Chapter Text
Satoru Gojo was born lucky.
His mother and father were both successful in their fields. His father, the CFO of a major corporation, that was passed down to him from his well-off family, one of the oldest estates in Japan. Gojos father never seemed to mind his pre-ordained fate and considered his place ‘earned’. His mother was a doctor, a brain surgeon to be exact. His mother worked hard to become what she was, along the way her family abandoned her, not wanting to support the women's ‘silly nonsense’ nonetheless, she scraped her way to the top of her graduating class.
His parents met during his mother's gap year in Paris, the city of love. His mother was 7 years older than his father, at the time people would describe his mother as all business and his father as all pleasure. Yet against all odds, they fell head over heels in love with one another. They got married in the fall, surrounded by coworkers and the Gojo family. His mothers' parents did not show up, Satoru never discovered if they were invited. In the photos his mother is grinning ear to ear, in a way he rarely saw her in life.
They lived together in Matsue, in one of his father's estates. Trying over the next decade, desperately, to have a child. He was what many would call a rainbow baby, a baby born after serval miscarriages. After IVF, and years of tears, they had nearly given up. Until one day, randomly, no science required, Satoru was there. All that to say his parents wanted their life, wanted each other, and wanted him, he was wanted.
Satoru explains all this to his therapist, looking at him hands, taping his foot on the floor, “So, logically I should be fine. I mean, near the end our relationship was strained, with me being gay and my dad being oh so traditional, but really, I have nothing to complain about.”
The therapist, a soft women named Laura, leaned back in her seat, “Therapy isn't for complaining Satoru, it's for understanding, you've told be a lot about your parents before you, what about during you?”
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“I think there's something wrong with me,” Satoru says on a random day in June, Laura nods, “Like, I wasn't... put together right, like, I'm not right.”
“Why do you think that?” She asks, and its earnest with no strings attached,
Gojo has this dream sometimes, he's young, maybe 3 or 4, and he's sat on a horrifically bright green floor, his mother is above him, watching him attempt to stack blocks, she's talking to an older man, with black framed glasses, She’s whispering angerly and Satoru is too young to understand, but he is old enough to understand one,
“So what? Your saying my kid is stupid?”
The man nervously corrects her to say, no, he's not stupid, his brain just works differently, and given the right time and therapy he could-
The dream always skips there, like a CD with a scratch on it, and suddenly he's in the car, and his moms on the phone with his dad, and there's more yelling, and now his mom is crying and Satoru doesn't know what he did wrong, but he knows his mom is crying and it's his fault, “I am sorry.” he remembers whispering, and suddenly the car is pulled over and his moms asking him to “say that again, say that again please, please baby.”
And he does. “I am sorry.”
His mother smiles wide, like she does in the wedding photos, and she puts his dad on speaker, and asks him to say it again for dad, and he does,
“I am sorry.”
And in the dream his mother is so happy, and his dad is happy and he's so confused, but he keeps saying it because it makes them happy.
“I just sometimes think I ruined them, yknow, like before me my mom was so happy, and at the beginning, yknow I was their literal miracle, and they were both so smart and I was... me...”
Gojo remembers tantrums and screaming, him and his mother at each other's throats. He thinks about loneliness, his father's absence at his graduation.
“And I can't even really be mad, cause like, I’m me, and I’m not easy to deal with, Suguru made that very clear... and now Megumi.” He swallows.
Gojo thinks of silence, the stench of alcohol, the void Geto left, the one Megumi couldn't fill.
“It's just like, there must be something wrong with me if all these people see it... and it's not even, I'm not damaged... I’m defective.” He laughs to himself,
“It's just like, for a moment there it all felt so different. Me, Megumi, Tsumiki, Suguru, it was... like, good, we were happy, or at least, mostly happy, or at least I thought we were. It felt like we were.”
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Suguru and Satoru met in high school, it's a bad time for both, both closeted, both lonely. The meet in English, a class neither of them practically care about, with Geto being practically fluent already and Satoru only taking it to appease his father.
“We both tried to sit in the back corner, and we got into an argument about it.” Satoru laughs to himself,
“I ended up, yknow, being the asshole, I was, getting to class early every day to get the seat first, and then, of course, since the only person who ever met my stubbornness was him, he got there even earlier.”
It was the first class of the day, and before either of them knew it, they were spending the first 30 minutes of everyday just... talking,
“I think I feel in love with him over spring break, it was Junior year, the cherry blossoms had just bloomed all over that stupid small town, and I-” He laughs, “Suguru pulls up on a fuckin motorcycle, and I’m kind of like ‘bro what the hell is that thing?’ And he asks if I'm ‘chicken’ and of course I get on.”
Suguru speeds down the streets, the only thing Satoru could hear was the motor of the bike, and Suguru, laughing, joyous and loud.
“I still have it, that stupid bike, I hated when he road it, it was dangerous, especially when we lived in the city for a while... anyways, we drive down to the edge of town, just before the miles of farmland, and he turns to me when we stop, and he asks me, ‘where to next?’ and it's in that moment I realized I didn't care where we went, anywhere in the world, as long as we were together.” Gojos voice cracks,
For years Suguru made everything better, spring, summer, fall, winter.
Spring was cherry blossoms and motorbikes and laughter and late movies/
Summer was sweaty heat between Geto and his sheets, it was the smell of cigarette smoke and his first time.
Fall was quite trips to Getos favorite books store, it was piano recitals and the sound of late-night studying.
Winter was full, colorful streamers, no one had ever celebrated his birthday the way Suguru did.
Now, everything Suguru had once brought light to was absorbed in darkness,
“Spring is when he told me, about the night he... cheated on me, and summer was the crash, and fuckin fall was him in the hospital after his first OD and-”
Winter is when he died.
“He ruined Christmas and my birthday and Megumis-” Gojo pushes the tears away, he's not sad right now, he's angry, angry at Geto in a way he never allowed himself to be,
“I found him there, in that bathroom, and I remember for a brief second, thinking about our first kiss, in the bathroom at one of those dumb high school parties, I remember how scared I was, I remember after kissing him thinking ‘oh god what if I ruined everything.’” He laughs at nothing, it's a dry, unimpressive thing, “He didn't even have the decency to do it somewhere Megumi wouldn't see. He didn't even...”
“That was cruel of him, I’m so sorry Satoru.” Laura says, and Gojo almost forgot she was there,
"It wasn't. Cruel. He wasn't in his right mind he...”
“Does him being high or depressed make it hurt less? Did it make it less traumatizing? If not, then frankly Satoru, I don't care, he shouldn't have done that, it hurt you, and it was cruel.” Larua says it with such sureness Gojo can't find it in himself to argue.
“Can I tell you something... bad?”
“Sure.” She humors him,
“I... I don't think I miss him. I don't think.” Gojo swallows, “I think, sometimes I look for him? Like, look for his contact in my phone, or check for him in the next room, but every time I don't find him, I feel... relieved, I... I search for him, but I don't miss him, and I don't know why.”
Deep down, somewhere under all the love and grief, he does know. He remembers the last thing Suguru said to him “Your mom was right, you are cursed.” he sneered. He thinks that's not the first time Suguru had hurt him like that. But he doesn't say that, because it feels like speaking ill of the dead.
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“I think I'm a narcissist.” Gojo says before even sitting down,
“Oh?” Laura asks, raising an eyebrow,
“Yep, I’m pretty sure, I mean, with everything I’ve told you wouldn't you agree?”
She pauses for a moment before she stands up and grabs a worn copy of the DSM-5 from her shelf, “Well why don't I read out the requirements to you?”
They go down the list and as Gojo tries to input his own counters she just pushes forward, by the end Satoru feels like well... not a narcissist, but still...
“Gojo, may I be completely and totally honest with you?”
He nods,
To his surprise she throws the book to the ground in a loud thump, “This book? Is a whole bunch of bull. Had I read out all those symptoms and you had found they aligned, what would that have changed?”
“Erm.. Well...”
“Would that have helped you? Fixed you even?” She asks
“No but...” Satoru trails off,
“But?”
“How am I meant to fix myself when I don't know what's broken!?” He finds himself standing suddenly, pacing,
“You don't.”
“I- What?” He stops pacing,
“You don't, because you are not broken, and you do not need to be fixed, you are not damaged or defective or cursed or whatever new fun flavor of self-deprecating you've come up with.” She leans forwards, kicking the book to the side, “You have experienced a lot of suffering in your life, suffering you can't understand, and from a young age you learned that suffering you don't understand must be your own fault, it's not. Sometimes bad stuff just happens.”
“But... Suguru...”
“Made his own choices.”
“He saved me. He saved me and I couldn't do it in return.”
She pauses at that, looks out her window, lets it sit for a moment,
“When something bad happens it's your fault, but when something good happens it was someone else.” She says it almost to herself,
“What?” Gojo asks, his voice a ghost of a whisper,
“Why is it possible, that you had the power to do all this evil and bad in your life, but you weren't able to save yourself?”
“Save myself?” He asks in a gasp,
"What makes that so impossible to you?” She reiterates
“I-”
And suddenly, for the first time since Megumi left, he’s crying, his breath coming in short bursts,
“Because I don't want to, I don't want to save myself.” He sobs, “I want someone to save me, I wanted him to save me, I wanted to- I wanted-”
“I was so lonely, I am so lonely, I’m all alone, I don't wanna be alone.” He screams, and cries, like a toddler, no, maybe younger, an infant, and he can't find himself to be ashamed.