Chapter Text
He comes to with a dull throb in his temple, limbs feeling like cotton. He’s laid sideways on something soft and fuzzy. Lead coats his eyelids as he pries them open, possessed by inexplicable urgency, and it takes a few beats long to decipher his surroundings. A moving car, streetlights cutting through the night, partially illuminating the driver’s hair, catching buttercup-gold on its edges. The light ignites sharp sparks of pain behind Suguru’s eyes despite their relative dimness.
He groans.
The car veers so abruptly he almost chokes, biting his cheek so hard it almost cuts the flesh. It’s such a sudden movement: the steep turn, the scream of tires skidding against pavement, the vehicle’s fullybody jerk as it slams into full break—hitting the curb in the process, judging by the metal crash.
“G’ morning!” Tsukumo Yuki grins at him, body twisted to look at him from the driver’s seat. The grin splits her face like a sickle. “I was almost starting to worry I got the dosage wrong!”
“What?” And it’s only then, when he tries to sit up, that he realizes the awkwardness of his position. The ache around his wrists, ankles, that raw irritation of the skin. It’s because he’s bound. His brain feels like an ill-oiled machine. His last memory, what’s his last memory—“Dosage?”
Memories shift through his mind in fast succession, brief images and bright splotches of emotion. Tsukumo by the motorcycle, gold and black under the summer sun, one hand on the seat, head slightly tilted; Say, Getō-kun, do you wanna come with me? The shake of his head, his rejection; ...but thank you very much for the offer.
She must have read something in his face, then, with the way her eyes narrowed even as her smile continued unfaltering and her body didn’t shift from its lax slope. There’s nothing I could possibly say that’d change your mind? His confirmation. Then—then—what? A blur of motion, his startled alarm, the sharp stab of pain against his neck.
No fucking way, he thinks, incredulous.
“Why,” he manages, pulling himself upright, glancing at the binds around his wrists, cursed energy seals, “am I bound?”
“’Cause,” Tsukumo answers easily, all bright and casual under the burnt streetlights hitting half her face, “if you weren’t, you’d try t’ leave or attack or both!”
Right, okay. He sucks in a deep breath, air stuttering uneasily in his lungs. He has to keep calm, keep his voice steady, maintain the appearance of reason. He doesn’t want to deal with this. “And you did this, why?”
“Hmm, what do you think?”
“Because I rejected your invitation,” Suguru says, “you…” he doesn’t know, “want something with me.”
“Wow, vague!”
He grits his teeth.
“You realize,” Suguru says, tugging lightly his binding, the seals suppressing his cursed energy, and he can only just barely keep the molten frustration on his tongue from burning the flat silk of his voice, “that this is a kidnapping.”
“So harsh!” Tsukumo laughs, “Think of it as a dubiously consensual internship! Fully paid, 'promise!”
He glares, jaw setting. “Let me go.”
“Sure,” she agrees, “if you promise not to try anything.”
He stays quiet.
“Hah! Thought so.” Her grin is still right there, infuriatingly flippant. Her clothing is different from when he last saw her, he realizes; a black denim jacket over a high-collar flower-print shirt. “It’d be no use to attempt something, though.”
He arches a brow, something mean slipping into his voice. Not sarcastic, exactly, but somewhat mocking. “Oh, really?”
“Yep! We’re all the way in Italy, y’know?”
Suguru freezes. Italy? It doesn’t feel like she’s lying. Fuck, how long has he been unconscious?
“Shit,” he says.
Tsukumo’s eyes glint. There’s something like victory, there. An unbidden thought surfaces: he rips them from her skull and bites them between his teeth. “I haven’t eaten all day,” she says, “wanna get something t’ eat?”
He stares for a moment. “Seriously?”
“C’mon,” she protests, “it’s a nice bar! I’ll unbind you.”
“Unbind me?” This soon? This easily? “You’re not worried I’ll...”
“You won’t,” she answers, and her smile doesn’t fall so much as be discarded, no longer the right face; he knows the movement, “you’re in a foreign country without proper documentation. You don’t speak the language, you don’t have any connections, and you don’t know the land. Your phone doesn’t have service and you can’t contact support. You’re being kept by a special-grade seven years your senior and in much better condition besides. You don’t have any option but to go along with my whims, Getō-kun!”
There’s a certain sort of whiplash between her cheer and the cold analytics she’s just given him. It’s not untrue.
“And let me guess,” he says, dry humor, because it’s easier to play along, “no one knows where I am?”
“Of course! I’m not sloppy.”
He figured. “...Fine,” he bites, “we’ll go. Just unbind me.”
Tsukumo beams. She gets out of the car and comes round his side, opens his door. When he holds out his wrists expectantly, she cuts cleanly through the binds with the blade of a swiss army knife. Before he knows it, the same has been done to the ones around his ankles.
“No thank you?” There’s something teasing on her face, even as she steps away from the door, further into a narrow street.
He scoffs, swinging out from his seat, shoe hitting on solid ground. “No, you—”
The world goes dark, vision splotching black. He staggers over the abrupt lack of balance, head spinning, a sudden vertigo. His body is too light and too heavy, and its all he can do to stumble a step, two, and catch himself on the hood of a neighboring car. His ears are ringing so loud, a high pitched line of white noise that momentarily eclipses all other sound.
He waits.
Sight bleeds back in segments of static purple, sharpening gradually. He recovers balance before vision, stomach settling in place, nausea lingering only in phantom visage. His orientation solidifies, world becoming once more tangible. One second, two, three, four. He straightens himself. Waits for the last of his vision to return; five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.
His ears won’t shut up already—!
Tsukumo is peering curiously at him, features soft in the warm streetlight. “Are you okay? Did I overdo the dosage?”
“It’s fine.” He grimaces, voice sounding oddly grating layered against the ringing, sharp and steady, in his head. It’d be so much easier to be dead. “It’s normal. This happens all the time.”
“Ohhhh,” she says, “really.”
Something defensive pricks down his skin. “Aren’t we going to a bar, or whatever?”
A beat. Somewhere in the distance, through this winding maze of closely-pressed two-story stone buildings and cracked asphalt roads, a police siren cries. The air smells oddly of ocean and roast coffee, of cigarette smoke and melted cheese. Dry heat kisses over Suguru’s skin, bloats humid under his rumpled school uniform. There’s still the lingering scent of chemical laundry detergent; saccharine lavender.
“Yeah,” Tsukumo agrees, easily, “we are.”
-
It takes five minutes to get there by foot. They take two turns, twist into a narrow road that really resembles more an alley, and duck into a shady place with no windows. By the time they settle into their barstools, Suguru has only just regained normal hearing.
Tsukumo abruptly slaps him on the back, and she greets the nonshaman-bartender in bright, cheerful English. Hello! From there, the conversation is almost entirely lost to Suguru. He can pick out pieces from Tsukumo’s side, but the nonshaman speaks with an accent, and Suguru can’t understand a word he says.
He wishes they had gotten takeout or gone to a supermarket, or something. Being so close to nonshamans makes his skin crawl. Bile in the back of his throat. What the fuck is wrong with him.
“...How,” he asks, finally, after they’re done “did we even get here? Security on international travel isn’t that loose.”
“Oh, easy!” Tsukumo’s nails clack against the glass of her wine. “I’ve got some connections to the mafia here—it’s really useful having a lot of friends.”
She can’t be fucking serious. “The mafia.”
“Yeah, useful for smuggling.”
He studies her, the slope of her shoulders, tilt of her head, movement of her wrist. Burnt light from a bulb that seems in need of replacement casts her in shades of gold-orange. She’s got this lazy smile on her face, a little amused, somewhat expectant. Oh, she’s serious. Okay.
“How extreme.”
“Risky for sure,” she agrees.
He scoffs. “As if a nonshaman mafia could pose a danger to you in the slightest. They’re nonshamans.”
She shrugs. “A gun is a gun.”
Static breaks in Suguru’s head. The shot rung out with the sound of cracking stone; Amanai Riko’s brain matter against the stone, blood and bone and cranial fluid. The ugly state of her skull. That split second of disbelief, of noncomprehension, before registering Fushiguro Tōji. The gun in his hand, sleek and black. His shark-grin, ugly and rugged. It all happened so fast. A gun is a gun.
I know, he wants to fucking scream, I KNOW.
An image surfaces unwillingly: he is ripping Tsukumo’s heart from her chest and peeling her apart down an autopsy line. The image changes, and he is in her place. He wants to bite his teeth. Stop.
“But yeah,” Tsukumo is saying, “in this case, they weren’t a threat.”
Something acidic or painfully polite or both in the same hovers on his tongue and never gets the chance to slip off. Their food comes. It’s some creamy pasta dish with western-style noodles. Two lemon slices on the side as a garnish. Looks heavy on the stomach. Some revulsion curdles on the back of his tongue.
“I still don’t understand what you gain by this,” he forces himself to say, because he has to be useful.
“Hmm.” She twists her noodles into yarn around the prongs of her fork, and there’s something incredibly cold in her eyes. Her posture doesn’t change at all, maintains its flippancy. Tsukumo swallows, and grins. “You remind me of myself, I guess? Third year was pretty rough for me! I asked you if you hate nonshamans because that’s something I asked myself.”
There’s something in her tone, though, in the curve of her smile. The way her eyes analyze his own posture. It’s somewhat vague, somewhat specific, but most of all, it’s just so convenient.
“Bullshit,” he says, because he only knows how to recognize himself in his worst reflected pieces, “stop lying to me.”
She doesn’t blink, but she does lean back. There’s no flicker of surprise, but there is an odd blankness, and then: “...Hah! You could tell!”
Suguru’s lips press thin. “...You’re a good liar.”
“Oh I know,” she says, then hums, contemplative. Tsukumo’s gaze pricks cold on his skin, feels indifferent and unfeeling; analytical. Feels like she’s dissecting him alive. Can she see the rot that festers under his skin, molds in his stomach and pollutes his head? The grotesque thoughts that just won’t leave no matter how unwelcome they are? How awful Suguru feels about having them at all?
“What?”
Something flicks across her face. When she speaks, it’s with an odd tone, a little surprised, but not unpleasantly so. Impartial, maybe. As though she’s stumbled across something interesting. “...You like sincere people, hm.”
Suguru bites his tongue between his canines, hard enough to hurt. “Everyone likes sincere people.”
“You’d be surprised!”
“You aren’t making sense.”
“Right right,” she laughs, hand waving to the side. “’Doesn’t matter. You want the truth, yeah?”
“Are you gonna give it to me?”
“You’ve got red flags plastered all over you. You’re a ticking time bomb; that much became obvious after ten minutes...” her nails tap against the glass of her wine, and her eyes glint pale-gold in the light. “You’re standing on the edge of a cliff and instead of pulling you back, I rationalized why you should step off. That’s something I need to take responsibility for, you know?”
Shame burns his skin. It’s overwhelming, the tide of self loathing that engulfs him, clots in his lungs, makes his head hurt. Has has too—focus, focus on something else. His lips thin. “There’s more.”
“Mhm! I’m the only high profile shaman looking to eradicate curses from the root. It’s not even common knowledge that shamans don’t produce curses, for some godawful reason.” She rolls her eyes. “Had you stepped off that ledge with my goal in your mouth, it’d be so sorely obvious who you took inspiration from. I really don’t wanna deal with that mess, especially given who your best friend is.”
And Suguru doesn’t know what to say. It makes sense, that she wouldn’t want to be associated with him. He doesn’t wanna be associated with himself. He picks at the lemon slice, severs a crystal of flesh, and slips it past his teeth. It bursts sour in his mouth.
On the far wall, a chalkboard menu is written in roman script he barely recognizes and can’t read. The bartender is European, as are the three other people here; one at the opposite end of the bartop, two at a table in the corner. Some foreign song wafts from the radio, slow and sweet and sung in a language Suguru doesn’t know.
He’s so far from home.
-
They sleep in the car. Or rather, Tsukumo sleeps. These times are the worst, when the world is still, and Suguru is alone with his thoughts.
He doesn’t wanna think about Satoru so he tries to think about his situation and that loops right back to why Tsukumo took him in the first place, ticking time bomb, red flags, and then he just hates himself. Feels disgusting. What if we just killed them all? Why did he say that? Except he knows why, because—
—fucking monkeys—
Suguru bites his cheek so hard it bleeds. The low hatred that’s been stewing in his stomach for god knows how long simmers. It’s always simmering.
Sometimes, Suguru feels that he is bursting. His heart picks up in his chest, beats against the bars of his ribcage, pulses so fast he can feel it in his neck. His skin starts to feel hot and molten and he lays replaying memories and moments in his mind, thinking and thinking, ‘till he’s sure his face must be red, it’s so hot. His palms go sweaty, nails digging into the skin, and there’s a hive of locusts in his stomach. It surfaces at inconvenient times, this feeling, and when breath catches in his lungs and his heart skips an angry beat in his chest, he has to bite his tongue to keep from saying something stupid. That is the depth of his wanting.
There’s a difference, subtle but significant, between ‘to love’ and ‘to be in love’. Similarly, Suguru thinks, there is a difference between ‘to hate’ and ‘to be in hate’.
He goes to sleep in hate and he wakes up in hate. It strings him along the orbit of a black hole, makes itself his sun and his moon and his stars to guide his dead-heart towards a reason to beat. It fills him with a certain sort of pining, makes him want himself dead and them dead and the whole entire world dead, makes him want and want and want want want want until the enormity of his desire swallows him alive. He is left daydreaming through car-rides, fantasizing through nights, cheeks hot, heart fast; I will kill your family and make you watch, I will pull out your entrails and stuff them down your throat, I will make you pay in pain. The face of his victim never settles, changes as light refracts through sharp-cut gemstone turned under bright show lights; it never matters. It’s that sort of hatred.
He digs his nails into his palm, and leans against the car door, temple pressing against lukewarm glass that offers no relief, and glares into the night.
-
They’re on some back-road running past sunlit vineyards and Suguru watches the world run by: green fields, blue skies, pale gold buildings. Tsukumo is driving, and the car radio sings some upbeat Italian pop that’s probably terribly overplayed here but Suguru has never heard in his life. Its cheer grates on his ears.
“Turn it off.” One palm is holding the side of his face, the other closed tight in his lap. He doesn’t look at her when he says it. His jaw hurts, he’s been clenching it so hard.
“You’re so moody!” But the radio cuts off, sharp into silence.
-
Three days in, Tsukumo asks: “What do you wanna eat?”
They’re in the green sprawl of Naples, where buildings are packed less densely and the air bloats somewhat with greenery. He can taste it in the air, leaves and flowers and grass. He shifts uncomfortably on the grumbling stone wall they’ve say themselves, pressing his heel into a small rock that’s found its way into his shoes.
“I’m fine with anything.”
“Nah,” Tsukumo says, “you haven’t been eating. I’m not blind.”
If he bites his cheek, it shows visually. He bites his tongue. It’s been—he’s not sure how long, since he ate a curse, actually. He’d eaten one the day he talked to Tsukumo, but nothing high-grade since. A couple grade fours at the gas station, cafe, beach, just on habit. By now, he shouldn’t have any issue with eating real food. It’s habit, though, or something like it.
“...I like all foods.” Which isn’t untrue, not exactly. He does.
Some irrational compulsion, maybe: if he’s morally obligated to eat curses, then maybe he doesn’t want to eat at all. Like some misdirected rebellion. It feels childish, when he frames it like that, feels stupid.
“Alright,” Tsukumo says, “then what’s easiest?”
How does she manage to see through him like that?
Things he doesn’t have to chew much are the easiest. He’s developed a habit, over the last year, of downing food quickly as he can; there are rarely moments when the taste of the last curse he’s eaten doesn’t pervade his senses. But eating fast means eating clumsy, means not chewing much, means choking or having to force food down, and then he just wants to die. It’s too similar.
And that feels so personal.
“...”
“C’mon,” Tsukumo says, uncrossing her legs from where one was over the other, touching to the ground, and making towards the car. Her head twists back to look at him. “Your body is a tool; you have to eat.”
Here’s the thing: when Suguru isn’t burning alive, he’s rotting. He’s made of mold, a skeleton corpse dragging itself along. He doesn’t want to answer, but doesn’t want to argue, either.
“Smoothies are fine.”
So they go to a smoothie bar down near the ocean and drink under the bright august sun. Salty breeze clots in his hair, and strawberry lingers on his tongue. It sort of makes him sick.
-
His thoughts are worst when he’s alone on the train back to Jujutsu Tech, when he’s crashing in his dorm room, when he’s exorcising and ingesting and exorcising an ingesting and exorcising and ingesting and—when he’s walking the same road in circles. Cycles.
And here’s the thing about traveling with Tsukumo, actually: he never has time truly alone.
On the fifth day, when Tsukumo is picking snacks off the shelves of some grocery store—crackers and cherries and sparkling lemon water—and Suguru is carrying the basket, he realizes: oh, I don’t hate this. He’s immediately stuck by an enormous guilt. He should be home, in Japan, exorcising curses and saving monkeysnonshamans, because that’s his duty to do.
Some nonshaman-mother with her nonshaman-children brushes his shoulder on their way through the aisle. He grimaces unwillingly.
(Dammit.)
-
Six days in, Tsukumo runs low on money. They’re in some Romanian motel—somehow, Tsukumo attained his travel papers and documentation, the real ones, god knows how—, and Tsukumo’s sitting cross-legged on the floor while Suguru sits cross-legged on the bed, playing Tetris on his phone and trying to stop thinking about nonshamans. Click click click.
“Looks like,” Tsukumo says, voice airy in the dry heat, “we’ll have to take a job!”
He glances at her, pieces piling up on his screen. “A job.”
“They’re not hard to find so long as you know where to look,” Tsukumo says, “there are more than enough curses. It makes easy money.”
Easy. For a special grade, it is supposed to be easy. He doesn’t continue the inquiry and the following day, they’re putting up a curtain at the docks. It doesn’t take long for the curse to reveal itself; a second grade. Tsukumo has it down in barely a minute, and Suguru pulls it into a sphere before she can exorcise it.
He swallows it on the edge of the dock, and when he forces it down, gagging even in its departure, he imagines throwing himself off and onto the sharp rocks below. His skull cracking open against the stone, waves washing his blood clean.
Afterwards, they get smoothies. It’s okay.
-
Tsukumo is sleeping. It’s the first time she’s gone to sleep before Suguru. Her breath is quiet as sand, but Suguru listens, and listens, and listens. He lays on his side, eyes open. The room is dark bar streetlight filtering in from outside, and it casts the bedside landline in dim contrast. Suguru has no cell service, but this phone…
He could make an international call, if he wanted. He knows Satoru’s number. He knows Jujutsu Tech’s number. Outside, a car passes.
He doesn’t extract himself from bed and attempt a call. It’d be pointless anyway, he tells himself; Tsukumo would wake up, and even if she didn’t, they’d move locations before it’d even matter.
-
August turns page to September. They’re outside some winery in France, a distant scent of plums and strawberries wafting on the breeze. Suguru has just downed a curse that he spotted on the winery’s steps, and feels somewhat sick. It’ll pass in a few more minutes. Tsukumo is looking at him, though, head slightly tilted, unblinking.
“You eat to many curses,” she says.
He wants to scowl, but plasters a smile. His uniform feels sticky on his skin. He’s been wearing it this entire time. “I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean?”
“That curse you just ate,” she says, “what grade was it?”
His smile sags. “Grade four, maybe? Does it matter?”
“Why’d you eat it?”
“...To use later?”
“How do you know it’ll be useful later? Does it even have a technique?”
“It could have had a technique,” Suguru says, because the moment he actually devoured it into himself, he knew that it didn’t.
“But it didn’t,” Tsukumo says. “You keep eating nearly every curse you find. It clearly impacts you negatively. You’re not balancing your factors at all.”
This time, he really does scowl. His hand curls in the grass. There’s a half eaten breadloaf between them. “I can’t just stop eating curses.”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Tsukumo says, voice measured and patient in a way that makes him want to bash her head against a curb, “I’m saying to only eat useful ones. You’re way beyond needing grade fours.”
It’s not like she doesn’t have a point, not exactly. But... “It’s useful to have a wide-array of things. Just in case.”
“If you have to rely on a vague ‘just in case’ for eating a curse then don’t eat it,” Tsukumo says, then: “Maybe we can build your other skills. Hmm.. You’re good with hand-to-hand, right? How about cursed tools?”
His pride tells him to disagree. He can take it, he can. The effects of eating curses—they’re all psychological. When it is physical, that’s usually just the psychological element reflecting psychically. He should be able to do it, to eat curse after curse. It’s his own weakness if he can’t.
Although he doesn’t want to. He really, really just—
(It’s all their fucking fault, those fucking monkeys, monkeys, monkeys—)
“Okay,” he concedes, half to derail himself. “Like what?”
Tsukumo grins, legs stretching out over the grass. “There’s a pretty large market for cursed objects,” she says, “and unlike almost everything big to do with Jujutsu, the largest center is located outside Japan. It has to be; Japan’s shaman world is too closely watched and regulated for an independent cursed object market like that. But...”
He frowns. “But what?”
“There’s no way we can go with you wearing that,” she says.
It takes a moment for Suguru to understand. He pulls on the sleeve of his top. “My uniform?”
“It’s internationally recognized,” Tsukumo nods. “Jujutsu Tech is part of the Japanese Jujutsu authorities, who are notorious for trying to claim exclusive hold of so many cursed objects as they can get ahold of. It’d make people distrustful at best and incite panic at worst.”
“...Yeah,” Suguru says, and his tone is oddly blank. He’s never been one for sentimentality. “Alright. That makes sense.”
-
He doesn’t actually need to get rid of his school uniform, not exactly. He could, hypothetically, just pack it away into a bag and carry it around. That’s stupid, though, an inefficient use of space; they travel light. So Suguru buys cargo pants and a loose T-shirt—always loose, cause nothing else is comfortable—and switches his clothes out. Then he sits on the cigarette-burned floor of their motel room, and thinks.
White light casts Suguru’s uniform in sharp contrast. There’s a discolored patch on the left elbow that’d been sewn in place during second year in the infirmary while anxiously waiting for Nanami to regain consciousness I’m supposed to be a better senpai than this, how could I let him get hurt; a line of blue-stringed stitching down the right pantleg when he’d repaired it outside some konbini in the middle of nowhere during first year, Satoru complaining the whole while, jeez you’re taking so long we can just order a new uniform when we get back ugh why do you even know how to sew anyway I just throw away everything that gets ruined who cares right up until Suguru threatened to poke his eyes out with the needle; a bloodstain he never quite managed to wash out on the collar, and which only shows when you really look for it.
Perhaps the most conspicuous mar on this uniform, though, is the repair work that’s been done in a diagonal cross across the chest. Shoulder to hip on each side. It’s been concealed well, but Suguru sees. His chest aches, pricks, itches. Shoulder to hip.
This uniform has been his for three years; it carries a lot of history.
Suguru breathes in, out, and closes his eyes. Presses his palm to the rough carpet. He’ll find it a new owner tomorrow morning, he decides, give it to someone who needs it more. From there, it’s no longer his business. Before that, though…
He carefully removes the golden, swirl-patterned button from its top, crosses his legs, and sews a replacement. With the button, he strings a thick woven chord, hangs it round his neck, and tucks it under the collar of his shirt. The metal burns cold against Suguru’s skin.
Satoru would laugh at him, he thinks; he just resolved not to be sentimental, after all.