The closed fan is the length of a dead child's arm.

It rests embedded in the pillow, the suitcase yawning motes of dust wide open.

The lacquered wooden outside doesn't stand out in exceptional beauty. It is a soft, dark brown hue, with a few scratches pointing up the side like cat scratches.

Mizumi's fingers linger over it, bandages covering scars and soon-to-be scars. She's not yet ready to touch it, just to be exposed to it. As if looking at it can burn away the wave of emotions breezing in sea foam and tidal anger over her ribcage the longer she forces her hand to linger.

"A man who walks too much at night stumbles," one of the older townsfolk in her neighborhood told her, with the care of someone who has a single coin of wisdom to throw into a well. This was shortly after she and Yuta started their nightly patrols at the edge of town. By now, everyone in the community is used to figures walking around the houses and edges of night in the most unholy hours.

And this night, she uses the nightmare parade accordingly now that she is alone on the upper floor of the house. Memories are more visceral when they become attached to objects and feed on humans. Almost like curses.

Her hand lingers one more quiver, a muscle twitching before it closes around the cursed tool.

The sharp end of the tessen stabs her in the wrist before her muscles remember how to grip it accordingly, a strange reminder of how her body remembers something as a specter even a decade after the last time.

It's a familiar weight, hardwood, metal, and the tough layers of painted flow hidden.

She doesn't let go as she stands up from the closet and stares at the extension of her hand.

It is an extension. Still. How strange.

Two more turns of her grip, changing the grip and reversing it, and it is like it never left her hand. An old friend from a forbidden tomb locked away with the mummified corpses of memories she cannot escape.

The cord slings around her wrist like a noose, and then fits so snugly it might never have been gone.

She takes a relaxed stance and shakes the fan open in an easy swing, taking care of her thumb. The layers glitter in the same electric blue her hair used to have before the African sun bleached it. The noise echoes through the empty house, a loud heavy clap.

With a thundering noise rippling the brown floor of the training hall, the fan flaps open right beside Satoru Gojo's ear. He staggers back with exaggerated force, as if deadly wounded, the gesture of an actor and not a truly wounded person by the noise. Before his eyes turn behind the glasses, he's already half-smiling, a sharpness that is like the blades in the fan. Hidden daggers in a silky smooth ground.

"I have already told you to stop hiding my weapons, Satoru," the younger version of Mizumi she remembers chastises, a little too soft, a little thinner, a little less strained. And certainly not as scared as she was on the phone.

"Oh, was that yours? I must have mistaken it for one of my own."

The tessen snaps closed again with the same explosion of noise, right in front of his nose this time. He's incredibly unbothered, smug almost to see her agitated. Measure twice against sarcasm.

"You're my teacher, show some kindness."

Perhaps it was measure thrice against sarcasm.

"I can't even teach you anything if you only come by to bother me."

There's nothing to teach Gojo. Or if there is, she lacks the patience to do so. He spends his time like a hummingbird fluttering around the training ground if he participates even or is present. And she usually lets it slide if there's no competition with the other person in the room.

In contrast to Gojo, there is nothing sharp to her other pupil. It's calm waters running down a mill, approachable and watching the scenario with a certain adjusted annoyance. It is the good-natured kind you bring for a friend in a furrowed brow or an eye roll, but you endure.

For every breathing moment, she wishes that she was dreaming instead of being awake. In the dreams, everything dies, at least. The cursed fan slaps together and thunders in lamentations for younger Mizumi and her favorite pupils through the house.

"Mizumi?"

"I'm sorry," she apologizes courtly, tightly gripping the cursed tool. "Did I disturb you? Were you about to go to bed?"

He wears outside clothes, so the question is senseless. But he has the kindness not to comment on it.

"That's a very nice weapon," he compliments.

"It is, isn't it?" She lifts it, as if holding it out and offering it will banish it. "Have you fought someone with a cursed tessen before?"

Yuta very carefully handles the fan. As if it is a treasure, not an instrument of tremendous murder. It's a haunting moment, one more deliverance of a blow she can't face yet between them.

"My friend preferred other weaponry." Not a yes or no, but the answer is not of any practical use. Small talk won't help now. As he turns the fan around, he unfurls it very slowly, staring at the blue with an unfathomable soft expression, studying the sharp stabs of metal, before handing it back closed.

"Well then." She holds the weapon too hard as she takes it back. "Do you care for a training lesson?"

Taking a stance with the fan is easy. It's a part of her fingers until they are cut off.

Young Mizumi, the teacher, takes over the muscle memory, and her legs twist to the side. It's a safe stance with very little surface for an opponent, monstrous or humanoid, to hit her. Dust crumbles under her shoes as she takes a breath, and from the other end of the plain opening, as always, her trusted trainee does the same.

It's pitch black now, ice-cold air creeping under their shirts and a starry-eyed sky blinking down. Yuta always fits in this environment, eaten by it, but also fighting it. It is his admirable trait.

She never had any nighttime lessons with Suguru Geto. It was always sun-drenched and warm in that summer, with cicadas singing somewhere behind the stone pillars and fence lines.

"We could start with other forms, just as a show of serene grace and train patience," younger Mizumi used to start her later lessons when it was incredibly clear she had nothing to teach to someone with Suguru's inherent talent and specialization. "But I think you have the patience of a much older soul. And this is you staying in shape, not learning to best me with my favorite tool."

"This is why Satoru says you play favorites," Geto scoffs, lowly. The next word is the same huff of a warm mockery. "Sensei."

"I would never." The fan swings forward, cold air swatting the strands of bleached hair and short bangs, a gust much stronger than it should be from a fan the size of her head. It ripples past the bushes in the open space and through his dark hair and clothes. "Now. May I have your attention?"

His hand is not a fist to attack her with a punch. It's a gesture to make other things fight her. Skittering wings and tiny, angry claws, and they're behind her as she jumps forward.

It's still his hand she is after. A hand that feeds directions and summons commands.

In theory, it is easier to stop a hand than a katana. But in both cases, the aggressor needs to be baited. So Mizumi keeps eyes sharp and lets temperance flow through every tendon of her legs and hands, steadying herself. Waiting to be circled but not crowded.

In both cases, the aggressor has more reach. The fan stays closed against the sword now. She doesn't have the confidence to control it or the metal daggers inside its ribs. Past Mizumi sliced curses in a swing with it before turning temperance into her own speed and all her muscles bulging.

The sword swings toward her throat in a predictable curve after the last training sessions. This time, she doesn't move, her back steady high, and she can see the white in his eyes as she does so, waiting for the swing to behead her, if he cannot retreat.

What happens instead is an entirely different thing, as the angular edge of the fan burrows like a cuff into his wrist, bones ready to be bent and broken. Her hand holds the fan grip left side, and her other hand is crossed to the opposite in a swift motion. His wrist and hand get trapped between the hilt of the sword and her tessen and she presses down. The sword gets rendered useless for a second, a wobbling, unsafe gleam of silver demise. His reaction is fast, but not fast enough as she presses down on his flesh with force. It gleams blue in the darkness. If he wasn't using her own technique against herself, or steeling himself, she would break his bones with the following drag of her crossed pull. The katana flies through the air and lies like a dying corpse in the dust.

Yuta doesn't fall with it in the throw, he doesn't roll in the dirt. But that is only because he gets out of the grip as she softens the blow and finds enough momentum to vault his upper body up, kneeling in the sand like a small creature devouring some sort of carcass.

"Every lesson is worthwhile, Suguru," young Mizumi used to say, stepping away and letting her pupil stand up. They're sweaty and disheveled, with drips of blood drenching the front of the fan and some uncanny, cursed green version of the same blood staining his sleeve. "Learn from it. Don't let anyone too close. And don't go easy on me again."

He didn't need any of the lessons. He never did. She could have wept in front of a stone altar instead.

"Every lesson is worthwhile," old Mizumi whispers and holds out her hand. Yuta takes it easily, with a firm, warm grip. "Surprise can be deadly. But you're never going to fall for the same trick twice."

The next time she moves the fan toward his chin in a stab, he already adjusts to it with the easy swiftness of the usual, fast-learning prodigy she knows.

They leave it at that, but something in her is pleased now that she has exorcised this fear. It's as if it is easier to accept that she can't run anymore.

The next morning, the usual sparring and everything else falls flat. It's a departure, but no one gets left behind as the old green jeep rattles over the spare path by the house.

"We travel light," Miguel notes, as he sees her weaponless and only tied up in a broken wrapped-together jacket and the fan. Both of them use the sunshine to their advantage, pretending to not fly around with their eyes behind their sunglasses as they wait.

"You'd rather I have a secret arsenal hidden in a town of civilians? Get the truck, I need to find my secret stash in the basement."

The shadows of the house hush and move, but it isn't night, and no one stumbles, not Yuta, nor her. The terror receded to the back and far away just as dust already settled on the white jacket and his hair hanging into his eyes.

"You don't even have a computer as we noticed, we don't expect anything," a mild insult after all the traded blows. She raises her fist but doesn't speak up, sparing them from some sort of repeated match. And she is still far from good at continued banter. And the idea of being a technological imbecile and old in that regard is hurtful even for the most tempered mind.

"Your teacher is bristly today." Miguel hits the metal roof of the car with his fist as a signal before getting on his spot.

When Yuta steps toward the car, she notices the way he squints against the glare, pale eyes narrow. There's already a freckle of heavy sunshine resting on his skin.

"Wait," Mizumi offers, as she lifts her fingers and pries the glasses off her face. Even with the wounds closing, a slight tremor shoots past her scarred arm under the wraps. His eyes widen for a second in slight surprise before they disappear behind the gray pair of ancient shades propped up half to fall. The teardrop-shaped glasses sit involuntarily on his nose, crooked, with the metal frame bending slightly away before his own hands grip it.

"They're yours," he tries to decline.

"It suits you," she offers. "You look like a movie star."

The corners of his lips twitch upwards in a brief, almost imperceptible smirk, together with the tiniest red line under the huge shades.

It reminds her of someone much younger, and how smitten they were with everyone around them, in a soft, funny way. A way that she doesn't appreciate. It is the dangerous way that makes people think you're blood when you're not. Even if she has given up on dispelling the rumors.

She seals it away in a perforated dried-out part of her heart and hopes it will die pleadingly and not bloom to anything.

"You're a good teacher," he says and lowers his head, walking back to the car with her. "But a bad liar."

"Maybe it's the opposite," she mutters. "You do look nice. Keep them, please. I don't really like them."

When she slides into the front seat, Yuta adjusts the glasses one more time.

"I look a little like Gojo-Sensei with them," he states, low, not even very serious.

Miguel's response is swift and stern, slamming the driver's door shut. "Never say that again."

"Maybe I should take the glasses back," Mizumi offers amicably, but only half-heartedly palms backward to the seat, just for Yuta to be gone to the other side and tightening his seatbelt as if he never heard her.