Chapter 57: Chapter 57 - Father’s Friends [bonus]
[You and Gojo followed gumi through a dim corridor that reeked of mold and rotting garbage. A key turned with a dry click, the iron door swung open, and you finally saw the ho these two siblings shared.]
[The room was small. Cramped, if you were being generous. A few stacks of yellowed tatami filled most of your field of vision, with clutter piled in the corners eating up what little space remained. It could have traded places with one of Jujutsu High’s spartan dormitory rooms and neither would have noticed the difference.]
[But it wasn’t the poverty that caught in your throat. It was the dignity clinging to life inside it.]
[The walls were chipped, plaster flaking in patches, yet the floor had been scrubbed clean. Two small pairs of shoes sat lined up in the entryway with military precision.]
[gumi and Tsumiki had been keeping house. That stubborn, almost defiant tidiness painted a picture sharper than any words could: two abandoned children in a world with no adults, gripping each other’s hands, fighting to hold together the thing they called "ho."]
[But more than sympathy, what churned through you was sothing closer to disgust.]
[Toji Fushiguro. The man who’d taken contracts worth astronomical sums, who’d accepted Special Grade commissions like kill Satoru Gojo and assassinate the Star Plasma Vessel without blinking. The sa man who’d thrown fortunes away at the racetrack like pocket change. And this was what he’d left his own flesh and blood.]
[Your gaze drifted past gumi to the girl inside, wearing an apron, rising to her feet in alarm.]
[Tsumiki’s features were soft, gentle. Not a trace of Toji’s predatory edge anywhere in her face. She clearly wasn’t his biological child.]
[That didn’t soften your judgnt. If anything, the revulsion sharpened.]
Zenin through and through, even after everything...
[The thought cut cold and clean. It didn’t matter that the man had married into another family and taken a new na. It didn’t matter that he’d fled the clan they called a den of monsters. The curse branded into his soul, the one spelled Z-E-N-I-N, had followed him out: the arrogance, the indifference, the bone-deep reflex to discard anyone weaker who shared his blood.]
[But your thoughts circled back to sothing Gojo had relayed outside.]
[Toji had already negotiated gumi’s sale to the Zenin Clan and pocketed the deposit. Yet in his final mont, with half his body erased by Hollow Technique: Purple, he’d thrown the boy’s fate to the very enemy who’d killed him.]
Rather than send him back to that rotting family, he’d trust an enemy?
[Maybe Toji had decided, in those last seconds, that even the man who’d killed him was a better destination than the Zenin Clan.]
[Maybe, at the very end, the boy’s future had mattered to him. If only slightly.]
[The thought didn’t redeem him. But it left a small, human footnote at the bottom of an otherwise brutal story.]
["gumi... who are they?"]
[Tsumiki tugged at the hem of her shirt, her voice soft but threaded with the instinctive wariness a young girl has around unfamiliar n.]
[The question stumped gumi.]
[Those dark eyes, so much like his father’s, swept back and forth between you and Gojo, whose sunglasses had slid down his nose as he peered around the room with shaless curiosity.]
[The boy thought for a long ti, visibly weighing how to explain this situation to soone as trusting as Tsumiki.]
[He seed to give up. One glance back at you and Gojo, and he answered with a perfectly straight face.]
["Father’s friends. I think."]
["Pfft...!"]
[Gojo lost it. His hand clamped over his mouth, but the explosive snort of laughter broke through anyway.]
["Friends? Us? Hahahaha! That’s got to be the highest complint that man has ever received, gumi!"]
[His shoulders shook. He looked like soone who’d been told the funniest joke of the century.]
["You..."]
[A vein pulsed at your temple. You drove your elbow into Gojo’s side with zero hesitation, your eyes ice-cold, telling him without words to rein it in.]
[You had no intention of dragging these children into conversations too heavy for them. gumi’s maturity was unsettling enough. Tsumiki was an ordinary girl. She didn’t need to learn about the killing and the bloodshed that connected all of you.]
[You adjusted your expression, faced both children, and spoke.]
["We are your father’s friends. He wasn’t what you’d call a reliable man, but from now on, we’ll be looking after you in his place."]
[Tsumiki didn’t react with the kind of wild relief that might co with being rescued. No shock, either.]
[She accepted it the way soone accepts weather. Her parents had been gone long enough that anything could happen. Being taken in by strangers or ending up on the street had probably felt, for so ti now, like a coin flip.]
[She lowered her eyes and turned to her younger brother, that unconscious dependence on him aching to watch.]
["Should we trust them, gumi?"]
[The decision-making power in this household belonged to a first-grade boy.]
[gumi lifted his head. Those eyes, Toji’s eyes, fixed on your face, then Gojo’s.]
[His small mind replayed the conversation from outside. He’d already been sold to the Zenin Clan. That place was hell. If he went, Tsumiki would suffer.]
[He studied Gojo’s irreverent, untouchable confidence. Then your gaze, cold but free of pretense.]
[A beat of silence.]
["I don’t know for sure. But I don’t think they’re lying."]
[His clenched fists loosened. Sothing wry flickered across his face, too old for it.]
["Let’s try trusting them. It’s not like we have better options."]
[Toji’s death was already far behind them. The money he’d left had nearly run out. Tsumiki’s mother had vanished without a trace, and no more paynts ca. Overdue utility bills had filled the mailbox to bursting.]
[Even without you and Gojo showing up, the tightrope act over the abyss couldn’t have lasted much longer.]
[Once you’d taken on the ss, you moved fast.]
[With gumi and Tsumiki’s consent, you began searching for a new place imdiately.]
[Your reasoning was practical and thorough. Unlike gumi, who had the makings of a Jujutsu Sorcerer, Tsumiki was completely ordinary. Dropping them into a place like Jujutsu High made no sense. And even if gumi was bound for Tokyo Jujutsu High eventually, that was years away. What they needed now was normal schooling, a normal environnt, the chance to build normal lives instead of being ground into numb exorcism machines before they’d finished growing up.]
[There was also the security concern. Given the parents they had, leaving them in a run-down apartnt with nonexistent security was asking for trouble. Toji Fushiguro had made enemies. So of them might co looking.]
[You weighed Jujutsu High’s response distance, the strength of nearby barriers, and proximity to good schools, then settled on a unit in an upscale residential district in Tokyo.]
[As for moving costs, the steep rent, tuition, and future living expenses...]
[You didn’t bother being polite about the money.]
[You slapped every projected bill and budget estimate directly against Gojo’s chest.]
[He was, after all, the de facto head of the Gojo Clan, a man who could buy a building on a whim. Your own salary, earned by nearly dying to replicate Cursed Techniques, had no business being wasted on expenses that rightly belonged to the person Toji had entrusted his son to.]
[Watching Gojo grumble "Hayase, you really don’t hold back, do you" while cheerfully arranging the transfer anyway, you stood on the balcony of the new apartnt and caught a glimpse of gumi’s profile. Still tense. Still guarded. But the rigid set of his shoulders had eased, just a fraction.]
[And sowhere inside your chest, the gloom that had been pressing down for so long seed to lighten. If only a little.]
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