Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

All Kagome had wanted to do that night was get home. If anything, she was quietly fuming at the thought that she had, again, let Eri, Ayumi and Yuka talk her into going out, only to be met with thorough disappointment and boredom, and she wanted nothing more than to get back to the comfort of her bed.

Upon coming back from the Feudal Era, she had reveled in the feeling of safety, in the fact she no longer had to risk her life or see her friends be gravely injured, in no longer having the weight of the world on her shoulders, in the mundane pleasures of the modern life. Time had gone by since then, though, with the well never letting her through again, and though she had accepted it and moved on, now…

Well. Now, she may or may not be a little… bored.

The modern world had its oddities, too. Though yokai were few and far between, particularly in Tokyo, as the remaining ones preferred the empty forests and mountains, there were creatures roaming the world. They looked somewhat like yokai, but were unintelligent, for the ones she’d seen, strictly malevolent, and, from what she could tell, non-living.

They also instinctively steered clear of her and, as she’d confirmed for herself, they could not resist even the smallest contact with spiritual energy. No need for spiritual arrows, even coming in contact with her was unbearable for the weaker ones. As for the stronger ones, while they also could not withstand her touch, it was still more efficient to use arrows — but not necessary, not in the way it had been with yokai.

She wasn’t sure what these things were. Since becoming a teacher, she’d gotten used to cleaning the high school of them, as they appeared frequently, and discreetly freeing her students of them. After a few years of that, the school had started to feel… purified, with the creatures’ appearance becoming rarer and rarer.

“The atmosphere feels much better in the school, don’t you think, Higurashi?” one of her colleagues had asked her recently. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s gotten much brighter in here, I think. Even the students feel it!”

She’d hummed and smiled, but hadn’t commented on it.

That was one of the more interesting aspects of her life these days. Going clubbing on Halloween night with her high school friends, on the other hand… wasn’t.

She cursed under her breath as she wedged her way through the crowd outside of Shibuya. Maybe she’d have been better off calling a cab, but her small salary as a teacher, paired with the rising cost of life in Tokyo, meant that she’d be feeling the ripple of that for far too long. So, even if just the thought of the sea of human bodies down there exhausted her, she started making her way down, deep into the belly of the station.

She had just reached the top of the stairs to the last level, where she hoped to catch a subway soon enough, when she felt it.

Something was coming down. She lifted her head, only to be, of course, met with nothing but the ceiling. Even without seeing it, she felt its power extending, caging the whole building, and she felt it sealing as it reached the floor. Her breath caught painfully in her throat, heartbeat racing as she glanced around, trying to understand what was happening.

“Yeah, so I told him— Can you hear me? Hey, do you— Hello? Shit, my call cut off,” a young man muttered beside her.

Soon, everyone was echoing the same feeling — calls cutting off, SMS not sending, no Internet, no signal, no signal, no signal.

And Kagome couldn’t see anything, just try to keep breathing through the oppressive feeling.

She hadn’t experienced something like that since the three days she had spent inside the Jewel. The longest, worst days of her life.

She’d never thought she would have to deal with something like that again. But, unable to move, stuck between the bodies of thousands of others, as everyone slowly came to realize that no trains were coming and they couldn’t leave the building, she felt tears well up in her eyes.

I don’t have time for that, she thought, forcing them back and tightening her jaw to keep her lower lip from trembling. There had to be something she could do, and she refused to stand there, weak and useless, as whatever had caused this to happen decided what to do with them.

Except she couldn’t see anything.

She managed to take a few steps more, craning her neck in hope of spotting something others might not be able to see, when she bumped into a broad man.

“Sorry,” she said sheepishly, “if I could just—”

“Listen, lady,” he said, turning around a glaring at her, sweat dripping down his forehead, “no one here can move. So just stay where you are until they fix the issue, alright? No need to try anything. Stay in your goddamn place.”

Then he turned his back on her again, and Kagome stared, blinking slowly.

See, it was in moments like that when she regretted not having a big, strong half-demon with anger issues by her side.

Well, that, and whenever she was making herself ramen.

She hoped he’d found something he liked just as much, in the Feudal Era.

Bumping into the man again — one might say, deliberately pushing him, but Kagome would never —, she slipped through the crowd further, out of reach by the time he turned around to shout at her.

“You bitch!”

Asshole.

There were odd things going on, she realized as she got closer to the trails. She couldn’t see them, but she could feel strong presences, exuding the same energy as the creatures she’d been getting rid off for months, except so much stronger it made it hard to breathe, not unlike Naraku’s miasma — except that she seemed to be the only one to feel it.

The spiritual energy swirled inside her, instinctively wanting to rebel against whatever energy that was — not demonic, nor spiritual… what could it be? — and she pushed it down. She hadn’t let it out fully since the first couple of months of her first year of high school. It brought her unnecessary attention, which she didn’t want to deal with back then, and she had never gotten around to letting it out fully. There had been no need, and her emotions were either to reign in when she didn’t let herself experience everything. With her spiritual energy out, she didn’t have a choice to do that. Still, even when under control, it prickled unpleasantly when that energy infested the air.

“Does anyone know what’s going on?” she asked out loud, to no one in particular.

“No clue, but there are some dudes on the tracks,” a woman answered, somewhere in front of her. “Maybe that’s why the trains aren’t coming? The security should hurry up to get them off if that’s the case, though.”

“Some dudes?” a tall man in a suit scoffed. “There is one man there. Anyway, I heard the security is waiting for someone to come.”

“Who?” Kagome asked, frowning in confusion. She could not imagine how one man was necessary here.

“Gojo Satoru,” he replied with a shrug. “No clue who that is, though. Heard someone saying that.”

Okay. Very odd. Sounded like a trap for that guy, whoever he is, if you asked her, but there wasn’t much she could do about it from where she, and the doors to the tracks were shut close, which left her with another choice.

Going back.

Whatever it was that she felt fall earlier, she could at least try undoing it. If it was similar in nature to the weird energy of the creatures, it wouldn’t last long in front of her anyway.

Problem was, of course, that everyone was trying to leave, and there just wasn’t any space to go. She managed to make around twenty meters before getting stuck again, back at the bottom of the stairs.

This was starting to get annoying. If Inuyasha was there, she’d hop on his shoulders and they’d jump over the crowd. If Kirara was around, she’d fly over the scene and away from here. If Sango was here, well, she’d probably start mowing down the crowd with her Hiraikkotsu.

Kami, she missed her friends.

“What’s he doing up there?” yet another anonymous voice in the crowd asked.

Tilting her head all the way back, Kagome squinted to try and figure out what is was she was seeing.

If her eyes weren’t betraying her, high up there, where she thought the ground floor of Shibuya was, there was a man. Floating in the air.

She’d seen such things before, of course, but these were yokai. That man, though even from where she was she could tell that there was something incredibly powerful about him, was decidedly human.

And, as she slowly realized because the silhouette was growing closer, coming down.

Fast.

Right above her.

Surely, he wasn’t going to…?

Nope, he definitely was. She ducked with a shriek before his shoe came in contact with her face, and watched as he stepped onto some guy’s head instead, then jumping through the crowd before disappearing behind the gates protecting the rails.

Could that be Gojo Satoru? The guy that was supposed to save everyone here? Really?

Well, she supposed having the power to fly was a step in the right direction — no pun intended — but she did wonder if he could be trusted to save them.

Though, again, she once knew a boy with a heart of gold who would have saved everyone here while absolutely stomping all over them and yelling insults at the people under him too, so maybe she shouldn’t be so prompt to judge.

She still couldn’t move, could only crane her neck and try to glimpse what was happening. And things were happening, which made it all the more frustrating. She could hear the screams, as the gates to the tracks opened and people fell down, she could feel the energy’s rise and fall, she could see a blueish aura developing, become stronger. She both heard and felt, deep in her bones, as one of the things that was never really alive died, and it tugged at her heart in a way it never had before. Somewhere, she thought, a leaf had weathered and died.

She couldn’t explain it though, couldn’t explain anything that was going on there — and things only got worse from there.

She’d stayed composed, mostly, as things went crazier, even she didn’t understand a thing. Fear may have been running through her veins, but it was a feeling she was once used to, and she found that that wasn’t the kind of things you just forgot.

As a train started to approach though, slowing down not far from her, fear was replaced by absolute horror.

She could see the souls seeping out of it, contorting, bent into abnormal shapes, sobbing and begging to anyone who could hear them, for freedom.

Souls weren’t things she usually saw. Sometimes, she noticed someone with a very large one, and she wondered what their story was, if it was anything like hers, but for most people, their shapes espoused their bodies perfectly — they were right where they belonged.

She choked a sob, and it was only when she felt the tears slide down her cheeks that she realized she was crying.

She tried to take a step back, bumped against another body, didn’t comprehend the person’s protest.

Her head

spins.

These

are

all

people.

 The subway doors opened slowly, and all Kagome could do was watch as the horrible, misshaped humans with the screaming souls poured out, tearing into the other humans who stood in their paths. One of them rushed towards her, and she grabbed onto it, hands tightening onto its shoulders as it tried to bite her face off.

As she was falling, she felt its body shift under her hands.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered quietly to the young woman whose dead body remained in her arms, as her soul was freed. She saw it shiver, taking back its true form, before floating towards the exit of the station — hopefully, it would be free to do so.

Around her, there was nothing but chaos. The humans that were no longer humans ripping into the ones that still were, bodies falling from the upper floors and coming to crash down near her. She didn’t have time to mourn any of those deaths, nor did she have the power to do much, not as she was. She wished that she had her bow and arrows with her, but they were forgotten in a corner of her grandpa’s shed, where she hadn’t stepped foot in months, maybe years.

That meant she had nothing to channel her spiritual energy into. The only choice that left her, she thought as she slowly rose back to her feet, abandoning the woman’s dead body on the floor, was to let her spiritual energy flow out.

It had been so long since she’d last done that, though, that she had no idea where to start. She had spent so many years repressing that side of her, only using it to protect her students and loved ones, trying to dismiss the years she’d spent in the Feudal Era, trying to fit in and be normal and forget… How could she let it out again, even if she wanted to?

No choice, though, she repeated to herself, clenching her fists. Another monster jumped on her, and with a gentle touch she set it to rest, doing her best to accompany the body of the old man to the floor. Then came a businessman, and a teenager, and a middle-aged woman with a round face, and Kagome couldn’t figure out what to do, not when they kept coming, and they were all people, all with their own lives, their own loved ones, and her eyes burned, and her heart ached, and she needed it all to—

Stop.

When the world froze, she didn’t understand what was happening.

She saw a dash of white to her left, and realized, slowly, that everyone around her had gone completely and utterly still. Former humans, humans, even the oddly shaped creatures she could spot now that the world had gone quiet. She took a step forward, then another.

Nothing moved, except — except that white bolt, running through the people, piercing through the former humans.

It was the man she’d seen earlier, she realized.

Had she been right about his identity then?

Was he Gojo Satoru?

She walked through a world gone still. She could feel, distantly, something pushing against her mind, trying to get in, but the spiritual energy inside her would never let it. It was an instinctive thing, a refusal, and she knew that whatever was happening outside of her just wasn’t compatible with what was going on inside.

She had so many questions, not even the beginning of an answer, but she let them go, walking slowly in the frozen space, bending down to brush her fingers against the back of former humans to get their bodies to turn back into their rightful form. They deserved to find rest as they had existed.

One of them was a young girl, wearing a Sailor Moon costume. She had to have gone out to have fun tonight — and her life had not only been cut short, but horrifically so, through pains Kagome could not even begin to imagine. She bent down, picking up the magical girl staff that was hung at her waist. It was a silly thing, nothing like Miroku’s staff, but holding it like it was a weapon gave her a little bit of strength.

She needed magic too, tonight.

She walked between an odd young man — who she knew was no man at all — with long grey hair and stitches all over his body and face, and a blue creature with what could best be described as a volcano for a head. She didn’t touch them, knew right away that they were not the same as the ones she had gotten rid of at her high school. She needed more information, and that meant that, at least for now, she would not risk making contact.

Plus, there was something by a pillar that had caught her attention.

Well, it didn’t feel like something. Her eyes told her it was a box, but she picked up nothing from it.

No, not nothing — less than nothing, a void, a black hole, an emptiness in a world where nothing was truly empty. It was off, in the same bizarre, fucked up way this whole situation was off, and once more, she couldn’t figure out what on earth was going on here.

The white bolt appeared again on the stairs on the other side of her, on the opposite side of the place through which he’d left, still tearing through the former humans, finally getting to the last one, a couple meters away from her. He didn’t pay any attention to her, probably assuming she was frozen like the rest. The second the head was torn off, the world switched back on.

Kagome looked at him. There was blood all over his clothes and hands, dripping from a spot on his cheek. The bluest eyes she’d ever seen appeared to shine under white locks of hair that clung to his forehead. He was panting painfully, shoulders slinking down with each exhale, chest rising up and down. He was a handsome man, but that wasn’t what stuck out to her right now. No, she thought of how he looked tired. She thought of how he had just allowed the souls of hundreds, maybe of thousands of those humans to go free, and carried that burden on his shoulders forever now. She thought of all the people that were alive now, thanks to him. She thought of how he’d done it all alone, and her heart ached.

All of her important battles, she’d fought with all of her friends by her side.

His eyes darted to the box, which was sitting between him and her, and all of a sudden, eyes snap open on the box, as the nothingness around it expanded.

The white-haired man’s eyes widened, and he spun around, starting to get away — when another man appeared. Long black hair, traditional clothing, stitches on his forehead, and something so deeply, deeply wrong about him that even after everything she’d seen that night, it still made Kagome’s stomach churn.

“Satoru!” he said cheerfully, confirming Kagome’s suspicions about the man’s identity. “Long time no see.”

The white-haired man froze, and almost right as that happened, the box started to shake.

Kagome’s body moved on instinct. Her gut telling her that something bad was about to happen, her knowledge that she could stop it, her deep conviction the white-haired man deserved to have someone on his side, it all took over, and she couldn't have stopped to think about it if she wanted to.

Just as the box was launching itself forward, she’d stepped in front of it, raising a hand. Her back collided with that of the white-haired man, so she was certain whatever was coming wouldn’t get in contact with him, another unconscious decision. Since she didn’t have anything to channel her energy into, all she could do was raise the Sailor Moon staff she’d grabbed earlier. It wasn’t anything much, but she could still push her energy through there, using it to shape it as she wished to — until she figured how to actually let it out.

“Kekkai!”

Barriers had never been her specialty. Kikyo and Miroku might have excelled at them, but her powers mostly manifested in an offensive way, not defensive. In this case though, she only wanted to shield the two of them, not a whole building, like she’d tried — and failed — to do at her school a few times. This was much more within her capabilities, even with such a small staff as her only tool.

The box shrieked like it was in pain when it hits the barrier, and her spiritual energy started pouring into the barrier, through the staff, as it purified it. A lesser priestess could have been drained in an instant. Kagome? She felt energized. As the power left her body, used as it was intended to, it felt like she finally had room to breathe.

The box fell to the floor, eyes closed again. Defeated, if only for now. Around it, space was back to normal.

Wow. Not too bad for someone who sucked at barriers, huh?

“Are you okay?” she asked, whirling around to look at the man, a hand naturally coming to rest on his shoulder.

She was met with wide blue eyes that seemed to be able to look straight through to her soul. They were cautious, inquisitive, something cold about them, but more than anything, they were curious.

“You’re conscious,” he noted, tilting his head to the side, fascination growing more and more obvious on his face.

Well, yeah, of course she was, she thought at first — until she realized, glancing around them, that all the humans looked frozen in place, bodies slack though they were still standing, mouths open, eyes dull and empty.

Why…?

“A priestess,” the man with the black hair said thoughtfully. “I thought you were all extinct.”

They weren’t, and she knew for a fact that she was far from the last one. Despite that, she doubted that this was an information she should be giving him, so she held her tongue, even if she wanted nothing more than to throw in his face how wrong he was. The white-haired man turned to face him, deliberately placing himself between him and Kagome, as if shielding her from him.

“Now that that’s dealt with,” he said, tone light and breezy, “how about you tell me who you are?”

The man’s eyes remained cold, but the corner of his lips lifted to form a smile — one that appeared quite painful to put up. Kagome wasn’t sure what was going on here, but if she had to guess, she’d say she might have thrown a wrench in that dude’s plans.

Good.

“You know me too well to ask that, Satoru,” he said. His tone was soft.

Satoru scoffed.

“Please. As if I’d be fooled.” His eyes hardened, and Kagome could feel his muscles clenching. He was preparing to throw himself into battle. “My Six Eyes might be telling me you’re Geto Suguru, but my heart and soul know otherwise. Who are you?”

Six Eyes…? Oh, whatever. That seemed pretty low on the list of her priorities right now, actually.

The man started to raise a hand, but let it fall back down to his side.

“Maybe we’ll have that conversation again, at a later time, Satoru,” he said sweetly. “For now, I’m afraid we’ll have to backtrack.”

“Are you kidding me?” the volcano dude hissed, not far from him. “Is that it? Just because some bitch appeared?”

Rude.

“I don’t know who he’s supposed to be,” Kagome said, tiptoeing to try and get closer to Satoru’s ear so he could hear her, “but there’s a presence in his head.”

He glanced at her over his shoulder, blue eyes filled with confusion now.

“How can you know that?”

Kami. Why was everyone intent on being so disrespectful to her tonight?

“No time for this, Jogo,” the black haired man — Geto, was it? — chimed. “I would advise you leave while you can.”

Satoru spun back around.

“None of you are leaving this place,” he announced calmly.

In just an instant, he was gone from in front of Kagome, launching himself at both Jogo and Geto, with a speed that made it impossible for her to follow. Her eyes left the fight once it looked to her like he could take both of them at once, and focused instead on the third bystander — the one with the grey hair.

He looked at the fight with vague interest, and she thought he might not be as invested in the result as the others, maybe not as dangerous as the rest — until he walked to one of the frozen humans, a woman with a long dress and short black hair, and she saw the shape of her soul and body change into something that couldn’t be recognized as a human.

When he let go of her, the woman, who looked nothing like a woman now, threw herself into the fight. It took less than a second for Satoru to kill her, but already the grey-haired non-human was moving on to the next one.

Changing these people’s bodily integrity, wounding them so deep in their very essence they couldn’t survive it, all to kill them.

Something started burning within Kagome.

“You’re the one who’s been doing that to those poor souls,” she hissed between her teeth.

He glanced at her, eyes widening as a big smile formed on his lips.

“You can see souls?” he asked, sounding genuinely delighted. “Finally someone who can appreciate what I’m doing!”

“Appreciate?” She was trembling with anger. She felt her spiritual energy banging against the walls of her mind, the ones she didn’t remember how to lower fully, as had been natural to her when she was a teenager, and she could feel them getting ready to collapse. “You destroyed them. All they can hope for now is death. You’re a monster.”

He laughed, light and happy, and his eyes were warm when they focused on her.

“Thank you,” he hummed. “Maybe you’ll appreciate what I’m going to do to you?”

He was in front of her before she could blink.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m sure Gojo will kill you soon. But before that, I’m going to make you so, so disgusting.”

Both of his hands closed over her face, almost delicately, as if he was cradling a small animal within them.

Almost immediately, she felt him pull on her soul. It wasn’t a new feeling exactly, not to her, though his attempts at shaping it were. She could tell it was expanding, knew, on some level, that in order to fit her body, it was forced to make itself smaller than it was. That was what that old witch had said, too — her soul was much, much larger than usual.

She heard him let out a sound of surprise.

“Oh,” he commented, obviously delighted, “oh, I’m going to have so much fun with you! Maybe I’ll keep you!”

As he pulled at her soul, she could feel his — if you could even call that a soul. She could see all the shapes it had been forced into, found it distended and fragile and about to tear. More than anything, she found it repulsive. It tried, clumsily, to change hers. But she was never going to let anything or anyone else toy with her soul, ever again.

“Get you filthy hands off my soul,” she snarled, wrapping her fingers around his wrists.

She would never have bested him in a purely physical fight, but this wasn’t one, and he was the only one to blame.

He was laughing at first as she forced him back.

Then the laughter turned into screams.

“It burns!” he protested, like a child discovering fire for the first time. “Stop it, it burns!”

She could feel it, too, her spiritual energy piercing through him as easily as a knife through butter. She forced him to his knees, and as he looked up at her, eyes terrified now, she knew he saw it. Her soul, wrapping itself around her in a wide sphere, dwarfing him and his poor excuse of a soul completely.

“That’s… beautiful,” he whispered.

Even then, he couldn’t resist trying to change it, couldn’t help himself. And so, as Kagome called it back to her, felt its warmth as it invested her body completely, she felt no guilt, no shame, not even rage anymore.

She was merely doing what needed to be done. This creature was an anomaly existing to cause chaos. It wasn’t a yokai that played its own part in nature, not a human, not even truly living. A plant warranted more respect than this.

So, through her palms, she pushed her spiritual energy on him, in him, ignored the burning it caused her. Through and through, with no regards for the amount of energy she used, she purified him. There was so much pain inside of him, and she let it pass through her, let it turn back into what it was, just an emotion, just something human that should have always stayed that way, never taken that form.

When she reached the end, all there was left was a sense of relief.

He smiled at her.

“That’s not so bad,” he whispered before vanishing.

Kagome fell to her knees, heaving. It had been years since she’d last used her powers like that. Glancing down at her hands, she saw her palms were red and burnt, and she closed her trembling fingers over them carefully.

It took her long seconds of trying to regulate her breathing and to calm down the energy within her — which was telling her it wanted out, still so much left inside her, no matter how much of it she had just used up — before she realized how quiet the station had gotten.

Glancing up, she saw Satoru approaching her, lips twisted into a annoyed expression.

“Where—” She realized her mouth was painfully dry, swallowed. “Where are…?”

“Geto’s gone,” he said, clicking his tongue. “Used the other one to escape.”

He’d gotten rid of Jogo, which had barely been a work-out, but whatever or whoever was puppeteering his friend’s body had managed to escape him.

Which delayed the moment when he’d kill it. He couldn’t say that thrilled him.

“Now,” he said, ridding himself of those thoughts to crouch in front of her. “Tell me. Who are you?”

She blinked at him.

“Kagome,” she answered. “Kagome Higurashi.”

He studied her. The name was unfamiliar, not any exorcist family he’d ever heard of. On top of that, she didn’t produce any cursed energy. It was almost reminiscent of Fushiguro Toji — except Toji had been a void, and she definitely wasn’t one. Whatever she exuded was warm and gentle.

“You’re not an exorcist,” he said finally.

“Well,” she said, glancing up at the ceiling thoughtfully, “I’ve dealt with ghosts and yokai — demons, if you’d like. So, I guess technically, you could say I am an exorcist…?”

She watched as a wide grin formed on his lips. Reaching up behind him, he wrapped a blindfold around his face, hiding his eyes.

“He called you a priestess, though, didn’t he?” he asked, fiddling behind his head to tie it.

“I guess you could say that too,” she shrugged. It wasn’t like she’d ever spent that much time working at a temple. Really, it was just a title to describe her ability, one she didn’t feel that strongly about. “I’ve been called a miko, too, but— I’m sorry, do you need help with that?”

He stilled his awkward attempts at tying the thing behind his head, examining her — she thought — from behind what looked like a thick blindfold.

Odd. Very odd, in fact, but so low on the list of ‘odd’ she’d dealt with today that it would feel silly to ask about it.

“My oh my,” he said once he’d gotten his bearings back, “is that what you’re into, then? Blindfolding guys you’ve just met?”

Oh God. She might have missed Miroku, but not nearly enough to be happy that this was where he was going right away.

“Now, when you said yokai, were you talking about curses?” he asked, having apparently succeeded with his blindfold.

“What do you mean ‘curses’?” she frowned, mind immediately going to the Wind Tunnel. “I’ve known people who were cursed, but I mostly meant… Well. Yokai.”

“Alright, Kagome,” he said, and her brow furrowed some more at the immediate familiarity. “I’m going to have a lot more questions for you, but I think my people are going to get here soon, and it’s probably better if you’re not here when they get there.”

Ominous. Another question to add to the list.

“What do we say we get out of here?” he asked, shooting her a cocky grin.

“Um. Sure, but how do you— Ah!”

Without a warning, he’d pulled her to her feet and, wrapping a strong arm around her waist, he’d pressed her against him as he— took off, basically. It wasn’t her first time flying, but it still caught her off guard. She wrapped her arms around his neck without giving it a second a thought, almost jumped back when he let out an outraged gasp.

“We’ve just met!” he protested with fake modesty. “Do you always hug strangers?”

She glared, tightening her hold so she didn’t feel like she’d fall down the second he’d let go.

“Do you?”

He let out a light laugh as he flew up. He kept her tightly pressed against his hard chest, arm not once faltering. He might have been a stranger, but for the first time since the beginning of the night, Kagome felt fully safe.

Eventually, they made it out of the building and he distanced himself from it, taking her to a nearby rooftop.

“Alright then,” he said, setting her down. “Call a cab.”

She groaned. After the way she’d spent her evening, it felt very, very unfair to have to live on a teacher’s salary.

He watched her as she reluctantly got her phone out, then sighed while she stared at it.

“Do you want me to call you one?” he asked.

Did she? If he was like Miroku, she’d never hear the end of it. On the other hand, well, she didn’t know what that weird box thing was, but she didn’t think it would have helped him, so…

“So, you’re an exorcist, right?” she questioned, looking at him. “Does that pay well?”

He seemed surprised for a second, then laughed again, throwing his head back as if she’d said the funniest thing ever.

“I can’t complain,” he said, pulling out his phone and pressing a few touches on the screen. “They’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“Thanks,” she sighed. “It was nice meeting you…?”

“Gojo Satoru.” Then he paused, as if for dramatic effect, and his grin widened when she didn’t react. “Well, I’ll be in touch, Ka-go-me,” he said, stretching her name as if he was testing out how it felt on his tongue.

She opened her mouth to ask him a question — she wasn’t even sure which one, there were so many on her ever-growing list, but before she could, he’d raised a hand, and then he’d vanished. She didn’t think he’d run, though, no, he was just— gone. There one second, away the next.

She had no idea what on earth had been tonight.

The news talked about some sort of terror attack in Shibuya that night. She let herself weep then, mourning all the lives that were lost, wishing them a safe travel to the other side, hoping the next life would prove kinder to them.

She knew she would not have that long to get used to those thoughts, to that world that she had only caught glimpses of until then. She knew that whatever had started in Shibuya, this was only the beginning.

Next time, she would need to be ready.

“So you’re saying that Geto Suguru, whose body you refused to have destroyed last year, has come back, possibly as a curse himself, and was responsible for the attack on Shibuya?”

Gojo scratched the back of his head, failed to stifle a yawn.

“It wasn’t Geto Suguru,” he answered with a shrug. ‘A presence in his head’, Kagome had said. Not that he had any clue what it meant, of course. He’d had to look into that, but he couldn’t do that while these old farts kept interrogating him about something none of them could have even hoped to achieve. “Are we done here?”

“We’ll see what the consequences are for your actions, which have endangered all the lives of those living in Tokyo, will be,” the distant voice boomed. “For now, we have one more question.”

On a screen, a camera recording of Kagome appeared.

“This woman. While we lost sight of her, it appeared she was not affected by the use of your domain extension. Who is she?”

Gojo stared at the screen with fake concentration.

“Oh, that’s what I forgot to do! I didn’t ask her that.”

There was heavy silence on the other side.

“We will find her identity,” the voice threatened. “You are only delaying the inevitable.”

“Well, you should tell me once you do! I sure would like to know who she is, too,” Gojo answered with a shrug. “Now, if we’re done here, some of us are actually working hard, and need to rest.”

He waved as he turned his back on the Higher-Ups, moving towards the doors with some wide strides. They didn’t bother answering him, and he didn’t bother looking back. He could have been worried about Kagome, but all they had to go off of was the grainy footage of a damaged surveillance camera. On top of that, even if they tried to find a better picture somewhere, doing that while looking at the footage of Shibuya on Halloween night would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Maybe they’d be able to pull it off eventually, but it would take them time.

He was sure that he would get to her first.

Chapter Text

Kagome had forgotten how easy going back to normalcy was. One would think that, after experiencing the kind of night she had, going back to teaching in her mundane life would be near impossible. To be fair, all of Japan found the first week after what were called the ‘terror attacks’ of Shibuya impossible to navigate. But life moved on, and, with no revendication made for the attacks, while conspiracy theories ran rampant, most people simply went back to their lives.

Among them, Kagome at least looked like she was one of the people having the easier time with it. She was approached as a shoulder to cry on by her students and colleagues alike, a rock, reliable, always present, always patient, always listening. Truth be told, she didn’t think she felt as traumatized as others did — nor as she should be. The experience had been horrifying, the loss of lives, devastating, but while she had never seen something on that scale before, she had witnessed entire villages massacred, seen women’s souls be torn away from them for the sake of being consumed by an undead being, and felt herself surrounded by evil in its purest form.

Then, she’d gone back to school and passed her maths test, and she’d done that over and over again for a year. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

Shibuya was likely worse than any of the events she’d lived through, she was well aware of that. Yet she’d walked away from it mostly unscathed, and the burns on her hands were already fading, thanks to her mother’s remedies.

She was… fine. True, at night, the guilt for her lack of lasting trauma ate at her, that gnawing feeling that she should be in a worst state than she was. During the day, she tried to make up for it by shouldering as much of people’s pain as possible. It was a compromise that suited her, one she could live with, one that kept at bay the fear that she was reacting to such a tragedy the wrong way.

Throughout the weeks that followed Shibuya, she kept the white-haired man in a corner of her mind. He’d said he’d come find her, but she hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of him since then. Him and his people were probably busy, she assumed. They had to be the first in line to deal with the aftermath of the event. There was a curiosity within her about what the event was, exactly, what the things she had dubbed the ‘creatures’ actually were, but she had no way to satiate that curiosity, and so she shrugged it off and went on with her day.

She couldn’t get in touch with him anyway.

Yes, she had looked him up. Yes, it did, in fact, deeply frustrate her that she knew so little of the world that surrounded her, that she could be caught so unprepared and that the lives of so many people could be lost in the process. Yes, she would like to make sure it never happened again.

But all she could do, for now, was wait for him to show up.

And kami, did she hate waiting.

She didn’t realize right away that the whistle meant that time had come. It had been a few weeks since the attack by then, and it was yet another peaceful day. They were getting shorter, and when she left her house in the morning, air came out of her mouth in puffs of smoke, but the sky had been clear all day. She had tilted her head up to feel the touch of the cold winter sun before walking into the school. After that, it had been a long day of teaching — history, what else? At the end of the day, once the students were done cleaning the room for the class of which she was the homeroom teacher, she’d sat behind the desk, as she always did, in case someone wanted to come talk to her.

Outside the window, some students were running laps despite the cold weather, but she was inside and warm.

In times like these, the world felt completely human to her.

She didn’t pay attention to the whistle at first, but she did glance up when she heard a pleasant, and vaguely familiar, deep voice saying her name.

“…Miss Higurashi’s classroom?”

“This one,” a voice she was pretty sure belonged to Hana, a student she’d had every year since she had started high school, chirped.

“Thank you,” the other voice chimed.

Kagome, who’d been resting her head on her closed fist with her elbow propped on the table to look out the window, much like her students did when they were bored, pushed herself back up, furrowing her eyebrows. She couldn’t, for the life of her, figure out which student that voice belonged to.

The silhouette that appeared behind the screen door confused her even more. Very tall, with long limbs and messy hair that were probably against school’s rules. The only thing she could think of was that she should remember his name, because the PE teacher would love to have that guy on the basketball team.

Then the door slid open, and she stopped feeling like a bad teacher for not being to identify him.

Behind small, round sunglasses, blue eyes stared at her.

“Hi there, Ka-go-me,” Gojo Satoru grinned at her, rolling her name on his tongue, syllable by syllable.

She blinked, still not sure she appreciated the familiarity. Well, she didn’t mind it either, but her, uh, lived experiences meant she didn’t often care when people only used her name. It was one of those things she’d had to relearn, since coming back.

“You came to my school?” she asked instead of returning the greeting.

Without being invited, he strolled inside the room, sliding the door close behind him. He walked around the class, looking at projects and posters she’d put on the walls. Students didn’t have much time to themselves, and spent most of their days in here, so she liked to make it as homely as possible. Dressed in all black, he stood out clearly against the cream walls, starkly out of place in a school where the uniforms were made of white shirts and blue pants or skirts.

“Well, you’re not that easy of a person to track,” he commented, back turned towards her as he examined a project on Feudal Era that was one of her favorites a student had made this year. “Have you even heard of social media? You should consider it.”

“I would have given you information if you wanted it,” she answered, brows furrowing as mild annoyance started to creep within her. “You didn’t ask.”

He hummed vaguely, and it didn’t sound like he cared much about the point he was making.

“How have you been since that day, by the way?” he asked, still touring the room.

“I’m… alright, I suppose,” she said, choosing her words one at a time. “It was hard in the beginning, but…” A sigh. “I did what I could.” It was hard to put words on what she felt, exactly. There was nothing she could have done about the pain that had already been inflicted in Shibuya, but what she had done. Free the souls she could, offer some dignity, and make sure it would never, ever, happen again.

“See,” Gojo said, spinning around to face her, a smile breaking on his face, “that’s what I don’t get.” With wide strides, he started to cross the classroom, heading towards her. “The most seasoned exorcists got sick while cleaning up Shibuya. Grown men and women, breaking down crying, with some real unfortunate timing in some cases, by the way, and you…” He stopped right in front of her desk, leaning towards her, blue eyes wide with interest behind the glasses, until their noses were almost touching. “You’re alright.” He lowered the glasses to the tip of his nose, eyes taking her in fully, searching her face, her expression, her soul, maybe, for answers. “Who are you, Kagome Higurashi?”

For a moment, Kagome stared back at him, breath traitorously catching in her throat. His tone was excited, his expression fascinated, and she… she wasn’t sure what to make of it.

“What about you?” she asked finally.

He blinked, smile falling to turn into a confused pout.

“How have you been since that day?”

He stood upright, half-sitting on the desk, one foot still on the ground.

“Well, that’s different. I’m the strongest exorcist there is.”

“You said it made even the most seasoned exorcists sick. And they weren’t there to watch it happen,” she argued.

They didn’t make it happen, she didn’t add.

“Yeah, but they’re not me,” he said, cocky grin stretching his lips again.

“In that case,” she answered, “let’s say they’re not me either.”

He snorted at that, examining her while she just stared back, her expression unchanged.

“Fair,” he smiled. “Is that all the answers you’re willing to give?”

Kagome shrugged. It was true that there were things she didn’t want to divulge to a stranger. Her past and the things she’d seen were among those things. But there was a lot that she was willing to share. She just wasn’t sure where to start.

“Those things, back there,” she said slowly. “Not the… former humans, but the… the ones that weren’t humans. You called them… curses, right? What… are they?”

He looked at her pensively, like she was a curious animal he’d stumbled upon.

“Curses are born from the unchanneled cursed energy produced by humans. Negative emotions, if you will. Did you really not know that?”

She shook her head, eyes lifting towards the ceiling as she thought of the implications of that.

“That’s why there were so many of them here,” she said, talking to herself more than she was talking to him. High schools had to be a place where negative emotions were running high.

“Oh, that’s for sure,” Gojo said. “But it’s peaceful now, right? One might even say… too peaceful, don’t you think?”

There were the blue eyes again, shining with mischief from behind the glasses.

“Oh, I cleaned it when I got here,” Kagome answered, non-plussed. “I wasn’t going to let them mess with the kids.”

“Hmm, but they should be coming back,” Gojo insisted, starting to lean closer again. “With a place that big, full of non-sorcerers… It should be impossible to keep it devoid of curses. And the air here is very light, don’t you think?”

She blinked at him. He was talking like she was hiding something and he was trying to make her admit it. Problem was, of course, that she wasn’t.

“You’re saying I have something to do with it, but I haven’t really been doing anything,” she said slowly. “I tried to put up a barrier, but the school was too big. I put up a couple talismans, but I never bothered to refill them. Other than that…” A shrug. “I don’t know. There just weren’t many of them after a while.”

“A barrier?” Gojo repeated. “Talismans? How do you— Can you use cursed energy? You don’t look like you have any.”

“I thought you just said cursed energy was for, well, curses,” Kagome frowned, annoyed at his vaguely accusatory tone. “Why would I have that?”

“Everyone has negative emotions,” he answered, staring at her like she was stupid. The conversation sure was starting to make her have some negative emotions about him. “Exorcists also produce them, but they know how to channel it so they can use it in battle, or to create barriers and make talismans, among other things.”

“That doesn’t seem very healthy,” Kagome mumbled, again more for herself than for him. “How does it feel, that energy? When you produce it, I mean?”

In her body, running through her veins and swirling under her skin, spiritual energy was warm and electrifying. She had never bothered to question where it came from, understanding, on some level, that it was a connection to every living thing. It was belonging, and thankfulness, and nature, and humanity, and Earth, and life, all at once, and all within her. It was a deep knowledge that she was welcome, that her life, and that of everyone else, was a blessing. It came to her as easy as breathing, surrounded her and filled her, every moment of her life. Even before she’d fallen down the well, it had been there, dormant, but still allowing her to move through life, in peace and content.

In front of her, as she was contemplating all of that, Gojo just shrugged.

“It’s a weapon. It doesn’t matter how it feels.”

That… that was not reassuring to her. If anything, she found it more worrying.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “I… don’t think that’s what I use. I take it that’s what you have?”

Around him, she could see a very light, blue glow, so close to his skin it was almost impossible — but it was definitely there, and had been since he’d walked in. She hadn’t been able to see it through the door, yet she couldn’t miss it now.

“What else could you be using?”

Again, there was that interest she’d heard in his voice on that fateful night, and earlier in the conversation, like she was an enigma he wanted to solve.

“We— We usually call it spiritual energy,” she said, stumbling over her words.

“And who would that ‘we’ be?” he insisted. He was leaning closer again, back in her space, entirely focused on her. He didn’t seem like the type of person to even be able to give all of his attention to one person, or one thing for that matter, and to be on the receiving end of all of his usually spread out focus was— she wasn’t sure. Overwhelming. Intoxicating. Dizzying.

“Priestesses,” she answered nonetheless, her voice remaining even despite the way she felt. “Mikos, like that man said. Monks and priests too, I guess,” she added after a brief pause.

“The one miko I know definitely uses cursed energy,” he noted, sounding skeptical.

Oh kami. Was he really going to mansplain priestesses to her?

“There are many ways to be a miko,” she said.

“Well, you’re a lot more powerful than her. She should have chosen your way.”

Ouch.

“How’d you get rid of that curse anyway?”

His tone was more serious this time, less playful.

“The one with the long hair?” Kagome asked, waiting for his nod of confirmation. “I just… purified him.” Just like she had done it for the Jewel, just like she did when she shot her arrows or like she’d learned to do with her bare hands since then. Like most things that came with her powers, it was all natural to her, and she wasn’t sure how to explain it better than that. He was a fire and she’d extinguished him, pouring her spiritual energy onto his… cursed energy, then, until there was none of it left, and once it was all gone, so was he.

“Hm,” Gojo said, expression turning thoughtful. “This isn’t going to work.”

She blinked.

“I’m sorry?”

“You don’t make sense to me. I don’t think I make sense to you. So,” he lifted a finger as if he’d just gotten some genius idea, “we’re going to have to clear that up, if we want to understand what’s happening here.”

That sounded fine to her, actually, if a little anticlimactic. Surprisingly sensible, too, and unexpected given the way he’d behaved since waltzing into her classroom like he owned the place.

“You should come with me to Jujutsu High,” he suggested, offering her a toothy grin and jumping off the desk, as if to invite her to follow.

…and they were back on the territory of things that made less than sense.

“Are you saying I should follow a stranger with powers I don’t understand into a place I know nothing about?”

He stopped to consider her words.

“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Glad we’re on the same page.”

Kami, give her strength. She raised her fingers to rub soothing circles against her temples. She was more patient now than she was at fifteen, but after a whole day of teaching teenagers, she could feel it running thin.

“And why would I do that?”

“Aw, you wound me,” he said, leaning over the desk once more. He propped an elbow on the table, placing his chin on his knuckle, and grinned. “Don’t you trust me, Ka-go-me?”

Her first instinct was to say no. It didn’t even have to be rude — she didn’t like being rude. Just say “no, thank you” and move on with her life, no matter how badly her curiosity was eating at her. But she remembered that night, in Shibuya, and something tightened in her chest. She remembered how tired he looked, killing hundreds — thousands? — of the former humans to save the ones that were still themselves, taking that burden entirely on his shoulders. She remembered him taking her outside and calling her a cab, so she wouldn’t be forced into this world she didn’t know.

Now, looking into shining blue eyes through the dark lenses, she did doubt that he fully knew what they would be walking into, and yet…

Her lips parted. His eyes dropped down to them, following her movements.

“Miss Higurashi! Are you still—”

Kagome jumped as the door slid open brutally, two of her students coming running in and pausing in the doorway, uncertain eyes going back and forth between her and Gojo.

Gojo, who was clearly unfazed by the sudden intrusion, and just turned his head towards them, greeting the two young girls with a lazy wave.

“Hi there.”

“Sakura, Misaki, how can I help you?” Kagome asked. Her voice was as sweet as ever, even if she could feel her cheeks burning. She hadn’t done anything wrong, and she refused to feel embarrassed for this, dammit.

“Oh,” Sakura said, shifting her weight from her left foot to the right and back, eyes darting from Gojo’s face to Kagome’s, “um, you know, I had forgotten an essay we were supposed to turn in today at home, so I figured if I just grabbed it at home and ran back I could give it to you before you left and you’d know I wasn’t lying when I said I’d done it.”

She said all that in one breath, and Kagome couldn’t help but smile fondly. Sweet, sweet girl.

“I didn’t think you were lying,” she answered, extending her hand, “but you can give it to me if you have it here.”

With a big grin, the girl walked across the room over to her, pushing the paper in her hand, before turning around and walking back to her friend, who was still staring at Gojo, mouth agape. He shot the two of them a wink, and Kagome watched as the two flushed and giggled girlishly. Ah, teenagers…

“Is there something else I can do for you?” Kagome asked, tone clearly indicating they were supposed to leave.

“Miss Higurashi,” Misaki, who had always been the bolder one out of the two, started, eyes filled with stars, “is that your boyfriend?”

Gojo’s laugh burst out of him, light and natural, while Kagome sighed. Okay, she’d walked straight into that one.

“Girls, that is a private matter.”

“That’s not a no,” Gojo hummed from next to her, and she shot him a dark look.

“Also, no.”

“Aww,” the girls whined. “But you’d be so cute together!”

“Girls, out,” Kagome said. They obeyed right away, giggling as they ran away, while she turned to look sternly at Gojo. “Why would you encourage them?”

“They looked so happy about it,” he grinned, “just wanted to give them a little hope. Also, I’m a great catch, I’ll have you know.”

She rolled her eyes, shaking her head. She didn’t need her students poking their noses into her personal life — it wasn’t their place, but also, she already had three friends who did just that at every chance they got, thank you very much.

“Alright, so, shall we go to Jujutsu High?” Gojo asked, dropping the matter the second he got bored with it.

“Sure,” she said.

“Right, I figured you’d say that, so I— Huh?”

She stood up, starting to gather her belongings.

“I’ll go with you.”

“But why?”

He sounded flabbergasted, and she had to say, there was a certain pleasure in catching him so completely off-guard.

“Because I do think you deserve to be trusted,” she answered as she was putting on her coat, looking at him and noting how young, how boyish he looked as he stared at her, eyes wide and mouth open in confusion. “Whether you’ll keep my trust, that’s up to you,” she added.

She liked trusting people. She trusted him, and she trusted Sakura when she promised her she’d done the work, she’d just forgotten it at home, Miss Higurashi, really, and she trusted Daiki when he swore, with tears in his eyes, that he wasn’t the one who’d stolen Takumi’s shoes from his locker in the back of the class. She could take back that trust, but everyone got their chance.

“Oh,” was all he said, and she didn’t know then how hard it was to make the Gojo Satoru run out of things to say.

“But not right now,” she added. “I need to get home and grade some papers. My last class is at two on Thursday, though, so if you give me an address—”

“Nah, I’ll come get you,” he interrupted her, words coming back to him in an easy drawl. “It’s a date then, right?”

She rolled her eyes once more.

“Thursday at two,” he said cheerfully, despite her ignoring him, walking by her side, both hands behind his head as she made her way out of the building. “It’s not that far from here, probably won’t take too long anyway.”

She nodded along and, as they were crossing the courtyard, she spotted, sitting on a wall, a familiar looking cat with golden eyes. Its two tails moved slowly behind it, and she couldn’t help but grin. Yokai were rare in the city, but she’d spotted more of them around the school lately. This one, of course, was an old friend, and she always felt thankful when she came to check on her. She shot her a wink. Gojo turned around, looking in the same direction as her, but by then she’d already jumped off and disappeared behind the wall.

“Was there something there?” he asked, sounding puzzled.

“Just a cat,” she said innocently.

“Is that so?”

It didn’t sound like he believed her, eyes lingering on the spot where Kirara had just been, and she looked at him, trying to understand what it was that was puzzling him. Could he tell that there had been a yokai there? Curses felt different, of that she was certain, but she didn’t know what was going on with his eyes. Why the shades inside in the dead of winter, why the blindfold — did he use something other than sight? She didn’t have a clue.

“Alright then,” he said lightly, shrugging it off as they reached the front gate with such ease it was her turn to be caught off-guard. “I’ll let you go from here then. Don’t forget, Ka-go-me.”

With that, he turned around, waving at her as he walked away, and her eyes followed his dark silhouette thoughtfully, until he disappeared around the corner as easily as he’d appeared back into her life.

She didn’t think she could forget about him, even if she wanted to.

And, so far… she didn’t want to.

Chapter Text

On Thursday at two p.m., Gojo was nowhere to be found.

Kagome lingered in the classroom, using the time to make small talk with her students while they were waiting for the next teacher to arrive, stealing glances outside the window every now and then. She couldn’t say she was all that surprised. It would make little sense if she tried to explain it, but he just… hadn’t struck her as the type to be on time. It wasn’t a bad thing per se — some of her favorite students were never on time if they could help it, and she didn’t see that as a reason to think any less of them. It was, however, annoying, especially since he hadn’t given her any way to get in touch with him, or even an address for that Jujutsu High— place— where he wanted to take her.

She stayed in the school hall a while longer, and when the janitor asked her if there was anything she needed help with, a polite way of telling her she was in the way, she decided she’d done enough entertaining him for the day. It took her only a moment to bundle herself under a scarf, gloves, and a beanie before she headed out at last. She retrieved her bike by the school gates, where she had kept it ever since she’d started working here. She rode it to school and back every day, whether it was raining, windy, snowing, or, like today, freezing cold.

Behind her, her backpack swung from side to side, and she fastened it tighter with practiced ease. The yellow one had not survived long past the Feudal era, and she had since bought a bright green one. To it, she’d attached her bow and arrows.

Not that she carried them everywhere, of course not. She had just taken on training the archery club every now and then.

With one last glance at the school, she took off at a gentle pace, humming to herself as she rode through the familiar streets of Tokyo.

She hadn’t made it very far when a big black car came to a screeching halt in front of her. She braked as quick as her reflexes allowed, letting out a very undignified yelp in the process, and steadied herself with one foot. The other one, she kept on the pedal in case she needed it to book it. You never knew.

A white-haired head popped out of a window, and its owner waved his hand erratically in her direction.

“Kagome!” The shout, both familiar and yet foreign, said with that voice, made her wince and shake her head. “Over here!”

Yes. She had eyes.

“You’re late,” she said, riding her bike closer to where he was.

“Fashionably so, right?” Gojo asked with a wide grin. He was wearing the blindfold again.

“No, just late.”

With that, she rode straight past him and the car without speeding up her pace, still going towards her house. He let out a string of offended noises from behind her, and she couldn’t help the smile that bloomed on her face. That… brought her far more satisfaction than it should have. A few seconds later, the car was starting again, catching up with her. By that time, she had managed to school her features back to a more neutral expression, one that didn’t let on just how pleased with herself she was. A window was rolled down, and there he was, in the backseat, popping his head out again.

“Come on, just get in! It’ll be a lot faster and— why would you even be on a bike in that weather? It’s November.”

“I like this bike,” she said, which was true. She’d had the same one since she was fifteen.

“Well I’m cold, so get in the car!”

This felt childish, and she had enough self-awareness to recognize that this was behavior that she would see in her students, but also—

“Can’t you at least apologize?” she asked, stopping her bike abruptly once more and glaring at him with as much aggressivity as she could muster.

A few meters further, once the driver had pulled over once more, Gojo left the car at last, long limbs unfolding as he did. Cars couldn’t be comfortable for him, she thought without lingering on the idea too much. She wasn’t a fan either, to be honest. After such a long time on the open roads — and maybe, just maybe, after three days in a space she couldn’t leave — she tended to find they made her quite… claustrophobic.

“I’m sorry,” he said as he reached her, burying his hands in his pocket in a casual gesture. “Also, I can just have someone grade your papers, if you’d like. Or prepare your classes, or whatever it is you want.”

He accompanied the comment with an easy shrug, smug smile letting her know how inconsequential this all was to him.

Kagome sighed. None of this was serious to him, she could tell, and she knew it was mundane but— her students mattered to her. The ones that sat in the front row with an anxious look on their faces, the ones in the back of the class that struggled to get a passing grade, the ones that came to her after class in hope she’d help them improve, and the ones that laughed as they stuffed the papers in their bags, not planning on looking at it ever again. Sure, curses or whatever were life threatening, but to her kids, so were these grades, in their own, twisted way. They could change whether or not they’d get in the university of their choice and get to have the life they wanted. Even to the ones who acted like they didn’t care were paving the path ahead of them, whether they liked it or not.

“It’s fine, I’ll just do that later. Where were we going again?”

“Jujutsu Tech,” he hummed, reaching his hand towards her bike. “Give me that, I’ll get it in the trunk.”

“Be careful with it,” she warned, letting him grab her prized possession and lifting it from the ground as though it weighed nothing. “I haven’t heard of any school named that in Tokyo…”

He popped open the trunk, and the bike fit without trouble in the large car.

“You should get a new one, this one’s falling apart,” he noted as he slammed the trunk shut. “And yeah, we don’t advertise to non-sorcerers, no offense. So this will have to be a surprise!”

She eyed him cautiously. In reply, he gave her a toothy smile that failed to be reassuring at all. Around him, there was still this discreet aura of what she was starting to identify as cursed energy, buzzing lightly. Would that be true of every sorcerer she would meet? That would definitely end up giving her a headache if it was the case.

“Alright, then,” she caved in the end. “Let’s get going.”

“Don’t worry, Kagome,” he said, his voice bright and cheerful, while opening the door for her. “This will be fun!”

She had serious doubts about that.

The car came to a halt at the bottom of a hill she didn’t remember ever lying eyes on. The sensation caught her off guard, disorienting her more than she would have expected. She’d lived in Tokyo her entire life, and she had no idea where she even was. Not that she knew every corner of the capital by heart, but this felt— odd.

“Thank you, Ijichi,” she took the time to call out to the driver, her tone sweet, as she stepped out.

“It was my pleasure, Miss Higurashi,” Ijichi replied, and Gojo snorted when he noticed his cheeks were dusted pink.

“And it will also be his pleasure to drop your bike to your place, isn’t that right, Ijichi?”

The short man cleared his throat, averting his eyes and clearing his throat before replying whicha  much more professional voice.

“Certainly. I will do this right away.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Kagome chirped, “thank you again.”

As the car was driving away, she rolled her eyes at Gojo, who was still chuckling to himself.

“You didn’t need to make fun of him.”

“But he makes it so easy…” he protested with a pout.

She shook her head, then turned to look up at the hill. Never-ending stairs climbed up its sides, disappearing in the forest. For a fleeting second, she thought she was looking up towards Mount Azusa, and her heart tightened in her chest. She had fond memories of most of her time in the Feudal Era. Some, however, remained painful, even a decade after she’d left it behind, never to return again.

“Shall we?” Gojo asked, already halfway up the first flight of stairs, and she jumped when his voice brought her back to the present.

“I don’t suppose there is another way up there, is it?”

“Nope!”

From the way he was staring at her and his grin, she wondered if he was testing her. She struggled to get a read on him, had the feeling that he was always a step ahead of her. She could imagine glimmering blue eyes behind the blindfold, but knew she would have been unable to figure out just what was behind them, even if she’d been looking into them. She needed more information about him — but then again, so did he.

So, with a sigh, she started up the mountain.

She wished there was someone to carry her on their backs, but she couldn’t see herself asking Gojo, and…

She glanced back, spotting the familiar, small dot of youki in the forest, and grinned.

She’d wait a little longer before she called on Kirara.

It felt like an eternity of thankless climbing, accompanied only by Gojo’s uninterrupted whistling. He didn’t seem to struggle a bit, always ahead of her, though never going fast enough to widen the gap between them. Finally, they reached a torii. On the other side, she could see what she assumed were the buildings to the school, hidden away from the world. Gojo crossed it without hesitation, then turned to look at her, and the whistling stopped. There was a tension in his shoulders now, and he looked focused, alert.

Kagome was breathing faster upon reaching the top of the stairs, and her cheeks were a healthy pink, but she had been able to hold her own on the way up. Her eyes were on Gojo as she approached, but she let the surroundings wash over her while walking closer, her pace more leisurely than his. She liked nature, always had, and she made sure to take time away from the city whenever she could. Such places were the ones where yokai still lived in relative abundance, though she hadn’t perceived any in the woods here — apart from the little one watching over her, of course.

Still, there was a definite presence here, one she had felt growing stronger as she’d climbed the hill. She couldn’t quite put a word on it. It felt like a benevolent divinity, but there was no reiki here, as far as she could tell. It wasn’t aggressive, though, and so she stepped in what she thought was its sphere of influence without hesitating.

Gojo’s grin widened.

“What is it?” she asked, brow furrowing.

“Nothing,” he hummed, sounding very pleased with himself.

It obviously wasn’t nothing, but Kagome refused to push again to get only vague answers. Behind her, the dot of Kirara’s youki vanished. She had to assume the presence was the reason for it, though she didn’t know for sure what was causing it. She supposed she’d get to figure out later on — in the best case scenario, once Gojo had given her at least some answers.

She followed him in the courtyard of a building that she had to assume dated back centuries, based on its appearance. Gojo strolled through them, whistling, without paying any attention to them. Kagome, on the other hand, felt like she had gone back in time once more, and nostalgia caught her at the throat. She swallowed painfully around it. Had Gojo not been here, ahead of her, the illusion would have been complete. But he had no care, walked with his hands in his pockets, and she kept her eyes on his back to keep herself in this world.

Then another man appeared, sliding a door open. He also looked very 21^st century, with sunglasses — what was up with all the sunglasses? —, a goatee, and black sportswear that looked somewhat like Gojo’s. He stared at her for about half a second before pinching the bridge of his nose, accompanying the gesture with an exhausted sigh.

“Satoru,” he groaned, “you know you’re not supposed to bring civilians here.”

“My bad!” Gojo said, an easy smile forming on his lips. “You know, I’ve been thinking we need to up our teaching techniques, so I figured an actual teacher would be the way to go.”

The man stared at him, clearly trying to figure out what was going on in Gojo’s mind, while Kagome did the same, at least as confused as him. Gojo was a teacher? She knew he was lying, but she did agree that he needed her help. There was no way he was doing this right.

“The students are doing fine,” the man said after a while. “They have excellent potential. I see no need to—”

“Kagome, this is Yaga,” Gojo interrupted him, voice light, but Kagome noticed his shoulders straightening. “The Principal for this school.” Then, dropping his voice to a loud whisper, “He doesn’t do much but we still keep him around.”

“I can hear you, punk!” Yaga snapped. “There’s no reason for her to be here, so you can take her back—”

“There are threats unknown all around the city,” Gojo said, and his tone was as sweet as ever, but his gritted jaw betrayed him. “All I want is for the kids to be ready, and they aren’t yet.”

Tension crackled in the air in the seconds that followed. Many things unsaid that Kagome had no way of catching, but even she knew that whatever was going on here had long been brewing. Unfortunately, she had no idea what it was exactly, and frustration was starting to bubble inside her.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said, stepping in front of Gojo and standing between him and Yaga. “We’ll make it quick, of course. It’s better for me if I see the kids in their usual teaching premises. I’ll be gone really soon.”

There was a surprised silence, but Kagome kept herself still and steady, her smile directed as Yaga. Gojo didn’t growl like Inuyasha used to, but it wasn’t the first time she’d done something like that.

“Well, I suppose since you’ve come all this way, the least I can do is let you do your job,” Yaga said reluctantly. “But we’ll talk about this again, Satoru,” he added, more a threat than a promise, while Gojo waved him off.

“Always nice talking to you!” he shouted at the man’s retreating form.

Kagome looked up at him blankly.

“You didn’t tell anyone I was coming?”

Gojo looked at her, lips pressing together into a thoughtful expression.

“Everyone around here has been looking for you since Shibuya,” he said. Even his tone had lost its usual warmth.

“They have?”

“And now that you’re here…” A corner of his lips lifted up into a cold, cynical smirk. “Because they can’t imagine that anyone without cursed energy would be capable of anything, they don’t even stop for a second thinking it could you.”

His shoulders were slumped, his tone bitter. Kagome looked at him, a lump in her throat. The red gate they’d crossed earlier stood far behind him, framing him where he stood in the middle of the courtyard. All alone. She felt the need to reach out to him, but nothing came to her. She had no idea where to start.

After a few seconds, the smile appeared again.

“Alright, shall we? You’ll see, you’re going to love the kids.”

To be fair, Kagome had never met a kid she hadn’t loved. Even her worst students, even the ones that had given her the most trouble, she’d had love for. She never let outside biases cloud her judgment, just saw them for what they were: children with their whole lives ahead of them.

Walking into the Jujutsu Tech Gym, where the whooping six students in first and second year were waiting for her, she worried she would not be able to do that.

It wasn’t anything the kid did. In fact, he looked up at her with wide eyes and a bright smile. It wasn’t even his pink hair, because Kagome would never judge anyone on that. No, it was the fact that he felt deeply, deeply… wrong.

There was no miasma in the room, of that she was certain, and yet the air felt corrupt, so much so the mere act of inhaling was painful. One glance, and she knew no one else was feeling that way. But there were eyes on her, a malevolent entity surveying her every move. Even as Gojo started going around the room and names filled her mind, she could never quite shake it off. She allowed a light burst of reiki to run over her skin, and it did help, letting her breathe at last, but the entity didn’t go away, waiting, just waiting, and watching.

“…and this is Kagome!” Gojo concluded before adding, for good measure, “She’s a history teacher.”

“Um,” the brown-haired girl chewing on a lollipop stick interjected immediately, “we’re not going to have history lessons, right? I didn’t sign up for that.”

“No, that would be completely useless,” Gojo confirmed, ignoring the nasty glance Kagome gave him. “She’s here because she has very interesting abilities.”

The pink-haired boy lifted a hand, and despite herself, Kagome tensed.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, voice deep but kind, once more so ordinary compared to what she felt around him, “but she doesn’t have any cursed energy, does she?”

Based on the lack of reaction from others, they were all aware of that information — apart from one girl, ponytail, glasses, and a scowl on her face, who narrowed her eyes at Kagome. Maki, no last name, she remembered from the introductions.

“That’s correct, Yuuji. Actually, up until recently, she didn’t even know what curses were!”

Kami, he was using her for theatrics. She could understand wanting to keep a teenage audience engaged, but she didn’t much appreciate being a prop for it.

It did get the kids’ interest, though, and she noticed them throwing each other glances.

“Can she even see curses?” Megumi, the one with jet black hair, asked, sounding very skeptical.

“I can,” Kagome answered before Gojo could do it for her, “but—”

“How?” Maki asked, pushing her glasses higher on her nose.

“I just can,” Kagome said, blinking at her, “I’m—”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Megumi commented.

“Tuna,” one boy who’d been silent so far — Inumaki, if she wasn’t mistaken — added.

“What are you doing?” Megumi asked Gojo, staring at him like he was trying to burn a hole through him. “Is this some sort of test?”

“Well,” Gojo said, “yes. For her, though, not for any of you.”

There were scoffs and more glances exchanged in the room, and Kagome watched in interest. No one seemed all that fond of Gojo. Yaga had seemed annoyed by his antics, outside, not taking him seriously for a second. As for these kids, well, it did not look as if any of them respected him. Maki, Nobara and Megumi were exchanging mocking quips about him. Inumaki didn’t speak, but it did not look as if he spoke, as a general rule. The Panda, she wasn’t too sure of, to be honest. She hadn’t figured out what was going on with him either — or with the three bright lights that she could see shining inside his large body. Yuuji was a notable exception here, though Kagome still had no idea what to make of him.

Standing next to her, Gojo was grinning from ear to ear watching the kids’ antics, and she watched the obvious care in his expression and attitude with interest. Huh. Maybe… maybe there was something of a teacher in him, after all. Well-hidden, and that needed lots and lots of polishing, but it was a start.

She took a step to get closer to him, hands held behind her back as she tilted her head in his direction.

“It looks like maybe I could actually help you be a better teacher…”

He gasped in fake outrage.

“I’ll have you know I’m a stellar professor, the best these ungrateful brats could dream of!”

Kagome sighed, shaking her head in amusement. The hyperbolic statements, the refusal to take anything seriously, she didn’t mind it all that much. It did intrigue her that she sensed something genuine under the fake outrage. She was pretty sure that he did believe he was as good of a teacher as the kids could get. Whether that spoke to his character or that of other people around him, she couldn’t say just yet.

“Just let me know if you want any advice,” she said, smiling at him with nothing but sincerity.

For a couple seconds, Gojo just looked at her, lips parted, brows furrowing, though it was barely visible under the mask.

Then he clapped his hands, and she held herself back from jumping at the last second, her eyes going wide.

“Alright class, let’s get started!” he called, as if the conversation had never happened. “Maki, could we get one of your cursed weapons for the lady?”

The girl groaned, her eyes going back and forth between him and Kagome with obvious distrust.

“Fine,” she caved in the end. “But I want it back, alright? And you’ll have to take good care of it.”

“We’ll be standing right here, Maki,” Gojo answered, voice booming and bouncing against the wall of the gym. “You can just come beat her up if you think she’s doing a bad job!”

Kagome winced.

“Hey now—”

“Maki’s a really good fighter,” Gojo added with far too much cheer. Kagome could appreciate how proud he was of his student, and any other time, she would be thrilled by that. Right now, it just made her grimace.

“Here,” Maki sighed, walking over to Kagome, holding what looked to her like a broad and short sword. She had no idea what it was called, but she could tell there was some type of energy running around it. It didn’t feel like Gojo’s, though.

With ease, Maki threw it in the air, catching it by the blade without cutting herself, and offering the pommel to Kagome. She considered it for a second, but she had no reason to think this was a trap of any sort, so she just reached out to take it.

Her spiritual energy reacted without her wishing it to. She did not command it, barely even felt it moving. The second she took hold of the pommel, she felt the energy around it — cursed energy, she assumed, though she could not recognize the ‘signature’ for it yet, just somewhat detect that it was there — twisting, trying to fight against the energy she produced naturally.

Her reiki lashed out, wrapping itself around the sword as if it was an extension of her, hungrily swallowing all the energy that was there, extinguishing it whole, then retracting back into her, satiated.

“Um,” she said.

There were confused looks among the students, though none of them seemed clear on what had happened exactly.

Gojo appeared by her side, lifting one side of his blindfold to reveal the bluest, most piercing eye. Then he directed that eye towards her, and Kagome swallowed. She hadn’t gotten used to that yet. She— She thought she had, but it felt like he was looking right into her soul now, and she could only hope she wasn’t blushing.

Gojo’s laugh escaped his lips, light and surprised, seeming to catch even him off-guard.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” he commented, the eye she could see wide with what she read as fascination.

“Neither did I,” she admitted with a grimace, glancing down at the sword in her hand. “It’s all gone now, right?”

“What?” Maki asked, a threatening edge in her tone.

“Completely useless,” Gojo laughed, setting the blindfold back in place. “I mean, you could still cut someone’s head with that, but it wouldn’t do you any good against actual curses.”

The notion seemed to delight him and, thoughtful, Kagome kept looking down at the weapon. If that energy was what curses were made of, she was starting to suspect she wouldn’t need weapons all that much. Then again, she would much rather not be close enough to touch them. Looked like her bow and arrows would come in handy once more…

“What happened,” Maki growled.

“I’m afraid I purified it,” Kagome said, apologetic. “I’m truly sorry, Maki. This— cursed energy doesn’t seem to react too well to mine.”

“What?” Maki snarled, pivoting to tear out Gojo’s throat, with Panda grabbing her and ensuring he stayed out of her reach at the very last second possible, pulling her back as she kicked and protested.

“How’s that even possible?” Megumi’s voice came from the bleachers, his expression clearly confused. “I’ve never heard of something like— that.” Cogs were turning in his head, but, well, Kagome didn’t have anything to offer to him at this point. She didn’t know either, though she was starting to figure out that she was just, purely and simply, incompatible with cursed energy.

“Let’s find out,” Gojo said with a wide grin. “Megumi, call one of your shikigamis.”

Kagome frowned. Huh. Now that was something she was familiar with — in theory anyway. Like most things she’d seen so far though, she doubted that it had much in common with what she knew.

Megumi blinked.

“No.”

“Say what now?”

“I said no. If you don’t know how her power works, I don’t see any need to endanger her. Or them. Find some curses to throw at her — whatever you want. I’m not doing it.”

Then he folded his arms over his chest, looking every bit the moody teenager he was.

Gojo stared at him, mouth open, and Kagome bit her tongue to stop herself from laughing. She turned to him, wondering how he was going to respond.

“Aww,” he said, “you’re standing up for yourself! Good for you, Megumi.”

Huh. She hadn’t expected that, and yet, she couldn’t say she was surprised. You could tell a lot about a person by how they reacted when their authority was challenged. Seeing Gojo so unbothered by it — and willing to let his student act according to his own beliefs as opposed to following him blindly — was a point in his favor in her book.

What an odd man. It seemed like he would take her by surprise every time he was given the chance.

So far, she hadn’t minded too much.

“Alright, Kagome, how would you feel about a little showdown then?” he asked, turning towards her with his eternal smile.

“I’m sorry?”

“Try to hit me.”

She blinked, slowly.

“What?”

Behind him, Megumi scoffed. She could see other students rolling their eyes, exchanging annoyed glances among themselves. There was a catch, clearly.

She just couldn’t figure out what it was.

“Go for it,” Gojo egged her on. He slid his thumb under his blindfold, pushing it over his head, revealing his eyes, and she felt the energy in the room shift.

“Wait, is he serious?” Nobara muttered, glancing at Megumi.

The boy shrugged, but he kept staring at his teacher’s back, frowning.

“C’mon, Kagome, don’t be afraid,” Gojo smiled, turning his head to present his cheek. “Just really land one on me, alright?”

“But I don’t want to hit you,” she said, voice slow and filled with confusion.

“Not yet, but you’ll regret it if you pass on the opportunity, trust me,” he said lightly, amusement twinkling in his blue eyes.

“He’s probably right about that,” Maki mumbled under her breath, still holding the now common weapon in her hand.

Kagome stared at him, glancing at the students behind him. This didn’t look like a good idea. She had never been in favor of violence, not outside of desperate situations, which was not the case here. She didn’t enjoy inflicting it on other people, and she was of the belief that it should be as sparsely as possible.

However, she also didn’t see Gojo dropping this conversation. If it was a test of her abilities, she was about to be a big disappointment for him. Still, she didn’t want to offer to shoot him with an arrow. She was worried he wouldn’t refuse the offer, and considering the cursed energy that was buzzing around him at all times, she wasn’t sure how the contact between their energies would go.

“Alright,” she relented. “Fine.”

“Don’t worry about hurting me,” Gojo instructed as she set her bag down. “Hit as hard as you’d like.”

“I’d like not to hit you,” Kagome sighed as she stood in front of him, awkwardly lifting her hand. She kept her hand open. Inuyasha had taught her how to punch someone, a lifetime ago, with the thumb outside the fist, as he’d been very insistent about, but she had to assume that would hurt more, and the last thing she wanted was to cause more pain than necessary.

“Aw, don’t make me beg, Kagome,” Gojo teased. His smile was still plastered on his face, but there was something unnerving about it, now that his eyes were visible, because under the surface amusement, there was something else. Something cold, running all sorts of calculations, and just waiting for her to let him add one more variable to them.

She could have walked away right then, the moment she spotted it, but, just as had happened back in her classroom, and back on that rooftop, she chose not to. She had seen him doing everything in his power to save people’s lives, she had seen him caring for his students the best way he could. She took a gamble, and she chose to bet on him. Again.

The sound of her open palm colliding with his cheek echoed loudly in the room. Gojo’s head turned, and there was, briefly, the red trace of hand on his cheek, subsiding in a matter of seconds. Despite herself, Kagome felt herself flush with embarrassment. In the bleachers, Megumi let out a short laugh before catching himself, looking very contrived.

For a moment, Gojo stood there, completely motionless, in this exact position. Then, like nothing had happened, he snapped back in place.

“Okay!” he said. “Who wants to go out for some extracurricular activities?”

Wait, that was it? She’d just hit him for nothing?

“I’m so sorry,” she squeaked, “Kami, you should— you should have dodged—"

“Must be his kink or something,” Nobara commented, making Maki chuckle.

“At least she didn’t hurt her hand on his Infinity,” Megumi said with an eyeroll. For a second there, he hadn’t been sure Gojo had dropped it.

“Inumaki!” Gojo called. “You’re coming with us! The rest of you can… practice or something, I guess.” He waved their hand in their direction, but stopped when Kagome turned to glare at him, her pretty eyes — he wondered if she knew there were specks of dark blue in them — now stormy. “Maki, you can work on hand-to-hand combat with Yuuji. Panda, work with Megumi and Nobara on their cursed techniques.” Then, as he was walking over, he rose an eyebrow at Kagome’s intention. “Happy now?”

She studied his expression for a second and, looking pleased with what she saw, smiled, her eyes creasing.

“You know, I could almost start to believe you’re a good teacher.”

It looked like it came easy to her. Talking to him, that was. It made something in his throat tighten — but not for long. He didn’t need to be reminded that she was an outsider. She didn’t know this world yet, didn’t know its rules, and most importantly, she didn’t know what role he played in it. Who he was, what he was. As long as that was true, it didn’t matter that her smile and her eyes were warm, or that she talked to him like he wasn’t the strongest. All that mattered was that she stayed close enough for him to figure out what her deal was.

Waiting by the door, Inumaki let out a brief laugh, and Kagome’s attention switched to him.

“Salmon,” he commented, shaking his head.

Gojo watched as Kagome walked over to him, doing that head tilt of hers as she spoke to him, voice gentle, trying to understand him. He followed behind them as they exited Jujutsu Tech, eyes laser focused on the girl. There was an energy around her, one he’d felt flaring when her hand had hit his skin, but it hadn’t been long enough for him to be able to read it fully, or even to recognize it easily. Still, the exercise had answered one question he’d had.

Because at no point had he dropped his Infinity.

Chapter Text

“Did we lose Kagome?”

Gojo and Inumaki had just reached the bottom of the stairs, and at his teacher’s question, Inumaki glanced up to his face. For a few seconds, the kid stared at him with dead, empty eyes, before turning around. Indeed, Kagome was nowhere to be seen. She’d trailed behind for most of the way down, sure, but Gojo couldn’t think of any reason why she would have lost herself. It’s not like there were any other ways down.

Just as he was wondering if he should go look for her, she appeared, emerging from the forest and rushing down the last flight of stairs, her cheeks a healthy pink.

“Sorry!” she exclaimed as she reached the bottom. “The two of you were too fast for me and my feet hurt.”

It was true that she wasn’t dressed for the occasion. With a skirt and elegant, flat dress shoes, she sure hadn’t prepared for, well, curses hunting or anything of that sort. While Inumaki shrugged, Gojo observed her a while longer from behind his blindfold. She hadn’t struggled much with keeping up with him when they were climbing the stairs. But he didn’t find anything when he studied her face or her energy.

Then again, he never had.

“Our taxi’s on its way,” he announced, choosing to drop the matter anyway. “Now, where should we go?” Pulling out his phone, he started going through various alerts he’d received. Curses had kept their heads down since Shibuya, so there wasn’t anything strong in here, nothing he could test Kagome with as much as he wanted to, but it should make her use her powers again, and that was all he needed.

Well. He hoped it was.

“Let’s see,” he hummed, “haunted house, former hospital, the closed-down aisle of a prison, ooh, an abandoned amusement park, that sounds fun, cemetery—”

“When you say ‘we’,” Kagome interrupted him, her voice polite as always, “surely you don’t mean that Inumaki will be coming with us?”

Inumaki blinked. Gojo stared.

Right. Not a sorcerer. Some people frowned at using children as cannon fodder.

How strangely refreshing that was.

“Inumaki’s one of our best elements!” Gojo said, tone bright. “He’s a very promising sorcerer. Nothing to worry about. Plus I’ll be here, remember? And I’m the strongest.”

Kagome sighed, ignoring what she took as pure bravado. Instead, her worried eyes moved up and down over Inumaki’s frame. He didn’t look strong, but she didn’t need any reminding that physical appearance and power didn’t have to correlate. She was convinced that children should be children and get to experience their lives, which didn’t include any life-threatening situations in her book. Yet she knew all too well that in some situations, standing by wasn’t an option. It wasn’t just about urgency — it was about doing what you thought was right. It was a choice she had made herself, when she was fifteen.

She couldn’t deny it to someone else.

“Fine, I suppose,” she relented, “but it’s getting late and I have work to do. Which of these places is the closest?”

“I guess the hospital is closer,” Gojo said, pouting, “but the amusement park would be—”

“Hospital it is,” Kagome said, tone final.

Inumaki chuckled.

“Salmon, salmon!”

“Rude,” Gojo mumbled, but it was the address he gave Ijichi, with a defeated tone, when the man pulled over.

Kagome climbed in the car, cradling her bag with great care as she did so.

In it, the two-tailed yokai she had picked up while in the forest stirred, but did not wake.

Kagome looked up at the hospital with a grimace as she was stepping out the car, already regretting that she had agreed to come here. Even though none of the ‘curses’ were visible at the moment, she could tell the place was crawling with them, the air thick with the resentment, sadness, anger and pain that had been experienced here for years. It was so present it almost sizzled against her skin, purified as soon as it came in contact with her.

“The place closed down due to a huge scandal,” Gojo explained with too much enthusiasm. “A nurse was reportedly killing her patients and the director hid it to save his place. Since it’s been abandoned, it’s been a favored place for drug dealing.”

Kagome shivered. For all her time in the Feudal Era, this was the kind of place she’d never set foot in. She couldn’t say it thrilled her.

“Of course,” Gojo continued, “that makes it a ripe spot for curses to appear in, but we don’t have any reports of anything above a grade two appearing here.” Then, leaning close to Kagome’s ear, “You’ve taken out a Special grade curse, in case you were wondering. This should be a walk in the park.”

Kagome’s teeth dug into her bottom lip, chewing on it, deep in her thoughts. She kept staring at the hospital.

“Why don’t you sorcerers— I don’t know, empty places like this? Get rid of all the curses so people don’t risk anything by coming back here?”

Gojo went still.

“Curses are born of humans’ negative emotions,” he said. “They’ll be around as long as there are humans around. A place with such history will always attract curses.”

“There’s nothing to be done then? Wouldn’t you have some kind of— ward, or— an ofuda, something like that, that you could use to protect it?”

Gojo shrugged.

“We could try, but that would be a huge waste of time and resources,” he answered. “There’s only so many of us. And there’s not much we can do but kill the curses as they come, anyway.”

“That’s a shame,” Kagome said, unable to stop watching the building or to keep the whispers of her mind quiet. There was something that could have been done if, say, there was a priestess here, purifying the cursed energy within the place as it appeared. She had to assume that wasn’t an ability of sorcerers, but the thought gnawed at her. There were few priestesses left nowadays. As the number of yokai dwindled, less and less people were born with spiritual energy, and there weren’t many more who bothered to train it. But maybe… maybe there was an idea worth investigating here.

Gojo studied her a moment, curiosity on his face as he waited for her to add to the conversation. There was an uncharacteristic tension in her jaw, a line creased between her eyebrows from her focus.

“Whatch’ya thinking?”

That seemed to bring her back to the present, and she shook her head.

“Just— just that it’s a shame that places like these can’t be reclaimed.”

From his perspective, trying to do that would cost valuable energy and had the potential to cost the lives of exorcists. It was nothing but a place. Humans could go elsewhere. He could have cleaned the place without damage, obviously, but what was the point? Curses would be coming back soon. The best way to protect both humans and sorcerers was to leave it behind.

“Eh, at least that way, everyone stays safe.”

Kagome looked up at him. His tone had been flat, matter-of-fact. No questioning, no nuance, no way to pursue the conversation.

So she chose to drop it, nodding her head.

“You might be right,” she said. “I was just thinking out loud.”

She didn’t have enough information. Of course, neither did he, but that didn’t seem like it would stop him.

Gojo shrugged then rose a hand, looking up at the sky.

“Emerge from the darkness, blacker than darkness. Purify that which is impure.”

Kagome flinched as the curtain fell, rolling down from the sky and turning it pitch-black. She braced herself for the moment it reached the ground — but the suffocation she expected to feel never came. She felt it seal, knew that whatever it was doing was in effect, however it placed no constraint on her. Once more, she looked at Gojo.

“What does that do?”

“Just means non-sorcerers won’t be able to see us or come in here. You know, in case we blow up the place.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“Speak for yourself,” he grinned. “Alright, are you two going in or what?”

Kami, Kagome really wished he would explain things to her instead of dropping them in her lap unannounced and expecting her to go with the flow.

“You’re not coming.”

It wasn’t a question. She was starting to put together how he functioned.

“It wouldn’t be a test if I did,” he said with a toothy smile. “Curses wouldn’t come out if I was around, and that wouldn’t be interesting at all now, would it? Plus, I wouldn’t get to see you use that staff of yours again.”

Kagome blinked.

“My staff?”

“Yeah, y’know, the magical girl thing? Hey, I’ve been wondering, does it come with a transformation too?”

It took her far too long to remember the Sailor Moon cosplay staff she’d picked up back in Shibuya. Not that it stopped Gojo from talking.

“D’you have a catchphrase? A cute outfit maybe? Oh, is there a team of people who—”

“I have my bow and arrows,” Kagome interrupted him. “That will be more than enough. Inumaki, if you’re ready, we can go in.”

“Salmon,” Inumaki agreed, falling in step beside her as she marched towards the hospital’s door.

Gojo watched her back and his grin spread on his face. So he could get under her skin after all, huh? He’d been starting to wonder. Sure, she still kept up the stern teacher attitude, but—

“I’m not a magical girl,” Kagome snapped, turning around to throw him a furious glare. “I just grabbed whatever I had lying around.”

With that as her farewell words, she pushed the door of the hospital and disappeared inside. Gojo didn’t bother to hold in a laugh.

Aw. Wasn’t she cute, with her face flushed and her disapproving, pouted lips? He could see himself getting used to that. Matter of fact, he wanted to walk after her just so he could elicit that reaction again. Too bad he couldn’t just stay around to tease her. He had a job to do — and that job very much entailed figuring out every last one of her secrets.

He floated up, sensing Inumaki’s cursed energy climbing up the stairs and leading Kagome towards the second floor. The kid was well-trained, spotting right away where the majority of cursed energy was gathered. Was that on the list of Kagome’s ever growing list of abilities, too? He’d have to test that as well. All in due time, though.

For now, he watched through the window as Kagome and Inumaki stepped out into the hallway. Lured out by the night, curses were starting to poke out from every corner. Inumaki walked in front of Kagome without hesitation, starting to lower his collar. Well-trained indeed, Gojo thought, protecting someone who, to his knowledge, had no ability to defend themselves. But he wasn’t surprised when Kagome put her hand on his shoulder, shaking her head.

“Let me deal with that,” she said.

There was a quiet strength in her tone, and Gojo observed her as she pulled an arrow out of her quiver, nocking it with practiced precision. He removed his blindfold while she was taking aim, pulling the string back until the feather was brushing against her ear.

Nothing was happening. There was no shift he could see within her energy, no change in the nature of the arrow. He didn’t think she’d done anything else to it prior to coming here, either. He’d spotted the sparks of her power before, and he was certain he’d be able to notice them again. When she took aim, sucking in a deep breath, his brow creased. What was one arrow supposed to do against the array of curses poking their heads out of former hospital rooms? She had to know better than—

He saw it happen the second she released the arrow. As it shot out of the bow, it was as if a beam of energy was coming out of her, and with the sheer, raw power coming out of it, he couldn’t tell with certainty if it had attached itself to the arrow, or if the arrow was just guiding it out of Kagome’s body. There was so much of it, it was blinding to his Six Eyes. He had a hard time explaining what it was he was seeing and feeling.

The only explanation that came to him was power. Power in its truest form. Cursed energy disintegrated upon touching it, leaving behind clean air. Pure air.

She’d said that before, hadn’t she? Said she’d purified the grey-haired curse, as well as Maki’s weapon.

Shit. He was starting to understand what she’d meant and he— he’d never heard of anything like that before. He’d never thought it was even possible. He knew many sorcerers who could destroy. Hell, he was one of them. He could make curses, sorcerers, humans, buildings, mountains all alike fall before him.

But as Kagome lowered her bow and the energy subsided, the arrow planted in the wall opposite her, causing no damage and yet leaving nothing behind, he could tell that wasn’t what she’d done. He sucked in a breath, unable to tear his eyes away from her for even a second, and even that felt lighter. The energy vanished as fast as it had appeared, though for a moment longer, he caught a glimmer of it within Kagome. He thought. He wasn’t sure.

Fuck. He’d lost it again.

He had a lot of work ahead of him, if he wanted to be able to spot it. He knew it was still there, just dormant, but this was as far from cursed energy as things went, and he’d spent his life working on his understanding of that. Now he had a whole other field of whatever the hell that was ahead of him? He should be fuming.

Instead, a laugh escaped his lips as his wide eyes kept following Kagome while the woman walked through the hallway and took to clearing the rooms one by one, most times with a mere gesture of her hand, rarely wasting an arrow on the problem.

She was something else, wasn’t she? Something he’d never seen before.

She could change everything.

In that moment, he was so enthralled by her he almost didn’t notice the rumbling coming from deep within the hospital’s belly. It shouldn’t have surprised him all that much. Kagome’s actions had caused a shift in the repartition of cursed energy within the hospital, and that had caused a vacuum. In the basement, a curse was waking up, long and slithering.

“Kagome!” Gojo called, and she heard him through the glass, head whipping to look at him. He pointed a finger upwards. “The roof!”

She blinked, but as the curse was gathering speed, the long, snake-like body starting to uncurl, filling the ground floor of the hospital first entirely, sending long left behind beds and chairs flying through windows, then cramming itself in the stairwell to make its way towards her, she had no time to think.

“Let’s go!” she shouted to Inumaki, and the two of them took off her running, both of them sprinting up the stairs.

Inumaki made it out on the roof first, then Kagome, not far behind him, though Gojo was pretty sure he’d have distanced her with ease if that had been his intention. The snake-like curse emerged not far behind them, teeth snapping and only barely missing Kagome.

Semi-grade one, Gojo figured. Huh, he’d never heard of anything like that in here. Then again, there had been suspicious disappearances in the area — but it had been homeless people, a couple of drug addicts, and some troublemaking teenagers. It had been easy to blame them on your typical curses. With this out, he had no doubt that it meant the case had been underinvestigated and mischaracterized.

Again.

Inumaki pulled down his collar.

“Back!” he ordered, and right away the creature’s face, long and scaly, did indeed push back into itself, as if trying to stuff itself into its own body. It screeched with anger and pain as it was forced away from Kagome, retreating into the stairwell.

The relief lasted a fleeting second.

Despite Inumaki’s order, the curse’s seemingly endless body had gathered too much speed and power to be stopped at once. Through sheer inertia, the back of it came crashing into the front, and soon the long body was forced out through the windows of lower floors, coming out and lashing at them.

Inumaki dodged without struggling too much and, to Gojo’s surprise, so did Kagome, managing to jump out of the way with movements Gojo could only think of as practiced.

Huh. He hadn’t expected that. He’d been under the impression that her life had been peaceful — mostly. Knowing how to shoot arrows was one thing; having experience with actual combat was another.

“Down!” Inumaki ordered once more.

He feared for Kagome, Gojo realized. Without cursed energy, he wasn’t sure she could protect herself against his orders. A kind thought, but a dangerous one, and indeed, when the curse did go down, it took the whole building with it.

Gojo set in motion at once. The curse was thrashing through the debris, still falling down, on Inumaki’s orders, sending stone and cement flying everywhere. He spotted Inumaki first, his energy familiar and clear, focused, in the chaos of the curse’s. His eyes darted around for Kagome then. Inumaki might be fine on his own; he doubted that she would.

Then the creature emerged — a white, two-tailed, lion-sized feline with red eyes, who dodged both the attempts of the curse to hit it and the collapsing building. On its back, Kagome, riding it like she’d done it her whole life, legs keeping her anchored to it as well as the one hand she had in its mane.

Just like her, the mount possessed no cursed energy and Gojo narrowed his eyes at it. Could it be a shikigami?

“Grab him,” she said, pointing at Inumaki, and the— lion? Cat? followed without missing a beat. It caught the back of Inumaki’s collar with long teeth, making it out of the heart of the chaos as the remaining parts of the hospital came crashing down.

It was far from over, though. The curse appeared to be collecting itself, now that it had obeyed Inumaki’s orders. The sound of its teeth snapping as slit pupils searched for a new target resonated loudly under the curtain.

“Kirara,” Kagome called once she’d gotten hold of Inumaki and he was secured behind her, “up.”

The creature did not hesitate to obey her, turning up towards the sky and soaring up, leaving a trail of flames behind it. Gojo watched them as they reached the top of the curtain. Behind them, the curse followed. Its body appeared to still be emerging from the earth, all of it coming out as a column, jaw unhinged, ready to devour them whole. It looked endless, gigantic, monstrous. The size difference was laughable, with the priestess, her mount and Inumaki nothing more than a dot to someone with human eyes.

There was nothing human about Gojo’s eyes.

He could tell that the curse’s energy wasn’t nearly as impressive as its size — but brute force could be enough, depending on the adversary. He was confident Inumaki could have taken it, if he’d been sure it wouldn’t harm anyone, but right now, Kagome was the one on the front line. Gojo studied her face, from all the way down, searching for a sign that he should step in.

He found none. Kagome was calm, collected, watching the approaching curse. Letting go of her mount, she took another arrow out of her quiver, nocking it and taking aim once more.

“Inumaki, hold on tight,” she advised, and the boy nodded.

Gojo’s eyes were wide with focus. Earlier, she’d cleared a hallway, sure, but this was a whole other beast. Despite its limited cursed energy, if she couldn’t get all of it, she could very well get hit by the remaining parts.

With a press of her thighs around Kirara, she signaled for it to come down, and with that, the three of them charged towards the curse. It was coming up in a perfect vertical line, and they were coming down at it in much the same way, the only thing holding them onto the mount being Kagome’s legs, strongly fastened around its middle, and Inumaki’s hands, which were digging into its mane.

They were already halfway into the curse’s gaping mouth when Kagome released the arrow.

It cut through the long body like butter, and Gojo watched, in real time, as it hissed against the cursed energy, catching and spreading everywhere, before all of it dissipated like ashes in the wind.

By the time the three of them reached the floor, there was nothing left of the curse.

Kagome hadn’t even broken a sweat.

“Are you okay, Inumaki?” she asked, turning around to look at him.

Inumaki jumped off with ease, pulling his collar back up. He shrugged, face placid once more.

“Salmon,” he said, non-plussed, but then his eyes lit up as he stared at Kirara, stroking her head with great care. “Tuna, tuna,” he commented when she leaned into his hand.

“Congratulations!” Gojo called. He clapped his hands together as he approached the two of them, which only took a few, long strides. “Very impressive.”

Kagome met his eyes without fear. Many people avoided the six eyes, but she looked back at him with nothing to hide — and yet barely anything for him to see, again. As long as there had been cursed energy remaining, he had been able to spot a twinkle, still emanating from her, as if the power she had released kept feeding on the source. Now, it was gone, but he knew not to be fooled. With time and effort, he’d be able to see her power just as clear as he did cursed energy.

He just wasn’t there yet.

“I didn’t know you could call on shikigamis,” he said, looking at Kirara, “I thought—”

Then he stilled. It wasn’t just that the creature had no cursed energy.  He should have spotted it earlier; would have, had he not been so focused on Kagome. Intelligent red eyes looked at him, blinking a couple of times. It had something else, something that was different from Kagome’s power entirely, but something he couldn’t recognize either.

How rude. Just as he was starting to get used to Kagome’s whole shtick.

“Oh, Kirara’s not a shikigami,” Kagome laughed. “She’s a yokai.”

The world around him started to move in slow-motion.

She’d used that word before, he remembered with vivid clarity, that night in Shibuya. He’d been talking about exorcists and she’d said she’d dealt with yokai. When she’d made it obvious she had no clue what curses were, he’d assumed it was all a misunderstanding — that, for whatever reason, she used yokai as a placeholder for curses. Many creatures that were referred to as yokai in folklore had, after all, been just that. Plus, what was more plausible: that an entire world existed beyond his knowledge, or that the strange, if helpful, woman he’d run into that night had been wrong?

Well, he had his answer now.

“Caviar,” Inumaki mumbled, moving his hand away.

“Are there many of them around?” Gojo asked. He didn’t have any more time to waste in questioning the validity of her claims. He needed information, and he needed it quick.

Kagome frowned at his tone, which had an uncharacteristic seriousness. She dismounted, jumping off Kirara without struggling, and took a step towards him. His blue eyes were cold and cloudy, his jaw set.

“Not in Tokyo, not anymore,” she answered with sincerity. “Kirara’s an old friend, though, so she’s stuck around. They were very common a long time ago, but they’ve since chosen to move where there weren’t so many humans — in the mountains and forests, mostly.”

There were still kitsunes in the cities, since they could assume any appearance they liked and enjoyed playing tricks on humans, even now. Some old, powerful yokai who looked similar enough to humans, and whose wealth justified any physical extravaganza that was, in fact, due to their species, also refused to be forced into exile. None of the ones she knew enjoyed being around humans, as far as she knew, but it was a matter of principle, and yokais could be quite stubborn.

There had been a few incidents with yokais, too, since she’d come back from the Feudal Era, with some of them wandering into cities, others feeling vengeful against humans, but they had been few and far between. Also, it was nothing she couldn’t deal with, if needed.

For a moment, Gojo’s expression remained hermetic, so unreadable her pulse spiked. He’d locked eyes with her, studying her, and she thought she could feel him picking her apart, hear the cogs of his mind turning. It made her feel vulnerable, naked. It reminded her, with sudden, brutal strength, that she didn’t know him. She’d chosen to follow him, to trust him — but she could have been wrong. If that was the case, if he chose to go in another direction right now, she wasn’t sure she’d know how to defend herself.

It took everything she had in her not to tighten her hold on her bow.

Then a smile broke on Gojo’s face, uncovering pearly white teeth, and he leaned closer to her.

“Well, Kagome, it looks like I should have been the one asking the questions today.”

Amusement was back in his eyes, as was the playful twinkle she’d noticed there before.

“Now, Inumaki, it’s time for you to get back to the school!”

The kid’s brow knitted together and he narrowed his eyes at his teacher.

“Tuna mayo,” he said with caution.

“Yes, yes, Ijichi is waiting for you right outside the curtain. We’ll have someone take care of this mess soon. Also…” He slung his arm around Inumaki’s shoulders as he ushered him towards the car. “No one can know about what happened here today, okay?” he warned, lowering his voice. “I’ll let you know when I figure out what we can do about this. In the meantime…” He shot a glance in Kagome’s direction, who was watching the two of them with confusion. “…someone could get hurt real bad, if this gets out.”

After today, he thought there was a chance the someone in question would not be Kagome — but the likelihood it would was still far too high for his liking.

“Understood?” he asked.

Inumaki nodded, once, decisively.

“Salmon,” he answered.

He was a good kid.

“Now off you go! And make sure the others don’t murder anyone before I come back, okay?” After a second, he thought to add “If Maki’s already gone ahead and done it, remember to give the body to Shoko!”

Inumaki shook his head as he exited the curtain, and Gojo spun around to face Kagome again.

“Now, where were we?”

“What were you telling him?” she asked, unimpressed.

“Just to keep this to himself for now,” he answered without hesitation. “We don’t want anyone to panic and do something stupid, do we?”

She didn’t fall for his light-hearted tone or his nonchalant attitude, frowning instead.

“So you had no idea what yokai were before today?”

“None!” he admitted without hesitation. “Odd, don’t you think? How did that all coexist for so long without us knowing?”

“It is odd,” she agreed. “I’ll ask about it. Now, um, did you send Ijichi away? It’s getting late and I’m going to need a ride back to my place.”

“I sure did,” he grinned. “I’ll be your ride.”

She stared.

“Are we flying home? I’d rather not do that. I think I’ll be sick by the time we arrive.”

“Nope,” Gojo replied, and then, before she could blink, he had an arm around her waist, pulling her close. She jumped at the sudden gesture, placing her hands on his chest so she wouldn’t lose her balance. “Breathe in,” he advised, voice deep and close to her ear, “this will only take a second.”

She was just inhaling — because it didn’t look like she was going to get much of a choice in the matter — when the world shifted, a displacement of energy on a scale she couldn’t even begin to comprehend, and by the time she was conscious enough to try to understand it, it was all over.

Gojo released her, and when she looked around, she realized she was— well. Home.

“The Higurashi shrine, right? I’ve done my homework.”

“That’s terrifying,” she let him know, though she couldn’t say she didn’t expect it. “How— uh, how—”

“Teleportation,” he said with a shrug, “but I think we’ve established I’m the one who needs to be asking you questions, haven’t we?”

Shining blue eyes were staring into hers once more, his attention focused on her and her alone, with no distraction, as if nothing else existed. Despite herself, she felt herself flushing under his gaze.

“I’m afraid I have to go back to work,” she managed to say regardless.

“Yeah, these papers won’t grade themselves, right?”

Okay, now she felt like she could glare at him again.

“Don’t make fun of me,” she warned.

“I would never,” he promised, voice teasing but also quite fond, much to her surprise. “But we’ll need to get this whole thing cleared out sooner or later, Kagome.” He didn’t add that he didn’t know how long he’d be able to keep the vultures at bay. He didn’t talk about how useful her powers could be to the sorcerers. He didn’t say a word about the fear the very concept of yokai could provoke, if it ever got out. Instead, he handed her a card. “Get in touch when you can do that, hm? I’m very busy but,” a dramatic sigh, “I’ll make the time. For you.”

She smiled, holding back a soft scoff at the grandiose statement, and reached out to take the card, her fingers brushing against his for just a moment.

“Sure, I’ll do that. But just so you know, there are a lot of exams coming up in December, so it might be a while before I have the time.”

Well, it was only the fate of the world that relied on her. Potentially. Maybe not. In truth, he had no idea.

“If I haven’t heard from you in two weeks, I might have to kidnap you,” he warned her with a light tone.

She laughed, though there was a small part of her that wasn’t sure if it was a joke. So far, through everything she’d witnessed him doing, he’d been unstoppable, crashing through walls erected in front of him, steamrolling refusals and opposition. The possibility that he would, in fact, kidnap her, was not zero — but she doubted he’d find her an easy target.

“I’ll make sure it doesn’t come to that, then. Tell Maki I’m sorry for her weapon again, will you?”

“Sure. I’ll see you soon then, Ka-go-me.”

And just like that, while the last syllable of her name was still hanging in the air, he was gone, vanishing in front of her very eyes too fast for her to figure out how he did it. She clicked her tongue, a little annoyed at how quick he’d been.

Standing at the top of the stairs that climbed up to the Higurashi shrine, she looked over the city. Night had fallen by now, but there were enough lights in Tokyo that she could see most of it without squinting. She had wondered if she would feel any different about it, now that she knew of this entire other world she shared it with. She didn’t. Tokyo was still Tokyo, regardless of who and what lived in it, and she loved it all the same.

And now, there was even a place in her heart for one sorcerer teacher and all of his students.

Chapter Text

Getting a hold of Shippo was no easy feat these days. As the unofficial lead of the movement for kitsunes’ presence in modern society, and despite not being the oldest, nor the most powerful kitsune, he represented them in a number of daiyokai Councils. He was a busy, busy man, much to his own annoyance, pulled in every direction, both by people who relied on him and by people who wished nothing more than to see him fall.

Getting a hold of Shippo was no easy feat these days — unless, of course, you were Kagome Higurashi.

Because Kagome, well, all she ever had to do was ask. She would set a date, and there was nothing that would stop Shippo from showing up.

Even she had no way of knowing the exact time when he would appear, or the form he would assume. He had jumped out of jars before, had disguised himself as yokai, humans, kitchen appliances, and, on one occasion, her own grandfather. The fact that, every single time, she had spotted his energy ahead of time and had not been surprised one bit did not seem to deter him at all.

So when Kagome noticed, in the early hours of the morning, the little old lady climbing the stairs to the Higurashi shrine, hands clasped behind her back, she did not run down to offer her help. Instead, she smiled, and got to preparing the tea.

“Hello, young lady,” a quavering voice called out to her as she poured boiling water over tea leaves. “Could I trouble you for some water?”

“Hello Shippo,” Kagome answered, glancing over her shoulder. “If you give it just a little while, the tea will be ready soon.”

The old woman’s eyes widened for a second, before they flashed with yellow and a wide, unnatural grin broke on her face. A cloud of smoke surrounded her as a loud popping sound echoed, and then Shippo appeared.

Kagome had gotten used to the changes in his appearance — after all, she had known this adult version of him much longer than the kid she had traveled with in the Feudal Era — but it always tugged at her heartstrings, thinking she hadn’t gotten to see him grown up. Now, a redheaded man in his thirties was smiling at her, clad in a traditional kimono. Five tails swung lazily behind him.

“I can’t believe you knew it was me the entire time and you didn’t say anything,” he said, childish pout appearing on his face. “I thought I’d finally gotten you!”

“I can’t believe you’d think I would let an old lady climbing all the way up here without helping her!” Kagome protested, more offended than she should have been.

“Ah,” Shippo said with a shrug, “whatever. I’ll get you next time.”

“Sure you will,” Kagome grinned.

She would be able to pick his energy out of even a thousand other kitsunes. There was no way she would ever get it wrong.

“Should we go see everyone?” she asked after giving him the time to take a sip of tea.

He nodded right away, smoothing out his kimono with the back of his hand. This was half the reason why he always took such care of his appearance before coming up to the Higurashi shrine. He sometimes visited even in her absence, leaving behind small presents for her to find. She didn’t think he knew that what she loved most about those days was the way his energy lingered around. In such moments, when she closed her eyes and sat by the Sacred Tree, she could almost believe she was back in the Feudal Era.

Almost.

They walked side by side towards the Tree. No matter how much he’d changed, comradery came easy to her when she was with him. His shoulder brushed against hers, and it all felt comfortable and safe, in a way very, very few people had ever made her feel.

Together, they knelt down in front of the Tree, paying homage to three of the other people who had made her feel that way. There were flowers there already, her entire family made sure of it. Still, Shippo materialized a bouquet in his hand, setting it down in front of it.

“Inuyasha, Miroku, Sango,” he called, voice soft, “I’m doing well. Inuyasha, I’ve been wanting to tell you, the school has welcomed its first hanyo since its opening. She’s a kitsune, and she’s really young for now, but we’re very happy about it.”

Kagome kept quiet. She knew Inuyasha had fought for hanyo’s rights after she’d left, until the very end, side by side with Shippo and everyone else. He’d died surrounded by people whose life he had helped change, when his human life span had caught up with him. It filled her with pride and joy — but she hadn’t been there to witness any of it. It would feel like she was interfering, if she said anything.

Most of the time, she felt at peace with her farewell to the Feudal Era. She looked back at the year she’d spent there with fondness, knowing she’d left it a better place than it was before her, knowing her friends were well.

Sometimes, the bitterness of everything she had not been there to witness caught up with her.

“Miroku, Sango, the kids would drive you crazy,” Shippo kept going, a smile forming on his face. “They’re some of the worst troublemaking kitsunes I’ve ever met. They’re amazing. I think you would have been great teachers for them.”

He said that almost every time he came to visit, ever since he had managed to open the kitsune school — right in the middle of Tokyo, under the noses of humans who were none the wiser. It wasn’t a big school by any stretch of the imagination, but it was the apple of his eye, his greatest pride, the most cherished of his treasures.

“Kagome would also make a great teacher, but she doesn’t want to come work here,” he added, shooting her a teasing grin, and she rolled her eyes.

“You have a very competent staff, I don’t think that’s where I’m the most needed.”

Shippo let out a hearty chuckle. To a yokai as old as him, death was a part of existence. He could get a little choked up still, but it was no reason to be all grim.

“So,” he said, shifting so he was sitting down with his back to the tree, “you had something you wanted to ask me?”

She did.

“That’s right, but I’m— I’m not sure where to start,” Kagome sighed. “Have you— Have you heard of exorcists? Or— sorcerers, I guess?”

Shippo looked thoughtful at first, but recognition flashed on his face when she used the word ‘sorcerer’.

“Yeah,” he answered as if it was obvious, “but we don’t meddle with sorcerers.”

She blinked. She had expected many answers, but this nonchalance had not been one of them.

“What— How come I’ve never heard of them? Were they around during the Feudal Era?”

Shippo scratched his head.

“They were,” he said, dragging out the words and staring at the sky as if he was trying to recall something he hadn’t thought of in ages, “but they were pretty weak back then. Plus, our village had a priestess, and like I said, we didn’t meddle with them.”

Kagome clicked her tongue, unable to contain her annoyance. So he knew about that entire world that was right under her nose, and he hadn’t thought to say anything to her? Rude.

“Why not?”

Shippo frowned

“It’s a long story, and that’s not really my thing… Don’t you want to ask Sesshomaru about it?”

As a matter of fact, she preferred not contacting Sesshomaru unless it was absolutely necessary. He had changed, too, over the last five centuries, and they were cordial, but she had never felt at ease in his company. So she lifted an eyebrow at him, waiting for him to continue.

“Fineee,” Shippo groaned, “but there’s a reason I’m not a history teacher.” He folded his arms in front of his chest, looking thoughtful. “From what I know, they were really powerful during the Heian era. Not just the sorcerers, but also the… abominations, you know, the monsters they deal with?”

“Curses,” Kagome recognized with a nod.

“I guess,” Shippo said, scrunching up his nose in disgust. “They’re things that shouldn’t be around, is what I mean. They’re not… natural. Anyway, the thing about sorcerers and abominations is that their energy doesn’t mesh with demonic energy at all. Most of the time it just goes boom,” he made a tiny explosion between his fingers to demonstrate, “others it changes people’s appearances or nature, it could age someone in a moment… Basically, any effect you can imagine is an option. Only the most powerful of daiyokai can reign it in, but it doesn’t come easy, and most of the time, no one knows what’s going to happen before it happens.”

Then he tightened his jaw, eyes turning stormy, his whole expression darkening.

“But really powerful abominations can channel our energy. Steal it from us, use it for their own gain. During the Heian era, many yokai were taken and used for that. So an alliance was made to take them back. I don’t know much about the details — I’m pretty sure Inuyasha’s dad was one of the yokai leading the charge. Anyway, after that, the daiyokais made sure to keep the abominations’ numbers under control. That’s why there weren’t many of them around in the Feudal Era. There were probably little ones in the swarm Naraku threw at us, but the more powerful ones were in hiding, if they could even emerge at all.”

“I see,” Kagome said, thoughtful. “But there were still sorcerers back then?”

“Yeah,” Shippo answered. “They dealt with the abominations most of the time, it was just that the daiyokai would step in if they thought it was warranted. Actually,” a grin formed on his lips, one of his canines poking out of his mouth as it did, “they came to the village to ask us for help once.”

“Oh,” Kagome perked up, “did you fight with them then?”

“Nah,” Shippo said, grin widening, “they only wanted Miroku’s help. Didn’t speak to Kaede, even though she was the resident priestess, and declined when Sango said she’d go with them.”

“Oh,” Kagome repeated, confused this time. “Why would they do that?”

“They were women,” Shippo answered with a shrug.

“I mean—” Kagome knew the Feudal Era wasn’t kind to women. She taught about it frequently, and she had experienced it herself. But— “Priestesses were rather well respected, though,” she said, “and Sango— well, as a taijiya, she would have been a great asset, wouldn’t she?”

“That’s what we said,” Shippo nodded with enthusiasm. “But they only wanted Miroku. Didn’t want Inuyasha either, obviously. So we all threw them out of the village on their asses. Even the villagers helped out,” he added with a genuine laugh.

Kagome echoed it. Warmth filled her at the thought of Inuyasha having everyone’s support over something like that. Villagers had grown quite fond of him over the years, Shippo had told her, but hearing about it in such a direct way made her feel all fuzzy inside.

“Has something happened since then?”

“I’m not sure,” Shippo admitted. “It wasn’t my area. I know there were some negotiations at some point, because sorcerers wanted to have more control. When the yokai pulled away from regulating abominations and started to leave modern life, I think they agreed to… let us go, basically. Stop being involved with us completely. Not sure what that entailed though.”

Well, Kagome had her idea now.

“You’ve heard of what happened in Shibuya, right?” she asked. Shippo’s expression turned somber, and he nodded. “I was there.”

This time he tensed up, sitting upright. His eyes moved up and down over her frame with alarm, as if it hadn’t happened over a month prior.

“You never said anything,” he mumbled. “Are you okay?”

Kagome smiled, and Shippo took a moment to take her in. She looked as she always had. Kind eyes, soft smile, long black hair flowing behind her. The green uniform had long been retired, but the long, professorial skirts felt familiar too, reminiscent of her priestess’ outfit. Her cheeks were pink from the cold, even though the weather was always mild, under the tree.

She was Kagome. And sure, this version of her got in significantly lesser fights, didn’t yell at people as much, didn’t tell him when he needed to go to bed, but at her core, she was the Kagome she had always been.

“I’m fine,” she said, and he believed her. “Everyone did their best there,” she added, melancholy seeping through her expression. “If things had gone differently… I’m afraid something terrible could have happened.”

Shippo blinked. Shibuya had traumatized the country as it was. How much worse could it have been?

“I met a sorcerer there,” Kagome continued. “He had no idea yokai even existed.”

“Is that so?” Shippo hummed. “Well, there hasn’t been any direct contact that I’m aware of in…” Decades? Centuries? “…a long time. You know how humans are. A couple generations go by and…” He snapped his fingers. “It’s like nothing ever happened.”

Kagome bit the inside of her cheek. She wanted to defend humans, but knowing that yokai used to be roaming around and now all of the humans thought they were nothing but legends didn’t help her case.

“They do have an immortal in their ranks though,” Shippo added. “Someone who’s been around since the Heian era. Dunno how it’s possible, but that person must remember us.”

“I see. I’ll ask about that.”

“But I meant it earlier,” Shippo said, meeting her eyes again. “I don’t think getting involved with sorcerers is a good idea. If everyone keeps to themselves…”

He interrupted himself, watching her expression shift to one of soft disapproval. She would never agree with where he was going, and he sighed. This battle was already lost.

“Be careful. You know that yokai and humans can be unkind. Sorcerers aren’t any different.” Then, for good measure: “And many of them are assholes.”

She laughed.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll make it work.”

Shippo trusted Kagome like he had never trusted anyone, before or since. If anyone could do it, he believed, with all the conviction that existed in his body, that it was her. The mere thought of her stepping back in the throws of danger still made him sick to his stomach. She’d given enough. They all had, during the Feudal Era. The world was already indebted to them. All they should have known afterwards was peace and quiet.

And also— she was the last one.

He couldn’t lose her too.

“There was something else,” Kagome said. “Someone who was there in Shibuya and who escaped. Long black hair, stitches on his forehead. He was wearing a traditional outfit. Does that… sound familiar?”

Shippo tilted his head. He didn’t think he knew the man, but the stitches… that sounded like something he’d heard before.

“I’ll look into it, if you want to,” he said. He’d do anything for her.

“I would really appreciate it, Shippo. Thank you.”

For a moment, there was quiet. Just the wind in the branches of the Sacred Tree, the noises of Tokyo far beneath them, and shared companionship.

“Oh, and, Shippo, I’d been thinking…”

“Yeah?”

“Yellow!” Gojo answered when Kagome dialed his number. She closed her eyes, a wave of fatigue hitting her at full force right away. Kami, give her strength.

“Gojo? This is Kagome.”

“Ah, perfect! I’ll take back the bounty I’ve put on your head then. Don’t worry, I said I wanted you alive only, of course.”

She chuckled, reigning herself in too late. The last thing she should be doing was encouraging him, and yet…

“Do you think you could stop by the shrine this afternoon? I have a present for Maki. As an apology for destroying her weapon.”

“Aw, and here I was thinking you wanted to talk to me,” he fake-whined. “Maki’s fine, anyway. Or not. She’s been pretty violent lately, but then again, she’s always violent. Not sure if there’s anything weird with that.”

“I’m afraid I won’t have time to discuss it today, but if you bring Maki, I could at least— Kami!”

Right outside the window, a tall silhouette with white hair appeared out of nowhere, holding Maki’s shirt by the back, the girl’s eyes wide with shock behind her glasses. Gojo shot her a wide grin through the window, phone still pressed against his ear.

“Boo,” he said.

“What was the point of that?” Kagome hissed, glaring at him with fury in her eyes.

“What would be the point if I couldn’t at least surprise you a little?” Gojo replied, voice light, not intimidated one bit.

“How about not giving me a cardiac arrest?” she muttered, rushing through the house to meet him outside.

By the time she got there, Maki had freed herself, and Gojo was hopping around on one foot, holding on to his shin with a pained expression. Had Kagome been pettier, she would have felt great satisfaction from it.

Since she was only somewhat petty, all she felt was mild satisfaction.

“What am I doing here?” Maki asked, directing her ire towards Kagome.

“Hi, Maki,” Kagome smiled, not put off in the least by her glare. “I’m truly sorry about what happened last time, but I think I’ve got something to make up for it, if you’d like?”

She gestured towards the back of the shrine. Maki narrowed her eyes at her, then glanced at Gojo.

“Don’t look at me,” he protested, lifting up his hands in a sign of defense, “I have nothing to do with it! If it’s bad, it’s all on her.”

“If you don’t do your due diligence, that’s your own fault,” Maki growled through gritted teeth. “I’ll check it out,” she said, voice somewhat gentler, to Kagome.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Kagome said.

As she walked the two of them behind the shrine, she couldn’t help but steal a glance at Gojo. He was walking in short strides to stay by their side, fingers intertwined at the back of his head. Everything about him screamed indifference, and yet he’d just acted as a lightning rod for Maki’s anger, directing it away from her. Not that she had needed it, but still. She wasn’t sure how conscious it had been. Was it intentional, or was it just second nature for him?

When they reached the back of the shrine, there stood the Sacred Tree. Underneath it, amidst lit incense, was the Hiraikotsu.

Shippo had helped her take it out of the shed earlier, removing the protective layers around it. After he had left, Kagome had polished it, running purifying powers over it, just in case, even if it didn’t feel needed. From what she could tell, the poison it was once capable of emitting had disappeared, some time over the course of the five centuries since she had last seen it used. Apart from that, Hiraikotsu, much like Kirara, did not seem to have aged one day since the Feudal Era.

Maki let out a discreet whistle, then disguised it as a cough, schooling her features to mask her surprise.

“And what would that be?” she scoffed, her wide eyes betraying the disinterest in her tone.

“That’s the Hiraikotsu,” Kagome answered, great reverence in her voice. “It belonged to a good friend of mine, a long time ago.”

Maki hummed, walking closer to the weapon to examine it. It seemed refined, efficient, and she could tell its weight just from looking at it. This would pack one hell of a punch. She ran her fingers over its polished surface with great care.

“What’s it made of?” she asked.

“Bone.”

“Gross,” she commented, not sounding deterred at all. There was something about it that called to her, and much to her frustration, she couldn’t quite explain it. She’d heard people say they felt such things with cursed weapons, but that had never been the case for her, nor did she think it was possible, so this… was new. She had to chalk it up to how competently the weapon had been forged, to the many uses for it she could see in battle. And yet…

“Unless it’s a cursed weapon, it’s not going to be of great use to me,” she sighed, removing her fingers from it with clear reluctance. “I don’t generate my own cursed energy, so I need my weapon to do it for me.”

She had long accepted this as a fact, didn’t care about it most of the time. It still stung in moments such as these. Having to give up on such a formidable weapon because she just wasn’t born with cursed energy… Shit. That sucked.

Kagome smiled, and while Maki didn’t believe in kindness given with nothing in exchange, even she could feel the warmth coming from her.

“You know, I don’t think this is going to be a problem. Hiraikotsu is purified. I suppose you’d have to test it out for yourself, but I suspect it shouldn’t struggle with curses.”

Maki stared at her for a few seconds, wondering if she’d lost her mind. She’d never heard about anything like that — not in her time with the Zen’in, nor since. But Miss Higurashi was… weird. So, instead of just telling her what she thought about her hypothesis right away, she turned to look at Gojo.

“Is that a thing?” she asked, not bothering to hide how incredulous she was.

Even then, the sliver of hope in her voice would have been hard to miss. Kagome followed her eyes to him. Hm. Underneath the jabs and the mocking tone, she did hold him in high regards, didn’t she?

“Could be,” Gojo replied with a shrug. “Why don’t you send that my way so I can take a look?”

Maki grinned at him. Challenge accepted. She lifted the Hiraikotsu with one hand. It was as heavy as she had imagined, but perfectly balanced, the shape making it easy to gain momentum. It espoused her body as she wielded it back, and moved as a perfect extension of her arm until she released it. Not too shabby for a first try, she decided, brain already filing what she’d done wrong and how she could improve on it and how she could use it in battle if—

Fuck. She was going to be so disappointed if it turned out to be useless.

Gojo caught it without struggle, swinging it once before planting it in the ground to study it. He plastered a big grin on his face, one that he hoped would hide the fact that this was the second time in a very short while that something pushed through his Infinity. It had been nothing like what Kagome had done, though. It had been slow, and it would have taken ages for it to reach him, with no strength left at all by then. But still.

The thought of destroying it was the first that went through his mind, but he pushed it aside. If Maki was the one who had it, it shouldn’t be a threat to him, and it would of great use to her. On top of that, as it was, there was no way it would do enough damage to him to injure him in a significant way/

Plus, it would upset Kagome, and he didn’t want that now, did he?

Just like what he’d noticed about her, there was nothing much to be seen on the weapon. A glossy varnish, maybe, a faint, colorless sheen around it that didn’t seem durable was all he spotted around it. That, he thought, came from her, and it might have been the reason why it had been able to penetrate the Infinity. Now that he had his hand on it though, he could feel a current of power, buried deep inside the bone, something ancient that bared its teeth at him when he tried to look closer, but did not bite.

He looked back at them, Kagome watching him with a knowing smile and Maki doing a poor job of hiding the hope bubbling inside her.

“Yeah, looks like it could do the job,” he commented. “You sure your friend isn’t going to mind?”

“I think she would be thrilled to see it being used again,” Kagome replied, eyes creasing as fond memories washed over her.

“Don’t you wanna ask her?” Maki asked, not wanting to have it ripped from her hands at the last minute.

“She passed away a long time ago,” Kagome said, voice ever so patient and sweet.

“Oh,” Maki said, with the formality sorcerers often had when it came to death. Expected, just a normal part of existence, regardless of age.

It came to a much greater surprise to Gojo — because, of course, Kagome was no sorcerer. Yet here she was, speaking about the passing of her friend with an ease he didn’t recall encountering with normal humans. They all reacted to death with horror and anguish — and maybe they were the ones in the right, maybe it was the sorcerers who had it all backwards, so used to seeing their own fall in combat and not make it past thirty. Still, he hadn’t expected this kind of tranquility in the face of death, coming from her.

“Sorry to hear that,” he told her, a contrived note in his voice.

Kagome nodded. Now did not seem like the right time to explain that Sango had been dead for more than four centuries centuries. Seemed like it would raise a lot of questions she did not have time for, nor wanted to answer.

“Why don’t you try it out a little more?” Gojo then asked, sending it back to Maki. “The grown-ups need to talk.”

She rolled her eyes at him, but, for once, did not protest.

“Fine, I guess,” she mumbled, before promptly walking away from the pair without so much as a glance in their direction, all of her attention already on her shiny new weapon.

“I don’t think we have time for an in-depth conversation,” Kagome let Gojo know when he approached her.

“Maybe I just like talking to you and don’t have any ulterior motives, hm? Have you thought about that?” he teased.

“Well, that would be for the best, because I have papers to grade,” Kagome replied, smile so warm he would almost not have caught she was making fun of him. “Tell Maki she can train here as long as she wants, will you? I’ll be in my room.”

“Wha— Hey—”

She brushed her fingers against his shoulder as she moved past him, patting it gently.

“I’ll call you,” she mouthed at him, eyes creased, before making it back into the house, a spring in her step.

Gojo was left there, staring, mouth open.

“Guess she only wanted to talk to a grown-up?” Maki called from somewhere behind him, balancing the Hiraikotsu on her back.

The next second, she was shrieking in protest as he teleported them both back to Jujutsu High.

The mind could play funny tricks on people, couldn’t it? Because for a second, back there, he could have sworn he’d felt his heart jump when she’d walked by him.

Chapter Text

Kagome had not thought, that afternoon, that she would be seeing Gojo again anytime soon, too aware of what was to come. It didn’t miss — never had since her first year as a teacher. She buried herself in work, stayed long hours after school was done to help her students prepare for the upcoming exams, offered everyone who wanted it an opportunity to take mock exams, even if it meant she had to stay up in the late hours of the night, grading them. As stress, anxiety and exhaustion filled the high school hallways, thick enough you could have cut through it with a knife, her classroom remained an indomitable bubble of fresh air, and that was the only thing she wanted to devote her energy to.

That was the plan, and it would have remained as such if it hadn’t been for one text message she received one afternoon. She stared at it for long seconds, brain going through her options.

“Miss Higurashi?”

She pocketed her phone in one swift movement, and gave a guilty smile to Kenji, who was staring at her with a pleased expression.

“Can I help you?”

“Don’t worry Miss,” he said with a conniving wink, “I won’t tell.”

She laughed softly and shook her head.

“Did you have a question?”

“Yeah, I—”

She focused on his words, trying her very best to block out the content of the message she’d just received. To do that, she had no choice but to ignore the burning urge in her stomach to walk out the door right this second to go fix the issue.

It was something she had struggled with for the longest time. Her abilities, under the right circumstances, weren’t just useful, they were unmatched. As a result, many had expected her to dedicate herself entirely to being a priestess. She hadn’t seen a point in doing that. The use for her powers were few and far between in the modern era, and she couldn’t bear the thought of sitting around, doing nothing but honing them while waiting for something to go wrong. That was why she was a teacher, why she had walked away from that option, and she was almost never given a reason to regret it.

Almost.

She used a five minute break between classes to send Gojo a text. His response came almost immediately, and the smile that broke on her face then was as easy as they came.

Who knew, she might even come to rely on him, if things kept going like that.

Kagome was outside the school, her trusted bicycle under her arm, when Gojo materialized in the middle of the schoolyard. She narrowed her eyes at him. She’d been waiting for it this time, but it didn’t change anything. She could tell that there was some kind of distortion occurring, but not more than a fraction of second before he appeared out of thin air, which didn’t help her to figure out what was at play here. She wasn’t used to not understanding things.

She didn’t like it one bit.

“Kagome!” he called, waving at her with, as always, too much enthusiasm. “And here I thought you wouldn’t have time for me!” He leaned in, mouth curving into a wide grin. “C’mon, it’s because you missed me, right?”

“Actually, I’m kind of in a hurry right now,” she replied, refusing to show that his teasing was maybe getting to her just a tiny little microscopic bit. “How does that teleportation thing you do work? Can I— can I give you an address?”

Gojo straightened himself, and if she had been able to see his eyes, they would have been wide with disbelief.

“Did you call me just so I can be your taxi?” he asked, sounding both shocked and amused.

“No,” she protested, clicking her tongue, because she was in a hurry, “it would just be faster, but if you can’t do it, you’ll have to get on the carrier.” She pointed at the back of her bike with her chin.

This time, Gojo frowned with obvious distaste.

“…can’t I just call us a taxi?”

“No,” Kagome said again. “I don’t like cars.”

“And couldn’t your yokai friend…? Fine,” he sighed when she dead-panned at him, “where is that place?” Then, eyeing her bicycle, “And is that coming with us?”

“I have the address right here,” she answered, pulling out her phone. “And yes it is.”

Gojo groaned, but did not protest.

One still unexplainable distortion of space later, and Gojo’s hand let go of Kagome’s waist, while the other unceremoniously dropped her bicycle to the ground. He glanced up at the temple where she had instructed him to go. It was small and discreet, hidden in a quiet street on the outskirts of Tokyo. Far from all the touristic spots, it looked like it could use a good deal of paint — but the stairs that led up to it were spotless, so it had to be occupied still. There also wasn’t a drop of cursed energy coming from it, which he suspected was a tell-tale sign that the people in there had abilities similar to Kagome’s.

“Ooh, are you taking me to some secret priestess hang-out?” he asked, bending over to talk right next to her ear, from where he could see the goosebumps forming on her skin when she felt his breath on it, even if she never reacted to it.

“N—” she started automatically, before catching herself. “Well, I guess you could say that. I’ve seen what your organization looks like, right? If you see ours, it might make things clearer.”

“But you’re not part of this one.”

It wasn’t a question, and Kagome gave him a smile, pretty eyes shimmering with what he thought was amusement. Clearly, she didn’t feel excluded from whatever this was.

“That’s right,” she said with ease. “I don’t have to be.”

With that, she knocked on the heavy door. There was no strength whatsoever in the gesture and, not for the first time, Gojo wondered how on earth she was as comfortable as she’d shown herself to be with fighting, considering how weak she was. Sure, he hadn’t felt fear in combat in as long as he could remember — couldn’t say for sure anymore, but he didn’t think he’d been afraid even against Megumi’s dad — but he was, well, Satoru Gojo. Meanwhile, Kagome moved with quiet confidence, as though nothing around her could hurt her, despite how blatantly untrue that was.

The door opened, just enough for someone’s eye to come into view.

“M-miss Higurashi?” a young girl called out, struggling to keep from stuttering.

“That’s right,” Kagome answered, her voice warm. “You must be one of Miss Miyamoto’s students. She asked me for help for one of your schoolmates— Sumiko, if I’m not mistaken.”

Aw, wasn’t she just so good at talking with children? You’d almost think it was her job!

“Y-yes,” the kid replied, before glancing in Gojo’s direction, “b-but Miss Miyamoto said you’d be a-alone—”

“Don’t worry,” Gojo replied, crouching down so she could get a better look at him, “I’m just here to make sure Miss Higurashi doesn’t get in trouble. I won’t interfere with Sumiko at all!”

Kagome scoffed, but managed to turn it into a cough when the kid looked back up at her.

“That’s right, he won’t be a problem,” she confirmed sternly. “He is a friend and he—” She hesitated for just a second, enough for Gojo to catch it, “—he might know what is happening to Sumiko. Miss Miyamoto’s warned you I was coming, hasn’t she?” She held out her hand for the kid to reach out. “You should be able to feel my spiritual energy, and I swear to you on all that I hold dear that I would never bring someone here who could endanger any of you.”

There was a tingling in Gojo’s chest at her words. Shit. She did trust him, didn’t she? He— he was used to having expectations to meet. People ‘trusted’ him, he supposed, to make sure the whole world didn’t go to shit, to ensure minimal damages, to swoop in at the rescue and save the day without flinching. This— didn’t feel like it was the same thing.

The kid relaxed upon taking Kagome’s hand, letting out a relieved sigh, then opened the door for the two of them to walk in. She was young, eleven or twelve years old, Gojo assumed, her hair up in two cute buns, and dressed as a dignified shrine maiden. The uniform, which was too big for her, had been rolled at the ankles so she wouldn’t trip over it.

“I’m Hina,” she said, bowing in front of the two of them. “I’ll take you to Sumiko now, Miss Higurashi. She—” Her bottom lip started shaking and she swallowed. “We’ve tried to heal her, but nothing has worked so far.”

“I’ll do my best to help her, Hina,” Kagome replied, voice soft and comforting. “I promise.”

The kid nodded, lifting her chin in an attempt to look braver, then started walking through the temple, leading the two of them.

“So is that why you asked me to come?” Gojo asked, keeping close to Kagome. “You think it has something to do with cursed energy?”

“Miyamoto’s message wasn’t clear on the origin of the issue,” she answered, making sure to keep her voice low, “so yes, I think it could be cursed energy, but it isn’t why I asked you to come.”

“C’mon, you can just admit you wanted my help,” he teased, unable to resist the opportunity.

“Please,” she protested, and a satisfied grin formed on Gojo’s mouth. What he didn’t let on, though, was how oddly hot he thought her confidence was. “Whether cursed or demonic energy, I can take it, with or without getting your opinion on it. But if it’s of use to you, and if you want to see how we work, it’s better that you’re here, don’t you think?”

“I think you just can’t stand being away from me for too long, Ka-go-me,” he replied, stepping away with a discreet laugh when she tried to elbow him in the stomach.

Before she could reply, they reached another door, which Hina slid open without pause. Inside, there were two other young priestesses, both about  fourteen years old if he had to guess and, lying down, eyes closed, pale as death, face contorted into a pained grimace, a teenage girl who looked to be around sixteen or seventeen. He knew instantly that Kagome had been right. There was unmistakable cursed energy at play here — covered with the filaments of something else, which explained why he hadn’t spotted it through the walls. It was eating away at the woman’s core, cursed energy smothering the flame, gaining on the other at a snail’s pace, but making its way nonetheless to the center of her very being.

“Hello,” Kagome said, bowing her head at the two other girls, “do you know how long she’s been like this?”

The girls exchanged worried glances.

“We— we thought she was cured,” the oldest of the girls said at last. “She— she came back from the Shibuya incident with, uh, something, uh, wrong. We— we all got together with Miss Miyamoto, and we tried to—” She looked away, eyes wet with tears, hands balling into fists and clenching at the fabric of her hakama. “We failed,” she whispered, voice breaking.

“She needs someone who can use reverse cursed technique,” Gojo said, and the girls jumped. They had not expected him to talk. “I know someone I could take her to,” he added for Kagome.

“I think I can handle it,” she replied, taking a step in Sumiko’s direction before pausing, looking thoughtful.

“Not sure who did that to her, but cursed energy is almost completely intertwined with hers,” Gojo warned her. Even he didn’t feel like joking around — perhaps him more than others, truly, considering the fact that he was the one that knew best what was happening to the girl. “She’s fighting it, but we might be too late. I don’t even know that our healer could do something about it.”

There was a quiet gasp, Hina turning around to wipe tears. Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t keep her sobs quiet, and they shook her small body violently. Gojo’s jaw tightened. Yeah, this was no space for kids. Didn’t mean he was going to sugarcoat things, but the silence that filled the room after his words was heavy and unpleasant. The girls’ eyes moved to the floor or to Sumiko, and Kagome stood with her back to him. He felt wholly exterior to the moment. An intruder, whose energy was the same at the one devouring Sumiko from the inside.

He may have been standing in the same room as them, but they were worlds apart from him.

“I’ll try,” Kagome said. “I think I can make it work.”

There was no doubt in her voice, no hesitation.

“And I thank you for it, Shikon priestess,” an old woman said.

Gojo didn’t bother a glance in her direction. He’d heard her small, heavy footsteps as she’d approached, her slow breaths, and the sliding of the door. The title she gave Kagome though, and the immediate change in the kids’ demeanor, that he hadn’t seen coming. The way their eyes widened, chin lifting up, the way hope brightened their expressions at once… Huh. New.

“It’s my pleasure, Miyamoto,” Kagome replied, bowing her head in the woman’s direction. Deep, Gojo noted, but not as deep as would be expected in front of an elder, which had to mean that, in their hierarchy, Kagome was at least her equal.

“Kami,” the oldest girl whispered, “you really are the Shikon priestess? We— We weren’t sure that—”

“So you really can save Sumiko then!” Hina exclaimed, too loud, earning herself a shush from the elderly priestess.

“Oh, being the Shikon priestess really is not that big a deal,” Kagome was quick to dismiss, kneeling down by Sumiko’s side. “I’ll try my best with her,” she added, her smile worth a thousand promises.

“Um,” Gojo intervened, because this was, yet again, something new that no one had bothered to tell him about, “what’s a Shikon Priestess?”

“You mean who,” Hina was the first to reply once again, practically vibrating with excitement. “She defeated the great yokai Naraku and purified the Shikon Jewel, and she’s the strongest priestess who has ever lived.” She recited it like it was straight out of a history lesson which, if Kagome’s accomplishments were that impressive — he wouldn’t know —, might have actually been the case.

Gojo studied her, as if this knowledge would change her. The strongest, huh? Funny, he’d heard that one before. But there was no second head growing on her, no sudden change in her aura. She glanced up at him, shaking her head with an amused smile. Yes, she was the same she had ever been, small, pretty, warm, kind.

“That’s greatly exaggerated,” she said. “I wasn’t alone for any of those things, and I would argue Midoriko was a stronger priestess than me.”

“But you purified the Jewel,” Hina said with all but stars in her eyes.

“Not alone,” Kagome repeated, and this time, Gojo saw the tension in her neck when she said it, heard the note of finality in her tone, even if she hadn’t raised her voice at all. He didn’t think anyone else noticed it. “Now, I’m going to need some quiet, if that’s okay with you, girls.”

“We’ll let you work in peace, Shikon Priestess,” Miyamoto answered for them, bowing in Kagome’s direction with great deference. “Let us leave the room.”

She gestured at the girls who, even though they clearly would have preferred to stay and watch Kagome do her work, didn’t protest. Gojo did notice that Kagome rolled her lips together at Miyamoto’s orders, but she didn’t say anything either. After ushering the girls out of the room, the old priestess turned to Gojo, who hadn’t budged. He gave her a toothy smile.

“I’m good, thanks.”

“I’m sure she’ll work better if she can focus.”

She had that authoritative tone that might work well on kids and teenagers who’d been taught to worship people who had just had the luck of being born before them, but was nothing but grating to his ears.

“I’m sure she can speak for herself.” Then, turning his head towards her: “What’d you say, Kagome? Do I distract you?”

She shot him what he was sure she meant as an irritated look, but even then, her eyes were twinkling with amusement.

“It’s fine, he can stay,” she told Miyamoto. “He understands what’s happening to her better than I do; he’ll be able to help me if I need it.”

The old woman pursed her lips with obvious displeasure, but, with her students’ eyes on her, all gathered behind the door, she did not attempt to contradict Kagome. So Gojo waved at her as she left, sliding the door close behind her.

“I meant it when I said I needed some quiet,” Kagome warned as she raised her palms over Sumiko’s body.

“When have I ever been loud? Don’t worry, you’ll even forget I’m here.”

She rolled her eyes at him one last time before closing them, and then she got to work, her entire body motionless, her face still.

Without a sound, like he’d promised, Gojo removed his blindfold. She hadn’t waited any longer, hadn’t taken time to focus or meditate or anything like that, nor was she putting on a show. Yet, even though there was nothing visible to the human eye, she was hard at work, and Gojo knew it.

He hadn’t gotten a chance to study the way her powers functioned, not in detail like he would have liked to. So far, he had seen immense outbursts of powers from her, pure strength flashing out of her in monstrous quantities, then gone the very next second, as if he’d just imagined it — quite the frustrating phenomenon, by the way. Sometimes he could track remains of it, knew without any precision that the power was still there, dormant, under her skin, but his untrained eyes lost track of it in a matter of minutes, as if it was doing its best to hide from him.

This was different. From what he could see, she was using her spiritual energy to connect with Sumiko’s, pushing through her to get in touch with the cursed energy that was wreaking havoc on the young priestess’s essence. She did no damage to her, quite the contrary in fact, as far as he could tell, her energy sending Sumiko’s soul in full bloom. While it looked like she knew where the cursed energy was, he suspected, from seeing her feeling her way with great care, that she couldn’t see it as precisely as he did.

When she encountered it, what he witnessed was quite similar to what he’d seen her do back at the hospital, if on a much smaller scale. The very second cursed energy got in contact with her, it started disintegrating, and a pink light started to emanate from Sumiko’s chest. The teenager took a big gulp of air, her shoulders relaxing. Kagome didn’t even flinch.

She kept going methodically, tracking every filament of cursed energy until there was none of it left, then moving on to the next thread. And Gojo kept on watching, trying to soak in the signature of her energy, committing it to memory as best as he could.

By the time she lowered her hands, Sumiko’s breathing was even, her face now peaceful.

“You’ve missed some,” Gojo warned.

Her eyes snapped open, meeting his, black into blue. Gojo’s breath caught in his throat. In that second of eternity, it was like falling into her, witnessing what felt like an infinite amount of power — enough, perhaps, to drown even him, and yet he felt no fear, just the desire to jump in.

Then Kagome smiled.

“I know.”

Her power flashed out of her, bright and blinding. In less than a second, all remaining traces of cursed energy were gone from Sumiko, and Kagome lowered her hands, wiping them against her shirt. She let out a relieved sigh.

“Couldn’t you have done that from the start?” Gojo asked, still observing her.

This time, power didn’t quite vanish from her. It was still at her fingertips, receding slowly, a gentle glow around her hands.

“I could have,” she acknowledged with a nod, “but because it was so tightly caught up in her soul, I didn’t want to risk damaging it.” Then, she frowned. “That— do you know many, er, curses that damage someone’s soul? I’m just— I’m just wondering—”

“Just the one,” Gojo shrugged, “y’know, you got rid of him at Shibuya. Why, you think that was him?”

Kagome was frowning now, a line forming between her eyebrows.

“Sumiko’s always been a gifted priestess. I don’t doubt that, with everyone else’s help, she could have kept it at bay for a long time, without realizing that there were pieces left, it’s just—”

She interrupted herself again, something on the tip of her tongue that she didn’t want to say. A better person would have waited.

“Couldn’t they have just called you, if that had been going on since Shibuya?” Gojo pushed instead, because who had the patience for that?

She bit the inside of her cheek. When she met his eyes again, hers had darkened.

“Yes. They could have.”

Sumiko stirring between them cut the conversation short. In an instant, Kagome was back to her normal self, eyes wide with worry as she brushed some hair out of the girl’s face.

“It’s okay sweetheart, take your time,” she said with the most gentle tone.

“M-Miss Higurashi?” Sumiko managed to croak, the words painfully making it out of her throat.

“That’s me,” Kagome replied. “You’re okay now. You’re safe.”

Sumiko blinked at her a couple of times, before tears started to spill out of her eyes, rolling down her temples.

“I couldn’t— He wouldn’t let me leave,” she sobbed. “I couldn’t get out, I thought— I thought I would never—”

“It’s okay,” Kagome repeated like a mantra, holding the girl’s hand in hers, stroking her skin with her thumb in soothing circled, “you’re okay, you’re safe now. It’s over. You made it.”

The scene was sweet, nothing to say there, but it didn’t feel like Gojo’s place to intervene. With a restraint that would have made Shoko proud, instead of interfering, he stood up to open the door.

“She’s awake,” he hummed at the intention of Miss Miyamoto and the three girls that were anxiously waiting outside.

There were lots of cries as they barged into the room, lots of hugs, kisses, the whole shebang. Very cute, if that was your thing, and judging by Kagome’s smile, it was hers. Gojo leaned against the wall, waiting for it all to come to an end. He had never enjoyed that part of the process all that much. He was doing things no one else could do, and he didn’t even have to try to get it done, so why bother? The people who thanked him profusely were the same ones that would send him to face unspeakable dangers without flinching. Oh, he would triumph, sure, but it made all this thankfulness feel very— performative.

Kagome, however, appeared to be basking in the moment. The traces of her power that he’d spotted earlier were gone, and yet she was still glowing, her smile fond and sincere. When Hina threw her arms around her, wailing and thanking her, hugging her with all the strength she had, and Kagome laughed, hugging her back, Gojo caught the corner of his lips lifting into a smile.

She was part of the picture. One of them, despite how different her abilities were.

Good for her.

He didn’t expect for her to look at him. Her eyes wandered for a second, searching, before they found him. His breath caught in his throat, and he froze. No joke, no quip came to his mind. He couldn’t even muster a teasing wink.

With gentle movements, Kagome untangled herself from Hina’s embrace.

“I’m afraid we have to go,” she said, “but I was happy to help.”

Miyamoto, knelt by Sumiko’s side, bowed deeply to her, until her forehead was against the mattress were the young priestess was still lying.

“We’re forever indebted to you, Shikon Priestess, I do not know how—”

“Oh, there’s no need for that,” Kagome laughed it off with ease, “and, please, you can call me Kagome. All of you,” she added, glancing at the girls. “And you know you can always ask me for help, if anything like that ever happens again, don’t you?”

“We would never wish to inconvenience you,” Miyamoto mumbled, still bowing. “You have already done so much—”

“Please believe me,” Kagome said. There was a bite to her words this time, even if she’d hidden it under all that sweetness. “Saving a life isn’t an inconvenience.”

“Of course, of course,” Miyamoto replied, not looking up. “I apologize.”

Kagome gritted her teeth but, powerless, she had no choice but letting it go. Ha. So even she could struggle with those things, huh? He hadn’t seen it coming. She glanced away, pushing herself back to her feet. She made her exit on her tiptoes, as quiet as could be, but there was still an unusual tension in her shoulders by the time she reached Gojo.

“Th-thank you, Miss Higurashi,” Sumiko called weakly from the mattress, and Kagome turned around to give her a final wave.

“Any time, Sumiko. I mean it.”

Then she slid the door close, and finally let herself drop the smile, heaving a long sigh.

“You okay?” Gojo asked. He didn’t feel like joking around, not with the bitter taste the interaction had left in his mouth.

Kagome dismissed his concern with a wave, but her expression was still closed off when she glanced up at him.

“It’s fine,” she said. Her voice was soft, cautious. “I just— wish things weren’t so complicated with Miyamoto.”

“You’re a threat to her,” he pointed out, gesturing for them to start walking with a nod.

Another sigh as she followed.

“Like I said, it’s complicated. Miyamoto is a great priestess. There is a lot of knowledge that has been lost over the years, but she has trained her whole life and she has preserved as much of it as possible. But even then…”

“Yeah?” Gojo pushed open the door to the temple, holding it for her to go through.

“Ah, I shouldn’t be too harsh. I’m just— I don’t quite fit the standard for a priestess nowadays. Miyamoto herself is not particularly gifted when it comes to spiritual energy, but she has trained many who are, like Sumiko. I’m afraid I happen to be too much of an anomaly for her to take in.”

That, Gojo could understand. He fell in step by her side, putting his hands behind his head. At least she didn’t sound sad, just factual.

“So you’re the strongest priestess there is, huh?”

At that, she chuckled.

“Alive? Yes.”

A laugh tore from his lips. Unexpected, again, keeping him on his toes once more. He’d expected denial, humility, nuance, anything but this matter-of-fact nonchalance.

“You’re an interesting one, Kagome Higurashi.”

“Did you doubt it?”

Her eyes were glimmering again, all of her earlier frustration gone and forgotten. She made it look effortless, and he had to wonder if it truly was, for her. He knew all too well how deep that frustration could run, how, sometimes, he felt it was pure fury flooding his veins. Shrugging it off became harder with each step he took, each life he saved, each sorcerer that fell in combat. Was she like him in that? Or was she the proof that a better path existed?

“I think I could still take you down,” he commented, watching her from the corner of his eye.

“I’d like to see that,” she scoffed, and his grin widened. He hadn’t gotten the rise out of her he’d been hoping for, but he’d take that too.

“Now, are you going to take your bike again, or d’you want me to take you home?”

Well, she loved to ride her bike, but it was late. And cold. And she had things to do.

She wasn’t sure she liked the way his grin widened when she sent him a pleading look.

“What do we say?” he asked, with this annoying habit of his, where he leaned in real close to her.

This time, without his blindfold, it meant she was looking straight into his eyes, and kami, she had to hope that the alley was dark enough that he couldn’t see her blushing.

“I would appreciate it if you could take me home.”

“What’s the magic word?”

“Don’t push your luck.”

He laughed again, but while the earlier conversation had felt— unrehearsed, for lack of a better word, this one sounded a lot more expected. She was starting to get to know him now, to be able to tell what was spontaneous and what was more… deliberate, in line with the persona she’d seen him present to his students. She couldn’t say what his point was, though, particularly not when all he did appeared to be trying to get on her nerves.

“Well,” he said, picking up her bicycle with one hand and opening his other arm wide, “why don’t you come here?”

She stared at him. She was pretty sure he expected her — wanted her — to make a scene. Hah. She had done far worse than hugging acquaintances, in her time. In two steps, she was standing in front of him, and she didn’t even blink as she put her arms around his neck. She struggled to reach that high, so her arms were stretched out, her hands joining right against the nape of his neck.

The next laugh was a lot breathier than his last one.

Spontaneous, again.

His eyes were wide, looking into hers, as he closed his free arm around her waist, and she found that she could barely breathe, when he looked at her like that.

“Yeah,” he repeated, mostly for himself. “An interesting one.”

“Just warn me when you— Ah!”

They were gone in an instant. Gojo’s laugh, light and easy, echoing in the air, was all that was left of them in the alley.

Chapter Text

There were few feelings better than waking up in the middle of the Christmas holidays, not bound to any alarm clock, free to laze under the warm covers without having to be forced out into the cold.

It wasn’t that Kagome didn’t love her job. She did, and she adored her kids. By the time the last school day of December rolled around though, even she, who everyone in the teaching staff considered to be a breath of fresh air, a saving grace during this difficult month, didn’t think she would have had as little as one more hour of teaching in herself. She had hidden it as well as she could. After all, she’d become an expert at hiding both exhaustion and physical injuries when she was fifteen, so she might as well put it to good use. She certainly didn’t sport the kind of dark circles under her eyes the other teachers had, but she knew that she skirt she’d thrown on the morning of that last day was one she hadn’t gotten around to ironing — and that her bun had more to do with the fact that she hadn’t washed her hair than with elegance.

The holidays weren’t quite the time to rest, though. She had come home with hundreds of papers to grade, papers that her students would expect her to be done with by the time school started up again in January. She could have left some for later on, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to stand the nervous little faces, looking up at her hopefully when she would walk into class for the first morning. As a result, she had made as much of a headway as possible during the first week.

Maybe it was the thought that she had only a third of her original stack left to grade that put a spring in her step as she stepped outside the bedroom, not bothering to change out of her pajamas to go into the kitchen. There, her mother, who was physically incapable of sleeping past 7am, was making breakfast.

“Hello there, dear,” she said cheerfully, “have you slept well?”

“Hmm, the best,” Kagome hummed in reply. “Isn’t Sota up yet? Should I go get him?”

The first one wasn’t a real question — not that you could have known that from the innocent batting of her eyelashes. Sota was never up before noon when he didn’t have to go to college. Now the second question, that was far more sincere. She would love to drag her little brother out of bed.

Her mother, of course, was not fooled and sent her a stern look.

“He works hard. Let him be.”

“Just think your food is better when it’s freshly made,” she replied with big, angelic eyes. “Thought he wouldn’t want to miss that.”

Her mother shook her head, the corners of her lips curving upwards traitorously, and Kagome hid her smile in the steaming hot cup of chocolate that had materialized in front of her. It was rehearsed by now, that little speech of hers, but she knew her mom loved getting to feel like her kids were still kids, even if they were both long out of childhood.

Also, she would, in fact, really like dragging Sota out of bed.

The meal was peaceful. From up on the hill, Tokyo was quieter than anywhere else in the city. Her mother hummed to herself as she switched from cooking to knitting, unable to keep her hands still. Moments such as these, Kagome thought, had kept her from losing herself too much, when she was traveling back and forth from the Feudal Era, anchoring her to normalcy and the small pleasures of life. She treasured them dearly to this day.

“I think I’ll try to grade twenty papers today,” she announced to her mother as she was finishing up her meal. “I’ I keep that rhythm, I’ll have a few days with nothing to do at the end of the week.”

“That’s wonderful, darling,” her mother smiled. “Don’t forget to get some fresh air before you start to work!”

She always said that when she felt Kagome was spending too much time inside the house. In fact, her daughter could swear she’d heard her muttering things about how ‘At least when you went to the Feudal Era, you didn’t stay cooped up all the time’, blatantly ignoring the life-threatening situations she was also getting herself into back then. She hadn’t reached that point just yet, but her daughter knew better than to argue — even if she did roll her eyes at her.

“There isn’t such a thing as fresh air in Tokyo,” she mumbled as she got up, a tiny act of rebellion. A meaningless one, though, because she knew fully that, just like the silence, the air felt preserved around the shrine. Pure.

She stepped outside, and tilted her head up to look at the low, grey winter sky. She couldn’t wait for spring to come.

It was as she was standing there, eyes closed, breathing in and letting herself connect with everything that was around her, that she felt a tug on her soul. Her eyes snapped open.

She wasn’t unfamiliar with the feeling — as a matter of fact, she had experienced it countless times during the Feudal Era. It throbbed when she sensed a Jewel shard nearby, in the presence of certain yokai, when she was near a barrier that she couldn’t yet see. The feeling hadn’t disappeared when she had come back to the Modern era, but she had ignored it, assuming it was either yokais passing by, or a sort of phantom pull that would never quite leave her soul, not when it had been a constant within her for a year.

Just two months ago, she would have shrugged it off like she had done for the past decade. She would have gone back inside her house, would have gotten to work, would have thrown herself into her oh so normal life. Now, she found herself watching over the city, trying to find something unusual like the tell-tale glow of spiritual activity, teeth worrying at her bottom lip.

Should she try to figure out what that was? It could very well be nothing. Could also be one of those ‘curtains’ she’d seen Gojo use, acting more or less like a barrier. The likelihood of it being nothing but sorcerers doing their job felt pretty high. That wasn’t something she wanted to interfere with.

And yet, the feeling wasn’t going away, becoming harder to ignore with every second that passed by. Now that she knew of sorcerers, she couldn’t just dismiss it. It kept nudging at her, urging her to go check it out, if only to appease herself. Back when she was fifteen, she might have been able to find it from where she was standing, her awareness of everything around her sharp and precise, her mind expanded.

Unfortunately, it was one of the abilities she’d lost — or rather, that she had taken from herself.

For years, after her return from the Feudal Era, she had worked on reigning herself in. Where she used to let her spiritual energy flow out of her naturally, forming a large sphere around her, she’d restrained it until it fit neatly within the boundary of her body. Having her spiritual energy all over the place, moving as it wished, had been very appropriate when it came to purifying cursed Jewel Shards, or her out of control best friend, or even a giant ball of youki from the inside, but it also meant that she had to feel everything around her at all time, from the steps of wolves to the breathing of the plants to the smallest insect.

It had been sustainable, if tiring, during the Feudal Era. In modern day Tokyo? It was unbearable.

It also harmed what she now knew were curses simply by making contact. Back then, she hadn’t wanted to do that, just in case — at least not without having a say in it.

The problem was that now, she couldn’t figure how to get it out. It was frustrating to the utmost degree, especially when it would have been such a great help in Shibuya. Maybe if she’d trained since then, she would have figured it out by now, but she— ah. She just hadn’t gotten around to it.

She suspected that was the true heart of her issue. Training or not, this free movement was the natural state of her soul. No, the problem was her life. She was freer back then. She had chosen to go after the Jewel, chosen to keep going back to the Feudal Era, chosen to fight. Now… She adored her students, she did, but a part of her was shackled by the many rules of modern life. Oh, she’d chosen her job, too, but she answered to the Principal, to students’ parents, to the school schedule, to—

Ah, this was no use. But she suspected, a bitter thought that she couldn’t get rid of, that had she chosen to live strictly as a priestess, following the rhythm of her body and spending her time meditating, that she wouldn’t be struggling in such a way. She did worry it would have dulled her, but there was no way of knowing that for now, was there?

Maybe meditation was the way of getting it back. She’d have to look into that. Later. When there was time. When she was out of papers to grade, and when her planning for her next classes was done, and when the students’ report cards were filled, and—

Later. For now, she had to figure out where that stupid feeling was coming from, or else she would go insane.

“I’m going for a ride!” she called out to her mother, running through the house to throw on the first clothes she could find.

“Have fun, honey!” her mother answered as she passed through the kitchen a second time, heading out.

Groaning, Sota rolled out of a bed with a few choice words for his sister already on his tongue. How dared she scream in the house when it was basically dawn?

By the time he’d stumbled out of his room, Kagome was already far down the hill.

Following the tug on her should proved to be easy, which was a relief. She could still listen to herself, after all. She just had to remember to do it, when it used to be second nature. It crossed her mind, a bittersweet thought, that the diminution of her powers might just be the natural order of life, before she shook it off, a line creasing between her eyebrows as she sped through the streets of Tokyo, avoiding cars and pedestrians alike.

‘The natural order of life?’ Ha. She had never followed the natural order of life. Not when it came to training her abilities, not when it came to the rules of the soul, not when it came to time itself. If she wanted to get them back, she would. No matter how impossible it was supposed to be.

For now though, she was focused on figuring out what was going on with this feeling of hers. She slowed down as she spotted the curtain. With the bow and quiver she had thrown on her back before leaving — you know, just in case — she looked somewhat like a horseback archer from hundreds of years ago. If they’d been on bikes rather than horses, of course.

From close up, the curtain was impossible to miss, and yet non-sorcerers passed it by without so much as a glance in its direction. In front of it was an inconspicuous sleek black hair. Behind the will, his eyes focused on his phone, was Ijichi.

No tall, white-haired sorcerer in sight, though.

Shame.

Kagome didn’t bother approaching the man in the suit. The last thing she wanted to do was mess with whatever business sorcerers had going on in here. No, she was just going to pop her head in, make sure her intuition wasn’t the proof that something terrible was happening, and then get herself home. So, tiptoeing, she stepped through the curtain, going completely unnoticed.

There wasn’t much to see inside. The curtain formed a dome over an old museum, surrounded by scaffoldings. Yet, the second she walked in, Kagome forgot any thought of leaving, and a feeling of dread coated her skin like oil. The air was thick with power and evil — and not just any evil, but a presence she had felt before.

The one that came from that kid. Yuuji.

Shit. She hadn’t talked to Gojo about it, assuming it was another one of those things that she didn’t yet understand about sorcerer society, but maybe she should have. She didn’t think twice before rushing in. With fluid movements, she took her bow off her shoulders and grabbed an arrow, keeping it at the ready.

Inside, she found that the museum had been emptied of most of its valuable pieces. She sprinted through a deserted hall, populated only by statues covered in white sheets. Guided by both the noises of combat that echoed in the empty hallways and the bright, burning flames of cursed energy she could easily perceive at such a short distance, she made her way, unimpeded, through different rooms, until she finally reached what looked like a reconstitution of a roman amphitheater.

There, in the middle, was Yuuji, standing face to face with a tall man in a kimono, his hair in two buns, dark lines drawn over his face. There was something odd about him, something Kagome couldn’t put words on. They both looked rather worse for wear, the fight clearly having gone on for a while, but they weren’t the ones in the worst shape.

Slumped against a wall, down several rows from her, was a blonde sorcerer in a brown suit, clenching a blade in his hand. His face was contorted in pain as he tried to get up despite the numerous injuries she could spot all over his bodies. The injuries weren’t the worrying part, though. No, it was the energy flowing through and around him was a mess. Kagome zeroed in on it, trying to understand it. Cursed energy was a pain to read in the first place — unless it was as neatly organized as Gojo’s — and she found herself struggling to differentiate the different forms it took.

It looked like there was some under his skin, she could tell that much, some that wasn’t his. It was spreading like a disease.

The man groaned as he fell back down.

“Nanamin!” Yuuji called, clearly worried, but that second of inattention cost him a strong punch to the jaw.

Kagome flinched, but Yuuji didn’t hesitate to retaliate in kind. The fight was brutal, moving too fast for her to be able to read it. She tightened her fingers over her bow, hesitating. There was no way she would get a clear shot of Yuuji’s adversary, and considering how incompatible cursed energy was with her reiki, she feared that she would hurt both of them.

There was no time for such consideration. As much as she hated to leave the kid to fend for himself, she had to hope he could make it a few minutes more so she would be able to help that Nanamin man.

Unfortunately, the second she started moving, shoes squeaking on the marble floor, both of their heads whipped towards her.

Stupid amphitheaters and their stupidly perfect acoustic. Would she truly never be free of mathematics?

“Miss Higurashi?” Yuuji called, eyes going wide in surprise.

The other man stared at him suspiciously before focusing back on Kagome, and she owed her survival only on the bow she happened to have been clenching in her hands. Sheer old luck, in theory, but also a testimony to how second nature her abilities were to her, when she got the chance.

What she saw was him clapping his hands together.

“Piercing blood,” she vaguely heard.

The ray shot from his hands faster than she could begin to comprehend. Yuuji whipped back towards him, trying to intercept it with a cry of protest. It hit her before she had even processed it. Or rather, it would have, had it not been for the barrier she projected in front of her with her trusted bow.

It was a half-assed attempt at a barrier at best, one that would have shattered under an attack imbued with more cursed energy. In this case, though, the projectile splattered on it, and she realized as it turned liquid and slid down that it was blood. Distantly, she thought that his cursed energy shouldn’t have felt like that, though she wasn’t able to explain why.

She swallowed — then resumed moving.

The man kept his eyes on her, trying to figure out what had happened. Yuuji used that brief respite to come standing between them, shielding her.

“She has nothing to do with this,” he pleaded, desperate.

“If you don’t wish for her to be in danger, all you have to do is surrender,” the black-haired man replied, his tone flat, almost bored.

Jumping over the rows without pause, Kagome soon found herself kneeling by the injured sorcerer.

“Hi,” she said, squinting at him as if it would help her figure out the mess that were the energies inside him. “I’m Kagome.”

“There isn’t much to be done, I’m afraid,” he said, ignoring her greeting in favor of going straight to the point. “His blood is a strong poison. Considering the amounts of it in my body, not even Reverse Cursed Technique could help me at this point.”

Kagome’s heart tightened painfully. Using blood to fight…? That reminded her of someone. She looked back at the dark-haired man, and finally, she understood what she had been feeling since she had walked in.

“He’s not a curse, is he?” she asked, eyes wide. She had been saying it mostly for herself, barely noticing she was speaking, but the blonde sorcerer answered all the same. For a man at death’s door, he managed to remain incredibly calm.

“A cursed womb painting. Half-curse, half-human.”

She bit down on the inside of her cheek, hard. She didn’t know much about sorcerers yet, but she couldn’t begin to imagine what kind of life had to come with such a status.

Nor did she have time to think about it, no matter the complicated emotions it stirred within her.

“Okay,” she said, turning back towards Nanamin. “Let me examine you.”

He shook his head. The poison was clearly taking its toll on him, his teeth gritted, sweat dripping down his face.

“No need,” he answered nonetheless, even if his voice was strained. “You would do better helping Itadori now. The only way for this to cease is to force this man to cease using his Cursed Technique.”

She stared at him. With enough attention, she was starting to differentiate the energies battling within his system, but it was going to be a pain to entangle, she could already tell. At least Sumiko hadn’t been producing cursed energy herself, and she didn’t have to worry about blasting through that. Now, in theory, she would have to somehow destroy the one kind without touching the other, considering that he was using his own to fight against the poison.

Ugh. This mind last time look like a walk in the park.

Nanamin didn’t realize what was going through her mind, mistaking her silence and stare for incomprehension.

“Either he chooses to end it himself, which seems unlikely, or he dies.” Then confusion appeared on his face, finally piercing through the haze of pain. His eyes moved up and down her body, searching for something that would mark her as a fellow sorcerer. He couldn’t even feel cursed energy coming from her body — but that… That made no sense, did it? “Wait a minute. Are you even—”

“There is another way,” the black haired man noted. His voice was calm, as if he had no involvement in what was happening. “I could stop using my technique on you.”

He flexed his fingers, and blood jumped out of one of the blonde sorcerer’s wounds, forming small, perfect beads.

“All I want is for Yuuji Itadori to die.”

Kagome turned around. The man’s eyes were on Yuuji, barely paying attention to her or Nanamin. She watched the kid’s Adam’s apple bob up and down, before his shoulders fell and he lowered his gaze.

“I can’t do that,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

He looked dejected, as if he regretted it, and just the sight of it made her sick to her stomach. No one should be made to feel like going on living was the wrong decision, like they didn’t have as much of a right to live as anyone else. Especially not a kid his age.

Before the han— No, before the half-curse could send his blood back into the injured sorcerer’s body, Kagome shot a small wave of reiki through the sphere, making it splatter on the wall. The man’s head whipped towards her, examining her in surprise. She paid him no mind.

“I’ll take care of it,” she announced, giving Yuuji a decided nod. “You just focus on staying alive, okay?”

His lips parted. For a moment, he looked at a complete loss for words, trying to figure out if he could let himself hope again. Finally, his expression hardened, and he punched the palm of his left hand with his right fist in front of his chest.

“Alright,” he said, his determination back. “You save Nanamin, and I’ll deal with this!”

Ah, so she had heard the name right.

“It’s Nanamin, then?” she asked, going back to the man.

“No,” Nanamin answered. “I told you Reverse Cursed Technique would not be effective. What is it you intend to do? Do you even have cursed energy?”

These were questions she didn’t want to even have to think about. Not when there was a much greater task at hand here.

“I’m going to get to work, okay, Nanamin?” she said rather than asked, ignoring his questions. “I’m afraid this will be unpleasant.”

He said something after that — about how his name wasn’t Nanamin — but Kagome had already closed her eyes, trying to figure out how on earth she was going to handle the situation. The smartest way of doing it would be to focus on the tiny beads of cursed energy that came from the half-curse’s blood. Problem was, there were so many of them, dotted in Nanamin’s blood, mixed with his cursed energy, that she would have to operate with extreme precision.

Now, Kagome was capable of many things, but extreme precision wasn’t quite at the top of that list. As far as spiritual energy went, she was a weapon of mass destruction, not a needle, and it was that kind of microscopic instrument she would need. On top of that, there was the matter of time, and how terribly she lacked it at the moment. With every second that passed, the infection spread, the beads multiplied, and it became more and more difficult to counter.

She could only see one solution. It might blow up in her face spectacularly, but if she didn’t at least try, there might not be anyone left to save, even if she came up with the perfect method.

Instead of starting by dealing with as many of the beads as possible first, the method she had used with Sumiko, she blasted Nanamin with reiki. There was enough of it to purify a number of insignificant yokai as well as a number of perhaps less insignificant curses. He visibly winced under the sudden onslaught, and then his eyes went wide. While his cursed energy rescinded significantly, his production of it picked up right away, irrigating his body with it again.

“What— What did you just—”

“Just a second,” she shushed him, raising a professorial finger. She didn’t have even a second to lose.

The half-curse’s blood, while affected by her powers, had still managed to resist her. She suspected, though she had no time to test that theory, that her reiki was not as effective against the cursed energy emanating from humans as it was against curses themselves. In other circumstances, this would have been a fascinating discovery. As it stood, she filed the information away. She didn’t have time for that.

Before Nanamin’s cursed energy could drown out that of the half-curse, which was still present in enough quantity that it would have no issue proliferating again, she ‘popped’ as many of the droplets as possible. Pouring all of herself into the effort, she went still, biting her tongue and keeping her mind dedicated wholly to the task at hand. No matter the state of her focus or how fast she tried to go, there was no getting them all though, not when she couldn’t make her mind isolate them efficiently enough. The second she moved to another area, cursed energies all blurred together, and she found herself constantly searching for the right one. She groaned when she lost sight of them, once they had become too microscopic and were swallowed entirely as the returning cursed energy washed back in.

Well. She had to hope she had done enough. If anything, it would keep him alive a little longer.

“You should still get that checked by a doctor,” she announced, her breathing heavy. “For now… It should do.”

As for what would happen later on… Unfortunately, it would depend on how potent that poison was.

Nanamin stared at her, trying to read him, and she stared in return — at least, until she realized how utterly silent the room had turned while she was focused on something else. Turning around, she discovered Yuuji slumped against a wall, head low, blood dripping from his chin onto the floor. His opponent was prostrated in a distant corner, eyes open wide, head in his hands. He was mumbling incoherently, all desire to fight evaporated from his body.

“What… happened?” Kagome asked. Her jaw moved painfully, and she realized she’d had it clenched too tight as she’d focused on helping Nanamin. In fact, all of her muscles felt sore. Seemed that this had taken a lot more out of her than expected — definitely a lot more than just spewing out far more devastating amount of reiki.

“Don’t worry,” Nanamin answered, slowly getting up, testing his balance. “I’ll put an end to this.”

With his hand still pressed to the wound on his flank, he started to make his way towards the half-curse. His pace was slow but steady, his eyes glued to his target. He held his weapon tightly, and Kagome felt, deep in her bones, that this man was deadly.

The half-curse was rocking back and forth, muttering under his breath, making no movement to retaliate against him. Kagome’s heart started hammering with urgency. She had to do something. Everything within her was screaming at her to do it.

“Why did Yuuji say he was sorry?”

Nanamin paused, turning to throw a glance at her over his shoulder.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Yuuji,” Kagome repeated. “He said he was sorry he couldn’t die to save you. Why— Why would he feel sorry about that?”

“Ah.” The sorcerer stared at her a while longer, clearly sizing her up, before gesturing towards the half-curse. “He killed this man’s brothers. Two more cursed womb paintings, whose appearacnes were more curse-like than this one. Yuuji mistook them for curses.”

Kagome’s heart ached terribly in her chest. Hanyo often looked monstrous, too, having less control over their form than powerful yokai did, most of whom were able to change it at will. Her mind turned to Jinenji, to the numerous scars on his gentle hands, to the horror he inspired the villagers living near his house.

“These womb paintings were trying to kill him,” Nanamin added, a hint of protectiveness in his voice, his eyes laser focused on her.

It would never have crossed her mind to blame the kid for anything.

“Then I’ll take it from here with him,” she said on a whim, just because it felt right. She knew that it would keep her awake at night, if she didn’t at least try. “You should get Yuuji to a doctor — maybe calling Gojo would be the fastest way to do that.”

Recognition flashed across Nanamin’s face, pieces of the puzzle starting to fall into place at last. It made so much sense that she would be involved with Gojo in some way.

“I’m afraid he is not in Tokyo at the moment,” he said. “If he was, this attack would not have occurred.”

Kagome blinked at him. So his mere presence was enough to deter attacks…? Huh. Maybe she should be taking him a little more seriously after all.

“Couldn’t you just use Reverse Cursed Technique on Yuuji?” the sorcerer continued. “He is a tough kid, but I’m afraid his injuries are serious. That would ensure I could take him to get treated safely.”

More blinking.

“Isn’t that what you did for me?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at her from behind his glasses. He was probing for answers, she could tell, not unlike what Gojo had done when they’d met, although with a lot more restraint. He didn’t seem like a bad guy, she could tell that much. In fact, in many ways, he looked more trustworthy than Gojo had when he’d barged into her classroom demanding answers. And yet… Gojo had also felt like the type to do as he pleased, not as he was expected to. She couldn’t say the same for this man. Counter-intuitively, and with Gojo’s words about how small-minded sorcerers could be, it made her more cautious.

“No, it wasn’t,” she said, giving him a sincere smile, but not expanding on it.

For a second, there was silence. He was still trying to figure her out, and she let him, without ceding him so much as an inch.

Ultimately, he was the one who gave in. He didn’t know that he would approve of whatever her plan was, but she was no curse user, of that he was sure. She had also just saved his life, even if he couldn’t begin to understand how she’d done it. Repaying that debt right away was the smart thing to do — as well as the right thing.

Plus, it was just about time for him to go on his lunch break.

“Are you sure you can handle it alone?”

Kagome eyed the half-curse, who was still unmoving, his eyes watery and fixed straight ahead. His essence, by its very nature, meant that he would be no match for her reiki. On top of that, even though her earlier purification of the poison within Nanamin’s blood would have been an exhausting show of force for anyone else as far as quantities were concerned, it had been but a drop of spent energy for her.

She shrugged.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Then it’s settled,” Nanamin said with a nod. “I’ll entrust you with this.”

He walked over to Yuuji, picking up the boy carefully. For the first time since the end of the fight, the half-cursed looked up, following his movements as he carried the unconscious boy towards the exit — but he remained where he was, curled up on himself, and he made no movement to stand up.

“Ah, and, Miss Kagome?”

How polite of him. Maybe Gojo should take a page out of his book.

“Yes?”

“The name is Kento Nanami.”

She smiled, eyes creasing sincerely.

“It was a pleasure meeting you, Nanami.”

He nodded, examining the scene once more, before deciding he had done all he needed to and leaving the room. Kagome went back to the half-curse, whose breathing was slowly evening out.

“Hi,” she said, her voice soft. “I’m Kagome. Who are you?”

He stared at her from under his lashes. Like Nanami before him, he struggled to read her. He couldn’t feel anything negative coming from her, that much he knew. She had to have some kind of cursed energy, but even that he couldn’t pick up on. She radiated warmth and kindness, and it made him want to finally, finally rest. After 150 years of the coldest darkness, he felt, for the first time, as if he might at last get a good night’s sleep.

“Choso,” he answered softly.

“Choso,” she repeated, and she said it with a care he had never heard coming from a human. “Well, Choso, let’s see if we can figure out what to do with you, shall we?”

“Aw, you really can’t stand being away from me for too long, hmm?” were Gojo’s first words when he picked up the phone.

Kagome clicked her tongue and rolled her eyes. He couldn’t see it, but she was sure, from the chuckle on the other side of the line, that he could picture it just fine. She pinned the phone between her shoulder and her ear, using her free hands to cut up the vegetables she had laid out in front of her.

“What has it been, a week?” she asked, knowing full well it wasn’t the case and grinning he spluttered indignantly. “No, I just— Ah, I ran into of your students today. Yuuji? I was wondering if you knew if he— was okay.”

“Ran into him?” Gojo repeated. “Ah, is it about the cursed womb painting? Ijichi said there was an issue with that. Curses tend to get bold when I’m away…” A sigh, a heavy one. “But what can you do!” he went on cheerfully. “not everyone can be as scary as I am. Anyway, we have a real good doctor. Yuuji’s fine.”

“That’s a relief,” Kagome sighed. “I felt bad for not helping him out there.”

“Wait, what do you mean ‘not helping him’? I thought you’d met him on the way. You were there?”

She hummed as she dropped the vegetables into the pot. Her homemade ramens were coming along nicely.

“Yeah, I got a feeling that something was happening. At first, I just wanted to check that everything was okay, and then it turned out they needed help. Yuuji… seems like a really good kid.”

A weird one, too, but since her instincts did seem to be failing her when it came to him, she would wait a little longer until she discussed that part.

“He is,” Gojo agreed spontaneously, “but, wait— did you fight that curse?”

‘Oh, no! Just helped the other sorcerer at the scene with his poisoning. Nanamin— No, Nanami, I think. He was very polite.”

“He might look like he is at first, but he has no respect for his senpais,” Gojo sniffed disdainfully.

“He’s younger than you? I would never have guessed.”

“Thank you.”

“That wasn’t a—”

“So did they exorcise the cursed painting then?” Gojo interrupted her before she could finish her thought. “Ijichi was pretty vague. Just said it was a pain.”

“Hm,” Kagome said, taking the pot off the fire and proceeding to pour a generous portion of ramen into a bowl, “no, they didn’t kill him. I brought him to Miyamoto’s temple.”

With a smile, she gestured at Choso, who was perched on a chair across from her, watching her carefully, to start eating. He only hesitated for a second before digging in. Kagome sat down, waiting for Gojo to say something. For a while, there was shocked silence, before a high-pitched laugh trickled in.

“You’re something else, Ka-go-me,” he said at last, not bothering to question her one second. “Not afraid he’ll kill everyone there in the middle of the night.”

“No,” she said matter-of-factly. Even if she’d thought Choso would do that, the priestesses were setting up ofudas, just in case, but they hadn’t hesitated to open their doors to him when Kagome had explained the situation. The notion of a half-curse had been as confusing to them as it was to her, and she was pretty sure they had just equated it to a hanyo and moved on. Anyway, Sumiko could no doubt handle him on her own. “I’m a good judge of character. I trusted you, didn’t I?”

“You should ask Nanami if he thinks that makes you a good judge of character,” he laughed again, but it was softer this time. Fonder. “But alright. You better know what you’re doing.”

Well, she wasn’t sure about that, but she was going with what felt right to her. It had never betrayed her before.

“You should let me know when you’re back in Tokyo,” she said.

“Ah, I’ll have to see if I can find the time,” he sighed dramatically. “I’m a busy, busy man, you kn—”

“Too bad,” she interrupted him. “Guess I won’t be seeing you anytime soon, then.”

He didn’t fall into her trap this time.

“I’ll tell you when I land,” he said, with a smile so wide she could hear it in his voice. “Bye, Kagome.”

Land? Just how far did they send him?

“Bye, Gojo,” she replied. She waited a second longer, hesitant to end the call, before dropping the phone on the table, thoughtful.

She hadn’t expected she would be this impatient to see him again.

Chapter Text

Kagome had to be the only person at her high school who didn’t hate the first day after the holidays. Teachers and students alike dragged their feet back to their classrooms while she marched through the hallways, determined to start that final term the right way. She did try her best to lower her energy levels, not wanting to overwhelm the kids, but she still caught herself humming while wiping the board. She just couldn’t help it — she loved it here. Loved her job, loved the kids, and she genuinely, truly believed in what she was doing with them.

That first day, after the winter holidays, was an exception. She hadn’t meant to act any different than usual, and truth be told, she still was far more cheerful than any other teachers, earning herself exhausted looks over coffee cups as she’d blitzed through the teacher’s lounge on her way to class. Still, there was a distance to her, a thoughtful expression when her eyes drifted to the window, which happened more often than it normally did.

Her students, all obtuse, tired teenagers that they were, didn’t fail to notice, unlike her colleagues. It was Ms. Higurashi, after all, and she came back to herself with that warm smile of hers any time someone called for her attention. She might be just a little off today, but no one had the heart to try and mess with her. Instead of taking advantage of it, they let a peaceful quiet take over the room. While the kids reviewed the papers she’d given back to them, along with exercises she’d planned to help them correct the most common mistakes they’d made, her mind was free to wander.

There wasn’t much outside to inspire her. With the school being in the middle of Tokyo, all she could look out on was the concrete school yard. There were some well-maintained lawns, some perfectly trimmed bushes, and even a couple of old trees, but it all felt so very urban, so modern, so overbearing. Everything right where it belonged, without any room for growth or, frankly, without any room for people. No one could walk on those lawns, the bushes were there to look pretty and nothing else, and the trees weren’t meant to be climbed.

She wasn’t sure how much longer she could be here. She wondered if she should have seen it coming, that fateful day in Shibuya, that using her powers on that scale again would eventually awaken this itch in her soul. So far, she’d been happy to just go wherever she was needed. When she was fifteen, it had been the Feudal Era, then her family’s side, when they had thought her gone forever, and then to these kids — her kids, for all intents and purposes.

Problem was, now she felt called in another direction, and figuring out what to do with it was weighing on her, heavier than she would have expected. It wasn’t like she was no longer needed here. She would just be more useful elsewhere, and she didn’t know how to keep being a teacher while looking the other way. That wasn’t her, it had never been. But if she did choose to leave her job, going back to her roots as a priestess… It would make it the second time she had to leave behind something she loved once her role there stopped being the most important thing in her life.

These questions followed her around all day, a dark cloud over her head. She knew it wasn’t the same, that she would be able to see her students again, even if she left her job, but dammit, she loved it here. She didn’t want to leave — and at the same time, if there was something greater out there, she did want to seize it, and—

And by the end of the day, she wasn’t any closer to having a definitive answer than she had been a week ago. She let her students escape, missing, for once, the worried glances they were exchanging and their kind, worried tone as they wished her a good evening. Once everyone was gone, she stayed behind, tapping her fingers on the wooden desk, slowly putting her stuff back into her bags, mind and eyes both unfocused.

She was still there when the door slammed open.

“Miss Higurashi! Miss—”

There was Misaki, panting, completely out of breath. She doubled over, resting her hands on her knees, choking on her words when she tried to keep talking too soon.

“Misaki,” Kagome called, alarmed, walking up to the girl and putting a hand on her shoulder, searching for injuries, “is everything okay? Did something happen?”

The girl shook her head and hands vehemently at the same time, as hard a denegation as she could muster.

“No,” she finally managed to inhale, “no, I’m fine, but your boyfriend is there!”

Kagome blinked.

“My what now?”

“Your boyfriend!” Misaki repeated, impatient. “He’s waiting for you outside the school.” Then, leaning in as if in confidence: “I think he’s brought you a gift! That’s why you were upset today, right? You two fought?”

Oh. Oh, sweet kid.

“It’s really nice of you to worry about me,” she said, her voice soft, “but even if that was true, that is my personal life. I don’t share that with my students, you understand, right?” Then, after a couple seconds, and because she couldn’t not say anything while Misaki’s face grew dejected, she added “but thank you for letting me know.”

Just like that, the smile was back.

“I’ll go tell him you’re coming!”

“No, please don’t—”

Kagome didn’t bother finishing her sentence, Misaki already too far to hear her. She was sure the kid would stay behind to try and see the ‘reconciliation’. She was also sure that Sakura would be behind her, pulling on her arm and trying to get her to leave the scene, but wouldn’t be able to convince Misaki and end up watching the whole thing as well. She shook her head, smiling. The whole day, her students had been the ones to pull her out of her melancholia — but it only made it harder, didn’t it? She loved this place, and yet a part of her ached to leave it, while the other ached at the thought of leaving.

She wasn’t surprised to find Gojo waiting outside for her. Seeing him chatting up a very flustered janitor who just wanted to close the gates but seemed too enraptured by the shine of his blue eyes behind his sunglasses, now that caught her off guard.

“Gojo, would you let Mr. Hayashi do his job?” she called out, walking up to them.

The sorcerer turned towards her, shooting her a dazzling smile that made her breath catch in her throat. By now, she knew full well how handsome he was, of course, and yet even she hadn’t expected that it would have that kind of effect on her.

She blamed it on the weird day she’d been having.

“Kagome!” he replied cheerfully, before turning towards the janitor, triumphant. “See, I told you she knew me.”

“I’m so sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Hayashi,” Kagome apologized, “I hope he hasn’t been too much of a nuisance?”

“Hey, I’ll have you know that—”

She pushed her bike into Gojo’s legs, deciding on the fly that he’d live and it might succeed in shutting him up long enough for her to remove them both from the situation.

It never actually made contact with him, but she didn’t notice that.

“We’re just leaving,” she said, apologetic once more.

“No worries, Miss Higurashi,” the old man replied, shaking his head politely. “We were just having a conversation.”

“We were just having a conversation, Kagome,” Gojo parroted, “who do you take me for?”

She glared at him, and he snickered, clearly enjoying teasing her.

“You make a very lovely couple,” Mr. Hayashi added as he closed and locked the gate, smiling fondly at her.

“That’s not— Ugh.” As the janitor was leaving, she turned around to face Gojo. Maybe she should have known that, with how she’d been feeling lately, it would only take a moment before he got on her nerves. “Was that necessary? I work here.”

He shrugged, not looking too concerned with it.

“Dunno why you’d care,” he answered. It should have sounded like nothing but a throwaway sentence, yet Kagome got the sense that it was, in fact, as genuine as it got. He had no clue why she would care, and her anger left her like she’d just taken the lid off a pot of boiling water. Not only was there no point in trying to explain it to him but also… Did she care more than she should? “I got you something,” Gojo added, unaware of her mental turmoil, thrusting a small bag in her hands.

“Thank you,” she said, mostly on autopilot, glancing down at the elegant, pristine bag.

“Figured I might as well bring back some macarons, since I was in Paris. Now, how about we go see that cursed painting of yours?”

Now that brought her back to herself.

“You were in Paris when I called you?”

She couldn’t even begin to process the rest of his sentence, and she didn’t know if she liked how thrown off her game she was right now.

“Yeah, but don’t worry, I’ll pay for the phone bill,” he answered lightly. “Don’t you want to get moving so you can get home faster and, I don’t know, grade papers or something?”

“I’m all caught up,” she handwaved his concerns, “now why were you in Paris?”

“’cause they needed help with a curse,” he said like it was obvious.

Kagome held back a groan, raising her hands to massage her temples. At this point, it felt like he was deliberately not helping.

“But why would they need you to come all the way from Japan to do that?”

“I told you before,” he said, and even if he didn’t appear to see the point in this conversation, he at least didn’t sound annoyed, “I’m the strongest. They didn’t have anyone there that could handle that thing.”

She studied his expression, found it to be as nonchalant and easy-going as ever. He didn’t have that bright smile of his plastered on his face like he often did, just a ghost of it, curving the corners of his mouth upwards. It was true that he’d said it before but she— hadn’t taken him all that seriously. Now, he wasn’t giving her any reason to think he was bragging, just making a statement. Seemed like it was true, then…

“Did it go well?” she asked, and his eyes went wide behind the sunglasses, before a grin broke on his face.

“Yeah,” he answered, half laughing. “It was nothing.”

She kept watching him. It didn’t make sense to her, that it could both be nothing and that he would need to be flown in from all the way across the globe to deal with that curse. He would have to be ridiculously strong for it to be true and—

And, well, if yokai existed outside of Japan, the same could probably be said about her, which at least made it a possibility.

“Thank you for the macarons,” she said at last.

A soft wind blew on the street, running through her hair, as a comfortable silence settled between them. Gojo was watching her, an unusual softness in his expression, and she was watching him back, studying him quietly. Not staring up at him in awe, not thinking about ways he could be useful to her, no, just watching him.

In the end, he was the one that looked away. There was something about her eyes — something that felt a little too real.

“Not that I don’t like standing outside doing nothing, but… Cursed painting?”

“Right,” she said, blinking herself back to reality. “You— You just want to check on him, right? You’re not going to hurt him?”

“Depends,” he answered with a shrug. “If he’s a threat, I’ll have to.”

“What?”

Yeah, he’d thought she wouldn’t like that.

“There’s an execution notice on his head,” Gojo replied, his tone just as light and airy as it had been when he’d given her a gift. “If you think about it, I’m doing him a favor by checking on him first.”

“And why is there an execution notice on his head?” Kagome all but snarled at him.

Huh, she actually looked mad now, her face turning red and her eyes stormy. Her hands clenched around the handles of her bike, her jaw tightened, and he thought he spotted sparks of her power flying off her.

There were a number of answers he could give her. Truth be told, there had been a notice ever since the death paintings had gone missing because of their very nature, but that wasn’t enough of a reason to end a life, as far as he was concerned, so he didn’t see in point in stating that. Instead, as he typically preferred doing, he went straight for the kill, casually, burying his hands in his pockets.

“Has he told you he was part of the attack on Shibuya?”

He watched as she paled, but didn’t back down.

“He hasn’t said anything about that,” she admitted, lowering her gaze, her voice shaky, “but he’s— it’s been clear that he carries a lot of guilt.”

“He didn’t play the biggest role,” Gojo said, his voice still leveled, like he was talking about the weather, “but he did kill people, and if he’d chosen differently, he could have saved many of them.”

Kagome went quiet. She believed in people’s ability to change and to get better — how could she not? Of her friends, none had been the same when she had met them and when she had left them. There was something about Choso that resonated with her deeply, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to look at herself in the mirror if she didn’t at least give him a chance. And yet… She wasn’t part of the sorcerer world, but Gojo was. She’d seen firsthand the lengths he was willing to go to in order to ensure humans’ survival. It was easy to forget, with how he behaved most of the time, but right now, he radiated calm power and determination, and she was reminded of it once more.

“If I think he’s feeling remorseful and that he wouldn’t do it again, he’ll get to stay,” she decided at last.

“And if I think he’s a danger to society and to my students, I’ll kill him,” Gojo said in reply.

Like every part of the conversation until now, he stated it matter-of-factly. He wasn’t trying to pick a fight, so Kagome shrugged.

“If I disagree, I’ll stop you.”

A grin formed on his face, wide and amused.

“Think you’d be able to?”

Yes, she did.

“Do you think it would change anything if I didn’t believe I could?”

He laughed, eyes crinkling, and Kagome watched him in interest. He hadn’t balked when she’d gotten angry, hadn’t flinched when she’d stood up to him. It hadn’t changed his mind, clearly, but if anything, he seemed to like it and she… wasn’t sure what to do with that. If anything, it made her curious, wanting to know more about this side of him — more serious than most of what she’d seen from him so far, yet with an odd gentleness to it.

Yeah. She was curious.

“Shall we go now?” he offered, opening his arms for her.

“I’d love to,” she said, letting the tension dissipate and turn into their usual back-and-forth, “but two of my students are watching us and it would be very weird if we just disappeared. So I’m afraid you’re going to have to climb on,” she smiled innocently, pointing at the carrier with her chin.

His smile fell.

“If only you’d let me know ahead of time you were coming, I’m sure this could have been arranged for,” she sighed, mercilessly playing her part.

“I could just call—”

“I’m not getting in a car.”

He pouted, staring at her, and she remained unflinching. For some heartbreaking reason, she seemed to be perfectly immune to his puppy eyes, while he always ended up giving in without her even having to try.

“Fine. But if you can’t carry me, I’ll drive.”

He didn’t know what was funny enough in that sentence to make her burst out laughing.

“I think I’ll manage,” she said, still chuckling to herself.

Well, in that case, he wasn’t going to miss the opportunity, was he?

He sat behind her, balancing himself without trouble, even if it meant awkwardly holding up his long legs. She didn’t have any trouble maintaining her bike upright, which was a little impressive, to be honest. As she started moving, he wrapped an arm around her waist, putting his head on her shoulder. Not that he needed it, he’d be able to stand on that thing and still not lose his balance. He just figured it’d be fun to see her reaction.

“You don’t mind?” he practically purred in her ear.

He didn’t think she’d turn around, her face only inches from him, wide brown eyes staring into his. She looked mildly surprised by the question, but not bothered in any way.

“Sure, go ahead,” she replied with a smile, and he didn’t know if it was the sparks in her eyes, how pretty she was, or how easy she made it sound, welcoming him in her space, but either way, he found her to be breathtaking.

She turned away and went back to pedaling, and while he didn’t let go, Gojo found himself very thankful that she couldn’t see the redness that spread from his cheeks to his ears and the back of his neck.

It should have been an invitation to do whatever he wanted, to try and mess with her some more, just because he could. Instead, as his heartbeat increased, he went stiff behind her, frozen, unsure of what to do. The thought of wrapping himself around her, letting himself enjoy her warmth and her proximity, was more enticing than it should have been, and it set off alarm bells in his mind that he thought he should have heard a long time ago.

He just— he just hadn’t even realized he was letting her get so close before, close enough to affect him in that way. He welcomed fun, and distractions, and things that were outside the norm, and Kagome was all of that at once. He’d never bothered thinking about it, going with what was most natural to him at all times — until now.

Because now, it wasn’t just that it came naturally to want to be close to her, though it did. Now, he was finding that he wanted to be close to her. Badly. In a way no one had made him feel in over a decade, if ever.

And no matter how much he wanted to give in, he remembered distinctly where that had landed him the last time.

Kagome had worried about how Choso would react to her bringing Gojo with her unannounced, but he kept himself expressionless, waiting for them under the naked cherry tree in the temple’s courtyard. He showed no surprise, no sadness, no fear.

“Have you come to kill me?” he asked Gojo, not letting his voice waver.

“We’ll see about that,” Gojo answered cheerfully, his usual smile on his face.

Next to him, Kagome grimaced. She didn’t like how flippant he was about the whole situation. She had agreed to at least ensure Choso wouldn’t hurt civilians anymore, but she wasn’t sure that was the way to do it. She was no stranger to death, and she had killed yokai herself when they had been threats to her or her friends. This was different, though, because she had already taken Choso under her wing.

“I understand,” Choso nodded before she could intervene. “Many innocents died by my hands. I likely deserve the fate your higher-ups want for me.”

“They’d certainly think so,” Gojo chuckled, “but what we need to figure out now is if I do.”

A shadow passed on Choso’s face for the first time. Hesitation.

“I’ll let you kill me, if that’s what you wish,” he said at last. “As long as you promise to protect Yuuji Itadori, I won’t fight you.”

Gojo scratched his head, tilting it to the side as if it would give him a better look at him.

“It wouldn’t do you any good to try doing that,” he said casually, “but I’m going to need you to explain that one, ‘cause last time I checked, you wanted Yuuji dead. Kugisaki too, I’m pretty sure.”

Choso visibly balked at that.

“That is no longer the case,” he said through gritted teeth.

“And I’m going to need more than that to decide what to do with you.”

Choso stared at him. Gojo exuded confidence and power, but despite his open attitude, he wasn’t giving him much to decipher. When he couldn’t find anything in the man’s frozen smile, his eyes instinctively darted to Kagome. The woman who had put a roof over her head without questioning him, the woman who had just decided to extend a hand to him after witnessing the harm he could cause. She was now watching him, worry all over her face, but still no defiance.

“How about we sit down and have a cup of tea?” she suggested once she realized they’d gotten to standstill.

“Lots of sugar for me!” Gojo called out.

She rolled her eyes, but hurried to a side door in the courtyard, which she opened to find three kids with their ear pressed against it.

“You heard that, girls?” she asked, and when they nodded sheepishly, she grinned. “If you get it to us real quick, I won’t tell Miyamoto.”

They scampered, and she returned to the more pressing business at hands. Choso and Gojo were still standing several feet apart, Choso’s posture defensive, while Gojo’s was casual and relaxed. She elbowed him in the ribs when she approached.

“Play nice,” she whispered when he looked down at her, eyes wide in surprise.

He blinked at her. Damn, he knew she could get through his Infinity, but he hadn’t expected for it to happen in such a blatant and easy way.

“Did you not hear the part about him trying to kill two of my students?”

“I did, but it didn’t get us very far, did it?” She turned to Choso, softening right away, which made Gojo scoff in disbelief. “Why do you no longer want Yuuji dead?”

His eyes went back and forth between her and Gojo, unsure. He knew Kagome would never even consider harming anyone based on their nature. She hadn’t asked him questions, about what he was, but it had been clear that she knew from the start. A sorcerer, though? That was a different matter entirely.

“How do I know you are to be trusted?” he asked Gojo, voice hardening.

“You don’t,” Gojo shrugged, not giving him an inch, “ you just answer me.”

“Will you stop?” Kagome hissed at him, and it made him smile, but not enough to make him look away from Choso. There was too much at stake here — namely, the safety of his students, one of whom had already nearly died twice while he wasn’t there to protect him. She was being protective, too. He could understand that.

Might even think it was kind of cute, actually.

“You know what I am,” Choso stated, words chosen with care.

“Cursed womb painting, yeah,” Gojo shrugged.

“Is that what you call it, when someone is half-curse and half-human?” Kagome chimed from next to him, and, for the second time in a matter of minutes, Gojo found himself just blinking at her. “I can tell from his energy,” she clarified, which was not helpful at all.

Hina walked in the courtyard before he could quip back at her, and they all went quiet, tacitly deciding that this was no conversation for a kid to hear. The girl did throw them curious glances, taking her time, making it obvious that she wanted to know what they were talking about.

“Thank you, Priestess Hina,” Choso said, bowing his head at her, and the girl beamed, looking up at him with stars in her eyes.

“Thank you,” both Kagome and Gojo echoed.

She waited a little longer, before reluctantly leaving the courtyard, a cute pout on her face.

“Cursed womb paintings is what they called us,” Choso answered Kagome’s previous question, reaching for his cup of tea. His voice softened when he was talking to her. “My brothers and I are the result of the experiments of Noritoshi Kamo, former head of the Kamo clan. We were preserved as fetuses and, because we could not be exorcised, kept as cursed objects in the jujutsu headquarters for 150 years.”

Bile rose from her stomach.

“But your mother—”

“We never knew her,” Choso replied, speaking with little emotion. “We were never born, but due to our connection by blood, we were at least able to talk to each other, during those years. Nothing but darkness, cold, and my brothers’ voices. That is who Nobara Kugisaki and Yuuji Itadori took from me,” he added, looking at Gojo again.

“In their defense, your brothers were trying to kill them,” Gojo replied, placid as ever.

Choso nodded, his expression tightening, but Kagome could barely hear them over the sound of her own heartbeat. 150 years of nothing. She had spent three days in the Jewel, with nothing to cling to but the thought of Inuyasha coming to save her, and that had been enough for her to consider dooming herself for eternity.

If what he was saying was true, Choso hadn’t even had that escape.

She was going to be sick.

“And that… was my fault,” Choso kept going, getting even slower, words coming out painfully. “I was the one who— thought we would be better off, living as curses instead of among humans who would never accept my brothers.”

Sick. Jinenji was in her mind again, except now she had to wonder: would he still have been a gentle giant, after 150 years in the worst kind of prison? How was she to look at Choso and condemn him? And how was she to not say anything, to act like the lives of the kids and the innocents of Shibuya were an acceptable price for the universe to pay as an apology for what he’d suffered?

This wasn’t something she was cut out for. She couldn’t be. But next to her, Gojo stood, unwavering.

“So why the change of heart?” he asked. “The remaining cursed paintings are still at the headquarters and there’s nothing to be done about it, so it can’t be that you want to protect them.”

“No,” Choso agreed, “but—” He hesitated again, eyes flickering to Kagome once more, before he drew in a breath. “I only realized when I was fighting Yuuji.”

A deep breath.

“He is my brother too.”

Silence. Gojo looked up at the sky, thinking about it. He’d known there was something about Yuuji, obviously, his Six Eyes had told him that much, but he’d assumed it was just Sukuna’s presence within him. Knowing he had failed to come to that conclusion on his own was a very frustrating realization. Sure, he had never seen an incarnated death painting, but did that make a difference? He was Gojo Satoru. The strongest.

He should have figured it out, if not when meeting Yuuji, then the second he had laid eyes on Choso.

“Wait,” Kagome said, coming back to the conversation even more confused, “how is that even possible?”

“I— I’m not sure,” Choso admitted. “What I know is that Noritoshi Kamo’s blood runs through him, too. I don’t know how he was able to go through the ages, but there is no mistaking it.” His eyes were pleading when he looked at Gojo. “As long as you ensure nothing happens to him, I will let you kill me.”

“What about Nobara? No longer want to kill her?”

“She’s my brother’s friend,” Choso replied, unflinching. “All I have ever wanted is for my younger brothers to be safe and happy. If letting her live is what it takes, then so be it.”

When Gojo had fought with him in Shibuya, his eyes had been dead, his body guided only by his desire to inflict pain upon others. Now, there was a light in there, a determination he could see in the tension of his shoulders and of his jaw.

“Sounds good to me,” he said, grin stretching his lips once more. “What d’you say, Kagome?”

He found her looking up at him, her eyes glassy with tears, and a new emotion surged in his chest. He felt an overwhelming urge to wipe them off, to destroy whatever had made her tear up forever, to ensure it would never happen again. Against his thigh, his hand twitched, fighting to lift up towards her face, but he forced it down.

Hm. He wasn’t used to not doing whatever he wanted the second he wanted it.

How unpleasant.

“Really?” she asked, sounding surprisingly fragile, which she never had since he’d first met her. “I mean— I agree, obviously, but if you feel that way too—”

“We’ll have to bring Yuuji here, at some point,” Gojo commented, and Choso immediately lit up.

“Here?” he asked, childlike excitement in his voice. “Well, you’ll have to warn me first, so I ensure— I’ll have to look presentable, of course—”

Kagome chuckled, taking one step towards him to put her hand on his arm, and something in Gojo’s stomach twisted.

“Of course, Choso. I could even take you to buy some clothes if you’d like but— Just take your time, okay? You have plenty of that.” Here. Outside. Under the sky.

Choso looked at her, and, at last, he let himself believe that he wasn’t on borrowed time. He leaned into her touch, closing his eyes, and Kagome didn’t hesitate one moment before wrapping her arms around him. She’d yearned for human touch so badly after the incident with the Jewel, so she was sure there was no harm in a hug.

“Thank you,” Choso whispered.

“Of course,” she answered, because it was true.

“And I’m just happy to be here,” Gojo said from behind them, switching his weight from his toes to his heels, pouting like a kid who was being left out.

Kagome giggled, letting go of Choso and taking a step back.

“Thank you, Gojo Satoru,” he said , bowing his head respectfully. “I won’t forget what you’ve done here.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Gojo shrugged, waving off the thanks because, well, what else was he supposed to do? Kill a guy who’d been dealt such a shitty hand at life when he wanted to do better? “Just don’t get yourself noticed, ‘kay? I’ll figure out when Yuuji’s ready for this.”

“Certainly. I’ll stay here. Thank you again.”

Kagome squeezed Choso’s hand, before turning to Gojo with the brightest smile he’d ever seen on her. He felt his lips move to reply in kind without him having any control on it. He couldn’t help being pulled into her orbit, and he wasn’t careful, he was going to come crashing down, too.

“I’m not getting on that bike again, but how about I take you home now? You must have papers to grade or some shit.”

She tilted her head, thoughtful.

“Actually, I told you, I’m all caught up. I’ve given all the papers back to the kids today, so I don’t have anything like that to do tonight.”

Well, there was no harm in having a little fun, hm?

“Oh my god, that’s so good!”

“Told you,” Gojo said with a smug grin, sitting down at the counter next to her. “Best ice cream parlor in Tokyo.” He bit down in his, ignoring the way it made his teeth ache. “Might be the best in Japan,” he commented, “Not the world, though. Italy’s got some pretty decent ones. You’ll have to try it at some point.”

“I don’t know when I’ll be able to do that,” Kagome sighed, taking her time with her ice cream. “Or have the money, for that matter. My brother’s still in college, and mama and grandpa don’t work, so… someone has to.”

“For the record, being a sorcerer pays real well,” Gojo hummed.

She frowned at that, but he didn’t realize why, couldn’t understand why it would make the thoughts that had been running in her head worse — that leaving behind one of the things she loved most in world might solve all her problems.

“I could also just pay for you,” he added. “That’s not an issue.”

Kagome chuckled, let his words distract her. Wasn’t it fun, how easy it was for him to make her forget all about what had been torturing her for the past week?

“I wanted to thank you,” she told him, voice soft.

“Well, wait until I’ve actually paid for the plane tickets at least.”

“No, I didn’t— I meant about Choso.”

He stilled, tilting his head to the side to look at her.

“There’s no need for that.” His voice was just more tense than earlier. It was barely noticeable, but Kagome didn’t miss it. “I wasn’t going to kill him for no reason.”

“That’s still not what I meant,” she said, resting her elbow on the table and propping her chin in the palm of her hand. “I couldn’t have done it. Fighting with him to protect kids during a battle is one thing, but— I would never have been able to go through with it. I could—” A brief, embarrassed laugh. “I could barely keep it together, when he was talking about what had happened to him. So, thank you. For taking that responsibility.”

Yeah, there was still no need for her to say that, and yet Gojo felt a knot forming in his throat, choking him up. This was something he dealt with constantly. Curses were one part of his job, but curse users were just as big of an issue, and he was the one who went out, the executioner sent by the higher-ups to deal with what they couldn’t handle themselves. Oftentimes, there was no debating that they were right — dude who liked wearing people’s faces? Dead. Hired killer who could walk through matter and liked pulling his victims in walls before leaving them there to die an excruciating death? Dead. That one woman who only dated married men and then ate their hearts? Dead.

But not all cases were that easy. Sometimes, there were kids. Kids who had grown up not even knowing what curses were, shunned for seeing things no one else could, and who had an execution notice floating over their heads even if they’d never gotten the chance to learn that what they were doing was wrong. And then, yeah, he stepped in, obviously. Who would do it if not him? He was the only one who could do it without facing consequences. He didn’t need anyone to thank him.

Yet Kagome did, and suddenly, he felt small.

“That was nothing,” he said.

“It wasn’t to me,” she replied, her eyes so fond and warm, he thought they might make him melt.

He couldn’t do that, though, no matter how much he wanted it. There was too much to lose in giving himself over like that. He needed to step back, or else he might become the asteroid plummeting through the atmosphere, all of him lost before he ever reached the Earth’s surface.

He would do it. He’d step back, because Kagome was getting too close, making it look as easy as breathing, and he couldn’t have that.

He would do it. He swore he would.

But he would wait— just a little longer. He’d wait until her shoulder was no longer brushing against his while she happily ate her ice cream, he’d wait until her arms were no longer around his neck once he dropped her off at her place, he’d wait until the thought of letting her go no longer made him sick to his stomach.

He would do it. Just not right now.