Chapter Text
Although you could never really describe a Jujutsu Sorcerer's life as normal, the day was about as typical as days got since everything went to hell.
She wakes up to her phone ringing at about three in the morning. One hand fumbles for the device while the other snags her white coat from her baseboard. She slips it over her clothes from the day before; she'd only been asleep for maybe three hours or so. The suit on the other end of the line informs her to get to Kyoto as quickly as possible. An alumnus needs her expertise.
From Kyoto, she's ferried a city over, where she meets three injured sorcerers that have been shipped in for her to fix. And the day slogs on. Patient by patient, gory sight by gory sight, Shoko's driven, carried, and flown across the country, eventually landing near the coast of Shizuoka. There, she finally finagles herself a decent smoke break.
She stands on the fire escape of the hotel and leans on the rail. She's conscious of the building's cameras but not bothered by how she isn't supposed to be out here. Her cigarette is mostly gone, and the delicate churn of RCT in her lungs mingles with the nicotine.
Since Satoru was sealed, it really all went to shit. It wasn't that Shoko had a particularly good work-life balance before, mind. She just managed on five or six hours of sleep every night, along with some naps, instead of the head-splitting two or three she gets now.
All the curses the Six Eyes kept at bay with his existence crawled out of the woodwork. All the most minor curse-users thought they could be the next Geto Suguru.
More curses meant more work for already overloaded sorcerers, not to mention the mountain of assignments Gojo's disappearance created on its own. More work for the sorcerers meant proportionally more work for Shoko. Lower-class sorcerers were forced to fight higher-class curses, too, and their short-handedness as a society became a glaring issue, especially when you considered everyone they lost in Shibuya. Near-fatal injuries skyrocketed to truly untold heights.
Shoko puffs one last time on her cigarette. The smoke curls towards the sky and almost shimmers in the afternoon haze.
Satoru, she thinks, you really left a mess behind for the rest of us.
-
The first time Gojo teleported her, Shoko threw up.
Teleportation with Limitless feels like being squeezed through a pasta press. Or like those Star Trek teleporters, where you're broken down into your most basic components and reassembled. Geto always said it was like an assault of sensations, but Shoko thinks it's like a brief absence of all sensations. The return to the world where you can abruptly feel the air and the sun and your own body is so overwhelming after a moment of non-existence that it makes you nauseous.
This incident wasn't quite like Limitless. With his perpetual infinity, Gojo crackles with cursed energy. So before he uses a technique, you can almost taste it in the air, like the feeling right before it starts to rain. His presence goes from overwhelming to overbearing.
Before Shoko disappears, there's no warning, no influx of energy, no curse bursting from the shadows.
She puts out her cigarette on the rail and lets the stub fall into the alley below. She straightens up and stretches her back. She turns and takes a step forward, intending to start down the stairs. When her foot lands, she's gone.
-
The people here are not curses, no matter how much they look like it. This place is home to a truly exotic population: people with objects for heads, extra limbs, horns, antennas, and inhuman body parts. There are also more humanoid people, but they're distinct with unnatural hair, skin, and eye colors. It almost feels like Shoko is the one out of place with her brown hair and brown-green eyes and only having two arms and legs.
But the monsters here are not curses, because they have no cursed energy. It feels like nothing does. That omnipresence of suffering all sorcerers struggle to block out, that normal people can't sense but looms like a storm cloud over all their heads, that darkness curses were birthed from, is absent. Just gone. Like Shoko was.
She wanders down the street and tries not to stare. She's so confused and concerned and half-convinced she's trapped in a Domain that she goes right over the state of panic and straight into apathy. Shoko always feels things this way, she has since she was small. She reaches some maximum threshold of emotion and stops feeling entirely.
Her world may be different, but she's the same. Apathy is her best friend.
-
Musutafu does not exist.
Shoko glares at the screen in front of her. The search results remain, staring right back at her without wavering. She sits in a library in Musutafu, and this city does not exist. Should not exist.
When Shoko was barely in junior high, before everything, she memorized all the major cities in Japan for her geography class. It was a competition her teacher set up. Whoever could name the most cities next Friday would get a prize. And little, determined Shoko with feelings too big for her chest and her hair cropped in a truly horrific pixie cut, just knew that more people would be friends with her if she were cool enough to win.
Memory is a funny thing. Fickle. Things you memorize in key developmental years tend to stick around, like how you seem to remember the lyrics to all the songs you loved as a kid, no matter how grown you get. To this day, Shoko can stroll down memory lane and recite all the major cities of Japan. At the culdesac is the crushing realization that few wanted to be friends with the know-it-all, either.
Musutafu is a large city with skyscrapers and lots of development, and she passes at least three construction sites before she stumbles on the library. Crowded with people. Thrumming with life. A major city. And it should not exist.
Also, she's more than a hundred years flung forward in time. Imagine that.
The apathy settles deeper.
-
The man behind the front desk is plain looking by this world's standards, which is to say he has blue yarn for hair and otherwise looks human. His hair—yarn, string, whatever—is as long as Geto's and rolls over his shoulders. He looks young, maybe mid-twenties, and he's all smiles and pleasantries for her when she walks in.
"Welcome," he says, and waits for her to step up to the desk. His eyes flick over her form.
"I'd like to book a private room."
It won't be the most comfortable stay, but it will be cheaper than a hotel. Without a source of income or Jujutsu society to fall back on, she needs to be careful with what she has.
"Of course. Are you a member with us?"
"No, I'm not."
She reaches up to twirl a strand of hair around her finger and meets air. Too short. She aborts the movement, instead tucking what she can behind her ear. Her hands twitch back down.
"Would you like to sign up to become a member?" he asks. "It makes it easier to book rooms in the future, and you become eligible for some discounts the longer you're signed up."
Her ID says she was born in 1989, which she expects will not fly here. "That's alright. I'm just staying a couple nights while I'm in town."
"Not a problem. What would be a good name?"
"Ah—Ieiri Shoko."
He rattles off the basic costs as he types in her name. Shoko fishes out the check-in fee from her purse, having to nudge her cigarettes aside.
Fascinatingly, yen is the same. She's honestly not expecting acceptance at the nearest internet cafe to the library, but he doesn't even blink at her cash.
(She carries more around than anyone should. Satoru has a habit of pressing bills into her palm whenever he sees her, usually without acknowledgment of the action. He picked it up some time after Geto left. She thinks it's because he can't verbalize anything he feels. It's not like Shoko ever presented herself as an outlet, anyway, always turning tail and going to smoke when serious discussions broke out. The money is easy love when they don't know each other well enough anymore to buy good gifts.)
"Alright," he says as he passes her a room key. "Here is your key. You're all good to go; you'll pay the rest of the cost when you check out on Friday. Do you need any amenities?"
"A toothbrush and toothpaste would be great, thanks."
He smiles warmly at her. "Color preference?"
"I don't care."
"Understood," he says in a jokingly serious tone. He collects her items and passes them to her in a small paper bag. "Anything else?"
She hesitates, then leans in to put her forearms on the edge of the desk. The man doesn't lean back, just looks at her, eyebrows raising by the smallest amount.
"Actually, I'm having a bit of trouble with my phone. I didn't see any payphones on my walk here, so I was wondering if you knew where I could make a call?"
"A payphone?" He laughs, leans in. His breath smells like fresh mint. "You must be from somewhere pretty far away. There haven't been payphones since, like, my dad was little."
"My bad." Shoko slumps, trying to appear smaller and younger, and blinks up at the man helplessly. "I don't mean to be rude; I just don't want my friends to worry. Would you mind if I...?"
He winks at her, already retrieving his cell. It's a slick model and very thin, though not new-looking. The screen is scratched, and one corner of the case is cracked. He passes it to her with the phone app pulled up.
"Here you go. Just put your number in it when you're done, yeah? For when you get your phone fixed."
Shoko giggles without affection. Her face drops the second she turns around. She thinks she's probably older than this guy in reality, but. She's not in her right...body...anymore. And she's definitely too young for him like this.
Her fingers automatically move to dial Satoru's number. No use with that, obviously. She calls Yaga instead.
"Hello? Takeo speaking," a feminine voice answers.
Shoko hangs up. Calls Utahime. Nobody answers. The only other number she has memorized is Nanami's, and that's pointless, too.
She returns the cell with a random number input as "hers" and a phony laugh on her lips, making up something about late hours and trying again tomorrow.
"Sounds like a good idea. I'm Furukawa, by the way. Furukawa Masumi. Where are you headed after Musutafu?"
"Oh, you know," she replies as she steps back. "Around."
"Ahh. You're a refugee, right? Don't worry, I won't tell anyone."
Shoko purses her lips. "I'm not. Just visiting the city briefly. Tokyo's next."
"Is it? That's cool. Lots of neat quirks to see in Tokyo, you know. Mine's the yarn, obviously." He scans her body again. "What's yours?"
Unsure how to explain Reverse Curse Technique to a non-sorcerer (non-sorcerer? He has powers, but he doesn't know about cursed energy), she simplifies. "I can heal people."
His eyes go wide. He quickly controls his face, lowering his eyebrows and fixing his smile, but it's like something dislodged in his surprise, and there's a certain intrigue or hunger to his expression that wasn't there before.
"Really? Just, like, little stuff though, right?"
"Yeah." Her mouth feels dry. "Just little stuff. Look, I'm pretty tired—"
"Oh! Of course, of course." He waves her off. "Please, go ahead. I work all week, so I'll see you tomorrow. Take care."
"Thank you."
She feels his eyes on her all the way to her room.
-
The following day, she doesn't leave. She spends the full day abusing her internet access to expand on what she learned at the library.
She's essentially been isekai-ed into a bizarre, superhuman society of sorcerers. Almost everyone is born with cursed energy, called "quirks" here, that allow them to perform unnatural feats like manipulating clothing fiber or transforming into a dragon or (why is it all so weird) literally being a washing machine. In Furukawa's case, having yarn for hair.
Certain people in this world, the strongest among them, take up a career as a superhero professionally. A "Pro-Hero." It was a career born from the need to combat people using their powers to commit crimes, this world's "villains," since cops aren't allowed to use their techniques...for some reason.
"History," she mutters under her breath. "I hated history."
It all started with a glowing baby in China.
-
She pays to use one of the shower rooms just to put on the same clothes again. Like her body, her outfit thinks it's a teenager again, and she runs her thumb over the swirling button on her uniform until it becomes her fingerprint.
The cafe isn't a very fancy one, which is good for her wallet when she gets cheap, hot food, and bad for her privacy. The room separators aren't real walls, and they don't touch the ceiling. Her second night, she wakes up to the feeling of eyes on her. Furukawa leers over the barrier between her room and the one beside her. Yarn dangles down, longer than it was yesterday, inches from brushing her leg.
They make eye contact. The yarn retracts, magically shortening, and he disappears without a word. She doesn't go back to sleep.
-
The morning hours Shoko has before check-out lead her down an unfortunate rabbit hole. It starts with simple curiosity about how her RCT might fit into this world. As it turns out, "healing quirks" are very rare and highly sought after.
The most famous healer is Shuzenji Chiyo, AKA Recovery Girl. She was extremely popular in her prime because she went out in the field more than any other healer before her. She's since retired from active heroics to be the school nurse at U.A. High School, the most renowned Pro-Hero school in Japan. Majority opinion online says that deciding to serve at U.A. was the best decision she could have made. It gave her the full protection of U.A.'s faculty roster, all active or semi-retired Pros. Bodyguards, essentially, that she lacked as an independent hero, which was a point of serious concern for the public.
Healing quirks, when they do pop up, are mostly "minor": powers that only work on papercuts or headaches, or ones with more specificity, like blood-replenishment without being able to heal the actual wound. Recovery Girl is apparently over-powerful by a significant margin, coming from a long line of famous healers before her, and her family's been targeted relentlessly by...traffickers.
What a strange notion.
In Jujutsu society, it's similar that few people can use RCT, and even fewer can use it on other people. Shoko's the exclusive doctor for basically all of Japan's sorcerers, since Okkotsu filled a different role and was abroad anyway. (He also didn't have a degree, thanks.) But their worlds differ sharply in that only Jujutsu sorcerers know about sorcery. Trafficking like what she's reading about just isn't possible in a small community.
Oh, there were kidnapping concerns. Particularly concerning Shoko after Geto defected. For a brief period of time, the higher-ups were convinced he was going to break in and whisk her away to serve his cult. She'd never spent so much time with Yaga's cursed dolls in her life.
There'd been passing concern about the recent band of curse-users wanting her, but for all her ability is highly respected, it isn't coveted quite the same way as it seems it would be in this world. It's not like the Zen'in or Gojo clans ever fought over who got to...have her...she was just expected to help all sorcerers who were hurt.
It made sense, sort of, that when the entire world's population were sorcerers, and when there was such a big emphasis on the "Heroes vs. Villains" thing, people who could help the heroes out were treated like treasure. Like a hot commodity. Almost a prize. Heroes whose agencies had in-house nurses and doctors with minor healing quirks were praised for keeping them safe and ruthlessly torn apart if anything happened to them.
Something about a Pro named Endeavor losing a healer on his staff.
The more Shoko looks, the sicker she feels. But it's a distant ailment, almost intangible, that curls in her gut. A feeling she can acknowledge is there, but her mind isn't really letting her feel. The information didn't sicken her, but it sickened her.
Recovery Girl never married and had no children of her own. When that point was brought up on the internet...? Wow, did people think she was selfish for not "passing her Quirk on." The argument usually fell along the lines of "she's so valuable she should have shown her gratitude for the safety she's been provided by having children who could've continued her valuable work when she passes." A sentiment growing each year as Recovery Girl gets older and older.
As young as she is, it certainly seems like Shoko would be on people's radar, to put it lightly. She exits the comments under a young photo of Recovery Girl as quickly as she can.
Apparently, a generation or two back, something called a "Quirk marriage" was popular: buying a partner for access to their quirk in the hope of bearing children with powerful abilities.
Ideas like these weren't all that strange. God, just look at the big three clans and the basic principles were all the same. Responsibility to have children to inherit strong techniques. Specific breeding for more cursed energy. The need to get stronger, be better, with each generation.
Funny, just how familiar it all was in a world so different from her own.
-
Furukawa almost doesn't let her leave. He finds every single excuse he possibly can while checking her out. The register stops working for a good ten minutes until he reboots it. He needs to know this and that and the other thing. He counts her cash very, very slowly.
Shoko weathers it unflinchingly. She doesn't giggle or pander anymore; she regrets ever having done that. With all she's learned the past two days, she regrets telling him her "quirk" and definitely regrets telling him her real name. Hopefully, he's just a creep. Nothing more will come from this.
She finally gets out the door, and that's that.
-
The shadiest part of Musutafu is along the coast. The docks there are notably worse than the docks in the rest of Shizuoka, and jobs that pay cash and don't ask questions are easy to find if you're willing to accept less than minimum wage. All in all, she scores a decent gig under a middle-aged man named Nishiyama Kei. He runs a smaller warehouse on the docks that exports and imports giant, unmarked crates of various, mysterious goods. She's pretty sure it's illegal drugs.
...She's certain it's illegal drugs.
Nishiyama needed a manager for inventory after his last one "suddenly quit," and Shoko knew how to count. He accepted her sob story of bad parents living further inland that she wanted to get away from and paid her shit for too many hours. The only upside is that he doesn't use the tiny office on the upper floor of the warehouse.
It used to be a factory, making shoes, he said, before the business went under. The office is decrepit and dusty as hell when she first moves in, but she gets to live in it at no cost. Well, the cost is the other half of the goddamn wage she should be getting, but it was illegal to hire her anyway, and she doesn't even have any valid paperwork. Nishiyama pays cash and never asks for an ID, so she doesn't complain about the fixer-upper. At least it's a roof over her head.
One major downside is her fellow employees. Nishiyama only needed one person keeping track of the crates, meaning all his other workers are physical laborers to load and unload shipments. They're all men. Broad, muscular, middle-aged men who stare at her a little too long and make passing comments about being more "motivated" since she was hired.
Part of her is fine with the attention. She's twenty-nine, technically, and some of the workers are her age. But her body? Her body's young again. Her hair's a nice length bob, so she must be at least fourteen, but she's skinnier and near gangly, not like she was when she filled out before graduation, so she can't be older than seventeen. She'd peg herself at around her first year of high school. Probably fifteen, when everything was easy and she had two best friends and nobody fucked off and died.
The Shoko these guys were looking at was not twenty-nine. It's...uncomfortable. Easily ignored, but uncomfortable.
Not every worker is a sleaze, though. Some are just down on their luck.
"Good morning, Ieiri-chan," he greets her every morning.
Morimoto Masa is about seventy, but as fit as twenty, kind-faced with greying hair, and a bit of scruff on his chin that gives him a western grandfather appearance. He's twice divorced and has three daughters, two from his first marriage and one from his second. He treats Shoko like she's twelve, but when she smokes in front of him, he never says anything, just looks at her sadly until she puts it out.
"Morning," she replies.
When they take short breaks, usually five or six minutes, Morimoto stands between Shoko and the other workers. She accepts the protection without acknowledgment, just a quiet sort of gratitude she hopes the older man feels.
-
U.A. High School, second to none, operates by the machinations of the mysterious Principal Nezu and functions entirely without government support. Where, exactly, all its funding comes from is an ongoing debate that rages on conspiracy boards. Shoko reads them religiously for three days one week and comes out the other side unsettled, but largely on U.A.'s side. It seems the Hero Public Safety Commission may be the lesser of two evils, if the internet wack jobs are to be believed.
There's no reason for Shoko to look into U.A. other than trying to learn the culture of this world. U.A.'s Sports Festival is this country's Olympics, and their Heroics department dominates hashtags online when the third years go out on the town. Their staff is half celebrities, the most famous being their primary English teacher, Present Mic, who runs Put Your Hands Up!! Radio. U.A.'s social impact is not to be downplayed.
Outside of blending in, though, there's no reason. No reason for Shoko to know that their classes are split into four departments. No reason for her to study the faculty roster. No reason for her to look up the enrollment requirements and stare at them late at night when she can't sleep.
She supposes...Well, she is bored.
Her cursed energy is starting to inch under her skin. It's not meant to be bottled up; it's negative energy. Even Shoko's, whose output is positive. Stuffing all that darkness inside you is a recipe for disaster. She can feel it writhing just under the surface.
She's always worked to the bone, sometimes pulling her last dregs of energy to heal just one more patient before she crashes. Jujutsu society is a violent world, even more so than this one. She's never not healed people for this long before, not since she was really small and had too little cursed energy for it to matter.
If she goes on like this, either her own powers or her boredom is going to kill her.
-
"What do you think you're doing?"
Shoko jerks her head up. A cigarette dangles from her lips, half dead, and her hair has gotten a bit longer than it was when she first arrived. She has one hand in the crate before her. It's different than the others because it's marked. A small symbol was quickly drawn in black marker on the corner. Five circles in a vertical line, and then two more mirrored on either side of it, aligned horizontally with the second and third circle down.
Inside the crate was mostly stuffing. Right in the middle are two small, black briefcases. They were unlocked, so she snapped one open. Five tiny, green canisters rest within. They look like they might be loaded into a syringe or something, like little vials of a liquid, but they're opaque, so she can't tell what's in them.
Nishiyama stands with his arms crossed a few paces from her. His look is mean and unforgiving.
"Whoops," she says, already stepping away.
He snaps the case shut with a snarl. The briefcases are repositioned inside the crate before he drags the lid over it. Turning to Shoko, he jabs a finger into her face.
"Listen to me, little girl. You're messing with things you don't understand and don't wanna be involved with. I'm gonna pretend this didn't happen, because, honestly, you're not so bad. Not even bratty, for a kid. You do good, honest work here, okay? I don't wanna have to find someone else who isn't a total moron. But you pretend you never saw anything here. You understand?"
"I understand."
That night, she slips out of the office and into the main warehouse. She opens the other briefcase. The canisters inside this one are red.
-
Morimoto asks, "Could I join you for lunch? I brought an extra bento."
"Sure. Thanks."
He passes her the blue bento, keeping the green one for himself.
Shoko sits on a stack of two crates. She likes the height; it forces the workers, who are all taller than her, to look up at her when they list their counts.
Morimoto settles on the crate beside her, a level down. "How has your week been?"
"Boring," she laments. "Same old."
"One would think you'd be in school right now. February's just started."
"To go to school," she replies blandly, "I'd need paperwork."
He clears his throat. "About that. I may know a guy who could help. You know, forge you a junior high diploma so you can go to high school."
She decidedly does not want to go back to high school. Are you crazy? Re-entering a mass of teenage hormones and feelings as her almost-thirty-year-old self sounded like actual hell.
(She hasn't felt very old lately. It's a weird feeling. She thought it was just nostalgia at first, but what is there to be nostalgic about when she doesn't recognize anything around her? This is something else. It's a feeling of youth that's like gum in her hair.)
"You deserve to go to school," he continues. "A good school. Look, I have some money saved up, alright? And I'm old, and I don't exactly have anyone in my life willing to talk to me. None of my girls want a cent of my money. My wives even less. Let me get you this paperwork, and I'll pay your tuition in April, and you can go to any high school you want. Let me—I'm old. I'm old, okay? Let me do a good thing with my money before I pass."
Poor as she is, alone as she is, she can't find a reason to reject his generosity.
-
Gojo's sealed. His teleportation is probably her only hope. What are the odds she ever gets back to her world? By the time they free Gojo, if they free him, the trail to find her will be long cold.
Satoru, she thinks, you really left me behind, you know.