For some reason that had nothing to do with the Six Eyes, Satoru felt like he knew this boy already. 

He reached out—hesitantly, at first, before he remembered he was Gojo Satoru and he didn’t let societal norms hold him back. Infinity shimmered between them—Satoru must have left it on reflexively after the fight he just had—but Satoru dropped it quickly, resting the pad of his thumb against the scar at the corner of the sorcerer’s mouth. He traced it slowly, following the edge, noticing the difference between the soft skin and the harder, tighter skin of the old wound. 

One eye shot open just as Satoru started to pull away, staring up at him. Satoru almost pulled away anyway, but something held him there—something in the way this boy looked at him, like maybe he knew Satoru too.

The sorcerer let out a rough, hitching breath that usually preceded tears, though no tears followed. Maybe he couldn’t even cry anymore through all the damage—Satoru didn’t really know how scars worked but that seemed like a logical assumption. 

“Thank god,” was all the sorcerer said, and dropped his head back, eyes drifting off of Satoru’s face and up to the clear blue sky above them. Satoru felt the words moving against his thumb, where he was still holding it against the scar at the corner of his mouth. 

Satoru finally withdrew his hand. “Do I know you?” he asked.

“Probably not, no,” the boy responded, a little hollowly. “You’re…. what? Fifteen? Sixteen? You don’t know me. I don’t even really know me. I don’t even know where the fuck I am, man.”

“You’re delirious from blood loss,” Satoru said, which was a guess more than anything. It sounded right though, like something someone would say on a cop show. “You’ve gotta tell me your name and your birthday and stuff now, just to make sure you’re all square.”

The tiniest, most strangely captivating smile Satoru had ever seen turned the corners of his lips upwards. “If you wanted me to introduce myself, you could have just said.”

“Could I have?” Satoru asked lightly. “You still haven't introduced yourself, anyway, and I’m pretty sure I’ve asked.”

“Yuuji,” he said, flicking his honey brown eye back over to Satoru. Satoru found himself wondering if the other one worked at all, or if Yuuji was down to just the one. That scar certainly made it seem possible. “March 20th.”

“No last name? Birth year?” Satoru asked.

Yuuji huffed, like this was funny, and said, “You haven’t introduced yourself to me either, you know.”

The lightheartedness was ridiculous at a time like this.

There was a body lying in a puddle of his own blood not far from where Satoru and Yuuji were. There was a hole in him—a hole Satoru put there—something so dire that not even the best reverse cursed technique would be able to fix. And there was Satoru, Satoru who was now a murderer—which hadn’t seemed like a big hurdle to cross when it was happening, but now felt like a very big change—who now knew what it meant to be infinite. And there was this sorcerer—this boy who hardly looked older than Satoru himself—lying on the ground and healing himself slowly as cursed energy trickled back into him, mysterious and terrifying and otherworldly.

He had saved Satoru’s life—Satoru knew that for certain. Had Fushiguro Toji reemerged from the Tombs and saw that Satoru could still move and breathe and sit up, Satoru would not have survived a second time.

And Satoru could see him—he could see the swirl of his cursed energy, the maelstrom of other energies within him. He had dealt with the elders enough already to know what the outcome would be if they found Yuuji—execution.

If Satoru was anyone other than himself, the answer would be to let it happen—Yuuji was dangerous, that much was clear. He was possibly even dangerous to Satoru. 

“Can you stand?” Satoru asked, surprised by the gentleness of his own voice. “Assistant managers and sorcerers are going to be crawling all over this place soon. If they find you, you’ll be executed.”

“Yeah, I imagine they would probably try that,” Yuuji said, like it didn’t really bother him one way or another. He brought one hand up—the one missing the finger—and rubbed absently at a spot under his left eye. 

And then his lips curved.

“They’ve got to give me a trial though, right? Or at least put on a show of giving me a trial?”

“It wouldn’t be in any way fair,” Satoru warned. “You really should—”

“No, no, I’ll be fine,” Yuuji said. “You’ll have to trust me on this one. I learned how to beat the elders into submission from the best.”

He sat up then, a ghost of a smile on his lips and a gleam in his eye. 

“Who’s the best?” Satoru asked, feeling out of his depth for the second time in one day. 

“You, obviously,” Yuuji said, and glanced over at him. 

Satoru stared, feeling like it must be impossible and knowing it wasn’t at the same time—in some deep, intuitive way he couldn’t have examined more thoroughly even if he wanted to. 

It was rare that he felt so at a loss for words.

“Well?” Yuuji said, after Satoru stayed silent for too long. “Are you going to arrest me or not, Sensei?”

I wonder, Satoru thought, for the first time in his life, if this is how other people feel when they deal with me.

“You know what,” Satoru said, feeling lighter than he really should have. “Sure. I’ll arrest you. Since you asked so nicely and all.”

That small, mischievous smile grew just a little more. 

And then—

“Wait. What the hell did you call me?” 

Chapter Text

If it hadn’t been for Yaga, Satoru would have probably hovered outside of the trial room Yuuji had been taken to so he could await the elders’ judgment for an eternity—or at least until a verdict had been reached. 

His fixation was a two-headed beast. With one mind, Satoru wanted to stay because of an element of concern. He had no reason to like Yuuji—and truthfully, he was more than a little wary of him—but he had plenty of reasons to be interested in Yuuji’s continued survival. He had saved Satoru’s life, after all. 

With the other mind, Satoru had a feeling something very entertaining and possibly gory was happening to the elders inside of that room, and he wanted to see it for himself or else. 

And perhaps Satoru would have never seen sense—he would have prowled back and forth outside of the elders’ sealed meeting room, turning this way and then that, stalking up the hall and then back down it again, nothing more than adrenaline and fear and excitement, trying to process the all-encompassing, soul-crushing feel of the entire universe pressing down on his brain, giving him everything he needed to truly be the strongest right before presenting him with someone that could take it all away. Someone that had saved Satoru. Someone that Satoru supposed he wanted to save in return. 

“Satoru,” Yaga’s voice said behind him, sounding the tiniest bit disgruntled. Gruff, as always, but strangely…careful, for once. If careful was even the best word for it. 

“Ah, Sensei,” Satoru said, turning to look at Yaga.

Silence filled the space between them. Satoru wasn’t really used to it, silence. Normally he filled spaces with words, or with actions, or with noise in general. Except today he filled silence with more silence, staring at Yaga who stared at him, both of them thinking but neither of them saying what was really on their mind. 

Eventually, Yaga sighed. “Who is the curse user you arrested today?”

It wasn’t the question that Satoru had been expecting, but he supposed it was a good place to start.

“Don’t know,” Satoru responded, just as gruff. Then, “He said his name was Yuuji.”

“Was he also attempting to assassinate the Star Plasma Vessel?”

“No.”

“Then he was arrested because…?”

Satoru huffed. “Because he’s dangerous, unregistered, and…”

And definitely not from this world.

“And?”

“And he asked me to,” Satoru finished, like it had been what he was intending to say this whole time. 

“He asked you to,” Yaga repeated flatly. 

“He asked me to,” Satoru said, for the second time. 

Yaga continued to look at him, eyes hidden behind his dark tinted glasses. 

“I wasn’t aware you were in the business of granting favors,” Yaga said. 

If Satoru was feeling like he normally felt—like himself—he probably would have turned an assessment like that into a joke. At least he would have turned it into an opportunity to talk about his own perceived greatness, and yet Satoru did neither. Couldn’t bring himself to do either, because…

The world felt different, now that he had actually seen it, and that left Satoru feeling jagged and exposed, as stark and dangerous as a cliff face. 

“Something’s changed,” Satoru said. “Can you feel it? It’s like the earth itself is weeping.”

Yaga hummed, noncommittal, which meant he knew exactly what Satoru was talking about. You didn’t have to have the Six Eyes to know power when you saw it, if you were experienced enough and skilled enough, of which Yaga had plenty of both to boast of.

“Go to the infirmary, Satoru,” Yaga said instead.

Satoru smiled wryly. “I’m not injured,” he said. “I can do it now, Sensei. Reverse cursed technique—I truly am a god amongst men.”

“Not for yourself,” Yaga said, voice heavy. “Amanai Riko and Suguru are both there. Your friend could use your strength.”

Reality crashed back into Satoru. 

How could he not have thought—how could he not have realized—

“Suguru is injured?” Satoru asked, standing up a little straighter. “Is he—?”

“Suguru is fine,” Yaga said. “Amanai is exhausted, but alive and unharmed.” He eyed Satoru, his expression inscrutable. “You are still bound by duty to protect her. Until such time as she dies or the erasure is complete.”

Yaga must have seen something in his face, because his expression softened. He reached out—not to clap Satoru over the head with the fist of guidance, like usual, but to squeeze his shoulder comfortingly. Yaga’s hand closed around the Infinity between them instead of Satoru’s skin, and he gave his hand an almost sad look for a moment before withdrawing. 

“You’re not a god amongst men,” he told Satoru. “You’re a teenager amongst teenagers. A powerful teenager, granted, but still a teenager. I’ll make sure you know the outcome to this mysterious curse user’s trial. In the meantime, go spend time with your friends. Do your duty. Whatever it is you need to do to get your mind off of whatever that horrible mess in your head is, do it.”

Satoru wasn’t one for subservience. He never had been, considering he had largely been too great for mentors or too different for peers for much of his life. He respected Yaga, if only because Yaga knew exactly what he was to this world he was entrenched in, but had never really viewed him as a mentor so much as a keeper, someone to point him in particular directions while he was young and impressionable and supposedly incapable of pointing himself. 

But in this case, for the first time in Satoru’s life, he closed his eyes, accepting Yaga’s kindness at face value—he was a teacher, and he cared about his students first and foremost, even if he was wrong—and that was all that really mattered. 

“Yeah, alright,” he told Yaga, and stood to make his way into the infirmary. 

It wouldn’t help him—he knew that. 

But the thing about Satoru—the thing he hoped was never as apparent to other people as it was to him—was that despite all outward appearances, he rarely did anything for himself. 

He was a jujutsu sorcerer, after all. He always had been. He always would be. 

Selfishness was a luxury he couldn’t afford. 

Despite being two years into his actual career as a jujutsu sorcerer—and being more than aware that sorcerers died early, tragic deaths—Suguru had never actually had a close call before now. 

It settled in when everything was done and over with. Once he had carried Riko back to the school and laid her on a pallet in the infirmary, her eyes closed like the dead but her heart still thumping in her chest, after he’d sat himself down in a corner of the room and stared in shock as she continued to sleep on, it settled. 

Close, close, close, his brain chanted, like a mantra, like a death sentence. There had been a gun pointed at Riko’s head, and Suguru hadn’t even noticed. If the strange, pink-haired curse user hadn’t interfered, Suguru was sure that she would be dead. 

He wondered what had happened to the curse user, afterwards. Only distantly, not so much that he was about to ask either Shoko or the old but brilliant window that served as their doctor currently. Both were unlikely to know, anyway, considering both tended to keep their head buried firmly in their medical duties. 

Of which they had plenty more than just Riko to worry about—Toji had left a trail of blood getting into the Tombs of the Star Corridor. Some of the sorcerers were saveable. 

Some of them, like Kuroi, were taking up a bed with a white sheet drawn over their face. 

“Yo, Suguru,” a voice said, jolting Suguru out of his head. 

He looked up at Satoru and jolted again—Suguru was so rarely subjected to the full, terrible force of his eyes that they had a tendency to jump scare him whenever Satoru left them uncovered, and now was no exception. 

The next second, Suguru remembered that while he had been informed Satoru had not, in fact, been killed by Toji previously—he definitely must have been injured by him. 

Suguru was on his feet in an instant, reaching for Satoru’s elbows. He was covered in blood, but he seemed fine—he was standing fine, looking at Suguru like he was fine, holding his body like he was fine—but there was no way that Toji would have gotten into the Tombs of the Star if Satoru was—

“Suguru,” Satoru said. “I’m fine. I used my reverse cursed technique.”

“You can’t—”

“I can,” Satoru corrected, voice soft. “Now I can, anyway.”

Suguru blinked,  forcing himself to relax. Emotional displays that were also authentic weren't really their style, either of them. They fought, yes, but that hardly ever felt real. With Satoru, nothing did—it was both his most infuriating quality and at times his most valuable one.

“Shit,” he told Satoru. “That’s the last time I worry about you, then.”

Aww, you were worried about me? I always knew you cared, Suguru~

“Did you meet him too?” Satoru asked. It was… serious. Sincere. Nothing at all like how Satoru usually sounded or acted or anything else.

“Who?” Suguru asked stupidly.

“Yuuji,” Satoru said, absently, before seemingly realizing that Suguru had no clue what he was talking about. “The sorcerer. With the—”

“Pink hair,” Suguru finished. “I remember him.” He became weirdly aware of how he was still holding Satoru’s elbows—or rather the space around Satoru's elbows—and released him. “He’s the one that saved…”

Satoru’s gaze felt unbearably sharp all of a sudden. Suguru looked away, back at Riko, where she lay peacefully asleep.

“Cursed energy exhaustion,” Satoru said, almost like it confused him. “She must've… oh. Oh.”

Suguru glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. It wasn’t uncommon for Satoru to have these revelations, and while Suguru was normally content to ignore them, something about this one—

“Satoru?” Shoko asked, evidently finally noticing he was here. When Suguru looked at her, she was a little pale, though it was difficult to tell if that was because she had been overusing her technique or because of the sheer amount of blood Satoru was covered in. 

“Yo,” Satoru said, raising one hand in greeting.

Shoko was on him in an instant, her current patient forgotten. It made Suguru feel marginally better about his own reaction to Satoru. She fluttered around him for only a moment though before evidently deciding he was fine, as she stepped back, effecting a relaxed air. 

“I thought you must have died or something from how Suguru was carrying on when he first got here,” she said.

“Hey,” Suguru objected, because being concerned about Satoru and Satoru knowing he had been concerned about him were two different things. “I object to that—the majority of my concern was actually for Riko.”

Shoko hummed like she didn’t quite believe this—which really was fair enough—but Satoru, in a continued strain of uncharacteristic behavior, leaned closer to Shoko and lowered his voice, startlingly considerate. “How is she doing?”

Shoko pursed her lips a little, looking a little suspicious. “She’s fine. She’ll be awake in an hour or two—hey, idiot, you can’t just waltz over there—”

Satoru, as uncaring as ever, waltzed over there anyway. Shoko gave an exasperated sigh and followed him. Suguru hovered for a moment, torn between following the rules and missing out. In the end, his worser impulses won out where Satoru was concerned, as they always did. He sighed and followed, coming to stand beside Shoko, sandwiching her between him and Satoru.

Closer, Riko looked less peaceful, her eyelids fluttering, her hair sweaty and sticking to her face, her under eyes bruised from too many hours awake. Suguru reached out reflexively, pushing her fringe out of her eyes, and then became uncomfortably aware of Satoru and Shoko both watching him as he did it. 

“Um,” Satoru said. 

Suguru quickly dropped the strand of hair and refused to explain himself. 

Shoko sighed. “Well, I’m done here, for now. I think you two better tell me exactly what happened on your mission.”

And to that…Suguru found he had to agree.

Shoko stood outside of the clinic, twining her hair around her finger. Satoru and Suguru stood across from her. The former had his arms crossed over his chest, uncovered eyes eerily glowing in the low light of the hall. Suguru was outwardly more calm, but there was a tightness to his shoulders that reminded Shoko of a snake, coiled and ready to strike.

“What happened?” she asked, eyes flicking between Satoru and Suguru. They were both acting so different, but it was hard to say which was more to blame. Satoru was antsy in a way she hadn’t seen from him in a long time—twitchy and nervous, like he wanted to run off somewhere. Suguru was antsy in a different way, casting repeated looks towards the clinic door like being separate from the Star Plasma Vessel was causing him actual physical pain. 

There was an awkward pause. It felt unnatural, stiff, haunting. Normally Satoru filled the space between conversations with hot air and his ego. She could hear it in her mind's eye as clear day. ‘What happened?’ he would say, with his customary scoff. ‘I’m the strongest—nothing happens to me.’

Except Satoru remained silent, staring fixedly at the toes of his boots as he scuffed one repeatedly against the floor. 

“Well…nothing, really,” Suguru assured her at last, after the silence dragged on and on. “The mission was successful, you know? As far as missions can be successful as a sorcerer. Kuroi and those other sorcerers died, but… casualties don’t really matter so long as they aren’t the subject of your mission, do they?”

“Sure they matter,” Shoko said eventually. “Lives are still lives.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Satoru said, voice a low scoff. “It’s not the deaths that have either of us concerned. It’s the other complications that are taking up so much space in here.” He jabbed a finger aggressively into his forehead, eyes dark and shoulders tight.

Shoko resisted the urge to take a step back from him. It was a stark, almost frightening reminder of how Satoru had been when she first met him. Cold. Aloof. Difficult to connect to, right up until the first time he walked into a pole on accident and laughed so hard he cried.

That moment had made him human, suddenly and viscerally. And now…

“Complications,” Shoko repeated, keeping her voice carefully neutral. “Like what?”

“Like…” Suguru trailed off, glancing at Satoru for help. Satoru didn’t offer it—his finger jammed into his forehead still, his eyes lost somewhere far away. “There was an unexpectedly good assassin sent after Riko, but Satoru handled him—” A low sound that was almost like a laugh from Satoru revealed this probably wasn’t the whole truth. “—and…some other guy, too.”

“Some other guy?” Shoko asked, raising her eyebrows. “Another assassin?”

“No,” Suguru said. “...Well, maybe.”

“Yuuji,” Satoru said, his voice low, almost guttural.

“...Who?” Shoko asked.

“That was his name apparently,” Suguru said, turning back to her. “He was a curse user—unknown and unregistered—with pink hair and a lot of scars. He appeared in the Tombs of the Star Corridor with no warning. He saved Riko’s life.”

Shoko hummed, digesting this. She longed for a cigarette—something to take a long, desperate draw on just to distract herself from everything she didn’t know how to digest. 

“Did he?” Satoru asked, lips curling cruelly like it was a trick question.

“Yeah,” Suguru said, glancing at him strangely. “What aren’t you telling us, Satoru?”

“I have a theory,” Satoru started to say, but he got no further than that before the click of heels preceding Mei Mei rounding the corner silenced him.

“What? Oh, don’t stop on my account,” Mei Mei said, her grin sharp. “I would love to hear what you have to say.”

Satoru breathed out, long and slow through his nose, and didn’t engage.

It was unsettling and unusual, seeing this version of Satoru after so long of only seeing him acting like an idiot. Shoko hadn’t forgotten, not necessarily, that Satoru could have his serious moments. But she had forgotten what it felt like to bear witness to them. She had forgotten what it felt like to know gratitude in not having that raptorial gravity turned towards her.

“What are you doing here?” Suguru asked, in Satoru’s absence. 

Shoko might as well have not even been there.

“Transport and protection of one former Star Plasma Vessel,” Mei Mei said, propping a hand on her hip. “I’ve been paid in full already.”

“What?” Suguru asked, pushing himself off the wall. He made an intimidating sight all of a sudden too, as lanky as he was, with his arms crossed over his chest. “That’s my case. Mine and Satoru’s, and you’re only a grade one.”

“I don’t know what’s more insulting,” Mei Mei said, though she didn’t seem very insulted so much as she seemed horribly amused. “The fact that you think I’m not perfectly capable of a little surveillance and babysitting, or the fact that you would rather spend your time with a comatose girl when I’m right here too.”

“You bitch,” Suguru said, lip curling. The nice guy routine fell away in an instant, exposing a bit of the rot underneath. 

Shoko had long since thought that of them all, Suguru was the least suited to the machinations of jujutsu society, despite how pretty he smiled and how carefully he tried. He frightened her too, though she knew better than to ever say so to him. 

“You said former,” Satoru said. “Former Star Plasma Vessel.”

“That’s right,” Mei Mei said in a sultry purr. “Tengen has refused the merger.”

“That means—” Suguru started, still with his saccharine mask down, just a ball of naked emotions and fear. 

“Amanai Riko no longer warrants the protection of special grade sorcerers like yourselves,” Mei Mei said, smiling unpleasantly. “You boys now officially have better things to do. Take care of yourselves, yes? Excellent.”

She turned on her heel, stepping inside the infirmary. 

Satoru laughed, high and cold and unforgiving. 

“Well, shit,” he said. 

Shoko suspected that just about summed it all up. 

Satoru didn’t sleep that night.

He should have. Yaga was right to say that he was still mortal. Satoru was mortal in the ways that mattered most, anyway, which was to say that he needed to eat and sleep and do everything else mortals had to do in order to survive. Except now…

A reverse cursed technique running constantly was sweeter than any sugar Satoru could have eaten. Better at stimulating his brain than any caffeine, better at keeping him going than any drug. He didn’t even feel tired right now. He couldn’t have slept if he tried. 

He had showered like a human, though. Ate dinner like a human, sulked off to his room like a human. Normally, he celebrated successful missions with Suguru in one of their rooms, but that didn’t feel right tonight. Not when the sight of Suguru’s fingers pushing back Riko’s hair was too fresh in his mind, the blood still warm on his hands, the bodies still cold in the morgue. 

Not when the memory of pink hair and honey eyes and scars—more scars than any one person ought to have on their body—was still imprinted on the back of his eyelids. 

He could feel him on campus, Yuuji. He doubted anyone else could—or that anyone else would want to. Now that he wasn’t fighting, that maelstrom of cursed energy that Yuuji carried inside of him was relatively quiet. Though, it was quiet and still plenty easy to distinguish from a sea of other, lesser cursed energy signatures. 

If Satoru was right, and Satoru was fairly certain that he was right, Yaga was with Yuuji. 

His range felt so much broader than it had been twenty-four hours ago. Then, it took everything he had not to pass out on the spot from keeping the Six Eyes active and engaged for so long. Now, it was child’s play to keep his eyes open and peeled. 

Yuuji stepped onto the winding path that led up to the dorms, Yaga at his side, and Satoru turned his head. 

Oh? 

It wasn’t a guard detail. Yuuji wasn’t being led to his execution at another location—his pace was casual, easy. If one of them paused, the other waited for them. This was a conversation—a moving conversation, but still a conversation. At first Satoru thought Yuuji was being politely escorted off campus. Sort of a ‘thanks for deciding not to kill us today even though you could, here’s a pass to walk around free for now, come back to work for us soon’ treatment from the higher-ups. They had certainly done similar things to powerful sorcerers before, though none of those sorcerers were on Yuuji’s level.

Satoru hadn’t imagined there would be a reality where Yuuji enrolled in school. 

Though then again, maybe the problem was with Satoru’s imagination. He hadn’t thought that a technique as specific and unruly as Riko’s could be used for anything other than a little casual misdirection in a fight, and yet here Yuuji was.

Here being the past, if Satoru was right—and Satoru was almost always right. 

Satoru stood. He didn’t need visual information from his actual eyes so long as he had the Six Eyes to tell him where someone’s cursed energy was and what shape it was taking, but Satoru craved it anyway. He crossed to the door at the end of his room—he had a room on the top floor and therefore had a balcony attached. Generally speaking it was too small to use for anything other than opening the door and leaning against the railing (with the door still open, to accommodate his legs), which really meant Satoru didn’t use it very often. He didn’t smoke—that wasn’t his vice of choice—and he didn’t have any particular interest in being outside either. And yet Satoru pulled the blinds anyway and opened the door, stepping out into the warm summer air in his T-shirt, with the ends of his hair still damp from the shower he took to wash off the blood earlier. 

And there he saw them. 

There was Yuuji, looking a little ragged and a little bloody, but entirely whole. Well, entirely whole minus one finger and one eye, but those were old wounds. He dogged Yaga’s footsteps patiently, hands tucked into his pockets, eye flicking around the twilit campus like he couldn’t actually believe anything he was seeing. Satoru was starting to think he was right about the state of Yuuji’s right eye—he didn’t think it was there any longer. If it was, it definitely wasn’t usable.

Yuuji turned, lifting his chin almost like he sensed Satoru watching, and—

And he had. He must have. 

Satoru held his gaze, knowing that he had met it even across an entire campus, even in the low lighting. He could even see the way Yuuji smiled, grim and a little sad, right before he took his left hand out of his pocket and slowly raised it to wave at Satoru, not breaking eye contact for a moment. 

Satoru stared, for just a moment longer, and then raised his right hand in like. 

So that’s how it is, he thought, as Yuuji turned away, head ducked as he followed after Yaga. They’ve decided to dress a wolf in sheep’s clothing. 

This was going to be fun.

Chapter Text

It was all too familiar—being chained, sealed, and placed on his knees in a candlelit room. 

The difference was that instead of Gojo—sitting backwards in a chair and staring fixedly at him from beneath his blindfold—Yuuji was sitting in front of the elders. They sat behind screens, faces and builds concealed by paper thin walls, more silhouette than anything else. Yuuji wasn’t sure of what he was imagining when he thought of the elders before. Gojo used to talk about easily killing them. Even Yuuta had spoken of them with a vague sort of annoyance masked by his ever-present politeness. Between the two of them, Yuuji had somehow ended up with the impression that the elders were a bunch of shriveled old men that couldn’t even use cursed techniques. 

He’d overlooked one fundamental fact, though. The elders were old. It was in the name. Which meant—in a career full of people that died before they turned fifty, these were the people that were strong enough to survive. 

Or they were the guys that were the best at running away, a cynical voice in the back of Yuuji’s mind that sounded a little like Fushiguro pointed out. 

Which was fair enough. Except for the fact that these elders definitely had enough going on in the cursed energy department to at least put a dent in him if they wanted to. 

Of course, leave it to guys like Yuuta and Gojo to be so strong they didn’t even notice all that power. 

“What is your name, curse user?” the elder sitting behind the screen directly in front of Yuuji asked.

“Itadori Yuuji,” Yuuji answered.

“Truth,” the elder sitting next to Center Elder said. 

Hm. Yuuji wondered if that was a technique a little like Higuruma’s. Something that let him know whether someone was telling the truth.

Though, that was admittedly a very small aspect of Higuruma’s very complicated and incredibly deadly technique. 

“How old are you?”

He paused to think for a moment. Admittedly, he’d lost grasp of the concept of time just a little bit. There wasn’t much of a point to celebrating a birthday when he had shit to do and no one to celebrate with, so…

“Seventeen,” he eventually decided, figuring it must be so. 

“Truth.”

That sent a strange murmur through the crowd of elders. 

“What is your day of birth?”

“March 20th.”

“Year?”

“2003.”

The murmur increased tenfold. “Impossible!” an elder behind Yuuji shouted. 

“How dare he lie so blatantly to us—”

“Truth,” Lie Detector Elder said, albeit reluctantly. 

“How can it be…”

“Perhaps a cursed technique?”

“Curse user!” Center Elder shouted. “Explain yourself at once!”

Yuuji felt his lips quirk upwards. “Explain myself? What do you want me to say, man? It’s time travel or something—I’m not the one that did it.”

“...Truth,” Lie Detector Elder admitted. 

There were several cries of outrage. 

“Enough!” Center Elder commanded, and gradually, the others fell silent. “Curse user, you were arrested for illegally accessing the Tombs of the Star Corridor. How do you plead?”

Ah, wait, wait. This was all very familiar. Yuuji resisted the urge to bang his forehead against something, trying to remember all those years ago…the trial with Higuruma…

Right. 

“Not guilty…?” he said, like it was a question. No, no, confidence was key here. “The Tombs of the Star Corridor is just another abandoned place. Who cares if I enter it or not? There isn’t anyone to stop me, and no one to enforce any kind of law, so it can’t be illegal. Right?”

“...Truth,” Lie Detector Elder confirmed grumpily. 

Score, Yuuji thought. 

“Anyway,” Yuuji said, before the elder in charge could pose another question. “That’s not why I asked Gojo Satoru to arrest me, and I’m pretty sure that’s not what you really care about. So…elephant in the room, anyone? Do you know the whereabouts of Death Paintings Four through Nine right now?”

The elders clamored again. 

“Someone, check at once—” the Center Elder commanded, and there was some shuffling at what was probably the edge of the room.

Yuuji wanted to verify it for himself, more than anything else. He could feel his brothers residing in him still, and he could still use their techniques, but the question he needed to ask was whether coming back created duplicates, in a sense—Yuuji and the Death Paintings—or if one existing overwrote the others. 

Because if Yuuji’s presence meant that his brothers no longer existed as wombs in this world, then that might mean…

Fifteen other cursed objects might have been conveniently blinked out of existence too. Yuuji had actually ingested those fingers—he had merged with and processed Sukuna, even if Sukuna had died in another body in the end—which meant it was possible. It was a long shot, but it was possible that both Yuuji and those fifteen fingers couldn’t exist at the same time. 

But, it was equally as possible that Sukuna had taken those fingers with him when he went to Fushiguro. It seemed kind of bullshit—that he might be able to condense the essence of fifteen special grade cursed objects into one of Yuuji’s pinkie fingers and fucking go, just to make things harder for everyone else later. 

What was it Fushiguro used to say?

The only thing fair about life was that it was unfair. 

“What year is it?” Yuuji asked, cutting through a brewing discussion he hadn’t been paying a lot of attention too. 

Nobody seemed all too keen on talking, all of a sudden. 

“I said,” Yuuji repeated, “what year is it?”

“2006,” came the answer from behind him, just as reluctant as everything else.

“And the month?”

“August.”

August. 

Fourteen years in the past. 

It helped to have a specific timeline. Yuuji had been thinking about something since he picked himself up out of a pool of his blood and met teenaged Gojo Satoru. At first he’d thought it was a bizarre hallucination, admittedly. But the longer the bizarre hallucination continued, the more it felt real. 

And if it wasn’t a hallucination, then maybe, just maybe he could make something out of it. 

At the very least, he could make sure Getou Suguru got cremated this time if he died again. 

But Yuuji had bigger plans than forcing Kenjaku into a less competent vessel. Killing Sukuna—or at least containing him—seemed like an obvious first step in the right direction. Staging a hostile takeover of the jujutsu world from these guys seemed like a logical next move. Then there were other things—saving Gojo, keeping Kenjaku from getting his grubby hands on Fushiguro’s sister, keeping Sukuna from getting his grubby hands on Fushiguro, exorcising Mahito, buying bread for Nanami, carrying Kugisaki’s shopping bags for her one last time, stopping the Culling Games from happening, just fucking seeing everyone alive and well again—

Not…dying alone, like he was going to do before. 

But he might be getting ahead of himself, too. Movies had taught him long ago that time travel was almost never permanent, no matter how much you wanted it to be. 

Which…was in the name, he supposed. If time travel was permanent, they would call it time migration or something, wouldn’t they? Time moving? Time relocation? Time—

“They’re gone!” someone cried, in a frantic pitch. “Cursed Womb: Death Paintings Four through Nine—they’ve disappeared!”

Yuuji turned his head over his shoulder, looking for the source of the sound. It was a man he didn’t recognize in the suit and tie he associated with assistant managers—the poor soul that had probably been sent to check on the Death Paintings, since the elders certainly never did anything for themselves. 

Yuuji turned back around, closing his eye in a moment of grief. 

Sorry, brothers, he thought. I wish you could have lived your own lives, just this once, but…

There was a soft, comforting thrum of cursed energy deep in his belly, even as the room around him erupted in noise. 

“Death! Death at once!” one elder cried hysterically. 

“You insolent boy!” another shouted. 

“We must execute him!”

“He stole from us!”

“Why is it,” Yuuji said, feeling that dark rage that he’d grown so accustomed to in the last few years bubbling up again, “that you assholes always jump to execution first?”

The room fell completely silent. 

Yuuji lifted his head, looking at each of them in turn, wishing they hadn’t been so cowardly as to refuse to show him their faces. 

“I consumed my brothers long before I came here,” Yuuji continued. “And they weren’t ever yours to start with. They’re human, you know, every single one of them. They’re at least two/thirds human, and you just—what? Let them marinate in a fucking cellar for hundreds of years? Fuck all of you for that, honestly.”

No one in a thousand years had managed to come up with a way that could effectively seal away Sukuna. That was an immutable fact—even fourteen years into the future—but it made him wonder. If Sukuna couldn’t be contained, then surely…

Yuuji stretched, twisting his wrist, reaching and reaching…if he could just reach…

Yuuji’s fingertips brushed against the paper seals holding him. 

“Anyway,” Yuuji said, funneling his cursed energy into the smallest amount he could, letting it fill up his fingertips and pass through him. It was dampened for sure, but he didn’t exactly need to be at full power to cleave a piece of paper in half. “You can execute me if that’s what you would really like to do—I would probably deserve it, to tell you the truth—but if you could at least hear me out before—”

“As if we would listen to you after you admitted to consuming the Cursed Wombs created by Kamo Noritoshi!”

“And I told you, they aren’t evil just because—”

“Kill him!” Center Elder shouted.

Well, so much for peaceful negotiations. 

Cleave tore through the paper sutras binding him in an instant, and Yuuji broke his wrists apart, bracing for a fight—

“Stop at once,” a woman’s voice said.

Surprisingly, the cursed energy in the room actually plummeted, the silhouettes of elders falling to their knees in subjugation to whoever had spoken. Yuuji stared around him, utterly baffled by this turn of events, before he slowly turned to face the woman who had spoken. 

…Tengen?

She looked different, which was to say she looked human… mostly. Like a very old human, with white hair that fell in disarray around her head, poking out at odd angles. He remembered thinking Tengen looked a little like one of those smooth bark trees when he met her the first time. Now, he thought she looked a lot more like a weathered tree, something that had been standing for hundreds of years.

The outfit she wore, though, was exactly the same.

“Tengen…sama?” Yuuji said, feeling flabbergasted at every turn, now.

“Demon God,” Tengen greeted him, with something like respect.

“What?” Yuuji said, pointing at himself. “Me?”

“Fitting, no?” Tengen said, looking deceptively mild-mannered as she folded her hands over the top of a weathered staff. 

“Tengen-sama, you shouldn’t be out—” Center Elder started to say, which knocked a thought loose in Yuuji’s fairly disjointed mind.

“Ah,” he said, pointing at her accusingly. “I thought you didn’t interfere in the affairs of the jujutsu world. I find it hard to believe 2006 Tengen is more involved than 2018 Tengen.”

“I do not interfere,” Tengen said, voice neutral, “and yet this is the second time I have done it in the last twenty-four hours.”

“You don’t mean—”

“You brought him here?” Center Elder demanded. “Impossible!”

“My vessel brought him here,” Tengen said. “To me that is the same thing.”

“You don’t share with your vessels,” Yuuji said, feeling somewhat on edge. Time had dulled Tengen’s peculiarities, that was true, but Yuuji hadn’t forgotten, either. Tengen was just as uncaring as the rest of them, once you peeled back the skin to expose the rot. All these incarnated bastards were shifty, in one way or another. “So forgive me for not buying it.”

“Not the vessel I currently inhabit,” Tengen corrected. “The one I was close to transferring into. Perhaps that is why I felt it when she called to you for help. I have not heard one of them before. I will admit…it unsettled me.”

Yuuji blinked once. He blinked twice.

“Who?” he asked, very intelligently.

“We will speak,” Tengen said, like this settled it, before turning slightly to the elders. 

“The Demon God has my blessing. He will be protected by me so long as he stands on my land.” She paused, as if considering something, before she added, “Whoever you people are, you should not attempt to kill him again.”

Oh, man. If only Yuuji could see their faces right now. He might trust Tengen as far as he could throw her, but he had to admit—ordering a bunch of people that thought they were in charge around and then revealing you didn’t even know who they were afterwards? Kind of brutal.

Gojo would have liked to see that.

And then, like the warmth of a fire seeping slowly into his veins, Yuuji realized once again—Gojo. He was alive. Yuuji had seen him, not even a day ago. 

On that note, he followed Tengen out of the meeting room with the elders.

In some bizarre twist of fate, Tengen served him tea in the same room he had found the crusty teacups in earlier. Though obviously, the crusty teacups were there no longer.

“Amanai Riko,” Tengen said, by way of beginning. “She is a Star Plasma Vessel. My next, or so I thought.”

Yuuji was aware it was disrespectful, but he still made a noise of disgust or disappointment or something else generally unkind in response to that.

“I am required to merge with a new vessel,” Tengen reminded him, a little defensively. “Otherwise, I would become a curse. My allegiances would be unreliable.”

“I think that implies your allegiances are reliable now,” Yuuji countered, “and I don’t really think they are.”

Tengen went silent for a long moment, only breaking that silence once she sat a cup of tea down in front of Yuuji. 

“Perhaps that is true,” she said eventually. “I no longer see purpose in what I do—I simply do it.”

Yuuji was silent for a long moment, staring at his tea and mulling this over. 

People weren’t built for immortality, he had learned that the hard way. Humanity was weathered away with time until eventually there was none of it left. A determined, powerful sorcerer could change bodies and change them again, but eventually…

“You’re already more curse than human, aren’t you?” Yuuji asked. 

“...Yes.”

He rubbed at his forehead, trying to think through things. This all sounded vaguely familiar, now that he thought about it, like a story Gojo told him a long time ago slowly unfurling in front of him. “August of 2006…” he repeated, doing mental math. “Gojo-sensei looked like he was sixteen, so…that is second year, probably? And you said you were about to merge with a new vessel, so…” The lightbulb finally lit up. “That’s— that’s where I am? That one mission Gojo-sensei said he went on, where they failed and a girl died and Getou lost…it…”

A girl died. 

And Yuuji had saved a girl from dying as soon as he got here, hadn’t he?

…Maybe he was already turning the tides. 

And then Yuuji blinked. 

“Would it even matter?” he asked Tengen. “If you merged with a new vessel or not? You’re barely human as is.”

Tengen frowned a little, the weathered lines of her face growing heavy with the expression. “Where you come from, how did this play out?”

“The Star Plasma Vessel died,” Yuuji said. “Your merger failed. By the time I met you twelve years from now, you were just another curse, albeit a more reasonable one than the usual.”

Tengen tapped her fingernails against the table. 

“What is the difference between a curse and a human?” she asked. “You implied it a moment ago, but say it plainly now. If anyone would know, I suppose it is you.”

Yuuji sat up a little straighter, looking Tengen directly in her eerily blue eyes. “It’s purpose,” he said eventually. “And it’s will. Curses know their function in this world, don’t they? That’s something humans struggle with more. But will…the will to do it, the ability to stand back up, the determination to keep going for something other than yourself—that’s human.” He held eye contact with Tengen for a moment longer, thinking about all the things he had seen, all the things he had learned. 

“Are you aware,” he began slowly, “that there’s a sorcerer alive right now that can subjugate, consume, and control curses? He can even do it to special grade curses, or at least he will be able to one day. He can do it to you.”

“Is that my future?” Tengen asked. 

Yuuji sighed, sitting back. “Yeah. But that’s not really my point. If sorcerers like that guy can exist, then what do you think the difference between curses and humans really is? Curses come from us. They are often stronger than us—faster, harder to kill, better at using cursed energy—but that doesn’t change their origin point.”

“And eventually, the curse will fall to the human?”

“Depends on the human,” Yuuji said, closing his eye and leaning back. “Depends on the curse.”

Tengen lifted her tea to her lips, then sat it down undrunk. “Do curses know fear, Demon God?”

“Curses know fear best of all,” Yuuji responded. “It’s what they are.”

“What do you think I fear?”

“What all of you fear,” Yuuji said. “Consumption.”

He cracked his eye open, studying Tengen now. She didn’t look particularly bothered by this revelation, but then again…

“You said you heard your vessel call out to me,” Yuuji said. “What does that mean?” 

Tengen held his gaze for a long moment, unperturbed. 

“They usually have techniques of immense power, my Star Plasma Vessels,” Tengen began.

Yuuji curled his lip. “I’m aware of the concept. Assimilate the body, assimilate the technique, right? It always comes back to greed. You don’t just look for vessels—you look for vessels that will make you stronger.”

He thought about a finger crammed down Fushiguro’s throat. Mahoraga rising from his shadows. Gojo lying in a puddle of blood, those all powerful Six Eyes staring blankly up at the sky.

Something Sukuna might never have been able to do, if he had stayed in the body he fucking belonged in.

Tengen dipped her head, an acknowledgment of his anger, or perhaps of his grief, and continued onwards. “Amanai Riko used hers to pull you from another time.”

“Can she use it to push me back there?”

“No. This technique overwrites reality with possibility, creating a new reality. It cannot be undone. I had thought it would be incredibly useful, should I ever need to—”

“To make a clean getaway when everything goes to shit?” Yuuji asked, raising his eyebrows in challenge. “How selfless of you.”

Tengen sat back, studying him blankly. “Your anger consumes your reason. It is not me with whom your quest for vengeance lies.”

Yuuji sighed, rubbing at an itch on the scar over the right side of his face as he sat back. Tengen was right, really—she was true neutral at best, mildly inconvenient at worst. Sniping at her wouldn’t actually get him anywhere, especially not after…

“Thank you,” he said. “For stepping in. I suppose I owe you that much.”

“They could not have killed you,” Tengen said, a neutral observation.

“True enough,” Yuuji said, smiling a bit. “But think about how much easier you made this for me anyway. The great Tengen-sama, notoriously aloof, who doesn’t concern herself with the outside world, leaving the Tombs of the Star Corridor just to save little old me.”

Tengen didn’t dignify this with a response, which… he supposed he should have seen that coming. 

“For the merger to be successful, both the vessel and I have to consent to the arrangement,” Tengen said instead.

“I know,” Yuuji replied softly. He had done something similar before, after all. 

“Should we be in discordance, a battleground shall take place in our body, of which, she with the stronger will would win out.”

“Which wouldn’t be you,” Yuuji inferred, eying Tengen critically. “So, this is why you refused to merge with another vessel, even after this vessel died initially.”

“That is my line of thinking, yes,” Tengen said. “And I must remain in control, or—”

“Or what?” Yuuji interrupted. “You might actually be helpful for once in your life?”

Tengen glanced back at her teacup, not denying it.

“How about a third option,” Yuuji said. “Agree to share the body. Stay human a little longer. Save this world a little trouble, yeah?”

“Is that what you intend to do now that you are here?” Tengen asked. “Save this world from trouble?”

Yuuji smiled, feeling the ache in the way his lips pulled at his scar. He didn’t do this very often anymore. He hadn’t in a while.

“I’m not a hero,” he told Tengen. “I’m a jujutsu sorcerer. I would light the matches myself and watch the world burn if it meant I got to see the people I care about one last time.” 

“I see,” Tengen said. Curiously enough, she was smiling too. “In that case, I would like to make a deal with you.”

“What sort of deal?”

“Amanai Riko is to be included in the list of people that fall under your protection. In exchange, I will grant you these.”

Tengen waved her hand, and on the table a portal opened. It deposited three jars there before it closed again, each filled to the brim with a sickly goo and containing inside of them—

“Choso,” Yuuji realized, because he recognized the flow of his brother’s cursed energy, even reduced as he was. And moreover— “Kechizu and Eso. They—they’re alive again too. I nearly forgot—fuck—”

“Do you accept these conditions?” Tengen prompted, and Yuuji flicked his gaze back to her, something occurring to him.

“Wait,” he said. “Why should you—”

“My vessels are a part of me,” Tengen said. “Whatever else you think of me, I am not completely ungrateful to the opportunity these women afford me. I would like to see her remain safe in the world you create.”

And yeah, there was nothing saying Tengen didn’t have some nefarious ulterior motive for asking this, but…

Yuuji had meant what he said. He had learned he wasn’t a hero a long time ago. 

He closed his hand around the top of the jar containing Choso. “Deal.”

“The boy acquired Tengen’s favor,” Gakuganji explained, as he led Masamichi to the meeting room where Itadori Yuuji was now holding court. “And then he had the gall to summon us. Us!”

If Masamichi held just a little less value for diplomacy than he did, he might have said that the elders deserved to be summoned ominously for once. They’d certainly had enough of doing it to other people to earn them a lifetime sentence of the same treatment. 

As things stood, he valued diplomacy very much. 

“What has he asked of the elders?” Masamichi asked. 

Gakuganji scoffed. “He won’t say. He said he would only talk to you or…well, he wouldn’t talk until we brought you to him. I can’t imagine why.”

“And you said he’s from the future…?”

“Yes,” Gakuganji grumbled. “Somehow.”

He paused, one hand still on a screen door. 

“He’s incredibly dangerous, Yaga,” Gakuganji warned. “He consumed Death Paintings Four through Nine. He can most likely use Blood Manipulation as a result, on top of whatever his initial cursed technique might be.”

“Understood,” Masamichi said, feeling the tempo of his heart beat picking up at the revelation. 

Gakuganji nodded at him before he opened the door, letting Masamichi step inside. 

Itadori Yuuji didn’t seem like much, before he turned around. He was another one of those stupidly tall teenage boys with awkwardly long limbs. The oddest thing about him was that his hair was pink, and even that wasn’t exactly out of the ordinary for a sorcerer. His clothing was nondescript—just a battle-worn black hoodie and a pair of pants it looked like he had outgrown a while ago—paired with a pair of worn sneakers that had certainly seen better days. 

And then he turned around, and something inside Masamichi broke. 

The boy was covered in scars. There was one at the corner of his mouth, another that stretched between his brows. There was a scar over the bridge of his nose, a nasty looking one that covered the expanse of his face and seemed to have cost him his eye, which was tightly shut. Even his hands were scarred—thin, short slices that repeated over and over again in random patterns, like he had been caught in a hailstorm made of knives. Last, Masamichi noticed that he had only four fingers on his left hand—there was only a jagged, nasty scar where the smallest finger used to be. 

The boy crinkled his eyes and his lips twitched, like a smile returning to a face that had forgotten how to hold a smile a long time ago. 

It was, most surprisingly, an entirely genuine expression.

“Principal Yaga,” the boy said, raising his mangled hand in greeting. “It’s good to see you again.”

“I’m not a principal,” Masamichi said, feeling like he was running a bit on autopilot. 

Because this child had recognized him. He had taken one look at Masamichi and known his name, despite Masamichi being quite certain he had never met this young man before.

“I guess you probably aren’t,” the young man said. “Wait, do you teach at Tokyo Jujutsu High at least? Are you Gojo-sensei's sensei? Um, Gojo Satoru, I mean.”

“I do,” Masamichi said, reeling a bit. “I am. Sorry, did you call Satoru your sensei? Who put him in charge of students?”

“You did,” the young man said, a little smugly. “You do become principal, you know. I wouldn’t have just said that to fuck with you.”

“...Satoru must have changed a great deal between now and then for me to consider something like that,” Masamichi commented.

“Probably not as much as you’re hoping,” the young man said. “He was always kind of childish, Gojo-sensei.” He paused, watching Masamichi intently with his one eye. “It was still a good decision on your part, if you ask me.”

“How so?” Masamichi asked, finding himself morbidly curious despite himself.

The boy watched him for a long moment, considering something. 

“Gojo-sensei needed us to feel human,” he said. “We needed Gojo-sensei to feel safe enough to grow. It was a good arrangement.” 

And…Masamichi could see that, if he allowed himself to think about it. Satoru was already so distant sometimes, even with his friends. The moments where he didn’t have anything to laugh about and he hadn’t yet thought of something irritating to do to Suguru. He would harden, if the battlefield became all he knew. Maybe teaching would be good for him, in a backwards way. It would give him something to do with himself in a world that moved too slow.

“What year are you from, young man?” Masamichi asked, studying the kid in front of him more closely.

“Ah, wait, I’m being rude,” he said, taking a step back. “I forgot you haven’t met me yet. Hey—let me introduce myself a particular way for nostalgia’s sake, okay?”

Before Masamichi could say whether it was okay or not, the boy had bowed at a perfect ninety degrees, his hands clapped at his sides. “My name is Itadori Yuuji and I like tall girls with big butts.” 

…Sounds like he’s met Tsukumo Yuki, Masamichi found himself thinking.

The next moment, Itadori laughed a dry laugh, straightening up. “God, what a stupid thing to say. You know, Gojo-sensei told me that my acceptance to Jujutsu High hinged on me meeting you and impressing you, and this is how I decided to open discussions. Keep in mind, it was kind of something to be taken seriously considering I would have been executed if you didn’t take me on as a student. Looking back on it, I can’t even be mad about all those times Sukuna called me stupid.”

“Sukuna?” Masamichi repeated. “Ryoumen Sukuna? The King of Curses?”

Itadori nodded, seemingly sober all of a sudden, and tucked his hands into his pockets as he straightened. “I was his vessel once upon a time.” He stood up a little straighter, looking Masamichi dead in the eyes. “I’m not surprised the elders brought me you instead of Gojo-sensei, considering he’s teenaged and probably even more difficult to deal with than normal right now, but…I wanted to ask a favor from you. And…before I do that…I need to tell you the story. The whole story. I only ask that you hear me out, please, and then make your decision about what to do with me afterwards. I’ll respect whatever choice you make, just…please listen.”

What a strange young man, Masamichi thought. 

He had never seen someone thrumming with so much wild power carry so much humility on their face. He could remember the clear fear in Gakuganji’s voice as he showed Masamichi to the room. 

He wondered when exactly it was jujutsu sorcerers lost their compassion. 

“Of course I will listen to you,” Masamichi said. “Though whatever favor you have to ask me, you should know—it seems I don’t have the power I had in your world. There aren’t many favors I’m in a position to grant.”

This time, Itadori did smile instead of the expression dying before it could reach his lips. It pulled at his scars, stretching the roughened skin on his face taut, but it took five years off his perceived age despite the discomfort it clearly put him through. It was an unexpectedly kind smile paired with an eye that had clearly seen the worst the world had to offer. 

“That’s okay,” Itadori said. “I’ve been in the business of granting myself my own favors for a while now, Yaga-sensei.”

Masamichi felt heavy, by the time Itadori finished his story. It was as if someone had injected lead into his veins, replaced his bones with steel, his socks with cuffs, keeping him chained to his chair. He knew that Itadori had skimmed over large parts of this tale, but he also knew that this young man had been kind enough to not hold himself back as he told this story. 

“I don’t have any intention of going back there,” Itadori said, as he concluded this tale. “Things worked out fine in the end, I suppose, if your only standard for something qualifying as fine is Sukuna’s ultimate death. But if I’m going to stay…”

Let his favor be a request for rest, Masamichi pled, with a god he knew wouldn’t care. Let him ask me for a week on a sunny island with a stunning view of the beach at all times. Let that favor be anything, really, so long as it’s not…

“I’m going to kill Ryoumen Sukuna again,” Itadori announced, with the hard tone of a man that could not be swayed. “If for no other reason than because I can. It’ll be easier to do that if I have access to resources, a place to sleep, and powerful allies I can rely on if I need them. So I’m asking—I’m begging, really—let me rejoin Tokyo Jujutsu High. Let me sit in your classes. Let me go to the movies with your students. Let me fight for you—with you—in whatever battle you need me to fight. I’ve been a weapon without a wielder for the last…fuck, I don’t know. Point me at something, please, so that I can survive.”

Masamichi knew it was coming. Men like this rested only when they died. 

“I don’t have the power to admit students to Jujutsu High,” Masamichi reminded Itadori. 

“I told you once already,” Itadori said, with a smile in his eye. “I don’t care about that, man.”

“Then there’s just one question I need to ask you,” Masamichi said, adjusting his glasses as he looked up at Itadori. 

“Yeah,” Itadori said, meeting his gaze. “Yeah, you do, don’t you?”

“Why do you want to be a jujutsu sorcerer?”

“Because when I die,” he said, his one eye blazing, “I don’t want to be alone.”

Masamichi dipped his head in acknowledgement. 

“In that case,” he said, “welcome back to Jujutsu High, Itadori Yuuji.”

“You’re going to be staying in the student dorms. There are a lot of available rooms, so you are free to pick your own. You’ll receive a one time allowance from the elders as well as your usual stipend to purchase any clothes or toiletries you might need. You can borrow a change of clothes and the necessities from me for now.”

Yuuji hummed noncommittally, absorbing the information but not responding to it.

“I’ll order your uniform when we're done here,” Yaga said, as he led Yuuji back towards the main campus. “Do you have any customizations you would like to make?”

Yuuji paused for just a moment before he convinced himself to keep walking. Naturally, like he hadn’t thought anything at all in that little pause. 

Truthfully, he entertained the idea for a moment. He could just say to Yaga, ‘Yeah, add a red hood, if you could.’ It had been the design Gojo had made for him, after all. The uniform he had fought Sukuna in, the uniform he had beaten Sukuna in. It had been a staple of his time here at Jujutsu High, just like Fushiguro and Kugisaki walking at his side had also been a staple. Maybe, if he got it back, it would bring some crucial part of him that had been missing since October of 2018 back, too. 

But then again…

“Put a little room in the sleeves,” Yuuji said. “It’s easiest to use Blood Manipulation from my arms.”

“Anything else?”

“No,” Yuuji said. “That’s all.”

Chapter Text

For the first time ever, Satoru was already sitting in class when Suguru and Shoko came in. 

They gave up on seeing Satoru getting ready in the morning two days into knowing him. They gave up on seeing him in class on time by the third. Back then, they thought it was lazy entitlement that drove Satoru to be horribly late to everything everywhere. Now—

Well, now, they knew it was lazy entitlement that drove Satoru to be horribly late to everything everywhere. 

Which meant, in order for him to be on time, there had to be something monumental happening to him. 

Suguru glanced at Shoko, who nodded imperceptibly at him. 

“Are you finally going to tell us what’s going on with you?” Suguru asked, directing the words to Satoru. Satoru didn’t react—he just sat, barely moving a muscle other than the thumb he slid along his bottom lip, eyes fixed on something in the distance. 

If he heard Suguru, he didn’t respond. Which probably meant that he heard him just fine, because Satoru did everything with intention and an unnatural amount of competence. 

“Satoru,” Suguru chided, though he wasn’t sure where he was going with it. 

“Sorry,” Satoru said, uncharacteristically genuine, and he turned slightly to look at Suguru. “I’m fine.”

Which wasn’t really the question at all, was it?

The door to the classroom opened, and Suguru turned towards it with anxiety erupting up his spine and stiffening his skeleton.

It was only Yaga.  

For some reason, it felt like a disappointing climax. A weird return to normalcy, when everything else was anything but. 

Except it wasn’t exactly normal either, because Yaga looked unsettled too. It was in the set of his mouth, which wasn’t quite a frown but certainly wasn’t happy, either. It was the heavy way he stared at them before he sighed.

“Sit down,” he commanded. 

Suguru forced his grip on his bag to relax, his knees to bend. He sat, but only after Shoko managed it first. Satoru remained standing. 

“Satoru, sit down,” he said.

“I would rather stand,” Satoru said.

“Sit.”

“I know what is on the other side of that door,” Satoru said, strangely hard, “and I would rather stand.” 

“He does not pose a threat to you,” Yaga said, and Suguru felt a spike of panic lace through his heart. 

Could it be that Yuuji was on the other side of the door? Suguru could recall thinking he was their age earlier, and there certainly wasn’t any reason for Satoru to have this reaction to anyone else.

“Oh, I’m not worried,” Satoru said, in a cold, mocking voice. “This is an exhibition of a different kind of distress.”

The door cracked open, and a few tufts of pink hair poked through.

“Sorry,” Yuuji said, because it was him. “I figured it would only get worse if I kept hiding out there.”

“It’s fine,” Yaga said, sighing. “Come on in.”

Suguru felt his body going rigid with an inexplicable strain of fear. Surely someone that was arrested earlier wouldn’t be here now if he was still dangerous, but something about this guy set him on edge in the worst way.

And judging by the way Satoru went tight like a pulled wire and Shoko shifted uncomfortably, he wasn’t the only one.

“No offense, but I think Gojo-sensei must have gotten it from you,” Yuuji continued conversationally, taking the sails out of everyone’s suspicion in favor of inflicting horrible confusion on them instead. “He was pretty shit at these introductions, too.”

“There it is again,” Satoru said, words sounding measured, smile strangely curled. “Gojo-sensei. You can’t keep dodging that question forever, if you’re going to keep calling me that.”

“Who says I’m calling you that?” Yuuji said, but it sounded like a flimsy excuse even to Suguru. “There are other Gojos out there. Plenty of them could be senseis.”

“Naturally,” Satoru agreed, strangely chipper. “Which is why you called me Sensei, right?”

Against all odds, Yuuji smiled. It pulled at his face strangely—the scar at the corner of his mouth being unwilling to follow the expression, the scar on the other side of his face not crinkling right as he did it. Suguru thought it might have been a gruesome expression on someone else. On Yuuji, it just seemed a little…heartbreaking. 

“Alright, fine,” Yuuji said fondly. “I’ll say it first. I never really was good at lying, but especially not to you.”

Except he didn’t actually say anything else, just held eye contact with Satoru for long enough that it was starting to get a little uncomfortable. 

What the fuck is going on? Suguru wondered.

“Yuuji is from the future,” Yaga explained in Yuuji’s stead. “A future where I became principal here, and Gojo Satoru teaches the first year students.” 

“Satoru, a teacher?” Shoko repeated, dumbfounded. “This Satoru? Is this a joke?”

Suguru wondered the same thing.

“I think we should concern ourselves with the time travel part of that statement,” Suguru said, trying to establish reason, “and not the Satoru teaching part.”

“It is difficult to explain,” Yaga said, “but an unprecedented occurrence that you don't need to know the details of means that Itadori has the unyielding trust and belief of this institution, at least for the time being.”

“The trust and the belief of the institution,” Satoru echoed, oozing disrespect. “Because that means so much to me. What about us? Don’t we get a say? If Yuuji is going to join our class, then shouldn’t we get to decide if he’s trustworthy or not?”

“Didn’t you decide that first?” Yaga shot back, eyebrows raised beneath his darkly tinted glasses. 

“I recall arresting him,” Satoru said. 

“I asked you to do that, though,” Yuuji said. “If anything, you going along with it is a sign of you finding me at least somewhat trustworthy.”

“Besides, isn’t he?” Yaga asked. “He saved the life of the Star Plasma Vessel, Amanai Riko. He engaged neither you nor Suguru in combat upon his arrival here. He even saved you, as I recall. He didn’t resist his arrest. He didn’t even protest his execution—”

“Not that I could have been executed by them,” Yuuji interjected. “But I would have let them try, at least. Nothing like a little failed homicide to humble a person, you know?”

Shoko gave him a strange look—a look that Suguru felt probably showed on his face too—but Yuuji only looked evenly back at them, evidently unconcerned. And then Satoru barked out a noise that was half like a laugh and half like someone had finally decided to strangle him in his sleep, and Yuuji’s lips quirked upwards. 

“Anyway,” Yaga continued, after a sigh he normally reserved for only Satoru. “Yes, he will be joining your class. He is seventeen presently—and would have been heading into his third year in a few months, so putting him with you seemed like the best idea even though…”

He trailed off, as if unsure how to elaborate.

“Even though I missed my entire second year and half of my first,” Yuuji said, “because nearly every jujutsu sorcerer is dead, this school was destroyed, and basically everything else went to shit long ago too.”

At that, everyone just stared stupidly as if hoping prolonged eye contact would make him into something that was easier to explain.

Yuuji grimaced after a moment, the first sign he was just as affected as they were about this situation. “And as for trusting me, I know that's a lot to ask. But I swear on my life that I will not intentionally kill anyone that is enrolled at Jujutsu High, now or ever.”

A Binding Vow?

Even Satoru seemed a little staggered by the implications as the hold of the vow settled on Yuuji’s shoulders, born just as blankly as Yuuji bore everything else. Yaga cast him a sideways glance, revealing unintentionally that the vow hadn’t been something they had talked about beforehand. 

“I…” Shoko started, a little hesitantly. “Sorry if this is rude, and I appreciate the vow, but I feel like I need to know more.”

“More about the future?” Yuuji asked, like this question startled him. 

“Well…yeah.”

“Isn’t that a time travel paradox?” Satoru interjected, suddenly a lot less frosty than he had been before. “You tell us something about the future, and then it turns out your parents don’t meet because of that, and then you kiss your mom, and then you unalive yourself by accident?”

“Oh my god, Satoru,” Shoko groaned. 

Yuuji, though, seemed amused by the question. “That’s the plot of Back to the Future,” he said. “Well, that’s sort of the plot of Back to the Future. Like usual, you’re missing…large chunks of that movie.”

“Like usual?” Satoru repeated, though it was hard to tell if he was confused or insulted. 

“I figure it’s a lot more likely to work like regular science than movie science,” Yuuji continued, undeterred. “It’s like—you get it, Sensei. Like…when you spread out your domain, and you just…if you’re caught in it, that is, you can see everything. Everything you could have been and everything you’re not and then four seconds later your brain explodes. This is just a different reality, now. Maybe the original one still exists somewhere without me, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe time was always a circle where you guys do this once and then I kill the King of Curses and then I come back here and you guys do this all again, but differently. I don’t know, man. I was never the smart one.”

“My…domain?” Satoru repeated, though it was still hard to tell if he was confused or insulted. “I…can do that? Wait, I used it on you?” 

“Oh. No. You used it on a special grade cursed spirit that was attacking you. I was teleported to a lake randomly one night and told I was going to witness ‘the height of jujutsu battles.’”

“I feel like I need three cigarettes to have this conversation,” Shoko said. 

There it was again, that strange flick of Yuuji’s lips, like he knew Shoko well enough to know the irony of this statement and find it amusing. 

“Tell me more about my domain,” Satoru demanded, standing up straighter. “How big could I make it? How strong is the guaranteed hit?”

“Once again,” Suguru said, trying to reestablish order. “Let’s focus back on the time travel thing.” He looked at Yuuji, and his reflection in Yuuji’s dark-tinted glasses stared back at him. “Even if it’s an alternate reality…or whatever it was you said to Satoru—”

“A possibility,” Satoru corrected. “One of infinite possibilities. Theoretically, reality as we perceive it branches at every possible juncture. If coming to the past was a choice Yuuji made, then there is a possibility where he did it and a possibility where he didn’t. It’s when those points converge—”

“Oh my god, Satoru,” Shoko groaned. “Four cigarettes. I need four cigarettes.”

“I thought you quit smoking?” Satoru snarked. 

“It doesn’t bother me, if that’s what you’re asking,” Yuuji said, face pointed fixedly at Suguru. His voice was quiet, but it cut through Satoru and Shoko’s brewing argument like butter. “Losing that world, that world losing me—it doesn’t bother me.”

Suguru frowned. “It’s your home, though. Surely you had friends, family, loved ones—”

“Getou,” Yuuji said, and reached up to grab his sunglasses. He pulled them off his face, meeting Suguru’s gaze with a heavy, earnest expression. “What do I really need to say? Ten years from now, everyone in this room is dead except for Ieiri-sensei. Should I tell you how Yaga-sensei died? Would that make you believe me? Maybe—maybe I should talk about Gojo-sensei, if that isn’t horrible enough for you. Or I could just skip all of that and tell you what happened to you.” 

All of a sudden, Suguru wasn’t so interested in knowing things about Yuuji’s future. Maybe it was the look in his eye, the scar on his face, the way he stood. Maybe it was all of these things and more. 

Yuuji’s expression shifted minutely, his eyes softening. “I wasn’t actually going to tell you,” he said. “I’m not cruel. Don’t look so—god, don’t look so fucking human about it. Fuck.”

And then he turned abruptly, shoving his sunglasses back on his face, and made his way to the door. 

“Yuuji—” Yaga called.

“I only have one outfit, and the elders gave me cash to buy clothes with,” Yuuji said abruptly. “I think we’re all going to benefit from trying this again later.”

Yaga didn’t protest other than to frown slightly, which was evidently all the permission Yuuji needed to blow out of the room like a force of nature, unstopping and uncaring. 

“What…” Suguru ventured, before finding he didn’t really have the courage to finish the question. 

What did I do to him to warrant a look like that on his face?

“You know what,” Satoru said, like anyone had asked his opinion. “I think I like this guy.”

“Weren’t you ready to kill him less than two minutes ago?” Shoko asked, squinting at Satoru. “You seemed ready to kill him less than two minutes ago.”

“And now I like him,” Satoru said. “He’s so disrespectful—it’s going to be great. Yo, Sensei, since the new kid bailed, what about a free day for all of us? We need to make sure our new classmate is settling in well and all that.”

Yaga sighed his Satoru sigh and said, “Satoru.”

“Is that a ‘do what you want because I’m too old to deal with you’ kind of Satoru or a ‘sit down and pay attention to this math lesson’ kind of Satoru?”

“Just…go,” Yaga said. “But don’t bother Itadori. I know you think you’re invincible, but—”

“Oh, I am,” Satoru said, an edge of that coolness from earlier creeping back into his voice. “Invincible, that is. I’ll see you later.”

He left too, blowing out of the door like another very different force of nature. Yaga fixed both Suguru and Shoko with a weighted look. 

“Well?” he prompted. 

On the one hand, Suguru wanted to go chasing after Itadori Yuuji himself. To poke and prod and investigate, reassuring himself that this was safe, this was fine, this wasn’t anything to worry about. On the other hand…

Suguru needed a distraction or twenty, and unfortunately, schoolwork would certainly do that. 

He sighed. “I’ll stay.”

“Good kid,” Yaga said, approvingly. “Shoko?”

Shoko glanced at Suguru furtively and then sighed too. “Yeah, fine,” she muttered, and dragged a notebook out of her bag. It was more than obvious that she was only doing it for his benefit, but all the same…she was a good friend.

Suguru only hoped that this would resolve itself soon.

Satoru caught up to the new kid right as he was leaving school grounds.

And by caught up, he meant he did an almost embarrassing amount of space jumps trying to catch up to a guy with a mad power walk, and didn’t even get the satisfaction of seeing him jump when Satoru appeared right in front of him.

“Watching me buy socks isn’t going to be entertaining for you,” Yuuji said, as soon as he made eye contact with Satoru. Satoru actively suppressed any kind of pouting he might be doing at losing the element of surprise. “Just so you know. It’s wasted effort on your part.”

“Maybe I need to buy socks too,” Satoru said. “Two birds. One stone.”

Instead of having any sort of reaction Satoru might have expected, Yuuji lowered his gaze. He took a moment to rub at the edge of his massive face scar like it irritated him. 

“You’re going to have to give me a few days, Sensei,” Yuuji said, in a tired, broken sort of voice. “I didn’t exactly wake up two days ago prepared to see you walking around like…”

“Do I really go into teaching in the future?” Satoru asked, taking a step closer.

Yuuji was pretty close to his height. A hair shorter. Tall enough that Satoru didn’t have to stoop to look into his eyes—or rather his sunglasses. He would wonder if Yuuji had picked sunglasses up because he needed to reduce his sensory overload like Satoru, but he didn’t need to wonder.

Whatever unholy amalgamation that was Yuuji’s cursed technique, it had nothing to do with his eyes. Eye. Whatever.

Which meant he wore the sunglasses for a different reason. Normally, Satoru would assume it would be to hide what he was looking at from people that couldn’t see curses, but in this case—

He wondered if it had more to do with hiding he had a blind spot.

Yuuji took a step back. “You did,” he replied, very quietly.

Satoru hummed. “Don’t believe you. Guess you’ll have to prove it to me somehow. We could trade war stories, maybe. Nothing like bonding over shopping for socks, and all.”

“Gojo-sensei,” Yuuji said, with a peculiar edge to his voice. “I know you’re crap at boundaries and you don’t take orders from people, but you need to leave me alone right now. Please.”

…Yeah, that Gojo-sensei thing was still weird as hell. And also, who did he think he was, really?

Ah, well. At least Satoru tried to play nice first. No one could really fault him for what happened now.

“Listen to me,” he said, stepping back into Yuuji’s space. For good measure, he grabbed a fistful of Yuuji’s hoodie in his hand too. “I know I’m the one that saved you here, so don’t get the wrong idea—there’s a difference between letting you get away and inviting you into my home. I don’t care if there are unprecedented circumstances, or whatever Yaga said. You’re a stranger, and that means you’re a threat. And if you so much as think about—”

“He sliced you in half,” Yuuji said, voice blank.

Satoru paused. “What are you talking about?”

“Right at the waist,” Yuuji continued, punching him there for good measure. Not that it did him any good, with Infinity engaged. “Right there. He cut straight through Infinity, and there you were, lying in two. He laughed about it afterwards.” 

Satoru saw a flash of metal in his mind’s eye, a chain, extending and extending, the feeling of reaching for everything he carried in the palm of his hand and finding nothing there—

Yuuji brought his hand up to close it around Satoru’s wrist. Satoru frowned at him, Infinity firmly in place between them. Yuuji met his eyes, pushing harder against Infinity, harder and harder until—

He grabbed Satoru’s wrist. His grip was iron. 

“December 24th,” Yuuji said, face strangely blank. “2018. That’s when you die. You want to know what day it was when I ended up here?”

“Don’t say December 24th,” Satoru said, gritting his teeth against Itadori’s grip. A moment later he caught himself and tried to turn it into a smile. “That’d be pretty pathetic.”

“Ha,” Yuuji said. “Like I fucking know the date. It was December though. That’s good enough, these days. 2020.” 

He tore Satoru’s hand off his hood, and then used his grip on his arm to shove him back. To Satoru’s own surprise he went, stumbling backwards a few steps. 

“So,” Yuuji said, and this time it sounded worse, somehow. “Let me buy some fucking socks. Please.” 

He looked at Satoru for a moment longer, while Satoru resisted the urge to rub the wrist he had grabbed. 

Then he left, just as abruptly as he left earlier, stride determined as he disappeared through the school’s gate.

It was then that it really sunk in—he had broken Infinity.

I’m still not there, Satoru thought, with the heavy, sinking feeling of the weaknesses he thought he overcame dragging him down.

Satoru clapped his hands together, bending space until he once again stood at Yuuji’s side. This time, Yuuji’s only reaction to him was the slightest turn of his head even though Satoru had been sure to pop in on his blind side.

“So, who slices me in half in 2018?” Satoru asked breezily. “It’s not that I don’t believe you, but…”

“Guess, if it means that much to you.”

“That it’s bullshit? Infinity would prevent that from happening.”

Yuuji went silent, a muscle in his jaw jumping. Eventually, he said, “There have been people with Limitless and the Six Eyes before you, haven’t there? And didn’t those people die?”

“Obviously,” Satoru said, waving a hand lazily. “The last guy went to the Ten Shadows user of the era, and there isn’t one of those right now—”

I have a kid. He’s going to get sold to the Zen’in Clan in a couple of years. Do what you want. 

Satoru inhaled sharply. “The Fushiguro kid?” he asked Yuuji. 

“Wait, do you know him already?” Yuuji asked, staring at him. “I mean, I knew that you knew him before, but I assumed it wouldn’t be until a couple of years before, not when we’re…three?” Inexplicably, his lips curled up in an unexpectedly radiant smile. “Aw, baby Fushiguro. I bet he's insanely adorable.”

This conversation was giving Satoru whiplash. “Wait, didn’t you just imply that kid kills me? Wasn’t that sad for you? You seemed sad.”

Yuuji stopped in his tracks, rubbing at the edge of his scar again. “Ah, fuck,” he said, in a soft, mournful way. “This is exactly why I didn’t want to talk to you right now.”

It was true, Satoru knew, what Yuuji said about him and boundaries. And it wasn’t that Satoru didn’t know how to respect them. It was just that normally, he had a pretty good idea of how someone would react to having them pushed. 

Right now, he had no fucking clue what Yuuji would do next.

“Listen, Gojo-sensei—” He stopped abruptly, eying Satoru up and down. “That’s weird. This is weird. Did I really grow so much? Or have you shrunk? I mean, obviously you probably shrank, considering you’re sixteen and not twenty…nine. Would it feel weirder to just call you Gojo? Ah…fucking time travel.”

All of this was apparently said to Yuuji himself and not Satoru.

Which was good, considering Satoru wouldn’t really know the first thing to say in response to all that.

“Listen, Gojo,” Yuuji said, grimacing weirdly. “Erm…Gojo-san? I’m just gonna— Listen, Gojo Satoru,” he said, and this was evidently the extremely terrible compromise he had come up with because he finally continued. “Sorry for telling you how you died. I didn’t mean to do that. And I don’t actually want to talk about it, either. It happened a long time ago, you know. I haven’t even thought about it in…”

He trailed off, turning his face away. He stared into the distance instead, looking far away for all that he was standing right next to Satoru. 

It wasn’t actually hard to believe that he was from the future. The capabilities of jujutsu were in a lot of ways unending. Satoru himself could distort time, in a way, even though he couldn’t necessarily move through it. There were other things, too—legendary cursed object Prison Realm could suspend time for its occupant, ceasing both their aging and their survival needs, forcing them into a reality where they eventually had no choice but to take their own life. It was entirely possible a technique existed that could propel Yuuji through time.

Even if there wasn’t, Satoru thought he would believe it looking at Yuuji’s face alone. 

“Hey,” he said. “Who cares? So some older me got careless and died because of it. Why not? I’ll be stronger than that.”

Yuuji didn't look at him, but he did let out a strange huff, the corner of his mouth twitching like he was resisting a smile. 

“Don’t act like you don’t owe us some answers, though,” Satoru continued, tucking his hands into his pockets and mentally taking a step back. “Like how you got here, for instance. Or what you plan on doing now that you’re here. I can’t think of anyone that would willingly attend school once they got out of it if they didn’t have some ulterior motive.”

“It wasn’t my decision to come to the past,” Yuuji said, finally turning his face towards Satoru again. “Tengen said her Star Plasma Vessel brought me.”

“You—you talked to Tengen?”

Yuuji didn’t smirk, but something about his face did look unbearably smug. “Unprecedented circumstances, remember? You’re looking at the one and only person Tengen-sama has ever vouched for.”

Satoru had the urge to knock that smug look off this guy’s face. A little concerning, since he'd only met him earlier that day, but then again, Satoru could recall having the urge to knock a smug look off of Suguru’s face within a few hours of meeting him too. 

Satoru made a grab for Yuuji’s sunglasses, deliberately approaching from his blind side. Yuuji still dodged him, surprisingly quickly, and beyond that, even managed to block his next strike with his other hand.

“You’re slow, Sensei,” Yuuji said, sounding a little amused about it.

“Quit calling me ‘Sensei,’” Satoru snapped, with a lazy, irritated grin. “And don’t call me ‘Gojo Satoru,’ either. That was weird as hell. Pick one—Gojo, or Satoru.” 

And then the most brilliant thought he ever had occurred to him. He was supposedly this guy’s teacher. And if he had learned anything from manga, it was that if anyone had a teacher as beautiful as him, they would most certainly harbor a secret crush on him.

“I bet you would just love to call me Satoru, wouldn’t you, Yuuji-kun~?”

Yuuji went statue-still. Unfortunately, it looked to be from horror, not embarrassment. Fortunately, it meant Satoru was able to grab his sunglasses.

“What are you, forty?” he asked derisively, still a little insulted by the expression Itadori was making. “Your dad called, he wants his shades back. Hey, will you cut it out? I’m starting to feel a little self-conscious here.”

“You—” Yuuji stuttered. “You just—the violin thing—to me —god, I shouldn’t really be surprised—but I feel so betrayed —”

“Excuse you?” Satoru said, feeling properly irritated now.

Yuuji put his face in his hands and let out an almost deranged sounding giggle. “Is it like an ultimate move, Sensei? ‘What are going to do, player?’ ‘I have just the thing for this opponent. I cast… Flirt!’”

Satoru raised an eyebrow. “I’ll break your glasses, you know.”

“They’re Yaga-sensei's glasses. I lost mine when I was fighting Fushiguro’s dad,” Yuuji said, finally sobering. He lifted his face from his hands, but the amusement was still in his eyes, still twisting the shape of his mouth.

He was suddenly like a different person. Strangely captivating, with his bright eye and his scarred face. Satoru didn’t think he would call him beautiful, and he certainly hadn’t been thinking of him as particularly attractive up to this point—he wasn’t Suguru—but there was something about him. He was rugged. Handsome. Striking, at the very least. 

“And you could have just asked me to take them off, you know,” Yuuji continued, holding out his hand expectantly.

“Where’s the fun in that?” Satoru asked, moving the glasses further out of reach instead of handing them back to Yuuji. 

Yuuji raised his eyebrows at him. “Are you having fun now?”

“...Alright, listen—”

Yuuji laughed again, a softer sound than before. It almost wasn’t even a laugh, with how thin it sounded. “God, I missed you,” he said.

This time, it was Satoru that was frozen like a statue, caught so off guard that Yuuji could easily reclaim his sunglasses, which he put back on his face. He turned and started walking away again, like this was a perfectly normal thing to say, while Satoru stared at his retreating back. 

He thought he might have actually let him go that time, despite giving up not really being something Satoru was used to doing. 

Yuuji paused, half-turning back to him. “I thought you needed to buy socks too, Satoru?”

The delivery was somewhat ruined by how he grimaced afterwards, but still. 

That was worlds better than being called Gojo-sensei. 

“Oh, I’m Satoru, am I?” Satoru asked, unable to help himself. “So you did always want to call me that, hm?”

Yuuji groaned, which was a sign of embarrassment…but not really the kind Satoru had been going for. “C’mon, man, this is already weird enough as it is. Don’t make things worse.” 

…Satoru supposed that was fair enough, actually. 

Not that he would ever admit it out loud.

Gojo—Satoru, because Yuuji was trying to consolidate the fact that he lived in a world with Gojo Satoru back in it with the fact that they were now about the same age—kept sneaking Yuuji secret looks from the corner of his eye. Maybe he thought he was being subtle, even though his glasses kept slipping down his nose and he was standing on Yuuji’s good side. 

A not insignificant part of him was really starting to wonder if he had accidentally uncovered the real reason Satoru of the future wore a blindfold instead of glasses. But there wasn’t a way to ask that and there definitely wasn’t a way for Satoru to answer it, so instead, Yuuji put up with it.

Until he didn’t. 

“What?” he asked Satoru, as he held up a pair of aviator sunglasses and tried to see the bright side of 2006 again. 

Satoru, who evidently took this as permission to stare more blatantly, leaned closer, pressing against the sunglasses stand and invading Yuuji’s space in all the worst ways. 

He was a little lucky Yuuji knew him already, Yuuji caught himself thinking sometimes. He was pretty sure that if literally anyone else tried to stand within elbowing distance of him they would get punched. 

“Every sorcerer has a different story for their sunglasses,” Satoru said, like he was telling Yuuji a secret. “Yaga-sensei told us his once—not that I paid a lot of attention.”

Yuuji huffed. “Is that your way of asking to hear mine?”

“I wouldn’t ask,” Satoru said, with a shit-eating sort of grin. “That’s rude.”

He was unsettling, this younger version of Yuuji’s old sensei. Yuuji couldn’t tell if it was because he hadn’t seen Gojo Satoru in so long or if it was because this younger Gojo Satoru wasn’t as good at hiding his sharp edges. 

Or maybe it was just because he liked to get in Yuuji’s space, and Yuuji had forgotten what it felt like to stand next to another person. 

Yuuji sighed. 

“Alright,” he said, after taking a moment to dredge up the story from the recesses of his mind. “So I got the scar in a fight. My eye was likewise damaged. I can’t really feel this side of my face because so much of it is scar tissue, which isn’t really relevant other than meaning the eyelid just kind of stayed shut, once I healed the wound.”

“Yourself?” Satoru interjected. “Aren’t you impressive.”

Yuuji raised his eyebrows at him. Well, he raised the one because the other one…yeah. “Can’t you do it too?”

Suddenly, Satoru’s razor sharp edges were showing again. “As of two days ago,” he said, with a smile that cut. “So. As I said. Aren’t you impressive. Ooh, wait—did I teach you how to heal yourself?”

Yuuji eyed him for a moment and then ultimately decided it was a can of worms he didn’t want to open. 

“No,” he said, and then scratched his cheek. “It was someone else.”

“Bummer,” Satoru said. “What kinds of things did I teach you?”

Since Yuuji got the impression Satoru probably didn’t want to hear the real answer—how to use his cursed energy with a built in bad habit and how not to survive—so he kindly diverted Satoru’s attention. “Did you want to hear the sunglasses story or not?”

“Carry on, then,” Satoru said. 

“Okay,” Yuuji said. “I wore an eyepatch for a while.”

“And probably felt too much like a tool to keep doing it,” Satoru finished, with a wise nod that was definitely a jest. 

Yuuji felt the corner of his mouth twitch. “I felt two things. One, like a pirate. Two, like people stared at it a lot.” 

“How tiresome for you,” Satoru said. 

A hot wave of anger crashed through Yuuji, and he forced himself to swallow it. “You don’t understand,” he said, voice rough. “People in 2020 knew about curses, man. Imagine seeing an old man without a leg today. What do you think about him? What’s the first thing? That he’s a war veteran, right? You know what they thought about me? ‘That’s one of those guys that killed my brother for sport. Better toss rocks at him for sport and see how he likes that.’ And they’re right, anyway. I’m not a good person.”

Satoru was silent for a long moment. “And they didn’t know that sorcerers notoriously wear sunglasses?”

Yuuji laughed darkly. “What sorcerers? There were, what, ten of us? Total? Everyone else was too fucking dead or too fucking broken.”

He saw a sliver of blue as Satoru looked away, hiding his eyes carefully behind his sunglasses, and he remembered who he was. Where he was. Who he was talking to. 

“Sorry,” Yuuji said. “Sorry. I—I can say something that’s not depressing as shit, I promise.”

He wasn’t actually sure he could.

“The glasses are good for something else, too,” Yuuji said, after a moment of silence. “My eyes are…they give me away a lot. My friend used to say they were where my heart was. And I remembered eventually that you and Nanamin and Yaga-sensei all wore them too, and I figured…hey, why not.”

“Wait,” Satoru said, perking up. “Repeat that. You said…?”

And Yuuji knew Gojo Satoru in his essence, even if this younger version of him was challenging, so he knew exactly what part of that sentence he wanted to hear a second time. 

“Nanamin,” Yuuji repeated, a little gleefully, a little nostalgically. He leaned into Satoru’s space a little bit in turn, remembering the way Gojo-sensei had laughed until he cried with one of his arms thrown over Nanami’s shoulders the first time he heard this nickname himself. “And yes, I mean Nanami Kento.”

“There’s no way Nanami Kento let you call him something so ridiculous,” Satoru said, but he looked delighted. 

“He threatened to smack me,” Yuuji admitted. “He never followed through. But I was very cute back then, in his defense—I would probably actually get smacked now.” And then he had the second, disconcerting realization…that the Nanami Satoru knew and the Nanami Yuuji knew were different people. “At least, twenty-seven-year-old Nanami would probably smack me. I don’t know about yours.”

“He’d be too chicken-shit to smack someone like you,” Satoru declared confidently. 

Yuuji blinked at the glasses in his hand, then at Satoru. Yuuji used to not get it—how Gojo could be both so heart wrenchingly kind as to give people like Yuuji second chance after second chance they didn’t deserve, and yet so cruel, too. 

Part of him wished he still didn’t understand it.

“I’ll get these ones,” Yuuji said, and headed for the register. 

It took Satoru a moment to catch up to him. Long enough that Yuuji was already handing over money to the cashier—a nervous girl that flicked her face to his scars frequently—when he finally put in an appearance at Yuuji’s side. 

“That’s it?” Satoru asked, a little whiny. He didn’t notice, but the cashier looked at him with a lot more interest. “You aren’t going to ask me what my sunglasses origin story is?”

“I thought asking was rude,” Yuuji reminded him. 

“Clearly that was a ploy to get you to tell the story by making you feel like you were doing something illicit. And it worked, I might add.”

“You only have to ask, you know.”

“I don’t know,” Satoru said, a little too forcefully. “I don’t know you. I don’t know anything about you and I don’t know what you’re doing here and I don’t know why you’re saying things like ‘God, I missed you’ one second and then giving me the cold shoulder the next.”

The cashier looked between them with wide eyes.

Yuuji turned slowly towards Satoru, scrutinizing his face. 

He hoped Satoru got his wish and this poor cashier thought about this weird ass conversation she was about to overhear between two teenage boys of very different attractiveness levels wearing sunglasses indoors for the rest of the week.

“I know why you wear your sunglasses, Satoru,” Yuuji said. 

“And that’s the unfair thing about this, Yuuji,” Satoru returned. 

This guy. 

This fucking guy.

“Keep the change,” Yuuji told the cashier. She fumbled her way back to life, tripping over her words as she handed the sunglasses off to him and told him to have a nice day. For some reason, Satoru was radiating smugness as he strode along behind Yuuji.

“You start wearing a fucking blindfold some point between now and 2018,” Yuuji said, as he strode along the street. “It kind of clears some things up. Sensory overload from the magic eyes, right? It’s not exactly a secret known only to Gojo Satoru’s closest allies.”

Satoru was silent.

Yuuji turned to look at him when the silence stretched on for too long. He found Satoru walking along beside him, eyes glued firmly on Yuuji’s face, posture radiating…insecurity.

“When I was thirteen,” Satoru said, as soon as he saw Yuuji was looking at him, “I fought a curse user. He was strong enough he probably would have been grade one, if he had gone the sorcerer route. Three of my trainers died because he could tell when I was splitting my attention between my Six Eyes and the fight. I started wearing sunglasses.” 

Yuuji stopped in the middle of the street. Satoru stopped too, and very many people got very annoyed with them over this.

“I’ve never told anyone that story before,” Satoru said. “Don't know why I told you. And yeah. I do get a brand of sensory overload from using my Six Eyes. A blindfold, huh? That’s kind of showy of adult me, isn't it?”

Kugisaki called them all emotionally constipated once. Him, and Gojo, and Fushiguro. ‘It’s not normal to just never talk about anything and then blow off your allies because someone got a little bloody and you got irrationally gay about it,’ she told Yuuji, on one memorable occasion.

Well, the last part was directed to him, anyway. And she’d been talking about Fushiguro, specifically. 

Though Yuuji liked to think he got irrationally gay about anyone being injured, not just Fushiguro. To use Kugisaki’s terminology, anyway, since he couldn’t actually count fretting over a bloody Kugisaki as a gay activity, what with them being a cis man and a cis woman, respectively.

If Yuuji was a better friend, he might try to turn things around in her honor, now that he was once again in a world where feelings mattered, but…

“It was kind of showy,” Yuuji said, looking back at Satoru. “The amount of times you would show up last minute to a fight and dramatically pull it off your face—you know, you’re probably the only person that could make that look cool, actually.”

“I’m impressive like that,” Satoru said, face splitting into a wide mischievous sort of grin. “Wait. Let’s try it. I bet I could look ten times cooler than your Satoru.”

“No way,” Yuuji said, feeling his lips twitching like they wanted to mirror the grin. “With your round little baby cheeks? You’ll look ridiculous at best.”

“I take that personally. Come on,” Satoru said, reaching out to snag Yuuji by the sleeve, seemingly unthinkingly. Infinity shimmered briefly between them, but it dropped quickly, instinctively.

It was causing Yuuji to experience a strange mix of emotions, this younger Satoru and infinity. He kept it active all the time, Yuuji had noticed. Earlier, in the classroom, it had shimmered between him and the windowsill he leaned against. Even when he grabbed something with his hands it usually shimmered between his fingers and the object, barely there.

And yet, when he grabbed Yuuji or when Yuuji grabbed him, it slipped away like butter. 

Yuuji didn’t know why he kept dropping it, but… a not insignificant part of him wished he would stop.

Because Yuuji hadn’t done anything to earn that trust in this life or the last.

Satoru took them to one of those high end men’s suit stores, with what was apparently the sole purpose of finding a tie to wrap around his eyes like a blindfold. The employees were wary of them the second they walked in.

I don’t foresee this going poorly at all, Yuuji thought, but he couldn’t deny that he was maybe the tiniest bit excited. 

“It has to be black,” Yuuji said. “For maximum coolness.”

“...Well, that hardly seems fun,” Satoru said, frowning.

“Dude,” Yuuji said, gesturing to a leopard print tie. “Do you think anyone would take you seriously if you tied that around your eyes and went to battle?”

“...Point taken,” Satoru said. “I bet you could get away with it if you actually wore it as a tie, though.”

“And take Nanamin’s whole aesthetic away from him? Perish the thought.”

Satoru gasped. “No way. Nanami in one of…?” 

“Yep,” Yuuji said. “Your reaction is really making me wonder what fifteen-year-old Nanamin is like. Does he not wear three piece suits like loungewear?”

Satoru laughed, and then laughed louder, and then drew the ire of every employee in the store with his laugh, and then laughed some more. “No way. I don’t believe you. There is no way Nanami wears suits and fun leopard print ties.”

“He gets colorful dress shirts for his suits too,” Yuuji added, just to see if Satoru would laugh like that again. 

“No,” Satoru said, and actually wheezed. “Not Nanami.”

“He does, I swear he does,” Yuuji said. 

Satoru doubled in half he was laughing so hard. “Nanami Kento,” he said, through his laughter, “wears spiked arm bands, guy liner, and band tees—and you expect me to believe—”

“What?” Yuuji asked, delighted, because Nanami being emo as a teenager was news to him. “He did not. There’s no way. No way at all.”

“He does,” Satoru said, his eyes gleaming with mirth as he peered at Yuuji over the rim of his glasses. “And unlike you, I have proof. Nanami Kento himself, just as soon as we get back to school.”

Yuuji went still.

It wasn’t that he had forgotten, necessarily. It was hard to forget he was in the past when he was staring at teenaged Satoru, but he hadn’t exactly been thinking about it either.

That there were more people than just Satoru and not-evil Getou and Ieiri with a haircut painfully similar to Kugisaki’s, and he had to get used to seeing all of them again.

“What?” Satoru said, serious now despite how hard he had been laughing just a moment ago. “Wait—I wasn’t thinking about it. You’ve been talking about him like you knew him well, back in…the future.”

Yuuji huffed, grabbed his brain by the shoulders, and forcefully pointed it in another direction.

“Not really,” Yuuji said, which was the truth, no matter how he sliced it. “I went on a few missions with him in my first year. He was a good guy.” And then, because he lived to disappoint Kugisaki’s memory by being emotionally constipated, “I think you might have been lording a favor over him or something to get him to agree to take me on.” 

“Uh oh,” Satoru said, in his terrible teasing voice. “Yuuji wasn’t a bad student, was he?”

Yuuji resisted the urge to hit him. 

“I was a legally dead student, not a bad one,” he said, and made eye contact with a very irate employee that didn’t seem to appreciate Satoru’s deranged laughter as much as Yuuji did. Or at all, really. 

“Alright, time to go,” he said, snatching a tie up at random, grabbing Satoru by his shoulders, and pushing both of them through the aisles of neatly pressed suits until the employee lost sight of them. Breathless and a little worn out from laughing so much in such a short amount of time, Yuuji deposited both of them onto seats outside of the fitting rooms. 

Satoru wasn’t laughing anymore, though. He had gone back to eerily serious Satoru, looking at Yuuji fixedly—like he was a puzzle, or like—

Like he was trying to discern something the Six Eyes were telling him. 

“What’s up?” Yuuji asked, even though he kind of didn’t want to know what was up, because he didn’t want to explain anything heavy.

“That tie isn’t black,” Satoru said, with a teasing smile. It was not at all what he had been about to say when he first opened his mouth, and they both could tell. “I thought it had to be black to be suitably cool, no?”

“It’s blue,” Yuuji defended. “It’s close enough. Here, anyway.”

Satoru took the tie from him, and he took off his sunglasses, and then he paused, staring at it with his bizarrely blue eyes.

“I think step three is tying it around your head,” Yuuji said. 

“Ha. Funny,” Satoru said, and finally did that. Except he didn’t push his hair up and he didn’t get the knot fast enough, and one side of the blindfold drooped off of his eye as he was still trying to tie it. Yuuji laughed at him.

“Stop laughing,” Satoru said. “That was only a first attempt. I’m going to make it cool, I promise.”

“If you say so.”

“I’m making it cool,” Satoru insisted, and then pulled the blindfold up over the eye it had fallen off of. “I think I need a stretchier fabric to try this with—ah.”

As soon as he stood, the makeshift blindfold slid down onto his nose.

Yuuji snorted. “I think you need to tie it tighter.”

“But my hair…”

“Push it up,” Yuuji suggested. “Embrace the paint brush look.”

“There’s no way that would make it cooler.”

“That’s how older you did it!”

Satoru grumbled, but he tried again, pushing his hair up with the blindfold. Except the styles were slightly different, now that Yuuji thought about it—older Satoru had an undercut that probably made this easier to achieve. As it was, younger Satoru kept getting the tie tangled in strands of his hair while Yuuji tried not to laugh at him. 

“I’ve done it!” Satoru finally crowed, and Yuuji had to smother more laughter when he straightened and faced Yuuji. He hadn’t really succeeded in pushing his hair up off his face so much as he had plastered his bangs to his forehead, with tufts of white hair sticking out under the tie. 

Yuuji fought his face out of a smile, very somberly nodding at Satoru. “You were right, Satoru,” he said. “You are cooler.”

“Fucking good,” Satoru said, and turned abruptly. What he was attempting to do was unknown—waltz up to an employee looking like that and embarrass everyone, probably—but what actually happened was him running forehead first into a mirror and bouncing off of it—or rather, the Infinity between it and him—with enough force to rattle it. 

It had been years since Yuuji laughed—really laughed, and yet he found the sound finally pulled out of him anyway. The laugh came from his belly and twisted his face, hurting his throat as he used his vocal cords in an unfamiliar way, burying an ache deep in his ribs that would live there for the next hour at least. 

I can’t believe I forgot, Yuuji thought, as he wiped a tear out of the corner of his eye. I can’t believe I forgot what it was like to laugh.

“Yuuji…?” Satoru prompted.

He was staring at Yuuji, blindfold pulled up onto his forehead and eyes exposed, watching him like he had no idea what to do with him. Like he wasn’t sure if he needed to run or fight. 

Which was fair enough, really—Yuuji had no idea what his face looked like when he laughed these days, but it was probably somewhat horrifying. 

“Sorry,” he said, swallowing his laughter and kneeling beside Satoru. “Thanks, though. I think I needed that.”

He reached forward unthinkingly, gently pulling at the knot where the tie tangled with Satoru’s hair.

A hand closed around his wrist.

“What?” Yuuji asked, when Satoru didn’t immediately say anything.

“How?” Satoru croaked, not looking at him. “How are you breaking through Infinity like it's nothing?”

“I’m…not?” Yuuji said, feeling his heartbeat growing rapid. “You’re letting me do it. Aren’t you?”

“Why the hell would I let you do it?” Satoru asked, in a fiery, petulant way, as he finally looked up at Yuuji. 

“Well, I’m definitely not doing it,” Yuuji defended.

“Bullshit,” Satoru spat.

“It’s not. Why the hell would I be able to just push through Infinity with no special effort if you didn’t want me to?”

Satoru made a frustrated noise. “I don’t want you to! Why would anyone want some shifty guy they just met—” He cut off, narrowing his eyes at Yuuji. 

“What?” Yuuji asked, exasperated. “What’s that face?”

“You aren’t actually doing anything, are you?” Satoru asked. “I would see it if you were…attacking Infinity, somehow. Hold out your hand.”

He mirrored the action himself at the same time he said it. Yuuji frowned but he complied, holding up his hand as if for a high five. Satoru did the same, approaching Yuuji’s hand with his slowly, like he feared it might bite him. 

Not that it would. Anymore. Sukuna might have tried it just to be inconvenient, though. 

Infinity shimmered between them, perfectly intact.

“See?” Yuuji said, raising his eyebrow. “It’s not me, it’s you.”

Satoru frowned, took his hand away, pushed against the wall as if to make sure infinity was still functioning fine, even though it clearly was, and then made a grab for Yuuji’s hand again, though slower this time. Infinity stopped them at the same point.

“What the fuck,” Satoru grumbled. Then, brattily, he added, “You try.”

“Try…what, exactly?”

“To hold my hand,” Satoru said, still scowling at Yuuji’s hand like it personally offended him.

“Dude,” Yuuji said.

“Just do it,” Satoru said.

“What exactly are you getting out of this, anyway?” Yuuji asked.

“Yuuuuuuuji,” Satoru whined. He actually whined . “Entertain me here, okay?”

Yuuji sighed, figuring he might as well, and pressed forward. He actually jumped when the tips of his fingers collided with Satoru’s, no Infinity between them. He recoiled, not sure why it was happening, but Satoru grabbed his hand before he could get too far, fingers slotting between Yuuji’s to curl over his palm. Yuuji jumped again when he felt Satoru’s skin brush against the scar where his pinkie used to be.

He hadn’t realized it was a sensitive area, but then again, he hadn’t held hands with anyone since he lost the finger either.

Or…ever. He was pretty sure he hadn’t ever held hands with anyone ever. 

…That was kind of pathetic, wasn’t it?

“It didn’t even work then,” Satoru said, tightening his grip on Yuuji’s hand. “And I was the one that moved that time. What the fuck is happening?”

“I don’t know?” Yuuji said. And then, before he could really stop himself, he added, “Having performance issues, Satoru?” 

Above them, there was a very loud, very displeased throat clearing. 

All of a sudden, Yuuji was very aware of several things. First, the tie still tangled in Satoru’s hair was wrinkled beyond belief. Not to mention, it was unpurchased. Second, they were teenagers, and that qualified them as delinquents on principle, even if they weren’t also the sort of teenagers that wore sunglasses inside like they were trying to poorly hide the fact that they were high. Third, they were sitting on the floor holding hands. Fourth, they were sitting on the floor holding hands and Yuuji had definitely just said an innuendo. Fifth, they were sitting on the floor holding hands in 2006, they were two dudes, and Yuuji honestly couldn’t remember how other people felt about two dudes holding hands in 2006. 

Judging by this particular store manager’s face, the answer wasn’t ‘grab a pitchfork and a torch,’ but it definitely might be ‘get out of my respectable establishment, please.’

Though that might have more to do with the destruction of property and the delinquency than the potential for homosexuality, he supposed. 

Yuuji cleared his throat in response to the throat clearing. “We were just going,” he said.

The store manager raised one eyebrow at them. “See that you pay for that first,” he said, in a high, reedy voice, and turned on his heels to go. 

For the first time in a very, very long time, Yuuji felt human. 

He looked back at Satoru, and by some mutual agreement as soon as they met each other’s eyes, they both burst out laughing. 

“I knew it,” Satoru said, finally letting go of Yuuji’s hand and pushing himself to his feet. “I knew you’d be fun.”

I didn’t think I had any fun left in me, Yuuji thought. 

But then again…

Gojo Satoru had always had a way with bringing out the best in people, hadn’t he?

“Stop worrying.”

“I’m not worrying.”

“Stop pacing, then.”

“I’m not pacing.”

Shoko coughed delicately, and Suguru’s feet finally stilled. A section of carpet in front of the couch was extremely, unarguably flattened.

“I’m not worried,” Suguru insisted, and sat down.

Shoko hissed at him like a startled cat.

“What?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at her. “I thought you wanted me to stop pacing.”

“This couch is made to seat four people, Suguru,” she said, swatting at his leg. “Four people. There is absolutely no reason why your knee should be touching my knee.” 

“You don’t say,” Suguru said blankly, pressing the whole side of his calf against hers too. “Four people, huh.”

Shoko shot him a venomous look but didn’t say anything, pushing herself up from the couch instead of fighting him for seating space…

…And promptly started pacing back and forth in the same spot Suguru had just vacated.

“It’s okay if you’re worried, you know,” Suguru said, tone only a little teasing. 

“I’m not worried,” Shoko said. “Satoru is too annoying to die.”

That was definitely true, but it didn’t change the fact that Satoru had been gone literally all day with a scary, scarred boy from the future that reeked of cursed energy like a ten year old landfill reeked of trash. 

“You could stop pacing if you aren’t worried,” Suguru suggested, leaning his head against his hand. “It’s quite irritating to watch.”

“...I’m never healing you again.”

Suguru opened his mouth to protest this horrid, unfair declaration, but before he could, the door opened.

“Satoru,” a voice was saying. It took Suguru a moment to realize it was Yuuji’s voice—he sounded younger than he had earlier. “I don’t know how else to tell you this, but no matter how many times you hold my hand, we aren’t going to magically solve your little problem.” 

Suguru made eye contact with Shoko, who seemed to be thinking the exact same thing Suguru was: Did you hear what I heard?

“I just don’t get it,” Satoru’s voice said in response, definitely in the middle of one of his whining, bratty fits. “Explain to me how—”

“I already told you I’m not the one doing it!”

“You have to be! You have to! I asked that girl, and she couldn’t pass it, and it works if I keep it engaged when I move on you, so what the hell are you doing, huh?”

“Better question: What the hell are you asking me for? You’re the one with the eyes.”

“Oh, Yuuji. Jealousy isn’t a good look on you. Just because I have five more of them than you—”

“Dear god,” Yuuji said, as he finally stepped into the room, Satoru behind him. 

“What about your Satoru, anyway?” Satoru said. Suguru noticed that Yuuji was carrying several shopping bags. Satoru was holding only a single blue tie, which he had strung over the back of his neck like a sports towel. “Did he ever let you…you know…touch him?”

“Dear god,” Yuuji said, with more emphasis than before, but the corners of his lips were twitching upwards like he was somehow enjoying Satoru’s presence anyway. And to his credit, he didn’t dignify Satoru’s question with a response. He nodded to Suguru and then Shoko instead.

He had new sunglasses on, Suguru noted.

“Hello again,” he said. “Sorry for leaving so abruptly earlier.”

“It’s no—” Suguru started to say.

“Did you touch him or not?” Satoru demanded, in a high, impatient voice. “It’s important, Yuujiiiii—”

Yuuji swung around so abruptly Suguru half stood, expecting Satoru to get hit, but Yuuji just readjusted some of the bags on one of his arms. “Yes, Satoru,” he said, in an exasperated way. “I could touch Gojo-sensei. I could touch him every night if I wanted to. I could hold his hand, throw my arms around his neck—”

“Wow,” Satoru said, in a lazy drawl. “Kinky.”

“But he was letting me do it every time I did,” Yuuji continued. “Consciously. How does it feel to know an almost thirty year old version of yourself could keep it up better than you could?” 

He raised one hand—the one he had just freed from shopping bags—to poke Satoru in the cheek.

While Satoru had Infinity engaged.

“Remember what I said about making things weird?” Yuuji said, and readjusted his bags again. “Please stop making things weird. See you later, man.” 

He nodded to Suguru and Shoko one more time and then retreated to the boys’ side of the dorms, leaving behind a very agitated Satoru, a very red Shoko, and the belated realization that, oh, they hadn’t been talking about anything other than Satoru’s technique that entire time.

“Um—” Shoko started to say, but cut off when Satoru made a high, annoyed sound and flung himself onto the sliver of couch beside Suguru, counter spreading. To Suguru’s chagrin, he found himself getting pushed back by Infinity, and then by Satoru himself. Irritated, he reached out to attempt to shove Satoru away, and—

Bounced off of Infinity, like usual—so long as Satoru was abusing the ability to get what he wanted. 

“See, it’s not me,” Satoru said, waspish and petulant, and he threw himself off of the couch to take up pacing back and forth in the spot in front of the couch that Suguru had started in. “I’m not having performance issues!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, directed to the boys’ side of the dormitory. 

Suguru winced. Yuuji, if he had heard Satoru, didn’t respond. Though, Haibara did let out a quiet little, “What?”

“Sheesh,” Shoko said, fishing around in her pocket. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes, flipped it open, and sighed. She put the pack back in her pocket, twirling a strand of her hair around her finger instead, and tilted her head tiredly towards Satoru. “What’s got you so worked up, anyway?”

“If I had to guess,” Suguru piped up, “Infinity doesn’t stop Yuuji from touching him.”

“Eh?” Shoko said, blinking. “Weren’t you letting him do that?”

Satoru made a noise like a dying whale and threw his hands up in the air.

“He’s having performance issues, remember?” Suguru added, directing this at Shoko. 

“I am not having performance issues!” Satoru shouted. 

“Seriously, what?” came Haibara’s tiny reply from upstairs. 

“Anyway,” Suguru said, eying Satoru. “I won’t ask about the Infinity thing, because if I have to hear you talk about your performance issues one more time I’ll probably barf, but…you really spent all day with him?”

Satoru half turned to look at him, his glasses slipping down his nose. He was unsettlingly serious once again, cold and aloof, distant in a way that he shouldn’t be. “Don’t ask me what he’s like. I don’t have an answer for that.”

“Is he trustworthy?” Shoko asked. “Do you have an answer for that?”

Satoru sighed, looking away. He apparently took a long moment to think before he responded, and even then, the answer was…

“I don’t know for sure.”

“What do you know?” Suguru asked, irritated. 

“He’s doing something here,” Satoru said. “I’m not sure what it is, but he has a plot. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t really concern any of us, but…it’s good to be on guard, anyway. As to if you can trust him…probably. His cursed technique, though, it’s—”

The door to the common room slammed open. 

“ITADORI YUUJI!” Yaga shouted, as he thundered into the common room. “WHERE IS HE? ITADORI!” 

Yaga caught sight of the three of them standing in the common room and staring at him. “Your classmate. Where has he gone?” he barked.

“Hey now,” Satoru said. “I’m sure we’re better than pointing fingers at comrades when you’re clearly so upset—”

Wordlessly, Suguru and Shoko both pointed upstairs.

“YUUJI!” Yaga shouted, up the stairs. “COME DOWN HERE, YOUNG MAN!”

“What is happening?” Haibara said, in a small voice. 

“YUUJI!” Yaga shouted. 

“I hear you, I hear you!” Yuuji finally shouted back. “Sheesh, Sensei, I’m working on it—”

“Who the—?!” 

“BRING THOSE THINGS WITH YOU!” Yaga shouted. “AND HURRY UP.”

“What things? You don’t mean—oh. Oh…”

“What things?” Suguru asked Satoru.

Satoru shrugged helplessly. Shoko looked just as lost. 

Yaga retreated into the common room to wait, tapping his foot with his arms crossed over his chest. Suguru almost wondered if they were expected to leave. 

“Let me explain before you freak out about it,” Yuuji’s voice said, before his body followed behind it into the common room. He looked the same as he did when he left, other than the fact that now he was now carrying a jar hugged protectively to his chest.

A jar that radiated cursed energy on par with a special grade sorcerer.

“What the hell?” Satoru blurted, twitching backwards like he had been slapped. 

“Listen—” Yuuji started again.

“Where are the other two?” Yaga asked, voice thunderous.

Yuuji paused. “I left Kechizu and Eso upstairs,” he said. “You seemed pretty angry, and Choso would probably get upset with me if I put them in danger when he could handle this just fine—”

“For God's sake, you’ve named them?” Yaga asked, incredulous.

“I—no,” Yuuji said, glancing furtively around the room. “Let’s start over. Okay—why are you mad at me, exactly?”

“Are you honestly asking me that?” Yaga yelled. “I find out that you traded your life for possession of dangerous cursed objects from the elders and you don’t know why that might be worrying?”

“...I didn’t trade my life for anything?” Yuuji said, raising one eyebrow. “I agreed to protect Amanai Riko for Tengen in exchange for Death Paintings One through Three.” 

“Amanai Riko is a Star Plasma Vessel. Whether Tengen agrees to the erasure or not, her name and face are still known and targeted— to swear to protect her permanently is to throw one’s body on a funeral pyre, one day or another. I was told you made a Binding Vow with Tengen-sama for this. Did you?”

“Another Binding Vow?” Shoko asked, blinking. 

“Look,” Yuuji said. “Tengen offered me the Death Paintings. It was simple. I was probably going to protect this Riko girl anyway. I don’t get why you’re so worked up about it.”

“What do you think happens to you if you fail to protect her?” Yaga asked harshly. 

Suguru had never seen him so worked up before. 

“I’d be cosmically punished,” Yuuji said, like it was just another Tuesday activity, really. “I would die, possibly.”

Yaga reached out and knocked him very firmly on the head, and Yuuji cut himself off with a yelp. “You idiot boy,” he said. “What are you even going to do with that? Eat it?”

“Woah, what?” Shoko asked. 

“I’m not going to eat Choso,” Yuuji said. 

But Suguru was a little more concerned with something else. 

“You—you were willing to sacrifice your life for Riko? Just because…? Were you even enrolled in Jujutsu High when you made that vow? Why would you go to such lengths to protect someone you didn’t know?”

“Of course I would,” Yuuji said, with an unexpected earnestness. “I’m a jujutsu sorcerer. I live, breathe, fight, and die for other people. Besides, I would have agreed to anything, if it meant Choso, Kechizu, and Eso passed safely into my possession.” 

Yuuji finally uncovered the jar, setting it reverently on the coffee table in front of them. Suguru looked and then looked away, resisting the urge to vomit—because that was a fetus. A human fetus, suspended in liquid and floating in a jar like something out of a horror movie. 

And beyond that…it radiated power, sentience, feeling—something that felt like a curse, and something that also felt like a human. Yuuji rested one hand on top of the jar fondly, like this wasn’t the weirdest thing in a long list of weird things he had done. 

“The Death Paintings are two-thirds human,” Yuuji said. “Every single one of them. They deserve compassion and respect, just as the rest of us do, and I’m going to give it to them this time even if it kills me.”

“Didn’t you consume—”

“I merged with Death Paintings Four through Nine,” Yuuji said. “But that was their choice as much as it was mine. They’re my brothers, Yaga-sensei. We live for each other.”

Satoru let out a weird, high-pitched laugh. “You’re crazy,” he said, staring at Yuuji. “You’re absolutely insane.”

Yuuji smiled. “I mean, obviously.”

Yaga let out a very long sigh. “Youth. What a troubling thing to be.” He stared at the wall for a moment, and then sighed again. “Yuuji.”

Suddenly, there was a case file in Yaga’s hands. 

“A mission already?” Yuuji asked, raising his eyebrows as he took it. 

“Don’t act surprised,” Yaga said. “You’re the one that made the Binding Vow that you would protect her.”

“Oh,” Yuuji said, flipping the folder open. 

“Satoru, you’ve been requested for this as well,” Yaga said. “Since the day Yuuji was…recovered…Amanai Riko has been kept in a secure location. A location that will be changing to Jujutsu High, now that her caregiver has…died.” Suguru winced. “She will be moving into the dorms here, as she has agreed to the arrangement of having Yuuji as her guard.”

“Wait,” Suguru said. “Just Satoru and Yuuji? Isn’t this my case?”

“It was decided that your presence was unnecessary,” Yaga said, with a frown that said he wasn’t exactly in agreement.

“Who decided that?” Yuuji asked. “Amanai Riko, or the elders?”

“The elders,” Yaga said. “Seeing as Satoru’s Six Eyes would be better for monitoring threats and assigning three special grade sorcerers to one case would be overkill.”

Yuuji stepped forward, holding out the now closed case file out for Suguru. Suguru stared at him for a moment, baffled, until Yuuji shook the case at him like he wanted Suguru to take it. Suguru hesitantly did, closing his fingers around the case file. Yuuji pulled away as soon as Suguru was holding it, snagging his creepy fetus jar from the coffee table and getting ready to go back upstairs. 

“Yuuji,” Yaga said, sounding very, very tired. 

“See you tomorrow, Getou,” Yuuji said. 

“Yuuji,” Yaga repeated. “You can’t just ignore the elders because you feel like it.”

“Unless Getou is going out and saving lives somewhere else instead, I don’t see any reason why he can’t come too,” Yuuji said. “And I can definitely ignore the elders just because I feel like it. Didn’t you say I was ranked special grade? Pretty cool, honestly. Bet none of those stuffy old geezers can relate.” He turned his back to them, hooking the handle to the door to the stairs with an elbow, and threw up a salute. “Later, Yaga-sensei.”

The door clicked shut behind him, the four of them staring in silence at where he had been standing. 

Yaga adjusted his glasses, turned to Satoru, and said, “On the off chance I become a principal someday, do not ask me to be a teacher for literally any reason. I will say no.”

Satoru opened his mouth to respond, but before he could, the door to the boys’ stairs opened again. 

“What’s this about performance issues, Senpai?” Haibara asked, poking his head through the crack. And then he spotted Yaga and froze, a look of abject horror plastered on his face. 

“I will pretend I didn’t hear that,” Yaga said. He pointed at Satoru—almost threateningly—and then promptly left. 

“Seriously,” Haibara said. “What’s going on, you guys?”

Suguru glanced at Satoru, who glanced at Shoko, who glanced back at Suguru. 

“Honestly,” Suguru said, pressing his fingers into his temple. “I don’t even know how to start answering that.”

Chapter Text

“Maybe we should have just left Suguru behind,” Satoru said. “This is fucking annoying.”

‘This’ was Suguru’s horrible manspreading habit. Or maybe it was Yuuji’s irritating skill to bypass Infinity. Or maybe it was the fact that Satoru had been forced into the middle seat of this itty bitty car, by some mutual silent agreement on Suguru and Yuuji’s part, and they were all very long teenage boys with a lot of leg to spare, and all that spare leg had ended up in Satoru’s space.

“Don’t complain, Satoru,” Suguru said, in that irritatingly smug way of his. “You have so few good qualities to start with—you ought to be careful not to lose them.”

The real problem was definitely Suguru. Or maybe the real problem was Yuuji, who was so unfairly receptive in a world Satoru had learned was uncaring a long time ago. 

Suguru was indifferent. 

He was indifferent in every aspect of his life. He didn’t have an opinion on the food he ate. The clothing he wore was equally as unmotivated, a host of empty neutral tones that could go one way or another. Even his occupation as a sorcerer was something he treated with indifference—a duty to protect the weak, he said, like that meant something more than enjoying beating the crap out of people and being too much of a coward to say that out loud.

Satoru used to think it was cool, even though it stung, the way Suguru mastered this balancing act of purpose and enjoyment. He used to think it was something he should aspire to, before he had seen the world.

And now Satoru had seen the world, and he knew he had been given too much purpose yet not enough, skill with no direction. 

A knee bumped against his.

It was Yuuji’s knee, because Satoru was diligently maintaining Infinity between his knee and Suguru’s—mostly because he wanted nothing more than to drop it, to test Suguru’s indifference, to see if he would let Satoru get away with pressing their thighs together, their calves. The cause for the disturbance was Yuuji fixing the laces on his shoes—the ancient looking red ones that barely fit him and were falling apart, even though Satoru had seen him buy new shoes yesterday. Insisted he buy new shoes, really, considering these ones were held together with duct tape and a prayer.

“Why are you wearing those?” Satoru asked, mostly just to distract himself from Suguru, Suguru, Suguru —

“To tell you the truth, it feels kind of weird to take them off,” Yuuji said and held his feet out as if to admire them. “I’ve been wearing these shoes for something like two years straight now.”

“All the more reason to stop wearing them, if you ask me,” Satoru grumbled.

“Hm,” Yuuji said, turning his foot to the side, like this was something he actually needed to consider.

“Yuuji,” Suguru asked suddenly. “Were you homeless before you came…here?”

And some people accused Satoru of having no tact.

“No,” Yuuji said, like the question hadn’t bothered him. “Grandpa’s house was still standing, when all was said and done. I returned there when I needed to think or sleep or stare at the ceiling and pretend I was somewhere else. In that sense, it was a home.”

“...I’m sorry if I offended you,” Suguru said, after a moment. “It’s just—”

“To answer your question though,” Yuuji continued, strangely chipper. “Yeah, I wandered a lot, changed clothes very rarely, and slept in beds almost never.”

It was at this point that the assistant manager driving them stopped the car, cleared her throat awkwardly, and announced, “We’re here.”

Yuuji hopped out of the backseat, entirely unbothered. Suguru shared a look with Satoru before following after him—not that Satoru could tell what exactly the look meant. 

And Suguru shut the door in his face, always so indifferent, always so self-absorbed, leaving Satoru to crawl out on Yuuji’s side. Yuuji, who was strangely attentive as always, held the door open for Satoru as he leaned towards the driver. “Thank you for driving us,” he told the assistant manager politely.

“Of course,” she said, dipping her head towards him. “I was happy to.”

And because Satoru was in a bad mood after being squished and squashed in the backseat—and for no other, Suguru related reason—he jerked the door out of Yuuji’s grasp and slammed it closed.

“Aren’t you the charmer,” he said to Yuuji.

Except Yuuji didn’t seem particularly upset so much as he just seemed himself, staring at Satoru with his eyes hidden behind his glasses and his expression neutral. 

Great. Now he was getting indifference from the ‘God, I missed you’ guy too.

“Well, one of us has to be and it certainly isn’t you, Satoru,” Suguru said, in that pleasantly unpleasant voice of his.

Hey, Satoru probably would have shouted a week ago, when he still felt like it mattered. I’m plenty charming, actually. You just don’t care because you’re you.

“I think if any of us are charming it’s probably you, Getou,” Yuuji said, tilting his head back to look up at the building they were parked in front of. 

“You flatter me,” Suguru said, in that same damn voice.

The corner of Yuuji’s mouth twitched. “Wasn’t really a compliment,” he said, which…actually got a reaction out of Suguru, for the first time all morning, in the form of him narrowing his eyes at Yuuji.

“No, really,” Yuuji said, earnestly. “It wasn’t a joke. Dishonesty in any form is still dishonesty.”

“I—” Suguru started to say, before stopping abruptly. That was unlike him too—Suguru never yielded, but for some reason, Yuuji’s gaze always stopped him in his tracks.

Yuuji, who was either oblivious to Suguru’s reaction or uncaring of it, smacked Satoru lightly on the arm, using the back of his hand. “The cursed energy lingering around here—what’s it from, friend or foe?”

Satoru tipped his glasses down his nose, studying the building. There were three sorcerers inside, all of whom Satoru knew the techniques of intimately.

“Friend,” Satoru said. “Looks like Riko has two guards.”

“Cool,” Yuuji said, and strode on in.

Which…was usually Satoru’s job in these things.

To rush in blindly.

Not follow behind the faster guy. 

Yuuji didn’t falter again, or ask Satoru for any additional information. He pressed up the stairs and down the hall, guiding himself towards the place where Satoru was sure Riko was sitting with little to no trouble. The floorboards creaked as they walked across them, and Suguru made an irritated noise.

“Seriously,” he grumbled under his breath. “Isn’t she the Star Plasma Vessel? Why shove her in what has to be their worst safe house?”

“Probably trying to make her seem unimportant,” Satoru guessed. 

“She is unimportant,” Yuuji said. “Her potential has been realized, her merger refused. This is how the elders were going to kill her—slowly, then all at once. Tengen has a good nose, for being such an ignorant shut in, huh? I guess this is why she really wanted me to make that vow.”

…Not so oblivious, then. 

“What makes you say that?” Suguru asked, though he had his hackles up a bit, watching Yuuji with a dark look on his face.

“I’ve been in a situation like this more than once,” Yuuji said. “I know what men that have no real power like to do when you hand them flimsy authority to act on. Sometimes, I almost think…”

But whatever he almost thought, he didn’t finish, opening a door and stepping into a room. 

He also dodged the ax swinging at his head like he had seen it moving through the wall. 

“Mei Mei, always a pleasure,” Yuuji said. “I saw the crows outside and wondered. ‘Course, I saw the crows outside, which means you know I’m affiliated with Jujutsu High and you attacked me anyway.”

“Oh, you can never be too careful, can you?” Mei Mei said, in her smooth purr. “Especially when you ought to know anyone with that monstrous cursed energy of yours when you’ve been working as long as I have, and I don’t know you.”

“I’ll give you that,” Yuuji said, turning his attention to the second occupant in the room. He went comically still before laughing unexpectedly. “Wo-ah, Utahime-sensei, is that you? You’re so cute, what the heck—”

“Excuse me?” Utahime demanded, jerking to her feet with her hands at her fists. “Who are you?”

“I do kind of miss the bow though,” Yuuji continued. “The bow was also pretty cute.”

“What?!” Utahime asked, evidently not knowing if she should be confused or angry. 

“Excuse me,” Mei Mei said, swinging her ax ominously to settle the handle across her shoulders. “You, there—dashing young man with the delectable scars—what about me? Are you not going to call me cute?”

“Nope,” Yuuji said. “You’d eat me alive for that. I’ll call you batshit insane and kind of creepy, though, since it means so much to you?”

Mei Mei giggled. 

She fucking giggled. 

“Oh, you charmer,” she said. “Do you sweet talk all the ladies like that?”

“I don’t sweet talk any ladies,” Yuuji said, blinking at her. 

“Oh, pshaw,” Mei Mei said, tossing a strand of hair out of her face before peering at him. “Won’t you change your mind? I mean.” She stepped closer to him, and honestly, Satoru had the irrational urge to step in between them. “I don’t begrudge you for your preference—I hardly could, when men are just so easy to bite—but can’t you see the benefits of a little softness too?”

Did she just—

Did she really—

“Alriiiiight,” Yuuji said, and grabbed her gently by the shoulders, before using that to put an arm’s length between them. “I think that’s far enough.”

Satoru glanced around the room. Utahime had gone bright red, probably from virginal embarrassment. Suguru looked like someone had pressed eject on his brain. Riko, who was still standing still by the window, looked torn between hiding and defenestrating herself.

Honestly, Satoru could kind of relate. Especially since Yuuji hadn’t denied it. Not even for the sake of appearances.

“Perhaps,” Mei Mei said. She eyed Yuuji like he was a piece of meat, but she didn’t approach again, which Satoru supposed he should count as a blessing. “What’s your name, cutie?”

Yuuji took another step backwards, dipping into a shallow bow. Then he turned on his heel, offering Utahime a deeper one. “You can call me Yuuji, Mei Mei, Utahime-sensei. I’m from the year 2020.” He turned towards Riko last, offering her the deepest bow of them all, while Riko stared at him with wide, almost fearful eyes. “It’s nice to meet you officially as well, Amanai.”

She covered her mouth with her hand, continuing to stare at him, and not responding. 

Wait. 

Something about this reaction was off. 

“I’m so sorry,” Riko said, with tears streaming down her face. “I’m so, so sorry—I thought maybe you would go back after the technique expired, but—I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

The corner of Yuuji’s mouth turned upwards. “Don’t be sorry,” he said, still bent at a forty-five degree angle. “I’m fine with this. Really, I am.”

A technique expiring…

Satoru’s theory was right, then. It hadn’t been random chance or even something in the future that had brought Yuuji here. Instead, it was Riko, her technique, and whatever it was she had sacrificed to create such a monumental change in the world.

Things really were getting so interesting.

Amanai Riko’s cursed technique was called Dimension. 

It was one of those cursed techniques that was so complicated it was next to impossible to use, as Riko put it when she explained it to the group. It made Yuuji think of Mai’s technique, or Inumaki’s, or even Satoru’s. 

Difficult to the point where very specific circumstances had to combine just to produce results. Powerful, but heavily limited, too. 

“I never trained with it,” Riko said, staring down at her hands. “I never had a reason to—I existed for Tengen, body and soul. Nothing was really mine in the first place.”

“And yet you were able to pull a powerful sorcerer through time and space?” Suguru asked, disbelievingly. “Just so he could save you?”

“It’s…a powerful technique,” Riko said. “And I was really worried, you know. I mean—” She glanced furtively at Satoru before looking back at Suguru. “I know I had only met you two recently, but you both…you were doing something for me that no one else had ever done before. I had never had my own life before you, Suguru, and Satoru was dying for me too, and…I just…”

Satoru and Suguru both stared at her, both of them seemingly floored by this earnestness, and Yuuji pressed his knuckles into the scar at the corner of his mouth in an effort to fight the ever-present itch that resided under his skin. 

“Don’t be sincere towards them,” Utahime said, still sounding vaguely annoyed. “These assholes don’t deserve it or know what to do with it.”

“I could kiss it better,” Mei Mei whispered to Yuuji, evidently noticing his discomfort. She leaned over the coffee table Yuuji had intentionally put in between them just to run a fingernail up his arm. “If that scar is bothering you, Yuuji.”

Satoru stood, pacing a circle around the couch like a furious winter storm. 

“This doesn’t make sense,” Suguru said. “Satoru and I have been protecting you this whole time, and you’ve just had a cursed technique for the duration of it?”

“A cursed technique she couldn’t use,” Satoru reminded him. “A cursed technique I didn’t see the potential of.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Yuuji said, subtly shifting his arm away from Mei Mei. “Vessel is a word for someone that’s able to manipulate their soul. If anyone can hide something from your Six Eyes, it’s people like us.”

“Us?” Riko echoed, confused. 

“I don’t want to hear it from you,” Satoru snapped, all bubbling over, white-hot rage, as he rounded on Yuuji.

“Satoru,” Suguru chided. 

Yuuji waved a hand, unconcerned. He had seen Satoru angry like this before, even if it wasn’t ordinarily directed at him. He could understand anyway—Satoru was already frustrated by the problem with Infinity, with having the one defense he knew he could always rely on stripped away from him—and having more chinks in his armor exposed was the last thing his pride or his sanity needed right now. 

It made Yuuji regret it—whatever it was he was doing to get past Infinity.

“I want to hear more from you,” Mei Mei said, leaning even closer. “You’re a vessel? What’s it like carrying another soul within your body?”

“Mei Mei,” Utahime warned. 

Yuuji cleared his throat. “Not to embarrass you either, Getou, but…uh, it was in the mission report.”

“What?” Getou asked. 

“Amanai’s technique,” Yuuji said. “It was in the mission report I handed you last night.”

Suguru gave him a blank look. 

“You… did read the mission report, right?” Yuuji said. 

Suguru glanced at Satoru, who looked just as blankly back at him. 

“I’m the only one of us that read anything in the mission report,” Yuuji realized, with a sinking feeling. 

Oh my god, he realized a second later. I’ve turned into Fushiguro. 

“You were tasked with protecting my life at all costs for multiple days and in multiple locations and you didn’t even read my case file?” Riko asked, sounding very annoyed. It was quite the contrast from the despairing way she had greeted him. “I knew you were stupid, but—”

“Hey,” Suguru interjected. “Call Satoru stupid if you want, but don’t lump me into that assessment.”

“Excuse me?!” Satoru protested, folding his arms over his chest. 

“What a good boy you are,” Mei Mei said, leaning impossibly closer to Yuuji. “So reliable.”

A pang of something old and terrible and heavy shot through Yuuji’s stomach. “Don’t call me reliable,” he said, feeling sick. “I’m not. I’m the furthest thing from it.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Mei Mei said, reaching for his arm again, probably to caress it weirdly one more time—

—And she bounced off of Satoru’s infinity. 

Yuuji blinked at Satoru’s side, and then at his crossed arms, and then at the way he casually hooked an ankle over one of his knees, like he had strolled over here to casually sit instead of teleporting himself across the room just so he could…what? 

Protect you, Yuuji’s mind very unhelpfully pointed out, and Yuuji scowled. 

“Oh, Satoru,” Mei Mei sighed, but she didn’t move to harass him. 

“Maybe knowing this is a good thing?” Suguru said. “If that’s Riko’s technique, then maybe it would be possible with training for her to—”

“What?” Yuuji asked. “Send me home?”

Suguru flushed like that had been exactly what he was going to say.

“I can’t,” Riko said, though she directed this part to Yuuji. “I’m so sorry, but I—I can’t ever undo my changes. I never meant to bring someone else through time. The best I could do is send you somewhere else, maybe, but I have no way of knowing if it’s the same place, and—your life, wherever it was, is gone.”

She was crying again.

There wasn’t really a sensitive way to say, ‘Hey, it’s cool, I wasn’t doing anything better than time traveling,’ and also have himself be believed. There wasn’t an insensitive way to say it either, considering Suguru was apparently still operating under the impression that Yuuji wanted to go back there. 

“Don’t cry,” Mei Mei advised her. “He gets to be here with me now. Isn’t that right, sweetheart?”

“Mei Mei, for fuck’s sake,” Utahime said. “We’re supposed to be getting debriefed, not sexually harassing minors.” 

“Oh, please.” He couldn’t see her, but he could hear Mei Mei rolling her eyes. “He can't be younger than seventeen.”

“That’s still a minor,” Utahime snapped. 

Yuuji pressed his thumb and his forefinger into either side of his cheeks and he thought about something.

“Anyway, Suguru is sorry,” Satoru told Riko, from his perch on the arm rest beside Yuuji that he was somehow making look casual. “Yuuji doesn’t want to go back to the future. He's made that perfectly clear. Suguru shouldn’t have implied otherwise, knowing that it might upset you.”

This last part was accompanied with a glare in Suguru’s direction.

Contrary to the last twenty-four hours Yuuji had spent with them, Suguru didn’t turn it into a fight. Surprisingly, he stood, crossing to Riko’s side of the room, where he wrapped one arm around her shoulders, and then the other one, and then pulled her into his chest.

Oh my god, a hug, Yuuji thought, like it was a novel idea. Considering he had neither hugged anyone in a year and a half nor seen it happening in front of him, it kind of was.

Oh my god, Getou Suguru is hugging someone, Yuuji thought in the next second, like it was a novel idea. Considering the Getou of his time was a terrorist that was then possessed by a terrorist and the Suguru of this time was a contrarian that loved picking fights at best, it kind of was.

“...Whatcha doin’?” Satoru asked, in a very mature way.

“Oh my fucking god, Satoru,” Suguru said. In Satoru’s defense, even Riko looked a little confused by these circumstances.

“We should probably go, anyway,” Yuuji said, sticking a finger into the air as the thought occurred to him. “While we still have Mei Meis tec’hnique to monitor incoming threats.”

“I can monitor incoming threats just fine,” Satoru grumbled, while Mei Mei let out a pleased but neutral hum.

“A crow with wings has better range than your Six Eyes and you know it,” Yuuji said. 

Satoru gave him a disapproving look, like he had committed the highest treason instead of being reasonable.

But then again, pride was a sore point for any Gojo Satoru, no matter his age.

“Wait,” Riko said, shoving Suguru off of her despite the way her eyes were still red from tears. “Where are we going?”

“Back to Tokyo Jujutsu High,” Suguru answered. “Disregarding that we nearly died there…it’s the safest place there is.”

“I’ll be there too,” Yuuji said, jerking a thumb back at himself. “Along with these two, so don’t worry. There isn’t a person alive that couldn’t be taken out by one of us.”

Riko looked at him, something considering in her gaze—something deeper that he probably needed to dig into later.

“Alright,” she said. “I…trust you. Not the other two, though.”

“Hey,” Suguru protested softly. 

“Hey!” Satoru protested loudly. 

Yuuji met Riko’s gaze, seeing the flicker of something there before she was drawn into the mostly one sided argument now brewing between Satoru and Suguru. 

Right. 

That was what he was wondering earlier, wasn’t it?

Her technique had to have some kind of activation requirement, and Yuuji had to have filled it, somehow, which left the question—

What was it?

Riko wasn’t sure what she had been expecting when she reached into the depths of her unexplored jujutsu and pulled someone out. Through. With.

Whatever it was she expected, she supposed he looked somewhat like Getou Suguru in her mind. Pretty. Elegant. Possibly wearing armor and riding a white horse. 

Yuuji was none of those things.  

Well…he was attractive, which wasn’t really the same thing as being pretty. He was attractive in a tough way, like he rode a motorcycle and carried weapons and smelled like man sweat. 

She supposed this gave Yuuji a fair bit of charm too, even though he was hardly Prince Charming. He was straightforward in a refreshing way—maybe, uh, forward and very little straight , actually—and he was a little sullen, but also insanely competent. 

He was rolling up his sleeves with every step he took. It gave him a predatory feeling, like he was hunting something, or hunting someone.

It wasn’t actually doing a very good job at making her feel secure, despite everything she knew he was thanks to the jujutsu that brought him here. 

“Well,” Gojo said, from the rear end of her guard. “That didn’t take long, did it?”

He sounded almost gleeful, despite the way his words settled icily in her veins.

“Told you,” Yuuji said, with the grin of a wild cat. “What are you thinking, Sensei? Getou and Utahime-sensei with Amanai?”

“You talking to me?” Gojo asked, straightening out his collar. “I thought we already agreed to cut the ‘Sensei’ crap.”

“Sorry, Satoru,” Yuuji said, with a huff. “Force of habit.”

“I’ll forgive you just this once, since you were asking for my superior advice. And for the record—I can handle this on my own.”

“Oh, any of us could handle this on our own,” Yuuji countered. “That’s not the point. The point is that Suguru’s technique is more suitable to guarding, Utahime’s technique is more suitable to support, and you and I are the scariest looking people here.”

“I don't look scary,” Satoru immediately protested. 

“You can if you want to,” Suguru said. “Once you cut through all the layers of stupid dumb shit to get to it.” 

“Neither of you look particularly scary,” Utahime grumbled. “But even I have to admit… you are the most intimidating of us, probably.”

“You’re both devils,” Mei Mei agreed. “And this plan of yours? Where do I factor into it?”

“Nowhere, because I’m not paying you to do extra work for something I don’t need you for. I know how you are.”

Mei Mei gasped. “Yuuji. You wound me. I’ll accept other forms of payment besides money, you know. A favor for a favor, perhaps?”

“Shut it,” Gojo said cantankerously. “I’m getting real tired of you two carrying on.”

“Don’t say ‘you two!’” Yuuji protested. “I’m not engaging here! It’s all her!”

“That’s the problem,” Gojo said. “You’re practically encouraging it.”

“Jealous, Satoru?” Mei Mei purred. “You should have said something sooner. I don’t mind giving you a little attention too~”

Riko was almost glad to be going back to these boys, if only because it meant she wouldn't have to listen to this anymore.

“Stop protecting me, Satoru,” Yuuji said, voice suddenly flinty. “That’ll get you killed one day.” 

He pushed ahead of Riko then, though he took a moment to pat her shoulder on his way out of the door to the house she had been staying at since…everything.

“Emerge from darkness, blacker than darkness,” Yuuji said, in a rough voice. “Purify that which is impure.”

Riko had seen a veil being lowered before, but she had never seen one that emerged like this. It dropped cleanly between her and Yuuji, even though he was still standing beside her. It cut Getou, Utahime, and Mei Mei all out similarly, leaving only Gojo and Yuuji inside. Gojo turned to look at her as the cosmetic effect of the veil took hold second, eyes hidden behind his sunglasses.

The one person at any point in time that would be able to save Gojo Satoru. 

That was who Riko had called out for.

The curse user trapped in Yuuji’s veil with them was a man of average height and unimpressive stature—once he stepped out from behind his poor hiding spot, that was. Satoru glanced at him over the rim of his glasses, noticing his dark hair and his cursed energy in equal measures. He wasn’t anything particularly special. He could trade food into cursed energy, where certain food types granted him more energy, which Satoru assumed was then transferred into the sword he carried at his side or used for general enhancement. 

Satoru had learned a lesson about simplicity recently. There was probably a lot this guy could do with a sword and a good steak, having had so much time to perfect both things. 

Beside him, Yuuji took off his sunglasses. 

My eye gives me away, he had said yesterday. 

Ironic, considering right now it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. 

“Want to chat?” Yuuji asked, as he folded his sunglasses up and tucked them carefully away in the pocket of his hoodie. 

“Your barrier is strong,” the man said, his grip tightening on the hilt of his sword. “I hadn’t expected to get trapped in it.”

Yuuji shrugged one shoulder. “That’s probably the least impressive thing I can do, man. You aren’t off to a good start if that’s already blowing you away.”

Satoru wondered just how much Yuuji could do. He had ingested multiple special grade cursed objects—that much he had been forthcoming about. What exactly he had gotten out of that arrangement was what was unknown. And infuriatingly, the information he received from the Six Eyes wasn’t helpful either. Yuuji was a patchwork quilt of different cursed techniques, so many that they completely overwhelmed him when he tried to focus on one. Possibly, Yuuji was even intentionally concealing the information, considering what he said earlier. 

“I have no quarrels with you,” the sorcerer said. “Only the girl.”

“Hate to break it to you, but that means you have a quarrel with me too, buddy. You’re obviously a little terrified of the situation you found yourself in though, so I’ll make you an offer. Swear on your life and the lives of your three closest loved ones—as decided by the Binding Vow you take, not me or you, by the way—that you’ll never intentionally harm her, and I’ll let you out of here with all your bits and pieces still intact.”

Satoru gave Yuuji a look out of the corner of his eye. That was a steep ask, and judging by the guy’s expression—

“Ah, thought so,” Yuuji said, the corners of his eye crinkling in a sad facsimile of a smile. “So you're being forced to do it by someone else. Well, alright. I’m not unreasonable. Tell me who it is—or better yet, take me to them—and I’ll do both of us a favor and take the problem out at its roots.” 

A bit of sweat snaked its way down the side of the curse user’s neck, and it was just as telling as his silence. 

“No?” Yuuji asked, and now Satoru could make out the look in his eye perfectly—predator meeting prey. “Don’t like that one either? Can’t be because you don’t think I can do it—you’re too scared of me to doubt my ability to follow through. We’ve had such a nice chat so far. Maybe you could tell me why you want Amanai Riko to die and who sent you to get the job done, and I can make sure you have a proper death. You know what the alternative is, right?” To Satoru’s surprise, Yuuji jerked a thumb at him. “That’s Gojo Satoru. If he’s the one that disposes of you, there won’t even be enough of you left to send home in a matchbox.”

The curse user glanced at Satoru, eyes blown wide, and back at Yuuji. Yuuji smiled—something that was all teeth and no comfort—and the curse user’s stance shifted. 

Yuuji moved so quickly Satoru almost didn’t even see it. He was on top of the curse user before he even had a chance to fully draw his sword. One hand closed around the handle of the sword, the other around the curse user’s right arm. Satoru was already halfway to his own fighting stance but he paused at the appearance of dashed lines on the curse user’s arm. The lines were chased by a pair of scissors, chomping at the dashed line, and then Yuuji stepped back, sword and sheath both in his hands. 

There had been no dismemberment, but long gashes ran up his arm, deep and thick. There was a delay—only a second long—and then blood spurted out of the wounds like a fountain, smattering the side of Yuuji’s face like freckles. 

The curse user screamed later, as if on a delay, hugging his arm to his chest. Needless to say, he wouldn’t be using it again any time soon.

“I don’t love doing this, you know,” Yuuji said, his grip tightening around the sword he had stolen. “I don’t actually want to see you die. I’d still be willing to let you go—with this sword and that arm as payment—but you have to tell me the name of the person or group or whatever that sent you, too.”

“Burn in hell,” the curse user spat, apparently giving up on the wise swordsman act now. “We are trying to transcend humanity—we must evolve—we must evolve through Tengen—”

Satoru remembered, then, why exactly Yuuji had included him in this too. 

“Forget the matchbox,” Satoru said, taking a step forward himself, and then another. “You’re dying either way, now—it just depends on whether you want there to be anything left of you or not when I’m done with you.”

He shook, blood streaking his clothes, his face, the ground beneath his feet. “The—the Star Religious Group—I was hired by them. Let me go! Please! I won’t kill the girl!”

Satoru glanced at Yuuji, and found the strangest look on his face. He knew before it even happened, the choice Yuuji was going to make. He saw it in his eye. 

“Alright,” Yuuji said softly. “I believe in second chances.”

And as the curse user began to cry tears of gratitude, Satoru couldn’t help but wonder where someone that looked like Yuuji could have learned his kindness. If it was something born intrinsic to him or something that someone else taught him. 

It cut through a cold part of Satoru, touching something he thought might have died that day he put a hole in Fushiguro Toji. 

He couldn’t help but feel like a future that could produce young sorcerers like Yuuji—the kind sort, who genuinely wanted to help others—couldn’t be all bad, as far as worlds went.

“You’re too good,” he told Yuuji. 

He made sure he said it quietly enough that Yuuji probably didn’t hear him.

Riko’s movement back into the custody of Jujutsu High went without a hitch from there. 

Satoru and Yuuji reemerged from the veil after going into it for less than two minutes. Yuuji was covered in blood and carrying a sword that hadn’t belonged to him when he went in. Satoru looked largely the same, so long as you didn’t look at Satoru’s face. 

The curse user that had thought to attack them emerged with them, though maimed. That was something Yuuji must have also been responsible for, considering the injuries didn’t match up with anything he knew Satoru could do. The whole display was casually grotesque, especially considering one of these two had opted to save the poor guy only after disfiguring him.

It put into perspective what other people saw when they looked at Suguru and Satoru—the kind of power they held, the kind of abilities they had. Before, the only other person that could have gotten away with that besides Satoru was Suguru himself, and yet Suguru had been left on the sidelines this time. 

Not that he protested it, not really, but the point still stood that he hadn’t been needed. He’d barely even been wanted—this, he was sure, was at least ninety-percent a pity mission for him. 

“He’s a monster, isn’t he,” Riko commented softly, as a sickly looking assistant manager wandered over to look at the curse user and an amused looking Mei Mei took him into custody. 

“Yeah,” Suguru agreed. “He’s a monster.”

Fortunately, he was a monster on their side.

Chapter Text

Satoru was never early to anything, and yet he made an effort to show up to class twenty minutes before it started the day after Riko’s move had been concluded. She didn’t bring a lot of stuff—most of it, she said, she had already gotten rid of in preparation for the merger—so she filled a dorm room pretty quickly, especially with Yuuji helping her move what little she had into her space. Riko seemed different, quieter… not that Satoru really wanted to dwell on it when he had so many other things to worry about.

Maybe all of them had changed in the Tombs of the Star. That was the real consequence of Tengen’s technique—once you stood where she stood, you became less than human yourself.

His earliness paid off anyway. Just like he expected—on some weird, peculiar hunch he had no way of explaining—Yuuji was already in the classroom, leaning against the window with his arms crossed over his chest. 

Someone had finally given him a uniform. It was unexpected, after so long (two days) seeing him in whatever random clothing he had either come with or bought at Satoru’s behest. He seemed almost incorrect—like he shouldn’t be wearing sunglasses, or like the regular collar of the uniform was wrong. Even the crisp white shoes on his feet seemed peculiar after so long seeing the absolutely destroyed red hi-tops. 

“You should add something red to your uniform,” Satoru decided, by way of greeting. “It would suit you.”

“Really?” Yuuji asked, startling slightly. It was hard to tell if it was because Satoru himself surprised him or if it was because what he said did. Satoru couldn’t help but hope for the former. A moment later, the corner of Yuuji’s mouth curled slightly, bordering on mischievous. “Why? Why red?”

“Dunno,” Satoru said, drawing closer to him and leaning his posterior against Suguru’s desk. After a moment of consideration, he folded his arms over his chest. “It would suit your hair, maybe. Plus I think it just reminds me of you after seeing those terrible shoes for so long.”

“What if I let you customize my uniform for me?” Yuuji proposed, still with that peculiar curl of his lips. “Hypothetically. What would you do?”

“I feel like I’m being led into a trap,” Satoru stated, blinking innocently at Yuuji. “You wouldn’t do that to little old me, would you?”

“What? I would never!” Yuuji cried, unexpectedly playful. “I’m very innocent and sweet, I swear.”

“Well, what’s not to trust with a face like that,” Satoru said, deciding he might as well just fall into this trap and see what it was. “Maybe I’d give you a hoodie. Make it red like the blood of your victims and your hideous shoes, and set you loose on the world.”

Yuuji tilted his head to the side, giving Satoru a poignant look over the rim of his glasses. “Maybe some things never change,” he said.

Satoru blinked. “Don’t tell me that your Satoru customized your uniform like that?”

“You did,” Yuuji said. “Exactly like that.”

Satoru huffed, not caring for the idea that he would be so unchangeable even after so much time. “You really aren’t worried about time travel paradoxes, are you? What if you get blipped out of existence one day and I still go on to be a teacher and you still go on to be my student and I decide to stick you in a regular uniform just to spite you? What then?”

“Then I wear a regular uniform,” Yuuji said. “It’s not the end of the world. It’s just a hoodie.”

“You say that like it is the end of the world, though,” Satoru said, then focused back on Yuuji. “Wait—why didn’t you just add your own customizations to get the hoodie look back?”

“It felt wrong,” Yuuji said, after a moment. “Not that this feels right, either, but…”

“Hm,” Satoru said. He took a cautious step forward—invading Suguru’s or Shoko’s personal space was second nature, but Yuuji was different. Newer. Warier. 

Yuuji let him approach with the statuesque posture of an animal trying not to be seen. He even let Satoru seize one of his arms and pull it to him, watching silently as Satoru began rolling up the sleeve. They had been made roomy, but not so much so that they had become traditional. Satoru folded the last bit up just over Yuuji’s elbow, showing off the full length of his scarred forearm. 

Yeah. That was better. 

“What are you doing?” Yuuji asked, though not like he was mad about it. When Satoru grabbed his other arm, he let him work on it too, despite the question.

“I’m customizing it,” Satoru said. “Something new. Special people should look special, after all.”

Yuuji was silent for a long moment, watching Satoru roll up his sleeves. Satoru refused to feel weird about it despite Yuuji’s mood—he had done worse to or for people he knew even less well than Yuuji and he hadn’t been embarrassed then, so it seemed foolish to get shy about it now.

He ignored the part of himself that loudly shouted what he already knew quietly—this was a special privilege being afforded him because of who he was. Anyone else would not have gotten this close to Yuuji in the first place.

“Satoru,” Yuuji said eventually, slowly and then stopped abruptly. “Nevermind.” 

“What?”

“I was just going to ask a question you couldn’t answer,” Yuuji said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Which was as good a way as any to remind Satoru of why he had come here early in the first place.

“I had a question for you, actually,” Satoru said. “Maybe one you could answer, since you aren’t bothered by time travel paradoxes.”

“Oh,” Yuuji said. “Okay. Question though…?”

“Yes?”

“If it's something I don’t want to answer—”

“You don’t gotta,” Satoru said. “Sheesh, I’m not going to demand all your personal information. Just what kind of guy do you think I am?”

Yuuji laughed, pulling his arm out of Satoru’s grasp. Satoru’s fingers twitched, already missing the opportunity to keep his hands busy. “Alright, alright. Ask away, then.”

“Remember the guy we were fighting when you first came here?”

Yuuji huffed in a way that pretty clearly conveyed ‘how could I forget.’ “Sure.”

“He was a Zen’in,” Satoru said. “With no cursed energy. He asked me—well. He said something a little strange as he died.”

“Really?” Yuuji asked, raising his eyebrows. 

“He has a kid,” Satoru said, leaning back against Suguru’s desk now that he had nothing better to do with himself. “He’s selling that kid off to the Zen’ins in a few years. He told me that and then said…do what you want.”

“Ah,” Yuuji said, digging a knuckle into his forehead like this was familiar information to him, but only distantly. “Fushiguro.”

“So you do know something about it,” Satoru said. “I thought you might, since you mentioned the name earlier.”

“Yeah,” Yuuji said. “Alright. Well—why not. Fushiguro conversation it is. What do you want to know?”

“What did I do in your world?” Satoru asked. 

Yuuji leaned back against the window contemplatively, arms crossed over his chest and one cheek puffed out as he mulled it over. “I don’t know exactly,” he said. “Fushiguro wasn’t exactly forthcoming, even before he… And anyway, you and I didn’t ever really talk about stuff like this.” 

“Wasn’t I your beloved sensei?” Satoru asked, unable to help himself. “Didn’t we gather around and talk about our dreams of the future and the past and sing a get along song every Tuesday?”

“Do you do that with Yaga-sensei?” Yuuji asked, though he sounded amused at least. 

“Hitting me with the tough questions, I see.”

“And here I was thinking it was you asking me to recount the detailed history of two people I knew for about six months two years ago,” Yuuji said. A moment later, he seemed to realize precisely how unfunny a thing it was to say. Six months. For some reason, Satoru had been thinking…

“Well,” Yuuji said with a sigh, “You two knew each other before Jujutsu High started for me, and he still went by Fushiguro and not Zen’in. Oh, and they couldn’t hand off the title of head of the family to him until you’d been incapacitated. Not that it mattered, since Maki killed them all a few days later or something.”

…What?

“What are you thinking?” Yuuji asked, tilting his face towards Satoru in a way that meant Satoru had his full attention. “When his dad said that, what was your plan?”

Truth be told, Satoru had kind of forgotten about it. 

What was he supposed to do, anyway, when he was sixteen and stupid and would rather spend his time goofing off with Suguru than being serious? He probably would have put it off for another full year if he had been left to his own devices. Besides, it wasn't like Fushiguro Toji had given him much to go off of with his dying breath. He hadn’t even told Satoru the kid’s name.

But if he had been thinking about it…

“I was going to find him, I think,” Satoru said. “I probably could have. I’ve got the resources. I guess then it would be the kid’s choice, whatever happened. Hopefully he wouldn’t choose the Zen’ins. They’re pretty awful, even by my standards. Does someone really just murder them all?”

“Yeah,” Yuuji said, sounding like it was a fun memory. “Maki does. She’s pretty great like that.”

“And the consequences for killing all the Zen’ins?” Satoru asked, feeling dazed. “What were those?”

“Well, some of them she had to kill more than once, because not all of them were killed with cursed energy,” Yuuji said, all too casually. “She and Noritoshi said cursed Naoya was a pain, but they did exorcise him, so it couldn’t have been too bad.”

Satoru stared at Yuuji until Yuuji’s cheeks started going a little pink.

“Sorry,” he said at last. “It’s a big deal, don’t get me wrong. I just had other things to worry about. I wasn’t even there for most of that—I was—” He stopped abruptly. “Fushiguro,” he said instead. “What are your options? For getting him away from the Zen’ins?”

Satoru tried very hard to reorganize his brain and wrangle it back into submission. “Well, I would have to start with the Zen’in clan, not the kid. I don’t know if you know, but I’m the head of the Gojo clan, so if I ask for an audience with Naobito he would have to give it to me.” Satoru scratched the top of his head. “The little brat would probably have to agree to become a sorcerer no matter what, and I can see there being other conditions I might have to concede to. They’d probably want to send him on supervised missions to start out with, and he’d probably still have to do some training with the clan or me.”

“What about his living situation?” Yuuji asked. “Where would he have to go?”

“Nowhere, probably,” Satoru said. “Throwing money at the kid isn’t the problem.” 

“What is the problem?”

“What I do, exactly,” Satoru said, surprised at the uncharacteristic honesty. “I was told specifically to do what I want. I want to just pretend I never heard him say something about some brat kid of his. Why should I care about someone else’s snot-nosed son?”

Yuuji turned his head, staring Satoru dead in the eye if it wasn’t for the sunglasses between them, and said, “I’m really not a good person to ask, Satoru. I never knew why you cared either.”

“About,” Satoru started, stammering uncharacteristically. “Cared about Fushiguro, or about you?”

“Oh,” Yuuji said, soft as a whisper. “Either of us, really. Neither of us exactly did it alone, did we?”

The last part wasn’t for Satoru, or at least not the Satoru Yuuji was talking to. Maybe that one would understand this vague reference to damnation, maybe he would know what to do with it, what to say to the man claiming it. 

Satoru was left in the dark. 

“Maybe I ought to ask anyway,” Yuuji said, with a strange huff. “Even if you don’t know the answer.”

“...What?”

“Why did you customize my uniform for me?” Yuuji asked. “Not rolling up my sleeves—the real customization. To everyone else in the jujutsu world back then, I wasn’t even human. And then there you were—my secondhand savior and my appointed executioner all rolled into one—making an effort to make me into a teenager instead of a monster. You weren’t the only person in my corner, granted, but you were probably the only one there that shouldn’t have been.”

“What the hell are you—”

To Satoru’s eternal frustration and all-encompassing gratitude, the door opened. He and Yuuji stared at each other for a second, two, maybe two-thousand, the air between them thick and swampy with an infinity’s worth of unspoken conversations—things that would occur, that were occurring, that were always occurring. 

“Doth my eyes deceive me,” Shoko said, and the moment tore like tissue paper being removed from the gift bag of an eager toddler, “or is that Gojo Satoru in class on time? Nay, early even?”

“I know, I know,” Satoru said, falling back into old patterns easily now that the moment had passed. “I graced you with my presence, and now your poorly mortal eyes are overwhelmed with my beauty and grace—feel free to hold the applause—no really—”

Yuuji punched him in the arm hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to bruise, and Satoru let out a soft oomph . 

“I was surprised too,” Yuuji said to Shoko. “For a moment I thought his timekeeping must have worsened as he got old and senile, but I should have known better.”

Satoru made an offended noise at the word ‘old,’ and then an even more offended noise at the word ‘senile.’ He went ignored on both counts.

“He’s probably just here to interrogate the new guy,” Shoko proposed, giving Satoru a stink eye like this concept personally offended her.

“Yuuji-kun and I are the best of friends, I’ll have you know,” Satoru said, feeling the strangest urge to defend himself from her scrutiny.

“Push him if he gets too weird with you,” Shoko advised Yuuji, completely ignoring Satoru. “He doesn’t know what personal space is. He’s a somewhat okay person, despite all the bad jokes and horribleness, so give him an appropriate amount of a chance. And if Suguru comes off as standoffish—he will. That never really changes. Try not to fight with either of them—they’re stupid enough as is even without getting other people involved in it.”

“Thanks,” Yuuji said, sounding a strange mix between amused and sad. “I’ve never really minded Gojo-sensei, though, you know?”

“Gojo-sensei,” Shoko repeated disdainfully, at the same time Satoru encouraged, “Oh?”

“You were difficult, don’t get me wrong,” Yuuji said hurriedly, like speed might actually do something to deflate Satoru’s ego. “But you were fun too. I’m grateful to you for that, you know. I never really got a chance to say it.”

The air got a little awkward, as the air did when one was reminded they were going to die tragically twelve years from now. 

Yuuji grimaced. “Sorry. I swear I’m going to stop doing that eventually.”

“It’s cool,” Satoru said, raising one shoulder nonchalantly. He wondered if it really was cool, though—for all that he knew that jujutsu sorcerers tended to die gruesome deaths at young ages, he had never really afforded much thinking power to how he would eventually go. It didn’t really help that up until recently, he hadn’t even fully registered that it was even possible for someone as gifted as him to be killed. “We all die eventually, right?”

Shoko cleared her throat strangely before turning back to Yuuji. “Right, well, this is a good opportunity anyway. I was hoping to get a chance to actually introduce myself to you before class. I mean—I assume you know who I am since you mentioned something about me being the only one of us left alive when we first met—” Even Shoko, as unaffected by the gorier parts of jujutsu as she normally was, seemed vaguely uncomfortable at the prospect of saying this out loud. “Anyway. I’m Ieiri Shoko, reverse cursed technique user and non-combatant support sorcerer.”

Yuuji stared at her for a moment in a way that made Satoru think he was blinking at her in bewilderment, and then said, “Right, yeah. Um. I’m Yuuji.”

“Just Yuuji?” Shoko asked, voice light. “I don’t want you to feel like we’re pushing to be your friends all at once just because you’re here instead of where you belong.”

“That’s a nice bedside manner, Doc,” Yuuji said with a half smile. Shoko raised one eyebrow, but didn’t ask. “And it’s fine. Feels kind of weird anyway, knowing there’s another three-year-old Yuuji running around with the same name.” He stilled, then said, “Sorry. I probably shouldn’t call you that. Um…Ieiri…? Shoko? Oh, that’s admittedly kind of weird.”

“You weren’t weirded out calling me Satoru,” Satoru reminded him.

“You act like a child no matter your age,” Yuuji said, in that hurtfully frank and yet somehow endearing way of his. “And I definitely was weirded out calling you that—give me some credit here, dude. I just don’t have the time or the energy to keep feeling weird about it.”

Satoru frowned. He frowned even more when Shoko burst out in unprompted, entirely too girlish giggles. Even Yuuji seemed a little startled by them, staring at her with his lips slightly parted.

“Come on,” Satoru said, folding his arms across his chest. He felt like a petulant child, and yet also didn’t stop himself. “That seems unwarranted.”

“Sorry, god, this is all so weird,” Shoko said, wiping a tear out of the corner of her eye. “I’m just laughing because I feel completely off-kilter, you know? I still can’t imagine anyone letting Satoru explain jujutsu to a bunch of teenagers. I can’t imagine anyone letting me explain jujutsu to a bunch of teenagers, either.”

“You didn’t teach,” Yuuji said a little quickly. “You were a doctor.”

“Oh, good,” Satoru said, and then turned to Yuuji. “Making me a teacher is one thing. Letting Shoko do it… You know how she explained reverse cursed techniques to me?”

“It’s a perfectly valid explanation, I think,” Shoko said, absently twirling a strand of her hair around her finger.

“Fwoosh,” Satoru said, flapping his hand. “Then fwish. And there you go! You’re healed.”

“She’s right,” Yuuji said. “A very valid explanation.”

And it was all fun and games, really…

…But it had also almost cost Satoru his life not understanding it. And it had cost thousands of sorcerers their lives before him, probably. And asking Shoko to learn how to teach it to someone was a ridiculous idea to start with. But if someone could, anyone, then maybe—

“And just Shoko is fine, too,” Shoko added, almost as an afterthought. “What is it we said our first year, Satoru?”

“We didn’t say anything,” Satoru said. “Suguru said something wise and morally sound, and we went along with it.”

“Yeah, but you know what it was, don’t you?”

“Why would I know what it is?” Satoru defended, a little too quickly. 

Shoko raised her eyebrows, and said with her eyes, Do you really want me to expose your giant crush on Suguru to the attractive time traveler on day three of knowing him because I will if you aren’t careful. 

“We’re asking each other to die for us every time we go out in the field together,” Satoru quoted sullenly. “So we might as well be on a first name basis with each other.”

“Sorcerers have a tendency to keep each other at arm’s length,” Shoko said, leaning towards Yuuji conspiratorially. “It seemed like a good way to keep us from falling into that same trap.”

Yuuji adjusted his sunglasses, pressing them back tighter against his face. 

My eyes give me away, he had said to Satoru. 

Satoru wondered what he was trying to hide in them now.

“I don’t know,” Yuuji said eventually. “Maybe it’s easier to keep that distance there. Then it hurts less when…”

“When…?” Shoko prompted. 

“Megumi,” Yuuji said, like it was a foreign word on his tongue. 

Satoru glanced at Shoko, who looked just as confused as he felt. 

“I just realized,” Yuuji said, turning to look at Satoru. “I was saying Fushiguro this whole time, but that’s his name. Fushiguro Megumi.”

Oh, the kid. 

“What?” Shoko asked, though she directed the question at Satoru, not Yuuji. 

“It’s nothing,” Satoru said. 

Maybe it’s easier to keep that distance there, Yuuji said, voice soft and echoing in his mind.

Yuuji had already implied that Satoru saved the kid, in one way or another. He hadn’t explicitly said it, either, but Satoru still got the impression that maybe Fushiguro Toji’s kid was in his class in school too, that maybe they were even friends. 

Which meant—

He dies, somewhere between now and the future Yuuji came from fourteen years from now. He dies, and Satoru couldn’t or doesn’t save him then. For some reason, the thought of this child he didn’t even know dying to a cause that hadn’t even been listed hurt Satoru more than any of the other information Yuuji had accidentally let slip about his past. The future, whatever. 

The door to the classroom slid open again. Suguru stood there, panting and a little flushed like he’d run to class even though he still had five minutes before he would technically be considered late. He took one look at them huddled in the corner by his desk and sharply assessed the situation, eyes keen as he gazed at them.

“Satoru,” he said, “if you’re over there because you were sticking gum under my desk again so I would bump it with my knees, I will kill you.”

…And completely missed every single context clue in the room, as he always did.

It was part of his charm, and all that.

“Wait,” Suguru said, finally noticing everyone’s expressions. “What did I miss?”

Yaga took them to train as soon as they got back from their lunch in the afternoon. 

And by training, Suguru really just meant he threw Satoru and Yuuji at each other to see what happened. 

Well, that wasn’t necessarily true. He had thrown Suguru at Yuuji first, and now Suguru was sitting on the sidelines with Shoko while she verified that Suguru wasn’t actually going to die. A very embarrassed Yuuji—who had put Suguru flat on his ass in about thirteen seconds using an unholy combination of martial arts, raw cursed energy, and his dashed line technique from earlier—had spent the first half of training apologizing profusely for very nearly turning Suguru into mincemeat while Satoru laughed until he cried in the background.

Shoko was silent as she patched up the last cut on Suguru’s arms where he guarded against the attack. He didn’t need all of them healed—especially considering that some were incredibly small—but Shoko had insisted anyway, on the grounds that she had to train too and it was as good an opportunity as any. 

The line of her mouth as she frowned intently at Suguru’s skin told a slightly different story. 

“Are you thinking about it a lot?” Suguru asked her. 

“What?”

“What Yuuji said,” Suguru said, before remembering that Yuuji had said a great many things that warranted extensive thought since coming to the past, and clarified. “When he said that everyone in that room died except for you.”

Shoko let out a shaky, shuddering breath before she turned to look at Satoru and Yuuji. Suguru wasn’t sure what exactly Yaga was trying to accomplish—or why exactly Yaga hadn’t stopped them yet, since they both looked more than a little like they were getting into it more than they should, and Yuuji had already very nearly maimed another classmate once today. 

Yaga seemed content to stand there with his arms crossed while he continued watching, though. 

“Suguru,” Shoko said, in that same shaky way she had exhaled, “I feel so out of my fucking depth and I’ve got no idea what to do about it.”

And then she fished a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket, took one out, and lit it right there in the middle of the training yard. She took a long drag, eyes closed, nostrils flaring, and then sighed out the smoke before she offered it to Suguru. 

What the hell. It wasn’t like Yaga was paying them any mind right now.

“Honestly, I feel the same way,” Suguru said, before he took his own drag. Having his throat heavy with smoke cleared his head in a sharp, particular way. He stared at the grass underneath him, not really seeing it, and then passed the cigarette back to Shoko. 

“It’s hard to describe how it feels,” Shoko said. She knocked off some of the ashes, but didn’t take a new drag. “To hear that fourteen years into the future or whatever it is all your friends are dead. And maybe it’s not our future anymore, but…”

“You still can’t convince yourself to stop thinking about how in at least one world, it is,” Suguru finished. He rubbed a thumb against his palm, picking at a bit of dry skin absently with his nail. It had been sitting in his chest and rattling his ribcage in a bid for freedom—this theory he had. It ate him alive at nights and when he was alone, nibbling at his sides and curling his toes in his bedsheets. 

“What would be worse, do you think?” he asked Shoko eventually. “Being dead or being…bad?” She breathed in sharply, and he glanced over at her. “You see it too, right? The way he looks at me sometimes is so…”

Shoko finally took another drag. “You wouldn’t ever become a curse user, Suguru,” she said. “Get that out of your head now.”

“Shoko—”

“You wouldn’t,” Shoko insisted, a little too forcefully. “You’re too good for that, okay? You’ve got it straight. Help people because you ought to help them, and that’s that. There are a thousand reasons Yuuji could be weird around you. Make it ten thousand, even, considering the only person he genuinely seems to like in any capacity is Satoru, not that it makes any fucking sense at all.”

That was peculiar too. Though that, at least, wasn’t peculiar in a bad way. 

Besides, it seemed infinitely easier to talk about that instead of the darkness that Suguru sometimes felt swimming in his gut every time he swallowed a particularly unpleasant curse, so talk about that he did. 

“Isn’t it so weird?” Suguru asked Shoko, allowing himself to be distracted. Unhealthily so, probably—they had to talk about Yuuji and the concerning things he said eventually or they were all going to combust from emotional constipation of the worst kind—but Satoru’s relationship with Yuuji was strangely captivating to see unfolding. 

“Honestly, it makes me feel like shit,” Shoko said, and took a long draw on her cigarette before holding it out for Suguru. 

Suguru held up his hand to decline, a little shocked. “Shit? Why?”

“Don’t know really,” Shoko said, staring fixedly at them as Satoru and Yuuji fought. Satoru was laughing, despite being in the middle of what looked a little like a battle for his life. “Guess I’ve just never seen…”

“Enough, you two,” Yaga finally said, and Yuuji and Satoru dropped their fighting stances. They almost immediately gravitated towards each other, Yuuji clapping Satoru on the back in the same way one would a good bro, if one was a star player on a sports team. Satoru didn’t even pause before he hooked an elbow around Yuuji’s neck, dragging him closer, closer, closer. Yuuji didn’t seem to mind, either, smiling widely.

Earlier that day Suguru tapped Yuuji on the shoulder to ask if he had a pencil and very nearly got punched in the throat for his troubles. 

Actually…

“I know what you mean,” Suguru told Shoko. “I’ve never seen Satoru so present for so long.”

And it was true, strangely. Suguru had known Satoru for a year now. He had been through thick and thin with him, considering he rarely had missions without him when they were both first years, and even special grades were prone to making mistakes when they were also fifteen-year-olds.

And yet, Suguru had never seen Satoru without some kind of distance between himself and everyone else in the room, Suguru included. It was rarely physical distance, since Satoru had no sense of personal space, but…something else. Suguru hadn’t been aware of it before, and now that he was…he couldn’t place its origin. Was it in how other people treated Satoru, or how Satoru treated them? Both? Neither?

And how did Yuuji slice through it so cleanly?

“You’re crazy,” Satoru said, as he actually wheezed, flushed with happiness and hanging off of Yuuji. “You’re so fucking crazy.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Yuuji said, surprisingly good-natured about the whole thing. 

“Satoru, you did well,” Yaga said. “You’ve unlocked something within yourself, haven’t you?”

“Yeah,” Satoru said, tone light, eyes icy. He unhooked his elbow from around Yuuji’s neck, releasing him. “It feels different now. Natural.”

“You’ll only grow from here,” Yaga said, in one of those moments where he was strangely encouraging. “Keep up the good work.”

“Aw, Sensei, you’ll make me blush~”

Yaga looked like he barely restrained himself from hitting Satoru on the head, only managing it because he apparently had something he wanted to say to Yuuji too. Yuuji, Suguru realized, who had an almost fond curve to his lips the moment before he turned to look back at Yaga. 

Fond, when everyone else was irritated. 

“As for you,” Yaga said, before sighing heftily. 

“It’s cool, Sensei,” Yuuji said, saluting him. “You won’t hurt my feelings.”

“You’re a very reckless young man,” Yaga said. “From what I understand of your past, I know why the habit developed. I would like to train you out of it all the same. There’s some damage even the best reverse cursed technique can’t heal. I’m sure you know that.”

“Oh, I’m well aware,” Yuuji said, a little darkly. 

Suguru saw the way he turned his face slightly towards Satoru to glimpse him with his good eye. 

“Don’t stare so much,” Shoko muttered beside him. “Keep it up and even Satoru will get shy about it.”

Suguru glanced over at her, only to find her staring at Satoru and Yuuji almost as intently as Suguru himself was. 

“Pot, kettle,” he quipped. 

“Do as I say, not as I do,” Shoko replied. 

“Suguru!” someone shouted in the distance. 

They both turned to look in the direction of the shout. Suguru, because it was his name being called. Shoko, because she was inherently nosy. It turned out to be Riko, who was moving with two assistant managers flanking her. She waved exuberantly, almost childishly. It was a far cry from how she looked last, vacant and lost in her thoughts as they led her back to Jujutsu High.

Suguru smiled back as he raised his hand in greeting. This was apparently all the encouragement she needed to break away from the two assistant managers following her and run across the grass towards where Suguru and Shoko sat. 

“Oh, boy,” Shoko said under her breath. “Young women shouting your name and running up to you can not be a good thing for my blood pressure.”

“Shut up, Shoko,” Suguru said, with a sugary smile.

At that point, Riko came to a stop in front of Suguru, cheeks a little red from running. The two assistant managers she had come with were awkwardly hovering back on the trail.

“What are you doing out here?” Riko asked, slightly out of breath. 

“Presently? Watching Satoru get his ass kicked by Yuuji. I could ask you the same question.”

Riko made a face. “I’m being shown around campus. Apparently, I’m going to be here for a while.”

“If that’s the case, then I would like to introduce you to Ieiri Shoko—she’s another second year here at Jujutsu High with us. She’s one of the best healers there is.”

“Oh,” Riko said, turning to look at Shoko a little guardedly. Shoko gave Suguru a strange but brief look, then turned to wiggle her fingers at Riko. 

“Hi, hi. Shoko is fine. What reason are you living on campus? Something to do with your case, or are you joining one of the classes and becoming a sorcerer?”

“Ah—”

“Shoko,” Suguru said, resting his chin on his fist. “This is about Yuuji’s living arrangements.”

“...Ah,” Shoko said. “It’s that thing where Yaga-sensei stormed into the dorms and demanded to see his aborted fetuses.”

“What?” Riko asked.

“Don’t ask,” Suguru advised her. “You don’t want to know.” To Shoko, he added, “Probably. It would be easier for him to defend her from the dorms, considering he lives there as well.”

“In any case,” Shoko said, turning her attention back to Riko. “It would be very nice to have you around. We’re a little short on girls around here. I think I’m the only one presently enrolled.”

“Wait…really?” Riko asked. “Just one girl?”

“There was one other,” Suguru said. “She was a fourth year last year when we were starting out—special grade, like Satoru and I. She was hardly around then—she’s around even less now.”

“I never even met her,” Shoko said. “Impressive, really, considering there are so few of us in general.”

“There aren’t any third years right now,” Suguru said. “Just one fourth year, but he’s gone pretty much all the time as well.”

“Fourth years get more missions than classwork,” Shoko added. “And a lot of them are working hard to promote themselves before they get into the actual workforce anyway, so they don’t have a lot of spare time to hang around and chat. So it’s really just us—the four of us, and then Haibara Yu and Nanami Kento are the two first years below us.”

Suguru glanced back at Satoru and Yuuji—they had gone back to sparring, though this version of it was much more mediated. Yaga was a great teacher but he tended to hyperfocus on one student at a time a little bit—one week he would spend primarily training Satoru, then the next Suguru. He’d put them together the week after that, and then Suguru and Satoru both would be more or less left to their own devices while he worked on whatever it was he and Shoko worked on. It wasn’t a bad way to do things, especially not for a career like theirs, but it was also evident that right now, he was prioritizing Yuuji’s unknown depths and Satoru’s new developments with his cursed technique over either of them. 

Which meant, if there ever was a time to be a slacker, it was now. 

“How about Shoko and I give you the grand tour?” Suguru asked, standing and brushing strands of grass off his pants. “We can explain things to you a little more in depth if you’d like. Couldn’t hurt, since you’ll be living with us.” He leaned a little closer to her, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “And just between you and me, the assistant managers hardly know anything worthwhile.”

Riko glanced up at him, eyes horribly wide and innocent-looking, contrasting with the edge to her grin. “Really? You aren’t in class?”

“Oh, not really,” Suguru said. “Satoru and Yuuji are in class. I could sneak away for a moment. I think I’ve earned that, don’t you?”

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “You seemed to have plenty of downtime when we were on the beach.”

“Your wish was our command, Riko,” Suguru said. “You wanted more time on the beach, you got it. It hardly seems fair to accuse me of undue relaxation while I was fulfilling my duty as one of your guards.”

She didn’t seem to have anything smart to say to that, her cheeks going a little pink as she flustered herself trying to come up with a comeback, and Suguru smiled. 

“Anyway,” he said, taking his victory graciously and leaning away from Riko. “Shoko, what do you say? Let’s ditch class for a bit in favor of introducing Riko to Jujutsu High?”

Shoko blinked at him for a moment, coffee-brown eyes heavy, and then cleared her throat. “You know what? I’ve got some, uh, stuff to do. Very important. I’m afraid you’ll have to do it yourself.”

“What stuff?” Suguru asked, narrowing his eyes.

“Oh, you know, the usual.” She pinched a strand of hair between her fingers and gave him an entirely false look of innocence. “Anatomy, physiology, superior autopsy techniques…”

“Come now, Shoko,” Suguru said. “You could afford to be a little more social than that.”

“Oh no!” Shoko cried, dry and dramatic. “It looks like Satoru’s been injured. I must rush to his side at once, my dear friend whom I would miss more than anyone else should he go, oh no…”

And with that, she stood quickly and practically rushed down the hill. To her credit, Satoru was actually injured. Not to her credit, he was healing it just fine by himself. 

But if she wanted to be antisocial, that wasn’t really Suguru’s problem. 

“Weird,” he said, dismissing it, before turning back to Riko. “Well. Shall we?”

“You’re sure it’s fine?” Riko asked, eying him out of the corner of her eye. 

“Of course,” Suguru said. “It’s still my prerogative to make sure you’re happy, you know. That was in the mission file—I’ve read it now, so I know.”

“So this is about work for you, then?” Riko asked a little hotly, but she didn’t actually contest it when he led her away. He threw a wave over his shoulder at the assistant managers—they seemed very lost and confused. 

They would figure it out, he was sure.

For now, the memory of her near-death was too close, the bad taste of his almost-failure still sitting on his tongue. For now, her presence brought a sense of comfort to him, a feeling that not everything had gone as bad as it could have.

And it wasn’t really so bad to indulge in that, was it?

“I think that’s enough for now,” Yaga said, three hours after he first set Satoru and Yuuji loose on each other.

Satoru felt unrestrained, wild, like the very earth was trembling at his fingertips. Or maybe it was just his fingertips trembling, as he struggled to hold onto himself. He had never felt so challenged before, not even by Suguru. Not even really by Toji, who nearly killed him—that was less of a test of strength and more of a test of tactical skill. Satoru had been outsmarted, not outpowered.

He was fairly sure Yuuji could overpower him. Especially since Yuuji seemed largely unaffected, even as Satoru sprawled tiredly on the grass, arms and legs splayed, hair sticking to his forehead with sweat.

“What the hell are you made of?” Satoru asked, strangely delighted to be put flat on his ass as Yuuji crouched over him.

“If only I got ten yen everytime someone asked me that question,” Yuuji said, offering him a hand and a cheeky grin. “I’m just built a little differently.”

“I’ll say.” Satoru accepted his hand up. It was a little frightening how quickly Satoru had gotten used to skin contact with Yuuji. A little scary in how little it scared him. “You’re some kind of demon. Or some kind of god.”

“Hey,” Yuuji said, his lips curving. “Don’t get your god complex on me, man. I’ve got enough problems.”

“God complex,” Satoru repeated, incredulous. 

“It only gets worse when you get older,” Yuuji said, though his smile hadn’t dimmed even a little bit. He let go of Satoru’s hand just as casually as he had grabbed it now that Satoru was back on his feet, stepping politely out of Satoru’s space. 

“Final notes,” Yaga said, cutting off any response Satoru might have made. “Assuming neither of you receives a mission tomorrow, you will meet back here at seven. We will pick up where we left off here. Yuuji—I want you to think about ways to improve your ranged attacks. You rely too much on your close quarters combat. Satoru—it’s time to start seriously working on domain expansion. You’re ready.”

Satoru turned to Yuuji near immediately, feeling a zing of anticipation up his spine. “You’ve seen it, right?” he asked. “You’ll tell me what it’s like?”

“Sure,” Yuuji acquiesced, untroubled. 

Satoru blinked at him before turning back to Yaga. “There you have it, Sensei,” he purred. “I’m already working on it. Am I a top student or what?”

Yaga merely stared at him for a long moment, the curve of his mouth disapproving. “Be in class in the afternoon, then,” he said, mercilessly. “Enjoy your lunch.”

He left them without so much as a wave of his hand, and Yuuji laughed softly.

“Something funny?” Satoru asked, shooting for haughty superiority with his tone. 

Yuuji’s nose crinkled like Satoru smelled bad—and maybe he did, really—and smiled a little softer. 

“Something tells me you aren’t a very good student,” he said.

“If I’m too good at everything then there would be nothing left for Suguru to excel at,” Satoru said, sticking his tongue out a bit. “He needs something to his name, and if it has to be schoolwork, then it has to be schoolwork.”

“You’re a shithead,” Yuuji told him with very little fanfare, and nudged him playfully in the ribs. 

Satoru was distracted though, because he had just realized—

“Where’s Suguru?”

There was a strange pause, where Satoru felt Yuuji’s gaze heavy on the side of his face and Satoru tried to feel Suguru out with his Six Eyes.

“He left a while ago,” Yuuji said instead. “I don’t know when exactly, but it’s definitely been at least thirty minutes.”

Suguru never left.

Even when Yaga started focusing on just one of them, Suguru stayed. Diligently observing, hovering by Satoru’s side. He said it was so Satoru didn’t surpass him while he was looking away—privately, Satoru liked to think it might have been because maybe…

“He’s with Riko,” Satoru said as he finally spotted Suguru. “In the dorms.”

“Is he?” Yuuji asked, looking towards the dorm building with a hand held over his eyes to block out the sun like he might suddenly develop the ability to see through walls. “Well, damn.”

Riko, who Suguru hugged. Riko, who Suguru had touched, fingers feather light as he brushed her hair out of her face. Riko, who Suguru had managed passion for when he insisted on going back to her mission.

“What the hell are you saying ‘damn’ for?” Satoru asked.

Yuuji laughed. “I was just thinking he stole my babysitting gig right out from under me, didn’t he?”

I don’t think it’s babysitting Suguru has on his mind, Satoru thought. It made him feel better to think it was, though, so he laughed.

“And to think—you’re the one that dies if she’s unhappy.”

“I know, right?” Yuuji didn't sound particularly concerned about it. “Bad look for me. Good thing Getou Suguru of all people is there to pick up my slack.”

There was something in there,  something that maybe warranted a little prompting, but at the same time… Satoru found he didn't really want to talk to Yuuji about Suguru, not in any capacity. 

“It doesn't matter,” Satoru said, turning to grin at Yuuji. “You owe me an explanation of my domain, yeah?”

“Yeah, alright,” Yuuji said, returning his smile easily. “Lunch?”

“Lunch,” Satoru agreed.

Chapter Text

“Thoughts?” Suguru asked.

They had ended their tour of Jujutsu High at the place Riko knew best—the dorms. Though Suguru had shown her the tiny kitchen and the tinier dining room this time in the name of making her feel more comfortable there—she wasn’t a student, but she was a resident, and hiding out in her dorm room all day wasn’t going to be good for her. 

As it was, she sat with her feet pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped around her knees. Suguru was working on tea—it had been at least a week since the last time Suguru had eaten a curse, and yet he could still feel the aftertaste of the last one on his tongue in the afternoons. It made stomaching lunch hard—he was fortunate that neither of his friends were particularly attentive, and he could only hope that Riko wouldn’t think anything strange of it if she noticed. Not that she seemed in the sort of mood where she would be noticing much presently.

“It’s quiet here,” she said. 

Quietude was something that Riko was and wasn’t used to. She had been granted a large home as a courtesy from Tengen, but Kuroi and Riko had been the only people that occupied it. Kuroi was a sorcerer, Suguru had learned when he read Riko’s case file. Grade three, which wasn’t spectacular, but she had been specifically chosen to be a minder for Riko. That indicated some modicum of talent—and also explained something about her frustration in being bested by curse users from Q. 

But Riko had also been a popular girl at a small but tight-knit school. She had been a member of her school’s student council, Suguru read, as the treasurer, as well as a member of the school’s volleyball club. Meaning she had spent most of her time up to that point surrounded by people—probably by her choice.

“Is that a good thing?” Suguru asked anyway, careful to keep his voice pleasantly neutral. 

“It’s…” Riko trailed off, and when Suguru snuck a peek at her over his shoulder, she was making a face. “It’s different. I never really realized how few sorcerers there were.”

“Really?” Suguru said, thinking that realizing how few sorcerers there were was one of the first things that became so apparent to him when he entered this world. He had been headhunted very young, after all—it wasn’t exactly like being offered a job at seven made for promising prospects in hindsight. 

“Well, I wasn’t very attached to this world,” Riko said, her tone a little dark. “I knew about Tengen, of course. And Kuroi told me a few other things, but it always sounded like…I don’t know. It was some distant thing, you know? Far enough away from me that it wasn’t my problem, which made it seem like…I don’t know.”

“There were plenty of people to deal with it?” Suguru supplied. 

Riko scowled. “It sounds dumb and cruel when you put it like that, but yeah.”

Suguru finished pouring the water for the tea and turned around, two cups in his hand. He sat one down in front of Riko—she stopped picking at the fraying hem of her jeans for a moment to play delicately with the handle of her teacup instead. Suguru sat back in the chair to the left of hers, nursing his cup and mulling it over. 

“We’re chronically understaffed,” he said. “Frankly, it’s a miracle that neither Satoru nor I have had a mission since we went to pick you up a few days ago.”

“Don’t you think it’s strange that students are sent on these missions?” Riko asked. “I mean—you and Satoru are only sixteen, and you both had to fight a whole…flurry of assassins just to move me anywhere.”

Her expression was dark as she stared at her teacup—Suguru couldn’t help but think she was remembering one assassin in particular. 

Suguru knew he was unlikely to forget Fushiguro Toji’s face anytime soon, at least. He wondered if it was the same for Satoru—who had nearly died by Toji’s hand, who had ultimately killed him. For that matter, he wondered if it was the same for Yuuji, too. Yuuji had been the one to fight Toji while Suguru carried Riko out of the Tombs of the Star, after all. 

Except Riko had been the one that was very nearly shot by him. 

“Well, we’re strong,” Suguru said, before taking a sip of his tea. “And capable. Neither of us has ever been seriously injured on a mission up until yours came along. There isn’t a reason not to send us, and besides…we would never learn if we didn’t gain actual work experience.”

“Isn’t it terrifying, though?” Riko asked. “I just…I don’t understand why you would do it.”

“Because…” Suguru said, before trailing off.

It was so simple, really. Suguru knew this answer—he had defended it over and over again, even, one day after the next. To Satoru, to Shoko, to Yaga. He’d brought it up to starry eyed first years to assert his impressiveness (and to diminish Satoru’s). 

Except it wasn’t simple, because for some reason, Suguru found himself incapable of saying it. 

“Uh, Suguru?” Riko prompted.

Suguru swallowed. It tasted like the aftertaste of the worst curse he’d ever eaten. 

“Because the strong have a duty to protect the weak,” Suguru said. “That’s why.”

Riko looked at him, her eyebrow climbing higher and higher the longer she stared. 

“What?” Suguru asked eventually.

Riko puffed out her cheeks. “Ugh,” she said, looking suddenly very irate. “You’re such a jerk. I don’t know why I keep forgetting that.”

“Me? A jerk?” Suguru asked, raising his own eyebrow in return. “And here I am, sacrificing my time and my safety, just to help people that will never even know to thank me—”

“I’m amazed your head hasn’t fallen off of its shoulders with how big it is,” Riko cut in, her lips curling in something like disdain. “Or do you just grow your ego out into your hair?”

Suguru choked on a sip of his tea, and then thumped himself in the chest. “What?”

“Whatever,” Riko said, suddenly sour. “I needed to go anyway.”

It was only after she stood, tea completely undrunk and discarded on the table, that Suguru realized what the cause of her sudden change in attitude was. Protect the weak. A number that included her. 

“Wait,” Suguru called out, standing too. But once he stood he found he actually had no idea what to say. An apology was warranted, perhaps, but at the same time it felt wrong to apologize. That would be akin to saying he didn’t mean what he said, and he had been saying this for several years now.

But Riko paused anyway, giving him a chance to apologize anyway. 

“I said we would go home together,” Suguru said. Softer, he added, “You aren’t weak, Riko.”

She stayed silent and still for a moment, head hung but face still turned away from him, before she broke her silence with a loud, frustrated sound. “That’s easy for you to say,” she muttered.

“Why is it—”

“Because you’re so strong and great and everything else that people should be getting on your knees and thanking you, or something,” she said darkly, and then flicked her braid over her shoulder. “Don’t follow me, weirdo,” she added in a tone more like her own, before marching off in the direction of her room. 

Satoru had argued with Suguru about his ideals since their very first meeting. He had probably called Suguru every word Riko had just launched at him several times a piece, and yet…

“I probably fucked that up,” Suguru observed.

Not that anyone was there to hear it other than Suguru himself.

“You can use your own domain, can’t you?” Satoru asked, as they sat down at one of the tables in the cafeteria. 

It was a little heartening to see that the cafeteria wasn’t all that different in 2006. It was still a little small, still a little dark, still a little gloomy. It served mediocre meals to students and sorcerers on campus at any time of the day to accommodate the fluctuating schedules of the average jujutsu sorcerer, but the operative word in there was definitely ‘mediocre.’ There was only one sorcerer in there with them now—some forty something guy Yuuji didn’t recognize that looked like he was in desperate need of a nap. 

Yuuji kicked his chair back, chewing on the inside of his cheek. “Well, in a way,” he told Satoru. “That domain wasn’t really mine. I just prefer it in certain situations because the guaranteed hit is so brutal.”

“Hm,” Satoru said, tapping one finger against the table. His lunch tray was one sandwich and ten different sweet snacks, some of them purchased from vending machines and brought here afterwards. Some things, like the state of this cafeteria, never changed. “Whose was it if it wasn’t yours?”

“Decline to answer,” Yuuji said, smiling coyly. “I’m still allowed to do that, right?” 

“Cheeky,” Satoru told him, but he didn’t seem all too bothered. “That’s fine, anyway. I would rather talk about me.”

“Classic Gojo Satoru,” Yuuji agreed, not unkindly, and Satoru did that thing he often did where he glanced at Yuuji with genuine surprise when Yuuji didn’t seem all that annoyed with him.

This was something unique to this Satoru. It puzzled Yuuji, challenged him—Satoru wasn’t someone that should have insecurities. Yuuji wondered when they went away. If they went away, or if Satoru had just gotten better at hiding them by the time he turned twenty-eight.

“So,” Satoru said, sitting back in his seat. “You know anything about sorcerer clans and how they train their prize show ponies?”

Yuuji blinked. “Actually, no. Not really. I guess I probably should have known more, considering I knew you and Fushiguro and Noritoshi.”

“Noritoshi?”

“Kamo,” Yuuji said. “I know—the name was intentional. He’s probably five or six right now. If he hasn’t developed Blood Manipulation yet he will soon—he’s the illegitimate son of the current head.” 

“Saucy,” Satoru declared. He paused for a moment, then said, “You know…that’s usually how it goes. One of us kicks it off and then the other two follow soon after. It’s widely acknowledged that the only techniques that can kill us are the other two.”

“I think,” Yuuji said, “that depends on the sorcerer, and the way they use that technique. Besides…I think it's an outdated judgment anyway. I had a classmate that could attack a person’s soul from a long distance using a part of their physical body, a hammer, and a nail. One of my senpais could copy any technique, so long as he or his bound curse consumed part of that person's body. There are plenty of other techniques too—things that were lost over hundreds of years, where they only ever belonged to one person and that person died. There is always someone that will have enough cursed energy to be a challenge, even to you.”

“Or to you?” Satoru asked.

Yuuji wasn’t sure what compelled him to say it, but he said, “You can kill me if you decide you want to, Satoru. You don't need to worry about that.” 

“I wasn’t—” Satoru started to say. “You—”

“Sorry,” Yuuji said, laughing. The sound came out bitter and cruel. It shouldn’t have been a sound he could make, and yet there it was. “Oh, man. I need to stop saying such fucked up shit.”

Satoru was eerily silent for a moment, and then Yuuji felt the cool press of fingers against his forehead, and then the sharp bite of a fingernail afterwards when Satoru flicked him there.

“I was asking what you knew about it for a reason,” Satoru said, carefully unbothered. It reminded Yuuji of the basement suddenly and viscerally, right after Junpei had died. He had dreaded returning to Gojo then because it meant rehashing everything that had happened. He should have known better—Gojo didn’t do feelings, other than his particular brand of gleeful sadism.

“Sorry,” Yuuji said, fighting the corners of his mouth out of the smile they wanted to lift into. “I sidetracked us.” 

“You sure did,” Satoru said, sniffing haughtily. “I had nothing to do with it at all.”

“That sounds right,” Yuuji said, unable to fight the smile off this time. “You can do no wrong, after all.”

“None at all,” Satoru agreed, before leaning back in his seat. “We have records of our techniques. Handling guides, how tos, dos and don’ts. Even when there isn’t anyone else with the technique to teach it, there’s always someone that knows, that studied the records, that relays it to us in excruciating detail. Look familiar?”

He held up his hand, middle finger curled behind the forefinger, and Yuuji nodded. 

“That’s your seal, yeah?”

“Yep,” Satoru confirmed. His grin sharpened and he tilted his chin down, the blue glint of his eyes just visible over his sunglasses. He cocked one eyebrow suggestively and added, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

Yuuji raised his eyebrows. Just when he thought he was finally adjusted to young, disturbingly flirtatious Gojo Satoru, too. “Maybe later.”

“Buzzkill,” Satoru protested, but his smile didn’t drop. “The ancient texts describe it as an expanse of blackness, oppressive and empty—”

Yuuji interrupted him, shaking his head and sitting up. “Nah. It’s everything, Satoru. Not nothing. Think of it as space, right? A void—it shows everything. Everything you were, everything you are, everything you could have been, all of that transmitted directly into your brain.”

“Like… a wormhole,” Satoru said. 

“Yes,” Yuuji said, snapping his fingers at him. “Your whole cosmic science thing. Wait—young you is still into that stuff, right?” 

“Don’t know if I would say I’m into it,” Satoru said, “but I sure do know a lot about it.”

“I guess I’m using the concepts interchangeably,” Yuuji said, after a moment of thought. Knowing something and enjoying it were different things, after all. He leaned back in his seat, kicking the front legs off of the ground, and stared up at the ceiling, hands clasped behind his head. “All that science stuff goes over my head a bit.”

“Struggle with school, do you?”

“Actually, not really,” Yuuji said. “It’s easy enough. School kind of tests your surface level understanding of something, doesn’t it? If you can memorize the time periods and the equations and the rules, you can get by just fine without really understanding it.” He smiled a little, dropping his chair before quickly pushing it back on the back legs again. “You still had to give me the theory bits in dumb person speak though. Examples helped. Ah, well. Kugisaki was even dumber than I am, so at least I wasn’t lonely at the bottom. I wasn’t even at the bottom, actually. That was a bad metaphor.”

“So this Kugisaki,” Satoru started. 

“My other classmate,” Yuuji explained, dropping his chair onto the floor so he could look at Satoru again. “There were three of us. Fushiguro, obviously, who started first by courtesy of kind of already being a sorcerer. Kugisaki was taught the tricks of the trade by her grandmother, though she ran into some complications last minute with her parents not wanting her to come. Non-sorcerers, you know? I was last. Fushiguro found me in early June of 2018, and then you added me to the class too.”

“And Maki who murdered the Zen’ins,” Satoru said, looking particularly intrigued. 

“Second year,” Yuuji said. “There were four of them when I started out. There was Zen’in Maki, who I’ve mentioned. She had a Heavenly Restriction like Toji’s. Panda-senpai—I don’t actually know if Yaga-sensei has made him yet, but he’s a cursed corpse—”

“A cursed corpse attending classes?” Satoru asked, tilting his head. “Now, that’s intriguing.”

“Sentient cursed corpse,” Yuuji said. “Panda had his own will. His own soul too, believe it or not.”

Satoru ran a thumb along his bottom lip, thinking. It was a gesture Yuuji had seen his older counterpart perform a thousand times over. “Impressive. I didn’t know the old man had it in him.”

He dies for it, eventually, Yuuji barely managed to stop himself from saying. 

Yaga hadn’t died for his skill, anyway. He had died because he had dared to protect Yuuji once, and that was worse. 

“Inumaki Toge was another second year,” Yuuji said instead. 

“Cursed speech user?”

“Yeah. That’s a clan thing, too, isn’t it?”

“You do learn fast,” Satoru said, all cheek, and Yuuji rolled his eyes. 

“Okkotsu Yuuta was the fourth second year,” Yuuji said. “His technique was—is—Mimicry. He’s related to you, actually.”

“Really?”

“Distantly,” Yuuji said. Contemplating Yuuta and Satoru and how they were related, however distantly, was starting to make him the tiniest bit depressed, though, so he moved on quickly. “Anyway. There were two third years too—Hakari Kinji and Hoshi Kirara. And of course the Kyoto students, like Noritoshi, Todo Aoi—though you’d probably know him best as Tsukumo’s personal student, if anything—Zen’in Mai, who was Maki’s twin sister…”

“What’s with all these Zen’ins everywhere, anyway?” Satoru asked, unwrapping some prepackaged mochi and spearing one with a toothpick. “Are they just breeding like rabbits over there trying to give birth to some unlucky sod with the Ten Shadows?”

Yuuji paused for a moment. 

He’d never really thought about it before, but…dear lord, they probably were. 

“...You’re the worst,” Yuuji said, after taking a minute to really let that sink in. “Like, actually the worst. I could have kept on living my life in blissful ignorance, but no. You had to go and say that.” 

Satoru’s lips parted, teeth bared, a bit of that sadistic glee of his rearing its head. Before he could say anything that was going to scar Yuuji any further, though, he was interrupted by a cheerful voice. 

“Senpai!”

Yuuji looked towards the voice, just the same as Satoru did. It proved to be a young man, fifteen or sixteen by Yuuji’s estimation. He had dark hair and wide eyes and the swirled button of a jujutsu sorcerer on his jacket. 

Yuuji had no idea who he was. Not even a vague recollection of an old story, and that could only really mean…

“Haibara!” Satoru greeted enthusiastically, flapping his hand at the kid. Haibara responded with equal enthusiasm, trotting over. 

Oh my god, Yuuji realized, because he was older and crazier now, and even if he could see it then Satoru must have been able to back when Yuuji was his student in his first year class. And Satoru must have been sitting there for a reason— he had more important things to do than sit in a morgue with his dead student—

“—just got back from a mission,” Haibara was saying to Satoru, while casting furtive looks over at Yuuji. “Nanami will be over soon.”

“Will he? That’s good.”

Yuuji pressed his hands flat together, then pressed them against his lips. He counted backwards from ten. 

It didn’t matter.

Nine.

Yuuji was not the only student to have ever died tragically while still in school. 

Eight. 

Who said Haibara died in school anyway?

Seven.

It could have been after. 

Six. 

There were twelve years between Yuuji’s first year and now, after all.

Five.

Death wasn’t the only option, anyway.

Four.

There was also defection.

Three. 

He could have left to start a happy life—Nanami had, even if Nanami also came back.

Two.

There was one other possibility too, though, wasn’t there?

One.

Some other reason he could have left, some other person he could have left for. 

Getou had been dead by the time Yuuji arrived in the jujutsu world, but Yuuji knew enough to know Getou hadn’t operated alone.

“Who’s this with you, Senpai?” Haibara asked. “Oh—sorry for being rude!”

“This,” Satoru said, voice grand,  “is Ita—”

“Yuuji,” Yuuji interrupted quickly. “Just Yuuji.”

“He’s your new senpai from the future!” Satoru continued, unbothered.

“My…what?”

“It’s a long story,” Yuuji said, pulling his mind out of the shadows and smiling at him. “But it’s nice to meet you, Haibara.”

Haibara stared at him, blinking and wide eyed. “From the future, though?” he repeated. 

Which was a very fair thing to be stuck on, actually. 

“Jujutsu, am I right?” Yuuji proposed, very awkwardly.

Haibara paused for a moment, expression contemplative, before evidently deciding that ‘Jujutsu, am I right?’ was an acceptable explanation of events.

“Is that your technique, then, Yuuji-senpai? Time travel?”

Yuuji felt a strange little jolt down his spine.

Senpai. 

It was surprising. He had been a senpai before back in middle school, technically. And he had known he would be one again one day when he started high school, but then… 

Then a year and a half passed where he just wandered around fighting things instead of attending classes, and he sort of forgot it was a thing people did. He’d accidentally stuck himself in the mindset of a first year high school student for the rest of forever.

How depressing.

“Uh… no,” Yuuji said, on a delay. “Not me. Someone else has the time travel technique.”

“Ah, okay,” Haibara said, natural and easygoing. Surprisingly, he didn’t follow up by asking Yuuji what his technique was. “Well, that’s pretty cool, actually. Could I ask you what the future was like? Does that break time travel paradoxes and ruin the world or something? Oh, do you know me? Am I cool in the future?”

And there wasn’t a good way to say it, there just wasn’t—the best he could do was just say things as they were and hope it didn’t crush him, this kid that was barely a sorcerer, this kid that was most likely going to be dead before he turned twenty-seven.

“I never met you,” Yuuji said.

“Ah, well.” Haibara blinked, taking the news fairly well. A moment later, it was clear why he did, because with a blinding sort of innocence, he added, “I guess we must not have worked together.”

Yuuji pressed his lips together and closed his eye, grateful for the fact that he was still wearing the aviators. He’d gotten better at controlling what his mouth did over the years, but trying to tame the emotions that lived in his eyes—eye—was a lost cause. 

“Guess not,” Yuuji said, priding himself on how normal it sounded, and left it at that.

He felt Satoru’s gaze on him, sharp and hard. He knew that Satoru hadn’t missed it—that he remembered Yuuji saying there was a grand total of ten jujutsu sorcerers left when all the dust settled, and therefore also knew that Yuuji must have known them all, in one way or another. 

“Wait,” Haibara said, eyes sparkling, entirely unbothered. “How old are you, actually? Like when are you from? When were you born?”

“I’m seventeen,” Yuuji said. “I’m from 2020. I was born in 2003.”

“That’s, what? Sixteen years from now?”

“Fourteen,” Yuuji corrected.

“Wow—I’ll be so old by then,” Haibara mused. “Maybe I settled down and had kids or something—you never really know, do you?”

To think there were sorcerers out there that actually wanted to have children... 

“I hope so,” Yuuji said, genuinely meaning it despite the foreign feeling of the concept. “I really do.”

He was saved from continuing to try and find things to say to Haibara that weren’t depressing by Satoru vigorously and repeatedly slapping the back of Yuuji’s hand, where it rested on the table. 

“Nanami, Nanami, Nanami—” Satoru hissed excitedly, like it was a chant. 

Yuuji looked—making a note to thank Satoru in some way later—and found Nanami Kento as Yuuji had never known him. He had hair like Junpei, swept to the side and covering half of his face. It was a far-cry from the strict salaryman look of his hair before, a far cry made worse by the fact that he wasn’t wearing his customary bottle green sunglasses or his colorful three-piece suit, either. 

And to make matters worse, he was, in fact, wearing a spiked wristband. 

“No,” he said, caught between horror and delight. “You weren’t lying.”

“Like I would ever lie to you,” Satoru said, fluttering his eyelashes at Yuuji over the rims of his glasses.

“Nanamin had an emo phase,” Yuuji repeated, dumbfounded and weirdly struck by how cute and squishable Nanami looked. “I can’t believe it. Sensei, why didn’t you tell me before? I mean, like, before before. We could have been making fun of him for this that whole time I was living in your basement and you let me down.”

“Sensei?” Haibara repeated, bewildered. “Basement?”

Satoru barked out a wild, startled laugh, and belatedly Yuuji realized he had slipped again when the sound came out a little too high and youthful.

“That’s surprisingly mean-spirited of you, Yuuji,” Satoru practically purred, and Yuuji swatted at his hand, still resting on the table. “And I already said—”

“Satoru, sorry,” Yuuji corrected quickly, waving off the complaint. “I’ll have you know I can be very mean-spirited sometimes, for the record.”

Which reminded him—

“Nana min!” Yuuji shouted, just because he could, half rising out of his chair to flag Nanami down. “Nanamiiiiiin! Hello! You’re emo! I’m Yuuji! It’s nice to meet you!”

Nanami paused, still several paces away from where they were sitting, expression going sour in a thousand Nanami specific ways. Yuuji grinned as he watched the irritation unfolding there—he had missed Nanami so much too. He’d nearly forgotten, in the face of all the other people Yuuji had lost, but…

Satoru laughed, wicked and sharp and lively, and Nanami’s face twisted even further.

“Whatever this is,” he said, “I am not going to like it, am I?”

Satoru made it all the way through their afternoon classes before he asked. He even pulled Yuuji aside to do it—and Suguru and Shoko accused him of not being subtle. 

Or, well. He didn’t so much pull Yuuji aside as follow him upstairs while Suguru and Shoko sank into their customary spots on the couch without him, but the sentiment was the same.

“You need something?” Yuuji asked, sounding vaguely amused as Satoru doggedly followed him up the stairs.

“Your love and affection,” Satoru said, because he wasn’t actually sure that Haibara wasn’t loitering around here somewhere. “Hold me, Yuuji! Kiss me, Yuuji! Give me—”

“You’re so embarrassing,” Yuuji said, though he didn’t look embarrassed so much as he looked gravely fond. Not even irritated, like any normal person would be.

“Alright, you caught me,” Satoru said. “Really I just want to see your room so we can braid our hair and giggle over the posters you undoubtedly have hanging on your walls of—of—”

“Well, there’s not much to see,” Yuuji said, saving him from actually coming up with a celebrity poster Yuuji would know people hung in their rooms in 2006, being from 2020 as he was. “But you’re still welcome any time.”

“Oh, Yuuji,” Satoru said, lips curling. “You should know better by now than to offer me something like that.”

Yuuji buckled down, strangely, one of his cheeks puffing like when he was thinking too hard about something. It had the unintentionally adorable effect of making it look like he was pouting. “Any time,” he insisted. “So long as you knock first and wait for me to open the door.”

“What a valiant attempt at establishing boundaries,” Satoru said. “That’s very cute of you. But yes, yes, I’ll knock first. There are things you could be doing in a room with a closed door that I don’t want to see. Expect to get so tired of hearing knocking that you regret establishing your little boundaries, though~”

“Wouldn’t be you if I didn’t,” Yuuji said, lips curved into a smile, like that was that. 

Satoru once again found himself thrown for a loop. Seriously, just—what in the world had his older, future self done to warrant such blind devotion? It hadn’t been anything inappropriate, considering Yuuji generally couldn’t seem to care less if Satoru flirted with him or not. And if it wasn’t Satoru’s god-like good looks, then that must mean this had something to do with his personality, and that…

Well, that was just impossible to comprehend. Everyone objected to Satoru’s personality. Even Suguru objected to Satoru’s personality. Sometimes, even Satoru objected to Satoru’s personality. 

“Satoru,” Yuuji said, and Satoru realized they had arrived at the door to his dorm room, and that Yuuji had cracked it open for him. “You coming or not?”

“So gentlemanly,” Satoru teased Yuuji—who once again didn’t really seem to care one way or the other—and Satoru pushed inside Yuuji’s room. Yuuji followed him, flicking on the light and letting the door fall softly shut behind him.

Yuuji was right to say his room wasn’t particularly personalized. It actually wasn’t personalized at all, if one didn’t count the jars of fetuses sitting on the dresser…which Satoru wasn’t inclined to do. His bed was a little rumpled, but made, like Yuuji had sat back down on it after going through all the effort of putting it together. There was a hamper of dirty clothes in the corner, except the only dirty clothing inside it was the black hoodie Yuuji had arrived in, with holes torn in it and blood turning it stiff and a little splotchy. 

“Why the hell do you still have this?” Satoru said. “It has holes. Put it out with the rest of the trash.”

“You can mend holes, Satoru,” Yuuji said, with a little huff. “And clothes have more value than we give them credit for. It’s best to save them as long as you can.”

“This isn’t your post-apocalyptic nightmare world,” Satoru said. “This is 2006. Throw out the black hoodie and get a new one.”

“But Satoru,” Yuuji said, turning an impossibly wide eye on him, unfiltered by the sunglasses he ordinarily wore. “I met you in that hoodie.”

It took Satoru an embarrassingly long time to realize what was really happening here. 

This wasn’t sincerity—or at least if it was, it wasn’t an entirely wholesome expression of it. Instead, this was playfulness, teasing, the exact same thing that Satoru had been doing this entire time but turned back on him. 

He felt strangely off-balance about it. 

Maybe I should stop if this is how other people feel around me all the time…? he wondered. 

Then, immediately afterwards, Nah. 

“More reason to burn it, if you ask me,” Satoru said. “Pretend like you met me in Italian silk, like I deserve.”

Yuuji laughed, casting his glasses aside on his dresser. Evidently, he didn’t feel the need to hide his eyes from the world when it was just Satoru with him. This, too, was an uncomfortable revelation…though Satoru did have to wonder if it was more because of the full visibility of Yuuji’s scars and the sad way his right eye stayed permanently closed, or because of the way his remaining eye looked, honey brown and haunted, gazing at Satoru with an unwavering, unnerving sort of kindness.

“I’m keeping the hoodie,” Yuuji told him in certain terms, and then spun his desk chair around so he could sit on it backwards, arms hanging over the back of the seat, legs splayed around the middle. It tugged his uniform closer to his body in different ways—his cuffed pants riding up his calves and showing off the solid muscle there as he rested the heels of his white kicks against the ground, the jacket tightening similarly around his shoulders and highlighting their breadth and musculature. 

Satoru looked away, mouth feeling a little dry, and searched around for something else to occupy his attention. The bookshelf was empty of books, the desk empty of homework, the floor empty of dirty clothes and other debris. He wasn’t desperate enough to bring up the Death Paintings again, so instead he turned towards the bed, where he spotted a single journal sitting on the nightstand. 

A diary? No way. 

Satoru made a grab for it—going quickly in case Yuuji decided to stop him—and thumbed it open. “What’s this?” Satoru asked, trilling his voice dramatically. “Your most private thoughts and feelings? What if I just…read them?”

Yuuji rested his cheek on the back of the chair nonchalantly, spine bent at a weird angle, and looked up at Satoru through his lashes. “Nothing to read, really,” he said. “I haven’t exactly started yet.”

Well, something had been started. It was the impression of a face—wide eyes, a cold smile, stitches slapped across a forehead. A long, graceful neck, sharp collarbones, silky dark hair. Satoru turned the page and saw her again, from a different angle, with different hair. He flipped the page and there she was again, staring at him with pinpoint pupils, though this time Yuuji had only done the eyes and the stitches on the forehead. 

Satoru regretted picking up the book. Something in him felt cold and hollow looking at this beautiful woman—someone he was sure meant something to Yuuji, maybe in another time. Maybe Mei Mei had been wrong—Satoru knew now that Yuuji didn’t really engage in anything, and most of the time, his silence couldn’t be taken as either an acquiescence or a denial. 

He felt the warm press of calloused fingertips at the back of his hands, Infinity struggling briefly and reflexively against Yuuji’s touch, and then Yuuji pressed on through, folding his hands over Satoru’s and then using them to press the journal closed. When had he gotten close enough to be able to touch him, anyway? He was still sitting in his desk chair, so he must have rolled it over—

“That’s my mom,” Yuuji said, like he anticipated Satoru’s next question. Assuming Satoru would have ever found his voice to ask it, that was. “I don’t really remember what she looks like. I keep getting her confused with…”

His mom, Satoru thought, with a lot of misplaced relief he was sure he was going to have to cross examine later. Then, the rest of that statement caught up to him, too. Satoru turned his head, meeting Yuuji’s gaze over the rims of his glasses. “With whom?”

“Suguru,” Yuuji said, like the answer was being dragged out of him against his will. Then he clarified, “My version of Suguru. Not yours.”

And now that he said it, Satoru could see it too—the reasons those sketches made him so uncomfortable. The eyes were shaped like Suguru’s in one sketch, the hair draped beside her face like his in the next, the curve of her smile suspiciously close to that blank one he liked to give so often in the sketch after that. All still clearly the same person that was not Suguru, but also, all clearly variations on a theme where Suguru was the anchor.

Satoru swallowed. This wasn’t really the conversation he was planning on having when he came up here, but…it was still a conversation he knew he had to have eventually, whether he wanted it or not. 

“And you…didn’t get along with your Suguru?”

Yuuji grunted in a way that could have meant any number of things, gently tugging the book out of Satoru’s hands. Satoru let the book go but watched Yuuji closely, even as he wheeled himself back slightly to put the journal back on his nightstand. 

“You didn’t answer me,” Satoru pointed out, suddenly wanting to press, suddenly needing to know what happened to Suguru—because something clearly happened—despite all the cowardly feelings that kept him from asking before this point.

“I don’t think we should have that conversation,” Yuuji said, not meeting Satoru’s gaze. 

“I thought you said you didn’t care about time travel paradoxes.”

“I don’t. But I care about you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Satoru asked, bristling.

“Look, Satoru, I know you loved him. Love him, I mean, since we’re in the past.” Satoru froze, going stock still like lead had been injected into his veins and now was doing its best to drag him to the floor. “You only actually told me about Getou once, but I’m not stupid and I’m definitely not straight—I know that best friend is a term people like us use to describe the severely mentally ill but very pretty guy we want to date but can’t. So let’s not talk about it, because I don’t want to hurt you, man.”

“I—” Satoru said, not sure where exactly he wanted to start addressing all these things that had just been said to him. “I don’t—I don’t love Suguru.”

“If you say so,” Yuuji said, sounding miserable and disbelieving and everything else all at once too. 

“I don’t,” Satoru insisted. “I’m not—I’m not—”

I’m definitely not straight, Yuuji had said. 

“I—are people different about it in the future?” Satoru asked, sitting down heavily on Yuuji’s bed. “You just…you seem so fine with it.”

Yuuji sat up a little straighter, frowning with the corners of his mouth. “Different about what?”

“The…” Satoru gestured nonsensically but didn’t finish. He felt nervous. 

Some god he was. 

Yuuji watched him, still and focused, his single eye peering into Satoru’s soul. “Oh,” he said, after a moment of this careful study. “You mean sexuality stuff.”

“I guess I do,” Satoru said, feeling more awkward in his own skin than he’d felt since he was fourteen and had just hit his first growth spurt. 

“Well,” Yuuji said, rolling himself back and forth—a nervous tick. “I can’t say I really know what people are like about it in 2006, considering I was three the first time I was in this year and didn’t particularly care about romancing anyone. I can’t really say everyone’s accepting of it either, but maybe…I don’t know. Maybe they’re more accustomed to it? I think I saw it more often in 2018 than I do now. You know, like…movies, and stuff, where gay people are characters with fellow gay love interests.”

Satoru didn’t say anything, not sure why he brought it up in the first place, and Yuuji watched him. The nervous energy that had caused him to start fidgeting with his chair when he was talking had dissipated again, leaving him still and focused once more.

“You know,” Yuuji said, after a long moment, “I used to introduce myself to other guys by saying, ‘I’m Itadori Yuuji and I like tall women with big butts, like Jennifer Lawrence.’”

“Who’s Jennifer Lawrence?”

“You don’t know who—” Yuuji stopped abruptly, his offended gasp trailing off into contemplation, and said, “Right. 2006. She’s an actress. She probably hasn’t been in anything yet. She’s probably like…wait. Wait. She would be sixteen too. I can’t believe I never realized Gojo-sensei and Jennifer Lawrence were the same age…”

“Um, hello?” Satoru said. “I’m a little insulted by how excited you just got realizing you’re the same age as your celebrity crush when you barely even—”

“She’s not my celebrity crush,” Yuuji said. “Not really. She’s cool—she’s definitely my favorite celebrity—but she’s not really my crush . That’s the point of the story, yeah? I introduced myself to other guys like that because I played sports, so I didn’t want anyone to think I was being a pervert in the changing rooms and stuff.”

“... Were you being a pervert in the changing rooms?” Satoru asked, unable to help himself.

Yuuji laughed, a surprised sound, wide and open. “I mean—yeah, a little bit,” he said. “Kind of hard not to be, you know?”

“True enough,” Satoru agreed, because he had never had the privilege of being surrounded by a bunch of sweaty naked men taking showers, being rich and a sorcerer and everything else, but he could imagine it would be a little hard to not be easily distracted by some of that. 

Especially if someone in there had a physique like Yuuji’s. Or Suguru’s.

In an attempt to forcefully beat the thought of imagining either of them naked out of his head, Satoru fumbled his phone out of his pocket, flicked it open, and showed Yuuji his screen saver.

Yuuji leaned forward, eye flicking over the image before he gave Satoru a knowing smile. “She’s pretty,” he said. “Very big boobs.”

“Long eyelashes, too,” Satoru said. 

“Very sleek hair,” Yuuji agreed. “She’d probably leave behind the smell of her strawberry scented shampoo every time she flipped her hair over her shoulder.”

“She probably would,” Satoru said, before snapping his phone shut. “I was mostly focused on the size of her boobs when I was looking for it, though. Which was a good call—Suguru called her hot, too.”

Yuuji made a hissing sound that was almost a laugh but also wasn’t, laying his cheek back against the back of the chair. “It’s always the boobs for straight guys, isn’t it?”

“Or the butts,” Satoru agreed. “You had it right there.”

“It’s a little ridiculous,” Yuuji said, rolling his chair back and forth and looking amused. “Could you imagine if I said I only used the size of a guy’s dick to determine if he was hot or not?” Satoru snorted, startled. “Do you know how many guys would be terrified to hear that’s the only standard their attractiveness is being measured with? Do you?” 

“Most guys, probably,” Satoru admitted. “Not me, though,” he felt compelled to add. “I’m good on size. Great even. Don’t you dare think otherwise.”

Now Yuuji finally got embarrassed, letting out an awkward giggle that was horribly endearing and burying his whole face in the back of his desk chair. “Oh my god,” he whispered. 

“It’s very big,” Satoru said, because he was enjoying the way Yuuji’s ears were going red. He’d been trying to get a reaction like this out of him this whole time—if this was what he had to resort to in order to do it, then so be it. “My dick. You know what they say about men with big hands? It’s true. You could just—”

Yuuji tilted his head back, neck flushed dark with embarrassment too, and fixed his gaze pointedly on the ceiling. “I wanna be the very best—” he began to half sing, half shout. At the ceiling. 

“You could just get a ruler out,” Satoru insisted, but louder. “And you could—”

“Like no one ever was—”

“And you could hold it up, right here, like this.” He demonstrated badly. “And—”

“To catch them is my real test—”

“And need a bigger ruler!” Satoru said, shouting now. 

“To train them is my cause!” Yuuji also shouted. 

“Because it’s big!” Satoru said. “I’m not lying!”

“I will travel across the land—”

“Stop singing the Pokemon song!” Satoru whined. “It’s making me think that you think that I’m in denial, and I don’t like it—”

Yuuji looked down from the ceiling. He made direct, very pointed eye contact with Satoru. 

“Searching far and wide,” he sang. “Teach Pokemon to understand—”

“I’m not in denial!”

“The power that’s inside—”

Satoru launched himself off the bed, colliding with Yuuji on the rolling chair. Yuuji cut off his (cute, but) terrible singing with a strangled yelp as Satoru overbalanced him, sending both of them to the floor. Satoru got a hand around Yuuji’s mouth, permanently ceasing any continuation of that infernal song. Yuuji got a knee in Satoru’s stomach, but it was worth it. 

“I am not in denial,” Satoru insisted. 

Yuuji licked his palm. 

Unfortunately for them, this was the exact moment that Yuuji’s door was thrown open. Surprisingly, it was Shoko on the other end, glancing around the room quickly before her gaze landed on them. More specifically, on Satoru straddling Yuuji, who had put both of his hands on Satoru’s waist at some point between when they landed on the floor and when he licked him in an attempt to throw Satoru off. 

“I,” Shoko said, blinking at them. “I.”

“No one’s injured!” Yuuji said, after grabbing Satoru’s forearm with his other hand and forcibly removing his hand from his mouth, once Satoru failed to move it himself after the licking. “Well, Satoru’s pride might be a little injured, but nothing important is injured!”

“Excuse you?” Satoru said, looking incredulously down at Yuuji. “The whole point is that—”

Yuuji slapped one hand over Satoru’s mouth. 

“We’re good in here,” Yuuji said, shooting Shoko a thumbs up with his other hand. 

Shoko just continued to stare at them, eyes narrowed a little, expression inscrutable. “Wasn’t Satoru shouting something about dicks earlier, come to think of it?”

“No,” Yuuji said, a little too quickly. 

Satoru licked him, and Yuuji jerked his hand away with a disgruntled, “Dude—”

“No,” Satoru said. “We were arguing over the validity of using the Pokemon theme song to win an argument.”

Shoko continued to squint at them for a moment longer. 

“Please just go,” Yuuji said, with a defeated sigh. 

“I can give you both a sex talk if you need one,” Shoko said. “I think you might need one, considering one of you is so rich he had servants to wipe his own ass for him and the other is some homeless vagabond from the future.”

“My servants never wiped my ass for me,” Satoru said, offended. 

“I’ve had sex talks,” Yuuji said. “I’ve had a lot of sex talks. I especially don’t need one from you again—that was traumatizing enough once. And that is definitely not what this is, I promise you, I swear to you on my grandfather’s grave—”

Satoru, who was suddenly a little intrigued about exactly how traumatizing Shoko’s sex talk might be, asked, “Can I hear it?”

“You know what,” Shoko said. “Offer retracted. I’m closing the door. If either of you starts dying in here, understand that you’ll be doing it alone because I will not come here to investigate a suspicious noise ever again.”

She left, closing the door quickly behind her just like she said.

For a moment, Satoru and Yuuji just stared at each other. 

And then Yuuji laughed, pushing Satoru off of him and wiping his saliva off on his jacket all in one go. Satoru landed on his butt, already laughing, and reached out to give Yuuji’s jacket the same treatment. 

“You’re going to get me into so much fucking trouble,” Yuuji said, though not like he was disappointed by this prospect. 

“Well,” Satoru said, sitting back against Yuuji’s bed and leaning his head against the mattress. “I doubt that much has changed about me on that front since 2018.”

“Not really,” Yuuji said, pulling his legs up and crossing his ankles, wrapping his arms around each of his knees and clasping his hands between them. The mood shifted with the motion, dragging them both off their high and back to where they started. Or, well…where they were supposed to start, if Satoru hadn’t gotten so distracted. 

“I wanted to ask you about Haibara,” Satoru said, with all the gravity a statement like that deserved. 

“Yeah, I figured,” Yuuji said. He didn’t immediately follow it up with a statement, though, turning to gaze at the Death Paintings sitting on his dresser instead, left cheek puffed out like he did when he was thinking. “I gotta be honest, though, I don’t really know what happened to him.”

“What’s most likely?” Satoru asked, even though he knew the answer. “That he quit being a sorcerer and got a wife and kids like he talks about every now and then, or that he died?”

“Dying is definitely more likely,” Yuuji said, voice soft. “He seems like a good kid. Even if he got out, he probably would have come back when everything else about the world was going to crap.”

Satoru closed his eyes for a moment, letting that settle. “And for none of us to say anything about it…”

“Must have been a while ago, as far as I can figure,” Yuuji said, scratching at the edge of the scar on his cheek like he did when he thought about sad things. “It might have even happened when he was in school, with the way Nanami looked at me sometimes…”

“Wait,” Satoru said, keying in on that. “Elaborate.”

Yuuji huffed. “You shouldn’t order people around,” he chided. “It’s not very polite.”

Satoru rolled his eyes, but before he could respond, Yuuji had already continued. “For context, I died two weeks after I started at Jujutsu High.”

“...What?”

“There was some blowback for accepting someone like me to the school,” Yuuji explained, gesturing at himself. Satoru considered him. Up till now, he’d gotten the impression that eating the Death Paintings was something he hadn’t done until later in his school year, but he supposed that was probably wrong. Besides, he could see how having a vessel for something as fundamentally wrong as the Death Paintings would get a lot of elderly knickers in a twist. 

“The higher ups went behind your back and sent me, Fushiguro, and Kugisaki on a mission we weren’t remotely qualified for. A special grade cursed womb in a detention center—we were supposed to clear out survivors, but of course the special grade curse would still be there. I held it off while Fushiguro and Kugisaki got out. My heart got ripped out of my chest in the process.”

“Like…actually?”

“Yeah,” Yuuji said. “Actually.”

Sorcerers could survive a lot of dangerous, messed up things. Case in point being Satoru, who survived both a sharp object inserted into his brain and a technique blocking spear slicing him from throat to navel. But having a heart literally ripped out of your chest and still somehow surviving…

“I made a binding vow with a curse to survive,” Yuuji said. “Stupidly, because I didn’t actually want to be alive that bad, but still.”

“That’s…” Satoru started. 

Yuuji huffed. “You don’t actually have to comment. The point is that it happened once… And everyone was clearly a little worried it was going to happen again. You hid me in your basement for two months and trained me until I felt like my arms would fall off. I went on a mission with Nanami and he followed me around and did his best to keep me away from everything dangerous and with hindsight… After meeting Haibara, I mean…”

Satoru contemplated it. He tried to imagine himself as twenty-eight and teaching. He tried to imagine what he would feel like if one of his students—someone he was responsible for as the strongest sorcerer—died on his watch. Was keeping said student hidden away in a basement and training the arms off of him an extreme reaction from Satoru? Probably not.

But imagining twenty-seven-year-old Nanami wearing suits and hovering protectively over a child when Nanami had been very clear now about how much he hated children…

“Maybe,” Satoru said, not sure where the savior complex was coming from even before he said it, “we can prevent it this time. It would be easier if you knew how it happened, granted, but…”

Yuuji lifted his head, his eye gleaming with something…unnameable. Something profound, like a blind man seeing light for the first time.

Maybe it wasn’t so unnameable a thing.

Maybe it was hope, that winged, finnicky thing. Maybe this was what she looked like, returning to perch again on the shoulder of a man that had forgotten her name. 

“Yeah,” Yuuji breathed, after a moment. “We could, couldn’t we? Maybe it's just about training, or preparation, or something…”

Maybe, now Satoru knew what Yuuji looked like with hope, he never wanted to see him without  it again.

Strange, wasn’t it, for someone he just met?

“I'm sure we can,” Satoru said, and knew it in his bones. “We’re stronger with you, after all.”

Chapter Text

The first job assignment came in on the Monday of the second week Yuuji was with them.

It wasn’t like Suguru had never had his own mission in the past. He was a capable sorcerer that had been ranked special grade—he saw plenty of curses and defeated them entirely on his own. It was a different thing entirely, though, to sit in a debriefing and hear—

“Grade threes,” Yaga said, skimming through Suguru’s mission debriefing with him. “A pack of them. Weak, but numerous. You’ll have to subjugate them one by one—it should be challenging for you.”

Immediately followed by:

“And Satoru, for you. There have been students drowning in the third floor girls’ bathroom in a middle school in Shinjuku. We have reason to believe it’s a reappearance of special grade curse Hanako-san of the Toilet—you’ll investigate and exorcise the curse responsible.”

“On his own?” Shoko asked, startled. “I thought anything of special grade or higher—”

“On his own,” Yaga confirmed, looking incredibly unhappy about it. “And, technically, Yuuji will be available to back him up should he find he needs it—”

“I won’t,” Satoru said. “I’ll win.”

From Satoru’s other side, Yuuji turned his head just slightly, eyes hidden behind his darkly tinted aviators, mouth firm. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking other than that it wasn’t good. 

“Isn’t it jujutsu regulation for all students to be accompanied by at least one other sorcerer on missions of semi special grade rank and higher?” Shoko said. 

“Concerned for me?” Satoru asked, and she shot him an askance look. 

“Are you stupid? Of course I’m concerned. You’re—”

“Fine,” Satoru said, folding his hands behind his head and leaning back in his seat. “Just fine.”

“Yuuji,” Shoko said, turning to Yuuji unexpectedly. “Go with him, will you? He’s stupid and cocky and patching him up will take time and effort and I don’t want to do all of that for him—” 

Yuuji grimaced. “I have an outstanding mission,” he said. “I’m not supposed to leave for any non-essential missions.”

“You—oh. Guarding Riko.”

“Right,” Yuuji said. “But, uh, Hanako-san of the Toilet probably can’t seriously injure Satoru, so there’s that… And I’ll be there in an instant if I’m needed…”

Shoko sat back in her seat, still not looking happy about it. Satoru leaned forward in contrast, sliding his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose and fluttering his eyelashes at her. “Why, Shoko, I never knew you cared so deeply for me~”

Yuuji caught Satoru’s shoulder with one big hand—bypassing the very Infinity that Suguru himself had not actually been able to pass since everything with Riko and FushiguroToji and the Tombs of the Star Corridor—and pushed Satoru back into his seat so he was sitting like a normal person. “Satoru will probably call me in as soon as he gets bored anyway,” Yuuji said, the unscarred corner of his mouth pulling up into a half-smile. It still looked a little painful, even for how small and lopsided it was. “Just because he can.”

Satoru barked out a laugh, reaching up to pat the back of Yuuji’s hand. “Maybe I will,” he said, fluttering his eyelashes at Yuuji now instead. “Everyone knows I don’t do well when I’m left alone, after all.”

Satoru would do no such thing—Suguru knew it, Yuuji knew it, and Satoru sure as hell knew it—but Shoko looked marginally more relaxed anyway. Or at least she looked more aggravated than concerned, which was a step in the right direction. 

Suguru marveled at it for a second, staring at Yuuji like he had grown a second head. He’d known Yuuji for so few days that he could still count them on his fingers and toes. And yet in that time, Yuuji had somehow become an expert on all things Satoru. Even beyond that, he was suddenly able to comfort Shoko when Suguru wasn’t even entirely aware of why she was so agitated, not when she neither liked Satoru particularly much nor had to heal him in recent history. 

And yet this guy had waltzed in and done it in less than half a month. 

“That’s settled, then,” Yaga said. “Suguru, Satoru…there are two cars waiting for you outside of the school.”

Suguru pressed a thumb against his forehead, smoothing out the thoughts that resided behind his skin, and steadfastly ignored the unnerving feeling of Yuuji’s hidden eye pointed at the side of his face. 

“Let’s be strong and sure,” he said, “as sorcerers are.”

Yuuji waited until classes were done, Shoko had retreated to wherever it was Shoko went, and Riko had been briefly, awkwardly checked on before he left.

(“...Yuuji-san,” she greeted him, holding the door open, but only a little.

“Yo!” Yuuji said, trying for cheerful and missing. Riko just looked up at him, eyes wide, eyebrows raised. “Need anything?” he finished lamely.

“I’m fine,” she said, still staring at him with wide eyes.

He wasn’t sure if he scared her or if she just didn’t like him or what, but weirdly, he had no idea of how to go about fixing it.

“Okay,” he said, after a too-long pause. “You know where to find me.”

She didn’t. Since he was leaving and all.

…She probably wouldn’t look for him anyway.)

He found his car waiting for him at the end of the school, already arranged for him by the elders, and he found everything he needed to act in the hands of the assistant manager driving the car. Officially, he was Ita Yuuji, volunteer, making the rooms of patients with  no one to visit them feel more lively. 

Unofficially, Choso’s fetus jar form felt heavy in his bag as he climbed up the steps towards the hospital.

He showed his fancy new paperwork to the staff and got guided to the first of five patients he was going to be doing this with. 

“She’ll appreciate the company,” the nurse leading him back to the room said. “Her son used to come pretty frequently, but now…”

“What happened to the son?” Yuuji asked, as casually as possible. 

The nurse sighed. “I have no idea. He just stopped coming one day, and now she’s here all alone.”

Well, that could mean anything, really. The son could have moved, or died, or been incarcerated, or just decided he didn’t want to waste any more time on a mother that was never going to wake up. 

Yuuji was shown into the room. The door had the name Honda printed on it in bold kanji. Honda herself was lying still in the hospital bed, graying hair splayed out around her head. The nurse started checking vitals and doing other things while she was in there, and Yuuji pulled out the first of five bouquets. He set it up in a vase on her windowsill under the approving gaze of the nurse, then dragged the cold, long vacant chair at Honda's bedside closer.

She was thin. She had long black hair shot through with gray and sunken cheeks. Her chest moved rhythmically up and down, the monitor at her bedside beeped. She was probably fifty at the youngest—which was a little old to be either of the things Yuuji was looking for here. That was fine—he had brought the flowers by for a reason. 

He reached forward, pushing her hair off her forehead anyway. 

There was no mark there.

“Hello, Honda-san,” Yuuji said, leaning back in his seat and folding his hands together. “My name is Yuuji. I’m seventeen, I just came here as a volunteer. I’m going to be sitting with people that don’t have anyone else—I hope you don’t mind…”

Nothing said he actually had to talk to anyone. But…

Well. He might as well. 

The second patient on his list was a young man, only twenty. No parents and no siblings. Dark hair, a wide nose, a surname that wasn’t Japanese. His fingers twitched against the sheets when Yuuji recounted the story of the day he beat his track and field coach at all things track and field. His eyes moved under his eyelids when Yuuji told him about the first time he won a MMO cage fight.

Yuuji pushed his hair off of the young man's forehead last, and breathed a sigh of relief when he found it unmarked. 

“You’ll wake up one day,” Yuuji whispered, as he let his hand drop. “Let some people in, okay? You don’t want to be here all alone if this ever happens again.”

He met an eighty year old man that was somewhat capable of holding conversation, even if there were sometimes periods of ten minutes or longer between questions and responses. He thanked Yuuji for the flowers—and did it again when Yuuji was leaving—and called Yuuji Shinsuke the entire time he was there, even though Yuuji introduced himself.

He wasn’t cursed. At least, not in the way that Yuuji was supposed to care about.

“What made you want to do this?” the nurse that popped into his fifth and last room of the day asked him, while he was still setting out the flowers. 

Yuuji only paused for a moment.

“My grandfather died alone,” he said. “Well, I was there, but that was it. Sometimes, I think he might have preferred it if I wasn’t. Not his kid, you know?”

The nurse went silent, her pretty brown eyes blown wide, and Yuuji smiled even though it hurt. 

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to get dark.”

“No,” she said, closing her mouth back. “No, it's fine. It’s…noble. It’s a good cause. You should keep doing it.”

Her gaze lingered on the scars on his face like she wanted to ask about them, but she remained professional.

“Thanks,” Yuuji said, and turned back to the patient lying in the hospital bed.

She was young. Probably in her early twenties somewhere. Her dark brown hair was still down, like someone washed it for her regularly. The cursed energy in the room was minimal, the skin on her forehead bare. There wasn’t a single sign she was ever going to wake up, as far as Yuuji could tell. 

She would have been perfect for Choso, except…

“Who is this from?” Yuuji asked, pointing out a blanket at the foot of her bed. Real, not the thin, scratchy hospital stuff, laying across the foot of her bed like a lipstick mark pressed into a cheek—a mark of love and care, or at the very least, hope.

“Oh,” the nurse said, her eyes gaining a glint of mischief. “Sato from the night shift left that here. I think he might have a little bit of a crush~”

She would be missed. Someone, somewhere, would miss her. Yuuji couldn’t even be sure if the vessel would be compatible for a variety of different reasons. It wasn’t very likely she would be—which meant there was something like a 90% chance he was condemning anyone he tried it on to a gruesome death. 

And there was one person out there that would miss her if she was gone, so Yuuji couldn’t try it. Wouldn’t try it. His morals were as flimsy as a house of cards these days, but taking that hope away from someone was too much for even him.

“Well,” Yuuji said, words coming out slowly as he tried to think of what to say. “I’m no Sato-san, I’m sure, but I hope you don’t mind if I sit with you for a bit anyway…”

Yuuji had left the school for the moment. Riko was next to sure of it—otherwise, he wouldn’t have come to check on her. He was too hardened to do something like that just because, or at least, he was too hardened for it now. He was genuine and kind in an unexpected way—if she had met him two years ago, she was sure he would have taken to his assignment as her guard dog with much more…attention.

And truthfully, him being her guard dog was slightly uncomfortable too. Like—yes, okay, she brought him here. But not to save her, though she supposed he had done that. Maybe her objection wasn’t actually Yuuji—maybe her objection was really Tengen, Tengen’s decision to make him her protector when Tengen had once been interested in erasing her, and Yuuji’s acceptance of the terms, whatever they were. 

She wished she could talk to Kuroi, but Kuroi was…

In the end, she went looking for Suguru. It probably wasn’t healthy—Suguru was older and cooler and very, very attractive. Though he was nice most of the time, she needed to stop nurturing any sort of crush on him, especially since he also had beautiful girls with perfect hair like Ieiri Shoko, his one classmate, to talk to instead. And especially, especially since she was still a little bit mad at him for what he said last time she spoke to him.

She went looking for him anyway, not that she was very successful on that front. He wasn’t in the common room of the dorms or in the meal hall, he wasn’t outside in the courtyard or in the library. It was probably for the best; it was like she said. She needed to stop nurturing any sort of crush on him. 

“Looking for someone?” a voice asked, and Riko nearly died of a heart attack on the spot.

It was her—Ieiri, the girl from earlier. She looked a little different like this, dressed in a purple t-shirt and a pair of shorts that were most likely for sleeping in, considering their shortness and fadedness. She was also sitting on the roof of a nearby temple, brown eyes reflecting the setting sun, cigarette clasped loosely between her fingers and still burning. 

“What are you doing up there?” Riko asked, still blinking away her shock.

Ieiri smiled in a way that mostly used her eyes and took a drag on her cigarette. Afterwards, she said, “Being disrespectful and young.”

And unbelievably cool, Riko’s mind added, entirely against her will. Smoking was not cool. Smoking was a bad habit that would lead to lung cancer and an early grave. In fact, Ieiri’s smoking habit was probably a point against her when it came to dating, no matter how pretty she was. 

“Anyway, you didn’t answer my question,” Ieiri said, flicking off a few ashes. “What’s got you out here looking lost? Need Yuuji for something?”

“Ah, no,” Riko said quickly. Too quickly. Ieiri’s expression had gone distinctly predatory.

“Suguru?” she asked, in that way girls had of making you feel transparent. “Satoru? Better not be Satoru.” 

“Hm? Why not?” Riko asked, latching onto the distraction so she could ignore how hot she felt at how quickly Ieiri had narrowed her interests down.

“Because he’s stupid, and unguarded, and quietly desperate. He’ll be so in love with Yuuji by Christmas he won’t be able to think about anyone else ever again. You seem nice—I wouldn’t want that for you.” She cast Riko a look, almost sly, and added, “Suguru, though.”

She didn’t say anything else, but the implication was definitely there.

Riko felt so warm she was practically glowing, but she refused to admit defeat. “Um. What makes you say that? About Satoru, I mean.”

Ieiri gave her a smile, thin-lipped and tolerant. “I don’t participate,” she said, which didn’t exactly answer the question. “It’s not my thing.”

“Uh…”

“I observe,” Ieiri said, turning towards the sunset instead of Riko. “From up here, from down there, it doesn’t matter. I need to have all the pieces of the puzzle so I can make out what it is when it’s done, I don’t need to be there for the building. I know Satoru. I know Suguru. That was my function in that three-headed beast we used to be.”

It occurred to Riko that her questions about Yuuji—her misgivings about him, whatever—they were in fact things that could be eased by other people. And she shouldn’t be nurturing her itty bitty crush on Suguru, right? Right. 

Riko drew closer to the temple, tilting her head up to look at Ieiri. Ieiri seemed to notice she had moved but didn’t adjust her position—other than to take another drag on her cigarette. 

“What do you know about Yuuji?” she asked. 

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ieiri said. “He’s broken. I think that’s obvious. The better question is probably what you know about him—I hear you’re the one that brought him here.”

“Yeah,” Riko confirmed. She brushed her fingertips against a pillar, briefly considering if she had the skill to climb on top of the temple too. She doubted it. “I did, but…”

Ieiri turned to look at her when she trailed off, expression expectant, eyes and ears open. 

“I never really trained with Dimension, you know?” Riko blurted out, before she really got a chance to think through what it was she wanted to say if she even wanted to say anything at all. “That’s not true…I played with it, I guess. I knew it might theoretically be able to bring people from other dimensions. I wasn’t crazy enough to try it because…”

“Cursed energy doesn’t work like that?” Ieiri guessed, crossing her legs beneath her and sitting forward a bit more. “It’s essentially creating something from nothing.”

“It’s trading something for something,” Riko said, surprised to hear herself saying it to Ieiri. The one person she had known for the least amount of time here in this place, and still… “It’s trading one life for another. There really wouldn’t be a way to pull a soul and a body and everything else through different dimensions without first sacrificing something of similar weight.”

“What was sacrificed, then?” Ieiri asked. In her hand her cigarette burned, nearly down to the butt, completely forgotten. 

“My…my friend,” Riko said. “My best friend. Yuuji couldn’t be brought through dimensions to save any of us until she died. I felt a tugging sort of sensation and I just kind of knew that I should pull on it. And there he was.”

“What was it like?” Ieiri asked, nearly clinical in her curiosity. 

Involuntarily, Riko shuddered a bit. 

It was horrifying. She dreamed about it sometimes still, the red-tinted gleam of Yuuji’s single eye in the darkness, the last thing she saw before she blacked out from cursed energy exhaustion. The realization that someone had been pointing a gun right at her head, that she owed everything except Kuroi to the guy that Kuroi had died to bring her. And yet Yuuji wasn’t Kuroi—he wasn’t some knight in shining armor with a pretty face and a nice attitude. He was surly, and scarred, and a little—and a lot—scary. 

“I don’t know what to make of it,” she said, honestly. “Of him. I know I brought him here, but I don’t know…”

I don’t know who he is, was the rest of that sentence.

Ieiri was silent for a moment after that, studying her with a blank expression and academic eyes. The staring contest went on forever and ever it felt like, long enough that Riko felt she really ought to be uncomfortable but not long enough that she actually was. 

“I think we’re missing the obvious solution here,” Ieiri said. “Just asking him who he is.”

Without further notice, she turned her body slightly towards the west side, arm raised high over her head, and called out, “Yuuji! Hey!”

Riko felt her heart pound loudly in her chest as she realized Yuuji was indeed over there, trudging in, backed by the setting sun. There was a bag slung over his shoulder, and instead of wearing his school uniform he was wearing a…suit. A three piece suit, minus the tie, with the same white hi-top sneakers he had been wearing when he stopped by her dorm room earlier. He had his hands tucked into his pockets, looking strangely unassuming for an attractive but scarred seventeen-year-old wearing a suit. 

“Oh,” he said, as he got closer. Something seemed different about him than when she normally saw him. Something about him was a little less present than normal. “Ieiri-sensei, hi. And Riko.” His gaze sharpened a bit as he looked at her, suddenly ready for something, suddenly alert. 

Because I’m just a mission to him, Riko realized. 

It didn’t exactly help her sort out how she felt about him.

“It’s Shoko to you,” Ieiri said, and flicked her snubbed out cigarette butt at him. He dodged, looking the tiniest bit amused. “Let’s play a game.”

“A game?” he repeated, one eyebrow climbing above the rim of his glasses. 

“Two truths and a lie,” Ieiri clarified. “I’ll go first.”

“What—right now?”

“When else?”

“Okay,” he said. “Uh…right now. Why not?”

“My favorite animal is a bunny,” Ieiri said, not even pausing to think about it. “I secretly enjoy karaoke, and I played volleyball in middle school.”

“Karaoke,” Yuuji said, also without thinking about it first. “It’s a lie in and of itself. You can’t both secretly enjoy something and tell us you enjoy it.”

Ieiri stared at him, expression slack, before she said, “You really do know me, hm?”

Yuuji smiled a sad smile. “Not so much,” he murmured.

“Your turn, then,” Ieiri suggested, evidently determined not to dwell on this subject. “Two truths and a lie for you.”

He thought for a moment, one cheek puffed out. “I was in the occult research club in high school before I transferred into Jujutsu High, my favorite flavor of smoothie is banana, and I once got tried and convicted for entering a pachinko under the age of eighteen.”

What.

What were these options? 

“You’re hardly playing fair,” Ieiri commented. “Riko, give it a shot.”

“What? Me? Can’t you go first?”

“I could,” Ieiri said. “But I don’t want to.”

Riko let out a frustrated noise, but didn’t bother arguing further. Instead, she studied Yuuji. 

Her first instinct was to say it was the smoothie flavor, since people usually threw in innocuous things in here when they didn’t know what else to say. But Yuuji was kind of clever and extremely complicated—she didn’t think he would go so easy on her.

“The pachinko,” she said at last, hesitantly. It was the most outrageous claim—he was seventeen and a jujutsu sorcerer that had survived an apocalypse, to think he would also have time to attend a trial was ludicrous. Besides…he didn’t really seem like the type? He’d seemed pretty morally upright, so far.

Yuuji smiled with one corner of his mouth. “I like mango smoothies,” he said.

Ieiri whistled. “Itadori Yuuji, you dog of dogs,” she said. “Pachinko, really?”

“Life’s a gamble,” Yuuji said, shrugging slightly. “And the games are fun.”

“How in the world did you have time to be tried for it?” Riko asked.

Yuuji looked at her for a moment, not quite surprised but definitely a little startled, before he laughed. “Good question, actually. Um—I had a friend. He wasn’t a friend at the time, but, uh, his cursed technique—it was a shikigami that ran a mock trial or something along those lines. I barely understood it as it was happening to me, but the shikigami would bring up a charge or something, you would defend yourself, Higuruma would present evidence to his shikigami, you would be judged. Depending on the verdict, you would lose something or Higuruma would gain something.”

“Sounds like a conditional domain,” Ieiri said, sitting up.

“Yeah,” Yuuji said. “That’s exactly what it was.”

“Conditional domain…?” Riko asked.

Yuuji turned to her, suddenly giving her the full force of his attention in an unexpected way. “How much do you know about sorcery, Riko?”

“...Not a lot,” she admitted. “Just that it exists.” 

She was never going to become a sorcerer herself, after all.

“There’s an ultimate move some sorcerers can do,” Yuuji said. “Hell, plenty of curses can do it too. But it’s like a manifestation of your technique itself, right onto the land we stand on. The goal is to trap someone else in your domain, because doing so gives you a guaranteed hit. So even if you’re dying, even if you’re up against an opponent you could never beat otherwise, if you can expand your domain on them, you could still kill them.”

“That sounds…” Riko started.

“Terrifying? I know,” Yuuji said, but his smile was kind. “Don’t worry though—there are ways to survive if you get trapped in a domain expansion.”

“What are they?” Riko asked, intrigued. 

“Any attacks that come at you there, you could blast away with your own cursed energy. Obviously you couldn’t keep this up forever, but your opponent can’t keep up their domain forever either. You could try escaping, though that’s not recommended. Or, you can expand your own domain on top of theirs. In that case, the more polished domain will win out.” He grinned, reaching up to pull his sunglasses down his nose and off his face, looking suddenly very boyish. “It’s a gamble, but so is life, yeah?”

“Conditional domains are different,” Ieiri said, evidently taking over the explanation. “They’re simplified and easier to master, but less powerful. There’s still a chance that you could kill an opponent in one hit if you pull them into your conditional domain, but it’s not very likely.”

“Higuruma, for instance,” Yuuji said, folding up his glasses and hooking them in his shirt collar. “If I’m declared guilty, then he gets a cool weapon to fight me with and I lose my cursed technique for five minutes. If I’m convicted for a greater crime—something like murder—he gets his guaranteed hit. Either way, the domain took a lot less energy from him than standard domains take from the sorcerer that cast them.”

“They used to be a lot more prevalent,” Ieiri said, glancing between Yuuji and Riko. “That’s what our history books say—the problem with domains like that is that they only really work against other humans, and now, jujutsu sorcerers mostly only fight curses.”

Meaning there was once a time when jujutsu sorcerers primarily fought other sorcerers. 

Yuuji nodded, agreeing with both Ieiri’s sentiment and the underlying message behind her words, before he turned to Riko. “Anyway, it’s your turn for the—”

“How old is Tengen?” Riko asked, the words bursting out of her in a rush. “How long has Tengen been alive?”

Ieiri gave her a strange look, but Yuuji didn’t seem particularly bothered by the question, gazing just as evenly at her as he had been. “She’s old,” he said. “Very old.”

“Old enough to be from a time where sorcerers mostly only fought other sorcerers?” Riko asked. 

“Old enough to be from a time where those sorcerers thought it was acceptable to steal bodies from other sorcerers in order to live forever,” Yuuji said, surprisingly bitter. “The bitch might have even had the idea first. It’s hard to tell between her and Kenjaku sometimes—their goals were never actually all that different. The only difference between them is their level of investment in what they want.”

Ieiri glanced down at Riko, who glanced up at her, suddenly a united front. 

What’s the most important question to ask here? Ieiri seemed to be asking with her eyes. What part of him do you want me to prod at the most? 

Riko didn’t know.

“You don’t seem to like Tengen very much for agreeing to enter a Binding Vow with her,” Ieiri said. 

Yuuji laughed a dry, bitter laugh. “Tengen is fine. What’s she going to do? Sit in her catacombs and steal the bodies of young women and continue to do absolutely nothing at all? Seems pretty likely. Besides, I had to ally with one of them, and I’d take Tengen over Kenjaku any day.”

“Who is Kenjaku?” Ieiri asked. 

Yuuji blinked, the dark look leaving his eye, and pressed a knuckle into his cheekbone. It was right over the edge of his scar, hard enough to hurt.

“Um,” he said, suddenly back to normal. “Just…just a really bad dude, I guess. Don’t worry—I’m trying to find him. I won’t let him take everything from me a second time.”

“Yuuji-san…?” Riko prompted after a moment.

Yuuji grunted in acknowledgement. 

“Is it just because of Tengen?” she asked, surprising herself with her own directness. 

“What do you mean?” he asked, blinking at her. She was so glad he took his sunglasses off—looking into his eye made him suddenly so human. So broken, like Ieiri had said. 

Whatever he was, Riko doubted he was an enemy. 

“The reason you agreed to protect me,” she said. “Was it just because Tengen asked you to and you wanted to be in Tengen’s good graces?”

Yuuji was quiet for a long moment, though his eye said a thousand words.

So much so that Riko almost didn’t need to hear it when he said—

“I’m sorry.” His voice was gentle, unexpectedly kind, like a warm summer breeze. “I didn’t realize—I never meant to make you feel like your life wasn’t important to me. I accepted Tengen’s terms because she had something I wanted and because protecting people—almost any people—is something I can’t seem to stop myself from doing anyway. It wasn’t a burden to me to add you into the mix, but I shouldn’t have treated you like it didn’t matter either.”

It was such an earnest, heartfelt thing to say. Riko honestly had no idea how to respond. 

Yuuji stood up a little straighter, adjusting the strap of his bag on his shoulder. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, his eye a little brighter. “I know, I know, I know—this is the most important thing I think I ever learned. Riko, look—look here.” 

He pointed at his own eye, and transfixed, Riko looked at him. 

“I’m strong,” Yuuji said. “I’m strong enough that I could win almost any fight, that I could defeat almost any opponent. I have more than enough persistence to carry us both. The one thing you fear the most—whatever that is—ask me if I could defeat it, and I’ll answer you honestly.”

“I…” Riko said, flustered. “I don’t know…”

“Whatever it is, no matter how small or stupid. If you fear it, ask me if I can prevent it, and I’ll tell you exactly what I’m capable of. No embellishment. No humility. Whatever I can do, I’ll tell you. Whatever I can’t, I’ll tell you that, too.”

Riko closed her eyes. 

The truth was, she knew what that fear was. It was a new one—something that had grown in her heart about a week ago and stayed there, something dark and frightening. Something she used to welcome like an old friend—something, now, that filled her with fear. 

“If Tengen.” She paused, licked her lips, tried again. “If Tengen decided she wanted to—to erase me. Could you…could you stop that?”

“I can win in a fight against Tengen right now,” Yuuji said. “I could beat Tengen into a pulp if I needed to. I could destroy her, regardless of what it did to society. In a fight between me and Tengen, right now, in this moment—I would win.”

Riko breathed out a long sigh through her nose. 

“Tomorrow is a different story,” Yuuji said, his voice soft and full of sorrow. “There are other vessels Tengen could fuse with if she chose—one of them could have abilities I would never be able to overcome. If you went willingly to Tengen for any reason, I wouldn’t be able to stop you. I don’t have that power. If I had to fight Tengen while she wore your face or the face of someone else I cared about, I would stumble. I would probably even fail. I’m weak like that. To a degree, everyone is.”

Riko’s eyes felt suddenly, alarmingly wet, and she blinked quickly. 

“Maybe I’m a good home for your feelings of safety,” Yuuji continued. “It’s not a bad thing to rely on others. I’m not selfish enough to tell you I’ll always be there, and I’m not selfless enough to tell you I’d always win. I’m honored—whatever security I offer you, I’m honored that you chose me for it—but if you want to know how to make sure Tengen never erases you…” He lifted his head, his eye burning, practically like molten gold in the light of the setting sun. “Learn how to fight her yourself.”

Riko could only stare, not sure what to do or what to say. Unexpectedly, Yuuji rested a hand on the top of her head. His hand was heavy, his palm wide, his fingers rough. He ruffled her hair—because her hair needed more problems—and then withdrew. 

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I get it now. I’ve gotta go, but listen—if you want to learn how to fight your own battles, come and find me, okay? You’re strong, too.”

He retrieved his sunglasses, sliding them back on his face, and continued back up the path, getting smaller and smaller until he turned a corner and disappeared, and Riko was left with only Ieiri and the last traces of golden hour. 

“I can’t help but wonder,” Ieiri said, after a long, long moment, “where it was he was coming from.”

“I’m more concerned about where he was going,” Riko said, honestly, and turned to look at Ieiri. 

Inexplicably, they both started laughing. It felt wrong for such a serious moment—just one disbelieving giggle from Ieiri that was mimicked by one from Riko, until both of them were clutching their sides and wheezing. Nothing was funny—it was just the only thing they could do. 

“Do you think he gets off on it?” Ieiri asked, once she’d finally recovered her breath. “Being mysterious?”

Riko giggled again—this time at the ridiculousness of imagining Yuuji being aware enough of himself to even know he was being mysterious, when her general impression of him after talking to him once was that he had literally no idea he was being ridiculously profound as he was doing it. 

“I don’t think he has the brains for that,” she told Ieiri, and Ieiri laughed again too. 

“You know,” Ieiri said. “That’s about what I think about him too. Just another idiot in a sea of idiots.” She glanced down at Riko, gaze knowing, and asked, “Feel better now?”

“Yeah,” Riko said, taking her headband off so she could smooth her hair back down. “I think I do.”

Chapter Text

“Where’s Suguru?” Satoru asked.

Shoko, who was sitting on the couch with a book open in her lap, tilted her head back to look at him. It was hard to tell considering she was upside down, but it looked like she was frowning. “Well, he’s popular today.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry about it.” She sat up a little straighter, resting her chin on her arm. “And he didn’t text you? He’s staying another night for his mission.” 

“No,” Satoru said, pulling out his phone and flipping it open to check. Just like he knew, there was only a meaningless hot girl with big boobs staring back at him. No blinking messages from the (probably straight) guy Satoru was hopelessly in love with. Or at least unwisely attracted to.

Shoko stilled, evidently sensing her mistake. “Probably because you had a bad signal wherever you were,” she said. “I wouldn’t read into it too much.”

“Yeah, bad fucking signal,” Satoru agreed, and shoved his phone into his pocket like he was trying to break it.

“He probably forgot—” Shoko tried.

Satoru silenced her with a look.

Suguru didn’t forget things like that. And if he did forget things like that, he sure as hell wouldn’t remember to tell Shoko and forget to tell Satoru.

This distance growing between them… Satoru hated it. He hated it all the more because it was familiar—he had seen it over and over again in his life. The moment someone stopped trying to surpass him. The moment someone decided he was fine on his pedestal and left him there. 

“Yuuji’s in,” Shoko blurted out. 

“What?”

“He’s here. He’s up in his room,” she said, all in a rush. “You might want to take a shower before you aggravate him though—you smell like a bathroom.”

“That’s because I spent all day in a bathroom—wait, what are you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything,” she said, ignoring him in favor of her book. “You look like you want to be annoying people, for some god forsaken reason Yuuji likes being annoyed by you, it’s a win-win situation. And it means less time where you stand next to me and smell like that , so…”

“You’re a pretty shitty friend sometimes, you know?” Satoru said.

Shoko hummed, not caring one way or the other. She had contented herself with leaving him all alone at the top a long time ago—she’d been more than clear about that. Her only interest was healing—not pushing the bounds of healing, and certainly not dying at anyone’s side. She was his friend and he cared about her—of course he cared about her—but even now, a year and some change later, she was very careful about exactly how close Satoru was permitted to get to her, and he honestly wasn’t much better.

He still took her advice about the shower, though. 

He thought about it the whole time he was under the spray—Yuuji and his damnable acceptance, Yuuji and his unrelenting tolerance. It wasn’t that he hadn’t noticed it before—he noticed it the second time he met Yuuji, at some point between when Satoru got them thrown out of a respectable establishment and Satoru kept demanding they test Infinity and Yuuji went along with both with neither complaints nor reluctance. 

He still hadn’t really pinned down exactly what Yuuji’s relationship had been with his older self. He wasn’t entirely sure it was strictly teacher-student, but it didn’t seem necessarily friendly either. And of course, there was the comment about Satoru being his appointed executioner, which—yikes. That was something he had been avoiding thinking about. 

He continued to avoid thinking about it by thinking about Shoko’s implication instead. Did she think this was some kind of romantic thing? It wasn’t. Satoru wasn’t so desperate that he would just throw himself at the first openly gay guy he met. He wasn’t interested in dating anyway—love was for fools that didn’t mind getting cursed, and Satoru minded getting cursed very, very much. His plan had always been to just…go it alone forever, with maybe the briefest hiccup in there when he realized Suguru was able to stand at his side. That Suguru used to be able to stand at his side. It was ridiculous to think that he would let his plan hiccup again for someone he barely knew. 

Satoru rested his forehead against the tile and stood there until the water started going cold, his hair hanging into his eyes and his mind racing. 

Yeah. Pretty ridiculous. 

There was no way in hell he was going to visit Yuuji’s dorm room tonight. It wasn’t like that. He hadn’t been thinking of it before Shoko suggested it and he definitely wasn’t thinking of it now. Sure, his usual routine was to go and brag to Suguru, and sure it was weird that Suguru wasn’t here, and sure it was kind of like a balm to all the agitated bits that made up his soul to sit in Yuuji’s presence and he still wasn’t sure why Yuuji had that effect on him, but—

He wasn’t fucking doing it. 

“Are you naked?” he shouted from the hallway outside Yuuji’s room ten minutes later.

“...No?” 

Satoru twisted the doorknob. Unlocked. Ha—for someone so mysterious all the time, Yuuji sure could do with a little more paranoia in his life. If he had Infinity, he’d probably leave it down while he slept like a moron, too. 

Satoru flung the door open, noticing Yuuji swiveling around to look at him as soon as he did. Yuuji’s eyes were uncovered—because he was sitting in his room by himself and he didn’t share Satoru’s light sensitivity—and his lips were already forming that overwhelmingly fond smile that Satoru had grown too comfortable with seeing. His pink hair was a little damp, plastered down to his forehead. They must have just missed each other at the showers. 

“This isn’t knocking and waiting for me to open the door, you know,” Yuuji said. 

“I asked the most important question first,” Satoru said, and wandered inside so he could collapse bonelessly on Yuuji’s bed. It smelled a little bit more like a mildewy old room than it did like Yuuji. 

Hm. Someone doesn’t sleep as often as they should, Satoru noted. 

Satoru burrowed into the pillows anyway, just to be annoying—and also to coat them in water from his hair, which he supposed was also a form of being annoying—and then grabbed the pillow that seemed the most used and hugged it close in an effort to get a rise out of Yuuji. 

And he did, except it was Yuuji rising out of his chair—literally—so he could put the fetus jar that had been sitting on his desk with him back where it normally sat, which was on his dresser, and then sat back down to roll himself closer to Satoru. He was sitting on the chair backwards again. The only difference was this time he was wearing shorts and a baggy tee, so there was a lot more leg to look at and a lot less shoulder. 

…Maybe Shoko had a tiny point. A tiny one. Satoru still wasn’t desperate enough to throw himself at the first openly gay man he met, but he certainly wasn’t above checking him out. 

…And Satoru needed to think about anything else at all, so asking about the Death Paintings it was.

“Were you talking to it?” Satoru asked. 

“Hm? Oh, Choso?”

Satoru huffed, propping himself up on his elbow and smoothing the pillow out with his other hand. It wasn’t any fun if Yuuji wasn’t even going to comment on it, so he might as well be comfortable. He briefly considered asking why he called the Death Paintings by name…but he supposed it was a redundant question. Two-thirds human, Yuuji had said before. Brothers, he had also said. 

“How are you related to them?” Satoru found himself asking, suddenly genuinely curious about how such a thing might have come to pass. 

“Long story,” Yuuji said. “You got time?”

Interestingly, there wasn’t any reluctance there either. Satoru asked and so Yuuji would answer. 

It painted a sharp contrast to the one and only time Yuuji had told him no so far—in response to the question about his domain. 

“I’m all yours, baby,” Satoru said, fluttering his lashes at Yuuji. 

Yuuji laughed, surprisingly heartily, his head thrown back and his eye gleaming. “Stop that,” he told Satoru, despite looking neither upset nor flustered. “I’m almost eighteen, you know. I’m hardly a baby. Or something—I don’t know, time travel is complicated.”

“When’s your birthday again?”

“March,” Yuuji said, which was an answer that did not include the specific date that Satoru was fishing for here. 

“And you said you came from late December,” Satoru mused. “Does that mean you’ll turn eighteen in November this year? Or will you hold out until March…?”

“I’ll be seventeen for extra long, I guess,” Yuuji said, squishing his chin between his thumb and his forefinger so he could think about it. “Less confusing than having two birthdays.”

“Two birthdays on what day of the month, exactly…?”

Yuuji blinked at him, his eye crinkling a bit at the corners with his smile. “March 20th,” he said. “You could have just asked.”

“I literally did ask,” Satoru said, raising his eyebrows. “Just now.”

“I guess you did,” Yuuji said, still amused, and then abruptly changed gears. He jerked his chin towards the journal that still sat on his nightstand, expression dark. “We’re half-siblings, technically.”

Satoru remembered that disturbing journal well, and carefully didn’t pick it up this time around. “You mean your mother is the woman that could get pregnant with curses hundreds of years ago?”

“My mother,” Yuuji said, lips twitching like he was fighting off amusement, “is Kamo Noritoshi.”

“What.”

“I know,” Yuuji said. “I should have mentioned, I guess, that the story’s as weird as it is long.”

He launched into it in earnest then—some thousand year old sorcerer guy named Kenjaku with a cursed technique that allowed him to transplant his brain into other bodies. He’d been inhabiting Kamo Noritoshi when Kamo Noritoshi went down in history as the most evil sorcerer ever to live, and then he’d gone and inhabited Yuuji’s mom so he could have sex with the reincarnated former twin brother of Ryoumen Sukuna—

“Why,” Satoru said, at this point. “Just why.”

“Glad I never had to do a family tree project in first grade,” Yuuji said, with a sly little grin. 

“And then because this Kenjaku guy mixed Kamo Noritoshi’s blood with the fetuses—”

“Brothers,” Yuuji confirmed, nodding. “Weird, backwards ass brothers, but still brothers.”

Satoru stared at him for a moment longer, and then rolled over onto his back to spare himself the pain of trying to figure this shit out. He threw his arm over his delicate eyes—they had seen enough. “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Satoru said. 

“It’s pretty weird,” Yuuji said. “You know what’s weirder though? They never actually found my mom’s body. I think that means he’s probably still in her.”

Satoru almost asked who Kenjaku was inhabiting in Yuuji’s time if not his mom, but thought of a better question at the last minute. “Is that why you’re doing these creepy police department sketches of your mother?”

“Yep. I know—I’m no artist,” Yuuji said, followed by a light tap on Satoru’s wrist—almost like he was indicating where he was in the room, and a soft, “Be right back.”

Satoru frowned, peeling his arm off of his face so he could watch Yuuji retreat out of the corner of his eye. He wasn’t leaving the room, just crossing to the towel closet so that he could retrieve something. 

A hand towel, Satoru realized. A thick, dark one. 

Satoru recovered his eye, curious about where this was going despite himself. “What’s your next move, then?” he asked. “Finding your mom?”

“Nah,” Yuuji said from across the room. “At least, not really—there’s something else I want to do first.”

“Which is?” 

“Choso,” he said. “I’m looking for a vessel.”

“Looking for a—for a Death Painting? Are you actually insane?”

“The elders will hate it very much,” Yuuji agreed, though he sounded like he was looking forward to it. There was the brief sound of a sink being turned on. “Choso’s cool, though. He’s helpful.”

“You…miss him,” Satoru surmised, rolling the idea around in his head. Missing a curse, even a part curse. It was hard to imagine, except, well…maybe not. Suguru would miss some of his curses, too, if he lost them. Though a talking, breathing, fighting brother was very different from what was essentially a pet. 

“Yeah,” Yuuji said. “As soon as I realized it might be an option to get him back…”

“You mean I’m not good enough for you?” Satoru asked teasingly. 

“You were my teacher, Satoru, not my brother,” Yuuji said, turning off the sink. “I relied on Choso in a very different way than how I relied on you.”

Satoru frowned, unable to argue that point. “What if you awaken him and you tell him this story and he decides it’s all bullshit and it’s time for you to die?” Satoru asked. “What then?”

“Well,” Yuuji said. “I’ll still have you, won’t I?”

Satoru’s stomach clenched tight at that. “You—”

Yuuji tapped his wrist, another gentle warning that he was once again at Satoru’s side. Subsequently, he tapped away Satoru’s words, everything he thought he was going to say a second ago disappearing in the wind. “Here,” Yuuji said, as kind as could be. “Move your arm.”

Satoru obeyed numbly, and then startled a bit when Yuuji laid the towel over his eyes. It was cool but not cold, relieving on the itch in his previously uncovered eyes but not quite comforting. That was, until Yuuji rested his hand on top of it, too—just the lightest of pressure there—and suddenly it was like some kind of freaky miracle cure. 

“What,” Satoru said. He was sure there was more to that sentence, but he had no idea what it was. 

“Feel good?” Yuuji asked. 

“I…yes? What? Why would you…?”

“I was just guessing,” Yuuji said. His rolling chair creaked ominously—he’d probably settled on it again. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in pain over your eyes or whatever. But my grandpa used to get migraines and it looked a little similar, I guess.”

Satoru reached up to lift the towel off, forgetting momentarily that Yuuji’s hand was there. He remembered when his fingertips collided with the warm roughness of Yuuji’s knuckles. Yuuji pulled away reflexively, Satoru curled his fingers into a fist and convinced them they didn’t want to follow. 

“Never in pain, really?” Satoru asked, peeling up the corner of the towel. “Not even in fake pain to guilt you into taking care of me like this?”

“Not even fake pain,” Yuuji said. “I saw you taking a nap once, though.”

“A nap?” Satoru repeated stupidly. Then, more incredulously, “Only once?”

“Sensei healed himself constantly with his reverse cursed technique,” Yuuji said. “He didn't really need to sleep anymore.”

“That sounds kind of awesome,” Satoru said, wondering if he should start working on it.

“Does it? I thought it was sad,” Yuuji said.

“Why…sad?”

“It’s lonely, being the only person awake,” Yuuji said, eye distant. “I would know.”

“Maybe I ought to learn how to do it quicker then,” Satoru said. “Keep you company.”

Yuuji, always so tolerant of him, just gently pressed the towel back over his eyes in a no nonsense sort of way. “Don’t do that. Really, I should just sleep, right?” He paused for a moment, causing Satoru to desperately try to scrounge up something to say in response. Fortunately, Yuuji saved him the trouble. “How was your mission?”

Nevermind. Yuuji was right—this was a superior conversational topic. 

“I have a bone to pick with someone about that,” Satoru said, taking the towel off his eyes and sitting up abruptly. “Since when does the legend of Hanako-san of the Toilet involve a fucking three-headed lizard that tries to eat you?”

Yuuji laughed at that, loud and uncomplicated. “Oh, wait, I think I did hear a bit of that back in middle school.”

“You’re shitting me,” Satoru accused. 

“I’m not, I swear I’m not,” Yuuji said. “What’s scary about a creepy little girl in a red skirt?”

“Arguably a lot, considering she’s a special grade curse,” Satoru said.

“No, no, you’re not thinking like a straight guy,” Yuuji said, smacking Satoru lightly with the back of his hand repeatedly. “Put your straight guy hat on and tell me what’s scary about a creepy little girl in a red skirt.”

“Nothing I would be willing to admit out loud, with my straight guy hat on,” Satoru said. “I’m not sure the three-headed lizard is more or less embarrassing, though.”

“Definitely more embarrassing,” Yuuji said. “So I guess you fought the lizard today? Not the creepy little girl?”

“I fought both,” Satoru said, laying dramatically on his back again. “It was easy, of course, but tedious. Should I regale you with the tales of my woes?”

Yuuji laughed. “Why bother asking? You’re going to do it anyway, aren’t you?”

“You know me so well,” Satoru said, which came out a little embarrassingly earnest instead of teasing like it was supposed to. He recovered by launching into the story. He spared no detail—Shoko’s eyes would have glazed over by the time he got to describing the three-headed lizard he was not expecting emerging from a toilet, Yuuji asked him what color the lizard was. Suguru would have gotten irritated and competitive by the time Satoru got to the part of the story where he beat the lizard into a pulp with his bare fists, thus concluding his mission spotlessly (if you ignored the persistent bathroom stink). Yuuji rested his chin on his hand and asked, “You know, how long does it take a special grade curse to reform, anyway?”

“A year or so, usually,” Satoru said. “Well, about a year for Hanako and the fucking lizard, I would wager. A special grade curse like Ryoumen Sukuna—who we actually have contained—he isn’t going to reform until a compatible vessel comes around and somehow ends up with one of those fingers.”

“Have…people tried to revive Ryoumen Sukuna before?” Yuuji asked. 

“Oh, wait,” Satoru said. “You mentioned fighting him before, I think? So he reincarnates eventually? How did that happen?”

Yuuji stared at him, looking strangely caught off guard. 

“Some desperate kid ate one of his fingers to save his friends,” Yuuji said, glancing away. “Things went downhill from there.”

“Why wasn’t he executed on the spot?” Satoru asked. “The vessel. I mean, just one finger should have been…”

“He could keep Sukuna down,” Yuuji said. “So, that was a good enough reason to keep him around. Finish the job, you know? Eat all twenty, die with all twenty, rid the world of a great and terrible evil.”

“Who the hell was going to kill this kid after he ate all twenty fingers?” Satoru asked, frowning. “I mean—the things Ryoumen Sukuna could do. That’s kind of…horrifying. I can’t imagine anyone who would be able to…”

He stopped. 

“Me?” he asked Yuuji, looking over at him sharply. “I was going to kill this kid?”

“No,” Yuuji said. He stood suddenly, agitated, and pushed his chair back under his desk with enough force that it bounced back. “You weren’t.”

“Then who?” Satoru asked, trying to think of anyone else that could maybe fight Sukuna and win. Wait—stupid. He had the answer in front of him, didn’t he? “You?”

Yuuji didn’t say anything, his back turned to Satoru.

“Oh,” Satoru said, sitting back up. “That’s…that’s kind of messed up, actually, even for sorcerers. Did you know him? This vessel you were supposed to kill?”

“Satoru,” Yuuji warned. 

“Can you really blame me for being curious?” Satoru asked, huffing. “C’mon, man, you have no problem with any…other…”

Satoru turned to look at Yuuji—not with the eyes set on his face, but with the eyes that lived within him. He saw it again but he knew what it meant now—there were seven distinct cursed energy signatures within Yuuji. Five for the different cursed wombs, one for him, one for—

“You were Sukuna’s vessel,” Satoru guessed. Speaking of being Yuuji’s executioner in the future—this was the only thing that made sense. “You were the kid that ate a finger out of desperation. Which meant I was supposed to kill you, because there’s no way anyone else would be able to—”

“You’re a little full of yourself, you know,” Yuuji said, though he still didn’t sound irritated. 

“Yuuji—”

“Shh,” Yuuji said, turning around suddenly. For a moment Satoru thought he really was mad, that he was going to drag Satoru and his damp hair out of his bed and give them both the boot. Yuuji didn’t look angry, though, even though he was approaching kind of quickly, and when he got to the bed he just slumped onto it. He landed perpendicular to Satoru, his legs hanging off the bed, his head landing on Satoru’s stomach. He pushed through Infinity, just like always, but just like always…Satoru didn’t really mind. 

“What’s this? Are we having a moment?” Satoru asked, mostly to disguise how much he enjoyed the heavy weight from Yuuji’s body. 

“I said shh,” Yuuji said, closing his eye. He turned his head slightly—towards Satoru’s face—his nose pressing into one of Satoru’s ribs. 

It probably wasn’t entirely comfortable for Yuuji. 

“You could have just laid beside me,” Satoru suggested. “Or kicked me out, maybe. That’s what most people would have done, I’m sure.”

“It’s my bed,” Yuuji countered, his lips barely moving. “I can lay on it like a weirdo if I want.”

“And me? You’re also laying on me like a weirdo, you know. What if I wanted to get up? Use the restroom? Go back to my own room? What then?”

“I said shh,” Yuuji said again, though he was smiling just a little. 

Satoru shhed at last, taking a moment to study Yuuji. He placed the damp towel back over his eye but only covered one of them, studying Yuuji’s face with the other. He traced the scar at the corner of his mouth with his gaze first, mapping it out, memorizing its exact length and shape. He studied the scar over the bridge of his nose next, and then the one that stretched between his brows. It was a slightly different texture than the one that marked his eye, Satoru noticed. The scar between the brows had been there first. 

“What are you looking so hard at?” Yuuji asked, without opening his eye. 

“I thought you wanted me to shh.”

“I lied, I guess.”

Satoru laughed at that. “I’m looking at your face, stupid.”

“The scars?” Yuuji asked, cracking one eye—his good eye—open. 

Satoru could remember the feeling of the scar at the corner of his mouth under his thumb. He wondered if Yuuji would let him touch his scars again, in this much less delirious state. He probably would—Satoru was hardly the best at boundaries, and Yuuji didn’t actually seem to be all that much better. 

“Yeah,” Satoru said. “They’re a little…eye-catching.”

Yuuji paused for a moment, blinking a few times. “Was that a pun?”

“I refuse to apologize for my superior wit.”

Yuuji laughed, a startled sound. “Well, I don’t blame you.” He paused for a moment, then reached up. He ran his own thumb over the scar at the corner of his mouth, tracing its shape. “This was a cursed spirit. Mahito. October 31st, 2018. Same here.” He marked a different scar, the older looking one that stretched between his eyebrows before getting absorbed by the larger, rougher scar that consumed the rest of his face. Yuuji paused for a beat, then traced that scar too. “Sukuna,” he said, then ran a finger over the back of his hand, tracing one of the many crisscrossing lines on his arms. “Sukuna.” Last he circled the pad of his finger around the roughened stub of his pinkie, and finished: “Sukuna.”

“Not a lot of variety there,” Satoru commented, mouth feeling a little dry. 

“Well,” Yuuji said, rolling over so he could look up at the ceiling instead of at Satoru. “Sukuna hated my guts, but he kept our body in decent condition while he inhabited it, so not many of my injuries scarred before Shibuya. Afterwards, once he’d seen…once he’d seen what Fushiguro could really do and he knew he wasn’t going to stay here for long no matter what, that was when he stopped caring about what condition I was in. That’s how I ended up with the two from Mahito.”

“Mahito isn’t a name I recognize,” Satoru interjected. “A curse, right?”

“You wouldn’t,” Yuuji said. “He hasn’t been born yet. He’s a special grade curse—an unregistered one—born from the fear that people feel towards other people. I don’t know that he’ll be much of a problem this time around.” Yuuji paused for a moment, the silence reflective, and Satoru let him have it. He figured this was something like the calm before a storm—and pressing about this ‘Mahito’ wasn’t much of a priority to him compared to the revelation that Yuuji had once been Sukuna’s vessel. 

“Sukuna tore the finger off to switch vessels,” Yuuji said. “That’s the important part of that story, I guess. The rest of these I got fighting him after he killed you.”

Satoru deliberated for a moment on which part of this story he should focus on. 

“You said Fushiguro earlier,” he decided on. 

“Megumi,” Yuuji said, like a correction. “The same one, yeah.”

“Also a vessel for the King of Curses?”

Yuuji swallowed, heavy and thick. “Yeah.”

“...Your life sucked,” Satoru decided. 

Yuuji released a strangled laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, it really did.”

There was another one of those silences. The thinking silences, where more of the story was sure to come out at the end. Satoru spent it wondering if he could get away with touching Yuuji’s hair. 

Technically, Yuuji had laid his head on Satoru’s lap first, right? Practically an invitation. 

Why do you care? a cynical part of his mind that sounded a lot like Shoko asked. You aren’t interested, right? 

Fuck you, logic brain, Satoru shot back, but whatever part of him that had temporarily seen reason was now silent. 

“It used to be comforting to me to know that you were waiting for me at the end of the line,” Yuuji said, startling Satoru out of his argument with himself. “That no matter how bad it got, you would at least be there to end it.”

“That’s a pretty fucked up thing to say to a guy you’re laying on,” Satoru said. 

Yuuji laughed, and this time it was broken. “You wouldn’t have done it,” Yuuji said. “I know that now. You only let me think you would because you knew it would help me.”

“Mm,” Satoru said, pulling the towel over his other eye. Maybe if he didn’t look at it, he would have enough courage to actually touch Yuuji’s hair. “Doesn’t sound like me.”

“No?”

“Nah,” Satoru said. “I’m not emotionally intelligent enough for that. Everyone knows that.”

It was a test, and Satoru wasn’t entirely sure what depths of his mind the idea to run this particular test came from. He wanted to blame Shoko for suggesting that he come see Yuuji today. He wanted to blame Shoko for being right about Yuuji not seeming to mind.

Satoru was unknowable, that much was a fixed truth. Maybe Suguru had been able to know him once, but that seemed a little less likely with each passing day. He doubted he would have gotten more transparent in the future, so undoubtedly, Yuuji was going to agree with him, say—

“You could’ve fooled me,” Yuuji said instead. After a moment, he seemed to embarrass himself over the statement and shot straight up, taking his hair firmly out of touching range. Satoru clenched his fist sorrowfully over the lost opportunity . “I mean—you cared. You care. You definitely hurt people’s feelings on purpose sometimes, but when it matters—how it matters—you’re there.”

Except for that point in time where Satoru was dead. 

He wondered how that felt for Yuuji, knowing what he knew now. Some poor, desperate kid eating a finger to save his friends. That same kid agreeing to his own execution. That same kid living his life with a monster inside him. That same kid fearing that one day the monster was going to win, but knowing that there was always someone standing in the way of that happening. 

That kid being left without that hope. That kid presumably having to kill his friend to save himself. 

“When you go looking for vessels for your brother,” Satoru said, “what is it you do?”

“Visit hospitals,” Yuuji said, a little hesitantly. “My cover is that I’m a volunteer sitting with patients that don’t have any family to come visit them. As far as the elders know, I’m looking for people that might be affected by a particular kind of curse.”

“Sounds lonely,” Satoru said. 

“Hospitals usually are.”

“Take me with you next time,” Satoru suggested. 

“You’d hate it,” Yuuji observed. 

You’re the only person in this world that seems to know anything at all about me, Satoru didn’t say. I should return the favor, shouldn’t I?

“I doubt it,” Satoru said instead. 

“If you’re sure,” Yuuji said, voice dubious, and Satoru smiled. 

“I’m sure.”

There would forever be a before and an after. A time when Suguru was just a student and a time after when he was a jujutsu sorcerer. As with most things in the world, those times were dictated entirely by the successes and failures of Gojo Satoru.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Yaga said, as Suguru dragged himself and his bags back to Jujutsu High, several hundred curses heavier and in desperate need of a nap. Yaga looked like he had been eating lemons for the last hour—maybe Suguru had unintentionally been late.

“Sensei?” Suguru questioned, a little too tired to put the meaning together on his own.

“You have another mission,” Yaga said. “It starts as soon as you put your things back in your room.”

So much for a nap. 

It’s the duty of the strong to protect the weak, Suguru reminded himself, blinking sleep out of his eyes. This is what you do.

“What’s my mission, Sensei?”

“Something familiar,” Yaga said. “There’s a cursed spirit in custody you need to devour.”

Chapter Text

Suguru went to Yuuji begrudgingly.

At the end of the day, Yuuji was the best at hand to hand combat. Even better than Satoru, though from Suguru’s observations, at least one part of that was the fact that Yuuji had frequently sparred with an older, more polished Satoru before he came to the past. He already knew Satoru’s tricks and how to counter them. 

But as far as Suguru could tell, his older self and Yuuji had no such training, and he still got his ass handed to him every time Yaga put them together for spars. And before Yuuji came along, Suguru could more than hold his own in a hand-to-hand, no cursed energy allowed spar with anyone and everyone he knew— including Satoru.

Suguru tried Yuuji’s dorm room first. It was logical, as he saw it. Yuuji was reclusive, usually preferring his own company when he wasn’t in class or training…not that Suguru could really keep track of something like that, considering he was gone most of the time and he was pretty sure Yuuji avoided him when he wasn’t. 

There was no answer when Suguru knocked, though, and no sign of movement on the other side of the door either. Yuuji was either very good at sitting still and making no noise or he wasn’t in, and Suguru was more inclined to believe the latter.

Yuuji was decent, after all, even if he was clearly uncomfortable for whatever undisclosed reasons he was uncomfortable for. He wouldn’t have just ignored Suguru because he could—that kind of pettiness was more on par with Satoru than Yuuji. 

Not for the first time, Suguru wondered about Satoru’s and Yuuji’s fast friendship. It seemed so improbable, so strange. He was vaguely concerned for Satoru—worried that one day Yuuji was going to wake up and decide he was out of patience—but the very worry itself felt patronizing, not to mention unfair to both of them. 

As if brought upon by that thought, Suguru found Yuuji and Satoru together, standing in a field. Satoru had his jacket unbuttoned to combat the heat, Yuuji’s sleeves were rolled up in their customary way. Suguru paused, curious about what exactly they were doing, and then all of a sudden both were sprinting straight for him.

Satoru, who had been closer to him when they started running slowed to a mild jog. “Su-gu-ru~” he chanted, flapping his hand at Suguru. 

“Go, go, go!” Yuuji shouted, as he shot past both of them and threw himself over the top of the hill like he was in a war movie. He flattened himself onto his stomach, just his eyes peeking out over the top. Satoru seemed unbothered, trotting the rest of the way up like he had nothing better to do. 

Below them, something exploded. 

The something in question turned out to be a bottle of soda, mixed with Mentos and shaken to a centimeter of its life. Yuuji was far enough away to be out of the blast zone—Satoru was not, not technically, but he remained clean anyway thanks to Infinity. Suguru, who had no warning and barely any time to run, made it out of the event with drops of soda on the tops of his shoes and his shoulders. 

Satoru laughed, because he was Satoru. Yuuji peered over the top of his hill—just a pair of aviators and a particularly curious eyebrow—like some kind of gag character in a comedy sitcom. At first, Suguru was just bewildered.

“What the hell?”

“Sorry,” Yuuji said, sounding reasonably sheepish about it. “I always wanted to try that.”

Then, Suguru was angry. 

It was bizarre, even to him. Sudden. A little unwarranted.  He remembered not too long ago he had been thrown off by Satoru’s seriousness. Now that he was being ridiculous again it felt—what? Inappropriate?

“Suguruuuuu~” Satoru called, his voice pure glee. “It’s youuuu~”

He moved to throw an arm over Suguru’s shoulders, Suguru knocked it away. 

Just like that, the mood was entirely ruined. Satoru’s face did something complicated.  Something Suguru was pretty sure that Satoru’s face wasn’t supposed to do. He stepped back, arm falling, smile frozen on his face.

It made no sense, because Suguru had dodged his unnecessary clinging at several points in the past without receiving this kind of reaction. 

“I came here to ask you something,” Suguru said, tearing his gaze away from Satoru. “Yuuji.”

“Me?” Yuuji repeated, pointing at himself. His eyebrow seemed even more curious about this revelation from where it peeked out over his sunglasses.

“Do you see anyone else named Yuuji around?”

“Well, no.” He stood, climbing back over the hill, dusting off the back of his cuffed uniform pants as he did. “What, uh, what’s your question?”

He didn’t quite meet Suguru’s eyes, which was obvious even with the glasses. Still irritated and a little confused, Suguru almost considered switching tactics and asking him what Suguru of the future had become; he stopped himself at the last moment.

“Your martial arts skills are impeccable,” Suguru said, gritting his teeth.

“Thank you…?” Yuuji responded, like it was a question.

“Does that extend to weaponry, or is it just hand to hand?”

“Oh!” Yuuji said, suddenly able to meet his eyes. “I did kendo for a little while, but there was always something more satisfying about the—”

He stopped. Hard.

“Don’t be shy now,” Satoru said, crossing his arms over his chest and directing an expression at Yuuji that was most closely related to a pout. “Tell us why a sword couldn’t satisfy you, you maniac.”

Yuuji turned his face towards Satoru, starting some kind of bizarre staring contest where neither party actually knew if they were making eye contact or not. 

“I,” Yuuji said slowly, entirely to Satoru, “It doesn’t matter.” He shook his head and looked back at Suguru, giving Suguru the feeling that Yuuji would have answered Satoru’s question had Suguru not been there. “Why did you ask?”

Suguru paused, warring with himself. He knew enough about both Yuuji and Satoru to know that neither of them would report this to anyone else. He also knew enough about both of them to know that they probably wouldn’t even view it as a big deal. But Satoru might know Suguru well enough to know how much of a break in his character this was. 

But demonstrating was still easier than explaining, so at the end of the day, Suguru held out his hand, cursed technique activating, and manifested the curse that he held in him now. 

The worm-like curse settled over his shoulders, wrapped around his waist. It was a disgusting feeling—not just because of the curse but because of the memories too—but Suguru held strong against the urge to fight it. There was something nice about this—something superior about taking this curse that resisted him once and wearing it like the man that didn’t quite defeat him. 

Satoru and Yuuji both took a step back. In Satoru’s case, he was slightly more dramatic about it, grabbing onto Yuuji’s arm and breathing out a half-laughed, “Fuck.” 

Yuuji didn’t seem particularly bothered about either occurrence, though his lips did open slightly in surprise.

“The elders asked me to subjugate it,” Suguru explained. “So that I could command it to surrender all of the weapons that assassin had stored in it, so those weapons could subsequently be sent back to the clans that owned them originally.”

He had smiled and nodded through the whole thing, despite the way it made him feel. The elders, demanding this from him? When they had been ready to erase Riko? When they had sent two kids on a mission to protect jujutsu society itself when they should have gone themselves?

“For fuck’s sake,” Satoru said, which just about summarized what Suguru felt about it too. Except Satoru wasn’t talking about that, evidently, he was talking about— “And you probably went right along with it, didn’t you?” Satoru continued, rolling his eyes so visibly that it was obvious even through the sunglasses. “It doesn’t matter so long as lives aren’t directly in danger, right?”

Which was cruel, but also accurate. Suguru would have given all of those weapons back to the elders without a second thought, if they had asked him to in July. He believed that people in positions of power would do what was right, that it was the objective of those at the top to protect those at the bottom.

Now, he held his hand up by the curse’s mouth and took the weapon that was released on his command.

And Yuuji started to laugh .  

It was easy to forget sometimes that Yuuji was broken in peculiar ways. He presented himself so well normally, minus the scars, that it wasn’t always obvious. And then other times he laughed that laugh, and Suguru…

Suguru felt a bone deep discomfort hearing it.

“You stole from the elders,” Satoru said, sliding his glasses down his nose to look at the three sectioned staff and looking genuinely shocked for once in his life. “You. Getou Suguru. You stole from the elders.”

“He stole Playful Cloud from the elders,” Yuuji clarified. He took his glasses off entirely, handing them to Satoru. There was a gleam in Yuuji’s eye that was uncomfortably vicious as he appraised the weapon Suguru now held in his hands. 

It was easy to forget, too, that Yuuji was some kind of war veteran.

“You know what it is?” Suguru asked, a little surprised. 

“Mhm, I know it,” Yuuji said. Out of his line of sight, Satoru smooshed his hair down over his head, then made some incomprehensible hand gestures, then pointed at Yuuji. For his own sanity, Suguru decided to ignore it. “What made you grab this of all weapons?” 

The question was deceptively casual, especially following laughter like that and especially paired with that gleam in his eye, but…Suguru supposed he had a right to the answer.

“I've been wanting something to supplement my hand to hand,” Suguru admitted slowly, “and I sensed it was powerful, so…”

“Okay,” Yuuji said, and then held out his hand. “Alright. I never used Playful Cloud myself, but I watched either Maki-senpai or Todo use it at least a thousand times. I bet I can replicate the movements.”

Suguru had asked the question but he still handed the weapon over with reluctance. It was still somewhat hard not to see Yuuji as a usurper. Probably because so much of what Yuuji did was above everyone else. 

Satoru stepped back as soon as the weapon passed into Yuuji’s hands, eyes keen, and Suguru followed his lead. Yuuji swung once, experimentally, the staff snapping obediently from one hand to the other. He paused, looking so natural he might as well have been born with this weapon in his hands, and closed his eye to take a deep breath in.

Yuuji switched forms, throwing the staff over his shoulder this time. He chained it into a wide swing which he turned into a continuous spin. He leapt, the staff swinging over his head, and snapped the end of it into the ground.

He stopped there, still and tense, practically a fixture of the background if it weren’t for the way his shoulders heaved with each passing breath.

“So, Yuuji,” Satoru said, voice too unnaturally bright for the moment. “Did I or did I not see Fushiguro Toji using that to beat the crap out of you?”

“You did,” Yuuji said, straightening up. He closed one hand around each end, then slung it around his shoulders. “This weapon in particular is a really good way to deal with my usual fighting style. It prevents me from getting close enough to use Cleave or Dismantle, while also preventing me from losing blood to add to Blood Manipulation.”

“And I’m sure he didn’t tell you what it was called,” Satoru said, clearly fishing.

“No,” Yuuji said. “I know what it's called because Maki-senpai knew what it was called. Which one of you told her, I couldn't tell you.”

Suguru jolted.

Other than the time Yuuji proposed telling him about his gruesome death, that was the first time he had mentioned adult Suguru at all. If it wasn’t for the wary way Yuuji still acted around him, he would have thought he died long before they could have met.

“Why would I have told your senpai the name of the weapon?” Suguru asked.

Yuuji looked at him and away again, quick and sharp. “Because your greatest weakness is the soap box you stand on, Suguru,” he said, which was hardly a satisfying answer. 

Suguru opened his mouth to respond and—

“He just called you a show-off,” Satoru announced matter-of-factly, like Suguru could have somehow missed that.

“You aren’t much better,” Yuuji said, smiling as he elbowed Satoru a bit. “You might even be worse, actually.”

“Mm.” 

“Don’t sound so pleased with yourself,” Suguru chided, feeling very irritated again.

“Anyway,” Yuuji said, removing the staff from around his shoulders and holding it out for Suguru almost like an afterthought. “I could teach you how to use it. Probably. If that’s why you were asking.” 

Suguru took the staff back, feeling better once he had it in his hands. Yuuji wasn’t quite meeting his eyes—questions Suguru didn’t really want to ask were back at the forefront of his mind. 

Why is he making this offer genuinely, and yet can’t meet my eyes? What did I use this weapon for in his world? Why did he laugh like that when I first showed it to him?

But they were going to be stuck in this weird place forever if neither of them tried to move forward. Not quite hostile but not quite comfortable either, neither enemies nor friends. Maybe if Suguru could just show him what kind of a person he was, maybe that would be enough for Yuuji to stop judging him for his future.

“Do you mean that?” Suguru asked.

“Of course,” Yuuji said.

He finally met Suguru’s gaze and held it, unflinching and earnest. 

“Okay,” Suguru said. “I’ll hold you to it.”

Maybe a connection was all they needed.

“Farther!” Yaga barked. “Focus, Yuuji! Precision!”

Yuuji hissed out through his teeth, carefully repeating the motion. One hand over the other, a spin, a swap. A swirling flame between both of his palms—like a rose, blooming. Flat fingers, direction, point, grasping with his right hand. Flipping his left hand down—two fingers and a thumb—aiming, aiming, aiming… release. 

The arrow forged in Divine Flame shot out, arcing over the open rock cliff deep in the mountainside he had been dragged to, burning and burning as it smashed into the cursed corpse running for its life below Yuuji. The corpse went up in flames, joining the bodies of the eleven before it, and Yaga hummed.

Yuuji dropped Divine Flame, glad to be done with it, and rubbed at a crick in the neck.

“You have it, Yuuji,” Yaga said, gently prodding. “It’s an ability in your arsenal—therefore, you need to be just as comfortable using it as you are anything else.”

“I never liked this one,” Yuuji admitted. “I used to wish it hadn’t been left behind at all.”

“What’s different about it?” Yaga asked, surprisingly gentle. “It’s from Sukuna, is it not? You use Sukuna’s domain. You use his other techniques.”

“That’s different,” Yuuji insisted, though he wasn’t sure how to explain it to Yaga. “Cleave and Dismantle and Malevolent Shrine…these are all things I allowed him to use. Even if I didn’t know exactly how devastating he would be using them when I allowed it. Divine Flame…the one and only time he used that in my body was when he got control of it without my say so.”

“People died?” Yaga asked, perfunctory. 

“So many.”

Yaga the teacher and Yaga the principal were very different people. Yaga the principal had been more abstract than anything else, at least to Yuuji. Yuuji knew he had been in Yuuji’s corner at least enough to allow him to attend school. The only times Yuuji saw him after his initial introduction had been briefly in the halls and at the Goodwill Exchange event. 

Yaga the teacher was surprisingly concerned with the welfare and development of his students, devoting whole mornings to private lessons and afternoons to classes. Gojo-sensei had been a different kind of teacher—better at honing students into a lethal edge once the student knew that was what they wanted. Before a student decided they needed to be stronger, Gojo-sensei was only really good at throwing so much at them that they snapped or learned they didn’t want to snap.

But this world was very different from the world Yuuji had stepped into in 2018. Pacing was a luxury and Yaga could afford it. Gojo-sensei never could.

“Then learn how to wield this technique for them,” Yaga said. “It is destructive and it is vast, yes, but it can save lives too.”

Yuuji took a slow breath in, pushed his glasses up his nose, and reminded himself that patience was a luxury he could now afford too. He readied himself for another drill—repetition was the essence of jujutsu, Yaga had said a moment ago, but Yaga raised his hand, silently signaling for Yuuji to stop.

“It’s noon,” he said. 

Yuuji blinked, taking the ancient technology people in 2006 called a cell phone the school had given him and flipping it open to check the time. It was 11:54 to be precise, but that was close enough to noon to count.

“Oh,” Yuuji said in response. “I didn’t realize.”

“Take a lunch,” Yaga suggested. “I know that Satoru isn’t here, but please try to eat with people regardless.”

Yuuji huffed out a laugh. “Eat with people? Are you worried about my social life, Sensei?”

“Truthfully, yes,” Yaga said, unphased. “Don’t forget that you told me yourself that you wanted to attend classes specifically to meet powerful allies. You can’t meet powerful allies in your dorm room.”

“Yeah, but I really just wanted—”

“Yes?”

Yuuji pressed his lips together unhappily. “I don’t belong in this world, Sensei. Everyone else sees it too. Everyone else is bothered by it too.”

Everyone except for Satoru. Not that it was like Satoru to be bothered by anything everyone else considered abnormal.

“Of course that’s all anyone sees,” Yaga said, “when all you do is hide in your room unless you are in class. You’re a jujutsu sorcerer, Yuuji. You don’t have the luxury of grief.”

Which resembled something Nanami had said to him once closely enough to be painful.

“Be young for a while,” Yaga said, patting Yuuji on the shoulder. “While you still can be. This peace won’t last forever—you should know that better than anyone.”

Yuuji took a deep breath in. “And what about Satoru and Suguru? Shouldn’t they get a chance to be young, too?” 

“Excuse me?”

“This is how it started last time,” Yuuji said, grimacing as he turned to meet Yaga’s eyes where Yaga had been in the process of leaving. “Satoru on his own missions, Suguru on his own missions, both of them gone all the time.”

Yaga’s expression twisted into something sour, though Yuuji knew that it wasn’t directed at him. “I can’t control how many missions they are given. They are special grade sorcerers—the only ones that are operational—and that means there are expectations placed on them that no one else has.”

“The only ones operational?”

“You don’t count,” Yaga said. “You have plenty of your own missions, not that anyone else really knows what they are.”

“I’m not on a mission right now,” Yuuji pointed out. “And no offense, Sensei, because I really am grateful, but I don’t need your training either. I’m very trained. I’m so trained it’s honestly harder to hold back than it is to destroy whoever my opponent is. Let me go with them at least.”

“That won’t work,” Yaga said, sighing. “For one thing, the elders don’t like that you have permission to leave right now, and they would like to avoid giving you any reasons to leave in the future. For another thing, if Suguru and Satoru can’t handle missions on their own by the end of this year, then that could prove detrimental to their careers.”

“Their careers?” Yuuji repeated, incredulously. “Sensei, what about their lives?” 

“I have another concern,” Yaga continued, almost as if he hadn’t heard Yuuji in the first place. “You would be a liability to them both, in different ways.”

“How the hell would I be a liability to either of them?” Yuuji asked, confused and a little insulted. “I can hold my own in a fight better than they can right now!”

Yaga sighed. “Emotionally, you’re a liability to them.”

“I still don’t follow,” Yuuji said, crossing his arms. He felt like Kugisaki all of a sudden, haughty and self-assured. It was strange and uncomfortable, having outgrown his friends, carrying them around inside himself like this now instead. 

Yaga sighed even deeper. “Satoru would be distracted trying to protect you, despite your competence,” he said. “Suguru would be distracted trying to trust you, despite your competence. So we circle back to the main problem—make friends.”

Yuuji grimaced, unable to argue the point this time. 

It wasn’t that he was oblivious to how Suguru acted around him. He definitely knew it had everything to do with how Yuuji treated Suguru first and nothing to do directly with the time travel situation. Yuuji was more than aware that—with his extremely limited knowledge and all—that there was a one in a million chance of preventing Suguru from becoming a notorious and nefarious curse user and treating sixteen year old Suguru like he was already a notorious and nefarious curse user wasn’t going to improve those chances. He needed friends, not enemies. Friends, not people with complicated feelings about their peers superimposing those feelings undeservingly onto them. 

Still.

“It would be easier to make friends with Suguru if he was here,” Yuuji muttered, and Yaga slapped him upside the head with absolutely no mercy. Yuuji yelped, rubbing at the spot Yaga had hit, letting out a startled, “What was that for?”

“Teenagers and their attitudes,” Yaga said, though one corner of his mouth had lifted slightly. “Go check on your other mission, at least. You are bound to verify Amanai Riko’s welfare is still acceptable.”

Yuuji stilled, feeling his eyes widening, and then very quickly grabbed his bag. When was the last time he even spoke to Riko? A week ago? Probably a week ago. 

“Shit!” he shouted.

“Language,” Yaga reprimanded him, without seeming like he particularly cared. 

“I gotta go, Sensei!” Yuuji shouted, sprinting down the path back to the school. “Thank you again for the lesson!”

Sometimes, he couldn’t help but wonder what Tengen had been thinking when she asked him to make that vow. 

Life at Jujutsu High turned out to be fairly lonely, with no classes for herself and no friends. Well, that wasn’t necessarily true—she could probably count the second years as friends, except the second years were busy all the time and she felt weird about bothering them when they all seemed so important. And sure, she was regularly given course work for the average middle school curriculum to keep herself busy with by the people in suits, but that wasn’t exactly hard. 

She missed Kuroi. She missed Kuroi like she would a limb, and yet…

There was a knock on Riko’s door.  

She blinked, overwhelmingly nervous all of a sudden. Nobody really came to her room—other than the boys helping her move her things in, she hadn’t had a visitor since. She couldn’t help but worry that it might be another assassin—she’d been put here and assigned Yuuji as guard detail because she wasn’t safe, even with Tengen refusing the merger now too. 

“It’s just me,” Yuuji’s voice said on the other side of the door, like he sensed her anxiety about who might have come for her. 

Riko straightened, once again feeling that inexplicable urge to impress Yuuji. Maybe it was because he was so badass, or maybe it was because he was so scary. Maybe it was because she had brought him here and still felt guilty about it even though he said he was fine with the arrangement multiple times. 

“Coming,” she said, sounding very cool and suave as she said it, and rose gracefully to her feet. She gave her room a once over—which involved kicking a bra under the bed hastily—and deemed it good enough for Yuuji to see it from the hall. He was a boy, anyway. She highly doubted he made his bed at all, let alone cared if anyone else did. 

When she opened the door, she found Yuuji lounging against the doorjamb, his arms crossed over his chest. He didn’t have his sunglasses on for once and it threw her off for several seconds where she just blinked into his honey brown eye. He—like Suguru and Satoru—was unnaturally attractive, with his broad shoulders and his angular face, though the sunglasses did a good job of making him look enough like an asshole that it didn’t usually bother her. 

“Hey,” Yuuji said, smiling at her in a way that made his eye dance. Well, he always smiled like that, to be fair. Actually, not always. Just…when his smiles showed any teeth they tended to have that effect on his eye, so—

“Hi,” Riko said, a little too late to be natural. “Yuuji-san.”

“Just Yuuji is fine,” Yuuji said. “I don’t really see myself as an honorific guy.” He paused, looking slightly horrified, and tacked on, “You don’t see me as an honorific guy, do you? I’ve already turned into the one guy in the group that actually reads case reports—if I’ve gotten any more mature while I wasn’t paying attention, someone really should tell me.”

“I—” Riko started, but didn’t know how she wanted to finish because…

Well, this wasn’t how Yuuji talked to her. Normally, he was all…serious and sad and vaguely mysterious. She knew that wasn’t his constant—she’d seen him around Satoru enough times to know that wasn’t his constant—but she had never heard him direct anything other than that towards her. Or…anyone aside from Satoru, to be honest.

“Um,” she said, after a suitably awkward pause where Yuuji’s expression grew more and more concerned. “No. You aren’t an honorific guy. Actually, no—uh, I think senpai might suit you?”

“Senpai? Really?” Yuuji said, the corner of his eye crinkling. “Haibara called me that and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I guess better than ‘san,’ though. I’m definitely not a ‘san’ guy.”

“No,” Riko agreed, with a slight giggle. “Not a ‘san’ guy.”

“Yet you called me Yuuji-san anyway,” Yuuji said, smile taking on a teasing lilt. “Any particular reason, or…?”

“I guess,” Riko said, shuffling slightly out of embarrassment, “you just seem…too cool to have no honorific?” 

“Too cool?” Yuuji repeated, though not like he was teasing her about it. Like he couldn’t understand why someone else might think that about him.

“Obviously,” Riko said, straightening up a little. Yuuji wasn’t like Satoru and Suguru—he wasn’t going to tease her for admitting this sort of thing. “I mean—you fought that guy, didn’t you? The one that Satoru couldn’t beat?”

“I mean, Satoru beat him,” Yuuji said. “In the end, Satoru beat him.”

“Yeah, but Satoru wasn’t beating him at first,” Riko pointed out. “And then there’s the scars.”

“Are my scars cool?” Yuuji asked, raising his one eyebrow as high as it could go. “I thought they were kind of scary, to be honest.”

“They’re cool,” Riko confirmed, and then judging by the heat she felt in her face, concluded she no longer wanted to talk about it. “Plus, the place you must have come from…”

Yuuji went a little silent and a little still. 

Stupid, stupid, stupid, Riko chided herself, suppressing a grimace. Why do you think he’s always mysterious and serious around you when you keep bringing this up? 

“It wasn’t all bad,” Yuuji said. “My world.”

“Oh, uh, no?” Riko asked, caught a little off guard. “Hadn’t all your friends died, though…?”

“Sure,” Yuuji agreed, sounding like someone that had so much time to get used to the idea that it no longer troubled him. “That part of it was rough, I’ll give you that. But it was peaceful there. Quiet. Life was starting to come back around in 2020, but everything had been shut down there for a while. You could see the stars clearer. You could go out in Tokyo in the mornings and sit on your balcony and not drown in the sounds of traffic. It was peaceful, other than the fact that it was lonely. Sometimes peaceful is nice. Maybe some people even preferred it that way.”

“I don’t know,” Riko said, thinking about how her life was technically peaceful in the same way now. Freedom to do a lot of whatever she wanted—like sleeping in late or eating junk food or whatever. It was quiet here, too—wherever Shoko lived in the girls’ dorms, she sure didn’t make a lot of noise. Mostly, her assessment about her living arrangements was that it was just lonely—lonely, and a little boring. “I wouldn’t like it, I don’t think. The quiet is nice, but there’s a point where it’s…too much?”

Yuuji studied her for a moment longer, eye assessing, and then said, “Hey. How much of a trust fund baby are you?”

Riko spluttered. “What?”

Yuuji laughed, an unexpectedly bright sound. “I mean—you are rich, right? You have rich vibes. Plus all the stuff we had to carry in here was definitely rich person bullshit.”

“I—” Riko started, before straightening her spine. She needed to defend herself here—his perception was probably just skewed because he’d spent the last two years or so being homeless. “I was well cared for, but I am not a trust fund baby.”

“So if I asked you if you owned five or more things that could be considered designer or luxury brand, the answer would be…?”

“Ex cuse you,” Riko said hotly. “That does not make me a trust fund baby. That makes me normal.” 

“Ah,” Yuuji said. “Very trust fund baby then.”

“I am not a trust fund baby!”

“If you say so,” Yuuji said, in that way that clearly indicated he didn’t believe her at all. “So if the question was if you’ve ever cooked for yourself…?”

“Why would I cook for myself?” Riko asked, genuinely confused for a few seconds. 

A moment later, she realized the error of her ways. 

“No, I mean—” she said, but Yuuji’s eyebrow was still feeling very judgmental about it. “I’m only fourteen. I don’t need to cook—that’s what adults are for. And I always had Kuroi, so—”

Yuuji interrupted her explanation with a laugh. “Okay, trust fund baby,” he said. “Don’t sweat it. You aren’t my first friend that was too spoiled for their own good—I know just what to do with you guys. Come with me.”

“Come with you? Where?” Riko asked, as he turned away. “Why?”

“To the kitchen, of course,” Yuuji said. “You’re getting a midday cooking lesson.”

Riko flushed, embarrassed. “I—maybe I don’t want to know how to cook.”

“Tough luck,” Yuuji said, taking a few more steps. When she still didn’t follow, he turned back to her. “Look, either you come on your own or I carry you, so…”

Riko stepped out of her room and closed the door behind her.

“Good choice,” Yuuji said, shooting her a thumbs up, and started leading the way again.

Riko followed after him, feeling not too different from a duckling trailing after their mother, not entirely sure where her destination was but happily waddling towards it anyway. She almost wanted to ask Yuuji what had brought this on, but she also didn’t want to say anything that might ruin his strangely good mood, either.

“Why, um,” Riko started to say, and then lost the courage to ask him anything at all a little too late to be conspicuous.

“What?” Yuuji asked, glancing over at her. 

Riko took a deep breath in. “I was just wondering, um, why you’re doing…this?”

Yuuji blinked, then looked away. “Just wanted to show a trust fund baby a bit of the real world,” he said, which wasn't a lie but certainly wasn’t the truth either. “And Satoru isn’t here, so you’re up.”

She put it together herself from there. He was here to keep her company. This was some form of pity, but fortunately well timed for him, because she desperately wanted company. Not that she would admit that.

An idea occurred to her of how she could exact a little payback for the pity. Ieiri’s comment earlier, about how Satoru was going to be head over heels for him by the end of the year paired with Yuuji’s blasè announcement of his own sexuality.

“I see,” she said, tilting her chin up and hoping it gave her a sense of being wise and all-knowing. “So you wanted to cook a meal alone with Satoru and I’m only the replacement.”

Instead of getting embarrassed, Yuuji let out a bark of laughter. “Maybe for the best,” he said. “Adult Satoru was a menace in the kitchen. I can only imagine teenage Satoru would be worse.”

“You knew him that well before?” Riko asked. She wracked her memory, trying to remember what exactly she had heard about the two of them before Yuuji came here. “He was your sensei, right?”

“Mhm,” Yuuji said. He glanced at her, evidently determining this wasn’t really what she was trying to ask, and answered her real question anyway. “Well, it wasn’t really a standard teacher-student relationship. I lived with him for a little while because I had to pretend to be dead—that’s a long story, let’s not get into it.”

“And you… cooked for him?” Riko asked, thinking that it would be a kind of creepy cherry on top of a kind of creepy sundae if he had.

Yuuji let out a startled laugh. “Him? No. Myself? Yes. He just happened to hover over my shoulder and whine about something irrelevant when I was doing it, and then it felt weird to not also make him a plate if he was going to sit there while I ate anyway. Not all of us can survive on junk food and takeout, you know!”

This aligned exactly with the sort of behavior she would expect that unrepentant attention whore to display, actually. Irritating, but a little less…creepy old man taking advantage of a student.

“So how did you learn to cook anyway?” she asked instead. 

“My grandfather—he raised me, by the way—got really sick when I was about thirteen or fourteen. ‘Course, he would have preferred it if we just ate takeout all the time and he didn’t have to rely on me because he was like that, but I learned how to take care of him anyway, which meant learning to cook. When I was home, anyway. I was… going through something back then.”

“What sort of something?” Riko asked, before remembering her manners. “Sorry—I’m not trying to pry.”

“It’s alright,” Yuuji said, but he didn’t answer her question. Whether this was because he didn’t want to or because they had arrived at the kitchen, she wasn’t sure. He started cooking as soon as he set foot in the place with a laser-like focus, opening the fridge and rooting around in it until he emerged with a variety of vegetables and a pack of meat. He opened a cabinet, and then opened four more, and then finally returned with a cutting board and a large bowl. More rummaging produced a skillet, and more rummaging after that produced a knife. 

“Start on the onion, will you?” Yuuji prompted, passing the knife, cutting board, and onion into her care.

Riko stared at all three like they might bite her if she tried to touch them. Realistically, the knife was the only object capable of such a thing. 

“You don’t know how to cut an onion,” Yuuji guessed, looking like he couldn’t decide between being teasing and being disappointed. 

“It’s the knife!” Riko protested, feeling unfairly judged. “I don’t want to cut myself by accident or anything of the sort.”

“You won’t ever learn if you don’t ever take a risk,” Yuuji said, and passed the knife to her hilt first. She still didn’t take it. “Alright, I’ll show you first,” Yuuji conceded. “I promise it’s not as hard as you seem to think it is.”

He beckoned her closer, using the knife to do it. She approached hesitantly, wedging herself between him and the fridge and trying to appear small enough that she might disappear into the background. If she was quiet enough, maybe Yuuji would forget he was trying to teach her anything. 

“Start by chopping the onion in half,” Yuuji said, demonstrating. He wielded the knife like he wasn’t afraid it was going to bite him, slicing the onion in half and discarding the remnants fearlessly. “Then you just gotta hold it like this and slice it in ribbons like that, then the other way—you try.”

“Me?” Riko asked, with the appropriate horror for someone that had just witnessed knife wizardry and now was expected to perform the same trick herself. 

Yuuji laughed at her. “You’ll be fine.”

Surprisingly she was. The onion was slippery and her minced pieces weren’t nearly as symmetrical as Yuuji’s, but they were all going to be thrown into a pot and cooked anyway. 

“What are we making?” Riko asked, once she got the hang of chopping down enough to try speaking while she did it.

“Meatballs,” Yuuji said, with an ironic half-smile—one of those ones that wasn’t quite strong enough to twist his scars into the shape of his joy, leaving him half full of sorrow and half full of life. “They’re really simple. Even Fushiguro could make them.”

“Who’s Fushiguro?” Riko asked unthinkingly.

This time Yuuji didn’t seem to mind the question, though. “My best friend,” he said. He said it with a mix of fondness and grief, an old wound that had long since scarred. Something that still itched and ached, but no longer bled.

Riko wondered if in two years she would talk about Kuroi the same way. She wondered if that was a blessing or a curse.

“What was he like?” she asked, swallowing thickly, suddenly grateful for the onion that was causing her to tear up.

“Reliable,” Yuuji said, without needing to think about it. “Cranky. Cynical. So genuine and also so unwilling to admit that to himself.”

“What happened to him?”

Yuuji paused in his chopping—he was working on the absurd amount of ginger—and then started again, like nothing had happened. “He lost himself. He died because I couldn’t lead him back home.”

Riko’s breath hitched. “Sorry,” she said, wiping at her eye with the back of her hand. “Onion.”

“It gets easier,” Yuuji said, voice gentle. “I heard your caretaker died recently too.”

“Kuroi,” Riko said, sniffing. “She was the best. She was my family.”

And now, she had Yuuji. A fair trade of lives for an unfair trade in importance to her—though maybe that wasn’t true. Yuuji had saved her life when Kuroi couldn’t. Credit where credit was due.

And Kuroi was already dead when Yuuji came here. Wasn’t it better to take advantage of that? To have one different person around instead of one less?

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Yuuji said. “Your technique—”

“It’s an equivalent exchange,” Riko blurted, before he could ask. “Someone close to me dies, and someone else from an alternate reality can travel through space and time to fulfill all the requirements I stipulate at the moment.”

“What were my requirements?” Yuuji asked, continuing to chop ginger like he wasn’t particularly bothered by this conversation.

“Save—save Gojo Satoru,” Riko said. “I didn’t know that assassin guy was around the corner. I didn’t think I was in danger, so I didn’t include myself. I didn’t even realize Kuroi had died until after.”

“Save Satoru or save Satoru from Fushiguro’s dad?”

“Fushi—didn’t you say that was the name of your best friend?”

“Yes,” Yuuji said, his mouth quirking like he was amused. “That was his dad that tried to kill you.”

“...This is all so crazy,” Riko commented.

“I know,” Yuuji said. “It’s one weird network of weird connections. Time travel makes everything worse, probably.”

“Mhm,” Riko agreed. “And it was just ‘save Satoru.’ I don't think I was thinking of Fushiguro’s… dad… specifically.”

Yuuji hummed, a strangely disconnected sound, but otherwise didn’t elaborate. “We’re going to mix up the meatballs now.”

Mixing the meatballs actually turned out to be surprisingly fun. Touching them was disgusting at first, but shaping them was weirdly relaxing. Yuuji was a good teacher too, patient and clear with his directions, and in no time at all Riko was relegated to shoulder lurking while Yuuji took over the actual cooking. 

It was all surprisingly… good. Relaxing. Like she had been straining herself more than she realized sitting alone in her room. 

“Yuuji-s—” She stopped, the word ‘san’ on the tip of her tongue. “Yuuji-senpai?”

Yuuji made a strange choking sound. “Is that sticking?”

“It suits you,” Riko declared, trying not to be self-conscious about it. 

“You don’t call Suguru or Satoru a senpai,” Yuuji pointed out.

“It doesn’t suit them,” Riko said, wrinkling her nose. “But you’re more…”

Mature? Brotherly? Old?

None of these words sounded particularly complimentary.

“You’re older,” Riko settled on. 

Yuuji laughed. “By one year. Is that the real qualification for senpai-ship? You have to be seventeen or older?”

“Yes,” Riko said, sticking stubbornly to the stand she had decided to take. “Um—I wanted to ask you—”

You said you were a vessel once. 

The words died before she could speak them. 

“If I asked you to teach me…I don’t know, jujutsu stuff—could you?”

Yuuji raised one eyebrow at her. “Jujutsu stuff?”

“Like…how to use a cursed technique or defend myself. Stuff like that.”

Her ears felt unbearably hot. 

“Do you want to be a sorcerer, Riko?” Yuuji asked, his eyebrow climbing even further. 

“I don’t think I can be,” Riko said, shaking her head, “but if anything ever happens and you aren’t able to be there with me—”

“You can be whatever you want to be,” Yuuji interrupted, though not harshly. He leaned forward, elbows on the counter, and pressed his forehead into his knuckles. “I could hardly judge you for choosing to be a sorcerer, anyway.”

“...Wouldn’t it be dangerous, though?” Riko asked. 

“Yeah,” Yuuji said, and smiled a thin, sad sort of smile. “But isn’t that kind of the point?”

Riko stared at him.

“Worries seem smaller when you’re hurting, at least for me,” Yuuji explained. “I dwell less on the things I’ve lost.”

“I get it,” Riko said, looking down at her hands. “I just…I don’t think I'm strong enough to do what you guys do.”

“You are,” Yuuji said. “Not every sorcerer has power like Getou Suguru and skill like Gojo Satoru and talent like Ieiri Shoko. Most of us are just persistent, stubborn, and willing to put in a little hard work. You can do that easily, Riko. You do that everyday.”

“Is that what you do?” Riko asked.

Yuuji made a strange noise that was almost a laugh and almost a wheeze, and closed his eye and leaned his head back. “If I’m being honest, I think I have a little more power, skill, and talent than the average sorcerer these days too,” he said. “But when I started? That was all hard work and persistence.”

Riko considered him for a long moment.

“So, would you? Teach me, I mean.”

Yuuji blinked his eye open at her in surprise, and then his face split into a slow, ironic smile. “I feel like I’ve been getting that question a lot lately.”

“It’s the senpai in you,” Riko said. “You seem like a good person to learn things from.”

“This is weird as hell,” Yuuji declared, but it was more for himself than her. “But I’ll teach you. I don’t have a clue how good I’ll be at it, but…leave it to me!”