Archive of Our Own

i.

“In on the wrong side, out on the right side, needle, point,” Obaa-san says. “Come on, now, don’t be afraid you’ll hurt yourself.”

“Obaa-san,” Nobara tells her, “I think you think I’m better at this than I actually am.”

Obaa-san raises a thin eyebrow without looking at her, wrinkled hands steady as she goes through the motions, unpausing between a stitch and the other. Meanwhile, Nobara’s hands are tangled in so much spare thread — blue thread, she was supposed to be sewing Fumi’s blue jacket before Fumi realized she’d taken it — that her circulation is cutting off a little. Maybe. Her fingertips do look a bit more purplish than usual, but Nobara would rather die than call it quits. 

It’s still frustrating. She wiggles her fingers a little, trying to make some room. Obaa-san’s hands are so sure; she does it like it’s no trouble at all, like she barely has to think about it. And Nobara knows that practice makes perfect or whatever, but come on. She’s practiced. She’s been in this exact predicament maybe four times: cross legged on the engawa right across from her grandma, facing the sun so Obaa-san doesn’t have to, fingers numb and trying to discreetly search for the needle she’d dropped somewhere between the floorboards. Her legs are sore and her neck is sweaty and gross, because it’s Spring and out in the countryside it gets warm. She’s told it’s different in the big city, though. Not that she would know for sure. 

It’s nice enough out, she supposes. Obaa-san’s house is halfway up a small hill also full of other houses, and from up here she can see the rest of the village — the lake that overflows during monsoon season, Midorika Park and the dirt paths leading up to the cherry trees, the main avenue and the pastel-colored conbinis. It’s idyllic, Nobara’s heard Fumi say. Fumi is good with words, which is cool, but she also likes this place, which isn’t. Nobara has lived here her entire life, and that’s the only reason she’s still here; she can’t imagine ever moving here out of her own volition.

Well, it’s not like Fumi made the choice, if Nobara has to give her some credit. She’s ten, and Nobara is nine and three quarters. No one’s letting them choose anything. 

Obaa-san puts a finger on her inner lip, as if checking for gashes. Now, that’s one thing Nobara really dislikes about sewing. The whole licking the thread to make it smoother thing just means bringing the needle way too close to her mouth, no, thank you. She hates the taste of blood. It makes her feel sick.

“Obaaa-san,” Nobara whines, leaning forward over her useless tangled hands and doing her best long-suffering voice. “ Please help me.”

At that, Obaa-san clicks her tongue, immediately putting down the skirt she’d been sewing and giving Nobara her full attention. Her wrinkles are deep and sulky, which makes her face look a little bit like an old tree trunk; some of the wrinkles are rosy-pink or white, and Obaa-san calls those scars — she has one over the bridge of her nose, about the size of Nobara’s thumb, and another longer, thin one curling down her neck. Nobara has one of those, too, on her left elbow, from when she got into a fight with a boy from the grade above at school and he threw her down in such a way that she skidded across the concrete of the playground. 

It hurt like hell, but Nobara hadn’t shed any tears for it. She wouldn’t give that boy the satisfaction. When Obaa-san came to pick her up, she saw the gash, and her fingers were very warm and very kind as she examined the wound. Oh, dear, she’d murmured, just a breath. It’ll scar.

And Nobara got so excited she sort of lost track of herself for a moment, her entire body buzzing. Really? She’d asked, bouncing on the heels of her feet. Like you, Obaa-san?

Obaa-san’s face had done a funny thing, but it’d smoothed out after a second, like Nobara only imagined it. Like mine, child. That’s what scars are. A sign that you were hurt. A sign that you healed.

Nobara likes to trace Obaa-san’s scars sometimes, ‘cause they feel bumpy and weird and cool, and she says they’re numb so she doesn’t feel them. She never says where they came from, though, but everyone’s entitled to secrets. Nobara has a few of her own. 

Obaa-san snorts at Nobara’s situation, because she’s not very nice. “I almost want to leave it alone,” she says, low voice brimming with mirth. “Those fingers of yours are a very nice shade of purple.”

“Obaa-san, ” Nobara says again, pleadingly. 

“No, really, hear me out. Do you think Rei-san sells that color at the store? Maybe I could use you as reference.”

“Obaa-san!”

She lifts her hands up in a placating motion, but the corners of her mouth won’t stop twitching. “Alright, alright,” she says. “Only took you ten minutes to ask for help, too. I’m half-tempted to give you extra credit.”

Nobara pouts, but raises her hands so Obaa-san can start untangling the threads more easily. “You’re not even my teacher,” she says. “You can’t give me any credit at all.”

“Oh, yeah?” Obaa-san cuts through a particularly nasty knot with a frown and her sewing scissors. “No taiyaki for you tonight.”

“You’re so mean to me,” Nobara says, shaking her free hand to try and regain some feeling in it.

“I’m mean to everyone,” Obaa-san deadpans. “You’re not special.”

Nobara smiles, because she knows it’s both true and not-true. Her grandma has a lot of things that are both at the same time: she’s both old and not-old, with her wrinkled face and smooth black hair, as dark as it was in old pictures of her Nobara’s seen; she’s both lived here since forever and yet been away for a very long time, sometime before Nobara was born; and she’s both very mean and very kind, although she’s never, ever nice. Nobara loves her to pieces.

And in a way, she’s sort of glad Obaa-san is all she has. Parents seem awfully complicated, and people always expect her to be sad whenever she mentions she doesn’t have any, even when she explains that she’s never had them, never known them, never even seen pictures of them, and how can she be sad about something she’s never had? It’d be like being sad she doesn’t have wings or orange hair. It makes Nobara want to punch their teeth in.

And she could, because Obaa-san taught her to throw a proper punch when she was seven. Ha. 

Obaa-san snips a final cut, and Nobara’s hands are finally free. She clenches and unclenches her fingers, squirming at the pins and needles that start running up and down her arms. Obaa-san gathers the blue threads into a tidy pile and sets it away inside her sewing box, which is made of clear varnish and about twice the size of her head. Fumi’s jacket lays on the floor next to Nobara, half-forgotten, and Nobara pats it gently, reassuring it that she will come back to it sometime, as soon as they’re done with this.

“Now, child,” Obaa-san says, and her voice makes Nobara sit up straighter. “How do you feel?”

Nobara scrunches up her nose. “It’s hard to explain. You can see it, right?”

Obaa-san looks at her, dark eyes appraising. “I can. It — and don’t lose it now that I tell you — didn’t waver since we began. You kept the flow steady.” At that, she smiles, and it makes her look much, much younger. “Good job.”

Nobara preens, grinning so wide her cheeks hurt. There’s a flicker of something at the corner of her eye, but she dismisses it; Obaa-san always says it’ll still take her a couple of years to be able to see her own cursed energy, nevermind other people’s. And it doesn’t matter that much, either. Not when Nobara can feel it.

It’s hard to explain cursed energy if you’ve never felt it, because it sounds like an ugly thing, but it isn’t; there’s just things that people think are ugly, because that gives them an excuse not to look at them too hard or even think about them more than they need to. It’s the things that make people uncomfortable, like hurt and anger and grief, that settle like splinters under your skin, either burning hot or aching cold. It’s fear, bone deep, that there’s something out there that no one will be able to save you from, or that the ugly things you feel might mean you’re not worth staying around for, or that at the end of the day you’ll have to trust yourself completely. 

If you break down fear, it’s very, very easy; it just means no one wants to be alone in the dark. And Nobara has always been taught that grief is the easiest thing of all, because it’s just love with nowhere to go, and the only hard thing about it is that people die while love doesn’t. It’s hard to put down, but sometimes it gets too heavy to justify it.

When I’m gone, you can love me best by letting hands touch hands, and letting go of what needs to be free, Obaa-san always says. When all that’s left of me is love, give me away. 

Fumi looks sort of queasy whenever Nobara brings that up, and one time, when her father overheard it, he said that it’s really, really not appropriate for Obaa-san to talk to Nobara about death at all, since she’s so young. Nobara had only squinted at him and not answered, but deep down she’s still not sure what that meant. Seeing death as a tragedy sounds upsetting for no good reason at all.

She knows she’s different like that. Everyone has cursed energy, but controlling it, like she’s learning to do, is another thing entirely; you can’t control it if you don’t understand it, and if you want to understand it, you need to admit you feel all the ugly things that people are so ashamed of. When she first started practicing it, Obaa-san would look at her through half-lidded eyes, silent and sturdy, before shaking her head and telling Nobara to go play somewhere else. That made Nobara so angry she could barely stand it, because it was a dismissal if she’d ever seen one, and Nobara hates being dismissed. Hates it, hates it, hates it.

“As a grandmother, I’m glad this doesn’t come easily to you,” was all Obaa-san had said, mouth set in a hard line. “As your mentor, I’m telling you to try harder.”

And she did. Every afternoon, if she had the time, she’d run all the way down the hill to Midorika Park, backpack hitting her back with dull thuds to the beat of her steps, ankles aching and shoes full of gravel. There were easier ways to do it, like going there straight from school — which was only a few blocks away, no hills and dirt paths and bugs on the way —, or catching the bus that stopped just down the street, which took a little longer because it went all the way around, but Nobara liked the hard things. She’d get there too thirsty and achy to grunt a hello to Haruma, the park guard, and pick a route at random to get deeper into the trees, where no one could see her. There, she’d throw down her backpack, sit down on an overgrown root, close her eyes, and start.

It’s both difficult and not difficult at all, because everyone sort of knows the things that they’re afraid will make them unlovable, or bad people, or something between the two. They never teach you that being a person is hard work, though. Everyone just acts like it’s easy even though it’s not, and then they teach you that if you’re struggling that’s something to be ashamed about, and shame is only ever a seed planted from the outside. Obaa-san always says that everyone has cursed energy not because everyone is afraid all the time, but because they’re ashamed of being.

(Shame would have made things easier. It’s so, so easy, when it comes to children.

Kugisaki Mirume is many things, but cruel is not one of them. That doesn’t mean the thought never crossed her mind. It just means she found a better way around it.)

So Nobara sits, and imagines her heart is a big, wide house, and there are hundreds and hundreds of rooms inside it. Some of them are messy and dirty, others are dusty and unused, and many are well-kept and warm, as if loved well and often. But Nobara is looking for the rooms down hallways with flickering lights and cracks on the walls, that have her looking over her shoulder and walking so slowly she’s almost stock still with fear. She searches for them, and opens doors, and makes herself look. In one room there’s blood on the walls and in another there is formless shrieking and in another there’s rotten fruit and girls that have gone bad. There’s her resentment and loathing and hatefulness, the way she loves Fumi to bits but would leave her behind in a second if she had the chance of going somewhere else, the way she knows Obaa-san lies to her all the time and it makes her hurt and want to hurt back. 

There’s all that, and it’s her. In spite of it all, it’s still her. Once she gets it, it’s as easy as breathing.

Obaa-san never asks her how she did it, exactly, and she’s sort of glad. It takes Nobara a month and a half of coming home past sundown and crying herself to sleep, barely paying attention to class, ignoring Fumi’s nervous eyes and attempts at conversation. It almost takes too much to justify it, but Nobara is stubborn, prideful, and she won’t stop even if she bleeds for it. 

But Obaa-san never asks her to do so, and in the end, Nobara is too embarrassed to talk about it. It would mean talking not as grandmother and granddaughter, but as person and person. It would mean talking about Saori, and in a town as small as this, Nobara hoards her secrets quietly and greedily. Everything she’s ever let go of has claw marks on it.

The first time she controls her cursed energy, Obaa-san laughs, and it startles her enough that she nearly loses it. Obaa-san smiles little and shows her teeth even less, so while Nobara’s home isn’t an unhappy place, the only laughter around is usually her own. But Obaa-san has a nice laugh — deep and throaty, and she laughs with her whole body, slapping her thigh and throwing her head back — and it makes Nobara feel warm all the way down to her fingertips. If it’s for a laugh like that, then maybe it’s worth it.

(Kugisaki Mirume has a scheduled phone call every month with someone whose life she saved, which was either the best or worst decision she’s ever made. The boy says he likes her because she’s interesting in every way he looks at it, and since he has six eyes too many, she takes his word for it. Doesn’t mean she has to agree with it, though. 

“You know I’m not a boy anymore, Kugisaki-san,” he always says, the sound of a smile plastered on his voice.

“You know I only humor you as a courtesy,” she always tells him. “You can’t charm me into saying yes.”

He hums. “Your granddaughter is promising, isn’t she? Must be around my kid’s age.”

“The kid’s not yours.” Her voice has been getting rougher and rougher, these past years. It must be the cigarette smoke.  “Heaven knows how you pulled that off in front of the higher ups.”

“Limits are a social construct, and they don’t apply to me.”

“You’re not cute,” she says. Her knuckles are white as they clench into fists, but her hands do not shake. “You teach that Zen’in boy to be a sorcerer. I’m only making things right.”

The boy hums again, and he sounds almost playful. Sometimes, she wonders if she’s really the one doing the humoring. 

“Kugisaki Nobara,” he says, and it chills her. “Got a soul as raw as her mother’s, doesn’t she?”

She hangs up on him. She always does. And she knows that the next time he calls her she’ll still answer, the same way she knows her granddaughter is eavesdropping just around the corner, the same way she knows that everything she’s doing might not be enough to save her.)

“Obaa-san,” Nobara says. “Are you proud of me?”

A cloud passes over and away from the sun, as if the sky had blinked. It’s a beautiful day, and she can hear the splashing of a water hose over on the neighbors’ backyard, and bright laughter, the thrilling of birds and buzzing of bees. It smells like Spring is making its way to Summer, and everything is sun-soaked and sweet. The shadow the engawa casts over them is cool and just slightly darker than it should be, but she’s well aware that’s just Obaa-san’s cursed energy. She wears it like an old coat, well-worn and only not threadbare both because she takes good care of it, and because she’s good at sewing.

Obaa-san blinks at her, face going slack before she’s able to school it back into its usual slightly amused demeanor. “Does that matter?”, is all she says.

Nobara shrugs. “Don’t know. Doesn’t it?”

She knows Obaa-san’s scared a lot of the time, because once you see it in yourself it’s easy to recognize it in other people. Obaa-san is scared and angry and always grieving, but she never really shows it. Nobara has never seen her sad, so she’s not exactly sure what it looks like.

It’s probably a bit like this, though.

“Well, now,” Obaa-san says, after a long pause. The needle and thread are back in her hands, and she doesn’t look Nobara in the eye. “For the sake of do’s and don’ts, let’s say I am. I’m very proud of you, Nobara.”

Nobara wonders if all adults think kids can never tell when they’re being lied to. Wonders if maybe Obaa-san knows Nobara knows, and if that isn’t somehow worse. She’ll have to ask Saori later — Saori always has the answers for difficult questions.

If you’re scared you could tell me, you know, she thinks. I know that it’s hard. But if you’re scared telling me would make me leave you then you’re just wrong. I would never leave you.

It probably doesn’t count as a lie if you don’t know it’s not the truth when you say it. Maybe that makes it easier.

Or maybe it’s somehow worse.

Sometimes Nobara doesn’t think Saori is real.

She thought of her as an imaginary friend for an embarrassingly long amount of time, up until she brought Fumi over after school, and it turned out Fumi could both see her and talk to her. Then again, it wasn’t like Nobara had been trying to prove to anyone that Saori existed; she only ever brought Fumi along because she’d mentioned her friend to Saori, and Saori wanted to meet her. Well, she didn’t say she wanted to meet her. She only said, I’m glad you’re making friends, Nobara-chan, and She sounds lovely, Nobara-chan. But when it comes to Saori, it’s a useful skill to know how to read between the lines.

And she only ever brought Fumi over one time, too. Fumi is her friend and Saori is her friend, but they’re not each other’s friends. Both because Nobara is greedy, and because she’s pretty sure Fumi thinks Saori is a witch. 

Well — she is sure. In those very words.

“I’m not making things up,” Fumi had told her once, at school, before the bell rang. Her eyes were wide and dark, and her thin face always some shade of nervous. “There’s just this — this feeling around her. Like — I don’t know. Cold when it should be warm, warm when it should be cold, and just so heavy. And her mother is always by the fields picking up those weird plants, or at the drugstore talking to Kise-san about or-ga-nic medicine. She’s definitely a witch.” Her face had crumpled. “I don’t want you to turn into a frog, Nobara-chan.”

Nobara had laughed so hard she nearly threw up and had to be excused from class. Fumi-chan, she’d thought, between giggles. I wonder what you’d think if I told you that when I grow up, I’m going to be a sorcerer.

(It takes a year of honing her control over her cursed energy for Obaa-san to finally tell her why. 

Why harness it. Why train herself to see, to be aware, to be on guard, to fight and defend herself. You can only get away with calling something a “family tradition” for so long, and Nobara has never been known for her patience. She’s nearly eleven and old enough to take it, because nothing can be scarier than visiting those dark rooms inside her heart.

Learning that those ugly things, if they’re strong enough, can become actual, physical embodiment of fear is pretty close, though. 

“They’re called curses,” Obaa-san tells her, hands oily from where she’s separating meat for their dinner. “I told you everyone has cursed energy, and most people don’t ever learn to control it. Those who do are called sorcerers. Jujutsu sorcerers. Those who don’t  — well. One person can create their own curse, if they’re in enough pain. If enough people fear the same thing, that thing becomes stronger. But only if you can’t control it.” She glances at Nobara, who’s perched up on the tabletop. “So you don’t have to worry about making your own monsters. There’s already plenty of them out there that belong to people who don’t know any better.”

Nobara hums, one thumb stuck in her mouth as she bites her nail. “And since people who can’t control it make the monsters, they can’t see them, right?” Obaa-san grunts in agreement, and Nobara nods to herself. “That makes sense. Sometimes it’s easier to be scared of something you can’t see. And seeing them means you’re not as scared.”

Obaa-san grunts again, but it sounds strained. “Yes,” she says. “But mostly it’s safer.”

She doesn’t explain what she means. Nobara doesn’t ask again.)

It’s funny in ways she can’t explain. But she can’t tell Saori either, and that blows.

When she first heard the rumors, Nobara was so excited. Her village is the sort of place where it’s harder to be a stranger than it is to be friends, and new people were as rare as four-leaf clovers; when both Fumi and Saori moved there within the space of two months, the whole town was a mess for weeks on end. Fumi told her that her family had been to dinner by literally everyone around, including Nobara herself. But Saori’s family wasn’t offered the same courtesy, for no reason Nobara was able to name, other than the gossip that started up almost immediately. So she stopped, and listened, and thought, Huh.

She tried to bring it up with Obaa-san once, discreetly, but Obaa-san only snorted loudly and turned over a page of her newspaper. “Child, that family is not from the Jujutsu world,” she said. “They’re just weird.”

And that was mean, but Obaa-san is mean to everyone, which meant that even though Saori’s family is weird, it isn’t special. Which is why when Nobara crossed paths with Saori for the first time, she had smiled with all her teeth.

It happened in a clearing at Midorika Park, where Nobara didn’t go to dig too deep into herself anymore, but still went because it was quiet, usually deserted, and cooler in the summer than any air conditioning. She hates feeling sweaty with a burning passion, and she’d been laying down on an overgrown root — the kind of huge ones that are large enough to fit her entire body and then some — when she’d heard the steps. 

Immediately, her hand had gone over to her pocket, where she kept part of her cursed instruments. The nails are easier to shrug off, while the hammer and straw dolls stay on her school bag at all times unless need be. The town is small, so there aren’t that many opportunities for a curse to take hold, but you can never be too careful. Obaa-san once had to whack Daiki-san (you know, the farmer?) over the head with a broom. 

But curses don’t walk like people, and they don’t cry like people, and their eyes don’t widen in shock as they meet Nobara’s, greenish brown and shining. There isn’t one sane person in this town other than Nobara, and Saori might be the most beautiful thing for miles. 

“Hey there,” Nobara had said, because she’d been eight years old and there was no such thing as strangers. “Do you want to help me shoplift Hajime-san’s conbini?”

Saori had blinked, her pale green skirt streaked with dirt and eyes puffy from crying. “What.”

Nobara blew a raspberry, flopping down on the tree root once more. “I’ve been trying that for years.” She made a face. “It never works.”

“I mean,” Saori answered, crouching down to Nobara’s eye level. “Shoplifting is illegal.”

“It’s not illegal if I just give it back when he comes over for Thursday dinner,” she’d mumbled.

The corners of Saori’s mouth were dancing. “Thrill of the chase, huh?”

“Thrill of the chase!” Nobara chirped back, even though she didn’t know what that meant. She stayed quiet for a few moments, and then said, “Can I go over to your house?”

Saori had looked bewildered. “Did your parents never talk to you about stranger danger?”

“No,” Nobara answered, because it was true, and then, because it was necessary, she’d given Saori a piece of advice. “Strangers aren’t a thing here.”

Saori is the first thing that belongs to her and her alone, and Nobara has always been greedy when it comes to what she owns. She’s good at sneaking, too, so Obaa-san never sees it when she goes out and turns left instead of right to go over to Saori’s place instead of Fumi’s, and people downtown only ever catch them together sparingly for the first few weeks. If anything, that draws their attention away from her; they call Nobara a good girl for being so nice to that family, and then they wash their hands off whatever social niceties they’d been reluctant to oblige beforehand. The kids at school sort of know Nobara’s acquainted with Saori, but with only nineteen of them, gossip tends to burn bright and fast before dying down and leaving them itching for more. They do that in small towns. 

Saori doesn’t seem to be offended by it, either. She’s homeschooled, because she’s sixteen and grown and that means she could choose whether she wanted to give a try to the only local high school with only five teenagers in it, or keep taking classes online at her old high school.  Nobara thinks it’s probably because she misses home. 

“I don’t mind it,” she says, whenever Nobara asks. “It’s only temporary, anyway.”

She says things like that because she thinks Nobara is too young to understand what she means. Nobara has half a mind to take offense to it, but Obaa-san has taught her since she was very young to measure every grief she meets, and sometimes Saori seems like a bunch of endless space tied into the shape of a girl. It’s the sort of thing she can’t fix, and Nobara hates that too. But she can be there for Saori, and that’s what she does, until her smiles don’t seem as strained, and her face doesn’t look as pale.

They grow along with the years and with each other. Nobara turns nine and ten and eleven, grows her hair out and then cuts it short, gets into fights and wins more than she loses. Saori always welcomes her to her house with a harried come in, come in, and a cup of black tea, her pale hair tied back in braids and face growing into its high-arching brows and crooked smile. Things between Saori and her mother get bad, and then things between Saori and the rest of the town get worse, but Nobara’s carved herself too deep into this to ever think about letting go of it. They talk about little things and big things, and though Nobara knows Saori is never as honest with her as she is, she doesn’t mind it. She’s lived with half-truths for most of her life. 

But they make plans. They talk about the Tokyo SkyTree and the stores down in Shibuya, about the time Saori’s volleyball team made it to Junior Nationals and she got to play at the main arena. It becomes a running joke between them, and Fumi eventually joins in, too. Did you understand question sixteen from the History exam? No, maybe I’ll understand it when I get to Tokyo. I don’t have money to buy that now, but I will when I get to Tokyo. Nobara falls head over heels for the big city in her head, the skyscrapers and noise and strangers, the thrill of being a face in the crowd that could be anyone instead of what she is. 

She starts getting ready. It makes so much sense in her head, to begin leaving bit by bit before she’s actually gone so it doesn’t hurt so much to do it all at once. Nobara wonders how Obaa-san would fare in the big city, since she can barely imagine her outside their own house. She doesn’t even think that there might be a time where Obaa-san might not be with her, because that’s a terrible thing to know when you’re eleven years old. Or at any age. 

When it ends, it ends with the cherry trees. For once, that’s nobody’s fault.

It’s been a tradition of theirs, since they became friends, to go watch the cherry blossoms fall as Spring shifts into Summer. Saori used to live in Tokyo before she moved to the village, and the city was too big to have place for things like these, but in this town, the entirety of Midorika Park is a blanket of soft pink, and you can’t walk down the street without ending up with a blossom or two in your hair. It’s the prettiest time of the year, in Nobara’s opinion. It’s one of the only things she thinks she’d miss if she ever leaves. 

When Nobara arrives, Saori is already there, a few ways away from the tree where they first met. Her head is tilted back, hands gripping tight to her own arms as if hugging herself, and Nobara takes off running as soon as she spots her. 

“Saori-san,” she calls out. “Obaa-san made extra onigiri, I brought some for you!”

Her school shoes are awful to run in, but she hadn’t had the time to pass by her house and get changed before the meeting time they’d agreed on. Math class had droned on and on, as it always does whenever she has plans with Saori. Sometimes Nobara has to wonder if she really isn’t a Jujutsu sorcerer, and if her innate ability doesn’t have something to do with time. It always seems slower when Saori is away, but goes by too fast for Nobara to grasp it when they’re together.

Saori turns to look just as Nobara reaches her, slipping a little on the blossom-filled earth, and Nobara knows.

It’s not even about the grief. Nobara has been able to see cursed energy since a little bit over her tenth birthday, and Obaa-san taught her how to recognize the signs of someone who’s just hurt — in pain or scared or angry — and how to differentiate that from someone who’s unstable enough to be the origin point of a new curse. Saori’s energy has always been flickery, pale-silver and tasting of old metal and sad things, but never unstable. It’s still not unstable now, but Nobara can still feel it pulse, gaping like an open wound. She barely has to meet her eyes to know something has happened. 

Nobara puts her school bag on the ground and tackles Saori in a hug, squeezing her down the middle with all of her strength. Saori hugs back like she’s not sure she should, just bringing her hands up to rest on Nobara’s back. 

“You’re upset,” Nobara says, muffled into Saori’s shoulder. She’s starting to grow bigger than her, but Saori was not all that tall to begin with. “Was it something someone said?”

Saori huffs a laugh over her head, fingers twitching. “I know you’re itching for a fight, but it’s not something you can fix.”

“I can try,” Nobara says, pulling away so she can glare at her. “Just tell me what’s wrong.”

“I’m leaving,” Saori says.

Nobara blinks. “Oh,” she says.

“Oh,” Saori agrees. 

“When are you—,” Nobara tries, but has to stop to clear her throat. She steps back, embarrassed for a reason she can’t name. “When are you going away?”

Saori worries at her lip, hands going back to clutching at her own arms. Her hair is down and limp down her back, and along with her white shirt and pale face, she almost looks like a ghost. “By the end of summer,” she answers, a few moments later. “My Ma was offered a position back in Tokyo, and I’ve been job-hunting, too. I need to be there for an interview, and Ma said that if we’re both going to be employed there, it’s only logical.” She shrugs, and everything about her demeanor is both sad and hopeful. 

“Are you sad about going back to Tokyo?” Nobara asks, because she has to. Her mouth feels parched.

Saori smiles ruefully, and one of her hands stops gripping herself in order to ruffle Nobara’s hair. “I’m sad because I’ll miss you, sprout.”

Nobara’s eyes burn. 

“I’m — I’ll miss you too,” she whispers, staring at her shoes, brown and blurry between the cherry blossoms. “But at least there’s one good thing.”

Saori tilts her head in a silent question, and Nobara smiles with all her teeth, even as her nose turns red and she has to draw a hand over her eyes. “Since you’re going back to Tokyo,” she says, voice stronger than she feels, “That means there’s no excuse for Fumi-chan and I to just be stalling all the time. You’ll go first, but now we start making plans for real. And we’ll meet you there.”

She meets Saori’s eyes, mouth set in a hard line. And Saori, ever the storyteller, doesn’t seem to have any words for her other than a shaky smile.

(Years later, Saori isn’t technically stuck in a dead-end job, but she’s twenty-three and so exhausted by working full time and taking night classes at the community college that she doesn’t see herself climbing higher any time in the future.

It’s an odd thing, to remember those whose lives have intertwined with yours. Saori had Nobara-chan for only three years, which really is no time at all, but children like that stick to you no matter how many days pass between the last day you saw them. She knows the face she remembers is years out of date and that she might not recognize Nobara if she sees her down the street, but she can still imagine her — bright eyes, short-tempered, a presence too big for the space she occupied and more ambition in her pinky finger than that whole village combined. And for some reason, she’d believed in Saori so unwaveringly that it made Saori a bit scared, sometimes.

Years later, it’s midnight and she’s the last one at the office. There’s something rumbling in the underground of Shibuya, and between her fourth cup of coffee and the fifth, Saori wonders if Nobara is doing alright. Wonders, but doesn’t worry. She knows that a kid with a smile as sharp as that doesn’t need anyone to worry about her.)

The sun is starting to go down by the time they speak again, and Saori’s voice doesn’t sound as thin as it did before. “It’s beautiful up here. I think that’s one of the things I’ll miss the most.”

Nobara hums, kicking lightly at the ground so she can see the blossoms fluttering. There’s no wind, and just cool enough for the weather to not be stifling, though she knows it’s just a matter of time before Summer arrives and that changes. It’s a nice place for a picnic, even though they haven’t brought anything for it, so Nobara just flops down on the ground with her legs crossed and ruffles her bag for the leftover onigiris from lunch. Saori sits down next to her, still looking up at the cherry tree, and Nobara uses that distraction as an excuse to close her eyes and flare up a bit of her own cursed energy, fingers tightening around her hammer in the hidden inside pocket. Just because it’s hard for curses to take form here doesn’t mean there aren’t any around, and if anything tries her right now, she is going to scream. 

She hands over one onigiri to Saori, and keeps the other to herself. They eat in silence, watching the cherry blossoms fall.

Minutes later, or maybe hours, Nobara says, “I know nothing lasts forever, but I think I wanted this to last just a little bit longer.”

Saori rubs at her jaw with the back of her hand. “Some things last forever, though,” she says, quietly, eyes flitting over to Nobara. “They just say that because they’re scared that, however long forever is, it’ll be longer than they can love it. So it’s easier to just settle for ruining stuff or letting go of them.”

Nobara tilts her head back, looking at the sky as it fades from blue into purplish pink and pinkish purple. She thinks she understands what Saori means, which doesn’t always happen. You can ruin anything if you know too much, and in childhood, it is so, so easy to ruin things. She looks at the stains on her hands and figures it’s just dirt.

They don’t talk until they’re wishing each other good evening, walking different paths even though they know there’s a way they could’ve walked together. And suddenly, summer had come and gone. Summer had come and gone. And although the world wasn’t really ending, it felt a bit like it.

It hits her the day Saori leaves, as soon as Nobara and Fumi turn the corner after saying their goodbyes and Nobara is sure Saori can’t see her even from her attic window. It hits her so quick and fast that it leaves her breathless, and her face scrunches up and she sobs, hands uselessly rubbing at her eyes as if to fend off the tears. She hates crying in front of people, which is why she’s never done it, but now she can’t help herself.

And Fumi doesn’t blink. She just takes Nobara by the hand and leads her home, palm warm and soft and small against hers. They walk the whole way together, and by the time they stop outside Fumi’s house, Nobara’s face is still tear-streaked and blotchy, but she can breathe without it catching on her chest again. 

Fumi turns to look at her, dark eyes serious, and the usual hesitant air she wears around herself is nowhere to be seen. She places her hands on Nobara’s shoulders, leans forward, and kisses her forehead. “Don’t be sad anymore,” she says. 

Nobara sniffles. “Okay.”

“Good. I’m still here, aren’t I?” She smiles a shy little smile, the one Nobara has always thought makes her look very pretty. “So don’t be sad anymore. Come on,” she urges, stepping back and reaching out a hand. “Tell me how you’re going to make it to Tokyo.”

And Nobara does.

ii.

When Nobara turns fifteen, she dyes her hair bright orange, packs her life into seven separate polka-dotted suitcases, and leaves home. It’s the easiest thing she’s ever done. 

Metaphorically speaking, of course. If she’s speaking in literals, it’s a huge pain in the ass and she hates every second of the moving process, from the wistful and slightly envious look of the people in town to the actual packing. If anything, the easiest part of it all was enrolling in high school, and even that was a hassle when it came to convincing Obaa-san to actually let her go. 

Obaa-san was no help at all. 

Nobara doesn’t like to think about it. 

With the years, it isn’t so much as the promise to Saori and Fumi that keep her pushing forward as much as it was the growing need to just get out. Every year she’s spent in this town has been a distance she’s travelled in circles, and sometimes, she’s terrified she might miss a turn at the only exit. Like that time she got stuck on the carrousel at a school fair, hands gripping tightly at the handle bars, stock still even though it hadn’t been moving that fast. Because it wasn’t about it moving fast or not; it’s that she felt too small, and the ground felt too unsafe, and there was no one looking for her and coming to take her home. It was that she only managed to get off by closing her eyes and jumping until her feet hit the dirt, and no one even looked twice at her as she sat down and looked at the sky and tried to stop feeling like she was about to throw up. 

And Nobara has heard so many stories. She knows Obaa-san used to live in Tokyo, that she still has friends she calls work acquaintances there, like the guy that calls her every month and the old man that showed up for New Years once or twice. She’s seen yearbook albums and a diploma, and exactly two black and white, grainy pictures Obaa-san keeps on her bedside table, of a younger version of herself and two other kids, all wearing the same dark high school gakuran, and smiling at something off-camera.

There’s a Jujutsu school in Tokyo. Really, is it any choice at all?

Nobara’s grown up between tales of curses and men, of power and grief. She’s been able to control her cursed energy since she was nine, to harness it since she was eleven, and she’s had her cursed tools for just as long. She wears her innate abilities like a second skin, and the three times Obaa-san had taken her out to observe exorcisms were so thrilling she could barely sleep afterwards. She wants this. She wants this so much she almost chokes on it, sometimes. 

“I just don’t get,” Nobara says through gritted teeth, staring at Obaa-san’s back so intensely her temples pulse, “what’s so difficult about it.”

Obaa-san’s hands don’t tremble as she dries the dishes, but they don’t need to for Nobara to know there’s something so tense about her she seems about to snap in two. “Hm,” Obaa-san says, almost dismissively. “It’s not difficult at all. I said no.”

“Oh, it is extremely difficult,” Nobara is saying even before she’s done speaking, tone biting. “Because I was smart about this. I did my research. It’s every guardian’s wildest fucking dream. I’d be a legacy student, so the tuition problem is solved. As for living situations, they have dorms and free boarding for legacy students. Plus one of the teachers vouched for you and they threw in an escort and a gakuran as a show of good faith. Why, you’d think they want me there as much as I do.” She slaps her hands on the tabletop, savoring the sting as she leans forward on her seat. “So why are you saying no?”

Obaa-san doesn’t even twitch. “I have my reasons,” she says, seemingly very interested in drying one of the bowls they’d used for miso soup last night. “Many of them, in fact. You can even have some. No way I’m sending my fifteen year old granddaughter to the big city all by herself, it’s too far away and I’ll miss her too much, I’m a fragile old lady, what if something happens to me and she’s not here. There.” She takes a deep breath, and there’s only the slightest shake in her voice when she next speaks. “There. You happy?”

“Ecstatic,” Nobara says. “Now try that again without lying to me, and I might even consider listening to you.”

There’s a loud clatter as Obaa-san slams the bowl down on the kitchen counter. “Heavens, who taught you to be so—”

“You did! ” Nobara exclaims before she can get another word in, clenching her fists and closing her eyes. She’s angry enough that her whole body is buzzing. “You did. You taught me the arrogant, and the stubborn, and the prideful and snarky and full of myself, because you raised me. I’m your fault. You talk so much but you only mean half of what you say, and I barely even know you, Obaa-san. You’ve been lying to me since I was old enough to understand it.”

Obaa-san finally looks at her, dark eyes bright and glassy, her oak-like face scrunched up in what looks like a grimace of pain. She leans back on the kitchen counter, crossing her damp arms and straightening into the height Nobara hasn’t yet grown into. 

“So help me understand this, now,” Nobara says, and hates how small her voice sounds. “I’m not saying I’ll stay if you give me a good reason, but I am saying I’ll leave regardless, and I don’t want to leave without knowing.” She spends a good few minutes trying to catch Obaa-san’s gaze, and when she does, she asks as softly as she can, “Who were my parents, Obaa-san?”

It’s quiet for so long that Nobara almost gives up. Her bags are mostly packed, and that teacher — Gojo Satoru, he’d chirped at her on the phone — had sent her a train ticket and a time and place. If she really wanted, she could go out the door right now, spend a couple nights at Fumi’s house until it was time to go. Make a whole weekend out of it, a proper goodbye to her best friend. 

But Nobara doesn’t move. She stands her ground, and she stays.

When Obaa-san speaks again, her voice is so raw it sounds as if she’d been screaming this whole time. “Your mother was beautiful.”

Nobara’s breath catches in her throat, but she dares not speak. Obaa-san is looking straight at the wall behind Nobara’s head, at the hole on the drywall Fumi accidentally ripped open during an intense game of Uno. “Beautiful,” she repeats, like the word is sacred. She visibly squares herself, and then keeps talking. “We lived in Tokyo most of our lives. You were born there too, but we moved just a few months later. Me, and you.” Her jaw ticks. “Me and you, because your mother was beautiful and she died and it was my fault. Because I was so scared of her becoming a Jujutsu sorcerer and ending up like me — with the nightmares and wounds that didn’t heal right — or even worse, of her not being like me and dying young, that I didn’t even consider that it might be safer for her to even know about it. So I never taught her.”

Nobara feels a bit lightheaded. “You never taught her,” she echoes, faintly. “She didn’t know, so she couldn’t control it, and she couldn’t see — ”

“She couldn’t see curses,” Obaa-san finishes, knuckles white as they clench into fists over her apron. “But she had a mother who’d pissed off one too many cursed entities and sorcerers.” She braces herself on the edge of the kitchen sink. “End of story. It isn’t a happy one.”

Nobara can sort of see the logic in that, which is just infuriating, because things can never be fucking simple. It’s not — she’s not sad about the mother she never knew, other than the overlying sadness of hearing about something that was just too bad, a tragedy that had nothing to do with her. But Nobara knows how to measure grief, and she sees it on the back of Obaa-san’s throat, in the space before tears; a hollowing in the shape of a girl, a daughter she couldn’t save, someone she loved and still loves even though sometimes that isn’t enough. And there’s Nobara, fifteen and itching to go, and it’s almost poetic. 

Obaa-san looks at her, sharply. “Still didn’t change your mind, did it, child?”

“Well,” Nobara tries, voice thin, but she decides not to lie. “Not really, no.”

Obaa-san snorts. “Wouldn’t be my granddaughter if you had. The Kugisakis are known for having strong opinions, regardless of how wrong they are.”

Nobara glares at her, but there’s no heat in it. “Being passive aggressive won’t help, either.”

“It won’t,” Obaa-san agrees, turning the tap on again. “But at least it amuses me.”

They’re silent but for the sound of running water and cluttering dishes. Nobara sits back down, cross legged on the pillow and a bit unsure of what to do with her hands. She waits until Obaa-san is done wiping down the counter with a rag to speak again, voice small, “So you’re letting me go?”

Obaa-san looks at her oddly. “I thought you said you were going regardless of whether I let you or not,” she says, and her tone isn’t exactly playful, but it isn’t aggressive either. “Sure, go. Call me if you want, don’t call if you don’t. It’s your life.” She takes a deep breath, drying her hands off on her apron before walking up to the table and crouching down next to Nobara, even though they both know that’s hell on her knees. “But if you need to know anything, know this: you either leave the Jujutsu world like me, or you do it when you’re ashes before you’ve hit thirty. I don’t need to tell you which one I prefer.”

“Okay, Obaa-san,” Nobara answers, quietly. “Okay.”

They don’t say goodbye, and in a way, it’s easier. Fumi is the one to help her bring all her suitcases to the town’s only train station, the one who waits by her side as the luggage gets dispatched and they watch the timetables of the trains blink in and out. They stand next to each other, both in their respective high school uniforms, hands clasped tightly between them. 

To Obaa-san, Nobara gives a nod. To Fumi, she stands on her tippy toes — because the years have made Fumi grow thin and wiry, towering over most of the boys in the village, and Nobara barely reaches over her shoulder — and gives her a kiss on the forehead, soft but firm. 

“Meet you there, okay?” she says, and Fumi’s eyes are bright as she nods, and even brighter as Nobara steps back into the train, and the door slips shut. 

People talk about leaving the place they’re from as if they’d left something very special there, something only that place holds, but Nobara doesn’t feel like that at all. As she leans her head on the cool glass of the window, she feels like she’s got everything she needs.

iii.

No one said anything about boys.

The most she can say is that out of all the boys in the world, she could have gotten stuck with something way worse than an exclamation point in the shape of a person and a knock off version of Prince Zuko without the scar. Also, because her life is fucking weird, the first one is technically-but-not-really being possessed by a millenia old cursed spirit, and the scars on his face are actually just slits that sometimes open to reveal eyes. The other one is just gloomy as hell for no reason. 

And maybe Nobara had made up this sort of idealized version in her head of what high school in the big city was going to be like, and the reality is, well — in the exorcising curses, kicking ass, getting stronger part of the deal, it’s actually pretty sweet. When it comes to the actual high school experience, she has to say she’s a bit underwhelmed.

Seriously, there are three people in her grade, including her. She grew up going to a school with only nineteen students total, and she thought that was bad; there’s only four second years here, though one of them is abroad, and no third years to speak of other than the off-hand mention. Even when it comes to adults they’re scarce, which on one hand makes it easier to break rules, but makes campus life way less livelier than she’d imagined it. 

Well, okay. The only rules to be broken are the living quarter rules, but those were agreed upon and voted for by all of them at the beginning of the year — Itadori didn’t get a vote because everyone thought he was dead when they did it, and according to Maki-san, dead people are not entitled to representation in a democracy, on the grounds of them being dead. 

The rules go as follows: if you eat food from somebody else’s named tupperware, you’re the asshole, but if the tupperware was not named, they can cry about it; don’t steal the keys to people’s rooms, and if found one lost, leave it on the dining table; don’t microwave plastic; keep the bathrooms clean at all times; laundry and litter duty are weekly and negotiable in favours; everyone washes their own dishes, and the person who cooked doesn’t wash the pans. They’re typed down and stapled on the inside of the door leading to the dorms, and there’s a couple faded post-its stuck under it with unofficial suggestions from Inumaki-senpai and Panda-senpai, like “Pranks are free real estate” and “Panda is excused from laundry duty, on account of the fact that he does not wear clothes.” Maki-senpai only sighed very deeply at those, but ultimately did not take them down.

“So unfair,” Itadori had whispered when she took one look at his post-it suggestion — Itadori has vetoing power over movie night picks —, ripped it from the wall, and stomped on it. “How does it feel to be God’s favorite, Inumaki-senpai?”

Inumaki-senpai considered it for a few long seconds, adding pepper to the milk Fushiguro had left on the table before running back to his room to pick up something. “Salmon,” he’d answered.

Itadori had blinked glassy eyes back at Maki-senpai. “So unfair.”

It’s weird how they fit together, for all that it’s not weird at all. If she stops to think about it, she knows next to nothing about all of these people, other than what’s immediately available, or what she gets told as an afterthought. Maki-san has a twin sister who goes to a different Jujutsu school, her favorite color is purple, and if you even look at her while she’s doing a face mask, she’ll kick your ass into next week; Itadori has the whole Sukuna thing going for him, and he’s basically a sports scout wet dream when it comes to literally any sport; Inumaki mostly speaks through onigiri ingredients to piss people off, because other than his cursed words, he’s perfectly capable of using sign; there’s whatever the hell Panda has going on, and then Fushiguro. That one is so tight-lipped about himself you’d think he’s a serial killer.

That’s actually something she worries about for a couple days, on a very deep and very real level, until she remembers the guy was pretty much raised by Gojo-sensei, and that makes a lot of sense, actually. Their teacher may be the greatest Jujutsu sorcerer to ever live, but he’s a good teacher at best, and probably a worse parental figure. He has an — arguably justified — god complex she wouldn’t poke at with a long stick, a flair for the dramatic, and according to his Jujutsu Wiki profile, the only thing about him that’s not perfect is his personality. Not that she’d really needed to check to know it. 

But Nobara likes Fushiguro. He’s amusing in an irritated cat sort of way, the super assholish ones that look at you straight in the eye before pushing your mug off the counter, and he hates noise. It’s hilarious, because Nobara is noisy, and Itadori is noisy, and Fushiguro is stuck with both of them at all times. 

(She sees the way he clings, though. He’s in any room Itadori is in, and if Itadori leaves, it’s only a few minutes before Fushiguro gives some excuse and follows him. It’d make her feel jealous if she was just a bit crueler, and if it weren’t for Obaa-san’s lessons. Jujutsu sorcerers keep a tight hold on their cursed energy at all times, which means Nobara can’t check, but she doesn’t need to.

Fushiguro saw Itadori die, once. That’s not the sort of thing that goes away just because Itadori is up and breathing again.)

Another reason she likes Fushiguro: he’s a pretty great sparring partner. 

Nobara had next to no sparring experience before coming to Tokyo, because her Obaa-san was a lot of things but not immortal. She taught her everything she knows, but their village didn’t even have a gym, much less other kids her age willing to fight with a specific technique in a controlled environment. And though some exorcisms don’t require a lot of hand to hand expertise, some of them might, and she doesn’t like feeling like she’s lacking. 

She’d thought about asking Itadori first, but the guy has the attention span of a goldfish and since she’s seen him punching through concrete with barely even a grimace before, she’s a bit reticent on being the one in the receiving end. Panda-senpai was out for mostly the same reasons; great advice giver when it comes to form, but also, you know, a two-hundred pound panda. Inumaki-senpai and Maki-san are already sparring partners, and Nobara felt oddly out of her depth by even thinking of asking them. 

Fushiguro solves the problem by knocking at her door after dinner dressed in full gym gear, and saying, “Gojo-sensei finally found the keys to the gym. Wanna go?”

She blinks. “I’m in my nightgown,” she tells him. 

Fushiguro nods. “I can see that.”

“My incredibly see-through nightgown,” she continues.

“I can see where you’re going with this, and I have to tell you I’m not really interested in looking.”

“Fushiguro. Get out. ”

She makes him wait outside until she’s changed, and then makes him wait an extra five minutes just because she’s petty and he pissed her off. Then she opens the door, smiles with all her teeth, and tells him to lead the way. 

The gym is on the lower floor of the living quarters, underground and with spell-embedded walls so it’s both soundproof and sturdier than drywall and wood should be. It’s awfully nice, as most of the quarters are: polished floorboards and wall-length mirrors, an arsenal with cursed weapons and another one with normal gym material, like weights and rope. The floor is covered with tatami, and Nobara’s first impulse is to take off her shoes, but Fushiguro just walks in like a man on a mission, sits down, and starts taping his fingers. 

Nobara shifts the weight on her legs, pursing her lips as she searches for something to say. Just because she likes him doesn’t mean they have a lot of material for small talk; she trusts him to watch her back as much as he trusts her, which is more than Nobara has ever trusted anyone, but the easy banter is her and Itadori’s thing. Even then, it only feels right when it’s the three of them together. There’s some things you can’t just go through without ending up close, even if you don’t know that much about each other.

She wasn’t there the moment Itadori died, but she’s the one who washed the blood off Fushiguro’s face afterwards. Suddenly, she feels silly for even feeling awkward at all. 

Fushiguro looks at her, and for the second time that night, Nobara has to wonder if his innate ability is mind reading, and the shikigami are just for show. “I’ll show you how to do it properly,” he says, finger tapping at his fully taped hands. “Fingers and wrist, for support.”

Nobara walks over and flops down in front of him, tying half of her hair into a bun. “Give me your worst, Porcupine.”

Fushiguro just sighs, that way he usually does when they annoy him, and it’s delightful. Nobara even pays attention as he explains the importance of taping up for sparring, when they work in a field that relies so much on agility and tenacity. He also looks mildly impressed at Nobara’s warming up routine, noting that she must have learned it from someone who really knew what they were doing, and Nobara pretends to faint, because the guy is awful at giving out compliments, so she takes it where she can get it. 

They settle into a rhythm, and begrudgingly, Nobara has to admit that he’s better at this than her. His fighting style is an actual style, where hers is just being strong, quick on her feet, and throwing a mean punch. Fushiguro blocks all her hits with practiced ease, catching her foot with his hand and twisting her leg ‘till it hurts, or grabbing her wrist and immobilizing her before she can even blink. She doesn’t break into a sweat, but she gets the wind knocked out of her multiple times in a row, and she only lands a few hits on him by luck.

“You’re telegraphing too much,” Fushiguro tells her, and it’s hard to tell what his face is doing when she’s looking at him upside down. “Whenever you take a swing, I can see where you’re going with it, and you always look at where you aim for a kick, so your opponent will know where to defend themselves.”

“Alright,” Nobara says, breathless, accepting the hand he offers to pick herself up. “Let’s go again.”

It’s oddly soothing. It feels good to work her body like this, even as it starts to ache and burn, and she knows her legs will be jelly in the morning. It’s also comforting to see that Fushiguro starts to tire out around the same time that she does, so she’s not completely hopeless.

Actually, scratch that. She’s never been hopeless. She’s just getting stronger.

“You’re pretty good at this, for a beginner,” Fushiguro comments as they start their cool down exercises. “I can tell you had the right guidance, but probably not a lot of practice.”

Nobara stretches out her arm behind her head until it pops, groaning. “Yeah, yeah,” she says. “My Obaa-san taught me everything she knows, but you know. Old woman, old bones. She’s plenty strong, but one wrong move and it’s a wheelchair forever.”

Fushiguro tilts his head, smiling slightly. “Your accent gets stronger when you talk about home,” he says. “Do you miss it?"

“Nope,” Nobara answers, popping the word with her lips. Her eyes meet his in the mirror reflection. “Just Obaa-san. And a friend, too, but we still talk sometimes. Other than that, there wasn’t really much around there to miss. Nothing worth staying around for, either.”

Fushiguro hums, straightening up. He looks askance, and although his face is neutral, he almost looks uncomfortable. And because Nobara always liked to scratch off scabs to check if they would really bleed, she asks, “What about you?”

He snaps to look at her almost immediately. She’s sitting down on the tatami, legs stretched out, and he’s extremely tall and out of his depth from this angle. “What about me?”

“Well,” she says, really slowly, “considering the only things I know about you are because we quite literally stumbled upon it during that case, and late night sparring sessions are the storytelling archetype for deep, meaningful conversations, I guess I just want to know.” Nobara leans back on her elbows. “You never say anything about yourself.”

Fushiguro’s jaw is tight, and she doesn’t have to be a genius to know his hands are clenched inside of his pockets. She doesn’t know why it pains him so much to talk about it, and she doesn’t have it in herself to care for backing him into a corner.

“Neither do you,” is what he says after a few long moments, and though his words are forceful, his tone is anything but. In fact, Nobara has never heard him sound like this — he’s sad. He’s almost gentle. “No one does. I bet you didn’t even notice you didn’t mention your friend’s name, even though you probably would if this were somewhere else. Getting to know someone is sometimes too painful to justify it, when you’re a sorcerer.” At that, he lowers his gaze to meet hers, and Nobara sort of wants to look away.  “There’s this saying in the Jujutsu world. Don’t let anyone get close enough to make leaving an echo. And it goes both ways.” He turns around to pick up the gym keys from where he’d left them, and Nobara only knows him well enough to be able to tell he’s hiding his face from her. “So it’s not about you. Really, it’s not for your sake at all.”

Nobara gets up slowly, legs sore. “So you’re telling me,” she says, flatly, because that’s just what she does, “that we’re at the ‘it’s not you, it’s me,’ stage of the relationship? That’s pretty unmanly of you, Mister Righteous.”

Fushiguro snorts. “This isn’t a story about heroes, Kugisaki,” he says. “The sooner you understand that, the easier it’ll be in the long run.” He turns around, crooked smile growing on his face. “Now, let’s go before Gojo-sensei decides to do a head count and screams bloody murder when he doesn’t find us, even though he knows we’re here.”

“Okay, ‘I Am Not A Hero Allied With Justice’ Megumi,” Nobara says, widening her arms. “Lead the way.”

He gives her the stink eye. “That’s Mister Jujutsu Sorcerer for you.”

Nobara laughs so hard she cries. Gojo-sensei still screams bloody murder, to humor them when they try to sneak up on him.

Sometimes, it’s hard to believe Itadori is real. Or rather, that the whole situation with him is.

Nobara knows it’s not impossible, because impossible sort of loses its credibility when learning how to exorcize the personification of fear, anger and grief is your bread and butter. But she still catches herself looking at Itadori from the corner of her eye, tracing his movements, watching the way he scrunches up his nose when he thinks really hard or drums his fingers on any surface available. 

She knows she’s not the only one: for the weeks after the Kyoto Goodwill Event, Maki-san never stayed in the same room as him without a cursed weapon nearby — for her own peace of mind, she’d explained, until she figured him out and stopped being so on guard. Plus, that was nothing compared to how Inumaki-senpai acted around Itadori after the whole deal with the blood-rotting pain-inducing brother curses freaks, when he accidentally consumed another one of Sukuna’s fingers. Inumaki kept his shoulders tense and hand ready to unzip his collar at all times, because they all know that, if Itadori ever loses control of Sukuna, Inumaki’s cursed words might be the only thing that slows him down.

(A conversation Kugisaki Nobara was not meant to overhear, but she did, anyways:

Gojo Satoru says, “Yuuji, I need you to be more careful about this.”

Itadori Yuuji answers, “I’m as careful as I can be.”

“I may be able to work miracles, but being able to do that means also knowing that miracles have limits.” Satoru’s voice is soft. It usually is when he’s talking to his students — when he’s talking to his kids, and it’s so ridiculously fatherly of him that it would have made Geto laugh his ass off. “I’ll keep you safe for as long as I can, but the higher ups will use any excuse they can to execute you as soon as possible.”

Yuuji falters. Rubs his knuckles against the slit on his cheek, a nervous habit that didn’t exist until a few weeks ago. “You never promised me safe, sensei,” he says. “You only ever promised that I’d live just a little bit longer.”

Satoru hums, lips pulling into a light smile, and he feels sad in ways he cannot name. “Still hoping for that good death of yours, huh?” At Yuuji’s nod, he sighs, running a hand through his hair. “You know, Yuuji, sometimes when people die, that just means they’re dead.”

Yuuji huffs, softly, kicking at the ground with the tip of his foot. It’s late and he looks young, messy-haired and soft-faced, and there’s a small heart drawn with pink marker on his upper left cheek, just under one of the slits left by Sukuna’s presence. Satoru tilts his head, but says nothing. Instead, he steps forward and puts a hand on Yuuji’s shoulder, squeezing it as tightly as he dares, and hoping Yuuji can read his gaze even through the blindfold.

The kid’s smart. He can do it.

“You have a good life here, Yuuji,” Satoru tells him. “Don’t throw it away just because you feel like your ending is inevitable.”

Down a hallway and behind a wall, Kugisaki is eavesdropping on them, and though Satoru could call her out for doing so, he won’t. It’s sort of cute how the students still think they can keep secrets from him. They don’t see his six eyes, so they assume they’re not there.

He’ll probably have to lecture them on it, sometime. After all, that’s exactly the sort of thing that gets people killed.)

Nobara was the only sane person in a town full of crazy people, and she knows it can be an unbearable sorrow, for someone to know that they’re seen as such a wild animal in other people’s eyes. Itadori never seems offended, though. He’s not that sort of person. He just seems happy to be here, and happy to be around them, and God knows Nobara has been lied to enough to know when someone’s being earnest. The guy’s as sincere as it gets, and that makes it hard to ever truly dislike him.

But Nobara measures every grief she meets. Itadori Yuuji has a lot of them. 

“You’re so going to regret this tomorrow.”

Itadori looks up from the dining table, looking shy, but not entirely surprised to see her. It’s not like she tried to make her arrival a secret, because she didn’t know there was anyone still up, but it’s still sort of disarming that she can never sneak up on him, and it isn’t even an innate ability like Gojo-sensei’s; Itadori’s instincts are just that good.

“Hey, Kugisaki,” Itadori says, flashing a smile at her. “What’re you doing up?”

“I could ask you the same question,” Nobara answers, opening the fridge and giving a little sigh at the cool air that greets her. She loves the fridge. She could live inside that fridge. The living quarters do not have an air conditioning system, August in Tokyo is hotter than it has any right to be, and Nobara is going to scream. “But that sour candy looks like it’s not yours, and I don’t want to be here when you get what you deserve for stealing.”

Itadori makes a face at her, throwing a handful of brightly colored, sugary, dinosaur-shaped candy into his open mouth. “Finders keepers,” he argues, although it mostly just sounds like noise. The bright yellow package on his hand makes a crackling noise that’s entirely too loud at this hour of night. “No name, so they legally can’t be mad at me.”

Nobara finds the bottle of peach ice tea she’d stored for a moment like this, and closes the fridge with a huff. “Just because it’s on the rules doesn’t mean it’s illegal, Itadori,” she deadpans. “You better hope that’s not Maki-san’s, because then you’ll have to deal with me.” Nobara takes a large gulp of her drink, and then frowns a little to herself. “Not that she needs me to protect her. Or anyone to protect her. She’s strong enough on her own.”

“Oh, we all know about your huge gay crush on Maki-san,” Itadori says. “You don’t have to talk in circles around it.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

She kicks back a chair and sits down across from him, slumping down with her head over her arms. She brought a pillow with her, because sometimes this takes a while, but she just leaves it on her lap for now. She’s so tired. She can only hope she doesn’t look as tired as she feels, but it’s nearly three in the morning and she has no makeup on, so it’s a foolish hope.

Not that Itadori would judge her. The bags under his eyes make the slits look even more like wounds than they usually do. But they don’t talk about it, because whenever they do talk about it there’s tears and blood and other embarrassing stuff involved, and Nobara doesn’t feel like tearing herself open right now. Her friendship with Itadori is easy, and ticking time bomb or not, he’s safe. 

Nobara is greedy with things like that. 

They have a routine for when this happens — for when there’s a nightmare or two, and the warm lights of the dining room and lounge are better than an empty dorm, because it helps to remind yourself that there’s other people here, and those people are alive and not in danger, and morning is always just a handful of hours away. Itadori usually sleeps like the dead, so whenever she hears him walking around after midnight, she’s always right behind him. Sukuna has things to say when Itadori is alone, but he shuts up around other people, and even though Itadori is flustered whenever he asks, Nobara gives it to him without blinking. If it helps, it helps. If being around means her friend isn’t being fed poison by the being he shares a body with, then that’s the reason. And the routine means they sit down, talk shit, and share a trademark thoughtful commentary to get their minds off the problem.

“Chop chop, bubblegum man,” Nobara says, squinting stinging eyes at him. “Last time was on me, so it’s your turn.”

Bubblegum man, Itadori mouths. Out loud, he says, “Well, no thoughtfulness from me right now. Too late for thoughts. But I do have an interesting fact!” He shoves another handful of candy into his mouth, and the lower half of his face is sprinkled with sugar. “Did you know an adult heart is the size of a fist?”

“Ooh,” Nobara entones, flatly. “So throwing your heart in someone’s face would be a metaphorical punch?”

“You’re so smart, I can’t stand it,” Itadori answers, and the bastard sounds like he means it. Then he shrugs, tilting his head up to look at some odd point in the ceiling. “It’s weird, though. I remember how my heart felt on my hand, but it seemed a bit smaller. Maybe that’s just my perspective.”

Right. Nobara’s life is weird as fuck, and she’s talking to the guy who had his heart literally, physically ripped out of his chest just a few months ago. 

She rests her head on her hand, elbow propped up on the kitchen table. “Probably because you’re not an adult,” she notes, absently, because there’s not much you can say to that. “But it’s poetic, at least.”

Itadori laughs. “You think everything’s poetic. You want to be in love so bad.”

“Shut up, I’m right this time.” 

“Sure, sure.” He grins, just a flash. “Hit me, then. What’s poetic about it?”

Nobara opens her mouth. Closes it. Thinks about cherry trees, and a train station, and a heartbeat opening and closing, opening and closing. Says, “A fist holds on.”

(In a way, she’s lucky. You don’t usually get the chance to lose someone more than once.

Everything she’s ever let go of has claw marks in it.)

A rough, guttural voice rings out through the dining room, and Nobara looks around wildly before she notices the sound is coming from Itadori: a reddish mouth with pointy teeth is snarling from the slit just under his eye, and fuck, that never gets less creepy. 

“Wow, that was so sweet,” the mouth drawls. “I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.”

“Oh, you are disgusting. ” Itadori slaps a hand over Sukuna’s mouth, on both sides of his face, looking way too much like an irritated puppy. “Don’t throw up. Your mouth is on my face. ”

“Believe me, brat, I wish it wasn’t,” Sukuna says, muffled, but Itadori keeps his hands in place until he seems to get bored, and the mouth fades back into a slit again. 

“Fucker,” Itadori mutters, and for a moment, he seems so sad Nobara can barely look at him. Then it’s gone, and although she could say something — she lets him have this. They have time.

The dining room door opens with a creek, and by the way Itadori lights up like the fucking sun, Nobara already knows it’s Fushiguro standing there before she even looks. His hair is spikier than usual, mussed with sleep, and there’s pillow lines on his cheeks. She almost feels bad for waking him, but she’s an asshole, so she doesn’t.

Fushiguro leans against the wall, looking absolutely done with everything. “Did your parents never teach you that it’s impolite to be noisy when other people are sleeping?”

“No,” Nobara says, because it’s the truth. Obaa-san slept like a rock.

“Same,” Itadori says. “I lost mine when I was pretty young.”

Even half-asleep, Fushiguro looks sort of worried for a second. “Did you ever find them?”

Itadori and Nobara just look at him. Honestly, she’s sort of impressed. “Fushiguro,” she says, disbelieving.

“Kugisaki,” Fushiguro says back.

“Itadori,” Itadori adds, unhelpfully.

Nobara feels her eye twitching. Her hand tightens over the pillow on her lap. “I’m going to kill you both.”

“Oh,” Itadori says, voice earnest. “So, like my dead parents.”

Nobara throws the pillow at him. 

And they laugh. They laugh and laugh, giggling into their hands like pre-school children, and even Fushiguro looks amused, watching over them with a warm look in his eyes. Nobara doesn’t know if they laugh so hard because they’re happy, or because they’re relieved, or because it’s late and they’re not thinking straight. But at that moment, she loves them. She loves both of them so much. She hopes they still have an endless, infinite amount of time together.

iv.

Nobara has only so many seats open in her life, and she doesn’t let her heart be swayed by anyone who’s not sitting in one of them. The thing is, she spent so long having only less than a handful of those seats being occupied — Obaa-san, and Fumi, and she even had Saori until she didn’t — that until she moved to Tokyo, she couldn’t remember how it felt to let in someone new.

She’s been living so much, these past few months. And suddenly all of the empty rooms in her heart are full, and the people inside them take good care of their spaces, and they don’t leave messes behind or their dirty shoes at the door. A part of her is relieved. The other part thinks, Took you all long enough.

She doesn’t plan on Maki. When it happens, it’s almost an accident.

Because for a Jujutsu sorcerer, it’s safer not to let it. Obaa-san taught her that love doesn’t die, people do, but if all the love she has to give ends up meeting empty air all the time, Nobara doesn’t know if she’ll be able to take it.

(She forgets Fushiguro’s words, though. It doesn’t cross her mind that it goes both ways.)

But Maki in the sunlight. Maki with a weapon on her hand, and Maki throwing her head back and laughing, and the warmth of her hand on the small of Nobara’s back, the way her eyes glow when she looks at Inumaki and Panda and Nobara knows the love she has for them, because it’s the same way Nobara looks at Fushiguro and Itadori. She loves the way Maki loves people. And really, in the end, is no choice at all. 

Her heart only beats faster for things that might ruin her. Maki makes Nobara feel her pulse inside her head. 

It starts slow. Maki holds her hand one day, as they walk back from sparring practice. Nobara looks her in the eye and makes Maki promise to come back safe from a case she’s assigned. They dawdle behind the group together when they go into town, step alongside step, and against the sunset, Nobara thinks Maki might be the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. 

Not in the way Saori was beautiful, because the most beautiful thing about Saori was that she was a stranger. The most beautiful thing about Maki is everything — the way she snorts when she laughs, the way she makes a point to drape herself over everyone after practice when she’s sweaty and gross, how cranky she is in the morning, how mean she is to everyone unless the people she respects. She’s not nice, and not exactly kind or gentle, but she fits into every empty space under Nobara’s skin, until she can’t really tell where herself ends and Maki begins. 

Oh, Nobara wants to be loved by her so badly her fingers shake. She’s not beautiful like this, but she could be. Maki could make it so.

“Maki-san,” she murmurs into her shoulder one morning, when they’re alone. Itadori and Inumaki-senpai are out working on a case, Panda-senpai and Fushiguro are sparring in the field, and the living quarters are still and quiet all around them. “Do you ever think about kissing me?”

Maki’s shoulders tense, but Nobara is holding on tight to her waist, head lolling on her shoulder and just breathing. She’s not afraid to ask this. She’s never afraid when it comes to Maki. 

“All the time,” Maki answers, voice oddly muted. Her hands, resting on Nobara’s over her stomach, tighten just a bit.

It’s a beautiful morning, outside. It’s cloudy but the sun makes the sky bright, and the morning dew makes everything smell fresh and new and good. It feels like Spring, even though it’s Autumn. Nobara watches it through the window over Maki’s shoulder, and her heart beats. Love, and love, and love. 

“But you never do,” Nobara tells her, not unkindly. 

“Do I have to?” Maki asks, but it doesn’t sound like what she wants to say. 

Nobara shrugs, knowing that even though Maki isn’t looking she can still feel her. “If you want to,” she says, “I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”

Inside her head, the little girl she used to be mouths, This is not a joke. Love me. Love me.

Maki is silent for a long time. Her hair is down, and it tumbles down her back, half-dark and half-green. “I don’t know how to lose you.” Her fingers trace patterns on the back of Nobara’s hand, and this is the smaller she’s ever sounded. “So I’m not sure how to have you, either.”

Nobara hums. “You’re not going to lose me,” she says, even though they both know that’s not true.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Maki deadpans, demeanor shifting to normal again. “You’ll break my heart.”

It rained last night, and a few odd raindrops scatter from the roof down to the ground in front of them. Sunlight cuts through the water, and it almost looks like shards of glass. “Maki-san is not the kind of person who gets her heart broken,” Nobara mumbles into her shoulder. She smells like lemon and spice.

Maki laughs. “And Nobara-san isn’t the sort of person who breaks them,” she mimics, and Nobara can hear the smile in her voice. She pulls away from her, only to turn around and take her by the waist upfront, until they’re properly holding each other. “Can’t wait for us to prove each other wrong.”

Nobara rolls her eyes. “Don’t be morbid.”

This embrace is not safe, but it’s warm. Some kinds of hugs are only a means of hiding your faces from each other, but with Maki, it doesn’t feel like that — Nobara is hiding her face on Maki’s shoulder, and Maki is hiding her face in hers, and no one else ever has to see them again. 

“A knife can’t cut itself open,” Maki mutters into her hair, as if it’s a saying she’s heard before. “But you still want me to be you and know you.”

Nobara licks her lips. Her mouth feels parched. “Are you going to keep talking,” she says, “Or are you going to kiss me?”

And Maki kisses her. And kisses her. And kisses her. And Nobara just keeps kissing her back.

(This won’t last, Maki tells her, sinking.

Nothing does, Nobara answers, drowning, because time has passed and she’s forgotten. So pretend this is the last time.)

They only break away from each other when Inumaki-senpai throws a bucket of water at them. Both water and bucket. He and Itadori are bloodied, grimy, but for some reason, Inumaki looks personally affronted at this new development in this relationship. He signs so forcefully at them he nearly whacks himself in the face.

“He says if you’d waited just another week, he wouldn’t owe Panda-senpai two-thousand yen,” Itadori translates, nudging with his boot at the puddle of water that’s pooling around Nobara and Maki. “But I’m just happy for you guys!”

“Itadori,” Nobara tells him, cheerily. “Start running.”

“Toge, you’re dead,” Maki says.

It ends with a couple broken plates, footprints on the ceiling, and probably a concussion. Nobara is sort of walking on air.

v.

In the end, there’s no one to blame.

She’s fought hard. Her body aches in places she didn’t know it was possible to ache, and there’s blood under her fingernails, and she’s so exhausted her control over her cursed energy is slipping a little, which hasn’t happened since she was ten. In many ways, Nobara feels like a kid again — small and lost and a bit afraid, looking around for a stronger hand to hold that’ll lead her somewhere safe, but she’s not sure a safe place exists anymore. 

When they first heard the rumbles on the underground of Shibuya, no one thought much of it. Nobara has seen more dead bodies tonight than ever before. 

As she races to where she’s needed, she stumbles over what used to be Nanami Kento, bloodied and broken, looking like something blew him up from the inside. She’s used to the smell of blood, but she still has to breathe through her mouth to keep her stomach in check. She wonders if Itadori knows, and it makes her sick. 

She can hear the sounds of fighting, though. Itadori’s black flashes have a distinct buzz in the air, and she doesn’t have to wonder anymore; she’s tracing his steps, following the path he’s taken, because wherever he is is where Sukuna is, and wherever Sukuna is is where that human curse is. Mahito. She loathes the name.

Nobara finds them, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late to matter, and she thinks of how Obaa-san used to be glad Nobara had too little grief for curses to be easy for her, and how wrong she would be nowadays. She wears it like a second skin.

The air buzzes with Itadori’s cursed energy, burning brighter and stronger than it has any right to be. The concrete is brittle and cold even through the soles of her shoes, sounds bouncing off the walls of the subway station in a damp, muted way. The curse — Mahito — spots her first, and he looks delighted, smile like an open wound on his face.

“Poor pathetic human child,” he calls out, and Itadori stops when he realizes. He doesn’t hesitate; he just stops. “I know you came to help out your friend, but I think you’ll be of more use to me. ”

Bereavement may keep her warm but it will not save her. And for once, it won’t even be anyone’s fault, unless you want to point fingers at a shadow.

When it happens, she barely has any time to blink. Between the curse’s deranged glee, and the drying blood and sick on Itadori’s face, and the taste of metal in her mouth, she breathes, and all she can think is that it probably won’t be painless, but at least it will be fast. 

Nobara’s hand tightens around the hilt of her hammer, the familiar splinters on her palm almost reassuring. She sees more than she feels it, really. It’s her own damn fault for meeting Itadori’s gaze when she shouldn’t. His face goes slack, eyes full of muted horror and pain and a grief so big Nobara can barely see the end of it. He looks at her like she’s already dead, like he’s seen how this story goes, and though Nobara has only ever been able to measure his grief, not know it, she thinks she might get it now. There were dead bodies outside the subway station, and there’s blood on Itadori’s hands. 

This is bigger than her. She doesn’t know all of the details, but she knows enough. She knows enough to think, Oh. Oh, I’ll miss this.  

Many things die in Shibuya. In that sense, Nobara really isn’t special at all.

The inside of the room of seats in her life is wider than it used to be. There’s Fumi, sitting wispy and nervous, hands fiddling with her tie, dark eyes serious and sad. Obaa-san stands behind her, because she’s never been one for following rules, and her dark hair finally has wisps of white in it. There’s Inumaki-senpai and Panda-senpai, looking at her expectantly, and Gojo-sensei smiling like he wants to say she’s got this, and Fushiguro watching it all with his mouth set in a hard line. There’s Maki, looking like her heart has been ripped out of her chest and she’s not all that surprised about it.

Nobara tells them, I’m sorry I couldn’t keep our promise and I’m sorry I left even though I said I wouldn’t and I’m sorry I could only ever say half of what I meant because I was too scared it wouldn’t turn out to be true. She tells them all, and in that split second, she looks back at Itadori. To him, she smiles. Says, “Yuuji? Don’t miss me too much.”

To the curse, she bares her teeth. There’s no time to tell him that she won’t give him the satisfaction of making a tragedy out of her, though. When it counts the most, there never really is.

Death comes to her again, a girl in a cotton slip. Barefoot, giggling.

It’s not so bad, she says. Not like you’d think. It is not empty and it is not dark. You will never have to be alone again.

Picture this: a girl rubbing at herself in the mirror until there is nothing left.

Picture this: on either side of a life, light spills in, blinding and overwhelming and bright.

It is endless.

It is beautiful.

And then it is gone.