synopsis: satoru gojo hasn't slept in thirty-one days because god told him.
god has told satoru gojo the world would end if he closes his eyes, and he believes him.
notes: hellooo!! this is my new on-going gojo x reader fanfiction. ofc its angst and slowburn what else can u expect from me??!! comment if u wanna be added to the taglist
There were roses on your mother.
The kind that bloom from the inside out, purple going green at the edges.
They moved.
Monday on her forearm, Thursday at the jaw.
You were four and you would press one finger to the center of a petal and watch it go white under your touch and fill back in slow.
You thought everyone's mother grew like that.
You thought it was something bodies did, something ordinary as weather.
She eventually left him, took you and walked out of a house to a one-bedroom with a deadbolt she checked three times before sleeping.
The hum of a microwave at midnight because she got home too late to cook and too tired to eat but you needed to eat, so she stood there watching the plate turn behind the yellow glass, and that was dinner.
She worked for rent and electricity and the coat you needed in October and the inhaler you needed in March and she poured herself into the cracks until there was nothing left of her by evening.
You loved her.
Of course, you loved her.
--
What no one will ever understand about you, is that nothing happened.
You want there to be a door, a moment someone came into the room and broke the part of you that was supposed to want this.
But there is no door.
You came into the world like this — pre-emptied, the pilot light out before anyone thought to check.
As far back as you can reach into yourself, you find the same thing: flatness.
There is no sadness.
At least sadness you could hold in your hands and show to people and say here, look, this is mine, this is what's wrong.
You went to school.
You sat where they told you to sit.
The other kids moved around you in their herds, bright and frantic, grabbing at each other, wanting so much so loudly — a spot on the swings, a best friend, the approval of their peers.
You watched them with genuine curiosity, the way you'd watch an anthill.
Why.
Why do you try so hard.
Why do you want things.
What does wanting feel like.
Does it hurt.
How do you do it.
You had nothing to give them.
You'd open your mouth and reach down for something to say and your hand would come back empty every time, lowering a bucket into a well and pulling up only the rope.
You grew a second skin around you and inside it, at least, you didn't have to pretend.
--
You are twenty-three years old now.
You are in the back of a car that smells like vinyl cleaner coffee.
There is a woman driving whose name you've already forgotten and a stack of intake paperwork on the seat beside you, and outside the window the world is going about its Tuesday: a man hosing down a sidewalk, a dog tied to a parking meter with its chin on its paws, a neon sign for a nail salon with the N burnt out so it just says ail.
And you are thinking:
I am so tired of almost.
You keep getting found.
You keep being pulled back by some ordinary grace that feels more like cruelty — a roommate's early shift, a dosage you got wrong, a fall that wasn't far enough, your own stupid shaking hands.
You are not brave.
You are not brave and you are not crying out for help and you are not doing this for attention.
You are just bad at the one thing you have ever wanted to do.
I can't even do this right.
The stranger woman is talking, something about the facility, the program, visiting hours.
You watch her mouth move and the sounds enter your ear and fall to the floor of your skull like coins.
You look at your hands in your lap, there's a raw place at your wrist.
It doesn't hurt, nothing hurts anymore, and that's the problem.
You'd kill for pain, you'd get on your knees and beg for the kind of sharp bright feeling that would prove you're still in here.
The building is painfully ordinary.
Beige brick. Sliding doors.
A woman behind a desk who smiles at you soft but careful.
They take your bag.
They take your phone.
They take the string out of your hoodie and the laces out of your shoes and the spiral wire out of your notebook, and you think, distantly, you could have at least left me the notebook, I don't even write in it, I haven't had a thought worth keeping in months.
They give you socks, gray, with little rubber grips on the soles.
Grippy sock jail, that's what your roommate would have called it.
She was not a person who made jokes often.
She was the kind of person who called 911 with a perfectly steady voice.
A nurse walks you down a hallway that smells like cafeteria food and something chemicals.
She talks, she points, she shows you a room with two beds, industrial frames.
A window that opens four inches.
A bathroom with no lock.
"You'll meet with the doctor in the morning," she says.
"Okay," you say, and it is the first word you've spoken in a long time.
At least since the floor of your apartment with the ceiling light buzzing overhead and your roommate saying your name, saying it again, and again, and again.
You sit on the bed and the mattress crinkles.
Nothing here will fix me.
It's a thing that is true and will still be true when you leave this place, if you leave this place.
The pills won't fix you because there is no chemical slightly off-balance that a milligram of something could nudge back into place.
The therapy won't fix you because you don't have a hole to fix.
You have a house with no foundation.
Nothing will fix me.
Only God could do something like that.
Only God, if there were one.
---
Gojo Satoru came into the world white-haired and screaming and strange.
That's the truth of it.
The nurses passed him around.
What a pretty baby.
They pinched his cheek, help him up to the light like a shiny rock they'd found at the bottom of a river and couldn't quite identify.
His mother looked at him then looked away.
There is a photograph somewhere — hospital bed, her arms around him, her face forcing a smile.
He was too pale, too bright, too loud, and she was twenty-four and already tired enough.
He doesn't remember this, of course.
In the version Satoru remembers, the nurses wept.
They wept because they knew, of course.
Even then, birth-slick and barely breathing, the holy light was already coming off him and they could feel it, they could feel that this was not an ordinary child, and they held him not out of duty but out of reverence, and his mother —
Well, his mother loved him obviously.
Of course she did, what kind of question is that.
---
He was raised by a woman named Ayumi who was not his mother.
She had thick hands and a small mouth and she was paid to keep him fed and dressed and out of the way, and she did all three efficiently well.
When he misbehaved — and he misbehaved often, he was loud and fast— she'd pinch the soft skin at the back of his arm, the way you'd snap a dog's leash.
He doesn't remember this either.
Or, he remembers it differently.
To him it was just the way prophets are tested in the wilderness.
You don't become what he is without being broken in first.
She was not cruel, she was the first trial and he passed it.
This is what Satoru does.
The world hands him a bruise and he makes it a medal.
---
He grew tall.
Taller than everyone and then taller still, as though his body couldn't stop reaching for the heavens above him.
The white hair never darkened.
The eyes stayed that color — the blue that makes you look away and then look back.
Teachers liked him.
Girls liked him.
Boys hated him or wanted to be him which is the same thing at that age.
He was smart without trying, funny without meaning to be, and beautiful in the way that all beautiful people are when they know it, which is to say: unbearable.
He let them love him and he let them stare.
Of course they stared, of course they did.
He would have stared too.
And somewhere in the years between fourteen and nineteen, slowly, one molecule at a time, his confidence changed.
He didn't just think he was special anymore.
He knew, the way you know the sun will come up.
A certainty so total it didn't need evidence, didn't need agreement, didn't even need to be spoken aloud because the truth doesn't need to announce itself, the truth simply is, and the truth was:
He was chosen.
---
God had sent him.
Not metaphorically, how people say I feel called or I think I have a purpose.
Those are human words for a human feeling, and Satoru was not — he understood this now, — Satoru was not entirely human.
He was the second son, the new covenant.
Sent down in a body that was too tall, too bright, because the vessel had to be strong enough to hold what was inside it, and what was inside it was a light so old it had been burning before the earth had a name.
And he shall come in the form of man but he shall not be of man, and by his suffering shall the world be preserved.
He heard this.
He wasn't crazy, he wanted to be clear about that, he wasn't hearing voices the way those crazy people did but there was a frequency, and it spoke to him, and it was God, and it told him things.
It told him:
You must not stop.
Above all others.
You must not stop.
Because his too-tall, too-pale, too-beautiful body was load-bearing.
The world was a ceiling and he was the pillar, and if he sat down, if he rested, if he closed his eyes and slept, the ceiling would come down on everyone.
Every person in every city on every continent, every child in every bed, every mother cooking dinner, all of it, crushed, because he was selfish enough to rest.
So he didn't rest.
He hadn't slept more than two hours in how long now? A month? Longer?
Time had started folding over on itself, Tuesday becoming Thursday becoming Tuesday again, and he couldn't always tell if the light outside was morning or evening but that didn't matter because the light outside was his doing, it came from him, and as long as he was standing it would keep coming.
You must bear it.
The hatred, the cruelty.
Every sin committed by every person in every second of every day, and there were so many, so many, the numbers were staggering, he had to absorb them.
That was the price, that was the deal and that was why his back—
There were marks on his back.
He had put them there himself, with a belt, methodical, counting.
One hundred for one hundred sins.
And then again.
And again.
Because the sins didn't stop, they never stopped, and his flesh was just flesh, it would heal, it had to because his body was a tool.
Suguru saw his back on an ordinary Wednesday.
---
Suguru is not an easy person to frighten.
He is the kind of person who doesn’t speak a lot but means every word and he’s someone who has thought about things long enough to stop being surprised by them.
He has known Satoru since they were fifteen.
He has watched his confidence curdle year by year, the arrogance shift from charming into something that Satoru was living inside of now like a cathedral he'd built around himself, and he had worried, and he had waited, and he had told himself it's just Satoru, it's just how he is, he's always been like this.
Till he saw his back.
Satoru had been changing.
Just pulling a shirt over his head in his own apartment, easy, careless, the way he did everything.
And Suguru was sitting on the couch and he looked up.
He looked at the mess of welts and broken scabbing, you could see that each mark had been placed with terrible care, and he kept his face very still and he thought:
I have waited too long.
Then Satoru pulled the shirt on and turned around and gave him that enormous white stupid grin that had been getting people to forgive him for things his entire life and said,
"You wanna get food?"
Suguru said, "Yeah."
They got food.
They didn't talk about his back.
Suguru drove home and sat in his car in the parking garage for forty minutes with the engine off.
The next day he made a phone call.
---
Here is how you get a god to walk into a hospital:
You don't call it a hospital, first of all.
Suguru thought about this for a long time.
Longer than he'd thought about most things in his life, and he was a person who thought about everything.
He sat at his kitchen table at 2 AM with a cup of tea and he ran through every possible version of the sentence you need help and he knew, with the same certainty that Satoru knew he was chosen, that none of them would work.
You can't tell a messiah he's sick.
Sickness is for other people.
If Suguru said I think something's wrong, Satoru would smile at him with those horrible blue eyes and say I know, that's why I'm here.
So he didn't say something was wrong.
"There's a place downtown. It’s a building full of people. Their minds... they are under attack, Satoru. Some kind of… I don't know. The doctors can't cure them and they need someone strong enough to go inside and protect them, someone like you."
He said this.
He said this ridiculous phrase looking Satoru right in the face.
Suguru could see him processing it, his eyes went somewhere.
His jaw set.
His fingers, long and pale and shaking slightly from the caffeine.
"How many," Satoru said.
"A lot."
"And the doctors can't…?"
"No."
The refrigerator hummed and a car alarm went off three streets away and stopped.
"Okay," Satoru said. "Okay, yeah. I'll go."
Suguru nodded and pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth.
He did not cry, but a stone sat in his throat for three days afterward.
He drove Satoru to the hospital on a Friday morning.
Satoru talked the entire way.
About the patients and the healing he was going to do, the light he was going to bring into the building.
About how God had been preparing him for this : all the sleepless nights, the suffering, the marks on his back, it was all training Suguru, it was all leading to this, and he should have seen it sooner, and wasn't Suguru smart for figuring it out first.
Suguru kept his eyes on the road and said "yeah" and drove his best friend to a psych ward.
He told himself it was love and it was, it was love, but it was also betrayal, and he knew Satoru would see it that way eventually.
And that's how he ends up here.
In the same fluorescent-lit, floor-wax-and-cafeteria-smelling building where you have been sitting on a plastic-lined mattress for sixteen hours, not doing anything at all except existing in the most minimal sense of the word.
You hear him before you see him.
A laugh that takes up a whole room and then the hallway.
The kind that makes the nurse at the desk look up and the guy watching the Simpsons in the common room turn his head and the girl in the corner with the bitten-down nails stop picking at them for one second.
You're sitting there because the nurse said it would be good for you.
The Simpsons is playing.
The volume is too low to hear the dialogue but you can see the shapes of it, the bright flat cartoon colors, and you are watching it without watching it, the way you do everything now.
Then the door opens.
He takes possession of the air in the room and all the light in it and every pair of eyes that happens to be facing his direction.
He is absurdly tall.
White hair, the white of new paper, of fresh snow, pushed back off his face.
And the eyes.
Not blue like the sky or the ocean.
This is the blue at the center of a flame where the heat is so intense.
He is grinning.
He is looking around the room assessing, pleased, making plans.
The nurse next to him is saying something and he is nodding the way you nod when someone is telling you things that are beneath you.
And then he looks at you.
Oh God, this is hell. Hell has obnoxious blue eyes.
He grins wider, and you think he’s heard your thoughts.
"Hey," he announces to the room.
To the Simpsons and the flickering overhead light and the girl with bitten nails and the guy who talks to himself and you, you especially, you specifically.
if you don't mind this question, I was wondering something about crying during sex.
I know that emi's feelings towards satoru wasn't necessarily romantic, he was just the one person who truly cared and treated her normally but she didn't know how to regulate that normally so I understand that.
But from satoru's side I am slightly confused because I want to say it's obvious he cared for reader but why did he only decide to die for emi and leave reader behind knowing she cared about him? Did he love/care for emi more?
thanks for the question but i think its very important to clarify:
satoru didn't decide to die because emi died. suicide is almost never a decision made in a single moment, it's the accumulation of everything and every little moment that came before it and we see satoru's descent across the last chapters of the story. the heavy drinking, going back to sex work, the constant internal monologue telling him he's a burden, that reader would be better off, that he should just stop existing. those thoughts were always there and emi's death didn't create them.
emi and satoru were two sides of the same coin. i've used twin lotus imagery for a reason. when you watch the person who is most like you go, something in you goes with them. its like the loss confirms everything you already believed about the world. for satoru it was: “see. this is what happens, this is where it ends.”
satoru loved reader romantically but his love for her and his mental illness existed at the same time, one doesn’t cancel out the other. and i think suggesting that someone doesn't love their partner because they end their life is one of the most painful and insensitive things we tell people who survive that kind of loss.
hi so I don’t remember which chapter of crying during sex it was but there was a part where reader x gojo were having sex in a shared room while emi slept, when reader asked him to cum inside did she ever take like birth control or a pill? If not I feel like if reader were to become pregnant the plot would have been cool aswell. and also despite you mentioning emi and satoru’s sibiling-like relationship, did emi ever have any romantic feelings for satoru? I loved this fan fic so much and I stayed up until eight in the morning to finish it😩 I BAWLED.
thank you for reading!
to answer your questions: reader is not going to get pregnant every time someone finishes inside her lol—the female body doesn't work like that, if a pregnancy had been important to the plot i would’ve made it a plot point, but it wasn’t so i didn’t dwell on it!
as for emi's feelings toward satoru—i'd suggest rereading the story, especially the last chapters, and watching the video edit i made. i've answered this one a few times now and i think if you go back with fresh eyes you'll find your answer already there 🤍
Idk if youve ever answered this but how did you come up with the ideas for your fics? Like what was the inspiration bc your recent one is so interesting and unique
i don't really have a method! the stories kind of just... come to me? if i start overthinking nothing good ever happens. i usually start from the character and build the story around them and i'll have a major theme i want to explore and then it unfolds naturally from there.
with crying during sex i wanted to explore sexual trauma, addiction, and how they shape our lives and relationships. with close enough to god's hands the focus is on mental health 🤍
haha Satoru is giving Kai Anderson from american horror story in your new series so far
i have never watched! just from reading the character description though i dont think satoru could be described as a cult leader but that will be get more clear as i develop his character in the next chapters :3
delusional!gojo satoru x reader | psych ward au | explicit | angst | dark themes
a girl with nothing left inside her meets a boy with too much of it. neither of them is getting better but somewhere between the fluorescent lights and the fifteen-minute bed checks, they learn the definition of love.
synopsis: satoru gojo hasn't slept in thirty-one days because god told him.
god has told satoru gojo the world would end if he closes his eyes, and he believes him.
notes: hellooo!! this is my new on-going gojo x reader fanfiction. ofc its angst and slowburn what else can u expect from me??!! comment if u wanna be added to the taglist
There were roses on your mother.
The kind that bloom from the inside out, purple going green at the edges.
They moved.
Monday on her forearm, Thursday at the jaw.
You were four and you would press one finger to the center of a petal and watch it go white under your touch and fill back in slow.
You thought everyone's mother grew like that.
You thought it was something bodies did, something ordinary as weather.
She eventually left him, took you and walked out of a house to a one-bedroom with a deadbolt she checked three times before sleeping.
The hum of a microwave at midnight because she got home too late to cook and too tired to eat but you needed to eat, so she stood there watching the plate turn behind the yellow glass, and that was dinner.
She worked for rent and electricity and the coat you needed in October and the inhaler you needed in March and she poured herself into the cracks until there was nothing left of her by evening.
You loved her.
Of course, you loved her.
--
What no one will ever understand about you, is that nothing happened.
You want there to be a door, a moment someone came into the room and broke the part of you that was supposed to want this.
But there is no door.
You came into the world like this — pre-emptied, the pilot light out before anyone thought to check.
As far back as you can reach into yourself, you find the same thing: flatness.
There is no sadness.
At least sadness you could hold in your hands and show to people and say here, look, this is mine, this is what's wrong.
You went to school.
You sat where they told you to sit.
The other kids moved around you in their herds, bright and frantic, grabbing at each other, wanting so much so loudly — a spot on the swings, a best friend, the approval of their peers.
You watched them with genuine curiosity, the way you'd watch an anthill.
Why.
Why do you try so hard.
Why do you want things.
What does wanting feel like.
Does it hurt.
How do you do it.
You had nothing to give them.
You'd open your mouth and reach down for something to say and your hand would come back empty every time, lowering a bucket into a well and pulling up only the rope.
You grew a second skin around you and inside it, at least, you didn't have to pretend.
--
You are twenty-three years old now.
You are in the back of a car that smells like vinyl cleaner coffee.
There is a woman driving whose name you've already forgotten and a stack of intake paperwork on the seat beside you, and outside the window the world is going about its Tuesday: a man hosing down a sidewalk, a dog tied to a parking meter with its chin on its paws, a neon sign for a nail salon with the N burnt out so it just says ail.
And you are thinking:
I am so tired of almost.
You keep getting found.
You keep being pulled back by some ordinary grace that feels more like cruelty — a roommate's early shift, a dosage you got wrong, a fall that wasn't far enough, your own stupid shaking hands.
You are not brave.
You are not brave and you are not crying out for help and you are not doing this for attention.
You are just bad at the one thing you have ever wanted to do.
I can't even do this right.
The stranger woman is talking, something about the facility, the program, visiting hours.
You watch her mouth move and the sounds enter your ear and fall to the floor of your skull like coins.
You look at your hands in your lap, there's a raw place at your wrist.
It doesn't hurt, nothing hurts anymore, and that's the problem.
You'd kill for pain, you'd get on your knees and beg for the kind of sharp bright feeling that would prove you're still in here.
The building is painfully ordinary.
Beige brick. Sliding doors.
A woman behind a desk who smiles at you soft but careful.
They take your bag.
They take your phone.
They take the string out of your hoodie and the laces out of your shoes and the spiral wire out of your notebook, and you think, distantly, you could have at least left me the notebook, I don't even write in it, I haven't had a thought worth keeping in months.
They give you socks, gray, with little rubber grips on the soles.
Grippy sock jail, that's what your roommate would have called it.
She was not a person who made jokes often.
She was the kind of person who called 911 with a perfectly steady voice.
A nurse walks you down a hallway that smells like cafeteria food and something chemicals.
She talks, she points, she shows you a room with two beds, industrial frames.
A window that opens four inches.
A bathroom with no lock.
"You'll meet with the doctor in the morning," she says.
"Okay," you say, and it is the first word you've spoken in a long time.
At least since the floor of your apartment with the ceiling light buzzing overhead and your roommate saying your name, saying it again, and again, and again.
You sit on the bed and the mattress crinkles.
Nothing here will fix me.
It's a thing that is true and will still be true when you leave this place, if you leave this place.
The pills won't fix you because there is no chemical slightly off-balance that a milligram of something could nudge back into place.
The therapy won't fix you because you don't have a hole to fix.
You have a house with no foundation.
Nothing will fix me.
Only God could do something like that.
Only God, if there were one.
---
Gojo Satoru came into the world white-haired and screaming and strange.
That's the truth of it.
The nurses passed him around.
What a pretty baby.
They pinched his cheek, help him up to the light like a shiny rock they'd found at the bottom of a river and couldn't quite identify.
His mother looked at him then looked away.
There is a photograph somewhere — hospital bed, her arms around him, her face forcing a smile.
He was too pale, too bright, too loud, and she was twenty-four and already tired enough.
He doesn't remember this, of course.
In the version Satoru remembers, the nurses wept.
They wept because they knew, of course.
Even then, birth-slick and barely breathing, the holy light was already coming off him and they could feel it, they could feel that this was not an ordinary child, and they held him not out of duty but out of reverence, and his mother —
Well, his mother loved him obviously.
Of course she did, what kind of question is that.
---
He was raised by a woman named Ayumi who was not his mother.
She had thick hands and a small mouth and she was paid to keep him fed and dressed and out of the way, and she did all three efficiently well.
When he misbehaved — and he misbehaved often, he was loud and fast— she'd pinch the soft skin at the back of his arm, the way you'd snap a dog's leash.
He doesn't remember this either.
Or, he remembers it differently.
To him it was just the way prophets are tested in the wilderness.
You don't become what he is without being broken in first.
She was not cruel, she was the first trial and he passed it.
This is what Satoru does.
The world hands him a bruise and he makes it a medal.
---
He grew tall.
Taller than everyone and then taller still, as though his body couldn't stop reaching for the heavens above him.
The white hair never darkened.
The eyes stayed that color — the blue that makes you look away and then look back.
Teachers liked him.
Girls liked him.
Boys hated him or wanted to be him which is the same thing at that age.
He was smart without trying, funny without meaning to be, and beautiful in the way that all beautiful people are when they know it, which is to say: unbearable.
He let them love him and he let them stare.
Of course they stared, of course they did.
He would have stared too.
And somewhere in the years between fourteen and nineteen, slowly, one molecule at a time, his confidence changed.
He didn't just think he was special anymore.
He knew, the way you know the sun will come up.
A certainty so total it didn't need evidence, didn't need agreement, didn't even need to be spoken aloud because the truth doesn't need to announce itself, the truth simply is, and the truth was:
He was chosen.
---
God had sent him.
Not metaphorically, how people say I feel called or I think I have a purpose.
Those are human words for a human feeling, and Satoru was not — he understood this now, — Satoru was not entirely human.
He was the second son, the new covenant.
Sent down in a body that was too tall, too bright, because the vessel had to be strong enough to hold what was inside it, and what was inside it was a light so old it had been burning before the earth had a name.
And he shall come in the form of man but he shall not be of man, and by his suffering shall the world be preserved.
He heard this.
He wasn't crazy, he wanted to be clear about that, he wasn't hearing voices the way those crazy people did but there was a frequency, and it spoke to him, and it was God, and it told him things.
It told him:
You must not stop.
Above all others.
You must not stop.
Because his too-tall, too-pale, too-beautiful body was load-bearing.
The world was a ceiling and he was the pillar, and if he sat down, if he rested, if he closed his eyes and slept, the ceiling would come down on everyone.
Every person in every city on every continent, every child in every bed, every mother cooking dinner, all of it, crushed, because he was selfish enough to rest.
So he didn't rest.
He hadn't slept more than two hours in how long now? A month? Longer?
Time had started folding over on itself, Tuesday becoming Thursday becoming Tuesday again, and he couldn't always tell if the light outside was morning or evening but that didn't matter because the light outside was his doing, it came from him, and as long as he was standing it would keep coming.
You must bear it.
The hatred, the cruelty.
Every sin committed by every person in every second of every day, and there were so many, so many, the numbers were staggering, he had to absorb them.
That was the price, that was the deal and that was why his back—
There were marks on his back.
He had put them there himself, with a belt, methodical, counting.
One hundred for one hundred sins.
And then again.
And again.
Because the sins didn't stop, they never stopped, and his flesh was just flesh, it would heal, it had to because his body was a tool.
Suguru saw his back on an ordinary Wednesday.
---
Suguru is not an easy person to frighten.
He is the kind of person who doesn’t speak a lot but means every word and he’s someone who has thought about things long enough to stop being surprised by them.
He has known Satoru since they were fifteen.
He has watched his confidence curdle year by year, the arrogance shift from charming into something that Satoru was living inside of now like a cathedral he'd built around himself, and he had worried, and he had waited, and he had told himself it's just Satoru, it's just how he is, he's always been like this.
Till he saw his back.
Satoru had been changing.
Just pulling a shirt over his head in his own apartment, easy, careless, the way he did everything.
And Suguru was sitting on the couch and he looked up.
He looked at the mess of welts and broken scabbing, you could see that each mark had been placed with terrible care, and he kept his face very still and he thought:
I have waited too long.
Then Satoru pulled the shirt on and turned around and gave him that enormous white stupid grin that had been getting people to forgive him for things his entire life and said,
"You wanna get food?"
Suguru said, "Yeah."
They got food.
They didn't talk about his back.
Suguru drove home and sat in his car in the parking garage for forty minutes with the engine off.
The next day he made a phone call.
---
Here is how you get a god to walk into a hospital:
You don't call it a hospital, first of all.
Suguru thought about this for a long time.
Longer than he'd thought about most things in his life, and he was a person who thought about everything.
He sat at his kitchen table at 2 AM with a cup of tea and he ran through every possible version of the sentence you need help and he knew, with the same certainty that Satoru knew he was chosen, that none of them would work.
You can't tell a messiah he's sick.
Sickness is for other people.
If Suguru said I think something's wrong, Satoru would smile at him with those horrible blue eyes and say I know, that's why I'm here.
So he didn't say something was wrong.
"There's a place downtown. It’s a building full of people. Their minds... they are under attack, Satoru. Some kind of… I don't know. The doctors can't cure them and they need someone strong enough to go inside and protect them, someone like you."
He said this.
He said this ridiculous phrase looking Satoru right in the face.
Suguru could see him processing it, his eyes went somewhere.
His jaw set.
His fingers, long and pale and shaking slightly from the caffeine.
"How many," Satoru said.
"A lot."
"And the doctors can't…?"
"No."
The refrigerator hummed and a car alarm went off three streets away and stopped.
"Okay," Satoru said. "Okay, yeah. I'll go."
Suguru nodded and pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth.
He did not cry, but a stone sat in his throat for three days afterward.
He drove Satoru to the hospital on a Friday morning.
Satoru talked the entire way.
About the patients and the healing he was going to do, the light he was going to bring into the building.
About how God had been preparing him for this : all the sleepless nights, the suffering, the marks on his back, it was all training Suguru, it was all leading to this, and he should have seen it sooner, and wasn't Suguru smart for figuring it out first.
Suguru kept his eyes on the road and said "yeah" and drove his best friend to a psych ward.
He told himself it was love and it was, it was love, but it was also betrayal, and he knew Satoru would see it that way eventually.
And that's how he ends up here.
In the same fluorescent-lit, floor-wax-and-cafeteria-smelling building where you have been sitting on a plastic-lined mattress for sixteen hours, not doing anything at all except existing in the most minimal sense of the word.
You hear him before you see him.
A laugh that takes up a whole room and then the hallway.
The kind that makes the nurse at the desk look up and the guy watching the Simpsons in the common room turn his head and the girl in the corner with the bitten-down nails stop picking at them for one second.
You're sitting there because the nurse said it would be good for you.
The Simpsons is playing.
The volume is too low to hear the dialogue but you can see the shapes of it, the bright flat cartoon colors, and you are watching it without watching it, the way you do everything now.
Then the door opens.
He takes possession of the air in the room and all the light in it and every pair of eyes that happens to be facing his direction.
He is absurdly tall.
White hair, the white of new paper, of fresh snow, pushed back off his face.
And the eyes.
Not blue like the sky or the ocean.
This is the blue at the center of a flame where the heat is so intense.
He is grinning.
He is looking around the room assessing, pleased, making plans.
The nurse next to him is saying something and he is nodding the way you nod when someone is telling you things that are beneath you.
And then he looks at you.
Oh God, this is hell. Hell has obnoxious blue eyes.
He grins wider, and you think he’s heard your thoughts.
"Hey," he announces to the room.
To the Simpsons and the flickering overhead light and the girl with bitten nails and the guy who talks to himself and you, you especially, you specifically.
Thankuuuu for liking my poemm, it's like Satoru trying to reassure reader that he's going to heal, they're going to heal and he'll be better for them, when inside and inside knows that it is not even close to the truth and is just falsely trying to make the reader feel better for being there for someone like him😭💔💔💔
I just had this thing stuck in my head for such a long time and I feel so happy that you loved it(・∀・)
thank you so much for this message and for caring so deeply about these characters 🤍
to answer your question yes, i do think satoru loved reader but love alone was never going to be enough for someone like him. he couldn't accept that someone like him deserved to be loved back. he saw himself as rottenand used up and how do you receive and give love when you fundamentally believe you're unworthy of it?
the only moment satoru ever said "i love you" was crying during sex and it was intentional bc sex was the only language he knew and the only moment he felt present enough in his body.
as for reader she's passive by nature. she never chased anything in her life and then satoru disappeared and something in her snapped. she ran toward something for the first time but even that act of love was selfish n wasn't enough to save him from himself.
could they have been better for each other in different circumstances? maybe. if reader had been a little more assertive earlier if satoru had been able to receive even a fraction of what she was offering but as they were, it was always going to end the way it did.
Thankuuuu for liking my poemm, it's like Satoru trying to reassure reader that he's going to heal, they're going to heal and he'll be better for them, when inside and inside knows that it is not even close to the truth and is just falsely trying to make the reader feel better for being there for someone like him😭💔💔💔
I just had this thing stuck in my head for such a long time and I feel so happy that you loved it(・∀・)
thank you so much for this message and for caring so deeply about these characters 🤍
to answer your question yes, i do think satoru loved reader but love alone was never going to be enough for someone like him. he couldn't accept that someone like him deserved to be loved back. he saw himself as rottenand used up and how do you receive and give love when you fundamentally believe you're unworthy of it?
the only moment satoru ever said "i love you" was crying during sex and it was intentional bc sex was the only language he knew and the only moment he felt present enough in his body.
as for reader she's passive by nature. she never chased anything in her life and then satoru disappeared and something in her snapped. she ran toward something for the first time but even that act of love was selfish n wasn't enough to save him from himself.
could they have been better for each other in different circumstances? maybe. if reader had been a little more assertive earlier if satoru had been able to receive even a fraction of what she was offering but as they were, it was always going to end the way it did.
Hii I wrote this little poem/song heavily inspired by crying during sex ((I was sobbing at the ending)) this is probably from Satoru's perspective to the reader, I hope you like it :3
Sunshine will pass
On me, my love
On me
You will see it pass, on me, my love,
On me
Darkened days will pass
Light will cast on us
This growing need will not last
Mercy will be shown
Light will glow
I will be ready for the blow.
WHAAATT i'm gonna cry thank YOU for writing this and for being inspired enough to create something... the fact that crying during sex moved you enough to write a poem :( I love it!! satoru is reading this from heaven and he absolutely approves
Thank you so so much for your message and that you read my thoughts about the story, I am very grateful for this! Thank you for taking the time to explain your thoughts so openly. I completely understand and respect your decision. I can see why an alternative ending wouldn’t fit the story you wanted to tell, and I really appreciate you sharing your perspective on Satoru’s arc.
That being said, I would absolutely love to see more of these characters someday, whether that’s through small moments that happened between chapters, scenes we never got to see, or even the same characters in a completely different AU. I think I just became very attached to all three of them and I’m not quite ready to let them go yet.
I also found Emmi’s death incredibly emotional. The music, the chapter itself, and the way Reader and Satoru found her all stayed with me. Because there was a time skip after Satoru’s death, a part of me still wonders about those moments. I would love to know more about Satoru’s final thoughts, and what happened after that and what Reader thought and felt after everything happened, and even the thoughts they had about each other throughout the story. Their relationship and the way they loved each other affected me so deeply that I’d happily read anything centered around them.
And now you’ve made me curious: could you ever imagine these same characters in a different AU? Do you think that, under different circumstances, Satoru and Reader might have had a chance? Or do you feel that their tragedy is something inevitable, no matter the setting?
Regardless, thank you again for sharing this story. I know I’ll be thinking about these characters for a very long time. 🤍
i'm so glad you got attached to them because honestly so did i haha especially emi. she took on a life of her own
i don't want to promise anything but if i did write something more, it would probably be an emi x reader story. i'm not sure how many people would want to read that since she's technically an original character and not jjk related, but their dynamic is the one thing i feel like i didn't get to fully explore. crying during sex was always satoru and reader's story first so emi always lived in the margins of it
as for satoru's final thoughts, they are actually written in chapter 21. that last section is all about it, those are his thoughts as he goes :) and i made that choice deliberately i didn't want to write reader finding him or the aftermath because it felt too theatrical, which emi's death already was.
and no i don't see satoru and reader making it in any version of crying during sex that story is what it is. if i ever wrote a happy ending for this version of reader it wouldn't involve satoru. maybe it would involve emi. maybe reader and emi meeting each other in a different world where satoru doesn’t exist and having their own little sapphic escapade LMAO
thank you so much for reading and for caring about these characters 🤍
CRYING DURING SEX --chapters XIX, XX, XXI [ENDING]
content: gojo satoru x fem!reader, MDNI (18+ ONLY), college au, friends with benefits, s3x worker gojo satoru, TW: rap3, angst, trauma, addictions.
previous chapters: HERE
DISCLAIMER: the final chapters contain heavy themes. if you're struggling with your mental health or feel like you might not be able to handle it, please take care of yourself first and don't read. there are somewhat graphic scenes. i'm warning you now without wanting to spoil it for those who do want to continue.
this has been a big project, i've worked on it for hours and hours over the past month and it means everything to me.
This fanfic made me feel so many emotions. When I first started reading it months ago, I never could have imagined how the story would unfold, nor how special a place it would end up holding in my heart.
I had a feeling that Emmi wouldn’t make it, but I truly didn’t expect Satoru to die too. Maybe I simply didn’t want to believe it. After Emmi’s death, when the chapter opened with the cake, I genuinely thought there had been a time skip and that Satoru and Reader had managed to work things out and were celebrating Emmi’s birthday together. I hoped he would finally find the happiness he deserved, go to therapy, and that the two of them would be able to love each other the way they deserved.
You can’t save everyone, and some things require professional help. But because Satoru had made so much progress, it made everything even more heartbreaking. That’s the cruel thing about mental illness: things get better, you make progress, and then suddenly everything crashes down again and you feel like you’re right back where you started. It’s exhausting and devastating.
After experiencing some traumatic things myself last year, your story became an anchor for me. I’ve struggled with panic attacks, self-harm, and depression, and this fanfic felt unbelievably real. There were so many moments where I felt understood because the characters reacted in ways that I have reacted myself, or ways I know I would react in those situations. At the beginning, I thought I related most to Reader and experienced the story from her perspective. But by the end, I realized that I actually had much more in common with Satoru. I saw so much of myself in him and his behavior. Maybe that’s why I ended up connecting more with him and Emmi than with Reader.
I also found myself relating the story to my own relationship and how difficult it can be to be mentally ill while being with someone who genuinely wants to help you. You can feel how much you’re hurting and burdening the person you love. Deep down, you want their help. You want to be saved. But out of self-protection—and because you think you’re protecting them too—you push them away, believing it’s the right thing to do.
I think that’s also why I was hoping so desperately for them to have a happy ending. Because, deep down, that’s what I hope for myself as well.
And maybe that’s why a part of me still believes that Satoru and Reader were meant to be. Through everything they went through, I couldn’t help but hope that somehow they would make it and find their way back to each other.
Their deaths were written so beautifully and peacefully, yet they evoke such painful emotions when you put yourself in Reader’s place—going to bed believing that Satoru is sleeping beside her. Even though their suicides are described peacefully, as a reader you can feel what they leave behind for the people who remain. Death may be peaceful for the person themselves, but never for those around them.
I don’t want to presume to ask anything of your work, but I would be incredibly happy if you ever considered writing an alternative ending. Maybe one where Reader pulls the emergency brake before it’s too late, gets them both into therapy, and takes them away from that city. Or perhaps one where we can at least see Satoru choose his life to continue after Emmi’s death, eventually finding happiness with Reader. I wanted that so badly for him.
I know that tragedy is an important part of this story, and I completely respect the ending you chose. But I think having an alternative “what if” ending could also help readers process everything that happened. This story evokes such intense emotions that a version where healing and recovery are possible would feel comforting in its own way—not as a replacement for the original ending, but as another way to experience these characters and their journey.
Maybe it could even exist alongside the original ending. Emmi’s story could still end the way it did, but we could see Satoru choose a different path for himself—one where, with Reader’s love and professional help, he slowly learns how to keep living after loss. In a way, both endings would show two different realities that people in situations like these can face. One where despair wins, and one where healing, despite being difficult and imperfect, is still possible. I think that would be such a beautiful and meaningful way to conclude this story and these characters.
Thank you for taking the time to even read this, and thank you for this story. I hope I managed to put at least some of my thoughts and emotions into words. I know this story will stay with me for a very long time, and a part of me still hopes that someday you’ll write something more about the three of them. 🤍🕊️
thank you so much for this message, genuinely. the fact that you took the time to write something this thoughtful and detailed means a lot and i'm so sorry you've been going through hard things. none of that is easy and i'm glad if this story gave you even a small sense of being understood during that time that's what “art” is for. i hope you're doing better and if you're still struggling please don't hesitate to reach out 🤍
now i want to say this with all the love and respect possible, because i genuinely appreciate your perspective and this is not me being dismissive at all but i wouldn't be able to write an alternative ending. and i want to explain why.
i understand completely why you'd want one. these characters meant something to you and you wanted better for them that's a beauti ful thing and it shows how much you connected with the story.
but an alternative ending would defeat the entire purpose of what i wrote. satoru's arc was never going to end in healing not because i'm a sadist or i wanted him to suffer, but because even what looked like progress wasn't really progress. he was hiding. he was putting all his hope onto you being there, onto the cabin, onto emi. that's not healing.
to write him surviving would be writing a different story entirely and it's not my story. crying during sex only has one ending.
that being said i would love to explore these characters again in other ways, what ifs where they never meet each other at all maybe :)
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