Your heart doesn't just skip a beat; it stutters to a dead halt in your chest. The air is stolen from your lungs, leaving you hollow and breathless in the polished hallway of Jujutsu Tech. Because standing there, as real as the ghost that has haunted you for years, is him.

Satoru.

Once, you knew every secret his smile held. You were the cartographer of his laughter, the keeper of his quietest fears. You mapped the constellations of freckles on his skin and swore you’d navigate by them forever. You were just kids, two halves of a single desperate promise whispered under starry skies: We'll make it. We'll get out, we'll grow old, and I'll marry you. It was a vow etched into the very core of who you were, a future so bright and certain it felt like destiny.

So why did it all shatter?

The question is a fresh wound, ripped open by the simple, brutal fact of his presence. The years between then and now collapse into nothing. And the most devastating part isn't the shock of seeing him—it's the agonising, intimate familiarity that follows.

You know the exact shade of blue of his eyes, even hidden behind his blindfold. You know his birthday is December 7th. You know he has a devastating sweet tooth, that he hates stuffy formality, and that he loved that stupid indie band you both discovered together. You know the story behind the name he’s now known by, the one that carries weight and fear throughout the jujutsu world. You know the boy who became the myth.

You know everything about him.

And he knows everything about you.

Yet, a canyon of silence and unsaid words stretches between you. You are historians of the same ruined kingdom, standing on opposite sides of the rubble. You are living archives of a love that was supposed to last a lifetime, now reduced to a case study in how everything can go so terribly wrong. You are the keepers of a language only the two of you ever spoke, and now you’re both mute.

The world narrows to this corridor, to the space between his footsteps and yours. The fluorescent lights hum a funeral dirge for what you were. He stops. You stop. The silence is a physical thing, thick and heavy with a decade of questions.

And then, a voice you haven't heard in a lifetime, yet one you'd recognise in the chaos of a thousand others, breaks it. It’s softer than you remember, laced with a hesitation the boy you knew would never have possessed.

"Hey..."