𝒅𝒐𝒏'𝒕 𝒘𝒆𝒆𝒑, 𝒎𝒚 𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒆𝒍
PART NO.1
Pairing: Higuruma x (Widow?) Reader (2nd POV)
Synopsis: A desperate lawyer in love with a woman who won't love him back. Her heart belongs to someone else. He will stay with her nonetheless.
Word Count: 4.1K
Warnings/Tags/Notes: Angst, Nanami’s death, Grief, Reader's hair is long for the plot
Inspirations:
- 🎶 Be like a Woman: Chris Rainbow
- 🎶 PRIDE.: Kendrick Lamar
- 🎶 My One and Only Love: Mon Laferte
- 🎶 Do I Wanna Know?: Hozier (Cover)
- 🎶 Risk It All: Bruno Mars
- 🎶 Breathe onto me: Wisp
- 🎶 Lover, You Should've Come Over: Jeff Buckley
- 🎶 Sweet Dreams, TN: The Last Shadow Puppets
- 📖 the phone booth at the edge of the world: Laura Imai Messina
The mind often forgets tragic events as a protective mechanism against itself.
Maybe that was why you couldn’t exactly remember Nanami’s face when that curse got to him. Or what he told you before the inevitable. Or if he was even looking at you at all. All you remembered was being surrounded by hideous curses and the smell of iron, blood. Nanami’s blood specifically.
You couldn’t remember who was there at the scene. Who hand was there to pull you to your feet when you couldn’t move? Who was there to shield your eyes from the horrors of transfiguration? Who was there to lead you to a temporary safety outside the station? Who was there first to let you cry on their shoulder? It could have been anyone. It just wasn’t Nanami.
You just couldn’t remember. What you did understand; however, was that you lived a life you no longer wanted to participate in alone.
For as long as you could remember, it had always been you and Nanami. Working together in school, meeting with him every now and then when he left the jujutsu world, and working together again when he came back.
All throughout that time, you loved that man. Now that he’s gone, with his name on a tombstone, you love him even more. You miss the way he’d love you. You miss the way he would loosen his tie the second he walked into his home, like the day had personally offended him. You miss those times where he would dryly comment about Gojo’s man child behavior or how much he nonchalantly wants the best for the students. And the way he always made space for you like it was the most natural thing in the world. You missed it all.
You didn’t go home the first night. There was no possible way you could. You’d be instantly reminded that only one person survived. There would have been a thick silence at your throat as you slept, no longer the warmth of the man you loved at your side to comfort you as you cried. Everything would have been cold and empty.
You stayed with Shoko for at least a month. Poor woman, sometimes she’d wake up late at night to see you drowning in your silent tears at the dinner table, or even hear you mutter his name in your sleep only to wake up and realize the hard truth of reality.
It never really did get better. Going back to your home, you threw everything away, save for a few photos and gifts he gave you. Everything else was either sold or thrown away in a dumpster. You put the place up for sale too, wanting to get and stay away from the places you knew.
The worst part of it all was when you were digging through drawers, digging out stationary items and wires of cables you had no clue what they were compatible with, you stumbled upon a small velvet box. By curious nature and shaky hands, you opened the top. The box opened like a clam and presented the most beautiful diamond ring you have ever laid your eyes upon.
Putting the pieces together, his late night talks about wanting to quit sorcery again, the way he mentioned a getaway trip to Malaysia, the way he’d close his phone when you were around, the way his hands felt around yours, paying special attention to your left ring finger. It was right in front of you, but time had been evil. The world had been evil and took the one thing you loved right out of your grasp. It had been right there, a future neatly folded into a velvet box and you had never known to reach for it.
The ring was too heavy for something that had never been worn. It pressed into your palm like it expected an answer for why it hadn’t been worn.
You cried again that night, clutching the engagement ring to your heart as if it were to revive him and prompt him to ask the million dollar question. You envisioned yourself in the moment. Him down on one knee, holding your hand as he showed you the ring in the velvet box. You’d say yes, tears flowing down your cheeks out of surprise and pure merriment, watching as he slid the diamond band around your finger and getting back up for a kiss.
Then you’d imagine the wedding that never happened. All flowers were perfectly organized at the reception. Your bouquet of your favorite flowers in your hands as you walked down that aisle in your dream wedding dress.
You’d imagine the way he would have looked at the altar, tearing his eyes away for a moment as he blinked away his tears. How dearly he would have held your hands and looked into your eyes as he spoke his vows, promising to love you for an eternity and more.
But the moment you opened your mouth to speak, you tasted blood. It was as if you were transported back into the station at Shibuya, seeing him burned and bloody, a blurry memory of him being transfigured. And just like that, you were left at the altar, hands empty with no future, alone with that white dress you didn’t deserve to wear.
From that day forth, although the ring itself felt like a cursed object, you kept it where it should have belonged in the first place, on your left ring finger. No one questioned it. No one wanted to question it, afraid they would open a wound that was just about to seal.
You stared at it often, imagining a perfect future you both deserved, but now, it seemed like you didn’t deserve it. Not when you visited his grave everyday and placed a different flower each time you came, and when you sat on the grass, telling him about your day as if he could respond to the tears flowing down your face.
It was something you had to face from now on, a new heartbreaking reality.
⋆⭒˚ 𓍝｡⋆
The subway was quieter than it should have been. Not silent but muted in a way that made everything feel distant. Conversations blurred into background noise, the screech of metal against metal dulled, the world moving forward without asking if you were ready to follow.
Someone stood among the other passengers, one hand loosely gripping the overhead strap. His posture was relaxed, tired even, but his gaze was not. It always moved with purpose, scanning without appearing to. A habit ingrained from years of listening to lies dressed up as the truth.
People revealed themselves in small fragments.
A twitch of their jaw, a hesitation before speech, the subtle tightening of fingers around something they wished to keep. Truth was never spoken plainly. It leaked.
And you were leaking.
At first glance, there was nothing remarkable about you. You occupied space the way everyone did. You sat where there was room. You breathed when necessary. You existed in a way that didn’t demand attention.
But existence, Higuruma had learned, was rarely neutral.
Lawyers had always been good at reading people. It came with the disciplined years of dissecting testimonies, watching for inconsistencies, and weighing truth against performance. People were patterns. Both behaviors and motives are waiting to be uncovered.
You sat there unmoving, gaze fixed somewhere far beyond the train window, posture too precise, hands folded neatly in your lap like you were attending a funeral that never ended, fingers loosely intertwined, yet every few seconds, your thumb moved.
Once. Twice. And again. Repetition without only purpose.
But Higuruma noticed the details. His gaze lowered, a ring caught his eye. A quiet assessment was conducted.
It looked new and it didn’t look like you wore it out of comfort, too. It sat on your finger like evidence improperly submitted, accepted, but never validated. Your thumb brushed over it again, slower this time, as if confirming its existence. Or perhaps disputing it.
Grief, he thought, he wasn’t so sure though.
But not the kind that announces itself. No trembling shoulders. No tearful outbursts. No visible collapse. This was something far less merciful. A kind of grief that integrates. The kind that rewrites a person from the inside out until what remains is functional enough to avoid intervention, but hollow enough to no longer qualify as living.
He had seen it before, not in court but in its aftermath.
Defendants who had nothing left to lose. Clients who had no faith in the system. People who stopped participating in their own lives. People who had lost, not just cases, but meaning. People who walked out of courtrooms, already carried their sentence, regardless of their verdict. People who continued breathing out of obligation rather than desire. People who—
His gaze lingered a second too long. You looked like someone who had already been sentenced. Judged without ever standing trial.
The train lurched, dragging his attention away for a moment. A low monotonous drone. No one paid attention to it. No one ever did.
That was the nature of suffering, wasn’t it?
It only mattered when it was loud enough to disrupt. Anything quieter was permitted to exist. It was ignored, filed away, and dismissed. Even then, only after extreme measures were taken to be noticed, whether someone wanted to be or not, they were still met with ignorance.
Higuruma’s fingers tightened slightly around the strap.
Society had no mechanism for people like you. No category. No defense. You were neither well or unwell. Neither stable nor broken. Just continuous, like a case with no prosecutor, defense, and verdict.
He found it unsettling.
Because if there was no verdict, then there was no end.
You weren’t recovering, just waiting. The most troubling part was that no one around you seemed to notice. Not the man scrolling absently through his phone. Not the woman dozing against the window. Not the group laughing too loudly at something trivial.
Life, as everyone knew, continued.
As if your quiet deterioration had already been deemed acceptable collateral damage.
Higuruma clicked his tongue softly against the roof of his mouth, the sound barely audible. If this were a courtroom, he thought, there would be outrage. Negligence and failure of duty. A system that allowed something so visibly wrong to persist unchecked, but this wasn't a courtroom. This was the world and the world was far less interested in justice than it claimed to be.
Day one, he told himself.
That would have been easy to dismiss. A passing observation. A stranger on a train who looked a little worse for wear. Just a simple someone whose life was deemed hell and unfair.
But then it happened again. It was the same time. You were on the same train car and the same seat. Still carrying the same expression with the same ambience radiating from you. Higuruma didn’t mean to notice at first, all of it. Pattern recognition was instinctual, automatic, like breathing. His mind catalogued details before he could stop it.
Day two proved him wrong because you returned.
You wore something different, but it hardly mattered. It mirrored perfectly how you felt about the world. Your posture remained the same. Your gaze, just as distant. That ring still sat on your finger, catching the dim fluorescent light every time the train rattled.
Your hair was loose today, cascading over your shoulder and slightly covering your eyes. It was outgrown from its usual style he could tell. You were, as he would put it, in desperate need of a hair cut, but he wasn’t so sure if you could let go of it all just yet.
Day three.
Your eyes looked worse. Not swollen, no, you didn’t seem like the type to cry where people could see. But there was a heaviness to them, like sleep had long since stopped being restful. Even the underside of your nose looked irritated, as if you had dragged rough tissues every time you felt the need to wipe your nose.
Yet this pain you carried on your back and in your mind was not visible to others. Not in a way anyone would intervene, but the degradation was there.
Day five.
You almost missed your stop. That, finally, was a deviation. The chime had rung. The doors had opened. People shuffled past you, like water around stone, brushing against your shoulder, and still, you didn’t move.
Not until the last second. Not until the threshold between staying and leaving was nearly decided for you.
Higuruma’s gaze sharpened. It wasn’t negligence, no. It was pure distraction. He would have never thought of you as being distracted.
Day seven.
He stopped pretending it was a coincidence. You were a routine now. A fixed point in his day, whether he liked it or not. You refused to resolve. His thumb tapped once against the strap, a quiet, measured motion.
And like any case that refused to resolve, his mind began to organize you.
Subject: Female. Mid-adulthood.
Condition: Functional, but deteriorating.
Notable traits: Persistent dissociation. Repetitive tactile fixation (ring). Lack of environmental awareness.
Preliminary conclusion:
Grief.
There was something inherently wrong with that. Humans were not meant to exist in suspension. They broke, adapted, or ended. You did not do that, which could only mean one thing. This was not stability, but rather postponement.
This was something else, though. Something that didn’t sit right.
People in grief behaved in extremes. They broke down, lashed out, isolated themselves completely, something visible and something decisive.
You did none of those things. You showed up every day and sat in the same place, held yourself together just enough to pass as normal. And yet, your eyes told a different story. One that suggested you weren’t enduring life. If he was right, just waiting for it to end. Higuruma exhaled slowly through his nose, gaze flickering away for the first time in several minutes.
That was the problem. You weren’t a case that had ended. You were one that hadn’t reached its final verdict. And for reasons he couldn’t quite justify, it bothered him.
So the next day, when the train doors slid open and you stepped inside once more, he made a decision. This time, he wouldn’t just observe, he would intervene.
⋆⭒˚ 𓍝｡⋆
His gaze flickered once across the car, empty seats scattered here and there, enough space to avoid proximity, and yet, he chose yours. Not directly decide you. He left good enough space for someone to sit between him and you, but it was close enough for him to observe.
The cushion dipped slightly as he sat down, posture relaxed, one leg angled just enough to avoid encroaching on your space. One hand rested loosely against his thigh, the other adjusting his sleeve with quiet precision.
To anyone else, it would have looked incidental. It wasn’t, you noticed.
Your fingers paused briefly against the ring before resuming their slow, repetitive motion. You didn’t look at him nor acknowledged him. He was just another stranger.
“…You’re going to miss your stop again.”
Your thumb stilled, just a small pause. You didn’t turn to the voice. “…I won’t,” you replied.
Higuruma took in your words, not making a move to lean in or fully turn his head to examine your well-being. Nonetheless, he continued, “I’ve seen you almost miss it twice this week.”
Your brows knit faintly and that feeling of unwelcome crept in. You turned your head slightly, just enough to catch him in your peripheral. “…Do you always keep track of strangers?” you asked.
From his outward appearance, you could suppose he was a man who had his bearings together and understood the basics of what it meant to be human. The gold pin on his lapel gave it all away. Though, you could guess he's just as sick of the world as you are.
One would never truly know.
“Only when they’re consistent,” he replied.
Your gaze lingered for half a second longer this time. Then you looked away again. This guy was weird. That was the simplest conclusion. Weird and too observant for someone who should have minded his own business.
“You wear a ring,” he said.
“I’m aware.”
“You check it often.”
That did it. Your gaze snapped to him, irritation finally surfacing, not loud, not explosive, but sharp enough to cut. “And you talk too much.”
There it was. A reaction Higuruma noted without expression. It was better than nothing. For a moment, neither of you spoke. The distance between you, the empty seat, felt intentional now. Like a line neither of you agreed to cross.
“…If you’re trying to start a conversation,” you said after a beat, voice flattening again, “This isn’t a good way to do it.”
“I’m not.”
That made your expression falter, just slightly. “…Then what do you want?”
Higuruma’s gaze shifted, not to your face this time, but to your hands, “A clarification.”
“About what?”
“Whether you’re aware of what you’re doing.”
Heavy and uncomfortable silence settled between you. Your fingers curled inward, breaking the pattern for the first time since he sat down. “…I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You will,” he said.
And just like that, he leaned back slightly into his seat, gaze shifting forward as if the conversation had ended before it ever properly began. Like you were no longer something to be addressed, just something to be observed again.
You got off at the next stop, ending up in a place you did not recognize in the late hours of the night.
⋆⭒˚ 𓍝｡⋆
Death is an all consuming curse.
It is not merely an event; it is a quiet rearrangement of reality. One moment, a person occupies space in the world. They breathe, speak, and laugh in the ways that shape the air itself. And then, without asking for permission, death removes them. Not just from life, but from the ordinary continuity of presence.
What remains is not nothing. What remains is absence, which is far heavier.
For those who mourn deeply, death is experienced less as a conclusion and more as a distortion. The world continues, but it does so incorrectly.
Chairs remain where they used to sit, but are now accusatory in their emptiness. A phone may light up, but never with their name. The mind, stubborn and loyal, keeps reaching outward as if the person were still accessible, forming thoughts meant to be shared, only to collide with the unyielding fact that there is no one to receive them.
Death is confronted as a paradox, the person who has died is nowhere to be found, yet they are everywhere in the one who grieves. Memory becomes a kind of haunting in the sense of persistence. The deceased no longer exists in the world as a body, but they continue as impressions, habits, and echoes. The mourner carries them forward, unwillingly at first, then necessarily. In this way, death does not fully erase; it transforms presence into an internal landscape.
This transformation is not gentle.
To mourn deeply is to experience a kind of temporal dislocation. The past becomes vivid, almost painfully so, while the future feels hollowed out. Plans that once included the living now feel like broken sentences. Even joy, when it returns, carries a fracture because it cannot be shared with the one who would have understood it most intimately.
Intimacy in grief is another concept to be understood.
Death strips away the superficial layers of the relationship and reveals its core. The sheer fact that another person mattered, profoundly and irreversibly. Mourning becomes an act of continued love in the face of impossibility. You cannot speak to them, yet you address them in your thoughts. You cannot touch them, yet you feel their absence as if it were a physical wound.
In this sense, death teaches something severe and honest; that presence is not guaranteed, that connection is fragile, and that love, once formed, does not simply vanish when its object does. Instead, it lingers, searching for a place to go, often settling into the quiet rituals of remembrance.
And so the mourner lives in two worlds at once. The external world, where the person is gone, and an internal one, where they remain vividly, stubbornly alive. The tension between these worlds is the essence of grief. It does not resolve cleanly. It softens, perhaps with time, but it never fully disappears.
Because to deeply mourn someone is to carry the shape of their absence forever, and to learn, slowly and painfully, how to live around it.
Like any other day, you stood in front of his grave, in front of the weeping angel hunched over the stone.
It was a rather beautiful day. The sun was out, occasionally hiding behind the grey clouds that passed its way. There was a subtle breeze, fresh enough for you to wear a thin coat yet chilly enough to make the ring on your finger feel like ice. You greeted the stone like normal, going down on your knees, offering fresh flowers and just staring at the characters of his name.
There were many things to talk about; how your life was now that he was gone, what was happening in the world you both knew as jujutsu sorcery, how sad you still were…
“I read a book.” You spoke, voice cutting the gentle silence of the cemetery. “I finished it this morning. I think you would like it.”
You waited, hearing nothing but cars pass by and the gentle rustle of leaves on the trees. In your mind, he responded back. He would ask you follow up questions. Did you like the book? Did you find yourself relating to the main character? Did you underline quotes you found inspiring or thought consuming? Would you read it again? What was it about?
No one responded; however.
“‘There must be an expiration date on the soul like there is on the body’,” You repeated the memorized line to the tombstone. “Once I read it, it made me question something. I didn’t understand it, partially. How does the soul differentiate from the body? Do you know, Kento?”
You were met with silence again. Your mind was filled with silence and not his usual voice you grew to love. If there was no voice, then he had no answer. He could not answer your question either.
“Do you think there is an expiration date on the soul?”
Once again, there was no answer in your mind. Biting your lip to stall the tears brewing in your eyes, you changed the subject. One that brought irritation to your stomach just at the mere thought of it.
“I met someone last night,” you hesitated on telling him, afraid of what he would think. “On the subway. He told me if I knew what I was doing. What does that even mean? He seemed like those crazy people who rant about how society gives up on certain types of people. I think he was aiming it at me.”
You swallowed, jaw tightening slightly. “He asked about my ring.” Your fingers curled instinctively, thumb pressing hard against the band like you could shield it from memory alone. “He wouldn’t stop looking at it. It was like it meant something to him. Like it was something he had the right to question.”
You continued, “He is a lawyer. He had that gold pin on his lapel, but that means nothing to me. He means nothing to me. He doesn’t know who I am and what I’ve experienced.”
Silence stretched again, but it wasn’t gentle anymore. A quiet and humorless laugh escaped your mouth. “He said I keep touching it. Like I didn’t know that. Like it was some kind of habit he could dissect and label.”
Sharp nails dug into your palm. “He doesn’t know anything,” Your voice sharpened, cracking at the edges now. “He doesn’t know where it came from, what it was supposed to be, he doesn’t know you-”
Your breath faltered, but you pushed through it, anger carrying you where grief couldn’t.
“But I’m wearing it, aren’t I? I didn’t throw it away or lose it. Isn’t that enough?”
Silence answered you again. This time, it made something in your chest twist. Your expression tightened, something painted slipping through the cracks of your anger.
“You were supposed to give this to me.”
The accusation wasn’t even aimed at the lawyer on the subway. It wasn’t even aimed at the world. It landed here; on the grave.
“And now some stranger, some man who thinks he understands people, looks at it like it’s wrong,” Your voice dropped to a whisper, trembling now. “Like I’m wrong.”
“I’m not wrong.”
“Right?”
