#flawed!gojo

Megumi doesn’t knock.

The door to the office slams open so hard it rattles the glass, and Satoru Gojo doesn’t even look surprised. He looks tired.

“You sent her,” Megumi says, and his voice is already breaking.

Gojo doesn’t answer.

That sets Megumi off.

Megumi crosses the room in three strides and shoves him. It’s not calculated, not controlled and it barely does anything. His hands fist into Gojo’s collar and he hits him somewhere, not sure where because Megumi is seeing too much red to know what he’s doing.

Gojo rocks back a step but doesn’t defend himself.

“You knew,” Megumi chokes. “You knew it was shady. I told you it was shady.”

Another shove. This one angrier. Megumi’s shoulders shake.

“She can’t even stand up,” he spits. “She just— she just sleeps. She doesn’t wake up unless someone makes her. She needs help to eat, to move, to—”

His voice fractures completely and as gives himself completely over to anger, he has a small blackout at first. There’s a lot of moving and breathing feels hard to do. Gojo can see how for a while, the boy is on autopilot. He doesn’t register how or where he hits the teacher. Gojo takes it all though.

“S’okay…” he slurs out as his upper body is jostled once again. His head bobs a little, and his hair, usually kept out of his face by the blindfold, falls in all kinds of directions.

The aforementioned blindfold isn’t even covering Gojo’s eyes now, which means the Infinity that usually keeps everything at a distance is deactivated.

That allows Megumi to land every hit.

He avoids the area of the spleen and mainly goes for the chest, where real damage cannot occur, at least not with Megumi’s strength. There’s an occasional shove as the words pour out of him, albeit in a choppy way.

“You n-never listen to any of us,” Megumi gasps, and his sore fist connects with Gojo’s muscle. It likely hurts him more than Gojo. “No, you actually just…just don’t care!”

It’s been about twenty minutes of this, Megumi crying and taking his frustrations out, while Gojo just lets him. Normally, twenty minutes of punches wouldn’t tire out Gojo that much. But it’s actually been a while since anyone got close enough to do that. Voluntarily or not, Gojo is letting himself be beaten up, if Megumi’s attempts at violence could qualify as such.

Gojo presses his lips into a thin line as he looks down and sees his student’s desperate face. The tears clot Megumi’s lashes together, and his skin is red in irregular patches.

“I was—nh— okay with it! I would’ve been okay with this bullshit d-deal!” Megumi continues and sniffles in between the sentences. “I don’t care if you think I’m expendable—“

“I don’t think that,” Gojo interrupts with a mumble. It earns him another shove toward the wall. Fair enough. If Gojo puts all his ego and unseriousness aside, he can see how it looks.

A little predatory, no?

Gojo goes around collecting kids in the most miserable situations, offering them a way out. So it cannot really be 100 percent their choice to join Jujutsu High. It’s either the school or the shit they lived in previously. That kind of thing makes his students dependent on him, or jujutsu sorcery, however they want to interpret it.

All this, coupled with the fact that Gojo does come off a little indifferent toward their fate, understandably it makes Megumi feel expendable. Used.

“I don’t care about what happens to me, but I care about her and Tsumiki—that’s— that’s why I’m here and you—you r-ruined it!”

Gojo doesn’t respond this time, only grunts when a surprisingly strong hit knocks the air out of his lungs.

He doesn’t have enough self-awareness to know if he truly did ruin it. Or, like Megumi claimed, he doesn’t care enough to question what he does and what effect his actions have.

Did he go too far this time?

“S’okay, let it all out…”

The image of your face flashes through his mind. Swollen, one of your eyelids sliced open, popped blood vessels painting the white of your eye red. Barely even able to speak coherently, you sobbed about having gone blind, though Shoko later reassured everyone that it was just blood accumulated in front of your retina and not actual loss of vision.

You haven’t moved much from the infirmary since then.

The familiar sight must have triggered Megumi pretty badly.

“I asked you not to send her there! And now she’s—she can barely walk—“ Megumi cuts himself off with another sob and turns sideways this time, to shove his whole body weight against the teacher. It doesn’t do much. Megumi is tiring out.

“I know, I’m—“

“Don’t…don’t you dare say you’re sorry, I know you’re not, I know you don’t care!”

Megumi stumbles forward and instinctively holds onto Gojo’s shirt so as not to fall. His knuckles turn white from how hard he’s tugging on the fabric. His hysterical cries grow quieter, but his breathing quickens.

The first little trickle of blood seeps through between Gojo’s lips, most likely from accidentally biting his tongue too hard at some point during the breakdown.

The man ignores it as it runs down his chin.

Huh. Weird.

Gojo feels something uncomfortable in the back of his mind, the icky feeling of guilt. He hasn’t felt it in years. Is this what it was like for Yaga when Haibara died? Or when Suguru defected?

A quiet gurgle, damped with the red liquid in Gojo’s mouth, escapes his lips as his body gives in a little more to the emotional pain.

Megumi has stopped sobbing loudly, and it’s just heavy breathing filling the room now. His voice breaks after every other word, going up in whiny octaves after each sentence.

“I’m such a fool… I really thought you’d be serious about us, despite how you kept proving me wrong every fucking day…”

His head dips forward, and his forehead crashes against Gojo’s chest in an aggressive but defeated way. “And I was sitting on such a high horse about it too, belittling Itadori whenever he talked in an admiring way about you while secretely hoping that he’s right.”

The tears and possibly snot smear into the expensive white shirt. The red from Gojo’s lips has soiled the collar anyway.

“I’m sorry… I shouldn’t have… this is my fault for relying on you in the first place,” Megumi slurs out. That does break Gojo’s heart a little. It’s wrong that Megumi is blaming himself, and it hurts that he doesn’t even want to see Gojo as someone he can fall back on.

“S’okay, you just made a little mistake,” Gojo croaks out after having been silent for a while. The bitter iron coating his taste buds matches the bitterness of his decision to play along. Not to put the blame on Megumi, he absolutely does not think he’s right, but in the moment, any protest seems useless.

“You’re so messed up.” Megumi doesn’t mean it as an insult. More like a plea for Gojo to be a good person.

“I know.”

Slowly, Gojo sinks his fingers into Megumi’s cheeks, and forces his head to tilt up. For a moment, Gojo recognizes an impulsive urge in the way Megumi’s nose scrunches up, maybe to spit in his face or headbutt him. But he stays still, exhaustion winning him over.

“I’ll still fix it,” Gojo says firmly. A scoff of ridicule is Megumi’s immediate reaction. Nevertheless, Gojo keeps going. “I don’t think I think of you as expendable.”

“You don’t think?” Megumi raises his voice again, pushing himself away from Gojo. He steps back and wipes his face with his lower arm, his posture as hostile as it can get. Drawn up shoulders, loose fists, flaring nostrils. “You can’t even say for sure.”

Gojo sighs, about to say something when he Megumi turns to his office’s exit.

“Where are you—“

“What do you think?”

There’s no time for a reply because he’s already slamming the door shut, leaving Gojo on his own.

Gojo stares down at his dirty shirt. In the end, he has to realize that he isn’t the bad guy Megumi claims he is—not entirely, at least. If he was, this whole thing wouldn’t hurt as much as it does.

At least he has a conscience, even if it’s dirty. That should make it a bit better. He must care to a degree.

Later, in the late evening, Gojo attempts to visit you, but when he shows up at the entrance to the infirmary, two familiar shikigami block his way.

Predictable and fair.