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Maki
It’s too quiet without Satoru around. That’s the first thing that really hits her once it’s all over and they’ve gotten on with their lives. With Japan in chaos, she has more missions now than ever. On top of that, she’s had to step up to help Megumi rebuild the Zenin clan, which fills her already busy schedule with even more shit to pull together. And even through all this tumult, there’s something missing. She cycles through her day-to-day tasks too efficiently with no one to pull her aside to stop and rest or drag her into inane competitions for a free dinner out. Nobody interrupts her meetings with the Great Clans to drop off souvenirs she’d never admit to enjoying, or send her and Yuta on some contrived mission to make them spend time together outside of training.
At first, she tries to pretend it’s peaceful. Look at how much smoother things go without Gojo—Look at how quickly she can get from one mission to the next, and the next, and the next.
Then the curses start coming out of the woodworks.
Maki knew in theory that Satoru’s power kept the curse presence in Japan in check, but she always assumed the explosion of Special Grades after his birth canceled it out. For the first few weeks after his death, her hypothesis holds true. No new Special Grades are being unearthed, and she can’t help but chalk it up to Sukuna’s exorcism and Satoru’s death. But just because no new monsters are being created doesn’t mean the ones that exist suddenly went away, and that is made all too clear when her tight schedule becomes even tighter. The well-oiled machine she created starts to squeak and stutter. Two missions a day turn into three; four; five. And it’s not just her. They’re all spread thin combating the influx of cursed spirits—Satoru’s students, anyway. The adults, not so much. Ieiri doesn’t have combat capabilities, Iori is too busy repairing Kyoto, Mei Mei is off the grid with no Gojo Clan coffers to pay her for missions, and Kusakabe-sensei is impossible to get a hold of.
Maki has to begrudgingly admit that it would be easier if they could work together on missions. She prefers to work alone, but she can’t count the number of times Nobara’s Resonance would be helpful, or Toge’s Cursed Speech, or Yuta’s raw strength. But they rarely go on missions together anymore, even the second years. Their resources have to be spread out to keep up with the onslaught of curses now that there’s no Gojo Satoru to ward them off.
And so, it’s quiet without her friends. It’s quiet without her teacher bringing them together and taking some of the load off so they can breathe. It’s quiet as she cuts down curse after curse after curse, to the point where Maki starts wondering if Satoru was suffocated by similar silence when he was alive. She decides he probably wasn’t; he was always talking after all, even to himself.
Sometimes, in moments of weakness, she can admit to herself that she wishes he was still here to talk to her, too.
Toge
No one talks about Gojo after he dies.
It’s something Toge doesn’t understand. The rest of them don’t have the same barrier he does, forced into muteness by a technique always active, embedded in his every cell. The only one who ever understood was Gojo. Gojo, who no one seems to remember.
They’re taking their speech for granted. If Toge could talk, he would make sure the world remembered his teacher’s name. He would talk about the first time they met, a too-tall, too-energetic stranger barging into the deadly silence of the Inumaki Compound and whisking him away with promises of new friends. Toge never had friends before Jujutsu Tech. He was too dangerous.
He would talk about how the scarf he always wears was actually a present from Gojo, bought the very same day he took him to the school. Since the age of four, Toge only ever knew the cold iron grip of a muzzle with cursed seals wrapping around his cheeks. Gojo took one look at the thing and incinerated it without a single thought. The scarf he replaced it with is still the softest thing Toge owns.
Toge would talk about how Gojo wouldn’t have wanted this future for them—a future where Maki stretches herself thin taking on mission after mission; where Fushiguro speaks nearly as little as Toge; where Itadori and Kugisaki and all the rest of them are perpetually chained to Jujutsu. If Gojo was still alive, Toge knows he wouldn’t let Kusakabe-sensei stand by and let them handle the cleanup like this. But Gojo isn’t alive, and no one will say the obvious and stand up for themselves.
Sometimes Toge toys with the idea of actually saying what he thinks, and forcing the adults to actually help them. Maybe he’d make Yuta and Maki and Panda tell him what they’re thinking for once, too, instead of just giving him sad smiles or lackluster pats on the back in passing between missions. But his conscience won’t let him. He thinks back to Gojo’s weary face when he realized none of them had left when he told them to before killing the Higher-Ups, and thinks Gojo wouldn’t want Toge to turn himself into a weapon, too.
What Toge wishes he could say most, though, wouldn’t remold the universe the way his technique is built to. Whenever he passes by the rows upon rows of gravestones in the school burial grounds, faced with the absence of Gojo’s and forced to remember that no one gave him a single eulogy, he wishes he could speak just so he could be the exception. But Toge can’t speak, not outside of rice ball ingredients that infuriatingly few people even understand. And so he can only think of all the things he’d want to say to his teacher if the man was still here, the only adult to ever look out for him. He hopes that, wherever Gojo is, he knows that there’s someone who would give him a proper eulogy if only they could.
Yuta
Waking up is the hardest part of Yuta’s day after Shinjuku. It’s been a month. He should be used to his reflection by now, but still, every time he looks in the mirror when he washes his face or brushes his teeth, the sight of the scars cutting across his forehead make him want to bury his head back in his pillows and scream.
When Yuta goes to Kusakabe-sensei about his struggles, his new teacher tells him that he isn’t the only one who has to deal with scarring after Shinjuku. And while that’s true, none of the others’ scars are from ripping their teacher’s body open to use as their own.
Yuta doesn’t know why he bothered seeking solace in the first-grade sorcerer in the first place. Kusakabe was never there for them, not the way Gojo was, not even when they moved up to second year and Gojo was no longer their main teacher. But Yuta is so desperate for absolution from the guilty dreams plaguing him every night that he can’t help but recede back into the bullied child he’d once been, reaching out to the adults for help. They never did. The only one who did was Gojo-sensei, and even if he was alive now, Yuta wouldn’t deserve his help.
Sometimes, on especially bad nights, Yuta lies awake and wonders if Gojo might’ve had a chance to come back if he hadn’t used his body. Yuta was too delirious from his own wounds by the time Ieiri started the procedure to know whether or not his teacher’s body was still warm on the morgue table across from him. He remembers the moments leading up to the operation in bits and flashes—Maki’s furious, teary-eyed face hovering over his own; Ieiri-san’s calm assurances that everything would be fine as he was put under; Rika’s wavering voice echoing from the far recesses of his mind, small and frightened. Rika didn’t want Yuta to go through with the plan either. It took a week for her to stop snubbing him whenever he tried to call on her.
Thanks to Rika Yuta made it out of the operation alive, but the same couldn’t be said for Gojo-sensei. Whether or not his teacher had actually drawn his last breath by the time his dismembered body hit the rubble will forever haunt him. Gojo told him once that he died before when he was Yuta’s age, and survived. Why couldn’t RCT have done the same this time? Could it have? If they had made a contingency plan to save Gojo instead of a contingency plan to win the fight, would Gojo still be here today?
Yuta will never know. All he’s left with are the stitches in his forehead and the memories belonging to a body that wasn’t his own. That, and the guilt. The guilt, like Rika, will curse him as long as he lives.
Nobara
It’s fine without Gojo-sensei. No, really, it is. But “fine” isn’t the same as “good,” and Nobara can admit that, even if some of her idiot classmates can’t.
There are no weekend shopping trips without Gojo-sensei around. The guy was the only person who enjoyed the mall as much as Nobara did. She wonders how many missions he ditched just to go to Yokohama or Akihabara or Roppongi with her. At least half her wardrobe is from those trips, and she wears the outfits every day, stubbornly ignoring Itadori’s puppy dog eyes and the clenching of Megumi’s jaw when they see her wearing the things Gojo-sensei bought her. Screw them. She can wear what she likes, and besides, at least one of them should be emotionally intelligent enough to not just trash everything Gojo got them. She saw a few of Megumi’s books that Gojo gifted him in the trash once, and she marched right back to his dorm, threw open the door, and chucked the books at his head. Luckily she hasn’t caught the moron trying to throw things out since then.
It’s not just the absence of shopping trips and souvenirs that yawns in Gojo’s absence. The whole of Jujutsu Tech is somber and moody now. Everyone takes their duties as sorcerers seriously and then some, barely smiling when they pass each other in the halls. It makes Nobara wanna kick something. Gojo was annoying, yeah, but he at least brought the mood up. She misses his dumb jokes and the way he annoyed all of them into acting their age. He made her feel like a human and not just a sorcerer. She remembers him encouraging her to go into the fashion industry, once upon a time. They both knew she became a sorcerer to get out of the country and because she was good at it, not because of some crazy strength like Itadori or a burning passion like Maki-senpai. She was pleased that someone around her noticed her model potential.
Now, with missions piling up and up and up, her ambitions of going to fashion school or getting scouted by a major modeling agency seem like pipe dreams. How the hell will she find time for that? Sometimes she remembers Itadori telling her how Nanami-san left Jujutsu society after school, and she’s tempted to do the same. Then again, he got pulled back in the end and ended up dying like Gojo. Maybe they’ll all end up that way, eventually.
Ugh. Even she’s getting too serious without that blindfolded idiot here anymore.
Gojo-sensei, I swear, I’ll get into the city for real this time and leave this sorcery shit behind. You’ll see.
Megumi
When Nobara catches him cleaning out the books and trinkets Gojo got him, Megumi nearly throws them right back into the trash just to spite her. It only takes one glimpse of the inside cover of one of the novels, though, and the little message Gojo wrote in it with a smiley face for him to cave just like he feared.
Nobara doesn’t get it. All this stuff cluttering up Megumi’s room, all of Gojo’s things, only makes it harder to forget him. And Megumi has to forget him, because if he doesn’t, he’s going to lose his mind.
He does all the things people are supposed to do after a traumatic event. He goes to Tsumiki’s grave every Sunday and tells her about his week. He apologizes to everyone he hurt during the Shinjuku Showdown (everyone who’s still alive, at least). He keeps himself busy with missions and new duties as the Zenin Clan Head. He even responds to Yuji and Nobara’s texts on time. But none of it is enough. There’s a chasm deep inside of him that he can’t outrun. It’s with him when he visits Tsumiki and reminisces on edited versions of their shared childhood memories. It’s with him when he takes accountability for the pain his possession caused, then refuses Ieiri-san’s offer to decide how to handle the little remains of Gojo’s body they dragged out from underneath the rubble. It’s with him when he meets with the new generation of Zenin children and feels a splitting sense of deja vu as he remembers being in their position ten years ago, looking up at a stranger offering him a better future. It’s with him when there are awkward lulls in his conversations with his classmates, as if they’re all waiting for someone else to fill it.
Megumi doesn’t want the emptiness to follow him like this. It’s pointless. It isn’t as if Gojo was actually his family. He bought him, plain and simple, and no number of shared holidays or parent-teacher conferences or baseball games would change that. Gojo was only his teacher, and not even a good one at that. He spent more time annoying Megumi on purpose than actually trying to teach him anything. There’s no reason for Megumi to be so hung up on Gojo’s death. Except…
He was supposed to be the Strongest. He wasn’t supposed to die. He wasn’t supposed to leave us, leave me, when he promised to stay.
It’s easier to blame Gojo, so Megumi does. He should have prepared more for the fight. He shouldn’t have let Kenjaku surprise him in Shibuya. They were all counting on him, weren’t they? And Gojo wasn’t like other people. He should’ve been fine.
(“Satoru-nii’s human too, Megumi,” Tsumiki chides once, when Megumi was refusing to speak to their guardian after another missed holiday. “He’s doing his best to be here for us. We just have to be there for him, too.”)
Megumi hates the sick guilt that wells on the back of his tongue whenever he goes to see her and doesn’t mention the man who raised them. He knows she would be disappointed.
Would Gojo be disappointed?
In the letter Gojo left behind for Megumi, he told him he killed his father. Megumi laughed so hard at that, the hardest he’s laughed in the months since. Gojo hadn’t killed his father. Fushiguro Toji was a man Megumi barely even knew. He never knew his favorite sweets, or his ringtone, or his music preferences or affectionate hugs. It’s just so ironic that Gojo claimed to have killed Megumi’s father, when if anyone should answer for patricide, it’s—
Nobara doesn’t get it. She’s not the one who would be forced to confront the blood on her hands if she even for a moment admits what Gojo Satoru was to her.
Yuji
You’re still alive in my head, Yuji writes to Gojo-sensei one day. It’s something his therapist told him to try. He’s the only one who decided to see one; he tried to at least convince Megumi, but the other boy isn’t ready to even admit to himself that he cares about Gojo, let alone talk to someone else about it. It’s a lonely feeling, trying to recover and heal and not having anyone else to do it with.
Whenever I pass a sweets shop I think you’d like, you’re there. And you’re there when I’m watching Megumi and Nobara train and they’re using things they learned from you. You’re there when I’m at the grocery store and I see those casse croûtes you always used to bring Nanamin, too.
Whatever Nanamin and Gojo-sensei had was one thing Yuji never managed to figure out. It sends a pang through his heart to think about it now, when they’re both gone, with no graves to lay in side-by-side. He wonders if they ever figured it out themselves. He hopes they did.
I wanna tell you that everyone’s doing good. I know you’d want that for us. But… But the truth is, I think we all really miss you, Gojo-sensei. I don’t think we’re doing well without you.
No one is. Ieiri-san started smoking again. Yuji used to see her around campus every now and then, and she now lives out of the morgue. When Iori-sensei stops by for inter-school business, she only ever looks at Yuji and his classmates with pity in her eyes. Yuji hasn’t seen Hakari-senpai or Hoshi-senpai ever since the battle. Either they went back to fighting, or ran off somewhere else. The last time Yuji saw them, Hakari was too angry to look any of them in the face. Kusakabe-sensei is probably the only one doing better after Gojo died, and that’s just because he’s free to saddle Yuji and his friends with all the missions he wants now.
I don’t want you to blame yourself though, sensei. I think you did that a lot, especially at the end. It made me sad. I never understood why you did, even though I knew you were the Strongest. Now I think I get it. No one ever told you you were just a human when you were around, so it’s not your fault you didn’t see yourself that way, either. Teardrops fall onto the flimsy notebook paper. Yuji blinks hard and scrubs at his eyes, but he can’t stop them. He writes through blurred vision, biting his lip hard to not bother Megumi in the next room over. I’m sorry, Gojo-sensei. I thought you knew. If I realized you didn’t, I would’ve told you more. I’m sure the others would have, too.
Gojo looked so sad in the days leading up to his death. Yuji tried everything back then to cheer him up, but it was all met with the same bittersweet smile.
I think… I think you knew what was going to happen, he writes. A stone settles into his gut. But why did you still fight then, sensei? Why didn’t you ask one of us to help you?
They wouldn’t have helped him, Yuji knows, and it makes him so angry. Okkotsu-senpai was the only other one who wanted to jump into the fight when it looked like Gojo was losing, and Kusakabe-sensei stopped him. Now that Yuji knows what the adults and Okkotsu were planning, he can guess Kusakabe didn’t actually stop them because he thought they would get in Gojo’s way. He probably stopped them so Gojo could exhaust himself, die, and then they could use his corpse.
I’m still angry about what they did to you. I know I shouldn’t be, probably. They were all desperate, and I think Okkotsu-senpai thought he was doing it for you. But that doesn’t make it right. Maybe life isn’t about making sure you die a good death, but when people do die, don’t they deserve to be honored and remembered?
Sometimes Yuji starts to think he’s the only one who remembers Gojo-sensei. No one talks about him anymore. It’s as if he never even existed, even after all he did for them. But then Yuji sees Nobara leave for town in the skirt Gojo-sensei bought her in Akihabara. He sees Megumi reading one of the books Gojo gifted him for his birthday, even though Yuji knows he already finished it. (He pretends not to notice Megumi rubbing his eyes after, too.) He catches Maki-senpai looking around her with a frown in the middle of training like she’s waiting for pointers, and Inumaki-senpai filling out mission reports in Gojo’s abandoned homeroom classroom, and he watches how Okkotsu-senpai acts with the kids they sometimes rescue, mentorly and smiling even though he’s not as naturally cheery as their teacher was. Yuji knows, when he sees all of that, that he isn’t the only one who remembers Gojo-sensei. But it isn’t enough. He just wishes…
None of us told you we cared when you were here. And I know it’s too late, and you probably aren’t reading this wherever you are, but you deserve to hear it from at least one of us. I miss you, Gojo-sensei, and I’m probably never gonna stop missing you, but that’s okay. Because missing you means I’ll always have a part of you to carry with me.