Chapter Text
The tarmac was empty, except for one plane waiting at the only open gate. Gojo looked over his shoulder one last time, staring back towards the deserted halls and kiosks of the airport.
“Okay. I’m ready.”
Gojo hadn’t seen Geto’s theatrical eye roll in a very, very long time. It was still annoying, as it turned out.
“You’re sure, Satoru? You can’t think of any more ‘unfinished business’ to keep you here just a little bit longer?”
Gojo flicked him in the ear, right in the blind spot created by his bangs. Geto growled and swatted his hand back, and Gojo didn’t even have to fake his answering laugh. It took him a moment to sort through the emotion he was feeling, which he was pretty sure wasn’t hunger, and didn’t feel quite mean enough to be spite. Eventually, he landed on…happiness. It had been a while.
But it was about damn time. Gojo let out a long, slow, sigh, reflexively reaching for his cursed energy and feeling something like relief when he remembered he didn’t have to. He started forward, towards the gate.
And then Geto was no longer by his side.
By the time Gojo turned around, he was already disappearing.
“NO!” Gojo lunged forward, catching Geto’s wrist. Bones ground. Gojo held on tighter. “Don’t-”
Geto gasped, eyes widening, looking back over his shoulder towards something Gojo couldn’t see. Gojo grasped emptily for infinity, for red, blue, purple, something, as Geto’s wrist began to dissipate beneath his grip.
Five more seconds, and he was gone. All that was left, hanging on the empty air, was a name: “Takaba.”
Gojo didn’t remember making the choice to sit down. But there he was, on his knees, alone in what was supposed to be their afterlife.
“Take me back.” He didn’t need to think about it. He was done thinking. Gojo had spent his whole damn life scheming, and planning, and working, and all it had gotten him was the longest short life of all his loved ones. He’d wanted to rest. He’d wanted to rest, goddamnit.
But not without Geto. Gojo would follow him this time. He could still save him.
“I don’t care about my power.” Gojo spoke aloud to the still air, the words vanishing as they left his mouth, suffocated by whatever attention he’d seized. “Take it. I don’t want it anymore. I never did. Make it worth something.”
It had to be worth something. Gojo was the strongest, after all. No one had as much power to give as him. And he didn’t want it anymore, didn’t care, a binding vow to give it up…
Maybe, just maybe, it would be enough.
At first, he thought it was his imagination. But the lights grew bright around him, so bright he had to close his eyes, and when he opened them, one by one, the lights were going out. Darkness raced towards him, and Gojo greeted it with a smile.
Satoru Gojo - Head of Jujutsu High’s First Years, only Six Eyes user in a hundred years, the former Strongest Sorcerer in the world - woke up flat on his back. He was pretty sure he was naked, but he was covered by a thin, scratchy sheet. The surface he lay on was metal, and he was cold. He opened his eyes. Bright fluorescent lights shone down on him. His eyes were sensitive - always had been - and he blinked in discomfort.
He sat up. The sheet slid down his chest to puddle at his waist. He looked down, and saw that a thin, white line of healed scar tissue encircled his middle. He lifted a hand to feel his back, and confirmed that the slender scar went all the way around. Someone could have wrapped a string around him and pulled the ends in opposite directions to leave a scar like this one. If he’d been made of cookie dough, that was.
Slice.
A wave of intense nausea rolled over Gojo. He remembered the briefest instant of pressure, and then an even shorter second of horrible, all-consuming pain. Then…nothing. No feeling aside from an unplaceable, indescribable sense of wrongness . Brokenness.
As the moments before Gojo’s death flooded his memory, his time with Geto in the airport started to slip away. Had it been a hallucination? A dream? Was it all…?
No. No . Gojo forced his eyes open and cast about for something to write with. He was sitting on a metal table, and there were two more tables on either side of him, each covered with white sheets. He was in…a morgue? He’d been hoping for a hospital room, and he filed that information away for later.
Luckily, there was a notebook of Shoko’s lying in easy reach. He scrambled for it and fumbled for a blank page. His body didn’t seem to want to obey him. His thoughts were muddled, his hands stiff like he’d just come in from the cold. He had to use his teeth to uncap the nearby pen - he didn’t think his fingers could manage it.
Takaba has Suguru, he wrote. He hesitated.
Save him .
Another pause. He trusted himself, but between one breath and the next, it was getting harder and harder to remember why he was writing himself a note. Why would Takaba have Suguru? He wasn’t even positive he remembered who Takaba was .
You made a binding vow, he scribbled. You’re alive .
Alive? Why was he writing that? Of course he was alive.
A bolt of pain in his head had him closing his eyes again. He scrubbed a hand over his face, and was surprised to feel a second scar, equally thin. This one carved across his forehead. Like the one Suguru - Kenjaku - had, the last time Gojo had seen him.
Gojo stared blankly down at the table, working his fingertips into his new scar. He didn’t remember Kenjaku being involved. Kenjaku was supposed to be dead. Yuta-
Yuta. Standing in front of him, asking Gojo if he could use his body, if the worst happened. Well, the worst for everyone else, anyway. At that point, Gojo hadn’t much cared whether he lived or died, as long as he made his mark on the way out.
Maybe that’s why he’d agreed to let Yuta crawl inside his corpse. Or maybe, deep down, he’d still somehow thought that there was no way the great Satoru Gojo would ever actually lose.
Either way, he definitely hadn’t thought that Yuta would actually do it, and a shiver ran up his spine.
Gojo pressed his lips into a thin, tight line, swallowing against the nausea welling at the back of his throat. The feeling of someone else inside his head was just his imagination - they wouldn’t have left him in the morgue if Yuta was still inside him. He rubbed one more time at his forehead and forced himself to pull his hand away.
Clothes. Gojo stared down at his lap, almost afraid to move his legs. He wasn’t sure why he was back in one piece, but his new forehead scar probably explained that too. Yuta would have needed a body with working legs, and he had RCT. Hopefully, the “working” aspect would last even now that Yuta was gone.
He swung his legs over the side of the stainless steel table, and they moved. They felt stiff, but all of him felt stiff. Automatically, he reached for his cursed energy, preparing to use RCT to drive away the last vestiges of death.
It was there, but barely. The almost unlimited reserves he was used to had dwindled, the empty space where they’d been aching like a phantom limb.
Binding vow. Gojo glanced down at the note he’d written himself, the words in his handwriting barely familiar. Suguru.
Right. He’d traded some of his cursed energy, the advantage which had made him the strongest sorcerer (once), to come back and inhabit this perfectly good body, which had been dumped in a morgue instead of being preserved.
That was fine. They didn’t have to help him. Gojo was perfectly capable of doing this himself, like he’d always done everything else.
A pile of folded clothes lay on the table beside him, along with his phone and a few other personal effects he’d had laying around before fighting Sukuna. It was his Jujutsu High uniform - presumably what they’d planned to cremate him in. It was a little strange that they hadn’t cremated him already, or held any sort of funeral, wasn’t it? Didn’t they hold funerals kind of fast? Gojo had been to a lot of them.
How much time had passed? He wasn’t gross or anything, so Gojo was pretty sure it hadn’t been more than a couple of days.
Why…hadn’t they brought him back? Yuta had RCT, Shoko had RCT, he had RCT. Aside from the two scars, thin and slight as silvery fishing line, his body seemed to be completely fine, perfectly intact.
He must not have wanted it. Even before the fight with Sukuna, Gojo had been…ready for something new. Something more. He’d been restless and exhausted and guilty. Maybe a little depressed, as strange as it felt to admit it. And… Suguru …it was written right there on the paper. Wherever he’d been before waking up in the morgue had already almost entirely faded from his memory, but it only made sense that Geto had been there, didn’t it?
But also, if the others had tried hard enough to bring his soul back, Gojo wasn’t sure he could have resisted. They must not have tried very hard then.
Assuming they hadn’t all been killed by Sukuna, that was. But Gojo highly doubted that. Yuji was getting so strong. Yuta too. And besides, the morgue was notably empty of other bodies, which seemed to suggest that the good guys hadn’t suffered many other losses.
None of that mattered anyways. Takaba had Suguru, apparently, so that was his first order of business. If he could stand, he could rescue Geto. If he couldn’t get any of his powers to work, he would just do it with his fists or something.
He always made something work.
Every time but once.
Gojo had put on his clothes, and used his phone to google Takaba. Once he had determined that Takaba was a comedian, he remembered meeting the guy in the month between the prison realm and Sukuna. Gojo hadn’t thought he was that funny, which was probably why he hadn’t exactly remembered him. But there was no accounting for taste, he supposed.
Once he’d determined he for sure had the right guy, he’d been able to find his current address without too much trouble. There were a lot of things on the internet these days. Once that was done, he’d slipped out of the morgue - he still really didn’t want to see anyone from Jujutsu High, although he would have struggled to explain why - and then he’d walked and walked until he’d gotten far enough away from Jujutsu High that he felt comfortable calling a cab.
Tokyo was kind of a mess - whole sections closed down, cursed spirits everywhere. But cabs were kind of like cockroaches, apparently, and if taxis were still running, how dire could the whole situation really be? In any case, it didn’t take him long to arrive at the address listed for Takaba.
Takaba wasn’t answering his door, so Gojo broke it open. His cursed energy wasn’t that low. Besides, it was just the lock part, and if Takaba was strong enough to tear Geto away from the afterlife, he would be strong enough to deal with people breaking into his apartment. People that weren’t Gojo, of course.
No one was home. Gojo didn’t bother to turn on the lights. Even with his cursed energy scraped low, Six Eyes was still round-the-clock operational. He would know if someone was there.
Gojo walked into Takaba’s living room and dragged a chair around so it was facing the door. When Takaba walked in, Gojo wanted him to instantly realize the magnitude of the mistake he’d made. He still wasn’t exactly sure what the bounds of that mistake were, but they could all figure that out together.
Gojo sat down, steepling his long fingers over his knees. He cocked his head to the side, at the angle Megumi had always said was unnatural. No, no, he wasn’t thinking about Megumi right now, he was thinking about scaring a second-rate comedian who had stolen his maybe-boyfriend.
Usually, Gojo couldn’t sit still for much more than a minute at a time. But this was for Suguru, so when there were footsteps outside, hours later, he was still sitting in the chair waiting.
“That’s funny, the lock is broken! Well, don’t worry about it, maybe we can work it into our routine-”
The door swung open, and Takaba froze as the light from the hallway flooded in. Behind him, Suguru Geto’s cursed energy swirled and tangled.
Gojo smiled at Takaba. It wasn’t a very nice smile.
“You have something of mine,” Gojo said, and let the smile widen. “I want it back.”
The light in the doorway moved, and Geto was standing there. The wrongness that Gojo had sensed in Shibuya melted away, replaced by the Suguru he’d desperately missed for the past ten years.
“Satoru?” His eyes flashed in recognition, and then he put a hand to his forehead, fingernails curving into the livid scar carved there. “...Help.…”
“Oh, shit.”
Takaba vanished into the background as though he’d never existed, and Gojo was across the room in the time it took to blink. Tenderly, more gentle than he’d ever been with Suguru before he lost him, Gojo took Geto’s hand and pulled it away from his face.
“Suguru?”
“Hey, I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to be dead-” Takaba continued talking, and Gojo continued to ignore him.
Geto was right there . In the flesh. Maybe he was still evil, but Gojo didn’t really care about that. Had he ever cared about that? Maybe a little, but in the face of everything that had happened, defecting from Jujutsu society seemed small. Gojo had killed the higher ups, after all. It wasn’t like he was a saint.
Gojo should kiss Geto, right? He’d killed him, killed for him. He’d lived for him, died for him, revived for him. A kiss didn’t feel like enough. He would have wanted to crawl inside his body and live there forever, if that wouldn’t have horribly traumatized them both. He never wanted any single part of him to ever be separate from Geto again. Not even for a second.
But before Gojo could do anything, Geto was gone. His cursed energy didn’t change - Six Eyes was horribly unreliable when it came to detecting Kenjaku. But Gojo could still tell. Something shifted in the set of his face, and the way he looked at Gojo wasn’t the same anymore. Gojo backed up an involuntary step, and another wave of nausea crashed over him.
And then, Geto’s form shifted once again. His shoulders rolled forward, and he buried his face in the crook of his elbow. Gojo couldn’t tell if he was in pain, or if he was trying to hide his expression. He slumped backwards against the wall.
“Suguru?”
Geto stiffened, but there was no reaction aside from that. Gojo didn’t think he was Kenjaku anymore, but he…wasn’t exactly Geto either. Or if he was, this version was in a lot of pain.
“What did you do to him?” Gojo said, whirling on Takaba. “You were supposed to-”
“I just said ‘wouldn’t it be funny if Kenjaku was alive again? And if he wanted to do comedy with me?’ And then he knocked on my door. I didn’t mean to do…I’m still not exactly sure what you’re upset about?”
Takaba wasn’t going to be any help. He was powerful - Gojo could see his cursed energy, and he’d been told that before anyways - but he was clearly an idiot. Gojo was done with him.
Gojo needed to get Geto out of here. He needed to get him somewhere safe. Then he could…figure out how to get Kenjaku out of him. He could fix him.
“Alright, come on, Suguru,” Gojo said. Gojo was still furious, and a little bit disoriented, and kind of scared. But he tried to make his voice sound gentle. He wanted Geto to feel safe. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
Geto’s hand was limp, like he didn’t realize it was being held, but Gojo squeezed it anyway. He tugged, and Geto followed him slowly out of the room.
When they got to the hallway, Gojo looked back. He put one arm around Geto, who looked like he was in danger of collapsing to the floor, then caught Takaba’s confused gaze.
“Don’t ever tell anyone about this,” Gojo said brightly, favoring Takaba with another smile. “You don’t ever want to see me again, do you understand?”
Takaba shook his head, slowly. Gojo looked pointedly at his broken lock. The slow nodding turned faster, and Takaba backed away a step.
“Plus!” Gojo turned back to Geto, slumped over, with his hair covering his face. “Then everyone would know you revived Kenjaku, and that’s no good. Our little secret, right?”
He didn’t wait for Takaba to agree. He just pulled Geto close, and folded them into a different space.
The familiar surroundings of his apartment snapped into view around him, and Gojo stumbled, then caught himself. A wave of exhaustion crashed over him, leaving him gasping. He steadied himself on Geto, who didn’t seem to be looking anywhere in particular.
“Wow,” Gojo told him. “I guess teleporting myself uses more cursed energy than I thought. Weird, right?”
He didn’t mean “weird,” exactly. He meant “concerning,” at best. He’d never bothered to track how much cursed energy it took to teleport, because it had never mattered. Now, with his newly diminished power, he supposed it did. And if he couldn’t teleport, he also probably couldn’t do hollow purple, and he already knew enough to let infinity lapse (not that that had worked anyway)....
Gojo cut that train of thought off with a snap. It didn’t matter. What mattered was Geto.
“Okay,” Gojo said, clapping his hands. It sounded loud in his empty house, loud enough that he winced slightly. Geto didn’t seem to notice. “Welcome to my apartment, Suguru! You haven’t seen this one. I moved after you…well, after you died.”
Slowly, Geto’s eyes turned towards Gojo. He blinked, and Gojo’s heart climbed into his throat. “Yeah? Do you want a tour?”
Geto’s eyes slid back to the floor. Gojo swallowed, grabbed his hand again, and turned in a slow circle.
“Sorry about the mess. It’s even worse than when I was in school, huh?” He hadn’t been properly back to his apartment in about two months, not since Kenjaku had sealed him in the prison realm. Mail was piled under the slot, dust had settled on his unused furniture, and even from the living room, Gojo could tell that something had spoiled in the refrigerator.
“That won’t make you gag, will it? Do you still have a weak stomach, Suguru?”
Geto was still staring at the floor. He was tense, like he was scared or in pain, but there was no outward reaction to anything Gojo was saying. Gojo had no idea if Geto was in a position to even understand that Gojo was talking to him.
Well. That’s why Gojo had brought him somewhere safe. Gojo may have failed at…most everything, really. But he was the Strongest. Or at least, he had been the Strongest. And that didn’t really matter anyways, because Strongest or not, he was Satoru Gojo. Goddamnit, he would save Geto if it killed him.
Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that, though.
Gojo kicked aside the pile of mail and guided Geto over it. He thought it was honestly a little strange that no one had bothered to go through his things. He wasn’t positive how much time had passed. But no one else had even died! How long could it really take for literally anyone to go through just one guy’s apartment? He was the only one with affairs that had needed to be wrapped up, and the entirety of Jujustu society hadn’t been able to manage even that.
“It seems like they’re pretty helpless without me, huh?” Gojo said.
Once Geto was in the center of the living room, Gojo dropped his hand. Geto immediately clenched both hands by his side, shoulders scrunched and tight.
“They didn’t even go through my things. Not that I really would have wanted them to anyways! Then I wouldn’t have any things! Maybe they secretly thought I was going to come back to life all along, and they knew I would need all this stuff. It can’t hurt to give them the benefit of the doubt, can it?”
Geto groaned. Was that in response to something Gojo had said? Geto had always liked to listen to Gojo ramble. Maybe this was helping him come back to himself. Reminding him of safer times, familiar times, something like that.
“Or maybe I forgot to tell anyone where I moved to. No, that doesn’t make sense. I moved before Principal Yaga…it was when he was…he was always really on top of things like that. Always…bothering me to fill out paperwork, or whatever. I’m sure my address is on record somewhere . Maybe everyone was really tired after fighting Sukuna, and they needed to sleep for a few days, and they were going to start laying me to rest tomorrow or the day after. Fighting can be pretty exhausting, I’ve heard. For normal people , at least-”
Gojo broke off. Cockiness was a hard habit to shake, but being flippant about the Sukuna fight now…it didn’t feel right. Gojo had given everything he had to the fight. He didn’t like to admit to losing, but, well…the proof was in the pudding, as they said.
Gojo looked up. Geto was looking right at him. There was something in his expression, almost recognition, and Gojo felt his heart flutter.
“But that’s…not important right now.” Whatever had happened to him, to them, he could think about later.
Gojo took Geto’s hand again, trying to focus on how solid it felt beneath his fingers, and not that Geto had dropped his head, hiding his face with his hair. He pulled Geto with him into the kitchen, wrinkling his nose at the smell from the fridge.
“I mean, really . No one could have stopped by and thrown out my milk? Shoko-”
No, he wasn’t going to go there. He didn’t want to think about…. Gojo slammed that particular line of thought closed, instead yanking open the fridge. The smell got stronger, almost overpowering, but that was good. That was a problem he could handle. He stood in the doorway, looking at spoiled milk, maybe-spoiled miso, condiments, mochi….
Impulsively, Gojo grabbed each one of the items in his fridge and flung them into the trash. He hadn’t had much food, and it didn’t take long. The empty shelves sat there and sparkled.
When he turned back to Geto, he was staring at the closed trash can, eyes narrowed like he was in pain.
“I’ll get you…soup,” Gojo promised. “Right now. That’ll help, right? We’ll figure everything out.”
He reached out and reclaimed Geto’s hand. It was still solid. His hair, which he clearly didn’t have under control, spilled over his shoulders, probably already getting all over Gojo’s floors. He’d shed so much when they were younger. With the two of them in the kitchen, it felt smaller. He was really here.
“I missed you,” Gojo said suddenly, his chest tightening with the truth of it. “But…it’ll be okay now. I’m…I’m getting you soup.”
Geto looked up, eyes widening as they caught Gojo’s. He didn’t look like someone who was excited for soup. He looked frightened.
“No, Suguru, you like soup. At least, you did. Um….” Gojo trailed off, staring back at Geto. He looked…more like himself now, certainly. Or more expressive, at least. Gojo had very rarely seen him look truly scared.
“I’m not making the soup myself , silly,” Gojo told him, trying for a laugh. It didn’t sound very good. “I’ll order takeout.”
Geto made a small, strangled sound.
“What was that?”
“ Curse. Ropes. ” Geto’s fingers tightened on his, his grip suddenly almost painful.
Instinctively, Gojo jerked away. Geto released him, panting like he’d just done something physically taxing. His eyes stayed on Gojo, wide and pleading.
“No,” Gojo said immediately. “Curse ropes? No way. That’s-”
Curse ropes were for people who were dangerous. Had he put Yuta in curse ropes before he’d understood Rika? Yes. Had he put Yuji in curse ropes before he’d understood Sukuna? Also yes. But that didn’t mean he thought that he should have put the students in curse ropes - in fact, he kind of regretted it. Treating Yuji and Yuta like monsters seemed to have, to some degree, turned them into monsters.
He knew that the situation with Kenjaku and Geto wasn’t exactly the same. For one thing, Geto had been a tiny bit evil even before the Kenjaku thing. Maybe more than a tiny bit, even. Maybe more of a “kill on sight” kind of thing. And Kenjaku had been almost as big of a threat as Sukuna, so some caution was definitely warranted.
But this wasn’t Kenjaku. Some part of Gojo knew that it wasn’t Geto either, probably more like some sort of Kenjaku/Geto hybrid. But Geto was definitely in there, and it seemed like he was mostly in control, and after having lost him for over a decade Gojo didn’t want their reunion to involve him tying Geto up.
At least not tying him up in a way that didn’t involve velvet and massage oil and maybe a special little outfit he’d bought from the internet. But these kinds of ropes weren’t the fun kind.
Gojo wasn’t convinced they’d exhausted all their options. He still wasn’t convinced Geto couldn’t be fixed with some soup and some TLC and maybe some cuddles. He didn’t want to treat Geto like a monster again. That was what had ruined him the first time. That was-
Geto groaned again, snapping Gojo out of his train of thought. “Please,” he whispered. His voice was hoarse and strained.
“No,” Gojo said. “I said I can’t. Don’t…don’t make me-”
“ Please .”
Gojo had always been good at doing painful things, and bad at denying Geto. He swallowed hard, nodded, and went to get the ropes.