Chapter Text
The line between toothpaste and peppermint is too thin.
Suguru pushes the candy to his cheek, giving his brain a moment to split the good from the bad, but they still taste the same. Peppermint still tastes like fighting nausea over the bathroom sink. He spits the candy into a nearby trash can.
This mission should be simple—recover a single cursed object from a high school in Sendai—but he’s failing. He can’t find anything remotely resembling the cursed object or its residuals. To make matters worse, there aren’t any low level curses roaming around the campus; so either he’s simply overlooking the object, which is pathetic, or there is a legitimate threat lying in wait nearby.
Classes ended over three hours ago. Only the after-school clubs remain, and from where he stands on the sidewalk, the windows remind him vaguely of fishbowls—overhead lighting illuminating the occupied rooms, each holding their little pocket of life, of students laughing and studying and being young. Doing all of the things that non-sorcerers can do that Geto Suguru cannot.
He’s had ample time to speak with the administrative staff but he thinks, in his current state, he could not walk the halls without gagging; and he doubts negotiations would end favorably if he spent them burying his nose in his collar.
Suguru is standing two long strides from the entrance, breathing into his sleeve, when his senses go haywire. The massive presence scaring all the low-level curses away has reached the other side of these doors. Watching him, probably. With all these non-sorcerers around. Suguru has been anything but subtle, and fuck, he’s such an idiot—of course the campus is desolate, with this thing around. This feels like—like death, like he’s a bug pinned to a collector’s board and they’re staring at him from above.
Fear rings from the base of his brainstem—less like an alarm and more like the tolling of bells—and Suguru should be running, he knows. But his will is weaker than whatever lies in wait on the other side of those doors. He isn’t sure he wants to run, anymore. If he has the strength to care where his body ends up.
The doors do not crash open, in the end. There are no shattered windows, shards of glass against his skin; no property damage to write on his mission report.
Instead, a little boy pushes the door open with both hands, looks up at Suguru with red-rimmed caramel eyes, and says, “You need to go in?”
Suguru should ask about the cursed residuals echoing from the boy’s backpack. He should ask about the monster hiding behind the door that seems to have vanished into thin air. Instead, he asks, “Why are you here?”
The boy says, “The nurse office. Are you going in?” His voice is nasally, a little warbled; but he looks up at Suguru like he would wait forever, with his tiny hands holding the door, if that’s how long Suguru needs to make up his mind. It’s a little disorienting to be caught in such patient eyes. It's just an open door, really, but Suguru can’t remember the last time someone looked at him that way.
Suguru shoves his hands into his pockets and focuses on how the earth feels beneath his boots. Once his cursed energy settles around his skin like a blanket instead of a live wire, he feels grounded enough to speak without shaking. “No, I’m not. But thank you for holding the door. That was very kind.”
The boy sniffles as he nods. He wipes his nose with the sleeve of his sweatshirt (gross), but there are tear-tracks below his eyes. “Bye bye.” Then he walks away, small red sneakers against the pavement, and Suguru scrambles to follow. He catches sight of a decorated nametag hooked to the zipper of his backpack, but the words quickly become too far away for him to read.
Suguru has a harder time catching up than he probably should, which is vaguely humiliating, and he’s grateful that the lawn between the high school and middle school seems to have emptied out by this point in the evening. When they’re finally walking side by side, Suguru feels dizzy with the familiar cocktail of waning adrenaline and persistent exhaustion—maybe he should have eaten today, he thinks. Or maybe he’d be hurling the contents of his stomach into the grass right now, if there were anything in his stomach at all.
The boy—Itadori, according to the ‘This bag belongs to: Itadori Yuuji’ nametag, which is plastered with clumsily-placed stickers of paw prints and tiger cubs—glances over as he walks, and those innocent eyes are still glassy. His hair is a light pink shade that Suguru would otherwise doubt to be natural, considering the undercut is dark brown, but he’s so young that it's hard to tell. Resting on the curve of his cheekbones are two mirrored scars that Suguru hadn’t noticed earlier. One beneath each eye, so cleanly lined they appear intentional—like someone took a thin blade to either side of Itadori’s face, tracing half-moons into the fragile skin of his under-eyes the same way people trace their makeup and tattoos.
Suguru tries to keep his tone as gentle as possible when he asks, “Hey, kid. Are you alright?”
“Mhm. ‘m goin’ to the playground,” Itadori says, as if that fixes everything. If the speed of his walk is any indication, he likely believes it will.
Suguru finds his stride eventually, but holy shit, this kid is moving. They’ve settled into a pace that Suguru would place on the upper end of casual, but any non-sorcerer would be stumbling to keep up. Itadori doesn’t even notice.
“Would you mind if I came with you? I haven’t been to a playground in a while,” Suguru offers. He wants to ask about the cursed residuals leaking from the boy’s backpack, but he can’t just yet. He wants to get the hell off this campus and throw the mission back in Yaga’s face, but he can’t do that either. There are only two special grades at jujutsu tech, and while Suguru wouldn't launch an interrogation on a visibly upset kindergardener, Satoru might. Satoru approaches things with about as much tact as throwing bricks through glass windows. Probably less, actually.
Asking to come along is the right move, because the kid turns to Suguru with an expression so hopeful that Suguru feels a pang of guilt deep in his chest.
“You can come play! I’m gonna miss the playground when I get to the big school. You don’t get a playground anymore when you get to the big school.” Itadori does a little skip as they round the corner of the middle school, and then immediately takes off to the climbing dome.
Suguru can’t help but smile a little at that. He’s too tall for most of the equipment, so he pulls himself up above the monkey bars to sit on top of the frame. “You’re right. There’s no playground at the big school. It’s very different from yours, isn’t it.” Itadori is not as impressed by his acrobatics as he’d expected him to be. He’s too focused on the climbing dome.
“They don’t put their drawings on the walls.” Itadori reaches the top and drops inside, swinging his legs back and forth. He’s incredibly coordinated for such a young kid. Suguru expected to be guiding him back down the structure by now. “I walked in there and there was nothing on them. And there’s lockers,” Itadori says.
Suguru hums in agreement. He doesn’t have a locker.
“How did you end up in the nurse’s office? You’re cleared to run around, right?” Suguru realizes, “I should have asked you that before we got here, I think.”
Itadori frowns, looking about as dejected about his trip to the nurse as any small child would be—which is to say, overwhelmingly. Suguru expects Itadori to say something like ‘I got sick,’ or ‘I scraped my knee.’ He does not expect; “I ate something bad at recess.”
“Huh. You guys get snacks during recess? I didn’t get that when I was your age.”
Itadori shakes his head, staring off into space. The nurse’s office really did a number on him, apparently. “No. We don’t get snacks outside.”
“You don’t? What did you eat, then?”
“I dunno.”
And that’s—okay. Suguru is the last person who should be saying this, really. He knows. But isn’t Itadori a little too old to be eating random shit off the ground?
Suguru puts on his best kindergarden teacher voice, and bites down the knee-jerk reflex to say, Why the fuck would you do that? “Why… did you eat it then? If you didn’t know what it was?”
Itadori shrugs. He’s pondering something serious, in that tiny brain of his. He wrings his hands as he looks up, like he’s still deciding whether Suguru is worth telling.
Suguru wouldn’t believe the reasoning from any other kid, because it’s such a stereotypical ‘hand-in-the-cookie-jar’ response; but Itadori’s face is determined, his eyes wide and so, so honest, that Suguru finds himself believing; “It told me to.”
Which is not good. Arguably worst-case-scenario bad, actually. He scans Itadori’s cursed energy as it wraps evenly around his body, dense and controlled—too calm for a non-sorcerer, not to mention one so young. There’s an unnerving stability in the way it curls over his shoulders, subdued. Dormant, Suguru thinks.
Fuck, he can’t believe he didn’t notice sooner. The signs were right in front of his face this whole time, since the moment Itadori stepped through the entrance doors.
“They didn’t believe me when I told them. But it did, though. It was talking and I heard it so I got it out the box. It wanted me to get it out,” Itadori continues, his voice quiet but steady, as though he’s sure of himself regardless of what the nurses have said. “It’s still talking to me. It’s not very nice.
“They gave me a juice that makes you throw up in the nurse office but it didn't come back up. Just my lunch, and it didn’t even look like my lunch. It hurt but they said I had to. I couldn’t get it out. It laughed at me so I knew it was still in there.”
Suguru needs to call jujutsu tech right now. He needs to wipe the mission off the books.
But Itadori needs to talk about the terrible day he’s had, and that takes precedence. Suguru needs to listen, since no one else has.
Suguru doesn’t know what vitriol Itadori has been subjected to for the past few hours, or what he’s watching right now from behind the distant look in his eyes. As Suguru looks down to where Itadori stands under the climbing dome, still wringing his hands (still small enough to grasp the bars without touching the ground, for his only worry to be losing his untied shoes as he climbs from one side to the other), he mourns for the normalcy neither of them will ever know. He mourns for who Itadori could have been, if his constitution were slightly different.
Itadori has a responsibility, now—one far too heavy for his small shoulders to bear and understand. One that is not his fault.
He feels the familiar hatred that reaches up from the pit of his stomach, wrapping its dirty claws around his heart and sinking its teeth into the meat for another bite. As though his heart is meant to be consumed this way, torn apart in the feed of his anger, until all Suguru has left to source through his veins are the acids of anger’s maw. Until there’s nothing left of himself to be.
Suguru is just… so fucking tired. He’s tired of fighting, of spit and vomit, of the bile that stings the back of this throat when he lays down to sleep at night. And now there’s another boy who will end up like the rest of them—beaten, exhausted, dead—staring up at him from between the metal bars of playground equipment and Suguru wants to shout, run away and never look back. Don’t let them have you. Suguru wants to follow.
That makes him a bad person, he thinks. But he doesn’t want to be a martyr. He doesn’t want to make sacrifices that err toward suicide. He doesn’t want to be strong, if all his strength is poured into a system that chews it up and spits it out onto the shoes of the next generation.
Suguru wants to stop feeling so tired.
He drops down from the bars and walks over to Itadori’s backpack, only a few feet from where Itadori stands, watching him.
“The box is in here, right? I can feel its energy.”
Itadori’s eyes go wide, pointing at the bag as if he isn’t sure Suguru can truly see it. “You can feel it?” He asks, and the words are fragile in the air, a promise offered up to be broken.
Suguru sits down on the rubber padding of the playground floor. It’s softer than he expected. “I can. I believe you.”
Then Suguru is holding the weight of the boy in his arms, having been tackled into a pile of shaking hands and unnatural strength. He tucks Itadori close to his chest, where his heart beats, and pats his back as he cries. Suguru doesn’t know what he’s doing. He didn’t have any younger siblings, and for all that he’d done his best to reassure Riko, she was at least 14—and she’d died, in the end.
Itadori trusts him enough to cry in his arms. How could Suguru even begin to explain what lies ahead of him? How could he promise such a small child, “It’ll be okay,” when he has told that lie before?
He doesn’t know. For now, he hugs the boy a little tighter and lets him cry. Even though Itadori is stepping on his pants and going to leave dirty shoeprints behind. Even though there is definitely snot on his uniform shirt, now, and he’d asked Itadori if he had tissues in his backpack and he’d said no.
Sukuna hasn’t taken kindly to his new status. He’s loud, even while dormant. Yet somehow, subconsciously, Itadori’s control is ironclad even as the King of Curses hovers beneath his skin. Suguru knows it's too fortunate to be a coincidence that Itadori is still standing as himself and not a corpse, or that a vessel perfectly compatible with a 4000 year old cursed object was born only streets away from where the object was hidden. Suguru knows that jujutsu sorcery would have found Itadori regardless—it just so happened to find him young.
He mourns who the boy could have been, still. Suguru holds an arm around Itadori’s narrow shoulders and thinks, these bones do not know the weight they carry. They do not know what they were made for.
Itadori finally lets go. If it weren’t for the snot across his shirt, Suguru would be tempted to assume nothing had happened at all; Itadori is smiling brightly as he rushes to his backpack for the cursed object.
The box is worn with age. The wood is splintering enough that Suguru makes a point not to drag his fingers, but the Buddhist sutra painted on the lid remains clear. This case had held one of Ryomen Sukuna’s fingers until this afternoon, when a small child decided to shatter centuries of jujutsu precaution with one bite.
Suguru sends a quick text to Shoko with the school address;
you: meet here now. secret
shoko: u ok?
you: ye
you: hurry tho
shoko: k
“My friend is on her way here. Her name is Shoko, and she’s like us. We can talk about the box and figure out what to do next. Is that okay?”
Itadori nods as he runs over to the balance beam, not even listening—he’s moved on to better things, clearly. Suguru is tempted to join him, but he settles for sitting on one of the lower bars and swinging his legs until Shoko arrives.