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Bad things tended to happen when Gojo summoned his six students all at once.
Maki narrowed her eyes at their teacher; her glasses lenses were all that stood between a look that could kill and its intended target. “You called us all here for ‘special training’?” she asked, slowly emphasizing the last two words of her question.
“Correct! I expected nothing less from one of my top students!” Gojo cheered, clapping his hands and throwing Maki a thumbs-up.
Kugisaki crossed her arms as she leaned forward, examining the miscellaneous gardening tools strewn across the picnic blanket laid before Gojo’s six students. “If we’re here for ‘special training,’ what’s with all this?” she asked, pointing at the mess of rakes, shovels, and garden shears. “I thought you said we were here for endurance training.”
“Salmon!” Inumaki added with a nod as Panda tapped his chin thoughtfully with a single claw.
Fushiguro sighed, rubbing the back of his neck with a hand. “He’s probably here to ask us to do his chores for him. Nothing unusual,” he hypothesized.
Itadori frowned with a thoughtful look on his face. “Huh? I thought Gojo-sensei said it was endurance training in his messages,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest to match Kugisaki.
“Megumi, you wound me! Why not share Yuji’s faith that I’ve put together the best of the best endurance training?” Gojo grinned mischievously. “Today is Gojo-sensei’s Super Effective Endurance and Team Bonding Training, Version Yardwork!”
Maki turned to the rest of Gojo’s students, pointing an accusatory finger at their eccentric teacher. “See. I told you it was pointless and that we should have ignored Gojo-sensei’s suspicious messages. Let’s just leave.”
“That’s exactly what I thought you would say, Maki!” Gojo declared. “So I decided, what if I told all my lovely students, ‘if you fix the school’s yard for me — I mean, finish your Super Special Training, I’ll treat you all to dinner in the city!’ Maybe that would change everyone’s minds?”
A heavy silence settled over all six of Gojo’s students.
“All right. We’ll do it,” Itadori, Kugisaki, and Panda announced in unison.
Gojo clapped, feigning relief that his students decided to cooperate. After all, with the added bribe of a special dinner, he knew they simply could not resist. “Excellent! There are weeds that need to be pulled, trees trimmed, and some flowers that need to be planted along the perimeter of the lawn. Why don’t you all pair up to complete those tasks? Good luck!”
The Six-Eyes bearer snapped to a salute, then gleefully sprinted off to terrorize a particularly uptight coworker sporting a speckled tie.
Upon Gojo’s departure, Kugisaki immediately clung onto Maki’s arm like a koala. “I’m with Maki,” she announced, despite the fact that no one was going to compete for her partner. “I refuse to be stuck with any of you for the rest of the afternoon instead of her.”
Itadori turned to Panda. “Panda-senpai, I think we should be in charge of trimming the trees,” he suggested. “You’re the tallest out of all of us. We could reach even higher branches if I got on your shoulders!”
Unlike Itadori, Panda didn’t feel too keen on that idea. “I don’t know, Yuji, you might be a little heavy. Can’t you jump to reach those branches?”
The two leftover students glanced at each other and exchanged silent nods. “Since you got your first choice of partners, we’ll take our first choice of the tasks,” Fushiguro noted with a serious expression. It was a reasonable suggestion. No one objected to it. Quickly, he added, “Inumaki-senpai and I will take the flowers.”
“Wait! No! I don’t want to pull weeds! We’ll do the flower-planting instead!” Kugisaki yelled. But it was too late, as both Fushiguro and Inumaki had already grabbed a set of gloves and shovels before sprinting away to the trays of unplanted flowers.
+
Itadori frowned, lifting the tree branch cutter to snip at a shriveled branch. “Hey, Panda-senpai, Kugisaki doesn’t really think I look like a potato, does she?” he asked, completely forgetting to catch the fallen branch. It bounced off Panda’s head unceremoniously.
“Well,” Panda began, crouching to pluck the branch off the lawn, “even if she thinks you’re a potato head, I think Nobara actually likes you more than you think. She visited that shrine for you every day after you died, but only when she thought people weren’t looking.”
Itadori blinked.
“For real?”
“For real.”
Panda scooped their growing pile of snipped branches into his arms. While the initial plan had been to crumple everything so it was small enough to compost, Itadori pointed out it would make excellent fire pit fodder for roasted sweet potato: a fitting reward after everyone completed their tasks. “Oh, but don’t tell her I told you,” Panda hummed, cradling the branches like a newborn cursed corpse. “Nobara is scarier than Maki when she’s angry. I’m just Panda. I didn’t tell you anything.”
Itadori hesitated for a beat before asking his next question. “...Did Fushiguro visit?” he asked tentatively.
“Megumi?” Panda tapped his chin with a claw. “I don’t know, but he had dark circles that made him look a lot like Yuta. Yuta looks pretty down a lot of the time himself, so Megumi was probably pretty down too.”
That was all news to Itadori. The topic of his death had come up during impromptu pizza lunches in Fushiguro’s room with his classmates, but none of those conversations gave any real insight into how well (or, according to Panda, maybe not that well after all) they’d coped with it.
Silently, Itadori lifted the branch clippers to snip away some broken branches.
Only then did Panda notice his underclassman’s uncharacteristic reticence. “Something on your mind, Yuji?” he asked, sliding the tree branches into a plastic bin. “You can tell your senpai about it.”
“Panda-senpai, I’ve been thinking, about if I had actually died, or if I died again,” Itadori mused.
Panda frowned. “Hey now, you just died last month. It’s too soon to be thinking about that again, isn’t it?”
Itadori shook his head, and despite the tone of conversation, there was a smile on his face. “No, I don’t think it is,” he replied simply, as though he had just claimed that water was wet and grass was green. “I just — I want to make sure that people can die proper deaths. But I think other than that… At the end of the day, I don’t want to have any regrets.”
He thought of Junpei’s disfigured form crumpled on the floor.
He thought of Nanami’s hand on his shoulder, wearily warning him that it was impossible to save everyone.
“...Someone told me it’s impossible to guide everyone I know to a good death. So maybe… maybe living a life where you have no regrets is another way to do that?”
Panda kept gathering clipped branches in his bin. “Humans are pretty funny,” Panda began, a smile breaking across his face. “They think about weird things, like how to live a fulfilling life. I don’t think that’s a bad thing though. It’s part of why I like humans.”
“...What about bad humans?”
Panda paused in his work, and for a moment, Itadori was worried he’d stumped his senpai.
“What about them? Just do your best at what you choose to do, Yuuji, and everything will be fine. ...Does that help?”
Itadori exhaled through his nose. “Yeah. You’re right, Panda-senpai,” he replied.
Panda pushed the full bin aside before dragging an empty one closer towards the two of them. “If that’s all, we still have seven other trees to trim. We can’t fall behind the others, Yuji. If they finish first, there won’t be any maybe-sweet potatoes left for us to eat!”
Itadori’s eyes widened at that realization. “Oh! You’re right, Senpai! All right, back to work then!” he exclaimed, lifting the branch clippers into the air again. He snipped away at a stray branch, and it tumbled through the air, bouncing unceremoniously off Panda’s head.
+
“Inumaki-senpai.”
At the sound of his name, Inumaki set the pansy plant back in the plastic tray.
“Inumaki-senpai, I disagree with that dryad curse.”
“Salted cod roe?”
“...Yes, I've been thinking about it.”
Fushiguro slid his gardening glove off to sink a hand into the fur on Divine Dog’s back. It wagged its tail, wedging a paw into the soil to carve out another hole to plant the next flower. “I don’t think it’s wrong for humans to exist,” Fushiguro mused, smoothing the familiar’s fur out. “I don’t think it’s wrong for humans to want to exist.”
Inumaki was there too. He had heard the special grade curse’s words reverberating through his mind, as it waxed on about humans choking the life out of their home planet.
“Salmon,” Inumaki mused, causing Fushiguro to pause in his work, re-gloved fingers pressed against the loose soil. His shikigami whined, tail thumping against the dirt as it wondered what had caused its master to halt his work. “Tuna mayo.”
Fushiguro suddenly became incredibly engrossed in staring down the unfinished flower beds. He exhaled through his nose, releasing a breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. “No, I suppose what I’ve been thinking about lately isn’t necessarily that dryad curse,” he confessed. “I don’t think it’s wrong for Itadori to live. You thought the same of Okkotsu-senpai.”
Now, it was Inumaki’s turn to fall quiet, fitting another pansy plant into one of the holes that Divine Dog dug for them. It was true. How could any of them deny earnest, teary-eyed Okkotsu, defying his own death sentence and declaring that he wanted to live?
Instead of grabbing the next flower, Inumaki turned his gaze back to Fushiguro. His eyes softened. It didn’t take the world’s most intelligent rocket scientist to predict what was cycling through Fushiguro’s head.
“Mustard leaf.”
Sensing its master’s distress, the Divine Dog halted its digging to press its wet snout against Fushiguro’s side. Fushiguro shifted, allowing the shikigami to shimmy its head under his arm. “...How could I not?” Fushiguro sighed. “Gojo-sensei entrusted that mission to me. It was my carelessness that — ”
“Bonito flakes!”
Rarely did soft-spoken Inumaki raise his voice. Fushiguro blinked, taken aback by the sudden scolding. Divine Dog licked the back of his hand, as if reassuring Fushiguro that it would have his back no matter what Inumaki said about him.
As Inumaki intended, Fushiguro found himself at a loss for words.
“I feel responsible in part, yes,” he admitted when he finally found his voice again. “...It’s not because of my pride. It’s because I’ve decided he should have the right to exist.” How could he not? The way Itadori, even if he was terrified, didn’t hesitate to hurl himself in front of danger was inhuman. It rebelled against everything that Fushiguro knew. No person was that kind or compassionate. That was why, last month, Itadori had to die. It was impossible for that sort of person to exist.
And yet, Itadori had returned from the dead, and with it the world regained an impossible person.
“Tuna mayo?”
“... Yes. Because I decided to save people unequally, according to my own conscience and nothing else.” Suddenly, it occurred to him that there was only one person who should know about that. Fushiguro flushed. Surely Kamo-san wasn’t walking around telling everyone at both the Tokyo and Kyoto branches of Jujutsu High what he had said during their skirmish?
“Salmon. Mustard leaf.”
Fushiguro scowled, sliding his arm off Divine Dog to ease another flower out of its tray. The next time he saw the young heir to the Kamo family, Fushiguro decided he needed to have a very stern word with him.
+
Kugisaki blew a stray lock of hair out of her face. “I thought you said we should just leave. Why are we actually doing this?” she asked, glowering at Fushiguro and Inumaki hunched over a flower bed.
Maki yanked another onion grass clean out of the ground. “We’d have to do it eventually,” she sighed, tossing it aside. “It would only be a matter of when.” She tugged at another weed, raising an eyebrow at Kugisaki. “Weren’t you one of the people who said they’d do it in exchange for dinner on Gojo-sensei’s tab?”
Kugisaki offered Maki a sheepish look. “What can I say? Clothes aren’t the only expensive thing I like. And besides — ” Kugisaki paused, grabbing at a stray dandelion, “I guess in a way this is a form of training. I’ll take anything I can get for my future rematch against Mai! No offense, but I can’t believe the same household produced someone like you and also someone like her.”
Maki grinned, but her eyes remained distant. “I’m not exactly an angel to them either, Nobara,” her second-year yardwork partner finally noted, and with a small swell of pride, added, “and I was probably the biggest thorn in their side.”
Sensing a good story, Kugisaki flopped on the ground and crossed her legs. “That’s right, I’m betting on it. You’re going to become head of the Zenin clan.” After all, outside of Maki, there was no one else she knew of with the mettle to accomplish such a task.
Maki readjusted her glasses on her face. “It’s like I said before, I want to see the looks on their faces when I become clan leader.” A serious expression crossed the second-year’s face, one that was enough to kill the snide comment on the tip of Kugisaki’s tongue. “But it’s not just tearing down their egos. I — ”
She remembers an open courtyard. She’s ten-years-old. A blond Zenin grinds his heel against her ribs. She bites her lip to avoid making any noise.
“You’re not going to cry? You’re not going to beg for help? Why don’t you use a cursed technique to throw me off? You’re already on the floor with the shadows. So go ahead, reach into it and pull out a Shikigami — oh, wait.” The young man leans forward, applying more pressure onto his foot.
He bends lower to smirk at her. She whips out a hand to rake her nails across his face, but he’s too fast. Maki thrashes under his foot, trying to break free, but there isn’t much that a child can do against someone ten years her senior.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Mai huddled in the corner, trembling like a leaf.
There were other reasons, Maki thought to herself, but she’d rather Kugisaki believe that she was motivated by her pride and ambition, and nothing else.
“I… especially want to see the look on the face of one of my cousins.”
Kugisaki let out an unusually loud sigh, catching Maki’s attention. Maki glanced over her shoulder, just in time to watch her underclassman pluck a golden dandelion and hold it out before her.
“Maki-san, you’re like a dandelion.” Kugisaki grinned, twirling the dandelion stem between her fingers. Against the azure backdrop, it became a miniature sun. “Your relatives thought you were a weed. But dandelions are stubborn. They’ll grow anywhere. And it’s not like they’re useless either. People just think they are, but you can toss them into a salad or turn them into tea, like I used to for my grandmother. People just don’t appreciate their potential.”
She tossed the flower aside to a growing pile of uprooted dandelions. Surely, everyone would appreciate a treat of fresh dandelion tea after their tasks.
“You come up with the strangest analogies,” Maki noted and shook her head. “And don’t think that flattering me is going to make me go any easier on you with our task. You know Gojo-sensei will give us an earful if we don’t pluck every last dandelion on this lawn.”
Maki turned her back to Kugisaki in a declaration of finality. There was work to be done.
Behind Kugisaki’s back, Maki smiled.
+
Nanami gazed at the spotless yard through the faculty lounge’s open glass door. Not a single weed or stray tree branch was to be found, exactly to Principal Yaga’s liking.
“The yard is quite tidy,” Nanami commented without vocal inflection.
“Isn’t it?” said Gojo with a grin.
Nanami eyed his upperclassman suspiciously. “It’s unusually tidy, given we’re expecting a severe typhoon next week and the lawn will need to be recleared.”
Gojo shrugged. “I had my students clear it as a team building exercise. They can just do it again! Gojo-sensei’s Super Effective Endurance and Team Bonding Training, Version Yardwork: Round Two!”
Nanami blinked behind his goggles. Panda, Inumaki, and Itadori were easy-going enough to go along with Gojo’s eccentricity, and Fushiguro was simply used to it by now. However, he found it difficult to believe that Maki and Kugisaki willingly participated. “...And they agreed to it?” Nanami asked, arching an eyebrow.
Gojo folded his hands behind his head, leaning further back into his armchair. “I promised I’d buy them some dinner in the city,” he replied. “I’m not that unreasonable, Nanami.”
Nanami glanced at the orange sky with its setting sun, then rolled up his sleeve to check the time. “It’s getting quite late if that’s the case,” he commented. “The dinner rush should be at its height now.”
Gojo waggled a finger at his underclassman. “I didn’t specify when that dinner would be. It doesn’t have to be tonight. They can scrounge leftovers for today.”
“You are truly rotten sometimes,” Nanami sighed, readjusting his goggles on his face.
From the lawn, Itadori sat up and waved at Gojo and Nanami. “Gojo-sensei! Nanamin! When’s dinner?” he called.
Nanami shook his head. Underneath his blindfold, Gojo winked.