Chapter Text
“Gather round, children,” Gojo says, trying and failing to seem mysterious, “And let us embark on an adventure.”
“We’re not kids, Gojo-sensei,” Megumi drawls. Yuki feels lingering resentment from yesterday, so she ignores him out of spite.
“We shall be going on an adventure,” He says, drawing out his words, “to… Tokyo!”
“Wait, really?!” Yuki grins, “We are?”
“We are!” Nobara says, similarly giddy with excitement.
“If you both would quiet down, I’ll announce our destination.” They both hush, still jittering with energy.
“Roppongi!”
They end up at a dump in the worst part of the beautiful city of Roppongi. The air stinks of cursed energy, miasma flowing out in waves from the abandoned office building. Yuki wrinkles her nose along with Nobara. “Liar!” Nobara screams, Nobara’s more angry than her. Yuki’s bad start to the day, along with what happened with Sukuna has soured her mood enough to make Gojo’s ruse seem irrelevant. Nobara winds down, huffing as she finishes her rant.
“There’s a big cemetery nearby,” He says, “That, plus an abandoned building and you’ve got a curse.”
“So they pop up around graves?” She asks, tilting her head at the sight.
“It’s not the graves themselves rather than the fear and uneasiness associated with them.” Megumi turns to her, annoyingly helpful. She decides to ignore her hatred for him momentarily.
“Curses are born from fear, right?” She asks.
“Generally, b-” He starts, but is interrupted.
“Wait!” Nobara says, stopping stomping around, to turn to look at her incredulously, “he didn’t even know that yet?”
She flinches, avoiding Nobara’s eyes. The gesture draws attention from Megumi and Gojo, who both turn to stare at her in creepy unison. There’s an awkward pause as she avoids their eyes. Once the silence is suitably awkward, Gojo speaks up.
“He ate Sukuna’s Finger,” he says, voice oddly cheery. She flinches again at the reminder, trying very hard not to think about that night.
“He swallowed a Special Grade cursed object?!” Nobara shouts, “Gross! That’s so unsanitary and discusting I want to hurl!” Yuki does not point out the whole point was that it was disgusting.
“I want to know what the three of you are capable of,” Gojo says, then turns to her, “But before we do that, Yuki, swallow this.” He throws a finger of Sukuna’s to her, which she catches easily. She looks down at it, then back up at Gojo.
“Now?”
“Why not? I meant to give it to you before but I kind of forgot, so…” She blinks, then shrugs and puts it in her mouth. It takes a long minute to get down her throat, angrily scrapping along her throat again. The taste throws her back to her house, to where she tried to kill herself, to the forest where Sukuna fought Gojo and Gojo won.
There’s a familiar rush of power, of energy. She blacks out for the tiniest of moments before suppressing Sukuna and coming back to her body. He yells obscenities against her family and friends and Gojo, but she easily ignores them.
“How interesting,” Gojo murmurs, leaning in. She stares into the blindfold, wondering momentarily what his eyes look like. He leans back out suddenly, clapping. “Yuki and Kugisaki, you two go in there and exorcize any curses in there.”
Yuki blinks. “How are we supposed to do that? I don’t know how to use cursed energy,” Gojo holds out a large, ornate cleaver in response.
“This is Slaughter Demon, a cursed tool. It’s embedded with cursed energy, so you can kill curses with it,” he says. Yuki takes it, throwing it in her hand experimentally.
“Only a curse can kill a curse,” she muses. Gojo blinks.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Sukuna told me in the forest.” Nobara starts toward the building.
“Did he now?” Gojo mutters, looking away. Yuki takes that as an end to the conversation and starts to follow her. He glances back at her suddenly, “Oh, and Yuki?” she turns around, “don’t let Sukuna out.”
“Why?”
“While you’d wipe out any curses in the area… you’d also wipe out any humans as well,” her eyes widen. She nods in acknowledgement and follows Nobara inside the building.
“What a pain…” Grumbles Nobara once they’re inside, “I came all the way to Tokyo and the first thing I get to do is take care of curses?”
“Aren’t you here to expel curses?” Yuki asks, following behind her.
“Let’s split up,” She says, ignoring Yuki, “You go from the bottom up, and I’ll go from the top to the bottom. We’ll meet in the middle. We can get sushi after!”
“Wait! Shouldn’t you be taking this more seriously?” She says, grabbing Nobara’s arm to stop her from heading upstairs, “Curses are dangerous, don’t you know?” She sees the movement a split second before she’s being pushed down the stairs. She lands on her feet, thankfully.
“Why’s a newbie like you telling me off?! Get going!” She says, stomping up the stairs.
“This is why girls don’t like you!”
“What?! How do you know that?!” She says, spinning around to find Nobara calmly walking up the stairs. “Are you even popular enough to talk…?” she mumbles, turning around spitefully and going downstairs.
Yuki looks around, scanning the area for the source of the familiar choking presence in the air. She finds it when it snaps its jaws at her from where it hangs over the ceiling. She jumps back, watching carefully as it lowers itself to the ground with its six insect-like legs. It tilts its head, one askew eye blinking carefully at her. Yuki leaps away as it lunges at her, dropping to the floor and letting the knife slice through its vulnerable underbelly. It spins, jumping on top of her and trying to stab through her stomach with one of its sharp legs. She rolls, slicing the front two legs off and jumping on top, cutting off its head. She sighs as she sits on the body, looking down at the knife with barely-concealed awe.
Yuki, deciding that while Nobara was rude she didn’t deserve to be left on her own, starts upstairs. She goes up to the floor where she can sense the blob of her unfamiliar cursed energy. Nobara is fighting a weak curse that has another, weaker… curse? Person? Next to it. Yuki speeds up, approaching the wall the curse has taken residence near. She braces herself, punching through the wall and aiming for the curse. When her fist doesn’t connect, she groans, “Did I miss?” She asks absolutely no one, before she takes her fist out of the wall and rams into it, breaking through. She manages to cut the hand holding the little boy off. She grabs him and puts him in her lap before she dashes under the curse, ending up next to the mannequins. “You alright?” She asks the little boy. He nods slightly, looking up at her with hero-worshiping eyes.
Yuki’s head snaps up as the curse giggles from around a corner.
“He’s getting away!” She yells. Nobara spins, hammer (Hammer?) and nails at the ready.
“Oh no you don’t!” she says, “Get back here!” Something – a window, sounds like – crashes from the direction the curse ran. “Itadori! Hand me that arm!” Yuki does without question, watching on as she drops it and a straw doll on the floor. “Straw doll technique!” She shouts, “Resonance!”
There’s a scream from outside. Yuki, still holding the boy, goes over to Nobara.
“I told you it was dangerous!” She says, trying (read: failing) not to yell in front of the kid.
“No, you didn’t!”
“Yes I- wait, did I?”
“Besides, what the hell’re you eating that you can bust through walls like that!?” Fuming, she points over to the Yuki-shaped hole in the wall.
“It wasn’t a cement wall!”
“That is absolutely not the point.”
“You’re asking all these questions, so it’s my turn. Why’d you even come to Jujutsu High, anyway?” She asks, adjusting the kid in her arms.
“I didn’t like living in the middle of nowhere, so I came to Tokyo!”
“...That’s it? You’d risk your life for that?” Yuki wonders aloud.
“Sure,” she says at a normal volume finally, “It’s to stay true to myself.”
Yuki wonders how she can stay true to herself, even when she’s so broken. She’s damaged goods. Who would ever want her?
“And on that note,” Nobara continues, “I’m grateful to you, too.” she leans in to pat the kid on the head, “If I had died, or been the only one to live, the future would have been less bright.”
“So thank you, Yuji,” she smiles, so bright it hurts, and Yuki wonders for the moment if this is what she would have turned out like if she hadn’t decided to be a boy.
“What’s up?!” Gojo says, too happy, “We sent the kid home safe and sound. Time for some grub.”
“Sushi!” She shouts. Yuki holds back a laugh and plays along.
“Steak!”
“The perfect compromise: Sushi and steak. How’s that?” Gojo asks after he’s flirted his way into a Michelin Star restaurant.
“Yeah, yeah, manwhor*,” Nobara says, sitting down with a dramatized huff. (Yuki would have missed the repressed flinch if she weren’t intimately familiar with the action. Distantly, she wonders why.)
Yuki smiles at Gojo as she sits down, taking the menu in her hands and surveying it carefully. She’s never been to a restaurant this fancy before. Despite all the money Jiji had accumulated, he was anything but frivolous with it. He bought a rice cooker forty years ago and still used it in the years up to his hospitalization. The only reason it got thrown out was because along with him being put into the home she got control over his assets - which included the decades-old rice cooker that she promptly threw out.
Well… she thinks, glancing at the menu and refusing to glance at the prices, I did say I wanted a steak. Maybe… a wagyu steak? What is wagyu anyway?
“Yuki!” Gojo sing-songs, “How was your first mission?”
She looks up, “It was okay. Not like I expected.”
“What did you expect?” Megumi asks, looking up from his menu.
“Something like a fight from Naruto, maybe? I don’t know.”
“Naruto?” Nobara asks incredulously, “You thought it would be like Naruto?”
“I’ve never seen curses before! How was I supposed to know what it’d be like?”
She huffs, “We’re fighting curses born from the bad emotions of humanity, why would you think it’s like Naruto?”
“Well- I dunno.” She looks back at her menu and goes back to debating between wagyu and sushi.
“Hi everyone!” A server comes up to them, “I’m Amelia, I’ll be your server for this evening!”
“So, Yuji,” Nobara says through mouthfuls of sushi after they’ve gotten their food, “Why does Gojo-sensei call you Yuki?”
“It’s just a nickname, that’s all,” She says, smile not reaching her eyes.
And that’s all it’ll ever be.
