The air in the room grows thick and heavy, charged with a frustration so potent you can taste it—metallic and sharp, like a storm about to break.

"Damn it. Hold on, try it one more time!"

Satoru’s voice, usually so laced with lazy arrogance, is now strained, stripped raw. It’s a sound that makes the fine hairs on your arms stand on end. For sixteen years, he has moved through the world wrapped in a divine, untouchable certainty, a king in a castle of his own making. His Infinity was not just a technique; it was the very bedrock of his identity, the invisible wall that kept the world at bay and him forever above it. He was Satoru Gojo, and he was alone at the top.

Until you.

Until a few days ago, in a crowded hallway, your shoulder brushed his. Not against the impenetrable barrier that had repelled everything from curses to catastrophe, but against the warm, startlingly real wool of his jacket. Against him.

That single, mundane point of contact shattered something fundamental in his universe, and now the god-king is trying to piece his reality back together, using you as his reluctant anchor.

He stands before you, all that legendary power coiled tight in his frame, yet he looks… unmoored. His famous Infinity is down, voluntarily dismissed, leaving him exposed. Vulnerable. The word feels foreign, wrong, when applied to him. He instructs you to touch him again, his voice a low, focused command that brooks no argument. You see the absolute concentration etched into his features—his brows are drawn together in a severe line, a stark contrast to his typically playful expression. The very tip of his tongue is caught between his teeth, a childlike gesture of pure, unadulterated effort that feels strangely intimate to witness.

He is trying so hard. You can feel the energy crackling around him, a hum of immense power being forced to bend to a will that is, for the first time, genuinely baffled. He is pouring every ounce of his legendary strength into making the impossible happen—into making you stop. To make you bounce off the air an inch from his skin, like everyone else. Like everything else.

But he can’t.

Your fingertips, when you finally extend them, meet only the simple cotton of his t-shirt. Beneath it, you feel the solid warmth of his shoulder, the faint tremor of muscle tensed not in defence, but in desperate, futile focus. You feel the rise and fall of his breath, a rhythm that is slightly too quick, and you realise with a jolt that steals the air from your own lungs—he’s afraid. The great Satoru Gojo is terrified. Not of you, but of what you represent. A flaw in his cosmos. A crack in the foundation of everything he knows to be true.

And in the devastating silence that follows yet another failed attempt, the only sound is the ragged pull of his breath. He doesn’t look at you. His brilliant blue eyes are wide, staring at nothing, seeing only the beautiful, terrifying chaos of a world that has just become infinitely more complicated.