Chapter Text
In the darkness, Riko hears a voice. She can’t parse out any words, but she can sense pity—she can see the twist of red lips into a frown, can feel a warm cursed energy cocooning her, and she sinks into it. Like falling asleep. Her eyes slip shut—or maybe they were shut already—and she exhales a quiet breath.
If this is death, she thinks, it’s really not so bad.
But then—
She’s ripped away from the warmth, plunged into an ice-cold something, head throbbing, heart pounding, it’s like the worst cold she’s ever had combined with the time she got food poisoning and when she got the flu—she’s not supposed to get sick like this. She’s supposed to keep her body in perfect health. She’s supposed to be the perfect vessel. Kuroi always made sure of that.
She winds up on the ground, face-up, with a twisting tree of cursed spirits and silently-shrieking faces towering above her. She tries to scream, but her voice won’t work. Like a dream where you yell and yell and yell but the only thing you can manage are hisses of empty air, and so no one comes to save you.
But dreams aren’t real. If no one saves you, you’ll still wake up.
This is dream-like, but Riko is pretty sure she’s dead, which is a thought she hasn’t exactly had a chance to fully grapple with yet. Because when there was warmth, it was easy, and there was a love like Kuroi’s fingers carding through her hair to soothe her as she fell into nothingness.
And now—
A man appears standing over her. Sneer pressed across his features, stitches lining his forehead. “Star plasma vessel,” he muses. “No innate technique, but an ability to see curses. How strange.”
I’m— Riko tries to say, but her voice still won’t work. She doesn’t know what’s going on. Is this hell? Is this the devil? She went to a missionary school; shouldn’t she have ended up in heaven instead? Or was that all a lie? Or was it that she wasn’t even sure she believed it all in the first place, because it sounded good, but what did it matter for someone like her, who would merge with an immortal being? She never expected to die.
She never expected to die.
She wasn’t supposed to die.
Is she dead?
Oh, God, is she— ?
Her chest seizes, lungs spasming, breath catching in her throat, which shouldn’t really be possible if she’s dead, but maybe your body still works in many of the same ways once you arrive in the afterlife. Maybe it’s muscle memory. Maybe her heart beating at the speed of light and the hyperventilation don’t mean anything at all, because she can’t die a second time—probably? hopefully?—unless she’s not dead, but she has to be, because—
A gunshot, a burst of pain, splitting her skull, blood, nothing.
No one can survive a bullet through the brain.
The man crouches beside her. He places a hand on her forehead, then carefully shuts her eyelids. “This won’t hurt if you don’t struggle.”
Hurt? Struggle?
What—
The man’s hand sinks into her.
She screams for real this time, a piercing shriek torn from her lungs, shattering the world around them. The pale white void they’re in splinters into hexagonal tiles, and she feels the man’s smirk rather than sees it, feels it on her own lips, twisting up in utter glee.
“Oh,” a voice says, and it sounds like her own. “Now this is exciting!”
And then everything goes dark.
—
When Riko opens her eyes again, she’s lying on a surgeon’s table. Briefly, she wonders if she’s still on the campus of Jujutsu High—if someone managed to use reversed cursed technique in time to heal her brain before it went completely dead, and their healer was able to fix her up. But there’s something inside of her that feels…off.
She takes careful stock of her body. Wiggles her fingers, then her toes. She lifts one arm, and then the other. Her head aches, and at first, she assumed it was lingering pain from the bullet through her skull, but that’s not quite right. The bullet went into the side of her head. The pain now is centered along the expanse of her forehead, skin-deep.
She reaches up, and her fingers brush against—
She yelps, jolting upright. “What—”
Her vocal chords are ripped from her control, and her own voice and mouth say, “Ah. You’re awake.”
She realizes, in that moment, what the other strange sensation in her body is.
It feels full.
Kuroi told her, once, that as a star plasma vessel, her body was made with room for another inhabitant to share it with her. That was exactly what marked her as a potential vessel in the first place. There are varying levels to it, too—or, at least, that’s what Kuroi was told by a sorcerer who kindly informed her about star plasma vessels after Riko fell into her care. There are vessels with little potential, which means their bodies technically have the space necessary to be a vessel, but it would be a tight squeeze and could very well end badly.
And then there are vessels like Riko.
Kuroi didn’t tell her, outright, that her body was nearly empty. But that was the implication.
Not physically empty, mind you—Riko had exactly all of the correct internal organs and bones, and the typical amount of blood, and exactly as many veins and muscles as any other person. It had to do with the body:soul ratio.
She really didn’t understand at the time; she felt like she had plenty of soul within her.
But now—
She can feel the difference. The emptiness wasn’t something she could pinpoint before, because it was all she’d ever known. But there is someone else sharing her body now—another soul slotted in next to her own—and she feels full.
It’s almost overwhelming.
“Who are you?” she asks, surprised at the ease with which she manages to pull control back into her own hands.
“Fascinating,” the other person inside her body says, instead of answering her question. They speak using her voice and body again, but it’s less jarring now that Riko knows that’s how she should expect a response. It can’t be Master Tengen, because she doubts he would be dodging her questions like this. And the merger is supposed to take place in the Star Corridor, which…this is not.
Actually, Riko has no idea where she is.
It must not be Jujutsu High either, if the person sharing her body isn’t Tengen. She looks around the room, searching for any clues. But it’s not big, and the only things in here besides herself (herselves?) are a bunch of medical supplies.
Riko thinks back to the moment of her death, which must not have been a real death—or at least not a permanent one. There was the gunshot, the blinding pain, and then darkness. In the darkness, there was a brief warmth in which she felt wholly understood for perhaps the first time ever.
And then, she was ripped away from that. There was the cursed spirit-slash-tortured soul tree. And there was the man with stitches on his forehead.
And now there’s Riko, awake, here, wherever this is, also with stitches on her forehead.
She traces them with her fingers, and realizes that actually, it’s not just her forehead—they go all the way around, circling her skull. As if the top of her head was completely removed, and then sewn back on.
Okay.
So,
the person sharing her body must be the man she saw earlier.
“You’re that guy,” she says, testing out her theory. “The one who told me not to struggle. Right?”
He hums. “I suppose. Guy is a subjective term.” He—she? they? it?—stretches Riko’s arms, then hops off of the surgical table. It paces her body around the room, guiding her gaze to various scalpels and scissors and gloves and things Riko couldn’t give a name to even if she tried. “I was a man previously, and now I’m a girl. Do you see how this works?”
“No, I’m a girl,” Riko corrects. “You’re you.”
“I’m you.”
“No, I’m me.”
A sigh. “I suppose we are both you now. I had hoped a star plasma vessel would be an easier body to overtake. There is the drawback of you having no innate technique, of course, but it’s not as if I would need to remain in this body for long. I only require enough time to ensure Tengen does not find another vessel.”
“Huh?!” Riko demands. “Why?!”
Laughter bubbles up in her throat, and she’s surprised at the malice it holds when it escapes her lips. She slams a hand over her mouth. She’s decided she doesn’t like whoever this guy is sharing her body. She needs to figure out a way to get rid of them.
But she has a feeling they won’t let her just strut back onto the campus of Jujutsu High and ask for help.
“Okay,” she says—to herself, not the guy in her body—“Kuroi-san should know what to do.”
This time, the laughter sounds within her mind. Somehow, that’s worse.
“Kuroi?” her own voice asks. And then her own voice says: “Darling, she’s dead.”
Cold nausea washes through Riko’s body.
She lunges for a scalpel.
—
Outside, the sun is just beginning to rise.
Riko does not want to be out here. She wanted to jam a scalpel into her head, through the temple, right where the bullet went through. She wants this thing OUT she wants them GONE she wants to be alone and she wants to be DEAD. She told it, KUROI CAN’T BE DEAD SHE’S ALL I HAVE!
And the thing said: SHE IS GONE. YOU HAVE ME NOW.
And then it laughed and laughed and laughed and no matter how hard Riko tried, she could not keep hold of any scalpels or scissors or knives. She could not even keep herself inside, so now she’s outside, in the grass, rolling around and laughing on a whim that isn’t her own. There are tears in her eyes and she’s not sure if it’s her own grief or that other thing’s glee. She wants to die. She wishes she’d died. This is worse than dying. This is worse than everything.
She digs her fingers into the dirt.
“SHUT UP!” she screams.
The thing just keeps laughing.
—
For the first week, Riko lets herself go numb in her own body.
The thing inside of it—an old sorcerer, who calls themself Kenjaku—takes complete control, and Riko mindlessly rides in the passenger seat. They make her food, and they clean her body, and they put her to bed at the end of the day. They tidy up the small home in which they’ve taken refuge. They dispose of the last body they were in. They threaten to eat it, and Riko just shrugs in response.
They didn’t eat it. Riko doubts they even really wanted to.
—
“This was more exciting when I thought you would fight back,” Kenjaku muses.
“I thought you said it would hurt less if I didn’t struggle?” Riko replies. She’s pushing the food on her plate around, waiting for Kenjaku to force it into her mouth. She hates eating. Nothing tastes like it used to. She blamed it on Kenjaku, and they said it had nothing to do with them; it had to do with her grief.
“That was when I assumed you would be like everyone else,” Kenjaku replies. They take control of Riko’s hand, pinching a bite between her chopsticks and lifting it to her lips. When she doesn’t open her mouth on her own, Kenjaku does it for her. And then they chew, and they swallow, and once that’s done, they tell her, “This is like having a child again.”
For the first time since she opened her eyes after her death, curiosity spikes inside of Riko. “You have kids?”
“Had,” Kenjaku corrects. They sigh, melodramatic. “All of them were failures, I fear.”
Riko makes a noise of disgust. “You were one of those parents.”
“My children were not fully human,” they explain, as if that somehow makes it better??? “They were experiments. Half-curse, half-human. Most could not survive outside of the womb.”
“That’s so messed up.”
Kenjaku giggles. “Isn’t it?”
“You’re awful.”
“I know!”
Riko decides to eat the rest of her dinner on her own, even through the nausea that has settled in the pit of her stomach.
—
Kenjaku takes her shopping, and Riko lets them do most of the talking, because she’s getting annoyed with how everyone is looking at her. The house Kenjaku has her in is isolated, a far walk from the closest town, which is a small place where everyone knows everyone and everyone definitely knows Riko is a stranger. A stranger, who is a school-aged girl, who has shown up at the one grocery store in town in the middle of a weekday with no adult accompanying her.
At least her bangs mostly hide the stitches.
Kenjaku piles necessities into a basket hanging from her arm and ignores all of the strange looks she receives. They return home without incident, and Kenjaku puts everything away, and Riko wonders if this is how the rest of her life is going to be. In the backseat of her own body. She wonders if this is what it would have been like if she’d merged with Tengen too.
Except—
Tengen has to stay in the Star Corridor. Kenjaku can go wherever they want.
Riko falls asleep with that thought in her mind. She’s never had that sort of freedom before. Ever since she can remember, her life was planned out for her, letter by letter, moment by moment.
Now, though—
Hm.
—
Riko gives it another week.
She lets Kenjaku get comfortable, and then she wakes up one day, and she takes back control. She hears Kenjaku laugh in her mind, can sense their thought process of Let’s see where this goes! and does her best to ignore it. This is her body. Kenjaku isn’t in charge.
She walks them back to the nearest village, and she sits herself down at the bus stop. She takes the bus to the next town over, which is bigger, and has a train station. She gets on the train with no real plan other than to head in the direction of Tokyo. But she ends up in Yokohama instead, when Kenjaku walks her off the train early, which is sort of exactly what she expected would happen. She’s surprised they let her get as far as she did.
“Have you had your fun yet?” they ask.
Fun? Riko thinks. This isn’t about having fun. This is about exploring the possibilities. This is about wandering around, idly looking for another sorcerer to help her out, until she gets tired and lets Kenjaku take back control. She really doesn’t have a solid goal in mind here.
That’s the grief, too. Probably.
She’s trying her best to just ignore all of that. She didn’t see Kuroi die, and her own death proved to be a temporary thing, so— If she doesn’t get any real proof, she can just imagine Kuroi is at home. Cleaning and cooking.
All alone.
Maybe that’s not the best thought, actually.
“How much money do we have?” Riko asks.
Kenjaku sighs. “We do not have a job, Riko-chan.”
“Well, you got money for groceries somehow,” she points out. “How did you—?”
Something slams into Riko’s side.
Kenjaku takes over, twisting to fight back against it, and Riko finds herself face-to-face with what might be a cursed spirit. It’s reminiscent of a large robotic snake—or maybe dragonfly? It’s got wings—and it seems to be trying to wrap itself around Riko in an attempt to restrain her.
The strangest part is—
“I can sense your presence,” Riko’s voice calls out.
The warmth? Riko thinks. Because it’s warm. Not the cursed spirit—it’s more like when the clouds part and the sun shines down after you’ve been in the shade for hours, and the entire world instantly feels a few degrees warmer.
She takes control back. “Stop fighting,” she orders, holding her arms at her sides. The cursed spirit wraps around her, and she lets it. “I’ve felt you before,” she says. “It’s me now.”
“Oh?”
Riko turns to face the source of the voice and finds a tall, blonde woman. She stands with her hands on her hips, one eyebrow raised. She’s the sort of familiar that only comes with a bone-deep, inexplicable, sense of deja vu. The warmth recedes along with the cursed spirit. Riko remains still.
Kenjaku is strangely silent.
“Amanai Riko,” the woman says. “The supposedly-deceased star plasma vessel. I’ve been looking for you.”
—
The woman introduces herself as Tsukumo Yuki, a former star plasma vessel. The first to choose to walk away from the merger. And in place of Tengen sharing her body, she is now home to the remnant soul fractures of every other potential star plasma vessel who died before merging. She felt Riko join her—felt her death an ocean away—and then felt Riko ripped away from her just as quickly.
So, she returned to Japan to search for an explanation.
“You said you still have near-full control over your body?” she asks. They’re in an otherwise-empty restaurant, tucked into a corner booth where they can talk without drawing attention to themselves.
Riko nods. “It’s like a tug-of-war game where both sides have the exact same strength,” she explains. “They can pull control away from me on a whim, but I can take it back just as easily.”
“I see.” Tsukumo tilts her head, squinting. “I’ve never heard of a vessel who can share consciousness. Even with Tengen, the process of the merger is referred to as an erasure, and that’s an instance where the vessel is picked out specifically because it has high potential to not be completely destroyed the moment another soul enters into its body.”
“Never?”
“Well,” Tsukumo makes a so-so gesture, “nothing reliable. There are old legends and folk tales and rumors and accounts from someone who had a friend of a friend of a cousin of an aunt who once met someone who could co-exist with the thing that had made their body its vessel. But nothing recent.” Tsukumo points her chopsticks at Riko. “Except for you.”
Riko purses her lips. She thinks of Kuroi telling her she had the most potential for a star plasma vessel that had been seen in centuries. She had the emptiest body. She had the smallest soul.
“You’re a fool to write off legends like that,” Kenjaku says, speaking up for the first time since Tsukumo introduced herself.
Tsukumo grins. “So you are in there too. You’ve been able to hear everything?”
Kenjaku scoffs. “Do not insult me. Your power pales in comparison to the sorcerers of the past. Modern sorcerers are all weaklings.” They lean forward, resting their chin on their hands. “I suppose I should be grateful, though. It will make my plans so much easier to carry out.”
“Your plans?”
Kenjaku smiles.
And then, they retreat back inside of Riko, ceding control without her having to take it back.
“They never say anything useful,” Riko complains. “The only motivation I can figure out is that they do things for fun.”
“For fun?” Tsukumo’s eyes light up, and she grins. “That’s crazy!”
“Don’t make it sound like you approve—”
“You understand me,” Kenjaku interjects suddenly. “Perhaps I wrote you off too soon, Tsukumo Yuki. I should have targeted your body instead.”
She barks out a laugh. “I’d like to see you try.”
Riko sort of feels like she’s third wheeling on the weirdest date of all time. She eyes her chopsticks, half-wondering if shoving one into her temple would make Kenjaku shut up. It probably wouldn’t even leave any lasting damage, because Kenjaku can use reversed cursed technique—has used it, just in the time since they’ve been in Riko’s body. Apparently that’s how they fixed her up well enough to inhabit in the first place.
It’s a strange sensation, to feel her own body manipulating cursed energy in any way. Riko has been able to feel cursed energy her entire life—she’s been able to see curses, and sense a prickling sensation on her skin when she gets too close to them. She could feel the energy when Gojo used his technique while holding onto her, and even when Geto used his while simply nearby.
But to actually use cursed energy herself is a different experience entirely.
The prickling sensation sinks into her body, tingling in her bones, like an adrenaline shot injected directly into her veins. It makes her wonder if there was a possibility she could have been using cursed energy to fight the entire time, or if it really is only Kenjaku’s doing.
“Perhaps when I’m done with this vessel, I will find a way to obtain yours,” Kenjaku muses, breaking Riko from her thoughts.
“No!” she exclaims. “You can’t just say things like that!”
“I don’t mind,” Tsukumo assures her. “This is fascinating, actually. There are no physical tells for when control switches, but your mannerisms are distinct, and there are slight fluctuations in the cursed energy. Though, it’s such a smooth switch that even that is hard to pick up on.” She pulls a notebook and pencil from her jacket pocket and scribbles something down.
Kenjaku leans over, trying to look. “Are you taking notes on me?!”
“I take notes on everything; you’re not special,” Tsukumo tells them. She snaps the notebook shut. “Anyway, this has been fun, but I can’t just let you walk around doing…whatever it is you’re doing.”
“You think you have a choice in the matter?” Kenjaku asks.
“I know I do.”
Outwardly, Kenjaku laughs. Internally, Riko can feel their wariness. They’re itching to look around for an escape, wanting to run before Tsukumo manages to best them and drag them to Jujutsu High.
But Tsukumo isn’t making any moves to attack. In fact, she’s resumed eating her food. She really doesn’t look interested in fighting at all right now. Does she trust Riko will be strong enough to suppress Kenjaku when taking them to the one place that could end up thwarting whatever plans they’ve made? Because even Riko isn’t sure she’ll be able to manage that…
“Well?” Kenjaku growls. “What are you waiting for?”
“Hm?” Tsukumo looks up. “Oh, no, you misunderstood me. You can leave; I won’t try to stop you. I don’t need to physically restrain you. You made your mistake in taking over the body of one of my sisters.”
That’s so cool, Riko thinks.
She’s full of shit, Kenjaku replies. Riko rolls her eyes. And then, she’s violently ripped out of her body—or, into her body?—and ends up back in that white-void space with the cursed spirit tree where she first awoke after her death. Some liminal space between life and death, except this time, Kenjaku is wearing her face instead of a man’s.
“We’re leaving,” they tell her.
“Uh. Okay,” Riko agrees. “Where are we going?”
“Anywhere but here. Take your pick.”
“I thought you said we didn’t have any money?”
“I can get us some. But you will not let us remain anywhere near Tsukumo Yuki. She is a danger to our body.”
“I think she’s just a danger to you,” Riko points out, crossing her arms. “She seems perfectly nice to me. And if she’s figured out some way to defeat you, I doubt running away is going to change things.”
“If she defeats me,” Kenjaku says, “you will die again, too.”
Riko blinks.
She—
She hadn’t really thought about that.
She knew it, in theory. She’s known this whole time that the extra life Kenjaku has offered her is only a temporary thing. It’s stolen time that she was never supposed to get, because she’s supposed to be merged with Tengen instead of them right now. And she’s also supposed to be dead. She was dead. Everything since that has really just felt like a bad dream—some sort of strange farewell to send her off permanently.
But…
She isn’t dead. She’s alive like a parasite, but she is alive. But she won’t be, if she wants to let Tsukumo thwart whatever Kenjaku is planning. Because if she’s alive like a parasite and Kenjaku is her host, killing the host kills her, and then she’s dead for good. No more second chances.
She considers this.
She doesn’t want to die a second time.
There were so many things she decided she wanted to do right before her first death. So if this second life is going to be fleeting regardless of whether or not she walks into whatever trap Tsukumo will set for Kenjaku…
She could just…
prolong it a little more…
She shouldn’t. She knows this. The entire reason she grew up fully accepting her fate as a star plasma vessel is because it would be the best for the world at large. It would prevent any possible Tengen-related catastrophes, and it would keep Jujutsu High—and thus the sorcerers associated with it—safe, which keeps the rest of the world safe from curses.
Her purpose has always been to sacrifice her body for the sake of the world.
Why is she even considering anything else?
Geto’s voice sounds in the back of her mind—telling her she could walk away if she wanted, and he and Gojo would vow to support and protect her decision. And she did choose to reject the merger.
Geto said she was allowed to be selfish.
She’s never been selfish before.
“Where do you want to go?”
Riko’s own judgment stares back at her as Kenjaku parrots, “Where do you want to go?”
I don’t know, Riko thinks. She’s never gone anywhere. Growing up, she was hardly allowed outside. She’s read about various places all around the world, but they were no more real to her than the worlds from fantasy books and fairytales. A land of magic with witches and wizards and dragons felt no more fake than the Eiffel Tower or Mount Everest.
I don’t know. How could I? I don’t know how to be selfish. I don’t know if that’s allowed. I don’t know if I care whether or not it’s allowed.
“Anywhere,” Riko answers. “Everywhere.”
“If only my children had been like you,” Kenjaku replies. They step closer, cupping Riko’s cheek with one hand. They press their lips to Riko’s forehead, tender, but colder than Kuroi ever was.
(In the back of her mind, she hears Kuroi urging her to do the right thing.)
(In the back of her mind, she hears Geto saying The choice is yours.)
(In the back of her mind, she knows she is dead already.)
“Maybe,” Kenjaku muses, “I would not need a son if I could have you instead.”
“Okay,” Riko agrees, because she misses having someone taking care of her and she misses the gentle mother-like touch Kuroi always offered, and Kenjaku is just playing a part to get her to follow them away from danger, but—
She’ll take it while it lasts.
She’s spent her entire life living with the knowledge that all the best things could only ever be temporary.