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In hindsight, there were worse ways to spend Saturday morning.
Yuuta looks past the line of kiosks gracing Takeshita, rows and rows of vendors selling trade goods and snacks. The konara trees from the alleyway racked some of its leaves down, alighting the path with amber fall leaves. Even the wind lazily lapped against their skin, cool and inviting. The sun was mildew and the air tasted like fresh spring, and any other time, he probably would’ve stayed in like he always did.
But Gojo encouraged—no, insisted—he go out and bond with the world.
Shoko apparently made a few notes on his initial psych eval, because taking a condition test as part of your highschool entrance exam was completely normal, that he displayed anti-social tendencies and was just a little on the reclusive side. Gojo, being Gojo, wouldn’t have any of that for his second years. Very quickly he all dragged Yuuta out of the dorm room he was only just settling in, put him in with the only other boy in his class (because the talking Panda insisted despite his masc-displaying tendencies, was everything but), and shoved them out the gates of the school compound before he could even stop to ask whats happening.
And so here they were, in an icebreaker attempt disguised as a mission (Harajuku is full of curses! You boys might learn a thing or two!) with Yuuta sneaking glances at the man strolling beside him.
“Toge, right?”
Inumaki bristled a little, clearly not expecting to be addressed so directly and quickly. He nods shyly, before facing forward again and avoiding his gaze.
He was the one Yuuta couldn’t quite place just yet: because Maki, in an attempt to even explain her, was in all sense of the word a bombshell. That encapsulated everything he knew—and would know—of the Zen’in. Panda was Panda.
But Inumaki: he seemed himself of an entirely different calibre, not as loud and obvious the same way Maki was, or humorous and friendly like Panda. He was just.. there.
His rumoured powers, though, had been anything but.
Yuuta knew a thing or two about existing between planes, of dangling on edges of society that was neither there nor here: of still feeling, in one way or another, to not have been lended agency to control his own fate. It was a deeper kind of unknowing that was stripped from him entirely, and the balance of his own powers not even within his control, that had him thinking maybe this other boy would about it too. Cursed speech, he deduced, left very little to choice.
“So you’re like,” Yuuta hesitates. “Ariel from Little Mermaid?”
When Inumaki cracks a small smile at that, and turns his head a little to peer at him, and the sunlight spilled into his hair and turned ash into lilac: Yuuta feels, faintly and for the first time, here.