Chapter Text
You don’t notice the exact moment your life stops being “normal” and starts being “you are now, unfortunately, involved in jujutsu society.”
It’s more like a slow accumulation of incidents.
Like the first time you see Yuuji Itadori punch a curse so hard it turns inside out, and your brain, instead of screaming or fainting or doing something sensible, simply goes: huh. That’s kind of impressive, actually.
Or the second time, when you realize the school he’s talking about—Jujutsu Tech—isn’t a metaphor for anything, but an actual place where people learn to fight things that should not exist.
Or the third time, when Satoru Gojo very politely tells you that you are “spiritually interesting,” which you later decide is not something a sane person should ever hear from a man wearing a blindfold indoors.
But that comes later.
Right now, you are sitting on a curb outside a convenience store with an onigiri in one hand and the faint awareness that your entire worldview has been structurally compromised in under forty-eight hours.
Yuuji is sitting next to you.
He’s eating three onigiri at once like he’s trying to settle an argument with hunger itself.
“You’re really calm,” he says around a mouthful, like it’s a compliment.
“I think I’m still in shock,” you reply, and take another bite anyway because eating is currently the only normal thing your body recognizes.
“That makes sense,” he nods. “First time I saw a curse, I almost threw up.”
“You seem fine now.”
“Oh, yeah,” he says easily. “I got used to it.”
You glance at him.
He says it like he's talking about bad weather. Not something that should have rewritten his understanding of reality.
A car passes. Someone laughs too loudly down the street. The city continues pretending it is normal.
“So,” you say carefully, “just to confirm—the thing in the alley that almost ate me—”
“A cursed spirit,” Yuuji supplies immediately.
“Right. That. Is that… a normal thing here?”
He hums, thinking, then takes another bite.
“Not really supposed to be,” he says. “But…” He hesitates, tapping his chest lightly like it means something. “Since I got involved, they've been showing up more.”
You don’t ask what that means, but you do file it away for later.
You are already learning that asking the wrong question in this world doesn’t get you answers—it gets you involved.
The convenience store door slides open.
Satoru Gojo steps out like he owns the street.
He’s carrying a small bag of snacks that feels too small given how many items appear stuffed inside. The blindfold is still on, but somehow you get the very clear impression he’s looking directly at you anyway.
“Still alive,” he says, sounding mildly amused rather than surprised. “Nice.”
“I didn’t really do anything,” you reply.
“That’s usually the safest way to survive around here,” he says immediately.
Yuuji waves. “Gojo-sensei! We got food.”
Gojo crouches without hesitation, plucks one of the onigiri from Yuuji’s hand, and eats it.
“This one’s cursed,” he says.
“It’s rice,” you say flatly.
“It’s metaphorically cursed,” he corrects. “Like your current life trajectory.”
You stare at him.
He smiles wider, like that reaction is the point.
You find your dislike for the man solidify. He drops down onto the curb like this is an entirely ordinary conversation and not a structural collapse of your reality.
“You’ve got potential,” he says suddenly.
“I don’t have anything,” you reply automatically.
“That’s what makes this interesting.”
Yuuji glances between you both like this level of conversation is standard adult behavior. It is not. You are fairly certain of that.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” you admit, because there is only so long you can stand next to reality bending without asking for a manual.
Gojo tilts his head slightly.
“That’s fine,” he says. “You don’t need to understand it yet. Survival comes first.”
You frown.
Somewhere nearby, a crow calls. A train hums in the distance. The world keeps insisting it is ordinary.
Then Gojo adds, almost offhand, “So. You made contact.”
Your stomach tightens.
“I touched it,” you say carefully. “Yes.”
“Mm.” He sounds like he’s confirming a note to himself. “And then your energy changed.”
Yuuji’s posture shifts slightly. “Is she okay?”
Gojo doesn’t answer right away.
That silence is worse than anything he could say.
“Well, I guess she’s not going to die or anything,” he says finally. “But she’s marked now.”
You frown. “Marked how?”
Gojo taps his own temple lightly, like he’s indicating something that doesn’t sit on the surface.
“When cursed energy touches you directly—especially something strong—it leaves a kind of imprint. Most people don’t hold it. It fades, or they die, or nothing happens at all.”
He shrugs slightly.
“And then there are people who stick. Like the system remembers them.”
“Stick,” you repeat.
“Bad word,” he admits. “Think of it more like… visibility. You’re easier to notice now. Not just by curses. By us too.”
Yuuji looks at you. “That sounds dangerous.”
“It can be,” Gojo says lightly. “But it’s not automatically a death sentence. Relax.”
“That is not relaxing,” you say.
“No,” he agrees. “It’s just accurate.”
You exhale slowly through your nose.
“So what happens now?” you ask. “Do I become one of you?”
Gojo shrugs.
“Maybe,” he says. “If you had cursed energy, we’d talk about training. Techniques. Structure.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you stay what you are,” he says. “Just… someone the world can see now.”
Yuuji is quiet for a moment.
Then: “That’s still dangerous though.”
Gojo waves a hand. “Everything here is dangerous. That’s kind of the job description.”
You rub your face once, tired in a way that feels too fast to have earned.
“Why does everyone talk like nothing is certain except the bad parts?” you mutter.
Gojo actually considers that for a moment.
Then he says, very matter-of-fact:
“Because we work in curses.”
And unfortunately—
That makes perfect sense.
----------------
Megumi Fushiguro is the one who explains things properly.
Or at least, as properly as anything can be explained when your understanding of reality has been permanently revised without your consent.
You meet him the next day at Jujutsu Tech, which turns out not to be a school in any familiar sense. It is a sprawl of old buildings and quiet courtyards, folded into itself behind layers of barriers you can’t see and don’t know how to name. Even the air feels slightly edited, like the world has been carefully persuaded to forget this place exists. GPS would probably refuse on principle.
Megumi is already waiting when you arrive.
He looks at you the way someone looks at a missing file that has turned up in the wrong folder.
“You’re the civilian,” he says.
“I prefer ‘accidentally cursed-adjacent person,’” you reply.
Behind him, Yuuji makes a sound that might be a laugh, then tries to hide it like it wasn’t.
Megumi does not react.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he says instead.
“That’s becoming a recurring theme,” you say.
From somewhere behind you, Gojo hums, pleased with himself. “She’s fine.”
Megumi doesn’t even look back. “She is not fine.”
“I’m fine,” you say automatically, because you are not going to let a stranger and a blindfolded menace collectively decide your condition.
That earns you a long look from Megumi. Not judgment, exactly. More like reassessment. Like he is briefly revising every assumption he has ever made about how reality is supposed to behave.
Then he speaks again, in a tone that sounds less like explanation and more like documentation.
“Exposure to cursed energy can leave residual imprinting on non-sorcerers,” he says. “Usually it fades. Sometimes it doesn’t.”
You blink once. “Doesn’t what?”
“Fade,” he says.
Silence settles after that, clean and uncomfortable.
Yuuji shifts beside him. “But that doesn’t mean anything bad will happen, right?”
Megumi looks at him for a moment that lasts too long to be reassuring.
Then he looks at you.
“It depends,” he says again, and you are starting to suspect that ambiguity is just how jujutsu sorcerers communicate.
Gojo claps his hands once, bright and abrupt. “Anyway. Orientation.”
There is no orientation, in any meaningful sense. There is only Gojo talking as if he is giving a tour of a system that was never designed for onboarding.
You learn about cursed energy—how it is born from negative emotion, how it gathers when people are not looking, how it eventually learns to take shape.
Fear. Anger. Grief. All of it, compacted into something that can move. Something that can bite.
You learn that Yuuji is currently housing a cursed object in his body.
You learn that Sukuna is not a metaphor anyone is being polite about.
You learn that Megumi’s shikigami are real enough to have moods.
All of this is delivered in a room that looks like it has been waiting, unchanged, since long before anyone thought to ask whether this kind of knowledge should come with safety warnings.
At some point, you realize your hands are shaking.
You fold them under the desk before anyone can comment on it.
Yuuji notices anyway.
Afterwards, when class dissolves, he falls into step beside you as if it was always decided.
“You’re okay,” he says.
“I am absolutely not,” you reply.
He considers that seriously, like he is weighing whether disagreement would help.
“No,” he says eventually. “But you will be”
It should be comforting. In a different world, it might even be funny.
Instead, it just feels like another small confirmation that you are no longer standing inside anything that can reasonably be called normal—and everyone else has simply adjusted faster than you have.
-----------------
The first time you are sent on a “simple observation mission,” it is with Yuuji and Nobara Kugisaki.
Nobara greets you by immediately informing you that she does not trust civilians, which she delivers like a sentence rather than an opinion. You point out, once you have the chance, that you also do not trust jujutsu sorcerers, so at least the feeling is mutual. She considers this for half a second and then decides, apparently, that this is perfectly acceptable.
The mission is described as low-risk.
That is the first lie you are told in jujutsu society.
The building is abandoned in the way abandoned places always are here—less like emptiness and more like something has been removed too quickly. The air inside feels wrong in a way your body understands before your mind does, like stepping into a room where something emotional and violent has only just finished happening and has not yet stopped echoing.
Nobara clicks her tongue almost immediately, the sound sharp in the hollow space. “Disgusting,” she mutters, as if the building itself has offended her personally.
Yuuji rolls his shoulders once, like he is preparing his body for impact rather than uncertainty. “Let’s just get through it quickly,” he says, trying to sound normal about something that very much is not.
Megumi is not with you. You later learn this is because Gojo “didn’t want to overcrowd the vibe,” which nobody is able to explain in a way that makes it sound like an actual reason.
You are increasingly afraid to ask what anything means in this world.
Something shifts ahead of you.
There's a change in pressure, like the room has remembered it contains something else.
Your instincts react before your thoughts do, pulling tight in your chest with a very clear instruction: leave.
There is nowhere to leave to.
The curse forms out of the dark in pieces that do not arrive in the right order, like a thought assembling itself incorrectly. It does not announce itself with sound or speed. It simply becomes present, and in doing so makes everything else in the room feel temporarily less real.
Yuuji steps forward immediately.
You notice, even now, that there is something different about the way he occupies space. Not confidence exactly. Something closer to inevitability, as if the world has already agreed to accommodate him and is simply waiting for him to move first.
“Stay behind me,” he says without looking back.
You almost laugh at that. Not because it is funny, but because it is absurdly predictable. Of course he does. Of course the boy who treats cursed spirits like something that can be met head-on is already deciding where you belong in the geometry of danger.
Then the curse moves.
And everything after that becomes motion that your mind cannot fully keep up with.
Sound breaks into fragments. Movement stops being linear. Nobara is suddenly there and not there at the same time, laughing once as she drives nails into something that should not be able to hold a physical shape, her expression sharp with something that looks almost like enjoyment if you don’t think about what she is doing too closely.
Yuuji takes a hit hard enough that your body tries to anticipate the impact just from watching it. He staggers, then corrects, like pain is an interruption rather than a stopping point.
And then, in the middle of all of it, you feel it.
Not contact in any physical sense.
Something colder. Wronger. Like static brushing against the edge of your awareness, searching for something it recognizes.
You stumble back a step before you even realize you have moved.
The curse turns.
Not fully at first. Just enough to register direction.
And then it looks at you.
Not like a predator choosing prey in the usual sense.
Like something that has encountered a pattern it recognizes.
The air shifts.
Nobara’s voice cuts through immediately, sharper than before. “Hey—stay away from her!”
Yuuji’s voice follows a fraction of a second later, strained but immediate. “Move—get back!”
But you already understand that it is not a question of timing anymore.
Because something in you has already been noticed.
Whatever touched you in that alley did not leave cleanly. It did not simply pass through. It stayed in a way that feels less like damage and more like residue—something the world can still read if it knows how.
And now this thing knows how.
You do not run.
You are aware, distantly, that you should.
But your body does not follow the instruction. Instead, it does something far more irrational, far more instinctive, and entirely unhelpful.
You step forward.
Not away from the curse.
Toward it.
And you are not sure, even in the moment, whether it is curiosity, instinct, or something inside you responding to the fact that you have already been seen.
-----------------
Later, Gojo will look at you with that particular kind of clinical amusement he reserves for things that are either deeply concerning or deeply entertaining and say,
“Oh. That’s interesting,” as if you’ve just turned up in a dataset he didn’t expect to include human consequences. Megumi will stare at you for a long time afterward with the faint, exhausted expression of someone who has personally been assigned a problem he did not volunteer for. Nobara, when she voices her opinion about it, will call you insane without hesitation—but there will be something almost approving in the way she says it, like at least you are being insane in a direction she understands.
Yuuji is different. He looks relieved.
Not loudly so. Not in any way he would be able to explain if you asked him to. It’s quieter than that, folded into the way his shoulders loosen when he sees you still standing, still intact, as if some part of him had been bracing for a different outcome and didn’t quite know what he would do if it happened.
It is only later that you realize that this is the first time you notice it—the way he looks at you. Not like you are an accident that wandered too close to something dangerous. Not like you are an intrusion into a world you were never meant to touch. But like you are simply… there. Present in a way that fits. Like you belong in the same mental frame as everything else he is trying to keep track of.
Like you are part of the equation instead of a disruption to it.
And that is where things begin to shift.
Not in any dramatic, declarative way. Nothing in jujutsu society ever changes that cleanly. It happens in the aftermath instead, in the quiet return to breathing once the curse is gone and the world has stopped trying to kill you for the moment. You are still standing there with your hands unsteady, still trying to convince your body that it is no longer in immediate danger, when Yuuji steps closer—not quickly, not urgently, but as if it is the most natural place for him to be—and takes your wrist gently to check if you are hurt.
And then he doesn’t let go immediately after.
------------------
You do not realize anything has changed at first.
Not because nothing is changing, but because everything already has. Your sense of normal has been so thoroughly eroded by cursed spirits, near-death experiences, and the casual existence of people like Satoru Gojo that there is no stable reference point left to measure anything against. What once would have registered as unusual now barely makes it past the threshold of “survivable,” and even that category feels increasingly flexible.
So when Yuuji begins to stand a little closer to you than he strictly needs to, you don’t immediately read it as anything meaningful. You tell yourself, almost automatically, that it is practical—tactical positioning, awareness of threats, the kind of instinct that makes sense in a world where danger can materialize out of negative emotion and bad timing.
When Gojo starts assigning you to observation missions that somehow, without exception, include Yuuji, you assume it is just another expression of his particular brand of chaos. Gojo being Gojo becomes a catch-all explanation for anything that does not fit neatly into logic or procedure. You stop interrogating it because interrogating anything in this world has a habit of making it worse.
And when Sukuna begins to surface at the edges of your awareness—his presence slipping through like a pressure change in the air, followed by that low, amused sound that is not yours and never will be—you simply refuse to acknowledge it at all. Not out of denial exactly, but out of necessity. There is only so much of this reality a person can actively engage with before something in them starts to fray.
This becomes your system.
Not a good one. Not a stable one. But a system nonetheless—built entirely on deflection, reinterpretation, and the quiet hope that if you do not name something too directly, it will not have the opportunity to become real in a way that forces you to respond to it.
And for a while, it works exactly as poorly as it sounds.
----------------
The first time it becomes hard to ignore, you are in the training grounds behind Jujutsu Tech.
It is late afternoon, the kind of light that makes even this place look briefly forgivable. Shadows stretch long across the worn stone and cracked practice posts, softening the edges of everything that is usually too sharp to feel safe. Somewhere out of sight, Megumi is off doing whatever it is Megumi does when he disappears—something efficient, almost certainly, and vaguely burdened. Nobara left for downtown Tokyo earlier under the stated pretense of “supplies,” which everyone politely understands to mean she is either shopping or committing emotional violence against retail pricing structures.
Gojo is not around.
That, in your experience, is never accidental.
Which leaves you and Yuuji.
Which, increasingly, is not unusual.
It is starting to feel like a pattern you were never asked to consent to.
Yuuji is working through cursed energy reinforcement on one of the training posts, the wood already split in places where his control has slipped and then been forcibly corrected by repetition. He strikes again anyway—careful, but not hesitant—like he is still negotiating with his own strength, still trying to learn where “enough” ends and “too much” begins in a world that does not forgive miscalculation.
You sit on the steps with Gojo’s notes spread out in front of you, though “notes” is generous. They are mostly sketches, arrows, half-finished diagrams, and one disturbingly detailed drawing of a cat wearing sunglasses. You have stopped trying to interpret them. That way lies madness, and possibly a quiz.
Yuuji pauses, shakes out his hand, and looks over at you.
“You alright?” he asks.
“I’m processing trauma,” you reply without looking up.
He considers this with the seriousness of someone trying to determine whether it requires medical attention. “That sounds worse than spacing out.”
“It is,” you say.
That seems to settle something for him.
After a moment, he walks over and sits beside you on the steps rather than across from you or below you, close enough that his shoulder almost brushes yours but doesn’t quite. The distance feels intentional in a way he does not comment on, as if he is adjusting himself around an invisible boundary he has decided to respect without ever naming it.
“You’re doing better though,” he says after a while.
You let out a short, disbelieving sound. “That is a very generous interpretation of what’s happening.”
“You didn’t panic on the last mission,” he adds, like this is objective data.
“That’s because I’m emotionally exhausted,” you reply.
“Still counts,” he says immediately, as if exhaustion is just another form of endurance.
You finally glance at him.
He is smiling—not the loud, effortless version you are used to seeing in motion, but something smaller. Softer at the edges. The kind of expression that doesn’t belong to fights or curses or emergencies, but to quiet moments that don’t demand anything from him except that he exists in them.
And for some reason, that is the moment you look away first.
It is a small thing.
But it is new.
---------------
It starts small after that.
Too small to name at first.
Yuuji begins walking you back to your room after training, always with an easy excuse ready—“it’s on the way,” he says, even when it very obviously isn’t. He shares food with you without thinking about it, slipping you the better half of whatever he’s eating, and when Nobara notices she reacts like he has personally violated a sacred law of friendship. He just laughs, unbothered, and still hands you the last bite anyway.
You stop commenting on it out loud.
Internally, you start noticing everything.
Because something is forming here—quietly, without permission—and you do not trust things that form quietly in a life like this. Not anymore. In your experience, patterns are never neutral. They are just delayed consequences pretending to be coincidence. And patterns like this tend to end the same way: something breaks, or something bleeds, or both happen so close together you can’t tell the difference.
Sukuna notices first.
It happens on a mission in an old apartment building on the edge of Tokyo, the kind of place that feels like it has been left alone long enough for the air inside to forget how to move properly. The silence there is wrong in a way that clings to your skin, heavy and stale, like the building has been holding its breath for too long and is waiting for permission to exhale.
You are not supposed to be inside.
You are inside anyway.
That, too, is becoming a pattern.
“This is still a terrible idea,” Megumi says flatly, standing slightly ahead of the group with his shikigami already forming at his side.
“You said that last time and we were fine,” Nobara replies, rolling her shoulders like she is preparing for something she fully intends to enjoy.
“You were almost swallowed by the curse,” Megumi says without looking at her.
“And I wasn’t,” Nobara adds firmly, as if this is a meaningful distinction.
“That is not reassuring,” you mutter.
Gojo is not physically here, but his presence is still implied in the way everyone speaks about the mission, like somewhere far away he is watching this unfold with the mild curiosity of someone deciding whether it will be funny later. You can almost hear him: this will be educational.
The building groans around you.
Something inside it shifts—slowly, deliberately—like a thought trying to remember how to become real.
Yuuji moves slightly in front of you.
It is subtle. Almost unconscious.
But you notice anyway.
You always notice now.
The curse emerges wrong.
Not just in shape or presence, but in awareness. It does not feel like an animal or a force so much as something that understands it is being perceived and does not like it. The sensation crawls under your skin like static, like the moment before a storm decides whether or not to become violent.
Megumi’s voice tightens. “Special grade?”
“No,” states Nobara, “But it’s getting close. Annoyingly close.”
The curse moves.
And everything breaks at once.
Yuuji is the first to react.
The world collapses into motion—impact, cursed energy flaring, Megumi’s shikigami cutting through the air in sharp, controlled arcs. Nobara is laughing again, that sharp, exhilarated sound she only ever makes when things are going badly enough to be interesting.
And you—
You feel it again.
That cold static at the edge of your awareness.
Except this time it isn’t scattered.
It is focused.
Looking.
You stop breathing without meaning to.
The curse turns its head.
Directly toward you.
Megumi shouts something you don’t fully register. Yuuji’s voice cuts through louder, sharper—
“Don’t touch her!”
It is not tactical. Not procedural. Not something that belongs in an instruction manual or a battle plan.
It is instinct.
Protective.
Immediate.
And the curse responds to it.
Like it understands what matters in the room.
Like it recalibrates.
Something in the air shifts—too sharp, too aware—and your mind translates it, unwillingly, into laughter. Not Yuuji’s. Something older. Something folded inside him like a blade left in bone.
The change is subtle if you don’t know what you’re looking for—an expression that doesn’t belong, a smile that doesn’t sit right on his face, a distortion in presence rather than form. It is still Yuuji. Still his body, his voice, his movement.
But the attention in it is wrong.
“Oh?” Sukuna says, amused, his voice slipping through the shared space of Yuuji’s consciousness like something testing the edges of a locked door. “This one again.”
Your blood runs cold.
Your body recognizes him in a way your thoughts can’t catch up to.
“What do you mean?” you whisper under your breath.
The curse lunges again.
Yuuji intercepts it—but for half a second, his focus fractures.
Just enough.
Just long enough for Sukuna to notice the shape of you properly.
“She’s interesting,” Sukuna says, almost conversationally, like he is making a note he intends to remember. “You didn’t mention you’d picked something like that up.”
“I didn’t pick anything up,” Yuuji snaps internally, strained, like something inside him is being pulled in two directions at once.
Sukuna hums, faintly entertained.
And then—
The curse hesitates.
Not because of Yuuji.
Not because of Megumi or Nobara or the pressure of cursed energy filling the room.
Because it is looking at you again.
Like something in it recognizes you in a way that should not be possible.
Like something in you is answering back.
You step back without thinking.
Your heel catches on broken tile.
Too small a movement.
Too loud in the silence it creates.
Yuuji is in front of you immediately.
Not suddenly in a supernatural sense—no blur, no impossible speed—but decisively, like a choice made before thought finishes forming. He is simply there, body between you and everything else, one hand raised.
Not toward the curse.
Not toward the fight.
Toward you.
Blocking.
Not the attack.
Not the threat outside.
But the fact of you being seen by it.
That realization lands harder than anything else in the room.
You do not like it.
You do not like it at all.
--------------------
Afterward, everything resolves the way jujutsu missions always resolve—violently, incompletely, and with the lingering sense that something important has been left unresolved on purpose rather than by accident. The curse is gone, or at least no longer present in any way that can immediately kill you, which is generally the closest thing to closure this world offers.
There is always blood. Not always yours. Not always anyone’s you can name yet. But always enough to suggest that whatever happened will matter later in a way nobody is willing to explain in the moment.
Gojo arrives at the end of it all as if summoned by narrative necessity rather than anything as inconvenient as timing.
“Good job, everyone,” he says brightly, surveying the aftermath like someone reviewing a mildly interesting report.
Megumi looks like he is one sentence away from committing arson out of principle alone.
Nobara is wiping blood from her knuckles with the casual precision of someone already deciding what she is going to complain about for the next three days.
Yuuji is breathing hard beside you, shoulders rising and falling as the adrenaline starts to drain out of him in uneven waves.
And you—
You are standing slightly behind him.
You do not remember deciding to do that.
That is what bothers you most.
Gojo’s head tilts, just slightly, in your direction. It is not dramatic. It is not even particularly obvious to anyone who isn’t already paying attention to him too closely. But you are, and you notice the exact moment his attention settles.
“Oh,” he says.
Just that.
One syllable. Light. Measured.
But it lands like something has shifted shape without announcing itself.
You hate that sound immediately.
Yuuji notices your reaction before you have time to control it.
Of course he does.
“You okay?” he asks right away, already turning toward you, voice lower than it was a moment ago.
“I’m fine,” you say too quickly.
Even to your own ears, it doesn’t sound convincing.
He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t press. That is not his way.
Instead, he just looks at you for a moment longer than necessary—long enough that you start to feel it in a different part of your awareness, long enough that something in your chest tightens without asking permission.
Then he says, quietly, like it is not meant to carry weight and therefore somehow carries more of it:
“Stay close.”
It is not an order. Not really. Not in the way orders exist in Jujutsu Tech, where everything is usually filtered through Gojo’s particular brand of chaotic authority or Megumi’s reluctant pragmatism.
This is something else.
Something simpler.
Something personal enough that it does not fit cleanly into any category you would prefer it to belong to.
And that is exactly what makes it a problem.
Because Sukuna notices too.
The shift is immediate—not loud, not physical, but present in the way attention itself seems to sharpen inside Yuuji’s awareness.
“Oh,” Sukuna says in your mind, almost delighted, as if he has been waiting for a pattern to complete itself. “That’s what this is.”
Your stomach drops so sharply it feels like a physical misstep.
You do not respond.
You do not ask what he means.
You absolutely do not ask.
Because asking would mean acknowledging that there is something to understand.
And understanding, in your experience, is rarely something that leaves you better off.
------------------
It gets worse after that.
Or better.
Depending on who you ask—and more importantly, depending on how willing they are to be honest about it.
Nobara is the first to say something out loud.
“You’re always with him,” she remarks one afternoon, without preamble, while Yuuji is off training with Megumi somewhere out of sight.
“I’m not,” you answer immediately.
She looks at you with the kind of flat, unimpressed stare that suggests she is already tired of the conversation before it has properly begun.
“You are.”
“I’m really not.”
“You are,” she repeats, like she is correcting something factual rather than debating it.
You hesitate.
Then try again, weaker this time. “…that’s not evidence.”
“It's an observation,” she says simply.
You open your mouth.
Close it again.
Because the problem is not that she is wrong.
It is that she isn’t.
And that, more than anything else, is what makes it impossible to argue with.
---------------
Megumi doesn’t say anything for a long time.
It is not unusual for him, but in this case the silence feels different—heavier, like something unsaid has been placed between you and left there deliberately, without anyone bothering to explain what it is meant to become. With Megumi, silence is never empty. It is structured. Intentional. The kind of quiet that suggests he has already reached conclusions and is simply deciding whether speaking them out loud will make things worse.
Which, in your experience, it usually does.
So when he finally does speak, it catches you off guard.
It happens after a mission that ends the way too many of Yuuji’s missions end: with him not quite dead, which everyone pretends is reassuring enough to count as success. The details blur together in the way they always do afterward—too much motion, too much cursed energy, too much of that sickening moment where the world narrows down to a single point of impact and then expands again into aftermath.
Now you are sitting outside the infirmary.
The bench is cold beneath you. Your hands are still clenched in your lap without you meaning them to be, fingers locked tight enough that your nails press small, dull crescents into your skin. You do not remember when you started doing it, only that you cannot seem to stop.
The door behind you is closed. On the other side, Yuuji is alive.
That is what everyone keeps saying, as if repetition can smooth out the edges of what it cost to get him there.
Megumi drops down beside you with so little warning that, under different circumstances, it might have startled you.
As it is, you’ve spent enough time around Jujutsu High to accept that people here tend to appear the way bad news does: abruptly and with no regard for personal space.
He doesn’t say anything at first.
Just settles onto the bench, shoulders slightly hunched, his hands shoved deep into his pockets as he stares out across the training grounds. Evening has softened everything into long shadows and muted gold, but there’s nothing relaxed about the way he sits. Megumi always looks like he’s bracing for information he doesn’t particularly want.
For a while, the only sound is the distant thud of impact from the far side of the field, where someone is probably getting thrown into a wall for educational purposes.
Then, without looking at you, he says,
“He gets like this sometimes.”
You glance over. “That is wildly unhelpful as a sentence.”
Megumi doesn’t react to that.
His gaze stays fixed ahead, expression unreadable in that particular way of his that somehow manages to look thoughtful and deeply inconvenienced at the same time.
“When he decides he cares about something.”
The words settle strangely.
Not because they’re dramatic. Megumi doesn’t do dramatic.
Because he says them like they’re obvious. Like this is a pattern he’s seen enough times to recognize on sight. There’s no judgment in it. Just quiet certainty.
You look down at your hands, suddenly aware of how carefully neutral you’ve been trying to stay about all of this. About Yuji showing up where he doesn’t technically need to be. About the way his attention seems to find you even in crowded rooms. About how impossible it is to tell whether he’s being obvious or whether that’s just what sincerity looks like when it’s stripped of self-consciousness.
The thought lands somewhere uncomfortable.
“What exactly is that supposed to mean?”
This time Megumi glances at you.
His expression doesn’t shift, but there’s something faintly assessing in it, as if he’s deciding how honest to be.
“It means,” he says, “once Itadori decides someone matters to him, he doesn’t really know how to do that halfway.”
The air feels cooler all of a sudden.
You let out a breath you hadn’t realized you were holding.
“That’s a mildly terrifying thing to say so casually.”
Megumi looks forward again.
“Yeah,” he says.
A beat passes.
Then, with the same flat tone:
“You should probably get used to it.”
You don’t answer before the infirmary door opens.
The sound is small compared to everything that has happened today, but it cuts through the moment anyway. Metal latch. Soft movement. The shift of air as something inside the building decides to become part of the outside again.
Yuuji steps out.
Bandages wrap parts of him in uneven lines. Bruises bloom beneath the skin where the world hit back harder than it should have. He looks exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with survival.
And still—
He sees you first.
His entire posture changes.
Not dramatically. Not like a performance.
Just… release.
Like something in him had been holding itself in place, waiting, and finally decided it was allowed to stop.
The sight of it does something to your chest that you do not have language for. Something sharp and immediate and entirely too honest.
Sukuna laughs from somewhere inside Yuuji.
And this time it is not amusement.
It is recognition.
And hunger.