OBLINE, KUSUO SAIKI.

✶. the cursed child.

✶ . . . WHEN YOU WOKE UP THE next morning, it wasn't the PK Academy uniform hanging on your door, but one with a black jacket and pants. The golden pin on the upper chest glinted softly in the light. You took one look at it and groaned.

How could you have forgotten?

Maybe it was because you had been looking forward to teasing the hell out of Kaido today. Nendo had invited you and the gang to grab some ramen at a place he swore up and down served the best. It would have been fun. You would've gotten your usual dose of satisfaction from aggravating Saiki.

You could have gone to PK Academy, the other uniform be damned. No one would have blamed you. You had made it clear where you stood.

But the black uniform was like an old, bittersweet friend. When you pulled it on, it was as though you had never left.

It was as though you were still one of them.

You would go. Because as much as you hated them, you still missed them. It was one of the few opportunities you had to see them. You'd be an idiot to waste it.

Your mother smiled sadly at you when you entered the kitchen. She took in the uniform, then drew you into her arms.

"You don't have to go if you don't want to."

"I know. But I might as well. Especially if they summoned me and all that."

Your mother's smile was strained. "You don't owe them anything."

"It's not them that I care about."

Both of your parents had been jujutsu sorcerers. They had met on a mission and then become inseparable partners, both on and off assignments. You didn't know the particulars of their cursed techniques or even much about their time as sorcerers. Only that once you had entered the picture, a leg injury had left your father as an instructor and your mother leaving sorcery completely. And that for the first decade of your life, you had been primarily under the care of the Gojo clan.

There was no lost love between you and jujutsu society. There was a reason your mother never wore short sleeves, and why your father used a cane and tried his best to hide his limp. You had been told on multiple occasions that you were the pride of not only the Gojo clan, but of jujutsu sorcerers everywhere. You had both Six Eyes and Limitless. With the proper training, you could be the strongest sorcerer of the modern age.

The strongest, period.

It appealed to you. Of course it did. Learning about protocol and jujutsu lore was a bore, but actually fighting and exorcizing curses ... the thrill was unmatched. You were good at it. Limitless was cool and all, but against those grotesque beings, that was where it shone.

It was what you had been born for.

But as you had grown older, you realized that if you didn't have Six Eyes and Limitless, the jujutsu higher-ups would likely have thrown your family out on your asses. They turned their noses up at your mother's Second Grade status, scoffed at your father's injury. They only cared about you so long as you could fight, could be a cog in their machine.

And so, you had left. You didn't want to be the strongest if the higher-ups would only use you. You hated that you had left behind your friends, but you just couldn't handle it. Jujutsu sorcerers existed not to kill curses, but to protect people. So long as you believed that, you and the higher-ups would never see eye-to-eye.

But that didn't stop them from requesting check-ins every once in a while. Sometimes they asked for your help dispatching curses. Mostly they liked to lament about how you were wasting your potential and should be honing Limitless, not prancing around with high-schoolers.