[Content Warning: Vague mentions of self-harm and suicidal ideation]
"Is there a reason we're doing this?"
They let the building fall away behind them as the car drove on. In the driver's seat sat a woman with dusty pink hair, and eyes the colour of petrol. Seated next to her was a Buddhist monk wearing a green yukata, and a contemplative smile on his face. The voice came from the back passenger seats, where a pair of sisters sat in their uniforms. But where one of them wore a simple black sailor uniform, the other had hers stylised to match her blonde-haired gyaru aesthetic. She had been the one to speak.
"Hm?"
"I don't know, this is a little lame, isn't it?" said Hasaba Nanako, as she tapped at her phone with feigned indifference.
"Complete waste of time," echoed her sister. Mimiko was currently doing needlework; her cursed technique required effigies as mediums for its voodoo effect.
"Was it?" Geto said. "We learned quite a lot from this, and I'd say we're about to learn even more. And you, Nanako, were completely essential. I couldn't have gotten close to that child without her noticing otherwise. If I didn't know any better, I'd think she had the six eyes."
"And what did we learn?" Suda Manami asked from the driver's seat, but they could tell from her tone that the question wasn't meant for Geto.
"She sucks. Can't control her cursed energy very well. Used a damn lake's worth—she has way too much by the way—just to make some tables move."
"She's kind of homeless right now—Oi, Nanako, I see you, why're you trying not to laugh? That's disrespectful as shit." Mimiko threw a sister a long-suffering glare, as the latter did her very best—a heroic attempt really—to keep her facial expressions neutral. "That means she hasn't been scouted by the 'zookeepers' yet."
"Hm, correct. And?"
"..."
They didn't have an answer; Geto let out a sigh, but he was smiling.
"Her monkey parents have abandoned her," The twins scowled as he said this; it had been years, but on some days, they could still feel the contempt. The judgement; the fear. They could still remember the dirt under their fingers. Geto smiled kindly before speaking again. "Can I see the photo you took of her?"
Nanako obliged, breaking eye contact with her phone for the first time as she handed it over.
"See," said Geto, as he traced his finger around the image of the girl's arm. "Only half the scarring there looks self-inflicted. She's staying here, because she has nowhere to go. I think we could be that for her, just like..."
His voice trailed off. There were just some things that didn't need to be said.
"So," Mimiko coughed, "what else are we about to learn?"
"Does it have anything to do with the curse you left behind?"
"Ah, yes... I believe it was the Imaginary Vengeful Cursed Spirit: Hanako-san," he said. A serene smile played at his lips.
The engine hummed softly as Manami brought the vehicle to a stop. Nobody spoke for a moment. It was cute, really. Despite their conscious attempts to differentiate themselves as individuals, neither Mimiko nor Nanako could fight their instinctive reactions. Their eyes widened incrementally; their jaws hung in tandem.
"I thought we wanted her to join the family?" Manami hissed, but her words came out without any real venom to them.
"We do."
"Do you think she's a—?"
"Closer," he interrupted "but you're all still missing something. Two disgusting somethings that I considered."
"The non-sorcerers," spoke a twin.
"You're testing how she'll react," her other half completed.
***
He hit the ground floor as the banging stopped. Yuji was slowing down now, unwinding like a spool of yarn, but still the muscles in his legs stayed strung. He was preparing to run again without a moment's notice. The spell broke when he felt a gentle tap at his shoulders. Oh. Yuji set Sasaki on her feet, and the clack of her boots reverberated down the hallway.
"Uhm, thanks," Sasaki mumbled. "And sorry, this was a bad idea."
Yuji barely heard her. No, he heard her loud and clear, but he wasn't listening. Hearing her speak, and the gaps between her words made him notice. It was too quiet. Along with his general fitness, from a young age, Yuji had learned that he could see, hear and smell just a little better than the average person.
The wind outside wasn't blowing; the night heron didn't sing; even the smell of cleaning products on the floor evaded him. Something was off. He felt the hairs on his forearm as they stood at attention. There was a quality to the air—a presence that awaited activation, like a sleeper cell. Where once the dark halls had seemed objective—like just a thing that was—now they felt almost... hostile? Yuji blinked.
No. That didn't make any sense at all. He was just being paranoid; he had to be. It had to be his frayed nerves. Had to be the lingering adrenaline. Whatever that noise had been, there had to also be an explanation that made sense. Sasaki had probably already come up with one; Iguchi would definitely have had one—even at the expense of sense. A prank. Yuji chuckled with more mirth than he felt. It was probably a prank. Rat boy had set them up. That had to be it.
So, he ignored how the silence stretched the shadows. He ignored how the moonlight scattered through the corridor windows in myriad refractions, never quite illuminating the path in front of him. They were still living in the real world, and the real world made sense.
"It's fine, let's just get out of here," he said.
Yuji's ears twitched. Footsteps. From above, closing in, fast. His hand found Sasaki's wrist. He tensed up again. The urge to move almost overran his higher functions. He wasn't thinking straight when he grasped for the bathroom's door handle, and maybe that's why he didn't notice that it hadn't been a handle on their way in.
His mind froze as it all hit his senses. The overwhelming smell of damp, the endless rows of tile that stretched and stretched far beyond what his eyes could see, the roar of sewage against pipe, and the taste of something unspeakable. He didn't know whether to gag, foam out of the mouth, or cry so his body found a compromise as it did all three. The room was larger than large. It was larger than the whole school—large enough that he could get lost in it, and there were no walls, no ceiling. Just rows upon rows of toilet stalls and plumbing fixtures.
He could vaguely hear himself still hacking up a lung. Sasaki's voice, but all he heard was "door", and "gone". He could hear a third source of human sound, but it wasn't coming from either of them. There was the sound of wailing, the paradoxically gentle pitter-patter of tear drops against ceramic. There was the sound of a knock, and then another and then another coming from the third stall from where the bathroom door would have been. And then there was a voice.
"Haven't you done enough?" it pleaded, sounding very much like a little girl, even younger than Yuji was. So much so that he was going to ask if 'she' was okay, before it spoke again. "Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. LEAVE ME ALONE!"
Which each repetition of the words, the voice lost a certain quality. It wasn't pitch; it wasn't tone. It was something not immediately identifiable, but as it spoke and it spoke, the words sounded less and less like words, and the voice sounded less and less human.
Then the floodgates spilled open.
What must have been gallons of toilet water erupted from the third stall; sloshing and gushing as it went. Yuji felt his body heave to the side as Sasaki, who had already been tugging his arm, just about managed to pull him to the side. They were still caught in the current, but Sasaki had saved them from the thalweg. The wave shattered tiles, tore sinks from their dwellings, displaced pipes which only served to feed the tide.
The wet slap on his face snapped him back to reality. Yuji kicked off the ground, and he sliced his way closer to Sasaki. Cut. His uniform tore. Scrape. A shard of something brushed against soft tissue. Blood. A gash; red met the froth. His back took the brunt of the punishment, before the water level evened, and spat them out like the ocean did to sediment. He tried to stand, but just about managed to kneel, positioning himself between his friend and whatever that was.
"Wha—wha," Sasaki was better than him. He was still power washing the floor with the contents of his stomach. And lungs.
Yuji looked up and almost wished he hadn't.
She (it?) wore a red sailor uniform, but it was hard to tell where the blood ended, and the design began. She (it?) wore her (its) hair in pig tails. She (it?) wore her (its) tears like leaky faucets, stacking sheets upon sheets of water onto the ground. Her (its) neck snapped then stretched two meters into the air.
"Stop," it pleaded. "Please, stop. Make it stop! Just go away!"
It didn't need to tell him twice. It didn't need to tell him once, really. The problem was that there was no "away". He risked a glance behind him.
"We... can't," he said.
The wail that followed made his ears bleed.
***
They chant, and all she can do is listen:
Stinky Hanako,
Toilet water Hanako,
We. Don't. Like. You. So,
Cry, cry, Hanako,
Friendless, ugly, Hanako,
Go and disappear!
***
She didn't acknowledge how bizarre it was that none of the water was spilling into the hallway. Okay, made she did. It was weird. It broke a lot of physical laws as she understood them. Maybe—
"Itadori!"
Right. Yuriko stepped into the room and immediately felt shift in atmosphere. Numbers pinged against her barrier and were flung away contemptuously. From this she could reverse calculate humidity. It probably stank like hell, but she wouldn't know for the next three minutes.
The scene spilled itself before her. Three signatures. One subdued, but otherwise stable. One loud—intense. Intimidating: it was like standing in front of a waterfall, knowing that for whatever reason, you had decided to swim upwards. But the third took all of her focus. Bright, but fading.
Yuriko exploded into motion, but in her mind, the process was far more surgical. She seized the vectors around her, injecting every little bit of herself with an even distribution of force. One moment she was still, the next her hands were diving into the wastewater curtain Itadori Yuji was suspended in.
She still marvelled at the ease at which she was processing all the information. It shouldn't have been possible in real time, but the very instance she touched him, she had already generated a safety 'net' of numbers around and through his body. Then, just as quickly, their combined acceleration flipped in the opposite direction. Inertia stayed put like a good little dog, as she shot back towards—wait, she knew her—Sasaki Setsuko.
All three of them flew back a respectable distance away from the thing.
Damn, at this range its sadness was overpowering. Somehow, she felt like she could smell a little of what the bathroom must have smelt like despite her field of isolation.
The entire action, from start to finish had only taken two seconds. Yet it also took another minute from her barrier.
Sasaki was only just beginning to react. Her lips were caught between her concern for her friend, and the bafflement at seeing a fourth party. If she had tried to say something, maybe her words would have come out as "Suzudori!", or something equally offensive? Yuriko dumped Itadori on his feet, then immediately had to catch him. She would have used her power to stand him straight, but as it stood—heh— the clock was ticking, and she was running on the byproducts of incomplete combustion.
"Can you stand? Please tell me you can stand."
Maybe it was a moment of clarity in an absurd situation, or maybe it only looked like she was nodding because the poor girl was shivering, either way Yuriko pulled Sasaki to her feet.
"Great. Excellent. Run, I'll cover you."
Sasaki stared at her for a second. Which was one second too many. Time, it seemed, was in vanishing supply. One minute.
"What are you waiting for? Kamen Rider? He's not coming." Her irritation rippled the energy shroud around her. Fuck. She'd lost some time.
"Wh—what about you?" Sasaki sputtered. "You need to run, too."
Just like that, her irritation vanished—odd, she'd been shown concern twice in a single week, that had to be a record—only to flare up with renewed intensity.
"Get. Out," Yuriko spat. "The space has gone 'all wonky', in layman's terms," she said, shamelessly ignoring that she too was 'layman,' and had no clue what was going on. "But it's still a bathroom. Conceptually speaking—there has to be a door. Just keep running. I'll catch up."
***
Outside the innate domain, and even further outside the school's premises the car was still going. It was circling the entire affair through a series of interconnected roads.
"She's decided," Geto sighed.
"I take it that she made the wrong choice?"
"There's no such thing, Manami," he said. "Not for a sorcerer."
Then he closed his eyes, as his mind delivered the order. Kill the spares.
***
They were finally moving, which was just grand because. Forty-five; forty-four. Science, that annoyed her.
For the first time, she looked at the thing. It stirred a memory in her, a ghost story—were there ghosts now? This was certainly the most humanoid entity she had ever seen, to also not be human. Was she about the kill a person, or just the idea of one? She crunched the numbers in her head. She needed an attack that would wipe it out in one hit. One hit was all she had in her before the very vulnerable, squishy girl underneath her forcefield was exposed to the world again.
She didn't have the time to think. An apocalyptic eruption of energy occupied every thought in her head. Every droplet of water returned to the thing Yuriko had designated in her head as 'Hana.' The surrounding toilets became geysers; taps snapped as they too contributed to the catchment area around Hana.
It towered over everything—a column of water so expansive, Yuriko realised there wasn't a ceiling. Its shadow stretched to every corner of the engorged space. Its shadow that only grew deeper as it fell.
"Oh, fuck."
She would be fine. At the rate it was moving, thirty seconds was plenty. But from the length of the shadow, she deduced that Itadori and his friend were definitely within the splash zone.
No one could blame her, really. She did try. Who told them to break into a school building? Delinquents, the pair of them. Another active use of her ability would burn her out. And what could she even feasibly do for three people with only twenty-seven seconds? Alone, she could just fling herself halfway across the city. She had never tried to, but it was just a matter of trying. It was something she knew she could do. And would it be so wrong?
She thought of the police all those years ago. Of all the work they didn't have to do, because what was a simple 'run away' case, hadn't evolved into a domestic abuse case. Right. That was how it was. When had anyone ever looked out for her? Not her neighbours. Not her teachers—Miss Yomikawa has. She bought you new stationary when dad wouldn't. Okay, but when had anyone ever tried to make sure she was safe? That she was okay?
Yuriko had found her excuse. Had found her reason to turn heel to this whole situation and let the devil—Hana—get its due.
But then the lie tasted like cheesecake.
Zero. As the column fell, Yuriko forced everything, every last drop of that formless heat, of that regret she was already starting to feel—the shame—into her palms; then she threw them both upwards, catching the mass... Her emotional processing gave way to cold, hard logic. The moment her palms contacted the column, her mind was filled with data. Momentum, the downward acceleration, velocity. Mine. Forget the principles of the universe, they were under new management.
It stopped in its place, but if her only plan was to stop it, then maybe she did deserve to die. Instead, the column became a sphere, and the sphere became smaller, pulling away from the would-be ghostbusters. More compact. Denser. She could feel water fighting to get free as the pressure built, but then she flipped the arrow, and now the negative pressure only made the ball shrink faster. It shrank until it could fit between her hands. Besides the volume, the process wasn't that much different from her brief experiments with running tap water. This time though? She accounted for the bubbles, infinitesimal as they were.
Her eyes snapped towards 'Hana.'
In that moment, Yuriko caught its eyes, and suddenly she could believe that it once had been human. That it had been a been a girl; that she(?) had loved, cried and begged until her voice tasted like blood. Yuriko looked into her(?) eyes and found nothing. Not the nothing an astronaut observes in a vacuum. Not the nothing that dancing between blades of grass, giving each an individual shape. Not even the nothing that falls between notes to make them music, but a deeply human absence that only a human could ever know. That only sentient thinking things can stick their fingers in and describe the shape and dimensions of its yawning hunger. The kind of absence that may have once driven a little girl into bathroom she would never leave—the kind of nothing that once drove a little girl to the roof of a construction site.
"Sorry," she sighed, because in the now, 'nothing' didn't matter. "I owe him one."
Yuriko unleashed the one-way road between her palms. That narrow corridor—the once driest point within the room devoured every molecule of H2O. The hydrogen bonding that held them all together practically strained as each gram followed the next. Ceramic chips, broken bits of tile and unmentionable solvents shot through that gap like pilgrims who mere metres and a doorway from their messiah. Even that indescribable, formless nothing flowed into the path she had ordained. They had been restrained for too long. Too beholden to the will of the one whose will was broken.
And so came the vapour cone as the beam—and it could only be called a beam—shattered the sound barrier. So came the hiss of steam as friction made itself known. So came the thorough bisection of the thing that could have once been human.
She wept as she fell. "Please, no... more."
The liminal space collapsed as lonely, friendless, Hanako did.