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“I warned you, you know,” Gojo muttered to the headstone before him. He wrapped his arms around himself, a feigned effort to keep out the biting cold of winter. It wasn’t necessary. Infinity kept any of it from reaching him, as always—but that didn’t keep his heart from feeling numb. “You stupid idiot. I warned you.”
Dead leaves crunched under Gojo’s weight as he knelt down before the headstone. Absentmindedly, he wiped away some of the snow that had collected atop its surface to cover the name inscribed on it.
“Suguru,” Gojo murmured. No puffs of breath left his lips despite the temperature, unable to escape the vacuum he’d created around himself. It was as if he hadn’t spoken at all. “What would it have taken to get you to just listen to me, huh?”
Nothing, Gojo knew. Whatever pushed Suguru over the edge that awful year had been a long time coming. None of his nor Shoko’s attempts to get through to him in the months before had worked. He’d been so determined to wither away alone that there was absolutely nothing any of them could have done to prevent him from going down the grim road he’d chosen.
Gojo cocked his head back and stared at the gray sky, a more bearable sight than the gray headstone. “Am I a shitty person for still mourning you, after all you did?” he mused. Then he laughed. “Then again, you’d probably be the worst person to ask about morals, huh? Thought I outgrew that when you started killing normies. Guess not.”
Weariness crept in at the corners of Gojo’s consciousness. Had they really been doomed to this dance since day one? Would he ever be free of the pedestal he’d hauled Suguru onto, undeserving?
Gojo toyed with the idea of letting his Infinity down. Just for a moment. Just long enough for the cold he felt inside to be reflected in reality. Just long enough to feel the nip of the wind; the soft-falling snow; the warmth of his own breaths as he exhaled. No. Probably best not to. Not here, alone in a graveyard festering with enough regrets to breathe life into a dozen different curses. Haibara’s grave was somewhere here, Gojo knew. Well, his memorial headstone, anyway. His family had requested his body be brought back for burial on their ancestral plot. All for the better. One of them should be able to join a family that loved them in the end.
“You wouldn’t want that, would you?” Gojo mused aloud to Suguru’s silent gravestone. His bitterness seeped into his voice, impossible to corral any longer. “You killed your parents. That was what pissed me off the most, you know? Jujutsu sorcerers get really shitty lots in life when it comes to family, but you struck gold. And then you killed them.” Gojo’s jaw ticked. “Asshole,” he laughed, sharp and cutting.
A strange sort of grief always filled him when he thought of that particular crime of Suguru’s. Geto Aimi and Geto Daihachi had only ever been kind to Gojo the few times he’d met them. He even got the chance to spend a week or so out of summer break with the Getos the summer before Riko, and still remembered being struck by how easily the two had accepted him into the fold as if he were their own son. It was in the kitchen with Aimi that he’d first learned to cook; it was at the Getos’ chabudai that he first was introduced to chess by Daihachi. Not that he engaged much in either hobby now, but it had been the first time he’d been treated like a normal kid by any adult. If he thought too long or too hard about what their faces must have looked like when Suguru entered his childhood home, bloody and expressionless—what they might have said to their only son before he murdered them—
His fists clenched at the thought. Just for the novelty of it, he kept digging his nails deeper and deeper into his palms until he felt mirroring stings and the heat of blood trickling between the gaps in his fingers. He healed the tiny cuts immediately, of course. There was no point leaving them there to scar, even if he sometimes wished he had even a single bit of proof that he was mortal like all the sorcerers resting in the dirt beneath him.
Gojo sighed. He didn’t want to sit against Suguru’s grave any longer. He felt his soul being weighed down by the same tar that had contaminated his best friend the longer he idled by his grave, threatening to pull him down to Suguru’s level. Down? Yeah, probably. If such Western concepts as Heaven and Hell really did exist, there was no way Suguru was ending up in the former after all his sins, no matter the boy he’d once been.
“Happy New Year, Suguru,” Gojo breathed out into the iron-gray sky. He blinked up at the snowflakes as they caught on Infinity and melted away, just out of reach. He thought he’d stuck his tongue out to taste them once, when he was very young. The memory was fuzzy, the taste of snowflakes eroded to make room for the stronger memory of his trainer’s scoldings for leaving the Compound. Gojo pushed himself to his feet with a sigh, appreciating the rare stiffness in his joints as he did so. “Maybe there’s a part of you out there enjoying it somewhere.”
Gojo’s pocket buzzed once, then twice more in rapid succession. For the first time since coming to Suguru’s grave, Gojo felt a smile tug at his mouth that held not a single hint of bitterness. He didn’t bother checking his phone before turning on his heel and beginning his leisurely stroll out of the graveyard, listening to the crunch of freshly fallen snow underfoot.
“But for now, there’s people I gotta enjoy it with too, you know?” he called over his shoulder. No one answered him, not even with a whisper on the wind, but that was for the best, really. There was far too much left to do to waste time trying to reach the dead. For now, Gojo headed towards the school where his students and friends waited, away from the cold.