𝓱𝓸𝓹𝓮

What is the memory? The one that tastes like ash in her mouth. The one that beats in the roots of her sinew, her tendons, her ligaments, her muscle and flesh. Something her body knows that her brain won't tell her. 

When Illayona Ikeda returns from months of oblivion, screaming and kicking and covered in blood, like her second birth, violence turns to rot in her body. With blood that hisses and spits, bones that thrum with unused venom, muscles that ache for the thrill of a punch, her reformed self likes to think of herself as somewhat of a pacifist. 

There's a line. Some blurry, intangible thing, that carves out two selves. Before and after. 

She's retired her old life (a dark, damp whirlpool of hate and misery so consuming it could send the unwise to the brink of insanity) and, as Gojo has put it to her, turned over a new leaf.

She doesn't fight, doesn't spar, doesn't exorcise, she hasn't raised a fist in months, she hasn't even cussed out Gojo for weeks. And perhaps resisting insubordination and violent tendencies doesn't quite call for the level of celebration she's affording herself, and maybe Principal Yaga has a point when he says that she hasn't really proved anything, given her technique has relied on avoidance and no introspection or self-work, but that's not the point.

She's renewed. 

Illayona doesn't have to address the haunting nightmares that's plagued her mind, chipped away at her shaky resolve, brought her to crushing lows. Her past is a murky, slithering thing that refuses to be caught, it's nothing but a flash of teeth and hair and wounds. She cannot work her mouth around the words that sing to her, she cannot confess to a crime she doesn't recall. 

So Illayona's healing on her own terms - and she's doing that by healing others. Tokyo Jujustu High's very own... medical assistant? She doesn't really have a specific role, with her newly discovered Reverse Cursed Technique, she mills around and leaves the hard work to Shoko. It's better than trying to touch something innate that she cannot recall. Her technique, like a taunt, like an omen, unreachable, indecipherable. No longer accessible. 

But no one needs to know that. 

Illayona doesn't need to talk about her months in some alternate dimension she refuses to describe, name or even mention. She doesn't need to tell anyone about the strange link she has to a cursed tool the Jujustu society believes has been lost in time.  No. She doesn't. Because that would entail picking at sticky, unsettling threads, like will reveal a rat king's worth of tangles so sickening she'd rather just wait for death to come to her. 

But that was before a murder, eerily reminiscent to the mission she was on before disappearing emerges. And it was before her dreams began to bleed into reality, her two selves shrouding each other in darkness in an attempt to converge. And it was before some odd, unsettling feeling of being observed began to overrun her days. 

And now she's saddled with Yuta Okkotsu, trailing after a goose chase that may just be enough to rip apart the fragile peace she's created for herself. And what she definitely doesn't need is another, traumatised, pretty-eyes-with-a-dark-backstory sauntering into her life. 

It's for the best to shove him as harsh and hard out of her life. If there's any constants in her life, it's two things: hunger and death.

Even if he looks at her like that. 

posted to wattpad. will be cross-posted to ao3 eventually