The first week after Yuji Itadori's death was a lesson in the different shapes of grief. The world of Jujutsu High, which had just begun to feel like a cohesive, vibrant place, was now fractured, each of us retreating into our own private islands of sorrow.
Nobara's grief was a thing of sharp edges and furious, defiant anger. She threw herself into training with a reckless abandon. She argued with everyone, her words laced with a bitter sarcasm that was a shield against the gaping hole that had been torn in her new life. She had finally found a place where she belonged, only to have one of its pillars kicked out from under her. Her anger was a desperate attempt to feel something other than the crushing weight of loss.
Megumi's grief was a cold, silent thing. He became a ghost in the halls, his already stoic demeanor hardening into an impenetrable wall of ice. He trained with a silent, monastic fury, pushing his body and his Cursed Technique to their absolute limits. He was punishing himself. In his mind, he was the one who had dragged Yuji into this world, the one who had been too weak to protect him. He was trying to build a version of himself strong enough that he would never have to feel that kind of helplessness again.
And my grief… my grief was a lie.
It was the most difficult, most exhausting performance of my life. I had to be the responsible senpai, the stable anchor for my grieving friends, all while knowing the truth. Every comforting word I offered felt like a betrayal. Every shared, somber silence felt like a deception. I had to mourn a boy who was, at that very moment, likely being forced by Satoru to watch movies with a cursed doll punching him in the face. The sheer, soul-crushing absurdity of it was a constant weight on my conscience.
The three of us would train together in the main yard, the space feeling unnervingly empty without Yuji's boisterous energy.
"Fushiguro, your timing is off!" Nobara would snap, parrying one of his attacks with her hammer. "You're leaving your left side wide open!"
"Focus on your own form, Kugisaki," Megumi would retort, his voice flat and cold, as his Nue swooped down from above.
Their sparring was no longer about growth; it was about hurting. They were lashing out at the only people they could, trying to find a physical outlet for an emotional pain that had no other release.
My role was to be the unmovable center. I would step between them, my presence a quiet command for order. "That's enough," I'd say.
"He's right, Nobara," I said one afternoon, after she had berated Megumi for a missed block. "Your anger is making you sloppy. You're over-committing on your strikes, leaving yourself open for a counter." I then turned to Megumi. "And you're fighting without thinking. You're just throwing your shikigami at the problem. You're not using them strategically. You're not fighting to win; you're fighting to punish yourself."
They both flinched at my blunt assessment, but they couldn't deny the truth of it.
"The Goodwill Event with the Kyoto school is in a months," I continued, my voice hard. "Right now, you're both a liability. Yuji died because we weren't strong enough. All of us. If you truly want to honor his memory, then stop fighting each other and start fighting to get better. That's what he would have wanted."
The mention of his name, the quiet invocation of his selfless spirit, finally broke through their anger and grief. They looked at each other, then at me, a shared, painful understanding passing between them. The fight was over. The real training had begun.
But as I mentored them, a part of my soul felt like it was rotting from the inside out. I was using the memory of their dead friend as a tool to motivate them, all while knowing he was alive. The lie was a poison, and I was forcing myself to drink it every single day.
Maki took on Nobara. She was, in many ways, the perfect mentor for her. She understood anger. She understood what it was like to be looked down upon, to have to fight for every scrap of respect. Her methods were brutal. She would disarm Nobara, knock her to the ground, and stand over her, her wooden polearm pressed against Nobara's throat.
"Your technique is good," Maki would say, her voice devoid of any sympathy. "But it's useless if you can't land a hit. You rely on your hammer and nails, but what happens when the enemy is too fast? What happens when they close the distance? You're dead. Get up. We're doing hand-to-hand until you can block at least one of my strikes."
Panda took on Megumi. His immense durability and physical strength were the perfect wall for Megumi to test his tactical mind against. He couldn't just overwhelm Panda; he had to outthink him.
"Your Divine Dogs are good for tracking, but they're fragile!" Panda would say, batting one of the wolves aside with a casual swipe of his massive paw. "Your Nue is good for aerial support, but what about close-quarters? You need to learn to use your shikigami in concert, Megumi! Use one as a feint to set up an attack from another!"
And Toge… Toge became our strategist. He would oversee mock battles, using his limited vocabulary to force us to communicate non-verbally, to anticipate each other's moves, to think as a single unit. A single "Salmon" or "Kelp" from him would signal a complex tactical shift that we had to learn to interpret on the fly.
Slowly, painfully, we began to heal. We were not the same. The easy camaraderie was gone, replaced by a grim, shared purpose. We were a team being forged in a crucible of loss, our bonds tempered by the lie I was forced to live every single day.
My reprieve from this performance came in secret. Twice a week, under the cover of night, Satoru would appear in my room.
"Time for class," he'd whisper, and the world would dissolve.
He didn't take us to a hidden basement in the school. He took us somewhere far more significant, a place steeped in my own strange history. We would reappear in a vast, silent forest, the air crisp and clean. A short walk would lead us to a clearing, and in that clearing stood a large, traditional, but clearly long-abandoned compound. The wood was graying, the paper screens torn, the gardens overgrown.
It was the branch family home where I had been born into this world.
The first time he brought me here, I froze, a wave of vertigo and phantom memories washing over me. The memory of being a helpless baby. The horror of my gender change. The terror of my awakening Stygian Eyes. The day Satoru had crashed through the walls and stolen me away.
"Recognize it?" Satoru asked, his voice soft. "The clan abandoned it after your family… moved on. It's not on any official Jujutsu High maps. No one knows it's here. The perfect, private little gym for my two secret students."
And there, in the overgrown courtyard, was Yuji Itadori. He was shirtless, his body already showing the lean, hard lines of a dedicated fighter. In front of him was Principal Yaga's cursed doll, a small, stout creature with a cartoonish face, currently pummeling Yuji relentlessly every time his flow of Cursed Energy wavered.
"Satoru-sensei! Aki-senpai!" Yuji called out, a wide grin on his face despite the constant barrage of punches. "You're here!"
This was our new secret life. In this forgotten corner of the world, the lie fell away. Here, Yuji was alive, and I could finally be his senpai without the crushing weight of deception.
Satoru's training regimen was hellish. He forced Yuji to maintain a constant, steady output of Cursed Energy while performing complex physical tasks. The main tool for this was cinema. Yuji was forced to watch a massive catalogue of films—everything from high-art dramas to schlocky horror movies—while keeping the cursed doll from beating him unconscious. The goal was to teach him to control his emotions, to detach the flow of his power from his immediate feelings.
While Yuji was being tenderized by the doll, Satoru would turn his attention to me. My training was more esoteric.
"Your problem isn't power, Aki," he explained one night, as we sat on the decaying engawa of the main house. "It's application. Your Black is a perfect killing technique. Your White is a perfect defense. But your Gray… it's a mess. It's a conceptual power that you're trying to use like a physical one."
He pointed to a stone lantern in the garden. "Don't try to create a force to push it over. Don't try to create a phantom fist to strike it. That's crude. That's thinking like a normal sorcerer. You are not a normal sorcerer. Your technique is about rules. So, give it a rule."
I focused on the lantern. I remembered my breakthrough with Yuta. I didn't think about force. I thought about a concept. 'Gravity here is ten times stronger.'
I whispered the name of the technique. "Gray."
For a split second, nothing happened. Then, with a deep, groaning sound, the ancient stone lantern seemed to become impossibly heavy. It didn't fall; it sank, crushing the ground beneath it, its own weight suddenly a catastrophic burden. The effect lasted for three seconds before my concentration broke and the lantern returned to normal, now sitting in a small crater.
Satoru clapped his hands softly. "Better. Much better. You're not creating force. You're rewriting the physics textbook for a few seconds. That's the true nature of your reversal. It's not creation. It's temporary legislation."
These nights were my sanctuary. Here, I could be honest. I could train, I could talk to Yuji, I could breathe without the lie choking me.
One night, after a particularly grueling session, Satoru had left to check on something in Tokyo, leaving Yuji and me alone. Yuji was sitting by a small fire we had built, staring into the flames, his usual cheerful expression replaced by a somber thoughtfulness.
"Do you think they hate me?" he asked quietly.
I sat down beside him. "Who?"
"Fushiguro and Kugisaki," he said. "I died. I put them through that. And now they're training, thinking it's to honor my memory or something. But I'm here. It feels… dishonest. Like I'm letting them suffer for nothing."
The guilt in his voice was a perfect mirror of my own. He was a good person, trapped in an impossible situation.
"They don't hate you, Yuji-kun," I said softly. "They miss you. And their grief… it's making them stronger. The pain is real, but it's not for nothing. It's forging them into the sorcerers they need to be. The sorcerers you will need them to be when you return."
He looked at me, his brown eyes full of a deep, painful uncertainty. "But will I ever be strong enough? To control Sukuna? To be worth… all of this?" He gestured around at our secret life, at the lie we were living.
I knew, in that moment, that he needed more than just a training partner or a senpai. He needed an anchor. He needed a promise.
"Look at me, Yuji-kun," I said, my voice firm, drawing his full attention. I met his gaze, my crimson eyes holding his. This was not a lie. This was the truest thing I had ever said in this life.
"The path ahead of you is harder than anyone else's. Satoru-sensei is going to push you until you break, and then he's going to push you further. You will feel alone. You will feel like a monster. You will feel like a fraud. But you need to listen to me."
I took a deep breath, making a vow not just to him, but to myself, to the memory of all the people I had failed to save.
"I know you feel alone right now. But you're not. I'm here. And I promise you, on my life, that I will help you get strong enough to face whatever comes next. I will help you master your power. And I promise that one day, you will stand beside Megumi and Nobara again, not as a ghost they're mourning, but as their comrade. You just have to survive until then. You have to trust us."
Tears welled up in his eyes, but he didn't look away. He saw the absolute conviction in my face. He saw a promise he could believe in. He nodded, a single, sharp, determined movement.
"Okay," he whispered, his voice thick with emotion. "Okay, senpai. I trust you."
In the flickering firelight of that forgotten compound, a new pact was forged. He was no longer just Satoru's student, and I was no longer just his keeper. We were partners in this grand deception, allies bound by a shared, secret future. He had his grief and his monstrous tenant. I had my foreknowledge and my lies. And together, we would prepare for the day when the world would learn that its greatest hope had not been extinguished, but had merely been waiting in the shadows.
As the weeks wore on, the change in Megumi and Nobara was undeniable. Their grief had not lessened, but it had been honed into a weapon. They moved with a new synergy, a silent understanding born from countless hours of shared struggle. They were no longer just classmates; they were soldiers who had survived a war together.
The announcement for the Kyoto Sister-School Goodwill Event came in late October. It was to be held at our school this year. The stage was being set.
I stood in the training yard, watching Megumi and Nobara execute a flawless combination attack on a powerful Cursed Corpse Panda was piloting. They moved as one, his shikigami creating an opening for her Resonance to strike a fatal blow. They were ready.
I looked at my friends, at the powerful, resilient sorcerers they had become, forged in the fires of a lie I had told them. A profound sense of pride swelled in my chest, so fierce it almost choked me. But it was immediately followed by a wave of deep, aching sorrow.
I had helped build this. This strength. This family. But it was all built on a foundation of ghosts and secrets. And I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the bone, that the day was coming when the ghost would walk again, and the truth would threaten to bring our entire, fragile world crashing down.