Heaven Forbid
Best friend Satoru has started dating but why does it bother you so much?
Part-6 | Masterlist - Play this!
Back when you and Satoru were eight years old, the teenage years of your life still seemed impossibly far away, and everything about the world felt simpler than it would later become. Every summer, just as reliably as the seasons changed, both you and Satoru would make their way to the outskirts of Tokyo, where Satoru’s grandmother lived in a quiet little house surrounded by fields, narrow roads, fruit trees, and enough flowers to make the entire place smell sweet by evening. She had never been particularly fond of the lavish lifestyle
Satoru’s family was accustomed to, and after her husband passed away, she had chosen to live a quieter life away from the noise of the city. She loved growing her own vegetables, tending to her flowers, picking fruit from the trees in the morning, and sitting outside with a cup of tea while the breeze moved through the fields. She would always say that there was something about the countryside that made a person remember who they really were, although eight-year-old you had mostly been interested in finding out how many strawberries you could eat before she noticed that she was short on them for making dessert.
There were always neighborhood children around during those summers, and one boy in particular seemed to appear wherever you went. His name was Rintaro, and Satoru already knew him from previous summers, having played with him whenever he visited his grandmother.
You barely remembered him from the years before, but that changed rather quickly when you were eight. Rintaro was around more often that summer, and whenever Satoru was helping his grandmother with something, you would wander off and play with him. It was completely innocent to you. You were eight, after all. You climbed trees, chased butterflies, played stupid games with sticks, and argued about which one of you could run faster. You never thought there was anything remotely suspicious about it, but Satoru apparently had a very different interpretation of the situation.
The thing with Satoru is that he noticed each and every thing or detail about your life and you simply didn't have any sort of clue about it.
One afternoon, Satoru had been outside helping his grandmother carry baskets of vegetables from the garden, while you were sitting on the grass with Rintaro, attempting to build something that vaguely resembled a miniature house out of twigs and feathers. By the time Satoru came back inside, you were laughing about something Rintaro had said, and the moment his big blue eyes landed on you, his expression changed. He didn’t say anything at first, but you knew him well enough to recognize the pout forming on his cute little face. You looked up at him with a grin, completely aware that you were about to make his afternoon considerably worse.
“What?” you asked.
“Wha-nothing!” he shrugged.
“You look angry....Toru, are you tired?"
“NO! Just a little sleepy is all.”
You glanced at his face, the pout was still there and so was the irritation in his tone “Okay...hey! Look we made this house.”
“Together? It doesn't even look like a house, a light blow will break it, just like that, besides...it looks hideous".
You tilted your head, studying him for a moment before the most mischievous smile spread across your face. “Hideous? Rintaro likes it...maybe he is my best friend now.”
Satoru’s head snapped toward you so quickly that you almost laughed.
“WHAT? No, he's not.”
You blinked “No?”
“No.”
“But... Rintaro is always kind so why?”
“Because I AM your best friend.”
You burst out laughing, which only seemed to make him more offended. He crossed his arms over his chest and turned his face away from you with the dramatic dignity of a child who had just suffered the greatest betrayal imaginable. “You can’t just replace me.”
“I didn’t replace you Toru"
“You just said that he is your best friend.”
“I said maybeeeee”
“Same thing.”
“Uhhh, no it 's not.”
And then, because eight-year-old Satoru Gojo apparently possessed the emotional maturity of a particularly antsy cat, he stopped talking to you entirely. He wandered into the living room where his grandmother had just placed a large plate of freshly cut watermelon on the table for the two of you, stared at it for several seconds, and then picked up the entire plate.
You watched him in disbelief.
“Hey! Where are you going with that?” He didn’t even look back. “These are for my best friend.”
You frowned. “But I’m your best friend.”
“I’ll make a new one.” Your mouth fell open, you suddenly struggling for a comeback for a mess that you created.
“You can’t do that.”
“No? Why not?”
“Because I AM your best friend.”
He finally turned around, the most smug little expression appearing on his face. “Then don’t have another one.”
You huffed, puffing your cheeks out as you crossed your arms, while Satoru walked away with the watermelon like he’d just won some enormous game. At the time, neither of you understood what was actually happening. You only knew that Satoru hated the idea of someone else becoming important to you, and apparently that was enough to make him steal an entire plate of watermelon.
Growing up, it would happen again, and again, and again.
As you grew older, the circumstances changed, but Satoru’s jealousy never really disappeared. He never minded you having friends, no...not really. He understood that you needed people outside of him, and he never wanted to become the kind of person who controlled who you spoke to or where you went. But there was a very specific point at which his patience seemed to vanish, and that was whenever someone began taking up too much of your attention.
If you started sitting beside someone else at lunch too often, Satoru would suddenly find a reason to sit beside you. If you began spending more time with somebody after school, he’d conveniently appear with some ridiculous excuse about needing your help. If you laughed too hard at somebody else’s jokes, he’d casually show up leaning his weight with his hand on your shoulder and would spend the rest of the afternoon trying to make you laugh harder..."Bro- that guy was so lame, I feel bad for you having to laugh at those lukewarm jokes" He never admitted what he was doing, and you never called him out on it because, at that age, you simply thought it was another strange part of being best friends.
The funny thing was that Satoru didn’t seem to care nearly as much when he was the one making new friends. He could spend hours with people without giving it a second thought, and you rarely felt the need to interfere. You trusted him completely. Besides, whenever he started getting close to somebody new, you didn’t want to become the nosy female best friend who suddenly demanded all of his attention. You wanted him to have his own life.
Well, congratulations because you are that nosy female best friend now but there was one thing you noticed as you grew older.
The jealousy changed when dating entered the picture for him. Friendship was one thing, romance was another and somewhere along the way, you began realizing that you were jealous too.
It started on a random day. You would see a girl laughing with Satoru and feel something uncomfortable twist inside your stomach. You would hear someone mention that he had been talking to somebody after class and suddenly find yourself wondering who she was, what she looked like, whether she was prettier than you, and why you cared so much. You would watch girls approach him simply because he had grown into that ridiculous combination of tall, broad, handsome, and unfairly beautiful, and you would pretend you didn’t notice when they flirted with him.
You noticed.
Now, the thing is that you too seemed to notice each and every thing about Satoru, it's just that he wasn't aware as well.
And that realization became harder to ignore because you’d dated other people by then. You had gone out with handsome guys, funny guys, popular guys, athletic guys, guys who were taller than you and guys who were more muscular than Satoru, but somehow none of them ever made you feel what white haired, blue-eyed freak would.
It didn’t matter how attractive they were.
They weren’t him.
They weren’t the nerdy boy who used to steal watermelon and pout when you played with someone else. They weren’t the boy who had sat beside you in that tiny treehouse while the rain poured outside. They weren’t the boy whose terrible jokes could still make you laugh when you were in the worst mood imaginable. They weren’t the person whose presence had become so deeply embedded in your life that sometimes you didn’t even realize you were looking for him until you couldn’t find him.
And Satoru was beautiful.
There was absolutely no point pretending otherwise.
You weren’t some innocent monk, some sheltered girl who had never noticed attraction before. You were human, sometimes a vile one at that...but still human. You could be petty, jealous, angry, possessive, hurt, unreasonable, and occasionally downright spiteful. You could recognize when somebody was attractive, and you could certainly recognize what Satoru had grown into.
You simply had never wanted anyone the way you wanted him and the thought of it being too late for you was eating you from inside.
The realization came almost reluctantly, but once it settled inside you, there was no unknowing it, no stopping it from taking form. Perhaps that was why the party had affected you so so badly.
Because you had spent years watching Satoru get jealous over you while convincing yourself it meant nothing. You had watched him pull you closer in crowded streets, rest his head on your shoulder, find excuses to sit beside you, flirt with you just enough to make your heart stumble, and then act as though none of it had happened.
You had never been certain whether he meant any of it.
But that night, watching him sit beside Utahime for hours, watching him laugh with her and give her all the attention you had become accustomed to receiving, something inside you had finally snapped.
And then there was Sukuna.
Sukuna, of all people...
He was the kind of person Satoru had always hated. The kind of person whose reputation preceded him, the kind of person who could walk into a room and make everyone instinctively look his way. He was confident, intimidating, attractive, and completely aware of the effect he had on girls.
More importantly, Satoru hated the man's guts. That was all you needed to know. You didn’t have to say it aloud. You didn’t even have to think about it for very long.
Sukuna was the key.
If Satoru wanted to spend the entire night making you feel replaceable, then perhaps you could remind him that you were perfectly capable of making him feel the exact same way. Maybe it was childish, maybe it was cruel, or maybe it was the worst possible decision you could have made.
But sitting there that night, watching Satoru’s eyes follow you while you sat on Sukuna’s lap, you realized something that frightened you more than the jealousy itself.
You didn’t just want Satoru to notice. You wanted him to hurt, just like you were and deep inside, beneath all the anger and alcohol and wounded pride, you wanted to know whether seeing you with someone else would finally make him feel what you had been feeling all along.
-
The restaurant had been almost offensively romantic, which was probably why Sukuna must have chosen it. Warm amber lights hung low above the tables, soft music played somewhere beneath the murmur of conversations, and every few minutes a server would pass by carrying plates that looked far too beautiful to eat. Sukuna sat across from you with one arm resting lazily beside his plate, occasionally reaching over to steal something from yours despite having ordered the exact same dish for himself, and you had to admit that the date was going far better than it had any right to.
He was attentive without being overbearing, funny without trying too hard, and, much to your annoyance, remarkably good at making you forget why you had agreed to come here in the first place. You had spent the first half of dinner telling yourself that this was nothing more than a game, that you were simply borrowing Sukuna’s presence to make a certain white-haired idiot jealous, but somewhere between sharing dessert and arguing over which of you had chosen the better appetizer, you found yourself actually laughing at his jokes.
Then your phone buzzed against the table, and you glanced at it before remembering the real reason you had been so eager to make this date public. You looked at Sukuna’s hand resting beside yours, then at his face, and with the most innocent expression you could manage, you reached across the table and intertwined your fingers with his. Sukuna looked down at your hands, then up at you, one eyebrow rising in silent amusement. “You’re planning something,” he said, and you smiled as you lifted your phone.
“Nouuuu, I’m taking a picture...Kuna”
“That’s not what I asked, pretty."
Wait...was he getting jealous?
“Hey— I just like to post updates on my profile.” He gave a low laugh but didn’t move his hand, and you quickly snapped the picture, making sure his fingers and his gorgeous rings were clearly intertwined with yours, before uploading it to your Instagram story with the simplest caption you could think of: getting to know him. You stared at it for half a second before locking your phone, and something wickedly satisfied curled inside your chest, blooming into the silent victory of getting to his nerves...because you knew Satoru. You knew him better than you knew most people, perhaps better than you knew yourself most times, and you knew there was absolutely no chance that blocking him had actually stopped him from seeing your life. Somewhere, somehow, there would be a fake account, a second account, a friend’s account, perhaps even some ridiculous anonymous account with a profile picture of a golden retriever and three followers, and he would find your story.
You knew because you too had a fake account to stalk him.
What you didn’t know was that Satoru had already been playing the same damn game. He had seen the story within minutes, stared at the picture for far longer than he wanted to admit, zoomed it to make sure it was your pretty fingers. Oh! so she matched her nail paint with his dick's eyes, cool. He then laughed once under his breath because, of course, you had chosen Sukuna. Of all the people in the damn world, of all the men you could have chosen to have gone out with, you had chosen the one person Satoru had spent years warning you about. He didn’t even need proof to know that this wasn’t some sudden romantic revelation. He knew you. You never posted temporary people.
You hated gossip, hated people dissecting your life, and had always been particularly careful about what parts of your personal life you put online. If you posted someone holding your hand, there was usually a reason. Which meant this was not about Sukuna. It was about him. It had to be. And perhaps that should have made Satoru feel victorious, but instead it left something bitter sitting beneath his tongue because he had no idea what you were trying to accomplish anymore, and he wasn’t entirely sure what he was trying to accomplish either. Still, if you wanted to play, he could play too!
So later that evening, when Utahime suggested getting ice cream, Satoru drove them to the tiny little shop hidden at the edge of the city, the one you and he had discovered years ago during one of your ridiculous late-night bicycle rides, after being burnt out from finishing your assignments. It was the place where you had once sat across from him at nearly three in the morning, lecturing him between spoonfuls of ice cream about how much sugar he consumed, while he had laughed and ordered another serving purely to annoy you (Not that he wasn't craving it). Now Utahime sat beside him, laughing at something he said, and Satoru lifted his phone. He took a photograph of the ice cream, then angled the camera just enough to catch Utahime’s hand reaching into the frame. He posted it with no caption. He didn’t need one.
He knew you would understand.
And you did. Hours later, lying awake in bed with the room dark except for the glow of your phone, you saw his story and felt your stomach drop before you could stop it. The photograph itself wasn’t even particularly intimate, which somehow made it worse. So he is having fun with her? You resented that you knew exactly where he was, how he could move with sharing all your favourite places with her. You knew that little shop. You knew the table they were sitting at by heart. You knew which corner he always preferred because the light above it flickered and he used to complain about it every single time saying he gets a headache because of them.
You knew the exact flavour of ice cream he had probably ordered because he had been eating the same one since he was sixteen. You stared at the screen until the photograph blurred slightly due to something warm in your vision, then scoffed at yourself and threw the phone onto the bed as though that would somehow make the feeling disappear.
The scoreboard said Satoru 2. You 1.
You had started the game, and apparently he had decided he was going to win it. The ridiculous thing was that neither of you had to do this. You could have simply spoken. You could have walked into his apartment, sat down, yelled, cried, admitted you were hurt, admitted you were jealous, admitted that the entire party had gone wrong because neither of you knew how to say what you actually wanted to say. But instead you were both behaving like two idiots with access to social media, and apparently that was enough to turn years of friendship into some twisted competition where whoever looked happier won.
The next day, Sukuna dropped you near the lecture hall, his hand intertwined with yours as the two of you walked across campus, and for a brief moment you almost managed to convince yourself that this was normal. You almost managed to pretend that you were simply a girl walking beside a handsome guy who had taken her out on a date, rather than someone who was constantly measuring every moment against another person who wasn’t even there.
That was util you saw the tree. The old tree near the centre of campus, the one with the thick roots rising slightly above the ground and the broad branches that had provided shade during countless afternoons, and the sight of it pulled you backward through years of memories so quickly it almost hurt. You and Satoru had spent hours beneath that tree. You would lie with your head in his lap while absentmindedly twisting little flowers between your fingers, talking about absolutely nothing while he studied, and he would occasionally look down at you over the top of his book and tell you that you were distracting him, even though the tiny smile on his face always gave him away.
You knew what that place meant for you both. Which was why the sight of Utahime sitting beneath it made something inside you go completely still. She was there with Satoru, laughing at something he had said, and you realised with a strange little jolt that you had never even known she was at your university. Perhaps she had been there all along. Perhaps she had come from one of those formal circles and clan gatherings Satoru always complained about, the kind of traditional social events he used to swear he hated attending, surrounded by people who cared more about names and families than actual human beings. You had always teased him that he would eventually marry some terrifyingly elegant woman from one of those circles, and he would always insist that women like that weren’t his type. Yet there she was, sitting beneath your tree, and when she shifted closer to him and laughed, you felt something acidic crawl up your throat.
Apparently, he had been lying.
You kept walking beside Sukuna, forcing yourself not to look back, forcing yourself to keep your fingers comfortably intertwined with his even though suddenly the gesture felt like a performance you were no longer enjoying. You wanted Satoru to see you. You wanted him to hurt. You wanted him to realise that you could move on too, that you weren’t going to sit around waiting for him while he paraded his new relationship in front of you. Yet when you looked at Utahime leaning toward him beneath that tree, you realised that victory didn’t taste anything like you had imagined it would. It tasted bitter and disgusting. It tasted like swallowing spit from your enemy's shoes. It tasted like looking at the person who had been your home for most of your life and realising that someone else was beginning to occupy spaces you had once believed belonged to you. You hated yourself for thinking that way. You hated the jealousy. You hated how childish it was.
Most of all, you hated that despite everything you had done to make him jealous, you were the one who kept ending up hurt.
Two days later, you found yourself standing in the front row of Sukuna’s football match wearing his jersey, surrounded by screaming students and the chaos of the crowd, and for a little while you managed to feel almost triumphant again. Sukuna had looked genuinely surprised when he saw you there, and you had smiled brightly enough that anyone watching would have assumed you were hopelessly smitten. The game itself was intense, and every time Sukuna touched the ball, the crowd erupted, while you shouted his name until your throat hurt, fully aware that if Satoru happened to see you like this, wearing another man’s jersey and cheering for him like you belonged there, it would probably drive him insane.
You had crossed some invisible line now. You knew that. This was no longer just a harmless story posted on Instagram. You were building an entire alternate reality around a person you barely knew anymore, and the worst part was that you weren’t even sure you wanted the reality itself. You wanted the reaction. You wanted him to look at you and feel something, anything. When the final whistle blew and Sukuna’s team won, the stadium erupted, and Sukuna turned toward the crowd, searching for someone. You assumed it was you. For one ridiculous second, your heart lifted. Then he ran toward the fence and wrapped his arms around one of the cheerleaders, Ana, who had been waiting for him at the front. You stood there, still wearing his jersey, watching them hug, and instead of feeling jealous of Ana, you felt something much stranger. You felt nothing. Not the sharp, ugly ache you felt whenever you saw Satoru with Utahime. Not the sudden need to look away. Not the jealousy that made your chest hurt. Nothing at all. You simply watched. And that was when the question finally arrived, quiet and devastating: if you were genuinely falling for Sukuna, if you were actually beginning something with him, why didn’t this hurt? Why was your heart perfectly capable of watching another girl wrap her arms around him, while the sight of Satoru merely sitting beside Utahime could make you feel physically sick?
That night, when you finally returned home and crawled into bed, you made the mistake of checking your phone again. Satoru’s story appeared near the top. You tapped it and your stomach instantly dropped. He was in Okinawa and he sure as hell wasn't alone. Utahime was there. A weekend away? A fucking weekend getaway? You stared at the screen in disbelief, your thumb shaking and hovering uselessly over it while your mind scrambled for some explanation that would make the sight less painful. A date was one thing. Dinner was one thing. Ice cream was one thing. But a trip? That was different. That was planning. That was time. That was choosing to spend an entire weekend with someone. You threw your phone onto the mattress and covered your face with both hands, feeling utterly ridiculous because none of this was supposed to matter. You had started this. You had posted the first picture. You had chosen Sukuna. You had turned this into a game. And yet somehow you were the only person losing.
Why, why, why, why?
As if your emotional disaster wasn’t already sufficient, your academic life had decided to collapse alongside it. You were failing exams you should have passed easily, missing things during lectures, forgetting deadlines, staring at notes without actually reading them, and every time you sat down to study, your brain would automatically reach for the same old memory. Satoru teaching you, Satoru leaning over your desk, Satoru explaining the same concept three different ways because you had somehow misunderstood all three, Satoru tapping your forehead with his pen when you stopped paying attention, muttering that you were hopeless while secretly making sure you understood everything before the exam. He had been part of your routine for so long that you hadn’t realised how much of your life had quietly been built around him until he was suddenly gone from it. Now you had no best friend, no peace, no decent grades, and apparently no functioning love life either. You had managed to lose almost everything simultaneously, all because you had been too stubborn to admit that what actually hurt wasn’t Utahime, or Sukuna, or the party, or even the stupid Instagram stories. It was Satoru.
He called you again that evening. Then again the next day. Then again after that. You watched his name appear on your screen until you couldn’t bear it anymore, but you still didn’t answer. You eventually listened to one of his voicemails, and his voice came through sounding frustrated and exhausted when he told you that this entire thing had gone far enough, that your friends weren’t idiots, that everyone could tell something was wrong, and that you both needed to stop behaving like children and talk. Shoko had apparently told him almost exactly the same thing, though you didn’t know that yet. Somewhere behind the scenes, your friends were desperately trying to push two impossibly stubborn people toward the conversation they should have had weeks ago, but neither of you was willing to take the first step.
Satoru had your email. He knew the time you reached university. He knew where you lived. He knew which café you went to when you were stressed and which library corner you preferred when you actually wanted to study. You knew his schedule almost as well as your own. There were a thousand ways to reach each other. A thousand opportunities. Yet neither of you did.
Beneath all the jealousy and anger, you began to wonder whether he had actually stopped trying because you weren’t worth the effort anymore.
Maybe the person you had known your entire life had finally decided that losing you was easier than fighting for you. Maybe all those years of friendship had only seemed permanent because you had never imagined a world in which either of you could choose to walk away.
You sat alone in your room, scrolling through photographs you should have deleted, finding pictures of Satoru asleep on your couch, Satoru making stupid faces at the camera, Satoru standing beside you beneath the old tree, you wearing Satoru's sunglasses, Satoru with his arm around your shoulders, and each photograph seemed to carry its own little piece of a life you could no longer access. You had thought jealousy would make him come back. You had thought making him hurt would make him understand. Instead, all it had done was teach you exactly how much it hurt to watch him live without you.
The scoreboard said Satoru 4, You 1.
And suddenly the score didn’t feel funny anymore.
You had started this game because you wanted him to feel jealous, but somewhere along the way you had forgotten what you were actually trying to win. You weren’t even trying to prove that you could make Satoru regret losing you. You had simply wanted your best friend to look at you and realise that you mattered, and instead of telling him that, you had chosen every possible way to make him believe the opposite. Maybe that was your punishment. Maybe it was karma. Maybe it was simply what happened when two people cared too much and were both too terrified to say the one thing that could have saved them. You closed your eyes and let your head fall against the wall, feeling the exhaustion finally settle into your bones, and for the first time since the party, you allowed yourself to consider the possibility you had been avoiding from the beginning.
Maybe it was time to let him go.
Maybe it was time to stop waiting for the fantasy you had built around him, stop expecting him to magically understand what you couldn’t bring yourself to say, stop measuring your worth by whether he looked jealous when another man held your hand, and stop pretending that you were winning when every victory left you feeling emptier than the last. Maybe Satoru had already moved on. Maybe Utahime was genuinely becoming important to him, and was a nice girl to be with. Maybe Sukuna was simply someone who had entered your life at the wrong moment, caught in the middle of a war that had never really been about him. And maybe, after years of having Satoru beside you, you had finally managed to lose the one person you had always believed you would never have to lose.
The thought hurt so badly that you finally stopped fighting it.
You looked at your phone one last time, thinking about his previous attempts to talk to you and for several long seconds you simply stared at it, wondering how something as simple as answering a phone, admitting your feelings could possibly feel more terrifying than losing the person on the other end.
Then you turned the screen face down. For the first time, you didn’t check his story, you didn’t wonder where he was doing anymore, you didn’t try to calculate the score.
You simply lay there in the darkness because you lost it all, alone with the awful realisation that perhaps the game had never been about who could make the other jealous.
I'm so deep in love with you, what do I do?
Wassupp guys…
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