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"Put your clothes back on," Higuruma said.
He couldn't tell if the girl had heard him. She had remained in her half of the destroyed theater with an odd look on her face, and didn't seem at all as if the act of standing half-naked in front of a stranger affected her. Neither did the blood and dust covering her.
It took Higuruma an awkward second before stepping forward. The girl's shirt was spread across a piece of demolished pillar, no doubt a ruin of a performance long past; he picked it up with tense fingers. The fabric felt like spikes and burns. It was probably nothing more dangerous than cotton.
The abject thought that, perhaps, he should be looking for the girl's bra as well—somewhere under the debris, on the right, where he hadn't managed to deviate the sword far enough to avoid cutting it off along with part of her skin—transperced him. His left foot hit a large piece of roof. He tried not to cry out in pain.
The girl didn't look at him anyway. She hadn't moved at all—still standing in the same spot, still staring at the floor unexpressively. Higuruma held the shirt to her from as far away as he could. He cleared his throat, envisioned calling her by her name, and buried the idea in horror.
At last, she reacted, without him having to endure a second more of this.
"Oh," she said, seeing her shirt in his hand. "Thanks."
The, 'You're welcome,' which Higuruma tried to give her turned into a nervous hum. Still looking as if she couldn't care less about being torso-bare in front of a grown man, the girl, Itadori, took her shirt but didn't dress back up. He considered begging her to do it.
Perhaps he should simply leave her there. Give her the points as he had planned and run away and never again think of this girl's words or actions or eyes, and how her presence alone made his skin tear off his muscles and his insides rot.
Like a radiation victim, he thought. Like the melted firemen of Tchernobyl leaving strands of their bodies on their hospital beds.
Before he could, however, Itadori spoke again: "I wanna ask you something."
"Very well," he replied without thinking.
"It's gonna sound weird, so, sorry about that," she said. Higuruma's heartbeat sped up in terror. "I wanna… sorry, I mean, I would like to have sex with you."
Her way of correcting herself, like a child learning to be polite, did nothing to change the overall effect.
"Excuse me?" he managed to say.
His throat felt made of stone. So much for the liquefied men of Tchernobyl. He tried to speak again and found that he couldn't. Meanwhile, the girl had started rubbing her nape absently. She hadn't stopped looking him in the eyes. He wondered if it was all a show, if she was hiding fear and tremors via this unthinkable bluntness.
"You saw my life with your ability, right?" she asked.
"I saw your crimes," he corrected weakly.
"Right. And Sukuna's too."
He did. A millenium's worth of crimes.
Itadori was rubbing her mouth, now. He saw her take a great inhale before speaking. "So you saw that he fucked me… Sorry, I don't know how to be more polite. I don't wanna say that we 'had sex', you know."
Out of everything going on in that time and place, Higuruma felt that her attempts to be polite were the saddest. That girl could probably kill someone by talking to them.
"I read that he assaulted you," he told her. At least this was easy to say. He had said such things countless times in the past; he could imagine himself in the company of a client.
"Yeah, that," Itadori replied, enthusiastic now. "Assault and all. Although it was all in my head and while I was dead, technically, so I don't know if it counts."
It certainly counted for the magical tribunal that Higuruma could summon.
Perhaps Itadori thought he didn't care about what she was saying, that she was losing his attention, perhaps she simply wished to fill the silence—she rubbed her neck once more and she said, "You're a lawyer, right."
"I am," Higuruma replied weakly. "I—used to be. I kill people, now."
"That's okay. I don't think you're a bad guy."
Listening to her would kill him.
"Anyway," she went on, still bare-chested, still covered in dust, speckled with injuries that he had inflicted on her, "I don't really have a good memory of sex right now. I thought maybe I should try doing it with someone else and get a better experience. But every time I try to talk about it with the others, it just won't come out. It's weird. Even with a stranger like you—well, an enemy, I guess… It's really hard."
She quieted. This time her hand came to her cheek, and she stroked one of the odd lines under her eyes with her thumb.
"For a while I thought Sukuna put a spell on me or something to stop me from talking, but I don't think he cares if I tell someone he raped me," she declared.
The air pressurized around them. Higuruma imagined a sound akin to a snort of laughter, a deep voice dripping with contempt spreading over the torn room like a layer of paint. His heart shot up his throat; and Itadori scratched her cheek and said, "Shut up."
The feeling disappeared. Higuruma's disgust remained.
He cleared his throat once more. He tried desperately to go back to the memory of a client in a cell, simply asking for his professional advice.
"It's not a spell," he told the girl, "it's… a rather common reaction to what you experienced."
"Yeah, I guessed so. Trauma and stuff, right?"
"Right," he answered shakily. "Trauma and stuff."
Silence hovered heavily. For a long time, neither of them spoke. Higuruma realized that Itadori was still waiting for his answer to her proposal, and found himself gutted straight out of any professionalism.
He tried to sound firm: "Miss Itadori—"
"Don't worry about sexual majority and all that," she cut him off, waving a hand dismissively, "I'm sixteen."
Higuruma pushed both hands against his face and breathed in, out, three times.
"Is that not the right age?" she asked after a moment.
Even with her out of sight, he felt that each of her words were a stab.
"It is," he replied shakily. "The age of sexual consent in Japan was raised from thirteen to sixteen recently."
"Thirteen… That's real young."
"Yes. Which is the reason why it was raised." Higuruma wished that his palms could flatten his face, erase his mouth, his nose, and his eyes, and render it a plain surface of skin. He wanted to choke on them. "Miss Itadori," he said again, lowering his hands, and the dusty air of the theater bloomed in his nostrils once more. "You don't know what you're asking."
"I do. I'm asking if I can have sex with you."
"You don't—you have no idea."
Another moment of silence came; then, for the first time, Itadori lowered her gaze.
Not having her meet his eyes felt that a great weight had been lifted from Higuruma's shoulders. He was even filled with hope from gut to mouth when he saw her raise her torn shirt and look at it in great detail, as if to put it on…
Until she threw it across the room with enough strength to send it all the way to the farthest row of seats.
"What can I do to convince you?" she asked him, determined.
"Nothing," he replied.
"I trust you, though."
"I just tried to kill you—"
"But you didn't."
"There must be other people!" Higuruma lashed out. Despite the volume of his voice, Itadori had not flinched, and so he kept yelling. "Miss Itadori, I am more than twice your age. I just tried to kill you. There must be people you can trust more than me!"
At last, he saw her bristle. Her lower lip trembled just quickly enough for him to notice, and only because he had looked at her face for so long and waited for this moment.
"Is it the scars?" she asked. "I know I don't look very attractive right now."
"It's not the scars," he answered.
"Kugisa—"
Whatever she had tried to tell him then seemed to die on her tongue. Her lip shook again. He saw her struggle to find her words and waited for her.
"One of my friends," she settled on, "told me that I could look pretty hot sometimes. She wants… wanted to teach me to use makeup and all."
"Miss Itadori." He felt exhausted to the bone. He felt as though he weighed twice as much as usual, and gravity were attempting to drag him to the floor. "It has nothing to do with your appearance. It has nothing to do with your age or your experience or my personal preferences or—or anything."
Higuruma wondered how he could not have noticed all the signs of her hesitance before. Now he could see and hear it all: the nervous closing and opening of her hands, the shaking lip, the tense voice.
Her throat trembled as she swallowed. "Well, I'm not gonna force you, am I," she joked. "Sorry. Forget it. It was a stupid idea anyway."
She finally crossed her arms over her chest and hid her breasts from him.
"I dunno if I'm gonna be alive tomorrow," she said. "We're in the middle of some kind of extermination game. And, man, I didn't even ask if you were married or anything—fuck, forget it. Why am I even thinking about all that? It's so dumb. I don't have any time for this stuff. I'm sorry."
She laughed loudly and turned around. Higuruma watched her climb over the vacillating wall and find her missing underwear. She struggled to hook it back on for a second. It hadn't been entirely sectioned.
Had he not wished more than anything in the world to be gone from this place and never again see this girl, Higuruma would have told her that she was wrong. It was not dumb. It was not stupid or incomprehensible. It was only sad.
And although he tried to ignore it, he wondered about the kind of friends that she had whom she could one day trust with this, rather than a man with blood-drenched hands and a lifetime of failure behind him. A pathetic and cowardly man. Itadori Yuuji was a tall girl with short hair and the sort of body type associated with high-level athletes. A runner, perhaps. Despite the scars and inhuman strength, she was an objectively attractive girl. He couldn't envision that no one in an appropriate situation to have sex with her would be willing to.
That simple thought knocked his brain sideways and would no doubt remain, forever, a core of self-aborrhence and guilt. So be it. What was one more source of guilt? Let observing a teenage girl's attractiveness find its place alongside the murders.
He nearly jumped out of his skin when he noticed that Itadori had walked up to him while he was lost in his grim thoughts and was now standing next to him.
"So," she said awkwardly. "Are you gonna join us, or…"
He would not.
She tried to convince him. He did not change his mind. He gave her the points as he had planned and crossed the ruined room, trying his best not to fall on any schemeful rooftiles, feeling Itadori's gaze upon his nape like a great, heavy burden. Before crossing the door, he gave her one last look.
Several words crossed his mind. He wanted to tell her that he couldn't stand to be in her presence and excuse his refusal that way. Sorry, but being near you makes me feel like a demon near Buddha. A quite awful good-bye.
"Put your clothes back on," he said.
That would have to do.