Chapter Text
It’s a perfectly ordinary Tuesday night, if a bit chilly from the brisk February air. Your queue for the next train to Daikanyama is blessedly short, though the station is busy with the usual flux of commuters heading to and from their respective platforms. Behind you, two teenage girls are engaged in a passionate discussion about an idol group, while the man in the grey overcoat in front of you bobs his head now and then, seemingly half-asleep as you wait for your train to arrive.
You idly scroll through your inbox, clicking on the latest message from Ward 1E’s nurse station containing the results of your patient’s latest CBC. Just as you start to type out your thanks for the update, you feel a shiver up your spine, your skin breaking out in goosebumps. You immediately look up from your phone, stomach twisting in unease as you glance around the station.
Why here? Why now?
It has been so long since you had last felt cursed energy this strong, and it had to happen at a train station, of all places, during Tokyo’s rushhour. You tuck your phone in your bag and remind yourself to keep calm, making sure that your own energy is still concealed even as your instincts scream at you to get ready.
Everything then happens in quick succession. The electricity goes out, the emergency lights flickering on. A woman screams from a couple of platforms away, immediately followed by more shouts and yelps from the crowd. You take a deep breath and begin to make your way towards the direction of the commotion, pushing past the throng of people that are heading the other way, rushing towards the exits.
You probably should have noticed when you felt that strangely familiar electric feeling as you brushed against someone on your way to the injured, should have spotted his snow white hair in the sea of blacks, greys and browns, should have realized that he (and others) could have been there. But you are too focused on keeping yourself upright as you move against the panicked crowd, trying to keep calm even as you begin to break out in a cold sweat.
You drop to your knees as you finally see a woman’s body sprawled on the ground. Her eyes are open and unseeing, mouth open in a scream that had lost its sound, with otherwise no apparent injuries. Three other pedestrians have also collapsed around her in a similar fashion, all bearing the same expression of unseeing eyes and a perpetual, unheard scream. You quickly check her pulse and breathing, both of which are erratic and weak. You reach into your bag for your Swiss Army knife, using the smaller blade to cut through the woman’s blouse, revealing a distended abdomen. You quickly do the same for the other three victims, all of whom are suffering from pallor, fast breathing, and tense abdomens.
A curse that inflicts internal injuries, all intraabdominal?
You scan the area for the cursed spirit responsible for the chaos and to make sure no one else is paying attention to you. Finding the area clear and yourself unnoticed, you quickly move your hands into a familiar form: right index finger touching the right thumb and the left index finger touching the left thumb, left palm facing inward and right palm facing outward — with your voice just barely above a whisper, “Reverse cursed technique: Regeneration.”
Almost immediately, the victims’ abdomens lose their tension, color returning to their faces, breaths evening out. Checking their pulses (regular and strong), you scan the area again for witnesses and for any sign of the cursed spirit responsible for the chaos, carefully cloaking your energy and making sure you didn’t leave any residuals. You gasp as you feel someone suddenly grasp your arm, pulling you to stand and turning you around.
“Interesting,” the man with white hair and bandages over his eyes murmurs, glancing down at where his large hand circles your forearm before looking up and leaning down towards your face, as though able to see through his blindfold, “Do I know you?”
A crash a distance behind you startles you both, saving you from answering the tall man’s question and giving you the chance to pull away from him, hastily grabbing your bag from the ground and running as quickly as you can towards the nearest exit. You hear him cry out to you to stop but you keep running, refusing to look back as a memory from your childhood resurfaces.
Gojo Satoru, inheritor of Limitless and the Six Eyes, the once little boy with the wild, white hair and the bluest, most disarming eyes you’ve ever seen.
Did he see what you had done? Did he recognize you?
You had left that world behind more than a decade and a half ago, and this encounter could spell the end to your treasured solitude if he realizes who and what you are.
Your grandmother had told you this was how things have always been done among the jutsushi ke, especially among the three big sorcerer families. Rarely were marriages borne out of love, and even rarer were marriages between a sorcerer and a non-sorcerer.
You close your eyes and press your lips together as you allow the maids to comb your hair straight and silky, pressing your hands against your lap for fear that you might give in to the temptation to push them off and run away. They are only doing their duty, as you are.
You had always been envious of the children you would see whenever you left the Kamo compound: playing in the park, walking to school, enjoying their childhood. Car rides were both your happiest and saddest experiences, because they gave you glimpses of a world where you could have just been a child treasured and cared for solely for being your parents’ precious child.
But like the duties you had no choice to carryout, it was your fate to have been born to the Kamo clan, one of the three most powerful sorcerer families in Japan. Not everyone who is born to a sorcerer family inherited abilities, but chances of a child with abilities were believed to be higher in unions between sorcerers.
It was a great honor, your grandfather had boasted, that you had been chosen to be one of the candidates for the Kamo clan. You were far removed from the main family: those who were directly descended from the infamous Noritoshi Kamo, a source of both shame and a secret, unspoken pride in the clan. But you had been one of the few girls in your generation who had been identified to have potential for cursed energy manipulation, even if you had not inherited the family’s technique, and that meant that it was your duty and an honor to represent your clan.
Duty, honor, responsibility.
You couldn’t remember a time when the weight and burden of all three had not been on your small shoulders. At one point, you had truly felt proud to have been born under the Kamo clan. Your grandparents had taught you to take pride in your lineage, that it set you apart from others. That although you were distant from the main family, you were still part of a clan that was revered and respected in the world of jujutsu.
You had shown early signs of being able to both perceive curses and manipulate cursed energy. The clan elders had taken a mild interest in you, as they did any clan member who showed potential for becoming a sorcerer. You were a distant relation to the main family, and it was rare for the lesser clan members to have offspring who had strong techniques, let alone the family’s blood manipulation technique. They had tested you, tried to see if you could manipulate the contents of a bag of blood, but you had failed. Your father also reported that you had not shown signs of having any cursed technique.
Had you been born male, you would have been immediately placed under punishing martial arts training, to be of service to the family even if you could not join the ranks of the clan’s sorcerers. But as a female who had no apparent cursed techniques, the elders entrusted your training and education to your father. And it was only through your father’s careful, meticulous tutelage that you were able to escape the typical fate of a Kamo woman.
Your father taught you everything, from Japanese history to the sciences and mathematics. Away from prying eyes, he also taught you how to defend yourself. Kamo women whose abilities to use cursed energy were deemed to be little to none were always treated as though they would be too weak to be trained in combat. Your father, however, said it was important that you were, at least, able to fend off an attacker. He later encouraged you to practice and perfect your skills in bōjutsu, when he realized you had an affinity for it.
But the most important part of your education was your father’s lessons in wielding and channeling your cursed energy, and in later developing your innate abilities. You truly had failed the Kamo’s test for the inherited technique of blood manipulation. But your father had always suspected that you had a different innate ability. On your sixth birthday, two years after your failed test with the Kamo elders, your father’s suspicions were proven true. He made you promise to never reveal your abilities, even as he helped you refine it, and he doubled his efforts to ensure that you perfected your ability to channel and conceal your cursed energy. This is important, he had told you repeatedly. This is important for your freedom.
Your father sits quietly as he watches the maids help you into your furisode, a pale pink affair in silk crepe, elaborately decorated with stenciled white and pale yellow chrysanthemums. The inner lining was a vivid red, contrasting with the demure tones of your kimono, as well as the milky complexion of your skin. The style was typical for young, unmarried women on formal occasions, and you were sure that all the girls who would be brought to the Gojo compound today for scrutiny would be similarly dressed.
Kamos rarely married outside of the clan, especially those who were identified to have abilities, but this was no ordinary marriage arrangement. It was a potential union with an extraordinary sorcerer, and even the Kamos, who zealously safeguarded the purity of their line, were not averse to the idea of having a Kamo marry the powerful sorcerer.
Everyone spoke about the ten-year-old prodigy in hushed tones, some in reverence, many in contempt. The Gojo clan rarely produced strong sorcerers, and there were generations when they had no sorcerers at all. The clan stood in stark contrast with the Kamo and Zenin clans, who would usually have at least a handful of children who showed potential to become strong sorcerers. It had been over four centuries since there had been a child who had both the Limitless ability, the primary inherited technique of the Gojo family, and the legendary Six Eyes, the most powerful jujutsu in history. Gojo Satoru’s very birth shifted the balance in the jujutsu world, and you couldn’t even begin to imagine what it must be like to have been born with and to live with such immense power.
You approach your father as the maids attending to you excuse themselves from your chambers. You place your much smaller hands in his and he squeezes them, his eyes sharp and serious.
“The moment we step foot into the Gojo compound, eyes will already be on us, assessing you. Ignore them. They will sit us down in a room with the rest of the candidates, where we will wait to be called, if the Gojo elders believe that you are worthy of meeting the young master. Once we are seated and before they begin calling candidates…”
“I won’t forget, father,” you interject, smiling in what you hope is in a reassuring way, even as your heart races beneath your pretty clothes, “But will you be okay?”
He chuckles, again squeezing your hands, “When has your father let you down, Kumi-chan?”
Your father has never let you down. And when it came to matters concerning your safety and your liberty, your father would absolutely not allow failure, especially from himself.
The Gojo compound is unsurprisingly vast and ostentatious, its main house and surrounding grounds much like a smaller-scale Himeji castle. Of the three big families, the Gojos have produced the least number of sorcerers in its history. But their power lay not in the quantity of their sorcerers, but in their vast wealth and political influence, both in the sorcerer and non-sorcerer worlds. While the Zenins’ and Kamos’ interactions with non-jujutsu institutions were limited and infrequent, the Gojos were heavily entrenched in their politics and were also engaged in various lucrative businesses. Coupled with their lineage’s ability to produce the strongest sorcerers of any generation they were born into, no one dared question their standing or their power, even during the decades, centuries they would fail to produce a powerful sorcerer.
Just as your father had warned you, you feel yourself being watched as you are both led to the main house. You follow one of the Gojo’s attendants into a large room lined with tatami but is otherwise sparsely decorated. You count fifteen other girls and their parents with you, all of whom are seated quietly but proudly on the floor. Once the last of the families found their place in the room, a stern looking woman announces that they would call for the girls who were deemed worthy of meeting their young master shortly. Taking this as your cue, you stand to excuse yourself from the room, claiming that you had to use the toilet. You ignore the stares of the other candidates and make your way out of the room.
The hallways are surprisingly empty and you trace your steps back to where you had seen doors leading out into a garden area. Hide for an hour, your father had told you. You had been worried it would be difficult to keep yourself sparse, but the vast grounds with its countless gardens and buildings, from intricate pagodas to multiple traditional homes of varying sizes, suddenly made your task easier.
You move quickly to distance yourself from the main house, just like your father had instructed you to. They wouldn’t expect you to wander too far, and, given the size of the house, it wouldn’t be difficult to believe that you could have gotten lost in it. You keep walking until you find yourself in a garden of cherry blossoms, a small, obviously manmade pond nestled amidst the trees. It was still too early in the year to appreciate their blooms, but there were a number of trees that bore a few early buds, the young flowers seemingly impatient for their time in the sun. You decide that this is the perfect place to hide away for a little while.
You spend the rest of your time skipping stones and watching clouds slowly drift across the sky. You wonder how your father is faring, and if they’ve sent out people to search for you. An hour passes by and you feel pleased to have been undisturbed in your hiding place. You begin to make your way back, and it is only once you near the main house that you hear shouting. But it isn’t your name that they are calling out; they are calling for the young master Gojo.
You quicken your pace, wondering what had happened. You make a sharp turn, your shoulder bumping roughly against another kid heading towards the opposite direction. You find yourself losing balance and you instinctively grab the boy’s forearm to steady yourself. A warm, almost electric feeling quickly spread from where your hand clasped the boy’s arm to the rest of your body, and you suddenly release your grip on him in your confusion, looking up at him in bewilderment to find the boy staring down at you with the same expression. The first thing you notice are his shockingly blue eyes, made more captivating by his hair that was white as snow. And it is only then that you realize who you had run into.
“Hey. Who are you?” the boy demands, the confusion in his eyes now replaced by genuine curiosity.
You wince at his rude tone and instead of answering him, you bow with an apology and quickly run towards the main house, ignoring his cries for you to stop. By the same door you had left, you find your father standing, seemingly in search of you. At seeing your approach, he kneels down and you run to his embrace, readying your spiel of having lost your way.
As you tearfully and loudly recount how you had made a wrong turn and couldn’t find your way back, your dad pats your head and whispers so only you could hear, “Good job, Kumi-chan. Let’s go home.”
You allow your father to pick you up, easily carrying your 9-year-old body in his strong arms, and you keep your face buried in his neck, as though in shame, as he walks back to where your car is waiting. You don’t see the young master again.
Your father informs the Kamo clan elders about the unfortunate incident and how you were also not chosen to be one of the final candidates to become the young master’s companion. In the end, it turns out that Gojo Satoru had rejected all the candidates.
The following spring, you and your father finally find yourselves free of the Kamo clan and the world of Jujutsu.
Gojo sighs, collapsing into the plush, dark grey sectional that sits in the middle of his living room. The lights and faint sounds of nighttime Tokyo filter in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, casting the room in a faint glow, even as he pushes a button on a remote to switch off all the lights in his apartment.
He glances at the report he had just finished writing, the loose sheets in a messy pile on his coffee table. He doesn’t remember the last time he had made an effort to conceal what had happened during a mission, and he also doesn’t quite know why he felt the need to in the first place.
He had just come home from a trip overseas that day and had every intention of avoiding missions for at least a few days, partially to rest and mostly just to piss off the higher-ups. It was just his luck that he had been in the area and had been the easiest choice to address the semi-grade 1 curse that had suddenly shown up in Shibuya Station. He wonders now if maybe it really was lucky that he had been in the right place at the right time.
After his encounter with you, he had quickly taken care of the wayward curse and went back to check on the people you had healed. He had found them dazed but otherwise unharmed. He then left them to quickly make his way to the station’s security office, erasing the footage of you attending to the fallen pedestrians. Looking back, he probably should have made a copy of the footage first before deleting it.
He reaches up to run his hand down his right arm, unable to forget that strange, warm, electric sensation he had briefly felt when you had brushed up against him. That, in itself, was strange. You shouldn’t have been able to touch him, especially if you had cursed energy, which you definitely did, though you had masterfully concealed it, not even leaving residuals despite the use of your technique. What was also strange was how you clearly used a reverse cursed technique on those people, but he had no idea who you were. Were you an unregistered sorcerer, or just a sorcerer he hasn’t heard of or encountered before? There were so few jujutsu-shi who were known to have a reverse cursed technique, and even rarer were the ones who were capable of healing others. Shouldn’t he have heard of you then, at least?
He throws an arm over his bandaged eyes, recalling how your expression had shifted from startled to worried when he had confronted you. He is sure of it now: he hadn’t imagined the recognition that dawned on your eyes when you had seen who had turned you around. You knew him. And Gojo had a very strong feeling that he knew you too. That warm, electric sensation after having touched you was paradoxically both foreign and familiar to him, but he couldn’t quite place why. Was he just no longer used to others being able to touch him without his permission, without bringing down his infinity so that they could reach him?
Who are you? How were you able to get past his infinity? Why did you feel familiar to him somehow?
Gojo’s mouth settles into a thin line. He has too many questions and no answers and no leads. He decides it’s time to do a little private investigation. And whatever the result of his investigation, he also knows that he has to find you again.
Preferably before others find out about you.