For a while, he let the water trickle along ceramic, and into the abyss that was his bathroom sink. Maybe the sound would heal him. Maybe the quiet reflection would absolve him.
But as the seconds ticked, Tanaka Kenzo found no forgiveness in his medicine cabinet.
'Never bargain with terrorists' was an aphorism that only really applied to powerful nations. Plutocracies that could literally afford the 'cost' of civilian casualties. Hostages die, people grieve, nations carry on.
Not his little dragon. Not his girl.
Mr Tanaka drew a shaky breath and nearly doubled over from the strain on his ribs. He swallowed his pain, his painkillers, and waited. It would be fine; the shame, the weight of the guilt that was buckling his knees—it would all be worth it if Kaori kept her promise. But if she hadn't...
"Dammit!"
Then it was all for nothing. Mr. Tanaka slammed the cabinet.
And there she was, occupying the surface of his mirror. Not Kaori. Not his daughter. Older than Kaida, but a young girl regardless. Yet another student he had failed tonight. White hair, falling to her shoulders. Red eyes, perforating his soul like a needle. And an expression so glacial, he could have sworn he saw his breath fog. She had a red mark on her face that hadn't been there earlier.
"Worth it, you say?"
And she was upon him.
A hand snatched Mr. Tanaka by the collar, an undeniable force pulled him to her level. "Ig—Takeshi," she amended, "lost his arms, Setsuko fainted and Yuji is... but it was... worth it?" Suzushina's finger landed on his carotid like a bird of prey. "Explain."
He flinched as she read him the toll. What he had cost them all tonight—what he had cost her. Was there an answer she would be satisfied with? In her position, would he have been willing to hear one to begin with? So, Mr. Tanaka said nothing, and the girl returned his silence with sub-zero eyes.
Her knuckles went white where her fist gripped his shirt, and her sleeve fell. He instinctively broke eye contact, but what fell into his line of sight instead were the manifold scars trailing down her arms. Dammit, had anyone noticed? Any of the faculty?
It wasn't right for his mind to wander, but wander it did, and Mr. Tanaka remembered passing comments. An innocuous statement from the school nurse, that dredged up old memories; a not so innocuous comment from Itadori-kun.
She wanted an answer. He didn't have one.
"I'm glad... you're not alone anymore."
Suzushina's nose flared. Her eyebrows were converging on her nose. That unspoken something descended upon him again, lighting his nerves on fire.
Suzushina Yuriko opened her mouth, but that was when the front door slammed shut.
"Papa!"
And that one voice defrosted the entire situation. For a dizzying half-second, Mr. Tanaka almost dismissed it as another cry inside his own skull, but then he saw the shift in Suzushina's expression. She had heard it too.
"Kaida!"
His student's hand sprung off his neck like she had touched something scalding.
"Kaida, sweetie, are you alright?!"
Little footsteps pounded the staircase.
"Papa!" she cried again.
Upon later reflection, this would later become another point of shame for Mr. Tanaka, but as he heard his daughter's voice getting closer, he forgot the other young girl was even in the room at all.
He didn't notice when she dropped him, just that he was suddenly throwing open the bathroom door. A familiar force collided with his stomach, and all was well with the world again.
***
She could still hear the sound of sirens, still distantly feel the presence of cursed energy converging on the school. Not curses—they had all been exorcised—but Jujutsushi. The other faction that she had only tangentially interacted with through Satoru, and now Fushiguro, she supposed. A faction that, just like the first, likely wanted her friend dead.
Yuriko landed on a high-rise overlooking the city. Sendai rippled with an undercurrent of anxiety. A potent concoction of cursed energy found her, even at the distance she had chosen to place herself away from people. They would have heard her approach to the school; they would have heard her go off like a bomb from the gymnasium. This symphony of fear was one of her own composition.
And then the flash of...
But Yuriko wasn't focusing on Sendai.
She wasn't even thinking about the predicament that was thrust upon Yuji; not really, at least. Nor was she thinking about Setsuko, recovering in a hospital bed. Or even of Takeshi as he was being prepped for surgery. No, what had devoured the scope of her attention was the scene that was spilling from the bathroom window.
Like someone had turned off the metropolitan light of the city but left a candle burning in one humble apartment.
Mr Tanaka, and the little girl with her arms around him.
Yuriko couldn't look away. Not even when the colossal mass of Satoru's energy landed beside her.
"Were you gonna kill him?"
Truthfully, no. But she wasn't in the frame of mind to rationalise her decisions.
"That depends."
Her fingers flex, and the world goes red.
Force: unilateral violence tears through the treeline like a bullet through oobleck. The fires extinguish, the rain—for a moment—forgets it is falling. And standing in the sky, with eyes so blue they could have been cut from a kinder horizon, is the strongest sorcerer of the modern era.
All that is left of the 'god' with one eye is matter; unthinking matter.
"Would you have blown up the building to kill him first?"
"..."
***
He would never admit it but, in some of her quieter moments, when she wasn't examining a new idea or idly digesting new music, Yuriko reminded him of Suguru. If he told her this, Satoru would probably get one of those looks. That unimpressed, Suzushina stare that seemed like she was calculating the cost to effort ratio of beating the shit out of someone versus lecturing them, or both.
She wasn't a violent person—allegedly. She didn't enjoy fighting—allegedly. But it wasn't any of that preamble. Yuriko reminded Satoru of Suguru as he had been in the weeks following the incident with Amanai. The look of someone teetering at a precipice. Experience, as it often did, taught him far too late that Suguru's eyes had been clouding because he had been drowning. And so, the boy with 'all seeing' eyes, had failed to see the ledge his dear friend had alighted toward. He couldn't save Suguru; perhaps he could save her?
"Red."
Her expression when he had found her kneeling over the corpse of the man she had been about to execute...
Don't walk so willingly toward the edge, young lady.
He didn't say that of course, just held her gaze.
"Gojo-sensei!"
"Ah, Megumi." The other child whose parent he'd blown up ran into the clearing. His head was bleeding, his uniform was tattered, his— "You look... Sukuna really did a number on you, huh?"
"..."
"It was Sukuna that did this to you, right?"
"..."
"Yuriko?"
"Don't look at me, his ass was kicked before I got here."
"So, it was..." Satoru looked at the stain that was once Negi Tohihisa, now wishing he had had the chance to punch the guy. Oh well. More importantly...A deft flourish brought his phone to his hand, "The second years are gonna eat this up!"
"Gojo-sensei! This crazy girl—"
"Oh, right. Yuriko, meet Megumi, my first student. Megumi, this is Yuriko, my super-secret star pupil!"
The pair shared a second of eye contact—their mutual animosity dying for a moment—before placidly fixing him with a look. A mole of sweat slinked down his face. Why did all his students always unite against him? Awkward silence broke way to the sound of sirens.
Satoru cleared his throat. "Right, so where's Yuji?"
"You promised—"
"Oh, ye of little faith," he teased.
Yuriko flinched. Clearly what he had intended as a joke had landed for her as a poignant accusation; her cursed energy stirred as Satoru reached out and messed up her hair even more than it usually was. She didn't react the way he expected. She didn't react at all.
Instead, he caught a sideward glance in the direction of a miniscule source of cursed energy. Not at Takeshi, but her other teacher—pulling further away. It was brief. It was conclusive. Satoru frowned.
"Gojo-san!" said a voice, sounding more panicked than he'd ever heard it. It retained all the inherent qualities he had come to expect from Itadori Yuji. Liveliness suffused the airwaves. The boy hopped toward him, shirtless, with an exposed foot hanging in the air. "Over here!"
"So..." he responded, already knowing the answer to the question. "Which one are you?"
"Digimon data squad clears Tamers."
"Loud, and wrong," Satoru lambasted. "You're Yuji, alright."
"Please, Gojo-san!" Yuji looked down. At the mangled corpse of Negi Tohihisa, his expression uncharacteristically unreadable. Then he moved on. "The closest hospital's Sugisawa! Gramps is there! Do you know where it is!? Do you need to, to teleport?"
"Yeah, yeah, relax." Satoru watched Yuji as the King of Curses failed to even put up a token resistance against the boy's will. That level of talent as a vessel was practically unheard of. "Shoko's on her way. So, they're basically..."
But then Satoru noticed. A faint sheen where a bruise stood impressed against the boy's skin. It took the shape of a footprint. He could see the architecture of Yuriko's cursed energy—the individual sparks that formed the stars that in turn made up her universe. But that wasn't it. That wasn't it at all. Something tangible, something that glittered in the dying embers of the forest was binding the stars together as though it were gravity. Something he recognised.
Satoru, the man who ruffled hair, closed his eyes, and by the time they opened again it was Gojo Satoru—the sorcerer—who watched the world in his stead. The Six Eyes filtered the environment for Yuriko's energy, and sure enough, sitting in the soil beyond Yuji, and adjacent to the injured civilian was more of the substance he was certain he had annihilated months ago.
His next actions came to him before his decisions did. Satoru's fingers interlaced, and he was gone. He reappeared with Sasaki Setsuko, Iguchi Takeshi the boy's limbs tucked under his arms.
With a flare of cursed energy that was more instinct than thought, Itadori Yuji slid violently toward Satoru, still balanced on one leg. Rubber burned as Blue funnelled the metal into its epicentre and cast him toward Yuriko. Whether it was wind, or from a startled teenager, Satoru dismissed the screams as his positive energy exploded outward, dominating the space in tandem with his lapse. Equal, and opposite. +1, -1. Push and pull.
"Hollow Technique," he chanted. "Purple."
0.
***
White walls. Scrubs. The acerbic taste of disinfectant. Even for someone who had done so much, and seen even more, hospitals were always, eh. What was the word? Disconcerting? Disconcerting to the wielder of the Six Eyes. Suffering unspooled itself like a yarn interwoven by final goodbyes, newborn anguish, stress and now the malevolent presence of Ryoumen Sukuna sealed within a fifteen-year-old. He knew that Yuji's body was weird, but that was just... wild. Hilarious, even. He'd be laughing right now if it wasn't for—
SMACK!
A crisp, sudden sound rang across the walls with elasticity. Mrs. Iguchi stood, arm extended; the back of her palm redding on contact. Behind her was a man who looked like he didn't know whether to be horrified, or whether to sigh. Mr. Iguchi did a little bit of both.
Well, that was rude. He was going to think, 'if it wasn't for the fact that Yuji was grieving at the moment,' but today would be the day for disruption, wouldn't it?
"I don't care whomever you're affiliated with, Suzushina," glowered Mrs. Iguchi. She was just one cortisol spike away from spitting at the girl. "So, help me, you will stay away from my son."
His eyes had seen her curse energy surge to her face, reflexively. They had also caught her split-second decision to dismiss the protection entirely. Satoru sighed. The back hand had struck Yuriko authentically, snapping her head to the side.
"...understood," she said. Three syllables.
"Hmph."
The clack of heels punctuated the silence in the hallway, clack, clack, clack until Mrs. Iguchi rounded a corner, and vanished.
"I'm...sorry," Mr. Iguchi pinched the bridge of his nose. "She doesn't—actually, she did mean all of it. She's just been through a lot, and she's worried. I'm worried. They said he'll be fine, but... You never think it's gonna be your boy, you know?"
"It's fine." Two syllables.
The man seemed to deflate, tension leaking out of his stature like water from a sponge. "So, you'll forgive her?"
"What?" Wow, one. She really is out of it.
"My wife... you'll forgive her, right?"
Satoru watched the man as his eyes flittered from Yuriko, to him, to her again.
The girl in question had a befuddled look on her face, that probably mirrored his own, "Why does it matter if I forgive her or not?"
"Oh god—look. I take it back, she didn't mean any of it." The man's eyes were bouncing frantically between the pair. "You know how mothers get, right? Fiercely overprotective creature, that woman. She's lashing out, looking for someone to blame and you're..." he trailed off.
But Satoru had caught the social cue his student was too unathletic to catch.
"'Affiliated.' Who do you think we are?" Satoru asked.
"You're...not? But I thought... wow, wasn't your mother...?"
That seemed to do it. Red eyes snapped up, and the words died in Mr. Iguchi's throat.
"What?" Or maybe not. One syllable.
"Oh!" Mr Iguchi shouted, cupping a palm over an ear. "What's that, he's awake? Coming, dear!"
Nobody was calling that man. His Six Eyes confirmed it. But that was just what that Suzushina glare did to people; Satoru was smiling now, content in the absolute certainty that she was on his si—wait a minute. Why was she aiming that patented Suzushina glare at him now??
Yuriko's squint turned her pupils into slits; her cheek flushed in a distinctly palm-like shape. "A while ago, you told me you were keeping something from me."
Ah. Crap. That conversation; it was a fact he knew he had to broach at some point, but honestly? After the night they'd both had, Satoru was just hoping he could save the drama for the morning—and there would be drama. He hoped desperately that this was just a coincidence.
"You already knew ma—my mother was a sorcerer, didn't you?"
Shit.
"Yeah..." Satoru steeled his mind as he said this. He remembered detonating his own arm; he remembered how long it took to regenerate. He remembered that there had been more of her, somehow. Satoru's mind narrowed in on the risk that solely depended on— "how did you find out?"
Yuriko let out a defeated sigh, and her posture crumpled even further. "I met my... I guess my 'cousin' for the first time in six years and—shit! Nobara!"
He blinked. "Who?"
"She's got neck-length hair. Light brown. A perpetually smug look on her face, Kugisaki Nobara." The girl palmed her forehead. "Shit. What if they go after her too?"
"Oh, her. She was supposed to head to Tokyo." Y'know... if you join Juju—"
"Really? A sales pitch? Now?"
"Right. I see her. We'll talk about Sukuna when I get back."
"Be quick."
He locked his fingers, and the hospital—the white walls and menagerie of suffering within—vanished around him.
***
"Oh, you're Gojo Satoru."
He found the girl wheezing, and cursing, as she was running along what seemed to be the most direct path to the school.
"In the flesh," he confirmed, "Nice to meet you."
"And Yuriko sent you to pick me up because... she was worried about me?"
"That's correct."
"I'd hurry back."
"Hm?"
"If she really was that worried, she'd have come here herself. That's the kind of person she is."
***
Two scene changes, and Satoru was with his student. Him and her, so high above the world, that he wondered how their feet ever trod the ground. He was watching the girl watch her other teacher hug his daughter. The silence hung like a guillotine.
"You tricked me."
Yuriko shrugged.
"Did you get what you wanted?" he asked.
"I...no."
It was that look on her face again. The one that reminded him of how utterly he had failed his best friend. "You're blaming yourself."
"I noticed."
"It wasn't your fault."
Nothing. He sat beside her and turned his eyes to the tearful reunion through the window.
"I was a teenager too, you know? A lot better at Jujutsu than you are now. I could throw an actual punch, do more than one push up every ten minutes." Her face didn't give her away, but Yuriko's CE rippled with irritation. "And as far I can recall, I never lost a fight to a cat while my reinforcement was down."
The girl flushed.
"I thought I was invincible."
"There's no such thing as an invincible sorcerer. Least of all a fool with something to protect."
"Dafaq?"
"Lesson two..." she mumbled, when he turned to probe her expression.
"Sukuna?" he guessed, and Yuriko nodded. Dude, get your own student... "Well, he's not wrong. I was already the strongest, and it wasn't enough. I did my best though, and sometimes, that's all we can do."
"I'm... I haven't. Been doing my best, I mean." Yuriko fell on her back, her feet dangled off the rooftop. "I should have thrown myself into it. This Jujutsu shit. Sukuna nearly killed me. If it wasn't for..."
"The metal?"
"Yeah, what was that? Why'd you blow it up?"
"Well, you tricked me once today, so I'll just say I'll tell you later."
Predictably, she pouted. But that was significantly less concerning than the last several minutes of non-expression.
"Where was I?"
"You were telling me how much you stink at sorcery."
"Right." Her lips thinned. "I can only make slightly modified curtains. My barrier's riddled with flaws, and I haven't really improved my reinforcement since I first learnt how to do it."
"And when did you first learn?" He wasn't expecting her to tell him. Yuriko had previously been tight-lipped about how long she'd been practicing Jujutsu.
"Oh, the same day I felt my cursed energy for the first time."
Wow. "And that was?"
"Four months ago."
"Nice."
"What I'm saying is, I've barely gotten better at anything that hasn't been my 'technique.'"
He very much disagreed but, from personal experience, he knew to never interrupt an arrogant child while they were in the middle of self-evaluation.
"If I knew RCT, I could have healed Takeshi." Not really how it worked, but... "If I had a domain, I could have countered Sukuna's." Also, not really how it worked, but.. "I'm so far behind, no wonder you brag so much about Yuta."
Bruh. He had just been lightly goading her; he never expected it would be so effective...
Once again, never interrupt an—
"I want to join Jujutsu High."
"..."
For the next few seconds, Gojo Satoru understood what it was like to be subjected to Unlimited Void.