"You're a sorcerer?"
"Yeah! And I guess you can use Jujutsu now. Nice."
Nobara threw up a thumbs up, as if she hadn't just raised a thousand questions along with her digit.
The chase itself had lasted for nearly an hour, but their conversation started as a non-Euclidean mess of syllables and intentions. By the time it wound down, ageing sunlight scattered orange across the cafe. A few of its workers had come up to them since they'd sat down to question why they were out of school in the first place, but Nobara had honest-to-god barked them all down.
Yuriko, who had discovered the little bit of shame she still had tucked away in her soul, ordered herself a black coffee, and the Kugisaki a caramel Frappuccino.
She set the drinks down at their table and studied the other girl with a frown.
"You should sit,' Nobara suggested.
But Yuriko tucked away her chair instead.
"I was supposed to be somewhere," she sighed. "Hopefully we can wrap this up quickly?"
The country girl raised an eyebrow, her eyes alight with evaluation.
Until the bereavement, the Suzushinas had been spending every summer with the Kugisakis in their home in the country. That was just another way of saying that Yuriko hadn't seen Nobara since they were both nine.
"You've...changed."
Yuriko stared, trying to keep her face as even as possible in the hope that it would stifle any of her old tells.
"Not much vertically, but still."
The tiny girl blinked. "Watch it, Kugisaki."
Nobara instead elected to slide her hand from the top of her head down to the top of Yuriko's head. She pouted.
"Maybe you haven't changed that much." Nobara flashed teeth.
"You certainly haven't," muttered the irritated girl in response. "And I doubt you know me as well as you think you do."
"Sure, sure. But if you haven't gotten too cool for little old me, then please sit. Yurikon."
The nickname elicited a full-body shiver. With a sigh, Yuriko retrieved the wooden time prison from under the table and begrudgingly complied. A silence punctuated the moment, as that same smug smile from yore reemerged on Nobara's face, much to her chagrin.
It was in this silence, that a metaphorical creature slapped its trunk on their table and blew a trumpet. The elephant in the room was begging to be addressed.
"You don't seem surprised..."
"Why would I be? I've always been taller than—"
"That I'm a sorcerer."
Nobara tilted her head. "Eh?" She leaned back into her seat, as she took a greedy sip of her drink. "It'd be weirder if you weren't. You had more cursed energy than everyone in that dumb village combined! Except Aunty Hatsuko, of course."
"What?"
"Really? You couldn't tell? It's like—" Nobara stretched her hands apart to the full length of her wingspan. "This big. Granny even wanted you to—" Nobara took another slurp of her drink. "Woah! So sweet! Can't find this in the middle of nowhere."
"Stay on topic."
"Alright, alright. Buzzkill." Now Nobara was pouting. "You were a curse magnet; I'm talking city numbers whenever you came to visit. The hag had her work cut out for her. Or she would have, if it weren't for Aunty Hatsuko."
"That. That there. What do mean 'Aunty Hatsuko?'"
"It... hasn't been that long, has it?" Nobara slapped a palm to her forehead. "Right. I'll start from the beginning. So, your mother—Aunty Hatsuko—wandered into our village alone when she was just a little—"
THUD.
Yuriko's hands slammed into the table. Her barrier redirecting the counterforces of the strike until its wooden legs were trembling. Power slipped out of her control as a metaphysical chill swept over the room, and back.
"I know!" she shouted, stunned by the harsh tone of her own voice. Heads turned. Whispers followed. Drinks spilled.
Nobara just watched her in silence, her own cursed energy remained completely undisturbed. At her befuddled, but utterly unbothered mien, Yuriko regained the presence of mind to feel embarrassment.
"Sorry," she said, dropping back into her seat. "I—it's my fault. I know why you call her aunty, that wasn't what I meant." A deep breath returned the tide of tangible confusion back under her grip and the natural mood returned to the establishment. "'Except Aunty Hatsuko', 'if it weren't for Aunty Hatsuko.' What did you mean by that?"
"Oh." A light flickered on behind Nobara's eyes. "You didn't know?"
Didn't know.
Didn't know...
Didn't—wait.
Short strings of conversation, little innocuous implications called back to the forefront of her mind.
'Do you know if your mother was one? A sorcerer, I mean. You would have felt it.'
That had been Geto.
'I take after my mother' [...] 'Yeah... I imagined you might.'
Her first meeting with...
'I won't deny that I'm currently keeping things from you'
Her eyes widened.
He knew. Yuriko's cursed energy surged again, but this time it remained firmly around her form as a flame stands atop a Bunsen burner. Her shoulders slumped simultaneously.
"Do... you wanna talk about it?"
"No." There was a certain blue-eyed idiot she needed to grill instead.
"Phew..." Nobara smiled. "Because I'm the worst when it comes to cheering people up."
A memory flashes. Cicadas and louses. A scraped knee. An older boy is sucker-punched to the ground.
"I remember." But that never stopped you from trying, did it? Yuriko suppressed the tug at her lips.
"So... how've you been?"
One unfair interaction into the next. Now she knew for certain why she had run.
Fourteen summers.
Thus far, Yuriko had lived through fourteen summers. In the year of her ninth summer, she could have honestly answered 'fine.' Life had been good, outside of the whispered disconcertments between her parents. Her mother had been sickly, but she had always been sickly. It hadn't been enough of a departure from the norm that her dumbass nine-year-old brain could sense the escalation.
Besides, Suzushina Hatsuko had been 'fine,' every fucking time she asked. The primordial lie that soured them all.
But Nobara had known about her as she had been during her ninth summer. So naturally she had been talking about—
In her tenth summer, her father had finally awoken enough from his grief that he had mustered up the strength to hit her. He had been blaming himself at first, and maybe he still did, but seeing 'her' face every day had finally broken something in him.
A blow to the stomach. Somehow, the daughter was the reason his wife no longer lived under the same sky that he did. And she'd believed him. Because until that fist swallowed her field of view, their relationship had been 'fine.' Pocket money here, light novels there. Yuriko had been indulged in every possible way a child her age could ever want to be indulged. She had been lavished in academic journals, doctorate papers and dolls. She had no reason to believe that her father felt anything but love for her.
So, if he blamed her—and in her mind, he did so reluctantly—he had to be right. And if he was right, then the closed fist had been merciful. He had gone easy on her. So, she punished herself.
Yuriko pulled her sleeves lower and thanked the season for forcing a change in school uniform.
"Fine," she replied, smiling a little. The expression was a hang over from the involuntary font of fondness her recollections had roused. "I've been fine."
And if her year continued as it had been, if her father didn't flex his legal authority to demand her return 'home,' and if three individuals continued to be as they had been, then by her fifteenth summer 'I've been fine,' would become a understatement instead of a lie.
Nobara's fingers drifted to her waist where her hammer was. A little steel galvanised her expression. "You know," she said. "Whether I 'know' you or not, there's still a seat at my table reserved for a certain girl who dived into a river before she'd learned how to swim."
"..."
Yuriko begged probability itself to spit out an outcome that had nothing to do with the current conversation. Literally anything else to derail the conversation would have been welcome. That knowing smile, the grip on her hammer. That damn smile.
"Wait a minute, you said 'again.'"
"Hm?"
"When I saw you on the staircase, you said 'do I have to use this again today.'" Yuriko pointed at the tool. "Do you just go around hitting people with hammers?" Nobara's face wilted at the aspersion. "Oh my god, you do. Who the fuck did you hit?"
"Hahaha..."
Yuriko wanted details, but apparently probability wanted to divert her attention. A Clorox adjacent OST start blaring from her pocket. She flinched, then deftly fetched the device. A text message from ten minutes ago, and a call that ended before she could pick it.
Dammit, Sasaki.
Yuriko flinched under the new round of stares the sound drew; Nobara started smiling again.
"But really," she said. "Your hair. When was the last time you brushed it?"
Yuriko ignored her and read the message. The cafe window exploded thereafter.
***
Sugisawa High: Sports Pitch
She squeezed Mr Stupid's eraser as hard as she could. Setsuko couldn't let go of the images she had seen in the classroom. The man himself. Their substitute teacher. A third familiar voice.
It was easier—she found—to 'recall' the memories of an object that had been imbued with cursed energy from a different source. Yuriko's phone delighted in revealing its secrets at the slightest brush of her technique, which was why the girl's forty-six-character alphanumeric passwords couldn't stop Setsuko from changing its ringtone. According to Gojo, it was probably because the lingering 'sentiments' in the energy itself provided more data for her technique to 'reconstruct' events.
Her technique—which she was tentatively calling psychometry—allowed her to view the history of any object she touched, as well as the events that occurred around it. It wasn't sky-splittingly flashy like Yuriko's. She would never be able to fire off a Galick gun, or do what Vegeta couldn't, and win a significant fight. But Setsuko found that she didn't mind, actually.
Her technique was useful. Invaluable, even and she was grateful for that. The main pull factor for going to Jujutsu High was the promise of a good conventional education, as well as a generous salary just to 'properly document' the actual histories of so-called cursed objects. If the higher-ups saw fit, with the value her ability provided, she would never see combat. It was a better deal—air tastes of rusted pipes and stale water—than most would get.
Though, Setsuko didn't particularly feel valuable as she redoubled her efforts on the eraser. To an outsider, she was willing to bet she looked—eyes closed, head bowed and feet apart—like she was suffering from a bad case of eight-grader syndrome. The stares she had gotten from other students on their way out of school had burned, but that hadn't been enough to shame her out of the endeavour. After all, she shared a perennial failing of Yuriko's. She had to know.
Setsuko pumped even more energy into the eraser, and it started to vibrate subtly in her hands. That was when she heard him.
"Hey!"
Setsuko's head snapped up.
A boy with spiky black hair. Honestly, he looked a little like a sea urchin placed on top of a human body, even as he stood in a battle-ready stance his feet apart and his hands clasped together. What was most striking about him was his Jujutsu High uniform and the cursed energy eking into his limbs for the bare minimum degree of reinforcement.
"What are you doing?" he demanded.
He reminded her of Yuriko. Not in capacity, not even close, but of a conversation when she had held up a single finger and lowered her apocalyptic presence into what Setsuko was now sensing from the boy in front of her.
"One Megumi..." she whispered.
"Excuse me?" He said, tone caught somewhere between irritation and confusion. Cursed energy fell into his shadow. "How did you know my name?"
"That's your name?"
His face twitched. "...Divine dogs."
Megumi's posture shifted. His eyes darted around the field; his shadows shifted beneath him as a pair of lupine figures sprang forth.
"Woah, woah!" Setsuko took multiple steps back, waving her free hand in front of her face as she did so.
"Relax, they're not here for you."
"I'm not scared!" Setsuko lied. "I'm allergic!" That part was true. "Last week, I had to save my friend from a cat, and—"
The hairs on the back of her neck stood.
Just then, a wave of depression hit her, but not before the white wolf that tackled her out of the way. A creature stood where she had been—a curse with manifold limbs running across its stomach, and hair that ran along its spine. Saliva rolled off its tongue and the eyes embedded within blinked to clear themselves.
The tongue swivelled and the pupils lasered in on Megumi. Greed in every one of them. Its limbs flexed and it pounced again.
"A Grade Two, huh?" Megumi leaned and it stumbled past him. "Must be the influence of the finger. Are you alright?"
The boy extended a hand to Setsuko who laid supine. She was hyperventilating as he came into her field of view.
"You must be the new transfer." he said, as he crouched to her position. "Sasaki-san, right?" The sea urchin stared down at her a little longer, then sighed when she didn't respond. "Ugh, Gojo must have played a prank on you or something. I'm not 'one Megumi.'" Mr Not-One Megumi pulled out an ID card and angled it toward Setsuko. "Call me Fushiguro."
But she couldn't register what he was saying. Her eyes darted over to the curse which was quickly regaining its footing. Setsuko squeezed the eraser so tightly that her knuckles cracked. Fushiguro followed her line of sight.
"Oh." He shook his head. "It's okay."
As his voice fell, the idle wolf tackled the curse back into the ground. Fangs sank into a pseudo-throat, and ripped it clean of the body. It was no fight at all. The curse faded in seconds.
"You're okay."
Setsuko looked at the offered hand, and this time she took it. The urchin hoisted her to her knees by her non-dominant arm, and her body shot up without the faintest resistance. He was strong. Maybe not Yuriko strong, but stronger than her for certain.
Fushiguro watched her impassively. "Breathe."
The word itself fixed nothing, but it helped her focus. In, and out. Slowerand slower.
Silence often made a contortionist of time. In the lulls within a conversation, time could stretch moments far beyond the point of comfort. Here she was, Sasaki Setsuko, exposing just how 'valuable' she was to a stranger she had just met. Weaker, and more pathetic in his eyes with every breath she took, and each lungful tasted like another minute of judgement. In, and out.
She didn't mind. She didn't mind. But it would be nice. Actually, it would be euphoric to be like Yuriko. To only see the chittering creatures and amorphous thoughtforms as pests to cull and then forget. To never dream of the bathroom again.
The boy continued to watch her patiently.
"Th—thanks..." she finally panted, her inflections contradicted her racing pulse; her heart pounding in her ears and so on. Soon, Setsuko was able to manage a shaky grin. "They still freak me out."
"Well. Then you need to stop whatever it is you're doing... Or learn to hide it better."
"Sorry?"
He pointed at her fist. "It was headed for the building. You caught its attention. As a sorcerer, you need to exercise caution when you're using cursed energy. It could put the people around you in danger."
Setsuko stared at him, then mutely nodded. What a straitlaced guy, she thought. And she did her very best not to let the judgement show on her face.
"Sorry," she said again. "A teacher kept two of my friends behind, and I just needed to find out—ow!"
Pain. A spear of sensation drilling into her palm. It was almost like...no. Setsuko unclenched her fist and there was blood on her nails. Little shavings fell from where the eraser had been, leaving behind marks in her skin.
"Wha—what?" A trickle ran down Setsuko's nose. It reeked of iron. Her head was swimming, as a sudden sense of emptiness overcame her. The white wolf quickly positioned itself by Setsuko's flank to support her unstable body.
"Are you..."
Whatever Megumi had been about to ask was interrupted by a feminine voice originating from what had been an empty patch of field adjacent to the two sorcerers.
"—Ryoumen Sukuna."
Fushiguro let out a sharp exhale beside her at the name.
But what caught Setsuko's attention was the voice itself. Even in her state of delirium, Setsuko could remember. The lilt of condescension, the smarmy certainty. It was the kind of voice belonging to a person who supposed they had unravelled the mysteries behind the human condition and found them wanting.
"Kaori-sensei?" Setsuko muttered. But she wasn't alone.
They weren't really there, per se. They couldn't possibly have been. The lighting was all wrong; their voices reverberated like the sound had walls to bounce off. Shadows cascaded unnaturally around the scene.
Setsuko narrowed her focus on a figure. A ghostly apparition—one of three—who had been the first to speak. She was conventionally attractive, sporting curt, dark hair, and an asymmetrical cut which partially obstructed what appeared to be a medical scar.
"And you're certain his values are in alignment with Geto-sama's?"
She recognised that voice too. The substitute. The man who only ever taught when—Setsuko's pupils constricted—he had only ever taught during hours when Yuriko had been absent.
The spectre of Kaori-'sensei' rolled her eyes. They could feel the contempt billowing even through the projection. "I'll leave that to your discerning eye, Negi-kun. In the meanwhile, what you should focus on is whether or not you can circumvent Gojo Satoru, or even young Suzushina-chan, without the King of Curses in play. I think your 'sisters' learned the answer the hard way?"
'Negi' stayed quiet.
"Right, then. I'll leave this in your capable hands." Kaori flashed a smile, as she turned and walked towards—or rather in the direction of—Fushiguro. "The both of you."
Kaori bumped into his shoulder, walked out of 'frame' and disappeared. The boy flinched, a reflexive hand shot to the point of contact. Fushiguro turned to Setsuko. Gone was his easy composure; he looked confused at first, but confusion gave way to understanding, and then horror.
He opened his mouth, but then a whimper stole the words before he could lay them. Mr Stupid. Not even the ghost of his classroom presence remained in the apparition as he sat bound to a phantom chair with a gag tied to his mouth. 'Negi' regarded the man with a humourless almost-smirk. Setsuko wondered in an idle part of her mind, whether it came naturally, or whether he practiced his disdain in the mirror.
"Got something to say, monkey?" The gag ripped loose into Negi's grasp.
"He's just...a child." Mr Stupid was slurring. "Please—"
A strike to his lower abdomen cuts him short. Negi snorted as Mr Stupid, chair and all, went flying across the space until he hit an invisible threshold. Erasers spilled from his pockets when he fell.
"And?" said the curse user. "So is your daughter."
With that final comment, Setsuko's breathing returned to normal and the illusion dissolved.
"Is this..."
"Yea—yeah. It has to be what happened... I didn't know I could...This is..."
"I felt that." Fushiguro rubbed his shoulder again. "She touched me."
"Fushiguro-san, who's Ryoumen Sukuna?"
The boy clicked his tongue.
"Let's hope you don't find out today." Fushiguro crossed his thumbs together. "Nue."
From his shadow, sprang the largest, ugliest, bird Setsuko had ever had the misfortune of laying her eyes upon.
"Hop on," he said. "I think your friends are in danger."