Shame On Me || satoru gojo x f!reader

Grief

Grief is a cruel emotion. It wraps its clawed hands around your throat and drags you down until you can no longer catch your breath. It threatens to drown you in its grasp, leaving nothing behind but the bubbling feeling of what once was. Like an anchor, it holds you below the surface until there's nothing left but a shell of your former self.

Gojo knows the feeling well, although he's gotten better at hiding it over the years. He didn't have a choice. After all, he's the strongest.

He tilts his head to the bedside table, flipping his phone screen towards him to check the time. Three in the morning. He lets a breath out through his nose, staring at the ceiling. His stomach churns as he lays there, a grimace plastered to his face.

He can't help but find the whole situation he'd found himself in ironic. Despite your inherent kindness towards others, he had pushed you away. He had pried away any ounce of respect you may have had for him because of his misconception of Miriko, and when he had been wrong he hesitated. Satoru Gojo hesitated.

Although the thought clung to him like a hangnail, it wasn't what kept him awake at night. What kept him awake was the haunting sound of your sobs. The reminder of the domino effect his poor judgment had caused.

It all could have been prevented, had he treated you like the rest of the faculty. He could have treated your first meeting as a lapse in judgment on his behalf and moved on. He could have been civil. He could have accepted your original denial to help him train Yuji.

Would that have changed anything though, really? You were too kind to have denied Gojo your help in training Yuji, he was sure of it. You would have said yes had he begged. At the end of the day, you were always meant to be here. Here in the cabin, in this moment, choking on your agony.

It didn't stop the fact that Gojo blamed himself. You likely did too.

Rubbing his hands over his face, he flips onto his side. Eventually, things would get easier. He kept reminding himself of this fact. That no one was there when he lost...

Suddenly jumping to his feet, he grabs his glasses from the bedside table and slides them over his iridescent irises, throwing on a loose white T-shirt and gray sweats and bounding down the stairs to the kitchen. He steels himself in his resolve, swallowing his guilt. Maybe no one was there when he needed someone, but that was no reason for him to let you drown alone.

More importantly, it occurred to him for the first time since you'd agreed to stay in his cabin almost two full days ago that you hadn't eaten anything. Shoko would not be happy to know that Gojo hadn't been doing his job keeping an eye out for you.

Your sobs subsided as he moved through the kitchen, opening the fridge and cabinets. He was assuming you held them in at his expense, not wanting him to hear your moment of weakness, but he didn't blame you. Were he in your position, he would have done the same.

His hand pauses over the carton of eggs as a stray thought wanders through his mind.

"It's lonely," he recalls your words to Yuji, "being at the top with no one able to touch you."

He lets out a long sigh through his nose. It pained him to say it, but you were right. He knew you meant it in a different sense than how it felt for him, that you truly had been lonely for a long time, but it didn't change the way your words struck him. Gojo was surrounded by people in a way you never had been, but that didn't change the fact that at the end of the day, he too pushed everyone away, even if they failed to see it.

He had a job to do, a part to play. It was a trait of his that Yuji had picked up and he hated it, but he also saw the way that you were attempting to coach those thoughts out of him and he admired it.