Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

On December 7th, 1989 Gojo Satoru is born with dull blue eyes, so dull they're almost black, and white hair. There's nothing special about this birth except how not-special it is. The child is horrifically ordinary. His parents insist on the horrific part. Being who they are, being the Gojo clan, something should've come about. Maybe they weren't going as far as hoping for the Six Eyes and Limitless but, they had been expecting a hearty sorcerer. Gojo Satoru is the most disappointed out of the clan actually, not from dashed hopes but from knowing, from birth, that something has already gone horribly wrong and he has lost more than the small heart he carries can bear to hold.

The child is a big crier for his first few years.

"What are we going to do with him?" Gojo's mother asks her cousin. Her cousin shook her head and gave a soft exhale. 

"I'm sorry to say this about something you made, Saki, but he's kinda an embarrassment. Were you drinking during pregnancy or something?" Her cousin asks, not as unkindly as the words sound. The two have practically been raised to be sisters and while misogyny didn't run as rampant in the clan as it did in Zenin, it had provided enough of a struggle for them to bond with each other against.

It had also taught them how to dehumanize others in order to set themselves above others within their complicated household hierarchy, 5 year old sons being no exception. 

Sakiko gave a soft glare back at her cousin. "Of course, I didn't drink. Though Heaven knows what is wrong with his father."

Kame shrugs in response and the conversations lulls as the two women ponder over what to do with such a useless child. 

"Well, he can still see curses. Being a window would be fine, solid job security, always need more." Kame offers after some thoughtful consideration.

"Good mortality rate too." Sakiko says without any real bite to it. She doesn't really resent the child, his general cuteness and quietness (after age 2 that is) did a lot to earn him some fondness. He was obviously smart too, taking in everything, listening to everything, noticing things that most adults would be able to pull over a child. But with little talent to be a sorcerer he was just another burden to her. A better burden than his father, who she couldn't care less for, but a burden still. 

"He's smart at least." Sakiko offered up. 

Kame hummed in agreement. "You could always send him out with the monkeys, he could make some good money for the clan at least, doing whatever it is they do to make money out there."

"Not a bad idea. We'll see how smart he can prove himself to be then." And with that their conversation carried on to other gossip around the estate.

Satoru had heard every word from where he pretended to play outside. He did this often, realizing long ago adults truly say just about anything in front of a kid who seemed occupied. 

Playing with monkeys sounded better than being here, he thought to himself.

On February 3rd, 1990, Getou Suguru is born. If there's a sense of deja vu in the air, no one really notices due to the general chaos of birth and the infant that screams for longer than any nurse there has ever heard. Everyone agrees the child will be very healthy, lively, strong.

Memories fade with time and small bodies can only hold so many memories. That's why childhood feels like a blur of a few significant moments. The brain is busy with an ever-changing and ever-growing body. The body is busy being shoved around by the world. The person occupying this chaos thus only tunes in for key moments every day and then categorizes those key moments into "forget" or "remember" and the days stretch on like that for years. 

So despite the fact that both Getou Suguru and Gojo Satoru feel like they're forgetting something huge, often feeling is out of place and emotions are randomly running haywire, they don't get answers as to why this is for many years.

It's easy to chalk up feeling out of place and neurotic when everyone treats you as such.

Gojo wakes up with a migraine. He sees and feels doubles of everything, in front of him simultaneously is a 30 year old body and his 13 year old one. His entire body and consciousness feels like a phantom limb. 

He stumbles to the mirror in his room first. Despite knowing this reflection for 13 years, it's jarring now.

Dark blue, haunted blue. 

He runs from his room and heads to his nearest sanctuary, a forgotten part of the woods on the Gojo estate. Early morning light creeps into the sky.

Up in the trees, Satoru stares at the world and plays his whole life backwards, forwards, and around. Looking at his life from every direction again and then again.

He doesn't come back until the last red and orange slivers of light leave for the day. He gets an earful from his mother for playing hooky that he rolls his eyes at, resulting in getting a sharp slap upside the head and denial of dinner. The beginning of his teenage emotions start to crash over him but he's steeled himself against much, much worse and shuts it all down instead. 

It took a full day to come back to himself but he knows full well who he is now, Gojo Satoru, the weakest sorcerer in jujutsu history.

At age 15 Geto Suguru wakes up from the worst and longest dream he will ever have. 

It's too vivid, too detailed and long to have been just a dream, but as he runs to check on his parents and siblings in the wee hours of the morning, watching them breathe quietly in their beds, he can't bring himself to accept that it was fully real either. 

Did he? Would he? Really?

That night he had gone to sleep a boy excited and nervous to start school at a place where he may finally get to meet people who understood him. But that didn't mean he harbored any ill resentment towards the family that didn't understand him. He grieved the fracture in their lack of understanding the way kids who have language barriers to their parents grieve. He still loved them. 

Well, he had gone to sleep still loving them. 

He searched and dug within his chest for the same feelings he harbored in that long and horrible dream as he stared at his parents sleeping. 

It just couldn't. 

He startled at the feeling of water streaming down his face. Silently as he came, he left the room and went back to his own and stared at the sunrise. 

Maybe it was all some jujutsu nonsense he would learn at the school, he tried to assure himself. 

He prayed the characters of his dreams wouldn't be there.

Satoru had always done as he pleased, it was just harder to do that now. But when he woke up with all of himself back together again at 13 he had spent only half the day processing. The rest he had spent planning out how to still get to do as he pleased. 

It didn't matter if the world didn't rest on his shoulders anymore. If everyone who died was living now. There wasn't a single reassurance in the world that could stop him from going down the jujutsu path once again. 

No one was offering any reassurances anyhow. 

Megumi and Tsumiki were out there. His students. Amanai Riko. His old classmates and coworkers. 

He was out there.

The jujutsu world as it was right now would tear them all to pieces again. Not just Kenjaku and Sukuna, they succeeded as far as they did because the jujustu world already worked to their advantage. It was uncaring and threw sorcerers at curses like bullets. Satoru had been their greatest weapon and he had done what he could to pick up the casings that fell along the way, but there were too many. His purpose in teaching the next generation himself was so those bullets could protect each other and become people again.

Satoru had just gotten ahold of this whole teaching and taking care of kids thing. He wouldn't admit it to anyone else, but he didn't have a natural knack for it. It had come to him through a lot of trial and error with Megumi and Tsumiki and even his old students. He had been unobservant, aloof, and callous and had to learn the hard way how that had hurt Megumi and Tsumiki. He had struggled for so long to connect to them the way they needed. To watch out for them the way they needed. 

The way Suguru had needed. 

He was going to be a teacher again, no matter what it took.

There's an urge here as writer and reader, to zoom out here on Satoru's story and put on some montage music. Time to train right? Maki did it and Toji before her and there were acknowledged by anyone who had to actually deal with those forces of nature. No cursed energy? No problem! Just punch your way out of your problems with the sorcer world right?

Right. Except Satoru Gojo's body, at his absolute peak, with decades of training, cursed energy, and a fully grown adult body probably would have still lost an arm wrestle with Maki. 

And now he was working with no training (physically, knowing how to ride a bike meant nothing when you had zero neural pathways to your muscles to make them ride), zero cursed energy, and a scraggly, skinny 13 year old body that was 90% limbs.

Stretching, running, every movement felt strange and off-balance.

He was just trying to do a quick warm-up set of 10 push-ups.

His face was bright red, sweat quickly accumulating as he grunted in frustration.

His arms were shaking. Then his whole body. Before he could count "4" his wrists suddenly gave out and he hit the ground.

Satoru was going to scream. 

'A literal endless prison where time flowed forever was less tortorous and taxing than this,' he thought, glaring at the floor.

Being the scrawny, zero cursed energy kid had turned Satoru into target #1 for every cousin in the sprawling Gojo estate. Most of it was just shit talk which had actually made him laugh the first few times. He'd heard plenty of shit talk in his life, but the classic bully type? The kind that assumed weaknesss? It was so absurd to associate himself as the target of those words it had first hit him as the greatest cosmic joke he'd ever heard.

"Hey, Noodles! Get over here!"

It got old after the nickname had come around. "Noodles" Get it? Because he's pale, white, and thin, scrawny as a noodle. It made him roll his eyes every time.

He came over anyway, it was never worth getting chased down.

"What do you want?" He asked, full brat mode on. Sure technically, he was mentally an adult, but it's not like he had behaved like much of an adult even when body had matched mind.

His cousin, Joko, gave a smile, teeth on full display.

"Your turn to wipe down the courtyard floors." Joko said, shoving bucket and rag into Satoru's arms.

Satoru rolled his eyes.

He really should just keep his head down. He wasn't the all-powerful Gojo clan heir anymore. He wasn't anything at all.

Too bad his attitude never got the memo.

"Sure, it's been a while since I wiped. I only did it yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that." He replied, hand gripping tight onto the bucket and rag.

Joko opened his mouth to retaliate but Satoru interrupted without a care, "But you helped me realize I missed a spot." The bucket water went flying, then bucket tossed as well, just for pettiness sake.

Joko's little brother, Joto doubled over giggling. Joko boiled over like milk, all at once. Satoru was on the ground before he could admire his handiwork with full satisfaction. Oh well, the half second of indignation would be a memory to help him go to sleep for at least a month.

Joko gripped his hair hard and swung with the other hand, right for the money-maker. That's all it took to restart Satoru's fight or flight instinct. Even in his incredibly boring, frustrating, human body, Satoru felt himself come back to life when he was fighting. He definitely wasn't always like that, or maybe he was, he's been mentally alive for... 40 years? Ugh, that was horrific to think about. Mentally, he was middle-aged, in another life he would be crying and moaning over the fact right now.

After Toji and before the last year of his life there wasn't really any fight that felt like a fight to him anymore. Sure, after coming into his full powers he had this euphoria over controlling them, but that soon faded with mission after mission. Making a cursed spirit explode for the thousandth time (with no one around to even praise him anymore!) or even the rare curse user hadn't brought about any emotion in him for some time.

He felt plenty in his battles starting with Shinjuku but-

Distantly he could taste blood in his mouth. But all he really processed was old ground fighting training coming back to him, it was far from smooth but worked fine against a 14 year old boy who wasn't expecting retaliation.

Satoru was above him within a second, and blood was gushing from Joko's face the next second. Adrenaline pumped through Satoru's veins like golden ichor, he felt like his godly-self again.

The moment lasted forever and was gone the next second as Joto jumped in to pull Satoru off his brother. Limbs flew in every direction, with a non-zero chance that the brothers didn't hit each other in their effort to gang up on Satoru.

By the time a nearby adult interrupted the scene his cousins were already sporting impressive bruises, Joko's nose still gushing blood. His teeth stained red too. Satoru sported one impressive cut above his eye, blood flowing from that cut too, but face otherwise clear of injuries. The rest of his body would bloom smaller bruises later.

The winner was clear, though the scolding they all got didn't win Satoru any prizes.

That was until later, when his mother looked over him and his cousins with a guarded look of satisfaction. She said nothing, only shooting a look at Satoru that held too many thoughts for him to decipher.

Did he mention how weird it was to suddenly have a mom now? He was far from untangling those emotions, honestly he probably never would. It didn't feel worth the time it would take.

But he almost felt something akin to warmth to receiving approval from a parent.

It could have just been relief that she didn't take away eating dinner privileges though.

A new idea formed in his mind that night for a training regimen.

He knew what it felt like to be dead for awhile. And now, finally, he felt alive. The following days he struggled to keep the manic grin off his face as he egged another one of his older cousin bullies on, but the look in his eyes was never going away.

Gojo Satoru's parents would have laughed Satoru off the estate if he had suggested going to the jujutsu academy when he was 13.

By 14, they couldn't be more relieved at the prospect to get their problem child off the estate and wash their hands of him forever.

He would be sent off right after he turned 15. Just as before.

The night before Satoru left for the academy (again) a very important thought that he had shoved deep, deep down finally came to the surface in the dark of his room.

He would be at the academy.

Fuck.

Chapter Text

There were obvious and pronounced dark circles under Suguru’s eyes. He was heavily considering stealing his mom’s makeup or something.

He was going to meet his classmates and teacher like this? And it might be the people he saw in his dream? The people who seemed like they would become very important and dear to him, so much so that he was going to burn the whole world down to the ground for them?
“Sugu~” His mother called from downstairs.

His chest clenched. It was strange enough trying to face his family last night when they were unconscious. He had no idea how to handle the awake and talking versions.

Part of him whispered to ignore them, shove them away. They didn’t matter. They were weak. And they would never understand. The whispers carried on as he made his way to his mother and came face to face with her.

She gave him a sad smile that was meant to put up a stronger facade than she was capable of actually putting up.

Nanako and Mimiko flashed through his mind. He still wasn’t sure if they were real. If any of this was real, past or present.

But it felt real.

So much done in the name of justice for his loved ones, and it had ended with him dead and them alone.

There were too many thoughts, too many memories storming through his head. He was looking at his mother but he may as well been blind. He couldn’t see her as she was now.

“Oh, Sugu,” His mother said empathetically, completely misreading the cause of his mental turmoil, “I know it’s going to all be new and strange. And we’ll miss you, of course. But it’ll be okay. This school will help you more than we can, as hard as that has been to admit.”

She took him into a hug.

Suguru still felt that shiver of revulsion. Was it from her being a monkey? From his memories of her dead body? From the general emotional intimacy that no one in his family had expressed often?

He didn’t know.

He weakly hugged her back anyhow. His vision actually going blurry this time.

“C’mon train leaves in two hours. There won’t be another until tomorrow, let’s go. Honey, stop coddling him. He’s 15 and going off to be a big boy in the city. We can’t keep treating him like a kid.”

Suguru’s vision cleared quickly, storm in his chest settling to annoyance, and pushed away from the hug.

His father had been the worst at handling Suguru’s sorcerer tendencies as a child, completely unable to understand. And what could not be understood was yelled at, demeaned, and otherwise punished until it went away.

It wasn’t until the scout from the school had come and explained things to his parents that his father had… softened. He swung as easy as a see-saw from seeing Suguru as a neurotic problem child to seeing him proudly as a blessing. His son would go to a prestigious school! He was even scouted out by the school and going on scholarship!

Suguru wanted to rip that unearned parental pride out of his face.

His father came over to clap Suguru on the shoulder. His face still held that stupid, proud smile.

Suguru’s mind overlaid the look of rigor mortis on his father’s face. His breath hitched.

“Do good over there, I know you will.” The dead man said.

In a stupor, Suguru absently nodded. The dead man nodded back and said something about putting luggage in the car.

“Make sure to go say goodbye to your siblings too! Go wake them up for me while you’re at it.”

Suguru’s mind needed to stop reeling before he passed out from dizziness. If his classmates really looked anything like they did in his dream last night, he just might.

In the car with his father, Suguru quietly mulled over killing his father again. It made him shiver at first, the way the thoughts came so easily to him. And the number of them, there were over a hundred ways he could right now, even with his limited cursed spirit inventory now. He sorted them from quickest to longest and pondered over how much time the murder really deserved.

'Could you even call it murder?' A part of him asked.

The brew maelstorm of moral conundrums ended suddenly with his father roughing up his hair, not unkindly.

He looked at the man in open-eyed surprise and met eyes filled with love and pride. Misguided and poorly emoted feelings, but honest and true.

"Your mother and..." His dad started quickly stopped, before swallowing and continuing, "... gonna miss ya. Be good, alright?"

The hand on his head gave a soft pat. Suguru stared blankly.

Overlaid on his father's face where his eyes softly glistened stared the empty, dead eyes of his father from another time. He watched a soft, sad curl of cursed energy float off his father's shoulders.

His father took his shocked silence for shared emotional constipation.

"It's ok to miss us too. Just not too much, it's not like we won't see each other again." He assured.

The train pulled into the station then.

Suguru couldn't remember how he responded, if he did at all, or even getting to his seat. The next thing he was aware of was the familiar rolling countryside from the view of the train line. How many times had he gone this way? He dream from the night before was beginning to blend and blur with reality. He still wasn't quite sure if he believed it to be real. Maybe it was all some sort of sorcery he would learn more about at the school.

The school.

Unbidden memories of the dream’s first impression came rising to the surface.

Yaga’s word-for-word rehearsed class orientation speech that nearly put him to sleep, the lazy smile from Shoko,
him coming in late, mischievous written all over his face, manic smile growing as Yaga ripped into him.

From day one, he had been enchanting. Suguru, even at his most annoyed (which was all he felt for the first two weeks they knew each other), felt pulled to be by his side every moment they were near each other. There was something so energizing just from being in his orbit, he was shocked to realize he never got sick of it.

Suguru quickly caught on that he felt the same pull.

Heaven above, if he was real... 

A lot of the dream honestly felt like a strange nightmare, but the parts with him in it made Suguru pause to call it that. 

Even the ending moments.

Especially the ending moments.

If he was real... 

Scratch passing out during orientation, Suguru felt light headed at the thought of facing him again now.

It was an 8 hour train ride.

Suguru didn’t even pretend to try to close his eyes.

This was the genius plan 15 year old, powerless Satoru Gojo had come up with thus far.

• Actually convince both the academy and his family to let him attend (hence all the fights, honestly he might be better at hand-to-hand combat now than in his past life)
• Go the “Shoko” route by showing off his superior intellect in curse energy research and make himself a valuable academic resource they don’t send out to get rid of curses but keep at the school
• Become a teacher
• Gather up his students again
• Profit?

Where did Riko Amanai come into this though? Or Toji? Did he even have to worry about Toji if he never gets sent out on that mission? Or Kenjaku and Sukuna later on? How do they manifest if things that weren't say directly (he still feels bad about leaving Megumi alone during that mission) his fault, but also definitely happened due to some of his actions?

Or him?

That was all TBD. A decision Satoru arrived to only after a whole year of headaches and heartache. Too much was going to change just by him not having his techniques anymore. He was just going to have to stay vigilant and think on his feet. He had played wrose situations by ear, it only backfired like, a couple times. Not a bad success rate all things considered (he ignores the huge pit of guilt that threatens to swallow him every time his thoughts wander this path).

He was smart.
Kinda.

What he was not good at was dealing with the fact that come tomorrow, he was going to come face to face with a lot of people that once died in his memories.

New year, new Satoru! And new everyone else, whoop whoop!

He briefly considered pulling the same antics he pulled his first go around, because he really would never get tired of Yaga's face slowly turning more and more red as he lectured until he was sputtering more than talking. He would just end it with "GOD DAMN" and tell Satoru to fuck off.

It would be hilarious and a much needed relief.

The problem was the cause of like, 90% of his stress would be there at the same time and while he was certain he wouldn't freeze for a full minute and have his life flash before his eyes again, he was pretty sure he wasn't going to act normal.

Normal for Satoru being deflecting, dissociating, and never addressing the huge monster of emotion that had existed within him for about 2-3 decades, give or take, that threatened to crash down on him and bury him at all times.

Shoko, in their later years, when it was just the two of them would subtly accuse Satoru of being unaware of his deep traumas.

He deflected then too, which didn't help his case. But admitting that he was well aware of them and kept his warring emotions tied up and held at proverbial gunpoint at all times was not actually something he was capable of admitting without at least 7 layers of irony softening the admission.

He had only worked his way up to 5 layers- something to work on in this life for certain.

He mulls over irony layer number 6 for the entire night before school starts, again.

Suguru was on edge. Scratch that, worse, he was balancing between the atoms on a knife point. He was about to be split down the middle. The train ride had been bad enough, with sparse scents of monkeys invading his senses. He had flinched when an employee had tried to ask him something and stared at the leaks of cursed energy falling off like dying leaves. He doesn't remember responding.

The entire campus was disorienting, not because anything had changed, but because nothing had. Fucking old traditional schools and their old traditional layouts making it so both your earliest and latest memories of the place blended together in perfect, gut-twisting harmony.

He was also out of anything to throw up.

He remembered vaguely now that he wouldn't meet his classmates until orientation class tomorrow, he hadn't run into either of them when he moved in the evening before.

But that didnt change the fact that they were still around here. Somewhere.

Well, maybe not him. Suguru wasn't sure if he just didn't move in until the last second or met Suguru and decided to switch dorm rooms to be right next to each other in order to increase his opportunities to menace Suguru. 

A soft smile came to Suguru's face at the thought.

All it took was coming back to where he was, outside his old dorm room to make the smile drop.

In there every memory of deep, dark days of depression and doubt blended together all into one.

Suguru turned. He wasn't doing this right now. There was too much, literally and mentally, to unpack tonight to even touch on those memories as well.

You try waking up at age 15 to discover your path in life is to become a delusional cultist mass murderer.

Ugh, he sounded like a fucking shounen villain when he put it that way.

A part of him argued desperately that he didn't regret it, that he had done it all in the name of justice, for the sake of a better world.

It shut up in front of Gojo's room.

Suguru glanced at his old room one more time.

This felt like the lesser of the two evils for now.

He ignored his option of taking literally any of the other empty rooms in the hall. It didn't even register to him as a real option.

Suguru passed out in the familiar room before his back had even hit the bed.

No dreams this time.

Satoru came to the academy at dawn. 

As apprehensive as he was the night before about having to live this all over again, he was even more ready to put the Gojo estate behind him again as soon as possible. He’d go to his old dorm, get situated, and try to dissociate until it was game time and he had to pretend this was all new to him. 

Easy, he had years of not listening to Yaga anyway. 

Well easy until something went wrong with his genius plan immediately.

He was in his bed. 

“Suguru.”

Suguru woke up to the sweetest sound in the world. 

He didn’t know quite what it was, in the fog of rising consciousness he couldn’t place it. 

Yet he knew it was the sweetest melody he’d ever heard and his body chased it, waking up his mind. His eyes opened and he was already sitting up and facing his dreams again. 

“Satoru.”

Wide, grey eyes stared back at him and the dream fractured.

Satoru could tell it’s his Suguru immediately. 

He’d been barely prepared for a young Geto, one that wouldn’t know or recognize him but at least also wouldn’t know the horrors that Satoru knows. He’s not prepared to see his Geto. For real this time. For certain. He’s not frozen and reminiscing, about to be trapped. 

The thought of being trapped again has Satoru moving before he knows it. Suguru’s face in his hands and inspecting every detail, feeling warm skin beneath his. 

“Satoru.” He breathes again. The world is still. Amidst all the chaos in Satoru’s head, there is a part of Satoru that feels the same as a still, calm lake. There’s peace again. There’s Suguru again. 

“What’s happened to you?” His Suguru asks, voice filled with accusation and venom. 

The world cracks.

This was 

This was not happening. 

A maniacal giggle was crawling through and around Suguru’s body, snaking itself through the breaks in his brain. He held it back, barely.

Gojo Satoru, just as Suguru had seen him the night before in his long, long dreams, stood before him, completely tangible.

And completely wrong .

He has no cursed energy. The weight of the Six Eyes isn’t there. There’s no tingle where their skin touches like Limitless could activate any moment.

This was the funniest and most fucked up joke Suguru had ever experienced. 

His one and only, the strongest of them all, reduced to the same state of a monkey . 

Suguru’s face is being held in a monkey’s hands. 

“What’s happened to you?” 

Suguru searches every inch of the body, of the boy he once knew. It was almost identical to that monkey sorcerer girl. He feels nauseous. 

The hands gently cradling his face grip him fiercely and he looks straight into an unremarkable yet furious gaze.

“If you start waxing on again about hating monkeys or whatever, I’m going to kill you in this life too Suguru, I swear to Heaven.”

Suguru meets the animal’s gaze head-on. “I’d like to see you try this time, monkey .”