Akari Gojo learned to hide before she learned to speak.
Not consciously. She didn't remember her father's barrier, the one that wrapped around her like a second skin from the moment of her birth. She just knew that when she was very small, the world felt... soft. Muted. Like colors that should have been bright were just a little faded.
Shoko raised her in a small apartment outside Tokyo proper. Not Jujutsu High, not the Gojo compound, not anywhere sorcerers would think to look. Just a normal building with normal neighbors and normal sounds and a normal life.
"Don't look at the weird things, Akari."
That was Shoko's first real lesson. Not about jujutsu, not about cursed energy, not about any of it. Just: don't look.
"But there's a man with no face on the corner."
"There's no man with no face." Shoko's voice was steady as she poured cereal into a bowl. "Eat your breakfast."
"There is. He's waving at me."
"There isn't." Shoko sat down across from her, took her hands. "Look at me. Right at me. What do you see?"
Akari looked. Four years old, white hair pulled back in pigtails, eyes that were just a little too bright blue for Tokyo. "I see you."
"Do I look normal?"
"Normal." Akari tilted her head. "Tired. Like always."
Shoko snorted. "Rude. But accurate." She squeezed Akari's hands. "If I look normal, and everything else looks normal, then everything is normal. Okay?"
"But the man—"
"Is not real. He's a trick your brain plays because you're so smart. So you ignore him. You focus on what's real. Me. School. Your friends. That's all that matters."
Akari frowned. She knew Shoko was lying. She'd known for years that Shoko wasn't telling her something. But she also knew that when she pushed, Shoko got that look—the one that meant she was remembering something sad. So Akari smiled, nodded, and ate her cereal.
The faceless man was still on the corner when she left for school.
She didn't look at him.
(She looked. Just a little. Out of the corner of her eye. He was still there.)
---
When Akari turned seven, she stopped mentioning the things she saw.
Not because they went away. They didn't. If anything, there were more of them as she got older. Shadows that moved wrong. People with too many teeth. A massive, crawling thing that lived under the overpass and only came out at night.
She just learned that other people couldn't see them.
She tested it once. Second grade. A boy named Kenji was crying because his mom was late picking him up. Akari saw the thing standing behind him—a small curse, maybe knee-high, with too many arms and a face like a crying baby. It was mimicking his sobs. Feeding on them.
"Do you see that?" she asked Rina, her best friend.
Rina looked where Akari was pointing. "See what?"
"That thing. Behind Kenji."
Rina squinted. "There's nothing there, Akari. Just the wall."
Akari nodded. Smiled. "Yeah. Just the wall. My bad."
That night, she asked Shoko about it while they made dinner.
"Why can't other people see them?"
Shoko's knife paused over the cutting board. Just for a second. Then she kept chopping carrots.
"See what?"
"The things. The wrong things." Akari watched her carefully. "I know you can see them too. Sometimes at night, when you think I'm asleep, I hear you go outside. And the sounds stop. The scratching sounds. The crying sounds. They just... stop."
Shoko set the knife down.
"How long have you known?"
"Always." Akari shrugged. "I'm not stupid, Aunt Shoko. I know we're different. I just don't know why."
Shoko wiped her hands on a towel. She looked tired. More tired than usual.
"Sit down."
Akari sat.
"The things you see are called curses. They're born from negative emotions—fear, anger, grief. Most people can't see them. But some people can. Those people are called sorcerers."
"Are you a sorcerer?"
"Yes."
"Am I?"
Shoko was quiet for a long time. The apartment hummed around them—the refrigerator, the traffic outside, a dog barking somewhere.
"Yes," she finally said. "You are."
Akari nodded slowly. It felt like putting on glasses she didn't know she needed. Everything clicked into place.
"Is that why we live here? Just us? No family, no visits, no—"
"Yes." Shoko's voice was firm. "Because there are people who would want to use you. Hurt you. For what you can do."
"What can I do?"
"I don't know yet." Shoko reached across the table and took her hand. "And that's okay. For now, you just need to be careful. Keep pretending you can't see them. Keep being normal."
Akari looked down at their hands. Shoko's was warm. Solid. Real.
"Okay," she said. "I can do that."
She kept her promise.
For five more years, she was normal.
---
Normal meant:
- Walking past the faceless man every morning without flinching
- Sitting in class while a finger-curse tapped on the window
- Playing in the park while something huge and sleeping breathed under the slide
- Never telling anyone why she sometimes woke up screaming
Normal meant lying to everyone, including herself.
By the time she was twelve, Akari had gotten very, very good at it.