Chapter Text
The prison realm was an endless void of nothingness. Immobilised in place, unable to move anything but his arms, Gojo Satoru rested.
It was impossible to see out of the realm, once the gate had fully closed, and the prison realm had long sealed away any cursed energy that still circulated through his body, along with his ability to manipulate it. After the first 8 hours of counting time with notches on the old bones surrounding him, Satoru had come to two dismaying realisations.
One, the prison realm was interfering with his ability to count time. He would lose count halfway, skip to a different number of minutes, etcetera, far more often than could be put down to human error.
Two, without his ability to manipulate cursed energy, he would require sleep.
It was the first time in a decade or so that he had felt the curtain of weariness close, his eyes beginning to droop even as he kept up his internal counting of the seconds and minutes. Though he fought to keep his eyes open, it took only another approximated 6 hours for sleep to claim him.
When he awoke, he was unsure of how much time had passed. If the average human slept 8 hours, could be assume that? He made another 8 notches on the bone in his hands. If this kept up, he would soon lose track of the days he slept. From watching over Megumi, he knew that regular people’s sleep patterns were irregular at best and chaotic at worst – or was just for teenagers?
Either way, he expected that his sense of time would deviate from the true passing of time as the days dragged on. Days. Because almost a day had passed without an external party unsealing him, and Gojo Satoru had met his match in the prison realm and the thing piloting his best friend's body.
A week or so passed before Satoru began to give up on his hopes of a rescue. He was 168 notches and 3 bones into his imprisonment, and he couldn’t even be sure if that was accurate. Hadn’t he read somewhere that people naturally drifted into a 25-hour sleep-wake rhythm? With the prison realm’s interference on top of the endless blackness, it could have been a month without him noticing.
He counted 1000 more notches before he gave up on counting. Satoru wasn’t sure how long had passed before he drew himself out of the funk he had fallen into and deemed counting further useless. Had weeks passed? Months? Years?
What point was there when all he could do was wait?
At an indeterminate point later, he realised that he wasn’t ageing. His hair remained at the same length it had been when he had been sealed, meaning that though he was conscious and alive, his cells had stopped dividing, the telomeres no longer shortening.
The prison realm kept him in stasis.
And that was it.
What more could he do to track the passing of time when not even his body could be used to record it?
Alone in the empty realm, Gojo Satoru resigned himself to staring into to space, his mind retreating in order to protect itself from itself.
The first signs of outward stimulation were light rays, piercing through the endless gloom of the prison realm. Satoru woke from his daze, as if from an endless dream, peering upwards at the harsh, fluorescent light from above.
He flexed his hands. They moved easily, as if his muscle memory had never deteriorated from his stay in the prison realm. His arms showed no signs of muscle atrophy either. How long had it been? The light must mean that someone had finally managed to free him – but would they be somebody that he knew?
If the prison realm had a mouth, Satoru knew it must be wailing, because tears of cursed energy were pouring from its eyes. The fact that he could see it was a sign that his abilities had returned as well. He stuffed his blindfold into his pocket, preparing himself.
Would it be his students, unsealing him in a safe area? Or would it be in the middle of battle, a hurried mess? He had to be prepared for anything.
The Six Eyes darted around to the numerous eyes leaking cursed energy, and between one moment and the next, he was on his hands and knees in a torn-up underground chamber.
He blinked, eyes readjusting to the real world.
It was filled with cursed energy, as Shibuya had been, but the patterns of its flow were different. A few floors above him were several self-contained coalescences of cursed energy - sorcerers? But they were too small to be sorcerers; grade 3 cursed spirits? Not one bore the familiar signatures of anybody he knew. There was something very, very wrong.
How long had he been sealed?
In front of him, unnatural spikes rose up from the ground, obscuring his vision. To his left was a man with four arms. Curse , the four arms said; sorcerer , his Six Eyes told him.
“You.” The man said. “Who I have released from the cube. I have an order for you to fulfil.”
Satoru blinked. The man was ordering him around? Him?
“Very well.” He heard himself say, looking around the room he was in. Five other concentrations of cursed energy stood out to him; two below, one in front of him, and three grouped further back. Hearing the man out would help him to reorient himself and better understand what was going on.
“Kill everyone else in this room except the girl. Bring her to me.” The man said. His facial muscles twisted, but the beak - no, there were straps - the mask that he was wearing obscured his face and his expression.
He guessed that the man was grinning.
“Eh, what did they do?” He asked, standing up.
“I am obsessive about cleanliness.” The man decided to start with. “So, when someone touches me, my blood boils. They, who have contaminated my base and this world must either be cleansed or perish in order for the world to be freed.”
Cleansed.
Satoru is reminded suddenly of the last body he had seen before the prison realm had swallowed him whole. This man’s philosophy…
“What do you mean by contaminated?” He asked.
“Just do it!” The man snapped, as a green blur whizzed past him and collided with the man.
Upon impact, Satoru saw that the blur was a teenager dressed in garishly green clothes with red highlights. At least it wasn’t neon.
The man retaliated with a flood of cursed energy that concentrated itself in his hands that deformed the room around them further, more unnatural spikes rising up in an attempt to pierce the teenager.
“Nah.” He shrugged.
“What!?”
“It looks like you’re attempting to murder some children and want me to join in.” Satoru said flippantly. “No thanks.”
“But I released you from that cube-!” The man avoided an attack from an older man with striped green and yellow hair.
The older man’s call of “Who is that, Overhaul?” went unanswered as Satoru placed an Infinity around the youngest child there was there. Five years of age, was it? Even if the rest of the people in the room were kidnappers, the child was innocent.
He needed more information.
“What, did you think I’d just obey you if you unsealed me? That cube,” which he had buried with a concentrated Purple letting it fall 5 kilometres downwards into the floor - he’d like to see anyone try to retrieve it to reseal him, “wasn’t a genie lamp or anything. I don’t owe you anything, Overhaul. It was a prison.”
“A prison?” The older man sounded confused, but Satoru didn’t bother answering. Instead, he teleported directly to the group of children halfway across the room, letting the fight play out.
“What’s the deal?” He asked.
A punch from the green one at his sudden appearance was nullified easily by his Infinity. He could see the teenager’s mind whirring behind those eyes of his, so he put a stop to it as soon as possible.
“I don’t know anything that’s going on.” Satoru told them. “I won’t attack you unless provoked. And I don’t think that guy over there has you kids’ best interests in mind. Just tell me what’s going on.”
The youngest child still seemed shell-shocked, but the blond teenager answered. “This is a Shie Hassaikai raid. The man with the beak mask is their leader. Our primary objective was to rescue Eri, with a secondary aim of capturing the Yakuza’s main players.”
Concise, clinical and informative. The older teenager had been trained. He couldn’t yet trust their information (Suguru’s girls, Mimiko and Nanako, had also been trained, though for a much more nefarious purpose) but their goal seemed more morally upright than Overhaul’s vague notion of cleansing the world.
Cleansing. Of what?
Monkeys. His mind whispers, but that train of thought is promptly interrupted by the green one’s shout. “Sir Nighteye!”
He looked over his shoulder to see that the older man had been impaled by two spikes from Overhaul’s manipulation of matter.
“Togata, take care of Eri! Mister-” Green lightning was sparking around his body as cursed energy swirled throughout it. Interesting.
“Gojo.” He provided.
“Gojo, please protect them!” The teenager didn’t even wait for an answer before dashing off to save Nighteye, either trusting in Togata’s ability to protect him or in Satoru himself’s good intentions.
Satoru shook his head in disbelief. Seemed there was a Yuuji in every world, overly trusting and self-sacrificing to a fault.
“You know, I think I’ve heard enough.”
“What do you mean?” Togata asked, curling his arms around Eri protectively only to come into contact with Infinity. “Wha-?”
“Who is Nighteye to you?” Satoru asked.
“He’s my teacher.” Togata said. “And he’s a pro Hero.”
“Working on the side of the law?”
“Of course!” Togata responded, indignant. “Sir is one of the best Heroes there is. He was the sidekick of the number one Hero, All Might, before he created his own agency.”
There were a lot of terms there that he didn’t understand. ‘Hero’ seemed to be used as a profession, as did ‘sidekick’ and ‘agency’ as a concrete rather than an abstract noun. Even so, the adamance and the way he had instinctively protected a girl that didn’t seem anything alike to him - not related - from Satoru told him enough.
Satoru reached out to the space around him, performed the calculations and tugged, appearing in the air beside Nighteye. He brought Nighteye and Midoriya back to where he had been a moment before, and surrounded them all in a small barrier before Overhaul could react and reach them.
“You’ll be able to pass through this barrier. That guy over there won’t be able to. I’d suggest you stay within it until people come down to rescue you, or until I get back.” He said. “Now, where’s the nearest hospital?”
All of them looked shell-shocked now, not just Eri. He snapped his fingers in front of their faces, falling back into his usual demeanour now that none or their lives were at stake.
“Oi. Man bleeding out in front of you?”
Togata was the first one to react. “The nearest hospital is a few kilometres away, but a field hospital should have been set-up on the surface. It’s, uh, a few floors above us?”
The densest congregation of cursed energy, probably. “Understood. You’re bleeding out as well, so I’ll bring you as well?”
Togata hesitated. “Midoriya, will you be alright?”
Midoriya nodded. “Gojo said that the barrier will keep Chisaki out. I’ll protect Eri, so please, make sure you and Sir don’t die!”
A small smile stretched Togata’s face. “Okay. Yeah, let’s go, Gojo.”
He warped them up to the surface without a second thought. They were on a road’s intersection, and true to Togata’s words, a field hospital had been set up and the next intersection. No cars were on the road, fortunately.
Flying them over to the field hospital, Satoru released Infinity and dropped them off before peering over the houses at the fight happening back at the intersection. Just as his head peeked over the roof, he saw a frog-like girl slam a overly muscled man into the ground with her- her tongue?
It seemed that the ‘heroes’ up here had it handled.
Satoru teleported back down to Midoriya and Eri just in time to see Infinity slow the velocity of the rubble above them to zero. A well-placed Blue erased the rubble easily, and once that was done, he crouched down in front of them. Overhaul was still battering the barrier with endless attacks but it wasn’t doing much damage.
“I think your allies are on the way.” Satoru informed them cheerfully. “So don’t worry too much.”
“But…” Eri mumbled, speaking her first words in his presence since his release from the prison realm. “...they’re outside the barrier…!”
“Overhaul will-” Midoriya started, but stopped when Satoru held up his hand in front of him.
“He wants you dead and Eri alive, right?”
Midoriya jumped to the wrong conclusion. “We’re not killing Eri!” His shout made her flinch.
“That’s not what I meant!” He frowned. “I mean, he wants Eri. So he won’t focus on the others much if Eri isn’t here. Why don’t we move this fight to a less populated area?”
“He wants me.” Eri echoed, as if that was the only thing she had heard from his speech. “I can… go back… Then, you won’t have to fight.”
Satoru couldn’t tell if the tears brimming in her eyes were for herself, them, or both, but he wiped deactivated Infinity for a moment to brush them away.
“Of course not.” He said simply.
Midoriya was more than happy to add his own opinion. “Eri, dozens of people have gathered here in order to save you. Togata and I have already failed once - we will not let that happen a second time.”
“But– my Quirk– I’m cursed.” Eri sobbed.
Cursed energy did concentrate in that horn of hers, and its erratic motions made it evident that she didn’t have much control over it, but cursed energy either resided in or emanated from every person Satoru had ever encountered, save Fushiguro Toji.
If anything, Satoru was the cursed one, what with his own reserves eclipsing those of any sorcerer below Special Grade.
“Eri.” Midoriya said, steadfast. “I’m - we’re not letting anyone die. And we’re saving you, I promise you that. Even if you don’t want our help, we won’t stop until you’re safe.”