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Thin lips. Long lashes that curl like a butterfly’s wing and beat atop of nude-powdered eyelids. A little mole right… there. Chin-length hair, black like string and in need of a good washing. A small nose that scrunches when she smiles.
Her features are perfect in all the ways that matter to a grown, gets-what-he-wants Toji. They spark some fuse deep within him that screeches to a halt when she looks the other way. It’s a feeling unlike anything he ever felt with the first one, albeit she’d be a close second.
All together, her features must paint a very pretty picture.
………
Toji sits at a kitchen table in the most mundane apartment he and his wife could afford, watching little hands scribble purple wings and Spring-green grass onto a piece of blank paper across the table. He sees little nails on little fingers. The fingers of a child he’s sure he’s seen before.
Tired eyes drift up to the little girl’s face. Her mouth scrunches towards her nose in concentration. He hears the snapping of a brittle crayon. Thin eyebrows bend in frustration. Her hair is down, not up, with white and purple clips pulling back any pieces that might have draped onto the rainbow of crayon residue on the table. They’re shaped like hair clips normally are, round and with a gap in the center, but, like her drawing, they too sprout wings.
Toji glances back down at her drawing and wonders who the girl sitting across from him is; where her parents are; what she’s doing in his house when his second wife is still sleeping soundly in their bedroom; why she’s pressing those crayons against the table so damn hard.
The little girl’s skin is really pale. He stares at her hands and how they readjust on a crayon half the length of the others, notes how her nails need trimming, how that little chubbiness of baby fat is still clinging to her bones like it’s starving.
Well, he thinks, That’s enough of that.
He looks away. He doesn’t need to babysit some random kid just because she snuck into his house while his wife was sleeping. Kiyomi has always been the “people person” out of the two of them anyway; she can figure out what to do about this brat when she joins him in the kitchen for stir fry and fridge-cold beers later on.
The scratching of children's art tools is the only sound he hears as he sits there, staring at the ceiling across the room. Then, the fridge starts humming. That light above the sink buzzes like a moth in a flytrap. A spiderweb that cuts across the kitchen from the light above the dining table where he sits and the light above the counter bends and jumps, its creator scuttling greedily towards a captive and struggling fly there.
Toji sighs and puts a hand atop his eyes before closing them. The sounds don’t go away, but that flickering lightbulb in the next room over doesn’t strobe in his eyes anymore, and the gritting of crayons across the table morphs into the timeless beats of horse hooves on a dirt track. He doesn’t much mind the noise once he transports himself to the races, thundering whoops and boot-stomping surrounding him in a comfortable cacophony.
The screeching of metal feet against the wood floor breaks his illusion of gambling and takoyaki-eating. He blinks green eyes behind his palm and stares at the lines there for a while. That psychic he saw back in high school said he’d have good luck forever if he always avoided the things that bothered him. Her words weren’t worth half the 1,000 yen he gambled to see her, but he’s still been taking her advice ever since. In his humble opinion, it’s usually worth the effort to avoid things that bother him. He didn’t need some old hack to tell him that.
Something that will surely bother him rounds the table and taps on his knee. Toji drops his hand to his thigh and looks down on the child-scribble before him.
“I drew this for you,” a meek little voice says from behind the paper.
But the drawing is nothing special. Round, asymmetrical leaves separated by a round, black worm beneath long, round, black matches. Flicked lines of bright green frame the bottom of the page like scratches on a sharpening stone.
“It’s a butterfly,” she supplies after a few too many moments of silence.
Toji nods and takes the drawing from her young hands. Now that he’s really looking at it, something about the style of the drawing is strikingly familiar. Maybe the girl who stands shyly before him is a friend of his daughter’s from school.
“Do you know Tsumiki?” he asks the child gruffly, crinkling the paper with the drawing when his fingertips drag over the smooth and chalky surface where the crayons have indented the parchment from her damn-hard pressing. “She’s my daughter. You draw like her.”
The girl sighs something heavy, and Toji looks up at her for it. It’s not the sort of sound one would just expect a young lady to make, let alone in the presence of a stranger. Everyone’s got appearances to keep up these days.
She reaches behind her head with too-pale fingers and pulls dark locks up into a handheld ponytail style.
Oh.
Toji’s eyes widen in recognition at the sight of her. “Tsumiki,” he breathes out, lowering the drawing slightly to examine her face unobscuredly. Thin lips. A small nose. She looks so much like… that woman. He furrows his brows.
His daughter releases her hair. It falls behind her shoulders like a waterfall of loose string, and she disappears. Well, she doesn’t disappear, not really, not physically, but in every way that matters. Because Toji now understands that his daughter is the one standing before him, and because her hair is done differently than he’s used to, he knows in his heart that there is no “friend from class” or stranger in their home.
It’s his daughter standing there, but he can only tell that because he remembers. It’s his daughter standing there, but she doesn’t particularly look like anyone familiar with her hair down.
She tentatively reaches out towards the drawing before bringing her hand back to her chest and holding it there with the other. “I’ll take it back,” she says softly, “if you don’t want it.”
Like hell he’ll let anything happen to all the hard work his little girl just put into this masterpiece. He pulls the paper up towards his face before placing it on the table and smoothing it out with calloused hands. “No thanks,” he replies shortly. “I’ll be keeping this.”
The way she smiles, so brightly and wide, must make for a very proud expression. She spins on her heel in the way that little girls do before tracing the table with her arm and hopping back into her chair. The metal squeaks again when she pulls it back and sets herself up on the seat, but Toji does his best not to let it bother him too much.
He knows all too well what overly harsh childrearing can lead to, and he has the scars to prove it.
Toji folds her butterfly into little, even squares before tucking it in the pocket of his pants. He closes his eyes and leans back slowly, lulling into an uncommon sense of peace to the sound of a buzzing bulb and the crayon-on-paper, wood grain etching of a child’s heavy hand.
………
When his wife guides their little family to the park for a “nice day out” and “some time in the sun, Toji, just look how pale we all are” and “yes I know it’s in fashion now, but I’d rather look ‘ugly’ than sickly”, he doesn’t think much of it. He’s been to plenty of parks before now, tracking squirming targets and beating back invisible assailants under the heat of a Summer’s gaze between play structures and barkdust that jumps up when he does.
That said, spending time together as a family in such a place is a completely alien experience to him. He usually lets Kiyomi handle all of this wholesome crap while he handles other peoples’ filthy business for cash. He’s used to Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheep: Toji’s version. Not… whatever this is.
“Pump your legs,” he tells the boy who keeps insisting he’s his son, standing behind the occupied yet unmoving swing with his arms crossed heavily. “Push against the ground with your feet. That’ll get you moving.”
“But I can’t,” Megumi argues fruitlessly. He shakes the chains of the swing a few times before grunting in resignation. “My legs are too short.”
Toji sighs. “What do you normally do when you come here without me?”
“I swing,” his son replies flatly, like his father’s question is the most stupid inquiry to ever have been uttered in the entire world. “Mom and Tsumiki push me.”
They push him, Toji considers faintly. He imagines himself forcing the boy out of his seat from pushing on his back too hard. That won’t work. He imagines himself flipping the swing over the top bar after pushing at the chains. He grits his teeth. That won’t work either.
“Well,” Toji remarks, taking a step backwards from the swings. “You’ll need to learn how to swing on your own sometime or another.”
“Yeah,” agrees Megumi, his voice tight with irritation. Toji imagines his thin brows furrowing. Toji imagines his lips frumpling in irritation. “When I can reach the damn ground.”
Toji huffs out a laugh and approaches his son’s back. Guess I’ll just flip him around. See if he asks me to push him again after this. Hah. “Where’d you learn that from, huh?”
“You,” Megumi mutters, tilting his chin down while gripping the chains as tightly as he can.
Toji hums. “Fair enough.” He grabs onto the chains above his son’s hands, steadying their frantic shaking. “You ready?”
Megumi nods stiffly. “Yeah—”
The air rushes out of the boy’s lungs in a sudden burst of adrenaline when his seat swings up, up, up, down, down, down and over the frame of the swingset. He screams in terror at the rushing feeling of falling.
Toji catches his son before he hits the ground, grinning toothily from the sudden rush.
Megumi shouts at him, asking “what’s wrong with you?!” and other stuff like that, but Toji’s too busy watching his eyebrows furl and raise and his mouth babble open and closed in rapid succession to hear his words clearly.
He lets out a little laugh when his daughter, hair up and eyes wide with fright, steals her step-brother from his arms and consoles him, gripping his arms and speaking kindly.
Megumi’s frightened expression probably looks priceless. Despite himself, Toji Fushiguro chuckles again.
………
He remembers the last time he saw that Gojo brat, way back when he was strictly a mercenary for hire and even the strongest jujutsu families had bridges in need of burning. He’d been the first person to ever notice him standing there on his own two feet, and his eyes had been so blue.
They’d glisten beneath the shade of his mother’s wagasa that blocked the light and drifting powder of fresh snow, and they’d tear right into him, meat clean off the bone. Six Eyes was a sight that Toji once dreamed of getting to see with his own two green eyes, as green as his son’s when they crinkled or widened or closed. But then, right then, when he experienced firsthand just how intimidating it is to really be seen, he could only wish that he’d been anyone or anywhere else.
His eyes sort of look like geysers now, spewing ice and water into the air with every heaving breath he takes. The setting sun makes them glisten, and the fury in them just makes them sparkle brighter. The otherworldly mist above his retinas is a layer of uncontinuity he’d rather not think about.
Now, listen. It wasn’t like Toji made it a habit out of taking the lives of dumb brats with bounties over their heads that made yen coins pop out of his eyes and the ca-ching! of a cash register opening roll past his tongue, but a hefty bounty is a hefty bounty no matter who the target is, and a hefty bounty is a hefty bounty that keeps food in his kids’ stomachs for a little while longer.
So, he had seen an amount of money listed that had made his mouth water. So, what? He’d taken the job without so much as a second though, following through with it all the way til the end, sure, but it wasn’t purely for selfish reasons. It was for sentimental ones, too.
“Any last words?” The Six-Eyes-and-Limitless-wielding sorcerer asks him, the huffing and puffing man with a hole in his side and an arm missing to prove it, with a glint in that swirling, otherworldly mist that makes Toji’s cursed energy-less hackles rise.
“Yeah,” he says gruffly, fighting hard against the lulling grasp of death that continuously clings to him. “My wife just died. My kids will too, if you don’t save them.” Toji lets out a breathy laugh, but it comes out more like a witless wheeze the way his blood runs sluggishly. “I’d appreciate it… if you took care of them. Drop them off somewhere; take them home; do whatever the hell you want. Just keep them safe.”
…Wow. The talking corpse standing and swaying sure is asking a lot of his killer, isn’t he?
Gojo doesn’t even flinch when his body hits the ground.
Call it habit, call it sentimentality, call it whatever you’d like, but Gojo checks his victim’s pocket before leaving his body to rot in front of the decimated base of his employer’s dastardly operations. From the only pocket left on him, spattered with blood but left attached to his silhouette, Gojo pulls out a faded and yellowing piece of paper.
It’s been folded with care twenty too many times, nearly ripping at the seams but still holding together despite all the odds. The teen unfolds the parchment and comes face-to-face with the sight of a child’s scribbles.
He scoffs lightly and folds the paper back up hastily, but with care. It gets shoved into the deepest depths of his uniform pocket, and Satoru swears he’ll never even dare to think about Toji Fushiguro and his horrible misdeeds for the rest of his life if he can help it.
But the paper crinkles in his pocket when his fist brushes against it. …Maybe he’ll have a few kids to pay a visit to after all.