Chapter Text
The room felt too colourful for a murder conspiracy.
That was the first thing his borrowed mind noticed after the impossible, after the sickening blankness between one breath and the next, after the world had gone from somewhere else to polished wood beneath his knees, silk against his skin, and the smell of old incense settled deep into the grain of a traditional estate that he knew with a familiarity he had no right to possess.
The walls around him were painted in bright, almost festive color, all careful elegance and inherited wealth, a room that existed to make cruelty look ceremonial if one jsut happened to commit enough of it beneath a respectable roof. To the sides, candle light spilled through the latticed edges of the space, catching on lacquer, tea implements, and the broad, ugly face of Jinichi Zen’in as the man spoke across from him with all the grave annoyance of someone explaining a murderplot to an arrogant idiot.
Naoya Zen’in sat still.
His hands rested loose near his knees, his posture held at an effortless angle of aristocratic arrogance, and his face, somehow, remained composed in a faintly bored way that did not fit the topic. It was an incredible performance, made more incredible by the fact that he was not performing it on purpose. The body simply knew how to be insufferable without consulting him first.
Across from him, Jinichi spoke, irritation dragging at the corners of his mouth.
“You moved too quickly,” he muttered, his voice low and heavy with annoyance. “Going after Megumi Fushiguro on your own like that was careless. You should have said something if you were planning to do it from the beginning.”
Naoya listened.
More accurately, the person inside Naoya listened, because listening was the only thing he could do without immediately screaming.
He knew this room. He knew the man sitting across from him, the heavy brow, the brute shape of his shoulders, the name Jinichi attached to that scarred, resentful face. He knew the topic. He knew the plan he was about to hear. He knew exactly what it would lead to, and the thought alone made something cold and hysterical claw up through his ribs.
Because this was not just a bad time to be Naoya Zen’in.
This was possibly the worst time in human history to be Naoya Zen’in, and that was including every second after Naoya Zen’in had been fucking born.
It was the day of his death.
“You jumped the gun,” Jinichi went on, bluntly enough that it pulled Naoya’s focus back to him by force. “Megumi Fushiguro has significant influence, as per his relationship with the Gojo clan, and the Kamo clan’s heir. There are more than a few voices willing to accept him as the new head, especially now, when everyone is looking for a way to repair relations with the Gojo Clan.”
Naoya’s mouth felt dry as Jinichi’s expression darkened slightly, as though the thought disgusted even him.
“Of course, no one here intends to hand all Zen’in assets over to Megumi Fushiguro,” he added, his lip curling faintly. “But killing him outright without cause would bring more eyes than we need. There are people outside this estate who would question it now, and it would weaken our Zen’in clan’s position.”
The real Naoya would have sneered, or scoffed, or leaned back in this bright, gaudy room like he owned the air and made the conversation nastier just by breathing through it.
But the person inside him could only sit there, trapped behind his face, feeling his own pulse hammer at the base of his throat.
Jinichi seemed to take his silence for sullen attention, because he continued after a short, impatient pause.
“In case you haven’t read the new notices. Jujutsu Headquarters has declared Satoru Gojo a criminal,” he explained, folding his arms inside his sleeves as his gaze sharpened. “Freeing him from the Prison Realm has been forbidden. That gives us a pretext we can use. Megumi Fushiguro, Maki Zen’in, and Mai Zen’in can all be dealt with under suspicion of attempting to unseal Gojo.”
His stomach dropped so violently that for one deranged second he thought he might actually throw up into Naoya Zen’in’s lap as Jinichi continued, mercilessly practical, as if he were speaking of documents to be filed rather than three teenagers being maneuvered toward execution.
“Maki and Mai have been included to provide legitimacy to the Zen’in clan’s claim. It’ll be even stronger if Ogi handles his daughters himself,” he continued, his tone flattening into something uglier. “A father cutting down his own children for treason gives the accusation weight, and proves our resolve. With their execution, we will not be questioned.”
Naoya’s face did not change.
He couldn’t remember dying. That was the worst part, somehow, worse even than the body, worse than the clothes, worse than the smooth fall of blond hair against his cheek when he shifted his head by half an inch and nearly vomited from the recognition of it. He couldn’t remember a hospital, or the genre-typical truck-kun, or any grand cosmic explanation for why his consciousness had been picked up like a loose coin and jammed into the skull of a man whose greatest accomplishments included being fast, being pretty, and being one of the most repulsive little freaks the Zen’in Clan had ever produced.
He was in Naoya.
He was in Naoya Zen’in.
He was in Naoya Zen’in around the Zen’in massacre.
A very rational person, if placed in that situation, might have taken a moment to collect information, assess available resources, consider whether Maki had already entered the estate, and formulate a strategy based on the known failures of the canon timeline.
Unfortunately he was too busy shitting his fucking pants, figuratively—because hadn’t this conversation taken place on the same day the Zen’in clan got wiped out?!
He didn’t want to die.
He didn’t know if he’d already died once, which felt like information a person should have had access to under the circumstances, but he knew with absolute clarity that he did not want to do it again even in Naoya Zen’in’s stupid expensive robes.
Jinichi stopped speaking.
The silence that followed was not peaceful. It had edges. There was faint creak of the estate around them, the distant hush of birds in the garden outside, the muffled presence of servants or guards moving somewhere far away. Jinichi stared at him, and the longer Naoya failed to respond, the deeper the man’s scowl became.
“You’re quiet,” Jinichi grunted at last, the words dragging out of him with open suspicion. “That’s rare.”
Naoya felt his mouth want to smile. The realisation struck with a fresh pulse of nausea, because the expression rose as naturally as breathing, disdainful and lazy and sharp. He kept it from fully forming by sheer, pants-shitting terror alone, though what reached his face was probably no better, a faint curve of amusement that belonged to the original misogyny-maxxer 10,000.
Jinichi’s eyes narrowed. “What, nothing to say after rushing off after Fushiguro like a spoiled child? Maybe you finally learned the value of foresight.”
‘Foresight,’ Naoya thought, with such violent internal laughter that it almost became a sob.
Oh, for sure. Foresight. He had foresight. He had so much foresight, actually. He had a premium subscription to foresight. He had the entire miserable spoiler thread for this entire fucking universe downloaded directly into his skull, and the headline was that every single man in this estate was about to get packed the FUCK up because they were stupid, arrogant, and pathologically incapable of treating women like human beings for longer than five consecutive seconds.
He wanted to grab Jinichi by the shoulders and shake him until the man’s neck gave out. He wanted to ask how an entire clan of professional sorcerers had looked at Maki Zen’in, looked at Toji Fushiguro’s living, breathing echo, looked at the twin sister being used as a sacrificial fuse, and somehow concluded that the safest option was to light the match themselves—
—BECAUSE GENUINELY WHO FUCKING DID THAT??
Instead, Naoya opened his mouth calmly.
“What day is it?”
The question came out in Naoya’s voice; smooth, bright, and edged with a Kansai lilt so natural that he felt it settle over the words like a sneer.
Jinichi blinked once before his expression twitched.
“What does that have to do with the plan?” The burly, mountain of a sorcerer. demanded.
Naoya’s palms were sweating beneath the fall of his sleeves. He could feel it. He could feel everything too clearly, the strength in his fingers, the loose readiness of muscles that had been trained since childhood, the subtle hum of—of fucking cursed energy inside him like a coiled mechanism waiting to be told how to move.
Without a doubt, Projection Sorcery sat somewhere in the body’s instincts, present but unreadable, like waking up in the cockpit of a fighter jet while remembering only that the previous pilot was doomed to crash into feminism and lose horribly—rather than how to use the technique itself.
He could not fight Jinichi here, he would get folded.
“It’s got everything to do with the plan,” Naoya returned, and his own borrowed tone made him sound so obnoxiously confident that for a moment even he almost believed he knew what he was doing. “So answer me, won’t you?”
Jinichi’s jaw flexed.
The pause stretched long enough for Naoya’s mind to begin eating itself again. If Jinichi said the twelfth, he was finished. Indeed, if Jinichi said anything after the eleventh, everybody was gonna fucking die. If Jinichi said the eleventh itself, or anytime before it, then maybe there was time, though not much, but enough that he could do something.
“The twelfth,” Jinichi growled.
‘WALLAHI.’
Naoya stood immediately.
He stood too fast, but Naoya’s body made even panic look elegant for the first half-second, rising from the luxurious seat as his robes shifted around him, pale fabric whispering against itself, and Jinichi’s gaze snapped upward with fresh suspicion while Naoya arranged his face into something bright and unsuspcious.
“Wow! I’m grateful!” He choked out, yet the words came out with a cheerful, poisonous warmth that made Jinichi’s brow twitch again. “You really can rely on the uncles when there’s a problem, can’t you? Here I was getting worked up over Fushiguro, and you’ve all already handled everything for me!”
Jinichi’s eyes hardened. “Are you mocking me?”
“No, no,” Naoya assured him, lifting one hand in a light, dismissive motion that somehow managed to be both placating and insulting. “I’m being genuine. It’s reassuring, that’s all. All those high school brats running around making trouble, and my elders are already cleaning it up before I have to tire myself out. Uncle especially. A father willing to snuff out both his daughters for the clan’s sake is really something, isn’t he? What a man you are, Ogi Zen’in.”
Jinichi stared at him, and Naoya stared back with a pleasant expression and felt his soul peel itself off the inside of his ribs from pure stress.
‘WALLAHI I’M FINISHED WALLAHI I’M FINISHED WALLAHI I’M—’
“—What are you doing?” His cousin asked, slower this time, as Naoya turned away robotically, towards the room’s exit.
Naoya glanced back over his shoulder, and the motion was so practiced, so vain, so perfectly calibrated for maximum irritation that he nearly apologised on instinct before remembering that Naoya apologising might actually escalate the situation.
He let the borrowed face brighten instead, reaching for a level of cheer that made Jinichi’s expression flatten with disbelief.
“I’m going to thank Uncle Ogi personally!” He replied. “A plan like this deserves appreciation!”
Jinichi’s mouth tightened. “Naoya.”
He was butchering the act, for sure. But he was also scheduled to FUCKING DIE today—so he could live with Jinichi thinking he was acting sort of strange.
‘I’M OUT OF HERE! FUCK YOU!’
“See you, my beloved cousin!”
Naoya gave Jinichi a wave; bright, airy, and disturbingly girlish, the sort of fluttering little farewell that did not belong on Naoya Zen’in at all and therefore landed in the room like a thrown cup.
‘YOU ARE GOING TO FUCKING DIE.’
Jinichi went stilled on the couch, his face genuinely confused.
Naoya turned toward the sliding doors with all the dignity he could gather, reached for the frame, and fiddled with the exit awkwardly. He tugged when he should have slid, adjusted too quickly, nearly pinched his own hand, and spent three long, excruciating seconds fumbling with it while the entire weight of Jinichi’s gobsmacked stare pressed into his back.
The door finally gave, and Naoya slipped through the opening with a smile that had begun to ache at the corners of his mouth, closed it with perhaps more force than necessary, and stepped into the outer hall.
Cool morning air moved through the corridor from the direction of the courtyard garden, touching his face with the crispness of late autumn. For a moment, he stood there under the eaves, breathing in the scent of damp earth, trimmed pine, old wood, and distant water trickling over stone.
The Zen’in estate stretched around him in layered quiet, every polished beam and carefully swept path pretending that the people inside had not built their lives around cruelty and called it tradition.
Naoya inhaled once.
Then, with his face still arranged into something that would have looked calm to anyone watching from a distance, he began internally shrieking so hard it felt like his soul had left his body a second time.
‘I NEED TO GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.’
He burst into motion.
The wooden floor flashed beneath his feet as his robes snapped and fluttered behind him while he entered a desperate, unaugmented sprint, his sandals slapping against the ground as he huss-hussed as quick as he fucking could.
Oh, he was going to die. He was absolutely going to die. He was going to die in Naoya Zen’in’s body, after possibly having died in his original body—a death he couldn’t even fucking remember.
He rounded a corner too sharply, nearly collided with a servant carrying something wrapped in cloth, and heard the poor man choke on a greeting as Naoya flashed past him with a breezy, automatic, “OUTTA THE WAY!” that sounded so vile he wanted to bite his own tongue off.
‘Sorry,’ he thought desperately, already gone before the servant could do more than bow in terror. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, that was the body, or the upbringing, or the muscle memory, or maybe I’m just under a lot of stress! I think dying and waking up in Bubble Pop Electric does that to you!’
The estate corridors branched ahead of him in ways he couldn’t recognise, desperation pushing him through the endless labrinth.
‘Think,’ he ordered himself, and the command nearly dissolved into another wave of panic before he clamped down on it. ‘Think, idiot. You know what happens. Ogi takes Mai below. He cuts Mai. Maki comes later, fights him, gets cut. He throws them down into the curse-pit. Mai dies. Maki gets the full Heavenly Restriction. Everyone dies. Naoya fights her later and gets his shit rocked because she’s the GOAT.’
Unfortunately, in-case one had missed the prior messaging; he was Naoya.
That single fact made every possible strategy look like a joke someone meaner than God had written in the margins. Warn Maki? Fantastic plan, except she would see Naoya Zen’in running toward her and reasonably assume that whatever came out of his mouth was some form of either harassment, condescension, or a prelude to violence.
Warn Mai? Slightly better, maybe, except he had no idea where Mai was, and if he found her, he would still be Naoya, which meant there was literally jackshit he could say to make her take him as anything other as a fucking eyesore. And, that was all assuming she wasn't already shanked by Ogi.
Stop Ogi before he shanked his daughter? Incredible, sure, he loved the ambition, but he could not fight Ogi because he did not know what cursed energy was supposed to feel like beyond the vague sense that his body was full of lightning trapped inside a silk bag, and trying to brawl a Grade One sorcerer as a panicking guy™ in antagonist packaging seemed like a spectacular way to become floor art.
So the plan, if it could be called a plan without insulting the entire concept of planning, was to get the fuck out.
He could leave. There had to be gates, and a road somewhere beyond the estate walls and possibly a car, preferably one with keys already inside and no cursed technique requirements to operate. Once he was out, he could… he could…
…okay, he could work that out once he got out. Leaving the country was a must—because Maki was going to hunt down everyone with a Zen’in surname immediately after nodiffiing the clan. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck—
—he heard boots.
Several bodies at once moved in a soldierlike rhythm, heavy and numerous. His whole body reacted before his brain caught up, and Naoya skidded so hard that one sleeve whipped around his arm, his sandals scraping against the polished floor as a row of Zen’in guardsmen stormed into view at the far end of the hall.
They moved with weapons at their sides and grim intent in their posture, men with dead-eyed focus in their eyes.
Naoya shrieked at the sight—the sound comign out of him before he could stop it, high and sharp and deeply undignified, and several heads began to turn.
He snapped backward around the corner, his gaze slashing across the hallway, catching on a set of sliding doors, and seized upon them with the wild gratitude of prey spotting a burrow. He lunged for them, slammed one panel open with far less grace than Naoya Zen’in’s reputation deserved, threw himself inside, and dragged the door shut behind him so quickly that the wood rattled in its track.
For a few seconds, the only sound in the room was his breathing.
His chest expanded and deflated too quickly beneath the layers of his robes, each inhale shallow and useless, each exhale thin enough to tremble. Sweat traveled down the side of his face, gathering near his jaw and slipping beneath the collar as he leaned forward against the closed doors with both hands braced upon it.
The hallway beyond filled with the passing rhythm of the guardsmen, their steps moving closer, then directly behind the doors, then away, and Naoya held himself so still that the effort made his muscles ache. He could feel his heartbeat in his throat. He could feel it in his fingers. He could feel it in the roots of his borrowed hair.
‘Shit,’ he thought, with the full-bodied sincerity of prayer. ‘Shit, shit, shit. How am I getting out of this fucking place?’
The guardsmen continued past, their presence sliding by like a blade just missing skin, and the cold that followed them sank deep into his spine. How much longer did he have before Maki came up from downstairs and slimed everyone out? Had it already happened? Was the estate already a dead thing still pretending to breathe? Was he hiding in some random room while the Kukuru marched to their deaths? He didn’t know enough. That was the worst part, the maddening, choking lack of exact information. Why hadn’t Gege included timestamps to go with the plotlines?!?
Then someone gasped behind him.
Naoya went still in an entirely different way.
The breath froze in his lungs, and for one absurd, cowardly second, he considered pretending he had not heard it. Maybe if he remained facing the door, the person behind him would politely cease existing. Maybe the universe, having already shown an impressive commitment to nonsense, would grant him one tiny mercy and reveal that he’d just imagined it. Unfortunately, the room behind him remained unmistakably occupied.
Very slowly, very horrified, Naoya turned, his face paling.
None other than Mai Zen’in knelt on the tatami several paces away, dressed in a sleeveless black turtleneck dress that made her look both composed and terribly young beneath the morning light.
She had been positioned as if waiting for someone, her posture stiff, and the thin tension around her mouth told him that whatever had been happening before he burst into the room had not been pleasant.
Her eyes were wide now, fixed on him with a wary uncertainty that stabbed straight through his panic and into something worse. She was alive. She was right there. She was breathing in front of him, startled and confused and trapped in tge Zen'in estate on the morning her life was supposed to end.
Naoya’s jaw dropped.
“G-guh?” He managed, and he hated that Naoya’s voice still somehow made even complete verbal collapse sound faintly judgmental. “You? You? You’re alive? What are—what are you doing here?”
Mai stared at him as the silence between them thickened by the heartbeat.
“I’m…” she began, then stopped, her brows drawing together as confusion overtook fear by a narrow margin. “I’m in my home.”
Right.
Yes, that was a fair answer.
Naoya’s eyes flicked over the room with delayed comprehension, taking in the restrained quality of the furnishings, the personal austerity beneath the clan wealth, the evidence of a residence rather than a reception chamber. Ogi’s home, probably. Of course. Of course he had not dived into a random empty room.
Of course he had fled armed men by breaking into the home of the very daughter whose murder was about to ignite the massacre he had been trying to avoid. The universe had apparently mistaken him for someone competent and was now aggressively handing him plot-critical encounters while he was still trying to figure out how to open doors—awesome sauce!
The horror opened into possibility so abruptly that it almost hurt. Ogi had not cut Mai yet. Ogi had not taken her downstairs yet.
The thought struck him with such force that he nearly forgot to breathe—that he could save Mai. He could save Maki. He could save them both, maybe, somehow, perhaps, potentially, Megumi, even.
His thoughts were getting nonsensical.
Behind him, the guardsmen marched past the sliding doors.
The sound made both of them flinch in different ways. Mai’s eyes darted briefly toward the hall, her shoulders tightening beneath the black fabric of her dress, while Naoya felt a chill travel down his spine as the steps moved by in disciplined sequence. He listened until the last footfall faded, and the fading did not comfort him.
Because, shit. What was he meant to do?
He could not fight these guys. He could not protect Mai in any traditional sense unless the enemy agreed to settle matters through panicked trivia game, and while Naoya’s body was fast, strong, and full of cursed energy, the man currently occupying it had the practical combat literacy of someone who had learned sorcery through page turns and Youtube analyses.
Oh, that was probably because THAT'S WAS THE EXTENT OF HIS KNOWLEDGE IN SORCERY.
He could not tell Mai the truth. “Hello, I am John Transmigrator in the body of your cousin who sucks, and your father is about to murder you for political clout,” was not the kind of sentence that built immediate trust. He could not pretend to be the real Naoya either, because the real Naoya would not help her, and if he sounded too helpful, that would be suspicious in its own horrifying direction.
Mai swallowed.
The motion was small, but he saw it, and it dragged him sharply back into the room, back to the girl kneeling in front of him
“N-Naoya…” she ventured, then corrected herself with visible effort, her voice tightening around the honourific like it tasted bad. “Naoya-sama. Did you… need something? You just missed my father, if you were looking for him.”
Just missed him.
Naoya’s relief surged so violently that the edges of his vision brightened.
Ogi was out. Ogi had left, recently even, and he might already be headed to fetch the weapons or kickstsart whatever miserable sequence led to his daughters being dragged into a hole beneath the estate.
He had a window!
Naoya dropped to his knees before her.
Mai shrieked and jerked backward so hard that one hand flew toward the tatami to steady herself, her eyes going enormous as Naoya’s robes pooled around him and his palms planted firmly against his thighs. The movement was too abrupt, too intense, and he realised half a second too late that kneeling suddenly in front of a girl who had every reason to distrust him was perhaps not the calming, trust-building gesture his panic had intended it to be.
Unfortunately, he had already committed. His heart hammered, his mouth was dry. His borrowed face was too close to hers, and his gaze fixed on Mai with desperate focus as he opened his stupid, fat mouth, to enact the first change, in the very, very long line of world-shattering changes this idiot transmigrator would cause throughout his simple existence in this world.
“WE GOTTA GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE, BITCH!”
Mai’s jaw dropped, and he felt a piece of him die inside. He didn't mean to say it like that.
“...What?”
'Wallahi.'