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i. “You’ll regret this, Six Eyes,” the curse snarls, shrinking away from him all the same, “you sorcerer freak, you mons–”
It never gets a chance to finish.
Gojo Satoru brings his hands together, and with a flash of blue too fast to track the curse falls to pieces around him. Satoru doesn’t let the words hit; without faltering, he rocks back on his heels, lets a grin tug reflexively at his lips. “Did’ya, did you see,” he starts, bouncing on the balls of his feet, before the silence takes shape behind him, before he registers the complete lack of cursed energy other than his own.
The grief that accompanies this realization is so sharp it is startling. In between one blink and the next, Satoru's vision shudders and then shifts. His stomach rolls. His sight goes hazy and indistinct. He thinks he can vaguely make out the vast expanse of the sky and the grotesque mask of his own face before he manages to squeeze his eyes shut again.
Snapping back into the right body is strangely disconcerting. The perspective shift is a violent snap and then Satoru is left staring blankly down at his open hands and the atomic blue eyes still rolling under the tips of his fingernails.
He waits until the extra eyes sink back under his skin, then runs a hand down his face, absently feeling to make sure that his the features of his face are where they should be. He thinks stubbornly of nothing but the taste of kikufuku mochi, those chocolates from Kyoto, the way -
the way that he still reacts instinctively, in the split-second gaps where he forgets Suguru’s absence. The way that even the curse had clocked him as a freak of nature. As the monster he has always fought and always been regardless, something less than human.
Fundamental truths he cannot face. He warps away suddenly, leaving the curse-corpse behind.
ii. There will always be consequences to evading the natural order of things.
Gojo Satoru’s birth fundamentally changed the balance of Jujitsu society.
Satoru, with six eyes and limitless and so much cursed energy for such a small boy, was born wrong. His presence is unsettling. His movements are sharper than humanly possible, sudden and unpredictable. It seems like he can never quite make contact with the world — his touch destroys, or he falls short of ever making contact. His eyes are altogether too blue, wide and eerie and always staring outwards. He watches the world with an awareness that is unnatural. Sometimes, his features seem to shift along the malleable frame of his face; he never looks quite like how anyone recalls.
No one can meet his gaze.
(Why won't they just look at him?)
Regardless, he is the pride of the Gojo clan, raised with godhood as his birthright. Beautiful boy-king, brilliant and blinding and better than the sun. The expectations follow him for years, as he grows up alone under the ever watchful eyes of those who deny his humanity. The weight of it drags heavy on his thin child-shoulders.
“You were always destined to be great,” his mother tells him over and over and over, reverent like a prayer. She promises him that his life is a privilege, but she too keeps her eyes lowered.
He knows this to be a cruelty, but he cannot quite articulate why.
iii. There is a boy sitting at the desk beside his.
Satoru pauses in the doorway, blinking.
It has been only two weeks since he has started at Jujitsu Tech, and already he has become a favourite topic of discussion. He hears the rumors, of course he does: the strangeness of his sunglasses, worn even indoors, how he talks too loud, the discomfiting way he moves.
He has put so much time, already, in sanding off the jagged edges of his eccentricities. There is simply nothing more he can do. The distance between him and his fellow classmates is one he cannot bridge.
He always sits alone.
But it is a bright Tuesday morning, and there's a boy sitting at the desk beside his.
Dust swirls lazily under the sun, framing the boy’s face warm and golden. There are studs in his ear and a necklace gleaming silver in the hollow of his throat. The boy has black hair darker than an oil slick, smoothed into a bun. His posture reads relaxed; he lays casual claim over the classroom, sprawling over the chair with the sort of confidence that says that he has belonged anywhere he has wanted to. Satoru looks so intently his sunglasses slip slowly down the slope of his nose. Beneath his ribcage, his heart begins to race with a feeling he cannot name. The boy shifts his weight minutely under his persisting gaze.
Then he looks right back at him, steady and unflinching. His eyes are darker still.
iv. Geto Suguru is gentle Buddha smiles and blade-edge wit, steady hands and steadier presence. He is the moment when the sun meets the edge of the horizon and he is the blinding mid-afternoon sun, he is –
Geto Suguru is the first fight Satoru ever loses.
They spar out on the training field. No cursed techniques, just the sheer physical force. The sun is high and Satoru is laughing, bright and carefree. He sees everything, always. He can see the projected curve of action, see Suguru’s next move before Suguru knows it himself. There is no moment in which he is uncertain; the end of every fight is as assured as the reality of his overwhelming strength. It is simply that he knows, intuitively, what will happen and exactly how to react, how to dodge and how to counter. His body reacts entirely of its own accord. He leaps into the air, still cackling, and for a brief moment he is entirely airborne and untouchable. He turns, and
the air is forced out of of his lungs in the impact. He hits the ground hard. His elbow slams ungracefully into the soil, and it sends a shot of pain up his arm that is entirely foreign. There is dirt stuck to the sweat at the nape of his neck. Unbelievable. The novelty of it is intoxicating.
Satoru blinks up from flat on his back, and Suguru is already there to meet him with his hand outstretched. He is hit, suddenly, with the novelty of this too. Suguru’s smile is crooked and small and smug, and he looks just as breathless as Satoru feels.
Suguru blocks out the world, fills up the entirety of Satoru’s vision. In the stretched-out second where neither of them move, he is more beautiful than the sun.
v. Geto Suguru isn't afraid of Satoru, not even a little. He doesn’t flinch away from his cursed energy, oppressive and too-cold. He doesn’t care about clan politics or when Satoru doesn’t quite manage to hide his eyes and his mannerisms, the firecracker pops when he moves fast enough to blur. Suguru doesn’t mind that he is unnerving; Suguru has the same disquieting undercurrent hidden in him.
He is the first friend Satoru ever makes.
Suguru likes him loud, likes him fun, likes him even when he is too sharp or his voice too flat or when he miscalculates and flashes the entirely wrong expression. Suguru always nudges him when the planes of his face collapse into each other without him noticing.
Suguru looks at him constantly, and he sees him, wholly and completely.
It is more than a promise: equals, and best friends. The burden of the strongest shared.
In those halcyon days, it is the happiest Satoru has ever been.
vi. In the wrecked aftermath of the Star Plasma mission, Satoru rises alone. Blue crackles between his teeth, so cold that it burns. He surpasses every benchmark, overtakes every master that came before him, gets stronger and stronger and stronger. He is a conduit for godhood, power in its purest form. The undisputed strongest of a generation.
It is unbearable. Six Eyes has always made him a prodigy, but he sees every dust particle in the air, now, sees across the whole of Tokyo, peels back the crust of the earth and into the core of it all. He sees people as a collection of individual cells. He sees into his own body and beyond, its flesh-and-blood components, the pulsating mass of his own internal organs.
His cursed energy is endless. It is the ever present humming in his veins, the constant rush of too-much-power looking outwards for escape. The edges of reality where Satoru meets the world waver; he cannot tell where he ends and everything else begins. It is unbearable. His power is fused into his bones, in his blood, his very heartbeat. It distorts his body, pulls apart his face, undermines every human thing left to him. Reality shutters in his wake. He sees so much that he is almost blind with it, a constant clamouring for his attention that is hot-wired directly into his nervous system.
It is unbearable. The air itself stings his skin, painfully sensitive to the microscopic shifts in cursed energy around him. One person was never meant to have so much power; in the interim Satoru struggles. There is an irreconcilable dissonance between him and the world.
He only lets down infinity for Suguru.
In the dead of the night, the air is always still and silent. Satoru lays in Suguru's bed, lets himself lean into the warm heat of Suguru’s frame. The brush of skin against his is almost enough to bring him to tears; it is a sort of trust that he can afford to indulge in so rarely. Suguru's hands in his hair, Suguru's legs in between his, their bodies entwined. All six of Satoru's eyes on him. Each point of contact is a tether. It’s about intimacy, he thinks but doesn't say. About how he only feels real under Suguru's warm, patient hands.
It goes like this: Satoru seeks unspoken reprieve in Suguru and Suguru lets him in every single time. It is the sort of quiet kindness that never fails to floor him. He rests his head on Suguru’s lap, lets himself lie still and expressionless. In the underlying the beat of his very pulse: I love you I love you I love you.
The confession slips out and disturbs almost nothing; it is so quiet as to go unheard.
vii. Suguru leaves and does not come back. The door to his dorm is left just slightly ajar.
This does not change anything.
viii. Satoru doesn't think about it.
He doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep. He takes every single mission that lands on his desk and some more besides. In between exorcisms, he finds out that he really doesn’t need food at all, doesn’t need sleep, can substitute any number of human functions with his endless reservoir of cursed energy.
He is entirely self-sufficient and self contained. He is the strongest he has ever been.
He is so, so tired.
He keeps his infinity up always, swaps his sunglasses for a blindfold to hide the reptilian twitch of his eyes. There is a dissonance between him and the world, within himself. He isn't real. In Suguru's absence, he has become purely reactionary, remade into some sort of wretched, unrecognizable thing.
One day Shoko reaches for him and he doesn’t flinch but her hand slows so abruptly it may as well be a complete stop, caught in stasis, infinitesimally close.
Almost in contact, but not quite.
ix. There are rules to becoming human. Satoru knows this intimately; he has learned them all throughout the years. He knows how to hide his migraines and the piercing intensity of his eyes that follow people for much too long. He has learned how to compensate for his sharp, jagged movement with bright slights of hand and loud commentary. He’s memorized all of the right jokes to diffuse the tension of his existence.
In light of Suguru’s defection, it is all entirely pointless.
He looks into the mirror and cannot recognize himself. His reflection distorts, or he does. His features are too sharp. His smile fractures sideways. His teeth meet at perfect 90 degree angles. His eyes are —
too wide, and too blue, sometimes slitted and sometimes gone. Sometimes, new eyes seem to blink open in his ears, on his cheeks, between the gaps of his teeth. They roll around erratically, leaving trails of tears, unseeing, all-seeing.
Searching for something, he thinks, but he doesn’t know what.
x. In the quiet moments of the last time they meet, Suguru gazes up at him and there is no hint of recognition in his dark eyes. Before him, in the liminal space between mortality and godhood, Satoru stretches, horrific and obscene.
xi. Gojo Satoru has spent his whole life looking to be seen.