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Prolonged isolation can carry with it serious effects, including but not limited to; depression and anxiety, suicidal ideation, and hallucinations.
It doesn’t start immediately, of course. It’s a gradual buildup. You won’t notice when your heart seems to race all the time, when your breath feels like it doesn’t fill your lungs like it did until it occurs to you one day that it didn’t always feel like that.
The walls will start to talk, and shadows cast by a fixed light will warp and shift in your peripheral vision. You won’t feel your mind slipping away until something drastic happens which makes you notice. Like ripping at your own skin hard enough to leave bloody nail marks several layers deep into your arms.
Time will feel slowed, or maybe sped up, and you won’t be able to accurately estimate how many hours have passed, or how many days, unless you have access to the sun.
Satoru Gojo does not.
The Prison Realm is completely pitch black, not a light source in sight. The only reason Gojo can see is his Six Eyes, and the strain it’s causing to them has given him a constant headache that refuses to abate. He doesn’t know how long he’s been here, or whether time is even something he should be thinking about. He doesn’t feel hungry, his hair and nails do not grow, he doesn’t need water, he isn’t tired. There is no way at all for him to guess how long he has been trapped.
He can assume it’s been several days, though, when he starts hearing Suguru in his ear. He whips towards the voice on pure instinct the first few times, his natural reaction to hearing something right beside his face, feeling someone’s breath against his cheek, and he scoffs at himself when he finds no one there.
It doesn’t stop, though. Every few hours, he assumes, there’s another whisper, something he can’t make out. He feels hands on his skin, running over his shoulders and face. Infinity doesn’t stop them. There’s something terrifying about it, something unsettling and grotesque. Probably because those touches aren’t foreign. They were pressed into him a decade ago.
With the touching his anxiety grows like a rising tide in his chest. It’s like there’s a weight on his chest that he can’t remove no matter how hard he tries to inhale. He’s had panic attacks before, dealt with most of them himself too, but now he can’t. He can’t seem to catch his breath whenever they start, forced to hyperventilate himself into unconsciousness while the shadows dance around him and someone long gone whispers things he can’t understand and touches him like nothing ever changed.
Despite everyone else, Gojo has never thought himself invincible. His shortcomings have always been far too noticeable, lying right there on the surface where he’s forced to see them. He had assumed, though, that he was used to being alone. Apparently not.
The first time he sees sunlight again, his arms are a mess of scars and blood he’d been unable to wash away with no water. Reverse Cursed Technique can only do so much when you’re trapped in a box designed to nullify your Technique. The wounds heal, but they leave behind gnarly scars he’s not sure he’ll ever be rid of.
The sun is bright on his face, absolutely blinding to his already hyper-sensitive eyes. The headache turns quickly to a migraine, blurring his vision. It would’ve sent him to the floor had he been standing.
There are voices around him, hushed in reality but loud to his poor ears. He’s freed? How? Is this another trick from his brain? He thinks it must be. The sun is too bright and everything is too loud, this isn’t what the world looks like.
He scrambles weakly to his hands and knees, dirt and dust kicking up around him, adding another layer of discomfort to his skin that he isn’t ready to deal with. He lurches forward with a gag that has him tasting blood. Nothing comes up, but the voices do get slightly louder.
He can’t tell if the hands on him are real or not. They aren’t tracing familiar patterns like they were before, but they’re light enough for him to be genuinely unsure. A moan bubbles through his throat, and his feet refuse to hold him. It’s like everything is catching up to him, maybe, fatigue he couldn’t feel before crashing into him all at once.
“Gojo, hey.” He knows that voice, but he can’t recognize its owner. The Reversed Curse Technique that rolls over him is not his own, but it isn’t unfamiliar. It’s soft and cool, but in a different way than his own. Shoko.
It’s soothing, in a way.
“Can you look at me?” There are hands on his face, tilting it towards the sky.
‘No,’ he thinks, looking at the blurry mass of what might be a face. ‘I can’t see you.’ They peel open his eyelids and shine something even brighter in his eyes and it hurts. His teleportation lies just beneath his skin, and it rushes to his fingertips when beckoned. The tug it gives aches down to his core, but it does the job, and he lands somewhere far away, dark and cold and home.
The sheets smell like Suguru beneath him, silky and soft against his skin. The sheets smell like Suguru, overpowering the blood and the dingy smell of the Prison Realm, still stuck deep in his nose.
The whispers sound like wind, like branches on the window, not so much like words. If he concentrates hard enough, the touches almost feel like clothes on his back. The pillow he drags into his arms is plush and solid, real.
He’ll have to get up in a moment, get up and fight for all he’s worth, but for now he can simply breathe, free and doomed and tired. He’s so tired.
Real or not, this place is nice, and he’s happy with that.