Shoko Ieiri

The incense burners at Oshino Hakkai hadn't been lit in three years, not since the last of the mourners shuffled away from the double funeral and left the Ieiri siblings to carve out their own meaning from the silence. Shoko had been fourteen then, already accepted to Tokyo Jujutsu High, already marked as something special—a reverse cursed technique user, rare as blood in water. You were younger, still believing that grief was something you could outgrow like old clothes.

Now she was back.

The village hadn't changed in the six months since Shoko returned. The same mist clung to the eight sacred lakes each morning. The same tourists came to photograph the thatched roofs and buy overpriced matcha. But everything inside the Ieiri house had shifted, gravity working differently, pulling you both toward different centers.

You found her on the engawa when you came home from school, smoking with that particular efficiency she had—deep inhale, held, released in a thin stream that disappeared into the grey afternoon. She didn't look up from her phone.

"Welcome back," she said, as if you'd just gone to the store.

"You're smoking again."

"Still." She tapped ash into an empty tea can. "Not again. Still."

You dropped your bag and sat on the step below her, close enough to smell the tobacco and something else—antiseptic, the ghost of hospital corridors, the scent of someone who had seen too many things healed and too many things that couldn't be. She'd come back different after Geto Suguru's name became forbidden. Quieter. Harder. The way she talked about her former classmates—Gojo with his impossible power, Geto with his moral decay into something unrecognizable—made them sound like characters from a story she'd stopped believing in.

"The tea shop," you said. "The Tanakas said they saw a realtor there today."

Shoko's thumb paused on her screen. "I sold it."

The words didn't register at first. The Ieiri Tea Shop had been there for four generations, the only thing your parents had left besides debts and the house. You'd worked there every summer since you were small, learning to whisk matcha until your wrists ached, watching your mother smile at customers with that particular patience that made them feel welcome.

"You what?"

"Sold it." She finally looked at you, her eyes flat, medical, the same eyes that had watched cursed spirits tear people apart and had learned not to flinch. "The Yamasakis offered good money. Enough to get you through high school and university. Enough to get me—" She stopped, took another drag. "Away."

"Away where?"

"Doesn't matter."

You stood up, your shadow falling across her. "You can't just—you didn't even ask me. That was Mom's shop. That was—"

"Mom's dead." Shoko's voice didn't rise, which somehow made it worse. "Dad's dead. Geto's—" She caught herself, the name slipping out like a wound opening. "The world's full of dead things. Shops. People. Ideals." She crushed the cigarette out against the wood, not bothering with an ashtray. "I'm tired of preserving corpses."

"You ran away," you said, and hated how your voice cracked. "From the school. From your friends. From—"

"I survived." She stood too, suddenly taller, older, the gap between sixteen and whatever age her eyes had become yawning wide. "That's what I do. I survive. I heal the wounds and count the bodies and I don't—" She stopped, her jaw tight. "I don't need you to understand. I need you to eat and sleep and grow up somewhere that isn't a battlefield."

"So you sold our history for tuition money?"

"I sold a building." She turned away, her ponytail swinging, medical coat flapping around her legs. "The history was already gone. You just didn't notice."

She went to her room. You went to yours. The house settled into a silence that felt like drowning.

Hours passed. The sun set behind the mountains, turning the lakes into black mirrors. Your stomach growled—you'd skipped lunch, too anxious about the midterm, too worried about the rumors in the village about your sister's smoking, her dropping out, her failure.

You hadn't eaten dinner. Neither had she.

At nine, you surrendered. The cold war required two combatants, and you were too hungry, too tired, too young to maintain the fortress of your anger. You padded down the hallway in socks, past the family altar with its fading photographs, to Shoko's door.

It was cracked open.

She was asleep at her desk, head pillowed on her arms, headphones covering her ears. The blue light of her laptop illuminated her face—softer in sleep, the hard edges blurred, looking almost like the girl she'd been before Tokyo, before the jujutsu world opened its jaws and showed her what waited inside.

You stepped closer. Her playlist was visible on the screen—something classical, something sad. Medical textbooks were stacked beside her, anatomy and cursed energy theory, notes in her precise handwriting covering the margins. A half-empty bottle of sake sat next to a cup of cold tea.

And there, beneath her cheek, a photograph.

You recognized it—Gojo and Geto flanking a younger Shoko, all of them in their first-year uniforms, smiling like they had forever. Like the world was something that could be saved with enough power and will. She'd drawn a cigarette burn through Geto's face, but she hadn't thrown it away.

You stood there, watching her breathe, and understood something about survival. It wasn't about running. It was about carrying the dead with you, heavy and sharp, letting them cut you until you learned to hold them without bleeding out.

You reached out, hesitated, then gently lifted the headphones from her ears. She stirred, her eyes fluttering open—confused, vulnerable, sixteen and ancient all at once.

"There's rice," she mumbled, voice thick with sleep. "I made rice. Before."

"I know."

"I didn't mean—" She sat up, rubbing her face, the photograph falling from beneath her cheek. She didn't try to hide it. "I didn't mean to decide for you. I just... I don't know how to be the older sister. I don't know how to—"

"You're here," you said. "That's enough."

She looked at you, really looked, and something cracked in her expression—the wall she'd built, brick by brick, since the day she came home with her suitcase and her silence and her refusal to explain.

"I'm scared," she whispered. It might have been the first true thing she'd said since returning. "All the time. I'm scared."

"I know."

"You're not supposed to know. You're supposed to—" She stopped, laughed, bitter and fond. "You're supposed to be the kid. I'm supposed to protect you."

"Then let me protect you back." You picked up the cold tea, sipped it, made a face. "Starting with teaching you how to make tea that isn't terrible."

She stared at you. Then, slowly, something that might have been a smile touched her mouth—not the practiced thing she showed customers, not the cynical curl she used at school, but something real and tired and grateful.

"You're an idiot," she said.

"Yeah."

"I'm still selling the shop."

"Yeah."

"But—" She reached for her cigarettes, stopped, put her hand down. "But maybe we can visit the lakes tomorrow. Before the paperwork finishes. One last time."

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