bewitched me

growing pains

APRIL 24TH, 2017. 7:34 AM. TOKYO JUJUTSU HIGH SCHOOL. JAPAN.

"So, Maki, what kind of music do you listen to?"

Maki, in her own socially inexperienced life (unless she counted her interactions with other members of the Zenin clan as 'social development', which she would've been sooner caught dead than ever caught calling it that), was quite aware that some people had some mystical ability to act normal after something really dramatic had happened just hours before. Irony or something, maybe it was a poker face or really good acting or whatever, she thought either of those were suitable answers so it didn't really matter.

In some way, a really twisted and screwed up way, it was like that at Jujutsu High. The students there sort of acted like everything was normal while countless abominations happened around the country (and the world, no less) every day. Maki ate and slept and trained like any normal Jujutsu High student would. Panda chewed on bamboo, as one did, of course, and he also went to class and talked to his friends, and trained, too. Toge tended to his garden, started taking up sign language lessons on his phone after the first conversation about it, ate, worked out some, though his efforts to stay in shape paled in comparison to Maki, and also played games on his phone during his free time.

Of course, like with every other witch in the world, nobody really knew a whole lot about your normal activities.

Maki knew you liked to meditate, so she made sure to leave the training room open for you from time to time. She also knew you liked looking at your tea leaves at the bottom of your mug (which she noticed was your only one: a simple earthy green shade with a rune engraved in the porcelain) sometimes. She thought it went without saying that you practiced some sort of witchcraft on your own time when you weren't learning about Jujutsu and cursed energy and whatnot. Panda and Toge knew those things, too, as everyone's hobbies were brought up occasionally in conversation.

But as far as anything not witchy related, none of them really knew anything about you.

Maki didn't care all that much just yet. She wasn't in a rush to figure out everything about you, and she didn't think Panda and Toge were, either, until you were pulled out of class again the following Monday after your blood test and came back twenty minutes later with an opaque bag of something that clearly wasn't meant for everyone else to see and they asked her after class what she thought it was for.

Well, for one, she told them it was a mistake talking to them after class had ended, and two, she told them that the bag's contents were nobody's business but your own and that she didn't care if they were smaller bags of coke and meth or if they were twelve different passports to twelve different countries. Of course, she was partially lying, because she was slightly curious about it but only because it was in her nature as a human, she also didn't give that much of a crap that she had half a working brain cell to start gossiping about it and making guesses on what was in there. Toge and Panda stopped for a bit after she told them to mind their own business.

The rest of the week was kind of normal, or as normal as it could've gotten at Jujutsu High, at least. Toge got assigned his first mission on his second Wednesday at the school. It wasn't much: it was a curse invading an abandoned park, it sounded pretty basic and bland when Maki heard about it. Maki trained outside for the first time on Thursday because it was too nice outside for her to spend her training time indoors with lackluster manilla walls and a tan training mat and matching colored dummy as her view. Gojo took you all out into the city for a bit as his treat (which none of you had a clue what the reason was behind the treat, but turning down a free trip to the city was nonsense) on Friday and let you all explore the impossibly and absurdly busy streets of Tokyo for a few hours. People fawned over the literal panda walking around. Toge went to several game stores and junk food stands (from some of which he brought back souvenirs for the group, like dango sticks and Pocky boxes). Maki didn't want to spend her time with the boys so she opted to stick with you the whole time and consequently got lost a few times, stood in the middle of a bookstore for an entire hour while you looked around the whole five hundred square foot store, walked with you to the next bookstore you found, stood there for only fifteen minutes before you bought a journal and a copy of Wuthering Heights and Outlander with your share of the allowance Gojo gave to all of you, went with you to another store that was centered around coffee and herbs and tea and other stuff Maki didn't care about, then got lost again.