A holiday.
After the past couple of days, it was one he didn't mind and one he actively enjoyed. Jiki soaked in the tub of warm water, hovering on the capacious edge between bliss and unconsciousness. At least he was until she spoke, her very voice washing away the sleep in his eyes faster than anything else.
"You've been smiling all day."
He tilted his head up to her face, knowing the soft smile she mentioned remained on his face.
"Should I not?" he questioned as they peered into each other's eyes. The eyes were the entrance to the soul, and they stared deeply into each other's. Whatever she found in his made her return the smile with a bashful expression and a deep blush.
"You don't smile often," she replied before breaking off the eye contact and rolling the sleeves of her black-colored shirt up. She picked up a sponge and a bar of soap before making her way back to his form. Then she glided the sponge through his skin, cleansing it while simultaneously shifting to his white locks and sinking her fingers into them.
He relaxed further and began to sink into that unconscious sensation once more before he remembered to reply.
"I rarely have a reason to."
Even with his eyes half-lidded and his awareness barely in the waking world, he noted her pout with a smile.
"So what's your reason for smiling now?" she questioned, and he answered easily.
"You." Her face heated up so fast that if he took a pan and eggs to it, he would've made fried eggs in a second.
"Y-you really should smile more. Regardless of the reason," she finally managed to stutter out after a few seconds, but he had already begun to drift into unconsciousness again. His guard was truly down for the first time in months as he immersed himself in her presence.
She continued to speak as she washed him, but he had stopped listening. Instead of focusing on the words, he marinated in the soft candor of her voice, allowing blissfulness to take him.
Truly everything was right in the world whenever Aiko was present.
…
He sat in seiza in a very familiar dark cavern. Like every other time he was made to come down here, he was forced to remember the first time he came here; he had been... confused. Not frightened, never frightened. But he had just woken up to a new life, and Aiko had led him here with fear in her eyes and a summon from the capricious clan head.
"Hmmm," old man Tatsumi finally spoke. The older man had stepped down years ago and was no longer the head of the Gojo clan, but considering Satoru was Satoru, the man had been forced to retake some of the responsibilities that he had happily discarded.
Jiki had just finished telling the old man about everything. From the Night Parade of a Thousand Demons to Shoko's kidnapping, his clash with the sorcerer killer, and finally, the agreement they came to.
"The elders are not aware of this agreement, I take it?" the old man questioned as he took a slow drag from his pipe, and Jiki nodded in agreement. He had been ordered to kill the sorcerer killer, and when he came back without a dead body as proof, they had stayed silent for long seconds before dismissing him from their presence. One that he was all too happy to leave.
Even as he walked out of the room that day, he could hear the mutters, their fear driving them: "Untrustworthy," "unpredictable," and "frightening." It was only a matter of time until they did something… unwise. Old men and women with more power than they should wield always made them forget that in the end, what they wielded was political power.
An ephemeral thing that only mattered to those who cared or paid it any heed. "They forget that compared to people like me, to people like us, they are no different from the regular people they look down upon so much," Satoru's voice came back to him, and just like the first time he heard it, he saw the point.
"Good," old man Tatsumi finally replied before blowing another cloud of smoke out. "Now, do you know your greatest… weakness, Jiki?" he questioned as he took another drag, and just like the first question, Jiki didn't waste time thinking about it.
"My inability to use the reverse curse technique." Jiki had flaws. The acknowledgment of such was... unnerving.
"Correct," the man replied with a sage nod. "You're a genius, Jiki-kun. A prodigy that might never again be born, yet you are constrained by something. Your eyes, which are your greatest strength, are also your greatest weakness due to the damage they take with each activation.
"We have been patient and considerate, hoping you'd pick it up on your own like Satoru did or learn it from him or Shoko, but that has proven to be not forthcoming, which leaves you with a final source of guidance. One that you have not made an attempt to use."
The man waited for Jiki to say something, but instead, Jiki remained closed-eyed and waited for the man to continue, and there Jiki had the upper hand, for his patience was a thing of myth. Seeing a lack of response, the old man let out a sad sigh before continuing.
"Do you truly hate me so much that you'd handicap yourself instead of learning from me?"
He wanted to stay silent, but he refused to allow the allegations to slide. "I do not hate you, Tatsumi-sama." Yet even as the words left his lips, he knew them for false. Not exactly false, but there was a touch of untruth to it, and Jiki was self-aware enough to note it as his eyes opened and his brows scrunched.
"Even you do not believe those words, at least not totally. Maybe hate is not the right word. So let me use something else. You have not forgiven me for that day."
And here Jiki found himself unable to deny it. He thought he had. Assumed it had been washed off his back like all the times he had been forced to lay down his free will on the altar of sacrifice once more for those he loved.
But he hadn't, just as he hadn't forgotten that day. Now Jiki was forced to think, forced to recollect vividly. Despite his efforts with reverse engineering the iryo-nin techniques of his past life, he had failed and had never even bothered to give the old man a chance because of the choice that he had forced him to make.
Yet if he never made that choice, he would never have formed the new bonds he would've in this life. Brave and reckless Maki, timid and smart Emi, gregarious and loyal Panda, and finally somber and solid Toge. Without making that choice that night, he would never have been a pillar that Satoru could rely on and the pressure on his cousin would have been heavier.
He would've spent his days living a carefree life, painting and indulging a happier Aiko. And the world would have been lesser and weaker for it.
He found himself letting out a long sigh, as his brows smoothed back and his eyes closed once more. Perhaps it was time to let it go. For even if it was a choice he had been forced to make, it was one that he believed he would've made anyway, if only because in the end, Satoru reminded him so much of his brother. The happy boy who had been scarred by Itachi's deeds.
So he shifted from his seiza and bowed. His head to the ground and palms pressed flat to the ground as he said, "Gojo Jiki requests tutoring from former clan head Gojo Tatsumi."
It was time to let go.
…
This was his first holiday and an end to the school year, so when he was not in the depths of the Gojo clan alongside the old man, learning the surprisingly simple act of adding two negatives to create a positive - once again he cursed Satoru and Shoko because just with that single phrase, he was smart enough to put it together and go up in leaps and bounds. That aside, he spent the rest of his time with Aiko.
It had been a soothing couple of weeks, and they were merely days away from resuming the new session. And with that resumption came a lot of new challenges. Confirmation of Panda and Toge's health. He had not heard anything about them yet from shoko. Then there was the recent elder summon he had ignored unabashedly.
They still refused to believe his words on Toji's death, which he didn't honestly blame them for. The lie was flimsy, especially without a body. They were scared of the hold they had on him slipping and content in Satoru's presence as a blunt hammer to bash away their enemies. So knowing what the summons were about, he had shrugged it off and ignored it till they tired of it. They had stopped after discovering that one of their own had been missing, their attention shifting to something else. Instead of worrying about them, he focused on better things.
They walked down the entertainment districts hand in hand, and Aiko was furiously pointing towards different things. If she was distracted enough, she would drag him into whatever particular store drew her fancy, and they would either take turns trying on new outfits or whatever weird Western food Aiko had heard about. That was how he ended up in an all-black tab-collar shirt with white buttons to match, coupled with a pair of black trousers. She had noted how good it looked on him, and like with all things Aiko, he had succumbed to her will, unable to tell her how similar it was to Geto's dressing before he went rogue.
That was how their days usually went. Two people, one relaxing and mending from what he had experienced and the loss he had gotten, while another, more wholesome, more naive to the true cruelties of this world, went about with a constant smile on her face.
Jiki glanced at the near-euphoric look on her face as she tried a particular Western food: Bolognese spaghetti, and he smiled in return. He honestly wouldn't have had it any other way.
It was on this day, the sun was down, the night walkers had already begun to walk the streets with their partners, and the shops that preferred the hustle and bustle of daytime had begun to close while the ones that flourished with the nighttime audience had begun to open.
They sat inside a restaurant, and Aiko tried her best to devour the plate of spaghetti as fast as she could. She had forgotten the story she had been telling him the moment she took a bite of her meal, and Jiki didn't mind. Instead, he took another sip of his drink as he stared out the window. That was when he saw him, or them, to be more accurate.
A young boy walking and talking to himself, or that's what it might have looked like from a regular person's perceptions, but anybody with a shred of cursed energy running in their body would recognize the boy's partner as a curse. A humanoid curse with an extensive patchwork of scars and stitches criss crossing his body.
Jiki watched them walk past from his chair in the restaurant, and just as they were about to walk past the two-way glass, the curse's attention drifted to him. One gray and one blue eye stared at his swirling red and black.
It was fleeting, but he recognized the look in the curse's eyes. Curiosity. Like he had seen a new toy for the first time and was wondering how to take it apart, and if it was interesting, put it back together in whatever fashion that made the most fun. A child's curiosity.
"Come on, Mahito!" the boy called out from ahead of the two-way mirror, and the curse, Mahito, gave him a brief wave and began to walk forward once more to catch up with the boy.
The whole scene had left Jiki immensely curious. A humanoid curse, possibly a special grade, and a boy. An unregistered sorcerer. He didn't recognize the boy nor did he see any clan markings to affiliate him with a clan. Neither were there any obvious bindings or anything that linked the two together, so it was a relationship that had no chains. No masters.
So what was a maybe unregistered special-grade curse doing with a young impressionable civilian sorcerer?
"You've been looking out the window for the past few minutes," Aiko finally spoke, and he shifted the full weight of his attention back to her. She had finished her plate of food, and the sight of sauce on her face brought another soft smile to his lips.
'Have I?" He rebutted.
"Yeah, you have. You didn't even hear me the first time I—hey, why are you smiling?"
He took up a napkin and stretched over the table to dab at her lips with a smile. The act caused her to blush furiously as she tried to maintain a coherent train of thought. Realizing it was no use, she instead shifted tracks.
"An—anyway, what was I saying earlier?"
Jiki smiled again at the attempts to change topics but went along with it with a shrug as he put his elbow on the table and his face in his hands to stare at her better before replying.
"You were talking about how one of the maids stepped on old man Tatsumi's robes and forced him to fall down a pair of steps."
"AHA!" With that exclamation and laugh, she continued the story, and Jiki allowed his attention to drift as he sent the four cursed crows that lay perched at multiple strategic locations to follow the strange duo.
The original curse had split into four over the past few weeks, and it didn't take him long to figure out its technique. It was a good thing that even after it multiplied, he still had control over it.
So he shifted his focus back to Aiko as the birds went to sate his curiosity.
…
Ito Emi was uncertain, and not for the first time since she made the choice that changed her life. She woke up with an accelerated heartbeat, which happened at least twice a night. Scared, wide eyes darted around the room as she tried her best to shake off what she knew was a nightmare.
She put her hand between her head and rocked herself on her ass as she sat alone on the bed in the otherwise empty and spartan room. A reminder of the room she had stayed in for years. A room that a suited man had broken her out of.
She still remembered it like it was yesterday.
"You said you see demons." A rough and gruff voice called out from above her, and she raised her head up from the drawing she was making. She hunched over it as she raised her head to look. Hiding the image of a snake like monster hovering over a nurses head.
He was a big man. Stern features hidden behind a pair of shades, well-built and dressed in a corporate cream-striped suit and a blue undershirt. One of the senior doctors? She shook her head desperately in denial as she stuttered, "I—I'm cured now. I understand that I was halluci—"
She could see the way something change on the man's face, a sadness creeping in before it hardened once more and he raised a hand up, a hand that glowed bluish purple a second later. She stared in shock, her well-rehearsed lies falling apart, as she stared at the power wafting off the man's hands. "What is that?" She found herself asking as she stared transfixed.
"It is cursed energy, and if you can see it... You're a sorcerer, Ito Emi, and you have no place here."
Just like that, she was given a choice.
She couldn't return to bed now, so she slipped out of her bed and took off an oversized shirt from the hanger. Slipping her legs into a pair of slides, she found her way out of the room.
It didn't take her long to walk towards the door that marked the entrance of the female student dormitory. Her eyes glanced at Maki's door, but just like the rest of the other students, she was not around.
It was the holidays, and everyone had gone back home. Most of them still had something to return to. Even Maki had left with a vague note of wanting to see her sister
That left her, the sole student in Jujutsu High ignoring the resident sorcerers that lived on the campus. That particular group had been cut down drastically both from fear and Geto Suguru's rampage. For all Jiki spoke highly of him and he didn't aim at killing any of the students, the man had not shown the same restraint with the few sorcerers that had been stationed on campus.
She found her way to the entrance and stepped out of the corridor. The stars were bright, she noted. And if she squinted a bit, especially with the darkness, she could ignore the scars that marked the night of a thousand parade as they littered the school.
She let out another sigh as she remembered how much the stars reminded her of her time back in that hell. When she stared from barred gates and in clothes that strapped her hands to her body, as she tried her best to ignore the gibbering and whimpering of both curses and humans that staggered around the hospital.
She had dreamt of the outside world for so long that when the chance came to see it once more, she had not cared. Had not considered what it would mean to be a sorcerer. Instead, she had grabbed the chance, uncaring of what might follow it.
Not that she regretted it, she admitted to herself with a smile as she turned back and found her way back into the building. If she never made that choice, she would've never left that room with the barred windows.
After all, how was a sane person supposed to prove they were sane when they kept flinching in fear at things that no one else could see? But she had made that choice, taken the hand that had been stretched to her, and she didn't regret it in the slightest.
She had gotten to meet Jiki, Maki, Toge… Panda. She felt a sob rack through her, and she put her hands to her mouth to strangle the cry, regardless of the fact that she was alone in the building. She was not a kid anymore; she was no longer the girl in the dark room.
The squeak of hinges on a door opening tore through the silence of the night, and immediately she found herself freezing in place. An attack? She doubted. She was not important enough to be attacked. She was not a clan scion like Jiki or Toge, neither had she offended any clan or the higher-ups like Maki and Hakari-san had done.
That removed an attack from the probabilities, yet she found it impossible to relax. Instead, she found her eyes drifting to the door of her room and scanning her surroundings. She regretted not stepping out with a blade, yet she knew she was not completely useless without it. She had a technique now, one she had hidden while practicing to show it off to Jiki. Till she was forced to reveal it to survive Toji Fushiguro's blow, and even with that, she barely made it out with her life.
Yet it was enough. Enough to survive a single hit from the sorcerer killer, and that reminder was enough to give her the strength and confidence to breathe out easily. Instead of sinking into panic, she cleared her mind as much as possible and let out another breath. A technique Jiki had taught her for clearing her mind and compacting her thoughts, and just like everything he taught them, it worked remarkably well for each of them.
The second breath had her straightening up her body as she slowly walked toward the still slightly open door. Curse energy primed and technique ready to be fueled. Yet, the moment she opened the slightly ajar door and walked in, she was floored and subsequently lost control of her cursed energy. Still, she found that she was not scared.
Instead, her eyes drifted, and the first thing that left her surprised lips were words instead of a scream. "It's bigger on the inside."
"Yes, it is."
That reply brought back all the fear and sense of danger as she found herself taking control of her cursed energy once more and rapidly adopting a combat stance.
In the middle of the impossible room sat a figure. Even with the half-formed sensor training that Jiki had put her through, it was enough to let her know there was something eerie about the creature in front of her. The creature possessed four eyes with a cylinder-shaped head that featured no hair at all. The rest of its body was further hidden behind a beige robe.
"What—what?" She stammered out as she stood confused, still in her combat stance, yet the weird figure still sat relaxed, heedless of her readiness to fight.
"You're not the most curious thing I've seen this century; that spot is taken by that malevolent eye child's birth."
She stood stunned, unsure of what to reply, because she understood who she was talking about—Jiki—and once again, she found herself wondering about her teacher. It was not the first time something weird referred to his birth and presence as unnatural. She still remembered that vessel in the depths of the abandoned hospital surrounded by corpses.
"Yet unlike him, you interest me. Truly interest me. Now how did you, a child of civilian origins, do it?"
With those words, Emi's heart froze as she realized the creature in front of her knew.