Corpse Flowers [Jujutsu Kaisen]

🥀 Chapter Sixteen 🥀

Ever since she was a young girl, Seiran had hated the thought of marriage – it was an obligation, a responsibility, a commitment that stifled, sucked and strangled everything out of a human being. There were books and movies and long-lasting mythical folktales that would speak of marriage as something sacred, something spiritual... something that tied two people together in a tangle of red strings of fate since the moment they breathed air.

Kageyama Sarina had told her daughter, holding her in the feeble grasp that remained from the burden of childbirth, that people were fated to fall in love with one another and that marriage was beautiful because it was made of that love. But Seiran never believed in the concept of fate's interference when it came to love.

Seiran had always fought against fate – the fate that had brought her in the world as a Manjushage, the fate that had torn her parents and her brother away from her, the fate that had forced her into a role that she had never wanted to occupy so early in life. Fate had always been cruel to her, and she had begrudgingly let it all happen to her.

... but fate could not choose who she loved.

When she had first stepped her feet into Tokyo Jujutsu High, Seiran had been running away from fate, from the stifling hold of her grandmother's tyrannical rule over her personal life. Seiran had wanted to focus only on becoming strong, she had wanted to focus on making something of herself – of someone who was known as just Seiran.

Not Manjushage Seiran.

Not the next Daisaishi.

Just Seiran.

Yet the moment that Seiran opened the door to her new classroom, her defensive pink eyes had flew onto the boy in the room – a boy with beautiful, dark eyes that sent a rush of warmth through her chest. She had stared at him in suspended silence, shocked at the sight of him as if she had known him all her life at first glance, and when his expression had mellowed into a gentle smile, Seiran had known that she had lost to fate... and fate had always been so cruel to her.

"I do not know anything, Satoru-Kun! I do not know!

Every step that he has taken belongs to someone I have never known!"

Seiran stood with unseeing eyes, her gaze settled beyond the window of time that she did not recognise. She was suspended in memories of a person that no longer existed. She was caught in the embrace of a man that had killed himself years before he took his last breath. Seiran let out a sigh as her eyes refocused themselves.

There was a tense silence in the hallway where Seiran stood, and she was not alone in that silence – she was in the company of Gojo Satoru and Master Yaga Masamichi. It was almost insanity to see the two of them as being quiet, or even serious. Seiran wondered if the world had gone mad.

"We still aren't picking up on any actions from Geto," spoke up Master Yaga, having heard of the entire fiasco from earlier. "Are you sure you're not worried over nothing?"

"Principal, I'm sad to say that's not possible," Satoru responded. "It wasn't just me – both Sei-Chan and I confirmed it ourselves on the scene. There's no way I would mistake the residuals of Suguru's cursed energy,"

And then there was, the feeling of familiarity, the warmth that Seiran had felt so deeply throughout her teenaged years – the feeling of Geto Suguru's Cursed Energy. Her heart lurched before her mind could catch up. Seiran was the first to sense it, the first to yearn for it. That cursed energy brushed against her skin like an old embrace, and for one impossible moment, she wanted to sink into it, to believe he was still there.