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Chapter Text

April arrives at Jujutsu High in a flurry of pink cherry blossoms and sheets of broad blue sky, but Yuuta does not wake to the sound of the season's coming. Instead he startles to a chill against his skin and the ache of stiffness, his muscles twitching uncontrollably as he gasps in the stilted air. His voice is deafeningly loud and quiet at the same time. Only moments before had he been dreaming of flying. 

“You’ve never met my best friend, have you?” Gojo said, so put together. Hawaiian at the neckline, sandals made for sandy shores. Thick sunglasses; the weather’s hot where they’ll be going, hot as the sun might blind. 

“No,” Yuuta had answered, and reached to take his hand when he realized it was already firmly grasped in another’s. 

The odd noise in his head is one both familiar and foreign to him while he’d been dreaming. He thinks he may still be dreaming, as the world is dark around him and the chill in his skin is all encompassing. But then senses tingle in the pads of his fingertips as he presses them to the cold surface of his clammy palm, and sweat breaks out across his skin just as icey. He was dreaming. This is not that dream. 

“Let go,” she said earnestly. “Let go.”

“I can’t,” Yuuta responded,

“You’ve never met him, have you?” Gojo pressed on. He laughed an odd and endearing laugh that Yuuta reciprocated. The speakers blared, calling all passengers to Gate A1 for Flight to Nicer Beach.

“Let go,” she said. Who was she anyways?

“Lets board first,” Yuuta admonished. She shook her head crossly. Yuuta fumbled through his pockets for a ticket stub, coming up empty.

“Don’t you have it on your phone?” Gojo asked. “I always keep my tickets on my phone. Less wasteful that way, and I’m getting old. Always losing things in my jeans.” 

“I can’t board without a ticket,” Yuuta said faintly. He watched as Gojo took his place in line. “Gojo?”

The noise is incoherent - a scramble of spiraling thoughts in his head maybe, even though it has a lilt that is charming and familiar. It sounds like the croon of a song, then flat-lines, then rises in pitch to deadly screaming; so strong and forceful that it floods Yuuta’s body like a command. 

It’s a feminine noise, he realizes. It’s her voice. She lifts him up, as if her pleas - please, please, please - are threads tied to the meat of his heart pulling him upwards with her to an empty room he can make out just barely and blurry at the edges. The ten tonne weight in the pit of his stomach tugs at the soft flesh of his ribs, trying to breach it. 

“I’ll save you a spot!” Gojo shouted from afar. Yuuta took his bag off, scouring its contents and coming up empty. There was nothing in there at all. What was he supposed to pack? Where were they going? Did he bring his passport?

“Let go.” Rika said. She sounded very sad. 

“I can’t, I-” Yuuta said, looking down at his hand. 

Agonizing pain tears through him - that does it, it’s the pain that truly sparks the flame, his sweat like gasoline lighting up his body in a spread of vicious wildfire. Yuuta screams as he begins to wake, that odd voice joining him in a chorus, his twin, her cry dying in his throat just as his eyes flicker to life. His scream echoes back at him, as does an odd ringing, and when his body begins to shake in wild tremors the tunnel of darkness clangs, all hard edges, all metal . It’s so, so cold. He’s freezing with it, dotted vision making little sense of the black ceiling as sensation slowly returns to his fingers and toes like trickles of water to a starving man. There is little space to squeeze his arm past the side of his body. There is even less of a gap between his nose and the top of his confinement. 

“I love you,” Yuuta said to her. He had meant to say, “I think I’ve lost my ticket.”  

The line moved, Gojo’s body a dot, a star. 

“I know,” Rika replied, joining him. 

The ten tonne weight pulses through Yuuta, released into the air so suddenly it makes him feel all at once an inexplicable weightlessness. The odd imbalance in his body yanks him forward, his forehead crashing into the top of the darkness. And then just like that, as awareness seeps into his thoughts about who he is and where he is and how he- how is he- he screams ! He lashes out against the cage, his knee slamming into the low surface, strength returning to his fingers as he curls them into a fist and slams, again, again, again-

A grating, screeching noise pulls him into a floodlight and he gasps, the breath crisp and painful over his chattering teeth. Someone is looking at him. He can’t yet make out who it is. The light is blinding and painful. He gulps madly for air again.

“Oh, hell,” they swear, backing away. “Fucking hell it’s been 3 months - Shoko-san, you were right, you were right he’s alive-” 

Yuuta wakes up in spring. He didn’t think he’d wake up at all. 

*

Shibuya is a dead zone; its survivors herded around the brink of that atomized space, peering into the void with disbelief and hysteria still trying to make sense of what happened between Halloween and Christmas. Well, Christmas is only a few days away, but ash flakes like snow and gathers thick enough to clot the storm drains and in place of catchy jingles are the unforgettable wail of sirens, likely to blare well into the morning. 

Inumaki still has every funny little human consciousness wrapped around his finger; the living ones, of course. It was his job during the games. He continues to keep them in line even as sorcery’s brightest individuals are laid out on stretchers beneath him for immediate care: form a line, exit south, stay calm, don’t panic - round and round his head woven so tight the words bleed him something nasty. 

Gojo Satoru’s body catches his attention below, where Maki is screaming Yuuta’s name. She is hunched over him angry, resentful even, and it takes a momentous effort from Miguel and Larue to pull her off. 

“Five minutes,” Arata Nitta can be heard faintly amongst them, the spark of his cursed energy like a firecracker across the dead man’s skin. “It’s well past that now, but we can hope to try. We can always hope to try.” 

Inumaki watches. He takes off his mask, his gaze locked onto Gojo’s forehead scar. There is no indication that Yuuta was even there at all.

Still he whispers, daring to hope, “ Come back. ”

*

Panda’s father is gone, which is why he takes up knitting. 

It’s the most logical conclusion that he comes up with the night that Sukuna falls, wrapped up in Inumaki’s arms as police sirens fill the air and smoke drifts and canopies the stilted atmosphere. He smells human fear and tastes salt on their tongues, screams and wails of agony that have very little to do with sorcery and much more to do with the sheer implausibility and scale of the death surrounding them. Sukuna’s amorphous composition is somewhere in the concrete, possibly absorbed in cement, possibly blown to ash by the wind. It’s of no concern to him, because he is a Panda, but in the grand scheme of things the victory was pyrrhic and they’d all been rather grateful for having won at all.

“It would be the perfect downtime hobby,” he says to Inumaki, seemingly startling him out of a shock. “And a tribute of sorts. Yaga never passed down the Cursed-Corpse technique to me. He told me he wouldn’t because he loved me.”

“I’m sorry.” He doesn’t see Inumaki’s face because it’s too far up above his head, but his hands are large and all encompassing in his vision, and they’re shaking just as vigorously as the hands of humans trying to vault police cars and take photos and call their dead parents. 

“Don’t be,” Panda says, and after a while he is lifted onto Inumaki’s shoulders and carried into a sleek black car. Ijichi watches them closely in the mirrorview, as Inumaki protects Panda’s vulnerably small form from being squished tightly between the unconscious figures of Yuuji and Fushiguro. “I’m just a panda.” 

Not a day later is Panda sifting through Yaga’s things for a trace of something to remember him by. The letters on his desk are not yet coated with fine dust, though the frequency by which the pile stacks high and higher sends a stab of something sickly through Panda’s stomach. Administration scrambles to configure a decent plan of action for the revival of the school without Yaga’s permissions, and their traditional ways of adhering to the chain of command only bring about more delays in the reinstatement of the Jujutsu school. Among half-written documents of experimental curriculums are also proposals to Jujutsu Headquarters of policy reform, many of which appear to be written and rewritten, and rewritten again. 

A knock at the door distracts Panda from his musings as Gakuganji enters the room and, as if surprised by Panda’s being here at the principal’s office, takes two great strides back, colliding with the wall. 

“You,” he starts, but fails to find the words. Panda opens the tall drawer at the side of Yaga’s desk and finds to his pleasure a colorful array of yarns. They do not speak for a while, though Gakuganji takes a step closer and remains standing beside the guest couch. 

After a while he says, as if to explain his presence at the school, “A new principal is to be appointed by the board. Without one the college will go to shambles.”

“There are still members of the board,” Panda returns thoughtfully. 

“Of course.” Gakuganji draws himself up. “The Three Families continue to be the mainstay of Japanese Jujutsu society. They are only Two now, though they may introduce a new governing family to uphold the distinctions of their traditionalist dogmas.”

The unwritten reformation policies in Panda’s hands become rather cold all of a sudden. Gakuganji himself observes the way in which Panda remains stoically unmoved from his father’s seat, his eyes softening to something akin to guilt. 

“As the Jujutsu Headquarters' only surviving member, my recommendations for the new board members will go directly to the clan leaders.”

“Do you still have their trust?” Panda says. 

“I killed for them.” Gakuganji responds. “That was an ultimate act of loyalty. Whether or not I divulged the secret of your creation was not important. It died with Yaga, and it will die with me, and they are content to hear it.”

Panda relaxes into his seat. “I see,” he says. 

“With that said, it is tantamount that my recommendations are not… far fetched, so to speak.” Gakuganji continues. “I will be recommending Atsuya Kusakabe, Mei Mei, and Okkotsu Yuuta.” 

“Hm,” Panda says, his lip curling. “A supposed coward, a mercenary with a penchant for luxuries, and the comatose descendant of Michizane.”

“Do you understand?” Gakuganji says, almost forcefully. A desperate note in his voice sings its way to Panda’s core. He is asking for forgiveness. 

Panda slides forward a manila envelope to the center of the desk, one that he knows, that Yaga had once told him, was of great importance to the future of Jujutsu High. Gakuganji relaxes, as if a great weight was lifted from his shoulders. He takes the envelope. Panda observes the frailness of his figure, the lines of age mottling his skin, like if the wind blew too harshly at his body he would drift away.  

“You hold no animosity towards me,” Gakuganji pauses at the door before he leaves. 

“I have no reason to hate the knife,” Panda replies. 

Although a principal is not nominated for several weeks after their conversation, Gakuganji’s hand in the reinstatement of Jujutsu High makes a noticeable difference on campus as, only a few days after Sukuna’s death, a number of administrative roles previously filled by the deceased are now occupied by the living. 

Those are easy roles to fill, Gakuganji writes to Panda. Sorcery professors will be a far more difficult gamble with what time we have left before next semester.

That, and Panda will not teach classes, despite how hard Inumaki tries to coax him into giving it a shot. He’s just like Gojo after all, Inumaki insists - what with the teasing and the pranks, they’re both black and white too, how about that! - in different places, of course. He doesn’t ask too much about how he’s faring without Yaga, which is very sensible of him but, in all truthfulness, Panda would rather him be straightforward about the whole thing. Yaga was, after all, headmaster before father, and sorcerer beyond all other titles. He was meant to die, in the way all sorcerers become sorcerers to die as sorcerers, and Panda didn’t die that day but he surely will in time at the hands of a curse or the inevitable expiry of his core.

“There must be other substitutes,” he says to Inumaki as they get to work making a slipknot. The large courtyard just outside the dormitory common rooms is just beginning to thaw from the frigid grasp of winter, and the cold is mild enough to bear. “Higuruma’s been suspended from practicing law since his trial was scheduled, so he’s been largely unoccupied. Gakuganji offered him a teaching position at our school.”

Inumaki sets down his crochet kit on the grass. “He doesn’t seem right for teaching though, does he? And he only manifested his abilities during the Culling Games - he might be more preoccupied with going back to court than taking on a couple of kids for a martial arts class. I’d sooner see him on the Board of Education than at the board educating, if you know what I mean.”

He was a lawyer, Panda thinks begrudgingly. He probably possesses credentials far too impressive and unrelated to teaching sorcery, but that would mean admitting that Jujutsu High has a lack of teachers and a surprising influx of students to teach. The second years insist that they do not need to be taught what they’ve already learned through their hands-on experiences in combat, deliberating on the subject of whether any sorcerer would even come close to having the same talents or skills as their former teachers. Their discussions, many of which Panda bear witness to, most frequently escalate between Yuuji and Fushiguro as it becomes clear not all of their arguments are based objectively on the hopes of future students. Then again, as they both know, sorcery has always been about selfish desires. At least, that’s what they tell themselves.

“How about Miguel?”

“Africa.” Inumaki signs, pulling his slipknot tight against his hook. Panda’s paws are too fat for the yarn; his third attempt at his own knot fails miserably and he throws it to the ground. Inumaki pulls it through for him, increasingly forgiving. “Though last I heard it was just to see his family and he may come back, seeing as how bad the situation is over here.”

“Well,” Panda says after a while. “I’m fun in a spar, Toge, or at least I used to be. I don’t know about teaching things I don’t even like studying.”

“Me neither. I was asked, too, and I can barely talk.”

“Maki?” 

“Fun in a spar, like you,” Inumaki repeats Panda’s own words back to him. “Not particularly good at teaching, like you.”

They don’t discuss Yuuta as a possibility, not yet at least. And there’s not much to talk about since he’s been… asleep for so long. Panda thinks about sleep oddly - for humans, it’s restorative. For cursed corpses like him, they only function as another way to conform to human society. Shoko assumed the odd nature of Yuuta’s condition was a byproduct of Arata Nitta’s cursed technique, but did not have the heart to tell the first-year what he may have done.

“His cursed energy signal is still present,” she said to the second-years when pressed about Yuuta’s condition. “Though his body seems to be well beyond the grave. I don’t understand it. We will have to preserve him in the mortuary. Perhaps stretch out his limbs once in a while, to keep his muscles from shrinking.” 

“You want to keep him alive,” Panda realized, Maki following up with an abrupt and angry, “You’re fucked in the head, Shoko. He’s not even vegetative he’s just- he’s- he’s so clearly DEAD!” 

“No,” Shoko said distantly, twirling a curl of her hair. “Yes, maybe. I am a doctor for the cursed, after all. Not the human.”

“But we are human,” Inumaki signed.

“Are… we?” she said, her eyes doleful and sad. “Well, we certainly try to be.” 

Yuuta has no legal living family, and so naturally Jujutsu Headquarters took this as a sign to mean his body belonged to the school. Panda thinks of him: not living, not dead, not vegetative, not comatose. Some odd in-between of a brain-hop stuck. Somewhere. Stuck in something unexplainable. 

As for their professor’s corpse - the Gojo clan made it clear that tradition would preserve him in a burial mound among other Gojo greats, and that he would certainly not be buried amidst the hodgepodge of other mid-level sorcerers laid to rest at the school. 

Panda was in the surgical room during the transfer process: unsurprisingly a confoundingly uncomfortable procedure, even for something so inhuman as a cursed corpse. How could it have not been? Amati fled the room in abject horror. Inumaki threw up his fish cake into a steel bowl of cleaning solution. Maki watched defiantly, as if Yuuta was only feigning sleep as Shoko’s scalpel made the necessary incisions across his forehead. She could never decide whether she wanted him dead or alive.

That was the last time Panda had seen her. Sitting opposite the occupied autopsy table, her slender legs long and stretched out under her, Inumaki’s fingers tangled in her own. Without glasses, she appeared younger. With the burn scars though, her face was a constant irritation of swelling and pain. And yet she was alive, and that made her very beautiful. 

“I would like to do other things,” Panda says abruptly, drawing Inumaki away from the Youtube tutorial they’ve been watching together for the past twenty minutes. “Other than sorcery.” 

“What do you mean, Panda?” Inumaki signs. “We do loads of things together. Remember that time we went to Koenji, just for a bowl of ramen?” 

“I mean I want to stop.” Inumaki’s hands stilled, his face a twisted knot of emotion.

Panda presses on. “I’m tired, Inumaki. Maybe it’s the lack of cores in me. Maybe it’s the danger. Maybe it’s the loss. That I wasn’t expecting things to work out perfectly, but I didn’t expect this.” He looks down at his paws. 

“Is knitting… helping?” Inumaki signs after a while. 

“I think so.” Panda replies, staring down at his hands. “It’s helping me make up my mind.”

*

Inumaki doesn’t feel the bruising pain in his knees until he gets up and even then the blurring of his vision is far more distracting than the shake of his bones. As for his throat: well, that’s a foregone conclusion. There are bruises mottled around his neck like a brand, clawing up the underside of his jaw, thinning his skin to something translucent as trails of sticky saliva-clotted blood marks the edges of his lips in a wobbly frown. 

He’s been coughing for days on end, no rhyme or reason. Where the blood stops, the bile starts. Where the bile stops, the sting of stitches around the stump of his arm begin to scream. 

While they were in the heat of things at Shibuya, either deep in the dredges of a fight or the responder to many casualties, it had not hurt then. Now, as he affixes his puppet arm back into his socket and concentrates his cursed energy into thin points along his shoulder, it is as if the fear and fury rush back into his blood to remind him. 

Inumaki stares at himself in the mirror, tracing the image of his neck there upon his cool reflection so that he cannot hurt his throat anymore than the coughing has. He doesn’t remember a time where he had spoken and been so thoroughly caught in the throes of the backlash that his own body tried to kill him - but that was before Sukuna raised a bubble of hell around Shibuya and ripped his arm clean off his body. Sent the vibrations of Malevolent Shrine through him so viscerally that it felt like claws were peeling through his skin, looking for his heart. And maybe they were because Sukuna didn’t reap his soul that day: he turned Inumaki inside out instead, looking for something, searching for something Inumaki didn’t even know he had.

And then finding it, had discarded him promptly. Disappointed in what he discovered.

Sukuna tilted his head. A look of recognition flitted across his face. Tendrils of shadow curled over his shoulders, draped heavily over him like a lover, drawing back like a friend, hovering gently like a father.

“Ah,” he said, the way one would react to the answer of an unimportant question. It shocked him to hear the curse speak like they were well acquainted. “You don’t know who you are.” 

It was true. Inumaki couldn’t remember much of his past. Not like his past mattered much anyways; it was his future that was important, or the future of others , to be more precise. He had to be there, to take charge of something, to save someone, because he had the ability to do so and the willingness to do it. 

And he did just that; saved a lot of people that day. 

Inumaki took off the mask, gaze locked onto Gojo’s forehead scar. There was no indication that Yuuta was even there at all.

Just not the people that mattered most. 

Shoko has no clear answer for Inumaki about the unexplained backlash without understanding its original source. She chalks it up to his puppet arm and the imbued cursed energy rejecting Inumaki’s own unique signature; cursed prosthetics are still relatively new in research, and a highly specific focus of select few countries willing to give their beta-tested models away to worthy recipients. 

“It will take a lot of patience,” she says, “and even more effort, to get it to function in any way as a normal arm. And even then it will not be the same.” 

Inumaki curls and uncurls his wooden bones, stretches with it, leans into it as the training grounds populate with students and Maki and him dance around each other like two wary cats. He cannot tell if she moves impossibly fast, or if he’s just been slowing down ever since that fight. 

Her polearm twists and brings the wind with it, a flurry of calculated strikes Inumaki stumbles through. His footwork is slow, his balance is off. The puppet arm is lighter than his meat and bones, but its cursed energy is heavier and disproportionately balanced like a ball and chain swinging haphazardly off his shoulder joint. He leaps into a backflip, Maki’s spear tip grazing his chin. 

“Spin, ” he spits weakly. Maki grits her teeth as her hand jerks, her body contorting into a twist, and before she leans fully into the cursed command she throws , her aim strong and true. The spear flies forward and Inumaki swerves out of the way as it burrows straight into a chink in his prosthetic. He is thrown backwards instantly, thrashing as the cursed energy in the ball joint rapidly unravels - his focus has wavered and the link between mind and external body broken. It happens so fast that they can barely register the noise at his arm to be not the snap of bone, but the splintering groan of wood as Maki’s spear cleaves through the puppet arm and embeds itself into the dewy grass louder than the thud of Inumaki’s body. Wind pushes through his lungs, a whistling rush of it through his teeth and then a vacuum, as the lack of air paralyzes his body in the dirt. 

He lies in the grass defeated. The puppet arm jolts, recognising the absence of its master. It clicks, moving through the grass like a snake, all the while being watched by his opponent. The puppet joint reasserts itself against the groove of Inumaki’s shoulder socket, smooth as butter, mending naturally. It falls silent when rejoined. All the while Inumaki stares at the sky, wondering when he became so weak. 

“Maki-san,” Fushiguro reproaches as she stands over Inumaki’s body. The polearm flies into her hand. She draws a slow and gentle line across the skin of Inumaki’s bruised and hollow throat. It tickles and stings, and he coughs weakly under her. “Maki-san! ”

“That was poor,” she ignores him, her calm stare fixated on Inumaki’s neck. This phrase, which is so often accompanied by the teasing grin Maki has only ever shared between them, rings solemnly in his ear. “And now, you’re dead.” 

He hates the arm. He hates to need it, but anger blurs his vision into a blind rage as he sits up, yanks it forcefully from the socket and throws it to the ground once again, where the impact of his body has made a crater in the muddy green. The training ground becomes a blur as the white stripes of the running track meld into one and he walks away from it, his whole body tingling with the ache of soreness and humiliation. Just out of the corner of his eye Nobara has put down her hammer and is yelling something incoherent to Maki. He doesn’t stick around to find out what; lets his feet carry him towards the boy’s room, to the squeak of open stalls shifted by a strong wind that’s found its way through the ajar door, banging it shut against the confusion in Yuuji’s eyes pinned to the concrete walls of his new enclosure.

Oh, blood. 

It’s thicker this time. Like spitting out a clot. Inumaki just barely has time to collapse over the sink before he hurls, feeling what’s left of his energy draining from his skin, his stomach upended despite not having eaten at all. He coughs and chokes, his Adam's apple jumping from the gag, one clammy hand reaching for the wall to steady himself and cutting his skin on a crack in the mirror. It’s the strongest pull he’s felt - so intense that sparks ignite with every blink, and the tiles on the bathroom floor begin to shear left in doubled vision. He gasps, throwing up one more time, like he could afford to lose more blood - does he have any more left to lose?

Vertigo takes him and Inumaki’s forehead slams into the porcelain sink, a head-splitting pain that topples him completely motionless to the floor. Banging, banging, banging noises from behind him. He must have locked the door to keep the rest of his classmates away. Maki’s voice as it calls his name bellows and blurs in his ear. By the time she breaks the lock, he’s out cold.

They all ask him later, when he comes to, about Shibuya. Pester him for the small details, for things they overlooked, for all the words that he had spoken. Oddly enough, it’s Nobara who catches him off guard as he details the events leading up to finding Panda. 

“I saw you up on that bit of broken highway,” she says, perking up. “I thought you were just coordinating civilians into groups, but by then there was nobody there that wasn’t a sorcerer.”

Maki is screaming Yuuta’s name.

“You spoke.” Yuuji’s eyes narrow at the flicker of emotion that crosses Inumaki’s face as he remembers. “What did you say?”

“Who did you say it to?” Maki demands.

“-we can hope to try, we can always hope to try!”

“Did it work?” Fushiguro asks softly. Inumaki scowls, his head still woozy with RCT, his memory sharp with the helpless emotions that came flooding in with it. 

“No,” he signs, his movements sharp and cold. “He was already dead.”

Out of an abundance of caution, Kusakabe does not assign Inumaki any missions after the incident. Instead, he grills him on his middling to lamentable academic performance which, after Mahito’s inception, had since plateaued into a nebulous grade average that no Window bothered to reassess. In fact - since Mahito’s coming about there was not much focus on any student’s academic progress and now, with most if not all immediate threats neutralized, it seemed rather pertinent to address the elephant in the room that was higher education. At least pertinent to Inumaki, incapacitated from his throat injuries. Despite Yuuji’s abysmal grades, the math lessons he’d been sorely lacking since last semester were nowhere to be found on his schedule. 

“So you’ve got a 6 in… academics,” Kusakabe starts, sitting Inumaki down. “Well, that’s a very broad category. Is this how we give out grades in this school? Is that a hard average across all nine subjects?”

“Shake,” Inumaki answers, not quite knowing it himself. 

“Inumaki, do you know anything about higher education?” 

“I… haven’t given it any thought.” Inumaki signs. Kusakabe motions to his phone apologetically, and Inumaki types it out for him. 

“Well, you’re a third year now, so it’s about time we started talking about this.” Kusakabe scratches his head. “Jujutsu university isn’t a thing - I mean, Jujutsu High is a front, in many ways. Your current capabilities as a sorcerer are already more than decent, but in the current state you’re in I wouldn’t be surprised if you wanted to think about your other options.” 

Inumaki blinks. Kusakabe scratches his head again, proceeding with, “As you know, the world of sorcery has a scant few professional combatants, and our current system is frankly lackluster due to the rarity of jujutsu sorcerers. You will be going pro on a pay-per-mission basis, which will require extensive use of your voice. I understand that among our sorcerers your ability has a much higher frequency of backlash regardless of curse level.”

A small, intrusive thought slithers its way into Inumaki’s brain all of a sudden - an old memory, pleased by the thrum of Kusakabe’s words. But I’ve always loved your voice, it sighs.

“You want me to give up?”

“You, like any other sorcerer, understand the severity of this job.” Kusakabe continues, pressing on even as his jaw clenches at Inumaki’s words on his screen. “Your academic grades aren’t particularly noteworthy which I’m assuming is because you lack interest in pursuing a more typical career - for your health, you might want to consider it.” 

“I’m fine,” Inumaki insists, knowing how flimsy of a retort it is. 

Kusakabe folds his hands together. “This is just my personal opinion. I know it has no bearing on your final decision, but if you’ve ever needed a teacher’s advice, this is mine.”

“I can’t just,” Inumaki pauses, blinking slowly again. “I can’t just leave.”

The gears in Inumaki’s head have long stopped turning. He stares into the palms of his hands, tracing lines and curves in his flesh. The room has suddenly gotten quiet, and in the silence he realizes he’s never really thought that far ahead, about his long term goals and things like that. What’s the point of thinking about the future when the present is always trying to kill you, anyways?

“Contrary to popular belief, you have a choice. Perhaps now, more than ever.” Kusakabe says finally, almost fiercely. “Inumaki - the current state of the Jujutsu world is in shambles, and Jujutsu High is being called in to restructure our society the way we see fit. If there is no current way to relieve you of this burden, I will find a way. Or else, what’s the point of me being your teacher?”

Still about as much of a teacher as Gojo had been, Inumaki thinks dryly. Kusakabe continues, but his words fall on deaf ears as Inumaki sinks lower into his seat, the thought of abandoning the only thing he knows still harping on his brain. Who is he anyways, without the sigils on his mouth? Who could he possibly become without them?

Either way, there is an unspoken but demanding pressure on him to perform in some area if not combat, and Inumaki finds his schedule filled with basic school subjects that he can’t remember Jujutsu High ever taking seriously. Without Yaga at the head of operations structuring the paths of his high school students, the rest of the non-magical faculty have seemed to assume that if there is no going back for Inumaki, then he must try to conform, and then he will retire his rather short sorcery career, pushed out slowly from the sorcery world. And of course, in this outcome, he must never reveal sorcery to the common folk, lest be punished by way of secret execution. In some ways, it’s more humiliating than any injury he’s ever had.

He’s only a few nights into his solo studies when the door opens to the common room and one of the second-years enters. It’s Fushiguro, pale as a leaf and shaking like one caught in a hailstorm. His uniform is dripping wet and his eyes are wild and unfocused. Behind him Yuuji has a grasp on his shoulders as he guides the other boy gently into the center of the room, to sit silently on the couch while Fushiguro looks at his fingers and begins to zone out.

“Takana?” Inumaki says from the dining table. Fushiguro begins to mutter incoherently.  

“Yeah,” Yuuji responds slowly, unsure of the words that eventually leave his mouth. “Yeah, he’s gonna be okay.”

The next day, his chair at the desk is occupied. Fushiguro writes out a mathematical formula on a scrap sheet of paper, and noiselessly acknowledges Inumaki’s intrusion as he slips into the space beside. They write for a while in silence, sharing a textbook between them. 

“Did Kusakabe,” Fushiguro asks after a while of silence. “Did he talk about… other career prospects to you?”

Inumaki nods. He shuts his eyes. 

“Do you think,” he says, “It’s just to clear his conscience?” 

“I think,” Inumaki responds honestly, as unsettling as it may be. “he’s just trying to do his job.”

“I can fight,” Fushiguro says, breathing out slowly. “I can fight, I have to I just, I need some time.” 

Fushiguro is a whip smart student, his body a temple and his mind raped by a Heian-era curse. It would not have been possible for him to focus, even despite being pulled from missions to clear his mind - he tries, with great difficulty, he really tries. But there are moments in the writing and the reading where Fushiguro lapses into a silence that isn’t accompanied by jargon muttered under his breath and when Inumaki looks up, the companionable background noise gone, he sees Fushiguro watching his hand curl and uncurl and curl again. 

“Fushiguro,” Inumaki will say, in a tone that is gently soothing. And Fushiguro will lean over, his breathing shallow and intoned, to whisper: “I always see him in the corner of my eye.” 

*

Inumaki is spitting blood into a toilet one night when the door opens and a noise that sounds like Yuuji drags itself into the room with a groan. Murmurs rise in the common area, Inumaki leant back on his haunches on the tiled floor as he listens to an argument escalate and de-escalate. He can’t be bothered to make out what they’re saying amidst the pain in his throat but eventually, their voices rise. 

“- gonna tell you tomorrow, we just don’t have enough information right now to be sure-” 

“This is stupid, the academic thing, you’re not being forced to study, because you’re not all that fucked up like him and I, are you! They’re just lying to us because they think we’re damaged goods-”

“It’s not about that,-”

“ Tch, of course it is-!”

Yuuji's voice explodes with noise as he responds, and it shakes the room in trembling vibrations. “Look I don’t wanna see you like that again , okay? I don’t wanna see you like that ever again! And if it means sitting in the common room for 6 months or whatever Shoko told us, then you’re gonna do that and I’m going to punch every four-armed freak rising out of that pit in Shibuya until they’re all fucking dead!”

Inumaki bursts out laughing. His voice echoes in the bathroom stall, and he can almost hear the jolt of Yuuji’s shoulders as the boy realizes he’s been heard. 

“Pit?” Fushiguro stills. Yuuji swears, loud and scathing. He must have kicked the couch with the heel of his foot in frustration. “What pit , Yuuji?” 

“Don’t do this right now,” he hears Yuuji plead. There’s a scuffle across the floor, a huff and then a shift in weight across the couch. “Not tonight. I’m gonna tell you stuff tomorrow, like I said, I promise, alright ? ” 

Fushiguro’s voice is barely there, but Inumaki hears it through his heart: complete and utter helplessness.

“Alright,” he sighs.

Yuuji must not have been able to tell him the next day, because Inumaki spends the morning with Panda and returns in the late afternoon to Fushiguro at his desk, whittling at his eraser with a blade and a distant look in his eye. Fushiguro has sharpened the eraser to a fine point, tickling the surface of his paper idly. The literacy comprehension sheet in front of him remains blank, likely since morning. Panda himself did not seem to be privy to the information that Yuuji mentioned and Maki - well. Maki leaves in the early morning, and returns late at night. Inumaki does not bother catching up to her; if she has something to say to him, she’ll say it. 

“What a let down.” Fushiguro mutters, his tone bitingly sharp. “Him and Nobara are doing overtime. We’ll just have to wait.” 

“Shake,” Inumaki responds. They sit in silence for a while, neither moving for their homework until Fushiguro kicks the table hard in his petulance. It rattles. Inumaki can’t help himself - what with the ridiculousness of it all, the studying, the bitterness, the waiting game - like they were marching to death and not just simply lost in indecision wasting time. He laughs again much louder this time and Fushiguro looks at him wide eyed, bordering furious, as Inumaki gets out of his chair and slaps his shoulder.

“Come on,” Inumaki signs. “ Let’s get some air.” 

Fushiguro thinks they’re going to spar, which is why he changes into his training gear before they leave, but as soon as they hit the open courtyard Inumaki takes a left turn around the boy’s bathroom towards the back of the cafeteria, where the greenhouse awaits them. 

“Inumaki, did you seriously-” Fushiguro scowls, and then comes to halt. Inumaki squats in front of a planter, gloves already on, feeling the heat of the sun begin to bead sweat across his skin. He turns to Fushiguro, as much of a smile he can muster painting his face. Pressing on towards a much more important subject, Inumaki cants his open palm slightly to inspect the sapling’s health. 

“I’ve been growing tomatoes. You can help me transplant these seedlings into larger cells.”

“What-,” Fushiguro says, taken aback. He shakes his head confusedly. “Senpai, what are we doing here?”

“Hobbies, Fushiguro.” Inumaki explains, looking up at him. “Gotta get you back into some, okay? Or else your brain is going to go bust again.” Fushiguro flinches at the teasing jab, but he knows better than to scowl.

Inumaki has Panda to thank for the idea, as it had come to him while they were knitting their troubles away in Yaga’s study. Panda, who doesn’t quite know what to do with himself now that he’s lost his ability to perform combatively. Panda, a frankensteined labor of love that scarce few would be able to truly understand. Panda, who's taken to shouting - Goddamn! - like his father when Inumaki puts on a Dodgers game and they watch Shohei Ohtani hit a home run. Inumaki realizes he likes the version of Panda outside of sorcery a lot more than he likes the version of him in it. 

“I don’t know if I enjoy gardening that much,” Fushiguro says, but as he digs out the seedlings gently, turning soil in his hands, Inumaki knows he’s more on task than he’s been the past two weeks. 

“Good,” Inumaki says. “Greenhouse is mine, anyways.” 

So Fushiguro puts his mind to a hobby as Inumaki turns to his when need be, and before they know it the once grueling task of studying for term-end exams and quizzes isn’t nearly as arduous as it once was. Inumaki doubles his efforts into his studies and there is a noticeable change over the next few days to his throat condition, astonishingly good changes: by the end of the week he wakes up without a strain in his voice as he mutters gibberish through his teeth. Blearily running through the vocal exercises Shoko made him practice in the morning, he finds his voice smoother than honey once again. 

Just in time, maybe. Inumaki can’t acknowledge it as a complete positive, seeing as how his throat’s full recovery means he’ll be thrown into combat and get it fucked up all over again. But the healing must count for something, he thinks. He must be doing something right. He hopes so.

He dreads the fight. He knows it will take his voice from him again.

Fushiguro brightens as he sees Inumaki at breakfast, but no smile excites his face - the anxious shuffle of his feet betrays hesitancy, and then the resolute decision to slap a thick linguistics textbook onto the table confirms Inumaki’s suspicions that he’s very afraid of what he’s about to say next. 

“Thing is,” the second-year student begins with a deep breath as Inumaki holds his, “I’ve heard you speak before.”

Silence. Inumaki’s mind races. His past had always been a blank, a question. A private note, intimately written, only for it to be blotched and blurred by coffee stains and smelling of wisteria. He reaches in as Fushiguro tries not to look at him but the memories still don’t sharpen. 

“When?” Inumaki signs.

“During your-” Fushiguro halts. Pushes on, determined, “Your trial, eight years ago.” 

Inumaki sat on the ground, cross-legged. He asked politely for the curse to stop breathing and it did; and Inumaki knew in his mind’s eye that the creature had held its breath and wouldn’t let go until Inumaki released him from that command, until its exoskeleton heaved, and it rolled over with six legs pointed to the air completely dead.

Inumaki nods. He remembers this in parts. Parts are all he needs for now. 

“Which means that while you were perfectly capable of using your voice without cursed speech,” Fushiguro continues, picking mindlessly at his scrambled eggs as Inumaki sits with memory simmering in his head. “Perhaps it was because you were too young to fully recognize the meaning behind the words you were speaking. Think of it like this, senpai. Say something enough times - fast, repetitive - and that word begins to feel like it’s lost its meaning. Keep your thoughts trained on that, and the word becomes nothing but a sound. An exclamative. Onomatopoeia.”

“Shake,” Inumaki says, and Fushiguro would snap his fingers here if he weren’t so adamant about keeping his composure. He tilts his pen to Inumaki’s nose instead. “Salmon. Sha-ke. It doesn’t mean what it should mean anymore. You’ve categorized the onigiri vocabulary into a series of exclamatives that have different purposes to their definitions, thus losing their original intent. Do you cognitively recognise the word as its meaning, or have you subconsciously defined it into something lesser, like a sound?”

“Tsuna,” Inumaki starts quietly, dumbfounded. He had never thought of it like that before.

“Another thing that we can test,” Fushiguro continues to rattle off his hypotheses, flipping open the textbook which, at this point Inumaki’s come to realize, is merely a point of decoration and a subtle flex to the fact that Fushiguro’s been reading it all night long. “Has technically already been proven. Salmon, tuna, pollock roe… ingredients aren’t imperatives. Even if you curse someone with, let's say table, what would they do? There’s the matter of the definition of a table, of which there are many. Then there’s the fact that nothing precedes or follows the word, making it impossible to be interpreted as a command. It’s harmless. You could say it to me right now.”

“You’re sure?” Inumaki signs. 

“Yes.” Fushiguro says, suddenly growing a little quiet. “I trust you. And I trust myself.” Inumaki shuts his eyes, breathing in slowly.

“Table.” he says slowly. Every atom passing between them trembles softly from the vibrations. Fushiguro flinches, but nothing comes to pass. Only a soft irritation at the back of Inumaki’s throat, even then barely a tickle in comparison to the hellish torture of earlier weeks. Fushiguro is practically preening with delight, leant back smugly on his chair pretending to pore over his notebook with additional comments scribbling across the page. 

“Neat hobby.” Inumaki teases with a smile. Fushiguro makes a point of not looking over his notepad, but the tips of his ears blush pink at Inumaki’s praise.

“If you’d like,” he continues hesitantly, as if Inumaki would possibly refuse what he might say next. “We can try more of that. Developing your vocabulary. Slowly. I’ll be your test subject, or something. How about that?”

Inumaki looks down at his hands, at his voice intertwined and resting on his lap. A sense of anxiety rises up at the possible thought of backlash, at the possible thought of injuring his friends. But then, he’s tried so hard at everything else in life. Why not for this too?

“Thank you Fushiguro,” Inumaki signs, as sincere as he can manage. “You’re helping me in more ways than you know.” 

And of course, as Fushiguro looks away sharply, the faintest shimmer collecting at the corner of his eyes, to help is all he’d wanted to do. All this time, always.

*

At the end of the week on a day of heavy rain, Maki knocks on Inumaki’s door. She smells like cursed blood despite no trace of it on her body and her eyes are lined with the absence of rest, the raised flesh of scar tissue on her face swelling from the humid weather. Inumaki opens the door to let her in, and she casts a look over his hastily made bed and the cardboard boxes lining the edge of the room - the third-year dorms never felt like home to him. Hakari’s desk still smells a little like alcohol, like he had been prone to spilling it so much that it was lacquered with the scent.

“You must ree-aally like it here.” she says dryly.

“Konbu,” Inumaki rolls his eyes. Her eyes drift over to the puppet arm holding the door open, and guilt pricks her gaze just enough that she ducks her head. 

“It’s fixed, right?” Inumaki nods.

“Good,” she straightens up. “You and I are gonna meet the others outside tonight. We’re ready to tell you what’s going on.”

Yoyogi park is lively at this time of night, crowded with vendors as the two of them squeeze past the bustle of the crowd. Small curses nearly indistinguishable from shadow slither from hawker to hawker, watching as Maki’s silent aura brushes past them. She reaches out to pinch one between her fingers, and it bursts to dust as insignificantly as a mosquito. Nobody notices, and she brushes the purple ichor from her hand off the pocket of her pants.

“You know I’m,” she says hesitantly as they walk. The crowd is dense enough that she keeps her eye on the movement, clearing a path for Inumaki with her broad shoulders. It also serves as an excuse to not look at him, he knows, when she’s embarrassed about something and can’t say it to his face. “I’m sorry about what happened last week. I was an ass.” 

“Okaka,” he says. 

“I should have gone easier on you.” 

“Okaka,” Inumaki shakes his head. They reach a pinch point between two popular stalls, heavenly smells fighting for dominance wafting just above their noses. Maki’s hand curls around his wrist, tugging him closer to her. 

“But it’s hard.” She says at last. “Sitting at the top without you. Forcing you to climb with me.” 

“You calling me weak?” Inumaki signs, trying his best to look comically offended, and she laughs but she looks at him; he already knows the answer.

“You’re too damn nice,” she says, her voice drowned in the noise. “Alright, what do you want? Takoyaki or Ten Yen Cheese Bread? Did you forget your wallet like I told you to?”

Inumaki beams, nodding. Maki barks a laugh. “Good boy.” 

Shoko greets them with a smile and a bottle of sake when they sit down at the yatai, the sound of Yuuji overindulging himself with food behind her silhouette. Nobara is half-asleep against him, idly picking at her nails, and Fushiguro simply watches Yuuji eat, an indiscernible look on his face. 

“I thought it better to explain less and let you see it for yourself,” she says to Inumaki, wasting no time for introductions. With a gesturing hand and an inclined head, she motions to her left, where an unobstructed view of the halted construction around Shibuya Scramble towers above them. Cursed energy coils and shudders from the fissures in the asphalt. From the looks of the messy scaffolding, the tire-treads surrounding the site, as well as the men still pacing back and forth across the cordoned off border, it seems as if something is hindering their progress. Among them, workers dressed in the unmistakable staff’s uniform of Jujutsu High can be seen documenting the cursed energy. 

“Yuuji called it a pit, though as you can see it’s not a physical one.” she says. Nobara makes an ominous, though sleepy, sound, without any energetic motions to back it up. “I’d describe it as more of a pool, which is why we call them that. The Pools, and within each pool, there are zones of cursed activity.” 

Inumaki concentrates his stare towards the construction site again, and just barely makes out a trail of cursed energy hovering among the buildings a few blocks further down. There, and a few blocks to the left, another one. Dread not too unlike what he’d experienced during the beginning of the culling games resurfaces. His arm stings again, though his throat feels oddly numb and unaffected. Shoko smoothes out a map onto the bit of table space between them, red circles highlighting areas Inumaki can just vaguely remember the importance of until he connects the dots and breathes in sharply with surprise. Marked on the paper are five of the ten major colonies - the colonies where the Culling Games took place. 

“Every major battle that occurred from October 31st to December 24th.” Shoko says slowly, circling them one by one. “Every location marked has spawned what Jujutsu High is officially naming a pool: a significantly large source of cursed energy flowing outwards from construction, damaged buildings left abandoned, from every crack in the ground, every thunderstruck tree, every displaced manhole.” 

“The spawning cursed spirits themselves aren’t all severe,” Maki continues, grabbing Shoko’s bottle and pouring herself a glass. “Unlike Getou’s Demon Parade, they haven’t been fermenting over a long period of time. But there are a lot of them to deal with.”

The Pools, Shoko explains, do not seem to be spreading any farther than they already have. Though there are many theories as to how the Pools came to exist, there is no doubt an undeniable connection between them and the death of Sukuna and Kenjaku - perhaps a reactivation curse, or something else worth putting the time into to research. She tells them that the Japanese Government, in collaboration with the Jujutsu Headquarters, have made attempts to excuse the delayed restoration of popular tourist and local hotspots and mostly through sheer authority have communicated that the impacted area will be completely cordoned off until further notice. And, though unfortunate, they expect to and will be prepared for the surge of cursed activity borne from the fears and worries of Tokyo’s citizens. That, they said, will just have to be dealt with in tandem. The way her tone jumps, from droning boredom to snappish and blatant sarcasm, tells Inumaki that she may have had to personally discuss these matters herself with the board. 

“Jujutsu Headquarters has considered requesting aid from other countries, but you’ve likely experienced first hand just how conservative Jujutsu Society can be,” Shoko grimaces. “The United Federation of Jujutsu Sorcery - well they call it something different in western countries, they have yet to respond. I wouldn’t blame them.”

“We have two sorcerers on standby,” Maki grumbles, crossing her arms. “But one’s a foreigner and the other’s from Aomori. We just got introduced to them yesterday and it’s even harder to understand than your onigiri talk, Inumaki.”

“Well, that’s the rundown.” Shoko says, folding her arms. “When you two are well enough to join us again, you’ll be dropped into pools. All the same from there, you know the drill. Suffice to say if activity in The Pools rises above its current frequency, we’ll be forced to request emergency relief.”

“How many sorcerers are on it right now?” Inumaki asks.

“Maki, Nobara, and Yuuji from Tokyo. Kamo, Todo, Momo, and Miwa from Kyoto. Kilgore and Sato Sadami are the two newest recruits. We pulled Sato from a research school in Hokkaido, actually.” Shoko says offhandedly as she counts. “I’d say we have a decent number, but there are four to six zones in each pool and each one can spawn an average of one curse every 2 days.”  

“That doesn’t feel like enough.” 

“No it’s not.” Maki says, wearily enough for Inumaki to take notice. For the first time tonight, he notices just how gaunt she looks. “Not unless you don’t care about getting sleep.” 

“Cheerful dinner, isn’t it?” Shoko looks over the table, to where the second years have more or less dozed off. “Well, that’s all I have for you right now. Feel free to enjoy the rest of the night while you can.”

Maki takes him around the rest of the way, and they get in a few rounds of darts at an underground bar. They forgo the drinking; Inumaki’s voice finds itself suddenly quite sore after talks of The Pools. As they play, the room shakes a little, lights blinking on and off. 

“It’s the construction,” the bartender explains at the table, close to closing shop. “Been like that the past month. Everything still works and all, don’t worry about it.”

They leave, Inumaki feeling sickly as he spies a curse slink its way up the bartender’s pant-leg. That night, he dreams of falling, his body rushing towards Shibuya leveled at ground-zero, Sukuna greeting him with open arms and a smile.

*

His throat heals, almost perfectly, and it is on the same day that he is assigned his first comeback mission that Maki drags him aside to break his heart. 

“I’m going to Kyoto.” She says.

“When?” Inumaki says, “How long? ” Why didn’t you tell me sooner, was his other question but it’s all happening a bit too fast and a bit too sudden for his liking. 

“Tomorrow. I don’t know.” Maki responds, looking down at her knees. They’re sitting beside each other in the grass, the world a shade paler than it used to be. Paler still as time passes between her words and his silence, as the sound of Yuuji and Nobara sparring echo across the training grounds. Fushiguro is watching them, clutching Yuuji’s jacket in his hands, his grip knuckle-white and rigid. “Momo and Utahime are support role sorcerers, and Kasumi can barely hold her own against a first grade curse. If you haven’t heard… Kamo succeeded Kenjaku as clan heir.” she rolls her eyes, but her gaze as she looks up at the tree above her is not nearly as playful. “The clan elders want him to take part in discussions regarding the Higher Ups and the current state of the Jujutsu world. He might end up stuck at headquarters instead of being out here on the field.” She looks away, spitting at the ground forcefully with a hiss, “ Fucking headquarters.” 

Inumaki looks at their intertwined fingers, his mind a cloud of troubled thoughts as he draws away to sign, “But what about… the rest of us? ” 

“You don’t need me here,” she ruffles his hair gently. “Yuuji and Nobara are competent enough and can hold their own just fine. They have you, too. Little genius.”

“Kyoto has… Todo,” he struggles to come up with an excuse, finding her explanation unfairly sound, “And- the new recruits. Where will they be going?”

“They’re taking care of Sakurajima. They have plenty to do.” 

“What else, Maki?” Inumaki’s fingers curl into the grass, his answers unfulfilled. There would be no reason to go to Kyoto. No reason but…

“I’m dreaming of her, Toge.” Maki says. She draws circles into the ground, thoughtful and solemn. “I’m dreaming of Mai.”

“Will going there… will it fix it? ” 

“It,” she hesitates, biting her lip in thought. The raised flesh of her scars there snag on her teeth. “It’ll give me some time to think. I need- I want to think of her properly, you know?” Her breath catches towards the end of her sentence, and it’s close enough to crying for Maki that Inumaki doesn’t say any more. He leans his body towards hers, resting his head on her shoulder as she strokes a hand through his hair in a single, shaky breath. It subsides to something even and hidden. Something secret. 

He hears above him, “I’m only going to be a few hours away.” 

“Whatever,” he says, raising his hands childishly into her face. “Message me every day.”

“Of course,” she replies, planting a soft kiss into his hair. “Every day.” 

In the common room study that evening, Inumaki finishes the last few pages of Rashomon before getting ready for bed. He catches Fushiguro at the kitchenette putting away the dishes. The companionable silence between them grows and, even as they dart around each other, neither of them speak for a long time.

“Okay?” Inumaki asks after a while. 

“I’m fine,” Fushiguro replies. “Thanks.”

He’s about to leave when Fushiguro catches him by the arm, desperate and firm over his wrist. His eyes betray a bit of helplessness, if also a bit of that dauntless pride. 

“Don’t wait for me, Inumaki.” he says firmly. “Don’t think you have to.” 

“Yeah,” he replies, and Fushiguro smiles. 

*

Some pockets of Ikeburo have tried to recover from the Games, late-night stores almost as vibrant and lively as Inumaki had left them last year when he and Panda stole one of many school-owned, sleek black taxicabs to drive through Meiji Dori. Other areas are worse off; dismal, empty corners abandoned by fear and superstition by the common people. They’re not wrong to leave it behind - though the zone has no report of significant curse sighting yet, there’s an almost tangible stench in the air as Inumaki passes by. Sunshine City calls out to him like a lighthouse at sea, swathed in crumbling skyscrapers and gang-turf graffiti. 

Inumaki remembers, quite suddenly, their trip through Meiji Dori. They had ended up at a skateboard park. People were doing tricks and smoking, both at once and neither, just sitting at a low railing chatting into old phones. A stranger had asked him something like, what’s your name? , and then he had been - pulled into the backseat of a limousine, a raven trying to peck out Panda’s eyes.

We’re not like them, Mei Mei had said, her lip curling. We’ll never be like them. So don’t try.

The curtain feels massive when Inumaki finally reaches it, and a Window steps aside to let him in. Buildings above him have fell over themselves, like crisscrossing dominoes gritty and thick with coatings of dust and grime. Inumaki’s puppet arm snakes along the side of the building, his cursed energy coating it in concentrated waves. He learned this from Yuuji - a revised form of Divergent Fist better suited to his own physiology. 

In a clearing settled in soot, the curse perches isolated on a protruding foundation of wire and gravel. It’s near humanoid - a semi-level one, the perfect match up for Inumaki. Perhaps a little too close to perfect for his first mission in months; but The Pools don’t care, and Inumaki can’t start to either. Or else he’ll die, and if he dies, then others die. That’s just how it is. 

It notices him suddenly, although Inumaki had not been making noise - an ear appendage swivels around the curse’s amorphous, rippling skin as the curse’s whole body perks up.

“I am your screaming voice,” it whispers.

Inumaki feels a chill in his chest, from the wild eyes darting towards his puppet arm, to the hand that brings itself to the curse’s teeth, to the tongue that slobbers over each finger slowly, before closing around them and crunching down. The bone splinters, veins bursting like raspberries in its mouth, the slightest spray of blood across its lips. All the while, its eyes do not stray from Inumaki’s chest. And then, the curse flings its arm forward. 

Inumaki dodges just barely in time for the finger to make contact with his cover and explode, a deafening noise that knocks Inumaki’s head back in a forceful gust of wind. The whiplash winds him up, his hands scrambling for hold, and his feet move faster than his mind can as his intuition grasps that it’s no longer safe here, not while the curse is bounding towards him on all four of its legs. The scenery here is so dilapidated that Inumaki can hardly make sense of it: rubble in all four cardinal directions, and no true north. With a wild sense of urgency he lets his feet carry him towards a looming building of shattered glass, two concrete giants making an overpass that he runs through, the curse chasing behind. Explosions to his left and right send tremors through the earth, Inumaki leaping past the jolting vibrations. Shadows enclose the area, Inumaki’s breath becoming shallow as the gap narrows towards the end- some sort of signage, piled onto each other with the remaining debris of fallen foliage makes for a small gap. 

A hand scuttles towards his feet all of a sudden, so close that Inumaki shrieks and falls forward, momentum propelling him into the ground harshly. He scrambles desperately out of the way, crawling through the gap backwards as the curse slows its approach still a few meters out from where Inumaki is, still hunched over on all fours like a beast with a human head. 

“I am the limb of a lost mother,” it says, standing. “I am the leg of an only child.” Walking forward, its eyes are almost predatory. Inumaki watches the building creaking and groaning above it. 

A bubble of air seems to push at his chest, pulling the skin tight as the curse thrusts its chest forward from the force of it. A hand ruptures its skin, reaching out to Inumaki. Another forms along the fingers, and from its fingers more hands. 

“I am the hand of a writer whose book is unpublished,” the curse cries, piercingly loud. “I am the head of a lover who will not marry.”

A geometric figure containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, Inumaki thinks suddenly, remembering a boring night of study. It’s a fractal.

The hands burst as the arteries in them explode. The curse rises in the air, growing in size, ascending as if he were floating towards heaven and not the shattered glass above him in that fallen office building. 

“I am the wife of a man who is widowed!” It screams, from its neck growing arms like brittle branches. “I am what dies when we fall!”

A slithering voice comes to Inumaki then, as it had when Kusakabe spoke to him not too long ago. Now, when the time is right, it says. Like a kiss at his cheek, though cold and unfeeling. Inumaki stands shakily, his concentration focused. 

He cannot die here. If he dies, then others die. That’s just how it is. 

“Collapse,” he says.

The buildings crumble, an aching, almost ancient groan as the wind pierces through the shattered glass in it like a shriek and the weight crushes the screaming curse. Its infantile limbs are helpless against the structure, and a torrent of wind and sound blasts through the curtain when the buildings fall, Inumaki knocked back by the force and sent straight into the black mass of magic behind him. He turns to run but his hand presses firm against the sorcery there- turns around again and catches a mouthful of dust and smoke, debris toppling towards him in an avalanche of brick and mortar. The tightness of the gap as the concrete closes in on him seizes his chest - his lungs fill with blood and smoke, gagging thickly in the fog of it all. He coughs, retching blood again, the familiar taste of it clotted with powdered limestone so dry and painful that he tries to scream, clawing his way out towards visible light. 

Just like that, someone whispers as the curtain melts away to darkness. 

*

He wakes up in Ijichi’s care, shivering, a blanket over his shoulders. Outside, Jujutsu High staff cordon off the domed area of his exorcism, a cleanup brigade dispelling the smoke and rubble with cursed energy. 

“I have incredible news for you, Inumaki,” Ijichi says. “News that my source says cannot wait.” 

Inumaki nods. He feels the tremor of the crumbling building shaking in his skin. His throat is still tight and dry with limestone, and he fumbles with the bottled water in his hand, choking liquid down in rapid gulps. 

“Okkotsu-kun is… by some miracle, he is alive.” Ijichi reaches over to the passenger’s seat, his gaze careful and attentive as Inumaki sits up properly in his seat and puts on his seatbelt. His slender hands hold Inumaki’s gently. “He woke up not long after you finished your work here. You may see him tomorrow, in the afternoon, after he is properly readjusted to a bed.”

“We will have to preserve him in the mortuary. Perhaps stretch out his limbs once in a while, to keep his muscles from shrinking,” Shoko said. 

“Okay,” Inumaki rasps. The shock of the news leaves his system faster than the pain. All he can think about is the ache in his throat again, how quickly the fear and the hurt had come even after weeks of careful attention.

“Congratulations, by the way.” Ijichi replies softly, drawing his hand away. The car revs to a gentle start as they pull away from the destruction. “I look forward to working with you again.”

The walk back to the dorms is silent, though Ijichi makes sure that Inumaki goes to his room before he leaves. At first too exhausted to clean himself up, Inumaki tosses and turns in arbitrary cycles of sleep over his bed-covers; he has odd, short dreams of burning houses and Yuuta’s deep, slow smile. Eventually he wakes up sweating furiously and gets into the shower. Water sluices down his back, little rivers along his spine. He leans his forehead against the mosaic of the tiles, inhaling slowly. He tries to breathe and makes the wrong move of inhaling water, coming up past the low shower head as coughs wrack his body. 

In his memories, Inumaki’s father is braiding his hair. He tells him that he is very powerful, and that he loves his voice, a voice that can do insurmountable damage. It is a voice that sounds sweeter than honey, and he must not damage it, because it can, and will, protect him from anything. 

Inumaki trusts him, because he loves his father. He loves his father more than anybody else in the world. 

Inumaki’s eyes snap open, his fingers tangled in a blonde and messy weave of knots. In a sudden, blind surge of anger he reaches for the blade at his sink, and viciously cuts his hair. 

*

Three months is long enough for Inumaki to be well acquainted with the third-year dorms in Jujutsu High, and yet even now as he stops by to drop off his crochet kit Inumaki knows he’s barely bothered to unpack. It feels a little surreal to be a year older after the battle. He didn’t feel like he had grown very much at all.

Yaga’s office is only a five minute walk from the medical ward. Inumaki finds himself walking at a snail’s pace under the shedding cherry blossom trees. Campus is relatively silent, and the training field is empty save for a janitor sweeping leaves and debris off the running track. With so much manpower focused on monitoring the ever changing shifts in cursed energy around Shibuya, very few of the school’s management has time to dedicate towards recruitment of first-year students; suffice to say, it remains to be seen whether the first year-students will be recruited at all, considering their lack of professors. 

It is both comforting and foreboding for campus to remain so oddly untouched. Not since his first year at Jujutsu High have the school grounds been damaged, and despite the terrifying demonstrations of power during Halloween forever changing the heart of Tokyo, Inumaki walks across the school bridge; under the canopy of camphor trees beside the faculty offices; lets his eyes glaze over the main gate standing tall and proud in front of campus. It is unshaken by the events that occurred to its students.

Of course it is; its students are the ones bearing scars. The Jujutsu system had done nothing to protect them - in some ways, they had to become that system. This was how the sorcery world worked. And disappointingly, it was what Inumaki had understood his whole life to be. 

The second year students are already gathered around Yuuta’s bed by the time he arrives, and the shock of seeing him in the flesh destabilizes Inumaki so quickly that he nearly topples over. He ducks his head as he makes his way around the room towards the little bustling group, chit chatter simmering to a murmur with the occasional shriek of Nobara’s voice, and an abrasive rebuke from Fushiguro. For being the most agile sorcerer of their bunch, he’s having a hard time avoiding everyone’s feet. 

A feeling strikes him as the chatter dies down, Yuuta’s eyes finding him with that polished, slate-blue conviction easy to spot amongst a crowd. He’s fine, really, really fine. Pale and awkward angles, jaw set with anxious energy as he worries his lip between dying conversations. 

“Thank god,” Inumaki says. It surprises him how much he means it, takes a breath sharper than ice through his nose, delirious off the sight of Yuuta frail but moving, breathing, looking at him-

And then, a near imperceptible shift in tension. Yuuta's smile fades and his eyes glimmer cold as cut gems. 

“I heard you.” he says, his gaze never straying from Inumaki’s face, “You woke me up.”

Chapter Text

The air’s stale when Maki gets out of bed, tastes sticky odd in her mouth, not yet used to the warm itch of the scars across her face as she yawns. There’s barely anything in her dorm room which makes for effortless packing. She’s never been a material person; the only things worth taking with her are some old polaroids left scattered at the far end of her desk dusty to the touch. 

Aside from her shuffling, the dorms are mostly silent in the early morning. The floorboards squeak noisily under her feet and as her bedroom door creaks open she lifts her luggage up with one hand, carrying it steadily out of the building. The wheels knock against her bare ankles as she walks. They make a grating sound against the stone tiles outside, waking her with a noise just as harsh as the cold and whistling wind. A black taxicab slides into view beyond the gate, and she’s about to start walking towards it when a voice stops her. 

“You could have said goodbye,” Panda hums. He’s sitting on the backrest of one of the outdoor benches, an old and brittle thing sprinkled with mildew. It looks uncomfortable, Maki notices. The odd way his body sags over the narrow edge makes it seem as though he’s made of something downy. A blue knitted scarf winds gently under his chin, barely long enough to cover his round stomach. 

“Goodbye,” she says tartly.

“Wait- hey, don’t run away from Yuuta now.” he tilts his head. There’s something eerie about Panda’s voice, how deep and throaty it sounds coming from a body so tiny. He continues with a bit of a laugh, “You guys haven’t even made it to first base!”

Not too long ago she might have flushed at those words, but the implication behind them is hollowed of meaning and almost bitterly nostalgic. It briefly projects her back into a year where things were verging on the edge of being okay: moments of tranquility that actually felt like they settled instead of drifted, waiting for the next gust of wind to veer them all off course.

But that was before she massacred the Zenin clan. Who she was now felt disembodied from the girl who needed glasses to see curses; she saw more than that now, without. 

The more she thinks about it, the more uncomfortable it becomes; they both know, and Panda’s just pressing in with the advantage of being physically vulnerable, frail. If only it were this easy to fall back into such an old routine. 

“Our resident clown isn’t so funny anymore, is he?” she drawls instead. 

“Oh he’ll bounce back,” Panda says, referring to someone else entirely. “He’s only human, after all.” 

“Well you’re not, so what’s with all the lame jokes?” 

“I only have one core left,” Panda shrugs, patting his chest. “I don’t know what you expect from me.” They fall silent as Maki turns away, her fingers clammy from clenching her luggage so tightly. One of the wheels has gotten stuck in between the uneven tiles; she jerks it hurriedly, growling as she does so. 

“Are you saying you’ve gotten dumber or something?” she says sharply after a while. A gnawing irritation claws at her from the inside. 

“Well,” he says. “I’ve certainly changed. And change doesn’t always make a person stronger. In my case, it made me rather weak and good at knitting.”

“Change depends on the person,” she responds. “It depends on their strength.” 

“Yes,” he deliberates a little, continuing with, “Sometimes. Is that why you’re going to Kyoto?”

Her eyes narrow as she responds, because the answer is obvious but Panda isn’t Toge: “I’m going there to kill curses,” she replies, “What else? I’m going to kill them, and keep killing them, until there’s nothing left of them. I’d have killed the Higher Ups too, if Gojo hadn’t beaten me to the punch.” 

They’re an extension of herself as she speaks, a bubbling sensation that whispers and soothes her as she says those words: killing, kill, killed. There’s a thrill to it that sings to her blood. That was the change that made her stronger- the survival she endured. The cursed blood in her veins responding to the call of her twin’s binding promise.

“Does doing that make you happy?” 

Maki pauses. An acidic feeling slinks through her chest, long fingers unfurling beyond the cage of her lungs. Destroy everything, Mai said.

“It satisfies me.” she manages without spitting the words out like a toxin.

“What part of you?” Panda asks. 

Mai puts her hand on his shoulder and she doesn’t smile as Maki meets the eyes of the ghost but she does nod, in a way that unmoors another piece of Maki’s soul. A piece Maki was so sure she could keep to herself. 

“I’ve got to go,” she snaps and, not waiting on Panda’s response, turns quickly on her heel into the dark of morning. 

*

Inumaki catches the alarm clock in his palm but he misses the hardcover book by choice, and lets the pillow slam into his face smelling of the sweat of someone else. Across from the room Yuuta sits up, one hand braced against the headboard of the hospital bed, the other reaching up for his forehead to cover his scar; an oddly crude row of stitches across his forehead. His eyes are wild and his breathing uneven, and his lips stretch wide across his face in a snarl, like a scared animal. 

A dry, cold tremor of tension rattles the room. 

“I know it was you,” he shouts, and hoarser, “ I had to leave her because of you! You forced me awake with your voice, I could hear it!” and as he struggles to get up Yuuji tackles him, forearms bearing down on his shoulders and leaning his full weight onto the bed to keep Yuuta still. 

“Easy there, senpai,” he chuckles nervously, cheeks puffed. 

“Let me go,” Yuuta growls. He’s always been quite frail. His cursed energy lashes out in waves, so strong it blankets the room in a miasma of nausea, and the lights flicker as he struggles against Yuuji’s headlock. 

Inumaki whirls out of the room, turning on his heel as he looks to the ground. He was right about change , but this… wasn’t it. His swallows harshly, all the guilt harbored in his bones releasing off him in waves, his own negativity curdling like shedded skin over his shoulders tight and stiff. But he’s angry too - viciously, curiously so, and lets the anger hold him hotly in its grasp the way he holds the alarm clock and the hardcover and the pillow. Realizing that he’s still holding on to everything Yuuta’s thrown at him, he lets go. The alarm clock clangs shrilly, a noise rivaling the shouting behind him as it rattles across the ground. 

Behind him somebody tries to match his pace - it’s Fushiguro, and he catches Inumaki by the arm to tug him aggressively to the side.

“You can’t leave like this,” he says. Inumaki scowls, tugging his arm away. “Hey, come on!” 

“He,” Inumaki chokes on the word, his cheek sigils flaring. Breathe in, breathe out. Fushiguro looks at him pointedly, like he does when they’re having one of their lessons together in the common room. It’s raining lightly outside, water leaking under the door and the TV on in the background, all noise and sound and noise and sound -andnois-e-andso-und. Inumaki takes a deep breath. 

He shuts his eyes, enunciating slowly, “He. Knows.” 

Fushiguro’s shoulders relax, leaning against the wall. His hand comes up to Inumaki’s shoulder, reassuring even as the sound of Yuuta’s hoarse yelling punctuates the stillness of day. Nobara’s shrill voice joins it, a betrayed and confused retort. He’s your friend, she’s shouting. Why would you throw all that, he saved your life, how dare you!

Ever perceptive, Fushiguro guesses rightly as he asks, “The day Nobara remembers, right after Yuuji dealt the final blow to Sukuna - you told Yuuta to wake up, didn’t you?” 

Inumaki nods his head. “Rika is gone,” he continues with a grimace. “Akari witnessed it during her night shift down at the morgue - almost destroyed the fridges trying to get out. He tried to summon her, that’s when -” Fushiguro ducks his head, gaze shifting towards the floor tiles. “That’s when he found out.”

“How is this possible,” Inumaki’s hands shake through his signs, so rough that Fushiguro puts his arm out again to steady Inumaki like he might stumble and fall on perfectly flat ground. “It was just wishful thinking, spite. I couldn’t have - I didn’t think it would - there was no response at the time-”

But then he thinks about the blood. Days unending that he’d spent kneeling in front of a toilet bowl, smelling rancidly of bile and iron and bits of food, feeling the stringy and loose spit on his lips, the heaving tug at his chest, the flaring pain in his lungs. He thinks of the echo of his voice in a stall, Yuuji and Fushiguro casting concerned looks over their shoulders as Inumaki would come crawling out of his room in nothing but sweatpants, pulling a jacket on to look decent before going out for more throat medication. 

“I really-” Inumaki looks down at his hands. “I really did this?” 

“You couldn’t have known it would work.” Fushiguro says harshly. “None of us expected this.” 

“None of us, yeah.” Inumaki responds, looking back at the open door. Yuuta’s shouting has dwindled enough for Inumaki to notice, now that the corridor is silent and the only thing distracting him are thoughts in his own head. He looks to Fushiguro, whose gaze has softened to something of concern, and his hands brush Inumaki’s shoulders gently like he were soothing him. It takes a second for Inumaki to realize he is shaking, and a second more to stop. He shifts his shoulder, Fushiguro’s hand sliding off him. 

“So he wanted to die,” Inumaki signs slowly, watching Fushiguro’s gaze. 

Fushiguro hesitates. “Maybe he didn’t think he’d have to live without her.” 

They stand there, milling about the corner in silence, Inumaki staring down at his fingers twisting and interlacing at his hips. 

“Let’s go back inside,” Fushiguro says at last and Inumaki lets him tug him by the sleeve, numbly following. 

Yuuta is a lot more agreeable when Inumaki steps into the room for the second time, though the way Yuuji’s hand firmly touches his shoulder seems to indicate that he may have been coerced into exhibiting more decorum. Ijichi must have slipped past Inumaki and Fushiguro while they were talking because he’s right up at the front of the room, congratulating Yuuta for his graceful recovery and handing over things that were preserved for him over the course of his coma. A new custom white jacket, of course - ever Jujutsu High’s problem child; his katana; his ring. 

Yuuta takes his belongings with a slow kind of acknowledgement, as if he were still trapped in the sluggish confines of a dream. He pockets his necklace and gingerly slips on the jacket. His katana he leaves sheathed on his lap, a hand curled over its hilt in a vice-like grip. When he looks up, his face is tight with restraint. An odd, sharp anger seeps into the red of Inumaki’s cheeks as he stares back, silently daring Yuuta to throw a book at him again. 

“Sorry,” he says tightly, averting Inumaki’s eyes. Nobara scoffs. “I’m not quite myself just yet.” 

“Takana,” Inumaki responds. They look at each other from across the room, a dozen pairs of eyes hesitantly observing them do so. “Tsuna?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry.” Yuuta replies. “I really am, I must be disoriented,” His other hand comes up to stroke his katana, running his fingers lightly over the black casing. He bows his head, his eyes acquiring the thousand yard stare that he’d become so acquainted with during the Shibuya event. He whispers, like he means to only tell himself, “- she’s really gone.”

The room acknowledges her absence with a quiet, solemn silence. To say that any of them had ever gotten used to Rika’s presence would be a lie - but she was Yuuta’s strength and his self-perseverance. Their history together was a brief but soul-touching bond; her silhouette, once so interwoven with her master’s, now left his widowed and lonely.

“As difficult as the current situation may be, your capabilities as a special grade will have to be reassessed due to this new adjustment, Yuuta.” Shoko responds, folding her arms. “I’ve given your diagnoses to Kusakabe at the moment and though he’s undoubtedly concerned with your health we need to know whether or not you’ll be able to return to combat.”

“When?” 

“As soon as possible.” Shoko shrugs. “Your vitals are normal, your body seems to be producing cursed energy at a normal rate. The only remaining question is whether your CT is still as it was, which it most certainly is not, without Rika. Find out what’s changed. Your reassessment could start as early as tomorrow, so use today to get it together.”

“Tomorrow?” Yuuji’s head snaps up, wide eyed, “Shoko, he just rose from the grave-” 

“We’re not exactly in a best case scenario right now, Yuuji.” Shoko drawls. “You would know. Your next dispatch is in what, two hours? Have fun in Sendai, by the way. You’ll be there for a long while.”

“Yuuji,” Fushiguro admonishes, his head whipping left to face him. Yuuji looks away abashed, blurting out, “I was meaning to tell you, it’s been- I’ve been so busy,”

Inumaki watches Yuuta fidget with the ring before them, rolling Rika’s gift between his index and thumb as the room clamors with argument. He plays with it like a toy and not the prized possession Inumaki knows he takes it for, perhaps because it’s now, more than ever, just a relic of history. He’s still staring down at it in the palm of his hand, the ferocity of his stare a challenge asking for Rika to call to him: it does not, for Rika no longer resides within it, the last vestiges of her power having sewn tight the scar across his forehead that binds his soul to his body and her hauntings to the grave forever.

Inumaki watches his gaze harden into something like determination, mouth thinning to a firm line before Yuuta looks up again. Fushiguro and Yuuji are still going back and forth at each other, and Nobara’s resorted to picking at her nails with boredom. Panda, sitting at the very edge of Yuuta’s bed, feels motionless despite the anxious movements of his paws as they crochet. His ears are downcast, and his figure very small. He may as well be a ‘get-well-soon’ gift.

“I’ll be ready,” Yuuta says faintly and then, louder to rise above the clamor, “I said I’ll be ready!” 

The noise dies down, Fushiguro red-faced as he falters on a dwindling shout to look away. Shoko nods primly, unsurprised. 

“Good,” she says. “Because we’ll need you.” 

Inumaki and Panda stay behind as Yuuta is discharged from the medical ward, bickering from the second-years slowly fading as they exit through a corridor on the right. He swings his feet over the side of his mattress, the bed legs creaking under his weight as he does so - when he stands he stumbles, disoriented, one hand on the nightstand to keep himself upright.

“Where’s Maki?” Yuuta asks, looking at the door. A faint wisp of Shoko’s smoke trails out of the room. 

“Kyoto,” Panda answers. He holds up his newest creation, a knit beanie far too small for anybody in the room, including himself, one eye narrowed to test its width to the silhouette of Yuuta’s backlit hair. “They need more sorcerers down there, so she volunteered.” 

“I see.” Yuuta responds. He looks up to meet Inumaki’s eyes again. The collar of his shirt is mussed up, his collarbones sharp and angled downwards. His glacial stare is unreadable as it moves over Inumaki’s face; he’s worried his bottom lip so thoroughly that the skin there is bitten and raw. 

“And you didn’t?” he asks him.

“Mentaiko?” Inumaki responds with a jut of his chin, in lieu of something more scathing.

“What- I just thought,” Yuuta flinches, “you guys are close, that’s all.”  

“Toge’s been ill.” Panda says in quick defense. “He’s been ill while you were sleeping, since he woke you up and all, just like you said. He’s been out of commission for a while now, too. Throwing up-”

“Panda,” Inumaki says sharply.

“Throwing up blood, all the time.” Panda continues, unabashedly accusatory, “No, Toge, he should be grateful you saved his life, and I know he’s upset but so am I!” 

Guilt flits quickly across Yuuta’s face, and he draws back as Inumaki shrugs Yuuta’s katana and jacket over his shoulders. He tries to reach for them in a casual way, to take the load himself. Inumaki jerks back, their shadows dancing across the sunlit floor.

Later, as Yuuta opens the door to Kirara’s old dorm room, Inumaki deposits Yuuta’s belongings onto the empty mattress. Yuuta catches him by the shoulder as he’s about to leave. His hold is unsure, like he wouldn’t stop Inumaki if he wanted to push him away, and so Inumaki stays. 

“It’s not your fault,” Yuuta mutters. “I meant it when I was sorry. You know that.” 

“It’s fine. I’m over it.” Inumaki signs. Just beyond the crack of the door, the second years move about in the common room. Somebody switches on the TV. The kettle begins to boil, a whistle permeating the silence of the ground floor.

*

Yuuta’s reassessment is scheduled for the day after tomorrow. The Two Families understand your situation, was the message he received in his inbox the other day, catching up on all the spam mail and discounts and school news he’d missed out on for the past three months. 

Yuuta’s sitting in a room that isn’t his yet. It smells like pachinko candies, tangy and sweet - the kind of lasting taste you’d find tapered to the roof of your mouth even after a third wash of water. His new clothes are too tight around the shoulders; his ring doesn’t budge, doesn’t glimmer, doesn’t wink at him anymore. In some ways, that kind of makes it new too. 

“Rika,” he says. He stretches out the words in his mouth, like the simple act of saying her name keeps her there in that long note of a vowel. Keeps a little bit of her alive. “Ree-kaa.”

His cursed energy tumbles clumsily around the ring, a delicate confinement to the proportionally large size of his aura. At the very least, he has that familiarity. In a flight of fancy he condenses his cursed energy as tightly as he can, willing it into a piercing point small enough to just lightly tuck into the ring’s circumference. That’s as much as he can do, however; any attempts at infusing it directly are like trying to stuff a blanket into a mason jar. 

“I’ll hurt myself,” he says suddenly, a ridiculous idea forming in his mind. “Rika?” 

The room echoes his words emptily. He counts to ten on his fingers, breaking his pinky on the last syllable with a snap. With his good hand he unsheathes his katana, cutting deeply into his palm as deliberately as he can manage. Once upon a time, when he was just shy of fourteen and locked in a broom closet, he thought madly of killing himself. Rika appeared before him, at the time a dreadful apparition, her claw-like hands closing gently over his wrists and her jagged fangs rubbed against his cheek. He thought it was saliva dripping over his hair, a ghostly wet substance crawling into the skin of his scalp. 

Oh but I would eat you, Rika had told him cheerfully a year later, when they reconciled their differences. I’d eat you whole, Yuuta. I’d have you in the pit of my stomach, just under the cage of my lungs, listening to my heart.

You don’t have a heart, Yuuta told her, not unkindly.

Just because it doesn’t beat doesn’t mean it isn’t there, she said.

That doesn’t make any sense, he said, and she had just smiled at him in return, horrifically fanged, adoringly pretty.

Blood drips over the round flesh of the heel, staining his pants. His pinky throbs a little, limp as he rotates his wrist and feels the jolt of pain and numbness at the joint. How awfully stupid of him. 

“You can’t have gone,” Yuuta says after a while, feeling very pathetic. “You weren’t even really you.” He waits, expecting an answer from his ring despite all evidence pointing to the contrary. And again, nobody responds.

It’s not a particularly good use of his time, but after crying for a while about the girl he’s already mourned once he sits up in his bed to heal himself. He can’t stay here. He needs something more familiar than the shallow fulfillment of self-loathing. He needs something he understands instinctively, because he certainly does not understand this. 

His mind sorts through his cursed energy, like sorting through a file cabinet thumbing up the wrong names. There is no inventory to call upon if the entity holding it is gone - and that’s a whole other slew of questions left unanswered in the wake of her absence. 

He goes for a run in the dead of night, his old trainers treading the wild and winding path up the mountain past the school grounds. The grass has grown plenty since he last trekked down this hill but he still recognizes the shortcut to the closest village; since his absence it’s grown a little, little curses twisting over fallen trees and stretches of empty land like the shallow fuzz of young moss. There’s a bigger curse in the water, tadpole shaped, just beginning to form limbs as it wades clumsily through the pond. It might have been because of a bad harvest this season, and the shortage of farmhands. Once in a while, back when Yuuta was a first-year and he’d wander down the path from an early walk or a midnight run, he’d bump into a farmer complaining about energetic youths leaving their responsibilities here and moving to the city. 

The farmhouse he stops at is derelict but not yet abandoned. A frog, larger than life, squats in the barn shed beside a mat of hay and an old horse. It is distinctly curse-like as well, with a gaping maw that drips with purple ooze, and the stench of something sickly and depressing. 

“You’ll do,” Yuuta says. “Come here.” He’s never enticed a cursed spirit before - he finds, with an aura so packed with cursed energy, he never has to. Curses like feeding on it, the negativity in his body, the way it thickens his flesh like an extra layer of fat on a juicy slate of meat. For someone so bony, curses have always stated how delightful Yuuta would be to feast on; no curse has ever come close to proving it.

The cursed frog leaps forward, surprisingly nimble. It croaks, and the air that leaves its mouth stinks of pestilence and famine. It ribbits, its vocal sac expanding to squash dirt beneath it, bugs and crawlies visible under a thin layer of mucus and skin. 

How will he kill the curse, without copy, without Rika, without his CT? The old way, he supposes, drawing out his katana. His steel is cool against his fingers, pressed lightly against the flat of the blade exposed above his sheathe. Before he even has a chance to draw his sword, a lightning quick tongue darts towards him, and instead of his blade Yuuta puts up his hand instinctually. 

His heart hammers in his chest, his muscles playing out actions he’s never performed before. But it’s instinct that touches the frog curse, instinct that flicks his wrist and channels something deep within him, his brain whirring with the concept of motion, of motion as an illusion, of time as nonlinear and space as a vacuum. Of people as insignificant and curses as a chore, and life as a meander through consciousness. It’s a bore, really, such a bore, to be strong .

Such a bore to be strong, he thinks without really thinking. There is no how , only I remember - there is no what if- only when to.  

Such a bore to have everything. The odd voice in his mind supplies. To be limitless. 

He concentrates the glow of his hand into a point, a sphere that crackles with light and energy, warmth flooding his chest. The cursed frog screams, more human than animal, skin ripped from the bone as the very atoms in the air vibrate around Yuuta. Bits of gristle circle his hands, flying towards the orb magnetized to its light. In an instant the curse is gone - not ashes. Gone, to the prick of light in Yuuta’s outstretched fingers, a smattering of purple blood on the ground the only evidence of its existence. That too fades, and Yuuta staggers back into reality when he hears a fearful bray - the horse in the stable - and a light illuminates the second story of the farmhouse above him as the sound of footsteps grow near.

“Oh,” Yuuta breathes, backing away. He runs to the trees, through a thicket that scratches long scars down his legs, behind the trunk of a large camphor as light sweeps the empty farm, and its owner calms the whinnying horse. His hand aches and his mind is a whir, heavier than ever. As if it had been waiting for this moment of reprieve, his body collapses before his mind can catch it shut down and he falls to his knees. A hollow at the center of his heart grows, like the very essence of his soul had been ripped out of him. It’s excruciating, draining.

“Oh,” he says weakly again, like it would help any, after knowing what he’s done. 

Yuuta decides, early next morning, that he will go away. There’s a lovely little apartment in Minato city, far enough from Shibuya to give his conscience a break but reachable by teleport should immediate danger arise. He doesn’t unpack much since the reassessment mission is only a few hours away - just sort of surveys the option, much nicer than someone’s old dorm room and plenty spacious. He’s got quite a bit of money saved from his mission earnings and the only thing niggling at his conscience is coming back to Jujutsu High, making a beeline for his belongings as he cuts across the common room, and seeing Inumaki waiting; staring at the small of his back, not quite sure that Yuuta is really there. 

It must be odd to think about a friend who died and came back to life, who everyone was sure was long gone. Who would have rotted away if Shoko hadn’t kept him in cryogenic hibernation for three months. Who threw a book at him, among other things, in a fit of rage like he hadn’t wanted to be brought back to life. He’d want to see Yuuta gone. Who wouldn’t, after a fiasco like that?

Maybe I knew, Yuuta wonders to himself and then, brushing it aside, maybe she knew. Maybe it was her fault. 

The dorms are full of a strange feeling anyways; the second year rooms don’t belong to them anymore but the third year dormitory somehow still reeks of Hakari’s old booze and Kirara’s candies. Yuuta doesn’t ask for Maki’s whereabouts when clearly not a trace of her is to be found. Panda doesn’t sleep in the dormitories anymore; apparently holed up in Yaga’s nursery, knitting with what tools he inherited from his late father. Everybody’s changed places. There are holes in Yuuta’s schedule where Nanami would have been teaching theory, other holes where Gojo would be doing practicals with the students. It all says Pools? now, like no matter what grade he gets reassessed to, he’ll still be fighting the same fight.

“I can’t live here,” Yuuta says, looking at Inumaki. He slings his katana over his shoulder one handedly, jacket tied around his waist. His body feels bare without the weight of Rika’s ring across his collarbone. “It doesn’t feel like how it used to be.” 

“ You’ve only just woken up,” Inumaki signs slowly, looking at him. He’s giving him that odd look again, like he doesn’t quite know what to make of him. Yuuta can understand it, even if it irks him somewhat, like Inumaki hadn’t expected him to change. “You haven’t even been reassigned yet.” 

A cursed frog’s remains crumple to ash as a farmer searches his grounds for an intruder. Kill curses, Maki had said to him once, and the memory rushes back to him like an easy answer. Kill them over and over again. Everything else comes after. 

“It’ll be special grade,” Yuuta says hastily, averting his gaze as Inumaki narrows his eyes. “I’m sure.” 

“Okay,” Inumaki continues, carefully. “ Where’re you going?”

Everything comes after, of course. It’ll fall into place; he’ll have his answers mingled in the smell of curses lined up to one-shot kill. “Minato city,” Yuuta responds. Inumaki nods, more to himself than to Yuuta, looking down at his phone for the time. He seems to want to say something, but doesn’t. “Just to take my mind off things. Looking out at Shibuya all the time makes it… makes it hard.”

Inumaki doesn’t respond as they move out, head down, watching something on his phone. Doesn’t say anything in the car, nothing at the station. Then suddenly, at the wheat field where Yuuta will be judged and reassigned, just before the rubble of old buildings among the tall grass where a Jujutsu High staffer sets up a curtain and drones rotate around its circumference in methodical formation. He looks up to meet Yuuta’s eyes, melancholic indigo.

“ Need a roommate?” he signs. “I want to get away from here too.”  

*

Comeback missions aren’t all that common considering the scarcity of sorcerers in Japan, but the tradition is old and the formalities unchanged. To reassess a sorcerer when their rank is removed after a long absence or otherwise doubted, clans record the sorcerer reassessed as they perform an exorcism on a fourth grade curse. The sorcery performed is witnessed by any available sorcerer, annotated by a cursed quill that describes the performance of the sorcerer, then graded by the Three Families and given a rank approved of by the ruling authority of Japan. 

Reassessment does not require a strong curse. Inumaki would know - he… he killed one, nearly a decade ago. The trial, his mind supplies instantly as the dots connect, and a spark of recognition sends a thrill through him rewarding his body with a shot of dopamine in the form of a memory.

“Skill indubitably plays a large role in deciding the grade of a sorcerer,” he had once heard Gojo Satoru say, eight years ago. “But it is the will of the sorcerer, their intent to kill, or to save, that determines their true strength.” 

They had met with a wall of glass between them, but the speakers installed in all four corners of the room gave Gojo’s voice a startling clarity. He was very young and very handsome. Inumaki remembered that much about him - his eyes were an unnatural color, like his fathers. They were cold, like his fathers. They weren’t lifeless - but they were distant, looking through you, looking beyond what was presently surrounding them,

Like his father.

“Toge-kun,” Gojo said into the microphone. Beside him sat a panel of sorcerers, many of whom he did not recognise. “Would you like to kill the fourth grade curse?”

“No.” Inumaki said.

“Why is that?” Gojo was gentle, but his voice sounded tight.

“Okaka.” Inumaki said again. It was as much as he could say.

“We would like you to demonstrate your skill.” Gojo explained. His fingers wove an interlaced pattern around the microphone. Six pairs of eyes watched him from the glass, high above, much higher than Inumaki could reach. “We would like you to demonstrate your voice in its utmost capacity. Can you do that for me?” 

Inumaki observed the curse: a beetle, a bug no taller than his ankle squirming restlessly as it tried to look for a way out in the sealed container of the room. It was a tight room with little air. 

“Second grade.” Gojo said, relaxing into his seat as he killed it. The panel of judges beside him burst into furious disagreement, but his voice held firm above a chorus of dissonance, shouting, “He’s harmless without his father, at most a semi-first with no gut for blood. Let him go!” 

Inumaki thinks about the cool, gray eyes roaming the floor for the cursed beetle now, seven years forward in the present, the way Yuuta’s chest seizes just as he spots it trying to run away. His own breath catches, anticipating. Naturally his strongest moveset would be something out of copy but copy no longer exists if Rika is dead. 

Then a word leaves Yuuta’s lips and the pin drops there, like a gong’s low timbre heralding the arrival of a god. 

“Limitless Blue,” he says. 

Yuuta removes the curse’s presence in a blaze of pure white that voids atoms and flora and insects caught in the crossfire, a rush of power so inexplicably Gojo Satoru that the very atoms in the atmosphere are sucked into the barrelling vortex before them. Even Inumaki, standing to witness it, feels his body jitter attracted to the light, sucked towards the source of power tearing into the earth like a bullet eating away flesh. 

Yuuta isn’t even wholly present as he does this - his eyes are glazed over, though his hand makes movements and his katana is sheathed and unsheathed through pure muscle memory. His cursed energy bubbles and simmers, like a cauldron of contents frothing over the edges, the scent of its potent mixture too strong to withstand. His fingers uncurl, in a sharp and twisted movement- the eye of the vortex burns a path forward, straight through the curse’s body a second time, and eating into the building behind it. 

Not a single drop of purple ichor hits the ground. It’s as if the curse was never there. That’s why he was so sure, Inumaki thinks, shaking.

“I did it again,” Yuuta says quietly, flexing his fingers. Peat smells of ash and fire and metal torn from the gravel in the ground. Cursed energy sizzles the air, hazy and volatile. Deadly energy contained in a dissipating orb, a white hot color that Inumaki dares not look in the eye.  

“Yuuta?” Inumaki rasps. 

“No,” Yuuta’s gaze falls upon him, his head tilted back with an air of impassivity. “The honored one.” 

Gojo Satoru might have thought himself a god, once. He’d certainly talked about it once or twice while punch drunk, sort of like how a parent would set the scene for a bed-time story, when Inumaki still had time for those and Fushiguro indulged him if it meant the greater benefit of not needing to make his breakfast next morning. 

The Honored One , Gojo called himself. It sent a shiver down Inumaki’s spine now, uttered through Yuuta’s lips. 

Just as suddenly as Gojo’s cursed technique had overtaken him, Yuuta halts abruptly and takes a step forward, his movements drunk and unstable. Inumaki barely has time to make sense of it before he drops to the ground soundlessly, and he rushes forwards to catch him before Yuuta’s body hits the pavement. When he turns him over in his lap, tracing patterns over his skin to find a pulse anywhere he can measure it, the absence of even a skittering heart beat fuels his paranoia.

“Takana?” Inumaki says haltingly. Yuuta’s body heat begins to dissipate rapidly as he fumbles for his phone, switching on his flashlight. His shadow trembles over Yuuta’s lifeless pupils, clumsy fingers stretching open a distant eye. Inumaki tries a brighter setting with little success.

“Wake up.” Inumaki speaks. He can’t be sure of himself now, what with all the practice he’s been doing on his voice, whether his cursed speech is leaking out or his command over language is allowing him the auditory dissociation Fushiguro had discussed with him prior. In any other circumstance he would have welcomed this moment of pride. Now though, it sits less as pride and more frustration, because he needs Yuuta up or else he’s dead, and he’s no good to anybody dead, especially not when Inumaki just-  

“Wake up, wake up, wake up!” Inumaki hears the strangled rasp in his throat, fumbling for his phone again. How rare it is to hear himself like he would anybody else. Then again, it’s only a body. It’s only a shell, perhaps. Inumaki thinks hard to the moments where he saw Shoko sew Yuuta’s brain back into its fleshy carapace, that his body was just a body and not a soul, that his thoughts may have wandered out of sync from a concussion. Maybe he should wait. Maybe he shouldn’t.

Above them, the buzz of drones offer no reassurance. He can’t tell whether anybody from the outside knows what’s happened - but the curtain isn’t lifted, and the recordings are still picking up noise, so Inumaki looks up and says, “Let us out.”

Nothing.

His puppet arm aches so painfully that Inumaki drops his phone in the dirt. He picks it up again, trying not to delay any longer. He calls Shoko, listening with maddening attention as the line goes dead. No signal, of course. Not until the curtain falls. 

“Answer.” The screen is too grimy. Inumaki scrubs furiously with his fingers, demanding from it, “Answer me.” 

“Answer me,” Like a foreign word on his tongue, an exclamative, and onomatopoeia. Inumaki's fingers jam the screen so hard they throb and sweat against the glass, throwing his whole body down on the receiver as he starts to shout. There’s shouting, and then screaming, perhaps too well-pronounced were his words that they lost meaning, and so Inumaki takes a second to inhale deeply. He closes his eyes and concentrates and speaks instead of sounds, he seethes, “ answer me. Answer me please,” 

Yuuta shifts, just slight enough to make Inumaki hysterically desperate. He begins to shout it again, mouth turning red and raw that his throat bleeds from the authority lashing at his throat but at least it’s working, so just- answer, answer me, answer- 

“Do you love me?” an appraising gaze swept over his own, smile inlaid within. “Prove it.” 

Inumaki closes his eyes, something building inside him, unfurling from the depths of his memory as he opens his mouth, breathes, exclaims in a begging cry, “You have to answer me!”

Yuuta’s eyes fly open, his hands grasping Inumaki’s shoulders so tightly it feels like his fingers will leave marks there for days. He gasps, and Inumaki stares at him with incredulous disbelief, so tangible on his face that all it takes is another shift in Yuuta’s movement before he shatters completely, breaking into a sob that eclipses the wrecked babble of Yuuta’s voice. It’s a wretched sound, one that will haunt the both of them for days. 

“Why’d you wake me up,” Yuuta whispers, shaken white as he clasps and unclasps Inumaki’s arm, “Why’d you wake me up, Inumaki, huh? Why’d you bother?” 

They stagger through the curtain hand in hand, Inumaki’s fingers digging so fiercely into Yuuta’s palm flesh that he’s sure his nails will leave marks. Yuuta says nothing of it though and neither does Akari - she probably doesn’t even notice, too busy ushering them into the backseat and fussing over them in a motherly way. They sit in silence as the cleanup brigade and staffers assess the damage outside; it takes a long time. Even through the tinted windows Inumaki can make out the damaged building, teetering from its unstable foundation, a gaping orifice torn from its left side. A perfect circle made from Limitless Blue carves into the dirt, tunneling across the street like a 2D cutout. But it’s not flat; it’s destruction that bulldozes across the road, eats metal and concrete and gravel like a spoon to a scoop of ice-cream. The carnage ends where the curtain has begun to melt away,  stopping right up against an old playground tapering the shimmering barrier. Children flock around the rickety red slide, one screw loose from the tremors that Blue sent beneath the ground. 

“I’m sorry,” Yuuta mutters. They’re sitting a seat apart. He tries to nudge the back of Inumaki’s hand. Inumaki pulls away jerkily, wiping his face with his sleeve, and then nearly jumps out of his seat as his phone begins to ring.

Shoko’s voice crackles as she asks, “Inumaki? What happened, are you alright?”

“Yeah,” Inumaki says hoarsely. He stares out the window, watching a staff member tow away the remains of a demolished car. He hangs up. He can’t deal with her right now. 

“Why’d you-” Yuuta starts and stops, shrinking in on himself. He still asks, though it doesn’t sound like a question, “Why’d you bother.”

Inumaki turns to him slowly, still feeling the soreness in his throat, a ringing in his ears, the way the atoms in his skin still vibrate with the memory of Limitless Blue tearing through him, threatening to rip him apart. Yuuta looks at him, skinny and hard around the edges. His eyes are hollow, a purplish bruise painting both his eyes a dark shade. His hair is unkempt and oily, and a smudge of dirt below his chin has stained the top of his white jacket. He looks the same, sort of, and yet not quite himself. 

He’s never been just himself, Inumaki realizes in that moment. He’s always been a part of someone else. Even now. 

“Because you’re my friend, you idiot,” Inumaki signs, his hands shaking vigorously, angry and exhausted. “You’re my friend.” 

*

Two days after the comeback mission, the Higher Ups request both Yuuta and Inumaki’s presence at Headquarters. Ijichi is waiting for them just outside the gates of Jujutsu High after dark, taking a moment to wipe his glasses as Yuuta slips into the backseat and Inumaki joins him. Inumaki watches as Yuuta chews anxiously on his lip as Ijichi sets the gear into motion, and they slide away from the school grounds.

“The board hopes you enjoy their gift,” Ijichi says smoothly. “A return to the sorcery world. A much needed return, given the circumstances.”

Yuuta’s old jacket was decimated in the battle - their gift to him is made of expensive leather, a thin layer of wool keeping his body warm underneath it. A delicate gold pattern threads over his shoulders, and even the bagginess of the jacket’s arms feel more refined, tucked towards two gold cufflinks. It’s a suffocating little thing. For all its new embellishments, Yuuta doesn’t wear it as well as his old one.  

“It’s alright,” Yuuta says and then, more importantly, “I thought the Higher Ups were dead.”

“As the ruling authority over all matters of sorcery, their empty seats cannot stay empty for very long, Okkotsu-kun.” Ijichi responds carefully. “This is a rather important matter, so I would very much encourage you to go and see for yourself.”

Inumaki is surprised to find a very different version of the building he visited a year ago when Ijichi drops them off; instead of a traditional buddhist temple, the establishment they’re in front of now is modern, fitted with rotating doors and a robust reception desk, two attendants flanking the glass double-door entryway. 

He recognises the interior he steps into, but much has changed since Shibuya. For one, there is much more luxury in the setting - every piece of furniture looks handpicked, the front desk is actually being used and the monitors are sleek and up to date. A sweet looking secretary takes him through a long corridor, past a server room and an organized kitchenette. At their destination, Yuuta nearly bumps into a long and lavish dinner table; looks up at the high ceiling, gold coving, baroque ornamentation draped over the white plaster. At the head of the table Mei Mei dabs politely at her mouth, flanking her on the right an awkward looking Kusakabe; to her left the ever expressionless Gakuganji. Filling the rest of the table are people he’s never met before: most are men in their mid-forties sporting distinct looks likely based on the traditional garb of their respective clan, though several of them have silvery white hair and pale blue eyes that send a shock of familiarity to Yuuta’s core. 

Gojo, Inumaki thinks suddenly. Not Gojo-sensei, a Gojo.

They’re a strange bunch together - even stranger with Yuuta taking a seat at the far end of the table, fiddling with a long, embellished tablecloth that droops over his thighs. The men and women he does not recognise do not welcome him. He suspects they will not talk, either.

“Welcome back, Okkotsu, Inumaki.” Mei Mei says with an elegant smile. “You made quite the impression with your comeback mission, both of you. Okkotsu - so you can wield the Limitless technique now, permanently. Still as unstable and amateurish as before of course, but how do you manage without his body to maintain it?” 

“It’s- unclear.” Yuuta takes a deep breath, as if trying to understand the ability himself. “Aside from our ancestral bond, I don’t know if I can fully explain how it works until I’m given more time.”

“Can you use Hollow Purple?” One of the white-haired men at the table speaks up suddenly, and all eyes shift their attention onto Yuuta. Mei Mei, equally curious, leans over her food with a glint in her eye. Her braid - braided in purple andromeda - narrowly avoids the saucer of gravy under Ui Ui’s hands. “Can you use Unlimited Void?”

“I just said I need more time.” Yuuta snaps back. He’s a live wire, shaking under the table. Inumaki’s firm hand over his seems to settle the urgency in his voice but not the shake of it, the confusion and the rush to understand himself the way Mei Mei seems to want to understand him. 

“Hm." She hums. “Well, without the Six Eyes, I would have expected even less. Your ability to handle the Limitless technique is still far beyond the practitioners at this table.” Her lip curls, her eyes darting past him. “And Inumaki Toge. I didn’t know you could… talk talk.” 

“Things. Change.” Inumaki says with effort, looking up at her. “Takana?”

“Things change indeed.” Her voice reverberates around the room. Ui Ui, beside her, cuts his sister a slice of roast duck. “You certainly exhibit a mad tenacity for exorcisms, Yuuta, but if you can’t control Limitless Blue without blacking out you’re not a special grade- you’re just a first grade glass cannon. I don’t want a single-use molotov cocktail on the battlefield; I want a humvee with a mounted turret shooting everything on sight. Maki Zenin is a fantastic example of that,” she laughs, a tinkling, porcelain sound. 

Yuuta stares at the embroidered cloth, his face half cast in shadow under the harsh ceiling lights. Kusakabe coughs, concerned.

“In my opinion the reassessment was too soon.” Gakuganji speaks up, fixated on him with an impassive stare. “Have you forgotten that Yuuta has only just recovered from his condition? If we cannot give him time, we can at least excuse his lackluster performance.”

“It was never my decision anyways,” Mei Mei sniffs, sipping at her champagne flute. “Well, not mine alone- the remaining Two Families were eager to see the only remaining special grade in Japan back in action. I’ll let him keep the title for now if it pleases the Gojo clan to have a descendant of theirs climbing the upper echelons of Jujutsu society with them.” 

“As for Inumaki,” she continues, looking directly at him. “You took on a unique unprecedented supporting role. We’re bumping you to baseline first grade for your versatility. Enjoy the pay raise.”

Inumaki blinks, stunned as Yuuta snaps, “Since when have you been in charge?”

“Since I nominated them,” Gakuganji butts in. “Jujutsu Headquarters lost eight members of the committee. We have now only four Higher Ups governing the countries’ leading sorcerers, at a time when we may have to depend on every sorcerer’s might.”

“For the sake of upholding Jujutsu Society, we must find a way to maintain order.” Gakuganji looks away with a grimace, adding quietly. “We must maintain the status quo and structure the changes we want to make to Jujutsu Society slowly. That means understanding who the Two Families might accept within their ranks, and who they would rightfully deny. For instance,” he gestures to Inumaki. “A serpent-fang boy of an inferior clan who cannot speak in proper sentences would hardly inspire change.”

“But a sorcerer with Michizane’s blood in his veins and the Limitless technique,” Mei Mei leans forward, a glint in her eye. “Would undoubtedly be granted a seat at the table.”

Shit, Inumaki thinks. No way.

“Stand proud, Yuuta.” Mei Mei says mockingly as she plucks a grape off her plate and swallows it whole. “The Gojo clan put forth a request for you to become a member of the board. Due to your age and inexperience with Jujutsu Society we can’t reasonably allow you to make any broader decisions regarding the restructuring of the system, of course. But knowledge that Gojo Satoru imparted onto you, and knowledge of Sukuna and Kenjaku, will no doubt be of vital significance as we begin preparations for how to usher in a new era of sorcery.” 

She exhales, grinning softly, “Oh - and welcome, to the top of the food chain.”

*

Yuuji is an easy sell to the theory when Inumaki and Yuuta break it down to the second-years. He’s so easy a sell that he doesn’t even ask how it really works - just smiles and nods, his heart on his sleeve, one hand braced on the back of the couch and the other in Yuuta’s calloused palm like it might reassure him of what he’s become. Nobara’s biggest complaint is Inumaki’s unintentional reassessment - honestly, if that’s how things are going to go with the new Higher Ups everyone should be reassessed! Little to no comment on the actual state of affairs. If anything, they seem unperturbed by the chaotic restructuring of the ruling board - something Yuuta finds surprisingly comforting, like they’re still first-year kids thinking about curses in the broadest sense of the term, and nothing more dangerous than a second-grade encounter.

“You’re already semi-first though,” Yuuji points out. “And so am I. Isn’t that good?” 

 “Well let me tell you, Itadori Yuuji,” she rebukes, enunciating each syllable with a punch of her finger to his chest. “That semi-first grades don’t get paid hourly, we get paid salary . And we work overtime! All! The! Time! Now rethink what I just told you, think again, and agree with me!” 

She is curious, halfway through drinks (“On me! I’ve been doing so much shit you know, just SO much, anyways, shots?”) and her hands are clumsily knitting through Yuuta’s buttons like Infinity is stored somewhere inside his chest, the warm light of the izakaya burning the red of her face into the white of his jacket.

“He’s in there?” she shouts, drowsy. “Hey! Gojo!” 

Inumaki shakes his head. Yuuta’s nervous laugh falters at the sound of his voice, sobering up. “Gone.” 

“As he should be.” Yuuji says, eyeing Nobara’s hands still trying to grope for Infinity as Yuuta politely ignores her. “And he is. Right?”

“He’s… dead,” Yuuta responds, staring at the table instead. “Not gone.”

“So rest his soul.” Fushiguro says. They stop to look at him, arms crossed, a shock of monotonous gray and black in the vibrant decorations of their narrow booth. His voice is unbothered, almost lazy, his eyes shifting over Yuuta’s face as he regards him and the power inside him. His gaze seems to shift a lot these days regardless - something that’s been holding him back from a full schedule of Pools missions and search & rescue operations. Everything assigned to him is partnered, whether with Nobara or Yuuji, and Fushiguro’s never told him why but Inumaki doesn’t have to ask: Yuuji cares too much about his health to spare his dignity. 

It was one day in mid-June when they had bumped into each other at the konbini that he had spilt the secret, his words an untidy rush of helplessness. “It could be anything,” Yuuji said to him, clutching his soda tightly on the way home. “Too many eyes, four limbs. A funny looking torso. A low voice. Anything.” 

His can of soda popped and fizzed, the hand curled into it so tight that liquid began to leak through the firm lines of his fingers, the curl of his thumb, sprite and blood. 

“Sukuna’s already dead,” Yuuji muttered faintly. “I know, I killed him. So why,” Turning to Inumaki, looking up, a hint of something in his eyes, the same kind of desperation that lingered and deepened during late spring season, at Nanami’s funeral service. “Why?”

Inumaki and Yuuta do their due diligence and walk the second-years back to campus safe and sound - Inumaki makes for a trip to the toilet, halting just before rounding the corner of the boy’s bathroom as the sound of Yuuta’s voice needles through the silence. 

“You used to look up to me a lot,” Yuuta says. 

“I still do.” Fushiguro nods stiffly, shifting in his spot. Yuuji and Nobara’s voices disappear into the night, a drunken caterwaul eclipsed by the exasperated groan of friend raised too well to let a girl wander off into a forest by herself. 

“I don’t know why this is happening,” Yuuta responds. “I don’t know why I can use Limitless. But I won’t let what I have go to waste. I won’t let- what he’s given me go to waste. I hope you know that.” 

“What he’s given you.” Fushiguro’s words slow in his mouth. His eyes glint, harsh in direct lamplight as a shadow across the cobbled stone splits their path in two. “He hasn’t given it to you, Yuuta. You obtained it - how, I don’t know. But it’s your own. You should think of it as such.” 

“Fushiguro-” 

“Think for yourself, senpai.” His eyes glitter in the dark, expression hidden in heavy shadow. “That’s what a sorcerer should do.” 

Yuuta watches as he strides briskly away, unmoving even as Inumaki returns so they can leave before the day can grow any darker, watching the back of his head as it morphs into the dappled gloom of tree shade.  

*

The move in together sort of happens with the realization that staying at school would be a chore of a commute, and Yuuta’s special-grade salary is sitting in the bank accumulating interest, him not having spent more than a few thousand yen a week for the past two years. Knowing what they know about Yuuta’s condition and Inumaki’s ability to bring him back from a blackout, the Higher Ups agree to Yuuta’s proposal - there’s really no reason to deny him after his newfound abilities - and their new housing arrangements are quickly coordinated by the Jujutsu High staff. Ijichi personally drives them to their new work-appointed two-person apartment complex and they survey the grounds, satisfied if also a little disoriented. 

Strange how quickly the process becomes when their thoughts align with the Higher Ups and Two Families - there’s no tedium, no chain of command to struggle through or argue against. Well - they have Gojo to thank for the severing of that chain. Now, the Two Families are all too eager to let their only official special-grade back into the action.

Neither of them talk much about Yuuta’s blackout yet - it might be the rush of procedure that delays their discussion, or the awkwardness of everything that happened in between. Yuuta thinks of Inumaki’s red faced anger, his cursed energy lifting him out of the darkness the way Rika’s voice had woke him in the morgue. He’s never seen Inumaki cry before. Inumaki himself isn’t too keen on talking about it either - and they carry on with their going about so normally it’s as if it didn’t happen.

Yuuta doesn’t even mention it explicitly in the cursed spirit mission report they pass along to Kusakabe - only: Inumaki Toge was witness to the exorcism of the fourth grade curse - so Inumaki does not say anything either, not even to their resident medic when she pulls Yuuta aside the next day as they stagger back into their dorms and start packing for their new home. 

“I missed eight calls from Inumaki on your comeback.” she says sharply, “Excellent supporting role my ass. Mei Mei told me everything. If you’re going to be blacking out during missions, at least drop by for an examination so I know you’ll be okay out there. I’m still a teacher at your school, you know.”

“The chances of it happening again-” 

“- are unknown, possibly likely, and dangerous. And you don’t care.” Shoko rolls her eyes. “Yes, yes. We get it. You’ve already got Gojo’s abilities, you don’t have to adopt his reckless behaviors as well.”

“It’s not as reckless as you think it is.” Yuuta says tightly. “I’ll find a way to get it under control.”

“Keep telling yourself that.” Shoko huffs a laugh. “When it comes back to bite you in the ass, don’t come crying to me about it.”

It’s hard not to notice Inumaki’s mouth curled into a grimace over the sound of construction being done around the border of Minato city, and beyond that Shibuya buried under mountainous scaffolding likely for years to come. This will be their last trip before Yuuta will consider the house partially settled - a quick grocery run to check off the last things on their to-buy list, baseline necessities for one’s first night in a new home.

New again. Well, it has to be. But the fighting isn’t going to be new now that he knows he’ll be stuck in it for a long time. That, at least, he might be looking forward to. The memory of using Limitless Blue still tingles between the skin of his palms like a cold sheen of sweat. It surprises him to know that he’d like to try it again - if only to confirm that he’s still powerful. That he can still fulfill his duties as a sorcerer. 

“Home sweet home.” Inumaki signs to Yuuta as the last of the movers leave. Left by themselves in their new house, Yuuta watches Inumaki flop down on their leather couch, smelling like it came straight out the store. 

“It could be fun.” Yuuta says.

“Are you having fun right now?” Inumaki responds. There’s no malice behind the words; if anything, he seems amused by it. 

“I’m-” Yuuta starts and stops, unsure. “I’d like to. With a friend. Would you?”

They were friends, at some point. Yuuta never knows how close - Inumaki is like that, keeping to himself, well-guarded even when he pulls pranks with Panda and wears skirts or backflips off the fifth story of the administrative building; even when he’s physically affectionate with Maki or clinging to Yuuta like he’s his bratty younger brother. There are things that Yuuta doesn’t know about him, that he didn’t realize he’d want to know about until they found themselves hand to hand, gaze in fear-stricken gaze. The sound of Inumaki’s screaming voice undoes a knot in Yuuta’s head, unraveling a string that coils tightly around his lungs instead. He shuts his eyes and sees a painted red mouth in a thousand different shades.

And now a meter apart they’ve found themselves sitting together on a couch overlooking a half-built city, phones pinging with messages about curses and curses and curses.

“Shake,” Inumaki nods, head bobbing knowingly. Why not, it means. Why not.  

*

Yuuta wades in a perpetually dark world, no true north, no axis to align his movement. There are two pricks of light he can see in opposite directions. One of them smells sickly, like a fresh wound heaped with gauze; the other sounds like the sea shore and tastes like salt and sand. Both unknowns are overwhelming. As Yuuta curls into himself, images swarm the void too fast to make out, sequences scrubbed into the distorted, dissonant pitches of unintelligible sound. People he’s never met blink in and out of existence. Places he’s never been to force themselves into his mind. Yuuta clutches his head as a migraine sets in, a pinching pressure at his temples winding tight around the back and front of his head, like if it squeezed any more than this he would snap, and then-

“Are you alright?” Gojo says. Yuuta blinks. He’s at the airport, staring down at his unlaced sneakers.

“You’re here,” he says instead, looking up. Gojo is looking down at him, smiling. High above them, through the glass ceiling and steel framework of the building’s infrastructure, the sun shines a glowing radiance into his hair.

“Against all odds,” he says, checking his watch. “They’ve delayed me, I think.” Yuuta’s heart soars faintly with hope, even though he doesn’t understand why.

“But I have to go,” Gojo frowns a little then, unsure. “It’s my calling, Yuuta. I have to find a way. I have friends to meet, you know.”

He tries to get up and leave, but Yuuta catches him by the arm. Desperation latches on like an extra finger, his fist tightening, Gojo’s eyes widening as his head snaps up to meet Yuuta’s gaze.

“You can’t go,” Yuuta breathes, panicked. “I won’t let you go. I won’t, I won’t!” 

“Yuuta,” he says softly. 

“No, listen to me-” He gets up and all of a sudden Gojo is gone and everything is gone with him. “Gojo!” 

The void stares down at him, past his toes, at the bottom of it a single prick of light. Then he’s falling, shouting, screaming as someone calls for him, asks him to answer.

And despite every atom in his body begging him to keep silent, Yuuta responds. 

Chapter Text

Kusakabe Atsuya plays guitar - well he played guitar, and now occasionally dabbles. He’s not bad, he thinks, not bad at all for a hobbyist, and maybe that’s because once upon a time he’d hit the sound stage after-school, riffing off with his classmates like they were some kind of punk-rock band. Sometimes he’ll pick up that old thing after work, when he’s not on call, and improv doesn’t come to him that easily anymore but chords are alright. He can play chords.

He’s chipped his old guitar pick, so he goes out to buy a new one. His regular commute takes him through plenty of well known music stores but he’s just a hobbyist, you know? He doesn’t have to get serious about it.

“That’s what I always hated about you,” The sales clerk says at the counter, flicking through a book, “And my shop is very reputable, I’ll have you know.” 

“Yeah?” Kusakabe responds. His eyes take in a good sweep of the goods out on display. Plenty of guitar picks. Kusakabe reaches for an otamatone shaped like Devilman. “Why’re you shutting down next week, then?”

“Because I’m moving out of Saitama.” 

“For a more reputable location?”

“Ironically, the rent is better in Shibuya. At this rate I might even consider saving up to buy the 109.” 

“The whole damn thing? What would you do with it?” Kusakabe answers, deciding that he likes the otamatone. It’s cute and sounds terrible, and he adds it to the lone guitar pick at the counter before leaning his weight against the glass showcase beneath the two of them, and sneaking a glance at the sales clerk’s choice of literature, who looks up at him expectantly. 

“Oh, I don’t know.” He’s prim and proper; white button up in a textured sweater vest, nails trimmed, hair neatly curled and parted in soft waves. He looks just like Kusakabe remembered him. Likely, if they met, Mei Mei would comment that he’s just as antagonistic - but he’s never enjoyed her presence, or any other sorcerers for that matter. Kusakabe looks at him a little more, while he has the time. “Open another equally reputable music shop.”

“Will you ever swing by the school again, Usami?” Kusakabe says, taking a moment to catch his breath. 

“Sure,” Usami’s lip curls, his mouth a painted red line. “On your last day.”

“I can’t leave right now.”

“You said that last time.”

“You know Gojo Satoru asked me to stay, back then.”

“Gojo,” Usami tuts, snapping the book shut. He closes his eyes, as if reminiscing that moment. “Well, he’s dead, isn’t he?”

“You tell me.” Kusakabe says. “Is he alive?” There’s an ache in his back; he’s getting tired of leaning over the desk. Usami’s pink mouth parts, and then it closes. He sighs and shuts his eyes as his cursed energy manifests around him, pulsing steadily like a heartbeat. It fills the room like water, sluggish and heavy and so thick Kusakabe feels himself wanting to rise with it like a buoy at sea. Usami breathes in, channeling his cursed technique. 

And he was always good at that; slow things, careful things, things that took patience and time. Kusakabe would play something from B’z and Usami would lean against him and channel, and they would plan their hunts like that without ever leaving the room: have lunch at the sushi belt place next to the first curse, take the train to the second just a block away from the Daiso near the Shodai clan complex. Day drink. Kill something close by. Fuck around and go kill something else. Usami always knew where the best curses would be. Curtain another kill; call post-mission ops, split up and go home. 

Kusakabe didn’t like going home alone; he was a coward, he would say. Never admitted to being lonely. 

“No,” Usami exhales after a tense silence. Sweat beads at his temple, and he rises momentarily as if nauseous. Kusakabe catches his shoulders, and Usami sags into his hold. “No I don’t feel him, just… his puppet.” 

“Yuuta.” Kusakabe corrects him.

“Right.” Usami closes his eyes. They stand a desk apart, and as Kusakabe releases his hold on him, Usami’s hands come up around his elbows, tucked in on himself. “Well, onto business. The Kamo clan are adjusting to their change in leadership. The Gojo clan are holed up in their temples, as per usual. Oh, a single Zenin - your student, I think, no more than that.”

“Anything in The Pools?”

“Mmn,” Usami’s brow furrows. “Whatever you’ve encountered there are no stronger than Kenjaku’s minions. If the Big Families were involved in their revival, I would assume it to be so they can continue negotiating Jujutsu Society’s portion of the annual police department budget with The Cabinet. Nothing more petty than that.” 

“I knew I could count on you,” Kusakabe says. Usami rings up the bill; and he catches the thin wrist pushing the change tray gently forward. Earnestly, he adds, “Come on, Usami. The Higher ups have changed. The school’s better; the curses are weaker, the world’s not in peril anymore. Won’t you go back?”

“Go back?” Usami says, wrenching his hand away sharply. “Ridiculous. Why would I go back to a job that only dredges up bad memories?” 

He ushers Kusakabe out of the store, not out of anger, but rather a sort of shyness that dredges up nostalgia for the both of them. At the door where a bell chimes and a hinge groans, Kusakabe grabs him by the shoulders.

“I liked hanging out with you,” Kusakabe forces out of his mouth. It sounds clumsy and unpracticed; felt much more appropriate in his head. “Was that not a good memory?”

“Atsuya,” Usami says gently. His eyes dart left to right, taking in the empty street in front of them before pressing a chaste kiss to the side of his mouth. It’s light, like a butterfly landed on his unshaven stubble. Kusakabe goes rigid. “When did I ever say you were the problem?”

Kusakabe goes home; plays chords; messes up one too many times before sinking into the plush cotton of his unkempt blanket and groans at the ceiling.

“Damned sorcery,” he says, to nobody there. 

*

The Pools aren’t brutal like the Culling Games were, with reincarnated curse users and cursed objects and rules to remember to play by. A high level sorcerer might consider it a playground of sorts - there are different zones with different types of demons, each with puzzling abilities that are better figured out with the precision of skill rather than brute strength. If Inumaki concentrates hard on just that, just that puzzle-solving-pop-quiz kind of, trivia night aspect of it all, he might even consider it fun.

But curses aren’t actually fun. They’re filled with negativity and they smell of it putridly, constantly, overwhelmingly. It’s a nauseating thing to be stuck in the miasma of a curse for any longer than an hour. At the rate that The Pools spawns curses, he’s been in these dark pockets for days at a time. It’s efficient; it gets the job done to exorcize them in groups rather than individuals. At the very least, he gets to suffer it with a friend. 

In the early hours of the morning, Okkotsu Yuuta takes the first available train to Yoyogi park. He eradicates twelve third-grade curses loitering around the cordoned off gymnasium, five more mourning at the Family Mart not too far from his ride back home. Inumaki joins him like he was asked to and Yuuta says nothing of his shadowing - his gaze hardens as he completes his tasks, unwavering concentration until his sword is sheathed and wrapped again. They’re silent on the train ride, cramped between passengers on a congested Thursday evening.

“Hold on a minute.” Yuuta says, putting his hand up to stop him in front of a curtain. They’ll be in Sendai for most of the week, clearing Aoba-ku of the final dredges of curse-infested pockets. The street ends at the convex black dome, its barrier properties so strong that it split the zelkova in front of it in half, the tree’s spine bent fully over a bench overgrown with ivy. The sun’s just about to set, a murder of crows heading south past their heads. 

“Shikigami are extremely prevalent in the Sendai colony,” Yuuta reads off the mission statement, Inumami shaking his bottles of throat spray in preparation for their battle. “- most notably, shikigami that can take flight. Curses in the area are grades one and two.” he looks up with a shrug. 

“Slow?” Inumaki signs. 

“We could round them all up if we’re fast enough first.” Yuuta says, drawing with his fingers across the map they’ve laid out in the air between them. “Like this. If they’re grade two, you’d probably be able to get them to form a line , and then it’ll just be a matter of blasting them away.”

“Do you really want to blast them through Ichibancho though?” Inumaki points at a symbol in the mark, making an invisible cross with his finger. “The shopping district that’s supposedly invaluable to Sendai's economic recovery?” Yuuta glances down again sharply to reconsider and Inumaki gets his hands around his wrist, guiding it away from the little black and white top-down street. “Yeah, Mei Mei’s gonna actually kill you if you fuck this one up like you did Shibuya 109.” 

Yuuta grimaces, rubbing his hand through his hair. “Hard to concentrate when you’ve got that many curses coming up a single flight of stairs.” 

“We’ll lead them to the river.” Inumaki says. “You should be able to use Blue there and avoid ‘devaluing’ the district. Don’t tell me you won’t enjoy the freedom in a harmless blast radius like that.”

“Tell you what I don’t enjoy,” Yuuta runs a hand through his hair, nodding as they walk through the black barrier. From light to dark, even the sound of the wind goes considerably mute within the curtain. “Mei Mei making money a part of her everyday conversation.” 

Watching Yuuta in battle used to be a chore. He was clumsy and unpracticed, unmotivated and not the least bit challenging. As a first year he would weave between hits because he was scared of them and tapped back so lightly he’d hardly leave a scratch. There is none of that now in his technique. Yuuta fights brutally, even despite his weakened body and Rika’s absence. There is nothing performative about his movements, nothing indecisive in the artful stroke of his block.

A moving curtain of night envelops his next target, a formless and long-necked curse batting away the shikigami that can’t tell friend from foe as they swarm the sky like horseflies. It reminds Inumaki of a curse he’d felt during the fight for Shibuya: a flutter of wings overhead as he guided civilians towards exits, away from the station despite its coaxing fluorescent lights. Away from carnage, steady on foot, his voice entrancing them step by step, street to street, corner around corner.

It hadn’t mattered in the end. He remembers the sweat heavy on his brow like it was just yesterday, the concentration in his honeyed voice lulling thousands on a safe pilgrimage to Elsewhere as long as it wasn’t Here. Then Sukuna had blown his arm off and a woman’s head exploded just a few meters behind him - there was, spontaneously, a spray of guts on the street signaling the first shockwave of terror before the entire road was squeezed under the pressure of Malevolent Shrine, cracking like glass and unable to shatter. Everything else had, though. The people. Inumaki came to learn that day, just how many fascinating, horrifying ways people could shatter. It was something out of his old dreams. Like the darkest corners of his childhood, just beginning to seep into daylight’s conscious wavering.

Things he thought he’d forgotten entirely. 

“Follow me,” Inumaki directs to the swarm in front of him and they droop at his suggestion, making a lazy turn right towards the wide street. They’ve finally reached an embankment, and from the left he can feel the great haze of Yuuta’s energy fill the street like a flood of white noise, trickling towards the shoreline of the river. Behind him, a mole-rat curse digs the ground ahead, uprooting a hawker stand and a park bench, raking freshly turned soil through its razor sharp claws. It screeches, a banshee’s wail that has Yuuta flinching as they make another sharp right. Inumaki’s throat sores, the bats descending upon him. Yuuta’s gaze tracks the frantic movement, one hand outstretched towards the string of obedient curses just as Inumaki lets the command to follow drop. He curls his index finger towards himself, a beckoning taunt laced with the tantalizing pull of Limitless. 

“Come here,” he coos. The bats follow, charmed. The mole-rat, like a clumsily drunken suitor, rears its head with another screaming cry. Grades of all morph into a blob-like marathon, a competition to outpace each other towards the central pivot of pulling gravity at Yuuta’s fingertips as he skips towards the deep end of the river like he could walk upon it. And maybe he really can with Limitless- maybe it brings him closer to godlike sanctity. Maybe Inumaki’s scared of it too, just a little bit, how effortlessly Yuuta does so, like a deity frolicking the water. 

“Watch him,” Inumaki coaxes the curses; coaxes himself. He’s unwittingly entranced by the light of Blue - not so dangerous anymore when it’s far enough from harming him. It looks like a star nestled in Yuuta’s palm, so bright that it lacks the ambient tones of shadow, so dense with energy that the world wavers around the heat-stroked air. 

“Come here,” Yuuta breathes. The curses come, compelled by speech and by awe, at the star in his hands offered so generously. Yuuta, lit up by the glow of Blue’s power, sheds age by the decade as light floods every cavern of shadow on his face.

“Come and die.” Yuuta laughs, tossing the light up. It pulses once; twice; the third time is strong enough for Inumaki to pull away, for his throat to give out as the curses squirm under his hold, his mind a migraine and his hands slippery with sweat as they squeal for control of their own senses before Blue breaks them. But it’s already broken them - engulfed them, seized them by the mote and grain. Sent them hurtling towards the star, a prick of immovable gravity between Yuuta’s palms, until their bodies are as fine as white sand and their breaths intermingled with the first wash of blood-rain that descends all around them.

Inumaki watches Yuuta chuckle. He’s not manic, not insane. Just disbelieving. He blinks, losing balance for only a moment- will only allow himself that vulnerability before it is tucked away and he straightens up again. He smiles, slow and knowing, if not also tired. He teleports in front of Inumaki, staggering onto solid ground as Inumaki catches his forearm lightly, feeling out the solidness of his body as if it would help make him feel more real. 

“We’re done here,” Yuuta says, and calls in the ops. 

Later by the bay, as staffers tidy the riverbank and they take a seat at a long pier where abandoned boats bob against the undulations of clean-up, Yuuta fishes a smoke out of his breast pocket and lights it with a lightning-quick snap of his fingers, fire blooming under his nose as he inhales and puffs out. 

“I’m allowed to have them,” he says to Inumaki, like he’s owed an explanation. “Shoko gave these to me.” 

They look out across the water, to the riverbank and the bite of it taken out by Blue. It’s a perfect shape, a pretty thing, almost. Like the artistic decision of an omnipotent designer. 

“Gojo never told me how much it stank,” Yuuta says. He gestures to the air around them, “curses. How much they smell. How the air thickens when you’re in contact with one. How heavy it gets around a first grade, a special grade. And god I wish I asked,” he laughs, shaking his head as he reminisces fondly, “Rika smelled like a corpse. It was hard to even move around her. I can’t believe I put up with it for so long.” 

“You stink plenty, yeah.” Inumaki signs, nodding to his body caked in dried blood. His skin crusts where he’s stretched his neck, long streaks of burnt sierra striping his white jacket. Not something that will easily come off in the wash, he thinks. 

“You know what I mean,” Yuuta says, but smiles ruefully all the same, and Inumaki nods. “But I meant to say - I understand. Why Gojo never told me. He could have joked about it at least, I always thought. He seemed like the kind of guy to joke about it. See, now.”

Yuuta raises the back of his hand to his face, wrinkling his nose like he’s bracing himself for the hit of something rancid. His breath deepens until he’s pressed skin to skin. Inumaki watches as Yuuta opens his mouth slightly - he licks his hand, purple staining his tongue, up, and up to the very tips of his fingers. Something uncontrollably ugly rises from the pit of Inumaki’s stomach. Twists and turns and lashes out, repulsed by the liquid staining Yuuta’s bottom lip, a pink tongue darting out to catch that last drop of ichor. Entranced by how it sticks and stays on the flesh, by the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallows. 

“I don’t smell them anymore,” Yuuta says. “I’ve stopped being able to smell them since I woke up- it’s almost instinctive. I can smell everything else, taste everything else - the wet earth, the river, my own sweat.” he trails off, then quietly, “No curses.”

“Not the rancid stink of them like aged food holed up in an old place,” he whispers. “Not the persistence of a fly hovering at your ear in the nighttime. Not the touch of it, like a coat of grime over your skin. Imagine that.”

Cursed energy has always been a bit of a poisonous thing. Cursed speech was the same: There’s an acidic quality to the casting of a word - to the spell woven into a phrase, the toxin administered with a command. It oozes something sickly when the words find their mark when-

Inumaki asked the older gentleman to squeeze his own throat, squeeze, squeeze, and as he squeezed he would praise Inumaki-sama for his wisdom and his beauty in a haiku: “the spring haze; a scent hanging in the air; your beauty in one smell”. And when he was done and he was dead Inumaki clapped and Inumaki-sama held his tiny body up and threw him to the sky once, twice, one more time, well done! Well done, my son, my son, well done,

You are blessed, he would say. You are blessed. And the bodies leaked oil and old age. 

Inumaki signs to Yuuta, careful to hide the tremor in his fingers, “How does it feel?”

Yuuta responds, casting his gaze towards the sky, “Amazing. Like the anticipation of guilt and sadness is gone. Like there isn’t guilt or sadness, or even anticipation, at all.”

*

Yuuta’s a bit of a messy roommate but he tries not to let it show in their new shared spaces. He’s never had a place with someone before, he told him; Inumaki notices Yuuta rub his thumb absentmindedly over his fourth finger, like trying to feel for the ring that isn’t there. He hasn’t put it on since he woke up.

Me neither, Inumaki had said to that and then, clinking his glass to Yuuta’s across their table of takeout, here’s to new experiences.

Today, Inumaki tries out one of Fushiguro’s linguistics textbooks - sturdy hardcover, bound in an old plastic wrap; likely taken from the Jujutsu High common room bookshelf. There’s a yellowing library slip in the first chapter when Inumaki flips through it, documenting its age to be at least around a decade old, and one person’s written their name neatly in the enclosed box of student check outs. Fushiguro had told him that he didn’t need it anymore, having read it all.

“You can have it or whatever,” he had said to Inumaki. “I just read it for fun.”

“I hate reading for fun,” Inumaki said dryly, and Fushiguro shoved him.

It’s a perfect fit. Not too thick to tilt over the coffee table, just heavy enough to stay unmoving on the floor. Inumaki gets up, resting his head happily on the surface of the table, and it stays put, not the least bit wobbly.

“Don’t you need that to learn more words or something?” Yuuta asks from the lounge chair. 

“No.” Inumaki pronounces, and then without much ability to explain himself further out loud, “I’ll study. Now.” 

“Alright.” Yuuta says. A cup of steaming coffee reddens his fingertips. His face has filled out considerably since his awakening and as he sips at his drink mildly, color returns to his cheeks to stay there. 

After a while of sounding out words, Yuuta interrupts him to say, “I’m happy for you, you know.” There’s a flush down his neck that feels oddly misplaced, like it’s the wrong shade of red against his cream colored sweater.

“Oh?” Inumaki looks up. 

“It must have taken a lot of guts to start to do that. To speak.”

Inumaki pauses, thinking of the words as they come to him. He looks up, his hands signing, “ Not really.” 

Yuuta’s brows quirk. He leans forward. For the first time, Inumaki notices the light 5 o’clock shadow curving his jaw, and a spot of razor burn on the right side of his jaw, just under his ear. “No?”

“Maybe the first time. But after that, it was just a shift in perspective.” Outside, a sparrow flies into their patio, coming to rest at the cool silver railing. It nips at its feathers for a little bit, quick little jerks of its head as it takes in its surroundings. Inumaki’s plants, having grown in the presence of his fluctuating cursed energy, rustle at it menacingly. The sparrow flies away with a squawk. “But something’s holding me back, still. Something beyond the psychological theory of sound and all. Something cursed.”

Yuuta exhales out a long breath, shrinking in his seat. He tucks his bare feet onto the lounge chair, toes curling into the fabric. “If it doesn’t work out, I can still understand you perfectly in JSL, you know.”

“I know.” Inumaki’s lip curls. “ Not everything is about you, Yuuta.” 

At this, Yuuta’s ears go scarlet. “I didn’t mean-” 

“S’fine.” Inumaki replies. He means to be teasing, but as he speaks it feels less of a joke and more of contemplation.

“So what’s stopping you, then?” Yuuta says, hesitantly pushing forward. “If it’s not psychological, what is it?” 

Inumaki stares out towards the window, not meeting Yuuta’s gaze as his eyes affix on the sparrow’s fluttering silhouette as it escapes to the trees. Light flickers through its small-bodied form, a brief and fleeting splash of golden sunset on its back before the branch snaps, and the sparrow is gone.

“I don’t know,” he says. Sukuna’s eyes watch him behind his eyelids, tendrils of shadow pressed against his chest. He guides people from the disaster of Shibuya, focused on a dot behind his eyelids, a single point of concentration leveling thousands of scattered minds. A year ago shingles cracked beneath his feet, Fushiguro’s palms sweaty as he pulled them away, Hanami’s eyeless gaze observing. 

“Is it a binding vow?” Yuuta presses on.

Earlier than that, Suguru Getou leveled by a blast of his own making, rubble torn out from the ground beneath him falling, perpetually. A school of fish, a miasma of ill smells. Dead men hanging by thin wire, their hands bruised by the bending. Purple eyes and a hand on his shoulder. Firm, always firm. 

“I don’t know.”

*

They go back again, a month after, though Aoba-ku is mostly just on their list for a quick check in. It’s completely sectioned off from the other wards, having been revitalized following the purging of the cursed-energy pools there. Oddly enough, the mole-rat curse reappears in Izumi-ku, swarmed by bats almost identical to the ones they’d killed prior. Yuuta exorcizes it without hesitation as he did the last time, and with much less fanfare. 

“I fought a Shikigami user with this exact lineup,” he frowns as it disintegrates. “A sorcerer called Dhruv Lakdawalla. I remember his shikigami: I copied them myself. His bats are handy when they’re on your side. Just a nuisance when they’re not.”

The mole curse is stronger this time, though not by much. It gains the ability to speak and, at Inumaki’s beckoning call to get stuck , perks up to his voice. 

“Sweet like honey,” it says in an eerie rasp. “Inumaki. Say it again.”

Yuuta dismantles it in one swift stroke, Limitless sharpening the edge of his blade. They watch shadows slink away from the ground as the curtain rises again, with Mei Mei herself greeting them with a polite and rhythmic clap. The men in suits around her give her a wide berth - having so quickly established her place at the head of the Higher Ups, she seems to be adapting to her newfound authority much more quickly than the other members. 

She talks, her buzzwords droning over Inumaki’s head. Too caught off guard is he by Yuuta looking at him, these days always just looking , never inquiring much until,

“Inumaki,” Yuuta repeats quizzically. “Say it again.” 

Inumaki shakes his head, just as confused as he recalls what the mole curse said. “ I’ve never met this curse before Aoba-ku,” he signs.

“And I have,” Yuuta responds, curious. “But it only remembers you.” 

Throughout the recorded history of Jujutsu Sorcery, only a number of significant events have been richly recorded to text: the Civil war of Wa was not one of them, and the archives of the Three Big Families dredge up only the vaguest of details describing Dhruv’s barbaric takeover of early Kansai, nothing mentioned of the Inumaki clan. The emblem of the fanged serpent was, after all, discovered at its earliest during the Muromachi period. 

“Maybe it was just messing with us,” Yuuta says at some point, knees hooked over the armchair of the couch. What scarce information they were given by the Big Families is tucked under his arm, and he’s ended up tangentially reading about the Heian era and its mythical curses instead. He turns around, twisting his body to look at Inumaki sitting on the opposite side of him. “Or maybe the clans are hiding something from us. Do you have any relatives you can ask, by the way?” 

“Family’s all dead.” Inumaki signs. Yuuta nearly falls off the couch, his arm shooting out towards the coffee table to keep himself from bruising his hip.

“I’m sorry,” he says in a whisper of abject horror. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Nobody ever told me.”

“S’Okay,” Inumaki responds. “ Nobody asks after anyone else here. Everybody has dead family eventually, when you’re a sorcerer.”

“Well, at least I should have-” Yuuta swallows, pausing. “Did you, were they…” 

He trails off in indecision. His phone buzzes on the coffee table amidst the silence, a sharp and alarming noise that has him scrambling to excuse himself. As he talks, Inumaki lets his mind wander again, to that little crevice left largely unexplored and thoroughly denied. 

Until Sukuna tore it open with his claws. Yes, he remembers now. His fingers stroke the rough grain of his puppet arm, letting cursed energy shift and grow around him.

He understood a little bit of what he was supposed to do here. With his father’s guidance, the words would flow much more easily. As they did, with a power like this, with a pretty little voice like his.

“You would like him to dance,” Amane Inumaki said. 

“Don’t know,” Inumaki responded. He was young enough to make out only the linen of his father’s pants, and raised his head back to observe the hazy blur of features on his father’s face.

“Do you love me?” Amane Inumaki asked.

“Yes,” Inumaki responded, and was kissed with praise. “Father.” 

“I would like him to dance,” Amane Inumaki combed his hair. So Inumaki made him dance, and then they all danced happily, every dance under the sun, and Inumaki was happy.

He was happy then, Inumaki remembers. He knew how to speak then, restricted as his speech was. Beyond what the fuzzy outlines of memory have resurfaced, a gap remains to be bridged between the start of his career at Jujutsu High and those days, those odd and lost days. His puppet arm stings again. He knocks on it, like knocking on someone’s door, waiting for an answer.

“We’ve got to go.” Yuuta says as he emerges from his room, grabbing his jacket off the hook at the front entrance. “Coming? No, of course you are.”

He mutters, abashed, hand scratching his neck, “Of course you are. And thank you.”  

Yuuta completes his eighth mission of the week and another shakes his phone vigorously before the curses can even begin to scatter ash-blown to the wind. His flawless quality dominates the gray dome of sunless Tokyo, unchanged despite the day’s toil and listless nights of moving across the country. Soon they will make the trip up to Gosho Lake, then make their way back down again, across Japan. Their routes are quick and dirty, sparing little to no time for detours. It makes for boring trips despite the scenery changing every hour that they’re on the go to seek out the next source of cursed energy to quash.

Asphalt, grass, asphalt. Crumbling city skyline. Police tape. Curtain: Obsidian black. Cream colored mortar. 

A man comes up to him beginning to ask for directions, shooed away by a Jujutsu High staffer Inumaki didn’t even realize was present. This area is unsafe, please go around and take the long way, she says without preamble. There will be a public announcement when the district reopens, as the man shouts angrily about the closure of his favorite retro-games store. Thank you for your consideration, as the man points his finger at Inumaki, who ducks under his collar and hides his face.

“Let’s get something to drink,” Yuuta says wryly. “Are you thirsty?”

“Shake,” Inumaki lies.

Spring still has them dressed in down from head to toe, as the season’s beginning is crisp from winter’s leaving and the low breeze around their ankles nips softly at their bare skin. Inumaki watches goosebumps shiver across Yuuta’s arm, visceral and real. Yuuta himself seems impartial to the temperature, taking a seat beside a vending machine on a bench laced with morning dew. 

“I’m not sure how long you’ll be working with me, but I don’t want to keep you.” Yuuta says, musing in silence. Today’s menu is ice coffee and honey yuzu tea. Inumaki nods and extracts a few hundred yen from his pocket. “Tea please. Thank you.”

“You know that’s Kusakabe’s orders and not mine. You also know I don’t care, and either way we’re doing our job and getting paid.” 

“Yes,” Yuuta breathes in. “Of course.”

“And you’re my friend,” Inumaki adds. He forgets, sometimes, that Yuuta needs reminders like that. “So it’s fine.”

“I threw a book at you. And an alarm clock. And my pillow.” 

“You were upset.”

Yuuta looks up. “I was angry at myself. That I let her die without me. Always have been, ever since first year.”

“And those kids,” he continues, looking down. “Those three kids I killed.”

“She killed them.” 

“No.” Yuuta shakes his head, swallowing with difficulty. “ I killed them. They were only fourteen. I’m angry about them too, that I- left myself kill them, and their parents will never understand why.” 

Yuuta looks at him past the open top of the honey yuzu, drinking slowly. Inumaki watches his Adam’s Apple bob, his jaw flush red, lightly, matching the tips of his fingers. “Thank you for bringing me back.”

“Do you mean it?” 

“I don’t know,” Yuuta sighs. “It doesn’t matter. I’m being an inconvenience anyways.” 

“Don’t start hating yourself again. It makes for boring conversation. ” 

Yuuta stumbles over his breath, muttering embarrassedly, “Fine then, what do you want to talk about?”

“ Why do you take cold showers? What are you, a psychopath or something?”

Yuuta’s eyes widen first, and Inumaki catches the unmistakable storm-blue of his eyes like a close comfort. Then his mouth stretches open, he laughs at that - really laughs it out like it’s the funniest thing in the world, crisp and echoey across the open plain of fresh snow below their feet. He laughs, and laughs, and laughs so hard that light flickers out of his storm-blue eyes, and Inumaki catches the dead weight of his head as it drops heavy like a bowling ball into his open hand.

“Fucking hell,” Inumaki swears out loud. Nothing happens, because nobody’s around him, not right now anyways. Not while Yuuta has blinked out of his body, hovering between dimensions with nothing to permanently anchor his stitched up soul. Inumaki lets rampaging thoughts of people falling prey to his cursed speech invade his mind before fear takes hold of his skull and slams it repeatedly into the ground until it shatters. He counts under his breath, one, two, three. Eases Yuuta back on the bench, keeps his head upright, looks at him, into him, straight through him. 

He’s done it once. He can do it again. Still his arms tremble, hands supporting Yuuta’s limp neck. 

“Come on,” he urges himself. The faintest flicker of cursed energy responds to his speech. 

“Come back,” he insists and, hearing his voice ring through in cursed-energy vibrations, knows it will work this time. Yuuta’s heart thunders to life over the fingers Inumaki has pressed against his neck. Warmth flows into his veins, a shiver traversing the surface of his skin. His eyes blink open, first blue then black again. 

“I’m here.” Yuuta gasps, back in his own body once again. “I’m here.”

“Takana.” Inumaki lets him go, noting his own hesitance as he does so. Yuuta wipes a hand across his face slowly, almost as if he’s feeling out the parts of himself that changed while he was away. 

“I see him when I black out.” Yuuta says after a while. “Like he’s stuck in my mind. Like he can’t get out.”

“We should tell Shoko,” Inumaki signs, but before he can continue Yuuta is shaking his head numbly, frantically, clutching his hands to his chest as he sits up. 

“No,” Yuuta says. “No, he’s- he’s not.” He shuts his eyes firmly, breathing deeply in the crisp, chill air. “He’s fine- he doesn’t want to go.”

“Yuuta,” Inumaki’s hand stills, thinking of that star in Yuuta’s palm, that dot. His face enveloped in light, inescapable awe in his eyes. “What does that mean?”

“I woke faster, didn’t I?” Yuuta says, changing the subject. The next words seem to challenge him as he forces out a, “Didn’t I?” and his eyes narrow, defiant. 

Inumaki nods. Yuuta clenches his jaw, looking away. “Good. Next time I might not even need your help.”

Inumaki motions to their next destination and Yuuta takes his hand as he plants his feet into the ground to rise up almost forcefully. As they walk back to the station, Yuuta watches his shadow cross dips and crest’s in the uneven ground. It wavers like a candle well into the evening, into the dark of night.

*

It’s odd that the blood comes later, but it does. Delayed, Inumaki thinks as he hunches over the bathroom floor, the ache in his knees as familiar to him as the back of his hands clenching the toilet bowl in a white-knuckled grip. It’s never delayed before, but there are firsts for everything.

He feels the sticky drip of it down his lip, then the gush of his food pulled from his throat, and the wrench of his gut seizing, seizing, seizing again. He lurches over it, his eyes boring into the filth lining the bowl, some leftovers scattering into water pinked with his spit, turning red. Every breath stings the lacerations in his throat, like the words themselves were pronged and clawed and refusing to leave him - leaving their mark on him, in him. 

This fucking sucks, he thinks dizzily into the toilet bowl. Footsteps move in and out of a bedroom. When he’s anxious, Yuuta will pace frantically across their shared spaces. The wave of cursed energy that paces with him surges over Inumaki like moontide, and he sicks again.

*

They meet their host for their next mission-stay in Miyazaki, getting off at the Shinkansen to a tall man waving a sign that says, SORCERERS OF JUJUTSU HIGH SCHOOL in curly hiragana. Kilgore does not sound at all like his name - there’s a slouch to his imposing figure, and his eyes are a soft and weathered brown, like autumn grass. The heels of his shoes click as they walk, in time to the jumbled phrases of Japanese and English. His raven-dark hair is slicked back, curling just under his ears, and he sports a long, parted fringe that keeps getting into his eyes. 

Kil is easier, he says in passing as they walk through the weathered old streets of Mimata but Inumaki’s tongue says otherwise, and he laughs with a baritone that could rumble broken soil. 

“In America,” he says, “We don’t teach much combat or inherited techniques - well, we just call them Inheritances. Only old families have those.”

“Oh?” Yuuta asks, mid bite. “That’s interesting. Are there not many old families in America?”

“There are some,” Kilgore starts, scrunching his nose. “But we’re er, hm, we all come from different places. Lots of immigrants in the States, a melting pot, you know? I’m half-Japanese, so my blood isn’t as pure.”

It’s an odd few days that they wait out The Pools in Sakurajima, watching for the forecasted special grade curse. Yuuta is surprisingly antsy during their more idle days, his fingers twitching with the anticipation of another fight despite the good news of none. On their second day of waiting, Yuuta begins to pace around the little kitchenette connected to Kilgore’s open study, his slippers making a rhythmic vibration on the floor until Kilgore gets up cracking his neck with a few head rolls, and takes Yuuta by the shoulder. 

“That’s it,” he says, with exasperated determination, “We are going to the arcade!” 

He makes for surprisingly pleasant conversation through a translator - and after a long and exhausting dance battle, which whittles their senses down to hand motions and charades during a couple rounds of beer at the nearest yakiniku place they could find. But getting a little tipsy doesn’t stop him from leaping out of his seat when Yuuta mentions that they’ve only got a handful of sorcerers fighting curses across the whole of Japan and when he does, he nearly knocks the table over in surprise.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he says. “If anything, keeping people in the dark about curses would make them worse when disasters happen.”

“So do regular people know that curses exist in America?” Yuuta asks. 

“Well, that’s the plan.” Kilgore responds. “It’s in its early stages, but the Sorcerer’s Society is campaigning to raise more awareness so that people know what to look for when something’s bothering them. Doesn’t have to be big. And the less scary it is, the less the curses feed on, the more of a minority they become.” 

“Won’t people still be afraid of something they can’t see?” Inumaki wonders. Kilgore stares out the window for a little bit, nodding, glass half full before he downs it all. 

“Maybe,” he says. “But they’ll be less afraid of something that can be explained. That, my friend- that’s what science is all about, isn’t it?”

Kilgore’s apartment is small and clearly unfit for three people; on arrival, Inumaki had tripped over his suitcase on the way to their room. A Twin size bed occupies the left corner, a small desk to the left scattered with notecards and a large, laminated paper with numbers and their corresponding television channels. 

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” he says apologetically. “Sorry. I thought there was only going to be one of you.”

“No worries,” Yuuta responds quickly, a disarming smile across his face. “We’ll make do.”

It’s a decent fit for scrawny builds like Inumaki, but Yuuta’s broad and tall and his feet make an odd sound as they skirt the backboard of the bed every time he turns, a square of light illuminating his face as he scrolls through a news update from Jujutsu High. The school received a record high two-digit number of fifteen new student applications, a statistic so inconceivable to Inumaki that he laughs and Yuuta startles beside him, his phone jolting in his hand.

“We’ll finally have to fight for the communal kitchen, I guess.” Inumaki types to him, unable to sign in the near darkness. 

“Maybe,” Yuuta responds, not entirely dedicated to the discussion as he continues offhandedly, “Do you think Kilgore was right?”

“About his sick dance moves?” Inumaki says rather seriously.

“No, you-” Yuuta punches him lightly. “God, you’re annoying. About curses.” 

Yuuta shifts, all at once too close for comfort in the dingy little bed. Outside, Kilgore’s television hums with noise. The floorboards beneath the gap under the door dance with light, illuminating the plaster baseboard around it in a soft glow. It’s dark enough to mistake Yuuta’s eyes for his mouth, or his hair for his eyes - when Inumaki shifts his arms, they brush up against Yuuta’s shoulder, and he rests a hand there to feel him out so he can put some distance between them. 

“My sister follows Shinto.” Yuuta says suddenly, in a rush of breathless noise. 

“So does fifty percent of Japan.”  

“Why is Jujutsu sorcery kept such a secret?” He sits up a little, propped on his elbow as his mind races. “Kenjaku already proved how fatal non-sorcerer ignorance could be during the games. Were the rules really put in place for the wellbeing of the people?” his eyes shift, his stare deepening. “Or were they put in place to let those in power stay there?” 

“We already have the means to provide people with the ability to see curses ,” Inumaki signs. “ At the very least, we know the Zenins had the technology to infuse Maki’s glasses with the ability to see curses. It’s just a matter of making that technology available to the wider public.” 

“But they never did that.” Yuuta nods. “It would have upended the structure of Jujutsu Society as they knew it. They were afraid of change, because change would have removed them from power.” 

“Are you?” Inumaki asks, “Afraid of change?” 

“I am.” Yuuta says, turning away from Inumaki as he sets his phone on the nightstands to his left. He stays like that, back pressed up against Inumaki’s hand, the one that was clinging to his shoulder. “I’m afraid because I’m a pessimist, and I know that change won’t happen just because we’re forcing our hand.” 

"And saying that, I’m also afraid of failure.” he continues, “Failure to succeed. Failure to do what’s right for the world as we know it.” 

As he lets that hand fall, the muscles in Yuuta’s back flex, firm and sinewy under the thin film of his cotton shirt. He’s hot all over, his legs beginning to tangle up the sheets. There’s tension in his shoulders that keeps the fabric there taut, Inumaki’s eyes catching on a thin fold, another one, another one.  

“You know, Toge,” Yuuta says, “I’m kind of afraid of everything right now.”

Inumaki turns over in his back. He plays a game on the ceiling, where light and shadow make shapes that look like curses. 

“Me too,” he replies, but Yuuta is already asleep.

The three of them greet a tentacled monstrosity the next morning, a tiresome special-grade battle that ends in a pincer attack and a lot of blood. Kilgore staggers to the left, slumping against a piece of human-sized debris, holding up Inumaki as he coughs into a new can of throat spray and gags at the blend of alien scents. Yuuta stands in the crater of their combined blows, watching the curse writhe in its small and vulnerable form on the ground. He kills it with one swing of his fist, a dense concentrate of cursed energy across his knuckles, and the plate beneath him splits like the glass surface of a frozen lake. 

He hits it again, and again, until soil jumps through the fissures. Until the curse is bruised an ugly shade of blue, until the concrete is stained with its entrails and its components drip from Yuuta’s skin to the ground like raw egg. Until the sun rises at its highest, so blinding that it pierces the veil of the curtain and their shadows become short, hard; their faces sweaty and unsightly. 

Until Inumaki looks at him again and knows, despite the clear dark-blue of his irises, that Yuuta is gone.

*

Early signs of summer swell by late June, and July is sticky with heat as the students fight well into their vacation days. Decent progress has been made to certain Zones of The Pools - Sendai in particular experiences a modest but well-needed revival in tourism after the cordoned off zones are restored and Zozenji-Dori is recultivated. Tokyo remains a hub of malignant activity, however, and despite the good work in Miyazaki, the Two Families are insistent on keeping their special-grade sorcerer on close watch and send both Inumaki and Yuuta back to work on Shibuya. 

Before they know it Jujutsu High greets them in sweltering bloom, buzzing with cicadas nesting high up in the trees. The mountains behind them glow with effervescent light as if to celebrate and yet, despite nature's gentle beckoning, their friends are absent when Ijichi pulls into the main gate. Instead, a tall black man in a white beret gestures widely to Yuuta who stumbles, practically tripping over himself past the car door, letting out a shout of joy. 

Miguel’s reappearance at Jujutsu High is a surprising one, nostalgic in the sense that the last time Yuuta recalled him standing at the front gates it had been with the enemy; two girls; a very large bird and a naked man. Said naked man, Larue, declined invitation to teach at Jujutsu High, which Yuuta was frankly rather relieved to hear - his choice of everyday wear was an acquired taste few could stomach for any longer than the duration of an hour. 

“I may as well start living here, what with how many times I’ve been called back to the school.” Miguel says to him fondly as they walk. His face is relaxed but Yuuta’s lived with him for too long to not notice the nervous tick of his left hand, running up and down his thigh. “At least I don’t need to train you anymore. You’ve got plenty of opportunities laid out for you.” 

“It’s a lot for sure,” Yuuta nods slowly. He tells Miguel about the Higher Ups - Gakuganji’s invitations to the Jujutsu High staff as well as the Gojo clan’s support for Yuuta to join them as a member of the board. So far Yuuta hasn’t been directly involved in certain proceedings, though it’s hard to say whether that is because he lacks the experience others have, or because there is simply not much work to do at the moment. 

“The Gojo family can hardly be called a clan of power now,” Miguel muses. “Though Gojo Satoru himself never seemed to care much for intricate clan politics. It was always the bigger picture, with him in it.” 

“All I know is he wanted to make things right,” Yuuta says.

“He was right in wanting to.” Miguel continues, hands in his pockets. They walk past training grounds, where new students are being given a tour of the facilities. “Though I’d always thought he was rather stalling for time. Waiting for things to fall in place, unlike Suguru Geto, who would never wait for a world that wouldn’t change for him.”

“Some things need time.” Yuuta argues,

“Time had been given,” Miguel rebukes. “And time wasted, and time spent poorly on traditions that far outlived their bygone eras. I don’t doubt Geto’s decisions were overly radical - but I have always had my qualms with Gojo’s passivity. Geto would often refer to his former friend as a selfish god. He did not - could not - experience curses like we did , ” His eyes, hidden behind the dark shade of his sunglasses, flash as he cocks his head to look at Yuuta. “You would know now, wouldn’t you?”

Yuuta looks away, his surprise at Miguel’s knowledge of his condition quickly abated by the realization that he must have been told by the Higher Ups when he’d arrived earlier. He ducks his head, feeling the blood under his fingertips coat his skin, and taste of nothing.  

“I am glad he is dead.” Miguel shrugs. He does not flinch when Yuuta stiffens beside him and looks sharply up to the shadow of his white beret. “True order would never have existed for as long as he was alive. And now his dream will be fulfilled by others, who may well understand how to revolutionize the Jujutsu world better than his generation could have.”

“With my power - with the power he’s given me,” Yuuta says, “I’ll make his dream a reality.”

“It would do you good to tread lightly with his power.” Miguel says, coming to a stop at the dorms. It’s well into the afternoon, golden hour casting a warm glow across the sloping roof of the temple shingles. “For as talented as you are, you are not Gojo Satoru. You were not born selfish, even though you have every right to be. And so, what is your dream, Yuuta?” 

“My dream,” Yuuta replies, walking in, stopping to think. He turns. Miguel hangs about by the doorway, not entering - waiting, instead, like Yuuta’s response would grant permission to leave. “My dream is his dream, obviously,” 

He frowns, composes himself, knowing he is unconfident. Miguel smiles sadly, a little defeatedly as he repeats again, “My dream is his dream.” 

The apartment is quiet by the time Yuuta gets back, the only sounds of life muffled by the door to Inumaki’s bedroom. He mulls about by the kitchen putting away the dishes, readjusting to the ambient city sounds from across their lively neighborhood, a stark contrast to the narrow little street Kilgore called home. It was odd then (and now) to think about the foreign sorcerer living there by himself, his quirky disposition sure to make him a standout character among the rest of the local folk. The right kinds of sorcerers, Yuuta thinks, are all like that. Standouts, for better or worse.

He’s in his own room alone after twilight and the gloaming sets his room aglow - left the curtain beside his bed wide open, for lack of a better view elsewhere. The moon casts its gentle radiance on his skin and he runs his hands curiously over his body, as he had been doing since the very first day he’d woken up; feeling out the oddities of his cursed energy, how it fluctuated and changed over the course of the month they’d been fighting in The Pools, how it stabilized to Limitless with supernatural efficiency.

How exhausting it is. Alone, of course, where no one can see him or care, Yuuta collapses into his bed and gulps in a deep intake of air. He raises his hand to his face, allowing it to tremble, feeling the vibration as a whole body shiver until he’s gasping for air and spasming quietly in his bed. His blanket brushes against his ankle, a spark of oversensitivity so intense it spikes pain into the base of his foot. He blinks, and stars burst across the ceiling again - not stars, as he’d realized a week into adapting to his new abilities. Pricks of negative energy - pockets, nestled between atoms, far enough apart that they’re unable to converge into the monstrous, thicker substance of a real curse. It’s a sort of ambience Yuuta’s had to reacquaint himself with: like background noise, like the ticking of a clock lost in the throes of a difficult exam. In the silence of waiting, the second hand is almost deafening in motion. 

If it were visual, it’d be blinding. Yuuta sweats, closes his eyes. Refreshes his mind, like a wave of calm numbing over the sensory overload. He breathes in, counts to ten. Breathes out. Wills himself to dream.

He’d been teleporting for hours, breaking and manifesting Rika’s connection to copy Gojo’s technique and do his teacher’s bidding - fun and training, of course. Gas station snacks and district souvenirs, from odd knick-knacks at the antique store down in Koenji to retro consoles inside an icky alleyway shop right at the heart of Akihabara. Though drenched in sweat by the time all the errands were done, Gojo watched him with an air of indifference. Yuuta used to think it was the blindfold; the natural cyan of the Six Eyes were even more of an anomalous contender. They seemed to show nothing, want nothing, want everything, see all that was, is, could be. 

Yuuta threw up into a trashcan Gojo teleported to him. He hadn’t eaten for the whole day - it was always better to teleport on an empty stomach - and so the contents of his bile were mostly water and heaved air. Gojo watched him again, one hand on his back. Or maybe he didn’t watch. Yuuta could never tell, with the blindfold. 

They sat at a bench, eating snacks, bickering with the food and the souvenirs. Gojo ate with his blindfold on too. It was a peaceful day. Yuuta blinked stars out of his eyes, and drowned out the taste of his phlegm with the taste of soda instead.

“Oh god,” he said after a while. Gojo laughed. “This is impossible.” 

“You say that, but you’re doing what most of my clan could never accomplish.”

“Dry heaving?” Yuuta said, and Gojo laughed so, so much harder. It was more of an uncontrollable wheeze, and then a firm hand on Yuuta’s thigh, a slap and a beaming smile.

“Oh- so much worse.” He wiggled his eyebrows, a motion that only seemed to tighten and bunch the blindfold at the bridge of his nose. “They just spit blood. It’s bad. Should’ve seen my father try it! Almost died! And then he did!”  

It wasn’t funny, but Yuuta was in a laughing mood and so he laughed. Gojo beamed brighter, ruffling Yuuta’s hair in an oddly teasing way. 

“It burns,” Yuuta admitted. “It burns up so fast I can practically feel it eating away at my cursed energy. The upkeep makes it an impossible technique to maintain for even ten minutes.” 

“Really!” Gojo responded, picking at his ice-cream wrapper. “Well. Imagine that. I’ve got the eyes, you know. They do all the heavy lifting.”

“How?” Yuuta asked. Gojo bent down - he wasn’t abnormally tall, but something about his disposition always made him seem higher than others. His hands found their way onto Yuuta’s shoulders. Somewhere between turning and crouching, his blindfold had come off and Yuuta found himself staring into the depths of Gojo’s eyes - in between them, hair aglow in the afternoon light as soft as silvergrass. 

“What’s five-hundred-and-sixty-three times twenty-seven?” Gojo asked, watching him. 

“Uh,” Yuuta swallowed. The eyes in front of him demanded his attention, consuming it. They were beautiful. He was undeniably distracted. “I might need to- write that down- to solve that.”

“Fifteen-thousand two-hundred and one.” Gojo responded. “Most sorcerers parse their cursed energy by hand, by movement, by a manual procession. Some are faster than others, more efficient - like you. Others are slow and clumsy, or cannot parse it at all - like the Windows we employ.” 

“And you’re a computer,” Yuuta exhaled. “You’re automatic.” It wasn’t as if he’d figured it out by himself - it’s that he could see it in the reflection of the Six Eyes, the minute movement of his irises, the consuming force of them extrapolating the energy sizzling around them. “You’re brilliant,” he said, like it was the answer. Maybe it was part of it. He wouldn’t be wrong. 

“Very flattering, kid.” Gojo cooed teasingly, cuffing Yuuta’s head. Then he blinked, looking away, and Yuuta’s vision dizzied with sparks of white as he shook his head. “Yep! Simple as that. Limitless is mathematical at its core - a calculator can’t make sense of everything but computation is a whole lot faster with one, don’t you think?” 

Yuuta leaned back into his seat, breathing through his nose deeply.  

“Did you solve that math with it too?” he wonders, like an afterthought. 

“Nope,” Gojo cackled, hooting his third laugh of the day. Yuuta joined him, cracking up until the last light of day left the sky. “I’m just a fucking genius!” 

Darkness greets his early morning an hour before the sun rises, and Yuuta lies one foot in a dream and the other in shadow. Neither drag him back into the chasm of sleep; he rises groggily out of bed instead, blindly fumbling his way to the bathroom and twitching at the harshness of the light. His cursed energy effuses from his skin like the steam of the hot water, condensation heavy with every breath he takes. Enough time has passed since his last exorcism, and his cursed energy leaks through the gap in the glass door of the shower stall, clouds of it crowding the toilet and sink. 

He stares into the mirror after his shower. The sunlight pouring in through a window reflects off his eyes, and for a brief moment he thinks he sees Gojo looking back at him. He lets out a small breath, unclenching his hands. Tired.

“I think I miss you,” He whispers, shutting his eyes.  

Condensation fades from the glass. When he looks up again, he sees only himself.

*

Yuuta bumps into Kamo on the way to Headquarters one morning trying to find his way to the conference hall. His hair is in a tight bun, tight as his stare which holds firmly as they shake hands, tight as the fabric around his waist more processional than functional. He wears a leather chest brace practically gleaming with unuse. 

“You’ve been with-” Yuuta starts, unsure how to end. He hasn’t seen Kamo since Shibuya - hardly recognises him now.

“My clan, yes.” Noritoshi responds. “We are trying to establish healthier ties with former allies that were severed after Kenjaku came into power. And make new friends, of course.” 

“Younger clans, you mean?” 

“Clans with a hundred or so years of lineage.” Noritoshi nods. “Sato, Shodai, Kanen, Dedarappa.” He pauses, muttering thoughtfully, “Inumaki, once upon a time. Would’ve been useful.” 

He doesn’t dwell on it for long though, despite how it piques Yuuta’s interest - instead, he smiles politely and claps Yuuta on the shoulder with a firm, “You’re looking well. I heard you’ve been adapting to Infinity quite capably.”

“It’s been a trip for sure,” Yuuta responds, opting to omit the less than savory side effects of shouldering Limitless. “Getting used to it again isn’t a problem - I’m just wondering if I’m doing enough as a board member. It sounds silly, but I haven’t contributed much.”

Noritoshi nods, his hand squeezing Yuuta’s arm as they wait for the processions to slow behind the door. There seems to be an argument escalating from within, and Gakuganji’s voice grows in muffled exasperation that Yuuta can’t quite make out. “I can see that without a non-sorcerer background it may feel as if you’re not really a valuable asset to the board right now - but I don’t think that your role is meant to be contributory.” He glances sidealong, catching Yuuta in an embarrassed nod of resignation. “No offense. Mei Mei put you here to please the Gojo clan - it’s an old-fashioned show of power for them, you know? Having more Gojo blood behind legislation makes the old clans happy. Gakuganji and Kusakabe don’t expect you to order anyone around.”

“What do they expect from me, then?” Yuuta asks. 

“To behave, most importantly.” Noritoshi answers. “To be a part of the conversation and offer insight to those who were not a part of the battle with Sukuna. To be humanized in the eyes of the old clans so they don’t kill you for being a potential threat that could cause havoc the way Sukuna did during the Heian era.” He pauses then, smiling warmly, “Though I’d say you managed to curry favor with the Gojo clan fairly well, considering how open they are with the changes we are about to make in the coming weeks.” 

“Changes, huh,” Yuuta murmurs. Kilgore’s words come back to him - his presence, as well, suddenly making so much more sense despite how his odd disposition stood out in the broad fields of Miyazaki.

“You might be wondering why your missions have so far been in major colonies surrounding the outskirts of Japan,” Mei Mei starts once they’re settled into their seats. “That was a decision proposed and approved of by the Gojo, the Genyu, and the Itoh clans, after a discussion regarding the Good Will Event, which will occur two weeks from now.” 

“The Good Will event?” Yuuta asks, confused. “We’re continuing it?” 

“We’re improving upon it,” Kusakabe says, in a tone that Yuuta assumes is meant to be soothing but approaches him with a frantic cadence instead. “The old clans have been rather insistent on maintaining the strong bond between our schools by allowing the Good Will event to continue. This, obviously, might delay the complete scourging of The Pools by next spring. We had to come up with a compromise that would satisfy all parties.”

“The curses in The Pools of Tokyo 1 and Tokyo 2 were allowed to accumulate and grow,” Gakuganji continues, “under direct supervision of Kusakabe and Mei Mei of course - any curse approaching special grade was immediately dealt with. But the variety of cursed spirits that now reside within the curtains that we’ve set up around Tokyo are quite abundant. Not only will that greatly accelerate our projected eradication date for the curse colonies, but this will serve as the perfect opportunity for our incoming first-year students to test their abilities.”

He levels his gaze with both of the younger sorcerers, though there’s a subtle shift in the tonality of his voice. “We thought it best to allow our youngest members of the board to give us insight on how to structure the activities for the Good Will Event - in a way that would not completely endanger our new students, but challenge them and let them grow in the stressful environments which may undoubtedly lead to evolutions in their techniques.”

“See,” Noritoshi says, a bit of a smile on his face as Yuuta gapes, utterly shocked at the suggestion. “What did I tell you?”

The talks go exceedingly well, with Noritoshi and Yuuta reviewing the first draft of the revised schedule for the Good Will Event. There isn’t a whole lot to divulge from Yuuta’s experiences in Africa - being a course designed specially for a special-grade sorcerer - but the gadgets and hacks the sorcery community developed there, far superior to some of the methods at Jujutsu High, instantly come to mind when Noritoshi makes a passing comment about SOS signals and scouting drones. By the end of the meeting, they’ve devised a sufficient activities list to last a week of sorcery activity, and the council is appeased enough that Mei Mei sends them away with a lazy hand, her second pair of eyes having dozed off peacefully in her lap. 

He’s about to head back to the apartment when someone yells to catch his attention - mid-swing, his head bumps into - hers? - and then they’re a meter apart grabbing for the air, the awkward pain stunning them into short little breaths. She laughs, her hands reaching for the messy bun in her snowy white hair, loosened to something shoulder-length, and her eyes as they look up at Yuuta are a slate gray as calm as a midday ocean. It comes to his attention suddenly that she’s one of the board members: one of the many Gojo clan sorcerers who recommended him for the board. 

“Okkotsu Yuuta,” she says in a breathless rush of air. “Satoru told me about you. I’m his sister, you know. His sister - Gojo Sakura.”

“He never-” Yuuta splutters, still reeling a little from the pain. She waits patiently, an arm on his shoulder. She’s touchy for sure - Yuuta doesn’t know how he feels about it, but the touch stabilizes him somehow, and he takes a moment to compose himself before properly saying, “He never said anything about a sister.”

“Well,” she responds. “He doesn’t like to mention family. Less weaknesses, you know? He was the caring sort.” 

“I always thought he was,” Yuuta says, surprised. 

Her eyes soften, her gentle smile widening. “I understand how you feel about his passing. We all do - and I know he may not have talked much about me, but what he did impart to me was his connection to you. How much he cared about you and worried for your safety - even when you were in Africa training with Miguel.” 

Yuuta blinks, frowning, unsure. Her smile is persistent, and his cursed energy thrashes with uncertainty. He knows, knows it, of course. Something wells up inside him, parched and dry. Gojo’s laugh, sonorous and light as a chime, burrows into Yuuta’s brain an idyllic memory. Yuuta blinks, frowning, upset and wanting for things that are already gone.

“He’s a distant soul,” she says quietly. “I understand how hard it is to really, really get close to him - I never have. And yet, when he talks to you, if he cares about you - he makes you feel as if you’re the most important person in the whole world, doesn’t he?” 

The eyes in front of him demanded his attention, consuming it wholly.

“He does,” Yuuta admits in a small voice. 

She draws in a breath, her eyes fluttering shut. He watches her, how the liquid orange of golden hour seems to set her snowy white hair on the brink of hallowed flaxen. “Gojo clan cursed energies have a signature, and that signature gets stronger the closer we are to one another. It’s something that can calm us, or call us together. If I may,”

Reaching forward, she touches his chest lightly - a movement so sharp and sudden that Yuuta barely has time to react. A surge of energy floods through him, hot and warm and oddly soothing. Yuuta’s cursed energy collates, thrashes again, despite how his soul seems to grow tame under her hand. He gently pries her fingers off, and they interlace between his own. 

“What did you-” he starts sharply.

“Limitless is about space.” she says in a hushed voice. “It is about negation and conversion. I relaxed your soul using my own, because we share the same signature. Our family’s blood, though distant, runs in your veins. Michizane’s blood, my blood,” she squeezes their interlaced fingers tightly, exhaling long and slow. Odd, odd, Yuuta thinks, but can’t will himself to pull away. “Satoru’s blood.” 

Gojo watched him again, one hand on his back. It was the kind of watchful guidance Yuuta couldn’t quite understand. It was the kind of observance that made Yuuta feel very loved.

“Let go,” Yuuta says, helplessly. She draws back with a kind, if saddened smile. 

“You are closer to him than we could ever be,” she says. “And the Gojo clan is in awe of what you are able to do with Limitless. The Gojo clan encourages your understanding of it, as do I, if only to bring you closer to him. To be with him."

She moves away, instantly withdrawing her hand from his with a jaunty step back. She tucks her hair behind her ear. It reminds Yuuta a little of the way Gojo might have shifted his blindfold over his eyes - a part of him that made him unique. Yuuta spies her entering a sleek black car parked ahead at the roadside - within it a family of slate gray eyes peeking through the windshield. They watch him, expressionless, as they leave.

*

Inumaki greets him on his arrival back home, the kitchen smelling of something mouth-watering and delightfully savory. He finds himself inexplicably without appetite, and Inumaki makes no move to pressure him to finish what’s on his plate, but his eyes are wary when Yuuta discards his leftovers, and takes it upon himself to do both their dishes. They sit at the couch together, one arm each, reality TV filling out the background noise as Inumaki taps away on his phone. 

“I should keep this power,” he says to Inumaki, who looks up at him suddenly. “Shouldn't I?” 

“Is that something you can decide?” Inumaki signs, watching him. Yuuta turns back to the screen. A couple fight, and the man watches the woman walk away. She’ll come back, though, he thinks. She hasn’t died or anything.

“Well it’s only right,” he says to himself. He says it again, under his breath, an hour before bed. “It’s only right. This version of Limitless, it’s his and mine.”

Chapter Text

He knew little of the world beyond his home besides a few old magazines littered about the living room. His father never talked much about what lay beyond the tall mountain and Inumaki didn’t ask questions, far too caught up in impressing him with other things.

“After all, we will die once our mission is accomplished,“ his father said to him under a gnarled willow tree. He took a pause; regarded his son briefly, adoringly, maddeningly. "It would be a waste of energy to have you entertain thoughts of living in a modern society, when you will be living with me in the paradisiacal afterlife."

“Yes.” Inumaki responded. His father smiled.

This old estate belonged to the Inumaki clan for decades - a sprawling hip and gable complex facing a lively river that ran far and wide down the mountain. He had decided that dying here, as per his father’s wishes, would be a wonderful idea. It was beautiful on the mountain and his life was short but devoted. 

“Are you going out again?” His sisters whined, tripping over themselves. They weren’t permitted to leave the house, though many other luxuries made up for it: eating together; speaking at the table; playing house. Inumaki was never afforded these privileges, because he was given the honor of being his father’s son.

“Yes,” Inumaki said to them. They sighed, disappointed.

“Come back soon, onee-san.” they said.

The village beyond the Inumaki estate was a ghost town - the mountain behind it, which so often bled the orange hues of an early sunrise, would soon become blood-red from good harvest. Inumaki learnt quickly the sound a limp body made when it hit the floor - not too different from his own, crashing against the training room tatami.

Buried into the long, braided hair of his father, Inumaki familiarized himself with the smell of rust and iron; the silence of a man under cursed spells; growing headaches, fierce, hammered into his skull with every phrase of cursed speech uttered.

When the sun was finally ready to set, Inumaki’s father took him to see the shriveled man. His father’s hands cupped his cheeks gently. He began to speak in a tone that did not command - it was a tone that Inumaki loved more because, despite his father’s inability to control others like he did, Inumaki would always obey. 

“There is an old saying, my dear, about our family. That we communicate with our hearts.” his father said to him. “That we are lovers in the deepest sense of that term. That we feel deeply, and those feelings become our power. And so when I ask you to kill for me, it is not because I know you are strong. It is because I know you love me.”

“I do,” Inumaki agreed, and turned to the shriveled man who was sniffling, sobbing hysterically. Called him a sick little boy. Said he was sorry, and then called him poor. A poor little boy, who didn’t realize what he was doing.

“ Die for him, ” Inumaki said. He imagined he was saying it the way he asked for a hug. Or a kiss, or a limb. It was all the same to him. It would be given to him, because he was loved and those who were loved would be given anything. 

The man died,

And Inumaki wakes up in a cold, beading sweat. It’s his most vivid memory to date - another memory dragged out from his subconscious, unable to escape the clutches of Sukuna’s claws. Of course, Sukuna had said to him then (and he remembers this too, these days he remembers everything-)

An Inumaki is at his weakest when he has no desires.

Inumaki thinks, as he stumbles blindly into the bathroom with a razor to his face and a toothbrush in his other hand, that he does not know if he wants love if it can bring a man to ruin that easily. 

He is a killer, of course. He knows this better than anybody else, even Gojo Satoru who had reassessed him so many years ago to save his life from the Higher Ups that threatened to execute him on the spot. Once a killer, always a killer. 

But everybody kills as a sorcerer. There is no meaning to the word - it is customary, almost. Like graduation. Like passing an exam. Like drinking water in the morning. He knows this because he had overheard Nobara mention it in passing just last week, after reminiscing about killing the curse that had bloomed her face into a gorgeous, rose-welted rot. 

“We’re all killers!” she crowed, raising her wine in triumph, quite obviously three types of drunk. “Cheers to killers, cheers to letting us kill! Sorcery life is for the debauched, anyways, for the mad, for the psychotic, even!” 

He’s not sure how he feels about it. He rolls the word around in his tongue and it’s his, whether rightfully or shamefully, it’s his. He doesn’t find it so rewarding, especially not when the rot reaches the back of his bloody throat, and his reward for killing a curse is to gag up a concoction of stomach chemistry. 

“I do hate when she’s drunk,” Fushiguro tells him afterwards, when they’re sitting on the third story of the dormitories, an attic space with a vaulted ceiling and moonlight streaming past the lattice windows. It’s not a space privy to many people; Fushiguro wasn’t many people and neither was Inumaki. They had both grown accustomed to the school walls well before they had even been initiated into sorcery - on account of their respective guardians and tragic backstories. Inumaki slams his beer back, and it flares hotly under his jaw. “She gets too honest when she’s drunk. It’s unsettling.” 

“Aren’t we all a little unsettling?” Inumaki signs clumsily. “To the common person.”

“Oh, I’m alright,” Fushiguro says. It’s so monotonous Inumaki forgets his junior has a way of being snarky without sounding like it. For a moment, caught up in his tipsy, Fushiguro sounds almost genuine. “I don’t know about you.” 

Fushiguro’s fair game to talk about the memories. He’s just as well five ways fucked up in the head anyways, and after all that happened between them - what with their hobbies and healing and long lapses of comforting silence - Inumaki thinks it’s only fair to divulge. A weight leaves him as he speaks, like he’d been holding something down in the pit of his stomach tied to helium, and only just now let go of it. It’s weird, Inumaki says to him, it’s really strange. How he’d been able to harness so much power and suffer no setbacks. How much control he had over the cadence of his cursed energy, the rhythm of it. 

“That Inumaki communicate with their hearts… yes.” Fushiguro says, “I heard this a while ago, from Gojo. When you’d just moved into the dormitories, right off the back of that called-off execution.” 

Inumaki recognises the phrase. Not in passing, nor from a deep-rooted memory - but in the dream that he had just woken from. “ What do you know about it?”

“Cryptic, isn’t it?” They observe moonlight wane across the fuzzy old floorboards, slivers of it spotlighting a dazzle of dust motes dancing in the air. “Reminds me of that theory about cursed energy I read about in an old discarded scripture from the dens of the Zenin Clan - Maki cleared it out, though she never sorted through the archives. The theory is that the modern day grading system was imposed upon sorcerers as a sort of limiter: a passive binding vow. That their cursed energy can neither exceed nor depreciate the value determined by the Board. With new Higher Ups, I don’t know if that still holds, but it’s still an interesting take.”

Inumaki cocks his head, attempting to listen in vain as the alcohol stirs his stomach. 

“Cursed energy is born from negative emotion, an immeasurable thing that fluctuates depending on one’s situation, one’s environment, one’s upbringing.” Fushiguro turns to him, more animated than Inumaki’s ever seen him - and he spies a bit of red across his cheekbones, likely the reason why. “But it doesn’t have to stay negative. You know that old news article of a mother lifting a car off her child to save them? And how it was humanly impossible, and after she’d done it she’d broken 26 bones in her body?”

“No,” Inumaki says, watching him.

“During a moment of weakness, a special-grade’s abilities can become a third-rate; inversely during a moment of strength, a third-grade can exhibit traits of a special-grade. That’s the theory - that cursed energy grows and diminishes based on feelings.” Fushiguro says. “The Zenin were doing tests on that. Controlling a child’s environment by incrementally removing affection from their lives, because they saw hatred as cursed energy’s most potent emotion. Triggering events so virile and toxic to foster that negativity so it would be a permanent, eternal thing etched into the child’s emotional state forever. A true special-grade, a world class hater.” 

“What does this have to do with me?”

“It’s just a theory,” Fushiguro shakes his head. His hand stills on his bottle and they grow quiet, gazing out into the evening through the laced window. Lights dance in the pockets of open doors and windows below them. The cobblestone path glimmers, untouched by passing shadow. “The Zenin clan has always had a poor mastery of reverse cursed technique, which utilizes positive energy. They didn’t tap into every available source . Things like Ambition, justice, curiosity… It’s silly to think about, but maybe we should have studied it, right? Feelings, emotions. The core of cursed energy...”

Fushiguro trails off, “May not be hate, but love.” 

*

The Good Will Event might well be one of the only activities that a student at either Jujutsu school might anticipate in their entire year of training, which is why Yuuta seems to have made it a point to start them off with a ceremony, complete with a cacophonous symphony of Kamo clan musicians lined up across the bank under the school’s memorial bridge. The first-years cross over to the main campus in two lines, toe to heel as the second and third-years herd them from the back. The Kyoto school is waiting for them on the other side, already seated in an empty courtyard on rickety little plastic chairs. 

“Noritoshi’s idea,” Yuuta supplies under his breath, nothing but cheerful waves as the first years ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at the processions. “Get it a bit festive, a bit fun.” 

“No, it’s good, I like it,” Yuuji encourages, adding, “Reminds me of sports day, back in my old high school.” 

Gakuganji and Utahime take their places at a hashed together stage and a particularly crispy microphone, a roll of script unwrinkled from Gakuganji’s hands. Many of the new students hold their breaths eagerly - for as much as this is the Good Will Event, it also happens to be their welcome ceremony.

It’s a stilted affair, as this may just be Jujutsu High’s first ceremony without Yaga at the head. Gakuganji solemnly lists out the core values of the Jujutsu Institutions, and Utahime’s cheerful tone encourages a year of prosperity and growth. No one bickers and no one draws dicks on a blackboard. All in all, a shockingly respectful auditorium of teacher to student interaction.

Their silence does break, however, at the mention of The Pools. Students recruited straight from their Culling Game talents are quick on the uptake about what exactly changed about their bodies and their souls - others, having applied through traditional means, only heard it in passing from their fearful clan leaders. 

“Your month’s training should suffice for the activities we’ve laid out this coming week,” Utahime responds to answer the nervous protests of their new students. “First-years, second-years, and third-years will travel in routes designed for their skill and experience levels.”

“This task may seem daunting, but we will keep you safe,” she says. “No harm, unless provoked irresponsibly, will come to you. The school can promise you that.” Her words are firm, and her gaze holds steady - steady for long enough that the student body before her settle down, long enough for the first years to disperse to their dormitories and temporary lodgings. As the courtyard empties Utahime sags against the podium. She shuts her eyes and stays there for a long time.

Kusakabe takes the third-year students to an unused classroom a block away from the dormitories, just close enough to the greenhouse that Inumaki can catch a glimpse of his tomatoes growing healthily under the glass. The Kyoto students are already there by the time Inumaki and Yuuta arrive - Miwa, greeting them all with the same politeness she’s always exhibited and, Maki - 

“Maki,” Inumaki brightens upon seeing her, her name like a steady call home. She sees Yuuta first, and her eyes light up with a fierce and uncertain look about her, but Yuuta is nothing if not generous in his affections and her hesitance seems to disappear once they hug.

“I heard there’s something wrong with you,” she says sarcastically to him, waving her finger around. “Dead person attached to your soul or something?” 

“You would know what that’s like, right?” Yuuta responds, entirely genuine, and she shrieks a mad bit of laughter. 

The Good Will Event will not be the same for the third-years as it is for the others, Kusakabe explains. Miguel will direct the Tokyo students towards the worst of Tokyo 1, while the Kyoto students monitor the first-grade activity in Tokyo 2. Having been left unattended for a short but significant period of time, the curses are multiplying like bacteria overnight, an exponential growth that fuzzes over swathes of quarantined city. Curtains within curtains cut off the worst of the curse population - as if the obsidian mirror of their default barriers weren’t dark enough, these domes are thick to wade through, sluggish, like pushing against water. 

“In these unprecedented times, we need to stay vigilant,” Kusakabe reminds them. “Not just to make sure that incidents like the Shibuya Collapse don’t happen again, but to overturn the old statutes of Jujutsu Law that led us to those moments. The Kamos have done a brilliant job of communicating our new ambitions to the younger clans, and they’ve entrusted their children to us.”

“If their offspring are injured,” he warns, “They may withhold that trust, and that support. We’ll need it if we want to keep our seats as members of the Higher Ups. We’ll be counting on you seniors to keep the worst of the worst in containment. Our graduates - Todo, Momo, Hakari and Kirara - will continue working with Kilgore and Sato Sadami to exorcize the curses regenerating in other colonies.” 

“We won’t lose their trust,” Yuuta promises, nodding seriously. “You have my word.” 

It doesn’t take long for Maki to find Inumaki later on in the afternoon - he’s sitting in the greenhouse, sweating through his gloves as he waters his plants. Beside him, Panda sleeps soundly, his latest knitting project tucked into a big plastic box almost as big as himself. He’s been sleeping a lot lately, hard at work with the crochet. Inumaki spies the makings of legs and arms, with blotches of color making little sleeve buttons for a black jacket. 

It’s my core, Panda explained. Without its siblings, it doesn’t like to be awake very often. 

“I thought you’d be with Yuuta.” Maki interrupts him, toying with the fluffy crossguard of her blade. She doesn’t look any better than he’d last seen her - if anything, she looks even more guarded, the paleness of her skin jumping out in contrast to her black bodysuit, cinched at the waist. The corded muscles of her triceps hide beneath thin white gauze, which wraps tightly around her forearm and over her knuckles, bruised and blue. 

“Nah,” Inumaki responds. Her hands thread through his hair, even as he protests (“Sweaty!”, “I know, I kinda missed it!”), observing the stages of life in front of her on rows of short, stacked shelves. 

“I heard he can’t do missions by himself,” she continues casually. Inumaki brushes the dirt off his pants, standing up. He can’t help but reach for her, so he touches her shoulders - her elbows, the tips of her fingers. She’s all sharp around the edges. Her gaze too, as it demands answers from him, is piercing. “And I don’t like when Yuuta makes promises he’ll try to die on.” 

“You know him,” Inumaki shrugs helplessly. 

“I knew him,” she replies, crossing her arms. “You’re going to have to catch me up on everything else. He didn’t seem very keen on wanting to do it himself.” she rolls her eyes, adding, “Too busy playing Gojo’s successor and all.”

“Ah,” Inumaki starts, taking a deep breath. “ About that.”

 He catches her up on the big changes first - Rika, Yuuta’s new abilities, their own situation in Tokyo and Sakurajima. Then, to the more concerning: “ He blacks out sometimes,” Inumaki signs. “I bring him back with my voice.”

“That makes him a liability.” her eyes narrow. “And wastes your talent. A special-grade sorcerer shouldn’t have that kind of weakness.”

“That’s harsh.”

“And when have I ever been soft?” Maki responds, folding her arms. “Am I wrong?” she stops then, looking at him, perceiving him. “Or are you letting his incompetence be an excuse for you to procrastinate?”

Inumaki shakes his head. Their spar before she’d left comes back to him, her polearm at the skin of his neck, tracing death in a single, confident stroke.  “ You’re so focused on the fight, Maki. I just… want to make sure he’s okay.” 

She huffs, backing off the question. “Can’t fault you for that.”

“Maki,” Inumaki says, as they walk to the dormitories. They’ll have to stay here for the duration of the event, as it makes things easier when everybody’s gathered in one place. “ When we first met, you were afraid of me, weren’t you?”

“How could I have not been, Toge?” she responds. “The Inumaki clan incident was huge, tons of people died. You came off it practically unscathed.”

“You weren’t always so nice.” she continues, trailing off. “Now that we’re talking about it. You had that glazed, faraway look about you constantly. I thought it was because you were addicted to screens, but Nanami told us it was to keep you distracted.”

“Distracted,” Inumaki signs. 

“Yeah, from your intrusive thoughts, he said.” she nods. “Do you really not remember anything at all about your childhood, Toge?” 

“It started coming back to me in bits and pieces,” he explains. It’s strange to describe it himself, but he does his best to make it sound like memories and not just odd, odd daydreams. “ I think when Sukuna hurt me during the Shibuya battle, he triggered something in my memory.” 

Maki hums, kicking her feet as they arrive at the dorms. Inside, a cheerful light sways with the good cheer of an overfilled common room, fresh faces weaving in and out of the doors. They’ve never been this packed, and the liveliness makes the whole building feel a little less drab than it usually does. 

“You never asked, so I didn’t bring it up - I thought it was a sore topic for you - yeah, I knew about your trial. How could I not?” Maki reaches out to snatch a falling leaf from the sky, snapping it in half between her fingers. She gives it her undivided attention. “But I also couldn’t trust what the Zenin clan were telling me - most of what they shared were lies anyways, and this information in particular didn’t seem any more truthful than others. Maybe that’s where I went wrong.” 

“Tell me.”  

She meets his gaze, stricken with an emotion that Inumaki can’t quite place, her shoulders hunched, as if the very idea of sharing what she might now would be unwelcome. 

But everybody kills, as a sorcerer. There is no meaning to the word - it is customary, almost. Like graduation.

“Inumaki Toge’s trial concluded not guilty,” she repeats as if rehearsed, or recalled from memory. “As he proved, through official Sorcery Reassessment conducted by the Board of Jujutsu Sorcery, he could not recreate the egregious acts committed during the Inumaki Clan Massacre despite having previously displayed impressive control over the now critically endangered innate curse technique, cursed speech . Inumaki Amane’s trial concluded guilty, admitting to having orchestrated the murders of all eighty-five residents of Maimako town, his wife, and his three non-sorcerer daughters using his son’s abilities. His request for his son to be executed with him was denied.” 

The man took a pause; regarded Inumaki briefly, adoringly, maddeningly. 

“The Zenins said it was mind control,” Maki says, her eyes not leaving his, “Your father called it love.” 

*

Inumaki gazes at the curtain before him, shoes against the splitting gravel. There are undulations in the sizzling energy from hand-prints where curses mold their futile methods of escape. A cheerfully ominous floating diagram displays how it’s been conjoined to another curtain equally monstrous in size, with a circumference and depth that supposedly covers nearly the entirety of Tokyo bar its meager, livable areas. 

The unusual number of students being sorted and assigned into groups makes preparations last a little longer. Nobara makes a grumbling remark about having to babysit a bunch of first-years by herself, while Yuuji gets into several rounds of rock-paper-scissors with the three students in his cohort. 

“Terrifying, isn’t it?” Kusakabe says next to him. His professor has aged considerably since they last talked, and adds another half-decade to his features with a low sigh. 

“Everything seems to be, nowadays. ” Inumaki types.  

“This too, is no exception.” Kusakabe has one hand tucked into his back pocket, the other fiddling with the end of his tie. “Let me paint you a picture.” 

“You’re an elderly visiting his son, who works in Shibuya, when disaster strikes and an explosion levels the city to the ground flatter than a pancake. Factory mishap, always happens, they tell you. You ask for his remains but the cops can’t find them - the cops can barely find anything of anybody’s for the matter. You’re convinced that it’s a conspiracy, that terrorists killed your son, and that would explain a lot of things actually - it would explain all the rampant looting and vandalism in Sendai, the fires in Sakurajima, the rot down at Lake Gosho. But the government tells you it’s a natural disaster, thirty percent of all train lines are permanently closed, and you can’t leave your home for longer than 2 hours a day.”

“We’re fixing it, ” Inumaki says, his hands suddenly feverish to explain himself. “We fixed some of it. We tried our best.” 

“We did,” Kusakabe says and though hesitant, reaches out to ruffle Inumaki’s hair fondly. “We did something for this world that altered the very foundation of sorcery, Inumaki, and I wish we’d done it sooner. But we were all cowards and we kept to the status quo. All of us, bar none. ” 

“But now look,” the professor nods to an unassuming and quiet girl on the right, grabbing the hem of Fushiguro’s uniform as a way of not losing him in the sea of other children receiving equipment. “Even the Shodai clan are bringing their offspring to Jujutsu High. With clan sponsorship we might be able to seriously consider putting money into the Jujutsu High program. Not a poorly disguised hub for newbie sorcerers - an actual program designed to maximize your potential and keep you safe. More school-wide events, more cleaning crew, and maybe even more overseas training.” 

Inumaki thinks about stealing a black car from the school garage and driving into Sunshine City. There’s wind in his hair and lights fly by his peripheral. Panda tells him to brake at the skatepark, where a mismatch of reggae and J-pop punctuates the vibrant air. Right before Mei Mei had found them, Inumaki imagined that he and Panda grabbed something to eat at a 7-11. There would be a girl having dinner alone at a high table facing the window; she’d have her ID card in one hand and be mumbling to herself about working overtime. Kilgore’s words come to him, unsurprisingly, and he imagines what it might be like to sit beside her. To grumble. To talk about how tiring killing curses can be. To gripe and connect over how much they hate their jobs. 

Inumaki blinks. Kusakabe is still at it, somehow having talked himself into memories of halcyon days. 

“Usami was in it for fun at first,” he says, folding his arms. The curtain shimmers as Yuuji enters, three kids tailing him like ducks to their mother. “I did it ‘cause it was less boring than my day job. You kill a couple curses, earn a lot of money for a kid with no degree, train this crazy power of yours that’s straight out of a shounen manga. Then the novelty fades, your friends start dying, your health declines, but the smell, the smell always sticks. Unless you’re mad, or the one percent, you stay, like Gojo. Or you realize you deserve better in this life and you quit, like Nanami.”

“And even then,” he adds, voice grim and lamenting. “You come back, because no one else can.” 

“Sujiko. So you’re mad, then.” Inumaki signs to him, bumping his shoulder. Kusakabe looks down at him and smiles. 

“Maybe, kid.” he says. “Or maybe I’m just a goddamn coward.”

*

The third years are the last to enter the curtain; a floating red lantern opens up a path through a rocky maze of rubble, collapsed infrastructure far too risky for any first-year to venture into. It’s a path that leads into an even thicker, murky darkness, despite the sun’s heavy efforts upon the black dome. “You’re with me, right?” Yuuta asks. 

“Yeah,” Inumaki responds. 

“Good.” Yuuta shifts his katana over his shoulders. He looks over once, and then begins walking forward. “I’m glad.” 

So they go in a pair again, and Inumaki doesn’t know if that means Yuuta isn’t ready to go solo yet or if he just wants to work with a friend. It could be either, knowing him, knowing a past version of him that enjoyed the company of companionship and generally other people. Of course, Inumaki knows that Yuuta wouldn’t have invited Inumaki to come and live with him in his narrow little apartment in Minato city if that wasn’t the case, but these past few months make everything Inumaki knows about him come to a halting stop. Quite like how Limitless itself works, he thinks. He could be right up against Yuuta’s side, like his namesake, digging into him like a thorn, and they would somehow still be a world apart. 

It seems, as Inumaki thinks back to the third-year gathering in Gojo’s old classroom, that their convictions have changed too. Yuuta’s drive scares him. His own lack of one is disturbing. 

Inumaki, the curse had said. Like honey, I remember you.

Yuuta takes the lead naturally, his footsteps calculated and quiet in the darkness of the abandoned warehouse they’ve been tasked to clear out first. Between them the lantern floats and exposes Yuuta’s white jacket to a searing red, the glint of his katana hilt a spot of focus for Inumaki’s gaze. 

An explosion goes off, first a sizzling spark of firelight to their left before a flash and a burst knocks them straight into a row of shelves that domino to the ground. Inumaki mounts the falling debris nimbly as they fall, his puppet-arm snapping to attention as it diverts a concentration of cursed energy to the center of his palm and springs his body upwards into the metal rafters above. Yuuta counterattacks quickly with a sharp blast of Blue hurtling towards the noise, piercing the thick brick wall of the warehouse with a ball of energy the size of a coin. Light stripes across the floor as the mortar crumbles and flakes - a humanoid spirit darting between the shadow and up through the shelves ghostlike emerges, raising in his hand a torn off limb.

“I am your screaming voice,” it chatters, teeth glinting in the bounce light.

Inumaki’s blood runs cold. 

Yuuta doesn’t react to the words and teleports straight in front of the curse in a blink of an eye. At point blank range, he fires with his fingers pressed to the skin of the curse’s temple - the gust of wind that picks up from the speed of the blast as it tears a coin-shaped hole through one side of the curse’s head to another sends the room tilting backwards in a shockwave. The curse barely makes a sound as its head is wiped clean from its body, a weak and fleshy thud to the ground. Its arms fall, the limb caught in one of them hitting the ground. It explodes on impact, debris and metal shrapnel ricocheting off of Yuuta’s Limitless body.

The battle ends almost as quickly as it’s begun. Inumaki tastes the bitter splotch of purple blood on his lip, his heart thundering, his body stiff with shock. He can hardly make out what Yuuta’s saying until the latter has his hands on him, shaking his shoulders gently. “Toge? What’s going on?” 

“Shoko,” Inumaki rasps, his fingers fumbling to sign, “ There’s something I have to tell her.”

*

They clear one more area out before they leave the curtain - pushing into Kusakabe’s watery prison sphere to exorcize a curse that Yuuta frowns at - watching it, predicting its moves before the curse has even taken a few steps. It’s almost comically easy how they handle that one - simply reaches out with his fingertips to dig into the curse’s lungs, puncturing its flesh, curling around its heart. 

His eyes flare, briefly cyan as a halo of reverse curse energy glows around him. A smile graces Yuuta’s lips as he extinguishes life after life. Well that’s not entirely correct - curses aren’t lives, not even half-lives, and so really, Yuuta’s doing the world a favor by getting rid of them. 

And still.

Inumaki’s stomach twists as he watches Yuuta’s fingers clot with blood and his jacket, perpetually stained in that odd mixture of browns and deep violets, grow ever darker. He should have laundered that thing ages ago. 

After their last mission of the day is over they exit the curtain to regroup with the rest for the night. It’s nearing twilight just outside the barrier - makes little difference to the sky they knew within it, though the crisp breeze is a welcome thing to their stiff uniforms. Yuuta throws down his katana, collapsing into a fold-out chair under a pick-me-up tent where sorcerers have come and gone to stock up on water and supplies. Shoko watches them on a rattan recliner, her interest piqued by Inumaki’s wide eyed stare as he beelines for her. As he shares the news, her face morphs into something grave - her hand comes up to rub her jawline thoughtfully, the smoke of her cigarette stuttering with every minute pause and hum.

Yuuji, Fushiguro, and Nobara had only recently stumbled upon the very same phenomenon: curses they’d once exorcized revived in close proximity to their original spawn points. Mannerisms were generally the same, weaknesses more or less unchanged - it made for a simple kill which, at least, didn’t escalate the problem, but the oddity of it had piqued Shoko’s interest enough to approach the Kyoto students as well.

“It’s an interesting pattern with no identifiable common source,” Shoko hums. “Peculiar for sure, not deadly. Inefficient and impeding the progress of rebuilding the infrastructure in vital parts of the city, indubitably, which is why we should figure out where it’s stemming from. But not dangerous. At the very least that makes one less thing to worry about.” 

“Are there any hypotheses as to how it works? Or the source of it? ” 

“Kusakabe and I can only suspect clans associated with the board that do not align with our push for change in the system.” she returns, though she clearly seems on the fence about that being her final verdict. “A continuous number of curses being spawned would induce stress on our school and our efforts to protect the clan children from being harmed. If we slip up, it would serve as a reason to remove the school’s affiliates from the board for their irresponsibility. Nothing more petty than that.” 

She sends them back on their way, and it’s nearing the end of the day as Inumaki gets one last jab in at a new curse, albeit an easy one. His throat tickles a little bit, not nearly as difficult to swallow as the weight in his stomach that had grown heavier over the course of the day, that now weighed on him immensely so, enough to retire early to bed and forgo the barbeque party the next building over at the canteen. He stops by the greenhouse and nothing has changed since the morning, but the tomatoes don’t seem at all like the same batch he’d been watering hours earlier. 

Quiet chatter around the corner distracts him briefly - the type of chatter that means secrecy, and Inumaki finds his feet wandering right up to the edge of the cement, careful not to rustle the wall ivy. The first thing that catches his attention is a shock of white hair, dazzlingly soft under the moon’s aura - then, the dirty white jacket talking to her, and an unwrapped hilt that bounces off an animated shoulder, shifting and sliding against the fabric. 

Yuuta. He observes in silence as the girl reaches out to touch Yuuta’s chest - a glow emanating from her fingertips and Yuuta sighing, as if relieved of some great burden, before her fingers withdraw and she smiles. The tail end of her sentence comes into earshot as Inumaki peers through a shroud of leaves. 

“-apting to Limitless brilliantly, and if you want to know anything else about Satoru, just let me know.”

Yuuta nods and she seems to disappear into thin air. Teleporting, maybe. He goes straight to the barbecue, and Inumaki lays flat against the ivy, his heart thudding loudly in his chest. On Yuuta’s chest there had been a fading imprint of the girl’s fingertips. She had an eager gaze - and though he could not discern through the darkness whether that was a look of sincerity or one of malice, it was easy to be skeptical.

The Kamo clan pride themselves on their blood; the Zenin clan, on their power. Though Inumaki can safely assume that the Gojo clan may pride themselves on Limitless, he knows little of the inner workings of the clan itself.  

“I should keep this power,” Yuuta said to him, full of an odd and eerie wonder. “Shouldn't I?” 

Inumaki sleeps, and as he sleeps as he fears, for everything he’s come to learn about himself and the cursed world and boy that he’s shadowing. Not so long ago Yuuta would smile with a bit of darkness under his eye. Not so long ago they had watched a school of cursed fish make their way across an abandoned shopping mall, Yuuta’s voice still pitched to something anxious and not the light but steady lilt it was now. 

Love had scared Inumaki back then - it was a gray and complex theory, one that Gojo did not expound upon and Nanami had no time to explain. Perhaps neither of his professors understood it in the way that it was meant to be understood - first-hand, with a ringed confession and a dying wish, and a death-that-couldn’t-part-them. In an overpowering, all-consuming, maddening way irreplaceable by any other. 

An odd thought compels him awake as he lies there underneath moonlight, tracing shadows with his fingers. Inumaki’s father held affection for him the way a sorcerer might. Despite how dredging up memories of the past would leave a sour taste in his throat they would pull at him strongly, fuel to the energy stirring within him. As if he had left something there down in the ashes of whatever they’d burned down together, just now being swept out of the debris. 

So love really is a curse, he falls asleep thinking. The most twisted curse of them all.

*

Yuuta is fine, better than fine, better than better, really. The Good Will Event will be a good challenge to test his abilities in cursed energy precision. He’s never had much difficulty controlling his output before, but controlling it for Limitless is a different beast entirely: Limitless consumes energy voraciously, physically, like claws ripping chunks of it away to feed the technique. The real difficulty being tested would be utilizing Limitless’ powers without it completely frying his brain to the point of a black out, because well - he can’t black out again , of course he can’t. That would make him a liability.

“A special-grade sorcerer shouldn’t have that kind of weakness.”

Maki’s right of course, and maybe she knew he was listening and told him anyways, his cursed energy pressed right up against the wall leaking out, spilling clumsily through the cracks in the asphalt carrying along dustmotes and smoke. He’s sure she knows he’s heard it by the sound her voice makes when she greets him next morning, alacrity with a hint of ice - bitingly fresh like a cold spell during the middle of summer. Looking at him with her new eyes , well Yuuta doesn’t need new eyes to work Limitless into the ground like a farm animal, but having Six Eyes would have certainly made everything more efficient.

He already has Gojo inside him, though. That Blue part of him that does his bidding as he calls it, that works in tandem with his thoughts and his feelings, moves according to the rhythm of his sweeping hands, every arc and twist and jerk. Yuuta uses Blue and Gojo says that’s right, you’re better than I thought you’d be!

And Yuuta says, I learned it all from you, sensei.

But Gojo doesn’t like it when students call him sensei - Sakura told him that. And maybe he’ll be careful how much he learns from her - always be careful now, as a sorcerer, trust yourself and rely on only yourself - since what he learns from her can’t exactly be backed up with evidence now, can it? Things like, 

Gojo loves sweets (of course he does), and his favorite piece of candy? Well he doesn’t have one (of course he doesn’t). Gojo cares about his students and he’ll-

Do anything to keep them alive. That’s why nobody died during Shibuya, of course, nobody. It was an inevitable outcome, a resounding victory - not a pyrrhic one like Mei Mei had put it, not a tragedy like Gakuganji mentioned or Kusakabe saying let me paint you a picture and we were all cowards and we kept the status quo all of us bar none -

“Oi,” Inumaki says to him. “Yuuta.” 

“Huh?” Yuuta replies. 

Inumaki looks at him - Inumaki is here, just outside the bubble of spit and blood suspended above the ground, the curse long gone, evidence of its exorcism restricted within the circumference of a dotted white line. It all comes back to him now: Yuuta played with it the way you would fool around with a guileless chicken, wanting to see it run circles around itself within the confinements he’d set for it, kept in by only the invisible forces of Infinity, and so if you were an outsider to the altered perception of the Limitless technique all you’d see is a curse doing circles, banging its head against thin air.

“It’s cool, isn’t it?” Yuuta asks him. Inumaki’s stare holds, the tilt of his head observant and cautious, his hands suspended in motion as they speak. 

“Sort of,” He responds, signing jaggedly, “ In a super creepy, unsettling way, sure. It’s cool.” Yuuta laughs. 

“You weren’t always so talkative when we first met,” he replies. “What changed?”

“A lot,” Inumaki laughs back, but it’s stilted and contained. “ And I’d hate to be a one trick pony, ” He mocks himself out loud with a, “Shake!” And Yuuta laughs again. The dotted line wavers, purple blood leaking from the crack in Yuuta’s concentration. He breathes in sharply, the air whistling through his teeth and pricking his nostrils. The noise of the curtained world around them, though primarily ambient and unobtrusive, fades into a thin and whining pitch just below a pain point at his temple. He blinks, and white seems to follow that blink, and when he opens his eyes again the floor gives way beneath him despite seeing his feet planted firmly into the ground. 

“Yuuta,” Inumaki asks after hell freezes over. “You alright?”

“Of course I am,” Yuuta responds.

“You don’t seem alright,”

“What about me doesn’t seem alright?” Yuuta snaps.

“Hey,” Inumaki says, a little gentler this time. Yuuta didn’t know it was possible, with just the motion of those hands, but the signs are rounded somehow, curved, and slow. He watches Inumaki’s fingers for what seems like an eternity, though the three words he makes out are simply, “ You look sick.”

“I’m not,” Yuuta insists. The words feel heavy on his tongue, his cursed energy parsing the space in front of him as he moves, prods and pokes. He can sense Inumaki’s cursed energy responding in kind, like the spark of a chemical reaction quickly drowned out in a wave of water. Then, in the blink of an eye, as if he’d seen an illusion for what it really was, all the energy in his body is sapped from his bones; his voice slurs as he stumbles, watching helplessly as Inumaki leaps forwards to catch him. Yuuta is liquid, half the state of a drunk man and the other a volatile one, pins and needles alight on his skin like the prick of poison from a jellyfish sting. 

No more Limitless. He feels Inumaki’s skin and the raw contact makes his own arm burn, numbing heat that sends a shiver up his spine as he collapses against the other body. Inumaki does a good job of keeping him upright - his shoulders are strong, and his heart a steady, rhythmic beat keeping Yuuta three steps away from being sick. Or passing out. Both would be bad.

“Hey, Yuuta,” Inumaki whispers, reaching to pull down his muffler. Yuuta wrenches his hand back down - unsure where to put it, places it between them, between Yuuta’s ear and Inumaki’s chest. Inumaki’s heart beats fainter with something in the way. 

“Don’t,” Yuuta grits his teeth, shutting his eyes as the dizziness overtakes him again. “I said I’ll try, so let me try.” 

“Okay,” Inumaki says quietly. His words carry, echoing in their trembling cadence, but force nothing from Yuuta’s consciousness. He turns Yuuta around, eyes boring into his. 

Just below their patio in Minato city, where a sidewalk meets a bike-lane and a left turn takes you into the public park, an ancient wisteria tree towers tall and beautiful over the people passing by. Inumaki looks at him, and Yuuta is reminded of that tree. Of standing under that tree, of looking up into the cascading curtains of lilac.

“Stay, then.” Inumaki says.

“I will.” Yuuta replies. “I’ll stay.”

Yes, yes. Yuuta is fine. So fine. 

He can’t remember how he got up in the morning or why his jacket is bleached to snow-white perfection, but he registers that he’s wearing it; and his pants, and his katana, which is more than what he needs. Standing in front of the open door to an old dorm room at the crack of dawn he turns, reassesses what’s necessary for today’s missions and promptly unequips his sword. Limitless works better when applied directly to the body, Sakura taught him: how to breathe and apply it like a coat on the epidermis, a thin layer of cream, SPF 40 for the harsh sun or the ‘sickness’ of curses. 

“That’s most of what we can do,” she had explained to him the other day, letting him observe as she coated her own hand in cursed energy. “I can teleport too - only once a day, but my cursed energy reserves are above average. Even then, the technique burns through it all so quickly.”

“How about Blue and Red, are they as expensive?” Yuuta asked.  

“Yuuta,” she responded, smiling. “Do you know why Limitless is called what it is?”

“I assumed it was because of the Infinity technique,” Yuuta answered.

Sakura nodded. “Limitless is named so because of the bottomless amount of cursed energy it costs to utilize it to its full potential. All of the offensive Limitless abilities come with that same price; it’s how you focus on the individual techniques and understand them instinctively that allows you to reduce those costs. And the reason why not a single Gojo clan member other than Satoru was able to utilize Limitless, is because they simply did not have enough cursed energy to even begin to try .” 

“You however,” she said, one hand on his chest as warmth flowed through his whole body once again. “Are extraordinary. You can try, and you have tried. With practice, the blackouts you’ve been experiencing will disappear. Your dizziness will be replaced with strength.”

“And your love for Gojo Satoru,” she said, looking up into his eyes. They are soft gray, but all Yuuta can think of is harsh, cyan blue. “Your love will become power.”  

So he can’t remember how he got up in the morning, but he remembers this and remembers Sakura words , love becomes power, and he doesn’t have to try very hard to work up the courage to summon Limitless again. Infinity is a coat of sunscreen that burns a little less after each application; today it hardly burns at all, more of a prick on his skin that fades into a comforting buzz mid-afternoon. Blue is trickier, but with what he’s reflected on during his time body-swapping with Gojo, there are shortcuts that his sensei just knows , that Yuuta replicates curse after curse after curse, until the movements and thoughts come to him with a snap of his fingers and fading dust. He shows all this to Inumaki throughout the day - tips and tricks, cheats and hacks - wonderful things. He’s laughing because it’s brilliant, really. How much he’s understanding, how much it’s beginning to click - and when he’s,

Tired,

(Try as he might, sometimes he’ll get a little tired,)

Inumaki will stay Yuuta’s hand at the job. Deliver the final blow to a curse: a single fall , a double get crushed, a sentence of die, die for me. Yuuta isn’t sure where he learnt that one - it seems, from the look of it, Inumaki doesn’t either. 

Blow like dust and melt like snow, Inumaki sings once with so little difficulty it seems to surprise even himself. Like a dance, so tantalizing it pulls Yuuta’s heart right up against his lungs where he feels it cling to his ribcage, yearning to hear it against his ear like a sailor would a siren’s beckoning. 

Your final breath is mine, to reap and to own.

By the final day, he’s managed to cut his output of cursed energy for Limitless significantly. If he had to put it in numbers it’d feel less grand, so he compares it instead to memorizing an overcomplicated formula on a calculator. The numbers are hard to keep track of, and the formula itself is inefficient and repetitive, but answers come to him faster than before and without even thinking, Yuuta turns his wrist over the hard, round shell of a curse and says, “Red.”

It reacts like this: erupts, every inch of skull clenched around Yuuta’s fingertips repelling the energy pulsing between his fingers, generated from within the curse itself and it’s flesh, repelling the foreign entities it detects: brain, brain fluid, bone, skin, cartilage, sebum, hair. Instead of a vacuum at his fingertips, a vibration pulling him towards the center of the white dot hovering just between the two walls of his skin, it reflects , detects, reflects, so instantaneous and quick that Yuuta feels the very blood under his skin sting from the force of the repulsion.

And then, “Yuuta,” Inumaki says under his breath, and Yuuta’s honestly forgotten he was there - forgotten where they were and what they were supposed to be doing, much too focused on the steady tick of Red, of its heartbeat. He dispels Red and Inumaki nods his thanks, motioning to the edge of the curtain.

“Soon you won’t need to tag along anymore,” Yuuta beams proudly, gesturing with his head at what they’ve left behind. With such a small blast radius, the cleaning crew should be done with it in no time. “Did you see that?” 

“I saw a lot.” Inumaki signs. 

“I’m not your burden anymore, look,” Yuuta insists. Extending his hand outwards, he flattens his palm against the air and spreads his fingers. “Come on, put your hand against mine.”

“Yuuta, you-” Inumaki closes his mouth, frustrated by his words, and as if unsure what else to say until he signs, “You’re not a burden. You’re doing a good job, alright?”

“Then just humor me.” 

Inumaki’s fingers line up smoothly against Yuuta’s hand. They’re only slightly smaller but they’re thicker than his, more calloused and imperfect. Inumaki’s eyes reflect their colors well under the curse-light of the thick barrier. For a moment they stand there in silence, simply feeling the force of Yuuta’s Infinity pushing back against Inumaki’s skin. For a moment Inumai looks sad, and that makes Yuuta feel almost guilty. But then, what is he guilty for? 

Getting stronger?

“Ring,” Inumaki says suddenly, looking past his hand at Yuuta’s neck. “Gone.” 

“Ring?” Yuuta replies. He draws back sharply. Feels his hand, his other hand, his neck. Only the white leather of the collar brushes up against his fingertips. No cold steel. “Oh,” 

“Oh, I,” Yuuta says, lost. Suddenly so lost. “I was so sure I had it with me.” 

*

He’s still looking for it when Maki drops by, her shadow short and haggard by his door frame, his complexion strangely composed as he pauses in his search to acknowledge her. It’s a fruitless search; he’s already looked into every nook and cranny of the place, and repeating the motions feel like he’s doing something worthwhile even when it’s futile. As he searches for the ring, feeling like it should belong somewhere on his body, he finds that the longer he searches to no avail, the more content he is with keeping it hidden.

“Need help?” Maki asks.

“I’m alright,” Yuuta responds. “Just lost my ring.” Maki’s eyes widen at that. 

“Her ring?” she says. “How’d you even lose it?”

“Took it off,” he says. 

“Took it off, ” she repeats, equally puzzled. 

“I don’t really need it,”

“You don’t need it!”

“Stop parroting me,” Yuuta snaps. She steps back, though her face morphs into a slight smirk as he glares at her. “It’s just missing, I’ll probably find it at home.” 

“That’s the thing,” she says, taking a step forward into his personal space again, her eyes darting over his body like she’s inspecting it for change. “You never forget her ring.” 

“Well things are different now that she’s gone, Maki. Don’t be surprised.” Yuuta retorts. He’s been awfully snappish ever since they got back from their final mission - Inumaki’s eyes are still lingering in the back of his head, his fingers lined up to Yuuta’s, palm to palm. The unusual sadness, even despite Infinity between them as proof of Yuuta’s growth, makes him feel irritation he’s never felt before. “I’m not the Yuuta you knew last year.” 

“Yeah, you’re definitely not.” she says, crossing her arms. “You’re Gojo 2.0. Blacking out left and right letting Inumaki handle your shit. Heard you’re hitting it off with the Higher Ups too.”

“Isn’t that better?” Yuuta responds, taken aback by her disagreement. By all accounts she should be happy - he’s back, alive, more powerful and connected than ever. It makes him clench his fists, oddly unsure about what’s so wrong about feeling so good. “The Gojo clan were the ones who nominated me for the board, Maki, did you know that?” she scoffs, incredulous as he continues with, “They’ve changed. They know what this society needs. They know what Japan needs!”

“You’re just as fucking gullible as the day I met you,” she hisses, advancing towards him so much so that she’s right up against his face. “You don’t get it, Yuuta. You weren’t born here - you didn’t grow up with their fingers down your throat, with their dogshit dogmas etched into the wrinkles of your brain, into every fucking pore on your skin, they don’t care about you, Yuuta. All they care about is your blood.”

“That’s a lie!” Yuuta responds back, wide eyed and near the cusp of a shout. “They’re teaching me how to control it, they’re helping me , and at the very least they’ve given me something to hold onto.” He catches a heavy breath, exhales. “A piece of Gojo. And Gojo meant everything to me, Maki, you know that.” 

She looks at him, incredulous, though she takes a while to speak and when she does, it’s with a seething ire she’s having difficulty containing. “I know that. They know that. Everyone on this goddamn planet will know it, because at this point you practically smell like him. The way you use his powers it’s like… like you’re obsessed.”

Yuuta looks at her, stunned. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Look, Yuuta.” She says, with a heavy, angry sigh. “I don’t give a shit about higher order anymore. I don’t care about restructuring the stupid - society, or whatever. You’re nothing like that . You care too much about wanting better and helping everyone.” She glances up, putting a hand on his shoulder. Firm, unwavering. Unwilling to let Yuuta shrug her off. “And I’m not going to govern you, you’re your own person.”

“But just because you’re desperate to prove yourself right,” she says, tapping her temple, staring at him. She moves her hand to her heart and her gaze softens, tapping again, lightly. “Doesn’t mean you should lose track of what might be going wrong.” 

“I just want,” Yuuta responds, buzzed by their argument. She draws him into a fierce hug, his hands finding the small of her back, his head resting against the crook of her neck. “I just want to prove,” he says, faded and faltering. He finds himself coming up empty with the words. Just as lost as his ring. As lost as everything. 

“That I'm not useless,” he halts, in a whisper. “That this means something, Maki.” 

“I know.” she responds, squeezing him tighter. “I know.” 

*

Everybody goes out together later that night and despite the narrow, brightly lit alleyways calling to the rest of their friends, Inumaki turns away Nobara’s invitation and heads straight for Minato city on the first train back. Yuuta follows suit much to Yuuji’s chagrin; he doesn’t like to party very much anyways and he wouldn’t want to leave Inumaki alone by himself. 

His roommate is a lightweight but they raid their own stock of alcohol the minute they get home, managing to procure several cans of Asahi that they stack on top of one another on the metal railing of their narrow little patio, a bit of a mindless game. The condensation on the wrapping is cool to the touch.

Yuuta cracks open one and the sound it makes is fresh and crinkles the air. He motions his head to Inumaki’s white tank, eyes tracing a line across his collarbone. 

“Aren’t you cold?” He says, lingering for a touch too long. 

“Aren’t you hot? ” Yuuta takes off his jacket, tucking it around his waist. He pulls out a cigarette from his back pocket, inhaling deeply as a pinprick of light illuminates his face. 

“Ah,” He says after a while. “Just a little.” 

“Found the ring yet?”  

“No.” 

“ I saw you with a kid.” Yuuta snaps to attention, turning quickly to Inumaki, who continues nonchalantly. “Chill out. I’m not Maki, I won’t bite your head off.” 

“She’s just trying to be nice,” Yuuta says. 

“ If you say so. I won’t tattle.” his shoulders relax. “But only if you’ll tell me who she is.”

“I- don’t really know. ” Yuuta insists, adding bitterly. “But she’s been nice to me. She knows how I feel about… about Gojo-sensei.”

“So she’s Gojo clan?” Inumaki doesn’t look at him yet, but takes a meaningful pause to sip at his beer. Yuuta nods. “Do you like her?” 

“No- no!” Yuuta shakes his head, waving his arms quickly. “I don’t.” when he settles, he’s a little more bashful but he says it again, and it’s odd he feels embarrassed but he can’t help but insist in denial. He leans the weight of his elbow against the railing as his body sags under gravity and a slow descent into tipsiness, touching skin with Inumaki’s arm. His heat is electrifying. Is it the drink, or is it the boy?

“No,” Yuuta says again, quietly. Assuredly, more to himself than to anyone else. “I don’t like her.” 

“Anyways- she’s one of the people who recommended me for the board,” he continues after some silence. “She’s helping me with the technique and it’s… it’s working. You know . You’ve seen how much better I am with it, how many more curses I can kill in one shot. And I don’t black out - I didn’t black out yesterday, I hardly even got dizzy. Isn’t that something?”

“It’s good news.” Inumaki nods, smirks a bit playfully, “ Means tomorrow I don’t have to babysit you anymore. Just in time for the final event, too.”

“Yeah, exactly.” Yuuta smiles. “And I mean, not just that. Inumaki, they got me a seat at the board. I feel like they might have even understood Gojo’s desire to reset Jujutsu Society. Like they want me to push for the change he wanted.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Inumaki agrees and then, expectantly, “Bit weird though, you, recently. Not going to lie.” 

“Yeah?” Yuuta says. 

“Yeah,” Inumaki replies, and Yuuta breathes out softly, nodding. “I mean, I’m impressed, don’t get me wrong. Using Limitless without the Six Eyes would take an impossible amount of control over your CE. But I can- sort of tell you’re not all there. You’re thinking really… fast.” Inumaki’s hands twist, intertwine, fold over themselves in ways that Yuuta finds himself fascinated with as he struggles to articulate his thoughts. “A mile a minute in there. Your eyes are darting all the time, like they want to see- or like they’re seeing everything.”

“I can’t help it,” Yuuta says, and Inumaki presses, looking up suddenly, “ No, I know-”

His hand skirts over Yuuta’s for a bit. Presses into it gently. I know , he says, without signing. He draws away, and Yuuta’s hand turns over, instinctively wanting what was there, but left empty. 

“Weird shit is happening to me too,” he rubs a hand over his face. “ Bad shit.” 

“I don’t see it,” Yuuta frowns. Explaining he continues with, “Everything you’ve done just keeps getting better. Your voice control, your movements - yesterday you sang-”

Inumaki cuts him off with a groan as he wrinkles his nose, shaking his head. He signs, “I sang a song that would have tortured a curse for hours had you not killed it.”

“I thought it was amazing,” Yuuta says softly. “It’s like a power of your own you never knew you had.”

“That’s the thing,” Inumaki shakes his head again, faster. “ That’s not me. Not anymore I mean, and I don’t even want,” He sags, then, against the railing like it’s the only thing keeping him upright, and strangely Yuuta wants to prop him up, holding him against it if it means he won’t look as exhausted as he seems to feel. Or just hold him. He wonders if Inumaki would let him do that.

“You’re powerful, Inumaki.” Yuuta says instead.

“If this is my power, I don’t want it.” Inumaki responds. It’s sloppy and tight, and if signs had a voice this one would sound like a whisper. “It makes me feel… cold.”  

“Wouldn’t it be worth it?” Yuuta pleads. “Why wouldn’t you want something that could help?” He feels like he’s been making this case the entire day - he feels himself torn at four ends, confused by the lot he’s been given. Maki’s hug tightens his shoulders, and Inumaki’s eyes watch him, watch him all the time. “Being powerful makes everything better. I started at Jujutsu High because I wanted a reason to live. Curses gave me that reason, a purpose . I thought you’d understand.” 

“Killing curses keeps me alive.” Yuuta says, staring down at the city below.

And after a while, Inumaki answers, “It shouldn’t be the only thing that does.”

*

The final part of the Good Will Event is a competition; at the very least, Noritoshi stated during their board meeting last week, some tradition should be observed to maintain the long-standing culture between the sister schools. They made it easy: a straightforward Battle Royale, the kind of fast action that would be sure to entertain the first years, who get themselves riled up in their own eagerness as Kusakabe draws a shimmering black curtain over an abandoned stadium. Miguel strides into the center of it holding a bag that jostles and kicks as he drags it along the ground. The second years and third years get into stance, all poised at different locations on the soccer field. 

“Well,” he starts, his voice projected into the stadium stands with a jaunty bellow. “It wouldn’t be a sorcery competition without these now, would it?” and, without further prompt, releases chaos into the air. 

He’s a bastard, Miguel. Yuuta’s used to it - endeared by it now, which is why the storm of curses that sweep the soccer field don’t shake him like they first did when he was a first-year, fighting Getou’s Uzumaki with only a kiss of pure love to save him.

Pure love. He hasn’t heard that word in a while. It stings a bit, pure, authentic love. Fated strings and katanas embedded into the ground, and Rika’s terrifying voice an unadulterated vortex of affection. He’ll have to find his own without her. Without her ring which he lost, without her body like a shade, or her hands on his shoulders like a guide. 

“Don’t cheat,” Gojo said to him, hovering over him under the sun. He took Yuuta’s smoke from his lips with a hand, and put it out against the wall before sitting down again. Then the sun was bright and heavy in his eyes and Gojo’s laugh was crisp and dry, and his hand was at Yuuta’s shoulder, patting him gently, no right to be so gentle with somebody like Yuuta, no right to be, and he was so pretty too.

Yuuta’s breath hitches and he strikes - where, he wouldn’t know explicitly: it’s all instinct as he lashes out, to Noritoshi’s blood as it splits against his blade and reflects off a semi-first curse; Yuuji’s divergent fist slamming into the ground an inch away from his jaw; A nail striking a hammer, the blast of it slow and easy to divert to Maki’s energy-less tempo; Miwa’s simple domain far too simple.

He taps her out first. Yuuta will be relentless towards his comrades in a way that isn’t malicious - just clinical, perceptive and easy. Infinity does a better job than any technique or practiced move he’s ever made by himself. It’s a cheat code, the best one, and when Noritoshi gets tapped out by Megumi’s flood of rabbits nipping the Good Will token from his neck, Yuuta takes that distraction to throw his katana like a spear, directing Blue around it so it doesn’t curve off to the side like Maki’s spear. He rips Megumi’s token in two, dispelling a third grade curse under his foot - nearly catches Inumaki as well, one hand clawed into the back of his shirt, but too busy dealing with a swarm of cursed shikigami to commit to the hunt.  

Inumaki is too fast, anyways. He’s getting really good at controlling his puppet hand, and he backflips off the wall to tell everyone to stop where you are ; Maki doesn’t have the cursed energy to muffle him like the rest of them do. Maybe he’ll be the one to bring her down; but Yuuji rides down the fight with a curse that spits lightning, roaring into the center of conflict as he plows it into the ground. The earth shakes, dirt unearthed and the sound drowning out the ringing of cursed speech - Yuuji’s moving in now, clawing out the noise with hunger, hunger Yuuta knows he’s raging for hunger he craves- 

“You tapped Megumi out?” Yuuji says, ice cold.

“Yeah,” Yuuta responds, advancing towards him. “What about it?”

“Thanks for that,” Yuuji nods, cracking his knuckles. Bursts of cursed energy explode over his forearms. His snarl, heightened by how it’s drenched in a curious mix of loathing and ecstasy, makes the crowd go wild. “I don’t like holding myself back.” 

He’s a different beast when it comes to messing with his best friend. Yuuta thinks it’s fun, in a way - Limitless doesn’t catch Yuuji nearly as easily as it does the others now with something spurring his CE on. It grows, sizable in comparison to his own, a beast that enshrines Yuuji’s body as he leaps across flying debris and boulders of concrete Yuuta brings to the center of his palm with a Blue vacuum. He’s incredibly strong when he’s mad - in a whole different league than what he’s classified. But that’s how love is, Yuuta knows. That’s what happens when you’re in the pit of it. 

“Oh, what did I mean by that?” Gojo responded. “Honestly, I just thought it sounded deep, but it’s true don’t you think?”

He was standing at the water’s edge, Yuki’s motorbike at the far end of the boardwalk where she was chatting with Todo about something mundane. Yuuta’s feet tickled the surface of the water, and Gojo stood above him blocking out the sun until he squatted down, slipping his sandals off to join him. Gojo’s pale skin had developed a tan. He looked at Yuuta looking, and smiled. 

“I wanna show you something cool,” he said, patting his arm. It was a light touch; like fire crackling under his skin. “You’re gonna love it.”

He did. 

Yuuta’s Blue erupts in his hand, and the spear hooked inches away from his Good Will token shreds into strings of metal and wood as Inumaki is thrown off balance and Nobara slams into the ground next to him. Yuuji holds his own, trying to tear into the void of space that circulates Yuuta’s body, and Maki doesn’t even bother; rips Nobara’s necklace from her chest and taps both her and Inumaki out before the both of them can get up from the shock of the blast. Then it’s two to one in a sense - they’re trying to grab at him as Infinity recirculates, as his RCT refreshes and he feels like a totally different beast with it. Gojo’s right - he does love it, being in the eye of the storm, being the raging vortex, the honored one. 

And it’s mine.

Yuuta laughs. The last few minutes of this battle is a test of endurance, and Yuuji doesn’t have enough cursed energy to outlast Yuuta. Maki doesn’t even have cursed energy; finicky, since she’s always done so well without it, but it doesn’t take all that long before Yuuta has her by the throat and her token dangling between his fingers. It’s easy - almost too easy, as if she saw something in giving up that was worth letting go of victory. She’s smiling but it’s mean and hard, the lines of it etched across her forehead in ugly wrinkles that pull her scars taut across her skin.

“You love it, don’t you?” she rasps, watching him through her blood streaked face. 

“Is that so bad?” Yuuta replies, and crushes her token in his hand.

*

“You’re getting rather good at this.” Gojo mused. His fingers were slightly longer than Yuuta’s, his palm broader, his smile wider. But Gojo was Yuuta, and Yuuta was Gojo, and it was all very confusing how easily Gojo adopted his younger features when they switched bodies. It was as if even despite wearing someone else’s skin, he would always be one and the same. “And now let go.”

Yuuta let go of that feeling; as he did so, his hand jutted forward, and then he was touching his own palm: felt the hard calluses on it, leapt back as he did so with Gojo’s laugh carrying the movement further. “I can’t,” he said harshly, in Gojo’s more baritone voice. 

“We’ll try it again,” Gojo replied in his higher pitch. It was odd hearing himself speak without opening his mouth. “You’ll get it on the second try, you’re smart like that. Remember: you’ll need Infinity to be automatic if you want to be untouchable.”

“I just don’t believe in myself enough to do it,” Yuuta faltered. Gojo’s body was very heavy. It felt cumbersome to move in. Yuuta saw his own body laughing; that stringy, wire thing more confident than he’d ever seen it. 

“Believe in me, then.” Gojo responded. “Do you?”

“Yes,” Yuuta said, and tried again, and failed. He realized, as the surface of Gojo’s skin touched Yuuta’s once more, that he didn’t really want to let go at all. 

“Come on then,” Gojo said, and Yuuta heard it to be gentle. “I’ll stay with you for as long as you need me to.”

And if that was a lie, it was a good one.

He gasps awake to the sound of his own harsh breathing. His back clicks like the whole thing’s one misaligned joint, bruised and cold where the line of his spine juts against the cold wooden floor. So he’d blacked out, then, halfway between the entryway and the living room right after the party ended. Streamers glimmer in the moonlight, the faintest tang of alcohol and Lays like an acrid perfume sprayed across the couch.

His own reflection stares back at him on the dark and fuzzy ceiling, confident and cocky, Like he knows something Yuuta doesn’t. Maybe so. Yuuta rolls onto his front, a migraine pulsing wildly at his temple, his mind an anxious and voracious thing that turns shadows into people with a single glance. The kitchen island greets his blind and fumbling hands. His palms begin to sweat as he inches along it looking for a sink to retch into. 

He finds it; the sick finds him and so does the clench in his stomach, a violent tug at his gut. He’s palming himself in his hand before he knows it, chasing the desperate and feverish feeling of release as his cursed energy buzzes loudly in his ears and his fingers dig dents into the steel basin. Short bursts of breath echo metal-like in the sink, still smelling faintly of soap, and when he comes it’s bitten into the side of his arm so hard he stutters into the red mark, his fist shaking and his vision a spotted haze. 

Getting up is a frozen keyframe tied to the clarity of his deed; it takes him three tries to move, and when he does he kicks a streamer on his way. He cleans himself up in the bathroom. Faintly across from the open door, the sound of a podcast drifts past Inumaki’s room.

Like always, sleep does not take Yuuta slowly into a dream. He lies awake in the darkness, letting the feeling of Infinity hum across his skin, until it spreads like a rash across his body and boils a fever into his bones. And even then, even while the slow clutches of exhaustion drag him under, his reflection watches from the ceiling with a cocky, confident grin.

*

With Christmas just around the corner and the Goodwill Event coming to a close, the students of Jujutsu High delve back into their practical training and development courses and the second-years scatter to where they’re needed. Despite all that Yuuta’s tried to convince Inumaki he doesn’t need an assistant anymore, something about the way he’s held himself in the past few days has cause for concern. The second-years chalk it up to the busyness: as special-grade and a Higher Up, he’s needed in more than one place at a time. 

Yuuta’s hopes to become a better father to the greenery they’ve housed in the patio have dwindled since the start of the year because of it. The scent of rosemary and thyme wafts into the room as Yuuta kneels before their plants and does his daily duty, grumbling as he inspects the wilt of leaves under his fingers. 

Inumaki switches on the TV just as a newscaster announces a tremendous fireworks display right now, live! , the tinny TV speakers wheedling out soft popping noises that are quickly eclipsed by the real thing outside their window. He pads barefoot towards the sound of Yuuta’s quiet humming, leaning over the railing and letting his head rest gently into his crossed forearms as the night sky shines brilliantly with exploding colors. 

“Sky is nice,” he says. His back is turned to Yuuta, and he can’t be bothered to sign. 

“Yeah,” Yuuta responds, looking up and into Inumaki’s inky shadow. Inumaki hears him set down the watering can, footsteps slowing to a stop beside him. As he hunches over his arms, his necklace shifts and a token glimmers, reflecting the yellow of their patio light. 

“I couldn’t find her ring,” Yuuta scratches his head sheepishly. “But, this is better, don’t you think?” 

“I can’t be the judge of that.” Inumaki says. He reaches out to touch it: the token Yuuta won during Good Will: the one the Gojo Clan honored him with as victor of the Battle Royale. It’s a golden eye, much more stylish than an old ring for sure, Inumaki supposes. Though not any better than a childhood memory.

“Sakura said it was Gojo’s.” Yuuta mutters, his own hand reaching up to fondle it between his fingers. “She wasn’t able to hand it to him; he was too unwilling to return home. They said it was imbued with his cursed energy from when he was a child.” His eyes flutter shut, his hand forming a fist that shakes the chain of the necklace as it trembles.  

“Is he still somewhere in your head?” Inumaki signs. Cryptic as it is, it’s what Yuuta told him those few months ago, pressed against Inumaki’s side, his skin feverish as he woke up. 

“Yes,” Yuuta responds. “But he’s- different now, just a memory, not a dream. It’s like the more I use Limitless, the more I can remember of him and I- of us. Like he’d be right beside me when I woke up.”

“Do you think,” he starts again, one hand on the pendant, muttering low, “I mean, he’s Gojo-sensei. The most powerful sorcerer in our timeline. Do you think he’s really dead?”

There’s a simple response to that, which Inumaki knows already at the tips of his fingertips. And then there’s the harder one, the one that Inumaki’s had a hard time placing in every conversation they’ve ever had, every glance that wasn’t reciprocated, every observation that had Yuuta locked in a moment with his own mind like he was trying to tear it out, to see if it was really his own. Like maybe if he tried hard enough he’d solve the puzzle of his new existence. 

“I tried it once in my dreams,” Yuuta says, looking at him. He tries not to let his voice break, but it does and it’s heavy and raw with feeling. “I looked him in the eye.”

“You used cursed speech?”  

Yuuta shrugs. He holds the pendant close, close enough to where it brushes his mouth like a kiss. A prayer. 

“I tried to make him stay,” he says at last. “Maybe I wasn’t enough.” 

That night, Inumaki reminisces about things he’s never recalled before. He remembers that there is pain in truth and sacrifice in the sound. That Inumaki communicate with their hearts because their words are their weapons, and the cursed blood means to choose one or the other, and never both. To be an Inumaki is to forfeit your voice to the world, my son, which is both your curse and your blessing. 

Yes, he answered. He could say no more than that. Yes.

And then he dreams that he is born in a boring, nameless town to a simple working-class family. He learns how to walk when he turns one and count when he turns three. He celebrates his birthday by blowing out candles bought at a bakery, and fills a school bag with textbooks on history, literature, and math. He spends his middle-school years in manga cafes playing PC games, and cramming for difficult exams overnight.

He wakes up with none of these things but a halting breath on his mouth, trepidation for things that could have come to pass but never did. His phone vibrates and, reaching for it across the nightstand as he rolls out of bed, reads Fushiguro’s texts as they appear across the screen.

9:13 AM

Fushiguro Megumi: Hey, senpai. 

Fushiguro Megumi: It’s not my business but you’re my friend and I know you

Fushiguro Megumi: care about him. 

Inumaki Toge: what?

Fushiguro Megumi: Gojo-sensei cut ties with his clan 10 years ago. I don’t like how they’re talking about him, and especially if they’re parading Yuuta.

Fushiguro Megumi: I’ve just got a bad feeling.  

Inumaki’s fingers freeze over his phone, a numb chill crawling through him.

Fushiguro Megumi: Just tell him again. If he won’t listen to Maki, I know he’ll listen to you. 

“Yuuta,” he calls out, his eyes glued to his phone. “Yuuta?”

The sound of shattering clay startles him into proper wakefulness, as does the heavy thump of knees on lacquered wood. Inumaki opens his door: directly across from him in the living room Yuuta’s eyes meet his, eyebags dark and concave beneath the harsh sunlight and shadow. A healthy monstera lifts limply off the floor, a tangle of roots visible amongst clumps of dirt scattered into the carpet. Among those, the remains of the pot that housed the plant glimmer warmly in the light. 

“I-” Yuuta says, surprised, as if only just discovering the revelation himself. He raises his shoulder in an odd way, his other hand coming up to press against his bicep. Dread rises in the pit of Inumaki’s stomach, dread and longing and terror and anger. 

“I can’t feel my arm.” 

Chapter Text

Fushiguro sees them in the corner of his eye. One, two, three, four. Yuuji walks past him, animated as he talks, skin nicked and cut up along the side of his face. 

“Hey, Fushiguro.” Yuuji says,

“Hey, Fushiguro.” Sukuna sneers,

“Hey, Megumi.” Gojo smiles. 

He doesn’t tell anyone about seeing Gojo Satoru, because Gojo Satoru isn’t real anymore. Just like how Sukuna isn’t real and Mahoraga behind him isn’t real and the spinning, spinning, dharmachakra above them isn’t real. It doesn’t matter anyways because Fushiguro falls to his knees at the sight of it all again; Yuuji catches him, and he can still hear it turning. A monumental weight upon his head; never a full rotation, always stopping part way through. Changing, adapting. 

“Did he know?” 

“Know what?” Utahime looked at him oddly, like she didn’t want to answer his question, and her hands were tucked into the tight folds of her sleeves.

“Did he know I was in there?” Fushiguro asked again. 

“We all knew you were in there,” Her voice pulled taught, an anxious line, as if she’d been caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to. “Alright? It’s not like he could just pull you out.”

“Fushiguro,” she snapped, at once volatile and bristling like the first angry snaps and crackles of a firecracker. He walked away, his heart high in his throat as she called after him. “He’s not your father. He’s not responsible for you!” 

It wouldn’t be right to fault Gojo Satoru for something he had no control over, nor would it be right to speak ill of the dead. Sometimes in the dead of night, or between a hallucination so strong it brings Fushiguro to a kowtow, he lets himself hate anyways, caught somewhere between the lines of love and betrayal. 

“What’s going on,” Yuuji says roughly, cupping his warm hands to the underside of Fushiguro’s chin. “Tell me what’s happening, Megumi.”

“I can’t,” Fushiguro replies. He’s crooked, cradled in two arms. Yuuji holds him careful, steady. He’s as close to trust as trust can be. He’s even closer to love, beating like a war drum. All he feels is the wheel, grating across his forehead, and six eyes watching him in the gloaming. “I just can’t,” he says again.

“Is he still hurting you?” Yuuji asks. Gojo raises his hand to his forehead, as simple as twisting in the knife. A rush of Everything, all at once, engulfs him.

“Yes,” Fushiguro whispers. Yuuji’s face is made of stars. “He is.”

Fushiguro can name every constellation in the sky, every train station in Japan, could tell you the difference between the air in Canada and Hong Kong. He wakes up and forgets he has teeth; has a penchant for toys; scrolls through his contacts looking for his mum like he’s ever had one. Lived a thousand lives in five deaths, can name only a few before his head hurts and Sukuna stuffs his body into a mason jar, coos over how he’s curled up like a baby in the womb. 

In the womb he spins. Life, death, rebirth. He was all those things, and he is none of them, and he will be a thousand motes of dust in the nighttime, living through centuries between pauses in breath. And he is here, awake in his room, breathing so loudly he can no longer make out the sound of his own heartbeat. 

He doesn’t register Yuuji’s voice until it’s pressed against his forehead, begged into his ear like a desperate prayer, and when he surfaces from the illusion of adapting (adapting, adapting, adapt,ingadaptadaptadaptadapt-he hearshim say

“-hat did I do wrong?” 

“Nothing,” Fushiguro croaks, touching Yuuji’s wrist lightly. “It’s not you.”

“Then who?” Yuuji asks. His cheek is tearstained, pressed into the flat of Fushiguro’s palm. Fushiguro has a hunch that he’s in love with him; maybe more than a hunch, maybe a certainty. He isn’t sure what to do about it.

The last person he loved was Gojo Satoru, and Gojo Satoru broke his heart.

*

Inumaki drags Yuuta straight to the infirmary even despite the clearly labeled opening hours on the front door, banging on it long enough to eventually incite the quiet fury of their only medical professional who swings it open with a harshly enunciated: “I heard you the first time, what the hell is going on ?”

“Yuuta,” he gestures helplessly.

“Oh,” she says.

It’s rather irresponsible of sorcerers, Inumaki thinks while Yuuta is propped up on the examination table and Shoko observes his lifeless limb, to have their most accomplished medical professional situated at the school and not a proper facility with top of the line equipment for their most powerful sorcerers. Then again, when in all of Jujutsu society had there ever been a proper institution?

Yuuta inhales sharply as Shoko’s stethoscope presses against his bare chest. The noise is so loud and filled with restraint that Inumaki’s head snaps up and their eyes meet. He hasn’t seen panic like that in those eyes for months - the last time Yuuta looked at him with so much fear was when Inumaki had shouted at him, screamed at his lifeless body before it shot back into wakefulness. 

“It’s gonna be okay,” Inumaki signs, but he can’t really be sure.

The stethoscope moves, Shoko’s breathing gentle and rhythmic. Her hands dance past the side of Yuuta’s body, her fingers pressing into chakra points along his spine. 

“Interesting,” she tuts, setting him down gently onto the mattress. “Your cursed energy signal is stronger than ever - not that I doubted it. Just as healthy and obnoxious as usual.”

“Obnoxious?” Yuuta mutters. She waves a hand around airly, gesturing to where Yuuta’s cursed energy materializes faintly around the room. “Obnoxious,” she repeats matter of factly, unimpeded by the way Yuuta’s body has begun to flush a deep red.  

“Humor me for a second, Yuuta.” she says once she’s finished examining him. She takes a seat at her desk, swiveling her chair towards her monitor. With her back facing him, Inumaki can hardly discern her tone. “When did you learn that you possessed the Limitless technique?”

“Early April,” Yuuta answers, mildly puzzled. “A day after I was discharged from your office.” 

“Yes,” she says, folding her arms. “And you’ve been avoiding me ever since. For how long can you maintain the Limitless technique?” 

Yuuta pauses, as if unwilling to give her the answer. After a while he shuts his eyes and acquiesces under her calculating stare. “For as long as I choose.” 

Shoko hums. She pushes off of the reclined bed, gliding back to her work desk. A little drawer beside a pack of sticky notes procures a box of cigarettes, and she lets the tense silence envelope the three of them completely before drawing out a fresh one and lighting it. She laughs as she smokes, hand extended across the arm of her chair; the sound that escapes her is hollow and brittle.

“Just to be clear, you’ve lost Copy entirely.” 

“Yes.” 

“How can you be so confident?” 

“Because she’s -” Yuuta shuts his eyes, like his answer will sting. “Because the entity maintaining the conditions of the Copy technique no longer exists.”

“Your parents were non-sorcerers.”

“Yes.”

“Although you’re distantly related to Michizane Sugawara, your blood does not show any traces of Gojo clan DNA.” 

“I wouldn’t know that.” Yuuta throws his hands up helplessly.

“Then you must have never read any of the autopsies I’ve done for you,” Shoko chastises, holding up a thin folder. “Which is a real shame. You never got very far with RCT.” 

Yuuta’s brow furrows, as if affronted by the implication of her words. “Shoko, what do you mean by that?” 

“Oh, well.” she shrugs, a lazy drawl about her as she props her heels up on her desk. “Sorcery’s all about being selfish isn’t it? All the running around and the fighting and the look at me, I’m leveling an entire city with a single blast…” her voice trails off in a sing-song, though her lips are terse when she puffs, and the whiff of smoke twirls sourly into the air. “Nobody likes the painful part. It’s tedious and slow, so that's where I come in.” 

“You know how to heal yourself,” she explains, looking at Yuuta. “But you don’t know what it is you’re healing at all, don’t you? Name a bone in your body, any bone. I bet you can’t and I wouldn’t fault you for it. It was the same with him, you know. Satoru.” 

“What does he have to do with this?” Yuuta replies, growing impatient.

“He knows self-healing RCT, doesn’t he? That know-it-all,” she replies, inspecting her fingernails with sudden interest. “Well he’s not as omniscient as everyone seems to think he is. And never let it be said that I didn’t offer to teach - but no, I get it. When you hit a certain pay-grade, a certain threshold of insanity… you think you’ll be fine.”

Even without prompt, the Sukuna fight floods Inumaki’s memories in an instant. Both sorcerers going back to back, domain after domain, Gojo’s body glowing with the same brilliance he’d always shone in, only this time it was real. Reverse Curse Technique.

“He’s the strongest man in the world,” she says dryly, observing Inumaki’s face as realization dawns on it. “He worked Red like the back of his hand after Okinawa, RCT not so much. Just put it on autopilot, like most sorcerers. He could have won that fight and lived,” her voice drops, soft and bitter. “Personal opinion, of course. My stance on certain decisions we’ve made as a team in the past shouldn’t matter much now.”

“Shoko,” Inumaki sits up. “Takana?” 

“Simply put, some form of cerebellar ataxia ,” she puffs, as if the revelation that just came to her were triflingly mundane. “A condition that causes loss of muscle coordination due a damaged cerebellum. The fact that you only lost control of one limb is practically a miracle , considering how long you’ve kept this up - since April, right? You’ve been doing a good job maintaining it, and maybe that’s the problem: you don’t know what to fix, only that you have to fix it.”

Yuuta refuses to look at her, though his numb arm twitches. A vein in his neck pulses, his shoulder straining, the arm jerking in brief response before it slouches off the edge of the bed again. His mouth is a firm set line, betraying no shock. An odd feeling rises in the pit of Inumaki’s stomach once he recognises Yuuta’s expression as one of connecting the dots - already prepared for the response she’s giving him. So he knew , perhaps, or guessed. Predicted that it was hurting him, let it unfold, let it just happen-

“The blackouts,” Yuuta responds, looking up.  

“When Limitless consumes all the cursed energy at its disposal, it looks for another source to feed on if the user remains active.” Shoko says, watching him carefully. “It looks for the closest match for cursed energy that a sorcerer can have - its original source. The limbic system, the physical root of human emotion. Your body shuts down automatically to deactivate Limitless before it can kill you, but the damage is already done.” 

Inumaki stands, one hand on the wall. He lurches forward and Shoko watches, though makes no attempt to catch him. Her gaze softens, something perhaps akin to guilt - but he’s hardly watching her at this point. The paint on the walls is old enough to start to flake. He sits back down as vertigo takes him, and picks his phone up off the ground, where it had fallen; made not a single sound worth hearing. 

“Something forces you back into action,” she continues. “Your body seeks a way to conserve energy - to replenish it. Reverse the damage. Any sorcerer worth their salt knows what to do next.”

He drops it. Puts it in his pocket, dropping it once more. His hands are shaking. He tucks them under his arms to stop them from shaking, but then his shoulders begin to shake too. Everything is too clear, too crisp, all at once. He looks up again, to Yuuta, who stares back at him, distraught at first and then defiant.

“You can heal me though,” Yuuta asks. “It’s reversible, right?”

“Heal you and then what?” she replies with distantly ambivalent boredom. Her eyes flit to her laptop screen, keying in notes of Yuuta Okkotsu’s health checkup as she continues, “You’ll go back to fighting, overexerting yourself, rewriting the damaged portions of your brain over and over again. Crippled in another year and a half,”

“Only a year and a half,” Yuuta shoots back, like a frantic reassurance.

“- come back here and expect me to fix you so you can break yourself all over again. Is that really what you want for the rest of your life?”

“Well you’ll heal me now, won’t you?” he pleads, facing her. His arm rolls uselessly, Shoko’s gaze trained on it. “You said you needed my help and without my arm I can’t help-” 

“I will,” she says gently, her hands raised as if approaching a cornered animal. “But it’s important you know that this is temporary, alright?”

Yuuta’s expression turns irate at her voice, and he sits bolt upright with a quiet rage that seems to shock even himself. “What other option do I have right now? What else can I do? I can’t use Copy anymore, Shoko! ” His voice rises, from a throaty seethe to a graceless and brittle shout, his skin shaking off his bones, his voice trembling with emotion. He screams at her, “I don’t have Rika! I LOST HER! SHE FUCKING LEFT ME, AND THIS IS ALL I HAVE LEFT!”

Shoko’s eyes widen, stunned by his outburst, sentences on her screen left unfinished. Inumaki’s phone clatters to the ground. Cigarette smoke wafts into the air and as Yuuta falls back on his pillow and begins to giggle hysterically, his good hand raised up to press the bridge of his nose trying to rein in his composure. 

He exhales, sharply, “Please just fucking fix me,” so she does. 

*

He can’t even remember what mission they go on, but it’s as meaningless as Yuuta’s outstretched arm: pink and strong and surging with power as it ramps up a shot of Red and blows the head off of a cursed thing they were scheduled to kill next. His movements are jerky and imprecise, newborn as his new limb is, and his other hand comes up to steady his aim. 

“We’re done.” Inumaki says, looking at the mangled thing on the floor with slow clarity. It puddles into ashes and bleeds into the dark, smelling sharply of bile and a stench of flies. “Let’s go,” Inumaki beckons, motioning with his head to the exit. “It stinks.” 

Tonight’s Shibuya is noticeably animated; with most of the zones shut down and only a few aggressive resurgences, city folk needle back into the husks of their old homes. Most of all store shutters are down at this time of night; light lines leak out of gaps and windows. Flickering street lamps follow their shadows along the crosswalk. 

“I’ll be fine,” Yuuta says after a while. He’s kicking the asphalt with the heel of his converse, flicking a large piece of grit across a stretch of road devoid of cars. “Whatever she said, I’ll be fine.”

“Really.” Inumaki turns to him, and it’s just one word but it leaves him fiercer than he expects. Yuuta turns the corner, his eyes tracing neon. He licks his lips. 

“It’s just an arm,” he says. Gesturing to it, like a thing. Anger rises in Inumaki’s throat, a kind of anger that wants to lash out with words. But words can be dangerous, he’s learned. Learned that better than most. 

“Sure.” he says instead, tight and restrained as he signs, “ I think you should really think about who you’re talking to when you say that.” Yuuta’s eyes dart to his, flinching guiltily as if struck. 

“If you’re so bothered by my decision,” he responds, jerking his chin. His hand makes a hapless gesture in the air. “Then maybe we should split up.” 

“Now?”

“Something wrong with that?” his gaze does not waver, as if in an act of defiance, and Inumaki stares him down because he knows he can. Because he dares. Because the callous ignorance in Yuuta’s tone belies what Inumaki understands about him, and Inumaki refuses to believe what he’s hearing.

Because he knows Yuuta, and whatever this is, isn’t him.

They go home consumed in silence, small noises and shuffles magnitudes louder than usual until Inumaki drops his keys and Yuuta trips over his shoes and says bitterly, “This is stupid, I’m going out.” 

“Yuuta.” Inumaki grabs him by the arm at once; awkwardly, and at an angle he’s never held him at before. He signs, “ Just tell me if you knew this was happening to you.”

“I had a hunch,” Yuuta replies quietly, “Nothing concrete, but I could feel it.” He tries to turn away, but Inumaki moves swiftly to block his path and Yuuta’s eyes narrow as he takes a step back into the entrance. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” 

“I knew it would make you worried and- and what good would that have done?”

“A lot of good, are you kidding me? I’m your friend, I go on missions with you, I practically revived you-”

Yuuta grits his teeth, shoving past him with his shoulder. They weave between each other through the living room as he sets down his keys; Inumaki moves to hang his jacket on a chair; an ungraceful dance heightens the tension of his words as Yuuta rebuts him with, “Well you shouldn’t have to do those things-”

“That’s bullshit!” Inumaki slams his hands on their dinner table, shifting the tablecloth. “ Who else was going to call you back from your blackouts?”

“That period of hell is already over ,” Yuuta seethes, “I really doubt it would happen again when I’ve clearly been doing fine, you saw what I could do during Good Will, you know Sakura has been teaching me how to control it-”

“That kid could be lying, Yuuta.” Inumaki signs, seethingly furious. “Gojo hated his clan, he practically disowned them-” 

“Like you would know anything about him-”

“Do you?” Yuuta halts his movement at the words. 

“It’s not about trust,” Inumaki signs, jabbing a finger to his chest. “It’s true, Yuuta, because Fushiguro’s lived with Gojo practically his whole life and you’ve only known him for a year. So just give me the truth about how you really feel, alright?”

“You want real?” Yuuta seethes, a hair's breadth away from Inumaki’s nose. He pushes him away, and Inumaki’s elbow catches on the dining chair, a chattering sound against the wooden floorboard. “You want real, like I haven’t died. Like I haven’t lost Rika, like it doesn’t hurt me to lose Gojo too, like I won’t be that kid moving from bed to bed in that hospital if I lose my powers, like it doesn’t scare me to be changed, like I know what I’m doing I’ll give you REAL, Inumaki Toge!”

“IT FEELS FUCKING GOOD! ” Yuuta explodes with a furious shout, his eyes shining with the first hint of tears. Inumaki’s never seen him angrier in his whole life - not the calm and dangerous fury in vengeance, but something clawed out of his chest, not wanting to be seen and yet unfurled to him shamefully. “Christ , like you would understand what it feels like to be like this, of course you wouldn’t. Everything I hate about this world is so far removed from my consciousness, everyone I’ve ever mourned is just a blip in time and space . When I’m in it, I don’t feel sadness, I don’t feel fear, I don’t need to feel anything at all so yes, call me a monster and pull the fucking plug on my arm, Toge, I could give less of a damn!”  

Inumaki slows, his hands shaking violently. He flexes his right, his dominant, his puppet arm, and even though it’s been a year since Sukuna ripped it from his torso, every muscle fiber stitched clean begins to burn like fire. Cold and bitter humiliation seeps through him, Yuuta’s words tugging at the grooves in his skin and the pain of having to live, of struggling to feel.

“Since when did you become so selfish, Yuuta?” 

Yuuta freezes, flinching as he makes sense of Inumaki’s words in the dim. He breathes through his nose, as if his fury is but one pent up breath, taking a step towards Inumaki and shoving him against the table with so much force that it moves their chairs and drags them against the ground along with the ratling silverware. Inumaki’s heart thunders in his chest, his head dizzy and clouded with anger and confusion as Yuuta’s gritty snarl eclipses his sharp inhale of breath. They’re so close he can make out the pores in Yuuta’s cheeks, the haggard bow of his eyes and the tendons in his arms rippling as he turns, Inumaki’s arm caught by the wrist, and yanks until their noses are touching. 

“We’re sorcerers,” he whispers. “Everything I’ve done has been selfish from the start.”

He throws Inumaki off of him, his face painted the colors of bleeding rage. Inumaki stares at sweat lining his palms, feels the sizzling heat of his skin, still burning as Yuuta leaves, not looking back as the door slams behind him.

*

They go a week without talking, another trying not to coexist. Somehow, despite their lives so intrinsically intertwined at this point, a sixth sense pervades the household and Inumaki will return to the apartment just as Yuuta leaves it. Though there are moments where their schedules will intersect, and suddenly they’ll be sitting at the table across from one another: Inumaki spoons leftovers and Yuuta scrolls through his phone and-

“Hello, monster.” Inumaki will say dryly.

“Shut up,” Yuuta will say back, and they don’t laugh and it’s not alright, but the tension never ramps up to a shouting match. And it’s not Inumaki’s business what Yuuta chooses to do with his body, but he’ll be damned if he can’t complain about it.

“It’ll be a year and a half, she said?” Panda asks. The courtyard isn’t empty, but they’ve taken a seat far enough away from the practicing first years that their voices get blown away by the gusty autumn weather. “That’s not so bad. Not terminal. No such thing as ‘terminal disease’, with RCT. Especially with Shoko, she can fix him right up again.” 

“But to know and omit those things,” Inumaki insists. “From me,”

“Makes him a bad friend, though he has his reasons,” Panda acknowledges, pulling tightly on his needle. “Well he’s hard to understand.”

“What do you mean?” 

“Oh, you-” Panda says, tugging again. “I said the same thing about you once, you know. When we met you were so distant. Wouldn’t ever talk, always on your phone. Nanami told us it was to keep you distracted. From those voices in your head.”

“From my father’s voice,” Inumaki replies. 

“Yaga just told me he felt bad for you, you were just a little kid then. Lost everything. First few weeks together, we didn’t do much in it - not like we wanted to, being strangers. Just be polite, keep your head down, you know. That’s not the same as being friends.”

“I don’t understand.” Inumaki signs, throwing down his crochet kit. He hasn’t managed to make anything past the slipknot. Panda looks at him, amused.

“And then we had our first fight,” he carries on. “I was so hungry one night, it must have been my core. Ate everything in the fridge- Maki went insane. We had a tussle in the living room, so loud you stood up and screamed at us. Then our ears started bleeding. It was so bad,”

The Tanaka Goods Show he’d been watching. Three for the price of one, buy two get one free, sandals and toilet paper and a laxative formula that tasted like strawberries, apparently, or not. Inumaki stopped listening after the loud girl had thrown that fit in the kitchen, her body a blur of motion chasing the lumbering cursed corpse around the living room. The room was shaking; he was so heavy, that creature. Panda, he called himself. 

“Are you fucking kidding me?” The loud girl shouted, her face red-hot. Like the chilli paste Panda had smeared on his black bottom lip. “My sister made that for me you fucking creature , I’m going to rip you to shreds you fat fucking-”

The high pitched whine in Inumaki’s ears was ever so persistent, less a fly and more a burst eardrum, a pricking pain, an anomaly. He stood, and he pulled down his mask because it was so goddamn noisy and he wanted some goddamn peace and he’d never get to finish the Tanaka Goods Show so he-

“ Shut up, ” he said. They stopped, turned, looked at him with wide eyed curiosity. All the ire in the girl’s eyes had gone.

“So you do talk,” she sneered with an air of finality. 

“I told you to shut up,” Inumaki said. “ I can’t hear a word of my show.”

The words shook the air, trampled the ground. Marble split diagonally across the grout line, as if the floor could not take the weight of his petty irritation. “I’m not a fucking dumbass,” The girl replied jauntily, pulling out an earpiece from her ear before slotting it back in. “and neither are our teachers. Tell me to go shit myself, I dare you.” 

Nobody had ever talked to him in that way before. He saw red when he was angry, like he’d been humiliated by her and then he screamed, and the next thing he knew she was standing over him, one hand over his chest, the other at his chin where blood leaked profusely into her palm. 

“I always clean up the mess, don’t I?” she spat, blood in her teeth, blood running down her ears, then stood. She held out her hand like she expected him to take it. “Are you alright?” 

After that the Higher Ups muzzled him, and he woke up the next day throat locked, jaw stiff, three stupid, stupid words on a paper scribbled hastily like some sort of cipher for a joke. Like he was a joke, like speaking was a joke.

“It is a joke,” Gojo Satoru had said to him. “It has to be a joke. After what you just pulled, they wouldn’t let me give you anything else.”

Panda says to him in the present, “You didn’t talk to Yuuta all too much until this all happened and you moved in with him. He was always busy with Rika anyways, you know. And then Africa came and went and then he was different but we didn’t have the time to process it, not really. How could we? We didn’t know him that well, just that he was one of us.” 

“Well that’s what mattered ,” Inumaki starts. He thinks of taking Maki’s hand and says, “ He’s one of us. That makes him our friend.”

“And what about now,” Panda responds. “That you know how he is in the morning, what he likes to drink for breakfast, what about that?”

Inumaki falls silent. Panda continues, “Your favourite color is blue. One day you’ll learn to skate and I bet you’d be a riot at the skatepark. Arm’s working great, needs a bit of oil. Hard to sleep on, hurts when you sleep on it, I’m sure- all guesswork, you’ve never told me any of this. Why won’t you tell me, Toge?”

Inumaki pauses. He takes Maki’s hand, and his father tells him he loves him, and he remembers it now: he remembers burning homes and marionetting the bodies into a slow waltz, and Gojo’s eyes watching him through the glass and Panda licking chilli sauce off his lip. 

“I’m scared,” he signs. “Scared of you understanding.” 

“Understanding what?” Panda presses.

“Understanding me.” Inumaki replies, “ When I don’t even understand myself.”

*

The next time they see each other, trapped once again in the liminal period of twilight to early morning, Yuuta is crashing through the door nowhere near sober and Inumaki is deeply absorbed in watching a movie on his phone, halfway through his nightly preparations and too invested in the fictional relationship onscreen to go to bed. He looks up as Yuuta shuffles off his shoes, so enamored by the pot shedding leaves at the windowsill near the kitchen that he falls over himself trying to reach it. Eventually, Inumaki figures out that he’s really just aiming for the kettle, and sets about to brew hangover tea. 

“Yuuta,” he says, with politeness usually reserved for evenings where he’d much rather be alone.

“Toge,” Yuuta croons, and then gags. He smells rancid. Like sweat and piss and strong alcohol. Like an alleyway kiss ground up into powder, music so loud it could rearrange your organs. Inumaki can hear the nightclub already and taste the vodka on his lips without even looking at them. Yuuta shrugs off his jacket, a sheen of sweat lightly coating his shoulders in glittery grime. It occurs to Inumaki, rather irrelevantly, that Yuuta looks just as striking now as he does on more well-rested mornings. 

“I’m- think I’m fucking wasted,” Yuuta mutters, “I nearly missed the, last train home.”

“Tea.” Inumaki gestures. Yuuta staggers to the sink and throws up, loud and awful in the dark. He hurls until he dry heaves, until sparks leave his eyes and the smattering of disco lights become warm spots of color and the memory of sweaty bodies grinding up against one another becomes merely an unpleasant dream. 

“Never liked clubs,” he says faintly after a long silence. “But for some reason I said yes.” 

“Nobara?” 

“Hakari and Kirara. They wanted someone to third wheel their barhopping date and snuck stuff to me when we left.” Yuuta responds, taking off his shoes to try to hang them up against the wall. They fall - he’s well beyond their apartment entrance - and Inumaki bends down to pick them up just as Yuuta crouches for them. Their foreheads bump painfully. Inumaki staggers to his feet, Yuuta mumbling an apology as he throws his shoes into a corner instead.

“I’ll do it in the morning.” he babbles. “I’ll do everything in the morning. I’ll restructure Jujutsu Society. And exorcise all those curses. That’ll make everyone happy.”

“You’re talking nonsense,” Inumaki signs. It’s too dim to make out every letter, and Yuuta’s inebriation doesn’t help in trying to decipher his signs either.

“I see him in my dreams,” Yuuta ignores him, looking up drowsily under half-lidded eyes. He comes closer, hiccuping, now smelling of an odd concoction of tea and whiskey. Inexplicably Inumaki finds himself letting Yuuta wrap his large and calloused hands around his own, not too long ago warm against pulsing lights and spastic movement. “I see what I could be, but I’m not, and I’m lost, and I’m trapped and I’m alone again in that awful metal box,”

“Not lost,” Inumaki shakes his head, choking on his words. “Woke you. You’re here.” 

Yuuta interrupts, with startling clarity amidst an incoherent slur of noise, “Why?” 

“Because,” Inumaki responds. The words he wants to say come flying forward in an instant, caught in the grate of his teeth. Yuuta’s hands are a burning cage over his own. He hears his own heartbeat thrum in them, centimeters from Yuuta’s fingers. He traces the words he wants to say slowly, over his lips, and has never concentrated so hard as in the moment that he says, “I care. About you. You’re my-”

He pauses. Swallows. “Friend,” he mouths, and he truly means it. Yuuta closes his eyes, his body swaying on its own. 

“I don’t have Rika anymore,” he says after a while. Looks up, as if something in Inumaki’s words had stolen his breath away. “But I have you,” his brow furrows, fighting the sway of his legs and the swirl in his head. “Why do you stay with me? Why do I have you?” 

“Yuuta,” Inumaki pleads. Yuuta shakes his head but he crowds them in. The heat crawling across his skin permeates the chill of the room, prickles into Inumaki’s fingers, curling over the tight release in his lungs that seem to flutter and thrash even as they stand still. 

“What did I ever do to deserve you?” he exhales quietly. They’re a step away from melding into one another; the darkness of night blends their figures into one and the same kind of shadow. His breath is warm and wet on Inumaki’s cheek. “What do I need to do to keep you?”

"Nothing," Inumaki sucks in a breath. He licks his lips, swallows nothing but painfully dry air. "Nothing."

It is not a desperate plea or a beg - Yuuta doesn't even really see him there. It’s a realization that dawns drunkenly on him, who holds Inumaki’s hand in his like it were something grand and precious, like there was depth there that Yuuta could see into and make his own. He mutters it again, like a fact at first, and then with loathing, and then with fear. He mouths it, as he lifts Inumaki’s hands to his lips, brushing the words from his lips to Inumaki’s fingers like an oath. 

“What do I do?” he whispers. One last time, like he was grieving.  

*

Inumaki’s first solo mission in months goes horribly awry, as they tend to, but Inumaki has been craving the medicinal taste of his favorite brand of throat spray, and it washes out the bitterness of his incompetence in the final dreadful minutes of completing his mission. 

There are bones everywhere. He clutches his own arm, twisted at an angle he can’t look at for too long. Smaller spirits line the walls like water leaks, descending downwards in oddly misshapen forms as Inumaki dispels them word after word. There is a moment in which he is heading out of the abandoned hospital, past the sign that warns of fierce dogs, through an overgrowth where the curtain barrier shimmers and undulates, where he briefly considers just giving up. 

The thought comes to him naturally quick, a striking moment of certainty amidst a year’s worth of confusion. And though he cannot die, mustn’t die - for if he dies, then others die - it’s a peaceful thought all the same. All of a sudden it’s easy to imagine Yuuta's pink mouth raw from a scream, throwing an alarm clock and a book and a pillow. Dying is easy; living on is the hardest part. Sorcery or not. 

The curses continue to coagulate, and by nature they watch him because they are ready to kill him. His throat spray burns in his hand, as if it already knows how acidic it will taste in his throat, that no matter how strongly flavored it is it will always taste of blood and nothing less than that.

“Leave me alone,” he shouts hoarsely to the curses at the door, no bite in the bark. His body aches, and the curses can smell it - moving forward in a mass, splitting tiles, travelling grout to get to the soles of his feet. They reach out to grasp him like hands in the dirt. 

“Sweet like honey,” they blabber in unison. “Inumaki, say it again.” 

There’s a blinding sound and a crash then, and somebody shouts as the curses begin to conjoin and melt into a puddle. To fuse, like melted plastic as they scream and cry. A kettle’s whistle, then frozen solid, articulating in jerky, discomforting movements. The familiar tug of cursed energy swaddles the empty bay, a blanket of it thick enough to feel through fingers and Inumaki breathes raggedly as he takes two steps back, bumps into the warmth of somebody, turns around-

“Careful,” Yuuta says, his mouth a thin and waiting line. Just a few nights before, that mouth was softer than his eyes, and he spoke like he might’ve wanted to let somebody in on his secret. The Yuuta in front of him now is not really Yuuta: it’s a body with his face, and a power that takes, takes, takes, and all Inumaki can think about is Shoko’s tense brow and a feeble boy’s raw scream and the brain eaten away by the body.

“That was close.” Yuuta’s scar glows, his palm open like he’s waiting for Inumaki to take it. In lieu of an apology - the apology Inumaki feels he’s owed, wants to be owed - the curses dissipate, dissolving to ash against the ground. He says, “You alright?” and he’s looking at him, distantly lonely and uncertain. 

Inumaki doesn’t take his hand; wouldn’t take it even if he wants to - and a thrumming, thrumming anxiety weighs on him as he brushes past Yuuta and walks out the curtain. 

“Hey,” Yuuta calls out, chasing after him.

It would be a bother to sign his frustrations. Not like Yuuta listens anyways, not like he would now. Inumaki steadies his breath counting tiles along the pavement. The numbers in his head jostle as Yuuta’s voice remains persistently throughout the walk home, remains a thorn, he comes close enough to brush the back of Inumaki’s hand-

“Stop it,” Inumaki pants, seething, and Yuuta stops. 

Yuuta’s shadow is a maddening thing as he fumbles for the keyhole and presses against the door. Shoves once, twice; it gets stuck on particularly frosty days. 

“Let me,” Yuuta starts, and Inumaki shoves, tumbling into the narrow foyer with a noisy breath. What a waste of his voice, Inumaki thinks deliriously as warmth blooms into the tips of his frozen fingers, what a waste if he’ll just be letting that Limitless thing eat at his brain anyways. Eating - Inumaki imagines a voracious fire spreading through skin, and he trembles as he hooks his fingers into the collar of his shoe to tear it off.

The shoe bounces off the entryway bench. Yuuta inhales sharply behind him, a crisp and loud sound of impatience. 

“Let me,” he says again, meaning something else altogether. “It’s cold out here, I need to shut the door.” 

They amble further into the corridor and the heat is starting to get to him now, the way it lingers and cooks his skin under a thick coat. All of a sudden Inumaki is too hot, and Yuuta shuffles in trying to make space for himself but there is never going to be enough space, and Inumaki elbows him in the back by accident.

“Watch it,” Yuuta hisses. Inumaki turns, sees Yuuta’s hand tucked at his side. A wave of helpless anger rushes over him, dizzying. 

“Be careful,” Yuuta continues, carefully toeing off his boots. “It’s dark in here.” 

Neither of them move to switch on the light, but Inumaki doesn’t need it to see that Yuuta’s still breathing heavily, blood splattering the front of his shirt, his forehead scar glowing with RCT. There’s a faint hum in the air as he refreshes another cycle. The pit of his stomach is an endless loop of knots, tugging at him as Yuuta looks up and notices the staring. 

“Don’t,” he warns quietly.

“Don’t what?” Inumaki shoots back. 

“Don’t start,”

“I’m not.” 

“Don’t make this more difficult than it already is,” Yuuta grinds out, his hands fists at his sides. “You’re not the one making sacrifices here.”  

“Whatever,” Inumaki scowls under his breath, and it must not have been the right answer, the good answer, the patient answer Yuuta was looking for because he stalks up to him. One, two strides is enough to lean him up against the wall and Yuuta strikes his fist against it seething, “What the hell is wrong with you?” 

He kicks his shoes to the side, both their frustrations simmering to a boiling point. Takes Inumaki’s shirt in his fist, raising it to his chin and Inumaki goes with it, his back arching off the wall just slightly, his skin tingling a muddled mixture of anger and fear and something else he can’t quite-  

“I thought you’d be on my side,” Yuuta’s breath is ragged, bounce-light reflecting azure in his eyes. “I- I’m doing all this for us. How do you not get it , Inumaki, you’re a fucking sorcerer, so just- what the hell is wrong with you?”

“Me?” He barely registers what he does next, so spur of the moment that it appears just a blur to him: one moment grasping his duffel in his hands, the next flung across the room as its contents scatter and he cries madly , “You’re the one. Who’s going. Fucking insane!”

“It’s for the-”

“Greater good?” Inumaki howls back, a bawl, a laugh. He’s breathing heavily, shaking, unsure where to put his hands with Yuuta so close, so close their bodies have aligned, and Yuuta’s hand slides from his shoulder, over his waist like it can’t decide where else it wants to go. Inumaki raises a finger to his chest, jabbing with every shaking syllable, his throat hoarse with the noise, the sound of his words reverberating around them, knotted at the base of his throat as Yuuta holds him, so tight, so- “Tell yourself that, that you’re so, fucking selfless, go, kill, yourself then, like I haven’t told you I cared, like you don’t know how I feel about you!” 

Yuuta slams him against the wall again, more emotion than Inumaki’s ever felt in him, his whole body hot and shaking with it, the hand curled into the collar of his shirt gripping so tensely he feels it strain and thread in Yuuta’s fist. He’s shaking as he tries to find the words, so close that their mouths brush as he whispers, eyes closed, “Don’t say that to me don’t - Toge , don’t tell me about things I shouldn’t have.”

“Too late,” Inumaki snarls, harsh against his ear. “I’m right here.”

Yuuta pushes them flat up against the wall, bodies pressed into a searing line, and kisses him. His breath is rank with sweat, blindingly hot against Inumaki’s mouth, then his lips at the jut of Inumaki’s jaw and his teeth against Inumaki’s lower lip biting him, daring him to acquiesce. Inumaki’s mind is a similar miasma of white heat and hunger - his hands rake down Yuuta’s sides, gripping his waist in an immovable vice. He rocks into the motion without thinking and Yuuta moans breathily, each movement a punch to the gut as words tumble out of his mouth, still clinging to their threadbare argument- fuck, please, see I’m trying, see me, I’m trying-

Their bodies are asynchronous in movement, confusion and anger and lust all muddled up and devolving into a clumsy frot against Inumaki’s thigh. Delirium sets in at an unrelenting pace, just as damning as the obscene tent of his pants, trying to make sense of what he wants as opens his mouth to God, please just- please- as Yuuta chases it with I care, against his lips. 

Inumaki slides his hands down to the parting of their bodies to undo his belt and pull him out just as a hand undoes his fly. They’re sliding against each other both hard, something like fire igniting every wet kiss across his skin and every shaking breath that can’t seem to cool them down.

“You want this,” Inumaki breathes ragged, too caught up in the moment to phrase it like a question but he tries again he says, “ You want this?” 

“Yes,” Yuuta’s hand comes down to grip his waist, a sharp inhale as Inumaki wraps his fingers around the both of them. Yuuta sobs in his punishing grip: up, down, thrusting into his moving hand with the rabid intensity of a person who thinks they might die. 

“Fuck,” Yuuta groans, his head buried into the juncture of Inumaki’s neck. His curled fist leaves Inumaki’s waist, a hard and slow thud against the wall as pleasure mounts his back, the tail end of it gripped in hand. Inumaki pants, seeing stars in his peripheral as Yuuta whispers, “Toge fuck, please- please-!”

They both come apart with a jolt, Yuuta’s hands on either side of Inumaki’s shoulders, one final shudder following the sound of his fingers, like claws, tearing into the drywall. A second passes before Inumaki shoves him off, the shock of his sobriety hitting like a freight train in the silence. Yuuta bumps into the coat rack. It falls, a deafening clatter on the herringbone wood. 

They stare at each other for a moment, Yuuta’s chest heaving, his mouth glinting with a distinct wetness that makes Inumaki hard pressed to look away. His fly is still down, hip bone flush with color. It’s obscene.

In an instant he’s gone, the only memory of him there a drying stickiness on Inumaki’s hands and the odd taste of blood and salt in his mouth.

Inumaki’s back slides down the wall, still panting, shaking with the intensity of it all. He thuds a fist against the ground, right as the door to Yuuta’s room slams shut on the far end of the hallway. He stays there, thudding it, hearing that odd sound. Hardly knows himself for the rest of the night, as if a ghost had come into the corridor to clean, and take his rest for him.

Yuuta is gone in the morning, a nervous rhythm of footsteps across the floor behind closed doors. Inumaki listens to him leave as the day breaks across a trough in the city skyline and sheds warm light across his blanket covers. Within the hour it becomes a stuffy weight, and Inumaki wakes a second time to his own panicked breathing beneath the cotton sheet. 

His heart is a scrambled mess. Yuuta’s mouth replays itself over the back of his hand, skirting it, soft and slightly wet. His badly shaven stubble catches on Inumaki’s chin, a quick and painless prick. 

A bug skitters over his table, doing circles around his eraser bits. 

“You killed yourself,” Inumaki whispers, “With a piece of my hair. Stripped of your skin, skeleton bare.”

The bug shivers, its shell a gradual undulation of trembles as the curse energy whispers through the exoskeleton. Then it turns over, sitting like a weaver with a golden thread between its legs, to asphyxiate itself by noose. The eraser bits shift as the hair travels across the desk, as energy concentrates, as Inumaki watches, transfixed as the bug cuts away at its chassis gently.   

Yuuta’s mouth travels across the back of his hand. Like he was something precious. Like he was something to be adored.

Wings in four pieces, husk in three, legs- two taken. Like a bump of pus the bug chitters, a prick of liquid smattering the desk. Its limbs spasm once, twice. Dead. 

Like if Inumaki asked for it, he’d give him anything.

Inumaki shrieks. It’s an explosive sound in the dim light of early morning and so is the mad laughter that follows it: a curdling, awful sob echoed to the ceiling. Inumaki laughs and laughs, and laughs until he’s gasping for air and his heart is hammering home a pain that spreads beyond his lungs to the tips of his toes. Or maybe it’s a warmth, a hearth, a fire that burns endlessly throughout his body and leaves him shaking and bare, gulping for air like he’s been holding his breath for far too long. 

He curls in on himself, sobbing. Lets a final, long uninterrupted breath sweep him into a restless and haunting dream. Opens his eyes to Nobara looking up at him from below the wreckage of a powdery building, his feet planted firmly into the damaged concrete, into the carved bite of cursed power. 

Looks down, to the body below, beyond that an open abyss of rumbling, dormant curses. They shift like scales in the sun, like snakeskin as Yuuta’s body rolls over the waves. 

They respond to the call of his voice: to come back, come back, come home. 

*

As though nothing had changed between them, Yuuta rearranges and fills his schedule so tightly that he leaves far too early in the morning for Inumaki to register the door swing close, and arrives home far too late in the evening to be waited on in the living room. 

What would he say to Yuuta anyways? That The Pools were some fucked up symbolic representation of Inumaki’s raw and unfiltered emotions? That every demon sleeping in the shifting plates of the earth was moved by a single phrase, a single outcry of help? That every waking day spent waiting for Yuuta to resurface from the dead was a day equal to constantly dying, to have been bound in some way to the thousands of creatures crawling towards the light of life along with him? That perhaps, even, that it was Inumaki’s fault Yuuta hated himself like this, loved himself paradoxically, might not ever feel whole again. 

Fushiguro takes pity on him on the few nights that Inumaki cannot stand to see himself living in Yuuta’s home. They crash the old Gojo joint, and Tsumiki’s room is just as Fushiguro had left it, down to a plaid pink skirt hanging on the inside of the door, and a pair of white shoes drying on the windowsill.

“I don’t think it’s my place to do this,” Inumaki responds when the offer comes up to clean it up and move in.

“Don’t you like cleaning things?” is all Fushiguro has to say about that. 

It’s homey. There’s a clear distinction between the three roommates. Fushiguro hasn’t touched Gojo’s room either, but a shirt peeks out from the gap under the door, and there’s a faint whiff of candy coming from the tightly shut inside. His room is in the middle. A path on the floor marks someone’s coming and going, and things in the kitchen he won’t touch because they’re not his, never will be. 

“Fushiguro,” Inumaki says. They’re in his room because the couch smells like Gojo Satoru, and somehow the TV’s got his favourite channel on. 

“He’s not my father.” Fushiguro says, looking out the window. “He’s not my anything. He’s nobody’s anything.” He looks at Inumaki, head cocked, and there’s vulnerability to the posture when it trembles and Fushiguro sniffs, swiping at his nose. “He was a sorcerer. And sorcerers die alone.” 

“It doesn’t have to be this way.” Inumaki signs. Fushiguro nods, sipping at his glass of water. 

“Yuuta-senpai, he doesn’t… he didn’t grow up like us.” he says at last. “He doesn’t understand what that means. He doesn’t accept it. And that’s a good thing, it means, he’s got hope, even if it’s skewed right now. Like Yuuji. Those are the kinds of people that are going to change our world someday.” 

“That doesn’t mean we’re not part of the equation.” he puts the glass on the table, folding his arms. “But it also doesn’t mean we have to be. I’ve thought about it for a while. I think you should too.” 

The rest of the month rolls by like this: Inumaki wakes up to his alarm ringing off his nightstand, brushes his teeth as he puts on the kettle, watches Fushiguro stir coffee, toeing on his shoes. Greeting the crisp breeze as it hits him outdoors, locking up before the stairwell. He gets assigned around a few smaller fry on the outskirts of some of the Pool zones, and doesn’t have to see Yuuta to know what he’s doing in the meantime. Within the period of their falling out, his number of scheduled missions drastically reduced, The Pools dwindling in size to a mere three colonies of consistent curse activity. 

He meets Kilgore on occasion, an oddly pleasant surprise on his more drab mornings, and with Kilgore comes topics of grander things beyond the scope of Japan. There’s a fantastical element to the culture shock of the western world, and Kilgore indulges him generously without ever really asking why. Every question gets answered, like if are hamburgers bigger over there or does everyone say freedom all the time and most of them aren’t serious, some of them are. 

“Come over,” Kilgore says, ruffling his hair after a long day. They’re drenched in sweat, and Kilgore’s long stretch of torso is splattered in purple blood. He’s smiling but he’s tired, and when they’re cleanly dressed again they hunker down at a ramen stall and he says it again. “I’d like to show you around so you get to see these things for yourself. Have you been anywhere besides Japan?” 

No he hasn’t. No he won’t, or he doesn’t plan to since he doesn’t have much money, and he’s got to stay here because where else can he really go? He can’t just leave, he’s got the sigils, he’s got blood on his hands and curses calling his name. The more he comes up with the same thoughts, the more they sound like flightless excuses. 

“I left Japan when I was eight, and I thought something similar,” Kilgore says, nodding thoughtfully. “I was young and it was just me and my mom. But new things have to happen, for the old to wear away. Or else it’ll stick for too long and one day you’ll be wearing it like you wear your own skin, right? And that wouldn’t be fair for yourself, to keep yourself down there like that.”

Like Fushiguro’s lessons, and a once uttered, bolded table. Or a friend who was a friend until they weren’t, and every touch after that is new, is raw. Inumaki looks down at his bowl and realizes they’re at the yatai where the Pools first began, and that he wants to be somewhere else. 

“Don’t hang out with me if you’re just running away, kid.” Kilgore says after a while, but he smiles and it’s kind. “But I like your style. And I am serious. We’ll talk some other time, alright?”

“Why?” Inumaki says as Kilgore gets up to leave, their food already paid for. 

“‘Cause you gotta go home.” Kilgore says warmly, patting his shoulder, and he’s right. 

That night Inumaki waits for Yuuta in the living room, for no particular reason other than to follow the churning, twisting feeling in his gut that threatens to tear him open if he stays silent for much longer. There is fear in the wait, but there is estranged love in it too - every teenager’s folly, and Inumaki finds himself desperate to tell the truth. If he’ll be punished for it, at least both parties will know. 

It’s late summer now, and cicadas join him in a chorus well into the dark of night. Humid darkness seeps into the living room; he fans the hem of his T-shirt. There is no noise by the door, and still Inumaki keeps himself curled up on the couch willingly sipping at tea steeped for hours, watching a show he doesn’t know, dreading the moment the sun peeks through the valley as though it would mean Yuuta would not be coming home at all.

And, he thinks, eyes fluttering shut. And, Yuuta-

*

Goes for a run because he thinks he has to. He can’t stop thinking-

“-show you something cool,” Gojo pats his arm. His touch is fire, crackling under his skin. Yuuta palms himself standing over the kitchen sink, staring at his bile as he bites back a hapless groan, hearing that voice as his hand fists his trousers, hearing, “You’re gonna love-”

Toge’s hands on his shoulders, his eyes angrily, beautifully violet, kissing him then tearing him away- knocking him into the wall, “You’re fucking insane!” 

Yuuta flexes his fingers, practically shouts the command like his brain could talk to it. It doesn’t really, because that’d be stupid, but his arm responds naturally. 

So do his legs; not like there was anything wrong with them. He doesn’t realize until he moves through the turnstile that he’s at a train station: the lights flicker, briefly, and Yuuta wonders if it’s him that made them flicker. Extending a hand, he closes his eyes and takes a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. Exhales out while watching his fingers touch the surface of an old column. It’s grimy at the bottom. The baseboard is brown with age; a mascot peels at its poster edges, replacing an ancient ad not fully scraped off the wall. Yuuta’s fingers stop short of it - the smallest gap prevents him from fully touching what’s there, an atomically miniscule space that leaves the pads of his fingers clean as he turns to examine them. 

Love is power, love is power. The sentence drums a beat into his heart, pumping blood through his system, burning hot on his skin. His head feels buoyant, his skin clammy and cold. He stumbles through the train station. Six months to lose an arm - hardly a loss, and easily fixed with Shoko’s help. Losing an arm meant little to Yuuta at this point. 

Maybe he’ll only lose it again if he’s not careful. He can be careful - he’s been careful, been good. And he knows how it works now, all of it: Infinity, Blue, Red, Purple. 

No, not Purple. Not yet. He hasn’t tried, not since Sukuna’s battle. Would he dare try it without the Six Eyes? How much would Limitless take? How quickly would it burn him away? 

He refreshes his mind on instinct, catching himself mid-action as his skin glows with reverse cursed technique and his focus sharpens. Numbly, Yuuta brings his fingers to his temple; nothing, of course. 

He’s careful, oh so careful.

Toge looks at him, in shadow, in light. In the dark, his purple eyes darker than coals in the gloaming, his mouth bitten and red. Leant against the wall, heaving a breath that Yuuta stole from him. Porous, temporary, memory.

“This isn’t about you, Yuuta,” he’d say, so what is it about, then?

Love is power, and Yuuta is in love. He’s in love but he doesn’t know who, or how, or why. He doesn’t know when, he doesn’t know where. He knows he can feel it, like a well he’s put a bucket at the bottom of, that burned his hands as he pulled it up for water and then threw himself in. He knows he is in love, he knows he loves everything around him.

He knows he wants to kiss a boy and wear a ring, and take up his teacher’s mantle so that he can save this world. Or maybe he’ll kiss a ring- wear that mantle in his skin- take up a boy on his offer to move in with him. 

But he can’t be in love if he can’t use Limitless. He needs to wield it, wield it right . He needs it first, before everything else. 

At a loss for what to do, Yuuta comes to a halt; so he’d been running again. Where to, he doesn't know. Looking up the camphors surrounding him are gnarled and old, casting eerie shadows across the forest ground. He’s off the beaten path of what seems to be an abandoned hiking trail - follows the gravel road where it’s walkable, and floats up with pulses of red beneath his feet to propel him up the steep mountain. 

A distinct lack of cursed energy halts his movements, and despite the densely packed noise of the forest, an unsettling void asserts itself here and moves throughout the ambience. Yuuta does not have to search long before he comes face to face with the spear-tip of Maki’s cursed weapon, and her eyes narrow upon recognising his face. 

“Seriously,” she says, more genuine shock than anger. “What the hell are you doing in Kyoto?” 

Yuuta blinks, his cursed energy shifting around her, molding a space where she stands. Her shoulders tense as his CE presses against the vacuum of silence like an obstruction to be filled. He says stupidly, “I’m in Kyoto.”

“Yes, dumbass,” she lowers her spear, one hand gesturing to the wilderness around them. “To be fair to you, it’s hard to tell. You just walked straight into my mission. Not everybody can just do that.” 

“Your mission, ” Yuuta starts, backing down. Turning his head sharply to look behind him, he notices the thick, shimmering barrier of a common curtain cutting across the tree line. “I didn’t realise-” She cuts him off with a sharp laugh. 

“Well now that you’re here, you might as well put yourself to work,” she says, pointing ahead of them. Between bushels of wildberries and the jagged edges of shed bark, a well-camouflaged cursed spirit glides through the terrain like mist. “What d’you say you help me out?”

The spirit whines, throwing its head back. It splits with a blistering, crackling pop. A mirror image of itself ambles into the valley of two old trunks, and Yuuta’s instincts thrum, falling back on the vibrant crackle of power that sparks across his skin at the thought of the cursed spirit in his hands, rendering it ash-like, not dead but removed, or reduced, for what power could return dust to dust but the one he called his own-  

“God,” Maki says again, watching him. “You’re not just lost, are you?”

“I’m fucking insane, apparently,” he answers and her spear twists in her hands, a tight wrist flick. “What are you waiting for?”

“Nothing,” she sneers, and they move towards the mist. 

It was going to be overkill, with him and Maki. Yuuta doesn’t so much exorcise the curse as he does play with it, and Maki aligns her intent with his actions as he passes her bits and pieces of their sport to spar with. She acquiesces; just that, no enjoyment from his careful dissection, but she’d be good at it if she liked it- liked to go beyond it, to reach further than the human limit of power to the apex of knowledge and the culmination of humanhistoryand-to-thecr-eationof-aneww-orld-

“Fuck off with that already,” she says, jamming her spear into the heart of their play. The curse dissolves with a sigh, relieved from his gaze. “Seriously. It’s not funny.” 

“They deserve it,” Yuuta responds. 

“I know they damn well deserve it,” Maki says. She’s walking up to him, looking him dead in the eye. She’s not a cursed spirit. Her gaze doesn’t waver as she scrutinizes him and all at once he sees her, everything about her, every detail from the spotted pores on her brow to the chi circulating her nervous system, to the past and future of her movements. She raises a hand to slap him. Yuuta catches it in his grip and she bristles with unbridled fury, snatching her arm away. 

“I’m doing a good thing,” Yuuta insists. “I told you I wanted to do a good thing.” 

“Well,” She looks him up and down, skeptical. “This good thing isn’t you.”

“Nothing’s me anymore then, is it?” he snaps, flexing his fingers again as he clenches his fists. “Why can’t this be me! This is me! Maybe I want this to be me so why don’t you fuck off!”

“Fucking make me,” she snaps, taking a step back. The Split-Soul Katana materializes in her hands, gleaming bare as she raises it in front of her as she shouts, “You want to push me away okay, make me! DO IT, YUUTA!” 

He strikes her first with an angry thing, whether Blue or Red he doesn’t care to discern; her body moves in the careful steps of a rite as she deflects and counters him. A sound-shattering blow cleaves the trees of their capped peaks. A single strike of her blade against his raised arm is like a body of water crashing into him, all the force of a tidal wave. So she’s good, Yuuta thinks, fear rising in the pit of his stomach leaping up his throat, she’s good but he’s better, can be better- is better. Like so: one hand to the sky, making the atoms in his palm tremble and crackle into flame. He brings it down with one sweeping arc of a thrust that lights up the right side of her face, watches her eyes go wide as something primal halts every muscle in her body, flinching at the sight of it singeing the raised flash of her scars. 

The fear is gone in the blink of an eye as she leaps nimbly back. Her mouth sets into a snarl, not anger but betrayal. Something about that makes him falter, makes him remember Inumaki telling him he’s fucking insane! Gojo watching him in his own body. Panda raising a beanie to his head that’s three sizes too small.

“I don’t want to be powerful,” Inumaki said, but then what did he think this was all for, anyways? What was Yuuta without power? Who was he when he had nothing?

Maki’s spear skirts the edge of Infinity, and Yuuta brings Red to the ground and levels the forest into a clearing: one, two, three booms echo as the earth splits beneath their feet and the deafening, splintering groan of splitting bark roars in his ears as Yuuta shakes with the intensity of Red’s force, the strength of it, the need for it to be strong. His knees bend to the quake just as Maki reaches for him, past Infinity to grab him by the collar. She flings him across the ground- he grabs her ankle- they roll and grapple and somewhere between hand and foot Blue finds its way to his palm again. He whirls in her grip, beneath her fingers brandishing his hand in her face and lighting up her anger with the opalescent shimmer of Limitless just say it say it say Blue say Blue sAY BLUE-

“Blue!” he shouts and his hand sparks, her eyes wide with the shock of it- 

Crackling, sputtering, falling. 

His arm, at the elbow joint. He gasps for air, dread seizing in his chest as a numbness spreads across his chest, and she’s looking at him wildly and he sees it now- tears, smeared and muddied with loam. The world stops spinning all around them, earth shuddering as pockets of their fight shudder and collapse to soft and powdery dirt around them. The clash of noise begins to crisp in his ears, a burning whining noise in his ear rendering it all mute and only Maki’s voice, teetering on the edge of disbelief, makes its way to his head. 

“You’d really kill me,” she falters, her eyes wide, “Toge was right. He said you weren’t- you’d really- you’d kill me?”

“Fuck,” Yuuta pants, willing his arm to tense. It’s alright though, as it’s just an arm, two arms-

“You are going insane,” Her hands stay where they are, and his as well despite the thrashing of his legs, his chest, his head tossing and turning. “It’s actually making you go insane .” 

“Fuck!” he spits, frustratedly, “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

“Don’t you know he’s upset with you?” She yells hoarsely, on the edge of tearing the sound from her throat, “You don’t know how much he cares!” 

If Blue doesn’t work maybe Red, as it should, or Hollow Purple which he’s never tried wouldn’t dare but he is changing and so maybe it would but the

“Stop it,” her voice wobbles,

ground is soft and hard and she is a void above him empty, but he is wired a God and his love is Limitless and if Blue doesn’t work then the Red will or he catches her wrist and summons atoms with a single wrist-flick or

“Stop it,” His head thrashes, the edge of his teeth catching at her fingers as she snarls, “I said stop it, Yuuta!” 

becomes the machine that calculates the energy consumption of a second in Infinity the world at eye level is sharp and green within it thrives an ecosystem that feeds like Limitless will feed and is feeding it needs more so give it more so give it more so give i-

Maki slams her fist into his nose with a shout and white explodes behind his eyelids SLAM , Infinity is his shield as she says how dare you you’re hurting him how dare you dirt in the funnel of his ear SLAM into the bridge of his nose Infinity cracks as she screams you don’t see him you don’t see anything dirt in the duct of his eye in the gaps of his teeth SLAM into the splinter of his jaw Infinity shatters SLAM as she screams you only see the dead dirt everywhere like the

cage, SLAM the lonely coffin where he woke that April

SLAM steel surface of a morgue cabinet, sweat breaks across his skin just as icy

he blacks out 

and then

a woman dances on the tatami across from him. She’s barefoot and her callouses dig into the weathered straw. The chime of bells distracts him from her routine, and a chorus of cries undulate as heads swing from the shadows, reverberating around the room. 

When he blinks the world is spotty and his nose is crusted and bruised, his shoulders shifting under the taught fabric of a crusty shirt that smells of herbs and spices. The room is pitch black, paper sigils plastered to the walls. He looks down, hands feeling out a sharp pain in his abdomen. It stings but he presses into it because the pain keeps him awake and looking up again he finds his palms smeared with blood. Someone says-

“He’s bleeding,” in the pitch dark. Excited and frantic, like the scuttling chatter of bats they whisper, “It’s working.”

A woman dances on the tatami across from him, and her hair shimmers like freshly fallen snow despite how darkness disfigures her silhouette. He makes out the rise and fall of constant kowtows, the throat-singing growl of an ancient phrase he doesn’t understand, and the rising, churning sizzle of cursed energy filling his chest. He doubles over in pain as the cut in his abdomen sears, he cries out, pressing a hand to it and feeling blood stutter and jerk across his skin as if having disrupted an artery. 

He catches himself as he falls and his hands are broad, thick with veins. A gurgling pool beneath his swarming vision grows in size to mirror his murky reflection and his groan of pain comes out low and baritone and not at all his own. 

A woman dances on the tatami across from him, and she throws her head back with an ear-splitting scream. Her whole body shakes, the cursed energy around them vibrating as if on the verge of implosion. 

“His soul is your shrine my Lord,” she hums, “His soul a shrine for your husk my Lord, his soul is Yours as our devotion is Yours as our Love is Yours,” she hums and he doubles over again, gasping, flexing his fingers in this too-heavy body and the pool of blood tremors with the thud of every kowtow. In the liquid he sees himself blink, eyes of cyan.

He shouts, a hoarse and primal bray-

“Wake up,” Maki shouts, “Wake. Up. Yuuta!”

Yuuta wakes with a shiver and a gasp. They’re in the dirt, he’s in the dirt with her surrounded by the clearing of fallen trees. The cleanup crew bustles around them, giving them a wide berth. He catches a glimpse of - Akari, Akari Nitta - in the corner of his eye trying not to observe them.

“Maki?” He shudders in a small voice.

“Yeah,” she replies shakily, gripping him as if to never let him go. “It’s me.” 

He teleports back into his apartment, pulling her side-along and she yelps with surprise. The living room is deafening in its eerie silence, but Maki cusses life into it and Yuuta can just barely remember the way to the bathroom through pure muscle memory before he throws something up into the sink. The last bite of an egg tart he picked up before going through the train station. He’d forgotten he even ate. 

Spittle trails down his chin - just nose blood and nothing else but the crusted over wounds of old fights and his earlier scuffle with Maki. Just a transparent solution of a dry-heave clotting his throat and the dizzying throe of nausea leaving every surface unbearably ice-hot. His mind goes white as something glimmers in his peripheral, clinking softly against the porcelain bowl of the sink- Gojo’s necklace.

Gojo’s necklace, a Gojo’s necklace. Maybe it was all the same, or maybe it was neither.

He tries to tear it off with a keening cry, but his feeble hand burns with it nestled in the lines of his flesh instead. His head throbs once, twice. Maki might have come up behind him though he’d hardly been able to make sense of much beyond his immediate line of sight, speckles of black mould rimming the waterline and a single blonde hair halfway down the drain. 

“Yuuta,” Maki says - so she is there, there beside him - one hand on his neck. The other comes up to his back, rubbing deep circles into it. He doubles over, his back one brittle bone. Her voice slows, softens to a rough rasp.

“Fucking hell,” she whispers. “You there?”

“Yeah,” Yuuta says, and it must sound real enough for her to believe him. He feels real, at least - the bowl under his fingernails is real and the sound of her voice falling short of sound in their narrow bathroom is real; the quietness of the living room and the morning chill of the marble floor is real. “Yeah,” Yuuta says again, to nobody really. “I’m real.” 

“I’m calling Toge,” she says, stepping away. “And then we’ll go see Shoko together and figure something out, alright? Stay there.” 

She won’t, of course, and Yuuta knows this because Maki takes a step back but Sakura Gojo is taking a step forward, and when Yuuta blinks he sees her snow white hair and her slate grey eyes watching him. He blinks again and Maki has her back turned, one phone against her ear, feet tapping the floor impatiently as the line rings on speaker. 

“Pick up,” she mutters impatiently under her breath.

“I thought you wanted this,” Sakura Gojo says. “I thought we understood each other.” She’s looking at him again, and when he blinks he’s in the pitch-black-dark, torchlight at his ankle burning so hot his sweat smells like soot and there’s sand in the creases of his skin. His stomach stings in pain as he tries to sit up, but finds his hands restrained and a metal collar presses against his neck, an ancient thing that scrapes the underside of his jaw. 

“Please,” he says.

“You were moving too much,” Sakura Gojo answers, in lieu of a proper explanation. Her gestures mean little in the dim light and his poor vision. “It’s all falling out of the wound. We need the body whole.” 

“Please,” he shakes his head, very scared.

“It’ll only be a minute.” Maki soothes. Her back is turned to him. He cannot see her face, and the thought terrifies. She moves away to the kitchenette. Yuuta takes a step forward, so as to keep the dark colours of her jacket in sight. The wooden floor stings, as if embedded with needles. He hovers at the opening of the bathroom door as noise begins to liven up the kitchen in clangs and thuds. 

“How about some water?” she asks. “You must be thirsty.”

“I’m sorry,” she shakes her head, one hand caressing the bare side of Gojo’s body. 

“We need our God.”

“No,” Yuuta braces for the wooden floor, takes one step, two steps, and then Maki is catching him in her strong grip, her eyes alight as she observes him. “No I won’t,” 

“Yuuta,” 

“Something’s happening to me,” Yuuta shakes his head. It takes him a moment more to realize he’s shaking furiously, trembling all over like he’s been caught in a spell of freezing cold. “Something’s happening to me , Maki, don’t bring Toge here you can’t,” 

“Okay, I’m with you- shhh, I’ll call him,” she says, grabbing him and saying, “I’m right here.” Her hand is numbingly cold and he jerks back, stumbling and hitting the wall. His vision sparks, dark and light and dark again. Sakura Gojo’s eyes glimmer in the gloaming. He reaches for his abdomen, to where the cut of Sukuna’s cleave slashed his torso in half. 

“No- something’s taking me, I’ll hurt you both, I’ll-” he gulps. The hem of her shirt, in his hands, is f̴̡̛̙̪ͭͮͫ̆ͧͯirm and soft and itchy all at once. He looks up and her e̵̸̮͕̮̱͍̻ͨͫ̏ͨ͐͂͆̑ͥ̿́̅̋ͣ̓͊̕̚͟͝yes flash slate grey. He yells, tripping over something underf̴̡̛̙̪ͭͮͫ̆ͧͯoot - blood or a book or tatami the TV console and then crashing into the sink and knocking over his- 

“Don’t yo̵̗͐͛͢u nee̵̸̮͕̮̱͍̻ͨͫ̏ͨ͐͂͆̑ͥ̿́̅̋ͣ̓͊̕̚͟͝d him too?” Sakura Gojo asks, her eyes bo̵̗͐͛͢ring into his skull.

“Something’s ta̷̡̰̺͍̜̥̹̥̼͔̦̪͙̺͛̽ͪͯ̉͑́ͥͬ̅̿̕͘̕ͅking me, Maki!” he screa₥s a̷̡̰̺͍̜̥̹̥̼͔̦̪͙̺͛̽ͪͯ̉͑́ͥͬ̅̿̕͘̕ͅt her, ǵ̸̢̛͓͎́ͫrabbing her and sha̷̡̰̺͍̜̥̹̥̼͔̦̪͙̺͛̽ͪͯ̉͑́ͥͬ̅̿̕͘̕ͅking her like a mad̨̪̣̥̠̲̓̈́͆̑́̒̈́ͮ̔͆ͫ̒͘͢ man. “SomẼ̡̨̡̛̫̪͍̲̗͇̘̺̯͉̱̟̋̆͊͡thing’s taking ₥e SOMETHING’S Ṱ̪̤͖̯̪̤̪̦̬͔̃̋͒̍̐̀̕͢͡Â̵̞̳̟͍̙̹̮̝͖̤̊ͨ̐ͤ͆̅ͥ̌͛̃̓ͭ̽ͥ͐̃̈ͦ̀̿̎̽̐̽̀̚̕͜K̦͔͉̪̣͉̭͓̻̏ͨ̏ͮͮ̅̈́̓͟ING M𝐄⃥⃒̸! S̛̛͇͉̱̭̮̈ͪ̊͑OMET_̸̸̛̘͙͔̱̭͓̲͉͚̺̓̓̇͂ͨͫ̽̈̽͌͊͗ͪͫ͘͟͢͜͢͝ͅͅH͈ͩI̡̭̱͍̠͍͕͈̱̝̜͙̼̲̙͖̠̿̾ͤ̓̓̊̏͗̔̾ͥ̐̈̒̽̂ͥ̏͟͢͢͟͝͡͡N̡̹͉͓̪͓̅́͆̀͌ͫ̓̂̈G̦͚͓̎̓ͮͭ'S TA

₭ł₦₲ ₥E! SOM₮Ⱨł

N̷͉͕͓̟̠̟͐̇́̀̂̔ͅ G̶̛̺͊̀̽’̷̣̻́͊̕ S̵͚͚̤̈́̈́̀͋ ̷͙̲̪͚̦̮̐͂̓T̵͎̤̹͕͠ Ă̵̡̱̪̲̰̱̓̇ K̴̟͈̳̤͑͐̔̍̅̈́̿͜͜ Ȋ̵͈͉̖͚͚̌͐̐͆͛̈́͠ Ņ̷̱͎̳̗͙͈͛ -̴̡̱̼͂̊̂͌̃ G̵̨̟̺̍̓͑̈́ ̷̗̣̣͉̎̉͑̈́̊͌̔ͅ M̸̨̯̪͓̞̲̫̈́̕ Ȩ̶̥͔̠͕̙̬͗͗̈́͗́͌͝

T̵͎̤̹͕͠ Ă̵̡̱̪̲̰̱̓̇ K̴̟͈̳̤͑͐̔̍̅̈́̿͜͜ Ȋ̵͈͉̖͚͚̌͐̐͆͛̈́͠ Ņ̷̱͎̳̗͙͈͛ -̴̡̱̼͂̊̂͌̃ G̵̨̟̺̍̓͑̈́ ̷̗̣̣͉̎̉͑̈́̊͌̔ͅ M̸̨̯̪͓̞̲̫̈́̕ Ȩ̶̥͔̠͕̙̬͗͗̈́͗́͌͝

Ņ̷̱͎̳̗͙͈͛ -̴̡̱̼͂̊̂͌̃ G̵̨̟̺̍̓͑̈́ ̷̗̣̣͉̎̉͑̈́̊͌̔ͅ M̸̨̯̪͓̞̲̫̈́̕ Ȩ̶̥͔̠͕̙̬͗͗̈́͗́͌͝

M̸̨̯̪͓̞̲̫̈́̕ Ȩ̶̥͔̠͕̙̬͗͗̈́͗́͌͝

*

Inumaki’s never run this fast, never willed himself to fly like he does now like the floor is made of ice and the gaping mirror of the sea beneath him. He sees Maki in a blur of noise and color, just a puddle on the floor and a mop of black curtain; then the ground proper, slippery with water and glass, apartment windows shattered and the whole building shuddering like it were an animal jerking clumsily in death’s maw.

“Yuuta?” Inumaki calls. He finds him slumped on the floor, his hand a red shock of blood against the pastel hues of the house. Yuuta is slippery and sweaty, a rubbery thing that jerks alight as if shocked. 

“No, no, no,” he sobs. He pushes him. Inumaki is flung back by the force of a violent gale, his body slamming into the kitchen island with a crack. Pain explodes across his back a vicious firecracker. He sees Yuuta crawl for the bedroom, a maroon stain smeared along the wallpaper daisies. It shuts with a click, a lock. Yuuta cries faintly inside, a child dragged into his nightmares. 

“Yuuta,” Inumaki groans, hobbling to his feet. 

Despite the walls that divide them the sound of his voice is startlingly clear. “Get away from me ,” Yuuta screams, hoarse and barely coherent. “Don’t fucking touch me, don’t you dare , I’ll fucking kill you, don’t touch me, don’t FUCKING TOUCH ME DON’T TOUCH ME!”

Inumaki braces his weight against the door, slamming against it desperately. His feet feel numb against the wood-grain, his lungs bursting with pain. His shoulder aches as it bears the brunt of the wood but it won’t budge, he’s built wiry after all, he doesn’t have the strength-

“ Go away,” Yuuta cries. Inumaki takes a step back, breathing shaky and uneven, his vision dark and murky red as he runs. Slams into it. The door jolts, the lock jiggling, the slightest peel of wood. He slams into it again. Again. The door groans. Again.

“Why’d you wake me up,” Yuuta whispered, shaken white as he clasped and unclasped Inumaki’s arm, “Why’d you bother?” 

The lock smashes through the wood, bursting into the air, the door flying open flimsy as cardstock and Inumaki staggers into the room face to face with Yuuta’s wild and unfocused stare. He’s breathing heavily, gripping his katana so tightly in his hand that his skin’s begun to flake from his palms; there’s a slick shine of sweat across his forehead and feathers floating in the air.

“Where are you?” Inumaki asks. His heart is a scribble and a line. Yuuta’s katana falls limply from his hands, which crowd his face in a forest of shaky white fingers. 

“In the dark, In the,” Yuuta gulps, sobbing, “In the dark, I can’t see I don’t know where I am I’m in the body, something’s trying to take me she’s trying to take me- ”

“Come back,” Inumaki says. Two simple words - so simple they meant everything. His cursed energy shifts, like tension in the room or a spark, the strike of a match. Yuuta’s eyes widen, his body seizing as something within it reacts to the power. He throws his head back, his spine arching as it cracks against the headboard, his mouth agape as it erupts with blinding white light. The necklace shivers, glowing from within as fractures split across the silver and beams erupt from the cracks. 

“Come back!” Inumaki shouts, staggering as the force of the light knocks him back. Clothes fly, scattered into the walls. The bedroom shakes as the necklace splinters, and Inumaki yells, “Come back, Yuuta !”

It explodes with a shrill, whining scream that erupts in Inumaki’s ears, and Yuuta slumps against the wall with a hapless cry. Pink tinges his face, returning color to his cheeks as his breaths begin to slow. Inumaki limps forwards, crawling across the mattress. He snags his foot on a bedsheet matted in dried blood, before collapsing beside Yuuta with a heaving breath. For a moment they lay there in the chaos, in a vacuum of silence that’s deafening.

“I’m sorry, I thought I knew,” Yuuta babbles, his face soaked in tears, the sound of his words eclipsed by the pain in them. “What I was doing I thought it would make everything right I thought-” 

Inumaki reaches for him, any part of him, settles for stroking his bent knee. Yuuta’s hand closes over his fingers and shakes him tightly. “It was all because I couldn’t let him go,” he sobs, “Because I- ”

“I’m sorry,” Inumaki closes his eyes.

“Because I love him,” Yuuta gasps haltingly. “I loved him.” 

In their nest of bloody blankets where light reaches them just, their ankles become gently awash with hallowed rust and gold. Inumaki’s lungs burn, skin torn from the flesh of his hands, the weight of his body sinking deep into the bed as he watches the setting sun. He lets Yuuta bow into the crook of his knee, every shake and tremble vibrating across their skin; lets him cry like his heart is slowly breaking.  

*

He wakes up in a bed that isn’t his; to a sunrise that’s too early, his body trying to acclimate to the chill of the thirteenth hour. The stench of iron hits the back of his throat dry and sandpapery as he gets up. His phone buzzes. According to the number of calls he’s been getting, it’s been buzzing for the past two hours. 

“We’re okay,” he says. Doesn’t bother asking who’s on the other side. By the time the second-years break into the apartment, he’s asleep again.

Inumaki’s father reached down to kiss his temple, to tell him about love, but with his heart he meant to kill them both and the heart spoke first. So Inumaki said, “ I love you more ,” and it was true that his heart spoke louder: not in words but in the whisper of a thought that asked only for the brookside willow tree and summer days he couldn’t count on all ten fingers and toes. 

The tree remained, despite the burning of the village and Inumaki under it. Just as his words, as his love, had promised.

Chapter Text

He was running from the vow that eclipsed Shibuya. He saw it surface through the ground like a wave of water from beneath the concrete, overlapping runners like him who weren’t fast enough to avoid getting swallowed up in the ink of Malevolent Shrine. 

Sukuna caught him later, like an afterthought. Maybe he was bored. Maybe he was waiting, Inumaki didn’t know - didn’t care to learn what Sukuna had in store for sorcerers like him that weren’t supposed to be worth his time. At the very least, Inumaki thought, he’d serve as a good distraction from the key players of their strategy. Even if it meant being ground into a fine dust. Sliced and cleaved, marinating in the smoke and ruins of the city.  

“Inumaki,” Sukuna said instead. It shocked him then to hear the curse speak like they were well acquainted. “That’s what you are. I was hoping you’d speak, but it seems your fangs are just an empty threat.”

He had the space to move, but his feet stayed where they were rooted to the ground. There was a sharp piece of glass there, beside him from a window that had exploded under the pressure of a domain expansion, but he could not pick it up. Of course, there was his ever-accessible voice, too; nothing impeding it but his tongue, which was a weight in his mouth so heavy it tipped his body forward. 

The backlash would kill him. Inumaki just didn’t know how; there was fear in that unknown, which he tried to disregard the way he did with any threat greater than he could take on. 

“An Inumaki is at his weakest when he has no desire.” Sukuna tilted his head. “You don’t know who you are. You don’t know what you could be. You don’t choose to be anything other than this,” he gestured broadly. “Victim to morality. A mute. A toy.”

“Okaka,” Inumaki finally said, empty of meaning. The fear had won out.

“What a pity,” Sukuna responded, extending a hand from his rising throne. A bubble darker than night clipped through the ground, swallowing them whole. “What an unfulfilling life.” 

After that they’d found him - Arata first, holding him down as he screamed and thrashed, sparks along his skin by Nitta’s hand keeping the blood caged in his wound. Momo gave him the tail end of her broom as she whisked them towards the makeshift clinic on the side of the road, under the scaffolding of a building that soon would never see the light of day again. Shoko was there, her brow tense with concentration as Windows and wounded staffers lay around her in a disorganized pile, suspended in a slow-thawing state of still death by Nitta’s hand. Nothing gave the doctor away to fear or unsurety - her hands were controlled and her cursed energy smelled distinctly of chlorine. It wove through the crowd like a thread stitching wounds, and her skin paled as theirs grew dark and fuller, blood returning to their cheeks. It seemed then so awkward - embarrassing even, that Inumaki lay on the mat sweating bullets as he continued to scream in raw agony no matter what Shoko tried; he continued to feel the burning, odd feeling of flexing muscles that were no longer there - an imbalance testing his every jolting movement, searing pain embedded into his bones. Perhaps worst of all was not the pain but knowing that despite bearing it, like everybody else, his arm would be unsalvageable. 

Yuuta had come to see him sometime in the night. He smelled like an airport, like the sweat of visitors and luggage and compressed air. He didn’t cry, which was something he used to do and it struck Inumaki that his eyes were still doe-like but constrained in their compassion. Tightened, like the fancy new belt cinching his waist; like the red stitches across his jacket sleeve; like the way he held Inumaki’s shoulder, as if he could hold nothing else but the one part of him that was gone.

He spoke little when they met, which was good; Inumaki could hardly sign now let alone speak. Yuuta’s RCT dulled around the wound, which gaped under the fluorescent blue of his palm. It must have been shockingly disappointing; Yuuta inhaled sharply as he concentrated. A faint gust picked up around them, playing with the loose strings of Inumaki’s hospital gown. 

“I can revive the dead,” he said with a helpless smile, “Kill a special grade-sorcerer. Fool the Jujutsu Higher Ups with a single bluff. But when it comes to helping a friend I’m out of luck, huh?” 

“Takana,” Inumaki responded. 

“Yeah?” Yuuta said. He rounded the bend of the operating table, coming to a halt at the surgical lamp. He switched it on, a flood of blue fluorescence like a spotlight grazing his body. It turned the garish black of dried blood an unsightly brown. They both stared at his stump for a while and with both gazes leveled on the thing it seemed oddly obscene. Perhaps the pain had fried Inumaki’s brain; he already felt a distinct detachment from it, like it was no longer his.

“Shoko told me your arm was mine to take. To consume.” Yuuta said. “She told me that you offered it to me freely. Is that true?” 

Inumaki nodded, and Yuuta’s jaw clenched.

“How could she say that,” he rasped, on the cusp of a cry. The first trembles of anger rattled the table as he slammed down on it with his fist. “How could she say so like it didn’t matter, like you’re not one of my friends.”  

It’s just an arm, Inumaki wanted to offer, but knew there was more to it than that, and maybe others didn’t - like Gojo, who might not have cared for sentimental humanity anymore, so far removed from the prospect of pain. This was the practical choice, after all. The choice of the strong. 

“I don’t want it,” Yuuta whispered. He was crouching now, kneeling at the base of the table with his forehead pressed against the edge of steel at the base of Inumaki’s amputated limb. For a second, as he ran a hand through his hair, he looked like the distraught first-year kid Inumaki met in a dingy little classroom. “I don’t want it,” he said again, like a prayer. “I can’t just take it, Toge. I can’t make this choice.” 

“Sujiko?” Inumaki asked. Yuuta looked up. 

“You mean so much to me,” he said. There were tears in his eyes, trickling down his face in rivers. In an odd and calming way, the thought of Yuuta crying endeared Inumaki. Took him back to first year where it was just them and cursed fish, and Yuuta gazing out towards the open garden beyond their classroom. “I don’t even know you, and you mean so much to me already. How can I make a choice like this for another human being? How can I make a choice like this as a friend?”

“Would I,” he halted, taking in a harsh breath that sounded like his last. “Would I still be human?” 

It was an odd question to Inumaki, who had for most of his time on earth, lived half a life. Some of it was glory; most of it was pain. He could hardly remember his past, unlike the others, who seemed to wade through it on the daily. Could only remember a doorstep exchange, his mouth hot with fresh blood, and then onigiri fillings for five years of limited human connection. It hadn’t hit him, hadn’t set in until it did, and Inumaki watched Yuuta cry over his limb, and heard Sukuna mock the blank void of memory that was his childhood, and maybe- 

Maybe it was time for it to change.  

“What a pity,” Sukuna responded, extending a hand from his rising throne. A bubble darker than night clipped through the ground, swallowing them whole. “What an unfulfilling life.” 

“Take it, Yuuta.” Inumaki replied. “That’s what being human means.” 

*

Maybe it’s for the better that they don’t talk right now - per Shoko’s diagnosis, while Yuuta rests in the medical ward. He’s asleep longer than the rest of them for reasons that Maki’s convinced are due to the summoning. She says most of this in partial hysteria as Shoko realigns her dislocated shoulder, amidst struggling breaths she tries to take between cracked ribs. 

“-get that shit out of him,” She pants, her hand a fist that shatters the first glass of water Inumaki pours for her. “We’re gonna, I’m gonna get that shit out of him, and I’m going to kill that fucking bitch.”

Yuuta sleeps through Wednesday. He’s pale and his movements are unnatural - not the rise and fall of breathing but short, responsive jerks as if reacting to a rubber hammer to the knee. Despite all that Inumaki tries to get him to wake up his responses are little to none; in return, Inumaki’s throat doesn’t ache, doesn’t bleed, doesn’t even itch.

The board comes by the next day. Kusakabe’s shadow is fleetingly busy as it flickers briefly across the entrance to the room, while Mei Mei’s clicking heels come to a slow stop at the front of Shoko’s office. A fresh but chipped manicure clings to her small coin purse and bleeding axe, a thin smile ghosting her porcelain features. 

“Fuck off,” Maki says, but there’s no bite to the bark. Mei Mei ignores her, looking straight at their doctor. 

“A powerful source of energy was detected by some intel a few days ago and interrogated by Kusakabe. The curse-user is dead,” her axe thuds to the ground, blood splatter dried across the blade. “But he was just the catalyst, and the reaction’s already happened.” 

“A connection cannot exist without two souls.” she continues, as if rehearsed from memory. “And a connection between two souls can only be severed through physical removal of its host.” 

Shoko’s fingers curl over Maki’s bed frame. She says, hoarse and quiet, “That can’t be possible, Mei.”

“I’m not here to debate possibilities, Ieri.” Mei Mei returns icily. “I’m just here to say my piece.” 

And when she leaves Maki catches Shoko mid-fall, like her legs have turned to jelly and her body to mush. Shoko doesn’t cry, but she doesn’t slip her hand into her coat for a smoke either: simply stares out the window with a look in her eye like every star in the sky has died.

“Oh, Satoru.” she whispers, clutching Maki’s shoulder. It’s the only thing she says for the rest of the day. 

Panda tells Inumaki not to think about it much yet, though perhaps only because that means Inumaki will spend more time with him instead, who’s right on the cusp of completing his big knitting project. Maybe he doesn’t understand how suffocating it feels right now, pretending Yuuta is simply an iPhone that won’t restart, or Inumaki’s heart isn’t falling at terminal velocity just waiting, on something unknown and incapable of fixing. But that isn't true, from what Inumaki knows about his best friend; maybe he does understand, and that's precisely why they take a break. 

Maybe Inumaki needs this period of idle nothing after so much everything. Panda takes him by the hand Thursday afternoon and shows off his doll that can sit and stand and try to walk, one leg longer than the other with a spark of cursed energy strong enough to make the stitches of its little face smile. 

“It doesn’t look very much like… him ,” is what Inumaki signs the first time he sees it.

“The doll’s not supposed to look like anyone,” Panda says, and Inumaki leaves it at that. 

They watch as the Yaga lookalike gets to his feet, conscious of its surroundings though not fully sentient. Its eyes, which are soft little black stitches of yarn, observe as mayflies hover at the brookside, making little undulations in the water. The buzzing creek is alive with little noises, a microcosm of the training across from it. It takes one step, then another, a lazy spinning movement. After a while they realise the cursed corpse is going in circles.

“Does he need help? ” Inumaki signs. “He doesn’t seem like he knows where he’s going.” 

“He’ll figure it out,” Panda says, calling it back. Yarn Yaga obediently props its knee onto Panda’s lap as the latter expertly adds a few centimeters to the bottom of Yaga’s shoe. “Just finished him up yesterday, you know? So young.”

The Yarn Yaga gets up again, hesitantly gaging the distance under its two new feet. It steps forwards, a few loose strings pulling under a taut motion. It takes another step before falling again and Inumaki can’t help but blurt in sign, “ I think it was me.” 

His hands barely make out the words. He feels his eyes well up with tears, the residual fear of The Pools as a great unknown now clear as day. “ The Pools. It was me, I started it I feel like,- I think I did it.” 

He buries his face in his hands, burning like a warm stovetop, a chill down his spine, dread gripping the struggling tempo of his heartbeat. Despite not seeing he still flinches, feeling Panda’s little body shift beside him. Neither move any more than that. Panda hums a little bit, the sound of his needle threading string, then the sound of a small blast behind them as one of the first-years knocks out another. 

“All my fault,” he croaks. His heart is racing, hurtling towards something unknown as he tries to explain what he can. Not a confession to be taken lightly, after all. “All the work,” he starts and halts when he’s done with it all, exiting his mouth in a rush of warm air. Buries his head in his hands, watching the micromovement of Panda’s black furs changing direction with the wind. “All this time.”

As he peeks through his fingers, Yarn Yaga looks back at him. It mirrors the motion, hands to its face, before standing and falling again. With both paws outstretched, Panda beckons the Yarn towards him and as it tumbles he catches it tightly, though not out of fear. He turns, black eyes glittering like stars under the dappled morning light. There’s nothing cross about his expression, despite how much Inumaki feels he deserves to be scolded.

He says, “I’ve learned that if you love someone, you’ll want to do anything to see them again. What kind of sorcerer would you be if you didn’t take that chance?”

“A selfless one,” Inumaki whispers.

“See now,” Panda nods, “Then you wouldn’t be a sorcerer at all, would you?” 

They lean against each other, Inumaki’s body a breath away from exhaustion as he wipes tears from his eyes. Panda is warm and soft beside him and the sounds of the creek lull his shaking body to a slow rocking, to a gentle sway. A richness of swallows chirp noisily overhead on the willow branch above; they coo an argumentative melody before taking flight across the mirror of water. Their wings cross it briefly as if painted by ripples; then gone, to mayflies that skim the surface of a clear blue sky.

“If this is what love is,” Panda says, clutching him, clutching his love, cradling the yarn between his paws. A prayer murmured into evening’s auburn. “Let me be filled by love. Let the curse of love run rampant through my veins.” 

If this is it, Inumaki thinks. If this is what it is.

*

Yuuta sleeps through Friday. He’ll get his nutrients through the IV while Shoko stretches his leg muscles, shines a flashlight in his eye, and tries to subside the tremors in her breathing when Yuuta jerks a little to a hammer to the knee. She’s ever so patient with him, Inumaki notices. He jerks a little again when Inumaki stops by a second time, and it takes an insurmountable load of effort to not throw his bag at a wall and scream at him, to wake up or come back or whatever the hell it was that used to work. 

“Affection is an odd thing in our cursed world.” she says as they take a seat, looking at Yuuta’s rested figure; just like the first time he’d been there, he hardly makes a dent in the mattress. “It’s not quantifiable or recognizable in cursed energy, despite how much it’s been harnessed by others to achieve great things. Perhaps because we never thought to study it.”

“I’m not surprised that it evolved him,” she says, “For better and for worse.”  

“The Pools,” Inumaki starts, finds his hands flying rapidly across his chest to sign, but Shoko puts her hand up to silence him.

“You’re not a hero.” she replies, folding her arms. “You’re a sorcerer, Inumaki. You were doing your job.”

Even now, they regenerate. Dwindling, but there. A reminder of the things he’s caused. A reminder of his voice ever deadly, eternally so.  

“I made,” he signs, “Mistake- a mistake that could have cost lives, it was all just a- just a stupid, stupid, accident.” 

“If it were the doings of higher powers, I'd be worried about being forced under the safety net of tradition.” Shoko shakes her head, looking up at him. “But if this was just you, Inumaki, then this is sorcery at its most basic form. No complex evil, no Heian curse. We truly can reshape society without their puppetry.”

“But how-” His gaze waters, confusion and guilt seeping through his skin. “How can you forgive me?”  

“You’re just a kid, Inumaki.” She says. Takes a step to him, her hand on his shoulder, ruffling his hair as gently as the wind’s caress. She smiles a little, reminiscent of something far, far before his time. “Why would I fault you for falling in love?”

His third meeting at Jujutsu Headquarters is not nearly as stifling as his previous encounters. For one, a portion of the board is absent, the other a frantic reassembly trying to salvage what’s left of the Big Families. Noritoshi Kamo sits opposite his elders, in full agreement of completely abolishing the Old Clan rules, and Inumaki steps into the room just in time to hear: “To be rid of the Three Big Families as a ruling authority is to practically be rid of your own title, Noritoshi!” 

“Then I’ll be rid of it,” Noritoshi snaps, “As Jujutsu Society would be better without the heel of tradition kicking us facedown into the dirt, blindly digging down and not forward!” 

“Ah, the canary’s come.” Mei Mei says, as Inumaki makes his presence known. “Knowing what we know now of the Gojo clan and their suspected conspirators, we’re more or less in agreement that they should be punished. The issue is not whether they will face judgement; it’s whether we are in a position to do so.” 

“Are you not?” Inumaki says, confused.

“As the current leading authorities of Jujutsu Society, we cannot act on mere whim.” she replies, shaking her head. “We sought out to maintain order, not chaos, and it would go against the society we’re trying to build if we act so brashly against clans like the Gojos who have supported the Higher Ups for so long.”

“Brashly?” Inumaki rises from his seat, jostling the dining table. Tableware clatters noisily, the only sound in the room as the rest of the board sits stunned to silence. Noritoshi Kamo clenches his jaw, bowing his head. “They sound like cultists! They lied about Gojo Satoru!” 

It’s as much as he’s ever been able to say without pause; the words themselves leap from his throat and the backlash this time is punishing, affecting a swell of cursed energy that batters the room like a miniature vortex. 

“Then where is his body, Inumaki?” Mei Mei shoots back, her eyes stone cold, braid undone by cursed wind. “Where’s your proof, your concrete evidence? The Gojo clan are absent today - would you like to ask them? Tomorrow, maybe? Cordially, with a cup of tea? With your voice,” she sneers, “which you so gratefully offered to the hellscape below us dredged up into the Pools?” 

The accusation pierces like shrapnel to the heart. Inumaki’s mouth twists into a snarl and he feels his cursed energy grow and clot around them. Mei Mei’s seat creaks against the weight of her resting back, and though her movements are languid her gaze tests him.  

“Come on, kid,” Kusakabe whispers sharply, catching his wrist. Inumaki only realizes it’s raised above his waist when he turns and meets Kusakabe’s warning stare. “Remember where you are.”

So he storms out of the room instead to preserve what’s left of his dignity, anger rising to a boiling point that reddens the tips of his ears in humiliation. Kusakabe catches him right outside, where the harsh morning light makes coffee-stains of their shadows, murky and dark.

“She’s riling you up for a reason,” he calls after him, just slightly out of breath as Inumaki whirls around, pulling down his gaiter. The lurching threat of Inumaki’s cursed speech has him backing away slightly and he puts his hands up in panicked defense. “Woah! Not here to rub it in, okay?”

“Then what do you want? ”

“Just passing something along.” Kusakabe grips Inumaki’s hand into a firm handshake, slides a piece of paper down the loose opening of his sleeve where Inumaki tenses. It’s an address. Inumaki sees coordinates and neatly scrawled instructions below it just before the paper is concealed by his cuff. 

Himekami-san, Morioka,
Iwate Prefecture
39.853330, 141.336179
[...]

“I asked a favor of an old friend,” Kusakabe continues under his breath, his expression going soft. “Maybe one day you’ll meet him. When we right this cursed world. Or make it just a little less shitty than it is right now.” 

“Kusakabe,” Inumaki looks up, the flush in his cheeks settling. “What is… why?”

He’s not unsure of himself, Inumaki can tell. Clearly just nervous as he clears his throat to say, “I once asked you to consider a path aside from sorcery. At the time I did it because I saw that you were hurting. And even though you look alright,” he taps Inumaki’s neck lightly, and his chest, then his heart. “I think you still are. In here. Maybe I wasn’t so wrong after all.”

Inumaki throat is a coil of sandpaper waiting to grate across his flesh. His father watches him from far up in the skies above, waiting to see it happen. 

“I’m not strong,” Inumaki whispers, clutching Kusakabe’s sleeve. All of a sudden he feels like a child, given a choice to make that they don’t fully comprehend. Or maybe it’s not that Inumaki doesn’t understand what he’s about to do: maybe he fully, wholeheartedly does even if, “I'm not- Yuuji, or Maki, or- or Yuuta. I don’t know if this is even possible. ” 

“You’re not strong?” Kusakabe muses knowingly, a crooked smile aligned to his ears. “Kid,” He says, pulling Inumaki into a loose embrace, exhaling into the crisp and cold morning air. “Strength is not defined merely by the play of physical power, not based on their inheritances, not in one match of traded blows. But the will of the sorcerer and their intent to save or to raze.”

“Trust in me when I say you are strong,” he says, pulling them apart gently. “Trust in me when I say you, at this very moment, are at your strongest.” 

*

Yuuta surfaces once, throughout all his dreams. Inumaki doesn’t mean to catch him in it but the apartment’s completely wrecked, their neighbors have piled the mailbox with death threats, and the dorms are less of a comfort with the first years moving in. He doesn’t know them like he does Yuuji, or Fushiguro, or Nobara. Shoko’s office is dark and the air is very still, very stiff. Makes the silence all the more suffocating, and every shift of noise a deafening crackle in his ears. Yuuta’s chest barely rises when he breathes.

Inumaki says, “Are you there?”, and Yuuta blinks awake. Just like that, cruelly, easily.

“Again,” He croaks. Inumaki looks at him. He can’t sign with his hand trapped in his grasp. It seems he doesn’t need to; Yuuta reads the silence like an old friend. 

“Heard your dad in my head,” he whispers. “Last night. That night. Heard him, everyone, every curse six feet under and to the earth’s core. Heard Gojo. Maybe it was never me.”

Inumaki swallows. Yuuta presses on with a rasp, his skin feverishly warm. “Maybe it was you. Maybe it was always you, and will be you.” 

“I don't know,” he answers, bringing them close so Yuuta can press his forehead against his - and he runs so hot his body feels like it’s burning, in flames. 

“Kill him.” Yuuta says. He pulls Inumaki into a hug, a tight and graceless thing. “Don’t hold back.” 

“Yuuta.” Inumaki shakes his head. Yuuta pulls in close, brings his hand to the back of Inumaki’s neck. Kisses him once, softly, and despite the itch of his chapped lip Inumaki chases the connection like the drifting of a song. When he breathes out he’s calm, and Inumaki shakes, can’t seem to stop himself from shaking.

“I wish I could take your place,” Yuuta whispers, caressing his hair. “I wish I was- I was stronger, I suppose. But I’m stuck making choices again. Let me make the right one this time, alright?” 

“I’m sorry,” Inumaki sobs. Yuuta holds him; they fall asleep just like that. And when the sun finds them warmly settled, statues of warm light to the morning, Inumaki goes.

*

Maki is waiting for him at the entrance of Jujutsu High, as if she’s read his mind before he’s even made the decision to go through with it. The fresh scars on her face are starting to heal well, crisscrossing over her burns, and her arms are mottled blue and dark where they aren’t wrapped in bandages. 

She looks over him, him over her. It’s decided in just that single glance as Maki opens her mouth to say, under her breath, “Noritoshi will clear our record for the next two days.”

“Then that’s all we need.”

They walk silently together at first, deciding quickly – Just us? - Just us. – before she follows Inumaki into his room and he replaces his windbreaker for a thicker jacket, an extra can of mouth spray, his wallet and keys. It goes into his bag, making a clunking noise against the rest of his other stock.

“He told me you shouted at Mei Mei,” Maki says.

“Why not?” he replies, huffs a little. “ When you have an excuse to, go for it.” she snorts. 

“I never mentioned this, but you can speak again,” she says, after a while. “Even if it’s just a little, it’s nice to hear your voice.” 

“Yeah.” 

Inumaki runs to the bathroom to refresh himself. He hears the thud of Maki’s katana as her sheathe hits the floor, the quiet crack of bones as she stretches. Outside the midday weather is calm, and no chatter distracts them. For a moment as he gargles and spits, wiping down his face with his hands, a rush of calm displaces the nervousness of his movements. He wonders if this is what they call the calm before the storm, and holds himself there for just a second longer to relish it.

Maki pulls him out of it eventually, her bare feet padding across the floor as she hovers at the bathroom door watching him.

“The last time I heard you talk I barely knew you.” she says, “It was during the trial.” 

“It was,” he replies, and they leave it at that.

They hunt curses first, as is customary for a sorcerer’s return to her old station. It takes the Kamo clan off their backs for one, their suspicions initially heightened by Inumaki’s brash behaviour during the council meeting. The first day of their tag-along missions bounce across pressure-points along the edge of Tokyo 1, staying inland as they move up north towards Morioka, a path that strays far from what should be the sorcerer priority. 

The minute he and Maki phase through a curtain their watchful eyes disappear and the barrier surrounds them in a privacy Inumaki has never appreciated until now. All thoughts of clans fade away to the maddeningly instinctive call of the hunt. Their synergy brings about nostalgia of their better days, her footfalls light against oakwood and his never far behind. She’s just as much an acrobat as he, and as they approach the curses she rests her hand gently on his shoulder. 

“Go left.” she says. “But you knew that.” 

“Got it,” he says, observing the first-grade curses writhing before them. This abandoned storeroom sits below a quaint and unassuming massage parlor, just a few blocks from Sunshine City. Sendai, unfortunately, still never goes too long without erupting with disturbances. Even despite his absence, Yuuta’s cursed energy leaves a trace residue of scent - the balmy smell of amber, and a sharp note of lingering sage. 

This was his territory last week. Inumaki’s heart skips a beat as the curses coalesce, climbing each other like a tower as they advance towards him. It’s different now, somehow, like a plate beneath his heart has shifted to make way for something new. 

If he dies, then others die. That’s how it was, but not how it always has to be.

The ground shifts beneath their feet, a cursed worm moving below splitting the asphalt under him. Inumaki leaps back, his puppet arm springing him upwards into the air, as Maki cuts across their battlefield in a destructive movement that cleaves an opening across the ground where purple seeps into the gravel. Maki draws double, the sharp whistle of breath sucked through teeth as she meets cleave to cleave and strike to strike. Inumaki pulls down his neck muffler, the wind chill on his cheeks a welcome breeze. The words come easy to him, like they had last week: words, not exclamations of half-phrases.

At the rush of air past his ears, against the screaming wind of his acceleration, “Go back,” he shouts, plummeting towards the ground. “Go back to ash!” 

The curses dissolve, and Inumaki rolls away to the concrete rubble and Maki’s outstretched arms, to the great gasping breath that shudders through him as the curtain shimmers away and light breaks through the ceiling of black. He sees stars in his peripheral - then on full blast as he retches just barely missing the point of his shoes, a dry heave that pulls up a splotch of blood from his lips and an achy, scratchy soreness in his throat. His mind supplies, your cursed blood means to choose one or the other, and never both, and his father is watching him again somewhere out of the corner of his eye where Sukuna put him, as if waiting for his impending choice like he had ever been given a choice at all.

“Little genius,” Maki says, and Inumaki’s father disappears like smoke as her breaths puff through him, visibly short and stilted. “Are you evolving too?”

It’s not easy to infiltrate the Gojo clan which, much like Jujutsu High, disguises itself as a Buddhist temple in distant mountains away from public view. They make a stop on the way to the train station to plan out their route, eating hurriedly at the nearby Family Mart and facing glass where a cleanup crew cordon off the surrounding border of their completed mission in the distance. It will be a long way up the mountain, even with their super-abled bodies. The snowfall tonight will be heavy and unforgiving.

“I told him to watch himself,” Maki says finally, to break the silence that’s grown between them while they eat. “But the stupid fucker didn’t listen.”

“It’s hard to listen to anybody else but the voice of the person you love. ” 

“So he really loved him then?” she turns to Inumaki, her face pinched with something unusual. “It wasn’t just a stupid crush?”

“He was ten years old when he manifested Rika Orimoto.” Inumaki signs. “I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Love is Yuuta’s domain, Maki. He thrives on finding love. Acting on it, being consumed by it.”

“In some ways,” he adds, thinking of his father’s willow tree. His trial. Yuuta’s hand on his knee, the sun drowning the room in auburn colors. “We all do.”  

Maki nods, fiddling with the chopsticks in her hands. The konbini’s front door chimes, a customer gliding through the shelves. A gaggle of preschool students hover around the cashier, picking out plastic toys. The cashier rings several times throughout the minute, and laughter bubbles throughout the store. Maki plays with her ramen, her feet tangled between the legs of her plastic stool.

“I’ve been a ghost since Mai left me.” she whispers, barely audible among the ambient noise. “It’s like losing half your body and your soul, as a twin, and I could hardly consider myself her twin at all. I know nothing about her except that we hated each other, and even that I got wrong.”

“So Gojo was right, Yuuta was right, and the clan Inumaki understood it, too. Love is a curse and it’s real, and fuck if it sounds stupid, but it might just be the most powerful force in our universe.”

She ducks her head, scowling as she picks at her bento, but Inumaki catches the thoughtful look on her face before it’s hidden away.

“God,” Inumaki swears in a huff and then, shoulder to shoulder, adds to break the ice, “He’s a close second, right?”

She jolts first, taken aback by what he’s said, and then she laughs, punching him. It’s a beautiful sound. For just that moment, the world slows to a perfect stop.

It’s of no surprise to Inumaki that Nobara shows up at the konbini not half an hour later, honking obnoxiously at them in a car probably rented from a downtown shop. Maki ties her sword around her waist as Inumaki exits. 

“I can’t drive,” she unhelpfully supplies. “And Nobara’s more familiar with the area.”

“Just us, you said!”  

“S’close to my hometown.” Nobara smirks, lowering the window to look up at him. “And I don’t like being left out of risky situations, Inumaki. I thought you knew that!” 

“Most powerful force in the universe, I guess.” Inumaki raises his eyebrows at Maki as he gets into the backseat, scowling when she cements a bruise into his arm with a strike of her fist. 

“Do you remember Ogami, the shaman?” she asks him as they drive. The rolling hills of wintry Morioka are but pink blurs along the windshield, jolting as their path northward reaches the outskirts of the city. It’s begun to snow, and it batters their rental as they tread past Kitekami River. Nobara turns on the news forecast so as to liven up the car, and a news anchor babbles quietly in the background. 

“Hardly,” Inumaki responds. “ She was a shapeshifter of sorts, summoned Toji Zenin through her grandson, something like that. ” 

“Yuuta told me he was being taken by somebody when I was with him.” she says, worrying her bottom lip dry. “And when he came to he didn’t see me as Maki, he saw someone else.” 

“Are you saying he was possessed or something?” Nobara pipes up at the front. “Or is he possessing another person?”

“Well if what Mei Mei says is true, then neither.” Maki replies. “A third party’s involvement triggered a connection between the two souls that needs to be severed.”

“I see him when I black out.” Yuuta said after a while. “Like he’s stuck in my mind. Like he can’t get out.” 

“Gojo-sensei.” Inumaki utters under his breath. 

“Isn’t he supposed to be dead?” He sees Nobara’s fingers clench the steering wheel, her knuckles white and her profile rigid as she concentrates on the road ahead. “How can somebody whose dead have a soul?”

A buried girl turns in the soil. She rises a cursed spirit, bears a new face in the name of love.

“This is fucked,” Inumaki says quietly after a while. 

“What isn’t fucked right now, Inumaki?” Maki responds sharply. “Everybody who chooses to become a sorcerer is fucked, and we’ve accepted it and lived with it like fools because Kusakabe was right. We chose the status quo for hundreds of years.”

“Not today.” Inumaki looks up, meeting her gaze fiercely. He doesn’t feel scared. His heart doesn’t ache as it did thinking, wasting time on thinking, mourning, dreaming about pasts and futures that have nothing to do with the present. 

“No,” Maki responds, squeezing his fingers. “Not today. Not tomorrow.” 

“We could be punished severely if we get caught though, wouldn’t we?” Nobara says in a hushed tone as they drive, her voice more solemn than he’s ever heard her. “We might be suspended from mission work, or have our grades revoked. At worst, lose our source of income if we’re banned.”

“For what reason would exposing the crimes of the Gojo clan be considered criminal enough to ban us?” Maki says. “I saw him, Nobara. I saw his soul react to a body that wasn’t his, to eyes that saw people that weren’t me. The Gojo clan promised that Satoru Gojo would be buried with his elders per tradition. If that is untrue then they’ve lied to the governing body of Jujutsu Sorcery - a far more unforgivable act than trespassing.” 

“But if we fail?” Nobara shoots back, and Maki settles a hand on her shoulder as she drives. Her voice lowers, eyes darting over Maki’s outstretched arm, her gaze a potent mixture of adoration and uncertainty. She says quietly, “I don’t want to lose this.” 

Maki turns to face the window, wearing her determination like a fresh scar. When she speaks, it’s as if she’s made her choice long ago. “Then we fail,” she answers simply. “Then we make way for something new. Something that’s ours alone.” 

*

It’s a long day’s trip up the side of the mountain, the air thinning as heavy fog tumbles down the mountainside across acres of forest like jagged daggers cutting through the mist. The Gojo clan temples are non distinctive, almost stock: the key structures take up a meager portion of the open land, which stretches far and wide across sprawling plains. On closer inspection and higher ground, Inumaki can barely make out the distinct pillars of the Buddhist layout, and it takes him a moment more to realize that there is none. The layout has no rhyme or reason, the structures non-functional, ceremonial or otherwise. A potemkin village, he thinks. Just a mask. 

It makes sense to him now, why Gojo spoke so little of his family.

Though the hour is late, figures survey the terraced crop, and some till what’s been left buried under thin sheets of snow overnight. Torch fire lights a path up the steep steps, hot enough to cast dark shadows. Nobara’s boots catch on the glazed surface of angled rock as they scramble up the hillside, and though the sound of her stifled gasp isn’t loud enough to reach the temple workers, the wintry stillness in the air is enough to leave them tense.

“It’s smaller than I thought,” Maki whispers beside Inumaki. “Just a farm with a shrine and barely any people.” 

“Winter, maybe.” Inumaki says haltingly. 

A small building catches Inumaki’s eye at the far end of the clan territory, an anachronistic block of cement far enough from the rest of the temple that it appears to be newly built. Nobara takes her position in the trees to scout as Inumaki rushes forward, Maki hot on his heels. His footsteps do not echo across the ground, cleared of snow, though he doubts if they did anybody would hear. Despite having kept up its appearance, the temple truly feels as if it had outlived its owners. 

Nobody guards the entrance, though it is paved well with a broad cobblestone path just beginning to smooth over with a sheen of settling snow. In place of a lock around the sleek-edged metal handle of the door a rope winds tightly around the two handles bursting with sigils tied into intricate knots between the braid, all of which disintegrate to ash at Inumaki’s warming whisper to fray . Without the knot the building opens up with little resistance, the cold draft that sweeps into the room doing nothing to alter the temperature controlled interior.  

When Inumaki steps in, to the sound of a low humming and the touch of a cool marble floor, the first thing he notices is Satoru Gojo. There’s a heart rate monitor set up beside the metal autopsy table he’s lying on, the faintly occasional blip an instant reminder of the same sound he heard back in Shoko’s office; the one reminding him that Yuuta is still alive.

Except here, that reminder isn’t for Yuuta.

“Oh, shit.” Maki curses under her breath beside him. 

“Oh,” Inumaki says beside her. His eyes trace the IV drip fed into the pallid color of his teacher’s skin. “ No .” 

“He looks ill,” Maki whispers, sounding ill herself. 

“Looks dead,” Inumaki says softly and Maki twitches, as if stung. 

“That’s the thing though,” she says, horrified, touching his arm. “He isn’t, is he?”

Seeing him in the flesh brings Inumaki’s brain to a complete halt. Some parts of Gojo remain beautiful even like this; no doubt because he looked holy, hallowed, in life. His body is clothed in a thin jinbei, the striped fabric a perfect match to the color of his skin save a brown gash line horizontal across his stomach bleeding fractals across the processional embroidery. The bed is as gaunt as he; a thin thing of metal, marks of its movement scratched into the floor. As Inumaki moves forward, his hands instinctively come up to a glass wall - a half-barrier concave screen with a gap at its center, presumably where people can come and go.

Maki swears again. The room is so cold that her very breath seems to freeze solid beside her. Gojo’s lashes are webbed with frost, and his nose is a bluish tint. Perhaps the most unsettling thing about it are his eyes, glassy and far removed. 

They look at the body for longer, then at the door swung wide open across from it. A gust of howling wind batters the large metal doors of the building in harsh whistles of tunnel-like noise, and snow begins to build in light layers across the entrance, puddling inwards.

A connection between two souls can only be severed through physical removal of its host.

“We have to,” Maki falters, unable to bring herself to say what they’re both thinking. It comes out choked the second time, and her posture wilts as she looks at him, “We have to.” 

“Fuck,” Inumaki rasps, stricken. The look of Gojo’s porcelain body burns like a brand in his mind’s eye, and fear rises in him so quickly at the thought of what Maki’s insinuating that he has to look away before the nausea hold.

“Your call,” Maki says. Her hand does not leave his back, her eyes darting to the entrance. “I’m just the cavalry.” 

His teacher’s glassy-eyed stare seems to skate across his figure, despite it having not moved at all. Sometimes, when doing battle with curses, it was easy to distance himself from the enemy - an amorphous composition of abstract thought glued together with magic and black haze, nothing concrete, nothing that made him feel grounded in reality. This is not it. This is the sort of thing that Inumaki thinks he might never forget. A small part of him thinks that he shouldn’t, anyways - surely it can’t get worse than this.  

But then Gojo twitches at the right shoulder, and he’s wrong . The IV sways, millimeter to millimeter. 

“Fuck, he moved!” Maki hisses. 

Yuuta holds the pendant close, close enough to where it brushes his mouth like a kiss. A prayer. 

“I tried to make him stay,” he says at last. “Maybe it wasn’t enough.” 

“Yuuta,” Inumaki falters, with only dread to keep his body upright. “It’s Yuuta.” 

The body twitches again, a slow and jittered articulation. Gojo blinks once. 

He’s going to be sick.

Before he can excuse himself to the patch of snow outside, a shout distracts his stupor and he whirls around just as the whistle of a cursed nail embeds itself into the ground at the foot of the door. Nobara’s energy cuts through the winter wind like a knife through butter, a warning that they’ve been compromised. Just a few meters in front of him in the center of the room a crackling pop is heard from within the glass chamber and the sound makes Inumaki take a startling step back. The air distorts, rubbery and thick like how Yuuta had once tore into the fabric of spacetime with Uro’s magic: this is nowhere near graceful, and he watches the shimmering air stretch and tear, like something were holding it open. Maki, beside him, stares dumbstruck as a pair of hands emerge from thin air - pulling the distorted space wide apart before a foot reaches over the illusory chasm and steps into the room. A man emerges from the portal, heaving a gasp like the act of doing so had seeped all the energy from his bones, and collapses over the body on the table. 

“Gojo-sama, ” the man pants hysterically, pulling at Gojo’s jinbei. “Gojo-sama, are you hurt?” 

The IV skitters across the floor, knocking against the wall as he shoves it aside. There’s nothing careful about the way he holds onto the corpse - the man’s fingernails are crusted with dirt from daily toil, and his callouses smudge grime into the pristine clothing. Maki draws a kunai and her weapon flies, cutting a light gash across the man’s neck and embedding itself into the wall, and the man ignores her completely. Blood flows freely down his neck where her knife had cut him slightly. His voice fades into a quiet murmur as he lowers his face to Gojo’s ear, bowing over him like to say a prayer. When twists his head around to face Inumaki, his expression is carved with blinding disgust, a contortion so unnerving that it looks more like a mask than it does human flesh.

“Who are you to desecrate his shrine?” he shouts, his chest puffed out in a swell of rage.

“What?” Inumaki utters under his breath, “ Me?”

The man shrieks again, no words but a primal screech so erratic and inhuman that Inumaki flinches, struck by the change in his voice. A second nail tunnels through the ground with a blasting echo just outside of the building as the first returns to its owner - Nobara’s second warning, an emergency.

The air pulsates once, twice: a bigger distortion ripples the air composition from ground to ceiling, and Inumaki watches in stunned horror as hands and fingers grasp onto the materializing portal, pulling and pulling and pulling! Until the gaping hole of a new dimension spews limb to limb an avalanche of snow-kissed shamans, not one but dozens of them yelling and scrambling for the corpse. 

“Gojo-sama,” they wail again, a chorus fluid as the river flows that swallows up the room from flask to cup. Over-brimmed, their flesh presses hard against the glass as Inumaki and Maki step back with alarm, raising their weapons. It’s happening so quickly that Inumaki can hardly begin to gather his bearings before the small room is filled with people, trampling on each other as they crowd around the body like moths to candlelight. Gojo’s body gets covered in the sea of robes and his hair, once his most easily recognizable trait by way of its unusual color, is lost to the rest of his kin. It’s like seeing double, Inumaki thinks; triple, quadruple. Easily a hundred versions of Gojo take up the space, squeezing out of the gap between the two glass frames like a tube of expanded toothpaste. 

A third nail finds its mark an inch away from Inumaki’s foot, and he looks up sharply to the distant trees in eyeshot, the mist and growing blizzard covering up Nobara’s tracks. A third nail means doom: The noise of it cuts through the commotion, and the burst of new cursed energy triggers a wave of self-awareness in the people in the chamber, who begin to hoist Gojo’s body up in the air. A quiet murmuring ripples through the crowd as he’s passed along their palms, guided carefully to the front where six larger clan members try to make a path.   

Who are you, echoes around the room as Gojo clan encircle them, their only point of escape the howling blizzard at their backs. The sun sets early on the mountainside, and small sources of light emanate from the center of the room: the health monitors, the detached medical equipment. A single camplight clutched in the hand of a larger clansman shines light as harsh as shadow across various corners of the room, giving the lower planes of his face a gaunt, hollow quality. Who are you, who are you, who let you in?

“Maki Zenin and Inumaki Toge.” she answers, stepping forward. “We came of our own accord.” 

Zenin, one of the voices say in a hushed tone. Fearful. Zenin. So powerful. And then, with even more trepidation, Inumaki, Inumaki, what will he say?

“The Gojo clan told us Satoru Gojo would be buried honorably, on his own clan soil.” she demands, her shaking sword pointed at his corpse. Her voice remains level until the last moment; wavering as her eyes dart to the corpse of her former teacher. “You lied to the board of Higher Ups. This is a criminal offence.”  

The clansmen flinch, holding the body close to their chests. Gojo’s head, bowed and limp, swings gently back and forth like a pendulum.

“For the preservation of the clan, it was,” one of the Gojo clan members scowls, stepping forward eagerly. “For the preservation of our pure blood.”

“Why?” Inumaki rasps.

“For the blood,” the man continues in a hushed voice, as if matter of fact. His eyes dart from the corpse to Maki, alight with what some might call enlightenment . “For the strength of the clan. The power of the Six Eyes must be passed on . To deliver unto us a new era. To ensure our survival.” 

A figure emerges from the amalgamation of clan men right then, pushing forward as the crowd parts in whispers. Her robe is thick and woollen, though that warmth is not reflected in her eyes - unfeeling and as icy as the frosted tips of her snowy hair. Inumaki recognizes her- the girl who he spied on, touching Yuuta’s chest. Watching him with adoring eyes, anticipatory of the things he could yet accomplish. 

“You of all people should understand the lengths we will go to preserve the Gojo line.” she says, cold and detached. “Twin daughter of Ogi Zenin and Thorn of the Mountain.” she cocks her head, watching as Maki’s sword begins to tremble in her grasp. “Okkotsu Yuuta is the vessel through which the Six Eyes will be reborn. I will be its carrier. I will suffer, too.”

“Keep his name out of your mouth,” Maki sucks in a harsh breath, cocking her head. Inumaki stays her hand with his own gripping her shoulder. “Keep his name out of your mouth, or I swear I’ll kill you.” 

“And add another sorcerer to your death toll?” Sakura sneers softly, flinching as Maki looks up. “Go ahead; be the murderer you are. I can only try to reason our truth. The blizzard tempts our patience, and the hour is dark. Satoru Gojo will die stuck in the passage of souls, and it will have been your fault that his blood runs dry.”

They draw back out into the blizzard, his and Maki’s footfalls crunching lightly on the inch thick snow beyond the door. The mass of Gojo clan members move as one amorphous mountain, their fukagutsu kicking up snow as they walk. Gojo’s body in the harsh lamplight seems to have decayed significantly beyond the exit of his containment: the gash on his waistline is fresh once more, his jinbei tearing from being groped on all sides. A long stitch runs through his skin where exposed, a crude, messy thread. It’s too dark to see the rest of him. 

The procession of Gojo clan members stumble as the storm picks up around them, snowflakes bitingly cold against the skin. One of them pitches forward with a cry, unable to take the burgeoning weight of Gojo’s frozen body, and it hits the ground with a sickening crunch. Clan members shriek and rush forward, like a swarm of ants to food. 

“The Gojo clan cannot survive without its heir,” Sakura drops to her knees before them, the falling snow clustering in thick clots around her bedraggled kimono. Her voice, now frantic and hushed, rises in octave with every syllable. “Give us this one grace. Give us Satoru Gojo. Without the Six Eyes we are nothing, we are no one, is that not clear to you?” 

“You promised Jujutsu High that Gojo Satoru would be buried honorably,” Maki says, pushing past Inumaki to raise the tip of her katana to Sakura’s neck. The pointed tip is so lethal it bleeds her, a drop of red disappearing into snow. Her mouth is set into a snarl. “You would go so far as to disrespect the dead who saved you!”

“But he isn’t dead!” she shrieks, waving her arms manically. Her bun loosens, strings of wiry white hair turning yellowish in the firelight. “He isn’t dead, he lives, look at him, he still bleeds!”

The Gojo clan members huddled around Gojo’s body murmurs, cooing over the lifeless corpse at their center like a purring heart. Their figures are small and frail. As if, at any moment, the blizzard might blow them away. They don’t fight back at all. One of them catches Inumaki’s eye - a member of the council he met months ago seated at the table in Jujutsu Headquarters. He cowers behind his sleeve now, one hand on Gojo’s shoulder, not daring to meet Inumaki’s eyes.

“Maki,” Inumaki realizes something then. “Stop.” 

“We should kill them,” she turns to him, incredulous. “They’re all insane .” 

“They’re just-” he halts his words, watching them. Like ants, shuffling along the wet ground, their yukata picking up dirt and snow-sludge. He stops at the foot of Sakura’s hapless figure, her eyes bleary as she blinks away the blizzard’s frost biting at their skin. 

“Pathetic.” he finishes.  

“This is how it’s always been,” she pants heavily. “The strong eat the weak. Chaos binds Jujutsu law. Technique defines order, and order makes hierarchy. Second grade, first grade, special-grade,” 

“God.” she spits, heaving, trembling. Her hands clasp together in prayer, looking up at her through frosted eyelashes. “Give us our God.”

Inumaki reaches out to her, hovering his hand over her head. It’s his decision now, his choice. He pushes it down into her hair, carding it softly, watching the snow fall.

Panda knits himself a new father in the loneliness of his old home. Maki wakes up with a thing of metal at her side, like it could be any better than the other half of her soul. Fushiguro watches the empty darkness as if it might snatch him out of the depths of reality at any moment, throw him back into the body of a mortal demon. 

And Inumaki bleeds. He’s never known more than blood, half his life of it, half his voice in it, half his body devoted to the danger of dying but never death. He could never die - his morality didn’t permit it, just as Sukuna predicted. In some ways it meant he could never really live either. 

He nudges Sakura aside to move past her, and Maki pins her to the ground as she screams against the struggle. The Gojo clan caterwaul against the howl of the raging wind, battering Gojo’s corpse left and right in their many arms. 

“Put him down.” Inumaki speaks softly. They keen as the chains of his words bind them to fealty. “Step away now.” 

Gojo’s body is lighter than a feather. Inumaki’s hands tighten around his lifeless arms, which have since shrunken down, skin tight with rigor mortis. “Toge,” Maki starts, her eyes wide as he steps back inside the building. She doesn’t move, but her shoulders tense as she watches him go. 

“Seal, fuse, bind.” Inumaki rasps, hand pressed to the door as he enters. “Let no one come inside.” 

Right as the words take effect, the command keeping the Gojo clan members still shatters - they charge towards the building, hammering their fists against the steel doors bound by cursed magic. Sakura’s voice is a screeching howl against the wind current, a bellow that seems to rip through the thickness of the brick wall before Maki has her in a chokehold slammed against the wall.

“Give him to us you fucking heretic!” she screams, her voice raw and hoarse. The door rattles on its hinges, battered by a cacophony of moaning, wounded noises and striking fists. Inumaki’s throat burns as his cursed speech weaves between the entrance and the weight of the cursed energy pushing against it, his hands trembling as he takes a step back. Gojo’s body is heavy, so heavy his feet drag as Inumaki tries to keep him upright. 

The chamber echoes his footsteps, deafeningly quiet within. Aside from the marble center tiles and glass barrier, everything else is relatively primitive. Gojo’s body stirs in Inumaki’s arms but never wakes. Not even as Inumaki sets him down on his metal bed, limbs clunking heavily atop the thin blue sheet covering it. 

It’s a lonely place to die. The blizzard rages on outside, and the building holds fast against the riot, despite how it seems to shudder and shake with every blow. 

“Strength is not defined merely by the play of physical power, not based on their inheritances, not in one match of traded blows.”

Inumaki shuts his eyes.

“But the will of the sorcerer and their intent to save or to raze.”

“My words are spoken curses,” he coughs, throat throbbing, to Gojo’s corpse. The very atoms of the air freeze, hushed to hear him. It twitches again, as if moved by his words. “In exchange, my speech I yield,”

His cursed energy coils, thickens, around him as the words spill from his mouth. The Gojo clan voices rise, determined not to let their screams be drowned out by the wind. 

“Love determines my full strength,” Inumaki’s voice grows alongside the surge of his cursed energy, vibrating the still air. “And thus my hand has been revealed.”

The room sizzles with sound and noise, his vision a blur as he feels his power erupt at twofold capacity, long coils of it snaking around the room like tendrils, crackling, bending the steel doors of the exit. The blizzard rages on outside as the latch to the door bound by Inumaki’s former command shatters, a viciously icy draft swept into the room with the roaring gale. Maki’s katana sweeps the ground, splitting the earth before the Gojo clan can reach him, tripping forward into the sinking soil instead. 

“Inumaki!” She shouts. Her voice is faraway, barely a fly’s buzz, a prick at the ear. “What are you doing!”

“You don’t choose to be anything other than this,” Sukuna gestured broadly. “Victim to morality. A mute. A toy.”

It’s rushing back to him now, the horror, the sound, the wakeful nights and the retching, the retching, the retching. The blazing village pyre, a kiss to soothe the soul and deaths to wake it. A world to save, people puppeteered into a line, a pool, two-three-four and more-

“In exchange for my core, the depths of my power,” Inumaki says, his shaky voice booming above the calamity around them. “for havoc, for ruin, until night’s final hour,” 

Sakura tears through the masses, at his feet a sullied blur of blood and fabric. Her barren feet are tinged blue, her eyes wild as she meets his own against the thick of his cursed energy so dark of a concentrate he can hardly see her. 

“Don’t you dare,” she whispers. 

He feels nothing as she grovels at his feet. For a moment, he thinks it means he’s lost his humanity; a god controlling the tempest, seeing havoc unfold around him. But that’s not really the person he is. Not really what he’s ever wanted to be. Just a kid, watching where the eye takes him. Waiting for it all to be over. For something new that’s his, and his alone.

“Burn it all,” Inumaki says. “Devour.”   

The floor shudders once, a rumbling echo of shifting earth triggering cracks and fissures in the tiles above before the ground gives way and explodes. 

The Gojo clan scrambles backwards, screaming in panic as Gojo Satoru’s corpse erupts into white flame, wild and cursed and not at all in its natural form. It catches and ignites like the floor is made of oil, and soon swathed in blazing flame the heat begins to swelter the air. Flames lick the walls, the insatiable burning spurred on by Inumaki’s words as they eat into the concrete and the steel and the structure begins to break away around them. Sakura leaps and scuttles towards the exit, tattered strips of her kimono fluttering to ash behind her with nothing more to say that would keep her alive - past them despite the dark of night, light blazes across the tilled fields as the temples begin to spew cursed flame. 

The farmlands burn just as quickly, and fumes thicker than rain clouds weigh heavy in evening air. A fourth signal from Nobara erupts across the entrance to the Gojo clan building, ricocheting off the warping metal, getting caught in the sinkhole that threatens to cave the whole building in. 

Fatigue finally reaches Inumaki as he collapses, his vision blurred in the heat. In front of him, just above his right eye where Gojo can watch him from the melting autopsy bed, his teacher’s body jerks again. Fire catches on the jinbei and his whole body comes alight like in a fever pitch, spreading voraciously around him. 

Gojo burns. He’s never seen anything like it, anything so terrifying, anything so final. The heat suffocates Inumaki’s throat, like a ring around his neck as he coughs through smoke of his own making. All the while Gojo watches, blinks, watches. Burns, skin peeling from his flesh, flesh melting from his bone. 

A movement flits between the dancing shadows, a hand warm under Inumaki’s waist and another lifting him into a pair of strong arms. “Come on,” Maki urges under her breath, “We’ve already seen it once.”

He doesn’t hear. The fire thickens across the terraced crop, among the potemkin village, around the Gojo clan. It carries out the will of its master until the snow crumbles to ash, until night becomes as bright as day.

*

“I’m not a good person,” Gojo Satoru said to him the first night of Inumaki’s parole. He was sitting on a ledge, watching a young boy return home as the sun set behind him, casting long shadows across the narrow street. Inumaki was beside him, because Inumaki was not permitted to leave Satoru Gojo’s presence, despite the Higher Ups having granted him his freedom. 

“Good?” Inumaki parroted. 

“I’m not giving you a choice to join me,” Gojo said, ruffling his hair. His eyes were distant, the way his father’s eyes were distant, but he did not tell Inumaki what Inumaki wanted to hear. He said nothing about love, or trust, or family. In some ways, it made him very honest. Inumaki did not know what to think of his honesty, only that it was cold. “For the sake of my dream, I’ll be a monster. That doesn’t mean anything to me anyways. I’ve never felt human.” 

Inumaki watched shadows grow around the boy they were watching, who was now halfway through the street. The shadows grew, lean, tall. Inumaki wondered if the boy would die; two dogs leapt through thin air and Inumaki stopped worrying. 

“You’ll get the chance to choose, one day.” Inumaki tilted his head up to where Gojo was turned. Observing the boy and his dogs. Pitying him, perhaps. Or seeing him, like no one else could. “I’m sorry I don’t know when, but I promise.” 

“When that day comes, choose you.” Gojo said, looking at him. “Inumaki Toge. Choose you.” 

*

When Inumaki comes to, they’re sitting high up in the trees. Nobara’s acrylic nails dig into his shoulder, her eyes wide and pricked with tears. He coughs, eyes adjusting towards a horizon covered partially in thick plumes of black smoke. 

The fire has eaten away at the buildings, blackened snow trodden under heels and knees and hands as the Gojo clan run wildly around their temple like headless chickens at the cleaver’s edge of their demise. Several younger clan members trudge up the side of the terraced hills, heaping fresh snow onto the unrelenting fire, finally slowing after hours of merciless rage. 

“It was never worth losing her,” Maki says quietly beside them, lowering her sword. “For all this talk of power. When has power ever stopped the pain?”

“Maki?” Nobara replies.

“Not even now.” The Split Soul Katana finds its mark between a thick knot on the tree’s trunk, Maki’s grunt of pain breaking through Nobara’s anxious silence. She shuts her eyes, bowing her head away from where her blade reflects light off the planes of her darkened expression. Slowly, her fingers reach for her face, crowding it tightly as her shoulders begin to shake. It’s jerky and not at all natural, but she doesn’t cry. Just stills against a twisting branch, heaving slow and ebbing breaths from her chest. 

Nobara reaches for her, carding a hand through her soot-blackened hair. 

“Nothing is worth this.” Maki whispers. “Nothing.”

None of them sleep - they cannot until they are sure, when it is clear from the mourning early next day, that everything is gone.

“So that was it, then,” Nobara says finally, when the smoke settles and the burning smell of wood lingers, doesn’t grow. Her voice is the quietest it’s ever been. “He’s really dead this time, right?” 

“Think so,” Maki says beside her. Like she isn’t sure, even though she saw it with her own eyes. The sweat beading down her forehead hours earlier cakes into grime that shimmers along her neckline as the low sun rises in the east. “Toge?”

Her head turns as her fingers do, outstretched and palm faced upwards. He doesn’t take it.

“I hate my job.” he says instead, a soft rasp. She shuts her eyes, her fingers curling away. Accepting.

“Then quit.” she says quietly.

Beyond the sycamore’s twisting branches, the final billows of smoke dissipate into the cold morning air. The Gojo clan flock to the open pavilion, a scatter of kowtowing figures among the ruins as firefighters finally arrive at the scene, having been hindered by the heavy snowfall. Nothing material is salvaged. Jujutsu High representatives, eventually showing up in the late afternoon to a clearing blackened by soot and ash, find no casualties nor suspects at the crime scene. The bodies on the floor are simply religious mourners who will not move even as they are pulled, yanked, dragged by the beds of their fingernails into ambulances. 

The Gojo clan lament the loss of Satoru Gojo the way they would as men left to their own devices by an indifferent god - that is to say, they do not mourn for him at all. 

*

Their trip down from the mountain is a fever dream to Inumaki. He’s asleep on Maki’s shoulders half the time while branches of trees make diagonals across his vision, the other half focused on Nobara’s acrylic nails on his shoulder keeping him upright as they stumble towards where she parked at the side of the road. It snows heavily all the way back. A catchy tune loops through his head for hours and hours as the car trudges back on to the main road, it having been shovelled of snow since the disastrous blizzard up top where they escaped from. 

“Hey baby,” Maki coos softly upon his third waking, her lap warm from sleep and her gaze steeped in partially remembered dreams. “We’re almost there.”

“Maki,” he murmurs. Something falls from his side - something heavy that rolls around the footwell, making a clicking noise. It takes him another drowsy second to realize that it’s his puppet arm, looking for its master. 

He hears Maki’s sharp intake of breath, her hand stilling at his side as she watches the puppet arm twitch once, twice, and deactivate without cursed energy to latch on to. Turns onto his back, on her lap. Clears his throat. Dry, sandpapery, rough with grit and blood. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” she breathes. There are tears in her eyes, but they don’t fall as she kisses the top of his forehead chastely. Inumaki knows how he sounds, but she doesn’t seem to hear the ugly rasp of it. “You sound good.” 

“I’m done with it all,” he says, in a huff as he closes his eyes again. His heart is an ocean of calm as her fingers loop through his. 

“With what?”

“When they ask for me. Don’t stop them.”

“Depends on what they’ll do to you,” Maki says lowly, her fingers stilling over his head. 

“It’s my choice,” he responds. “Maki. Please.” 

Her posture withers, her back hunched over him. 

“Alright,” she says finally. She cards a hand through Inumaki’s hair gently, humming a song with no name. Singing quietly into the breaking of the day. “You’ll be alright.”

Chapter Text

Yuuta wakes up in a plastic bucket seat, his neck sore from bad posture and a shadow over his face blocking out the sun. The crowds are dense, the intercom loud and filled with static. He catches his bag; it was slipping through his fingers while he slept, but there’s nothing in it when he digs a hand through the open slit. 

“Hey, kid.” Gojo says, prompting Yuuta to look up. “You gonna let me go yet?” 

“I-” Yuuta starts. He realizes he doesn’t really know what to say. No apologies, no regrets, no grievances but just an honest, “I didn’t know it would be this way.” 

“Well,” Gojo smiles. Reaches out a hand to ruffle Yuuta’s hair lightly. It’s a ghost’s touch; he hardly feels it. “Didn’t I tell you? Love and such. Twisty, curse-y thing.” 

“I’m a mess.” his voice comes out a choke, nearly a sob. “Don’t forgive me, sensei. I’m a mess.” 

“Hey. I’m flattered.” Gojo squats down to face him at his eyeline. He’s a spark, a shimmer, going fuzzy at the edges. The airport smells like incense, burning wood the longer they linger. Gojo’s hands smooth over Yuuta’s head, pressing his thumbs lightly to his temple. “I really am. It’s alright. It’s gonna be alright.” 

Yuuta heaves, his hands trembling as they come up to grasp Gojo’s. “I just didn’t know what to do without you.”

“You live, kid.” Gojo kisses the top of his forehead, chaste and light, cradling Yuuta’s head against his chest as Yuuta trembles in his grasp. The sun showers them in her warm affection but Yuuta feels so cold. Like it’s all just a burning memory. Something that never was. 

*

It must be Inumaki’s paranoia that’s driven him to think they’d be captured on sight when the three of them screech to a halt at the front gates of Jujutsu High. This is an odd time to be walking across school grounds and the courtyard feels tense and silent as Inumaki crosses it, but Nobara honks to disperse the air and simply waves, a confident grin stretched wide across her face. Maki’s head is a mess of black curls hidden by Nobara’s shoulder, asleep to the rest of the world. 

“Go on, senpai.” she says goodnaturedly. Her eyes are very kind. It’s not a side of her Inumaki thought he’d ever be privy to. 

The morning clamor as he passes by the classroom buildings is something he’s still trying to get used to: there’s never been this many first-year students before, and now they occupy the narrow alleyways he once used as shortcuts, making small-talk over the school bridge. Something about what Kusakabe said mid-year resurfaces in Inumaki’s memory - about hope, beginnings, and real opportunities. Things that can be, and not just flights of fancy. 

Yuuta is alone when Inumaki enters Shoko’s office; it makes for a tranquil, almost silent, setting save for the steady beep of the heart monitor to his left taking a pulse. The sound of Inumaki’s footsteps must have startled him because he looks up, alerted to the noise, and puts down what he was reading on the nightstand. His eyes are clear and untroubled. Inumaki’s throat goes dry like he’s been using it all day, seeing Yuuta moving and breathing again like this. 

“You’re awake,” he manages to say. 

“Yeah,” Yuuta breathes in, sharp and quick. Lets his hand linger on his neck, and brushes it awkwardly down his other arm tight and shy. “And you’re alive.” 

“Yeah.” Inumaki says haltingly. He steadies himself at the foot of the metal four poster, letting the decorative tops dig into his palm flesh to keep him awake. “I’m okay.”

Yuuta exhales- heavy, nearly a sob. As if the tension woven tightly through his body suddenly snaps, and his shoulders let go of such a heavy burden that sags into bed.

“Thank god,” he whispers, running a hand through his hair. He says again, shuddering, under a shaky breath, “Because I saw-” 

Yuuta looks away to the blankets that have fallen around his waist. His wrist is thin, brittle, as he tucks his hair behind his ear. Looks up with stormy grey eyes dulled of color. Inumaki finds flecks in them, and old scabs around his jaw, down his neck. “I saw you in my- well I thought it was a dream but I wasn’t, was I?”

All the while Gojo watches, blinks, watches. Burns, skin peeling from his flesh, flesh melting from his bone. 

“No.” Inumaki answers. 

Yuuta shuts his eyes painfully, his fingers curled to tight fists in his covers. He lets go with one of his hands, raising it up - not at Inumaki, but beside him. Narrows his eyes, stills his breath. His palm remains empty for a minute, two, and Inumaki waits patiently before Yuuta drops his hand and nods slowly. It’s shaking a little, and he brings up his free hand to steady it.

“Figures,” he says quietly, a huff of laughter. And then he adds, so sincerely that the gravitas of his words weighs like a stone in Inumaki’s stomach. “I couldn’t have killed him, you know? I’m a coward. Always have been.”

Inumaki’s throat closes up. “That’s not fair.” 

“I forced your hand in this.” Yuuta’s jaw clenches, his shoulders tense. Seems as if the very air he breathes in next would expel a curse. “You paid my dues- why do you keep doing things for me ?”

“Yuuta,” Inumaki says. He reaches out to squeeze his shoulder, firm and honest. “Not everything is about you.” 

Yuuta looks at him, wide-eyed as he takes in his words - the length of his sentence, and the silence that follows it. 

“You can speak,” he replies. “You figured it out, then?”

“Yeah.” The room descends into a murmuring silence for a little while, as background noise fills up the space between them. Outside the snowfall is light, and a sparrow leaps off a sapling branch that shakes a thick coat of white from its shoulders. 

“What did it cost?” Yuuta says after a while. 

Inumaki shoves his hands in his pockets. He isn’t sure how right he is about this, but doesn’t doubt that he’s got a good guess. Nobara hasn’t pinged him yet, at least, and nobody’s leapt out of a lesson distracted by something else. “Going rogue. I’ll turn myself in when they find me.” 

“They -” Yuuta sits up straighter, his head turning to the window abruptly. “If this is Higher Ups you’re talking about, I know my place with them - they know what you had to do-”

“That doesn’t mean they can disrupt order.” Inumaki finishes. “Their words.” Then, wryly, with a crooked smile across his face, “I’m just a pawn. It’s whatever.” 

“No- I can change this,” Yuuta shakes his head frantically, shaking his combed back hair into disarray. Inumaki sees it now, that familiar tenseness, the way he worries his bottom lip. He forgets they’re so close to each other until Yuuta turns to reach for his phone on the nightstand, arm brushing Inumaki’s. All of a sudden sage and amber flows into him, lighting his body up like a firework. “They’ll see sense- it’s not right, you did it for me-”

“Hey,” Inumaki says. “Stop.” He grabs Yuuta’s hand, fingers curling around his wrist so tightly it stings them both. Yuuta looks up, startled, and his lips part quietly as he acquiesces. “Just - how’re you feeling?”

 “Oh- good, I’m,” Yuuta says, confused and just a bit struck by the motion. He shuffles back to sit up properly against the headboard. He bites his lip again, fiddling with his phone but not unlocking it. “I’m doing much better but that’s- that’s not important, that’s-” 

“That’s all that matters.” Inumaki says. It seems to stop Yuuta in his tracks, and Inumaki leans against him, letting Yuuta’s arms latch onto his waist as he pushes a gentle hand through his hair and strokes it quietly. “That’s all that matters, Yuuta.” 

It seems as though Yuuta’s spirit leaves him at the thought- his body sags again, like one great heaving sigh. Inumaki follows his gaze pinned to the door to Shoko’s office, to the handle, like keeping this entrance sealed were at this very moment the key to fixing everything. 

“I thought I was doing the right thing,” Yuuta whispers, leaning his head against him. “I thought if I held on long enough the curtains would fall away and it’d all be this grand test I’d passed by being the strongest. I’d have Rika back and Gojo would be alive and everyone would be happy because all the curses were gone.” 

“But it isn’t a test and no one’s happy.” he laughs bitterly, looking up at Inumaki. “No one’s happy and Rika is dead and Gojo joined her eleven months ago. The truth is, the new world scares me. I don’t want to be in it. I don’t want to feel.”

Inumaki considers him for a moment, just as he hears a fleet of cars pull into the driveway and a stampede of footsteps break out across the courtyard across from Yuuta’s windowside. Kusakabe leads the charge with Miguel on the backline as students clamber out of their classroom windows to get a front row seat at the show; they’re filling out campus in a flood of black suits and cursed energy signals, confused by the lack of response they’re getting. It’s a scary thing to most sorcerers, Inumaki thinks, to be without something that’s protected you your whole life. That makes up everything you are and everything you thought you would be. 

“We didn’t get to choose what happened then, but we can choose what happens now.” Inumaki says finally. The door to Shoko’s office opens, Kusakabe leaving it slightly ajar as he walks in, hands in his pockets, catches his eye and leans against the wall. He tilts his head to the gap. Yuuta’s fingers tighten around Inumaki’s waist, digging into his skin. “So, be scared. It’ll pass, like all things.”

“Even now, you-” Yuuta calls after him, pulling Inumaki back by the hem of his shirt. He’s hesitating even as he says it, not unsure of his words but unsure of how they’ll be received. He shakes his head, licking his lips as he looks up again. “After everything I said,”

“Yes?” Inumaki answers. 

“Are we still friends?” Yuuta says. Inumaki takes another step forward; Kusakabe coughs, checking his watch, and Inumaki takes a step back. 

“Weren’t we always?” he replies, just barely above a whisper. Yuuta smiles, wet and teary. It’s not distant anymore. It seems to bridge the gap between their pause, to fill the whole room, to quiet the rest of the day.

“Yeah,” he says on a low exhale. He looks out towards the window, where a pair of black cabs are waiting under the cherry blossoms. “From the start.” 

*

His judgement day comes quickly and is an easy, almost informal affair, save for the raucous clamor that Sakura makes upon her witness testimony at the podium when she sees Yuuta in the stands. Representative members of each clan as well as the Higher Ups make up the jury of the trial, and Higuruma - at long last vindicated and returned to his post - sits at the head of the table, Ui Ui playing with his gavel. He strips Inumaki of his sorcerer rank, his job, his uniform; all material possessions belonging to the school to be returned at the front desk next Monday morning. He’ll finish the semester’s theory and academic study under the supervision of two Grade 1 sorcerers but otherwise be unable to continue his education at Jujutsu High as a sorcerer.

“I’d like to clarify to the court one last time,” Higuruma says, fingers idling at the frame of his glasses as he pushes them up. “That Inumaki Toge can no longer use cursed energy as a result of a binding vow. As Jujutsu High is a school for sorcerers, Inumaki Toge no longer fits the criteria as a next year applicant. That alone,” he muses, “is punishment enough.” 

The Gojo clan, in turn, admit to concealing their preservation of the late Satoru Gojo, as well as fraternizing with curse-users and attempting soul transfiguration on special-grade sorcerer Okkotsu Yuuta. Sakura is removed from her position as elder clan member; her hysterical screaming does not shake anybody in the room but Yuuta, who bows his head to look at the floor as she is dragged away by the judicial security.

“All your credits are transferable, by the way, should you choose to further your studies at a non-sorcerer institution,” Higuruma says once court is adjourned and the jury scatters. Judgeman wanders aimlessly above him like a passing thundercloud. “Jujutsu High converts all field-training - that is, your missions - to collegiate level sports experience. Where are you planning to go next, Inumaki?”

“I’m not sure,” he replies honestly, “I- I really didn’t think this part through.” 

“Maybe that would have been wise,” Higuruma responds smoothly, as if having expected that answer from him. “Seeing as how burning down the ancestral ground of a thousand year old Big Clan cannot be excused by the Japanese Government as military field work.” 

Inumaki knows he’s just trying to be as objective as possible, and maybe that should scare him more than it does. He simply shivers, feeling the consequences of his actions catching up to him in the present, ominous and leering over his shoulder. Higuruma clears his throat.

“Jujutsu High is working something out.” he says primly, clearing the podium of his work. The gavel on the desk shrinks into something minute, flying into his breast pocket. “You did save somebody’s life, after all.”

“Thank you,” Inumaki blurts out, and Higuruma smiles, toothy and genuine. 

“Oh, don’t thank me. Times are changing, as we’ve both experienced. I’ve learned through the Culling Games that one may prove to be a valuable asset to both worlds if one makes their moves wisely.” 

Kilgore is waiting for him at the station, as they’d arranged several days prior; suffice to say that they’ve exchanged contacts at this point, what with the mission matchups and friendship formed between them. 

“I thought it’d only be fair to show you the epic view after it’d been recovered,” Kilgore says as they head up the Ebino Highlands. The hiking trail takes them far above the treeline, to a misty avenue of mountains like shelves against shelves of azul blending into a faraway fog. It’s breathtakingly beautiful. The air begins to thin as they reach the peak and wind blows past Inumaki’s ears, reddening the tips of them. So vast is the landscape that he can hardly tell the distance from one mountain to another - simply layers of life crowded against the mist.

“I heard about what you did for your friend,” Kilgore adds. “A show of real bravery.” 

“I did it for myself, too.” 

“That’s good!” the older sorcerer laughs, clapping Inumaki on the back. “We’re so caught up in trying to save the world that nobody thinks we need saving, sometimes.” he says. “From the rot and the smell. From each other, caught up in that mad routine of kill or be killed.”

“Like wanting to be free from it is an immoral choice for the weak,” Kilgore says, looking at him. “Am I right?”

Inumaki has only ever known cursed energy his whole life. Known the restrictions of his birthright, and the challenge it posed when trying to be any more than a weapon. Erased the memory of his past, dredged it up again to remind him of the things he’d done, the things he could do with it. In truth, he’d known himself better as a sorcerer, because it was difficult to allow himself to be anything beyond that.

Kilgore doesn’t wait for Inumaki to answer as he takes a seat on a boulder overlooking the ledge of the cliffside. “There’s no more work for me in the Pools, and my agency is asking for me. I’ll be heading back to America in a week or two.” 

“Thank you for helping us.” 

“Well, I had my own selfish reasons for coming.” Kilgore smiles, tapping the empty spot beside him. Inumaki takes a seat just as the wind picks up, but Kilgore is sturdy and warm. “Japan is host to some of the most high-level curse threats in the world. It has some of the most powerful sorcerers too because of it. And now that I’ve experienced you guys at work, my reports make me sound like a fanboy.” 

“Reports?” Inumaki blinks.

“I was sent here to assist on the condition that my agency could study Jujutsu sorcery here and keep it on file back home.” Kilgore nods. He breathes in deeply, and Inumaki feels himself tense. “We’re impressed by what you accomplished, Inumaki, but from what I heard about your trial, you won’t be able to return to Jujutsu High. It must not be easy to overturn a ruling like that without losing some of your biggest fish.” 

“Works like that here.” 

“So you insinuated, when we first met.” 

Inumaki nods. “Change is slow.”  

“Tell me, Inumaki Toge.” Kilgore says, folding his hands as he now leans back to study him. “What are you planning on doing after you wrap up this term?”

“Not sure,” Inumaki huffs, stopped short of what to say. He runs a hand through his hair nervously. “All I was thinking about was saving a friend. I have some money saved up, that’s it.” he says quietly after a pause. 

“My agency is offering to let you continue your studies abroad,” Kilgore responds then, catching Inumaki completely by surprise. “To clear your name so you can study at my old school, or pursue a degree in another line of work if you want. I talked to some of the Jujutsu High staff about it - your lawyer, I think. Hopefully we’ll be able to work out a more official affiliation in the future but for now, offer’s open.”

His voice is steady, confident. He crosses his arms but his smile is warm and inviting, so warm that not even the chilly atmosphere can cool it down. Inumaki wonders if one day he’ll get to be like that: sure of himself and his place in the world. To go somewhere new. To be met by people that don’t completely understand him, but learn and thrive in it anyways. 

Yuuta had done it, when he went to Africa, and he’d come back almost completely changed. The new world made him confident in ways he hadn’t been before. It challenged his perception of the world. In some respects it made him better, before Shibuya tore down what he was mending. In a period of peace where Inumaki might be able to mend himself, he hopes he’ll be able to think less about the fear of losing everything and more about the wonder of starting over again. 

There were places beyond the cursed ones that were worth truly exploring, not just killing in. He was sick of killing. He was sick of feeling nothing but blood - chased instead, the feeling of whatever he’d begun to understand in the final moments of calling upon the core of his cursed energy.

You’re just running. His father asks, somewhere high up in the sky. Running from your birthright. Running from who you were meant to be.

“I don’t want to sever the bond I have with the cursed world,” Inumaki replies, moreso to him than to Kilgore. “I just want to find my place in it without it hurting me. If that means losing cursed energy then so be it; that doesn’t matter. Maybe it would matter more if I wanted to stay a sorcerer.”

“But,” he says. “I think all I’ve ever wanted was to be a person.”  

*

Spring season brings about weeks of torrential downpour: days of damp shoes and sticky air, little rivers pooling into the divotted asphalt of the Jujutsu High training grounds. Inumaki goes to support the second-years as they prepare for their third-year exams with Miguel, who agreed to take on a permanent position at the school at the behest of Yuuta, who found him second only to Gojo Satoru in Jujutsu arts. 

“He should be teaching, not me.” Miguel grumbled to that, through an exchange of middle-men (Inumaki, mostly, though Maki tried to help). “Yuuta is far more patient than I am with teenagers. He can attest to it.” 

“Just too busy with the board, and cleaning up the Gojo clan mess,” Maki replies with a shrug. Weaving through the corridors on a busy Monday morning makes it difficult to carry a conversation. Students flit by like hovering flies, pausing to glance briefly at her scars like they’re a trick of the light. 

“Without Limitless, he’ll have to be reassessed again. Prove himself worthy of the title.”

“Oh, he’ll prove himself.” Maki says with an expression that’s both a grimace and a laugh. “You can be sure of that.”

As the Higher Ups continue to move forward with their reassessments of the old, iron-clad clan laws, Yuuta makes his recovery slowly under Shoko’s careful guidance and Inumaki boxes up his school-things, some having been dusted to a corner of his room since the beginning of The Pools. 

It’s not much work on Inumaki’s part as opposed to Yuuta’s struggle with recovering, though it wouldn’t be amiss to say that learning to speak in full sentences keeps him busy. The Kyoto students drop in having heard about the trial, and Todo practically explodes with delight when Inumaki says his hellos. In some ways, it’s like pulling a prank. 

“It’s just a shame you cannot fight or spar with us anymore, Inumaki.” Todo tuts. 

“Is it, really?” Maki says, stepping forward between them. “When you can spar with me instead?” She bares her teeth in a curved grin, and Todo flexes his arms instinctively - they’re blasting through walls before anyone can stop them, and Inumaki laughs, despite being flung across the room caught in the crossfire of blows. 

“Forever is a hard thing to swallow,” Miwa says, taking a seat on the ground beside him as they watch. Her hand tightens around her spear - a new thing, practically a baby with only the first inklings of her cursed energy stored within it. “Forever means… you need to rely on something else to prove your worth.”

“Was it hard?” Inumaki asks her. “After your vow?”

“Only at first,” she nods, smiling distantly. “But I meant everything I said in that moment. If I were given the chance to do it over, I wouldn’t change a goddamn thing.” 

Maki leaps out of a cloud of smoke, her power like a spark of electricity coursing through her veins. Mid-air, she looks at him, and grins. 

“Me neither,” Inumaki says. 

As a distraction to the sore and ache of his bones, Yuuta takes to fostering a small garden at the windowsill of his bed; tragically killing Inumaki’s housewarming succulent on its eighth day home, though, that's just about how long Inumaki expected it would live under the guidance of a bed-ridden special-grade teenager. Yuuta’s frankly more upset about it than he should be, given the plethora of other priorities that were much more pertinent to his well-being. But that was how it was, with loved things. They always mattered more.

"I'm so sorry," Yuuta says as Inumaki transfers the succulent to another pot. He winces with each gentle trim of the leaves, the careful inspection, the hope. Inumaki has hope it will thrive. Not all that rot stays decaying. 

"Poetic." Yuuta responds to that. "You're always like that with plants."

"Not with anything else?”

“Can’t seem to remember,” Yuuta says, lip curling. “I only recall you annoying me, at least half the time.”

“Those are fighting words, Yuuta,” Inumaki hums, trimming away the succulent’s root rot. “And you’re not in a position to fight now, are you?” Yuuta groans, kicking his feet uselessly. He’s recovering fast with practice - Shoko explicitly told him to use his RCT like a needle and a thread, something Inumaki couldn’t comprehend but sounded like a chore from the way Yuuta reacted. 

“I’ve been thinking of proposing something to Jujutsu Headquarters once I’ve recovered,” Yuuta says to him after Inumaki rehomes the succulent in a new pot. “Do you remember last year, when we met that American sorcerer down in Sakurajima?” 

“Yeah, Kilgore?” 

“I’ve been messaging him lately, about… the differences between our system and his.” Yuuta says, fumbling around the desk drawer beside the bed for something. “And with the damage Shibuya caused, I think now’s a better time than ever to start.”

“Start what?” Inumaki says, putting down his watering can.

“The Sorcery Cultural Integration Act!” Yuuta says, flourishing his hand with dramatic flair. He pulls out a document - thick enough to feel its weight - arm stretched out for Inumaki to take it from him.

It’s heavy. Inumaki hefts it onto his open palm, flipping through it. Thorough, as he reads, a program that allows Japanese citizens without the ability to see curses to understand and identify them either through adopting cursed tools (see p12, Cursed Tool Aids) that enable them to see, or recognizing the common indicators of a present curse (E.G. smell, psychological dread)...

“It’s my first proposal to the board,” Yuuta says in a timid voice, like he's submitting an essay to Nanami and not a friend. “Mei Mei just wanted me out of her hair while she dealt with 'more important matters' and Kusakabe thought it could keep me busy while I recovered. Of course, I’d like to prove my worth being there. I had a lot of help from Kilgore and Shoko.” he laughs, tinny and nervous. “I accidentally called him sensei, too! He got so embarrassed, insisted that he wasn’t that old.”

“This is,” Inumaki starts, his throat dry as he reads, adding to this, cultural reform as a whole - for example black company work culture, school hierarchies, and psychology are given proper room in the Japanese political sphere [...] stronger push for mental health and reduction of toxic herd mentality behavior commonly seen in collectivist societies, “This is pretty good.”

“Oh, really?” Yuuta perks up, smiling. “I just think a lot of what he said made sense that day. If we change the public perception and understanding of what curses are, it lessens their impact. Reduces the number of curse incidents, also reduces the probability of higher-grade curses being manifested.” 

“Things that happened to me,” he says thoughtfully, playing with the ring on his finger. Rika’s ring. He’d put it back on after Gojo’s second death like it had never left his hand. “Happened to Maki, to you. The second-years. The kids who manifested their powers during the Culling Games and didn’t survive. This is for us. This is for our future.” 

“All this sitting around was good for your brain, huh.” Inumaki says, slapping him lightly across his blanketed lap with the papers. There must be something in the air, because his eyes are suddenly laced wet, and his next breath is drawn from him involuntarily. Yuuta laughs, not noticing, putting his draft manifesto back into a manila envelope.

“You must have heard from Kusakabe by now that I’ll be reassessed again,” he replies. “In light of what’s happened I have no excuse not to, even though it’s rare to have it happen so quickly.” 

“When’s the date?”

“A month’s time. I guess I should be thankful that our new board members happen to prioritise the future of Jujutsu Society and its sorcerers more than its traditions. Being reassessed as a special-grade doesn’t really have anything to do with politics anyways.” 

“Have you tried using your cursed energy?” Inumaki watches Yuuta raise his hand, in similar fashion to the way he did a few days ago when they’d met after the burning of the Gojo temples. He can’t call upon anything but the heavy swathe of cursed energy and the distinct smell that it carries fills the room. 

“No,” Yuuta says, stilted and quiet. “I don’t know if I’m ready for that, but it’s present and I can feel it. I have that comfort, at least. That it’s there for me.” 

Inumaki’s next words are a lump in his throat, graceless and unguarded. “I’m here for you,” he says. Yuuta looks up. There’s a sweetness in his smile laced with regret- a lot of regret, and guilt, and all the other things he likes to keep stored up inside that frail body of his. But then he says, “Thank you,” and he sounds strong as he does so. 

Inumaki watches him, as he realizes he’s done countless times. The fluid movement of his arm, the fading calluses on his palms as he turns his hand over. Yuuta’s laugh ebbs away, and Inumaki finds himself drawn to every noise until it’s gone and he’s bowed his head, looking up at Inumaki through dark lashes and thin lips.

“Last year I told you that I had to get away,” he says, quietly. “I didn’t understand who I was. And you asked to come with me, and I didn’t really get why, but it didn’t seem to matter.” 

“Yes,” Inumaki responds. Plays with Yuuta’s hand like a joke. Tries not to feel for his heartbeat - feels it anyways, pulsing fast and hard like he’s been running laps all day instead of sitting in bed writing proposals. 

“I don’t understand it.” Yuuta murmurs. Inumaki trails his hand down Yuuta’s shoulder. The air inside reflects the dampness of the apartment’s exterior; it’s bleak out there, and clouds gather clusters as the wind batters around a deluge of rain. Yuuta’s mouth parts, closes, and when he blinks again his eyes are darker than coals. “I don’t understand the way I feel about you.” 

Inumaki’s breath is heavy, weighted like a stone. He doesn’t dare take another.  

“I can’t help but wonder if it’s me.” Yuuta laughs. There’s a strain in his voice, when just earlier it had sounded so easy. He shakes his head. “I just- I can’t help this curse. It makes it so easy, so easy to just…”

If only Inumaki could hide behind his onigiri words now. He has no excuse, and Yuuta’s voice falters while his gaze pins him where he sits, a confession beating violently under his fingertips, wildly like a wardrum. He thinks back to a night with Yuuta’s body pressed up against his, his breath ragged against his cheek, fingers digging into the wallpaper as Inumaki looks up at him in the moonlight. He thinks of the rising and falling in his chest the next morning, of burning a temple to ashes, of losing a power that kept him alive in order to truly live.

“You don’t have to respond,” Yuuta says.

Inumaki looks away. “It’s hard to know what to say,” he replies. 

“I feel too strongly, don’t I?” Yuuta says. Like it’s effortless to state that fact. Like saying the sky is blue and the world is cursed, and Rika’s ring is sitting on the nightstand glimmering, glimmering between them. “That doesn’t make it insignificant, you know.” He’s confident when their eyes meet again, and this time Yuuta has his hand wrapped around his wrist, holding him there gently. “That doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

No, maybe not. But Inumaki certainly doesn’t think Yuuta’s love is simple - it’s the opposite. It’s complex, it fluctuates, it revolves around a single person. When the focus is on you, you’re the eye of the storm. And when you’re not?

He’s seen Yuuta look at him like that; he’s had that focus and that thrill. He’s also been caught in the vortex and not the eye, spun out of control where Yuuta’s holding love in the palm of his hand like it encompasses his entire world. At some point, it had.  

Yuuta’s love isn’t simple. Yuuta isn’t simple. And Inumaki won’t stand for taking the easy road if it makes it so much shorter than the long one.  

“Why’d you wake me, last year?” Yuuta whispers. Inumaki pries his hand off, holding it in his own instead. He tries to be gentle. He smooths a thumb over the back of it, reaches forward to cup Yuuta’s face so he’s balanced over his body on his bed, the manila envelope dipping towards the points of weight. Yuuta’s cheek leans into his palm as they press their foreheads together, and Inumaki breathes in, staying there, a weighted second between them. 

“For all the same reasons I’ve told you a thousand times,” Inumaki whispers quietly, pressing a hand to Yuuta’s heart. His pulse flutters under Inumaki’s palm. 

“It’s just that- I’m so fucked up, Toge I just can’t understand. Help me understand.” Yuuta’s breath rattles out of him like a gasp. He squeezes his eyes shut, gulps in like he’s missing air. “You saved me then, back then. What were you thinking, really, when you saw me down there dead?” 

Yuuta’s body moves as he draws away to stand up, as if trying to keep their contact for longer. But he can’t answer, try as he might, close as he is to the truth. Chasing the familiarity of belonging to someone, because he can’t bear the thought of being alone by himself.

“I wasn’t thinking when I saw you down there,” Inumaki answers simply at the door before he closes it. “I was just... feeling.”  

*

It only takes a few more days before Yuuta can stand, and he wastes little time in going back to his duties as board member and student. It’s the marvel of his body, working little miracles through him. Despite the full recovery Yuuta’s forehead remains scarred, and when Inumaki passes him by one day, hovering a hand to trace idly over his forehead while he’s sat down at the couch reading, Yuuta looks up through his hair:

“I don’t heal this one,” he says softly, as if he could read Inumaki’s mind. “It’s my reminder.” 

He’s much busier with the Higher Ups now, as the new school term ramps up and another slew of first-year applications from younger clans are received by the Jujutsu High administrator’s office. There are moments when Inumaki can hardly recognize him, when he eats animatedly, paces back and forth across the school yard, each time taking a new staff member with him. Finally gets out of that white jacket, and tries on a fashionable long-coat that suits his looming height much too well. 

Then, there’s the Yuuta he knows when they’re alone. The slouching one with an anxious disposition, whose started reading with tinted glasses because it hurts sometimes, like I’m seeing too much, like I’m seeing everything; who washes dishes to the tune of old citypop songs, and has taken a liking to the throw blanket with the frilly yellow edge. 

Who sometimes, when they’re eating silently across from each other at the dinner table, looks up and doesn’t look back down. Watching Inumaki, as Inumaki had always liked to watch him, his gaze full of soft and enigmatic wonder. 

“Have they seen your proposal yet?” Inumaki asks, hoping to curb the heat of Yuuta’s stare with a question. 

“No,” Yuuta responds hastily, digging into his mashed potato. “I’ve mentioned it to Kusakabe, though. We’ll be meeting with the Prime Minister of Japan in two weeks to give him a closing update on the Pools, though. I hope we can bring it up during a discussion, at least.”

“Yeah,” Inumaki nods. It’s much too out of his depth for him. 

“I’m trying not to be too optimistic about it,” Yuuta continues, gazing off to where the sink is. They’ve had a leaky tap for a few days now, and the rhythmic sound of dripping water is cozy. “Trying to think… realistically, you know? Good things don’t happen overnight. We’ll have to wait, and I don’t know for how long.”

“But I’ll be patient,” Yuuta says, watching Inumaki carefully. “For as long as it takes.” 

He'll give that to him: Yuuta is patient. He seems to want to make a point and Inumaki can tell, whether they’re visiting the school to run Inumaki’s final errands, or sparring with the first-year students trying to get Yuuta used to using his body again. There’s certainly something different about the way he holds himself; something that makes him appear almost wise.

“Wise?” Maki scoffs, but the hand she outstretches to Yuuta when he’s starfished on the ground is a kind one. “I think you mean weak, Toge.” and then, to Yuuta, “I thought I trained you better than this.”

The toll that the transfiguration took on him, even despite it being a mere few seconds, was enough to leave his conscience scattered and his mind offset from his body. There are moments when Yuuta will judge a distance to be lower than it is. He’ll stumble over his legs and put his hand to his belly, having begun to fill out with muscle, to grow strong; wince like he’s been bleeding there all along.

“Ah, Maki.” Yuuta says with a reminiscing sigh. “Those were the days, weren’t they?” 

“On the contrary, I prefer us now. I never lose,” she says with a smirk, though she adds with a genuine smile, “and our audience is a lot bigger than it used to be. Isn’t it?” 

She waves to the first-year students on the plastic bleachers who holler and cry her name, enamored by her show of physical prowess. Nobara, wielding an absurdly enormous flag with her face on it, unabashedly whistles her affections. 

“The day you burned it all down, Toge,” she says. “I thought about what that bat, Gojo Satoru, said about resetting the world.”

“He wanted to have allies that could stand alongside him. To be his equals.” Inumaki recalls.

“What do you think of that, Yuuta?” Maki says, one arm slung around his shoulder as they walk back to the cheering crowd. “Making all your sensei’s dreams come true?” 

Yuuta looks up at the sky, shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun. A bead of sweat rolls down his neck, his shoulders rolled back, his muscles red, aching from the fight. Inumaki never thought of him as beautiful. Inumaki never thought much of what he looked like at all, until he was breathing alive, in front of him, crying, screaming, yelling, laughing, becoming . Everything all at once.

Yuuta says with a glimmer in his eye, “His dreams are hardly comparable to mine.” 

By the time he’s made the decision to leave, everybody already knows - in an effort to not make it seem like some kind of sham, Kilgore sets up meetings with Gakuganji (their de facto principle, at this point), and Shoko, and the Higher Ups. Students gossip about exchange programs in the corridors whenever Inumaki stops by to visit Panda, and Yuuji isn’t subtle about it; Nobara pretends she doesn’t care; Maki’s already said her piece long before anyone else. Fushiguro is the party’s looming shadow, absorbing their sadness and their bittersweet goodbyes like a sponge.

“You’ll break his heart, you know. Or his core,” he says, as they watch Panda run, knocking into a surprised student on his way across campus ground. Maki chases after him yelling profanities, and Nobara’s worried glances makes it known to them that the cursed corpse isn’t taking it very well. “Do you really have to go?”

“I don’t have to do anything,” Inumaki says, looking at him. “But I want to.” 

Fushiguro nods, satisfied by his answer. 

“I haven’t gotten to tell you yet, senpai,” he says, hesitantly, “I’ll be officially recognized as the Zenin clan head next week.”

Inumaki turns to him, inhaling sharply. “That means-”

“I’m withdrawing from Jujutsu High.” Fushiguro says. “I can’t-” he shakes his head, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. When he breathes out again, his sigh is long and low, emptied from the pit of his stomach. “I don’t want to fight anymore.”

“If your path leads you out there, then follow it.” he continues. It’s the first time Inumaki’s ever seen him smile so wide, so content. “I’ll be here. And I’ll share everything I learn, of course. As long as you do the same.” 

“Well, since you’ll be part of the board soon,” Inumaki says, “I need someone to keep an eye on Yuuta. He’s alright now, but I know him too well to be content with just his word.”

“You don’t trust him?” 

“I trust him,” Inumaki looks down. “But I don’t think we understand enough about ourselves and about the world to really… to trust us . You’ll be good, won’t you?” he says, teasingly patting Fushiguro’s back. “Don’t hate him too much.”  

“It’s not that I… hate him,” Fushiguro halts, carefully choosing his words. “I respect him as a sorcerer. I just don’t understand him, as a friend.”

“It takes some getting used to.” Inumaki says. “Like me and you.” 

“Like us,” Fushiguro agrees, leaning against him slightly. The world grows dark to sunset, clouds rushing towards a holy point of light in the sky. The dayglow’s fast fading sends rays of sunlight through the gate of Jujutsu High, like a beckoning towards something new and bright. 

He meets Yuuta outside at a park bench in front of their apartment complex, like they’ve agreed to meet there since yesterday and it’s not merely happenstance that he knew Yuuta would be waiting for him, guilt weighing on him, putting his head in his hands and unable to meet Inumaki’s eyes. Yuuta is like that, sort of, and it makes him easy to predict sometimes. Like every decision in his life is a be-all end-all. Like every mistake he makes puts them all one step closer to doomsday. 

“Of course I ruined your career, I can’t stop thinking about how I’ve ruined your career. No- don’t- don’t look at me, not right now.” Yuuta babbles when he sees him. He looks like he’s been crying. It endears Inumaki, just a little, but he’d never tell anybody. 

“It’s not all bad.” Inumaki says, coming up to stand behind him, “I’d been meaning to try something new.” The note of his voice disappears to the whipping wind. Speaking is a quiet sort of joy; hearing himself without any repercussions, without having to choose his words in such a way that won’t tear himself and anything in his vicinity apart. He watches a couple boys across from them at the center of the public park end a game of kickball, chasing each other out of the field in echoey, crisp laughs. 

“This isn’t trivial, Toge-” Yuuta looks up angrily. “You have no cursed energy. No Heavenly Restriction either,” he gestures wildly to his armless sleeve, the puppet prosthetic most likely back in Shoko’s office. “You can’t use the puppet arm anymore so what are you going to do if you get attacked by something?”

“That’s rigid, traditional thinking, Yuuta.” Inumaki flicks his forehead. “Remember that dream you were chasing after?”

“That’s one thing to another, they’re not relevant.”

“I’ll get a normal prosthetic.”

“They cost, I’ll- look, even if I bought you one - and I will, don’t protest - it wouldn’t work like a puppet, you can’t protect yourself with it. What are you going to protect yourself with there, in America? Did you know people are allowed to carry guns in public?” 

“I’ve got Kilgore, he’ll get me used to it.” 

“I don’t trust him with your life.”

“Well you don’t have a choice. It’ll be fine, what’s this about, really?”

Yuuta whips his head round, nearly shouts as if unable to restrain himself saying, “I just don’t want to fall in love with a ghost again, alright! I don’t!”

Inumaki blinks. He stays where he’s standing as his heart races, a rabbit chased through fields of fiery auburn. Yuuta swallows, his face blooming blotches of crimson as he runs his hands over it.

“I think of all the things you’ve done for me,” Yuuta rasps, his voice wobbling through the grate of his fingers. “I think of all the time we’ve spent together that I took for granted because I was so caught up in trying to save something I already lost. Then I nearly lost myself.” He looks up, reaches to grasp Inumaki’s hand. “To think that now when I think I’ve begun to find my place in the world that I could lose you next.” 

“Do you remember that night?” Inumaki says suddenly.  

“Toge,” Yuuta snaps forcefully. 

“I do. Because it was stupid.” Inumaki says, leaning down to look at Yuuta properly. “But I don’t regret it. I hope you don’t regret publishing your proposal. I hope I don’t regret leaving Japan. New things make us better people, Yuuta. I want to see where it takes us. And whether or not it’ll,”

He pauses. Interlaces their fingers, and watches Yuuta’s hold on him tighten, his breath still. 

“Whether or not it’ll bring us back here.” he finishes. Yuuta exhales, shoulders falling. 

He’s looking away, to the ground, so Inumaki can’t tell quite what he’s feeling - but the tips of his ears are red and close to smoking. Inumaki’s fingers brush over them lightly, and Yuuta’s whole body trembles as he leans into his touch. He reaches up to pull Inumaki down till he’s lowering over the bench, their noses grazing, eyelashes soft and ticklish against his skin. 

“You’re brilliant. I want to kiss you,” he breathes softly, “I just don’t want to do it like we’re running out of time.” 

Iunmaki laughs, the sound low and warm like summertime.

“Then don’t,” he says.  

*

A week before he’s set to leave, Inumaki’s phone blows up in his face. Figuratively: Panda is like that with text, in part due to his clumsy paws, in part due to his sporadic style of messaging. They meet somewhere downtown, where a low hanging light meets a vert wall leading into a funbox, and it isn’t until Panda’s black cab comes up beside the skatepark does Inumaki realize where they are. 

“Last time we hung out here you were huge,” Inumaki says, picking him up gently. He sets Panda into the crook of his elbow, and looks to the side to avoid the crochet needle poking through the air. 

“Last time we hung out you were mute!” Panda barks. Inumaki laughs. One of the Jujutsu High staffers approaches with a skateboard, somewhat awkwardly laying it down and sliding it forwards. Inumaki can’t do too many tricks on it, but the wind is nice as he pushes and weaves through basic obstacles. Tries out the flatbar and nearly stumbles straight into the light pole; Panda jabs him with the tail of his crochet hook, hooting loudly. 

“Should we get out of here?” Inumaki shouts as he propels forward. Grabs the fence with a finger and swings them both out of the open door with the force of his shoulder, Windows yelling from behind them.

“Fuck yeah!” Panda yells, and it feels like old times. Like summers of yesteryear. 

That’s the thing: they’re not old, but Inumaki feels old, like he knows too much, like he’s seen too many things. His feet are agile but the wind is strong; it blows and Inumaki jerks away from an incoming lamppost, his left side too heavy with Panda weighing on it. He falls hard on his ass, rolling onto his stump to keep Panda out of danger’s way. 

“Can’t use the puppet arm anymore?” Panda asks, nudging his body under Inumaki’s right shoulder to push it upright. Inumaki groans, swings himself into a sitting position. It’s as much as he can do now. His right arm ghosts, and sometimes he’ll see it in his mind's eye when he tries to put weight on what isn’t there.

“Nah, no more cursed energy.” he replies. “That was fucking stupid, right? Giving it all away?” 

“Not if that’s what you wanted,” Panda says. Inumaki nods, huffing a laugh. 

He’s gathered his bearings. There’s grass under his feet, and the moon is a sliver of light in the sky, reflecting off a rickety old swing a few meters from where they fell. Panda doesn’t wait - he’s bounding over to the plastic seat, a perfect fit as he hauls Yarn Yaga onto it with him and gets to work like he never stopped. Inumaki stands, stumbling a little, before making his way to the swing. 

“Shove off.” He says, smiling, and picks up Panda by the neck fur. 

“I used to pick you up like this, with just my two fingers!” Panda grumbles as he settles into Inumaki’s lap. “Almost done. I just need to put my core in it.” 

“Your core?” Inumaki pauses, one hand hovering over Panda’s head. “What do you mean?”

“Well if I want it to live,” Panda blinks, looking up owlishly at him. Black, beady eyes glinting under a streetlamp’s hazy yellow glow. “It needs a puppet’s soul.”

Inumaki falters, his hand coming down on the wrought iron chain links, chilled by the night air. “You’re serious? But it knows how to move already.”

“That’s just a trick of cursed energy.” Panda says, resting his head back into Inumaki’s chest. He juggles Yarn Yaga on his knee, and Yarn Yaga wobbles to life again. “I could give it something real. If I gave it my heart, it’d speak and have opinions and learn how to play pranks and everything. It would be wonderful. It’d be whatever I wanted it to be.”

He could see it now, in his mind’s eye, a toy’s version of a man listening to a Panda. But that wouldn’t be the truth of the thing, not even half of it: because Inumaki knew what it was like to have been given a heart, to be whatever someone else wanted him to be, to have an all encompassing love be the vice, be the cage around him. And then it would always be that, it would always be a toy, and there would be a heart inside it but it would never beat the same as one that grew there on its own. 

So Inumaki replies, “Yes,” hugging him tightly in the swing, hugging him fiercely in a way that he feels he remembers his father might have done as a child. There was love in that faraway hug - there’s love in this one too, of a different sort: like a wave and not a vice washing over the both of them. Not a fixed statement, not an undeniable fact, but overwhelmingly uncertain. Inumaki supposes that it’s responsibility that he feels in the moment, and decisions that scare him. But he’s been here before; he knows what to choose.  

They sway a little more, moved by the wind and the gentle rocking of their bodies, and Panda nods but he can feel it too, Inumaki’s love and his fear and their admittance to the fact that everything’s a little bit wrong. One step away from a mourning song.

“But it wouldn’t be him, would it?” Inumaki says. 

Panda hums, a long and contemplative note that ends with his paws outstretched, abandoning the crochet needle, and Yarn Yaga’s feet settling gently to the mulchy ground below them. It takes a step forward and falls, like it had once done before. Despite being nearly as big as Panda is, Yarn Yaga’s body is dwarfed under the long shadow of Inumaki’s legs. It looks up, and Panda looks at it, before motioning it forward towards a small lake gated by a wooden fence. 

“And you wouldn’t be you,” Inumaki murmurs, his voice a low rasp. “I’d miss you very much. I’d have less to look forward to when I visit Tokyo.” 

“You’re my best friend, Toge. I’ll take your word for it.” Panda says, watching as Yarn Yaga gets distracted by a moving light in the distance. It disappears behind a bush, multiplies, a dozen neon lights blooming and circling above the still water. Yarn Yaga walks towards it, and Panda’s shoulders tense every time it stumbles over itself on the mulch and the pea sand. 

A piece of loose yarn snags onto a fallen twig nestled into the ground, Yarn Yaga blissfully ignorant to the unwinding of its body as it begins to run. Panda’s paw comes up to clutch Inumaki’s sleeve as they watch it unravel, browns and blacks and reds on the floor, in the grass. Over the fence, lit by a hazy green glow. 

Yarn Yaga doesn’t die. It was never alive. Panda cries about it anyways; how can something so little feel like so much?

“Good-bye,” he says. Yarn Yaga reaches for a firefly just as the last of the fabric unwinds, the tip-toe just a string defying gravity. The cursed energy within it dispels, and they watch the final trail of dotted pink dip into a sea of reflected stars. 

“Damn you, Toge.” he chuckles, wiping his eyes. “I’m going to be so damn lonely.” 

Inumaki shuts his eyes. He can still see the sky there. His chin touches the top of Panda’s head, and lowers his face into Panda’s fluffy, furrowed brow to kiss it. 

“Thank you,” he whispers, “Thank you for letting us go.” 

*

Inumaki leaves Yuuta’s apartment on the 3rd of May, at 6PM sharp on a night of lazy fireworks. He doesn’t mean to sound like he’s sneaking off, either - but Yuuta had known, ever since Inumaki did not renew his part of the lease, and it hadn’t gone unnoticed.

So it’s here now, fiddling with his luggage and his room key, two bags to his name and a one-way ticket to Princeton - New Jersey , that Yuuta walks out of his room to watch him go, sunglasses over his head and a slew of nervous habits on display. The manila envelope is under his arm, his keys dangling from his overturned pocket, white leather jacket slung over his shoulder meant to be casual. 

“Board meeting?” Inumaki motions to the documents. Yuuta nods. 

“You never actually told me where you were going,” he says after a while. Inumaki checks his watch. 

“Kilgore wants me to meet up with the Society of Sorcery,” Inumaki responds. “I’ve got an arrangement with him approved by Jujutsu High, as you know. He made me an offer that was hard to pass up… a chance at something new I want to take on.”

Yuuta watches him lift his leg, pulling at the heel tab of his shoe while he steadies himself on the counter. His first shoe pops in place, then the other, and when he’s done Yuuta moves to push him gently against the other side of the wall, one hand grabbing his shoulder and the other his waist. Inumaki lets him, a towering shadow that flinches when their eyes meet. 

Yuuta’s head bows, his nose brushed against the side of Inumaki’s cheek. He’s tall, taller now that he stands proudly and not inwardly ashamed of himself all the time. His brows are fuller, and the set of his shoulders stronger than Inumaki remembered. Somehow, he still looks as brittle as falling glass. 

Inumaki’s hand comes up to Yuuta’s neck. Holds him because he can. Smells sage and amber on his skin, a faint glow of cursed energy as it thickens and coils restlessly around them. It takes an immense amount of energy to concentrate on his thoughts and his words when they’re close like this. It seems as if the feeling takes hold for Yuuta too, who moves into every backstep Inumaki takes, the back and forth of an uncertain dance. 

“It’s not my place to keep you,” Yuuta says in a single, sharp breath. “All this time you’ve been doing for me what I could never do for you- I’ve been holding you back, and I won’t anymore, alright? It’s not my place to ask you to stay. I have my dreams, you have yours.”

He looks up, and his gaze is soft and reverent. “I know I love too easily. But trust me when I say you mean something to me, Toge. You do.”

“I should hope so,” Inumaki jokes, searching his eyes and then his lips. Yuuta smiles a little, his eyes blinking rapidly, and Inumaki smooths down the wrinkles on his dress shirt, adjusts his messy tie. He drops his hands down onto Yuuta’s shoulders, combing through his hair softly.

“Your heart can only belong to so many people before it breaks,” he murmurs carefully. “You’ve got to take care of yourself,” he continues, plucking a stray white hair from Yuuta’s head, “I can’t do it all for you.”

“Then don’t.” 

“You said it, lover boy. Not me.”  

“I want to see you again.” Yuuta’s hands shimmy up Inumaki’s sides. Into the bob of his hair, one thumb curling over cheek, to the sigil on the right side of his mouth. Despite all that the pain they’ve brought him, it’s moments like these that make Inumaki glad to have been able to keep them. 

“He said the program’s four years,” Inumaki hums. “But I’ll visit, in between.” 

“Four years,” Yuuta echoes.

“We may be different people in four years,” Inumaki tells him. “And I wouldn’t fault you for whatever happens in between.” 

Yuuta pauses, stricken at first by the notion, to think and take a moment to himself. And then he shakes his head, closing his eyes, leaning forward again. To press his forehead to Inumaki’s and breathe. He’s counting seconds, savoring time. 

“Other things may change,” he says at last, lowering his head to press a light kiss to Inumaki’s cheek. “I hope this won’t.” 

Inumaki kisses him. Feels the curious furl of his brow against his skin, the way Yuuta’s hands shimmy down his sides and up again. Above him, Yuuta’s breath hitches, nipping at his lower lip, and then leans. Presses the weight of his body against him, like he’d done that night, right here, where they’d been shouting and toiling away. 

Yuuta doesn’t know how to kiss. He’s anxious about it, he opens his mouth and Inumaki pulls him in by the neck, and his hand comes up to brace against the wall, curling over a hook hanging off it. He kisses Inumaki again and lowers his hands to Inumaki’s waist, rubs his palms over his shirt, the underside of it to touch his flesh, lifts him up ever so slightly to pin him against the wall. The booming echo of fireworks outside fills his chest with a flutter of warmth. How something so loud can be so quiet. How something so still can be so vivid. 

“Toge,” Yuuta whispers. His words bridge the gap between their mouths, and Inumaki looks up, and he falls in love. Perhaps again. Perhaps for the thousandth time. 

“Fuck. I love you,” so he swears in a single breath, their foreheads pressed together, letting it sink in slowly. “I can’t help it. I love you.”

“I love you,” Yuuta shuts his eyes, his voice breaking on a note he tries to hold. “I love you and, I’m going to let you go now. You have to go.” 

Inumaki’s cheek becomes wet with tears and he stills Yuuta’s face with a hand on his nape, letting him slide into the crook of his neck once he realizes Yuuta is crying. Slow hiccups send tremors through his body. His hands fist into the woolly jacket, an itchy thing. Inumaki’s hand comes up to stroke his back. A whistle of wind leaks through the gap in the glass door, the cold draft chilling their ankles.  

“I don’t know who I’ll become without them,” Yuuta whispers into his hair, half his words nestled in a quiet laugh. “Without Rika. Without Gojo. Without Copy, or Limitless. Without you. I’ll just be me.” 

Inumaki runs his fingers up and down his spine. The clock ticks. The day begins to end just as somewhere far away, on the other side of the world, wakes to a rising sun. His heart, a heart that is his own- it grows, and grows and grows.

He smiles. He says, “And isn’t that exciting?”

Chapter Text

The author's note 

So really, this isn't much of an update in regards to additional story content but since this story hasn't gained TOO much traction I think I'd like to document some of my thoughts on here because I consider it a personal achievement. Completing something so big can be a challenging process! 

I want to clarify that all the images posted here belong to me unless stated otherwise. I used procreate for all illustrations, and Milanote for the Timeline. Thank you very much for stopping by. 

A warning before you proceed: If you prefer using your imagination for the visualization of these characters - perfectly understandable, by the way - look no further! I will ruin your perceptions and I am sorry about that, but you have been warned!! Thank you yes, that's all. <3 

Story Timeline 

Initially, the story was short: I was going to hit the 10k mark and call it a day, I think, in the early stages of writing. It was going to have a very rudimentary, AO3-esque structure. The one I'm most familiar with, that moves a reader through various moments in time and explores the emotional intensity of particular moments. I think there's a lot of merit to that format - I use it all the time - but as I wrote and rewrote my 10k fix, it didn't really do anything for me. The impact was bland and confusing, there was too much I wanted to complain about. Maybe it just wasn't meant to be. 

Eventually I scripted the Timeline. It's my first, and your first will never be your best, but it was fun at the time to figure out where things were going, and how to connect one line of plot to the next. Where to use characters and things like that. I even pulled out Freitag's Pyramid in an attempt to hit the mark for all points in the story; initial spark, rising action, climax, etc..! That's how you know I was being really serious. (Freitag's Pyramid diagram was taken from the Dramatica website)

Art 1: Inumaki

I'm not much of a character designer, but I just couldn't imagine the JJK students in their really drab, funeral-esque uniforms post-canon. Black is the universally stylish choice, of course, but pops of color, and silhouetting the figure can go a long way. I certainly felt like there needed to be a change in how they looked like in this story- my story after all, I can do whatever I want.  

I thought to myself a lot about Inumaki's prosthetic. I think personally when reading the manga cursed energy was always rooted in the traditional, so I wanted a prosthetic that would feel like it belonged among their standard equipment. I've recently grown an appreciation for ball-jointed dolls and thought it would be the perfect fit for Inumaki. In my head he'd thread his cursed energy like a string through the holes in the prosthetic, letting it loosen and tighten to suit offensive or defensive needs. I'm sure there are ways to use it in tandem with momentum - and he's a very agile person. 

Had to throw in a Panda drawing too. I found it difficult to envision what Panda was making without actually drawing it, so now here he is, hanging out with Yarn Dad. Yuuta's there- and it's not explicitly stated in the story, but I do wonder about whether he would have actually adopted Gojo's eye-color. Unimportant and AU thinking of course, sometimes I do draw for fun. 

Art 2: Good Will Event

I really enjoyed writing the Good Will Event, and in particular my favorite moment is the special-grade face-off, which lasts about two lines, before Maki does the smart thing and lets Yuuta win while confirming to herself the fact that he's gone absolutely bonkers. One thing I've never really drawn before is three characters in a scene and - It's about as hard as I expected! Please enjoy the first and last time I'll ever draw Yuuji. He really did try his best - in a Yuuji-centric story, he'd come out on top for sure 😊

Art 3 & 4: Poster; Ending

Actually stumbled across a Star Wars poster while thinking about what to draw for this story. Symbolism is a big part of cool movie posters, and despite how little attention Rika gets in this story, her ring is still part of it in a way, the way Yuuta thinks about it, loses it, etc. Blue is Gojo's color, hence why the Good Will fight illustration is primarily blue toned, but I found red to be the primary color that I kept coming back to when I wrote the story, probably because fire is a big part of the story's climax. It didn't occur to me much but I realized in the end that Inumaki's story is also hidden in fire. It's got a very destructive, almost inescapable nature that I enjoy thinking about. How it blackens a forest to char, something like that. 

I debated a lot about who would be the B/W figure at the back for Inumaki's side of the illustration, because Panda is an equally important figure in Inumaki's life and possibly an even closer friend. But Maki is the one that has more pull in the story and ultimately she's the one that accompanies Inumaki into the Gojo Clan base, so she deserves that spot there. (Also yes, I forgot Yuuta's forehead scar. Call me unprofessional, it's true...) 

And we've got to have a happy ending illustration too. They're not wearing the same clothes as they are in the description, but Yuuta is wearing his fashionable long-coat. There's the monstera that he dropped in Chapter 4, thriving in the foyer. Manila envelope full of wonderful teenage dreams and hopes for a better future. Let him be idealistic, I'm sure good things will come to them ❤

Well, that's it really. Just thought it would be appropriate to put all the relevant art here too, incase anyone was interested. Thanks for your patience! I appreciate every one of you.