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After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.
HAN KANG
Then he said: "Don't you know? I am trying to make you great."
And I said: "I do not want to be great, I want to be loved.”
SUE ZHAO
⽔
It starts like this:
Anger is a long river running through all the great houses of Kyoto, wisteria falling down the stone paths like tears on a grieving soldier or a hurting child. Gojo doesn’t know which one he is at seven: maybe a little bit of both soldier and child but definitely weapon. But still, the tears, they collect on the sleeves of his yukata as he brushes them against his eyes, wild and harsh and hushed. He needs to narrow them, he thinks, he needs to make his big emotions smaller. Himself smaller. They can’t take his tears anymore—not the body nor the clothes.
Spite, then, is a tall arching maple tree spanning the rock garden of the Gojo compound.
He escapes there often when the world gets too loud for someone who just wants to watch Inuyasha reruns and eat daifuku mochi on the lazy hours of the afternoon. Their words about clan heirs and bloodline security fall on the deaf ears of a boy who just wanted to eat, who just heard the wind bell outside signaling the arrival of the ojisan who made his rounds on the village daily, who just wanted to feel the blades of summer grass on his bare feet. He gets two lashings on each wrist for his insolence and scurries away before his handler gets a third in. He runs and runs, until he gets right up to the roots of the tree and stumbles on the river staring right back at him.
He’s only seven, he thinks. What could he have possibly done so wrong at seven?
Gojo feels like a raw wound when he looks into the jaws of the river. He finds a god lurking and following his every movement, every shift of his face or blink of his eye as he lets the tears trickle down into the ripple of the water. When he inches closer into the deep abyss and finds his own reflection mirrored back to him, thinks finally, finally: some company.
God blinks right back at him. God is here and he’s watching his every move.
⊹
Sixteen is a harsh slap on his face for declaring Tokyo as his first choice. It’s strained whispers around the creaking ancestral house, maids and liaisons and clan heads alike shaking their heads at his misguided decision. Kyoto is the sacred ground, his father booms after landing a second blow that had him start coughing up blood. Every heir that has ever been, he rings with finality, began their journey here.
Gojo could only scoff back in return, outgrowing and outeverything his father by then, spitting blood right into the tatami mat and watching it sink its claws into the ground. Some holy ground, he thinks.
Because what was an heir to a god?
Until:
⊹
Consider Getou Suguru.
Theirs is a story that begins and ends with death. You've heard it before. You've seen it all play out. It's the cold slice of spear to spear, helmet to helmet, all of it culminating in the final act of love as the only invinsible general. It's about a boy forged from the winter fires of Kyoto, on a cold December evening; who clashes theoretically, ideologically, physically, and cosmically with someone who burned through the last legs of snow in February. They tumble into a decade of prejudice and massacres, and sometimes it looks a little like love. Sometimes Gojo thinks no one will ever understand the very core of his being, would never be able to find someone who transcended every idea he ever had of being human in the face of gods and challenged what it meant to be mortal. It’s another finally in the age-old question he’d been asking himself if being great always meant being lonely. But life starts and stops at seventeen for him, and then he is a raw wound all over again—cut open with the dull edge of a verbal and ideological knife, with his nerves jutting out and his betrayal vanishing into grief that still looks a little like love even when he should know better. Love he can’t tether himself out of. Love that he chases for a decade to have mirrored back to him one more time. Love that he doesn’t recognize is anger and grief and refusing to believe the two can co-exist. Love that tears him apart with clean lines of invisible sorrow like a general to an army of men he finally leads to their slaughter.
Then:
⊹
Ieiri Shoko is a distanced balm to his leaking.
The ends of her sentences are sometimes perfunctory and piercing, but never unkind. He doesn’t know what to make of it. She was always, in a way, trickier footing; and Gojo never liked feeling disarmed. Because sometimes she tells him after so much of them have gone and it's only them left at the wreckage of the world: We’re all a little sad sometimes, she says. But I think you're the saddest. So she's not quite like the gods of his dreams, he thinks, but something different: the smoke that comes with it, otherwise, the charred bits. She is the fine edge of a scalpel, slicing through his bullshit clean like a surgeon does with their cadaver. She designates points that go from A to B with cruel efficiency. Shoko is the one who gets him from great to God to god again. From 16, to 20, to 27, and then suddenly 17 all over again: in a skin so like his own but borrowed, lent, enforced, from one of his students. She would know best then what it meant to be a body and be bodied.
⊹
Nanami, Haibara, Ijichi, Amanai—
What is responsibility, he now found himself asking and wondering and mulling over because he truly didn’t know. He was never taught to treat anything else with gentleness, only to threaten anyone who does. Just, Getou would say when he got fed up with his pestering sometimes, Look out for them. Treat them to a meal every now and then. So he does. He confesses as much to whichever god was left listening and voyeuring on his life: Please quiet the world on them, he asks. Make it as loud as it needs for me but — but let them be. Please let them be. They are only so young.
⊹
Then people die or defect and Gojo at eighteen can't tell the difference because someone might as well have axed him on the heart, metal on skin and heart to soul.
Never again will I be gentle, he swears to himself. Never again will I care for anything so much it ruins me.
Never again, never again, never again.
But then—
⽔
You paid the bills, Papá.
You cast the spell.
MAXINE KUMIN
⽔
(Maybe it also starts like this:
He meets Megumi earlier than the rest, and he hurts. Megumi hurts. He hurts in a way that creeps up on the lining of his skin as he brings up the boy of his killer, as he teaches him a thing or two about killing, as he hopes every goddamn day he not turn out to be a killer himself. It’s insidious. It’s not healthy. But Megumi is probably the first real act of selfishness and selflessness he’s ever done in his life and it kills him. It pains him because this is the soul of a child skinned with the face of an executioner—and Gojo was trying to turn things around, turn over a new leaf, hadn’t he? It would be so easy to discard the boy. It would be so convenient to just leave him to the pack of Zen’in wolves and watch them crown him their new murderer. But when the first thing Megumi asks him about is his sister, Gojo hurts even more. He doesn't know if this child will be the end of him or the beginning or both. Instead he gives him his old dorm room and prays he doesn't leave with the same scars, and prays even harder, that it will be kinder than it ever was on him.
At first he doesn't know what to make of Yuji. Sukuna vessel or not, there was something about him so clearly uncut for violence and had a moral fiber that skewed just a touch too neat, a touch too righteous, a touch too honorable. The world will get its claws on him soon enough, but Gojo didn’t want to be the one inviting it in. He couldn’t. This is not a kid who will do well chopping off fingers or cleaving bodies in half. This is just a sixteen-year-old boy, Gojo thinks, and by the gods he was going to do his best to make him stay just exactly that. Then Megumi pleads, actually pleads—and he’s already heaving him up his shoulder as the words die on his mouth.
Staring at Nobara is like staring into a mirror version of himself: unapologetically dramatic, wildly assertive, but with strange weavings of empathy thrown in. These are traits he wishes he projected into the world at her age but sees so effortlessly embodied by her in her own roundabout way. So she will survive the best of them all, he thinks, with her cunning and refusal to bite back down on a world that will always try to eat her instead. Half of life is confidence, and Nobara had them by the pounds.
⊹
And Gojo is fucked, he thinks, because finally: he has found it. He will die for his students and they might very well lead him to his death some day. He doesn't know what frightens him more—the readiness to offer up his life or the fact it had been inside him all along. He is afraid because if he loves them too much, he will love them to death.
⊹
In April, the cicadas sing. There are golden streaks of sunlight bursting through the courtyard, and his students are laughing or eating or talking, otherwise just living; and he feels it in his bones then. He grieves this life he’s already living. He’s already missing this moment just as it's happening. He is already dying. Only Gojo doesn't think he protected his youth well, so he'll try his best to protect theirs instead.
⊹
October is a graveyard of losses around Shibuya that pile up. December is a burial ground for all Shinjuku. And when he sees Sukuna in Megumi's body, Gojo thinks, he might as well be dead.)
⽔
Life is short and the world is at least half terrible,
and for every kind stranger there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children.
I am trying to sell them the world.
This place could be beautiful, right?
You could make this place beautiful.
MAGGIE SMITH
⽔
But maybe, maybe, it really starts like this:
The night before he fights Sukuna, Gojo pays one last visit to the morgue.
He has two letters in tow and the bottle of Suntory Yamazaki they went halfsies on the day of their highschool graduation, promising to save it up for a special occasion. Gojo pitched in Megumi’s college graduation, Shoko suggested getting to 30. Gojo decides fuck all because ten years is a long enough time for whisky to mature and maybe now he will like the tang of alcohol at the witching hour. She follows his movements as he sets the bottle down on her desk, tucking the letters away in her drawer he knows she won’t touch or read. She was the one who brought up the idea of them anyway, knowing his dramatic flair for always wanting to get the last word. He brings up two shot glasses he knows she’ll try drinking his share of. He usually lets her. But not today.
And Shoko asks him, one last time, when they really have reached the end of the world with nothing to show for it but the dead in their hands and the more to come: “Confidence status?”
"I'm going to lose," he tells her.
"I'm going to win," he tells his kids.
⊹
The bottle and his body outlive him.
⊹
The airport is cold and dank and has far too many ghosts loitering around. There’s a reason sorcerers bury their dead.
So this is it.
He has killed. He has been killed. He is the farthest he's ever been from home and Tokyo, he thinks, this isolated corner of the world pulling him further and further away from where he wants to be. Where he had just started being again. Where he could still be—
Then, soft, a touch on his shoulder.
Consider Getou Suguru, now, he tries:
The absence of bags under his eyes, the glow in them still ever so subdued but at least flickering, the harsh edges of his frame during those last few months now seemingly tendered. He seemed more tranquil. More like he was at sixteen when they felt they could still conquer the world and play god. Consider Yaga, Nanami, Haibara: the lot of them ghosts and probably rotting away with bodies rimming the soil of Tokyo, but still they’ve never been happier. They’ve never felt, finally, as open as the wide glass windows spanning the airport and the clouds shifting in the sky.
And so when Gojo finds himself saying, “It was fun,” the ghost of a smile on his face is the same one he’d been staring at in a river in Kyoto. The same one that’s followed him all these years, collecting death stamps like a grim repear at his beckoning. The same one he sees every morning when he wakes up and every night before he goes to bed. The same one whose been there all along waiting patiently for the story to fold in on itself and fulfill the prophecy it was always meant to fill: This was always going to happen. He’s been dead since the beginning.
This, he thinks, is his true north.
It was fun.
And by the gods, he had fun.
⊹
There's a funeral of some sorts, people loitering around in black suits and black dresses.
Gojo looks on at Megumi crouching down on a tombstone some distance away from his, carefully placing a bouquet of white lilies in Tsumiki’s grave and praying over it. He finds Shoko looking somberly on next to him, a few respectful paces away. They talk for a bit, Megumi saying something about being thankful and Shoko waving him off, saying it’s nothing, saying he should’ve entrusted Getou to her too. Megumi lingers as he often does, and she gets the hint. Shoko breaks away and makes her way to another secluded grave by an oak tree, on the spot the sun hits first and leaves last. She fishes something out of her bag, and Gojo finds himself laughing, really laughing, when he makes out the familiar logo of a bakery he knew Nanami frequented. A fresh set of curry buns—his favorite—lay on top of his tombstone no sooner, Shoko’s hands lingering just a fraction as she imprinted the scene to her memory.
An incense stick for the other fallen sorcerers. A Fushimi Inari keychain for Mechamaru. A single red rose for Yaga.
When they get to him, Gojo swears he doesn’t cry. He swears he doesn’t feel the insides of his throat choke up and threaten to spill his soul out from inside him and dominate their grief. He swears he held the tears, held them through that initial wave of burning in his eyes as it kept clambering to get out. But when he feels Nanami slowly slide up a handkerchief toward him in silence and understanding: that’s how he knows none of it held.
Gojo was a dam breaking. They were all six feet under, but: he couldn’t have sunk lower then.
So he thinks, blinking up at the sky, a plead in his water-rimmed eyes:
Can you give me a minute? he asks. I didn’t think I’d ever have to grieve myself.
He will miss this life. He will want more out of it, if they wanted him. He would have stayed a little longer, laughed a little harder, maybe sat down for a meal with his students one more time: if they wanted him. There was still so much he wanted to do, places to go and experiences to live through and people to love. He will miss living, will miss smiling, will miss crying; will even miss the loneliness of what it meant to be the greatest in what he did and having no one to share the weight with. It's a heady little thing, he thinks, this weight: but he's used to it.
Mostly he wants to hug a younger version of himself and not have it mean anything. Not anything at all.
"How do the dead live on?" Gojo asks.
"One day at a time," Getou says.
The grief is going to stay, it's going to burrow itself deep into the chambers of his heart he thought he had bottomed out from loving all of this world and all of life he had nothing left for himself. When he thinks it's stopped, when he thinks he couldn't possibly hurt more and bruise harder than this, it will come to him again: a new landing, a new level, a new barometer for mourning. He will sink into it again and again, the gravity of the sorrow pushing past his chest and choking him underwater even six feet under.
It's not fair, he thinks, I found love.
I found love and I was loved.
Only he knows some days that won't be enough. Some days he will find violence wrap around his skin like a snake does to its prey, choking and gripping and asphyxiating on every tendon until they crack.
But today—
Today when the sun stains golden on the kyoju trees in the graveyard, and the falling petals are a lovely backdrop to the spring of his students' youth, Gojo decides not to let the pain win.
Grief is being cradled back into the arms of his mother, a quiet lullaby humming through the tunnels of his ears as gentle hands somber him to sleep. It’s coming home not to a place, not to a person, not even to an idea: but coming home to himself and the place he made in a world that denied him. It’s coming to terms with the fact he did everything he could to love a world that resented him for it.
It’s a homecoming and homeseeking and homedeparting.
Death is the sound of hummingbirds in the forest in summer, the smell of a beach day clinging to his skin, the bells of a bicycle tolling as they laugh their way into the busy intersection. It’s a popsicle melting off his fingertips as he licks the sugar clean. It’s splitting a watermelon five ways and playing rock-paper-scissors on who gets to break it open with just their hands. It’s the wind in his hair and the song in his chest. It’s the sunscreen Shoko forces him to wear and the midnight konbi runs with Getou. Death is the blue spring, and he has finally come back home.
So they will go on every day, sewing their longing to thread, before disappearing into the sun.
Because what's in a god anyway?
Today, he wins.
「ここで永遠に / 居眠りにつく / 最愛の / あなた」
Some years into the future and an entire ocean of hurt away, you meet a boy on the streets just outside of Shinjuku station. The lights stream in from the gaps in the pine trees, the air crisp with a dozen opportunities in a city as big as Tokyo. It engulfs you for a bit, so you don’t see where you’re going, you don’t notice you bump into him. This boy with the white hair and eyes the color of a river pond. As your shoulders graze, he turns, and the light shifts with him; and then you stare at this beautiful boy who has the light of the sun shining down on him and graceful hands that you don’t know have only known violence.
He is beautiful. He will die. You will mourn for him, die with him, die for him: and yet he will still be beautiful.
He is the sun on the shine of the earth and the gravel beneath the underbelly of the world. He is Gojo Satoru, who is in love with the world and has only ever died loving it. You brush past him, say sorry, say you didn’t mean to. He will say not to worry, happens to everyone. You don’t know it then but he will change your life in ways you didn’t even know possible. It feels like kismet, this chance encounter you’re having, and for a moment you are stunned out of saying anything in return. But the boy, you think, is used to this starstruckness, even gives you a knowing grin in turn as a friend of his with black hair nudges him along. You keep trailing them until they round a corner where a girl with brown hair is waiting, looking annoyed at being made to wait. The boy doesn’t turn back to give you a second glance, but he waves: a gentle gesture against the wind and lasts barely a second that you blink twice to make sure it was meant for you. If it was meant for anything. If it even meant something.
But before you can say anything, someone squeezes your shoulder. It’s your grandfather, who finally made it all the way down the steps, who had a limp in his leg and a knot in his heart you ventured out into the big city to fix. He uses you as a walking cane and you guide him gently along the sidewalk. As he does, you still look around and wonder if anyone else saw god like you did. But they don’t. They don’t see him. Tokyo really is a big, scary, wonderful place.
And there’s no way you could have known, not really, that he is going to be an even more beautiful boy who dies in ten years. But that’s not all he’s going to be: he’s going to be a teenager lost in the throes of his grief and anger, a twentysomething navigating his purpose in the world, a teacher who finally finds it. He will be breathtaking and bloody and golden and kind, but what he will be the most of, is his best. This beautiful boy will try his best at living every single day because he will know the world doesn’t end at seventeen: it wickers the tape back into its original melody as he dances to the tune of life again at twenty-seven. You will feel sorry for yourself for losing him, but you will feel even more sorry that he ever had to.
I have love and dreams too, he will tell you one day.
He will tell you he’s never lost a fight in his life. He will tell you he’s the strongest. He will tell you religion itself has nothing on him. He will tell you all of these things and you have to figure which is the four lies and the one truth and hope you never be proven right. He will give you the world on a silver platter as he chases away the crumbs for himself.
People are going to grow up and forget me, he will keep going. Only then, when you know everything you do, you will want to say back: I’ve known you long before I even knew you, and I will remember you. I will remember you.
Your name is Itadori Yuji, and your story has just begun.