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The world is beautiful.
There are so many things she wants to do before she kicks the bucket. (That’s a pretty funny phrase, right? It makes dying sound like something anyone can do if they please. It makes death sound inconsequential, like anyone can just realign a corpse after it falls and new breath will enter its decaying lungs. Amanai Riko knows life is a much more fickle flame than most people make it out to be. One moment is full of smiles and sunshine. The next one, the fire is gone. Extinguished. Poof. And Amanai Riko knows there is nothing that can raise the dead like God’s gentle hand can. That’s just the way of the world.)
There are many things Amanai Riko, the young and cheery girl of fourteen sunny years, wants to do before her flame goes out. (That’s probably a better analogy, for all toneless words are worth. Like a wick, it’s likely for life to be cut short. And, like a candle with a flame too close to the wax, it is too easily smothered. But life isn’t able to be reignited like a candle is. Maybe there’s another world where fire can burn brightly beneath the water’s surface, but it sure isn’t this one.)
When Getou Suguru, a boy only two years older than herself, asks her if she wants to live, many things go through her mind at once. Most notably are the thoughts of course I do, you idiot! I don’t have a death wish and I don’t have the authority to make that decision for myself followed by a meek and whispered, but what if I did?
“I want to stay with everyone!" The words escape past her lips like the final sentiments of a woman with her neck in a guillotine beneath a rusted blade, shouted out through fresh tears and the mourning of a life left unlived. “I don’t want to go. I’m not ready yet!”
And Getou had seemed so relieved after hearing her confession. Looking back, that might have been the most relaxed he ever appeared before her, even compared to their time on the Okinawan sand. His shoulders had slumped like the weight of the world had suddenly sloughed off of his shoulders. The chains of commitment to upholding the timeline of his mission—Riko’s mission, really—had broken free from his wrists, the ball and chain on his leg shattering to nothingness in a matter of moments.
“Riko,” he had said softly, voice full of a tender jubilation she hadn’t heard from him before, “let’s go home.”
Home. Yes, she’d decided right there and then, That sounds perfect.
Getou had stretched out his hand between them like a bridge over troubled waters. Every fiber in Riko’s being had lit up at the acceptance in his eyes, the catching of her breath in her own throat, the shaking of his hand between them. The limb had trembled like the calm after the storm, silently waiting for the other shoe to drop or for a victory cry to sound around them.
I’m ready to live, she cheered, begged, cried out to herself. The grin on her face had been a wavering one, her cheeks wet with tears and her teeth tight with elation. Let’s go home.
Bang.
And then, everything came crumbling down.
Riko isn’t the most articulate when it comes to explaining how she feels, but she’s been putting more effort into it as of late. She hardly ever stares off into space when contemplating her feelings anymore, and the better part of the reason why is because of her time spent with Gojo and Getou. Their company has done some real good for her, setting and upholding boundaries she isn’t used to bumping into and reaching past the white picket fence around herself to poke fun and get to know her—Amanai Riko—the real her, and to keep her company.
Drip… drip…
No one’s been this nice, this understanding, with her aside from Kuroi and, presumably, her parents whom she doesn’t remember. She wonders if not being given the opportunity to grow up in a conventional household arrangement is a requirement for being a vessel. Not that she’s met any other vessels in the first place, but the stringy line of events that has dragged her from Point A to Point B and onward for the duration of her life does cause her to wonder.
Thud.
“Riko?”
And there are so many places she hasn’t seen yet, so many other continents and countries out there, lying in wait for her imminent arrival. She wants to see Mount Everest; she might even try to climb it if she feels like it. And Kuroi, who’s been practically everywhere, hasn't ever stopped raving about the Hawaiian sunsets and the sounds of warm water crashing against the shore. That’s something Riko would like to experience for herself, too, that overarching warmth, that love for the moment that will etch itself into her memory like a pressing nostalgia for something long-obsolete.
Oh, well. At least she doesn’t need to go somewhere new to know what that feels like, that dizzying weight of uselessness that clings to her bones, sucking the marrow right out of them. It pulls her to the ground like a sudden gravitational shift, and the world always seems to fade and buzz to white around her when she feels more like a waterwheel in the city than a junior high school girl.
Like now, coincidentally.
Blood pools beneath her cheek, and for the first time in her life, Riko understands that there’s no coming back from this one. There’s no magical technique that can cure her state of dying, no elixir or prayer that will keep her from the light, not now. And she was born with one foot in the grave in the first place—Star Plasma Vessels are hard enough to come by nowadays, all restraints and terms and conditions notwithstanding—so what’s the harm in knowing the taste of death like a long time friend? What’s the harm in living life to the fullest until the finish line fades into view? What’s the harm in giving everything she sees an honest try, an effort to be proud of, so that no stone goes left unturned, no ponderment left unquenched?
What’s the harm in wanting to live?
Don’t get her wrong, Riko knows fully well just how lucky she is to have made it even this far in life. Short is the life of the vessel no matter how it ends, with assimilation or assassination, it seems.
Her last breath leaves her in a final, wordless goodbye to the world she never truly got to know, all of the places she wanted to go, and the ones who taught her how to live and love and learn in the first place.
Kuroi. Getou. Gojo. Thank you. Amanai Riko’s life fades from her eyes before her head hits the ground. Blood soaks the space around her head in a mourning halo of lust for life and its resounding gore. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
June, 2018.
Lung cancer. Itadori Yuuji thinks mournfully, pressing the toe of his sneaker into the glossy tile of a hospital waiting room. I can’t believe he got taken down by lung cancer.
Today is a day when the clouds don’t drift far, simply lying in wait for enough misery to fester to warrant their pouring gloom. And today, Itadori Wasuke, larger than life, has kicked the bucket.
Yuuji presses his face into his hands like a blushing schoolgirl, groaning against his fingers.
Wasuke lived a good, long life. He raised one good kid and one seriously messed up one decades later, but hey, at least he’s one-for-two. He lived a good, long life, and although he smoked for a good portion of it, at least it didn’t do him in.
Wait.
Ahem. He lived a good, long life, and although it was cut too short—like eighty-four years is a skip away from puberty, sure—at least he died doing what he loved. Overexplaining crap and leaving me with the fallout.
Yuuji sighs heavily and scrubs at his eyes with his knuckles, wincing at the pressure but allowing himself a moment of reprieve to be dazzled by the stars.
A nurse enters the room from somewhere behind him, placing a gentle hand on his shoulder upon reaching his seat. “Are you alright, Yuuji?” He recognizes the voice. That’s Nurse Hanamiya.
The boy nods heavily, letting his chin hit his chest out of pure indifference. “I’m planning my grandpa’s eulogy.”
Hanamiya’s eyes soften at his words, the hand on his shoulder releasing him a moment after. She clutches her hands in front of her chest. “Oh, I’m so sorry, dear.” Her brow crinkles with worry. “Are you expecting many people to attend the funeral proceedings?”
“No,” he says. “If everything goes to plan, it’ll just be me.”
No more Sukuna. No more mourning. No more jujutsu. I’m tired of anticipating having to deal with monsters I can’t even see anymore. I’m sick of it. I won’t let myself live like that again.
She blinks. “Oh… Well, I’m sorry about the timing of all of this, but I have some paperwork for you to fill out…”
He huffs a short breath of air out of his nose. “Can I fill them out later? I need to check on the apartment.” He rubs the back of his neck sheepishly, wracking his brain for a more acceptable excuse than I hate it here and never want to look any of you in the face ever again, bye. “No one’s been there since this morning, and grandpa usually has me—erm… had me—watering his spider plant at six.”
A clock against the wall reads the time to be seven-fifty-eight in the evening.
“Alright,” she agrees hesitantly, eyeing the time, “but only if you promise to come back first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Okay,” he says, fully intent on not returning unless he himself requires normal, human medical attention. Yuuji stands to his feet. “Thanks for always looking after him.” The words aren’t meant to cause a ruckus or draw tears, but he watches flatly as the woman wipes the bottom of her eyes.
“You’re welcome,” she croaks out. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything to save him.”
It’s a nice sentiment, he supposes.
………
The walk back to his apartment is a lengthy one. Not that Itadori Yuuji, fastest runner on the track and field team, needs another excuse to take the long way home, but spending some time in objectively fresh, not-hospital air is just what he needs right now.
No more stuffy rooms built specifically to suffocate him. No more tears shed in hallways bright enough to partially blind him, blinking back inkspots. Maybe he’ll even get the eternally pungent smell of lemon antiseptic out of his nose. That would be nice.
When rain starts to drizzle, he can’t keep himself from smiling. It’s blatantly obvious that he’s a boy in mourning, at least from the outside, with his teary eyes and hands firmly in his hoodie pockets. On the inside, though, he isn’t too sure what he’s feeling.
On one hand, his throat is tight with unshed tears, his eyes misting, his footfalls heavy with grief. But, on the other hand, his mind is so much clearer than the sky. He’s mourned his grandpa more times than he can count on four hands by now, so the sentiment of this deep and melancholic yearning that he feels is a more common one than the sunshine he’d felt upon waking up as a baby once again.
He’s used to feeling sorry for himself, sorrier still for others. If anything, it’s joy he’s become so less accustomed to.
On the outside, he mourns. And, on the inside, he ponders.
He’s seventeen, and the legal age of adulthood is eighteen, so he won’t be allowed to live on his own if the hospital staff fill out their proper paperwork, which they will. He has no plans of returning to the world of perpetual mourning known as jujutsu, so he has to find a way to live alone enough to stay sane and comfortable enough not to draw attention. It’s a hard task, but he has confidence in his own resourcefulness.
Trudging through the rain, hands in his pockets, heart in his throat, Yuuji thinks up a plan to keep himself away from his predetermined fate of misery. He wants to live a long, healthy life. He doesn’t want to be a tool or a vessel or the reason everybody that he loves dies early. He wants to die of old age, surrounded by people he can love and not hang over.
If that’s too much to ask, Yuuji’s pretty sure he’d be okay with dying alone, too.
Save people, his grandpa had said in this life, As many as you can. But don’t—he coughed—and I mean this, boy, so listen carefully, don’t discount your own happiness for the sake of others’.
So, he isn’t held in place by his grandpa’s dying wish (a curse, really) for him to die surrounded by people he loves, people that love him, anymore. All he has to do is save them. Small mercies. Strictly speaking, it’s a pretty easy ask. All he has to do is stay far, far, far away from everyone he’s ever known and loved and move on. He can find new friends, a new family in all but blood, new brothers to scold him, and maybe he can live a life without losing them before their time.
He isn’t totally sure he’s strong enough to move past those shining and smiling faces just yet, but he’s got nothing but time to jump over that hurdle.
Wasuke had given him a chance, one golden and glimmering opportunity, to live selfishly. …Yuuji doesn’t know how to feel about that. He isn’t a self-centered boy by nature, and acknowledging himself before others isn’t something he’s particularly used to. In every life, this is a pretty constant trait of his. Itadori Yuuji is selfless, perhaps dangerously so, and he is not selfish. He isn’t too sure he even knows how to dream for himself anymore.
He reaches the apartment when the rain beats hard against his skin and his hooded jacket is soaked through. Yuuji’s skin is wet past the cotton fibers that cling to him, and while the feeling that fills him is one of discomfort, he can’t bring himself to find sense in changing into dry clothes.
He clicks his key into the lock on the front door and twists the key to the left to unlatch the mechanism. The bolt doesn’t budge, not in that satisfying shunk sort of way he’s used to it doing, like he’s already rotated the key and then forgotten and tried again.
He furrows his brows and ejects his key slowly, softly, before dropping it back into the front pocket of his jeans. The answer to this quandary is a fairly simple one. Someone is already inside his apartment.
Sudden fury overcomes Itadori. How dare someone break into his home while he is away, at the hospital, mourning the only real, flesh-and-blood family he’s ever known. He balls his hands into fists the second he steps through the front door, and his stomach drops at the sight he sees.
Right there, on the innocently fresh and clean countertop of his kitchen island sits something inherently evil, malevolently wafting, drenching the air in a miasma of alien energy that makes his nose crinkle. It isn’t one of Ryomen Sukuna’s fingers, but it has enough of that distasteful ugliness about it that tells Yuuji it’s a cursed object.
It’s here, right in his childhood home. The idea is absurd, that this final place of innocence should be tainted by the presence of something so terrible. But that isn’t something he should be considering at all, is it? His entire life has been tainted since the second Kenjaku made himself any part of it, giving himself a role he was never meant to garner.
The cursed object takes up the shape of a butterfly, the type he might have watched curiously in a neighbor's yard on the jaunt from home to school as an elementary student, crouched in the dew-wet grass, but it appears distinctly fleshy in nature.
Itadori’s gut sinks when the miasma sings to him, whispering sweet nothings into his ears. If it is power you desire, then eat me, it seems to shout. If it is nothing that you wish to change, then eat me, it pleads. A vessel is who you are, and a vessel is whom you shall remain, it taunts.
Itadori marches to the counter and grabs the cursed object, grimacing at the fleshy squelch it procures from between his pinching fingers. Good luck being a normal, human person with me here, it jeers with a giggle. He drops it into the pocket of his hoodie and sighs the weight of a broken future out from between rain-chapped lips.
He takes in a deep, heaving breath, letting his chest swell with the oxygen, before releasing it suddenly. This sucks, he thinks helplessly, moving quietly, like a phantom, through the ghostly dredges of his home. Even with the initial shock that finding a new, unheard of cursed object brings, the fact of the matter is that someone broke into his house, and Itadori would hate for a scheming rat to make a nest-home in this sacred place.
He considers, briefly, the possibility that the intruder has already made themself scarce. That thought is followed by the morbid picture of his mother’s puppeted corpse setting a butterfly made of skin on the kitchen counter gently, tenderly, before trudging through the house and examining the long and happy life her son has lived without her. Itadori shudders at the thought and moves into the hallway towards the stairs upon clearing the kitchen and living room.
The flat railing is clean because Yuuji dusted just yesterday, but lightened patches cover the wood in a pattern of worn patches from Wasuke’s heavy grip on the railing. The boy traces his hand over the wood with reminiscence in his eyes. The bug weighs heavily in his pocket.
Silence greets him at the top of the stairs. No rug is scuffed out of place, no door latched closed when he knows he left every single one swung open this morning, and no muffled breath is caught between the wood of a door and his unobscured ears. He checks behind every door just in case, peeking in closets and behind the shower curtain in trepidation.
With every room cleared and no sign of the mysterious intruder left to hound-dog over, Yuuji flops himself down onto the couch downstairs, feeling the rounded, keratin edges of the cursed object with his thumb. It doesn’t move, not even a twitch; not that he expects it to, but it seems like something to ponder over. He’s so used to bugs that move that feeling one purely stationary, more like an unbaked, clay statue than an insect frozen in time between his hands.
What am I even supposed to do with this? he asks himself silently, tracing the wings with his fingertips. The image of a smiling, white-haired man flashes into his mind against his will, and Itadori groans and tosses his head onto the back of the couch at the mere idea of getting tangled up in jujutsu all over again. Maybe I can leave it somewhere that somebody who is already knee-deep in sorcery can find. But where…?
The answer is fairly obvious. Where else should he tuck away any part of the world he would hate to be reunited with aside from the very place where his first experience with it began? Itadori smirks softly, scoffing at his own absurd idea.
It’s ironic, he thinks to himself. But it’ll probably work.
………
By the time his masterfully crafted plan comes into place before his eyes, night has fallen over the Sendain countryside. The sleeping scene of his high school stretches out before him, coated in silvery moonlight, the Summer air a sweltering hug against his skin. Itadori approaches the thermometer shed slowly, like a child trembling in the dark.
When he slides open the door, peeking between boxes and dials and on every dusty shelf, that comfortably familiar sense of dread he knows so well settles onto his chest for the nth time. Sukuna’s finger, which he had planned to place the butterfly beside, is nowhere to be found.
This could mean a few things, he thinks evenly even as his skin grows clammy and his breath becomes heavy, sliding the door to the shed shut tight. It means that in this reality, Sukuna’s fingers were replaced by the bug.
He flips the lock on the door and steps away from the small structure, already running towards the main school building before he spins on his heel and keeps running. Or, it means I’m screwed.
The school building welcomes him with the sudden swell of air conditioning somebody probably forgot to turn off after the premises were (supposedly) evacuated for the night, and Yuuji slams the exterior door behind him rougher than he means to. He pumps his legs, pumps his arms, and takes the steps four at a time.
Sasaki and Iguchi, he thinks breathlessly, helplessly. If I’m too late, they’ll die, and it’ll be all my fault since I knew this would happen. He grits his teeth hard. And if nothing does happen, I’ll just be the sad and gloomy kid who can run fast, lost his grandfather, and gets bad grades on purpose.
A flash of white flickers at the edge of his vision, and Itadori feels his eyes widening when realization sets into his brain before his limbs. Fushiguro?
He stops suddenly, pivoting towards the white, before sprinting down the hall. If that is Fushiguro and not a cursed spirit after the butterfly or Sukuna’s finger which may or may not be on the premises, will he die without Yuuji’s help? The boy frets restlessly as he runs. On one hand, staying away from him will ensure he has a happy life, sans the boy with a curse under his skin and leaving misery in his wake. On the other hand, if Fushiguro dies here and now, he won’t get any chance to live a long and healthy life regardless of whether or not Yuuji’s even a part of it.
This is the hero’s responsibility, to risk life and limb to save others, to ensure a bright and smiling future for everyone but himself. Yuuji grits his teeth at the mere thought that chasing after his own ambitions could make him fall right into the palm of someone stronger and darker than he. Because that’s all this is, isn’t it? The pivotal moment. The call to adventure. This experience, this moment, is one Itadori can’t afford to let go any other way but a full sweep of survival. This is his hero’s journey, chasing after the light while fire nips at his heels and swallows him whole, a burnt and stretched-out arm restlessly searching for the next person to save, the next consequence to take on as his own.
When Fushiguro turns towards him, eyes full of shock with blood trailing down from the crown of his head, Itadori feels himself die within his own skin.
He jumps in front of the boy, letting a giant, purple frog-looking curse bite down onto his arm instead of Fushiguro’s head. The black Divine Dog yips at his arrival, its maw sinking razorblades into the flesh of the curse. The white Dog follows suit, carving into the frog on the other side. Purple blood flies with their actions while red drips quickly from Itadori’s limb. The shikigami take his distraction with haste, carving into the curse until it fizzles out into dark mist and then into nothing.
Fushiguro is on him in an instant, pushing Itadori away from the scene and slamming him against a wall of lockers behind him. “Idiot!” he roars, pinning into his chest with the side of his arm. “Why did you jump in the way?!”
Itadori grins sheepishly. His heart pumps heavily in his chest, lugging blood towards the rows of teeth marks that dig into his skin as though it could heal him faster by letting itself run dry. “I couldn’t just let you die,” he says through teeth grit with pain. “That thing was going to take your head off.”
“None of this concerns you,” Fushiguro grits out, eyes darkening with lids that droop with the weight of dripping blood. “You need to leave.”
“Relax, Fushiguro,” Yuuji says softly. “I go to school here. Of course it concerns me.”
The boy bears his teeth in a grimace, gritting them tightly. His eyes flinch briefly at the mention of the name he’s sure he hasn’t provided, and he presses harder against Itadori’s chest in retaliation. “It doesn’t!” he exclaims. “You’re just a civilian. Get out of here.”
Lifetimes of the fast and sluggish spinning of cogs and wheels and vessels and curses rotate in his mind like a morbid ferris wheel chasing after the ever-distant sunset of death.
“A civilian,” he whispers instinctively. “Would you call me that if you knew who I really was?”
“I know you’re an idiot.” The white shikigami growls in agreement to its master’s words. “And I know you’re going to march down those stairs and run as far and as fast as you can from here right now.”
Yuuji lets himself laugh humorlessly. “If you think that, you really don’t know me at all.”
A loud shriek sounds down the hall, and both boys’ heads whip to the side in response. The shikigami race down the corridor at Fushiguro’s silent behest, and the sorcerer flicks his eyes between the Dogs and the stranger a few more times than objectively necessary.
“Get out of here,” he grits out before shoving his arm against Yuuji’s chest and racing after the Dogs.
Itadori huffs, rubbing at his sore chest before chasing after the boy and his shikigami. There’s no way he’s letting Fushiguro go and die just because he doesn’t have any cursed energy at the moment. …He has a sickening feeling it won’t stay that way for long, anyway.
The scream they heard seems to have come from Sasaki, stumbling away from a curse with a long and thin neck like a young tree’s bole with grimy flesh as red as the insistently present haze of Malevolent Shrine in the waking world. Iguchi chases out of the classroom after her, darkness flickering yellow and gray from the residual light of their candles and sigils.
“Divine Dogs!” Fushiguro commands, and his shikigami barrel into the curse’s oblong body, pinning it in place before snapping its neck with one solid bite.
Sasaki and Iguchi cower on the ground, fighting back tears and screams and holding each other like neither of them can really tell for sure what’s real and what isn’t anymore, and Itadori flinches back to the present before rushing over to them.
“Itadori!” Sasaki cries out, tears running down her nose, breath fogging up her glasses in panic. “What’s going on? Did you see that–that–?!”
Yuuji places his hands onto her shoulders heavily, making eye contact with her as he speaks. “You’re fine,” he says. “You’re dreaming. But you need to get home now, okay?”
Iguchi stares at him silently, shaking at the girl’s side. Yuuji nods at him solidly.
“You too,” he says. Brown eyes glance downward, and Yuuji’s stomach churns impatiently. He snatches Sukuna’s sweltering finger from Iguchi’s shaking hands. “And give me that.” His voice sounds scolding. “You two need to get out of here.”
They don’t argue, simply nodding before scrambling off towards the stairwell together.
“Idiot!” Fushiguro calls again. “I told you to–”
“I know, I know,” Itadori interrupts. He holds up Sukuna’s finger sheepishly, grinning a thin line of quaking teeth across his face. “But didn’t you… want this?”
“What?” Fushiguro exclaims, eyeing the finger in Itadori’s hand with the kind of fear that sparks to life in the desolate presence of sudden death. “What are you doing with that? Give it here.”
Itadori tosses it to Fushiguro’s open palms, blinking slowly as a giant, gray curse with four sets of teeth, three eyes, and humanoid limbs grabs tightly onto the finger as it sails through the air.
“Huh?!” Fushiguro exclaims, surprised. “You– that– it– you’re kidding me!”
The curse scampers up through the ceiling, clambering away to revel in the fact of the Ryomen Sukuna’s finger being within its greedy possession.
“Idiot,” Fushiguro seethes as he passes Itadori, rushing towards the stairwell. The Diving Dogs chase after him quickly.
Yuuji blinks slowly, watching the boy and his Dogs chase after the cursed spirit. Oh, he thinks dumbly. Oh. I forgot about that.
He follows Fushiguro up to the roof. The curse that took the finger doesn’t look much stranger or stronger than it did when they encountered it a floor below, which means it probably hasn’t consumed it yet, but Itadori knows by now to take outward appearances with a grain of salt. The Divine Dogs double-team the curse, nipping at its limbs and skin, yelping briefly when it kicks them away before rushing back into the fray.
Fushiguro presses his hands together. “Nue!” he shouts into the air, and a large bird sparking with electricity shoots down from the starry darkness high above them.
It rams into the malformed curse, shocking it to the core. But its grip on the finger remains ironclad and unflinching. Fushiguro grits his teeth in irritation.
Itadori feels a certain calmness swell within him, and he lets his jaw drop open in concentration. His pupils expand to let in more light than before, and his breath comes and goes in a soft current of circulation. If he didn’t know any better, he would think that his body is preparing for a Black Flash.
He rushes towards the curse, ignoring Fushiguro’s indigent shout and outstretched arm, lobbing a heavy jab onto its face. The curse juts its head to the side in response to the hit, groaning under the pressure. The attack makes it let go of the finger! Yuuji jumps towards it quickly, but his motion is thwarted when the cursed spirit grabs onto him.
“Divine Dogs!” Fushiguro calls, his voice tense with adrenaline. “Get him out of there!”
The Dogs bite into the curse’s flesh. Yuuji’s abdomen squishes within the curse’s heavy grip. The finger keeps falling.
The boy catches it between his teeth.
Screw it, Itadori thinks, biting into the rotten flesh of the finger while reaching into his pocket. What’s the worst that could happen? He tosses the bug with an expert flick of his wrist before swallowing two cursed objects at once. While one tastes like soap and misery and nasty things that he’s used to consuming, the other tastes like a simmering and spicy hotpot in Autumn. It reminds him of Jujutsu Tech, and it reminds him of home.
Itadori closes his eyes heavily, hating how the school has become synonymous with security despite his best efforts at relinquishing all ties there this time.
The next time Itadori blinks his eyes, flexing his palms in the warm night air, he isn’t himself. Had the fact not been evident in the suddenly relaxed manner in which he holds himself, it would have been made obvious in the blatantly curious expression on his face.
“Ryomen Sukuna,” the boy exclaims, voice steely in the sort of way those in mourning usually exhume. His arms grow shaky at his own words, trembling as he brings his hands together.
“Huh?” the incarnated sorcerer remarks, twisting Itadori’s face into one of pure confusion, a hand cupped around his ear like the boy’s words have been spoken through a bent and broken phonograph. “Who’s that?”
Fushiguro tenses when the King of Curses doesn’t move to attack him, going against the very image of his existence, not portraying the hate and pain a long-dead, long-sealed, long-beaten sorcerer might be expected to. “That’s… you. The King of Curses.”
Not-Itadori sticks their tongue out in distaste. The fiendishly immature motion somehow reminds Fushiguro of his benefactor and the way he’d go blegh! at any minor inconvenience. “Ew, you think I’m him? That old guy Kuroi mentioned once?” They sigh heavily. “Gross. I am not some evil, scraggly dude with a bad temper.”
The words sound weird coming from Itadori’s mouth.
The finger-bearing curse lumbers towards them, dazed from the harsh blow Itadori landed on it before, grunting in irritation. It begins to pick up its pace, just a bit, heading towards the teenager and the currently possessed student a few yards in front of him.
“Isn’t there anything you can do to stop that?” Fushiguro asks harshly, gesturing towards the gray and bulky form of the cursed spirit marching its way towards them. “I mean, you’re– I don’t know! You’ve gotta be strong to have been sealed, right?”
“What?!” they shriek. “You’re crazy! I’m not strong enough to fight that thing!”
Fushiguro blinks rapidly before furrowing his brows in irritation. “Huh?!” he exclaims. “But– you’re– you’re you!”
“You don’t even know who I am!” they argue, rushing towards Fushiguro to grab the back of his uniform’s collar and cower behind his back. “I’m a vessel, not a sorcerer!” She shakes him. “There’s a difference!”
Fushiguro sighs heavily at the weight on his back and claps his hands together. He lowers his chin in acceptance that in order to live here, he will have to die. It isn’t the first time he’s accepted the fact that he might not return from a job that was listed as easier than it ended up being, and if he wasn’t about to take his last breath here, it probably wouldn’t be the last, either. He steels himself for the inevitability of his death and parts his lips to speak, to whisper out the words to his own eulogy.
“With this treasure, I–”
Suddenly, a shock of white hair appears before him. Fushiguro lets out a shaky breath he hadn’t known he’s been holding in.
“Gojo!” the incarnated individual shouts at his benefactor’s arrival, gripping onto Fushiguro’s back with shaky palms, pressing their knuckles into the fabric tensely. “You’re here!”
The strongest sorcerer turns towards them, stunned into silence at the sight before him. A curse lumbers to his left, hardly a grade two if he’d have to guess. But it’s what’s to his right that really interests him.
His ward, his son, crouched on the ground with his hands furled in the symbol for the Divine General, whom Gojo has explicitly instructed him not to summon unless it’s truly a life-or-death situation. Behind him is another boy, clutching onto the back of his uniform like a lifeline. His brown eyes are wide with worry, and his teeth are grit in terror.
And his cursed energy… for lack of better words, it’s royally messed up.
“What happened to you?” Gojo questions the strange boy with the pink hair, flicking his hand towards the curse with a Red that breaks it apart at the molecule until all that is left is a splatter of violet blood on the ground and a drifting mosaic of ash on the breeze.
The incarnated individual jumps up from behind Fushiguro once the curse has been felled, racing towards Gojo with a sense of familiarity that makes Fushiguro feel sick on the inside. They jump to grab his neck, and Infinity falls to pieces when they make first contact.
Gojo’s eyes widen behind his blindfold at the unexplainable penetration of his strongest line of defense. He grabs the teen under the armpits and drops them on the floor unceremoniously. “Who are you?” he asks, truly wary now, fingers curling and unfurling at his sides.
“You don’t remember me?” the boy’s mouth asks, voice twinged upwards like every word is its own separate question. His eyes droop at the steely look on Gojo’s face, twisting his hands in a show of embarrassment Fushiguro hadn’t witnessed since the actual boy grinned sheepishly in the hallway. “Amanai Riko.” He holds out a hand between them. “Nice to… meet you?”
“Riko,” Gojo breathes out, and a sudden weight relinquishes itself from his chest. He blinks and, for a brief and fleeting moment, he sees a vision of Getou and Amanai lounging beside him on the sandy coast of Okinawa. “How?”
The boy shrugs. “I dunno. That guy shot me and then I woke up here. I don’t remember anything else.” A nervous grin. “Sorry.”
Gojo swallows, his throat parched with the sudden revival of a girl whose death inadvertently flipped his life on its head. He reaches forward and taps two fingers onto the boy’s forehead purely because he’s unsure how to proceed with this confusion out here in the open. Itadori slumps forward, but Gojo catches him before he falls too far.
“Let’s… go back to the campus,” he tells Megumi.
His ward nods wordlessly.
………
It’s been a few days, and Itadori still can’t wrap his head around the fact that he’s been temporarily living at the Tokyo campus despite his incessant resistance. He doesn’t want to live here. He doesn’t want to be reminded of lifetimes that ended in hatred and misery with every corner he turns around. He doesn’t want to see lifeless corpses sprung into motion every time he enters a new room.
“I don’t want anything to do with Jujutsu Tech,” the boy says with that certain finality one might expect from a man who’s lived and died and made the same mistakes twenty times over.
Gojo shifts his weight awkwardly. “But you ate… Sukuna’s finger.”
“I absorbed him, I think,” Itadori replies quickly. “I can’t hear him at all.” He juts his finger towards the floor and an invisible force carves a straight and shallow line into the wood. “I just have his cursed technique.”
“I want to travel the world,” Riko supplies chippily from her vessel’s cheek. “Yuuji promised me we’d go see Mount Everest! And Hawaii!”
Itadori winces. “I did,” he agrees, his voice small. “But it might take a while. I’ve gotta get the money first… Traveling is expensive, Amanai.”
“Riko!” the girl protests indigently. “Calling me Amanai like I’m not living in you.” She huffs.
“I’ll pay,” Gojo offers seamlessly, dragging a black card from his pocket expertly, like he always walks around with millions of yen in his pocket at all times instead of having the ability to transport objects from Point A to Point B with his cursed techniques. “So don’t worry about the money. Making the clan elders cry is my favorite pastime.”
“Sweet!” Amanai cheers, and Itadori’s arm jerks like her enthusiasm nearly broke through their skin. The boy’s face pales at the sudden movement, stretching the limb slowly to take the credit card between trembling fingers.
“Thanks,” he says softly. “I can…”–he considers his words carefully–“pay you back… someday, somehow.”
Gojo waves his hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about it,” he says simply. “It’s my privilege to fund your adventures, anyway. And if I weren’t so swamped by work, I’d join you.” He says the words like he really means them, like the higher ups aren’t just another obstacle in his way towards making his ultimate dream of a peaceful future true, like he couldn’t just kill them all whenever he pleases if he really felt like doing so.
Itadori nods shortly, shivering at the unwarranted image of Gojo and Riko gabbing under the stars while he third-wheels the conversation of two long-parted friends catching up on over a decade of hijinks and shenanigans while he’s trying to sleep. “Maybe you can… swing by when you aren’t so busy,” he offers unsurely, like the words don’t really want to leave his mouth.
Gojo gasps lightly, clapping his hands together. “Yay!” he cheers. “I’d love to!”
I know, Itadori thinks helplessly.
Riko and Gojo start talking back and forth while he sulks, trading stories of triumph and failure and such dense emotion he can’t help but feel hopeful. It’s probably just Riko’s emotions influencing his own, as he is her vessel and all.
He doesn’t want anything to do with Jujutsu Tech in this life. Itadori sighs listlessly. It isn’t like he has much of a choice in the matter, now.
“Let’s go to Okinawa,” Amanai suggests. Her excitement tugs up the twitching corners of Itadori’s lips. “Right now!”
“Oh, oh! I wanna go! Me too, me too!” Gojo cheers, pumping his fist before checking an invisible watch on his wrist. “I’m not busy this afternoon. I’ll grab Megumi and teleport us there!”
Riko gasps. “Yes! That’s a great idea!”
Itadori sighs. Spending too much time with these two couldn’t be that bad. …Could it?
“Let’s go,” he says, voice tripping on his disappointment.
“Yay!”
“Yay!”
…Maybe having Fushiguro there to suffer with him will make him feel better.
Itadori groans when Gojo tugs him down the hallway to gather his ward. He’ll have a lot to figure out when they get back from their impromptu beach day. He doesn’t want to live here, so he’ll have to figure out how to move out without freaking out a sorcerer who could dismantle the world if he really felt like it, find some place he can live comfortably but inconspicuously, and probably attend his grandpa’s funeral proceedings. He’d feel like a complete and total failure as a grandson if he let himself miss that.
Oh, well. He’ll have all the time in the world to figure everything out when they get back.