Archive of Our Own ^beta

Megumi is coming back today.

Satoru marks the occasion with a plain breakfast, Megumi-style, just butter on toast with a cup of three-sugarcube coffee, no longer ten because nowadays, he doesn’t need so much energy. Light fragrance and sweetness fill his mouth, so subtle he barely notices it until three-quarters of the toast is gone, mild, mellow chamomile, the floral hit of chewy, preserved roselle hibiscus, and juicy, honeyed aroma of osmanthus. It’s just butter, but it’s the butter Megumi’s been blending just for him ever since he’d spotted the flower mix in one of Yuuji’s old teen mags early on, intended for a cake or a cute and pretty crystal agar agar dessert for White Day, but repurposed for “something that isn’t pure sugar, at least,” Megumi had said, butter glimmering on his fingers, whipped into creamy, light gold, flecked with vibrant red, the same red that marked his lips, last scraps in the bag, because preserved roselle was an old treat, something sweet in a time where he and Tsumiki hadn’t felt like they could offer themselves candy, had felt plainer than that, dingier than that, older than that, and reached for the same, cheap, unlabeled plastic packets that the snack bar hostess on the fourth floor passed around the complex every summer, courtesy of her daughter’s garden, good with the snap of a cold, refreshing glass of shochu, she always said with a laugh on her garishly made up face, and Tsumiki used to tell Megumi to be polite whenever he mentioned behind closed doors that he thought it strange that the daughter didn’t take her in, when it was clearly obvious she was struggling and miserable.

Megumi still can’t cook, not like Satoru can, not like Yuuji can. But as the one who knew the crumbling Gojou estate best after Satoru, as someone practiced at scraping himself together into a semblance of a person day after day, no matter the state of his mind, or even the world, in the early days of the aftermath, in the dawn of his new world, Megumi had waded haphazardly into the dusty kitchen to feed everyone subpar food with his own two hands. Silent and scowling, he’d shove bowl after bowl of still-lumpy miso soup and overly mushy rice in front of everyone’s faces, whether they wanted to see or talk to him or not, snapping at them to eat. Underspiced pots of curry with still raw chunks of carrot, sloppy stir fries with too-tough meat and unwieldy slabs of vegetable, storebought croquettes that still came out on the charcoal side of burnt, charred, overly salty fish; if Satoru hadn’t known any better he would’ve said that Megumi was getting back at them for something in an excruciatingly passive-aggressive fashion, except he knew that wasn’t the case.

In the privacy of his rooms, littered with growing piles of paperwork emblematic of increasing bureaucratic nonsense, Satoru had complained anyway, and Megumi had scoffed a retort as usual. Yet, under the brighter lights of the main room, futon and pillow lay crumpled behind the low table where Megumi always sat, sleeping in the living room again like he had when he was younger and more desperate, slumped back-to-back with Tsumiki and a threadbare blanket in the night like a pair of abandoned puppies. Satoru had seen him stare down his own meal in complete and stony silence, eyes so dark they’d seemed like sinkholes, filled with the shadows he shouldn’t have been able to manipulate much anymore. All of the former Jujutsu Tech students had contained themselves, squeezed their thoughts and memories into neat little boxes of paper and wood, the various rooms scattered across a single wing of the compound. They hid like injured animals, licking lonely at their slow bleeding wounds, uncertain and shaken by what they’d done and seen each other do, not wanting to see long held-off reactions, now that there was time to process, not wanting to endure more accusing glances and sharp words, but all of them still too lonely and bereft to truly stay away from the few others who could understand and empathize.  Satoru had been too drained and unused to his exhaustion to really care or make note of the way the group sectioned off originally, but when Megumi had stayed out in the main room night after night, the center of the living quarters, the place where a host would serve, entertain, relax, and converse, always communal, always welcoming, Satoru had taken notice. An air of dazed shock had permeated their wing after the first few days of moving in, the reality of the past several months finally sinking in, but Megumi had been possessed by another feeling entirely, launching himself into chores with an uncharacteristic fervor, considering his reluctance towards housework. Perhaps he’d wanted to keep his mind off things and head off the overthinking, or maybe he’d wanted to feel like he could still be constructive, positive, in a way that was so mundane and immediate it made Satoru’s head spin a little in the first week afterward, recognizing that this quiet, noncombative, sedate pace could be the rest of their lives, lives which could now span double, triple, quadruple the amount of years that they’d once expected. In the same way Tsumiki’s hard work in the apartment had quietly taught them how much energy and labor it took to maintain a home and take care of people, Megumi’s concentrated domestic efforts had been essential in getting the compound up and running as Satoru had swiftly and abruptly been swept up in strategic calls with Shouko, Yuki, and other surviving jujutsushi, wrangling his own clan back under his thumb, debating with the civilian government on what to do next in regards to the international market, and ensuring there were funds and resources for the compound to remain an isolated base of operations for some time. Tiles were scrubbed clean, bathtubs and sinks washed out, tatami and wooden floors wiped, musty futons dragged out into sunlight for a proper beating. Every day Megumi would make his rounds without fail, bearing trays of breakfast, lunch and dinner, and even if the others didn’t want to talk to Megumi after what he’d done, they still ate of the food he made, offerings formed with his own two hands, no matter how bad or how odd his efforts.

Wasn’t it funny that even with the shikigami gone, Megumi’s niche was still molded by his hands, the shape pressed into rising dough that had to be kneaded with knuckles and palms, rolled out and sealed with the deft pinch and press of nimble fingers to create rich dumplings, steam-fluffed buns, thick and hearty noodles, accompanied by the occasional fortifying soup and refreshing squares of kinako mochi, quick hands rolling out the path, bit by bit, to a steadier heart – the fillings that Satoru made, of course. Megumi’s solo efforts had seemed all the more disappointing in comparison, and it was no surprise that Nobara was the first to barge into the main room one day, disturbing Satoru’s heretofore peaceful morning tea, kicking Megumi out of his warm blankets and berating him about how bad his dashi was, how he’d been given ten too many chances to do better, and needed to give up on miso for everyone’s collective health. Yuuta and Toge soon followed, eyes red-rimmed, skin sallow, but with tentative grins on their faces, and breakfast duty was promptly transferred to them as a form of makeshift physical therapy for Toge, who still hadn’t fully adjusted to maneuvering with just one arm. They quickly proved to be not much better, inevitably turning out odd hodgepodges of half made-up dishes. Scrambled eggs with shioyaki and crumbled tofu, mismatched odds and ends from the refrigerator stuffed into a strange baby sausage, eggplant, and mushroom cheesy bake, natto on kimchi on salmon-flecked rice. Habit had Satoru and Megumi glancing at each other before checking the salt shakers and soy sauce, ensuring that nothing had been swapped out for sugar or fish sauce. After making rounds between Maki and Yuuji’s rooms one day, Nobara had draped herself dramatically over the table in the main room, Megumi’s room, made a face as she bit into an overly sour, plain onigiri with way too much roasted seaweed wrapped around it, and groaned that despite all that they’d survived, the real test would be surviving everyone’s poor cooking instincts. When Satoru had pointed out that she couldn’t cook at all, she’d swatted him.

There was Yuuji of course, but he was still recovering from Sukuna’s abrupt withdrawal, and even though she could cook, Maki had long refused to do so out of principle, and no one would be forcing her to while she still spent long hours staring off into space, still and silent, muscles tense while she fruitlessly listened for any hint of Mai’s voice. It didn’t help that she still held a grudge against Megumi for taking Mai away, for essentially killing Panda. Megumi was on her shit list and should start praying in case of sudden death, Toge had cheerfully declared, exactly the type of person who thought the best use of his newly regained freedom of speech was to spend all his words on flat punchlines, bad puns, and pithy lines. Megumi had therefore opted not to mention the surly phone calls he had with the Zenin clan lawyer on a regular basis, who kept sending report after report on the troves of archives, artifacts, assets, and armories that had been in the family’s possession, and now required dealing with. It hadn’t been long until he’d had his own stack of paperwork to wrangle, a clan head of two with no real hope of replacement or delegation, and he and Satoru had worked on their respective busywork together in the main room like they were six and nineteen again, adult homework. This time, too, Satoru was the one to provide a roof over everyone’s heads, make sure there was running water, heat, and a steady supply of food to eat, the strongest, an adult, even then. No one bothered asking him to cook, or clean, but sometimes Satoru did anyway, when he had the time or felt like it, felt like moving, destroying, cleansing, but there was nothing left to fight or destroy, except the others.

And Tsumiki was an option for kitchen duty too, but she had already done a lifetime’s worth of cooking as far as Megumi was concerned, not that it stopped her from getting her way when she insisted, hip checking him away from the stove, or shoving her way in and putting him on chopping duty. She’d ended up rooming next to Yuuji in a parody of the dorm assignments Satoru had made at Jujutsu Tech, a new Fushiguro next door. With their good-natured dispositions, Satoru would’ve expected them to get along well, if not like a house on fire, and thanks to the culling game, they had some recent common ground. Limbs weak and muscles atrophies from the years of coma, soul wearied and fatigued from Kenjaku’s soul manipulation and the use of powers she hadn’t been meant to have, she made an odd match to Yuuji, who had never quite gotten over the fact that he’d been birthed, created by Kenjaku specifically to be a vessel, a tool, made for Sukuna, preprogrammed with all the right triggers and abilities, an unknowing video game character jumping through hoops to level up, just operating on the code. The things that he had done, the circumstances that influenced him and his actions, his impact on others, still weighed on him heavily, the entire experience shaking him to his core and leaving him uncertain. Having Sukuna carved out, extracted, amputated from the core of him, from the areas where his and Sukuna’s edges had begun to spill over and become blurry, left his limbs weak and his stamina lagging, made him more prone to getting lost in his own head, cursed energy drained away to leave him empty and dry, flavorless bones at the bottom of a deep stockpot. Tsumiki had been a vessel too, could probably empathize, commiserate with having to play jailor to another powerful entity, with the feeling of having their bodies snatched away while they were still in them, reshaped in intention, modified without their consent, suddenly becoming people, things, they hadn’t thought they were. If nothing else, there was Megumi, before, after, and now, and surely, they could gossip about him to their heart’s content.

But the similarities were skin deep, and they seemed to grate on each other, more than anything else. Tsumiki had always been astute and determined, measured in her actions and words in a manner not entirely unlike Megumi, barely revealing the subdued melancholy that only showed itself sometimes when she was at home and close to dozing off too early in the evening, shoulders slumped and face lax with unspoken exhaustion. Megumi would poke and prod her then, say something caustic enough to get her to wake up and sass him back, enough so that he could needle her into going to bed early. Satoru could still remember long evenings resting in the apartment, watching Megumi stare down the hallway that led to their respective bedrooms, then look back down at his wrinkled sheets of homework and battered textbooks, saying nothing. She’d been more honest in the walls in the little apartment, more willing to speak harshly and scold, to shove and push and demand to get her way, to talk circles around Megumi and Satoru and hem them in with her kind but firm demeanor, not above pointedly using her hours of domestic labors as leverage. Regret had remade her in Megumi’s eyes, and revealed his patience, his tolerance, but nowadays, frustration, anger, and irritation boiled closer to the surface, bitterness frothing and foaming at the top, the gentle exterior Megumi’s middle school delinquent self had so despised discarded at last. She wavered between emotional extremes, sometimes overflowing with that nostalgic sorrow, full of tears and want of comfort, want of something familiar and dear, sometimes all hair-trigger temper and loud outbursts, angry because something was out of place, not where it was expected, because of other people’s habits, because of Megumi’s habits, which hadn’t changed much over the years despite the many times that she’d told him to do this or that. However she felt, Megumi and Satoru were the closest, most accessible anchors she had, and it was odd, to see the others’ reactions when Tsumiki was casual around him, with touch and in manner, and the way it had Megumi settling too, into old patterns and phrases.

“It’s weird seeing you like this, sensei,” Nobara had said once, huffing and flipping a growing ponytail over her shoulder. She’d glanced up at him with one, penetrating brown eye, and the wine-colors eyepatch with crimson embroidery truly suited her, made her look as dangerous as she really was. So he’d smiled back down at her, another precious student. “Maki-san had to tell me everything, since Megumi would never admit to shit, but it’s still weird.”

“Is it that strange?” he’d hummed, tilting his head and batting his eyes at her.

She’d made a disgusted face then, and he’d laughed, because she and Yuuji made the best faces, though they hadn’t in a while, and that just made him laugh harder. “It’s as weird as seeing you without your blindfold,” she’d said. “You better not start wearing them again, sensei. The eye-patch and heroine character niches are mine now and I’m not giving them up. Go find your own.”

“How greedy, Nobara-chan,” he’d said, amused, and wondered if this was her way of encouraging him. Megumi would know.

“That’s right,” she’d replied, voice dipping slightly, wavering as her head bowed a little. Her lip had trembled briefly before her hands had clenched into fists. With a small huff, she shook her head in a quick jerk, then raised it high. “That’s right,” she’d repeated, more loudly this time, hard and resolute, and Satoru really did have the best students ever. “I’m greedy. You’ll just have to deal with it, sensei.”

He’d sighed dramatically, woe upon him. “Ah, the rebellion of youth.”

And it was Tsumiki’s turn, it seemed. At one point, she’d wanted nothing more than to find a way to keep Megumi by her side, her only brother, her only family. There were moments where she’d sat Satoru down with tea and snacks as if they didn’t know each other, and interrogated him on Megumi’s training, what it entailed, how he was doing, what the plan was for the upcoming months, and he would see her hands twisting in one of the pairs of sweatpants that she and Megumi casually passed between their closets, soft and worn from years of use, and he would remember Megumi, much younger, asking if his sister would be happy with the Zenin, telling him to make sure to come by the apartment, forcing him to interact with his sister, trying not to make Tsumiki feel left out. In the early days, when Megumi had first begun to return home injured, Tsumiki had even asked, bitter and defeated, “I know you have a deal, but do you have to hurt him?” and instead of letting Satoru say that those injuries were nothing, were insignificant compared to what could actually happen in the field, Megumi had stepped in with a warning glance and a bland, “It’s like playing sports or doing a martial art, Tsumiki, if I didn’t get a little injured I’d never learn the right reflexes.” Since then, Satoru occasionally wondered if Tsumiki and Megumi ever fought about their little arrangement, but if they did, it remained a Fushiguro secret. For all the time that Satoru spent with them, there were still things that Tsumiki and Megumi kept between themselves, barely mentioned in public, and alluded to only by the most oblique of references. That had been the only time Tsumiki had ever asked him something like that, something so impossible, but there were moments afterwards where she would turn angry, beseeching eyes toward him and Satoru could practically see the words printed on her face, Stop hurting him, a defense neither Satoru nor Megumi would ever accept.

Tsumiki had spent years watching their world from inside the confines of the apartment, never stepping over the line because they told her it was dangerous, they told her they wanted her safe, and because of her tacit, mistaken understanding that this situation was her fault, that her brother was stuck where he was because of her. And she hadn’t been like Maki or the windows, who could at least sense, see, or hear; she’d had no aptitude for cursed energy at all, and couldn’t have helped Megumi even if she wanted. It was a unique form of torture to be so powerless, Satoru had supposed, little devastations that wore the beginnings of wrinkles in her forehead, and especially toward the end of middle school, leading up to Megumi’s entry to Jujutsu Tech, it wasn’t uncommon for her to be irritated with him on some level, spurred on by the part of her that knew he was taking away her brother, no matter how much he’d given them in the years leading up to it. But now that she’d participated in that world, secondhand though it might’ve been, she didn’t quite seem to know if she felt resentful or grateful for the experience. She was careful around the others, and sometimes struggled to take in Satoru and Megumi’s new shapes in her mind, trying to fit in the little brother that had ruthlessly racked up over a hundred points in the culling game, the benefactor who obliterated city blocks with a single flick of the finger, pulverizing all the bodies in the way, with the two people who had once laughed with her on a cramped apartment balcony, gleefully taking in the fresh scent of the summer sun on their laundry. Occasionally, she stared after Megumi like she wasn’t quite sure what she was doing there and who the person next to her was, like his face could show her something different after so many years of living together, lead her to some kind of revelation, like tea leaves, like night sky fortunes, like the Southern Cross lighting the way for seafaring travelers. But Megumi had just quietly stared back, calm and even in that infuriating way of his, which simply made words fall to ashes on one’s tongue, made obvious that answers already existed to the questions one wanted to ask. It’s a reflective quality Megumi carries even now, and it makes it hard to look at Megumi, sometimes.

“She’s going through what all starting jujutsushi go through,” Megumi had said, patient and permissive now that he had the time, now that no one he loved and cared for was on the line. Satoru understood – it was the struggle he’d seen Megumi thrash through in middle school, and the same one that Yuuji was still going through.

Yuuji had spoken less, hesitated more; would open his mouth and freeze, clenching his fists and deciding to keep his words to himself. A cog, he’d spent some time calling himself, and yet, finally being treated as an object, a vessel, his wants discarded, and by Megumi no less, had ripped apart his understanding once again. And now, what was a cog, a useless gear, without the machine? Left out to rust, he spent half his time helping Nobara fix up different wings of the estate, and the other half trying to keep distracted, jogging around the mountain when he had the energy, tending to the small corner he’d claimed as a makeshift vegetable garden, feeding and watching the koi, but more often, lying about, listlessly flipping through old magazines, artist monographs, and books, watching endless movies on the living room flatscreen, searching glossy, oversaturated photos and high concept, slow moving art films for better models of living, new influences to lean on, surrealist abstractions far enough removed that real life felt normal in comparison, even though the civilian normal was all that they had left. Where text appeared, his gaze wandered uncomprehendingly over the antcrawl of kana, the teachings of all his previous teachers – his grandfather, Megumi, Gojou-sensei, Nanami, and even Mahito and Sukuna – made useless when he couldn’t put the ideas together, make sense of the whole out of what he’d been given piecemeal, gripped by the unshakeable feeling of being tricked, cheated and betrayed, by some of the people he’d trusted most, even though they’d made him no promises. Words had become foreign to him.

Tsumiki had found it frustrating. Couldn’t stand his listlessness, the way he couldn’t face himself, kept looking outside instead of inside and only heard what he wanted, kept on with the same failed principles even when they were incompatible with the reality and what he really needed or wanted. She hadn’t liked how he would talk around the things he couldn’t face, including Megumi, and Yuuji couldn’t stand her simmering negativity and dark, despairing moods, her inconsistency and ability to commit to herself, didn’t like the manner in which she bullied Megumi about, an easy, rigid target who refused to talk back, still hyperaware of what he saw as filial failure, his former shortcomings. But Megumi had also known that it was more about control than it really was about him, so he’d glared and frowned and clicked his tongue like they were all errant puppies bumbling around his ankles, but he’d still made way for her, still draped a blanket over her still form if he found her collapsed from exhaustion out on the engawa. At times, Yuuji had seemed jealous of this, the effortless way Tsumiki commanded Megumi’s consideration and affection, and how easily Megumi held conflict and contradiction within himself, letting his judgement sway as he willed. Equal parts envy and admiration were reserved for the unmoving certainty and decisiveness that Megumi had long since cultivated, no one in his life to make decisions on his behalf, not until Satoru, and even then Megumi had always been overly conscious about his sole responsibility for himself, no safety net, no effect without cause.

When Yuuji fought with Tsumiki about the way she treated Megumi in short, frigid, passive-aggressive exchanges and jabs, he didn’t seem to know whether or not he wanted to put his all into defending Megumi, no longer as certain of him as he once was. For so much of the culling game, Megumi had been Yuuji’s sole anchor, the person who kept Yuuji’s head together, held his mind to task and out of the spiraling quagmires he’d taken to traversing, the person, the friend, who had looked out for him and accommodated him, always looked for him and found him again when they were split apart, the put-together, steadfast teammate who had planned and schemed and led them all to unconventional victory, the same as he would on a mission. And yet the Megumi he’d seen at the culling games, for seemingly the first time, was not the same Megumi he thought he’d gotten to know throughout his months at Jujutsu Tech, his friend and neighbor, a mature and reliable guidepost. It was a naïve, misguided perspective of Megumi, Satoru had thought, listening to Yuuji talk about his impressions and thoughts in those quiet basement days when he was still playing dead, and Satoru had laughed because he knew of Megumi’s practical ruthlessness, unflinching brutality, he’d laughed because it would be good for Megumi, for someone to think so brightly, so highly of him, a compatriot, a friend. That image of Megumi had lost its shine, polish worn off to reveal the plain substrate beneath, and Yuuji hadn’t been able to recognize that new stranger yet, so familiar yet so foreign, still unable to shake off the faith that clung to the shape of a friend he knew to be true, but who had nevertheless decided to work with Sukuna, reaching into Yuuji’s insides with bare, unwavering hands and scooping him out, summer watermelon red and dripping, spitting out the seeds, hurting him, betraying him, while seemingly unmoved and unaffected.

“I said that I would be the one to kill you, if Sukuna ever took over. I would have done it, if I thought there was a risk. How is that any different?” Satoru had overheard Megumi say once. Surprising, if only because he and Yuuji didn’t fight face to face about serious things in those days, simply let the silence fall between them like a thick blanket of snow, staring at each other from across a building mountain of white. Yuuji hadn’t wanted to talk, and Megumi was practiced at waiting. Through the closed shoji, Satoru had only been able to see the shadow of their forms, puppet theater, a show put on just for him, master of this crumbling, moldering, estate. Yuuji, still broad and athletic despite the sickly pale of his skin and the listlessness of his movements, still built despite the lack of strength, had loomed menacingly over Megumi’s defiant, steady frame, Megumi who always held himself like he was part of the ground, stubborn, unyielding bedrock. Satoru had wondered if things would be different that time, if the tension would bubble over and morph their relationship into a different form. For all of Megumi’s judgment, he could accept a certain degree of twistedness, understood it even if he didn’t necessarily advocate for it himself. Amused and smug, Satoru’s privately thought growing up with Satoru by his side probably had something to do with that. Yuuji, however, has never had that benefit.

“Because you didn’t kill him. You didn’t even try,” Yuuji had accused through gritted teeth, and it had looked like he had his hand fisted in Megumi’s collar, not that Megumi’s clothes needed to get even baggier. “You worked with him. You…you were something like friends with him. With Sukuna! I watched you, I saw it all. You let him use my body, you let him trap me inside, cooperated with that friend of his and handed over the last two fingers and just…you gave him everything he wanted! You told me to save you, you told me you needed help, and I believed you, I listened to you…! And all of those people you killed, how could you just throw away innocent lives like that?”

“Even before the culling games, death has always been part of the job. We can save people, but we execute them too, when they’re too far along to help. None of us are innocent, Yuuji. Maki-senpai cleared out the entire Zenin estate before she met up with us; Okkotsu-senpai ran half his colony through with Rika and his katana. Even Tsumiki – she’d racked up eighty points by the time we reached her. You decide how you want to pick your fight with them. But I didn’t think we had time. I did what I had to,” Megumi had replied, cold and uncompromising, him at his merciless best, and it made Satoru smile to hear him like that, the calculus at the core of him, steeled with willful strength, Megumi at his most arrogant, sure, and powerful, the delinquent rulebreaker in him peeking out, bruiser after Satoru’s own heart. “And it worked. We’re all alive, and you’re still here, aren’t you? I kept him happy; he kept us all safe. I won’t apologize for that.”

Instead of dragging him closer for intimidation’s sake, instead of erupting into violence, Yuuji had let go of Megumi’s clothing and reached out that sturdy arm, thick like a tree bough, to clamp down on Megumi’s shoulder, had shaken him once like a prize doll in a claw machine. Despite Yuuji’s strength, Megumi had barely budged, relaxed muscles absorbing the force, the weight of Yuuji’s feelings, weathering them the same way he weathered everything else Yuuji threw at him, as he’d always done from the start. Satoru had warned Megumi that it would be too easy for him to be taken for granted like that, even as kind as Yuuji was, but Megumi had always simply said that he felt responsible for Yuuji. Responsible in what way? Satoru had asked wonderingly. He’d heard Megumi’s thoughts on that fateful finger retrieval mission twice over already, first, while Megumi was being patched up after the mission itself, and second, after Satoru had been freed from Prison Realm and Megumi had confronted him over the true extent of his plans, including whether or not he’d tried to have Sukuna’s fingers gathered together on purpose.

“If Itadori never met me, he never would have gotten involved in this. I should’ve taken the cursed spirits more seriously,” Megumi had said, and Satoru had laughed at him, earning him another glimpse of that dear scowl, that well-learned, well-loved expression.

“He would have gotten involved one way or another,” Satoru had replied, stretching out cramped limbs, sighing as his back and shoulders popped. “The minute he was born to Kenjaku, it was already too late. You could say something similar of us, you know. Your involvement with the College is because of me, but the Zenin would have come for you regardless. You are your father’s legacy, but that’s circumstance. Call it fate if you want. Balance, if that exists anymore. Don’t go looking to shoulder burdens that don’t exist.”

Megumi had stared at him quietly then, mouth in a thin line, and Satoru had already been feeling a little left behind; a couple months, half a year or more, was a long time for teenagers wasn’t it, puberty was like that, but that look at least was still familiar, something that Megumi had never quite grown out of, the cloudy green gaze of his muffled doubt, unspoken uncertainty, never offering up anything personal about himself because hearing and listening would demand a reaction, and he simply didn’t want to know – didn’t want his truths to be up for debate, didn’t want the debt of someone doing things for him, didn’t want the hurt of being rejected, didn’t want the quiet resignation of going unheard. In those instances where he wanted to know where he stood, what he was worth, Megumi said nothing, but even Prison Realm couldn’t lock away eleven years together.

“Megumi,” Satoru had called, with a rush of fondness, pressing, whetstone at the edge of a knife, and though reluctant, those wary, green eyes still looked back, still waited for him, despite all Satoru’s failures, despite the months shut away. “When I said to be greedy, I didn’t mean for punishment. Aren’t you always the one saying that we should be more aware of the consequences of our actions? Unless you mean to, there’s no controlling what other people do.”

“I know that,” Megumi had scoffed, and surely he did, but for him, knowing and feeling were frequently two different things.

After everything, after Megumi had come to save him, Satoru realized that Megumi would never stop thinking of him as the strongest, the most reliable, the most essential, a presence that if gone, was missed, was sought. A figure of stability, security. And even if Megumi had thought of it in terms of pure strength only, that was enough – enough that he had acknowledged, recognized, and understood, Satoru’s place in his life, and had carved out a special niche for him there, a space just for him. Megumi had become strong, just like Satoru had known he would, but still, there were quiet conversations just like that, second after second spent together tumbling about like grains of sand, piling up, until Satoru was awash in it, all the time he and Megumi had spent together talking, divulging, trading concerns, strategies, and observations. So Satoru had to say it explicitly, had to make sure Megumi heard, and knew: “You freed me and bargained with Sukuna, you’re helping Tsumiki, and everyone else. You’re the opposite of a burden. And you’re supposed to be serving me tea too, Megumi, where’s my tea, where’s my cup?”

So Megumi had sighed and poured the tea, the noisy burble of water overlapping with the words that dropped from his mouth awkwardly, sentiments he wouldn’t have shared, before. “I’m not weak,” he’d said, because Megumi was one to concentrate on action and capability, not strength per se, and the quiet assurance in his abilities, the clean, confident motion of his hands as he’d drowned the world in dark, had been snatched away with his shadows and shikigami, and the things they had to battle now could not be dealt with through force. “Is that enough?”

“Doing what you can do and what you think you need to is still doing something,” Satoru had said, talking about something he knew better than anyone, Megumi’s beloved need of responsibility, nose full of meadow flowers and fresh grass, the precise, aromatic steep he’d learned to expect at the Fushiguro apartment, leaves overflowing from the lip of the teapot, unfurling from heat. “Have pride. After all, you’re still here, right next to me. Aren’t you?” And he’d pinned Megumi, stunned and wide-eyed, with his six-eyed stare until, after a beat, Megumi had nodded, a victory in and of itself because just some months ago, Megumi would have just looked away, would not have said anything, would not have owned up to himself, the value of Megumi, the quantity of Megumi, like an element, composition unknown, but integral all the same.

Perhaps that was the point, that Megumi had been right there when Itadori Yuuji had been introduced to the jujutsu world, had been right there when he swallowed the first finger and took on the mantle of Sukuna’s vessel, had been right there when Sukuna incarnated a second time and caused Yuuji’s first death. All this and the promise to execute him, save him, when Yuuji willed it. Handpicked witness and historian, proof of life, if not of death. Whether he thought of it consciously or not, through becoming best friends, then companions, then something like partners, Megumi had clearly never forgotten that detail. Megumi was a skeptic, someone who believed only in those he trusted, his own experiences, his own judgement. That had been why Satoru had chosen him to be his legacy too, that had been why Satoru had wanted him to carry on. Because he could, because he would do it with his back straight and feet planted firmly on the floor, his generation’s scribe, the one to see and survive it all.

Without cursed energy to give Yuuji’s emotions away, Satoru hadn’t been able to tell what the intention behind that single-armed shake had been. Maybe a meager expression of his frustration, with Megumi, with himself, or the redirection of a gesture meant more for the cursed being that had once inhabited his body, exerted instead on the person who’d been their intermediary of sorts, a common territory for them both. A jolt to a tree for fruit, hoping to shake something loose. Or perhaps, that was the only way Yuuji knew how to convey his unsteadiness, empty hand seeking a mooring while his own insides kept projecting out, painting the world with his messy, indistinguishable colors, his image, and for all Yuuji’s uncertainty and turmoil, Megumi was still the person Yuuji relied upon most, still the person he trusted to be his envoy, his medium, his interpreter, someone who helped him make sense of it all, and even confused, even unsure, he reached out, grasping, clinging limb, flowering vine needing a trellis, needing someone to reach back, and Megumi was not someone who flinched away.

Kindness is what Tsumiki had called Megumi’s cruelty, a rusted, barbed fence with tissue flowers shoved through the small diamond gratings, just large enough to slip fingers through, and she wasn’t wrong because Megumi’s kindness looks mean, looks harsh and oppressive, is rooted in a negative space easily overlooked, buried somewhere between true care, deep emotion, and the record of millions of seconds of observation, a tally of every microexpression, every reaction, speaking over to speak for, acting before instead of after, everything about acting first, which from another angle, looks like letting no one else act. He can compromise, but doesn’t do it often, does things for others the way he wants, regardless of how they feel. A selfish kindness, some sort of efficient, emotional intelligence cost-benefit. In comparison, optimism and gentleness had once been Tsumiki’s strategy, her choice and her shield, because if she gave into her worser instincts she hadn’t been sure how she would recover and find her way back to silver linings; there were moments where she had to believe in something to feel like she could carry on. It was almost laughable the way she’d disdained Yuuji because she hadn’t been so dissimilar when she was younger, but she’d seen the old parts of herself in him and had become tired of herself, tired of looking away rather than forward, exhausted from stifling the demands and questions she’d had because she knew the answers wouldn’t be good, frustrated from being swallowed up by her role as homemaker, caretaker, digging for a bright side and hitting nothing but dry, cracked dirt. Hard and sour like kari-kari ume snuck secretly into the bento rice, shell so hard it cracked the teeth that closed around it, stained the tongue with crimson, red perilla, puckered lips and made the face scrunch up, Tsumiki had been done with empty spaces, done with stories and excuses, and wanted to find a way to rewrite the way she lived her life, now that it was all bungled up anyway. In Yuuji, she’d seen someone who couldn’t do these things, someone who to her, was an example of maladaptation, unable to let go of the stories he’d been told to make the best of his own lived experience.

It was horrid to die alone, but that was the natural state of the individual, to be self-contained, only ever singular. What Satoru had learned was that the world flowered open after death, the soul burning down to pure energy and revealing its roots, bright and shining, in the universe, no energy ever lost, just recycled, everything connected, a flow, a flux, realm to realm, life to life, and in the wake of that illumination was understanding, the true shape of you against we, each unique contour, texture, and line of I – true comprehension of the self and all its parts, perfect synergy, each individual their own world. That was what it meant to hold a domain, that was what it meant to impose oneself on reality and assert a life. Understanding control and personhood, recognizing happiness and contentment, distinguishing good and bad, required comparison, a tacit acknowledgement that variance did exist, and therefore, recognition that individuals were unique in the combination of thoughts and values that made up their rich inner selves. Coexistence required flexibility, an active, constant negotiation of tolerance that assumed others’ individual values to be valid until proved otherwise, and had Yuuji not already acknowledged the reasoning behind Megumi’s actions, had not already understood, if not accepted it, he wouldn’t be so conflicted, so torn, his stubborn moral boundaries up against Megumi’s pragmaticism. But ah, that was the privilege of youth, to wander, confused, uncertain, to make mistakes and be forgiven for dint of age – if only Megumi was the forgiving, nurturing type who cared about such things.

“You actually got along with Sukuna, didn’t you?” Satoru had asked one sunny afternoon, looking away from the marbled flesh of chilled watermelon, water beading on the surface of creamy green rind, to watch the trees sway. Six Eyes could not be discarded the way cursed energy could, but with so much less energy crowding the universe, he was no longer distracted by oil-spill colors and layers of overlapping, twisting paths of energy and residuals, no longer overwhelmed by the mass contortion of people’s cursed energy, reacting to all feeling, all the time, an endless sensory cacophony that had kept him isolated for his early childhood, at least until he’d learned to control his Vision better. After Megumi had pulled all cursed energy to the other realm, everything seemed renewed and fresh. Now there was just the six dimensions and six plains, glimmering just out of sight, now there was just the world as it was. Megumi’s eyes were the same color as crisp, healthy summer leaves, something he’d never quite noticed before when he’d mostly looked into the shadow overlaying them, turning pupil and iris to tar pits and coal dust, hypnotizing for the subtle black-on-black swirl of energy that barely seemed to contain itself, despite being tightly controlled. That was how he’d known that Megumi was a tempest on the inside, nothing so cool and collected, principled or refined; he was an animal, snarling teeth and ready claws, a force of sacred nature like his shikigami, like the treasure embedded in his shadows, which swayed and swayed, ringing like New Year’s bells, wishes untold, unspoken words haunting mouths that had sewn themselves shut.

But Megumi had made a gateway of himself, lodged Sukuna’s shrine in his shadow and opened the path to worship in the form of a yawning maw, knocking on the door to a different universe altogether, a cursed Takamagahara boasting winding paths, expansive plains, and ragged mountains that reached toward a dark, mottled sky, streaked with clouds and smoke that seemed to draw the shape of curving ribs or segmented spine, the belly of a beast, fog wreathing unseen peaks in wisping swirls, not just a shadow garden, but a world. Everywhere, cursed spirits, the only inhabitants, the very air weighed thick and heavy with free floating cursed energy. They could recognize and validate each other, wreak violence unencumbered, and on the other side of the sealed gateway, in the world where Megumi and Satoru lived, there would be no more need for jujutsushi, for there would be no more cursed energy, all of it drained to the other realm. There would be no more need for acknowledgement or recognition of the manifested fears and anxieties that had so long gone ignored, the emotions that at their most powerful, wanted to also be recognized as part of the human experience, as authentic and genuine, truly human.

Both of them were still connected to that other side, where all cursed energy now flowed, broken down and digesting, self-sustaining, self-regulating in Sukuna’s ideal, strength-based world, a cycle of energy eating energy, energy exorcising energy, because only cursed energy could properly erase another curse from the world. Sukuna, forever in the underside of Megumi’s shadow, ensconced in the stomach of some creature, perhaps himself, his own priest, apostle, and evangelist, dwelling in the source along with all the curses birthed from it, the stomach that swelled in pregnancy, in starvation, in gluttony, in addiction. Shadows with no boundaries were no different from the dark, of night, of space, of vacuums that ate matter and light and everything else, gravity sinkholes, but with infinity fit right up against those invisible edges, the improbable became possible and the bubble of the world, the containment of the intangible, snapped into place, in the same way Satoru’s predecessor had helped Tengen trace the boundaries of his barriers, draw the limits and rules of that world. Fitting that part of Satoru’s legacy would be those barriers’ destruction, the cycle complete, Star Plasma Vessel the body, Tengen the soul, and Infinity drawing the demarcation of the mind, the domain, emergency reset. Megumi and Satoru, held in the palms of each other’s hands, sky and earth, ocean bed and saltwater, connected, unseen. It was no wonder that few of the surviving former jujutsushi and curse users came after the remnants of their cohort, even though it was perfectly clear where they’d all gone off to, because no one knew what would happen if Megumi or Satoru died, if the guardrails of that universe broke and everything spilled into the world once more.

On that sun-dappled engawa, Megumi had looked back at him, lips wet with fruit juice, cicadas droning, screaming in the background, last call before death. Like always, Megumi met him eye to eye, and Satoru had seen smoke roil across the green just briefly, in the same way rain occasionally still paused itself centimeters from his skin before making contact, and there was novelty in every small second of the day now, familiar sensations taking on new dimensions and shapes, a re-experience of the mundane, quotidian world that Satoru had never really belonged to, and therefore never concerned himself about. Now he had no choice but to continue as he was, so much weaker and finally, gloriously, hideously human, but Megumi was still there, Megumi was by his side, like old times, like always, reliable, and that wasn’t so bad. Sometimes it was like they’d wound time back to the moments they’d reversed roles – Satoru once again the awkward newcomer to the world of plain, daily living, Megumi by his side, an exasperated guide. Despite all the cleanup that had, naturally, fallen into Satoru’s lap, revealing his true position not as the strongest but as the janitor of the crumbling jujutsu world, the real challenge remained of what to do next, what to do in one year, five years, ten years, when they’d all completely uprooted themselves from their lives within the span of a few short months. None of them had come out the other side the same, and everyone coped in different ways.

In Megumi, this had come in the form of routines, new habits, new schedules, and from the outside, he looked to be quickly, efficiently, pulling a new life together from what was left, something that had a strangely grounding effect on the others. It was as if his experience of Shibuya, the culling games, and Sukuna had built him up, instead of battering him down, and while he still struggled, had his own nightmares, his own lapses into reverie, his own injured silences and days on end where he didn’t say a word, his movements were less harried, less sharp, and he’d lost that lean, hungry edge – whatever rangy wolf Megumi had been before, somehow, amidst the carnage, he’d grown into a powerful creature, a full, even coat, large, steady paws, and a healthy set of strong teeth, carriage almost regal, unbending and proud. And where Megumi had previously been self-deprecating about what he saw as a moral deficiency in his personal judgement, his guilty understanding of his own unfairness, part of his new surety seemed to stem from the fact that he’d truly, wholeheartedly embraced his subjectivity, no longer compared his decisions and person to the unreachable standard of a nebulously defined goodness, a habit that Satoru had never quite understood. Megumi wasn’t indecisive, but the way he thought of himself as some sort of undeserving person, someone who couldn’t match or level with the lofty ideals of others, whether those ideals actually existed or not, had contributed to his passively sacrificial mindset, and had him committing to less than his true level of skill and potential. Now, Megumi occupied every centimeter of his skin, his body; now, he was so much himself he brimmed over.

Satoru had a suspicion as to who had catalyzed the change, so he hadn’t been entirely surprised when Megumi had said, unapologetically, “To a degree, yes, I got along with Sukuna,” plainspoken as always, preferring to omit rather than lie. Satoru knew when Megumi wasn’t telling him the whole truth, but he usually didn’t pry because there were other things that Megumi spoke to him about that he told no one else, and Satoru was keen on keeping that distinction, on being something like a confidant, when the time was right, when the time was now.

In the city, young flowers and leaves had begun to sprout from cracks in the concrete, empty streets finally cleared of tangled, torn electrical wires, broken rebar, smashed glass, cracked gypsum board, and the fluff of exposed insulation, soggy cotton candy. On the engawa, steady sun came down from between fluffy white clouds, and the drippings from a newly-bitten slice of watermelon had sluiced a path down a bony wrist to soak into the cloth of a rolled-up black sleeve, smelling of coffee because one of the first things Megumi had done after the jujutsu world fell apart was find a job, ever conscientious towards money matters – and if it was something that would always sell, even after a miniature apocalypse, it was coffee, even as expensive as it was sometimes because of difficulties with import. Bitter, fragrant, complex flavor; Megumi manifested, every drop of potential carefully, attentively cultivated, seeded with understated self-assurance and awareness, and when Satoru had been freed, Megumi’s shadow had been a physical thing, licking at hands and fingers, nipping at heels, the growl of a monster running through, the vastness of Megumi spreading out like a dark star, howling, writhing, and hungry, many-limbed, many-mouthed, a tag writing itself on the streets, claiming his territory. And within moments, all that hard work and birthright had been drained away, displaced and stolen, all that promise erased, by Megumi himself. 

Pride had welled in Satoru’s heart at first, watching Megumi’s shadow doubles appear all over the battlefield, oozing into each other, flanked by multitudes of shikigami guardians, snarling Kon, trumpeting Banshou, croaking Gama, everything captured in the flood of Megumi’s domain, the new, twilight reality spilling into existence. The moment Satoru had waited so long for, the moment that had him grinning, feral with bared teeth, eyes wide open so all six would miss not a single thing. Cursed energy hung heavy and dense in the air, and he’d breathed in deep, eyelashes fluttering as he felt his own depleted energies begin to drink from the ocean they’d been plunged into, the char of charcoal-roasted coffee igniting at the back of his tongue, mineral, mossy peat, the smokiness of sugar burnt dark, the warm burn of ginger, Megumi’s energy pouring into him from his nose, his mouth, his every pore, and he’d watched as the curse users, the culling game participants, sank screaming into animal jaws and the many greedy children’s hands reaching out from the dark, pitch black and grasping, desperate palms empty. He could feel it, how those who were eaten were spun apart into nothing, digested, exorcised and excised, another wave of energy washing over them, sacrifice with Megumi as the origin, the summoner, and Satoru, the Strongest, in tune with the dimensions and layers of the world, the witness and the accomplice, laughing with drunkenness from the energy Megumi had doused him in, Megumi who’d come for him shadows blazing, trusted him and asked for that trust back.

Satoru had truly expected to die in a battle of ideals like this, one that would shatter the world and remake it, so when Megumi told him his plan, just the two of them in Prison Realm, the same way he’d shared his thoughts and ideas at night in his dorm room over warm cups of tea, Satoru freshly returned from a mission and a little lonely, souvenirs in hand, Megumi expectant and ever aware of his debts, but unbegrudging, Satoru saw no reason to resist, no reason to hold back and get stingy when his entire life had been sacrificed towards much lesser, untrustworthy goals, a status quo. With gentle, eager hands, Megumi filling his every cell, he’d pressed Limitless into place, into the space in between, like a gift, a puzzle, the smooth notch of a key slid home, that everything nothingness materializing under his hands, supporting the shadow that had molded itself to his form for so long, quiet and patient, a nothing everything that had nestled close and braced the soft parts of him, a bulwark, a blanket, a comfort. Giddiness, euphoria, like a quivering, like vibration, and when he’d looked to Megumi in that moment, he’d been met with the manic white slash of a smile, the lurid green glow of a jungle cat’s stare, the outline of relaxed, broad shoulders, just before the entire shape of him exploded, blurring into the dust-smoke fragmentation of an ultraviolet supernova, a proliferation of nighttime visions bubbling and rushing to the surface, all dream, all nightmare, all Rorschach’s blots and the things that people thought they saw in the dark and wasn’t that a curse too, wasn’t that fear, what was unseen and unquantifiable, and just then, that fear was power.

Megumi kind, Megumi vicious, Megumi the brother, the child, the friend, the apprentice, the heir and the legacy, ready to deliver retribution and wreak vengeance in the full bloom of his domain, each aspect of him lush and unfolding, a ripe flowerhead’s beauty before the fall, an entire world crawling forth from the heart of him, his imagination, his fantasies, and all that he’d purposefully left unknown, for fear of what he’d be moved to do. Lost kingdom writ in the ash of its glory days, a wild, overgrown garden had dragged itself free from writhing, twining ropes of shadow. Thick blankets of mature lotuses splayed themselves open, choking every lake, while mosses obscured the delicate wooden scrollwork decorating bridges and pavilions, which seemed to sag, dripping and melting between the intricate lacework of fine stems and rhizoids, all detail reduced, blurred. Vines and morning glories had vastly overgrown their trellises and were busy strangling other nearby plants, digging roots into the fragile cracks splitting the load-bearing wooden columns of moon-viewing houses, pulling on the branches of fruit trees bent double under their own weight, and Satoru could almost smell the sickly sweetness of the overripe, near rotting fruit, the antiseptic sting of ethanol. Where fruit could not grow, magnolia flowers swayed in an invisible breeze, and with everything rendered in glinting shadow, only barely lit by the glow of an unknown moon, the upward clusters of blooms looked like familiar, contorted fingers, bent this way and that in hand signs that should not have been possible.

In the middle of it all, the land sunk down, liquifying back into churning, choppy, dirac sea, streaming into the open gullet of Sukuna’s feretory, already become part of the ritual, an offering, one side of a mutual binding, having already earned the blessing of a curse. The implications had piqued Satoru’s interests then, but he’d been too distracted by the swirling winds that had begun to grow in that yellowed, fanged, maw, the rippling tear in space that he could have recognized from kilometers away, dappled purples and blues, the glint of stars, the only hint of color he’d seen at all, in Megumi’s domain, everything else charcoal and graphite, ink still spilling across the page, Megumi himself taking shape again, shadows twining lovingly about his figure, his shoulders set straight and proud, lips pinched, brow crinkled in concentration. Satoru had watched a trail of blood slowly trickle out his nose, and he’d settled a firm hand on Megumi’s shoulder silently. Megumi had looked up at him and laid fingers, still more shadows than flesh, over Satoru’s just briefly, the first hint of nerves that Satoru had seen from him since he’d stepped out of the catacombs of the Prison Realm. So Satoru had patted that hand, and smiled wide, and Megumi had scoffed, tried to hide his own small smile as he’d turned away, relieved, some tension draining from his back.

Sukuna had been smiling too, laughing, fingers steepled in the hand sign needed for his domain, and he’d said, “As expected from you, Fushiguro Megumi,” fond, pleased, and indulgent. He’d dropped his hands briefly to approach and squeeze Megumi’s wrist affectionately once, sneaking a challenging look to Satoru as he did so. Satoru stuck his tongue out at him, on guard but unmoving so long as Megumi seemed unalarmed. Sukuna had stood by with his white-haired companion as Megumi had opened his domain, concentrating on his own part of the ritual, eyes gleaming and covetous, and Satoru couldn’t say that he had any particular trust for figures who donned false monk’s robes after his experiences with Getou and Kenjaku. According to Megumi, Sukuna hadn’t either, as he’d apparently worked together with his companion to tear Kenjaku apart after being preached at one too many times, easily resisting Uzumaki’s pull, taking back the Prison Realm and leaving the weakened remainder and other ancient jujutsushi to the others, as he, Sukuna, and his companion went to fight Angel for the key, where they lingered closer to the focal execution ground. It was true then, that Sukuna and his companion were not exactly cursed spirits, inhabiting instead some sort of in between. They simply called themselves practitioners, Megumi had told Satoru later with a look of bemused tolerance on his face, clearly having suffered through similar preaching from Sukuna at some point.   

Sukuna stood by still as a holy monster had emerged from one of the lakes, lotus flowers sliding off gargantuan, muscled shoulders, jewelled, tasselled raiment slung in cascading strings over a mostly human torso, save for the ruff of small, orange down feathers, tucked up right underneath the fur that belonged to the white wolf’s head, wings for eyes, a snake’s tail lashing from where it sprouted from the back of the furred head like a live braid, wielding shield and jagged, ten-pointed sword. Bedecked in jingling bells and bangles, draped in diaphanous, fluttering fabrics, the monster, another guardian of sorts, had lumbered toward the feretory on large tiger’s paws to thrust its blade into the tear created there, jerking the sword up and in to lock the ten jagged points into place, before turning the sword, the key, clockwise with the reverberating ring of all its triumphant ornaments, a cleansing succession of shimmering, gentle tones, an incongruously peaceful soundtrack to Sukuna’s descent as he’d laughed and laughed, markings finally fading from Itadori’s body, which lurched, jerking bonelessly, doubling over as a shadow came crawling out of his mouth, his eyes, his ears, a hemorrhaging. His body had crumpled to the ground, limp and unconscious, so much flesh and bone, meat sack, and the shadow born of him sprouted malicious eyes, cackling mouths, and climbed quickly toward its shrine, the place of its transformation, growing as it went, climbing taller, sprouting limbs, two, four, then six, and then suddenly, upright, as it breached the ring of animal skulls that lay partially submerged in shadow still, and by the time Sukuna had reached the yaksha made for Megumi alone, hand still on its sword, the key, still in control, head following Sukuna’s every move with silent watchfulness, he’d become whole, a towering mountain of a creature, tongue lolling out from the mouth slit across his stomach, the sign of his eternal hunger for energy, for more curse, for more knowledge.

Megumi too, had been watching Sukuna, hands clenched, more blood tricking down his nose, his lip, his chin. Satoru had the distinct, incredulous feeling of being unneeded, everything come down to whatever agreement Megumi and Sukuna must have created – his role had been completed the minute he’d leant Megumi Limitless’ power, its netting, its boundaries, the impossible tension, all taken and held within that purpled, bruised tear in Sukuna’s shrine, keeping the gateway that Megumi had created from collapsing without its creator present there. All his years of planning and working had led to this specific moment, where his presence had finally become unnecessary. Chipping away at the higher-ups, arguing with them to bring the right people onto his side, jockeying with the clans for looser rules, the agonizing moments when he’d wondered if he was doing anything at all, moving anything at all, when he’d wondered if he should have just spared them all this and killed Getou, first and best friend, one and only, on the spot, spared him the violation of his body, puppeteered and moved beyond his death, disrespected – but perhaps Kenjaku was always meant to emerge anyway, like the timing of Limitless, the Star Plasma Vessel, and Ten Shadows all together. Yuuji had been a part of Kenjaku’s plan long in the making, before Satoru had even known about either of them, before he’d even considered Sukuna in his plans, and the culling game had been set in motion long before that. Satoru was never quite in control the way he hoped he would be.

But perhaps this was worth it, worth the chaos that would absolutely follow, the complete upending of their lives. Perhaps Megumi’s plan was the only way – simply pulling the plug on cursed energy completely. And maybe Sukuna was tricking them, his companion had worked with Kenjaku for quire some time after all, and maybe Kenjaku had some sort of contingency plan, maybe there were other parts to this game that Satoru couldn’t know, shut away all this time, but if Satoru didn’t trust Megumi, who he’d told all his plans to, to whom he’d sold all his hopes, someone he knew, who knew him in turn, then who could he trust? Satoru had never been in the habit of keeping all his eggs in a single basket, but Megumi was different, someone he depended on quite a bit, in private life and in work, someone he relied on and had expectations of. He’d looked forward to a day where he could work with Megumi, special grade jujutsushi, a person he knew he could share hardship with, a person who could possibly, take his place. Strongest or not, he would end one day, had already ended once, and for his plans to work, for his influence to take hold, there had to be continuity, someone to carry on the same spirit, the same fuck you very much – and if Megumi was an expert in anything, it was in detecting bullshit and carrying on the way he liked, continuing, in whatever stubborn way he could, too defiant and willful to ever lie down and let himself stop.

“A shame you will not cross over with us, Fushiguro Megumi,” Sukuna had said with his sinister grin, turning back at the threshold, his companion delicately shielding their mouth with a demure sleeve, though the wrinkle in their brow gave away their sentiments. “You retreat when you are nowhere near your limits, right as you’ve shown us the way. Are you truly satisfied with just this? If you stay, you will become nothing.” Four sets of eyes had narrowed, and his smirk widened into a sneer.

“Nothing but the owner and creator of the world you’ll be living in,” Megumi had drawled in response, face unchanging, only the purposeful relaxing of his white-knuckled fists giving him away. “We have a binding, Sukuna. I’ll be watching.”

“As you should be. I am worth watching,” Sukuna had near purred, his second pair of eyes narrowing dangerously, before rolling Satoru’s way, one arm tucking itself in the body of his kimono. “I suppose that so-called strongest will be peeking over your shoulder,” he’d scoffed, waving one thick hand, as if swatting a fly. “With cursed energy gone from this world, what do you think he will be able to do?” He’d pinned Megumi with a serious, almost solemn stare, his next words weighted with a significant sort of expectation, carrying with it an equivalent amount of ominous menace. “Keep entertaining me, Fushiguro Megumi. One day, we will meet again.”

Together, they’d watched him disappear into the feretory, his companion close behind, not even sparing them a glance. “Acting all mysterious, what, does he think he’s cool?” Satoru had groused, crossing his arms. “Both of us are still connected to that realm.” Distantly, he’d felt his energy rippling, accommodating powerful, new presences in its confines. Next to him, Megumi had swiped a careless hand over the fresh trail of blood dripping down his face, smearing a thin sheen of browning red over his cheek, tongue swiping over the semi-congealed remnants pooling near his lip, grimacing. Down in the sinkhole, Megumi’s guardian shikigami had turned the key and withdrawn its sword with another shimmer of jingling, clinking bells, letting loose a call that sounded more like an entire forest creaking under the strain of a strong wind, circling once, before its jungle cat hindquarters folded the shikigami into an elegant, watchful sit, one heavy paw carefully draped over the other, sword still held at the ready by the human set of arms. The tear to the other side immediately stitched together, seamless like it had never formed in the first place, and right after, the feretory’s ravenous teeth, its columns, the roof, begin to melt as if rotting, dripping and sagging into misshapen sludge, the rest of the garden following after it. However, Megumi had not yet dissipated his domain. Before the fluid remnants of the garden could join the rest of his shadows, they stilled for a beat, before exploding outward once more, a dome rushing into the sky, spreading so thin that the shadow became partially see-though. A new barrier rising for the final act, the new root of heaven, a mandate – all curses in this world to be relegated back to the stories that birthed them, all fears to be dealt with by the people that owned them, finally, culpability, responsibility, curses to put curses to rest, a negative and a negative to a positive.

With the single, minute twitch of Megumi’s merciless, unsympathetic hands, he’d sealed it all, the pantheon of his shikigami howling, screeching, thumping, and roaring to life from beneath their feet, a profusion of feral shadows spilling out once more, streaming all around them, streaking into the sky, and running alongside them, Megumi’s guardian monster, absorbing even more shadow to sprout beseeching hands, observant heads, and watchful eyes, many-limbed, many mouthed, singing in a droning chorus, all cursed energy clustering after it, interstellar cloud, growing and growing until, obscured by the dark, compacted by the density of the energy it had gathered, the cloud had dipped with one last howling shriek and swept Megumi up for one last butt of Kon’s head to his hand, the nuzzle of a small, fluffy rabbit, the nip to his ear from Nue’s beak and the ruffle of his hair from Banshou’s trunk, the familiar constriction of Orochi around a wrist, the brief twine of Gama around a leg. With that, Megumi had been released, haphazard and tumbling into Satoru’s arms as the shikigami herded them together, and as the brush of scale, fur, and feathers against their skin and sides stole away their cursed energy, they’d swayed woozily into each other, holding each other up.

Satoru had sucked in a breath when he couldn’t pull the power back to him the way he had so many times before, mouth going stale with the loss of the fragrance and aroma that had filled it. He’d been wrong, that moment had been the true bitterness, still able to see because Six Eyes was not a human burden but something else entirely, able to watch his lively energy leave him, abandon him to the hollowness he’d only felt once before, dying, watched the black flame that had always simmered so merrily in Megumi’s middle swirl away, cheerful firestorm, and Satoru had shivered, so weak, so cold, had reached out his hand as the shikigami began to leave without looking back, stretched after them to grasp at the precious thing they were taking with them, but Megumi had caught his fingers with his own, weaving them together neatly and bearing them against his side, weighing Satoru down so he would not leave too. It had been soothing to look towards Megumi and find him just as wide-eyed as Satoru felt, glimmers of vibrant green only beginning to emerge from the draining, wisping grains of Megumi’s cursed energy, so mostly, Satoru had found the calmer twin of his own desperation reflected there. He’d followed Megumi’s sorrowful stare to the place high up in the sky where his shikigami, his longtime companions, his partners, his pride, circled each other, swirling together faster and faster, caught up in a frenzied, floating, dance, clustering around the monster guardian circling round and round on deft, graceful paws, bells and chimes ringing in rhythm, arms waving like willows, cupped around royal blue lights, blooming flowers nesting in palms, the entire spectacle surrounded by cursed energy so dense all sun was blotted out.

Even then, Satoru could see, had hissed and shielded his eyes from the growing, eyeshattering brightness, Megumi’s warm hand rising to rest at his nape as he teared up and hid in the crook of Megumi’s neck, the way he sometimes had when he was younger and weaker, when he was older and sadder, only raised his head at the alarmed ringing of temple bells, sign of fire, just in time to see the blurring whirr of the midair bacchanalia collapse inward all at once with the violent bang of a firework, a vortex punched into the sky, vibrant blue at its center and still spinning, secret exit of all the world’s cursed energy, a new, insulating nothingness. Silently, it continued to shrink, to the size of a basketball, then a melon, a pinhead and then, nothing, winking out and leaving only the cloudy, gray, spring day behind, leaving Megumi and Satoru on cold concrete, huddled together, bone tired and aching, hollow. Satoru had finally shifted, raising pounding head to look at Megumi, only to finally be met with astonishing, unadulterated green. And hand flung over his eyes, the eyes that would see nothing now except for the quiet embers that smoldered at the bottoms of their souls, incense for dead things, he could only laugh, finally in a world where he wasn’t needed, a world where he’d helped make himself powerless.

The future he had once dreamt of would now never come to pass. Megumi couldn’t lead a clan that didn’t exist, and would not need to safeguard the ways of a new generation if there wouldn’t be one. Satoru hadn’t died, but he’d lost most of the power that had granted him authority and protected not only himself, but many others, too, like Megumi. He had wanted the two of them to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, and with all the power and pretense stripped away he supposed they could still do that, even if only like this, questioning together in quiet, still corners of the universe, roles undefined. It would take subsequent months of comfortable, nostalgic, overfamiliar cohabitation for Satoru to realize how important, how essential those moments were for both of them in keeping some kind of purpose, some kind of meaning. But in that moment, he’d only been able to think of how he hadn’t had the chance to knock on Megumi’s apartment door, take him out to lunch to talk and catch up, watch him fight newer, stronger opponents with confident, unhesitating ease, see him stand with comfortable self-possession draped across his shoulders, grown up and out. Satoru had only been able to think about how much time he’d lost in just a few months, how much opportunity and potential, how much what-if, the seconds, minutes, hours, days, he could’ve spent with Megumi, with the future he’d longed for. Dazed, he’d clung to Megumi’s hand with heated, sweaty palms and a horribly real, humid desperation, like a tearful child crying into his pillow, like a lost boy sobbing and dribbling tears and snot in the middle of a store, rolled out of the cart, discarded merchandise. But Megumi had not let go, had held on with all his might, nails digging small white crescents into the back of Satoru’s hand, and Satoru had been able to feel the pinch of hurt like he hadn’t felt anything in a long while because Infinity was gone. Together, they’d locked it away, contained what was Limitless, contained Satoru, leaving him exposed and vulnerable, trembling; together, they’d changed the world.

But none of it felt the way he thought it would, no vindication, no satisfaction. There were times afterward where he felt he had nothing but the bones and dregs of this Megumi, familiar frame but insides scratched out and stamped into place like a hand etching, needle picking, digging, scraping. Satoru heard about Fushiguro Megumi secondhand, every moment and instance of him growing gloriously into himself narrated to him in the way of bedtime stories, legends, myths, folktales, through Megumi’s own account and the anecdotes passed among the second years, Nobara, Yuuji, and Tsumiki, all of them still putting together the full picture of what had happened, everyone carrying just a fragment of the story, just one version of events. Lost time, lost like the person who had formerly been Chousou, struck free of any influence of the cursed wombs and left a hollow, wrecked shell of a person, like Maki, like Yuuji, like all his quiet, bereft students, Toge with no arm, Nobara with no eye, Yuuta without Rika’s remnants, Maki without Mai, all of them without Panda, and Yuuji now without Sukuna, but at what cost? They whispered the story to each other over and over and still, couldn’t understand it. Nevertheless, their mouths still moved, tried to uncover new words, new sensations, new memories, real or imagined, tried to reason and explain away, when there was no need.

Satoru had known that he needed to leave for his students to grow, too easy to use as a shield against anything remotely challenging, too powerful to do anything but stunt their expectations for themselves. Megumi was the proof of concept, Yuuta’s idolization of Satoru and his ready acquiescence to Satoru’s whims the confirmation. Without Satoru, there would be much more work and no hope of godly intervention or miraculous rescue, no back-up plan, and therefore, no room for error, lest they be ready for overcrowding in the morgue. By facing increasingly difficult opponents on their own, his students would be forced to recognize their limits and continually find more creative interpretations of their techniques, practical experience in the field their best teacher. They would have to think quickly, deploy new tricks, and iterate with each new mission, and the sheer volume of work would have them reaping the rewards of cumulative trial and error, of rigorous hours spent training. Urgency would hone dull edges, and grim resolution was a blade lodged in Satoru’s gut, the shards of a broken bottle brandished at his throat, because had he not been trapped in the Prison Realm, he would’ve had to make himself disappear. I have a bad feeling, he’d told Yuuta. More accurately, he’d had a premonition, could feel the balance of the world shifting once more like a tide in his blood, a vertigo changing the very density of his bones, strange sensations that he’d tried to downplay and ignore two times before, because Six Eyes wasn’t that kind of sight, and even in jujutsu there were some things that beggared belief. Third time’s the charm, he’d thought, and this time, he would be prepared.

He would have to play dead, the same way he’d convinced Yuuji to, he would have to purposefully stand on the sidelines and let his students suffer, hurt, and bleed, line his colleagues up like dominoes and watch them fall, letting the higher ups overplay their suspicious, overeager hands. At least there was Shouko, rigid as stone and always the last one standing, nigh unkillable, treating her life like it was just another pack of smokes to waste. People said Satoru was frightening because he couldn’t run out of cursed energy, but he thinks Shouko was more terrifying. Able to siphon away another person’s cursed energy with the mere brush of a finger, skin to skin, making child’s play out of planting residuals and creating fake trails, mimicking the shapes of other people’s souls with ease. In the time it took for her to exhale a mouthful of smoke, nonchalant and leisurely, Shouko could build a spiritual doppelganger indistinguishable from the original. Bloodied and battered to hell and back on missions, she would drain her opponent to a husk through a quick tangle and trip of legs, digging around in her skirt pocket for a lighter and smokes with the bone of her skull still showing through the quickly healing, bloodied tear in her scalp, flesh knitting together in a narrow, hairless strip, not even a scar left behind. The corpse she’d made would slide silently to ground in a heap, and she’d light up right there, ash off on the body, unhurried and unmoved as she’d watched smoke spiral into the sky.

Having a strong reverse cursed energy technique was more like getting a bonus one-shot spin-off of the main series, but Shouko was a reliable viper in the grass who could hold the fort. People would get injured, people would die. He had no illusions about what his seeming disappearance would do, about the learning curve he would leave in his wake. If anything, Prison Realm had spared him the difficulty of planning and timing a disappearance, especially with Sukuna on the loose, had spared him from having to intentionally abandon his students and colleagues, and being hated for doing what he had to. That was what it meant to be the strongest, to make the judgment call and accept everything that came with it. Shut away in the Prison Realm, he’d been embraced by skeletons and corpses like a lover, suspended, the soft parts of his pried at by spindly fingers, empty ribcages yawning open for some sort of warmth, a baby’s rooting instinct. Death, he knew, was only another beginning, he’d learned that years ago, and there were other things plenty more terrifying, more absolute, than death.

The strongest Satoru might’ve been, but there had been plenty of things he couldn’t do. He was still the strongest within a framework, an age-old institution – kill all the higher-ups and it would start infighting and let the curse users swarm into the power vacuums, and Satoru knew, despite what he always said, that there were limits to his power indeed, no matter how hard he tried to erase them by destroying the Black Rope, scrubbing away all mentions of the Inverted Spear of Heaven. Even Fushiguro Touji was not one of a kind, though if Maki was a sharpening weapon, she was not one pointed at Satoru. Six Eyes Limitless Satoru Gojou had duty and responsibility conferred upon him by generations past, by that same institution, because of what he could see, what he represented. The push and the pull, magnetism, and the wholesale destruction that came with structural disruptions, the penetrating insights to the flow of energy, of power, of people – Satoru had to be someone who did what had to be done, but he’d had to learn that to feel it, understand it. Suguru had said, but it’s not impossible for you, and Satoru only understood later, looking down at grade-school Megumi all beaten up and dirt-smeared after training, frustrated and bitter and snapping, I don’t know what you expect to get out of this, I’m not going to win, of course you’re stronger than me, and Satoru didn’t like to waste time on people who gave up before they got started but Megumi was just a kid, and he could see the glass marble glint in Megumi’s eye, how much he hated being powerless, hopeless, how difficult it was for him to see where Satoru was looking, not at the now, but five, nine, eleven years ahead.

It had nothing and everything to do with Satoru. Gojou Satoru the Strongest, more title than person, more duty than sentiment, who represented the far end of possibility, a ceiling, instead of an opportunity. He did what had to be done, collateral damage be damned, because if Gojou Satoru couldn’t or wouldn’t do it, who would? Everyone had become lazy and unambitious, everyone had begun resting on his laurels, and Satoru didn’t favor scavengers or people who wouldn’t put in the work, put their soul, mind, and body into it. Give them a couple missions and people like that would just die, cannon fodder. Those with no resolve could not survive. And resolve was personal, but power only let Satoru get away with being selfish in the way of children, using his privilege as a bludgeon to go where he wanted, eat what he wanted, make life difficult for others in ways that, in the grand scheme of things, didn’t mean much. Call him an eccentric, and he could get away with almost anything – anything but his own happiness, anything but an adult selfishness that had nothing to do with sweets and toys, and everything to do with being disoriented and lonely, tired and angry, frustrated and sometimes, horribly, searingly impatient.

Teaching was his biggest act of selfishness, guiding and cultivating a generation that would look beyond him, leave him behind, a set of comrades to fight by his side instead of leaving him to it because the Strongest didn’t need help, didn’t need someone to watch his back. If he was possibility and probability, let that extend to him too; he’d make it happen himself since he did everything anyway – let it be not improbable for someone to try and surpass him, to choose to stand next to him, help shoulder the burden. When Megumi raged in middle school and talked about responsibility, culpability, Satoru had understood, empathized. He’d been waiting, all that time, for a day where personal motivations and reasons would be enough to act without repercussion – a day when the next Six Eyes Limitless, another Megumi, another Maki, could all simply do what they chose, without fear. The role of the strongest had not been written by Satoru, and Suguru, his one and only exception, his most cherished and egregious mistake, had been tricked by it too, blinded by the possibility of power and completely overlooking what Satoru himself would choose or not choose to do. Even when away from him, Suguru had always uncovered parts of Satoru that he’d never noticed were there, and in his most egregious mistake, Satoru hadn’t been able to watch their dream, the possibility of a future where the two of them were together the strongest, able to do anything, go up in flames. No willingness or energy to strike Suguru’s beloved head from stiffened, bloodspattered shoulder, he’d stolen Suguru’s body from the cold morgue slab and let him go into the white foam of the sea on the sunny shores of Okinawa, the postcard paradise of their last pleasant daydream. That selfishness, that one and only exception, had brought him, Megumi, all the curse users, curses, and jujutsushi, to this point.

There had been times when he felt like he’d never left that white sand shore, stranded and left behind, watching the changing foam caps of salt water waves, letting water rush around his ankles where he stood in white sand, waiting to be pulled in, though he never would be. Always held away, separate from everyone else, the coach, not part of the team. And despite his hopes, Satoru had expected the new generation to go on without him, last inheritor of the old guard; Satoru would die and Megumi would carry on in his place with the united approval of the clans behind him. That was selfishness too, Satoru’s desire, his wish, that someone he trusted would shoulder his hopes and wishes and keep carrying them forward, leave room for him even when he was gone. It was a special frustration to know that in his absence, Sukuna had taken up the space Satoru had carved out, had been the one to witness Megumi’s growth, had been the one to nurture and lead him to selfishness, to his full potential, coaxing him to the pinnacle of his game where each and every bat would be for a home run. All this, without Satoru, despite his guiding hand, years of training and togetherness, popsicles in summer and bruises forming under the canopy of a cool, shaded wood, birthday cake and New Year’s amazake, tiers and tiers of courtier’s dolls and a tiny koinobori mounted outside their balcony, one for Tsumiki too, regardless, may all the Fushiguro swim upstream to prosperity, to become dragons, and didn’t they do just that. Megumi and Tsumiki at their most vicious, at their best, the instant of culmination a brilliant flare of color flashing in the night, and Satoru could still see, but there was nothing to see, really, anymore.  

“And you don’t even have a corruption arc to show for it,” Satoru had sighed with mock disappointment, half-serious but mostly fishing, biting into his own refreshing slice of watermelon. Megumi had made faces at him as he spat the seeds into the bowl at a distance, in a little game. Satoru’s power didn’t work like it used to, but the balance of the world still remained a little, in this way, in the same manner that both Maki and Yuuji were still stronger and sturdier than the average human, but not as much as they used to be – anything Satoru put his mind to, he could still do perfectly.

“How would you know?” Megumi had challenged him, frowning, pointedly pushing the discards bowl next to Satoru’s knee. “Maybe I just changed my mind halfway through.”

“Is that a fantasy of yours, Megumi-chan? Getting to be bad? Are we still in your rebellious phase?” laughed Satoru, overly loud and chewing noisily, pointedly spitting seeds straight into the bowl this time, hard enough that they bounced once before sticking. He’d stuck out his tongue and blew a short raspberry, ignoring the squirm of unease in his gut, the hair standing up at the back of his neck, still novel after months without Infinity. “We’re already bad. But you knew that. And you’d do anything to help Tsumiki but more than that, Megumi, you have standards, and quite high ones at that, enough that you don’t even meet them. Megumin, valiant top dog delinquent of Urami East Junior High! If Megumi does it, it’s righteous.”

Lip turned up and brows scrunched together, Megumi had turned an incredulous look on him, teeth still half-sunken in his own slice. “You’re telling me you had that much faith in the moral compass of a middle schooler,” he’d said, words garbled around the fruit chunk he was gnashing to bits, seeds spat out with the vehemence of his middle school self, spitting at the shoes of bullies older and larger than him, but not stronger. “In my moral compass. You, an adult.” You, the strongest, he hadn’t said, but they’d both heard it implied anyway.

“You’re hardly the type to go, ‘Ooh, Mr. Curse, these morals are just so heavy, won’t someone big and strong come and help me hold them please,’” Satoru had moaned exaggeratedly, and received a watermelon rind thrown at his head for his trouble. “Ow, Megumi, my hair!”

“You’re disgusting,” Megumi had hissed, eating furiously to keep from saying any more.

“As long as I’m not wrong,” Satoru had snickered, making a face as his fingers ran through sticky strands of hair and his apprehension kept him alert. “From what I heard, he was quite interested in you. Obsessed, even. And he left with so little fuss!” He’d stared at Megumi a little then, but Megumi had paid him no mind, and by the time he’d turned to look at him, Satoru was already smiling again, wide and charming, but the minute twitch of Megumi’s mouth said it all. He could see right through Satoru, like the washi paper of the shoji left open behind them, leading back to the maze of the estate waiting quietly to eat up their words, the way the dust and empty rooms had eaten up Tsumiki’s grace, Yuuji’s optimism, Yuuta’s calm, haunted not by ghosts but the absence of them, the lack, dry air, spiraling dust, and ozone. When Satoru had spoken next, his voice had rolled downhill to meet the innards of the house, bedrock foundation with a talisman sealed in the cellar, hole in the ground like the well out back, like the garden pond before it had been filled up, creaking lumber columns with fading varnish, and shivering, fibrous paper, thin enough to see the connection, thin enough to tear apart with just the right application of pressure. “But for you to work with Sukuna, I imagine there was more to him than just mass violence and eating babies.”

Not that the jujutsushi clans were any better. If anything, Sukuna fit right in with them, and at the very least, his bloodlust, brutality, and love for the fight were straightforward. Murder and reprehensible acts against children were practically tradition – the clans were, after all, formed by jujutsushi, people who were cursed, who cursed each other, so what could they become other than cruel? The crueler they became, the more they were feared and hated, and so rage and terror and power all grew together, a hook in the gut, an instinctual, heart-deep, soul-quivering type of stifling feeling that gripped the spine, tore it out, shook it, limp and flopping, the body moving with it as a puppet, limbs trembling, scalp tingling, sweat drip, drip, dripping. Primal emotion, fight and flight, all scrambled up with each other when facing something too big to outrun, too powerful to fight off, a predator who rose up on sinuous muscle and flared out flaps of skin and feathers, its shadow cast long and far on the ground, larger and more expansive than it really was – that was how the clans kept control. Keep the young ones spineless and fearful, too apprehensive to dream, shrink the world to the size of a cage and limit the definition of strength.

Hands in his pockets, Satoru could only throw his head back and laugh with the ease and luxury of a one-man clan, because the establishment was so very narrow-minded, so stuck in the past as a means to legitimacy that they had forgotten how quickly things became history in the modern era, how quickly they were being outpaced and outclassed, new categories of cursed techniques emerging every day, related to cameras, social media, the internet, high-speed rail, airplanes, bombs. Techniques like his were renowned for a reason, thought to have been created as the result of pacts made with divine beings when jujutsushi was still just nascent onmyoudou, but a little creativity could go a long way in getting the most out of a simpler technique. In the end, the golden age had only remained the golden age because further innovation and exploration could not thrive under the stranglehold of the politically powerful clans and the higher-ups that helped support them, research proposals going unreviewed, promising new talents ignored and squandered. Older and wiser, Satoru had known that strength oftentimes had little to do with power, with cursed technique, combat skill, or whether or not someone came from jujutsushi lineage. It all came down to the cohesion of soul, mind, and body, the stability and certainty of the self as a unified whole.

The strong must protect the weak, Suguru had said, and Satoru had stuck out his tongue at the distaste of it, the duty he’d understood, though disliked, since birth, something much more utilitarian, simpler and more calculating, than the noblesse oblige Suguru claimed, which reeked of a self-important righteousness. Being a jujutsushi was not about the power trip of smug heroism, not even about comparing strength and beating a bloody path to the top of money, fame or pleasure. Curse users and jujutsushi might think that was the case, but Satoru knew better. Jujutsu was a bartering for power, a binding between a person and the world, a promise to live by certain terms and conditions, in exchange for power. Self-cohesion was one step in the pursuit of those terms, uncertainty becoming realization, becoming resolve, and as one matured so did the binding, and so did power grow, maturing, developing a depth and heft, a complexity of flavor and mouthfeel, so by the time a domain blossomed open in full form, a birthing cry was ready and waiting, a declaration hoisted high: I, who I am, I am here.

In the end, all jujutsushi fought for their own ways of life, their right to exist as they wished, and that was the curse, that was the binding, and their cursed techniques and power responded according to the strength of those convictions. However, their significance as jujutsushi, their sense of collective identity, existed as it had because of civilians—there was no difference between jujutsushi and curse users, save for their actions relative to the civilian. For those curse users and jujutsushi whose techniques relied on tapping into the latent, free-floating cursed energy that permeated the air, too loose to form into cursed spirits, civilians were even more important. Reversed curse technique, the abilities of Six Eyes, even the regeneration of cursed spirits, all relied on the bits of cursed energy that civilians shed daily, energy they couldn’t generate themselves. And it was because of the civilians that jujutsushi became powerful, received imperial patronage to build up their clans, their businesses, their networks. If one chose to fight for public good, the social contract provided—the College with its room and board, access to accumulated knowledge and material that could further understanding of cursed energy and use of cursed technique, a secure if dangerous job for the rest of one’s limited days, and a certain amount of legal immunity necessary for the job. So: the strong must protect the weak, to maintain their position as the strong, to maintain all the other things that ensure their power, and because civilians, as the creators of curses, unable to see and therefore defend, gave them their authority. In the way of jujutsu, a duty was stronger for being voluntary, if reluctant.

But Suguru had a point too, when he defected: in many ways, the jujutsu world had struggled the most with scale. Jujutsushi were themselves a small fraction of the population who could use cursed energy, and the ability to see meant the ability to acknowledge, which meant that there was an aspect of responsibility attached if one chose to look away. However, because jujutsushi had higher cursed energy levels, they attracted more cursed spirits, and it was often unwise to play ignorant. It seemed almost irresponsible for civilians, who outnumbered jujutsushi by so many, to create a seemingly endless amount of cursed spirits and then not have to deal with them, but in a real sense, they did, because they still died, uncomprehending and full of fear, they still shuddered at unknowns and had no answers. Was it better to know, or remain ignorant? Why not just let them die, some bitter jujutsushi might have asked, and if one truly did not care what happened to others, Satoru supposed they could – but in his opinion that was simply a circular argument because if there was good money to be made off saving civilians, and prestige to be had then of course, people would build an industry, then an institution around it, especially if political power ended up in the ring. Soldiers and mercenaries existed for the same reason. And truly, that’s what jujutsushi were. Mercenaries, deployed for very specific circumstances. 

And because of the scale, there was a lesson every jujutsushi learned eventually, even one called the strongest: you couldn’t save everyone, not even those most important to you. So Satoru hadn’t doubted that desperation might have driven Megumi to team up with Sukuna, would have understood it, accepted it. But Megumi was deliberate and intentional in all things, including his recklessness. He would study a situation from all angles, thoroughly examine the consequences, then simply decide he didn’t care, the dark, smug satisfaction like blood on knuckles, the cherry red of a stolen cigarette, the white of his teeth sitting crooked in his smirking, taunting mouth, any ramification worth it for the vicious vindication of Megumi’s sole, unilateral judgment, falling heavily with all the weight of revenge. The results tended to be explosive, because when Megumi gambled, really put everything on the line, he gambled big.

Despite his level demeanor, or because of it, Megumi was a thrill seeker, a risk taker, enjoyed the discovery and triumph in wrestling down a new challenge, relished the solid, unquestionable thumping of his own heart, the rushing bellows of his lungs, adrenaline prickling at his skin and planting a blooming awareness of his entire body, the space he took up, the glory of his own capability. As ever, he’d continued to experience value through the potential of loss, a safer, more calculated kind of cost-benefit analysis, compared to his winner-takes-all moods. But it was because of that defiant rashness, the full-sighted folly, that Satoru did in fact trust the judgment of the six year old who had fearlessly looked him in the eye and bargained for his and his sister’s future, demanded Satoru’s attention and time and the way he was to care for him and Tsumiki; the middle schooler who grew in leaps and bounds, grade two, filling Satoru’s chest with a nameless, golden light, so different from the howling natures of Red, Blue, and Purple, blood and bruises, which Megumi dispensed upon others, and how Satoru had laughed then because if Megumi had that kind of fire he wouldn’t have to worry about it going out; the fifteen year old who had opened the door for him and the promised bag of takeout at Christmas with bloodshot, red-rimmed eyes, still smelling like antiseptic, wearing yesterday’s baggy, oversized clothing telling him, I hope that steak is bloody, the two of them picking wearily at sour-sweet strawberries side-by-side, cozy at the kotatsu, ignoring the dust in the corners because Megumi still couldn’t clean as well as Tsumiki, cook as well as Tsumiki, just be as well as Tsumiki, and there were so many ways in which she was better than him that at midnight, Megumi had stared at his charred attempt at cream cake still resting on the counter, and said, She wouldn’t have messed this up.

As if on cue, they’d gotten up together silently and swept the kitchen clean, left it sparkling, tidied the entire tiny apartment top to bottom, gleaming like it was just waiting for her, the centerpiece, waiting for her to come back and praise them. It had snowed gently, like a reminder, and they’d left the balcony door open until sun up, the two of them nestled into each other, exhausted but unable to sleep, and as a stripe of morning light fell across his face, Satoru had closed his eyes against its searing brightness and confessed, I killed my best friend, yesterday night, killed him, blew his chest all apart. Like I blew your father apart, Satoru hadn’t said, but he’d thought it, thought it while Megumi had nodded quietly, messy head on Satoru’s shoulder, because in this life of only a short fifteen years Megumi had lost friends and a one and only too, and he’d leaned harder into Satoru like he could press the imprint of all his bones and joints into him before Infinity could spring to life against his cheek, his palms, as if it would, a post-it note saying Megumi was there, others could be here, if Satoru let them. Suguru might be gone and irreplaceable but don’t you dare forget what you have, your colleagues, your students, the reason why you even have both, don’t you dare forget what you have the way I forgot, let slip through clumsy, arrogant fingers like a fool. Megumi, a clear-eyed, wounded animal that looked for duplicity in every corner just like Satoru, but sought out warmth anyway, hadn’t hesitated at Yuuji and Nobara’s loudness, scoffed but followed after Toge and Panda’s antics with a quiet smirk, the risk and the reward blended all together, the contradiction that only resolved at Megumi’s whim, at his pleasure and displeasure. That was why he was selfish, and why he was trustworthy.

“He was a lot more…complete, cohesive, than he was when he first emerged. The more finger he ate, the more stable he seemed to become,” Megumi had said, looking down solemnly at his watermelon, turning the slice in his hands this way and that to better see the subtle, fibrous white running through wet, red flesh, like difficult strings of tendon, like the river runs of stone veins, like geodes and gemstones, cut to the core. Loudly, the cicadas continued to drone. “I had leverage because Sukuna wanted me to help him build his ideal world. And I guess, in pursuit of that goal, he wanted to see what I could do. Test me, to make sure I could do it.”

Mouth pinching, brow wrinkling, Megumi’s jaw had opened wide, teeth gleaming as they sank into crumbling fruit, sucking noisily as the juice flooded out, pooling between his fingers, at the corners of his mouth.  “He’s oppressive, arrogant, and self-centered, and doesn’t hesitate to use violence to get his way,” Megumi had said, and the seeds that flew from his mouth stuck wetly the sides of the bowl, plinking. “But I’ve never met anyone with a deeper understanding of the flow and manipulation of cursed energy, and how to maneuver around the constraints, rules, and grey areas of jujutsu. It’s all about approach and attitude with him, he was always complaining about how bored he was and how he wanted to see people come at him with more curse, more conviction, more creativity. He’s hungry, all the time. Not just for human flesh,” and here Megumi had grimaced, hastily taking another bite of fruit as if to wash out an imaginary taste, “Though there were times where he definitely ate the people he killed. But also for knowledge, experiences. He’s picky. Talks about energy the way Itadori does, texture, flavor. But he keeps his word, centers his technique and practice around bindings and verbal barriers, reinforcing his techniques through intentional restrictions and opponent participation. I guess it makes sense that he’s old-fashioned that way, but it’s an approach that’s very different from modern jujutsu. But it also means that he’s strangely…fair, because he wants to see what others have to offer him, or sometimes needs them to show what they can do to bolster a technique.”   

“Sounds like he definitely made an impression,” Satoru had said evenly, through the frustration pushing insistently against his ribs, catching him around the throat. Megumi would never speak of Satoru that way, and nothing Satoru had done or would do, would change that. That was how they’d always been, how they’d always preferred it. Familiar, but unknowing. Understanding each other’s motivations, likes and dislikes, their natures, but never digging too deep, allowing for a purposeful distance on both their parts. Everyone knew about Satoru and Megumi, so no one spoke of them. Preferred not to. Gojou-sensei, Megumi had continued calling him, with everyone in the house, but when it was just him and Tsumiki in the room he called him Gojou-san once more, and sometimes Satoru’s estate was a time machine, sometimes it felt like an extension of his technique, some unknown, undefined space between now and then, where everything and nothing occurred. And Tsumiki would say, why do you do that, why don’t you just call him like you always did, and it still gave the others pause sometimes to hear Megumi saying Gojou-san, Gojou, scolding him like he always did at home, because this too was something they held at distance, away from missions and classes, at least until they were left together, alone, all that was needed to take them back to eleven years and semi-cohabitation. And so, Megumi, unflinchingly, had come up with another new thing, and had begun calling him Satoru-sensei instead, defiant and grumbling, because after all, half the people in the house called him Satoru anyway, nevermind that this was Megumi, this was different.

And Satoru had understood it, Megumi’s hesitance and awareness of his position, of his perceived weakness, Satoru has always understood that need for arm’s length because he’s needed it too, needed a position to stand relative to, the two of them orbiting each other – Megumi had looked at Satoru and seen both faith and powerlessness, Satoru looked at Megumi and saw hope and strength, and this, they’d kept between themselves. But public and private had collapsed, were one; the paradigm had changed and Satoru didn’t know what Megumi saw when he looked at him anymore. There was no workplace or college to be formal at, there was no quiet, sacrosanct apartment. It was just Satoru, Megumi, Tsumiki, and all their other colleagues and friends. It was the three of them washing dishes, doing laundry, scrubbing floors and counters, like they used to, and they would be in the rhythm of it, bouncing quips and fanciful, pointless thoughts off each other like always, until Yuuta would come in the front door, Nobara would barge in to ask if there were extra nails, or Maki would float through, her keen eyes watching, then say to Megumi in an empty, underused hallway, I told you once that you were favored but I didn’t realize how much, and the moment would shatter, held in place and but cobwebbed and distorted, the three of them falling into silence. And outside, footsteps, because Yuuji ever only ever stood by the open door, and listened, like a voyeur, and wasn’t as quiet as he thought he was.

“It’s not like it used to be, is it?” Tsumiki had asked Megumi once, as Satoru passed by yet another dusty room, inhabited only by the pointlessly serene brush painting hanging quietly in the tokonoma, empty white vase below. She’d blown up at him again that morning, after going in his room and finding it unorganized and messy, after finding smokes hanging out of a unwashed jeans pocket. “Sometimes it feels like it is. Like nothing ever changed.”

“No, it’s not,” Megumi had said, low and quiet. “But things were changing then too.”

“It felt like an end for you then, didn’t it,” Tsumiki had murmured. “I’d only been in high school for a few months. But you were so quiet at home. I thought I was living with a ghost.”

Fabric had rustled, and voice tight and trembling, full of violence, Megumi had said, “I wanted you to be free of all this.”

“But I always knew,” Tsumiki had shot back. “You kept me from the worst of it, and I know that personally, now, but you and Satoru-san weren’t good at keeping secrets. I wondered if you were even trying, sometimes. Protecting someone isn’t the same as telling them nothing, Megumi. You smother people that way. That’s the same as not having a choice. I was made to feel like an outsider in the home that I took care of. I had no idea what was going on with you.”

There had been no response aside from the soft shift of cotton, telling enough, in and of itself. Satoru had imagined Megumi gripping at his shoulder and kneading the muscle there, shifting his weight, the subtle play of ligaments right under his skin. “…Sorry,” Megumi had said, a word that rarely fell from his mouth sincerely, a word Satoru had only ever heard him use two or three times, at the most. “That was what I kept wanting to say to you, while you were asleep. I wasn’t a good brother to you. I should have listened to you more, instead of brushing you off.”

With a huff, there was a light thudding noise, likely Tsumiki thumping Megumi in the arm, the same kind of scolding Megumi had visited upon Yuuji while they were still in school. He rarely did it, afterwards, after everything. “Yeah, you should have,” she’d snorted. “I know you both had good intentions. You just wanted to protect me. But you’ve got to prove it to me, okay?” Her voice had begun to wobble, wavering. “I’m not letting you off the hook anymore, especially now. No more hiding. I’d never seen you fight before the culling game, did you know? It was a little scary. I wasn’t totally awake, but I saw you melting out of the shadows and Nue hurtling towards me….and the look on your face. I almost didn’t recognize you. And throughout everything, watching you come up with plans and sneaking around to make raids on different player groups in the middle of the night, it made me realize how little I knew about you, even though we’ve been side by side for so long. I’m not grateful that this all happened, that the we were put through the games, that we’ve become what we have, but…I am grateful that in the end, I got to see. Your shikigami, and what you can do. What Satoru-san can do. I’m grateful that I’m not just looking from the outside, anymore. I know now.”

“Sorry.”

A firmer, sharper whack. “For a smart guy, you’re kind of stupid sometimes, Megumi. I’ve always thought that. Just talk to me. Share what you didn’t before. You’re already a different person, from who you were in middle school.”

If only Satoru had Tsumiki’s grace, if only he could just accept the completely natural fact that Megumi would change without him, without a single glance back, would be influenced by the people he met and knew, people who wouldn’t necessarily be in Satoru’s circle. But to see the gulf between their intentional distance and the way Megumi spoke of Sukuna, Satoru found that as much as he had wanted Megumi to be strong, stronger, strongest, more than him, more than Sukuna, to fully accept the shadows that dogged him and embrace his true capability, he didn’t want Megumi to outgrow him, even though he’d expected it all along, expected he would end up dead as a payment for his plans, executed, or more likely, sealed somehow, finally out of the way like the higher-ups wanted. First day of high school and Megumi sat in front of him, straight-backed, only student in the room, and Satoru had pulled down his blindfold like always and smiled, had said, It’s just you and me like always, for now, and he’d seen Megumi’s brow wrinkle just the slightest bit, and tried not to feel the small sense of pleasure there, the idea that ‘for now’ was something that rankled Megumi, that you and me, that eleven years and semi-cohabitation, wouldn’t just be a part of growing up like in a jousei manga, something to look back on with rose-tinted glasses.

Satoru wanted Megumi to live a long, successful life, wanted him to become everything he could and wanted to be, wanted him to thrive in this shitty mud they were all mired in, rise up into the most pristine, immaculate flower there was in the modern era, floating peacefully atop the mirror-like surface of a shadow lake. Megumi could stand on top of it all, and Satoru’s role, as strongest, for now, as teacher, had been to make sure that his future, and the future of all his students, wasn’t just a footnote. He’d tried, half-heartedly, to encourage Megumi to move on, introducing him to the second years early, putting Yuuji in the room next door, but otherwise, things hadn’t changed much because Megumi got upset when he didn’t know where Satoru was, didn’t say anything out loud but would give Satoru the worst cold shoulder; lukewarm tea, snide remarks, one word answers on LINE, or no answer at all. With Tsumiki asleep, his contacts list had only gotten that much shorter and it was hard to think of him sitting in a dark room alone, shadows dancing up the wall and twining around his limbs while he stared at the overbright screen, the bubble of the message he’d floated out into the digital void, watched it dim, and turn black.

But now, Tsumiki was awake, now time rolled out in front of them without limits, and Satoru had no clue anymore what the future looked like. He’d fantasized about a freer, more selfish world, but he’d never imagined living without the power that had afforded him all his privileges, without the purpose he’d once been saddled with, which had dictated his life since birth. As one of the few surviving heavyweights of the jujutsu world, Satoru still couldn’t entirely get away, dragged into meetings with the civilian government to discuss the impact to the international market, figure out what relevance jujutsu society still had, if any, discuss what to do about violent curse users and surviving culling game participants who still roamed the streets and did as they pleased. There were messy group conferences cobbling together the remaining leaders of various clans, Jujutsu Tech teachers, and professional jujutsushi, all of them wondering what recovery looked like, trying to create a semblance of order before figuring out what to do next. And after all that, there was his own clan to manage, an internal transition to a fully demilitarized, civilian organization, devoted to the research and understand of myth, history, and culture. There had been so few jujutsushi in recent generations that the clan had already partially hybridized, determinedly planning its survival strategy. Reallocating resources to speed up the process was barely a challenge, paltry effort in comparison to the damage control Kamo Noritoshi was running on his clan, still silently imploding in the wake of Kenjaku’s schemes and the revelation of every filthy secret the Kamo had once tried to bury.

As for Megumi, three days out of the week, his little living room, his slice of territory, became littered in white, a snowfall of statements and deeds and other legalese, a forest’s worth of paper listing out asset after asset, inheritance after inheritance, Megumi become a wealthy man overnight, free lunch paid off with the reports of every grisly ongoing operation, the detailed disclosure of every cursed weapon locked away in the vault, the reasons they’d been made, their origins, their former lives, and it was horribly funny how efficient the jujutsu world had been, even taking advantage of death, taking care of the recycling like good, conscionable citizens. It had gotten Megumi laughing, at least, sarcastic, bitter, and dry, his most cynical self in fine form – even death could not buy peace, could only afford yet another transformation, the high of feeling out the edge of existence and teetering there, the dark glee of discovering one’s true worth like eavesdropping around a corner, the words that people said when the subject wasn’t in the room to hear them. Selfishly, Satoru had hoped that Megumi hadn’t had to experience that in the moment when Satoru had blinked, looked away, lost responsibility, hoped that Megumi hadn’t had to feel the unbearable euphoria of the soul expanding, struggling to shed its confines while the flesh cleaved in two, dividing again and again like embryonic regression, reduced back to mindless growth, like a spore, like a virus, unthinking but all the purer for it, uncomplicated, and essential. How terrible, to be so small and soft, to be shrink down to meat, bone, and blood, easily cracked like summer sparklers, exploding into color, all visible hues and more light besides, every tint unseen, the horrible yearning that made one want to claw at eyes, mouth, chest, arms, slough this life off like snakeskin, chewing one’s own tail to bone to ascend, or rather, descend, to a fragile invincibility, a single second’s worth of godhood, which only lasted until one realized there could be no turning back, small after all, insignificant and powerless. There was a sacrifice, a forfeiture to knowing what lay beyond humanity, a seed that could grow into addiction, driving one towards more permanent ends for one more glimpse, one more moment, one more, always, the glory of becoming power, becoming energy, something greater.

But Megumi was a reluctant, suspicious kind of young god who missed his power not because of what it made him, but because he’d grown too used to the incessant murmur of his shikigami, found his own mind too quiet. Megumi’s shadow never waved back at him anymore, the way it had when he was younger, and Satoru could have written it off as boredom if he hadn’t seen the way Megumi looked at the shape he cast on the world around him, how his head drooped in silence, forlorn. Washed up, past his prime, what did the clans and new leadership expect from him exactly, Megumi would cackle mockingly, beer cans at his hip while he and Satoru doggedly carved a new swathe through the morass of bureaucracy that the jujutsu world still somehow managed to generate. He’d determinedly ignored the crimson eye that would peep out from his shadow, every once in a while, only ever said, in the blandest way possible, that he’d peaked at seventeen, no one would be getting anything more out of him.

Finding Tsumiki again, playing the culling game, had accomplished the one thing Satoru had never quite been able to do over the years – assuring Megumi that he was the sole agent, the only master of his life, no matter the circumstances, and that he was capable of blasting open new paths if there were none available. For all his talk of responsibility, there had always been instances where Megumi had wanted to the excuse of plausible deniability, to be able to claim that he’d been strongarmed or forced into something, to be able to claim irrelevance not have to take charge, but in the end it all boiled down to the things that Megumi did and didn’t want, and how much it burned him to know them, because he did always know, being the unfortunately astute, self-aware sort that might’ve been better off oblivious. Indignant righteousness had suffused every restless limb; Megumi wanted so badly for someone to set things right, wanted the freedom and ability to be able to do that himself, but couldn’t. Middle school was spent staring down the dwindling, slow-burning match that was the remainder of his life, bitter and  wishing for something with more feeling, more passion, less utility, something to match the way his nose bled all over his pale-colored blazer uniform, not too unlike the boxy suits of salarymen, because jujutushi or not Megumi wasn’t going to make it to adulthood without a kilo of flesh being taken out of him at least, not when people were the most basic work unit, their hands, their bodies, their looks, their words, their blood, sweat, tears, and corpses, and perhaps it was only right that Megumi might as well die before he got there, to the point of being a slumped over suit in a dim bar, in a subway corridor, at a low table, lights-off. Choose your hell, indeed.

And Megumi had chosen to become an expert in opportunism. He knew to take advantage now, to take his lumps and seize unwelcome chances in the name of greater gains in the future, in the name of having an ear in the room and making sure to be in the right place at the right time. Take the reins, control the narrative; reclaim name and allegiance, and while Megumi sat in that lofty space, he might as well take the gas and burn it all to the ground because the only one who would have permission to do that, the only one who could own it, would be him or Maki, and Maki’s massacre and changed direction spoke enough for her priorities. But a Zenin clan, even if only of two, could still be of some of some use, especially with Megumi, world destroyer, at its head, and its connections to the surviving major players of the whole debacle.  Thanks to middle school, Megumi was somewhat used to having people come at him with minimal reason, though it was always frustrating, but it was stranger to be resented for having clan headship land in his lap, for having been favored by Gojou Satoru, for possessing a technique like Ten Shadows. In the culling games, those who knew of him, and how odd, that anyone would know of him, came at him with the full force of their vitriol and jealousies, seemed to assume he would be some sort of spoiled, cossetted fool instead of a battle-seasoned, field-tested jujutsushi.   

“I asked Maki once if she hated me,” Megumi had said once, lazing against a stack of paperwork, neatly stashed into plastic document boxes, much like Satoru’s, the result of Tsumiki’s latest irritated bout of scolding. Close to one in the morning and across the way, the kitchen ligts were off, no one coming in and out for a light snack. “She said that I was really self-absorbed sometimes, and there was no reason for hate when it was none of my business in the first place. That she just had to get over herself. I don’t really understand it.”

“She’s right that you’re self absorbed sometimes,” Satoru had snickered, humming as he crunched into a butter cigarette cookie, the light, herbaceous flavor of yuzu spreading pleasantly in his mouth. “Thinking of how you feel about something more than what someone else would think. Not that you’re inconsiderate. Just in your feelings. You’re better now than you were.”

“Why do I bother asking you,” Megumi had huffed, rubbing his hands roughly over his face in a way that would make Nobara scream about wrinkles and skincare, and bopped the ducky nightlight serving as his lamp on the head, turning it one setting brighter. Satoru had made a muted little shriek, ducking into the hood of his loose, dark sweatshirt, earning himself a paper swat to the head, a little love tap. “Shut up, it’s late.”

“Good boys should go to sleep,” Satoru had sing-songed, and Megumi had glared at him over the rim of his teacup. A raw pu’er they’d found moldering in the cellar for who knew how long, a whole ti of cakes. Satoru had been the only one able to read the paper labels compressed into the tea cakes, having been trained by his clan to read classical Chinese in order to absorb the Heian family records firsthand, only later learning modern Chinese to binge a positively addictive series of C-dramas. But he knew nothing about tea save the etiquette for various types of tea ceremony and how to brew an adequate pot himself, so it was only by Googling that they’d found it was a valuable crate of tea indeed, rare old tree material that would likely be better appreciated among aficionados, than a bunch of recently traumatized high school dropouts and their former teacher. Megumi though, had insisted on keeping two cakes, just to try, and the tea had become his late night indulgence. He’d claimed that the tea gave him more energy and made him feel more alert, but Satoru hadn’t liked his first sip, or any other subsequent sips, at all, disliked the odd, bitter funk of it, the mineral, earthy, vegetal tastes that made him think of dirt.

“Guess I’m not a good boy,” Megumi had replied blandly, pouring himself more tea as he narrowed eyes at Satoru. “Don’t even say it.”

“Bad boy Megumi,” Satoru had whispered dramatically through the hands that had flattened themselves against his mouth, sweater paws and all. Swatted again. “Ah, Fushiguro-san, step on me more!”

“You’re awful,” he’d said with a grimace, but the light pooling in his eyes had been soft and liquid. “Awful and deflecting.”

“What’s there to deflect?” Satoru had asked with a small sigh. “It’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Maki doesn’t think of you as a Zenin. You weren’t in the compound growing up, and you didn’t go through what she and Mai did. If you didn’t have Ten Shadows, you wouldn’t have been part of the line of succession. She acknowledges you as a relative, but thinks of you as an outsider. She always said she wanted to be the head, but she really just wanted to change things for Mai. She didn’t give a damn about anyone or anything else. The Heavenly Restriction isn’t about jujutsu for strength, or anything like that. It’s the forcing of an imbalanced, zero-sum game. Strength beyond anyone’s imagining, but only on the condition that you forget yourself, and everything that matters to you. Now, Mai’s not here anymore, and neither are the other Zenin. So I don’t think she cares about the clan head seat anymore. It was never about political power, just power for recognition.”

“To make a change,” Megumi had said quietly, spinning his pen in his hand. “But that’s why I couldn’t understand. If she’d been the one with Ten Shadows, she could have gotten instant legitimacy and the clan seat. It practically fell in my lap and I said I didn’t want it in front of her. And she didn’t even get mad at me, just kind of irritated.” He hadn’t mentioned how in the end, he’d also traded all that power away, and clearly didn’t regret it. Gave it up, even though Megumi would never use that kind of language.

“Don’t get self-absorbed,” Satoru had drawled, laughing at the insulted frown that had immediately spread on Megumi’s face. He’d poked one cheek, leaner than it used to be, and strangely, Megumi didn’t immediately push him away. Growing again, everything stretching out, and perhaps Megumi would be taller than him, one day. Maybe, Megumi missed him already. “You are the one who had Ten Shadows. The maybe and what-if doesn’t matter. And even with Ten Shadows, it’s unlikely that the Zenin would have let a woman take charge. She’d probably have the same fight on her hands, just at a different level. Same thing stands for Mai. Like it or not, she’s gone. The part of her that became Maki’s sword and strength, that’s still here, but without cursed energy, there’s no vehicle for the soul. She’s dead. Keeping her here, even out of love, would just be cursing her.” Satoru’s mistakes have testified to his experience in love and curses, having been the strongest even in weighing Suguru down, in both life and death. Megumi’s steady stare had stuck in him like a knife shucking an oyster, whittling, prying, levering him open to get at soft, tearful insides, succulent and briny.

He’d stopped poking Megumi’s cheek, let his finger rest featherlight on the skin instead, laid his other fingers next to it, not caressing, just touching, gently, gently. “You don’t like thinking about collateral damage, is that it?”

Megumi had snorted, a quick huff of air from his nostrils. “There were always going to be consequences. If anyone else had any solutions, I didn’t hear them. Even if there were, no one else showed up, no one else was there. There would have been no point in hanging on to cursed techniques if the culling game was completed, we’d be swept to the other side and merged with Tengen.” Around and around, the pen had continued to spin. “I only told Panda what I was thinking. Because that was fair. He said it made sense to him and it would solve a lot of problems at once, and not to worry about him because he understood, and he wasn’t scared or worried. But he’d warned me that he wasn’t human and didn’t think like humans did, and that I could end up hurting people, and I should think about that more.” 

With a slow exhale, something akin to a sigh, Megumi had nudged his cheek just the slightest bit against Satoru’s fingers, before leaning away to shuffle through his papers again. “I’d accepted that already – I didn’t tell anyone what I was thinking, because I didn’t want them to stop me. So if they hated me afterward, that was fine. I still think we’re better off for having done this. It just doesn’t stop me from wanting to understand where we are now.”

“You should give the others a little more credit,” Satoru had said, nudging a biscuit in Megumi’s direction. “They’re all jujutsushi, too.”

“I’m a jujutsushi, not a hero,” Megumi had murmured, set one finger on the biscuit, rolling it to and fro.

There was a certain amount of defiance in reaching one’s greatest heights and deciding to let it all go, fuck the expectations, let everything blow to hell and start right over, a brass-balls boldness that came with insisting that it had to be done, that there were no regrets. Even better, the jujutsu world’s sense of value had been turned on its head overnight – without strength and technique masquerading as virtue, there could be no more shortcuts in determining leadership, there would be nothing obscuring people's true worth on their own terms. That was Megumi’s indignant righteousness at work, so different from Suguru’s, insisting not on the superiority of the strong, but that all individuals were entitled to make their own decisions, and had to respect that right in others, however crappy those decisions were. Disagreements could be hashed out on internet forums, verbal debates, in alleyways, or in the middle of the night at an empty, abandoned parking lot. By extension, assassination attempts by reckless former curse users or jujutsushi who wanted their powers back were expected and tantamount to chucking complaints in to the anonymous comments box, and incurred a strong reaction from those who were uncertain what, exactly, would happen if either Satoru or Megumi died, but Megumi especially. In that sense, Megumi had made himself the most feared jujutsushi in the country, the same petty brat who took an inordinate amount of glee putting official clan documents through the shredder.

His knuckles had knitted together, the hand sign for his domain expansion repurposed for focus of another kind. “There were parts where it wasn’t so bad,” he’d said slowly, clenching and releasing his fingers in slow rhythm, “Being a jujutsushi.” And maybe that had been what he’d meant, peaking at seventeen, not a form of self-defeat, but a mark of transition and a taunt in one – Megumi had gotten away while the going was good, and all that power he’d unleashed would never be used in the service of corrupt higher-ups or asshole clans, no one’s power would, because he’d made it so. No going back, but there were still few who were willing to say they were not jujutsushi any longer, that such a position no longer existed, even if that was true.    

Cursed spirits, cursed techniques, Shibuya, the culling game – all of it had begun to feel like some sort of collective, mass hallucination, a waking dream that would have little evidence testifying to its existence, if it weren’t for the stories that everyone shared and corroborated, a living oral history that was also a form of communal memory, if it weren’t for the hollow institution left behind, the bones and bodies, the weapons, temples, and shrines, the shattered clans and the photos and videos that had been captured by former jujutsushi whose techniques had been more compatible with modern technology. Those images, that reality, was repeatedly questioned, torn apart, retold and reinterpreted, because fact of the matter was, the large majority of civilians had never been able to perceive cursed energy, and some had not left the colonies when offered.

Despite cursed spirits having become public knowledge, seeing was believing, and for many, the existence of Godzilla-style kaiju made of their petty day-to-day grievances and the entertaining urban fairy tales they passed around in workplace or classroom was difficult to accept, and the survivor footage, when retrieved, even more so. People suddenly becoming bisected, blowing apart into chunks because of some invisible force, entire crowds minced to pieces in the span of seconds; mass violence like that was already hard to watch, digest, even conceive of. Watching jujutsushi face off, seeing people float midair, shatter concrete with their bare hands, make odd targeted gestures at each other to throw opponents around with unseen hands, only to witness them standing up without a scratch after crashing through load-bearing columns and bearing the subsequent collapse – the public kept seeing odd causes of illogical effects, lending the footage and photos a surreal, uncanny feel, that just made things harder to believe. Bites or slashes appearing in people’s sides with no warning, limbs locking up strangely or abruptly twisting and breaking, inhuman speeds and teleportation. It was even worse with sound on – when people explained their techniques or incanted the technique names, the drama of it all, the resemblance to a fantastical manga series or sentai serial where the actors spent at least ten minutes shouting out the names of their attacks and methods, it did just as much to discredit the footage as the natural disbelief did, and nothing was worse than watching two people stand in place, moving occasionally, seemingly rocked by remote body blows, talking about features of a technique could not at all be seen, before one person would move in for some kind of one-hit KO and the loser would flop to the floor. Domain expansions at least, were sealed up in opaque domes, quietly flickering in and out of existence, bodies, or the pieces of them, left in their wake.

Shibuya, the ruins of once-proud metropolitan centers, the many differing and conflicting eyewitness accounts repeated all over the country – those were facts, monuments that could not be denied, so the general consensus was that something had happened. What it was, however, and why the government had decided to play games, was completely up to interpretation. It didn’t help that jujutsu flat-out no longer existed, leaving no way to post-justify or prove that anything the government might have wanted to speak to was real.

As a result, every possible rendition of events was trotted out for consideration, and with the so-called truth already so fantastical, each explanation was given the same weight, no matter how ridiculous. It was national terrorism on a mass scale, some said, carried out by members of a cult, everyday people seduced by the promise of a better, next life, where they would be reborn as cleansed, superhuman beings, death become a pathway to human evolution. Others suggested that the whole thing might be similar to 1995, with a near indetectable hallucinogenic gas released in the subway stations and tunnels the night of the Shibuya Incident, causing the odd eyewitness reports of monsters and magic, and boosting aggression, strength, and a sense of invulnerability in its victims, reducing their sense of pain and riling them up, getting them to tear into each other, producing the ravaged corpses that first responders were still cleaning up and retrieving from disaster sites, difficult work.

Still more people claimed government negligence or interference in some form or another. The widespread devastation of the culling game pointed towards some sort of supply source contamination, some claimed, and in the wake of thousands of people moving away from devastated city centers to more suburban and rural areas, some saw the specter of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, reviving questions about the true extent and effects of radiation years down the line, commentary around the mental health impacts of disaster-driven relocation, the mass disruption to people’s social fabric. Others still claimed that everything had been the result of war technology gone awry, using subsonic waves, some kind of wind pressure technology that was invisible but indiscriminately pulverized everything in its path, a new kind of land weapon, or even something that could be actively deployed in the air to destroy ballistic missiles. Rumors claimed that the iciness of foreign powers following the inciting incident at Shibuya, and the stock crash that had occurred right after, was due to US influence, wary of a domestically produced weapon that would compete against, or reduce the value of THAAD and Aegis land and sea systems, creating a whole new round of debate around Article 9 and the legalities of militaristic self-defense and belligerency, and how much each definition could stretch.  

Under Satoru’s roof, Toge made a game of tracking all the varying conspiracy theories about what exactly had happened, following podcasts and radio shows, playing them in the kitchen on weekend afternoons. In fits of black humor, Megumi would play music from Tokyo Incidents right after, bobbing gently along with the rumble of the bassline.

 “Panda would have found this interesting, too,” Toge had said once, over the impassioned exclamations of a vehement nationalist blaring from the tabletop speaker, now free to speak whenever and however he wanted, without the cursed technique binding his tongue. “He thought humans were fascinating that way. Always coming up with explanations and reasons for things, or wanting some kind of order.”  

“If only more people were more like Panda,” Yuuta had sighed. “We would probably fight a lot less.”

“He had that disclaimer of his though, about not being human and not seeing things the same way,” Toge had said, upper lip curling as he’d erased one of his crossword entries furiously. “He was a lot more calm and objective, that’s for sure. Less emotional, but still emotive.”

None of it was said with any sort of malice. Sitting next to them, Megumi had eyed them both carefully before turning his gaze away, fingers tightening around his pen for the briefest of moments, before he scribbled in two more answers in the crossword, getting a putty eraser thrown at his arm for his troubles.

“How did you even guess those, Megumi? Insolent kouhai,” Toge had grumbled. 

A cop-out ending where the protagonist woke up and found that everything they’d experienced had been just a dream – the jujutsu world was only beginning to rouse to this truth. The footage that had played on daily news, been uploaded to streaming platforms, been cut and edited by web publications, had transformed the lived experience of former jujutushi into something foreign. The techniques that had allowed jujutsushi past and present, curse users, and cursed spirits to be so keenly remembered had been disappeared, erased, only the empty images of fleshly bodies and solid, immovable weapons remaining. This was just the nature of things, a typical interaction between civilian technology and jujutsu, but this time, it brought to mind a long-held belief that had been forgotten in the race to power – the strong emphasis on cursed techniques existed not because of any sort of perceived moral superiority, but because at some point, cursed technique had been tantamount to identity, the manifested power of a soul and its unique nature and qualities, the demarcation line between one’s self and another. Two people with the same technique would not wield it the same way, and every fight was a debate, a statement of worldview, speaking out on their very way of life, reaching towards others and provoking them, interrogating them about the possibility of compatibility; I won’t hurt you, so don’t hurt me.

Technique was how a jujutsushi was identified and remembered, technique was what a jujutsushi’s life revolved around, what made them jujutsushi, person and vocation, the power that held all their pieces together, soul, mind, and body. Losing one’s cursed technique was a kind of brain damage, Shouko had mused, slapping another nicotine patch on her arm because she couldn’t heal her own lungs anymore. She’d done autopsies on the vessels and jujutsushi who’d been effectively created by Kenjaku as a result of the bindings they’d made, and there were areas of dead brain tissue that suggested the Idle Transfiguration Kenjaku had stolen from Mahito was actively altering the expression of something in the brain, neurochemical, genetic, or otherwise. If the soul was intangible, and the body physical, the mind was both, the brain making automatic, unthinking physical connections, everything a series of chemical reactions, a seemingly rational system if it weren’t for question of feeling, thinking, and dreaming, creativity and imagination. Logic said that everything was just signals and connections firing off, chained together, but how could that explain the fantastic lands that rolled out before one’s eyes in sleep, the complex, un-named feelings that could cause migraines and stomachaches, force irrational moves?

Megumi, Yuuji, and Nobara, all his students, they were all still young, he’d thought in the early days, watching Megumi sleep in the evening, slumped and drooling over his paperwork, lulled into a reluctant doze by the kotatsu. There were still more complications to address, but they would hopefully live long lives, years longer than the typical jujutsushi lifespan. And childhood experiences mattered too, but he’d wondered if they, if Megumi, would look back on their precious youth – and they were still young, he’d reminded himself, and that was almost worse – look back and think of it as a blight, part of their brains, their minds, blotted out, exploded, a completely different way to see, to experience. Questioning, they had all been questioning – the reflection of themselves from the outside made them wonder, had them piecing together their personal timeline of battles and events contrary to what netizens, the radio, the evening news, virtually everyone else was telling them, in a confusing game of telephone that changed what they remembered, even while they tried to keep holding onto it. The entire jujutsu world began to puzzle att the truth of their own existence, running about in circles to justify and explain who they had been, their history so closely tied to the mythological. Artifacts, journals, memories, they had in abundance, but the personal connection, the techniques that spoke of their soul’s innermost expression that were centuries of cumulative inheritance, the terror of cursed weapons that felt so familiar because they were begat of some long-dead relative’s body, prized talismans, important relics – overnight, all these things, everything that shaped the identity of jujutsushi, seemingly lost significance, and all that was left was the gallery of historical figures and stories, spoken of in history and literature classes, prayed to at shrines, remixed in thousands of different ways in pop culture, in and of themselves a part of that cultural fabric. Many were finding that jujutsu had never quite separated or disentangled itself from the civilian world at all, as obvious as that seemed. Perhaps it was the jujutsushi, who had become disconnected, one of the surviving clan members had sighed, and Satoru couldn’t help but laugh.

There had been no one and nothing else left to fight against, except each other, and arguments became public spectacle in the estate, always people watching as their former classmates shouted at each other, screamed, sobbed, broke plates and bowls, almost threw fists, redirected their frustrations to the heavy swing of mallets and hammers in the wings still being fixed up, called another one of their comrades out to vent in a spar in the gardens. The estate was nothing but different types of emptiness stacked on top of each other and all of them rolled around the place like unleashed marbles, like ghosts, some of them tethered to the same places in endless loop, like Megumi, who had long ago explored every cavernous space and inventoried it to his hearts’ content, the only person to ever know where everything was, others wandering down darkened hallways and cellars, frustrated and feeling shut-in, looking for new places to be, new things to discover and inspire them. Satoru had reveled in the fighting, the tension, watching over his former students with a keen eye and almost spiteful glee, the turmoil and uncertainty bubbling in all of them finally flung into plain sight. Still the only so-called adult, still the one turned to for guidance, for his experience in clan politics, in fielding the demands of a reshaping jujutsu society, and whatever else, Satoru’s frustrations had to be deliberately expressed, carefully, right place and time. That was one part of his life that hadn’t changed much. In an estate as large as this, it was easy to find a place and time for himself, as he did in the ever-shifting halls in Jujutsu Tech, but all the same this was Satoru’s estate, even if in name only, his space, his halls, and he never did forget who else occupied the rooms, wandered the gardens, soaked in the tub. He hadn’t had the eyes to see residuals anymore, but sometimes it had been as if he still felt them, the presence of other people lingering, at tables, along walls, in the hallway, the traces of them left behind.

He’d always been a powerful fool to his students, someone to ask things of, but not become close to, to admire or scorn from afar. His protection and strength was relative to their weakness, their inability, and Satoru had known that it made him hard to look at him, full frontal. And living under the same roof, most of his students still couldn’t take him in from up close – the penchant for baggy sweats, socks and sandals, nattou at breakfast, teru-teru-bouzu fluttering from the eaves, looming, lanky silhouette weaving through the garden in the middle of the night looking up at the sky, no longer able to walk amongst sunsets and stars,  but somehow Satoru hadn’t missed it, walking on thin air, city lights fanned out under the leather of his loafers, untouched even by clouds and mist. It had never felt the way he’d imagined flying to be like as a child, even physics bending to his will too easily – he wanted, so he did, and nothing touched him. Dragged down to earth, to eye level, his former students’ glances had spoken in place of their mouths, spelled odd, curious, surprised, their stares flitting over him like they recognized his shape but not his contents. But just one or two years couldn’t defeat the near eleven and counting he’d spent with Tsumiki and Megumi, and the two of them carried on near Satoru’s side unphased, deliberately unbothered, as if they were putting on an educational play with three. Here is how you pretend you are ordinary. Here is how you act like everything is fine, how to make domesticity your champion and proxy. Scrub harder, fold neater, change the fabric softener so everyone knows what you did, knows the impact of your actions. Now practice, until it is second nature, until it feels real. Tsumiki and Megumi had taught him that, the pretending and carrying on, the alienating acceptance that dissolved to imperfect affection through the intervention of nothing but slow familiarity, reluctant authenticity. It was how Tsumiki and Megumi became like siblings. How Megumi came to call himself a jujutsushi.

What Megumi would call himself next, how he would conceive of his own person, had been yet unknown, but he’d seemed to find a starting point, some semblance of peace in the quiet bubbling of broth and the rattling of the rice cooker, the heat of steam against his face and the smell of freshly cooked dough, carrying with it an invigorating whiff of ginger. Gently draping fabric, swaddling pointy elbows, scarred abdomen, pooling over the wide palms of calloused hands, oversized enough to flutter in the breeze, butter soft and worn from the wash, folding against bending spine, the inner, tender crooks of arms and legs, no more armored, reinforced fabric, snapping and thick, bunching stiffly around joints and places that needed more give. In casual, dark-colored clothing, the squared shoulders that had filled out the crisp, clean lines of his uniform melted into the sloping, rounded contours of yielding cotton, laid right against planes of smooth skin and relaxed, quiet muscle, the radiating warmth of body heat felt from millimeters away. Fluid and lived-in, not slouching but languid and formless, sprawling against the low table of the main room, leaning in door frames with hip tilted out, fluffing wild hair and cozy terry sweats. He’d fussed and nagged, cooked and cleaned with all the aggressiveness of his middle school years folded in, though he didn’t like housework and wasn’t particularly good at it. In an act of great generosity, Satoru had refrained from telling Megumi to stop compensating, to stop lying and playing pretend, because no one, including Tsumiki, needed him to make token amends when he didn’t even feel guilty, no one needed him to back down and pretend like he wasn’t pinning down an entire world in his shadow, the bulging weight of it a thick, imposing, blanket of pressure that pushed against every centimeter of Satoru’s skin, the backs of his eyes, tingled along the crevices of his gums, the beds of his nails.

With Limitless enclosed within Ten Shadows, bonded and given over, Satoru was always saturated with Megumi’s presence, a familiar and comfortable ghost that he wore as well as he had Limitless, perfume that lingered at his neck, his wrists, wove around arms and trunk. It was how Satoru sometimes gleaned the vaguest of impressions from Megumi, so much more imprecise than reading his cursed energy, no fluctuations of color or sense of texture, but nevertheless more intimate, immersed in the glow of Megumi’s general moods, feeling, however faintly, the same thing Megumi did. Likewise, Megumi could feel him, and it would have been horrible, exposing maybe, if it was anyone else but Megumi, who’d already seen him exhausted, in pain, in the wrong, prideful and fumbling, the Satoru before Gojou-sensei. And because they were in it together, nested into each other like big and little spoon, the gleaming little treasure of netsuke hidden in the lacquered face of an inrou, Satoru thoroughly understood that Megumi was the last jujutsushi by virtue of being the maintainer of their worlds, still able to access and manipulate cursed energy out of necessity. Satoru himself held just a thread, barely enough to raise Infinity just millimeters from his skin and do pinhole sized versions of his attacks, but for the most part he didn’t bother, because Megumi didn’t either. Megumi was the one who truly held the line, and he carried on like he wasn’t still able to tap into his power whenever he wanted, and Satoru might whinge and grumble about having to take the subway, being crushed in crowds of people with underexposed skin still so sensitive, getting papercuts and mosquito bites, stubbing toes and jarring the funny nerve in his elbow, but he wouldn’t ask Megumi for more power, not for himself.

Satoru could accept that this new era was one for forcefully imposed peace, the aftermath that forced the jujutsu community to hold the mirror to themselves and change. He didn’t disagree with Megumi’s approach, but it made something in him squirm, a slow-burning anger that was fanned by the flutter of a thousand small wings, a delirious sort of sour-sweet yearning irritation, to see Megumi playing house, as much as he liked to see Megumi comfortable and at ease. Domesticating himself, pretending he hadn’t revealed that he was a wild thing, keeping busy with housework and chores, because it was something he could do, something to keep hands busy and prevent from feeling useless and incapable still, despite what he’d already accomplished. He prowled restlessly about the estate like his bygone shikigami, scoping out the place and leaving reminders of himself everywhere, in the main room, in the kitchen, and on them, residuals, fingerprints, marking out his territory. He knew what he was capable of but kept his newly confident self-contained, spoke more crassly, more curtly, with the brute plainness that he’d carried away from the culling games, same as the composed leadership that kept the others returning to him to consult on second opinions for important decisions, no matter how much they’d personally reconciled with his decisions. The whole of them, first and second years and Tsumiki, were clustered in Satoru’s house to hide, not recover, still leading a life they knew how to live, in a place tucked between trees, remote and labyrinthine in its age.

And sometimes Satoru watched Megumi and wondered if things had truly changed, had wondered if Megumi was really there, walking by his side. He’d wanted Megumi to show him that power, the power that he’d shown Sukuna, his senpai and classmates, the power that had slaughtered participants in the culling game. He’d wanted the proof that Megumi wasn’t holding himself back, had become the whole of himself despite the future they’d given up, despite the years Satoru had missed, and it galled Satoru to see him pretend like his power wasn’t still there, distilled down to its essence, all shadow, everything and everywhere. The shikigami had just been a bonus – the shadows were a vehicle to pockets, dimensions, and little universes, to negative space and the possibility of endless creation, the unexpected. Pushing that part of himself away, ignoring it, never practicing or exploring the way he used to, felt like a rejection, felt like a burial. The normal life that Megumi had once wanted, quietly watching his peers walk home from school after hanging out at the arcade, out of ice cream parlors and limited edition comic releases, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows and blazer lashed around his hips, trying to hide the bloodstains from the missions Satoru had taken him on, their own ruthless after school activity. The quiet life Megumi never confessed he wanted but expressed through reactions to training, to missions, to the advice Satoru had given him ahead of his entry to Jujutsu Tech – dismissive glances away, irritated scoffing, the exasperated click of tongue, the small wishes that Satoru had stolen and overheard, but weren’t told.

“Would you become a veterinarian if you weren’t going to be a jujutsushi? You’re so attentive to animals, like that dog from this afternoon,” Tsumiki had once commented. It had been a rare day when Satoru came back early from a mission and decided to do the cooking, so for once it was both Tsumiki and Megumi out there in the living room, slogging through a weeknight’s homework.

“I have to become a jujutsushi, so it’s pointless to ask,” came Megumi’s completely graceless, disgruntled reply. “What brought this on?”

“Just because you have to be a jujutsushi doesn’t mean you’ve never thought of being something else,” Tsumiki retorted mutinously, probably scowling. “You’re allowed to think and dream about other things. And Satoru-san is always teasing you about how you treat your shikigami. They’re all animals too aren’t they?”

“They are, which is why I pay attention to animals at all,” Megumi had responded with a soft huff and the tinny clicking of mechanical pencil. “They’re more spirit than animal, so they’re more intelligent and aware, but the instincts and behavior are all still there. It’s better to learn and know.” The silence that had emerged was filled by the quiet scratch of graphite on paper, and Megumi’s voice barely rose above it, whisper soft. “It all comes back to jujutsu, in the end. I don’t bother thinking about things like that anymore.”

“Anymore, you said,” Tsumiki had pointed out, with the shuffle and thump of movement over the carpet, the rustling of papers being moved, stationery being repositioned. She was always closing the distance. “When did you stop?”

“Don’t worry so much,” Megumi had just said, voice low and reedy, already worn thin. “I never started. I thought about more important things. Food. Central heating. You know. Future aspirations are for high schoolers.”

“I want us to go to high school together,” Tsumiki had murmured, clear and forlorn. Already knowing it wasn’t to be true.

But stony, cruel and kind, Megumi had just said, “We will be,” as if he didn’t know that wasn’t what his older sister meant, “You’ll be in second year and I’ll be in first year. I’ll visit you on the weekends, and it’s not like we won’t have LINE.”

Tsumiki’s sigh had been like a smoker’s, and Satoru knew smoker’s sighs, expansive and gusty, jaw dropped open as if just waiting to receive the filter again, all the breath they’d lose over the years condensed, like the black in their lungs would waft out in a fine aerosol mist, the urge to cleanse something that couldn’t be so simply washed away.

If Satoru had been a better man he would’ve looked for Megumi right away, right after Touji’s death. If he’d been a better man, he would’ve supported Megumi and Tsumiki for free, without demanding a price, without forcing Megumi into debt. If he were better, he wouldn’t have pushed Megumi so much, wouldn’t have clutched at the extra fabric of the oversized clothes Megumi always wore, a child pretending to be adult, wanting to grow into a frame big and sturdy enough to make everything fit just right. If he were better Satoru wouldn’t cling onto him so desperately and drag him down but Satoru wasn’t, isn’t a better person, a good person. Satoru had it all and yet still wanted, Megumi’s time, his bygone years, slipping like sand through fingers, and he’d had to make himself fall for Megumi to rise, had to cut himself down and stop being Great Teacher Gojou, Good Looking Guy, white-haired sunglasses bulletproof stranger, untouchable, stronger than anything. The strongest, but still not strong enough to stop Megumi from growing past this, memories that would pale and fade and cobweb at the back of his mind, path in the rearview mirror, a hit of nostalgia around something that decades on, would seem so fantastical and trivial – remember that time we were teenagers, just first-years, and saved the world? Remember when I was primordial shadow, capable of becoming anything, and you were nothingness, the clarity of everything? Remember when I was your student?

Remember – what happens when Satoru does not let go?

If he was a better man he would’ve saved Riko, he would’ve killed Suguru earlier, cut off his head and burned the body, close as proper as he could get. Instead, he’d let Suguru’s memory become tarnished, his body be defiled. His heart was a thing that Satoru should have excised and buried long ago, but he couldn’t stop it from beating beneath the floor boards, rattling the planks, the rumble of its convulsing heartbeat shaking the walls until the crystal chandelier came crashing down in shards of brilliant light. And the breaking is beautiful –Tsumiki had wanted to go back to high school, Toge had wanted to visit his clan once more, all of them unshackled and full of words they hadn’t gotten to say, Yuuta had considered going with Toge before returning to begin helping Satoru with clan matters. Nobara had wanted to return and visit her grandmother, if only for a moment, Maki in tow, hands white knuckled around each other, the two of them brave and stiff-backed, missing eye, missing sister, burnt and scarred and whole despite it. The youth was the future, Satoru had thought to himself, clenching his fists in the sweatshirt fabric that pooled over them, oversized and cozy, his own preference reflected back to him when Megumi came trotting up to him with stubborn mouth and shoulders thrown back, the youth is the future, but what of Satoru’s, at least thirty years ancient, give it back, give it back; Satoru had felt too much but he could not see, he could not find the way, had buried himself in the old texts to help preserve his clan and find something to anchor him, a root to grab onto, had craned his head up to look up at the stars that smattered across the sky like white-out, specks of correction tape, redo, rewrite. There too, are houses, segments in the sky, plots to live in, trace the path of a soul and a life.

Warm wood, a bowlful of spit-slicked seeds, dappled sunlight, and the pale crescent moon of a watermelon rind. Megumi had wiped his chin clean in the sun, sweat making him salty-sweet, and he felt like a pool of warm wax, a spent candle with the aroma of its presence still lingering, something like content or maybe nostalgia, remembering an overly hot city summer spent complaining and sprawled over tatami, the single weak fan creaking and cranking away to cool all three of them. He’d opened his mouth, licking residual stickiness away, had said, “Sometimes when Sukuna talked, all I could hear was your voice, telling me the same thing,” said, “I couldn’t imagine you would be sealed away forever,” said, “You could take care of it, you’d know what to do.”

“Did you miss me that much, Megumi-chan?” he’d asked, did you miss me, or my shadow, my power, the security and stability, did you crave my presence, would you want me around without my money, my strength, my everything? Did you hate me for leaving you alone, do you hate me because you think we’ll never be equals? Satoru’s mouth had felt dry and hollow. Forgive and forget – but a man like Megumi didn’t do either easily, clutched his debts and harshness close, for as much as he wanted something unconditional, he couldn’t trust it, and a debt was a tie with the tangible attached, a guarantee of connection, reunion, regardless of circumstance.

Megumi had stilled, hands resting lax in his lap, palms facing upward to soak in the beams of sunlight streaking down, as if waiting for him to settle into a meditation pose, tribute to Mr. Sun. Briefly, his lips pressed together before he spoke. “You always told me not to get left behind,” he’d said, hands curling into loose fists, thumbs tucking in as he’d turned his hands over and down, to rest atop his knees. His eyes were dark pits, bright, smoldering color at the edges, burning in defiant challenge with the corner of his mouth kicked up in a nasty smirk. “So I made sure to catch up.”

“I told you, didn’t I?” Satoru had said with a coquettish tilt of his head, flipping the extra fabric of a yukata sleeve over his hand, using it to hide his mouth and batting large, blue eyes, trying to push his heart back down from where it had lodged in his throat, tight with an unease he wouldn’t let show. “You’re still here. Next to me. I’m but a purehearted youth so you better be careful with me, mister.”

“Sure,” Megumi had huffed, rubbing his chin against his shoulder like an irritated animal, face turned away. Satoru’s hand had twitched with something instinctive, but he couldn’t bring himself to reach out, close the gap. In between, the cicadas kept screaming.   

“Are you mad at me?” Satoru had asked, slid his fingertips along the weave of the tatami instead, at least until they hit the fabric bound edge, embroidered with the intricate patterns of waves, casual excess, were it only so easy to spill over, generous and effusive. “Because I wasn’t there?”

The gusting exhale Megumi had released blew his bangs away from his face, revealing the rare sight of his forehead. Cute, Satoru had thought, and wondered if he could get Megumi to wear it like that more often. Wondered if he’d see that forehead again, years down the line, soothing his hand over that cool skin, feel the feather of eyelashes against his fingers, like how he took Megumi’s temperature when he was young, the sudden awareness of the word cherish, some sort of softness gripping his heart, squeezing it for all its worth.

“No,” Megumi had all but grunted, chin dipping, the bare, vulnerable nape of his neck glistening with sweat. Did Satoru ever seem like that to him, like stone so hard it could chip any blade, carved and hewn along the flow of its veins to seem like something gentle and giving, malleable? Precious and molten underneath, dirty mining. “I rely on you too much.”

Rely, present tense. The house over their heads, the plate with the leavings of watermelon, red puddles, the money, the amenities, hot, running water and the clothes on Megumi and Tsumiki’s backs. But Satoru had never thought of him as reliant. Helpless and hapless as a child, a little pitiful for not being able to do anything for himself, but neither had Satoru had that choice as a kid, as powerful as he was. The was simply the fate of children, to be swayed this way and that, to be influenced by the older people around them who controlled their circumstances, and that was the luxury of youth, minimal responsibility. If Satoru had squinted and tilted his head, perhaps he would’ve found it like a continued growth arc, a little stop and start, learning to make one’s way in the world absent of any guiding truth, any true north or pithy ethos.

“Still? Even now?” Satoru had asked instead, genuinely, propping head up on elbow and hand, hair falling messy over his forehead because he hadn’t bothered to brush it in those days, and perhaps it would conceal the bags under his eyes, the bitterness of his smile, the brittle, hollow bones that had taken him over, bent him double, the essence of him leeched away. Escaping Prison Realm to immediately reinforce Megumi’s barrier, willing captive and prisoner, and Satoru had refused to regret it despite the emptiness he felt, staring out into the sky with nothing to do, everything bright and bland and new, Megumi reaching him from far away, message in a bottle bumping against his toes, waves reaching his shores, muted surprise, fond chagrin, the hazy glow of old, complex affections, like Megumi’s tea, odd flavors and experiences layered one over the other until the result was something unquestionably bizarre, but familiar and dear, invigorating for its reminders of the good and interesting, the unforgettable.

A curt nod, coarse black spikes of hair bobbing, and Megumi had leaned back, legs sprawling apart in his undignified delinquent way, fabric parting to reveal long lengths of skin, hair dusting lean shins and calves, hands splayed behind him, his arm crossing over Satoru’s, radiating an unbelievable amount of heat. Despite the summer, despite watermelon and ice pops and the mindless ripple of their voices droning right into the spinning blades of the fans, echoing in every room, every empty space, through the halls and out the doors to join the cicadas, shrieking before their deaths at the end of the season, abbreviated longevity, the dizzying patterns of overly elaborate, dusty yukata, and Satoru had dressed up around the house because what else was he supposed to do, all these things hidden in walls and floorboards and barely anyone to do anything with them, unmoored until he came to rest at Megumi’s side, eating fruit, sprawling over the table, lazing about, and Megumi had said he relied on him, Gojou Satoru-san, Satoru’s name said in stages, with a little something extra. Satoru should have felt happy about it, Megumi still needing him, Megumi leaning so close that his warmth seeped into Satoru, enough that Satoru should have melted into a puddle of sweat, exploded from the pressure, but horribly, he remained there, too human now, too mundane. Unable to rewrite their story the way he’d wanted, unable to spin reliance into weakness and strength, double-sided, affection and support, not a dirty word but a gift, and this was the way they changed and remained the same, unable to let themselves move out of the places they’d set for themselves, struggling to let go of what they were, who they’d been. Straw was straw, not gold.

“We were beating the culling game and I kept thinking it would be all over if we freed you, even though we were figuring it out on our own,” Megumi had said, voice like tumbling rocks. “Even at the end, when I opened the ritual, I asked for you.” He’d felt like swirling waters, eddying riptide, white capped waves crashing against the struggling stone of himself, wearing, wearing away, and Satoru could feel him then, but he felt so distant, familiar but far, like Satoru would have to light a lamp to draw him back. In that moment, Satoru had wanted to see his face, nudge Megumi’s chin so he’d look his way, stare into his eyes and try to understand. But Megumi had known better, carefully kept his gaze averted. “I wonder if I’ll ever stop relying on you. If I want to.”   

Torn, wanting Megumi to stand on his own, wanting him to stay, and still need Satoru, see him as someone strong. It didn’t matter so much if he was the strongest, more who saw him that way. With Megumi’s gaze on him, Satoru could know who he was, and when Megumi didn’t like owing anything to anyone, Satoru gave to be selfish. So he’d said, “You can ask for help,” even though he’d felt like he was already seeing Megumi’s back, the well-worn shape of him turning into a stranger. Megumi, next to him, the freeze-frame in a race right before he passed Satoru by. Growing up and away, the route to a future where Satoru became diminished to an eccentric figure of Megumi’s difficult, bygone youth, better forgotten, shoved to the back of his mind, a quirky, played up anecdote to pass the time, just like jujutsu.

“I want to hold onto everything with my own two hands,” Megumi had replied, firm, brooking no argument. No more shadows to keep him company, his choice, just his wits and the body he’d honed through years of training. And in the end, that was precisely the future that Satoru had wanted Megumi to have – something he’d chosen for himself, though he hadn’t imagined it to go quite so far. What kind of teacher would he be, to deny Megumi that? Megumi had fulfilled his side of his contract, gone above and beyond, made it null, even. He could become anything, go anywhere, perpetual motion machine – all the places Megumi had lived in had been waystations, temporary places that he’d forced to mold to his form, nesting there long enough that the space had taken on his marks, wearing in the weave of the tatami and threadbare carpet where he’d liked to sit, white specks on the table where he’d burnt circles into beat-up varnished wood, incurably crumpled pillows, lumpy blankets with the stuffing bunched up to one end. Waiting for the moment to be over, for the next stage to come, politely anticipating the point of transition to leave everything behind. No permanence, just a stretch of seeming stability before chaos, a messiness that Megumi could make a bed in, turn into something new and ordered. Empty then full, father then son, mentor and protégé, spaces and debt, youth and maturity, the two of them cycling round and round and round, dirty laundry in the wash, colors vibrant and unseparated, bleeding through like curses, because Satoru was too old to forget, too old to start over.

“This place will be here either way,” Satoru had said, and he’d tried to keep it light, but a rush of wistfulness caught him by the throat. Aside from the maintenance staff, the typical Gojou retinue of lawyers, inspectors, and obsequious board-level clanspeople, Megumi had been the only person to ever visit the lonely estate, the only one invited and wanted there. Led in personally with Satoru’s hand braced lightly against the small of his back, this estate had been where Satoru told Megumi about their ancestors for the first time, Ten Shadows against Limitless, had been where Satoru first hinted at his true hope, his true wish for Megumi, formulated one Christmas night, limp hands draped over his eyes despite the shadow already layered underneath and twined around the heart of his palms of his hands, the webs of his fingers, fitting perfectly to every wrinkle and crevice while his head had rested heavy against Megumi’s thigh, one steady hand soothing gently through his hair, out in the living room because neither of them were trying to think of the second empty bedroom. In the space that became their main room, Megumi’s main room, heart of the household, he’d hinted that Megumi could rival him, become stronger than him, kill him and repeat history. Satoru hadn’t been able to kill Suguru, but Megumi was not like them, Megumi was vicious and passionate, sensible but ruthless, always thinking things through. He wouldn’t be like Satoru. And when he doubted himself, hesitated, gave up, Satoru wondered what it would take for Megumi to choose fate, Satoru’s death, wondered if they would’ve been better off without him nurturing or supporting Megumi, so Megumi wouldn’t be so conscious of him, limits and titles, his outsize influence on Megumi’s life.

Megumi’s small sigh was colored fond and exasperated, and when he’d rearranged himself to lean elbow on knee, the collar of the yukata Satoru had cajoled him to wear gaped open just the slightest bit, revealing the triangle of stark collarbone, flushed, sweaty throat, the slightest shadow of curving shapes of mist throughout. Now you see him, now you don’t – how odd to think of mist and shadow, mirages and the unseen. Eleven years and there was still so much Satoru didn’t know. “That kind of suggestion just proves my point,” Megumi had said, voice cutting through summer breeze and rustling leaves, clear and articulate. “The College is gone. There are no more jujutsushi, so there’s no more deal. Tsumiki and I can’t count on you forever.”

“You’ve both stayed here up until now,” Satoru had pointed out, carefully maintaining his affected nonchalance, tucking his arms into his sleeves. “This estate would just be unused if no one stayed here, I’m hardly looking to chase anyone out with a broom. Just think of it like a couple years ago, but I’d say the deal is hardly relevant at this point, wouldn’t you agree? You’ve already gone above and beyond just working as a jujutsushi, and you’re still doing the administrative work of a clan head. Whether you and Tsumiki stay or not is your choice, but the archives, the artifacts, the gardens, the rooms, they aren’t moving anywhere anytime soon. They’ll be here, like they’ve been here before either of us were born. Call it reliance, or convenience, or whatever else, it makes no difference. There’s no deposit to lose, there’s no contract or lease, no clan deals or debts, no strings attached. You understand, Megumi?”

“I understand you’re still trying to convince me to not pay grocery money,” Megumi had said with a flat look, “And you should understand that it’s not going to work. The whole point is that this isn’t like a couple years ago, and it will never be like that again. It shouldn’t be like that again. And I need to know it won’t be. I need to think long term now. I can’t look at things the way I used to, anymore.” His gaze had wandered off, looking out into the treeline, wandering over the rippling waves of grass. “You sound more like you’re trying to convince us to stay, anyway,” he’d muttered, offhand, more observation than challenge. Megumi brand calculated distance.

“‘Cause I want you to tell me what your future looks like, Megumi-kun!” Satoru had said, laughing, leaning toward him on one arm, hearing a thrum in his ears like seashells, echoing the rush of blood back to him, his futile heartbeat, going on with or without him, automatic. Or perhaps he was hearing Megumi’s pulse, hurried and rushing ahead. “As your former teacher, I’m very invested.”

Scrutinized by sharp green eyes, Satoru had wondered what Megumi felt from him, what he would’ve seen if he’d had something like Six Eyes. Whatever he saw, Megumi did not say. “I’ll keep working,” Megumi had said instead, firm and cool in the way of his mission reports, announcing, not debating, even as his shoulders tensed and he dropped into a crosslegged position. “There’s savings from past missions, but not enough in case of a major emergency. We need a more secure buildup of funds. The coffee cart gets good business, the boss likes me, and they’re okay that I’m still a bit young.” A fist had bunched in the fabric wrapping around his left knee, and the muscles in his jaw leapt as he ground his molars together with a vengeance. “The rest I’m still figuring out. Like Zenin inheritances and assets and all the complicated legal bullshit they left behind.” 

Satoru had said nothing about Megumi’s fixation on possible financial instability and its effects on his sense of independence, had not even used it as an argument to convince Megumi and Tsumiki to stay with him in the estate. He hadn’t pointed out that one of the perks of inheriting the Zenin clan head position was access to ludicrously full family vaults and lucrative investment funds, which stocked enough zeroes let Megumi solve any money problem with ease. He had not given any inspiring pep talks about how Megumi was a smart young man with a promising future, had not urged him to return to high school with Tsumiki or contemplate any form of higher education to secure a position in some big-name well-known company, to grow into the picture perfect image of a successful adult. Satoru hadn’t even pointed out that Megumi’s plan was not a plan at all, much less a long term one, and just like Megumi’s ramshackle, worn-down, unpracticed caregiving, was another salve, another ploy – there was no doubting the genuine feelings behind Megumi’s intentions, but this was a stopgap, something to keep Megumi’s hands busy, while he contemplated the hollow burnt out of his own life, while he considered what to do. Just the appearance of being busy. Practical as he was, having spent the past weeks and months considering his actions throughout the culling game and sifting through the detritus of an imploded clan, there was little chance that Megumi hadn’t already thought about the money in his savings, his disinterest in academia, or the plentiful, lingering obligations he had to the jujutsu world. So Satoru had said nothing aside from what he needed to do, and as usual, sat back, and waited for Megumi to make his decision.  

Megumi had never acknowledged his tendency to play for an audience, or perhaps that was simply not how he viewed his sensitivity towards being watched and observed, thinking of it more as a kind of adaptation, a cautionary defense. It showed in the varying ways he addressed people, his deliberate use of formal and informal language, the bland, cookie-cutter, well-mannered politeness that he fronted, the demeanor of a studious, conscientious, and proper boy, if a little aggressive and grumpy. The mere shadow of him, cast in others’ presence. He was at his most brutal, most innovative when fighting alone,  in the schoolyard or alone in the forest, among broken rebar in abandoned buildings, below the swinging, aged yellow lights revealing mold and mildew staining concrete walls. Undistracted by the feedback of scouting shikigami and the movements of others, Megumi was more willing to go out of the box and make riskier moves, more willing to be harsh. So Satoru had told him to be selfish, to be the overbearing center of himself and honor his own instincts. You alone, are an honored one, you alone know what you seek and lack, the power within your dominion.

And with their hands centimeters away from touching, wearing mist and mirage on his skin, Megumi had said, “When I first met you, you had a lot to say about what my options would be for the future. In fact, you probably said too much – what sort of shitty adult tells a kid that their father was good-for-nothing? You haven’t changed that much. You’re expecting me to believe that you don’t have anything to say this time?”

“Asking me for guidance, Megumi? How rare!” Satoru had cooed, leaning in even closer with the tilt of his head and a grin, chuckling at the way Megumi ducked away, disgruntled. With a small flick to his ear, Satoru had continued, “You must be at the end of your rope, if you’re even giving me an opening.”

“Shut up, you know I’m not at the end of anything,” Megumi had retorted, batting away Satoru’s hand. “You would have felt it if I was.”

“Hm, well you are at that age, so like the considerate person I am, I try to leave you your privacy,” Satoru had said, holding up a finger. “You’re a teenager! Emotions running high and wild! I’m letting you enjoy your youth."

Megumi hadn’t berated him like he’d expected, had instead narrowed his eyes and stared at him for some seconds. “You don’t have to worry about protecting us anymore, Satoru-san,” he’d said quietly, the low timbre of his voice rumbling through everything, shifting the ground beneath Satoru’s feet, settling through the neat rectangles of tatami lined up within the boundaries of the room, shrinking inward, awkward spiral. “Not like that. Any mistakes are ours now, just like our decisions. Youth would be no excuse. That’s why we did what we did. You and me.” Megumi’s gaze had tracked side to side across Satoru’s face, as if he was being checked for his pupillary response to light, lighthouse beacon, searching Satoru for something, trying to find five more pairs of eyes which bore the kind of sight that just didn’t know how to stop looking, stop seeking, for something more, something beyond. Five kinds of eyes that encapsulated all that the enlightened could see, the flesh, the divine, the wisdom and workings, and the truths and laws of the realms, and the infinite nothingness from which all meaning must be formed – and yet still, a sixth, extraneous pair, for the mundane and blind, the unlearned and struggling, for by the rules of jujutsu anything given meant something else would be taken away.

So Satoru had smiled again, even though he didn’t quite feel like it, Megumi’s words rattling around in his head and down to his ribcage, knocking against his skull, the sudden tightness of his throat. “Of course I still have to look after you, my precious former students,” he’d said, a touch too soft, too throaty, and it was Megumi’s turn to lean in, a subtle thing, ligature in his wrist and arm thrown into faint relief as he shifted more weight onto his arm, subtle bumps and ripples under skin. Satoru hadn’t been a teacher for very long at all, just two generations of Jujutsu Tech first years, but even before that, there had been Megumi and a couch with his name on it, the nicest thing in the whole apartment bought with Gojou money, there had been Tsumiki and hot, homemade meals, the thwack of her slipper against his hip where it wouldn’t hurt, bottles on bottles of antiseptic and bloody bandages. “Like I said, I’m invested. You came up with a nice, clean solution that dumped the higher-ups on their asses. Their silly little mantras about keeping techniques to blood and preserving tradition don’t have a leg to stand on anymore. No one can judge you now, no one can stop you from doing what you want. Choose what you want, do what you want, without looking back. The others will be doing the same, now that they can.”

That was the freedom of civilian life, the trade-off of power – all people were bound to something and for so long, jujutsushi had bound themselves to the world that they’d created, confined themselves to a world of endless, cyclical suffering that brought them power, wealth, and prestige, granted them an exceptional status outside of any law or order, if they were powerful enough. There was something poetic about Megumi being the one to achieve Satoru’s lofty uphill goals, rendering the higher-ups powerless and revealing how truly meaningless and hollow their squabbles and cruelty were, how feeble the grounds of their authority. Satoru had thought that one day, he would die at Megumi’s hand, the same way his ancestor had died at the whims of shadow, ruined by the hierarchy and structure that dictated their roles, but Megumi, who had always claimed to be unfair and selfish for deciding things on his own terms, had instead asked for Satoru’s help, and won Satoru and the others a freedom of choice and wholesale autonomy that hadn’t been possible, before. Megumi the team player, who wouldn’t bat for gold, who thought he had the least to lose and didn’t think about what others could lose with him, ever determined to hold the reins to his own life as much as possible. Petty pushback and contrary instincts, his feelings like the flash of dolphin skin underwater, chirps and songs heard only at the right frequency, sleek and swift to disappear. Cruelty with kindness, selfishness without self regard, Megumi had a habit of going both ways at once, a person and their shadow, two headed and only sometimes facing the same direction, connected at the seams.

“And if I don’t know what I want?” Megumi had asked, direct and unyielding, stare still fixed on Satoru, and Satoru couldn’t read him as well without cursed energy, couldn’t see Megumi waver and flicker, couldn’t see the color of anything but his eyes, his skin, his hair, the physical line of his body second dimensional, stark, standing out against the background of anything else, cut out. Since they’d locked the other world away, Satoru has felt a warmth against his skin, familiar and nostalgic, the soft pressure of shadows against his eyelids, delicate but firm, like the rare touch of Megumi’s bare hands, Megumi who always covered up and hid himself away, private and unforgiving. Close, skin to skin, soul to soul, but somehow still strange and distant. Twisting, every time Satoru looks at him, refracting a new pattern.

Satoru had shrugged and leaned in too, bumping shoulders lightly. “Isn’t that your problem? You’ll just have to figure it out. I don’t know what you think you need to do.”

“You don’t know,” Megumi had parroted back, brow wrinkling, mouth settling into a customary frown.

“Of course I don’t!” Satoru had said, blowing a small raspberry. “I’m flattered that you think so highly of your beloved Satoru-sensei, Megumin, but I can’t actually read minds, even less so, now. I only get a faint impression of what you’re feeling, and it’s wholly possible to feel one thing and think another. I can’t even watch over my cute students anymore because all our fighting is done in conference rooms now, it’s awful. Hardly the place for a former vigilante delinquent like yourself, or a great teacher like me. And you pick all your fights with Yuuta, Maki, and Tsumiki, I’ll get lonely if you don’t pay attention to me, Megumi!”

“It’s odd not to train, and Itadori won’t fight me anymore,” Megumi had muttered, scowling. “And we all live in the same place, you see us every day.”

“Oh? Megumi, could it be that you actually wanted my attention?” With a dramatic gasp, Satoru’s hands had flown to his cheeks. “Who taught you this kind of playing hard to get!”  

“The hell I do, didn’t you just hear me say I wanted to stand on my own? It’s just hard to believe that you don’t…” Megumi had glanced away, clearing his throat. Atop the tatami, his hands had curled into fists, and a dry, mocking chuckle rattled out of his chest, raspy, as if it had scraped against his ribs on the way up. “And I said all those things about not relying on you.”

“Hm? It’s fine to ask for help, don’t you think? If even asking for advice is reliance, you’re setting yourself up for some hard times.” Turning to face Megumi, Satoru had placed a hand on his shoulder. “You’re right. There is no more deal. You’re asking me what my expectations are because you think there’s a catch, but there isn’t one, not this time. What you did changed everything. It’s a new era, now, a complete reset.”

Satoru had tried to smile, but wasn’t sure what kind of expression crawled across his face instead, everything muddled, the echo of Megumi’s feelings and his own, the impatience of bearing through the political aftermath, the quiet uneasiness from watching everyone plan on how they would leave. Walking through the grounds, every stepping stone, every bridge and path, peering into the corridors Nobara and Yuuji had restored, the paler color of the newer wood glossy with fresh finish, patchwork character lending a quiet energy to empty rooms, tears in the shoji repaired with small rectangles and squares of brightly patterned washi, a sudden spot of vitality. In the future, they would be a reminder of the people who’d lived there before, and Satoru thought of how empty the rooms would be, without the shoes piled up in the genkan, Inumaki’s potted plants, weapons polish and whetting stones in a designated kitchen drawer. Megumi’s little desk, his main room, with its immovable stacks of papers and supplies, one cushion in particular flattened from frequent sitting, folded and faded quilt, and ducky nightlight. The clinging, curling aroma of Megumi’s tea, dark and meaty like the peat of scotch, of old, wet trees in the forest, after rainfall.

“Like everything before was part of an extended nightmare, a dream,” Satoru had crooned, leaning in, a cobra rising, swaying, out of its basket. Megumi’s eyes, unobscured, were the vivid green of new, growing things. “Like we we’d only lived as civilians. Like nothing ever happened. That’s the kind of peaceful world we live in now. New enough that even you, its creator, can’t put your faith in it.” He’d squeezed Megumi’s shoulder once, before backing off with a carefree shake of the head, shrugging and throwing a single hand in the air. “It isn’t the kind of world I was born for,” he’d said, casual, cavalier, reading his own expiration date, his looming obsolescence. He didn’t need Limitless to get clearance around him, witnessing, detachedly, in real time, the way the beat of his presence would still all speech and motion in a room, his very presence enveloped in a pause, a caesura, that held as if the white static of Prison Realm had followed him out.

It was the same kind of silent timing that Megumi had learned as a child grudging with his words, the same heaviness and expectation as his unspoken hopes, too precious to expose to disappointment, the same pressure of his beseeching, searching gaze, tangible as a seeking hand, waiting for Satoru to turn around and look, reach back, respond, notice him. He’d joked about being needy for attention but it was the both of them wanting someone to look back and bet hell, be worth the time and the journey, reach out with warmth and care. And the way Megumi looks, had looked for him, shattered by Tsumiki’s hospital bed, full of relief and desperation while littered with sharp shards of shattered bone in the Prison Realm, sleepy, relaxed and close to content in the main room, hanten over his shoulders and ink-stained hands curling over crinkled papers – unerringly, he finds Satoru’s eyes and holds steady, true, gazes through a telescope looking for a star in the sky, sifts through the muck, bog mud and grave dirt, to find the smallest imprint of a fossil, a tiny, precious time traveler, the thing preserved, the thing impressed and enduring in negative, like him, a shape that coalesces through the colors of others’ response. Megumi looks at him, sticks his hands in the expanse of emotion between them elbow deep to rummage, to dig, to find the evidence, looks at him as if he holds the key, as if he knows the future, adult, fortune teller, benefactor, one who maybe never had it all, but had just enough to share, looks at him, thinks he’s the worst, hates his habits, but still searches for him like someone with all the answers, someone reliable, comforting in familiarity. Never forgetting who Satoru is, what he’s worth in all his guises, in the sum of him.

“You still look at me like I’m invincible, like you think I can do anything,” Satoru had said, one shade too soft to be an accusation and there it was, Megumi’s gaze, keen knife’s edge against his skin. “Like you still have faith in me.”

Before, that would have been another instance of being taken for granted, even Megumi susceptible to the lure of the legend, the myth, the parable of Gojou Satoru’s strength, a sacrifice and shield, a proxy to take on the damage intended for the original body, the jujutsu world, the lethal progenitor of Nobara’s Straw Doll. Grandiose, an alluring hero’s tale that weakened and diminished Satoru as much as it empowered him, conferred upon him privilege and wealth while his outline, that already blurred, meandering thing, smudged out and disappeared, buried beneath responsibility, bitterness, and desperation. But the image had been shattered by Shibuya, everything laid out in the light, the extent of Satoru’s folly revealed, too undisciplined and weak to cut off his best friend’s head, dispose of his body like so much dirty business, just another sad, overly burdened teenager making tragic mistakes, growing into yet another maladjusted adult unable to cope. Despite it all, Megumi still looked at him the same way. Still saw him as someone capable. Someone he expected to have his back. However reluctantly, someone reliable, someone dependable and sure. Megumi’s gaze now was clear of the resentment and frustration of his younger years, having embraced the full measure of himself, who he’d been as a jujutsushi, and now, who he would be as a civilian. Reticent and unsure, but still quietly placing one foot in front of the other, moving forward, trying to get somewhere with stabler ground.

Was Megumi his equal now? Satoru had always thought he would be one day, a check to his power, a strategic mind to steer the ship when he was gone, but the metric of cursed technique had fallen away. He’d had some kind of uncanny wisdom as a child, keen and ruthless in the way of the young, cutting with laser precision to the quick, focused on practical efficiency and the heart of things, wanting everything to mean something, have some significance to be worth his time. And he’d humored Satoru, as his ward, his student, and now, as an adult. Just a few centimeters shorter, stockier, having grown into the breadth of his shoulders, smooth, tectonic planes of muscles shifting under his skin, wiry and lean, still the tallest of the first years.

Satoru wasn’t his teacher anymore, was not even really his benefactor now, with jujutsu gone and Megumi grown. There were no more chances to intercept Megumi on missions, pop in as he liked to check on him and see how he was doing, no more chance meetings in the shifting college corridors and on the training fields. Eating out together had become a strangely deliberate, intentional act – despite living in the same space, they seldom spent time together in the quiet as they used to, constantly distracted by other people. No more lazing around the table with rain drumming on the window, Satoru closing his eyes and listening to the soft rustle of Megumi flipping through his assigned reading, the barely audible scratch of his pencil on paper, the gentle sighs and whispers of his breath. Megumi had become even quieter, after everything, barely making noise, can’t hear him breathing, can’t hear him walking, and it must have be something he’d picked up on his own, learning to sneak about in his own shadow, sink into the environment around him. But Satoru had hated it, that silence, that specter of disappearance, as if Megumi had wiped himself from his world twice, something only barely glimpsed from the corner of Satoru’s eyes. Without cursed energy, without active sight, Satoru couldn’t even feel him, his only consolation prize the slight, upward curve of Megumi’s mouth, eyes glittering.

But Satoru was also an adult, used to swallowing his bitter medicine, used to looking forward and breaking through, so he’d made his offers, clunky and awkward though they were, no transitions, no segues from conversations they didn’t have anymore. Non sequiturs hastily made while a space still belonged to just the two of them, half-baked excuses to anchor Megumi to a place where Satoru could see him, the muted sensations of their link like an ache, a reminder of what he was missing, what he couldn’t feel, and when they had finally, eventually, ended up alone, from his mouth had sprung a sudden invite to afternoon tea, to lunch when too much caffeine dulled Megumi’s appetite for breakfast, to early dinner, because they didn’t like to stay out late anymore when they didn’t need to, already expecting a full night’s waking and needing the extra rest.

Every time, Satoru had waited for a refusal, for the day when Megumi would move on, but he never did. Megumi had met his eyes steadily and said things like, “Sure, I could eat,” and when he did say no he would suggest another time soon afterwards. He never suggested that Satoru should go with one of the others, nor did he tell Satoru to stop wasting his time. And Satoru had wondered what significance Megumi saw in his invitations to set aside that time for him, what incentives Megumi found worthwhile enough to agree. He didn’t want Megumi to be just humoring him – if that was the case, he would much rather eat by himself in his room at the estate. Satoru was the one not ready for the future, not ready for Megumi the adult, the Megumi who would leave, and he wanted more time with him because all those years, he’d been relying on Megumi too, searching for a single source of the truth in the solid, tangible heart of him, the core of his person that had never changed no matter how many years had passed, the personal, intimate knowledge of Satoru that had been marked out for Megumi and Tsumiki alone, the way they’d seen him, the way Megumi still saw him, different from how Shouko, even Suguru, saw and had seen him, as if Megumi was the one with Six Eyes, all of them laser focused on the qualities of the soul, on what was immutable regardless of shape, size, form, or self perception.

If Megumi looked at him and saw something certain, unchanging and forever, what did others see when he looked at Megumi? He’d thought Megumi would kill him, but Megumi was not death to him. Megumi was a sort of hope, a future, a bright and unexpected horizon that delighted him, new colors painting the sky every morning, coming with the rotation of the Earth and the revolution of the planet around the sun, cosmic forces and machinations that went on unceasingly, each day, each year, no matter what happened to the small, miniscule lives of the humans scurrying about, something beyond even Satoru’s reach. And so Megumi would continue on each day, each year, no matter what; he would live regardless, of that Satoru was sure. That was the kind of strength that laid at the core of him, and were his bones ever charred to ash they’d find more than just relics there, they’d find his shadow and an eternity, the coal and carbon of him, the Megumi that marked the change in seasons and transitions of their relationship, once more, turning again.

Summer sun, autumn rain, winter snow, spring green, and MegumI had always been straining to grow, straining to stretch tall with wide and sturdy trunk, thirsty for things he didn’t yet know. Satoru saw his face in every season, a study in change, shifts in the light bringing new colors, new moods, and new insights to the fore, an endless parade of undiscovered topographies to study; the bump of an unnoticed mole on the neck, the faint, growing creases at the eyes, the lengthening shadow he threw upon uneven, weathered concrete, earthbound eclipse. He never offered the same perspective twice, and Satoru was sometimes struck by how different he seemed when tinted by the right atmosphere, set into the perfect situation, to highlight a new facet of his personality, a new gleam to the quiet quirk of a grin, or the fogginess that rested on his eyelids as his lashes dipped in subdued disdain. Preserved in precious metals, the circuitry of the memory in Satoru’s phone, was the diary of Megumi’s evolution, his body language, his manner, and the feelings and expressions he shared with Satoru through the years, a constant learning and relearning of the semi-feral creature he’d picked up as a teen, pretending to be an adult. It was good for Megumi to have met Yuuji and Nobara, no matter how things turned out, good for him to meet others and argue with them, become firm in his convictions. Even Sukuna, someone who’d tested Megumi’s moral mettle, pressed the limits of his understanding, had challenged how far and how much he would go, Satoru could admit that much, however grudgingly.

Satoru and Megumi’s meeting had been outside of fate, something new unfolding from Touji’s deathbed introduction, two years stale. They had chosen, and kept choosing, to preserve the connection that came of that meeting – a relationship that only existed because both Satoru and Megumi actively worked on it, maintained it in their own way. That thought consoled Satoru in his moments of doubt, where the decision he’d offered six-year-old Megumi became coercion due to the circumstances, the predatory Zenin on one side, future poverty and homelessness on the other. If Megumi could choose again, if he was asked now, would he say that he was better off not knowing Satoru, never meeting him?  Surely he wouldn’t, not with his occasional, hesitant affections, bristly as ever. Surely, Satoru was some kind of reminder in his heart, his universe. But until Megumi did the unbelievable and told him of that significance himself, Satoru would never know for certain. As much as they expected from each other, as much saw and felt from one another, Satoru didn’t know how to bridge the gap between action and emotion to demonstrate the shape of something that hadn’t entirely solidified yet. A muddled relationship formed out of muddled circumstances, and with nothing tying them together Satoru had found that he wanted it to be real, wanted things to continue as they had, even if they couldn’t anymore.

So he’d confessed to Megumi what was both the best and worst of the world that they’d created. “I can’t predict anything about this future,” he’d said, the words bitter and burnt, truth lacing each syllable with the wistful bite and sweetness of citrus peel, burst of brightness on the tongue. “In a way, I don’t know anything about it. You’ll be the one to choose what of the jujutsu world you bring with you, and what you’ll leave behind. You’re still young – you could forget it all, if you wanted. Live a normal life. You’ve all the time in the world to think about it now.” He’d given Megumi a winning smile, the low thrum of quiet contemplation nesting in his chest as if it belonged to him. “Don’t forget, if Megumi does it, it’s righteous. That’s something that hasn’t changed. Commit to your decisions and make them count.”

The sensation of Megumi’s rapidly moving thoughts, the daisy chain of his judgments and rationalizations, was different from anything Satoru had ever experienced. The soft stroke of a feather, the pop and snap of static electricity, the little off-kilter twist of things falling into place, not dissimilar from the overwhelming rush of Unlimited Void opening up to a galaxy of possibility, the jolt of a reflex and the zip of nerves up unfunny bones. Perhaps his expression had given him away, because Megumi seemed like he was already anticipating the answer when he’d asked, slow and unhurried, “Do you know what you want, Satoru-san? Did you want to be righteous?”

And Satoru had thought of early morning floating away, stumbling into the kitchen doorframe in his shapeless sweats, the hand-me-downs of which he’d given to Megumi, wanting to lend the kind of comfort he couldn’t provide, ever useless and weak when it came to the most critical, significant moments, and the sun was rising on the mountain, flushing the trees into rich jade and jewel greens, golden glow revealing the streak of crackling browns in every trunk, lush and new, or in the winter, the blinding flash of white, glittering like marble, untouched. Picture in the window, like a movie, a piece of art, something apart from him, not in his world, the world of old, fragrant wood, the choking smoke of incense, hinoki and hiba both, translucent paper fibers only good enough for suggestion, for shadows, for glancing through to see the shape of what haunted you. Early morning unreality, at least until his ear would catch onto the growling crank of the hand grinder, burrs dialed just right after weeks of meticulous adjustment and notetaking, the slow, steady trickle of water falling from the graceful curve of a gooseneck, discounted because Megumi was just as cheap as ever, had used his employee privileges to get a coveted matte black kettle on sale. His black-clad back, broad and subtly muscled even under the drape of fabric, the smoothness of his movement, terminating with a sense of curt finality, the shift of the tendons playing on the back of his hand as his arm moved in circles.

Still bedheaded, his hair had looked almost purple under golden light of sunrise, so bright that he’d almost been blotted out, except that Satoru would know his shape anywhere, feel it in his chest with or without the ramshackle, mostly pointless connection – what they had already, built piece by piece over the years, was good enough, created by them, for them. Perhaps it was the sound of his footfalls, frequently barefoot before changing into daywear, but Megumi always seemed to know if it was Satoru coming up to him, even without looking over his shoulder. He would turn without a greeting and say, “Sugar bowl’s over there,” “These beans are better than last month’s,” “You look like shit,” or “It’s not ready yet.” Whatever the case, Satoru always received a steaming, piping hot cup of coffee, the efforts of Megumi’s relentless pourover practice, always to be ruined by the copious amounts of cream and sugar Satoru added. The house was full of potential early risers, many of Satoru’s former students having developed erratic sleep schedules due to insomnia, nightmares, phantom pains, and anxiety, but there were days where Megumi and Satoru would be the only ones up for a few hours, circadian rhythms shot to hell and only matching up by chance, Satoru getting up to attend to clan business of some sort, or Megumi giving up on sleep, too bothered by thoughts that spiraled down and down and up and over, burning at the ends like the citronella smoke of mosquito repellant.

Coffee in hand, they would make like they were back at the College, Megumi coming by with mission reports or class materials, Satoru dropping into the infirmary or the dorm community room, both of them ready with any excuse, anything but the truth. They would settle into their version of gossip, trading small anecdotes, observations, changes they saw on the street, in the cityscape and the people around him, Gojou with his dessert cafes and viennoiserie, Megumi with his bookshops and museum exhibits, convergence at the dog park, the tunnels under bridges, the shadows of urban greenery, where the curses liked to lurk. Some things remained the same, the changing rhythm of the recovering city, the irritating high-powered negotiations and politicking, but living together in the estate they also passed notes on the changing moods of their housemates, complained about their petty everyday troubles, the pains of working in customer service and the frustrations of slow-moving change, these pointlessly important talks topped off with the salt of a trendy cap of crema, frothed into cloudlike dollops and served with a face-saving scowl, a Megumi special saved for Satoru that he’d claimed was an experiment. The espresso underneath was heavy and dark, bitter but burnt straight into sweetness, a spot of dark brown sugar tamped into the grounds, the tantalizing, honeyed fall of an almost solid stream of kuromitsu spilling over the side of a spoon, stirred until smooth.

Around and around and it always came back to the circle, completion and wholeness, the shape of a boundary and domain, circumambulation, emptiness and nothingness. Satoru knew the essence of what he wanted and so he did not know the shape or the manifestation, knew only the feeling nestled against his heart, throbbing behind his eyes, the only pair that anyone would ever see, the only pair that might as well exist. Five supramundane eyes and none of it meant anything, all that existed was the flesh, the emotion, the trappings of worldly existence, and even those who claimed to rise above it only felt what they did because they existed, here, real world, rot and dross and dreck and everything seeping, putrid and putrefying, and what would people say if they knew, the way jujutsushi like Satoru knew from the old ways, that all their gods were curses, and all their curses gods, and that humanity was not the in between, but the genesis. The beginning was a seed in the nerve and the flesh, the inability to untangle the soul, mind, and body, the beginning was a devouring, a cannibalizing, a sacrifice, destruction to begin anew.

But what more could Satoru destroy? Megumi had done it all already. Done it for Tsumiki, for Yuuji, for him, for his own self-satisfaction, nothing saying that one couldn’t be selfish and generous at the same time. Surgical kindness, so clean, so neatly demarcated that it hurt, the clear separation of what belonged and what didn’t. Satoru used to be able to rearrange the world with the flick of a finger, he used to be able to hold entire universes within himself, their wisdom and their entropy, but gravity was failing him, the laws of matter unravelling, chains of molecules unspooling with no bonds to keep them together. Even atoms were made of something smaller.

No, Satoru was not a righteous man, just a highly trained, learned one, desperate and calculating. A new world, but he couldn’t join it. Didn’t have the ticket, didn’t have the right. He’d thought for so long that he would be the last of his generation, but not like this, not still tussling with the clans and what remained of the higher-ups over what they could, what they should become, and knowing that things weren’t even close to being over. Not thinking of leaving the clan just to get a break for fucking once in his life and realizing it was just a fantasy, no one else to do the work, then returning to the estate to find Megumi chipping away at yet more clan papers, smelling of coffee, cream, burnt sugar, and the slightest hint of his own sweat, hands stained in blue ink, a dense carpet of notes blanketing the rumpled papers listing the most recent round of disputes and claims, eyes heavy and shadowed with the grave dirt dug up with the sordid history of each newly uncovered artifact, every hidden asset and bank account that fell into Megumi’s hands.

Chained to a desk in the Diet for hours, smiling winsomely at high-ranking politicians and sweating, inexperienced former jujutsushi before lashing them to ribbons with his crass, unruly tongue, Satoru had dug bloody crescents into his hands thinking about how the jujutsu world had never truly changed from its roots in the Heian onmyouji. Drivers of political influence from behind the scenes, the onmyouji bolstered the power of their patrons and weakened that of their opponents by forcibly manifesting scenarios that preyed upon their desires, fears and desperations. Every crooked divination was guaranteed, with judicious use of cursed technique, to become the future, well-phrased portents uttered in the right spaces at the right times guiding pawns to their proper places on the boards. Persuasive readings of the constellations, the movements of the sky, overexuberant trust and a little sycophantic encouragement could convince nobles to act on their jealousies and resentment, casting curses and with them, suspicion. Attack and rescue came from the same sources, engineering debts, favors, and affection. Slowly, inclination was stoked into belief, belief intensifying into faith, until faith was zealous enough to be religion. Since earlier times the onmyouji had been in charge of tracking time – watching water clocks, managing calendars, learning the specialized knowledge of geomancy, astrology, and astronomy that came flowing from the continent – and still they carried on their responsibilities, ushering new eras, new periods, in and out. Clans seized institutional power, and passive predictions became true action, cursed techniques, cursed energy, finally revealed to be what it was, shrouded in the language of prayers, rituals, and spellcasting, not infrequently turned to diabolical ends.    

So much for the golden era – whether they were called jujutsushi or onmyouji in the end, all practitioners with cursed techniques were nothing before the demands of survival and the corrupting force of greed. Tales of youkai, obake, ayakashi, urban ghost stories, tests of courage and the superstitions permeating the culture, all those stories ascribed a logic and reason to unexplainable, foreboding phenomena, a pathetic attempt at some kind of control over the fears that people rejected, overflowing with cursed energy that took on the shape of the concepts, ideas that the unconscious boundaries of their souls could not accept as real, enough that they became real in and of themselves, formed from the negative space of denial. With the vast majority of people unable to see or detect cursed spirits or any kind of cursed energy at all, regardless of their actual abilities, the truth that there absolutely were cursed spirits to exorcise and cursed techniques that might be described as supernatural meant that onmyouji then, and the former jujutsushi now, symbolized that makeshift control over fear, the attempt to justify and make sense of the unpredictable and undetectable, and in the manner of customs like hatsumoude, washing hands at the mizuya before entering a shrine, and the continued annual reconstruction of Ise shrine, the stressed and frustrated politicians under intense public pressure after the events of the Culling Game were reluctant to acknowledge and accept that jujutsu as a discipline had basically gone up in smoke, and was now mostly moot, and instead wanted to continue leaning on the jujutsushi as a sort of good luck charm, a methods of warding away misfortune and ills, despite all recent evidence to contrary, and the many times various jujutsushi had explained that their abilities revolved around curses and being cursed, not any sort of pleasant children’s story of the light vanquishing the dark.

After repeated, unnecessary meetings with obstinate politicians, the clear expressions of skepticism, dismissal, and apprehension from an unyielding  public, the combined inefficiency of the old guard that had survived and the cowering uncertainty of inexperienced former jujutsushi forced into leadership, Satoru had been annoyed to find that he almost understood the motivations of Sukuna, Kashimo, and other jujutsushi who had bided their time from the golden era – they had been the only group who had used jujutsu for jujutsu’s own sake and taken pleasure in it, as much a pure type of practice as it was irrefutably violent, brutal, and chaotic, jujutsu brought back to its original environs. As independent, grassroots jujutsushi they might have been less answerable to the Onmyou Bureau, and a controversial, renowned flashpoint like Sukuna, powerful and not answerable to any clan, would have been a major target, with or without the mass murder. An entity with enough strength and charisma to attract the major attention of both followers and opponents from all over the country, who blurred the lines between jujutsushi and curse and made people think of the connection there, who swaggered his way through the countryside using his technique right and left, helping or slaughtering the villages in his path depending on nothing aside from his whims and what his actual target, usually a cursed spirit or jujutsushi, was doing. He made people think and talk too much, goaded them to ask questions, make their own conclusions, and generally formed an alternate locus of thought, philosophy, and understanding regarding jujutsu that eschewed belief in the gods and sought instead an incisive, targeted cultivation of the self as sharp and bloodthirsty as the swords, and now knives, made in Seki, in Hida province, where Sukuna had made his base of operations. Dismantle and cleave he did, setting too-dry kindling ablaze, for when it came to Sukuna, everyone had had to have a stance, and the independent jujutsushi had suddenly become overwhelmingly active, organizing towards Sukuna, away from him, or trying to maintain their autonomy altogether. Unsurprisingly, something that impactful and uncontrolled was not something that the reigning clans could abide, and the political and social ramifications had been as much a factor for going after Sukuna as the simple fact that he was a mass murdering cannibal with a penchant for sadism and torture.

With the evolution and progression of jujutsu as a field dependent on the purposeful manipulation, use, and positioning of curses, how could curses do anything but persist? The line between jujutsushi and cursed spirit was a gossamer thing, Satoru had thought, paging through assigned reading as a child, lazy and bored as his tutors droned on and on. It was an idea he’d returned to over and over, after Riko, after Suguru, and after Suguru again, fevered and despairing and feeling so high and monumental and yet so small, full of the euphoria of how much he could be and do, brought crashing back down with the knowledge of how little that mattered. And despite everything, despite Megumi’s efforts and Satoru’s support, he kept returning to that fantasy, being consumed by himself, becoming the punishment and wrath upon the world that wouldn’t change, wouldn’t turn, sitting in meetings again and again, going over the same old agenda that never seemed to move forward, stuck on technicalities and bureaucracy embedded too deep.

Satoru had rediscovered his anger, excavated it from where it had been buried so deep that it had fossilized, filled in with stone and coal and diamond, heated by magma far below. Everything was supposed to be over. Everything should have ended, he should have ended, and instead he was still here, doing the same old things, waiting, again. Where was the change that they had wrought with their sacrifices, all of them, where was the new world they’d been promised? He’d been patient before, but only because he’d been the one nudging things along. They’d already reached the end of the game board, no more pieces left to spend and the entire road behind them conquered, and they still couldn’t leave, stuck like flies in a spiderweb. It had burned him to think they would be caught there forever, half-in half-out in limbo, waiting for the day to turn, waiting for the parade and trumpets and the major motion picture about unseen heroes so they could finally fade out with the ending credits, but more than that, waiting to shake off the deadened umbilical cord wrapped around their necks, circumstances of birth, of life, of death, waiting to put the cycle to rest and rise again, revived – Megumi in the kitchen again, no sun, no moon, no company, no comfort, in the deep night with hands washed to cracking keeping up with the food code every day, cradling a mug of black coffee, no lights on either because shadows were his hiding place, where no one could see his face or the bruises that lay beneath his eyelids, stay awake like the Earth would never turn again, stay mired in the dark. In the evening where no one truly slept he could at least pretend to hide for a while, let his shoulders slump, think more on the people he’d let go of, let die, and those he’d made sure would live, wondered about his culpability and where to go from there, and Satoru only knew because it wasn’t that he woke up because his chest hurt so much, nothing so dramatic, but he woke all the same, the feeling of everything between his ribs, his spine, and the cradle of his hips going up in smoke, hollow but excruciatingly aware of the weight of his own bones, his structure, scaffolding, and support, the organ that gave him his shape, conscious of the space he took up, the way he disrupted the world, disturbed the air, exerted force on the space around him, on tatami and blanket, in existence with his every word and action. Taut yearning rammed into the strained veneer of long-learned patience, and the use of the coffee became apparent with the ghost of a knot in Satoru’s throat, the sense of fingers scrabbling at his collarbones, sternum, trying to dig into the soft flesh of his jugular and windpipe with every wave of frustration and anger that rolled in, high tide, until it wasn’t, waves finally ebbing.

It wasn’t realistic for everything to magically improve all at once, and even in Satoru’s original plans for the future, Megumi had been expected to be heavily involved in clan work. But the loss of all cursed energy and jujutsu should have made things very simple – adapt or die, with the expectation that most would adapt, and in a way that would move jujutsu society forward. With the fallout of Shibuya, the Culling Game, and Megumi’s successful energy separation barrier sinking in all at once, the jujutsushi community and clans should have been sent into a state of chaos, the best condition from which to launch and introduce major paradigm shifts, to present new ideas and have them adopted, push the envelope. Jujutsushi had left in droves, finally able to resign without guilt hovering over their heads, no more curses to fight and no power to even see them, and the smaller clans began to make bolder moves to try and muscle onto a barren, moot playing field with the Zenin clan largely wiped out, its remaining heirs mostly disinterested in politics, the myth of Satoru’s infallibility upended, and the Kamo busy cleaning house and image. It should have been the best time to start from scratch, to finish demolition and rebuild, think of newer, healthier methods, better ways to make themselves obsolete, unnecessary.

But dressed back up in hakama, kimono, and haori for the first all-hands-on-deck, national conference after the energy separation, Megumi standing by his side, himself neatly pressed into the crisp pleats of high quality fabric, Satoru could only think, with an irritated, burning amusement, that the world of jujutsushi was truly that of a fishbowl, small and warped, unchanging, watching eager, power-hungry clans throwing accusations and insults at him and Megumi, clamoring to reduce their foothold in jujutsu society despite the significance and magnitude of the energy separation. They said that Satoru had been too weak, hadn’t been prepared or strong-willed enough, raged that their abilities had been unjustly taken from them without so much as a warning, opined that Megumi should have consulted others older and wiser than him before making such a large scale decision. All they’d succeeded in doing was ensuring that meeting would be Megumi’s first and last in attendance, and providing Megumi with an opportunity to make it clear that he didn’t give a single shit what they had to say.

“If you didn’t help at Shibuya or work to help end the Culling Game, your opinion means fuck all,” he’d said, even and controlled despite the disdain dripping from each word, shoulders squared and eyes flinty, narrowed. “Everyone had a choice of whether or not to get involved, and it’s too late now to pretend that you didn’t just brush everything aside and decide other jujutsushi could sacrifice their lives. Since you left a couple of high school drop-outs and a few teachers to handle everything for you, we did exactly that. There have been unintended consequences and drawbacks, but we did what we could and what we thought was best to prevent anything similar from happening ever again. And if you wanted to have a say, if you think you could have done better, then I have to ask – where were you? If you couldn’t even bother to show up, you don’t get to complain. Shut the hell up.”

Nothing ended up getting done, everyone too busy arguing over whose fault it was that things had ended up like this, people wanting the full story with all the dirty details, trying to swing their weight around when there was no power to anyone’s threats anymore except the relationships they had, if they were still worth anything. For a prestigious, renowned family such as the Gojou, predominately made up of civilian members who had well-developed connections in business and conventional politics, there were still plenty of strings to pull. Satoru had been a connection for his entire clan to use his whole life, lifeline to endless privilege and advantage, because things really hadn’t changed much from the Heian era – the Strongest had to be the one to handle requests for high-ranking officials, ambassadors, and any of the miscellaneous personnel affiliated with them, a whole web of contacts coming ready-made for networking, offer opportunities that only required some particularly savvy, charismatic personnel to unlock.

In many cases that person was Satoru, with his looks and playful persona, though sometimes he merely nudged open the door. But many of the other smaller clans, like the Inumaki, the Kusakabe, the Kokichi, only saw such requests if their members’ cursed techniques happened to be a good counter to the offending cursed spirits’ abilities, and their individual behaviors made a positive impression while on the mission. Reputation building could be slow, fragile going, but could pay large dividends down the road. The big names in power that had once taken the bulk of those requests, maintaining their clans since the onmyouji days, were therefore also the ones who acted as the face of the jujutsu world and had the most sway, and though it had been those same people who had forced the smaller clans and freelancers to lay low and only take the jobs that they didn’t want, the large swath that recent events had cut through the jujutsu upper echelons meant there had been no opportunity to talk succession and emergency plans, and only a precious few, like Satoru, had the knowledge of the various ways the jujutsu world clicked into the civilian one – who had informal alliances, who traded information, who were the contacts in the courts and the Diet who knew how to handle cases related to jujutsu, were familiar with how large a role jujutsu had played in politics then and now. For the same reasons, he often ran into spiteful, petty resistance in later meetings, had hard time herding around and guiding the hodgepodge group of former jujutsushi into making decisions, so that months, years later, what remained of the jujutsu world still had not yet been fully decommissioned.   

Satoru had wanted to change things so everyone could choose their own path. So there wouldn’t be anymore people like him, like Riko or even Touji, like Megumi or Yuuji. So it wouldn’t have to be so shocking to just get a papercut, feel the sting of pain, the way the heat of it radiated through his skin, just a small thing but so piercing, so surprising; so no one would have to wake up in the night still feeling hands grasping all over, breath coming fast because the dark was everywhere, had eyes and ill intent, until with a shift of fabric and low groan of discontent, the silly face of a cute duck lit up in the dark, and Satoru was brought back to his and Megumi’s nest of clan disorder, papers strewn about, pockmarked with bags of senbei, chocolate-covered potato chips, and the spicy-numbing peanuts Megumi liked to eat, and he would look up, heart still pounding, and see Megumi on the other side of the table, eyes glinting just over the low surface, hand braced over his heart. When he thought about it he was almost wistfully, darkly, envious of Sukuna, who had seemed to think of things in such a simple, straightforward way, never needing to care about consequences to anyone or anything because that didn’t matter to him – what mattered was the experience of living, and nothing else, the immediacy of the sensations that assaulted him, the flavors on his tongue, the feast before his eyes, the textures beneath his hands. Had he been a different man, a different curse, he would’ve been an asset, maybe a friend. That purity that had made him such an iconoclast in the Heian era would have doubtlessly been just as incendiary and inspiring in modern times, as he himself had proved after incarnating in Yuuji, as Kenjaku and the many Heian jujutsushi who had made pacts with him had proved.

He’d told Megumi to get strong enough not to be left behind, but here Satoru was again, time capsule, holder of hopes and dreams. Left alive, left dreaming, the worst thing the Prison Realm had left him with was the sense of cold stillness, the sensation of a vacuum. Infinite Void had movement all around, the unceasing rotation of a universe or two, and Megumi’s shadows had moved with their maker’s intent, and like the Ten Shadows shikigami, had an animal-like liveliness to them, bore their semi-sentience with the casual aplomb Megumi carried with himself as birthright, learned through years of weathering Satoru and Tsumiki, weathering violence, abandonment, and despair nipping at his heels. The Prison Realm had embodied the thing that Satoru could tolerate least in himself – the careless apathy that had swallowed him before he’d met Suguru and Shouko, before he’d died first, and came back with his head full of teachings, electrified into waking. Gojou Satoru was, after all, someone who cared. Someone who was not objective, someone who couldn’t be. Someone who bled and died like everyone else, someone who had limits, someone who didn’t know enough, couldn’t do enough. Someone who hadn’t yet learned inadequacy, to be dogged by it the rest of his life. Prison Realm had been the agony of waiting, the terror of an inescapable situation, the utter despair of helplessness, powerlessness, everything out of his hands, out of his control. The minute he’d escaped he’d been placed back into the driver’s seat, only to find he didn’t want it anymore.

Believing he wouldn’t survive past the climax of things, a final battle, was the kind of selfishness that he’d always chided Megumi for in the past. Perhaps that had been why he was so good at seeing it – the kind of death that could be remembered, the kind of death that meant that one didn’t have to look into the future great unknowns, that meant that finally, one could rest, one didn’t need to worry. Were he and Megumi the type of people who knew how to live, not just survive? He’d told Megumi he didn’t need to come to more meetings if he didn’t want because there would be little purpose to him being there. Because Satoru knew he could handle it, knew this was the role he’d always had, and because he’d wanted Megumi to live in the way that he hadn’t, with Tsumiki, with his friends. And it was Megumi looking at him again, brow scrunched up and mouth skewed with doubt, asking him if he was sure, the thrum of quiet trust in his heart, latent and subterranean, geomagnetic field that drew them in the same directions, compass rose, barrier to barrier resonance.

Satoru had said yes, aching, knowing it was the first step to walking away, the first step to the future, to another stage in their lives like when Megumi had been on the cusp of graduating middle school, another step to separation and estrangement. In that moment he’d known what he wanted was a future like that, rosy and full of potential, open and glittering. To look forward with excitement, with the bright anticipation of what unexpected happenings would unfold, to be young again in a way he had never quite been, to see things through the eyes of his unshackled students, stepping forward over the starting line, towards the rest of their lives. To walk alongside them on their journey, to keep pace and watch over them as he had before, to preserve tenuous bonds and teaching conversations, to see how their perspectives changed and see if they would change his, to experience a life like he never had. To finally feel comfortable and cozy, not just acclimated. And before Megumi had nodded his head in assent, he’d looked at Satoru again, patient and vaguely annoyed like nothing had changed, like he could still be the partner, the successor Satoru had hoped he could be, but with a new wrinkle to his eye, a new uplift to his mouth, looking at Satoru like someone he could trust beyond just being there in a pinch, like he wanted to hear Satoru’s answers, wanted to hear what he thought and had to say. Megumi in the estate in middle school, listening to him speak of their ancestors and the rotation of fate’s cycle, leaning near his napping chair in Jujutsu Tech to discuss the latest missions, and it was what was closest to Satoru that always remained inscrutable, mysterious, it was crawling into the estates many tunnels, hidden corridors, and cellars by candlelight when he couldn’t sleep, walking and walking, sifting through artifacts and lost treasures to report back to the clan archivists, until Megumi met him somewhere behind walls, under foundations, and led him back out into the light, noon sun beaming overhead. The estate was a solid thing full of mists and fog, its joinery holding not a single nail, the joinery having endured for many centuries, and likely to hold many more. Vanishing echoes and whispers crawled along its walls, its current inhabitants trying to paint its plain hardwoods over with the comfort of places they’d known before, déjà vu when they laid around the tables at new years with extravagant osechi on the table picked apart, pretending to watch Kouhaku while all of them secretly tuned in to the places in between, the feeling of all of them in the room, the sound of silence like a buzz, gaps in between.

Satoru had been accustomed to being displaced, visitor to many spaces, inhabitant of none, and had spared as little thought as possible to his own unmooring, to the feeling of being pushed from his niche and thrown out of orbit, abandoned to the frigid, bereft void of space, another airless prison, an aimless, untethered satellite running low on power. His paranoia and restlessness were well met by the coiling, dizzying corridors, the rhythm of sliding open fusuma and shoji over and over, every hallway and room looking the same, his former students’ rooms like little islands of splendor, brimming over with their presences, their mess, their personalities, their smells – posters and training equipment, worn plushies and game cartridges, stimulation in the middle of a polite, exquisite monotony. His own room, cramped and small, mostly holding clothes and knick-knacks and the discarded wrappings and bags of souvenirs, the rest of his things tucked away in secret parts of the house, storage, preferring his spot across the table from Megumi. Grand fusuma demarcate the edges of different territories, extravagantly embroidered or painted, inlaid with gold leaf and mother-of-pearl, coral, lapis, and other members of the seven treasures, beauty laid over the grotesque scenes of villages beset by ghoulish beasts and monsters, single brave jujutsushi fending off powerful cursed spirits, bloody battles and the details of perforated flesh and bone rendered like flowers, lace, a badge of pride for the warrior side of the Gojou, who had once come from more scholarly roots. Outside, the garden was beautiful, verdant and flowering without anyone’s interference, but too intentionally so. Flat and overwrought, too perfect, like a standard screensaver, mobile wallpaper, a two-dimensional stock photo put in place to take up room, too staged to be organic. It would be more lovely overgrown and a little wild, he’d often thought, and then suddenly, he wouldn’t want to be there at all, standing on top of all that history, an archaeological site with claims to make, more tethers he didn’t want. Halls familiar, but distant, footsteps that echoed in his ears. Away from legacy, away from more burdens, more responsibilities, swimming away from the shore to open ocean.  

But Megumi’s stares spoke their own language, and perhaps he already knew; asked Satoru what he wanted just to see what he would be willing to say, asked to get a glimpse of how he was feeling, a second’s glance through an open door, a confirmation of the reverberations he no doubt felt twanging against his hearstrings. His pauses, his scrutiny, was the instant of looking back on the way out from underground, the fear of seeing something one didn’t want to, an illusion, wisps of smoke between fingertips. He’d said that Satoru didn’t need to protect them anymore, that he felt he relied on Satoru too much and didn’t know if he wanted to stop; he’d said it was time for him to own his mistakes and hold onto everything with his two hands, hands that summoned, called, beckoned, and soothed, gentle and harsh in turns. Interpretation was different from hearing things straight from the monster’s mouth and growing into his own, Megumi’s appetite was changing. Not as caustic, not as resentful, but more curious, prodding, and in a way, incisive.

“I’ve never thought about things like righteousness or justice,” Satoru had said, let the words float up and settle between them lazily the way all summer conversations should. “I always found it boring and irrelevant. Jujutsu has never operated within strictly legal bounds, so what even is the point of justice? There’s no one who can define it or enforce it, so it’s nothing more than a word. Who’s to say that it isn’t the same as vengeance for some? Your morals are different from mine, from Yuuji’s, from Yuuta’s – what’s the difference between a forced righteousness and arrogance? Those who try to shove their own morals down others’ throats and try to get them to conform are just satisfying their own inflated egos.” Sighing, he’d let himself fall flat against the floor. “As for what I want…if you’re working hard then I can hardly afford not to do the same. I’ll keep working hard too. I’m your teacher after all, I’ve got to lead by example!”

“Former teacher,” Megumi had corrected, rolling his eyes. “You’re always working. Didn’t you just say it was okay to ask for help? You didn’t talk in terms of morals, but you didn’t spend those years working your influence in Jujutsu Tech for nothing. You might not be a teacher anymore, but you’ve got plenty of hands to help if you ask for them.”

“Encouragement? From our Megumi? How rare,” Satoru had cooed, stomach swooping uneasily. “Of course I’m still your teacher. Otherwise you’d be calling me Satoru-san, like Tsumiki.”

“Satoru-san,” Megumi had said immediately, looking directly into his eyes, and Satoru had smothered the small jolt of surprise that threatened to make him flinch, only allowed his eyes to flutter, once, twice. “You can call me back to the meetings if you need to. Talk to Kamo-san if you need to. We all had a part to play in this. In the end, energy separation was my idea. Letting Sukuna take point in the last stages of the Culling Game, having him guard the entrance, all that was my idea. What happened with Getou-san and Kenjaku is your fault but no one else did anything either. Shouko-san and Yaga-sensei could have found and killed him too, but they didn’t. Do what you need to, but in the end, everyone will need to pull their own weight.”

Megumi’s gaze hadn’t left him, so Satoru couldn’t look away either, lips pressed tightly into a line. This part of Megumi he both loved and hated, the part of him that dug his words in like chisels, prying pieces of him apart, the part of him that Satoru needed, someone who would pick apart his flaws, raise the mirror to his face, confront him with his worst traits and ideas, hit him the way Megumi was always threatening to. Not like Suguru, who complemented and magnified the best and worst parts of him, but didn’t have a way to really speak with him, couldn’t explain what he wanted and expected, and in the end, didn’t seem to understand what Satoru wanted at all.

“Why coffee, Megumi?” Satoru had asked in the end.

The low, humming noise Megumi made was a soothing, thoughtless match to the drone of the cicadas, and he’d flipped to lay on his stomach, leaning on elbows, one hand cradling his chin, heels hooked together in the air, calves tangling with the yukata fabric. “It’s slow, manual,” he’d said, stroking fingers against the tatami, following the weave. “Already part of the morning routine. We work around different parts of the city, like with missions, especially if there’s a delivery order and I take the bike out. And it’s got nothing at all to do with jujutsu.”

“That’s all?” Satoru had prodded, a little incredulous, but even as a kid Megumi had never been too picky, was pleasantly surprised when someone did find something to his tastes, like the matching set of INU mittens, jacket, and mug that Satoru had gotten him in the early years of their acquaintance. Satoru was quietly touched every time he saw Megumi still using that old mug, no cracks or chips anywhere.

A light, nonchalant shrug. “I like coffee,” Megumi had offered. “You and Tsumiki always tried to make me try the nicer stuff, drip single origins and sweet flavored lattes and whatever, but I stuck to instant because it was cheap. I get to try things for free this way.”

“Is it worth it?” Satoru had asked, bees buzzing in his chest, wondering how Megumi saw the world now, saw the future.

“Yes,” Megumi had replied simply, unperturbed. “Tsumiki and everyone else is here. I wake up every morning and there’s coffee, and a roof over my head. I have a job and I can resolve clan bullshit without doing too much. I can take things at my own pace. It’s worth it.”

Was it really? Megumi had seemed content but Satoru was sometimes not sure that he was, taking public transportation everywhere because he couldn’t teleport anymore, not being able to take midnight jaunts and walk around the spire of Tokyo Tower, watching the starlight fabric of the city’s night lights below to relax. Jujutsu had surrounded Satoru’s every waking moment since he’d been born, and even though Megumi, Tsumiki, and all the others did their best, Satoru found himself repeatedly diving back underground to unearth everything that had been packed beneath the estate like tombs, frustrated by his inability to adapt, irritated by the similarity between the modern era and history he’d studied as a child, for the cycle was meant to be broken. Among the artifacts that Satoru eventually had carted off for study by clan archivists and museum staff were little ivory netsuke, still cushioned within the compartments of elegant inro, all the lacquer and decorations intact. Rabbits, snakes, and other small animals, fierce miniature defenders that had likely once been used as anchors to summon shikigami of other kinds. After checking that they could still come in contact with the air with little damage, he’d gathered the ones that reminded him of Megumi’s shikigami, and given them to him, a small, but precious reminder that had drawn out a gentle smile. They stood proudly now in a little plexiglass case on a floating shelf near Megumi’s designated coffee corner.

Tansu and cabinetry with plenty of value in their own right hid away more morbid artifacts, an assortment of small, worn cloth pouches containing hair, sometimes what looked like blood-blotted cloth, dried leathery scraps of human skin, finger bones, and fragments of what Satoru suspect were human, rather than turtle scapulae, cracked by fire for divination. There were also the mothbitten ceremonial robes and ritual implements, headdresses, combs, and the kind of vanity boxes no one used anymore, the drawers rattling with handsome jade, vibrant coral, onyx, japser, and swirling agate of all different shades, settled right up against cursed weapons that had lost all their utility, simply remained as conventional weaponry, polearms, swords, maces, specially-tipped arrows, throwing knives, brass knuckles and even chain-sickles. Perhaps even more valuable were the rare texts, sutras, commentaries, and illustrations traded to the clan from India, Korea, or China, the star charts and sky maps and the attendant astronomical instruments, rusted with age. There were almanacs and personal journals too, mixed in with historical and medicinal texts, written by various clan members about their lives and their contemporaries.

Clan archivists had never studied the artifacts housed within that particular estate because the Gojou clan member that had built it as a secondary compound was second in line, and had a less than clean reputation that had caused his older brother, the clan head, to order that the house be abandoned and sealed in attempt to minimize any reminders of his sibling’s mishaps. It hadn’t been until recently that they had discovered that the younger brother had been stealing away artifacts from the main house to put up for auction on international markets, stashing them into the tunnels that his paranoia had demanded he build.  

In the studying the artifacts, it was soon clear that the personal journals were among the most valuable artifacts hidden away. Records written by single authors, not scribes and stenographers, the archivists had found that the journals covered events and periods of time that had only previously been hinted at, upending assumptions and presenting new findings, like the apparent petty squabble that had erupted between two minor Gojou clans over the hand of a lesser Kamo daughter, that had quickly grown out of proportion and nearly compromised the brisk medicine trade that the Kamo family had been doing at the time. Like the Culling Game recording project that a small group of archivists had taken on, where different survivors of the games were interviewed to gather records and information of the Heian era jujutsushi, Satoru was given the odd sense that perhaps cycles could never truly be broken. Those in the past were obsessed with predicting the future, trying to control the course of their lives; those in the future could not stop looking back in the past, fascinated by their origins. But the disappearance of cursed energy meant that the rules of Tengen’s barrier and fate itself could no longer bind former jujutsushi, meant that even if cycles persisted, they changed and warped and adapted the same way nature did, with equal inclinations toward order and chaos, balance and entropy and beyond that, there was always the ultimate force of choice. Perhaps Megumi’s perspective was the right one after all – simply, they were going to live, wake up morning after morning even if they did nothing, work, eat, and shit, and then go back to sleep before getting up to do it all again. As time passed they would forget some things and get used to others, and just like that, a day would become a week, would become a month and then a year. Maybe there would be a record of him too, in the future, the man who almost set the destruction of the jujutsu world in motion, a man who they called the Strongest, and they would uncover the cup that Megumi always served coffee to him in, they would peer through the cracked lenses of his sunglasses, find the wrappers and packaging paper of his favorite snacks tucked away in forgotten corners. Left behind, but one day, found again.

For once in his life, Satoru had decided to follow the path of a cycle to see where it would lead him, returning to his childhood studies, the little wobbly sketches and marginalia he’d scribbled into his hard copies, the originals long scanned to digital archives. Following the estate’s treasures to the skies, installing a telescope up on a lookout on the roof, he began to research and learn what he had never bothered to before, the old onmyoudou that most had considered unequal to the modern understanding of cursed techniques, outdated and too spiritual, not accounting for the actual ways in which cursed spirits proliferated and were exorcised, the ways that could become warped through the lens of people’s belief and become curses. But in the place of modern jujutsu, Satoru found that old-style divination still set those in the Diet at ease, attuned as they were to state rituals, superstition, the waxing and waning of the moon. Onymoudou was alive in well in new-age spiritualisms, in morning astrology programs, in the practitioners that specialized in fortune telling for babies, in designating fortuitous dates for marriage, for all sorts of means and methods that gave others more confidence in their future, searching for some kind of stability in an oft uncertain world. And Satoru liked the idea that he could plumb the stars and fit a framework around his world, had always wanted to be able to cast his own fortunes and map the histories that had yet to be written, identify the stories that would be challenged, and create prophecies ripe for the breaking. Continuing to teach a way of evaluating the world, one divination, one reading at a time.

Not everyone could be like Megumi, who created his own scaffolding as he went. He phrased things in a very cut-and-dry way, but he liked to get involved, put in the hard work and see rewards, be competent and confident in what he did. Work could be an end in and of itself for him, in its sense of progression. Perhaps he started with practicing latte art and distinguishing the many espresso drinks, but that quickly grew to helping manage the second, third, fourth coffee carts, the pop-ups at events as the city and its wards recovered, assisting in opening the brick and mortar, training to become a Q grader, and along the way, earning accolades in the World Brewers Cup and Japan Barista Championship.

The decision for them both to break away and go independent had been simple. Megumi had been thinking of going his own way for quite some time, wanting to cultivate his own interests and well known enough by then in the coffee community to have a bit of a following. Having opened up a branding and design outfit with her old friend Saori, Nobara had been encouraging and goading him behind the scenes, playing with concepts that had riffed off the symbols that had used to accompany his shikigami, who lived on in little icon sketches that could technically adorn coffee cups and easily become attractive merchandise. Satoru had also managed to shepherd along a partial decommissioning of the jujutsu world – after the first few years of complete stability and not even a hint of the return of cursed spirits whatsoever, the clans and freelancers had relented and instead turned their attentions into becoming more of a cultural preservation and anthropological committee, weaving the histories and findings of different clans together to built a more complete timeline of the growth, development, and history of jujutsu. It was something that had only become possible with the collapse of jujutsu infrastructure; much of the information would have been jealously hoarded previously, and some of it still was, but few jujutsu could afford not to move on with livelihoods, families, and futures at stake. At that point, he had been absolutely ready to abandon everything and leave, and he had his own set of devoted clients through his work with the Diet and as a jujutsushi-turned-diviner, who both understood the workings and limitations of high-class society, and knew how to tell his client exactly what they wanted to hear.

Shouko, putting her ill-gotten medical license to good use at a family clinic in Kyoto not too far from the mixed arts dojo that had been jointly set up by Kusakabe and Toudou, had been the one to first bring it up on a video call during her lunch break. “Just set up your own shop,” she’d said, sighing. The energy separation had done wonders for her health, the decline of stress enabling her to finally quit her chain-smoking habits, eyebags reduced to the barest hint of blue beneath her eyes, an everlasting reminder of her time at Jujutsu Tech. “You and Megumi combined have more than enough money to lease space in the city. Find a place and fix it up. Can’t be that hard.”

By then, Megumi, Yuuji, and occasionally Tsumiki, had been the only ones still staying at the estate. Tsumiki had been abroad that year for her masters in veterinary sciences, while Yuuji had preferred to remain among familiar faces during his recovery. He’d valued both Satoru and Megumi’s company as he sorted things out, appreciating the additional input and context they could give him with their additional experience in the jujutsu world, helping him make sense of the phenomena that had so confused him toward the last stages of the Culling Game. Eventually, it had even been a bit of a boon for him to be able to talk to Megumi directly about Sukuna, his mannerisms and opinions, his contradictions and confusions. He’d been at the table when Satoru put forward his proposition of opening a joint storefront, a combined coffee takeout window with a small, rounded outdoor seating area, and a small, curated shop for Satoru’s divination and spiritual advisory business, sure to host big names from the monied and powerful part of society, which in turn would benefit from having a little extra high quality service from the conjoined coffee operation. As Megumi and Satoru clashed over design, operations, acoustics, and décor, he’d been a helpful outside voice. Working as a paralegal for a defense lawyer he’d met during the Culling Games, one of Yuuji’s charm victims, as Satoru liked to say, he didn’t know much about building codes and local planning law, but his boss had had enough connections at city hall to give them good contacts to consult through permitting. The official opening had been nondescript and casual, since asking friends in Kyoto to come for such a short time had seemed unreasonable, though Satoru had managed to badger a good number of the former teachers to drop by for a weekend, and to help sift through some of the recent archival research. It was more difficult to reach friends like Maki, constantly traveling around Japan with Tsukumo Yuki, the both of them involved with each other and also Nobara and Saori in some incomprehensible configuration that had Megumi sighing and shrugging his way out of any related conversation, patting Satoru casually on the cheek and laying a soft peck on his jaw.

Satoru supposes he and Megumi have no room to say anything, with their relationship being what it is. Wholly amorphous and undefined, an exchange of subdued and frequently veiled, though genuine affection, the two of them had grown parallel to each other long enough to begin converging. Megumi’s decision to stay in the estate, to support Satoru, and Satoru’s own intention to let Megumi grow in what direction he wished, had led them closer together. That watermelon summer led to watching fireworks together, closer, voluntary involvement in each other’s clan matters, many more early morning discussions, and the slow uncoiling of touch, the meeting of stares in a different way, falling into the stretch of gravity between them in a manner different from anytime before. Holding Megumi’s hand, kissing his forehead, catching him early and sending him off at the door like a newlywed, the step into more nebulous, affectionate territory has not lost any of its novelty or potency.

Slate blue with the glinting metallic lines of constellations painted all along its face, the shop interior is black on Megumi’s side, the shikigami’s symbols painted in red on the back wall, each shikigami name boasting a corresponding specialty drink, along with the typical espresso and drip coffees. Satoru’s side alternates between a light grey, baby blue, and eggshell white, better to display tasteful curios and knick-knacks, a cross between a fanciful gift shop and astrology-oriented divination shop, star charts plastered all along one wall, cosmology books aligned catty corner to the rest. Tucked into an alleyway just off busy streets, Megumi makes brisk, respectable business as a so-called hidden gem of Tokyo, drawing customers into the shop as they wait, while the VIPs make their discreet way into the backroom of the shop through a backdoor, a narrow, nondescript wooden gate located on the residential backstreets, opening to a quaint, serene, stone path that takes them right up to back of the shop. It’s enough business to overwhelm the two of them a little bit, but they would never have it any other way – they aren’t the type to stay still and wait for happiness to find them.

By the time Satoru hustles up the street, whistling while spinning the storekeys around his index finger, Megumi is already in place at his café window, a distinctive, unruly mess of thick, black hair hovering in front of the espresso machine, the appliance hissing and clanking away, steam rising as he froths milk. He catches Satoru’s eye when he turns, face made rosy and golden in turns by the early morning light, his stern expression gentling into a small grin.

“You’re early,” he says, and Satoru leans against the counter to watch the graceful rise and fall of Megumi’s hand as he lays down stripes of milk, and it might just be Satoru’s romantic’s soul but the rosette drawn into his drink looks more heart-shaped than normal. “That’s rare.”

“Maybe I just missed you,” Satoru says, lacing their hands together. “Or maybe I just want my souvenir. You didn’t forget about me, did you, Megumin?”

“Satoru-san,” Megumi says in warning, and Satoru loves it when he does that, so stern and proper sounding when he’s anything but underneath; he’s never lost his rough-and-tumble, never forgotten his delinquent’s disrespect. And yet, he still addresses Satoru with the formality of a long-married spouse. Satoru doesn’t think marriage is in the cards for them, not when letting their relationship grow on its own has always served them just fine, but it’s the closeness that tickles him, makes his heart swell in a way he hopes that Megumi can feel too. And maybe he does, because he lays his hand on Satoru’s chin so he can tilt his head properly to drop a chaste, but thorough greeting kiss there, bitter with the taste of the test shot Megumi must have drunk while calibrating the machines for the day.

“Megumi,” he says in return, feeling his skin heat up under Megumi’s hands, feeling something close to the contentment he’d once found so uncertain, so elusive. There is only one coat rack in the shop, where their jackets hand side-by-side. The mug that rests on the counter is one that Megumi uses exclusively for him. Megumi absolutely didn’t forget about his souvenir because he never has on any of his solo trips, will get him a pack of his favorite candy from a conbini if there’s nothing special around. He doesn’t need to plan or scheme anymore, doesn’t need fortunes or divination to make sure things go right. He knows this future will be glorious.