Chapter Text
Getou wakes to the sound of laughter.
It echoes in his ears before he opens his eyes. Then comes the fresh taste of grass; the scent of spring. They permeate his senses, cool and crisp, before Getou fully wakes to the sight of a patch of hill inside Tokyo Jujutsu High.
He blinks.
One, two, three times, just to make sure his sight isn't failing him. He's surrounded by that familiar fringe of woods, dripping green in the early morning dew. The air is so cold it cuts into his lungs, a breath-stealer in more ways than one.
Getou rises to his feet. He knows this spot. A grassy mound at the far west end of the school, right beneath the largest tree on campus. It's a familiar place, one he had frequently visited with—
There’s no mistake, he thinks. This really is Tokyo Jujutsu High.
“Huh,” says Getou. No alarms blaring, nobody coming to attack him. He's still in his monk robes: the very telltale garments he has worn like a trademark ever since he left this place, so why—
A bright chime of laughter sounds from afar.
Getou turns.
(He knows this sound.)
(Of course he does. He knows who it is, before he even sees.)
Because there, a little ways down from where he's at, is Satoru. Lying on one of the sloping roofs of a building, one hand beneath his head. He's looking at the phone in his hand, occasionally bursting into fits of laughter.
Getou ignores the quiet flutter in his chest.
He's young.
He's so young, Getou realizes. It's not the lack of a blindfold that gives it away, or the uniform he's donning, but Satoru’s body is thinner. Smaller. More lithe. The angles of his shoulders less set, his chest less broad, and he's also lounging on a roof a little more casually — one leg hooked over the other, foot tapping the air with a rhythm Getou knows he's humming, body relaxed and more easy-going — than what Getou is used to seeing from Gojo Satoru for the past ten years.
This Satoru is young.
Getou rises to his feet, careful not to let Satoru spot him.
What has happened?
Why is he here? Last thing he remembers, he was closing his eyes in bed and settling in for the night, his family in the rooms nearby, Mimiko and Nanako tucked in, and now he's simply woken up here. Seemingly transported to the past? Some sort of alternate universe? It can either be a dream, or a twisted cursed technique, or he's miraculously lugged back ten or so years ago, back to this selfsame world they lived in, back to—
Satoru's eyes snap towards him.
Getou freezes.
Satoru — the one in front of him, the young, 16-year-old Satoru — has his head turned towards him. Getou can't make out his eyes, both because of the distance between them and because of the dark tint of his sunglasses, but he knows with certainty that they are on him.
Satoru is staring straight at him, completely frozen.
And before Getou can do so much as open his mouth, or shift, or turn around, Satoru cheerily throws his arm up in a wave and shouts:
“Suguru!”
And despite everything, Getou doesn't walk away.
He doesn't turn around. He doesn't summon his curses and leave. He stands there, stock-still, as Satoru scrambles to stand up and then — levitating easily in the air — flies towards him.
“Suguru!” Satoru calls again, and this time he comes to a halt, landing gracelessly on the ground in front of him and jogging the last few steps forward until he's only an arm's length away from Getou.
And Getou, for the first time, has to tilt his chin to look down at him.
It's… funny, seeing a shorter Satoru.
He remembers, distantly, all the arguments they’ve had about this. Hah! You're being petty again, Suguru! Even during the growth spurts they had after their first year, Satoru has always been his height or slightly taller. It's been part of their quarrels for years. There's never been a time, as far as he can remember, when Getou had to actively tilt his head to look down at him.
But he is now. Roughly a head shorter, Satoru stares up at Getou— hands on his hips, a slight downward tilt of his lips and his brows furrowed, the way he always gets when he's confused.
(Getou fights the strange, sudden urge to lift him up by the underside of his arms.)
Satoru stares at him for a beat longer.
Then he lifts a hand to his own face, holds the frame of his glasses, and pulls them down the length of his nose until his eyes are visible, clear as sky. All blue. And it cuts Suguru right then: that feeling of staring at someone you knew in your youth, only to find the same eyes still there.
“...My Six Eyes tell me,” Satoru says hesitantly, “you're Getou Suguru.”
Getou doesn't answer.
He only manages to stare back at Satoru, motionless. And so, of course, Satoru takes that as an affirmative sign that he should continue speaking.
“But, uh… Hmm.” Satoru frowns, holding his cheeks with his thumb and forefinger. “Why are you so big, Suguru? And what’s with these robes? Don't you get hot in them? Man, they're so ugly! It makes you look like a grandma, y'know, which isn’t really appealing if you’re trying to seduce those girls that have been making googly eyes at you for the past three months.”
“...Wow,” is the first word Getou says to him.
“You can talk!” Satoru grins. “And here I thought you were finally charmed by my looks to the point of being speechless.”
Getou stares at him, blinking.
“Hey.” Satoru scowls. “What's with this lack of a reaction? Did you knock your head during a mission or something?”
“No, you just…” Getou brings a hand up to cover his own mouth, tries to hide the smile that's threatening to form there. “I forgot how amusing you were.”
Satoru tilts his head questioningly.
How interesting, Getou thinks. His mind reels, nearly tripping over itself as he tries to conjure up explanations for how this could be. He should be getting back to his own timeline or universe, shouldn't he? There has to be some causation from this. An upset of whatever natural balance there is.
Does Satoru know anything?
Would he make the same face as you, Getou wonders quietly. That sadness and that wrath, in Shinjuku and in every place onwards. Would he make the same—
“Suguru?”
Getou’s attention focuses back.
Well, he thinks, after a moment. No matter. This entire thing is entertaining, either way. He'd be insane not to mess with it a little bit, because time travel or dream or cursed technique notwithstanding, he wouldn’t just pass up an opportunity to tease Satoru like this.
“So,” says Getou, crossing his arms and leaning against the tree, “what are you doing right now?”
Satoru squints at him skeptically.
Getou smiles. “What's that look?”
“Why do you seem…” Satoru squints harder. “Scheme-y?”
“Your imagination is always so creative,” says Getou. “What kind of ulterior motives do you think I'd even have?”
Satoru doesn't reply.
“Also, you're wrong, by the way,” says Getou. “I don't try to seduce girls.”
“Those upper-years from Shoto High would argue otherwise,” says Satoru.
“They're in their own heads.” Getou waves his hand dismissively. Those delusional monkeys. God, he hates them. “Either way, you haven't answered my question.”
“Eh?”
“What,” Getou asks patiently, “are you doing right now?”
It's a subtle invitation. They both know it. Satoru frowns, clearly dubious, his brows knitted in suspicion and his eyes narrowed. It's a good look on him, Getou notes privately. I've almost forgotten.
“Tell me what happened to you first,” demands Satoru. “You're not my Suguru transformed, are you?”
Well, now.
Getou smiles. Not a lot of things have changed, have they: Satoru has always been sharper than he wants to give him credit for. Despite all the silly theatrics he goes out of his way to perform, or the childish petulance, or the lazy façade, he's sharper than he realizes.
And so Getou takes a step forward. He leans down, closer and closer, and stops only when his face is several inches away from Satoru.
Satoru, to his credit, doesn't shy away.
“Unfortunately,” Getou says quietly, “I don't really know what happened to me. You'll have to help me figure it out, Satoru.”
Satoru stares at him.
Getou expects an outright rejection. He expects a disgruntled no, what, are you kidding me, and then maybe Satoru would just pick up the phone and dial the Getou Suguru of this timeline, hold Getou down until his Suguru arrives. It's what would make sense, anyhow, with the way Satoru deals with things and with the amount of doubt Satoru has for everyone. Who would simply agree to go along with a practical stranger like this? Even if it's an adult version of his own friend?
So Getou is surprised, naturally, when Satoru clears his throat, looks to the side to avoid making eye contact, and says:
“Okay.”
…Huh.
Getou blinks several times, just to process.
Trust, huh, he thinks after a pause, unsure if it's amusement or something else that is roiling in his stomach. Didn't realize you had so much of that for me.
“...Good,” Getou says instead. “Let's go eat, then!”
_____
This is what happens next:
Getou tries to summon his stingray. He fails.
He tries to summon his dragon. He fails.
He tries to summon any other aerial curses he possesses. He fails.
Satoru looks like he’s trying to hold back laughter— his lips are pursed together, eyes crinkled in mirth, and god, Getou now feels the faint urge to smack him upside the head. Satoru has always been bad at hiding his expressions.
In the end, Satoru does burst into laughter. In the end, Getou does smack him upside the head.
In the end, they leave the premises of Tokyo Jujutsu High by foot, and hail a taxi down to the city center.
_____
This is what Getou gathers:
The Tokyo Jujutsu High alarm doesn’t ring. Makes sense, given that he’s now back in his school years when Getou Suguru is not a renowned, registered curse user. No one comes after him.
Also, he can’t use cursed energy.
He still has cursed energy. He can feel it. Satoru can, too, judging by the way he’s able to immediately recognize Getou right off the bat. But it seems like Getou is unable to wield his cursed energy at all; he can't let it out, or use cursed techniques, or summon any of his cursed spirits to form.
“Maybe with this, I can finally beat you in everything,” says Satoru.
“Oh, shut up,” Getou says lightly.
What a shame, too. He would've been able to find the girls, or carry out his plans much earlier if he's able to use his cursed technique. Mimiko and Nanako must still be in the village unattacked, but he's just stuck here, now, practically faring no better than them.
And there are, he deduces, three possible explanations for this situation.
One, he’s in a dream. Would explain a lot of things, even if it seems too real to be one. Though if I am dreaming, he thinks, then I've remembered Satoru in his youth much more vividly than I thought.
Two, somebody has performed their cursed technique on him. Perhaps this is all a hallucination, a trick of the mind to get him back to a period that's already behind him, that he's already pushed to the corner of his memories. How foul this would be. How interesting. If this turns out to be the work of a curse, Getou would love to consume them when he gets out.
And three, he's time-traveled.
Seems unlikely, Getou decides as an afterthought, given that he remembers none of this. There were no gaps in his memory, no events during his time as a Tokyo Jujutsu High student that were even remotely close to this. Satoru would've blabbered on and on to him non-stop, also. This probably isn't time travel— unless it is a new breach in the timeline: something that would slightly alter the course of their history.
And if this is the case, Getou should be careful as to what he's saying.
_____
“So,” says Getou, “I’m from the future.”
“What?” says Satoru.
They're walking side-by-side down a crowded street in Shinjuku. The tiled pavement stretches beneath all the people milling by, cut across by boys in dark jackets whooping around corners with hair like the grease of their bikes. Getou wonders, vaguely, how it would feel to snap off their necks.
“I,” repeats Getou, “am from the future.”
Satoru blinks at him a few times. Then he says, simply, “Oh.”
“You know,” says Getou, “for someone so loud and talkative, I didn't expect this dry a reaction.”
“I mean, I don’t really know what else to say.” Satoru crosses his arms and tilts his head. “You sure, Suguru? I thought you were hit by some kind of cursed technique that makes you older or something. Isn't that more likely?”
“Are you trying to argue this?” Getou asks, amused.
“I'm just saying!” defends Satoru. “When did you get here?”
“Just a few minutes before you spotted me, actually.”
“How'd you get here?”
“I don't know.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Ew,” says Satoru. “That's so old.”
“Easy now,” Getou says calmly. “I can still beat you in hand-to-hand combat, you know, even if I can't use cursed energy.”
“Yeah, don't remind me,” mutters Satoru, wincing. “So you're not the one who transported yourself back?”
Getou shakes his head.
“Hmm.” Satoru scratches his neck, one hand in his pocket, and frowns up at the sky like he's deep in logicizing his way through this. It's always so entertaining, Getou thinks, to watch him move with such careless abandon, expressive like he's laying his heart out bare. He's easy to read if you know where to look; even, Getou adds privately, when you have grown to be twenty-seven, Satoru. “From the future…” Satoru mumbles. “From the future… from the…”
And then his face brightens.
Getou, well-versed in every single one of Satoru’s tells, knows the question that is coming.
“What am I like?!” Satoru asks excitedly.
“Right,” says Getou. “How predictable.”
“Come on, it's the number one question!” Satoru looks eager, his smile barely contained. “I bet I'm still as strong, right? Still as handsome? I'll wager that I have a much better fashion sense than you, judging by those monk robes you were wearing earlier. Yikes. Is that a daily outfit, by the way?”
“Don't insult someone you're trying to get answers out of,” says Getou.
"I bet I still look young,” says Satoru, nodding to himself. “Good genes and all. What do I do? Do I travel a lot? Am I better at exorcising curses than you? Am I more charming as an old man?”
“Twenty-seven is not old,” says Getou.
“Sure it is.”
Getou wonders, vaguely, how on earth he's managed to not drop Satoru from the stingray more times than he has. “Well,” he says, curbing around the words. “You’re unorthodox. You’re outrageous. Still into sweets, but the adult you is so serious that it's much more difficult to talk to you—”
“Suguru.”
Getou smiles pleasantly. “And,” he adds, “you’ve gotten pretty good at teaching.”
Satoru looks like Getou's just murdered someone.
Getou fights down the urge to laugh. He can read in the turn of Satoru's lip and the divot between his brows that he does not like to hear that, not really. Satoru looks bleak enough to give himself a shiner.
“You have students that you seem to annoy quite a bit,” says Getou. “But I think they look up to you.”
“Ugh.” Satoru seems disappointed in himself.
“You're good at it, Satoru,” says Getou, and he's surprised by how sincere it sounds. “You also go on quite a few overseas trips and still use pretty extreme methods, which I'm not sure how it pans out with those higher-ups, but you probably antagonize them to the point where they have to let it slide, anyway.”
“Okay, now that I can get on board with,” says Satoru.
“Of course you'd say that,” Getou says fondly.
“What about you?” Satoru grins, with a hint of mischief. “Do the students like me more than you?”
Getou keeps the smile etched on his face, and doesn't answer.
It’s almost blindsiding, hearing this now. He doesn't want to turn and look too closely lest it aches, but he knows what expression Satoru must be wearing: eyes like glass in the faint light, blue and bright and with none of the guard that Gojo Satoru at twenty-seven has harboured over the decade. Adoring and pellucid.
And for some reason, Getou doesn't want to remember him. He doesn't want to remember Satoru older; the permanently vacant look on his face, the white bandages, the quiet stance. The empty tone of his voice when he whispered Suguru, undone underneath him on the sheets, his hair a tangled mess when he finally opened up to Getou's kiss like he was shaking apart.
The way he never wanted to face him, even if Getou asked. The regret that always followed. The disappointed stares afterwards as he buttoned up his shirt— blankly drawn either at himself or the both of them, Getou could never tell.
“There,” Getou decides to say, finally. “Don't get too ahead of yourself now.”
That seems to be a sufficient answer. Satoru smirks, apparently satisfied with how Getou basically dodged the question.
And then his face lightens up.
Getou lifts a brow, curious. Satoru doesn't give him any explanation, any caution as he reaches into his own pocket, fishes out his phone, flips it open, and vigorously types something into it.
“Texting someone?” asks Getou, already knowing full well who it may be.
Satoru doesn't answer. He only finishes whatever he's punching out onto his phone, then turns it around and shows it to Getou. The messaging box glows bright on the screen, the words set clear:
SUGURU!! <
Im hanging out with a cooler version of you <
Hes 27 <
Wanna see pics??? <
“Ah,” says Getou.
“He should be done with his mission by now,” Satoru says cheerfully, “so he can join us in no time.”
“...Is this all you're telling him?” asks Getou.
Satoru looks confused. “Should I be saying something more?”
“No,” says Getou, and tries not to look too amused. It's jarringly odd to know exactly what the reaction would be; even odder to see in real-time how Satoru speaks, unintentionally, with so little tact. With the way Satoru is, Getou's surprised he never got himself checked for heart troubles.
“Anyway,” says Satoru. “It'll probably take him an hour to get here, since he just finished with his mission.”
“Oh,” says Getou, "I think he'll be here faster than that."
“In the meantime,” continues Satoru, “do you wanna eat, Suguru? I'm not feeling like sweets right now, but we can go get zaru soba.”
Getou turns to look at him.
Satoru’s staring back at him, expectant. He's smiling lopsidedly too, which only makes an odd sensation flit over Getou like the shock of blood in a bruise, because Satoru would never turn down sweets, Getou knows. He knows this for a fact.
“I think I already have a good guess,” Getou says, after a while of silence. “But what year is this?”
“Huh?” says Satoru. “Oh. Nah, I won't tell you. You should use your brain and figure it out by yourself, Suguru, can't you tell from all the hints here, or are you too old to think now?”
Getou gives him a look.
“It’s 2005,” says Satoru. “December. Why?”
December 2005.
December 2005, muses Getou, rolling the words over in his head. The memories come back to him, piecemeal. “That's only a month after that mission, huh,” he says quietly. “And you already know my favourite food.”
Satoru stares at him for a few moments.
Then he smiles, warm and teasing. As soft as an inside joke. “You just never shut up about it, is all,” Satoru says, and then he lets out a laugh, full and hearty, when Getou rolls his eyes at him and turns around — the sound reverberating in his ears — and walks on ahead.