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Mimiko.
...and she tries to stay alive. Nanako told her not to die, after all; it was the last thing she ever said. Mimiko thinks it’s real hypocritical of her, to have said that before dying herself, and she wants to be angry at Sukuna for killing her sister, at Gojō for killing Getō-sama, at the entire world for letting any of this happen in the first place. Unlike her sister and Getō-sama, though, Mimiko has never been one for anger in the face of tragedy. She just gets sad.
So she wanders the ruins of Japan and cries and cries and cries until she really realizes her sister is dead and her father is dead and her family is dead and she has to be the one to pick herself up. She can’t die because Nanako told her to stay alive, so she escapes overseas.
She tries to stay out of trouble. She fixes her broken English. Goes to school. Gets a job she doesn’t care about. It’s hard. It’s not hard. She may not take after Getō-sama in anger but she inherited his charm, his easy manipulation, his honey smiles and polite consideration. It isn’t easy living side-by-side with those whom she was taught to hate. There is an ache inside her that refuses to scar. She is always homesick for a place she isn’t sure ever existed.
She goes back to Japan, eventually. The country is beginning to scar, and with it, she begins to scar, too. A flower shop hires her. She goes to Shibuya station and can’t remember exactly where her sister died, but leaves flowers on the concrete. Nanako’s bouquet is one of many left in remembrance. It is at the Shibuya memorial that Mimiko meets her wife.
She’s a pretty woman who lost her whole family to Shibuya. She is also a nonshaman. They go out for coffee and date for four years before marrying in the height of autumn. Sometimes, when Mimiko looks at the ring on her finger, she feels herself lucky. Other times, the image of Getō-sama rubbing blood from his cheek to his knuckles plays loops in her head. She wonders if her father would have killed her wife, and knows the answer in her bruised heart. She hates herself for hating him then hates herself for not hating him at all. When the nights get long, her wife makes her miso soup and cherry blossom tea. They never have children.
Mimiko lives and she lives well. But when summer submits to autumn, she is always homesick for a place that never existed.
Gojō.
...and he cleans up the mess, because he’s the only one who can.
He exorcises and exorcises and exorcises and exorcises and when all is said and done, he finds himself in some random crematorium letting some random person he’s never even met cremate Suguru and Shōko’s bodies. He collects the ashes in two jars and stares at them for six hours till he gets tired of staring at them and throws them in a river and watches them shatter against the stony riverbed because he’s angry, dammit, he’s angry. His teacher is dead and his friends are dead and his kids are dead and he’s angry at them for dying and he’s angry at Jujutsu society for letting them die and most of all he’s angry at himself.
Japan is quiet, in the aftermath. Barren. Cracked earth. There is lots of work to do, but not the type that Satoru is suited for. He’s a weapon to be pointed and fired, is better at destruction than creation. He tried to take the role of a nurturer, once, and look where that got him.
Most of the country being dead means less curses means less for Satoru to do means Satoru can take his first vacation in sixteen years. Suguru must be laughing at him from beyond the veil, he thinks. Fuck him anyway, that crazy two-faced bitch. It’s not pleasant. This is the furthest thing from paradise.
He sits himself down atop a mountain, cross legged on the dewy grass, and closes his eyes. He observes the world beneath him through the eyes he can never truly close, each dot of cursed energy, each shift of things he has never found words for. His back hurts and his legs ache and his skin thins and his hair tangles, and he doesn’t move for an entire month. He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t drink. He chews his anger until it becomes grief and chews that grief until it becomes a cold numbness.
He thinks, and he thinks, and he thinks, and he thinks. There’s nothing else to do. When he descends the mountain, he is not quite the same person that climbed it. He converts to Buddhism, and doesn’t tell anyone, because there’s no one left to tell; someday, he knows, if he does this right, that thought will stop hurting.
He goes back into teaching. The schools are full of nonshams-turned-shamans, stumbling over their new abilities like newborn fawns. He loves his new students in the way he loves warm spring breeze and winter-sunshine. He doesn't get attached. He doesn’t make new friends, he doesn’t take a lover, but he does adopt seven children. It’s lonely right up until it isn’t.
That cold numbness sinks into something warmer, if no less numb. It’s the pleasantness of this world. Satoru contents himself.
Shōko.
...and she cremates the bodies. Tsukumo doesn’t want her to. Tsukumo wanted to take Satoru and Suguru’s bodies for research. Shōko doesn’t care. She tells her to fuck off and Tsukumo laughs in her face. Tells her: “Sure sure, you can come with me, if you want. God knows Japan is dreary right now.”
Shōko doesn’t join her, says she’ll think about it, and doesn’t mean a single word. Satoru left most of his possessions to her. It’s enough money to stun. He left her enough to live comfortably, luxuriously, for decades. He would hate to know she’s spending it on cigarettes and alcohol, but he’s dead, so what does she care. It’s not like it matters. Whatever. When Suguru left, Satoru learned to look behind himself. She wishes she had found it in herself to tell him what he meant to her, but she didn’t and now he’s dead. People die, and people are left behind. Nothing new is happening here.
She didn’t mean to think about leaving for-real, but She looks at the rows and rows and rows of urns and thinks about leaving this morgue that she’s spent half her life haunting. She thinks about it so much that she does. She’s tired of bodies.
So she buys herself first class train tickets out of Tokyo and wanders. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for. Doesn’t even know if she’s looking for something. Is this how Suguru felt? Jujutsu society labels her a curse user. Then the establishment crumbles, and she’s given a different label that means the same thing. Then that paper-mache government crumbles, too, and she’s not labeled at all. Society is a sandcastle around her, and she slips through the cracks.
People find her, sometimes. They are sometimes desperate and always wounded. She heals them with no fee and denies their thanks. She doesn't want to be known as The Miracle Doctor or The Morgue Doctor. She doesn’t want to be known as The Drunk or The Cigarette Addict, either, but. It’s not like Utahime’s there to chastise her.
The world is kind, though. Not always, but sometimes. Just enough. If you let the world be kind to you, it’ll be kind. Shōko makes new friends. Finds new people. Her favorite bartender goes into labor too-early and there’s no time to get her to a hospital and Shōko isn’t a midwife but she delivers the baby. She holds him in her hands, this red and wrinkled thing, slippery with blood, too-small and wailing, heartbeat so strong in his little body that it feels like holding a warm pulse, and she keeps him alive until he can stay alive himself.
She realizes she’s tired of death. She’s tired of the dead and the dying. She quits cigarettes and goes sober and becomes a midwife instead. These days, to those who know of her, she’s recognized as the best midwife in all of Japan. None of her patients ever die.
Sometimes, she indulges her evenings with a glass of wine, but never more than one. She buys cigarettes once a year—on the anniversary of Shibuya—and smokes in the deep of night. She doesn’t talk to the empty darkness; she’s not that sentimental. When the night passes, she throws away the pack and goes back to living.
Getō.
...and he wants to die. He fishes the cubed remains of his daughters out from the ruins of Shibuya station and he feels their soft, rotting flesh between his fingers, and Suguru wants to die.
The Zen’in-failure finds him sitting in the wreckage of Tōkyō, robes tattered, face towards the reddened sky. She looks different than she did when he met her, no longer carries the lightness of youth. She’s scarred and battered, rough on her edges, blade sharp as a diamond-cutter. He reaches for idle transformation, and observes the likeness of her soul with morbid impulse. It is the same disgusting shape as his own, and every other he has observed, and he despairs under it.
He says: “Kill me if you want.”
She says: “Shut the fuck up.”
“It’d be good,” he says, “it’d be justice.”
“I don’t care about justice,” the Zen’in-failure monkey-girl says. “Fuck, I can’t stand you. Talking about abstract shit like that right now. You’re a special grade, and if you haven’t fucking noticed, everyone is fucking dead. If you care about penance so much then help clean up.”
So he does, because it’s true: for him to die would be selfish. He helps clean japan. He exorcises and ingests, and most of all, he collects bodies. There are so many bodies. There are so many bodies. They dot every street, rotting in stores and pushed haphazardly against the walls of buildings. It’s the same no matter the city; all of them smell of urine and rotting corpses and burnt flesh. The crematoriums are all either full or out of order. Tens of thousands of bodies are messily burned in mass graves.
If hell is real, this is it, Suguru thinks.
Eventually, can no longer find shaman corpses to cremate. He hesitates only an hour before moving onto collecting and disposing of nonshaman bodies. He is an empty husk processing empty husks. There is some sort of irony in this, and he doesn’t care enough to puzzle it out.
He is made intensely aware that this was, minus the shaman casualties, part of his original plan to paradise. This exactly. To overrun Japan with curses and then clean up the aftermath. The road to hell.
He vomits into rat-filled alleyways. He heaves into out-of-order bathrooms. He doesn’t cry. He’s not sure he’s capable, anymore.
And then, months and months later, when all the bodies are eaten or burned or buried, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. An acquaintance he met through volunteer work offers him a job at their mother’s tea house, and for lack of anything else to do, he takes it. He works at this teahouse in the countryside which has become more of a soup kitchen and he doesn’t know what to do.
He looks at the world around him and observes the shape of each soul: the dragonflies that flit by marshy ponds, the fish beneath the water, the newborn birds still pink and featherless in their nests, and he sees the same soul. He looks inside himself and he looks inside every other human and he sees the same soul. It’s all the same soul. It is quite possibly the worst revelation of Suguru’s life.
He leaves the teahouse. Goes back to his hometown. Tracks down his parents’ ashes. They’re kept in two urns by the neighbor down the cracked road of his childhood home. He doesn’t remember her but she remembers him, and gives him the urns freely. He can’t stay in his hometown, but he finds a similar town and takes over an abandoned building. Turns it into a food kitchen. In the living space above the bottom floor, he sets up shrines: Mimiko Nanako Satoru Shōko Larue Manami Negi Okaasan Otōsan…
It’s too little too late, but he tries to find meaning in it.
He serves food every day. He starts a vegetable garden. First he eats because he can’t bear to waste food at the end of the day, and then because he wants to. One day, he wakes up in the morning and looks at himself in the mirror and realizes there’s some fat to his edges.
One day, he sits down to write philosophy and makes a cookbook instead. He makes candies for the neighborhood children. Grows his garden. Maintains the graveyard of shines inside his house. It’s not grand, but, he contents himself with one day, it doesn’t need to be. Suguru finds meaning in simple things.
∞
...and infinite worlds means anything that can happen has happened and will happen infinitely. There are worlds where half of them die. There are worlds where only one of them dies. There are worlds where only one of them lives. There are world where all of them die. And...
Sukuna asks them if there’s something they wanna ask him, says he’ll give them a finger’s worth of time, and Mimiko is struck with the sudden intuition that if they request something of him, they will die. It’s a bone-deep intuition, stabs her chest with cold fear and panic and before she fully register’s what she’s done, she slams Nanako’s head into the concrete.
Her father taught her to be charming, to weird words and expressions and gestures as sophisticated tools. There isn’t much room for sophistication in this, and she barely has a read on Sukuna’s character, but no one likes to be lied to and she has to say something so she says: “We had a request, but upon meeting you, we’ve reconsidered! It would be impudent to ask! Please forgive that we had such audacity to plan to ask something from you in the first place!”
Sukuna laughs, and for a moment Mimiko thinks they will die. They don’t die, though. Sukuna says she’s got good instincts, and his shoes leave Mimiko’s narrow field of vision. Five minutes after he’s left, she is still trembling with her head pressed against the floor. But she and her sister are both alive.
In the end, Sukuna doesn’t need to be involved for the thief to be cast from Suguru’s body. The acquisition of Idle Transformation becomes Kenjaku’s undoing; Suguru steals back his body, rips out the brain, and regrows his own. Barely a minute later, Satoru descends upon Shibuya with the wrath of an angry god.
When the dust has settled, Satoru finds Suguru sunk to the ground on his knees in the wreckage, eyes glassy. He says: “Do I need to kill you again?”
Suguru says: “Do you want to?”
And Satoru doesn’t want to, so that’s that. They take a vacation, the three of them: Satoru, Shōko, and Suguru. They buy first class train tickets out of Tōkyō and wander aimlessly. It doesn’t have purpose, but it does have meaning, and Suguru realizes that perhaps, for him, that should be enough. On their last day, Satoru announces that he’s converting to Buddhism—Shibuya was enough. I never want to have that strong attachment to someone, something, anything again. And even besides that...—and Suguru laughs for three straight minutes before admitting that he’s converting to Hinduism. When asked why, he says: “It’s all the same soul.”
Shōko doesn’t end up going back to the college. She still heals anyone who comes to her, but she is done with that life. Suguru and Satoru buy a small house by the sea, and she lives there intermittently. Her skin is tanned, now, a darkened bronze that she hasn’t had since her childhood years. She quits smoking for good one day, says she doesn’t wanna die because of that shit.
Nanako doesn’t like anyone but her father and sister enough to live a life with them, but Mimiko still falls in love with a nonshaman in the cusp of summer. When she introduces her girlfriend to Suguru, it’s in the depth of winter. Nervous hands and nervous glances. Suguru doesn’t address the matter for six dreadful hours before finally, finally saying: “I will kill you if you mistreat her.”
He isn’t joking; Suguru knows himself well enough to know what he would do. It’s never an issue, though. Mimiko and her fiance get married in spring bloom surrounded by wisteria and cherry blossom, and it’s with her father’s blessing. They have a daughter three years later. When Shōko places the newborn in his arms, when Suguru holds his granddaughter, he cries for a reason he can’t explain. A few months later, he visits the Getō family grave for the first time in nearing two decades, and brings with him his husband and twin daughters and step daughter and granddaughter.
Mimiko and her wife move into an empty house just down the road from Suguru and Satoru’s. They help fix it up. When harvest season comes, they all cook meals from Suguru and Satoru’s vegetable garden. Suguru writes childrens books, now.
Satoru’s kids outgrow him, just like he said they would. His students are all powerful and smart and the Jujutsu world steadily changes. He retires in his fifties and knows the world will not crash and burn without him. He has a handful of good friends and tens of children and a husband with laughter lines, and is never lonely again.
The premise of infinite worlds means that in one world, in some world, everyone lives.