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The universal consensus among the acquaintances of one Gojo Satoru (should you bother to ask them), is that leaving a child in his care is dangerous, stupid, a threat to public safety, and the kind of irresponsible parenting that should warrant the immediate intervention of child protection services.
If you were to ask Gojo Satoru himself what he thought of this, he would proudly declare that such a situation would never arise, because he hates babysitting.
What he would not tell you is that this statement needs a little bit more nuance. Maybe even a smidgen of reconsideration.
Because Satoru is currently sitting in the café of a zoo with two kids, sipping the last dregs of his milkshake through a straw as noisily as possible, and having the time of his life discussing the logistics of an animal team-based survival reality show with an eight-year-old.
"... no, I think you need small animals on your team," Tsumiki argues seriously. "They need less food to survive. Like raccoons. The information board said they are smart and have a wide diet. And crows! They can fly up to scout!"
"But that's super boring! Survival reality is all about the spectacle," Satoru counters, demonstrating the excitement with jazz hands. "Who wants to watch a bunch of raccoons and birds rummage through trash all day? You gotta have cooler animals, Tsumiki. Think bigger. Like tigers! They're one of the only animals that actually hunt humans for food."
"That's the problem. They need a bunch of prey. There's not enough food for them in a survival reality show."
"They'd hunt down your crows and raccoons and win by elimination before they'd starve."
Tsumiki crosses her arms. "My crows would fly away! And my raccoons would hide!"
"Oh yeah?" Satoru flicks a crumpled candy wrapper at her. She blocks it by hiding behind the penguin plushie freshly acquired from the zoo's souvenir shop. "In a trash can?"
Tsumiki huffs, and moves the candy wrapper from the faux plumage to the table with utmost dignity. Then she turns to her brother for backup. "Megumi. You agree with me, ri—oh."
It seems that they both got too caught up in conversation to notice that Megumi has drifted off to sleep in his chair, slumped against his own toy wolf. He had been the one to declare he wanted a plushie, despite the furious shushing from his sister.
"Dibs on his drink!" Satoru calls immediately and snags the now unguarded glass just as quickly. It's still half full with Megumi's smoothie, but the ice cubes have mostly melted in the summer heat.
Satoru realizes the mistake he made after a single atrocious lemon-and-ginger-flavored sip.
"Ew! What's the point of a smoothie if it's not sweet?" Satoru scowls, and pushes the glass away. "On second thoughts, you can have this, Tsumiki."
"Wouldn't Megumi be upset if it was gone when he woke up?" she worries even as she curls one hand around the cup. It seems huge clutched in her tiny fingers.
Satoru glances at the sleeping boy. Normally, Megumi probably would be, but the zoo has put him in an uncharacteristically content (dare we say chipper!) mood, so he probably wouldn't care too much if he found his gingery travesty of a drink gone when he awoke. But considering his deep, even breaths and the relaxed swirl of his cursed energy, he's not leaving the land of dreams anytime soon.
"He's out cold. Forgetting to be grumpy for once in his life must have really tired him out," Satoru quips.
Tsumiki giggles into her hand. It's cute. They both are, really.
Satoru always thought himself immune to this sort of disgusting mushiness, but the longer he stares at Megumi's round baby cheeks squished against the plushie and the serious little frown of his brows, the harder it is to pretend that it's not an adorable sight. With a small, resigned sigh, he sneaks his phone out to snap a picture.
The resolve of the strongest defeated by a sleeping toddler. What has this world come to.
The thumbnail of the photo pops up on the screen, pushing the others on his camera roll down by one row. Megumi's sleepy face is completely out of place in his gallery of beaten up bad guys, idol posters, silly selfies and covertly snuck photos of hairstyle tutorials from girls' magazines that Satoru hadn't wanted to be caught dead buying. Those pictures are the only tangible proof he has of the last three years, all wrought in blue skies and what felt like eternal spring—mementos of a shared daily routine that has thinned and thinned like a fraying string, until it snapped completely.
(A hundred and twelve civilians. There must have been children in that village. Children that had adorable round cheeks and slept with plushies and had terrible tastes in drinks.)
Satoru flips the phone shut.
This isn't the time and place to think of things like that.
As far as Satoru is concerned, the only appropriate time and place to think about those things is never and nowhere.
"Should we get going?" he asks before his thoughts could get too loud in the companionable silence.
Tsumiki looks up from the elaborate pattern she has been drawing into the condensation on Megumi's glass. "Of course. Just a minute."
She still has a few spoonfuls of forgotten strawberry cheesecake on her plate, and now she picks up her fork again to finish it.
The oddness of her suddenly strikes Satoru; not for the first time since he took the kids in. It's the slight impression of cursed energy around her, bleeding softly into the golden evening light, so unlike his and Megumi's much more substantial output that sits contained on their skin, accumulating just like the water droplets on the glass.
She's a non-shaman.
For all his work technically consists of protecting them, Satoru has never given a single thought to non-shamans before. They used to be an entirely homogenous, inconsequential mass to him, abstract like a moral concept. 'We need to fight curses to protect non-sorcerers' sounded exactly the same to Satoru as 'we need to fight curses for the greater good'—nothing but stupid, sanctimonious bullshit covering up the only reason Satoru held true: 'we fight curses because winning is fun'.
Satoru always knew himself to be stronger than all other sorcerers (with a single wonderful, painful exception), but he was never really aware that he considered himself to be above non-shamans, too. You never consciously think about being better than ants, do you? It's simply the way things are. Such a foundational part of your worldview that you never even notice it's there.
Except Tsumiki is here now. An individual from that distant, faceless crowd that Satoru has been taught to protect but dismiss his entire life. Sitting in front of him, she is no longer so faceless and nameless—she is a person.
And not just any person, but a kid. A kid who likes going to the zoo and likes her brother even though they bicker and has a sweet tooth and thinks a penguin plushie is the most precious thing in the world. She's… devastatingly normal.
Satoru doesn't have a lick of experience with 'normal'. Her mundanity is stranger to him than any alien life-form could be.
And the truth—a truth he can't deny as he watches her carefully spoon up all the crumbs from her plate—is that he likes her. She's cute and curious and oddly fun to talk to—maybe because she talks to him like she would to any other person. She is completely oblivious to the chasm between them, and it makes him hyperaware that the gap of strength that could not possibly get wider ultimately stems from that tiny wisp of cursed energy emanating from her.
It's… really not as noticeable of a difference as Satoru always assumed it would be. It's barely perceptible even to the Six Eyes.
(And yet enough for Suguru to wish death upon her.)
Every day Satoru spends with Tsumiki, he understands Suguru's decision less and less. She's a little girl finishing the last bite of a slice of cheesecake and swinging her legs back and forth because the chair is too tall for her to place her feet on the ground.
(What meaning could there possibly be in her death?)
When she's done with her cake, Satoru nudges Megumi's smoothie closer to her.
She tilts the glass to her lips, balancing it carefully with two hands, and has the same reaction as Satoru did. It's not too surprising, actually. Tsumiki is the only person Satoru has ever met who can match his sweet tooth. But unlike him, she smothers her disgust and continues to drink it.
"Hey, don't force it if you don't like it," Satoru pokes her hand until she tips the glass back down to the table. "Just leave it, it's fine."
"Are you sure? I don't want to—you paid for it. We're… we're not ungrateful, Megumi just fell asleep, and—"
Satoru waves off her anxious rambling and stands up. "Relax. Don't like it, don't drink it. Simple as that."
Tsumiki pipes down, but she continues to fidget nervously with the penguin sitting in her lap. She had the same flustered reaction when Satoru bought that for her (she didn't ask, but he would have had to be blind not to notice her silently pining after it, and blind is the last thing he is). She started fretting about superfluous expenses and exceeded budgets and all sorts of other words Satoru definitely hadn't known when he had been eight. So he shut her up by getting a little whale plushie for himself as well. It was cute, okay? And Satoru could have bought the entire store with the money he makes in just one week.
"I'll have to show you my salary when I get paid next month," Satoru muses while he's trying to extract the wolf plushie from Megumi's arms without waking him. It's a surprisingly challenging manoeuvre. "That'll stop you worrying about money."
"But… that's yours," Tsumiki wrings her hands. "You should spend it on things that you like."
"I've got plenty left over for myself."
Not that he normally spends money on anything as… recreational as this. Sure, he buys expensive food and clothes, and manga that ends up collecting dust on his nightstand; but he wouldn't bribe Mei Mei to take care of his first grade missions to clear up an entire Saturday for going to the zoo if it was just for himself. And that was by far the biggest expense of this outing.
Satoru picks Megumi up. The sleeping boy nestles into the crook of his arm with surprising ease. It's a peculiar feeling: how well the body of a child fits into the arms of an adult, like two puzzle pieces crafted by thousands of years of evolution clicking together. It's distinctly human in a way Satoru is not accustomed to.
Well. He can officially kiss goodbye to the last vestiges of his immunity to mushiness. What even is up with all these weird emotions?
Meanwhile Tsumiki, ever helpful, stuffs their new plushies back into the bag they came in. Satoru takes it from her and slings it over one shoulder, then offers the same hand to her, which she takes eagerly.
"Besides," he adds as they head toward the exit, intertwined hands swinging. "I am spending my money on stuff I like. I've never been to the zoo either, y'know."
"Really?" Tsumiki asks. "Didn't your school take you?"
That's where the idea for this little jaunt came from: a while ago, Tsumiki mentioned in passing that her class had gone on an excursion to the zoo last year, but she and Megumi hadn't been able to spare the funds for the trip. Satoru, who had been scratching his head trying to come up with some sort of bonding activity for the better part of a week at that point, jumped at the opportunity.
As the days of knowing these kids are turning into weeks, Satoru is slowly realizing that Tsumiki may have been a real blessing in disguise. And not just because she's sweet and polite and quick to laugh where Megumi is usually impersonating a thundercloud on a dour day.
It was a hell of a surprise at first, when Satoru found two children in that dilapidated little flat instead of the one he expected (the one Fushiguro mentioned—seriously, what kind of guy forgets about a whole entire child, even if she's not his own? Dickhead.). Satoru was completely stumped on what to do with a kid who couldn't even see curses.
But that might have been a good thing. Had Satoru not been forced to consider what sort of entertainment a non-shaman child would need, he would have just spent all of Megumi's free time training. And another realization he's slowly coming to is that as evident as that may have seemed to him, it might not have been very good for the kid.
"Nah. I was homeschooled. Sort of."
Tsumiki tilts her head curiously. "Really? What's that like?"
Satoru shrugs—it's awkward with Megumi slumped over his shoulder. He's not sure how to describe a clan upbringing when they have precisely zero common experiences he could compare it to. He doesn't know much about normal schools, except that they must majorly suck for them to spew out as many curses as they do.
"Kinda boring," he settles on. "There's only old tutors around and no field trips."
Tsumiki makes a face. "That sounds lonely. I'd miss my friends."
Satoru shrugs again. He hadn't known there was something to miss, back then. Not like he knows now.
He hikes Megumi up higher in the crook of his arm with a sigh. The long day must be getting to him, too—melancholy is not his style. Must be because his stupid camera roll reminded him of Suguru. Again.
He really should delete those pictures.
"Gojo-san," Tsumiki breaks the silence as they wait for the pedestrian light to switch to green just outside the zoo's entrance. "Thank you for today. It was really kind of you to take us."
He glances down at her sincere expression and soft smile. She looks so happy, and for a moment, Satoru sees an entirely different girl. He barely knew Amanai Riko, but the reminder somehow still makes him feel like his heart has been cleaved in two by Fushiguro Toji's blade all over again.
He gets the strange sense that he's the one who should be thanking her; though for what, he doesn't know. For the suggestion to go to the zoo, maybe. For being a non-sorcerer who is more than just a corpse torn apart by a curse for once, who is alive and happy and holding onto his hand. For smiling so innocently despite the life she's had. For being so willing to be saved.
He says none of that—he wouldn't know how to begin putting any of it into words when he doesn't understand it in the first place. Instead, he tells her, "You look tired. Do you want up?"
She does, he can see it. It's the same quiet pining she watched the plushie with, like getting close to something that once seemed infinitely out of reach.
"But aren't we going to be too heavy for you?" she worries.
He can't help but laugh. No one has ever asked him such an absurd question before. Whatever could be too much for Gojo Satoru to carry?
"Nah, don't worry." He pulls her up, and she wraps her arms around his neck. She's a small, warm weight, a little heartbeat tucked against his own. He'd sooner crush her by accident than drop her, light and fragile and human as she is against the strength he's only ever used for destruction before. "I'm the strongest."