Chapter 6: The Siren

The high collared throat of his jacket couldn't mask the canned air of Shinjuku Station. Japanese metro facilities were pristine compared to those overseas, but most passengers were blind to the residual matrix littering the city's underground railways. Scrutinizing the luminescent stains on the walls, Satoru swiped his IC card on the scanner and headed towards the boarding dock, waiting with some other strangers for the midnight train to take him home. Not that he was itching to return. He needed time to himself, to mull over recent events.

"You're the reason she's here…"

For the upteenth try, the white-haired sorcerer jammed his left hand into his pocket, twirling the irritable ring with his thumb, hoping with enough persistence it would pop off, but it was useless. The little collet dug into his skin with every vehement twist, every tug. The Six Eyes essentially made him a jujutsu locksmith, an exorcizing Houdini, but no matter how much he pulled, twisted, scraped, or bit, the ring stayed on. He wanted so badly to incinerate the gold like he did the curse from the previous night. The girl needed the protective charm, not him. If it weren't for the Reverse Technique his finger would be rawed red by now. He heard a merry jingle chime through the intercom.

"Rapid train will be arriving at Platform 10 shortly," announced a placid voice. "For your safety, please wait behind the yellow line. We thank you for your cooperation."

Lights shone in the distance, reflecting off his shades. He forfeited the ring when the train emerged from the tunnel and hissed to a rolling stop. Sliding doors opened and Satoru boarded the coach, peering over his shoulder to make sure no one suspicious was following. Nope. Just the typical old ladies and salarymen this time, their thermographic silhouettes colored in blobs of red and orange. Perfectly normal.

"Doors are now closing," the conductor spoke. Satoru was only half listening. "This Keio Line is bound for Meidaimae Station…Priority seating is reserved for elderly, handicapped passengers, expecting mothers…" Eventually the metro moved with a jolt. His stance kept him from falling over, though he refused to take a seat because like most trains he typically rode, neon residue caked almost every square surface of the coach, from the handlebars to the chairs. It reeked of cursed energy, decayed and cold. Satoru lifted his boot off the floor to inspect the wad of paranormal entrails ruining the Italian leather. Makoto was sure to kill him when he got home. It would take more than a bucket of bleach to wipe this shit off. Frustrated, he brought the boot down, squishing the residue under his weight until he heard the coach groan from the force. Anger churned inside him, festering, growing hotter. Damn them. It wasn't supposed to be like this.

How was it that he, the strongest sorcerer alive, descendant of the Vengeful Spirit, Sugawara no Michizane, inheritor of the Six Eyes and the Limitless, the first Gojo to possess both cursed techniques in over 400 years, had somehow been bested by a couple of old fogies and a foreign aristocrat he'd never heard of until very recently?

Satoru stared out the window, listening to the "tha-chuck, tha-chuck" of the monorail passing over the tracks. Tokyo blurred into smoke. His mind wandered back to the moment his life forever changed. That cold, gloomy trip he made to England four months ago.

A portly man with a balding head, wearing what must've been expensive coattails, sat across a lacquered table, the Cuban in his right hand emitting chalky grey fumes, while jeweled fingers tapped the table rhythmically. The fat bastard was enjoying himself too much for Satoru's liking and the tobacco was starting to give him a headache, combined with the harsh glare curoscating through the Roccoco chandeliers. Everything about this interaction offended him; The heady smoke, the bright lights, the three-piece Brioni he'd been forced to wear, which quickly became too hot, and then this Oswald Cobblepot wannabe sitting before him, all smug, dressed like a cliché supervillain just asking to get punched. It took immense restraint not to grab hold of the cigar and shove it down the earl's suilline gullette. He hated this man. He hated this place.

As if sensing his contempt, the earl puffed another heaping cloud. "Gentlemen," he crooned. "To what do I owe the honor?" His voice caused the muscles along Satoru's jaw to tighten. Honor? What did this motherfucker know about honor?

One of the elders spoke amidst their small caravan, rising from his seat. "Flattery will get you nowhere, Thames," he answered emphatically. "You know why we're here." He drew himself stiffly. "We've come for the seer."

Thames flashed his ivory stained teeth. "Ah, yes," he relished gleefully. "Why, of course you have. How silly of me to think otherwise." He flicked the cigar ashes on a tray, leaning back into his chair that accommodated his rotund girth. "But I am a man of principle, you see? They say there hasn't been a living seer in, what, one hundred, two hundred years? Given that reason alone, I couldn't possibly hand her over to you free of charge, now, could I? No. That would be bad business on my part. Very bad business." He twisted the coarse hairs in his beard, before taking an indulgent drag from his Cuban. His eyes sharpened. "Name your price, jujutsu sorcerers. If I find your negotiating skills up to snuff, she's yours for the taking."

And negotiate they did, each side throwing out numbers in rapid succession, turning them down, then proposing new ones. But Satoru broke from the proceedings when the amount reached eight figures, opting to take in the room instead. Anything to keep his mind off the money and what they were using it for.

He made quick inventory.

Two…

Six…

Fifteen….

Twenty display cases oriented themselves around velvet settees and ottomans, stocked with just about every treasure one could fathom; opal lozenges, slabs of lapis lazuli the width of dinner plates, columns of verdant emeralds and tsavorites, their raw conchoidal fractures glinting under the lights, magenta spinels faceted to metal rods. Satoru could tell by the inclusions embedded in the gemstones that they weren't fakes. Their incessant brilliancy meshed loudly with the Savonnerie botanicals carpeting the floor, not to mention the infrared radiation he was attempting to suppress. His eyes felt like they were shrinking. He'd forgotten his sunglasses back in London. Infinity blocked the tobacco from reaching his nose, but it couldn't screen the myriad of light and invisible color from assailing his vision. Hell. Makoto was right. He should've brought the Bufferin tablets with him when he had the chance. Spreading his tongue between his molars, he tried in vain to relieve the growing headache from clamoring up the nerves in his skull. His head pounded furiously like waves hitting a rocky promontory, innumerous, unceasing. Don't think too much, he told himself. Keep looking.

In one curio table lay a medieval manuscript, its Latin faded and withered upon dog-eared parchment. Another case held an impressive mini replica of a seventeenth century galleon, bedecked with ten sails, The Naiad painted on both sides of its bow; Faberge eggs, gold coins, jadeite bottles, enameled pill boxes, silk tapestries threaded with mollusk and sapphire beads, portraits of dead people hanging on red damask, junk, junk, junk. It's all junk to him. Of course, his Six Eyes noticed other things normal eyes could not.

The billions of microscopic dust particles hovering in the air like fallout. An overlapping stitch puckering from a brocaded cushion on the other end of the room. Switching to infrared for a short spell, he saw volts of bright electricity thrumming outside cables in the walls, and scurrying under the floorboards were three little mice, their rodent cheeks stuffed with kindling. There was probably a nest somewhere the occupants weren't aware of. He smirked at the thought. Served them right.

However, a bronze instrument, a lyre, was mounted on a wall near an old grandfather clock. Might've been the oncoming headache, or the thick tobacco smoke, but he swore the polymer wires strung between the harp were not so. They held an unusual sheen to them, keratinous, humanlike. He could make out the individual filaments in the strings, black and shiny, too thin in diameter to be horsehair, but that wasn't the creepiest part about the room.

A mural of naked mermaids luring sailors to their deaths stretched across the ceiling above him, their long hair and pearly smiles beguiling. Some men looked away in abject terror, while others leaned in for a fatal kiss, the ship going down in the middle of a raging sea. Satoru snorted, thinking the panorama a tad histrionic. They were nothing like Japanese mermaids with mouths like monkeys and golden fish scales. Weren't sirens supposed to have feathers? Whatever the case, the painting was frighteningly lifelike, he'd give them that. Perhaps if he stared long enough, one of the feminine creatures would leap out of the watery fresco and pull him under. He almost wished it would because the sound of flesh-on-flesh cemented in a firm handshake told him the proceedings were over. A bargain had been struck. All they needed then was his signature to solidify the deal.

That evening in Berkshire, Gojo Satoru purchased his bride for a whopping thirty million pounds sterling, close to four and a half billion in Japanese yen, essentially pocket change. Well done, Satoru, he mocked as he signed his name upon the dotted line. You are here by guilty of human trafficking. However, it wouldn't be until his wedding day that the sorcerer finally laid eyes on the woman he would call his wife.

"Train is now stopping."

The train slowed to a crawl, jerking him forward a little as it came to a halt. The pulsing in his head abated. Tobacco smoke feathered out. Lord Thames' crooked smile vanished into the night and the doors slid themselves open. This was his stop.

Satoru exited the train and stepped onto the outdoor platform, hearing the locomotive speed off shortly after. The April chill had yet to recede and it smelled like macadam and fresh rain. By his estimation, the school campus was approximately three miles away. Through the dense pine brush, he could make out the striped road leading up the highlands, a couple kilometers north from the Meiji no Mori Takao National Park entrance.6 His phone read 12:15 A.M. and a message from Makoto. "Dinner's in the fridge," her unobtrusive way of asking him where he is. He told her not to cook him anything since he'd gone out, but the housekeeper knew him too well. And after storming out of the izakaya, Satoru realized he hadn't eaten much except a few bites of mackerel and a club soda. He was more than a little hungry. Better get a move on then.

He began the ascent, his residual stained boots scuffing the pavement as he trudged up the street, unconcerned with getting run over. Cars rarely made the drive here. He could walk in the middle of the road as much as he damned well pleased. Higher and higher he went, immersing himself into the tectonic rock and ancient pines, the painted asphalt looping this way and that.

Crickets hummed. Frogs croaked. The cool breeze wisped through his hair. Trees gently swayed and a break in the clouds revealed a waxing crescent moon, brightening the conifers in a pale lunar glow. Perched on a branch, a couple yards to his left, he spotted a scops-owl with blood and feathers emanating from its beak, a dead hawfinch caged between two talons. On the ground, a female tanuki rummaged through forest leaves for juicy beetles and wild berries, sniffing the air for predators. He watched an elegant sika deer cross a trickling stream and hedge its way deeper into the valley. There were no streetlights. It's only because of the Six Eyes he was able to capture this nocturnal world, this thriving ecosystem. He stopped to admire it, the stars glinting above the mountaintops, untainted by Tokyo's light pollution. What it must be like to be way up there, far away from this chaos and disorder.

Satoru felt as though he were mourning the aftermath of a death. The death of his old life for this new hellscape he'd woken up in. Years of ingrained Buddhist philosophy remind him that life is a series of impermanence, a constant flow of change. "All things are passing illusion" wrote a wise monk long ago. "What is there that remains unchanging?" Nothing, of course. Fighting this truth will only lead you further down the path of suffering and reactivity. In other words, he needed to quit his bitching like Nanami said, and accept life's unexpectancies for what they were; use "skillful means" to avoid getting struck by that "second arrow." And yet knowing what he ought not, Satoru found himself despairing anyway, like he'd nose dived off the edge of a cliff and was waiting for the ground to flatten him. He'd already experienced this once before, the day his best friend walked out on him.

"Are you the strongest because you're Gojo Satoru? Or are you Gojo Satoru because you're the strongest?"

Right now? He wished he were neither.

Lost in himself, the sorcerer wasn't aware he was walking again until he approached the school entrance, moonlight reflecting off the mokoshi roofs like snow caps. The Gojo estate was located farther north off campus. Satoru made it past the temple gates, shuffled past the student dormitories, when suddenly a melodic sound reached his ears. A sweet sound akin to a woodwind instrument. He paused to listen. Weird. Who the heck was playing music this late at night? Now vaguely curious, he changed directions and headed towards the sound like a hound chasing a scent, desperate to reach its source, and the closer he got the more he understood the sound wasn't recorded music, but a voice. Someone was singing from the women's bathhouse.

There were no female students studying in Tokyo at that time. The voice was too young to be an elder or a staff member, which meant...

Satoru bent over a little known hole in the wall and saw her.

"Is bean ón slua sí mé

Do tháinig thar toinn

Is do goideadh san oíche mé…"

She was sitting on the edge of the pool, her smooth legs submerged in the steaming water. A towel was wrapped around her waist, but it wouldn't hide much. Satoru's been involuntarily looking through clothing since he was four years old. That towel wasn't gonna cover jack-shit. The naked plane of her back was exposed to him, wet and glistening, and when she raised her arms to slide a toothed comb through her long garnet hair, he'd catch the sides of her breasts, and sometimes a lovely pink nipple would peep behind the mist as she continued detangling her wet tresses. The white linoleum channeled her song into ringing echoes, numbing his brain, curling around his insides. He felt his scrotum burgeoning against his thighs, swelling like a blimp. He couldn't help himself really. She sounded so fucking good, so soft, so clear, like water welled from a spring; a crystalline soprano. Maybe if he just unzipped his fly and allowed himself to…wait.

What the hell was he doing? Was he under a cursed technique of some kind? Because, damn, it certainly felt like one

"Tamall thar lear

Is go bhfuilim as riocht so

Fé gheasa mná sí

Is ní bheidh ar an saol so…"

Seriously, what language was that? It was unlike anything he'd ever heard. English alone was gibberish, but this language was on a whole different level of strange.

Satoru had long believed there was nothing new for him to experience in this world. When Fushiguro Tōji plunged his "Inverted Spear of Heaven," into his throat and enabled him to reach the level of understanding necessary to perform the Reverse Cursed Technique, and fuse Red and Blue to make Hollow Purple, what greater high was there? What earthly pleasure? What worthwhile goal? And if all things were passing illusion, wherein lied the point? Even the activities he used to enjoy no longer satiated him the way they once did; sex, video games, movies, sex, caffeine, pissing off Utahime, sweets, more sex, etc. Nothing wowed him anymore, nothing thrilled him. He'd forgotten what it was like to live for the present, existing, more or less, in a perpetual state of lukewarmness. To put it mildly, he was twenty-four and bored.

Then Hannah Thames entered his life - or rather - she barged in, flipped his world upside down, and threw it off its axis, together with his sense of control.

She really wasn't what he expected.

On their wedding day, with her chin wedged between his fingers, he couldn't deny she was beautiful, though not in the conventional sense of the word. The partners he often coaxed into bed tended to be…well endowed. Hannah was dainty by comparison, tiny, fragile looking, someone he wouldn't have chosen for himself if given the option. However, her proportions weren't entirely undesirable either; long hair, cinched waist, moderately sized breasts, which he found annoying because he was hoping to find something not to like about her. But those eyes? Holy crap. He'd inscribe those verdant brown eyes to memory until his grave, along with her rich auburn hair, her tiny freckles scattered across her cheekbones that could only be seen up close, and her innocence. So much unadulterated innocence staring back at him he could almost choke. It didn't take an expert to know she was a virgin, which twisted his stomach into knots. Made him nauseous, angry. Furious even.

Why!? he wanted to scream, grab hold of her shoulders and give them a fierce shake when she slid that ring onto his finger. Why would you do this to yourself? You stupid girl. Can't you see? He could still feel his thumb on her lips, soft as rose petals. I'll only break you.

Innocence? Satoru didn't know what to do with innocence. The virtue held little value to him. Their marriage was simply a means to an end, a show of good faith for the higher-ups; He'd (begrudgingly) marry the foreign woman as promised, and in return, they'd offer him a teaching position at Jujutsu High. It didn't matter whether she possessed The Sight, or that they wanted him to retrieve the Sukuna fingers. He wasn't planning on taking their relationship a step further. Simple as that.

"Is caitheadsa féin

Tabhairt fén lios isteach

Ní taithneamh liom é..."

So why did he feel like an asshole the moment he ditched her after the wedding? Why couldn't he erase those moss brown eyes from his mind? When he held her in his arms last night, why had it scared him to imagine her with a bullet through her head? Like Amanai Riko all those years ago. And why the fuck did her voice make him wanna bust a nut right then and there like a adolescent teenager? Shit, what would Suguru do, if he were —

"That psychopath isn't your friend, Satoru. He's a traitor. A murderer."

Gojo let out a quiet huff.

Right. Suguru's gone and he ain't showing signs of coming back. Each passing day served as a reminder that he was on his own.

The sorcerer looked back through the peephole at the bathing woman, still singing at the water's edge, combing her long skeins of hair, oblivious she was being watched.

He then stared fixedly into his palm at the wedding ring on his finger. He flexed his digits, balled them into a fist and closed his eyes, listening to her sweet music drown every part of him and the onsen.

"Fhaid a bheidh uisce sa toinn

Is ná deinig aon ní…"

He remained motionless, breathing calmly in and out of his nose to settle the uneasiness in his soul and the throbbing between his legs.

"Leis an ndream thíos sa leas…"

Satoru's hand fell to his side, his will power slipping away.

He waited there, seconds, minutes, hours. He wasn't sure. Hannah's serenading eventually ended and he stopped to hear her petite frame exit the pool. He could hear water droplets plopping to the floor as she moved, remembering the curvature of her ass underneath that towel draped around her waist, how soft she looked, how supple. Then his mind reeled back to her breasts, fantasizing how those lovely pink nipples would feel inside his mouth, tightening and melting on his tongue. Tossing her wet hair to one side, the ventilation system caught wind of her scent just as she entered the hallway and brought it to his nose like a gift. She smelled like lilies after a morning rain. His brain went fuzzy, helping little to soften his erection as he finally acquiesced and brought a hand down to unzip his pants, eyeing the damp spot on his boxers as he filled out some more, groaning in relief. Ah, much better. He then panted a short laugh, unable to recall the last time he'd been this hard. By a voice, no less.

He should've been ashamed of himself for it.

But he wasn't.

Instead, he became vastly intrigued. After all, he's never been one to stay on the downlow for very long and any woman who's able to arouse him this good is definitely worth "getting to know." Maybe this'll be fun. He's never pursued a person like her before. I mean, if this is Hell, there's no reason why it can't be an enjoyable Hell, right? And she's pretty easy on the eyes.

Alright fine. He'd cooperate just this once. And if he didn't like it, he'd switch back to Plan A and keep his distance. For now, though, he'd humour the idea and see where it took him.

This whole marriage thing.

AUTHOR'S NOTES

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