Archive of Our Own

Maki Zenin stands at the edge of 400-meter crater that was once the center of the Tokyo Department Honten Store. Around her, the city is flattened in a 400-meter radius of scorched earth. Beyond that, blackened high-rises hang open like old carcasses against the clear winter sky, their glass exteriors skinned down to the steel and concrete skeletons beneath.

On the charred ground beneath her is a fresh corpse: Humanoid, flesh mottled like a drowned thing, with eight arms, and two faces. (So many of the nightmares that gestate here have two faces.) It’s rapidly disintegrating to particulate matter, its blood steaming out of her clothes and hair. A special grade cursed spirit aborted at its moment of predicted apotheosis because the Split Soul Katana—when in Maki’s hands—moves too fast to see.

Floating a few yards away, watching her heal like a malevolent djinn, is Rika. Yuta Okkotsu’s shikigami partner, even at partial long-distance manifestation, is a dangerous opponent for anyone and the dead cursed spirit found that out directly when they blitzed the thing together. With nothing now to attack, Rika stares at Maki with puzzled indifference.

Shikigami as a rule don’t feel things. Not properly. They’re more like programs than people, their personalities a gestalt of learned behaviors rooted in time and seeded context. The more context, time, and input from their masters, the more ‘personality’ each summon may have but at the core, shikigami are affable tools.

‘Rika’, in Maki’s opinion, might be the exception.

Maki’s breathing hard, the hot vapor from her breath clouding and drifting away, her muscles vibrating with the afterglow of impact and the cellular burn of her healing factor. She took a nasty hit direct to her center of mass to ensure her kill shot. Worth it to one-shot the thing, but ow. A little.

The euphoria, she knows, is a side effect of regen. Her Heavenly Restriction doping her on shot of adrenaline and dopamine to launch her into over-drive and sudden death in the likely event that serious injury means she needs to kill a bigger predator. Makes her a little giddy, if she’s honest.

It’s probably why she thinks it’s funny when Rika starts to drift toward her, then slowly circle her, orbiting silently just out of arms reach.

Creepy damn thing.

Maki’s long since grown accustomed to Yuta’s shikigami, horror-show that it is, a floating Frankenstein torso, lipless piano-key teeth and a bloated corpse-flesh accordion for a head. A goddamn xenomorph. She’s used to the little girl’s voice and sociopathy. She expects the shikigami to dismiss itself now that’s its completed Yuta’s directive to help her win the fight.

Instead, it lingers, tilting its head back and forth at her.

“You’re not going?” Maki asks, sheathing her sword.

Rika tilts ‘her’ head again, then asks curiously, “Did you eat her?”

Maki can’t remember the last time Yuta’s summon has ever spoken to her. She knows it sometimes talks to Toge Inumaki, but only because it’s used to him. Something about Rika getting more friendly with the people she’s fed on. (Toge hates it intensely.) Rika, as a proxy for Yuta’s cursed technique, exists to consume on some level. It makes sense she might be curious about the eating habits of others but…

“Did I eat who?” Maki demands.

Rika’s mouth gapes slightly, a grin crooking the corners of her mouth on meat hooks. “Your twin. It feels like you ate her.”

Maki, for a moment, considers attacking Yuta’s shikigami.

She’s not sure what would happen honestly if she did that with the Split-Soul Katana. Rika’s never been wholly destroyed in combat before. Yuta’s never seemed concerned about it, but that split second of uncertainty—the fear that killing ‘Rika’ will kill some part of Yuta— stays her hand.

Then the moment passes and, with it, the anger.

“You’re kind of right.” Maki tucks her sword under her arm. “Mai died to make me stronger.”

Rika floats a little closer, like a cat sidling up to a mouse. “Are you like me?”

“What do you mean, Rika?”

“She died and left you. Like the real Rika died and left me.”

“I’m not a shikigami.”

“I didn’t say you were, stupid half-girl.”

Maki feels a sick lurch of fascination, like tonguing a rotten tooth and chasing the jag of nerve-pain until it blinds you. She turns to face Rika properly, letting the predator-thing circle her, the cold wafting off her energy-dense body like the open door to a morgue. Maki’s breath gets icy on her lips.

“Does Yuta know you’re talking to me like that?”

“No.” That horrible grin again. “He’s too far away and we are just talking.”

“You’re misbehaving then.”

“You’re empty and ugly.” Rika giggles. “She took all the good parts with her.” Rika giggles again. “You ate the weaker twin.”

In her mind, Maki draws her dead sister’s blade and kills Yuta’s summon. In the curse-ruined streets of Shibuya, however, Maki snorts a laugh and before she can think better of it, she reaches up and pats Rika on her bulbous waxy head. She grins huge at the big eldritch creature who looks genuinely baffled to be patted. It’s almost cute.

“Wow,” Maki enthuses, “you’re a real bitch. You’re not wrong. But you are a bitch.”

Rika giggles. “I’m going back to Yuta.”

“Sure, Rika.”

Rika giggles even more, like a little kid telling a joke again because it got a laugh the first time. “You should kill yourself. Maybe something even better will be left.”

Rika vanishes.

Maki, intellectually, knows she should be angry. She should tell Yuta that his vicious shikigami did something awful because, she knows, it would horrify him. He would want to intervene. She should give him the option to intervene. She should tell him about the bleeding awful slit the words have opened in her belly and how, as she sits with the wound and waits for it to scab over, it seems hemorrhage faster.

She should tell Yuta that Rika found a nerve and ripped it out with her teeth.

She should tell Yuta it hurts.

What she does instead is laugh so hard it leaves her doubled over in the street, laughing until her eyes water and her ribs ache. When it’s over, she wonders what the ever-loving fuck is wrong with her. Then she goes home. She showers. She eats a bag of potato chips all to herself and thinks about being twelve, hiding with Mai the woods behind the estate and secretly eating convenience store junk food until they got sick.

When Yuta gets back from a staff meeting at Jujutsu Tech, he looks tired. To be fair, he looks perpetually tired in a models-that-do-cocaine kind of way, except it’s damage from sleep-dep and stress as a child. The dark under-eyes are permanent. It makes Yuta Okkotsu pretty the way something fragile is pretty; he seems delicate, pale, the skinny kind of muscular that looks starved and easy to bruise.

Maki likes that.

That he doesn’t look an inch like what he’s capable of.

“Hello, Maki. Sorry.” He rubs his neck drowsily. “We ran late. Again.”

When she gets closer to him, Yuta smells like the dispenser soap they have in the on-site gym and—compelled by a sense of possessiveness she cannot explain—she ignores his tired greeting and instead meets him, runs her fingers into his dark, slightly damp hair and kisses him so thoroughly he stumbles back into the door jam.

Yuta’s cute when he gets flustered.

He blushes and stammers, for fuck’s sake.

(He’s currently the most powerful jujutsu sorcerer of their generation.)

She thinks she can make him beg.

“Uhh, Maki? Are—” he clears his throat— “are we doing something or—?”

Her stomach hurts. Has been hurting since Rika opened her mouth and said, “You ate the weaker twin,” but the hurt is like fever, a literal ache in her gut. Useable, if she’s willing.

When she pushes Yuta against the wall of her cramped apartment and starts pulling his jacket open, she feels relief in the way his teeth fit to her shoulder. Fucking Yuta Okkotsu until her nerves glow is medicinal, orgasm like anesthesia unraveling from her belly to her brain, pinning him down in her bed, being pinned down in kind, trading off, until he dizzily tells her they have to sleep at some point.

“You work too many shifts,” she tells him, licking a bit of sweat from his temple, using her fingertips to rake his hair back from his brow. He’s too tired to notice her study the stitch-scar on his brow. (He’s self-conscious about it, but she thinks it’s interesting. Evidence of how far he’s willing to go.) “Tell them to fuck off. Sleep in tomorrow.”

“I can’t!”

“You can, nerd. Call in sick.”

“But—”

“Nerd. Goody-two-shoes.”

She kisses him when he protests this abuse. Bites at his lip to nip the words away and swallows his laughter. (She does not tell him.)

Six months later, Maki realizes there are some logistical drawbacks to moving in with your boyfriend who loves you; like the fact he’s there all soft and full of adoration when you’re vibrating out of your skin thinking about punching holes in your rental house because you get absolutely crawl-the-walls restless sometimes and he doesn’t.

Yuta is happy to have quiet, to sit with a mug of tea and stare, for example, at the beautiful interplay of shadows from the tree outside their second-floor balcony and a patch of sunshine moving across the floor.

Maki… does not want to do that.

She wants (small mercies) to watch Yuta do that, but she doesn’t get what he sees in it. She can only appreciate the things they have because she can see Yuta loves them and, in that way, she has become fond of the home-goods dishes that Nobara gifted for the housewarming party. Or the nice family set of handmade Kyoto chopsticks Miwa provided. Or the ugly dumbass set of mugs Yuji excitedly dumped on them. (Megumi just gave her a gift card, thank fuck.)

It’s starting to be a problem—how only Yuta seems to love things.

Maki would like to say it has nothing to do with the gaps where silence gets in and she must examine the phantom limb Mai Zenin has left her, flexing like a finger around an invisible trigger, pulling perpetually toward her own temple. Maki has not ever touched a gun. She’s sure she never will because she would hate to find out Mai’s final words – “Destroy it all, big sister.” – included her.

“Maki?”

Yuta’s hovering. He does that.

Maki can admit now that she likes it that he haunts her, like the sweetest ghost that ever once upon a time was an existential threat to small nations… is still a threat. There’s a file on her boyfriend in multiple governments around the world that say, “If you hit him with ballistic missiles, it probably won’t do anything but hurt his feelings.”

“I’m heating up water. Do you want some tea?”

“Yeah. That’d be great.”

Successfully tasked, Yuta disappears to do that and will reappear shortly with exactly her blend of green tea in her personal mug. It’s not that she actually has a favorite mug, but about two months into cohabitating Yuta noticed her go for the same mug (the round one with cats on it) a few times and now that’s ‘her’ mug.

She does not give a shit about the cats on the mug.

She does not, you know, give a shit about mugs in general

She does give a shit that Yuta thinks she does.

Maki resumes eating a family-sized bag of chips all by herself, sitting cross-legged on their cozy blue couch crammed into the living room of their respectable three-bedroom rental house. They have moved all their worldly possessions into this house like a normal couple with a normal life and normal jobs… and realized that between the two of them they only own enough worldly possessions to fill one bedroom.

Most of the possessions are Maki’s weapons.

The rest of the possessions are just Yuta’s clothes.

“This is a little embarrassing,” Yuta had remarked on moving day, rolling up to the apartment with one large rucksack and just three storage totes. “I have hobbies, you know.”

“Like what?”

Yuta opened one of the tote boxes and—crammed in beside the winter clothes and extra shoes—revealed a small stack of art supplies, specifically a bound set of old sketch books, pencils, and a jar of homemade eraser putty. This is how she found out Yuta’s primary way to deal with solitude when he was younger was sketching people and places from a safe distance.

Maki’s not an artist.

She can’t say if there’s something deeply artistic in Yuta’s drawings, but they are extremely technically accurate—copying, apparently, goes beyond his cursed techniques—but Maki finds that there is tangible longing in the details. Special attention in how he crosshatches the shadow on a salaryman’s suit jacket, or the furrow in the brow of a street vendor at a cross-street in Sendai.

In those books is evidence of what she already knows: Yuta likes people even if he’s bad with them.  (He likes people enough for the both of them she figures.)

Yuta reappears with the cat mug full of green tea and puts it down on the coffee table. When he does, it brings him in close enough for her to reach up and catch his forearm.

“Hmm?” he says, but she’s already tugging him down to her.

Here is the thing that she loves and hates a little about how Yuta’s brain operates: She’s never met someone with more empathy for others. Yuji Itadori comes close, but Yuji’s got a mentally healthy streak of selfishness that snaps taut in time to keep his personal boundaries in check.

Yuta gets… caught up.

It’s part of the reason his first relationship went quietly and undramatically by the wayside. Inumaki, when asked why exactly the two of them didn’t work out long-term, said a little cautiously that, Even though we were never super serious, sometimes, it was hard to tell how much of him loving me was even his idea.

Maki shelters, for now, in the knowledge Yuta had a crush on her first and that crush persisted through several years of her ignoring him as a romantic entity at all.

Yuta kisses her, then says, “We got a job request.”

“Exclusion Zone?”

He nods.

“It’s bad if they’re asking us both to patrol.”

“Either one of us could probably handle it, but we’ll get it done faster together. Kusakabe’s put a rush fee on it. They want us out there tomorrow at the latest. What do you think?”

Maki considers, nodding politely and making agreeable noises while pulling at Yuta’s waist, reeling him in and watching his expression go from fondly business-like to grinning. She feels him leave off his cursed energy reinforcement so she genuinely overpowers and pulls him down, laughing, to his side on the sofa so she can crawl over him and kiss his neck, his ear, his temple.

“We need to answer Kusakabe-sensei at least.” He admonishes her, squirming, doing nothing to escape as she pushes him onto his back beneath her. She settles straddling his stomach and he folds his arms, mock scolding her, “People could be in danger, you know.”

“People are always in danger—” she kisses at his pulse point, feels his laugh in his throat against her lips—"but if it was urgent, they’d flag it.”

“Okay, but—”

She reaches over, takes his phone, unlocks it, and messages: Tomorrow. 8am. We’ll both hit the zone. Send the brief and window rendezvous. She gets a reaction thumbs up and tosses the phone to investigate the grin Yuta is giving her. He tends to laugh as a lead into intimacy and, not that she ever gave much thought to romance, she never imagined an easy laugh in a life partner.

Mai wouldn’t have liked him for me.

The thought comes easy as she gentles a kiss against Yuta Okkotsu’s mouth. She feels him gather her hair in his fingers, tucked up behind her head as he pulls her down closer.

Maki is distracted, thinking, But Mai would have loved this house. Like Yuta loves this house. It’s got enough light for house plants. All her goddamn cactuses.

“Maki?”

She kisses her boyfriend and stops thinking about anything at all.

Sometimes Megumi Fushiguro has heinous screaming nightmares and calls Maki in the middle of the night, hounding her to talk to him on the phone until he can ‘get it out of his head’. In these dreams, he’s drowning in a black ocean, the water pressure crushing him inward until he’s in a fetal ball that threatens to break every bone in his body. Then, when he cannot move or breathe or do anything to fight what happens next, the water in his ears starts to roar.

Then the roar turns into noise, and the noise reorders itself until it sounds like Tsumiki Fushiguro screaming as she dies in ways so horrific Megumi once threw up trying to explain it to her.

He knows it didn’t happen like that of course. His nightmares are high-definition and over the top. Slasher movie shit. Reality was much more brutally banal. But loved ones dying was part of the torture reel that Ryoman Sukuna mainlined into his soul while he was possessed and, like a dented car roof, bad things pool in the damaged parts of his head.  

Megumi doesn’t talk about it much.

Or maybe he does, but not with Maki.

She’s honestly not sure why it’s her he calls when he’s paralyzed from missing his big sister and terrorized by the thought of her violent and unnecessary death. She’s not sure what he wants her to say, and she’s never once felt that she did an adequate job comforting him. (Seriously, why does he call her for this?) Despite her deficiencies, he calls her from the floor of his apartment at one or three or five AM, voice sleep-thick and ragged, and says:

“Maki, can we talk?”

Usually, she just sits on the edge of the guest lavatory bathtub, the fan on high so Yuta doesn’t wake up hearing her voice. Then she’ll drone in a pointless loop for an hour about her day, about a mission she had, or dinner with Nobara, or a quarrel she picked over laundry detergent. She just monologues at her cellphone, in her underwear, heel drumming on the linoleum floor until her cousin (okay, first cousin once removed) starts breathing normally.

Eventually, she’ll ask, “Do you need me to come over?”

And he’ll say, “No, of course not.”

And she’ll say, “Text Itadori. You know his dumbass will run out there.”

And sometimes, very rarely, Megumi will admit, “I fucking miss her. I miss her so much it hurts.”

Maki finds those nights the worst, if she’s honest.

She wants to tell Megumi to suck it up and get a grip, how the best way to get over your dead sister is to try to never think about her or mention her and eventually the space between the times you remember that she’s dead and never coming back will grow until you barely think about her at all and that’s called moving on.

Except that’s not true.

Maki will do a lot to shut her cousin up, but she won’t lie to him. She won’t promise him that the space between grief will grow because lately she finds herself accosted in tighter and tighter intervals by the specter of Mai Zenin—buying soda from a vending machine, or picking onigiri from a FamilyMart, or riding on the commuter train. Grief is a bullet and she keeps getting shot.

“Hurting means you haven’t forgotten her,” Maki said the last time he asked her about grief as injury. Recklessly, she declared, “It’s not a bad thing to be in pain sometimes.”

There was a pause.

And he said, “Is that how it is for you?”

And she said, “Don’t ask stupid questions.”

The next morning, a pint-sized grandmother tugs on Maki’s sleeve on the 7:35AM train to downtown. The train isn’t terribly crowded, but she took the seat by Maki anyway. She’s very nearly bent in half with age, her fingers crepe-papery and crimped on Maki’s jacket.

“Yes?” Maki says.

“Pardon me deeply, but aren’t you—” she lowers her voice and Maki leans down to let her whisper in her ear— “Miss Maki Zenin? From the showdown?”

Maki nods. “Yes, ma’am, that’s me.”

“Oh, I thought so. Well, don’t mind me. I’m sure you’re busy.”

Maki tilts her head. “Are you living in the exclusion neighborhoods, grandmother?”

“Ah, just moved back. My house was evacuated after the Shibuya Incident, but they just cleared my street for re-occupation.” She waves a wrinkled little hand in a shooing gesture. “My sons are very concerned about me moving back, but I say, ‘Who cares. I’m old. I’ll die like I want.’”

Maki grins but says, like a responsible jujutsu sorcerer, “I think your sons are right to be a bit nervous. Low-grade cursed spirits are common out here.”

“Well, I live next door to a nice window girl—Miss Ayase is her name—who works for the street watch division. She checks in on me, dear.” The old woman leans in like she’s letting Maki in on a secret, “Honestly, I feel for her. She obviously doesn’t like all the scary things she can see and yet, here she is, checking my basement for evil spirits.” A sigh. “Young people really have it hard these days.”

The train pulls into their stop.

“It was good talking to you, grandmother.” Maki stands up. “Maybe we’ll see you around.”

“Oh, I hope so. You have a good day now.”

“She was nice,” says Yuta once they’re safely on the platform.

He’s wearing a beanie to hide his forehead scar and has his katana in a kendo staff carrier. In his running shoes and athleisure wear, he looks like he’s off to a local martial arts competition. He looks so normal she could cut him out of this place and drop him somewhere else. In another life entirely and far away from her.

He beams. “Ready?”

Maki nods, but she’s thinking about the window girl.

She’s thinking about holding her sister’s hand and walking across an empty street while Mai clung to her and cried again about the things she could see that Maki could not. Grotesqueries writhing in the liminal spaces where negative emotions eddy like old leaves. If Mai had survived, the world would have still grabbed her by the neck and made her look regardless.

Maybe, really, there was never any other way…

“Maki?”

Yuta’s tilting his head at her.

“I’m ready.” She elbows Yuta in the ribs, flashes a grin and is grateful, as usual, that she has no cursed energy to give away her negative emotions. “Don’t rush me. Who do you think you are?”

“I think,” he says, hooking his arm through her elbow and pulling her in a little tighter, “I’m going to run late if we don’t hurry.”

They emerge on the street level and find their ride into the Exclusion Zone, a large man in a military-adjacent uniform standing by a heavy black SUV. Yuta, dutifully, reaches into his wallet to show the driver his license, but the stoic man in the suit simply opens the door.

He says, dryly, “That’s not necessary, Yuta Okkotsu. I… know who you two are.”

“Oh, uh, sure.”

“You’re such a loser,” Maki says observationally.

“You’re dating me,” he points out, getting into the vehicle.

“Being a loser isn’t a transitive property. I’m still awesome even if you’re a hopeless dork.”

Here’s how the world looks now: There’s spiritual wound in the center of Shibuya and Shinjuku. A double-loci for the near-miss apocalypse; this extreme concentration of fear produces cursed spirits like weather, spawning endlessly into the massive wasteland district now called The Tokyo Exclusion Zone. There are news channels dedicated to reporting on its condition with the psychological goal of making cursed spirit activity as boring as the Doppler radar.

Despite this, global netizens have started to call it Spiritual Chernobyl.

It’s now the public responsibility of the Japanese government to keep this ongoing threat to humanity under control. International pledges of support have been drawn up. Article 8 has been repealed and replaced with budget sheets, tax funding, and official permitting for jujutsu sorcerers; the kind one might give a fire fighter or a municipal exterminator.

Damn, Maki thinks. All this drama to be basically a kaiju-class ratcatchers.

Their driver drops them off approximately four blocks through the second barrier ward near a half-demolished shopping center and then speeds back toward Entry Point 23, leaving Maki and Yuta in the no-mans-land between the first and second ward lines.  No electronics work right this far inside.

They’re on their own now.

“Where should we start?” Maki unslings the Split Soul Katana from her shoulder, unzipping it from its carrier.

Yuta’s already got his weapon strapped to his hip, stretching like he’s just arrived at the gym. His body-language is lazily reluctant; like someone warming up for a workout when they’d rather be in bed. Maki takes a moment to eye him up while he’s not looking. She can’t decide if Yuta’s lost weight or just developed a lot of lean muscle lately. She’s not sure if that’s a sign of anything.

Yuta says, “There’s a swarm that’s moving toward Entry Point Forty and a special grade behemoth manifesting somewhere near the Shibuya Scramble.”

“Again?” she sighs.

“A lot of negative energy built up there.”

“I can deal with that,” she says, buckling Split Soul to her back. “You have cursed speech on deck?”

“Yup!”

“Then you take the swarms. I can take Rika with me as back up for the behemoth.”

Yuta looks at her. “You’d like to?”

She shrugs. “She’s reliable.”

“Alright. Rika?” Yuta turns his head as if talking to someone behind him. “Can you come here?”

He’s barely finished talking and Rika’s suddenly hovering at his back. Like a light turning on, the floating dead-thing appears. (Like the shikigami is always waiting and ready, eternally, for him to call.) She immediately nuzzles her master’s shoulder like an enormous cat and he laughs, letting her get it out of her system before she drifts further afield, batting at a swarm of low-grade spirits like an over-eager cat.

Faker, Maki thinks.

“You’re going with Maki on another mission. Rika. Do what she says and protect her at all costs, okay?”

“Okaaaaay.”

A beleaguered grade schooler could not drag the word with more reluctance. Rika orbits the two sorcerers, circling tighter until she’s coiling Maki in a way that feels like a little kid about to shout, ‘I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!’. Maki can see Yuta observe this and get visibly puzzled.

“C’mon,” Maki says, setting off for her destination.

Rika drifts after her like an evil balloon.

“Love you! Be careful!” Yuta calls.

“Love you! Go kill stuff!” Maki returns.

Then they both take off in opposite directions toward their chosen targets for the day. Maki is honestly sick of this neighborhood, once famous for being the Times Square of Tokyo and now famous for being the epicenter for Kenjaku’s failed Armageddon. The entire world’s anxieties are concentrated here. As Maki races up the side of a building, shimmering spirits peel off the glass and concrete, filling the air like a flock of shimmering many-eyed birds.

This place is a teeming primordial soup for the supernatural.

An amniotic bubble for evil shit.

Probably bad she finds it dull.

The cursed spirits can’t sense Maki, but they do react to Rika. Not like they’d react to a human being of course, but they acknowledge the shikigami’s cursed energy. Maki hits the roof at a run, flinging upward, then landing on the edge of the building to contemplate her path toward Shibuya Station.

Behind her, Rika says, “I don’t like you.”

Maki, who has heard some variation of this dozens of times since she’s started pairing off with Rika, says, “I know, but go ahead and me why.”

“I don’t want to help you. I want to help Yuta.” She’s petulant today.

“Helping me is helping Yuta.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is. If we kill this thing quickly, then we can go home and Yuta will be happy. And that makes you happy. So, stop whining.”

“You don’t care about Yuta.”

Maki’s heard this one before too. “Whatever you say.”

“You can’t care about Yuta.”

That’s a new one.

Maki turns her head to regard the creature, who drifts out over the edge of the roof, hovering over the twenty story drop to float face to face. Maki eyeballs her. She’s been working with Rika long enough to know that they must be at least a kilometer away from Yuta, which is when their two-way connection starts to fray a bit. Yuta can call Rika, but he can’t tap into her senses. Rika can always sense what’s going on with Yuta no matter the distance, but for now she’s safe to act badly in the one-way blind.

She’s figured out, after all this time, Maki doesn’t tattle.

Maki says, “Why’s that?”

Rika says, “She took it with her. You’re pretending you still have it.”

Maki feels that stomach-ache again, like a hunger pang but worse.

“What do you mean? What did she take?”

“Your heart.”

Maki blinks. “I didn’t tell you that.”

“I listen. Always. Mai took all the love. You don’t have any left.”

Maki tilts her head. “Isn’t that what the real Rika did to you?”

She half expects the shikigami to go ballistic, to deny it, to go full paradox manic on her and scream that she does love, that she’s real. Maki experiments putting her thumb down on this button just to see if she’s anything as vicious as the old Rika… but the shikigami simply tilts her grotesque head, the corners of her bloodless mouth pulling back further from the lipless rows of teeth.

“I am better than love. I am instructions. Protect him. Forever and ever. That’s what I am.” She leans in a little too close. “What are you instructed?”

Destroy everything.

Rika is near enough to touch while Maki doesn’t answer. The vertical folds like the slats on cell-shade curtains start to peel open and a dozen sickly yellow eyes blink out from Rika’s swollen skull, all jittering and fixed on her. She giggles in her breathy sing-song voice and whispers like a secret between siblings:

“You don’t love anything anymore, big sister.”

Maki feels her breath catch.

“The hell did you call me?”

Rika clacks her blunt-toothed maw at Maki.

“Say that again.”

Rika keens. Her voice gains a strange texture, less the mean schoolgirl and something more mature as she intones, “You’re rotten, Maki Zenin. You’re bad inside. You were bad for her. You’re bad for him. Bad for everything. You should go away forever.”

Maki, transfixed, says, “Yeah?”

Rika withdraws then, whispering. “You’re going to destroy it all.”

“What else?” Maki says. “Rika. What else?”

But Rika doesn’t answer.

Rika goes quiet and a little translucent. Maki knows she’s still there, but she’s done playing now. She’ll stay like that until Maki instructs her to come out for combat or assistance.

Maki tries not to feel frustrated.

She will need an excuse to try again.

She’s not sure how much the programming left by the original Rika Orimoto is simply saying what she wants to hear or communicating something novel. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Yuta’s shikigami is unique in all the jujutsu world. There’s so much that’s unclear about how she works and what, exactly, she’s tuned into when she speaks. Sometimes, Maki thinks the real Rika gets a word in through the veil, and she wonders if the dead can pass notes through the fence like that. 

But there’s no proving anything.

Yuta gets a bit of a headache later that night and falls asleep on the couch with his head on her thigh, her fingers combing his dark hair rhythmically from his temple. He feels a little feverish to her and she wonders, not for the first time, if running Rika long distance for long periods puts strain on him. Even an unconscious one.

Maki runs with Rika as backup so often now, she should really tell him to take a break from it or at least stop taking so many damn jobs for Jujutsu Tech. Like they need a goddamn nuke every day doing pest control…

It’s 2AM suddenly.

“What on earth? Why didn’t you wake me up?” Yuta is flabbergasted as he lifts his head, still groggy, scrubbing a wrist over his cheek, dimpled by the denim in her jeans. “Maki! You let me pass out on the couch for four hours?!”

“You needed it.”

“You’re sitting the dark like a lunatic!”

“How dare you. I’m being a sweet and accommodating domestic partner.”

“Who are you and what did you do with my beloved and extremely mean girlfriend?”

“Watch it.”

“I said ‘beloved’.” He starts to nuzzle her shoulder.

She sighs for drama. “You’re lucky you’re hot. Bed. Now. For real this time.”

She picks a fight with Nobara.

There’s no other way to say it, Maki sits in Kugisaki’s new apartment, on the adorable barstool selected exactly to go with the granite-top kitchen island and watches her dear friend excitedly unpack. She demands Maki’s opinion on every little thing—the arrangement of the couch, the rug, the gallery photos, the color of the mood lighting, and whether she can bully her landlord into letting her have a cat.

Two hours pass this way. Incandescently pleasant. Nobara has provided a junk food smorgasbord just for her. There is wine and pizza. Despite all these perfect offerings and Nobara’s unfettered cute aggression, Maki picks up her glass of plum wine from the kitchen counter and says:

“Why? Are you trying to speed-run your endgame to crazy cat lady?”

Nobara pauses amid fluffing a large bouquet of flowers. (A home-warming gift Yuta sent with Maki.) She squints at Maki with her one good eye, looking like a pajama party pirate with her eye patch and pink PJ-shorts and crop-top sweater.

“Hey. Why are you being a bitch?”

“I’m not. I’m just saying there’s a trajectory—” Maki raises her hand arches it down— “and you’re on it.”

“Yeah, that’s real bitchy.” Nobara resumes fluffing her bouquet, unbothered, but eyeballing her. “What’s up your ass? We were having fun. You’re acting weird.”

“You’re being a baby.”

“No, I’m not. I’m telling you—” Nobara whirls dramatically, pointing at her and half-yelling— “Your attitude’s rotten right now! What’s your deal? I am absolutely rocking this hostess thing and you’re being a jackass!”

Maki pauses.

She inspects the plum wine in her hand and she says, “You know it’s not me that likes this stuff right?”

Nobara, geared up for a fight, deflates a bit. “Huh?”

“It’s Mai that likes plum wine.”

Nobara, now in a minefield, says, “Oh.” She looks at the bottle on the counter. “It’s just what I had left over from the housewarming party. I have other stuff if you want.”

“No.” Maki downs the glass, sugar-sweet and mild. “It’s pretty good actually.”

Nobara drums her nails on the kitchen counter, her pink manicure click-clacking uncertainly. Then she says, “Are you okay? You seem off.”

“I’m fine.”

Nobara comes around the counter and hops up on the fancy stone tabletop, scooting so the back of her bare knees touch the edge. Maki sits there, watching her, agreeably enveloped by the scent of her expensive body mist and excellent shampoo, admiring passingly that Nobara’s pedicure matches her manicure—pink with little gem accents.

She wonders if Mai spent at least some of her time in Kyoto doing things their mother would have hated, like going to hair salons and getting gel-print nails. She hopes that Miwa and Nishiyama were sisters to her, though she suspects Mai would have bared her fucking fangs at them for trying.

“Maki?”

“Hmm?”

Nobara gingerly takes the wine glass from her fingers.

“You’re crying, Maki-senpai.”

“I’m what?” She touches her face and her fingers come away wet. “Oh. Well… what the fuck.”

“You didn’t feel it?”

“No.”

Nobara’s brow knits. “You sure you’re okay? You drunk or something?”

Maki rubs her damp fingers together. “Yeah. I think I’m just kind of restless lately. Like there’s something I haven’t finished…”

Nobara drums her nails on the granite.

“I mean… it’s September. It’s been almost two years exactly since—” a pregnant pause— “everything happened. Shibuya. The Culling Game. The rest.” She eyes Maki. “So… if you mean 'destroying the Zenin Clan', girl, that is finished. The extended family are all the weakest offshoots of the bloodline. You and Megumi are, basically, the last full-blooded Zenin with any sway or hereditary power and all the money is yours. You win, bitch. Let’s toast.”

“It's not that. Not exactly."

“Okay, then what’s eating you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that’s it.” Maki puts her fingers in her mouth, licking the salt from her skin like she expects to taste something off. “Hmm… Maybe I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do next. I did at sixteen what I thought would take my whole life.”

Nobara inspects the wineglass in her hand, tosses it back, and reaches for the bottle. When she does, her crop-top rides up and gives Maki a very clear view up her shirt where she can see a little birthmark like a star along the soft under-curve of her right breast. She sits back normally and pours herself a generous helping and drinks it from Maki’s glass. Maki can she her own lip-print on the rim where Nobara’s drinking from.

Her stomach starts to ache.

Nobara exhales loudly, the glass near empty. “Maki, that’s everyone right now. Megumi’s listless as shit. Itadori’s manic, chasing Okkotsu around tryna protect everything. Everyone is exhausted. It’s like… yeah, it’s not stressful like we’re all gonna die anymore, but we all did the biggest thing we’re ever gonna do. You know?”

She grumbles noisily.

“We killed Sukuna. We tore down Jujutsu Society. What do I do now? Laundry?”

She chugs the rest of her wine and kicks her heels.

Maki isn’t sure they’re talking about the same thing. Nobara’s ennui makes sense. She suspects her own species of malcontent is less neatly ordered. What’s eating her feels foreign, fungal, rotting its way in. Accelerating. But she nods, folding her arms on the counter. She angles a look up at the one-eyed sorceress.

“I think I’m just wondering if what we ‘killed’ is just playing dead. We didn’t kill everyone, after all. I wonder—” Maki sits up a little, flexing her shoulders like a cat and sighing— “should we do some more damage?”

Nobara frowns. “I think we’ve done plenty.”

“I dunno… there are a lot of bureaucrats trying to control Yuta right now. They’re pushing him, you know? The branch heads of the Zenin Clan are starting to rumble now that Megumi is almost eighteen.” Maki cracks her neck. “Lots of people I don’t know or like trying to corner people I care about…”

Nobara snorts. “I mean, okay, let them try.”

Maki laughs. “You’re not trying to talk me down?”

“Talk you down? From what? Killing these fuckers if they pull some shit?” Nobara rubs her chin with her perfect fingers, her one pale auburn eye going thoughtfully along the ceiling. “Nah. I’m not stopping you.” She looks at Maki. “But you gotta finish what they start. Not start the shit yourself. You understand?”

Maki clicks her tongue and sits back, swiveling her chair a little.

“Last time I did that, Mai died in a pool her own blood, Kugisaki.” She shrugs. “I’m not really comfy waiting around…”

“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned her,” Nobara says, not distracted by her threats of violence. “And that’s not the same. Don’t do that. I’m being serious.”

“So am I.”

“You better not. Don’t joke about that. It’s not just you affected. Gojo killed those higher ups to bring the new blood to the table and even if they’re fuckers too, they’re scared. That’s what we want. Scared useful fuckers who negotiate with us. Not dead fuckers.” Nobara stares at her for a long moment. “You can’t destroy everything you know.”

Maki stops.

Her stomach clenches like someone’s twisting two fists in her entrails, wringing her guts like a towel. She smells ocean air and blood. Then her palm is latched to the narrow part of Nobara’s thigh, just above her left knee, and her other hand is on her hip. She’s on her feet, stepping between Kugisaki’s legs and that doesn’t seem right.

She hears herself already saying, “I can settle for destroying just a few things…”

Nobara grabs her shoulder, hard. There’s cursed energy in her palm. Her fingers dig icy cold into her collarbone.

“What the hell?”

Maki tilts her head at her. “What? It’s not been that long since we—”

“You’re with Yuta now.” Nobara’s looking at her with anger on the verge of being something else— fear or disgust, Maki’s not sure which and not sure why part of her wants them both. “I’m lots of stuff, but I’m not a homewrecker. What is this?”

Maki laughs, moving her hands to the counter on either side of Kugisaki’s thighs, her fingers tense with the effort of not cracking the fancy countertops. She can see Nobara’s mixed response through her Divine Restriction—every response frame by frame—the surprise at the touch, the dilation of pupil, shortness of breath, and the clench of muscle all signaling a jump of arousal… then anger at the source.

“We have an arrangement,” Maki offers, far too late.

Nobara’s not having it. “I don’t care if you have a binding vow to fuck nasty and hall passes for days; I don’t like this weird energy you have right now. What is going on with you?”

Maki rocks back, stands straight, and raises her hands, palms out. She’s externally rock-steady in a way her heartrate—beating through her goddamn chest—is not.

“Nothing,” she says. “Just letting you know what’s an option.”

“Well, knock it off.” Nobara's cursed energy flares, a rush of negative emotion so strong it spikes past her considerable control. “I don’t know what this is, but you stop. Right the fuck now.”

Maki lowers her arms.

“Sorry.” She stares at her palms, empty, though she thought she’d felt something in her hand. “I… don’t know why I did that,”

Nobara, skittish now but casting desperately for a lighter tone, says, “Well, I am a fucking snack but I’m a country girl. Third-wheeling would be new and exotic and you really fucked up that pitch.” She tosses her hair and crosses her legs. “Anyway, get it together.” A pause. In a softer tone, she says, “You can talk to me you know. I think you know that but… just saying.”

Maki sits back down, folds her arms on the counter, then rests her cheek over them. For a moment she goes inward, making a catalogue of every fiber that makes up the dark matter void of her body. She is a dead battery in a thrumming network of cursed energy, an opaque mass that even domain expansion regards as an object.

She thinks of Mai’s construction technique.

She thinks of Mai dying to build one last weapon and wonders if she fucked it up thinking Mai’s final build was something inert as a sword. Maki wonders if they both died and like Rika Orimoto left a weapon in her image, Mai did something similar with her.

She feels Nobara’s hand on her hair. Her fingers smell like rose-perfume. Maki can smell the components of every ingredient. She can detect the oils in Nobara’s skin and the tension of muscle in her fingers and the vibrato of the mechanisms of the body that all make up the human being beside her.

All of it tells Maki, down to the cellular level, that she’s scaring her friend a lot right now… but despite that—despite all that—Nobara doesn’t go anywhere.

“I’m okay, Nobara.” Maki says it without lifting her head or opening her eyes. “Just… had a moment. Sorry.”

“Maki. Seriously. Is there something you want to talk about?”

She shakes her head.

“Okay, if that’s all you’re gonna give me, you get one strike.” A pause as Nobara considers her options, then: “For real though, do you and Okkotsu have an arrangement?”

Maki groans and buries her face deeper in her arms. “I should not have said that…”

“Oh my god, you do!” Nobara squees a little and shakes her shoulder. “Who is Okkotsu’s hallpass? He seems so straight-edge. I’m so impressed.”

“Fuck. I’m a moron…”

“Instant karma, bitch! Tell me, tell me!”

“You’re not taking that job.”

Yuta looks up from the dining room table where he’s been sadly contemplating his thumbs, running them over themselves in an anxious tick he usually masks from anyone but Maki. His eyebrows go up, then furrow, probably at her tone and less at the general declaration that she doesn’t fucking like it when the senior jujutsu personnel try to hand him scummy jobs.

“They’re special grade sorcerers,” Yuta says softly. “It would be dangerous to send anyone else—”

“Curse users.”

“What?”

“You called them ‘sorcerers’. They aren’t that anymore. Not after they do what they did.”

“Allegedly.”

“We’re far past that and you know it. There’s no sparing anyone because of their sob-story and they always have a sob-story.”

“And Utahime warned us some of these dossiers aren’t entirely vetted.”

“Hesitating is dangerous, Yuta.”

“I’m strong enough to talk them down if—"

She points. “That. Right there. That’s why you’re not the one.”

Yuta is quiet. “It’s me or Yuji. I won’t let Yuji—"

“No. It’s you, Yuji, or me. And between the three of us, only one of us won’t flinch about killing human beings.” Maki reaches over the table, puts her palm over his phone, and slides it to the center of the table in front of him. “Drop the job. Recommend me for it. They only asked you to see if you’d say ‘yes’. Swap jobs with me.”

“We’re spread thin. You won’t have back up.

“You think I can’t handle them alone?”

“Of course you can, but they are tricky. This is stupid but tactically, one of them can fly at will.”

“Then send Rika with me,” she says, shocked to find its both sensible and her perfect excuse. “I'm not totally helpless in the air, but if you’re so worried, send her as back up. You know she doesn’t cry about killing and she’s gotten very smart. She won’t hesitate.”

Yuta’s jaw tenses. “I wouldn’t hesitate.”

“You would, it wouldn’t matter, because you’d kill the fuckers anyway even with a handicap but, babe?” Maki reaches over the table and fits her palm to his cheek, watches him startle slightly— "You don’t want to.”

There’s a micro-expression, so fast she only catches it in her divine eye, but it’s relief. There in the slight release of tension around Yuta’s eyes and something that gives in his mouth and shoulders. He covers it quickly. Blinking up at her with a more familiar and conscious look of disbelief.  The thought comes idly, He’s so pretty when he’s appalled.

“And you do?”

“I do.” She lowers her voice an octave. “Does that make you hate me? A little?”

“No.” His hand catches hers, holds her palm against his cheek. He turns his face into it as if for comfort, despite what she just said. “Of course not…”

“Then let me do this for you.” Maki brings her other hand to frame his face, to make him look at her, almost nose to nose as she whispers, “You and Yuji hold the line against the monsters. Let me deal with the humans who act like monsters. Okay?”

Yuta closes his eyes when she tilts her forehead against his.

“It’s my responsibility…”

“No. It’s not. Being the scariest Swiss Army Knife in Jujutsu Society doesn’t mean it’s always you, every fucking time.” She shakes him a little. “This is bounty hunting. It’s not even a world-ending threat. These people just like to make money using their jujutsu sorcery for vicious shit. There is no reason it has to be you hunting them to death. It’s not your thing, Yuta.”

“They asked me—”

“Because all they see is the cold-eyed killer that’s cut down every obstacle up until now. Your goddamn scary-ass mask is too good. They don’t see you. Okay? But I see you.”

She presses her forehead a little harder against his, like she can transfer some of the rage in her skull to his brain as a warming agent. Something of comfort in her bloodlust if the words won’t do it.

“Let me destroy shit, Yuta. It’s what I’m fucking good at.”

“I don’t think I can thank you for this one,” he whispers and in the ragged quality of his voice, she realizes how near a miss this was.

“Then don’t. Just let me take care of it.”

“Uro’s name is on the list.”

She pauses; she leans back a little to see if Yuta will meet her eyes. “The ancient assassin for the Fugiwara? The one you spared in Sendai?”

He nods, not looking up at her.

In her ear, she hears her own voice (or a voice identical to hers) whisper, Destroy everything.

“If I can talk her down, I will.”

“If she’s killing civilians now, then she’s no different than Dhruv and I cut him down. No talking. No chances.” Yuta sits back on his seat, reaching for his smartphone. There are stickers on the back of it. A chibi capybara and a rice ball with blep-tongue face. Probably from Inumaki. “I’ll tell them to pull me from the mission.”

“You’re not responsible for the world, Yuta. Even Gojo didn’t want any of us shouldering it all.”

He shrugs. “He probably wanted to live to make that possible too.”

Destroy everything, big sister.

Maki knows what she should say. She should tell him that Gojo was a 28-year-old egomaniac with enough foresight to desperately stack the deck against an accelerating ceiling of power that even he couldn’t stop. Gojo died because it was all on him for too goddamn long and that left him exposed along too many flanks when the threats all came to call.

Gojo died because he was the strongest and sometimes being first over the wall just fucking kills you. Period.

But what she says is, “I’ll call Utahime-sensei. You should get some rest, Yuta.” She takes the phone from his fingers and this time when he looks up at her with a glare she says, softly, “Please?” and watches his anger melt easy.

“Okay. Just…”

“I’ll come to bed right after you. Go.”

She waits until he’s gone and she hears him close the bedroom door. Then she calls and tells her former teacher in no uncertain terms that if they try to give Yuta another hunt and destroy op in anything less than an emergency, she’ll hunt and destroy whoever is responsible.

There’s a long, long silence from the other end before Utahime Iori says very calmly: “I think you know that Yuta can pick and choose his operations. No one can make him do anything. Of course I’ll change the assignment.”

“You know it’s bad for him.”

“I do. Which is why I tried to reassign it. He insisted because Uro is on the list. Like I said: I can’t control him. He’s not one of my students anymore. Neither are you—”

Maki bites. “We were Gojo’s students.”

“Yes.” Utahime deflects the attack, a cool musicality in her tone, not a single note of anger. “I know that. And the few years after he died where you were all my students, I take very seriously. Even if you don’t.” The statement hangs a moment before, more softly, she says, “Maki, can I ask you why you’re so worked up about this?”

“I’m not.”

Another long pause. “Okay. It’s yours. I’ll send the dossiers. I’ll tell you what I told Okkotsu: These aren’t fully vetted, but the casualties require action. Use your best judgement. Field agents will be over to pick you up tomorrow and get any further briefings done.” She can hear Utahime shifting her phone against her ear. “Good luck, Maki.”

She hangs up. 

Maki feeds the first curse user to Rika like you throw a T-bone to a Doberman.

She can’t blame the man for trying a domain expansion when Maki dropped in on him like a cruise missile from ten stories up. She cratered him into the parking lot he was standing in, abandoned cars and pavement blasting out from the point of impact like a bomb went off. She felt his cursed energy bottom out briefly as he tanked all his power into surviving the hit.

Her target was an ancient sorcerer with a domain that drowned everyone in it. Cities full of people if he’s allowed to run rampant which he did in part of Seoul, South America, and then Okinawa. Big mistake that last one—coming home put him back up on the national roster instantly.

She put Split Soul through the skin of his domain like ribbon, then through his ribcage like butter, and before he could fully die, she threw him screaming to the shikigami ghost girl who ripped him limb from limb and ate him fucking alive. Yuta’s too far away to Copy anything from the dead man even if the conditions are otherwise met, but that’s not the point.

The screaming bloody violence is the point.

Rika, floating behind her, says, “Sky girl. She’s next.”

“Yeah.”

“You hate her?”

“No. She’s just next on the list if she hasn’t flown away already.”

“I hate her. I’ll never forgive.”

“Why?”

Rika makes this wet exhalation. “Hurt. Yuta.”

“If you hate everyone that’s hurt Yuta, that must be a massive fucking list.”

“I hate. Everyone. Just like you.”

Maki pauses as she wipes the Split Soul clean. “Indifference isn’t hate. You’re swinging in the dark there, little sis.”

“You leave both to die. Same instructions.”

“I’d argue hate is more active if you’re not lazy.”

The dead man’s blood is still all over Rika’s fists, teeth, ‘hair’, and body. It’s slowly absorbing into her skin as Maki watches. She cocks her swollen head and the air in the immediate vicinity gets colder. It’s already near to freezing in early November, but the cold gets hurtful around Rika.

“I hate you,” Rika says.

“Then do something about it.”

“Yuta said protect you. Yuta said he hates anyone who hurts you.”

“Yuta also told you to obey me. You need a refresh?”

Rika’s bloody teeth gape apart.

“Tricky,” she purrs. 

She starts to float forward, her dead-weight gorilla arms hanging inert at her sides, almost dragging on the ground. That horrible eye remains fixed on Maki, the grin grotesque and eager and Maki’s never not quite sure if the instructions she just gave Rika are explicit enough to break Yuta’s commandment to ‘protect her at all costs.’ Then the shikigami is directly in front of her, towering, breathing on her like a dead dragon, idling like an engine.

“Instructions?” Rika says, her Cheshire smile blood-free now, having soaked that man’s life the way you mop up soda. “Or aren’t you scared?”

Maki, fascinated as always, holds up her arm. “Go ahead and try something, kid.”

Rika cocks her head… then snatches her arm at wrist and elbow, her fists so big they engulf Maki’s hand and her entire upper arm. Then she sinks her teeth into Maki’s forearm and starts to tear into the meat like a dog. Maki’s Heavenly Restriction blunts her teeth only somewhat and Maki flexes her arm against the snapping jaws, feels her skin tear and wonders when the feeling of flaying became boring to her.

The pain brings adrenaline. Regen starts.  

A weird relief.

She watches her own blood spray Rika’s face and stream from her torn arm to the ground. She feels Rika twist her arm up and go for the arteries in her wrist. Maki feels her sever something, but her divine body cinches those veins shut even as her healing factor starts to kick in, triggered by the rush of endorphins.

“Stop,” Maki says.

Rika withdraws immediately, sullen.

“Cheater,” she complains. “Scaredy cat.”

“You had your chance. Better luck next time.”

“Big sister,” Rika pouts, cajoling. When Maki pauses, Rika gives her that horrible grin, the one that makes Maki certain the original Rika Orimoto was a fucking psychopath, and she says, “You’re breaking your promise—"

“Fucking hell,” says a voice, originating from all around the parking lot. Maki looks up to see the air all around her has distorted like a watercolor and feels the strange vibrato of air molecules warped wrongly to mask its origin. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but I know that wrinkled nutsack of a shikigami anywhere. You with Okkotsu?”

Rika goes on the alert instantly, zipping around like a furious dog, hurting a target but there’s not there. Just the sky above them suddenly melting like plastic in the sun.

“Hey. You want to die, burnt girl? Or does blood get you off or something?”

Maki supposes this is Takako Uro and her infamous spatial distortion technique. Maki pivots slowly on one heel, watching the warping of the sky with dim curiosity and boiling impatience. From what Yuta explained of Uro, redirection of force and sneak attacks are her forte, so it’s a little surprising she didn’t go for a kill strike while Maki was distracted.

“I’m training my hunting dog. Sometimes they bite.”

“That’s not your dog. Where’s its owner?”

“Not here.”

“You kill him?”

Maki’s not sure why some part of her lurches, sick instantly at the accusation, but it makes her momentarily defensive and she says, “Okkotsu is my partner,” too quickly. She tries to play it off, adding, “Rika works for treats.”

Rika bristles at her, but giggles, “I remember how this one tastes. Again. Again!”

Uro snorts, the noise ricocheting around weirdly. Maki keeps watching, her Divine Restriction parsing the smallest shift and refraction of color as it drifts through folded spaced and twisted light. If Uro tries to unwrap space to attack her directly, she will regret it, but then again maybe an ancient assassin knows better.

“No. Don’t try to play that off. You’ve got something wrong with you, bitch.”

Maki tilts her head. “Careful. I told Yuta I’d try to talk you down, but if you’ve got a big fucking mouth, maybe I’ll reconsider.”

Uro’s laugh fractures around the parking lot until it sparkles like shattered glass. “Shit. You’re nothing like him, huh? Here I was, doing all this bullshit to draw him out and then your dead space disaster-wannabe ass shows up instead?” She sighs, disgusted. “I’ve got the worst goddamn luck.”

“What do you want with Yuta?”

“Nothing. He’s the only one of you fuckers I know won’t slaughter me the second he claps eyes on me. Cuz he’s soft. Unlike you, burnt girl. You’ve got that calamity riding your skin, huh?”

Maki parses through the insults and zeroes in on the main point. “Uro, are you… trying to turn yourself in?”

“Fuck that, burnt girl. I have a warning.”

“You killed twenty people out in California. It’ll be a diplomatic nice-to-have reporting your death the Americans. I don’t believe you’re here from the goodness of your heart.”

“I don’t do anything except from my heart.” There’s a ripple across the left high hemisphere of the sky. Maki doesn’t react to it but tracks it while Uro’s voice resonates around her. “I'm my own woman now and collateral isn’t my concern. But, if it matters, I didn’t try to kill those people. They were just in the way.”

“Here’s the sob story,” Maki says, flipping Split Soul in her hand like a baton.

Maki feels something shift in the distortion again and suddenly the ripple she was tracking blows out and bleeds new color from a billboard down the road. Uro keeps warping things, fast, trying not to settle into a pattern. Maki wonders if maintaining the distortion is difficult, what with reality wanting (with the force of the whole universe) reversion to its original shape.

“So, you’re what?” she calls out, rotating slowly, Rika at her back. “Slugging it out with other sorcerers for fun? Fuck everyone else?”

“Your dossier doesn’t tell you why? Wow. I think you’re the dog here.”

“Boo-fucking-hoo.”

“Fuck you, bitch. You and that fucked up loaner shikigami.”

There’s a pause again. Something in the quality of Uro’s tone is strained, like someone buying time to think. Something shimmers in Maki’s right peripheral.

“Fuck it,” Uro says. “There’s a curse user cell forming in the West Coast of the United States. Seattle area. Quick hop and skip back to the homeland. You want something to kill, burnt girl, that’s my tip to you. The water guy you just handled? He’s one of them. Out here hunting me like the ocean meeting sky would ever do shit. They have a bead on you new-blood sorcerers.”

“There are curse users hunting us? Me and mine?” Maki pauses to really consider the audacity. “They know we killed Sukuna, right?”

“A small army killed Sukuna. And Gojo—the real hitter—is dead, little girl. Idiots think that means they have a shot at you individually.”

“But you know better?”

“I know what you are, Zenin, and I know your partner. He’s a soft touch but not that soft. I didn’t come back from the fucking dead just to die again. Consider this my good deed.”

“I didn’t say you and I were good, Uro. You’re still on my list.”

Uro makes a noise of disgust. “God. This is what I get…” The sky shivers and surges, the melting clouds bloating. Uro’s voice comes like a soft thunder from all directions: “You’re hitting your limit, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“You have all that fucking power and nowhere good to put it, right? Boiling you from the inside out. The overwhelming aggression and ego. So typical.” Rage warps the assassin’s voice, the sky cracking. “You killed a calamity and what’s left to do but become one?”

“Wow. You get that from a fortune cookie?”

“You sure you didn’t kill Okkotsu? You seem like the kind that could get the drop on him.”

Like Rika accusing her of eating her twin sister, Uro accusing her of murdering Yuta should fall so far beyond the pale it means nothing. Laughable nonsense. Instead, part of Maki's brain—quiet for two years of romantic entanglement—leans in her ear and recites for her the exact approach, methodology, and weapon she would need to kill him in their shared bed. It vividly models out the dismemberments required—the most efficient way to take Yuta's handsome head off.

She wouldn’t make the same mistakes Toji did with Gojo.

She’d finish the—

Then Uro unravels the sky and hits her with it.

Maki hits something just south of Mach 1 as she goes through a building two blocks away. This is a warehousing district, selected as hunting grounds for the express reason of low population density but it still puts a panic in her for a moment. Takako Uro may have lost her three-way battle with Yuta ten years ago, but she’s still a special grade.

Capable of felling nations.  

Maki pulls herself out of the rubble in time to see Uro coming at her like a fucking seeker missile and has enough heavenly foresight to ball up and take the blow as Uro flips to the stop, hands spread, and slams a second Thin Ice-Breaker against the space directly in front of Maki’s ribcage.

Reality fractures and the ribs break in hairlines along spatial faults undeniable as Gojo’s limitless. Uro splinters the reality where her ribs are in alignment, and Maki is punched again through a dozen supporting walls, blows out the back of the building and rolls into a skidding animal stop. She slams Split-Soul into the ground to halt the momentum.

Yuta did warn her: “She’ll be a terrible match for you.”

Takako Uro spirals into the sky above Maki. She looks every inch a modern sorcerer now; an IG model with bubblegum hair that ripples around her head like paint dissolving into water. Her high-top sneakers, blue jeans, and black-pink sukajan jacket suit her completely even as her cursed technique literally shreds them. (Ah, that’s why she fights naked.) Uro’s left arm is mechanical—some cursed tool, a lot like Inumaki’s.

For a moment Maki thinks how much she looks like Nobara. She thinks it’s so odd that there’s another sorcerer out there who lost an arm to Yuta, that Uro’s technique was one of many Yuta deployed in his all-out domain battle with Sukuna.

One could argue, Uro helped save the world.

“Didn’t have to be this way,” Uro crows. Her pretty face splits in a jackal snarl. “You dumb bitch! You fucking attack dog! You can’t touch me!”

Maki spits blood and leaves Split-Soul staked in the concrete, reaching behind her to unsheathe a second smaller blade from her thigh. Its weight is so awkward. The double-tine blade hums in her fist like a tuning fork.

“You sure?” she says. 

“Uh-huh!” Uro whips into a mid-air spin, distorting the space along a smeared horizontal axis, catching Rika’s sneak-attack haymaker and sending the shikigami spinning out like a gum on a taffy pull. Her CT spaghettifies Rika’s arms along the circumference of Uro’s spiral, then spits her out normal but traveling at 100-miles-per-hour directly at Maki.

“Goddammit!”

Maki dodges, but Rika scrabbles at her, claws her thigh as she goes past, knocking Maki off balance and—”

“Thin Ice-Breaker!”

Fuck.

Maki’s ribs shatter in new directions, her bones white-hot with regeneration as Uro (striking while she’s off kilter) hits her a third time, a relentless blitz attack. She’s not physical blows. She’s worse; she’s a soft-touch World Cutting Slash. She targets the ‘sky’ but what’s in that sky takes such horrifying breakage even when the shattering is so fine. Maki knows, in some respects, she’s also a bad match for Uro—she heals fast enough to survive the assassin's terrifying but diffused offense.

Maki hits the ground again, rolls back upright.

“Rika!”

The shikigami blurs to her side. Machine smooth and fast, she hikes Maki onto her giant forearm and—just like they’ve practiced—throws her like a baseball directly at Uro. A straight line, telegraphing her entire trajectory like she’s given up on tactics and fallen back on reflex.

Uro doesn’t even dodge. She raises two hands to meet Maki with a fourth, massive, storm-head of distortion. A building-destroying area of affect funneling into a deadly spiral at the join of Uro’s perfectly manicured nails. She's grown since she fought Yuta in Sendai. She's so dangerous now Maki could justify her death in any direction she likes. 

Uro chirps, “Bye-bye!”

Blade first, Maki hits the surface of the sky as it breaks.

Uro, naturally, is not expecting it when her technique simply stops working and Maki slams the Inverted Spear of Heaven directly into her ribs, just below her lungs. Blood bursts from Uro’s mouth. Uro grabs Maki’s wrist as Maki vices her free hand to Uro’s throat. Then, together, they start to fall. Uro’s eyes—black through the sclera, silvery through the iris—go wide with authentic terror.

“Talk her down if you can. I wasn’t able to, back then.”

Maki grabs Uro in a bear-hug, torques in mid-air, and lands with a ‘thwap’ of her boots on the concrete, bending her knees to absorb the impact and stand, carrying Uro like a bloody bride. Uro’s not looking at her. She stares in horror at the massive dagger lodged shallowly in her abdomen, soaking red into her ruined T-shirt and coating her bare belly in a curtain of blood.

“W-what?”

“It cancels cursed techniques,” Maki explains, kneeling. “My sensei was a moron. He sealed this thing away over a decade ago and refused to unseal it. Too dangerous, he said.” She tugs the strange knife from Uro’s ribs, waits for her to stop screaming about it. “Dunno why he told me where it was.”

Uro tries to staunch the bleeding. “Fuck… you… remind me of—” She bares her bloody teeth. “Well?” Her fingers are shaking against the wound. “Cross me off your list, burnt bitch.”

Destroy it all, big sister.

“Can I eat her other arm?” Rika leans on Maki’s shoulder, dead-weight and cold. Almost friendly. “She tastes good. Some people don’t taste good. Like you. You taste terrible.”

Maki stands up. “No. We’re going home.”

Rika hisses.

Uro stares at her from the ground. “What the fuck?”

“You’ll survive that.” Maki hefts the Spear. “I mean, it’s just a normal knife except for what it does to cursed techniques.”

Uro, cursed energy starting to flow normally, clutches her ribs and reinforces them. “Are you crazy? W-what the fuck did we even fight for?”

 “You’re lucky Yuta vouched for you.”

“This is ‘talking me down’? Stabbing me after I already tried to leave?!”

“Sorry. My boyfriend’s the diplomatic one.”

“OKKOTSU IS NOT DIPLOMATIC! HE’S A FREAK WHO ATE MY ARM. I HATE YOU PEOPLE.”

“Yeah. You’ll be fine.”

Maki turns and walks away, retrieving her sister’s sword from the concrete where she left it, wiping Uro’s blood on her pant leg as she heads for the extraction point about two miles away. She can feel Rika like a storm cloud at her back, enraged at the stolen kill, pouting about it. She literally keeps swatting at Maki’s shoulder for attention.

“It’s done,” Maki says.

“Not done. You’re not done.”

Maki feels her heart racing suddenly. So strange, it was metronome steady during the fight.

“It’s all done. All of this.”

She clips her dead teacher’s dagger (the one that originally belonged to her dead cousin) to her hip. She straps her dead sister’s sword to her back. She wonders why the dead keep handing her murder weapons as their last will and testament and why it didn’t bother her before. She feels the sting of panic now, like tears in the back of her throat.

“I’m telling Yuta,” Maki declares. “I’m telling him everything,”

Rika keens like a curious cat. “Really? He’ll hate you though.”

“Maybe.”

Rika grabs her arm suddenly, yanks her around. “He’ll be so mad.”

She shoulders Rika off her. “Maybe. So be it.”

Rika circles her. “You’ll be in trouble.”

“I thought about killing him, Rika. This isn’t a joke.”

Rika pauses then. Maki sees her look at the Inverted Spear of Heaven and do some math, returning a result the shikigami doesn’t like.

Rika says, “This is why you should kill yourself.”

Maki glares. “Go back to Yuta. Go the fuck away.”

Rika, directly commanded, begins to fade away. She says, simply, viciously, like she’s been waiting these last eight months to say it: “I’m telling.”

And she’s gone.

It’s dark when Maki gets back to the house. The streetlights are on in neighborhood, but the house lights are mostly off except for a single lamp casting orange light through the curtains on the second-floor balcony. Maki Zenin stands in the courtyard of her well-appointed rental home with two weapons wrapped and cleaned, tucked under her right arm. She checks her phone once more to confirm Yuta still hasn’t answered her texts. (She hasn’t gone as far as celling him directly.)

It’s nearly 2AM.

Despite this, she knows Yuta’s in the kitchen, waiting for her. She doesn’t have to see him to know where he’ll be—leaning on the little bar counter that separates the kitchen from the dining and living room. She can see his cursed energy like infrared through her Heavenly Restriction and for a moment, under a halo of moths from the solar lamp over the gate, she watches Yuta’s silhouette quietly drink tea and not otherwise move.

She stands there in the freezing November air and thinks, It’ll be two years tomorrow since you died, Mai.

Then she goes inside.

Yuta is indeed standing in the kitchen, leaning his forearms on the breakfast bar counter, contemplating his mug of tea. It’s cold. Maki can tell at a glance. Yuta looks jittery. Even with anxiety doing that thing where he forgets to have an expression and stares at you blankly, she can tell he’s wound up to the point of shaking. He's just hiding it. 

“Are you okay, Maki?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” He looks down at the counter. “We need to talk.”

“Okay.”

“Rika… told me some things.”

“What did she say?”

“What do you think she said?”

“I really can’t guess with her, but I bet she told you that I’ve been… asking her to break your rules.”

“Thirty-seven times.”

Maki startles at the number. Yuta’s expression in the low light is flat and unreadable and the dread that’s sat like a shotgun slug in her gut starts to get hot.

“You’ve circumvented my commands to have Rika hurt you at least thirty-seven times. The worst was today.”

“It wasn’t that many times.”

“It was.”

Maki senses that, whatever details Rika gave him, arguing the specifics is not going to help her case here. It almost doesn’t matter if Rika embellished, exaggerated, or spun the story. Maki didn’t keep count. Rika, malevolent calculator that she is, clearly did. What argument will she make? That didn’t care enough about letting Rika claw her to catalogue the details?

Yuta, after a long silence, says, “Why?”

“I know it sounds bad, but I just—“

“You were just using an extension of my technique to fucking hurt yourself over and over again and lying to me about it.”

Yuta doesn’t swear.

Like, he does, but usually when a building is falling on him. Not in casual conversation, not with her, not in their home, in their little kitchen with the cactus pots lining the windowsill, and not in this tone like he’s in free fall and can’t get his breath. Maki subtly changes the tension of her entire body, and her Heavenly Restriction unravels the details of Yuta’s nonverbal language into a thousand simultaneous details all telling her one thing:

She just really hurt him.

“Can you tell me why?” Yuta says this softly, but his arms are folded on the counter, gripping his own elbows so hard it must hurt. “I trusted you with Rika. I don’t trust anyone with Rika.”

“She wanted to.”

“Of course she wanted to. She’s a shikigami with a bad personality. That’s in her nature. You’re supposed to be the guardrail. I told you—” His voice snags in his throat and he drops his chin a moment. More calmly, he says, “You didn’t answer me. Why did you do it?”

“I don’t know.” Maki looks at the sheathed sword in her hand, the one Mai made for her with her dying breath and says, “I think it just felt good. Like… a relief.”

“I get that.”

Maki, unsettled, realizes Yuta would in fact get that. For the years that the original Rika Orimoto held him captive in the cats-cradle curse he’d snared them both in (tied together like two animals in a trap) she’d prevented him from killing himself to escape it. She couldn’t entirely stop him from hurting himself though. He’d told Maki once, with the whimsy of distant trauma, he used to scratch his wrists bloody, bite the inside of his mouth raw. (He didn’t have the nerve to bite through his own tongue.)

Yuta lifts his head finally, looking up at her through his hair.

“But why use Rika? Why specifically use Rika?”

Maki, quietly puts both the Inverted Spear of Heaven and the Split Soul Katana on the narrow countertop between them. Yuta glances at both weapons, then her. She doesn’t mean for him to interpret anything from her disarmament, but Maki literally cannot stand to have either weapon in her hands right now. Not with Yuta just feet away from her, too shaken up to be his best.

“Rika said you thought about killing me? That you said that. Aloud.”

Maki, almost dazed at this nightmare unraveling itself in her kitchen, says, “Yeah. I’ve been having a lot of fucked up thoughts lately. That’s the worst one so far. That’s… that’s what snapped me out of it.”

“You attacked Uro when she tried to parlay.”

“I did.”

“Why did you use my shikigami to hurt yourself?”

“It… felt right.”

“Maki. Do you actually want to—?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “No. That’s why it was Rika. I needed—”

“Someone else to do it?”

“I guess.”

“And you picked me. Me to do that?”

“Not you.”

“Rika is part of me. You know that. She’s not like other shikigami; while I’m alive, she’s—" Yuta shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’ve been doing this since before we moved in together. For almost a year. So, that whole time…” He looks around the kitchen, at the dishes and the stupid mugs and the plants in the window above the sink. His voice doesn’t waver, but his eyes run over and he wipes his cheek with his wrist. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Yuta…”

“I want to be here for you.”

“Yuta, I didn’t—”

“I can’t believe that I… I can’t be the one you talk to about this. We’re partners. I’m scared for you. I love you. I know there are things you don’t tell me, but I hoped you would. It’s supposed to be me that’s here with you but, I—” he shakes his head, horrified as he says, “I have to go.”

He starts to walk past her, toward the door through the only entry out of the kitchen. His voice has a shake, the shake is from the adrenaline, the adrenaline that’s got the hair on his arms stood on end, his eyes dilated, his heart beating so fast in his chest it’s like he’s in pitched combat. And, like any time she sees Yuta in combat, the instinct to fight surges to the front.

As he passes her, Maki grabs his shoulders.

“Yuta.”

“Let go of me.”

“Wait. Please—”

“Maki, let go.”

She knows it’s the wrong thing, but she tries to kiss him. He lets her, but it’s clumsy—his teeth hitting her lip hard enough it’s a spark of red pain. He goes rigid, almost relaxes, some instinctive call and response to what’s always been easy between them… then he turns his face away. She leans her forehead to his temple for a moment, and she can feel in the way he leans briefly against her that he wants to give in and just stay, but…

“Maki.”

Yuta’s cursed energy shimmers slick over his skin, boiling through every muscle fiber in his body because—for the first time since they moved in together—he’s got his guard up. She realizes, too late, how hard she grabbed him.

She lets go.

“I’m sorry. I—”

I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it. It wasn’t about you. I love you. I wasn’t supposed to love anything this much. I didn’t mean it.

“Please talk to me?”

Yuta hovers on the threshold for a moment. He’s so close, the heat off his body warms her bare skin. He’s close enough she could try again, gently this time, to pull him into her arms and try to take it back… but what she’s taking back is literally months of lying to his face and lying in their bed and sitting at breakfast with coffee and telling him over and over he was imagining things and everything was fine. So, she can’t touch him. Because she doesn’t know what the fuck she would say to keep him in her arms.

“All I’ve wanted,” Yuta says, “is for you to talk to me.”

His voice, always soft, is so quiet she can only hear it because she’s got her senses on divine focus. (He knows she’s watching him that closely.) He wipes his cheek with the heel of his hand this time, face angled away from her, his bangs blocking his eyes.

“Then talk to me," Maki pleads. "Here. Now.”

He shakes his head. “I can’t. You… you’ve made it so I can’t.”

“That’s not what I mean to do.”

“It’s part of me,” Yuta repeats. “Rika is part of me. If you use her to hurt yourself that’s part of me too. You don’t know what it’s like…” He stops. His throat works around something. “I’m sorry. We’ll talk later.”

He steps past her, barefoot, still in his sleeping shirt and sweats. He doesn’t even put shoes on. Maki tracks his cursed energy, like a tornado moving through walls of the house, as he walks quickly toward the front gate of the courtyard to the street. She’s got every divine sense gifted her by her dead twin trained on Yuta, so she hears it like it’s in her ear when he pauses at the gate beneath the little streetlight and inhales shakily. She watches him double over like he’s in actual physical agony…

Then he disappears in a flash-step from under the little cloud of moths.

She gets a text from Inumaki a hour later.

It just says, Yuta is with me. He’s okay. Then after a break in the message, another comes through: What the fuck happened? You okay?

Which she expected.

She texts back, I fucked up bad but I’m safe.

Good. Then fuck you, he’s CRAZY right now. What HAPPENED?

Maki sits in the dark.

I can’t explain over text.

You better. He won’t talk to me.

She tries for a few minutes to write and re-write her confession. So much stupider in the medium of phone screens and tip-tapping your letters into a little piece of plastic that she could grind to dust in her fingers. She’s tempted to do it, honestly. That ache in her belly is perpetual now, never-ending, no relief in sight and no one to act as a heat sink while the burning spreads.

I asked Rika to attack me. I’ve been asking her to do it for a while. I didn’t tell him. He found out. Yes. It was a self-harm thing. I guess.

There is a long pause. The little typing reticle in the text chat keeps coming up then dropping. She watches Inumaki compose whatever his thoughts are for a full three minutes before the final message comes in.

WTF Maki. Why?

I do not know.

Are you trying to die? For real? Are you okay?

I’m fine. I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I was trying to make Yuta hate me.

She stares at the text and realizes, in the frank distillation of electronic messaging, that’s the truth of it. What better way to slit his throat without actually doing it? Through Rika. Some fucked up thing with Rika.

Toge is a fast texter and sends her a rapid response. 

So you played suicide chicken using the shikigami gifted to Yuta by the dead girl that wouldn’t let him kill himself when he was in high school? Do I have that right?

Maki stares at the glowing screen for a while. Then texts, Yes.

Maki. You’re my friend and I know you’re hurting but what the hell?

Maki again, stares at the screen until Inumaki sends another text. She thinks if Toge could call her up and cuss her out without cursing her, he would, but instead he texts:

You know how nuts he is about protecting the people he’s with. You know better. We’ve fucking talked about this. I TOLD you.

Here is the thing about Inumaki—he rivals Yuta for compassion overdrive. Inumaki’s entire life runs on a monk-like discipline to protect others from himself. It’s part of why he and Yuta dated in the first place and ultimately why they broke up. Toge took a vow of selective mutism from childhood to keep others safe. Yuta would die for strangers in the right circumstances.

Maki, meanwhile, has two murder weapons on the coffee table in front of her.

Inumaki sends one last text: This could destroy him, Maki.

Yeah, she thinks, That was the point.

She puts the phone aside and curls up on the couch, picking up a pillow from nearby and hugging it to her abdomen. She’s never been one of those women who got crazy period cramps, but she wonders if it compares to the radiating chewing sensation pushing through her gut right now. She sits for a moment in the sickening aftermath of everything she’s done, finally spread out in all its glory before her, and in the silence of her empty home, she hears it clear as the day Mai died:

Destroy everything.

“No.”

Destroy everything. Okay?

“No, no, no…”

Everything.

Maki pulls her knees to her chest, presses face into her knees, but all she hears is Rika’s little girl voice asking her, “What are you instructed?” and the panic that starts to take her feels colossal. Unstoppable. The zenith of something born in that killing floor basement two years ago. A gravitational force moving through her chest and drawing her ribs inward, threatening to crack them along all the breaking points Uro sketched into her bones.

“I can’t.” She digs her nails into her calves, gripping her knees to her sternum. Through her teeth she says, “I can’t, Mai. I can’t. I can’t.”

Everything. Okay, big sister?”

“I can’t fucking do that! I—!"

There’s a knock at the balcony door.

Maki’s so startled by the interference of anything besides the rabid thrashing of her fucked up brain, it knocks her out of her spiral straight into alert. There’s a silhouette at the slider door past the living room. That silhouette has its hands in its pockets, impatiently casting a shadow against her curtains.

She opens the slider.

Megumi Fushiguro glares at her.

He’s sleep-rumpled, wearing a massive winter coat and scarf and looking very much like he just rolled out of bed and blearily pulled clothes on. He gives her an up down that feels rude.

“Yuta called me.” His voice has that lower octave some men get when they just wake up. He scrubs his face with his palm, then his hair, fucking up his spiky bed-head situation even further. It makes him look about twelve and he grumbles, “I have no idea what the fuck is going on but it’s bad-bad if Okkotsu’s freaking out. Let me in or I’m knocking the wall down.”

He makes half the hand-seal to summon Max Elephant with his right hand.

He covers a yawn with his left.

Maki lets him in.

Megumi Fushiguro—seventeen, on-paper head of the Zenin Clan, professional depressed shikigami-user, and the sullenest jujutsu sorcerer Maki knows—seems genuinely and visibly concerned when she admits Yuta isn’t responding to her texts or calls. That tells her how fucked she is. He sits with her on the couch in silence. When the silence drags on too long, he summons a pile of Rabbit Escape shikigami and places the fattest one in her arms.

“This rabbit is good,” Maki says, holding it up like a bowling ball.

It paddles its fluffy hind feet at her until she puts it down in her lap.

“Some of them have more personality than others,” Megumi says, patting another rabbit which rolls lazily onto its side beneath his palm. He glances at the weapons laid on the coffee table next to Maki’s bag of potato chips, candy, and a liter of half-empty soda. One of his other rabbits is sniffing at the Inverted Spear of Heaven like it might be a big bit of lettuce. “Hey. I know you’re going through it right now. But is that—?”

“Yes.”

Megumi stares at it. “Does anyone else know you have it?”

“Yuta. Obviously.”

Megumi gives her a look. “You two are crazy.”

“Gojo left it to me. Didn’t seem like anyone else’s business.” Then, seized by a strange thought, she turns to her cousin and says, “Do you want it?”

“What? No.”

The rabbit sniffing the blade hops away and disappears somewhere beneath the couch, wiggling adorably to wedge its body into the narrow gap. Megumi turns his pale face to Maki. Sometimes, when he looks at her, she wants to touch the scars that discolor the skin across his right eye and his temple, the little curve of keloid under his left eye—so much like burn marks. She wants to test their texture and see how it compares to the contracture scars that stripe her own body.

“Maki, seriously, what the hell is going on with you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sorry, but that’s not gonna cut it. Okkotsu is literally hiding from you. What the fuck did you do?”

“The one thing that would destroy his trust in me, I think.”

“You cheat on him?”

Nobara’s appalled face comes to mind, the feel of her bare thigh in Maki’s hand. “No. That wouldn’t be enough anyway. We could talk through that. That’s normal.”

“That’s not normal, but okay.” Megumi waits for her to go on. When she doesn’t, his expression gets hard. “You hurt him or something? Like, physically?”

She squints at him. “Megumi, cousin, I know I’m strong. But it’s Yuta. How would I do that?”

“He lets you.”

Maki stares but Megumi’s expression stays deadpan, unwavering. She thinks about kissing Yuta in the kitchen, about the red blot of pain against her lips, or the fact Yuta almost kissed her back instead of pulling away and leaving. Suddenly she’s sick-afraid of the alternate universe where he stayed and let her talk him down.

Maki pokes the loaf of rabbit in her lap. “You know how, sometimes on missions, Yuta sends Rika with me? Long distance manifestation, kind of like Divine Dog does for you and Yuji?”

Megumi blinks. “Yeah. We did distance manifestation training together. Why?”

“I circumvented Yuta’s safety commands on Rika to get her to fight with me.” Maki flicks the ears of the rabbit in her lap and gets lightly kicked for it, so she goes back to petting. “Today, I let Rika try to kill me. Not, you know, seriously. But I let her try. Then I almost killed a rogue sorcerer who tried to call a parlay.”

Megumi’s face does something complicated where he tries not to react.

He fails but doesn’t say anything so she goes on.

“It’s fine. I think I hit my limit. I was going to tell Yuta everything, but Rika beat me to it. Doesn’t matter. The point is, I’ve been using Rika to hurt myself for a long time now and now Yuta knows and he’s—” Maki’s voice catches in her throat unexpectedly— “he’s really upset about it.”

Megumi, a bit overwhelmed by that magnitude of this confession, looks at the snoozing rabbit laid on the couch beside him. He smooths his palm over its ears for a moment, then says, “You’ve been hurting yourself?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Since when?”

“A year now.”

Megumi continues to pet the rabbit, his face turned away from her as he says, “I used to do that. Not, you know, seriously. Just to make sure I was in my own body sometimes.” He scritches the rabbit between the ears and it wiggles happily. “Yuji caught me doing it though and we talked. Figured something else out. It’s better now, but I still have bad nights.”

“I know. You call me.”

Megumi shrugs. “I don’t have to explain to you that grieving someone makes self-destruction seem like a great fucking idea sometime.”

“This isn’t grief.”

Megumi checks the time on his wristwatch. “It’s the anniversary of Mai’s death and you just blew up your relationship with Okkotsu in the only way you could without attacking him directly. Nobara said you’ve been talking about attacking the branch house of the Zenin Clan. You’ve been taking on more dangerous hunt-and-destroy jobs and Utahime is worried about you. You also blew Inumaki and Panda off for like two months. Did you even notice?”

Maki, stunned at this curt distillation of her behavior, tries not to feel paranoid. “Are you stalking me?”

“You’re not good at pretending to be okay,” he says ambiguously. “It’s in the details.  What? Put all your energy into tricking Okkotsu?”

“Fuck you.”

“Like I said,” Megumi murmurs, “bad at pretending. Everyone’s noticed.” Her cousin’s dark stare moves back to her. “Have you talked to literally any fucking body about these fucked up thoughts you’ve been having? Or have you just pretended it was manageable until you picked yourself bloody?”

She suspects from his language he’s speaking from specific experience.

“This isn’t grief.”

“Whatever. Rage. Grief. Fuckin’ ennui. I don’t give a shit. Tell me what it is—”

“Homicidal reflex.”

Megumi examines her answer like a math problem, then says, “Elaborate.”

“Mai is dead and her last command to me was ‘destroy everything’ and every fucking day I am fighting a goddamn reflex to destroy something. Anything.” She swallows. “When the curse spirit counts were higher and everyday was extermination, I think that was enough. Then the work scaled back, but the reflex didn’t go anywhere.”

Megumi, quietly, says, “She told you to ‘destroy everything’?”

“Yes. She died and gave me all the weapons I would ever need to destroy anyone who had anything to do with killing her… but now I don’t think it was enough. I don’t think she just meant the Zenin clan, or maybe she did and it just—” she huffs— “included me.”

“Mai loved you.”

“I betrayed Mai. I broke my word to her and pursued an ambition that ultimately put her life in danger and then the bastards killed her. I killed my sister. It was me. My actions.” Maki exhales, shakily. “She’d be right to include me in her curse.”

“She didn’t curse you, Maki. And you didn’t kill Mai.”

“When people insist you didn’t kill Tsumiki, how does that sit with you, Megumi?”

He flinches a little.

Maki goes on. “I knew my actions endangered her. I’m more responsible for my actions than you or Yuji. Nothing possessed me but pride. My own. I knew it. I didn’t care.”

“Whatever. So we both killed our sisters.” Megumi bites the words out. “Great. Fuck it. Let’s call that fact. You really gonna blow up everything you love about it? You gotta break Okkotsu’s heart? You gonna ignore Panda until he forgets how to talk? Act like Inumaki doesn’t rely on you? You gonna bail on him? On Nobara? Me?”

On the last one Megumi turns his head away, reaching up to rub a hand over his mouth—a nervous reflex she’s come to expect. He grimaces when his poker face cracks so he tries to hide it with his hand. Just telegraphs himself even more. Maki’s not sure why but watching her cousin suck at stoicism cracks something open in her and warmth bleeds like a brain hemorrhage into her body.

Maki asks, “Is that how you deal with Tsumiki being gone?” She scoops her rabbit from her lap and gently piles it on top of the other rabbit in Megumi’s lap. It rolls like a fat pillow. “You just… live for everyone else?”

“Of course I do.” Megumi catches the rolling rabbit and gathers it into his arms. He peers down at it before hugging it gently, and mumbling into its fur, “If I do that long enough, maybe I’ll want to do it for myself one day.”

“I’m not like you or Yuji or Yuta. I don’t have the heart to live for others.”

“Well get over it.”

“This is your motivational speech?”

“Whatever.” He lowers the rabbit, tosses it, and the bunnies all poof into smoke. “You said Mai told you to destroy everything, but that didn’t include me, right?” He gives her a dispassionate stare. “It would be easy to just stop picking up when I call you. To blow me off. But you never have. Not once. Why not? Why is everyone else open season?”

Maki, taken off guard by this sudden argument, says, “Mai would have never told me to hurt you. Ever. Not you.”

Megumi glares. “I’m a Zenin too. I was even head of the clan at the time. Why the fuck wouldn’t it include me? That doesn’t make any sense. Hell, she let Todo beat me half to death once. Mai and I were… fine, I guess. But we weren’t close.”

“Maybe she had a cousin-crush.”

“Gross. Be serious. I’m saying your ‘destroy everything’ bad thought doesn’t make any sense and putting it on Mai is bullshit.”

“All I did,” Maki murmurs, “was cause Mai misery in a life where the misery was built in. I cursed her every day while I was a sorcerer until it literally fucking killed her. If she didn’t curse me, that makes her an angel, and she was lots of things, but she wasn’t that—”

“Yeah, which is why the entire Zenin Clan is literally fucking dead,” Megumi says loudly, enunciating every word. “She did it. You did it. It’s done. She loaded her last bullet and put down a whole bloodline with it.” He lifts a hand, forms a finger gun and cocks his thumb back, aimed at her. “Why do you think she wanted revenge on you?”

Maki grabs his arm and pulls his hand down. “I just told you.”

He glares. “Are you sure this isn’t just survivor’s guilt?

“That’s not it.”

“You get the cute house in the quiet neighborhood and boyfriend who loves you and the freedom to do whatever you want and she got dead. Right? You can’t stand it?”

“That’s not it.”

“It should have been her.” Maki grabs Megumi’s wrist but he just keeps talking, “Everything you wanted for her? You got it instead. You didn’t even want that shit, but you got it. Right?”

“Shut up, Megumi.” She grabs him at the collar. “We aren’t the same.”

“Sure we are.” He regards her with such a tired and worn-in kind of grief Maki is arrested by it, the familiarity—the same dead-eyed exhaustion she knows from her mirror every morning. “It’s why I always call you,” he says. “Who else killed their own sister trying to protect her?”

Maki lets go of Megumi and sits forward. She rubs a hand over her face until the pressure sets off white spots behind her eyes and she says, finally, for the first time, “I miss her.” She swallows the raw knot in her throat. “I missed her even while she was alive and now—”

“It’s too late,” Megumi says.

“Yeah.”

Megumi looks at her, then he tips his shoulder against hers. When she doesn’t protest, he drapes an arm around her neck and tugs her down until she’s leaning again him, until she curls toward him a little and whispers:

“It was supposed to be the both of us. That was the whole fucking point…”

Megumi doesn’t say anything. He just holds onto her while her eyes blur and run over.

“I didn’t win shit.”

“I’m sorry, Maki.”

“I can’t even… when I look in the mirror, I don’t look like her anymore.”

Megumi goes very still.

He lays his head on her shoulder. “What else?”

She’s not sure why it helps, having her cousin leaning on her while she talks. Maybe because Mai did have a soft spot for him, the blessed brat who never wanted any of it. Maki thinks if circumstances were different, Mai and Megumi might have gotten on better. Mai would have understood Megumi’s indifference to ambition—that in the end all he wanted was to be left the fuck alone. Again, it should have been Mai that walked away from all this. 

Maki tells him about it all—about stolen oranges from the estate kitchen, secret games and secret language that Maki alone now knows, a code for speaking in a house that hates you. She tells him about bloody, bruise-welted abuse. Spitting bits of her own teeth in the dirt behind the big house while Naoya laughed. About Mai rubbing poison oak oil into the fucker’s clothes because no one ever suspected her.

Maki tells Megumi everything she can remember and the knife-wound that’s been aching so long now it feels innate finally fades away.

Megumi, still leaning on her shoulder, her tears long since dried in his hair, murmurs sleepily, “What else?”

She decides it’s safe to admit she really does love him, but what she says is, “It’s getting late.”

“Early.” He glances toward the dawn glow through the sliding glass door. He lifts his head finally and when he looks up at her, his eyes are red. “What are you gonna do now?”

She sighs, slumps tiredly into her couch and rubs her face with one hand.

“Try to get my boyfriend to forgive me for being unbelievably fucking creepy and fucked up?”

“Yeah, good luck with that.”

“No words of encouragement?”

“Not my area,” he says, standing up. He picks up his jacket, hooks his fingers in the collar and slings it over his shoulder. He slants a look her way and just barely smiles. “You should probably tell him some of the stuff you just told me though. I think that would help.”

Yuta takes a remote exorcism in Kyoto.

For the two days Maki waits for that assignment to wrap, she doesn’t try to call him or text past a singular message telling him she’ll be waiting for him. As long as he wants. Then she gets an emergency assignment—seek and destroy. Curse user on the mainland coast, just south of special grade and taking towns hostage with half-mile wide domain and threatening to sure-hit every civilian inside if interfered with.

Like many sorcerers-gone-mad, they don’t see Maki coming.

Then Yuta gets an international aid call from Miguel and he’s gone again.

For two weeks they trade places in the house they share by circumstance alone. Maki comes home to find signs that Yuta was there in her absence—a glass left on the counter or the laundry hamper half-full of his clothes. The bed left unmade and when she lies down in the sheets, she can still smell him (balsam shampoo and cheap detergent) on the pillow.

He leaves a dated sticky note on the kitchen table that says, simply, I made too much curry. You can have the leftovers?

She leaves a sticky note back that says, You used too much salt again.

She is gifted a text for her efforts that is simply a photo of a from-package curry mix and an emoji thumbs down. Then, in the evening, he texts, Utahime pulled me off duty. I’m home tonight until next Tuesday.

Maki, seven hours away by local transport, train, and trouble, texts, I’ll be home in the early AM. I won’t wake you.

Meaning, she’ll sleep on the couch until they can talk.

He texts back, You can wake me.

It’s 2AM again. Maki stands once more in the gate to the rental house courtyard. There’s frost on the ground. The lights in the house are completely dark this time, but she can tell from here that Yuta left the balcony slider unlocked for her.

Maki hops the ten vertical feet from the ground to the balcony, landing soft and silently opening the door to the living room. She can feel Yuta in the house. Even sleeping, Yuta’s cursed energy has a soft pressure, his control ebbing when he’s unconscious until the ambient radiation fills their bedroom. She’s gotten used to it, like snuggling the Elephant’s Foot in Chernobyl. Maki can see his energy bleeding through the walls better than most sorcerers.

It’s how she knows, before she enters the house, that Rika is waiting.

“You can stop lurking,” Maki says to the empty living room.

Rika, materializing from the half-space where she exists at half-manifestation, seems to grow out of the shadows until she fills the air above the coffee table. The pale bulk of her body blocks the way to the rest of the house. Maki can tell from the lingering scent and the slight heat on Yuta's favorite mug, that Yuta was up refreshing his drink at the dining table for a while.

Waiting for her, probably.

“Go away,” Rika says, softly.

“No.”

“You’re still bad, Maki Zenin.”

Maki takes this critique with a nod, laying her sword and duffle bag on the dining table.

“Does Yuta know that you’re manifesting while he’s asleep?”

Rika shrugs. “He told me to watch out. In his sleep.” She grins that awful grin. “That counts.”

Maki tilts her head. “What are you? Really?”

Rika, unmoving says, “Instructions.”

Maki steps closer. “I’m going to bed. You need to move.”

“You made Yuta cry.”

Maki stops in front of the shikigami, close enough to touch.

“I know. But don’t act like you had nothing to do with it, Rika.”

Yuta’s ghost-like partner twitches a little when she says it. Through the lens of her Heavenly Restriction, Maki can see everything that composes the creature in front of her—the fibers of cursed energy made solid, the little responses that ape a human reaction but simply are not right. But even so… there’s a fragment of something real in there. Like a shard of cadaver bone lodged in an Anatomical Venus.

“Hey,” Maki says. “You don’t like me. That’s fine. I don’t mind. All you exist to do is protect Yuta and no matter how awful you are, I’m grateful for that.”

“You’re dangerous,” Rika whispers.

“I’m always dangerous,” Maki says.

“You’re breaking your promise,” Rika says, gritting her tombstone teeth together. “You told her you’d—”

“That won’t work, Rika.” Maki shakes her head. “I was wrong about that.”

Rika floats nearer, so close Maki can feel the ambient cold from her skin, and she feels a strange impulse to kiss the shikigami’s terrible face. She doesn’t, but she does raise a hand to touch Rika’s freezing cheek, waiting to see if she’s mauled for daring. But the shikigami just tilts her monstrous head and waits.

Maki says, “You were right about us being similar.” She runs a curious palm along Rika’s jawline. “We’re the last will and testament of someone who passed on.”

Rika floats sullenly, still waiting.

"Mai didn't die just to take me with her."

Rika clacks her teeth impatiently. 

“Rika, do you still think I’m a danger to Yuta?”

The shikigami sighs loudly. Petulant again, she says, “Nooo. Not anymore.”

“Can you let me pass?”

Rika grumbles. “Fiiiine.”

“Thank you.”

“You are still stupid and ugly.”

Maki isn’t sure why that, of all things, is what compels her to lean forward and plant a little kiss on Rika’s weird bumpy forehead. It’s like kissing permafrost. The shikigami receives this intimacy and cocks her bulbous head exactly the way she did when Maki patted her all those months ago in Shibuya.

“You’re so weird,” Rika complains, starting to fade into nether space again.

“Night, Rika.”

“Weird,” Rika whispers.

Then she’s gone.

Yuta sleeps on his side when he’s tired or stressed.

Maki’s shared a bed with her anxious-ass boyfriend long enough to read the tea leave (so to speak) of his mood based on how entangled she is when she wakes up with him. He kind of paws around for something to hold onto when he’s unsettled and if the morning breaks on her boyfriend wrapped around her like an octopus, having glommed onto her in the night while completely unconscious, then she knows he’s got something on his mind.

Maki gets her jeans and socks off, ditches her bra in the hamper and inspects the bed and its occupant for a moment. Yuta’s asleep still (Maki has no cursed energy for his hyper-vigilant defenses to trigger.) and from his disposition half-curled in on himself, his arms drawn to his chest, hands tucked near his face… Maki would hazard he’s dreaming and the dreams aren't nice. 

“Mmm…” Yuta doesn’t quite wake as she gets one knee onto the bed, depressing the mattress with her body weight. His brow furrows as she pulls the covers up to slide under. “Cold,” he mumbles.

Maki lies on her side facing Yuta and watches his eyes flutter open in the dark, relaxing with recognition. He shifts his limbs a little, rolling to fully face and mirror her.

“Hey,” she says softly.

Yuta kind of mumbles a response. Maki looks at him for a moment, studying every molecular detail of the way he blinks sleepily, and she can tell he’s not fully awake. She can tell his brain refuses to categorize Maki’s presence as a stressor, so Yuta doesn’t snap to alert. He just blinks more slowly, his eyes floating shut and she thinks vaguely about how Nobara told her cats slow-blink at you when they trust you.

“Yuta?”

“Mmm?”

“You told me to wake you up.”

Yuta mumbles. “No.”

Maki smiles. She very, very gingerly cards his bangs from his forehead with her finger, so carefully there is no way he’ll feel her do it. She traces the lines of his facial features without touching him—the curve of his right eyebrow to the line of his nose, his mouth.

“No?”

He shakes his head and Maki reads in his body what he’s going to do before he does it and meets him halfway when he blindly moves an arm to pull her into the warm space against his chest. She folds into him. He sighs against her hair, relaxing as she secures an arm around his waist and they settle into a familiar (if somewhat unsustainable) sleeping arrangement tangled together under the covers.

“We need to talk,” Maki whispers, but not with much effort.

“Laterrrr,” says Sleepy Yuta who is much dumber than Normal Yuta.

“When you wake up, we can talk.”

“Mmm-hmm,” he says, nuzzling his nose and mouth into her hair. His breath is warm and slow and steady, his heart rate coming down from whatever had it racing. He’s basically just tipping back into REM as he murmurs, “Talk soon.”

Then he’s asleep.

Maki is aware nothing Sleepy Yuta says means jack or shit. Once he’s awake, she’ll have a lot to make up for, and she might not be able to. (She’ll lie awake tonight, dreading that.) But Maki is a woman who is a body. So completely a body that the composition of her soul is private to her alone and she does take a specific comfort in the fact Yuta’s body—for all that his brain will make more sensible elaborations—seems 100% convinced of its safety in her arms. That's something at least to hang a hope on. 

“Talk soon,” Maki whispers.

And she closes her eyes.