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The taste of Suguru’s lunch lingers at the back of his throat as he spits out the mouthful he couldn’t bring himself to swallow. A shudder runs through him involuntarily as he turns on the tap to wash his hands and rinse the taste off his teeth. Blankly, he watches the water trickle down the drain.
What he’s managed to choke down sits as a heavy molten mass of metal in his stomach. It roils and refuses to settle quietly, the accompanying nausea making his head spin and throat ache. It reminds him, almost hilariously, of the buzz of cursed spirits the moment right after he swallows them. A slight desire to puke surfaces, but the thought of allowing that food to go through his throat a second time—even to exit his body—vanishes the notion. As if in a trance, Suguru dries his hands and sighs heavily.
His own hands brush against his knees as he settles into a sitting position against the cupboard beneath the sink. Suguru recoils from the touch like it stung him, like it struck him and left a mark. Revolting , he thinks. The feeling of touch is revolting. He wants to rip out his entire nervous system like dislodging a parasite from the surface of its host. His mind is a whirling mess of thoughts and emotions. Starbursts of confusion and helplessness and grief scatter across his head like marbles rolling across a wooden floor.
Humans are disgusting . The thought sprouts in his head, taking root deep inside his mind as it grows. Humans are repulsive masses of flesh and organs and blood and ligaments and bone, their skin stretched over everything as if to cover up the grotesque mess inside. The thought in his head blooms a mutilated flower, blood-red and ugly.
Distantly, Suguru imagines crushing one like a bug. The act would leave behind little more than a dirty, bloody smear. Messy in life and in death, humans. In his head, he is plunging his hands into someone’s chest and ripping at the flesh until he can see the white glint of bone beneath. Their organs spill out in a lazy sprawl as the blood on his hands dry mahogany. He pries their ribcage apart and looks upon their beating heart with a detached sense of satisfaction, something halfway between vindication and hatred. He wraps a hand around it, and squeezes—
He watches his hands curl into fists and release with a quiet sort of hatred, the taste of his abhorrence indistinguishable from the food he couldn’t stomach. (In that same moment he vows to never show these emotions to anything or anyone other than the inside of this bathroom.)
He stares at his palm unseeingly, and can almost see through the opaque layer of skin into the layers of nerves and muscles laying underneath. He is made of flesh and organs and blood and ligaments and bone like all the others, like everything he despises. It makes him sick. He wants to skin himself alive and tear out every layer of biological tissue until he is nothing but a disgusting, pulsing brain, and then smash that into bloody brain matter so that he could cease to exist as a consciousness.
If he could unzip the body he is trapped in and step out of it, he would abandon this corpse of a body in a heartbeat. If he could live as a simplified version of himself, he would condense himself into a swirling orb of gold and black that didn’t have flesh to feel the touch of the world around it. If he could just stop existing without the troublesomeness of it all, without the accompanying grieving and bloody mess and everything else, he would.
There is a difference between wanting to die and not wanting to live.
“Suguru!” the voice cuts through his fog of thoughts, the drawl of his name a familiar sound. “How much longer are you gonna take in there? You shitting or something?”
Suguru jerks from his spiralling, the fog in his mind vanishing as if blown away by a gust of wind and his frazzled emotions settling. He presses his fingers to his chest, pondering why a sense of peace and safety settled where anxiety and panic resided merely a moment ago, just from the voice of his best friend. Ah —he exhales, a soft sound filled with wonder. Is this love?
What a precious and fragile thing.
He stands up from where he was sitting, the movement too fast and sending his head spinning. With a disorientated shake of his head, he slams the bathroom door open.
Satoru stands outside, hands in his pockets and impatiently waiting. “Took you long enough,” he complains with an irritated scoff.
“You’re so goddamn vulgar, Satoru,” Suguru scolds, instinctively plunging a hand into Satoru’s messy hair. Seconds away from making contact, his hand freezes. Satoru’s infinity is deactivated around Suguru, he knows, but that is precisely the problem. The thought of touching another human being right now sets off a series of alarms in him, and he fights down an instinctive gag of revulsion. Hastily, he shoves his hand into his pocket and prays Satoru hasn’t noticed.
Satoru doesn’t appear to have noticed, prattling on and on about one thing or another as they walk back to the dorms. Suguru breathes a quiet sigh of relief and tries to ignore the grating brush of his uniform against his skin with every step he takes.
“So what were you doing in there that took so long?” Satoru complains, heedless of the way Suguru’s shoulders stiffen. Of course he goes and asks the one question I can’t answer, Suguru sighs internally.
“I don’t think it’s any of your business what I was doing,” he retorts, going for bantering but instead ending up sounding defensive. Dammit, now Satoru would be suspicious.
“Whoa, touchy,” Satoru whistles. For a second, the silence between them hangs thick and awkward like a stifling fog before Satoru breaks it again.
“Hey,” Satoru starts, his voice uncharacteristically serious. “You…know that I’ll listen to you, right? No matter what.”
Suguru lowers his head so that his bangs shield his eyes. He can’t bear to take the full brunt of Satoru’s gaze right now, not when he knows it would be suffocating in its entirety. He knows that if he raised his head then, met Satoru’s gaze head on together with all of the other boy’s kind sincerity, he would shatter into a thousand irreparable shards. Too kind , his mind supplies. Too kind for someone like me.
“I know,” he smiles. “I know I can come to you if I ever need to.” Not technically a lie, but not a promise either.
I think I killed you in every universe , he doesn’t say. I think that before I could ever peel back the mask I wear and let you into my festering heart, I’ll either watch the life drain from your eyes or abandon you before that can ever happen. I’ll kill you in more ways than one because it’s in my nature. It’s in my nature because I’m a human, and you are a god .
The rest of the journey back to the dorms was done in silence. Suguru pushes open his room door to find Shoko lounging on his floor, phone in hand. She glances up at his arrival and returns to her device as if this is her rightful room and not Suguru’s . Suguru opens his mouth to tell her to leave already, you have your own room , but Satoru pushes past him to sprawl on the floor beside Shoko. Suguru stares.
“What are you two doing.”
Blatantly ignoring the way his tone flattens the question into a threat, the two parasites intone in sync, “Chilling.”
Suguru groans, a long-suffering sound that he’d never had to make before meeting these two. Satoru, propping his head up on his crossed arms, encourages, “Just give in, Suguru.” Shoko makes an affirmative noise and gives a thumbs-up without even looking away from her screen.
He’s going to murder them.
Instead of acting on his murderous tendencies, Suguru just sighs and turns to leave his room. He returns a few moments later, tossing a plastic bag at Satoru’s face.
“If you’re taking my room, I’m taking your snacks,” he says, sitting down and crossing his legs before reaching for the bag. Satoru, rubbing the red mark on his forehead, makes a truly piteous noise that doesn’t make Suguru feel remorseful in the slightest. Suguru picks a rice cracker out from the bag and tears the packaging open, purposefully crunching the cracker as loudly as possible to make Satoru whine even more.
Shoko sighs in incomparable exhaustion as the two of them start shoving each other and squabbling over the rest of the snacks. She skilfully dodges the fighting to obtain a lollipop before unwrapping it so she could take a selfie with it in her mouth while they fight in the background. Suguru makes sure to stick out his tongue at the camera while she snaps the picture and sends it off to someone—her girlfriend, probably. Utahime is definitely sick of all the pictures with him and Satoru grappling and barely staying in frame while Shoko has the blankest look on her face.
Eventually, the two of them settle with splitting the snacks three ways. Satoru pouts over his pile of food as Suguru easily deflects all of his attempts at stealing from Suguru’s own pile. He bats the other boy’s hands away while enjoying a strawberry-flavoured hard candy which rids his mouth of the taste of the meal he’d barely finished. Shoko absentmindedly taps away on her phone with the same lollipop in her mouth, an occasional deathly glare enough to discourage Satoru from trying to swipe any of her snacks. Suguru watches her enviously.
The rest of the afternoon is mostly spent in the same way, with Suguru working on some assignments due the next week and Satoru whining about him being a nerd. After another scuffle, Satoru fetches his overdue worksheets from his room and reluctantly starts to complete them, complaining the whole while.
Maybe it’s because he’s distracted by the way the sunlight hits Satoru’s eyes and scatters into the endless fractured layers of blue. Maybe it’s just because he’s tired from the week’s missions and the room is warm with afternoon sun and his friends are beside him. Either way, he doesn’t notice his thoughts shift to a darker tone until it’s too late.
With a flash of surprise, Suguru realises that his body had unconsciously turned away from the people beside him so he doesn’t have to see them. Someone’s arm moves in the corner of his eye, a slight movement that’s almost unnoticeable. He pictures the shift in their muscles and bone that causes the motion, and feels vaguely sick. Determinedly, he forces his gaze onto the corner of the room where a spider is crawling, its sickeningly long legs scuttling across the wooden floor.
He watches it scamper from one brown groove to the next, barely stopping as if running blindly towards some unseeing destination, or away from some intangible threat. Like this, with its legs longer than its body, its shadow lengthening from the sun’s rays hitting it at an angle, it seems almost unnatural. Something born of dust and forgotten memories, something never meant to be alive and breathing, something fated to never be more than what it meant.
Suguru looks at its fragile body as it runs, and thinks: you mean fear, and darkness, and disgust. You will never triumph past what people first think of you when they see you, because they will never bother to look past what you represent and see into what you truly are. You will always mean what you do to others, because no one ever attempts to change their understanding of what you are after that first look.
It reminds him gruesomely of himself.
We’re the strongest. He used to wear the words like a sword, like a fact that proved itself to be true just by him verbally stating it. It became a crutch after Riko, like a reassurance to himself rather than for others. Recently it’s been feeling like a curse he was forced to bear from the moment he drew in his first breath. He is crumbling at the edges, like Atlas holding up the sky while it falls around him.
The elders don’t like him. They see power, and they think: threat . They see him, and they think: unpredictable . Suguru used to wear their distaste like a badge, something he could joke about with Satoru and mock with a flippancy that only came with the arrogance of youth. Now…their judgmental gazes burn his back like a brand, their hissed criticism stinging like knives against raw skin.
He wonders if they are right about him.
Sometimes Suguru can’t think of a single positive impact his existence has had on the world. Killing curses is a short-term solution—barely even a solution. ( What the Jujutsu society does is treat the symptoms. What I want to do is treat the root cause.) Sometimes he thinks of living his youth, carefree and arrogant, while people die because he was taking a break between missions. Because he is stopping the effects but neglecting the cause.
Worth of life and worth of preservation. The latter can be measured by the net output one has on the world by existing. Sometimes he calculates his net output and it would be sickeningly negative. If everything deserves to live, then what if something isn’t worth preserving? What then? Should he die?
Should he die slowly, killed by the Jujutsu society when he can’t pick himself back up after one of those life-threatening missions? Should he die fast, falling headfirst from a tall building and closing his eyes? He has always taken the easy way out, after all. He has always been the logical one, to weigh options and pick the choice with the least repercussions.
Dying is just as tiring and troublesome as living. It would be so messy. There would always be a chance he would survive, and he doesn’t want to deal with the aftermath if he did. Even if he didn’t survive, someone would find him, someone would have to clean up the mess, someone would have to deal with the aftermath. His loved ones will be hurt, shocked, traumatised.
Dying…it’s just so messy .
After every one of those episodes, Suguru would piece himself back together from the trembling mess he was until he could pretend he hadn’t just been thinking about ending it all. In the end, rationality would be what saves him from succumbing to the emptiness in his chest and the deadness in his eyes and the tremble in his fingers. Rationality above all. That is the one law he lives by, swears by, dies by.
In his first year at Jujutsu Tech, there had been a specific running joke about him (started by Satoru when they were still in the grey area between enemies and friends). He was called a computer for his logic. He has been thinking about it, lately. It seems pretty accurate, even though he could be an emotional person—when his emotions grow chaotic and out of control, he falls back on rationality. He thinks.
He thinks and thinks, dissecting every part of his feelings in a systematic analysis. He tries to be objective about his emotions, which sounds like an oxymoron, but he does. It isn’t just for understanding his thoughts. He falls back on logic when he is desperate for a reason. For an answer. For something.
At the end of the day, he supposed being called a computer wouldn’t be accurate. He is a computer with feelings.
Doesn’t that just make him a human?
He will never be able to run from his nature, no matter how much he shields himself with cold logic.
He hates his human nature, sometimes. It’s like his body is just a little off, just a little too awkward for him to comfortably inhabit it. There’s always a glitch, somewhere, like he’s a soul trying to pilot a body that’s just a bit too big for it, like he hasn’t quite grown into it yet.
There’s always a voice whispering in his ear. Away , it beckons, begs, calls. Away, away, it chants, as if it has nothing but that one word to cling onto, a piece of rotting driftwood floating about in the empty ocean. Away from what? He would ask, but he already knows the answer. Away from this life he’s caged in. Away from the burden of responsibility he’s trapped under. Away from it all.
There’s too much time. There’s too little time. He grasps for it like sand in an hourglass, slipping away, and then he turns and suddenly the future stretches out before him, a yawning chasm laying in wait.
There’s too much space. There’s too little space. It’s cold and empty and he feels so lost, then it’s closing in on him and he can’t breathe in this enclosed space. He’s never really been claustrophobic, but he thinks he’s starting to understand the feeling of being trapped. Like mice in a maze, not knowing if there's an exit. Wandering aimlessly anyway, because what else can he do but keep going on?
There’s too many people. There’s no one here. Too overwhelming, too much noise, and suddenly when his friends are gone he looks around and it’s like their absence stole the breath from his lungs with it.
The spider he’s watching reaches a corner and begins to crawl up a wall.
“Suguru, what are you looking at?” Satoru asks, unceremoniously leaning over into his personal space to follow his line of sight. Suguru flinches back into reality. Beside him, the white-haired boy spots the spider and instantly lets out an inhuman shriek, scrambling backwards in panic. His assignments are left abandoned on the floor in a mess, and Suguru sighs.
Shoko glances over and scoffs once she sees the cause of Satoru’s alarm. “Just kill it if you’re so scared,” she says uncaringly with a shrug. Satoru whines about how heartless she is from where he’s pressed against the wall furthest from the spider, and Shoko just sighs before standing up to kill it.
“Wait,” Suguru feels more than hears himself say, holding out a hand. He stands up, feeling as if he’s in a dream, and grabs a glass and a stray sheet of paper from Satoru’s abandoned assignments. Carefully, he walks towards the wall where the spider is and covers it with the glass. He feels Satoru’s eyes burning a hole into his back as he slides the paper under the glass and lifts the newly captured spider.
Holding the glass and paper in place lest Satoru starts screaming again, Suguru walks over to the window and lifts the glass before gently shaking the paper so the spider falls softly onto the grass outside. As the spider scuttles away, he turns back towards his friends and tells Satoru, “It’s gone.”
Satoru breathes an audible sigh of relief and slumps dramatically onto the floor. “You’re a literal lifesaver, Suguru,” he calls from where he lays on the floor in a position that could not possibly be comfortable.
“It was only a common house spider,” Suguru responds, replacing the glass and paper before walking back to the centre of his room and sitting down. “It couldn’t have hurt you, anyway.”
Satoru just flips him off and blows him a raspberry without raising his head. Suguru aims a kick at him but the bastard’s reflexes are too sharp and he rolls out of the way before sitting up with a triumphant smirk.
“You’re really too good of a person, Suguru. Killing it would have been faster,” Shoko sighs as the two of them start kicking at each other, her tone somehow managing to sound both fond and exasperated. The throwaway comment makes him freeze, but he forcibly relaxes and lets out a chuckle.
A good person, huh?
His painfully human life rattles along like a freight train on metal tracks, and occasionally—there is the thrill of being a good person.
There is a pride that comes with playing the role of a good friend. A good classmate. A good person. He tries, he really does, to be the best person he can be. Nestled underneath his tongue is the bitter taste of craving the ability to be a good person bleeding into the tang of stumbling under the misplaced weight of such a responsibility. Some days he can’t tell if it’s truly him or a skin he wears for his own validation. He wonders if he is kind so he can feel better about himself doing the right things.
People tell him he is a good person, and he desperately wants to disagree, because it isn’t true. He helps people because it is “right” by his moral standards. Isn’t that an ulterior motive? His worth is a butterfly with a broken wing, struggling to survive with the threat of being easily torn apart by the slightest wind.
“Suguru, you okay?” Shoko’s voice shakes him out of his thoughts. She's watching him carefully, as if he were a particularly interesting corpse that just arrived at the morgue.
“You’ve been acting really weird today,” Satoru adds, looking at him with those infinite skies he had for eyes, and all of a sudden Suguru feels exposed. Like he’s a vulnerable mortal caught in the overbearing gaze of a god, their stare alone dissecting him into a million pieces.
“I’m fine,” he feels his mouth form the words, but can’t hear them over the loud buzz in his ears. The noise is akin to being surrounded in a swarm of flies, their volume increasing by the second until it is overwhelming his thoughts. Suguru feels like he’s drowning, falling into the endless pit of curses he holds in his mind. He shuts his eyes for a moment, forcing himself back into focus before opening them again.
“...like you’re distracted. Do you wanna talk about it?” Shoko’s voice filters back in, and Suguru abruptly feels guilty. Satoru nods along eagerly, all wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, and insists, “We’re here for you, you know!”
“Really, I’m okay,” Suguru responds, wearing a smile stretched thin over his skin. He casts out his crumbling cheerfulness like a mask so it can hide the shake in his hands. His friends have their own burdens to deal with. It would be selfish to push something like this onto them when he’s best equipped to deal with himself anyway. “It’s just…”
Just what? Suguru doesn’t know either. Some days he would just get lost in his head, like the world is there and existing but it would be so heavy, like a physical weight in his chest that his breath catches on when it tries to draw in or leave. It’s no wonder he doesn’t like existing.
“It’s nothing,” he finishes. Deflecting any other reassurances his friends try to direct at him, Suguru lets himself sink into his thoughts once again. The same buzzing noise replaces the sounds of his friends’ voices, and he tries hard to focus on what they said, but his grip on the edge of the cliff is slippery and soon enough he’s falling into the abyss of his own mind.
You are a mortal, something hisses. Suguru can’t tell if it’s his own thought or that of the curses sharing the space in his head. Who is he, when it really matters? Absently, Suguru listens to the scream of static in his ears as he lays out the shattered pieces of himself neatly, their edges blunt and rough and bloody. With fumbling fingers, he holds each piece up to the sunlight so he can watch it fracture the soft glow, studying it as if it held the answers to his endless questions.
He is a Jujutsu sorcerer, first and foremost. Someone who saves. Someone who protects. Someone who helps. Jujutsu exists to protect the weak. Side the weak, and fight the strong. His own voice rings sharply in his ears, bleeding into his thoughts. The role he threw himself into from the moment he was scouted, because it had meaning back when his fingers still shook with the desire to help instead of ignore. The duty he has been forcing down his own throat like every curse he’s consumed and which now rests in his mind, the ugliest parts of humanity caged in himself. The reason he hung desperately onto in a sea of smiling, clapping people as he drowned, endlessly chasing that shred of meaning.
He is a moral compass when boiled down to the skeleton of who he is. A logical set of programming that runs its calculations according to a strict set of beliefs and concludes the most suitable course of action. Calm, reliable, rational, methodical. The unrelenting belief that he must protect, waging a war with the ugly nature of the protected. He knew the grotesqueness of the masses, and he still chose to protect them with this wretched awareness. That is his truth. It has to be, because what else is there, if not this? He stares at the tremble in his hands and sees through it to the stark-white bone of inadequacy it had been born from, and abruptly feels sick.
He is…a friend.
He starts as the thought comes unbidden to his mind. At that singular moment, all he could feel was laid-out before thousands of unforgiving eyeballs and scraped raw from the suffocating feeling of being in that room. There are no thousands of piercing gazes, in reality, but the weight of Satoru’s presence from where he sits next to him weighs just as heavily on his suffocated lungs. The supernova of a god beside him tears at the layers of protection he puts up between himself and the outside world every morning until he is bared to reality with nothing but his shaking fists and bared teeth, the shards of himself gathered haphazardly in his palm.
Satoru thinks of him as a friend. Satoru loves him fiercely and loudly, spilling his affection everywhere, declaring it in grandiose yet meaningful words, shameless in his acts of devotion. Satoru loves him deeply, loves him so genuinely that the world itself trembles to bear all of it.
Despite Satoru always being the more cheerful, livelier, better one, Suguru is still his best friend. Despite Suguru’s stubbornness and rigidity and devotion to his morals, Satoru still considers him his best friend.
The same Satoru who is a breath of fresh air in a stifling world. The same Satoru with whom conversations speed off in seven different directions at once. The same Satoru whose company is like running barefoot on soft, dry grass with the wind in their faces, hands clasped tightly in each other’s, like boarding a train with no destination, just a never ending journey, like having the sun in their eyes and laughter in their chests.
The same Satoru who leans lazily on him when he can stand just fine by himself and drags him out to expensive cafés that drain his wallet and gets him involved in the stupidest shit possible. The same Satoru with a sort of kindness that runs deeper than his arrogance and immaturity, hidden in nooks and crannies but which can be read in his looks and in the quiet ways he shows care, a sort of kindness that just by existing defies the cruelty of the world. The same Satoru who is painfully, beautifully human, in moments that he would look at Suguru and smile like joy personified, his eyes two rough diamonds catching the light and sending it spiralling into a thousand beautiful multicoloured patterns.
Yet.
Yet, sometimes Suguru looks at his one and only best friend, and what looks back is a powerful god who just chooses to cloak himself as a human.
The god of a boy considered him, saw through him to the senseless righteousness he was crafted from, and stands beside him nonetheless. It destroys Suguru to think that such a wonderful heavenly being, folded intricately into a mortal vessel, could walk alongside him, rely on him, trust him. He doesn’t deserve even a glance from Gojo Satoru, the strongest sorcerer in nearly a century, and yet he has the other’s unwavering attention and love.
Suguru loves Satoru like he was built to love him. He holds his love in the crevices of his ribcage and lets it consume him until it drips from his fingertips like inky tears.
Satoru taught him how to be proud. Satoru taught him how to be unafraid. Satoru taught him how to be free.
Suguru would die for and kill for Satoru a million times over if it means he can see him happy. He loves Satoru like it’s all he can do.
The flesh of Suguru’s chest is glass and so is his skin; everyone can see the flowers in his ribcage that he grows for Satoru.
That’s why it hurts as much as it does every time he sees Satoru stumble.
Seeing Satoru wince at the sunlight when his sunglasses are lost in battle feels like walking barefoot over broken glass. Seeing Satoru collapse into Suguru’s bed after a long mission—his complaints and whining a shoddily thrown up defence to pretend he’s much less tired than he is—feels like ripping his own heart out of his chest. Seeing Satoru’s hands shake during lessons and knowing it’s from hours of relentlessly practising Red and Blue feels like morphing himself into a cursed spirit orb, sinew and viscera giving way to a lifeless black-gold.
Satoru is the strongest, but the price for his strength was paid in blood and bone and pain. In moments of his youth stolen away by elders set on weaponising Satoru until he was dead and therefore, useless. Satoru is Sisyphus, infinitely withstanding a burden that was not built to be withstood by anything, neither god nor human. Endlessly pushing that damned stone hundreds of times his weight up that damned hill, knowing that it will, without fail, roll to the bottom mere before he ever reaches the top. A vicious cycle he has no choice but to continue, because what other choice is there?
What other choice is there? A voice in his head mocks. You know what other choice there is.
Then…why not just kill all the non-sorcerers? His voice, indescribably tired, the words spilling out before he could stop them. The instant flash of guilt and panic. Shit, he shouldn’t have said that. What kind of a good person is he if he could bear to say something like that aloud? But then—Geto-kun…that is an option. That’s probably the easiest way to achieve it. But I’m not that crazy yet.
Do you hate non-sorcerers, Geto-kun?
He still doesn’t know.
To kill weeds, you must pull them up at the roots. A vague memory of an English quote he’d once read in a book. It rings in his ears, echoing in the space that separates his own thoughts from the hive of curses dwelling in his head. The most wretched parts of humanity condensed into a section of himself.
To eradicate curses, you must eradicate them from the roots. Cause and effect. The cause of curses is leaked cursed energy pooling together. The cause of leaked cursed energy is negative emotions of non-sorcerers. Does that mean the cause of curses is non-sorcerers?
Does that mean the cause of Satoru’s burden—
—heavy is the head that wears the crown, misplaced on the head of a 16-year-old who didn’t even know what music players are—
—the cause of Haibara’s death—
—premature death, would his sister have died too if he hadn’t forbidden her from attending Jujutsu Tech—
—the cause of Riko’s death—
—premature death, would she have been hunted and substituted thoughtlessly like livestock if there was no need for a Star Plasma Vessel—
—are non-sorcerers?
Suguru feels like his head is spinning faster than the speed of light, threateningly close to the verge of something dangerous. He is suspended at the edge of a cliff with the sheer drop inches from where he stands in the wind. His vision swims in and out of focus, the sight before him that of his friends, beside him, living a normal, peaceful afternoon with the weight of the world on their shoulders. The weight of a world that takes and takes with ungrateful, gluttonous greed, uncaring of the cost Jujutsu sorcerers have to pay in turn.
At the end of the day, he hates humans.
He hates humans.
He hates monkeys.