Chapter Text
The longer Satoru spends in the prison realm, the longer he feels himself slipping. It starts with his mind, of course – between the boredom and the not knowing and the skeletons beckoning him to join them, it’s honestly a miracle he’s still himself after all this time.
The other problem, though they’re closer linked than he’d like to admit, would be the matter of his rapidly de-aging body.
He’s gone from a full-grown twenty-eight-year-old man to a goddamn fourteen-year-old in however long it’s been, which is both incredibly miffing and very concerning because depending on how fast the recession is, Satoru might be an infant before he gets out.
It started with the humming, just simple tunes to keep himself sane, but when the vibrating of his vocal cords melded with the rattling of skeleton teeth, he upped the ante. From humming to singing to full-on screaming, Satoru’s shouts bounce painfully in his ears while his half-overgrown, half-bitten-to-the-nub nails claw at whatever skin they can reach.
Then, when he can no longer make noise without choking on blood, he runs his meager pickings of reverse cursed through his veins and patches up what he can. And that – the near zero and very limited supply of cursed energy – is where his second problem arises.
He noticed in the first few days of his spiraling mind when it all got so much that Satoru bit down on his finger hard enough to leave it lying next to his pinky toe. A pinky pair, he thought sardonically, licking blood off his lips and watching in morbid curiosity as his pinky regrew.
It was… scarily small, no bigger than a toddler’s. After that, Satoru kept his reverse cursed – meager as it was – trickling like an IV drip through his whole body. He examined the stub of a pinky in the same way Shoko examined her corpses, and day by day he saw it grow. At the same time, the rest of Satoru was shrinking.
The rate at which it all happened varied greatly, based on the damage he sustained according to Satoru’s observations. His limbs were the quickest to shrink, until at one point Satoru looked like some startling combination of child and man, but after those had evened out with each other, the rest of Satoru shrank too.
His current hypothesis was a natural adaptation to his constant use of reverse cursed in the way he did. With the increasingly limited amount of cursed energy he had, his body shrank to reduce what Satoru had to repair.
It was almost interesting enough for Satoru to forget why he was shrinking – and not in anatomical terms.
He leans back with a sigh, head knocking against one of the skulls in his little box. With hands fisted in his now loose uniform, Satoru chokes on the stagnant air permeating his lungs. It’s just so- so frustrating! His only ways out are waiting patiently for a get-out-of-jail card, or suicide – neither of which sounds particularly appealing but one of which grows more tantalizing as the time stretches on.
It’s just that if suicide becomes more tempting with each passing minute, everything also becomes more pointless should Satoru go through with it. What would be the point of tortured days if he dies now? He, Satoru Gojo, spent an unknown amount of time in a psychological torture box only to pointlessly kill himself, leaving his students to die and the world to be screwed ten times over.
“What a shit dilemma,” he snorts humorlessly.
Satoru spreads his arms as far as they can go in the tight space – which really means shoving them into piles of skeleton mouths that teeth at him through his sleeves – and closes his eyes. He’s already decided to wait, what’s a few more days? Just a few more… days…
When Satoru wakes next, it feels more like a horridly vivid hallucination, and he almost keels over right then and there from the shock of it all.
Satoru blinks unseeingly. Overwhelmed and overstimulated by the noise flooding his ears – chatter and footsteps and voices and life. He trips over his feet despite standing still when his hazy vision finally comes into focus.
He’s surrounded by colors, buildings taller than most he’s ever seen before, flashing screens filled with advertisements stuck anywhere they can fit, neon lights illuminate the city block hung from store awnings and between streetlights, but most of all, Satoru takes note of the people.
His first thought, naturally, is that this place has a lot of curses, but as he lets his six eyes coat over them, Satoru sees not cursed energy, but something else. Not to mention, with how human-like the curse look-alikes are, they’d have to be special grade and they definitely don’t have enough energy for that.
“Excuse me, sir! Sir!!” A hand meets his shoulder and Satoru flinches so hard he nearly falls again. Satoru’s cursed energy reserves are still so empty he can’t even use infinity or do anything much for the time being. His eyes grow glassy and panicked; after so long in the prison realm, Satoru’s forgotten what touch feels like, what voices sound like. Hell, he’s even forgotten how to stand right apparently.
“Sir, are you ok?” The hand is still there, pulled back just enough to hover by his arm, but it’s no longer touching him so Satoru will count that as a win. He blinks a few times, clearing his stinging eyes and taking in the woman’s appearance. She wears a uniform – police, by the look of it – and where her voice sounded urgent and scolding at first, she now wears a look of confusion and worry.
“Uh-” Satoru starts, but when he tries to speak the rest, his throat closes off and he breaks down coughing. The woman licks her lips nervously, her fingers toying with the walkie-talkie hung from her vest.
“Sir, are you injured or in danger?” she asks next, but when Satoru just stares at her blankly, she elaborates. “You appeared in the middle of the street out of nowhere. I’m guessing now that wasn’t your doing. Were you kidnapped by villains?”
Satoru swallows dryly and looks around him. He’s clearly not anywhere in the Japan he knows, and he was technically kidnapped. Satoru shrugs. The woman smiles at him gently, bringing a slow hand up to brush his hair back.
“Officer Nakamura, requesting a car. I’ve got a potential kidnapping victim here.” She exchanges a few more words with whoever is on the other side of the transmission, but Satoru tunes them out in favor of sitting on the cold concrete sidewalk and leaning against her legs. She continues to rub his shoulders soothingly, and though each touch sends a jolt of panic through his neglected nervous system, Satoru finds himself too out of it to do much.
Satoru wakes up sometime later with a killer headache and the worst body aches he’s had to date. He groans, flipping over from where he’s got his face stuffed into the corner of a couch, and chugs the glass of water he finds on the coffee table next to him almost immediately.
Now that he’s out of the prison realm’s stasis, all the damage he’s sustained that he didn’t quite manage to patch up hits him full force in a throbbing tangle of, “Ouch.”
“I’ll bet,” comes an amused chuckle from the corner of the room. Satoru jolts, sending his empty glass careening onto the floor. It comes to a stop with a dull thud in the carpet, sending the last few drops of water into the threads.
“Ah- oops,” Satoru rasps, picking it up with a wince. He looks at the other man present, who wears an apologetic look on his face and a thick beige coat on his shoulders. With Satoru’s full attention, the man moves his chair to face Satoru from the opposite side of the coffee table and crosses his legs comfortably.
“I’m Detective Tsukauchi, pleased to meet you. I expect I’ll be seeing quite a bit of you until we can get everything sorted out, but today I just need to ask some standard questions, sound good?” At Satoru’s nod and hum of consent, Tsukauchi continues. “What’s your name and date of birth?”
“Gojo Satoru, December seven… I think I’m fourteen?” Well, physically at least. But I don’t think I’d be winning any points going around announcing I’m twenty-eight. The detective writes on his clipboard quickly before his eyes flicker back up to Satoru.
“Your voice is quite hoarse, huh. If you need to take a break or anything to drink, just let me know, okay?”
“Okay. Can I have some honey tea?” The detective nods kindly and shoots a text off to someone, probably asking for the tea.
“Right then, can you tell me how long you were held and how you got out?”
Satoru swallows thickly, hands shaking minutely where they ball up the blanket he’s cocooned in. “I don’t know,” he answers honestly, eyes trained on the floor. The detective nods sympathetically, jotting down more notes.
“Right, and what can you tell me about your parents or any other family you have?”
He shrugs again, surprising even himself with how nonchalant he is about the question. “They’re probably dead, maybe. I haven’t seen them since I was very little.”
“I see, my condolences. Last question then, what’s your quirk?” Quirk? Like… quirky? How the hell is that relevant at all to this?
“Uh,” he says after a moment of deliberation, “I guess my sweet tooth?” The detective’s brows scrunch in confusion, which is understandable because most people have a sweet tooth. Satoru’s is just a bit extra. He chuckles proudly and gives Tsukauchi a grin. “I pretty much only eat sweets, ya know? No better nourishment than sugar!”
The detective looks a little miffed, muttering something like, “That can’t be healthy,” but writes something down anyway. When he’s done, Tsukauchi pops his head back up. “I know I said last question, but were sweets the only food you were given during your captivity?”
“Huh? Oh, no. I didn’t have anything to eat at all, then.” Tsukauchi takes the opportune moment to choke on his saliva, right as the door opens with Satoru’s herbal tea and a jar of honey, which he pours the majority of into said tea before gulping it down ravenously.
“On a scale of days to years, how long would you guess you were held captive?” Tsukauchi asks as soon as the other officer has left the room.
“Hey, you already got your extra question,” Satoru teases from where he sprawls on the couch. Now that he’s gotten some sustenance and rest, Satoru can feel his cursed energy levels ticking back up much steadier. He’s got enough now to run reverse cursed through all his deeper aches, leaving just minor inconveniences whenever he shifts and his surface-level scratches catch on his clothes.
“Gojo-kun…”
“Satoru is fine, and I was just teasing! Anyway, I really don’t know. The place I was in… was a stasis, of sorts. Even though time passed in the same way as anywhere else, I had no way of knowing. I couldn’t get hungry or thirsty, I didn’t get sleepy, and couldn’t really sleep in general, if I got hurt I could bleed but couldn’t bleed out, and I was in complete isolation. It could have been anywhere from a few days to several years and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”
“I see…” the detective says, mulling over Satoru’s words. After a moment, his lips thin and he asks, “If you were in complete isolation, how would you get hurt?” Satoru just gives him a pointed look. A non-answer just as clear as any words could be.
The next few days, Satoru is given lodging in the police department as he’s asked various other questions. After the first day, most of the things he’s asked are fairly noninvasive, just mundane things like ‘what type of family do you want to live with’, ‘what career path do you want to take’, and ‘what prefecture would you like to be housed in’.
In response, Satoru tells Tsukauchi he doesn’t really care much, as long as he’s somewhere not too far from Tokyo, and his new guardian can deal with his humble and charming personality. He also tells the detective that he refuses to go with anyone the man cannot personally vouch for. Satoru’s had enough untrustworthy people try to hold him on any sort of leash for two lifetimes.
“How do you feel about living with a hero?” Tsukauchi asks after a few days. Satoru has since done a great deal of research, learning about heroes, villains, and quirks – and wasn’t that something to learn about, knowing everyone thought his was Sweet Tooth – so Satoru knows enough to raise a brow at the man in front of him.
“Why a hero?” Satoru asks, once again cocooned in his precious and fluffy blanket, which he is definitely taking with him when he leaves.
“There’s a hero school in the Shizuoka prefecture. The teachers there are all pro heroes, most of whom I work with often. The school, UA, also has a general ed program if you’re not into heroics, but if you choose to stay with one of the heroes there, they can guarantee your safety and education. And as heroes, they’re all well-equipped to care for you.”
Satoru mulls it over for a minute, because as much as staying with a hero doesn’t appeal to him, he can’t deny it’s a good deal. The only problem is that it’s only November, putting him in a bit of an educational limbo for half the school year. It’s not a huge issue for Satoru, since he’s already done the high school curriculum, and his math and physics are well above college level, but from an outside perspective, Satoru is missing an unknown portion of his education – not helped by the way Satoru projects himself as having been imprisoned from a very young age.
“You’re very smart, from what I’ve observed,” comes Tsukauchi’s voice, like he’s reading Satoru’s mind. It’s startling enough that the boy jumps slightly. “We won’t bother putting you into middle school for what’s left of it, but if you choose to stay with a hero, they’ll have the financial ability to find you tutors to catch you up on any gaps in your knowledge.” Well, isn’t that just the nail in the coffin.
“Alright,” Satoru agrees “I’m game.”