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Tsumiki did not want to be here.
She hesitated to express this—or worse, act on it—because she had already foolishly promised her classmates she would come. Tsumiki could handle their scrutiny well enough if she decided to leave, with the aid of copious well-crafted excuses, but Mio could easily be insufferable regardless. Her one victory of this night, perhaps, was that Mio did not try to pressure Fujinuma-chan into another clearly cursed outing while deriding her sensible fear.
Although perhaps Tsumiki was being too harsh. Her long-time friend—awkward as though that friendship could be at times—had planned the outing largely with Tsumiki in mind, claiming it as both a birthday excursion and a customary outing before they all officially started high school. Most of them were going to stay in the Urami Municipality, despite previous grandiose talk of scattering to the winds, but the general attitude of excitement stayed the same, as if they could have been separated forever but decided to stick together as some sort of pact and not a lack of desire or ability to go to some specialized private school elsewhere. Tsumiki’s upcoming birthday was just a cherry on top of all the reasons why they should definitely follow Mio to this decrepit park.
Tsumiki’s birthday was not in April. However, Tsumiki had been lying about her birthday for years now, including on official documents, so she weathered the fake celebration with practiced ease. Nobody here knew that she turned fifteen back in November, and this was all just a long-running con she convinced Satoru to help her with, as an early sign of goodwill, so that the new school district would have no idea that she had to repeat second grade, back when her mom had just… left, and Tsumiki spent too long trying to figure out what to do that her grades became unsalvageable.
All of that was ancient history now, though. Tsumiki fought her way into belonging until her grades and her social graces improved and then she earned herself the luxury of being perfectly average. Not the dumb kid, or the poor kid, or the absurdly rich kid (she was, technically, but she never felt like one), or the super smart kid. Only blissfully normal. Any burdens she shouldered were hidden, as she preferred, and her success at such a simple life meant she would not add any burdens to Satoru and Megumi with her existence. As a bonus, nobody at school worried much about her either, so maybe she did not want to be here, but at least nobody noticed when she hung back and failed to muster appropriate enthusiasm.
Mio liked “spooky” things far too much. Tsumiki had been dragged into such outings before, but usually she received enough of a warning to smuggle in her glasses and remain as vigilant as she could be, as much as the world of jujutsu remained outside her understanding. Still, she should have known that Mio’s idea of a “spring celebration” in a park would not be to go to somewhere nice, like Akigase, but rather some off-the-beaten-path failed theme park with overgrown flowers and a reputation for being eerie. Tsumiki touched as little as possible and kept Satoru’s contact pulled up in her phone just in case. (She has never called him for this kind of emergency before, and if Tsumiki had her way, she never would. He was much too busy to have to drop his students, or his current job, just for her, foolishly in a situation she could never dream of handling.) At least it was daytime, and the place still had some other people milling about. It probably wasn’t actually cursed… at least not enough to be noticeable now.
“Look, there’s a photographer!” Mio cried, ushering the group forward. “Let’s see if she will take our picture. Hey! Hey, Oba-san!”
Tsumiki sighed to herself. There went Mio, assuming she could convince anybody to do what she wanted. At least this was a better alternative to her trying to take a selfie on top of dilapidated equipment.
The photographer turned around and did not immediately curse Mio out. Instead, after a brief moment of surprise, she smiled. If anything, Tsumiki might actually say that there was curious interest in those golden-brown eyes of hers. A true photographer, perhaps. Although Tsumiki would admit that behind her relief at avoiding a dramatic altercation, she immediately became distracted by the woman’s injury: a thin scar stretched across her forehead, still with the stitches and everything. Tsumiki tried not to look, but her short-cropped dark hair framed it well. At least it didn’t seem to be bothering the woman too much…
“Are you kids out on a walk? That’s so nice,” the woman cooed. “I’m glad to see people your age enjoying the outdoors.”
“Yup,” Mio agreed, although ‘enjoying the outdoors’ probably had little to do with it. “It’s our friend’s birthday, too. Could you take a picture of us?” She offered her phone, and despite how forward it was, the photographer didn’t seem to mind. Worse, her attention slipped from Mio to Tsumiki at Mio’s comment and vague gesture, and for a moment, Tsumiki felt she was being sized up somehow in the thoughtful head-tilt and hum sent her way.
“I don’t mind at all,” the photographer accepted. “In fact, it’s great timing. Would you girls mind if I got some shots as well? A fine group like you would work well for my newest series on public spaces.”
Mio lit up. “That’d be great! Thank you, Oba-san!”
And so, the group’s fate for the next fifteen minutes or so was decided, as they posed for Mio’s phone and then some more for the photographer’s camera. The others enjoyed it more than she did, but Tsumiki simply took heart in their pleasure over a relatively benign activity. She could have done without the photographer’s keen gaze, or the passive questions about her impressive height or natural hair color, but at least the others were subject to them as well. As long as Tsumiki wasn’t singled out, she could pretend everything was normal.
“Fushiguro-chan?” the photographer prompted when Tsumiki thought they were finally parting ways.
Still, she paused politely. “Yes?”
The photographer reached over and pressed a finger against her forehead with a smile, part apologetic and all nonchalant. “Sorry. Mosquito.”
Tsumiki wiped her forehead off to find the small smear of blood, but not the insect’s body.
Two weeks later, Tsumiki collapsed in the middle of class.
One moment, everything was normal, and the next, the last thing she felt was a jolt of heat and one last gasp of air before the functionality of her body was ripped away from her. Everything blacked out, and the last and only thing Tsumiki heard in that moment was Mio’s surprised scream.
That experience would be indicative of the rest of Tsumiki’s life.
Those initial hours passed in a blur, to the point where Tsumiki was unsure what was happening at all. Noise filtered in as chaos and the dredges of feeling were distant pain before it faded to uncomfortable numbness. In this time of tumultuous relationship with her own body, Tsumiki had a moment of startling clarity—the kind without clear origin—as she recalled that odd moment from the park, and the chill of that photographer’s nonchalant and knowing grin. Intrinsically, deep where only gut-feelings and primal instincts could be felt, Tsumiki knew that she had been cursed and that the woman was somehow responsible.
And this knowledge would rot with her.
The curse sapped all the agency and life from Tsumiki’s body, rendering her alive in only the barest, most clinical sense of the word. Her heart beat and her lungs breathed, but nothing of her mind or spirit ever surfaced. All the parts that made Tsumiki herself were buried under dormant flesh and a cursed sigil, as if her body had become her own grave.
The worst part, in Tsumiki’s developing opinion, was that contrary to what it appeared, Tsumiki was aware of everything.
Well, mostly aware. She could not see, nor feel, but she could hear, which was the best option available to her when nothing else requiring voluntary muscles worked. It turned out that all of those tales of coma patients listening to their loved ones were true, although nobody ever expressed just how horrifying and helpless it was. She couldn’t help but to believe it would have been kinder if she was completely unconscious, but then again, curses were never supposed to be kind.
“She won’t wake up… will she?” Megumi asked. After all of the activity of the last few… hours? Days?... the quiet almost-question of her brother cut through the anxious static with nothing but cold dread. It was worse than hearing all of those snippets of everything Satoru tried, and then Shoko, and then some other deep voice she almost recognized but couldn’t place, who tried everything they thought of with increasing desperation. Tsumiki had held onto hope when the doctors had all failed; when Satoru failed, too, her hope had begun to crumble into despair.
Evidently, Megumi thought the same.
She wished she could have seen Satoru’s face. He lied as easily as he breathed, but sometimes, in the breath before the plunge, the truth would be written on his face—in the light of his eyes, or the tension in his jaws—if only one knew where to look. Then again, Tsumiki did not know if she could bear the answer.
“Never say never, Megs,” Satoru replied, his chipperness too forced. It was as close to an agreement as their guardian would likely give.
There was a huff and a slam of a door, followed by a distant admonishment from what Tsumiki assumed was someone from the hospital staff. Megumi was surely gone.
If Satoru remained, he stayed silent.
Her ears rang with certain doom.
Tsumiki did not pay attention to everything. She couldn’t, even if she wanted to. The strain became too much, and the ongoing beeps and shuffles and murmurs of the hospital environment would drive her insane otherwise. She dipped in and out of fluid consciousness, but never past the barrier between her and her skin.
They might have moved her somewhere else. There was a particularly hectic day, filled with enough activity she wondered if her heart was giving out, but then everything grew quieter. Not the quiet of home—she would know home by sound alone, she was pretty sure—but not quite the bustle of the hospital. The school? No, she would hear Shoko-san then, right? A private care facility, maybe? Was that where people with comas were sent to?
Tsumiki hated not knowing.
She began to hate the silence too.
The attempts to break the curse placed on her—her forehead, everyone said, and she remembered that woman touching her forehead like a brand—waned with time, unless they were carried out silently. Satoru was normally the only one who wasn’t silent whenever he visited, which Tsumiki became immensely grateful for, even if he characteristically said nothing important at all—just the same idle chatter he would always engage him as he flew by, home just a single stop in his busy schedule.
“Utahime found out that my students averaged less on their quarterly test than hers and now she’s insufferable about it! Like, come on, it was a standardized test! And, okay, it should have been really easy, but my adorable little killing machines don’t care about math and memorizing the periodic table or all that stuff, and Utahime’s got all these try-hards on her hands! I have a Panda! Between me and you though, that’s the easiest excuse I could give, because Panda did the best this year—he has his dad’s smarts in him. Poor Yuuta, though, missed a bajillion days at school because of his whole curse situation, though, and—” He cut himself off abruptly. In lieu of Tsumiki being able to give him an earful for his insensitivity (or cry, because she forgot about school, sometimes, and this would be the second year she would have to repeat, surely, and she wasn’t sure if she could ever hide the embarrassment of that), Satoru schooled himself. The sudden, stilted silence was all she had, and yet it was more of an indication he would have given had he known she was listening.
“My kids are a great hand at fighting, though, and that’s definitely more important,” he continued. “Sure, Utahime’s Aoi guy is actually really impressive, but he made the mistake of asking Maki what her type in guys was, and she folded him like a pancake. I know you’re not a fan of condoning violence, ‘Miki, at least in front of Megs, but I promise, it was fantastic.”
Satoru offered a shred of normalcy, but it wasn’t enough. If anything, it made her homesick with such ferocity that she wondered if her spirit could perish from it. She should never have taken her life for granted, after that first miracle of a second chance; now she didn’t know how to cope in disaster again.
Then there was Megumi.
She did not know if he visited at all, or if he just stayed silent. Both were all too plausible for him. Tsumiki herself was torn on how to feel about it. On one hand, the absence ate away at her, dredging up those embers of not good enough that said that everyone would abandon her; on the other hand, Tsumiki was glad that Megumi’s stubbornness would mean that her little brother would not have to see her so weak.
But clearly, he knew. Everyone knew. Everyone in Tsumiki’s circle, near and far, surely knew that she was wasting away in a hospital bed. Everyone important to Tsumiki would know that she managed to get herself cursed, despite being surrounded by sorcerers.
Not for the first time, and not for the last, Tsumiki chastised herself for not getting help before it was too late. For not saying a single thing. She had been wary of something potentially happening in that park, but when she came home, neither Megumi nor Satoru said a single thing. Satoru had those cosmic eyes of his, so if anything was wrong, he would have seen it, right? Even passively. So when everything appeared to be normal, Tsumiki let it go and forgot about it. All of her life, if she kept her head down and did her best, things would work out eventually. The periods of despair and desperation in between were just trials. Harsh ones, comparatively, but life was never supposed to be fair.
It occurred to Tsumiki, too late, that she could have done better. She could have tried harder to tell somebody when her mother left. She could have told Mio no. She could have told somebody that she had a bad feeling when she had the chance.
Could, but didn’t.
So now Tsumiki would fall apart. If curses were supposed to be human creations, then she wondered if she earned this curse after all: cursed to silence, to inaction, as punishment for not doing enough.
She still wished that someone would come, just like Satoru did when she and Megumi were kids. She wished that one day, she would hear the voices of her family and it would come with a magic solution only they were capable of.
“…I don’t know why I came here,” the voice of Megumi whispered harshly above her.
Instead, Tsumiki only became privy to the way they degraded alongside her, as if being near her spread her curse to them. Perhaps it did.
Megumi did not say anything else during that visit. For a while, though Tsumiki strained to pay attention, she wasn’t sure if he was still there. Then she heard his quiet gasps, the creak of a hand too tight around the bedrail, the ethereal whine of a dog, and all of the other miniscule signs he was distressed. Even when Megumi thought he was alone, he still refused to cry outright. Tsumiki could not begrudge him for it, but just this once, she wished he would release all those unshed tears somewhere. (Although maybe that was selfish, because Tsumiki could no longer cry if she wanted to, so she wished it on her brother instead.)
She wasn’t sure if Megumi ever came back or not. She wasn’t sure if he was out there, harboring crushing guilt that wasn’t his responsibility until he shut down piece by piece, or if Megumi was… fine. Maybe it was too much to hope for, that he found whatever support he needed and accepted it, but since Tsumiki could no longer hope for herself, then she would direct all of it towards her little brother instead. Even then, however, it was hard to imagine him processing anything, but she could at least hope that he could take care of himself and move on. He was older now and coming into his own. He hadn’t needed her in a long time, anyway, before she became permanently unavailable.
(Was she dead? She felt it, sometimes, except it was a death that came with too much awareness. A worse death, then.)
Would she stay in this coma forever? Were there machines keeping her alive, or did the “stable condition” she remember from discussions that happened eons ago mean that her body wasn’t on life support? Although surely they were keeping her on food and water… When would they pull the plug, then? It would never be an issue of money, only hope. So even as Tsumiki’s hope waned to nothing, she took her frozen existence as proof that they still had hope. It was worth something, right?
She continued to drift in and out of awareness. Out, mostly, but Tsumiki was starved enough for stimulation that she could snap onto the faintest sign of activity, like a caged bird dying of thirst. It was pathetic of her, she knew, but Tsumiki’s sense of shame eroded too. She was desperate. She was scared. She futilely wanted comfort she could never receive again.
A shuddering inhale, too emotional and too close to her than normal, stirred Tsumiki from her paralysis. She strained to listen, horribly guilty for wanting to intrude on what was clearly a private moment of pain, but hearing her brother’s silent, shaky distress was the only way she could assure herself that he still existed. She… had thought he would never return…
She couldn’t comfort him (couldn’t even comfort herself) so she just listened to the quiet, shaky breathing in a private simulation of crying just to take it as a sign that he was alive.
“I’m sorry. I’m… I’m so, sorry…”
But it wasn’t Megumi at all. It was Satoru.
Tsumiki lived in a constant state of disorientation, but the realization startled her to a new level of it. It shouldn’t have, but it did. She knew Satoru was more human than he ever wanted to appear, but still, he remained largely unflappable in her eyes. And yet here he was, shouldering the guilt that should have been hers and then buckling under it.
It made Tsumiki want to cry too. Both because it meant that there really was no hope for her, and more importantly, because she had tried to be as unobtrusive, as un-burdensome as possible, and yet she brought nothing but pain to the two strongest people she knew—the two people she cared most about.
“Oh,” a nurse startled from further away—the door, probably. “Gojo-san, I— I had no idea you were visiting.”
Satoru scraped his façade back together. With more difficulty than he normally did. “Ah, right. I just… It’s Christmas. I had to stop by.”
The flimsiness of his excuse worked on the nurse. Maybe it wasn’t even an excuse at all. Satoru cared about birthdays and holidays and other gestures he could perform, always being better at action than with words.
“Right, of course. I’ll leave you two to it, then.”
Satoru crumbled as silently and as privately as Megumi did. Tsumiki supposed she was no different, though, but this time she did not have a choice.
She did not know how much time passed. The absence of autonomy stripped her of that, too, and all she ever had to judge were the words of visitors—if they came. Tsumiki believed they became less and less frequent, but she could not be sure. She might have even missed some. It began harder to pay attention. To… exist. Her life (if it could be called that) amounted to
Nothing
Nothing
Nothing
Nothing
Crushing dread
Nothing
Nothing
Nothing.
Maybe her body could not rot, but her mind could.
Perhaps it was the only way she could die.
But then.
Was that…?
A flash of warmth. Her nerves were all shut down, so she didn’t know where it came from. Her forehead, maybe—or her soul, still sinking downward. Upward? No. Downward. She did not think she could get farther away, but she did.
And yet—
Her eyes opened. Against impossibility. Against her conscious will. Light filtered in, but Tsumiki could not see. It was… Too much.
She sunk further. Further and further until—
She did not know the date, not then, but perhaps it was fitting, that so close to her real birthday, her life changed as drastically as it did near her fake one, all that time ago.
Tsumiki survived a year and a half of hell, with no choice but to wait for a miracle she gave up on believing for.
She was right: a miracle never came.
Instead, a new kind of hell began.