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The ink had dried too quickly.
Suguru watched the last stroke darken against her skin, its edges sinking into the shallow lines of her palm where she had pressed too hard with the brush. It was not supposed to look like that. The ofuda talismans she had seen at the shrine had been clean, deliberate things—black characters arranged down narrow strips of white paper, each line certain of where it belonged.
Her copies were crooked.
The first one had been almost careful. The second leaned too far to the left from her navel. By the third, the brush had started to tremble between her fingers.
She dipped it back into the ink anyway.
Tracing the lines of the characters across her own belly felt almost meditative. Like something women in her condition had done for centuries, in the hope of protecting their children. Had they? Suguru had read about ofuda being placed against the body in shamanic rites of exorcism, but now she was applying protective signs, charms meant to keep her child safe… from herself?
How was she supposed to protect what grew inside her when she was a vessel for something else, too?
For evil.
The cool touch of the brush soothed the feverish, intrusive thoughts a little. When she bent over the dish of ink, her dark hair slipped over her bare shoulders; she sat with the sleeves of her kimono loosened around her arms, her belly already too round beneath the open fold of fabric. Strangely, the scented incense she had been burning all morning did not turn her stomach the way every other sharp smell did these days.
Her little shrine. A small sacred space made in the middle of the bedroom she shared with Satoru, in their Tokyo apartment. An apartment where they lived as husband and wife. A place the jujutsu community had preferred to keep her in, to make certain everyone was safe: the woman carrying the strongest sorcerer’s child, and everyone else—the people who might have to face the consequences of it.
No one knew exactly how her body would respond to pregnancy, considering her ability to consume curses. The elders feared a leak of uncontrolled cursed energy… or things even more terrible. Suguru feared even the thought that she might lose the child.
A child with Satoru was more than she had ever thought to ask for. More than she had allowed herself to want.
It was something so ordinary to other people, so commonplace, and yet something she had never truly believed would belong to her.
Sorcerers had their own version of normal. They were raised without the quiet comforts that made ordinary people human, taught to value strength above tenderness, power above family.
Satoru, of course, had always wanted something else from Suguru.
Love. Feeling somehow more twisted than any other power over humans. Not the kind that demanded conquest, but the kind that longed to create.
There was something sweetly painful in understanding how fiercely Satoru craved her, how deeply he had always wanted them to remain one. In the way he had given her the chance to become someone who made life, who kept it hidden and safe in the darkness and warmth of her womb for almost a year.
Pregnancy itself felt like a sacred rite. Suguru was grateful whenever as few people as possible were allowed near it, growing more withdrawn, more private in the way she moved through her own sensations. She needed that solitude to comprehend the scale of what she was doing.
A soul being made.
Satoru was always there. Her constant.
With hіs own fears and difficulties, with the pressure from the elders and the clan, who took a far too lively interest in any news of Suguru’s condition and even offered doctors who would, in truth, have been jujutsu spies—if not something worse.
The elders had never liked her.
At first, Suguru had been the distraction Satoru devoted too much attention to, the person who kept him from focusing properly on missions and on the purpose everyone else had assigned to him. Then she became something more dangerous still: his wife. That alone had given sorcerers something to discuss for months, perhaps years, afterward.
Suguru was not a clan sorcerer. She had not been a carefully chosen match. Those who had hoped to bind Satoru to one of their own descendants had choked on their envy.
The pregnancy softened the elders somewhat, though only because it awakened a different kind of interest in them. They wanted to see what power a child born from abilities like theirs might possess.
Suguru had never been weak, and her forced withdrawal from the community during the pregnancy had been felt sharply over those months—especially when high-ranking missions needed to be assigned. But in the end, their answer to everything was always Satoru. They had simply found another way to use him even more.
It upset her. Privately, it made her feel guilty. In some ways, the pregnancy felt like a battle too—against the world outside, and against the demons within.
The system swallowed them whole and put down roots inside them, even when all they had ever tried to do was carve out a little life for themselves. The kind of life other families were allowed to have.
Impossible dreams for people like them.
And still, no one could forbid them from standing up for it. From fighting for it.
Satoru had felt the strain from the moment he learned about the baby, too, but he had never turned it toward Suguru. He had only become more… intense.
The child had not been planned by either of them, but it had been wanted without question. But where hope went, fear followed.
Suguru had found there was plenty of it in her. It came for her through nightmares and waking visions, fed by too bright imagination and sensitivity. She felt soft and vulnerable.
She was terrified.
The ofuda was an answer to that fear. An attempt to take some control back over her thoughts, over her body.
The ink dried on the hot skin of her stomach, tightening faintly as it set, and remained… nothing more than ink. She felt no shift in the air, no protective barrier unfolding around her. Symbols could only hold power when someone believed in them, when they were given energy; Suguru knew that well enough.
But she could not make herself believe that she was truly safe—
not for her own child.
She set the brush aside for a moment and looked toward the window, where raindrops slid down the glass.
Outside, it had been raining since morning. The rainy season was only beginning to gather its strength, the buildings opposite their apartment were washed pale beneath the gray Tokyo sky. Their outlines were as blurred as their shared future as a family.
Suguru had not gone out all day.
She told herself it was because the air smelled wrong after rain. Too heavy. Thick with damp concrete, exhaust, overwhelming to the point of nausea. Curses liked weather like this. They gathered in places where people were already irritated, already tired, looking for something to blame.
That was what she told herself.
The truth was simpler.
She did not want to be seen.
Not by the people at the school, when she came to visit Satoru at his workplace. People whose eyes had begun lingering a second too long whenever she crossed a hallway. Not by the elders, who had mastered the art of speaking quietly without lowering their voices. For her to hear everything.
Not by strangers, either.
Strangers were worse sometimes. They did not know who she was, which meant they could look at the curve of her belly without pretending they had not noticed it. They could stare, and being the wife of Gojo-sama himself did nothing to protect her from it. Non-sorcerers did not care about any of that, of course.
Perhaps because pregnant women were something rare on the streets; perhaps because people lacked even the smallest amount of tact. Or perhaps they sensed that there was something wrong with her.
Those looks fed her paranoia.
They were disgusting.
Afterward, she wanted to scrub herself raw beneath the shower, standing under the stream of water for far too long with a rough washcloth in her hands.
Her belly had changed enough that she could no longer ignore it in mirrors. It was still easy to hide beneath loose clothes, if she wanted to. But when she sat like this, on her knees, loosening her house kimono and uncovering the vulnerable roundness of what had become both her gift and her torment, something in Suguru settled into clarity.
Her palm smoothed over the curve of her stomach, feeling the first faint, uneven lines of stretch marks beneath her fingertips, and she truly understood that she was pregnant.
That she was inside this process—together with the child for whom she was home. There were still long months ahead of them.
A body making space for another body.
Another being.
Suguru had spent most of her life doing that.
The next character was supposed to mean protection. Or perhaps warding. She had looked it up twice and still could not remember which meaning had felt more correct. Her thoughts tangled more often now, whether from the exhaustion of pregnancy or from some quiet madness taking root inside her.
The priest at the shrine smiled at her gently—the face of a man who had lived long enough to understand the meaning of life set against hers, strained with the terror of bringing it into being.
He had only bowed when Suguru bought the paper charms, accepted her money, and placed them carefully into a small envelope. His hands had been dry and pale.
Suguru remembered wondering whether he could feel anything through the paper. Her trembling fingers, her aching fears. Whether he knew what kind of person had come to ask for protection.
A person tainted by evil.
The thought made her jaw tighten.
She drew another line.
Then her baby moved.
It was more than a flutter now—still so faint that she might have mistaken it for the pull of a muscle if it had not happened before. A small shift inside her. A brief, stubborn reminder of the hunger for life.
Suguru froze.
The brush slipped from her fingers and rolled across the floorboards, leaving a dark streak behind it.
For a while, she only sat there, her belly and palms covered with the unfinished symbol.
“Sorry,” she whispered to her little one, she was not even sure why.
The apartment was quiet except for the rain whispering. Satoru had left early that morning, called away to deal with something near the edge of the city. He had kissed her forehead before going, lingering for half a second longer than usual.
“You’re staying home,” he had said.
“I was planning to.”
“Good.”
“You say that like I need permission.”
“You don’t,” he replied, already smiling. “But you do need supervision.”
Suguru had thrown a pillow at him and, of course, he had caught it without looking. She felt irritated, yet at the same time her cheeks flushed at his words. She wanted Satoru to be there, watching over her. She craved him more than she had ever admitted. With Satoru by her side, she felt calmer… her mind was quieter, and the curses fell silent.
But he had gone.
When he was gone, the apartment seemed larger. Colder. She could still feel the absence of him in the rooms sometimes. It was not loneliness exactly. Satoru took up too much space even when he was quiet, absent; his cursed energy settled into a place and changed its shape. It made a kind of cocoon out of borrowed safety, layered over the high-grade barrier techniques that had long since been placed around their home.
Other than a handful of trusted clan members, and the people closest to them, no one was meant to know that Gojo Satoru was going to become a father. A private condition. A piece of news kept carefully out of sight, so that other sorcerers would not even be tempted to imagine harming an heir. Fear was supposed to keep anyone with bad intentions at a distance.
And still, within the comfortable prison of their apartment, the enveloping presence of Satoru’s cursed energy was far more pleasant than the constant, barely perceptible—though maddening—vibration of the protective barriers humming in the background.
She gazed at the black characters on her belly, her eyes wandering, while her thoughts were lost in memories.
They did not look protective.
They looked like scratches, like something trying to get out.
She remembered the first curse she had swallowed after learning she was pregnant. At that time, she was still working in the city, collecting and exorcising curses. It had been small, barely strong enough to deserve the name. A thing formed from the fear of a minor illness, which has grown more out of anxiety than out of dread of the disease itself. It was clinging to the ceiling of an overcrowded clinic. It had smelled of old medicine and wet cloth.
Suguru had stood beneath it with one hand pressed over her mouth.
The curse had looked at her, then at her belly, as if it could sense life growing inside.
She had exorcised it before it could move.
Afterward, she went into the nearest restroom and washed her hands for a long time, working soap into them until her knuckles reddened and her skin began to sting. Then she threw up what little breakfast she had managed to eat, her appetite already so poor these days. She rinsed her mouth with water, sucked on a mint, and swallowed back another wave of nausea.
It was the familiar taste of curses that made her sick—the poisonous, filthy taste that had become part of her long before she had grown into herself. When she was a child, she had tasted those curses out of genuine curiosity. Oh, poor, naïve girl.
Now there was a child inside her.
Nurtured. Created during one of those sweet, impossible nights when she and Satoru had been unable to pull themselves apart until morning, and that was no exaggeration. Made from intoxicating, all-consuming love, from the pure need they had always carried for one another.
And Suguru was poisoning them.
Swallowing those vile curses, born from other people’s equally vile feelings.
Perhaps that was when she first began to cry—not simply from fear, but from the realization of what a twisted ability she had been given. Of what she herself was. Of what kind of filth she had touched Satoru with—Satoru, who had always seemed so clear and bright to her, despite the darker corners of him she had come to know so well over years of friendship and love.
He had illuminated her life.
And Suguru, in return?
She had not told Satoru about this curse at the clinic.
There were things she could say to him. Things that came easily, almost without thought. Complaints about the wrong food he brought home, because by the time he was driving home with dinner, she had already changed her pregnancy cravings. The way he left his belongings on every available surface. The ridiculous messages he sent her from meetings, usually photographs of bored-looking elders with captions she was not supposed to laugh at but she did. All sorts of silly and sweet things that she truly appreciated and knew how to respond to.
Other things stayed behind her teeth.
They had always been good at silence, the two of them, better than people assumed. Satoru could fill a room with noise if he wanted to. Suguru could sit beside him for hours without speaking, just doing their own business in comfort. Somehow, neither of them mistook that for distance.
But this was different.
It was something Suguru had hidden inside herself so long that it had begun to grow teeth.
And she felt those teeth begin to sink into her.
When the apartment door opened, Suguru barely registered Satoru’s greeting drifting in from the hallway. She did not hear his chatter about how his day had gone, or about the still-warm takeout he had brought from her favorite café. She did not notice him crossing the room at his unhurried pace.
So she startled when Satoru’s palm touched her bare shoulder.
He looked tired—not hurt, but worn thin. He only allowed himself to look like that around her; only with her was he simply Satoru, not some Gojo-sama, strongest-prodigy-whatever. Her lover. Her partner.
And partners were supposed to talk about the things that frightened them.
That was how it should have been.
In practice, it was much harder.
“Suguru?”
His fingers brushed over her shoulder as he sat down beside her, carefully moving the half-empty bowl of ink and her brushes out of the way. He shifted closer, touched her chin, coaxing her gently to look at him. He did not ask what had happened, what she had been doing. It was already obvious that she was sinking into something close to madness.
Instead, with a tenderness enough to hurt, he asked, “Are you okay?”
And the softness of his voice—the sound of it, which Suguru had already missed over the course of a single day—made something in her ache and ease at once. Her wound hurt, but he had pressed something healing to it. Only his presence.
“It’s nothing.”
Bitterness lodged in her throat. The words came slowly, and for a moment, her breathing stopped altogether.
She had not expected Satoru to see this.
To come home before she had the chance to clear away the mess.
His eyes narrowed.
“That looks like something.”
“It’s just ink.”
“I can see that.”
Satoru waited for an answer. That was worse than if he had pushed.
“I bought some ofuda,” she said finally. “I thought I could copy them.”
“On yourself? Why?”
The question came quietly, but with insistence beneath it. Hidden inside it was something almost commanding:
Tell me. I need to know. Explain. Don’t shut me out.
Satoru stroked her cheek, though Suguru caught his wrist and looked away. She picked up the brush again, her fingers closed around the handle until the wood pressed deep into her palm.
“Because they’re meant to keep things away.”
“What things?”
She laughed softly and nervously. It came out wrong.
“You know what things.”
He looked at the symbols again, then at her face.
The expression in his eyes changed so slightly that someone else might not have noticed. But Suguru had known him too long. She knew every version of his silence.
Satoru looked as though he could not—would not—allow himself to imagine that anything might be wrong with her, or with their child. The pained expression that flickered across his face was brief, but Suguru did not miss it.
Of course he had already turned every possible outcome over in his mind. He must have done it long ago, though he had kept those fears to himself, trying to shield her from them. But now, seeing Suguru on the floor of their living room in the half-darkness, marked with shamanic incantations, her kimono loosened around her, the tender curve of her stomach growing more pronounced by the day—
the vulnerability of what she was going through reached him even more.
And suddenly every word of reassurance, every encouraging joke, caught in his throat. She could feel it.
“You think something is going to happen to the baby.”
It was not a question.
Suguru’s mouth went dry.
“I keep thinking about what I carry,” she said and it wasn’t about their baby. “All of it. The curses. The ones I’ve taken in, the ones I haven’t used yet. They don’t disappear just because I don’t think about them.” Her throat tightened.
She was their vessel.
Sometimes the curses even spoke to her, no matter how hard she tried to ignore their voices. That was her deepest secret—the one she had never voiced, not even to Satoru.
“Suguru—”
“And now she’s there too.”
The word slipped out before Suguru could catch it.
She had not said it aloud yet.
She had known for weeks, somehow. Not with certainty. Not in a way she could explain. Just a feeling that had settled quietly in her chest whenever she thought of the child.
She. A daughter.
“What if she can feel them?” Suguru asked. “What if something reaches her before I can stop it?”
“It won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know you.”
The answer came too quickly.
Satoru moved closer in a slow, careful motion and drew her against him, arranging her so that her back rested against his chest. His large, warm hands moved gently over her shoulders, pulling the loosened sleeves of her kimono back into place and wrapping her in the fabric as though he could warm the cold that lived inside her.
Suguru let out a quiet breath. A shiver passed over her skin when Satoru bent down and his lips touched her shoulder, then the curve of her neck. Light, barely-there touches meant to ease the tension from her body. He nibbed the sensitive skin there gently, and heat rose into Suguru’s cheeks.
She leaned into him, searching for comfort, and responded with an embrace, with the soft tenderness of kisses. His neck smelled of sweat and something sweet, touched with a faint bitterness—something familiar, something so deeply absorbed into her that it had become part of her too. The scent made her anxiety retreat just enough to let her breathe more freely.
“You think you’re full of something rotten because you’ve had to carry rotten things,” he whispered. “That’s not the same thing, love. But you know what I think?”
Suguru did not answer, listened silently, pressed against him.
“I think you’ve spent so long being the place where ugly things end up that you forgot what else you can be.”
Her breath caught.
“You’re not a grave,” he continued. “Not just a vessel, never for me, you understand? And you’re not whatever those old men whisper when they think we can’t hear them.”
Suguru closed her eyes.
“They’ve been talking to you.”
There it was.
The anger beneath his voice.
Thin and bright as a blade.
She knew what Satoru was like when someone gave him a reason to use it. The elders knew too. That had never stopped them from speaking.
“They want to understand who I might become. They already see me as a protector and teacher, and they suspect that once I become a father, I’ll be even more unbearable.”
“They’re afraid of you.”
“They should be.”
“Satoru–”
He exhaled through his nose.
In truth, Suguru was a little afraid of how intense he could be, too.
Not because Satoru might ever turn his anger on her. No—never that. It was the thought of the power he carried, and the fact that he did everyone else the kindness of not using it the way terrible sorcerers of the past had used theirs: for tyranny, for control.
Satoru cared about other things.
He carried a strength that wanted to create something and leave something behind. To be someone close to others. Someone needed. To escape the loneliness that so relentlessly set him apart from ordinary people—
but never from Suguru. Never her.
She was his path back toward humanity, the place where the two of them grew the flowers of their love together. The thing that binded him to the world. And now, through their child most of all.
Because his breathing caught during conversations like these. Because his hands traced the curve of her belly with a reverent tenderness. Stroking in slow, steady rhythms while he pressed his nose into Suguru’s shoulder. Because feeling the warmth of her body, and knowing that he could now feel the small kick of their child beneath his palm, was something extraordinary.
Yet simple. Human.
Terrifying in its vastness.
A whole life.
Satoru became lost in moments like that. Confused emotions crossed his face—sharpness and anger born from the need to protect, then something close to a wonder.
How had he been lucky enough to have any of this?
How could Suguru disappoint him with her fears in moments like these?
“Why she and not he? You think it’s a daughter?” Satoru asked, sliding his hands over her stomach. His fingers moved from her navel downward, following the patterns of the ofuda now dry against her skin.
Suguru did not answer immediately.
She did not know how to explain it without sounding foolish. There was no proof, no clear sign she could offer him yet, she didn’t try to find that out during the ultrasound. Only a certainty that had settled somewhere beneath language, low in her body, as instinctive as the knowledge that the child was there at all.
“I don’t know,” she said at last, though the words felt unconvincing even to her. “I just… feel it.”
A girl.
The thought lived inside her with strange, quiet insistence. Not because Suguru had dreamed of ribbons and dolls or any of the fragile things people attached to daughters. It was simpler than that. The presence within her felt soft, but not weak. Watchful. A small, steady spark tucked beneath her ribs.
Her heart beat faster as Satoru’s fingertips continued their slow path over her skin.
The touch was almost unbearably sweet. Too gentle for someone like him, whose hands had broken curses and carried violence so easily, elegantly even. Yet here he was, tracing the protective symbols on her belly, every line mattered.
The baby moved beneath his palm. It was not the first time Satoru had felt it. He had felt those small kicks before, always freezing for a second afterward, his expression changing so quickly she almost missed it.
But it was still unfamiliar.
Still a little impossible.
This time, the movement came stronger. A firm shift beneath the curve of her stomach, followed by another, as if the child had recognized him.
Satoru’s eyes narrowed with quiet delight.
He leaned forward until his nose pressed into the back of her head, breathing in slowly. Then kissed her hair, his lips brushing through the thick, dark strands once, then again.
“Well, she’s definitely stubborn,” he murmured.
“She gets that from you.”
“Absolutely not.”
The laugh that escaped her was quiet, but real.
“I have something for you,” Satoru remembered suddenly. “Something special for my beautiful girl.” A warm shadow of a smile touched his mouth.
Anyone else might have found something frightening, even repulsive, in the scene before them. Satoru treated her shamanic rituals as ordinary. What worried him was only the haze in her thoughts, only the harm Suguru was doing to herself because of the power the gods had given her. It was written plainly in his luminous, faintly sad gaze.
Suguru shifted reluctantly so he could stand. He held out a hand and helped her up with care, settling her on the sofa and surrounding her with cushions as though they might keep her from running away from herself.
When he returned from the hallway, he placed the gift in her hands.
Satoru gave her the obi.
It arrived wrapped in a box too elegant for something meant to be worn at home, tied with a silk cord and lined with tissue paper that whispered when Suguru unfolded it.
The belt was white—not the stark, sterile white of a hospital corridor, but the softer shade of fresh rice paper, warm beneath the early light. Fine chrysanthemums had been embroidered across it in threads only a little brighter than the fabric itself, their petals opening and overlapping in a pattern so delicate that Suguru had to bring it closer to see.
It was an iwai-obi in spirit, perhaps, but made for the life they actually lived. The traditional length and symbolism had been translated into something modern: a structured maternity band with a wide, supportive panel, adjustable fastening, and enough careful tailoring to follow the changing shape of her body. It had obviously been made to order.
Like so many things Satoru gave her.
He had always been extravagant in ways that pretended not to be. A rare tea left casually on the kitchen counter because he had heard her mention it once. A coat in exactly the color she liked, delivered before winter arrived. Books she had wanted but never bought for herself, stacked on her bedside table without a note. Gifts that carried no demand except that she accept the fact of being cared for.
This one felt the same.
Intimate.
Satoru sat behind her on the edge of the sofa, close enough that the warmth of him reached her back before his hands did. Suguru lifted her arms slightly as he eased the obi around her waist. The fabric passed over the ink on her stomach, covering the protective characters she had painted there. Its touch was cool at first, then gradually warmed against her skin.
Satoru adjusted it with attention; his fingers moved slowly over the fastening, testing the fit, loosening it, then securing it again with quiet precision. There was none of his usual impatience in him. No teasing offered to soften the seriousness of the moment. Only the steady care of his hands.
When the obi settled properly around her, it felt like support, a gentle pressure around the place where her body had begun to change beyond recognition. A reminder that she did not have to hold herself together entirely alone.
Suguru rested both palms over the white fabric.
The chrysanthemums curved beneath her fingers.
For a while, the fear receded.
Not vanished. She knew better than to mistake a quiet mind for a healed one. But it moved farther away, as though the obi had drawn a boundary around her body and told the darkness that it could wait outside.
For a while, it truly helped.
The obi, and the small, sweet omamori—brightly colored, tied with little cords—that Satoru brought home from different shrines he stopped at between missions. He did not care much for ceremony or spiritual solemnity, but he endured his own boredom to bring Suguru one more charm, another small gift meant to protect her.
She collected them carefully on the windowsill in their bedroom.
They kept evil away—outside of her, and within.
For a while.
A few months before the birth, the nightmares returned.
At first, they came as shapeless things. A pressure behind her eyes. A sensation of waking with her heart racing, unable to remember why.
Then fragments began to remain: the white obi darkening beneath her hands, its embroidered flowers folding inward like dying things; the omamori slipping from her fingers and falling endlessly into black water.
Soon, the dreams grew clearer.
They were not dreams at all.
They were visions.
And somewhere in the deepest, most hidden place inside her, the curses she carried had begun to stir.
Suguru would lie beside Satoru with the room warm and familiar around them, the white obi soft beneath her nightclothes, his hand resting on her waist. The apartment would be quiet, the charms on the windowsill would catch the faint light from the street below. Then, just as sleep reached for her, the bed, the floor below her would disappear.
She would fall into her domain.
A cavernous dark stretched around her, wet and breathing. The walls pulsed with the slow, diseased rhythm of something alive. Shadows gathered in every corner, thick with the shapes of curses she had swallowed years ago, some so old she no longer remembered their names, some new enough that she could still taste them at the back of her throat.
They waited for her.
Mouths opened where mouths should not have been. Along their stomachs. Across their palms. Between clusters of blinking eyes. Teeth pushed through skin in uneven rows, wet and yellowed, and claws scraped against the ground as they dragged themselves closer.
Their faces shifted whenever Suguru tried to look at them directly.
A woman with no lower jaw smiled at her from the dark.
A child-shaped thing crawled across the ceiling, its limbs bending backward at the joints.
Something enormous unfolded itself from behind the walls, its body made of too many hands, too many tongues, too many mouths whispering over one another.
They knew.
There is something inside you.
Something we want.
The voice came from everywhere.
Something special.
Suguru pressed both hands over her stomach.
The white obi was there.
At first.
Then the embroidered chrysanthemums began to blacken beneath her palms. Their petals curled inward, dark threads twisting like veins. The belt tightened around her body, pulling harder and harder until Suguru could not breathe.
So small.
A clawed hand reached toward her.
So soft.
We can smell her.
We can touch her.
We can eat her.
“No. Never!” Suguru cried, but her voice barely existed.
The creatures came closer, their mouths stretched wider.
We can curse her.
She will be sweeter than you.
So tasty.
She will not know how to fight.
Suguru tried to summon them back.
She reached for the familiar thread of control, for the part of herself that had always known how to command the things she carried.
Nothing answered. The curses only laughed.
The ofuda on her skin began to move. The black characters lifted from her stomach like insects crawling free from beneath her flesh. They wrapped around her wrists, her throat, her ribs. The ink tightened into thin, choking bands. They only pulled tighter.
You thought paper could save her from us?
Something pressed against her stomach from the inside.
Not her baby.
Something else.
A hand. Too large, too sharp. Beastly claws pierced her soft, hot, blood-filled flesh with a crunch.
Suguru screamed.
It seemed to her that the sound of her scream was endless—and just as endlessly muffled and futile.
Then she suddenly woke up choking on the sound. The dreams were all alike; day after day, one after another, they tormented her this way.
Her body was soaked through with sweat, hair stuck to her neck, the sheets twisted around her legs.
For one unbearable second, she could not tell whether she had returned. She spent too many nights in this stifling madness.
Her hands flew to her stomach, she expected blood, she expected to find herself torn open. Instead, there was only the warm curve of her body beneath her palms. The baby moved weakly under her touch, startled by the violence of her waking.
Suguru began to cry and Satoru was awake immediately; he was always awake immediately now.
Satoru never spoke of guilt.
He carried it too proudly for words, burying it somewhere beneath the quiet certainty with which he cared for Suguru. Every gentle touch could become an apology for having been part of what had brought her here. Suguru wished he would stop apologizing for something that had never been his fault.
Her suffering had not been born from Satoru, but from the terrible place her own thoughts had learned to inhabit. The nightmares, the shame, the certainty that her body could betray the life growing inside—they belonged to fears far older than either of them. They had both dreamed of this child for the same reason: because there had always been too much love between them to remain held by only two people.
Neither of them had imagined that the road toward meeting her would be so haunted.
Too proud, yet grown together, blooming from the same, they could never truly close themselves off. Had they done so, they would never have survived this storm that was bringing their child into the world.
Neither of them could have endured the burden of their own fear alone.
He sat up, reaching for Suguru, but stopped before touching her. His hands hovered in the air between them, uncertain in a way Suguru had never seen before.
“Suguru,” he whispered. “I’m here. I’m real, it’s okay. I’m here.”
She could not answer, her teeth would not stop shaking.
Satoru drew her into his arms only when she leaned toward him first and then held her for a long time, until her body stopped trembling, drained of strength and limp as cotton.
He took Suguru into the shower when the sweat began to chill against her skin. The water ran warm over her shoulders, over the curve of her stomach, over every thought full of terror
He helped Suguru out of it carefully, as though she might break if he moved too quickly. He washed her hair, he brought her clean clothes and helped her into them with quiet hands.
Afterward, he tried to make her drink water. Then a few bites of rice, soft enough that she did not have to chew much. Suguru swallowed only because he watched her with that unbearable, helpless patience.
Satoru, her kind, steadfast prince.
Could it be that the curses had only ever been trying to frighten her? That they had never truly dared reach for her child because she did not belong to Suguru alone?
Because it was Satoru’s legacy growing beneath Suguru’s heart, shaped from her blood and her flesh alike but also from that spark of pleasure and mutual giving in the way they made love.
The thought soothed Suguru despite everything. It settled somewhere deep within, in the part of her that had always refused to break, becoming something steady enough to nourish her own stubbornness. Her determination to carry this child. To bring her safely into the world.
During one of her prenatal appointments, she cautiously mentioned the nightmares to her doctor. He merely smiled and told her that vivid dreams were perfectly common during pregnancy.
What haunted Suguru was anything but common.
It was far too real.
Her body continued to change as well.
There was the growing heaviness, the slow widening of her hips, the constant awareness of a tiny body moving within her own. And alongside it all lived an unbearable contradiction: a tender, instinctive love for the child who knew her body as shelter, tangled inseparably with the shame of being unable to find joy in her pregnancy.
The woman staring back at her from the mirror looked scarcely better than some of the curses lurking through Tokyo’s forgotten alleyways.
Her hair was often tangled from sleepless nights. Dark circles had settled beneath her eyes. Her lips had become dry and cracked, while her gums had begun to bleed—another perfectly ordinary symptom of pregnancy, the doctor had informed her with that infuriatingly cheerful smile.
Each new change filled her with quiet grief for the beauty she had once carried through the world with effortless confidence and pride.
Satoru never allowed her to mourn alone.
He whispered, over and over, that she could never be ugly to him. He would tuck fresh flowers into her long hair without warning, return home carrying another lipstick in a shade he thought would suit her, drape her in impossibly soft silk, or arrive with his arms full of white blossoms simply because he wanted something beautiful to brighten the apartment for her.
Not once—not a single time—did he look at her with disgust.
Not once did he look at her with disappointment.
And somehow, that hurt too.
Because Suguru had wanted to be pregnant and beautiful at the same time. She could not understand how Satoru still saw the woman he loved when all she could recognize in the mirror was someone slowly unraveling beneath the weight of fear.
They both stopped sleeping properly.
The nightmares came more often.
Suguru grew thinner over the next months, despite the roundness of her belly. Her cheeks hollowed, shadows gathered beneath her amber eyes. Every time she closed them, she waited for the domain to open beneath her feet. She began to fear sleep with instinctive terror.
What if the next dream was not a dream? What if she lost control? What if her domain opened without her willing it to, spilling everything she had ever swallowed into the world around her?
The elders whispered about it.
A sorcerer as powerful as Suguru, under that much strain, carrying that much fear—
What if she created a curse from it?
A curse born from the terror of pregnancy itself.
The thought followed her into every room.
By the time the labor began, the hospital was not only filled with nurses and doctors.
There were sorcerers too.
They stood at the edges of the corridor, quiet enough that ordinary people did not notice them. Some wore medical uniforms, some did not. They watched the doors to Suguru’s room as though something larger than a birth might emerge from it.
Suguru knew they were there.
She could feel their cursed energy gathered beyond the walls, a watchful, uneasy presence threaded through the corridor, and under any other circumstances it would have made her angry. It should have made her angry—that they had come expecting disaster, that they had positioned themselves so quietly around her as though they were waiting to see whether she would give birth to a child or unleash something monstrous into the world.
But when the contractions seized her body, drawing a sharp breath from her and folding her inward around the sudden, overwhelming pain, anger was not what she felt.
It was relief.
It was happening at last. Here, now, in the bright sterile room with Satoru beside her and the whole world held at a careful distance beyond the door. There would be no more waiting, no more long nights spent imagining every horror before it had the chance to arrive, no more wondering whether the next dream would become real.
For Suguru, it felt almost like freedom—she could finally move forward through it. There was only pain, immediate and undeniable; only her child, moving through her body toward the world; only the frightening, sacred work of opening herself and letting her go.
The hours that followed became difficult to separate.
There were movements, voices guiding Suguru through moments that felt too large to survive. There were pauses between the pain, brief enough to be cruel, long enough for Suguru to believe she could do it. Each time, pain took more of her with it.
Suguru had thought she understood what it meant to carry something unbearable.
She had swallowed curses until her throat burned. She had stood inside her own domain and listened to the things she held within herself scrape against the walls. She had survived injuries that left her covered in blood and bruises.
She had spent her whole life learning how not to make even a sound when something hurt. No complaints.
None of it had prepared Suguru for this. There was no room left for that kind of control. No space in her body where she could hide from herself.
Her body became a way for another human to live. For a life itself.
There was final pressure.
A terrible, impossible force.
Suguru thought of the shrine as the pain carried her somewhere far beyond the bright room and the voices around her, into that strange, blurred place where exhaustion softened the edges of thought and time no longer moved in any way she could understand. She thought of cold water running over her hands beneath the shrine’s basin, of the white cloth wrapped around her stomach, of the first uncertain flutter beneath her palm—so small she had almost dismissed it at first.
Please, she thought, though she no longer knew whom she was asking.
Only let her be here.
The world broke open around her.
For one suspended, impossible moment, there was no sound. Suguru could not breathe. Her mind reached instinctively for every sign she had been taught to fear: the shift of cursed energy in the air, the pressure of something unseen gathering at the edges of the room, the subtle disturbance that would mean one of the barriers had recognized a threat.
The talismans remained still. The barriers did not flare. No shamanic seal awakened in warning. Nothing answered.
Then the baby cried.
It was not a beautiful sound in any ordinary sense. It was a loud cry, angry even, thin with outrage at having been pulled so abruptly into the cruelty of the world.
But it was the most beautiful thing Suguru had ever heard.
Her whole body shook with it, with pain and disbelief and relief so vast it left no room for anything else. Somewhere beside her, Satoru made a sound she had never heard from him before, caught between a breath and a sob, raw enough that it seemed to tear something open in her chest.
When they placed the baby against her, Suguru could only stare.
She was so small.
Suguru knew that, of course. She had seen infants before, had held other people’s children with awkward caution, frightened of their soft heads and fragile limbs. But this child was smaller than anything she had imagined: warm against her bare skin, red-faced and furious, alive in every trembling breath.
And there was no darkness around her.
No curse clinging to the air. No taint in the room. No sign that anything Suguru had carried inside herself, anything she had swallowed or contained or feared, had ever reached this tiny body.
Only a baby.
Only their daughter.
Their child had arrived safe.
“She’s loud,” Satoru whispered.
Suguru’s mouth trembled.
“She gets that from you.”
“Absolutely not.”
The laugh that escaped them was quiet and wrecked, hardly more than a breath between them, but it was theirs. An old, familiar joke finding them again in the middle of something so immense.
It hurt Suguru to laugh; everything hurt, her body still shaking with the aftermath of labor, every muscle aching as though she had been broken apart and put back together wrong.
But she could not stop.
The laughter dissolved into something wetter, more helpless, until tears slipped down her cheeks and caught at the corners of her mouth. Suguru was exhausted beyond anything she had known, raw and open and hurting, yet relief moved through her with such force that it was almost painful too. It filled every hollow place inside her where fear had lived for months, washing through her in warm, blinding waves.
Their daughter lay on her chest, still slick with vernix and blood, still tethered to Suguru by the pulsing cord between them. There was blood on Suguru’s skin, milk already beginning to gather in the tender ache of her breasts, the unvarnished and almost unbearable truth of life surrounding them in every breath.
And she shared it with Satoru.
He held one of her hands tightly in his, as though he could keep her anchored to the world by touch alone. With his other hand, he stroked their daughter’s small back over Suguru’s own trembling fingers, his palm covering hers where it rested protectively against the baby.
A closed circle of touch, of breath and energy.
Three people made into something whole.
For the first time in months, Suguru did not feel as though her body were waiting to betray her. She was simply a mother holding her child, with the person she loved the most beside her, nothing more, nothing less.
Darkness had no power here.
The first days after they came home from the hospital passed in a soft, exhausted blur.
Their apartment had changed without changing at all. The barriers still hummed faintly beyond the walls, the omamori still rested in a careful row along the bedroom sill, their colored cords stirring whenever someone opened the window for fresh air.
But there was a cradle beside their bed now.
And inside it, their daughter slept.
Suguru sat sideways on the mattress, her weight carefully balanced on one hip because sitting upright still hurt too much. Everything inside her was healing slowly, bleeding and throbbing painfully. A small pile of baby clothes had gathered around her knees—soft cotton wraps, tiny socks, a shirt so impossibly small that she had held it in both hands for a full minute before she could bring herself to fold it.
Satoru sat beside the cradle.
He had been there for so long that Suguru suspected he had forgotten the rest of the apartment existed. Or even the rest of the world.
Their daughter made a dissatisfied sound in her sleep, her little face scrunching beneath the unfamiliar light and noises of the world. Her mouth opened once in a tiny yawn, then closed again, her body settling deeper into the blanket.
Satoru leaned closer immediately, his finger was resting against the baby’s stomach, stroking there with the lightest touch.
Suguru looked down at the things beside her and found the obi folded beneath a stack of clean cloth.
The white fabric had supported her for months. Its chrysanthemums were still pale and delicate, their petals stitched in thread that caught the afternoon light. It had survived the terror of the long nights when she had woken shaking and convinced that something inside her was trying to claw its way out.
It was still so clean. Pure care in the form of clothes.
She unfolded the obi and laid it carefully over their daughter’s blanket, light enough not to weigh her down. Then she smoothed her palm over the white cloth, over the place where the embroidered chrysanthemums rested against the baby’s small body.
A quiet gesture of gratitude.
For the belt itself, perhaps. For every charm gathered on their windowsill. For the prayers and the rituals that had given her something to hold on to when her own mind had become too frightening to inhabit.
But mostly for Satoru himself. Always for him.
For the way he had held Suguru through every nightmare, washed the sweat from her skin, fed her when she could barely swallow, combed her hair until sleep finally took her.
For the way he had never once looked at her fear as something ugly or inconvenient.
Their daughter shifted again, making another small, indignant noise. Her eyes remained closed. The ordinary ones, still narrowed against a world that was too bright and too new.
But there were no other eyes waiting beneath them. No impossible inheritance of the Six Eyes, no terrible clarity already shaping her future.
They had known it from the moment she was born.
In that one way, at least, their daughter was freer than her father had ever been.
She would still have to grow beneath the weight of her name. She would still have to learn what it meant to belong to them, to the world they fought against. There would be expectations and danger and things neither Suguru nor Satoru could protect her from.
But not yet.
For now, her only task was to sleep, to eat, to grow healthy beneath their hands.
Satoru’s fingertip moved gently over her stomach again.
“Our little flower,” he murmured. His fingers traced the petals of the chrysanthemum on the obi covering the child. “Bloom happily!”
His gaze was spellbound, like that of a child who had found a magical artifact at the bottom of a pond, pulled it up from the depths, and held it up to the shining sun. He had discovered his greatest treasure and presented it to the world.
Suguru pressed a kiss to his forehead and Satoru leaned into her touch, smiling.
Something inside her finally loosen. Not relief alone, not the sharp, breathless absence of fear. It gave Suguru faith in herself: the knowing that, despite every darkness of her being, despite the abilities and horrors that had become part of her, she had still been capable of creating something so pure, so perfect.
Someone who would one day find her own path through the world, carrying both Satoru and Suguru within her.
For all the softness and warmth of the moment, Suguru felt powerful, almost omnipotent. The curses had retreated into the deepest corners of her, pulled short on their leashes, and for a long while yet, they would not dare make themselves known.
Peace, for now.
For the three of them.
At the cost of everything she carried.