Alternate Universe short stories of Ciri: both as a witcher and empress. Again, canon hounds, these are headcanons, more fiction than fiction, imagination at work.... or a fever dream :D.
Might expound on some of these on AO3 when I'm not busy.
I keep thinking about this ask. Maybe it's a bit egotistical, but I keep asking myself, if I believed very strongly there was a possibility Gojo might die, why did I also proceed to write scenes and endings that have myy oc go on?
I've been very busy and haven't been able to write much, but myy oc is not watching the Gojo vs Sukuna fight, they weren't able to bring themself to watch it. This is because myy oc does not feel that Satoru is thinking of saving Megumi. They want to believe he has a plan for saving Megumi, but they aren't sure and haven't seen any evidence of one.
And then I read this meta, by one of my favorite meta posters on the whole site. And I think this is why I never started imaging scenes, once I realized this was becoming an au, where myy oc dies before Gojo.
For one, I don't think he grieves like a normal person. The best he'd be able to come up with is probably defeating whoever killed myy oc. And after responding to this ask, if you want a Shibuya death for them, it would probably happen due to Sukuna's rampage.
Myy oc doesn't die there, because where Gojo is a person who, if he was changing at all, was shifting very, very slowly, myy oc's whole deal is change, it's their power, it's in the name I use for them when I'm writing things for myself or talking about this au with with my friend.
If they die, it's going to be fighting Kenjaku because they want to do it alone. They want to spare the children the fate of killing and dying, they want to give the children a different answer than the one they found at a young age - that they were never the one who was going to be saved.
Where Gojo and Getou's journey as teenagers was finding and losing the one person who was supposed to understand them, Shoko's journey is about being left behind and underestimated left with the bloody aftermath, myy oc's journey is a little opposite. Being surrounded by strength that is sometimes working together, for the first time they believe that maybe they won't die because the people they care for survive, maybe their fate is more than death, that it's okay to fight hard enough that you survive too.
And that perspective changes. They keep in touch with their family (where Suguru kills his) and old middle school/hometown friends (even though they lie to those people about their sorcerer life).
Unlike Gojo, for whom Suguru's death signifies the end of the only person who was his equal, myy oc has already moved on, they have other people who they care for who have survived.
In the Nightmare ficlet, myy oc knows what Satoru wants - which is for the new generation to be strong enough to fight physically. What myy oc wants is for their hearts to be strong enough to open up to one another, to willingly be weak because they know they're strong enough to have others around them.
The crisis they're having right now, is that they have been deeply hurt by opening themselves up to Satoru and Megumi and Tsumiki, because all of those people are dead, or in Megumi's case, lost. Their old mentor (an oc sorcerer named Takao) wanted myy oc to be a sorcerer, first and last, and myy oc deeply resents him for it, for impressing upon their childhood that sorcery set them apart, made them dispensable, and trying to make them internalize that their life not quantifiable compared to the people they were meant to save - that it's too different to compare.
It's really interesting to see at this point, given the parallel happenings in bsd and jjk, that the absurdist bsd and the tragic jjk are starting to once again diverge, showing us the relative differences between dazai and gojo who are playing the same type and role in their respective stories, but dazai is starting to believe in connection, in allies, in making a life that doesn't have to make logical sense to be valuable, vs gojo who is still fundamentally a sorcerer, that's what he goes back to.
