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Things you don’t know: how it happened. Why it happened. Why it happened to you of all people. Whether it’s even real, or just-
Things you do know: You are sixteen years old. You speak English and a few words in Spanish. You frequently read and write fanfiction. You like to draw. Your name is-
Your name-
…Your name doesn’t matter anymore.
Your name was the name of a sixteen year-old American fanfiction writer. Those adjectives no longer apply.
Your name is Gojo Satoru.
Repeat it. Recite it. Say it until it’s true.
It’s the only person you can afford to be, here. The you-who-was could not survive this place. The you-who-is will have to.
Your life is one of snapshots. A realization as you sit in the womb. A scream as you enter a new world. Snatches of Japanese learned quickly for an infant, but unbearably slow for a teen. Faltering first steps. Turning two and eighteen in the same breath and having to decide for yourself whether it counts.
The people around you aren’t any clearer. You know your mother as a distant smile and an ornate kimono you aren’t allowed to touch. You know your father as ice blue eyes and a cold voice of authority.
Your eyes are bluer than his. In the mirror, they look like shards of glass suspended in an endless blue sky.
They let you see everything.
From the rabbit crouched in the bushes outside the bathroom window to the spider hidden behind your bookshelf to your nanny to your parents to your extended family to the deer sleeping in the forest attached to the estate-
Closing your eyes helps a bit, though you can still see light through them and nothing impairs the six-eyes at all. Covering them with an arm helps more, cutting off your mundane sight entirely and leaving you with only your technique.
You learned, in your previous life, how to identify sensory overload. It took you years of meltdowns and leaving classes early and hiding away at lunchtime, but eventually you reached a point where you could tell exactly how much you were able to bear, exactly how long you could last before you’d turn snappish and cold, unwilling to further interact with the world until you’d taken a breather.
Here, sitting in your room with an arm over your eyes, still able to see for miles, you think to yourself:
No wonder the og Gojo was Like That. With this much input all the time, I doubt he even realized this much stress isn’t supposed to be a baseline.
Thankfully, you have sixteen years of coping mechanisms and the self control of the adult you would have been without your death, so you’re much more equipped to take it in stride.
It’s still difficult to deal with, but it’s something you think you can get a handle on, with time. Something you can get used to.
What’s harder is being untouchable.
Not in the sense of your infinity - you’re still getting a handle on that, at your current age of three, though you think you’ll be able to replicate og Gojo’s hand-holding trick within another few months.
No, what’s getting to you is the isolation. Your parents are barely present and aren’t especially affectionate even when they are. The servants are terrified of the child who holds both the six-eyes and limitless. Most of your extended family reveres or resents you, usually both.
Your nanny is the only other human you regularly speak with, and even then you have to take pains not to scare her off and can’t display any actual affection towards her lest your parents send her away to prevent you from “becoming soft”.
It’s a terribly lonely existence.
You can easily imagine how the original Gojo might have acted out just to be acknowledged. How the isolation might have warped him until the idea of a human connection he didn’t have to force became utterly foreign to him. How he might have been rude and flippant because he had literally no other examples of how to act.
You don’t know if that’s precisely what happened, but… nothing about this childhood is liable to produce a functional member of society. A functional human being, even. Honestly, it’s a miracle the og turned out as well as he did.
You, yourself, are not immune to the effect of this place. In this kind of environment, you have two choices: adapt, or die.
Adaption has always been a strength of yours. You develop a chillingly polite manner, saying exactly what’s required and no more. People take your reticence for tact, and find themselves on the back foot when any attempt to manipulate you is met with stony indifference.
In short, you become an ice queen, at least at home.
The other shoe drops when you figure out teleportation and start spending long periods of time away from home. Your mother summons you to a discussion over tea.
“The family has been lenient with you because of your techniques.” She informs you. Her hands are perfectly manicured, red painted nails held against her cup. “But your recent truancy is intolerable. You will cease immediately.”
You meet her eyes, storm clouds against shattered glass.
“No.”
She raises an eyebrow. “This isn’t your decision to make. As the six-eyes, you are expected to act in the best interests of the clan. As this behavior is in violation of that, you will not be permitted to continue it.”
She states it like it’s self-evident. A fundamental pillar of the world. The sky is blue, things fall when you drop them, the six-eyes serves the Gojo clan.
Here is another pillar of the world: the dead remain so.
Your expression remains calm. Unbothered.
Untouchable, even.
You tell her, “I don’t think you understand the situation. Allow me to explain, mother.”
You place your teacup back on its saucer with a clink you let her think was drilled out of your reflexes by hours upon hours of etiquette lessons. “You are the first wife of the Gojo clan head, due to my position as indisputable heir. As the matriarch of a powerful clan, you have significant status and influence within Jujutsu society. You are wealthy, well-connected, highly respected, and a powerful sorcerer in your own right.” You pause, for a moment. Let the tension stretch until it’s ready to snap.
You stand. “And you, along with the rest of the clan, are completely at my mercy.” She opens her mouth, as if to interrupt, but you hold up a hand and in the same breath allow the weight of your power to settle fully within the room.
Your mother turns grey, and presses her lips together into a thin line. She doesn’t try to speak again.
“Before my birth, the Gojo were a declining, washed up clan with little actual power. While we were once at the top of Jujutsu society, after centuries without either of our bloodline techniques making an appearance, we were figureheads at best. Our money dried up. Our allies turned fickle. The name that once sent fear into the hearts of men and curses alike became a joke. And then, at our darkest hour…” You spread your hands, and in turn allow a smile to spread on your face. It’s not a particularly nice one. “I was born. Suddenly, all that power and status returned in an instant. Like a miracle from the heavens, answering your prayers and restoring the clan to glory. What you seem to have forgotten, however, is that what is given can also be taken away.”
Her eyes widen, and you see that she understands. As quickly as you’d released it, you spool your power tight within your body once more, and the pressure of the room eases.
You’re still smiling. With you standing and her still seated, your mother has to look up to meet your gaze. You allow her to do so with an indulgence that sends an invisible shiver down her spine. (Still visible to you, of course.)
She really is a strong person, to take all of that and still look you in the eyes without an ounce of obvious hesitation. You’d respect her, if she wasn’t such a shit parent that you had to pull this in the first place just for an ounce of independence.
Fucking politics.
“I could leave the clan high and dry easily, mom.” You say. “There are dozens of people who would kill to have me as an asset. I could wring any concession I wanted from them, if I offered that. Do you know why I’m not going to?”
She asks, “Why?” With a suspicious tone and steely glint in her eyes. She’s getting it, now. You won’t need to push much harder.
“Because I won’t need to. You and the rest of the clan are going to let me do whatever I please, however I please to do it, and in exchange I’ll be kind enough to keep my last name. You aren’t going to stop me from going where I want. You aren’t going to control who I associate with. You’ll give me whatever funds and assistance I may need, and as long as it’s to my advantage I won’t bother sucking you dry.” You lean forward, looming over her despite the fact that you’re ten years old and less than five feet tall, and shamelessly steal og Gojo’s favorite sentence. “Because I’m the strongest. And as long as I’m the strongest and a Gojo, the Gojo are the strongest along with me.”
And then you turn around and walk out.
Several years later, you join Jujutsu tech. By now, you’re one of the strongest sorcerers alive, though not the strongest altogether, whatever you tell your family. You haven’t figured out reverse cursed energy, yet, but you’ve gotten very, very good at the standard kind.
Once you do figure out your reverse technique, there will be no one capable of opposing you.
After all, og Gojo was already an absurdly powerful person. Add that to an extra lifetime of memories and knowledge of the future, and your existence crosses the line even further into the territory of blatantly unfair.
You’re essentially a living god.
How sobering. Even as it is, you’re strong enough to blackmail your entire family into serving your every whim just for the honor of being associated with you. Fully realized, there won’t be a force in the universe that can stand against you.
What are you supposed to do with that?
Jujutsu tech is interesting, at least. Almost enough to distract you from the horrifying weight of the world on your shoulders, even.
Yaga looks at you alternatively like a bomb about to go off and a feral cat he’s trying to befriend. He’s distant with you and handles any interaction gingerly, but under that you can see that he genuinely does care for his students, for all that he’s mired too deep in the corrupt culture of this place to fully realize the harm his methods do.
On the other hand, he’s training child soldiers whose existence is necessary to the world’s continued function. Maybe some harm is inevitable, when you’re trapped as a cog in a system like that.
Either way, he’s trying his best to keep you alive and for that, you respect him enough not to actively cause trouble. To a degree you can’t avoid it, given projecting a certain amount of irreverence and disrespect for authority is how you keep said authorities from wanting to deal with you more than they absolutely have to, (which would in turn force you to deal with them) but you don’t make any special effort to make Yaga’s life harder, specifically, and you try to tone it down a bit when he’s in the line of fire.
It’s the absolute bare minimum, but you can tell he notices it.
Shoko is great. Unsurprisingly, she’s not able to help you figure out reverse technique, (which you theoretically understand, like, it’s just squares, you just can’t get it to work for some reason-) but something about her general give no fucks and take no prisoners attitude just clicks with you and you become fast friends.
Later in the year, Geto Suguru enrolls.
He’s fiercely principled, highly intelligent, charismatic, and when you meet him the only thing you can think is Hello, Icarus.
Because past all his positive qualities, all you can see is how fast he’s burning himself to fuel his dreams. All you can think is how hard he’s going to crash into the sea. How many people he’s going to take out as he drowns.
You befriend him. You tell him you two are the strongest. You become rising stars together.
You don’t tell him: I don’t know how to save you from yourself.
Years later, you think - maybe he knows. Maybe he always knew.
What a terrible way to fall in love.
You’re sent on a mission to retrieve the Star Plasma vessel. You fail. Even knowing what’s coming, you fail.
Her death is marked by a celebration. You look on with eyes like shards of glass and think, Hey, Suguru. What if I snapped first? What then?
He stops you, of course. He was always going to stop you. You were always going to let him.
Aren’t I supposed to be a god? Shouldn’t I be above this? Shouldn’t I be able to disappoint you without feeling like the world’s collapsed, when I know full well you’ll do something much worse?
But you’re not a god. You never were. You never will be.
All the power in the world, and a heart remains the heaviest burden of all. How do I do this? How do I hold this?
Please, You think. I’m not Atlas. Let me put the sky down.
You are holding the world on your shoulders. It’s too much weight to bear. Your elbows buckle. Your knees give out.
Fushigoro Toji kills you.
In that moment, you stretch your six-eyes further than you ever have before. You gaze at miles and miles, in such fine detail as to pick up every molecule, every atom within your sight.
When the brain processes a large quantity of things at once, time appears to slow down as the speed you think at speeds up.
For a moment, you have eternity.
You think, Oh no. I’m supposed to figure out the reverse technique now, aren’t I.
You think, I’m going to die again.
Oh well.
The first time you died, you were on a rollercoaster. It was a sunny day, not a cloud in sight, and you were at the top of the first drop, arms in the air, ready to fly.
In that life, you’d always been kind of a twig. You just didn’t eat enough, you suppose.
The coaster was poorly secured. No bar over the shoulders, just one over your lap.
The person seated next to you, under the same bar, was much larger than you. His horrified expression was the last human face you ever saw as you slipped from under the bar, falling out of the coaster to your death.
That feeling of absolute weightlessness as you realized you were at your end… It was utterly exhilarating. You’ve felt nothing quite like it since.
Your eyes are closed, you realize. You open them.
You take the energy inside you and multiply it by itself. It inverts.
Time stops, and all you see is red.
You live.
Because you’re marginally less of a disaster than og Gojo, you pick up Megumi and Tsukimi early. You take some time off in order to set things up so someone can take care of them when you’re on missions.
You don’t parent them, really. You don’t have the time, as much as it galls you to leave them with only the (very expensive and thoroughly vetted) nanny you’ve hired, you don’t have a choice .
It is what it is. You do what you can. You make sure they’re not actively suffering, even if you can’t take care of them the way they probably need you to.
At some point, in the midst of back to back to back missions and trying to be there for two young children who have no one else to rely on and working on your reversal technique and purple, you realize you haven’t seen Suguru in a while.
A week after that, he annihilates a village and declares war on non-sorcerers.
Against your will, you realize you’d hoped you’d changed enough to stop that. You chide yourself for it, because Suguru’s always been too messed up for friendship alone to solve the problem, and if you really thought you could change this you should have done something about it, instead of just standing around wringing your hands.
Regardless of how at fault you are for your own disappointment, you can’t help the hollow feeling in your chest and the stinging sense of betrayal that you weren’t enough, that he was enough to stop you but you weren’t enough to stop him, and-
And that hurts. It’s your own damn fault, but it still hurts.
You keep moving. Years pass.
You become a teacher. A boy named Yuuta joins Jujutsu tech, with a special grade curse clinging to him who used to be a little girl who loved him very much.
The higher-ups want to execute him. You say absolutely the fuck not, and Yaga backs you up because he’s a bro like that.
You face Suguru. He tells you, Kill me if you want.
Says maybe you’ll find meaning in it.
You say, “You asshole.” And “You motherfucker.” And “Damn you.”
You don’t say, I love you. I love you more than anyone else in the fucking world. I’d kill for you. I’d die for you. I’d live for you.
You don’t say, And I hate you, too, because you’ve become a monster and I’m the only one who can stop you. I’m the only one you’ll let stop you.
You don’t say, You asshole, why couldn’t you have just come to me from the start? Why couldn’t you have let me stop you then, when there was a way to do it that didn’t involve killing you?
It’s okay. He knows. You think maybe he’s always known.
God, what a dick.
You say, “You’re the worst.” And he’s polite enough not to mention your tears soaking into his dumb fucking outfit.
And you kill him.
And you don’t destroy the body. Predictable enemies are easier to counter, after all.
(If the thought of him gaining awareness in that final moment, as you kick Kenjaku’s ass and make his thousand year plan look completely stupid- if the thought of Suguru watching in that moment, seeing your triumph, makes your heart flip and twist because god, to have one moment where you can be fully truthful with him- Well.
That’s your business.)
Tsukimi ends up in a coma. Megumi enrolls in Jujutsu tech.
The plot is here.
Itadori Yuuji eats one of Sukuna’s fingers. He becomes the vessel to the king of curses. He proves he’s able to keep full control of his body.
The ten second fight you stage with Sukuna is extremely fun. Maybe you’ll do it again sometime.
In most areas, you take pains to follow the script you carry from your last life. The tighter you keep to those rails, the more you’ll be able to manipulate things to fall into place all at once.
One divergence: The higher-ups try to murder Yuuji while you’re out on a mission. As you’re extremely wary of Sukuna and absolutely do not want him having more wiggle room than absolutely necessary, you make sure they do not succeed.
When they get there, all the curses have already been exorcised. You tell Megumi and Nobara that they need to pretend very well that Yuuji died here unless they want him to become actually dead.
By some miracle, no one on the wrong side of things catches on, though just about everyone else does.
A special grade curse named Mahito plots to kill a boy named Junpei. At the critical moment, his attempt to touch Junpei is rendered hopeless by an infinity.
Within a minute of that, you have made him very extra dead.
Ah, purple. What a bullshit technique. You love it so.
Events continue in a similar fashion, sticking almost to the script before you veer them wildly away at the last possible moment before disaster.
Somehow, nothing too big gets knocked off course by your shenanigans.
Somehow, you end up in Shibuya, staring down a man who is not Suguru. He tries to put you in the prison realm. You use purple. What prison realm?
There is fear in his eyes.
You laugh at him. You tell him the only person allowed to do inadvisable things with Suguru’s corpse is you. It comes out as a much dirtier joke than intended, but you play it off.
You hold blue in one hand and red in the other. You say, “Ever heard the song “Pen Pineapple Apple Pen”?”
There’s a wild grin on your face as you bring your hands together.
Kenjaku looks like he’s about to shit himself. Then, he grins, and the person grinning is not Kenjaku at all, and you say,
“Bye, Suguru. Sorry I didn’t save you.”
And
And then
It’s over, you guess.
Not over over. You’ve still got problems to solve. Sukuna still needs dealt with. Tengen is definitely going to be an issue.
But the big part, the part you’ve spent decades building up to and getting ready for, the part you’ve planned and replanned and planned again-
You’ve done it. The prison realm is gone. Kenjaku is gone. Suguru has been laid to rest and you hope he gains peace there, for all he never managed it in life.
Everything else, you can handle.
You put your blindfold back on. Tilt your head back. Laugh.
I did it.
Fuck, I actually did it.
Laugh harder.
I really am the strongest, aren’t I?