the sun and the sky | gojo satoru

side story III | departure is excruciating

aka the angst chapter with a flashback of child gojo and child hina
[Manga Spoilers: Shibuya Incident Arc]
———

Someone knocked on her door.

Hina hesitated, her fingers trembling as she held her phone to her ear, the call going to voicemail once more. She'd tried dozens of times to call him, sent dozens of texts—but Gojo wouldn't answer. She hadn't heard from him in days.

A sickening feeling brewed in her chest as she stared at her front door, seemingly looming over her. Three more knocks, a bit more urgent now, but still collected, Hina tells herself.

It wasn't Gojo. She knew it wasn't him. There was a particular rhythm and pattern that he'd use when he knocked—it was a secret code, kept between the two of them.

So Hina knew, she knew that whoever was standing outside her door—it was not Gojo. It wasn't Kaito, nor was it Mayumi—they'd text her, because they were safe. They knew what had happened at Shibuya—everyone knew.

Cursed energy crackled at her fingertips, static and trembling. She slowly stepped forward, shakily pressing her fingertips to the door. She breathed in.

Not a threat. Whoever stood outside that door was not a danger, at least not to Hina. It didn't feel like it.

She slowly creaked the door open, her eyes landing on a boy, a familiar boy, with black hair and dark-blue eyes, with a faint set of eyebags.

"Okkotsu-kun." Hina breathed, somewhat relieved. Okkotsu Yuta stood in front of her, his hand on the strap that held the case to his weapon. He forced a small, short smile, before his lips parted.

"It's nice to see you again, Nakano-san."

-

When Hina was eight, she spotted a koi fish in a pond resting in the gardens of the Gojo Estate. This koi, however, looked quite different from its fellow friends. Rather than donning a coat of only white and spots of orange, this koi had black splotches across its back as well.

Hina thought it was unique. Hina thought it looked sad.

For a few weeks, she was tasked with feeding the koi in the pond. It didn't take her away from serving the Young Master—but it did delay her a couple of minutes from serving him breakfast.

She often wondered why they would make her take such a risk—to serve breakfast late. But each time she would show up, her hair in a disarray from her nimble running, all the Young Master would do is glance at her, blinking. He never questioned her late arrival.

She was grateful for his patience, but it didn't numb the fears nagging at her every morning.

At some point, while watching the koi, she even started a race in her own mind. Each time she would arrive at the pond to feed the koi, she would scatter the pieces and watch, waiting to see which koi would reach the pieces faster. And each time she did, she noticed that the white and orange koi would practically swarm the pieces while the koi with black spots would lag behind, blocked by its friends.

It upsetted Hina to see it, so she tried tossing the pieces closer to the black-spotted koi in order to give it a head start. It wasn't cheating in her book. She would lean over the rocks, trying to get as close as she could to the black-spotted koi, dropping a few pieces in front of it.

However, even with its head start, it would only be able to eat one or two pieces before the entire flock of koi came to overcrowd it.

And so, that's when an eight-year-old Hina began to feel a new wave of dissatisfaction.