Chapter Text
Tick
The crease between Shoko’s brows deepened in concern and her lips continued to move, but you couldn’t register a single thing she was saying. The only thing you could hear was the incessant ticking of the clock echoing throughout the mostly empty infirmary. Your vision clouded, and not even the harsh fluorescents on the ceiling could wake you from your daze.
Tock
Shoko already had your arm in a total death grip, effectively cutting off your circulation, but not even the discomfort of your fingers tingling and growing numb was enough to make you listen to her. Her grip tightened.
Were it not for the clock’s steady tempo, you would think time had stopped in that moment. In that one terrible, awful moment. You squeezed your eyes shut and grit your teeth.
‘Stop, stop, stop.’
No matter how hard you willed it, your sad attempts to stop time were ultimately futile. Tears pricked at your eyes, but even still, you focused all your energy on that damned clock.
Tick
Tock
Shoko’s nails were digging into your arm now, and the smallest bit of additional force would surely break skin; her hold on you was the only thing tethering you to the earth.
Oh, how you wished she would just let go. If she would just let go, maybe you could finally escape the taunting ticking of the clock. It was mocking you – the way it just kept going and going and going.
Over and over and over again – that damn ticking.
Why wouldn’t it just stop?
What you wouldn’t give to make it stop.
If it stopped, you would never have to confront the truth of your situation which, despite the incredible amount of energy you were putting into impeding it, was finally starting to seep through the cracks of your psyche. The dam you had carefully constructed over the years was threatening to burst – hell, it already had, but was now being tentatively held together with your bare hands. Millions of thoughts, fears, emotions – all being kept at bay by you. Tiny, insignificant, nothing you.
Twelve years. You had spent twelve years of your life fighting the worst horrors imaginable and atrocities that the human mind would never fully comprehend. You had been flirting with death since you were a teenager – and for what? For the occasional broken bone? For the scars from being impaled? Or maybe because, not so deep down, you knew there was nothing else out there for you.
Nothing else. Until there was. And until there wasn’t anymore.
Tick
Tock
You wrenched your arm out of Shoko’s grip and smacked your fist against the adjacent wall. Your knuckles stung as tiny blots of blood began to appear across the skin of your hand. She wrestled you back into place and wrapped her arms around you, realizing it was the only way to keep you from moving. There was absolutely no way in hell she would let you go even though you were stronger than her and could easily overpower her.
The ticking of the clock was starting to get drowned out by the sounds of the medical ward and you realized you wouldn’t fade away no matter how much you wanted to. She wouldn’t let you.
And so, you succumbed to the wave of realizations crashing over you one-by-one in quick succession.
First was that the pain in your chest was unbearable. It felt as if someone had used a torch to heat up a serrated knife and then used that same knife to saw through the protective layers of skin, bone, and muscle to finally tear away at your heart.
Second was that your throat felt raw – a result of your wailing.
When did you start crying? You don’t remember crying.
Your voice was hoarse, and the sounds coming out of you were alien to you because never in a thousand years would you allow yourself to fall apart so dramatically.
“No, no, no.”
No. That was all you could say.
No - this wasn’t supposed to happen. No – you weren’t supposed to be the last one left. No – he wasn’t supposed to leave you. You weren’t supposed to be left alone. He was supposed to find you.
He promised to find you.
“I’m so sorry,” Shoko whispered after what felt like hours. “I’m so, so sorry.”
The final piece of reality you tried so desperately to escape from came at you like a speeding truck and all you could do was go limp in Shoko’s arms. She pulled you into her chest and she rocked you gently, rubbing slow circles on your back as you buried your face into her neck.
“He’s gone. Kento’s gone.”
Over and over again, her words echoed in your mind. Kento was gone.
And that was a far more terrible loss than that of your right arm.
Your tears stained her lab coat and she continued to rock you. You focused on the clock – one final attempt to make time stop.
Tick
Tock
But no. Time would not stop. Not even after everything you had been through would you be granted this one small mercy. Time would crawl forward. One agonizing second after another.
Tick
Tock
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“Trick or treat!”
October 31, 2021 (9:44 PM) – three years after the Shibuya Incident
The gaggle of children on your doorstep blatantly stared at the empty sleeve dangling at your side as you used your other arm to reach back into the candy bowl resting on a small table by your front door. They immediately ceased their gawking when they realized you had splurged on the good candy as opposed to the generic crap you could buy in bulk.
You had grown tired of waiting around for more trick-or-treaters, and opted to empty the entirety of the bowl’s contents into their sacks – much to their pleasure and much to their parents’ dismay. You sent them off with a wave and a silent apology to the adults that would have to deal with the inevitable sugar rushes.
With a sigh, you flicked off the porch light and locked your front door, and rested your weight against the hard wood. You hated Halloween – or, rather, you hated the date. That’s why you always went so out of your way to get the good candy – because at least someone should enjoy the day. You peered out the window and watched as the trick-or-treaters skipped away; two parents clasped the hands of their young child and swung him between them as they walked down the sidewalk. You allowed your wistful gaze to linger longer than you should have allowed it to until the dinging of the kitchen timer drew your attention to the loaf of bread waiting for you in your oven.
You slipped on a mitt, opened the oven door, and the smell of freshly baked bread wafted into your nostrils. With some difficulty, you removed the loaf from the pan and placed it on a wire rack to allow it to cool off.
The bottle of 2010 Chardonnay hiding in the back of your cabinet was a gift from an overly-friendly neighbor. The poor woman was merely seeking out a friend, but you didn’t have it in you to be a halfway decent companion; slowly but surely, the number of visits tapered off until, eventually, she just stopped showing up. You figured now was as a good a time as any to take it out.
You had mastered the art of opening bottles with just one hand, so you easily uncorked the Chardonnay. You were never much of a wine fan – in fact, you could call it sacrilegious that someone with as unrefined a palate as yours was in possession of the aged, $379 bottle of wine.
No, you were never much of a wine drinker. But he was, and he used to possess the knowledge of the most experienced sommelier so if you were going to do this, you were going to do it right. For him.
The oaky, full-bodied Chardonnay was served at exactly 55 degrees Fahrenheit and formed a small tornado as the liquid swirled through the aerator, into the first glass, and then the second. You pulled a serrated knife from the knife block, and cut two perfectly even slices from your loaf.
Steam rose from the incision, and the aroma in the air grew more potent with the smells of garlic, parmesan, and herbs now reaching into the far corners of your living room. And that’s how you knew you got it right. You finally got it right. Three years of trying to perfectly recreate his recipe, and you finally got it right.
You placed the second slice of bread and the second glass of wine on the mantle over the fireplace, right in front of the blunt sword still wrapped in bloodied, spotted cloth – untouched since you put it up there almost three years ago. A single armchair stood in front of the lit fireplace – just close enough to bask in its warmth – and you took your seat.
You leaned back in the chair and raised your wineglass to eye level, swirling its contents around just as he had shown you.
“It allows evaporation to take place which removes sulfides and sulfites.”
“Are you telling me wine has the same compounds as rotten eggs? How do you drink this stuff?”
“You’ll learn how to appreciate good wine. In time.”
You took a small sip from your glass and wrinkled your nose in mild disgust.
He never did get the chance to convert you.
By then, the bread had had enough time to cool off, so you picked off a piece of your slice and placed it on your tongue to properly savor all the flavors. As you chewed, your fingers curled tightly around the stem of your wine glass, and you scowled.
All those years of practice were for naught because apparently, you still couldn’t get it right.
No matter how hard you tried, the damn bread never tasted as it should – as you remember it tasting. It never tasted the way it did when he made it.
It wasn’t right. Nothing was right – why couldn’t you get anything right?
You let out a frustrated yell and hurled your glass at the wall next to the mantle, then stormed your way over to the kitchen to grab the mostly-full bottle of wine; you chugged foul-tasting liquid until the bottle was half empty. You threw yourself back into your armchair and raised the bottle in a cruel, mocking gesture to the blunt sword above the fireplace.
“Happy fucking anniversary.”
He would be so disappointed by the way you continued to pour wine down your gullet – you weren’t even bothering to taste it. The rest of the hour went by in a blur and eventually, the lights of the neighborhood began to shut off one-by-one, signaling that the night of trick-or-treating was officially over. You had neglected to throw an additional log into the fire, and it eventually died down. Soon, the embers cooled off, and the little light they had provided faded away, leaving you in total darkness.
As the final drops of alcohol landed on your tongue, you decided that this was certainly a fitting end to your evening: drunk, sad, and alone in the dark. It was what you deserved.
“I don’t know how you drink that stuff – it’s disgusting.”
Your grip on the empty glass bottle tightened, and the sound of shattering glass filled your living room before the lights flickered on. As your eyes adjusted to the light, your bloodied hand came into focus; small shards of glass were buried in the flesh of your palm, and the blood trickling from your fresh cuts dripped down your arm, staining the armrest of your seat.
You didn’t even have to turn around to see who it was – you would recognize that voice anywhere. “What are you doing here, Gojo?”
The white-haired giant sauntered over to you and placed one of his long fingers under your chin, tilting your head up so that he could have a proper look at you. His blindfold wrinkled just the slightest bit when he knit his brow.
“You’re a mess,” he sighed. You bared your teeth at him and you attempted to swat his hand away from your face. Gojo grabbed your wrist mid-swing and sat down on the coffee table across from you. “Let me help you.”
You clenched your jaw, but nodded and allowed him to pick the bits of glass from your hand. Your blood marred his perfect white skin and you watched as he worked in silence, paying no mind to his red-stained fingers. It dawned on you then that in all your years of knowing Gojo Satoru, the two of you had never been so quiet for so long.
He navigated around your house as if he were a frequent guest, knowing exactly where to go to find your first aid kit. No one, no matter how perceptive, would have guessed that it was his first time seeing you in almost three years.
“I’m not going to ask you again, Gojo. What are you doing here? We made a deal.”
“No, you made a deal – I never agreed to anything.” He dabbed at your open wounds with alcohol pads, effectively drawing a hiss out of you, as if he were punishing you for your insolent behavior. “And there’s been… a bit of a development. I need you for one last job.”
Just as he finished clipping the bandages around your wrist to keep them in place, you yanked your hand out of his grasp and shot up from your chair, marching over to the front door in a panic.
“No. I told you I was done being a sorcerer and I meant it. You need to go now. Please get the fuck out of my house. Please.” You unlocked the door and went to turn the knob, but Gojo’s long legs closed the gap between you in just a few strides. He raised his hand over your head and pushed on the front door, keeping it shut. You tossed him a glare over your shoulder, knowing full well there was nothing you could really do to intimidate him.
He backed away from you slightly and brought a hand up to his blindfold, tugging it downwards and allowing the fabric to pool around his neck. His bewitching blue eyes peered at you from beneath stray strands of his white hair, and he put his hands up as if reminding you that he was not a threat.
“I wouldn’t have come all the way here if it wasn’t important.”
After the events of Shibuya and the Culling Game, you had left Jujutsu Tech – you left Japan, you left the continent just to get as far away from everything as you possibly could.
To say the least, Gojo showing up on your doorstep 6,500 miles away in a small town just outside of Burlington, Vermont came as a shock. If you were a stronger person, you would consider this unexpected drop-in as a pleasant surprise – but you weren’t. Just looking at him made memories of your previous life come flooding back, and you weren’t prepared to deal with that now. Maybe you wouldn’t be able to deal with it ever.
The alcohol was making your emotions even more tumultuous than normal and you squeezed your eyes shut, cursing yourself for allowing tears to start building up.
It was dawning on you that you had missed him so much, but you couldn’t be in his presence any longer, not if you wanted to keep from breaking.
“Satoru,” you whispered, using his given name. “Please.”
Gojo visibly softened when your pleading reached him and he placed both hands on your shoulders, tightening his grip just enough to be reassuring – to let you know that he was here. You realized it was the first time you had been touched so familiarly in years, and remembering how alone you had been since you had left made your breath hitch in your throat. You really had missed him.
You thought about what the last couple of years must have been like for him – something you actively avoided doing up until that moment. The last time you saw him was right after he had finally been released from the Prison Realm after being trapped for weeks. In the brief moments you had with him before you left, you had noticed a drastic shift in his behavior; before Shibuya he was cocky, but no one could fault him for that – he had every right to be.
He never had to be careful or strategic, instead opting to take care of things with brute force. And then he was caught off guard.
Say what you will about pre-Shibuya Gojo, but you could never say he didn’t care about the people in his life. So, when his complacence got the better of him, he shouldered all the blame for everything that happened. And you could see that for three years, he had lived his life being weighed down by the tremendous guilt for everything that had happened. He looked tired.
That wasn’t fair to him. Everyone who was left tried telling him so, but he just wouldn’t listen.
‘All the power in the world,’ he had said. ‘And I couldn’t do anything.’
He repeated himself. “I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important. Please just hear me out.”
You could hear the near-desperation in his voice and urged yourself to muster up every bit of strength you had in order to respond.
“No.” Gojo’s hands dropped from your shoulders and you made your way back to your living room, grabbing a throw pillow from the loveseat before throwing yourself onto the sofa. You curled yourself up into a ball with the pillow hugged tightly to your chest. “It’s time for you to leave, Satoru.”
“I’m not leaving until you hear me out. Don’t make this any more difficult than it has to be.”
You slammed the pillow to the ground and sprung up from your seat, your sudden anger fueling you and giving you the might to confront the intruder. Because that’s what he was – an unwelcome presence in the space you had spent so long carefully curating into some kind of sanctuary where you planned to live out the rest of your days. He wasn’t supposed to be here.
“Are you threatening me?”
“I am trying to help you!”
“A little too late for that, don’t you think? Where was that help when Kento needed you?”
It was the first time you had said his name in years, and the way your lips moved to speak felt almost foreign to you. The first time you had said his name out loud in years, and you did so to be needlessly cruel. Despite the hit below the belt, Gojo was seemingly unfazed. Until you head the slight, nearly undetectable waver in his voice.
“You don’t mean that.”
You slicked back the stray strands of hair that had fallen onto your face and sighed. “Fuck. You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“If you’re really sorry, then you’ll listen to me,” he said.
No. No. No.
You couldn’t do this – not ever, but especially not today. You bit down on your bottom lip – hard – but it wasn’t enough to keep yourself from breaking. Tears cascaded down your cheeks and you let them flow freely, not even bothering to wipe them away.
“No! Part of me died in Shibuya!” You were screaming now, and you wished your biggest problem was worrying what the neighbors would think. You wished you could just have a boring, ordinary life. You had been working so hard towards that, but Gojo was blowing everything up. He was messing everything up. “I don’t care what you have to say to me – I meant it when I said I wasn’t going back. I am not going back – I can’t go back to that life! Ever.”
You heard your door creak open and whipped your head around to see another familiar face staring back at you from the entrance to your home.
“Yuji?”
The last time you had seen Itadori Yuji was right before the start of the Culling Game when he came to visit you in the morgue at Jujutsu Tech. He had thrown himself at your feet, a blubbering mess as he profusely apologized to you for not reaching Kento fast enough.
You were so glad to see him again, but seeing him older and wearier broke your heart, and it was only when your gaze met his that you finally gave in.
-
“You do hear yourself right now, don’t you? Do you realize that what you’re saying sounds totally fucking insane?”
November 1, 2021 (12:17 AM)
“Yeah, I know.” Yuji ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “And it’s just a theory but if this works– ”
“We can make sure things happen the way they were supposed to,” Gojo interrupted.
“And if it doesn’t work?”
Yuji started wringing his hands nervously. “Then we can at least say that we tried.”
You rubbed at your temples. The effects of the alcohol were just starting to wear off and your head was starting to pound as a result of the combination of dehydration from drinking and crying.
“Alright, I’ll play along for now so answer me this: I’ve watched enough movies to know that the whole ‘time travel’ thing – if it’s even possible in the first place – is something you don’t want to mess around with. What if we, I don’t know, fuck up the timeline or whatever?”
Gojo smirked and ruffled your hair – a habit he had adopted as a way of showing affection back when you were teenagers. Now that you had agreed to hear him out, he was treating you as if no time had passed at all. You softened a bit. You missed this.
“That’s the thing,” he said. “We wouldn’t be fucking up the timeline, we’d be un-fucking it.”
“How do you know things need to be ‘un-fucked’ anyway?” you asked. “What exactly are you basing all this on?”
“I know you feel it,” Gojo replied, frowning. “And don’t lie to me because you are a terrible liar. You feel that there’s been a huge, unnatural shift in cursed energy and it all started three years ago.”
You couldn’t deny it. As hard as you tried to leave everything behind, your sensitivity to cursed energy wasn’t something that could be discarded; so, when Gojo mentioned the shift, a chill ran down your spine. You had noticed things feeling… off in a way you couldn’t describe.
You first noticed the off-ness creeping up on you on November 1, 2018 – right after the events in Shibuya. It started off as a slight, uneasy feeling; it felt as if someone broke into your house and moved everything one foot to the left – nothing drastic or critical, but enough to throw you off. The gradual shift, however, had become impossible to ignore over the last three years.
Gojo pulled two skeins of embroidery floss from his back pocket and began to unravel them. “Think of it like this.”
“You came prepared, huh?” you snorted. Gojo grinned, relieved that underneath the layers of anger and cynicism built up over time, a shadow of your old, sarcastic self still lingered.
“Of course! Now let me demonstrate for you.” Gojo took the end of the red floss and tied it to your banister. He gestured for Yuji to come and take the loose end and Yuji pulled the thread taut as Gojo tied the blue floss against an adjacent rod. The threads ran parallel to each other.
“Now this is what the flow of energy is supposed to look like – the red floss represents natural energy and the blue floss represents cursed energy. See how they never intersect? That’s how it supposed to be – separate.
“We as Jujutsu Sorcerers exorcise curses for a variety of reasons – the obvious, of course, being to protect non-sorcerers. We also do it as a manner of… course-correcting, you could say.” Gojo took several steps away from Yuji so that the two threads now formed an obtuse angle. “And here is where our problem lies: three years ago, things were thrown off course, and now we’re really starting to see the effects of it.”
He pointed to the banister. “It was just a slight change at first, but over time…” He dragged his finger along the length of the thread, drawing attention to the wide angle it now formed in relation to the other. “We’ve gone farther off course – the gap has widened.”
“How do you know all this?” you asked. “I agree that things have felt off since Shibuya, but who’s to say this is what’s happening?”
“Master Tengen said so,” Yuji replied. You hummed pensively and leaned back into your seat, motioning with your hand for Gojo to continue with this presentation.
Gojo held out his thread to Yuji, swapping the red for his blue. “To make things even more complicated, there’s no way to know exactly how we’ve been thrown off.” He pointed to the intersection where the two threads crossed and grew serious. “For all we know, the gap isn’t widening, it’s closing.
“In case you’re not getting it, we absolutely do not want either of these things to happen. The convergence of energies would be a disaster, but the divergence of energies would be just as bad. If Tengen’s theory is correct, the effects would be similar to my cursed techniques – ‘red’ and ‘blue’.”
You stayed silent for a moment, taking in all that he had said and allowing his words to sink in. “So, what can we do about it?”
“We go back to when the shift started and prevent it from happening,” he said matter-of-factly. You pinched the bridge of your nose, feeling your headache develop into more of a migraine.
“You say that like it’ll be easy.”
“It won’t be,” Yuji said. He dropped the end of floss he was holding and proceeded to untie both strings from your banister. “But what else can we do but try?”
You got up from your seat and paced the room. The two men in your home watched expectantly.
“Why me?” you asked. You gestured towards your missing arm. “There’s only so much I can do and I’m sure there are much stronger sorcerers out there who could help. So why me?”
Gojo rested his large hands on your shoulders and met your gaze.
“Because skill alone doesn’t compensate for a lack of motivation and you – more than any other capable sorcerer – have the most to gain from this if we succeed.”
“And why is that?”
His eyes bored into yours before he said the words that he knew would finally convince you – the final nail in the coffin.
“Because Nanami Kento wasn’t supposed to die that night.”
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November 2, 2021
The airplane skidded to a halt on the tarmac and you heard the pilot’s voice over the intercom cut through the sounds of clapping passengers.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Tokyo National Airport. Local time is 3:28 PM and the temperature is 52 degrees Fahrenheit, 11 degrees Celsius.”
You were back.