ITSY BITSY SPIDER. ― ( Jujutsu Kaisen )

CHAPTER TWO. a boy named yuta

Could it be that they had a falling out? No reason sounded good enough. Perhaps it was about his mystery lady. Shiori had invested too much in Ryosuke to allow him to marry a random woman. But how well did she know either of them to play a guessing game? He had shut them out for years under the same roof,  and they had never tried to make him come out and play.

"By any chance," Shoko joined them, "skipping your aunt's birthday might have anything to do with her trying to get you to find a wife?"

Ryosuke looked defeated. "Ieiri, please don't enable them."

His tone with the overworked doctor differed greatly from what he most often used with Arisu and Satoru; it was softer, friendlier. Of all the sorcerers in the room, the wielder of the Dark Matter knew the best to appreciate the woman who kept his body intact.

Still, no amount of appreciation and time spent alone together in the medical ward could make Ryosuke open his heart to anyone. He wanted nothing more than for it to remain under the rug he swept to until it rotted away there along with all his personal problems. But he knew what was expected of him, he knew what was his responsibility to the family name that opened every door to him. With the head of the clan's lack of interest in settling down and his unpredictable nature, the future of the clan was left on his shoulders as the only other son of the main family. Despite the clan's superstitions, Ryosuke could still pass down the Limitless to his children. In their eyes, it was worth the risk of having another Dark Matter user.

Arisu felt bad for him.

After her death or the destruction of the shikigami, whichever was to come first, no baby was going to be born with her technique until the beast regenerated her body. Four centuries was too far in the future to guarantee keeping the technique in the clan, it required too much investment for too little. She was the shiny shell you found during a walk at the beach and put into your pocket, not the one you sought in the sand.

She was another average sorcerer, who manifested her technique a few years earlier than other average sorcerers, for longer than she had been special.

"We all knew the day you make a loveless contract marriage would come." The white-haired man was lucky that looks couldn't kill, or else Ryosuke would have been written in the history pages as the man who ended Gojo Satoru. "You actually waited for longer than I expected."

Shohei was only nineteen, straight out of school, when Kousuke-sama decided marriage was the last resort for his youngest child to settle down and mature, and a month away from twenty when he held his younger daughter for the first time. At fifty-three, he was still the same rowdy, joke of a man. Ryosuke had his father's looks but none of his traits; he was more rational than he was ambitious. Condemning yourself and a stranger to a miserable life for power was something only a fool driven by emotion, by greed and fear would do. Ryosuke was no fool.

"Worry about yourselves," the eldest cousin said.

"Myself?" Arisu laughed. She never had an issue with charming men. The real challenge was making them stay. "I'm just a third cousin, remember? No one cares about what I do."

Ryosuke unlocked his phone and returned to texting as he spoke without looking at Satoru. "Does that mean you didn't tell her about the background check?"

Arisu sat up straight. "What?"

"Mom was curious about who you were with. You were in a rebellious phase," Satoru said. He looked like a kid who got caught getting into the cookie jar. "She didn't find anything interesting."

"That's good to know," Kusakabe grunted behind the newspaper pages. 'That's why I never wanted to do anything with a sorcerer.' How could she blame him?