chapter 1: god children
"I thought it'd be you, if I'm being honest."
He looks over at her for the first time that afternoon. She's always found it difficult to meet his eyes when they're not obscured. His sunglasses slide down his nose, possibly from perspiration—no, she has never seen Gojou sweat. It doesn't matter that the sun delivers divine punishment in the form of thirty-five degrees on a cloudless Tokyo summer day, when they've chosen to sit outside the school's dormitories, on the deck overlooking the koi pond. The bamboo well fills, then dips onto stone with a pleasant hollow clunk, and pivots back up, the cycle repeating. Her pit stains are impossible to hide against her blouse, no matter how closely she presses her arms to her sides. The strands of hair that have escaped her braid cling to her neck like drenched nets to the side of a ship. Breathing feels like drowning in this humidity.
Gojou's dressed in full uniform, black as charcoal, his eyes bright as the clearest sea. Not even the slightest sheen shines against his skin. Maybe his Infinity evaporates his sweat. Maybe gods don't perspire at all. Why should they, when they have nothing to fear?
When it's clear she is not going to elaborate, Gojou gestures his teacup at her as a prompt.
"It'd be me who what?"
Is she allowed to say she knows Gojou better than most, when she can discern the barest edge in his voice, a warning, a microscopic papercut across the shallowest layer of skin, sure to burn like hell when she douses it in alcohol? That cut suggests he knows what she means already, and that he's annoyed by it, and she's smarter than to say it out loud.
"Who'd go mad. Who'd go on a killing spree." She doesn't look at him. This isn't news to him; he should know by now why she's kept him at an arm's length since first-year. "Who'd just wake up one day and decide none of us are worth anything."
There's a pause. The wild thought that Gojou is going to kill her passes through, but it's fleeting. He wouldn't do it. She's not worth killing, after all, not for just expressing a harmless opinion. Nothing she says could possibly hurt Gojou. Gods do not concern themselves with the opinions of monkeys.
"Damn, sensei," he says, convincingly jovial. "Didn't think you thought so little of yourself."
Didn't think you thought so little of me simmers beneath.
She shrugs. She thinks she should be more scared right now, but she isn't. She's tired. The heat oppresses, the mosquitoes peck, her skin crawls, and underneath, her blood boils. The collective convergence of her internal and external environments exhausts her. While Getou Suguru had been murdering a hundred civilians, she was dispelling a curse for a local politician who disseminated child pornography. Briefly, she wonders if Getou Suguru, who just murdered his parents in his childhood home, is right after all. Then, she wonders if she's insane, too.
She wonders how Gojou, of all people, knows which lines can't be crossed when his entire Cursed Technique is full of asymptotes.
"You should stop calling me that." She observes the bamboo well and its assiduous work, refilling, emptying, refilling, emptying, soothing in its predictability.
"Calling you what?"
"Sensei."
He raises his eyebrows. "Are you quitting?"
He's mocking her. He thinks she's shaken enough to quit. Like Nanami, one of the second-years, who has decided that he's seen enough shit and has had enough people die (Haibara being the last). After he graduates, he's going to just earn a ton of money and be a hedge fund broker. Nanami is a fucking genius, in her completely genuine opinion.
Gojou knows that's not even an option for her, no matter how desperately she wants it.
"Fuck you," she bites.
He grins. "Wow, sensei, I'm seeing a lot of different sides of you today."
He has the gall to sound delighted. As if she's not livid. As if he's not wounded. As if his best friend didn't commit a mass murder and earn himself a nice execution order, as if Gojou hadn't just failed to carry out this exact order when he found Getou in Shinjuku. As if Gojou was not just finally forced to realize that maybe he has a heart after all because he couldn't bring himself to kill Getou. (And thousands of innocent civilians in the middle of the district, but they were a thousand minor afterthoughts).
"Don't call me sensei." Her words come out less harsh than resigned. "I didn't teach any of you shit."
"Ah-ha. Is that it? You think if only you'd taught Suguru and me anything, this could've been avoided?" He barks a laugh. "Maybe you think too much of yourself after all."
Gojou's eyes are brighter than supernovas, all shades of blue shimmering at once, Infinity and beyond. They scald her in a way the sun cannot, below the skin, deep into her marrow.
"Of course not. I just don't want anyone to think I should take any responsibility for what Getou-kun did. What you will do."
What you should have done.
"That hurts." He doesn't sound hurt. "You act like we're monsters."
"Aren't you?" Her teacup is full of lukewarm sake. She downs it.
"I don't think I like you this honest, sensei."
He puts his empty cup aside and abruptly lies his head down on her lap. She startles like she's badly burned, but his head, like she predicted, isn't hot. Maybe it's because his snowy hair can't absorb heat rays. Maybe because Infinity repels even the sun. She imagines Gojou in his own world, protected from the harshest realities of the earth, and wonders if his is any better.
"What are you doing," she deadpans.
"I'm sad, sensei. You're being so cold. I came to you for comfort."
That is a fucking lie. No one would ever come to her for comfort.
"You already got that from Yaga-sensei."
Gojou snorts. "He asked me why I didn't chase after Suguru. You wouldn't ask me a stupid question like that." He puts his sunglasses to the side and drops an arm over his eyes. "You just call me a monster instead. Can't expect anything but the cold hard truth from you, I guess."
His head is heavy, his hair soft. Not for the first time, she thinks of how ridiculous it is that someone like Gojou exists at all, the singular hope of the jujutsu world, one stone outbalancing all the others on the scale, blessed with not one but two Cursed Techniques seen once in a thousand years, all while being stupidly beautiful.
"Gojou-kun, you're going to get me fired."
"There's not enough of us around for you to get fired over something so small. Besides, you just told me to stop calling you 'sensei.' So. This isn't weird."
"This is weird because you're seventeen and I am an adult."
"Or is it weird because I'm a monster and you're not?"
She's annoyed that Gojou is fixating on this comment, but she can't blame him. She is being too careless with her words—a string pulling her mask in place has snapped. She knows better than to believe she has the luxury of honesty. She ties her mask back, secured.
"I didn't mean it," she backtracks.
"Liar," he says petulantly. "You can't even look at me."
She lets out a breath and finally tears her gaze away from the repetitive cycle of the bamboo fountain, where an orange-white koi has just surfaced under the water lilies. She looks down at the boy lying in her lap, feeling like a coward because she can only do it when he can't reciprocate.
"Gojou-kun." She schools her tone back to the neutrality she has always employed with him. Holding him at an arm's length. Her own Infinity, personalized to repel her own students. "If you're tired, you should go rest in your room."
"I'm not tired."
"Why are you acting like a child?"
"Because I am one."
Gojou tenses the moment the words fall from his lips. She waits for him to relax, for the words to settled, for his guilt to pass. He's not allowed to acknowledge it aloud. No one has ever seen him as a child. He hasn't ever been allowed to behave like one. He's being foolish and selfish which is not unlike him, except this time, it is. Gojou doesn't want to be a child. He wants to be the strongest, he wants to be the Honored One, the only one. A child cannot be the strongest.
She doesn't actually know what Gojou wants. She only knows what he is.
She lets out another breath. They are child monsters. Child gods. Stand too close and she will be burned alive, an unwilling sacrifice, but hold them too far and see what happens—consumed by their power and sorrow and madness, leaving nothing but blood and ashes in their wake. Loneliness addles the mind, devours the conscience. She hadn't taught Getou anything. She just watched him this summer consume curse after curse and allowed him to wallow in his strength alone, because how was she supposed to help anyway? The only person who could have understood him was gone, learning how to become more untouchable than he already was.
Ironic, now, that he lies in her lap now, asking something of her that she has denied since she's known him. She is kidding herself. She knows that she owns responsibility over Getou's actions, if only through her own inaction.
She rests her hand in Gojou's hair, half expecting to approach the strands, only to never touch. But to her surprise, Gojou has released his Infinity, or maybe he has unconsciously sorted her—by mass, speed, cursed energy—to not be a threat. Regardless of the reason, her fingers land in the white nest, her painted nails like spilled blood. Gojou does not startle like she thought he would. The Six Eyes can see everything and anything all at once.
He relaxes to her touch, stretching into it like a cat that has realized he likes to be pet after all. She sips her empty sake cup. She indulges him and cards through his hair, relishing the feeling of Infinity, released.
They don't talk about it for ten years.
Morimoto Yuna remembers her first day at Tokyo's Jujutsu High Technical School more than she remembers her wedding day. The summer heat had waned in the last weeks of August, but it was still hot enough that she didn't wear tights with her skirt, choosing to expose her legs for the first time in years. (It's a mental reset, a fresh start, she told her reflection that morning.) She remembers sweating through her makeup and uniform within seconds of sitting at her desk, remembers scrambling to write down the difference between Cursed Energy and Cursed Technique in her notebook, shaking so badly that her pen tore through the fragile pages.
She remembers meeting Tsukumo Yuki for the first time. Yuki with her foreign fearlessness, her bare face, her bleached blonde hair the color of sand, her laugh like a hyena's howl. There had been only one other student in their class. He died two weeks later, when he was sent on a severely under-graded solo mission. A Grade One curse had torn the Grade Two sorcerer apart so badly that the only thing they could find was a solitary eye. Now, four years later, Yuna does not remember the sorcerer's name, but she does remember when Yuki plucked the eye from the ground with her bare hands to toss in a jar and take to the morgue. The pupil was so large that Yuna could barely make out the brown iris beyond it. She stared at it, and it stared back, seeing nothing. (She promptly puked her lunch out afterward, which Yuki laughed at, because Yuki laughs at everything).
Jujutsu High does not nurture, which is fine by Yuna, because never in her life has she been told that she is the nurturing type. It is therefore a surprise when Yaga stops her when she's packing her dormitory and offers her a position as a teacher at Jujutsu High immediately following her graduation.
"Why me?" she says, bewildered. She's not even a semi-Grade One sorcerer. "Shouldn't you be asking Tsukumo-san?"
Yaga frowns. His goatee frowns with him. "We did. She has other priorities."
"I laughed him out of his own office." Yuki appears behind Yaga, blonde hair floating as she peers into Yuna's bedroom like she belongs there, her lips peeled in a gleeful grin. "Me, a teacher? You gotta be kidding me."
"You're the only Special Grade sorcerer at the Institution, Tsukumo-san," Yuna says as she wraps a set of scrolls carefully in tissue paper before settling them in a sealed box. "You should be the one ushering in the new students. But, Yaga-sensei, I thought you weren't taking on the principal role for another year?"
"It's not for me. Takahiro-sensei's stepping down, and between me sorting things out for the current students and making the transition to principal, it's too much for me to juggle the new kids too."
"What's happening to Takahiro-sensei?"
The old jujutsu sorcerer barely leaves the campus. Yuna can't think of him idling his time away with anything else.
"He wants to retire," Yaga answers. "Says the job's getting to be too much on his bones."
"Retire?" Yuki cackles. "That old coon's just getting promoted to be one of the Jujutsu Higher-Ups. They're the only ones who get the luxury of retirement, when they haven't personally exorcised a curse in decades."
Yaga brings a large hand to his temples. "Tsukumo, you've already rejected the job. Do you want me to lose mine too?"
Yuki isn't wrong, but Yuna doesn't have the Special Grade status to agree with her out loud, so she diverts the question.
"Maybe Takahiro-sensei can just teach for another couple years," she offers, "until one of the current students accepts. Some of the third years are really promising."
Mei Mei, a gorgeous third-year girl who lugs around a giant axe like it's made of her crows' feathers, will likely be promoted to First-Grade sorcerer by the end of the year. While Yuna doubts a Jujutsu High teacher's salary is enough to match the financial appetite of the crow whisperer, Mei would be a much stronger candidate than she would.
"You thinkin' of Mei?" Yuki invites herself inside the room and plops down on Yuna's carefully made bed. "No way. Not unless you pay her a shit ton."
"Utahime-san would be a good candidate," Yuna counters.
"She's from Kyoto," replies Yuki. "She'll teach at that branch."
Yuna purses her lips. "Tsukumo-san, why are you doing Yaga-sensei's job for him?"
Yaga shrugs. "I'm not complaining. Keep it up, Tsukumo. Either way, Morimoto, it's a good opportunity. I'll expect your answer by the end of the day."
"That's not—"
The principal-to-be leaves before Yuna can finish vocalizing her indignation. Beside her, Yuki laughs. She leans over to Yuna's bedstand and turns on the radio without asking permission, in the carefree way only strong, confident people can behave around other people's belongings. She dials to a local pop station and turns the volume low so that the pitchy treble is a mere whinny, a tinnitus that is enough to be annoying but not enough to complain about.
"What are you doing, Tsukumo-san?" Yuna stacks her scrolls neatly in the box.
"Just tryna find my favorite song. And can you stop it with the 'Tsukumo-san' already? We graduated, Yuna-chan. Surely that's enough for you to drop the formalities already."
She tests the waters, her tongue the clumsy tip of a child's pencil scribbling kanji for the first time. "Yuki-san. I wasn't talking about the radio. If you don't want me around on your journey, you can be more straightforward. My feelings won't be hurt."
"That's not the point," Yuki grimaces. "I told you, it'd be great to have you. Your Cursed Technique is perfect for it. But I need time to gather info and scout some stuff out and map out our route."
"I know, I said I'd just be a private sorcerer until you're ready."
"It's not gonna just be a couple weeks." Yuki lies down on the bed, her blonde hair splaying over the sheets. "I think it's gonna be closer to a year."
Yuna pauses after stacking her final scroll and thinks before saying, "I can wait."
"I know, so wouldn't it be better for you to stay with the school and teach in the meantime?"
Yuna digs through the packing peanuts littering her floor and finds the tape. She presses the lids of the box neatly in place and begins to draw the tape carefully over the seam.
"You think I'll die if I become a private sorcerer," she observes.
"Well, I mean, kinda?" Yuki says. "You're not great on your own." She pauses briefly, then adds, like she's only now remembering her manners, "No offense."
"None taken," answers Yuna. "I know that. But I still think I can dispel minor curses better than teach some prodigy from the Zen'in family."
"You don't have to teach them anything," Yuki scoffs. "We don't learn shit here."
"I learned things," replies Yuna, tone mild.
"Which means you can teach kids who have things to learn!" Yuki pivots, shooting her previous argument straight between the eyes. "Look, being a teacher means you'll be sent on less missions, which means you'll be safer overall. It also gives you more time to train—didn't you want to do what Mei's doing, and focus on physical strengthening?"
"I don't need the school to do that."
"You'll have more resources!"
"All alumni have access to the gym equipment and field."
"Yuna," Yuki groans, finally rolling over to her side so she can look Yuna square in the eye. "I just don't want you to die."
Yuna blinks, immediately surrendering their staring match. "You mean before you can use me."
Yuki's eyes widen and the corner of her mouth tilts downward. "Dude. You are so morbid."
"Sorry."
"I don't want you to die, like at all. Period. Because you're my friend. Why's that so hard to understand?"
Yuki rarely gets angry, but Yuna can tell that her classmate is genuinely irritated.
"Sorry," she says again. "I didn't mean that."
Yuki squints at her, because Yuna rarely says anything she doesn't mean, but lets it drop.
"I just don't think I have much to offer in terms of knowledge," Yuna says in an attempt to smooth things over. "What am I going to teach a bunch of…little you's?"
"Aw," the Special Grade grins, all hard feelings forgotten, "is that how you imagine them all? Real cute and sassy," Yuki winks, but she shuts both eyes at the same time, "just your type?"
"Yuki-san, please be serious if you genuinely want me to take this position."
"Fine," she rolls her eyes, "look, even if I didn't learn much from lectures, there's something about the structure of this place that is important in young shamans' growth. It's a home base, and it gives some sense of order to a chaotic world. Sure, half the students outclass the teachers, but the fact those labels exist still helps ground students. It teaches them that power's not just the ability to blow someone up." Yuki leans against her outstretched arm. "Like Yaga-sensei. I could beat him, but I still respect his opinion and would go to him for advice, y'know? Even though we don't agree on anything. You would bring a different perspective to the table, especially for kids from the big families."
Yuna doesn't reply immediately. She feels a bit disappointed, though she thinks it's mostly because she wasted a lot of money on boxes and packing peanuts.
"You would tell me if you're just trying to get rid of me, right?" she tries one more time, already resigned. "If you are, I'll just go away and be a private sorcerer, you don't have to worry about me."
"Yuna," Yuki says exasperatedly, "could you please just…learn how to be more optimistic?"
Yuna fixes her with a look, silently reminding Yuki that she has plenty of reasons to be pessimistic and depressing and morbid and all the other adjectives of negativity Yuki has ascribed to her for the last four years.
"Fine," Yuki pinches the bridge of her nose. "No, I'm not trying to get rid of you."
"You'll come back and get me, right?"
"Yes, I will, you want me to do a binding vow to prove it?"
She's actually being serious. It warms Yuna's cold dead heart a fraction.
"No, thank you," she answers. "You can help me unpack, though."
"Sure." Yuki slides down to the ground and takes a box labeled "Clothes" from the side and rips it open, making the box unsuitable for future use. Yuna doesn't chastise her. "If anything, I hope teaching builds your confidence. You got a lot to offer. Remember that."
Yuna hums. She thinks the purpose of most jujutsu sorcerers is to exorcise, exorcise, exorcise, then die. She doesn't say it aloud.
"Thanks, Tsukumo-san."
"Can you not? Yuki, Yuuuki."
Yuna smiles.
She signs Yaga's contract that evening. He promptly tells her that the first day of class is tomorrow. She regrets everything.
Yuna has always been meticulous with her appearance. Yuki calls it vain. Yuna concedes, as she often does to Yuki, but only because pointing out Yuki's many privileges as a naturally tall, talented, beautiful shaman will lead to arguments Yuna will not win. Yuna is not tall or talented, but with the right amount of powder and rouge, has been called "pleasant to look at." She has limited advantages in life, but has noticed the trajectory of events in her life improve when she looks presentable, so she does it when she can.
The next morning, she wakes up half an hour earlier than normal. The sky has lightened to a subdued orange, and the early birds chirp. Yuna goes through her routine: she meditates, practices calligraphy on the scrolls she packed and unpacked yesterday, and eats a light breakfast of miso soup and a hard-boiled egg. She showers, blow-dries her hair, then straightens it. Each strand sits perfectly above her shoulders; the front curls in toward her chin. She dresses in clothing not too far from the uniform she retired recently, an all-black ensemble, from blouse to heels. Yuna examines her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes are dark, the lids slanted downward to give her a perpetually morose impression, (which aligns with her internal circumstances). She has a gash on her left cheekbone that is still healing from her last mission. She conceals it carefully, correcting for the redness and sealing her work in with a light powder, before tapping a bullet of brown lipstick to the center of her mouth. She tugs the sleeves of her blouse to her wrists, covering the spellwork winding up her forearms.
She looks professional. Her face remains notoriously blank despite her heart thundering in her ribcage.
Jujutsu High is a terrible school. She has had less than twenty-four hours to create a lesson plan, so she simply didn't. There is no point creating a lesson plan when students' backgrounds are so variable; most sorcerers have seen curses since their birth and manifested Cursed Techniques when they were children. Secretly, she hopes at least one of the students is like her. She can at least teach the difference between cursed energy and Cursed Technique now.
She tucks her hair behind her ears, slides in two small hoop earrings with a hanging pearl, asks the gods for a minor blessing, and leaves the dormitories. The sun is now high in the sky, though it remains cooler than she would have expected for late summer. A chipmunk scuttles across her path, its mouth bulging with leftovers dug out of the trash. Yuna makes a mental note to check that the garbage has been adequately disposed of; the last thing she needs on her first week of teaching is a room overrun by rodents.
Outside the first-year classroom are two women engaged in deep conversation: one a tall, robust woman in the summer Jujutsu uniform with a large axe the length of her body slung across her back, the other a petite woman in traditional priestess clothing, her hair tied in two loose pigtails. Their conversation halts when Yuna approaches.
"Yuna-senpai!" Utahime waves, the long sleeves of her priestess robes swinging at her elbows. "Or should we say, Morimoto-sensei now?"
"Heard Yaga-sensei roped you into this," smiles Mei demurely. Her blue hair has lightened with the summer months. "What happened to Yuki-senpai?"
"She didn't want it." Yuna opens the classroom door and invites them inside. There's still twenty minutes before the students are supposed to arrive. "She left early this morning to go check out a used motorcycle shop."
"She's going to travel the country on a motorcycle?" says Utahime, scandalized. She and Mei slide into seats in the front row as Yuna settles in at the front of the room.
Yuna tucks some small scrolls in the shelf underneath the podium, in case one of the students is brand new to Cursed Techniques and needs a demonstration. "In her words, she will never die, but not for lack of trying."
"She'd rather die than teach?"
"I think she'd rather die than be bored," corrects Yuna as she finds an eraser to clear the chalkboard of its most recent lecture—a cartoonish overview of domain expansions. "But let's not talk about the death of our only Special Grade so cavalierly. Seems like we're jinxing the future of the jujutsu world."
The following pause is more prolonged than it should be, so she glances over her shoulder to find Mei and Utahime studying her curiously.
"Is something wrong?"
"Yuna-senpai," says Mei, "did Yaga-sensei not tell you who's going to be in your class?"
She is immediately filled with more dread than she started the day with.
"No. Did I miss something?"
"This school," Mei shakes her head in disbelief. "Utahime and I are here because we wanted to meet the first-years. Rumor has it the Gojou boy is one of them."
Yuna stares. "You're kidding."
"Nope," Utahime responds. "My folks told me. Some distant Gojou clan members came to our temple to pray for his good fortune."
"Not just him," adds Mei. "Yaga-sensei there's another kid coming in who's going to be Special Grade too."
Yuna stares harder. "Are you saying two of the students will be Special Grade?"
"Supposedly."
Yuna is lost for words, so she says nothing at all. Utahime looks uncomfortable, and even Mei appears sympathetic.
"I guess the Gojou kid's reputation precedes him," Mei says, "even if you're not from a sorcerer family."
"I shouldn't be teaching them," says Yuna. "I'm going to ask Yaga-sensei to resign."
"Don't do that," Mei says sharply. "That's breach of contract. You'll lose so much money."
"Mei-san, the Gojou family probably taught that kid everything I know before he could walk. It just doesn't make any sense for me to be in this position."
"It's going to be fine," Utahime says, consoling. "It's not like we genuinely learn anything in the classroom. We learn all the hard skills on missions. The classroom is more for…the rest of life. And theory."
"I didn't know what cursed energy was until four years ago." Yuna's voice cracks slightly. It's tremendously unlike her. She knew she was floridly unqualified for this job yesterday; she cannot for the life of her remember how Yuki convinced her to accept the offer. "I'm no good at theory."
"Just tell them where the bathrooms and cafeteria are," says Mei, undeterred. "The school won't fire you, Yuna-senpai. You don't have to do much. Just collect your paycheck. Worst comes to worst, the Gojou kid does his own thing, runs off and gets killed on a mission but that's not your prob—"
The door slides open before Mei finishes her sentence. The three women turn collectively to look at their new visitor.
The boy has white, silver hair that almost grazes the entryway when he walks in. He's tall for his age and looks like he will only grow taller, judging by the lanky build of young adolescents whose metabolism allows him to consume thousands of calories in one sitting with little repercussion. He's wearing sunglasses, the first-year uniform, and a million-watt smile. He walks with the easy assurance of one who is accustomed to having—money, attention, power—without having to ask where it comes from. Yuna swears that the boy is glowing, but then she blinks, and the blue aura surrounding him disappears.
He waves. In his hands, even such a minor movement seems more graceful than normal.
"Hi," he says with a small nod of his head, not a full bow. "I'm Gojou Satoru. Nice to meet ya. Are you all students?"
Yuna glances at the others—Mei is eying Gojou like she'd devour him quicker than she cashes her checks, and Utahime is blushing to the roots of her hair. Yuna does not blame them. Gojou is undeniably beautiful in an ethereal kind of way.
"I'm Morimoto Yuna, I'll be your teacher," she replies, her tone careful not to betray that she'd found out that this special god child was going to be her student merely five minutes ago. "These are third-year students, your senpai."
Mei waves lazily. "Mei Mei. Hi."
"I'm I-Iori Utahime," Utahime says, cheeks flushing harder.
Gojou grins. "Great." He does not bow. "Hi Mei, Iori."
Utahime's blush evaporates. "Senpai."
Gojou cocks his head to the side. "Huh?"
"We're your senpai," Utahime says severely. "You should address us with respect."
"Oh." Gojou scratches the back of his head. "Is that really a thing we have to do here? You can't be much older than me."
Utahime now looks at Gojou like he's the scum of the earth.
Mei chortles. "I don't really care."
"Mei-san," hisses Utahime. "You're setting a bad example!"
"Take me to dinner and you can call me anything you want," purrs Mei at Gojou.
Gojou looks confused but delighted at the same time.
"Mei-san," says Yuna, wishing she had not gotten out of bed this morning. "Please refrain from landing yourself in jail."
Mei's attention snaps toward Yuna. "Huh?"
"Gojou-kun is underage. You are not," she explains. "You just had your eighteenth birthday last week."
"You're joking, right?"
"No." Yuna considers the matter case closed and gestures to Gojou to approach. "Please come in, Gojou-kun. I apologize if any of this is startling—your senpai just wanted to welcome your class. May I see your student ID, please?"
He ambles toward her and hands over his ID. Yuna examines the picture, which he kept his glasses on for, memorizes the dormitory that Gojou will be staying at so she will be able to show him later, and pauses at the grade. There, in plain black letters: "Special Grade Sorcerer." She glances at his birthdate: he's only fifteen.
She looks up abruptly. "Gojou-kun, how old were you when—"
Gojou's glasses have fallen slightly down his nose bridge. She glimpses his eyes behind the shades and loses the momentum of her sentence in the face of a shifting open sea, cerulean waves crashing to seafoam, threatening to swallow her whole. Yuna's tongue is lodged in her throat; she is overwhelmed and mystified and enamored and frightened all at once.
Gojou looks at her. "When I was what?"
His voice snaps Yuna out of her reverie. She inhales only to realize that she'd stopped breathing briefly. She swallows and steadies her voice, betraying nothing.
"When you were named a Special Grade."
"Oh." He looks up at the ceiling in thought. Even his eyelashes are white. "I dunno. No one really gave me a label until I got here."
Yuna nods and hands back his ID. Gojou looks at her curiously, as if he expected a continuation of the conversation, but Yuna does not probe further. Gojou takes a seat next to Utahime and grins at her.
Utahime is not enamored by the sight of Gojou's eyes. She stares straight at them and glares. "Should've known that the Gojou heir would have no manners."
Yuna has always admired Utahime. The priestess is not the strongest by any means, but she can hold her own, and she has never doubted her self-worth. Even in the face of the boy who is rumored to be the savior of the jujutsu world, Utahime demands respect.
Regardless if Gojou refuses to give it, or has absolutely no idea how because no one else has demanded it from him before.
"Doesn't pointing out that I have no manners mean you have none yourself?" Gojou asks innocently.
"How would that possibly make sense?" Utahime snaps. "I'm trying to rehabilitate you."
"I wasn't aware I was in need of it."
"You," Utahime jabs at his shoulder, "are a menace."
"Now, now," Mei pulls Utahime back. "Why are you surprised? Gojou Satoru has been famous since he was a baby. You can't expect him to have manners when even most of us normies don't. You'll pop an aneurysm whittling stone."
"Mei-san, Utahime-san," says Yuna, attempting to play the role of the teacher while secretly grateful that her two kouhai are here to act as a buffer, "don't you have class this morning?"
"Nope. Yaga-sensei said we have today off."
There is a short knock at the door before it slides open again, revealing a girl with dark brown hair, purple shadows under her eyes that could've been lack of sleep or an aesthetic choice, and a bland expression that Yuna feels an immediate kinship with. She looks at them all, slightly bemused but too tired to question much.
"Hello," the girl says. "Is this the first-year classroom?"
"Yes." Yuna beckons her inside. "Please, come in. I'm Morimoto Yuna, your teacher. These two," she gestures to Utahime and Mei, "are your senpai, and Gojou-kun," she waves slightly in Gojou's direction, careful not to look at him directly, "is your classmate."
"Nice to meet you," the girl gives a deep bow, and Utahime looks pleased. "I'm Ieiri Shouko."
"May I see your ID please?"
Ieiri hands over her ID from a cute wallet with a cartoon ghost with patchwork "X's" for eyes. Her hands are freezing and her fingernails are painted dark purple. Ieiri, according to her ID, just turned sixteen, and is a Grade Four sorcerer. Yuna relaxes a little—at least she's a higher Grade than one of her students.
"Thank you, Ieiri-san. You can—"
"Are you injured?" Ieiri interrupts.
"I'm sorry?"
"Your face." Ieiri leans in close, her nose centimeters away from Yuna's cheek. "You have a nasty cut there. That's going to scar if you don't fix it."
"I don't—"
"Here." Ieiri brings an icy palm to Yuna's cheek and pinches her index finger and thumb together over Yuna's skin. Yuna is rooted to the ground. A pulse of something white-hot floods Yuna's face, disappearing in milliseconds, along with the sting that had been throbbing since the weekend. Ieiri leans back, observing her handiwork, before acutely realizing that she has just behaved in a way that no one would consider appropriate. "Oh, sorry. That was—"
"So cool!" finishes Gojou, who appears right next to Ieiri like an overexcited puppy. "That was positive cursed energy, right? Reverse Healing Cursed Technique? How'd you do that? I've been trying to do that for years, but something just doesn't work for me, and I can't figure out why! Can you teach me?"
Ieiri gives Gojou a one-over, obviously making a judgment call to decide if he is worth the energy.
"No."
Utahime snorts, and Gojou makes a sputtering sound as Ieiri sits on the other side of Mei. Yuna wants the ground to swallow her whole. She soldiers on.
"Gojou-kun, please take a seat."
The door slides open for a third time, revealing what Yuna hopes will be her last student because she does not think she can handle much more. The student is a bit shorter than Gojou, though still tall for his age, with hair tied back in a low bun and loose black bangs framing his pale face. Like the others, he is dressed in Jujutsu High's dark uniform, buttoned all the way to the collar, but his pants are loose and billowing. He smiles and bows deeply.
"I'm Getou Suguru. I was told to come here for first-year orientation?"
"Yo," Gojou waves with only two fingers, like he's giving a salute. "I'm Gojou Satoru."
"Hi."
Utahime is annoyed on Yuna's behalf. "Why are you introducing yourself before the teacher?"
"It's fine, Utahime-san. Getou-kun, I'm Morimoto-sensei. May I see your ID?"
She examines the ID as Getou formally meets the others. His aura is pleasant and easy in a way that contradicts the "Special Grade" inscribed under his name. He moves fluidly, much like Gojou, but his mannerisms have a quiet, earthly humility that contrasts with his classmate's superstar status. He listens attentively to Ieiri when she greets him, bows again when he realizes Utahime and Mei are his upperclassmen, and does not seem particularly starstruck by Gojou.
Unprofessionally, Yuna has already decided which student she likes the most.
"Getou-kun," she asks, "are you from Tokyo?"
He turns around to give her his full attention. "No, I'm from Kagawa prefecture. My parents work at the local shrine."
"I see. Are they shamans?"
Getou shakes his head, causing his bangs to sway back and forth. "No, they know of shamans, but neither of them can see curses, let alone have Cursed Techniques."
"I see." Yuna hands back his ID. "Welcome. You've traveled a long way."
"What's your Cursed Technique?" Gojou asks, not quite rudely, but bordering so because some people keep their Cursed Techniques a secret.
Getou isn't fazed. "Oh. Cursed Spirit Manipulation. I can store and use the curses I exorcise."
Gojou's eyes bulge a little. "Any curse? All of them?"
"Yeah, well I have to be able to exorcise them," answers Getou. "So I have to be stronger than them. But yeah, I can store a lot."
"How many do you have stored?"
"About a thousand."
Gojou lets out a laugh full of genuine delight.
"Someone who knows Reverse Healing, and a Cursed Spirit Manipulator. This school is amazing."
Yuna, who will teach him nothing for the rest of the day and possibly the rest of his life, is glad that through no effort of her own, Gojou has been tricked into thinking so.
"Two Special Grades and a girl who knows a Technique neither Special Grade can do."
Yaga's sunglasses and beard hide most of his expression. "And?"
"I would have appreciated a heads-up of the roster," says Yuna.
"So you could refuse the offer? I'm not that dumb, Morimoto." Yaga turns back to the task at hand: sewing up a stuffed cartoon chicken. Yuna ignores the stacks of paperwork on Yaga's desk, including several letters that have ominous red stamps threatening overdue deadlines.
"You know how unqualified I am to handle them. If those two boys get in a fight, I won't be able to stop them."
"Literally no one in the world would be able to," returns Yaga. "You shouldn't expect so much out of teachers. No wonder this school's reviews are so bad: unrealistic expectations."
"This school's reviews are bad because we have a thirty-three percent mortality rate before graduation."
"So you should be proud of yourself," says Yaga. "You survived. That alone makes you qualified. Plus, with the first-year class this year, you may even be able to get yourself a hundred percent survival rate. Two Special Grades and a girl who can heal them when they're idiots. I could not have set you up for more success."
Yuna desperately wants to stress how flawed the logic of this godforsaken place is. Yaga can sense the tension, despite that Yuna's face is blank and her tone flat.
"Morimoto, I get it," Yaga sighs, finally setting aside the stuffed chicken. "You want to teach them something because that's your role. I'm trying to tell you, you don't need to. Those guys are ready to go on missions now. Your job is to tell them the missions, and once in a while, you'll go with them. That's it."
"Then why have a teacher at all?"
"Honestly?" Yaga scratches his chin. "In order to be considered a school, we need someone on the hiring sheet with the title of 'teacher.' Gives us a tax break."
Yuna does not know if she is comforted by her status of being a tax break. Later, she looks up how much of a tax break she garners. In a rare moment of remembering Yuki telling her to know her worth, she goes back to Yaga for a raise after a day of not-really-working. Mei is unreasonably proud of her.
Two years later, after her favorite student becomes a mass murderer, Yuna returns the money to Yaga and asks to quit. Yaga refuses. Her class graduates with a hundred percent survival rate, though among experts, the statistic is debated.
free talk:
it's been a super long time. i posted this on ao3 since there's more of a jjk community there but figured i should cross-post here along with the rest of my fics. hope you all are well during a trying time and i hope this can provide a little bit of distraction. xoxo