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aimfor-theheart · 2 years ago

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Chapter One: Swallow

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Masterlist | <- Prologue: Godlings | Chapter Two: Anything, Everything -> | Read on Ao3

Pairings: Satoru Gojo x f!reader

Summary: And the form leans down, closer, as their voice drops to a murmur, all honey and thorns, the promise of something far greater than you. A storm to come. The future that you will bear upon the slant of your shoulders. And when they speak, you know they’ve cursed you;

“I will teach you how to make a God.”

(Arranged marriage, angst, hurt/comfort, dark content)

Warnings (specifically for this chapter): Parental abuse (emotional and physical), possessive behavior, unhealthy relationships, toxic dynamics, and manipulation. Please be wary of overarching story warnings, too. Let me know if you think I should add any other warnings! **Please mind warnings overall and for each chapter**

Word Count: 10k

A/N: well, here is chapter one (two technically but you get it!) i hope you enjoy! another deep thank you to @lorelune who beta read this chapter as well and has been SO helpful!! i really would love to hear your feedback, questions, gripes, predictions, anything! thank you so much for reading!

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Satoru stands lonesome against the sky, head haloed by the last rays of golden sun.

He is only fourteen but holds all the world on his shoulders. He’s growing into his sharp tongue and wicked smile. His eyes are too bright, hopeful for a future he thinks he can still change and shape to his own vision.

He visits you weekly. You’re confined to your family’s grounds. You’re kept on a tight leash by your father as per requested by the clan. They can’t have you running off or forming your own thoughts quite yet.

You train your technique with other members of your clan, you learn from your aunt on how to be a good wife, your mother tries to shield you from it all. You wander around the garden when you want peace.

Satoru always meets you in the garden.

He has become your friend. Perhaps your only friend at this age. Perhaps yours, only.

He doesn’t greet you with a kiss (you are still twelve, still so young and clueless in so many ways), he doesn’t hug or reach for you.

But he does walk with you, follow you around trees and stone, dogs your steps. He does sit beside you, knee to knee, elbow to elbow.

You call him Satoru by this age. He calls you by your first name.

(By fifteen, you will start shortening his name to Toru. When he is sixteen he begins to call you darling, dear, honey—a joke, in the beginning, for your ever approaching marriage, but then not.)

You go to him now, so he isn’t so lonely against the massive sky behind him.

“You walk so lightly. Like a rabbit. Or a doe.” He says when you brush up against him.

“My father says I should wear a bell.” You reply, “did I startle you?”

But you know the answer before you even ask it. You just want to see his lips lift at the corners.

“No, but you would be cute in a bell.”

Heat engulfs the round slope of your cheeks.

You slug his arm hard enough that he gives an undignified yelp.

He never puts up his guards around you. He lets you hit him and push him and pinch him and tug on his hair. He lets you nudge him and lean against him and play with his hands. At this age, it is still a little childish, rounded with playfulness–flirting, perhaps, but in the way children do, uncertain and wobbly and with a pinch of pain.

You wonder if he’ll bruise beneath his sleeve. You think about leaving a mark on him.

“You’re getting meaner,” Satoru tells you, rubbing his arm, “sharper. More prickly. You’re going to be absolutely evil by the time we’re married–”

“I thought I was a sweet, little rabbit? Or a doe?” You counter, moving past him to the stone steps that will lead down to a small, winding path. He watches you for a moment, before following.

“I take it back. You’re something mean and vicious and quiet.” He says, shoving his hands into his pockets. He is boyish at this age, a little gangly, not quite grown into his ears or his hands. “A fox or a leopard. Something with teeth.”

As you walk ahead of him, you smile, feeling your own teeth emerge behind a tender lip. You turn to stick your tongue out at him from over your shoulder.

He picks up his pace to finally fall into step beside you.

A small stream of water bubbles softly. Koi swim lazily in the wide dip of water.

“I start school in a few weeks.” He says, “I’ve decided I want to move into the dorms to get away from my family a little.”

Your face twists, unsatisfied, a pinch of irritation.

The idea of losing him to high school–to new friends and somewhere further away, where you certainly won’t be able to visit per your father’s strict rules—is horrible to you.

You feel jealousy rise in you like a mountain at the thought that others will have him day in and day out. Jealousy that he will go and you will not; that he can escape his family and you will never be able to. The freedom of a man.

(Of a god–)

More than that, possessiveness steals your breath for a moment. At this age, you can’t name it.

Later, it will sink its claws into you; mine, mine, mine. He is only mine.

“I’ll still visit you,” Satoru says quickly, attempting to soothe you, appease whatever beast he’s awoken in you.

You think he must’ve done this with his mother, too, you think that’s why he knows how to do it.

You’re young and not quite done being hurt. You want to pout. You want all the world to know your pain. You turn away from him, walk a little further off. He follows again and it begins a chase that you lead.

“It’s not too far,” he says, and you continue to wander from him. A sigh leaves you. You pass over a small, wooden bridge.

He follows.

“I said I’d still visit you–”

You lope around a willow tree, careful of its roots.

He cuts to the other side. He stops you from running.

He catches you.

“Every week.” He adds.

You look up into his face, eyes flitting along the glasses over his eyes. He rarely takes them off. In fact, you’ve only seen his eyes a handful of times as he’s gotten older. You know them more from your dreams, from memories that you hold tight to, from the sky at a particular point in the day.

You lift your hand and without a second thought, you tug on the glasses until they fall into your waiting hands.

“Do you promise?” Your voice has an edge that he might catch himself on.

His eyes are all cosmic sapphires, too blue, too bright, too beautiful.

White lashes flutter. He is so soft looking at this age, pretty, with a dash of pink on his cheeks. His wind-chapped lips. Your boy. Yours.

“I promise.”

The world turns, but you think time must stop for you. For him. For just a moment. And you wish it always would, wish you could just keep him and trap him for yourself.

(Time must stop, for gods–)

He encircles your wrist with a big hand and you let him pull you towards him.

He isn’t so tall yet. It’s easy for you to get up into his face.

“Repeat after me,” you say.

And he smiles, “repeat after me.”

“I will always have you,” you say and it’s almost a hiss, almost with teeth. A little heat. Maybe it’s a threat, halfway to a vicious promise.

And he soothes, “I will always have you.”

You feel him squeeze around your wrist, anticipating your next words, craving them, “you will always have me.”

And he promises now, voice gaining a stronger note, “you will always have me.”

You sniff, as if you’re deciding whether to accept him or not. Then;

“And I’ll never forgive you if you don’t keep your promise. I’ll bite you with the sharp teeth you think I have.”

Satoru tosses his head back and laughs, the sun slipping through pearl locks, drenching him in its light. Always so light. His laugh so full and blooming that you want to hold fast to him, to cling to his shoulders, dig your nails into his chest. You want to hear his laugh forever. You want to shout at him because it makes heat blot your cheeks. Because it makes you angry. Because it makes you unreasonably happy.

You push him again. He laughs harder. Chases you when you dart off.

And he never misses a week–but he’ll still let you bite him with your sharp, sharp teeth.

***

Your training intensifies. So does Satoru’s in preparation for school. When you see each other, it’s a brief reprieve. Bags grow beneath your eyes. You don’t think you’ve slept well in days but everything begins to feel like a dream.

Satoru comes up with bruises and scrapes and things his mother says–

“She told me I should be untouchable without my technique.” And, “it’s just the way she shows her love–she says, sometimes it hurts a little. She says, you hurt me, when I gave birth to you, and I still love you.”

And you tell him things your father tells you, “he says it’s all I was born for. All I was made for, was to decipher Time. To know it.” And, “he’s harsh because he has to be, because the world is, and Time will be harsher still.”

But Satoru can make you laugh at least, until your sides hurt. He can drive you crazy, too, until your head spins. At least you are young with him, though, at least he makes you feel your age.

Your mother tells the two of you, watching as you shriek and chase each other in the garden, that it’s good.

That no one should take youth away from young people.

But they will anyway, she knows, they always will anyway.

***

You scour time with your amulet. Some days, you think you are mindless with it, the shell of a girl with swimming eyes that keeps darting in and out of the past. You push for the future and come up empty handed. You push for–

You can’t seem to find the person you first found. They’ve slipped through your fingers, through time.

Still, you’re relentless.

Your mother tries to pull you from your trances. Yanks the amulet from your hands until your eyes clear. You become stronger, though, unwilling to bend to her. Even when she pulls the amulet from your hands, you can still see it, time, swimming in front of you and you hold fast to its untempered currents.

It’s so old, has such a large future, too, that it is nothing like looking into a human’s lifespan. Humans become so quick for you. A blink and you’ve swallowed their whole life.

You snap at your mother, sometimes, wrench the amulet back into your clutches from her.

“It’s mine,” you seethe, “it’s mine.”

She looks as if you’ve struck her, when you act this way. Sometimes she yells back until all the house is filled with it. Until your father intervenes, until he hands you the amulet again.

Until he says, leave her.

(Hindsight is a funny thing. But you’re just a child now and you don’t understand half of it.)

You spend your days in and out of dazes, fever dreams of the past, of the haunting future. Some days you can hardly speak, your mind on fire, your eyes burning.

You cry out of frustration. Your temples throb. Some days you vomit, wretch because you’ve hardly eaten. Some days you end up barefoot, in the back garden, while it storms, staring into this amulet endlessly.

On one of the worst days, your mother calls for Satoru.

And he is the one to pull you from your stupor, yank you from all of time only for you to be met with the skyblaze of his eyes.

And you hiss at him, too.

“Don’t you understand?” You crow, “you know what this is like!”

He pulls the amulet clear from your neck and keeps it from you. You scream and shout and throw a fuss.

The one time he uses his Infinity on you to hold it far from your grasp, your sudden shouts of anger go unearthly quiet.

Tears well in your eyes.

You must look betrayed, because he drops it immediately. But it’s too late and you’re crying like a baby and he’s trying to coo and shush you.

You’re crying like your heart has been broken, like something inside of you, huge and otherworldly, has just split open and ruptured. It gushes, overflows, nearly drowns you at the idea that he would–

That’d he’d use it on you.

Untouchable.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m sorry–look, it’s down.” And he touches your shoulders. Your arms. He lets you take his hands as if to prove to you that you are above his Infinity, you have collapsed it.

You sink your claws into his wrists, dig into them until blood wells to the surface and say through your hitching sobs, through your bared teeth;

“Don’t ever do that to me again.”

***

Your father is desperate for you to look into Satoru’s future. Everyone expects you to. Including Satoru, you think. Especially his mother, who watches you with all the contempt in her heart. Your whole family awaits it, the card you could hold above him, above everyone, all of the world. Your mother, who defends you at every turn, is the only one who does not press you for it. She has never pressed you for dealings of the past or the future.

You can hear your parents argue for the thousandth time about you.

“She has every right not to, if she doesn’t want to.” Your mother’s voice is strong. It’s always been strong. You hope you’ll have her voice one day.

(But you’ll realize no one listens to her still, that it doesn’t matter how great the bark if–)

“Don’t be naive.” Your father snaps.

“Do you want her to go insane?” You can hear your mother’s low hiss of a threat. “She’ll go insane if she sees too many peoples’ future–if she sees his–”

(If there isn’t any bite.)

“I told you she shouldn’t be spending so much time with him.”

“Don’t you want her to be happy?” Your mother pleads, “don’t you want her to be as safe and cared for and loved as she can be with him?”

“I keep her safe here!” Your father’s voice raises. “She has a responsibility!”

“She’s a child!” Your mother shouts back. You can hear the tears in her voice. “She’s just a child! So is he!”

There’s a slam. The pictures on the wall of your room rattle. You have already seen this. And all of their fights, you have seen your mother’s fate.

(He didn’t hit her, if it soothes you, just the wall beside her head. But it scares her enough into quieting, into hiding her teeth–all bark, no bite.)

Your father will lecture you again tomorrow morning. You will bow your head and lie, tell him that Satoru doesn’t let you touch him yet, that he always keeps up his Infinity still. It will buy you time.

Oh, time.

***

“I can’t stand you!” You scream before lobbing the apple in your hand at Satoru’s head.

It doesn’t touch him, thanks to his Infinity.

“You’re so touchy today.” Satoru muses.

“And you’re so annoying!”

“That’s right, because you’re such a dream to deal with–” he says before he can stop himself.

You freeze and he can tell he’s said something he perhaps shouldn’t have. You can tell he regrets it, by the way his mouth opens, then shuts. He’s always been good for this, little one liners that are snippy, snarky.

He’s like his mother in that way.

You have tea with her, on occasion.

And she’s beautiful like him and untouchable. She says things like, you’re a scrappy little thing, aren’t you? Like, your hair could use a trim. And, didn’t your mother teach you to dress?

You can feel tears welling in your eyes. But before they can fall, you snap at him, “get away from me.” Before he can see you crying, you turn away from him and storm off, deeper into your garden. Your garden that has always cradled you.

Instead, he lurches towards you, “don’t be like that–”

You can feel him hot on your heels, taking quick strides to try and catch up with you.

You want to make it hurt worse. You want to reduce him to these tears that prick your eyes. It isn’t fair, you think, to have this heart, and this boy who you’d do anything for–

You turn sharply and he almost runs into you, hard stops and comes up short. And before he can open his mouth again, you hiss, “it’s not a dream being stuck with you, either.”

He rears back a little.

“You’re being mean.”

“I’m being honest.” You sneer.

So fast your eyes don’t even catch it, he’s got your wrist in his hand, pulling you towards him. “Then let’s break the vow,” he threatens, “if that’s how you feel. I’m sure I could figure it out.”

You squirm in his hold, pull a little, but he tightens his grip. The look in his eyes, above his glasses, is strange. Otherworldly. Challenging in a way that makes a thrill go up your spine.

“Is that how you feel?” You demand, all teeth.

He softens a little, and then;

“I haven’t figured it out yet, have I?”

You glare up into his face, “have you tried?”

“A little.” He admits and it hurts worse than it should, a wound to the chest, a sudden stinging in your eyes.

“Because I’m just so awful–”

“Because I’m so awful.” He says softer than you anticipate, “I’m not stupid–we’re both young. Neither of us had much of a say in it. And I know–I know your life would be easier without being tied to me.”

You glance down at your wrist still in his hand. You don’t try to fight him anymore, though.

“Do you want out?” You ask tentatively, terrified of the answer, your heart like glass in his hands, ready to be shattered.

“I don’t try very hard,” he admits, “selfishly,” he pulls you a little closer to him and perhaps it’s the first time you’ve been this close to him. “I want to keep you. I don’t want to be alone. And I don’t think–”

His thumb, tender, gentle, rubs against the pulse point of your wrist. You hold your breath.

“I don’t think there’s anyone else.”

You sink your nails into his tender hand, stilling his movement, and look up at him with all the venom in the world. And you vow, voice sweeter than the look in your eyes, disarmingly so;

“There isn’t.”

***

“It’s you.”

The person who greets you in the amulet this time is different from the first one, you can tell by their voice, by the shape of them that slowly comes into focus.

You clutch your amulet tight.

Their face is clearer, a man that must, in some way, be an ancestor of yours. You can tell because his eyes are like yours, the base of his are brown, but then a slash of silver in one, a speck of gold in the other.

You are peering into the past at someone who is peering into the future at you–it makes your temples throb to think about.

“I don’t understand how you know me–” You get out, “I don’t understand how we can speak to each other.”

The man eyes you, brows furrowing, almost into a glare. “You’re the only one who ever figured it out,” his voice is smoky, soft and old. “You’re the one that figured out we could communicate by finding the exact moments in time when we peer at each other; right now, you are looking into the past, at this exact moment, at me through the amulet, while I look into the future at this exact moment, at you through the amulet.”

“But I didn’t–”

“Imagine folding paper in half and stabbing your pen through both sides at once.” He continues.

“I didn’t figure that out.”

Your voice is quiet. Just a child’s voice.

“Not yet.” He says and it’s accusatory. In the tense silence, you feel guilt for something you have not yet done. You can feel his judgment. Eventually, his face softens fractionally, “you’re still young now. Still innocent, huh? I forget–”

His voice catches.

“I forgot that you were once this young and unknowing.”

You don’t know what to do with that, how to feel. “So you know me differently?”

“Very differently.”

“When I’m older?” You ask, “can you tell me more?”

He shakes his head, “I don’t think I should.”

“You’re supposed to teach me.” You respond and perhaps it is accusatory. His eyes flash, a flickering of recognition. As if to say there you are, the one I know.

Regretfully, he nods. “I will. We all will. Until you surpass us and then we’ll spend the rest of our days peeling through time to try and catch up to you.”

You aren’t sure what to say or how to respond, you’re not sure what you should feel or do. You frown.

“Do you ever catch up to me?” You ask when you can think of nothing else.

He smiles now, a little bitterly, but almost fondly, “no. You leave us all in the dust.”

“Does that make me your best student, then? Out of all the other Hindsight and Foresight users?”

A laugh is startled out of him and the hand that is holding up the amulet, the same hand of yours, lifts so you’re both eye to eye. Amulet to amulet. Hand to hand in two different places and two different times.

Past to future.

“The very best of us all.”

***

Satoru begins school.

He upholds his promise and tells you about his new classmates. He gushes about their potential; a girl with the ability to reverse her cursed technique and a boy who can swallow curses to control them.

Not to mention his seniors, all so shiny and exciting to him.

Jealousy curdles inside of you, bubbling and ugly. You can’t quite swallow around it. You can’t quite stomach it.

But he wants you to meet his other first years, Ieri Shoko and Suguru Getou. He wants them to know you, he wants you to know them. He wants those important to him to get along.

He brings them to you in the garden and you can’t help but feel as if they’re intruding on this little world you and Satoru have created since you were young. Since you first became engaged.

When you see them with Satoru, flanking his sides, you have to fight the urge to glare, to bare your teeth to them.

Satoru sings your name, though, excited, so you slip out from your hiding place among the trees and flowers. You’re quiet as you approach, one foot carefully over the other, like a predator watching. Waiting.

It is only Satoru who senses you behind them, who turns sharply and laughs when he finally spots you.

“Trying to surprise us?” He asks.

“Something like that,” you answer, eyes flickering over the two beside him.

He smiles nonetheless and introduces you proudly, introduces you as his fiance.

“So strange to think you have a fiance at your age.” The girl, Ieri, says.

Satoru shrugs, “we’ve known since we were young–plenty of time to accept our fates, huh?”

You hum, “funny choice of words.”

The dark-haired boy who's been watching you a little too closely finally says, “your technique is with time, isn’t it? Satoru was telling us–”

You finally approach and it’s a little too close, enough that it makes Ieri shift uncomfortably. But to his credit, Suguru doesn’t budge, even as you look up into his face and ask, “what else does Satoru tell you?”

Suguru smiles slowly, disarmingly so, like a cat. “That you’re pretty. And smart. I can tell he likes you a great deal.”

And despite it all, you can see Satoru’s cheeks flush darkly out of the corner of your eyes. He fidgets, “I think I said–”

“What has he said about me?” Suguru asks and the darkness of his eyes is mesmerizing. The exact opposite of Satoru, where his eyes seem to reflect light, Suguru’s consume it.

You hold his gaze for a fraction more before severing it. You turn away, wander a little further off as you say over your shoulder, “he hasn’t.”

Suguru laughs as Satoru squawks, beginning to deny you but Suguru interrupts him cooly, “you’re a poor liar.”

“He’s mentioned Shoko, though–you can reverse your cursed technique, can’t you?” You respond, just to get under his skin. This time, it’s Ieri that laughs, an amused huff.

“That’s me.” Her eyes, sly and tired, slip to Satoru, “anything else he’s said about me?”

“That you smoke too much.” You say and this time, you’re being truthful, perhaps too truthful. Enough that you can feel Satoru’s eyes on you. You’re trying to cause trouble and he can tell. Your smile is knowing, just a little too barbed, “those things’ll kill you, ya know.”

The irony is not lost on them.

You wander further away to test Satoru, see if he will follow you or stay with his friends. You can feel his draw, his uncertainty for a moment. But surprisingly, it is Suguru who moves after you first.

“Will you come to school with us? When you’re old enough?” Suguru asks and Satoru is on his heels. Ieri lollygags behind.

You can feel the heat and attention of Suguru and for whatever reason, it makes warmth bloom deep in your cheeks and for all your trouble and bravado, you are perhaps still just young. You bite the inside of your cheek to keep from smiling at his attention, at the way they follow you. You face resolutely forward and don’t allow them to see the full scope of your face.

“No, my father forbids it.” You tell him, leading them through a maze of lush flowers and small trees that lope over your heads.

“I told you, I’ll fight for you to go.” Satoru pipes up and because he knows the garden well, he takes a sharper left, beats you around a hedge to stop you in your tracks. Suguru almost runs into you. “I’ll tell him I want an educated and trained wife.”

“Gross,” Ieri scoffs, and then she says dryly, “who knew you were such a traditionalist, Gojo?”

“I’m not! But I have to speak his language!” Satoru protests, “you two don’t know her father. The clans. They’re impossible and archaic.”

You think of your mother, at one point, in your position; betrothed to a man at your small age. But she didn’t know the future and your father was no revolutionary. No, he didn’t shake heaven and earth with his birth. He was not meant for greatness.

The only greatness he would achieve is you. You think he resents you for it, you think that is why you are kept so firmly beneath his thumb.

You think your mother should resent you for getting more, for being her warped reflection of could’ve been and should’ve beens. You wish you saw more of yourself in her, sometimes, that you weren’t growing into such a beast. That you weren’t so gifted or strange or burning.

You have learned, though, that the difference between you and your mother will be her life. Lamb-hearted woman she is, you resent her for not being you. For not having bigger teeth, for not resenting you more.

“But you’re going to change it all, is that right?”

Suguru’s voice slices through your thoughts, cool and cleanly.The way he says it, like it’s hardly a question but an accusation, sends a shiver rippling through you. There is an undercurrent to his voice that makes you go completely still, the way a predator does when it senses danger. “That’s what you said, isn’t it?”

You know now that you will have to lay your hands on Suguru. For Satoru, you will dig into the pits of his future and pull it out with your own trembling fingers.

Satoru looks at you, “I’m trying to. We’re trying to.”

“We have our work cut out for us.” You tell Satoru and with your back to Suguru, you mean it only for him.

We, as in just us. Just us two, always.

You try to shut Suguru out, maybe, you try to shut them both out. But it is hard and as they talk and joke and amble with you in your garden, as you watch them interact with Satoru and with each other, you understand horribly what it is that Satoru likes so much about them.

Unfortunately, there will be no ridding Satoru of them. Unfortunately, they will stick and stay and bleed into your life.

So unfortunately, you will get attached. And worse than that, you will then need to learn how to get unattached, because you will know exactly the path they will walk and it isn’t one you are interested in enduring to love them.

But still you will love them.

Even though you know.

You will always know.

***

When you are fourteen and it comes time for you to enroll in school, Satoru fights tooth and nail to get your father, your clan, to allow you to join him. He hems and haws, he bickers and makes scathing comments, he acts out. He tries to pull every card that he has.

None of it works.

And for the millionth time, Satoru comes storming out of the room he’d been speaking with your father in again. You are never allowed in, even though all they do is discuss you. You are their centerpoint and yet you remain outside the doorway, lingering, listening faintly to your name pass between their lips.

They are very naive, to think you don’t know all of this already. For how miraculous your technique has been treated, they have the strangest tendency to forget how it works, what it implies for you. Even Satoru at times forgets, perhaps purposefully, what you know, what it must mean. You don’t think he wants to think about what it might imply about you or who you are becoming, at least not yet.

Still, you follow after him quickly, leaving your father behind, “I told you—“

“I’ll keep trying.” He clips, heading through the winding halls, towards the front entrance. You want to reach out and grab him, stop him in his tracks, force yourself in front of him, but you wouldn’t dare touch him where you know your father watches closely.

Instead you say his name, sharply, a little ringing.

It has the same effect. He stops. His back is to you, shoulders raised slightly in tension.

“I told you, my father will not change his mind. He never will.”

Satoru’s shoulders drop with a hard exhale.

“Do you know this for certain? Is this—“

The future?

“Yes.” You respond coolly, “I will never go to school with you. I have known this for a while.”

“Well, now it must be a self-fulfilling prophecy because you told me this. If you’d never have told me, would it still happen? Or would I keep trying until they let you come to school with me? In telling me this, does it make me give up? So you never do?” He asks, turning finally to face you. “Why tell me this? Whose future did you see to know this?”

So many questions. You can feel the sudden tension between you—the surge of distrust or inkling in the back of his mind about you. It must be all of his doubts rushing forward.

He must be wondering why you told him this, why you won’t tell him more then.

“My mother’s.” You respond, “she argues with my father about this, too, and to no avail.”

Satoru stares hard at you. And you hate the look on his face, the sudden unease as he gazes at you, like he doesn’t quite recognize you. Upset and anger prickle inside of you.

“Why do you look at me like that?”

“Like what?” Satoru asks.

You narrow your eyes, “don’t play dumb.”

He pauses. And then, as if hesitantly, he decides to ask, “can you change the future once you know it?”

And right now you are only fourteen, still rather naive, if not growing sharper and quicker, slicker. You have an inkling. You could share it with him; I think you can. I think, if I play everything correctly, I could. I think if I–

Instead, you say, “I’m not sure yet. I’m still learning.”

“Are you experimenting with me?” He asks and it surprises a laugh out of you.

“Well, now that you say it–”

Finally, his smile crooks up in the corner. The tension in him snaps and gives out, deflating him. He takes a few steps towards you. He is lanky at sixteen and stands a head over you (he’ll keep growing, taller and a little broader, muscled beneath your future hands).

“You’ll tell me, won’t you?” He asks, “when you figure it out?”

Now it’s your turn to stare hard at him.

“Of course.” You say and instantly, you recognize it for what it is;

The first lie you’ll ever tell Satoru Gojo.

***

Over the years, Ieri and Suguru will visit you frequently. With Satoru and without. With each other and without. Ieri will let you take drags of her cigarettes, put it up to your lips, let her fingers press there, too. Suguru will wander around the garden with you aimlessly, he will playfully flirt, he will tease you. Both will confide in you. Both you will love and hate; love them for who they are, who they could be and hate them for having pieces of Satoru. Hate Suguru for who he will become.

You hate him for what he will do to Satoru.

You decide relatively quickly that on an instance where one of them allows you to touch them, or touches you, that you will peer into their futures.

Ieri’s comes easily, she is always leaning and draping herself over you. She is always sharing candy and cigarettes and swigs of alcohol she sneaks past your father to you. You have learned that if you don’t want people to suspect you have peered into their future, you must do it at a time that seems light-hearted, simple, fleeting.

She leans her head on your shoulder one night as the sun slips easily beneath the trees. It’s a Friday night.

She says, “I wish you could come out with me. The boys are pissing me off.”

And you are barely able to get out a very plain, far away, “me, too,” before your vision tunnels. You are careful to breathe through it. You are careful not to make a sound as her life begins to play out in your mind’s eye. Cursed energy that takes her shape shimmers to life in front of you.

At once, you see her very plainly.

But what you care about most, is that she will always be loyal to Satoru. That is what you sought and what you found. A knot unravels inside of you, unspools easily and your suspicion of Ieri dissipates. Momentarily, you sink into the feeling–but in peering into her future, you’ve caughten another glimpse of Satoru’s.

Another piece to the puzzle of his future that you are slowly attaining.

(One day, you will know all of it, one day you will guard all of it, one day you will swallow all of it and stomach what comes with it.)

But today, you sink into Ieri’s side, back in the present, and let the smell of smoke cloud your mind. You breathe it deep, only for her to press the cigarette up to your lips, soft fingers and all. You inhale and let it burn.

You sputter out a cough, which gives way to Ieri’s rough laugh, her head tipping onto your shoulder, and the sun drenching you in its last light.

You’ll let her curl herself around some part of you. She’ll ask you one day, as everyone does, “did you ever look into my future?”

And they’re never sure if they want the truth.

You’ll smile, though, an asp’s clever grin, and drawl, “we’re still friends, aren’t we?”

***

Nanami Kento and Yu Haibara are your age. You would be in their grade, if Satoru had gotten his way and your father had allowed you to attend Jujutsu Tech. You meet them only briefly, but even then, Satoru catches the way you create a reason to touch each of them. For Haibara, it is just to brush past him, knocking elbows a little.

(At the time, it wasn't so bad. It doesn’t startle you. He is not a domino effect. But he can be–you know he is the perfect sacrifice.)

For Nanami, you are braver. You sweep his hair from his face, “I want to see your eyes.” You say boldly and though Nanami recoils back slightly, glancing quickly at Satoru, you have already gotten what you need.

(Nanami, you think with a slight sigh, you like a great deal. Both loyal and caring. Enough so that he would give his life for Satoru, for what Satoru wants. Martyr-boy, golden-hearted, he is perhaps the best of them.)

Afterwards, you can tell Satoru is displeased in some way, prickly.

“You’re upset,” you say when it is only the two of you in the garden again.

He opens his mouth to deny you, you think, but then promptly shuts it.

“Do you do that with everyone now?” He asks carefully.

Your eyes flash to him, “do you want the truth?”

He stutters a step towards you, but holds himself back, careful, unsure. “Always.”

“Then ask again, as if you actually want it.” Your voice doesn’t sound quite like your own. It’s beginning to slip from you, become someone else’s, you think. You’re losing whatever cadence you had as a child, losing the tone that used to reflect your mother’s.

You see the furrow of his brows, but don’t see his eyes behind the wrappings. He frowns. “What has gotten into you?”

You, something inside of you hisses, but it’s older, a little foreign. It almost sounds like–

“Do you want to know or not?” You ask instead, flippant, but your eyes burning, hot.

“I don’t like what you’re becoming,” he says suddenly, and once he’s said it, he doesn’t stop, “I knew you should’ve come to school with me, I knew it wasn’t good for you to be stuck here with your father and the clan–is this their doing?”

Your laugh is sharp, tittering, almost, a little off-kilter.

It’s so ironic, isn’t it? To think he knows what’s best. People think they know everything and they think you know so little.

You step towards him, have to tip your chin up, rock onto the tips of your toes just to get into his face now.

“You know what’s best for me now, do you?” The wind picks up like your voice has agitated it, rushing past, between, around you two. “My fiance knows what’s best for me?”

“I didn’t say that,” he replies and the sudden inability to see his eyes makes your anger spark and break into a fire.

You reach up, snatch the bandage from his eyes so quickly that your nails catch the delicate skin of his face. It unspools around his neck. He doesn’t flinch, though, his eyes now finally finding yours without the barrier, looking you over like he’s trying to root around inside you.

The wind is sharper this time, colder, it whips past both of you, pulls at your clothes.

“Ask. Me. Again.” You bite out, the flash of your teeth make his eyes skip down to your mouth, back up.

When he asks, something in his voice has changed. It isn’t the voice of the boy you grew up beside, but someone stepping into godhood. Satoru Gojo the Untouchable.

Regret pulls inside you like a dog at the end of its leash, don’t be untouchable to me. Not me. Never me.

“Do you do that with everyone now?” He asks again and he needs to know.

“Yes,” you breathe, just a hiss of your breath through your teeth. And because he suddenly feels far from you, you reach up, and lay your palm to his cheek. He never put up his Infinity, he never blocked you out. Your shoulders ease, you can feel relief hit you like a rush of cool water.

Still yours. Still close.

He swallows hard, like he isn’t quite sure what to do with that information. You know he is weighing his next question carefully.

You thumb the little scratch you left on his cheek, streaked pink against his pale skin, let your nail drag featherlight over it again, like you’re thinking of making it deeper. Oh, to scar the Untouchable.

“For your clan?” He forces himself to ask.

You shake your head fractionally, make an irritated little noise, “you think so little of me? I thought you knew me so well? We hate the clans.”

Satoru finally brings his hand up to cradle yours, lets his cheek sink into your palm, even with the threat of your nails. Maybe especially.

“Then for who?”

You, a voice inside of you howls like the wind, oh, you, you, you.

“For us.” You say instead, “for our future.”

When he remains silent, you press on, “isn’t this what I’m supposed to do? This is my technique–should I never use it?” You turn on him, and then when you’ve got it between your teeth, you shake hard, “are you scared of it? Scared of me?”

“No,” Satoru says quickly, “never you.”

“Then why are you upset?” You snap, low and hot. Your fingers begin to dig a little more desperately into his skin, angle his face so he can’t look away, so he can’t run, “why do you look at me like that?”

Satoru is silent for a long moment.

You let him be.

Eventually, he turns his face into your palm and you feel the brush of his lips, soft, a little shy.

It brings a surge of warmth to your cheeks.

(You’ve never even kissed yet, only poked and prodded and tickled and held and brushed and scraped. Never felt his lips like this. Never felt his words on the inside of your wrist–)

“Would you tell me? If what you saw was–” he won’t finish the sentence.

“Do you want to know?” You ask again. “Do you want to know the future?”

He weighs it, you can feel the way he gets heavier in your hands with the decision, let your fingers slip down his jaw, brush over the pulse that thuds at his throat.

“Say I did,” he murmurs, “would you tell me?”

“Yes,” you answer, but as you study his face, you know he doesn’t want it. “If you could stomach it.”

“Can you?”

“I was fed it until I could.” You let him go finally, “I can tell you can’t.”

You turn away.

The wind rushes through you, carves its distance between you two.

When you move to walk away, Satoru follows you as if compelled, jerks forward to you as if pulled by a string. “Do you want me to?”

“Would you learn to stomach it for me?” Make yourself sick with it? Make yourself mad with it? Would you do it all for me, too?

“You’ve learned to stomach it for me.” He answers and so you pause to let him catch up to you as a reward.

When you look at him this time, something inside you softens, “I will only feed you what you can stomach, if you want it.”

You are not lying.

Satoru lets out a slow breath and chooses to allow you to decide what he can swallow around. He decides he can trust what you feed him, that it will go down easy and not poison him, that you won’t make him regret it.

He nods, agreeing.

His trust blossoms hot and sweet inside of you. You have to hold back a satisfied grin; a cat with a canary, beautiful white feathers fluttering by your feet.

You look ahead, let the wind catch your hair, cut across your cheeks.

You summon the vows that now feel like an ancient part of you, old words, soothing words;

“Repeat after me.”

As if possessed, he says, “repeat after me.”

You smile, slow and knowing, “I will always have you.”

He leans into it, takes it easily from you, “I will always have you.”

“You will always have me.”

Like prayer, he finishes, “you will always have me.”

And after, when the wind gusts and pulls at you, you dare to admit to him, “Keep Nanami close. He will always be loyal to you.”

You don’t turn to look at him, but you can tell he has gone inhumanly still. After a moment, he dares to ask, “and Haibara?”

Your lips twist, just a flash of a grimace like the quick arch of a bat’s wing.

You refuse to look at him when you say, “just leave Haibara to me.”

When he swallows around that, too, you know now that you’ll always have him eating from the palm of your hand.

***

Suguru only visits alone at dusk. Twilight suits him in the same way that you think dawn suits Satoru.

Usually, Suguru comes to you pensive, almost irritable. You imagine he can’t decide what to do or think of you, you imagine he can sense your animosity or jealousy, you imagine he is too clever to not know what it means if you, a user of Foresight, do not like or trust him.

You know his future intimately. You see it behind your eyelids at night, hot and simmering, too brutal, too brilliant. You have memorized it the moment that you saw it, replayed it over and over and over until it no longer made you sick. Until you could look him in the eyes again. You know it so well that you think you could recite it to someone who asked, could say Suguru’s words to him before he ever even thinks of them himself.

You think that must mean you know him intimately, too.

When he finds you, you frown, and then ask, “what are you doing here?”

“Delightful, as usual.” He responds lazily.

You grin at him, “where’s Satoru?”

“Mission.” He responds a little too bluntly.

You sink your claws into it, “without you?”

He doesn’t rise to your bait this time, “your father’s in a bad mood.”

You pause.

Your father isn’t happy with you. He never is, though, he never will be.

“Why are you here, Suguru?” You ask instead, drifting around the trunk of a tree to emerge on the other side of him.

“I can’t visit a friend?” He counters.

“Are we friends?” You ask. “I don’t like you.”

He laughs then, warm and low and in a way that reminds you that he is just shy of being a man. “You wound me.” He says, turning over his shoulder to face you, to let you come up to his chest.

There is something magnetic about Suguru, you can feel the pull of him, like he’s ready to swallow you whole, too. Ingest you if you aren’t careful.

He reaches out suddenly and you force yourself to remain very, very still. Suguru’s hand, careful, graceful, tucks a strand of loose hair behind your ear.

“Satoru asked me to check on you while he was away.” He admits and at the mention of his name, you allow Suguru’s fingers to linger at your jaw.

“When will he be home?” You ask instead, uncharacteristically subdued for the moment. Suguru must realize it, because he becomes bolder, steps closer.

You let Ieri touch you and wrap her arms around you, lean her head against your shoulders and pull you into her lap. You let her drape herself across you, crawl over top of you. Tuck up against you. Satoru knows. He doesn’t mind, rather, you think he’s pleased that you’ve found a friend in Ieri.

But with Suguru–

“When will he be home?”

“You don’t know?” Suguru asks and something in your expression must give you away, because it is his turn to dig into wounds, “he didn’t tell you?” Faux sympathy touches his voice, like you’re a cat to coo at. His knuckle traces lightly along the line of your jaw.

His brow arches fractionally as his thumb traces over the line of your chin, to your bottom lip, “or better yet, you didn’t look into his future? Know when he will return to you? That he would return safely?”

Anger is a slow rumbling beast inside of you, raising its weary head, cracking open an eye.

“I thought you knew everything.” He insists.

When his thumb parts your lips, you sink your teeth down onto his thumb, hard and quick.

But he laughs again, surprised, delighted.

He squirms his thumb out from between your teeth, wretches it away, letting you swallow around the faint taste of his skin once it’s gone.

“It’s always been so amusing to me, to see bruises and scratches and bite marks in Satoru’s skin. He is supposed to be untouchable and yet–”

“What do you want?”

(You know what he wants.)

“–he isn’t. Not to you.”

“Never to me.” You agree, if only to spite him.

“I’m only here to check on you,” he says, but his voice is strange, always setting off alarm bells in your mind. “Just as he asked.”

“Aren’t you a good friend?” You sneer, because you know what he will do, you know how this ends. You know because–

“The very best,” he answers and it is almost sad, voice losing some of its bravado, its oil. All water now. It pulls at you. You swallow hard. “I only came to check on you.”

He means it this time.

You look at him, hard and long, before you say, “did you enjoy it?”

“What?”

“Walking in his footsteps? Coming here like you’re him? Trying to touch me like you’re him?” You ask and your voice isn’t mean, but honest, genuinely curious. “Do you want me to treat you like him, too?”

Surprise parts his lips, rounding out his eyes fractionally.

“Do you want to be him? Or have him the way I do?”

But then his surprise sloughs off, melts away into a slow revelation. His face transforms, suddenly open.

“You’re jealous of me,” he realizes.

“In the same way you’re jealous of me.” You answer him and his smile is a slow, confident curl.

“In the same way that we’re both jealous of him.” Suguru says and his voice is just a rasp, caught somewhere in the space between you two, in the horrible truth of it all.

You turn your head away from him, give him your profile, but he snatches your jaw back quickly and forces you to look at him.

“If I was him, I would marry you and make another garden to keep you trapped in. I would perfect a veil you could never get through. I would keep you safe somewhere. I would keep you on a leash somewhere.” The admittance frees from his mouth and makes you squirm and fuss, suddenly struggling in his hold, “I would never let you out of my sight.”

You claw a little at him, jerk your head free enough from his grasp to bite out, “it’s a good thing you aren’t–”

“I think he underestimates you. I think you’re his blind spot.” Suguru says, eyeing you, almost glaring at you, trying to unravel you with his gaze alone and pull you apart. “I think you have something horrible inside of you.”

It’s your turn to laugh, wildly, letting your head fall back a little in his grasp. Crowing up to the sky.

“Suguru,” you say his name, “Suguru,” you sing it, clawing at his clothes, his arms, up to his chest and shoulders, “Suguru,” you purr, laughing again, looking up into his face until the clash of your eyes could have sparked and burned a whole forest down. You look at each other, horrid reflections of one another, a wretched mirror, and smile the way he does, like a lazy cat that’s caught the truth between its teeth;

“I think the same of you.”

***

Your amulet winks in the sun. You let your eyes flutter, let it pull you throughout time.

One of your ancestors is on the other side; the man who you’ve seen several times. Who sees you now and frowns as if you’re a bad omen.

“Hello, again,” he still says.

“You don’t look pleased to see me.” You say, and then before you can stop yourself, “my father looks at me like that.”

His face instantly crumples, “I’m sorry–I’m sorry.” He shakes his head, “sometimes, I think you just needed someone to treat you like your age, to treat you kindly.”

“My mother does.” You say, almost defensively. Infinitely, you are defensive of your mother, you wish you could covet her. You wish you could be her. You wish the world hadn’t been so cruel to her. And then you speak, “but my father will kill her.”

You think about Zeus, sometimes, and how his father swallowed him whole. How he had to gut him to get out.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, “we’ve tried countless versions to–”

Slowly, you realize, “you’re trying to save me.”

He looks too guilty for that.

“No,” you say carefully, “you’re trying to stop me.”

You wonder if they should’ve stopped Zeus, too.

Formidable you are, they can’t quite seem to do it, though, somehow, someway, it is always you.

“I often think it’s the same thing.” He says gently, “but at every turn, we’re stopped.”

“By who?” You ask.

He goes silent now and the vision begins to bend and run, like watercolors washing together on a page, it’s all going sideways.

“By the person who orchestrated this all from the beginning, the one we can’t–”

Stop.

***

You plant seeds now.

You begin to throw fits, as your clan calls them. Whatever that means.

Tantrums, is what your father bemoans about, warning your mother that if you don’t cut this shit out, he’d do it for you.

But you have days where you won’t stop screaming and crying. When you start, you realize sometimes it just won’t stop, like there is a beast howling inside of you. Agonized. It burns and aches in the pit of you, to get on all fours and cry and cry.

To sob wretchedly. To wail until it fills your whole house with that sorrowful noise.

You thought, at first, you were only doing it for yourself. For what you needed. It’s realer than you can understand, the tears are real, cutting down your face, the anger is real. The heartbreak.

You break things. You and your father scream at each other.

He slams hands against walls beside your head.

He grabs you too harshly, shakes you so hard that your teeth click in your head, and all you do is fight and kick. Moan and cry. Growl and hiss through clenched teeth.

At some point, you always beg for Satoru.

And at some point, your mother always sends for him.

And he always comes.

Always.

It happens once, twice, three times, until there are too many to count.

He always comes.

Your father won’t hurt you in front of him. Your clan, everyone, leaves you to him, since he is the only one who is able to calm you.

(You plant the seeds now, so when you need them–they’ve already grown.)

Behind closed doors, he holds you, cradles you to his chest and coos until you can calm down. You’re reminded of being children like this, puppying up next to his side, against him.

You think he loves it, being needed by you. Being the only one who could soothe you.

(The only one who can ruin you.)

Possession blossoms in him and tenderly, you nurture it.

Until one day he looks at you, with your tear stained face and sniffling nose, thumb brushing beneath your eyes, along your faded little scars, and says;

“I think I owe you an apology.”

You pick your head up a little, tilt it to the side.

He gives you a sad smile, loving, and doting, but infinitely sad.

“I think I made you–” he murmurs, “I think I made you like this.”

And when he says he’s sorry again, you can’t help but feel he isn’t that sorry, after all.

You know you aren’t, at least.

***

Your side is slammed into the wall, hard enough to make your teeth clink together, but slow enough that you knew it was coming. You know how this argument goes. You know everything your father is about to say before he even says it.

Your mother is pounding on the locked door. It is best she doesn’t see this.

She screams and scratches at the wood for you, wailing, begging him not to hurt you in any way. Her whole life she has begged for you.

You think Rhea must’ve begged Kronos like this, too.

A knot aches in your throat, tears blurring your eyes as you listen to her scream, and scream, and scream. You refocus on your father.

He approaches you again, lifting you by the front of your clothes, up from the ground. “I’m sick of your excuses,” he hisses to you. “I know you have had opportunities to look into this future.”

“He keeps his Infinity up around me–”

“Bullshit.” Your father slams you again against the wall, the back of your head colliding hard enough with the wall that it leaves a dent. Pain radiates up the back and you think you can feel the slow warmth of blood blossom there.

Something inside of you goes completely still and quiet.

Then it roars forward like an animal at the end of its leash.

“You refuse to look into his future–I will not have raised a weak, sentimental–” Your father drops you in a heap, turns away from you as he rakes a hand through his hair, “you’re just like your mother.”

You can feel blood slide down the back of your neck. You reach around to touch tentatively at the wound, your fingers returning to you slick and shining with it. You rub it between your fingers before peering up at your father.

With everything inside you, you wish you were like your mother.

“I am not,” you say simply and he rounds on you again.

“Then prove it to me that–”

“I will kill you one day.” You tell him and there isn’t a threat in your voice.

He freezes, hovering above you.

You smile at him, slow, all teeth.

“What did you say?” He asks and maybe he’s trying to intimidate you, but you can hear the note of fear in the question, the tremble that he can’t contain.

So you say again, slowly, so he can understand you perfectly, “I will kill you one day.”

“How dare you threaten me–”

He raises his hand like he will strike you.

“It isn’t a threat, father.” You tell him, “it’s just the future.”

The slap stings but it only makes you laugh. Barking. Hysterical. Your mother has gone quiet.

All the world has gone quiet, you think, with what you’ve said.

You pick yourself up from the ground and rise, a little unsteady, as more blood rushes from the wound in your head. But your father doesn’t move, doesn’t budge, frozen in shock, maybe fear, as you return to the door and open it slowly.

You will gut him one day, crawl out of his belly victorious.

Your mother falls into your arms in a heap. You hold her, let her hold you, let her fold you into her arms and cradle the wound at the back of your head like you’re a child again. You look at your father over her shoulder and the look on his face is nothing short of horror.

You must have proved to him that you are nothing like your mother, after all.

***

Masterlist | <- Prologue: Godlings | Chapter Two: Anything, Everything ->

#gojo satoru x reader #satoru gojo x reader #gojo x reader #satoru gojo x you #gojo satoru x you #gojo x you #satoru gojo x y/n #gojo satoru x y/n #gojo x y/n #jjk x reader #jjk x you #jjk x y/n #cielo writes #cielo’s writing #godmaker

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aimfor-theheart · 2 years ago

Text

Chapter Two: Anything, Everything

Masterlist | <- Chapter One: Swallow | Chapter Three: Anew -> | Read on Ao3

Pairings: Satoru Gojo x f!reader

“I will teach you how to make a God.”

(Arranged marriage, angst, hurt/comfort, dark content)

Warnings (specifically for this chapter): Parental abuse (emotional and physical), possessive behavior, unhealthy relationships, toxic dynamics, relationship abuse (the reader strikes Gojo in this chapter), mention of death, and manipulation. Please be wary of overarching story warnings, too. Let me know if you think I should add any other warnings! **Please mind warnings overall and for each chapter**

Word Count: 7.7k

A/N: here is chapter two!! as always, thank you so much to @lorelune for beta-ing this and helping me out so much!! i would love to hear any and all reactions to this chapter!! now go bully me to get chapter 3 done so i can get it out on time lol

· · ───────── ·𖥸· ──────── · ·

“You haven’t kissed yet?” Ieri asks, stretching her legs out on the blanket you’d laid out beside the creek.

You shake your head, lying on your stomach with a book half-hazerdly lying open to your current page. There’s a bowl of berries between you two, the fading sun slowly slides away from where it’d warmed your back, now leaving a chill in its wake. The sky is bruised and tender.

“Aren’t you going to be married–” she does the math in her head, “–in two years or something?”

You turn onto your back, looking up at the tops of trees, a little vignette of your world.

“Yes,” you sigh, “as soon as I turn eighteen.”

“Have you ever kissed anyone before?” Ieri then asks and she eases down so she’s on her side, elbow propped up, hand holding up her head.

You can feel heat prickle your cheeks. You think about lying for a moment. But the pause must give you away because Ieri’s brows cock upwards in surprise.

“Has he?” you dare to ask.

“You haven’t asked him?” She questions, “I just figured you two were so close–”

Anger is a sharp, mean little thing inside of you. You’ve never asked because you’re not sure you want to know the answer and you are always telling people not to ask if they don’t actually want to know.

But now that you’ve acknowledged it, you know it will not let you rest unless you know, unless you force yourself to swallow around it.

“Has he?” you demand now, stubbornly fixing your eyes on the sky, blue as his eyes, slipping away into night.

“He’s an eighteen-year-old boy.” Ieri responds with a shrug. “He’s not as bad as Suguru but,” she reaches for a berry, pops it into her mouth and you watch as it blossoms purple red against her tongue and teeth. “He’s certainly not as chaste as you.”

Jealousy curdles in your gut, the feeling of it sickly and sour. Inadequacy drops like a stone inside of you, too. Why wouldn’t he want to kiss you? Be with you?

“Do you consider it–” Ieri chooses to rephrase, “are you two even dating? Or just–engaged?”

The irony isn’t lost on either of you. It’s so backwards. You’ve never really talked about it before, always just assumed (known) that Satoru was yours. And you were his. In your mind, that’s all there has been, all there will ever be.

“I don’t know.” You answer, but your voice has gotten thick, childishly, tears prick at your eyes.

“Don’t cry over him yet,” Ieri tells you, “it’s not like he’s ever really seen anyone. I think you mean more to him than any little kiss would.”

“I don’t care. I want to–” it comes out of you before you can stop it, “I want to kill him.”

Ieri barks out a laugh, “I’m sure it won’t be the last time you feel that way about him; you have your whole lives.”

When you don’t laugh with her, she nudges you, “I’m serious.” She says, “I know you mean the most to him. Suguru knows it. Everyone knows it. If someone wants to get under his skin, they bring you up.”

“I still want to kill him. I want to–I want to trap him, so no one else can have him.” You say, but it has less heat, a little more subdued. Placated by what she’s said.

“You should talk to him about it.” Ieri says, “if it bothers you so bad–if you don’t want to do the same.”

“Do the same?”

She leans over you, lazily smiling, “you know, kiss someone else–be with someone else, before him.”

“I could never get away with it–” you answer, “it would have to be someone who my father allows me to see here.”

Ieri’s smile turns more into a smirk, “I know Suguru would–”

“I would sooner kill him, too,” you tell her and she laughs again, throwing her head back, “besides, that would really hurt Satoru.”

“Would it? Might be his wet dre–”

You lurch upwards, throwing yourself into tackling Ieri before she can finish the sentence. Your book lands in a heap beside you. Her laugh gets choked on as she struggles with you, as you roll around on the blanket beneath the growing stars. You bite her hard enough to leave a ring of teeth bruised into the skin of her bicep. She’ll show Satoru tomorrow. She takes you in a headlock, letting you squirm and kick and struggle against her.

Eventually you both settle and she’s still got her arm thrown around the back of your neck, your shoulders. You are still half atop her, curled up at her side, head tucked into the crook of her neck.

She reaches blindly for her pack of cigarettes. Slips one out with deft fingers.

“Hand me my lighter.” She says and you know it’s in her right pocket, so your hand slips easily down into the folds of fabric against her hip, against her thigh. Your little fingers close around its smooth shape, fish it out, and hold it up to her.

“Light it for me,” she says, the cigarette dangling from her lips.

You sit up a little, enough to bring the lighter up to the end, strike it, let it catch. Her free hand cups around yours, around the flame, and you can feel her slim fingers brush over your knuckles. She breathes deeply and you settle back into her side. You become aware of the dips of her body that you fold yourself into.

Smoke unfurls slowly from above you.

You don’t know what possesses you–

(Maybe the knowledge that you already know this conversation, as if you are reading lines from a script and you suppose you could swallow them down if you wanted to, change the script now but–but you love this part with Ieri. You wouldn’t change it. You’ve come to find that there are just some moments that you would never, in a million years, change. You understand now why they happened. How. What you felt. How she felt against you. You don’t just see the outlines but feel it. So you don’t know what possesses you but you say–)

“I sometimes wish I was more normal. I don’t feel like a teenager at all. I don’t feel like myself at all.” Your voice is soft, hushed against the column of her throat.

Her fingers slip into your hair, against your scalp, you can feel them tangle and soothe.

“That’s the most teenager thing I think you’ve ever said to me.” Ieri responds and you pick your head up to see the curl of her lip, her heavy eyelids smeared with mascara.

And she laughs at the look on your face, smokey and soft against you, laughs when her hands move and flex in your sides, tickling your ribs to send you squealing and laughing with her.

To make you feel like a teenager again, to remind you why sometimes seeing the moment isn’t enough to know, but feeling it, being in it, is what gives you most understanding.

***

The rain comes down cold and hard, slanting in its harshness, beating down on the earth and drenching it. Your garden bends and drips with it, all blue-dark leaves curling with the rain’s torrent.

Satoru calls your name.

You shiver in the branch of your favorite tree, watch him from above, see the halo of his head as he wanders further into your garden.

You’ve been out here all day. Your mother must’ve called him. She’s taken to calling him when she’s worried about you. You don’t know this because he’s told you, rather, you know this because you know your mother’s path as it lays out before you.

You will use it to change everything one day. You will use it to carve a new path into the future.

But for now, you let him look.

He’s taken his glasses off, face uncharacteristically bare and his Infinity is not up, so his hair sticks to his forehead, the nape of his neck. He drenches himself in the rain for you, comes to you with his hands empty and his walls down. He comes to you open, ripe for the taking.

His eyes slide up towards you, until you can tell they’ve picked you out.

And still, he smiles, “come down from there. Come down to me.”

“No,” you answer, “I don’t want to see you.”

“What have I done?” He asks and he seems genuinely surprised this time, “should I have bought you flowers? Jewelry? Have I been neglecting you?”

“Yes,” you answer stubbornly.

Satoru wipes the rain from his face, “come down from there so we can talk.” He says again, a little smile still playing on his lips. He’s amused by your temperament.

You turn your nose up at him and then lift yourself up onto the next branch. It creeks and sways with your weight, with the wind. The rain is cool and a little prickly as it hits your skin.

“Aw, don’t be like that–” he coos, “what’ll it take for you to come down?”

“Depends,” you call down to him, “how many people have you kissed?”

There’s a furious heat in your cheeks, you feel so juvenile, so petulant, and yet, it still takes the smirk off of his face for all of ten seconds. It’s replaced by surprise. His eyes widen, his pink lips part.

“Did Suguru mention it to you?” He asks, “you two are always–”

“Ieri.”

Satoru goes quiet again.

“They really don’t mean anything. I don’t–I didn’t think we were actually–”

“Dating?” You sneer, “no, just engaged.”

“We’ve been engaged our whole lives!” He protests, “you’re being purposefully stubborn, you know it isn’t like a genuine engagement–”

“No, it’s only worse, we’re divinely bound to each other!” You snap at him.

“Come down from there!” He snaps back “come down from there so I don’t have to shout up at you!”

“No!” Your voice is a little more hurt than you’d like, a little more wobbly, and then you lie to him for a second time, “I don’t want you near me!”

He goes quiet.

“I won’t touch you.” He promises after a silent moment that the rain fills.

You make a strangled noise, “no, I–I want you to touch me!” Warmth flares so bright and hot in your cheeks, over top your ears, your chest, “why will you–why will you kiss others, but not me?”

He has the audacity to smile a little, “come down from there.”

“Come up to me!” You bite, white-knuckling the bark of the tree, letting it dig and scrape into the tender parts of your palms.

In an instant, he’s in the air, not very far for him at all, to hover in front of you. His hands, grown so large since he was a boy, grip the branches near your face to steady himself. His lips quirk at the corners when he reaches you and you pull away from him ever so slightly, duck into the tree, suddenly shy.

“I didn’t think you’d be upset by it,” he admits.

“Would you be upset if I had done it?” You counter. Water drips into your eyes, on your lashes, the slope of your nose. You’re getting chilled finally.

His eyes darken, all cobalt and thunder blue, “I wouldn’t want people to hurt you. I don’t know what I’d do if someone—”

“I feel the same about you!” You hiss, and it flies out of your mouth before you can think about it, “The thought of it makes me—I’d kill someone for you.”

It sounds like your own damnation.

He catches on.

“Will you?” He asks. He wants to know.

“Yes.” You breathe. And then, “so will you, for me.”

He swallows around that. Tries to decide on the taste of it in his mouth. Digests it. Then he nods as he accepts it.

He asks, and he doesn’t want to know now, “so you’ve—you’ve looked into my future?”

But you shake your head fractionally, just the barest movement.

“No?” he murmurs and you almost don’t hear it, more just watch his mouth form the word, the slight noise. “You haven’t-?”

You shake your head again, more certain this time, “not yet.”

“What are you waiting for?” He asks, a little taken back, surprised that you hadn’t already torn into his future.

“Courage.” You answer, “I don’t know if I can take it.”

“I’ve never known you to be scared.” He says softly and tentatively, he reaches out to peel a strand of your hair away from your cheek, smooth it back behind your ear. He draws in a slow breath. Lightning flashes faintly, illuminating him in a neon shock, a brilliant light. Heavenly. Godly.

When you don’t pull away from him, when you can’t stop looking at him, he asks, “then how do you know? About us?”

“Others,” you answer. “I have a tapestry of futures that have given me glimpses into our own.”

“Will you ever–” Look into mine?

“Yes,” you answer, “when I can stomach it, when–” it won’t break me.

He pauses for a long moment, studying you, rain coming down on him, slicking his silver hair to his forehead, to his cheek, to his neck.

You can tell he understands you, in ways that only he has been able to, in ways that you have only been able to understand him. You look at each other the way children do, very honestly, wholly, and unhindered. The rain washes most of your anger away, maybe, and leaves something larger, more encompassing.

As if he can feel it, he finally speaks and when he does, it is in a tone you have perhaps never heard; a certain fear in being vulnerable, a waiver of imperativeness–that you must know this, that he has to tell you, that he’ll wrestle it out of himself for you, force it still, lay it before you. Spit it out at your feet.

Distantly, thunder rumbles.

“You must know it’ll only ever be yours.”

Your heart stutters, young and naive, and you try to be tough, “you better be.”

His lips lift at the corner, but he presses on.

“You must know that all my future will ever be–is yours.”

(It’s a little startling, to be told the future by someone else. You think maybe you won’t even need to peer into his future anymore. Maybe this is all the glimpse you’ll need.)

You shake your head fractionally, the barest movement.

“Let me do the future-telling for once; I’ve only ever known you.”

You don’t dare stop him now–

“When I see myself, I always see you with me. I don’t have a version of me without you. I don’t have a future without you. You have always been and will always be the fate that I walk towards.”

He lets the words unspool him, let the rain drown his voice, “I’ve thought endlessly about it and I used to despise you maybe but now–now I know–all my life points to you.”

And then he smiles, a little sheepish, a little regretful, sad at the corners, “I just thought you knew. I thought you’d–you’re so high above everyone that I’d thought you’d understand…they’re nothing compared to you.”

(To be above the highest is its own complement and curse.)

You stare hard at him, search to see if he might be lying to you, might be trying to placate you. You have the sudden rush of bravery to peer into his future now, as if to test him. You don’t, you hold back like a dog on a leash, you watch him carefully, and he watches you back.

Finally, you say, “I’ll kill you if you kiss anyone else again. I’ll never let you leave my sights.”

He barks out a laugh, short, and sharp and sweet. A little wet. “I won’t. Cross my heart.”

And finally, you touch him, reach your finger out to draw the cross across his heart. You have half a mind to make it hurt a little, to sink your nail in and really draw it, half a mind to think of that cross permanently on his skin for you.

(You think he’d let you–he’ll let you get away with murder. You think he’d let you do anything, everything.)

He catches your wrist, fingers slipping over your pulse, over the lines of your palm.

“Do you want me to kiss you?” He asks.

You don’t have it in you to be proud now, “yes,” you answer, hungry, greedy with him.

His lips slip up into that boyish grin of his, far too charming for his own good, so handsome that you never want him to share it with anyone but you, “all you had to do was ask. If I had known–”

“Toru–”

“I would never have kept a lady in waiting–”

“Kiss me.”

Commanded, possessed, he lists forward. His hand finds your jaw, bringing you halfway, bringing you into a slow kiss. Gentle. Appeasing.

His lips are warm compared to the rain, almost feverish.

I’m sorry, he seems to say, you have me, he nudges further into it, I have the rest of my life to give you, he hums against your lips.

Strange, you think, with heat licking up your neck, how soft, how wet, how warm–

Your hand on his chest tightens into a little fist of the fabric of his uniform. Maybe you’re trembling. Maybe you’re putty in his hands for once, subdued, gentle the way the world wanted you to be.

And tucked away in your garden, hidden from the world, you kiss a god, and swallow it down.

Tucked away in your garden, hidden from the world, you burn and burn and burn at the taste of his divinity.

And in your garden, hidden from the world, Satoru thinks he just might be kissing a god, too. Because he burns and burns and burns almost as bright as you.

***

“You seem tired.”

Your mother’s voice is gentle. She smoothes your hair from your forehead as she approaches you. But she startles when she feels you, before turning her hand over to lay the back of it along your forehead. Then her palm again.

“Oh, that’s why–you’re burning up.”

“‘M fine.” You tell her, “just tired. I was training late into the night.”

You’d been scouring through the future of your amulet, searching it’s corners to try and find someone on the other side, to try and find the person you’d encountered the first time you’d ever peered into the amulet–

The blurry face. The melodic voice. You’ve dug for it ever since, more than anything, you’ve sought them again. You’ve met previous users, learned from them, sat through their lesson out of time, on time.

But the first was never like the others. Not quite. You’d hardly slept.

Your mother’s eyes skip down to the amulet at your throat. She eyes it suspiciously, almost glares at it, before she looks at you again. “You’re running a fever.” She replies, “come on, I’ll help you to your room.”

She dotes on you. She makes sure you’re comfortable in bed. She fluffs the pillows. She retrieves a thermometer to confirm it. She treats you like a child and you let her. Maybe some part of you will always feel a little like a child around her.

She moves a little skittishly around you now, a little unsure; she knows you best. She knows what you are becoming. You wonder if she always knew. You wonder if she hoped for it or if she hates it.

Still, she mothers you. Still, despite what you are becoming, she loves you. But she–

You don’t think she likes you anymore.

She’s never said it, only indicated it in the small moments, only looked at you a little too long like she can’t believe she raised such a–such a–

Monster. Abomination. Wretched girl.

When she gets a cool cloth to lay across your forehead, you say, “I’m fine. I think it’s just overuse of my technique–”

She goes quiet, busies her hands. You watch her mouth turn down in a splinter of a frown. Distaste, disgust, that she tries to bury quickly.

“What?” you snap, because you know her face, the first face you ever saw, blurry in your infant vision.

She shakes her head–nothing, she seems to say.

“What?” you say again, tilting away from her touch.

It’s quiet for a moment, just the sound of birdsong, the little chimes outside your window. It’s a beautiful day.

When she has the courage, she asks, “what are you searching so frantically for?”

And she’s pulling on something that few have guessed at, that even Satoru seems to dance around, “I feel like I–I feel like I lost you somewhere, to everyone else, to time. I feel like–”

I don’t know you anymore.

She won’t quite look at you.

“Are you scared of me?” You ask, careful to ungrit your teeth. Careful to not start growling and biting back so soon. You try so hard with your mother, to be more than your father’s daughter, to be more than they wanted.

Your mother shakes her head, short and quick, “no,” she says, almost coos, “no. Never. I’m scared for you.”

“Why?”

“You make everyone nervous with your technique. And you’ve stopped hiding it as much–how strong you’re getting. They’re getting scared and when they get scared–”

She tucks a strand of your hair behind your ear. Her eyes finally find yours.

“Well, it’s a little like your father–they’re all a little like dogs. If they get scared, they may bite. And I don’t want to see you bitten.”

Torn to shreds, maybe.

And when you look at her face, it is crestfallen but attempting to be brave, there is a wobble in her lip. A tightness in her throat. Her eyes are blurry with unshed tears and you know that all mothers must look like this in front of their daughters at some point; attempting to still be a mother, to still be your mother, braver than you, stronger than you, but not. Not anymore. She sniffles with it, tries to keep all her grief for you carefully tucked inside. You look at your mother and see her wrinkles and her gray hair and her worried face for you. You look at your mother and see a woman who has tried her best, but maybe it wasn’t quite enough.

Who never could bite back enough, avoided their bite so long that her own teeth fell out and her back curled and her skin grew thin and saggy. Easy to hurt. Easy to break.

You swallow tight around the lump in your own throat.

“Mom,” you whisper, and you reach out to smooth her brow now, too, to trade places with her. Your turn to soothe, to comfort, to tend. And you get out, your own tears caught the crux of your lashes, heart in your throat;

“Mom, it’s okay–” your voice is just a breath, trying to keep out the sob, just a gasp, “it’s okay– I have the bigger bite in the end.”

***

When you look into Satoru’s future, it is a cloudless day, and it is as easy as his head in your lap.

You don’t even pause from carding your fingers through the silky strands of his white hair. You don’t tense or gasp or scream or cry. You settle into his future like you were always meant to be there, carved your own path long before you even knew it, and made it yours so when you see it–

When you see it, it feels more like coming home.

You don’t even miss a beat. You don’t stutter or misstep. Satoru is none the wiser, eyes fluttered shut as he enjoys the breeze, white lashes like moth wings against his cheek.

“Satoru,” you say his name in a new way, in the way of reverence and adoration, in the way of ownership and pride.

“Satoru–”

“Hm?”

He cracks an eye open to peek at you.

“What?” he asks with a slight laugh, at the look on your face.

You tug at his hair and he yelps a little.

“Satoru–” you laugh when he sits up, when he tackles you back into the wildflowers. “Satoru, Satoru–” you sing his name like a bird, high on the rush of your technique.

He must notice, maybe, the residuals of cursed energy, because he looks at you underneath him for a moment. He stares hard at your face. But it isn’t suspicious just–

“Is it good?” He asks, “is it okay?”

You smile at him, lovely and so warm that he’s almost taken back, torn asunder by the radiance, the love.

“It could be great.”

“And you know it? You know how to–”

“I know what to do. I know what I have to do.”

And when he kisses you sweet and hard and excited, you laugh a little, dazed, shocked.

Oh, God, you know what you have to do.

***

It begins the day before Satoru and Suguru are to receive their mission to protect the star plasma vessel. Satoru visits you.

And before he leaves, you snag his wrist, pull him back to you.

You say his name with a heaviness he recognizes instantly, worry pulling at his features, at just the tone of your voice. He knows you so thoroughly at such a young age that you almost fear he could pull the thoughts from your head–take comfort that he could recognize any part of you anywhere. Your voice. Your steps. Your bite.

And somehow, you think you know him more.

“Don’t be scared of it–when it comes.” You tell him gently, like it’ll somehow soften the blow of what he has tried to fight his whole life. You know he has run from this in the same way that you have run straight towards it, faced it with brashness, perhaps too much harshness.

Divinity is something that you wrestled still and tamed, bit down into it until it became all yours.

Divinity is something that he has hid from and denied and ran from like prey.

Soon, it will catch him by the throat, by the quivering heart.

“When what comes?” He asks and he draws back to you for comfort. So you touch his face. You cup his cheek in your holy palm.

“You’ll know,” you soothe gently, “and you have to accept it, when it does.”

“You’re making me nervous,” he tries to laugh. It’s hollow. All hollow.

“It’ll be okay.” You murmur, and then you lean up onto your toes to kiss him with a sweetness he isn’t ready for. One that you rarely use on him. “I’ll see you soon.” You say against his lips, before slowly parting from him.

He blinks at you.

“Can’t I stomach it?” He asks.

“You’ll be forced to.” You answer. “And I’ll be here to help you through it.”

He stares hard at you; you can tell he doesn’t like what you’ve said. He doesn’t like how cryptic it is, but you know if you tell him now, he’ll only fight it harder.

If you tell him now what any of the future holds, he will die at the hands of a non-sorcerer.

So again, you remind him, you almost beg, “just don’t be afraid. Accept it when it comes. Promise me?”

And something in your face must frighten him, it must seize him, because he nods quickly. Sharply. Resolutely.

“For you? Anything.” And then he smiles in the way that you think heaven made, “I promise. I promise–besides,” he tilts his head down so you see the flint strike blue of his eyes, “have you ever known me to be afraid of anything?”

***

Satoru stumbles into your arms after everything. A God realized returns to the arms of his own God.

“I’ve got you,” you say and it almost seems like he’s running a fever, “I know.” You hush.

And as you hold him in your twilight-dark garden, the lush fauna shrouding your forms, your brush your lips against the shell of his ear. You tangle your hands in his hair. You touch him and soothe him and say over and over again in a thousand different ways, just like you have all your lives;

“It’s just you and me and what we have to carry. I have you. I have you–you have me. It’s okay–I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

And he takes it and swallows it and stomachs it as true.

***

Satoru presents you with two children before you’re even married.

Megumi and Tsumiki Fushiguro stare up at you with wide eyes.

Megumi is wary and jaded. Tsumiki is overly polite and helpful. You realize both are attempting to protect themselves in their own way, protect each other.

“This is my fiance,” Satoru tells the kids, “I’m sure you’ll get to know her well.”

Tsumiki bows politely and thumps her younger brother on the back of the head when he doesn’t. You glance over top of their heads at Satoru who grins fondly at them.

It strikes you very suddenly that you never asked if he wanted children. If you two were ever going to–

You knew about Megumi and Tsumiki, of course.

Children favored by Gods. Raised in your care.

Megumi, the son of one in his own right.

But as you watch Satoru look at the kids now, you realize perhaps he did always want this. Children. Them. You think maybe in another world entirely, he would’ve wanted a big family. You were both only children. Too blessed to be anything but alone in your childhood.

You try to imagine yourself as a mother, as your own mother, with a daughter sitting between your legs, clinging to you, reaching for you.

You try to imagine yourself with a daughter like yourself and the image curdles and sours.

You don’t think you could do it–

You wonder how your mother did it. You wonder how it didn’t break her heart, rip her apart, you wonder how she stomached it, how she didn’t despise you.

But then one evening Tsumiki sits in front of you and you comb her long hair out. And you ask her to pick a beautiful clip from your vanity.

She picks a light blue one, the color of the sky, and you begin to understand.

(And over the years, you’ll realize, you’ll think, I suppose I really would do anything. I suppose she really could become anything, and I would still love her.)

And Megumi, oh Megumi–

He seems to despise everyone but you. He sidles up to your side and he nudges his small head against your ribs, makes his hair staticky and mussed and clings to you the way he must want to do with his mother.

You begin to understand how she could stomach all of it, how every mother must in some way. How she could do it a thousand times over–

When they doze at your sides in the sun, on a blanket in your garden, and you know their futures, and all the tragedy and all the love, you begin to understand it all.

***

Your amulet shutters in your vision, before pushing you into–

Into the future. You know it’s taste now. Sulfur and ash. Bitter and heavy on your tongue. The past is sweeter, like rotten fruit, sickly.

Your vision swims with your successor.

This time, they are veiled, because you can see clearly now.

It’s the one you saw when you were younger, the one you’ve searched for countlessly–

You jolt.

Their face is a wash beneath the shimmering veil, adorned in silks and gold and jewels. They look half phantom, half-god, the hues of their world too-bright, lush like Eden.

“It’s you,” you say this time.

And they must be smiling beneath their veil.

You wish you could pull it from their face, reach all the way through time, and rip it from them the way you pull away Satoru’s blindfold. You wish to see them clearly, for who they are.

“We meet again finally,” it’s a feminine voice. Silky. Lovely in a way that is otherworldly. A shiver rips up your spine because–

“I’ve searched for you since–”

“I know.”

“Will you teach me?” You ask, you nearly beg.

“Aren’t you the one from the past? Shouldn’t you be teaching me?” Their voice is almost teasing.

“No,” you say defiantly, “you know this. You’re supposed to teach me.”

“Yes,”

“Then–”

“But I have little teaching to do. You know it.” The figure cants their head beneath the veil, twitches ever so slightly, “I know you do. It’s been festering, hasn’t it? The dreams, the thoughts, the plan that has unspooled inside of you.”

“It’s horrible.” You admit, “it’s–”

“Unforgivable?”

“Yes,” and then suddenly the pressure of tears that you weren’t prepared for, “I don’t want to do it. I didn’t–” want this.

Stillness.

“It’s worse if you don’t.” The voice like god says.

“I know,” you gasp, “I know–but it doesn’t make it any easier.”

“It will be easier than you think,” it’s a coo, like a mother’s voice, “for them. For your love.”

You fight the sob that crawls its way from the depths of you, a whimper coming out in its stead. Tears blur the heavenly vision in front of you so that it sways and swims in flushed pinks, tangerine, all gold light, honeydew greens and melancholy blues.

“What would you do for it? For love? For the future you want?”

“Anything,” you gasp, “everything.”

The figure raises their chin beneath their veil and you think maybe they’ve damned you. You think maybe it’s all their fault, from the beginning, it was always them, this god, leading you down the path they have created. Was it ever yours to begin with?

Like a curse, they condemn you;

“Then you know exactly what you have to do.”

***

When the day comes, you begin with breaking a plate against the wall.

You throw it near your father’s head so hard that it bursts on impact into thousands of shards that go pinging across the room in little flames of colorful ceramic.

Your mother gasps your name.

Your father reaches across the table at you in a fury, “you little shit–” and he grabs you by the collar hard enough to haul you halfway across the table. The other plates and glasses go crashing to the floor, clattering around.

Your mother tries to stop it.

But the moment your father has got you, you put your hands around his throat.

“Shall we do this now, father?” You hiss in some strange voice that does not feel like your own. “Running straight towards your fate, are you?”

(He is not–he has several years still. But the look on his face, the fear that shadows his eyes briefly is enough to make you start laughing.)

“What has gotten into you?” He growls, “I made you–why do you turn against me?” You squeeze at his throat, testing, testing–

“Satoru says you’re scared of me.” You whisper, “he wants to take me away from you. I think it would save your life if he did–”

Your fingers flex tighter. Your father grits his teeth.

Your father curses, cuts out the name Gojo so viciously from his mouth you wonder if blood will fall out onto you. “I’m not scared of you,” he spits, shaking you, wrestling until he’s got you over the table entirely. Your feet barely touch the floor with how he holds you up.

“No?” You ask, “I don’t haunt your dreams? I’m not driving you mad?”

(You know you are, it’s why you say it.)

“Shut up,” he snaps and when he slams you to the ground, it is enough to knock the wind out of you. “Shut up! You are my daughter and you will respect me–”

The peeling laugh that scrapes out of you sounds more hyena than human. It splinters off into a screaming, grating sort of laugh.

(And even still, you tremble like a child in his grasp. But you press on–)

“You are my father and you will respect me.” You tell him, “you are my father and you will fear me like I used to fear you.”

He stares down at you hard, searching frantically in your face for something, anything–

“I want Satoru.” You demand. “I want to go with him and maybe it’ll change everything.”

“No.”

“I want Satoru!” You snap, thrashing in his hold now, twisting and arching. He bears down hard enough to make you bleat in pain, to make your chest ache and compress hard underneath the weight of his forearm. “He’d kill you if he knew how you treat me–if I told him–”

Your father seizes the top of your hair so cruelly that it wrenches all the words from your mouth a moment.

Your mother is begging. Neither of you hear her.

You look hard at your father, searching frantically for something, anything–

“I am your daughter and you have made me. I am your daughter and I will be your death. I am your daughter and you have made your own death.”

You think the look of fear that transforms his face must be what you looked like as a child.

“You babble insanities–this is what I get, then, for pushing you too young–they say Foresight users always lose their mind and–” Your father tries to get it all out before you can say more, pushes the words out like he’s angry, like he’s trying to drown you out.

“Am I not the prophet you begged for?” You ask on a half-sob, almost pleading, “didn’t you wish for me? Pray for power? I know you did, at the shrines of our ancestors–”

“Stop it!” He snaps, horrified that you’ve touched upon a memory. That you know him, know it all. “Enough!”

“It’s why you chose my mother!” You crow, tears catching, “because you thought she would bear you a powerful child! Because you read the journal of an earlier Foresight user and–and what did it say?” Your voice drops, “what did it say, father? About which wife to chose?”

He is trembling now, you can feel it all over, like he’s a frightened child.

“You chose her because a Foresight user told you to in a journal from two-hundred-years ago–because it would give you me–”

Because I told them to put it down. Because I am my own maker. I am my own God.

When he hits you this time, you go howling like a beast, crying and crying and crying. Your mother pulls him off of you. But you don’t stop turning and twisting and holding the blood in your mouth and in your hands and feeling it all slip down your chin. The sob catches and surprises you, works it’s way out of you on a raw, animal note.

“I want Satoru–”

You wail at what you’re doing, what you will do, what you have always known to do. You wail at what’s been done to you, what will be done to you.

Your head swims; when did it all–how did it all come to this? How did it get so twisted up?

You were innocent once, weren’t you?

You lurch away from your mother when she tries to comfort you. You throw more glass at your father. You scream and kick and destroy the dining room. You break china and splash water and hot tea everywhere. It burns your hands. It cuts your bare feet.

You look at the sky out the window for the time. You can’t stop now–

So you go down the hall, running and howling, flitting to and fro like a trapped, shrieking bird. You break a window. You bloody your palms. You scratch at the wallpaper until it tears beneath your ruined fingernails.

You do this for hours. Your mother can not calm you. Your father has gone away.

“Please, please–” your mother begs, “how can I help you? What can I do–anything–I would do anything for you–I would–” tears trek down her cheeks as she pulls at your skirts, as she tries to stop your bleeding or soothe your cries.

And finally, you say again;

“I want Satoru.”

You breathe hard. Your mother’s hitching sobs quiet.

“I want Satoru.” You say again, and then you shout it, “I want Satoru!”

And you sound like a child, you sound like a warbling little curse saying the same thing over and over again.

But that is who your mother finally calls.

And that is who comes flying into your home, into your room.

(“Where is she?” He’d asked the moment he got there, the moment he saw your mother, hand over her mouth, still crying.

“Her room–” your mother hiccups. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry–”)

And your room is where he finds you in hysterics still. Your mouth is swelling, blood sticky and half-dried all over your lip, your chin, your whole body.

You glance out the window, at the sun in the sky, to see what time of the day it is.

You need more time.

Still, you collide into his chest, let him immediately pull you from your torn up feet to be cradled in his arms. “What have they done? What’s wrong–”

“I called for you for hours–” you whimper, arms tightening around his neck, “where were you? Where were you-”

You sob hard into his shoulder, so he shuts the door behind him, sealing you away from the world before he moves deeper into the disaster of your room. His large hand pets over your hitching back, over your spine, as if he’s trying to iron out all your trembling.

“I came as soon as I was called.” He responds, holding the back of your head, pressing you into him. “I’d never lea–”

“But you did leave me.” You realize and you lift your head from his shoulder to look at him, “you left me to go to school. And now you’re gone and I’m stuck here–”

“I’m here now, aren’t I?”

Something tightens and then bursts inside of you.

When you strike him, you do so with your nails against his pretty, unmarred face. Blood swells to the little cut.

“And it wasn’t soon enough.”

When you reach for his face again, he doesn’t even flinch away and you think he would accept anything from you at this point. Regardless, you pull his blindfold off. His eyes are glazed, watery.

“I’m sorry,” he hushes.

Your face twists up in pain, in hurt, “no, you don’t–” understand. The tears come harder. Years of your agony come rushing forward, “I never wanted–” this. “It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair–”

Your voice hitches on a sob.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, even as you begin fussing and twisting in his arms, as you begin to fight him.

You push and shove and scratch and bite.

And he never puts up his Infinity.

You throw glass at him and yell at him about how he’ll never understand, how he left you, how you hate him and resent him and need him. You beg him to take you away. You yell at him to stay away. You cry until your dry heaving, until you’re near sick with it all, with what you’re doing.

Someone knocks. Your mother’s wobbling voice, “someone is here for Gojo–they say it’s important. That he needs to go–”

And then you grab him and you beg him not to leave. You’re going to be sick. You grab his wrist, you fall to your knees, you push your head into his thigh. You sob into his stomach, clinging desperately, fingers tightened like a small child’s fist. You beg him to forgive you. You beg him to stay, stay, stay.

“I won’t leave you,” he soothes, coming down to your level, letting you crawl into his lap. He’s all torn up from you, but he still lets you nuzzle your damp cheek to his, lets you cry and whine and whimper into his shoulder.

(And some part of you knows that he loves this. Needs you to need him—like all gods do.)

He holds you as someone pounds on the door and begs for him to come. You dig your nails into him as if it might keep him still, keep him in your arms.

“I’ve got you now,” he whispers, over and over again, “and I’m going to take you away from everyone–” he vows the words into your throat, along your pulse. “And then it will only be us and you’ll always have me.”

The knocking never seems to end.

(It’ll pound in your head the rest of your life—)

You look up at him, in all your raw bloodlines, your tears and your fever hot godhood.

“You’ll always have me.” You repeat.

“And I’ll always have you.” He soothes, hushes with such love that you start to cry harder.

(You know it’s coming. So you hold tighter. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me—)

Until finally someone says through the door;

“Gojo! Gojo–Haibara is dead. A first year is dead–they need you–”

Suguru Getou stands in a morgue over the body of a fifteen-year-old as his world turns on its axis, as everything shifts onto a new path. A thought burns into his mind the way they will soon burn Haibara.

(Shortly after, he will massacre one hundred and twelve people. You have seen that number in your mind a thousand times. You hold Satoru when he can’t stand anymore, when he admits he couldn’t kill his best friend. You soothe him, you tell him that this is the only way forward, there was nothing he could’ve done, you tell him–you did everything right.

You recognize your third lie to him the way you recognize his heart; easily, readily, simply.)

All because Satoru Gojo was too late to save Haibara—too late because he simply just wouldn’t leave you.

“And I’ll always have you.”

***

Masterlist | <- Chapter One: Swallow | Chapter Three: Anew ->

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