Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

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Verse 1: You'll tumble in my gaze, but you won't find the answers

I. You're the bug, I'm... not sure what's going on here

Gokumonkyo. Nothing.
No time, no space. Only the breath of existence and the taste of loss in infinite silence, so absolute that even his thoughts arrived too late.
Satoru Gojo sat amidst coldness. Not the kind that made one shiver or forced him to tremble. It wasn’t truly cold, but the sensation stretched through his entire body, creeping over his bones like a curse-laden veil.

And then there was something else… The bones.
Skeletal figures, motionless, deathly still, yet caught in silent movement. Their necks stretched long, as if, at the moment of death, they had tried to catch one last glimpse. Even without mouths, without tongues and muscles, their jaws seemed to whisper restlessly. If it wasn't so unbearably quiet, the murmuring would have annoyed him. Yet, as it was, it was a welcome distraction. He did not understand the words—suspected they weren’t words at all—but Satoru understood their message. They spoke of salvation, of freedom.

Of something more than this.

He sat and listened to them without taking their wishes to heart. He too longed for salvation, but he could wait - wanted to wait. There was no hurry. He had endured worse.

His hands lay open on his knees. His fingertips twitched, barely noticeable. He wasn't tense per say, but his body didn’t know where to put itself. Restlessness had settled into his bones like a fever. Because not even his Six Eyes could clearly discern where up and down were anymore.

Time dripped.
Seconds felt like dust, settling on his shoulders.

After minutes, or hours, he laughed hoarsely:
“So this is it, huh?”

His voice sounded foreign. Scratchy, as if it came from another mouth, perhaps an older one, or one forgotten too long. Maybe it had even been days.

“You sure are taking your time… Or do you not need me anymore?”

He smiled. Brittle.

It was just a thought. Realistically, he knew, he would always be needed. If not by his students, that surely would surpass him someday given enough time, then by the elders at least. Even if he hated their stupid guts. He was the poster boy, the chosen one. You couldn't not need him.

His thoughts halted. A feeling, fleeting, almost like numbness spreading through him in the tenth of a second. Then—

A tear. Nothing he could see. Nothing he could hear. But a tear. Salvation? Just when he had begun to doubt? Hardly. Whether it had been days or hours, he realistically knew no one could be coming yet. Time flowed differently here. He hadn’t suffered enough. Yet the tear was there. Like a tingling, a pull beneath his skin. Electricity in his veins and prickling in his blood.
–
The Six Eyes flashed.
An eruption. An echo. An impulse, like a heartbeat struck too fast.
He didn’t see. He felt.
The world turned, folded inside out, collapsed in on itself.
And everything became—

Different.
The air was too clean. No longer empty, no longer infinite, but—dull. Sterile. It smelled of expensive cleaning product, fresh and floral, paired with printer ink and high-grade coffee beans. The walls around him were office-gray, artificial and uniform, like in the building where Nanami had once worked. Only… more high-end. Could you even say that about paint? It seemed unnecessarily expensive.

Windows with white curtains, structured, all half-closed. A desk with a large monitor before the window front, freshly wiped but with a half-empty coffee cup on a coaster beside the mouse pad.

It was too quiet.
Not like in Gokumonkyo—that was emptiness.
This was crushing normality.

His head throbbed, a reverberating echo deep within. It didn’t hurt, but it was—overwhelming. Like when too many people spoke at once and you understood every single word.
He moved slowly. His feet on beige, immaculate vinyl. Everything vibrated faintly under his skin—the building, time, himself.

“What… the hell…”

He lifted his hand to his blindfold, slid the dark fabric up ever so slightly, just enough to peek out with one eye. Everything about this… workplace was oppressive. Yet it was just different enough that he had to examine it. Clear sight would help, even if it could quickly become too much.
When he lifted the fabric, it was as though the entire universe poured into him.

Colors that should not exist. Walls made of light and yet of nothing. Voices, frequencies, movements within movements. Every particle vibrated with an energy that was not cursed energy—but neither was it its absence.

His brain screamed. But he laughed.
A short, broken chuckle, like that of someone who hadn’t felt a real stimulus in weeks.

“Oh. Ohhh. That’s new.”

He pulled the blindfold back down, cloes the door to muffle the party behind it. Satoru breathed deeply and the world did not calm—but at least it behaved again.

Dissatisfied, he once again surveyed his surroundings, twisted his mouth in thought, and ran a hand through his hair. His hands did not tremble, but his heart beat too fast. It had been a long time since Satoru had felt this way. Not necessarily frightened or insecure, but… consciously shy.
Blowing air out of his cheeks, he sank into the office chair, let his fingertip glide over the smooth edge of the desk. Rough wood. No cursed energy. No cursed presence. Just… office. Human. Civilized.

Far too civilized.

“Okay… so if this is a dream illusion, then someone has a very twisted sense of humor.”

He closed his eyes – under the blindfold – and reached for an anchor. Something that wasn’t like this. So intangible and strange and… wrong. He didn’t even know where he was. But it wasn’t his. His world, his reality, his students…
All of it lay behind walls.
This world breathed differently.
The matter vibrated on a different level.

He might almost have called it primitive—if not for that faint, subtle tension beneath the surface. Satoru couldn’t quite describe it, but it also felt powerful. At least sometimes. It flickered in uneven little clusters of energy around him, like fireflies of different sizes swarming around a giant tree.

Not threatening. But awake.

And one of the fireflies drew closer. A larger one. If Satoru compared the power radiating from it to that of a jujutsu sorcerer, he would have estimated the insect at Grade 1. Strong, but not almighty. Not him.

The closer the glow came, the more he felt it. A presence. Human—and yet… not.
Not cursed energy. No sorcery. Different.
A step, paired with shadows beneath the door. Satoru crossed one leg over the other, leaned back in the office chair with his arms folded. He smiled. Broad. False.
A little sharp. A little too bright.

The doorknob lowered. The light in the room seemed to flicker briefly. And there he was. The firefly.
Red hair. A suit of light fabric, wrinkle-free, as if drawn. Behind him a long, red… cloak? Presumably his supposed wings.
A tablet in his hand.

The man stopped.
Looked at him as if someone had placed a deer in his conference room.
Satoru raised a hand. Grinned. Tilted his head slightly.

“Oh, hey~ ”

The man before him stood there, unmoving, yet Satoru felt something.
Or rather—sensed it. Even before the play of muscle beneath the white suit stirred, before a twitch ran through the man’s arm, there was that trace of heat in the air. A faint shimmer, little more than a promise, a threat that crawled across Satoru’s skin like electrified tension, even though no physical flame touched it.
And then, indeed—a movement.

The stranger lifted a hand, calm, practiced, as if part of a choreography he had lived a thousand times. Fingertips curled, air condensed—a fireball. Not blazing or hissing like the untamed element itself, but controlled, compact, burning blue, like an artificially cultivated heart of flame. It danced lightly in the hollow of the stranger’s palm, pulsing as if it followed its own rhythm, a life of its own that depended solely on its master’s intent.

Satoru didn’t even blink. He simply raised his hands, slowly, exaggeratedly theatrical, as if he were about to shriek in a falsetto. Ridiculous.
His lips curved into a relaxed, almost amused smile.

“Woah, nice. Though, if that's supposed to be a welcoming gift, it's a little too... hot for my taste.”

His voice was velvety and playful, but every note carried that subtle sharpness, perceptible only to someone used to listening between the lines. He made no move to take cover. Why would he? The aura of the stranger—pressing though it was, steeped in wild, almost tangible power—was nothing that could rattle him. Not with what he knew. Not with what he was.

The firefly, as Satoru had dubbed him inwardly—in a not entirely unfriendly, but still mockingly condescending way—did not react immediately. The flame merely flickered in his palm, casting light and shadow across the immaculate walls, distorting the office interior into something eerie and ghostly.

“Who are you?” the stranger finally asked, in a tone that offered no friendliness and expected none. Behind his glasses, his eyebrows drew together. Satoru could almost taste how much his reaction had thrown the insect off balance.
Deliberately, he stretched his hands a little further out, as if to say, “See? I’ve got nothing.”.

“Oh, I know, I know… I look like the world's prettiest burglar. But come on… is that really necessary?”

He grinned broadly, crookedly, with a streak of arrogance that could almost pass for charm, if it hadn’t been so utterly sincere. Slowly his cheeks begun to ache from all the acting. But something about the redhead intrigued him too much to simply vanish. The whole situation was surreal. Besides, it was better than the whispering of the skeletons. A welcome distraction.

The firefly did not answer immediately. The way his eyes scanned Satoru—focused, professional, analytic—betrayed that he was already making other plans internally. The flame in his hand barely shifted, but his stance did. Not relaxed, but hesitant. As if he had sensed something that made him pause. Perhaps it was Satoru’s nonchalance. Perhaps it was the aura surrounding him—hard to grasp, beyond cursed energy, unclassifiable. No mana, no curse, no system he knew.
But he said nothing about it.
And Satoru’s arms were slowly getting heavy, so he let them sink and groaned in boredom instead. Under the blindfold, he rolled his eyes, leaned his head back, cracked his joints, then looked cheerfully back at the stranger.

“All right then. You first,” Satoru said with a wink. “Or would you rather I keep calling you firefly? I think it suits you. So quick. So dangerous.”

A flicker of annoyance crossed the stranger’s face, but then—the flame went out.
He simply let it vanish, lowered his hand, and replied calmly:

“Jong-In Choi. Guild Master of the Hunters Guild.”

Finally.
Satoru nodded slowly, as if he had expected that. As if the spoken words told him something rather than raising more questions. Guild… what? Maybe this was really just a very strange dream.

“Sounds important. And stylish. Is that your real name or the title of your biography?”

Choi still studied him. But something had shifted. Perhaps it was the way Satoru showed no fear. Or how his name alone meant nothing, yet the weight surrounding him could not be denied. That aura—like a foreign sun, whose light he did not know.

“You are not registered. And you are no ordinary civilian.”
A brief sideways glance. “Not with that.”

Satoru chuckled softly, half through his nose, half like someone fully aware of how absurd he appeared—and enjoying it. With another satisfied groan he stretched back in the office chair, letting his arms dangle loosely over the sides.

Caught, he pouted: “All right, you got me. I’m a little… special.”

Choi crossed his arms, then, almost contrary to his initial threatening gesture, he said with a warmer voice: “How about a drink? Something cold. Maybe a little less fiery than my first attempt.”

Satoru was about to reply with a cheeky remark when he froze. The words had been spoken.
And he had understood them. Not just understood.
Spoken.

He frowned slightly.
Something about that sentence made him take notice—not its content, but its sound.
Korean. Of course.
He was speaking Korean. And understanding it.

But… the realization hit him like lightning, electricity running through his veins, twenty minutes too late.
He was not in Japan.

He looked around—again.
And now there was more.
The desk. The newspaper. The fine details of the characters. Hangul.
Not Kanji. Not Katakana.

“Wait,” he murmured, blinking briefly behind his blindfold and sitting upright again.
“This isn’t… Tokyo.”

The firefly looked at him as if he were losing his mind. Was he? Slowly, he raised his hand, looked at it. His skin seemed normal. Behind it his Six Eyes could detect the muscles, the blood pumping through his veins. So his technique worked... Why was it then, that he had only just now realized he was in the wrong country? Maybe it was the faint headache still hammering behind his eyes... Or the whole everything that had happened in the last twenty minutes.
Satoru raised one finger.

“Sorry, Choi-chan, wait a sec—I need to check something.”

A shimmer.
A tear in the air, invisible, yet tangible to anyone sensitive enough.
Then he was gone.
A gust of wind, a faint hum.
Empty.

Shibuya Station.
The loudspeaker counted down the last seconds to departure.
Lights flashed.
The world was fast.
Tangible.
Familiar.

Satoru Gojo stood amidst the crowd.
And knew with absolute certainty:
He was back.
But nothing was as it had been.
He laughed, empty inside and out. Too loud.

“What the hell.”

He blinked and decided. A tear in the air. A gust of wind, a faint hum.

The room was still the same—he stood once more in the center. The desk behind him, the filing cabinet to the right. The air tasted of purified oxygen—synthetic, clear. Everything too sterile. Too controlled. As if this reality continuously tried to convince itself it was real.

And then there was Choi.

The firefly was still exactly where Satoru had left him. As if not a second had passed. Only his eyes had widened—large and incredulous. Where before uncertainty had lingered, now pulsed pure fascination. Perhaps even a touch of… reverence?

“You… just disappeared,” the man finally said, like someone who had moved a chess piece only to find himself suddenly playing against a three-dimensional monster.

Satoru only grinned and brushed imaginary dust from his shoulders, though he still looked as though chaos had merely brushed past him. Back into the act.

“Getting some fresh air. All this smoke here—you know, I’m more the forest-air type.”

Choi stared at him. “You teleported.”

“Technically it was a dimensional jump.” Gojo dropped himself nonchalantly into the chair as if it belonged to him. Arms spread wide across the backrest, one leg crossed over the other, eyes half-closed—not because he was tired, but because Jong-In’s expression was simply too amusing to look at directly. “But let’s just call it a ‘teleporting’.”

The firefly—that flicker in his eyes, so reminiscent of uncontrolled heat—stepped closer, slowly, as if Satoru might vanish again at the slightest wrong move.

“What are you? An assassin?”

“Choi-chan,” Satoru sighed theatrically, utterly clueless, “you flatter me.”

His counterpart narrowed his eyes. “So you are one?”

“What even is that?” Satoru leaned forward, his gaze beneath the blindfold locked squarely on the red-haired man before him. Of course he knew the word. But the man used it as if it carried a very specific meaning. Just like before. Guild Master. Wherever Satoru was, for the man before him these terms were everyday language, their meaning normality. Smirking, he continued his questioning: “A job? A title? An insult? Sounds like a guy who lives on rooftops and takes badly paid side gigs.”

The firefly briefly pressed his lips together, as though deciding whether it was funny or simply disrespectful. “You don’t know what an assassin is? And you… you can just teleport like that?”

“Sure,” Satoru muttered, then deflected, “Say, weren’t you going to get me some water? Or was that metaphorical?”

For a fleeting moment, Choi just stood there, eyes behind his glasses filled with disbelief. He looked at Satoru as though he were some cheeky, insolent child. Too bad. He had given him that escape route himself when he had offered the drink. For another moment, the redhead remained standing. Then he grumbled something unintelligible, spun on his heel, and left the room.

Satoru was alone again.
And yet—not really.

His senses were wide open, like a net of gossamer light spreading through every wall, every layer of air, every dimension. It wasn’t just Jong-In’s aura—it burned strong, wild, raw. Not as structured as cursed energy, but familiar in its ambition. It was also the world itself that surrounded him. Every speck of dust, every reflection, every detail in this room—too smooth, too homogeneous, too perfectly calculated.

His fingers glided across the desk’s surface. Not a single flaw. Not even the creak of wood when leaning on it. Everything in him screamed of simulation. Or of… dislocation. This wasn't home. But where was it then?

Before he could fully finish that train of thought, the firefly re-entered. His cape swayed behind him with his large steps, right to left, as he brought Satoru the glass.

The platinum blonde sipped at the glass Choi finally handed him, with a skeptical crease of his brow. Even the water—it was strange. Too cold. Too pure. None of that faint earthiness good Japanese tap water sometimes had. Here, everything was… different. Not a terrible place. Just not his.

“You are not an ordinary human,” the bug finally said as he sank into the sofa chair opposite the desk, as though he were a potential new employee and Satoru the company’s boss. And yet the jujutsu sorcerer was fairly certain this was Choi’s office.

Satoru smiled over the rim of the glass. “I was never particularly good at being normal.”

“Then help me understand. Where do you come from? Which guild do you belong to? Why does no one know you?”

Satoru shrugged. “I wasn’t… quite myself these past few years. Let’s say, I was away. Not present. Something woke me—no idea what exactly. And that led me here.”

Choi nodded slowly, almost sympathetically—but the glimmer in his eyes was greedy. Not dangerous. More like someone who had just discovered a treasure chest.

“S-Rank,” he murmured under his breath. His gaze drifted past Satoru out the window, almost dreamily. His eyes shone, the clear glasses reflecting the building opposite, visible through the windows. Satoru could only guess what his words meant. Apparently, here, too, there was a form of power some humans possessed. And “S-Rank” seemed to be a classification of that strength and power. Just how high “S” ranked on their scale, Satoru didn’t know. He also couldn’t imagine, even in this… other reality, that anyone was stronger than he was.
At least, if he judged by the firefly—who glowed brighter than the others in the vicinity and was surely inferior to him nonetheless. And he was, by his own admission, the Guild Master—and while Satoru didn’t know what a guild was, he knew what the word master meant.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said flatly at last.

“You are… different.” Choi leaned forward slightly. “Your aura—it feels like a wave that could roll over us at any moment.” He pursed his lips, unsatisfied despite his curiosity. “And you still haven’t introduced yourself.”

Satoru looked at him, then smiled. Wide. Slightly crooked.

“Perceptive little bug.“, he said, uncaring how insulting it sounded. Putting the glass down and standing up, he continued, „I'm Satoru Gojo, of course. Or Gojo-san. And… what was it you said again? S-Rank? Let’s make it Satoru-Rank from now on.”

He winked. Choi groaned, leaned back, and ran a hand through his hair. “You are impossible.”

“But useful. I know that much about myself.”