Work Text:
The lighthouse in Cape Zanpa is a budding tourist spot, not yet lost to the throes of crowds and sullied in the way that touristing usually causes: litter in places you wouldn’t look in, dirt from shoes that have travelled the world and the photographers & food shops that are important components for a feature in a guidebook. Regardless, Ieiri is here in the late evening, past the closing hours. There isn’t a single soul around while she stands at the base of the locked lighthouse, and looks at the expanse of the ocean.
Eighteen days into the future and a thousand, five hundred and forty kilometers away, Megumi Fushiguro destroys the Prison Realm in his domain before losing consciousness. The domain dissolves into air, and a seriously wounded Itadori Yuuji dives to stop Megumi Fushiguro from cracking open his skull on the ground. Yuki Tsukumo finds the ashen remains of the Prison Realm. It is not clear if the prisoner in the Realm is set free.
For now, Ieiri searches her handbag for a hairtie. She finds an old one, the owner of which is long dead now. The elastic is loose now, but she ties her hair together with it anyway, and climbs down the rocks to reach as far as she can. Her fingers turn a cigarette over and over between them, trembling a little in the cold.
Ieiri tastes the salt in the air, and thinks about the last time she had visited Okinawa. They had all spent an entire day here in her second year, faces sticky with sunscreen and tongues popsicle-red. Back then, there was light, in the sky and in their ribs.
Now, the inky sea swallows the light hungrily from the slow-rotating beacon of the lighthouse.
✶
Their story began like this. Here was a boy who had always known he was powerful and had been told so more times than he had felt loved. Here was another boy who had only just learnt what he was capable of, and realized the world was the pearl and he was the oyster. Here was a girl who on some level knew she possessed a rare ability, but doubted that being rare necessarily made her valuable or powerful.
✶
On the glittering sand of a beach in Okinawa, Gojo declares them Gods. We’re the strongest! he says and births a new religion. The waves crest and fall in tandem with his laughter. We’re the strongest! he says again, this time looking at Getou, whose eyes are crinkled in laughter.
Ieiri splits a popsicle with Utahime, and Gojo splits one with Getou. Nanami gives his to Haibara, and watches him smile earnestly. The seagulls croon as the sun sunk into the horizon.
Gods of a new world. It had felt like a promise.
✶
It is a windy night she realizes she is a little in love with both of her boys.
Because Gojo, a prince with none of the discipline, has no use for rules, he steals a car from one of his father’s countless garages and flashes the keys at Suguru and Ieiri during dinner. They follow, Suguru already stifling a yawn as they sneak out close to midnight.
It is a sleek black car that looks rather expensive and neither of them have a license but Ieiri figures none of this is her responsibility. She grabs Satoru’s sunglasses off his face and heads to the backseat. She lays down immediately, stretching her entire body out on the seat, only partially listening to the boys squabble about who should get to drive. Suguru lets Satoru have his way, something he had seemed to make a habit out of recently.
They set off.
The Jujutsu Tech campus is situated a little bit away from the center of the city, and follows a series of tunnels to reach the heart of Tokyo. The heart that beats in and out fear, to give life to curses. Satoru accelerates the car, cackling along with it. Ieiri puts her bare feet against the edge of the window and watches the streetlights dissolve into light trails.
Suguru cranks up the radio at some point, and Satoru quiets at some point, and Ieiri feels dizzy at some point. She hauls herself up, and sits in the middle of the backseat, just as they emerge from a tunnel out into the open. The empty road stretches out longer than her eyes can see. Gojo could probably see the end of not just the road but the wide expanse of the inky sky with his Six Eyes thing, but he seems utterly unconcerned today, not even fighting Ieiri to relinquish possession of his glasses.
Satoru’s pale hair flutters rapidly in the wind, and she catches a hint of a smile on Suguru’s face in the side mirror. Satoru yells the lyrics of the 80s song playing on the ratio suddenly, cranking up the volume even louder. Suguru tells him to shut up, in between laughs. Ieiri watches them, a boy in white and a boy in black, and thinks about the short-lived existences of sorcerers like them.
Satoru’s voice cracks in the middle of the chorus, and Suguru howls in laughter, louder than he ever has.
Maybe it’s silly, maybe it’s the naivety of youth speaking, but it’s tough not to feel a little inspired by them. Who, if not them, to redefine what it means to be a sorcerer? Who, if not them, to topple down these power-hungry, useless, conservative leaders? Who, if not the strongest?
Ieiri fights the urge to be more grounded, to expect the worst before it has the chance to creep up on her. They may be zooming past half a dozen tunnels now, but they had almost died two weeks ago, on their worst mission yet. Being pulled into this world meant giving a little bit of yourself away, and for Ieiri, it was her optimism sacrificed in increments.
She sees Satoru smile, really smile, an elastic and true thing, and thinks about how she has never seen him this way before. She thinks about how it’s likely he never shared the same privilege as she did, of growing up normally, and knowing joy before knowing what a curse is.
Many years later, she narrows down this night as the moment she began fearing losing happiness, while the wide crescent moon of Satoru’s smile was a stamp of true happiness he had perhaps felt for the first time ever.
In the windy night that almost froze Ieiri’s ears, it had been easier to live in the present. To speed past traffic lights, to scream themselves hoarse on empty roads with hearts beating louder than the radio. It was easy then not to have any consideration for the past, or the future, at least no future where it wasn’t them together.
Satoru gets them to sing together, and they make a garbled mess of the bridge, and Ieiri feels for one moment that there was going to be a Forever, and they would be the creators and residents of a Forever. They, the three of them, side by side and invincible, if not immortal.
✶
She hears Satoru rummaging around the kitchen before he nudges open the bathroom door with his foot. He hums a hello, with a cookie half in his mouth, and sits on the closed toilet seat a little bit away from her.
Ieiri turns the faucet, and watches the hot water flow in between her feet. She touches her toes together under the rush of heat, and moves them back to the edge of the bath tub. Satoru pulls off his blindfold and watches her.
Ieiri watches the white of her thighs distort in the water. “Can you—?”
“Yeah.”
Satoru unzips his jacket, and undresses. Ieiri bends her knees closer and moves forward to make space for him. It’s going to be an uncomfortable fit, owing to his overly long legs in a bathtub made for one. He complains softly as he sits behind her, and adjusts his legs on the sides of her, feet sticking out at the top of the tub. Ieiri inhales shakily as he pulls her by the waist and fits her snugly against his chest.
“Sober?”
“Yeah,” her voice cracks.
Satoru hums again and noses at her hair, untying the knot at top of her head. He reaches out for the shower head behind him and lets warm water spill over her hair. Ieiri watches the ends of her hair turn into ink in the bathwater. She can’t see his face, but she feels his fingers gently pulling her bangs behind her ears to wet them thoroughly. She shuts her eyes and swallows thickly.
He washes her with slow and methodical hands, humming a song she doesn’t recognize. Satoru doesn’t ask for shampoo and she doesn’t tell him she hasn’t had the energy to go to the store to buy one. When he’s done, he pulls together her hair and places it on one side of her shoulder, and wraps an arm around her waist in the water.
Satoru sits with his head atop Ieiri’s and lets her sob in between his arms.
The water drains out. Satoru nestles his chin on her shoulder and tells her about Tsumiki’s first sleepover with her school friends (“Megumi was happy to be rid of her, but still set the table for three for dinner and I laughed in his face!”), Megumi’s slow and strenuous training and Kento’s new corporate job he heard through Iori (“Why does she know before I get to know? You’d think he doesn’t care about me at all. Wait do you think they’re hooking up?”) and a new transfer employee he has to work with who has a stick up his ass.
The water fills again. Ieiri sneezes. Satoru hoses them down with warm water and continues to hum a song, entirely off-key. The humming is so soft, she feels the lump in her throat grow heavier.
“How is everybody else doing this?” Ieiri says quietly, rubbing the wrinkled skin of her fingers on his forearm. “I just feel like— there’s this hole in my chest and it grows hollower every day. What do I do with this? Where do I put this?”
Her words echo in the quiet midnight, in the porcelain of the bathtub.
“I want this gone.”
What she doesn’t ask him is how he deals with it. They both bear an absence that makes itself louder the more they refuse to think about it, about him. She doesn’t ask Satoru, because while she has been collecting grief in shards across the years, Satoru was born with sadness inbuilt and instead challenged the universe to prove him wrong. She doesn’t ask him because they never talk about him, not really.
Satoru says, “I know.”
The light from outside the shutter window falls on the floor in sharply cut rectangles. Ieiri traces an edge of a rectangle and feels the water go colder. Satoru attempts to hum another song, one that Ieiri doesn’t recognize but stops mid-way.
“Let’s go,” she says finally.
They get up, and Ieiri towels herself off while Satoru pulls his hair on his forehead back with his palm. He looks at the mirror, and says “Would you want to cut my hair?”
She sniffles a little and realizes she’d have to dry herself completely before falling into bed if she didn’t want to miss any more work days. “Do you not think we are a little old for that?”
He frowns at the mirror. She hands him the towel, touching her palm briefly to his back. His skin is cold as the moon.
“How am I too old for you to cut my hair? Are your hands losing their dexterity? How are you going to continue your job this way?” The last question is muffled under the towel.
“No, I mean, mess around,” she mumbles. The bone-tiredness grows exponentially the longer she spends between a bathtub and a warm bed. “You know how incapable I am with scissors, why do you want my help to make a fool out of you?”
He turns, only watching her with one eye as he towels his hair off a touch too aggressively. “Because it’s fun. I liked you cutting my hair the last time. I had fun, at least.”
Satoru drapes the towel on his shoulder, and grabs his clothes from the toilet seat. “Besides, we’re only as old as we want to be.”
The tight knot in her chest eases just a fraction, and she exhales. What a naive and childish thought, only fractionally endearing the way just Satoru seems to accomplish sometimes, only fractionally endearing because it’s said in a shitty bathroom at an hour neither the moon nor the sun show their face.
She follows him into her bedroom in the dark, and resists the urge to hold on to his hand.
He stops mid-hum again and says “Happy 26th birthday by the way, I got you some cake. It’s in the kitchen.”
✶
were you the kind of child to rip off heads and arms of Barbies and mix and match them?
[2:23pm, Wednesday]
No you barbarian, I stitched them new clothes.
[2:50pm, Wednesday]
you’d make a great mother! has anyone told you that?
[2:51pm, Wednesday]
My mother tells me every time I call her.
[3:01pm, Wednesday]
You’re both wrong about that btw.
[3:04pm, Wednesday]
✶
can I come over?
[2:43am, Friday]
missed call from Gojo Satoru
[3:00am, Friday]
doors open im sleepi ng
[3:02am, Friday]
✶
When they were sixteen, Gojo offhandedly told Ieiri that he wouldn’t kiss her because she had started smoking and she’d taste bitter. She blew him a kiss from across the classroom, and he caught it.
On Ieiri’s seventeenth birthday, they snuck out in his car. Suguru refused to come after ingesting a particularly nasty curse earlier that day. Ieiri guesses where Satoru wants to go, and drives them to a blunt hill near the campus. He chatters the whole way, sprawled over the reclined seat and emptying a packet of chips. His feet are resting on the dash, sweatpants riding up his legs. His ankles are pale in the moonlight.
It’s nearly midnight.
“Up, up,” he says with a toothy grin. Ieiri drives them to the top of the hill.
Tokyo glitters in a single line on the horizon. Satoru pulls her by the hand and gets them seated on the bench. He brushes his hand over a crude carving of his given name on the side of the bench.
Ieiri shifts to sit on half of his lap facing him, pulls the lollipop out of his mouth and pops it in hers. Watermelon flavored, as always. She watches him watch her. She pulls out the lollipop and asks, “Will you kiss me now?”
✶
If I cut you open, would what I find? What is the body of a God like?
✶
In every human’s calf muscle exists a second heart.
A single heart pump has enough power to send blood to every part of the body, capable of reaching the lower legs in seconds. But the oxygen-depleted blood flows against gravity when returning to the heart, requiring more force than what a single heart pump allows. The calf muscles are the body’s chosen ones to pump blood from the lower legs back to the heart. And so the blood flows on endlessly in a cycle of push and be pushed.
Ieiri traces the swell and dip of Satoru’s calf that’s draped over her stomach. From the achilles heel to the dip of the back of his knee, she recites the names of the bones and the muscles she had memorized. She presses her fingertips on the meat of his calf, on his second heart and searches for a heartbeat. He doesn’t stir.
When they were younger, they’d spend nights sitting in hallways and doodle moustaches on people’s faces in magazines or play chess in empty rooms, all in shared insomnia. On the warmer nights, they’d roam the campus. Gojo had an affinity for finding small animals that’d he point out to her. On the worst nights, they’d climb trees. Ieiri would scramble to the first branch and smoke, while Gojo climbed right to the top. Getou never joined them, for he was the only one with a functioning schedule. It was also possible it was all the curse eating that exhausted his body to sleep.
Satoru slept better these days. He claimed the orgasms helped. She liked that she seemed to have fucked the insomnia out of him, but she wishes it’d help her too. All she had were tired eyes and the texture of the ceiling wall she had already memorized.
She presses her palm to his second heart, and curls herself around his knee. The intimacy they share is enough for her, or enough for them both if she was secure enough to assume, to skirt around the edges of the knowledge that they are cared for, and care in return.
The human body has two clavicles that are unconnected. In the moonlight, Satoru’s look like two wings unfurled on the expanse of his white shoulder, one slightly longer than the other. Ieiri bites into the soft dip of skin past his clavicle, and lets him tug her waist down, hitting bottom and merging them. He’s close, and she knows by the way he gasps at her to kiss him. It’s not a measured kiss. She brushes a hand on his ribs, and presses her thumbnail on his nipple and he comes.
For a few moments, she remains there, gaining consciousness of her sweat-slick body fused against his own.
A human wishbone, one longer than the other.
She is in the bath a little later scrubbing her thighs, when she hears a knock on the bathroom door. Satoru lets himself in a second later, and kneels at the bath tub. He’s naked apart from the thin blanket draped on his shoulders. He holds the sides of her head, brings it to his face and kisses the o-shape of her lips, a measured and careful kiss. His eyes are closed, sleep clouding his face and there’s a hint of a smile even as he kisses her.
He lets go.
“Forgot to kiss you.”
He turns, and leaves.
Ieiri thinks that objectively, she knows this is not love. Subjectively, she thinks she is allowed to be wrong sometimes.
✶
“You know some spiders have six eyes.”
“Some spiders eat their mate after having sex.”
“Would you be into that Satoru?”
He looks up from between her legs, licks his bottom lip. “You’d never do that, you need me around.”
Ieiri links her ankles together behind his head, as he pushes another finger in her, and tugs him closer to her cunt.
“Need and want are different things,” she says.
“With the two of us, they’re the same things,” he says, kissing her thighs. “Now can you stop talking, so I can get you to come?”
Ieiri hums.
✶
Ieiri watches the hunched man with certain interest, when he switches the second wet handkerchief for another pale blue one from his pocket. Just how many of those did he fit in a single pocket?
"He does this every time," Kento says, his first words that evening. "Every week he comes here and performs."
Ieiri fiddles with the metro card in her pocket. She'd have to be back soon to meet her classmates to revise. "Performs?"
"Performs. Acts. Does a whole schtick." Kento looks up at her, and squints at the sun.
"He'll come with his handmade bouquet of mismatched flowers, place it on a different grave each week and sob hysterically. None of these people are related by the way, I checked." Kento spares an irritated glance at the man. "At some point he stops and talks to the grave."
"What does he say?" Ieiri wasn't all that interested in this man and his supposed acting, as much as she wanted to just listen to Kento.
"Talks about people. People who are proud of the dead, and people who the dead would be proud of. They’re probably all made up. It's bullshit." He looks back at Ieiri.
They got sunflowers for Haibara today. Ieiri didn't often accompany Kento, but she needed any excuse to get out of the library so here she was. She rubbed a hand at the top of the grave self consciously. She was never quite sure what she, or anyone, was supposed to do in graveyards, apart from attend funerals. Death to her arrived in a body bag and left in a body bag, with more holes and incisions than before. Death was a clinical fact, was just another tool for a lesson on anatomy in medical school.
Kento crouches beside her and watches the grave, and he looks to her a decade older than he should.
She doesn't tell him that everything about grief to her seems like a performance. Death is a finite ending, but grief is a continuous feeling of loss, a river that ropes itself through memories and the present, and the human body and mind seeks to do something out of it. It is also human to want an audience for it, to prove to yourself that you are in the active process of feeling. If there's a witness to an outwardly act of feeling, then the feeling is real. Anything that is real also has an ending. Ergo, there is an expiration date for the grief. Why else would Kento ask her to come?
The man's loud sobs cease as he breathes in and out. He breathes some more, and then makes himself comfortable next to the grave, pulls out a book and starts reciting something animatedly.
Kento pays no heed to his companion in mourning, and bends to write something on the dirt with his finger.
Ieiri puts her hand back in her coat and watches both men commit to their rituals.
✶
They hadn’t celebrated Getou’s birthday like usual when he turned seventeen. Getou had been getting increasingly sick after swallowing powerful curse upon powerful curse. Ieiri had watched him return after every mission exhausted and a few shades paler. He hadn’t been eating too well either, but he showed up for dinner and smiled regardless.
On the day of his birthday, Satoru showed up with cake. Getou smiled courteously, watched Satoru eat the cake and went to bed early.
A day later, he came to her with wounds after a mission. He didn’t want to make the walk to the regular physician. She watched him as he put his coat back on after she was done. His eyes were devoid of the usual light and mischief, and he had given up on taking care of his hair.
Ieiri wasn’t particularly close to Getou. It made sense to be better friends with him than Satoru, like the rest of the world preferred it. Getou was more personable, courteous and respectful of people than Satoru was. What made Satoru so unpleasant to the rest of the world however, was his brash honesty, which Ieiri would pick over Getou’s caged intentions, no matter how polite, any day.
“Are you getting enough sleep?”
He smiled thinly at the floor. “Yeah, don’t worry about it.”
She grabbed a candy from a pack Satoru had left behind in her room and threw it at Getou. He raised an arm as a thank you, and left.
There was a barrier separating Getou from the rest of the world, even as teenagers. Satoru tried everything possible to get through that barrier in their first year, whether he was conscious of it or not. He seemed to have succeeded by the end of their first year, separating the two from her in an invisible line not for the first time that year.
She wondered if Satoru liked Getou the way he was past the barrier.
Probably, yeah. Satoru was not stupid generally, but he was stupid about Getou.
That didn’t last very long. Satoru remained stupid about Getou, but as he perfected his curse techniques, Getou turned himself inwards. Something was morphing inside of him. It’s not that Satoru stopped caring, not exactly, but he seemed to have overestimated the permanency of that previous intimacy. He hadn’t quite thought of what would happen to that bubble of theirs once the feelings began changing.
When Getou left, it should have been obvious to Ieiri at least considering she had known all this about him. It wasn’t.
Ieiri did not know Getou but she trusted him.
She tells him so, in her first voice mail to him. It had become a necessity at some point for Ieiri to have memorized the boys’ phone numbers. They went on countless missions, and Ieiri called infrequently but it had been enough times for her fingers to move on their own on the keypad of her phone. This made her want to throw the landline against a wall. That’s likely what he had done too. Ignored Satoru’s texts and calls, Yaga’s calls, threw his phone in a trashcan and continued on to do whatever cult leaders do.
“It’s Suguru, leave a message.”
The calls lead her to his voice mail directly, which suits Ieiri just fine. To her, sending these voice mails feels like writing letters to a dead person. It’s what therapists recommend anyway, in some of the magazines Ieiri would read on the nights insomnia was too hard to shake off. When you haven’t got any closure, and there’s no way of getting one, you pour your feelings into a letter and hope they form a sensible shape out of the unbearable sadness and shock. Getou was not in the afterlife, but to her, he may as well have been. It was easier to think of him as dead because then at least, her grief would make sense.
She tells the phone about Yaga’s possible girlfriend, about the demotion of a leader in the upper management, about how she’s thinking of maybe growing her hair long so she can look older. She laments about trying to quit smoking, about a new and terrible television show she has really gotten hooked onto and about how she wishes he had spoken to any of them before committing mass murder.
The voice mails became less frequent after the first month. It’s on one of the worst nights three months after he left that she calls him nearly in tears. The old man who was the resident doctor, and mortician in the school passed away. It was a small mercy that he died of natural causes, but Ieiri was left with no mentor. She had only just felt like she was making progress in understanding her technique.
“I hate my technique,” she says, reaching up with a hand that feels like it weighs too heavy to rub at her eye. “I have never said that to anyone. None of you are going to understand why, because you don’t know what it is like to be on the path to be a witness for carnage and death for the rest of your life, and being too afraid to step away.”
She presses her phone closer to her ear. “You are all actors in this universe. You take lives, for whatever reason, be it justice or vengeance or whatever fucked up shit you’re doing. I will never be that, and I don’t want to be that either. None of you are going to understand what it is like to be the antithesis to everything you all do.”
“I know I can give up, I know I can leave and live a regular life and get married and have kids, but I am too afraid to. I know this healing thing is too important. But I want you to know,” she pauses to wipe her nose on her sleeve. “I don’t want to see the body of a loved one.”
“So you better not show up to my morgue or clinic or whatever shithole I’m stuck in. Do you understand?”
There is silence on the other end, and she cuts the message.
Ieiri leaves him only two more messages in the next three months until one day, about six months after he left, the automated voice informs her that Suguru’s voice mail inbox is full. Fine, fuck that and fuck him then. She didn’t have any more self-help advice she had gleaned from pop psychology articles in magazines, so she left it at that.
It’s alcohol that’s her undoing in the end, as it often is. It’s after she stumbles into her apartment after drinking with Iori, calls the number she hadn’t touched in two months and tells the voicemail inbox about an interesting curse she dissected earlier that day and Iori’s recent break up does she finally realize that the voice mail was recording.
She cuts the call.
The voice mail goes through.
Getou had made space for her.
In a neat arc, Ieiri slams the heels she was carrying onto her landline phone and watches the handset clatter on the floor loudly.
Fuck that, and fuck him.
She returns the handset to the switch hook and blocks his number the next day. She doesn’t send him a single voice mail again.
✶
In Ieiri’s first year as an employee in Jujutsu Tech high school, Satoru’s house gets flooded. Some thing to do with the faulty plumbing and it being an ancient house his parents or grandparents or great-grandparents had bought a very long time ago. He had, for reasons Ieiri didn’t care enough to ask about, decided to live off campus at the time, having already spent two years as a teacher in Jujutsu Tech. He arrived with two sets of clothes, a toothbrush and a mug.
He was meant to stay only for a few days. Her quarters were large, larger than she had expected but they were short on staff so it made sense she was given the one with the largest room. Satoru took full advantage of this space and made himself home. After his first week, he returns with a suitcase of clothes, books and miniature sculptures that he seemed to have collected.
“You have to be kidding me.”
“I’m utterly serious,” Satoru says, dusting the trinkets with a cloth (Where did he get that? Was that his ?) “You have nothing fun in this house Shoko! There’s no character. Where is all the glitz and the … pizazz?”
Ieiri huffs. “So small statues of the laughing buddhas, little cats and — is that a plastic Bonsai — bring pizazz to my house?”
He pulls out another trinket, a small train and places it on the ledge of the window. Ieiri wishes she was surprised by the existence of these. Even as a teenager, Satoru had had a habit of bringing back pointless souvenirs from every place he was sent to for a mission. She had argued back then, calling them entirely useless, but Suguru took his side, as he often did, and that was that.
Ieiri eyes the row of plastic spoils of war and thinks about how many curses Satoru killed in each place he brought back these trinkets from. How many people did each of these curses kill before Satoru got there? How many families were affected?
Satoru finishes fixing the spacing between each trinket, and turns to grin at Ieiri. Her thoughts evaporate. He says “See, this is so much better. I’m gonna take a picture.”
“Wait,” she says, and finds her way to her bedroom. A long while ago, after they became legal adults and before they learnt how to wear their adult lives like a second skin, a drunk Kento, Satoru and herself had gone to a casino. After Ieiri lost 12000 yen in a slot machine, they stormed out of the casino in a drunken rush and stopped at a conbini. Kento was starving, and bought them all buns while Ieiri and Satoru stood star-struck at a very ordinary claw machine outside the store. Ieiri had set her sight on a Hello Kitty key chain among the pile of soft toys in the machine. Satoru slotted in a coin (from her purse, since he only carried around notes and credit cards) and won her the exact Hello Kitty keychain.
She pulls the soft toy from a drawer and walks back to the window. She places it next to the train figurine. Not exactly a spoil of war as much as evidence of one of many nights made easier with alcohol.
“There, done. Some pizazz.”
“Some pizazz.” Satoru smiles at her, and she smiles back at him.
After about two and a half weeks after he started staying over, and several half-hearted complaints from Ieiri about dishes and clothes lying around the house, he asks her to cut his hair. Just a trim he says, waving a palm nonchalantly, as if handing Ieiri the scissors was the easiest decision he has taken in his life.
Ieiri had watched her mother cut her father’s hair when she was younger. She probably still cut his hair. He’d sit on an old chair above newspapers Ieiri was responsible for spreading on the floor, wrap a towel around himself and face the garden. Ieiri’s mother took great happiness in complaining about how often he wanted her to cut his hair, but she also took great happiness in punctuating every bit of town gossip she had learnt that month with a snip, snip, snip.
Satoru is already on the floor, reading the headlines on the newspaper next to his thigh and waiting for her to get seated.
Ieiri holds the sharp pair of scissors in her hand, and snips it on empty air, feeling more and more like a little child holding a tool or a weapon meant for adults. Ieiri had hoped that either nature or nurture had to come through and imitate the way her mother had moulded those scissors between her fingers and made them listen to her.
She feels no inner calling, but sits on the chair anyway. His hair is softer than hers, and smells like her shampoo. She makes a mental note to buy another bottle in their next grocery run.
Ieiri makes an experimental snip a few centimeters from the white tips.
Satoru talks through it all. He tells her about Tsumiki and Megumi who had, a few months ago, moved out of his house into the Jujutsu Tech campus so they could focus more on training. They still went to school, one that was closer to the campus and was unaware of Megumi’s delinquent reputation, but Megumi’s technique was subject to plenty of curious eyes from the jujutsu world and so Satoru wanted him to hone his technique further. He tells her about Tsumiki’s birthday and how he forgot to bring her a cake but she had made one for herself and had waited for Satoru to return from his mission so she could cut it with everyone present. Megumi had huffed and puffed but had brought her chocolate with his allowance money, and ate her cake diligently anyway.
Ieiri gets up, and shifts to squat on Satoru’s right. She cuts his hair in a crescent moon above his ear. Satoru still talks through it. It makes it harder for her to focus, but she doesn’t complain. She switches to his left side, and cuts his hair in a curve.
Satoru quiets. He stares at a landscape photograph hung on the wall, one that had been there before she had moved in.
She shifts to his front, interrupting his view, and braces herself to cut his bangs. He puts his hands on her knees crouching just inches away from him, and closes his eyes.
Satoru is easier to look at with his eyes closed. She doesn’t know if it’s feature of the six eyes phenomena, or if it’s a Gojoism to make every creature in his vicinity feel observed and consequently disoriented, but it was sometimes tiring to deal with. Most times though, she enjoyed the little thrill of guessing she was perhaps the only person around whom he didn’t wear that ugly blindfold or the glasses. She didn’t know this for sure, but there was no harm in assuming.
She blows air at the bridge of his nose and watches the small strands of white, like shaved ice, fall and dissolve into the ground.
In the end, it was Satoru looking in the mirror and laughing softly. Never laughing at her, always laughing at both of them for indulging in this, for indulging in him.
Satoru cooks for them thrice, just simple soups or noodle bowls that Ieiri appreciates more on the days she spent more hours than usual elbow-deep in entrails of curses. Most days though, they made do with takeout food, beer and watching reruns of an old show on Fashion TV because Ieiri’s television broke some time ago, and displays just one channel.
“You could have been a model,” Satoru says, scooping out more curry for himself.
“Right.” Ieiri’s gaze doesn’t waver from the screen, at a model sporting a mullet and a threadbare dress. He spins, and the little sequins stitched into the sleeves form pinpricks on the screen.
“I’m serious,” he settles down on the floor again, knees almost touching hers below the table. “Your little mole would have been the selling point.”
She moves her plate closer to the curry container, and Satoru drops a spoonful. They were both picky eaters, and bickered over what to order usually, but both possessed a voracious appetite for Indian food. She licks at the red-orange curry on her thumb and asks “The one on my boob or my face?”
Satoru grins widely. “Audience’s pick.”
She laughs, and takes the compliment. She doesn’t tell him he could have been one too, with his otherworldly grace and outwardly arrogance fit for a star in showbiz or fashion. They both know the only way Gojo could be part of that world was only if he was never born into this world. The jujutsu world needed him as much as he needed the jujutsu world.
Satoru is gone for a whole day and night one of the days, and leaves her one post-it on her side-table explaining his disappearance. A mission he was assigned, one that could take him a few days. Ieiri eats her takeout dinner on the floor, drinks half a can of beer and goes to bed. Satoru has been an occasional occupant of her bed for a few years now, but this is the first time she thinks of it as his side of the bed.
She pulls her blanket tighter around her and sleeps.
Sleep, as most days, is fleeting, and Ieiri is interrupted when she feels a leg rub against hers, and move in between her own. She never could tell when Satoru snuck up on her. So loud with his mouth and so light on his feet.
She lets go of her grip on her blanket and feels Satoru pull the blanket, and her, closer to his chest. He smells a little like smoke and sweat, and his lips are soft at the nape of her neck. “Missed you,” he speaks into her skin.
For just a moment, she didn’t fixate on what the implications of this visible neediness meant for him, for them. For just one moment, she let herself feel the sharp burning point in her chest. There it was: happiness.
But happiness is a fleeting thing, especially when bestowed on someone who has quite forgotten how to grip it close.
This inability to hold on to it came from somewhere, of course. She was right to be suspicious of the happiness, of the careless and easy co-existence with another human being after years. With Gojo Satoru of all people. She was right, because they fight and it’s ugly.
Years ago, while Suguru and Satoru had spent hours dissecting the topic with both the heat and laxity teenagers possess, Ieiri put on Satoru’s sunglasses and tuned them out. Questions of power in the jujutsu world meant introspection and vulnerability and she had no interest in doing this with two of the most powerful sorcerers of their era. What would they know about vulnerability? What would they know, when they didn’t even realize their questions of strength automatically excluded her, by virtue of the nature of her power?
She had dealt with it for years now but it wasn’t a loud emotion, really. Her discomfort didn’t arise from any ambition to become the poster-child of an ideal jujutsu sorcerer. She understood that being a healer meant existing out of bounds of the usual levels of danger, and most days, she was grateful for it.
She has no reasonable explanation for why she feels rage pooling in her stomach.
Satoru speaks on and on about the new generation of sorcerers, the inherent strength that the Zenin girl has, the potential of the cursed speech user, and with absolute glee, he talks about a boy he had heard of recently, who could possibly be as strong as him. A demon attached to him, it had seemed. Satoru folds his laundry and shoves them into their closet too small for two while Ieiri studies the floor.
“Does it not worry you that nobody in the past three years has shown up with the reverse cursed technique?” she interrupts him mid-sentence, something he was saying about what it’d be like if more young people were capable of possessing power like he did.
She picks on the lint on the rug. Satoru quiets.
“Do you even think about people like me?” she continues, this time turning towards him. “Is strength only measured by how many curses someone can kill in 30 seconds? Or is a complete domain expansion your parameter for it?”
Satoru turns away from her, and stuffs a pair of socks inside the overfilled drawer. Ieiri studies the floor again, and realizes that her fingers had carded through the threads of the rug and held on tightly.
“There is nobody good enough to replace me. See how well you do with your strong students if there’s nobody to patch them up.”
“Nothing is going to happen to you,” he mumbles. She knows he’s pouting, and this irritates her for some reason. He didn’t understand, that the point of this was that his understanding of who a strong person is, implies that she isn’t strong, that she isn’t needed as much as these poor, unsuspecting kids are. She realizes then, that while it was easier to ignore this when they were teenagers, she cares now because she expected him to grow out of this thinking.
He sighs, “You know what I mean when I say strength. You have to know that curses are getting stronger, more —”
“You would think that Suguru leaving would teach you something.”
Ieiri lets go of her grip on the wayward threads of her rug, and exhales.
“That is not fair,” he says, from behind her. The strange emotion in his voice is like a bowstring drawn back. She feels her lungs shrink into themselves, waiting for the blow. It’d only be fair.
Three sickening seconds go by. She waits for him to continue, for him to counter her, to yell or shout or whatever it is. She doesn’t dare turn around.
It was unfair. It was unfair of her, because she knew that Satoru wasn’t the same as all the higher-ups, and that the more powerful sorcerers showed up, the more his work increased as a teacher and a sorcerer. She knew he would do anything to make sure they don’t lead the same lives they did, to lose as many friends as they did foes, to be pawns at the hands of the rotten leaders.
She knew that bringing up Getou was crossing a chasm into something she wasn’t at all sure she was welcome to.
Satoru finally moves. She turns to watch him shove a pile of unfolded laundry into his bag long discarded under her bed. He hesitates for a second, before abandoning the bag and shoving past the bedroom door. Ieiri hears the main door open and then close loudly.
The newspaper’s weather section had warned of a cold night. She hoped he took his jacket on his way out at least.
Ieiri understood at a young age that a cornerstone of every relationship is the formation of a habit created and understood by just the two of them. A ritual for just the two to participate in. The rare times Ieiri’s parents fought, they wouldn’t speak for a day, and on the second day, her father would come home with flowers and her mother would make his favorite dessert for dinner. Ieiri’s brother had a habit of tugging at her hair to get her attention on days he wanted to spend time with her, even after they became young adults. Iori has a codeword with Ieiri when she needs to crash at her place without giving any explanation.
Satoru and Ieiri have known each other for a long while now, but they never got around to inventing a language between them that doesn’t hinge on the giving and receiving of an orgasm or two.
Three days after Satoru leaves, Ieiri returns home after an unexpectedly long shift to find his things gone. He takes his clothes, his mug and toothbrush and the few books he had left in her room. Ieiri feels tears well up in her eyes, and before she can brush it off as a product of her exhaustion, she looks at the line of his trinket collection he left behind and cries.
She doesn’t know why this feels like a break up, when they’ve always existed as a maybe; a muted possibility in the periphery of their lives.
(Whose fault is that anyway?) (Does it matter whose is it?)
She looks at her blue light of her phone screen where the last message from him was from a week ago (“do I bring rice from the store”), and faces the open-skinned truth that the only reason she hasn’t apologized to him yet is because she doesn’t know how to. She has never had to before, not to him.
Ieiri stands at the door of his office in Jujutsu Tech a few days later. She knows he knows she’s there, and appreciates him letting her have the freedom to decide to knock and enter. The plastic bag of candy crinkles in the awkward hold she has over it.
She had planned this far, and hoped that her mind might supply her with the words she required to fix this, but she comes back empty.
She sighs, and feels a brief flash of irritation that she was not afforded the privilege of developing any rituals with him, that could have made this ordeal easier.
In the end she knocks; she’s not above admitting that she’s equally responsible for not having granting him the same privilege, for treating their relationship as a crutch on lonely nights.
The apology is as stilted as it can be, and Satoru is as difficult as he can be for an excruciating minute until he unwraps a candy from the packet and gives it to her, all while not looking at her in the eye. She says sorry again. He says sorry. She makes a poor joke about his ego, and he smiles faintly.
A single packet of watermelon candy doesn’t fix everything, but she finds she can breathe easier around him now. A few days later, Satoru invites her over to his place, whose faulty plumbing was fixed ages ago, just for dinner. He cooks them yakisoba, which they eat while watching an old film Ieiri vaguely remembers from her childhood. They laugh at inappropriate times, and wash the dishes together. After dessert, he kisses her sweetly and she returns home.
Satoru finds more reasons to visit her in the morgue now during working hours. She lets him bother her.
They’re trying.
A few months after, he brings a young boy to her office, a powerful first year haunted by a demon. Satoru smiles with giddiness barely contained when he informs Ieiri that Yuta Okkotsu can use the Reverse Cursed Technique.
He’s a scared boy, saved from an execution on Satoru’s insistence and still coming to terms with his powers. But Satoru asks him there if he’d like to learn from Ieiri how to use his technique to heal and mend and he nods with surety.
✶
Satoru was born with more eyes than should be possible in a human, ergo he is a God, and sees and hears everything, ergo he experiences and feels everything. Ieiri is quite exhausted and bone-tired with just her ordinary two eyes. She is short-sightedness next to his limitless.
But some days he is just a boy. Some days, the distance between Gojo and Satoru is infinity.
She watches him put an extra spoon of sugar in his coffee those mornings.
On the thirteenth night of Gojo being locked in the Prison Realm, Igichi brings her two cups of coffee. She stretches her arms, and turns the ash tray into the trash bin before swiveling back to the stacks of paper on her desk.
“I can’t do this alone Satoru.” She chips away at her nail polish and fights the urge to light another cigarette. “I don’t have it in me to love another dead man.”
She puts an extra spoon of sugar in the colourless cup, and drinks her third cup of the day.
✶
There’s a white tendril that runs from the skin between Ieiri’s second and third toe, till about half of her foot. Once upon a time, there was an ocean of pain she had dealt with, when a sharp rock had cleaved her foot — an ocean worth of salt had entered that wound, and took with it an unimaginable amount of blood.
It was in Okinawa; the third ever family trip she went on, soon after the birth of her younger brother. He was deemed old enough to travel with, hinging on their parents’ hips in turns. Ieiri wasn’t old enough to care for her brother alone in a new, shiny place, but she was old enough to run faster than her busy parents could cope with. At the end of a beach, it’s a mossy rock she first slips on, on their second day there. Her left foot slides down the rock, and with that her right foot, in an attempt to regain balance, slices into an edged rock.
She doesn’t remember the pain and the blood that followed, only recollects it as a muted memory that belongs to her parents who recounted the story multiple times to guests. Ieiri however does remember the white-hot pain of the stitches in the hospital. She was told to just bear the pain a while longer, so she could get better later. That this scary needle and these sharp wires were necessary pain in the short-term. Ieiri could hardly look at the middle-aged woman through the pool of tears in her eyes, but the doctor had smiled at her afterwards, and told her she was awfully brave for an eight year old.
She spent the rest of the vacation out of the blue saltwater, and golden sand. She sat with her foot wrapped in bandages, on a chair under the blue tarpaulin of a shop selling fried snacks, with her parents as company once in a while. She watched the ocean swallow up the orange sun without a single cloud in the sky to break the fall.
Years later, she watches Satoru and Suguru walk a step ahead of her, and wonders if she’s the sun.
A twenty-eight year old Ieiri jumps over the rocks slickening by the second and makes her way back to the Cape Zanpa lighthouse. Her sandals are not meant for mossy rocks, but she makes it to the end with the soles intact. She rubs her right foot and shakes away any phantom pain. There’s a smattering of rain and an electricity in the air that spells a storm, and she has a flight back to Tokyo she has to catch soon, but she decides to wait.
She did come all the way here just to pose to the ocean a question. The waves roars louder than her thoughts for a moment, before the question parts through the ocean in her mind:
Who else, if not me? Who else to be a witness to this carnage, of foes and loved ones alike? Who else to keep patching up bodies but not damaged minds or weakening hearts?
But Ieiri has already asked herself these questions every single day for a decade.
She thinks that maybe this is the wrong question.
The beacon light of the lighthouse disappears into the dark again, and Ieiri knows better than to ask whether she is the light or the sea. That’s not the right question this time.
With the cigarette back in her pocket, she makes her way out and leaves before the rain catches up to her.
Ieiri Shoko turns twenty-nine on a small aircraft, a flickering dot in the sky miles above an infinite ocean. As land creeps up the corner of the horizon, the right question occurs to her then: is she more afraid of growing old, or dying?
She tugs the complementary eye-mask back, and attempts to catch some sleep before she’s due to resume her work in a never-ending war.
✶
Each of their birthdays marked an occasion in the coldest season of the year. Satoru claimed that this was enough reason for them to bail on their sorcerer lives, and go live in a beach house with an everyday sunshine. With Ieiri’s November birthday came the beginning of the winter: frost creeping up glass panes, sweaters being dusted off and cleaned for use and kotatsus on sale on television. In February, Suguru’s birthday marked the end of the cold, giving way to the hesitant buzz of insects just waking up to a new world while the sun reacquaints itself with the clear sky.
It is the coldest day of December on Satoru’s 29th birthday. There is an exhaustion in Ieiri’s bones that no amount of rest seems to ease, but her calves burn with the force of her sprint. Her boots sink into the snow with every step, but she makes her way through the endless white and reaches one of the infinite mansions of the Gojo clan.
Igichi had called her earlier in the morning. He left her five voice mails and texted her to inform that Satoru had awoken, all while she had passed out on her bed in the blue hours of the morning, and her phone had dropped on the ground next to the empty rum bottles.
Now, Ieiri makes a fist of her ungloved fingers to keep them warm, to at least gain some feeling in them and nods at the employees of the Gojo clan. They lead her wordlessly to the main room, an expanse of what Ieiri guesses is the finest wood in the country. A large window overlooks the endless expanse of white of the snow and the sky melding together. In the center of the room, a prince sleeps under blankets of blue. Ieiri barely registers Igichi sitting on Satoru’s left before she kneels at his right. She breathes in sharply at the physicality of him, at the impossibility of him.
He opens his eyes, and there’s light through choppy blue oceans.
"Ieiri," he says relief-soaked in his broken, beautiful voice and she wonders how she ever thought she was alone in this all.
His skin is warm under her trembling hand against his cheek. He leans into her palm, just a fraction. Her throat feels stuck with an emotion bigger than her, so she curls down to press their foreheads together instead. There’s a feeble laugh from him. He says something, but she cannot hear him anymore. She only registers hot tears falling on to Satoru’s face, the blanketing quiet of the snow outside and a repeating shape of her mouth.
She realizes later that she’s praying.
✶
Every two months like clockwork, Satoru sits on a plastic stool in their bathroom and talks while Ieiri cuts his hair. She’s starting to get better now, with practice and some Youtube tutorials. After, he sits in the large bathtub they had bought on sale a year ago, and Ieiri takes his place on the stool at the side of the tub. She rolls her sleeves up and washes his hair with warm water.
Later, he will tell her the best and worst parts of his day and kiss her at the nape of her neck just as she falls asleep.
The sun will rise, and she will kiss him in the light.