Itadori Yuji was raised by his grandfather.
He didn't remember his parents, and he didn't particularly care to — as far back as he could remember, the only person he truly loved, the only one he considered real family, was Wasuke. And Wasuke was enough. More than enough.
Itadori Wasuke's life came to an end in a hospital bed, surrounded by little more than the sound of machines and a grandson who didn't yet know what it meant to lose someone. There may not have been many people there in his final moments — but for Wasuke, having Yuji by his side was all he needed.
His last words left a mark.
That Yuji might die surrounded by people who loved him. Not alone like him — not in silence, not in an empty room. That he'd have that.
Yuji probably didn't fully understand what his grandfather meant at the time. He was a teenager who had just lost the only person he could call family, and a dying man's last words don't always mean what they're going to mean until years later, when it's already too late to answer them.
What he did understand — immediately, without having to think about it — was that he was going to honor them. Not as a solemn promise; Yuji wasn't the kind of person who made solemn promises. He just was who he was, and who he was fit perfectly with what his grandfather had asked of him. Help people. Show up. Don't look away.
That wouldn't change. He just didn't know yet how much it was going to cost him.
What came next happened fast, the way things that change a life forever tend to happen.
A student from Jujutsu High showed up at his school looking for a cursed object — Fushiguro Megumi, serious and straightforward, with that specific energy of someone who prefers facts over long explanations. Yuji didn't need many details. People were in danger, and that was enough.
He went. Of course he went.
His classmates were in there, and the alternative was standing outside knowing something was hurting them, and that simply wasn't an option his body knew how to process. He didn't have a plan. When he kicked the curse that was about to kill his friends, he hadn't even had time to register the fear running through him — he just acted, because it was what needed to be done, and because he was Yuji.
Things got complicated fast. There came a point where both of them were cornered, and the curse already had its jaws open when Yuji made the only decision he had available: he swallowed the cursed object. The finger of the King of Curses.
The worst possibility out of a million came true. Ryomen Sukuna reincarnated inside the body of Itadori Yuji.
Except not entirely. Yuji held him back.
Gojo Satoru arrived with his usual energy of someone who has never needed to rush because he's already worked out how things end. He asked Yuji to release Sukuna for ten seconds — a request any reasonable person would have turned down — and what he saw in those ten seconds was enough to make up his mind. He'd bring him to Jujutsu High.
The sentence came shortly after, punctual and cold as expected: by order of the higher-ups, Itadori Yuji was to be executed. There was no precedent for a vessel of Sukuna who maintained control. No protocol. Just a threat and the institutional habit of eliminating what couldn't be understood.
Gojo stepped in before any of that could happen — with the energy of someone who already knows how the conversation ends before it starts. He negotiated the only thing worth negotiating: time. Yuji would swallow the remaining fingers. When Sukuna was complete, he would truly die, and the King of Curses with him.
It was a terrible plan with airtight logic, the kind that only works when the person accepting it is exactly the kind of person Yuji was.
Yuji accepted it.
Jujutsu High welcomed Itadori Yuji the way it welcomed most extraordinary things — without much ceremony and with the pragmatic efficiency of a place that had seen too much to be caught off guard by anything.
Gojo showed him around with the selective enthusiasm of someone whose priorities are hard to predict: he moved quickly through the training buildings, lingered unnecessarily in the cafeteria, and pointed out his room with the vagueness of someone who assumes the other person will figure it out on their own.
The dormitory hallway was usually quiet at that hour.
That night it wasn't.
Rei was in his room with an anatomy book open on the desk, mentally noting details about muscle distribution and how they related to the efficiency of the reverse technique, when voices came through the wall clearly enough to be impossible to ignore. He closed the book. He cracked the door open just enough to see what was happening without committing to being part of it.
In the hallway, Megumi was staring at the door of the room next to his with the expression of someone who had just discovered something they'd have preferred not to.
"You're in the room right next to mine?" he said, in the specific tone of someone who isn't really asking a question so much as working up to a complaint.
"Fushiguro!" said Yuji, with a smile that appeared completely naturally, effortlessly, as if spending the past twenty-four hours in the worst day of his life were a minor detail. "You look way better."
"There are plenty of empty rooms," Megumi continued, turning to Gojo with the hope that the adult in the situation might apply some logic. "Aren't there?"
"There sure are," Gojo confirmed, with the tone of someone who has considered the problem and decided it isn't his problem. It was at that moment that Gojo glanced down the hallway and found Rei peeking out from his doorway with the expression of someone who had just made a strategic mistake.
"Kagami!"
Rei stepped out. There was no other reasonable option. He walked toward the group with the quiet resignation of someone who knows they've lost a fight before it started, while Gojo stepped aside with the gesture of someone presenting something they expect to impress.
"We've got a new first-year."
Rei's gaze landed on Itadori Yuji.
And stayed there.
It wasn't a conscious choice — it just happened, the way things happen that the body processes before the mind does. Itadori in person was exactly how his father's books had described him and completely different at the same time. The same physical build that made no sense for someone his age, the same open expression that hadn't yet learned to put distance between what he felt and what he showed. But the books hadn't captured this — this specific quality of presence, the way he occupied the space around him without effort or intention, simply because that was who he was and he didn't know how to be anything else.
Rei knew this face. He'd read about it dozens of times in his father's notes, tied to events that now had dates and shapes and a living, breathing person standing in front of him in the hallway.
The thought arrived before he could stop it.
If he killed him now — quickly, before he swallowed more fingers, before Sukuna could consolidate himself — the King of Curses would never return complete. Everything that was coming, everything Rei had read and now knew was real, might not happen. Gojo would live. The people who were going to die wouldn't. The math was cold and perfectly clear: one life now for all the ones that would follow.
Rei was honest enough with himself to admit that the thought didn't feel entirely repulsive. That was the most disturbing part.
But it lasted exactly as long as that kind of thought lasts when you look it in the face — one moment, before reality takes it apart.
Because Itadori Yuji wasn't a variable in an equation. He was someone who twenty-four hours ago had lost the only family he had, who had walked into a building full of curses to protect his classmates without thinking twice, who had accepted carrying the most unjust death sentence Rei could imagine with the same ease with which he seemed to accept everything else. He was someone who, based on what Rei had read, was going to lose more than most people could bear and keep moving anyway — not because he was invulnerable, but because he was exactly the kind of person who kept going even when he didn't know where.
Taking that from him wasn't a solution. It was just another kind of loss Rei would have to carry.
The thought dissolved. What it left behind was harder to name — not quite guilt, but the specific weight of knowing too much about someone who doesn't yet know anything about what's waiting for them, and not being able to do a single thing with that knowledge.
He realized he'd been quiet too long. Everyone was looking at him.
*Can you all stop staring,* he thought, with the discomfort of someone for whom attention has never been easy.
"Kagami Rei," he said, drier than he intended. Introductions had never been his thing. Itadori didn't seem to mind the tone.
"Itadori Yuji," he answered, with that same smile, unchanged. "Nice to meet you."
Before the conversation could go anywhere, Gojo clapped his hands twice with the energy of someone who has decided there's been enough normalcy for one night.
"Alright, alright. Introductions can wait." The three teenagers looked at him. "We're heading out tomorrow. We need to find the fourth first-year."
"I'd rather not" Megumi muttered, at a volume calculated to be heard while still giving him room to deny it if needed.
Gojo ignored him.
Rei exhaled slowly. Somehow, without being able to pinpoint exactly when it had happened, quiet moments had started to feel like something worth noticing before they ended.
The next morning the three of them were in Harajuku waiting for Gojo.
Itadori was already wearing the Jujutsu High uniform. He wore it the same way he seemed to wear everything — without overthinking it, just on. He was watching the street with that scattered, genuine attention of someone who finds most things at least a little interesting.
"How can there only be four first-years?" he asked, to no one in particular.
Rei glanced at him sideways. Megumi answered without looking up.
"Do you know anyone else who can see curses?"
Itadori thought about it for a few seconds, visibly serious about it. Then he shook his head.
Gojo arrived late enough that it was clearly intentional, and led them to the agreed meeting point.
The first time they saw Kugisaki Nobara, she was trying to convince an agent from a modeling agency to sign her, with the absolute certainty of someone who doesn't entertain the possibility of rejection. The agent was doing his best to ignore her with the discomfort of someone who would very much rather be somewhere else.
"Embarrassing," Itadori said, in a tone that would have been more convincing if he weren't wearing tourist sunglasses and wearing an expression that announced exactly the same thing.
"Same goes for you" said Megumi.
Rei had quietly drifted to one side, putting enough distance between himself and the group that any casual observer would reasonably conclude he didn't know them.
The introductions came with Gojo playing emcee with more enthusiasm than was strictly necessary.
"I'm Kugisaki Nobara." She looked at all three of them with the quick, unfiltered assessment of someone who forms an opinion before anyone has finished talking. "I'm the flower of this group of happy boys."
"Itadori Yuji, from Sendai." Enthusiastic, no reservations, completely himself.
"Fushiguro Megumi." Dry. Sufficient.
"Kagami Rei." Nobara hadn't even noticed him until he spoke.
Nobara studied them in order, with the quiet focus of someone running calculations.
This one — Itadori — had nothing sophisticated about him. Probably picked his nose as a kid. Her eyes moved to Megumi. Just gave his name — she couldn't stand the self-important type, definitely the kind of guy who'd set a seagull on fire for fun. Last came Rei. Too quiet; she hadn't even registered him until he opened his mouth. Weird energy. Though his skin looked good — she wondered what he used.
She wrapped up her conclusions with a long, completely sincere sigh.
She sighs every time she looks at someone's face, Itadori thought.
The test Gojo put together that afternoon was short and to the point, the way things tended to be when he decided theory had had enough time and it was practice's turn.
Itadori stood out the way he stood out at everything — not through refinement, but through a physical ability that had no reasonable explanation and that he himself didn't seem to consider particularly noteworthy. Nobara demonstrated a technique that was, in Rei's quiet estimation, considerably more interesting than her introduction had suggested.
Rei paid attention to everything. It was what he knew how to do.
They made it back to Jujutsu High as the sun was going down — all four first-years together for the first time, none of them quite sure what they'd gotten themselves into or what it was going to cost them.
Rei knew a little more than the other three.
It wasn't much of a comfort.