Chapter Text
Nobara could count on one hand all of the times she’d ever thought about giving up. Once when she was seven and playing a rage-inducing video game she wasn’t smart enough to understand yet, once when she was twelve and couldn’t for the life of her figure out how to use a tampon, and once when she was fourteen and her grandmother gave her a goddamn rubik’s cube to distract her from one of her mother’s infrequent visits. And now, there was this.
“Hi, can I fucking help you?”
Admittedly, it wasn’t the most courteous of greetings, but then again neither was taking over her body, killing her best friend, going silent for weeks, and then creating brand new orifices on her hands. Survival wasn’t exactly at the forefront of her mind at that moment. In fact, it wasn’t on her list of priorities at all.
For a brief second, maybe less, Nobara wouldn’t have minded if he just killed her right there and then. Sucks to suck, though, because the moment passed as quickly as it came.
Before Ryomen Sukuna could respond, the dead girl flung herself across the room and rammed directly into Nobara’s torso, wrapping ice cold limbs around her body like tangled vines and knocking the air out of her lungs as they both fell to the glass-littered floor. She heard the crack in the back of her head before she felt the effects of it, blood smearing the tiles below her and congealing her hair into sticky clumps. Pain blinded her, static white light coating her eyes like layers of film. Worst of all, the impact caused Nobara to drop the nails she had at the ready, an amateur move, one her grandmother would have scolded her over.
Above her, a thick, rancid liquid fell from the girl’s hanging jaw and empty eye sockets, a guttural sound spilling out of a gash in her throat. Unable to see, Nobara tightened her grip on her hammer and swung it as hard as she could to hit the girl in the temple, more rotten liquid gushing out of her, but it didn't free her from the girl’s grip. If anything, those frigid limbs only dug into her even further.
“How heartless. Isn’t this the human you’re here to save?”
That voice again.
Dark and deep and rattling down to the marrow of her bones.
Through grit teeth and a dream, Nobara managed to respond with the necessary amount of courtesy. “Shut the fuck up, old man. No one wants to hear your crusty opinions.”
And then, casting aside her pride, she screamed. No doubt Todo would hear and come running.
“Heartless and cowardly. That sorcerer wasted his cursed energy placing a seal on you. Keeping someone this pathetic alive is a pointless endeavor.”
She blinked in a flurry, her vision coming back to her in phases. Luckily for her, the first thing she saw was something green and slimy slowly crawling out of the hole in the girl’s neck. Awesome. Wasn’t that just fan-fucking-tastic. “Can’t you see I’m busy? I don’t have time to sit and argue with some geezer like you.”
“Oh?”
And then it happened again. That familiar, splintering pain ran down her spine, setting her nerve endings on fire.
“Don’t get cocky with me, woman. I’ll shred you into ribbons, just like I did to that little friend of yours.”
Suddenly, everything went numb. The world spun on its axis, but Nobara remained eerily still. Above her, the girl gnawed on the head of her hammer, which Nobara had shoved down to the back of her throat in an attempt to buy time. She looked into the girl’s empty eyes, unable to shake the feeling that someone else was staring back.
“What… What did you just say?”
Silence.
“Oi, oi, what did you say? What did you do to Fumi you fuckass sack of shit?”
Again, nothing.
Nobara was beginning to hate his silence just as much as she hated his presence. The pain down her spine was nothing compared to the rage she felt burning behind her eyes. “ANSWER ME.”
Of course he did no such thing. And honestly, she wasn’t expecting him to, not after how he’d been so willing to hang her out to dry at the worst possible moments. Unsurprisingly, the eye and mouth were now gone from the back of her hand, but she knew he wasn’t far off. He would never be able to escape the sounds of her screaming.
“Come back… Get back here, you bastard! YOU FUCKING BASTARD!”
Of all the information given to her about the incident, no one ever mentioned how Fumi died. She could remember everything that led up to that moment, but after that was where her consciousness fell away. It was the memory that kept evading her, no matter how hard she tried.
“Ribbons…” The dead girl’s fluids fell onto Nobara’s face, making it impossible to tell which droplets were drool and which were her own tears. “What did you-”
A gunshot cracked through the stale air from the other side of the building. Then another.
Within seconds, the green curse completely emerged from the girl’s throat - a wide head with even wider eyes and a small hole for a mouth, but otherwise snake-like in form. Its emergence weakened the dead girl’s body, so Nobara hooked one leg around her waist and pushed them both over so that both curse and host were beneath her.
She pulled the hammer out of the corpse’s mouth and made quick work of exorcising the curse with her nails. If it needed a human body to do its dirty work, then it was a weak fucker to begin with. Something about that didn’t sit right with her, knowing that this poor girl died horrifically to something so insignificant, so avoidable. It was the same with Fu-
No.
No, no, no, she couldn’t think of that right now. Maybe not ever. Nobara rolled off the corpse and laid down flat on the grimy floor, her limbs sore and her back aching from the pain Sukuna shot through her body. Why did he keep doing that? Wait, no, she knew the answer to that one. But how did he keep doing that? Shouldn’t Gojo’s seal prevent him from affecting her body? Or was there a limit to how much of Sukuna’s influence he was able to hold back?
Fuck, she hated it here. She hated Sukuna and she hated Gojo and she hated herself above all else for not listening to Fumi when she begged Nobara to stop, to run away with her, because for fuck’s sake it was just a purse. It was never something to lose her life over. To lose both of their lives over.
“Nobara, please!”
Nobara clenched her jaw hard enough to feel each individual tooth ache from the pressure, the pain a reminder of where she was. Who she was. Right now, she had a job to get done, a girl whose body needed to be returned to her family.
She needed to get out of here. Curses like this one tended to travel in packs and there was likely a leader among them around here somewhere. If she was lucky, Todo would have gotten it already, but she didn’t hold her breath. This mission was primarily a test of her abilities, as well as to see how Gojo’s seal held up, so even if he found it, he was probably going to make her do all the heavy lifting. Ugh.
Soft footsteps echoed down the hallway and grew louder as they approached at an annoyingly casual pace. Nobara tilted her head towards the door when Mai waltzed on through as though she’d just returned from a day spa. Her uniform is spotless, not even a cobweb stuck to the hem of her pants, and it makes Nobara want to rip it all to shreds.
“Oh?” Her eyes landed on Nobara with an obvious flicker of boredom before morphing into unbridled mockery. “Did such a weak curse take that much out of you? Perhaps you shouldn’t be left on your own anymore. Don’t worry, dear, Todo and I can babysit you next time.”
Oh, yeah, and Nobara also hated this bitch, too.
“Shut the fuck up, you porous hag. Instead of spending all your time thinking about me, maybe try to worry about those bags under your eyes. I could fit a whole week’s worth of groceries in those things.”
Mai furrowed her brows together. “Big words coming from someone crying on the floor.”
“I ain’t crying.”
“Sure.”
Nobara sat up quickly, her body screaming at her for doing so. “I ain’t!”
“I believe you,” Mai said, taking a step back. Her eyes shifted from the door to Nobara, reassessing her with a bitchy shrug. “Your eyes are just red and swollen from all the dust down here. Allergies must be a real deterrent to your technique.”
Nobara tried to stand up so she could get up close and personal in Mai’s face, but a fog of lightheadedness kept her down on her knees, the floor beneath her just as damp as her skin and hair, which inherently removed some of the bite from her insults. She exhaled. “I hate you.”
“Aww, you do care.”
Fucking asshole. Always tried to have the last word, as if Nobara would ever allow that. “Not even a little. Where’s Todo?”
Mai snorted. “How should I know? I got stuck keeping an eye on you. Probably rounding up the rest of the curses, if I had to guess.” She shrugged and inspected her nails. “Wish he'd hurry up, though. I have dinner plans.”
As if Nobara could roll her eyes any harder. “So sorry for disrupting your plans, Princess-” She paused when Mai’s jaw twitched at the word. Good. Noted for later. “Next time I'll be sure to instruct the civilians to only die when it's convenient for your schedule. Can't have your royal highness late for supper.”
She finally managed to stand up without her head spinning, which was a small, but necessary win all things considered. Right now, being anywhere beneath Mai was not an option.
Damn it, if only she was a few inches taller.
Mai glared at Nobara with intent to kill, but then her gaze flickered to the girl on the ground, her eyes softening before she squeezed them shut and turned away. Her skin was blanched even in the low lighting, like her body was contemplating either throwing up or passing out. If Nobara didn't know any better, she'd say that Mai still wasn't used to the realities of this job, that seeing a dead body and remaining calm in its wake wasn't just another weekly occurrence. For a jujutsu sorcerer, that mindset was one of the most pathetic vulnerabilities to have.
Though, for once, Nobara wouldn't fault her. She couldn't, all things considered, and being a hypocrite is worse than siding with the enemy.
But only this once.
Because, at the end of the day, Mai was still a raging bitch and a pain in Nobara’s entire ass.
“We should meet up with Todo,” she said, turning away from the girl and pulling her phone out of her pocket. “I'll call in for someone to come collect the bodies.”
Bodies. Plural. She figured that was the case, but hearing it out loud, and from Mai of all people, made her feel hollow inside. Then again, she wished she was actually hollow inside. If she was, she’d still be in Tokyo with Maki and the others, the burden of being a vessel on someone else’s shoulders entirely.
Todo found them minutes later, completely unharmed and unbothered in a way that made Nobara’s jaw clench. She was the only one covered in dirt and grime, whereas the other two didn’t have so much as a speck on their shoes. How humiliating to be outclassed by a miserable woman with massive pores and a tacky uniform.
“This was boring and not worth our time,” Todo remarked to Nobara once he reached her side, stretching his arms over his head. “We’ve faced tougher opponents than this back in middle school.”
Nobara hummed and wondered what opponents he was imagining they faced. Then again, he wasn’t wrong - she had faced tougher curses, even out in the sticks where cursed energy output is at a national low. “Did you find all of the other missing students?”
He nodded. “Mai found one, you found another, and I got the rest. Utahime-sensei is sending someone out now to pick us up.”
“And was there a stronger curse among the others? Those weaklings couldn’t have been the only ones here, they must have been hiding behind a ringleader.”
Todo walked towards the door with a shrug. Everything in his mannerism screamed that he wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible. As if someone like him had better things to do. “I don’t sense anything.” And then, he turned his head back at her with an expression she couldn’t quite place - something like an accusation, but it wasn’t pointed at her. “And what about you?”
“No, I ain’t sensing anything either.”
“I see. It is concerning,” he said, the suspicion in his eyes now gone. “To be honest, I thought there’d be another one, too.”
Mai was leaning against the doorframe, staring off at the hole in the wall covered in spider webs. “Maybe it moved underground.”
“In that case, it’s no longer within the parameters of our assignment,” Todo said, shoving his hands in his jacket pockets. “It’ll reappear at some point and a weaker team will get sent out to deal with it. Next time, they’d better not waste our time.”
“Thought curses couldn’t escape veils,” Nobara stated rather than asked.
Mai rolled her eyes and spoke as though Nobara was an idiot. “Nitta’s relatively new to creating veils and lacks polish. He could have easily left holes along the underbelly where the ground makes it difficult to connect. That’s so obvious, even a child could have figured that out. Didn’t anyone teach you about veils where you’re from? Or were you so insufferable that no one wanted to bother?”
Nobara’s fists balled together, her nails stinging her palms. Beside her, Todo sighed and left the room, probably going back to the lobby to wait for their ride. His footsteps echoed down the hall and became softer as he disappeared up the stairs.
“Listen here, you snobby, oily-faced bitch-”
“At least I’m not the one covered in… Whatever all of that is,” Mai cut her off with narrowed eyes, giving Nobara a thorough once-over. The fluid from the corpse clung to her like a second skin, the stench causing both of them to scrunch their noses. “Consider a shower. And then a bath. And then a second shower. You know what? Maybe just put yourself through a car wash at that point.”
Nobara took a step towards her, then another, and suddenly they were face-to-face, breath on breath, passing hatred back and forth like secrets shared between friends. “Don’t you ever get tired shitting outta your mouth, Princess?”
Mai clicked her tongue, staring down at Nobara like a bug on the sidewalk. “How crude. Then again, what else did I expect from someone who was raised… Where again? A barn?”
“Oi! You fucking-!”
One more step forward, that was all it took before the ground crumbled beneath them and they fell into the open jaw of the curse waiting below.
A familiar dark laughter clogged Nobara’s ears like mounds of burning wax.
“You know, you really are a pathetic brat.”