Koi No Yokan (gojo x oc)

3. Into the City

April 2005
That evening.

While everyone else enjoyed a meal gambled on our own fight, Gojo and I were on the field once again trying to decide what we could possibly do.

"This is your fault by the way."

"My fault?" I say. "You're the one who fired off all that cursed energy."

"You were the one bragging about being all strong and fast. You were practically asking for a fight." He stands an entire head taller, but still folds his arms and pouts the way my siblings would. "How did you do that by the way?"

"Do what?"

"The teleporting," he says. "I couldn't see you."

"Why should I explain any advantage I hold over you?"

"I know we're the rivalry for the ages here, but we're both still Jujutsu."

For a short moment, I really had forgotten there was so much more beyond this competition. Curses, and people who were supposed to be saved. "It's called Time Jumping. I 'push' myself forward a certain distance by displacing myself in time."

He deeply considers the idea, then snaps his fingers, "So you make yourself a paradox to move through space."

"Sure, if you want to think of it that way."

"I'm going to try that one of these days," he says.

"How? You're not Uematsu."

"True, but our techniques aren't so different. You manipulate time and I do the same with space. I've thought about it, and that's why the collisions were so large earlier. It's the same poles on a magnet trying to touch."

I'm ashamed to say I find Gojo's intuition rather impressive. He possesses a natural understanding of cursed energy that I simply don't. The disconnect I cover up by working on my athletic capabilities instead. "So then, if I can displace myself in time, you should be able to displace yourself in space."

I feel my nose crinkle as his pointer finger taps the tip. "Exactly. I have a theory that most of our techniques could mirror one another's if we really tried."

"And you'd be willing to exchange that with me?"

"Why not? I'll still be stronger."

"And slower," I say. "Why don't we focus on fixing the field first?"

"Right!" Gojo pinches his chin, letting the gears of his mind turn. "Maybe if we—"

"Sorry," I put a hand up, "Usually, I don't like to interrupt, but I've seen what you're about to say, and I'm telling you now it's stupid." Neither of us had any means of moving a field from elsewhere. The very fact he considered that alarmed me. 

"Or how about if we—"

"No." Another grandly stupid idea.

He stops and thinks hard again. "We could try to—"

"No."

"What if—"

"No."

"But if we—"

"No."

He ran out of patience. "Well, why don't you think of something then?"

"Fine, I will." I hate the way I sank to his level, turning on my heel in a fit.. "Maybe... maybe I can use a curse technique to make the grass grow."

Gojo gained a second wind, and started to laugh, "No way! Are all the Uematsu secretly curse gardeners?"

I lifted my hands, index fingers pointed in different directions. "Reversed curse technique: voiding." I try my hardest to turn my hands in the counterclockwise direction, but it feels as if another set of hands are holding them in place. Barely moving a few inches, laughable patches of grass turning yellow instead of brown, I stop and sigh, "I thought I had it this time."