Chapter Text
When Yaga comes to him with the case, it’s early evening in March and the sun spills golden through the shop’s windows. Satoru is puttering about, cleaning up for the day and procrastinating instead of restocking the shelves. He prefers to let his apprentice do it. The ceiling in the shop is fairly low, and Satoru keeps brushing up against the fairy lights hanging from the wooden beams. It’s annoying.
Perhaps sensing his restlessness, his familiar, a slick black cat with eyes like amethysts, hops up on the counter and gives him a reproachful look, just as the bell by the door rings. Satoru looks up sharply—he’s already locked the door and flipped the sign—and sighs in relief when he sees his old teacher.
“Breaking and entering?” he asks, hand gliding down Six’s silky fur to soothe himself. “I thought that good witches never use magic for nefarious purposes.”
“It’s not nefarious to convince a lock that I’m welcome here when it’s true.” Yaga takes a critical look around. “These shelves won’t stock themselves.”
Yaga’s aura has been a constant in Satoru’s life for almost a decade. It’s a delicate composition of mustard yellow annoyance, general surliness pushing through like swamp green thorns, and the faintest shades of pastel pink amusement hidden underneath.
Satoru grins. “I dunno. They’ve been absorbing my deepest wishes and hopes for two years now. It’s about time they started showing it.”
“The most that’ll do is convince the shelves to hide things from your customers. Bad for business, don’t you think?” Yaga runs a finger over one shelf, checking for dust.
“You want tea or something, sensei? This a social visit?”
Yaga hesitates, which is something he does rarely. Six picks up on it right away, jumping off the counter and slinking into the back room, eyes judgemental. Satoru takes his place, hopping up onto the solid wooden surface, resting his arms on his knees.
Yaga doesn’t make him wait long. “Tengen-sama has had a vision.”
“Okay? That happens every other Tuesday.”
“It’s like the one from five years ago.” Yaga isn’t wearing his sunglasses. He rubs at his eyes, clearly aware of the kind of memories he’s stirring. “Two kids this time, fourteen and fifteen years old, and only one is going to die, but we don’t know which.”
Tengen’s ability to read the currents of magic, to feel as it blooms and spreads, or withers and withdraws, is unique. Even Satoru, with his innate talent, doesn’t come close in terms of scope of vision. He’s glad that’s the case.
Satoru’s hands clench on the edge of the counter. He does his best to appear cheerful and compresses his aura close to his body. Yaga can’t see it, but he’d be able to sense it if he brushed up against it.
“So? I think we established last time that there’s nothing to be done about that.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Yaga watches him like he’s trying to read his ingredients list, figure out what half-products make up Satoru today. “But what if it’s different this time?”
It’s a cruel question. Yaga knows him too well and isn’t above pulling on Satoru’s heartstrings. Satoru wants to unclench his jaw and let the barrage of blame he keeps behind his teeth spill forth. What did Yaga risk five years ago? What did he lose, in comparison? It must be so nice to dangle bait in his old apprentice’s face, knowing he’ll bite, and keep himself safely away from the action and the fallout.
They’ve had this argument already. Nothing ever changes. Satoru swallows back the anger and exhales the frustration.
“Fine. Tell me what you know.”
With a triumphant glint in his eye, Yaga does. The kids are Okkotsu Yuta and Orimoto Rika, both currently hospitalised and becoming fast friends. Yaga says he went to check, to feel the liquid warmth of friendship flow around them, underscored by sticky grief and chilly fear. Rika has just lost her father in a mountain climbing accident. Yuta is recovering from pneumonia. His parents and Rika’s grandmother, having noticed the kids’ developing bond, are in the process of transferring Rika to Yuta’s junior high school. Probably they want Rika to have a fresh start somewhere she’ll be able to avoid reminders of her loss.
The father’s death—presumed; his body hasn’t been found—is strange. The incident took place in an area which the Orimotos had been visiting for years, ever since Rika started school. Who takes a seven year old mountain climbing? Not the average widower. Yaga explains that Rika’s mother died when the girl was five, suddenly and of unknown causes. Even more strange.
More importantly, loss must cling to Rika like a second skin. Walking around with a void inside is a very vulnerable state, magically speaking. Satoru gets away with it thanks to his innate talent, but Rika is, reportedly, just a regular girl. She’s likely drawing all kinds of trouble towards herself.
“Yuta seems to have some talent,” Yaga says, though he sounds sceptical. “It’s the usual early signs: strong intuition, surprising emotional reactions. He gets sick easily, but that may or may not be about magic.”
“I’ll know when I see him,” Satoru says, dismissive. “You haven’t said anything about who or what might kill one of them.”
“There’s nothing to say. I haven’t noticed anything.”
Now that’s interesting. Usually, when someone is about to die, the magic around them freaks out—twists and contorts, changes colour and texture, flows more frantically or goes dead still. Yaga wouldn’t be able to see it like Satoru would, but any witch worth their salt can feel the signs of impending doom and, usually, trace them to their source.
Satoru sighs. “I guess you wouldn’t have come to me if it were that simple. Anything else?”
“Yes.” Yaga pauses to stare Satoru down. “If you’re going to investigate, you have to consider that it might be malignant magic at work. And if that’s the case, you know who’s the best source of information.”
Outwardly, Satoru stays calm. Through his connection with Six, he can feel that the cat’s shiny black fur is standing on end, its face scrunched up in a silent hiss. One of the many benefits of the bond between a witch and their familiar is channelling strong emotions to the other end of it, so that a part of the soul will feel them, but the physical body can hide its distress.
“If that’s your insight,” Satoru says, conversationally, “why don’t you pay Suguru a visit?”
Yaga looks like he bit into a lemon. They never talk about Suguru by unspoken agreement, and not just for Satoru’s benefit. “I don’t want to get cursed.”
“He wouldn’t.”
“He might. And you are immune.”
Aside from his eyes, Satoru’s second innate talent is his ability to cut himself off from all the magic around him, push it away before it can touch him. And because he can always see magic coming his way, his defences are nearly impenetrable.
Against magic, at least.
“I’m gonna be fine on my own,” Satoru decides. “It’s not like I don’t understand malevolent magic just because I don’t use it that way.”
Yaga doesn’t seem convinced, but frankly, he has no right to judge. He leaves with a promise to send Satoru all the files he has on the case, which is nice of him. Satoru locks the shop up again and leaves the shelves as they are. He posts a sign on the door to inform potential customers that the shop will be closed for the weekend.
It’s Friday, so Satoru chooses to avoid the crowds and focus on digital legwork for now. He goes through Yaga’s files, then updates them with extra tidbits he manages to dig up. There isn’t much. Rika’s mother had been a housewife and somewhat socially isolated. The father was a regular salaryman and avid hiker. He used to take his daughter to climbing walls, and he’d been passionate about mountaineering in his youth. He must have known what he was doing, then, when he took Rika on that fateful trip.
Okkotsu Yuta, to Satoru’s amusement, turns out to be a distant cousin of his. It doesn’t mean anything, really, except for the fact that Satoru can use the connection to get closer to the boy if he needs to. The pneumonia and general sickliness don’t look particularly suspicious on paper, and Yuta’s family life seems normal to the point of being boring. The only interesting clue is a collection of teachers’ notes from his elementary school. Apparently, Yuta has trouble connecting with his peers and is a suspected victim of bullying.
That’s no surprise. Since the boy grew up outside of the clans, he’s had to deal with being notably different from other kids his age. Satoru has heard that it’s not easy to pass as normal when one can read the emotions in people’s auras and simply knows what the weather will be like on a given day.
Satoru stays up late but wakes up early the following morning to the sound of his ringtone. He’s called in to consult on a homicide case involving the son of a high-ranking politician. The site is a fairly classy bar, the victim is a regular young woman with no connections, and the residual magic tells Satoru the entire story at a glance. It’s a sad one. As he always does these days, Satoru takes his time walking around the place, pretending he needs to check out every nook and cranny, giving himself time to think.
One of the biggest regrets of his life is that, when he’d been a kid sent on assignments like this one, he used to simply list his findings to the detective in charge and call it a day, without worrying about who’d be affected, or how. It was on the justice system to use the information in the best way possible, after all. Then he was apprenticed to Yaga and met Suguru, who used terms like ‘systemic violence’ and ‘secondary victimisation’, and Satoru couldn’t claim ignorance any more. So here he is now, manipulating the investigation towards the outcome he wants and not feeling any particular way about it.
It’s always a compromise. Between Japan’s famously high conviction rate, political interests, connections to the three clans that rule over the country’s witches, and some people’s sheer bad luck, Satoru can only do so much. He’s not ready to ruin his reputation for any one victim, not when it would mean he’d be helpless to do anything for the next one, and the one after that.
He heads to the hospital the moment that’s over, eager to take a look at Rika to see whether any interesting residuals linger within her aura. He’s disappointed to find that that is not the case. Rika fills the room with watery sadness and a sense of being lost like snowy static on a TV screen. All of it twists and swirls towards an invisible vortex centred on where she’s sitting, but it’s a gentle distortion, not the kind Satoru expected from a girl who just lost her second parent. He’ll need to keep a close eye on that.
He peeks into Yuta’s room next. The boy’s aura is all grainy restlessness, like sand sticking to skin, and muddy annoyance. Rose-petaled anticipation slips through here and there, but Yuta seems to be consciously pushing it down. He’s the pessimistic type, then. Poor kid. More importantly, Yuta’s aura is very much like a witch’s—self-contained, moulding itself around the edges of his frame, and leaking comparatively little, leaving only the faintest lingering stains in the air around him. Yaga was right about the boy.
Satoru doesn’t let either of the kids see him, easily obscuring his presence by blending his aura with the ambient magic lingering in the corridors. Hospitals are filled to the brim with hope, anguish, grief, anger, anxiety, fear, and love, a distracting mix. It’s still morning. Satoru chats up a nurse who looks at him through a pink haze of attraction and says that Yuta escapes his room several times a day, dragging his IV stand down the corridor, to visit Rika. The staff think it’s cute.
Satoru texts Shoko and meets her in the hospital’s designated smoking area. It’s probably not just luck that she’s doing her medical student thing at this hospital specifically. Magically inclined people tend to find themselves in the same places, following paths that attract them for seemingly no reason. (Satoru, who could see magic from the day he was born, has never fallen for this subconscious tugging on his senses.)
“When Yaga said he put you on the case, I almost didn’t believe him.” Shoko’s leaning back against the rough concrete wall, cigarette moving as she speaks. She radiates dark blue and purple fatigue, like bruises in the air. “What are you even getting out of it?”
Not for the first time, Satoru wonders whether she doesn’t notice that he’s changed, or if she’s only pretending. “A kid’s gonna die if we don’t do anything. Seems like a waste.”
“A kid’s gonna die, period. Tengen hasn’t been wrong yet.” She takes a long drag and holds the smoke in for a while before exhaling. “Kids die all the time, Gojo. All the time.”
He’s not sure how to explain that it’s different when magic is the cause. Even now, with his charmed sunglasses on, he can see the muted shapes and colours. They are impossible to ignore and they always feel so malleable to Satoru, like he could reach out, drag his fingers through the smoky strands of fatigue shrouding Shoko, and make a difference.
It’s both true and not at the same time. Seeing magic is one thing, but channelling it or changing its nature is a complex art. Shoko knows this, but she’s seen Satoru do the theoretically impossible numerous times, so she can keep her scepticism to herself.
“Maybe this kid doesn’t have to die. Maybe we win this one, Shoko.”
“You sure this isn’t about Amanai?” Shoko’s stare is as ruthless as her words. “The past is the past. You can’t fix what got broken back then by obsessing over Rika and Yuta.”
Satoru makes a wordless noise of pure, childish frustration. “Why bring that up? Can’t I do a good deed just because? Does it have to be about my tragic past? Stop being so cliche.”
“Whatever. Fine. I’ll keep you updated, but I’m not getting any more involved than that.”
“That’s all I need.”
They part ways without saying goodbye, as always. Satoru’s next destination requires a little more forethought. He has gone mountain climbing before, once or twice, but not in years. His only hope is that the trail chosen by the Orimotos on the day of the accident must have been easy enough for a kid to handle.
He buys gear he’ll probably never use again and drives to the site. After a frustrating afternoon of freezing his extremities and struggling to stay hydrated, Satoru’s eyes are sore from trying to spot the trail of a man about to die or abandon his daughter. And yet, nothing.
After retreating to his hotel room, Satoru has the unfortunate thought that Suguru, who grew up in the countryside, would probably have had more luck. The idea refuses to stop tumbling around in his brain, gathering years’ worth of mental lint, and ends up sending him into a fit of moroseness unfit for a witch.
Satoru could summon Six and share the burden, but he can’t make himself do it. It’s misery of his own making. He deserves to suffer.
He spends his evening handling another assignment from the clans. A politician needs extra luck for an upcoming event, which is so typical and boring that Satoru doesn’t even hesitate before sending Megumi instructions on how to prepare the appropriate charms. It’s good practice, he tells himself, as he copy-pastes instructions into an email to the client. Ijichi will deliver the charms tomorrow and lie to the client’s face about how the famous witch Gojo Satoru made them himself. They’ve completed this routine too many times to count.
Satoru has more luck on Sunday, picking up a trail of faded guilt and shame. It settles low to the ground like bluish smoke. Satoru dips his fingers in it and grimaces, hair raising on end as a sense of foreboding briefly overtakes him. He shakes it off and follows the trail, well aware that the emotions aren’t his, that they can’t affect him if he doesn’t let them.
By midday, he’s starting to worry that he’ll have to give up, since he doesn’t fancy spending the night on the mountain, and trying to make his way back to the car in the dark is even less appealing. And then he sees it, like a dark sun peeking from behind the trees. It’s painful to look at it—it’s all but tugging on Satoru’s eyeballs, pulling him in with inexorable gravity.
He adjusts his glasses and doesn’t let the thing distract him. As he emerges from among the trees, he finds himself on the edge of a cliff. Of course.
A glossy, pitch-black ball of despair hangs in the air above the cliff, reaching out towards Satoru with eager tendrils. It’s like the world having an abscess: a disgusting pocket of festering magic, the kind that would feel oily and wrong if touched. When Satoru takes another step forward, the magic begins to trickle diagonally in his direction. He’s suddenly immensely glad that he came here alone, because it can’t touch him, and he can deal with it easily.
Satoru’s innate talent allows him to move magic within a certain range. He can push it aside, concentrate it or spread it around, fling it away or pull it near. He extends a hand, forming a finger gun for extra flair, and punctures the ball of wrongness. It bursts. Everything is black and disgusting outside of Satoru’s personal bubble, splashed with concentrated suffering. If he lets it, it’ll slide and spill down the mountain, slip into cracks and sink into the earth.
Instead, Satoru uses another aspect of his talent, the ability to take a chunk of magic, divide it, say, in two, then divide the result in two, and go on like that, indefinitely, until virtually nothing’s left. He’s one of the only three witches in the world who can clean a magical mess up this well, and this easily.
When it’s done, Satoru picks his way across the rocky ground and heads back to the car. He’ll have to report this place to Yaga and update the clans’ map of dangerous magical sites. Someone will have to come back and check on it in a few months. Standard procedure.
Fatigue catches up to him on the drive back, so he calls Shoko to distract himself from it. She has no news about the kids. It’s a shame. Satoru is pretty sure that Rika’s father died because of the abscess, and that it had nothing to do with the girl. He’s still suspicious about the death of Rika’s mother, but that happened a decade ago, too far back to investigate magically.
He takes a long, scalding hot shower when he gets to his apartment above the shop. He forces down food he can barely taste, and collapses into bed, curling up around Six. His familiar purrs loudly against his ribcage, sharing warmth and syphoning off some of the stress.
Satoru considers his options. Without any more magical clues to follow, all he can do is watch the kids and do actual legwork. Which he would love to do, but his schedule is, unfortunately, full. After his weekend away, he’s dreading going through his backlog of messages and emails. He can’t properly throw himself into the investigation without showing his hand to the clans, which is out of the question.
So. Who does he know that would be up for messing with one of Tengen’s prophecies, and whose expertise Satoru can trust?
He hates that there’s only one answer to that question. Not just because he doesn’t want to pull Suguru into this bullshit, but because it’s just so unfair that he can’t name a single other witch who’d drop everything to try and prevent a fated death. He knows people who would care, but back out due to obligations or fear. He knows even more people who wouldn’t bat an eye.
Defeated, he sleeps, and dreams of better days.
Satoru used to turn candy into luck charms, but after he ‘accidentally’ ate his fourth one, he had to admit to his folly and use inedible objects, like belt buckles or cufflinks, instead. With his innate talent, it’s simple to make them. He just has to go to a place where people gamble, gather all their desperate hope and delirious victoriousness into a messy ball of red and pink, silver and gold, then condense it as tightly as it’ll go into a vessel.
His current charm, a pair of lucky socks, must be working well. He finds Suguru at home the first time he visits without calling ahead.
In contrast to Satoru’s shop, which is tucked into a street full of cute bakeries and cafes, cosy bookstores and flower shops, Suguru’s place of business is hidden away in a family home in a residential area. The house has a modern look, protected from nosy neighbours by tall, violently green hedges.
Satoru is shocked by how easy it is to convince the gate to let him in, then walk across the boundary. A typical witch puts all kinds of protections around their home, mostly in the form of charms that cause uninvited visitors to overlook the place, get lost on the way there, or remember they left the oven on just as they’re about to walk in. Satoru doesn’t feel even the faintest pushback.
A conservatory with squeaky clean windows is the first place he approaches. As expected, there’s a door, propped open with a watering can. The interior is warm despite the cold weather, likely thanks to climate control charms. Satoru has to push through a lot of greenery to get to a central open space. There, he finds a proper witch’s workplace: solid wood counters, shelves with dozens of bottles, boxes, and cans, a stove, a mortar and pestle, even a small cast iron cauldron. He spies a couple of cushioned wicker chairs out of the corner of his eye, but most of his attention is glued to the witch currently mixing herbs with sure movements, humming under his breath.
Suguru looks good. Satoru knows that he himself has aged like fine wine, but Suguru—his shoulders are definitely more broad. His hair is only half done up, with a few thin braids hidden among the inky strands. The loose tank top he’s wearing drapes across his torso, making him look both soft and absolutely sinful. When his arms flex, the complex tattoo-like patterns covering them from wrist to shoulder and beyond shift like they’re alive.
They might as well be. Each tattoo glows brightly with stolen magic. They’d be torture to Satoru’s sensitive eyes if not for the glasses he hides behind, which he’s been using for years and which have, therefore, had time to build up their magical properties. He kind of wants to take them off and let the image in front of him burn itself into his retinas. He’s the only person in the world who can see the magic preserved under Suguru’s skin, and it still feels special to him. Like a secret they share.
Satoru stands there, staring, waiting to be acknowledged. Suguru must be aware of his presence. There’s no way a witch’s sharpened senses wouldn’t register the magical void that folds itself around Satoru. He’s heard it described as looking at a picture he used to be in, only after he’s been cut out, leaving empty space.
He hates that he feels like he needs to protect himself here.
Suguru finally finishes weighing the little bags of dried herbs he’s been preparing and looks up. He keeps his body lax, but he can’t hide the way his aura swirls with a dizzying mixture of reddish brown annoyance and washed out navy blue worry.
“Welcome,” Suguru says through a customer service smile. “What brings you here, Satoru?”
Okay, so they are at least on a first name basis. “Would you believe me if I said I’m just visiting an old friend?”
“Not a chance.” Suguru wipes his hands on a clean rag and walks around the counter. He leans back against it, crossing his arms. “For starters, a social visit wouldn’t warrant a break-in.”
“The door was open.”
“Uh-huh. The gate wasn’t.” He sighs. The colours in his aura dull a little. “What do you want? Not that I’m not happy to see you, but four years is a long time. I don’t think you’re here on a whim.”
Abruptly, Satoru wishes he had tracked Suguru down, on a whim or whatever, years ago. He brushes the thought away, unnerved. They both have good reasons to avoid each other.
“I need your help,” he admits, hoping for a quick rejection that will end this farce.
Unfortunately, Suguru knows him. He narrows his eyes, tilts his head, and studies Satoru for a long moment. His aura goes rotting spinach green around the edges, slimy with disgust.
“Is it another case like Riko’s?” Satoru’s silence seems to be answer enough, because Suguru grins viciously, and rust red anger washes through the air around him. “I’ve heard rumours, and I guess this is confirmation. Have you considered not upending your life over it?”
“That’s very funny. You good to go now, or do I need to come back when you’re finished?” Satoru gestures vaguely towards the counter.
The anger doesn’t go away, darkening and bubbling instead, settling around Suguru’s shoulders like a cloak. “Give me five minutes to clean up.”
Satoru invites himself into his space to help, and to see how far he can push Suguru’s buttons. He keeps glimpsing the tattoos out of the corner of his eye, and can’t always hold back a wince. Suguru notices. He huffs and pulls on a leather jacket, obscuring the glow of magic. Satoru is both grateful and disappointed.
The drive to the hospital is not awkward. Satoru shares most of what he knows about the case. Suguru scoffs at Satoru’s music and fiddles with the radio, which leads to them rehashing an old argument about the arbitrariness of genre categories. It’s almost like they’ve jumped back to what they had before Amanai, before Suguru started to withdraw from their friendship, before they argued. Except Suguru’s aura is still mostly anger with a few wisps of purple nostalgia, and Satoru knows his own must taste equally dishonest.
“Your place is really nice,” Satoru says, prying. “You must be in demand. Is it all the quiet assassinations?”
Suguru huffs, clearly unimpressed. “Thanks. What if I told you I manipulated the previous owner so she’d write me into her will?”
“I wouldn’t believe you.” No trained witch would practise out of a space they didn’t own, and no witch would risk tainting their sanctum with underhanded acquisition tactics.
“Excellent.”
Satoru scowls. “Does my annoyance taste good or something?”
“Like peppercorn candy.”
“Disgusting.”
Suguru laughs—a real one. “Ah, keep insulting yourself. Do it for me.”
“Shut it. It’s not like that taste is real.”
Suguru just smiles at him knowingly, because it really is beside the point that both of them think that their perception of magic is highly subjective. Satoru sees colours and patterns, but he’s pretty sure that’s just his brain’s interpretation of something a human brain wasn’t meant to perceive. Suguru tastes magic whenever he breathes, and he’s agreed with Satoru that it doesn’t make sense for anger to taste like hot sauce from one person, and like toothpaste from another.
At the hospital, Satoru distracts the nurses while Suguru goes into Yuta’s room to chat up the kid, then they repeat the process with Rika. The nature of Suguru’s innate talent means that he needs to get close to someone’s aura to get a read on it. Suguru’s other talent, it turns out, is charming kids. He gets Rika to giggle at his dramatic rendition of a long-lost uncle worried about her health.
“You’re definitely not my uncle,” she tells him. “But it’s nice of you to talk to me. Do you do this a lot? Are you with an organisation?”
“All the time,” Suguru lies easily. He’s radiating copper and gold tones of friendly concern and kindness, but from his place in the doorway, Satoru cas see the darkness simmering underneath. “I’m not with any group. Call it a pastime, I suppose, though I don’t mean to sound flippant.”
“No, no, you came prepared and everything.” Rika lifts the book that Suguru gifted her with. “Thank you, again.”
“Nanako and Mimiko, the girls I tutor, talked about this book a lot. You have to tell me if it’s bad so I’ll know not to trust their taste.”
They laugh for a little bit longer and chat about inconsequential things while Satoru pulls grey fatigue and foggy apathy around his bubble, making himself all but invisible. His eyes are mostly on Rika. She acts sweet and happy to entertain her guest, but her aura roils with dark grey annoyance, maybe impatience.
“You were so gentle with them,” Satoru marvels as he and Suguru abscond through the back exit. “Like you really knew what you were doing.”
Suguru rolls his eyes, but the blue tint to his aura says he’s at least a little pleased. “I’m okay with kids.”
“More like husband material. Seriously.”
At this, Suguru’s mood sours, aura shifting to dirt brown. Satoru isn’t sure what it means other than general disapproval. Four years ago, they were best friends, but there was something more between them that neither of them ever acknowledged. Satoru saw it, though, and he knows Suguru could taste it. It was real.
He supposes the reminder is unpleasant. Or maybe Suguru is disgusted by the idea now that he’s twenty three and living his best life.
“I’m not convinced the children are the source of it,” Suguru says, all business. “Rika being dishonest isn’t surprising. She’s had to handle a lot of attention from strangers. But Yuta has potential, which probably means whoever or whatever’s after them isn’t an amateur or a coincidence.”
“Yeah.”
“So, let’s be thorough.”
Since Shoko is too busy for a chat, they head to the Orimotos’ apartment building to see what they can sniff out there. Homes tend to be a mess of incomprehensible magical residues, most of them entirely mundane, unlikely to provide answers. Satoru isn’t holding his breath.
They have to walk down a busy street. Watching Suguru duck and weave so he can stay as far away from other people as possible is always a little painful. He’s perfectly polite, doesn’t cringe or wince or anything, but Satoru can see that he wraps himself in prickly, coffee brown magic, which probably has a strong enough taste to overpower everything else.
Hoping he isn’t overstepping, Satoru brushes their shoulders together as they walk and extends his personal magic-free bubble to include Suguru. The obvious downside of this is that he can no longer see Suguru’s aura clearly, so when Suguru blinks at him, Satoru has no idea what it means.
Other people, suddenly washed clean of things that have been clinging to them for who knows how long, begin giving them a wide berth. Satoru laughs under his breath. Suguru is the only person he knows who has never shied away from this manifestation of Satoru’s talent, and instead found solace in it from the start.
They ride the elevator to the fourth floor alone. Suguru breaks the lock on the apartment door without lifting a finger, inky wisps of dark magic slipping out of his sleeve and into the keyhole.
“That was self-hatred, right?” Satoru asks. “Creative.”
“Basic.” Suguru pushes the door open and steps inside with no hesitation. “Just not intuitive to you, since you barely use this kind of magic.”
Satoru wants to disagree—on their way here, he was the one messing with CCTV by throwing uncertainty and anxiety at cameras—but he’s too busy taking in the apartment. It’s large for a two-person family, with an open-plan kitchen and soulless modern furniture. More importantly, it’s almost entirely empty of magic.
“No one could have cleaned this place out this thoroughly,” Satoru observes, taking off his glasses. “Unless you did it, or I’ve been sleepwalking.”
They investigate, finding watered down traces of magic in the dark corners and behind furniture, anywhere dust and cobwebs would normally gather. It’s the usual: boredom, anxiety, annoyance, affection, amusement. Nothing concerning at all.
“Okay, who do we know that could do this?” Satoru turns in a slow circle in the middle of the living room. “Also, what for? I guess a non-witch living here would feel like crashing at a stranger’s house?”
“Time to dig into real estate gossip,” Suguru says from where he’s staring at a painting of a stormy sea. “It’s not uncommon, actually, when people want to force someone to sell.”
“Are you speaking from experience?”
“Yep.” His aura flares red with challenge, like a splash of venous blood. “But I wouldn’t put in this much effort. This is the cleanest job I’ve seen in a long time. Living here could make someone lose it, I promise you.”
Deciding he can’t let himself be upstaged, Satoru makes Suguru stand aside while he pulls a sliver of shadowy guilt from behind a cupboard, multiplies it, then stretches it thin so it fills most of the apartment. Like this, it’s easy to notice how the magic gets distorted as it’s sucked up into the central point of the magical void.
It’s a potted plant, a peace lily. Suguru snaps a picture of it, then upends it over the table without remorse. Among the ruined leaves and scraggly roots rests a crumpled dust bag, the kind that goes into a vacuum cleaner.
“Huh,” says Suguru, and tears it open.
Satoru catches a glimpse of dark hair and a couple of teeth before everything is colour. He stumbles back, falling onto the couch through sheer luck. His brain tries to sort through what he’s seeing, but it’s flowing by too quickly, a proper deluge. He hears someone gagging. A hand lands on his shoulder, pressing in with enough force to hurt, then another palm, a little clammy, covers his eyes.
“Stop staring, idiot,” Suguru says.
Satoru knows what Suguru sounds like when he’s about to be sick, so he springs into action and extends a bubble of nothing around them both. The hand on his shoulder squeezes painfully for a second, then eases off as Suguru sits beside him. His other hand still covers Satoru’s face.
“Where are your glasses?”
“Dunno.”
“Okay. Gimme a sec.”
Satoru would give him hours, if he asked. Under Suguru’s careful fingers, he feels safe. Cared for. Known. Like all good things in his life, it doesn’t last.
“Keep ‘em closed,” Suguru murmurs, and then he’s off, presumably searching for the glasses.
Satoru stays where he is, head spinning a little. He tries to peek through one half-open eye, but all that gets him is unpleasant tingling and incomprehensible brightness. It’s always like this when too much magic gets thrown at him all at once. He could avoid it simply by not looking, but he has no impulse control. There’s some part of him that just refuses not to be captivated by chaos.
Suguru’s hands return, even more sweaty now, and slip the glasses onto his face. Satoru curls his own hands around the curves of the lenses, blocking his peripheral vision. He opens his eyes. Suguru collapses onto the coach again, head thrown back, eyes squeezed shut, throat working.
“You gonna hurl?” Satoru asks. “You did this to yourself, you know.”
He gets a middle finger in response, but no words, which means that Suguru needs to wait out the nausea.
Through Satoru’s glasses, the magic in the room is muted and blurred, but he’s had practice, so he can tell what’s what. He stays where he is, keeping Suguru in his bubble but not extending it, because he doesn’t want to shift the magic around too much. He doesn’t immediately notice anything unusual. Then he spots it, settling over surfaces like falling ash, grey and fluffy.
“There’s a lot of resentment here. I guess the Orimotos didn’t have a happy family life.”
The weird thing about the magic is that it’s sort of smudgy. Satoru would chalk it up to being stored in a bag for years, but the rest of what came out looks more normal.
“Teenage girls sure can hold a grudge.” Suguru’s voice is only a little strained. “The mom has been out of the picture for what, ten years?”
“You can resent someone for leaving you.” Satoru winces the moment the words are out of his mouth. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Don’t censor yourself around me. What does it matter?” Suguru peels himself away from the back of the couch with obvious effort. He breathes noisily through his nose, jaw clenched, then stands and goes to the table.
Satoru scrambles after him, unwilling to let him out of the bubble. They take another look at the cursed dust bag and its contents. Hair from three different people: two types of long strands, plus some short ones. Baby teeth. Several dead bees.
“What do you think?” Satoru asks.
“It was an effective curse.” At Satoru’s unimpressed stare, Suguru elaborates. “I wouldn’t make it like this. The design is too forceful, almost crude. But it was clearly done by a professional, or at least according to a professional’s instructions. The plant was so healthy, too. This thing didn’t leak at all.”
Unfortunately, Satoru has to agree. When he takes on investigative jobs, he often comes across all kinds of charms and cursed objects, some well made, some completely bungled. This one is clean, with no superfluous elements, though, like Suguru said, it’s a bit much for its most likely purpose.
“Couldn’t be the mom or the dad,” Satoru muses out loud. “Since they’d know they’d be living with this thing. There’s no personal protection against something like this.”
Suguru nods. “It could have been a stranger, but it doesn’t seem likely. Can you imagine breaking in to repot someone’s plant? Or if it died, to replace it with an identical one?”
“Easiest way would be to make the plant a gift.”
“I’ll show the photo to Rika tomorrow. She might remember where it came from.” Suguru takes several pictures of the destroyed cursed bag. “There’s also the possibility that it was the mom or the dad, but that they didn’t know what they were doing. I’ll try to see what kind of bag this is and when it might have been bought. I can also ask around and see whether anyone’s known for using these ingredients, but it’s a long shot. Insects, hair, and teeth are not an uncommon choice.”
“Guess you’ve got plans for tomorrow, then.”
They’re standing almost shoulder to shoulder. Suguru has to tilt his chin up, just slightly, to meet Satoru’s eyes. “Are you gonna be busy with the clans?”
It’s unnerving that he has the situation figured out so well. Satoru does indeed need to speak to the council of elders that polices witchcraft in Tokyo, hopefully with Yaga acting as a buffer. It’s annoying, but it’s better if Satoru brings the issue up himself, puts the geezers on the defensive. As far as pure ability goes, he’s the most powerful and accomplished witch of this century, but that barely grants him any extra authority in the fossilised clan hierarchy. Playing by their rules is such a hassle.
“I have to keep them off our backs,” Satoru admits. “The last thing we need is the clans trying to stop us from messing up Tengen’s prophecy.”
There’s a not insignificant faction which believes that interfering with Tengen’s foretellings would forever mess up her ability to see the future, and that even subsequent holders of the title of Tengen-sama could be affected.
“Can you get us police records?” Suguru asks. “Or would that be showing your hand too early?”
Satoru grimaces and Suguru shrugs, pulling a small notebook out of his jacket pocket. Satoru watches over his shoulder as he meticulously lists all the information they need to collect, all the errands Satoru will inevitably leave to Suguru.
“Oh, wait. I didn’t tell you about the thing.” Satoru describes his mountaineering misadventures, words clinical and to the point, which they both pretend isn’t wildly unusual for him.
Suguru isn’t shy about showing his disapproval. “Seriously? You didn’t think to mention it before?”
“I figured it’d come up eventually, and it did, so what’s the harm?”
They spend a little more time in the apartment. Suguru has to duck around the ugliest splotches of magic, since flooding the air with his own would distort the scene. Aside from a huge build-up of resentment, both of them notice a significant amount of fear and regret. There’s more, of course, but subtlety of emotion is difficult to read from the aura of an unfamiliar person when they are right there, providing extra cues through words and body language. Trying to decipher the various threads of ambient magic that came from at least two people over the course of years would be an exercise in futility.
Once they’re both confident they won’t learn anything more here, Suguru uses his innate talent to absorb the worst of the resentment and mops up the fear. It’s a trip to watch: the magic unravels like a knitted sweater, the threads slipping into Suguru’s sleeves and, presumably, settling into his skin.
Suguru shudders, rubs over his new not-quite-tattoos a couple of times through the leather, then flexes and stretches his arms. “Alright, I’m done. Drop me off at mine?”
“You know, you just made things a lot easier for whoever’s going to live here.”
“I’m really a philanthropist, didn’t you realise? None of the positive magic feels concentrated enough to bother.” He grimaces. “That tasted weirdly stale.”
“That’s on you for absorbing something that came out of a dust bag.”
The drive back is, once again, not even a little awkward. They try to exchange phone numbers—turns out neither of them has deleted the other’s contact information—and make plans. Suguru notes everything down in his little notebook, like an old man. They agree to meet next evening to update each other on their progress.
When they get to Suguru’s house, he doesn’t linger in the car or invite Satoru inside, which is fine and expected, yet somehow, it manages to sting. It’s so strange to watch him walk away and know they’ll see each other again soon.
It would have been so much easier for Satoru to handle this alone. If he had that kind of free time, that is.
He spends the rest of his afternoon on a money laundering case that involves some prominent families with connections to the clans. In only a couple of hours, he annoys everyone involved into giving him space, which he uses immediately to push the investigation as close to a desirable outcome as he can get away with.
It’s so frustrating. The clans want the whole thing swept under the rug, the investigation is mostly a sham, and the culprits are people Satoru has met and probably offended at social events. He has the power to take them all down—but he’d lose all of his influence immediately after, and cases like this are a dime a dozen. Better to nudge them towards a slightly better outcome for now, and bide his time.
At least Nanami is there, probably sent in to keep Satoru in line, which is an impossible task for him and they both know it. Or maybe it’s just that the press is also already here. Satoru hates talking to the press. They always manage to twist the narrative in such a way that magic is portrayed either as unreliable or nefarious, while describing him as some sort of culty rockstar.
“I assume you know you should be on your best behaviour, Gojo-san,” Nanami says in lieu of a greeting.
“Eh.” Satoru waves a hand in vague assent. “Are you here for the clans, or did Yaga get to you first?”
“Yaga. I hear you’re working on something that wouldn’t benefit from media scrutiny, so I’m meant to lend you some common sense.” Nanami sighs. “Which we both know is futile. I should just quit and stop wasting my time on this crap.”
“Why don’t you?”
Nanami threatens to quit witchcraft every other week, has done so for years. Satoru doesn’t take him seriously, but it’s still a valid question. Witches affiliated with the clans are forced to maintain an unjust, exploitative system, while witches who leave but still practice tend to end up dead, for one reason or another.
“I might, but not tonight. Look competent for the cameras, Gojo-san.”
There’s a flash, then another. Satoru resists throwing the reporter a peace sign. A few more years, he reminds himself, and he’ll be ready to make a difference.