"You'd be happier without me by your side."
flip your pillow
run plum
"It's... it's pink." Yuji's confusion with loud over the creaks and crumbles that my energy vibrated into, concerned yet fascinated at the mild glow that ran over the building like a combination of an MRI or a simple page scanner. There was a shimmer to it, a glow, that reminded Yuji of the reflection of scales on a freshly caught fish if it were a dying LED light on a store's entrance.
"First part of clean up: See the damage done!" Gojo instructed with a single finger air while the technique breathed its way through the abandoned building. "That's why she took photos before hand, to know how much to fix. Otherwise, she would go overboard and probably die from losing herself in the fix."
"Die?!" Kugisaki and Yuji exclaimed loudly with tones of indignation while Megumi only rolled his eyes at their dramatics. There was a black and white cat walking curiously a street over, stalking slowly to continue forward to its destination yet watching with yellow eyes that locked for a moment with the teen.
"Mhm, mhm." Gojo nodded his head up and down like an over excited toddler. His hands clasped together and made squishing motions as if he were mashing rice in between them, violently and using his mouth to make squish sounds that had Megumi's lip curl up in disgust. "If she doesn't know when to stop, then she'll slowly turn her mind into a big old slop of Jun slushy." Yuuji blinked down at his own hands with a face of unbidden horror while Kugisaki held her stomach dramatically as if she were going to pass out from the description. "...I think I'm going to hurl," She says, yet barely an hour ago she was watching gore and nearly died herself.
"Megumi! What's step two?" Satoru Gojo gladly ignored the weakness of his students with a twirl of hands to the quietest teen.
"...Do I have to?" Megumi sighed with a hand to the back of his head, looking away as the cat finally scampered off at his teacher's loud voice. At sensei's motion to keep going, a frantic roll of wrist, he rolled his eyes towards his new classmates and jabbed a thumb to the building. "Step two is determining what needs to be fixed and then fixing it."
The pink across the building slowly glided down the abandoned house until a circle just barely stretched out around the perimeter of the location. For a moment, nothing happened, until bricks started sliding from the ground outside up the building and into the large hole outside. Each brick and pipe slid in to place with soft clicks and swishes, cursed energy acted as a binding agent when mixed in and solidified.
"That's... kinda cool." Itadori admitted with unblinking eyes so so he wouldn't miss a single second of the ghostly rebuild. He particularly found a fixed point on a pipeline that melded and mended itself together in what appeared to be a ghost weld and next to it open wires braided back together, clipped with a chipped yellow, plastic tip.
"Eh, it's alright." Gojo's tone was mischievous as he stretched down towards the gravel beneath them and casually grabbed a single rock from below him between two long fingers. He examined it closely in front of his blindfold, threw it up in the air once, twice before nodding. "It's not usually something a team of sorcerers want on a mission." He stated factually before aiming the rock at the slow closing gap in a simple flick.
"Why wouldn't they want that?" Kugisaki scoffed at the sight and gestured to the hole that was now only a brick away from closing up. Her new sensei smiled wickedly at the question with the secret silence that he knew something she didn't as he flicked the rock - more pebble - with precision into the closing gap.
"It's weak in a fight." Gojo answered gleefully as the final brick slowly made its way to fill in the last rectangular spot. "She's not creating things from nothing, she's restoring things. She's mending and mending is not fighting." Megumi wasn't sure if the smile on sensei's face had changed but for a brief moment the teen swore the corners of the man's lips slipped even if it was for a fraction of a second, but his voice was light without a trace of remorse. "It'll get her killed."
—
Once the final brick was in I sighed in relief and let go of my energy to fall down on my butt. The orders had been simple, fix only the outside and any main structure imbalance. Easy enough since the building was symmetrical and patterned, so easy to guess the insides. Fixing buildings was way easier these days, especially after all the practice I had from a year ago.
But that didn't mean I wasn't sweating by the time I forced myself outside with a hand on the doorway to enjoy the praise that I deserved on mildly shaky legs. Even though I had done all I could to straighten myself out, my overall flustered and exhausted self wasn't something I even had the energy to hide even if I was trying desperately to use the small, worn handkerchief from my pocket to wipe my face delicately.
"That was awesome, Jun-chan!" Yuji exclaimed with fist in the sky and even Nobara had a similar expression of parted lips. Their eyes were on me and me alone, reminding me that I was alive and desired and needed in this fucked up world.
I know.
"Thank you, you're too kind." I responded with a closed eye smile when I was in front of the building and bowed shallow in proper thanks. What if they wanted a photo with me? My hair was in place right? Well, a few bobby pins were gone courtesy to Gojo-sensei, but the ribbon was still tight and everything felt normal. No pictures until I can make sure, I decided. "It wasn't anything special." Humble, stay humble and thankful, they'll remember you more if you do. Their reactions proved my point.
Megumi still didn't react, just looked away at the sky and waited, but that's okay. Two was better than just one which was better than zero anyhow. Yuuji was blushing and Kugisaki was regretting throwing me aside earlier, but that's okay. We can still be friends, Kugisaki, I'm a merciful friend!
"Ne, she's right you know." Sensei's teasing lilt made me freeze and foreboding washed over me like ice water. I'd gone with Megumi to the beach one time in the later fall months and we'd both jumped in the water to test ourselves. With that familiar heart-freezing sensation, I watched my supposed teacher with distrust and he didn't even have to glance my way to direct his words to me. "I just want you to know it's not me, it's you." He said it so sympathetically as if he were breaking up with me that I took a step back in reeling shock while he swooped down to pick a pebble the size of a tack up from the ground at his feet.
"It's me—?" I repeated only to watch the white haired special-grade flick a rock with his left fingers to hit my repair with a silent, yet sharp tick! No, no, no he couldn't— he didn't!?— I was perfect in my ability! My heart lurched into my throat and somehow my teeth were digging into the skin of my thumb in a numbing pain.
At first, there was nothing, and I made the mistake of letting go of the tension I carried in my shoulders and in the grit of my teeth, my thumb left my lips from the disgusting habit. But the air that left my lungs was soon choking me as the building first began to vibrate before the first brick fell, then the second, and then three were falling and—
"It's funny what a tiny rock can do." Gojo chuckled as a small rock fell from the hole that I didn't recognize as part of my plans and landed right in front of me immediately after the first couple bricks tumbled to the Earth. We watched in painful silence as my work and then some became undone right before our feet until the dust left us all in various degrees shock.
I stood there, weeping but not really. Nothing left me as I blinked at the bricks before me and my face covered in dust, but my insides were slowly filling with molten lava. It thickened the veins in my arms and my pushed its way through my beating heart with a rapid beat, beat, beat. There was a ringing in my ears and a twitch in my eyes, a small yowl of a cat in the distance.
"Hafu-chan, what are you waiting for?" As if I was the idiot, the daft one, in this duo he called mentorship. "Do I need to sing the clean up song?"
"...uh, what's the clean up song?"
No, Yuuji, you fool, you don't ask that to someone as annoying and confident as Gojo Satoru!
Sensei clapped his hands together and his eyes shone with happiness that one could only dream to obtain while he stared at Itadori like the boy was his long lost son. The two were nearly sharing a brain cell at this point. "No... please." Megumi tried to plead desperately with a tone that he rarely used to show for extreme cases of mercy. He even raised an arm as if he could physically stop the singing from cursing our existence. "Sensei—"
"Clean up, clean up, everybody everywhere~!" It was too late. Somewhere there was a purple dinosaur singing the same tune and in a Japanese classroom tomorrow there will be hordes of children cleaning their rooms to the same disastrous song. And tomorrow, it would be haunting my dreams.
My feet had already carried me to the front entrance of the building and my forehead hit the doorway in hopes that the pain would end, the singing behind me pushed me to get away. The English song that Gojo enjoyed torturing me with - because he knew I wasn't English or even spoke it - combined with the small pains that already ran up and down my body blended almost morbidly well with the dread of having to do the technique again.
"I thought I finally had a mission where I wouldn't pass out..." I murmured helplessly to the building who only dropped another brick next to me in response.
-
"What are you doing out here covered in dirt?"
Kugisaki was the first person to find me after the return from our mission and I was happy for it too. Megumi would have passed by without a word and Itadori would have tried to help but his impulsive behavior would only end in my frustration and his sheepish smile. We had been together enough for me to gain at least that much insight into our personalities.
"Gardening." I smiled back as my pink trowel lifted up the dirt and my left hand placed in the delicate plant into the soil with careful pats. My dress was pink and my blue overalls were short and ended in a skirt. I had woken up early to clear the large path beside one of the lesser used sidewalks and I had just gone to the greenhouse to gather the bulbs and plants that I had started before we had even known Itadori.
"...can't you just do that with your energy?" Kugisaki's tone was unimpressed, eyes in that familiar judging deadpan, and I snorted while I slid the dirt into place with a smooth movement of my hand. I sat back on my heels to look at my classmate with a smile, dirty hand next to me to hold me up while I stared up at her.
"Sure, I could." My shoulders shrugged and I made the upside down heart with my hands to my chest, a mumble. "Restore."
We both watched as the entire prepared garden next to pathway slowly began to fill with small green sprouts where each leave unfurled so slowly, so carefully, so perfectly that I almost forgot about Kugisaki Nobara. The plants provided me a feeling of tranquility that so many others had promised me in the form of various worldly falsities.
"Tulips. They grow to a foot tall before sprouting these amazingly vibrant petals." I smiled as each petal released from inside of its pouch and relished in the noise of amazement beside me. So many yards of flowers the color of blood all produced from me and me alone, so of course they were perfect and beautiful - they were made from me.
"If you get tired of red," I cracked my neck, and focused, and more than half of the flowers wilted into darken crisps gasping for even a hint of water as they suffocated out of life, but in their place pink, blue, yellow, even purple versions of the flower blossomed into a vast garden. "I mean, look how perfect they are. I've spaced them out in even numbers and each petal has grown their individual amount so that they are symmetrical, perfect, the best that you could find. Their colors? The most pleasing that you'll ever find here on earth." And it was pride but also truth, something that I could say honestly without even a single stretch.
"Right." Nobara trailed off as she rolled her eyes and gestured towards the beautiful garden of swaying flowers. "But you still haven't answered my question. Why waste your time getting dirty, sitting on your knees, sweating, when you can do that?" Perhaps she was bitter, but I could never tell. She was always so confident and sure of herself that it was more likely to have been a form of disgust.
"Because," I shrugged and killed all but the bulb I had just planted in a mass exodus of vibrancy to decay. I carefully patted the ground where the plant laid and smiled. "Perfection is the work you put into something, not just the outcome." There those eyes were, understanding and that respect that I so earned given to me a little later than it should have been, but that's okay. Who could forget such a magical display?
Bonk.
"Fuck!" I hissed as I grabbed my head that I'm pretty sure was now giving birth to an alien baby as an inside stabbing tried to leave the internal spots of my brain. The culprit scoffed and I couldn't even open my eyes to stare hatefully at the current nuisance in my life.
"Don't listen to her. She just has a killer headache from last night's mission and using her energy makes it worse." It was almost like Megumi had stabbed me himself as the pain took cover not just my head but my heart too. With no reason to hide as the other half of our class walked over to us, I tried to melt into a puddle with a groan. "She's trying to appear all mysterious and shit."
"You asshole." I told Megumi through clenched teeth and fingers digging into my temples. It was when I realized that if this was an attack, I would have been screwed, because not only did I fail to detect Megumi's presence but also Yuji's as well. Nobara hummed in realization that I wasn't, once again, what I had tried to make myself out to be.
"Stop being fake and maybe people will respect you more." Yuji and Nobara gasped in unison at the harsh words that sent an arrow through my heart and sent me flying to the ground in tears. Fake tears that never actually left my eyes, but tears dammit! "Seriously? You're so damn embarrassing."
I swore Megumi got off the same with that sensei does with kicking me while I'm down so that I stay down, never to even inflate the ego even the slightest bit. Some ego was better than none, otherwise I'd be as useless as the girl from Kyoto, and I was way better than most people here anyways. Again, just simple facts.
"Ow!" I glared at Megumi who was already walking away with our other classmates giggling at my reaction from my second smackdown of the day. It was like everything was against me recently and I wasn't going to put up with it forever. "Why?!"
"I could tell you were being mean."
I huffed while they laughed away and I was left to stew inside of the anger that I so rightfully deserved. Righteous, beautiful rage that aimed towards the trio that laughed at me, left me, and hurt me so that I could wallow in the pain that they inflicted on me. Me. Me!
"Soru!"
When I looked up I must have appeared lost like a baby, because the smirk on Kugisaki's face irked me more than usual. But she held up a familiar tool and my head cocked to the side in further misunderstanding. Was she trying to fight me? Stab, kill, bury the body after she slices off my limbs and—!
"So, where do we start!" Yuji came to sit at my side with his own trowel, the one from the green house that had no owner anymore, and I couldn't stop the confused noise because everything was happening faster than I could even comprehend. This was a weird fight to start and to fight with tiny shovels sure was something else that I hadn't experience, but wasn't necessarily opposed to.
A foot nudged my knee and I looked up at the still stoic, yet trowel-less Megumi standing before me. His body blocked the sun from eyes, gifting me a gorgeous moment to relax in the shade before the rays returned to heighten my overuse-headache any further. He continued to stare at me while the other two waited patiently in their weekend clothes.
"What?"
"We're here to help you, dumbass." Nobara elaborated with a show of her purple trowel, the one I had bought years ago with the pink one as a two pack, and an exaggerated roll of her eyes. "My mom used to have a vegetable garden and this was one of my chores that I actually enjoyed."
"And I might not have any experience," Itadori began almost embarrassed to admit with that light blush of someone caught in 4K. "But, I like helping my friends."
Friends.
Megumi didn't elaborate any further as he knelt down and grabbed a bulb from the basket I had brought to the school for this very project. He said nothing to me as our shoulders brushed together while he explained to the other two the pattern, how many inches apart, which bulbs were good, until the other two were able to make a partnership at the other end with a rapid conversation developing between the two.
"...So you do listen to me." I couldn't help the quiet accusation, although it was more of a perception than anything. Megumi paused with his hand in the dirt to manually dig a hole for the bulb he had chosen. Even though I could easily grow my own garden with the cursed energy inside of me, I couldn't help but appreciate the skill that came with planting and nursing the living things with my own hands.
It was something from my past before sorcerers and cursed energy made my life what it is, before things became complicated, before the hurt and the pain. There was a beauty to the land that I had ranted to Megumi on so many occasions only to get the same response every single time and every single time I except this one did by heart hurt.
"Hm? Did you say something?"
My lips curled and my heart was uncomfortable, but warm as I nudged him with my own shoulder and grabbed the tulip bulb he handed over to me as if I had asked for it.
"Idiot."