Koi no yokan (Gojo x Reader)

{1} - Saudade

-- Preface --

The river remembers every bridge. The moon keeps the names the morning cannot. He would wait where the seasons stop counting.

"I think I've loved you since I met you. I just mistook it for curiosity."

Not love at first sight, but curiosity at first glance. The need to know more, to learn everything. An inability to look away, he called it. They say attention is the beginning of devotion, and he always had hers.

But what did it matter now? 

There was only the smell of iron. It coated the back of y/n's throat, warm and metallic, thick enough that every breath seemed to carry the taste of it with her.

Blood ran down her hand. It gathered with a strange patience at the ends of her fingers, swelling into dark beads before gravity pulled them loose.

Each drop struck the shattered concrete beneath her with a sound far too small for the amount of destruction surrounding her.

The ground had been torn open for what looked like hundreds of feet. Concrete slabs jutted upward. Steel reinforcement bars curled from the rubble like exposed bone. Farther away, something was burning, though she could see no flames, only black smoke rising slowly into a colorless sky.

There should have been noise. Instead, the world had gone unnaturally quiet.

Y/n raised her head. Someone stood several feet away. She couldn't see their face. Only a silhouette. Something about the shape was familiar. Her body recognized it before her mind did.

Hatred struck her so violently that her fingers curled. It settled deep inside her chest like a beast gnawing at chains.

The silhouette blurred. The ruined city folded inward. Her vision shifted.

...

"Sensei?"

Y/n blinked once, and the destruction was gone. She found herself in a classroom.

Warm afternoon light poured through tall windows and stretched across the wooden floor in long, milky rectangles. Dust drifted lazily through the beams. Somewhere outside, cicadas screamed from the trees. Her hand no longer hurt.

"Sensei?"

She raised her head. Students surrounded her. Their faces refused to stay clear. Every time she focused on one, another blurred at the edges, features slipping away before she could hold them in memory. But she knew their uniforms. Tokyo Jujutsu High.

"You spaced out." The voice carried affection rather than concern.

Y/n looked toward it. For one second, she almost saw a face. Then sunlight moved across it.

"I'm sorry," she answered automatically. The apology left her mouth before she knew why she was giving it.

A few of the students laughed.

The sunlight brightened. White climbed the walls. The students disappeared inside it one by one. Her hand reached out, and her fingers passed through light. The room turned white, and y/n shut her eyes from the blinding light.

...

A drawer opened. Y/n did not remember opening it.

She was standing somewhere else now. She knew this room. It was her dorm room at Jujutsu high.

The drawer sat open in front of her. Inside lay a blindfold. Black fabric, carefully folded into a small rectangle.

Y/n stopped breathing. She knew exactly whose it was. Her fingers hovered inches above the fabric. Something inside her chest hurt. Not sharply. It was an old pain.