Chapter Text
Suguru Geto was dead. He’d died, and left a husk Satoru’s six eyes could not possibly differentiate from the person who was once his best friend.
Satoru Gojo (Gojo? Satoru? Which one should he use to refer to himself? Which one could accurately describe himself?) turns the unwrapped hard candy, long since melted in his hand, long since sticky and long since desirable over in his palm, as he sits in the back of a vacant classroom and his posture uncharacteristically reclusive.
Over. and over. And over. Over over over and over over over and over.
He barely registers the heavy, familiar slide of the classroom door, opening and closing and the seat next to him being filled with the weight of another person.
He barely registers the scented sugar rubbing off on his palm, sticky and sickly sweet in scent, penetrating his senses in a way Satoru is not accustomed to. Since when had he turned off his infinity? Just now? Always? He doesn’t remember. Doesn’t care.
Without his infinity, Satoru feels much too exposed. He recognises that scent. From where? It’s safe. Familiar. Too familiar. He shivers. He now realises just how cold all the classrooms in Jujutsu tech must be in the winter, realises why his friends (friends?) must wear so many layers this time of year when he was always toasty naturally.
(Did he always have it that much easier than others?)
“Gojo.”
A voice, calling a name. His? His. He does not answer.
“Gojo!”
Gosh, how persistent. You’d think they were in love with him, the way they-
“...Satoru.”
Ah.
“Mmh?” A noncommittal hum. That’s all she deserved.
A sigh issues from her.
It’s not fair, really - how nice her voice gets to sound, for someone so plain and boring. It didn’t fit. For such a plain and boring person, she should be destined for a forever plain and boring voice that made people snore and forget about her right after so she’d have to be stuck in some stupid, non-jujutsu job like accounting for the rest of her plain and boring life. That’s what she deserves.
So…
“You didn’t visit.” He croaks out, his face purposely angled away from her to stare at the other side of the classroom where Utahime is not. “I thought you would.”
A huff, this time. “I came when I could. We all have our own lives too, you know. The world doesn’t revolve solely around the treasure that is Satoru Gojo.”
“Doubt it.”
“Oh, you…” Despite everything, Satoru can feel himself smile against the fabric of his sleeve. (The uniforms here are rougher than the expensive silks and cotton he’d have been treated to back home.)
Was this what he'd really been craving all this time? A taste of normal? Between all the pitying glances he received nowadays, and the others always being even more busy with missions now that Suguru had screwed off to go play monk, there really was no normal anymore. This was his new normal.
No, then. A taste of how things used to be.
“Bummer.” He mutters outloud. Utahime’s brow further furrows.
“Bummer? What are you mumbling about this time?” Huh. “And - Oh, for the love of everything-”
The half dissolved, probably vile candy is plucked out of his unfolded hand by nimble fingers. He groggily lifts his head and stares at the thief accusingly, with the gaze of someone who’d just been deeply wronged.
“Hey-”
“Here.” She cuts him off, and tosses a handkerchief. It lands in front of his face with a soft floomph. He turns it over in his hands. A light baby blue. Worn out. Obviously well used over the years. “Wipe off your hands. You were getting everything sticky.”
It’s bright, too bright. a high pitched frequency rings so deep inside his ears it might as well be in his skull, and all of a sudden he regrets not bringing his glasses or something to shield his eyes from the world. It’s getting worse as he gets older.
“Don’t want to.” He tosses the handkerchief back carelessly, then buries his head back into his arms. Satoru wants that to piss her off a little. Maybe another huff or something, as she angrily folds up the handkerchief into a neat square and stuffs it back in her bag, muttering something about ‘zero respect for his elders’ under her breath venomously.
Instead, she does nothing. Now he’s the one who huffs and turns over, and she pulls a book (probably about something that only old people would be interested in) out of her bag and reads it next to him in comfortable silence, with the composure of a nun.
Damn.
A comfortable silence falls over them for the next ten-ish minutes, only punctured by the occasional turn of a page or a deep intake and release of breath from Satoru even though he’s not exactly sure when he’d fallen asleep. He can’t remember what he dreams of either. Something with swirling kaleidoscope colours and a vague whisper persisting in his ear no matter how many times he told it to fuck off, like he was currently tripping balls on the biggest acid trip mind-fuck of his life.
By the time he wakes up, it’s dark out. Everyone was surely asleep in their dorms, including Utahime.
And yet, when he turned around, there she was. Exactly in the same spot she’d been when he fell asleep, but changed into a pair of comfortable looking sweatpants and a plain white tee. Her hair is tied back in a loose ponytail.
“You left.” He accuses her, voice scratchy from just waking up. He sounds more hurt than he’d been meaning to let known. She rolls her eyes.
“To change into pajamas and get some snacks for myself. The miko get-up gets dirty if I leave it too long without washing.”
True to her word, Utahime is slowly peeling what was probably the source of his rude awakening. Her much too thick book is balanced precariously in front of her so she’s still able to read, as she tosses chunks of mandarin skin into a plastic bag she’d taken the liberty of bringing along with her and filling the air with a smell that’s almost as sweet as the tune she’s humming under her breath. He’s even more sensitive to scents with his infinity down. The sharp, citrusy scent released from the oils of the peel cuts through the stale classroom air like a katana being flicked through a sheet of paper, and it has the added side effect of chipping away at Satoru’s persistent grogginess and making him more alert by the minute.
“You still left.” He’s sulking now. Really sulking. Her dumb skirt could have waited. So what if she stank tomorrow. He’d just buy another one for her. She has no excuses.
“Oh, grow up.”
Hmph.
She’s started separating the pieces now. The fibers of the mandarin segments produce low sounds of resistance as they’re worked apart, and Utahime pops one in her mouth while putting the rest in a pile as she begins to take the white stringy stuff off their exteriors. Too much time to kill, Satoru supposes.
A bit of juice sprays onto the table. And then, entirely against his will in what was probably the universe’s doing just to spite him, his stomach fucking growls. Not quietly either. Loudly, like he’d stored a pissed off vacuum cleaner in his stomach to activate at this specific moment because god knows why. Like an actual dog.
Utahime doesn’t notice. Or if she does, she doesn’t react. His face burns. He almost wishes she had, just to rip the band-aid off.
When she’s done, she doesn’t eat any of the mandarin pieces. Instead, she leaves them as a pile on her table, perfectly peeled, and picks up her book again with both hands as she regains the ability to read properly.
Satoru watches her hazel eyes flick back and forth across the page. She resumes humming her tune.
Must be a really good book. She doesn’t bat an eye at him swiping a piece of fruit off her pile and shoving it in his mouth before she’s able to stop her.
And two. And three. And four.
The juice that envelopes his tongue is sweet in a way that’s different from the various candies he’d been gorging himself on the past few days, the only thing he’s bothered to stomach as of late. They were easy to indulge in. Unwrap, chew, lick, slobber, whatever, and go.
But the mandarin segments are fresh in a way he isn’t used to, and it’s only when Satoru swipes the seventh piece that he realises there are no more left. He pushes away the slightly uncomfortable feeling. Whatever. She wasn’t even eating them anyways. Who peels a perfectly good mandarin just to leave it on the corner of your table while you read the freaking dictionary or something?
He glances over. Utahime still hasn’t said anything. Her eyes aren’t moving across the page anymore. A really good book then, he decides.
Another hour passes before one of them finally throws in the towel.
Utahime speaks first. “It’s getting late.”
Satoru isn’t the one to notice how late it is, or the one to care - he’s perfectly content with half his face smushed against the cold table, watching Utahime read her book as time itself seemed to become irrelevant.
He thinks to himself more than a few times that he’d be more than happy to stay like this forever. He wonders if she’s thinking the same. Probably not. The bitter thought crosses his mind of her going back to Kyoto and kissing it up with some other guy that would objectively be inferior to him in every way shape and form. What did he have that Gojo didn’t?
But whatever. He just felt really bad for whichever poor bastard would end up stuck with Utahime of all people forever.
“You can sleep here.” He hates how pleading he sounds. She’d get jumped if she tried to head back now. Or something like that. Whichever got her to stay. “Shoko could bring you some blankets?”
“And you?” A questioning eye is cast his way. “Are you just going to sleep on that desk until you fuse with the chair?”
He shrugs. Not the worst idea he’s ever had.
“I’ve always wanted to see life through the eyes of a table.”
“Shut up.” Utahime starts ruthlessly packing her things. Satoru could’ve sworn he saw her cheeks redden for a second. “You need sleep. Go back to your room and put a blindfold on or something for your vision. You look terrible.”
“Rude. Shouldn’t you be telling me how wonderful I look to lift my spirits? I'm grieving, you know.”
“I’m going to be grieving if I have to attend your funeral when you keel over from lack of sunlight like the world’s most miserable vampire.”
It's very tempting for Satoru to point out that if he were a vampire, his health wouldn’t be affected by not going outside. Nor would he have the capacity to simply keel over. At most, he’d burst into flames at the sight of a cross.
Utahime is done packing now. Satoru watches with his eyes narrowed, but says nothing. He genuinely feels like his head might explode at this rate. Something sinks deep in his gut.
“I’m serious, Gojo.” She looks genuinely concerned now. He doesn’t like seeing her concerned. “Go to sleep. Have some breakfast. Go for a run. You’ll feel better.”
He’s not sure if anything could really make him feel better anymore, but her just being here was coming pretty damn close. It's definitely doing more for him at the moment than the very concept of going for a run.
He furrows his brow. Then looks away. “You stopped using my first name. Why? I mean… it’d be weird if you went back now. Just call me Satoru.”
Utahime stops in the doorframe, but doesn’t look back.
“...I’ll ask Yaga-sensei about you tomorrow. You better have gone back to your dorm and slept. I’m not kidding.”
Utahime closes the door after her, and all that she leaves for Satoru to even confirm she was there at all and not a product of his mind, is a faint scent of citrus and jasmine trailing behind.
He stares at the closed door. Then closes his eyes once the lights get too much again. Then takes a deep breath of citrus in.
Gojo Satoru had always wanted what he could never have.