Chapter Text
After Greece, they go to Albania, Croatia, Hungary. Austria, Italy, France. Riko sees sights she never imagined, tries a hundred different foods, and every time Kenjaku spills blood to keep them alive, she sinks into their internal domain and curls up in the warmth offered there. Legs hugged to her chest, enveloped in a comforting darkness, like a fetus cradled in the womb.
And then, in Spain, Tsukumo finds her.
She’s eating breakfast at an outdoor café when the energy of the world shifts and an oppressive warmth presses in from all sides. She looks up, expecting to see the sun having emerged from behind the clouds.
Instead, Tsukumo is standing several meters away.
“Oh,” Riko says.
“Ugh,” Kenjaku complains.
Tsukumo waves, smiling widely. “Riko-chan!” she exclaims. She closes the remaining distance between them, throwing herself down into the empty chair at Riko’s table. “Long time no see; how have you been?”
Riko hesitates.
Kenjaku replies, “They let you leave Japan to look for us?”
Tsukumo barks out a laugh. “No, no. I didn’t tell anyone about you at all, actually! See, I don’t actually want any harm to come to your vessel here. I hate feeling them die.”
Kenjaku makes an expression of disgust. Riko takes back control of her face to ask, “What do you mean?”
“I told you the souls of the star plasma vessels have found a home in me,” Tsukumo reminds her. And, yes, that does sound familiar. But it was so long ago and it didn’t make much sense to Riko at the time. It still doesn’t make sense now, actually. If their souls are in Tsukumo, does that mean they don’t get to move onto the afterlife? Wouldn’t that suck?
Then again—
Isn’t that what a star plasma vessel is made for?
“So basically, I can feel when they die,” Tsukumo finishes with a vague gesture. “And it’s not fun. Especially since they’re usually about your age when it happens.”
Riko looks down at herself.
…How old is she, again?
“Okay,” she says hesitantly. She’s sort of confused about what’s going on, but she doesn’t even know where to begin to go about clearing things up. “Um, so…why are you here?” she tries.
“I came looking for you.”
“For me?” Riko points to herself. “Or for them?” she points to her forehead.
Tsukumo shrugs. “Both, I guess. You know, I’ve been doing some research these past couple months, because I thought the forehead stitches thing seemed a bit familiar. And, lo and behold, what did I find?” She leans forward, a grin splitting her face. “Kamo Noritoshi. The original, I mean.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea who that is,” Kenjaku responds carelessly.
“Really?” Tsukumo pulls out a notebook. “You were the one who told me I was a fool to write off legends.”
Something fiery, half-rage and half-fear, bubbles up inside of Riko. She knows it doesn’t belong to her, but it’s strange to feel a physical manifestation of Kenjaku’s emotions so strongly. They stretch a smile across her face. “So what if I used his body centuries ago? There’s nothing that can be done about it now.”
“Oh, I don’t care about punishing you or anything,” Tsukumo assures them. “That’s not my job, and you’re right—there’s no point now. What’s done is done. Actually, I’m rather intrigued by your little experiment! I’m something of a scientist myself, you know.”
“Experiment?” Riko asks.
“My children,” Kenjaku answers.
Right. Riko had been pointedly trying not to think about that. She learned how human babies are made in health class, so she really doesn’t want to think about how half-human half-curse babies are made, thank you very much. She’s tempted to sink into Kenjaku’s internal domain just so she won’t have to deal with this conversation, but she also doesn’t want to leave Kenjaku and Tsukumo alone.
“Exactly.” Tsukumo folds her hands together. “I’ve been studying cursed energy since I was a student, and you’ve been playing around with the possibilities ever since you were in Kamo Noritoshi’s body, so I was hoping the two of us could come to an understanding of sorts.”
“An understanding?”
“I’d like to run a few tests on you.”
Riko’s blood runs cold.
But Kenjaku is alight with excitement.
“Tests—?”
“It won’t hurt,” Tsukumo promises. “I’m just curious about how Riko-chan’s body is handling the influx of cursed energy now that she’s housing a sorcerer’s soul in with her own. It won’t involve much more than running some of my own cursed energy and reverse cursed technique through the body and seeing how it reacts.”
“How delightful!” Kenjaku exclaims.
“I don’t think—” Riko tries again, only for Kenjaku to tug on her consciousness, pulling her away from the front of her own body.
You may sleep through it, they offer. You will not feel a thing. And I have reversed cursed technique of my own to ensure you are not hurt, remember?
Riko’s shoulders slump. “Okay,” she agrees. Because Kenjaku clearly wants to see how this goes, and Riko sort of owes it to Kenjaku to allow them a little fun. They are the reason she’s alive, after all. And they’ve been doing so much for her these past couple months. Tsukumo promised it wouldn’t hurt, and Kenjaku promised it wouldn’t hurt, and it probably won’t even take long, so…
Riko can sleep through it if she needs to. She can curl up in Kenjaku’s internal domain and shut out the rest of the world and let Tsukumo poke and prod her body with cursed energy while she and Kenjaku discuss their findings. That would be fine.
“Wonderful!” Tsukumo claps. “What do you say we start now?”
—
Something is wrong.
Riko can’t quite place what it is, but the longer she follows Tsukumo, the more wrong she feels. Tsukumo hums as she walks, bleach-blonde ponytail swinging back and forth like a pendulum and Riko doesn’t know where they’re going, but she’s only been in this country for two days, so she supposes that’s to be expected.
Still…
Her fingertips are tingling. The hair on the back of her neck stands on end. She can’t shake the feeling that somehow, she’s being watched.
They weave through streets under the morning sun until the crowds have thinned and it’s just the two of them, and they’re no longer on the streets but trekking through woods. In a park, maybe? Riko wasn’t paying enough attention. Kenjaku is trying to get her to sleep. And it sounds so tempting, but she’s on high alert because of the off feeling in her chest, so she knows she won’t be able to fully look away from whatever happens.
She might regret it later.
She wonders if Kenjaku plans to kill Tsukumo.
She wonders, if that’s the plan, would they actually be able to win?
Kenjaku is strong, but Tsukumo is one of only three special grade sorcerers. And Gojo said no one can defeat a special grade apart from another special grade. So—
“Ah,” Kenjaku says, at the same moment Riko realizes what felt so strange.
She’s used to Kenjaku’s cursed energy, because it’s part of her now. And she’s used to Tsukumo’s cursed energy, because it’s the comforting warmth that held her when she was dead. Back in Japan, there was more cursed energy everywhere, so it was near-impossible to differentiate between sorcerers, except for in cases with the special grades. But here, in Europe, the only cursed energy Riko has encountered has been from Kenjaku and Tsukumo specifically.
The strange feeling was the presence of another sorcerer.
One who makes herself known with the quiet melody of, “Cursed technique: Solo Forbidden Area.” Paired with the rhythmic beat of a foot tapping against the ground, and then clapping, and then a hum, and then—
Tsukumo turns on Riko, cursed energy bubbling up in her hands. She reaches out, and it’s so hot and suffocating, and then Tsukumo touches her, and—
A flash of light.
Riko screams—
But.
It doesn’t hurt.
“Simple domain,” Yuki says, and darkness expands around them.
—
Riko finds herself sitting cross-legged on the ground, Tsukumo across from her, hands bound behind her back. There’s a low light that seems to be emitting from the walls surrounding them, illuminating Tsukumo’s solemn expression.
The binds encircling Riko’s wrists burn.
“What’s happening?” she asks, trying to press down the panic. The burn around her wrists is echoed in her chest, and her head, and the stitches mending her forehead. She tries to reach for Kenjaku, so they can hold her and run their fingers through her hair and promise everything will be okay, but they’ve gone deadly quiet. Like they can’t speak at all.
Like Riko is all alone.
Truly, completely, entirely alone.
She struggles against the binds. “What’s happening!?”
“I wanted to talk to you alone,” Tsukumo tells her. “I’ve used seals, so the spirit in your body can’t take control or even hear what we’re talking about. And I’m having a friend amplify their strength, since I couldn’t get the stronger binds from the school.”
“I don’t—” Riko chokes on her words. She hasn’t been this alone since she died, she hasn’t been this alone since ever. Because before she died, she had Kuroi. And before Kuroi, there was her birth mother. And after Kuroi, there was Kenjaku.
But in the moment in between—
Tsukumo reaches out, and Riko flinches on instinct. But Tsukumo doesn’t so much as pause, brushing Riko’s bangs out of her eyes, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I don’t want you to die. But I worry what that thing inside of you might do—both to you, and to the rest of the world.”
“They haven’t hurt me,” Riko argues. “They saved me!”
“They just wanted your body.”
“But…” Riko shakes her head. She knows, at the beginning, Kenjaku wasn’t expecting to have to share the body with Riko. It makes sense, though—Riko was dead. And Kenjaku has had a bunch of different bodies before, and none of them had souls that could co-exist with theirs. Riko can’t blame Kenjaku for expecting her body to be the same. But when they realized it wasn’t—
Weren’t they excited?
Haven’t they been kind?
Didn’t they open their arms and let Riko run into them? Didn’t they whisk her away from potential harm and allow her to see the world like she’d only ever dreamed of? Riko was meant to live a meagre thirteen years cooped up in her childhood home, never travelling further than a hundred kilometers away, and then spend the rest of eternity stuck in the Star Corridor with Tengen.
Kenjaku saved her from that.
Kenjaku showed her that there could be so much more.
Kenjaku was the first person to let her know that she can be selfish.
“Riko-chan,” Tsukumo says softly, “they are using you.”
“No!” She shakes her head violently. “No, no, they’re not! They’re all I have!”
“They—”
“You’re wrong!” She tries breaking through the binds again, to no avail. No matter how much she struggles or wriggles or writhes, she cannot free her hands, and she cannot free herself from this liminal space Tsukumo has locked the two of them in. “They’ve been so nice to me. They buy me whatever I want, and they take me wherever I want to go, and I’ve gotten to see so many cool things, and—”
“And it’s all just them biding their time,” Tsukumo interrupts. “They’ve been around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. They want you to feel comfortable, so they can take over your body completely.”
Riko scoffs. “They won’t be able to. I have just as much control over this body as they do. It’s mine.”
“If they can’t assume complete control, they are going to kill you.”
Ice shoots through Riko’s chest.
“No,” she argues, but it comes out sounding unsure. Kenjaku wouldn’t kill her. Kenjaku holds her like a mother. Kenjaku washes and braids her hair, and sings her to sleep, and lets her hide away in their womb when the world outside is too much to bear.
When the world outside—
When—
(Like cold water poured over Riko’s head.)
The world outside is too much to bear when Kenjaku kills someone with no remorse. And it is too much to bear when Riko is reminded of their children—their half-human half-curse experiments, their failures, that they were all too happy to let die when they did not turn out as anticipated.
But Kenjaku said…
Kenjaku said that Riko was better than any of their other children could have ever hoped to be. …Right? That has to mean something! Right?
RIGHT?
There is a burning sensation around Riko’s wrists, and in her chest and her stomach and her head and all over, shooting through her veins. Maybe it’s Kenjaku fighting back, or maybe it’s just her imagination, or maybe—
Does it matter?
Riko hangs her head. “What are you going to do to me?”
“Nothing.”
She blinks.
Surely that’s not—
“I will not force you into anything,” Tsukumo emphasizes. “I don’t believe in that shit. I walked away from my merger with Tengen because I didn’t want to be forced into it. And Geto-kun told me you were going to walk away from yours, too. Even a star plasma vessel should get a choice in their own life, and so, I am not going to drag you back to Tokyo. I am not going to do anything to you, and I am not going to make you do anything to yourself. I am going to give you a choice.”
Riko sniffs. “A choice?”
“The seals are going to fail soon,” Tsukumo warns, “and then the thing inside of you will fully be a part of you, with control over your body, just as they were before. But like you said—it’s your body. I believe you have more control than they do, and so, you get to decide what happens. You can continue on like this, if you truly believe that thing cares for you. Or you can return to Japan and let us exorcize it.”
A choice, Riko thinks. The only other time she got one of those, it was abruptly ripped away by a bullet to the skull. Why should she believe this time will be any different?
Tsukumo said she brought a friend. How can Riko be certain that friend doesn’t have a gun?
Tsukumo lied to Kenjaku. Why wouldn’t she lie to Riko too?
“You don’t have to choose now,” Tsukumo finishes. “I believe you can return to Japan on your own, should you make that decision for yourself.”
And with that, the binds around Riko’s wrists finally snap.
Fire rushes through her, filling her to the brim—belatedly, she realizes it is not fire, but rather Kenjaku’s cursed energy. It shatters the walls around them, thrusting them back into the light. A maniacal laugh bubbles up in Riko’s chest and explodes from her lips, and before she can realize what’s happening, Kenjaku is lunging towards Tsukumo.
Tsukumo dodges easily.
Riko wrestles back control.
“Don’t,” Tsukumo warns. “I didn’t hurt her, just as I promised.”
Kenjaku sneers. “You—”
“I’m not here to argue with you,” she interrupts. “I did not hurt Riko-chan, and I’m out of seals, so,” she shrugs. “I’m not forcing you to come back to Japan with me either. But don’t expect me to forget about you. You may not want me to hurt her, but I don’t take kindly to anyone who messes with my sisters either.”
Kenjaku doesn’t reply.
Tsukumo turns away. “Utahime-chan!” she calls out. “We can go now! Thanks for all your help!”
A disgruntled young woman steps into the clearing. Her hair is dark, partially tied up in the back with a ribbon, and she wears traditional Japanese clothing. “Is she coming with or what?”
“I don’t know!” Tsukumo exclaims. “But we are heading back to the hotel! So we can change and then hit the town! I didn’t bring you all the way here just for business.”
“I only wanted to come for business,” Utahime argues. But Tsukumo throws an arm around her and drags her away, raving about different bars she looked up online and wondering what sorts of souvenirs she can smuggle onto the plane in just her carry-on.
Riko stands in place, watching them go.
Riko stands in place, and—
a tear rolls down her cheek. She wipes it away, but not fast enough.
“Child, why are you crying?” Kenjaku asks, the deep concern in their voice like a double-edged sword. How can it be that they truly do care for Riko, when they are also bad for her? How can that be possible? How can that be fair?!
“I don’t know,” Riko says. Lies. She does know. She’s crying because she’s watching Tsukumo and Utahime walk away, and they’ve both lived long enough to graduate high school and they’re old enough to drink and they’re not alone because they have each other. And they’ll return to Japan, and they’ll have all the other sorcerers there as well.
Riko has Kenjaku, while she lives on borrowed time, in a body that should have been burnt to ash months ago. Riko hardly even has herself.
Riko has a choice, and both options will lead to her inevitable death, sooner rather than later.
She watches Tsukumo and Utahime until they disappear, and then she collapses to the ground, hugs her knees to her chest, and cries.
—
Riko packs her things.
She refuses to answer any of Kenjaku’s questions, despite the gentleness with which they ask. And when their tone turns harsh, demanding Riko stop and think things through, she can only remember Tsukumo’s warning.
She knows—she knows—that Kenjaku does care for her.
But she’s unsure if Kenjaku knows how to properly care for anyone at all. They care like a knife, like a bloodied bandage, like a mother to a child they never really wanted.
Then again, maybe Tsukumo doesn’t know how to properly care for anyone either. Maybe it’s just a side effect of being a sorcerer—being incapable of the soft sort of love.
But if no one else cares correctly, then it’s up to Riko herself to love in the way Kuroi loved her. And Kuroi loved her to the point of sacrifice.
So that is how Riko will love the world she was gifted one last chance to see.