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My baby, my baby
You're my baby, say it to me
Baby, my baby
Tell your baby that I'm your baby
When Gojo Satoru is nineteen, he meets six-year-old Fushiguro Megumi.
Megumi is everything a six-year-old kid shouldn’t be. Quiet, sullen, tired, and malnourished. Sure he seems to have enough energy to throw insults at him, but Gojo can’t help but feel an immense sense of guilt as he stares at this child with the weight of the world on his shoulders.
He knows what that feels like.
He did this to Megumi, it was he who killed his father almost three years ago now. As far as he was aware, Megumi and his sister Tsumiki (who he had yet to meet) had had no adult figures in their lives in years. How they’d been making ends meet without ending up on the streets he had no idea. Tsumiki was only a year older than Megumi after all, nowhere near old enough to get a job. She would’ve been four when Gojo killed her step-father.
“In two or three years, my child will be sold to the Zenin Family. Do as you please.”
Here he was, doing as he pleased. Megumi would be coming into his cursed technique soon, if he hadn’t already. And here Gojo was, in the nick of time, to “save him” from the dangers of being raised a Jujutsu Sorcerer in a powerful clan.
To save him from the fate he’d gone through as a child.
So Gojo puts on a smile and crouches down at Megumi’s height level, pulling strange faces at him and wiggling his fingers, all the things that would make a normal child laugh. Instead, he gets called a freak.
At least the kid has spirit. He’ll need it in the world he’s been born into.
Powerful children born into powerful Jujutsu families suffer from a young age. Gojo knew that better than anyone.
The Strongest.
So he was going to train Megumi to be a strong Jujutsu Sorcerer. But he would do it in a way that didn’t slowly tear him apart and piece him back together again hundreds of times over. He would do it in a way that wouldn’t destroy his soul.
Years pass and the three of them grow older. At some point, their trio becomes a duo. Megumi’s training progresses well. He’s strong, and he’ll only get stronger. Gojo knows that one day Megumi will surpass him in strength. He has the ability to, the only thing stopping him is himself.
When Gojo Satoru is twenty-nine, he’s murdered in battle. It’s not how he thought he would go. He’d never really thought about it before, why would he have? Gojo Satoru was ‘The Strongest’, everyone knew that.
Not anymore.
He dies at the hands of someone he loves. Someone he holds dear. But it’s not him really. It’s not Megumi who killed him, it’s Ryomen Sukuna, using Megumi’s body and cursed technique like a puppet.
Gojo Satoru dies alone, staring up at a sky he doesn’t really see. It keeps flickering in and out of his vision. The picture of Megumi’s face, twisted and gleeful in a way that makes him look completely unrecognisable, is burned into his mind. Gojo finds that the only thing he can think of is that face, even in his final moments.
He’s never felt pain like this before, not even the first time he almost died.
Except this time he’s not ‘almost dying’, this time it’s real. He can tell. He feels at peace, there’s only so many times you can dodge death.
It’s not Megumi’s fault. It’s not his fault.
It’s okay.
It’s just his time to go…
His students have got it from here.
I bet on losing dogs
I know they're losing and I'll pay for my place
By the ring
Where I'll be looking in their eyes when they're down
I'll be there on their side
I'm losing by their side
When Gojo Satoru is twenty-seven, he meets sixteen-year-old Okkotsu Yuta.
Yuta is interesting. He’s powerful, his cursed energy is off the charts, hitting all of the bells in Gojo’s brain that scream at him that this kid is dangerous. But he is also clearly depressed and lonely, with clear suicidal tendencies and no friends, family, or parental figures. All because he was too powerful. Gojo would be lying if he said that he didn’t see his younger self in Yuta, but he’d always been that way with children who were cursed with power greater than themselves.
That was the other interesting thing about Yuta—the main thing really, the reason why they’d even met in the first place—he was cursed. Haunted per say, by a cursed spirit. Unheard of, to this extent at least, as far as Gojo was aware. A protective and possessive cursed spirit, and a powerful one at that. Special grade.
And this kid had just been walking around like that, living his life for six years with a special grade curse as his only constant companion. No wonder he was little fucked up in the head, Gojo would be too.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore.” Yuta tells him, voice flat and dead sounding.
It breaks his heart. He’s so empty, so broken, so terrified of his own power. And he’s only sixteen.
He’s slated for execution unless he agrees to attend Jujutsu High to study under him.
Gojo wasn’t having any of it. This kid wasn’t giving up that easily, not if Gojo had anything to say about it. And trust him, when Gojo had something to say, everyone and their mother was going to hear about it.
So Yuta came to Jujutsu High. He moved into an empty dorm room and began attending classes.
Slowly but surely, he came out of his shell. He made friends and his room lost its sad and empty feeling, walls plastered in photos of him and his friends. He steadily became stronger and Gojo couldn’t help but feel pride.
Yuta was still quiet and sometimes a little sullen, but that was just his personality, gone was the depressed and suicidal teenager Gojo had first met. He’d grown strong. Gojo was proud.
Months later, Gojo finds Geto Suguru bleeding out in an alley. He lost his fight with Yuta Okkotsu and Rika Orimoto, the student that Gojo trained and his possessive cursed spirit.
He’s bleeding out. He doesn’t have long left.
He asks about his children.
Seems they both have bleeding hearts and a habit of taking in talented children the world would seek to smother.
Gojo tells him they all escaped. He doesn’t tell him that he let it happen, or that the higher ups will certainly know that he did so. He doesn’t tell him that he did it for him, so that he wouldn’t be alone.
He couldn’t have known that Geto wouldn’t make it long enough to see them again.
“Any last words?” He chokes out, because he knows what he has to do. He’s put it off long enough and they both know it. The words taste bitter in his mouth.
Suguru smiles at him.
Despite everything, the sight of it still makes Gojo stop breathing for a second. Despite everything, it’s still him. And it always will be.
Suguru tells him that he never hated anyone at Jujutsu High. Gojo sees it for what it is: closure.
The lump in his throat burns, “You’re my one and only.”
Suguru smiles at him, but this time it’s sad, “Satoru. At least curse me a little, at the very end.”
The way he says his name is still the same. That soft fondness leaking into it. His words are laced with emotions that Gojo refuses to acknowledge. If he does, he might break down and be unable to carry through with what needs to be done.
Gojo shakes his head at him, “I could never curse you, Suguru.”
He doesn’t take his body to Jujutsu High, as protocol demands. Shoko would be the one who had to examine the body, and he could never do that to her. Instead, he bows his head over the bloody body of his best friend—no, his soulmate—and allows himself two minutes to mourn.
He doesn’t cry. He can’t.
But something in him has fundamentally changed. Something within him has cracked. It’s not something that can ever be fixed.
He presses his forehead to Geto’s and strokes his hair, rocking a little as silent grief overcomes him. His body is still warm. If he closes his eyes, Gojo could almost pretend that the body he was cradling to his chest was alive, and that Geto was sleeping.
But he isn’t sleeping. He’s dead, and Gojo was the one to kill him.
His two minutes is up. He gently rests Geto’s body against the wall and turns away from him, unable to look any longer.
The world seems a little less bright than it did before.
Gojo warps out of there thirty seconds before Geto’s daughters find his body, but he swears he can hear their wails of despair when they find his corpse anyway.
Will you let me, baby, lose
On losing dogs
I know they're losing and I'll pay for my place
By the ring
Where I'll be looking in their eyes when they're down
When Gojo Satoru is twenty-eight, he meets fifteen-year-old Itadori Yuji. He’s only just turned fifteen, three months ago in fact. Fifteen and sentenced to death.
His situation is so similar to Yuta’s, yet so different. Different because this time, there’s no chance that this kid is going to escape his execution.
The higher ups had wanted him dead immediately. Gojo had bartered some extra time for him. The deal? Yuji would consume all of Ryomen Sukuna’s fingers and then be executed, taking Sukuna with him. Easy enough.
Fifteen years old.
Fifteen years old and sentenced to death because he’d swallowed a special grade cursed object to save the life of a kid he barely knew.
Megumi blamed himself. Said he should’ve been stronger, should’ve been better. He hadn’t left his room for a whole day when he heard what Yuji’s fate was to be.
Gojo wasn’t sure that bartering for more time for Yuji had been the right thing to do. He knew that eventually it would just be more painful for all of them. That they’d all grow attached. But he couldn’t do nothing and let this kid be murdered just because he was stupid, brave, and unbelievably selfless.
And maybe because he reminded him of someone else he once knew, also cursed to endlessly consume cursed spirits. But Gojo couldn’t save Geto Suguru, so instead he’d save Itadori Yuji.
He was playing with fire and everyone knew it.
Yuji was a great kid.
He was loud and outgoing, and constantly joyful despite the horrors they all endured on a regular basis. It was a miracle he was able to even experience happiness at all, with the impending deadline that had been attached to his lifespan. He was strong too. Not in the same way as all of Gojo’s other students, or indeed like any Jujutsu Sorcerer he’d ever met.
No, Yuji was insanely physically strong, and had incredible mental strength and determination. He had to work twice as hard as most of the other Jujutsu Sorcerers, yet he did so without complaint.
It was admirable.
He reminded Gojo so much of Geto when they were in high school, that sometimes it pained him to be around him. Not because they had similar personalities, but because Yuji had the same unwavering determination Geto had always had, the same ideologies about saving those who couldn’t protect themselves, but unlike Geto, he didn’t fester in his losses and let them consume him.
Not to say that they didn’t affect him, they clearly did, and Gojo was sorry for that, but nothing could be done to protect a Jujutsu Sorcerer from loss. It was part of the job.
Itadori Yuji would not be defeated by his own brain like those who had come before him.
Still, everyone had bad days, even Yuji. But Gojo was older now than he’d once been, older and hopefully wiser, and he’d learned how to recognise when people had bad days. This time, he wasn’t going to let anyone lose themselves and drown in this cursed world like Geto had.
He started carrying sweet things again, so that Yuji would have something to drown out the foul taste of swallowing cursed objects. He hadn’t needed to do that in almost twelve years.
Yuji flourished in such a short period of time, forging friendships and growing stronger by the day.
Megumi fell in love with him. Yuji fell in love with Megumi.
Neither of them did anything about it, both knowing that Yuji didn’t have time. So instead they spent their days training and exorcising curses, exchanging longing glances and fleeting touches and going on dates that weren’t technically dates but instead “bro time”, all while Gojo watched it happen, a growing hole in his heart.
He knew how that story would end.
Time. That was always the problem. There was never enough of it.
He pulled Megumi aside, told him to act on his feelings before it was too late. Told him to make sure he lived his life with no regrets.
Megumi became defensive and told him that he didn’t know what he was talking about and what would Gojo know about love anyway? He was always with a different woman every week.
And then Yuji dies.
Gojo sits on the chair in Shoko’s examination room, head in his hands, unable to look at the body of the fifteen year old boy lying on the table. He looks far too much like the body of another teenage boy he’d once known.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
Dead, because the three kids, Megumi, Nobara, and Yuji, had been sent on a mission to exorcise a curse that was far too high grade for their current ability levels. Yuji had been forced to let Sukuna out. Megumi had fought Sukuna, who had then ripped out Yuji’s heart.
It was all far too reminiscent of another teenage boy’s death, sent on a mission with his best friend, just to die to a cursed spirit that was far above their ability level.
None of them had ever stood a chance.
Yuji had always been destined to die, he knew that, yet Gojo had been unprepared for it anyway. It hadn’t been supposed to happen like this, they should've been able to say goodbye first.
God. What was he going to tell Megumi?
And then, suddenly, miraculously, Yuji is alive again. Because unlike Yu Haibara, Itadori Yuji is the vessel of the most powerful curse user in all of Jujutsu history, and for some reason, Ryomen Sukuna needs him alive.
Yuji doesn’t remember how he came back to life, chalking it up as a stroke of luck. Gojo knows better, and he has a bad feeling about it. But despite his better judgement, the judgement that says that keeping Yuji alive now is more dangerous than ever before because now Sukuna has a hidden agenda that they don’t know about, his relief that Yuji is here, that he’s alive, outweighs his other concerns.
Time passes and Yuji consumes more of Sukuna’s fingers. Sukuna becomes stronger, but so does Yuji, and the two are still stuck in their stalemate. A target is put on Yuji’s back by every side of the fight.
Gojo does everything in his power to shield him from the blows raining down on that target, but at the end of the day, he’s only one man.
Eventually, it all goes wrong, as it was always destined to.
It was a ticking time bomb waiting to blow and eventually it did. That’s what happens when you play with fire around explosives.
Gojo is trapped in the prison realm. By Geto Suguru, of all people. But it’s not really Geto Suguru, Gojo would know. He knows him in his heart and soul and would recognise him anywhere.
Someone is wearing his face, his body, his cursed technique, but it’s not Geto Suguru. For a moment though, Gojo is weak and lets himself believe that it is. That his soulmate wasn't dead, that he hadn't ended his life himself. And that moment of hope, of weakness, kills thousands.
Shibuya is gone.
So is Nanami, Nobara, and thousands of nameless humans that Gojo will never know the name of, but could have saved if only he’d sacrificed those humans in the station and killed the imposter in Geto Suguru's body and his band of cursed spirits when he had the chance. If he hadn’t hesitated.
Shibuya is gone. Destroyed by Ryomen Sukuna. He wasn’t even at full power, Yuji had only consumed fifteen fingers by that point.
Yuji is different now. Heavier.
So is Megumi.
They have the look of soldiers who have seen war, and in a sense they have. This is a war against cursed spirits, and they’re on the front line. Kids. On the front line.
Yuji’s execution has been pushed forward, his lifetime shortened once more.
If only Gojo hadn’t allowed himself to be weak, to become trapped, then maybe he could have saved them from it.
But he was only human, and he had a habit of betting on lost causes.
Gojo Satoru, and his bleeding heart.
I wanna feel it
I bet on losing dogs
I always want you when I'm finally fine
How you'd be over me looking in my eyes when I come
Someone to watch me die
Someone to watch me die
I bet on losing dogs.