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Maki might as well be blind.
Her back is pressed against the wall of the clan’s disciplinary pit, grimy and slick with what she hopes is just cursed blood. She’s not certain how long it’s been, any disorienting horror or distress she felt at first gone, boiled down to make room once again to a wild, feral existence.
She bears her teeth at a cursed spirit that grazes her leg, imitating the stray dogs she sees when she’s allowed to venture out to join servants on errand runs. She feels the spit fly from her mouth as she remembers the animals’ snarling and biting in dark alleyways, fighting for the leftover filth from a dumpster. Similarly, when she feels something near her again, the hair on her arms standing needles as the air turns charged and frigid, she strikes, howling as she swings the small blade she’s been given.
The blood or drool from one that she shoves away sprays onto her, and Maki grinds her teeth as the putrid taste invades her mouth, rot on her tongue. With the frequency of attacks lessening, she hopes it’s over almost over. Her calves are aching and a wound on her shoulder burns, and it’s what displeases her the most. No matter what happens to her, no matter what bruising litters her skin or what wounds reveal the inner layers of her skin, they’ll be healed once she survives.
After all, she is a Zenin woman.
Even worse, one without a cursed technique.
She must be unmarred for her future suitor, must pretend to be marvelously untouched by malicious curses and absent of imprints along her spine from the soles of the shoes of childish, spiteful men. It’s the worst part of this all. Witnessing the erasure of her wounds right in front of her eyes as their healer runs her hands over her kindles a pure strain of rage. One blinding but absent of doubt.
Mai, however, is grateful for the healing.
Maki knows that she dislikes the possibility of scars, dislikes the remembrance of coagulated blood scabbing over and strands of collagen mending torn skin.
The night that Maki digs her short, blunt fingernails into her upper arm until she feels the sharp stinging of punctured skin, Mai finds her in their bathroom. Above their vanity mirror, the fluorescent white light paints them a ghostly shade, the beads of blood that dot the fresh half-moon grooves on Maki’s arm faintly fuchsia.
“Why did you do that?” Mai asks, in her soft, but angry way.
“I don’t know.”
Mai’s hands are clenched by her sides. Maki knows that a cursed spirit had slashed her left wrist two days ago, but her skin is faultless, immaculate down to the meager, light strands of hair that must have been torn out from the root.
“I’ll go get—” Mai tries.
“Don’t,” Maki cuts in.
She meets her eyes in the mirror they’re standing in front of. The bathroom light is swallowed by the darkness of their room behind Mai, her black hair and pajamas beckoned by dusk.
“It’s going to scar,” Mai says matter of factly.
Maki cast her eyes to the scratches, “That’s okay.”
Mai scowls, “If Mother sees, she’ll tell Father, they’ll think that Mayumi didn’t do her job right—”
“I’ll explain,” Maki says. “I don’t care what they do, but I want it. They won’t be able to make it go away.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
Mai doesn’t waste any more of her time. She turns and leaves Maki alone in the bathroom, careful not to slam their door at this time of night. Her eyes return to the angry crimson arches on her skin, and she steps towards the sink to clean them.
“What’s your name?”
The boy standing in front of Maki looks up at her with a scowl far too mature for the roundness in his cheeks. In combination with the pink, cartoon band-aid she saw a glimpse of on one of his knees it’s downright comical.
“Fushiguro Megumi.”
“Megumi,” Maki repeats, taking note of the absence of Zenin. “Isn’t that a girl’s name?”
Megumi looks away from her, “Screw you.”
From inside, where Maki knows Naobito, Naoya and her father are speaking to one Satoru Gojo over something involving Megumi’s birthright to the clan through his cursed technique, she hears Satoru’s juvenile laughter, and Naobito’s drunk, booming voice curse at him.
“I’m not wrong though,” Maki teases, cocking her head to the side as she hangs on a hip.
Megumi clenches his hands into fists by his sides, and Maki observes him, huffing. He’s only a year younger than her, but he’s so scrawny, and she doesn’t sense any of the ego that wafts off the men with techniques, supposedly far less impressive than his, in the clan.
“It’s my name,” Megumi responds. “I don’t care what you think about it.”
“You do if you’re getting defensive—”
“What’s your name then?” he interrupts, and Maki smirks, ample enough to show her fangs if need be. Knobby, childish knees, and lanky, undisciplined arms were possible of cruelties all the same.
“Maki,” she replies.
The screen door slides open harshly and out steps an audibly upset Naobito, spewing maledictions as he’s followed by her father and Naoya, who meets her eyes for a moment before disgust clouds his pupils and he looks away. After them, Satoru Gojo steps out, unwrapping a bright red lollipop before plopping it into his mouth, tossing the wrapper aside.
When he spots them, he strolls over.
She expects a detestable personality, but instead, he ruffles Megumi’s hair roughly, who looks up at him with benign indignation.
“You’re making friends? That’s good, your sister says you have none.”
“I don’t need—”
“Who’s this?” Satoru asks, looking towards Maki as Megumi grinds his teeth together at the complete interruption.
“Zenin Maki,” she responds.
“What high school are you planning to attend?”
She’s quiet. She’s learned long ago that there are flies in the Zenin clan that will buzz around and play dead in webbed-over corners but miraculously come to life when they hear a secret.
“You should go to Tokyo Jujutsu High,” Satoru says, and Maki can’t tell if he just honestly didn’t care about the clear tension in her lack of a response, or if he honestly couldn’t read the situation.
He lowers his hand to Megumi’s shoulder, though the boy frowns and shoves him off.
“Kyoto’s too stuffy in my opinion. Megumi here is going to Tokyo, too.”
“Not like I have a choice,” Megumi mutters, and Satoru barks out a laugh before stepping closer to Maki.
He’s too tall, she thinks.
He hunches over slightly, letting his glasses slide further down his nose to peer at her over their rim with his absurd eyes.
“Think about it, will you?”
In the Spring, breathing is painful.
Her ribs feel as if they’ll collapse at the slightest application of pressure, and she swears she can hear each drop of blood coursing through her rushing by in her ears. The men around her have started to take notice; her usual, merciless swings and whacks with her wooden sword are diluted into pathetic attempts that end with her wheezing and gripping her chest.
She’s knocked over easily, kicked to the ground, and spat on, but slowly, sluggishly, she starts becoming accustomed. The cloth that restricts her chest, that snakes around her and digs into the tender skin of her sides, starts to be forgotten as she surges around her superiors, dodging their swings as she aims for their ankles.
In the Summer, her body enacts the karma it’s held onto pettily. It reminds her that her ribs are of bone, not stone and that her skin is not leather, it is vulnerable, reddening in the dire June heat as the world around her swirls.
“Get up—”
She does. She forces herself to her feet, holds herself up with her staff, only to feel a fist connect to her abdomen and send her back with a wad of spit and bile rushing up past her throat. When her head hits the ground, the world goes black.
She wakes up to welcomed coolness on her forehead, and her mother’s dull eyes watching her disinterestedly. She moves to sit up, but her mother’s hand against her sternum stops her midway.
“I don’t understand you,” she says, clinically.
Maki doesn’t reply to her. Her throat is dry, and her lips feel chapped. When she licks them, she realizes the skin is split towards the center.
Unprompted, her mother continues.
“Is it not embarrassing enough for you that they already let you play with them? Why did you choose to weaken yourself further? And to do so in such an...odd manner.”
“Odd,” Maki repeats.
Her mother retracts her hand and twists on the bed, reaching for the cloth that Maki instantly recognizes. When she speaks, her hand tightens on it. It’s worn, the fabric frayed at the edges.
“Why do you do this?” her mother asks, and Maki knows that no answer she could think to offer would be enough. A rabbit could not think to understand a dog, and a dog a rabbit.
“Leave me alone,” Maki says. “I can tend to myself.”
“I did not tend to you,” she replies, insulted. “Your sister found you on the ground from heatstroke.”
Maki tries not to think of the implications of her mother’s words, forcing any thought of what punishment Mai possibly received for tending to Maki away. When she sits up and her mother stands, she catches the moist towelette that was pressed against her forehead when it slides off.
“Perhaps one of the lessons you can take away from your time with the Kukuru is how to let yourself die, Maki. Stop humiliating your parents.”
Maki doesn’t meet her eyes, she squeezes the towel, feeling the cloth ooze out through the gaps of her fingers. She isn’t staring at anything; her vision is unfocused, and she doesn’t hear her mother’s footsteps or the sliding of her door over the sound of her grating her teeth together rattling through her skull.
Later, when she falls asleep, she dreams of Tokyo. She dreams of humid, bustling subways, of sidewalks illuminated by the neon lights and advertisement screens hanging above storefronts, of what a school campus meant for horrors like cursed energy and spirits could possibly look like carved out in a metropolitan city.
She dreams of—
She wakes up to the sounds of early morning still muffled by the density of sleep, birds chirping faintly on powerlines while servants stir to prepare the day. As the swollen, bruised indigo of dawn melts the fatigued night sky through the slivers of her window blinds and onto her, she reminds herself to breathe.
“Come on, Maki,” Satoru huffs out, arms bent to form triangles as he rests his hands on his hips. “I didn’t think you were so weak.”
Maki kicks up dust as she whirls around, hands achingly gripping her training staff, to the point that she hears the slight crunch of wood. Satoru is standing on the sidelines, watching her run through her typical training routine, avoiding Panda’s swipes.
The whole day, he has yet to call him, or Inumaki or Okkotsu weak.
“Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean—”
Satoru snorts and the sound infuriates her further. Panda steps away from her.
“Wait, what? No, no, it’s not because you’re a girl,” he raises his arms above his head in a stretch. “I don’t care what or who you are, I just care that you get stronger. I mean, Panda isn’t even a person and he’s stronger than you.”
Maki frowns, unable to quell the rage gripping her shaking hands. When Satoru steps towards her, she glares up at him. There’s no telling what his expression really is with the bandages wrapped around his forehead, but there is something perceptive in his words when he speaks.
“If you push yourself too hard here, it isn’t going to be rewarded. You’ll just bring your comrades down.”
“I’m not pushing myself too hard.”
She blinks when she feels one of his fingers press against her forehead.
“Yeah, you are,” he argues. “It’s not weak to rest, you won’t fail to topple the Zenin family if you take a nap.”
Maki snarls, ready to reach for her teacher’s wrist to snap it away from her, when he flicks her forehead and her eyes roll into the back of her head.
Mai’s rage is a different beast than Maki’s. It’s encumbered with grief; with the mourning of what could have been and bitter contemplation of what could be. It speaks with the soundless voice of the woman Mai wishes she could be.
“Why didn’t you fall down the hole with me?”
Mai bears similarities to their mother. No answer Maki can think of will suffice. Mai can’t see their resolution, just not yet, but Maki will bear the weight of her vision for both of them. Her shoulders are sturdy enough to carry this.
“If I had done that, I would’ve hated myself,” she replies. “It’s as simple as that.”
Mai’s lip quivers. Maki’s shoulders strain.
“Sorry.”
It’s something she thinks about after when both schools are awaiting the decision for the rest of the exchange in one of the outdoor buildings. Mai is sitting on the couch as she listens to the blue-haired girl speak beside her, the mass of muscle that’s Todo sitting across from them, legs crossed and draped over the small table in front of him. He says something that stops the blue-haired girl in the middle of speaking and makes Mai cover the lower half of her face. Maki can see that she’s amused, the creases in the skin by her eyes that of laughter.
“It’s as simple as that.”
Is it?
Does Mai know all the reasons? Does she remember as vividly as Maki does the evenings spent in front of mirrors, Mai watching over her shoulder as Maki wrapped her chest before training yet again, as if to embalm herself? Does she remember the days Maki would layer athletic bras to lessen her chest despite the discomfort, and all the times where she didn’t bother to, and it didn’t bother her?
She wants to know if the fleeting moments of intimate significance still reside in Mai’s mind, if she really understands why Maki could never truly be happy as a Zenin woman.
She jerks when the door swings open, and Gojo steps in with a sorting box in hand.
“So, a lot of stuff happened and people even died—”
Kugisaki is beautiful.
Maki decides this on a Wednesday afternoon when they're both sprawled out on Kugisaki’s dorm room floor. The glass sliding doors are open, their legs outstretched and resting outside on the small patio while they both slouch against one another. The fan plugged in behind them whirrs, a loose strand of Maki’s hair poking her cheek each time it rotates towards her.
Kugisaki is in shorts and a t-shirt, the sleeves rolled up to her shoulders. Maki can see faint freckles scattered across her balmy, heated skin.
Maki has never thought of herself as something beautiful. She sank her teeth into the concept of beauty, tore out what was useless, and swallowed down whatever called for her family’s disdain. She didn’t consider herself ugly either. She didn’t linger on thoughts like that, but lately, with Kugisaki urging her to go shopping with her during their days off and letting the girl smear an array of aromatic facial masks, sometimes homemade, on her face, it’s something Maki considers.
Is she beautiful?
“Have you ever wondered,” Maki voices. “What your life would be like if you were a boy?”
Nobara hums, leaning away from Maki to readjust the fan.
“When I was younger, yeah. What about you?”
“Yeah. Though I wouldn’t have been able to spend as much time with my sister.”
It isn’t like her mimicry of a relationship with Mai is something secret, she’s spoken to Kugisaki about it amidst late-night conversations that call for nostalgic subjects and over soda gone stale and the third episode of a show neither have paid attention to. Yet, each time Maki addresses it in this manner, in a tone absent of malice and hate but oozing reflection, Maki feels vulnerable, unarmed even. She’s about to change the conversation, bring up that they should get some type of cold food to cool down their temperature when Kugisaki speaks.
“Do you still wonder?”
“What?”
Kugisaki waves a hand in the air, “About your life, if you were a guy.”
Maki huffs, “I think you would have hated me.”
That gets Kugisaki to frown, “Are all the guys in your clan jerks?”
Maki nods, folding her legs to sit crisscrossed.
“They’re either creeps or assholes, but yeah.”
Kugisaki rolls her eyes and groans, “I can’t even imagine. I would have been miserable without you here and the guys here aren’t even gross.”
Maki laughs, and suddenly Kugisaki’s expression stiffens, and she turns to stare at her.
“I mean,” she blurts, rushed. “It’s okay though if you ever think you’re like, not a girl. Don’t feel guilty or something.”
Maki blinks, once, twice, and then snorts out a laugh at how grave of an expression shadowed Nobara’s face.
“Don’t laugh at me,” Nobara complains. “I’m trying to be supportive.”
“Yeah? I bet.”
Nobara crosses her arms over her chest, “Yeah, you’re just Maki to me no matter what.”
There’s a pause.
“Unless you change your name, obviously. Then I’d think of you as whatever you come up with.”
Maki smirks, “I’m going to name myself something stupid then to see if you really will.”
“Worse than Panda being called Panda? I have my doubts.”
Maki chuckles, but there’s the slight, soft realization that something knotted in her chest has lessened, the exhale of bated breath.
“Thank you, Nobara.”
“You don’t have to be so formal about it,” Kugisaki mumbles, turning away from her, but not before Maki sees coral flush her cheeks.
There is no possible, innate way that a human body could withstand the suffering that Maki finds herself in suddenly. There’s absolutely no way, so Maki ceases to be.
She isn’t human; she isn’t a woman or a man or even a Zenin. The nonessentials that constitute Maki Zenin are incinerated, leaving behind only a reaction.
Her existence flares with the overwhelming sensation of unnatural flames scorching and blistering her skin and blows out when her nerves are burnt to cinders, soot obstructing her throat as she inhales for a single maddening second before she’s overcome.
If she really focuses on herself in the mirror, Maki can see specters of her mother’s expression hidden underneath her swollen eyelids and along the raw gums of her mouth. If she stares longer, she can see remnants of the genes her father begrudgingly passed onto her, too.
When she looks in the mirror now, dressed just in her underwear, she only sees an inheritance seared onto her out of unbridled tenacity. She brings her hands to her slightly brittle hair, rubs frail strands between her thumbs and index fingers, and then moves her hands down to the rest of her body. She traces the remarkably uniform pattern draped over her, committing to memory the new cartography of her skin.
She doesn’t think of beauty as she touches the grooved burns by her shoulders, nor of ugliness as she touches her abdomen. She doesn’t ruminate on anything similar to the metrics of a life before that are blithely useless now.
Now, she thinks of fire.
She thinks of the blaze thriving underneath her skin, of the ashes in her mouth she swears still discolor her teeth.
“I can’t do much about the scars,” Shoko had said hours after Maki had initially woken up days ago. She spoke the words easily, absent of the condolence Maki would have detested but open to consideration as her gloved hands checked over her vitals. The round, white medical light bent over Maki, above Shoko, was a blinding halo around the exhausted woman’s head.
“Your physically gifted Heavenly Restriction is the main reason you’re still here,” she continued, finishing her check-up. She stepped away from Maki as she sat up, moving over to throw away the rubber gloves into a bin opposite to them.
She covers her bandaged eye with a hand.
Heavenly.
Perhaps that’s what Maki could be.