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If there was one thing that could provide you as much solace as it inflicted despair, it would have to be one quote that had defined all of your waking moments.
Life… is unfair .
Like a religious doctrine, it ingrained itself into your soul, whittling away bits of your agency into a progressively colder and narrower worldview. And when you were left with nothing but an empty sermon in a hall devoid of people, such words preached themselves to assure you that it was only natural, as if it were a heavenly decree, that things had turned out the harrowing way they did.
Because life is unfair, you are always something lesser. Because life is unfair, this was completely expected. Because life is unfair, there was nothing you could have done.
You were born into the pinnacle of jujutsu sorcery, a gifted child of the prestigious Gojo family’s main branch. The only new child to have been born with such vast reserves of cursed energy in three decades, news of your birth had stirred up far greater winds than that of the Zenin family’s own offspring.
The whole world waited with bated breath for you to open your eyes, and all the expectations, apprehensions, fears, and hope boiled to a hectic crescendo before ultimately crashing into an endless tumultuous storm when soft eyelids had peeled open to reveal simple, dull black pupils.
Surely, this was another generation devoid of the blessing of the Six Eyes.
Still, your parents had still fulfilled their duties, as disappointed as they were, imparting upon you the education befitting a child of the Gojo family. Even without the Six Eyes, you were celebrated as a prodigy with your almost-instinctive understanding of the Limitless and energy control, and because for the next few years of your life the family had struggled to conceive another child, you were given the upbringing of the family heir. It was lonely and tiring having an entire clan’s worth of burdens on the shoulders of a child, but for the validation from the detached, cold, and practical people you called family, you had held on.
The first time the perfect paradise you were born into began to show signs of cracking was during your sixth birthday. You recalled making a foolish wish, closing your eyes and hiding your hopeful black eyes to wish for a sibling to alleviate the isolation of your everyday life. Right as you blew out the candles, your mother had been strangely disgusted with the cake the family servants had prepared for you and rushed out, and when she returned, she brought along news of an unprecedented pregnancy that stole all of your spotlight from your own special day.
You were elated back then. The heavens seemed to have answered your birthday wish right as you made it, you had innocently thought, and you had been blessed with a younger sibling to play with and talk to. You had found yourself wondering whether you would have a younger sister or brother and whether they would like the toys and games you did, working yourself up into a brand of your own childish excitement long after the nanny had put you to bed.
A few days before your mother’s expected due date, the housekeeper had clambered into the sitting room where you were quietly reading beside your heavily-pregnant mother by the hearth, sporting the palest face you had ever seen as a child. You had wondered whether he had experienced great shock or a mere snowstorm outside on an errand given the uncharacteristic blizzard outside that day.
The housekeeper had blabbered something too fast for a child to properly register but the adults in the room had heard him loud and clear, for one of the servants had directly fainted on the floor with a loud thud. Confused by the sudden uproar, you had let loose a bout of laughter incited by the comical sweating of the housekeeper and the passed-out servant on the floor, and earned yourself a harsh slap on the face from your mother.
“Heartless thing,” she had spat, “To laugh at the news of your father’s death!”
You barely remembered anything from that day after that, only the cold, icy feeling of her palm right before it gave way to a stinging burn from her blow and further upheaval as people suddenly swarmed your mother and brought her out of the room. The next morning, the midwife had brought out a bundle wrapped in baby blue cloth with her nails still stained in splotches of red, and you had come to the conclusion that you had traded both your father and mother for a baby brother.
Still, you loved your baby brother. It was you and the small baby in your arms against the world, after all. A six-year-old and a baby, freshly orphaned with the same snow-white hair, were prime targets for exploitation by the Gojo family’s political opponents, and when your baby brother had opened his eyes, the world had been drastically thrown off-balance, introducing a sliver of darkness that will only fester and rot your heart as the years progressed.
When you peered into the tiny creature’s eyes with your own dull, black ones, you were met with a vibrant pair of iridescent blue pupils.
Your brother, a sweet little thing called Satoru, was the long-awaited inheritor of the Six Eyes, and ever since then, you had rarely ever left his side of your own accord. He was your only true family left, and whenever he had giggled in your arms as he yanked at a lock of your hair, the harsh silence of your corner of the family estate gained a bit of colour. You studied hard and practised even harder, especially as both you and Satoru grew older and you had learned the hard way that a bounty was placed on his head when you became a murderer at the ripe old age of ten.
If you were a gifted child, your brother was the messiah. As he grew old enough for signs of his Limitless technique to be found out, you would have had lost any worth you still had left in the family had your father not named you the next clan head before he passed. Whatever limited contact you were allowed with him, your own baby brother, was taken away from you, and that only meant that you had to make yourself useful enough to be able to even see him at all.
You still remembered vividly one of the times when Satoru had begged you, in one of your training sessions with him regarding mastering the Limitless, to forgo typical practice and sneak him out to play. He was eight, almost at the age where you sacrificed your innocence for his, and you were fourteen and aware that at your ages you should both be at the public playgrounds and catching bugs instead of learning how to kill. You had snuck yourselves out and explored the areas outside the estate, and you had taught him childhood games you played with the nanny that he was never allowed to indulge in, and when you had returned home, he was unceremoniously wrenched from your side by his furious caretaker and replaced by a bout of corporal punishment.
You loved your brother very much, despite it all. You snuck him gifts in toys and candies that he liked but was never allowed to eat, taught him all you knew and more about his technique, gave him the familial doting he should have had on behalf of parents that left the both of you too early. You loved your brother despite the disdainful gazes burning the back of your head every time you were seen with him and the snide comparisons you wished you could not notice when you roamed the estate halls. You loved your brother, even if you had to restrain yourself from flinching away anytime anybody saw you with him out of force of habit, then beat yourself up over having such venomous apprehensions over your own brother.
Gradually, as you left the estate for your education in the Tokyo school, you hardly saw your brother ever again. Segregated by distances wrought by you moving to the dorms for school and the machinations of his supposed caretakers, you could feel your relationship with your brother growing more and more estranged. In the few-and-far-between visits back home, your meetings with him often deviated from mild chatting to Satoru excitedly sharing with you how much he has grown since your last visit. As you listened with a smile on your face, you could not help but hear the monster squirrelling around in the depths of your chest, making your efforts to be genuinely happy about your brother’s increasing list of successes harder and harder as the days went by.
You watched him grow alongside you, enrol into the same school as you, fight alongside you, and slowly, the realisation finally dawned upon you with the sickening, cloying onset of sinking into a vat of near-frozen tar that he had surpassed all that you could ever dream of even seeing.
You watched him become the strongest with friends he gained in school, you watched them go on missions, you watched them shine as youths all while comparing them to your own isolated experience as a student during your time. Your brother was celebrated for his ability to shine, whereas you had to fade in the background with no name, no presence, nothing. The name card in your wallet that bore your qualification of a ‘grade 1 sorcerer’ after years of blood, sweat, and tears gradually lost its significance and joy in the shadows left behind the colossus that was your special grade brother who earned it just by being born. Even if you did not have the Six Eyes, your cursed energy was still immense, your talent just as eye-catching, but as long as you stood next to your brother that was all you were; something motionless and monotone while the youth beside you flourished and bloomed.
By the time you noticed the darkness in your heart spreading and lodging itself within you like a malignant tumour, it was too late. All you could hear and see were people’s disparaging gazes in side-eyed glances and fickle greetings. It was as if your life revolved around your failings and your brother’s successes.
Did your peers even care about you or did they care about the status of ‘Gojo Satoru’s sibling’? His existence alone was proof of your uselessness, after all. If you were born with the Six Eyes, maybe he would have never needed to be born.
You were the firstborn, you were Gojo Satoru’s sibling, you had mastery over the Gojo family’s Limitless technique to the point of having been Gojo Satoru’s teacher, but it always felt as though you were never worthy of being a Gojo.
…Ahh, was that where the resentment had really started growing?
As envious as you were, you were painfully aware that Satoru did not ask to be born this way and had just as much choice as you did in accepting your lots in life. Plus, you still felt pride for his development into the wonderful sorcerer he has grown to be. Who wouldn’t be proud of how far their only other living family member had come? He did not go out of his way to be deliberately mean or make things difficult for you. He was just Satoru, and you were his sibling—no, his shadow.
You suppressed those bitter feelings until those sentiments broiled in the caverns of your ribs and bubbled endlessly to leave a disgusting taste in your mouth. The guilt and resentment waged wars in your bosom every time you instinctively turned away from the brother you had so desperately wished for as a toddler. However much you loved and treasured him was however much you secretly loathed him. Fearful of having such vile thoughts expose themselves in front of those all-seeing eyes, you found it harder and harder to make eye contact with the boy you raised, making excuses and half-hearted farewells whenever you ran into him and his friends because you could hardly stomach standing anywhere near him at all. Did he try to reach out to you? Did he even notice that such a hazy existence distanced itself from him? You did not really mull over it, and you tried not to care either. All you could see was the crippling inferiority born from your own type of inborn curse.
Like this, your heart corroded with each passing day. As your brother grew into his own man and became someone so brash and confident, you could hardly recognise him from the snot-nosed kid who clung to your pant leg as a child. Instead, you found your memories of him twisting as your old sentimentality corrupted itself, decaying with every comparison people made of you.
Your brother had become a god, is all, and you were but a wretched creature that must bend your body if he simply even nodded at you.
Such was the way of the world.
Long after your siblinghood became a relationship more detached than even that of roadside acquaintances, you had become so immersed in your job that you were barely anywhere at any given time for too long. You almost never saw your brother, only catching glimpses and snippets of him from people you worked with, and you liked that things were this way. You had the peace of mind knowing he was fine, you protected him as clan head behind the scenes to preserve his teenagehood as best as you could, and you did not need to have your own inferiority rubbed into your own face by actually interacting with him. You gave up your status and qualification as the clan head to your brother the moment he graduated and roamed the country on your own, seeking silence in never-ending work.
And that was how you met your downfall, in a joke of a mission that devolved into a mess of grade 1 and special grade curses decimating the original team you were supposed to be backup for. Left as the only survivor of a gory struggle, you remained alone and sprawled on the cracked concrete, trying in vain not to choke on mouthfuls of bloody rainwater as you gasped for air.
You managed to exorcise the curses and complete the mission, but with insufficient cursed energy left within you to heal the grave wounds inflicted on yourself, you had no choice but to stare at death in the eyes and accept reality once more.
Lying back-first on the ground, you looked up blankly amidst puddles of water and blood, the corpses of sorcerers and civilians alike, and the debris of the battle’s aftermath into the cloudy, stormy sky. You felt your life seeping out of you with the blood leaking out of your wounds and into the dirty rainwater pooling around you. Exhausted to the point that even if the rainwater was pooling in between the bridge of your nose and the corner of your eyes and it stung vehemently that you began to cry, you don’t even have the energy to move or wipe it away.
Further backup would either arrive too late or not arrive at all since there was no one else who could call for help, and your mobile phone had already been shattered into pieces in the fight earlier. Alone in a dilapidated corner of an evacuated town, you were already laid on your own deathbed.
In your dying moments, you mused to yourself about how if it were your brother, he’d be up and about without as much as a scratch on him because of the Six Eyes. As much as you genuinely cared for him and loved him as your only family—the only person who, at one point, made you feel like you were actually part of the family—the guilt-polluted resentment that you repressed clawed its way out of your chest with a few broken sobs.
Six Eyes, Six Eyes, Six Eyes.
People often said the world goes crazy for the number one, but your hellish reality only ever revolved around the number six.
If only your life was just a little kinder. If only you had the Six Eyes. If only you were better. If only you were born a success. If only you were the only child your parents needed.
If only Gojo Satoru never existed.
With this thought, you feel so much guilt and despair knowing that in your final moments you don’t even have peace away from his existence. You are denied respite even as you are dying, forced to think about your darling brother as if your life truly was nothing if not for your identity as Gojo Satoru’s failure of a sibling. That was all you were, and that was all that you will ever be.
In a delirium-fueled haze, you felt your cursed energy starting back up against your control, roaring as it twisted your existence, your sentiments, your resentment into something far more monstrous than it already was. You knew that as you were losing consciousness you were breaking down into a curse, a taboo as a sorcerer. You knew that he would likely exorcise this final outcry of yours without as much as breaking a sweat. You knew then even in death—no, even beyond death—you would always be forced to kneel in defeated silence to the harsh reality that you would never amount to even the smallest infinitesimal fraction of your brother. He was surrounded by people who he called friends, equals, companions and he stood in the light as it was a heaven-mandated birthright for him, while you were only a wretched creature darting underneath his shadow just to find yourself a dishonourable grave.
Surrounded by cheers, jeers, and whispers alike of your brother’s name for the majority of your life, you had already forgotten the sound of your own. Your existence, like the hatred you so desperately tried to suppress in your youth, was being smothered out like the silent death of a dying candle, and there was nothing you could do about it anymore.
Then let the world hear you. Just this once. Just once.
“I… hope you stay at the top forever… Satoru. The number one… a solitary prestige. May y…ou always remain at the top. The first... alone… forever…”
With this unreasonable curse spitting out from your cracking lips, your hoarse throat forced out a cacophonous, malicious laugh. You had never felt love, and once you were gone, you selfishly hoped your darling brother goes through the same thing. This is the only way things can be fair, right? This is the only way.
You laughed and you laughed and you laughed, until your breaths began to stall from the laborious exertion. The rise and fall of your chest slowed, and as your consciousness grew dim, you forced your dull, hateful eyes to stay open one last time, perceiving the cold grey skies and your cold grey world.
You hate this world.
You hate how unfair it is.
You hate your brother.
You hate you hate you hate you hate…!
You hate…
You hate.