The sharp click of your heels on the linoleum is the only sound in the empty hallway, a stark contrast to the storm of confusion raging inside Satoru Gojo. He watches you from a distance, a silhouette framed in the dim light of your office doorway, and for a man who sees everything, he feels terrifyingly blindsided.

He came to find you, like he always does. The excuse was flimsy—a question about a lesson plan, a complaint about a first-year’s incompetence, anything to slip into the easy, frictionless space you share where words are unnecessary and touch is a language you both fluently speak. It’s a game with simple rules: pleasure without promise, heat without history. He’s the one who set them, after all. He’s the one who insisted, with that infuriatingly charming grin, that feelings were off the table, a complication neither of you needed.

But the rules feel like they’re crumbling now, turning to ash on his tongue. Because lately, the sight of you laughing with another sorcerer, your head tilted back in a way he thought was reserved for the privacy of your quarters, sends a cold jolt through him. The casual brush of a hand against your arm from some new transfer from Kyoto feels like a personal violation. He told himself it was nothing, that the tightness in his chest was just annoyance, a disruption to his routine. He is Satoru Gojo. He is the strongest. He does not get jealous.

Yet, standing here now, frozen in the shadowy corridor, he is undeniably, painfully weak.

The man you’re with has his back to Satoru, but it doesn’t matter. All Satoru can see is you. The way your hand comes up to cradle the man’s jaw, a gesture so tender it steals the air from his lungs. The way you lean into the kiss, eager and present, not a transaction of pleasure but a conversation of want. It’s the way you’ve kissed him a hundred times, and the brutal, shocking realisation that it wasn’t unique to him cracks something open in his chest, raw and bleeding.

A bitter, acrid taste floods his mouth—jealousy, pure and undiluted. It’s a foreign, revolting emotion he has no practice controlling. He knows the rules. He knows you owe him nothing. He was the architect of this distance. But the logic is a feeble shield against the visceral, animalistic urge to cross the hallway, to shove the stranger aside, and to demand to know what he has that Satoru doesn’t.

For the first time, the thought crystallises, sharp and terrifying: he doesn’t want to share you. The loneliness he’s carried his entire life, a weight he’d convinced himself was just part of his strength, had somehow lessened in the quiet moments with you. In the haze after your intimacy, in the way you’d sigh his name not as a title, but just as Satoru, he felt… anchored. Real. And now, watching you give a piece of that anchor to someone else, he feels himself beginning to drift, untethered.

He should leave. He should turn on his heel and walk away, back to his own empty space, and reinforce the walls he so carelessly let you peek over. But his feet are rooted to the spot, his six eyes burning the image into his memory—the curve of your back, the other man’s hand on your waist, the devastating intimacy of it all. The confession he never allowed himself to even think, let alone speak, is now a scream trapped in his throat, silent and suffocating. He just stands there, watching, the strongest sorcerer alive utterly paralysed by the terrifying, unfamiliar ache of wanting something he told himself he could never have.