Chapter Text
The end of a fight is always jarring, regardless of the outcome. The sudden cessation of intensity, upending the state of affairs that had become the standard, however temporarily.
Satoru thinks of it a little like flipping the lights off when he has a headache. A measurable change, a softening. Not a total return to baseline, but the start of the downward slope.
This is not like that. Not entirely, at least.
He hadn't known that fighting Sukuna would kill him. He wasn't suicidal, no matter what Shoko had accused when he’d given her his letters.
It’s just in case, he'd told her, and he'd meant it.
He truly hadn't gone into it awaiting his death. But, once again contrary to the beliefs of those close to him, he's not stupid. Sukuna is an ancient god of slaughter, and Megumi wields the same technique that has historically been capable of defeating someone with Six Eyes.
Purely on tactics, it wasn't good odds for him. Add in the fact that his technique, at its full strength, is any neurologist’s nightmare and that it's hard for him to bring himself to hurt Megumi…
Well.
He hadn't accepted it. He'd still fought, with everything he has. It just wasn't enough. And he’d been prepared for that.
He’s bleeding out but his mind still whirls with maybes, how he could fix this, win despite the situation he’s in, dredge up enough energy to fuel his reverse cursed technique and get up and keep fighting. None of it is going to happen, he's certain of it.
Shinjuku is in ruins, but he's got all his kids behind him, ready to back him up. Ready to take over.
And isn’t it bittersweet that the only way for them to come into their own is for him to fail so spectacularly, in so many different ways.
Sukuna didn't learn. The only way he's going to learn is if he wins. And if he doesn't, it'll be Yuta taking that lesson, learning all about the loneliness and heartache of power. He’s not sure which would be worse.
He couldn't free Megumi, couldn't protect Tsumiki. Tengen is who knows where, the barriers being shaken up at Kenjaku’s whim. Every sorcerer still living has lost so much. He should have protected them, should have been out front keeping the enemy's attention so they could all stay safe and whole.
He still should, says guilt bubbling up from some depth of his soul that still clings to the words and approvals of clan elders who've been dead since he was a teenager. The rest of him lashes against it, young and selfish and hurt. What about the things he's lost? Does all that he's sacrificed for the good of everyone else mean nothing?
The sky is clear.
Suguru is waiting for him.
His body’s desperate last attempts at living are at odds with the calm that washes over him now. His lungs are spasming, choking on empty, on blood filling every space where there should be air. His heart stutters, rushing and flagging in turns, drowning him.
His head hurts, even though his sight has been reduced to what he assumes is the standard human level. Maybe even less, dimming rapidly in a way entirely unreminiscent of falling asleep.
There's no sound, or maybe it's just all blending together into a single all encompassing drone. He's pretty sure someone's trying to talk to him. Or maybe they’re just talking.
It doesn't matter. None of the things still in Shinjuku, in all of Japan, matter anymore. He can't touch it.
He can touch Suguru. Can reach out and receive what he hasn't had since he was seventeen and thought he ruled the world and not the other way round.
He's ready.
The lights flip off.
They're not supposed to come back on. Lights out means it's over, means he gets to be done, gets to regroup. Gets to take Suguru’s hand and claim the reward he’s more than earned.
They do anyway.
Waking up isn't as easy as dying, isn't as peaceful. It's slow and weighty. Like the hum of a backup generator coming to life, the heavy thudding click of emergency power kicking on, one bulb at a time.
Except that it's also not like that at all.
Awareness is a long while coming, yes, but it's not gradual. It's a drifting sort of nothing for what feels like a very long time, and then all at once he's thrown out into the bright, an overwhelming onslaught of information being shoved into his brain so suddenly and wholly that he can't do anything but know.
He remembers the aftermath of fighting Fushiguro Toji like a dream, hazy the way the street shimmering in a heatwave is. The broad strokes are lost on him, but the details are as vivid still as they were then, even a decade removed. The forest for the trees, or something like that
What he was seeing had mattered to him less, at the time, than that he could see it at all. He'd been thrust into the fullness of his abilities like the deep end of a swimming pool. Suddenly the space between atoms was his for the taking, a medium for the manipulation of cursed energy that only he can use.
Pay witness, the universe had commanded, and he was the only one in centuries who stood a chance at obeying. It was exhilarating, and he's never found anything else on that level.
This, now, is that moment of enlightenment amplified by some unreal number so large that attempting to comprehend it is pointless. It's orders of magnitude more. He wonders if this is what being in his domain is like for people who aren't used to it, who aren't him.
It’s the equal and opposite of the Prison Realm, he thinks. The Prison Realm is utter stagnance, an enclosed stillness so complete it could drive someone to madness. This is ever changing, shifting and writhing endlessly, failing to occupy any space he can even begin to conceptualize.
Six Eyes, usually, shows him everything around him, everything that he can see, in perfect clarity all the way to the subatomic. This is everything, period. Everything that is and was and has been, the fundamental workings of the world split open and laid bare for his perusal.
It's exquisitely lovely, and it's painful beyond anything he's ever experienced before. And it is almost immediately eclipsed. Pain is more painful, it turns out, when there's a body to experience it along with the soul.
Forever passes in an instant, until all at once he is returned, ungently and unceremoniously, into physicality. He thinks, maybe, he allows it to happen, for whatever that might be worth.
The everything, the knowing, clings to his soul like smoke, faint but present, focusing all encompassing sight on the most important bit first: a hospital, nine hundred kilometers or so north in Sendai, where a woman with stitches across her forehead has just borne a child with wispy pink hair and yet unopened amber eyes.
It settles into quiet passivity then, or maybe dissolves into him, and that information becomes extremely distantly secondary to all the other information suddenly available. He can see everything.
He can see the Gojo clan complex laid out around him, retainers and servants and lower ranked sorcerers all making the world go round while ancient leaders sit sequestered preciously behind ancient walls as if they're something valuable, something that can't be replaced.
He can see himself, paralyzed in the courtyard by the sheer breadth of his overwhelm, surrounded by instructors worried only for the trouble they'll be in if he's damaged on their watch.
He can see every bacterium living on his skin, every particle of stone sloughed off courtyard pavers in the many microscopic erosion events made up of the instructors’ footsteps, every atom of gas in the atmosphere rocking with the vibrations of his screaming.
He can't stop screaming. He's not sure he's entirely in control of his body at the moment. He's not sure he's in control of anything.
He shuts his eyes as tight as he can, and it doesn't help. He can still see each photon of light passing through the lids, trillions of blood cells rushing through billions of capillaries. Some of them have burst, blood rolling down the pale silk of his robes in drips and rivulets as he curls low against the agony, splattering on the ground.
Someone grabs his arm, uncountable microbes passing onto his silken sleeve from the surface of their palm. Infinity activates on pure, panic driven instinct to shove them away, and the resultant flare of cursed energy that lights up all his senses in vivid color is too much for his overtaxed brain to process. He can’t think, he can’t move, somebody make it stop-
He wakes. He doesn't know how long it's been, or if he's even really been unconscious or just incapable of registering anything through the unending tide of too much. The agony has receded, for now, to a level that allows him to hold on to his basic cognitive functioning.
He doesn't need to open his eyes to look around, is in fact a little afraid that if he does the too much will flood back in and wreck him anew. So he keeps them shut, scans his surroundings through that extrasensory knowing that comes with Six Eyes. He's done this before, after the Start Plasma Vessel incident, when the unexpected and all at once awakening of all his power had laid him low for days with the worst headache he's ever had.
Then, he'd had Shoko to offer him the sort of painkillers no sixteen year old should ever need while he'd worked through the learning curve. Now, he's on his own.
It's more difficult than he remembers it being, maybe because he was a world more capable at sixteen than he'd been at thirteen.
And he is very much thirteen now, physically at the least, a great deal shorter and less muscled than he's used to. He doesn't quite know how to catalogue himself chronologically, but thinking about it too hard makes his head hurt, so he decides it isn't important right now.
He takes in the room at the shallowest level he's capable of, keeps his breath measured like a meditation as he focuses on letting it all wash over and through without fully registering, without letting his brain begin to process anything he doesn't deem crucial.
He's in the infirmary at the clan estate, which he could've predicted; collapsing in the middle of training isn't exactly a good look. That also explains the presence of the Clan Head’s wife, Gojo Miyoko, standing impassively at the foot of his cot like she's got all the time in the world even though he knows she's well into her seventies already.
It’s a quiet entitlement that's always rubbed him the wrong way, but never more than now, with so many years’ experience of being out, of being untouchable, of the elders being unable to force him to do anything.
Except that isn't true at all, he thinks, and the acknowledgement is bitter and biting. Maybe he couldn't be cowed like lesser sorcerers, maybe both sides knew full well that their threats were empty and inactionable, but how many times had he bent to their whims purely out of convenience?
And again now.
He's thirteen, he justifies to himself. He's got appearances to keep up if he wants to have any chance at better. He draws on manners he's deliberately ignored for more than a decade and pushes himself to sit.
He's halfway afraid to open his eyes, afraid he'll just be inviting the pain back in. Fear has never gotten him anywhere, though, so he does it quick and clenches his fists in thin infirmary sheets as he tries to restore his equilibrium before he's expected to speak.
“Clan Mother,” Satoru greets politely, offering as much of a bow as his pride will allow. He still feels like something isn't quite right, somewhere deep inside that his RCT hasn't touched yet, but the sorcery clans aren't exactly known for giving any sort of grace, and he's already made her wait.
“Rikugan-sama,” she returns, calm and disapproving. It's bog standard for her, for the clan, but the reminder of how rare it had once been to be called by name is unexpectedly startling.
“I apologize for… for making such a scene.” It's the best he can think of to convince her to let him off easy. He doesn't want to give her the truth, even if he thought she'd believe him, which leaves him with little to offer in the way of reassurances or explanations.
She looks at him for what feels like a very long while, mouth pinched. “It seems that you've come into your power in full. Going forward, I expect to see significant improvement.”
He tips his head in a nod that only barely passes as respectful. He's got years more practice than she thinks. He could demonstrate ‘significant improvement’ in his sleep.
“May I go? I have an exorcism in Sendai this afternoon.”
It's a complete fabrication, but if he's clever he'll get away with it fine. The Clan Mother doesn't get to be involved with mission schedules for stupid sexist reasons, which means she has no way to know he's lying.
“You may,” she says, and sweeps out of the room in a waft of silk and incense. Pauses in the doorway. “Do look in a mirror, before you go.”
Right. He’ll put that on his to-do list, right after saving everyone he’s ever loved from their inevitable horrible deaths and checking to see what sort of omiyage Sendai has to offer in 2003. Now he just has to warp there and be back before anyone who's actually familiar with the mission schedule realizes he's missing. He gives himself three or four hours, probably, before the confusion of his collapse wears off and people start expecting things from him again.
Plenty of time to deal with Kenjaku and the Itadori family. Plenty of time to set the world on a path to rights.
He can do this.