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Usually when people talk about Gojou’s birth, they talk about how he tipped the balance of the world. They talk about how he is the first Six Eyes and Limitless user in over 1000 years.
While all of these things are true, when Gojou is born, he is born with snow white hair and eyes blue enough to challenge skies.
But none of the jujutsu world takes note of that, like a civilian non-sorcerer might have. The jujutsu world has seen odder than white hair and bright blue eyes, and would see odder in the coming years.
People assume that the chill that accompanies his birth is from his natural cursed energy.
They are wrong.
(The balance of the world shifts, more than any of them realize.)
-
He doesn’t...exactly, remember how he died. He’s fairly certain it wasn’t Pitch’s fault, when he tries to remember back on it. Or if he really died at all, and was just reborn.
Sometimes, if he remnants hard enough, he feels an ache in chest that feels more like an old wound, one that this body never experienced. Like a phantom pain over his heart, where his ribs meet in the center of his chest.
All he remembers from his…exit, is something pulling at him, while he was up in the clouds. He had been planning a blizzard, he thinks. Something to send Winter off with a bang before Spring hit. He had been in the air a while- most of the guardians had a home base, but the wind had cradled him for so long he couldn’t imagine his visits with solid ground as anything other than temporary treks, as much as he enjoyed them- when he felt a pull.
It hadn’t been the wind. He had checked, and only felt her throw a greater gull at him that pushed at him, almost frantic, right before he felt something tug in a direction that wasn’t a direction. It wasn’t a cardinal direction- it felt more...inwards. And also outwards. Somehow.
He remembers feeling torn, like his cells were being torn apart and being rebuilt all at once, and then another of the Wind’s frantic screaming gulls, like it was trying to whisk him away.
A scream, not from the Wind this time. Something rooted in agony and pain.
Then, nothing.
-
Sometimes, in his lower moments, he wonders if Mandy saw when he was taken away. What the guardians thought. If there were any guardians left, if his universe still existed somewhere.
He refuses to think of the word stolen.
-
Contrary to popular belief, he was used to violence.
Winter always had her edge, and it was one he tried to shield the kids from; but shielding, protecting, didn’t mean ignorance.
He just wasn’t used to being the cause of it.
Sure, he had been a part of winter- thrumming staff, cold winds, blizzards, snowball fights and snowflakes -but he had never really taken part in the more violent bits of the season.
At age 6 in his new life, he stares down at the cooling body of his would-be assassin.
-
The wind in this universe is...quiet.
Not that it doesn’t howl. It just doesn’t play.
Or maybe it does, just not with him.
He wants to leave his room.
He lays back down on his futon and closes his eyes.
He dreams of night skies and slay bells and tooth loving fairies.
-
He suffers from nightmares, sometimes.
He doesn’t remember them, mostly. Usually things with Pitch, or Mandy, or watching the Guardians turn to dust, screaming for him. He hears them call for Jack Frost, sometimes. He tries to respond, that he’s right here, he’s trying to reach them–
It’s like he’s invisible again, this time even to them. They can’t seem to hear him. The waking world, however, does.
They think his screaming fits are from his adjusting to the cursed energy in the world.
His caretakers at the time don’t know what to do with him. Gojou hears words like overstimulation and adjusting and then later insomnia and sleeping pills thrown around.
He doesn’t blame them for the misdiagnosis, really. They just see him awake when he is supposed to be asleep.
By five, he’s good at hiding the waking tremors and screams.
He adapts. He always has.
-
As a child, he used to stare at the snow outside his window for hours, much to his many tutor’s annoyance. Not that he cared; by that point, he was smarter than they were on the mechanics of the curse energy all around them. After all, one could only learn so much before experience and observation gifted a greater understanding and superseded anything than they could ever hope to teach him.
He remembers the first time he touched the winter’s frost on the window glass, how he almost expected it to swirl for him under his fingertips when he made contact. The crushing feeling that overtook his chest when it didn’t, just melted at the edges where his fingers had made contact. If he tries to remember, he thinks he might have been four.
Even as a child, he feels more at home in the frost than he does, or ever would, in the Gojou family compound. He learned to stop telling his tutors about his fascination with the season early on; learned to stop asking to go outside during blizzards and the like. He stopped asking the nannies when the looks of almost amusement turned to quiet concern.
He later learned that they thought he was seeing something in the snow that they couldn’t, something only his eyes could detect. Gods forbid he have an interest in something that wasn’t cursed energy techniques and studies as a child, apparently.
There was one nanny that let him out in the snow, once. It had been late March, and none of his tutors or nannies had let him out all winter. Too scared that he'd catch a cold, they claimed. He thought they were stupid; the cold could never hurt him, not properly, and he felt that truth in his bones.
He’ll never forget that first breath after he had snuck out the door and felt the cold air ruffle his hair. Watching the snowflakes fall and clump on the bushes scattered throughout the Gojou compound, able to see all of their little intricacies with his Six Eyes as he walked. He marveled at them, and before he realized it he had made a ball of the snow.
Snowball, his mind provided for him; a name for the thing he had created.
His chest hurt when the wind blew, like he was missing something.
He’s not sure exactly when or how, but in his wonder he lost track of time. People noticed that he had been separated from the nanny assigned to him. The nannies never gave him their names, but he remembers when he was located and found how upset everyone was. When they brought him back inside, he can still vividly see the snow covering his hair in the mirror’s reflection and feeling nostalgia hit his chest so hard it almost makes him double over.
Gojou never saw that particular nanny again, and it took a few more months of watching the concerned looks before he finally stopped asking to go outside in the snow.
-
The mischief of his old life never truly left him, but now it was more of a cover: something clever that’s roots started with fun and dense branches that now ended in protection and self preservation.
You couldn’t disappoint people, after all, if their expectations of you were never high to begin with. Social interactions are still…difficult. It’s still odd sometimes, remembering how to be human. Four centuries of being something else was hard to overwrite.
-
When civilians see him, they sometimes mistake him for being blind.
He was used to people’s eyes going straight through him, or even over him. He was invisible for 400 years.
Now it’s like people can’t stop looking.
Such is the life of a pillar, a symbol: you are an ideal, not human. Something to be gazed at, but not touched. Untouchable by normal weak human hands.
Symbols can’t afford to be human.
That was fine. Being human with flesh and blood still felt kinda alien, honestly.
-
It’s isolating, being at the top. But then again, he has 400 years of experience with being alone. He is so seen in this life, unlike the previous, and yet also not seen at all.
(Are you the strongest because you’re Satoru Gojou, or are you Satoru Gojou because you’re the strongest?)
The difference between that life and now, he still thinks, is that he chose it this time around.
(He’s gotten good at lying to himself.)
-
He doesn’t know how to handle puberty.
It’s slightly terrifying, he will admit to no one ever.
His body just never got the chance to…change, before. If it had (it was hard to remember sometimes) he assumes he never noticed, or else the first time he noticed new hair he wouldn’t have been so shocked.
It’s new. It’s different.
Being human is weird.
-
He’s 15 the first time he flies, and he swears he can almost feel the wind welcoming him back. Even though he only maintains it for a few seconds, the wonder impact of flight (the closest to home in 15 years) stays with him the rest of the week.
-
Sometimes the memories leave him feeling...frazzled.
He’s sitting and watching a curse no bigger than his thumb flying around a civilian’s head, watching as the light catches on its misshapen wings.
Memory blurs over the lines of reality, and he misses Baby Tooth so hard he almost doubles over from the pain in his chest.
Instead, he squashes the curse with his hand as he saunters past and keeps walking.
-
If Gojou is ice, Geto is made of sun.
Together, they are intense, but- they work. They work the way sunlight reflects off fresh snow and the way twilight casts a snowglow into the evening sky.
When he introduces himself as Gojou Satoru and gets barely a glance in return, he’s shocked. He’s gotten used to being seen in this life.
He’s fascinated.
When they fight each other, it’s brutal; when they fight together, more so, but only for their opponents.
Gojou thinks maybe he could get used to the sun. Maybe standing in the sun isn’t so bad.
They’re the strongest, and that first year is warm.
-
Before Toji, the world had been...confusing.
When the dagger is rammed into his skull, the silhouette of Toji hazes and Gojou swears he can see Pitch laughing in the background. Battle blurs with the edges of memory, and when he coats the edge of the blade with cursed energy he swears he feels frost racing to heal the head wound that follows.
It’s as easy as breathing and hits him like a choked cough all at once, like a bus, except it is full of memories finally restored to him. His eyes ache, like they’re finally letting their host know that they’ve seen too much.
Whatever. They’re the ones who chose him.
He is a Guardian.
The other Guardians aren’t here, he’d looked before when his memories were little more than fragments and bits and confusing nostalgia, and had believed with everything in him and had nothing to show for it but repressed nightmares.
They aren’t here. But he is.
-
For a moment, he is snowstorm and frost incarnate again.
-
Rika dies.
-
Geto walks away.
He doesn’t know how long he stands there. Cold nips his fingers, reminding him that he has a body to feel with, and the slight numbness grounds him.
He breathes, and the cold in his lungs douces the heat that had been prickling his eyes since he saw Geto’s back.
Carefully, he stitches himself back together. Stitches the feelings into a box and buries it deep within his psyche.
He is here now, and that is what matters.
He’s the strongest.
He takes a breath-
-
-and lets out a laugh.
The look on the boy’s face the first time he summons a curse is priceless.
"So this is the famous Ten Shadows of the Zenin clan, huh? Pretty neat."
Megumi quickly snaps out of his shock and turns to scowl at him. Which, honestly, is what he was aiming for- at this point, his prodding and wonderful personality was a bit of a normalcy staple for the kid.
"It’s a puppy," Megumi stresses, as though he expects Gojou to have never encountered one before.
The kid’s eight and Gojou already knows that when he gets older, he’s going to be even more of a menace. Gojou would make sure of it.
The little white puppy in front of him- really, the thing couldn’t have been bigger than his shoe- yips at them.
-
Sometimes when he bares his teeth, he swears he can feel frost under his fingertips, ready to be called forth should he will it to.
He thinks cursed energy has changed him, changed this world and it’s winter.
He misses the winter he used to help create.
For now, instead of a snowstorm, he creates a future for the next generation of sorcerers.
And if he sometimes stands in the snow for a minute longer than would be seen as comfortable for most, well. No one’s commented yet.
-
Gojou, in the past, has been told he has a heavy and cold gaze when he wants to.
Sometimes he wonders if he held his eyes in his palm if they would be heavy and cold, too.
He seals those thoughts back into the little box in the back of his mind. Best not to dwell on it.
There’s no point.
-
He remembers kids making snow angels and snowmen and joining snowball fights when school let out for snow days. Now the snow is in him, and he can feel it rising under his skin- hell, he has blood and a heartbeat this time around to edge it on.
He is so, so human and he couldn’t stop his best his one and only friend from walking away from him.
Later, he wonders if he could ever learn to freeze moments.
-
Sometimes, he thinks about how his role as a Guardian has changed in this life.
Before, his prerogative was to be Guardian of Fun. He still believed that no child should have their childhoods taken from them- that was their right to have them as children, after all- but he had an even bigger responsibility in this world: making sure they survived that childhood.
Luckily for his students, being the strongest meant that he could do both.
He was a protector of Fun and Childhood for over four hundred years. It’s not an impossible jump to become Protector of Childhoods here, too.
He finishes tying and balancing the water balloon bundle over the classroom door. Can’t go wrong with the classics, after all.
And besides, it was reflex training.
-
The first time he properly feels the manifested energy of Sukuna, he refuses to think of Pitch on principle.
Pitch was bad, yes, but Sukuna had an edge of bloodlust and killing intent that Pitch never quite perfected properly in his quest to cause fear.
Still, it’s been awhile since he felt such overwhelming and potent dark . He has experience shoving down old memories though, almost 28 years of it, and he throws on the same smile he perfected 15 years into being seen and believed in again- the rare one he didn’t show the kids, reserved for some of the more unruly winter spirits he encountered later on in his old life.
The first time Rabbit had seen it, he’d started calling him Frosty. Gojou still thinks the first time it stuttered out of Rabbit’s mouth it was said with a bit of respect.
As he and Sukuna fight, he doesn’t stop talking; he blames the habit from when he was a Guardian. One time after a fight from before , he remembers, Nick had scolded him saying that he shouldn’t play with his opponents because they weren’t food.
He never was great at listening, then or now.
Besides, his precious student was watching. And who was he to deny a little fun?
And if the normalcy of Gojou’s rambling helped stop the quiet shaking of Megumi’s shoulders, well. He already had pictures for the second years. Gojou is good at keeping some secrets, after all.
-
Gojou firmly believed that no one was allowed to steal the youth from children; he stood by it in his old life, and he stands by it now.
So he takes the brunt of the higher ups’ complaints, and he restrains himself from leveling them all then and there when they suggest executing Yuji, a child , one that didn’t ask for this and was only doing what he thought was right.
Gojou is the strongest, and at heart, always will be a Guardian.
So Yuji is going to be allowed to live, if he had anything to say or do about it. And he will.
Luckily, he has words and actions to back himself up as he looks up at the old geezers and says his piece.
If a little extra cursed energy leaks out, well. No one says anything about it, besides the tensing in their seats that they couldn’t hide.
He very carefully stops his grin from forming on his face. Gotcha.
-
More meetings meant more annoyance, but—
Sometimes it’s convenient being the strongest.
The higher ups agree to postpone Yuji’s execution until after Yuji had consumed all of Sukuna’s fingers.
That was fine; by then, hopefully, he will have trained Yuji enough to be strong enough to make his own decisions.
Sometimes, when Yuji smiles, he remembers Jamie.
He doesn’t dwell on it.
-
When Shibuya happens, when he falls into that pit that calls itself a realm- as if it would ever know the true meaning of the word- he almost laughs.
He taught this new generation.
For now, it was up to them.