Chapter Text
The gyudon goes marvelously, and before Yuuji even knows it clouds begin to drift across the iris of the sky, blocking it and rendering the open window useless save for the night breeze. He'd not given Geto the chance to bring anything related to their newfound friendship during the entire meal, instead pretending to be focused on the artistic values of meat on rice.
He can separate Kenjaku and Geto now. Easily. At least, he'd like to think as such.
But for some inane reason, he can't look at Geto without seeing Fushiguro, and he can't remember Fushiguro without seeing Geto, which is completely stupid because the only similiarity they have is black hair. And tall, but everyone in jujutsu is freakishly tall, so damn his perception of normality.
What would Fushiguro have done?
And what does Ishikuro Yuuji need to do?
He knows the answer; he does! — but making friends with Geto Suguru was not something he planned for, and certainly not something that can be ignored.
Yuuji rolls over, sheets cold but wrapped around his wormy, burrowing figure so much they've become oppressive as he tries valiantly to sleep.
Gojo never did show up to the dorm. Ieiri never came to the common area either, though he could have sworn he saw a head of dusty brown poke round the frame and disappear while waiting for the beef to simmer.
Yuuji wakes up, rolls over, and falls off the bed before realizing the carpet Gojo gave him isn't there, and there's no plush to cushion his head. An ache spreads through his forehead, beginning at the connecting point and slowly stabbing through the temple as he slowly gets to his feet, black dots dancing pirouettes in his eyes and body feeling weightless, feet hardly support for his wobbly legs.
He manages to stumble out the dorms, where the scent of something cooking in the kitchen soon lures him over. He's greeted by the sight of Geto already standing at the stove, puddles of clear slowly turning white as Geto scoops up one of the eggs and flips it over.
"Morning," Yuuji mumbles after the cold wash of knowing Geto and Kenjaku are two separate entities disapates.
"Ishikuro," Geto greets over the crackling of eggs as he flips the other one. "Morning."
"You, uh," Yuuji licks his lips; the air is warm and scented heavily with bacon, "didn't have to make breakfast. I could have cooked."
Geto opens a cabinet, humming something under his breath and scooping an egg in one clean motion, sliding it onto a blue-edged plate easily. "You were asleep, and I was exploring the kitchen anyways. It's fine. Just eat — we've got, like, twenty minutes before class starts."
The chair drags against the floor as he pulls it back, still half-asleep, drowsy, and dizzy with the heavy scent of food still thick in the air. Geto slides two plates on the table neatly, sitting beside Yuuji at the neatly-cut rectangular table, varnished oak neat and unmarred.
Through bits of fried egg, Yuuju says, "Ieiri-san's not 'ere?"
"Didn't see her at all," Geto mumbles, poking at his bacon, black-edged at slightly burnt with a wrinkled nose. "Probably hanging out with Gojo…burnt the bacon. Sorry, Ishikuro."
"It's no problem, Geto," Yuuji manages to get his name out without choking, doing a little mental fist-pump in victory. "It's enough that you even cooked breakfast for me," he adds, high on Cloud Nine and unwilling to fall off of it just yet.
Geto grins. "No problem."
"No problem," said Fushiguro, setting a plate of fruit in front of him.
Yuuji doesn't know this Yaga. This Yaga is not the one that died for Panda, this Yaga is not the one that believed in his student until the end, and most of all, this Yaga is not the one that looked him dead in the eye and asked him if he was ready to become a jujutsu sorcerer.
Even now, he doesn't know if the answer should have been yes.
Geto slides into the seat a little away from Yuuji, the closest to him in the classroom's arrangement. Behind them, Ieiri's relaxed, yawning in the sunlight painting wood glowing yellow like a basking cat.
Gojo's still not here.
Yaga makes a subdued little show of glancing around the classroom before his eyes wander over to Geto and Yuuji. "You haven't seen Gojo, I assume," he says dryly, flicking his eyes to the clock pointedly and back to them.
"Luckily," Geto mutters under his breath, just loud enough for Yuuji to catch it before saying more loudly, "He wasn't in the dorms. I thought he was with Ieiri-san."
"Hey, don't look at me," says Ieiri, holding her hands up in a surrender motion when Yaga turns to her. She shrugs. "Sure, Gojo was hanging around my room for a bit, but I thought he left to go to his room. No idea where he went."
"Ishikuro?" Yaga asks him in a pained voice.
Yuuji shrugs, following Ieiri's motion and stubbornly looking everywhere but Yaga's face. "There were boxes in a room, so I thought he'd just left them there for later."
Not that Gojo needs to have whatever're in those boxes. They're probably just truckloads of sweets, if sensei's younger counterpart is anything alike with the one he knows other than white hair, black covering eyes, and height.
Yaga sighs, settling down in his chair with a sad little thump before saying, resigned, "Take five minutes. If Gojo's still not here, we'll start."
Fifteen minutes later, Gojo's swaggering in through the door, plopping himself onto a chair, leering at Geto, and causing one more sigh from Yaga before the clock even hits eight thirty.
"Nice of you to join us, Gojo," Yaga says, shuffling some papers on his desk and pressing them down with a heavy, thick book on the corner of his desk. In the fifteen minutes it'd taken Gojo to get here, Geto'd given him five different ideas on dinner unintentionally, and Yuuji's determined to pay Geto back for breakfast, Ieiri'd cut in once or twice to ask about meals, and Yaga'd sighed four times. All in all, a very different dynamic from Fushiguro and Kugisaki, but really, what was he expecting?
Class with the mass terrorist of his time, his teacher, the doctor, and a dead man?
Technically, three dead men?
Gojo grumbles, "Not like it matters anyways. Not like any curse," a pointed stare sent Geto and Yuuji's way, "can harm me."
Yuuji can't help but be just a little reassured that Gojo's sense of self-pride has stayed the same, no matter the age, but it washes away when he remembers Shinjuku.
And what that pride led to.
Geto still looks miffed, like he wouldn't mind dumping a load of curses on Gojo, so Yuuji tries to bury the knotted feelings of hesitant resentment and ugliness beginning to coil in his gut and whispers, "Just ignore him, Geto."
His voice is strained, but it's the best he can do, because really, what can he do? Tell off his sensei and drag another can of worms into this trying to explain his morally dubious cursed technique? Let the chance to talk to Gojo, as much as he can be, slip by his fingers, when in the future, it's already gone?
It just reminds him of—
"Dog," says Gojo waspishly.
"Monkey," Geto retorts. His eyes flick over to Yuuji, blinking a violet apology before narrowing as they turn to Gojo.
Gojo's lips quirk into a cruel smile. "Curse," he says gleefully, like he'd been waiting for the chance to say it.
Geto's answer is interrupted by the screech of Yaga's chair on wood with varnish slowly peeling away and the teacher's projected voice announcing, "Do you want to do this assessment or not?"
All eyes turn to Yaga, each betraying a different emotion. Yuuji doesn't have a reason to mind any other person's reaction, actually, he should be avoiding their gaze, if anything, but he glances over to Geto just to see what he's feeling and—
There's fear.
His stomach contracts, not at the idea of being graded but rather the idea of going off to fight curses with this group and having to fight alongside them. Of fighting with someone other than Fushiguro and Kugisaki and everyone, where only his life was on the line and not the entire fucking future where one little mishap could be everything.
"Today?" a distant voice asks, and it takes him a moment to realize it's him.
"Today," Yaga confirms, as distant as his own voice and muffled to boot. Something rustles — the rats, the cockroaches, the curses — paper slams on the desk — blade, sliding down and cutting his skin — and falls on wood — his head — neatly. "As soon as your classmate decides to cooperate, Ishikuro."
Who is Ishikuro?
(Ishikuro is a dead man, and so is Itadori.)
He doesn't know.
"You hear that, Gojo?" asks Geto, strained and waspish. It brings him back, that voice, the one of his nightmares and the one that brought him here. "If you want to fight, you have to cooperate. Strongest or not, you're still in school."
"Don't be so high-and-mighty," spits Gojo. "You're in school too."
"I'm not the one acting like Koizumi Jun'ichiro himself," Geto snaps. "I don't see Ishikuro or Ieiri-san being like this, do you?"
"Again, no need to bring me into this," Ieiri calls out, sighing and trailing off at the end when she sees both Geto and Gojo ignore her. She catches Yuuji's attention as if to share her feelings, and Yuuji shrugs.
'You know what they're talking about?' he mouths, tuning out the other two's conversation as to focus on Ieiri's lips.
'No idea,' she says, or he hopes she's saying, because his lip-reading skills are hardly better than Okkotsu's, that is to say, horrible.
Perhaps it's better to go with simple questions for now. 'How was your night?'
Ieiri raises an eyebrow, so she must have gotten the question. She shrugs. 'Okay.'
He mimes bringing a spoon to his mouth. 'Ate?'
'Yeah.'
They've devolved to one-word answers when Geto brings up Ishikuro, and Yuuji swings his head round to hear their argument.
"Let's make a bet," Geto's saying, and Yuuji feels a little apprehensive considering his name was brought up just seconds before in the conversation, and Gojo's nodding along which is never a good sign in his experience.
He smiles nervously. "What're we talking about, exactly?"
Gojo ignores him. "Can you fight, Shoko?" he asks loudly, brash.
"I can smack curses with a clipboard and prescribe them pills, Gojo," she says dryly. "No, I can't fight. I'm working to be a doctor, for god's sake."
Gojo grins, all teeth. "That's fine," he says loudly, smug as anything as he looks at Geto sharply. "We'll see, then. Who can kill the most curses. You can be with Ishikuro, maybe you'll even get desperate enough to kill each other for points!"
Geto bristles at that, and Yuuji can see the same argument unfolding again, so he says—
"It's fine, Geto. We'll just go on the mission."
Geto whirls on him fiercely. "But Ishikuro—" he snaps, trying his best to reign in his voice and shove the demeanor saved for Gojo in a box, "do you not hear what he's saying?"
Yuuji shrugs. Geto is not Kenjaku, Shoko is not Ieiri, and Gojo is not Gojo Satoru, so perhaps Ishikuro Yuuji can slip up. "Yeah," he says, confused and irate but most of all indifferent to being called a curse, "but why don't we just go on the mission? I'm sure we can just exorcise curses like usual. It's not like Gojo's the one deciding our future."
This is the right answer, he reassures himself. To not react, to not lash out, to remind himself that he's here to be a ghost and not a part of their classroom. Ishikuro Yuuji is a ghost. The class of 2005 is only three people, and he is not one of them.
Geto still looks like he wouldn't mind siccing a curse on Gojo, but he gives a forceful nod and turns away from Gojo. Yaga notes this, stands up from his chair, and gives them the details on the mission amdst Gojo's scoffs and Geto's eye-rolls, and Yuuji breathes a sigh of relief when Yaga dismisses them.
Geto goes on ahead, trailed by Gojo out the door. When Yuuji makes a move to follow, Ieiri catches him at the door and elbows him.
He blinks. "Ieiri-san?"
Ieiri looks at him, brown eyes inquisitive and reminding him all too uncomfortably of an eye just a shade lighter than Kugisaki's as she says, "Ishikuro, do you really not care when Gojo calls you a curse?"
"No," he says truthfully.
"Why?" Ieiri asks, something like curiosity making up glass eyes, glass shattering to the ground when hand touches cheek. Did she live a good life? Will she? Will Yuuji mess this up? Will Kugisaki—
"'Cause, uh," he licks his lips, unwilling to say what he should, that he's worse than one, that he really wouldn't mind Gojo just killing him here and now, "I don't really know…?" he trails off, watching Ieiri's eyebrows furrow minutely.
"What do you know, then?" sighs Ieiri, trailing her fingers across the frame of the door and walking out. Yuuji glances one last time at Yaga and flees from the classroom with a dead man inside.
"Nothing," he says again, and isn't that the absolute truth.