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When Suguru defects, Gojo thinks his life is over.
He enters a depressive state that lasts months and worries everyone around him. Shoko tries to take care of him to no avail, and then Nanami tries to force him to take care of himself, also to no avail, and eventually they give up, watching from a distance as he slowly disappears into himself, crumbling. They have no idea how to react to this new Gojo they’ve found themselves suddenly facing, all empty looks and unmoving expressions.
Everything changes the day Yaga sits him down in the teacher’s lounge on the nicest, softest seat in the room he typically always reserves for himself alone, and kneels on the ground before him so that Gojo has to look down on him. It’s strange, and it feels odd, and Gojo harbours no respect in his body for this man at all, but still he feels inclined to tell Yaga to rise. Too many things have changed recently. He wants to conserve shreds of his old life wherever possible.
“Satoru,” Yaga says. “You’re spiralling. It is not healthy, and it is not good. You need to get a grip.”
Gojo feels a strong urge to slap him. He has to physically hold himself back when his fingers twitch, making to blow the room up or hollow purple Yaga or do something, anything, everything.
Alas, he doesn’t.
“Find something to ground yourself. Go out, travel for real, I don’t know. But you need a break.” Yaga removes his sunglasses and shoots him an imploring look, his eyes wide. “I know Suguru leaving was extremely hard on you. And shockingly enough, I just want you to recover. You’re scaring people.”
“So sorry my grief is such an inconvenience,” Gojo spits, and Yaga winces at him, as though the words were genuinely painful. “I’ll be better tomorrow. My bad.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.” Yaga sighs heavily, and in perhaps the wildest plot twist of the day, places a gentle hand on Gojo’s knee, squeezing it softly. “I’m serious, Satoru. I - we just want you to get better.”
Gojo feels a pang in his chest. Fuck. He didn’t want to worry people. He doesn’t deserve that kind of care.
“I’ll try,” he whispers, voice hoarse. “I just don’t know how.”
“Pour yourself into something,” Yaga says immediately. Like he’s thought about this before, like he’s been through the exact same thing. “Focus your energy into a new goal, and let that give you purpose. You’re spiralling because you don’t know what to do with yourself anymore, so give yourself something to do .”
Gojo thinks about those words for the rest of the week. He goes through the motions of his daily routine - sleep for two hours, do missions, take a shower, brush his teeth, snack on something small, teach, go on more missions, repeat - until he’s sitting with Shoko on the porch outside the teacher’s lounge and she passingly mentions Toji Fushiguro’s children.
“Wait, what?” Gojo whips his head around to stare at her, and she jolts. “What did you just say?”
Shoko frowns at him. “Toji Fushiguro….his kids. We had some sorcerers scour his house, and the kids are still there. We’re trying to figure out what to do with them before child services can get involved.”
Right. Because the younger kid - the boy, the one that Toji mentioned before he died standing up, blood seeping from the gaping hole Gojo left in his shoulder - has a powerful cursed technique. The higher ups can’t let a kid like that go; he has too much potential, can make for too strong a weapon.
Suddenly, Yaga’s words come back to him. He pushes them away, but they return the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.
On the fourth day after his conversation with Shoko, Gojo decides to act.
Focus your energy into a new goal, and let that give you purpose. You’re spiralling because you don’t know what to do with yourself anymore, so give yourself something to do .
Gojo gives himself something to do.
He adopts both the children.
***
Their names are Megumi and Tsumiki. Megumi being the boy, which initially surprised Gojo. Such a feminine name for such a grumpy, small kid. It throws him off, and he doesn’t understand him, much like how he understands almost no one else in his life.
He understood Suguru. But that is a ship long since sailed, and he doesn’t have the heart to put much effort into trying to understand someone that deeply again.
Thankfully, he clicks well with Tsumiki very naturally. She’s a little older than her brother and extremely mature for her age, which implies a lot of depressing things Gojo doesn’t want to delve into. But she’s a sweetheart and so, so kind, kinder than anything in Gojo’s life thus far. He embraces that kindness wholeheartedly, and by the time the year is over, he’s wrapped around her little finger.
“Thank you,” she says one day, on their walk home from school. He’d bought her an ice cream from a little stand, and she clutches at the sweet treat, her fingers turning white from the force of her grip around the popsicle stick. “It’s very good, Gojo-sensei.”
She says ‘thank you’ for many, many things, Gojo is realizing. She says it when he makes her breakfast, she says it when he drops her off literally anywhere, and she thanks him when he picks her up as if it’s assumed he’d drop her off and then leave her there. Like coming back is something she needs to be grateful for.
He hates it. He always tells her not to say ‘thank you’ for mundane things ever again, and she always says ‘yes Gojo-sensei’ in that sweet sing-song voice of hers before doing it again at the very next available opportunity.
It’s strange. So, Gojo asks her about it.
“Why do you say ‘thank you’ so much?” He’s trying to sound nonchalant, but he’s not sure if it works. Tsumiki tilts her head to the side at the question, as if pondering his words a great deal. Then she looks up at him and says, “what do you mean?”
“Just what I said.” Gojo shrugs, then ruffles her hair lightly. “You always say ‘thank you’ for things even though I always tell you not to. Why do you feel so inclined to do that?”
Tsumiki laughs, but it’s a sad a laugh - a regretful one. Kids her age shouldn’t know how to laugh like that.
“I don’t know how much you know about our father,” she begins. “But I know you know that he wasn’t a good man. He left us alone all the time, and every time he came back, he’d just shut himself in his room for a little while and then leave again.”
“I’m sorry,” Gojo murmurs. He doesn’t know what else to say.
Tsumiki just shrugs. “It’s okay. Maybe he loved us in some way. But even if he did, he didn’t know how to show it. He acted like he didn’t care. He never saw things through.” She’s frowning thinking about it, but after a few moments of tense silence the corners of her lips tilt upward in a small smile, and she turns to regard Gojo with a thoughtful look. “But you always go all in, no looking back. Even if you mess up, at least you mess up meaningfully.”
At that she skips forward, and Gojo watches her, his eyes on her back, her words ringing in his ears.
“You make mistakes as a result of trying, and you learn from them.” Tsumiki turns to glance at him over her shoulder, eyes sparkling. “So they don’t really feel like mistake mistakes, y’know?”
Gojo supposes he does know. He finds himself smiling back.
***
Megumi is trickier than his sister. Trickier in the sense that he hates Gojo to death (he says this to his face constantly) and refuses to listen to him in any capacity whatsoever unless Tsumiki gets involved, which isn’t great given that Tsumiki is also a child and doesn’t have a stellar temper when it comes to her sibling, either. Gojo has never had to break up as many fights as he has in the year and several months he’s had the children in his care, and he’s running out of ways to get them to calm down.
Everything comes to a head one night when Megumi - recently extremely interested in learning how to summon his shikigami - throws a fit in the dining room when Gojo vehemently refuses to do exactly that.
“It’s my technique,” he hisses, glaring up at Gojo who still towers over him even while sitting down at the dinner table. His face is strangely red, unnaturally so. “I’m not some weakling, I can learn it, I can !”
“I don’t think you’re weak,” Gojo hisses. It’s been a long day, a long night , and he’s starting to get seriously frustrated. “I think you’re a seven year old child, and I think it’s ridiculous for you to spend your time running yourself ragged in our backyard learning fighting techniques you won’t and will never need while you live under my roof.”
“But I’m -!”
“Just listen to him Megumi,” Tsumiki whispers. She’s cowering on the other side of the dinner table, curled into herself on the chair.
“STAY OUT OF THIS!” Megumi roars, voice hoarse and scratchy, and Gojo decides he’s had absolutely enough.
“That’s it,” he says firmly, standing. The chair he was sitting on rattles as he pushes it back, and Megumi takes one second to register that Gojo is actually, seriously pissed before he squares himself up like he’s preparing for a fight and scowls at him with all the venom of a thousand poisonous snakes. “Go to your room, or the bathroom, or the living room, or wherever. I don’t care. But I’m not teaching you how to destroy your body and turn it into a weapon when you’re this goddamn young, and I’m not in the mood to deal with your temper tantrum over it either. Leave .”
Megumi’s eyes water immediately. “You just want to keep me here so you can control me,” he grits, his voice full of emotion. “You’re just like everybody else, you don’t care about what happens to me at all!”
“Megumi,” Tsumiki gasps, but Gojo beats her to it.
Unfortunately.
“Fine,” he growls, and he feels it, that old anger, that old hatred rise in his body, boiling his blood, and it’s so strong and so potent he knows he has no hope of holding it back. “Fine. Maybe I don’t care, maybe I don’t give a shit , so just leave me the hell alone and stop suffocating me for one fucking second! ”
Silence.
Silence for all the world, as his words register in Megumi’s brain.
And it’s funny - casually, easily - it’s funny how Gojo can see it the second they click, can see the way Megumi’s eyes shutter just a bit, can see the way his shoulders fall and the way his breathing sort of just…stops being normal.
He wants to take them back - the words. He wants to take them back so bad, but in the blink of an eye, Megumi is gone. The sound of his bedroom door slamming closed rings through the apartment a second later.
“Fuck,” Gojo breathes. He slumps back into his chair, officially and resolutely done.
It’s quiet for a few minutes. Gojo is too tired to do damage control for Tsumiki, whom he realized somewhere between Megumi leaving and his eventual collapse back into his chair was present for the entirety of the fight. But then he hears the sound of another chair being pushed back, followed by the patter of gentle feet hitting the ground, and then there are small arms wrapped around his torso and a tiny head of long brown hair pressed against his stomach.
“I’m sorry,” Tsumiki whispers. “I know this is hard. But please, please, please don’t leave.” She raises her head to look at him, tears spilling out of her eyes like two little waterfalls. “He likes you. I promise he does. Liking things is just hard for him when he’s spent his whole life hating the entire world.”
And god, if that isn’t the most relatable thing Gojo has ever heard. Without pause he wraps his arms around her too, squeezing tight.
“Don’t be sorry,” he breathes. “We talked about this. I’m the one who should be sorry.”
Tsumiki takes this as her sign to freely break down sobbing, and Gojo can do nothing but hold and hold and hold her, hoping he’s enough to keep her together.
Everybody is a little broken , Shoko had told him once. It’s just a matter of how well you put yourself back together in the end.
Gojo hasn’t mastered that yet, meaning there’s no way Tsumiki has either.
Holding her is all he can do; so holding her is what he does.
***
Gojo is awoken to the sound of frantic raps at his door. He checks the clock on his bedside - the numbers 4:26 blink back at him - and tiredly drags himself out from under his warm covers to slink towards his door. He’d put Tsumiki to bed shortly after his argument with Megumi in hopes that plenty of rest would make her feel a little better in the morning, thus easing the process of making amends with Megumi in the morning. If she’s up at 4:26AM, that was either the entirely wrong move, or someone’s literally dying.
He opens the door and rubs his eyes. “Sorry Miki,” he slurs, still under the dregs of sleep. “If you’re upset I can -“
“Gojo-sensei,” she wails, and his eyes snap open in alarm. He looks down at her and oh, holy shit, she’s a mess , eyes red and cheeks stained with tears, hundreds of times worse than she looked earlier. “It’s Megumi, something’s wrong -“
Gojo is out of his room and breaking into Megumi’s before she can finish her sentence.
He quickly takes stock - it’s in order, impeccably tidy, as always - and there’s a lump on the bed. Gojo’s six eyes immediately narrow on it, and without pause or hesitation, his technique quickly reveals that there’s something extremely wrong.
“Megs,” he says, approaching the bed. He shakes the lump, and it groans back. “Megumi,” Gojo reiterates, and peels back the covers slightly. “What’s wrong buddy?”
“I feel sick,” Megumi wheezes, and Gojo can’t help the wince that takes over his face at just how awful the kid sounds. “My chest hurts and my body hurts, I don’t - I’m not -“
“Okay,” Gojo hums, rubbing a soothing hand over Megumi’s arm. “Okay kid, it’s okay. I’m gonna get you some help, alright? I’m gonna go call Shoko.”
“Please don’t leave,” Megumi wheezes, and he sounds like he can’t breathe, and it’s so scary and so terrible Gojo almost has a heart attack on the spot. “I’ll be back in a second, okay? I just need to get my phone, stay here.”
Megumi wails a pained cry, and Gojo teleports the short distance back to his room to snatch his phone off his bedside table before teleporting back and slamming a finger over Shoko’s contact. “Shoko,” he says the moment she picks up, holding the phone between his ear and his shoulder. He leans against Megumi and uses his free hands to wrap around the kid’s shaking body, patting reassuringly against his back. “There’s something wrong with Megumi - no, I’m serious, he’s in a lot of pain and he’s having trouble breathing - it came out of nowhere. Please, I need you to come. Right now.”
“Gojo-sensei,” Tsumiki whisper-yells, horrified. She’s still standing in the doorway.
Gojo smiles at her, tries to look confident and calming. She takes a step forward and he holds a hand up to stop her.
“I don’t know if it’s contagious Miki,” he whispers, lifting a hand to cover the phone. He can hear Shoko bustling on the other end, collecting her things. “I need you to stay far away for now, okay?”
Tsumiki’s face completely breaks down. “B-but,” she stutters, “but Megumi needs me.”
“He needs you to stay safe,” Gojo replies. “And so do I. It’s going to be okay, I won’t leave him. I’m right here.” He holds Megumi tighter at the words, pulls his shivering form closer. “No half-assing, remember?”
Tsumiki giggles weakly at the fowl language. “No half-assing,” she repeats, her voice low and soft.
Gojo nods.
Eventually, Shoko alerts him that she’s ready with all her equipment, and in the blink of an eye, Gojo is teleporting her straight into the room and dragging himself and Tsumiki away, their eyes trailing on Megumi every step of the way before Shoko is slamming the door closed, effectively locking them out.
***
Gojo learns later what was wrong.
Apparently, Megumi has asthma. Shoko revealed this to a tired and exhausted Gojo holding a sleeping Tsumiki on the living room couch around two hours after the initial scare, and told him they had to go the emergency room immediately. She was able to settle the more severe symptoms herself, but in her words, untreated asthma attacks can have “serious and long-lasting effects”. So, at 8:03AM, Gojo finds himself stewing in the waiting room of the emergency wing of a Hospital, Tsumiki knocked out on his left side, and Shoko napping on his other.
Megumi had been taken in an hour ago. Gojo has been restless the whole time, his foot rapping against the ground in an incessant display of nervous energy. An old lady sitting nearby shot him a very dirty look before pointedly finding someplace else to sit. Gojo ignored her and focused instead on running a hand through Tsumiki’s messy ponytail.
“Satoru Gojo?”
Gojo stands so quickly he jolts his chair, wakes Shoko, and scares the living hell out of Tsumiki.
“Yes,” he says quickly, “that’s me.”
The nurse who had called for him smiles from where she’s standing in the doorway to the hospital rooms. “Megumi is in stable condition. If you’d like, I can take you and your family in to see him one at a time.”
Gojo’s first instinct is to let Tsumiki go first. She’s his sister after all, and she’d been near total distress when she had first knocked on Gojo’s door so early in the morning. But just as he’s about to push her forward, she grabs his hand.
“You go,” she says gently. Her eyes, so young and full of innocence, are sunken and tired. “You need to see him more right now, I think.”
Gojo doesn’t even try to fight her on it. He just goes.
“He’s feeling alright, but I must warn you that he’s extremely groggy,” the nurse says as she leads him down a series of winding hallways, the smell of medications and antiseptic burning the inside of his nose. “So do be gentle with him.”
Gojo could never imagine being any other way.
“Do you know what caused it?” He asks eventually, when he and the nurse lapse into an uncomfortable silence.
“Asthma attacks can be triggered by a number of things,” she replies immediately. “But we ran tests on him, and his vitals appear to be normal, so we ruled out physical reasons such as allergies or underlying medical issues.” She shrugs, stopping at a set of sliding doors and pulling one open softly before shooting him a slightly significant look. “We’re thinking it was caused by an extremely large amount of concentrated stress.”
Oh. God. Gojo could just die.
“Thank you,” he whispers. He can barely hear the words. He barely feels his mouth form them.
Inside the room, there is a single bed. Megumi lies in it, his eyes open but drooping closed like he’s on the verge of falling asleep. He turns his head at the sound of the door opening, the movement slow and lethargic, and as soon as he makes eye contact with Gojo, he starts to tear up.
“Gojo-sensei,” he rasps, and Gojo doesn’t reply. He just bends down and wraps the kid in a hug, lets him cry and hiccup into his shoulder as those little hands claw at the shirt over his back.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and Megumi shakes his head, squeezing the shirt tightly. “I’m so sorry kid. I’m so sorry.”
I care so much, he wants to say. I don’t want you to leave. You don’t suffocate me. You’re the reason I don’t feel so alone anymore, not like I used to. Not like before.
He doesn’t say any of that, because he knows Megumi better than he knows the back of his own hand. That would accomplish nothing except making the kid cosmically uncomfortable, so his mouth remains firmly shut
He just holds on tight for all he has left in him; it’s the only other thing he knows how to do.
(Megumi understands)
***
If and when prompted, Gojo says he’s just a stand in. Just a warm body to keep around, to make sure the kids aren’t dying from starvation or hypothermia or accidentally cooking themselves in the oven or whatever children their age might get up to. He never lets them hear, because he’s sensitive like that, and he knows how much it means to them to have him there in a meaningful way. He doesn’t take care of them by accident; he does it with and on purpose.
It’s the higher-ups prompting, usually. The ones with power. The ones without hearts. The ones who want for nothing more than Gojo to mess up, to say the wrong thing, to hurt those dear to him, to be vulnerable and shaken and sad so that they can mold him into their perfect warrior. They almost made it when Suguru left him - they almost had him, body and soul.
But he knows how they think. He knows, because he is just like them.
Strong. Capable. A little bit of a monster on the bad days; an asshole on the good ones.
Except he has a heart where they do not, one that beats with purpose and drive. They can’t have him while he’s fighting to keep people safe, which will be always so long as those two kids and ones just like them are on this earth.
Gojo lays back against the bench he rests on, watching Megumi and Tsumiki chase each other in circles around the huge tree that stands in the middle of the park they’re at. He squints at them; the longer he looks, the more convinced he becomes that they’re not playing tag and are in fact fighting viciously about something Tsumiki seems to be holding in her hands.
He just laughs and shakes his head.
Peace never felt so close.