Chapter Text
When Suguru first watches Satoru Gojo exorcise a curse, it’s like watching the extinction of a star. The world distorts and collapses under its own gravity; the curse, a mammoth, twists and bloats, and then is flung so violently into the surrounding trees that it explodes on impact. The blood - viscous and purple - hits the barrier of Infinity and slides right off, hitting the dirt with a staggered wet noise. Suguru is not so lucky. It’s in his hair, gluey like vomit. As the remnants of Blue dissipate, the light is stained onto the backs of his eyelids.
Satoru Gojo converts biology into physics as if it’s child’s play. The curse ceases to exist so quickly that, if it weren’t for the viscera, Suguru would wonder if it ever existed to start with. Gojo is dangerous, a threat. Power like this could sculpt steel, carve valleys, powder femurs. It’s an honour, a horror, to bear witness.
Once the remains of the curse have begun to steam, Gojo spends a moment brushing down his unsullied uniform and stretching out his neck. When he glances back at Suguru, his eyes are kaleidoscopic and half-lidded with boredom. Suguru swallows, trying desperately to ignore the blood as it cools and congeals on his scalp.
“I could have absorbed that,” he tells Gojo. Somehow, his voice doesn’t waver.
Gojo points with his thumb over his shoulder. “What, that?” Suguru nods. “Wasn’t it too strong for you?”
Suguru grits his teeth. “No.”
“Are you sure?” Gojo is leaning forward, a complacent smile stretching his lips up, up. “There’s no shame in it, Suguru.”
“It’s Geto,” he snaps, feels the anger sour in his gums, and realises. This is purposeful. Someone like Gojo thrives on being peevish. It’s all part of his self-serving act, and Suguru refuses to be part of it, to feed into it. He’s better than that.
“Next time,” he says, evenly, straight-faced, “subdue it. Destroying it so thoroughly is not necessary.” He surveys the clearing. The trees are scarred by the altercation, bark burnt and leaves yellowing. “Look at this mess. Your amateur dramatics are not as impressive as you think they are.”
Gojo doesn’t reply, but his smile never falters. There’s something sharp, something wild in it now. Suguru turns his back, walks hands in his pockets away from the massacre. “Let’s go."
Something cold and bitter churns in his gut, but Suguru hasn’t absorbed anything.
Gojo is incredibly frustrating to coexist with in a myriad of ways. In the dorm kitchen, he leaves the water jug empty and his coffee spoon on the counter, sugar-sticky. Suguru can hear him clattering around his room at all hours of the night. He’s either disruptively hyperactive in class, barely contained behind his desk, or vacant and inattentive.
He never gets an answer wrong.
Maybe Suguru is just bitter, but he finds himself stewing over Gojo too often. The frequency with which the other sorcerer crosses his mind is, frankly, more annoying than any of his strange behaviours. He tries very hard to stay above it all, but he knows Shoko is beginning to notice. And he knows she finds it amusing. She hasn’t said anything to him yet, but he suspects she is gathering data, constructing a hypothesis. Suguru is dreading the moment she eventually decides to open her mouth.
Nearly two months after their enrollment at Jujutsu Tech, Suguru and Shoko are sitting together, backs to the vending machine, sheltered from the early summer plum rain. Suguru is nursing a can of iced green tea and Shoko a melon milk and Pianissimo, the cherry an orange sunrise. Suguru is starting to think he, too, should take up smoking. He might not be an aspiring medic, but curse manipulation is no walk in the park.
He stares at her. She stares at him. She hands the cigarette to him - he doesn’t have to ask. He pinches it between his forefinger and thumb and takes his first drag tentatively, wary of making a complete fool of himself.
The flavour is peach mint. It hurts the back of his throat.
“When Gojo uses this vending machine,” Shoko starts, “he always buys the strawberry soda.”
He wrinkles his nose. Toe-curlingly sweet. It makes sense.
She pulls the cigarette from his fingers and presses it to her lips. “He never drinks it,” she mumbles into the filter.
Suguru stops short, tea can halfway to his mouth. He can smell it: cut grass, the column of an orchid. When he turns back to Shoko, the rain behind her blurs the courtyard, puddles evaporating into rainbows.
“What?”
“He leaves it right there,” she explains, motioning to the dispenser. “Doesn’t touch it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I take it out and give it to Utahime.”
He laughs abruptly. “When do you see Utahime?”
“On Sundays.” Her smile is wicked. He watches the smoke pour from her mouth, her nose; watches her press the butt into the concrete. It leaves a smudge of charcoal behind. “Strange, isn’t it?”
“Only as strange as everything else,” he grumbles. “Did you know he showers in the middle of the night?”
“Oh?” Shoko raises an eyebrow. “Do you often listen in?”
“It’s loud,” he snaps, squeezing his fingers into the can. The metal is cold. Sharp. His diaphragm is pulled taut and he can’t fathom why. Shoko is still smiling, head tilted, opaque and bare-faced without the gauze of smoke. A mirror.
“He’s a clan kid,” she says, as if Suguru is supposed to know what that means.
“So, what? He’s never interacted with normal people before?”
Shoko says nothing.
“You’re serious.”
“I don’t know very much.” The dregs of her melon milk are sucked down loudly. Her next exhale is sweet, almost sweet enough to disguise the dry smell of smoke. Almost. “But isn’t that the point? That I don’t know. That none of us knows.”
“Spooky,” Suguru teases, nudging her shoulder. “This all sounds very dramatic.”
She huffs, lips curling. “I guess the nicotine is getting to me. I’m feeling very meditative.”
“Best you slow down, then.”
Just past her, Gojo walks across the courtyard. Far enough to be out of earshot, but close enough that Suguru can see the little crease between his brows as he turns to them, the near-imperceptible slowing of his step. There’s something off, something strange about the picture. It isn’t until Gojo is out of sight again, and Suguru hears the muffled thump of the shoji, that he understands what it was.
The rain had not wet him. It had fallen around him like an umbrella of mist, coloured light refracting over his head like a halo.
Suguru begins to wonder if it’s lonely for Gojo. Keeping an inch between him and the world.
Not an inch, a voice that sounds suspiciously like Shoko reminds him. Infinity.
But does it feel like infinity? When summer’s humidity swells to its peak, can Gojo feel the pressure? When a barrage of low-level curses ambushes them in Roppongi, can he sense their velocity, the twist of the wind? When Suguru grazes the immovable space between them - hands him a test paper, shoulders past him in the corridor, reaches out, unthinking, to slap him on the back – does Gojo know the warmth of Suguru’s skin?
Then, on July 12th, in a sour-smelling alley in Katsushika ward, Suguru catches him. Hunched over, spindly legs crouched, a street-worn cat pressing her nose to his fingertips. It licks her sandpaper tongue over his knuckles. Rubs the flat of her forehead against his palm. Gojo hums, pushing a tangled cowlick back with his thumb, a serene little smile on his face.
Yes, Suguru thinks. It must be lonely.
It’s only after that that he notices the other instances when Infinity drops. They are few and far between and only happen when Gojo thinks no one is looking. A hand trailing along a crack in the dorm walls. A cheek pressed to the cool surface of the kitchen counter. Pants rolled to the knees, calves blurry and pale beneath the water of a fountain. He even brushes fingers with a barista handing him his change.
Small, hidden moments. Guilty pleasures. Gojo is so desperately trying to paint an image of absolute impregnability; he is hallowed, he is immutable, he is pre-eminent. But Suguru is seeing it now.
He is a fifteen-year-old boy.
And he has no idea how to be one.
Gojo is a disturbing juxtaposition between a narcissistic child and an impassive adult. Both irritating and glacial. Between the bragging and jabs, there are terrifying intervals. Times when his gaze sharpens and his voice flattens. Seconds where eyes slide to the left and his cheeks hollow out.
Suguru pretends to be indifferent to it. But he wants to know. Satoru Gojo is, infuriatingly, compelling.
And then the time comes when Shoko has collated her data and opens her mouth.
“You want to be his friend,” she divines. It’s especially hot today. She’s fanning herself with one hand, and Suguru is red-faced from a run around the track.
“I don’t even like him.”
“But you want to be his friend.”
Suguru sighs. “I’m mostly motivated by curiosity.”
“Understandable.” Her next smile shows teeth. “I wish I could open his skull and peel back each layer of his brain.”
Suguru wrinkles his nose. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
Gojo is inside being berated by Yaga. Suguru can’t see him, but the shape of his pout comes to him like a spectral vision. Maybe he’s been infected with the Six Eyes.
“I don’t think that’s all, though,” she continues. “You have a saviour complex.”
“I do not –”
Shoko interrupts him with a sharp laugh. “Oh, please. Don’t start.”
“As if the Satoru Gojo needs saving anyway.”
“Mm.” The cicadas seem loud, now. They swallow everything: Shoko’s shoes scuffing in the dirt, the flapping of the thrushes and flycatchers, both of their loud, humid breathing. “But there’s something, isn’t there?”
Suguru doesn’t reply.
“Like an aura. Or, uh…” She snaps her fingers. “A residual.”
“A residual?” He frowns. “Like, of cursed energy?”
He imagines it, Gojo’s whole body a spectral footprint. Carrying around a scent that can’t be washed away. He’s been practising his perception of cursed energy, the shape of it around everything. Shoko’s energy is soft and carmine, translucent like stained glass. It ripples rather than burns. Yaga holds his energy close, a second skin that only ever extends from him in careful, thin threads. It leaks from non-sorcerers in slow, viscous drips, blood pooling at their fingertips, and is easier to see in prey animals than in predators.
But he struggles to look at Gojo. He’s the very heart of a flame, white, then blue, and if he focuses too hard, it blinds him and births Gojo-shaped amoebas in his eyes. It’s hard to imagine a residual, under all that. Hard to imagine anything at all.
Which, Suguru imagines, is the root of the issue.
It all comes to a head in Arakawa, in Jōkan-ji - or Nage-komi-dera. The throw-away temple.
In the Edo period, thousands of low-ranking Yoshiwara prostitutes were wrapped in hay mats and left at the back entrance of Jōkan-ji to be buried by the monks that served there. The cemetery is peaceful, despite the dead beneath the gravel and stone, and the curse that inhabits it is more melancholic than vicious. It’s taken lives regardless. Three women from the adjacent apartment complex have been found dead there, tucked away in hay and covered in oozing chancres. According to the mission report, autopsies found late-stage syphilis, despite no appearances of poor health prior.
When they both enter the temple’s cemetery, it becomes apparent quite quickly: an incomplete domain. The graves extend for miles, blurring the horizon. The air is too cool for August, and there’s a mildew stink. Gojo’s face, though, is tilted back towards the temple. It’s lost its modern renovations, simultaneously older and newer, tiles a different shape, walls a different texture. Suguru can see a sepia light flickering inside.
Gojo points. “In there. It’s trying to distract us with the endless graveyard.”
“The mission brief said first grade.”
“Mm. Maybe semi-special grade. I’d need a closer look.”
Suguru breathes evenly. The air is stagnant, stale, but he can sense it – a secondary presence rolling out of the temple in sluggish waves. It aches like grief. Like surrendering to a life you had no choice in.
Gojo is being especially quiet.
“I think this one is going to be hard to swallow,” Suguru murmurs. “Let’s get this over with.”
The inside of the temple smells like necrosis. Foul, sweet, ammoniac. Rotten fruit and rotten meat. It’s heady, dizzying enough that Suguru switches to breathing through his mouth. His mission partner, meanwhile, shows no signs of being bothered by it. He pushes his glasses further up his nose and scowls. “Hey! You can come out.”
Something in Suguru’s peripheral vision shifts. Something pale and thin. There’s the sound of bones unfurling, and then steady, scraping footsteps. The curse is no larger than the average person. White skin hugs sharp clavicles, sharper fingers. Hair, long and black, trails the floor in thinning strands. It’s wearing an obi, tied with a simple knot at the front.
What can I do for you? The echo is unnerving, more so than unusual, if only because it doesn’t have a mouth, doesn’t have a face. What can I do for you? What can I do for you?
“You can shut up,” Gojo says, and then he lunges forward. The curse meets him with clawed, dead fingers, only to encounter Infinity. Suguru watches them grapple for a while, Gojo using the curse’s momentum to lead it off balance, before driving a knee into its sternum. The thing screeches shrilly, the whole temple vibrating with it.
“Hey now,” Suguru says, steadying a Buddha with one hand whilst sending out a few minor curses to stabilise the rest of the rattling furniture. “Let’s leave this place as we found it.”
For once, Gojo is attempting to minimise collateral, wearing the curse down enough for Suguru to absorb it. The flow and application of his cursed energy is immaculate. The curse is fast, but Gojo is faster. When it crawls with broken limbs up to the temple’s painted ceiling, he drags it back towards him with a single outstretched hand.
“Think you can absorb it now?” He holds the thing by its head, baring its neck to Suguru. It writhes, hair falling in clumps, skin peeling with festered sores. Around them, the distorted wails of women crying. He takes a measured breath. Clears his mind. With an immaterial tug, it melts easily into an orb, thrumming in his palm.
Overall, the fight hadn’t taken long. Suguru pockets the curse to absorb later, watching the domain dissolve around them to reveal a sky much darker than anticipated. He’s relieved to find the temple and its artefacts mostly unharmed, save for a few splintered floorboards and shattered lamps; easily replaceable. He recalls his arsenal and turns back to commend Gojo on an unusually restrained fight, only to be interrupted by the sudden and awful thump of a body hitting the floor.
Of Gojo’s body hitting the floor.
“What –”
And then he starts seizing.
Suguru is on his knees next to him without quite knowing how he got there. Gojo is sprawled awkwardly on his side with one of his arms twisted under him, the right lens of his glasses cracked from the fall’s impact. He carefully removes them before unbuttoning his own jacket and slipping it clumsily under Gojo’s head. He knows he’s supposed to be counting, but time is skipping and jumping in a way that doesn’t make sense, the air thick in his throat.
“What the fuck, what the fuck! What’s happening –” Gojo makes a gurgling, choked sound, drool creeping down his cheek. An elbow connects forcefully with the ground, and Suguru’s whole body jolts, hands shooting out to flutter uselessly over him. His sparse medical knowledge is screaming don’t touch don’t touch don’t touch but something in him desperately, irrationally wants to hold him still. To stop this. To blink and wake up. “Gojo, come on. This isn’t… You’re okay, come on now. Please.”
Gojo’s neck arches, and he stares up at him with nothing but the whites of his eyes. Suguru looks away, feeling sick.
Eventually, the convulsing slows. His hands unclench last, twitching, loosening, and then going limp. It can’t have been more than two minutes, but Suguru’s exhausted and shivering when it’s all over, forcing himself to take shuddering breath after shuddering breath. He blinks the bite of tears from his eyes and then gently rolls Gojo into the recovery position. His pulse gallops under his fingers, but Suguru thinks that might be normal.
It takes him three tries to type in Yaga’s number. His hands are numb. His skin feels hot. He thinks: curses have never made me feel this way.
It’s beyond belief. Suguru has stood steadfast in the face of unimaginable horrors. But this, this, has shaken him.
Gojo wakes up once on the drive back to school. He mumbles something unintelligible, makes a small, pained noise, and then promptly fades away again, head heavy in Suguru’s lap.
Shoko is ready for them when they make it to the infirmary. She looks tense, but somehow unsurprised. She takes his pulse with her eyes closed, and Suguru feels when she activates her RCT, sees it reach and retreat in gentle wavelets, soft around the edges. It’s even and repetitive. Grounding. Until she scowls, peeling open one of Gojo’s eyes next. “He’s overused his technique.”
Suguru frowns. “But… he barely used his technique.”
“This is weeks in the making.” She pinches the skin on the back of his hand. “And he’s dehydrated as fuck. Idiot.”
She sets up the IV with a little more aggression than necessary, flicking and slapping the crook of his elbow until she finds a viable vein. He starts to stir when the needle slips in, moaning lowly. It takes him a while to open his eyes, and when he does, they’re glassy under the glare of the infirmary lights. He squints them nearly closed again, brow drawn with tension.
Suguru takes his hand and squeezes it. He doesn’t know why.
“Hey,” Shoko says, leaning over the bed into his line of sight. “You back with us?”
Gojo scrunches his nose. “No.” And then, “go ‘way.”
“I need to run some tests.”
“No.”
Suguru huffs. “Gojo, you had a seizure.”
“Fuck you, no I didn’t.” He’s slurring, and his glare is a poor effort. But then he must see something in Suguru’s face. Perhaps the sallow after-image of fear. “F’r real?”
“For real, real,” Shoko says. “Do you know what day it is?”
“Yeah.”
She looks ready to throttle him. “Tell me, Gojo.”
“Oh.” He smacks his lips. “August ‘leventh.”
A blood pressure cuff is wrapped around his arm. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Gojo hums, lips pursed. “Temple?” He’s searching for something else, but he doesn’t find it. “I don’t remember where.”
“That’s okay. You’ll be disoriented for a while.” The cuff deflates. “Your blood pressure is low.”
“’Kay.” Suguru is starting to wish he’d show a little more concern.
Shoko clicks on a penlight and flashes it in eyes. “Are you hurting anywhere?”
“Yes, fuck, my head, Jesus fucking Christ –”
“Sorry.” She doesn’t sound sorry at all. “What about nausea?”
Gojo groans, which answers her question. The heels of his hands are pressed firmly into his eyes, and his lips have lost all colour. “Your bedside manner is shit, Shoko.”
“I didn’t know we were on a first-name basis, Satoru.” She seems pleased with herself, though. “I want to do an ECG.”
Gojo stills. Peels his palms from his eye sockets. “Is that… Do I need to take off my shirt for that?”
“Uh, yeah. For the stickies, see?” She waggles the wires, but Suguru isn’t looking at her. He’s looking at Gojo. Gojo, whose shoulders have tensed. Gojo, whose lips have turned down at the corners, whose eyes have unshuttered to show a glimpse of something gaunt, something angular.
Gojo, who looks afraid.
Shoko sees it too. She looks hard at him, searching, and then up at Suguru. “Would you give us a minute?”
He doesn’t argue. When he looks at Gojo one last time, he sees a boy who’s surrendered himself to some unavoidable punishment. He doesn’t associate someone like him with shame or fear – has, in fact, found himself bothered by his brazen lack of both – and yet Gojo continues to surprise him. Continues to provide him with an exponential list of questions. To confuse him with his predictably unpredictable nature.
“I’ll… head back to the dormitory,” he informs them both. Then, to Shoko: “Call me if you need anything.”
He doesn’t hear from them for the rest of the night. The plaster of his ceiling presses down on him with a weight unfamiliar, the glow from his nightlight throwing the room in blue relief. Sleep evades him. Gojo’s limbs wrenching, eyes rolling, and his strangled, spit-slicked noises – they all haunt him in equal measure. His classmate’s undeniable humanity has been thrust in his face like an assault – he has not seen him eat, has not seen him sleep, but he has seen him rupture. Suguru feels like maybe this was inevitable, somehow; an unstoppable force meeting a mortal ceiling. A long, long fall reaching maximum velocity.
Gojo isn’t in class the next day, but Shoko is, slumped over her desk, an unlit cigarette in her mouth. Her face is pale. She seems burdened with a knowledge she didn’t expect. Yaga, too.
“I can’t tell you,” she tells him the moment he takes his seat.
Suguru swallows around the stone in his throat. “I know.”
He learns, later, that Shoko’s supervisor has taken over Gojo’s medical care. The involvement of a second adult makes Suguru incredibly nervous. Their seniors are perfectly happy sending them into volatile situations on a regular basis – he can’t quite fathom that this is the line.
Shoko starts spending more time with him, too, which only further curdles the thing in the pit of his stomach. Gojo’s cyclic bouts of hyperactivity have shifted from irritating to irritable as he tries to avoid her at every turn. He spits at her about the stench of smoke, the stench of the morgue that clings to her clothes. He sprints from the classroom before Yaga has time to finish dismissing them, bloats Infinity until it keeps her a foot away. The anxious snapping of his pen against the desk is almost enough to push Suguru over the edge.
Sometimes, he hides so well from them that they worry he’s left campus entirely. Suguru finds Shoko in the kitchen one lunch, two bowls of ochazuke on the counter. Her yellowed and bitten fingers twitch for a cigarette.
“He can’t keep this up,” she tells him. Mutters something that sounds like stupid, ridiculous, stubborn asshole.
The thing is, he agrees with her. Gojo is beginning to look drawn. Tired.
So, Suguru stops speculating and starts his inquiry.
“Why do you shower in the middle of the night?” he asks him outside on the track. The rubber under his feet is so hot he can feel it through the soles of his shoes. The back of Gojo’s neck is pink as uncooked chicken; a wide smile spreads over his lips as he looks at Suguru over his glasses.
“Why is Suguru so curious?”
He grits his teeth. “It’s Geto.”
“A little creepy, don’t you think?”
“It’s loud,” Suguru counters. “It’s bizarre.”
“A prerequisite of sorcery,” he tells him, feigning solemnity, before turning his back to continue stretching. Legs long, pale, bent sharply at the knee.
“Where do you go?” Suguru whispers five minutes before class ends, Yaga at the front of the room, floppy textbook in hand. There is no need for specificity; Gojo meets his gaze knowingly. He can’t see the Six Eyes, but he can feel them, arctic, electric.
“It’s a secret,” he replies. Conspirational.
And then, the next day, after lunch: “I’ve never seen you eat.”
Gojo kicks the desk away from him. It screeches, scratches the floor, and Suguru watches him get up and leave. He doesn’t come back, and by the end of the day, Yaga looks on the verge of a conniption.
Later, he sees Yaga and Shoko talking quietly in one of the corridors. He catches “just because,” and “disrespectful,” and “special treatment.” He can’t see their teacher’s expression, but Shoko’s is impassive as always, save for the tight set of her lips.
Suguru begins to feel frustrated. He’s not unfamiliar with patient confidentiality - his mother is a doctor, and even in the tight-knit community he came from, she was never one to entertain any rumours. But their class consists of three students, one teacher, and he seems to be the only one not in the know. It’s isolating. The tentative ease he had found in his tutelage under Yaga, in his companionship with Shoko, finally enclosed on all sides by people who see what he sees, who are equally thrumming with something twisted and powerful - it’s gone. He is nervous without direction, concerned but unsure what there is to be concerned about.
It’s on a trip to the infirmary that he begins to piece it together.
He’s looking for Shoko, a wad of paper towels pressed firmly to a gash on his forearm. The bleeding is sluggish - nothing he can’t heal naturally - but he’s procrastinating his mission report, and figures she could use the practice.
He doesn’t find Shoko. He does find Gojo. His classmate is sitting with his legs crossed on one of the beds, glaring down at a half-full glass of water, a small bowl of rice, and a blister pack of painkillers, all arranged neatly on the overbed table. The rice is still steaming. Gojo is tapping his chopsticks in a steady rhythm against the edge of the bowl.
“Uh,” he says, grip on his arm faltering. “Hi?”
“Hi,” Gojo replies. He doesn’t look up. Suguru supposes he saw him coming from all the way upstairs. Could see him with his back turned, his eyes closed.
“What are you doing here?”
He seems to consider not answering for a moment. The silence makes Suguru’s skin crawl. But then he gestures flippantly at the pills. “Headache.”
The packet is unopened.
“Aren’t you going to take them?” Suguru sits on one of the benches that line the wall. “I’ve heard painkillers are quite effective at managing, you know. Pain.”
Gojo isn’t amused by his sarcasm. His lips don’t even twitch. The crease between his eyebrows - the only indicator that anything is bothering him at all - deepens.
“Gojo,” he says. Sighs. “Take the painkillers.”
“I can’t.” His right hand squeezes the chopsticks tight, the left gesticulating at the bowl of rice like it has offended him, somehow. “Shoko says I need breakfast first.”
The clock on the wall reads 2:00 PM. Suguru looks at the blister pack, at the splintering chopsticks, at the clammy pallor of Gojo’s appearance. At the bowl of rice, untouched, served in a perfect dome. The clock again. 2:00 PM. Shoko says I need breakfast first.
It seems obvious now. The pieces were there. In all honesty, Suguru feels… stupid.
“You –” He clears his throat. “You’re not very good at looking after yourself, are you?”
Gojo looks affronted. “I am perfectly capable of –”
“Sorry, let me rephrase.” The rice, the clock. He’s a clan kid, says Shoko’s voice, a whispering spectre. “You don’t want to look after yourself.”
The sneer that twists his face is vicious. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I would like to.”
Gojo doesn’t have a response for that one. He just stares, and stares, and stares. Suguru doesn’t let himself feel the satisfaction.
“I get the feeling,” Suguru begins, “that you haven’t had friends before.” Silence, save for a shuffling against the sheets. The downslope of Gojo’s mouth twitches. “There are only three of us. I think we should at least try to get along.”
“I don’t need friends,” Gojo rasps. “I’m fine on my own.”
“But do you want friends?” More bottomless staring. Suguru aches. “I thought so.”
“Why do you care?” This time it isn’t vitriolic. This time, it’s unsure, insecure, almost… yearning.
Suguru smiles. “I’m not sure. But I do.” He looks back at the bowl of rice. He doesn’t know when it became the centre of the room, but it feels important, it feels like a trigger, a node. Simple, little bowl of rice, no longer steaming, going dry on top. “Your breakfast is getting cold.”
It’s just gone 2:00 PM. Methodically, Gojo eats four bites of rice, swallows one too many pills, and drains the remainder of the water. Suguru feels something loosen a little in his chest.
It doesn’t fix anything. Suguru isn’t naive - he knows that. But something has shifted. The tension breaks, the atmosphere snaps, the rain falls.
Gojo doesn’t follow Shoko obediently to lunch, but he’s no longer so good at hiding from them. Like he wants to be found. They both take turns looking, and sometimes, Gojo sits like he is waiting for them. Glasses pushed flush to his face, hands on his knees, lips worn and bitten. His hair is getting long and possesses the same sort of static as the fur of a skittish cat.
(Suguru wonders what it feels like.)
Shoko tells Suguru there is a meal plan. Lighter foods, thick with necessary nutrients. A lot of soups, plain rice, and vegetables boiled soft. The portion sizes are enough to make him hungry, but Shoko is insistent that recovery is a marathon, not a race.
Gojo only ever makes small dents in the food, or refuses it completely. Suguru can’t even find it in himself to be angry. He is intimately familiar with nausea. He knows what it looks like, even in a carefully crafted expression.
Smoothies seem to go down the easiest, especially if they have blueberries. One day, Suguru makes watered-down watermelon ice lollies, and Gojo sucks one all the way down to the stick. After, he chews anxiously on the wood until it’s soggy, but he doesn’t complain. It isn’t much, but it’s better, it’s good, and it’s a relief.
(From then on, Suguru freezes watermelon lollies twice a week, every week, like a ritual.)
But he still hasn’t figured out the why. He doesn’t know much about this brand of self-destruction - he’s only ever skipped meals after a particularly abhorrent curse, always to prevent a mess, always necessary. Never to punish himself.
Gojo has always given him an impression of vanity. It’s not unfounded. He’s willowy, polished bone china, the angles of his face sharp where they aren’t youth-softened. His hair white enough to reflect the pinks of dusk. It’s growing into him, too, less neat and more flyaway, untamed, impossible to restrain. And his eyes -
(Suguru is beginning to hate those sunglasses.)
Then September: a stumble, a blood sugar downswing - Gojo swallowed by a fatigue with so many facets that he’s forced to sit right there on the track field (Shoko throwing a plastic bottle at his head, shouting drink your fucking juice, you fucking asshole). Suguru calls his mother. He feels stupid for not thinking of it before. She has two decades of medical experience behind her, has always been sharp and reflective, never truly satisfied with the extent of her knowledge. She will have read journals. She will have bolstered herself against the stigma.
“Hi, Mama.”
“Suguru.” In the background, the hiss of oil frying, the tossing of vegetables. His father, humming, as he cooks.
“Sorry. Are you about to eat?” If he closes his eyes, he can taste home-cooked takoyaki. “I can call back later.”
“I have time.” She always does. His mother is not one to smile, to kiss foreheads, to sing lullabies. That had all been his father. But she always, always makes time for him.
“I have a classmate,” he says. Pauses. “A friend.” The story comes in strings, unchronological, tinged with self-deprecating frustration. His mother is patient, quiet. She waits until his complete silence.
“This sounds like it has been difficult for you,” is the first thing she says.
“What?” Suguru isn’t the victim here. He isn’t pointlessly hungry; he isn’t running on empty. “I’m fine. I’m just… confused. I don’t know why he’s doing it. I don’t know how to help.”
“It’s hard to think of it this way,” she tells him, steady, calm. “But this is a sickness. We don’t choose sicknesses - they choose us.”
“It’s not his fault,” he parrots back. “I know that.”
“But it feels that way,” she returns. “Doesn’t it?”
He swallows thickly. Whispers in a crackle over the microphone: “Yes. It does.”
His mother tells him that sicknesses like Gojo’s are complicated. That it isn’t always about vanity. It could be control, it could be repulsion, it could be rebellion. It could also be none of these things. There are often external factors, she says, like childhood trauma, abuse. But your genetics aren’t always faultless either.
Nature, nurture. Both. Shoko’s dismissive He’s a clan kid is becoming a repetitive, buzzing alarm in his head. He’s choked by the unknowing. The lack of context. He has the answer but not the working.
“It could also be a symptom of something else,” his mother adds. “Eating disorders are rarely singular. There are comorbidities.”
There’s a pressing warmth behind Suguru’s eyes he’s choosing to ignore. “Can I… help?”
“I’d recommend a therapist -”
“Ironically, in short supply.” Bitter.
“Sometimes,” his mother says carefully, “destructive habits can feel like safety blankets. They are an irrational answer to a rational question. In the absence of an alternative solution, they can feel like the only way.”
“So, if he feels safe. If I make him feel safe…”
“I know you, Suguru.” Plates are clattering behind this rare tone of sweetness. “I’m sure you already have, in some way.”
Suguru sits with her words for a while. It’s early evening, still daylight, and his room is west-facing. He sits next to the window and lets the sun run like syrup down his face. Watches the packed sand in the courtyard turn orange, the trees poking over the gables aflame.
He’s only met Shoko’s tutor a handful of times. It’s highly unlikely she is specially qualified to deal with Gojo, and as far as he knows has mainly been monitoring his vitals and constructing his meal plans. It’s a bandage on a festering wound. Shoko’s supervised lunches speak of more care and consideration, Suguru’s lollies a far more effective strategy, but progress is still excruciatingly slow. They’re fifteen. What else can they possibly give?
It takes him too long to identify the corrosive churning in his chest. Anger. Almost rage - one misstep away. The least they could ask for in a school like theirs is pastoral care. They’re child soldiers, Gojo and Suguru especially, unsheltered because of an arbitrary designation. First grade, with the potential to be special. It’s supposed to make them feel important and valued, and it did at first. Now it’s a sickening injustice.
He wonders if Gojo has even noticed. If he’s awake. If first grade, special grade, is so ingrained in him that he can’t feel its barbed sting. Or, maybe, he’s always felt it and has chosen to surrender himself to the riptide.
He’s a clan kid. Gojo has been force-fed his part in this from birth. Perhaps his rejection of food is symbolic; the sealing of a mouth, the blunting of a sword.
He needs to talk to Yaga. He’s not fifteen, he’s not twisted up in adolescent fury. He’s the closest adult who gives a shit.
The thing with Yaga’s office hours is that he has no office hours. Like most sorcerers, he’s not swaddled in the security of a schedule. He’s available when he’s needed, regardless of when, regardless of where.
When Suguru seeks him out, he’s not there. The door is locked, and it’s quiet inside. There’s a worn piece of paper on the door, in slanted black marker: OUT ON BUSINESS, PLEASE LEAVE A MESSAGE AT X-XXX-XXXX. So, Suguru does. Texts, I need to talk to you at your earliest convenience. Signs off, for good measure.
The reply comes eight minutes later. Just a time. 19:30.
Dinner in the communal kitchen is tense. Gojo isn’t there and Shoko can’t find him. Suguru is almost relieved; he feels like he’s doing something wrong, something Gojo would not approve of, and he knows he wouldn’t be able to hide it from those fathomless eyes.
Shoko doesn’t reciprocate his relief. She pokes at her green pepper stir-fry with a sour face. Her uniform jacket is thrown over the back of the chair, and she’s pulling repetitively at the collar of her pink undershirt, anxious, self-soothing.
He slurps a noodle. “You’re spiralling.”
She levels him with a vicious, vicious glare. “No. I don’t spiral.”
“You’re letting it take you over.” He gestures with his chopsticks. “You’re even following his meal plan.”
“It’s easier than cooking two meals.”
“That is not the point, Shoko.” Her food looks unseasoned, charred instead of seared – low on the oil. “Do you even enjoy what you’re eating?”
She stares down at it, forlorn. “It’s… bland.”
“I imagine.”
“Too bland. Everything still tastes like cigarettes.” She sighs. “Can you pass the rāyu?” He does. She uses it liberally and tosses her rice noodles until she’s satisfied. “That’s better.”
“You don’t have to suffer to help him.”
She scoffs. “I'm hardly suffering, Suguru. Not in comparison –”
“Also not the point,” he says again. He raps his knuckles against the table, counts himself in, one, two, three. “I spoke to my mother.”
Shoko raises her eyebrows. “Dr. Geto?”
“She’s not a psychiatrist, but… she’s wise. Principled. She likes to be well-informed.”
She nibbles at her dinner, slumped across the table. “I wish she could teach me medicine. Dr. Miyagawa is so… old-school. Traditional.” Suguru thinks that’s a rather tame analysis for Shoko, until she finishes off with an emphatic, “bor-ing.”
“I’m going to talk to Yaga about some of what she said.” At that, she peels herself off the table. A pepper crunches loudly between her teeth, near-raw, and she swallows it near-whole, fixing him with her full focus. Suguru feels dizzy under the attention. “I think his grasp of… clan politics. Creed. Is better than ours.”
“You want to unravel Gojo’s psyche.” Shoko pushes into the back of her chair. “You know, I, too, have a vested interest.”
“I know. But, Dr. Geto says that our psyches are equally important.”
“Suguru –”
“You’re doing more than enough.” He smiles at her; lets it soothe away some of the incredulity that lines her forehead, tightens her mouth. “I know they don’t see it. Dr. Miyagawa, Yaga. Gojo. But I do.”
Shoko sniffs. Twists her hands together on the table. Lets a rare, pale diffidence cross her face. “It’s not helping,” she whispers.
Suguru plants his elbows on either side of his bowl. “Shoko,” he says, patient, firm. “I promise. You are doing enough.”
The conversation shifts after that. It feels like plum rain, again, feels like sitting by the vending machine and drinking in second-hand smoke; it’s just the kitchen and them. No looming questions, no stifling expectations. Suguru had nearly forgotten how darkly funny she could be, how little and how much they have in common. He had missed her. Had missed talking without the filmy aftertaste that has dominated their conversations lately.
His upcoming conversation with Yaga feels less intimidating, now. He steps with purpose, the dying afternoon light vignetting the hallway and warming the lamps. He’s five minutes early, but the gap under Yaga’s door is bright, his shadow breathing behind the washi paper.
“You can come in, Suguru,” his teacher calls before he has the chance to knock. He inhales, exhales, and the last of his nerves sputter out.
To an observer, Yaga looks steady and unassailable; straight-backed, straight-faced, brows bowed fiercely over his dark eyes. But the signs of fatigue are there in the unzipped neck of his collar and the skewed papers on his desk, a mission report half-filled. In him, Suguru can see his future. It’s not that sorcerers adapt to their unending workload. They just get better at hiding how much it hurts.
He decides he doesn’t want to waste his precious time. No point in hesitating.
“I think we should have a therapist.”
Unfortunately, Yaga looks like he’s heard this before. Something resigned, something weathered on his face. “I agree.” Maybe he should have had more faith in Yaga, because he was expecting more of a fight. Instead, his teacher slumps so far into his chair it looks like it might swallow him whole. “I asked for one at your age, too.”
Suguru isn’t sure how to respond.
“My teacher said no. And when I became a teacher, I asked the principal, and he said no, too. So, I did some underhanded research.” A sigh, a nervous tic, pen tap tap tapping on the desk. “There aren’t any therapists. At least not one aware of curses. Even windows are too busy. And a non-sorcerer therapist…”
“Pointless.” He feels fevered, his teeth ache, the tips of his fingers itching. His anger is a vacuum, empty but powerful. He wants to hit something but there’s nowhere to aim. It’s not Yaga’s fault. It’s not Gojo’s fault. It’s not Suguru’s fault, either, but he’s starting to lose sleep, to obsess over it, desperate to fix something he isn’t even half-qualified to fix.
Why? Perhaps he should take a step back. Introspect. He shouldn’t care this much. He does. His heart aches too much for things that don’t concern him, constantly splits itself into pieces, soft and hardened at the same time.
He must get it from his father. His mother’s career hinges on being able to compartmentalise; his father, an artist, has never been able to temper his love. His art would fall flat and pallid, otherwise.
“I hate it here,” Suguru says, and then thinks of Shoko’s cigarettes and melon milk, sharp, sardonic; thinks of the sakura trees in the courtyard and sun on the running track; thinks of Gojo, persistent and annoying as a mosquito, but luminous and kindred (pretty as jasmine, as silk.) “Sometimes,” he adds, correcting himself. “I hate it here sometimes.”
“Better than always.”
“The Gojo clan.” This feels like walking into an opaque ocean; there are jellyfish, but he doesn’t know where. “What are they like?”
“You’re overstepping, Geto.”
“I don’t care.”
Yaga removes his sunglasses and regards him carefully. Suguru keeps his expression taut, immovable, even if he feels a little like begging. His teacher must realise he won’t leave without an answer, because he pinches the bridge of his nose, closes his eyes. “The clans operate under closed practices. Their affairs are private. Or, at least they’re supposed to be.” He releases his nose, but keeps his eyes averted. “How they treat their children is an open secret. Not that it matters. They have too much power to really care what people think.” Suguru didn’t ask about children. This is Yaga acknowledging his real question, offering him a thread of the tapestry. “Their heir was born with both Limitless and the Six Eyes. This makes them untouchable. The Zen’in and Kamo clans don’t even compare.”
“Gojo’s that big of a deal?”
Yaga gives him a strange look. “There hasn’t been another like him in four-hundred years. He’s part of your curriculum.”
He is. Not Limitless, not the Six Eyes. Gojo is part of the curriculum.
Swallowing is difficult, all of a sudden.
“Yaga,” he whispers. “He’s not okay.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do.” He feels inexplicably weary. He doesn’t feel fifteen, not right now - standing before this desk, patronising his teacher. “It doesn’t matter how powerful he is. He’s going to destroy himself.” More power just means a greater implosion. “We need to do something. It’s non-negotiable.”
“I’m not negotiating, I’m telling you,” Yaga counters tersely. “There’s nothing to be done. I know these politics well, Suguru. There is no solution, not one Jujutsu society allows.”
“I won’t accept that.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you not to bleed yourself dry over this. It will get you nowhere.”
“Fuck,” he says with feeling, and then turns and walks out.
On his way back to the dormitories, he finds Gojo in the courtyard. He’s basking in the sun with his face up, like a lizard. He turns as Suguru approaches, squints at him over his sunglasses.
“You look sad, Suguru.”
He doesn’t correct him this time. “I want to hit something.”
“You can hit me.” He cocks his head. “I won’t feel it.”
So, Suguru does. Swings at Infinity, feels the void bruise his knuckles. When he pulls his fist away, Gojo’s lips are peeled back.
Smiling.
In his early years, his parents had thought he was schizophrenic.
Overwhelming parental concern feels a little like deep-sea pressure. His mother never let her fear twist into something mean, and his father only ever cradled him softly, but the weight was there, and it stunk of guilt. It felt like he was making a mistake. Disappointing them. He didn’t know how to fix it.
Suguru and his parents lived in Higashinaruse village on the edge of the Akita prefecture. With unwavering dedication, his father took Suguru on the train twice a week to see a psychotherapist in Yokote. This meant pulling him out of school at 2:00 PM every Monday and Thursday. This meant, more importantly, that the children in his village - and in turn, their parents - knew something was fundamentally different about Suguru. That something was wrong with him.
His mother was a respected woman. She worked in their local practice, but her care extended beyond her working hours. Suguru remembers their neighbours appearing at all hours of the day and night. Medicine was precious to her; her own research sprawled in chicken-scratch around her private office, and her journals so carefully annotated. She was the perfect proprietor of both eastern and western medicines. This did not matter. Because whatever Suguru’s mother was, in equal measure, Suguru was the opposite. He told his teachers about the creatures clinging to their shoulders and screamed himself to tears in the market when a demon stared up at him from between the mandarins. He was weird, and eventually, disturbingly quiet.
Three days after his eleventh birthday, his mother reluctantly put him on antipsychotics. This, following an incident in his psychiatrist’s office. A curse, made up entirely of gaping, toothless maws, had peeled itself from the back wall and wailed in his right ear. Suguru had wet himself.
Dizziness, insomnia. A headache that never really went away. The double-vision was so bad that Suguru had to start wearing glasses. He withdrew into himself, skipped school, stopped speaking. But, worst of all: they didn’t even help.
He could hear his parents whispering to each other at night, his mother’s voice an even hum, his father’s trembling even through the walls. Eventually, their fear took shape. A black stain grew on their kitchen ceiling, like mould. It wouldn’t shift, not under white vinegar or bleach. At breakfast one morning, Suguru told his father that there was something on top of the fridge. Minutes later, it sparked, died out, and began quickly defrosting onto the floor.
The next day, a Sunday, Suguru stopped his mother from entering the kitchen entirely. Squinted up through his glasses, mumbled about something being too heavy, and with the howl of an avalanche, the ceiling collapsed.
His mother had stared at him for a long moment. It made Suguru nauseous. He thought maybe she blamed him for it, that she finally saw Suguru for what he was (cursed child, sick, twisted, touched by something dark). Instead, she got down on one knee in front of him and held him gently by the shoulders.
“Suguru,” she whispered. Softer than he’d ever heard her speak. “Was there something up there? On the ceiling?”
He nodded.
“Oh, baby,” she said. Choked up. Her eyes were glassy, unnervingly rare. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t listen to you, did I?” She drew him into her arms, and for the first time in months, Suguru felt so warm. “But Mama’s listening now. I promise, Suguru. I’ll never close my ears again.”
On the first day of November, Suguru oversleeps. Whilst he scoops his hair into something lumpy but acceptable, he ponders the adrenaline that comes with being late to school. It’s worse than exorcising and swallowing figments of fear, somehow. Perhaps he should spend more time nurturing his own mental health.
He hears it within a few steps of the kitchen. He can’t place it at first, but when he turns the corner, it’s there. Gojo is bent in half over the sink, back curled and white-knuckling the counter, spitting up whatever he happened to manage for breakfast.
“Shit, Shoko –” He glances at her, but she stays a good metre away, nose wrinkled with disgust. Without thinking, he jerks forward to press his hand to Gojo’s back, belatedly remembering Infinity – only to be shocked stupid when he makes contact, palm between his lurching shoulder-blades.
He knows this. He knows how to soothe someone through sickness, but he’s so consumed with the horror of it, so jarred, that it takes Gojo heaving again to snap him out of it. Then it’s simple. He sweeps his hand in wide, firm circles, presses the other to the back of his neck – warm with strain, not fever – and speaks lowly when his classmate makes a strangled noise, choking unproductively on nothing now.
“Hey, I think you’re empty.” Suguru runs the tap to wash away the acetic stench. “Take a deep breath, try to relax.”
Gojo coughs, groans, then spits. “Don’t look at me. Go away.”
“Your punishment is being perceived,” Shoko snaps.
“My punishment is that my stomach fucking hurts,” he moans into the hollow metal of the sink.
“Oh, look!” she exclaims, vitriolic, “if it isn’t the consequences of your actions!”
Suguru’s eyes widen. “Shoko. Take a walk.”
She’s gone within seconds. Like she was waiting for permission. Gojo pushes up from the sink and Suguru leads him over to a chair, hand fixed on his elbow - on his elbow, sharp and warm and not infinite. Gojo wraps his arms around his stomach and his head hits the table with a thunk, clearly past the point of pretending, so Suguru decides to make some tea. Tea and okayu.
The boiling, the stirring, is soothing. They’re late for class, but Suguru doesn’t care anymore. He’s collecting his thoughts, pulling them all carefully into place. He hasn’t felt at peace like this in a while.
Gojo hasn’t moved, but when Suguru brings the tea over, he turns to press his cheek to the table, watching him. “It’s ginger.” Gojo scrunches his nose. “I added some honey, too.”
Maybe, Suguru thinks, it’s about taking care of people. Not fixing them.
He sips at his own tea. Green, unsweetened. He’s patient. Gojo sits up eventually, and even if he only wraps his hands around the cup, only sniffs it, that’s okay.
“I grew up in the countryside,” Suguru tells him. “Higashinaruse, near the Ōu mountains. Do you know it?”
He shakes his head.
“My parents aren’t sorcerers. My mum’s a doctor, and my dad paints. Nearly everyone in our village has one of his pieces.” Mountains sliced up by sunlight, green foliage in motion. A portrait of his mother before she was a mother, brown eyes turned gold by the fireflies. “He had an exhibition in Yuzawa, once. Not a big one, but he was so excited about it. I remember him making us hot pot and butter mochi to celebrate.”
“Sounds nice,” Gojo mumbles, finally drawing from his own tea.
“It was.” His father had sold six pieces in Yuzawa. It hadn’t made them much money, but it had never been about money, anyway. He crosses his ankles under the table. “They aren’t perfect, but they try their best. I’ve always seen that. It’s the… attention to detail. They know that part of what makes a big moment special is the smaller, thoughtful things.” Like his father buying him fresh apple juice every time they went to the hospital in Yokote. Or his mother moving a bean bag into her office so that Suguru could sit with her whilst she worked. The iburigakko made with daikon from their garden, and a wooden box with stingrays carved into it, especially for Suguru’s pencils.
“Is there a point to this?” Gojo looks ready to bolt. Which is a strange reaction to someone confiding what is essentially trivial information. It should be harmless. “Or are you just trying to make me jealous?”
“No, I’m not trying to make you jealous.” Sometimes, talking with Gojo feels a little like trying to prevent a bear attack. Play dead, run, fight back. “I just thought I’d share some of my life with you.”
“I didn’t ask you to.” Suguru shrugs. Gojo’s eyes narrow. “I know what you’re doing. I’m not stupid.”
Debatable. “What am I doing?”
He points an accusatory finger. “You want me to talk back.”
“That is how conversations work, yeah.” He shakes his head, something almost fond in it. “But you don’t have to. If you wanted to, though…” Mama’s listening now. I promise, Suguru. “My ears are open.”
Gojo’s face goes blank. About thirty seconds pass, Suguru estimates. They have to be at least fifteen minutes late for class now. Shoko must be covering for them, or else Yaga would have already come looking. He watches Gojo’s lips unstick, parting only slightly. His throat clicks. Suguru stays still, continues to be patient.
His patience is not rewarded. Gojo stands abruptly from his chair. Sways, and then centres himself. “Thanks for the tea,” he says, even though he’s barely touched it. Doesn’t wash it up, or push his chair back in. Just puts his hands into his pockets and leaves.
He isn’t annoyed - it had been a gamble anyway. So he goes through the motions. Plates some okayu, finishes his own tea. Yaga reprimands him when he finally makes it to class. Shoko looks exhausted, but also fidgets in shame. He squeezes her shoulder as he passes her desk, as if to say I understand. I’m frustrated too.
Gojo is there as well, but not really; eyes fixed on the ceiling, fingernails biting into his palms. Out on the field, he slams Suguru into the grass with calculated grace, as if he weren’t being sick in the sink just two hours ago. And that’s that then, isn’t it? Message received.
Except, just gone 9:00 PM, there’s a sharp knock on his door.
“I’ve never met my parents,” Gojo declares when Suguru opens it. His sunglasses have been pushed up into his hair, eyes wide and exposed. He stands in the hallway with his usual composure, posture lax and unbothered. But he’s anxious. Suguru can tell.
“Come in,” he says, stepping aside. And Gojo - Satoru - does.