hi pluvi!! im a bit new here and have just very recently stumbled across usurper!gojo so perhaps this has been touched on before and I’ve missed it, but one aspect of the series i think about a lot is readers reaction to gojo’s “assassination”— and alternatively gojo adjusting to living without reader for the time being. thinking about them just being kids in love and then suddenly losing one another like that is so heartbreaking. like, reader first hearing the news of gojo’s “death” and how she grieved afterward. gojo left to wonder what was going on in readers life without him and missing her everyday. ugh, you’ve absolutely captured my heart with them.
usurper!gojo tag || masterlist
The news comes to you by messenger.
It doesn’t come to you, exactly. It comes to the academy you’d been sent to, a week away from the royal palace but only a day’s ride to your family’s manor in the south. It’s announced suddenly at midday: the king is dead, and the crown prince assassinated.
Your fellow students mourn, as is appropriate. More than a few had been potential matches—their visions of marriage and queenhood dashed in a moment, you find it difficult to relate. You mourn a person, you mourn your first love, you mourn your best friend; they find you pretentious, and conceited, and they make snide comments from the other side of your closed door, behind which you spend a week in your bed reading through the letters you never sent him, staining them with tears.
When you finally emerge it’s with a silver pendant around your neck, hidden beneath your gown. A token of affection from many summers ago, surprisingly tasteful for the spoiled prince who’d gifted it to you. It remains hanging upon your breast long after you return to the palace, older and wiser and more determined.
It remains there even when invaders storm the walls, even when that towering figure appears and those regal eyes fall upon you.
Gojo wakes up in a strange estate located, as he comes to learn, just outside the border in a neighboring kingdom. His injuries are numerous, he’s in such pain he can hardly sit up for the first month. You are all he thinks about because you are all he has left; his parents gone, his crown and country stolen, yet you remain, waiting for his return though you don’t know it. The thought of you is what keeps him going—it’s the tether to his sanity when his rage threatens to consume him, the reminder that there is still something to live for, to fight for.
Throughout the years he keeps up with your status, informed in more and more depth as time goes on and his shadow web within the palace grows thick and sturdy. He knows when you return, knows when the queen first notices you, knows as you claw your way up to become her close friend and most trusted confidant. He’d give you help where he can but you hardly need it. Not that he’d ever doubt you.
He grows dahlias in the gardens of the hidden manor, and he tends to them meticulously. Each one, he imagines, must be perfect; he knows they won’t be the ones he uses to propose but he refuses to let even one wilt before it’s time.
They’re for you, after all, even if you’ll never see them.
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