Jujutsu Headquarters, POV—
"Gojo Satoru!"
"What is the meaning of this?!"
"It's been 3 days!"
"Where are you hiding the vessel?!"
Six voices rattled the six shoji that stood as a physical barrier between them. Jujutsu headquarters: where common sense and logic went to die. Satoru didn't possess the logistical reach that the fossils did from their ivory towers; nor did he have the political capital they had amassed from their long... mind-numbingly long tenures as patriarchs from the great families and subordinate establishments. That was the main reason he listened to them. Rather, it was the main reason he took their rambling paranoia and the fear they swaddled in grandiloquence into account when he planned for the future.
For the sake of organising; the system depended on the higher ups, because they had built it around themselves. They were the arbiters of the of the ranking system; they were the ones who paid the salaries of the Windows like Ijichi; they were the ones whose subordinates kept track of the sites of interests like burial grounds, shrines, schools—anywhere that could produce special grade curses over time. Most relevant of all was their regulation of cursed objects.
Satoru's jaw tightened —the shed's been empty for months.
In short, they were necessary. For now. Even as they dangled the execution of Suguru over his head as leverage, like he couldn't just check in at his cell and leave with his former friend like he was luggage. They had to know that, right? That their orders only held water for as long as he, and everyone else was willing to listen. That they had no real power.
He would have thought that their summons showed they were beginning to realise that, if not for—
"Hiding?" Satoru was genuinely flummoxed by the accusation. He thought he had been rather bold with his actions; like, shockingly loud with them as he'd busted Yuji out of the cell, frolicking all the way to back to Sendai, and then Tokyo together. Why on earth would he have needed to hide anything from them? He'd been beginning to wonder why the higher ups hadn't already been talking his ear off about the break it, but apparently, they'd just too deaf to hear his audacity. "He's being enrolled as we speak."
"What?!"
"Yeah, I'm surprised too. Took longer than I thought to handle the funeral rites—turns out his grandpa hid a message in his mouth when he was murdered. Oh, and he was murdered. Crazy, right?" His eyes didn't lie. Satoru made a show of scanning the 'crowd'. "Hey, you're here somewhere right, gramps? Got any nuggets of wisdom for me before you croak?"
He heard an unintelligible stutter from somewhere behind a screen.
"Irresponsible!"
"You were ordered to take him out!"
"Should we take this as a betrayal of not just us, but of Jujutsu society as a whole?"
"I did." The room collectively drew a breath. "Not the betrayal thing, I mean I did take him out. Outside."
"..."
"Kid's got full control of his body. Fed him another finger, and poof. Magikarp used splash." Crickets. "Nothing happened... God, you're all so old," he muttered. "Anyway. We're not gonna see this level of talent in a vessel ever again, so I say it's a waste to just All Delete the poor kid."
"..."
"That means kill. If he can contain the King of Curses, I say it's better him than a cursed spirit. He's got potential, let him eat them all and we've got ourselves another promising talent," That is to say, he recovered remarkably fast after learning that his grandfather died. Crazy? Check. And this too was only second to the fact that he'd held off the equivalent of a Grade One sorcerer without cursed energy. Kid's going places.
"Irresponsible!"
"Gojo Satoru!" shouted the man who was probably paid at an hourly rate to shout Gojo Satoru. Shout the name, name-shouter. "We were keeping them sealed for a reason!"
Oh, golly. Were you?
"And if Sukuna regained his full power!?"
"Admittedly, from what I've heard, he might give me a little trouble."
One of them gasped, or croaked, it honestly wasn't easy to tell, "You would...lose?"
"Nah."
A quiet murmur of discontent rippled through the room. But if they had something to say about his declaration, clearly, they had chosen to forever hold their peace.
"Is that a risk you're willing to take on our behalf? Our only authorisation on this matter was execution. It's regrettable, but the best thing that boy can do for us is to die."
Yeesh. Well, they didn't notice—not with the barrier shielding them and the room from external factors—but he could literally see it. They couldn't have made a worse impression if they tried. Satoru fought the smile as a certain temperamental teenager's energy flared up from beyond the room. It had only been three days since he'd... and she was already... He felt a rare flash of exasperation. Really, he could only blame his excellent teaching skills.
And as a good teacher, Satoru said, "No, don't worry." He wasn't talking to them. "Even if Sukuna was able to incarnate with his full strength, I'll just find a way to stop him that doesn't put Yuji in danger."
"Clearly, you have chosen these...unprecedented times to exercise your capacity as decision maker. So why, pray tell, has the 'honoured one' decided to even bother answering our summons?"
It was the subtle subtext—if you placed a stress on the b of the first word—that Satoru read. And he appreciated that at least one of them still had at least a relative grasp on reality. He flashed him a smile.
"Ayy, you noticed! Yeah, I only came here to introduce you to another student. Courtesy call. You'll want to meet her."
"How impudent!"
"Who?"
"Gojo Satoru!" exclaimed the 'Gojo-Satoru-exclaimer.' To the degree of the headache, she would cause...his smile gained an authentic edge.
"Just a little someone I picked up from Sendai!"
"Sukuna! Ryoumen Sukuna is alive and walking our Tokyo campus, and you want to waste our time focusing on a girl? On a child?"
Satoru cleared his throat and ignored him. "I said just a little someone I picked up from Sendai!"
"..."
"Yuriko! That's your cue!"
"What are you—"
But then they felt it. Like a sledgehammer slamming through the shell of an egg. Only the shell was the room's barrier, and the sledgehammer was— She stepped in, all of her spilling outward and filling the turbulent space as it corrected itself around five feet of cat-like irritation.
A collective gasp rang out as the new figure manifested beside Satoru, and the weight of her presence settled in their minds.
"Introducing Suzushina Yuriko," Satoru beamed, as he reached out only to watch her Neo her way out of a head pat. "I promise, she's not always this grumpy..."
She grabbed his arm on its second pass. "Nice. To. Meet. You."
***
About 3 minutes ago, Jujutsu HQ. POV: Suzushina Yuriko.
Nailed it.
It had been around the time, dumb and lobotomite—Nanako and Mimiko respectively—had pulled her into a curtain that Satoru put barrier techniques on her syllabus.
Barriers, as she understood them, were just cursed energy fields with a defined outer shell. A territory, or a zone sporting measurable quantities like value, and—to her utter delight—direction. Just a function running within a space.
When Satoru had taught her how to set up a curtain—including that ridiculous chant he had insisted was necessary for beginners—he had told her that Windows used them to define a space with parameters that trapped in values such as 'noise,' and 'cursed energy'—other such conditions that in her understanding of things "strengthened the field" of cursed energy itself which forced cursed spirits to reveal themselves.
She had to admit; she had been a little concerned, partly because in all honesty they sounded a little bit like the Toaru concept of phases to her. The other part was because she assumed that such free designations of what a space could entail, meant that anyone who could cast a curtain was effectively a god. What was she supposed to do if someone threw up a barrier that expelled all atmospheric oxygen from the environment? Die? What if they said fuck 'atmospheric' and denied her the roughly 65%—by mass—of her body that was made up of oxygen?
Her concerns had elicited the most irritating, ear-aching cackle she had ever heard from the blue-eyed menace when she had raised them.
"Barrier techniques are hard, lol."
Supposedly a 'Tengen' level barrier user could have maybe done something like that.
(She had recently asked him if "this time" Tengen was a person, not a grading scale, and he confirmed that they were a person).
All modern barriers were contingent on the purification barriers that they had set up to begin with. It wasn't a system a sorcerer could game without either somehow equivalent knowledge, centuries of practice, or a healthy—read: unhealthy—list of comprehensive and disadvantageous binding vows in return.
(He had then asked what she meant by 'this time,' and Setsuko, the damn traitor—)
"It would be easier for the average sorcerer to just learn domain expansion," he had assured, than to modify a curtain for purposes that stringent.
And then Yuriko had constructed a curtain that specifically permitted the escape of infrared signals. Right in front of him.
No binding vows required, and it had done everything he told her a Window's curtain was supposed to do as well. After all, barriers were just strong cursed energy fields with measurable quantities. Trial and error were a lot easier when a person could laugh at the uncertainty principle and map out a startling number of variables within a finite space. Even if she hadn't worked out how to move them all.
For all his knowledge, there were still factors of Jujutsu that stood ostensibly outside Satoru's frame of reference. Or perhaps it was the typical tunnel vision of an expert? He could still be wrong. That was why peer review was essential when it came to cultivating knowledge. She understood that her technique was broken, and knowing what it could do put her at a significant advantage. But based her sample size of, well Sukuna, ̷I̷t̷a̷d̷o̷r̷i̷ Kaori, Satoru, Geto and Yuta she would say that she was probably average—for now—when it came to common Jujutsu principles.
But that had not been hard, in fact. Not even a little. Yuriko had taken great satisfaction in telling him to pick his jaw off the floor, until she watched the bastard raise two fingers, smile and replicate her feat like he was just making a xerox at a photocopier.
"When I said they were hard, I wasn't including myself...haha"
Prick.
And that brought her back to where she was in the moment. He had left her outside his meeting using some excuse about propriety, but she knew exactly who that man was. Satoru didn't give a shit about what the polite thing to do was. What he likely meant was 'we'll be talking about something I believe you won't react well to.' She had learnt the inflection in his voice when he did that. It was a tone he used often. Yuriko wished he wouldn't patronise her so often. She was fifteen!
Yuriko pressed her hand against the boundary in front of her—on the physical shoji that represented the metaphysical shell. They were discussing the fate of her friend in there, and she had the right to know.
It was a less sophisticated version of the barrier Satoru had casually thrown up so she couldn't hear him and... her dad. A separate space bearing its own set of rules within, but said rules were based on classical physics, and so the information known as sound would be coded the exact same way it was without. In crests and troughs.
"G—oj... S—to—ru!"
"Y—u... lose?"
"Nah."
It was a stretch to say she could hear them now, but she was refining—there!
"It's regrettable," said a voice. "But the best thing that boy can do for us is to die."
***
Earlier this morning: Near Tokyo Jujutsu High, POV: Still Yuriko.
Satoru found her peeling an apple in a small cabin in the mountains. Yuji waved at her from under the man's arm, looking more like a black nylon bag than a person in his Jujutsu Tech uniform.
"Principal finally accepted you then?"
"Yup!"
With any luck, when she herself enrolled there wouldn't have to do any self-aggrandising nonsense on her end, and she could have some say in the design of her uniform—it said she could in the handbook—so it wasn't ugly as fuck. The latter was her main concern.
"Wicked."
The reason she hadn't enrolled already, was—as far as she could tell—was just another one of Satoru's whims. He had told her she'd been isolated from the other students until the seconds years were all in one place and he could 'explain her existence to them' before 'anything unfortunate' happened. 'It was funny with Yuta, but uhm...you're you, so...' Whatever that meant. She threw the apple behind her.
"Catch."
The air was so clean here, and everywhere she looked was replete with greenery. The earth smelt fresh, and the smell of petrichor also carried the steady aroma of leaves. Only two days and living her already beat city living by a country kilometre. It was reminding her of those summers she had spent with—
Nobara snatched the apple out of the air.
"Kugisaki! That was for Setsuko!"
"My bad." Nobara bit.
"It's fine, I'm not really hungry."
"Tch."
Surprisingly, the debacle at Sugisawa had only reinforced the decision of the Sasakis to send their only daughter off to sorcery school. Something, something, self-defence, something, something "uphill both ways." She still hadn't heard from Takeshi since, and she was under no illusions that she would any time soon. But as long as he was safe and recovering, she could learn to live with it. She could learn to...
A hand landed on her shoulder. It was Satoru's. He smiled down at her.
"They've finally called me in," he said. "This is the perfect opportunity for you to—"
"Establish myself as a rational, and dependable collaborator so I can help negotiate favourable conditions for Yuji?" Even though she technically lost, "I've got proven experience with keeping Sukuna in check, so that works in my favour."
Satoru looked like he'd taken a double shot of pure lemon concentrate, "...Were a middle-aged salary man in you past life?"
"No?"
"I was gonna say 'to scare the shit out of them.'"
"Huh? Isn't that counterproductive?"
"Those idiots only ever make decisions based on fear," Satoru sighed. "If you get registered a Special Grade sorcerer you'll have a lot more—"
An increasingly familiar presence made her lips curl, as a second mouth split open across Yuji's left cheek.
"You're not the one calling the shots?" Sukuna wore his sneer like a bespoke blazer. "How foolish. What's the point of a hierarchy that isn't based on strength?"
Before Satoru could respond, Yuriko spun back to the countertop and grabbed the nearest thing she could find—another apple. She threw it so hard that it lodged into the improvised cheek-mouth, trapping the next syllable with its flesh. Sukuna the prized hog.
"Not everyone thinks with their fists, you fucking ape. Some of us use our words."
A deep, visceral crunch reduced the apple—core and all—into a bolus that vanished with a gulp.
"Was it your words that saved these brats from me?" Sukuna licked his lips. "Did you lessen yourself by begging?"
"..." Did he not understand how the circumstances were different?
"Chew them up for the little flavour they possess and do as you wish."
The mouth disappeared right before Yuji's palm connected with his face. And all she could do was wonder how the fuck his body would digest the apple.
***
Presently, Jujutsu HQ. POV: Still Yuriko.
"Nice. To. Meet. You."
Her teeth grinded as she sized up the silhouettes behind their screens. Surely, it couldn't be that bad? Her impulse control. She heard a position she was fully prepared to hear, from people she full expected to disagree with, yet murder was singing like a canary from every branch of her soul. Talking about someone else's life—someone innocent—with such certainty, that it was just a given that they would die for a hypothetical...
Chew them up.
She flashed Satoru a toothless smile and he shook his head.
"What's the meaning of this?!"
"How did you!?"
"No, no. You're right," Satoru snarked. "We shouldn't be focusing on a little girl, when Sukuna—who was fought off by said girl—is safely contained in a body he can't do anything from."
A beat. She took the gap in conversation as an opportunity to rein in her cursed energy. Penetrating glances peppered against her skin thereafter.
"Gojo Satoru!"
"Fought off..."
"You said you found her in..." The scritch-scratch of a ruffling beard.
Then a fist landed hard against wood. "Satoru, she's one of ours, isn't she? A Gojo!"
"Bah! You wish. Your clan gains one notable member once every four hundred years, and he's already here," exclaimed another. "Look at those eyes. Have you ever seen red eyes like those on a Gojo clansman? No, she's obviously a Kamo!"
"A Kamo? My foot. Not unless she were one of your experiments, and would you admit to this? Your legitimacy is in question as it is. Does your heir not originate from a branch family—"
"Noritoshi is the seed of the current clan head!"
"Noritoshi! You really named him... You wouldn't catch our Zenin clan naming another one Toji."
"You!"
What the fuh!? She looked at Satoru again, with the same expression, and he—sadly—just shook his head again.
"Gentlemen, this is unseemly." Right? "Before we decide when she joins the New Shadow School—"
"You bastard!" Another thump struck a wooden surface. "You struck a deal? With them? Did we not agree to start curbing their influence—"
"Not now." The 'unseemly' 'gentleman' interrupted. "As for the matter of young..."
"Suzushina Yuriko," said Suzushina Yuriko.
"Would it not be for the best to ascertain whether or not Gojo-san was joking first?"
"Joking?" Exaggerating, maybe. She had been more like a wall he had to expend unnecessary effort to circumvent, but joking? Yuriko didn't know why, maybe it was the inflection in his voice; maybe it was the way they had all tried to stake a claim on her like she was premium chattel, but even the insinuation that the night that had blown up her first peaceful environment in what had to be years was something anyone could joke about—chew them up. "No, I did fight Sukuna."
"Hm?" The voice drawled. "And you have no injuries to show for it?"
"Shoko fixed them," Satoru supplied. "He scratched her up a little."
"Ha." It was the man who had been arguing in favour of the Zenin clan. "So that's why you pulled our most valuable healer away from her post. You know she's been so busy she hasn't tended to the clan heir for months. Yet, somehow, she's had the time to treat unaffiliated children. I suppose the maternal instinct overrides sense."
Satoru snorted, "She just wasn't that busy to begin with."
"Impudent! Naoya-kun performed the heroic feat of exorcising a Special Grade curse in single combat! If she wasn't busy the least the wench could have done was—"
"I'm gonna stop you right there," Satoru was radiating so much smugness it could be picked up on by Geiger counter. "Yuriko, where were you on the 15th of December last year?"
She flipped the calendar back in her head. "Pretty much at school the whole day." She didn't exactly know what he was building up to but given the day it would have been illogical of her if she didn't have a hunch. Yuriko chose to play along. "At Sugisawa."
"Did you encounter a Zenin Naoya?"
"Doesn't ring a bell."
A low-level mumble began around them. Yuriko nearly made the mistake of parsing the sound again, ultimately deciding she preferred unelevated cortisol levels.
"Girl, if you were there then you must have seen him! It's unseemly, but he's bleached his hair and—"
"Oh!" It clicked. Yuriko dropped a fist in her palm, then turned to Satoru. "The misogynist Geto said I was supposed to have met. That's been bugging me for...actually no, I haven't thought about it since."
Well then, that wasn't strictly true, she had met him—probably. If not a curse, then that projectile that had slammed into her vector field at just under Mach one...was just some dude? At such an angle, reflecting him would have sent it on a course eastward toward...the Arahama coast? She wisely kept that to herself. They were talking about him as though he were still alive, though. Well, if he didn't plan on talking about it, neither would she.
Yuriko could have heard a pin drop in the wake of her statement.
"You encountered... Geto Suguru?" said one of the faceless voices.
She looked at Satoru, but this time he just winked. Whatever she did or said from now would probably have his blessing.
"Yeah." She shrugged. "Wanted to recruit me."
The sound of collective inhales.
"I said no."
Relieved sighs.
"Not after he sent that curse after me and my friends."
The sound of collective inhales.
"Wha—what? He attacked you...?"
"I think it was an Imaginary curse. Some kind of urban legend. It had an innate domain, but it wasn't particularly strong."
"A-and then Naoya-kun exorcised it, right?"
"Oh, no. That was me."
Somehow there was another sharp, collective, inhale—even though she was sure they hadn't let go of the previous one.
"Like I said, it was weak as fu—" She coughed. "It went down after one hit."
The silence hung for a moment longer, before another voice—the one whose statement had prompted her to crush the room's barrier—spoke up.
"A-and your 'friends.'" He didn't sound as certain now. "They saw this h-happen, right? We could find them and take their statements?"
"Oh, you don't need to find them." She was starting to see the strings now; the performance stoked the darker parts of her. Masterful. She didn't need to look at Satoru to know the look on his face. Smug. Bastard. "Itadori Yuji. Sasaki Setsuko."
"..."
Do as you wish.
"So, about that execution order."