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Gojo Satoru was a simple man of simple desires, capable of standard, average things.
Capable of changing the very fabric of the universe? Child’s play. Able to stand against a multitude of Special Grades without anything but his wits and his innate talents as a superior human being? Nothing to write home about.
A teacher to a number of adorable brats who had wormed their way into his heart against his better judgement?
Gojo stared blankly into the black film protecting his eyes, pretending it was enough to totally block his sight.
...Easier said than done.
“He looks like he’s asleep,” Ijiichi murmured, the light trembling in his words matching the minute shakes keeping Gojo’s hands in motion. He folded them together under his chin, forcing a cheerful hmmm of agreement.
Itadori could have been asleep, if you ignored the glaring evidence of a fight gone wrong and the massive hole where his heart used to be.
Gojo Satoru was a simple man of simple desires and dreams: All he wanted out of life was to be a consistent thorn in everyone’s sides, to thumb his nose at the higher-ups and their putred agenda, rotting their society from the inside out. He wanted to be a good teacher and a terrible coworker, someone who nevertheless could be looked up and believed in during a crisis.
Someone reliable; a strong, immutable hero.
Gojo smiled faintly, the darkness building in darkening clouds hidden behind the barrier of his skull. Reliable, huh? Itadori had most likely thought him reliable, up until Gojo left him to face a monster way above his capabilities without help or support.
(And he wasn’t even going to think about facing Megumi right now, not after leaving him with a pat on the back and the vague reassurance that everything would be okay.)
“Hey, are you going to just sit there and watch? I’m starting, you know?” Ieiri asked carelessly, just as his dead student sat up behind her with a stupid, sleepy expression on his face as if he was just waking up from sleep.
(Gojo Satoru was a simple man—a weak man, too weak to save anyone that mattered.)
—
“So he’s alive, then?” Yaga rumbled thoughtfully. The Principal sat on the floor, comfortably sequestered amongst his many stuffed creations. He was currently working on an axolotl with suspiciously familiar coloring, its dopey smile and large, dumb looking eyes sending strange spikes of pain through his chest every time he happened to glance at it.
It was annoying, so Gojo resolutely looked at the wall and pretended he couldn’t see it.
“Apparently so!” he cheerfully agreed. He tilted his head back, smiling up at the wooden ceiling of the dojo.
That scarring in the wood looked familiar; had he been the one to put it there?
“He sat up right before the autopsy, the lucky kid! Though Ieiri does have a way with her hands, hmmm~” Gojo widened his smile until it crinkled near his eyes, a pronounced enough movement to shift the cloth covering them. “Maybe not so lucky after all!”
Yaga didn’t dignify this with a response for a moment, leaving Gojo to sulk quietly. His sense of humor was incredible, seriously, an absolute gift ! Why was it that no one appreciated the pure wonder that was his everything ?
At least his students appreciated him, if no one else would.
Suddenly unhappy with being ignored, Gojo decided to keep going, hiking up the I-am-so-happy-you-are-so-happy tone to his voice that drove Utahime to shrieking heights of fury.
“I suppose we can still change that! Hey, maybe the next time a big mean curse shows up, why don’t I just drag all the kids along so we can get injured together as one big happy family? Maybe I’ll be the one to take the hit next time, so I can receive the full treatment from sweet Ieiri-chan’s soft, dexterous fingers~”
He’d definitely left that scar. Maybe it was time to leave another, and make a matching set?
“...If you are angry, Gojo, just say so. You do not need to hide it behind such fake cheer.”
Yaga’s voice had always been deep and rumbling, even back when Yaga had the honor of being Gojo’s teacher. Back then, Yaga had used that deep tone to scare the living daylights out of them, usually while Gojo was in the midst of coming up with some new and creative chaos to be orchestrated by his then friends and classmates.
That shouting had often led to some unfortunate physical reminders of how, no matter how powerful he was, he still had to bow to the wisdom of his elders and the people with a responsibility for his care.
A light flush threatened to rise along with some very unnecessary memories; Gojo obliterated the memories and any physical weaknesses both, and granted the principal with the ‘anger’ he was asking for in the form of a thin mouth and unsmiling eyes.
Hearing that tone now, while Yaga still had a position of authority over him but in a different capacity, just made Gojo want to curl his lips and snarl at him—made him want to add a million new scars to the training room and a permanent reminder of his autonomy, a reminder of how no one got to mess with Gojo Satoru’s students—
“Angry? What makes you think that?” A blink, and he was before his former teacher, ripping the stuffed animal out of his hands before the other man could react. Gojo stared down at him, chest inexplicably heaving, and smiled a wide, probably unhinged smile.
“It’s not like I was sent away from my dear, precious students while they were sent off to take care of a Grade 1 Curse all on their lonesome! Why, it’s not like literally anyone else could have handled those other Curses instead of me—say, for example, my two very talented students who were suspended for no good reason—“ His breath hitched against his will, and Gojo smiled wider. The feeling of his fingers digging into soft material briefly threw him off, and he flicked a glance down.
The soft, fluffy pink gills on the axolotl were the first thing he saw, followed by beady black eyes and a small, open-mouthed smile. It was a dumb smile, a vacant smile, but adorable in ways he couldn’t really put to words and that made him so. Inexplicably. Furious.
Gojo looked back up at Yaga, and on instinct, tore away the cloth covering his eyes.
The world instantly looked different, more beautiful and intricate and open in a way no one else would ever experience, but he ignored it with practiced ease.
“Why should I be angry,” he asked softly, sweetly, a gentle caress to the ears. Under his fingers, the pink Mexican Walking Fish begin to tear apart.
“Why should I be angry? Tell me that, Principal, if you dare.”
There was a moment of silence.
Yaga’s customary sunglasses made it hard to fully understand what he was thinking, particularly on a man with a resting-dour-bitch-face that looked like a bad attempt at Botox. He looked relaxed, but Gojo looked the most relaxed right before he was about to tear someone limb from limb, so that didn’t say much of anything.
The axolotl tore further, bits of fluff falling to the ground in clumps of white clouds.
“You were twenty minutes late to this meeting,” Yaga finally said. There was a note in his voice, a kind of finality, that Gojo felt he should recognize, even as he didn’t. It kept him from understanding what Yaga had said right away.
“...Was I?” he replied, feeling a little wrong-footed. The large man finally shifted, moving aside sewing materials and bags of cloth and stuffing from around him, along with the occasional stuffed animal, gently placed to the side.
Gojo watched, confused, as Yaga cleared everything in his immediate vicinity, until there was a space about one meter in diameter around him.
Then he sat, cross-legged, and put his hands on his knees.
You know this, Gojo’s mind whispered. We’ve been here before.
...Um, no? Not that he could recall?
Annoyed at his brain and the uncomfortable feeling that he’d lost control of this conversation, Gojo tilted his head to the side and smiled his widest, most vapid smile, eyes big and vacant.
“It’s so difficult keeping track of time, you know, when you’re being sent all over the place to do inane, unimportant work. It just gets so boring, particularly when you’re off saving, like, an empty parking lot while your students are being torn to pieces somewhere—“
“You were twenty minutes late,” Yaga interrupted his increasingly acidic spiel. He fixed Gojo with a gimlet stare.
“We’ve talked about your punctuality before, brat. The first time, you wizened up and started showing up on time for the next few months. I will freely admit that it was my failure to address the problem when you started it up again that has led us to this point.” He clapped his hands: a loud, sharp sound that rebounded off the walls.
Gojo’s hands twitched, tearing at already broken stitching.
‘The first time’? When was this? Was that the time he passed out after a job, woke up five minutes before a regional meeting, and couldn’t be bothered to go? Was it the time he spotted Utahime in town and abandoned a ‘very important meeting with the Kyoto Sister-school’ to stalk—to play with—to be, uh, friendly with her?
What exactly was—
(“Enough excuses, Satoru. You and I both know why we’re here. If you can tell me, with complete honesty, that you don’t believe you deserve this, I will let you walk away.”)
“...No,” he breathed, the words nearly soundless from a sudden lack of oxygen. Yaga held his stare, and reached up a hand, beckoning.
Staring at that hand, at familiar weathered skin and thick calluses, Gojo felt his head begin to shake back and forth.
(A sharp tear, and the head separated from the axolotl’s body. Uncaring, Gojo let it drop to the floor.)
“Uh, how about no?” The room was big, but wide open, with little more than pillars to separate the open space. Beginning to back up, head still shaking back and forth, Gojo held up his hands in supplication.
“If I, ah, were to actually understand what you’re—that is, if I were to pretend to understand what you’re talking about, which I actually don’t, so I’m not really sure where I’m going with this—“
“Gojo Satoru,” Principal Yaga (his former teacher and a constant support from his first introduction into the world of curses and monsters and death) beckoned with his fingers, implacable. “If you can tell me, with complete honesty, that you don’t deserve this, I will let you walk away.”
The exact wording as the last time he found himself in this unfortunate situation tore any remaining excuses from his throat. Heart thundering in his ears in a way even Special Curses couldn’t manage, Gojo found himself walking forward—one foot after another—as if in a dream.
They had been here before, was the thing. Shortly after Suguru—shortly after, Gojo had confronted Yaga over something similar: a miscommunication over a Curse? A slip up in management? Something that had led to injuries. Gojo had confronted him, and Yaga had taken one good look at him, and held out his hand in the same way.
You were five minutes late today, he’d said. You know how I feel about tardiness.
Back then, Gojo had sworn and fought as he was yanked over his teacher’s knee, even as he’d kept careful control over his superior powers, letting out only enough for Yaga to easily overcome; back then, Gojo had allowed his teacher to turn his ass into ground meat under the pretense of being late and over the unspoken knowledge that Gojo was reaching out and asking for the help in the only way he knew how.
It hadn’t been the first time, and it hadn’t been the last… but.
He breathed out, and—
Gojo was standing before Yaga, unmasked, hands hanging limply by his side. When Yaga reached up to take his hands and pull him down to his seated level, Gojo let him.
“You know, time is relative,” he informed the green rabbit giving him a thread-stitched smile. Yaga shifted him more comfortably over his broad lap, and Gojo carefully didn’t complain when his pants and underwear were unceremoniously swept past his knees.
“Or more specifically, time is an arbitrary construct created to define an essentially unstable and nonlinear—“
Gojo wasn’t babbling from nerves, which certainly weren’t getting more and more tangled around his throat with every second Yaga, with horrific steadiness, prepared him for a thorough ass-pounding. This wasn’t the first time they’d been here, but Gojo wasn’t an angry, confused teenager any more, craving stability and direction in an uncertain world; this was for Yaga’s sake, more than anything, because he was clearly very upset that his recent project had been cruelly beheaded without his consent.
Honestly, if the man had wanted to keep the little guy safe, he ought to have… to have tried harder.
“—which is to say that punctuality is a man-made construct, and you really should be less anal about it—“
Smack. Gojo accidentally squealed, and quickly slammed his mouth shut. Yaga didn’t wait another second before lighting into him with the kind of smacks Gojo wouldn’t dare hand out to even his most bratty students—Hello, sweet Megumi—without a proper warm up.
“O-ow, Yaga, that’s too hard!” he protested, flinching under the strength of the onslaught. Naturally, Yaga totally ignored him; the hits just got harder, if anything.
“Yaga!”
He hated being ignored, which Yaga knew all too well. If this was a sign of how things were going to progress, he might as well use his abilities to protect his poor ass now, before both it and his pride took any bigger a hit.
It had been like this back then too, he recalled suddenly. When Teenage Gojo finally stopped throwing tan—stopped respectfully fighting against his unjust treatment, Yaga-sen had proceeded to spank the living daylights out of him without a word of lecture, up till the very end. It had been mean, unfair, and incredibly cruel to mix a scathing lecture with the harsh cracks of a very sturdy paddle.
Gojo’s mind helpfully started drawing parallels to his current predicament, and he quickly pushed the memory away.
Feeling ill-done by, he wrinkled his nose at that annoying green rabbit and flicked it moodily away. It, of course, bounced off the opposing wall and exploded into a million bits of fluff.
Oops.
(He probably deserved the very mean, harsh, undeniably cruel slaps that landed on the back of his thighs for that one.)
“When you are done throwing a tantrum, young man,” Yaga scolded him over the sounds of smacks and his own huffs of discontent, “you let me know. There is only one way this is going to end, and if you keep fighting me, that end is going to be a long time coming.”
A tantrum—Aw, hell no. That wasn’t a subtle threat at all.
Visions of paddles and other instruments of torture danced before his mind. After a subtle flinch at a particularly nasty set of smacks from that leathered shoe of a palm, Gojo found himself caving.
“Yes, alright, I’m sorry I was late! And also that other time,” he remembered suddenly, “when I was supposed to show up at seven in the morning and showed up twelve hours later. And… and I guess that time I was supposed to deliver that paperwork—ow, ow, Yaga! Too mean!”
Gojo’s pain tolerance was as strong as his powers were when activated—which is to say, he actually didn’t have a high tolerance, he just never allowed himself to feel pain. He could feel the beastly man breaking down the barriers keeping a dark maelstrom safely inside his mind with each awful strike; if this continued, he might not get away fast enough to cover up whatever ugliness might escape.
Twisting his hips away from an overlapping smack, Gojo dug his nails spitefully into Yaga’s thighs. “I said I was sorry, didn’t I? I am very full of sorrow! Truly! As full as I am perpetually full of shit—wow, this wasn’t meant to be a confession, please ignore that!”
Yaga did, helpfully, but less helpfully, he ignored all of Gojo’s attempts to plea with him to stop.
The pain was reaching levels that indicated this spanking was intended to leave a point that would last for days; it was also reaching levels that brought a sting to the back of his eyes and a tightness to his throat that did not signal anything good. His ass must be scorching red by now, from the feel of it. Just the thought of getting the paddle on top of this was an unbearable thought.
(...Itadori’s heart had been torn out of his chest. How much had that hurt?)
“Y-yaga,” he said, only the once. The spanking stopped instantly, as quickly as it had begun.
Gojo was righted fast enough that a normal person’s head would have spun. A palm that was a little too-warm pressed at his spiked hair, urging him forward; giving in easily, Gojo pressed his face into the man’s neck, hiding his naked eyes and their unconscionable wetness.
His precious student had been hurt, nearly killed; Gojo, in his arrogance, had nearly killed his student.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, fisting Yaga’s coat with hands that wanted to tear, break, destroy. Blunt fingers massaged the back of his head, soothing the tension; another hand supported his lower back, holding him upright with no apparent strain.
“I’m sorry.” I’m sorry, Itadori. I’m sorry I nearly failed you .
“You’re forgiven.” You have paid recompense, and I pronounce you forgiven in his stead.
For all his heavy-handedness and a face that looked Botoxed to hell and back, Yaga had never needed words to know what Gojo needed him to say.
If Yaga’s clothing slowly became soaked in the following quiet, Yaga was kind enough to ignore it.
After a few minutes of allowing himself comfort he could never bring himself to ask for without extenuating circumstances, Gojo forced himself to sit up.
Blinking away any remaining wetness, he gave Yaga a half-hearted grin. His ass was throbbing like an open wound, and head ached from crying, but. Well. He had, in his own way, asked for this, and he felt loads better.
There was no reason to hold this against his former mentor and boss, even if he would really, really like to.
Really. No, really.
“Wow, your hands really do suck though,” Gojo complained, wincing as he shifted on his sore ass. Eyes catching the fluffy remains of the axolotl’s headless body, he said without thinking:
“Must be why your stuffies always come out looking weird as hell. Sorry about the tortoise, by the way. Didn’t mean to cut it’s head off—ow, OW, Yaga!! That’s so mean and unnecessary—“