Destined to Collide - Inumaki Toge

73. Okay

Hi everyone~ Here's a new update. 

Thank you for the lovely comments as usual. Hope you'll enjoy this one as well >_0

And look at that art~ So lovely! Please do drop a comment in if you're the artist. Would love to credit you properly. 

Recap:

"Maguro," he started in a serious tone. "If you would do me the honour of accepting my invitation, would you come home with me for the summer holidays?"

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Maguro blinked.

Summer holiday is coming up. There's bound to have a festival. Oh, festivals, she thought almost happily. Tanabata is just around the corner. There would be dango and ikayaki and Takoyaki and okonomiyaki and...

And wait. Did she just hear that right?

Home. Her devilish handsome boyfriend mentioned home.

His lovely amethyst eyes staring up at her in glittering anticipation. Her hand is placed on his broad chest. She could feel the strong heartbeat underneath the palms of her hand, and it's picking up speed the longer she kept her thoughts to herself.

Come...c-come home...

Come home with Toge-kun? Where all the festival food is?

Her eyes widened in acknowledgement.

Inumaki nodded with a smile. He had heard snippets of her thoughts – she pondered and repeated his words in her mind when she got distracted by food sold in a summer festival.

And he had to smile.

He always sounded so good in her thoughts. As if his voice were fine tuned. Was this how Maguro heard him all the time? No wonder she has been telling him so often that his voice is all lovely and beautiful. He thought she was just exaggerating. But clearly, she wasn't.

She really – truly – cherished him with all her heart. Just with that thought, Inumaki felt his world had just gotten a tad bit happier than the time before he met Maguro.

With her being so adorable like this, how could he not love her?

How could anyone not love her?

And it is exactly for this reason that he had to bring her home.

Other clans might try to sink its claws on her being the last heir to the Tsukigami clan, which is famous for all the secret technique scrolls the Jujutsu world has not seen for hundreds of years. The clan's warehouse that housed the secret technique scrolls are now watched over by Spirit Guardians, implemented in place since the Tsukigami clan came to power almost a thousand years back, attacking anyone or anything that comes close to it. All with the exception of Tsukigami's bloodline.

She is now like a Tuna fish on the market, where the highest bidder gets to own the Tuna – and own the Tsukigami's secret techniques.

For Inumaki, it wasn't the secret scrolls that interest him.

It was his girl, his Tuna, the lovely girl that had given him a rare chance to be able to speak normally with his friends – and hopefully with his family soon. For being the first to tell him he had a lovely voice, and for telling him that she got him too during her impressive display of the Golden Barrier.

"It's okay. I got you," she had said back then, supporting his weight so he won't fall over. "I won't let anything happen to you or anyone else here."

It was one of the most meaningful moments he had ever had in his life. For her to tell him she got him, for her to tell him it's alright.

For that, he is grateful that destiny had set them on a course to meet each other in this lifetime.

Anything she ever wanted; he will get it for her. If it makes her happy, he will do it in a split second.

"There's a festival coming up in that week too near my house," he continues to talk to her in his thoughts, caressing her hair in his hands as he continues. He never did manage to tell her how much he loves her hair. It's so lovely and smooth. "Panda and Maki followed me back home last year. Maki hated her ancestral home and refused to go back during the holidays, so she tagged along with Panda."

Maguro is still keeping quiet. Her eyes stares at him widely with her lips agape, appearing stunned still with his invitation. He couldn't hear anything else from her mind. It was all blank, possibly from surprise. He smiled, hoping to ease the dazed look he sees in her eyes and brushes her cheeks with the back of his fingers.

"We're arranging for the first years to follow me back this year too, seeing as none of them is going back home. It will be like a gathering to foster team spirits, and to wind down from all the death threats we've been facing since school term started as a jujutsu student. Only Yuuta has yet to come over, since his mission sends him overseas straight after the event last year. I understand that maybe you might have other plans, but if you're not planning to return to your home clan then I thought maybe you can-"

"Okay," she mumbled shyly, pursing her lips, causing the dimples normally hidden by the sides of her lovely cheeks to pop out.

"-come home with me...?" Inumaki pauses, then stops. He did hear that right, right?

She agreed, right? To come home with him?

Before he could even ask, Maguro leans up to the stunned Inumaki and kisses his cheek sweetly and blushes with a smile. "Okay," she said. "T-thank you for taking me in, Toge-kun. I'll be in your care then. And...emm...well... is it alright if I sleep here tonight? I don't want to have another nightmare..."

In that split second of happiness after she agrees to come home with him, an anxious and sad feeling fell upon him, blanketing his happiness for a moment. He realizes that it was Maguro's feelings shrouding his, and that again, might have stemmed from the attack earlier with the Special Grade Curses.

She did try to warn them, in ways she doesn't understand yet. That anxious feeling of a call, a pull of a string upon her heart, a desperate demand from something within her straining to tell them something is very wrong and please don't go, but she didn't know how to tell them that.

And only bid them good luck as she sends them off to the grounds, watching their backs growing further and further away from her.

It almost cost the Tokyo Metropolitan Curse Technical College lives of the students were it not for their Gojo sensei breaking the invader's cursed bloody Curtains. That moment of hesitation and unsureness she had had almost cost her all her friends.

Almost cost her Inumaki Toge.

Almost, again, cost her the new family she has right now.

She vowed to herself that this will not happen again.

Inumaki smiled as a response to her request.

Always. Always so mesmerizing whenever he smiled, Maguro had thought to herself, her finger reaching up to touch his Snake and Fang mark. And there it is again, pulsating with the power of the Curse he is carrying, as if calling out to her to claim it.

She smiled. It was as if the Snake and Fang mark is vying for her attention too.

Removing her hand from the mark on his skin, Inumaki lifted her hand to his lips and kisses the back of her fingers softly, warming the cold digits with his breath. Looking up at her through his long lashes, he answered her in his thoughts.

Knowing, as always, that she would be able to hear them whenever he voices out his thoughts to her.

"Anything my princess desires," he said to her, with eyes glittering and a beckoning smile.