𝔟𝔩𝔢𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔡 𝔟𝔢 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔡𝔞𝔪𝔫𝔢𝔡.

As Long as Your Back is Turned to Us

Gojo felt what Maki was going through.

He felt the same loneliness she felt in her chest, the feeling of her heart sinking into the abyss created by your absence—the same one he felt when he lost his one and only. He felt the misery of getting herself out of bed, to be met with the daybreak that reminds her of her solitude. Her eyes don't carry the same fiery twinge in them. The fire went out a while ago, but it's still painful to see the dullness in her gaze.

He gets it, even though she doesn't want him to say it out loud simply because of the corniness.

He sees himself in Maki. The way she walks like she has a ghost over her shoulder. She doesn't yet—but she will, soon enough. He knows, she will be the one to keep moving.

Maki's shoulders weigh almost a ton as she looks down at her lap, her hands resting in the small gap between her thighs. She'd been depriving herself of so many things that she swears she feels your head in her lap, your hair in her fingers, your lips hovering over each others.

The dim light of the time just after dusk casts a small shadow of her body on your wall—the outline of her head and her torso painting a hollow shape on the discolored paint of your wall. She turned her head to look at the rubix cube still sitting on your nightstand. She remembers staring at it for a long time—she can't recall the exact interval—remembering how you carefully held it when you were mixing and solving it so easily. She always watched you do it with admiration glimmering in her eyes, a soft smile on her lips as she watched you solve it again and again.

She remembers watching you solve that damn cube with several different methods, swiftly moving it around and showing her different sides each time you solved it. You even made a checker pattern out of those colors, rotating it with the cube in your fingers and your wrist flicking every which way as Maki would look at it with her eyes shining in the minuscule light of the sun that shone down on you both through tree branches. Your back was always against the tree, slouching as you kept your legs crisscrossed. Maki would sit adjacent from you, her hands in her lap as she watched you tamper with it and listened to the boys talk about boy things.

She sighs, getting up from the edge of her bed and standing tall on her feet, her breath coming out shaky as she blinks the sleep out of her eyes.

"Maki? It's Gojo."

A knock, a gentle one from a gentle hand, Maki lifts up her head to look at it, "Come in."

The knob twists and in comes Gojo and his tall, lanky figure as he slightly ducks his head before entering, looking down at Maki with an unusual frown on his lips.

"There are...rumors...going around, about Y/n," he started, his voice low as the dry air stills and Maki's chest tightens. A knot forms in her heart out of her heartstrings, a knot so tight that no fingers could undo it—unless they were yours, because only you knew the way through the maze of layers to her heart.

"That they're the one who started that fire that went down in the city. The color of the flames and cursed energy residue weren't a coincidence to the Higher Ups. So now they labeled Y/n as a special grade curse user."

Maki's heart ached in her chest as her throat tightens, her nails digging into the skin of her calloused palms. Her mouth dried itself of all the saliva, her teeth grinding together making her jaw clench.

"That's not true," she grumbled, stepping past Gojo and moving to grab her red spear case. "They wouldn't."

"The Higher Ups say they do. That isn't the same Y/n you reunited with last year. They're listed as a murderer and a curse user, there's nothing you and I can do about it."