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It’s silent without Suguru. Satoru’s room is drowning in it. The only sound is the rustling of the leaves outside and the tree branch scratching against his window.
Looking around the space, he wonders when it stopped being his room and became theirs. Suguru is everywhere. His Cursed Energy coats every surface in the room, lighting up in Satoru’s Six Eyes.
Suguru’s sweater he had left the night before is draped over the back of the desk chair, polaroid photos cover the wall by his bed. The navy sheets were once Suguru’s, and his dirty uniform is in the hamper. His touch is everywhere, his influence not so subtly hidden across every inch of space.
Satoru lifts the sweater from the chair and stares at it for a moment. It’s soft, one of the ones Suguru usually sleeps in, and a deep black color, like most of Suguru’s clothes. He brings it to his face and inhales. He feels weird doing it, but it smells like Suguru.
Tears well in his eyes, unbidden, and he desperately wills them away. The sweater is becoming damp where it’s pressed to his face. This is stupid. Suguru isn’t even dead and Satoru is here crying over a sweater. Curses are killing people all across Japan right now and he’s wallowing in self pity instead of exercising them.
It’s just that nothing has ever hurt like this before. It’s a new, foreign feeling in his chest, heavy and aching.
‘Grief,’ the voice in his head, (that sounds suspiciously like Suguru,) tells him. He mentally bats it away and squeezes his eyes shut, tightening his hold on the sweater against his chest. He twists and rubs the material between his fingers, relishing in the soft familiarity of it.
He can’t be grieving, he thinks, rolling the thought around his head like the fabric in his hands. Suguru isn’t dead. You can’t grieve for an alive person. And besides, Satoru is too strong for something like grief. Something small like his friend leaving should not be enough to bring him to his knees, to make him hurt quite so much. So why does it?
He balls up the sweater and tosses it across the room. It thumps against the wall and lands in a heap on the floor. He glares at it, as if willing it to go away so it isn’t there when he returns. He knows it will be.
Jujutsu High looks exactly the same as it did before Suguru left. Just as empty, just as sad. He doesn’t run into anyone as he briskly moves across campus. He has a mission to go on.
He forgets the veil.
Or, really, he doesn’t forget it, he just simply ignores it. The curse in front of him had been rather large, a Special Grade, of course, and Gojo had been angry, wanting to blow off some steam. At first, he used only hand to hand to fight, landing blows in the form of punches and kicks that it hardly flinched at. After it managed to hit him twice, he allowed his Technique to leak in a little, and made himself too fast to catch. It couldn’t hit him anymore, and it couldn’ even turn fast enough to see where he had ended up before he was hitting it again.
It got a couple of good licks in, but nothing Gojo’s Reversed Curse Technique couldn’t fix near instantaneously.
Essentially, he gets carried away. He blasts it with a Red that nearly tears the nearby buildings from their foundations, which was not strictly necessary. It works, even if it leaves a mess for Ijichi and the others to sort out later. It doesn’t make Gojo’s rage any calmer, even.
Gojo stares at his phone, miserably. His foot taps rapidly against the ground, his knee bouncing with anxiety. Someone is droning on about something he’s supposed to be pretending to care about, but his focus is stuck on his phone.
More importantly, Geto’s contact. His contact photo is the two of them that Shoko had taken, Gojo grinning madly, his arms around Geto’s neck, blue eyes hidden behind those glasses of his. He’s since switched to a blindfold, as it’s more practical in battle. Less likely to fall off, be grabbed, or break.
The last message either of them sent was from Gojo. The night before Geto left.
‘Hey! Hope you’re doin good. Soz I couldnt make it to dinner, big mission. See you tomorrow! Love you <3’
He’d known, even then, that something was wrong with Geto. He’d noticed him losing weight and drawing away, but he’d assumed that it was the changing seasons, or how many missions they were both going on. He regrets, now, that he didn’t probe further, didn’t ask anything more than a few cursory questions.
His finger hovers over the text bar. Maybe it isn’t too late. Maybe he can still salvage this, bring Geto back and sort things out.
Maybe.
He shuts the screen off and turns the phone over in his hands, idly running his fingers over the glass. He fiddles with the little charm attached to it, still tuned out of the meeting.
When it ends he is the last one left in the room. He feels like he’s the last one left often. It’s lonely at the top. He always knew it would be, but he’d kind of assumed recently that it would be him and Geto together.
He doesn’t reach out, but this is not the last time he thinks about doing it.
His body feels hopelessly heavy as he banishes curse after curse. On a technical level, Gojo does not need to sleep, because of Reversed Curse Technique, but when he doesn’t, his mind deteriorates. Things grow hazy in his vision, and he stops being able to truly think rationally.
Relaxing is almost worse, though, because if he stops for too long he’s at the mercy of his thoughts, and they haven’t been very pleasant. He doesn’t even want to leave his bed, really, but duty calls, and he’ll be damned before he succumbs to such a stupid, mortal disease.
Grief.
He still doesn’t believe that’s what this is, because Geto is still alive somewhere in Japan, even if Gojo can’t find him. He’s looked, passively, scanning his eyes over every nook and cranny he passes by with his Six Eyes. Not so much as a trace is ever found.
It never stops hurting. Even when Gojo meets and takes in his kids, Megumi and Tsumiki, the agony in his chest never quite goes away. It’s always there, ever present deep beside his heart.
When he sees Suguru again, ten years later, all progress is lost. It gets worse again, and this time he doesn’t have the time for it to get better before the body of the love of his life is sealing him away in a box.
And it hurts so much more, trapped in that prison with nothing but his own torturous thoughts.