Chapter Text
August 1, 2005
It had been a warm, beautiful day; rays of sunlight seeped through the new holes they had made in the roof of their training grounds. Sweaty and tired after what felt like an endless training session, they sat down for what was supposed to be a recap but turned into an argument and then a literal staring contest.
Satoru was confident he would win since Suguru clearly didn't feel well after consuming the two powerful curses—or the fat, sticky balls he had turned them into—during the mission earlier that day. But instead, Satoru found himself desperately losing, unable to keep his eyes open for long. Which was precisely the point Suguru was trying to make in that argument earlier.
Just then, Yaga arrived, clutching a new mission in his hands, his grasp on the folder so tight that it almost crumpled in his fingers. He placed a laptop on the table to show a photo of their target, a curse user, but he couldn’t get it to work. He fumbled with the controls and his two USB sticks, almost lashing out when neither seemed to connect. Satoru didn’t care much about the mission description and didn’t even bother to look up from where he was sitting. He was not breaking that eye contact with Suguru. And strangely enough, Suguru did the same. He smiled pleasantly at Yaga, even bowed, asked about his health, and helped with the controls on the laptop while still managing to hold Satoru’s gaze.
For some reason, Yaga didn’t seem to care about them not paying any attention or about their bickering in the middle when Satoru accused Suguru of blinking, knowing full well that that wasn’t true.
At some point, however, Suguru blinked and frowned for real. Satoru immediately burst into laughter and thrust his arms high above his head, interrupting the mission description blabber Yaga was in the middle of. “I told you I’d win. I’m the strongest!” He was about to start a longer tirade about how Suguru should never, ever tell him what he was supposed to do with his eyes and when, but he didn’t, since Suguru interrupted him, their silly game long forgotten.
“Sensei,” Suguru started, eyes downcast. “I… We…,” he paused when his voice seemingly gave up, and then, after collecting himself, continued. “Is there another way?”
Suguru listened to Yaga’s response listlessly, not protesting anymore, but he paled even further, his expression ashen; his hand clutched to his chest. That nausea from earlier was likely returning.
Satoru smirked, a plan forming in his mind almost immediately.
He raised his hand, wiggling in his seat until Yaga finally looked at him.
“What do you mean by e-xe-cu-tion?” he asked innocently, drawing out the last word and smirking at how Suguru’s expression fell even further when he heard the word again.
“Uhm,” Yaga seemed to be at a loss, too. “It means you two have to kill him.”
“But we are first-years,” Suguru finally found it in himself to protest again, his voice cracking just a little. He was the picture of internal torment: shoulders slumped, lips slightly trembling, his inhales deep. He was probably about to launch into a longer moral argument, likely about ‘protecting the weak’ and some other boring stuff, but Satoru shushed him away with what he knew was a shit-eating grin on his face.
“I know what execution means, Yaga-sensei,” he started, grinning even wider, noting another look of despair on Suguru’s face. “Do we have to do it the boring way—‘we are ordered to execute you, you have the right to remain silent, yadda, yadda, yadda’—or can I,” he paused, making sure that Suguru was listening, noting how his face went even paler and that he was already heaving just a bit, “can I do something fun, like a Mortal Kombat fatality?”
Suguru immediately stood up at that, his face furious, looking as if he were about to hit Satoru for real—not like the normal way the two of them would teasingly hit each other—but he didn’t, as his face immediately lost all its color, the notion alone enough for him to start throwing up. He bolted out of the room, fast as a bullet, and then the two of them could hear the distinct sound of vomiting from the room nearby.
Satoru was about to explain to Yaga what exactly a Mortal Kombat fatality was. In the one he liked the most, a character released a swarm of bees that penetrated the body of another character, blood spurting everywhere, and then the first character threw a knife at exactly the right spot to...
“I’m sorry,” Yaga said, sitting closer to him, hiding his gaze. “It’s...” he paused for a second, curling his fists, “the higher-ups,” he finished, gesturing with his arms as if to show what exactly the higher-ups wanted this time.
Satoru didn’t respond, still listening to the sound in the other room. He wanted to comfort Suguru—just a bit, to have something to tease him about later—but he didn’t move from his place, his eyes fixed on the floor in front of him.
Yaga coughed and looked at him expectantly, his hands now tearing apart the mission description, ‘Execution’ and ‘Top Secret’ written on top of it in red ink.
Right, he was supposed to respond, but he didn’t feel like it. The floorboards in front of him were cracked from where he had landed while dodging one of Suguru’s hits, and then there were remains of the flower pot to the right—who had even been stupid enough to bring a flower pot to the training ground in the first place?—practically turned to dust, where he had hit it at close range when Suguru had been hiding behind it. He raised his palm, looking at it against the warm sunlight. His palm wasn’t anything extraordinary, just a normal human hand (but beautiful, he reassured himself), and one wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking at it that it was capable of something so monstrous. That he could kill someone by just flicking his fingers, and then an entire life—an entire universe—would be gone.
“What does it feel like to kill someone?” he asked finally, his voice barely audible. He had met his share of curse users before—people who had wanted to make quick money from that bounty on his head—but they usually left him alone when they realized the sheer gap in power between him and them. If he needed to fight, he never bothered to deliver the final blow, and it was only now that he realized that it was not the laziness he had assured himself many times before, but a strange sort of sentimentality that he had. And the strongest shouldn’t have.
Yaga looked petrified at the question, and an uneasy silence settled between them until he seemingly arrived at a conclusion.
“You don’t have to do it,” Yaga said, his face revealing a tiny flicker of emotion. Probably sadness, and Satoru immediately understood what it meant. He had listened in on that short argument between Yaga and Suguru, and he knew that if the two of them were not deployed on that mission, Yaga would probably send the useless fourth-years or go himself; and they would all get killed since they were that weak. Not that he cared about them dying or anything, but he had kind of gotten used to their teacher already, and he also appreciated not having to go back to his clan whenever they called on him, which was all the time. Yaga was conveniently a kind of teacher to let it slide.
He also knew that the curse user needed to be stopped, or he’d continue killing and maiming.
“I’ll do it myself,” he said then. Even though he said that, there was something inside Satoru’s throat, like a bubble, that didn’t go away. It was probably fear, he realized, although why? He was the strongest. The strongest ever, ever, ever. “Today.”
Yaga looked scandalized at the notion.
“Haven’t you listened?” he yelled, although his voice couldn’t conceal the relief that he felt, probably because at least one of them agreed to the mission. “You are going tomorrow. We don’t have any free assistants today. And the mission is for you two—not safe enough for you alone.”
But Satoru was already looking up train schedules on the laptop, which he had managed to sneak out of his teacher’s grasp, his usual sunny disposition returning to him. Because well—he was indeed the strongest. The entire world changed just because he was born; why would he care so much about just one curse user? He could tie him up and drop him in the middle of the class, for all he cared; he wasn’t weak like all the other sorcerers, following orders like some lapdogs.
“Shibuya station at 4 PM today,” he exclaimed, finding the right schedule and feeling proud of himself for managing it since he had never used the trains before he enrolled in Jujutsu High.
Yaga tried to protest, but Satoru was already on his way out.
“Tell him I was called back by my clan,” he smiled happily, gesturing in the direction of the room where Suguru had stormed out to. “I’m gonna tease him until the end of the world about this.”
**
Satoru ended up going to the assignment alone, despite Yaga’s half-hearted protests. There had been an assistant who could drive him to the location that day after all, who miraculously appeared exactly when Yaga determined that Suguru seemed to have completely disappeared from the earth’s face.
When he returned, Satoru stumbled his way to the common bathroom, hoping it would be as empty as it usually was. He was covered in blood, not all of it his; his eyes hurt like hell, as did his head, and he felt like he deserved at least a nice long bath for all his efforts.
In the bathroom, he started getting rid of his uniform immediately, and when his leg got stuck in one of the pant legs, he didn’t think twice before ripping the cloth apart. When his uniform dropped to the floor but the smell didn’t go away, he realized that both his uniform and his body stank, a feeling of nausea now building in his own throat.
He looked down, and before he could look away, he noticed a bit of dirt sticking to his right sleeve. He squinted, picking it up with the tips of his fingers, and then he saw that the sleeve was not only completely soaked in blood; there was also some gunk. Like something had been torn apart into little pieces and then stuck there—something dark, squishy, and bloody. It then clicked in his mind; it must have been when he… He dropped his shirt immediately, almost slipping, and ran to the sink. He wanted—no, he needed—to wash his hands, but the water wouldn’t turn on. He tried the tap several times, then another time, until he broke it apart, but no water was coming out of the pipe either.
It was okay, he reassured himself, breathing in slowly. He had it under control.
His vision grew blurry, but he still raised his right hand in front of his eyes, trying to make out what exactly it was covered with, but all he could see was the general outline. It was dark in the room; he hadn’t turned on the lights since he never really needed them to see. Now he shuffled his way to the light switch, feeling the wall in front of him until he found the familiar outline of the switch and flipped it.
The harsh fluorescent light filled the room. It was nothing really to look at—glossy white tiles on the walls, a single bathtub in the middle, stark white, with one wobbly tap on top of it, a black wire sticking to the wall, running from one corner to another, a sink, a cupboard, and then a mirror to the right, but that was the direction he absolutely didn’t want to look.
He steeled himself to look at his right hand again. He held his breath because he couldn’t see his skin anymore; it was all covered in sticky red blood, drying up and tugging on his skin. The blood made its way under his nails.
A sharp 'tsk' escaped his lips because, well, it would be a pain in the ass to try to get it out. He carefully approached the bathtub, hoping that at least it was working—or he’d just… He turned the water on, and a thick stream of water shot in another direction, but it was at least something. His heart rate slowed, and he breathed out while washing his hands, carefully rubbing the dirt and blood away.
But then he saw a piece of the same gunk stuck under his fingernail, and it was enough; he couldn’t hold his breakfast in any longer. He turned to the side, the nausea overpowering him, barely able to breathe, the whole world around him going completely dark until, finally, he threw up on the floor. Perhaps right on his uniform, but he didn’t care about it that much.
His throat felt sore, though. That was probably why Suguru was so annoyed when he had to eat all his curses, he thought, noting how maybe he should kill at least some curses before Suguru would get a hold of them because throwing up wasn’t nice at all.
He didn’t even notice how he started scrubbing his hands raw at that point, but it still was not enough. His nails were still covered in blood and something else, so he started pulling at them. First gently, but then with such force that he began seeing white from the pain. The blood—his own finally—shot at him from the abused finger when the nail slipped off, the water stinging when it landed on it. But it felt good since there was nothing else to remind him of that day anymore. He started tugging on another nail, hoping to do it quickly, but his strength almost gave out when he felt the pain of pulling it out.
He moved on to the next, and he didn’t hear the door open with a sharp clatter; didn’t hear the voice calling for him until he felt another hand tightening around his wrist, pulling it back.
“Gojo!”
He didn’t listen, now flicking his hand away, starting with that nail again because he needed to be done with it. All of it: the blood, the gunk, the memory, the entire thing!
“Satoru,” it was Suguru’s voice, very quiet. He wrestled Satoru to the floor, careful to avoid that one spot where he had thrown up earlier.
The floor was cold against his back, and that must have been what finally pulled him out of that state he was in earlier: the noise of everything rushing in, Suguru’s panicked voice, the stream of water hitting the floor beneath him, the bright white light overhead that felt painful to his eyes.
“What the hell do you think you are doing?” Suguru cried out, his expression furious enough that Satoru leaned back a bit, his head hitting the floor in the process. God, could he have a moment to himself after what he had done? He bit back the retort because he could see the ashen expression on Suguru’s face, a mixture of guilt and something else—something close to sorrow, like… like he felt pity for him.
Well. He was sprawled on the floor. He was naked, covered in blood and who knew what else; there was vomit on his uniform, and the whole thing stank so much. And then there was the entire situation with his nails, as if he had a nervous breakdown over a simple mission like that. Cliché and undignified for someone who was born the strongest.
He felt a surge of anger at Suguru for breaking in, seeing him like that; as if anyone actually needed him there.
“How was your beauty sleep, Suguru-kun~?” he hissed, his voice teasing enough to conceal the anger he felt at being seen like that.