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Chapter Text

You nudged both sides of the casement window open and the Japanese spring opened before you. You’d admired it a thousand times since settling in this country but never managed to tire of it. The rustle of lush foliage, variegated in all shades of green, caressed your eardrums. Your olfactory senses were just as eagerly massaged by the sweet scent of blossoming sakura trees, so plentiful and coruscating at this wing of the clinic, like a great mountain of pink tourmaline crushed and disseminated for your visual pleasure.

You whipped around and made for the door of your office. The dark purple of your scrubs and the rich caramel of your skin sharply contrasted the sterile pallor of this tiny but welcoming countryside clinic.

Just before twisting the doorknob to invite today’s first patients in, most of whom you knew by name from years of genial doctor-patient relationship, you tucked your wavy strands behind your ears and lowered your clear black-rimmed glasses down over your eyes. You’d curled your fingers around the knob, but here remembered one last detail you’d almost missed: your doctor’s name badge.

With that now affixed to the buxom swell of your chest, you opened the door of your office and saw several familiar and some new faces in the waiting room. You walked on over to the receptionist, a spry lady and a long time friend.

“Good morning, Junko-san!”

“Morning, (y/n) sensei! Here you go – the list of today’s appointments,” she extended you a crisp sheet of paper with names, which you accepted, appraising how your day would go.

“Oh, and I just couldn’t wait to tell you all morning!” Junko-san chirped, her obvious excitement infecting you with a smile of your own. “My neighbour’s daughter, Sakiko – a lovely girl, big smile – opened a dessert shop in the town square last weekend! I got these from her fresh this morning,” she extracted a neat decorative box from behind the receptionist’s counter.

“Oh, how pretty! Are these mochi?” you asked, reaching for the colourful treats.

“Gyuhi,” she corrected you with wholesome delight. “Much softer than mochi. You won’t find them in every dessert place.”

You put one of the chubby little treats in your mouth and hummed in unabridged enjoyment at how smoothly it melted on your tongue, its sweetness unfurling along with a cavalcade of additional flavours Sakiko infused it with.

“Mmm! I’ll have to visit her shop on my way back from the home visit.”

“Ah, another home visit, sensei?” Junko-san clucked in her motherly concern. “You’ll tire yourself out like this! Let them come to the clinic! Tell me, who is it this time?”

“It’s Mrs Tanaka,” you admitted. “But you know how it is. She really can’t make it to the clinic by herself. And her children are all grown up and aren’t around to drive her anymore...”

“I know, I know, sensei. You and your big heart,” Junko-san waved a dismissive hand, though her fond smile didn’t escape your keen sight.

You turned towards the patients and silently read the first name on the list of today’s appointments, quirking a dark brow at it.

“Nomura-san, I’m ready for you now!” you called out.

Seeing a diminutive old lady stir in her chair and start to get up, a walking stick in her hand and her eyes pinched closed – you approached and took her around the shoulders to support her to your office.

“How are you today, Nomura-san? I thought Araki sensei was your doctor?”

“Oh yes, he was,” she agreed, her voice quavering with old age and tugging at your heartstrings. “But I was told he’s on vacation and unfortunately I couldn’t wait. My eyes, you see…”

“Right here, Nomura-san,” you guided her little frame through the door to your office and helped her to a seat. “Now please tell me about your eyes.”

“Well, sensei, my eyesight hasn’t been so good in the last two years. Araki sensei has been helping me. He’s prescribed me some supplements and medicines – on the more expensive side of course, seeing as they’re imported… But thankfully, the inheritance my dear husband Hiroshi left me is big support. Araki sensei had also adjusted my diet to slow down the regression of my sight…”

You nodded emphatically, though you were more than certain by now that she couldn’t see you.

“…And they’ve been helping, indeed,” she continued. “Araki sensei is a wonderful doctor, bless him! But recently, a few days ago actually, my eyes have started to hurt more and I don’t know what to do. I can hardly see anymore. It’s as if everything I’ve been doing to help them has suddenly stopped working…”

Her voice grew shaky and unstable as she carried on her narrative. It’s not that she could hardly see – the poor thing couldn’t see at all.

Who would curse an old lady? you asked yourself, your latent anger pressing your smiling lips tight. Though the clue lay in her loquaciousness, you knew. Money. Inheritance from her late husband. Her neat clothes made up of smooth and warm fabrics, genuine leather bag and trim shoes – further corroborated it. A jealous neighbour, perhaps…?

“Don’t worry, Nomura-san,” you placed an emphatic hand on the poor woman’s little shoulder, “we will help you.”

“Thank you, sensei,” she smiled through trembling lips. “Thank you.”

You stood up from your chair and walked over to the door of your office. Your face blank and unreadable, you softly shut it so the rest of the patients in the hall and even Junko-san weren’t able to see in.

You came back to the old woman, your prominent shadow floating across the ivory floor. You stood in front of the old woman’s pursed and hopeful face.

Slowly, near methodically, your hand lifted from beside the curve of your hips to the frame of your glasses. Carefully you pulled them out of your wavy hair and off your face entirely. The only sounds in the room were the impersonal ticking of the clock hand and Nomura-san’s expectant breathing.

You bent down, down, and down – until you were face to face with Nomura-san. But the potent hazel of your eyes wasn’t at all directed at the old lady. After all, there was something – dead, yet living and breathing – between you and her.

You looked into its sinister bulging eyes, with its reptilian-cut pupils – and it looked at you. There was always this curious titillation in seeing the initial surprise of these cursed spirits when they realised that they weren’t invisible; when they were dragged into the light. Even this little one panicked a tad, rashly sticking and unsticking its misshapen paws onto Nomura-san’s temples. Its freakish body, which now pulsed rapidly too, had already stuck too far onto her eyes, its cursed body having visibly fused with her wrinkled eyelids.

It wasn’t a powerful curse. Grade 3 at best. But it was an odd phenomenon that some ordinary townsperson could curse an old woman with a Grade 3. Though that wouldn’t be the first oddity that you’d been noticing in this remote town recently...

The curse’s agitation on top of Nomura-san’s face told you that it didn’t know what you would do next. But you did.

“You don’t belong here,” you spelled out, voice low, clear and death-dealing. Physically touching it wasn’t necessary – your cursed technique oozed from the syllables of your incantation and gradually throttled the teetering curse into plain non-existence.

“What do you mean?” Nomura-san stirred with an almost hurt expression, assuming you had spoken to her. “I’m here because of my eyes, sensei, I told you. My eye…”

Here the old woman opened her squinting eyes to reveal a clear pair of black irises. No blur, no smokiness, no fog obstructed them. She inhaled with a shocked shudder.

“My…” she broke out in a radiant wellspring of a smile and amazed tears glistened down her cheeks, without her even noticing perhaps, “…how beautiful you are!”

Upon recovering her eyesight after two long years, you’d expected the poor old woman to say anything but this. Her words surprised you and you blinked, your brows knitting in confusion. But Nomura-san’s amazement didn’t cede, didn’t fade. She was taking in your face, the caramel glow of your skin, the soft curl of your hair, her timid old fingers tracing your features with arrant appreciation.

“You’re not from here,” she said at last, a vague proclamation that puzzled you further. But then you understood the meaning of her words. Your fingers inadvertently lifted to your lips.

Your dialect. You sometimes forgot how obviously yours differed from the one spoken here in the outskirts.

“Oh yes, Nomura-san,” you smiled, still eye-level with the elderly woman. “I lived some years in Tokyo before coming here…”

She shook her head gently, her smile even gentler. “That’s not what I mean, sensei.”

Following a moment of rumination, you realised. Ah. She meant your skin shade, your eye colour, your unorthodox appearance. In other words, a foreigner.

Vexation with such things wasn’t your style, though a pinprick of disappointment didn’t fail to puncture your heart, as you diverted your thoughts to your other patients, refocusing the lens of your professionalism.

Nomura-san’s black eyes sought and trapped yours like wells of wisdom – which were now clear, following your exorcism.

“If you hadn’t healed my eyes, sensei, I would’ve missed so many beautiful things in this world, including you,” she said. “Thank you and may God take you under his wing and protect you always.”

Your lips parted in nonplus. Looking at the old woman’s tender-hearted face and hearing the guilelessness of her voice, you were reminded of why it was that you’d chosen to be a doctor and why, most of all, you exorcised cursed spirits to help patients with their ills.

Her words made you ponder something, though. Ever since you first saw Nomura-san today, you’d observed not a single article of religious paraphernalia on her. So you wondered which ‘God’ it was that she was entrusting you to…

“Odaijini, Nomura-san,” you began to help the grateful woman off the chair to guide her out of your office and invite the next patient in – when a sudden tremor shook the entire building. Medicine vials rattled on the shelves and you heard the muffled commotion of people in the waiting room.

“Oh gosh, an earthquake!” Nomura-san cried to the rattling ceiling, her fearful body aflutter in your protective arms.

You led the way toward the door. By the time you’d opened it, the tremors died down and the building was as if it’d never happened, save for the fraught faces of the patients and Junko’s tense smile greeting you.

She took Nomura-san from your hands. “Here, honey, let me help you out. It’s happened again, sensei! I’d wager we’re looking at 4.7, just like last time,” she called out behind her as she led the old woman to the front doors of the clinic.

“That was no earthquake…” you murmured to no one in particular, as you turned away from Junko and stared in a very specific direction.

The northern wall of the building.

It was plain white. There was nothing on it. But it was from the north, far out from the clinic grounds, that that outburst of cursed energy just now had come, rattling and shaking the building with its sheer force. It was the same brand of cursed energy as the ‘last time’ Junko was referring to – it was incisive, forceful, eclipsing all others you’d experienced before.

You had wondered if it was a cursed spirit that emitted such enormous output. But you knew from experience that that wasn’t it. It could be a special grade, sure, but special grade or not – curses’ output is always chaotic, without shape or structure or deliberate design.

The burst just now was calculated, targeted. Refined. It was a gale bearing an unmistakeably human signature.

But you knew for certain that that wasn’t a curse user either. It couldn’t be. Curse users rarely exploded their cursed energy so recklessly – their creed was to be clandestine. Hounded by the uniformed sorcerers of the Jujutsu Tech, AKA the self-proclaimed authority on jujutsu – curse users had to keep themselves well hidden in order to survive. So they were never this overt, this self-assured, or this flashy in their use of jujutsu.

Which meant only one thing: that that potent cursed energy just now, so refined and decisive, like the carefully pre-measured injection of snake venom – methodical, rapid and aggressive in its unfurling and poisoning of blood and melting of tissues – belonged to none other than a jujutsu sorcerer. An extremely powerful and confident jujutsu sorcerer.

And who were you – as a foreigner, an outsider whose powers awakened only a few years ago, leading you to become a self-taught wielder of cursed energy who never even tried to surrender herself to the strict authority, esteemed knowledge, and potential disposal by the Jujutsu Tech?

You exhaled a tense breath and walked back to your office, passing the rows of patients – each one of them with a grotesque body of a curse coiled around their heads, necks, bellies, and arms – curses foul and orgiastic in their cursed glee, like overgrown maggots twisting in the mud – and which you would exorcise by your own authority and your own arbitrary decree, just as you had done day in and day out for the past several years…

You were a curse user.




Many to counsel. Many to treat. Many to exorcise.

The job was gratifying, though the lunch break was even more so.

Junko-san was tidying her station in order to head out to the staff kitchen.

“Home visit, (y/n) sensei?” she called out as you passed her by.

“Yes. It’s Mrs Tanaka,” you confirmed with a smile, adjusting your glasses and slinging your doctor’s bag over your shoulder.

Junko shook her head, good-natured.

“Well, keep skipping lunch because of patients and I’ll have to pay home visits to you, sensei!”

You laughed out of the front doors, chummy and melodic, waving the back of your hand to Junko.


Your trainers pressed one after the other onto the sidewalk adjoining the clinic, footfalls of rhythmic purpose. Your fingers reached into the pocket of your dark pants, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. You lodged one in between the plushes of your lips, struck the lighter, and the end of your cigarette sizzled with the release of smoke.

You took a long drag of it as you trod the familiar neighbourhood. A hit of tobacco roiled in your lungs, unfurled across your bloodstream, and you felt your nerves begin to untwist.

So, a jujutsu sorcerer appeared around these parts, huh? Why? You had no idea. For how long? You knew not.

But there were things you did know – things about yourself. And that was that you had been very thorough in keeping a low profile. Caution was key, so you’d made absolutely sure to never make any significant waves to fall into Jujutsu Tech’s “radar”. You never crossed paths with uniformed sorcerers either, containing your interactions to a few peaceful curse users at most, who taught you the ropes here and there. Plus, as soon as your cursed powers had manifested, plunging you head-first into the mysterious world of jujutsu, you had packed up your bags, along with your medical career ambitions, and moved from the bustling metropolis of Tokyo to this sparsely-populated, bucolical town.

As stated – caution was key.

Your clinic was located on the very edge of the town, which in itself was bordered by the lush verdure of Japan’s countryside. Having now reached the very edge of the residential areas, you swerved from the sidewalk into the density of woods.

A curious sight it was – a doctor, in full scrubs, her medical bag on her shoulder – wading through tall grass and overhangs of trees, brushing aside with one hand their branches and with another – bringing her billowing cigarette to her lips. But a home visit was a home visit – it had to be done. Poor old Tanaka-san needed you and you were the only one who could treat her.

You left the town behind you. The clinic’s building was no longer visible and the path you took – untraceable. Only the almost burned out length of your cigarette indicated the duration of your trek, as you finally came out to a clearing in the forest.

You came to a standstill. The afternoon sun was high, blossoming dews of sweat on your temples. You leaned to set your bag on the ground by your foot.

“How are you today, Tanaka-san?” you asked with an inscrutable smile, seemingly of no one in particular.

But the moment you spoke, an explosive roar distorted space and vibrated soil. It started out as the belch of a giant about to swallow the Earth – before thinning to the screech of a million frenzied bobcats. You winced in irritation and took the cigarette off your lips, blowing the remnants of the smoke out and flicking the burned out stub into the grass.

“You sure are a loud one, Tanaka-san…” you remarked.

‘Tanaka-san’, or rather what you have been referring to as ‘Tanaka-san’ – looked nothing like the sick, frail old lady you’d positioned her as. In fact, the creature you were addressing didn’t resemble a human being at all.

Right in the centre of the large clearing, at the foot of which you stood – was a cursed spirit the size of a mammoth. Burly and mountainous, its mere shadow was oppressive. Yet its towering body was inconstant – it churned and pulsed with menacing cursed energy that was ready to be released, like nuclear matter being compressed inside an atomic bomb. As if to confirm this, the creature ground its teeth hungrily and thrashed violently, clawing and beating itself against something that was caging it in.

A Grade 2 cursed spirit of this size, freakishness and malice – could shred someone like you to pieces in a matter of seconds. And from the looks of it, it was dying to do just that. But you, seemingly a freak of a different nature, didn’t look even a tad afraid. Not even out of politeness.

“Sorry I had to lock you up like this,” you continued your conversational chitchat with the curse, as though over a warm cup of coffee with non-existent Mrs Tanaka. “But I needed a bit more time to study the structure of your cursed energy. And I can’t exactly leave you to prowl my nice little town on your own, killing all these lovely people I’ve made friends with, now can I?”

The curse didn’t seem to comprehend the meaning of your casually spoken address, beyond visibly burning up with greater and greater aggression, its killing instinct zeroing in on you and promising death.

You’d seen that look many times before. Many times – before you nullified their cursed energy and disintegrated their murderous lust into nothingness.

With an exhale you began approaching the curse, now stepping into the clearing proper. With only a few steps remaining between you and the curse, you stopped and raised your right hand in front of you. You placed it on the transparent outer wall of the Veil you’d set the day prior – the one that had been keeping the cursed creature caged.

Although this gritting and growling curse may not have been sentient the way we understand that concept, it still knew everything there was to know about cursed energy. After all, it was made up of it; it constituted its tissues and ruled its instincts. And thus it knew, just as you did, that you would be undoing your Veil shortly in order to exorcise it.

And in that split second between you undoing the Veil and striking it with your cursed technique – the curse had its golden chance to slaughter you first. And it deemed that split second more than sufficient.

Your gazes interlocked from the opposite sides of the Veil. You saw the merciless, vindictive fire in the curse’s eyes.

But unfortunately for it – the curse saw it in yours too.

Chapter Text

The very same forest looked different once the sun had set beyond its horizon. Its rural idyll had bled out. In the murk of night painting it now, the distinct and beautiful vegetation of the forest that was visible at daylight, was now swallowed by one long tract of darkness.

Amid this darkness, with a soft and easy rustle, moved a man. A predator in the night, he glided through the stygian wilderness as if it was his natural habitat. Leaves of perturbed trees susurrated not against him, but against the invisible chimera-like aura surrounding him. His stalking feet did not depress the soil, yet it seemed to bow to his approach all the same.

The small animals of the forest retreated into shadows. Even the elusive spirits inhabiting it cowered. For they knew, as every blade of grass knew, that the creature stepping through them was anomalous. Powerful beyond measure. Intelligent the way no living being on this planet had yet the right to be. And that, in the sinister combination of the two – he was unstoppable in his aims. Whatever he came to this uninhabited jungle to achieve – everything had to bend to his will, unfold before him, accommodate him – or die.

Gojo walked further into the heart of the forest, wading with ease through its high grass. Boughs brushed and scraped against the shell of his Infinity without him noticing, or caring. His eyes – you know, those eyes – which burned brighter than all lanterns put together, sought busily from behind their wrappings of white bandages.

From Gojo’s determined trajectory, it was becoming increasingly clear that he was aiming for a very specific spot inside this forest. He followed the path to it, his large hands in his pockets – weapons yet undrawn. His slim thighs moved steadily, his pearly hair oscillated, and his instincts sharpened as he approached a clearing.

It was a large circle of open land. No grass grew on it. No tree.

Gojo came to stand at the edge of it and ran his blindfolded sight over its expanse. Visibility was atrocious as even moonlight was stingy tonight, guttering feebly behind the clouds. But the sorcerer didn’t look inconvenienced by poor lighting one bit.

He took a deep breath, inhaling the unique history of this place. After a moment or two of Gojo’s extraordinary senses analysing that history, an ephemera of a smile flicked his mouth upward.

He moved from his spot and proceeded into the centre of the clearing with more surety, a spider moving to the core of its own web. Once at the centre, he leaned his head to look down pointedly at a spot beneath his leather shoes.

Here was, at some point today, the Grade 2 curse he was intending to exorcise. Since it was missing, it would make sense to almost any other sorcerer to look for it elsewhere in the area. Perhaps the curse was hiding behind a hill, or in a cave, or maybe it was even behind the nearest tree, with its head buried in the dirt like a frightened ostrich.

But that made zero sense to Gojo. Since his instincts, reinforced by his anomalous eyes – told him that the scent of the Grade 2’s cursed energy smelled deceased. He read in its scent its extreme readiness to attack, its once peaked killing intent, followed by its abrupt expiration, and now – its ineluctable decay. Even these few remnants of its cursed energy would evaporate into the wind soon enough like drying mould.

The curse was exorcised – this much was clear. Yet Gojo inhaled deeply a second time – and he did so with a curious lean of his head and an intrigued hum.

“Hmm.”

The olfactory feedback of his techniques returned him the same findings: curse was; curse was no more. No other cursed energy was detected. So did the curse spontaneously combust?

A chuckle teased Gojo’s long throat. Self-combusting curses would’ve been a nice little treat for jujutsu sorcerers – but it just wasn’t possible. Someone had to have exorcised it. But that someone, in this case, left no cursed residuals – and that went against the long-established exorcism formula.

Facing the entirety of the clearing once more, Gojo reached his hands behind his head and undid his bandages. They slackened and pooled around his neck, and the Six Eyes, now freed from their confines, got to work. Like bright blue atolls in the dark ocean of the night, they swept over everything from the clearing to the surrounding forest.

But alas – no traces, no visible signature.

“Hm. Clean,” Gojo frowned in thought, his mind already starting to paint a mental picture of the elusive jujutsu user.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. In no special hurry, Gojo answered it.

“Hey hey, Ijichi~” he greeted with a cheerful tone, though his expression of detached rumination was a deep contrast to his cheer.

A scratchy voice of Ijichi exclaimed from the phone, “Please don’t hey-hey me, Gojo-san! I’ve been calling you for the past 30 minutes!”

The white-maned sorcerer blinked, unperturbed by the manager’s distress, and circled around where he stood. His lambent blues were resuming their scan of the area.

“Oh yeah, bad signal out here. What’s up?” he said to the phone.

“Gojo-san, I am to tell you that a meeting of the higher-ups is being called,” Ijichi delivered importantly.

At this time the manager was hearing rustling sounds on the other end, as Gojo was stepping outside the clearing and into the grass.

“They can have their meeting, I don’t mind,” Gojo said benevolently. At which point Ijichi nearly slapped his own forehead in frustration.

“No, Gojo-san,” he did his best to keep his shaky voice level, and clarified, “they don’t need your permission – they need you.”

“And why is that?” Gojo asked, crouching down amongst the grass, long thighs spreading apart, eyes focused on something on the ground.

Ijichi gulped and lowered his voice conspiratorially.

“Apparently Master Tengen has warned of a new threat among curse users.”

At the mention of curse users, Gojo felt a twinge of irritation, because:

A) Curse users hated him from the day he was born, so his existence and theirs were antithetical by nature;
B) Due to that, he had spent his whole life having to wade off their attacks until eventually he had to resort to terrorising them into submission; and
C) His own best friend had…

His irritation got swept away within an instant when he picked something up from among the roots of the dense grass. He brought it up between his two long fingers. It was a burned out stub of a cigarette.

“Clean. Yet hedonistic…” he commented absentmindedly, confusing Ijichi on the other end.

“Excuse me, Gojo-san?”

“What’s the threat exactly that got Tengen all sweaty?” Gojo asked him whilst rotating the nicotinous clue before his eyes.

Ijichi answered, “A new curse user with the ability to nullify all cursed energy, including their own.”

Gojo’s eyes sparked wide with hunger at this piece of intel.

“No. Not all…” he murmured.

“Gojo-san?” perplexed Ijichi asked.

“I’ll be there,” the sorcerer said abruptly and hung up before the manager could say another word.

As soon as he hung up, Gojo brought the cigarette to the tip of his nose and smiled almost instantly.

Weaved into the smell of the forest soil and the potent kick of tobacco, there was also the faint signature of your cursed energy – embedded in the molecules of your saliva and imprinted on the cigarette by your lips.

Gojo’s brain dissected and dismantled the fibres of your cursed energy and etched it forever into his own mind – and only then did he discard the stub and retie his bandages.

Oh you were clean in your work, he’d give you that.

You were indeed meticulous in nullifying your cursed energy and erasing all traces of it from your sites of jujutsu activity. But your smoking habit suggested you were a hedonist, a pleasure seeker, no matter the risks. And it was ultimately your preference for pleasure over complete security that revealed you to him. If it weren’t for that, you may have evaded him yet…

Gojo walked away from the clearing with a spectral smile.

This mystery curse user who could nullify any cursed energy at will and who exorcised his curse for him before vanishing to thin air – had struck the match of his curiosity. And although a kindling for now, with Gojo, such curiosity had the potential to turn into a bonfire of obsession.

You were a mouse. And the big white cat was on your scent.





“Take care,” you saw a pregnant mother out of your office with a sunny smile.

“Thank you, sensei,” she smiled back at you, cradling her hand to her belly, heading towards the doors.

“Who’s next, Junko-san?” you approached her station, peering at her through your glasses.

“Oh, well, (y/n) sensei… There’s this little boy who came in asking to see a doctor.”

“A little boy?” you turned to look at the patients’ waiting room. “Alone?”

“Yes, alone,” Junko said worriedly. “That’s the issue. I tried asking him about his parents or relatives, but he wouldn’t tell me. He said only that he’d like to see a doctor…”

You spotted a little boy, about 10 years old, sitting by himself on one of the chairs in the waiting room. He was skinnier than most kids his age. His head was hung, forlorn expression unhidden on his youthful face.

“Is he hurt?” you asked Junko without taking him out of your sight.

“No. We checked him for any injuries, or fever. He’s suffering from some malnutrition, but no other ailments, sensei.”

“Okay. Thank you, Junko-san.”

You walked over to the little boy and leaned to his eye level.

“Hello. Are you alright?”

The boy blinked, as if awakening from slumber that wasn’t restful at all.

“I need to see a doctor,” he said.

You smiled at him.

“I am a doctor. Come on,” you beckoned him off the chair and into your office.

Shutting the door behind the both of you, you sat before him, still wearing some of your smile to help reassure the boy.

“What’s your name?” you prodded gently.

He swiped his nose with little spindly fingers and muttered to the floor, “Akio.”

“Akio, I’m (y/n) sensei. Does it hurt anywhere?”

The boy shook his head vehemently, eyes still tacked to the floor despite your attempts to seek out his eye contact.

“Can you tell me why you’re looking for a doctor?” you asked softly.

Akio’s countenance visibly darkened. You could sense the gravity of his answer in your bones.

Suddenly he whipped his head up and the look on his face punched you right in the gut. Suffering, misery, despair. He had seen things – things a child must never see.

“It’s for grandpa!” he cried. “He needs help, (y/n)-san! He’s not himself! He…”

Akio’s tough composure, which he had no doubt steeled as hard as he could before stepping through the doors of the clinic – now unravelled like a club of yarn and he broke into tears.

You wasted no time. You hugged his tiny frame to your much bigger body and enveloped him within your warmth. He sobbed uncontrollably into your soft wide chest, his little hands grabbing fistfuls of your scrubs.

In that profound moment, as tears welled in your own eyes too, you felt it. The poor boy was smeared in cursed energy. It stuck to him like sticky tar. It wasn’t his, no; he was just an ordinary 10-year old boy. It was his grandpa’s – or whatever was inhabiting his grandpa’s body now.

As Akio continued to weep in your embrace, you used this opportunity to scrape those vile traces of cursed energy off of his little body and quash them with your Nullification. You noticed how the density of those residuals resembled Grade 1. Not good…

Akio wouldn’t have noticed the cursed marks disappearing off of his body – he wasn’t even aware they were there – yet his crying subsided, as no doubt the clouds of depression and despair that had been plaguing him ever since his grandpa changed – have now began to dissipate above his little black head of hair.

He sniffled and lifted his face from your chest. He opened his eyes, blinked, and noticed the wet imprint of his own crying face on your scrubs.

“Sorry,” he sniffled again and glanced at you apologetically, hurriedly wiping his tears and snot with the backs of his hands.

“That’s alright, Akio,” you assured him with a squeeze of his shoulders and a tender smile. “I’ll take care of your grandpa. I promise.”

 

Over in the reception hall, you entrusted Akio into Junko’s caring hands. She immediately took him to the staff kitchen to give him hot tea and a warm meal, while you returned to your other patients.

Many to counsel. Many to treat. Many to exorcise. But your mind through all of it was on one thing and one thing only: Akio and the wicked curse that had stolen his grandfather from him.

So you made a decision – despite all of the risks involved, despite having intended to lay low for a while until you were absolutely sure that the flashy sorcerer from Jujutsu Tech had left these lands for good.

Jujutsu sorcerer be damned, you had a job to do and a responsibility as a doctor.

Chapter Text

The cover of night. That was when you chose to strike.

Grade 1 curses weren’t your favourites to take on – they were far more sinister by nature and a lot more cunning. And there was also the jujutsu sorcerer whose explosive cursed energy shook the clinic the other day. You hadn’t felt anything like that in recent days, so you hoped the sorcerer had completed their mission and left. In the worst-case scenario, if they still remained, you would do your best to operate with stealth. And finally, if push came to shove, you and them had similar goals anyways: the exorcising of malevolent cursed spirits. So they would either have to assist you – or stay the fuck out of your way.

You’d changed out of your scrubs into a more functional pair of pants and a long-sleeve shirt. You also removed your glasses and pulled your hair up in a tight bun. On top of it all you’d donned a black cotton muffler to cover half of your face. You did somewhat resemble a ninja with this look, but believe me, right now you would much rather be a ninja, than a jujutsu user who had to face a supernatural being which couldn’t be harmed with any number of knives or shurikens…

You stalked through the woods in the dead of the night toward where the boy said his house was. Just as Akio said, his home was located further away from the more populated parts of the town and deeper in the heart of the woods. Your senses on high alert, you neared the location, your feet rustling grass and breaking small shoots. Several times you’d thought about what you would do when you came face to face with the curse, and every single time the conclusion you came to was that: you could not kill him.

From what Akio told you, it sounded like the curse actually inhabited his grandpa’s body. Body-snatching – a cunning manoeuvre, indeed. It gave the curse the protection it needed, since exorcising it would be impossible while it was still in the old man’s body. You would need to drive it out – and to do that, you would have to trap it inside your Veil, just like you did with that mammoth Grade 2 before. What’s more, you would need to be fast – faster than the curse.

Your breathing quickened when you spotted Akio’s home among scraggly, bent-out trees and tall, unkempt grass. Though ‘home’ was a rich word for it – it was nothing more than a rundown shack, isolated and ominous. The lack of any visible path to the shack indicated just how long ago Akio’s grandfather must have gone senile and became incapable of taking care of either his grandson or their shared home.

The light in the shack suddenly switched on and you stopped.

Shit!

The curse knew you were here. Well, no more sneaking around, then.

With your hands balling and unballing into fists, you treaded towards the side of the shack where the door was wide open as if inviting you in, telling you to come closer. The dirty-yellow lit interior of the shack began to come into view.

At last, with your body hair standing on end and your heart hammering wildly, you saw Akio’s beloved ojiichan seated alone on a chair in the middle of the empty room. He appeared like any other old man his age – shrivelled, doddery, feeble. He looked to be dozing off, his chin inclined on his shoulder, eyes closed peacefully. Premonition rapped at your instincts and you hurriedly raised two fingers before your lips to spell out the rune for expanding your Veil over him. You began pronouncing the necessary words.

“Yami yori idete…”

But you almost choked on them when you saw that something was climbing from the old man’s shoulders. Dirty-grey, the climbing things were rising and rising without stopping, to become gigantic pereiopods, like oversized legs of a crustacean. One-two, three-four, five-six, seven-eight, nine-ten – ten of them towered over the old man, five on each side of his skinny old shoulders. The jagged points of the monstrous appendages began to strain towards you with unnatural creaks, like joints breaking – while the old man’s neck started to jerk, turning forcefully in your direction as well. You held your breath as your feet keened to turn back and run, but you nailed them to the ground through sheer resolve, your mouth a tense grimace, and began incanting frantically:

“Yami yori idete, yami yori kuroku, sono kegare o–”

“Wait.”

You froze and snapped your eyes to the old man’s face. He spoke!

No, you realised quickly, it was the curse that spoke. With a clenched jaw and hatred blazing in you, you saw one of the pereiopods with a sharp pincer-claw at the end of it – being held to the old man’s neck, while he himself had his eyes wide open now – a toxic purple glow in them – staring directly at you. You understood that you were holding the warning gaze of the curse. Its open pincer was dangerously close to the old man’s neck – a promise to kill him, should you try to put your Veil.

But the old man was somewhere in there. You were certain of it. It was proved all the more by the fact that the curse still held him hostage.

In this armistice, this calm before the storm, in which you had to quickly considering your limited options – you and the curse were sizing each other up. But what neither you nor the curse knew was that a third pair of eyes was sizing you both up from the crest of a nearby hill.

Gojo, in his dark uniform that blended with the shadows that surrounded him, was standing – hands in pockets, Six Eyes bandaged – and watching your face-off with the Grade 1 curse with riveted attention.

“What will you do?” he asked, his lips nearly dancing with entertainment. “What will you do, huh?”

Well, what you did was something not even the curse expected.

You suddenly bolted to it with the crackling speed it had yet to witness. Its unoccupied pincers began darting to you in panic one by one. Their krrscht, krrscht snapping sound was sharp and dangerous by your ears as they missed you by a hairbreadth. You dodged them left, then right, then left again. Fast, fast, fast – the pincer at the old man’s neck was coming within your reach! The curse knew this too so the pincer was tightening round his neck and the old man’s tongue was lolling out like that of an already severed head.

Wasting not a second, you flattened your four fingers together. And with a tensed forearm, you slashed with your fingers to the base of the pincer with all of your might.

Hard, fast. It worked.

The pincer clanged loudly to the wooden floor and filthy blood oozed from the curse’s severed appendage.

The technique you’d recently developed – condensing and concentrating your Nullification power into a blade-like form within your four fingers in order to slash at entities made up of cursed energy, but which you hadn’t had the chance to train to maturity – was something you didn’t want to rely on during such a risky fight. But what choice did you have now?

The curse was petrified; it didn’t understand how you did what you did. But Gojo, who had been watching what you just did with the flame of fascination in his eyes – was getting an inkling…

You rechanneled your Nullification power into your fingers with fresh hope. If your technique was able to cut through the curse’s carapace, then you had a chance. You had to get rid of all those pincers and incapacitate the curse for at least a little while, so that you could trap it inside your Veil.

In haste you rounded the curse to get to its back and raised your invisible blade above your head in readiness to slash at the base of the pereiopods – but here you froze wide-eyed at the sight of the old man’s back.

Fused! The old man’s flesh, realgar and veined – and the monstrous appendages had become one. They had grown like thick boughs of a tree from his spinal cord, disfiguring his skin and flesh in the process. And from the blood pulsing from the old man’s body into the pereiopods, it was clear that the curse was using his life resources for its own sustenance. If you cut them off, the old man would bleed to death.

Your moment of hesitation was an open invitation. You heard a violent cracking sound above you and looked up just in time to see all of the appendages twist back in unnatural convulsions, until all of the remaining pincers were aiming directly at you.

Dread gripped you. It was impossible to cut them all. And it was too late to dodge. All of your senses recalibrated into defence.

Although your self-taught defence technique was in its infancy as well, right now you crouched down and hardened your cursed energy around you in as hard a shell as you could muster. But even with this, you knew: injury was unavoidable. What you hoped to avoid was death.

The pincers rose high above you, like vipers ready to strike, and rained down on you in an instant and deadly shellfire. You clenched your eyes to override fear, preparing for the blow, and vowing to yourself that you would land a final strike on the curse if you lived. No matter how weak or how injured – you would do it, you wouldn’t be stomped down, you would hold your word to Akio, you–

An ear splitting crash rippled the air. It splintered the whole shack. Its broken wooden planks crumbled down and you instinctively shielded your head with your arms. The explosive squall of sounds, tremors, dust, and force rained upon you – until you heard in the midst of it all a male voice.

“Need help?”

Breathing rabid and open-mouthed into your muffler, you slowly raised your head from the protective shielding of your arms, and looked up.

There was a man. A tall man. A tall man with a razor smirk.

He was standing grand, hands in the pockets of his dark jacket, as if not even bothered to use them, his hair was as white as the moon above, his eyes were wrapped in chalky bandages, and his left leg – his long as fuck left leg was bent and his foot was holding the armada of the curse’s pincers to the ground.

The curse was reeling and vibrating with anger from its soiled attack. But the man didn’t seem to notice, or care. His attention was pointedly on you, as was yours on him.

But here you noticed his left hand slip out of his pocket, his two fingers joined together and starting to point at the old man’s back – to the core of the pereiopods. From the tips of his fingers sparked a bright blue ball, rapidly growing like cobalt inferno, and you knew it was an attack he was about to fire.

Fuck!

You condensed your Nullifying power into your fingers in an instant, and pounced up to slash through his blue ball. It disintegrated in a flash from having its cursed energy sequence interrupted. The man stared at his hand in surprise.

His distraction allowed for the curse to break free from under his foot and launch at him with an infuriated howl, making you fear for the man’s life – but that wasn’t necessary. He recovered from his surprise quickly enough and turned away from you to face the curse.

Finally taking both of his hands out of his pockets, he gripped with them the bases of the curse's appendages – how large would one’s hands need to be to do that! His were, you saw, as he also raised one of his legs – this time, his right – and lodged his sole to the core of where the old man’s spine and the pereiopods were merged. The man then pushed at it with his foot, whilst pulling the appendages back with his hands – and you realised that he was literally trying to rip the appendages from the old man’s back using his sheer force.

Your breath trapped in your throat. Was that even physically possible? It couldn’t be. No way! How much physical strength would one need to…? But here the curse began to screech in pain from the mouth of the old man, its sound jarring and penetrating, and the appendages began to creak at their stem.

That creaking sound slapped you in the face and you remembered – you couldn’t let him rip those things off! You could not let him kill the old man!

You lunged up and punched the man’s hands away from the appendages with your fist. The curse slipped away. Whereas the man, shocked by your actions, frowned at you like you were a complete idiot.

He didn’t have time to file his complaint with you, though, because the curse wasted no time and attacked him again. The man parried its blows with ease and amazing agility for his stupendous height. You were in awe at the immense power his attacks packed – how he broke several of the curse’s appendages at the joints – until at last, with a high, rounding kick of his long leg, he aimed his foot right for the old man’s head to deliver the finishing blow.

Your own leg met his at the shin, stopping his kick mid-flight. The collision of your bone and his rippled pain through your entire leg, short of causing a fracture.

The sorcerer no longer appeared shocked by your interference, though. He only shook his head at you, as if telling you without words that what you did just now was a big mistake…

It was.

To the side of you the curse launched its decisive attack. A massive eruption of dense cursed energy aimed at you both. Fiery, loud, devastating, and stripping of flesh down to the bones – the curse's attack avalanched on the two of you. You ducked to the ground for cover, your teeth ground in primal fear.

Then….




Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

Silen–

Your heartbeat and breathing rattling in your ears, you slowly opened your eyes and looked up. But what you saw there did not fit your imagination. It altered one’s mind. It was a celestial sight.

Your breathing came out in cries of astonishment. Your kneecaps melted into jelly and you couldn’t get up beyond just staring wide-eyed at the picture above you.

The sorcerer was alive. Standing tall. Not a hair on him disturbed. Not a single injury to find.

Unnatural.

His two long fingers were banded together and raised by his side, slightly higher above his head. There, the curse’s nuclear attack of cursed energy was still raining down viciously – but striking and decimating neither the sorcerer, nor you. It was met with a force – a barrier – unbreakable and undeniable in that it wholly rejected the cursed energy’s entry inside the large bubble that you and the sorcerer were in. The angry sparks of the curse’s energy were flying off of that invisible barrier in all directions, like metal being welded endlessly, like a million suns exploding across the sky and trying to reach the earth and devastate its dwellers – but unable, denied, repelled by this sorcerer’s barrier.

Powerful.

You looked at the sorcerer’s face in awe. There was not a drop of fear on it. Not a single muscle strung by tension even as he warded off such a horrendous attack. Only a smile. That wretched smile! It was still there and he was still smiling down at you – amused, fascinated, and mocking all at the same time.

This image of him was like nothing you’d ever seen. He looked almost like…

…like…

A god.

“He’s going to kill us both if you don’t exorcise him, you know,” he said to you in plain Tokyo dialect, instead of any of the divine languages.

You blinked as the meaning of his words slowly percolated through your astounded mind. Gradually you remembered Akio. You remembered his grandfather whom he cherished. You remembered the curse that had taken over the body of his grandfather – the one you must not exorcise until it let its claws out of Akio’s ojiichan.

The curse’s attack on the barrier was beginning to wean. Noticing this, you snapped your attention to the sorcerer. You shook your head at him and through your red and wide eyes you pleaded with him, “No! Don’t kill him! Not yet!”

As the sparks of the collision between the curse’s attack and the sorcerer’s barrier were reducing, the sorcerer seemed to consider your request, his expression blank and thoughtful. But then at last, the muscles of his face shifted with a nuance. That nuance was pity. Pity for your weakness.

Here you knew exactly what he was going to do.

Until now, no matter the blaze of your feelings, or the fire of your convictions, you’d bit your tongue and did not speak a single word aloud. You wanted to preserve yourself, hide your identity from this jujutsu sorcerer as much as possible, including through concealing the sound of your voice.

But now all of that was forgotten.

“No, don’t! Please!” you yelled at the top of your lungs.

And at the same time that you did, the sorcerer blew Akio’s grandfather’s head clean off with his cursed technique. The old man’s frail body, which was altered to monstrosity, fell to the ground like a limp rag. Blood spurted weakly from his severed neck onto the forest dirt.

You stared at his body in shock and shattering dismay. Then at the bastard who did that to him.

The sorcerer’s expression had hardened. He was no longer smiling. He was staring at you sombrely – but still fully owning up to what he did, and standing by it.

“You can’t save him,” he said.

And the tone with which he said it sounded like sympathy. But you didn’t want it. Any of it!

You exhaled a long and shaky breath of disappointment, before forcibly sparking all of your remaining cursed energy around yourself. It burned bright as an inferno, surprising the sorcerer, though falling short of intimidating him – and in a split second you dashed away from him.

“Hey!” he shouted after you.

You knew he was fast – likely faster than you could ever be. And you knew he’d use his superior speed to chase after you. So, making use of the momentum of his surprise, you got away from his sight. You then completely voided your own cursed energy, diminishing it to absolute zero – and continued to run as fast as you could in the skin and body of a normal person with not a drop of cursed energy in you.

Just as you’d thought, the tall sorcerer had followed the spark of your cursed energy. You saw him warp almost immediately to a spot you’d been in just 5 seconds ago and where you nullified your own cursed energy. But from then on, you no longer looked back.

You ran and ran. Away through the forest terrain. Away through the shroud of night. Away from your failure. Away from your shame. Away from having let a child down.

“I’m so sorry, Akio…” you said under your breath as bitter tears blurred your sight.

Chapter Text

Who could’ve known that regret had a colour – a dreary, brackish, painful colour? That in eyes dyed in regret - guilt could swirl with more tenacity? That incandescent sparks of cursed energy colliding with a cursed barrier – still flew across their guilty vision? That they could stare for hours at the sea of leaves past the open window, susurrating lush as peacock’s plumes – yet see nothing in them but the one they failed to save...?


“(y/n) sensei?” Junko’s voice broke through your trance.

You blinked through your glasses and found her softly smiling face in the door of your office.

“You’re spacing out again, sensei,” she remarked and came inside. “It’s lunch break already.”

A highly intuitive woman, Junko knew when something was off with you. More than once she’d observed you lament not having been able to help a patient and feeling like you failed them. She’d assumed something of the kind had happened to you again - and in many ways, she was right.

“Oh, yes,” you smiled without feeling it. “I think I have some lunch packed...”

“Plain rice isn’t lunch, sensei,” she admonished. “And you’re not staying in this gloomy office a minute longer! You need some fresh air. How about this, I have a cake order at Sakiko’s for my little niece that I need to pick up today. Could you please be so kind as to pick it up for me?”

You chuckled, and this time it was more authentic, with some soul behind it. “Junko-san, you live on the way to the dessert shop, don’t you…?”

“Oh, do I?” she grinned good-naturedly. “Can’t recall… Please, sensei, do this old woman a favour.”

Despite the way she was phrasing it, you knew it was actually her who was doing you a favour. You needed a distraction and she was supplying you one.

“Anything for you, Junko-san,” you acquiesced with a sigh, and got up.

“My, what a sweet doctor!” she gushed and walked out of your office.

 

In your dark purple scrubs and a light jacket over them, you took a walk through the sunbathed cobblestones of the town’s cosy streets. The wavy ends of your hair tickled your nape as a pleasant idyllic breeze danced among the charming little buildings.

Some of your patients whom you met on the streets greeted you with smiles and respectful nods; others stopped you outright to chat and tell you of new developments in their lives.

By the time you neared Sakiko’s dessert shop, you were shaking your head to yourself with an insuppressible smile. Junko knew you a tad too well.

The door of the dessert shop opened with the charming ding of a bell and you entered, taking in the interior – homely and clean. Quaint tables ringed the shop, providing snug little spots by the windows to sit and talk. The sweet scents of freshly baked pastries and coffee were holding your senses by their hand and inviting them for a taste. You obeyed and stepped forth towards the counter with a rich display of fresh desserts.

“Welcome, sensei!” a young woman with long black hair in a braid greeted you warmly.

“Is that you, Sakiko?”

“Yes, sensei. Junko-san told me you’d be coming,” she smiled. “I have her cake ready right here.”

She brought up a pretty pastry box with a pink silk ribbon. You began to take out your wallet but Sakiko quickly stopped you.

“No, no, sensei! It’s already prepaid,” she assured, shaking her head vehemently. “Is there anything you would like for yourself, though?”

She gestured with her hand to the myriad of desserts on display between you. Multitudes of cakes in dainty slices, lined up one after the other in flawless Japanese precision, like an army of little rainbow soldiers. To their side was the mochi display – a collection of multicoloured chubby buttons, with the ones in the front sliced in half to show their even more creative fillings. The sight of the mochi, however, reminded you of the very first dessert that Junko had treated you to from this very shop.

“Do you happen to have any gyuhi?” you asked.

Sakiko seemed slightly surprised, and pleasantly, that you knew about them.

“Yes, we do! Right here, sensei,” she showed you to the smaller collection of mochi-like desserts. “I recommend the walnut ones,” she said with subtle pride. And when a passionate pastry chef recommends us their favourite, who are we to say no?

“Please pack six of them for me.”

Sakiko nodded with a beam and got to packing your walnut gyuhi, when the bell of the front door dinged again with a new customer. You took your wallet in your hand and continued to browse the cakes to see what you could get next time.

The soft rustling and shuffling of Sakiko working behind the counter got joined by the footfalls of the new customer approaching the display. You moved a bit aside to let them place their order, whilst yourself reading the tiny placards before the rows of the cake slices.

“Irasshaimase!” Sakiko called out the standard greeting, whilst continuing her work with skilled hands.

“Hello, hello!” a melodic male voice responded to the greeting. “See, I’m no stranger to this town, yet I haven’t seen this shop before today! I mean, if I’d known, I’d be knocking down your door the very second you turned the ‘Closed’ sign around, you know? Wow, would you look at all this choice! I really should’ve…”

The man kept babbling on until his voice blended into background noise for you to join the hissing of the coffee machine and the din of cars outside.

“I myself like matcha cakes, but there’s only so much experimentation you can do with matcha when it comes to desserts, you know? Megumi hates matcha; I wonder how many slices I should bring him… Hold on, I think these green mochi would be quite nice actually, especially if paired with a nice warm cup of…”

In the meantime you were eyeing a particularly well decorated vanilla cake and its airy, spongy texture through the glass, reading its lush ingredients and debating whether to splurge on it this time or to wait until the next… That was why you didn’t notice it when the droning of the man’s meaningless rant about the shop and ‘Closed’ signs and matcha and god knows what else – died down mid-sentence.

On the other hand, Sakiko had been keenly observing her new tall customer with his unbelievably white hair, while also trying to keep up with his dessert-obsessed rant. And her heretofore maintained awkward smile now faltered in concern when she saw him suddenly go quiet mid-speech.

Her blood chilled in her veins when, gradually, the blue eyes of this odd but almost illegally handsome man – sparked behind the rim of his sunglasses. Unnerved, Sakiko wondered if those bluest of blues, those crackling icebergs of eyes, were looking at herself with such intensity.

But no, she realised, they weren’t. The man was simply standing, frozen, and looking at nothing yet something at the same time. A thought? A perception? A memory…? That is until he inhaled subtly but deeply. And whilst that particular batch of oxygen remained in his lungs, his eyes unfocused a notch as if analysing, thinking, reading.

Until at last he exhaled and his hunter’s stare gave way to a slow blink of what looked like confirmation. Equally, his face settled into an odd expression of ease, of knowing, of having found his prey.

Watching all of this transpire before her, Sakiko felt herself naturally drawn to the extremely attractive man and his mysterious eccentricity, but even more than that – she felt afraid of him. That was the right reaction. She did always have good instincts. And those instincts now told her to get on with serving the two customers as soon as possible…

She took her eyes off of the man, and quickly slid into their pre-cut slides the last flaps of the decorative dessert box containing your gyuhi.

“Here you go, sensei,” she extended the box across the counter to you, her smile renewed if not a bit tense – whilst you were in the process of saying your fervent goodbyes to the vanilla cake until your next visit.

“Oh yes, Sakiko, thank you,” you reached above the counter to receive your box – when, all at once, you felt the baring intensity of a thousand eyes pierce you from all directions.

You felt seen. In the worst possible sense of the word.

Although, in truth, it wasn’t a thousand eyes. It was only six. And they weren’t lancing you from all directions. Just your right.

Your heartbeat like the roar of thunder, you turned slowly to your right. There, above you, you came face to face with a man of familiar hair and familiar height. Danger raked alarm through your whole body when you saw a fraction of his eyes, refulgent as two moons zeroed in on you. But if you could see his eyes, that meant he wore no blindfold; those garishly white bandages weren’t on this time. Your peripherals told you he lacked the dark uniform today as well – presenting before you now in most casual clothes imaginable. No wonder your instincts delayed and failed to recognise him the moment he stepped foot into the shop...

But how did he find you? In your distracted melancholy over Akio’s grandfather, did you forget to nullify your cursed energy on your way here?

Wait, but what of his cursed energy? Why didn’t you feel it - his hubris of a cursed energy? The one you felt the first time from outside the clinic, the one that struck like venom of a viper, the one that felt like a star melting down to incinerate, that felt kingly, lethal, out to annihilate? How could you have missed it...?

You weren’t thinking aloud, and yet the man, as though privy to your thoughts, suddenly and deliberately sparked his cursed energy right where he stood, expanding its boundaries, with a smirk flicking his lips. It was invisible to the eye, that spark – but it was potent enough to grip you in a bout of nausea and dread. It was as if he was showing you that he could conceal his cursed energy too, if he so wished.

There was no room for doubt. It was him – the man who thwarted your mission, who killed the innocent man you were trying to save, who fought you and bruised you and nearly broke your leg. And who then protected you in a twisted show of power and excess. The anomaly. The welder of the sky. Fast – the way earthbound creatures had no right to be. A man who defied all forces of nature with his own - both godlike and monstrous at the same time.

Your first instinct led you to bunch your straight fingers together with the speed of shutters being snapped shut – and aim the blade of your invisible technique straight into his rib. The motion was sure to stab through his cursed technique and his body the way a real knife would, thus allowing you another lucky egress.

But he instantly caught your hand by the wrist and stopped it before it reached the fabric of his plain T-shirt. You pushed against his hold, trying to break through it like a dam. But to no avail – his vice grip did not budge, and neither could your captured hand.

He was stronger. By far.

“Easy,” he said under his breath, his low voice wrapped in a thread of amusement.

Still keeping your hand firmly in his control, he turned to the wary Sakiko. For the first time since feeling the lancing of his eyes, you remembered about her. Here you became almost thankful that this tall asshole was wearing a thin fleece cardigan over his T-shirt, the side of which was now covering your oddly gestured hand. But still there was hardly a ready explanation for what you were doing with your hand stuck in his cardigan…

“Sakiko-san, could you get us two lattes please? To have in? We’ll sit on one of those lovely tables by the window,” he cooed to her in such a sweet voice that absolutely confounded you. Was this the same man who blew a person’s head off in cold blood just a few nights ago?

“…two sugar cubes for me,” he was saying, before humming and reconsidering. “Wait, no, please make that three.”

“Ahh…” Sakiko was just regaining her customer-friendly smile. “Of course! Yes! And for sensei?”

Both Sakiko and the man turned to you expectantly. But you couldn’t return Sakiko’s gaze since you were too busy glaring in utter incredulity at the man. Neither his oddly white and ridiculously silky hair, nor the sight of his firmamental blues gazing down at you from above his sunglasses – interested you. He had an odd, almost extraordinary appearance – you’d give him that. But what you cared about the most were not his looks – it was his actions.

That was why you glared at him a silent message: “I’m not going to have coffee with you. You are my enemy.”

Your secret message, which he obviously couldn’t hear but seemingly deciphered anyway, only made him smirk at you. He turned back to Sakiko.

“Just one cube for her,” he directed her. Nodding, the girl retreated into the furthest corner of her station to work with the hissing and bristling coffee machine, leaving you two to your own devices.

Since the man was clearly having a hard time getting your message through your glares and expressions of enmity alone, you decided you would need to be direct. So you jostled your hand out of his grip. And this time, he let you do it by unclasping his long fingers from around your wrist.

“I just want to talk,” he said.

“We have nothing to talk about,” you rebutted, quickly placing cash with extra change for Sakiko on the counter, before stacking your gyuhi and cake boxes on top of each other, holding them to your side and heading for the door.

But here the man blocked your way, standing too close for comfort, close enough for you to sample the intimate scent of his cologne.

“On the contrary,” he leaned down and the blues of his eyes drew closer, like the sky was crashing down on you. “We have so much to talk about…”

Then his lips by the crown of your head murmured in half-tone, “You don’t want to cause a scene in your beloved town, now, do you?”

You gritted your teeth and glanced back at hard-at-work Sakiko. The girl was already much alarmed by the obvious tension between you and the man. And there was the real risk that he would fight you if you resisted him – and in broad daylight, too, since he had nothing to lose here. But, you, on the other hand…

No. You did not want to cause a scene and risk destroying the life you’d built up in this town.

Without meeting his eye, you rounded him and picked a table in the corner of the shop and sat down.

In no particular haste, the man approached and sat down opposite you. You eyed him waist up, from where the table cut his freakish height in half. He wore a minimalistic white T-shirt that hugged his muscle-toned chest. From its rounded neckline you could see a hint of hewn collarbones. A light grey cardigan hung loosely from his broad shoulders. His vaporous white hair, which wasn’t held up by the bandages anymore, fell in long loose strands over his forehead, reaching almost to the rim of his black shades.

In this casual outfit he gave off a soft, cosy, even dreamy vibe, like he could be someone’s boyfriend. But you knew, from that night, that this casual, benign outfit concealed a body carved and hardened for lethal combat.

“So what do you want to talk about?” you demanded, since he seemed in no hurry to start this supposed conversation.

He eyed you a while without saying a word. As if studying you, memorising you, or perhaps trying to break into your mind. With each passing second that he held you in his scrutiny, you felt anxious sweat blossom on the back of your neck. Until at last, he leaned forward, exposing the whole of his blue moons, making his sunglasses’ purpose obsolete – and asked:

“What are you doing here?”

Your prior tense face twisted even further into a full-blown scowl – just before transitioning into an overt mask of apprehension.

“I came to collect a cake for a birthday party, and also impulse-bought these lovely walnut gyuhi,” you opened the little dessert box on the table - your hands working, your eyes locked to his. “Would you like some?”

You extended the box with the sweet delicacies across the table, your smile wider, foxier, acidic.

The man appraised you for a second, eyes narrowing a flick with consideration – before he reached his hand into the box. Just before his long fingers touched a piece of gyuhi, though, you snatched the box back to yourself, and with unfiltered animosity you plopped one of the desserts into your own mouth, and even moaned in delight for good measure.

Childish move, yes, but worth it: the look of his raised brows and somewhat disappointed face was golden.

At this time Sakiko came with your lattes, and both you and the man thanked her – though, his toothy-smile and the coquettish glint in his eyes were more like flirting than thanking…

As you audibly swallowed the last of the gyuhi and stared him down, he sighed as if dealing with a petulant child and rephrased his question.

“I mean, what are you doing in this town?”

Here you sighed too. He wasn’t the only one dealing with an unpleasant interlocutor.

“What I’m doing here,” you leaned forward, same as he had done to ask his question, “is none of your fucking business. Any other questions?”

He was about to say something more but you interrupted him, very much on purpose.

“If you’re out of questions, then I have one for you,” you glared into his blues. “Why did you murder that old man?”

He scoffed in your face, as if somehow disappointed by the dullness of your chosen question.

“He was already dead. You were risking your life for a corpse,” he said like you made him say something which should’ve been obvious even to a 5-year old.

Blasé, bored, indifferent. Those were his reactions to the sanctity of human life.

You stood up. “We’re done here.”

You were reaching for your boxes when a folder landed with a slap on the table in front of your full coffee cup. It was black all over with a single large white spiral insignia on the cover. You looked at the man questioningly.

Where the fuck was he keeping this?

“What’s this?” you asked with visible distaste, as if he just tossed a pile of shit before you.

With a languid sigh, as well as a smile you just did not like, he answered, “It’s a dossier on you.”

You held his unwavering gaze for a long minute, checking if he was bluffing. But he gave no ground – instead, challenging you with his stare to open it and look inside.

You sat back down on your chair slowly and opened the folder, whilst glancing at the man periodically as if he might attack you in your moment of distraction. But once you saw the contents of even just the 1st page of the folder, your attention on it was completely rapt.

‘(y/n)…’ you read your name and last name in it. In addition to your full name, there was near complete information on you, including your approximated age, your origin, and bits and pieces of your history – incomplete, sure, but accurate, right down to the duration of your internship at the Tokyo Dental and Medical Hospital, as well as the last known traces of your jujutsu activity, including your assumed sights of exorcism; and even a rough description of your appearance as a foreigner, though no actual photo.

Wide-eyed, your skin tingling with anxiety, you devoured the contents of the dossier. Below all of that background information, with bold letters, as seemingly the most crucial piece of intel – was the description of your cursed ability:

‘Nullification of Cursed Energy. A technique not yet catalogued. EXTREME RISK. To be dealt with as a matter of priority.’

Your mind was reeling, trying to determine just how Jujutsu Tech found all of these things out about you.

“Who…?” your lips mouthed, whilst you were in deep thought.

It didn’t take you long.

The curse users. The select few whom you thought you could trust. The ones who hated Jujutsu Tech from the depth of their hearts and thus would never cooperate with it.

“They sold me out…” you verbalised your disbelief. The prospect of such betrayal didn’t fit in your mind and yet there was no other possible answer. You looked at the jujutsu sorcerer before you, who was devouring your reactions with blue-eyed greed.

He inclined his head to the side, overgrown silver strands sweeping across his high forehead, and smiled with sweetness from the deepest pit of sadism.

“I can be very persuasive,” he said.

Your blood chilled, as did the sharp inhale trapped within your lungs. But at no cost, at no cost could you let him see it. So you steeled yourself and remoulded your glare.

“Why do you have this?” you asked, snapping the report shut and gripping it in your hand.

He inhaled deeply and leisurely, closing his eyes. The sadism washed away from his elfin features like it was never there.

“Because I’m Gojo Satoru – the special grade jujutsu sorcerer whose task is to either eradicate you for posing a threat to the entire jujutsu world with your quirky nullifying technique…”

You tensed up, your cursed energy blazing in preparation for a fight that, as it seemed, was not avoidable.

“Or,” he opened his eyes and fixed you with a testing look, “to propose a more amicable solution – one that doesn’t end in this shop’s lovely interior getting covered in your blood.”

Though your heart had frozen from his words, outwardly you scoffed at his audacity. It irked you, once again, the offensive breeziness with which he treated the subject of ending a person’s life – and this time, he was doing it with yours.

“What’s the amicable solution?” you asked, as he sipped on his no doubt disgustingly sweet coffee.

“Easy,” he declared. “Join us and become a jujutsu sorcerer.”

You wondered if he was joking, but his steadfast expression told you that he wasn’t.

You? A jujutsu sorcerer? Stop hiding in the shadows and walk freely in the light? You knew from past interactions with curse users that, although they were practically indistinguishable from jujutsu sorcerers, save for their unregulated status – most curse users were not invited to join the Jujutsu Tech. They were simply ‘eradicated’, to use this asshole’s term.

But you, unlike them all, were getting a possibly once-in-a-lifetime offer. A smooth transition from the underworld. Legitimacy. Perhaps official training and resources as well, which to someone as self-taught as yourself could be invaluable…

The prospect of his offer beguiled you for exactly one short minute.

“No,” you shook your head with finality. “Our goals don’t align. As I take it, you’re the face of your organisation, Gojo-san. And you killed a man I was trying to save.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, (y/n) sensei,” he used your first name and doctor’s title, much to your irk. “We have the very same goals.”

You stood up without another word.

“We’re not done talking,” Gojo said.

“Yes, we are,” you negated simply, and headed for the door.

“If you leave now, I’ll have to drop in to your lovely clinic. And as a doctor, you’ll have no choice but to see me. Hippocratic Oath and all,” he called out.

His words halted you in your tracks.

But not for longer than a moment.

“Don’t bother, Gojo-san,” you said, throwing him a disdainful look over your shoulder. “There’s no cure for being an asshole.”

With that, you walked out of the shop.

Chapter Text

During your walk back to the clinic, with cakes absentmindedly in hand, you checked behind you several times to see if Gojo was following you.

He wasn’t. Or not in any way that you could see, or detect.

As your feet followed the familiar route, your mind replayed back every single word exchanged between you.

Was his offer for you to join his ranks – become a jujutsu sorcerer – a bluff? Your scepticism and experience told you yes.

But your instincts told you that someone as powerful as Gojo simply had no need for bluffing or for games. Whatever he promised, he should be able to deliver – good or bad.

In which case, if he meant everything he said, then if you refused his offer, he would have to kill you – that’s what he said his original task was. The thought of that infuriated you, to tell the truth. It filled you with a sense of injustice. You’d done nothing wrong. All you did was try to help. So why did you have to die?!

A rigid breath siphoned from your nose.

No matter. Survival first.

If he was planning to kill you, then you had no choice but to skip town and abandon the life you’d spent years building in this town. Could you do it?

Before you knew it, you were stepping onto the familiar cobblestone of the clinic’s grounds. By the time you neared the clinic, you had stopped looking back and checking for him. By the time you stepped towards its entrance, your usually proud shoulders had withered and your feet trod leaden-heavy.

The doors slid open for you and you entered deep in thought, overcast with depression and disquiet. But the familiar sterile smell of the clinic brought your head up, made you look around and find the walls you’d grown accustomed to.

The waiting area – a small hall with seats – was near full with your afternoon patients, who all smiled and greeted you in different ways when they saw you. These faces – young and old, of retired men and women, of parents with their children – all these people of this little town – seeing their smiling and hopeful faces made your leaden feet come to a quiet stop.

Looking at them, the answer was clear.

You approached the receptionist’s desk where Junko was working on some ledger with her head down.

“Junko-san.”

“Oh!” the woman looked up from her desk with a bright smile. “Welcome back, sensei! I see you got the–”

But then her face fell into concern from seeing yours so glum.

“What’s wrong? What’s the matter?” she asked.

You smiled at her ruefully, weakly.

“If a new patient by the name of Gojo comes in…” you said, placing her cake box on the counter, “…please give him a warm welcome and direct him to my office.”

Junko was unsettled by both your forlorn aura and your unusual request. But intuitive to a fault, she read that you didn’t want to talk about either of those things.

“Of course, sensei. I will do as you say.”

You nodded and proceeded across the hall to your office. There, you laid down your bag, smoothed your waves, wiped the lenses of your black-rimmed glasses clean, and fastened your doctor’s badge onto the chest of your scrubs.

You were (y/n) sensei. The head physician of this town.



Day in, day out you worked. Saw patients. Treated their ails. But all through it, your eyes couldn’t help but flicker to the door of your office. Through that door, at any second, you anticipated a pair of long, toned legs to enter.

“Sensei, is everything all right?” Nakamura-san, your patient, a retired farmer of 67 with arthritis, asked you.

“What? Oh yes, Nakamura-san,” you assured the elderly man in your office and wrote him the prescription he required.

And like this for 3 whole days. You worked through taut nerves, glancing periodically at the door, but Gojo never came. Upon leaving work on the first and second days, you were equally wary of him following you to your apartment, which you were renting on the upper floor of a tidy, modern two-storey house not too far from the clinic. But once again, he was nowhere to be seen, nor his cursed energy to be felt.

Day in, day out the same patients that you knew came and went – and in a way, you were grateful for them. Work distracted you; it kept you occupied. It kept you focused and in rhythm. And that was how towards the end of the 3^rd day your nerves gradually untwisted and you began to settle back into your routine.

With the last patient for the day gone, you brought your bag before you and started to stuff your things in it in order to head home.

But here you heard Junko’s voice in the hallway, talking to someone in a voice shriller with excitement than it needed to be at the end of a work day. Your fingers froze above your bag – your whole body did – and dark premonition knocked on your door even before the actual knock came.

“Sensei!” Junko opened the unshut door of your office. “Gojo-san is here.”

Fuck…

Junko was the first to peer her head into your office, but you didn’t see her. You saw only the ghostly white of Gojo’s hair towering behind Junko and the gaseous blue of his eyes staring pointedly at you. And with how smugly those blues were burning, he may as well have been sneering at you through his eyes alone… No, actually, he was.

“Thank you, Junko-san,” you thanked her and faced the open door.

Junko turned to Gojo, craning her neck even more than you’d been forced to, due to her compact height and his monstrous one.

“Sensei will see you now, Gojo-san. I hope you settle well in your new home,” Junko wished him good-naturedly.

Gojo took his eyes off of you to smile at her, “Thank you, Junko-san. It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”

You noticed (as you were sure Gojo did too, what with his freakish eyes) the dusting of pink that grazed Junko’s cheeks in response to his irresistible smile and heartfelt gratitude.

“(y/n) sensei is a very good doctor,” she assured him. “We all rely on her. I’m sure she will be able to help you.”

She looked at you in womanly surreptitiousness, nearly winking, in a sign that you understood well: she assumed that you and Gojo could have a romantic chance. Which was understandable, seeing as how the motherfucker turned up after your work hours and you, in turn, had specifically asked for him to be directed to your office if he showed up…

But no, sweet, sweet Junko-san! This wasn’t a meeting between two budding lovebirds. This was a conclave of two enemies.

“Come on in, Gojo-san,” you said drily.

Junko retreated and Gojo entered your office, shutting the door behind him. He was in casual clothing once again – none of that dreaded all-dark uniform or ominous white bandages. Today he was wearing a pair of black slacks, not too tight or too loose, and a dark grey corduroy button-up shirt, with recklessly rolled-up sleeves and too many unbuttoned buttons at the top. Whereas the last time he was going for the dreamy boyfriend vibe, today, you noted, he evidently chose the casual fuckboy look.

You rounded him to get to your medical equipment station, maintaining the distance between you – two predators circling each other – whilst he made his way to the medical cot with a fresh white sheet spread over it. Unceremoniously he sat down on it.

“ ‘A new home’?” you mused aloud, putting your stethoscope around your neck and pulling on a fresh pair of rubber gloves.

“Yeah,” he said. “Since I’m having to stay here longer than I intended, I’m renting a place on the other side of town.”

With your back to him, your face twisted into a raisin of incredulity. The fuck he just said?

“No one actually asked you to stay…” you voiced a portion of your thoughts.

“No one asked me to, no. But I’m being forced to stay regardless,” he answered matter-of-factly.

You quirked a brow.

“By your superiors?”

To this he chuckled. Truly chuckled. The melodious sound of it took you by surprise. So you turned halfway around to look at him. He seemed genuinely amused by what you said, in an affable way. His angular face had lit up away from the pit of his usual sadism. A look that seemed almost angelic…

“I have no superiors,” he said following his hearty guffaw. “I meant, by you.”

This confounded you even further. You turned to face him fully, your back to your equipment station.

“I never asked you to stay.”

With you turning around, your eyes locked. His sunglasses were no obstacle; they hung too low on his nose.

One thing you couldn’t figure out whether you loved or hated, but still felt it every single time he fixed you with that stare – was that his eyes always seemed to harbour forbidden knowledge. No, not about the universe, the Big Bang, the nature of God, or the purpose of life. About you! He always looked at you as if he knew you better than you did yourself.

“You didn’t,” he agreed with you. “And yet it’s for you that I stay.”

Your brows knitted in confusion, before you rolled your eyes.

He never made any sense. So why did you expect him to start making one now?

You sighed heavily, approached him on the cot, and stood before him.

Your eyes were above him. His blues were below, just slightly below, since pruning the grandeur of his height even by making him sit down was not easy. He gazed up at you with ease, with flawless comfort, with zero hostility, bearing no threat or danger. Simply sat, like a normal human male.

“Any particular pains or aches you’ve come here with today, Gojo-san?” you asked, like a normal human doctor.

He smiled, the corner of it cheeky. “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with my body, sensei. But I have been suffering from something these days.”

You narrowed your eyes, both despising and relishing the play in his tone and the way playfulness suited him.

“What is your complaint exactly?” you inquired, professionally.

He rolled his head from its right lean to its left, his blue eyes gliding before you like the crest of an ocean wave.

“Frustration,” he answered.

You hummed with a tight smile.

The player. The bad news. You wondered how long it had been since a player like him got put down in his place. Maybe never…

You sighed again and pushed your glasses back up over the bridge of your nose. You raised his newly opened clinic medical record on a clipboard before you, ready to check boxes that only you could check as his doctor.

“Mental or sexual frustration?” you asked him flatly and matter-of-factly, and fixed him with a blank, detached stare.

But blank didn’t cut it - his stare was anything but. He seemed to appreciate the brazenness of your question, and then slowly, deliberately, agonisingly slowly – raked his gaze from your face, down to your plush lips, to your bounteous chest, to your curvy waist, and to your wide and rounded hips – then back up to your face, with an easy and shameless smile plastered on his own.

“A bit of both,” he responded at last.

“Well…” you said, and instantly winced at how flustered your voice came out. You cleared your throat, refocused your mind.

“Well, Gojo-san, in this clinic, unfortunately, we don’t yet treat sexual dysfunctions…”

Amid speaking, you checked if your punch had landed. And upon seeing him roll his eyes – watching them glide across the glaciers of his pure white lashes – you knew it did.

“However,” you continued, your professional tone becoming a touch unsteady, “we do treat all sorts of physical ailments. So please allow me to check your vitals.”

“Please do, (y/n) sensei,” he said, enunciating the vowels of your name, tethering your attention to his slick lips – before reaching his long fingers to his own diaphragm and beginning to unbutton his shirt.

You flustered, hesitated, alarmed. Patients didn’t usually undress for physical examinations even though it would’ve provided for optimal results... But truly, it wasn’t necessary. And yet Gojo shamelessly unbuttoned his shirt all the way down to his abdomen and pulled its tucked hemline out of his black pants. He then slid its corduroy fabric over the toned swells of his shoulders, down the uneven surface of his muscular arms, and discarded it onto the white sheet. In the same fashion, he took off his sunglasses, folded their temples and placed them on top of his pile of shirt. What happened next was the unfurling of the universe before you.

He opened his eyes and looked up at you. His hair was cotton. His eyes – an ocean; individual specks within them glittered, as if two unfortunate stars were plucked from the sky, pulverised, and diffused onto his irises. His bare skin was milk, and your gaze poured down the lines of his muscles, dribbling down the slope of his long neck, swishing along the long keels of his collarbones, before cascading down his hard pectorals, and spilling all across the ridges of his abs.

You never considered breathing to be hard work – until today.

You cleared your throat; it was necessary to break the brutal current of your fascination. He did this on purpose, you knew. Everything about this man was a weapon: his techniques, his mind, and his looks too.

You put the earpieces of your stethoscope in, wrestling your mind back into focus, and placed the chest piece gingerly onto his chest. Upon listening in, your ears got flooded with the fervent beating of his heart.

Or wait, was that your own…?

You cleared your throat again, a bit too obviously, and carried the chest piece across his shoulder to his chiselled back.

“All right, deep breath,” you instructed and Gojo took a deep breath, obliging you.

You listened for any irregularities in his lungs, but there were none. Smooth and satiny, his breaths were clear and without obstruction. His inhales were deep, expansive, and telling of his stamina…

You pulled the earpieces out. “Great. No issues with either your heart or your lungs. I’ll measure your blood pressure next.”

He extended his arm for you, and this time you averted your eyes, not wishing to focus on the perfect knoll of his bicep, or the carvings of his long and strong forearms, or the blue veins subtly cording his muscles through his milky skin.

You slid the belt of the blood pressure monitor onto the swell of his bicep, tightened it and took his blood pressure. Once again, no issues. Perfect blood pressure for a male of his age and…mass.

“Now that you’ve ascertained I have the healthiest body you’ve ever seen,” Gojo interceded as you were taking the device off of him, and pulled his phone out from his jeans’ back pocket, “there’s something you should look at.”

You furrowed your brows in ready annoyance, to snap out a retort – but then your gaze landed on the lit up screen of his phone. Your breathing hitched and eyes widened.

On his phone was the photo of a boy you recognised.

Akio!

You grabbed it out of Gojo’s hand and greedily read the on-screen contents. Next to his photo – wan and skinny – was a report-style text. You scrolled and read it quickly, until at last you came to a photo of a mature woman.

“You found his aunt?” you asked Gojo.

“It wasn’t easy,” he admitted.

The confidential report intended specifically for ‘Gojo Satoru’ read that Akio’s aunt lived in a remote but well-off prefecture. That the nephew and aunt were reunited. That the boy was receiving top-tier counselling care. And that the tuition fees for the entirety of his high school education in a private school were paid from the Gojo trust fund – all of this with receipts, enrolment letters, and confirming statements.

“Why did you do this?” you handed him his phone back, your face wrought with confusion.

He took it from you, your fingers brushing together, tingling – and said, “I did tell you we had the same goals.”

Here he stood up from the cot, his full height dominating yours once more. You inched back from the muscled wall of his naked chest. He stood too close, too close for comfort.

“Why are you doing all this?” you asked. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just…”

“…kill you?” he finished your sentence for you, eyes ablaze.

You fixed your stare ahead, on the ravine between his pecs, onto the broadness of his chest – anywhere but up at him. A mistake that was. Because that very broadness backed you until your positions were flipped, and you were trapped against the wall next to the cot – as Gojo loomed over you, his hand on the wall by your face.

His chest breathed, his muscles twitched, expanded and contracted, and you watched, barely breathing.

“I could kill you,” he admitted, and you smelled his skin too close to you, fresh like the apex of a snowy mountain, with his heart beating so near you could stab it, or just as equally fall prey to its ravenous rhythm. “But I don’t want to,” he said.

You trailed your gaze from his heart to his face. There, in the limpid waters of his eyes, swam sincerity. He didn’t shy away from your visual inquisition; he continued to stare down. Meaning every word, every intention. And you got once again convinced: a man of his strength simply had no need for games.

“But if you want to save your pride,’ he continued, his other hand lifting between your heated bodies to just above your swollen breasts. “Then, I’ll do you a favour and try to kill you.”

His words puzzled you. What the fuck? But you had no time to ponder. From the tip of his long index finger blossomed a red ball. Your eyes were on it, wide, terrified, feeling its dense cursed intensity.

It was yet another weapon, you realised quickly – just like everything about Gojo Satoru was. It swirled and spiralled, emitting angry heat, ready to attack, ready to blow a hole through you, and getting denser and more destructive by the second.

“Cut it,” Gojo commanded above you.

“What?” you snapped up at him.

But there you saw he meant exactly what he said. He wanted you to cut through his technique with your technique.

You hesitated. You didn’t understand the point.

“Cut it – or I will fire it,” he warned, and you knew he meant it from his voice.

Exhaling tensely and quelling all your reservations, you bunched your fingers together and channelled a powerful torrent of your own cursed energy into your fingertips. With a precise attack, you sliced through the planetic red ball at the tip of Gojo’s finger and dissipated it.

But just as soon as it broke down and dispersed – a new ball of the same red shade and savagery replaced it. It swirled ever more violently than the previous one and hissed at you with lethal threat.

“I can replenish my energy endlessly,” Gojo explained. “But how much of your energy did you waste just now?”

You looked inward. Assessed the damage. He was right.

Slicing through his cursed technique was draining on you. To do it you’d expended the heft of your own cursed energy, just like you did that night when you nullified his blue cursed ball. But you’d assumed back then that he was expending about the same level of energy to reinstate his technique as you; but as it turned out, from seeing his new red ball roiling like magma at the heart of a volcano – his energy was limitless. You would have lost against him in any scenario…

“I know you want to get stronger, (y/n),” he said, omitting the ‘sensei’, though you paid it no mind as his words had sunk straight to your soul.

You fucking did want to get stronger. Fury sparked in you and burned bright. Fury – that you had been so gullible as to believe you could survive the way you were against forces so infinite. Fury – that you could so simply fail to protect the ones you wanted to protect. Fury – that if Gojo hadn’t been near the shack that night, you would’ve failed to protect even yourself…

Gojo saw it all on your face. Loved to see it.

His bets on you were correct. You were perfect.

“I can make you strong,” he avowed.

You looked up at him, you two now breathing in tune, breathing the same fire, from the same lung. Eyes tethered in contract.

“Deal,” you accepted.

Gojo appraised you, raining his incisive gaze on you, like he wasn’t the one who stood half-naked, like you were the one being bared and examined.

“Perfect!” he beamed at last, back to his usual chirp, and clapped his two large hands before your face in triumph.

He let you out of his warm body-cage and started for the door, whilst you were still recovering from his invasive intimacy.

His tapered back played a visual spectacle of hard, prominent muscles swelling and flexing and sliding and tensing, as he walked to the door – before suddenly remembering something.

“Oh shit, almost forgot!”

He grabbed his discarded shirt and glasses from the cot next to you. He swished the shirt across the air, putting it on his shoulders, and slid his long arms into its sleeves on the go.

The shirt's plackets hanging open, his washboard abs in plain view, Gojo pulled his sunglasses over his eyes and opened the door of your office.

With a sigh of uncertainty, you followed after him.

Chapter Text

The doors of the now empty clinic slid open and the man’s leather shoes stepped out of them. You followed in tow. As a pair of…jujutsu sorcerers?

“So how did you find me?” you called out to him.

He turned halfway back, long legs still moving, sunglasses reflecting the prisms of the receding sun.

“Funnily enough,” he said, his eyes the insinuative shade of blue, “because we apparently both love sweets.”

You rolled your eyes.

The last of sunlight lashed the town like overcooked strings of disgusting spaghetti. Or maybe that was just how it seemed to you in this moment of uncertainty. Of wavering. Of the new and unpredictable. Those were all of what Gojo Satoru represented to you as he led you to a fate you didn’t know. As well as to a location you had not a clue about.

You flicked your gaze from the setting sun to the steady and subtle swinging of Gojo’s narrow hips in his black jeans.

“Didn’t you say your house was on the other side of town? Shouldn’t we catch a taxi?” you asked him.

He suddenly stopped, and your body blared alarm when he did a 360 and started stalking to you instead.

“Glad you asked,” he grinned.

And before you knew it, before you could protest, fight or claw – the entire space around you, including the air capsuling you – lurched across space and time. You felt your surroundings – the asphalt, the cement, the buildings, the road – melt and blend, deconstruct and reconstruct – all in a blinding sequence – until your feet dug into the uneven surface of a flagstone path.

Plucked from the stone-and-brick surroundings of the town – you got injected into the heart of an entirely different environment. Enchanted forest came to mind, as you looked around at the evergreen flora hemming you in.

Flagging the path on both sides was dense and well-trimmed grass, and it carpeted the entire stretch of this huge garden. Birch trees stood tall all around, providing shadowy and dreamy overhang. The fanning leaves of Hinoki cypress, in their gradations from brackish to almost neon green, truly brought together this verdurous painting. And the fiery leaves of Japanese maple provided the daub of antagonistic colour, which wasn’t necessary for the beauty of this place to be complete but was welcomed by the senses all the same. Through all of this awe and magnified beauty, you were vaguely aware of Gojo walking ahead of you and leading the way, and yourself following him – until you felt your ankles tickled by the riffles of plum yews, which keened, in excess, over the flagstone path.

Gojo turned onto a narrow arched bridge, which crossed over a limpid brook, and beyond that you saw the noyane roofs of a two-storey temple. It looked empty, not a soul in sight. But that couldn’t be it - it looked way too clean and looked after.

Gojo slipped out of his shoes and climbed onto the engawa of black polished wood. Observing his actions, you took off your shoes too and climbed right after him.

“You live here?” you asked in astonishment, as he pushed the sliding doors open for the two of you. You both stepped onto the tatami floors of a spacious traditional room, and your eyes wandered everywhere, at every finest, minimalist detail.

Gojo turned around, giving you a generous view of his blues above his barely hanging shades.

“While I’m staying in this town, yes. But it’s also where you will be living from now on.”

You did a double take.

“I have a place to live. I’m not homeless,” you asserted.

“I’m well aware,” he smiled. “But what did we agree on?”

“That you would train me,” you answered.

“Correct. Now tell me, sensei,” he stepped closer, beautiful face towering, eyes glinting with play. “You’re usually very perceptive. So what did you notice?”

Your brows rose up at him. Was he already training you…?

You thought back to everything that had happened since he teleported the two of you up here. Every motion, every bit of surrounding, of the trees, of the murmur of the brook, the rustle of every single leaf…

But wait, should you maybe be thinking to even before all of that? To the staggering moments before he defied physics and warped the two of you here? Where was the answer?

The cogs turned in your head as you analysed anything and everything, every fragment of your memory of the past few minutes, whilst Gojo watched you in uncanny fascination.

But, alas, no matter how much you dug, no matter how you scanned and flipped your observations – nothing out of the ordinary turned up.

You exhaled long, hard, and frustrated.

And that’s when it hit you. Gojo was already smiling from seeing realisation strike your face.

The air.

Ever since you got here, besides the stunning foliage and paradisal chirping of the birds, you’d been breathing air that was stunningly clean. Clean air in a place of such natural beauty was no surprise, no – but this air was something else. Each inhale invited gratitude. It was so completely clean and abundant in oxygen the way you’d never breathed it before. It almost felt…

“Is it purified?” you asked him.

“It is,” he confirmed your guess. “Just like with exhaust fumes and light and smog – air everywhere is polluted to at least some degree with cursed energy residuals,” he told you with the patience of a teacher, voice unexpectedly kind and melodious.

He continued, “For you to hone your technique to the fullest, you need to do it in an environment such as this. And, that’s not to say I didn’t find that little second-floor room you’re renting charming, with its cute tiny dormer windows and all…”

Your eyes widened, fist clenching and ready to strike. “So you did follow me after all!”

Here Gojo leaned down to face-to-face with you, too close for comfort yet again. His much larger hand wrapped gently over your fist and he hummed, completely unperturbed by your accusation.

“I look out for the welfare of all my students,” he said sweetly.

Before all your blood rushed to your face and you almost swatted him away, he straightened up and started walking out.

“I gotta run some errands. Your bedroom’s on the upper floor. Make yourself at home,” he waved the back of his large hand. “But be ready, sensei – we’re starting tonight.”

He turned halfway around with a smile far too ambiguous. Then disappeared into a fissure in reality before you could say a thing.



Your spine slammed against the trunk of a tree – hard – and you slumped down in pain. It had never come to you quite in such focus just how rippling pain could be. It unfurled and stung your tissues with a radius far larger than the spot where you hit the tree. Honestly, by this point, you could write a dissertation on pain and the motley of ways it can manifest on the human body…

Goddamn! Fighting curses was a walk in the park…

You looked at your opponent. He wasn’t a cursed spirit. No, he was way more powerful, unpredictable in speed, and unbested in his cunning.

Clad in a grey long-sleeve T-shirt and ivory relaxed pants, your opponent was smiling at you from about 200 feet. His eggshell skin, and just as spectral shade of hair, was unmistakeable in this green backdrop. Which meant that every movement of his, came with the added irritation of knowing that you could have predicted it, could have caught it before it hit you – the way it did just now.

You pushed yourself off the mossy ground, while he brought his hand up to his mouth, cupped it halfway, and shouted (as if such theatrics were necessary).

“That defence was good, sensei! You are fast. But speed…”

He suddenly disappeared from your view and you panicked.

With good reason: the tree behind you got pulverised as Gojo reappeared right in front of you, piercing your personal space, while his fist was beside your head - destroying the tree instead of your head.

“…isn’t enough without power driving it,” he finished his sentence.

While his one hand was obliterating the tree trunk, his other hand was firing up what you had since learned to be called his ‘Lapse Blue’ – right before your nose.

Shit!

You did not slice at his blue ball of condensed and uniquely calibrated cursed energy right away – and instead punched his forearm away. He didn’t attack immediately, allowing you a chance for your counterattack. You made use of it by launching away from the tree trunk, out of the position in which he’d cornered you – in order to set up for a precise attack on his Lapse Blue.

Using your technique to nullify a cursed attack drained your own energy. That was a fact. So you had to use it at the most correct time – when the opponent’s technique could be nullified, and he – could be felled at the same time.

You parried him at a speed too fast – faster than you’d ever fought before. Limbs flew and clashed, rapid breaths echoed, muscles fired and burned.

Until at last you had your chance. You saw Gojo open – his Blue ready and his body vulnerable to a subsequent attack.

Your thigh diagonal to his, your resolve maybe more than his – you finally sliced at his Lapse Blue with all your might. It was a decisive attack, a worthy expenditure of your cursed energy. But with your invisible blade within just millimetres from his blazing blue ball, he dodged it – fucking dodged it! – and your technique ended up getting wasted on slicing empty air. He was still faster than you, fuck!

With that speed, and making use of your cursed energy depletion, Gojo grabbed your arm and overpowered you onto the ground. You fell and he fell on top.

Before you knew it, before you could fully decide how to feel about his body weight and body heat pressing yours down – you saw his Reversal Red materialise right before your face at the tip of his long finger. Gojo was smiling down at you, galactic blues mirthful, as he invaded your personal space with no abashment and easily pressed his hard muscles into your soft flesh.

Holding your eyes in his, he finally flipped his wrist around and fired the red angry ball to the sky, instead of your head. You watched in equal parts terror and fascination as it burst across the firmament, dispersing the clouds and ringing loud with violence.

Gojo got off of you.

“Curses’ attacks come non-stop,” he said. “That’s the prima facie assumption you have to fight under.”

You breathed heavy, absorbing his lessons and boiling in frustration at the same time.



Day in, day out – on and on it went. Frustration, frustration, and ever more frustration. It etched into your mind to such a degree that the word itself transcended the alphabet and became a being: it lived, it breathed, it affected your daytime work as a doctor, it made your short fuse shorter, it vexed you, it even invaded your dreams.

But no, what invaded your dreams wasn’t the word 'frustration' – but Gojo and frustration. After the day’s exhaustion you would retreat into your spacious bedroom, separate from his, all the way across the upper hall, and fall right asleep.

And there he would be. Waiting for you in your dreams – sparring with you and once again being untouchable, unreachable – and yet taunting you with his vulnerability as well, by making you almost believe that you could touch him, punch him, fell him, trace your fingers down the dip of his throat, along the dunes of his clavicles, over the slope of his pectorals, touch him, touch him like you’d bested him, like you won at last, like you were improving, growing stronger, faster, better, like you had earned the right to press your lips to his, gained the privilege of breaching his mouth with your lips, become powerful enough to challenge his tongue with your tongue, coil it and drink from him, make him groan and grasp for you for dear life, for the sake of his defeat, for your bodies to…

As always, you would spring up in your bed, all alone at the crack of dawn, feeling your cheeks burning up with heat and your core soaked the way it shouldn’t be. You would slap your mattress with your hands, uncaring if Gojo heard it through the walls. You were just too wrought.

Day in, day out – on and on it went. You were overwrought as you stood on one of these mornings out on the engawa of the open kitchen, lighting a cigarette, taking a long drag of it, and glaring pointedly at the birch tree Gojo had destroyed just yesterday by having spared your stomach. You were sick of those losses, those shows of his mercy, those destroyed trees.

For once you wanted him truly defeated, truly taken by surprise, so he wouldn’t just not destroy a tree in the process of substituting it for your body part – but would actually get so fucking shocked and stunned that he would even forget which body part of yours he was planning to strike…

Speak of the devil. Gojo walked in to the kitchen, pouring coffee for himself from the pot you’d made, and walked out onto the engawa where you stood.

On his way he grumbled a grumble you’d heard him say a million times by now, “I honestly don’t understand why these monks gotta hide the jar of sugar cubes so far up inside the cabinets. Is it something to do with the whole pleasure abstinence thing or…?”

He came side by side with you, your height competing with his – and losing, as always – as he suddenly raised his hand that wasn’t holding his coffee mug and snatched the burning cigarette from your lips. Before you could even make a peep of protest, he snapped it in half between his fingers and flicked the parts away into the garden.

“These are bad for you, sensei,” he said sternly, like you were a child and he – a goddamn educator.

Your hand flew to his face of its own volition; you couldn’t stop it. But just before your palm could slap the fuck outta him, Gojo caught it and stopped it, the messiness of his pearly bed-hair falling over his amused eyes.

Oh, the devil. The annoying, annoying…!

You froze just as you had opened your mouth to shower him in a torrential downpour of your annoyance.

Your gaze, instead of being on Gojo, was on the 3 white sugar cubes that were floating in an invisible path from the furthermost cupboard in the kitchen – towards Gojo’s mug, out on the engawa, through the ability of his cursed techniques.

It was a sight you’d observed so many times, every single morning that the two of you had awoken in separate bedrooms and come down to the kitchen for your morning coffees – but it was only now that the sight of it struck a crucial chord.

Cursed paths.

If you couldn’t block his attack itself, then maybe you could block its…

Your angry philippic at him all but forgotten, you submerged into deep thought, whilst Gojo observed you and tried to decode the curious caramel lines of your expression. His brow quirked and eyes sparked with intrigue.

He was looking forward to your next training session.



Which may have been a mistake on his part. Because during your next training session that evening, you were simply horrible.

You didn’t attack whatsoever. Forget attacking – you didn’t even defend yourself properly. Gojo was overcome by both disappointment and confusion. More the latter – as he couldn’t quite understand why you weren’t deflecting his blows with your prior deftness, why you let him corner you, why you allowed him to back you… It just didn’t sound like you.

Well, no matter. Time for a cursed technique.

As he pushed you against the corner wall of the temple, he lit his Lapse Blue – the very first technique he’d used on you and which you had sliced in half back then. Once again, there was no perceptible counteroffence from you, no deflection, not even the slicing. His intuition rang, but he had no idea how to read its call.

He fired. Fired this time! For real and for true. His intuition told him to do it. To blindly fire it at you, and he did.

The moment he did, you shuttered your fingers and sliced – but not at his Lapse Blue, not at the blue ball itself – but right across its intended trajectory – its cursed path. You nullified its intended course towards you. You voided its target, and in the blink of an eye, it fired in the opposite direction – at Gojo.

Thanks to you, Gojo’s Lapse Blue fired at Gojo himself.

He just barely managed to get out of its way – more out of surprise, than life-threatening necessity – his surprise was such that he even forgot about his Infinity protecting him 24/7 with no lunch breaks.

You were now both breathing hard and staring at the shredded root of a tree, which should’ve been his pretty, white-maned head.

Your eyes were wide, gleaming with triumph and purpose – you finally caught him off guard! You caught the strongest sorcerer off guard!!

You looked at Gojo a few feet from you. He turned from the destroyed tree root to you, his chest expanding with the depth of his surprised inhales. He locked eyes with you. But there, in his bluest of blues, in those limpid and all-knowing irises, was not what you expected.

Instead of pride, congratulations and jubilation – the way he was looking at you was through the lens of pain and disappointment. To confirm it further, he averted his gaze from yours, sinking it into the depths of hopeless discontent – you saw how his eyes darkened, as if storm clouds had overtaken the firmament and muddied its blue.

You felt hurt. It was the last straw. Weeks and weeks of sleepless nights. Of working at the clinic mornings and training in the evenings. Of hiding bruises from said training, smoking cigarettes non-stop to quell the stress. Weeks and weeks of not knowing whether you’d made the right choice. Whether you were wasting your time. Whether you’d gotten yourself into a trap. Whether you’d believed a fraudulent stranger and sealed your fate forever, with no more chance to change it, to egress. And finally – finally – gaining ground and making progress – but it turned out to be a flop. It somehow wasn’t what was expected of you. Your teacher hated it. He did not approve. You’d developed a new limb to your Nullifying technique – but somehow it was ugly, a freakish offspring, not good enough to keep.

You turned around and left.

Chapter Text

You slammed the door of your room, questioning everything, each and every decision that had led you to this place. Was it right? Was it worth it to have abandoned your established safety and your clandestineness in the curse users’ world – for this?

You sighed long and heavy, looking at yourself in the mirror, nothing but tired lines and sapped skin. But despite all of it, you knew the answer.

Yes. Yes, it was worth it. Your frustration and exhaustion be damned, getting stronger was worth it! Having the power to help and protect those important to you was worth it.

Avoiding letting down another Akio – was worth it a million times over.

You were a rational person by nature, always have been. So you knew, as much as it burned you from the inside, that today’s training session was a failure, yes, a flop, a fiasco, yes, and you were distraught over it, fuck yes – but that it was but a hurdle. And as with any hurdle in your life so far – you would overcome it. If Gojo didn’t like your new technique of cursed path nullification – then you would find another. You’d keep trying and trying until you finally rendered his attacks useless. Tomorrow you would try harder.

But that’s tomorrow. Today, as your chest burned with frustration that banished all peace, you would need to quell it. You needed to unwind. And desperately so.

You huffed and washed up, the day’s sweat and toil running down your ankles. You pulled on a new pair of panties and your pyjama slip dress over your freshened body, and flicked the light switch off.

Your sheets rustled as you settled in. You had your windows open, the night being warm and humid. Moonlight poured in in abundance, cutting your ceiling in half. You stared at that ceiling, at its boring square, its monotonous rectangle, as your muscles gradually relaxed into natural soreness from the day’s training. You closed your tired eyes, resolving to think of the positive until sleep took you.

But instead, all the nits and grits of the day reeled back – every single sour moment, every failure, every misstep during training – including the biggest one: the technique you’d wagered everything on, and how it fell flat, like a bad joke.

And Gojo’s eyes upon seeing it. The sharp blue emotion that swirled in them when he looked at you past the smoking trunk of a tree you destroyed. The sadness in those eyes, the care. He didn’t say anything, but in that look you sensed sympathy – like he knew you had been hopeful about your technique, like he understood its value to you – yet had no choice but to condemn it.

And his lips, his beautiful lips, their thin plushness pressed with words unspoken, with the reprimand he could have voiced by telling you exactly why your technique was no good – but kept them shut. Didn’t speak. Left it all for you to interpret.

Tears glistened in the corners of your closed eyes.

With frustration, frustration, and ever more frustration – your hand trailed down your body, from the ravine between your breasts, over the softness of your stomach, between the pillars of your thighs – and breaching the band of your panties, glided down the slickness of your core, teasing a hum from your parted lips.

You were too tired, too overwrought, but you didn’t know where to channel it. This cumulus of frustration and strain – the vectors of all of which led to Gojo – started with him praising you for your speed and instincts, and ended with his unconcealed disappointment; it started with him smiling at you amid the tall birches, and ended with him pinning you to the sordid soil like he owned you, like your body was his to push, to abuse, to overpower.

You hated it. You loved it. You wanted to fight it. You welcomed it.

Your finger dipped into your hole and a shattered moan broke free from you to find yourself so wet already. Did the thought of that man soak you like this? Why?

There was no time to solve the puzzle as you fucked in and out of yourself, your sounds sloppy, squelching, desperate – yet not enough. So you brought your fingers to your clit instead – circling, teasing the nub in search of speedy completion.

You breathed ragged and allowed your mind free reign in the name of that release. You allowed it to visualise Gojo on top of you, teasing your clit for you, goading you on, guiding your bodily functions, kissing a corner of your lips, and commanding you to cum…

“Cum for me,” his voice would be hard and throaty from being barely able to keep himself under control, as he waited for you to unravel and soak his long, delicious fingers with your slick, with magma from your very core.

“Ah, Gojo.…” you moaned needily and broken, from the friction of your fingers, not quite daring to call his first name even in your solitude…

Almost!

You nearly heard his panting over you.

Almost!

You felt the sparks of pleasure from your own teasing – but they were fragmented, distracted, not enough to follow on.

Fuck!

You threw your blanket off, sweat tickling down the backs of your thighs, and exhaled unsatisfied, desperate, aching and unfulfilled.

Frustration, frustration, and ever mor–!

Your door slammed open.

You sprung up on your mattress to see Gojo storming in. His white hair trapped the moonlight; his expression was hard, unreadable, and without compromise.

You climbed out of bed, your cotton dress dangling at your knees.

“What are you doing?” you barely managed to get out before his hands snared your cheeks and he slammed his lips on yours.

What was this? Why?

You forgot to push him away as his mouth melded with the softness of yours, moulded it with force, and tasted without restraint.

A moan broke past you. A confused, vulnerable little squeak it was – but it seemed to be all he needed, as Gojo undulated his muscle of a body against you and you felt all of him at once, too quickly. From the density of his thighs on yours, to the taut swells of his muscles digging into your skin, to the hardened bulge between his legs – brushing on and rousing your core.

You felt your pussy’s flame ignite, its slick – uncomfortable between your naked thighs. You pushed at Gojo’s chest.

“Why?” you breathed and looked him directly in the sky-blues. “Why?” you repeated with demand for truth.

His breaths were laboured and fanned your face hot.

His white brows were knitted. He searched for your eyes.

“I heard…” he said, but he couldn’t say any more.

…you touching yourself to me.

“I felt…” he tried again, pressing his forehead onto yours.

…the depth of your need, the depth only I can fill – that I want to fill.

“And I couldn’t…” he mouthed against your moist lips.

…resist.

His hand trailed down the flesh of your waist and gripped it to the precipice of pain – and the other circled round your neck, pressured your windpipe, and pushed you back onto the bed.

You searched his eyes, those blues for answers, but all you saw in them was lust uncaged. He dipped to your neck to kiss it.

“Gojo, I’m not sure if we should do this...” you protested, reason somewhat still alive despite you drowning in the roils of need.

“Satoru,” he corrected, dragging his teeth dangerously across your clavicle. “I’ve had enough of you calling me Gojo.”

“But you’re…” you began, though your words cut short as he raked his fingers up your side to your soft breast – grabbing it, kneading it, brushing his thumb roughly over your hardened nipple, “…you’re my teacher,” you barely finished your sentence.

His white hair rained on your chin as he murmured angrily to your windpipe, “Oh, is that what you call our relationship…?”

You were shocked. What else was it?

He slid forward on top of you and his eyes captured yours.

“Charitable teacher and eager student,” he cloyed with mockery. “Is that the reason I stayed in this godforsaken town for all these fucking weeks?”

You examined his face as he said that. His expression was cut from marble – just as sharp, angled, and stern. But his pupils were dilated with such rich dark passion and unaddressed need that they crowded out the blue. And the rock-hardness of him – you felt it dig into your clothed sex.

But how dare he blame you for having stayed here? You never asked him to! If anything, you’d actually wanted him to go and leave you alone…

It was like a tiger tore your soul apart and took a seat in its place – the tiger of your frustration. You grabbed Gojo by the muscled shoulder and flipped him around, putting your hefty weight on him.

As his head slammed on the mattress, you saw him grin.

“I never asked you to stay,” you gritted out to him as you straddled his slim thighs, your pussy throbbing on his thick length.

He opened his eyes at you, skewering you on their intense blue. “You didn’t,” he agreed. “But you were dying for me to stay.”

At this, his large hands grabbed the flesh of your thighs and he ground you on his cock, instantly unravelling and bleeding your composure.

His hand curled around your nape and he dragged your head down to him. You felt the heat of his gaze sear you up close and his breath of the dragon on your face.

“And hadn’t I done you the favour of staying – you would have begged me to,” he said.

Your brows knitted, eyes pained from inklings of defeat. He had a point. You bit your lip to stifle a moan. This was your chance to say something snarky, to protest, to put him in his place – but you could do naught else but stare at him as wide-eyed as a doe.

His torso rose from the mattress. His lips came to the shell of your ear and touched it like they were meant to be conjoined.

He murmured low and clear, “I know how much you need me. Known it from the start. So you can drop the righteous act…”

He kissed your ear wetly – right over the hole.

“…and be the needy slut you’ve been wanting to be for me all along.”

Your cheeks flamed, your head reeled, your hand – flew from your side in a bid to strike him across the face.

Slapping Gojo Satoru is a notional concept. It was something very few people ever tried to do. And if any did – they did so symbolically, as a jest, and always with the awareness that their slap would never land due to his impenetrable Infinity.

But yours did.

The whipping sound of it resounded across the room and your palm sizzled with the sting. Shocked, your mouth in an O of disbelief, you looked down at Gojo.

His head was turned to the side, his usually pale cheek was ruddy from your hard slap. His eyes were wide with surprise.

“Gojo? Did you forget to…?”

Your question about him activating his Infinity trailed off when his wide eyes narrowed and incised up to you.

Fuck…

Your next breath was knocked out of you as he flipped you on your back – for the last time – as you’d now lost all of your chances to top him, to control the process, to even have a say in it. And the strength of his assertion was apparent in the violence with which his lips captured yours and ravaged them.

His teeth were relentless, cutting into the meat of your soft lips, sucking and grazing – it stung! – before he left your needy tongue alone, didn’t pay it any attention – and kissed instead down to your jaw, biting along the length of it – then trailed his greedy teeth down to your neck.

You groaned in pain as he bit around your artery – and you hit and gripped his muscled shoulder.

Infinity didn’t stop you – and neither did he.

“Do you know the real reason I stayed?” he whispered over the open wound he’d just given you, as though soothing it with words.

“Why?” you whispered through clenched teeth, staring up at the ceiling with eyes glazed.

“Because I saw the real you during our fight,” he kissed your pulsing artery, lips oppressing your platelets with passion. “I saw everything you stand for. What you were ready to die for. We skipped all the preambles. We shattered the ice. I saw you bared.”

His hands sunk into the mattress on either side of your head. His rabidly beating heart assaulted yours from above.

“And ever since that night, I couldn’t get enough.”

He looked at you through a veil woven of both anger and surrender. You’d never seen his blues so conflicted, so murky, or his lips so pressed and trembling with need.

You drove your fingers into the white of his shimmering hair and brought those lips to yours. He thrummed in your throat, finally coiling his tongue with yours, as his groin came crashing down on you in another wave of passion, lust, demand.

You drove yourself up to meet him – at which his hips stuttered and he sucked in a sharp breath. His large hand came to your neck, not quite throttling you but close.

“Careful,” he warned huskily, and despite the thick arousal with which he said it, you almost broke out in a laugh.

Careful was never in your vocabulary, apparently.

If you had been careful – he wouldn’t have found you so easily from the expanse of the whole Japanese archipelago. If you had been careful – you would’ve remained in the shadows and not venture to a fight you couldn’t win, and encounter in the process the fucking strongest sorcerer. If you had been careful – you wouldn’t be under him right now, as his hands slid the hem of your dress up, his teeth scraping up your inner thigh.

You nearly kicked him in the face for such a brazen act, but only held back since you knew kicking him would be no use. That was why nobody wanted him for an opponent. That was why you wanted him.

The flimsy cover of your dress slid up your torso and over your head, and there was no going back. Moonlight splashed your bare belly and freed breasts, dribbling down the caramel hillocks of your body with effervescent glow. The night air frolicked in from the open windows, caressing your dark nipples into hardness and your lips into a timid shiver.

You looked at Gojo above you where he was straddling your hips, his long muscular thighs like cement blocks on either side of you. And the picture of him like that – ensnared your breath.

He was frozen like a man possessed. Stupefied into a statue, as though bitten by Medusa’s snakes. But in his eyes you saw life. Life itself – the way it’s made up of violent churn of emotions – such was the way in which he was consuming you now. Fascination, greed, hunger, lust, and the gusto of conquest – you saw it all in his stare.

His large hands grabbed your breasts, squeezing them to the brink of pain and having them spill from between his fingers. You cried out from the mix of pain and pleasure as he pinched your nipple and inhaled your moans. Just when you thought the pain was getting unbearable, he would let go and knead almost gently, pooling heat between your thighs.

Slapping his hands away was not an option. Not with his blues tethered to yours from above, watching you for misdemeanour, warning you of consequences for disobedience. Only he decided when to stop touching you – which he did, at last, to reach for the hem of his own shirt.

“I saw what you’re made of,” he said, pulling the garment up over his tapered waist. “I saw what you’re prepared to die for. Now I want to see what it is you want.”

Your pupils spread when you beheld his naked torso opening up above you. The perfect furrows of muscle that stretched as he slid the shirt over his snowy head; the heavy density of them when he leaned back over you; one of his biceps shadowing and trapping you – his other hand snaking between your bodies.

He dragged your panties aside and traced your wet slit. You barely registered his hair tickling your forehead as his fingers traced up the hood of your clit and circled the nub – once, twice – he moaned low and shaky – third, fourth, fifth – you moaned too, sharing the oxygen.

He picked up rhythm, testing the waters – testing you – as your moans rose, became more hectic. Seeing how well you respond to his work on your clit, his fingers moved further, spread your lower lips, coating in their slick, and dipped into your fluttering hole with not a warning.

You grabbed onto his bicep in sensual protest. But he controlled the process, remember? So he only smiled as he reached deep within you – first with one long finger, then two. His thumb continued to work your clit while your mind was muddying with every filthy squelch.

“Answer me,” Gojo commanded out of nowhere.

Your eyes shut as you were sinking to the sea of bliss.

“Gojo, I…” you breathed.

“Satoru,” he growled, low and menacing.

Your eyes snapped open, your attention coming to. But your look was already melted and weak. Your dignity hung by final threads as Gojo continued to unravel you with his fingers. Whereas his face was almost sympathetic in looking at you. But really, behind that thin veil of sympathy was relish, enjoyment, anticipation…

His fingers inside curled. He didn’t need to look – he easily found the spot inside you that was alien to all the men before – hit bullseye from first try. You jolted with a ripple of pleasure, eyes shot wide, your foreheads nearly colliding.

With a satisfied grin, he repeated his earlier question. “What do you want more than anything?”

Tears in your eyes, you mumbled, “To get stronger…”

Gojo chuckled in dark amusement. “Admirable,” he kissed the corner of your panting mouth. “Don’t we all?”

You wanted to say something along the lines of him being a dick. But your words got buried in your throat when you heard him mutter, “These are in my way,” followed by the sharp ripping sound of your panties. You gasped at the sudden shock of it, as your underwear was now nothing more than torn tatters stretched across your pelvis.

How dare he! This time you would really let him have it.

“You…!”

But here he started fingerfucking you in earnest, thumb working your clit mercilessly – with your pussy now in his full disposal. Somehow your arousal gushed extra on his fingers since he ripped the garment off, and Gojo sniggered satisfied for knowing the right keys to playing your body.

“Tell me, (y/n). What do you want more than anything else? Bare yourself to me again,” he resumed his earlier line of questioning, as his free hand cradled the side of your head with gentle affection, while his other pumped you with ferocity, his bicep flexing to insane definition.

The ladder climbed. The rain clouds were swollen. The dam was breaking.

But still, he controlled the process, so he could just as easily deny you your climax. And with how his fingers were deliberately letting up that tiny bit of speed, you could tell he very much would use this weapon at his disposal and rob you of your orgasm.

“You, Satoru!” you shouted, filthy with lust. “You!”

“I knew that already,” he shut you down with unabridged sadism. Though you couldn’t have known about the particularly large seep of precum that leaked from his cock in his jeans – at hearing his first name from your lips so intimately, so desperately.

“What else do you want?” he demanded, his own voice shaky, less stable.

Your mind was blank, it functioned no more. His fingers in you, his weight on you, his heavenly scent, his punishing voice, his poorly masked need – all of these turned your mind into a colourless plain with nothing but your necessity to cum at its centre stage.

“Nothing!” you screamed from the very brink of sanity. “I want nothing else! No one else! Nothing! Nothing but you!”

You screamed these words so loud they resonated through the whole temple. Even the forest heard it. And so did Gojo.

He was satisfied. He got his answer. Having kept you on edge, but withholding just that one drop in power and speed – he now gave it to you all. As if already knowing your pussy better than the remote control of his fucking 75-inch plasma TV, he applied just the right amount of pressure on your clit and amped his speed in fucking in and out of you – and you unravelled.

The ceiling plummeted on you and pulverised into stars right before hitting you.

Gojo’s open mouth was on yours, drinking your cries of bliss, as your walls squeezed his fingers with such force and you spilled all over them.

The sight of you cumming, the sensation of you clenching him, and the absolute brokenness of your moans – almost made him cum too. It almost felt like all the years of honed self-control were just for this moment – as Gojo nearly slammed his clothed hips over his fingers which still pumped in and out your fluttering pussy.

“That’s it, baby,” he murmured against your temple. “Let it go. Let it go on me.”

As you gradually slid down the stairwell of heaven, skated down the spiral of the universe – Gojo retracted his fingers from your slackened sex and shamelessly licked his fingers. His eyes hooded with the relish of a gourmet, and he hummed appreciatively.

“Sweet,” his eyes slithered down to your unfocused ones. “Like sugar.”

He leaned in. “As much as I’m craving to eat your pussy like a desert right now, I can’t wait to fuck you brainless already.”

Before you could even make a squeak, his fingers raked down your fleshy thighs and rid you of what little was remaining of your panties. Soon after you heard the unzipping of his jeans and his weight was off of you.

You propped yourself on your elbows to watch his statuesque body drenched in moonlight. He slid the waist of his black jeans, together with the band of his grey boxer briefs, down the V of his lower abs. As he did so, he held you in a shamelessly confident gaze, not an ounce of shyness or modesty to it – an albino leopard staring down its prey.

The jeans slid down and his cock sprung free. It boasted a length and girth you had yet to see, and it bled his sticky arousal from the pink domed tip.

Well, it suffices to say that you’d only ever salivated so abundantly over vanilla cake…

He noticed these subtle shifts in your expression, the tiny swipe of your tongue over your lip, the blowing wide of your pupils. He pumped himself a couple of times, his long thick fingers wrapping around his long thick cock – the only ones that could wrap around it fully.

“Next time, baby,” he promised and climbed back on you, his sanguine smirk to your steaming mouth.

He crowded the space between your thighs and lined his tip with you, mixing your orgasm fluids with his precum, and even snuggled his forehead to yours like you were two lovers about to embark on an arduous journey together.

That journey would be arduous only for you though – and he knew it. That stretching smirk of his confirmed it when he began sliding himself in. Your brows bunched together and pained lines creased your forehead.

He was too big, too thick, too everything. He was stretching you, filling you completely, inch by strained inch. When he was halfway through, you put your hand on his shoulder, a plea to pace himself.

He obliged and paused, despite his strained breaths fibrillating on your face. The onslaught of warm and velvety sensation swallowing him up – the sensation of you – was too much for him too.

When he could wait no more, he leaned in, his lips to your brow bone, and whispered hotly in both an edict and a plea, “Say yes, baby.”

You half-hummed, half-moaned. “Yes.”

With a thick groan he slid himself in to the hilt. You felt impaled. And then, without even a pause, you felt him right down to the ridges and veins of his shaft because he pulled all the way back to the thick tip, just short of exiting your pussy.

“No, no, no, not yet!” you exclaimed.

But he slammed back into you anyway.

“Fuck!” you hissed, feeling overfilled, your muscles clenching and refusing to give way.

But Gojo, the bastard, chuckled by your ear, his warm tongue toying with its shell.

“Oh, please, love. After all those hits you took during our training, don’t tell me you’re now too weak to take my cock…?”

You snapped a glare at him and found his blues sneering down at you. Goading. Anticipating your challenge.

Oh, he thought he was impervious to pain, huh…?

You raked your nails up his nape and to his snowdrift of hair.

His hair was something you’d wanted to touch ever since the first time you’d seen it and it was even better than you expected – thick, fibrous and beyond silky, slipping through your fingers like smooth sand. But enough of fascination. You gripped a handful at the roots and pulled hard – hard enough to tear a piece of his scalp off. Gojo clenched his sharp jaw, his cheek muscles strained, his eyes flared with blue fire.

You grinned beneath him. It must’ve hurt. Must’ve hurt a lot. Good.

In retaliation he began ramming into you even more mercilessly, bruising your cervix, disregarding all tightness in your muscles. You gasped and cried out, and your hand in his hair fell away.

But he wasn’t letting this go. His hips slapped your inner thighs repeatedly and rippled your flesh as he kept pumping and pumping into you. Your senses no longer knew what to focus on: the repeated pain from being pummelled so mercilessly and without a pause – or the feeling of getting so filled up, so deliciously filled up, completed, mended, invaded, impaled, so fully, so full, so fucking full, fuck!

“Satoru,” you mewled in such a shameful voice, one that no one had heard from you before.

“Yes, love?” he had the gall to ask, a sweat droplet trickling down his temple, his breath short but steady. Eyes alight.

You clung to him for dear life, your tits jiggling beneath him with the speed of his assault. Your nails raked his back but that only fuelled him. You bit into his neck with the aim to pierce an artery, but that only made him snigger proudly – not pause.

“Bite me, baby. Scratch me. Bruise me,” he murmured. “Give me your all.”

“Satoru, fuck!” you were bursting. Pain and pleasure were intermingled – one of them began somewhere but morphed into the other before you could trace it.

You felt it all – you felt his tip, you felt his shaft, you felt its veins, you felt his balls slapping the base of your ass… It was obscene, it was loud, his skin was hot and sweaty on you, and yours was plush and lackey to his rhythm and power.

Abruptly he pulled out and you never felt so empty in your life.

“Satoru,” you begged, blind with need.

“I got you, baby,” he soothed you just prior to flipping your curvy body with ease, positioning you face down on the mattress. His strong arms hitched beneath your hips, lifted your ass in the air and propped you on your jellified knees.

You huffed into the sheets from how obscene this was. Your great juicy ass in the air, thighs apart, pussy abused and clenching around nothing, dripping your joint fluids down your thighs, and absolutely glistening for only Gojo Satoru’s viewing pleasure.

“Such a tight pussy,” he praised from behind, running his thumb over its quivering lips. “And I already made a mess of it…”

“But I’m not done,” he warned, and you felt him sliding into you again from the back, re-stretching your walls, ordering them to learn the shape of his cock.

“Ah…Ahh…” you moaned into the sheets, your hair a sticky mess, your brain – even worse.

He held your hips up in the air by himself and you were thankful, since you had no control of your body anymore. His one hand travelled and grabbed the flesh of your waist, your thighs, your hanging bouncy tits – and squeezed so hard as if he wanted to rip off a piece of you and keep it for himself. His hand then ran along your lower back, as he lined himself perfectly to hit that spot inside you, and thrust so hard – too hard – so deep – too deep – whilst punishing you with his renewed pace.

“You okay there, sensei?” he asked from behind, as if he wasn’t burrowing into you like a fucking oil drill.

Unable to answer, or form a single word, you were clutching fistfuls of the sheets as he literally fucked each and every single thought out of your head.

But then a harsh, painful smack whipped you on your ass, making you cry into the mattress.

“I didn’t hear you, sensei,” the demon burrowing you from behind called out again, voice strained but still triumphant.

You gritted your teeth, still reeling from the slap of his stone-hard palm, and said to him, throwing his abuse of the word ‘sensei’ right back, “Is that the hardest you can go, sensei?”

Gojo chuckled darkly and leaned across your back towards your ear, not letting up his speed one notch.

“Glad you asked,” he repeated his earlier words, and here you felt his fingers snake into your hair, grabbing a fistful by the roots, and snapping your head back from the sheets, as he began pummelling into you with ferocity you didn’t think was possible.

You couldn’t think anymore. You couldn’t speak anymore. For all you knew, you were drooling and moaning and trying to say something, but only gurgling inarticulate spasmic sounds. Your body became nothing more than a sleeve to his cock, an object he impaled again and again as if trying to obliterate your insides, ramming and remoulding your internal organs to accommodate his length. That was how it felt. Sensation became your centre, your pyramid, your beginning and end – and you worshipped the sensation of his cock internally. Externally also…

“Yes, yes, yes! Satoru, yes, oh my god! Fuck, I can’t– Satoru! Too fast! I… Too much! Too much! It’s fucking too much!” you heard yourself chanting at some point, like a flicker of clarity amid the storm of your primal insanity.

Your skin was hurting where his hips and balls were slapping it. Your flesh rippled with each of his barrages, right down to your bones.

“I won’t stop until you cum around my cock,” he warned, hard and uncompromising, like a fucking PSA.

“I can’t cum like this!” you cried, tears dribbling, same as your joint fluids were dribbling down your thighs, soaking and staining the sheets.

“Well, then,” Gojo hummed. “I guess you need my help, don’t you?”

You gritted your teeth, tears of annoyance shimmering in your eyes. Of course he would make you beg for it…

You reached your hand towards your clit. But here Gojo released your hair and gripped your wrist instead. He wrenched it behind your back, as you yelped in pain, while he continued to fuck you like a madman.

“Let’s do this the right way, shall we?” he said.

“Satoru, I really can’t…” you were breaking down in tears.

The sensations were becoming overwhelming – with both your inner sensitive spot being assaulted with each merciless thrust, and his cock itself – its size, speed and rigidity – abusing your hole. But you simply couldn’t climb to the top of the summit, you couldn’t snap the forever building tension through penetration alone. So his fierce pace wore on you, stretched you beyond your limit, and you felt yourself being fucked all the way to your brain. Motherfucker may as well have been fucking you in your brain’s convolutions…

“You can cum, baby. But you gotta tell me what I wanna hear,” he said almost sympathetically.

Then, his voice dropped down like a block of cement, “Who do you belong to?”

Sniffling like a schoolgirl, you cried, “You!”

“And whose cock do you want?”

“Fuck! Yours! Only yours, Satoru!”

“How candid,” he cooed, though you could definitely hear his strain. He needed to cum just as bad as you did. “So should I seal your words in act? Should I mark you as mine? Pump you so full of my cum that you feel me in you for days?”

Teetering on the edge of orgasm, mind shattered from overstimulation, you shouted, “Yes! Satoru, please! Fill me up! Fill me! Cum in me, please!”

“Fuck…” he hissed, and his hips stuttered. He reached his hand around your belly and tended at last to your waiting clit. His finger pads rubbed it in circles with urgency, at the exact same pace as your pussy swallowing his driving cock – and sensation finally broke through the ceiling and rushed up to the stars.

His name was your oratorio. You screamed it, moaned it, butchered it in a million ways as your climax washed you over, under, and around until you plunged to the trenches and shot up heavenward. It was just your luck – or Satoru’s skill – that the moment your orgasm struck, he lodged his cock so deep in you that you came in blissful crashes with him stuffing you so full, with not an inch more possible, and your happy fluids streamed around his shaft and down his balls – as he resumed fucking you through your orgasm.

Somewhere in the cottony distance, as a muffled sound, you heard him swearing and groaning.

“Fuck… You’re squeezing me so tight…”

By then you had collapsed on the sheets, with just your ass being held up still by Gojo’s hands, as he used your extra moist pussy to fuck himself to his release.

He gripped your ass cheeks so hard, bruising them on the spot, and slammed into you a final time. His balls tensed and jerked as he said your name in a guttural growl and pumped you full of his cum – so full that it began spilling round his shaft and down your inner thighs, and he was still spilling inside you, still not done.

At last he was finished, both of you panting like you’d ran a mile in blistering sun – and he slowly retracted his half-soft length. You whimpered, with moans splintering it in between, since you felt empty – too empty now without him in you. Your lower half collapsed on the bed and his cum dribbled down your ruined pussy down onto the sheets.

“Oh, my god…” you whispered, still out of breath and dizzied from your mindblowing release, trying to remember what day it was, where you were, what was your name, and all sorts of other crap that was supposed to matter.

Weakly, barely – you registered Gojo’s hand on your shoulder. He took it almost gently and turned your spent body around, making you lay on your back. You felt his tongue on your lips and you opened for him automatically.

He kissed you deeply, lovingly; his warm tongue caressed yours into awakeness. You felt his hands trail up your sides, squeeze once at your breasts – not harshly but softly this time – and come to your face. His thumbs wiped at the tears in the corners of your eyes.

“You did well, baby. You took me so well. Took all of me,” you thought you heard him murmur, but you couldn’t be sure. With how dazed you were, it sounded like a voice within a dream.

He kissed down your jaw, your neck, your sternum – before taking one of your breasts in hand and languidly sucking your nipple in an open-mouthed kiss, then giving your other nipple the same gentle treatment, before kissing down your stomach and licking around your navel – earning a ticklish giggle from you and smiling against your skin himself – and kissed down your lower abdomen down to your leaking lips.

You jolted when his tongue swirled over your swollen clit and lapped at your abused hole.

You pushed weakly at his pearly head of hair, “Satoru, it’s too much. Not yet, please. Too…too soon…”

He chuckled, its sound vibrating in your folds.

“As I said,” he kissed the inside of your thigh before hovering his warm breath over your pussy again. “What was all that training for, hmm?”

Your head slammed onto the mattress and your eyes shot open when his skilled tongue got to work and unfurled pleasure before you, right down to its peeled down molecules…



When you finally opened your eyes to clarity, it was already dawn. Smoky morning light tiptoed in from the windows. Your ceiling was uniform grey, no longer cut in half.

You blinked, sighed, and turned to the side of your bed to find Gojo seated on the edge of it, his back to you. With some measure of pride, you saw the traces of your passion – your nail marks – scratched and inscribed all across his thewed back. But you didn’t need the full sunlight to see that they had faded. That those scratches weren’t bleeding anymore. That his Reverse Cursed Technique was speedy in its job.

You reached your hand to them – to him – but you hissed from the pain of the deep bite on your neck, the one he had given you last night.

“I’m sorry I can’t heal you,” he said.

You looked up and saw that he had turned around, his neck long and beautiful, chest wide and corded with muscle. But it was his expression that held your attention captive. It was so genuine, regretful, with not an ounce of haught.

Your heart clenched around a feeling you hadn’t felt before.

“You don’t have to!” you assured him. “You don’t need to heal me, Satoru. It’s okay.”

He smiled at you the way an adult smiles at a young inexperienced child. Kind but rueful and without joy. And in his eyes you recognised that same shade of blue you saw outside, amongst the birches, when you had shown him your new technique…

He took your face in his large hands, gently, without affront, and you wanted to drown in the oceanic bliss of his eyes so up close. But you knew he was about to dole out a harsh truth on you.

He called your name, his voice a unique cadence of the early morning – intimate, lacking play or pretence, a one-on-one tone. “Every cursed technique comes with a price. None of them are granted freely. And your Cursed Path Nullification technique – is too pricy.”

You didn’t understand, only watched his beautiful lips move with austerity.

His thumbs brushed your temples. He continued, his teacher self again.

“Nullifying the path of a cursed attack goes well beyond nullifying the attack itself. When you cut my Lapse Blue – you nullify it where it stands. But when I fire it, its path can be anything. I can fire it in any direction that you can’t anticipate. So you being able to nullify its path – goes beyond an ordinary sorcerer’s technique.”

You brows knitted as you listened intently.

“The price for such an extraordinary technique is this: because you nullified the path of the cursed attack – in other words, contradicted its natural course – the attack will seek a new target. It can’t just disappear. And that new target will be the next strongest source of cursed energy, its next most powerful concentration.”

He paused, appraised your slight confusion, and continued.

“Remember how during our training you nullified the path of my attack? Its intended natural course was to you. You cancelled that. So where did it fire next?”

It clicked for you.

Eyes wide and awed, you answered, “At you.”

Gojo nodded, his gaze becoming leaden.

“Because I was the strongest source of cursed energy. But if it can’t find its next strongest concentration of cursed energy, the attack won’t just disperse into the air. That’s just not how it works.”

“So think, my love,” his hands squeezed your head just that bit more protectively, “when it can’t find its next target, after you nullified its originally intended path – where will it fire?”

You realised, worry weighing on your heart.

“At me,” you said.

“At you,” he confirmed and kissed the crown of your head with a heavy sigh.

Chapter Text

Who could’ve known that contentment had a colour too – bright and sparkling like the morning dew? That in eyes dyed in contentment flew the fireflies of affection for one’s former enemy? That the visions of that enemy-turned-lover translated into all the objects in their environs? That the white upholstery of chairs reminded of his hair? That the clear blue sky was akin to his eyes? That the wispy white clouds streaming across it - were precisely the length of his white eye pledgets? That…

“Sensei?” the voice of your patient, a 30-year-old widower Yuito, roused you.

You turned to him on your swivel chair, readjusting the high neck of your turtleneck.

“What? Oh yes, Yuito-san. Let’s see here,” you shuffled through the papers on your desk. “Good news! Your check-up came back fine. Blood work is all good, too. I’m glad to inform you that there are no issues and you’re in perfect health.”

You offered him a big smile.

“That’s good to hear, sensei,” he smiled too.

It was a shame really that he lost his wife so soon. He was a handsome man. The young architect of the town.

You stood up to lead the patient to the door, but he was hesitant to leave.

“(y/n) sensei,” he said, and you saw a dusting of pink graze his cheeks.

“Yes, Yuito-san?” you paused, eyebrows raised in question.

“Well, I was wondering if…” you noticed the subdued fidgeting of his fingers by his thighs. “I was wondering if you and I could…if we could…uh…”

Here, you heard a commotion in the hallway, marked by Junko’s familiar voice.

“Gojo-san! You can’t go in there yet! She’s with a patient…!”

Your door slammed open and there he was. In full height and glory, nearly taking up the whole doorway. He was back in his immaculate dark uniform and the white pledgets were back over his eyes, making his hair rise to the ceiling like the licks of white flame. Behind him stood disapproving Junko, much tinier in comparison.

“There’s my student!” Gojo exclaimed at you, all grins and nonchalance.

“Student…?” confused Yuito-san exclaimed, reminding you for the first time since hearing the commotion that he was here.

You chuckled uncomfortably and turned to your patient. “He’s teaching me Japanese,” you explained. “I’m looking to improve my skills further.”

Assuaged, Yuito-san nodded emphatically, “Ah! I see, I see. How wonderful!”

You obliquely glared at Gojo’s grinning face.

“Sensei,” you enunciated the word to him, “Apologies, but I am with a patient.”

“That’s what I told him!” Junko mouthed to you from behind Gojo and splayed her arms in exasperation. You gave her a sympathetic smile. She shook her head at his tall back and headed back to her receptionist’s desk.

Gojo entered your office, looking around and appraising its interior.

Seeing as your hint for him to go away and let you do your work, fell on deaf ears, you decided you needed to see Yuito-san out as soon as possible, and then deal with whatever it was Gojo came to you to.

“Ahaha, Yuito-san...so I’ll see you for your next check-up, yes? Please keep warm and do come back if you experience any issues. My doors are always open for you,” you smiled sweetly at him.

The poor man was visibly confused by Gojo’s undeniable, splotchy purple presence in the white sterile interior of your office, as the latter casually strutted around and observed things as if he very well moved into his new home.

Hearing your words, though, Yuito-san remembered something.

“Oh! Thank you, sensei, once again. But…you see, I was wondering if I could, uh, if I could ask you… Erm, well, there is this lovely restaurant in the city square and I thought maybe we could…”

The poor man’s intentions were becoming clear to you. They were flattering, and even innocent, seeing as how he stuttered to even say the simple sentence to ask you out. But this was the worst possible timing. No, not for you. But for him…

Gojo abruptly halted in his viewing of your office and swerved around to face the two of you.

You opened your mouth to propose to Yuito-san to discuss this topic some other time, i.e. when an unwieldy menace by the name of Gojo was not around – but you were too late.

“Unfortunately, (y/n) sensei already has an engagement this evening where she’ll be thoroughly stuffed. She won’t be hungry,” the menace said, walking up to you.

You closed your eyes. Fuck.

“Oh? I didn’t realise…” Yuito-san was saying.

You felt Gojo’s presence next to you, his heat emanating way too close. So you tried to subtly move away from him to a respectable distance – but his large hand around your shoulder stopped you.

You smiled uncomfortably and held the door open for your patient.

“I’ll see you out, Yuito-san.”

But then, just as the man was gaping awkwardly at you and Gojo standing side-by-side, and reluctantly heading for the open door – Gojo’s hand on your shoulder lifted to the neckline of your turtleneck and pulled it down.

It didn’t click with you immediately what he was doing, but Yuito-san’s horrified bug-eyed expression told the tale.

The hickey! No, a ‘hickey’ was a cute word for the actual fucking bite wound that Gojo had left on your neck last night. It was the very reason you’d worn a turtleneck today of all the days. And now that ghastly mark of horror was in your patient’s full view.

You made to smack Gojo’s hand away from your clothing, but he was quicker – he retracted his fingers with an open palm. You shot him a death glare, but he wasn’t paying you any mind – he was grinning at Yuito-san.

Enough of this!

You decisively stepped out of Gojo’s reach and took the stupefied widower out of your office with a genial touch to his arm.


When you returned back from seeing your flustered patient out, you were fuming. You shut the door of your office to find Gojo seated on your swivel chair, his long legs crossed one over the other, his smile – satisfied and electric.

“What the fuck was that?” you demanded. “You can’t just turn up at my work like this, Satoru. Not to mention, scare my patients…”

Gojo snorted as if you said something funny, and got up, standing once again to his intimidating height.

He approached you, taking his hands out of his pockets, and your eyes inadvertently fell on those long and thick fingers which played your body last night like you were an instrument, and he – a virtuoso.

“I just can’t help boasting what I have,” he said with a charming shrug, his shoulders coming to loom over you.

You rolled your eyes behind your glasses.

“And I’m here to tell you something,” he added.

Your eyes flitted up to him.

He watched you a moment from the veil of his bandages, as if he could read your thoughts. He smiled at last, not unkindly, and said.

“I’m leaving for Tokyo this week.”

Your heart suddenly felt heavy in your chest, as if strung by stone.

“And I want you to come with me,” he added.

“What?” you asked.

He gave an amused chuckle and leaned down – significantly – to your height. You had a fair height on you, but his physical stature was unquestionably superior.

Gojo took your face in his warm hands, and repeated, “(y/n), I want you to come with me to Tokyo.”

You stared at the white makeshift blindfold before you, envisioning his limpid blues behind them. You responded to them with honesty.

“No, Satoru. There’s nothing for me in Tokyo,” you said. “My life is here.”

Gojo observed you a while. Assessed the resolve behind your statement. And sighed, his broad chest expanding, his warm breath fanning your face.

Here he leaned in to kiss you and your lips welcomed it. He was soft, so soft, and tasted like a bite of Eden’s fig.

When he allowed you egress from the kiss, which was reweaving your brain into cotton again – he smiled against your parted and huffing lips.

“(y/n)-san, don’t tell me you’re actually afraid of going to Tokyo…?” he asked.

You snorted and fixed your knowing gaze on his covered eyes.

“Such cheap tricks won’t work on me, Gojo-san.”

A corner of his lips quirked handsomely. He closed in again, enrapturing your senses with his scent, and murmured, “Then, what will?”

You looked to the ceiling, away from his bewitching face, and pondered.

“I have an idea.”


You stepped out of the Arrivals of the Tokyo International Haneda airport to join the rangy figure of Gojo outside.

He was dressed casually. A pair of indigo jeans that hugged his waist and hips illegally well. A baby blue button-up shirt, with its sleeves rolled up and its top buttons unbuttoned, showing off both his long sinewy forearms and his carved collarbones, along with a slightly excessive view of his elegant sternum. In one of his hands he was holding the upright handle of your wheelie suitcase.

You came up to his side and he peered down at you from above his sunglasses, which hung loosely from the bridge of his nose. Or rather, he wasn’t looking at you, per se – but at the open decorative ballotin in your hand containing the most exquisite-looking slices of vanilla cake, which were custom-made only this morning by the lovely Sakiko.

You’d eaten a couple of slices during the flight already and the Six Eyes (as you came to know they were called) were staring pointedly at the next decadent slice you were now piercing most princely with your Poseidon’s trident, i.e. your plastic fork.

You didn’t offer a single slice of the spongy-soft, aromatic goodness to your traveling partner, even though he was the one who bought the cake for you from Sakiko’s shop in return for you to accompany him to the capital. Instead, you placed a chunk of the slice on your tongue and chewed it with utmost enjoyment.

You heard him sigh next to you, and heard also the wheels of your suitcase skid sharply. The next moment your hand with the fork was held to the side and Gojo’s lips were on yours. His tongue invaded your mouth without invitation. He licked deftly all around it – scraped the cream from your tongue, the sponge-bread from your teeth, and the taste of it all from the roof of your mouth – before his tongue and lips left you, dazed and fluttery all over.

“That’s a good cake,” the bastard noted and began walking off the airport grounds with your wheelie case in hand.

You exhaled with hard-pressed lips and followed him.


By the time you two reached the destination, you discarded the empty box from Sakiko’s dessert shop, with only the tiny crumbs left at the bottom, into the nearest trash can. Actually, even more than your obsession with vanilla cake, the reason you had devoured all 4 slices on your own was because of nerves.

After all, Gojo was taking you to the very heart of the organisation you’d worked so hard to avoid all these years. But now he was telling you that you were legitimate. That you weren’t a curse user. That you were one of him – a jujutsu sorcerer.

But you didn’t quite believe that. Gojo still kept you on the low, you could tell. For one, he’d told you to refrain from using your Cursed Energy Nullification technique and your Cursed Path Nullification technique also. Which was basically tying your hands and telling you to be an ordinary civilian – and not a jujutsu sorcerer.

You didn’t know what he had in mind. But you trusted him – or tried to, anyway. Though your trust in him didn’t stop your feet from freezing up at the sight of Jujutsu Tech’s large gates before you. You gawked at how grand they were, gargantuan and square – done in orthodox Japanese architectural vein, yet the materials were new and reinforced, with not one weakness to be observed.

You startled when Gojo’s hand traced your lower back and curled around your waist, bringing you close to his side. You looked up at him.

He was smiling ahead; not even at you. But he looked so confident and reassuring in the way he did it – promising with his aura alone that you were under his protection, that nothing would happen to you while he was at your side.

You drew strength from his confidence and the two of you stepped through the gates into the heart of the campus.

The verdant leafy trees were your only cosy comfort, besides Gojo’s reassuring presence, as the whole campus, composed of wide grounds and many more traditional buildings – commanded a sense of authority and sternness.

The urban smell – the cars, the concrete, even the routine smell of coffee – didn’t reach here. You smelled only green nature and the musk of wood within the bracing coolness of the air.

The campus looked empty. Such large grounds, but not one person in sight.

“What’s next, Satoru?” you asked the tall albino next to you.

“Well,” he sighed big and heavy, his expanding ribcage brushing against your side, “there’s someone who’s been wanting to meet you…”


As soon as you entered the bleach-lit corridor of a one-storey building, you recognised the smell of steriliser – the one used to sterilise hospital floors on a daily basis to avoid the spread of infections. Goddamn, it almost felt like you never even left your little clinic…

Garish lamps hanging at regular intervals illuminated Gojo’s tall back and shoulders, as he walked a step ahead of you and led you through towards this mystery person who wanted to meet you.

The longer you two walked, the more your unease grew – until at last, he turned halfway back to toss you an easy smile, and swerved into a turn. You followed suit to find…

….a fucking morgue.

“Charming,” you commented, looking around the pale interior, as well as the two empty metal tables clearly meant for human carcasses.

Gojo laughed good-naturedly. “She’ll be here any minute.”

“She…?” you quirked a brow.

The heel-falls of 'she' echoed from the same corridor you two came from. Steady. Without hurry. Fatalistic ease reverberating from every click.

Your eyes widened and your heartbeat sped up as you anticipated the entrance of the wearer of those hills. Her white robe turned the corner before her – and shortly after, a petite Japanese woman appeared before you.

A dark aquamarine turtleneck, a lapis blue pair of cropped trousers, a cream pair of mid-heels, an unbuttoned white doctor’s robe, uneventful brown hair and everyday brown eyes – she was a lot more ordinary than you had anticipated. But you realised soon that she was a picture painted with a mysterious brush – one that revealed its secret strokes gradually the longer you looked at it.

For instance, looking at her, you understood what ‘pale’ truly meant. And you realised that Gojo, in fact, was not pale. He had milky marble skin; it was opaque and shimmered like a thick layer of clean white snow. But this woman’s skin was truly pale, thin and translucent, pallid like a ghost’s, yet eerily magnetic in its own morbid way.

But more than her dead, doll-like skin – it was her expression that ensnared you. It reminded you of a walking corpse – a corpse that didn’t mind walking amongst the living and maybe even found it a touch amusing.

Her heavy dark circles, accentuated further by her generously applied smoky liner – called to mind the visage of unlit wells. The sheer depth of those "wells" brought her brown eyes into sharp focus. And those browns were alive, oh they were teeming with life as they captured you, conveying from afar a kind of controlled derangement – which you had seen in Gojo’s eyes during your utmost intense fights. This woman was one of him, you realised, alike to him. They evidently shared the pain and the grind and the other abrasive facets of his “vocation”…

“(y/n) sensei, good to meet you!” she greeted you as a colleague, extending her hand. You hand met hers halfway; her skin was as cold as it looked. Yet in her resonant and clear voice you found a welcome and warm geniality.

“This is Ieiri Shoko," Gojo said to you. "I thought you should meet her, as she’s leading Jujutsu Tech’s medical treatment and research department.”

“Wow!” you were genuinely impressed. “My pleasure, Ieiri-san. You’ve got a lot on your shoulders.”

Her pretty rosebud lips didn’t smile but her chestnut eyes did.

“Which is why I’m glad you’re joining us, Sensei,” she said.

“Oh, I am, aren’t I?” you looked to Gojo who had told you absolutely nothing on the matter.

But instead of taking the cue and elaborating on your future here, the white-haired sorcerer started…undressing?

Your eyes were wide as saucers as Gojo casually unbuttoned his shirt and trousers and began taking them off. You looked to Shoko for a clue on how acceptable this was inside her morgue – but to your shock she wasn’t in the least affected. A fly may as well have been buzzing on the other side of the room – that’s how little attention she gave her colleague who was treating her morgue as his personal changing room.

“Don’t worry, Sensei,” she was saying, picking up a clipboard with some papers on it and reading through them. “I’ll be by your side as you acclimate.”

“I have a meeting,” Gojo said, as he swiftly pulled on his Jujutsu Tech uniform.

Zipping up his dark jacket, he walked over to you, in one hand holding his loose eye bandages – with the other, holding up a key to you.

“What’s this?” you asked.

His crystal blues gleamed down at you, “A key to your place.”

You accepted the key on your palm.

“How am I supposed to find it?” you asked, as he threw his head back to get his swan-white hair out of his eyes and started wrapping on the bandages.

He straightened up, now looking at you through the fabric.

“Shall I lead you by the hand, Sensei?” he asked with a playful lilt.

You rolled your eyes.

“No, thank you, Gojo-san. Wherever it is, I hope it’s as far away from you as possible. Either way, I’ll find it on my own.”

He grinned ambiguously and walked out, while you were left staring at the key in your hand. It was made of brass and was on a key ring, together with a round key fob.

You heard Shoko set down her clipboard.

“I’ll take you there,” she said and her rosebud lips curled at last.

Chapter Text

You walked side by side, two women, two doctors, and now – two colleagues.

Shoko’s hands were in her white robe’s pockets and her expression seemed serene. She reminded you of those rare people with whom silence was comfortable, unforced. And because of that, conversation with such people, whenever it happened, was even more organic.

White pebbles susurrated beneath your relaxed steps. Tree leaves conspired in their muffled whispers all around you.

You spoke up.

“Ieiri-san.”

You heard her smile – she smiled at the oddest of times, not at the most appropriate.

“None of my colleagues calls me that,” she said, voice so stunningly feminine and evocative, she could’ve chosen to be an actor, a singer, instead of this dangerous occupation. “Shoko is fine, (y/n) sensei.”

You re-addressed her in the same vein.

“Shoko sensei,” you said. “Do you think you’ve picked the right side?”

You shot straight, as you didn’t feel the need to beat around the bush with her.

You felt the tine of her brown eyes move to you.

“The way I see it,” she said, “there is no right side.”

You turned your face to her. Saw her brunette locks riding the wind. Her brown fringe sidling her high forehead. The muted pink of her lips shifting to add, “There’s only the side where you don’t feel lonely.”

There was an ambiguous sadness to her statement; you couldn’t quite decipher its meaning, though you felt its pang.

“That’s why he brought you to his side, you know,” Shoko said and met your gaze with a new smile.

You hummed, uncertain.

“I’m not sure how much use I’ll be to him. He even asked me not to use my cursed techniques while I’m in Tokyo… So I wonder how I could even help him.”

Irritation itched your chest at these of your thoughts spoken aloud. What was the point of you coming here if you couldn’t even fight at your full potential? What was the point of joining jujutsu sorcerers – joining his side – with such an obvious handicap?

Shoko spoke up, her clear voice cleaving your muddled thoughts.

“He’s always been more of a show, rather than tell guy,” she said. “He wants people around him to see and realise things for themselves, to draw their own conclusions. Which works for most people. But it really fails some of them...”

It was that same sadness again with which she said the last part. It permeated the air between you. You breathed its tartness down your lungs.

“So, he won’t tell you how much support you are to him, and he won’t tell you what to do to support him... But I think I can be of help when it comes to you,” she suddenly smirked at you and her voice rang unexpectedly cheery.

You quirked an intrigued brow.

“Recently Satoru’s side has gotten a bit lonely,” she added, looking up at how the fern pins pricked the clouds. “That’s why he’s been working non-stop, shipping himself off to any and all missions, even out into remote towns... But do you know when I finally heard a genuine smile in his voice?”

She looked at you with browns warm, like melted chocolate. Your breath held, your heart raced, you listened.

She answered her own question, “When he told me that he met a doctor in a tiny town out in the countryside. When he said she cheekily denied him a piece of her walnut gyuhi. When he recounted how she looked at him hurt – when he hurt not her, but someone else…”

Here the vision of Akio’s grandfather came to your mind. The hard, blank expression of Gojo Satoru as he blew his head off – came to your mind as well. Your own pain upon witnessing that moment – came to your heart. But now Shoko was telling you that that night had affected not just you, but Satoru too…?

You bit your bottom lip and looked aside, past the forest mist that reigned beyond the grounds of the school, past the dew still sitting swollen on these leaves due to no one venturing this far out the campus. You looked into the distance, into the green horizon with not a soul in sight. Only trees, underbrush, snippets of the dark blue sky, and the smell of heavy premonition.

“I don’t know what happened in Gojo’s life in recent times, Shoko sensei. How his side got lonely, as you say. But I want to help him. I want to help him with everything I have,” you stated with conviction.

“That’s a tough ask, (y/n) sensei...” she said with a sigh, and here she stopped and turned to you completely, “...seeing as how he is trying so hard to protect you from all danger.”

You appraised her compact frame – a frame that packed experience, beauty, and undeniably a hefty measure of pain.

“Why do you think he put you with me? In the medical department? Instead of making you one of the field sorcerers who go to cursed sites? Why do you think he asked you to not use your technique out here...?”

“I think,” she answered her own question again, since yours wasn't readily forthcoming, “it’s because he wants to keep you hidden. By his side. Within the reach of his protection.”

As she said this, she regarded you with no hostility, no guard, almost gratitude, the look of one’s team member, family, one’s own. You were ready to dive into that warm gaze and wrap yourself in their grounding brown soil – before Shoko looked to the side. You followed her gaze.

You saw the lights of a house in the distance.

Two-storey. Dark mahogany and pristine glass. Modern, luxurious, architecturally astute – it nested on the very edge of a promontory at the end of the forest, where it looked out into the limitlessness of the North Pacific Ocean.

“We’re here,” Shoko said with an attractive smirk, and began leading the way to the house. You followed her in tow.

At its doors, past its glorious deck of smooth wooden slats, she extended her open palm to you with a surreptitious smirk. You understood to hand her the key that Gojo had given you earlier.

“This can’t be my place…” your astounded words trailed off as you placed the key in her pretty palm.

“It’s both of yours,” she said, as a mechanical beep resounded and the high-and-wide door opened before you.

You took a step through the doorway and got engulfed by the spacious interior made up of tasteful luxury and timeless practicality.

You followed Shoko’s chestnut head of hair, as she headed in a predetermined direction. She wasn’t awestruck like you, evidently being used to the luxury that was Gojo Satoru’s world. Luxury that was seemingly an essential part of him – and yet auxiliary in that it didn’t consume his humanity.

You two traversed the foyer, the luminously lit corridors, abstract paintings and hand-sized sculptures – to enter the large unfurling of his living room.

Bright, tidy, minimalistically furnished – all attention in it was to be directed to the three of the four walls of the room, which were all constructed of glass. With wide eyes you walked over to one of those glass walls and stood in awe at the view it offered.

The deep orange light of the receding sun, opulently pouring in from this giant window/wall - sliced at the lower half of your jaw and at your rich wide chest. It shimmered against the brown swells of your breasts and reflected off of the golden necklace on your neck to cast a fragmented gilt shadow over the other glass walls and across the crests of the churning ocean’s waves behind them, and reflected back and back again, multiplied and mirrored its own prismatic patterns, not unlike the mirages in kaleidoscope.

“Protecting me by sealing me away from the rest of the cursed world – from the other jujutsu sorcerers, the curse users, and the curses themselves…Shoko,” you turned to her fully, “it can’t possibly work. He must know that.”

She didn’t say anything. Her doctor’s robe – her white cloak – spilled behind her onto the mahogany floor as she was crouching down and rummaging in one of the wooden cabinets. She pulled out a bottle of rum from what you now understood to be Gojo’s minibar, and deftly swirled the half-filled bottle within her manicured fingers.

“I think deep inside,” she smiled at you, her gaze suddenly glowing with a mischievous shade of brown - the shade of swallowing and hungry quicksand, “Satoru knows that.”

You opened you mouth to comment further on her vague statement, but she sprung up from the floor, rum in hand, her skilled fingers bunching two Old Fashioned glasses together and pouring the spirit in.

Perfect precision and suspicious finesse in the way her tiny hands scooped up ice cubes and clinked them to the bottom of each glass, then poured in exactly one shot’s worth of rum in each, before grabbing two slim cans of ginger ale from the mini fridge, cracking them open and topping the drinks up. She took the glasses and turned around whilst swirling them like it was her second nature. When she turned, you were offered one of the two vibrantly auburn alcoholic concoctions.

“Won’t Satoru mind?” you asked but took the glass from her regardless, savouring the feeling of her cool fingertips on yours, then holding the glass up to your nose and inhaling the potent fumes of rum.

She cocked her head, her long brown hair listing to the side. Her pink tongue – pinker than her rosebud mouth – licked her lip.

You realised you liked her. That fatalistic curve of her lips. That seemingly aloof exterior, yet the scalding hot edges of her gaze. You liked her a lot.

“Something tells me,” she said, edging her smile closer to your growing one, “we shouldn’t care.”

You couldn’t help but break out in laughter. She didn’t seem entirely stable. But then, neither did Satoru.

Whatever event overcame the two of them in recent times – you liked Shoko’s way of dealing with it better…


Gojo did come in later. But perhaps he should have come in earlier, since by the time he stepped foot through the front door of his stylish oceanside villa, you and Shoko were already best friends. Drunk best friends.

You weren’t 100% sure where he found you – maybe leaning your temple against Shoko’s slim ball of shoulder somewhere on the floor of his living room. But what you did know was that you smelled him: his gorgeously familiar scent, as he leaned over you and threaded his arms beneath your armpits to lift you on your wonky feet.

As your side rubbed against his muscled torso in his purple jacket – you felt bad. There was this unresolved sympathy, this unequated pain, which you now felt. You knew something bad had happened to him and Shoko, something you weren’t aware of – some loss that caused them both considerable anguish. But they dealt with it differently – she drank and committed herself more to her fatalism – whereas Gojo fought, didn’t drink, (well, guess he also fucked like a stag in heat), and trained his students.

“What happened, Satoru?” you murmured, as he helped you up the stairs to the bedroom within this spacious architectural piece of art.

All you got for an answer was the musk of his sweat, his day’s toil. But he himself didn’t speak.

He brought you up to the ajar door of the bedroom. It was bigger than you’d expected; what need had one for a bed this big?

In the dim and filtered light of the night, you caught the shimmer of his lips. He was standing and leaning down before you, eyes shrouded by his bindings, but his lips shimmered so very bright. Those lips moved forward and you felt them on your own. He kissed you intimately, wetly, languidly, not quite intruding but more savouring.

You kissed him back, wondering if he tasted the rum or the ginger ale on you more.

“I’m glad you two have hit it off,” he whispered against your steaming lips - and you knew he’d tasted both.

He grinned and so did you.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he murmured and stood to his full height, making his way to the door.

“Satoru,” you called his name in the dark.

He paused.

The dark back of his jacket cast a shadow over the corridor’s light, as he stood still and waited.

You told him in a heartfelt murmur, “Whatever happened, it’s not your fault, and it won’t happen again.”

“You’re wrong. It is my fault,” he said and you noticed, just barely, how his long and dignified spine stooped just that little bit with the unmistakeable weight of guilt.

Sadness listed you. In your drunken stupor it was heavy: it dragged your head to the pillow and dragged tears down your cheeks.

“But you’re right also…” Satoru added and turned back over one tall jagged shoulder.

“It won’t happen again.”

He avowed this in a voice of many layers, hard and deep like the earth’s strata. It gave you no choice but to trust him on his vow.

Chapter Text

Fate is a curious mistress.

Or mister. Well, animate, inanimate, omnipotent – doesn’t matter.

But what you were told as a kid, before you even stepped foot on the Japanese soil, was that our Fate is inscribed on the inside of our skull. As if God took his divine pen and wrote out our entire lives on the backside of our foreheads.

So you wondered if Gojo Satoru was written inside yours. If Shoko Ieiri, Mei Mei, Ijichi and Ino were carved on it too. Or the names of Maki Zenin, Panda, Toge Inumaki, and Yuuta Okkotsu – the students of the Jujutsu Tech who were under your care as their sorcerer physician, for almost 2 months now.

Or Geto Suguru.

You wondered, most of all, if your forehead told the prophecy that this man whom you’d never met before, would play such a central role in your life’s trajectory...



December 24^th, 2017

You stepped out onto one of Shinjuku’s large intersections and inhaled its ice-rimmed breeze. Before you, towered the pillars of the capital’s skyscrapers – vertical monsters of concrete, glass and marble.

You lit a cigarette and its tobacco rose hand-in-hand with the ever-present exhaust fumes vortically into the air.

Shoko’s white lab coat stepped out beside you, her expression more detached and impersonal than ever. From how her fingertips twitched, you could tell she was itching for a smoke as well. You slid your cigarette pack back into your pocket. She’d quit 5 years ago – no small feat – and you didn’t want to sabotage that, as much as you sympathised with her in her need to unwind from the tense situation you all found yourselves in, even if for a few short minutes.

“Satoru is at the main vantage point,” she said, as you blew the smoke away from her. “Well, you know what our job is.”

She glanced at you and you met her carob warning eye-to-eye. It was a warning for you to not engage in combat.

“To heal any sorcerers that are brought to us wounded,” you confirmed, painting the empty grey street with your white smoke.

Shoko smiled without joy, in simple affirmation, and walked back to the Jujutsu Tech temporary medical camp set up for this very day in the outskirts of downtown Tokyo just outside of Shinjuku. The jujutsu sorcerers were all called in to the capital and Kyoto for a frightful event: Suguru Geto’s “Night Parade of a Hundred Demons”.

You turned around and eyed the ominous dark rings of cloud, as well as the Windows stationed on top of multi-storey buildings to keep vigilant watch, and the thick tension hanging in the air and breathed by all the sorcerers and Windows collectively.

You turned to the horizon crowded by skyscrapers. Satoru was somewhere in that direction out of your sight’s reach, though not your heart’s. You sensed his cursed energy several blocks away. It was too faint and too far for your liking. But that was what he wanted of you, what he’d urged you to do: to stay with Shoko and heal the sorcerers that were brought injured to the camp.

By this time you knew the enemy: Suguru Geto. A former jujutsu sorcerer-turned-curse user. He was the opposite of you. He’d made the reverse transition. Was it because he lost the one who gave him hope – whereas you gained him…?

Offices were closed, schools and malls too. The streets were emptied of traffic. But total citywide evacuation was unrealistic, which was why in this part of the city that was furthest away from the centre, apartment buildings were still populated. It was also why your camp was set up here: it was the radius of least expected exposure.

In the building closest to your camp you saw nervous lights flicker in the windows. Those poor people didn’t know what was going on, what to expect, except a citywide alert and instructions to stay indoors. You sympathised with them but you also felt them lucky. This was the best distance away from Geto’s unleashing of his thousand curses. This wasn’t the danger point.

You looked back across the snake-stretch of the empty road. Satoru was at the danger point.

With a final nicotine exhale, you flicked off the stub and headed back inside the camp as well.



Sunlight was smothered by clouds, but even the few rays that had managed to get through, were swallowed by the density of cursed energy in the air.

You and Shoko were in the thick of bringing in, laying down and treating injured jujutsu sorcerers. You hadn’t even known there were so many sorcerers in existence – not until you saw them bleeding, wounded, some crying, others unconscious. Shoko used her Reverse Cursed Technique to heal the most life-threatening injuries, whereas you nullified cursed energy that was still affecting these poor fighters, in addition to providing medical care where cursed energy was simply not involved – gashes, stabs, severe lacerations.

You both worked tirelessly amid the groans and moans of the patients. You and Shoko made a good team, for what it was worth. A much better team than you and Gojo had ever been.

You tourniquetted and bandaged the latest patient’s leg and scanned the open tent. The air around you was pungent and thick with cursed energy – that of curses infesting the city, that of the jujutsu sorcerers’ themselves, and the distinct one of Shoko as she was using her RCT to heal.

You spotted her a few cots down, her rubber-gloved hands busy reattaching a severed arm to a sorcerer, the latter – unconscious. Her thin brows were in a knot, her beautiful face was deeply concentrated, and her usual unbothered demeanour was cracking around the edges.

You sighed and walked over to her. You lit a cigarette in your mouth and reached it over Shoko’s shoulder and held it to the faded lipstick of her rosebud lips. You heard her snicker and accept the burning cigarette in her mouth, taking a thick drag of it, and then taking one gloved hand away from the patient to take the burning stub between her two practised fingers. You lit one for yourself too and stepped out of the open tent to look at the city.

You didn’t think it looked particularly nice even before Geto’s attack had started, but now it looked abysmal. Dark, dense, wintry concrete. The sky overhead reminded of an inverted view of Hell. Curses of all shapes, sizes and malice were infesting it and forbidding the meek sunlight from reaching the ground.

You took a pull of your cigarette. Your nerves were sizzling hotter than its smouldering end. You glanced to the side, over the crowns of skyscrapers. There you felt the violent sparks of Satoru’s cursed energy. Even in the murk and grime of these curses polluting the air, you felt his unique energy as distinctly as ever.

He was fighting. He wasn’t losing. But he was angry. He was in a rush.

You felt it all. Your first instinct pulled you to him. You wanted to dump it all, ditch Shoko in her crucial duty, and leap to his side to help him in his fight. But you knew, easily knew, that that wasn’t what would help him the most right now.

Plus, he’d told you to not use your cursed technique, besides for the subtle and hidden art of healing patients. He had specifically warned you, as he held your face in his hands at the crack of dawn earlier today, with his heart beating onto yours and his lips pulsing at your crown – to eschew using your powers openly. He wanted you to remain hidden and safe. End line: you were a jujutsu sorcerer, yes. You were essential to the forces of Jujutsu Tech. But you were still a threat also – the same threat that was listed in the dossier he had thrown before you in Sakiko’s dessert shop…

“Be careful,” he had intoned gravely for the umpteenth time, as you two stood on the porch of his forest house.

He had kissed your temple, then your tragus, then the corner of your jaw, “Keep yourself safe for me.”

You’d assured him you would. Since that was the only way to get him to not worry about you and be on his way.

“Take this,” he had said…

You stopped abruptly in your thoughts when you noticed a swarm of curses beginning to spread out from the area controlled by Satoru. They were expanding their reach, moving to the outskirts of the city, including where you were as well – which was an area deemed outside of the zone of exposure. The site of the tent setup was presumed the safest distance from the epicentre of the “Night Parade”.

Your heart froze in worry and you flicked back in alarm to where you had felt Gojo’s cursed energy last. Your heartbeat resumed when you felt his cursed energy still sparking, still burning, still potent, and still angry. He was alive! He was fighting!

So it was due to the deficit of his backup that the curses were spreading where they were not supposed to reach. If curses had escaped his area of guarding, it meant the other jujutsu sorcerers were coming up short. And hell, you were treating so many of them right here, so it was no surprise.

You noticed in alarm that a group of those curses was closing in on the apartment building near your camp.

“Shoko!” you called your colleague’s name but she was already looking at the same spot you were.

“Yeah…” she said, confirming the gravity of the situation, as the savage swarm of curses alighted on the upper corner of the building.

You looked up to the Windows. They saw them too, of course. But the Windows were non-combative, they bore no cursed energy – their job was to act as the sources of intelligence only. And at the moment they were busy communicating to jujutsu sorcerers at the city centre that help was urgently needed in the outskirts. But it wouldn’t be soon that they could make it here, with their hands full, and with how thin their ranks ran already…

Although the decision was budding in you, you still sought Shoko’s expression to check her reaction and see if she had any other ideas. But you saw her face had twisted into a curious flavour of contempt as she trained her gaze on the vulnerable building. It wasn’t just contempt for the curses and for the lives huddled inside that building that were about to be lost. No, it seemed to be contempt for the experience. Something she had seen before. Something she had lived through before. And something that bred in her, as a result, a slew of complication, hatred, and…

…detachment.

Well, you decided, all the more reason to prevent that experience from repeating before her eyes.

You stalked past the camp and towards the building, with curses beginning to swarm it like bees to a beehive. Shoko left the patients on their cots and came to you.

She took off her rubber glove fast, as if it was burning her. Then she squeezed its rubber material in her palm as though she could make it disappear, along with her occupation, and make its purpose obsolete, make this whole event vanish... But both of you knew that that was impossible.

She curled her freed fingers around your shoulder, those petite fingers, broken many times before, and now smelling of tobacco once more.

“Sensei,” she said looking at you with kindness and genuine care. “You don’t have to. Really.”

Her serrated browns pierced you and urged you to stay put. You could see the conflict in her tense forehead and narrowed gaze – the conflict between morality and necessity.

You smiled at her.

“I know,” you said.

Curses’ fingers began cracking the building’s concrete. Screams and yelps of the people inside resonated.

“Just another home visit, eh?” you grinned lopsided at your colleague.

She sighed, closing her eyes. Then she threw her head back and grinned up at the sky. “I fucking hate those.”

She pulled off her other glove too and began setting a Veil over the camp to protect the wounded sorcerers inside.

“Shoko, you don’t have to come with me,” you said earnestly.

“(y/n) sensei. We may be good friends, you and I,” she said with a coy smile, “but you haven’t yet earned the right to insult me.”

You threw your head back in a peal of laughter.

“Fine!” you conceded, much to Shoko’s pleased smirk.

The next events all happened in bursts and violent flashes.

Quick, efficient and deadly. At the same time as Shoko burst through the double doors of the apartment building, your feet landed square on the chest of the curse that was aiming for the same doors. Your knees bent and flexed down on its body like a spring, before the impact blew its chest cavity right off. Stepping on its extinguished remains, you turned to the rest of the monstrous creatures that were closing in and raised your fists. Working without the help of your Nullification technique was hard, but it just meant you had to pummel through the curses using sheer force.

Curses of Grades 4, 3 and 2 assailed you but they no longer bore any distinction within the speed and urgency of the fight. You kicked through them, punched into them, grabbed them by their skulls and crushed them against the concrete. Weak, strong, small, big – you attacked them left and right, under and above. The whap of bursting flesh, the crunch of breaking bones, the wails of pain that followed, and soon after: death.

Breathing rancid lungfuls of the curse-permeated air, you glanced back at the building and spotted in the windows Shoko’s sleek form swishing through the floors with wraithlike speed. You knew there was no need for you to follow her inside. She may have been a jujutsu healer but she was just as experienced in combat as you, if not more. So what you needed to do was clear her way when she was ready to bring those people out.

You wheeled back from the direct attack of another roaring curse, its motile, slurry belly opening up to swallow you whole. You struck it in a curve - your fist crashed into its side and ground it to ash. You wished it were the end but more curses continued to crawl and cling to you through the ground. But your attention was drawn sharply up, where you gasped to see one of the curses – a huge, bull-like thing – latch its hands to the side of the building. It was readying to pound a hole through the wall and into where the civilians were huddling.

“No!”

You pounced from the ground, using your cursed energy to propel you higher than humanly possible, as wind whipped and whistled in your ears.

Your upward flight suspended right behind the curse’s gigantic bovine head.

“Take this,” he had said.

You looked down to see Gojo holding the handle of a short wakizashi sword. It looked sharp and ever more deadly with his fingers curled around it.

“I don’t use weapons,” you'd told him.

“Sure you do,” he'd countered patiently. “Usually your Nullification is your weapon. But it won’t be today.”

You'd sensed how the sword was alive in his hand, how much it wanted to sing and scythe. You'd realised it was a cursed weapon imbued with a sorcerer’s cursed energy.

You looked up, “Whose energy is imbued into it?”

Satoru had held your gaze and smiled slowly.

Mid-air, with your eyes on your target, the bull curse - you retrieved the wakizashi from its sheathe on your back. With a single broad and unhesitating sweep of your arm, you sliced the horned head of the curse clean off its bullish neck. The giant severed head leapt into the air and dirty purple blood erupted from its neck like a geyser - while the aftershock of the wakizashi's cursed energy exploded into the radius of several miles, electrifying the air with jagged blue threads, shattering all glass, and bellowing as loud as a crack of thunder right above the cityscape.

You were shocked. Shoko inside the building was shocked. The people huddled inside the building shrieked high with terror. And the eyes of all the Windows on nearby rooftops were wide and their mouths were agog from the absolute atomic explosion they just witnessed from a mere cursed weapon.

Your own mouth stretched into a slow smile too.

This was Gojo Satoru’s power. And he gave a part of it to you.

With renewed fervour you hacked at the curses with the sword, cleaving their bellies, hewing their legs off, splintering their skulls – using your dexterity and Satoru’s supremacy to methodically clear the monstrous horde.

You noticed Shoko coming out of the double doors of the building with the host of civilians, clueless people of all ages skittering behind Shoko without knowing what calamity had overcome them but looking deathly afraid of it all the same.

Your lungs were out of breath, your body was lined with sweat, but your energy and speed didn’t wane. Adrenaline, urgency, and the pure relish of the fight – one that Gojo’s cursed energy had infected you with – all saw to that. Shoko was moving with the group of people further away from the building and towards the protective Veil of the Jujutsu medical camp.

Almost clear! You cut down the last of the curses nearby at full speed, with no hesitation.

As you turned to run after Shoko and the people who had almost reached the camp, the right side of your vision lit up with an exordial light.

You swivelled round to see a colossal sphere of cursed energy flying in from between two office buildings right into the evacuating group of people. Like a small meteor that was about to scoop up a piece of the planet and annihilate all life on that scoop, you felt its titanic energy ripple your skin and disturb the blood in your veins. It bore Grade 1 energy, no less.

A tool imbued with a portion of Gojo’s energy wouldn’t cut it – he needed to obliterate it with his own hands. But he was nowhere to be seen.

You glanced at Shoko on the ground. She was already bracing for impact: she was firm in ordering the people to stop and huddle together, as she recanted a chant to set a new Veil.

You both knew a Veil couldn’t hold all of it off. It was a huge gamble, a huge risk. One you weren’t willing to take.

You hardened your grip on the handle of the wakizashi, and this time, instead of channelling your Nullification technique into your fingers like usual – you spread it further down the hilt and the blade of the sword - layering Gojo’s energy with your own technique. You felt power sizzle over the blade – Gojo's force didn’t like to teamwork, just like himself – but it was done now, ready. So you swung the sword down with both hands at the path of the furiously charged globe of cursed energy just before it passed by you to aim for Shoko and the people behind her.

With its path nullified, the globe came to a screeching, whining, painful halt. Nature fought nature - thanks to you reversing its physics, its intended course.

As you breathed hard, eyes desperate and exhausted, lungs burning through your throat - the sun-like crackling ball of cursed attack was now reversing its course and calibrating a new forced trajectory by the order of your jujutsu technique.

Ho hum, you didn’t need to guess. Gojo had warned you. That's why you weren’t surprised, not one bit, when the core of the cursed globe reversed, rotated, and opened up to you like the eye of Sauron, and distorting the space all around it – it fired directly at you.

You squeezed the blade. Nullifying its path again was no use – it would lead to the same result, same revised target: you. So, with the fire of the globe burning in the reflection of your eyes, you swung at it one last time, putting all of your remaining energy to use and resolving to Nullify as much of it as possible.

You nullified its centre – your burning core versus its – and the toxic globe split and swallowed you into its gigantic cursed hemispheres.

It was instant. Seconds got condensed into their hundredths. Pain was so intense, so indescribably total, incinerating every nerve cell you had – but for all its intensity, the pain lasted but a breath.

The fumes of the cursed attack drifted up in torn wisps – while you drifted down. You felt something alien spreading through your tissues and poisoning, clambering through the walls of your veins and killing. A curse.

Your ears heard nothing anymore, but your eyes still saw out of the remaining tiny space between the drawing curtains of your lids.

You gazed to your right, into the distance, for the source of that attack, for the Grade 1 curse that had fired it – whether at you or Shoko, or the people, or whether randomly, it didn't matter now - and you saw the exact moment its humanoid body got slain by Nanami. It hurt to smile but your lips still lifted.

With the corner of your left eye you saw Shoko running towards you, distraught, her beautiful face forced into an ugly twist of concern.

You felt a thud – likely your back meeting the concrete. Something spurted from your lips when your lungs hit it, but it was too foul-smelling for normal blood. Cursed blood it is.

Your blurry eyes opened to the fresco of the wintry sky, to its roiling grey clouds pierced by skyscrapers, and the pantheon of curses circling it in sinister chaplet. But no matter how long you sought, how hard you searched, you could find on it neither God himself, nor his heavenly blue eyes.

Within moments the fresco grew acast in pitch-black shadow and your eyes could seek no more.

Chapter Text

Incident Report [INCREP] #938


Date and Time: DECEMBER 24, 2017

Location: Shinjuku City, Tokyo
                Kyoto

Description of the Incident: Deploying by curse user Suguru Geto of an estimated 1000 curses in the city of Kyoto and Shinjuku City, a Tokyo ward.

Civilian Fatalities: 198

Personnel Fatalities: 36
Full Personnel and Status List in Appendix A.

Special Note 01: Unleashing of Special Grade Curse Rika Orimoto. Refer to Special Report #103 in Appendix B.

Special Note 02: Sorcerer with Nullification technique from the Special Report #102 dated SEPTEMBER 5, 2017, identified as (y/n) (l/n), was present on the scene. Combative and civilian witness accounts collected confirm active participation in the mission. Recommendation for delayed official appointment as authorized personnel with assignation of Grade 1.

Present status:    Wounded in battle
                            Alive




The heavy curtains of your eyes lifted to a bright room. It wasn’t garish light that surrounded you, but cotton-soft, airy and hazy like in dreamscape. With a blink or two you recognised the interior of Satoru’s spacious bedroom.

The high reach of soft cream walls, a chaise lounge upholstered in muted beige, and exquisite paintings of abstraction, of sea, of limitless planes, like a continuation of his room, an onward journey. Not once had you travelled into their palettes on the mornings you woke up in this bed with him, listening to his soft breaths and waiting for the sun to rise. Seeing those paintings again was a comfort. Though your other haven was above, on the ceiling, where the day’s clear light flooded in from the giant skylights.

There was this subtle nuance about Satoru’s bedroom that you hadn’t paid attention to before: he had several large windows on his ceiling that faced the sky. He also had vast windows on his wall that faced the expanse of the ocean and invited the first rays of the sun. And he had paintings – all of which depicted a boundless distance stretching far into the horizon. For the first time, waking up in this sleepy daze today, you recognised what this nuance was. It was limitlessness. Even in his bedroom interior Satoru sought it. He didn’t wish for his walls to hem him in, and so he created a comforting illusion of freedom, of escape routes all around him. A room that wouldn’t trap him, would not limit or confine him.

How very like him, you thought with a smile.

“Hey,” his voice came from your left like a warm drop of honey.

You turned your head on the pillow and found him lying on his side, gazing at you for what seemed like forever. The corners of your lips fluttered with a dopey smile, as did something sacred in your chest at the sight of him.

He was wearing a roomy long-sleeve tee in off-white shade and its neckline was spilling to one side and baring the sifted ridges and grooves of his collarbones. Same colour pants were on his long legs, which were resting comfortably half-tangled in the sheets, along with his bare feet. His hair was ruffled and silky over his forehead - bed-hair the way no one had ever sported it. And his blue eyes were completely naked.

You allowed yourself to relish this relaxed contrast to the usually strict colour, angles and lines of his work uniform. As well as commit to memory the angelic glow that contoured him thanks to the satin light entering from the windows behind him. And the way soothing clouds floated in his background on the azure sky above the ocean.

“The fresco’s complete,” you murmured with a contented smile.

Satoru searched your eyes, a little confused, though he couldn’t help his own smile too.

“What fresco, love?”

You chuckled, closing your eyes with a hum.

“Is this a dream?” you asked him.

All of this looked too good to be true. Being back in this bedroom, with him, in peace and serenity, with the sky so clear and paradisiac. After all the bad things that happened the last time you had your eyes open, was such tranquil possible?

You heard the sheets rustle and felt his warm breath on your lips. Yours parted in sweet anticipation and he took them in a languid intimate kiss. His nose inhaled of your skin as his lips glided, melded, and his deft tongue traced a single wet swipe between your parted lips – before his melted onto yours again. He finished the kiss with a single moist peck to each corner of your mouth and one to your cupid’s bow.

He separated from you and looked down. A subtly playful smile glistened his lips at the sight of your pupils so dilated, your eyes so glazed, and your breaths coming out in such soft huffs.

“You tell me,” he answered your earlier question.

You chuckled, “It’s the best dream ever.”

He hummed with approval and traced the pad of his thumb over the mixed saliva on your lips.

“How do you feel?”

You tried moving your legs a bit and did a mental scan of your whole body.

“Great!” you noted with some surprise.

Now that you remembered it, you got severely cursed by that gigantic globe of a cursed energy attack. You remembered how it all hurt. But now? Nothing did.

“Shoko must’ve done her best,” you grinned.

Satoru rolled his beautiful eyes. “Not without emptying out my mini bar in return.”

“I’ll help her finish what she took,” you quipped and he snorted.

“Sure. Just don’t expect me to chaperone you two and tuck you in every time. I don’t do nanny work.”

This time you rolled your eyes.

Something tugged at your heart, though - an invisible string drawing your gaze back to his. There at once you saw that his gaze had changed. A fathomless depth materialised in his pupils, weighed heavier by the shadows of his lashes.

You opened your mouth to say something in concern. What is it? you wanted to ask.

But he beat you to it. “What you did…”

And what you did came back to you: you took a fatal cursed blow - head-on - just to save a bunch of people. You knew it was reckless, but what other choice did you have?

You pressed your lips and looked aside as you had nothing to say for yourself.

“This is the life,” Satoru said, his thumb brushing a wavy strand of hair off of your forehead. “This is the life of a jujutsu sorcerer.”

His expression was kind, but also like a wall – a kind wall, a caring wall, a wall with things unsaid.

“I know,” you confirmed. “But nothing’s changed from when I was on my own, you know? And you know,” you looked at him hard and challenging, “that I was doing the exact same thing when I was what you would call a curse user. It’s just that I don’t have to do it on my own anymore. Now I have a team,” you said with a hopeful smile.

But he didn’t smile back.

“That’s not the only difference,” Satoru leaned closer and the tip of one frosty strand of hair fell from one side of his nose bridge to the other. “Now everyone knows who you are. And what you can do.”

You thought about it. He was right. You didn’t have Gojo, Shoko, Nanami, Ijichi and the rest of them by your side and having your back when you were working on your own as a "curse user". But you had your privacy, your clandestineness, your safe little nook in the world of jujutsu. Now that you had brandished your technique in the heart of Tokyo, in front of so many eyes – it was only a matter of time before the jujutsu realm knew who you were and what you were capable of. Especially the higher ups, the elders of jujutsu clans, the ones that had that dossier composed on you and wanted you dealt with…

Your countenance darkened here and your gaze receded into shadow. It caused Satoru’s heart to skip a worried beat. You failed to notice his neck stiffening and veins clenching.

Finally you looked at him and a cheeky smile stretched the bottom of your face.

“Would they still try to execute me if they knew I was Gojo Satoru’s student?”

Satoru stared at you in brief astonishment. Then he broke out in a relieved chuckle, its balmy sound rolling off the cream-painted walls. But what surprised you more than his confounding laughter, was how his long thigh lifted and arched over you as Satoru straddled your hips – the same way he had done that night he burst into your bedroom… Your cheeks flared from the inside and your heart beat fast at the memory.

Satoru’s snowy white texture – all of him, his apart thighs, his askew white shirt, his toned pecs breathing from beneath the textile, and his white lashes framing his inscrutable eyes – all leaned down. Inches from you, his large hands cupped your face gentle but firm.

“They sometimes try to kill my students,” he admitted, forcing your regard away from how his hips pressed down on yours.

“But if they ever try to lay even a finger on my wife...”

You stared in shock at his blues and the firestorm of rage and warning that flamed in them.

“...I will kill them all and dismantle their puny hierarchy altogether.”

You could absolutely taste the danger of his vow, but you were confused.

“I don’t understand, Satoru. Your wife?”

At this he smiled and enacted a curious ritual of kissing your chin, climbing up to your mouth, then tracing his lips along your nose, your forehead, then reaching to your crown – he kissed, smelled of it, and kissed it again.

When he retreated back enough for you to see his expression, you were consumed by the luminous expanses of his blues. They now dripped on you emotion, need, and a part of himself.

In a voice so clear, yet so intimate – one that I would not call a murmur, but one just as close and said in such a way as to ski down all your nerves and tingle all of your extremities – Satoru said, “Marry me.”

You inhaled a shuddering breath. Expression wide. Disbelieving.

With an uncertain smile, you inquired in barely a whisper, perhaps afraid that giving your uncertainty a voice would make him change his mind, “So soon…?”

Satoru's bangs shifted above you like icicles hanging loosely from the eaves; he looked aside.

“I want to eliminate…” he said, but couldn't finish. Something reared up on his face at this point. He became overcast. So you took his face in your hands and patiently encouraged him to look at you again.

He obliged – the warmth of your hands had that effect on him. But when he did, you saw such immeasurable pain flicker in his eyes - you got submerged into their dark hadal depth for a skim of millisecond, before being catapulted right back to their blue and steady surface.

Now his gaze was his again.

“I want to eliminate…all obstacles,” he continued at last. “All threats.”

Your breath held, while he spoke with great impassion. His whole being on top of you was so white and cotton dreamy, but his words and voice and gaze were all so powerful, so hard, and so avowing. His eyes looked crazed and possessive enough to drill right through you and pulverise the mattress and demolish the second floor.

“I want to eliminate all claims to you: to your safety, to your life, and to the way you see the world right now. I don’t want anyone to try and change those,” he promised with his thumb tracing your chin, and with his other – your temple. “Everything that constitutes you, (y/n) – I want for myself. I want all of you to myself.”

Satoru admitted it all at last - the truth he had known since the first time he’d seen you. Since the first time he’d fought you. Since the time he’d been inside you. It all came pouring out, and you felt it in his body heat stoking from above.

You freed your legs from sheets at once and wrapped them round his waist. With your hands on his neck, you pulled him close.

Your lips, tickled by the ends of his white hair, smiled widely in his ear.

“You want so much... You know there’s no cure for greed, right, Gojo-san?” you murmured to him.

His chest rumbled with a low and heartfelt chuckle, and he buried his face into the crook of your neck.

You felt his heart on yours, his mouth on your artery, as he whispered, “But there is one for loneliness.”

You turned to the skylights, to the windows on the ceiling, to the atmosphere above, with the strongest sorcerer’s arms around you and your eyes dyed a simple colour.

The colour of love. Just as absolute.

Chapter Text

Rolling your tired neck and taking your shoes off on the engawa, you entered.

How odd it felt to enter not a tiny 1LDK that you were renting in Tokyo but a palace-like traditional Japanese temple. You would’ve felt like an intruder if not for the exclusive pass granted to you in the voice of Gojo Satoru: “Make yourself at home” – a sentence of so many words that leased this space to you indefinitely, made this abode yours absolutely. Made you feel at home.

That same voice now punctured your thoughts as your fingertips held on to the traditional wooden partition.

“Okaeri, sensei!”

“Oh!” you turned in surprise to his mop of white hair, his long body sprawled at the centre of the tatami floors from where Satoru beamed at you with his rows of brilliant teeth.

You snapped the wooden partition closed behind you.

“You! You’ve got a lot of nerve barging into my office today and scaring off my patient like that!” you stomped into the room towards the angelic man, who, in turn, kept smiling at you faultlessly, seemingly without a clue.

He kept on smiling and even starting to point a clueless finger at himself, as if asking, “Are you talking about me?” – all the way until you reached him and rooted your legs into the floor before him like two angry pillars.

“Yeah, you! Yuito-san already blabbed to my other patients that there is some possessive indecent Gulliver in my office. Didn’t you know it’s a small town? Rumours go around just like that!” you snapped your fingers to emphasise your point.

But Gojo didn’t seem particularly bothered – though, more…mystified? His blues above his shades swirled into the distance with a look of contemplation, as he started to get up and brought two long fingers to his chiselled chin.

The emergence of his giraffe-like height made you pause and you stared at his looming face, the cottony fit of his ivory long-sleeve tee, the unfolding of his roomy grey pants, and the shimmer of his moonstone skin as it reflected the sunlight with each of his moves.

His blues rolled within the milky whites of his eyes, refracting the rays of sunlight every which way, to look at you once more. He unwittingly interrupted your respiratory functions again as your heart skipped a beat and your anger diluted.

“Possessive indecent Gulliver, huh?” he slowly echoed you, his lips morphing from one perfect shape to another, as one corner of his smile tugged up in emerging delight.

Your awed brain was a tad slow in registering what he just said, but one by one his words trickled down through your convolutions.

A tick of your wristwatch. Two more.

“That is the part that’s important to you?” you exclaimed loudly, throwing your hands up in exasperation.

But Satoru caught them mid-air, his large fingers curled around your wrists, and his forearms kissed yours. Inside the frame made of your raised arms, he tilted his head, spilling his smile and snowy bangs to the side.

His voice was profound, intimate, and meant just for you to hear when he spoke, “I don’t want to do things that harm you. If I did, I’m sorry.”

Disarmed, eyes wide, you stared into his sincere blues, propped up by his useless black shades.

“But at the same time, I want these people to talk about me in your office. Me in your home. Me in your life,” his lips continued to move beautifully as his oceanic gaze flowed all the way down to your mouth before lifting deliberately back up to meet yours.

You quivered your brows as he continued, feeling all too acutely how his thumbs had started rubbing soft circles over your pulse points.

“And I want them to know that you’re celebrating your birthday with me.”

At this proclamation his lips slowly stretched into a broad, brilliant, genuine grin that held nothing back – whereas your brows skyrocketed and eyes expanded in sheer surprise.

“How the fuck did you know my birth date?” you erupted, arms still raised up and within his hold.

Satoru’s blues jumped between your questioning eyes before he said with an obvious tone, “It’s on your dossier.”

“It’s on my dossier,” you both spoke in the same breath since you remembered soon enough that he had a whole freaking file on you – your birth date being one of the least sensitive bits of info on it.

You extricated your wrists from his hold and he let you. Shaking out your arms, you set your bag down on the floor.

“Aaand I maybe was there as your nurses surprised you with a cake…” he added after a moment.

“You were spying on me all day?!” you gawked at him.

“Only until they started singing Happy Birthday…” he admitted, raking a hand through his silky hair.

You came to a sudden realisation.

“Until they sang…? But that was at the very end of the workday, like at 5! You left my office around 1 – just how long were you snooping arou–”

“Speaking of!” he clapped his hands together all of a sudden to cut off your train of thoughts, moved behind you, placed his large palms on your shoulders, and began leading you into the next room while signing triumphantly, “Uuuu–reshii na kyou wa!”

“Ugh,” you rolled your eyes at his stentorian singing of the Happy Birthday song, though your grin was betraying your undeniable joy.

In the next room, through the open partition you noticed a low kotatsu table with a perfect birthday arrangement on it. Your breath held and your eyes teared up behind your glasses despite yourself. It was breathtaking – the care, the attention, the time he’d put into it.

You could see that effort, that care from the balloons that rose up from the table with words “Happy Birthday” on them; from the bottle of expensive champagne lodged in a bucket of ice; from the vase with freshly cut red roses; from the plates of fresh hors d'oeuvres – which you were sure he didn’t make himself, as you’d noted over the time you lived in the same house his annoyance with all crafts tiny, but he didn’t have to make them himself as they were lovely and caused your mouth to water already – and the regal item of them all: the beautifully crafted birthday cake atop a cake-stand at the centre of the table, with unlit candles stuck into it in a perfect circle.

“It’s not much but…” Satoru said behind you, kissing your ear shell with his breath, before breaking out in another obnoxiously loud bout of, “Tanoshii na kyou wa!”

You chuckled, though your eyes were still teary and blurring up. Gojo Satoru spent time on this for you. Gojo Satoru, who had a million things on his mind: the fate of the whole country, for one, the safety of his several students, for two, and maybe even the future of the entire jujutsu world - for three. This man who was the pillar and support for millions - he did all this, put you first before those millions, even if just for a few hours, and dared to make light of it.

You smiled through your happy tears. How dare he?

The man in question continued to vocalise behind you, loudly and with obvious exaggeration, as you two came up to the decorated table.

“Satoru, the candles on the cake aren’t lit…” you quietly motioned to the cake on the table that had its candles stuck into the frosting but none were yet glowing with any fire.

“Tanjoubi omedetou!” he sang without missing a beat but the index and middle fingers of his hand quickly flicked towards the cake and the candles blazed up with bright orange fires just like that.

Barking out laughter at his “magic trick”, you shook your head at him while he continued to bellow in his melodic voice, “Outa wo utaimashou!”

You rolled your eyes at him again, your grin no longer possible to hide, and approached the low-set table with your cake on it. You lowered yourself to the floor and so did Satoru, plopping his butt on the tatami right next to you.

The burning glow of the cake's candles reflected in your eyes, with the brightest lettering sitting in the very centre: “Happy Birthday, (y/n)!”

You searched for the word ‘sensei’ after it (the one Junko and your nurses used for you), or for the impersonal ‘-san’ honorific (the way any other acquaintance would’ve done for you. Though, you may have settled for ‘-sama’ in the case of Satoru…). But no, it was just your name.

No honorifics. No qualifiers. Like you were Satoru’s family. Like you were his closest lover. Like you were his.

Was he perhaps lazy with the lettering and was hoping you wouldn’t know the intricacies of the Japanese language? You looked to him by your side, his long legs bent before him, black shades long slid down the bridge of his nose, blue eyes sparkling brighter than the candles.

“Happy birthday, baby,” he said simply and cemented it.

‘Baby’?

The pit of your stomach churned and tingled while your heart raced.

You were his.

Reassured by his captivating smile, you turned back to the candles burning on your cake in orange tandem and with a wish so sacred and deep to your heart you blew them all out, inhaling the bittersweet smell of smoke and frosting.

But the moment that you did, instead of the hearty applause you expected as with any other candle blowing – what came instead was a sudden and heated kiss from Satoru who broached you from the side.

The same mouth – yours – that blew out the flames on the candles got captured in a flame of a different kind. Satoru’s large hand cupped your cheek, holding and guiding your face into the perfect angle for him to kiss you deeply, smoothly, thoroughly. As he seamlessly removed both of your glasses and set them on the floor, just for a moment you’d lamented not having tasted the sweetness of your birthday cake - but all that dissipated when you tasted the sweetness of his mouth, drowned in the velvety smoothness of his touch, and melted within the smelted ore of his embrace.

The way his fruity lips glided against yours, the way he held you – how he drew you in, held your face up, stroked your skin – the way his breath replaced oxygen inside your lungs – all of it, oh god, it wasn’t kissing. It was more than that, more than any kissing could ever be.

All of your tiredness melted away in the face of the heat that swirled and wetted like a whirlpool your core. Raking through the silky white texture of his hair, you moaned into his mouth, kissing back with lust, abandon, with everything.

When Satoru scooted closer, when his long legs opened up and cradled you in between his thighs, when his decadent woody scent was all you could smell, when his heart tried to touch yours through his chest – it was not kissing. It was tasting. It was greed. It was demanding. Symbiosis. No – parasitism, like he couldn’t live without you. Like he had to nibble on your lips and suck on your tongue to live another minute.

With such desperation did he envelop you in the heat of his arms, drawing you fully to himself, lighting your joined hearths in between his own thighs, holding you atop them and kissing fervently up towards your lips. A salmon swimming upstream. A swan craning its neck to drink the first thaw of a frozen waterfall to slake its thirst. Heavy ocean whitecaps reaching for the Moon as she rose high up, just like you. Such was his yearning as his fingers imprinted your skin through your clothes and dragged them shamelessly up, fingerprinting your spine, pawing at your nape, and pushing your lips down into his own.

Though you were hovering, it was impossible to not feel the hardness of him – engorged, domed, full and filling his trousers so much that it brushed up on your centre and tried to fill you too.

“Ahh…Satoru,” you were already in liquid moans against his lips.

He kissed your chin, touching his cheek to your thorax and relishing how you vibrated against him. How you were in his arms. How he could mould you in his hands. How he could encircle them around you and no, definitely, not trap you. Not make you his forever. Not let you go – ever.

He called your name against your skin, drawing a moan of satisfaction from you at how it sounded in his mouth.

“Yeah?” you barely managed to word.

He tilted his head back and you saw two cauldrons of blue magical potion roiling beneath you (douse me!).

“Don’t spend another birthday without me,” the cauldrons spoke to you in his voice like a magic spell.

But it was needless. Cauldrons were unnecessary. Any magic was wasted.

You couldn't spend a day without him anymore.