Chapter Text
December 7th was a national holiday in the jujutsu world. Unofficially, of course.
Officially, it was just a normal day. But if you walked through the halls of Headquarters on this particular day, you would think a visiting dignitary or a minor deity had descended from the heavens, railing clouds of glory and a decent PR team.
The lobby was overflowing with floral arrangements so enormous they constituted a legitimate fire hazard. There were baskets of gourmet fruit where each individual melon had its own security detail and a more impressive pedigree than most minor clans. Cases of sake aged longer than some current national constitutions sat gleaming in elaborate wooden boxes that whispered of craftsmanship and restraint, neither of which was evident in the sheer volume of them.
Gilded cards arrived every hour, delivered by increasingly nervous-looking assistants, offering fawning felicitations that were really just thinly-veiled reminders from the heads of various clans and prominent families that they existed, remembered Gojo Satoru fondly, and maintained unwavering political loyalty. (The loyalty would last precisely as long as it remained convenient, but that was understood by all parties and mentioned by none at polite gatherings.)
Everyone wanted a piece of Gojo today. They wanted to celebrate the Strongest, the Clan Head, the Savior, capital letters very much intended. They wanted to buy him extravagant dinners at restaurants with Michelin stars and year-long waiting lists. They wanted to shower him with gifts worth a small nation’s GDP. They wanted to bask in his reflected glory and hopefully curry some favor while he was in a good mood.
You, however, had other plans. Plans that involved significantly less gold leaf and significantly more processed sugar.
The Origin Story (Or: How You Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Swindle Ijichi)
It started a decade ago, in the first year after Gojo had scooped you up from the wreckage of your life. He had always been in the habit of collecting stray sorcerers. Maki, when she’d run away from the Zenin clan with nothing but spite and a chip on her shoulder. Yuuta, after that tragic accident with the bullies that wasn’t really an accident. And later, Yuji and his spectacularly questionable life choices. But that habit had started with you.
How you’d ended up in his care was a very long, very complicated story involving mental hospitals, cursed spirits, and the last frayed threads of Ijichi’s sanity. The relevant part, however, is this:
The year was 2015. You were fifteen years old and still operating at approximately sixty percent feral raccoon, forty percent functional human being. You lived in Gojo’s apartment, ate his food (so much food), and followed him around like a baby duckling that had imprinted on the first large moving object it saw. Which, in fairness, was what had happened.
You hadn't enrolled at Tokyo Jujutsu High yet. That particular joy was still a few months away. Your world was small, contained within the radius of Gojo’s orbit and whatever he deemed safe enough for you to explore without getting yourself killed or causing an international incident.
One afternoon in early December, you overheard Ijichi on the phone.
Ijichi was always on the phone, always stressed, always muttering about schedules and logistics and why-did-he-choose-this-career-path-his-mother-had-wanted-him-to-be-an-accountant. But this time, amid the usual litany of despair, you caught a phrase that snagged in your brain: “Gojo-san’s birthday.”
Birthday.
The concept filtered through your consciousness, turned itself over a few times, and stuck there. People did things for birthdays. Important things. They gave gifts. They celebrated. They made cakes with an inadvisable number of candles and sang songs that no one enjoyed singing.
Gojo, who gave you everything—a home, safety, a reason to stop biting people when they got too close—surely deserved a celebration.
But there was a problem. Several problems, actually, arranged in ascending order of severity, but the main one was that you had zero money. Not a yen to your name. Less than zero, really, if you factored in the general concept of economic participation and your utter lack of it. Gojo provided everything, so the thought of asking him for an allowance had never crossed your mind. Besides, using his money to buy him a gift seemed like cheating. It had to be your money. Your effort. Otherwise, what was the point?
You were, however, resourceful by nature. And also evil. Mostly resourceful. The evil part was more of a bonus feature that came with the base model.
Your social circle at that point consisted of precisely one (1) chronically overworked assistant manager who would do pretty much anything for you if he thought it would keep you happy, occupied, and most importantly, out of trouble and far, far away from his filing system.
Ijichi never stood a chance.
You had “found” a deck of playing cards. It was slightly battered, corners bent, but perfectly functional for your purposes. The origin of these cards was a mystery you refused to explain, and Ijichi was too afraid to ask. (Smart man.)
One evening, Gojo was away on some vaguely described dangerous mission and had unceremoniously dropped you off at Ijichi’s apartment with a cheerful wave and a complete disregard for Ijichi’s visible panic. You’d waited approximately seven minutes before striking.
“Let’s play,” you announced, materializing at Ijichi’s desk with the cards in hand.
Ijichi looked up from his reports, already sensing danger the way small animals sense approaching storms. “Play… what, exactly?”
“Cards.” You sat down across from him without waiting for an invitation, because waiting for invitations was for people with properly developed social skills. “For money.”
“Ah.” He adjusted his glasses—the nervous tic that preceded every bad decision he’d ever made. “I really should be filing these reports. The deadline is actually tomorrow morning, and if I don’t—”
“For money,” you repeated, as if he hadn’t spoken.
Perhaps Ijichi had thought it would be harmless. A quick game, you’d lose interest, everyone could return to their regularly scheduled emotional suppression. Perhaps he’d thought indulging you would prevent greater catastrophes down the line, because a bored you was a dangerous you, and everyone who’d spent more than five minutes in your presence knew it intimately. Perhaps he simply couldn’t withstand the weight of your unblinking stare, which you’d been practicing in the mirror and had recently perfected to an unsettling degree somewhere between “wounded puppy” and “cursed doll in a horror film.”
Whatever the reason, he agreed. This was his first mistake. It would not, unfortunately for Ijichi, be his last.
The game was poker. Simple five-card draw. Basic rules. Nothing fancy. You’d explained it twice, slowly, the way children explained things they don’t actually understand very well to patient adults. Ijichi had nodded along, endeared despite himself. He should have known better.
The first hand, you lost. Badly. Your cards were terrible, your poker face worse. You frowned at your hand like it had personally betrayed you, and Ijichi won ¥50 (in credit, naturally, since you literally possessed no actual money) with a pair of sixes that seemed almost apologetic about their victory. He relaxed, shoulders dropping an inch. Perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad after all.
The second hand, you lost again. This time you’d almost had something. Almost, nearly, so close. But Ijichi’s three of a kind beat your two pair. Another ¥50 went onto his side of the imaginary ledger. You looked genuinely disappointed, the kind of disappointment that made adults feel like monsters.
“Maybe one more?” you suggested, with just the right amount of hopeful determination.
Now feeling rather charitable and more than a bit guilty for taking (theoretical) money from a gremlin child who’d been through quite enough already, Ijichi nodded. “One more.”
That’s when you struck.
The third hand, you won. Nothing too dramatic, just a straight that came together at the last possible moment. Your debt was cleared.
The fourth hand, you won again. Full house, kings over eights. The cards had come together beautifully, almost poetically. Pure luck, surely. These things happened.
The fifth hand, you won with four of a kind. Jacks. All four of them, sitting there in your hand like they’d come to some sort of agreement.
Ijichi was staring at his cards now with the expression of a man who’d just realized he’d walked into an ambush but couldn’t figure out where the snipers were hiding.
“Another round?” you asked innocently.
“I…” He adjusted his glasses, looked at the cards, looked at you, looked at the small pile of coins that had migrated from his side of the desk to yours. “Yes. Alright.”
You won the next hand. And the next. And the next.
Your trick was a masterclass in misdirection and sleight of hand that you’d acquired through means you would never reveal. When you shuffled, the cards whispered against each other in a way that sounded perfectly normal but achieved quietly remarkable things. When you dealt, your hands moved with the innocent clumsiness of someone who’d just learned how to hold a deck, but somehow the right cards ended up in the right places.
Ijichi knew something was wrong. He had to know. He wasn’t stupid, whatever Gojo said about him. But every time he tried to catch you in the act, your hands were where they should be. Every time he thought he saw something—a card palmed too smoothly, a shuffle that went one pass too many, a deal from somewhere that wasn’t quite the top of the deck—he blinked and the moment was gone, and you were looking at him with those wide, guileless eyes that suggested he might be going mad. Perhaps the stress had finally broken something in his brain. Perhaps he should take a vacation.
“I think…” he started after the eighth consecutive loss, watching you rake in another pile of his coins with a pleased little smile. “I think perhaps—”
“Perhaps what?” You were already shuffling for the next hand, the cards dancing between your fingers.
He watched the shuffle. He watched it very carefully. It looked completely normal. Inefficient, even, the messy riffle shuffle a novice would do, cards bending awkwardly. And yet.
“Are you…” He hesitated. This was dangerous territory. Accusing you of cheating could go very badly in multiple directions. You might cry. You might tell Gojo. You might do something unhinged that he couldn’t anticipate with his limited imagination. “Are you sure you haven’t played cards before?”
“I told you,” you said, dealing the next hand with that same earnest concentration, tongue poking between your teeth. “I found this deck last week. I’ve been practicing the shuffling. Is it getting better?”
Practicing. Right. That explained everything and nothing.
The next hand, Ijichi watched like a hawk. He watched your fingers, your eyes, the way you held your cards. He looked for marked cards, for signals, for anything that would explain this systematic demolition of his wallet.
You won with a royal flush. The odds of a royal flush were 649,739 to 1.
“That’s…” Ijichi’s voice had gone high-pitched, the way it did when Gojo called him at 3 AM with a “small favor” to ask. “That’s remarkable luck.”
“I know!” You beamed at him, gathering up the cards with hands that fumbled just enough to be endearing. “I think I’m getting better at this!”
Ijichi requested to shuffle the next hand himself. You agreed with such immediate, cheerful compliance that he felt briefly ashamed for suspecting you. What kind of person suspected a traumatized teenager of being a con artist? A terrible person, probably. He was definitely going to hell for this.
He shuffled thoroughly, carefully, watching his own hands to make sure everything was fair and square. You still won. Three of a kind, which beat his pair of tens.
“Huh,” you said, blinking at your cards like you were surprised. “Lucky again.”
After that, something broke in Ijichi. Not his spirit, that had been broken years ago by this job, but rather his resistance. His will to fight. The part of his brain that insisted on logic and evidence and proof quietly gave up and accepted that this was simply happening now. You were going to take his money through some unknowable means, and there was nothing he could do about it except let it happen and hope you got bored soon.
You didn’t get bored. Thirty-five minutes after the game started, you had systematically cleaned him out of every piece of loose change in his wallet, his desk drawers, his coat pockets, and in a moment of true desperation on his part, his car’s cup holder. It wasn’t so much a game as a financial massacre. A very small-scale financial massacre, admittedly, but decisive. You sat in the wreckage of his monetary dignity, surrounded by piles of coins that totaled roughly ¥1000.
It wasn’t a fortune. It wouldn’t buy diamonds or aged whiskey or anything that came in a box with a ribbon.
But to you? It was a war chest.
You felt a little guilty, watching Ijichi’s defeated slump, the way he’d taken off his glasses to rub his eyes. Mostly, though, you felt triumphant. The party fund was secured. Phase One was complete. Your operation could proceed.
On the night of December 7th, 2015, you patiently waited for Gojo in his massive penthouse apartment, watching the clock tick past 9 PM, then 10 PM, then keep going with the relentless indifference of time itself. Clan gatherings and high-society obligations kept him hostage somewhere across the city, forced to mingle with people whose names he couldn’t remember and whose problems he cared about even less. You didn’t mind the wait. Patience, you’d learned, was just spite with better time management.
Gojo finally stumbled through the door just past eleven, looking like a man who’d survived several natural disasters in quick succession. He was still wearing his formal suit but his shoulders slumped under the invisible weight of a thousand polite conversations he hadn’t wanted to have. His sunglasses were askew. There was a smudge of what might have been cake frosting on his sleeve. His hair, which never quite obeyed the laws of physics even on good days, had given up entirely.
When he saw you sitting on the couch in your outdoor clothes, backpack already slung over one shoulder like a soldier ready for deployment, he froze mid-step.
“What are you doing up?” He blinked, genuinely surprised. “It’s late. Are you going somewhere?”
“Yes,” you said gravely. “We are going on an adventure.”
A flicker of curiosity chased away some of the exhaustion from his face. A faint smile touched his lips, the first real one he’d probably managed all day.
He raised a brow. “An adventure? Now? It’s nearly midnight.”
You nodded solemnly, like midnight was precisely when the best adventures happened, and held out your hand.
He stared at it. You could practically see him weighing the profound allure of his comfortable bed against the absurdity of letting you drag him back out into the December cold for unknown purposes. The sensible choice versus the interesting one.
Thankfully, Gojo Satoru had never been particularly sensible.
His much larger hand enveloped yours, and you pulled him back out the door, into the night, into the neon-drenched streets of Tokyo where the city hummed with late-night energy and questionable decisions.
Your destination was not a fancy restaurant with ambient lighting and intimidating cutlery. It was not an exclusive club where the velvet ropes parted for his name alone. It was something far better. A beacon of light and hope in the urban darkness: the nearest 7-Eleven.
The automatic doors slid open with a cheerful electronic chime. You grabbed a plastic shopping basket with both hands and began your raid. Gojo followed behind, bewildered but game, as you worked your way through the aisles.
- For the birthday cake: A family pack of Yamazaki Swiss Rolls in Mocha Cream flavor, containing five pre-cut slices of processed perfection.
- For the toast: Two cans of hot corn potage soup from the warming cabinet, because nothing said celebration like drinking your vegetables.
- For the main course: Two Pizza-man steamed buns, still fluffy and hot in their paper wrappers, cheese threatening to escape at the seams.
- For dessert (because a proper birthday required multiple dessert courses, this was just common sense and basic party planning): Four Black Thunder chocolate bars, which had the aesthetic of something vaguely illicit and tasted like pure joy.
- And for general festive snacking and party ambiance: Twenty sticks of Umaibo in assorted flavors, because if you were going to do this, you were going to do it right.
You’d done the math in your head a dozen times. This was the optimal configuration of deliciousness that one could acquire for under a thousand yen. Maximum happiness per yen ratio. Scientifically determined.
“You know you can get whatever you want, right?” Gojo said from somewhere behind you, watching you mentally debate between cheese flavor and mentaiko. He gestured at the shelves like a beneficent deity offering miracles. “Seriously. Whatever looks good. I’ll pay.”
“No,” you said primly, still focused on your Umaibo analysis. “My treat. It is your birthday today. You do not pay on your birthday. That is the rule.”
“That’s very sweet, but—”
“The. Rule.”
He held up his hands in surrender. But because he was Gojo, he kept trying to intervene. Spoiling you was encoded in his DNA.
“Are you sure you don’t want the caramel ice cream? It’s really good. I had it last week. Or the big bento box? That one has tempura—”
“No.”
“I really don’t mind paying—”
“Quiet.”
He fell silent, but you could feel him grinning behind you.
At the register, as the cashier scanned your items, Gojo made one last desperate attempt at financial intervention. He pulled out his wallet. You swatted his hand away.
He actually gasped. “Did you just—”
You ignored him and produced, with great ceremony and no small amount of pride, a small Ziploc bag filled with your hard-earned winnings. Coins clinked together like the treasure they were.
Gojo’s mouth fell open. He watched, genuinely stunned into actual silence for once in his life, as you carefully counted out the coins one by one onto the counter. Ten-yen pieces. Five-yen pieces. A frankly absurd number of one-yen coins that you’d bullied out of Ijichi in the final rounds when he’d been too defeated to find anything larger.
The total damage: ¥980.
There was ¥20 left over. You dropped the remaining coins into the charity box next to the register. Good karma for Gojo, maybe. And also to make up somewhat for the financial and emotional damage you’d inflicted upon poor Ijichi, who still hadn’t recovered.
The cashier, who had witnessed this entire bizarre transaction with the weary neutrality of someone who’d worked night shifts in Tokyo for far too long, bagged your items without a single comment. This wasn’t even in the top ten weirdest transactions he’d witnessed that week. Probably not even in the last hour.
“Your receipt,” he said flatly, holding it out.
You accepted it with a nod of acknowledgment—warrior to warrior, survivor to survivor.
With your party feast secured in its crinkly plastic bag, you led Gojo down the quiet street, away from the main road and into the labyrinth of residential back alleys. You walked with purpose, your hand still firmly clasped in his, guiding him to a place you’d scouted out on one of your solitary explorations of the neighborhood when Gojo was at work and you were supposed to be staying inside like a responsible person.
“There,” you said, pointing toward a small, fenced-in children’s playground squeezed between two apartment buildings.
It wasn’t much to look at. A set of swings, their chains rusted. A solitary slide shaped like a cartoon elephant with chipped paint. A sandbox covered with a tarp for the night, protecting it from cats with dubious intentions. The whole place had the melancholy charm of a place loved during the day and forgotten after dark.
The gate was closed, secured by a thick chain and a padlock that looked like it had been there since the economic bubble burst.
Gojo raised his free hand. The air around the lock began to shimmer with that telltale distortion of cursed energy, reality getting ready to have a very bad time.
“Allow me,” he said with a little flourish, no doubt planning to Limitless his way through the problem, maybe just erasing the concept of “locked” from the immediate vicinity, the way he solved most inconvenient obstacles.
You slapped his hand down. Hard.
“Ow—what—”
“No magic,” you chided. “That’s cheating.”
“Cheating?” Gojo snorted. “Who are we cheating against? The Playground Committee? The Ghost of Locks Past?”
“The spirit of the adventure,” you corrected, pulling two paper clips from your jacket pocket.
“Oh, you’re kidding.”
“I’m working. Now hold this.” You handed him the plastic bag, then got to work.
He watched, fascinated, as you straightened one clip into a pick and bent the other into a tension wrench. It was a cheap Master Lock, the kind you could open by hitting it hard with a shoe if you really wanted to, but you’d always disliked brute force. There was something almost meditative in the way you inserted the tension wrench and applied gentle, steady pressure to the cylinder before you began working, feeling for the pins like a safecracker in a film.
Gojo leaned in closer, observing over your shoulder. You could feel him holding his breath.
The familiar feedback of pins setting into place traveled up your fingers. Click. Click. Click. It was soothing, in its way. Mechanical problems had mechanical solutions. People were messy and unpredictable and difficult. Locks were honest. They followed rules. They either opened or they didn’t. They didn’t lie or change their minds.
Barely thirty seconds later, the shackle popped open with a satisfying metallic snap.
“Where did you even learn that?” Gojo asked, his voice caught somewhere between impressed and deeply suspicious, as he mentally reviewed everything he knew about your past and found some gaps he didn’t like.
“YouTube," you lied with a shrug, unwinding the chain from the gate.
He gave you a long, searching look. He didn’t believe you for a second but had decided to let it go. Some mysteries, his expression said, were better left unsolved. Especially where you were concerned.
You steered him toward the swing set in the far corner, where a nearby streetlamp provided a pool of soft yellow light. Not ambient candlelit atmosphere, but it was what you could manage on your very tight budget.
“Sit,” you commanded, pointing at one of the swings.
“Bossy tonight, aren’t we?”
“Sit.”
Gojo did as he was told, sinking onto one of the cold plastic seats. He was too tall for it by a considerable margin. His long legs stretched out in front of him awkwardly, heels dragging lines in the gravel below, his expensive suit looking completely incongruous with the setting, yet he looked perfectly at home anyway. That was Gojo’s gift: looking like he belonged everywhere, even on a child’s swing in a locked playground at midnight. The universe simply adjusted itself around him.
You dropped your backpack on the ground and settled onto the seat next to his. Then, you began the elaborate process of preparing the feast.
The Yamazaki Swiss Roll came out first. You carefully extracted each pre-cut slice from its packaging and restacked them into a log of mocha-cream-filled sponge cake, using the plastic tray as a serving platter. It was, you decided, the perfect combination of classy and convenient. Minimalist, even. Very refined. Michelin-star restaurants wished they could achieve this level of elegant simplicity.
From your pocket, you produced a tiny birthday candle—pale pink, slightly bent from its journey, decorated with faded cartoon bears. You’d liberated it from a box in Ijichi’s kitchen junk drawer during your earlier coin-collection raids.
You stuck the candle into the top of your improvised cake and took out another borrowed item: a cheap transparent plastic lighter, also courtesy of the kitchen belonging to one very good man who’d helped you in this difficult time and would help you in many more times to come, whether he wanted to or not.
The flame sputtered to life on the second try. A moment later, the tiny candle was lit, its warm glow dancing and making the mocha frosting on the Swiss Roll glisten invitingly.
Holding the makeshift cake with both hands, you offered it to Gojo. “Happy birthday,” you said, deciding to skip the awkward singing portion of the traditional birthday protocol. Neither of you needed that. “Make a wish.”
Gojo’s eyes were sparkling with something both fond and amused as he looked at you, your face illuminated by the flickering candlelight, all serious concentration and earnest ceremony. His expression softened into something you’d never seen before. He accepted the cake and closed his eyes, silent, wishing for something you would never know.
When he opened his eyes again, they were somehow even brighter. He blew out the candle with a soft puff of air. A thin ribbon of smoke curled upward into the December night, disappearing into the darkness above.
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
“Don’t thank me yet,” you replied. “There’s still the present.”
“There is?”
“Obviously. What kind of birthday party doesn’t have presents?”
You rummaged through your backpack and produced the real birthday gift. It was an old pickle jar you’d fished out of the recycling bin, washed until your hands were raw and wrinkled, and soaked for three days to get the smell out. You’d scraped off most of the label, though some stubborn adhesive residue remained. The glass was cloudy but it was clean, and it was yours to give.
The jar was filled with folded paper scraps—Post-It notes, torn corners of calendar pages, the backs of receipts, anything you could write on without spending money and Ijichi hadn’t noticed going missing—and a generous amount of those cheap individually wrapped mint candies that restaurants left in bowls by the door. You always grabbed them but never actually ate because they tasted like toothpaste and regret. They added visual interest, at least, color and texture. Made the jar look more festive, less like garbage assembled by a dumpster-diving raccoon.
Gojo took the jar carefully, turning it over as if it were a rare cursed artifact instead of recycled glass that had once contained pickles. The cheap candies rattled cheerfully against the sides.
“What is this?” he asked, peering at it with childlike wonder.
“Open it. You’ll see,” you instructed, already opening your own can of hot corn soup and taking a sip. It was perfect. Salty and warm and artificial in the best way.
Gojo set the cake aside carefully on the next swing, making sure it wouldn’t fall, and unscrewed the lid of the jar. He reached inside and pulled out a scrap at random. It was a pink sticky note, folded into a precise square. He unfolded it, smoothing out the creases.
February 14th. You bought chocolates for yourself, ate all of them, then told Ijichi you got them from admirers. You had chocolate on your cheek for three hours. I didn’t tell you.
A snort of laughter escaped him. “I knew you saw that,” he muttered, reaching for another one. This time, it was a piece of graph paper torn from a notebook.
August. You let me wear your sunglasses for the first time. They are heavier than they look.
He paused, remembering that day. It had been scorching hot. You’d been squinting and miserable, complaining about the glare giving you a headache. He’d handed the glasses over without a word, letting you wear the Six Eyes’ primary defense mechanism while he walked functionally blind for ten minutes, just to give you some relief from the sun.
His hand dipped back into the jar, moving a little faster now, almost eager.
Jan 15. You spent twenty minutes trying to fix the wobbly leg on the kitchen table with folded paper. It still wobbles. We pretend it doesn’t.
A rueful smile tugged at his lips. He remembered that table. He remembered getting frustrated and threatening to just buy a new table, and you telling him very seriously that wobbly tables built character and were more fun anyway.
Feb 8. I had a nightmare and woke up screaming. You were at my door in 3 seconds. You checked under the bed like I was five. You stayed until I fell asleep again. Thank you.
His smile faded into something more serious. He read the next one, written on the back of a grocery receipt for milk and eggs.
Feb 11. You tripped over your own shoes at the door. You looked around to see if I saw. I pretended to be asleep on the couch. I saw.
He actually laughed out loud at that one. “Hey, the floor was slippery that day.”
“Sure it was.”
June 30. You burned the toast so badly it set off the smoke alarm. You scraped the black parts off into the sink and ate it anyway. You told me it was “charcoal activated” and therefore healthy. You are a terrible liar.
July 7. You wouldn’t show me your wish at Tanabata. You hung it at the very top of the bamboo where no one else could reach. You looked sad up there. I wished that your wish would come true.
His fingers stilled on that slip of paper. He stared at it for a long moment, long enough that you glanced over at him with concern. Then he carefully refolded it and set it aside, separate from the others, like it meant something.
July 22. Mosquitoes can’t bite you. They just hover around you, confused. It’s unfair. I have three bites. You have zero.
Aug 15. You took me to visit a grave. You didn’t wear your sunglasses. You didn’t say who it was.
Sept 3. You helped me with my math homework. You got the answer right, but your method was crazy. My tutor marked it wrong. You wrote a note back to the tutor saying she was wrong and boring. She asked me for your phone number. I gave her the number for the pizza place down the street. That’s why she quit. Sorry you didn’t get laid because of me.
Gojo barked out a boisterous laugh at that one.
Oct 4. You let me win at Mario Kart. It was obvious. You drove off the edge on Rainbow Road three times on purpose. I’m not stupid.
“I did not let you win,” he protested weakly to the air, already pulling out another slip because he couldn't seem to stop now.
Oct 31. You stayed home with me the whole day even though you had an invitation to that party in Roppongi. We watched bad horror movies until morning. You ate all the popcorn and most of my candy. You said you were protecting me from cavities.
Nov 2. You wore your socks inside out all day. I didn’t tell you until dinner. You pretended you’d done it on purpose for “comfort reasons.” Still a terrible liar.
There were more. So many more.
You came back for me.
You make sure I always have a seat. You never let me stand.
You sleep with your mouth open.
Gojo read every single one. Every mundane observation. Every secret moment witnessed. Every small act of kindness you’d cataloged over the year.
The jar wasn’t filled with memories of the Strongest Sorcerer, the god-like being everyone else saw when they looked at him, the untouchable legend with infinite power and infinite distance. It wasn’t filled with records of battles won or curses destroyed or clans impressed.
It was filled with him. The human version. The one who tripped and burned toast and ate too much candy and cared enough to check under the bed for monsters that didn’t exist, just in case.
It was a collection of evidence. Proof that he was seen. Proof that he was real. Proof that someone was paying attention not to his power or his prestigious bloodline, but to him. Just him.
When he finished reading the last scrap—You pretend you don’t like cats but you always stop to pet them—he sat there in silence, holding the jar in both hands. He looked like he had a lot to say, a thousand things crowding up in his chest. His throat worked as he swallowed. His eyes shone a little brighter in the streetlight, reflecting something that might have been the beginning of tears if he were anyone else.
But he didn’t say any of the big, heavy things that were clearly sitting in his chest, pressing against his ribs and making it difficult to breathe properly. Instead, he looked at you and smiled. His smile was the brightest thing on the playground, brighter than the streetlamp, brighter than the city skyline. It was a smile that reached all the way to his eyes and stayed there, settling in like it had finally found home.
“Thank you,” he said, and his voice was a little rough. “This is... really great. Best birthday present I’ve ever gotten, actually.”
“I know,” you replied, immensely pleased with yourself. “Now eat your cake. We have snacks, too.”
And so you feasted.
You sat there on the swings in the middle of the night, trading bites of cheap Swiss Roll and steaming hot pizza buns that burned your fingers and the roofs of your mouths. You crunched on Umaibo and passed the Black Thunder chocolate bars back and forth, arguing about whether the cookie bits were the best part or just unnecessary filler taking up space that could be used for more chocolate.
You talked about everything and nothing. About the movies you’d watched. About Ijichi’s poker-induced breakdown and whether you should feel more guilty. About whether ghosts could eat popcorn, and if so, what flavor they’d prefer and why. Would they go sweet or savory? Did being dead change one’s snack preferences? Such important philosophical questions.
Gojo told you about his student days at this very fun school called Tokyo Jujutsu High that he’d help you enroll in next year, once you were ready. About a friend who could heal literally any wound and had the most magnificently dark sense of humor. About another friend who’d taught him to play guitar, badly, and they’d driven everyone around them slowly insane with their practicing. He thought you’d like them both. You’d get along, probably. Maybe even cause some trouble together.
The December air was cold enough to see your breath, but neither of you mentioned it. Neither of you suggested going home.
Under a flickering streetlamp in a locked playground you’d broken into, Gojo Satoru looked happier than he had all year. He swung gently back and forth, talking and laughing, holding a pickle jar full of paper scraps like it was the most valuable thing he owned. Like it was exactly what he’d wished for.
Maybe, in all the ways that actually mattered, it was.