Chapter Text
In this world, there’s only one god.
His name is Gojo Satoru.
Eyes you never dared to call blue (the word blue was—is—insufficient in describing the galaxies of stars hidden in his eyes) gaze at you with something soft, fragile, and painfully human. Fingers, bloodied and grim, stain your skin with a gentle caress—the warmth of his touch lingers on your cheek for one precious moment.
Even in the depths of hell, he steals your breath effortlessly.
Your lips part, desperate words dancing on the tip of your tongue, but you were never given the chance to form them completely. The connection between you is suddenly torn apart, destroyed, murdered; Gojo Satoru falls into death’s arms gently, heart-wrenchingly, your name on his lips and a hole in his chest.
“Satoru,” you recite his name slowly, painfully, a part of you still hoping, craving, praying for any response, “Satoru?”
A response never comes. Your god remains silent.
Stained in blood and clothed in dread, you close your eyes and dream up a pretty lie. In a better, kinder place, he would stand up and offer you his hand. In a better, kinder place, you would take it.
You open your eyes knowing dreams and lies mean nothing in this hopeless, godless world. A riven heart stutters painfully in your chest before reality settles upon your shoulders: this is how the two of you end. This is how you always end, with broken promises and dead gods, stuck in an October that never ends. Your fate has been written. Dried ink stains the pages of history, and nothing will ever change it. No matter how much you pray, you will remain as destiny’s slave.
Even gods lie, you learn.
“You always were a sentimental fool.”
The words rest upon the starless night. Through the veil of blood and tears, you see your killer’s face: crevices of his face carve into your memory; the color of his eyes taints your mind; the smile adorning his lips scars your heart. As a lover would, he speaks your first name—but your lover lies dead, his body a heavy weight in your arms.
Even gods die; this you knew all too well.
You swallow the retort that scalds your tongue. Choosing to ignore the hatred boiling in your veins, your gaze falls toward the one you adored. Your lips move again, the forming words sounding more like a curse than a promise—but whatever that curse could be, it’s far too late, for it will never reach the dead, “See you soon.”
The god’s slayer—the devil wearing a human face—looks at you and laughs, and laughs, and laughs; this lullaby of misery and death, performed just for you, seals your demise with each note. His disgusting, mocking laughter is the last thing you hear as your heavy lids fall over your eyes.
Led to death by the voice you hate, you fall asleep in a world where god is dead.
You wake up in one where he doesn’t know you. For a second, you feel nothing, see nothing, hear nothing. Respite ends way too quickly—Death sweetly whispers words of damnation into your ears. With them comes the overwhelming ache; oh, it hurts, hurts, hurts so much you want to wail and cry, to scream the name of a man who doesn’t remember you. Still, your lips don’t dare move, and you suffer in silence, biting down on sobs squirming in your throat.
“Kuma-san?”
The lights turn on, announcing the start of the cruel play. Isn’t it funny how the main actress refuses to act, curled atop her desk, trying to catch her breath and wishing for death? As if it would save her—as if anything (or anyone) could save her from this cursed fate. The show must go on; the show must never end.
You refuse to stir - just a moment longer, just one more precious moment to stay hidden from the world without gods, and ease the ache in your chest.
“You are still here?” Ever the professional, the supporting actor continues to play his role ruthlessly as if to mock you further. “Kashimo-san works you to the bone, doesn’t he?”
Your skin falls under your fingers; black claws imitating human fingers peel parts of you apart. The memory of pain blinds you completely—everything in you rots and dies, leaving behind only pain and the sound of your killer’s laugh.
“You should have gone home a long time ago, Kuma-san,” your coworker—and after so many times, you can’t even remember his name anymore—continues, sighing lightly while you battle pain and acrimony, “It’s already eleven. Won’t your boyfriend be worried?”
Your boyfriend (and how wrong it feels to consider Satoru that; the word is unfamiliar in your mouth, for he was so much more than that) doesn’t exist anymore. Beneath your closed eyes, you see a god stumbling to his death with a cry.
How unfair, the injustice makes you want to scream. How unfair, how unfair, how unfair! Your eyes open, darting from beneath your arm to steal a glance toward the harbinger of your fate.
Your coworker stays the same every time. While you drown in misery and burn with the pain of forty-three deaths, he stays unbothered, unhurt, whole. A part of you detests him with pure, unadulterated hatred for that; this man you cannot escape from is a grim reminder of June, June, June—the forever cursed June.
“Kuma-san?”
He doesn’t leave you alone, of course, he never does. If no answer comes his way soon, this troublesome man will only meddle more and more in your affairs. Biting down on your lip, you raise your head from the flurry of papers.
Your empty eyes (dead, you look dead and beaten, but your coworker will blame your supervisor for that, not the memories crawling on your back) glaze over your surroundings, starting from your co-worker standing near the doors and ending on the documents left on your table. Lifetimes ago, maybe they meant something to you—right now, they are nothing.
More details come into view—your friend’s unfinished coffee, somebody’s messy note left on the desk, a chair standing not quite right. It’s so mundane, so ordinary, you could become entranced by it, were it not for the hollowness of the godless world that follows you even after your death.
“Of course, thank you.”
The answer you give him is short and curt, but polite enough. Satisfied, the man nods at you. You are taken by the sudden desire to throw something at his stupid face. “Don’t stay much longer. The last train leaves in twenty minutes.”
“See you soon,” you repeat slowly, painfully, not seeing the man in front of you. Galaxies abundant with stars shine in your memories. Pain intensifies inside your chest, and you force yourself to stifle a cry.
The door creaks. The clock ticks. The heart in your chest beats loudly; you remain alone, all alone, again. In this familiar (but unfamiliar) room, there’s nobody but you—not even the ghost of your (former) lover.
Satoru Gojo died, and so did you.
You reach for your phone, knowing fully well what you will see. Still, for one horrifying second, you hesitate. Your lungs fill with dread—how terrified you are, to see this accursed date time and again— before, ignoring pangs of pain and throbs of dread, you flick your fingers across the screen.
Nightmares turn true; June the Second, 2018, welcomes you again.
You throw your head back and laugh.
“Forty-four, Satoru,” you whisper to the ghosts of your past before another laugh parts from your lips, “Forty-fucking-four!”
Forty-three times you’ve died on October 31, 2018. Forty-four times, you’ve come back to life on June 2, 2018. How many days is that? How many months? Years? The straying thoughts cause madness to spread through your limbs; you laugh and laugh, ignoring all pain and misery.
“You promised, Satoru,” you repeat breathlessly, begging him to answer. A response never comes; your god stays silent, “You promised!”
Promises of gods had to mean something, anything, even if the said gods had died. They couldn’t just be lies, right? Right?! So, why, oh, why does he stay quiet? Why is there no response?! You yearn to hear him—to catch your name spoken in a drawl, sounding equally charming as mocking; to distinguish his cheery but lonely laugh among the crowd of noises; to feel the weight of his confidence and assurance upon your shoulders. You want to hear his voice, his wonderful, awful voice.
Yet your lover fell silent, and silent he remains, his burning words turning to ashes in your mouth. The promises he breathed under the blinding sun turn forsworn; Satoru Gojo had lied to you.
In a world forgotten by everyone but you, a god had died. In a world forgotten by them all, you live. You are destiny’s slave; this is your fate—doomed to repeat the cycle of the few months, cursed to suffer through endless deaths, forever stuck in a time loop.
A stifled sob wretches itself from your throat. Beneath your closed eyes, you see a hand rip out a heart from a body; you watch the pain blossom like flowers on his face; you look and look as he dies in your arms. Suddenly, it’s too much—seeing, smelling, and breathing is too much—and you collapse into yourself, fingers desperately gnawing onto your chest. Memories of forty-three timelines plunge you into despair once again (forever).
You were never a religious person, too cynical to entertain the notion of higher powers at work, yet something about Gojo Satoru always made you want to pray.
“If you need to believe in something, believe in me,” he told you once, twirling a strand of your hair around his finger. The familiarity of his gesture should make you angry, or at least nervous. Instead, you could only focus on the way light framed his smile (and what a dangerous smile it was—a kind of smile women and men alike would fall for, but Satoru Gojo would never move to catch them in his arms). “Don’t you know, [Name]-chan? I’m the strongest.”
Those words would sound absurd in someone else’s mouth—but the one who spoke them wasn’t an extra getting ahead of the script. This person’s mere presence halted the shadows; a wrist flick suppressed the hottest of fires; a smile brought forth the rain in the desert.
Walking amongst mortal men was a god.
“Believe in me,” he told you once. His hand extended to you in an invitation. The open palm promised you everything you longed for; the open palm promised you everything you were afraid of.
“Believe in me,” he told you once. Like a fool, you took his hand. His touch turned out to be utterly, devastatingly human; his words emerged as lies; he whispered your name and slipped into the darkness of your arms.
“Believe in me,” he told you once. Until your name left his lips and his corpse fell into your arms, you did.
Even gods lie. Even gods die.
Your faith led you back to the office room you had grown to hate; it led you here, straight back to him.
Between the ruins and debris left by your forty-third time loop, you don’t know what to do. Swallowed by uncertainty, you have no more plans, contingencies, or ideas left. It feels like you’ve tried everything, and yet, nothing has worked so far. The only option you can see in front of you—the only option you want to take—is the one thing you should avoid at all costs.
In the end, Satoru didn’t—couldn’t—save you (he didn’t save himself, and that broke your heart so much more). In the end, Satoru didn’t—couldn’t—give you a future (thus, he gave you his instead). In the end, everything you owned—your heart, your soul—you bet on Satoru. And you've lost (and you have lost him, too).
Your presence didn’t help him in Shibuya; your foreknowledge didn’t save his life. So witness your lover’s end—hear a whimper, see a stumble, and feel how a god dies in your arms. After all, you were only human—how could you possibly stop the death of the stars?
Yet still.
Still.
Against all common sense and reason, you long to see him again. You want to taste the gentleness of his lips, to caress the contours of his face, to feel his arms wrap around your waist. Like the sun, Satoru Gojo is the brightest of stars. Once your heart tasted his love, you wouldn’t—won’t —be satisfied with anybody else.
Just one more time, you promised yourself quietly, enclosed within the four walls of the office room. Just one more time, your eyes will linger on his silhouette; just one more time, you will call him yours; just one more time, you will have him.
Led by this overwhelming desire—the need of your soul—you found yourself running away from your workplace, heading straight to the train station. Within the blink of an eye, the ticket to Sendai was carefully tucked in your purse. Within the blink of an eye, the Shinkansen arrived at your destination.
The unfamiliar city proved to be slightly complicated to navigate on your own—even more so when all you knew was the name of the place Satoru would be at in around eight hours. It took you a visit to the convenience store (and a small breakdown) before a tired student (coupled with their vague directions and confuddling signals) pointed you in the right direction, and finally, you were set on your way.
It took forty-three time loops (and one time loop of loving him) for you to find out where Satoru was on June the third. Sugisawa Hospital doesn’t look like it hosts a god—it’s a painfully ordinary building you wouldn’t look at twice in normal circumstances. Your Satoru mentioned this place once, in passing, not knowing how carefully you cataloged this information.
At best, your memory is fractured; you can’t remember your parents’ faces or your brother’s favorite pastry anymore. The names of former coworkers escape you, and friends are just a distant memory. Instead, what fills your head are numbers: future dates—each day, hour, and minute that ticks down to your inevitable death—and naturally, lottery numbers. What fills your head is every word Satoru has ever spoken to you.
One lifetime later, you find yourself using this information others would deem unworthy of remembering. The heart wants what it wants; long ago, yours decided it wanted him (and you asked yourself, time and again, why him to no avail). The two of you were doomed from the start; yet the heart wants what it wants. How utterly foolish - your heart will forever crave the presence of somebody who doesn’t remember you, yearning for things it cannot have.
Somebody laughs—and you know this voice, you know it a little too well. The vicious, mocking thing accompanied you to your deaths countless times. You don’t need to raise your head to know your killer isn’t here. Like everybody else, he never remembers you (be it a human, a curse, or a god).
Despite the warm weather of early summer, you shiver. Your arms fold across your chest, fingers digging painfully into the skin. Ironically, the sensation brings you a warm feeling of comfort, easing away the memories of your latest death.
It’s not like you need to hear his voice to know what he would say. For once, his sentiments are the same as yours. Deep down, you know how foolish—and pathetic—it is for you to be there. The heart wants what it wants. Yours yearns and burns for a chance to catch a glimpse of his white hair—or anything else, anything, just to know—to make sure -
“How precious,” Satoru called you once, leaning down to face you (and if your breath hitched and your heart beat louder, nobody but him would know), “Are you worried for me?”
Even gods die (but he didn’t know it yet).
Your eyes rest upon the building once more, and when they find nothing of note, they drop to the ground. One meeting is all you need. Can you even call it a meeting when you don’t face him? Your heart may want more, the greedy little thing, but all you will allow yourself is a fleeting look.
Your fingers carve themselves into the skin of your arms.
Days, months, and years of repeating the same circumstances again and again took a toll on your body. You feel tired—so, so tired. How can you look Satoru in the eyes and ask him to fight for you when you can’t fight for yourself? You can’t. Not when you know how it ends; not when his body still weighs heavily in your empty arms; not after you watched him die for you (your name on his lips, like a love confession, a prayer, a curse).
Out of all of the timelines you remember, he died in just one. Every other October thirty-first started with his sealing and ended with your death. The biggest change in the previous loop was you. Gojo Satoru died for you—and that’s reason enough to never cross paths with him again.
You know it.
You do.
Your fingers let go of your arms, but your legs don’t move. You stay rooted to your place. You couldn’t leave even if you wanted to. And you don’t want to. You don’t want to—your heart has already chosen—no, not your heart, you have already decided to see him again. The moment you grasped the ticket to Sendai and refused to let go, you chose this. You were—and evidently, you still are desperate. You held that flimsy piece of paper so tightly that one would think your life depended on it, and maybe it did.
Maybe it still does.
“I’m a sentimental fool, alright,” you muse aloud, holding your hair from being swept up by the wind. A laugh—its voice eerily familiar in its viciousness and mockery—echoes through your skull, ringing loudly in your ears.
Your Satoru is dead. You won’t be able to kiss the laugh off his lips as he proclaims himself to be the strongest; you won’t be able to hold his face in your hands, caressing the already healed bruises; you won’t be able to feel the possessive grip of his arms around you.
Yet still.
Still.
The heart wants what it wants.
Then suddenly, supernovae illuminate the sky. The cacophony erupts in your head, blinding your senses and grasping the hair out of your hand. But it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except that you are here, right now, drowning in the din of the dying stars.
Recognizing the gravity drawing you instantly (how could you not, when it’s all you ever dreamed of?), you don’t fight it. Instead, you let it pull you towards the center of the universe. You can’t see him yet (yet, yet, yet)—it’s a mere whisper (but in your head, it’s more akin to a scream) of a presence that halts your thoughts and stops your heartbeat—but your eyes (so hopeful, so full of despair) glaze over the entrance anyway.
The amplitude sizzles and burns; the cosmos shifts and bends; the world tries to accommodate the presence of a god. He, honored throughout heaven and earth, pierces through time and space, stealing your breath for the second (for the thousandth) time. It’s a miracle, a dream, a lie; your lover walks through the door alive and whole.
Less than twenty-four hours ago (a forever ago), you led him straight to Shibuya (to hell). The bridge of death was overflowing with carcasses and painted with blood, but the two of you crossed the Sanzu River with smiles on your lips. The promises he swore weren’t the seeds of treachery. The future in front of you was sanguine pink. Then, a demon appeared on your way and took your lover’s heart away.
Thus, the silence emerged, the suffocating, dreadful silence. The god was dead; long live the god! You want to laugh. You want to cry. You want to throw yourself into his arms.
(But you know what would greet you wouldn’t be the teasing lilt of his voice and the soft quirk of his lips. In this man’s embrace, you would only meet loneliness and the death of a broken heart—and so, you stay entrenched in the ground, unable to take your eyes off his form.)
The silence finally breaks; your god speaks again. There’s cheer in his steps as he skips ahead, throwing his head over his shoulder to say something to Itadori (and the boy looks so young and human, you nearly forget what he is), but the only thing you can hear is a whisper of your name.
You watch him greedily anyway, taking in everything he offers to the world—the uplift of his lips, the little wrinkle on his nose, the careful gesture of his hand. This Gojo looks different from the Satoru you love. His face may remain the same, but he isn’t the person you know. Your hand, held as if it were insanely precious, doesn’t belong in his grip; his porcelain skin isn’t stained by blood and exhaustion; his eyes remain buried under the blackness of his blindfold. But his chest remains whole, painfully so, the image taken from the prettiest of your lies. Yet unlike your dreams, his lips don’t curve to speak your name (you hear it all the same, your name and a whimper, again and again, until the world ends with a laugh).
It’s simple. It’s complicated. The paradox of it all takes your breath away because, because, because! He isn’t your Satoru, you know it. He didn’t speak your name, didn’t follow you through the gates of hell, didn’t promise you forever. This Satoru Gojo doesn’t know you. Doesn’t remember you.
And yet, it doesn’t matter. Nothing does. Your heart stutters for him all the same.
The pain of endless deaths—that you could take.
(Curses and men alike raise their hands at you. Claws, fists, swords, guns, knives, and spears blemish your body. Your skin melts under the heat of flames, and your lungs beg for air's respite in the darkest depths. Mocking smiles drawn over lips, they watch you. Eyes. Eyes! Gray eyes, blue eyes, green eyes, brown eyes - red, red, red eyes - follow after you as you fall.
You die.
They don’t.)
The madness of waking up in June until the end of the time—that you survived before.
(A phone’s screen taunts you. The date circled in red marker on a calendar laughs at you. October thirty-first doesn’t shift into November but morphs unnaturally into June the second. Twisted smiles distort the faces of your coworkers, friends, and family as they discuss plans that have already passed. They celebrate milestones long gone with a cheer. Happy birthday, they wish you forty-three times.
You change.
They don’t.)
But this? Watching the man you love completely forget about you?
(“We should go to that cafe you like in November,” he simply says, acting as if he isn’t promising you the world, “My treat, of course. Hm? Are you crying? Are you that taken by my generosity, [Name]-chan?”)
This is too much.
Something wet drops from your chin. Only when your hand moves to your cheek do you notice tears streaming down your face.
“Again?” you murmur to yourself, soft words from another life ringing loudly in your head (are you crying? are you crying? are you crying?). A soft sigh parts your lips as you repeat the word, “Again.”
A long time (forever) ago, you weren’t moved to tears so easily. These days, however, you grieve easily—for yourself, friends that have forgotten, and lovers that went wrong. The curse placed upon you stole so much (it will continue to steal so much more).
The teardrop on your finger glistens before you move to smear it across your cheek. If your thoughts turn back to the curse, then it means you have long since overstayed your welcome. All you wanted—all you needed—from this impulsive, stupid excursion was to ensure that he lived. He did. Satoru Gojo lives. Tucked safely beneath his ribcage, his heart continues to beat. This should be enough for you (so why isn’t it? why do you grieve all the same? why is your heart so intent on making you miserable for yearning for things you cannot possibly have?). Selfish, you call yourself, selfish, selfish, selfish, you were the one who brought him to his death.
Your gaze shifts from your fingers. One last glance, you promise yourself quietly, one last memory. Then you can disappear from this country (from his life) forever (forever). You raise your head—and oh, you should’ve known better. Your plans always fall short.
It’s a tragedy; it’s a comedy. Fate has cursed you; it has blessed you. You yearn for him so much it hurts, but there’s nothing you want more than to never see him again. Paradoxes, oh, paradoxes follow you. Somebody—and you know exactly who—laughs as you cry. Otherwise, your eyes wouldn’t have met his.
How can you refuse his gaze? How can you look away? The answer is simple: you can’t (you never could). Drawn by the gravity of power as primordial as the sun, you can only follow its intoxicating command as you let yourself be consumed by all of his Six eyes.
You could never just call them blue. Satoru held—holds—in his gaze nebulae and stardust, supernovae and the sun. His eyes weren’t—aren’t—blue like the ocean or the sky, oh, they were—are!—so much more. So why, when you look into his eyes, all you can think about is blue? Blue, blue, blue—the color jerks your wrist and carves itself into your bones. Then, it seeps into your veins, into your bloodstream, and reaches the very core of your being before it pulls, pulls, pulls just like the sun pulls the planets around its orbit, dominating the Solar System.
For a moment, you forget how to breathe.
The hands of time rewind, turning back not by the command of the curse created to make you suffer—but by the man you love. He sends you spiraling back to Shibuya, where you find yourself charmed by a smile—a little bit too hungry, a little bit too carnivorous—he graced the curses falling at his feet; back to Roppongi, where you hid a giggle behind your palm as his face twisted in poorly concealed disgust the moment he brought the glass closer to his face; back to Shinjuku, where he twirled the strand of your hair and commanded you to believe in him; back in his arms, where his love burned the most.
In the present time and day, you notice numbly, feeling like a stranger in your mind, how he lifts the blindfold from his eyes. He’s still holding it between his fingers, peeking at you from underneath the black cloth like you’re a threat, a curse to be exterminated, a danger to be eliminated. A god perceives you, and for the first time since that one time, you feel fear when you look into the irises of his eyes.
It should be an easy equation to discern, understand, and know that the person watching you can’t be your lover. Wrong, oh, so wrong, your Satoru would never look at you like that.
But he does.
(But he did.)
You look at him—truly look at him—and see a stranger in your beloved’s body, wearing his face and holding your heart. Where you remember softness, there’s sharpness, firmness replaced fragility; a god stands where a human used to be. There’s a difference, you learn, between the Satoru Gojo you love and the stranger in front of you. Death would be kinder than having this realization. It’s so simple you want to laugh; you want to cry; you want to scream.
This Gojo Satoru didn’t fall.
This Gojo Satoru isn’t dead.
This Gojo Satoru doesn’t remember you.
This Gojo Satoru is not yours.
You can’t take it.
You just can’t.
The connection between both of you is suddenly torn apart, destroyed, murdered—but this time, it’s you who kills it, not the cruel fate. Your hands caress the fragile bond, marveling at the delicate thread, before you snap it in half.
Commanding your heart to stop its torturous beat and forcing your eyes away from Gojo should be easy, but it isn’t. It may be the hardest thing you’ve done; it may be the cruelest. Still, you swallow your guilt (and your love) and avert your gaze, abandoning the cosmos of his eyes.
One step.
Then comes another.
And another, and another, and another—
At first, it’s slow, as if your body refuses to leave the periphery of his gaze. Gradually, your unsteady pace breaks into a desperate escape. You run. You run and run, and run, until you can’t run anymore, can’t breathe anymore, can’t feel the presence of the Six Eyes anymore.
“Fool.”
Like a deer caught in headlights, a prey that recognizes the presence of an unseen predator, you come to an abrupt halt. Words spoken an era ago, belonging to a world long gone, ring in your head even though it’s impossible. He’s not here. He’s not here. He’s not here, not here, not here, not here—
But you still feel his hand clawing on your neck. Bruises are still left on your skin. A voice still torments you (sometimes, you think it will torture you forever), “Did you think you stood a chance? I told you before. Everything you cherish, love, and desire—I will destroy it all.”
Like always, a mere phantom of his presence leaves you weak and lightheaded. Nobody you cherished, loved, and desired more than Satoru Gojo. Is that why? Is that why he killed him in front of your eyes, making a spectacle out of his death? The hole in his chest, stumble in his step, your name on his lips—was it all on your behalf? Were you the one who fated him to die the moment you decided to love him?
“You can only die when I allow it. Don’t forget it.”
Engraved upon your soul are his touch and words. No matter how much you try, you will never forget.
What if he knows?
Your body collapses as if the strings holding it were cut. On her knees, in the middle of nowhere, the actress of a miserable play regrets, regrets, and regrets. What if you’ve already fucked everything up, and he already knows? What if you sentenced another Satoru Gojo to death because you were too damn stupid to keep away from him? The thought leaves you with nothing but nausea in your throat and the barest scraps of sanity.
The world around you trembles. Dizzy, you try to squeeze your eyes shut, but the image of infinity leaving Satoru’s eyes is entombed in your mind. What if, what if, what if, you bleed and bemoan, spiraling into madness more and more.
“Idiot,” you agree with your killer, the remains of yesterday’s meal still retching in your throat, “Idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot—”
(A lover whispers your name. A god looks you in the eyes.)
A body has a limit; yours just reached it. Your insides twist, sicken, and disgorge, emptying all of your stomach contents on the pavement. It’s mostly acid and water, you notice absentmindedly, an awful concoction, but it shouldn't leave a feeble taste of rotten chocolate in your mouth.
Satoru’s lips always tasted like chocolate.
A broken laugh breaks between the insults in your ears as you fall to the ground. What are you doing, worrying about a demon in your head? He may know—he always does—but he can’t remember how much Satoru means to you. Calm down, calm down, calm down, you know better than anyone that the curse placed on you doesn’t work like that—the only person who remembers is you, always you, nobody else (be it a human, a curse, or a god).
There’s still a possibility that you won’t see him die again—or at least, there was.
Gojo—not Satoru, never Satoru (your Satoru is dead, dead, dead)—noticed you. A god looked at you and saw you in all your glory (in all your woes). Even though he stood right next to the vessel of the King of Curses, he granted you all of his attention. Isn’t it lovely? Isn’t it cruel? (Isn’t that what he wanted? For you to suffer forever?)
The play goes wrong as actors refuse to act out their roles. The director laughs; you can only lament. Why, oh why, did he do it? Why did he lift his blindfold? Why did he look at you? Satoru broke the script. It doesn’t make any sense - he doesn’t make any sense (but he never did, for how could a human be born with the eyes of a god?). In all of your lifetimes, Gojo discerned the energy around you easily—malignant, vicious, and foul, he called it casually—but he never got interested in the curse ailing you. He always addressed it off-handedly, nearly nonchalantly—the sky is blue, the grass is green, and [Name] is cursed.
You spent years trapped in time loops, fighting for a minuscule chance to be perceived by this god, only to be met with pain and death (and sometimes, far worse). And now that you don’t want it—dread it, even—you got the attention of his Six Eyes so easily.
Your heart, the pathetic thing, wants to hope that it means something, but all hope has ever wrought for you was the baleful end of a god.
So, you don’t let yourself hope any longer.
You look at the sky towering over you—this empyrean firmament stained in the purest of blues—and think about love. Love’s cruel because, despite everything, it brought you back to him. Love’s heartless because, despite everything, his eyes met yours. Love’s selfish because, despite everything, you still love him.
Words, soft like a poison and lovely like a blade, flutter between your lips, “Goodbye, Satoru.”
Not see you soon, not anymore; you will never see him again—in this universe or the next. In reverence and sorrow, you bid him the last goodbye, a final farewell. The infinity he promised you shatters in your hands. Your heart stops beating. You live on.
From that point onwards, you feel detached from your own body. It feels clinical. Mechanical, like somebody else is controlling your body. Those unseen hands push you to your unsteady feet. Then, ever-so-slowly, they force you to find your way back to the station where you buy yourself a ticket home and bitter coffee from a coffee machine. You vomit again. You board the train. You arrive in Tokyo. You return to your flat.
It should be easy; it isn’t. Your apartment—can you even call it yours anymore? this place doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to another woman (who was she? who were you? you don’t remember anymore)—stays the same. Clothes hurriedly disregarded in a cluttered pile on the floor, the breakfast you didn’t get to eat abandoned on the table, and the flickering laptop you forgot to turn off—here, it’s only been a day. Years came and went, yet here, it’s only been a day. Just a single day.
What a joke.
What a cruel, disgusting joke.
You sink into the silky sheets and fluffy pillows of your (hers?) bed, smelling the nostalgic fragrance of a lavender detergent (where is the owner of this cozy little place? where did she go? she won’t be back, for sure. she’s dead, dead, dead). The unfamiliar familiarity of this place, the bittersweetness of a home that no longer feels like one, the solitude of the one left behind - you hate it. You hate it all. But there is nothing you hate more than—
You don’t think you have any tears left anymore—but you do, oh, you do. A lover promises you forever; stars die in his eyes; a stranger looks at you, wearing his face. And suddenly, you howl and scream, and rue, and regret. You grieve for even infinity has to end.
Time waits for no one. As you mourn for a dead god, Sunday turns into Monday. Mundane, mortal squabbles find you over phones and emails, and you know ignoring them all will just mean more trouble than it’s worth. With your raspy voice and tears still left in your eyes, you resign from your job, again. Your former boss—Kagari? Kazari? Something that starts with a ka, written with the kanji of deer—takes your abrupt resignation with stunned silence. Instead of waiting for his reply, you hang up.
The ceiling of your apartment is pristine white. Untouched, unscarred, whole—you hate it with all your heart. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday—you continue to look at it, eyes stained with tears and heart crushed by grief.
What brings you out of this stupor is hunger—or rather, what the perspective of hunger brings, because you truly don’t feel anything other than sadness. You stumble out of bed with heavy limbs, clumsily reaching for the bathroom. A quick shower later, you find yourself in a convenience store handing your money to the overworked student who looks just as dead as you feel.
“No change necessary,” you mutter softly, leaving with lottery tickets and a humble sandwich. It’s not a lot, but your shrunken appetite prevents you from stomaching anything more. Carefully, you tear the wrapping and start munching on it, even as your body tries to gag. Death by hunger isn’t the most pleasant of deaths—that you know from your own, miserable experience—so you force the food down until it’s gone.
Wind plays with your hair, [color] strands flutter through the cherry blossoms scattered across Inoshikara Park. As the flowering season reaches its end, many people, mostly tourists, flock to the place, hoping to enjoy the sun. You didn’t expect anything less. Tokyo’s always brimming with people from all across the world, after all. How many of them will die this coming October night? A hundred thousand? Two hundred? You don’t know. Does it even matter? No, it doesn’t—it’s not like they will stay dead; it’s not like they will remember every painful way they lost everything again and again—
(Nobody—be it a human, a curse, or a god—ever remembers you; the most you ever got was a distinct feeling of deja vu in the eyes of somebody who risked his life for you before. No object—cursed or not—can follow you into a new life; the cursed tool you held in your mouth until the very last second disappeared when you opened your eyes. No skill perfected in one timeline can transfer to another; muscle memory was always gone, leaving you clumsy in a skill you were a master of before.
Every single time-loop means a complete reset.
In such a cursed life, the only thing that holds power is knowledge.
Because you remember, you remember everything and nothing at all. Every painful death, every tear left, every sliver of fear, but not your parents’ faces, your precious brother’s last words, or your friends’ names. Your memory is fractured at best—at worst, it’s completely gone.
Lifetimes ago, in the timeline you simply call Zero, you were cursed. Every October thirty-first, you die; every June second, you wake up, remembering every painful detail.
Not why. No longer why.
How? How? How? How can you escape?)
You shove your hands in the pockets of your hoodie and breathe. The laughter of children and the chatter of adults, flowers fluttering alongside the wind, and a sweet melody sung by the birds—those remain of spring truly mock you. The weather is just so pleasant and fair, you want to scream.
You don’t.
Instead, you find yourself seated on a bench, filling out the lottery tickets you’ve purchased. Over lifetimes, you’ve perfected the process—checking just the right choices so you will win enough money but not outrageously so. Yes, you could take the main prize easily, but the winnings came with their drawbacks, and you would like to avoid being stabbed in your own apartment this time around. You aren’t even sure what you’ll use the money for this time—maybe you should travel in this lifetime? You never visited Hawaii before—but the lottery is just something you do. It’s become second nature now to purchase lottery tickets and gamble.
What would your parents think, you wonder, knowing their daughter earns her money by gambling (is it really gambling though? you always know the right answer and the correct numbers to choose)? What would your brother think of his little sister, sitting in this pleasant park and thinking about how everybody visiting it will die (at some point, people lose their faces and just become numbers, isn’t it easier to keep track of them this way)? What would they t h i n k?
Suddenly, the sun is too bright, the noise around you too loud. You close your eyes, desperately trying to stifle another panic attack. It didn’t help you before, and it doesn’t help you now. Stars explode; infinity ends; divinity dies; fingers, adorned with claws and scars, strangle your neck. Breathe, you command your body, but your body doesn’t listen to your pleas. In you inhale sharply, yet the air remains in your lungs and refuses to circulate out. In the middle of this tranquil park, you are plagued by humans, curses, and gods.
Voices in your mind overlap, amalgamating into a monster.
You’re mine, it says, mine to kill, mine to keep alive, mine to torment. Don’t forget it (you never do).
“Yo!”
You raise your head and see the sun. There's a happy ending in all of the stories where the prince slays the dragon—but your story doesn’t have a happy ending. It doesn’t even have a happy beginning. Still, a sword cuts through the beast, and its voice dies. You’re safe, safe, safe and sound, and nothing can hurt you now. Nothing can ever hurt you (nothing will ever hurt you again, he swore in a dead world—but even gods lie).
“You got something in your hair.”
In this world, there’s only one god.
He leans down and picks a flower from your hair.
(then I realized someone's heaven
could be a source of my torment)