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Without an adequate supply of sorcerers to handle the essential task of dispelling curses, there never would be time to invest in proper study into the shape of magic. Early twentieth century, and in the mess of a war ravaging pieces of the world so far removed from its origin that you would have been forgiven for thinking the whole thing was pointless, someone had found the time to dig into a brain that was still sparking and see the origin of Jujutsu. Had it been black? Or blue or red or maybe even purple? How could you tell it was Jujutsu?
Gojou Shouji's mouth quirked up just a little. His Limitless white hair fell forward into blue-black eyes. Half a god and entirely human. The precocious four year old curled up in his lap had a volley of questions for everything, and was to be indulged with every answer and, all the more importantly, every unknown.
Children were so concerned with colour, selected a favourite and stuck to it. Shouji's son preferred purple and justly threw a fit when the time came to dress in the morning if there was none of it left clean in his wardrobe. It was a mistake the cleaning staff had only let happen twice before they came to understand that the boy would not be brought to heel. His every whim was sacrosanct, this world a playground built just for him.
Like so much of Jujutsu, the book open on Shouji's son's bedspread, the finer points of Jujutsu science more than acceptable as a bed time story so long as you pressed just how far beyond the level of his peers he would have to be to understand it, was aged to the point of collapse and still the most up to date information available on the living, breathing shadow of the waking world sorcerers were let into. Out of date kanji and errors in the handwritten calligraphy that would send you down a litany of rabbit holes if you didn't cut them off at the pass. Not that the boy would know. He thought he was the greatest mind who ever lived for having mastered his kana at such a tender age.
"I don't know, Sato-chan." Shouji hummed into the boy's hair. Identical to his, to his father and his grandmother, to a thin selection of cousins. "How do you think we could find out?"
Gojou Satoru thought for a second, his head moving minutely as he scanned the pages before him, that he almost certainly couldn't read. Almost. Shouji had tried, in vain, to comprehend the limits of the Six Eyes from his sister, who's brilliance had always been attributed to them. But Gojou Chieko couldn't spot the end of her cursed technique to save her life.
Can you see the edges of the universe yet? Shouji thought the question loud, just to test if his boy had gathered enough awareness to read thoughts. There were some old family texts that implied the far end of the Six Eyes allowed that, all so ancient and shrouded in the language of legend that it was impossible to pick apart what was real and what was just wishful thinking.
Satoru turned in his father's lap, eyes to match the sunken hull of an iceberg, wide and deep. If you stared into them long enough you could convince yourself that something was moving within them, sand or stars. Not that Satoru could sit still long enough to tell, but Shouji had enough childhood staring contests with Chieko under his belt to know for sure.
Small hands came up to trace Shouji's skull, fingers running along lines that must have been where the plates sealed as an infant. Satoru smiled, and his eyes flashed fiercely. "We would only need to open up someone's head when they were using their cursed technique! It would be easy with a Six Eyes user."
Because the Six Eyes simply could not be turned off. Once the cursed energy started flowing it would flow for life, and the user was stuck in a race against time to learn how to reverse the technique in time to undo the damage. This alone was what could keep Satoru humble, a tool that they had yet to deploy, that the low level of cursed energy associated with his all-seeing eyes would take years to do serious damage.
Chieko had been twelve when she learned, and despite her best efforts had never managed to teach the trick to her older brother. As with all things, she saw a path that didn't really exist for mere mortals. You saw an edge and you jumped, only to find that gravity had flipped itself.
"Well, we can't do that." Shouji smiled, pulling Satoru's hands away, cradling them in just one of his own.
Satoru pouted, his bottom lip such a pale pink it almost faded to white entirely. "Why not?"
The old family tenets were clear you had to stave off doubt for just as long as you could. The balancing act between Jujutsu sorcerer and curse user had only ever failed twice in their recorded histories, but the effects were always dire. You had to take that childish inability to conceptualise that which was not part of the self and stoke it. You had to hold that vicious naivety at just the right height to keep them curious, without fear or glory to be found in less noble exploits.
Those small hands had to be brought up to Shouji's mouth to be kissed. Oh, sweet thing. Know now your father loves you.
"Because in all the world there are only two people with the Six Eyes, and I love them much too much to let you cut their heads open."
Satoru blinked, like the steady swing of a lighthouse after dark. His little mouth fell open, astonished at the shrinking of the world. "Two...that's..."
Hands pulled free to count out fingers, spelling out victory in his right hand. "Me, and Aunt Chieko....and?"
Shouji raised an eyebrow. Satoru struggled with numbers, but he wasn't allowed to know that. He was the smartest boy in every room he walked into. And the most beautiful, the most blessed.
Satoru stared between his two fingers and his father. "Oh. That's two. Only us?"
He probably didn't even understand that his parents couldn't see the things he could. Already, Satoru complained of headaches when he strayed too close to the training compound that he was years off stepping foot in. The curses inside overwhelmed him, he could explain the texture of their rotten skins in minute detail.
"Amongst heaven and earth, you and Aunt Chieko are the honoured ones." Shouji slid his hands under his son's armpits, against the loose violet silk of his pyjamas, and lifted the boy off the bed. Raise him high. One day he would learn how to float all on his own.
Squealing in delight, Satoru wriggled in his father's grip, crowing about how the touch tickled. There was an echo of the useless flailing he had engaged in for almost two years after Shouji and Istuko had brought him home from the hospital.
"Parenthood is building a person." Gojou Hirumi had told Shouji when he had first gone to his grandmother to tell her the good news of the next generation, sprung from his loins. In her eighties, the white of her hair wasn't so strange. She wore it long and unpinned, fanning out around her like a second kimono. Proud but not haughty, her mind still sharp. No one had ever told Shouji a story about her that didn't begin and end in wonder.
Building a person, one block at a time. Shouji swung Satoru higher, letting go for just a second, right at the zenith of his reach, and tried to imagine what it would feel like for his son to not fall straight back into his arms.
Jujutsu was a state of mind. You could train all you wanted; you could breed your family to only the most powerful of sorcerers. It didn't mean a thing if you couldn't find the limits to yourself. The real secret was that the self had no limits.
But Satoru was an incomplete project and would remain so for years to come, if the usual way of things was to mean anything for the boy. Step one, you build up your arsenal. Step two, you learn how to load a damn gun.
"I think it's purple." Satoru hummed as he crawled into bed.
Shouji scooped the book up before Satoru could kick at it from under the covers. It would be a shame to lose something so rare, no matter how worthless it was. He glanced down at the faded diagram of the brain that had been sketched out, arrows pointing to the pre-frontal cortext to show just where the cursed energy in a human body would manifest. He scratched at his forehead and let the book fall closed.
"Maybe you're right." Shouji smiled at Satoru, in his purple pyjamas with his purple sheets. Maybe it looked different to him. Chieko had such a hard time explaining what colour was to her, sometimes she made it sound like she was as good as blind.
A kiss on the forehead and a wish that Satoru would sleep well, this and every other night. The boy was unbothered by the dark, because he could see just as well in a lightless room with his eyes closed as anywhere else. Tonight, there was no fussing for his mother, which was an improvement. This was the third night in a row that dinner with friends had stretched out longer than intended, and Shouji was starting to worry that his indifference to her antics was only making things worse.
"You too, papa!" Satoru said around a yawn. "You have to sleep...sleep for training..."
But the day was already bled out of him, and Satoru was asleep before his bedroom door had slid closed.
Out in the hallway, lit faintly by the moon striking light through a window, Shouji sucked in a deep breath. Perhaps if he had been born with the eyes, absorbing his sister before she was so much as a whisper in his father's ear, he would know where his wife was. Who she was with.
If Gojou Shouji had been given the eyes granted to his son, he might not have to worry that his sister could see the shape of his thoughts.
Shouji put his ear against Satoru's bedroom door and tried to listen for restlessness or night terrors. His little boy brain struggling to process everything he knew, everything he would ever know, compounding all at once. Every day for the past year, since Satoru's eyes had slipped from a rich cherrywood brown to match his mother's to ice blue to match his aunt, he had woken fearing that he would find the boy dead, or still breathing but lost to the world. The family doctor swanning in to diagnose a brain so damaged that it couldn't spark properly anymore.
Or worse, that this fear would break him before time broke his boy. The beating bright red flame Shouji's heart hadn't been destiny, it had been built into him by a family doing what they did best.
There was no sound, and with his feeble sorcerer's eyes, Shouji couldn't make out anything beyond the door. He had to leave it, though. You built a chid brick by brick, but half those bricks were blind faith.
Besides, if anything did creep into Satoru's room, Chieko would see it. She could be halfway across the world, but she'd still see. They had tested it when she had decided to take herself off to Spain to study, Shouji holding up fingers in his Tokyo apartment and asking her to text him how many he had stuffed behind his back. She didn't miss a single digit.
Which meant that wherever she was, she could see him now. Shouji smiled, passing under the low awnings of the west wing of the compound as he started up the path towards the main house. Tonight, he would drink with his parents, dodge their questions about his wife, and know with the perfect certainty fostered upon every child of this family that he would always be found.