where you go, i go (2)
TEEN!gojo x FEM!reader (soulmate AU)
TW⚠️: angst, toji being toji, reader thinks about killing someone, gojo is in his tweaked out enlightenment era soooooo gojo a little creepy and eerie
Part 2 of what you see, i see
She had been going through the motions for the rest of the day, she hadn't even bothered to stop by her school clubs, until she arrived home. A sickly sweet scent of pastries attacked her senses the second she entered. Her house doubled as a bakery for the first floor. It was a popular hang out place for people her age especially for couples. There was a parade of them this time - cheerful couples were already sharing their coffees and sugary pastries.
The universe was laughing at her. It had to be. Why else would there be so many happy couples in the store right now? It was pointing and laughing hysterically on the ground saying: "That's what you get for ignoring me! That's what you get for resenting my gift to you!" Because that's what a soulmate was, a gift. A rare and wonderful gift that no one believed in, except for those who have experienced it themselves, and she had lost it; lost him.
She almost cried on the spot.
Her mother waved gleefully from behind the register, her daughter seldom returned it as she went up the stairs. She dropped her school bag in her room besides her desk and, face first, flopped on her bed.
She closed her eyes. Nothing, there was nothing.
Her lip quivered as tears began to sting her eyes, but she couldn't cry. Not when her mother was expecting her to change and put on an apron and help as she always did after school. She could silently mourn him tonight.
She let out a shaky breath. Did she even have the right to mourn him? She had never met him or talked to him. Everytime she thought of him recently was only to insult him or dismiss him entirely. No, she did not have the right to mourn him and she deserved to feel empty on the inside.
She put on a clean apron and slugged her way down stairs with a smile as she took over her mother's place at the register. Her mom kissed the top of her head and beamed at her with a thumbs up.
She never understood why so many people hated working retail, but now, she did. She had to force a smile and treat every customer kindly, all the while, she was dying on the inside.
A man had come in. Tall and insanely buff, a scar on his mouth. He ordered the cheapest pastry on the menu and handed her a wadded up yen. Her blood turned cold when their fingers brushed.
Her mother quickly took the money away from her as she gave her a quick command to check on the oven in the back.
She swallowed and listened to her mom. Her steps were quick as she pushed the double doors that led to the kitchen, she hugged herself.
It was him. It had to be him. That was the man who killed Gojo Satoru. She reached for a knife and gripped it tight. She should kill him. Her soulmate was dead and he was the reason why. She should try and avenge him.
Sheshouldsheshouldsheshouldsheshould-
The oven blared next to her. Her head snapped to it as the knife clattered on the ground, and with shaky mitted hands she opened the oven, and took out the fresh pastries.
Those were dangerous thoughts; thoughts she never thought she would ever have against anyone. She took off the oven mitts and looked outside the circle window of the kitchen - he was leaving and her mother was watching him like a hawk, even when the bell rang sharply with a muffin in his mouth as he walked outside with the rest of the crowd. She didn't know what possessed her to run after him, but she did. Maybe, all she wanted to know was why he had killed Gojo Satoru. Maybe, she wanted this man to kill her too, so she wouldn't feel empty inside anymore.
A blur of a conversation as the words tumbled out of her mouth: "Why? Why did you kill Satoru?"
She didn't register anything other than his gruff voice, "Ah, he had a soulmate. If I were you I'd keep that information to yourself from now on." Uninterestedly, he continued, "You wouldn't want the Gojo clan to know about you. No doubt, they'll try to marry you off to another member of the clan." and then, kept walking.
She didn't hear the interest in his voice when he said to himself, "But she would be worth a lot of money if I did take her to them." He would negotiate a price first to see if he was right about her being worth any money. He would worry about that later, right now, he had a star plasma vessel to turn in.
A sharp tug on her arm is all that stopped her from running after him again.
"______! What were you thinking?" her mother gritted out as she led her back into the bakery. Her mother's voice is strict and unwavering, "Go to your room."
And she did.
She tossed the apron on her desk and kicked her school bag. How was she supposed to live like this with the rest of her entire life half-full?
A sob violently escaped her.
This was how everyone else in the world lived, she realized.
Aching and alone.
Desperate and searching.
Wanted and unwanted.
Now, she was just like everyone else like she had always wanted. She supposed, she couldn't complain.
She laid in bed, wrapped herself in a blanket - trying to keep warm, but she doubted, she'd ever feel warm again as she cried herself to sleep.
She dreamt about Satoru. Flashes of a long chain, of red, of purple, of blood, of a crowd clapping, of someone wrapped in a white sheet, of a long dark hallway.
The universe was laughing at her again. Why else would it give her dreams about him?
An uneasiness settled into her bones. Someone was watching her. The grim reaper, no doubt wearing the face of her soulmate's assassin. If death wanted her, so be it.
She kept her eyes closed.
She saw herself sleeping soundly in death's gaze. She saw the time pass through her window changing from sundown to night as death continued to watch her intently.
Hours had passed.
00:57:39
She wondered at what specific time the grim reaper would take her.
1:13:01
Did it want her to open her eyes?
1:13:10
Probably.
1:13:15
The grim reaper has been patiently waiting for her.
1:13:17
Why keep death waiting then?
1:13:20
Her eyes fluttered open.
Beautiful, vibrant cerulean blue.
It was not death. It was -
"Satoru," she whispered.
"______," he whispered back.
Satoru was sitting down on the floor extremely close to her bed with his legs crossed while his hands rested neatly on his ankles. There was dry blood on his face and on his white dress shirt.
Her mouth moved but no sound came.
"You were crying," he said as he caressed her cheek soothing his thumb along the trail of stained lines that her dried tears had left, "alot."
So, he had seen everything.
She put her hand over his and gently rubbed circles.
Satoru scooted closer to her bed, "I didn't like seeing you cry," his hand trailed up to her scalp, "or frown," and gently ran his fingers through her hair.
He laid his head down on her bed and stared at her with those vibrant, sparkling eyes; eyes that could see everything she could never see.
She touched his cheek gently, "I didn't like not feeling you."
Her whole body shivered. Satoru was here, in front of her, and she was still cold.
"Are you still cold?"
She nodded.
Never letting go of her, he kicked off his shoes and climbed under the blanket with her. He wrapped his legs around hers as her arms wrapped under his uniform jacket.
With his hand still tangled in her hair, he said, "Better?"
His heartbeat had returned to her. They were beating in unison again.
"Better," she hummed. "You?" She asked.
His lips pressed softly on her forehead, "Much better." He tugged her in closer into his chest.
She smiled.
She was warm again.
@whatamidoing89 @mr-underhills-things
Part 1: what you see, i see
Part 3: you know i adore you
Part 4: i'm crazier for you
Part 5: baby, you're the life of the party
Part 6: something's made your eyes go cold
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okay!! now that it’s not 2am for me, i’m going to post my selkie!jason todd hc’s straight up au apparently!
(uh. this was supposed to just be a list of hc’s but i got slightly,,,, carried away)
his selkie skin looks like an oversized red hoodie in his human form, and is just warm enough to help him survive new england winters.
when the summer heat becomes unbearable, he slings the hoodie around his waist
alternatively, he just coasts it out underwater. perks of living in a coastal city!
willis todd was a selkie. he used to tell jason stories of what it was like to swim through the big, wide ocean. of how freeing it felt. how different it is, from the smoggy, heavy air of gotham --- different, but both theirs, in their own right.
but to be honest, jason doesn’t remember much about the stories he was told, or really, anything about willis --- he had been in and out of blackgate for most of jason’s life, working for two-face to try and make ends meet, before dying.
what jason mostly remembers, are the warnings. don’t let anybody know you’re a selkie. don’t let anybody find your skin. they will find it, and they will use it to control you. even decades later, jason would still remember those warnings.
catherine is the one who teaches him how to swim, who helps him trial-and-error his way into putting his skin on, and learn how to make the transition seamless.
after she dies, jason spends three months as a seal, to just... exist. forget.
although jason technically lives on the streets, whenever he can;t find food, whenever he can’t find somewhere warm to sleep, whenever just being human becomes too unbearable, he spends the night as a seal. he ends up spending more time in the ocean, than on land.
that’s not to say he’s very good at being a seal --- he barely knows how to swim, has to learn how to fish the hard way.
when bruce finds jason stealing his car tires, he marvels over how nice jason’s hoodie is, soft and fluffy even after all of jason’s time on the streets, especially given the condition jason is in, ribs showing from malnutrition, and the worn and raggedy shape of the rest of his stuff.
jason is skittish when he goes to live in the manor, even after a few weeks. he always adopts an expression particularly similar to a cornered wild animal around alfred in particular, alfred, who keeps on trying to take his hoodie away, purportedly to wash it.
alfred eventually gives up on trying to force jason to wash it --- he figures that as jason becomes more comfortable living at the manor, he’ll wind up telling them why he’s so protective over that hoodie, and they can work something out then.
whenever wayne manor overwhelms jason with how big and how decadently expensive all the decor is, jason runs away, run to the ocean.
jason doesn’t actually end up telling alfred and bruce that he’s a selkie --- bruce just has a ridiculous amount of motion alarms, which are triggered every time jason ran off. he had followed jason the third night, and saw him transform.
bruce doesn’t tell jason that he knows, assuming that jason kept this a secret because he didn’t fully trust either of them. he would later learn that he was right in this assumption (a rare win for bruce in terms of emotional awareness)
except jason doesn’t fully trust either of them, even after a few months. bruce impulsively decides to do a few things --- a) tell jason about batman and robin and his crime-fighting secret identity, and b) tell jason he already knows about him being a selkie.
jason is absolutely bamboozled by the fact that bruce knows, and yet hasn’t tried to take his hoodie to control him, or to stop him from playing in the ocean for a few hours.
in fact, (under alfred’s encouragement) bruce offers to take him to the ocean during the day, so he can get “a proper night’s rest that a growing young boy such as himself would need”
jason remembers what his father told him, to never trust anyone, never let his guard down. but bruce has known about jason being a selkie for so long, and he didn’t take his hoodie or try anything. of course he can trust bruce.
and when he tries on the robin costume for the first time, it fits perfectly. just like his hoodie, his second skin. it fits just like magic.
oh, it’s a little loose in some places, the legacy of dick fucking grayson a little heavy sometimes, but he’ll grow into it. he’ll make himself, if he has to.
also, jason finds the fact that even though he’s a friggin’ selkie, his callsign is a bird (a robin, no less) incredibly ironic and funny
being a selkie is actually so useful for vigilantehood. the amount of people who talk freely, openly, and loudly about their drug smuggling plans near the ports is quite frankly, ridiculous.
honestly, towards the end of his robin years, jason remains genuinely surprised nobody catches on to him or his tactics yet. bruce is very proud.
even though jason is safe, has been safe for three years, and trusts bruce with his life, his skin, and everything, old habits are hard to break. so he has his hoodie on when he goes to find sheila.
and anyways, he wants to see if sheila is a selkie too. he’s taking biology right now, and they’re learning about punnett squares. jason’s never met another selkie before, other than willis who he barely remembers. there’s a possibility that sheila knows something, anything, so he has to try.
sheila gets a glint in her eyes when jason mentions that he’s a selkie, tells him that while she’s not one herself, she’s familiar with the myth. she has long suspected that willis was a selkie, she tells him, and she’s glad to have confirmation.
jason positively vibrates with excitement, can’t wait to ask, to pester his mother (mother!) with questions upon questions until.
until.
sheila doesn’t do anything after she gives him to the joker. she just smokes and smokes. and she doesn’t tell the joker about his hoodie, despite how it would have been much easier for the joker to destroy him that way. much more painful too.
small mercies, he supposes, in between hacking coughs that brings blood bubbling up his lips.
after he dies, his hoodie is ripped and in tatters from the crowbar, with burns along the edges from the bomb. bruce has to carefully peel it off his body.
when jason was alive, his magic kept the hoodie in perfect condition, always. even when the rest of him was covered head-to-toe in mud, or dripping sludge from the nasty gotham sewers.
bruce stares at the same hoodie, blood-soaked and mangled, so incredibly dissonant from how he remembered it on jason, when he was bright, whole, and alive.
he can’t stand it. the hoodie that was so precious to jason, that was jason, at the core of him, in this state. dirty and ripped and devoid of the magic jason had exuded.
in a moment of desperation, late at night, bruce asks alfred to teach him how to sew. he doesn’t dare to practice on jason’s beloved hoodie --- instead, he starts with the suits in his closet, grabbing the first one he sees, regardless of price. rips a hole and sews it back together over and over until he perfects his technique.
and then he washes the fabric gently, using baby fabric cleanser and scrubbing for hours upon hours until the last traces of the deep-set brown stain from jason’s blood washes down the drain.
he painstakingly sews the scraps of fabric back together with a red thread, carefully sourced to match the hoodie to try and make it flow seamlessly like it used to.
it doesn’t work, not exactly. despite his best efforts, the creases bruce had carefully sewn together are prominent and thick like scars, littering the soft fabric.
so he gives up. he hangs it over the grandfather clock entrance to the cave in his study. brings it with him every time he visits jason’s grave, because he doesn’t ever want to keep jason’s hoodie away from him, but he also can’t bear for it to get ruined.
dick visits him. a rare occurrence, these days.
dick yells at him, as he is wont to do.
these days, it feels like they spend more time angry at each other than not. dick says that this isn’t right. isn’t fair to anybody, not to alfred, not to himself, definitely not to jason. he rants, jason deserves to be remembered as he was in life, not frozen in death.
perhaps he is right. bruce is not unaware of the state of violent, cutting stasis he is in, this putrefaction of his life. and he is certainly not unaware of how it is affecting the people around him. dick. alfred. the neighbor’s kid, the one who wants to be robin.
bruce tries. not for himself, but for tim. for alfred, for dick. even for stephanie brown, who sometimes, when she smirks just right, or says something with just the right twang, he swears he can see jason in her.
he still can’t bear to put the hoodie away, because jason deserved better than to be forgotten, so he folds it gently and places it in his closet instead.
he also can’t bear to look at it for very long, so he forces himself to every single day.
it’s different from the glass case that houses robin’s tattered suit in the cave --- that, is a reminder of how he failed robin. this, this is salt in a constant, stabbing, festering would, reminding him of how he failed his son.
it was stephanie, that eventually helped him figure out what to do with the hoodie. when she was young, young enough to cry at ripped pants and skinned knees, young enough that her mother hadn’t touched the drugs yet, her mother would dry up her tears, give her a hug and a kiss on the forehead, before patching her pants up.
what not many people know, is that before crystal brown set her mind on becoming a nurse, she wanted to be an artist, first. and so she grabs her old set of embroidery needles, and stitched little designs. dogs and cats. stars and planets. tools and gadgets.
bruce doesn’t react, doesn’t even move, even as stephanie finishes her story. she hangs there awkwardly for a second, stares up at jason’s suit, waiting for him to respond, before shuffling towards the exit of the cave.
thank you, spoiler, bruce manages to croak out.
ah, yeah, she says, shrugging lightly while slouching in on herself, any time, boss. she walks out, and bruce watches her go from the reflection on the darkened computer.
that night, he takes out jason’s hoodie, smooths it out, grabs his threads, and stitches.
he stitches on constellations, argo navis, for jason’s namesake in the greek myths he had loved so much. a tiny seal, playing with beach balls. little books, with quotes on the sides. a robin, big and bold.
he tries to make it as true to jason as possible, not just in death and in bruce’s memories, but as he was in life.
jason wakes up abruptly.
he wakes up in a coffin, cold, alone, and with a gaping hole in his chest. getting dipped in the lazarus pit only made it worse, only made him all the more aware of what he was missing, all the more conscious of it.
he doesn’t bother trying to learn how to swim with two arms and two legs, instead of two fins and a tail. it doesn’t feel the same. it only reminds him of what he’s lost.
sometimes, on sleepless nights that happen more often than not, he wonders what would have happened if he still had a hoodie, still could swim.
if he still was robin.
and he doesn’t have access to the cave anymore, or to the titan’s tower, or the watchtower, and his memory of the past is still patchy and shitty in some places.
so in a burst of impulsivity fueled by the person he no longer is, he prints out photos of robin’s costume from the internet and recreates it on his own.
if his skin is gone, then fine. fine! he’s perfectly perfunctorily aware that nothing about this resurrection of his is natural. if he doesn’t think too much about it, he’ll be alright. his hoodie, his skin, that was something he was born with, a birthright that died with him.
but robin, robin was something that he helped shape. robin was something that he worked for, changed himself for.
and the makeshift robin suit --- it doesn’t fit him, not anymore. no, it feels wrong, like a child playing with their parent’s suit. or --- he realizes, perhaps more accurately, like an adult realizing they no longer fit in their favorite clothes.
and --- and --- what was the point of it all? what was the point, of trying to make bruce proud of him, of getting dick’s approval, of trying to futilely save people over and over again from the same gallery of supervillains who keep on escaping from prison?!
and what was the point of carving out a space for himself if the joker was just going to beat him out of it, and if tim drake was going to insert himself in the hole he left behind?
and then the next thing he knows he’s in titan’s tower hitting tim drake over and over again because who let him? who let him take jason’s role as a son, as a brother, as a hero? how dare he?
but when he’s slit tim’s throat and torn the ‘R’ off his chest, jason doesn’t feel any better. the robin suit still doesn’t fit. his hoodie’s still gone.
he’s starting to think it never will, not again.
sometimes, when he gets tired enough to let his mind wander, he wonders what happened to his suit.
he’s pretty sure he died with it, so either the hoodie is with the joker, batman, or... gone entirely. (it’s not like they found willis’ skin after he died. maybe selkie skins just disappear in a cloud of sea foam once they die, or some little mermaid shit like that)
it’s a cold comfort, that nobody can manipulate him now. nobody can control him --- not even batman.
(bruce had thought about it. when he first had his suspicious regarding who the red hood was, before he knew there was any trace of the son he once had left. he thought about using the hoodie, using jason’s selkie skin to coerce him, at least to stop murdering people, to stop hurting their family.)
(he would never go that far, in retrospect, or at least, he doesn’t think he could ever. to do that to jason, betray his trust so thoroughly and completely... but it would be a lie to say that he didn’t consider it.)
bruce reflects on this as jason reveals himself, the joker tied up at his feet with a gun pressed to his head, and venom spitting from his son’s mouth.
but when he lifts the batarang to hit jason’s gun, or wrist, or anything that’ll force him to drop the gun, he realizes that his hands are shaking.
and when he throws the batarang, he knows a millisecond after he’s let go, that he’s miscalculated the ricochet.
so when jason escapes that night, bruce knows he’s fucked up.
jason goes off the maps, completely. bruce doesn’t know where he is, if he’s safe, if he even made it out of the explosion that night.
it takes weeks. weeks for bruce to track jason down, from meticulously documenting the dropped threads of where the red hood was pulling strings in the gotham underworld behind the scenes, to tracking security cameras with facial recognition.
once bruce manages find where he’s staying, make sure he’s safe, he knows what he wants to do. and, he knows what he needs to do.
jason gets a package in the mail, five weeks after his disasterous meeting with batman and the joker. unmarked, unsigned, no return address.
when jason opens the box gingerly and carefully, he holds on to his skin for the first time in years. and then, and then, and then --- something right slots into place. his fingers brushed gently over the tiny spotted seal he knows he used to look like, the books he remembered ranting to bruce about for hours on end.
the robin, on the top left, over his heart, big enough to have changed him, yet small enough to not define him.
it’s not perfect. it doesn’t even fix anything, not entirely. he still fights with bruce most times he sees him, tries to punch dick in the face, steadfastly ignores tim and steph the entire time.
but it’s something. it’s something, and the next time nightwing, batman, spoiler, and robin fight a gang on the docks, the red hood gives them a helping hand before jumping back into the ocean and swimming away.
fin!
wow this got long
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