Chapter Text
It is hot. The sun sears the ground. Cicadas cry from their hiding places. A popsicle, held loosely in a small hand, drips blue.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a small voice says.
Geto Suguru--exhausted special grade sorcerer, third year--poised with one hand raised to absorb the curse in front of him, turns to look and sees a small child, perhaps four, standing behind him looking at him curiously. The child has pink hair, brown gold eyes and chubby cheeks. The very epitome of four, were it not for the weight behind his presence and the knowing look in his eyes.
“Can I ask why?” Suguru says. In his peripheral vision the curse hisses and shrinks back, afraid.
The child shrugs. “You’ll destroy yourself if you keep going. Sorcerers like you need to be selfish or they lose themselves. I should know.”
This child was a sorcerer.
That still did not explain why this random child, sorcerer or no, knew about Suguru or the thoughts that had plagued him. Did he really look so terrible? Did it have to do with the child’s technique?
Suguru activates his own technique and absorbs the curse. The curse twists and coalesces into his palm. The child watches on with apathetic eyes. Now holding a ball of blue light in his hand, Suguru looks down at it and thinks.
“Is your family around?” He asks after a moment.
The child shrugs. “Grandpa’s at work. Mom and dad are dead or missing.”
Well, that was concerning.
“Does your grandfather know…? About Jujutsu?”
The child shakes his head, “Not Grandpa, no.”
A frown tugs at Suguru’s lips. He raises the curse, swallows it, and grimaces at the taste of it lingering on his tongue. Then he turns to the child and asks, “What’s your name?”
The child tilts his head. “Itadori Yuuji. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
The child smiles and does not answer.
Suguru moves past it. “My name is Geto Suguru. Do you want to talk for a bit, Itadori-kun?”
Itadori raises the hand holding a popsicle and looks at it. He bites down. He chews. He nods.
“Why not?”
There is a park nearby.
They take a seat on the bench. Itadori digs through his pockets and hands over a piece of hard candy wrapped in wax paper. Suguru takes it and nods in thanks. The candy is lemon flavored. Sweet and sour and strong, it overpowers the taste of vomit in Suguru’s mouth.
“How long have you known you’re a sorcerer, Itadori-kun?” Suguru asks, shifting the candy to one cheek.
“That’s… kind of complicated,” Itadori says. “I’ve been able to see curses for a long time, though.”
“How old are you?”
“Four,” Itadori tells him. “Though…”
“Hm?”
Itadori sighs. “Nevermind.”
Suguru pauses to consider the child before him. “May I ask who told you about curses?”
Itadori frowns, thinking. They bite off another chunk of the popsicle, rolling it around in their mouth.
“Do you believe in reincarnation?” He asks suddenly.
Suguru blinks.
“Not really,” he says. “Even in a world of curses and sorcery, it doesn’t feel like something that could be real.”
“It is,” the child says. “Real, that is.”
Cicadas sing. The sun beats down on them. A trickle of sweat drips down Suguru’s neck.
“...You’re implying that you remember a past life.”
Itadori smiles. “I’m more than implying.”
Suguru looks at this child, at this four year old little boy, and weighs the presence that he can sense, the cursed energy that runs through his veins, and the aged look in his eyes. This child does not feel like a child and it is that, perhaps, that convinces Suguru to go along with it despite his beliefs.
“May I ask who you were in your last life?”
The child waves his hand dismissively. “Not important right now. I spent decades running from it, and it’ll catch up to me eventually, but for now…” Itadori sighs. “There are more important things to worry about.”
Disbelief fills Suguru, but he stuffs it down. This is a child he’s talking to after all. They are allowed their fantasies.
“For example?” He says instead.
“Geto Suguru,” Itadori says with a seriousness he did not possess before. “Soon, you will be forced to put all of your morals on the line. Either you will hold onto them and remain where you are, or you will snap and a great many people will die. Everything will change, and you will fall down a path from which you cannot return.”
“Are you saying I will become a Curse User?” Suguru asks. A weight settles in his stomach. Why is he entertaining this?
“I’m saying it’s a possibility.”
“And what do you think I should do?”
Itadori smiles. It is not a nice smile, bitter and angry. “This world is wrong,” he says. “Its focus on tradition, the rate at which sorcerers die, the rampant misogyny… There are many problems. It does not help that the balance which has been kept for decades at this point was so thrown out of whack by the birth of Gojo Satoru--” Suguru flinches. “--and soon enough, the thing that calls themself my mother will begin to make their move. So…”
Malice bubbles up in the child in front of Suguru, so deep and wretched it infects his aura until chills are running down Suguru’s spine. Suddenly, it is not so hard to believe Itadori’s claims of a past life. No child would be this angry at the world, this… hungry.
“I want to destroy it all.”
Suguru stares, afraid.
“And I want you to witness it.”
The child, the monster, sitting next to him looks Suguru in the eye, and it is in those bottomless depths that Suguru sees it--slaughter and desperation and starvation and a god ruling above them all. And Suguru is afraid. For the first time in some time, he is terrified of the thing that sits next to him, this incomprehensible thing that says that it wishes to overturn the world.
“So whatever you do, and you are free to do whatever you would like to do, don’t die, kay?”
Just like that, the malice vanishes as if it were never there.
And Suguru--
Suguru stares, unsettled to his very bones.
“Who were you in your last life?”
When he speaks his voice trembles.
And Itadori Yuuji huffs.
“Guess.”
With that, the child, the monster, gets up and walks away.
Months later, staring at a pair of young girls in a cage, Geto Suguru thinks back to that conversation and knows exactly what he is going to do.