Chapter Text
They say parents should never outlive their children.
They say that one of the biggest tragedies of this world is for a mother or a father to bury a daughter or a son.
From a young age, Mai knows her parents would happily bury her without a second thought, shove her remains underground and sigh in relief, in celebration.
Yet they can’t do that for now, so they settle for shoving her away from sight, neglect her to the smallest room in the house, the one further away from the main family quarters. They do not love her, and in time she begins to think that maybe, just maybe, they do not love her because she does not deserve to be loved.
But then there’s Maki.
“Stupid,” she says. “Skipping meals again? You’re going to get sick.”
Maki is there all the time, and they are together so much it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that if one got buried, the other would as well. Together until the very end, together even under the dirt.
Or so Mai thinks.
But that end will come later, for now there’s only this:
Maki going back to the kitchen in the middle of the night, her eyelids fluttering from how tired she is, coming back with a bowl of cold rice and the egg she cracks on top of it, shoving it into Mai’s hands and not looking away from her until Mai, reluctantly, starts to eat.
It’s gross, the flavor familiar but unpleasant because it’s only leftovers. Scraps from the main dinner Mai had helped prepare for the men of the clan.
But she eats because Maki is watching her, and Maki is clearly tired but she went to get her dinner and she’s giving it to her and Mai would be a bad sister if she lets all of that go to waste.
She’s been thinking about that a lot, being a good sister, a bad sister.
All she knows is this—Maki loves her, for whatever reason, and Maki is the best person she knows, and so maybe Mai does deserve to be loved, after all.
She wants to be.
“Mai,” her father calls one day. “Come with me.”
Mai has learned never to say no, so she goes with him and follows him through the compound.
It’s a horrible day for her. On her way to the kitchens that morning she saw a cursed spirit for the first time. It’s the worst possible day for her father to call her because her hands are still shaking and she can see the thing’s twisted claws whenever she closes her eyes.
“What is it?” Maki had asked, and Mai nearly broke down crying at the sight of it, and if not for Maki’s hand quickly finding hers she would’ve bolted. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s—there’s something—”
“Nothomenothomenothome~”
Mai yelped. It talked.
“It’s alright,” Maki said. “There’s nothing there.”
She couldn’t see it. Maki couldn’t see it. Maki pulled Mai along without understanding what was happening because there was one thing she did understand, and that was that they were going to be late for their chores.
Mai is still thinking about it even as she follows her father through the hallways, her hands are still trembling, she still feels the fear cling to her throat and she looks at the corners, looks into shadows, expects to see it again—
“The women noticed you acting skittish,” her father says as he ushers her inside an empty room. “What did you see, Mai?”
“M-monster.”
He sighs. “Not a monster, a cursed spirit, but that’s a good thing, girl. Sit down.”
She kneels in the tatami and he kneels in front of her, and he speaks. He talks about cursed energy, about being able to see curses and how that’s the minimum requirement to be a sorcerer.
“But there must be something more within you,” he says. “You’re a Zenin, and you’re my daughter, so you must have a cursed technique. Do you know what that is?”
She knows Naoya sometimes moves too fast for the eye to follow, wins all of his sparring matches because of that. She hears whispers of Zenin who can call forth the shadows, she knows her father can coat his blade in fire, hears whispers of the other clans—blood, eyes, infinity—it’s all a jumble.
“I think so,” she says.
He explains anyways, explains that it will most likely be something unique to her, says something about how inconceivable it would be if she has one of the clan’s common techniques—Mai doesn’t really get what that means.
“Try,” he says after everything’s said and done. “Try using your cursed energy, it should tell you the basics of what you need to do. It will be instinctual. You will understand what to do once you think about it.”
“I—” Mai’s hands are still trembling.
“Mai,” says her father. “Don’t you dare cry in my presence. If you shed a tear, then I will give you a real reason to cry. Now do as I say.”
Cursed spirits. Monsters. They are terrifying, yes. Her father’s black eyes and the sharp set of his jawline are even more terrifying.
So Mai bites down her fear, blinks back tears, thinks of Maki who hates crying and who tries so very hard to never cry, especially never in front of anyone.
Mai cries anyways, because she reaches for the cursed energy inside of her and lets the flow of it tell her what to do. And it hurts.
Surprisingly, crying doesn’t actually earn her father’s wrath, because Mai does do as she’s told, and what the cursed energy tells her to do is to close her hand into a fist and when she opens it there’s a single pebble there, smooth and white, round, very small.
For a second her father’s eyes widen, and he looks—almost pleased.
Then Mai collapses.
She doesn’t remember what happens afterwards, she only knows she wakes up in her room with Maki leaning over her futon, pressing a wet rag against her forehead—
Crying.
“Mai!” Maki pulls her up by the shoulders, tugging Mai into her and Mai doesn’t even care about the pain that shoots through her skull like lightning because her sister is hugging her, and crying. “Mai I was terrified! You—you were bleeding. Your nose—and you were so pale and—they just brought you here—and they didn’t tell me anything and what happened to you?”
Terrified.
Maki had been terrified.
Maki who was never afraid of anything, Maki who marched fearlessly no matter what.
Mai clutches her tightly, and she cries too.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what happened to me—I don’t know.”
She can’t tell this to Maki. Can’t tell her because this means that Mai is a sorcerer and Maki is not. Maki will never be a sorcerer, the thing she wants the most in the world.
Mai feels like a thief, taking for herself things belonging to her sister, and she hates it. Hates the thought of being a bad sister, hates the thought of Maki not loving her because of what she is, because of what she can do that Maki can’t.
So Mai hugs her, and cries.
And she knows she can never tell her the truth.
Her father doesn’t talk about her cursed technique ever again, perhaps because it’s so obviously useless, if Mai faints after making a single pebble.
When they turn eight, when it becomes evident to the rest of the family that Maki will never be able to see cursed spirits, and thus will never be a sorcerer, things get worse.
Mai’s known for some time now that she and Maki are not loved, but the change is immediate. They go from not being loved to simply being hated.
Chores multiply as quickly as harsh looks and harsh words, harsher hands tossing them this way and that, punishing them for stepping out of line, for mistakes.
They are only eight.
And yet, they are always together. They have the same chores, cleaning up after Naoya who is ten years their senior but who is expected to inherit the title of head of the clan. They fold his clothes, bring him meals, fetch whatever he needs fetching. Maki hates it, Mai learns to live with it.
“They wouldn’t treat us like that if I was a sorcerer,” Maki says one night when they finally make it to their room. There is a red, angry mark on the back of her left hand. Naoya spilled hot tea over her. An accident, he claimed.
Mai can’t point out that she is technically a sorcerer, and yet they treat her the same way. She doesn’t really think about it, actually, too young to follow that logic and instead she simply says:
“Why would you want to be a sorcerer? You would see all those scary curses and—” Mai gulps. She hates them. They’re only bearable whenever Maki is around.
Maki’s eyes, so sharp and ready for fighting, soften. She reaches for Mai’s hand with her burned one, like she doesn’t care, like she doesn’t feel the burn even though Mai knows she does.
“If I could see them, I would kill them all,” Maki says. “So you wouldn’t be scared anymore.”
This sparks an idea in Mai’s brain.
If the minimum requirement for being a sorcerer is seeing curses—and her sister wants to see curses—then she can do something about that. She can. She can.
Because at least she is a sorcerer, even if they treat her the same way as someone who is not.
(Mai wouldn’t have it any other way, because despite everything she wouldn’t want to be treated any differently than Maki. She is too young to figure that out, too.)
There is no one she can ask about this, but she knows when you can’t find an answer from someone, you can always find an answer in a book.
Something she heard in passing from one of her cousins. Ranta, maybe, he has a scholar’s mind despite being a sorcerer.
Mai only has access to books for two hours every day as one of her aunts teaches her and Maki how to read and write. Just the basics, she says, enough to get by if they need to run errands outside the compound though she doubts that’s ever going to happen—her words, not Mai’s.
When she asks her aunt if they can work with books about cursed techniques, instead of the dreadfully boring textbooks about the clan’s history, she gets a chuckle in response, a bitter “What would you do with that, girl?” and a sharp look that warns her not to ask again. Mai apologizes immediately.
“Why would you ask that?” Maki whispers when her aunt leaves momentarily to use the restroom.
“I’m just curious.”
“You can see cursed spirits, do you want to be a sorcerer?”
“No! I can’t be a sorcerer, I just want to know why the family sorcerers—why they act like that. Why they—hurt us.”
“They hurt us because they can,” Maki says, then frowns. “Whatever. Hold on a second.”
Quick as a lightning bolt, Maki stands up from her chair and rushes to the bookshelves, squinting up at the spines she can barely read.
Mai panics, looks around, hisses for Maki to sit back down because they’re not supposed to even talk to each other even if they’re alone, they’re supposed to be working on their spelling, not—
But Maki’s hand darts out to the books, she grabs one, and rushes to her seat as swiftly as she had rushed out of it. She hands the book to Mai.
“What am I supposed to do with this!?”
“Put it away or something! It’s about sorcerers!”
So Mai grabs it and she’s thankful is not very big, not very noticeable as she slips it inside her pockets. A thrill runs through her, but it’s not exactly fear it’s more like exhilaration at doing something she shouldn’t.
She shoves that down immediately, stomps on it and buries it because that’s not what a proper girl should be thinking about, and it would get her in serious trouble.
Their aunt comes back, none the wiser.
Mai reads the book by the light of their only oil lamp, tucked in a corner of the room to not bother Maki who is trying to get some sleep.
The process of reading is very slow, there are still some characters she can’t understand and has to puzzle out.
She reads about domains, and barriers, and objects created within domains, objects that disappear when the domains disappear—and she looks up to her futon, where under her pillow she keeps a single tiny, tiny pebble.
That never disappeared.
Maybe that’s why she got so tired, maybe that’s why she collapsed. She made something that wasn’t supposed to exist, that wasn’t supposed to remain.
So what if she makes something out of something that already remains?
…
Sorcery doesn’t make any sense.
It’s really amazing how easy it is to find the things she needs. When you’re a servant people usually don’t care much for where you go, as long as you’re on your way to do something and as long as you’re never late, you can go pretty much wherever you want—except locked places, secret rooms, and the places in the compound reserved only for the men.
Mai goes to one of the storage rooms on her way to the kitchens, and she has to be quick. Twine, she needs twine. She already has the other thing she needs—two makeup compacts she stole from distant aunts.
Distant, because that way it would be harder to connect Mai to the crime.
She shoves it all into her pockets and goes about her day normally. She isn’t late, so that’s good.
And at night, before Maki arrives to the room—and Maki always arrives late these days—Mai sets herself to very meticulously shape the things the way she wants to. She breaks the compacts, keeps only the mirrors, thinks they’re a little too big but maybe she can change that.
“Okay, cursed energy—tell me what I have to do.” She sits in front of her makeshift shape, legs crossed, and puts her hands on top of it. She closes her eyes, tries to remember what her father explained, how the power is inside of her, how she can reach for it. “This sucks—”
Mai shakes, grits her teeth not to cry out because then others would hear, and she would get in so much trouble. Everything inside of her cries out, though, everything screams, her very skin on fire, her chest constricting and closing and closing and closing—
Blood pours down her nose, she can taste it on the back of her throat, and her head explodes with agony.
She thinks she’s going to pass out again, but this is different, slightly. She feels herself grow weaker, feels the cursed energy traveling through her veins like liquid flames but she thinks—that it feels easier than making that one pebble had felt.
Mai thinks of Maki.
Maki. This is for Maki.
It’s done.
It’s done.
In front of her, twine has turned silvery and sturdy, almost elegant. The mirrors have become translucent, and smaller, and they fit perfectly.
A pair of glasses.
Mai drags herself across the floor, pressing her sleeve against her nose so as to not spill blood all over, and leaves the glasses on Maki’s pillow, then drags herself back to her own futon and she collapses, breathing hard, so spent she thinks she will simply disappear.
She finds the tiny pebble, barely the size of a fingernail, and clutches it in her hand.
And passes out.
Mai is too sick to move the next day, too weak.
Maki makes a ruckus about it until their mother lets Mai stay in bed under the condition that Maki has to take on her share of the work, too, and Mai wants to protest—doesn’t want Maki to do that—but she can’t, the words won’t come out, her eyes won’t stay open.
“Rest,” Maki says, brushing Mai’s sweaty hair out of her forehead. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but I’ll bring you breakfast, and lunch, and dinner, and I’ll take care of you. Okay? Don’t worry about the chores, I don’t care.”
Mai’s hand is a trembling little thing as she reaches for her sister’s sleeve. “I’m—I’m sorry—”
“‘s okay.” Maki’s fingers feel overly warm, but it’s the good kind of warm. “When you feel good again I’ll tell you about something—weird that happened.”
“W-what?”
“When you feel good again.” Maki leans forward, kisses Mai right on the forehead and Mai wants so desperately to cry again, but she doesn’t have the strength even for that. “That way you have something to look forward to, okay?”
“Okay, I’ll show you, but you can’t laugh.”
“I won’t laugh,” Mai says. Her fevers have receded, and her nose doesn’t randomly bleed anymore after two days in bed, but she still feels a little woozy, a little airheaded. At least now she can sit on her futon and she can talk without feeling like the words are leaving her mouth with a piece of her soul. So, that’s good.
The sickness must be still present, though, because when Maki puts on the glasses—the glasses Mai made for her—she feels dizzy again, overwhelmed and overcome and her heart squeezes painfully in her chest.
“They—they suit you.”
Maki frowns. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
When Maki smiles, Mai realizes that the thing crushing her isn’t the sickness—it’s fondness.
“Someone left them on my pillow,” Maki says. “Did you see anything?”
Mai looks down. “No, I didn’t.”
“I doubt it was mother or father,” Maki says. “Maybe Ranta-san? Jinichi-san? They’re not that awful, right? Remember that time we had to clean the dojo and Ranta-san was there? He helped us a little, and Jinichi-san stopped me the other day from falling because I was carrying those food crates—”
She talks for a bit more, and Mai sighs. They’re not that awful, of course not. Ranta still looks away whenever Naoya spits on the floor of the dojo just to tell Maki and Mai to clean it up. Jinichi had stopped Maki, balanced her with a simple tap on the shoulder, yet continued walking as she struggled the rest of the way to the kitchen.
They would never do something like this for her.
“And that’s not even the best part. I think I have to try them more but—” Maki’s voice drops down to a whisper, “I think they let me see cursed spirits.”
This time Mai laughs.
“Hey! I told you not to laugh at me!”
But that’s not what she’s laughing at.
She’s laughing because it worked.
She’s laughing because, for once, she was able to give Maki something she wanted. She’s laughing because she realizes—she wants to do this again, she wants to give Maki everything she possibly can.
She wants, she wants, she wants.
Always together, and yet they grow apart.
It doesn’t happen quickly, it happens across the years, across a childhood of scraped knees and chores and snide remarks from others. It happens as they grow up, as Maki starts biting out responses and glaring with eyes sharp as daggers and instead Mai ducks her chin and tries to do as told because she prefers being a follower than being punished.
Maki doesn’t care. Takes Naoya’s punches and kicks and never complains, smears blood out of her face and bares reddish teeth and everytime her skin bruises and breaks adds to that determination that Mai is sure will get her killed one day.
Maki doesn’t care about pain, maybe she doesn’t care about dying, either.
Mai doesn’t like pain.
Her mother calls her lucky that she isn’t like Maki, tells her over and over how important it is to act like a proper woman, a proper lady, and Maki will simply never be like that.
But Mai is not lucky, because Maki is not lucky.
She and her sister had been born unto the opposite of luck, the direct fruit of misfortune.
So she’s punished. Small mistakes she tries to not make again, a crooked photograph in the family shrine, a broken teacup, a rip on her clothes. Sometimes her mother’s cold words slap her, sometimes her mother’s hands slap her, sometimes her father does something worse. Unlike Maki, everytime Mai’s skin bruises and breaks just adds to the weight of trying her best not to be noticed, because if you’re at the bottom and you do what you’re told then you don’t get punished.
Maki is her opposite, and she tries her best to be noticed by all.
Maki tries, she tries so hard, and in return others turn to Mai, her father’s empty eyes always fixed on her as if daring her to make mistakes, her mother’s quick rasps against her knuckles whenever she’s just a tad too slow.
“Don’t be like Maki,” says her mother. “You’re a woman, act like one.”
“Maki’s trying to be something she’s not,” says her father. “But you both will never be anything other than bad omens upon this family.”
Mai hears those words a lot. Bad omens. Twins. They become synonyms.
Maki never listens, pretends she doesn’t care. Mai doesn’t understand her sister, her sister doesn’t understand her.
They grow up and grow apart.
Like rubber bands, they snap back together.
“Stupid,” it’s Mai who says this time, dabbing alcohol-soaked cotton against Maki’s bleeding cheek. “Why did you go and pick a fight with Naoya of all people? You got all messed up, look at you—”
“What was I supposed to do?” Maki grumbles. “Just let him try and kick me out of the Kukuru Unit?”
“Maybe.” Mai presses against the wound, and Maki doesn’t flinch even a little. “Maybe you should’ve done that, because it’s honestly embarrassing how you think they’ll let you stay for much longer.”
“They will.”
“You’re their toy, Maki,” says Mai. “You’re just their stupid whipping girl they can hurt without feeling guilty. Do you even know the things they say about you? How you will never amount to anything other than being a punching bag? How you will never be a proper woman, a proper—?”
“Stop.”
“I hear them all the time,” Mai continues. “They talk about you in the hallways and in the dining hall, they talk about you a lot, call you a bitch, an anomaly . It sickens me.”
Maki’s eyes have always been so different from hers. They are the same identical shade of gold, the same identical shape, but Maki’s hold a weight that Mai’s have never held. When Maki looks at you it’s heavy, it’s suffocating, as if something is reaching from behind her eyelids just to smother you to silence.
At least that’s how it feels to Mai.
She wears her glasses all the time, tells the family she needs them because her eyesight is bad, no one questions it because no one cares. No one knows what they’re truly for.
“And yet,” Maki says. Her voice, too, is so different from Mai’s, so bitingly cold, so incredibly intense. “You don’t do anything about it. You never do anything about it, Mai.”
Mai presses harder against the wound, so much that alcohol squeezes out of the cotton and drips between her fingers, mingling with the blood that oozes from the cut. Maki doesn’t flinch.
“It may leave a scar.”
“I don’t care,” Maki says. She never cares about anything.
“Well, you should. Things will only get worse if you have scars.”
“As if things can get much worse anyways.”
Oh, but Mai thinks they can. Every day she feels things just getting worse, and worse, and worse.
“Why do you do everything they say?” Maki asks, but it’s not so much a question as it is an accusation.
“If this is the alternative,” Mai says, putting down the cotton, now leaden with the weight of blood. “Then I think I’m doing better than you.”
“Oh yeah?”
It’s sudden, the way Maki’s hand reaches out for her. She’s fast nowadays, has gained a bit of muscle, a lot of strength, so when her fingers wrap around Mai’s wrist Mai cannot react, cannot shover her away, she can just yelp as Maki slides up her sleeve to her forearm.
And in Mai’s pale skin there are marks, too. Bruises. The perfect shape of fingerprints blooming purple and black around her wrist like a morbid bracelet woven of withered flowers.
Not good enough. Not good enough. Not perfect enough.
Don’t let me catch another one of your mistakes again.
Mai snatches her hand away, shoves her sleeve down. She glares at Maki, she knows it doesn’t matter because her eyes have never held any sort of weight.
Or—that’s what she thinks.
She can't understand why Maki suddenly looks—sad.
What happened to her anger?
“You can’t hide it from me,” Maki says, even her voice drops, stripped of that coldness from before, unveiling nothing but a softness Mai hasn’t heard from her sister in God knows how long. “It doesn’t matter what we do, Mai, it always ends up like this. You’re not doing better than me because there’s no such thing as better, not for us.”
They are fourteen and still share a single room in the furthest corner of the compound, the place where their parents shove them to because they cannot yet shove them underground. The floor is cold under Mai’s knees as she simply stays there, unmoving in front of her sister who has blood dripping down her cheek.
“I guess you’re right,” Mai says. “I guess we’re both at the bottom.”
Despite the blood on her face, the bruise on her eye and all the callouses in her hands that hadn’t been there before, Maki is exceedingly gentle when she reaches forward, tucks a strand of hair behind Mai’s ear.
“We won’t be forever.”
Mai tries to understand, after that.
Call her sentimental, but she misses her sister, misses talking to her like they did when they were children, whispering stories every night and chatting over menial work because there was no one else that would be willing to talk or—
Had they only ever talked because there was no one else?
Had they only ever been close because there was no choice?
Had their love been forced—undeserving?
Mai frowns. Surely not.
But then why have they grown so distant? Why has Maki chosen her wooden swords and her aches over her own twin sister? Why has she chosen to trudge to their room every night, incredibly late, too tired to do anything other than collapse? Why has she chosen painful training over their old menial work?
Mai loves her sister, loves her when she’s baring her teeth and standing her ground, loves her when she’s shoved to the dirt, and loves her when she looks up from said dirt with steel flashing in her eyes, cold, intense, defiant until the very end.
And so Mai is cursed to know that she will love her sister even if her sister doesn’t love her back.
She still tries to understand.
Maki’s never been easy to understand, not at all.
Before, when they were little, Mai would hold onto her hand and together they would move forward, Maki would tell her to close her eyes.
“If you can’t see it, then it’s like it’s not even there.”
Those words made Mai understand there were people in this world that simply weren’t afraid.
She never once wished she was like that, because fear kept her alive, fear kept her away from pain most of the times, when she sat primly and did her duties she did them out of fear and not out of habit. As long as she did them, then it was alright.
Even though it was never enough. Even though, most of the time, there was always a mistake she could never catch in time. Never perfect enough, never good enough—
Maki was never simple. She was always a bit of a brat, talked too much, laughed too much, pushed too much. Yet she was never too much, and Mai always liked being around her.
But she could never understand.
Why move so desperately towards the future? Why reach so much for things that were never meant for them, things they will never get? Why go through pain, why go through suffering, when it would be so much easier to try and avoid that, to try and live a normal life?
It’s just like Maki said. If you can’t see them, it’s like they are not there. And if they can become that, if they can be invisible, then others would stop bothering them, would stop trying to hurt them so constantly.
Why, then?
Why try so hard?
Curiosity turns to anger, and the next time Mai sees Maki beaten in the courtyard of the Kukuru Unit it twists to something poisonous, disgusting. Something like hatred, but she doesn’t know towards who or what.
“Girl’s a fraud,” one of the men says, speaking casually in the courtyard just as Mai passes by, a basket of freshly laundered sheets propped on her hip. “Almost a year training with us and what’s she got to show for it? She’s nothing like Toji.”
Mai purses her lips as she walks, and they don’t notice her.
Who is Toji?
It’s not hard to figure it out.
The Zenin don’t talk about their failures, they hide them away under lock and key instead.
Mai takes the only oil lamp she and Maki have had since they were little, and leaves the room in the middle of the night to go to the archives. Maki sleeps so soundly, so profoundly due to her arduous training, that she doesn’t even stir as Mai slides the door open and steps out.
Mai doesn’t have a key, of course she doesn’t have a key, but she has something else.
She makes a face as she grabs the lock in one hand and sticks in it a single nail she found discarded along the halls, steel cold against her palm.
The lock is an old thing, rusty and falling apart, perhaps Maki could break it in her grasp if she so wished. Despite what the men of the Kukuru Unit say, Maki is strong, strong enough wooden katanas splinter and crack under her unyielding grip if she swings too hard. No one notices, but Mai does.
The more she looks at her sister, the more she tries to understand, the more she understands other things about her.
Namely, no one takes Maki seriously, not really. None of them know what she is capable of, or what she will be capable of, one day.
Mai closes her eyes. “This sucks.”
And for the first time in years, she uses her cursed technique.
She is hopeless in the sense that she doesn’t see a future outside of this household, she is hopeless in the way of the beaten, the way of the abused, she doesn’t see a way out, she is hopeless in the way that has nothing but darkness ahead, nothing but this constant struggle.
But she is not hopeless in the sense that she can’t do absolutely anything about it.
Small things like these, she can do.
The nail she stuck inside the lock is a tiny thing yet it flares to life inside her mind like industrial iron, and when she pours into it, whatever she can, whatever pitiful amount of cursed energy she has, it drags something painful and primal out of her, squeezing her insides from the center of her chest to the pit of her stomach, replacing her legs with twigs that can only wobble as they try to withstand a storm.
It doesn’t last long.
She transforms the nail in her hand into something that’s not quite a nail but just barely the key she needs. It’s difficult, pushing out the cursed energy when it’s so meager in the pit of her belly is like forcefully trying to fill a jar with just a trickle, but it’s easier to work with something that already exists, modify it to her liking, create matter out of matter, instead of creating matter out of nowhere.
She’s panting when she turns the key, barely strong enough to manage that, and it clicks, it unlocks, it feels like it unlocks something even deeper inside of Mai.
It’s not the first time she does this. She’s been studying keys for a while now, studying locks, perhaps a pipe dream of one day making something that could get her out of this place.
Just another hopeless dream.
She cleans the trail of blood down her nose with the back of her hand and steps inside the archives, holding her lamp tightly because if she slackens her grip just a little then she is sure to drop it.
It’s dark, musty, it smells like old parchment and dusty books, the scent of unuse and decay. Rows and rows of shelves extend on either side of her, ominous in the obscurity outside the range of her pitiful lamp, towering over like giants.
She sniffs, smacks her lips to get rid of the taste of blood, and begins walking.
Despite the state of disuse, things are organized in here, it’s easy to find the massive book containing the family records, and she has to leave her lamp on a nearby table just to be able to get it off the shelf, her forearms straining with such a feather weight.
Mai drops it on the table, the echoing thud lifting dust off the wooden surface and she coughs, then begins flipping through pages that feel so flimsy and ancient she fears they will crumble to dust on her hands.
Then there it is, the most recent family tree. She’s surprised to find herself and Maki there, she thought they would’ve been excluded even from this piece of paper no one ever looks at, but there they are.
Maki Zenin. — Mai Zenin.
Heavenly Restriction. — Construction Technique.
That is all they are, after all, their worth measured by their last name and what they can do as sorcerers.
Not much importance to either of those things, not when it comes to them.
Mai recognizes all other names. Her parents, of course, her cousins and uncles and aunts, her grandparents and great-grandparents and even the distant cousins twice removed and the hideous grandaunts and even the scratched-out names of—
There is a single name she doesn’t recognize.
Next to Jinichi, making the owner of said name her cousin.
Toji Zenin.
Heavenly Restriction.
Dead, huh?
As she skims her fingers over the page, following the lines connecting every wretched member of this wretched family, she realizes that he and Maki are the only ones with those two words under their names.
The information haunts her, and she’s not exactly sure why.
She can't ask anyone about it without revealing where she discovered it, so she doesn't, but she thinks about it. Heavenly Restriction. The reason behind Maki's physical strength.
They're still only fourteen, enhanced strength or not Maki still doesn't win most of her practice matches against the soldiers of the Kukuru, more experienced men, but Mai sees something flash in the way her sister moves she's sure no one else can see.
Whenever Maki grows into her powers, whenever she becomes able to tap into her innate talent, then she will be unstoppable.
And they are all wrong to underestimate her.
Maki’s face hits the dirt again, her feet swept under her and she goes down with a grunt.
Mai is watching, but no one knows she's there. No one notices her, as usual. She’s lost count of how many times she’s stopped in this particular hallway that goes around the compound, how many times she’s stopped right in front of the courtyard where the soldiers train just to see this outcome over and over again.
The outcome of Maki standing up after being knocked down. Over, and over again.
Maybe that’s what Mai hates. That stubborn resilience that always ends up in more pain for her, more injuries Mai has to clean and bandage.
But no, she knows that’s not what sparks her hatred.
It’s the way they look at her sister. The man opposite from her smiling in the open sun, his uniform clean while Maki’s stained with dirt and blood, his eyes like he’s having the time of his life.
The wooden sword in Maki’s hand creaks, splinters a bit, and she swings.
Mai will have to do something about that.
She returns to the archives months after that, scared someone would notice anything different there and blame it on her, discover her somehow.
There is no further information on Toji Zenin, or Heavenly Restriction, no matter how hard Mai looks for it, lifting her little lamp to read the spine of massive books in the darkness. There is a lot about jujutsu, the history of the clan, past members, past enemies, books dangerous enough they can’t be kept in the actual library—but nothing of what she’s looking for.
One of those books on jujutsu eventually catches her eyes, but not because it has anything to do with what she really wants to know.
Anomalies within Jujutsu Sorcerers
The title makes her frown, something familiar about it, and she pulls it out to read in the flicker of her oil lamp. She skims through a lot of text that doesn’t make a lot of sense, theories and explanations of old techniques, old rituals, old sorcerers—
Until, suddenly, one thing makes perfect sense. Perfect, stark, horrible sense.
Twins.
To gain something, you must offer something in return. But for identical twin siblings, that rule doesn’t always apply. For some reason, cursed techniques treat them as one individual, and reserves of cursed energy are shared. It is like they are the same person, or share the same soul…
Mai’s eyes hungrily take in the words, over and over again, her finger sliding over the lines of text as she reads, and reads, and reads.
When her eyes burn and she’s sure she hasn’t blinked in minutes, she leans back in her chair with the back of her fist pressed against her mouth as if to drown a scream. She does feel like screaming, barely holds it back because she’s afraid someone may hear her.
The same person.
The same soul.
Together even when apart. Together even under the dirt.
There are holes in the knowledge that Mai now carries.
She can see cursed spirits, a fact that has always upsetted and terrified her, and her sister cannot, a fact that has always upsetted her and driven her.
It doesn’t make any sense.
They are identical twins, they should be—well, identical. Same person, same soul, whatever that means, yet they’re not. Mai has a cursed technique and Maki doesn’t, Mai can see cursed spirits and Maki can’t. Maki can fight—and Mai can’t.
Something is missing, and she is left wanting to understand not only her sister but also this strange thing that now stretches between them, this knowledge, this truth.
Are they bad omens? Are they cursed to nothing but bad luck, suffering, pain?
If the very world they live in says they are, then who is Mai to say otherwise?
She doesn’t talk about it with Maki, there’s no point. Maki’s mind is focused on only one thing, her body pointing towards where she wants to go like she is a compass and Mai is the furthest cardinal point from true north.
Maki was born first, older by several minutes, according to the whispers Mai has been able to gather over the years. Maki came into this world fast and hard, making a ruckus with her first breath. The first thing the midwives saw from her were her hands, shaking, reaching for freedom even from the womb.
A taker from the very first beating of her heart.
Mai can’t pretend she understands, she still doesn’t know why her sister is the way she is, why she chooses to struggle against the tide when it would be so easy to just go along with it.
And so there is no point in telling her anything, because Maki will be a taker until the day her heart stops beating, too, and knowing this or knowing that won’t make a difference.
Mai will figure it out on her own, for the both of them.
Maki leaves when they’re fifteen, and Mai finally understands.
Just like sometimes sorcerers are cursed when they die, their souls tethered and brought back in abstract shapes of abject horror, Maki’s soul is cursed in a different way. She is cursed to push herself to the limit chasing a goal she will never achieve, reaching for things that will never be granted to her.
Once Mai starts thinking about it this way, as a curse enforced upon her sister’s soul, once she removes Maki’s choice from the matter, she begins to understand.
If Maki’s soul is cursed, and Maki’s soul is Mai’s—then perhaps this too is something they have shared from birth.
And she comes to know something else. Understanding does not alleviate pain, not at all.
That night she goes to sleep and for a second she can pretend nothing has changed.
She’s been going to sleep earlier than Maki since they were children stumbling into the room together. Maki would stay up, tossing and turning in her blankets, sometimes speaking Mai to sleep.
Then they grew apart, and Mai went to sleep by herself without Maki in the room at all. Maki would trudge inside later, much later. At first Mai waited for her because Maki would occasionally murmur “Goodnight” before collapsing. Eventually she stopped doing that, and Mai stopped waiting.
Tonight she goes to sleep earlier than Maki, that isn’t anything new.
Except Maki doesn’t slide the door open in the middle of the night, doesn’t collapse in silence across the room.
Because Maki is gone.
Weeks pass, months even, until one day—
“Mai, pack your bags.”
Mai blinks, halfway through getting out of her futon. She’s awake, she’s always awake early no matter the difficulties of the previous night. Bad dreams, mostly, sometimes she just aches too much to fall asleep.
But even if she’s awake her mind struggles to catch up, unaccustomed to being addressed in her secluded bedroom.
“Mother?”
“Pack up,” says her mother, leaving a suitcase by the doorframe, not even deigning to come inside. “Everything you have, and meet me at the entrance when you’re done. Don’t take too long.”
At this point in her life Mai knows it’s better to do what she’s told rather than ask for an explanation. It’s always pointless, they never tell her anything, and if they do it comes laced with harsh words or harsh hands so she’s learned to simply never ask.
So she packs her meager belongings in a single suitcase and there’s space left, and who she meets at the compound’s entrance is not only her mother—but her uncle as well. Naobito Zenin himself.
It’s early in the morning, one of the few times when he isn’t drinking himself into a stupor or drunken rage. Somehow he still reeks of sake.
“You’ve been working hard, haven’t you, girl?”
Of course she has, and she’s sick of it. Ever since Maki decided she wanted to join the Kukuru Mai’s been getting both of their responsibilities, double the load of chores, double the life of a servant, and now that Maki is gone that seems to have doubled again.
She’s been working hard but not out of her own volition, and that sickens her, tires her to her bones, drains her. She simply goes through the motions, sometimes she goes days without speaking, sometimes that silence is only broken by whimpers of pain when someone strikes her because she is not perfect enough.
And for what? All because Maki walked away, all because Maki fought so hard to take what she wanted, all because Maki walked away and left her behind. Alone.
A broken promise, and a sister who always walks in front of her, never slowing down for anyone, not even for Mai. Especially not for Mai.
A broken promise, and Mai is left behind.
Mai wants to blame her, Mai wants to hate her, wants to direct nothing but rage and harshness at her, but she can’t.
Because she understands. She understands Maki the way no one else does.
This is not her sister’s fault, and it’s not her own fault either.
“I hope I have,” Mai says. What else can she say? Yes will be met with derision, no will be met with anger.
Naobito chuckles. “You will work harder.”
It doesn’t make any sense, makes even less sense when he walks away and leaves her and her mother there at the entrance, warm spring breeze tickling the back of her neck. Nothing makes any sense until a car pulls over in front of the compound.
Mai’s seen cars before, she’s not an idiot, but this one is black and sleek, tinted windows and from it steps out a short—woman? Girl? All that Mai can tell is that she looks young and is dressed in a sharp black suit, and she’s smiling.
“Pleasure to make your acquaintance,” she says, bowing perfectly at the waist. “I’m Akari Nitta, it’s nice to meet you.”
Mai frowns, looks at her mother because she knows she's not supposed to speak first, and the silence stretches until it becomes uncomfortable.
“Erm—did I cause offense?”
“Not at all,” says Mai’s mother. “This is Mai, as you can see she’s ready.”
“What’s going on?” Mai finally asks, unable to bear the suspicion any longer.
“Nitta will take you to campus,” says her mother. “If you know what’s good for you you will obey, and you won’t bring any more shame to the Zenin name while you’re there.”
Mai’s mouth opens, closes. Dread settles in her stomach, painful and heavy like using her cursed technique and she can almost taste blood on the back of her throat and on the inside of her nose.
“Campus?”