( the structure of the culling game doesn't make for much downtime. though meant to last as long as necessary to run its course and accomplish its goal, taking time to rest or refuel really only opened one up to the risk of attack. many players have already been overcome, stretching themselves to their physical and mental limits to avoid such a thing — yuuta personally doesn't have the same qualms. somewhere outside the barrier of the sendai colony, late afternoon begins to wind into evening, and he finds a place under a half-demolished overpass to take a breather. he removes his sword from its place at his belt, sliding down a crumbling concrete pillar to sit with the sheathed katana resting at his shoulder. they rise and fall as he heaves a long sigh, his eyes slowly lidding shut. he's not going to sleep now, though he wouldn't have any concerns doing so; one of the first dozen sorcerers he'd killed had been one who'd thought himself clever in sneaking up on him when he was resting. big mistake. )
What do you think about all of this, Rika?
( he doesn't really project the words; he just mumbles them to himself, his lips barely moving around the syllables. this isn't an uncommon occurrence for him — after all of these months, he still talks to her like he'd used to. perhaps it was the only way he had to cope with the distinct absence of something that had once been there, which had been there since they had been kids lording over the local playground or when her last living remainder had been caught around the spool of his unwitting curse until he'd finally unraveled it and let her go.
he'd let her go, but letting go is so much harder than that. he would've never imagined it would feel lonelier after he'd set her free than when she'd made it her personal mission to keep everyone away from him. so when others weren't around to hear him, he'd kept talking to her like normal, and that had been that.
until she'd spoken back.
it doesn't happen often, and he has no way of anticipating when it will, but sometimes the things he says seem to catch and transfer, drifting between the veil of the here and the hereafter in a way that she can reply. how he feels about that is still something he's working through. he worries it means that he's still doing something to her that keeps her tied down to the mortal world (though he does enough of that simply by being alive), but on the other hand... he's only human. he always wants to hear her voice again, and when he does, it gives him the strength to keep going on. he carries her final wish for him with a quiet and determined devotion — he's no longer in any hurry to cut short his time here, not with the new family that he'd found at jujutsu high, but...
yes, he's still only human. ) A world of jujutsu sorcerers... ( how he feels about it wouldn't change anything about his goals. obviously, he would flatly disagree with the goals and justifications of the culling game — it came at far too high of a cost. even though people had only ever turned fearful or blind eyes to him in his very worst years, he just couldn't sense those feelings of alienation transforming into contempt and scorn. he just pities them. they are out of their depth, just as how they had been (how he had been) when his curse was at its worst. it was only natural for people to fear and flee from what they didn't understand. )
...Would you have liked to have been a jujutsu sorcerer? ( he only wants to rest for an hour, hopefully less, but thoughts of a world where they could have fought alongside one another in that sort of way could keep him company for that time. )
[ death has limits. in that, it is not so different than life, and it is possible that therein lies the common ground of jujutsu sorcerers and ordinary people. none of them are exempt, and all of them can, given situations and details, be quite powerful. what drives an individual is their selfishness and their selflessness; creatures of contradiction whether they know it or not, whether they admit it or not.
in her life and her not-quite-life, for rika it has always been okkotsu yuuta — a heartbeat and a fatality all in one.
her happiest years were with him, and the form simply did not matter; likewise now, it does not matter. that she can be near him, that she can protect him within whatever limitations they encounter, it...well no. it isn't enough. it would never be enough to 'try', only to do, to well and truly save him when he needs saving, help when he needs help, and blot out in no uncertainty that which would threaten him.
to rika, it has never been a question of whether or not it is okay for yuuta to live; it has been, rather, been the desire to make sure he can live.
in a perfect world, she would always be with him.
even in an imperfect world, here they are.
sometimes yuuta speaks and she can hear him as if under deep water, comforting in the way even his unhappiness was a comfort because it meant he was alive. she cannot always understand, cannot, even if she understands, always respond. even before he let her go, it was sometimes this way, but the water was her own haze of inhumanity narrowed down to the head of nail where thrived only yuuta: her cat's cradle of existence, wanting to pull at his threads and yet also make the shapes he wanted without being able to touch the part of her that was still a person under all that curse. if before it was a near madness, now it is like the consciousness of desire with less desperation.
if she cannot reply, it breaks the heart a curse and a girl might have. there is only this: to keep trying.
even when she doesn't understand, she tries.
understanding is, of course, better.
rika is rika.
a jujutsu sorcerer? the presence of her settles near and never near enough all at once, unseen even to yuuta at this moment yet she is there. and she thinks: yes. because certainly someone like yuuta was going to become one, given his cursed energy, given his far-back lineage despite not knowing it at the time. she doesn't have to have 'grown up' to know: they were, in the best of situations, not going to have any normal life. without being a jujutsu sorcerer, she would not be able to protect him, would not be able to be at his side. in the end, she would rather be a curse than nothing at all, if it means staying with him like this.
love was telling yuuta not to come to where she truly resides too soon, and love is also yuuta permitting her to exist in this way with him after that.
who else would understand that?
it doesn't matter.
this culling game reeks. she dislikes the danger it puts him in, but yuuta was always resolute in his feelings even if he did not know whether he was allowed to have them. she knows he will not disappear from things, and indeed there are rules here. not formed but present, her words come to yuuta and only yuuta, even if someone else were here. ]
Together.
[ sometimes, to make sure it comes through without confusion, one word both suffices and is strongest. this one especially: the clarity of a shrine bell. with it: the thin fingertips of winter, because even when she's subtle, she's also overwhelming every time they are able to connect —
( the span of life, death, and the grisly interstitial tissue that connected the two was the domain of the jujutsu sorcerer. there is a give and take between the two that cycles with a morbid kind of circuitousness: in life, human beings suffer and despair, generating the cursed energy that gives birth to spirits which would drag unwitting innocents into death, thereby instilling more of the same negative emotions in their surviving friends and family. it's not a problem that jujutsu sorcerers can solve — it is a symptom of the world that they live in, and they are only surgeons attempting to staunch the flow of blood before it became mortal. there's a sort of clarity that one can gain over these things that would otherwise be towering in their inexplicable obscurity. yuuta no longer fears death. really, he hasn't feared it for a long time. what he fears now is being torn away from this world before he can accomplish what it is he feels he has to accomplish, to leave behind close friends to mourn him as an unfinished statement and not as someone who had truly lived to the fullest extent of his life.
in the end, it's not something he has perfect control over, so he puts everything he has into everything he puts his mind to. single-handedly taking on the sendai colony on behalf of jujutsu high, then, was one of those things.
they'd been inseparable (both figuratively and literally) for so long that it's still stranger to feel himself in her absence than remember how their camaraderie had felt. as kids, she had been a mystery that he had never felt any pressure to solve — yuuta had been terminally shy and fumbling with his words, making it difficult for him to make friends while simultaneously making himself a beacon for meaner-spirited kids. it hadn't really seemed an option for him to become rika's friend, though; she had pursued him aggressively from the day that they had met, and then they had structured their childhood days around when they would see one another next. all the way up until the day that —
even all these years later, with all that's come to pass, he still doesn't like to think about it.
so when something catches at the edges of his extrasensory perception, something so heart-achingly familiar that it startles him from a periwinkle state of semi-sleep to electric wakefulness, he just knows. he knows it with the same unswerving bone-deep assuredness that a mother would know her child, that pain would one day pass, that the sun would always come to rise from the east and herald a new day. whenever this happens, he feels the irrational desire to reach out and grab hold of the intangible, to once again pull her to him in a fit of selfish grief. he doesn't make the same mistake twice. he welcomes her beloved specter with a faintly sad, worn smile and a thin rime of tears forming between his eyelids.
his lips part at her reply, as clear and present in his mind as if it were one of his own thoughts, though perfectly distinct in just how hers the voice was. he holds onto that for a moment, his thoughts lulled and his breath suspended in his lungs as he wills it to extend past just these few fleeting seconds. then he exhales in a soft chuckle, one that sounds as dry as fall leaves rustling underfoot. )
That wouldn't change, no matter what. ( his free hand tracks up to his chest, to press his palm into the fabric of his uniform which covered where her ring hung from a chain around her neck, presently resting just a short distance above his beating heart. ) I promised you, remember?
( he never knows how long their luck will last. he doesn't question or challenge it — he had been ready to never speak with her again when he had severed her curse entirely, and the fact that their bond still manages to persist between the realms of the living and the dead was a mystery that he refused to search out, fearful that it would vanish the second he shone light onto it. he continues, conversational, with steady yet eager warmth, ) I think you would have liked everyone. All of my classmates. (because they love and care for me, just like you do. even if they got on your nerves, that fact would soften it. ) And I miss having you at my side for real when fighting.
( the rika that he summons is like a phantom limb — he can recall with such clarity what it had felt to be tethered to her as a curse that he can manifest it through cursed energy and sheer force of will. but it's like a shed skin, a shell which had long since lost its inhabitant, and yet — he still reaches for it instinctually when in combat, partially due to a yearning for what was lost to him but also because it still managed to feel right.)
[ rika remembers because of course she remembers. this was part of her own quiet and violent living curse as a girl, and it is her blessing as the monster out from under the bed in yuuta's presence. the things she would rather forget are, ultimately, nothing compared to the things she needs to keep for herself: yuuta's promise, yuuta's tears as much as his smile, yuuta's impossible heart. sometimes she thinks she can feel it beating in her shadowed hands more like claws more like imaginary things; sometimes.
invisible still as she is, there are no visual indicators such as a tilt of the head as a girl might do, such as the mild narrowing of an expression in skepticism as rika specifically might do edged always in something learned and saccharine that has never been aimed at yuuta. her presence might be perceived in the feeling of rippled water or changing weather without the carding of the wind to evidence it. yuuta might feel a bloom inside or a twist almost contraction of space, acute to rika as he has always been and ever will be. but she does not look for these things even as he cannot look for her; theirs is a bond of trust.
the madness of the world they inhabit was made known to rika from a very young age. as dramatic as the culling games are, she is not surprised and nor does she wish she was. wishes are a kind of prayer and the shape of rika's piety is the boy who never forsook her. ]
Maybe.
[ one release on her binds was certainly the near berserker level of response. the possessiveness is still present but control is key. rika would tap her tiny fingertips to her chin if she had that shape still. she does not know if she would like them. 'like'. who has she ever liked but yuuta? yet she could perhaps find value in them as people who care and protect him. this much, she can suppose in that way of near wild animals, half domesticated; that which is not a threat to the loved one is permissible, if always watched. there is the one yuuta aims to free; rika values that one, because he protected yuuta. the same can be said here, and where before she would have been excruciatingly maddeningly hurt by his investment in anyone else, this 'freed' version of her self spans the threshold of 'that' and 'this. what would be a soft hum from a girl is just a fluctuation in energy as she replies again, easier and unfettered: ]
Miss... you too.
[ selfishness is inescapable, a part of every human living or dead, still human or curse become. it hurts. still clear in her memory: how she forced everyone to be afraid of yuuta but in truth it was she that they feared. how she had not even the wherewithal to regret these acts of violence who came too close to the only reason she could see for persisting, that which bound her. it would not be accurate really to say she feels guilty; she doesn't. but rika spoke truly: she remembers. she thinks, against odds. she —
— stays.
also clear: how yuuta forgave her, how he held her as if she was not a monster and told her he would give her everything and how it tipped her into a madness deeper than she thought she could come back from.
how exhilarating.
how heartbreaking.
rika wants yuuta to love her. she also wants him to live. when the time comes that these two realities cannot co-exist, well, they will handle it then.
a curse dares to hope, invisible and validated by only one: time will give them a while longer.
the desire to take physical form, to draw herself out of the dark and into his true space is suffocating. she feels neither large nor small, formed as monster or girl, none of it; just the dense weight of aching want.
yuuta she thinks. ]
Yuuta...careful. The games...liars.
[ what limits will not permit: you must be careful who you trust.
because there are lies woven through everything here. it is in the air. a smell and a taste. deception is a kind of blood and bone. especially, rika distrusts because the jujutsu sorcerers world whether speaking of right now or going all the way back to the original kamo noritoshi has been a disaster widely misshapen by adults. the ones who suffer most tend to be children. even outside the realm of sorcery, this had been proven to be true in her eyes. to articulate this even in her 'head' is impossible. there are parts of rika that yet remain almost childlike and her communication is sometimes apparent in this, not only in how simple or short but her response. she isn't a child. she isn't a teenager. she isn't an adult.
rika, once queen of curses.
what then?
pure love. perhaps.
after all, no one ever said love was harmless. love can be scared and love can be violent. love can be a curse or a kindness or both.
how she sees, she could not explain, but in this rare lull of a moment, there is time to notice not only the suggestion of tears but also an errant scrape. not much of anything, and surprising given yuuta's skill. but he has been going through protecting people while also fighting; he is human.
frustrating to not be able to always choose when she can reach out, but it is such a small scrape she wonders...
yuuta may feel a blur of warmth then coolness against the place where one thin scrape graced his forearm. but it isn't there anymore. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚏𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚎𝚍:
What do you think about all of this, Rika?
( he doesn't really project the words; he just mumbles them to himself, his lips barely moving around the syllables. this isn't an uncommon occurrence for him — after all of these months, he still talks to her like he'd used to. perhaps it was the only way he had to cope with the distinct absence of something that had once been there, which had been there since they had been kids lording over the local playground or when her last living remainder had been caught around the spool of his unwitting curse until he'd finally unraveled it and let her go.
he'd let her go, but letting go is so much harder than that. he would've never imagined it would feel lonelier after he'd set her free than when she'd made it her personal mission to keep everyone away from him. so when others weren't around to hear him, he'd kept talking to her like normal, and that had been that.
until she'd spoken back.
it doesn't happen often, and he has no way of anticipating when it will, but sometimes the things he says seem to catch and transfer, drifting between the veil of the here and the hereafter in a way that she can reply. how he feels about that is still something he's working through. he worries it means that he's still doing something to her that keeps her tied down to the mortal world (though he does enough of that simply by being alive), but on the other hand... he's only human. he always wants to hear her voice again, and when he does, it gives him the strength to keep going on. he carries her final wish for him with a quiet and determined devotion — he's no longer in any hurry to cut short his time here, not with the new family that he'd found at jujutsu high, but...
yes, he's still only human. ) A world of jujutsu sorcerers... ( how he feels about it wouldn't change anything about his goals. obviously, he would flatly disagree with the goals and justifications of the culling game — it came at far too high of a cost. even though people had only ever turned fearful or blind eyes to him in his very worst years, he just couldn't sense those feelings of alienation transforming into contempt and scorn. he just pities them. they are out of their depth, just as how they had been (how he had been) when his curse was at its worst. it was only natural for people to fear and flee from what they didn't understand. )
...Would you have liked to have been a jujutsu sorcerer? ( he only wants to rest for an hour, hopefully less, but thoughts of a world where they could have fought alongside one another in that sort of way could keep him company for that time. )
no subject
in her life and her not-quite-life, for rika it has always been okkotsu yuuta — a heartbeat and a fatality all in one.
her happiest years were with him, and the form simply did not matter; likewise now, it does not matter. that she can be near him, that she can protect him within whatever limitations they encounter, it...well no. it isn't enough. it would never be enough to 'try', only to do, to well and truly save him when he needs saving, help when he needs help, and blot out in no uncertainty that which would threaten him.
to rika, it has never been a question of whether or not it is okay for yuuta to live; it has been, rather, been the desire to make sure he can live.
in a perfect world, she would always be with him.
even in an imperfect world, here they are.
sometimes yuuta speaks and she can hear him as if under deep water, comforting in the way even his unhappiness was a comfort because it meant he was alive. she cannot always understand, cannot, even if she understands, always respond. even before he let her go, it was sometimes this way, but the water was her own haze of inhumanity narrowed down to the head of nail where thrived only yuuta: her cat's cradle of existence, wanting to pull at his threads and yet also make the shapes he wanted without being able to touch the part of her that was still a person under all that curse. if before it was a near madness, now it is like the consciousness of desire with less desperation.
if she cannot reply, it breaks the heart a curse and a girl might have. there is only this: to keep trying.
even when she doesn't understand, she tries.
understanding is, of course, better.
rika is rika.
a jujutsu sorcerer? the presence of her settles near and never near enough all at once, unseen even to yuuta at this moment yet she is there. and she thinks: yes. because certainly someone like yuuta was going to become one, given his cursed energy, given his far-back lineage despite not knowing it at the time. she doesn't have to have 'grown up' to know: they were, in the best of situations, not going to have any normal life. without being a jujutsu sorcerer, she would not be able to protect him, would not be able to be at his side. in the end, she would rather be a curse than nothing at all, if it means staying with him like this.
love was telling yuuta not to come to where she truly resides too soon, and love is also yuuta permitting her to exist in this way with him after that.
who else would understand that?
it doesn't matter.
this culling game reeks. she dislikes the danger it puts him in, but yuuta was always resolute in his feelings even if he did not know whether he was allowed to have them. she knows he will not disappear from things, and indeed there are rules here. not formed but present, her words come to yuuta and only yuuta, even if someone else were here. ]
Together.
[ sometimes, to make sure it comes through without confusion, one word both suffices and is strongest. this one especially: the clarity of a shrine bell. with it: the thin fingertips of winter, because even when she's subtle, she's also overwhelming every time they are able to connect —
— the sound and the season of coming home. ]
no subject
in the end, it's not something he has perfect control over, so he puts everything he has into everything he puts his mind to. single-handedly taking on the sendai colony on behalf of jujutsu high, then, was one of those things.
they'd been inseparable (both figuratively and literally) for so long that it's still stranger to feel himself in her absence than remember how their camaraderie had felt. as kids, she had been a mystery that he had never felt any pressure to solve — yuuta had been terminally shy and fumbling with his words, making it difficult for him to make friends while simultaneously making himself a beacon for meaner-spirited kids. it hadn't really seemed an option for him to become rika's friend, though; she had pursued him aggressively from the day that they had met, and then they had structured their childhood days around when they would see one another next. all the way up until the day that —
even all these years later, with all that's come to pass, he still doesn't like to think about it.
so when something catches at the edges of his extrasensory perception, something so heart-achingly familiar that it startles him from a periwinkle state of semi-sleep to electric wakefulness, he just knows. he knows it with the same unswerving bone-deep assuredness that a mother would know her child, that pain would one day pass, that the sun would always come to rise from the east and herald a new day. whenever this happens, he feels the irrational desire to reach out and grab hold of the intangible, to once again pull her to him in a fit of selfish grief. he doesn't make the same mistake twice. he welcomes her beloved specter with a faintly sad, worn smile and a thin rime of tears forming between his eyelids.
his lips part at her reply, as clear and present in his mind as if it were one of his own thoughts, though perfectly distinct in just how hers the voice was. he holds onto that for a moment, his thoughts lulled and his breath suspended in his lungs as he wills it to extend past just these few fleeting seconds. then he exhales in a soft chuckle, one that sounds as dry as fall leaves rustling underfoot. )
That wouldn't change, no matter what. ( his free hand tracks up to his chest, to press his palm into the fabric of his uniform which covered where her ring hung from a chain around her neck, presently resting just a short distance above his beating heart. ) I promised you, remember?
( he never knows how long their luck will last. he doesn't question or challenge it — he had been ready to never speak with her again when he had severed her curse entirely, and the fact that their bond still manages to persist between the realms of the living and the dead was a mystery that he refused to search out, fearful that it would vanish the second he shone light onto it. he continues, conversational, with steady yet eager warmth, ) I think you would have liked everyone. All of my classmates. ( because they love and care for me, just like you do. even if they got on your nerves, that fact would soften it. ) And I miss having you at my side for real when fighting.
( the rika that he summons is like a phantom limb — he can recall with such clarity what it had felt to be tethered to her as a curse that he can manifest it through cursed energy and sheer force of will. but it's like a shed skin, a shell which had long since lost its inhabitant, and yet — he still reaches for it instinctually when in combat, partially due to a yearning for what was lost to him but also because it still managed to feel right. )
no subject
invisible still as she is, there are no visual indicators such as a tilt of the head as a girl might do, such as the mild narrowing of an expression in skepticism as rika specifically might do edged always in something learned and saccharine that has never been aimed at yuuta. her presence might be perceived in the feeling of rippled water or changing weather without the carding of the wind to evidence it. yuuta might feel a bloom inside or a twist almost contraction of space, acute to rika as he has always been and ever will be. but she does not look for these things even as he cannot look for her; theirs is a bond of trust.
the madness of the world they inhabit was made known to rika from a very young age. as dramatic as the culling games are, she is not surprised and nor does she wish she was. wishes are a kind of prayer and the shape of rika's piety is the boy who never forsook her. ]
Maybe.
[ one release on her binds was certainly the near berserker level of response. the possessiveness is still present but control is key. rika would tap her tiny fingertips to her chin if she had that shape still. she does not know if she would like them. 'like'. who has she ever liked but yuuta? yet she could perhaps find value in them as people who care and protect him. this much, she can suppose in that way of near wild animals, half domesticated; that which is not a threat to the loved one is permissible, if always watched. there is the one yuuta aims to free; rika values that one, because he protected yuuta. the same can be said here, and where before she would have been excruciatingly maddeningly hurt by his investment in anyone else, this 'freed' version of her self spans the threshold of 'that' and 'this. what would be a soft hum from a girl is just a fluctuation in energy as she replies again, easier and unfettered: ]
Miss... you too.
[ selfishness is inescapable, a part of every human living or dead, still human or curse become. it hurts. still clear in her memory: how she forced everyone to be afraid of yuuta but in truth it was she that they feared. how she had not even the wherewithal to regret these acts of violence who came too close to the only reason she could see for persisting, that which bound her. it would not be accurate really to say she feels guilty; she doesn't. but rika spoke truly: she remembers. she thinks, against odds. she —
— stays.
also clear: how yuuta forgave her, how he held her as if she was not a monster and told her he would give her everything and how it tipped her into a madness deeper than she thought she could come back from.
how exhilarating.
how heartbreaking.
rika wants yuuta to love her. she also wants him to live. when the time comes that these two realities cannot co-exist, well, they will handle it then.
a curse dares to hope, invisible and validated by only one: time will give them a while longer.
the desire to take physical form, to draw herself out of the dark and into his true space is suffocating. she feels neither large nor small, formed as monster or girl, none of it; just the dense weight of aching want.
yuuta she thinks. ]
Yuuta...careful. The games...liars.
[ what limits will not permit: you must be careful who you trust.
because there are lies woven through everything here. it is in the air. a smell and a taste. deception is a kind of blood and bone. especially, rika distrusts because the jujutsu sorcerers world whether speaking of right now or going all the way back to the original kamo noritoshi has been a disaster widely misshapen by adults. the ones who suffer most tend to be children. even outside the realm of sorcery, this had been proven to be true in her eyes. to articulate this even in her 'head' is impossible. there are parts of rika that yet remain almost childlike and her communication is sometimes apparent in this, not only in how simple or short but her response. she isn't a child. she isn't a teenager. she isn't an adult.
rika, once queen of curses.
what then?
pure love. perhaps.
after all, no one ever said love was harmless. love can be scared and love can be violent. love can be a curse or a kindness or both.
how she sees, she could not explain, but in this rare lull of a moment, there is time to notice not only the suggestion of tears but also an errant scrape. not much of anything, and surprising given yuuta's skill. but he has been going through protecting people while also fighting; he is human.
frustrating to not be able to always choose when she can reach out, but it is such a small scrape she wonders...
yuuta may feel a blur of warmth then coolness against the place where one thin scrape graced his forearm. but it isn't there anymore. ]