Chapter Text
Familiarity is a painfully human sensation. Being used to something, establishing a routine, going through something many many times until your brain decides to push it at the back of your skull, deeming it known enough to even consider wasting time on it.
When you are a Six Eyes user, migraines are familiar. Satoru has been used to them since he was merely a child, when the influx of information proved too much for his still-unexperienced senses. That is the reason why, when the tell-tale ache in his temples starts to blossom, he simply decides to not repair on it. He doesn’t have the time to, and because he knows it, it becomes a secondary concern.
The primary one, one may ask? The fact that Japan is in ruins, half of Tokyo is being rebuilt, Jujutsu Society has to get itself together —especially now that they exist to the public eye— and there are so many fucking curses still. Satoru tugs his blindfold further down his face, takes a deep breath. He orders his thoughts.
He knows the mission the second years are up to, he knows the first years’ lesson for later on, he knows Utahime is aiding Gakuganji in setting up the brand new Sukuna-made barriers, and he knows he should start bargaining contingencies in case that also goes wrong as things have proven to do before. Satoru has mental notes for Kento’s physical rehabilitation session later on, a text for Ijichi to drive him there ready to sent in his phone, and he has gotten over half of the mission reports he has just for today. Shoko would probably laugh at his busy schedule, if she wasn’t so busy with autopsies right now — because that’s also something he has to keep track of.
Satoru’s brain works so fast and so hard the migraines become usual, but this one feels different. Perhaps his brain reassessing itself after being forcefully taken out of its shell and then forced back in, not that Satoru was conscious —not even alive— to feel any of that, and for now, he thinks he might be grateful.
This headache that he’s trying to shove at the back of his head differs from others in the fact that he doesn’t feel as overstimulated as he often does.
Goosebumps raise on his skin at every slight change in the air that comes through the window, but he cannot feel the shudder that goes down his spine. The lighting is bothering his eyes greatly, even behind his blindfold, which he just put on for this specific reason, but his eyeballs don’t feel sore or teary. His mouth is dry, but it doesn’t hurt. He’s uncomfortable all over, but at the same time he feels hazy and disoriented, like his head is full of cotton.
What a strange sensation.
Satoru muses what Kento or Shoko would say, if only for just a moment. A painkiller and a nap might do the trick, but Satoru refuses to leave now. He has so many things to do, and his phone is ringing. Ringing, ringing and ringing incessantly the entire day. It’s overwhelming that now, even more so than ever, people are always competing to reach him. If not his phone, then an assistant manager bursts through the door of his office to request his presence in person.
But he doesn’t mind, really, because it’s familiar— and if he has gone a decade sleeping three hours a day, he can go a few years sleeping just two. It’s no big deal, even if he’s currently thinking of smashing the damned gadget against the wall right now.
He might be needed though, so he tugs it his way with Blue and answers without looking at the Caller ID.
“Gojo speaking,” he tries his best sing-song voice.
“It’s me,” Kento’s soft and deeply serious cadence says through the thing. “I just wanted to know if you were coming home for dinner today.”
“There’s nothing I’d love more than a romantic dinner with my fine man,” Satoru says, without taking his eyes off the too-bright screen of his laptop and the too-dull words in the report he’s writing. Mentally, he revises his schedule for the day, checks off and adds things to an immaterial to-do list. “But I think I’m sleeping at the school today.”
“You slept at the school yesterday,” his boyfriend notes.
“Well, yes, but the mission bled through the night, so I didn’t count on that.” A sigh. “I’m sorry, I’ll try to be quick. I’ll warp there for dinner. Are you ready for rehab? What do you want for dinner, I’ll order something tasty. I feel like Pad Thai.”
“I am ready, though I don’t look forward to exorcising greater curses than the ones I’m tackling now,” Kento says, undisturbed. “Pad Thai is alright.”
“Pad Thai it is.”
“Why don’t you come with me? We could go out for a walk afterwards.”
Satoru struggles to swallow around the dryness in his throat. What word was he writing again? He has a call on the other line. Kento has never been invasive on his work before, he has never been demanding of his time before last Halloween, always content with simply getting small, digestible doses of the Strongest every now and there. This is off, Satoru needs to approach it carefully. Are they on a crisis? The second years should be getting back now. He should talk about it with Kusakabe at some point. Tomorrow when he’s done inspecting that neighbourhood downtown. He has a meeting with a representative of the Public Administration, but should he call to reschedule? What word was he typing again?
“Are you listening? You went quiet.”
There’s something soft and wary and concerned in Kento’s voice that Satoru cannot push at the back of his skull in fears it will bring forward the relentless pounding on his head.
“I am, I am. Sorry. I can’t do today, it sucks. There’s so much for me to do here, and…”
“Okay,” Kento gently cuts him off. “You just sound a bit strange, I was wondering if you needed some fresh air.”
Ah, fresh air. Yes, he’ll get that. He has to leave in fifteen minutes or he’ll be late to that hearing regarding Shinjuku and there is no way he can reschedule now.
“Strange?”
“Tired, perhaps. You sound like you’re slurring your words, almost.”
Satoru stops typing mid-sentence. The last few sentences he has typed seem to be gibberish. This is what he gets from doing so many things at once. Now he has to rewrite half a paragraph and lose even more time, and there’s still a call on the other line, but he wants to hear Kento speak and listen to his voice and feel like his chest is not as constricted as he knows it is.
“Um,” he says, intelligently. He blinks, and he feels woozy. Woozier than he did before, that is. “Headache. A manageable one, though.”
“Have you taken anything? Painkillers? Water?”
Water— did he drink any water today? Coffee is water even if he adds milk to it later on, so that must count. Speaking of water, there’s that first-grade curse near the bridge, but Kusakabe is out of town and he doesn’t want Kento to handle anything bigger than a second-grade right now, especially now that he’s faring much better physically. That will need some time, he should check his students’ schedules, make sure they take a break and then exorcise that damned thing. He’ll treat them to lunch afterwards.
“No need, it’s very mild. Can barely feel it. Please call me when you’re back home and fill me in on how it went. Don’t flirt with any nurse that looks like me.”
He hears Kento ‘tch’ and shake his head as he sighs. Satoru thinks he smiles, but he can’t really feel his own cheeks, so it becomes a ere hypothesis.
“Will do. Take care. Meet you at the school for Pad Thai.”
“Can’t wait!”
As much as headaches and overstimulation are familiar, Satoru thinks this is overdoing it. The light is blinding, the noises too loud, and his body suddenly starts to feel like it’s crumbling in itself.
He’s in a meeting with Gakuganji when his body simply… resets, or something. Suddenly he feels all manners of distraught, blinded, deaf. Like he’s a puppet who’s only kept upright by a set of invisible strings. The image of the old man before him mixes in a blur that swirls and swims and now his eyes sting enough to make his hands twitch with the urge to scratch at them. There’s nausea pooling within his guts, a loyal companion to the way his skull gives him no reprieve, and by the time Satoru leaves the room without even excusing himself, his hands are clutching hard and rough at the sides of his head.
It almost feels as if it was threatening to roll over his shoulders and shatter into a million pieces. Satoru holds tight onto that feeling because it is the only sensation he has right now.
For the first time in ages, his eyes can’t see. He can see even with his eyes closed, normally, let his Six Eyes perception do the job. Now, everything is, quite literally, blinding, and Satoru shuts his eyes tightly. There’s bile rising up his throat as he stumbles into what he thinks is the man’s bathroom. Hopefully. And he retches in vain into one of the sinks.
He forgot his phone, again. He needs Kento here. He wants Kento here. Just hearing his voice and focusing on it has always helped him so greatly, and he misses that.
Even so, because Satoru is strong and levelheaded and refuses to get a migraine get the best of him, he grits his teeth and holds onto the marble edge of the sink. He thinks he hears something break, but he’s not sure as to whether it’s bone or something external to his body. The white hot pain that he feels between his eyes gives a very concerning impression, and for a moment Satoru feels like he doesn’t really exist. Like he’s not struggling to breath in the middle of a hopefully-empty bathroom in the Kyoto school building.
There are no thoughts inside his head, his tongue can’t taste, his eyes can’t see. It almost feels like floating except it doesn’t— it can’t feel like floating because it feels like nothing at all. He falls and falls and falls forward and when he gasps himself awake after what seems to be like an eternity it’s like someone has taken the breath out of his lungs. He gapes like a fish out of the water, trying to get some oxygen in and hoping his head will stop threatening with bursting open any second now.
Warily, Satoru opens his eyes, meeting his reflection on the mirror: pale skin, pink scars, disheveled hair.
And trails of crimson rolling down his cheeks, leaving a sickly scent of metal in their wake.
Blood.
Satoru is crying blood.
“What the fuck,” he hisses, when his eyes refuse to open any more. His eyelashes are tainted red. “This is a first.”
The migraine at the back of his head screams at him, almost tauntingly. He should call Kento right now, but he will make him worry about a probably ordinary Six Eyes ordeal, and he doesn’t want to be the source of his boyfriends’ misery so much as he wants to be the remedy. He could call Shoko, but she has better things to do and she should enjoy herself a little now that she can. He should tell his students, but they’re too young to concern themselves with those matters. He should leave without saying anything to Gakuganji but now everything is too important to postpone and he needs to meet the man halfway even when he hates it.
A nuisance. This is one. He feels like one, right now. What the fuck is he even doing? Nothing worth noting, absolutely. Satoru straightens his back resolutely— he can take a painkiller later, maybe. He wipes the blood off his eyes and splashes cold water on his face. He feels like a decent being now, even with eyes injected in red. He’ll just say he smoked a blunt and that conservative hag will believe him. That’s hilarious, and this is fine. If he quits this stupid meeting soon enough he can get Kento a nice bread for dinner as an apology for not being quite approachable these past weeks.
That would make him happy, he thinks. That thought alone seems to ease some of his pain.
He finds something else to busy his brain with.
The pain comes with the absence of a warning.
It is not gradual, it is not merciful, it is not mild. A pain like he has been stabbed through his skull, even more than that, has him almost scream awake. Satoru’s voice gets caught up in his throat, his body trembling and constrictive, like a dead weight. Unresponsive, but functional. Frozen, but somehow alive.
Kento is asleep by his side, his chest peacefully rising up and then going down with each exhale, and Satoru feels like he’s dying, but the pain is too unbearable for him to even think about how dying besides his lover would be okay with him right now. He’d love to kiss him one more time, tend to his scars and shower him with his attention before his body betrays him properly this time. This is unlike death: it’s not peaceful, it’s not redeeming, it’s nothing. There is no loving friend nor any airport waiting for him, but rather an electrifying suffering coursing through his veins and threatening to consume him whole.
When he find he can’t stand the torment any longer, Satoru jolts out of the bed, leaving behind drops of crimson onto off-white bedsheets. He can’t feel his face, his tongue doesn’t work, and his legs pathetically drag him towards the adjacent bathroom. He wants to scream now, beg for it to stop, but it doesn’t. The scent of metal is dizzying, and Satoru can’t see.
He can’t see over the blood pooling in his eyes. He’s crying: salt and tears and blood and snot and bile all at once, he thinks. Blood flows from his nostrils, and he can’t breathe, not when his mouth can barely move. Once again, he feels helpless on his feet, except this is where his decaying brain decides that “this is it”. It is unlike dying at the hands of Fushiguro, or the blood on his throat as Sukuna sliced him in half.
This is new, because deep down, he knows he himself did this. He’s an active part in his own demise.
This is new, and it brings with it a sense of finality.
He screams, but he can’t hear it. He can’t hear anything. Not even the sound he makes as he falls. Not even the way he chokes on his own fluids.
Satoru sees blood on the tiled floor, and nothing else.