(From the events of the original shounen manga: Jujutsu Kaisen written and illustrated by Gege Akutami, and anime, animated by MAPPA. This is my own personalized fan-fiction version of Junpei Yoshino's POV in his interaction between Yuji Itadori and Mahito)
Beware: This work is in no way connected or related to the original canon story and timeline of Jujutsu Kaisen, It is solely dedicated to the fans of JJK who hopes to bring back a potential Special Grade Sorcerer as Junpei Yoshino. Do well to join the ride, enjoy the captivating, intriguing and interesting debut of my first ever work as an author here.
I remain your dedicated author shhh_I_am_cooking
Junpei Yoshino's POV
Suddenly, I felt an unsettling, eerie sensation slither through the air, twisting the atmosphere until everything felt… wrong. The world seemed to tremble on the edges of reality, and I sensed it before I even saw it. Then, out of nowhere, it appeared. Footsteps echoed faintly but deliberately, heavy and deliberate against the ground, and Yuji Itadori, standing before me, shifted his gaze. His eyes narrowed as they met the presence behind me, his voice firm and unwavering:
"Who are you?"
The boldness of his tone jolted me back from the tangle of thoughts I had been lost in. I snapped my gaze toward the figure Yuji was confronting, and my stomach turned. Mahito. But… what was he doing here? How had he come? I could feel the pit of unease swallowing me, yet I couldn't tear my eyes away.
Then, it happened.
A fwoosh, a grotesque stretch of limbs, and it all unfolded faster than my mind could process. Mahito — the one I had called friend, the one I had trusted — mutated violently before my eyes. His arms lengthened and twisted in impossible angles, grappling Yuji and slamming him against the wall behind me. I froze, upright and rigid, disbelief pinning my body in place.
Why? Why would Mahito hurt Yuji, someone so good, so pure? My mind clawed at answers, searching every corner, every memory. But there were none — only chaos.
A voice shattered the paralysis I felt:
"Junpei! Run!"
The desperation in Yuji's shout pulled me back from my spiraling thoughts, yanking me to the present.
"I don't know how you know this guy, but you have to run! Please!"
The plea cracked, raw, desperate—not fear, not anger, but a hope tethered to me by sheer will. My head turned slowly toward him. Yuji's face stared back, wide-eyed, unwavering. He should have hated me. He should have been furious. My mother… everything I had lost… And yet, in the wreckage, he looked at me as though I could still be saved.
It made me furious. And it made me weak.
I wanted to prove him wrong. I wanted to prove to him that even someone as powerless as me could set things right. I drew in a breath, shakily, and spoke:
"Itadori… please… calm down! Mahito is not a bad person…"
The words barely left my lips before they became a trap. My mind froze on the phrase, "bad person," and memories clawed through my consciousness. The transfigured souls, twisted and writhing under Mahito's curse, replayed like nightmares behind my eyes. The helplessness, the horror—I had seen it all, yet I had somehow justified it.
My body remained still, unresponsive. My mind floated elsewhere, a spectator trapped within itself. I could see the chaos, could feel Yuji's struggle, hear his voice, but it was distant now, muffled like he was beneath water.
"Mahito, stop!" Yuji shouted. Stop? Why would he stop?
Mahito's hand, cold and deceptively gentle, rested on my shoulder. And with that touch, my consciousness snapped back into my own body—only to find it already too late. My gaze fell to his hand, smooth and unnatural, and a dread unlike any I had ever known curled through my chest. I looked at Yuji again, the weight of despair pressing down on me, and felt it—the cruelest revelation of it all:
Now, I had to face something far more terrifying than any curse. The possibility that I had been wrong. That perhaps not all humans were monsters. That perhaps… choosing Mahito, choosing the path of hatred, had been the easier way out of loneliness.
And then Mahito spoke.
His smile twisted inhumanly, grotesque in its perfection, and his words slithered into my mind:
"You wanted to see the truth, didn't you?"
Before I could even react, his cursed technique activated—Idle Transfiguration. My vision blurred, my body convulsed, and I felt the bones and flesh of myself being rewritten, reshaped, and violated. Pain, sharp and stretching, surged from within. My limbs bent in impossible angles, my skin crawling and stretching like wet clay.
I tried to speak. I tried to fight. But no sound came, no movement obeyed my mind. My body, my self, was no longer mine. I watched helplessly as my reflection in the twisted contours of my hands became something monstrous—something terrifying, a cursed spirit born from my own despair.
Yuji's voice screamed for me again. The sound pierced my mind, distant and unreachable, and I realized the cruelest truth: I wasn't just losing my body. I was losing the person I had been. The boy who had hoped, the boy who had laughed, the boy who had dared to imagine kindness. Gone, replaced by the nightmare Mahito had molded.
And through the terror, a single thought remained, jagged and hollow in my skull:
I wanted to be saved… and now, perhaps, it was too late.
Until, everywhere strangely turned ghost quiet, towards the brink of my fragmented soul slowly fading away into an empty void of nothingness between life and death, and annihilation seeming inevitable, an ancient, unseen force intervenes, reconstructing my broken soul.