"Yo!"
"Tch."
She thought she'd been careful. Yuriko had avoided storefronts. Avoided the streets, and wherever else she had passed where eyes were wont to wonder, damn had she moved—really booked it. Too fast for cameras, too fast for imperfect human vision. She had paid her train fare in cash; destroyed her physical ticket; buried her eyes behind thick sunglasses that dulled their uniqueness. Hell, she had even brought a change of clothes and done an Arturo Brachetti in a back alley. For the last two weeks, she'd even assumed she was in the clear. School had even started again.
So why? Why, why was this man... Supernatural forensics?
"I have special eyes," he said, as if that answered the question she never asked. "Glad to finally meet you! What do I call ya?"
"Uh, huh."
Itado—Yuji was bouncing in his seat like it were a bed of nails.
"Nice to meet you 'Uh, huh,' and Yuji, was it?"
Wasn't it bad form to ask for someone's name without introducing yourself? Yuriko's eyes were scanning the room's choke points. If it was necessary, she could just disregard the walls and pull herself and the pink potato to safety, but somehow she found the idea of damaging the house, even just a little, to be unsavoury. How inefficient of her. Needless to say, Vector Reflection was already firmly in effect. This could well have been the most dangerous situation she had been in since December.
The energy that she drew from her emotions burned blue, and for that observable reason alone, she had likened it to complete combustion. Yuriko would be laughing if she didn't feel so tense. Complete combustion. How arrogant her ignorance had made her. She was a kerosene lamp to this man's Bunsen burner. A dirty flame. Whatever he was doing, and he was doing something—she could tell from the way the air just choked when it came near him— he was doing it at a sum cost of nothing. She was looking at, and feeling an inhuman degree of energy efficiency. It set her on edge.
Now, Yuji who set himself at the edge of his seat was probably freaking out because, this week, it was his turn to clean. His very first turn, and the man was leaving the house in such a dismal, borderline scene-of-the-crime, state.
"Ambulance!" he shouted.
For whatever reason, the boy didn't own a phone, instead his eyes bounced between Yuriko—who for obvious reasons didn't have one—and the strange man who didn't seem as concerned.
Oh. He was freaking out because... Something warm fizzled in her stomach, before she doused it in liquid nitrogen. So needlessly caring.
"It's fine, it's fine," White-Hair waved dismissively—or he tried to. The motion sprayed blood all over the dining table. "After all, I'm the strongest."
"Dude, you're dying!"
"Oh, that, huh." Then he flashed a set of ridiculously white teeth. "Give it time."
"Time is exactly the problem!"
The man looked—she assumed he was looking— at the space where his right arm had been. It was like someone had sheared everything off, from the elbow upward with a blade the width of an electron. It was fascinating. Yuriko ran the math in her head as she wondered how she would produce such a result herself.
"I'm like, totally trying to heal it too, but the metal keeps getting in the way. Don't worry, though. Everyone's favourite sorcerer, Gojo Satoru, will be right as rain in no time at all!"
Gojo flashed her a thumbs up. Tried to. There wasn't wasn't a hand to speak of, but without missing a beat, he seamlessly threw up the gesture with his non-dominant hand.
Yuriko tilted her head, keeping the knee-jerk question of 'who?' at bay, but it seemed like he'd noticed anyway. She had never considered how expressive a person could be behind a blindfold until that moment. Is he pouting?
"Really? Oh, wow, you don't...Hm." He stroked his chin with his phantom limb. "You've either been kept horrendously out of the loop, or you're completely new to our world."
Yuriko bit the inside of her cheek.
"Ah, I'm right aren't I? A complete noob. Explains why Suguru thought he could win you over."
Gojo unnerved her in a way Geto couldn't. Where the latter had approached her with subterfuge, informed on her proclivities by way of espionage, the former thus far hadn't displayed any prior knowledge of her. Yet he was already proving to be the more discerning of the two. She had to be more careful. Steel her emotions better.
"What a shame, I was ready to give you my autograph, too. I thought I was meeting a fan."
"A...fan?"
"You copied my whole flow," the blindfold shifted as his fingers pried it off his face. "Word for word. Bar for bar." Hair fell every which way across his face, almost as white as her own.
Yuriko had too much self-respect to gasp, and if she did, then nobody heard her. His eyes; those crystalline jewels which sat in his sockets. There wasn't a gemstone to compare them to. Sapphires were not soft enough. Diamonds did not shine in quite the right way. But above all else, neither were made of living tissue.
In nature, in the wild, if you saw something pretty—something eye catching, it meant that it evolved without having a need to fear—or, well, that other thing. The South-American dart frog sprung to mind. An amphibian just daring a fool to bite from its low-hanging branch. And Yuriko felt that in this case, the way the cerulean irises saw through her, and measured the distance between them.
They stood in stark contrast with his easy-going smile.
"The way your cursed technique's protecting you kind of reminds me of how mine—"
She grabbed her forearm from under the table to stop it from shaking. Neither confirm nor deny.
"Though I can't seem to work out what it's doing, exactly. That's rare for me, and twice in one day, too." He laughed. She held her breath.
The easy honesty. The admission of his disadvantage. It was reckless. Reckless beyond belief. And not the naïve recklessness of the boy beside her. His was an honesty that could only come from complete and utter self-assurance. Gojo Satoru truly believed it when he called himself the strongest. And with the way that not knowing who he was came across as a startling display of ignorance on her part, perhaps there was a measure of truth to his stance? Or he was just profoundly arrogant.
"Yuji," Yuriko said, in what she hoped was a casual tone. "Your gramps is probably lonely right about now, why don't you pop over and say hi?"
"No way," he replied, puffing up his cheeks like a blowfish. Dumbass. She wanted to scream. "I saw him yesterday, and he threw a pillow at me."
"Lol. Cute kids. I'm not here to hurt you. Either of you." Gojo raised his hand in what he probably hoped was a playful gesture. It came across to her as condescending. If I were, you'd already be dead. Yuriko primed her energy for action.
"I'm not joining your cabal."
"Cabal?" The word clearly caught him off guard, the way his eyebrow twitched. Yuriko thought she'd unbalanced him—that he was about to preach to her from some moral diving board— but then he chuckled. "Maybe you're right? Oh, you're totally right. You're so right!"
By the time he was done laughing, he had to wipe a tear away with his non-existent hand, and somehow it moved away from his eye.
"Never heard that one before, and it's a hell of a lot better than 'zookeepers.' I like it. You're a riot, 'Uh huh'-chan."
"Suzushina Yuriko," she grinded every syllable along her molars. "And don't you 'chan,' me."
Her name was a matter of public record. It was a small thing to concede.
"Lily child, huh? Boring. Your parents have no sense of adventure."
"This coming from a 'Satoru?' A little on the nose, don't you think? You don't exactly strike me as someone 'enlightened'."
The defence spilled from her mouth before she could catch it. Her mother picked that name; no one would slander it. She almost forgot she was supposed to be scared. He did that on purpose, she realised with a start.
"Touché."
Yuriko threw a scowl in the man's direction, only to find the most airy-fairy smile she had ever seen before in her life. Or he's an idiot. She picked the former to preserve her sense of tension.
"And is it Suzushina, as in Suzushina Mayuri?"
A beat passed. Then the table exploded like a shrapnel shell, if its entire payload could be aimed on purpose at a singular target. In her mind's eye, the grinning man had already become a piece of modern art, but in practice? Splinters hung just shy of his eyes, torso and anywhere else that would have hurt him.
The smile never dropped from his face as he whistled.
"It has something to do with motion, doesn't it? Vectors? No shot it's that busted, actually. Telekinesis, then? Tell me I'm right?"
"How do you know that name?" Logic collapsed into a singularity of irrationality. Her brain misfired as signals bit-flipped from flight, to fight. "What the fuck did you do with my father?"
"Would you believe me if I said 'nothing'?"
Suzushina Yuriko was sitting on her chair.
Suzushina Yuriko's hands stopped shy of his throat.
The man lifted two fingers of a right-hand that was suddenly there.
Fragments of table embedded themselves into the walls on either end of the room in her wake.
All this happened between the previous tick, and the following tock of the clock.
Reality caught up with a gust of wind that swerved around Itadori Yuji, and disturbed everything else in the house. Plates rattled. Doors connected to rooms with open windows slammed shut; something fell over and broke in Yuriko's room from the sounds of it.
"A simple 'no,' would have been fine, Yuriko-chan."
"Answer my first question," she said in a level tone.
Her anger hadn't cooled, hadn't abated an inch; she was simply redirecting it toward problem solving.
Deceleration? No. She could empirically calculate her own vector values, and they weren't truly changing. Deceleration wasn't a vector per se, but she could simply interpret it as negative acceleration and circumvent the effect if that were the case; if that were what he was doing. Keep him talking. She pulled her hands back to her sides and noted that they faced no resistance. Incredibly small contact area. Like mine. But he had been getting hit by the man in the beret. How?
In her peripheral vision, Itadori Yuji threw up his fists by her side, looking exceedingly lost in the discomfort of his own home.
"He was attacked," Gojo finally said, and she couldn't fight the disgusting gasp she let out. "Not by me, but a cursed spirit," he added, probably seeing the creasing of her brow, and the narrowing of her pupils. "Specifically, a... you know what? I can't say until I'm surer about it."
"That last part was a lie."
"It was," he freely admitted.
"Is... Is he?" You don't care. You don't care. You don't— Fuck. You're pathetic. Fuck, you do. Damn it. You pathetic fucking piece of—
"He's fine, don't worry," Gojo said, as he slipped off his chair into a one-handed handstand. It sounded like the truth, even if she didn't want to take his word for it. The stress bled out of her body; her muscles relaxed. "Like I said, I'm the strongest."
A one-handed handstand while grandstanding. He pushed off the ground and to his feet, testing the new limb with a satisfied grin. Questions for later.
"He won't even see the inside of a hospital; others weren't so lucky. I got his name because he needed to fill out an incident form and blah, blah, bureaucracy. I could see some similarities in your cursed energy with his own, so I—"
"Cursed energy..." she muttered. Yuriko moved the thing inside her that had reached a fever pitch in her panic. "I guess that makes sense."
"—Wooow, you really don't know anything, huh... And Suguru had the nerve to call me a bad instructor." The man was practically vibrating with excitement. "But anyway, you didn't look anything like him—your dad, I mean—so I had to get your name to be sure."
Yuriko flinched like she'd been struck. She was the last person who needed to be told that. It was a reality she had lived, and she had the scars to prove it. Everything north of her neck had been spared for sentiment.
'Freak.'
"I take after my mother."
Gojo was pensive for a moment. His eyes zeroed in on her face and he...Why did he just sigh?
"Yeah... I imagine you might."
She could have sworn she heard him mutter something along the lines of 'fucking Toji,' under his breath, but she lacked the context and presence of mind to piece together a meaning to what he'd said.
"I'll start with the basics, then," Gojo continued, hand waving the topic away with all the subtlety of a stampede across the Serengeti. "Do you know what we are?"
Yuriko's eyes brushed past Yuji, who was still in a fighting stance, his eyes closely following the movement of the only adult in the room.
She felt an inexplicable sense of shame. Of course she hadn't told him about Geto, it wasn't any of his business. And she had planned to keep it that way for as long as she could. Now how was she supposed to explain away that she now knew that she was a 'sorcerer,' not an 'esper' like she had let him conclude?
Itadori was probably going to think she'd been trying to manipulate him, or guilt-trip him into a sympathetic position. It rankled on her.
"A sorcerer," she said, and when Yuji shot her an inquisitory glance, she clarified: "Someone I recently met told me. Told me about the curses too, but that's all I know."
"Was he the first ever sorcerer you've met?"
Ah, she knew this trick. He was trying to establish himself as a figure of authority. She could use that against him.
"He was." Well, no—there was that head case—but she watched Gojo let her lie slide in real-time. Damn.
"When and where did you meet him?"
"About three weeks ago." Yuriko turned her face away from Yuji's. "And here."
"Oh! But that was when... Huh? You sent me out on purpose! Is that where the KFC came from??"
Suddenly, the ground became exponentially more interesting that the threat who was standing in front of her. The 'threat' in question made a weird face as soon as the word KFC was said.
"What if you needed help?"
"Well," she stuttered. "It's not like you could have—"
"You just tried to do it again, didn't you?"
Yuriko's face was burning. Yuji always found the most inconvenient moments to be perceptive.
"Bwahahahahaha. I can't— this is too good. You look like a tomato, Tomato-chan. Can I take a picture to show the second years?"
Oh, he was here too.
"Second years?" she muttered. "I already said I wouldn't join your cabal."
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
"100% positive?"
"Like a positron."
"Nerd. Okay, then."
It was her turn to make a weird face.
"What, were you expecting me to strongarm ya?"
***
It was getting late, and Yuriko now had a better picture of the world than Geto had left her with. Sorcerers weren't really conscripted into service. They were recruited; only considered threats when they were complete unknowns to the powers that be. According to Gojo, the principal at the school he worked at wouldn't even allow a student to enrol if they couldn't present him with what he considered to be a valid reason.
She definitely didn't trust him, but she believed in the he that believed in him. A hurricane had no need to lie. Yet, like air from ripped from her lungs, he denied her chance to truly feel relief.
"I'll be back, by the way."
"Huh?"
"How else are you gonna fix your sloppy curse energy control? You've got like, what, three minutes tops till you're gassed out? You're using about point two-five Megumis every minute. Such a waste."
"I can figure that out myself." Was that a unit of measurement?
"You're a smart girl, Yuriko-chan. Take advantage of your available resources. I also still need to teach you how to set up a curtain."
"Didn't you say that was for active sorcerers? I'm not working for you."
"Well, until you get your cursed energy under control, it'll be like a flies-to-honey situation. You will encounter curses. You may as well learn how to keep it discrete. I don't mind you being an independent. Others...may differ."
"Fuck's sake."
"Ah, don't worry about it. I'll cover you—heck, I'll even pay you." Gojo shrugged, then raised a finger before she could speak. "Now, now, you'll be providing a service. I'm sure you've already killed several curses by now. It's only fair. Oh and, I'll pay for all the damage you caused here."
"I caused?"
"Yeah, you did. Work on that temper of yours; it could get you, or even your friend over there, killed." His tone shot ice in her veins. Then he smiled one last time before clasping his hands together. "Toodles."
And he was gone.
"Huh, where'd he go?"
Yuji's head peeked back into the room. He was wearing rubber gloves, a hairnet—for whatever reason— an apron, and he was holding a mop.
"I think he teleported."
"Eh?" Yuji's eyes widened. "If he could do that, why'd he track blood all the way into the living room?"
"I think that was his way of being polite..."
Yuji coughed. "Uhm, Yuriko, I went into your room, and"—he bent down behind the doorway, and stood back up— "I found this."
A picture frame. The same one she'd liberated from her father's house. The photo housed in the frame hadn't been damaged at all; it still depicted the same family of three with the missing face of their youngest member, but the glass had shattered.
Yuriko almost snatched it out of his hand reflexively.
"Do you..." he started. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"Fuck no."
"Oh, thank goodness—I mean, yeah, I'm relieved, a lot's happened today and I wasn't really ready for any more, but if you did want to talk, I'm all ears."
And he must have been 'all ears', because his eyes clearly hadn't registered that she had already left the room.
***
Back at the Tomb of the Stars, Satoru was lounging on a couch in one of Tengen's barriers.
"That went about as well as it could have," he sighed. "I'm glad you didn't send anyone else. I would have died on two separate occasions if I wasn't me."
"..."
"Tengen?" Satoru called out, but the silence stretched for just a moment longer.
"Satoru-kun. I'm sorry."
"Hm?"
"It seems the problems we face are bigger than just Sendai."
"Okay...?"
"Nanami Kento has gone missing."
"Oh."
***
Somewhere in the ambient fog of Japan's cursed energy, a metallic grain begins to build its body again. She has learned a great deal from that exchange.
And lurking in an alleyway in the heart of Tokyo, a Right Hand skitters across the shadows.