April 2, 2005.
The first official day of classes at Tokyo Jujutsu High.
At 7:50 in the morning, the mist in the mountains had just cleared. The faint, bitter scent peculiar to wooden buildings lingered in the corridor, mingling with the aroma of fish stock drifting from the distant cafeteria.
Suguru Geto stood outside Yan Si's door.
He was already dressed, the black Jujutsu High uniform fitting neatly around his tall, slender teenage frame, its lines tapering cleanly from his shoulders to his waist.
His hair was tied into a tight bun at the back of his head, with only a lock of bangs left hanging over his forehead, swaying slightly in the breeze passing through the corridor.
He raised his hand and knocked, his knuckles striking the wooden door exactly three times, neither too hard nor too softly.
"Yan, time to get up."
There was dead silence inside.
It wasn't the silence of someone still asleep, but the silence of a room with no one in it at all. The curtains were drawn tight, not a sliver of light escaped beneath the door, and the entire door radiated a refusal to engage with the world.
Suguru Geto knocked twice more.
"It's seven fifty. The first class starts at eight."
Still no response.
He frowned. From what he knew of Yan Si, the guy might be ridiculous in every conceivable way, but at least he wouldn't be late for the first official day of classes... no, wait.
Yan Si would actually be perfectly happy to be late.
There was nothing this freak of nature wouldn't do.
He reached out and pressed down the handle.
The door wasn't locked.
Yan Si never locked his door.
His exact words had been, "Look all you fucking want. We're bros."
He had been lying on the dorm room floor eating chips when he said it, scattering crumbs everywhere. Suguru Geto had stood in the doorway watching him for thirty seconds before finally going to borrow a broom.
Suguru Geto pushed the door open and went in.
The air inside was much heavier than in the corridor. The curtains shut out every trace of light, and the darkness was so thick it almost had weight.
The smell hit him first.
Chips, chocolate, and the cloying sweetness of some kind of fruit gummy mingled together, underlaid by an extremely faint, almost imperceptible smell of rust.
A row of snack wrappers sat on the bedside table, with empty bags piled beside it into a small mountain.
A half-read book lay facedown on the desk, its cover facing up. It was a book about "how to speak with emotional intelligence," and the borrowing slip bore Yan Si's name, dated three days earlier.
The bundle of bedding on the bed was wrapped tight, with a few strands of long black hair and half a pale wrist poking out at the edge.
The skin on that wrist was so thin that the veins beneath it were visible.
Nurses would love a hand like that.
It would be easy to get a needle in.
Suguru Geto looked for three seconds, then averted his gaze.
He walked over and yanked the curtains open.
April's morning light flooded in without warning, its whiteness bordering on violence, washing every last shadow from the corners of the room.
Dust danced wildly in the shafts of light, and the curtain track let out a shrill metallic screech.
A muffled groan came from beneath the covers.
"No, no, no, no, no..."
The sound squeezed out from deep in his throat, trailing on and on, somewhere between "I'm dying" and "I'm already dead."
"Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off-"
"If you don't get up, I'm pulling the covers off."
The covers squirmed.
Yan Si poked half his head out. His hair was a complete disaster, black strands sticking out in every direction without any rhyme or reason.
His eyes were narrowed to slits, his eyelashes bent crookedly from sleep. His lips were dry, and a few involuntary tears still clung to the corners of his eyes.
"I'm going to kill everyone who gets up early..."
His entire face was full of bewilderment and resistance toward the world.
Even so, that face was still beautiful. His features were simply too good, so good that exhaustion and dishevelment became nothing more than languid embellishments.
He wore a black long-sleeved T-shirt as pajamas, its loose neckline slipping below his collarbones and exposing a narrow stretch of shoulder.
Freshly dragged out of sleep, he looked considerably younger than usual.
Fourteen years old, from this angle, in this light, before he'd had a chance to start acting insane, he looked like an ordinary boy who wanted to die because the sunlight hurt his eyes.
His voice was terribly hoarse, thick with the nasal sound of someone who had just woken up, his Kansai dialect softened to a mush. "What time is it...?"
"Seven fifty-one."
"Still nine minutes."
"It takes six minutes to walk to the classroom."
"Then I've still got three." Yan Si buried his face back in the covers, his voice emerging muffled.
"You need to wash your face, brush your teeth, and get dressed."
"Three minutes is enough."
"No, it isn't."
"Yes, it is."
Suguru Geto looked at him for three seconds.
His expression didn't change. It remained gentle, his lips maintaining their polite curve.
Then he turned, opened the wardrobe, and precisely extracted a shirt and a pair of pants from the heap of wrinkled clothes, tossing them onto the bed.
His movements were brisk and efficient, every step carrying the practiced ease of someone who had done this many times before.
"Two minutes to get dressed, one minute to brush your teeth and wash your face. I'll wait."
Yan Si raised his head from beneath the covers, stared at the shirt, and blinked.
His brain clearly hadn't finished booting up. The signal transmission from his retinas to his cerebral cortex was suffering serious delays.
He looked for two seconds, then raised his head to look at Suguru Geto.
"You really are just like..."
He stopped halfway through.
He had meant to say my mom, but the image of his dear mother, who occasionally stabbed him a couple of times, surfaced in his mind at precisely that moment, gentle and terrifying.
Yan Si shuddered and decisively swallowed those words, replacing them with an indistinct mumble.
Suguru Geto stood beside the bed, looking down at him with a gentle expression and boundless patience.
Morning light shone from behind him, gilding his shoulders with a thin golden edge and making him look absurdly dependable.
"Come on, get up."
Yan Si sighed and crawled out from under the covers.
He sat on the edge of the bed, his bare feet on the floor, his black long-sleeved T-shirt crumpled and his loose hair trailing down to his waist.
He yawned, opening his mouth wide, then rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. His entire being was still stuck on the startup loading screen.
Suguru Geto turned his face away.
"I'll go save you a seat in the classroom. Be there in three minutes."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah." Yan Si waved a hand, his voice still carrying traces of that sleepy nasal tone.
There are only four students in the classroom. What the fuck are you saving a seat for?
Suguru Geto reached the doorway and paused mid-step.
"Yan Si."
The rustle of someone getting dressed came from inside, the soft friction of fabric and the clink of a belt buckle.
"Hmm?"
"There's breakfast on the bedside table."
There was a brief pause, then Yan Si's voice came, tinged with laughter. "Oh~ Thank you, Mommy Geto~"
He was being a little shit again.
Suguru Geto turned and left.
When he reached the end of the corridor, he heard a laugh from inside the room.
It was soft, brief, and subdued, not the kind of laugh meant for anyone else to hear.
Suguru Geto didn't stop walking, but he lowered his eyes, and the corner of his mouth shifted.
The corridor was empty. Morning light slanted through the eastern windows, casting his shadow across the wooden floor and stretching it long.
Satoru Gojo was already in the classroom.
He had arrived earlier than anyone else.
He had tossed and turned all night, unable to sleep because the Six Eyes received too much information in the dark.
So much that his brain was like a radio he couldn't turn off, crackling away as it broadcast every fluctuation of cursed energy within several kilometers.
After struggling until three in the morning, he had simply given up on sleep, gotten up, and wandered around campus. He went from the main building to the training grounds, then from the training grounds to the edge of the barrier in the mountains behind the school, memorizing the position of every tree.
At daybreak, he had wandered straight into the classroom, becoming the first human to arrive that day.
He sat in the middle of the front row. His long legs stretched beneath the desk, and his toes idly tapped the legs of the chair in front of him, producing a soft, rhythmic tap, tap.
His sunglasses rested on his nose, and his uniform jacket was casually draped over the back of his chair. The top two buttons of his white shirt were undone, exposing the lean line of a teenage boy's collarbones.
He was far too relaxed, lounging against the back of his chair with one arm draped over the empty seat beside him, looking like a vacationer stretched out on a beach chair.
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