[I saw nothing, I came from nothing, I lost everything I had built for myself… So I ate the apple you gave me, I ate from the tree and was corrupted by my purpose. You corrupted me, you gave me purpose and I thank you.]
(...)
"So why are you keeping me alive?" A brunette asked, looking out of a window from a hospital bed, overlooking the empty shell of a metropolis that became her second home. Her arms were secured to the rails of the hospital bed she was in, not in the best shape herself. She, in a hospital gown wrapped head to toe in bandages and an eyepatch over her right eye. "I don't know what you have been told, but I am no one in particular. At least no one you would need." The girl said with her face as neutral as possible, looking over to the other side of the room. An eye was placed on her captor, a teenage girl her age if not a bit older.
The other girl pulled a chair making sure to leave herself out of arm's reach before sitting on it. She smiled at the brunette flipping the chair to rest her arms on the back rest with her legs at either side of it. "Not a lot of people can say this but… You are the most important person I could get for all of this. I have been watching over you, you know. And not just you… but the king of curses' vessel." At that, the lethargic girl in the hospital bed, an instant snarled at the one in the chair, a far cry from her mood up until now. "And there it is, you care about what this world wishes to throw away, and something tells me you always have. You came to this city looking for someone yet you found someone else. Maybe you lost that person and maybe that person came back unlike the one you seek." The girl in the hospital bed tried to lunge at the person speaking, only to be stopped by the straps around her wrist tying her to the bed. "You are alive for that reason… you care for the life of Itadori Yuji."
The girl in the bed grumbled at that name and turned her attention back to the window. "And why does that matter?"
The other girl chuckled and stared intently at her. "Let's just say that a 'friend' of a friend dying because of some two-bit curse would leave a bad taste in my mouth. Plus this way I can control the situation better and leave those who wish him dead guessing their own next steps. As you know Yuji-kun has been marked for death from the very moment you entered Shibuya. That whole incident ended poorly for everyone involved. But thanks to it, any latent power that I have has been awakened." The girl in the chair made a show of pulling out a case from her skirt. "Soon even the area we are in would feel so claustrophobic, you know. Right now we are the only ones here but soon we are going to have some less-than-pleasant guests." She opened the wooden case to reveal a mummified finger. "All this fuss over these things." The girl spoke unimpressed with what she examined, getting a scared look from the other girl.
"What do you think you are doing?"
"Don't worry these things tend to be harmless in the right hands." The girl seated at the chair played with the finger tilting her head back and placing it on her tongue, the girl on the bed made a disgusted look before turning away, the girl smiling at the expression. Taking the finger from her tongue and getting up from the chair, she moved to the girl in the bed then with not much resistance she entered said girl's bubble all the while grinning. "So you have seen him eat some of these, you know what this all entails." The girl only glared at her. "So I can be sure that I can count on you to take care of this for me while I am gone." Now with that said the girl in the bedridden girl's company produced a large butterfly knife from her person, placed it on the nightstand next to the tied-up teen, and tugged at the gown's collar.
The girl tied to the bed recoiled as her only form of dress was nearly taken off and the finger dropped into it. "What?" Her eye shot wide in terror.
"Something I wanted to check, this has been bothering me for a while now." She turned around leaving the knife and bedridden girl where they were, headed for the door. "Sukuna's fingers tend to draw a lot and I couldn't get your equipment or things from the school so I will take care of the big ones and you hopefully will take care of the small ones. Let's see if you were like me and not like the others. Let's test your luck, Kugisaki."
(...)
[Somewhere, Sometime Before]
A teenage boy opened his eyes hearing the distorted voice of a man in a haze, not fully aware of his surroundings or the person speaking to him. "Good morning." The man said in a distorted but joyous tone. Still groggy the boy looked around him in the small room he was in to take stock of his situation. The room he was in was covered in talismans from the floor to the ceiling with the room being lit up by lanterns surrounding either side of him. "So, which one are you?" The man asked, looking down at the boy.
The boy still acting out of it recognized the man, the same shit-eating grin, white hair, and blindfold that he had the pleasure of meeting before this room. "Aren't you…" He began, his words slurred.
"Gojou Satoru." Satoru answered the boy calmly, his upturned lips never leaving him. "I'm in charge of the first years at Jujutsu Tech."
"Jujutsu…" The boy responded still in his stupor. "Fushiguro…" As if remembering where he was he was now fully alert. "Senpai!" He shouted struggling at the rope that tied his hands behind his back.
"I guess that answers my question."
"What is this?" The boy questioned looking back at the rope that anchored him to the floor.
The man chuckled from the backward chair he was seated at, the only one in the room. "I'm not so sure that you should be worrying about other people right now, Itadori Yuji." Satoru said going slack in his seat. "It's been secretly decided that you'll be executed." He paused to examine the serious look on Yuji's face.
(...)
[Itadori residents days earlier.]
A phone could be heard ringing from the hall from Itadori Yuji, he dropped what he was doing and ran to answer it. "Sorry, I called earlier, thank you for returning it… but how is my grandpa doing?" He asked calmly to the voice of a woman on the other side of the call.
'Huh? I thought they already told you. Oh, please hold on. I'll go ask myself.'
Yuji waited for a bit, removing the phone from his ear. 'Leave me alone!' The sounds of an angry man from the other end resonated in the room. 'Tell him not to come!' His grandfather continued calmer now. 'He should go to his club, His club!'
'What? What's going on? You heard him. By the way, what club are you in, Yuji-kun?' The voice of another woman came from the phone.
Ignoring the question entirely Yuji responded. "I heard. I'll come by tomorrow evening."
(...)
[Back to the Present.]
The girl that had left Kugisaki had returned after several hours with paper shopping bags, seeing an untied Kugisaki with Sukuna's finger in one hand and the butterfly knife being played with the other. The girl whistled examining Kugisaki seated on the bed sporting blood stains on her gown who wasn't there when she left. Seeing that her captor had returned made the bored expression on Kugisaki's face grow angry. "Small ones my ass…" She paused to get up her steps wobbly, and her messy now past her shoulders light brown hair swaying from side to side. "And there were a couple of people too." She barked, brandishing the knife in the face of the other girl. She had a rough time getting to the knife to cut herself free, but now that she had depth perception issues from a missing eye, and the fact that she was bedridden until a couple of hours ago made her a little useless in a fight and irked her to no end at how she was being treated by the other teenager. "Where were you, I could have died, you know."
The girl that Kugisaki was yelling at questioning shrugged without saying a word and walked past her without missing a step, dropping one of the bags at the nightstand before returning to Kugisaki, and making a play for the finger. Much to the girl's dissatisfaction Kugisaki took a more defensive posture and held on to the finger tightly. "You do realize that you are still injured right?" The girl said, not making another attempt to get the finger back.
"I am sure you can, but you wouldn't be going through this trouble if it meant hurting me would you? So answer me this, who are you? What do you want from me? And Where are we?"
The girl that was Kugisaki's captor let out a frustrated grunt, ruffling her short dark brown hair, before finally speaking. "You are lucky that you are close with Yuji-kun." She then paused letting out a deep breath. "To answer your questions we are in a general hospital in Shibuya near Setagaya. What I need from you is what I said before. I need people to protect Yuji-kun from those selfish self-proclaimed jujutsu sorcerers you call teachers and colleagues. And for whom, have you ever heard about the first finger that Yuji-kun swallowed?" The girl chuckled at Kugisaki's displeased face, clear that though she may know some of the details she did not know enough to be comfortable with where this was going. "Well, my story starts there at his former school's Occult Phenomena Research club."
(...)
[The day after Yuji got the call.]
The sounds of three teens messing around in their club room could be heard as they played with a homemade seance board. "Are you sure about this… Sasaki-senpai? Iguchi-senpai? Okay, here we go!" Yuji finished with a grin forming on his face. "Spirits, spirits, please tell us… Which creature is the council president just barely weaker than?!" As he finished the ten yen coin that he and his senpai had their fingers on moved across the piece of paper that was their seance board.
[Ku-ri-one(sea angel)]
The small image of the sea slug entered their minds at once and the two boys and girl each bursted out laughing. As if he had been summoned the president burst into the small room. "Occult club!" He shouted.
"Oh. Plankton President. What's up?" Yuji not missing a step asked as the other two giggled under their breaths.
The newcomer slammed a sheet of paper between the three on the table in front of them. "As you were previously informed…" He began crossing his arms. "A research club with no real activities must forfeit its club room. So vacate the room at once." He finished with menace.
"You shouldn't underestimate our members, President." Yuji retorted cockly.
The only female, Sasaki, grabbed folders from a bookcase adjacent to the table slamming them down next to the page, earning a smile from Yuji. "What's that?" The President asked, somehow annoyed.
"You know about our rugby field being closed off, right?" The girl asked.
"Yes. Some of the students who fell ill were actually hospitalized."
"Don't you think that was strange? We're talking about tough rugby players here. Truth is, the players said they started hearing mysterious sounds and voices right before they fell ill. That's when we found this newspaper article from thirty years ago." Sasaki opened one of the folders displaying it to the president. "It talks about the disappearance of Yoshida-san, who worked with the construction company that built this school, and it mentions he was last sighted at Sugisawa Third High School during its construction." She flipped through several newspaper clippings. Some of the articles talk about how he was fired and failed to start a new business, how he turned to loan sharks, and how some people may have been after him, Sasaki explains it all in a very detailed presentation. "Which means, the whole disaster at the rugby field was caused by the vengeful spirit of Yoshida-san, who's buried there!" She finished animatedly.
"No, it was caused by ticks." The President retorted, unimpressed. "A large blood-sucking bug." Explaining further the whole room lost its energy.
Yuji jumped at the defense of Sasaki and continued her argument. "So what? The Occult club is trying to uncover occult activity, so it is still a proper club activity report!" He spoke banging on one of the folders Sasaki had chosen.
"This isn't some kid's game!" The President shouted back, adjusting the thick-framed glasses he had on."Besides.." He spoke, pointing at Yuji. "Itadori Yuji… You are registered with the track team, not with the occult club, so this club doesn't even have the required three for the clubs at this school."
Sasaki sat in her seat sighing while Iguchi pressed Yuji by putting his hands on Yuji's shoulders from behind. "Yuji…kun…" Sasaki said slowly, a look of contemptment that he had never seen on her before.
"No, I know that I wrote down the occult club." Yuji said, genuine in his confusion.
"I wrote it…" A middle-aged man in a tracksuit and shaved head said while entering the room. The boys all recognized him as Takagi-sensei, the track and field coach, getting an unnoticed sigh from Sasaki. "Itadori." He got the attention of Yuji. "We need you so we can conquer nationals." He spoke firmly.
'Yikes.' Sasaki thought to herself, not sure how to react to the disregard towards his students that the teacher had.
"Give it a rest, how many times do I have to tell you I refuse?" Yuji yelled in response to the revelation.
"You can't!"
"Why can't I?"
"However, I am not a demon. If you can beat me, then I'll give up on you. Let's settle this fair and square on the track." The teacher challenged clenching his fist.
"Now that's interesting, you're on." Yuji accepted with the club members backing him, and the President in a state of apathy.
[Sometime Later]
Takagi stood dumbfounded by what he was seeing, on the school's soccer field the two of them decided to compete in shot put, but with him knowing the proper form and Yuji throwing the weighty ball like a baseball, he was defeated. The student who had come for their little bet cheered as the metal ball fell from the indentation that it left in the soccer net's frame. One of the track students brought out a tape measure and started for the frame, the boy had run out of tape. "Uh, roughly thirty meters." Double his score of fourteen meters and almost ten over the world record.
Sasaki seemed interested in the strength but didn't say anything about it, only to have Yuji come towards her and her clubmate. "Yuji-kun, you would do well in a sports club. You don't have to force yourself to stay with us." Sasaki said with a genuine almost sad smile.
Yuji however cringed at her statement and then replied with a straight face. "But as much as you love scary things, you couldn't go to haunted places without me, could you?" Yuji seemed to get more worried as he spoke.
Sasaki blushed at the retort and offered her explanation. "We're scared because we like it."
"Besides, this school requires everyone to be in a club, right?" Remembering his recruitment, with her selling him on the prospect of joining as a ghost member. "I want to be able to go home by 17:00 anyway, so if it's okay with you, I'd like to stay. I like the atmosphere there a lot."
Both members of the club blushed, liking that he would give the club a chance even after becoming a ghost member, and with… Sasaki couldn't help but shiver for a second… and with her knew why he would want to go home early. "Well, if that's how it is, I won't stop you."
"Same here." Iguchi confirmed as they giggled at Yuji-kun's blank face as if he wasn't in on the inside joke.
"Oh, it's half past four?" Yuji said as he started running past them. "I have got stuff to do… Later." He had stopped at the entrance of the field to wish them goodbye.
Sasaki noticed a boy with spiky black hair trying to stop Yuji before he left, succeeding in not catching up with him. Smiling, she turned to Iguchi the chill, the same she got from a haunted spot, not leaving for them to return to the club room, for the object Yuji found on campus wrapped in talismans.
(...)
[A regret from that time… Much later]
Sasaki sat on a hospital bed staring out the window as Yuji walked in. "How are you... Sasaki-senpai?"
"Yuji-kun?" She looked over at him and smiled when he came to her bedside. A white-haired Gojou something had come and explained a half-truth to her, about how Iguchi and her were saved by Yuji and a student of his, about what they were attacked by and why removing the talisman from the mummified finger Yuji found was so dangerous, So she could help but feel a sense of joy when Yuji came to visit completely fine, but then it hit her like a truck and tears started to form. Though her memories are fuzzy she can't get the image of what the white-haired man called curses out of her head, and her heart dropped. "It's all my fault. If I hadn't asked him to come back to the club that day…" She was fully crying now.
"It's not your fault." Yuji came closer. "That finger we found drew them in, so it wasn't your fault." Sasaki stopped crying to look at him as he continued. "It was mine for picking it up." She was confused by what he was saying. "Sorry." He continued with his voice cracking. "But don't worry I checked in on Iguchi-senpai and he will be fine, they have someone coming to help with his injuries tomorrow."
"Yuji-kun?" She did not know why but this felt like a goodbye, an actual one, a never going to see you again.
"Sorry, senpai. I just wanted to check on you. There is somewhere I need to go." Yuji left her bedside and started to walk towards the door. "Bye-bye." He said turning around to wave at her. She tried to get up, tried to chase, but as soon as she got to her feet he was gone already.
"Yuji-kun.."