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Imagine this: you're a little girl, not even ten yet. You haven't got any parents because everyone tells you you're too important for such worldly attachments. You're passed between a dozen trainers a week and you go to bed alone, no bedtime stories, no kisses on the forehead, no-one to tell you they love you.
But you're important. Everyone tells you that you're important and you're going to keep the country safe, and they train you each day in your technique until you have such a fine control over it. You know power and you are drunk on it, but no-one has ever loved you because love is beneath you.
You grow up a bit more and love becomes something that fascinates you. You see it on the streets, you see it among your trainers, you see it in all the people around you as they dance around each other. They never look at you, but you start to work out what attracts people together and what repels them, and it tells you all the things you need to know about someone. You ask someone, once, what they like and their answer is different to their actions, and that tells you something too.
You want to know more, about people and about life and about the things you've been taught, but you turn fourteen and you're told the moment has come. You shall become Master Tengen's vessel and the merger shall occur and-
No.
You tell them no to their face. You say you don't want to, that you like who you are right now, and they don't like it. They threaten you and try to coerce you, but they can't do anything unless you go in willingly. And you don't want to do that.
Eventually they stop. There's another Star Plasma Vessel out there, though they don't tell you where, and they will succeed with her where they didn't with you. You don't care.
You go to school in Tokyo because there's nowhere else for you to go. The Higher Ups are unhappy with it, but your technique is too powerful and they're the ones who got rid of your parents, so what other option do they have?
Execution, of course, but no-one can get you. They send you on missions that should kill you, but you come out the other side still grinning. There is a thrill in the kill, in the fight, in the furious battle, but there's always a niggling thought at the back of your head that you're doing this for someone else, that they're still using you even if they hate you, just in a different way.
You graduate high school a special grade. You have no friends, because your classmates have never liked you. The higher ups send you a mission to complete and you ignore it, and there is a thrill in that as there is in carrying out the fight.
Sometimes you do the assignments. The Higher Ups never stop sending them, no matter how much you pointedly don't reply, but most of the time you set them aside and try out other things.
You get a motorbike, try to enhance it, and it blows up, but then you just get another and another, until the bike is perfect and non-explosive.
You leave the country, go to Europe and Africa and South America, and learn enough foreign languages to get by. You try foreign food - you hate whatever it is the French do to their cuisine but Mexican food is a new favourite - and you have a whole album of pictures of things you've seen or worn or done.
You try out sex, too, and try to work out what your type is. You don't like going at it with random strangers, but if you've spent some time together and if they intrigue you, the sex becomes something great. It becomes a puzzle, to try to unpiece the person in front of you through what they like and what you do to them, and it's a thrill more exciting than any person.
If someone asks you, you tell them your type is emos.
You're mostly lying.
So you drift through life on a relentless hunt for something to dig your teeth into, because there's nothing to ground you, and soon the travelling and the new hobbies grow dull. It's interesting but it's aimless, a problem your brain can't sink it's teeth into, until-
Someone mentions it off-handedly. They're a foreign sorcerer from Peru, one you've met once or twice, that life would be so much easier if curses were just gone.
And you think - what if they were?
What if there were no curses? What if sorcerers were free from the responsibility? What if you could be free from the guilt that's been dogging you your whole life, for never doing enough, for being strong but unwilling to give up your freedom and your whole life for the old men in charge, who have tried to kill you in more ways than one?
So that's what you do. You travel with renewed vigor, your research something to fuel you, and sorcerers on foreign soil have all sorts of different ideas that aren't grown in the traditionalism of your home country.
You get the news that your replacement as Star Plasma Vessel died, a few hundred feet from Tengen. An ex-Zen'in called Toji who didn't have any cursed energy, who defeated the school's two special grade sorcerers; he's dead now but he still piques your interest.
(You pretend your heart doesn't ache, because you are made of science and logic now)
(It does though. You were once that girl. You wonder what she felt in her last moments, whether she regretted not being able to merge or if she regretted not being able to live)
You come back to the school in the aftermath, giving it a year or so to let the whole thing blow over; you're sure no-one will be happy to see you regardless, but you want to let things mellow over a bit before you show your face and remind them that if you had just agreed back then, then none of this would be happening.
You also want the time to do some more research on this Toji figure, but he's quite elusive after he was disowned by the Zen'in, but you find some records that say he got married and changed his name to Fushiguro, and it's a start.
The reason you say you come to the school is to check on Tengen, to see whether not merging fucked him over or not, but she doesn't accept you in and you don't particularly care anyway. You tell the higher ups everything is fine.
You're lying.
Before you leave, you try to find Gojo Satoru, who killed the assassin with the heavenly restriction, but he's away. You go to a girl in the morgue, who's in his year, and she's sitting cross-legged on one of the metal autopsy tables smoking. She looks like she's got through half a pack already.
The girl - her name's Ieiri - tells you that you're not going to find him. That Satoru - and she uses Gojo's first name, like it's not betraying an intimacy between them - is away on missions and she'd have to have the luck of the gods to catch him between them.
She also says, when you off-handedly mention Fushiguro Toji, that she did the autopsy on his body. She tells you it was half destroyed when she got it, but that nothing was otherwise different than any other human being. You can see in her eyes that she knows a lot about how other human beings look.
On your way out, still half-hoping that you might come across Gojo, you meet a boy.
Well, you meet two boys.
One of them is bright and cheery and young, and if you ever cared enough to learn that he dies that same day, you wouldn't be surprised, but the boy you care about is a special grade like you and he looks so tired.
You remember how hard school was, how much the higher ups pushed and squeeezed you when you were there, so you try to comfort him in the way you would want to be comforted - you tell him about your research, about your ideas, and he ponders about killing all non-sorcerers which is an interesting thought experiment.
The boy is called Getou and he's friends with Gojo. He's the other special grade who nearly died the day that the star plasma vessel did.
Three weeks later, you get a missive from the Higher Ups. As one of their two remaining special grades - although you're not theirs anymore really - you've been assigned the mission of hunting down Getou Suguru for the mass murder of 112 normal humans, two of whom include his parents.
You start to wonder whether you should have paid more attention to that conversation, whether you could have caught the difference between thought experiment and budding murderer in his voice.
He never did tell you his type.
There's another boy, a few years later. You meet him on accident but Todo Aoi is sitting on top of a boy double his age as you roar past on your motorbike.
You double back. He's got potential and you love potential, and you soon find out that his parents - though they don't care all that much for him - are both non-sorcerers on both sides.
You tell yourself it's for your research, when you take him under your wing. You say it's because he's a case study on non-sorcerer sorcerers, and if you can learn how cursed energy appears in bloodlines with seemingly none, then it's another step in your research. You say a lot of things.
If you weren't lying to yourself, it's because you care. Because Aoi has parents, like you didn't, but they care so little for him that he might as well not. You turn up every month or so for a camping trip or to test out a new technique, and you show your affection with training bruises and boisterous laughter and a wrestle lock that's just shy of a hug.
You don't tell him he's powerful, you don't tell him he's important (not to you and not to anyone) because if it's true, then he'll know it. You arrange for him to go to Kyoto because it's further away from the small town where he grew up.
There is no world in which you are his mother. You were not made for maternity, to either give or receive, so there are no bedtime stories or kisses or love, but you care, even if you don't know that the way you show it screams of a lifetime of emotional neglect.
There's more to come. The end of the world to prevent and other people to meet, and a death that will take you too early (you're still a sorcerer, afterall, and perhaps you're not quite as free as you thought you were).
You don't think that far ahead though. You think of science and logic, and of your great plans and of the boy who's climbed unwillingly into your plastic heart, and you live a life forever on the edge.
You've never been happy. Happy is for people with friends and family and a life lived beyond the thrill, but you're the closest to it you will ever get.
Your name is Tsukumo Yuki. You hope that someone will mourn you when you're gone.