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Being at Jujutsu Tech was…strange.
Although, for Yuuta, everything always had been. This new strange wasn’t worse than the strange from before, he’d even dare to say it was better, but it still put him on edge in a way that was difficult to describe. Having Rika acknowledged by the people around him probably had something to do with it. She’d always just been a quiet rumble in the back of his head, only bubbling loud when Yuuta was threatened. Now, his peers and teachers (well, teacher) were consciously wary of her. He wasn’t just a freak with an oddly threatening aura anymore, he was a real person with a respected curse. Or something. He still wasn’t entirely sure how to feel about it.
It seemed that the people around him were getting more used to having him around. Maki, of course, had been abrasive from day one in a way that didn’t feel anything like the bullying he once endured but still made him nervous. Panda was, well, a panda (although Yuuta knew now that this was not entirely true). Inumaki was...something. Yuuta had spent the last couple of months trying to figure him out, but he still hadn’t really gotten anywhere. Inumaki seemed to spend a lot of his time looking at Yuuta out of the corner of his eye, both when Yuuta was and wasn’t looking for it. Yuuta assumed this was Inumaki sizing him up, keeping an eye on him because he was new and had Rika hanging over his head—plus, he knew he’d made a strange impression when they first met, so he supposed he deserved the mistrust. Whatever the case, the feeling of being watched had seeped into his skin.
He felt it now.
He opened his eyes from his position on the common room couch and sat up, immediately meeting Inumaki’s steady gaze. Cool, this is fine. It’s good. We’re good. “H-hey, what’s up?”
Inumaki narrowed his eyes a little bit. The guy was like a cat, almost. His pupils were reflecting in the dim light, something that Yuuta had yet to figure out whether it was a sorcerer thing or a side effect of Inumaki’s technique or just some random crazy genetics that ended up giving him weird non-human retinas. “Kelp.”
And then there was the fact that Yuuta hadn’t fully caught up on how the whole communication thing worked for him. “Uhhh, right. Yeah.”
Inumaki sighed and gestured to the couch. “Kelp?” he said, more insistently.
“Oh! Yeah, sorry, I’m good, just had a headache again. It’s mostly gone now.”
Inumaki nodded, seemingly satisfied with the response. He looked somewhere over Yuuta’s shoulder for a moment, and then snapped his eyes back to Yuuta’s face. “Mustard leaf.” He stood up and walked off. Well, I guess that interaction is over, that was— “Mustard leaf?” He twisted to look over the back of the couch and saw Inumaki standing in the doorway, looking at him again. It took him a second to process, but he got the message.
“Oh, okay. Sorry, I’m coming,” he said quickly, pulling his sweater on and following as Inumaki started walking away.
They didn’t go far. Inumaki took them up the elevator, punching the button for the top floor of their residence building. Yuuta wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but he was a bit confused when Inumaki stopped them in front of a window. Inumaki pushed up the bottom pane to open the window and looked back at him. Without another word, he moved out the window and up to a place where Yuuta couldn’t see him anymore.
Oh. Great. Cool.
Yuuta leaned out the window, startled when he looked up to again meet glowing eyes. “Are we...allowed? Up there? Isn’t it a gable roof?”
Even in the dark, he could see Inumaki’s eyes crinkle in amusement. “Salmon,” he said, extending a hand down to Yuuta. Tentatively, he took it, and was immediately yanked through time and space onto the roof. He kept making the mistake of forgetting that Inumaki was, pardon his language, fucking ripped despite his small stature.
Once he regained his bearings and was stable sitting on the roof, he took a moment to look out at the view. Leaves shimmered gently in the near-new moon light, the slight sound of rustling traveling to him with the wind. He could faintly see the slope of the mountain across the way, mist starting to sneak in under the cover of night. The almost empty campus was practically frozen in time. No lights on in the windows, no young sorcerers out training. He supposed that was the effect of having so few people living in such a large space. Even though it wasn’t even 9 p.m., it felt like a ghost town.
Or it would, if it wasn’t for the feeling on his neck that told him Inumaki was watching him again. He turned and squinted when a light suddenly shone in his eyes—beside him, Inumaki was holding out his phone with an empty contacts page pulled up. “Oh, okay,” Yuuta said somewhat timidly. ”I don’t actually know my number, though, hold on a second.” He glanced back up at Inumaki’s face as he pulled his phone out and saw confusion cross it briefly before he seemed to shrug it off. Worried he’d drop either of the phones, Yuuta elected to just give Inumaki his. “Sorry, I just got a new number recently what with moving here and kind of technically being a criminal or something, I don’t actually know—”
“Fish flakes,” Inumaki cut him off, handing his phone back. He pointed at the screen of his own. Yuuta looked down to see a chat open with a few fish emojis at the top. There was a message there already that read, “It’s fine, you don’t need to apologize for not knowing a bunch of numbers. We don’t really learn math here.”
Yuuta took a deep breath. “Alright...wait, yes we do? We have math class. I’m in your class. All of our classes are together.”
Inumaki rolled his eyes and typed something in. “Sure. When was the last time Gojou actually taught you how to do a math?”
“Oh, yeah, I guess you’re right.”
They stayed silent for a few minutes. Yuuta moved carefully to lay on his back, looking up at the stars. There was still light pollution here, but it was so, so much less than anywhere closer to a big city. Inumaki, for once, seemed content to watch the skyline instead of keeping his eyes on Yuuta. It was a little strange, letting his guard down when they were so close to a pretty significant drop, but Yuuta didn’t really want to fight him on it. Exactly as the thought entered his mind, he felt his phone vibrate. He held it up to read the message: “You can come up here whenever, it doesn’t like belong to me or anything. Don’t fall asleep up here though.”
Yuuta chuckled, a little sadly even to his own ears. “I don’t exactly sleep much, but thanks for the warning. And, ah, thanks in general. It’s nice up here.”
Another text, followed by Inumaki looking at Yuuta over his shoulder. “What do you mean you don’t sleep?”
Yuuta sat up again, hugging his knees to his chest. “I...I mean you’ve seen me right? Maki keeps saying I look like a ghoul. I guess that’s not inaccurate, with Rika and all, I kind of am, but this is more of an appearance thing, I-I think, just, uh…” He trailed off, seeing Inumaki’s eyes widen with his rambling. “Sorry, sorry, none of that was really relevant. I just don’t sleep well, it takes forever to go to sleep and then I wake up a ton during the night. Probably a side effect of the being cursed thing? I don’t know.”
Inumaki just looked at him for a second, seemingly trying to take that all in. “…Kelp,” he said out loud. Yuuta managed to understand his meaning more easily this time.
“Yeah, it’s not great.”
They sat for a few more minutes before Inumaki stood up and brushed himself off. He slipped his phone into his pocket and stretched, silhouetted against the stars and again reminding Yuuta of a cat. Yuuta followed his lead and stood, nervous of the somewhat slippery slanted roof. “How do we...get...down? From here?”
Inumaki shrugged. “Salmon.” He moved to the edge and did a kind of butt-scoot turn around to get his feet back onto the windowsill, disappearing from view.
Yuuta felt all of a sudden that he very much did not think this through. This was a bad idea. He didn’t know why he chose to go through with getting onto the roof when he wasn’t sure of himself. Not good. Air seemed to escape him for the moment, leaving him struggling to stay upright, which is bad when you’re on a roof. Vaguely, he saw Inumaki’s head pop back up over the edge of the roof. “Mustard leaf?”
“No, no, I’m good, it’s—”
“Fish flakes.” Inumaki waved at him. Yuuta took a deep breath, nodded, and sat so he could move safely to the edge of the roof. Inumaki kept a hand on him as he moved back down through the window, which was both strangely distracting and incredibly comforting. Once he was back inside, Yuuta slid down the wall and let the massive knot of anxiety in his gut start to unravel. “Kelp?”
Yuuta looked up at him and gave a weak smile. “Yeah, I’m okay now, th-thank you. You can go if you have other stuff to do, whatever it is you...do. Thanks.”
Inumaki nodded, giving a thumbs up. Yuuta just put his head to his knees and listened to him walk away, trying to steady his breathing.
At least now he was embarrassing himself through being painfully socially awkward instead of through accidentally killing people. That had to be an upgrade, right?
He thought about that as he calmed down and walked back to his room. Yeah, that was definitely an upgrade.