Chapter Text
Sapporo, June 2018.
"What's that?"
The hotel room is dimly lit by moonlight. On the bed, two figures are curled together under the sheets. One of them props himself up on one arm, looking over the other's shoulder.
"Yomotsu Hirasaka," answers Nanami. The phone in his hand lets off a slight glow, the screen dimmed for the late night. "The website where the puppet maker was accepting requests to 'resurrect' babies."
"Hmm? You worried about other parents who might have bought those dolls?"
Gojo drops back onto the bed, but snakes his arm around Nanami's waist, huddling closer. Nanami turns the screen off and places his phone on the nightstand.
"I trust Ijichi-kun will be able to find them," Nanami replies, relaxed but distant. "I was merely thinking about the name of the site."
"Everyone is a real smartass nowadays." Gojo blows a raspberry in the back of Nanami's neck. The blonde man responds by elbowing Gojo in the gut. "Ow!"
"I should be surprised that you know of Yomotsu Hirasaka at all, considering how indecent of a student you were."
"It's part of the founding myth of Japan! Of course I would know," grumbles the twenty-eight year-old, petulant. "I was a pretty bad student—but I became a well-read teacher!"
Nanami rolls to face Gojo, his own arm wrapping around the white-haired man. "You read about it?"
"Not specifically about Yomotsu Hirasaka, but it was mentioned in passing. The famous place that connected the living world with the netherworld, yeah? Where Izanagi blocked the entrance to keep Izanami from escaping." Gojo rolls his eyes.
"Shinto myths are not the kind of thing you read for entertainment," says Nanami, patient.
"I'm getting there, I'm getting there! Some real old Gojo ancestor of mine wrote some dumb theory texts back in his day. He thought that curses and cursed energy might have been born from that moment, when Izanami cursed Izanagi for leaving her behind." The chatterbox shrugs one shoulder. "Seen a lot of curses, haven't seen a Shinto god though. Some other Gojo ancestors have visited the supposed real Yomotsu Hirasaka, can you believe that? That dumb tourist spot."
"I visited the shrine and the Yomotsu Hirasaka there."
"Whhhaaattt? Na-na-mi! I didn't think you were a sucker! Well, actually—ow!"
Gojo suffers a pinch in his side. Unrepentant, his companion in bed rolls on his back and pulls the blankets over himself, stealing from the piteous Strongest Jujutsu Sorcerer.
After a minute of silent blanket tug-of-war, Gojo manages to slither his way back up against Nanami's side. "Did you see any curses?" asks the man, incapable of stopping his form of pillow talk.
Nanami glances at glittering eyes, which blink back with false innocence but genuine curiosity. He closes his own, memories playing out beneath his eyelids.
"None at all."
Matsue, March 2015.
Business trips away from Tokyo are short reprieves. Nanami does not make a habit of treating his business trips like vacations. However, they are effectively the only extended periods of time he is away from the office. If he explores the bakeries in the area of his assignment, he can be satisfied with just that much for the next few months of office work drudgery.
In the end, he has simply traded one kind of misery for another.
One hundred and twenty-five years ago, Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Matsue and stayed there for just over a year. Sitting between two lakes and sprawling out to the sea, the 'City of Water' charmed him so much, Hearn eventually adopted Japan as his country, taking on the name Koizumi Yakumo.
Stepping off the airplane, Nanami knows his observation that modern Matsue is unlike anything Hearn saw when he first came to the same city. But, walking forward and taking a deep breath, Nanami wonders if the strange atmosphere blanketing Matsue now was present over a century ago. A tingle vibrates through the air, making goosebumps on his skin. Yet, he feels certain that the odd sensation is neither jujutsu nor curse-related.
Hearn came and wrote ghost stories. Wouldn't that be a twist, if what energy dominates here is ghostly rather than cursed?
"Nanami-san!"
He turns in the direction of the voice. A gray, nondescript sedan with a woman waving from the driver's side window. Nanami recognizes the woman as Ikikawa Junna, the branch manager he is supposed to meet.
"Is it a bit surprising? The meeting was scheduled for tomorrow, after all."
Ten minutes later, they're cruising down a stretch of road, past the proper greetings and with Nanami's suitcase in the car trunk. Ikikawa looks pale, but her voice is steady and exuberant. Nanami studies her from the corner of his eye, rather than looking directly.
"I am surprised you came personally to pick me up," he replies.
"Well, you mentioned you would arrive early to do a bit of sightseeing, and today I happen to be going to a pretty famous place around here, so I figured I would swing by the airport to see if you were there." Ikikawa tucks her hair behind her ear, but the straight strands just slide and fall back down. She has a heavy layer of makeup under her eyes.
"Oh? What would this famous place be?"
Ikikawa gives him a secretive look. "You'll know when we get there."
Her cheeful demeanor seems to ride a line between honest and forced. Nanami stays quiet; as a distant coworker, as a freshly-made acquaintance, he is in no position to pry. Ikikawa's personal troubles are none of his business.
Eventually, she turns into a road across the street from two traditional Japanese homes. The road goes a bit further in, and Nanami sees the giant sign.
"Welcome to the Iya Shrine," Ikikawa intones, beaming. "Adjacent to the famous so-called entrance to the netherworld, Yomotsu Hirasaka."
Iya Shrine, March 2015.
The place is muted, with only a few cars in the parking lot. Matsue invokes tourist appeal through locales of mythic origins. This type of attraction is more popular at other times of the year, when the cherry blossom season is not looming just over the horizon.
"This shrine worships Izanami," comments Ikikawa, her sneakers crunching on the rocky path. "Kind of weird to worship someone who vowed to kill a bunch of us humans every day. Not her fault her husband was a dirtbag, I guess."
One of the famous founding myths of Japan in Shintoism, that everybody in Japan knows: Izanami, who died birthing Kagu-tsuchi, and Izanagi, her bereaved husband. He went to the netherworld to retrieve his wife, only to betray her when he saw her as she appeared in death: a rotting corpse.
"He feared her ugliness and ran," Nanami murmurs. His eyes follow the pillars up to the support beams. The shrine looks old, older than even the buildings and shrines he remembers on the Jujutsu Technical College campus.
"What did he expect her to look like? She was dead!" The woman laughs, cynicism lacing her voice. "On top of that, he blocked her from escaping the netherworld. Like I said: total dirtbag."
Yomotsu Hirasaka, the slope that connects the Land of the Living to the Land of the Dead. In practice, based on description from the myths, it was probably more like a cave tunnel. Izanagi abandoned his wife when he saw her appearance. When Izanami pursued Izanagi in rage, Izanagi sealed the entrance of Yomotsu Hirasaka with a boulder. Furious, Izanami raged that she would kill a thousand every day; Izanagi countered by saying he would birth a thousand five hundred every day.
Such was the origin story of 'death'.
The two salaried workers pay their respects to the shrine in passing. Nanami merely follows Ikikawa; he understands early on her true destination is not the Iya Shrine. Instead, they are on the path to the supposed Yomotsu Hirasaka, when Ikikawa stops abruptly.
She turns her head. "Do you hear that?"
Nanami listens. He hears nothing but the rustle of leaves and branches in the wind. Casting a long look through the surrounding forest, Nanami wonders if there is a curse present. Have his senses dulled? He cannot tell. The strange feeling he had when arriving in Matsue feels vastly stronger here than it did at the airport.
Suddenly, Ikikawa seizes his elbow, eyes wide and staring at some point between the trees. "Do you see him? Can you see him?" Her words come out in a rush, disbelief and desire mixing together.
"Curses can sense when you're looking at them," said teenage Gojo, crunching into his lollipop. "If you look directly at them with your naked eyes, they'll definitely know you can see them."
He knows he should not look. But he does, to try and see what Ikikawa sees.
No deformed curse. No traces of cursed energy. Nothing.
"Who is 'he'?"
"My brother," Ikikawa almost whispers. "Isn't he there?"
What Nanami feels, through her grip on his arm, is Ikikawa's roiling cursed energy. Neither a sorcerer nor a curse user, Ikikawa is bleeding more cursed energy than a normal person, her heightened emotions sending her generation of negative emotions out of control. The place where they touch allows Nanami to absorb only a small portion of what she is emanating.
Consciously or unconsciously, she will make a curse, if Nanami does not stop her here.
He takes her hand in his. "Ikikawa-san, calm down."
The sky seems darker. The shadows seem longer. Something is here, but it is not her brother. At least, Nanami suspects it is not.
"I'm sorry," the woman stammers, but not to Nanami. "I'm sorry!"
"Ikikawa-san, calm down!" he repeats, grasping her other hand as well. He pulls to change her position, get her to stop staring at a random silhouette of a tree.
Somehow, it works. The woman peels her gaze from their surroundings to fixate on Nanami's face, eyes welling up with tears. And just as suddenly, the wind around them seems to die down, the rustle of leaves no longer so loud. Nanami breathes a sigh of relief; the tension from the moment has passed, though what caused the tension, he is unsure.
Ikikawa drops down on the ground, covering her face. For a long minute, she remains silent; Nanami waits patiently, crouching down on one knee next to her.
Will she talk, he wonders. Is he the kind of person someone could talk to? He lives alone, remains cordial but distant to his coworkers, and is sorely lacking in friends in his private life. He is no priest for confession nor a columnist to ask advice from.
"They told me to pick up his ashes," she says at last, beneath her hand. "It's been six months."
A drop of something wet lands on the dirt. Followed by another, and another. The blonde man is reminded of old days, a funeral at which the ground at his feet suffered the same pattern of damp.
"He was my only family left. And the last time I ever saw him, we had a really bad argument." Ikikawa removes her hand from her eyes, only to use it to wipe her wet cheeks. "I just wish I could have apologized."
"…So you came here, hoping to meet him?" Nanami pulls out the packet of tissues from his jacket pocket, offering them to Ikikawa.
She laughs, snagging a tissue. "It sounds so stupid, doesn't it? Actually believing that maybe there's a place here where the living and the dead can meet."
When the pain is fresh, and the mind and heart full of regrets, what-ifs and what-I-should-have-dones, the sentiment of just-one-more-time is completely understandable. Nanami had been there before. His regrets clouded his thoughts for so long, his doubts became unbearable. So unbearable that he ran away.
But right now, he finds himself surprised by his own calm.
"Earlier at the shrine," Nanami begins, steady and sure, "I saw a stand set up with paper and pen, with a sign telling visitors to write a letter to their loved ones."
Ikikawa blows her nose, blinking the last of her tears away. "Oh right. They set up a mailbox at the entrance to Yomotsu Hirasaka."
The idea is a simple, silly thing. More for the living than the dead; after all, there are no addresses in the netherworld. But Nanami accompanies Ikikawa back to the shrine, where she scrawls her apologies in several drafts before enclosing the final one in an envelope. He walks with her to the mailbox by the entrance, this time without incident.
When Ikikawa drops the letter into the mailbox, then claps her hands into a gesture of prayer, Nanami remarks, "You are a quick decider."
"Quick?" the woman scoffs. "Took me six months to crawl over here, even though I live in Matsue."
"…For me, it took…at least five years." A wound healed through time, rather than through conscious choice.
"Five years?" echoes Ikikawa. "Well, I don't expect to be instantly better tomorrow. But…I can pick up his ashes. Maybe." She plasters a shaky smile on her face. "I might have just lucked out, instead."
Nanami raises a questioning brow.
The shaky smile shapes into a more sure one. "I lucked out by having a sensible someone with me."
Sensible? Nanami would not go that far. But he understands, the hindsight and value of someone who can comfort and guide at a critical moment for the heart. It makes the difference between six months and five years.
Path from Iya Shrine to Yomotsu Hirasaka, later.
Why is Nanami walking down this path, for the third time today?
Why is he here, at night, well past overtime?
He breathes slowly, walks carefully. His brain claims he wants to be sure there is no curse here. A place where so many people's regrets can gather? The lack of cursed energy is what makes the place more suspicious than ever.
His logic states that Nanami has nothing to do with jujutsu or curses anymore.
Nanami stops before the mailbox, the easiest marker to note in the dark. His flashlight follows the shape of the mailbox before aiming at the cave boulder.
Something unsettling permeates the air, but his familiarity with curses grants him nothing. Nanami stares at the rocky surface, wondering if he is simply losing his mind.
Ikikawa will not be returning; her heart has settled, having assuaged some of her regrets by visiting and depositing that letter. His own regrets have dulled through the years; he has accepted what happened, and come to terms with a cruel world.
His hand brushes the rock, the gritty texture rubbing on his fingertips.
From there, the boulder ripples.
Nanami blinks. A chill travels down his spine. His eyes flick up to the sky, which blooms bright red above his head, spreading and spreading until the entirety of the sky is covered in the same impossible color. Before him, the boulder that blocked the cave entrance continues rippling, waves flowing on its surface in concentric circles until the rock fades from view, shifting into a tunnel with stone steps descending into blue fog.
He takes a step back.
"Too late to retreat."
Spinning on his heel, Nanami almost reaches for a swinging case that he has not held for many years. He drops his thought and focuses on the speaker instead, schooling his face into a blank mask.
An unnaturally tall man stares down at Nanami from above, his pallor ghastly white. No…he is not tall, he is a giant, with the right proportions for a human, but magnified. The streak of color on his face, a red slash from his forehead through his left eye, lends an aura of creepiness to the giant's gaze.
Nanami is outmatched. He is weaponless, in the middle of a forest, and the sky is an alarming color for late night. The giant man is also clothed in red, old-fashioned Japanese armor, a long blade in each hand.
"…You are?"
The giant's lips curve into the faintest smile.
"A son of the Minamoto clan. Yoshitsune."
