Chapter Text
Sendai City, December 2019
The ceiling fan spun overhead, its rhythmic hum barely cutting through the thick silence of the early morning. Setsuko Sasaki’s blue eyes snapped open, her breath caught somewhere between her throat and the cold air of her dark bedroom.
A nightmare.
Again.
Her fingers twitched against her sides, her body rigid as if expecting the weight of something unseen to consume her, something vast, something hungry, something that still lingered in the corners of her sleep. She exhaled sharply through her nose, forcing her muscles to loosen one by one.
Just a dream.
Reaching blindly toward the nightstand, her hand bumped against the thick plastic frames of her glasses before sliding them on. The world sharpened instantly—the muted glow of the streetlights outside, the digital clock’s green numbers reading 4:37 AM, the crumpled notebook on her desk filled with scribbled observations she now wished were just urban legends.
Her phone buzzed weakly beside her pillow. She snatched it up, the glow stinging her tired eyes as the screen flooded with notifications: news alerts, trending hashtags, emergency updates, all circling the same topic.
Tokyo
Thumb scrolling mindlessly, she skimmed past the headlines:
“Who was Ryomen Sukuna? Man or Monster?”
“The Merger “No longer a threat”, says Jujutsu Head Satoru Gojo.”
“Martial Law is still in place for most of central Honshu”
Setsuko’s jaw tightened. She had experienced this world once before, a year and a half prior. In June of 2018, she and Takeshi were attacked by monsters they later learned were called cursed spirits. She was sworn into secrecy, and she assumed that nothing else would ever come of it, apart from the nightmares, of course.
But she was wrong. Just over a year later, there was an attack in Tokyo, and Kenjaku, the mysterious sorcerer with stitches on his forehead, appeared in a dream to escort her away from the culling game, saving her life. By the end of November, Kenjaku and his ally Sukuna were dead, and the creature known as the merger was destroyed.
Setsuko’s neighbourhood had remained undamaged despite the culling games, and despite some reservations, she had moved back into her small apartment.
Setsuko lived alone, despite only being 17; her father travelled for work, frequently being away on business, and her mother was gone, having died years ago. So Setsuko lived in a small apartment paid for by her father and would see him when he returned from business trips.
Setsuko’s mind flickered back to her phone, and her thumb hovered over a grainy, blurred image, a still from the footage filmed of the battle in Shinjuku. A figure, silhouetted against the ruin of Shinjuku, stood tall. The curve of his shoulders, the set of his stance, the way he shifted his weight before lunging forward.
Her breath hitched
“Why does that feel familiar?”
She enlarged the image, ignoring the way the pixels distorted into jagged shapes. The quality was abysmal- no face, no clear details, just motion and shadow. But there was something there. Something about the tilt of his head, the way his arms moved, it itched at the back of her skull like a half-remembered name.
She’d seen that before.
Not in the news, not in the feverish online theories dissecting every frame of the “Shinjuku Showdown.” Somewhere else.
Setsuko let the phone drop to her chest, exhaling through her nose as she stared back up at the ceiling. The government’s new “Jujutsu Public Relations Department” had been tight-lipped about the identities of the sorcerers involved, outside of Satoru Gojo of course.
Setsuko agreed with them. The world wasn’t ready to know that curses were real, and she certainly wasn’t when she was attacked. The world wasn’t ready to know that monsters were real, and they walked invisibly among them. That there were people, kids, maybe the same age as her, who fought those things in the shadows just to keep the rest of humanity blissfully unaware.
Her fingers curled around the edge of her phone.
“It doesn’t matter”
Whoever that guy was, he’d won. The nightmare was over. Kenjaku was dead, and Sukuna was gone. The Merger had been stopped. That was the end of it.
Her phone buzzed, dragging Setsuko away from her thoughts temporarily. She rolled onto her side, burying her face into her pillow.
It didn’t matter. She was just a high school girl in Sendai. This wasn’t her world. But the way that boy moved.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Stop”
6:23 AM.
Setsuko tossed onto her back again, glaring at the ceiling fan as if it had personally wronged her. Sleep wasn’t coming back—not with the way her pulse still skittered beneath her skin, not with the phantom pressure of recognition clawing at the base of her skull.
She exhaled sharply and threw the covers off.
The wooden floor was ice against her bare feet as she padded toward the kitchen. She flicked on the overhead bulb, wincing at the sudden brightness, and pulled open the fridge.
Milk. Eggs. A half-empty carton of orange juice. A sad-looking bento from the convenience store that had been forgotten behind a jar of pickled plums.
Setsuko grabbed the juice and the bento, then slammed the fridge shut with her hip.
”What now?”
It was Saturday. No school. No literary club meetings—not that they’d been doing much since… well, since everything. She missed the Occult Research Club; Takeshi had moved away shortly after the attack last year, and of course, Yuji vanished.
She poured the juice into a glass too quickly, watching the liquid slosh dangerously close to the rim.
She could:
- Go shopping. (Boring.)
- Rewatch that terrible horror movie she’d rented last weekend. (Still boring.)
- Try to catch up on homework. (She’d rather die.)
- Try to ignore the gnawing feeling that she’d seen that sorcerer before.
Setsuko’s grip tightened around the glass.
“Stop”
She wasn’t going to spend her day obsessing over something she couldn’t change. The world was safe. That was enough.
She took a long sip of juice.
Her phone buzzed on the counter—a notification from one of the few remaining occult forums she still followed.
USER: Cursedtoiletenthusiast
“Anyone else think the guy who fought Sukuna kinda looked like that missing student from Sendai? The one who ‘transferred’ last year and has never been seen since?”
Setsuko choked.
Orange juice burned the back of her throat as she scrambled for her phone, her heart pounding.
“No way,” she whispered.
She was right, she knew it.
THUD.
Setsuko nearly tripped over her own feet as she bolted back to her room, barely remembering to set down her glass before diving toward the pile of half-forgotten things shoved into the corner of her room: old textbooks, notes, Occult Research Club materials.
Her fingers closed around a worn, spiral-bound notebook- the unofficial logbook of the Occult Research Club. She flipped it open. Sketches of “ghosts” stared back at her, crude pencil drawings of shadows in the hallways, rumours about the school’s “haunted” third-floor bathroom, the “haunted” rugby field, the “haunted” metro station 4.
Then, there. A rough sketch of it. The finger. Darkened, withered, impossibly preserved. The thing that had started everything, the thing that attacked her, the thing Yuji had…
Setsuko’s breath hitched. Her vision blurred. The memories crashed over her like a wave:
The stench of rot, the sound of her own heartbeat too loud in her ears, the way her legs had frozen as something lunged at her from the darkness.
Takeshi’s screams.
Yuji’s voice as he talked to someone about “Ryomen Sukuna”
A tear splashed onto the page, darkening it. She slammed the notebook shut.
“Damn it.”
She wiped her face with the back of her hand, but the tears kept coming. It wasn’t just the fear. It was the helplessness. The knowledge that she’d been half-unconscious and seconds from dying, that she would have died if not for-
Her phone buzzed again. Another notification from the forum.
USER: Sendaispecialist
“Seriously, look at the side-by-side from this other footage. Same hair, same height. And didn’t that kid vanish right after some weird shit went down at his school?”
Setsuko’s fingers trembled as she swiped to open the attached image. A screenshot of the Shinjuki footage, next to it-
A yearbook photo.
Pink hair. A wide, easy grin.
Yuji Itadori, her junior, her fellow Occult Research Club member.
Her stomach dropped.
“No way.”
But it was him.
It was Yuji.
Setsuko’s hand shook as she dug deeper into the pile, tossing aside objects with increasing desperation.
There.
A polaroid, its edges slightly frayed from a year of being ignored and hidden in a dark pile. She pulled it free, her breath catching in her throat.
There was no mistaking it.
Yuji.
Standing next to her in the clubroom, grinning like an idiot, his arm casually slung over her shoulders. She remembered that day, the first meeting of the Occult Research Club. He’d been so excited, so eager to dive into the supernatural, even if half of it was easily disprovable urban legends.
And then, the hospital. The memory hit her like a punch to the gut. Yuji, standing in the dim light of Takeshi’s hospital room, his expression unreadable.
“Those weren’t monsters, those were curses”
His voice had been quiet, serious in a way she’d never heard from him before.
“That finger is something called a special-grade cursed object, it was able to gather curses and make itself stronger, so it's not your fault, I’m the one who picked it up in the first place”
She hadn’t understood. Not really. She’d been too scared, too confused.
“I’m sorry, Sasaki, there’s somewhere I need to go. I’ll see you later”
Those were the last words she’d ever heard from Yuji. After that, he just vanished. His social media accounts gone, his phone number no longer in service, teachers denying he ever attended the school.
“When Doctor Ieri came to help Takeshi, she made no mention of Yuji, and ignored all of my questions” Setsuko whispered to herself, gripping the polaroid tighter.
Yuji. The boy who’d sat next to her in the clubroom, who’d laughed at her terrible ghost stories, who disappeared without a trace. Was the same boy who fought Sukuna. Who helped save the world.
Her chest ached.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you leave?” she whispered, her voice cracking.
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Omiya Station, Tokyo, 8:32 AM.
The train's intercom crackled overhead as Yuji shuffled onto a seat by the window, his hood pulled low over his scarred face. Even though his name wasn't public, he felt he would get recognised.
The last time he’d been on a train to Sendai, it had been with Nobara and Megumi, back when he was still new to Jujutsu High. Back when the worst thing he’d had to worry about was Sukuna appearing on his hand or cheek and saying something hostile.
He exhaled through his nose, watching the platform blur as the bullet train sped up. Gojo had let him go today without much fuss.
“You sure you don’t want backup? I could totally sneak onto the train.”
Yuji laughed.
“No sensei, you’re the most famous man in the world right now, back from the dead and telling the whole world about curses”
“Worth a shot!” Gojo grinned, slapping Yuji on the back “And don’t I look good, did I tell you Time Magazine want to meet with me?”
Yuji chuckled at the memory. His fingers tapping to the music blaring in his headphones.
“I’ll see you later.”
Had he actually said that? Had he really just walked away, knowing he might never come back?
His chest tightened.
She probably hated him.
For finding the finger, for vanishing, for lying, for leaving her with nothing but questions while he went off to play hero.
“I’m no hero, sorcerers are just con-artists” he thought to himself. She was alive, Takeshi was alive. That was what mattered.
But still.
He could’ve just called. The regulations had relaxed since Gojo had taken charge; no more hiding from the incident at the school, Yuji no longer had to pretend he was persona non grata, and he could contact his old friends again. Technically, he, Megumi and Nobara had already broken the rules with Yuko, but no one had found out. This was different; he was reaching out, making up for a past mistake.
He dug his phone out of his pocket, thumb hovering over the screen. No. This wasn’t the kind of thing you say over the phone; you don’t just announce the fact you’re still alive like that. He shoved the phone back into his hoodie, sliding back in his seat. The train rattled onward.
Somewhere ahead, in Sendai, Setsuko Sasaki was waiting, and Yuji had a promise to keep.