📖 MISPLACED DEVOTION — Chapter 3
(Jujutsu Kaisen — Isekai / Reader Insert)
Chapter 3: I have never wanted to throw up so politely
~✦~
You find out you have a bed roughly four minutes later, once you work up the nerve to unzip the backpack that's apparently been strapped to you all day without your notice.
Inside: a pencil case you don't recognize but that is, weirdly, exactly the brand you'd have picked yourself. A brand-new workbook, only the first page filled in, in handwriting that is unmistakably your own. A student ID with your face on it, your actual name printed underneath, and an address that means absolutely nothing to you.
No photo. No family tree helpfully tucked in a side pocket. Just an address, a name, and a whole lot of nothing else.
"Okay," you say, out loud, to absolutely nobody. "Guess I'm going home."
You are, it turns out, extremely bad at finding a house you have never seen before in a neighborhood you have no memory of, using nothing but a scrap of paper and the vague, growing dread of someone who suspects she's about to be late for her own life.
The street you're on is lined with near-identical houses, each with a little nameplate mounted by the gate, and you've taken to reading them one by one, out loud, under your breath, like some kind of deranged door-to-door census taker.
"Tanaka. Tanaka. Watanabe. Oh, come on, how many Tanakas can one street—"
"Lost?"
You nearly jump out of your skin. There's a man standing a few feet away, having appeared with the kind of silent, unhurried ease that should probably alarm you a great deal more than it initially does, because your first, instinctive reaction — before your brain fully catches up — is a small, warm flicker of recognition.
Long dark hair, tied back loosely. A gentle, faintly amused expression. The kind of face that radiates calm, reasonable trustworthiness, the sort you'd hand your car keys to without a second thought.
*Oh my god,* you think, delighted, for exactly one glorious half-second. *It's—*
You know this face. You loved this face, in the life you actually lived — one of your favorite characters, hands down, the kind of guy you used to see edited into unhinged, slow-motion thirst-trap reels set to some sultry remix, captioned things like *he could ruin my life and I'd thank him.* You remember thinking that was funny. You remember thinking that was, at worst, a harmless little internet bit.
And then the rest of you catches up, and every cell in your body turns to ice.
It's not Geto Suguru.
It's wearing Geto Suguru's face like a coat somebody stole off a corpse, which — you remember now, with horrifying clarity — is essentially exactly what happened. The real Geto's only been dead a few months. Barely enough time for the body to go cold, let alone for anyone to notice the person wearing it isn't him anymore. The thing looking at you with such warm, patient curiosity is Kenjaku, and Kenjaku is, by an extremely comfortable margin, one of the single most dangerous beings you have ever had the misfortune of knowing facts about.
"You seem to be having some trouble," Kenjaku says, tilting his head — Geto's head, Geto's gentle, easy smile — and gesturing vaguely at the paper in your hand. "Looking for a particular address?"
*Oh my god oh my god oh my god,* your brain screams, in a single unbroken siren of pure, undiluted horror. *This man is going to end the world. This man is going to orchestrate the deaths of thousands of people using a face that isn't even his. This man is currently standing eighteen inches away from me on a residential street asking if I need directions like this is a completely normal Tuesday—*
"Oh!" you say out loud, beaming, voice pitched so warm and easy it could pass for genuine sunlight. "Yes, actually, that would be so helpful, thank you so much!"
*I am going to throw up. I am going to throw up right here, on this man's shoes, and it will be the single most understandable thing I have ever done.*
You hold out the scrap of paper with the address on it, hand miraculously steady, and Kenjaku leans in to look at it with exactly the kind of unhurried interest a kind stranger might show, and you smile at him the entire time like you are meeting a beloved elder statesman, or possibly the actual Buddha, rather than a genocidal parasite wearing the face you used to see thirst-trapped into oblivion on your For You page.
"Ah," he says, and points. "Two streets that way, then left. You'll see it — big crooked mailbox, hard to miss."
"Thank you so much!" you chirp, taking the paper back, fingers not shaking at all, definitely not.
*Please leave. Please, please, please leave. I will build you a shrine. I will never watch another isekai anime as long as I live if you just walk away right now.*
Kenjaku studies you for one moment longer than is strictly comfortable — long enough that you feel it, somewhere deep and animal, the specific sensation of being catalogued — and then, mercifully, inclines his head and continues on down the street, unhurried, like a man with absolutely nowhere urgent to be.
You do not move again until he's fully out of sight.
Then you very quietly, very privately, allow yourself to have the nervous breakdown you've been holding off for the last ninety seconds.
"Okay," you whisper, hands pressed to your face. "Okay. Two streets that way. Left. Big crooked mailbox. Go."
You go.
The address leads you to a house that looks correct in a way that makes your chest hurt a little — same shape as the one you grew up in, same crooked mailbox, same wind chime by the door that's slightly, maddeningly, the wrong pitch.
You let yourself in with a key you found in the backpack's side pocket, because apparently whoever's running this simulation wanted you to have exactly enough information to survive and not one shred more.
"I'm home," you call out, testing the words like you're not sure you're allowed to say them.
There's a clatter from the kitchen, and your mother — your mother, or something close enough that your throat goes tight — pokes her head around the corner.
"There you are! How was your first day?"
"...fine," you manage.
"Good, good. Oh, your grandmother made way too much rice again, so you'd better be hungry."
You freeze.
"My — grandmother."
"Yes, your grandmother," your mom says slowly, giving you A Look. "Who lives here. With us. As she has for the past several years. You feeling okay, sweetheart?"
Before you can answer, a voice calls out from the living room — warm, creaky, and instantly, inexplicably familiar in a way that has nothing to do with this universe and everything to do with some dust-covered part of your memory you didn't know you still had.
"Is that my favorite grandchild? Come give your grandmother a hug, I haven't seen you all day!"
You round the corner. There she is. An old woman with your nose. Alive. Real. Here.
You do not cry. You want to, a little. You also want to laugh. Mostly you just want to sit down on the floor and take a minute, so that's what you do, right there in the hallway, while your mother asks with real concern whether you hit your head at school today.
~✦~
a/n 🖤 KENJAKU CAMEO. that's it. that's the tweet. she talked her way past one of the most dangerous men in the entire series using nothing but unhinged customer-service voice and I have never been prouder of a fictional woman. also: grandma's alive?? more on that later 👀 see you next chapter
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