When Gojo Satoru was born, the Force curled into itself from the way the pressure point of balance got shifted.

It had never whispered to him. It screamed, a tug of consciousness so strong that it wasn’t even a gut feeling anymore; it was simple and raw energy from the way others had described the Force by and into them. Or, not simple. It was complex, alive, divine. From the moment he opened his eyes to the twin moons of Serenno, he had seen too much, as if he had six eyes lost in time and space. Past, present, future, but not as a vision. As intuition. Devoured at once, the galaxy bent sideways in his skull.

The Six Eyes⎯draped in ivory robes, a saber brighter than the heart of a dying star clipped to his hip⎯stood on the deck of a ruined cruiser, nose scrunching at the foul scent of scorched metal and carbon scoring thick in the air, like the stench of a rotting swamp, thought that had been his fault, given the still-warm bodies that laid beneath boots slick with ash. His’. His reflection flickered across the darkened viewport; tall, loose-limbed, hair like the nucleus of a supernova, white and bright, the piece of cloth he used to conceal his eyes wrapped a bit below the nasal bone and over his forehead. Spotless from blood, too, given the manipulation of the force that constantly hummed over his skin like a thin wrapper.

The last droid hadn’t even finished sparking before he’d been requested in the temple.

Gojo had never truly fit inside the temple walls. Not really. Not at all. Too tall for their ceilings, too loud for their silence. Too brilliant. Too cursed. He flirted with darkness like it was an old flame, teased it with a smile that didn’t quite reach the corners of his eyes. But he never gave in. Sometimes he pondered about it, what it would be to have a system without corruption and old hags that, in the ‘ranking’ of their incredibility and pride, thought they were above him. That was the trick, wasn’t it? To hover right at the edge and never fall, otherwise he would be condemned.

Yet there was something obscene about the way they spoke his name, like reverence hollowed out and repackaged as expectation. A Jedi Council that did not trust him, bowing their heads and reciting their codes and fake words while keeping a blade trained on the hollow of his back, afraid of what he could become. A demand, born to bring balance, they said. As if balance ever came without blood. And if he opened his heart with his own mind, he could accept that he was tired of it all, yet somehow enjoyed his power. Two truths could co-exist, he supposed.

Balance. What a beautiful, brutal word.