Chapter Text
Satoru needed to see Shoko.
Satoru couldn’t see Shoko.
Why?
Because Satoru had a mission.
Satoru had had a mission for the last three months — six months — year — two years?
Anyway.
This mission was supposed to be a simple mission.
Hikarigaoka. Nerima Ward, close enough to the center of Tokyo not to be annoying, far enough away from all their old hang-out spots not to bring back memories. Over the course of the last few months, several seniors, between the ages of seventy-five and ninety, had been reported missing, never returning from afternoons usually spent at the park, Ichiji had informed him upon handing over the file he knew Satoru probably wouldn’t read. No remains ever found, nothing odd reported by any of the other hags there, who didn’t recall the missing ones among them at all, only remembered being hunched over Go boards the entire time.
“Are you sure this is even a curse?” Satoru had asked, the beginnings of a migraine throbbing at his upper cheeks, right below his eye sockets. He’d taken to wrapping himself with bandages since graduation, his old glasses too impractical, distracting, easily broken or lost in the endless string of missions that was now his life. Don’t get him wrong. He was the strongest. He liked missions. But there came a point when too many missions were too many fucking missions. “The demented geezers probably got lost on the way home. Tripped in a ditch or something.”
Satoru knew old people. His life was governed by old people. Old people were fucking stupid.
What had it been now, fifteen days, sixteen days since he’d last had more than an hour of sleep?
You can’t refresh your brain forever, Shoko had once told him, which was why Satoru needed to see Shoko.
Satoru would see Shoko.
Right after this mission.
Ichiji had winced at his crass words. “Well…Yaga-sensei thinks you’re the one best suited to this case, Senpai. The curse must be able to conceal itself, with your Six Eyes—” he’d started somewhat nervously, and Satoru had taken pity on the poor kid, agreeing to let him test out his new license by driving Satoru to the scene. It was the least he could do after as good as bullying him into letting sorcery go for a job that wouldn’t kill him on the third field trip.
It was more like Satoru was the only one available for the case at all, he thought as he waved Ichiji off, equally bright and forced.
Satoru had worked up a habit of keeping Infinity engaged at all times, now that the strain it put on his brain was no longer a problem, (“Yeah, right. Keep telling yourself that.” “Shut up, Shoko.”) so he wasn’t quite sure if it was cold, nor could he feel the breeze he saw snaking through the sad blades of dry grass that were about the only thing in the park still green at this time of year. His breath condensed in little puffs as he stepped soundlessly over the lawn, through the naked trees, and up to the raised concrete sidewalk the old hags used as tables.
Yaga was right about one thing. Satoru could tell the moment he stepped out of the car and bothered to start looking, there was a curse somewhere in this park, a decently strong one at that. Probably nothing Nanami couldn’t deal with, but Nanami would’ve had to go through the trouble of finding it first, which wouldn’t have been very efficient, and Nanami wanted to quit — he’d made that very clear to everyone — so he was only assigned minor cases until he graduated and left for good.
Something pulsed in Satoru’s cheekbones as he walked to the gathering of old guys, a pervasive smell of tobacco, sweat, newspaper, and a hint of ammonia for spice flaring in his nostrils. Despite being effectively blindfolded, he was hyper aware of every flap of skin hanging loosely around these grandpa’s necks and ears, of the little click each Go stone made as it was placed onto its board. Sounds and sights of frustration, elation, winning, losing, the only bit of excitement in these geezers’ lives, all concentrated around one source.
“Found you,” Satoru said, coming to a stop in front of one of the central tables. The old man on the other side looked normal enough, balding, ugly, toothless face, eyes practially sewn shut by cataracts — God, if Satoru had to choose between living long enough to become this or dragging Fushiguro Toji back from the depths of hell and letting him cleave the Inverted Spear of Heaven clean through his skull this time, he’d pick the latter any day of the week.
Not that Satoru was gonna look like this if he ever got old. He had the best genetics out there. He was Gojo Satoru.
The unwanted pulse, now spreading to his temples, reminded him he wasn't here to fuck around. There was an uneasiness in his chest, one that had been building for some five days now, that Satoru didn’t feel entirely comfortable with. He grabbed the non-sorcerer old man unknowingly playing with the curse by the back of his shirt and lifted him from his seat, taking it for himself. The board in front of him was about halfway full.
“You punk, we’re in the middle of a game! And what’s with the weird hair? Fucking deviant youngster punks who think they—” the normal geezer yelled, trying to get to Satoru, but freezing as Infinity rejected him.
“Gramps,” Satoru said lazily, tiredly, pulling up his bandages just enough to take a proper glance at the man, who might now be close to pissing himself, vision wildly shifting from Satoru to the curse opposite him like a broken metronome. Satoru didn't have to look to know the curse, having caught on to being exposed, had broken out of the humanoid form into a grotesque manifestation of flesh, bubbling, sewer green with eyes all over. Satoru glanced at the board again. “No offense, but you’re shit at this game.”
The old guy screamed, finally snapping out of his stupor to scramble away, tripping as a wet patch spread down his pants. The rest of the players followed suit, discovering strength they probably didn’t know they had left in their creaky bodies to leg it out of there. Satoru understood. The curse was about as big as the trees he passed on the way here, now, its power level had spiked, maybe to that of a first-grade, and it looked ridiculous as fuck, still sitting daintily on the broken chair opposite Satoru, its stubby, aged legs pathetic compared to its massive, bulging upper body.
Satoru sighed, his vision slightly blurry as his line of sight was completely overtaken by the ugly, stinky, annoying curse.
His fingers twitched. He raised his arms. Using Hollow Purple here was overkill to say the least, but Satoru’s head was starting to kill him like it hadn't since Fushiguro Toji — he’d been thinking about Toji a lot recently, huh, his birthdays always made him nostalgic — and he wanted this fight over before it could even start.
He breathed in, prepared to release the technique.
“Play with me—” the curse said, startling him with its garbled voice, somewhere between childlike and ancient, so much so that his concentration lapsed— because since when could grade one fucking curses speak? — he had no time to release Hollow Purple or react before the thing had put its massive hunks of hand together in a strange excuse for a hand sign. “Domain Expansion — Black White Stone Prison.”
Since when could grade one fucking curses expand domains?
Satoru was stuck there, quite literally unable to move, his cursed energy unreachable as if under lock and key. He could feel the stool, feel the grass, feel everything he didn't want to feel with Infinity off, as the domain transformed the park into a massive grid, darkening the sky.
“You’ve interrupted the game, so you must take over the game,” the curse said. Satoru flinched; he unironically flinched, as all the stones in front of him on the little board were mirrored on the big one in the form of massive, boulder-sized pieces plummeting from the sky. “You know how to play Go? Nineteen by nineteen grid.”
It’s simple enough, boy. You’re either black or white; you take turns placing stones on the intersections, aiming to control territory by surrounding empty points and blocking the liberties on your opponent’s stones. Whoever controls the most territory wins. Satoru could hear his grandfather’s voice ringing in his ears.
He never liked his grandfather.
“The rule of Ko is valid,” the curse rattled on. It must've been some truly ancient thing. This wasn't a modern domain. “Capturing stones gives you access to your cursed energy. The more you capture, the more you get. Once the game has ended, the loser is immobilised for a time period determined as ten seconds multiplied by the difference in points, during which the winner is free to use their accumulated cursed energy on the loser in any way they please.”
So was it because the idiot who was playing this game before him completely fucked it up that Satoru had next to no cursed energy at his fingertips now? No, that couldn't be it. It was less compared to what the curse had in its pot, but Satoru also had a few of his pieces captured. The game must have to start, then, for the rules to take effect. A glance at the grid, some of the intersections marred by bloodied splotches — a few of them grotesquely fresh, let Satoru imagine what the curse’s technique did with those big ass flying stones after its opponent lost.
If there was one thing old people loved to do, it was screw Gojo Satoru over.
“Ain’t this a bit unfair?” he said, his fuzzy brain already calculating ways to get out of this, planning his next moves. He should’ve levelled this thing the second he saw it, but he was off his game enough that he hesitated, and that hesitation got him stuck here.
What a pain.
“Those geezers you usually play against can’t even use their cursed energy, can they?” Nor did they have enough that getting access to it would actually help them.
“Life is unfair. Games mirror that,” the curse said easily. “Besides. All they have to do is win.”
Satoru scoffed. “What are you? A sorcerer?”
Six Eyes marked the thing as a curse, but curses this developed, borderline sentient, were rare, and the Six Eyes were also giving Satoru a migraine like he was still a little brat who couldn’t handle them, so he wasn’t sure which pair of eyes to trust right then.
“I was, once.”
Ah. A vengeful spirit, then.
“Too bitter to kick it?”
“Too bitter to kick it alone. You wouldn’t believe how easily people leave you behind when you’re no longer worth anything to them, when you’re too frail and brittle to keep up. Play with me, boy.”
The opposite was also true, but Satoru was too ticked off to get philosophical.
He felt the thrum of his cursed energy beneath his skin, simmering there, prevented from boiling over into his hands by this shitty domain. Said hands were shaking, slightly enough that Satoru and the Six Eyes were the only things capable of noticing it, but shaking nonetheless. His stomach was queasy. His head was splitting apart, or it felt like that at least. On another day, he would’ve been fascinated by this weird ass spirit and its weird ass power. Two or so years ago — maybe he would’ve found this fun.
Today?
“Sure,” Satoru said, his agreement releasing the binding that kept his body in place. As expected, he felt part of his cursed energy, thanks to the two stones the previous old man had captured for him, surge through his body. It was his turn, so he made a show of reaching for a piece, holding it up in the air, pretending to think about where he would place it. He dropped lower and lower, closer to the board, a distant part of him fascinated as the stone also manifested in the massive version of the board beside them, before flicking the stone away toward the curse, its counterpart doing the same, smashing into a tree.
Satoru proceeded to use the brief moment of confusion to grab the entire board and flick it towards the curse in such a way that, when the real stones mirrored the action, they aimed for it as well. The huge, lumbering things shot through the air. Smashing against the massive target that was the curse’s body, the violent sound was almost pleasant to Satoru’s ears.
Fuck, he was losing it.
“My opening move,” Satoru said, jumping to his feet before the domain’s conditions could get mad at him and punish him for fucking with the rules. The domain was truly fit for the host, because it had the reaction time of a two-hundred-year-old sack of bones. A bit blinded by his own fatigue (Ha! As if the Gojo Satoru was affected by such a thing!), his hand was in position on instinct, fingers bending easily into place. “I call it rage quitting. Heard of it?”
How many years before he stops being corny? He could hear Suguru say.
Shoko’s sigh of a response quite literally shook him.
Shut up, Suguru.
Had he mentioned he was losing it?
The curse roared, but before Satoru could be enchained again, he’d mumbled “Domain Expansion — Infinite Void” and they were only surrounded by a familiar nothing.
Even a smidge of his energy was more energy than the entirety of what this curse possessed. Eons more than what the normal grandpas this curse typically went up against possessed.
After all, Gojo Satoru was the strongest.
As Infinite Void dispelled, his opponent was reduced to nothing more than a splat on him and the ground. Satoru was too out of it to appreciate the best rendition of his domain yet, because Satoru’s knees buckled, enough so that an attentive human observer could have noticed it.
That was… not good.
Oh well, Satoru thought.
Even the strongest needed to see Shoko sometimes.
“I need to see Shoko,” that was about the only thing he remembered from the car ride back with Ichiji, covered in curse guts (seriously, who designed these things and why did they need blood and guts like humans?), stinking of death and newspaper.
He walked the halls of Jujutsu Tech like a man possessed — he could’ve navigated them with his head cut off, god — he wished someone would cut it off already, or maybe just the part having the migraine — stumbling into the nurse’s office Shoko practically lived in now and collapsing dramatically onto one of the beds.
“Shoko—” he whined when he heard the door snap open, dragging her name out. “You wouldn’t happen to—”
“Gojo-san—” decidedly not Shoko interrupted — Satoru was beat enough, and secure enough in letting his guard down inside the school, that he’d failed to notice the signature that had entered wasn’t Shoko before starting his whine fest.
Not good. Not good at all.
“I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t lay on the beds with blood all over you when there’s nothing wrong, again,” Nurse Ishimoda said, imediately relaxing upon seeing it was Satoru in the infirmary, which made sense, considering Satoru was the strongest, so Satoru usually only came to the infirmary to annoy Shoko into healing his paper cuts for no reason other than to be annoying, and probably wouldn’t need anyone to stuff his guts back into his stomach or regrow his arm.
Probably.
Satoru straightened up, too, pushing down his discomfort. Nurse Ishimoda wasn’t Shoko. She was also new here and hadn’t been around in Satoru’s first year when he regularly fried himself trying and failing to use Cursed Technique Reversal Red. He had a certain image to maintain.
“You of all people,” the nurse tsked under her breath, heading for the storage closet — likely to grab new sheets.
“Where’s Shoko?”
“Ieri-san is on leave.”
“Huh? What’s that?”
Nurse Ishimoda looked at him with a strange combination of confusion and pity nobody had directed his way before. Satoru didn’t know if he should be concerned or offended. “She requested a break. She’s been away for the last week.”
“Oh.” Satoru hadn’t noticed.
Probably because Satoru had been on a mission for what felt like the last month.
“When will she be back?”
“She has leave for two weeks, so on the seventeenth.”
It made sense. They hadn’t celebrated Satoru’s birthday like they usually did either. He’d been too busy to take her out for drinks, a tradition they’d kept up with for the rest of their school years despite Suguru fucking off and doing whatever Suguru was doing.
Fucking asshole.
Satoru’s head hurt.
“Where has she gone?”
“I’m not her mother, Gojo-san.” The nurse sighed, pushing him off the bed and onto the floor and stripping it with a swiftness. “I don’t know. But you’d best leave her alone. Since Nagai-Sensei has left for his sabbatical, she’s had to take over all the work here, on top of studying for the medical state exams. She doesn’t need—” The nurse gave him a look.
Satoru blew a raspberry, ignoring the pulsing now having an absolute rave across his nose bridge. “Nobody around here appreciates good fun anymore.”
“Gojo-san—”
“If Shoko’s gone, what happens if somebody does get hurt—”
“Gojo-san. Unless you are hurt, at this moment, I would ask you to loiter about elsewhere.” The bed was now newly made, and she’d even had the audacity to drop the soiled sheets on him, a clear indication to take them to the lavatory like he was some errand boy. “Are you hurt or not?” she asked, regarding him seriously for the first time since entering the room. Her voice wasn’t unkind.
But she wasn’t Shoko.
So Satoru allowed his lips to stretch into a smile that only irritated the pulse in his cheekbones and gave a ridiculous thumbs-up. “I am a-okay!” he declared, like saying it brightly enough would make it true, and gave his brain a refresh for good measure. It didn’t help.
The nurse smiled back.
“Then get out.”
“Nanamin—-”
Nanami shut the door in Satoru’s face. When Satoru teleported inside anyway, he found the window open and Nanami already gone.
That was a good thing. He didn’t get to see how Satoru had landed on his ass. From a two-meter teleportation distance.
Whew. That would’ve been embarrassing.
“Satoru.”
“What?” Satoru said, his mouth stuffed with a decadently sweet chocolate cake that must’ve been composed of ninety percent sugar. It tasted eerily similar to the cake he’d been surprised with on his sixteenth birthday, not that he was complaining. That cake had rocked.
“You can’t have the whole thing,” Suguru said. Shoko’s expression could only be described as a mix of mortification and disgust as Satoru absolutely demolished the cake, half of it already done and dusted.
“Bet.” He put another piece into his mouth. In its entirety. Suguru winced. Shoko had now settled for awe.
“Can you believe he’s a clan kid?” she said.
Suguru shook his head. “More likely raised by pigs,” he responded.
“Nah. Pigs are cleaner than that.”
“I’m right here,” Satoru’s words were muffled as he chewed.
Shoko regarded him flatly. “Eat with your mouth closed, piggy.”
“I deserve all the cake,” Satoru said, licking his fingers. “After all, I am the strong—”
Suguru threw a fork at him. Infinity easily captured it. Satoru grabbed it out of the air and left it on the table, beside the candles numbered twenty.
Huh.
Well, late was better than never.
He smiled.
“Fling utensils at me all you want, Su-gu-ru— Won’t change the fact you put your new life as Jujutsu Hitler on hold to throw this piggy a birthday party. And Shoko— deadpan all you want — we both know I’m your favorite.”
“Only when you pay for drinks.”
“If we staged his death, we could probably cash in the Gojo inheritance,” Suguru suggested. “Not like he has other friends. Or relatives. Or acquaintances who actually like him.”
“Dude, wait ‘till we’re sure we’re in the will before exposing us.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Satoru said. Regardless of what they claimed, it wouldn’t change the fact that they’d been here, one way or another, since the first day he set foot in Jujutsu Tech. They weren’t going anywhere. Not if Satoru had any say in it.
He took another bite of the cake, savoring the moment.
This was almost too good to be true.
“Not almost,” a familiar voice said, and Satoru looked down to see the blade of a familiar spear at his neck, easily slicing in as blood pooled in a line of beads. His fork clattered to the floor. A familiar arm reached from behind him to grab a forkful of his (HIS!) cake using the fork Suguru (Suguru!) had flung at Satoru, and eat it. All while Satoru sat there, frozen in his chair, unable to move or turn on Infinity or do anything.
“God,” Fushiguro Toji scowled, gagging, the Inverted Spear of Heaven Satoru had personally dusted to smithereens last year cutting deep enough to hit his windpipe, again, as blood gushed out all over the table. Satoru couldn’t see Suguru and Shoko anymore. Six Eyes couldn’t sense them either. They were gone. As for Toji — Six Eyes has never been able to sense Toji, so that tracked. “Not even my three-year-old would willingly eat this.”
“Megumi is six,” Satoru thought he tried to say, but the only thing that came out was a winded, wet gurgle as he tasted blood, a lot of it, on his tongue.
The Inverted Spear of Heaven dug, and dug and dug, cut and cut and cut endlessly, Satoru could feel every millimeter, the blade sharp yet dull, and well, he had wished for Toji earlier, had he not? You had to be careful what you wished for — in their world—
“The strongest?” Toji said lazily, like he was in the process of squashing a bug. “Don’t make me laugh.”
Satoru choked, his vision coming and going, his inhales ending up nowhere. He’d felt this before, he’d felt worse even, but as long as the stupid Stick of Inverted Fuckery stayed attached to his body, he had zero access to his cursed energy and not in the badass heavenly restricted way, in the terrifingly human way.
“The only thing you are—” Toji continued, as Satoru’s gaze finally blackened for good, his heart pounded in his chest, and his head hurt like it was being run through a shredder. “— is pathetic.”
Satoru hit the ground with a thud, gasping, raking his hands along his neck to make sure it was, in fact, still intact, and ripping the bandages away from his face, the sensory deprivation somehow too much. He felt sticky and sweaty, though he had made sure to shower after exorcising that curse in Hikarigaoka because a change of clothes wouldn’t rid his hair and skin of the stink. Worst of all, his head hurt like it had been decapitated, despite it being, unfortunately, still rather firmly attached.
“You’re pathetic.” Satoru flinched and for a moment, baby Toji was Toji and…
Satoru forced himself to take a deep breath.
Megumi was six.
Megumi was a kid.
Megumi didn’t even remember what Toji looked like. What his name was.
And Gojo Satoru? The strongest? The honored one?
Gojo Satoru had just come a hair’s breadth away from hitting a six-year-old child.
Holy shit.
He really needed to see Shoko.
Thankfully, said six-year-old seemed to lack the self-preservation instinct to be scared, cower, or even notice Satoru’s momentary lapse. Small mercies. He didn’t think he would be able to forgive himself if Megumi suddenly started being afraid of him.
“Megumi, don’t say such things, it’s rude!” Tsumiki dragged her brother by the back of his long-armed t-shirt. He didn’t bother to stand, all too content to let her do the manhandling. His lips formed a flat line, his eyes the suspicious, disregarding gaze Satoru was by now familiar with. There was something comforting about it.
Haha. Gojo Satoru was going insane.
“Can’t you see he’s tired? Let Gojo-san sleep. And apologise,” Tsumiki ‘whispered’ to him, utterly failing at being subtle.
Megumi humphed, finally fighting against Tsumiki’s grip when she tried to force him to bow his head. “Nuh-uh. He wasn’t even sleeping.”
“He was clearly—”
Megumi shook his head, jutted out his little chin. “Faking it. His eyes were wide open. I looked under his blindfold—”
And Satoru hadn’t even noticed? Hadn’t even felt it? What was that from before then, if not a nightmare? Some kind of hallucination? The after effects of contact with a curse?
Of all the weeks for Shoko to go on leave.
“Megumi—!”
“You naughty little sh— kid—” Satoru said all teasingly, getting his wits about him, finally scanning his surroundings and trying to at least look normal before Tsumiki caught on too. He was in the Fushiguro house, the little apartment he’d moved the siblings into after the arrangement he’d made for funding with the school and the Jujutsu Society. Satoru had still been living in the dorms full-time, back then, and if he was honest, even if he had had his own apartment, he wasn’t sure either party would’ve loved the reality of cohabitation.
Satoru was rarely ever ‘home’ as it was, still mostly splitting his time between missions and the school, the apartment he’d inherited and not bothered to swap out far too massive for two kids to live in alone — it was meant for a whole entourage of cooks and cleaners and managers and other snobby clan shit Satoru had no time for or interest in — and the kids hadn’t wanted to move too far from their old neighbourhood and be forced to change school, hence house Fushiguro.
The fact that no one in his circle had objected to the decision when Satoru had announced a six and eight-year-old were better off living alone than with him had had him seriously questioning his competence as an adult, but it was easier for everyone, this way. He still dropped by sometimes, mostly to make sure they hadn’t been killed or kidnapped, dump souvenirs at their doorstep, or take Megumi on a one off excursion as an excuse to check on how his cursed technique was coming along.
“That’s no way to treat your favorite—”
“You’re not my favorite anything,” Megumi snapped immediately. “I dislike you.”
“Ouchie, Megumi-chan. So harsh for a teeny tiny baby—”
“Don’t call me that. Get out of our house,” Megumi wasn’t pulling any punches today, struggling as his sister once again ordered him to shut up. “No, ‘Miki, he can’t just— just— poof his way in here and take our couch unannounced, any time he wants! Pretend to sleep like a creep. What is he even doing here?” Megumi turned to Satoru. “What are you even doing here?”
Wasn’t that a good question.
Last Satoru recalled, he’d exorcised that weird vengeful spirit in the morning, failed to find Shoko at Jujutsu Tech after, gotten the door slammed in his face by Nanami, taken a shower, went to Yaga for a new mission instead of sitting there worthlessly and gotten told there were none for now, which was almost more absurd than all the absurd things that had been happening thus far and then… and then…
The Fushiguro living room had windows. It wasn’t difficult to tell it was dark out.
So, for the entire afternoon, Satoru had done… something, and that something had somehow ended with him on the Fushiguro’s couch.
Right. Okay.
“Can’t I pay my favorite kids a visit?” he said lamely, moving into a cross-legged sitting position and smiling, hoping to glean more information from their reactions. “I’m wide awake now!”
“How many kids do you know you creep—”
Tsumiki stepped on Megumi’s foot, grinning warmly at Satoru.
“We were just making dinner when you showed—”
“Barged—”
“—up, Gojo-san. It’s done now. You can gladly have a plate, if curry is okay.”
“This is stupid—” Megumi muttered, turning his head away.
“You’re too mean,” Tsumiki scolded.
“You’re too nice,” Megumi fired back.
“We haven’t seen him in months!”
“Exactly.”
Satoru winced.
In his defense, he had made it abundently clear his relationship with the siblings would be strictly that of a benefactor and, if he committed to his vague dreams of being a teacher in the future, Megumi’s teacher. He wasn’t trying to be their dad. He wasn’t trying to be their brother, even. That was unrealistic, considering who and what Satoru was.
All three of them knew that. All three of them agreed to that. It was best for everyone.
So why did Satoru’s chest hurt?
Probably for the same reason your head feels like it’s falling off. You’re cursed, idiot. There’s something seriously, deeply, atrociously wrong with y—
“I’d love dinner, Miki-chan—”
He couldn’t remember the last time he ate, just hoped it hadn’t been close to the last time he’d slept. Eh. His reverse-cursed technique could keep his body nourished with cursed energy. It was fine. Probably.
But the curry smelled good now that Satoru bothered to notice it, and it wasn’t like there was anything else he could do, considering Shoko was on this ‘leave’, Nanami hated his guts, and Yaga had no work for him. Food sounded good. Nice, even. Maybe it would help cut down this ravenous headache.
“Don’t call her that—”
“Great. Come sit down. Megumi will bring an extra bowl.”
“Megumi will not—”
Megumi ended up bringing him the extra bowl.
They really do look so alike, Satoru thought as Megumi shoved spoonfuls of piping hot curry into his mouth. Well, Toji would never bring me an extra bowl.
Satoru glanced at Tsumiki as he played with his own food, swallowing when she glared at him in disappointment.
Tsumiki could bully even Toji into anything.
The food was good, though he’d learned to recognise the taste of curry made with those cheap storebought cubes after years of being free from his clan’s shackles. It was the best stuff he’d had in weeks, or maybe the only stuff. His stomach and chest had stopped hurting with sharp pangs, and even his migraine had quieted down to a subtle thrum that was easily ignorable.
“So, Gojo-san—” Tsumiki started, when the background noise of the TV Satoru had insisted they needed back when they’d first moved in stopped being enough to fill the awkward silence. “Why do you look like—”
“—shit,” Megumi filled in, huffing as Tsumiki demanded to know where he’d learned that bad bad word.
“You wound me so, Gumi Gumi— Even this handsome face can get a bit beat up sometimes. It’s part of the charm—”
“Gojo-san,” Tsumiki interrupted. “Forgive my brother for his language, but you do look… tired.”
“Adults have to do this pesky thing called work, Miki-chan. That means—”
“We know what work is,” Megumi snapped.
“Have you been very busy at work, lately? Is that why you haven’t visited?” Tsumiki asked.
“I’m always busy at work,” Satoru said, beating around the bush. “It’s been busier lately,” he admitted.
“You should go on leave, Gojo-san,” Tsumiki said, and Satoru was a little startled by the laugh that snuck out of him.
Haibara had left life. Suguru left their side. Nanami was leaving Jujutsu altogether. Shoko was ‘on leave’. Was leaving the latest trend or what? Was this some kind of cosmic joke only Satoru wasn’t privy to? What was so cool about leave, huh?
“No can do. I’m a very important person, you see. V-I-P!” With Suguru causing problems instead of solving them and Tsukumo Yuki off god knew where doing god knew what, Satoru was the only special grade sorcerer available. In the high season, exorcising two to three curses that would normally require a team of several first-grade sorcerers was considered a slow day for him. Five was average. On the first of December, he’d hit a record of ten. The closer they got to Christmas and the New Year, the worse it got. Christmas in particular was a pain in the ass. Satoru hoped whichever genius had thought to market it as a love-themed holiday in Japan had ended up in the depths of hell. It turned out love was capable of producing some seriously nasty curses.
That made it especially weird that Yaga had claimed to have no new missions for him.
Maybe because you look so shit, he doesn’t think you can handle them.
He hated how plausible that was. Yaga was going easy on him, on the Gojo Satoru, smack in the middle of high curse season.
This was why leave was for pussies.
Look what was happening the second Shoko took it.
“—Gojo-san—?”
“As I was saying, Miki, I’m too important to jump ship, especially now.”
“Ship? What happens if you jump ship?”
“It sinks,” he said brightly, though the disgusted expression bleeding in even through Megumi’s expert poker face indicated to Satoru he wasn’t doing a good job at playing it up for laughs.
“That’s too bad, Gojo-san,” Tsumiki said with an innocence only an eight-year-old normal could muster. “I’m glad you found a bit of time for us in all that. Megumi got another doggy, did he tell you?”
“His name is Shiro,” Megumi said, ducking his head. “He’s white.”
For the rest of dinner, Satoru almost managed to convince himself that everything was fine.
He was about to leave, in the process of saying goodbye to them on house Fushiguro’s doorstep, when his vision whited out for the tiniest split second and he had to stabilise himself against the doorframe. It was a minute slip-up, so negligible Tsumiki didn’t even notice, but Megumi’s little eyes narrowed, and he regarded Satoru like Satoru was the idiot six-year-old.
“Idiot,” Megumi said, slamming the door in his face.
That was one way to tell Satoru to see Shoko.
Satoru tried to call her as he took public transport to her apartment, this small, beat-up up old thing in Nakano that put Shoko easy commuting distance from the Medical University without breaking the bank. He was riding the train instead of teleporting for reasons that had nothing to do with his fear of pulverising himself by accident, nothing, and Shoko not picking up didn’t worry him, after all, she had a bad habit of regularly declining his calls, or hanging up the second he started speaking.
The automatic message announcing the person he was calling may have turned off their phone, did make him slightly suspicious, but, well, it was late enough. Shoko was probably celebrating her holiday by drinking herself half to death — not even noticing her phone had died first wasn’t out of character.
He reached her front door. Nothing was out of place. It was about as dingy as Satoru remembered. He knocked a few times. Rang the doorbell. Sing-songed Shoko’s name. The Six Eyes weren’t recognising any significant signatures inside the house, never mind Shoko’s familiar, rounded energy, but Satoru attributed that to how crappily they were working in general.
When ten minutes of trying yielded no result and Satoru started to get fed up, he said fuck it and risked teleporting inside. He didn’t pulverise himself, but he didn’t find Shoko either.
The apartment was covered in a layer of undisturbed dust. It looked, felt, and smelled like nobody had been inside in a while.
On his way back to Jujutsu Tech, Satoru thought long and hard about where Shoko could’ve possibly gone. A holiday abroad? A two-week-long pub crawl? Passed out in some banged-up Izakaya bathroom?
“She told me she was visiting her parents,” Utahime’s voice, groggy and sleep-addled (of course, she was in bed by nine), was tinny through the phone speakers. That was all the info Satoru got before Utahime hung up on him.
Shoko had parents?
“You both need a break, Satoru,” Yaga told him when Satoru barged into his office for the second time that day, or night, shuffling the steadily growing pile of pending missions under the school’s housekeeping records like Satoru wouldn’t notice. “You’re not okay.”
“Which is why I need to see Shoko,” Satoru pointed out in a rare flash of vulnerability.
Yaga had little choice but to give him the only address of Shoko’s parents he had.
2-12 Sakuragi-chō, Fukushima-shi, Fukushima-ken, 960-8134
A train ride later.
Nothing wrong with the address. Nothing wrong with the house either from afar, your standard suburban family home in your standard suburban family neighborhood. It was snowing, fresh layers of the stuff piling onto the previous layers already covering the sidewalks. The air was cold, almost stagnant. It was eerily quiet, even the few evening sounds of the neighborhood muffled.
There were no lights turned on in Shoko’s family house, no footsteps disturbing the snow covering the entryway. The mailbox was full, the latest letters so forcefully stuffed in there they didn’t allow the lid to properly close.
Satoru didn’t ring the doorbell.
There was no point.
Not when the second he’d reached the front gates, his Six Eyes had absolutely lost it, insisting something was very, very, very wrong.
This house was as empty of people as Shoko’s apartment, but it had — at the very least — more recent signs of life. Shoes lined up in the Genkan, a pair Satoru recognised as Shoko’s included. Food in the kitchen. The TV turned on, forgotten. Residuals everywhere. Shoko’s familiar signature stood out, followed by much weaker signatures that must’ve belonged to her parents, for how deeply saturated the house was in them. Under that, a dozen other residuals, incredibly faint, almost indistinguishable, likely belonging to any normals who’d come to Shoko’s parents for a visit.
Satoru was unsettled as he weeded through every room, finding each emptier than the last, and yet lived in at the same time, like the people who’d been inhabiting them had simply ceased to exist quietly one morning. “Shoko—” he called out, the cold making his shivering worse. “You know I hate horror movies.”
Silence was the only response.
Desperate and more than a little freaked out, at this point, Satoru tried his best to focus, get his breathing in order, and let his Six Eyes glean a little more information. He took his bandages off, bearing the overstimulation as the residuals instantly lit up five times brighter.
A particular extra signature, one that didn’t belong to Shoko’s family, stood out a bit more for how… slimy it felt, but Satoru attributed it to nothing more than a particularly unwashed normal, instead distracted by the strengthened signatures from Shoko’s parents. On autopilot, he followed the strongest, freshest trail, leading him to the back garden, which was effectively an undisturbed sheet of snow. After going on a bit of a circular walk, the old residuals meshing with the new ones confusing him, he came to a stop bang in the center, his Six Eyes pulsing like a metal detector sweeping over a buried bomb.
Here, the Six Eyes insisted. They’re right here.
These residuals were weak, weaker than they’d been in the living room, but there was something off about them.
Satoru frowned. The only place here they could be was down.
Using weak blasts of cursed energy, he gently burrowed through the snow, grass, and dirt of the garden. White mixed with green mixed with brown mixed with red — did Fukushima have reddish dirt or something? Was this a special kind of soil? Satoru would need to ask Shoko— and oh, he was pretty sure that looked like an elbow.
A decidedly human elbow.
Another split second of his vision flashed white.
Fuck.
It took him about two minutes to fully dig up the remains of Shoko’s parents, who looked to have been dead for at least two or three days, frozen solid in this cold, skin sallow blue, throats slit so expertly the wound was reduced to a thin line.
It’s a pretty clever plan, hiding them in their own back garden, Satoru thought, mentally far away from his own body, which was sitting next to them as snow continued to fall, covering them but stopping and melting around Infinity.
Whoever had done this had to be familiar with how cursed energy residuals worked. Dead bodies rapidly lost their residuals, which tended to leak out and spread, especially if the person never had much energy to begin with, like most normals. In a matter of a few days, the bodies would be indistinguishable from every other inanimate object in the house carrying residuals from years of proximity and use. They were buried pretty deep, and the cold had prevented decomposition, leading to no nasty smells. Had he arrived even a day or two later, had they been any other people but Shoko’s parents steeped in Shoko’s familiar energy, they would’ve been undetectable, Six Eyes spazzing out or not.
So Shoko did have parents, huh?
The woman had Shoko’s exact face, down to the mole under her eye. It was like seeing a vampiric Shoko twenty years from now.
Dead.
Satoru teleported into Shoko’s bathroom to puke.