Chapter Text
Chapter one: The Stolen Gojo Corpse Arc: Prologue
1
Tick, tick, tick.
Kami’s relationship with Shoyo Satori is a bittersweet one.
Tick.
Kami sometimes watches her go about her life when he’s bored, and she sometimes passively thinks of him from time to time, in varying degrees of scorn and abstract curiosity. I wonder if Kami is a DILF?
Tick.
Satori thinks about him more frequently in the moments he is watching over her though, which does make the exchange always underline with a hint of amusem*nt for him, like he’s almost somehow a part of the conversation for once. That didn’t normally happen with humans, the almost being able to pick up on the presence hovering just out of their reach.
Tick, tick, tick.
What have I done to forsaken you, Kami? Satori curses in her thoughts one day, rolling around back and forth on the floor with her foot held in both of her hands. There are shiny tears welling in the corners of her eyes as she looks up towards the ceiling of her bedroom in despair and unknowingly, in his amused direction.
She had just stubbed her toe pretty violently on the metal frame of her bed. Not for the first time , and probably not the last. ( But maybe this will be the last time , Kami absently considers.)
He watches the girl wiggle around in pain on her bedroom floor in the dark with something that feels almost like fondness, his chin resting in the palm of his hand as he stares down at her place on earth. That’s what happens when you walk blindly in the dark after all, but does that ever stop the silly girl from doing it?
Satori grumbles to herself, and unknowingly to him, as she gingerly crawls off the floor to sit down on her bed. I hate you! But I don’t really want to go to hell for saying that… My toe hurts. I’m not a total idiot, anyway, Kami doesn’t even exist…
The girl pauses at her own thoughts, seemingly having already forgotten the pain of her stubbed toe even though she’s still absently running her hands up and down her socked foot in soothing motions. Unless…?
Tick.
Kami finds Shoyo Satori entertaining in a way he hasn’t found a human being in quite some time.
Tick.
That's how he explains away his interest to himself. It explains why he catches himself watching the numbers tick down above the girls head with a growing frown as the days tick on by. Tick. Shoyo Satori’s sixteenth birthday is just around the corner, after all. Tick, tick.
Her death date.
Tick.
Mah, who is he kidding?
2
Tokyo Metropolitan Jujutsu Technical High School, Japan
When Gojo Satoru opens his eyes, he wishes he didn’t.
He blinks them back shut in regret but it’s too late now, he is awake, and instead of sleep that greets him when he closes his eyes again, it's the sight of a blade sticking through the center of his sister’s skull, the sharp tip shines in a glare against the sunlight as it pokes through her right eye.
The seemingly endless record of the hundreds of hands clapping in his ears reaches a crescendo, an incorrigible wave of sounds that makes him scream at the top of his lungs in his own head to drown it out. Not that they listen.
In one calculated strike, one careless drop of his Infinity, his entire life was savagely ripped apart right in front of him not once, but three times.
First, when Satoru drops his Infinity from around them beneath the Torii, and his sister is immediately stabbed through the head as consequence. Blood is suddenly splashed hot across his face, blurring the vision in one of his eyes as he can only stare and stare and STARE at the blade poking out of Satori’s eye. The smile she had been directing at him drops from her expression with a split second of lag.
That split second haunts Satoru, it wakes him up in the middle of the night in cold, sweaty tremors and sends him running to make it to the toilet before he pukes.
Second, when Satori’s killer immediately mocks Satoru about his success in killing her with loud, euphoric laughter.
The man nearly trembles with his titillation over being able to take down one of The Strongest Sorcerer’s with a completely normal, uncursed weapon. He then proceeds to murder Satoru too with finesse, grinning like an absolute demon in the flesh.
Except, unlike his sister, Satoru was the chosen one. Not Satori.
Satoru became a god in that moment, he defied death and rose up in his corpse as if nothing had happened because of his Six Eyes. Satoru figured out how to access true divinity and when he does it’s five minutes too late, and he wakes up, and when he does-
Third, it is only when Satoru is carrying Riko Amanai’s corpse, her lifeless body hidden from the eyes by a thin white sheet. They are clapping so loudly around him he can’t even hear himself think, there’s a loud rushing in his ears he thinks might be his own pulse, at some point he finds Suguru’s unfathomable eyes out of the many in the crowd and can’t look away. Satoru might collapse on the spot all of sudden otherwise.
Because there wasn’t even a body left for them to mourn for Gojo Satori.
Her murderer had taken it along with him like a hunter might show off a pair of antlers, or worse, and along with it went the last remaining bits of Gojo Satoru’s faith in humanity.
And the person responsible for it all?
Fushiguro Toji.
Satoru is going to avenge his sister and slaughter Fushiguro Toji even if it kills him, and there is going to be a smile on his face while doing it.
The clapping might never stop otherwise.
3
Twenty-three hours later. Kyoto, Japan
Shoyo Satori opens her eyes with a jerk when a sudden flare of pain volts through her right eye, like the heavy hammer of nail directly through her brain. Kami!
It wakes her from a dreamless sleep like a slap to the face, a freezing cold bucket of water being dunked over her, consciousness greets her like an angry, old friend.
Satori closes her eyes immediately again while deeply groaning, clutching at her skull with both hands as her entire brain pulses at a tempo like a rapid heartbeat, one foul beast of a migraine is wreaking havoc inside her head. Uuugghhhhhh.
“I need some tylenol.” Satori mumbles between another groan of discomfort as she curls into herself further in her bed under the blanket, at least the room is near pitch black around her, she feels like she would hiss away from any hint of sunlight right now, like some sort of Vampire awoken from a deep, eternal slumber. I vant to suck down an entire bottle of painkillers. Bah!
What even happened last night? Satori struggles to recollect the memories through the pounding in her head. She can’t remember ever having felt so awful before. Uugh. Kami. Why do I feel like this is all your fault?
Did she drink too much or something? Wouldn't be the first time . It probably won’t be the last, either. What can Satori say? She’s a creature of habit.
But if drinking was going to render her into- This - Then she might be forced to reconsider finding a different hobby. Satori has never felt more hungover in her life, maybe someone had slipped something in her drink at the party? But had she been out with Asuna? I can’t remember…
“You still awake,” Satori jolts in fright. Her head whips around on instinct as her eyes snap open again and blink a bunch of times, towards the darkest corner of the room. Towards the gravelly, intimidating voice that sends pinches of fear and utter confusion through her nervous system. “Brat?”
That was definitely the voice of an older man, there was that roughness in the throat they got only with age and enough packs of Malboros. Satori is starting to realize she might not even be in her own bed at all; in fact, the blanket is far thinner than her comforter, now that she really feels it.
Before she can so much as squeak out a response, the dark corner shifts again and Satori realizes with alarm that the man simply walks forward closer to the bed. How long had he been standing in the dark corner watching her for?
The barest amount of visibility is offered because of the closing distance, but the man stops as he reaches the end of the bed and if her legs weren’t already curled to her chest, Satori would have yanked them up by now. What the fu-
“Did you date rape me?” Satori asks with a scratchy, uncertain voice after a beat of silence, the thrum of her pulse beating away wildly in her throat. As she asks the question though, she’s not entirely sure if she wants to know the answer anymore. Sometimes ignorance really can be bliss, and she thinks, this might finally be one of those times.
She gives the man a completely suspicious, slightly harrowed look, hesitantly wrapping her arms around herself protectively as she looks up and down his shadowed form in the dark. Satori isn’t naked, but she also can’t recognize these clothes she’s wearing that feel stiff and a bit torn in places, and there's a sticky feeling of something dried all over her skin, the pounding in her head like withdrawal.
“Nah.” The man grins slowly, and there’s a pucker of the thick scar she can see faintly from in the darkness along the corner of his stretching mouth, a flash of teeth peeks. It makes the entire look almost feral, and no less intimidating in the slightest. It feels like her heart could burst free from her chest at any moment. “I’m not into ugly women. Sorry.”
Satori does a dubious double take at his deep, viciously amused tone as a tongue peaks between the man’s teeth, teasing. The upper half of his face is completely swallowed up by the darkness of the room, obscuring the rest of his expression from her view.The abrupt movement of her head, however, sends a fresh wave of pain convulsing through her eye and Satori can only clutch at it desperately, digging the heels of her hands as far into her eye sockets as she can, groaning in misery instead of a response.
Kami-sama. I’m sorry. Tears pool in the corners of her aching eyes and Satori just barely remembers to breathe between flashes of agony ripping at her from the seams as she curls up tighter in the bed. She can barely hear her ragged breaths between the pounding of her blood rushing through her head. It feels like a knife is being stabbed over and over and over over and over into her skull-
I must have been a bad person. Whatever I did to deserve this, it must have been really, really bad. Kami. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
Kami.
Are you even listening anymore?
“You’re so annoying.” Satori jolts as the man suddenly speaks through the hammering between her ears.
Satori tries through numb limbs to push the man away but she’s unable to resist the strength of the arms wrapping around her suddenly, holding her against him. The man had gotten into the bed with her at some point in her whining, wrapping his arms around her as he turned them onto their sides. With her back to his stomach, his entire form nearly curls over her, an iron cage.
With her arms forced to cross over her chest, being held almost tenderly by a gruff, creepy stranger in the dark for some unfathomable reason, Satori can only submit to unconsciousness tugging at her, promising to kiss away the searing pain inside her skull, threatening to crack in two under the pressure.
“Just go back to sleep, brat.” He huffs and it is not entirely unkind, the heat of his breath brushes over the bangs on her forehead as he tucks his chin to rest on the top of her head.
Satori closes her eyes, and forgets it all, if only for a while.
4
Nature always finds a way to balance its equilibrium. When Gojo Satoru was born, a child with The Six eyes, the strongest sorcerer in over four centuries, he wasn’t alone-
Nature created his ‘perfect counter’-
Gojo Satori.
Renowned for being The Second Strongest, it was Fushiguro Toji who now knew the real truth of the matter. He was the only one, after all, to watch the little monster pull a machete out of her own skull like it were merely a sliver.
Well, maybe not merely a sliver. After the brat pulled it free, as if in some sort of trance, it clattered to the path and she simply sat there, staring blankly at the ground. There wasn’t a single thought behind those pretty blue eyes of hers, dull in a way only death becomes a person, but there she was, sitting up and breathing. Like some useless vegetable, sure, but she was just sitting there.
What can Toji say? He’s always enjoyed gambling, even if he was never any good at it. It was always only the plans that worked out for him, meticulous, and as easy as it is for him to put those together, it’s almost more fun to just, not.
So he hadn’t really thought about it when he shrugged and approached the brat. Gojo Satoru and Riko Amanai were both dead, Getou Suguru quickly following behind. He could have just killed the brat but he was in a particular mood, high on his success. Toji grinned as he left the unconscious teenager behind to bleed slowly to death, next to the vessel he failed to protect. I better get a nice bonus for this.
“Oh, you’re still alive?” The brat doesn’t so much as twitch as he approaches, that completely lifeless expression on her blood splattered face, staring at the ground as if she couldn’t do anything else. The red smears a strange, speckled halo of red dye in her white hair, fading to an almost pink in some places, the most prominent amount having gushed from her eye where the blade had poked through. The entire right side of her face is bathed in blood, and even though he can’t even see the white of her right eye because of the blood, he can notice the distinct lack of a hole where a machete had poked through.
This brat, Toji can’t help but remember the one other time he met the infamous Gojo twins. Back when they were still tiny brats in middle school, held in the palm of their handlers.
A young girl, the perfect reflection of her twin all white haired and blue eyed, pauses before looking over her shoulder. They make eye contact and she stares right back at him, even though her brother continues to ramble at her animatedly from beside her, seemingly oblivious to her shift in attention.
Before that moment, nobody had ever noticed him standing behind them. And she had simply looked away from him after a moment and kept walking with her oblivious handler and brother, smiling widely at whatever the kid was babbling about at a mile a minute.
This brat really is a monster.
So he doesn’t really think about it when he takes her with him as he leaves. Just like he clearly wasn’t thinking when he decided to cross their hotel room and get in bed with the brat, to try to comfort her, even though he’s the perfect counter to all things comforting to anyone but his dead wives, and even they had thought he was a useless bastard on a good day.
“Panda?” Now here he was, with an assumed dead Gojo brat in his arms, muttering something stupid even in her sleep, the idiot. She really is annoying. Toji feels like he both just won and lost the best bet he’s ever made.
I wonder how much Gojo’s go for on the black market? He shifts to look down at the girl at his thoughts, almost as if willing her to hear them and wake up already. Man, this is getting boring.
Toji rolls his eyes as the kid only mutters unintelligibly, smiling a bit to herself in her sleep. He looks away from the expression, tucking her head back under his chin and even though the kid reeks of her own spilt blood, it’s not the worst embrace he’s ever had.
He sighs as the girl almost huffs some sort of laugh in her sleep. It’s far more tolerable than that annoying crying, at least. Toji closes his eyes, aiming to get some rest as well.
I’ve made a huge mistake.
5
What a selfish Kami he is, to tempt fate like this. But as Shoyo Satori draws her last breath and Gojo Satori inhales her first, he can’t muster a single regret.
And just like that, the clock stopped ticking for her all together.
