Chapter Text
Ch. 1
“Kill me. There’s meaning in that too,” were the last words Suguru would say to Gojo.
That week.
Gojo spends the next 3 days sitting on the front steps of Jujutsu Tech, analyzing the past few months. Cutting, splicing, tying red strings around hazy memories. Every few minutes it’s an “ugh!”, followed by hair grasping and dry heaving.
First he texts
Satoru: please tell me where you are.
Satoru: Fuck you! Are you fucking serious?
Satoru: Don’t be a coward.
And it goes on like
Satoru: will you have dinner with me tonight?
Satoru: answer my texts, I don’t know what’s real.
But there are no messages on the left side of the screen, no bubbles, no dots, no fucking bubble dots oh god,
oh…that heave wasn’t dry.
Satoru wipes his mouth and slowly sways his way back to his dorm. He presses Suguru’s name and listens to the “brrrrr….brrrr….” that he knows will eventually end with a voicemail prompt.
“Voicemail box full.”
Red, red, red end call button.
Blue, blue, blue message.
Satoru: i’m not mad, please call me back.
A lifetime of learning to temper his impulses couldn’t have prepared him for the willpower it would take to not burn the world to the fucking ground right now. In his room, Satoru falls to the floor and pulls at his hair, rubber bands snapping behind his rib cage. He holds the crumbling architecture of his chest together, crossing his arms around himself and pressing. A liquid heat spills through his throat and crashes at his sternum. He keels over and rips at the dorm floor, his nail beds collecting splinters as he peels hardwood from the subfloor. Everything shakes, chromatic pulses rocking his six eyes. Since when did brains have a heartbeat?
Then
Suguru: Zushi Beach. 1 am.
Satoru breathes deeply, erratically, frantically. Oh god, yes, finally!
Satoru: okay, I’ll be there.
Satoru begs the clock for a miracle, but the phone reads a mere 8:47pm. He spends the first hour pacing. He spends the second hour raiding the teachers’ lounge and shaking vending machines, gathering an offering for Suguru (has he eaten?). He spends the third hour packing some essentials into a backpack. Oh no, he can’t bring this, that’s too presumptuous.
Time goes by slowly, quickly, not at all, all at once.
Satoru stands in the dragging tide, perfectly dry. A tall figure emerges from the blue distance. Suguru dons a long robe, obscuring his physique behind trusses of cloth. Satoru sucks in a breath, suddenly overcome with anger at the sight of Suguru’s nonchalant demeanor.
“Satoru. I’m sorry I haven’t been answering your calls.” Suguru says with a balanced tone. He smiles with his eyes, but his teeth don’t show. He stands perfectly still, silhouetted by the light of the moon, unwavering. Satoru drops the snack bag in the sand.
“Are you kidding me? You’re sorry?” Satoru parries.
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t quite understand why we’re meeting again. Did I not explain myself thoroughly the other day? I can go over it again,” Suguru offers.
This is offensive. Satoru cycles between anger, disbelief, and confusion.
“You’ll forgive me if I can’t accept that my best friend has succumbed to some delusional, egotistical, unattainable ideology,” Satoru spits.
“I see that you’re angry. Careful, Satoru. Don’t lose your temper,” Suguru smirks, clearly amused.
“Oh. I see now. This is a game to you. I'm a game to you,” Satoru says.
“You’re not a game to me,” Suguru says, plainly.
Satoru grits his teeth and balls his fists. Liar, liar.
“Yeah? Well, what a relief! Here I thought you were just messing around. How about we settle this and you actually fight me?” Satoru proposes.
“I have no intention of fighting you, Satoru. You can kill me but you can’t fight me,” he says.
Insulting! Pathetic!
“Fight me!” Saturo yells, taking a heavy step forward, sand swirling to get away. Suguru lets out a groan, as if he’s tired, as if he’s so put out.
“I thought this would go differently, Satoru. I thought maybe you’d had a change of heart. I see I was wrong. I’ll be going now. Goodbye, Satoru,” Suguru says.
In a blink, Suguru is swallowed up by one of his larger-than-life shikigami. He’s gone.
Satoru Gojo is alone at the beach.
The next few days, Satoru trains about it. He pulls out the cursed dummies from the gym’s storage locker and leaves them as a pile of mulch. He picks fights with classmates and teachers. He breaks more than one cursed tool from overuse. And his room surely can’t be up to code anymore, what with the holes he put in the ceiling and floorboards.
“If I knew you were going to go totally crazy, I’d have just called Yaga that day,” says a familiar voice. Satoru looks behind him to see a neutral-faced Shoko lighting up.
“You don’t look like you’ve gotten any sleep,” she continues, inhaling through the white stick between her lips.
“Don’t need it,” replies Satoru curtly. He’s throwing random objects he’s found around campus into the air and eviscerating them with precision.
“Gojo, you’re acting like a psychopath. With all the….property damage, people are starting to talk. Suguru’s gone, I don’t want you to be next,” she says. Like she’s expressing concern, like she cares.
Satoru turns around, preparing to tell the holier-than-thou Shoko off. Then, Shoko becomes blurry and sideways. And, finally, darkness.