#Gojo Satoru

❦— Jujutsu Kaisen ☆°• SMAUs °• Hyped °• Yikes °• Bf!Texts: Megumi Fushiguro , Toge Inumaki °• Bsf!Texts: ☆°• Written Works °•

S A T O R U G O J O M A S T E R L I S T f r a t b f ! g o j o

Go jo

THIS POST INCLUDES IMPLICATIONS OF IF NOT DIRECT SPOILERS FOR JUJUTSU KAISEN PLEASE SCROLL THANKS anyways i don’t think we has a fandom talk enough about shoko ieiri actually yes satoru and suguru are a mess and break my heart and i love them all so so much my heart physically hurts sometimes when i think too hard about them but shoko utterly DEVASTATES me. she was friends with them all, too. they were her people, her loved ones, her family. like she was theirs. shoko, satoru, suguru. haibara and nanami, utahime, and mei (as much as i hate her). they were a group, a class, one, y'know? those were her people. and she had to watch them all, one by one, die. far too young, all of them died far too young. and she had to witness it from the safety of the school walls and sorcerers protection. and she would’ve had to preform the autopsies. she would’ve been the one to have to cut them open and prepare the bodies for burial. her friends. her family. and then there was none of them left to extend that back to her, not in the same way. i haven’t read the manga so i don’t know much about everything after satoru’s final fight; i know utahime survives, but does she and shoko even talk in canon anymore? there’s the students, but thats so different, its not the same. shoko ieiri the woman you are. she devastates me. she did not deserve that, none of them deserved that. catch me sobbing over them in my car for 2 hours.

The Fool’s Gambit She became a knight through blood and survival. He became a prince the court never bothered to understand. Assigned to guard Satoru Gojo, the kingdom’s so-called fool, she expects nothing more than wasted duty. Instead, she finds a man who is always laughing - and always watching. When she is accused of treason and forced back into his orbit, she begins to uncover something far more dangerous than court politics: a kingdom built on lies, and a prince who may have known it all along. As war approaches and loyalties fracture, the line between duty and betrayal disappears - and neither of them can tell whether they are saving the kingdom… or destroying i t. Prince!GojoxKnight!Reader Chapter 2: The Fool 6k words Previous Chapter / Next Chapter / Masterlist / ao3 She woke before dawn. Not from a nightmare. Not from a sound. She woke the way she always woke — cleanly, completely, with the abruptness of someone whose body had learned long ago that the space between sleep and consciousness was a luxury she couldn’t afford. She was lying on her back in the unfamiliar bed in the unfamiliar room in the east wing and the ceiling above her was not her ceiling, and the smell of the air was not her air, and for exactly three seconds she did not know where she was. Then she remembered. She lay there for another moment, looking at the ceiling. Outside the east-facing window the sky was doing the thing it did in the last hour before dawn — not lightening, not quite, but becoming a different quality of dark, the blue-black shifting toward something that couldn’t quite be called grey yet but was no longer committed to black. She had always woken at this hour. She had trained herself to it years ago because the hour before dawn was the hour before everything started, and she had found she needed that hour for herself, just the quiet of it, just the space between night and day when the world wasn’t asking anything of her yet. Today the world was asking something of her already. She got up. His schedule said the first appointment was at the ninth bell. She arrived at his door at the eighth, which she considered a reasonable hour to begin professional duties, and knocked. Silence. She waited. Knocked again. More silence, but a different quality of it — not the silence of an empty room but the silence of a room with someone in it who was making a decision about whether to acknowledge the knocking. “Your Highness.” A pause. Then, from inside, muffled by the door but audible: “I’m asleep.” “You’re speaking to me.” “People speak in their sleep all the time. It’s a documented phenomenon.” She put her hand flat against the door and leaned very slightly on it, not hard enough to move it, just enough to feel the solidity of it under her palm. She breathed in through her nose. “Your first appointment,” she said, with patience she was constructing in real time, “is in one hour.” “The Rennwick meeting.” “Yes.” “Rennwick smells like boiled cabbage and has the conversational range of a fence post. I’ve met the fence post. I prefer its company.” “That is not,” she said, “a reason to cancel.” The sound from inside was not quite a groan and not quite a sigh. Then movement, then the particular sequence of sounds she was already learning to identify — something hitting the floor, likely a book, possibly a boot, the shuffle of someone doing something in stages when their body hadn’t fully committed to being vertical yet. The door opened. He was not dressed. He was wearing the kind of loose shirt and trousers that suggested he had either slept in them or put them on with the speed of someone who had decided that getting dressed was a series of optional steps rather than a complete process. His hair was in a state she had no diplomatic word for. He was holding a cup, which suggested he had already found tea from somewhere, which suggested he had been awake long enough to acquire tea before she knocked, which made the I’m asleep a more creative statement than she’d initially assessed. He looked at her. She looked at him. “You’re very punctual,” he said. “Yes.” “Is that going to be a consistent feature of this arrangement?” “Yes.” He drank his tea and looked at her over the rim of the cup with an expression of someone doing mathematical calculations about their life. Then he stepped back from the door and walked away into the room, which she interpreted as an invitation and followed. The Rennwick meeting lasted twenty-two minutes. She timed it. She had nothing else to do with her attention in a room that contained two men discussing grain storage assessments and regional taxation, so she counted time and watched the door and watched Gojo, and noted that he asked precisely four questions during the meeting — all of them administrative in appearance, all of them specific enough that the answers told her he had read the briefing papers, all of them asked in the manner of someone who was barely paying attention. He was not barely paying attention. She knew that now — had known it for perhaps twelve hours, which was not long enough to be certain of anything, but was long enough for a person who had spent years learning to read people under pressure. She knew the way a person’s body looked when its mind was elsewhere versus when it was present but performing absence. Gojo’s eyes moved wrong for genuine inattention. A person who was bored moved their gaze the way water moved — restlessly, looking for something to settle on. Gojo’s eyes had a stillness in them at the wrong moments, the stillness of focus, and she kept catching it and watching it resolve back into the performance before anyone else could see it. She said nothing about this. On the way out of the meeting room, he stretched extravagantly, arms over his head, and said to the ceiling: “Seven more today. I might not survive.” “Six,” she said. “I negotiated the sixth into a written summary.” He looked at her sideways. “When did you do that?” “Last night. After you went to bed.” He stared at her for a moment with an expression she couldn’t fully classify — not the lazy amusement she was becoming familiar with, something slightly different, slightly more direct. Then it resolved into a smile that was more genuine than the one he typically aimed at the ceiling. “Hm,” he said, and walked ahead, and she followed, and she thought about the expression and decided she needed more data before she could catalogue it properly. He disappeared at the second bell of the afternoon. She was going to have to accept that this would keep happening. She had not accepted it yet, because the acceptance required a thoroughness she hadn’t completed, a full mapping of the how and the why that she did not yet have, and she was not in the habit of accepting things she didn’t understand. What she knew: he was six feet ahead of her in the corridor outside the records hall, where they had been heading toward the fourth meeting of the day, which was about water rights along the southern tributary and which she had looked at the briefing for and genuinely had no idea why it required the second prince’s presence. She turned to check the cross-corridor behind them — standard, reflexive, the habit of a person who never stopped watching all the entrances — and when she turned back, four seconds later, he was gone. Empty corridor. No doors ajar. No sound of footsteps. She stood very still and thought about four seconds and the physics of it, the distance a person could cover in four seconds, and none of the answers were satisfying because none of them explained the lack of sound. She walked the corridor methodically, both directions, checked every door — three locked, one that opened onto a linen cupboard containing exclusively linen, one that opened onto a stairwell — and then she went back to his rooms and waited. He arrived eleven minutes later. He came in through the main door, which meant he had come from the main palace corridors, and he had — she looked immediately, the way she checked everything — a small smear of ink on two fingers of his right hand that had not been there before, and a very slight flush of someone who had been moving quickly, and no other indication that anything had occurred. “The water rights meeting,” she said. “Yes, how did that go?” He went to his desk and opened a drawer and closed it again and opened a different one. “We weren’t there.” “Pity. I do love water rights.” “Where were you?” “I told you. I went for a walk.” She pressed her back teeth together carefully. “You cannot disappear. You understand that when you disappear I cannot do my job.” “You were right behind me.” “And then I wasn’t.” He looked up from the desk. He had found what he was looking for — a small glass bottle of something she couldn’t identify at this distance — and he held it up briefly in a way that seemed to indicate satisfaction before slipping it into his jacket pocket. “I walk quickly sometimes. It’s not intentional.” The bottle. She looked at the shape of the pocket where it had gone. She would not ask about it directly. Not yet. “Tomorrow,” she said, “you will not walk ahead of me. You will walk beside me or behind me and you will tell me before you change direction.” He looked at her with an expression that suggested he found this genuinely novel as a concept. “Beside or behind,” he repeated. “Yes.” “Like a very armed companion.” “If you prefer.” He appeared to consider this. “I think I’d prefer beside. Behind feels like I’m being herded.” “Then beside,” she said. “Tomorrow. Without disappearing.” “I told you, I wasn't—” “Without disappearing,” she said again, flatly, and went and sat in the chair and opened the briefing notes she had taken from outside the water rights meeting, because if they weren’t going to attend these things she was going to have to build an alternative system, and she was going to need to understand what he was actually doing with his time when he claimed to be attending them. Gojo watched her for a moment. Then he picked up a book and folded himself onto the sofa, and the afternoon settled into a silence that was, again and against her better instincts, not uncomfortable. The kitchens, she came to understand, were a fixed point. Whatever else the day contained, whatever meetings were attended or not attended, whatever corridors were navigated with or without disappearance — at some point Gojo would end up in the kitchens. It was not on the schedule. It was not subject to time or weather or the demands of the court calendar. It was simply what happened, with the certainty of water finding its level, and by the third day she stopped being surprised by it and started instead paying attention to what happened when he was there. He knew the staff. Not the way lords knew staff — not with the benign distant awareness of people whose names you might learn if they had been in your service long enough, whose faces you could pick out in a crowd of livery if you concentrated. He knew them the way you knew people you had chosen to know. He knew the cook’s daughter was getting married in the spring and had opinions about the cake. He knew that the head baker had a bad knee that worsened in cold weather and made a point of finding him seated work on the days the temperature dropped. He knew the kitchen boy Daichi was teaching himself to read and had, she discovered on the fourth day, been leaving books — specific books, carefully chosen, starting simple and getting harder in precise increments — in the spot where Daichi took his breaks. He never mentioned any of this. She only knew about the books because she saw them, and only understood what they were because she had been paying attention to Daichi’s corner of the kitchen and noticed the stack appearing and growing. When she looked at Gojo he was talking to Mira the bread cook about a spice order and had the expression of a man for whom book-leaving was not a thing that had happened. She filed it. Three days after her arrival, a girl named Sena — fourteen years old, junior kitchen staff, hair always escaping its braid — mentioned, while scrubbing a pot and not particularly addressing anyone, that her youngest brother had a fever that wasn’t breaking and that the physician on their street wanted payment before he’d come again and that she wasn’t sure what to do. She said it the way people said things they had no expectation of help for. The tired resignation of someone who was used to problems existing without solutions. Gojo, who had been eating something he’d convinced the morning cook to give him out of sheer social momentum, appeared not to hear this. He finished what he was eating and made a comment about the weather and left the kitchens through the back passage. The next morning, Sena came in with her hair properly braided and her eyes dry, and when Y/n happened to be passing the kitchen entrance she heard the girl tell another staff member that the physician had come, that the fever had broken, that she didn’t know how but someone had paid the man’s fee and she had found medicine outside her door before dawn. Y/n stood in the corridor and looked at the kitchen entrance. She thought of the small glass bottle Gojo had slipped into his pocket the day before. The one she had not asked about. She went looking for the head of palace accounts that afternoon. A pleasant woman, very busy, who confirmed — with the mildly puzzled expression of someone who had been asked this before — that the second prince’s household accounts contained several line items that were categorised, somewhat opaquely, as incidental pastoral expenses, and that these had existed for as long as she had been in the position, and that she had learned not to ask about the specifics because asking about the specifics always resulted in a conversation that lasted forty-five minutes and ended with her being less sure what the money was for than when she started. “They’re not irregular,” the woman added, helpfully. “The amounts are always within normal parameters. It’s only the category that’s vague.” “How often do they appear?” The woman looked at the ledger. “Every week. Sometimes more.” Every week. Y/n thanked her and walked back through the palace corridors and thought about what medicine cost and what a physician’s fee was and what a guard’s mother’s debts might run to, and did some arithmetic that arrived at an amount that was not large in the context of a royal household budget but was substantial in the context of kitchen girls and junior guards. She did not say anything to Gojo about this. She waited. On the seventh day, she was present when a palace guard named Hent, passing Gojo in a corridor, said quietly: “Settled. All of it. I don’t know how, Your Highness, I don’t know how to—” “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Gojo said cheerfully, and walked past, and Hent stood in the corridor with something in his face that she had no word for except undone — the particular expression of a person whose relief was bigger than they knew how to hold quietly. She watched Gojo’s back as he walked away. She thought: he has been doing this for years. She thought: nobody is supposed to know. She thought: why? A man who wanted credit for his kindness took the credit. A man performing kindness for an audience made sure there was one. Gojo evaded acknowledgment with the same practised efficiency with which he evaded everything else he didn’t want to engage with, but this was different from evading Rennwick and his cabbage smell and his grain storage assessments — this was the active and continuous work of ensuring that no one connected the things he did with his name. She had met people who did good works quietly. She had respected them. This felt like something different — not modesty but strategy, and she didn’t yet know what the strategy was for. She filed it. She filed everything. The folder was getting heavy. The court gathering was on the ninth evening. She dressed in the appropriate guard’s formal wear and stood outside his door and waited, and when he emerged he was — again, consistently, as though to make a point — dressed correctly, immaculately, with no outward evidence of the process that had preceded it. He had done something with his hair that made it look considered rather than abandoned, which she was fairly certain was more difficult to achieve than it appeared. He looked at her. She looked at him. “You look,” he said, “like someone attending their own sentencing.” “I look appropriate.” “You look like appropriate has been weaponised.” He fell into step beside her — beside, as she had specified, which he had done without comment every day since she had specified it, which she noted — and they walked toward the east wing receiving room. “Have you ever tried looking like you want to be somewhere?” “When I want to be somewhere,” she said, “I look like I want to be there.” “And when you don’t?” “I look appropriate.” He made a sound that was mostly breath, the almost-laugh she was learning to recognise as the genuine one — shorter and less performed than the one he aimed at rooms. The receiving room was full by the time they arrived, which she preferred — entering a room that was already in motion was easier than entering one that was waiting, because in motion everyone was already watching something and you weren’t it. She found her position against the wall, a spot she’d already selected on a previous visit that gave her sightlines to both doors and most of the room, and settled. Gojo dissolved into the gathering the way he always did — the particular social fluency of someone who moved between conversations without ever seeming to arrive at or leave them. She watched him and catalogued his route through the room, who he spoke to and for how long, the quality of his attention in different conversations. She had learned, over nine days, that there was a version of his attention that was genuine and a version that was performance and that they looked almost identical from a distance, and that the difference lived in his hands — when he was actually engaged, when something had caught the real part of him rather than the surface, his hands went still. Most of the time his hands moved. Not dramatically — he wasn’t an expressive person in the theatrical sense — but they moved, a slight adjustment of a cuff, a gesture that accompanied a point, the looseness of someone occupying a room. When the real attention was engaged, the hands stopped. She watched his hands. Lord Bresith arrived at the forty-minute mark. She knew who he was — she had made it her business in the first week to learn every name and face in the regular court circuit, the ones Gojo was likely to encounter, the ones who held power or who were adjacent to it or who had an interest in the second prince’s affairs, whatever those affairs actually were. Bresith was a man of forty or so, broad-shouldered, with the kind of face that had been handsome once and had not so much aged as solidified, the specific solidity of a man used to being the largest presence in whatever room he entered. He had substantial holdings in the eastern provinces. She had found that out in the first three days. She had also found out that there was some conversation in certain administrative circles about those eastern holdings — something about extraction rights, something about a project that had been approved with terms that several people had questions about, the specifics of which she had not yet assembled into a complete picture. Bresith made his way to Gojo’s current conversation with the ease of a man who was confident of his welcome everywhere. She watched his hands find Gojo’s shoulder in a clap that was the physical language of we are friends, I am at ease, there is nothing here to look at. She watched Gojo accept it with a smile. The joke happened quickly. She was watching another part of the room when the laughter began — the particular quality of court laughter, shaped and practised, the laughter of people performing amusement — and she looked back and saw Bresith’s expression and understood the shape of it without hearing the words. The expression of a man who had just said something at another person’s expense and was enjoying the recognition. Gojo laughed. Loud and easy, louder than anyone else in the small circle, the laugh of a man who found himself genuinely funny and was willing to be generous about other people finding him funny too. She watched the performance of it and thought: even that is deliberate. Even the too-loud laugh. Giving Bresith more than he asked for. Bigger than expected. Then Gojo said something. She read his mouth more than she heard him — the room was loud, she was against the wall — but she caught it: speaking of mistakes, how is your mining project going? And she watched Lord Bresith’s face. The colour left it. Not dramatically — not the full draining pallor of a man in genuine shock, but the specific shallow bleach of someone who has just heard something they were not prepared to hear in this room in this context in this casual voice, something that by all rights should not exist in this conversation. His smile held but it held wrong, the way a structure holds wrong when something has shifted in the foundation — technically upright, visibly compromised. It lasted one breath. Maybe two. Then his colour came back and he said something, she couldn’t hear what, and laughed, and the conversation moved, and the circle dispersed its attention back to the room, and nothing had happened. Nothing had happened and she was standing against the wall with her pulse slightly elevated and her eyes on Gojo and the certainty in her chest that had no name but felt like the ground shifting. He found her twenty minutes later, drifting toward her position as though he’d simply wound up there, a glass of something in his hand. “Decent crowd tonight,” he said, looking at the room. She said nothing. He looked at her. “You’ve got your considering expression on.” “I always look like this.” “You look like this but more.” He drank from his glass. “Did something happen?” She studied his face. It was perfectly pleasant. Perfectly, smoothly, infuriatingly pleasant, with the open lack of concern of someone who had either said nothing unusual this evening or was committed to the performance of that version of events. “Lord Bresith,” she said. “Mm? Good man. Well — decent man. Well.” A slight tilt of his head. “A man who exists. That’s the most honest assessment.” “What you said to him.” “I asked about his mining venture.” He turned to look at her with an expression of such complete innocence that she felt it like a goad in her ribs. “Was that wrong? I’ve been trying to show interest in people’s projects. I thought it was going well.” She looked at him for a long moment. “His face,” she said. “What about it?” “When you mentioned it.” Gojo blinked at her. Clear, guileless, the blue eyes wide and attentive and absolutely giving nothing. “He looked fine to me. Was he not fine? Should I check on him? I could check on him.” She turned back to the room. “No,” she said. “Leave it.” “Are you sure? Because I—” “Leave it,” she said, and he left it, and she stood against the wall for the rest of the evening watching Lord Bresith across the room and thinking about the colour that had left his face and thinking about the timing of a sentence and whether something that looked accidental could be the opposite of accidental and whether the person she was assigned to guard was the person she was actually dealing with. She did not arrive at any answers. She collected the questions instead, added them to the ones she already had, and kept watching. They walked back through the palace at the tenth bell, and he was the version of himself he was in corridors — quieter than he was in rooms, not performing for anyone, the commentary down to intermittent observations rather than the social constant of a gathering. She had noticed this variable early: public Gojo was loudest, semi-public Gojo was moderate, private Gojo was quiet in a way that had a different texture to it each time, and she was still mapping the different textures against their causes. Tonight the quiet was different again. Heavier. She noticed it when they turned into his corridor, when the sounds of the rest of the palace fell away and it was just the two of them and the lamplight and their footsteps on the stone. He had stopped talking entirely. His hands were in his pockets. She opened the door to his rooms and he went in, and she followed, and she began her automatic check of the space — windows, desk, doors — and when she came back around to the main room he was standing at the window. The one that faced the city. He had not taken off his coat. He had not moved toward the sofa or the desk or the books. He was just standing there, both hands in his pockets still, and he was looking out at the city below in the dark. She looked at him. The city at night was a specific thing from this window: a scatter of lights where the populated quarters ran, the dark gap of the river, the mass of the lower city spreading outward toward the walls. She had looked at it herself, from her room, in the first few days when sleep had taken its time arriving. It was the kind of view that made you aware of scale, of all the lives happening simultaneously in all those lit windows, all the problems and debts and sick children and mothers with letters of credit, all of it continuing in the dark regardless of what any individual room contained. He was very still. Not the performed stillness. Not the stillness of a man holding himself in position. The stillness of a man who had gone somewhere inside himself and hadn’t come back yet, and the thing on his face in the dark glass reflection was — she looked at it and did not look away, taking the chance while his attention was elsewhere — was not the face he wore for rooms. He looked tired. The particular exhaustion she had caught that first night, the kind that lived deeper than sleep. She could see it in the line of his shoulders, which were lower than they ever were when he knew he was visible. She could see it around his eyes, which were not performing anything — not lazy, not sharp, just present, just looking at a city, just a person at the end of a long day. He looked, she thought again, older. Not old. But the age that was actually his — the twenty-six years of whatever those years had contained, which she did not know yet, which she was beginning to understand was a question with more in it than she had expected. She was aware that she had been looking for too long. Aware that she had been cataloguing the real version of him with the same attention she brought to everything else, and that this was — perhaps not appropriate. Perhaps not the correct use of her considerable capacity for observation. Perhaps what she was doing right now was not professional assessment but something else, something she didn’t want to name, something she would need to set aside and address at a more suitable time. Then he turned. And the mask came back — immediately, completely, seamlessly. She watched it happen and it was the same as the first night, the same closing-over, but now she had nine days of data and she could see the seam of it, just barely, the join between what had been there and what replaced it. The shoulders came back up. The grin arrived. “Careful,” he said. “About what?” “You keep looking at me like that,” he said, “and people might start to think you like me.” She thought, with sudden and complete clarity, about every moment of the last nine days. She thought about disappearing corridors and cold tea and pastry with a kitchen boy who was learning to read. She thought about medicine outside a door before dawn and debts that were settled by incidental pastoral expenses. She thought about Lord Bresith’s face going pale for one breath and a grin arriving immediately after the word wrong. She thought: I would have preferred the assassins. If there were any. She was beginning to revise her prior estimates on that front as well. He laughed. It was the real one — she knew it now, could identify it cleanly, the shorter brighter version that lived in his chest rather than his performance. It filled the room the way his laughs always filled rooms, effortless and carrying, and she stood in it and kept her face very still and thought about what she was going to do with a man she could not read and could not leave and could not figure out. “Good night,” he said, still smiling, and turned toward the desk — presumably to locate something he had lost among the papers, which was a project that consumed meaningful time in his day — and she was moving toward the door, already compiling tomorrow’s revised schedule in her head, already thinking about Bresith and the mining project and what she needed to find out and what she needed to ask and whether the staff in the records hall could be persuaded to be helpful before the tenth bell — She stopped. On the desk. Beside the window, in the space where the lamplight reached it but barely, where the papers were deepest and most archaeologically layered — a folded piece of paper. Distinct from the others. Not loose, not stacked, but folded precisely and placed apart from the general disorder, the only thing on the desk that looked deliberately positioned. She could see the seal from here. She knew that seal. She had seen it on documents her entire career, had been handed documents bearing it, had understood from the first time someone explained it to her that the seal meant: not for you unless you have been told explicitly that it is for you, and the list of people for whom it was intended was a short and specific list, and the second prince of the royal house was not on it, had no reason to be on it, had no legitimate access to anything that seal closed. It was a military intelligence seal. Restricted access. The kind of document that moved through the palace in locked cases with two-person escorts. She stared at it. Her mind was doing something very fast and very quiet, running through the implications with the speed of long practice, the part of her that had survived by being faster at connections than the people trying to hide them from her. A useless prince. A fool. A man who disappeared in corridors and left books for children and paid debts from opaque budget lines and asked a lord a question about a mining project and watched a city at night with the eyes of someone who had been watching it for a long time and knew every light in it. That seal. Gojo’s hand came into her peripheral vision. He reached past her, or near her — she hadn’t heard him cross the room, which was itself a data point — and picked up the folded paper in a motion that was casual and unhurried and completely, almost perfectly natural, the motion of a man picking up correspondence that happened to be on his desk, nothing more. He slipped it into his coat. She looked at his face. He was smiling. The grin that she had spent nine days learning to read — lazy, bright, slightly crooked on the left side, the grin of a man who had decided the world was a mildly entertaining place and he was along for the occasion. “Good night,” he said again, as though the last thirty seconds hadn’t happened, as though the paper hadn’t existed, as though the seal hadn’t been there for her to see. She looked at him. He looked back, pleasant and unhurried, and she had the sudden vertiginous sense of trying to find the bottom of something that had no bottom — of reaching for a shape in the dark and finding the dark was larger than she’d thought, that she had been measuring a room and had just discovered it was a cavern, and the edges of it were nowhere her hands could reach. She thought: nine days ago I walked into this assignment expecting a fool. She thought: what is he doing with a restricted military intelligence report? She thought, with a coldness that was not quite fear but lived in the same neighbourhood: what exactly have I been assigned to guard? She looked at his coat pocket where the paper had gone. She looked at his face. She looked at his eyes, which were blue and pleasant and completely, utterly unreadable. She had spent her entire career trusting her ability to read people. She had staked her life on it, and other people’s lives, and had been right enough times to earn the title they had taken from her, and she had walked into this room nine days ago and thought: I will understand him within a week. She did not understand him. She was not sure she was going to. She turned toward the door. She put her hand on it. She thought about the sealed paper and Bresith’s face and medicine appearing before dawn and a man standing at a window in the dark who looked tired in a way he didn’t let anyone see. She thought: I cannot leave this post. Not because they wouldn’t let her — though they wouldn’t, not yet, not without reason they’d accept. But because she could not leave something she hadn’t figured out, could not walk away from a question this size, could not unknow the shape of the thing she had seen in his eyes that first day, the intelligence he kept underneath the performance, the current under the still water. She was stuck. Not the way she had been stuck this morning, in the dull pragmatic sense of an assignment she couldn’t exit. Something different. Something that had nothing to do with orders or rank or the sentence handed down in a throne room full of laughing nobles. She was stuck because she needed to know. She needed to know what was underneath the mask. She needed to know what a restricted military intelligence report was doing in the rooms of a fool. She needed to know what he was waiting for, what he was building, what the shape of the patience was that she could see in him sometimes when he thought no one was watching. She needed to know which version of him was real. “Good night, Your Highness,” she said, and her voice came out even. Behind her, she heard him settle onto the sofa. The rustle of a book. The small domestic sounds of a man ending his day. She walked out into the corridor and pulled the door closed behind her and stood in the beeswax-and-old-stone quiet of the east wing. Third door on the left. She walked to it. Sat on the edge of the bed. Looked at the east-facing window where the sky was dark and the city was out there beyond the glass. She thought about a seal she was not supposed to have seen. She thought about a man who had known she was outside his door before she knocked. She thought: he had this room ready for me three days before the sentence. She lay back and looked at the ceiling and knew, with the specific certainty of someone who had spent their career learning when they were in the middle of something larger than they understood — knew with the clarity of it, the cold clean weight of it — that she was in the middle of something larger than she understood. And that the prince she had been assigned to guard was at the centre of it. And that he had chosen to let her see that paper. That was the thought that kept her awake until the dawn came through the east-facing window. Not the paper itself. Not the seal, not the question of access, not the implications of restricted military intelligence in a fool’s coat pocket. The fact that he had let her see it. He had known she was there. He had crossed the room without sound, which was not something people did accidentally. He had reached past her to collect it, when he could have waited, when he could have moved her attention elsewhere, when he had nine days of evidence that she could be redirected with a well-timed comment or a strategically annoying question. He hadn’t redirected her. He had let her look. Which version of him is real? She didn’t know. She didn’t know yet. But she was beginning to understand that the question was exactly what he had intended her to be asking.

ik im taking a lil break but pls say hello to my new son spider gojo

hi !! my active era is maybe starting since i’m officially free from exams :D done with my first year of university :) i return with a question !! geto character study is in the works, but i have a lot of creative energy that i need to put out so please vote for a ship you’d like to read about !! or recommend me smth from the fandoms listed in my pinned post which ship would you like to read about? dottolone (dottore x pantalone) - genshin impact kuroken (kuroo x kenma) - haikyuu superbat (superman x batman) - dc zukka (zuko x sokka) - atla sakuatsu (sakusa x atsumu) - haikyuu thank you so much for your patience !! in the meanwhile, feel free to read the fic i have already uploaded on ao3 ( @/scyetchar ) OR follow me on twitter where i yap a bunch ( @/scyetchar )

+ ° . ๑・° ⊹ by proxy ( 2,756 ) ft. satoru gojo. dead dove ⋆˚✿ you were dangling from his arm, tiny fingers curled over his large bicep as if it were a monkey bar. the brilliant blue sky seemed to be reflecting his eyes, and not the other way around. a sunny summer day where his smile was as wide as yours, if not wider, cheesing for the photo. two faces of unparalleled joy staring you down. there was you, of course, four years old without a worry in the world, and then there was him. a perfect moment preserved in a quartz picture frame, the one you had placed so it was the first thing you saw every morning. you and daddy, in your last year of freedom. a moment you could never recreate. not because he had gotten weaker, quite the opposite, you were the weakling. your hands strained to clench around even a glass of water, it would be impossible for you to hold onto him like you did back then. that was around the time she left, wasn’t it? those memories always evaded you, your mind too exhausted from keeping you alive to perform any duties that required proper concentration. too overwhelmed by the constant state of processing information possessing the six eyes forced you into. damn your father’s genes. you spat out the feeding tube suspended stupidly between your lips, head and body heavy as you crawled out of bed. change in gravity had you stumbling, dizzy, vision leaving for a moment. a moment in which your brain was just useful enough to remind you of your appointment with megumi. ah, that was right. you’d be seeing him today. so you should probably take a bath. hunched over and clutching your bed frame, you pushed yourself to think hard. how did you take a shower again? satoru had been taking the best care of you since forever. smothering you with his love since you were four. you didn’t know how to do these things without your father. the man who kept you handheld and spoonfed. carried you more than he let you walk, your legs turning useless as boiled noodles, tilted your jaw when he wanted for you to drink, and would have even breathed for you if possible. but he was away on some mission now, so he couldn’t help you. you looked to his image in the photograph, then to yours in the mirror beside it. you didn’t look that bad. maybe you could just skip that part. too demanding, you weren’t strong enough for that. you were hungry with a dull kind of headache that was present without hurting like hell, just a nuisance. everything was, that’s why daddy did it for you. you didn’t have to be strong, to lean on him was all you had to do. it was at least relatively easy to gargle some mouthwash and mess with your hair a bit. effortlessly, you looked good. tired and delicate, but good, like a vintage doll found in some dusty attic maybe some of your father’s genes were worth appreciation. -♡- with hesitance, you knocked on the heavy wooden door of megumi’s dorm. from the delay between your fist falling to your side and your entry being made possible, it was fair for you to have assumed that megumi called for you to enter the room only for his voice to be muted by the wood’s thickness. “it wasn’t locked,” served as megumi’s ‘hello.’ you apologised and stepped inside, dropping to the couch in weariness from standing for too long. he followed you, amused concern swirling in the lilac ponds of his pupils, sliding down to his tongue. “from what i know, you don’t really do much of anything,” he pointed out, “you’re not even enrolled as a student, but you manage to look more shrivelled up and overworked than nanami on the regular.” megumi’s lashes, long and thick, concealed his downward gaze at your frail form. “how’s that possible?” from his tone, it was clear he was investigating out of sincere concern. you could say you wondered the same thing. “uhm, i guess i’m just weak,” you mumbled, closing your eyes to limit the amount of visual stimulation. missing your vision, megumi used sound to communicate. the loud rustling by your ear followed by the smell of sour cream wafting to your nostrils. “do you ever think that’s ‘cause you eat twelve calories a week?” when you opened your mouth to respond, the salty taste introducing itself to you– coupled with the cool of megumi’s fingertips on your lip– had your eyes flying open as well. you bit down instinctively, crunchy potato chip turning to a soft, flavourful mush between your brittle teeth, not used to chewing. it was yummy. he put another in your mouth, and you munched with happy greed. it felt natural. it felt familiar, your dad pushing the spoon past your lips as his other hand pet your hair and he called you good for finishing your meal. the tubes were strictly for when he wasn’t around to monitor your food intake, he always fed you himself when he was home. spoon for soft foods and all else was first chewed by him before he’d lean in to capture your lips, transferring the mass from his tongue to yours and guiding it down your throat with loving expertise. the recollection snapped you out of it, panicked as you reject the next chip. “no, i can’t,” you gasped, “i have to be careful with what i eat, it’s not safe.” your daddy’s voice sounded in your mind with the latter half of your sentence. ‘it’s not safe.’ when you wanted to go outside, to practice your technique, to do anything without him. ‘you’re not strong enough. let me be strong for you, okay?’ “what’s not safe?” you were startled by megumi’s question, reminded that your dad was nowhere nearby. “you have to eat, don’t be an idiot. a burger won’t kill you,” he grunted, eyes turning to the door, “speaking of, i invited ita–” it burst open to reveal a pink-haired man who seemed to be megumi’s age. “sorry to make you wait fushiguro, i kind of got lost looking for the place since they renovated recently, but–” he plopped down a brown bag on the coffee table at your front. “– i found ‘em. best burgers in all of tokyo,” he beamed with pride or relief or something else. whatever it was, it was magnetic. it drew your gaze to his smiling face right before he took notice of you. “you’re here! gojo sensei’s only child, right?. i’ve heard about you from fushiguro,” his voice dropped when he confessed, “and some other places, but it’s really nice to actually meet you.” the emphasis on ‘actually’ communicated a disconnect, a comparison of the ‘you’ gossiped about by servants and staff: the sickly brat satoru gojo worked himself to the bone for, never able to truly rest because he was too good of a father to give up on his worthless kid. the child prodigy with exceptional promise who, without a mother’s love, turned sickly enough to be sub-human. you winced at those rumours. megumi glared at his friend as if he’d said something he shouldn’t have, but the boy didn’t seem to notice. to be clueless like that… “nice to meet you,” you started and he finished, “itadori yuji!” his short sleeves showed off the impressive muscle of his arms, large to match his hand as it grabbed a burger from the paper bag and held it out to you. you bit into it and swallowed the piece along with the guilt you felt, guilt soon overwhelmed by pleasure of the tastiness assaulting your senses. “mmh,” you moaned and twitched a little, brows furrowing as you took another bite. followed by one more, two more, until the whole thing disappeared. it failed to register to you until you heard a loud laugh, then megumi’s more tame one. “see? they really are the best!” he moved to slap your shoulder, only for his palm to be suspended in air. your face burned with embarrassment. “woah, is that infinity?” megumi whipped his head towards you at those words, bewildered by the sight. “infinity? you haven’t done that since…” if megumi was bewildered, you were utterly floored. “how did i do that?” you looked up in awe, an amazed smile gracing your face. “you tell us,” itadori replied, grinning at you as megumi did too in a subtler manner. you felt it then. approval, recognition, capability. you weren’t being looked down on, they were looking up to you. it felt great enough for you to be unsafe. “throw something at me,” you commanded, “i wanna test myself.” itadori acted without hesitation, flinging a fry towards you. it bounced off. another one and megumi throwing in a ketchup packet, however, had both colliding with you. you guessed you needed more practice. as you were about to voice your self-discontent, one came from behind you. “honey, what are you doing?” the room’s atmosphere shifted. your neck snapped towards the tall figure behind you. white hair held upright by a jetblack blindfold covering the gemstone eyes his smile didn’t reach. with it on, you weren’t able to tell if he was mad at you. “dad, i was just hanging out with megumi,” you rushed to explain yourself, gesturing with hands you didn’t notice were shaking, “and itadori! i was trying to use infinity, but i’m no good yet.” the laugh you closed with was stale. awkward like the tension rising in the room. his smile didn’t drop, he simply snuck his arms around you and carried you as a groom would his bride, walking away without uttering a word to the students he left dumbfounded behind him. once they were out of range, he spoke to you. “is it too embarrassing to call me daddy in front of them?” his steps sounded with each connection of his shoes to the cobblestone path, a beat that kept calm silence from ever settling, only worsening your worry. punctuating his intentions. you shook your head, six eyes catching each detail of his face above you, not missing the twitch of his lip. “no, i’m sorry, daddy.” what a sweetheart you were. “doesn’t mean anything now,” he smirked, planting a soft kiss to your damp forehead. poor thing, he mused, you must have known you had been bad. -♡- he let you onto the floor once you’d been returned to your room, crouching in front of you. “did you have fun?” the blindfold was gone now, and you saw your dad as you’d known him all your life, white wisps clinging to and veiling his face. his eyes bore into yours, he asked a friendly question without a friendly face, signature smile sealed away. you pretended it meant nothing. “um, yeah. a lot, itadori was so–” “did you like having their eyes on you? having them dote on you?” you tilted your head and offered a puzzled frown. “tell me where i went wrong,” he urged, “what i’ve done to deserve all this bullshit from you.” he gritted his teeth, tousled snowy hair. “daddy?” “how did i end up raising such an attention whore? am i not enough for you?” your heart dropped at the accusation, eyes agitated by the teardrops that begun to line them. “that’s not true! you’re more than enough, i lov–” his hand must have moved faster than light. you saw the bile being expelled from your mouth before you felt it rise within you, before the pain reached your receptors and had you keeling over. the room was spinning, the sound in your ears like a flatline. high pitched ringing threatening to have made your head hurt more than your back. “ah.. ow.. dah…” you croaked, “why? hurts. hurts daddy, hurts,” you coughed and inhaled sporadically, doing your best not to ingest any of your spewed vomit, chunks of burger patty spewing from your nostrils. he just laughed at you. “not using infinity to defend yourself? don’t you wanna be strong?” piercing blue eyes stared you down, judging and daring you to make any attempt to stop him. you couldn’t. “how many times do i have to tell you that you’re weak,” he sneered, “but no, you won’t listen, you wanna prove that you don’t need me anymore, isn’t that right?” at first you were shaking your head in disagreement, then it was out of desperation as he loomed above you, his fingers curling around your throat. “so damn ungrateful.” your daddy’s frowning face blurred above you from thick tears as you did all you could not to choke on your own vomit. what hurt most was his look of disgust. you didn’t want him to hate you. your body shook weakly, hands reaching in vain as white started to bleed into your vision. right as you went limp, he released you. your head banged the ground hard enough to wake you, have you start sobbing and apologising incoherently. you clung to him and he brought you into his warm embrace, where your vomit-stained face messed up his clean attire and your tears soaked into its fabric. where he could smooth his hand down your back and nuzzle into your hair, then let his loving voice float into your ears and sooth you. “it’s okay, you don’t have to cry, i’m here, i’m here.” thick, lengthy fingers interlaced with your thinner ones as he pulled you up in a slow motion and let you lean on him, dizzy once more. “you’re so filthy,” he chuckled, “i gotta bathe you.” he led you towards the door, sure not to exert excessive pressure on your tender back, and pushed it open with a soft click. as your bare feet stepped onto the bathroom tiles, a warm steam enveloped you. he’d already prepared the bath. your dad stripped you down before himself, removing all your cute, ruined garments. he tossed them aside then sunk into the bathtub. he would d buy you new ones that only he could see you in. you climbed in above him, his hands pulling you between his long legs with your back to his chest as always. where you could melt into him. this was its own perfect moment, it becoming routine had made you ignorant to how precious it was, ungrateful. he reminded himself of all the praise bestowed upon him, across the estate and through the school’s halls, replaying every ‘you’re doing such an excellent job of parenting, even without a wife.’ recalling each ‘what an amazing father you are, making time to care for the sickly thing.’ thinking of how he would laugh it off whenever a nosy maid would wonder if he felt terrible being the strongest sorcerer, yet being weighed down by a feeble excuse for an heir. those calming reassurances were disturbed by your recent actions, letting another man feed you and showing off your technique when you thought he wasn’t watching. he cupped your breasts and fondled them idly, a common behaviour when he was stressed. “i wish i’d have married a woman like you,” he hummed, distracting himself from those thoughts, “you’ve gotta find yourself a man just like me when you’re older, hm?” your eyes met, two pairs of expansive galaxies lost in each other, and its beauty forced a smile out of you. “there’s not a man like you in the whole world,” you stated and he laughed as though you’d told him water was wet or that you couldn’t live without him. it went without saying. “yeah? i guess you’ll just have to stay with me forever, then.” “i guess,” you sighed, eyes closed as you relaxed into the warm waters of the tub. he scooped water into his hand and washed your face with it, smooth and easy. you loved your dad most in these times, when the world was just the two of you. when his admiration for you was crystal clear and it wrapped around you. gripping, and holding you high above the clouds. your daddy was undoubtedly doing his best to give you a normal childhood, without crushing expectations or the loss of autonomy, but how the hell was he meant to provide you with something he knew nothing about? he hoped with all his heart to keep you weak enough for an ordinary life, where he was the best dad you could imagine asking for. “i could never hate you.” a sweet whisper or a forgotten promise.

Favorite Satoru ship? Satoru x suguru satoru x nanami Satoru x utahime Satoru x shoko Other (comment/put in tags) Please no fighting: I’m just genuinely curious as to how many people ship different things since I haven’t really interacted with this fandom much until recently. Only put four options because I feel like any others would only get very miniscule picks and I didn’t want to have to list every character in the series.

chapter 7 is out! :P Yuuji Itadori’s Foolproof Guide to Avoiding the Apocalypse - Chapter 7 - kalipaw - 呪術廻戦 | Jujutsu Kaisen (Anime & Manga) [Archive of Our Own

THEY CAN’T KEEP ME IN CUBE JAIL FOREVER!!!!

I just LOVE drawing him SO MUCH ugh

Does anyone have a pdf of Coanda Effect, I downloaded back in 2024 and I am missing the last two chapters :’)

New trend

ALT ALT Should they kiss? They should kiss. They should kiss. This is a terrible idea. They should interact, but not kiss. They should stay far, far away from each other.

Gojo sleeping with his eyes open… it’s a habit he’s had since he was a kid and it freaks the fuck out of people. Imagine his eyes were always so dry before he learned how to heal himself because even when awake he kept forgetting to blink

goddamn, manchild you act like a kid even though you stand six foot two self-loathing poet, resident laurel canyon, know-it-all you talk to the walls when the party gets bored of you but i don’t get bored, i just see you through hmph

Gojo doodle w/ HB clutch pencil because he’s so majestic💙