ITSY BITSY SPIDER. ― ( Jujutsu Kaisen )

CHAPTER TWO. a boy named yuta

The air in the lounge room had gotten thicker by the time Arisu returned with the insipid brown liquid in a paper cup, barely hot and lacking the earthy smell of coffee the machine was shamelessly named after. Before she walked through the door, she knew. All the people she was either related to, dated, friends, or friendly with were in the same room now that the last chair was filled.

Inside the body of the pearl-haired man flowed an endless amount of cursed energy which caused the fuses in her brain to blow. His presence was so intense that he almost became invisible to the radar her technique had cursed her brain with. Some days being around him was overwhelming. That day, not her brain but her heart found it hard.

Satoru had taken over her seat, legs stretched out and arms dangling from the armrests, as he talked to the blond man. She heard him drop his nickname for her in the middle of a whiny sentence. He had to be explaining how she hung up on him earlier.

Seeing her walk in, he was swift to jump to his feet to show that he was on his best behavior for the requests to come. He grinned, both sweet and devious. "You arrived just in time. I was telling Nanami how my Ari-chan is always there for me when I need her."

The dinner it was.

Satoru never truly needed her. Not since he was ten and almost already mastered the gifts he was blessed with while Arisu was struggling to keep her spider in check and Ryosuke was learning to deal with the backlash of the Dark Matter. Not since he followed his family's footsteps to the Tokyo Metropolitan Curse Technical College a year before her and met a boy his match (the other children in their small private school were 'a bunch of airheads', and he needed her to keep him entertained during lunch breaks.)

A side glance from his former underclassman exposed his little lie. Arisu usually enjoyed humoring him by playing along, but her mind was kilometers away at that moment, in a little wooden box buried under the woolen garments in her dressing room in a pathetic attempt to keep what was inside contained — what embarrassment for someone with her experience level. She felt like its scent permeated her hair; she was afraid that he could sense it.

She shot a quick glance at Ryosuke. His violet eyes, two shades bluer and darker than hers, were glued on his phone with no attention to spare to his cousin's antics — just like how he used to bury his face in his books throughout middle school, pretending he wasn't acquainted with the loud boy calling him his cousin and that sharing the same family name was nothing but a tasteless coincidence; their different hair and eye colors helped him get away with it for a while. Despite sharing less DNA, she and Ryosuke looked more related with their violet eyes and black hair. Still, denying his relation to her always came easier to him, even outside the school grounds.

"Honey," Arisu affectionately sighed, and Satoru's smile dropped as he stared at her behind the bandages keeping his treasured eyes hidden. The leather felt warm against her bare legs as she took her seat back from him. "You know I'd follow you to death if you ask me to, and I'd much prefer doing that than attending the old hag's birthday dinner."

Kusakabe reached for the newspaper that Nanami was done reading and prepared to zone out. He never had any interest in the Gojo clan's affairs, or in any other clan, big or small. Yet her family was always a dark cloud over their relationship. 'That's why I never wanted to do anything with a sorcerer,' he had slipped and said one day. She couldn't even get mad at him. He wanted something simple. Her upbringing was anything but simple.

Arisu waited for Ryosuke to comment on her insult. The elder cousin believed their petty family dramas should be kept within the tall stone walls surrounding their childhood estate as if a single look of a stranger wasn't enough to figure out what kind of people they were raised by and why family gatherings weren't events to look forward to, why there was more than 'easier to commute' and 'times are changing' to two men to break the family tradition and move out as soon as they were no longer legally bound — she wasn't expected to stay as long as Satoru didn't.