#shometsu

The night had come on quickly with the tedium of the car ride, a quiet journey during which he was accompanied only by the drone of the engine and the disembodied chatter of the radio cutting in and out of static. Ijichi murmured something every once in a while- largely irrelevant blather on the weather, the current state of the stock market (of which Satoru was already well acquainted- Nippon and Daikin had both their edges trailing in decline), or commentary on the recent accomplishments of the Yomiuri Giants on the pitch. 

For the most part, Satoru turned to mindlessly scrolling through his fifteen pages of unread emails and messages, each urgently blinking icon left calculatedly unaddressed. If there was anything truly urgent to contend with, he was sure it would be brought up during his impending meeting with Yaga. There was nothing particularly riveting about the notion of giving his bimonthly report; which would in the end, likely amount to very little. His complaints, after all, were routinely ignored; the higher-ups generally unsympathetic to the plight of one they deemed both belligerent and recalcitrant. 

Which was to say, any meeting he was invited to attend was predictably an outright bore.

There was something to be said about fate’s fickle nature. Indeed, her mistress had skimped on her mercy towards him in the most recent months. Christmas Eve had been a debacle of gargantuan proportions. Following that, the emergence of Sukuna’s fingers and the deliverance of the boy who’d somehow decided to eat one into his charge; then the subsequent assasination attempts on said boy- the list went on. 

Yet now, it seemed that she’d had something of a change of heart. 

“Stop here.” 

“Huh?”

He left Ijichi’s spluttered protests behind, further muffling them as he swung shut the car door, attention already preoccupied. Thankfully, the man was smart enough not to linger or persist in questioning him. The car’s headlamps shrunk and dimmed with the distance, the vehicle following the winding roads and quickly disappearing from sight.  

Finally alone, Satoru pocketed his hands and drummed a heel patiently on the asphalt. For a moment, the only sound was the quiet susurration of the night’s cool breeze through the trees. Peace and tranquil. Not to last. The glow of the moon was abruptly blotted out by a rapidly descending silhouette which emitted a shrill and almost comically skewed cry. Like- Satoru privately considered, the mating call of an exotic bird, or a most egregious war cry of an assassin unused to subtlety.

But his visitor was no bird, exotic or otherwise. That said, whether he was some attempt at an assassin still remained to be seen. Satoru had seen his fair share of hitmen, so many in fact that they’d practically classed as a separate facet of his education growing up; day in and day out- daggers angled at a cradle, poison slipped into milk and food, hands grasping at the porcelain neck of a child with eyes too blue and indicting. 

Some things never changed. In the short span of five minutes, he was set alight twice, blown up once, been attacked by the curse’s attempt at emulating mosquitoes, then blown up again. His attacker engaged in this regrettably one-sided exchange with a good deal of enthusiasm, evidently immersed in a private fantasy revolving around his destruction and all its associated carnage. Each time he turned to take a few steps from his perceived victory, only to be halted in his tracks by the dawning and inevitable realization that he’d yet again been made.

Indeed, although Satoru recognised a peculiar variety of sadism lurking in the way he so gladly derived satisfaction from teasing his out-matched and clearly overpowered opposition, it did not jolt him. He made an unconventional Jekyll, unflinching in the face of his own mirrored Hyde. Evil this, kettle that. What mattered was not how despicable a foe was. He’d been called self-centered all his life and revolving around himself like some black hole with an insurmountable appetite lent itself conveniently to introspection. Gojo Satoru, white knight and respected teacher; still endlessly overjoyed with and unable to resist the juvenile schadenfreude that came with knocking down someone lesser who he deemed morally (subjectively) deserving, retribution taking the form of a reckless child pulling the wings off a butterfly.

Yet, it was almost sad to see his disappointment when he’d realized his folly.

It was…. cute. He had no answer to why he was feeling spontaneously magnanimous to someone who’d so recently tried to incinerate him. Perhaps his leniency was partly due to his having managed to eschew singing any part of himself, even if the smoke was something of a bother. Or perhaps it was because his newfound opponent bore a striking resemblance to a character he’d once seen in a Western cartoon movie- though that creature had been something of a lime-green if he recalled correctly, and this one was clearly a sickly shade of cyan. 

Much to Jogo’s putative chagrin, he hadn’t missed the curiosity gleaming in the other’s lonely eye. He was a proud curse, a staunch believer of his own strength and influence, of his god given right to walk on the backs of the weak and tread the parted ocean of the divine. These were conceptions reinforced over thousands of years, and yet Satoru- shallow, vexatious human that he was, had managed to shatter them within the mere span of three hundred seconds. 

They were of a similar breed, having both partaken of the ichor of strength and become drunk on it, and having both once fallen into the haze of its stupor to be rendered foolhardy and hubristic. The only difference between them in this respect was only in that where Satoru had merely lingered, the curse had chosen to wallow and remain. 

Satoru knew intimately that he’d want to know- desperately, why and how he’d lost.

As if to illustrate his point, Jogo was practically radiating indignation. Copious amounts of smoke spewed from the sides of his head, giving him the appearance of a kettle left forgotten on a stove and boiling too long. His teeth, black in the Ohaguro fashion (how well-read) were gritted and clenched with force enough to break a human jaw. His single eye flitted over him with the pupil quivering with rage, irises dancing with the likeness of sparks. 

Rather than match the searing intensity of his displeasure, Satoru extended a hand, five fingers outstretched. He rocked it back and forth in an invitation to display his technique- 

“C’mon!” 

He was met with a look of pure reluctance. Jogo’s mouth pulled into a thin, bloodless line, his tone flat as he queried after his intentions. Satoru gave no answer, only extended his arm and waved a bit more, the infuriating picture of an overzealous fangirl reaching towards some esoteric idol of her fascination.

“C’mon!”

He could practically see him calling on the accessible repositories of his patience and coming up empty-handed. That ironclad will which had thus far enforced his adamance to refuse to oblige him rusted and wore thin. The curse whipped around in an instant, then slowly reached over, single eye going wide with shock as he came into contact with his Infinity. 

“See?” Satoru gestured with what could only be described as overbearing nonchalance. “My technique brings the Infinity all around us into existence…” All this he had repeated an infinite (ha) number of times before. Each iteration to a fresh opponent, all to garner the very same response. The monotony of it became dreadfully dull. 

Jogo’s expression was twisting with barely concealed rage; to his credit, he listened with all the enthusiasm of an unhappy spouse discussing the prenuptial agreement to an arranged marriage. Satoru knew he was pressing his luck. With a gentle tilt of his wrist, he dissipated that invisible barrier and pressed their palms together at leisure, fingers curving into the gaps between each of the curse’s own in a gesture of superfluous revelry. He grinned easily with all the skittish glee and shyness- in his case, false, of a maiden on her wedding night.

“Like this, we could even hold hands.”

While such an experience could only tangentially be compared to the far more gratifying concept of human intimacy- it was a frivolous distinction but nonetheless, Satoru couldn’t remember the last time he’d truly touched another living being in such a manner, much less a curse. 

His skin was an unearthly shade of mint that made him think of wads of gum chewed up and spat onto the sidewalk to bake in the Tokyo heat. His nails were an unadulterated stygian, uniformly opaque in shade and unblemished. They lacked any interfering impurities, no scuffs, no chips, nor streaks of gray or white, the edges curved perfectly and smooth as if frequently attended to by surgeon’s hands guided with a manicurist’s expertise. His gaze traveled to the threshold between skin and nail where the polished curvature, glassy like the surface of a dark sea, receded onto paler shores. 

He was not so inhuman that the skin did not wrinkle at the joints as to appear overly artificial or entirely alien. No, there were human intricacies even in this being which could otherwise be considered from appearance alone situated at an extremity on a graded spectrum furthest from humanity. 

Or perhaps the basis of his comparison had long been skewed in some figurative hyperbola spanning the years of his life, spent entrenched in this world of the impossible and the unseen. Ah well. So much of his fun was gleaned from the aberrant and bizarre, the threshold for piquing his intrigue having only been heightened and his tastes made perverse with reprise. He’d suitably morphed into something of the like- he was not so ignorant of his own circumstances to be oblivious of his reputation as an idiosyncrasy, known for his unorthodox methods and nonconformist attitude towards reform and melodramatic revolution. The reports would have him campaigning openly for flux and anarchy if some of the higher-ups would have their way- all the more convenient that they might finally produce a reason to be rid of him.

Alas, he couldn’t wander about throwing tea parties for each and every living curiosity he came across. Besides, Jogo was growing warmer by the second, his face a veritable rictus of fury, his frame shuddering with all the thinly restrained savagery like bubbling magma on the verge of erupting, over which his skin drew taut as if about to pop. 

“Not interested? Aw.” Satoru let his smile droop slightly, a tolerable shift in expression if only to accentuate the disappointment he tried to convey in his tone. “Well in that case-” 

His grip ratcheted shut like a vise, all pretenses of gentleness dispelled in an instant. He felt Jogo yank at their interlocking digits in a sudden and instinctive jerk, the curse going rigid as his fury bled freely from him to make room for fear. The abrupt transition from relative stillness to the momentous heave of his fist into the other’s gut was a well-practiced maneuver, and an effective one to boot. 

Inky droplets sprayed from between his parted black teeth to splatter harmlessly over the curtain of his reinstated Infinity.  Satoru let the follow-through of the movement carry him through, swinging one leg forwards to shift the weight of his body midair and power the rest of him through the spin. There was little risk in him releasing his hold with his opponent still stunned. He flexed his fingers once free, then let himself fall through the rest of the arc, his trailing leg coming up to deliver a devastating roundhouse kick. 

He caught himself there as Jogo went flying on impact, his stunted stature doing him little good in negating the propulsive force. There wasn’t a moment to lose- Satoru gave pursuit without hesitation, his cheeks aching with the effort of holding his smile.