suguru?

The second time, Suguru wasn’t so ignorant. He was aware of his indulgence as he clapped you on the shoulder for a spar well-fought. He was out of breath, his defenses a little lowered, the inhibitions falling back just enough. You looked at him with a hint of surprise at the gesture, as one did when they realized a new milestone of friendship was reached. You punched his shoulder in return as you were just as out of breath as he was. Few things in jujutsu sorcery were as satisfying as a well-matched, good-spirited spar.

Suguru almost reached for your fist when it connected to his shoulder, maybe a left-over instinct of just having fought, maybe an urge to prolong the connection it made with him just a little bit. He looked after you only briefly as you excused yourself back to the dorms and calmed himself with a stretching session after.

He started looking forward to your spars. Sparring with Satoru was the kind of challenging he could not quite match, but facing off with you spiked an additional kind of adrenaline in his body. His longing for it only grew, the little extra thrill buzzing in his chest when you came particularly close for a left hook he had trouble dodging.

He made a point of catching your fist then. It hurt a little, the angle was a touch off, but he caught it and he reveled in the feeling of your raw power. The warmth behind it. Your cursed energies pressing against each other in a struggle to come out stronger than the other. You hadn’t expected his sudden move and the surprise showed on your face for only a moment before your features twisted into the wicked grin of a person well-entertained. Both of you knew catching a fist was a stupid move, strategically. It left his hand just as occupied as yours, your knuckles digging into his palms in a way that made him notice your other fist flying at him just a fraction too late.

Suguru landed on the cold hard ground that day, his hand and midriff in equal pains but his chest suspiciously tense. Like it was stretched full of air he had trouble letting go of. It only grew tighter when your hand appeared above his face as he lay on his back, your brows knotted in concern for him. Suguru rarely stayed on the ground, but that day he relished in the sight of your hand freely offered up to him, and he swallowed just a bit at the realization of how far gone he must have been.

He was sure it wasn’t just a fond friendship anymore when he fixed your hair for you. A particularly difficult scuffle had winded your hair around the button of his uniform, forcing your head close to his chest. Standing with his front to your back, it was on him to try and untangle the mess as complaints and pained whines rained from your lips. He’d seen you endure the excruciation of an impaled arm better than you were handling the tugging at your hair. Maybe you were playing it up to hurry him, he wouldn’t put that past you. But standing so close to you without having strong limbs fly at him, he couldn’t bring himself to respond to the urgency.

His fingers trembled. From the fighting, he told himself, surely, as they did after physical exhaustion. But it didn’t explain the timidness of his touch. His awareness of the scent perfuming your hair that he’d never noticed before. It was a little mean of him, the way he enjoyed his fingers wrapping around your hair, sliding along the strands, caressing them with his fingertips. He inspected the knot before he moved any of your hair. To lessen the pain, he thought. Not entirely because he enjoyed the touch so close to your head. He could feel the heat emanating from your body, not quite reaching him, as if teasingly. Giving him just an idea of what it’d feel like against his own. He had to lick his lips because they’d gotten far too dry as he stood there, distracted.

In the end, the tangle was an easy one to undo. Regrettably, even with all his stalling, the moment didn’t last long enough.

The final time, Suguru just got lucky. You’d asked him to practice a new move with you which involved kicking yourself off of a tree trunk and using the jump momentum to swing at him. He used one of his curses to throw you against said tree to increase the difficulty, per your request. Suguru himself needed to train his ability to sense incoming attacks from behind, usually relying too much on his curses instead of cursed energy detection, so this request was perfect. A competitive score-board followed shortly after, keeping track of who could best whom more often while training their signature weaknesses.

It didn’t look good for you. Your move was a lot harder, yet it had taken Suguru no effort at all to rope you into this senseless competition. A fact that kept his lips stretched in a grin every time he managed to block you before you got him.

For hours you hurled yourself at him. The more sluggish your movements became, the more competitive you grew. You wanted to win that last point to tip the scales, but you slipped instead of jumping, flailing through the air. Suguru, by then, understood your timing better than he could sense your energy, but he turned in time all the same. Just in time to catch sight of your face, mid-air, in trouble. Not enough time to dodge the full body slam that knocked you both into the ground.

He slid across the ground a little on his back before coming to a halt, and it took him another moment to realize you had weathered the fall better than him. Amazing, even. Dizzying, maybe. You’d managed to keep upright, landing straddling his abdomen, holding yourself up by means of his chest. You looked just as disoriented as he felt as you hovered above him. He needed multiple moments to process the view. There was a good distance between your upper bodies, but he grew increasingly aware of your warm thighs running up his sides, not to mention your weight on his core. You stared at him as he, for the first time, got lost in your eyes.

He allowed himself the moment of indulgence. You insisted this technically counted as a point for you as he argued you didn’t really get him, though. Challenging you was the easiest thing in the world for him, and the only way he could think to entertain you while he savored your presence a little longer. It lulled him into carelessness. It was an urge so primal, he couldn’t really stop himself.

His thumbs brushed your ankles before he could think better of it. When he realized, he looked at you, and you were already looking back at him in a way that whispered that you’d noticed it wasn’t so innocent anymore. What did it say about you, the fact that you didn’t move despite it? Were you so safe around Suguru you wouldn’t pay any mind to a thing he did, or could you be welcoming his touch? Boldly, his hands wrapped around your ankles, dragging his thumb across your skin. He searched your face for answers but the haughty smirk was back on your lips.

“I totally won this.”

Suguru could only smile then, feeling your warmth against him—the very sensation he’d wondered about for a while, now in his grasp. “No, you didn’t.”

“Was that necessary?” you pant. You come to a stop next to him in what feels like the middle of the forest. “Is this it?” ‘It’ being the direction the ever-persistent cursed energy residue which sits upon the forest like a heavy blanket. Gojo and you are to find the source of it and vanquish it. Gojo is here because he can make sense of the thick cloud of residue which lingers like a bad perfume. Find a direction. You are here because you can pick up on the finer subtleties. A macro vision and a micro vision. But to find subtleties, one must get closer to the target. A task that sits with Gojo.

“It’s here somewhere.” Gojo looks around, sunglasses on his nose despite the setting evening sun.

You’re finding your breath, though your sides hurt. A single mission with Gojo makes you feel like you’ve never trained for real. “Are you sure?” You scan the area for traces of cursed energy.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“You inspire confidence.”

“It’s hard to check everything at the speed we’re going,” he shrugs. You don’t bother being offended anymore. Yes, Gojo is just so grand that being near a human must be a weight on his ankles.

“We’ve covered a five kilometer radius around Point Zero.” You strain to pull the map out of your backpack’s side compartment and study it. “Surely we would’ve come across something.”

“No, two.”

“Pardon?”

Gojo squeezes his head into your space to look at and careless dig his finger into the map. “We’ve covered two kilometers. We’re here.”

You look up at him with your eyebrow arched. At the speed he was chasing through the woods, how would he know where you are? Meanwhile you absolutely have kept track of your location, if only to make sense of your search pattern later. Part of the reason why you’ve been so behind and so out of breath. You dig into another part of the map, farther away from the red dot marking the original curse sighting.

“We’re here. There’s Mount Odake.” You point in the direction the mountain lies, trees in the distance lining a pathway uphill to the sky.

He shakes his head and digs into the map. “That can’t be. We’re here and that’s Mount Mitake. We haven’t covered that much land yet. I think we need to branch out.”

Your head raised to the sky, you study the mountain you both claim to be another. You’re pretty confident in your map reading abilities. Gojo, however, should be more familiar with the mountains surrounding Tokyo than you. You know the Kyoto area much better. Still, there is a curse out here somewhere and reading a map should really be least important part of the job.

You whip your phone out. “Let’s just check where we are.”

“No way there’s reception.”

Now, that’s one thing he’s right about.

“Let’s check the next 3 kilometers,” he suggests and already looks ready to keep sprinting.

You are quick to intercept. “If we’ve covered two, we cover the next two. But if we’ve covered five like I said, then we return to Point Zero again and start over. Curses don’t travel that far once they’ve found something to kill. We’ll be running away from it.”

Gojo looks at you with something like surprise, then points back to the mountain. “That’s Mount Mitake. We’re two kilometers from Point Zero.” He speaks with the confidence of a thousand suns. And with any other person, that is something for credibility that you would take into account. But this is Gojo Satoru. You’ve never heard him say anything with less confidence.

“Gojo, do you have any idea how long we’ve been running around?”

“What’s that matter? Let’s go. It’s getting away.” He turns to leave and jogs a few steps before noticing you aren’t following. You stand planted in your spot, examining the long-limbed sorcerer.

“Do you have any lead?” you ask. “Any cursed energy residue, a scent maybe, a feeling, something? I don’t know how your power works.”

“It’s visual. And it’s all around us, we need to find where it’s coming from.”

“I can see as much. You know that’s the direction we just came from, right?”

You question him properly now, the way he stands where he does and the very direction he was just about to take you. The sureness of his posture, how straight his back is, how wide his grin.

“I think my visual range is a little bigger than yours.” He points to his sunglasses for emphasis.

And there you had a thought. You did think it weird that you were put on this mission with him. You might have the micro vision for cursed energy he lacks, but did he really need it? Was that really the reason you were here? You assumed it was, but you’re starting to question things in this moment. They did give you the map. You’ve been tracking your movements. Which are, by the way, as erratic as Gojo’s temperament.

“Of course,” you concede. “Should we continue North then?”

“Just follow me. And try to keep up this time.” He moves now in the opposite direction than before, straight forward as you’d come earlier. When he passes you, you attempt to stop him. Your hand doesn’t reach his chest; it reaches nothing but an invisible barrier around him, which he stops for nonetheless. Most graciously.

“How about going North?” you ask again.

“Why North?”

“That’s where you wanted to go, right? Farther from Point Zero?”

He scans you now, perfectly aware of the oddities, and draws the right conclusion: “You think I don’t know where I’m going.”

“I don’t think you know where North is. If you know where we are, you’d know which way is North.”

The sun has set by now, serving as absolutely no visual indicator for where which direction of the sky could be. Through the sunglasses, you catch his gaze go astray. You clutch the map to your chest. “No peeking!”

“I’m not peeking! North is right there.” His finger extends to point straight to the South-East. With the confidence of a million suns.

“Which mountain is that one?” You point to Mount Nokogiri.

“Hinodesan.”

You take a deep breath. Many things make sense now. Including why you were given the map. “I did wonder why you covered some spots three times and some only once. You absolute goof, if you’ve no sense of direction, why are you leading? That’s South-East. That over there is Mount Nokogiri. And we are five kilometers from Point Zero. We’re heading back North where came from. At this speed, the curse is gonna ambush us.” You don’t wait for him this time. You take off northward, sprinting with refreshed lungs. He keeps up with you.

“Let me see the map.” He tries to pry it from you.

“Careful!” You dodge a boulder with a yelp, keeping your balance without grace. “Don’t grab me.”

“Lemme see it, how is this North?”

“Gojo, just trust me on this. We’re wasting time.”

He doesn’t quite agree with the sentiment, or simply can’t let a thing be, constantly obsessing over details. Maybe it has to do with all the impressions he takes note of in every moment. Either way, he doesn’t cease his conquest for the map. In retrospect, you blame yourself for what happens next.

Preoccupied with a piece of paper and an argument, you miss the micro detail. The slightest of shifts in the ground ahead. A mere spasm of cursed energy. You don’t notice it until you reach it and the ground splits beneath you.

Something enormous shoots out of the ground and you jump in opposite directions. You unravel the whip clasped to your hip, the map forgotten. Mid-jump your leg barely dodges a set of razor sharp talons, which obliterate the map instead. You careen to a halt at a safe distance, and look at the mess you’ve made.

A big hole in the ground. Next to it sits a grotesque version of an oversized toad with bubbling spikes on its back and talons bigger than talons should be. You don’t want to know what is oozing out of those spikes. There are too many eyes attached to the deformed head and the screeching is anything but natural.

At least you’ve found your curse. You have to hold your ears to withstand its vile croak.

Gojo seems intact on the other side of the toad, high up suspended in the air where it can’t reach him.

“That’s a fat thing,” he yells.

As if understanding, the toad jumps forward on massive hind legs. Unfortunately, it ignores the strongest, and comes straight for you. Fortunately, you have learned your lesson in paying attention, and your’s is wholly where it belongs. You see the movement before the toad moves, the slight shift in its cursed energy signaling the direction it’s going to take. The micro vision advantage. You rear out of the way, your whip finding purchase around a tree’s branch, giving you the momentum to propel yourself towards it. The toad eats dust, turns, and—lacking any sense of self-preservation—barrels towards you again full-force.

You and Gojo know your dance. You are an excellent strategist, great foresight and speed. Gojo is an excellent fist, raw power at his very fingertips yearning to explode. Together, you can make quick work of any curse you come across.

The stupid toad-curse and its bulging eyes are busy chasing you. One of its front feet lunges at you, claws at the ready, when Gojo’s fist crashes into its side. The amount of cursed energy concentrated in his hand is ridiculous. It’s too late to get out of the way. You can only turn your back to it as the toad explodes into a splatter of slime and purple squishy matter.

The screeching stops. Your entire backside is soaked. Your hair now wet, sticky, and slick with goo. When you lift your gaze, you see that a radius of the forest is no better off than you. It’s gross, but not retch-worthy this many years into being a sorcerer. You turn around, whip dangling in your hand, and a sour expression on your face.

Gojo beams at you. He is entirely dry and unaffected— instead there lies a suspicious pool of said slime right at his feet. Deflected by his Infinity, and simply sunken to the ground. “Hey, that was easy.”

You can’t help but sound grumpy. “Can you aim somewhere else next time?”

“Oh, sorry. It was way squishier than I thought. How was that a grade 2?”

You don’t feel like explaining the grading system, or that he is simply stronger than most curses you come across. Hence most of everything is squishy to him. Hence it’s boring to only use half his strength all the time. Hence more boom, more splash. Much to your disgruntlement.

“Just— Hit it when I’m behind a tree next time, will you?” You’re picking soft chunks of organ matter out of your hair and flicking them to the ground.

“Not my fault you can’t beat it yourself,” he says with the hubris of a thousand suns.

Today, however, you’re feeling petty. “Sure thing, big man,” you retort. “Remind me, which way is North again?”

Gojo stops to glare. “Don’t ask me that.”

“Don’t gloat then.”

“Whatever.” He dusts himself off, which is only insulting because there is nothing on him. “We’ll need to hose you down before anyone lets you into a car.”

It only occurs to you then. “Where’s our map?”

Gojo finds a water-logged shredded piece of what seems like might have been a map one day. “You remember the way back, right?”

“Only if you carry me,” you say with open arms, dripping of disgusting curse parts.

Gojo grimaces. “Let’s find a river or something.”

“You can still smell through your Infinity, right?”

“Unfortunately.”