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In the aftermath: Maki drifts through life like she’s missing something.
/
Yuuji knows very little about the Zen’in twins.
What he does know: “The Zen’in are a pit of vipers,” Maki tells him once, not unkindly, before Shibuya, before everything. “You think it’s rough in Jujutsu Tech? You’re lucky you’ve never met any of the clans.”
Maki and Mai had grown up in a pit of vipers, then, and Maki is the only one who broke free of it and run away, and Mai had been—left behind. Kugisaki had used to speak spitefully of Zen’in Mai, a frustration colored by her fervent admiration for Maki, and these days she speaks nothing of Mai at all. Much the same as Maki.
In the aftermath of Shinjuku, when they are burying bodies—more accurately, looking for them, digging up bits and pieces of those who’d fought till the end—Maki is the one who accompanies Fushiguro when they go out to retrieve Tsumiki’s body. He comes back looking hollowed out and knocked breathless, and Maki’s expression is stone. Nothing to see.
Yuuji gazes across the landscape of rubble. Any of these piles of ash could be Choso, if it hasn’t dispersed away into the wind already.
/
He asks Fushiguro, “do you know what happened to Maki-san’s sister…?”
Fushiguro, balanced precariously on a piece of rubble, shakes his head. “I didn’t ask.”
Obviously not. Yuuji realizes it’s a stupid question, anyway; who’d dare to ask the girl who walked out of the remnants of her ancestral home covered in the blood of everyone within about what happened to the only person she cared about?
Kugisaki says this with certainty: “Maki-san loved her sister. So don’t go asking her about that, idiot.”
“I wasn’t going to!” Yuuji protests, deciding it’s better to say that it didn’t look that way to him. He doesn’t know why he’s so curious about this, except: he hadn’t known how much it’d hurt to lose a brother until the moment he watched it happen. He’d thought: is this how you felt when you watched me kill Eso and Kechizu?
/
In jujutsu theory, in order to gain something, you have to sacrifice something. This is the principle behind a Binding Vow; the same principle that almost took Fushiguro away from them for good. It’s the principle that applies to just about anything else.
Like his grandfather’s breaths dissipating into thin air. Like Junpei’s body thudding heavily to the floor; like watching Nanami disappear into a fine spray of red. Like Gojo’s grin dripping with confidence, of course I’ve got it, and smiling even in death. Like Choso saying—
Mai’s malicious words: Maki is a failure. Her mean, cruel attitude—Maki’s shrug and dismissal of the entire ordeal. Her coming back from the Zen’in compound without life in her eyes. She’d said that she left Mai’s body in the care of the Kyoto school. There seemed to be something deliberate about the way she had said it.
She’d entrusted clan leadership to Fushiguro before she went.
“Maki-san,” he says, sudden, lurching, “how do you—come to terms with it?”
“You’re going to have to be specific,” Maki says without missing a beat. They’ve become adept at talking around the grief, the gaping holes that exist in their lives, without poking at anything. A sorcerer loses something to gain something. To survive you must witness the death of another.
All sorcerers are a little crazy.
“I… never mind,” Yuuji says. He knows the answer, anyway, he just. He looks at Maki and he wants to know how someone can look so battered and all the stronger for it. Yuuji, on the other hand, appears he may blow away with the wind any second. If he thinks about everything that has happened in the past year, what is going to happen to him?
Maki stares at him. “You’re not slick, Itadori,” she says, once again not unkindly. “If you want to ask me about Mai, then say it. It won’t kill you to hear a ‘shut up and fuck off,’ will it?”
“I guess,” he frowns. “…will you?”
Maki shrugs. “There’s not much to tell. She entrusted everything to me, and I killed them all for her. For us. That’s all there is to it.”
It most certainly is not, but. Yuuji isn’t going to be the one to be hypocritical and say that.
/
After the aftermath: Maki’s wedding, grand and celebratory, a signifier of adulthood reached in one piece without losing oneself. An empty seat up in the front row, crystal ring swinging from Yuuta’s neck and Maki’s scars stubbornly left uncovered by makeup.
Yuuji, un-aging and forlorn, in the corner. A melancholic sorrow lifts the corners of his mouth into the joyous smile he wears for his friends.