Fallen

      How dare the sun shine so bright. So warm against my skin that if it were any other time of the year I'd be red and peeling, yet still, the blistering wind made me feel no better. My scarf flapped like a flag in the air, the whipping was the only sound in the cemetery. Even the birds had stopped singing in surrender. The bitter smell of rotted fruit crinkled in my nose and the distinct scent of oncoming rain. I could feel the weather in my bones, the dull ache in my ribs and knees of the climbing humidity. The sun began to fade, even it becoming too cowardly to keep shining. Even the sun was afraid of me. My feet hurt, the pain in my soles was sharp and relentless but to sink to my knees would be to admit that I was weak. That there really was something in this world that could take me down; break me.

Did I attract tragedy, I wondered. Was this divine punishment? Reparations for the unlimited power that I had? I had always assumed there would come a day when the gods decided that I needed humbling, and I thought it had come when I was forced to kill my best friend. Forced to watch as the glow of hope in his eyes gave way to cloud and I realized that I had, for the second time that day, ended a persons life. 

And now, here I stand again, in front of another dead friend. Someone who had been there since Sugurus death and put up with my endless bullshit. I was well aware Nanami tolerated me at best but he was still the closest thing I had to a best friend aside from Shoko. This was an ache I hadn't felt in years. I preached to my students about the loss that comes with being a sorcerer, the catch-22, and yet it never gets any easier. I felt like a hypocrite, and I needed to talk to them. 

I missed them, they were being hit with the losses just as hard as I was, maybe worse. And Yuji, who was blaming himself for the hundreds of thousands of deaths at the hands of Sukuna. I needed to pull myself together. I was... am the strongest, and I needed to continue being the strongest for them. I told Megumi once that he would die alone, as it always was for sorcerers, but I was wrong, and I was going to make sure that none of my students ever died alone. That was my real purpose in life, and it took too many deaths for me to realize I was selfish. 

Sorcery is evolving at a rapid rate and The Big Three need to keep up, each of my students will surpass the sorcerers of today, and create a new age of jujutsu.

 I didn't let myself fall, Nanami wouldn't have let me, would've been disappointed I even sulked for that long, so I put one foot in front of the other.

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I had only briefly seen Yuji and Megumi and before Shoko told me about Nanami. It was a moment of relapse and arrogance. I abandoned them for my own selfish desires, afraid that I been broken again by the death of a friend that I had forgotten what they had endured. I scolded myself on the way, the bitter wind serving as a grounding mechanism, reminding me that I am human, I have people that rely on me and I can't get swept up with emotions. 

The faces of my student in the dying light of day was enough to pull me from my stupor, it was sobering. Yuji had freshly healed scars and the bags under Megumi's eyes were even more pronounced. The both sat with a hunch in their shoulders and when they noticed I had arrived their eyes sank. Yuji avoided looking directly at me, the twiddling of his fingers suddenly proving to be the most interesting thing in the room. Megumi's mouth was in a dead set line, thin and grim; his jaw locked. 

"Meg-"

"Gojo," He interrupted, "We need to tell you something."

I thought I had known all of the deaths that had occurred in Shibuya, but it seemed Shoko was withholding one in particular. Perhaps for my sanity, or for Yuji and Megumi's.

"Kugisaki... she-" Fushiguro started but there was a sheen on his eye and a crack in his voice. My heart collapsed in on itself.

"She saved my life, sir." Yuji had to finish, he who didn't bother to hide the tears falling over the apples of his cheeks. It made him look young, made him look sixteen. "And she gave hers to do it."

 And so I fell. I was not the strongest, and I was not unbreakable.