tereza

APRIL 24TH, 2017. 7:34 AM. TOKYO JUJUTSU HIGH SCHOOL. JAPAN.

“So, Maki, what kind of music do you listen to?”

Maki, in her own socially inexperienced life (unless she counted her interactions with other members of the Zenin clan as ‘social development’, which she would’ve been sooner caught dead than ever caught calling it that), was quite aware that some people had some mystical ability to act normal after something really dramatic had happened just hours before. Irony or something, maybe it was a poker face or really good acting or whatever, she thought either of those were suitable answers so it didn’t really matter.

In some way, a really twisted and screwed up way, it was like that at Jujutsu High. The students there sort of acted like everything was normal while countless abominations happened around the country (and the world, no less) every day. Maki ate and slept and trained like any normal Jujutsu High student would. Panda chewed on bamboo, as one did, of course, and he also went to class and talked to his friends, and trained, too. Toge tended to his garden, started taking up sign language lessons on his phone after the first conversation about it, ate, worked out some, though his efforts to stay in shape paled in comparison to Maki, and also played games on his phone during his free time.

Of course, like with every other witch in the world, nobody really knew a whole lot about your normal activities.

Maki knew you liked to meditate, so she made sure to leave the training room open for you from time to time. She also knew you liked looking at your tea leaves at the bottom of your mug (which she noticed was your only one: a simple earthy green shade with a rune engraved in the porcelain) sometimes. She thought it went without saying that you practiced some sort of witchcraft on your own time when you weren’t learning about Jujutsu and cursed energy and whatnot. Panda and Toge knew those things, too, as everyone’s hobbies were brought up occasionally in conversation.

But as far as anything not witchy related, none of them really knew anything about you.

Maki didn’t care all that much just yet. She wasn’t in a rush to figure out everything about you, and she didn’t think Panda and Toge were, either, until you were pulled out of class again the following Monday after your blood test and came back twenty minutes later with an opaque bag of something that clearly wasn’t meant for everyone else to see and they asked her after class what she thought it was for.

Well, for one, she told them it was a mistake talking to them after class had ended, and two, she told them that the bag’s contents were nobody’s business but your own and that she didn’t care if they were smaller bags of coke and meth or if they were twelve different passports to twelve different countries. Of course, she was partially lying, because she was slightly curious about it but only because it was in her nature as a human, she also didn’t give that much of a crap that she had half a working brain cell to start gossiping about it and making guesses on what was in there. Toge and Panda stopped for a bit after she told them to mind their own business.  The rest of the week was kind of normal, or as normal as it could’ve gotten at Jujutsu High, at least. Toge got assigned his first mission on his second Wednesday at the school. It wasn’t much: it was a curse invading an abandoned park, it sounded pretty basic and bland when Maki heard about it. Maki trained outside for the first time on Thursday because it was too nice outside for her to spend her training time indoors with lackluster manilla walls and a tan training mat and matching colored dummy as her view. Gojo took you all out into the city for a bit as his treat (which none of you had a clue what the reason was behind the treat, but turning down a free trip to the city was nonsense) on Friday and let you all explore the impossibly and absurdly busy streets of Tokyo for a few hours. People fawned over the literal panda walking around. Toge went to several game stores and junk food stands (from some of which he brought back souvenirs for the group, like dango sticks and Pocky boxes). Maki didn’t want to spend her time with the boys so she opted to stick with you the whole time and consequently got lost a few times, stood in the middle of a bookstore for an entire hour while you looked around the whole five hundred square foot store, walked with you to the next bookstore you found, stood there for only fifteen minutes before you bought a journal and a copy of Wuthering Heights and Outlander with your share of the allowance Gojo gave to all of you, went with you to another store that was centered around coffee and herbs and tea and other stuff Maki didn’t care about, then got lost again.

Things that normal people did on a normal Friday.

Saturday was fine. You stayed in your room all day (probably reading one of your books) and only left when you were hungry and to shower in the morning and at night. Maki, for once, took the day off to rest after she learned she’d pulled a muscle in her leg and had a colorful gripe to give to the entire dorm building every time she had to walk more than a few yards (the trek to Shoko’s office that morning was hell to pay). Toge tended to his garden, and him coming back was pretty much the only time Maki saw him over the weekend. Nobody really knew what Panda was doing, but everyone liked to think they had more important lives to tend to, so no one asked or bothered to check.

Sunday was when things got a little strange.

_________________________

“Gojo announced a quiz earlier,” Panda sprawled out on the grass, laying in the middle of the sun kissed field and looking up at the orange and purple sky above him. He spread his arms and legs out like a starfish. “He said it’s tomorrow.”

“A quiz on what?” Maki inquired, her eyes following Panda’s and looking up at the clouds. She sat on one of the stands, a polearm on the inside of her arm. She looked back down at him. “We’ve hardly learned anything, and I think it’s nonsense considering we’ve been here for a few weeks now. You’d think we’d have at least learned something, but we haven’t, because he sucks at teaching.”

The door to the building behind the bleachers was pushed open, revealing you walking out with black jean shorts and your white uniform shirt tied at the waist and a cup in your hand. You waved to everyone else with a smile and jogged over to the bottom row.

“That can’t possibly be breathable,” Maki commented, eyeing your shirt. “Those things are, like, thicker than wool.”

“I think you’re being dramatic,” you sat down on the set of bleachers opposite from her. “Besides, I don’t think anything I wear would do anything more to keep me from melting.”

“Did you hear about Gojo’s announcement earlier?” Panda asked, lifting his head up from the grass.

“No,” you shook your head. “What was it?”

“A stupid quiz tomorrow,” Maki crossed her legs—careful to not put weight on her bad leg—and rested her chin on her palm. “With no material for us to study.”

“Has Mr. Gojo even taught us anything useful yet?”

“No, that’s what pisses me off,” Maki grumbled, glaring at you. A slight chill went down your spine when you were met with the immediate scrutiny of her gaze.

There was a gust of wind that blew past all of you. Panda closed his eyes, basking in the cool of the breeze. You fiddled with the knot around your waist for a minute, chewing on your bottom lip. Maki squinted her eyes and looked away from the sunset, instead opting to pay attention to her left leg, the one with the pulled muscle, and massaging (or at least, attempting to) her calf with her thumb.

You raised a curious eyebrow. “Did you hurt your leg?”

“Shoko said I pulled a muscle,” Maki answered without looking up. “She said I should let it rest, but I don’t wanna stay cooped up inside.”

“At least you’re getting your vitamin D,” you gave her a small smile that she felt even without seeing it. “I could make you something to help with it, if you’d like.”

Maki finally picked her head up, her thumb pausing its movements that weren’t doing much to help her. She quirked her own eyebrow. “Like what?”

“Some tea with a few enchantments. And a spell, if you don’t mind.”

Maki narrowed her eyes again suspiciously, backing her head away slightly. She wasn’t sure if she should’ve taken up on the offer, but last week Toge made a tea with some of those tea leaves you’d given him on the first day of school to help with his throat and he said they worked wonders, so she figured your medicinal skills couldn’t have been too bad.

“Sure,” she shrugged, but went back to rubbing her calf anyways (despite her last attempt being of no avail) in an effort to alleviate the pain sooner so that way when you hypothetically saw her again she’d have an excuse for you not to do anything. She looked back up just in time to watch the smile on your face as it turned towards the sun, watching the horizon.

The wind blew again. It stung her eyes and nearly blew a wound through your nose, but the air against your foreheads felt nice in the midst of the early comings of a brutal summer.

You brought a hand up to your head, holding it and sighing quietly. “I should be leaving,” you stood up. Maki watched with a confused expression.

“You just got here,” she noted, frowning slightly.

“I’ve got laundry to do.”

Maki’s frown deepened. Something was up, and she knew it. “You did that on Friday after we came back.” She knew that because you both did it together—you’d pressured Maki into joining you during your weekly routine of doing your laundry and encouraged her to bring her own.

She scoffed sharply. “If you don’t wanna hang out with us, just say that.”

“I meant my bedsheets,” you turned back towards the door, turning on the heel of your boot. “If it means that much to you, then I’ll make that tea and be at your door immediately after?”

“You don’t have to busy yourself with me,” Maki sat up straight, her posture fixing itself as she tensed. “I’m sure Shoko can do it.”

“Assuming she’s even sober enough for that,” Panda picked his head back up. “Didn’t you say you came to her about your leg the other day and she could barely answer you?”

Maki clicked her tongue and nodded her head. “Yeah. But I doubt it’ll be that bad today. I’ll just go to her later on.”

She turned to look at you, but you were already gone. She didn’t even hear the door open and shut, let alone the sound of your footsteps. The wind blew a leaf in your place, twirling it in the air until it floated down to the ground next to the bleachers.

“That was odd,” Panda commented. Maki didn’t even feel bad for agreeing with him at that moment. The air went back to normal as if you never came outside. Maki would’ve wondered if it was her imagination if it weren’t for the cursed corpse on the grass.

“Agreed,” Maki looked down at your spot and saw your cup next to it. She let out an exasperated sigh through her nose. “She even forgot the cup she brought with her.”

“I guess she was in that much of a rush.”

“Probably.” A small shrug left her shoulders as she pushed her polearm into her hand. “But it’s not like her bedsheets are going anywhere.”

“Maybe she’s just really into cleanliness.”

There was a moment of silence between them for a minute. The stretch of quietness was a nice combination with the soft and hardly-perceptible breeze blowing in the air, wafting the faint smell of incense into Maki’s nose. As fleeting as it was, coming and going the second she recognized the scent as something that was uniquely you, it was as clean as Panda said you were.

“Do you think she forgot it purposely?”

Maki narrowed her eyes and grabbed your cup. She looked at Panda when she stood up straight. “Why the hell would she forget a cup on purpose?”

Panda shrugged and sat upright, his paws on the grass. “I dunno. She’s not very forgetful.”

Maki couldn’t indulge in Panda’s nonsense. Although he had a point in your strange mishap of forgetting something, she wasn’t about to encourage his bullshit theory about you leaving your cup there on purpose. There wasn’t any type of scenario where you would’ve gotten something out of it other than simply having it brought back to you just for the sake of not having to come back and get it yourself (which was asinine, in Maki’s opinion)

“I’m sure she’ll come back for it once she realizes it’s gone.”

“I would bring it back to her, but,” Panda rolled over and sat upright with his paws on the grass between his legs, spreading them in a V-shape. “I don’t wanna go to the girls’ hallway.”

“Do you think it’s a war zone down there? It’s literally the same as the boys’ hallway, which you don’t even go into.”

“That’s no place for a panda!”

“It’s just me, her, and a second year girl!”

“Don’t care,” Panda raised his arms into an X shape, shaking his head. “Not doing it.”

Maki grunted and rolled her eyes, reluctantly getting up from her spot on the bleachers and leaving her polearm behind. “I’ll be back,” she called out, bending down to grab your cup. “And you’ll see that it’s not a war zone in the girls’ hallway.”

She went back to the building, opening the door and walking in and being blasted with cool air. It was a relief that the air unit had the strength of about ten bulls, she couldn’t imagine being outside in the heat and coming back to an infinitely more suffocating building.

A faint scent—no, scratch that, not faint at all, the aroma all but invaded her nose before the door even closed all the way—of incense was floating in the air. Her nostrils flared as she inhaled deeply, coughing slightly as she breathed it in. The smell was different from the last time it was that strong. Last time it was an instant wave of charcoal smoke and burning wood and another scent she couldn’t quite name, but the only idea that came even a fraction of the way close enough was lavender. The hallway was clearly reminded of your presence with the thick vanilla and patchouli and honey. She felt like she’d just stepped into a crystal shop. She wondered how it didn’t suffocate her earlier when you were right in front of her.

She stepped through the invisible cloud of incense, pushing against the spice that stung her nose and walked down the hallway and turned down the right corner.

The smell still lingered even after she’d long since passed the hall. The patchouli and vanilla were unforgiving to her senses, and she wished to be rid of the sweets and spices that hung around the walls. Or, perhaps the smell had faded already, and it had already made itself at home with her. The air stilled as she crossed between buildings to the dorms.

Judging by the height of the sun in the sky, surely it would’ve been dinner time soon, so she thought at some point she was bound to see you roaming the halls again. But you were unseen, even with every turn of every corner she expected to be met with your face.

The girls’ hallway became eery. The lights were dimmed for whatever reason, but there were no ceiling lights or a light switch—only a window extending down the hall and small lights outside each door.

All the blinds were drawn. All the light the hallway could’ve possibly needed felt like it was drained and yet Maki could still see very clearly ahead of herself.

She stopped. Her grip around your cup stiffened as she felt the air turn cold enough to send a chill from her neck and down her spine. She brought her free hand up to the back of her neck, feeling the sweat that’d built up from being outside and the heat of her skin.

It wasn’t that Maki had never felt strange presences before. (She grew up in an estate crawling with creepy old men for relatives, after all) Her sister complained about actually seeing them all the time when they were younger and she never gave her the time of day, always saying nothing was there even when the weight was barely over her too-young-to-perceive-it-as-a-cursed-presence head. And when she got her glasses, she finally was able to see all the gross and scary things her sister cried to her about and stuck behind her in fear of. And though her lack of experience with curses despite hearing complaints and whines about them all the time wasn’t a very large scale for comparison, the cold striking through her bones and leaving her with a burning stillness to the floor wasn’t like anything she’d felt before.

It was unfamiliar. Unknown, unwelcome, uncomfortable. For a minute she thought about being uncouth and keeping the cup to herself until you came out for dinner, making you get it yourself. And then another minute passed and she heard the faintest sound of window blinds being snapped shut. The unbridled need to investigate dominated her need to flee (which the ratio was egregiously low for such a creepy scene) and she stepped further into the darkened spotlight of the hallway.

Maki didn’t tremble. Her footsteps were secure in their path that became more and more narrow the closer she got to turning around the corner to your room at the end of the hall.

The second to last door on the left side. It was the same as almost every other door in the school. Brown surface, bronze handle.

You set yours apart. The bland brown became an unsightly faded mahogany. The bronze became an unpleasant and weathered copper. All the other doors turned away in shock and fear at the face of a door set apart from all of them.

Unbeknownst there was a mere ghost in the room. A shadow of normality replaced by unorthodox silence rained over the rest of the building. The air was unsettling. Maki knew something unnatural was happening.

The hallway seemed as if it’d stretched. The walls elongated and the doors distorted themselves with them.

Everything was still. Creepily frozen. Maki should’ve felt fear but she didn’t, because as real as it all felt—the walls stretching, the light clouding up, the door withering in on itself—it also felt fictional, like something out of an old fairytale made to scare kids.

She was a kid but it didn’t scare her.

Your door flew open before she had time to stop herself and knock. Your lights (a little lamp and candles—you hated using the big light) were off. The wicks were quiet and black and your lamp had stiffened. The old, rotting book on the lingering nightstand opened its nonexistent eye on the surface and stared at the intruder. Your walls were petrified and your tapestries stood like soldiers facing the peril of war.

Your bed looked as solid as a rock, but you seemed to sink right into the mattress. You were still, the walls were still, the bed was still, but your mind was a squiggling mess and Maki couldn’t see behind your stiff shoulders and rigid muscles.

The scene above you was everything short of punctilious.

The night was moving with the stars that peered down at you, then to each other in confusion, worry, then back at you as if to examine you.

The ground beneath you was solid but you felt like lifeless mesh. You would’ve condensed into a dew drop if you could’ve.

There was something in your hand. Your fingers could barely twitch and feel around for its shape, the cold and sharp edges dug into the plush of your fingertips.

Something stared down at you as you stared up at it. Something so familiar and strange and something that wore different faces with every passing second. They all made up an inevitable pattern that connected everyone and everything.

The dust settled hesitantly. The wind crept by in a sneaky tiptoe past your unwatchful eyes. A suspicious warmth filled your chest as it spread to your stomach and your neck and soaked your shirt in its embrace.

The patterns and the warmth and the sky and the cold reflected your eyes as if they were real. The ground beneath you shook and crumbled as a shrill gust blew past your ears.

Someone had called your name—or maybe it was two voices—no… three? 

Your bed dipped where someone had sat. A flame licked at your cheek when a slap whipped across your face.

Maki was beyond confused. She couldn’t tell if you’d felt it because you were unresponsive and, in her eyes, in a dream-like state with your eyes open.

“What is your problem? Wake the hell up!” Maki slapped you again. She was sure if she was even gaining any progress with the way your head simply lolled to the other side. She sighed, shoving your cup on your mattress and raising her arm again.

Your hand shot up and caught her wrist in a near bone-cracking grip just before her palm could slam against your face again.

“Maki,” your eyes were still faraway, like you were looking at something beyond her.

She frowned and yanked her arm out of your grip. “So you can hear me?”

“I can feel you, too. Including those slaps you gave me.”

“I wouldn’t have had to do that if you answered me when I called your name.”

“You interrupted me,” you frowned with her and sat up. Your dream went away as your head pushed through the invisible cloud, your hand clutching the back of your skull and rubbing your fingers at the base. You looked at her again. “Why are you here in the first place?”

“You forgot this,” Maki tilted her head towards your cup as she stood up from your bed. “I didn’t want to. It was Panda’s idea, but he’s too much of a pussy to wander off to this hallway, so I’m only doing it to get a jab at him.”

You looked at the cup and smiled, chuckling quietly for a moment.

“What’s humorous about that?”

“That’s not even mine,” you glanced at her through your eyelashes. “It’s from the kitchen. I meant to take it back.”

Maki thought for a moment as she stood, shifting her weight from one leg to the other. She was still reeling from watching you in such a state. Of course, she couldn’t let you know that it had such an effect on her.

“It’s dinner time soon, anyways,” Maki turned and started for your door, shaking off the chill that’d run up and down her spine. “So you might as well just take that thing with you to eat.”

“I’m not going,” you picked up the cup and stood from your spot. “I lost my appetite after… well, y’know.”

“Right,” Maki pulled your door open wider, standing in your doorway as you followed her. “I’m getting Shoko. There’s no way that shit doesn’t warrant her attention.”

“Maki, don’t,” you started firmly, grabbing her wrist again and stopping her before she got out to the hall. All the other closed doors watched. “I don’t need her.”

“You obviously do,” Maki pulled away once more and gained her distance, walking out into the hallway. “What even was that? A panic attack or something?”

“None of your business is what it was,” you hissed, your frown deepening. “Now I don’t need you making it everyone else’s business by going to Miss Shoko. This isn’t the first time I’ve been through that situation, and it won’t be the last. I don’t need her attention, either.”

Maki clenched her jaw and grit her teeth, staring at you as you stared back. You looked completely different from your dream state, you looked like you actually belonged to the land of the living, for one. You also didn’t look scared for your life.

She had no idea what you saw or what you were hearing, but what she did know was that it certainly wasn’t normal, and it certainly wasn’t something that was supposed to be left alone.

“You started going here,” Maki daringly stepped closer to you, narrowing her eyes behind her glasses and glaring at you. “You made it everyone’s business as soon as you came here.”

“You didn’t have to come and fetch me!”

“I wasn’t going to ‘fetch’ you! I was bringing that damn cup back when I could’ve saved myself a trip over here!”

“I felt a change in cursed presence out here.”

The both of you turned your heads to find Gojo standing at the corner of the hallway. A shadow was cast over his face as he stood with his back to the sunlight.

“I hope I don’t need to intervene over there.”

“What you need to do,” Maki grabbed you by your sleeve. “Is get this girl to Shoko.” 

“Ieiri has nothing to do with this,” Gojo stepped towards you and Maki, looming over you both with his hands in his pockets. “She can’t help her.”

“I told you,” you turned your head and looked at Maki. “I don’t need her help.”

“So you just sit that whole process out until it’s over, then? Is that what this is?” Maki’s face turned dirty as she let go of your sleeve, wiping her hand off on her own shirt. “You just let creepy shit go down in there?”

“Maki,” Gojo called out sternly, tilting his head towards her. “Leave her alone. You shouldn’t have come.”

“Gladly,” Maki rolled her eyes and angrily stomped off down the hall, disappearing around the corner. You and Gojo both listened to the sounds of her heavy footsteps until they eventually disappeared, pitter pattering off into the distance.

Gojo sighed and let his shoulders fall. “She has a point, you know.”

“Didn’t you just say Miss Shoko can’t help me?”

“I meant that you made your condition everyone’s business by going here,” Gojo stood in front of you, looking down eerily but softly through his bandages over his eyes. “You have your own comfort zone. I get that, I have mine, too. But the whole reason you agreed to go here in the first place was to make progress with your illness. Part of that includes communal support, not just prescription medication Ieiri gives you every once in a while.”

“How am I supposed to gain this ‘communal support’ if that was the first reaction I got?” Your own shoulders fell as your face shifted from that defensive look to a guilty expression. You nibbled on your bottom lip for a moment with your teeth.

“Well, you only got such a reaction by lashing out.”

You let out a quietly irritated huff through your nose, fiddling with the ends of your shirt tied together. “I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t even angry!”

“I did some reading online the other day,” Gojo brought his fingers to his chin and put on another brooding expression, making you bite the inside of your cheek to keep from giggling. “That comes with psychosis. Emotional outbursts, I mean,” he let his hand fall back to his pocket as he shrugged. “Or something like that.”

“I know,” you looked back at your room, eyeing your nightstand. “I used to have all sorts of outbursts like that back in Shimane during my episodes.”

“There’s ways to cope with that, y’know. And I don’t mean putting leaves in hot water and hoping for the best.”

“It’s not just putting leaves in hot water…”

He shook his head as he gave you a small smile. “My point is, there’s other ways to deal with it. You came here for a reason. You came to get better. How do you plan on doing that if you stick to the same old mechanisms you’ve been using since forever?”

You couldn’t argue with that. Drinking tea only got you so far with… anything, really. You supposed it was time to branch out, to reach outside of your comfort zone and try things that weren’t witch-related. You hated to think that you’d lashed out at someone like that, or at anyone at all, and you were ready for a change. You were ready for some peace of mind.

“You’re right,” it dawned on you that you were nearly hunching over, so you straightened your posture and squared your shoulders. “I won’t get anywhere like this.”

“I’m glad you agree,” Gojo’s smile stretched into a wide, toothy grin that had a glint of hope for you shining off his teeth. “Ieiri’s working on getting you the right medication you need, rather than that crappy excuse Yaga told her to give you, cuz that shit clearly isn’t working, so you won’t have to keep wasting tea leaves for much longer.”

He reached over and ruffled your head with his abnormally large hand that could’ve squeezed all the way around your skull if he wanted to, preparing to make a quarter turn. “Come on, small fry. You’ll need to eat soon.”

He started down the hall, pulling his hand away from your head and sticking it in his pocket.

_________________________

It wasn’t very often that Maki was bewildered by something (or in some cases, someone). She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been truly appalled by something she didn’t already have the reaction drilled into her head with. 

Then again, she’d never met a witch before coming to Jujutsu High.

Now, truthfully, she hadn’t really given it much thought as to what kind of music she liked. She rarely ever got that kind of luxury at her lap while she was living at the Zenin estate, so it wasn’t a surprise to her when she found that it was such a low priority on her list and hierarchy. That wasn’t to say she didn’t like music at all, she just hadn’t been all that invested in it very much.

But she couldn’t find it in herself to focus on her music taste when the person asking about it also previously had an episode yesterday containing something akin to “prophetic dreams”.

Maki stared at you with a slight glare, mostly confused while also simultaneously looking freaked out all at the same time. She watched as you sat at your desk in the classroom, your body fully facing her as if to force all of her attention onto you. The both of you were there before the other guys, so it was only you two sitting there, and Maki was forced to listen to you.

She couldn’t grasp it. She didn’t think anything could ever possibly help her grasp it. You looked so casual. Light eyes, a smile, your elbow on the table and your cheek stuffed in your palm and a lax poise to your shoulders that made you come off as having a normal day. You weren’t pressuring her, weren’t rushing her for a reaction like she did to you previously. You were watching her patiently, probably thinking about the awkwardness of the silence she was giving you, and that made you all the more uncanny to her. She wondered if it was anything out of the ordinary for you to act completely normal after something like that happened.

Maki opened her mouth to say something, barely parting her lips, before she stopped herself almost immediately. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to indulge in your façade, because there was no way she thought you could genuinely say you weren’t thinking about the situation from the previous day and not be lying. She also just wasn’t sure if she wanted to associate herself with you period.

You’d let out a quiet sigh. It seemed your patience ran out, finally.

“You’re thinking about yesterday, right?” You asked, your hand moving up to sift your fingers through your hair before stilling them. “That’s why you’re so quiet.”

Maki clicked her tongue and stiffened her shoulders. “You could say that.”

“I’m sorry,” your eyebrows knit together slightly to form a softer version of a frown. The only thing missing was a jut of your lips to make a pout. “I didn’t mean to lash out at you. I feel really bad about it.”

Maki gave you a real frown. “That’s not what this is about,” she shifted in her chair, crossing her legs. She straightened her posture and looked away from you, swallowing quietly. “I meant that weird shit. Before you lashed out.”

You blinked, and in that half-second interval, your expression changed to something on some other side of the spectrum, raising an eyebrow at her. “You mean my episode?”

“Episode?” Maki questioned, sparing you a side glance she thought you were hardly worthy of. “I thought you were having a stroke.”

“It was an episode,” you shook your head gently. “And you were right yesterday.”

“About?”

Maki half expected you to give her a deadpan look, some sort of hint that you were annoyed. A side eye or a glare or a frown to mirror her own. A shadow of a scowl never graced your face. Instead, you shut your eyes for a second, then smiled, looking at her again.

“About me making it everyone’s business, of course,” another small grin flashed at her in all its kindness and an effort to keep the warmth around it. “And… I should’ve told you and Panda and Inumaki together. I’m sorry.”

“You said it was an episode?” Maki repeated rather dumbly, and she internally sighed at her own words. “What kind?”

“The psychosis kind.”

Maki never would’ve guessed. Of course, it was also rude to assume anything about anyone (and most times she didn’t even care). You did exude something taboo and unwonted to your energy: a chill entering a room accompanied by incense in an attempt to compensate for your cursed energy presence. There was a car-crash-that-you-can’t-look-away-from vibe to you, something that drew stares and questions and mumbles from people around you and spurred theories and rumors about you. You were a blunt force and a small knife, but the edge of the blade was everything short of blunt: sharp with an abrupt turn from one surface to another with a mystery waiting on the other side.

Maki supposed that other side of the knife was the psychosis part of you.

She pretended to not care, like she wasn’t even the tiniest bit curious about it, and brought her hand up to push her glasses back up the slope of her nose and to brush part of her bangs out of her eye.

Either she wasn’t a very good actress, or you were some all-knowing divine genius, because you gave her a knowing look while she tucked her hair back behind her ear.

“So you’re, like, what, crazy?”

You exhaled deeply, leaning into your palm supporting your head and scratching your scalp with your nails. Your eyebrows pushed together slightly, causing a crease in your forehead. You nibbled on your bottom lip with your teeth and shrugged your shoulders. “No.”

Maki scoffed at that. “You have to be. No one would be at this school if they weren’t at least a little coockoo.”

“What does that say about you, then?”

“This ain’t about me,” Maki frowned, leaning sideways in her chair, and lightly kicked her leg back and forth over her knee. “Are you crazy?”

“If I was any more crazy than ‘a little coockoo,’ then wouldn’t I be in an asylum, rather than here?”

“That’s a pretty high bar to surpass.”

“True,” you shrugged your shoulders again and blinked away the cross look on your face and brought back the familiar pleasantness that highlighted the backs of your fingers with the sunlight peeking through the room. One of your fingers tapped the top of your head. “‘Anything that can happen, will happen.’ It’s bound to come to fruition at some point.”

“And you think you’ll be the one to pass that bar?”

“Maybe,” Maki thought your face must’ve brightened with the way it got her attention after a beat of silence. There was something up in the air left for you to add, and for whatever reason, she knew, too.

If I live long enough, that is.

You avoided that topic. “But someone’s gonna do it, eventually.” You hummed, continuing your tapping of your finger on your head. The wall behind Maki—to the right of her desk, really—almost glowed with the brightness of the sunlight shining through the windows. Maki was thankful that your silhouette blocked most of it from getting in her eyes save for the tiniest bit of light that was angled in such a way that any twist and turn of her neck wouldn’t have done her any favors.

“I don’t really want it to be me, though,” you shrugged—your signs of unknowing were something quite common for someone originating from a mystical, all-knowing region of witches—and looked down at your lap and eyeing the material of your skirt. “I didn’t come here to get any worse.”

Maki nodded—so clearly, you came to get better, something pertaining to your ‘condition’ or whatever you would’ve preferred to have called it, so that you wouldn’t have been burdened with it so much—she respected that. She knew a few people, in all their pompous ways, who should’ve had half a brain to follow that same principle, but one, it wasn’t boot camp, and two, she also knew that those people weren’t nearly as self conscious and benevolent as you.

“I don’t blame you,” she finally answered, throwing you a casual glance over the rim of her glasses. You gave her another look, curiously raising your eyebrow. She blinked her gaze away from you and at the surface of your desk. “I mean, I wouldn’t wanna be plagued with something as horrific as that all the time.”

A beat passed.

Another beat passed, and a thought came to her in a fleeting breath she took.

Maki clicked her tongue. She wondered if it was a normal thing for you to be avoiding talking specifically about your episodes and the aftermath of such. As heavy a topic it was, it also made a great elephant in the room for the two of you. Or anyone, for that matter.

“Where the hell are they?” Maki turned her head around to look at the door at the front of the room, glaring at it as if willing it to swing open and reveal her classmates (and teacher) hiding behind it. She imagined each of their heads peeking past the doorframe one at a time like cartoon characters.

“We’re both quite early,” you glanced up at the clock on top of the wall above the chalkboard at the front. It was hardly past 7:45. You hadn’t expected Panda or Toge to be in such a rush as Maki was (and usually you were on time, but you hadn’t slept at all in the previous night, so you came out early to fix yourself a cup of green tea before going to the classroom), and you had even lower expectations for Gojo now that you and the others had caught onto his penchant for being borderline unfashionably late (if the first day wasn’t enough of a warning).

“I guess we are,” Maki narrowed her eyes and sighed sharply. Her options were limited: she either stayed with you and waited in silence (with occasional uncomfortable small talk) or left for almost forty-five minutes before coming back. The majority of her wanted to leave. A smaller part wanted to discuss the elephant in the room.

You let out a small, quiet yawn, but loud enough that it caught Maki’s attention again. She raised an eyebrow at you.

“Did you not sleep last night?” She questioned, watching you slip to the desk and laying your head down on the hardwood surface.

“I hardly ever get any decent sleep, so I usually stay up. It rarely ever catches up to me,” you closed your eyes, crossing your arms underneath you. “But when it does, it’s—“

“Hell to pay,” Maki nodded, giving you the tiniest hint of a smile on the corner of her mouth. She knocked her knuckles on the surface of her table. “Via falling asleep on these hard ass desks.”

“And then waking up with a massive headache later on,” you replied, smiling back at her like you knew of the minuscule simper she was trying to hide. “I’ve fallen asleep with my head on tree stumps before, back home. If you don’t have anything resembling a pillow, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise when you wake up.”

“You’ve got that hood of yours,” Maki pointed to the hood around your shoulders, stopping just past your elbows from the way your arms were folded up. “Bet you could ball that up and use it as a makeshift pillow.”

“I could,” you shrugged, opening your eyes again. “But then I’d be leaving you to your own devices, and I don’t want you to be lonely.”

Maki sharpened her gaze, narrowing her eyes and watching you as you watched her. She felt a flash of annoyance flicker through her as she gave you a questioning stare. She wanted to tell you she was just fine on her own, and that she had been long before going to school in Tokyo. You were nice enough to stay awake for her despite having the worst bags under your eyes that looked like they weighed a ton and she couldn’t bring herself to feel bad just yet.

Seconds passed, and you both were still watching each other like hawks.

You created an opportunity to change the subject, probably because of the discomfort. “Does your leg still hurt?”

Maki finally tore herself away from the staring contest between the both of you and glanced down at her leg, flexing her calf muscle slightly and hissing quietly at the dull pain that shot through her muscles. “No.”

“Lying’s a bad look on you,” you chortled softly, a quiet snort leaving your mouth a second later that Maki found oddly endearing.

“I’m not lying,” Maki muttered through a very dishonest sigh.

“A witch always knows,” you flashed a smile at her, and as sly as it was, it was clear to her that it wasn’t just witchy-intuition. “You still haven’t gone to Miss Shoko, have you?”

“It’ll heal on its own,” Maki grumbled, shifting away from you and facing the front of the room.

“It will, yes,” your eyes followed as she shifted slightly, watching the sunlight create a glare in the lenses of her glasses. “But that would take a while. And if you never get any help, it would take weeks, and that would hinder your training schedule, would it not?”

Maki bit down on her tongue roughly, hard enough to draw a bit of blood, tasting the warm iron and scrunching up her face with a small grunt. She half expected you to laugh in the face of her minuscule pain, and was only half disappointed when she heard not even a shadow of a giggle.

“I suppose it would,” she mumbled, leaning forward and resting her elbow on her desk and holding her cheek with her palm. “But I’ll push through the pain.”

“Miss Shoko told you to let it rest, did she not?”

“I think I’ll be okay.”

Your smile morphed into a curious look. “Has no one ever taught you anatomy?” (no) “Putting strain on an injury like that can make it worse.”

“I know that,” Maki tapped her cheek with her index finger and eyed you morosely. “But I’m not frail. I’m not composed of noodles for bones.”

“Perhaps this isn’t about bones, then,” your lips split in a droopy grin that actually reached your eyes and tilted sideways towards your desk.

She frowned. “Stop splitting hairs, you get the point.” she sighed quietly through her nose, exasperated already even though the sun was still rising and the air was still dry and fresh with a stilled yawn.

She remembered the day before, thinking back to the offer you made her: giving up some of your free time to help her with something she could’ve helped herself with by stealing an ice pack from Shoko’s ‘medical fridge’ (or making one herself with ice from the kitchen freezer, ziploc bags and several napkins). Of course, she hadn’t thought of doing that until the fresh memory came back to her early into her day in the form of benign eyes staring at her (which also simultaneously sent a small chill up her spine) and a breeze that seemed to have followed you at your very whim.

She sighed again, clearly irritated, and glanced at you again, watching you as your eyes were shut loosely, as if prepared to jump back into the day if needed.

“Hey.” Maki called your name. “Are you still up for using your witchy shit on me to pull a fixer-upper on my leg?”

One eyelid pulled itself open, and it should’ve sent a similar shiver up her spine like it did whenever you stared, but it didn’t, and it felt quite liberating to no longer be affected by the scrutiny of foreboding irises watching her. “I never did come by your room yesterday, did I?”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“It was purely an accident. I’d never turn down an opportunity to help someone.”

“Right,” Maki brought her hand out from underneath the weight of her cheek and scratched her eyebrow with her fingernail. She didn’t bother noting to you that you appeared to not have put your bedsheets in the laundry, either, but she wasn’t about to get into that. She returned back to her former state and stared up at the clock on the wall, internally groaning when only several minutes had gone by.

She sat in the quiet, droned minutes that dragged by. The soft tick of the wall clock filled the silence, shifting and stilling the air every second that passed.

The air was dry. Hushed in the way that the tick of the second hand, as faint as it was, like it wasn’t trying to disturb anyone, echoed like a scream reverberating from the empty walls of a canyon.

A thought crossed Maki’s mind again. (She imagined it as someone running laps around a track ring and only crossing the forefront of her mind when it passed the proclaimed starting line.) The same thought she had a few minutes ago just before, and it irritated her upon realizing it was her third time thinking about it in just a few minutes. But then, she supposed, she couldn’t be blamed if it was about something that would’ve kept normal people awake and a wall between those they had relationships with.

The very, very deep, and very, very sharp, and very, very low sigh that came from the depths of her chest almost startled you if you hadn’t already sensed a change in her mood.

“Do you just not talk about it?” She questioned, eyes staring like they were their own separate entity interrogating you as they sharpened like spearheads.

You blinked once. “About what?”

Her eyes stared you down with an incredulous glare. “About your episodes. What else?”

You sat in the quiet for a beat, looking around at anything other than Maki—at the walls, plain and waxed hardwood holding them in the confines of a classroom all-too silent for the question hanging in the air to be something you felt comfortable looking right in the eyes of. You stilled, you pondered, and you dwelled in the moments you took to answer her, seemingly ignoring the signs of impatience she exuded.

The air unit turned off, leaving the air dead silent. The slimy sound of you swallowing your own spit felt louder than an earthquake.

The clearing of your throat was almost deafening.

“Sometimes I don’t talk about them,” you started, glancing at Maki. “Sometimes I don’t even think about them. It makes me feel like there’s nothing to dwell on, and that I’m a normal person with nothing out of the ordinary about me.”

Maki had only expected a simple yes or no (or maybe even straight up refusing to answer), as she thought her question was as basic as that, not a wish for a miracle she thought would’ve never come to you simply for being on that mountain with her. For the quickest and most daring moment, it was inconceivable that you should’ve even thought of having such a privilege, lest you’d already forgotten that one way or another, you had been, and always would be, part of the small outlier group in the world.

But, she supposed it wasn’t her place to judge. If a life where you weren’t even a toe out of the normie-line was what you wished for, even grasped at the tiniest of split ends of the opportunity rope ladder for it, she wasn’t anyone to disrupt the genie’s magic lamp.

It wasn’t lost on her that you gave no resistance to answering like she thought you would’ve. Barriers were nonexistent in your world, it seemed, and the layers and complexities flowed out from a gash like blood from a deep cut: freely and with no restraints until it dripped and stained the floor.

“That’s deep,” Maki said plainly as compensation for her expectation. Another epiphany dawned on her. She supposed there wasn’t really any shallow or casual or one-dimensional way to answer a question of that nature.

“You could say that,” a soft breath that resembled the early beginnings of a laugh left your nose. “But that’s the simplest I could have put it. I’m sure you don’t want the full story so early in the morning.”

“Story?” She quipped, the subconscious tapping of her shoe against the wooden floor faltering, instilling a mute atmosphere once more. Funny that she should have thought that there wasn’t anymore you had to tell her beyond your wish. 

“Did you think it was as simple as that?”

“No, but I didn’t think it’d be like gathering around a campfire, either.”

“Good thing the rest shouldn’t be for the ears,” at the wry smile that crossed your face, Maki’s eyes narrowed into a displeased look that directly opposed you.

“I’ve no means to burden you with that sort of thing,” (you weren’t sure if you had the words to describe the ‘story’ anyways) “At least, not in the manner of ‘gathering around a campfire.’”

Her eyes rolled at that. “Is that supposed to be an attempt to baby me?”

“Not necessarily,” you shrugged your shoulders in response and closed your eyes again, pressing your cheek to your white-clothed arm and effectively squishing it. “But if it were, it’s not just you.”

“So you’re passively attempting to baby all of us by keeping quiet about your ‘story’ or some shit?”

“I just don’t think that some things should be said out loud in the schoolroom.”

Maki couldn’t argue, but that didn’t negate the vexing part of it that meant you felt the need to keep something about you from everyone else in an attempt to not cause anyone discomfort when Maki was willing to bet her left pinky toe that everyone else had their own horror stories to tell. 

Her cross look deepened. The back of her neck felt hot and she was way above denying the real reason behind it.

“That’s essentially the same thing,” she sat up and folded her arms over her chest. “Hasn’t it dawned on you by now that we go to a school centered around fighting literal paranormal beings for a living? What part of whatever it is you have to say is considered ‘not part of schoolroom discussion criteria’?”

“Then I suppose if I should feel pressured to spend the day spilling my guts out because of that, doesn’t that incline you to do the same? Inumaki? Panda?” You pulled your eye open again, staring at her a little more sharply yet never losing that tolerant glint in your iris that you’d first greeted her with. “You, especially, since you appear to have such a distaste for your own backstory, given that you fuss over others referring to you by your family name.”

Maki’s teeth wanted to nibble on the inside of her lip, just to give herself something to focus on other than the absolutely mortifyingly casual way you looked at her whilst uprooting her whole argument. She wasn’t about to avert her gaze anywhere else because that was a one way ticket to the odyssey-level emotional journey of admitting that she was wrong, so rather than looking away like any normal person would (because again, nobody there was necessarily normal), she doubled down and stared at you even when her eyes burned after a while.

And another while passed. You humbly took it upon yourself to look away first (possibly as a mercy-kill to save Maki from the grueling process of doing it) and looked up at the clock.

Maki could’ve strangled you when you glanced back at her with a newfound teasing glint.

“We’ve gone a whole five minutes without talking,” the corners of your mouth pulled into a smile, “you put up a good staring contest.”

Maki didn’t say anything; she didn’t think it was a good idea to indulge in your gloating, though subtle, as clearly you weren’t rubbing it in her face that she was wrong.

You blinked again, glancing to the side and sat up, shifting in your spot. You looked at her again. “Your silence is quite telling, Maki.”

“I guess you have a point,” she rolled her eyes, pushing her glasses up her nose as she reluctantly pointed out the truth of your rebuttal. 

Impartial to your words, though she hated someone else being right, she gave up on the idea of sitting around with the rest of the class and listening to you tell the psychological horror story of your life and describing in your mystical modern-day-Shakespeare-as-a-teenage-girl language the vociferous and spine-chillingly ominous things you once swore were standing in front of you that turned into dream-like plagues of the mind’s eye.

“I’m glad we could agree, then,” you uncrossed your arms underneath your head and sat upright, stretching your arms over your head and bunching up your hood at your shoulders in the process.

“I’m going to go out to one of the breezeways outside,” you stood up after getting an urge for another drink—though actually making one yourself would’ve taken longer than simply walking outside and getting one from a vending machine—and started for the door at the front of the classroom. You sensed Maki’s confusion from behind you staring into your back, and you made a half turn once your hand rested on the doorknob. “Y’know, the one with the vending machines?”

“We have vending machines here?”

You nodded. “I saw them last week while I was going on a walk after school.” Your hand twisted the knob gently, a soft ‘click’ coming from the lock. “I’ll be back before class starts, I just want to see if they have anything good over there.”

Maki wanted to question if you actually thought there was anything above the point of decent on the good-bad-ugly scale in those vending machines—in any vending machine, really—but then it dawned on her once again that a lot of the things she and many others were used to seeing and talking about and using quite often, were things you probably had only heard about in stories (if ever) that witches around your coven had presumably told.

“Do you even know how to use that thing?” She quizzed, watching you pause with one foot out the door. She monitored the way your mouth twisted into a scrunch and the slow turn of your head and the morphing of your wry look into a neutral plane of expression.

“I’m taking that as a no.”

“It’s… the same principle as a times table, is it not?”

Maki frowned and her confusion grew. “How in the world does that correlate?”

“How would it not? On a times table, you put one finger on the x-axis row at the top and another finger on the y-axis to the left and follow the row from the top until you meet where your finger was at on the y-axis. Is it not a similar, if not the exact same process as using a number-letter combination on a vending machine?”

Maki stared lamely at you with lidded eyes and an unimpressed look.

At that, you simply smiled. “You’re welcome to join me and witness my thought process in person, if you’d like.”

“I wouldn’t like that, actually.” Maki relaxed her face and kicked her leg over her knee, swinging it back and forth. “Where’d you even get the money from? I know you haven’t been assigned a mission yet.”

“I’ve plenty leftover from that allowance Mr. Gojo gave us on Friday,” you shrugged (you’d only bought two books, both of them being paperback, but even if they’d been hardcover, you doubted it would’ve made any difference in your leftovers). Twenty thousand yen seemed like a hefty amount from someone who lived off a teacher’s salary (then again, it wasn’t like regular teaching, either) to hand over to four teenagers. 

(Realistically, you thought Panda wouldn’t have had anything to do with the money Gojo gave him, but nature had its way of proving you wrong by bringing him back to that creepy old corner you all promised to meet up at with the least amount of money left from his allowance and quite a few chunks of some unidentifiable vegetables stuck in his teeth)

“Anyways, I’ll be back,” you finally moved out into the hall, closing the door behind you.

For Maki, the room finally seemed to be dimmed to her liking as a cloud passed underneath the sun in the sky.

_________________________

To get outside, you had to pass through two other corridors, which were considered where the upperclassmen went for their learnings. The second corridor you passed through finally led to the dirt-gravel-sand mixture of a pathway of the great outdoors.

The air had been colder that morning for late April–the breeze you walked into brushed your cheeks and your hair and sent your hood flapping and soaring behind you as you sauntered, but it was pleasant and welcome and a break from the incinerating heat of the sun from the recent weeks.

Those who were still getting ready that morning were lucky all the same. Despite the rather chilling breeze that reached beyond the seams of your shirt sleeves rolled up to your elbows, the humidity clung to your skin and your hair and stuck to you all the way to the vending machine and back (which lacked all the basic criteria needed for it to have been deemed as “tolerable” by your standards (even with your open-mindedness)) and left you feeling like a mass of rogue dew drops by the time you came back to class.

On your way back, which the walk proved to be overall pleasant, you passed an open door that certainly hadn’t been opened on your first trip. Beyond it was an office-like background with all the classic icons you’d read in books: a bookcase on each side of the room (filled with their own books and things), the center showing off a rather dapper, rich mahogany brown desk (definitely not supplied by the school itself) with a mason jar at one of the corners full of pens and markers and clad in tacky stickers, a black rug in front of the desk, a somehow even more rakish office chair behind it, and an open window at the back of the room with a potted chia sitting on the sill and soaking the early sun. Somehow, when considering the context of whose office it was, there wasn’t a single speck of dust to be found.

Of course, the only person you knew who could afford such opulent things and still hand out eighty thousand yen to four teenagers willy-nilly, was none other than Satoru Gojo.

You couldn’t see him from the corner of your eye, so you walked right past him without so much as a simple “good morning” for him. He didn’t mind. He was going to see you anyway in a little over fifteen minutes, so he figured he’d say good morning to you and the others then. For the moment, he stood in front of one of the bookcases with a filing cabinet at his feet pulled open and a manilla file in his hand probably an inch thick with insolent papers that already sucked the energy out of his brain.

Another file had been stuffed loosely in the cabinet, the top sticking out slightly before folding when his foot kicked the cabinet shut.

The file in his hand was flipped open with his free index finger, and a deep, grotesque, crunchy-like sigh made way from his lips before he cleared his throat and stepped closer to his desk. The digital clock on the corner across from the one with the tacky mason jar read 8:11. His bandages were down and from behind his sunglasses his eyes darted across the page ahead of him. 

Something about a request for an update on administered medicine to a student, something about blood test result records, something about dates of birth and full names and even parents names. The gist wasn’t lost on Satoru that there wasn’t any sort of easier way for his students to take better-suited medication for their disorders and whatnot than filling in a whole inch-thick file of unnecessary paperwork that took longer than needed, and that was under the assumption that the request even got approved at the end of it all.

Satoru figured the file could wait. His procrastinating tendency reared in its lazy head as he plopped down in his chair, tilting his head back with his hair strung across the leather and pushing the much-too-tired-for-his-weight chair back that groaned and begrudgingly complied under the mass of muscle that was him and kicked his feet up on his desk. The sole of his shoe nudged his laptop further towards his monitor on his desk (because who was Satoru Gojo if not extra?) and made room for his other foot, crossing his legs at the ankle and staring at the ceiling.

He stared in almost-silence. The breeze outside blew into the room. He inhaled the smell of morning dew and faint herbal-mint.

The tint of his shades darkened everything above him; even the up-and-coming glare of the rising sun was dimmed to a tolerable point, and for him, it was easier to give himself the time of day to be late to his own class on a quiet April morning like that when the shadow above his eyes made the insipid confines of his office a little more admissible.

_________________________

In her room, the corners waited patiently for the open and slam of Maki’s door to rattle the walls and the nightstand next to it, sending her somehow stood-upright falling against the dark brown surface.

Her bed awaited her, welcoming her with thrown open sheets and the tiniest dip in the mattress from where she usually crawled into.

Her dampened towel that was slung over her shoulder eventually found itself hanging over the edge of her hamper and halfway inside with her accumulated laundry from a three-day period. Her ceiling fan swung gently and slowly as it hung, blowing the smallest gust of wind against her bare arms.

That Monday morning wasn’t as taxing as she thought it was. Gojo still passed out that quiz he’d announced a while ago and everyone still took it—he told each of you not to cheat, but it was very fortunate for his four current students that the quiz was about basic properties of cursed energy and objects (cursed spirits were the next unit), which, foolishly, none of you paid attention to but those properties of cursed energy and objects had similar principles as magic and enchantments and hexes and whatnot, so the four of you passed with flying colors because you were nice enough to mutter the answers under your breath and pass it off as talking to yourself from anxiety about the quiz.

Since that quiz was all Gojo had planned for the day (and he couldn’t start a new unit right in the middle of lesson time), you all were let off extra early by the grace of his kindness. Of course, everyone went off to their self-proclaimed curriculars. Panda agreed to spar with Maki for a while before he eventually called it quits and left the training room. Maki trained by herself most of the day even though she had internal complaints about her leg that Panda called her out on. Toge did his daily check on his plants and then went back to his dorm for a nap. You disappeared to some other part of campus and came back to the girls’ hallway two hours later with a bowlful of herbs and such.

Maki’s leg muscle twitched and nearly pulled her to her bed, ushering her to sit down before her fascicles gave out and blasted her leg to hell. She cursed at the pain, sitting on the edge of her bed and pulling leg over her other knee. Her thumb pointlessly rubbed at her calf, feeling the throb of muscle underneath the futile weight of her finger pressing against it. The pain came in sparks that reached through her shinbone, something that to her she imagined as red and pulsating with newer waves, knocking through her tendons and bones and echoing back to her muscle through a two-way torment-oriented tunnel.

Though the affliction ached and the red she envisioned grew darker, she kept pressing. She occasionally took her thumb off her leg just for her to put it back in the exact spot where her nail dug a crescent into her skin, forming a tiny, darkened semicircle in her flesh that grew more obscure each time she pressed. Her glasses were starting to slip to the tip of her nose and the pain began to ebb and for a minute she thought she might’ve finally pressured it into dissipating.

A knock brought her back to the reality that touching where it hurt only made it worse.

Maki sighed. She took her thumb off her calf and adjusted her tank top strap over her shoulder and brushed her hair behind her ear and pushed her glasses back up until the lenses almost pressed against her eyelashes and she pretended she never tampered with her pain. She bravely walked to her door and ignored the pang in her leg every time her left leg took a step.

The door swung open with a small gust that blew against her face. In front of her was you with a mug with a jar filter in it in one hand and a water bottle and two small, black and opaque pouches pinched in your other hand. The smile on your face went without saying.

“Hi,” you announced, fiddling with the pouches in your hand.

Maki looked at the pouches with narrowed eyes. “Hi,” she parroted lamely. “What’s that?”

“These are just oils and leaves I took with me on my trip here,” you shook the pouches gently, a muffled clinking sound coming from inside one of them.

Maki hummed and nodded along. She looked away from the pouch and looked right into your eyes. Without looking, she examined that your usual white uniform undershirt was gone in place of a similar dark shirt done all the way up until the last two buttons. Even with the sleeves rolled up to your elbows and your shirt only somewhat neatly tucked into the waist of your skirt and noting the tiniest wrinkles in your shirt at the shoulders, Maki concluded that you didn’t have much in the way of looking casual in any way even if you were simply visiting someone else’s dorm.

You looked down and at your boots, wiggling your foot slightly at the edge of the threshold of  Maki’s door before reaching down, dropping your pouches into your mug and holding your bottle under your arm before tugging your boots off of your feet and leaving them by the door.

The frame left Maki out of center as she stepped aside, giving you the unsaid notion that you were welcomed. “You look like you’re going to a job interview.”

“Is this my interview?” You quizzed, stepping in and becoming acutely aware of the fresh smell of lavender in the room, standing off to the side and waiting for Maki to shut the door. 

You looked around and took note of the rather stale display of her room—though you supposed it wasn’t much of a shock when considering her dry personality, too—and saw that she only had the basics: her bed, her closet, a nightstand, and a hamper.

“Not really,” Maki brought you back with the click of the handle and the light scuff of wood against wood for a brief second. “It’s just a favor, isn’t it?”

“Fortunately for me, it appears you have a penchant for not working within your best interest,” you eyed the towel hanging over the edge of her hamper, then at Maki with a knowing look and the tiniest bit of a simper on top of the halfhearted disappointment in the back of your throat. “Seriously?”

“What?” Maki questioned, her shoulders shrugging defensively as she waddled over to her bed, a little more steady than someone with a pulled calf muscle should have been. “A girl can’t shower anymore?”

“Good thing no one said that. What’d you do earlier?”

Maki took the shift in your stance from an awkward cross of your arms over your stomach to the one hand on your hip and the other arm limp at your side with your mug against your leg as an opening to get smart. Sitting on the edge of her bed again and scooting towards the center, she clicked her tongue and pretended to disappear into deep thought.

“Well, I… went to class this morning.”

A light scoff left your lips. “Well, thanks for reminding me of your whereabouts this morning, but I meant post-quiz.”

Maki stared at you, watching from the corner of her eye as you tapped your mug against your thigh and listened to the soft tapping of your foot against the floor. For the moment she took to say something, she contemplated why she let you in her room to begin with—she couldn’t ask Toge or Panda because she wasn’t quite sure how well-versed either of them were in medical practices and Shoko wasn’t much much help since her only advice was to let it rest. Maki thought that that in itself was “against her best interest”, one didn’t even have to know everything about her to know that rarely anything got between her and her time spent training.

Well, Shoko wasn’t the one making the offer, so.

Maki crisscrossed her legs and folded her arms over her chest. “I went to the training room again.”

“Right,” you nodded briefly, cautiously stepping towards her bed and waiting for her to give the green light.

Soon enough, her bed dipped at the end where you sat. In the gap between the two of you was the water bottle, the mug, and your pouch. Maki’s eyes lingered on the small collection of small things sitting on her bed, examining them as she did with all other things and analyzing them like they could’ve ever possibly done any harm to her.

Your black socks—no, your toes—curled and uncurled as you gazed around again, idly glancing at the uneventful manilla of her walls. Your shoulders rose and fell to the rhythm of your breathing. Your nails tapped against the porcelain of your mug and clinked quietly, yet it rang like church bells in Maki’s ears and she sat up straight.

“Is sitting in silence part of the process?”

“Only for the unguided.” Your eyes landed on her again, your eyebrow raising slightly as you tilted your head just a barely perceptible angle to the left. “And I certainly am aware of my place in that regard.”

“You think I’m unguided?” The shadow of a frown appeared across Maki’s face, her eyes narrowing into slits behind her glasses, the glare in the lenses from the sun making her tilt her head towards you.

“I don’t mean it in a bad way,” you took the pouches out from the mug and set them next to it. You stood the mug upright with one hand hovering next to it, keeping it up with some phenomenon Maki was apparently blind to. “I just mean that you aren’t even a little bit experienced with the ways of witchcraft,” you took the water bottle, warm in the palm of your hand, and carefully opened it using only the mystical force given to you, cautious not to spill any on Maki’s sheets, and poured it into the mug. The filter laid bare next to your knee. “For some, it seems like a daunting experience.”

“Should I perceive it to be in this moment?”

“Not quite,” you shrugged, the stream coming from the water bottle transforming into a stilled stream as it steadily filled the mug. Your hand pulled away and let the bottle float a few inches in the air. “But it’s something that bewilders most people upon first encounter. Usually their first response is questioning if it’s real.”

But Maki knew it was real—she knew from watching that water bottle pour its contents on its own and from the empathic air-cleansing you did for her on the first day and from your incense embers igniting and dissipating at the wave of your hand. She knew from the things her sister once complained about and from the whole school being built around the sole purpose of getting rid of such phenomena as curses and other ghastly things.

Maki supposed witchcraft and Jujutsu were similar, not that she could’ve ever used it, though.

“I’m aware that it’s real,” she watched the stream of water as it came to a halt, the bottle pulling away from the mug and the cap screwing it shut. A faint steam emitted from the waterline.

Your mouth twisted into something of a wry-looking smile that held an affectionate mirth at the corners. “Well, that’s because it’s in front of you, silly,” you took one of the pouches and held it in your palm, looking up at Maki. “Leaves or no leaves?”

Maki’s eyebrow quirked. “Aren’t those, like, essential to tea-making?”

“I meant do you want them left in the mug or not?” Your other hand grabbed the filter with your fingers, holding it up. “Some people don’t like the leaves at the bottom.”

“Would it change anything?”

“Nope. This is solely for your personal preference.”

Maki contemplated on just keeping the leaves at the bottom simply because it would’ve been more work for you if you left them in the filter and had to clean it out afterwards. She figured cleaning a mug was easier than cleaning a whole mesh filter.

“Keep them at the bottom.”

You set the filter back down and pulled the bunched opening at the top of the pouch, reaching in with pinched fingers and pulling out a pinch full of leaves. You sprinkled them in the mug and gently waved your hand over the edge, and the water began stirring slowly on its own.

“Alright, I’m gonna let that sit for a minute,” you sat up straight and took your other pouch in your hand, pulling it open and dumping out a small bottle into your palm before dropping the pouch to your side. Maki watched rather curiously as you opened it and left several drops on both hands, rubbing them together.

“May I see the injured leg, please?”

Maki stuck her leg out for you without knocking anything over—she doubted it would’ve made a mess anyways, since your magic probably would’ve cleaned it up as soon as anything spilled, but it wasn’t right to be careless—and leaned back slightly. Your knee knocked with her ankle slightly, and you apologized briefly before moving your hands closer to her calf.

“This does require physical touch,” you warned, eyes flitting up to meet intense golden hues boring holes into your face. Maki’s expression didn’t change from its quite unreadable tone as her shoulders shrugged. “Is that alright with you?”

She clicked her tongue. “It’s not like I have a choice in this regard.”

“It’s just common courtesy to gain permission before taking action.” Your eyes wandered down to her half again, watching it closely as it twitched slightly, and you doubted it was of her own accord from how brief it seemed. You met her gaze again, staring into pinpoint pupils surrounded by liquid gold. 

“Is this okay?”

Maki looked at her own calf as well, tilting her leg just an inch and sighed quietly. “Yeah.”

You hummed, and the mug in front of her began floating to her chest. Her hand—against her instincts to keep her limbs to herself—reached out and nimble fingers wrapped around the curved handle. Cold porcelain met warm hands as her other palm came up and cupped the bottom of the mug. She brought it up to her face, tentative, but taking a sip anyway because she knew it was more than probably necessary if you had to bring it on your trip to her room.

And, to her surprise, it was actually really tasty. She’d expected some sort of earthy-potent-green tea taste, something that wasn’t quite distasteful but not overly enjoyable for her tastebuds. Rather, it was more like a sweet and syrupy flavor that had her eyebrows perking up ever so slightly.

“I sense it’s to your liking?” You commented, feeling the shift in Maki’s attitude and listening as her quiet sips became longer. Your hand was already on her leg by then, rubbing over her calf and searching for a sensitive spot, which you’d found when your thumb pressed harshly into her muscle and her foot flexed against her sheets.

“It’s agreeable,” Maki took her lips off of the edge of the mug and held it to her chest, warming her up and leaning back some more.

“I figured you’d like it,” you smiled as you took your hand off of her calf and grabbed your small bottle from earlier, squeezing a few more drops of the cold liquid onto her calf and screwing it shut again. “I’ve never once seen you eat a single vegetable. It seems you have an eye for sweet stuff.”

Maki rolled her eyes and looked away from your hands. “So you’re watching me?”

“I watch everyone,” you shrugged and lathered the oil over her leg, watching her watch you as your fingers dipped into the thickness of her calf muscles. The minty smell of the oil that infiltrated her nose strongly contrasted the sweetness left in her mouth.

“You all seem to have strange eating habits.”

“I bet you snacked on chicken feet back in the sticks.”

“And yet you have no issue eating hen’s eggs that pop out of their vaginas,” you eyed her knowingly from underneath your eyelashes. “I don’t even eat chicken feet, by the way. But if I did, that’s no less normal than eating eggs.”

Maki’s jaw set as you continued rubbing the oil into her skin, leaving the smell of mint settling in her nose. She looked back at your hands and noticed the newfound glint that the sun had cast onto her calf and your hands from peeking through her window. Your fingers glided across her muscle, rubbing against it with your knuckle and easing some of the tension that’d built up during the day.

A breath left her lips and her ankle flexed as your knuckle passed the sore spot again, dragging slowly, thoroughly and deliberately as if to stretch the pain thin.

Your palm soon rested flat against her skin, pressing softly into her leg.

A warmth grew from her shin and swelled to the back of her leg. Your mouth moved inaudibly, though Maki guessed she’d already drowned out the sound surrounding her.

And then, as if you’d only just touched her for the first time, she became hyper aware of your fingers around her calf. Skin against skin, even just a tiny bit, had never felt so incinerating and relieving at the same time. Maki thought her leg surely would’ve melted from the shin down when the heel of your palm pressed down, squashing the pain and red appeared clouded in her mind’s eye again. Red and pulsating and growing darker each moment that passed. The pain knocked through her tendons again, fainter and fainter the more you pressed until your palm surely felt it would’ve reached the bone.

Red dissipated into black, and then nothing, and then something clear that was staring back at her. Her eyes opened—she was never aware they had closed in the first place—and she saw you sitting up with a cloth you’d pulled from somewhere on your person and drying your hands off.

“All done,” you smiled brightly at Maki, studying the changing looks on her face from confusion to expressionless to the faint relief in her eyes.

“Is that it?” Maki questioned, pulling her leg back and feeling her spine crawl upon the realization that someone had just lathered oil and rubbed—rather intimately, a bit more than she would’ve liked—their hands over her leg. Her shoulders squared and went lax briefly, her fingers pushing her glasses back up the slope of her nose.

Another question popped up in her mind. “Was that oil necessary?”

“It is,” you answered lightly, tearing your eyes from the bewildered-mixed-with-relieved look on her face and focusing on filling your pouch with the oil bottle, pulling the drawstrings with your fingers and sealing it shut. “And the oil was just to get my hands smooth and to avoid any friction. Wouldn’t want to irritate your skin while I’m supposed to be healing you, right?”

Maki nodded silently and waited for you to get up and leave.

You exhaled quietly and looked up at her. “You did well. More than I expected.”

Maki’s eyebrow raised again. “You had expectations for me?”

“Well, beyond not completely freaking out, not really. But you went above and beyond, so you’ve nothing to worry about.”

Maki hummed in response. She wondered what happened beneath her skin when you were healing her—probably her slightly ripped muscle sewing itself back together like nothing ever happened. At least then, she wouldn’t have had to worry about the trajectory of her leg days, unlike what Shoko had told her—something about her calf muscles being less flexible and weaker. 

Weaker muscles, my ass.

“Now you don’t have to wait weeks for it to heal,” you got up from Maki’s bed with your pouches stuffed in your hand. “And you can keep that mug,” you tilted your head towards the mug in Maki’s lap with her hand around it. “It’s one of my own, but it looks good in your hands.”

Maki looked down at her half empty mug and examined how it fit in the curve of her hand; it did suit her pretty nicely. The dark green glaze on the porcelain complimented her hair and pleasantly contrasted the pale-olive skin of her hand. She nodded slightly, bringing the mug to her lips again.

“Thanks,” she murmured, letting her mug rest in her lap again.

You stepped over towards the door and placed your hand on the knob. You turned your head back to look at Maki and flashed her a bright smile, “You’re quite welcome, Maki.”

You almost turned the knob and pulled the door open when a thought crossed your mind, one that softened your lips into a more gentle and toned-down variant of the bright beam you’d given her. You glanced at her once more. “You know, if you wanna do stuff like that, so that you won’t need me every time you get hurt, you need only to ask.”

“Ask and I shall receive,” Maki reiterated, getting up from her spot on her bed and resting her mug on her nightstand next to her door. She stopped and turned towards you as you opened the door, and you mirrored her, your eyes locking together.

Maki’s eyes studied yours, watching the light shine naturally in your irises and the sun reflecting the never ending glossiness in them. Though, in the midst of the golden sunshine that glimmered in the slightly bloodshot whites and irises and was swallowed by your pupils, there was a profound sinkhole that sucked in the rays that gave everyone your friendly image. She was sure it wasn’t imaginative, because she blinked once, twice, three times and it was still there.

“Thanks,” Maki repeated, stepping away from the nightstand that she’d been subconsciously digging her hip into the corner of. Your eyes brightened as you pulled yourself away from the haze made of her eyes and the sunlight shining right into your retinas.

“You don’t have to thank me, Maki,” you pulled the door open, giving her one last look. “I wanted to do this.”

Maki thought to herself that you were nice. Nicer than anyone had ever been to her without a mean streak under their belts as well. And so far you hadn’t started one—you’d never been mean to anyone at that school thus far anyway—but for her it’d been like a breath of fresh air away from the swamp and smog of the breaths and words of rage and distaste and disappointment.

That bewildered her. Such kindness had been extremely hard to find in Maki’s world—born in the epitome of patriarchy and absolutely filthy oppression that broke backs and minds. The weight of the Zenin clan’s Kukuru Unit uniform was a heaviness still remembered by her shoulders that made her shudder.

Maki couldn’t wrap her head around it. How anyone had the capacity to be so selfless.

She blanked and stepped to the center of her doorway, stopping before she could follow you out. “How noble,” she narrowed her eyes. “But such charities from you aren’t a necessity. At least, not to me.”

“Oh? Should it not be a favor anymore?”

Maki’s hand came up to rest on her doorframe, and her eyebrows furrowed slightly into an irritated frown. Her agitation only grew when she saw that you seemingly thrived in the face of her annoyance.

“It’s not charity work, Maki. It’s called being nice.”

“Charity work is being nice, just with public praise slapped over it.”

“I suppose you’re right, but this isn’t the general public, is it?” You gave her an inquisitive smile with a lifted eyebrow. You waited a moment for Maki to answer, and reveled in the realization that she had none.

You sighed quietly. “So your consensus was to water down my offer to help in order to persuade me into not doing it again.”

Maki’s hand left her doorframe and went to slam her door shut.

“I applaud your efforts to sway my philosophy, but I’m afraid the sentiment will stay strong for as long as I may live.”

The door stopped just a few inches before the scuffing noise of wood against wood became relevant, Maki pausing in her door slam and effectively killing the finality of it. She groaned, shutting you off from her and her room and ignoring the feeling that you were out there sharing a chortle with the walls about the satisfaction of successfully vexing her.

And as much as she liked to think she was right, she’d been far from it. You’d already been halfway down the hall, in a hurry to scurry off to your room to sit on your bed and journal and read and pick apart the silence and reflect upon Maki’s words and philosophy—something that obtusely intrigued you and found its way into your journal just minutes after you’d already closed it in your drawer—and finished it off by grinding a lone and defected leaf you’d plucked from your back patio and pasted a small green dash at the bottom of the page.

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i realized last week that this is like the 3rd chapter in a row about the teen timeline, so the next chapter is gonna be adult timeline stuff.