Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first fundamental rule of survival at Tokyo Jujutsu High was simple: don’t get involved in your underclassmen’s pranks. 

The second rule, which you’d learned through bitter experience, was that the first rule was impossible to follow when those underclassmen were Panda and Inumaki Toge.

You should have known something was up the moment you spotted them whispering in the corner of the courtyard, their heads bent together in a huddle that screamed ‘poor life choices in progress.’ Panda’s ears were twitching with a frequency that suggested high-level dumbassery, and Toge had that manic glint in his eyes that usually preceded someone’s dignity taking an unscheduled nosedive. 

As their senpai, the responsible thing would have been to march over there and shut down whatever shenanigans they were brewing before it could take root. Instead, you’d made a strategic decision to mind your own damn business, telling yourself that plausible deniability was a perfectly valid survival strategy. After all, what you didn’t know couldn’t get you dragged into whatever embarrassing situation they were about to unleash on some poor, unsuspecting victim.

You really should have known better.

The inevitable chaos erupted on a sweltering summer afternoon. You were heading to the library when you heard what sounded like a small explosion from the direction of the boys’ dormitory—a sort of wet foomph—followed immediately by Panda’s panicked “Oh shit!” and Toge’s equally frantic “tuna tuna!”

Cursing under your breath about troublesome juniors, you’d sprinted toward the commotion, only to screech to a halt as a completely naked Yuuta came barreling around the corner. A tide of aggressively pink foam was rapidly consuming him, expanding in bubbly, unnatural-smelling waves, but it wasn’t doing much to hide… well, anything. And there was a lot not being hidden.

Because you were a scout and ambush specialist, your eyes immediately conducted a top-to-bottom tactical assessment:

• Assessment #1: Damn. All that training really paid off. He’s ripped.
• Assessment #2: Oh. Oh. Well. That’s… impressive. Good for him.
• Assessment #3: HOLY SHIT, YOU ARE CATALOGING YOUR JUNIOR’S JUNK, CEASE AND DESIST IMMEDIATELY.

“Senpai! Help!” Yuuta yelped, his voice cracking with terror, snapping your eyes back up to his panicked face. “It won’t stop growing!”

An extremely unfortunate choice of words, because your wayward gaze immediately dropped south again just in time to confirm that, no, the pink foam was not the only thing experiencing rapid expansion. Yuuta, noticing both your line of sight and his body’s mortifying betrayal, made a strangled sound somewhere between a squeak and a whimper as his face went from pale to a shade of red that clashed violently with the encroaching pink menace.

The awkward moment was mercifully interrupted by Panda and Toge rounding the corner, also covered in splotches of pink foam but thankfully clothed (or fur-nished, in Panda’s case).

“Experimental cursed body wash!” Panda explained breathlessly. “It was supposed to be a joke but—”

“Salmon!” Toge added frantically, as if that explained everything, gesturing at the burgeoning foam monster that was Yuuta.

“Why the fuck would you—” you started to ask, but were cut off by Yuuta’s escalating panic: 

“Guys! It’s in my mouth!”

Indeed, the foam had reached Yuuta’s face now, threatening to suffocate him. You grabbed his arm (focusing very hard on just his arm) and dragged him toward the nearest water source, which happened to be the ornamental pond behind the building.

“Hold your breath,” you muttered, then shoved him face-first into the water. 

The foam fizzled and dissolved on contact with the murky pond water, leaving you with an even more awkward situation: a soaking wet, completely naked Yuuta trying desperately to hide his mortification behind a few sparse lily pads while sporting what could only be described as a full-blown anxiety boner.

You’d turned to unleash holy hell upon Panda and Toge, only to find they’d wisely made their escape. Smart move on their part, because you were already planning various creative ways to murder them both.

“Um, senpai?” Yuuta croaked, then switched to your nickname for added persuasion, “Spices, could you maybe... get me a towel? Please?” He was still in the pond, looking like a very distressed water nymph. “

You spun around and marched off, determinedly not thinking about what you’d just seen. You were a senpai. You were a professional. This was a professional towel-retrieval mission. You were definitely not going to think about the impressive physique of your junior. Not at all.

Later that evening, you’d cornered Panda and squeezed the full story out of him, a process which may or may not have involved threats against his luscious fur: Apparently, they’d been trying to create a cursed body wash as a prank gift for Gojo. They’d roped Yuuta into testing it since his ridiculously high levels of cursed energy were the closest they could get to their intended target (and, let’s be honest, because he was the only one gullible enough to fall for it). Something had gone spectacularly wrong with the formula, leading to exponential foam growth when activated by cursed energy.

The incident was immediately filed under “Things We Will Never Ever Discuss Again,” alongside several other misadventures involving Panda and Toge’s questionable decision-making skills. This did not, however, make the following week any less excruciating.

Yuuta couldn’t look you in the eye for seven solid days. Every time you were in the same room, he’d turn a shade of red that matched the ripest of tomatoes and find something fascinating to examine on the ceiling. Which was fine, because you’d also developed a sudden, intense interest in the patterns of floor tiles whenever he was around.

The cafeteria became a minefield. You’d sit down with your food, trying to project an aura of unbothered senpai coolness, only for him to enter the room. His eyes would dart around, land on you for a nanosecond, and then he’d practically teleport to the furthest possible seat. He’d spend the entire meal trying to hide behind his bowl, his ears glowing like twin crimson beacons.

Panda and Toge, in a transparent and pathetic attempt to atone for their sins, would offer you their food and try to engage you in overly enthusiastic small talk about the weather or the quality of the cafeteria’s pickles. Maki, on the other hand, would fix you all with increasingly suspicious looks.

Training sessions were where the awkwardness truly ascended to an art form. First was the sparring. You’d been paired up for combat practice, which should have been routine. But the moment you stepped into the ring, Yuuta’s face went nuclear red, and he started stammering apologies.

“S-sorry, Spices! I didn’t mean to—I mean, I wasn’t trying to— I don’t why it—”

“Yuuta, we haven’t even started yet.”

“Right! Yes! Sorry!”

The actual sparring was a disaster. Every time you got too close, Yuuta would freeze up, which resulted in him taking several completely avoidable hits. When you finally managed to pin him (a move that involved absolutely zero inappropriate contact), he made a sound like a squeaky toy and promptly achieved a previously undiscovered shade of red.

Maki had watched the entire debacle with narrowed eyes. “The hell is wrong with you two?” she’d demanded, her patience worn thin.

“Nothing’s wrong,” you and Yuuta said in perfect unison, which only confirmed her suspicions that something was, in fact, deeply and profoundly wrong.

And then there was the slow torture of sword practice.

“Your stance is too wide, Yuuta,” you’d say, your voice strained with the effort of sounding normal. “You’re off-balance.”

He would just grunt in reply, sweat beading on his forehead for reasons that had nothing to do with the physical exertion and everything to do with terminal embarrassment. He’d adjust his stance stiffly. His every move seemed designed to maximize the distance between you, which made sword practice incredibly difficult.

Your brain, being the traitorous bastard it was, kept replaying the scene in high definition. As you moved to correct his grip on the practice sword, your mind would unhelpfully supply a memory of him fumbling with lily pads. The professional, senpai part of your brain would be trying to focus on his footwork, while the less disciplined, far more vocal part was screaming “DON’T THINK ABOUT THE DICK, DON’T THINK ABOUT THE DICK.”

Next up on the Mortification Tour was the library. You’d been peacefully researching advanced curse classifications when Yuuta appeared at the end of your aisle, clearly looking for a specific book. The moment he spotted you, he froze mid-step and just... stared at you with wide eyes. Like a deer that had not only been caught in headlights but had also been asked to explain its tax returns.

For a solid thirty seconds. You counted.

“The section for your required reading is two rows over,” you said without looking up from your textbook, deploying some basic NPC dialogue in hopes of rebooting his crashed operating system.

“I wasn’t—I mean, I don’t need— that’s not why I’m—” 

Yuuta began his now-signature tactical retreat, but apparently his feet hadn’t gotten the memo about the escape plan. In his haste to escape your terrifying presence, he caught his foot on nothing—a remarkable achievement in creative clumsiness—and went down in a spectacular failure of motor functions, unleashing a small avalanche of books from a nearby shelf.

You looked up to see him flat on his back, staring at the ceiling with the resigned expression of someone whose life had become a cosmic joke.

“You okay down there?”

“Yep. Totally fine. This is normal. I do this all the time.” His voice was muffled because he’d covered his face with his hands in an attempt to will himself out of existence. “I’m just going to lie here forever now.”

“The janitor may charge rent for extended stays.” 

You returned to your reading. Out of your peripheral vision, you watched him eventually extricate himself from the pile of literary casualties and slink away.

The turning point arrived on Friday in the form of a high-speed collision. You’d rounded a blind corner at reckless velocity and body-slammed directly into Yuuta, sending both of you sprawling. 

Before you could even register the impact, his arm whipped around your waist, yanking you against him as he twisted mid-air, using his own body as a human airbag to absorb the collision and break your fall. You landed on top of him, the breath was knocked out of you, replaced by the scent of clean laundry and the faint crackle of his cursed energy.

The two of you ended up in a tangle of limbs that was remarkably similar to the pond situation, except this time you were both fully clothed and on dry land. A minor improvement in the grand scheme of your shared humiliation timeline, but still hovering somewhere in the suboptimal category.

For a suspended moment, you were both perfectly still, staring at each other from approximately six inches away—close enough to conduct a detailed analysis of each other’s pores. Yuuta’s face was doing its usual stop-sign crimson, but this time, he wasn’t looking away. His eyes were wide and shell-shocked, filled with a volatile blend of terror, curiosity, and something that looked suspiciously like wonder, as though he was a caveman who’d just discovered fire and wasn’t sure if he should worship it or flee screaming into the wilderness.

“This is stupid,” you said finally.

“Yeah,” he agreed, voice slightly hoarse. “Really stupid.”

“We’re both acting like idiots.”

“Complete idiots.”

You tried to disengage. He wasn’t cooperating. Which was either very rude or very interesting, depending on your perspective.

“We should probably get up,” you pointed out, because someone had to be the voice of reason in this trainwreck.

“Probably,” he agreed again, while making absolutely zero effort to move. If anything, he seemed to be settling in for hibernation, judging by the way his other arm had also mysteriously migrated across your back, securing you in place.

You were still lying there in a heap of mutual awkwardness when Panda’s voice boomed down the hallway: “Oh, come ON! Just kiss already! All this unresolved sexual tension is giving me stress-induced molting!”

That broke the spell. Reality crashed back in. Yuuta’s arms flew off you instantly. You scrambled upright with impressive agility, grabbed one of your hefty textbooks, and hurled it at Panda’s smug face. It connected with a deeply satisfying thwack, the sound of justice being served via blunt force trauma. You’d always possessed an unnaturally gifted aim when it came to nailing people with projectiles. 

“UNPROVOKED VIOLENCE AGAINST AN ENDANGERED SPECIES!” Panda shrieked, clutching his snout as he fled down the corridor. “I’M CALLING THE WILDLIFE PROTECTION AGENCY!”

Yuuta burst out laughing—actual laughter instead of his recent repertoire of squeaks and nervous giggling—and some of the odd tension dissipated.

Then, a week later, the Great Wasabi Mochi Offensive—a new and even more catastrophic prank involving weaponized hot sauce and Gojo’s favorite sweets—drew everyone’s attention. In the ensuing chaos that had half the school literally weeping and the other half plotting revenge, the foam incident got buried under a fresh avalanche of mayhem. 

Just like that, you and Yuuta went back to regular human interaction, the memory tucked away but no longer a source of excruciating social paralysis.

You’d made Panda and Toge swear a blood oath to never attempt amateur cursed chemistry again, though you had sneakily kept a small sample of the foam formula. Just in case. For science.

And if you occasionally found yourself conducting private mental reviews of certain anatomical data from that day... Well, that was also purely scientific observation. A baseline for human anatomy research. Obviously.

Chapter Text

There was a universally acknowledged truth at Tokyo Jujutsu High, and it went something like this: while Okkotsu Yuuta may have arrived with a special-grade curse stapled to his very soul, he was not the most disaster-prone individual on campus. That particular crown of thorns rested firmly, and perhaps a bit too smugly, on your head.

This wasn’t to diminish Yuuta’s impressive and ever-growing track record of accidentally leveling buildings, inadvertently traumatizing civilians, or generally causing the sort of collateral damage that required both extensive paperwork and creative explanations to the local authorities. He was, without question, a walking category-five hurricane stuffed into a vessel of crippling social awkwardness. 

But where Yuuta’s catastrophes came from the simple misfortune of being astronomically powerful while still figuring out which end was up, your flavor of chaos stemmed from something far more insidious: a relentless curiosity paired with survival instincts so dysfunctional they were almost suicidal.

It wasn’t that your incidents were more frequent than, say, Panda and Toge’s elaborate pranks, which had reached legendary status and inspired at least three new campus-wide safety protocols. The crucial difference was one of scale and lethality. When the boys decided to, for instance, replace all the training dummies with inflatable, life-sized versions of Gojo, the worst outcome was a stern lecture from Yaga and perhaps some wounded pride on Gojo’s part.

When you decided to investigate something, however, the aftermath typically required hazmat suits and a specialized cleanup crew to contain whatever had crawled out of the smoking crater you’d left behind. The fundamental problem was that you possessed the rare and terrible combination of a high-functioning intellect and a complete inability to leave well enough alone. Where other sorcerers might look at an obviously cursed artifact and think, “That seems dangerous, I should probably inform Headquarters,” your brain would instead skip straight to, “I wonder what would happen if I poked it with a stick?”

Take the Great Library Evacuation: All you’d wanted to do was test a supposedly harmless reading-enhancement charm you’d found tucked away in a dusty scroll. How were you supposed to know it would interpret “acquire knowledge” as a command to summon every book in a five-mile radius into a swirling, sentient vortex of paper? 

Or the Chemistry Lab Quarantine—attempting to synthesize cursed energy into a solid, stable form had seemed like a reasonable scientific pursuit until the resulting glob started eating through the very fabric of reality itself, leaving a shimmering hole where the supply closet used to be. 

And then there was The Thing We Don’t Talk About Because It’s Still Technically Classified, an incident which had required intervention from not just Headquarters, but also three separate government agencies and, mysteriously, a very confused marine biologist from the University of Tokyo.

The school staff had long since developed an entire emergency response system specifically calibrated to your disasters. It included such gems as the “Hellraiser Protocol,” to be activated whenever you got that evil gleam in your eye that meant you’d found something shiny and probably cursed, and “CODE SPICES” aka the school-wide immediate evacuation procedure for when anyone overheard you uttering the fateful phrases “I wonder if…” or, God forbid, “For science!” There was even a dedicated budget line for property damage that the accounting department had grimly labeled the “Inevitable Catastrophe Fund,” and it was rumored to be larger than the school’s entire food budget.

It wasn’t that you set out to cause chaos, precisely. You simply had questions about the world—perfectly good questions, in your opinion—and an unfortunate tendency to seek answers through what could charitably be called “experimental methodology” and more accurately described as “poking dangerous things with a variety of implements to see what happens.”

By necessity, Yuuta had become your designated bodyguard in this regard. Whether this was due to his genuine concern for your well-being, his misguided belief that his power could somehow contain whatever cosmic horror you were bound to unleash, or simply because Rika had taken a sisterly interest in keeping you alive, was a matter of some debate among the school staff.

What was not a matter of debate was Yuuta’s full-body flinch when you announced you’d acquired a potentially cursed shamisen of questionable provenance and even more questionable capabilities, and suggested that perhaps you should test it just to be sure.

The instrument itself was ancient, the dark wood of its neck worn smooth and glossy by what must have been centuries of hands. According to the extremely dubious documentation that came with it, this shamisen possessed the remarkable ability to resurrect the dead. This was precisely the sort of grandiose claim that any sensible person would have dismissed with a firm “absolutely fucking not” and then set it on fire for good measure.

You were not, it must be repeated for the sake of the plot, a sensible person.

“For science,” you’d insisted when Yuuta had given you that particular look—the one that suggested he was mentally reviewing his life insurance policy and wondering if it covered death by association with an unhinged senpai.

The largest training field behind campus was the obvious choice for your experiment. Far enough from the main buildings to avoid Yaga’s immediate detection, spacious enough to contain whatever abomination might claw its way into existence, and conveniently located near the medical wing, should things go spectacularly sideways as they so often did. 

You’d spent the better part of an hour setting up safety protocols, which mostly involved wrapping yourself in every protective talisman known to sorcerer-kind. Now, with everything as ready as it was ever going to be, you sat cross-legged in the grass, the shamisen cradled in your lap. Yuuta crouched behind you, his arms locked around your waist, and his cursed energy flowed over your body in tangible waves of “please don’t let this be how I die.”

“Spices,” he tried one last time. “This could be really dangerous. Maybe we should just… not?”

“It’ll be fine,” you interrupted with the kind of breezy confidence that historically preceded at least three major evacuations and one minor dimensional rift. You patted his arm reassuringly. “I've got protective talismans, you’ve got me covered with your cursed energy, and Rika’s on standby. What could possibly go wrong?”

Rika hovered in the air above, and even she seemed less convinced by your optimism than you were. Which, considering her usual enthusiasm for any and all forms of destruction, should have been your first warning sign. 

Your test subject lay motionless on the ground in front of you: a gecko you’d discovered behind the vending machines, thoroughly deceased and approximately the right size for a preliminary resurrection trial. You’d reasoned that if the shamisen somehow transformed your modest experiment into the opening act of World War Z, you could probably stomp one zombie gecko before it managed to bite anyone important. Maybe. You’d cross that bridge when you came to it, preferably at a full sprint.

The logic had seemed flawless at the time, which should have been your second warning sign. But like all your best worst ideas, it had that intoxicating blend of scientific curiosity and potential for large-scale catastrophe that made it impossible to resist.

Armed with the comprehensive musical education provided by one twelve-minute YouTube video titled “Shamisen for Absolute Beginners :) :) :),” you began your assault on both the instrument and the concept of music itself. The cheerful woman in the video had made it look deceptively simple. The sounds that emerged from your efforts were less a haunting melody capable of bridging the gap between life and death and more the agonized screeching of cats being strangled in a wind tunnel.

For several long minutes, nothing happened except for a series of increasingly discordant notes that made Yuuta cringe despite the nervous energy he was radiating against your back. The gecko, displaying remarkable commitment to its deceased status, remained stubbornly unresponsive to your resurrection attempt. You were beginning to suspect that either the shamisen was a fake or you needed to find a better tutorial…

Then, quite suddenly, the shamisen began to crack. 

It started as a hairline fracture along the neck, so thin you almost missed it in your concentration. Before you could even form the thought “oh shit,” the wood began splintering, and something that definitely wasn’t melody started oozing from the rapidly expanding fissures into the world. 

Yuuta yanked you backward at the exact second Rika’s massive hand had swept down, ripping the shamisen from your grasp and slamming it into the ground. You were squashed flat as he twisted, covering you with his own body just as the world exploded into white noise and concussive force.

The sound was less like a traditional explosion and more like reality itself having a brief but violent disagreement with the laws of physics. A pressure wave compressed the very air in your lungs before releasing it in a rush that would have your ears filing formal complaints for days. Every window in a three-building radius chose that moment to simultaneously retire from the glass business, shattering in a cascade of glittering shrapnel.

When the dust had finally settled and you dared to crack open an eye, the training field was decorated with a crater deep enough to require geological surveys. The gecko, you noted, had been redistributed across several dimensions as its component atoms.

“Well,” you announced to the ringing silence, still pancaked underneath Yuuta as fine debris continued to rain down around you. “That was educational.”

That was also the first time you’d ever heard Okkotsu Yuuta swear. Very colorfully, in fact, and with a surprising fluency in profanity that would have brought a tear of pride to Gojo’s eye.

The good news—a point you made sure to emphasize repeatedly—was that nobody had died, grown extra limbs, or been transformed into household appliances. By your admittedly flexible standards for experimental success, where “success” was defined as “still possessing roughly the same number of body parts you started with,” this could almost be considered a win.

The bad news was that the shamisen had indeed been cursed. Comprehensively, enthusiastically, and with what you could only assume was a deeply vindictive sense of irony. For the crime of poking at ancient instruments that were better left unpoked, you and Yuuta had been cursed as well.

It wasn’t that bad, you argued, mostly to yourself. The two of you were just... stuck together. In pretty much the exact same position you’d been in when the shamisen had decided to express its displeasure with the world: his arms locked around your waist, your back pressed against his chest, both arranged in the sort of “intimate embrace” romantic literature adored. It felt considerably less romantic when you couldn’t separate, no matter what you tried. No amount of pulling, pushing, or careful application of cursed energy had managed to create so much as a millimeter of space between you.

Shuffling toward the medical wing in this undignified fashion—a sort of awkward penguin waddle that required unprecedented levels of coordination—you passed a succession of horrified school staff who had rushed out to investigate what sounded like the ending of the world and instead discovered that it was merely Tuesday in the life of Tokyo Jujutsu High’s most creatively destructive student.

It was outside the medical wing, as you were preparing to throw yourselves on Shoko’s mercy and beg her to fix whatever cosmic joke had been played upon you, that you encountered Panda and Toge. They took in the sight of you and Yuuta: rumpled and dirt-streaked, your clothes torn and hair mussed, faces bearing a generous coating of dirt and smoke that gave you both the appearance of having been recently excavated from an archaeological dig.

Panda’s eyes lit up with unholy glee. “Well, well,” he chortled, cheekily nudging Toge with his elbow. “I have to ask, senpai—is Yuuta really that good?”

Yuuta’s entire body went rigid behind you, his cursed energy spiking in mortal embarrassment mixed with the overwhelming desire for the earth to swallow him whole.

Without hesitation, you kicked Panda squarely in his fluffy midsection. The kick itself was perfectly timed, aided by Yuuta lifting you at precisely the right moment with the unconscious coordination that comes from knowing someone well enough to predict their violent impulses, adding his considerable strength to the blow. Panda sailed backward through the already-shattered window of the classroom behind him with an indignant yowl. 

Toge gave you both an enthusiastic double thumbs-up before promptly jumping through the same window, presumably to render aid to his best friend. From somewhere inside the classroom came the sound of Panda extracting himself from a pile of broken furniture.

“I’m going to sue you for repeated violence against an endangered species!” he wailed dramatically. “This is a hate crime! I have rights!”

“You’re not actually endangered,” you called back, resuming your awkward shuffle toward Shoko’s office. “You’re an artificial life form with dubious legal standing, at best.”

“That’s worse!” came Panda’s muffled reply, accompanied by the crash of more displaced furniture. “Now it’s discrimination based on the circumstances of my birth! Toge, are you getting this? I want witnesses!”

Yuuta let out a long, weary sigh against your hair. “We probably shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why not? It builds character. Besides, he’ll bounce.”

To your mounting desperation, Shoko proved to be as baffled by your predicament as everyone else who had witnessed it. After several attempts involving standard un-cursing rituals (useless), a variety of tools that looked suspiciously medieval (equally useless but significantly more intimidating), and at one point, genuine prayer to several different deities (who were probably too busy laughing their divine asses off to help), she threw her hands up in defeat.

“I’m calling Gojo,” she announced.

“NO!” you and Yuuta protested in perfect, horrified harmony.

“Anything but that!” Yuuta pleaded, his voice cracked as he spoke directly into your ear, his breath warm against your neck in a way that your traitorous nervous system was finding difficult to ignore, even amidst the escalating crisis. “There has to be another way. Maybe we could just… wait it out?”

"Or,” you chimed in, your brain cells firing in increasingly deranged patterns, “we could try experimental surgery! I’m not opposed to losing a few non-essential body parts. Who really needs two arms, anyway? I’ll take quality of life over quantity of limbs any day of the week!”

Shoko merely raised a single, unimpressed eyebrow at your perfectly reasonable suggestions before pulling out her phone and hitting speed dial. “Sorry, kids,” she snickered, not sounding sorry in the slightest. “This is beyond my pay grade, and if I don’t call him now, he’ll find out anyway and make this ten times worse.”

The video call connected almost immediately. Gojo’s face filled the screen in extreme close-up, near enough that you could count his nonexistent pores, because of course he had perfect skin on top of everything else. 

“Shoko! To what do I owe the pleasure of— oh. Oh my God.”

His expression shifted from mild confusion to unholy delight in approximately 0.3 seconds—roughly the same amount of time it took for your soul to flee your body in search of a less embarrassing existence.

“Oh, this is beautiful,” Gojo snorted. “Please zoom in. I need the full HD experience.”

“Sure thing,” Shoko agreed, adjusting the phone to capture you and Yuuta in all your curse-induced, dirt-smeared glory.

What followed was ten solid minutes of wholehearted, gut-busting laughter. It began as a low chuckle, evolved into a wheezing chortle, and finally exploded into full-blown hysterics. Every time Gojo seemed to be calming down, he would catch sight of you both again and dissolve into fresh peals of cackling. At one point, he actually had to sit down on something off-camera because his legs could no longer support the weight of his own boundless amusement.

“This,” he gasped, “is the best thing that has happened all year. Possibly all decade. No, scratch that—this is the highlight of my entire teaching career. Shoko, you’re recording this, right? Please tell me you’re documenting this masterpiece for posterity.”

“I am not recording this,” Shoko lied with the straightest face you’d ever seen. You knew instantly she was absolutely recording every second and planning to use it as entertainment for years to come. You made a mental note to look into witness protection programs later.

Eventually, Gojo managed to compose himself enough to form complete sentences. “Don’t worry,” he said, his voice still shaking with suppressed laughter. “I’ll figure something out. Right after I show this to Nanami—I mean, after I consult with my esteemed colleague about this fascinating new curse phenomenon.” He wiped away another tear. “Shoko, keep them there. And keep sending updates. This is better than cable.” The call ended with the sound of fresh laughter echoing from the speaker, suggesting he was already sharing your misfortune with whoever happened to be nearby.

“Right then,” Shoko said, pocketing her phone. “Go clean yourselves up. You both look like shit.”

The bathroom proved to be another logistical nightmare. Every movement required careful coordination, and what should have been simple tasks became elaborate negotiations of space and dignity. Actually changing clothes was theoretically possible, you supposed. Fascinating to contemplate from an academic standpoint but not something you were ready to explore with Yuuta at this particular moment in your relationship, whatever your relationship had become in the last hour.

Instead, you made do with splashing your face while trying not to drown either of you, which felt like a minor victory. Since Yuuta’s arms remained occupied, you took it upon yourself to help him achieve a similar state of baseline cleanliness. 

“Let me,” you offered, reaching for a washcloth.

“You don’t have to—” he started, but you were already twisting around as best you could, the washcloth dampened and ready for deployment.

“It’s alright,” you insisted. “I’m the reason you’re in this mess. The least I can do is help you look presentable before sensei comes back to laugh at us some more.”

The task required you to contort yourself in absurd ways, but you discovered something oddly intimate about the simple process of cleaning someone else’s face. Yuuta stayed preternaturally still, his breathing carefully measured, as if he was concentrating very hard on not concentrating on something specific. The small bathroom suddenly felt several degrees warmer than it had any right to be.

“Sorry if the water’s too cold,” you muttered, focusing on a smudge of dirt near his temple.

“It’s fine,” he replied, his voice a bit tight. “It’s… nice, actually.”

You worked methodically, because this was just basic hygiene and not an excuse to trace the contours of his face. Not at all. The washcloth glided across his cheekbones, removing traces of dirt while revealing the faint flush of color underneath.

“Close your eyes,” you instructed, and he obeyed immediately. His dark lashes fanned against his cheeks in a way that made your stomach do an entirely unnecessary flip. This was, you told yourself firmly, a perfectly normal physiological response to... to whatever this was. Completely normal. 

Your fingers brushed accidentally against his jaw as you adjusted the cloth, and you felt rather than heard his sharp intake of breath. The muscles in his arms tensed reflexively around you for a fraction of a second before he caught himself and tried to relax his grip.

You paused, frowning. “Are you okay? You’re breathing kind of funny. The curse isn’t affecting your lungs, is it?”

“I’m fine,” he squeaked out. “Just… Please, keep going.”

You shrugged, or at least attempted a motion that vaguely resembled a shrug, and continued your work. When the cloth reached the corner of his mouth, his lips parted slightly on an unsteady exhale that ghosted across your knuckles. Your brain experienced a brief system malfunction, flashing a blue screen of death before hastily rebooting itself and returning to the innocent, G-rated task of face-washing.

“Done,” you said, your own voice only slightly breathless, as you gave his chin one final swipe.

Yuuta’s eyes fluttered open. “Thank you,” he whispered, and you made a determined effort not to think too deeply about how his pupils had dilated to a medically concerning degree. 

When you shuffled out of the bathroom, Shoko took one look at your marginally cleaner but still obviously shell-shocked faces and concluded that you’d both endured enough public humiliation for one afternoon. “Try not to break anything else,” she sighed, herding you into an empty infirmary room and handing you a couple of protein shakes. “You can be mortified in private while I figure out how to explain this to Principal Yaga.”

After some additional awkward shuffling that involved at least three near-falls and one squeaked apology when you accidentally elbowed Yuuta in the ribs, you managed to get sort of comfortable on the narrow infirmary bed. Yuuta’s back propped against the headboard, and you perched somewhat precariously in his lap. The position was simultaneously more and less awkward than it should have been. More because, well, obvious reasons involving teenage hormones, forced proximity, and biological responses. But also less because after the day’s events, personal space had become a distant memory.

“Here,” you said, holding up his protein shake and angling the straw toward his mouth. “Since my cursed curiosity has temporarily cost you the use of your arms.”

Yuuta accepted the drink with as much dignity as one could muster. “You know,” he said between sips, “we’re getting pretty good at teamwork. Give it another hour and we might even manage stairs.”

“That’s the spirit,” you grinned.

The truth was, you were well and truly stuck, quite literally, with each other until Gojo decided to stop being amused and start being helpful. And that could be anywhere from hours to geological ages, depending on whether anything more interesting presented itself to distract him. 

Having nothing better to do and recognizing that panic was both unproductive and exhausting, you settled back more fully against Yuuta. The position was surprisingly comfortable, once you stopped overthinking the mechanics of it. You let your head tip back against his shoulder, closed your eyes, and prepared to make the best of what was either a temporary inconvenience or your new permanent living situation. Stranger things had happened to jujutsu sorcerers (though admittedly not many).

“Tell me if something itches,” you murmured with a yawn, drowsily patting his forearm. “I’ll help you scratch it if I can reach the relevant area without dislocating anything.”

His only response was a warm chuckle that rumbled through his chest and vibrated pleasantly against your back. As you began to doze off, you felt Yuuta’s arms tighten around you, pulling you more securely against him. The movement was intentional and had nothing to do with ancient curses or vengeful musical instruments.

You considered pointing out that this might make the curse worse—what if whatever malevolent force had taken up residence in the shamisen interpreted his voluntary embrace as acceptance and decided to upgrade your situation from “temporarily stuck” to “permanently fused”? Then again, it did feel rather nice, being held like this. So you let the thought drift away, filing the concern under “Problems for Future Us” and allowing yourself to sink into the kind of peaceful half-sleep that was only possible when you felt completely safe.

Gojo would fix this. He always did, usually after he’d gotten maximum entertainment value out of your suffering. And if he couldn’t... Well, as far as curses went, there were significantly worse fates than being permanently attached to someone who always seemed to know exactly when you were about to kick someone through a window and was considerate enough to provide the necessary leverage.

In the end, it only took about an hour for Gojo to return, bouncing in on the balls of his feet and wielding... a rainbow-colored feather duster.

“Behold!” he declared, striking a dramatic pose straight out of a magical girl anime. “The solution to all your problems! This sacred artifact has been blessed by seven shrine maidens during a full moon while Jupiter was in retrograde and Mercury was having what I like to call ‘an existential crisis.’”

Before either of you could ask the obvious questions—such as whether he was being serious, where exactly one acquired rainbow feather dusters blessed by shrine maidens, or what Jupiter’s celestial angst had to do with anything—he began enthusiastically whacking you both with his colorful solution. Hard. Like, way harder than necessary for curse removal, but just as hard as you’d expect from someone who’d been laughing at your misfortune for over an hour and wanted to make absolutely certain you understood that there were consequences for blowing up a training field. Still, it worked, and since he also footed the bill for all the property damage, you really couldn’t complain about his methods.

You and Yuuta each got slapped with a week of suspension from Principal Yaga, despite Yuuta’s valiant attempts to take all the blame. He stood before Yaga’s desk, shoulders squared, and insisted through a series of earnest stammers that the cursed shamisen debacle had been entirely his idea. This heroic but transparent lie fooled no one who had ever met either of you, least of all Yaga.

During this disciplinary period, Yaga assigned you to assist the cleaning staff in different sections of the school—you to the east wing, Yuuta to the west—probably hoping that geographical separation would reduce the statistical probability of you collaborating on something even more outrageous. This classic divide-and-conquer strategy demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of both your resourcefulness and your commitment to circumventing authority when it suited your purposes.

Naturally, you spent the week skilfully evading Yaga’s vigilant supervision to meet with Yuuta anyway. These clandestine encounters typically took place in musty supply closets, behind humming vending machines, or in forgotten corners of the school library. He’d be waiting with a small bag of expensive, imported chocolate because he knew you would find a way to see him and wanted to ensure he had something to make you smile. You would huddle together in these improvised hideaways, sharing sweets and giggling about the sort of inconsequential things that seemed monumentally important when you were seventeen and suspended and running on pure dumbassery. 

It was, you reflected later, not the worst week of your life. There had been good chocolate, companionship, and the peculiar satisfaction that came from successfully defying administrative authority while maintaining plausible deniability. 

Of course, by the time your suspension ended, you’d already begun formulating plans for your next great experiment. The school’s collection of cursed artifacts was vast and largely unguarded, and you’d heard interesting rumors about a mirror in one of the lower storage rooms. Word was that it showed people their greatest desires, which sounded like the kind of thing that needed hands-on scientific investigation.

But that, as they say, was a story for another time and, inevitably, another lengthy incident report.

Chapter Text

There was an operational dissonance between you and Okkotsu Yuuta that had nothing to do with power levels or cursed techniques or any of the usual metrics by which sorcerers measured their compatibility. It was far more fundamental than that, a core conflict written into your respective operating systems that no amount of tactical briefings could resolve. The problem, quite simply, was your walking speeds.

You were, by nature and by training, a scout. A wanderer. A professional dawdler, if one wanted to be uncharitable about it. Observation was your specialty, and observation—proper observation—required time. Why rush when there are so many fascinating things to stop and stare at? 

For instance, the hairline crack zigzagging across the pavement just outside the admin building. If you squinted and tilted your head precisely seventeen degrees to the left, it bore an uncanny resemblance to the coastline of Iceland. Or that beetle currently navigating the treacherous terrain of a bench. Such a creature deserved, in your expert opinion, at least five minutes of intense scientific scrutiny, possibly more if it did anything particularly beetle-like during the observation period. 

The world was a treasure trove of fascinatingly useless information, and you refused to be hurried through your research, much to the exasperation of anyone trying to get somewhere with you on a schedule.

Yuuta, by contrast, moved like he was perpetually on fire. He didn’t just walk. He propelled himself forward with an urgent velocity that suggested he was fleeing the scene of a recent crime. He’d rocket down hallways, blur through courtyards, and navigate crowded city streets with the evasive, high-speed maneuvering of a startled squid encountering a submarine.

At first, you’d assumed it was just another symptom of his chronically high-strung nature, the same nervous energy that made him apologize to vending machines when his coins got stuck, or bow respectfully to automatic doors that opened for him. 

But after months of careful observation (and several instances of losing him entirely to his superhuman pace), you’d pieced together the truth of his speed: It was a deeply ingrained trauma response from a time when moving quickly was the only reliable way to get through a school day without Rika disassembling a classroom full of bullies atom by atom. His velocity wasn’t designed to get himself out of bad situations. It was calibrated to protect others.

This fundamental incompatibility in your respective locomotion protocols meant that any joint expedition into the civilized world was a logistical nightmare. Missions were the worst. Despite the vast chasm between your official rankings—his a Special Grade capable of rewriting city maps, yours a solid Grade 2 whose primary skills involved being extremely sneaky—you two often got paired up. 

The official reasoning was that your field experience and tactical acumen provided a necessary stabilizing influence on his volatile power. The unofficial reasoning was considerably more pragmatic: you were the only one who could reliably stop Yuuta from accidentally leveling a city block while trying to exorcise a minor curse. In a similar vein, he was the only one who seemed capable of preventing you from starting your own catastrophic incidents in the name of scientific advancement. You were, in essence, each other’s designated adult supervisor—an arrangement that worked remarkably well in theory and remarkably poorly in practice.

Naturally, Yuuta had also taken it upon himself to tag along for your personal errands, like restocking your snack hoard, hunting through dusty second-hand bookshops for rare occult texts, or conducting what you generously termed “field research” in Tokyo’s more interesting neighborhoods. 

He’d claim these voluntary escort missions were necessary to prevent incidents like the Great Appliance Experimentation of last month, insisting that you couldn’t be trusted not to “reverse-engineer the latent cursed energy in a toaster oven” again. This was, you felt compelled to note, a completely baseless accusation. It had been a microwave, not a toaster oven, and the scientific methodology had been perfectly legitimate.

You both knew the real reason, though. Yuuta just liked being around you. 

The problem—and it was a significant one—with Yuuta “being around you” was that more often than not, he ended up being approximately one full city block ahead of you. You’d start off walking together, and he’d be earnestly telling you about his training. Then, inevitably, his natural pace would reassert itself. His long legs would begin eating up the pavement as he defaulted to his “Immediate Threat Evasion” setting. By then, you would have already stopped, completely captivated by a funny-looking rock, only to glance up from your impromptu research and find him transformed into a tiny speck on the horizon, still talking animatedly to the empty air where you were supposed to be.

Which brought you to the Ginza mission: a delightful little assignment that would have been laughably simple if not for one crucial complication. It required you and Yuuta to navigate one of Tokyo’s most densely populated shopping districts without losing each other in the process.

The briefing had been mercifully straightforward, almost insultingly so. A curse had taken up residence somewhere in the glittering maze of Ginza’s luxury boutiques, where it was compelling innocent shoppers to purchase designer handbags they couldn’t remotely afford. It was the kind of supernatural nuisance that posed significantly more threat to personal credit scores than actual lives, but its location in a weekend shopping frenzy made the situation delicately complicated.

“Stay close, senpai,” Yuuta said, his voice tight with anxiety as you stepped out of the subway station into the crushing wave of humanity that was Ginza on a Saturday afternoon. The sheer density of bodies was setting his nerves on edge.

“I’ll do my best,” you’d assured him, despite having absolutely no intention of actually staying close to anything when there were so many distractions within arm’s reach.

To his considerable credit, Yuuta was genuinely trying. You had to admire his valiant effort to suppress every instinct screaming at him to move fast and move now. The struggle was visible. He forced himself to walk in a series of stilted, jerky steps, like a video game character whose animation was lagging. He’d take a step forward, pause mid-stride, rock on his heels, then take another, all while his eyes darted around, cataloging the thousands of people closing in on all sides.

Meanwhile, your attention had already been thoroughly hijacked by a shop window displaying a collection of artisanal cat-shaped marshmallows. “Do you think they have different flavors?” you wondered aloud. “Or are they all just vanilla? It seems like a missed marketing opportunity if they’re all—”

Before Yuuta could formulate an answer to your pressing marshmallow inquiry, the crowd shifted. A tour group surged past in a river of approximately forty-seven identical bucket hats and aggressively clicking cameras. You were caught in the current and pushed sideways. In an instant, the three feet of space between you and Yuuta became ten, then twenty. When you regained your balance and orientation, the spot where he had been standing was now occupied by a harried-looking salaryman frantically stabbing at his phone screen and a young mother locked in mortal combat with a stroller that seemed determined to fold itself inside-out.

You weren’t particularly concerned. You were a trained sorcerer. A scout, no less. Getting separated in a crowd was an inconvenience rather than a crisis. Rising onto your toes, you craned your neck to scan the bobbing sea of heads for Yuuta’s distinctive mop of dark hair.

There. You saw him about thirty feet ahead, his head swiveling frantically as he searched for you in the crowd, his eyes wide with the sort of panic wildly disproportionate to the situation at hand. You raised your hand high above your head and waved. Relief flooded his features when he spotted you, so profound that you felt a small pang of guilt for having caused it in the first place. He began attempting to push his way back through the flow of foot traffic. This earned him a chorus of annoyed mutters and dirty looks from the people he was politely but insistently displacing.

Yuuta hadn’t made any significant progress in your direction when another stream of people swept you away again, this time toward a different storefront. Your eyes, ever alert to interesting phenomena, immediately landed on a gachapon machine filled with tiny, exquisitely detailed figurines of capybaras sitting in miniature yuzu baths. Your brain short-circuited. All thoughts of the mission, of poor panic-stricken Yuuta, of the handbag-obsessed curse were replaced by one overriding imperative: YOU NEEDED THE CAPYBARA IN THE YUZU BATH. SPECIFICALLY, THE ONE WITH THE TINY TOWEL.

As you fumbled for your wallet, a hand shot out of the crowd and clamped around your wrist. The grip was firm, desperate, and crackling with a familiar, overwhelming cursed energy. You were yanked backward, away from the siren song of the bathing capybaras, and pulled flush against a solid chest that was rising and falling with rapid, shallow breaths of someone on the verge of hyperventilation.

“Found you,” Yuuta breathed into your hair, his voice shaky with relief and residual panic. His arm wrapped around your waist, holding you against him. You could feel his heart hammering against your shoulder blade, a rapid drumbeat that gradually began to slow as his nervous system registered your presence.

“Did you see the capybaras?” you asked, twisting in his grip to point back at the machine. “One of them is wearing a tiny towel on its head. The level of detail is crazy. I wonder what polymer they used for the molding process, because the surface texture looks super realistic for mass-produced—”

“Spices,” he interrupted, one hand coming up to cup your face and turn you to look at him, his eyes wide and serious. “This is a problem.”

“I know,” you agreed solemnly. “I only have one 500 yen coin, and with my shit luck, I’ll probably get the disgruntled-looking capybara instead of the one I actually want. The probability distribution on these machines is notoriously—”

“Not that,” he said, shaking his head. “Us. We can’t keep getting separated like this. It’s not safe.”

Not waiting for you to point out that you were perfectly capable of handling yourself in a crowd of civilians—you’d survived significantly more dangerous situations than aggressive tourism—Yuuta released you from the circle of his arm to take your hand, wrapping his fingers around your palm. The move was clumsy and hesitant, his skin clammy with nerves.

Your brain, which had been happily contemplating tiny plastic rodents, screeched to a halt and performed a complete system reboot. You stared down at his hand engulfing yours, noting the calluses along his palm from sword practice, the neat but bitten nails, the way his thumb was unconsciously stroking across your knuckles. Then you looked up at his face rapidly approaching a shade of crimson usually associated with traffic lights. His capacity for blushing could likely solve a minor energy crisis if properly harnessed for renewable power.

“So we... don’t get lost,” he stammered, his gaze fixed determinedly on a point somewhere over your shoulder, as though he’d suddenly developed a passionate interest in the architectural details of the Chanel building across the street.

Well, the proposed solution was undeniably logical. A physical tether would indeed prevent accidental separation in high-density environments, reducing the risk of mission complications and unnecessary panic attacks. However, his execution was woefully inefficient and displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of proper hand-holding methodology. A simple palm-hold like this was unstable and could be easily broken by another surge in the crowd.

“Good thinking, Yuuta,” you nodded approvingly, causing his blush to deepen another shade. “But your grip is all wrong. You’ll lose me if someone bumps into us.”

You adjusted, turning your palm against his and methodically lacing your fingers together. Protocol established. Contact optimized for maximum security and minimum chance of accidental separation in hostile environments.

Yuuta inhaled so sharply you thought he might be having some kind of respiratory emergency. His cursed energy spiked, and for a split second, you genuinely wondered if the handbag curse had somehow gotten to him and was currently compelling him to march into the nearest boutique and purchase a designer purse. His blush evolved from “embarrassed” to “stage four combustion.”

“Better, right?” you asked cheerfully, giving his hand a confident squeeze to test the stability of your newly improvised tethering system. The connection held firm, and you nodded with satisfaction. “Much more secure. Now, about those capybaras. Do you think if I put in multiple coins, I could increase my odds of getting the specific one I want, or does the randomization algorithm reset with each individual transaction?”

Yuuta didn’t say a word for the rest of the mission. He merely followed where you led, his hand locked with yours, his cursed energy gradually settling into a calmer rhythm, though it never quite returned to its usual baseline. 

When you finally tracked down the offending curse—a writhing mass of brand logos and price tags that had attached itself to a mannequin in a department store window—he dutifully obliterated it with a blast of energy. All without drawing his sword or showing any inclination to release your hand. 

The mission was completed in record time, with zero civilian casualties and minimal property damage. By all objective measures, it was a resounding success. The fact that Yuuta spent the entire train ride back to campus staring out the window with the expression of someone who’d just experienced a profound spiritual revelation was, you decided, probably unrelated to your improved tactical coordination methods.

The next time you left campus together, it was just for a snack run. Yuuta, as he often did, volunteered to come with you under the flimsy guise of “making sure you don’t acquire another cursed shamisen, senpai, please. I’m still having nightmares about the last one.”

The afternoon was quiet. The courtyard was empty. As you approached the school gate, you found yourself slowing to a stop, just short of the threshold between campus and the outside world. Yuuta glanced at you, confused. Without preamble, you reached out and took his hand.

Yuuta jumped like he’d been tasered. “S-senpai?”

“Protocol,” you reminded him. “To avoid separation.”

There was currently no crowd. But protocols existed for good reason, and consistency was key to developing effective operational procedures.

A complex array of emotions cascaded across his features. His mouth opened and closed a few times, producing no sound whatsoever. A slow blush bloomed on his cheeks, and he gave you a small, shy smile that made something in your chest do an elaborate acrobatic routine with aerial somersaults and a dismount that left your heartbeat slightly irregular. He nodded, almost to himself, and his fingers curled around yours more firmly. This time, his palm wasn’t clammy. It was just warm, pleasantly so.

From somewhere in the direction of the dormitory building, you heard a muffled but distinctly enthusiastic “HELL YEAH!” that sounded suspiciously like Panda. You made a mental note to investigate whether it might be possible to relocate him to a nice zoo somewhere without Yaga noticing the sudden decrease in enrollment numbers.

The third time, it was unconscious. You were leaving a mission site. As you stepped off the curb into a moderately busy evening street, both you and Yuuta reached for each other’s hand at the exact same time. Your fingers brushed in the small space between you. Neither of you said a word. He just opened his hand, palm up, and you laced your fingers through his as if you’d been doing it your entire lives.

It was no longer a protocol. It was a habit.

You held hands on crowded subway cars where physical separation would have required a minor earthquake, and down empty residential streets where the only thing capable of dividing you was perhaps a determined housecat with strong opinions about pedestrian right-of-way. You held hands while you browsed the aisles of the convenience store. You were still holding hands when you reached the checkout counter, and again when you returned to campus. Once, you didn’t let go until you were back in the common room and only realized you were still connected when Maki cleared her throat loudly and asked if you two were planning on surgically grafting yourselves together as a permanent solution to your apparent inability to exist as separate entities.

Something else had changed, too. Yuuta started walking slower.

It wasn’t a conscious effort anymore. The frantic energy that had always surrounded him began to dissipate when he was with you. He was no longer a block ahead. He learned to match your pace. He stopped when you stopped, investigated what you investigated, existed in the same temporal space rather than racing ahead into an uncertain future.

You, of course, were still just as prone to distraction as ever. But now, instead of losing you to his compulsive forward momentum, Yuuta would simply wait. You’d be crouched down, poking curiously at something that had caught your eye, and you’d look up to find him patiently beside you, a soft smile on his face, watching you with an expression of fond exasperation. 

Yuuta never rushed you. He never complained that you were taking too long trying to decipher the socio-political implications of a piece of street art. The world, which had for so long felt like a minefield he had to sprint through at maximum speed to avoid triggering some catastrophic explosion, was slowly becoming a place worthy of exploration. Your infectious curiosity was teaching him that there were wonders to be discovered in the spaces between destinations, and your hand in his served as an anchor that made it feel safe to slow down long enough to notice them.

One evening, you were walking back from a local bookstore as the sun bled orange and purple across the sky. Naturally, Yuuta was carrying your massive book haul in one hand, leaving the other free to hold yours. You were in the middle of an impassioned rant, gesticulating wildly with your unoccupied hand.

“…and that’s why I’m saying the current classification system for cursed tools is fundamentally flawed! It’s based on immediate lethality potential, completely ignoring conceptual impact and long-term effects! Consider, for example, a cursed object that causes its victim to perpetually forget the location of their keys. According to current standards, this would be classified as low-grade because it poses no immediate threat to life or limb. But examine the longitudinal implications! Over the course of a lifetime, the cumulative psychological stress, the missed opportunities, the minor disasters triggered by chronic lateness… The aggregate suffering caused by such an object far exceeds that produced by, say, a Cursed Dagger of Mild Disembowelment, which causes acute but limited damage.”

Yuuta was making appropriately engaged noises—humming thoughtfully at strategic intervals, making the occasional “mmm” of agreement—but you could feel his attention was elsewhere. Following his gaze, you discovered he wasn’t looking at the street ahead. His eyes were fixed downward, focused on the sight of your intertwined hands, his thumb gently stroking your knuckle. There was something in his expression that you couldn’t immediately categorize. It held a wistful quality that seemed to encompass both contentment and something that might have been melancholy, if melancholy could coexist with happiness in the same emotional space.

If you’d possessed even a modicum of romantic awareness or emotional intelligence beyond the academic variety, you might have recognized that expression for what it was: the look of a man staring at something he was certain he could never truly have. If you’d been capable of reading the thoughts written so clearly across his features, you would have understood that he was thinking that he could walk like this forever, down this road and every other road in the world, through all the seasons and years yet to come, for the rest of whatever lifetime he might be granted, as long as he had your hand in his.

But you were, as previously established, neither romantically astute nor possessed of telepathic abilities, so the deeper implications of his expression sailed cleanly over your head undetected.

“Hey,” you said, tugging his hand as you noticed his distraction. “Did I lose you at the part about the metaphysical agony of misplaced stationery?”

Yuuta blinked, then squeezed your hand, his smile soft and achingly sincere as he met your eyes. “No, senpai,” he said quietly. “I’m with you. Always.”

You shrugged, accepting the answer, and immediately launched into your comprehensive proposal for redesigning the entire cursed tool classification system based on multi-dimensional impact assessment matrices. His attention split between your words and the simple, extraordinary fact of your fingers laced through his.

Together, the two of you walked into the deepening twilight, your shadows stretching long behind you as the day slowly surrendered to night.

From somewhere in the distance, probably from the rooftop of a nearby building where he was undoubtedly conducting unauthorized surveillance with a pair of binoculars, came another muffled cheer that definitely belonged to Panda. Squatting beside him, Toge contributed a thoughtful “Salmon” that roughly translated to “I give it two weeks before he accidentally levels a convenience store just from Spices asking if he wants to share a melon pan.”

Chapter Text

The thing about habits is that they are pure autonomic function, no thought required. Your lungs expand and contract without any input from your prefrontal cortex, which is too busy catastrophizing about that one awkward thing you said three years ago. Your eyelids flutter closed and open on their own sacred circadian schedule (except when you’re binge-watching Netflix at 4 AM). Your heart pumps blood through approximately sixty thousand miles of vessels without requiring a single moment of your active attention, though it does occasionally throw in some extra beats when Yuuta smiles—purely for cardio purposes, obviously.

Somewhere along the way, reaching for Yuuta’s hand had achieved that same effortless status as these other vital life functions. Your fingers would seek his across empty space, guided by some internal navigation system that had apparently updated its core programming when you weren’t paying attention.

It was simply how things worked now. If you and Yuuta were in the same general vicinity and not actively engaged in the serious business of trying to beat up each other for training purposes, your hands were linked. This arrangement had long since shed its flimsy initial justification of “preventing separation in crowds.” You now held hands everywhere and under all circumstances.

In a relentless quest to impose order upon the chaos of human interaction (a futile endeavor if there ever was one), your big beautiful brain had reclassified the behavior from a temporary tactical measure into a permanent fixture of your partnership, which you’d mentally designated “The Unspoken Social Contract Regarding Interpersonal Proximity and Physical Contact.” Because obviously, that’s what normal people call holding hands with their definitely-not-boyfriend, absolutely-just-a-tactical-partner, completely-platonic-battle-buddy.

By your rigorous analysis, the system was efficient. It minimized the need for unnecessary verbal communication regarding spatial positioning and movement coordination. It provided a constant, real-time exchange of tactical information through tactile feedback: you could read Yuuta’s emotional state through the tension in his grip. Was he relaxed? Anxious? Approximately thirty seconds away from accidentally unleashing Rika because someone had committed the cardinal sin of taking the last chocolate pudding cup? All critical intelligence, really, essential for maintaining optimal unit cohesion and preventing unnecessary civilian casualties.

The fact that holding his hand also felt nice was an irrelevant data point. A pleasant but ultimately inconsequential byproduct of an otherwise sound strategic decision. The warmth that spread up your arm from where your palms touched was simply efficient heat transfer. Nothing that warranted deeper analysis or, heaven forbid, deeper emotional introspection.

You were, as had been extensively documented, a creature of scientific objectivity. You dealt in facts. And the facts clearly supported the tactical advantages of your current hand-holding protocols.

Of course, you were the only one who viewed this development through such a clinical lens. To everyone else, you were quite obviously dating Yuuta. And your spectacular inability to realize this fact had become the single greatest source of entertainment on campus, surpassing even the time Gojo had gotten his head stuck in the vending machine.

Unbeknownst to your blissfully oblivious self, your remarkable talent for romantic blindness had spawned a campus-wide conspiracy reaching from the highest administrative offices down to the grimiest corners of the equipment storage rooms, where even the forgotten mops were shipping you two.

Ijichi and Nitta had discreetly thrown their considerable logistical resources behind Panda’s ever-expanding operation, leading to a suspicious surge in “critical two-person surveillance assignments” that just so happened to be in scenic locations such as sunset stakeouts overlooking the bay or reconnaissance missions in botanical gardens. 

You’d written this pattern off as typical administrative incompetence and poor resource allocation. In reality, it was poor Ijichi, sweating through his collar while frantically engineering romantic opportunities, while Nitta cheered him on from the sidelines and occasionally offered tactical advice gleaned from her extensive collection of romance novels.

Even Hakari and Kirara, despite being technically suspended and theoretically banned from campus grounds, had decided that their exile was no reason to miss out on what was shaping up to be the greatest rom-com disaster in modern history. They’d shown up unannounced one afternoon, ostensibly to “check on old friends” but actually to conduct reconnaissance on the situation everyone was talking about.

Hakari had taken one look at you and Yuuta strolling past the main courtyard—hand in hand, sharing a drink (same straw, because why create unnecessary plastic waste when you could create unnecessary sexual tension instead?), while you explained to him in excruciating detail the tactical advantages of always carrying zip ties—and had immediately slapped down a fat stack of cash.

“Two hundred thousand yen says they don’t figure it out until one of them is actively dying in the other’s arms,” Hakari declared with the confidence of a seasoned gambler. “Five-to-one odds that it’s the Hellraiser. Last words will be something stupid like ‘My research notes are in the third drawer down, and remember to feed the cursed squirrels.’”

“Too cliché,” Kirara countered, delicately placing their own bet. “I’m putting money on an accidental wedding. They’ll sign up for some couples-only contest for tactical reasons and somehow end up legally married without noticing until someone congratulates them on their honeymoon.”

In Panda’s room, a large whiteboard hung on the far wall. It had been “permanently borrowed” from Lecture Hall C during an evacuation drill when everyone had been too busy running away from Gojo to notice Panda casually wheeling away institutional property. Now it served as the nerve center for the operation. At the top, the mission statement declared itself in bold, uncompromising letters that had been written, erased, and rewritten multiple times until the perfect level of exasperation was achieved:

OPERATION: CLUELESS MORONS (AKA THE DENSA BET)

Current Odds on When These Idiots Finally Get Their Shit Together

Below this admirably direct heading, the board was a sprawling ecosystem of names, odds, betting amounts, and increasingly unhinged predictions that suggested the entire school had perhaps too much free time and not nearly enough healthy recreational activities, or therapy, for that matter. Color-coded sections had been established with sub-categories, cross-references, and what appeared to be a small shrine dedicated to a photograph of you and Yuuta sharing an umbrella (completely unaware that someone had been documenting your weather-related cooperation).

WHEN WILL THEY FIGURE IT OUT?

• Panda: Within the month (Odds: 3-1. Bet: His prized collection of bamboo shoot recipes and three months of cafeteria dessert privileges. Justification: “Come on! Senpai’s literally seen his dick, for fuck’s sake! Biology has to kick in eventually!”)
• Toge: Soon. (Bet: A packet of premium kombu and his emergency stash of throat lozenges. Justification: “Salmon roe.” Translation uncertain. Additional betting slip included a crude drawing of two stick figures holding hands with question marks over their heads.)
• Maki: Same day Gojo develops humility. (Odds: 1,000,000-1. Bet: 10,000 yen. Justification: “So, never. They’ll die holding hands and still insist it’s for tactical reasons.”)
• Gojo (via text messages to Panda at 3 AM): The moment it causes maximum public embarrassment. (Bet: A crate of limited-edition Kikufuku mochi, two premium shopping vouchers, and something called “the nuclear option” that no one was brave enough to ask about. Justification: “My money’s on them having a life-altering epiphany in the middle of an exorcism, right after one of them gets impaled.”)
• Ijichi: Official confession before the fiscal year ends. (Bet: His dignity and what remained of his sanity. Justification: “I have assigned them fourteen additional low-risk, high-proximity missions in romantic locations to facilitate this outcome.” Success rate to date: 0%. Current psychological state: Declining. This entry was accompanied by an actual mission schedule.)
• Hakari (entry submitted via unsanctioned campus visit): Death scene confession. (Bet: 200,000 yen in cash. Justification: “Maximum dramatic payoff. You always go all-in on the final scene.” Additional Side-Bet: 5-to-1 odds that Spices’s last words will be about research notes and cursed squirrels.)
• Nanami (recent addition): During a moment of extreme exhaustion when their defenses are compromised. (Bet: A bottle of expensive whiskey. Justification: “Emotional breakthroughs typically occur when the prefrontal cortex is operating at suboptimal capacity.”)

WHO CRACKS FIRST?

This section was notably shorter, largely due to the fact that it represented the single point of near-universal agreement in the entire operation.

• Unanimous Vote (Minus Maki): Yuuta, obviously. The reasoning was scrawled across multiple handwritings: “More emotionally literate,” “Actually capable of introspection,” and “Literally anyone would crack before that dense-ass human disaster.” The odds were so low on this one that Panda wasn’t even accepting bets, having concluded that taking money on what amounted to a statistical certainty would constitute fraud.
• Maki’s Official Stance (written in red ink for maximum dramatic impact): “A meteor will strike the earth and end all human civilization before either of these idiots manages to string together a coherent romantic sentence, let alone an actual confession.” Someone had drawn a small meteor next to this entry with trailing flames and tiny screaming faces.

CATALYST FOR REVELATION?

• Panda: “A carefully orchestrated romantic setting engineered by me, of course.”
• Toge: Accidental kiss. (“Tuna mayo, extra pickled plums!”—his most passionate prediction yet, though the exact meaning remained diplomatically untranslated.)
• Shoko (late but enthusiastic entry): Medical emergency. (Bet: One carton of cigarettes and a medical textbook on trauma surgery, barely used. Justification: “Nothing says ‘I love you’ like massive blood loss and the possibility of permanent disability. Trust me, I’m a doctor.”)
• Maki: “Divine intervention, and even then I’m not optimistic.”
• Nitta: 10,000 yen on “accidental kiss during a mission gone wrong,” with a sub-bet on whether it would happen before or after the building collapsed. (Additional note: “I’ve been engineering opportunities for three months. So far, they’ve missed seventeen separate chances. SEVENTEEN.”)
• Kirara (accomplice to the above unauthorized visit): Accidental marriage through bureaucratic mishap or elaborate misunderstanding. (Bet: A professional gambling kit. Justification: “Their obliviousness can only be overcome by legally binding paperwork that they’ll sign without reading because they trust each other completely.”)

At the bottom of the board, in Panda’s increasingly desperate and somewhat manic handwriting, a recent section read:

EMERGENCY INTERVENTIONS UNDER CONSIDERATION

• Lock them in a supply closet together (Status: REJECTED. Reasoning: “No locks in existence can contain Spices, who has once escaped a haunted bank vault using paperclips, spite, and basic engineering principles.”)
• Fake supernatural emergency requiring “couple’s bonding ritual” for exorcism (Status: UNDER REVIEW. Concerns raised about potential ethical implications and Yaga’s likely reaction to the paperwork. Also, they might actually try to research historical precedents instead of just making out like normal people.)
• Sex pollen smut trope (Status: VIOLENTLY CROSSED OUT by Maki after she delivered what witnesses described as “a professionally executed bonking” to Panda’s skull using a conveniently placed textbook.)
• Get Gojo to “accidentally” reveal their feelings to each other (Status: REJECTED. Risk assessment concluded: “Too unpredictable. Might end in psychological trauma.”)
• Hire actors to pretend to be a cursed spirit that only attacks single people (Status: ABANDONED due to budget constraints and what Ijichi had noted as “serious concerns about insurance liability.”)

While bets were placed and plans were made, conspiracy theories flourished and romantic interventions were debated, the subjects of this unhinged operation remained blissfully oblivious. You and Yuuta were in the back room of Shoko’s lab, where a collection of demonic squirrels resided in a series of reinforced steel cages that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a maximum-security supernatural prison. 

The cages themselves were arranged along the far wall, each one marked with hand-lettered warning signs in Shoko’s messy scrawl, tracking her descent into rodent-induced madness: 

“DO NOT FEED” (written normally)

“SERIOUSLY DON’T” (underlined three times)

“KEEP YOUR FINGERS AWAY FROM THE BARS YOU IDIOTS” (accompanied by crude drawings of dismembered digits)

“IF YOU LOSE A FINGER IT’S YOUR OWN FAULT AND I’M NOT REATTACHING IT” (written in what appeared to be blood, but was probably just red marker... probably).

These particular rodents were the result of one of Gojo’s more questionable gift-giving decisions. Nothing says “I value our lifelong friendship” quite like a massive cage with a bow on top, containing approximately forty possessed woodland creatures. Most of the original subjects hadn’t survived the combination of possession and subsequent exorcism attempts, but the survivors… Well. The survivors had adapted. Evolved. Developed a taste for vengeance.

Shoko had officially kept them for “research purposes.” However, given that she spent most of her time drinking, recovering from drinking, or contemplating the philosophical implications of drinking, the actual care of these hellspawn had fallen to you. This arrangement suited everyone just fine. Shoko got to keep her “pets” without actually having to risk life and limb feeding them, and you got test subjects for your ongoing research into cursed creature behavioral patterns, social hierarchies among possessed wildlife, and whether evil could be reasonably quantified on a numeric scale (current findings: yes, and these squirrels were breaking it).

Also, and you’d never admit this out loud where anyone could use it as ammunition, you’d grown a little attached to the little demons. They were terrible, yes, but they were your terrible things, and there was something satisfying about being the only person who could handle them without dying.

Beelzebub, the undisputed leader of this furry legion of doom, was a particularly magnificent specimen of evil. The size of a small cat (and growing, which was concerning), with red eyes that literally glowed in the dark (sometimes in the light, just to show off) and tiny horns growing from his head that definitely weren’t there when Gojo first wheeled him in, Beelzebub had earned his biblical name by organizing coordinated attacks on anyone who dared come close to his cage without proper tribute (proper tribute being premium grade walnuts, nothing less).

The rest of the unholy squad included:

• Lady Morticia, a sleek black female with an extra tail who had mastered the art of appearing in places she definitely shouldn’t be able to reach. You’d found her in the ceiling tiles twice, in a locked filing cabinet once, and somehow inside a sealed jar of pickles last week.
• Professor Doom, the smallest but smartest one, a grey squirrel barely larger than your fist but possessed of a terrifying intelligence. He’d figured out how to pick locks and regularly attempted prison breaks, often succeeding in liberating himself and at least two accomplices before you discovered the jailbreak in progress.
• Sir Stripey, a chipmunk who’d somehow gotten mixed in with the squirrel population and survived through sheer spite and territorial aggression. His stripes glowed faintly blue when he was agitated, which was always. Even Beelzebub gave him a wide berth during feeding time.
• Potato, a round, golden-furred squirrel whose appearance belied her capacity for violence. She’d earned her deceptively benign name during the first week, when you’d observed her perfect spherical shape and made the mistake of saying she looked “exactly like a little potato.” She’d immediately demonstrated that potatoes, when cursed and given teeth, could be deadly. You still had the scar on your wrist where she’d bitten through leather gloves.

Yuuta had been quite nervous when you’d first introduced him to them several months ago. The cursed squirrels had taken an immediate and intense dislike to him, possibly sensing Rika’s presence, or possibly just because they were judgmental little bastards. Either way, they recognized him as a fellow cursed being, but definitely not accepting him as part of their evil little family. They’d hissed and attempted to bite him through the cage bars. Beelzebub had thrown himself repeatedly against the steel, making the entire structure shudder.

You’d simply hissed back louder and with more conviction, baring your own teeth and making a guttural sound in the back of your throat that you’d picked up from observing their social dynamics. The squirrels had paused, cocked their heads in unison, and seemed to respect that power move in the way that ancient evil respects more competent evil. It probably helped that you frequently supplied them with really fancy nuts.

“Are you sure this is safe?” Yuuta had asked back then, backing away with barely concealed horror as you stuck your fingers through the bars to scratch Beelzebub’s head, the squirrel alternating between accepting the pets and trying to remove your fingertips.

“They’re not that bad once you get to know them,” you’d assured him with the confidence of someone who’d never developed functional self-preservation instincts and considered “nearly fatal” to be an acceptable risk level for scientific discovery. “Besides, Beelzebub only tries to eat people he doesn’t know yet. We’ve worked out an understanding. He pretends to bite me, I pretend to be scared, everyone’s happy.”

At first, Yuuta had been baffled by your ability to care for these clearly evil creatures. But then he’d remembered. You’d done the same for him, hadn’t you? That was you all over. Seeing the scariest things and loving them anyway.

While others had run from Rika (entirely justified), you had marched right up to her with a pack of sparkly unicorn stickers and declared yourself her new best friend. Yuuta had been certain he was about to witness a murder. His heart had stopped, then restarted at triple speed as he’d prepared to throw himself between you and Rika, to beg, to do anything to prevent another person from being hurt because of him. 

Instead, Rika had glowered down at your beaming face and then… carefully, almost gently, plucked the sticker sheet from your hands, examining it with wonder. Miraculously, she’d allowed you to put the stickers on her claws one by one. You’d chattered the entire time, spinning stories about unicorns and their magical properties, while Rika actually listened with rapt attention, making soft sounds that Yuuta had never heard from her before in all their years together. Sounds that reminded him of the little girl she’d once been.

Unlike the others, you hadn’t just tolerated Rika. You’d brought games to play with her—simple ones at first, then increasingly complex as you’d figured out her cognitive abilities and preferences. Board games, card tricks, drawing exercises. You loved her like a little sister, loved her like she was an essential part of him rather than a curse to be exorcised or a weapon to be wielded, and that had meant more to Yuuta than he’d ever found the words to express.

To this day, Yuuta was still afraid of the squirrels—a reasonable response to creatures that defied natural law and possessed both teeth and grudges. But he loved watching you take care of them from what he considered a safe distance (which was still too close, given these particular squirrels’ demonstrated jumping range and Professor Doom’s track record of achieving the impossible). 

There was something mesmerizing about it though, the way you moved within this space that existed at the intersection of science and supernatural horror. The way your voice could shift from hissing to cooing in the span of a breath. The way the squirrels responded to you with a grudging respect, they showed no one else. When you spoke, they listened. When you reached into their cages, they might attempt a token bite for dignity’s sake, but they never truly hurt you. You existed in your own category in their tiny cursed minds: not food, not threat, but something else. Pack leader, perhaps, or possibly the concept of “mother” filtered through several layers of demonic possession and rodent neurology.

In the present, you were currently engaged in your daily ritual of arguing with Beelzebub over his food preferences while restocking their supplies. 

“Listen here, you little shit,” you lectured, wielding the bag of hazelnut nuts, your other hand planted firmly on your hip in what Yuuta had come to recognize as your “I mean business” stance. “We’ve discussed this. Multiple times. You can’t survive on premium almonds alone. Do you have any idea what these things cost? There’s only so many times I can ‘borrow’ Gojo-sensei’s credit card before he notices something’s up.”

Beelzebub chittered back what was most certainly squirrel profanity, his tiny body puffing up like an angry demonic pompom as his tail lashed behind him.

“Don’t you take that tone with me, young man,” you shot back without missing a beat, hissing impressively enough that even Yuuta felt an instinctive urge to back away. The squirrel actually looked somewhat chastised, his tail drooping fractionally as his ears flattened against his skull. They’d learned early on to respect your superior hissing skills. “You’ll eat your regular nuts and be grateful, or so help me, there will be consequences. No cashews for a month. No macadamias. And you can forget about those fancy candied walnuts.”

There was a long moment of standoff, apex predators locked in a battle of wills that transcended species. Beelzebub’s red eyes glowed infernally. You stared back, unblinking. The other squirrels had stopped their various activities to watch. Finally, Beelzebub deigned to accept the hazelnut, though he made a show of examining it for a full minute before taking the smallest possible bite. 

“Ha!” you declared triumphantly, your whole face lighting up with victory as you deposited several more hazelnuts into his food dish. “See? Was that so hard?”

Beelzebub released a rapid-fire series of clicks and chirps, definitely something deeply insulting in squirrel-demon language, but he was eating the hazelnuts. The others had returned to their activities, the crisis averted, the hierarchy reestablished. You counted it as a win.

As Yuuta watched this bewildering scene, he felt the familiar twist of insecurity coil around his heart. The feeling was old and comfortable in its discomfort, worn smooth by repetition: that sensation of being too much and not enough simultaneously, of being fundamentally unworthy of good things, of taking up space he hadn’t earned.

How had he gotten so lucky? What had he done to deserve someone who could look at cursed creatures—whether they were powerful spirits or tiny evil squirrels—and see something worth loving? The answer, he knew with the cold certainty of long-held belief, was nothing. He’d done nothing to deserve you and probably was just one mistake away from you realizing you’d made an error in judgment.

But then you finished refilling the water dispensers, dusting off your hands with an accomplished flourish, and bounced over to him with a smile that made his heart stutter. Your hand found his, and you pulled him toward the door. 

"Come on!” you urged. “I heard the cafeteria has chocolate pudding today, and I need backup in case Panda tries to take all of it again. Last time he ate seven cups before anyone could stop him, and I’m not letting that happen twice. This is a matter of principle now. Justice must be served. Also, I really want pudding.”

You pulled him outside, away from the dim laboratory and the sulfurous air and the chittering of demonic creatures plotting their next escape attempt, out into the afternoon sun. The light hit your face at just the right angle as you turned to grin at him over your shoulder, briefly turning your eyes into something between amber and gold, making them sparkle with that intoxicating blend of mischief and brilliance that never failed to take his breath away. Your hand was warm, your presence solid and real and wonderful, and Yuuta made a silent promise to himself. 

Because you loved cursed squirrels and malevolent spirits and had an absolutely terrible habit of poking dangerous things to see what would happen, he would become stronger. Strong enough to watch out for you while you conducted your crazy experiments, brave enough to follow you into whatever nightmare you decided to investigate next, worthy of being the person you reached for without thinking.

It seemed like a reasonable goal. An achievable one, even, if he was being optimistic. Lately, he’d found himself leaning toward optimism more often than not, a fundamental shift in worldview that he attributed entirely to your influence. If he worked hard enough and survived long enough, and maybe convinced Gojo to actually take his training seriously for once.

The sun was warm on his face. Your hand was perfect in his. Somewhere ahead, there was chocolate pudding to be defended from Panda. The world smelled like summer and possibility.

Life, Yuuta thought as you dragged him along the sun-dappled path, was pretty good actually. Better than good. Better than he’d ever imagined it could be when he’d been a terrified, lonely boy who thought the best thing he could do for the world was disappear from it and spare everyone the collateral damage of his existence.

Even if he didn’t deserve this life yet, he’d work on becoming someone who did. It would take time. It would take effort. It would probably involve more demonic squirrels and more of your unhinged schemes and more moments when his heart forgot how to beat properly because you were just there. But Yuuta had always been patient, had always been willing to work for the things that mattered. 

The cafeteria doors loomed ahead, and through the windows, he could already see Panda making a beeline for the dessert counter.

“Quick,” you said, shoving him forward. “This is it, Yuuta. This is what all your training has been for. Don’t let senpai down.”

Yuuta laughed. Yeah. Life was pretty good.