Chapter Text
"Yo, Satoru", Suguru greeted light and casual, as if he wasn't declared MIA at best and dead at worst. Not only that, but the ass had the gall to add, "Wanna join my cult?"
"Suguru..." He grits his teeth, "You bitch!"
...
Suguru didn't publicly defect but he sure is not coming back.
Unlike his past life as a shinigami, he isn't put in a high enough position to pull strings and manipulate people. Nor did he remember his memories in a conveniently early age where he could 'set the stage', so to speak, on upending jujutsu society the same way he did for Seireitei. The only influential person near him is Gojo and, despite the hundreds of years of memories, he's not willing to manipulate one of his only friends. His best friend even.
That and he doesn't know how effective Suigetsu is on him.
This whole entire thing is too heavy for Suguru. It was heavy for Aizen but it was even heavier now for Suguru. After all, Aizen didn't have to deal with 600+ years worth of spiritual burden. Suigetsu is bitching on him for being weak. He's pretty sure they weren't as assertive as this back then.
He honestly didn't plan to revive the whole Soumu-sama cult thing. He just... wanted to travel around the country without strings attached to the jujutsu society and Soumu-san was the first name he managed to blurt out when someone asked his name.
Honestly, he's living the life!
He has a stolen shamisen, he's wearing a more comfortable kimono, and sure, he could be wearing a more durable modern shoes but an old woman in some shrine offered the pair to him as payment so he wears some traditional wooden sandals again too.
People think he's some kind of ghost or spirit now.
This is really, the best possible outcome for everyone involved.
Shoko and Satoru are suddenly young in his ancient eyes. Easily molded and influenced. Suguru can't trust his own self control NOT to influence them even for his own curiousity.
(Seeing that he couldn't resist stringing his dear old captain along just to see that pretty face in such a mess.)
He does miss them though.
He could tell Satoru tried looking for him. Unorthodox way and slightly insulting that he'd ask his bitch of a mother who still lives in bumfuck nowhere and whom Suguru hasn't seen nor talked to since he was 13 when she sold him to a passing jujutsu sorcerer for a few thousand yen. But! Even more alarming is that she'd somehow managed to find him faster than his own literal superpowered friend. Just to send him a scathing note of complaints about how annoying Satoru is, which is valid, and to never bother her again with his freakishness and his gang of freaks.
He doesn't want to even think about how she did that.
Seeing as no one he knew from the jujutsu society managed to tracked him down still after that... debacle, it's safe to say mommy dearest didn't share notes with anyone about his location or what he's doing. Suguru gives her thanks in the form of ignoring her and giving her personal phone number to random call and messaging subscriptions.
Suguru is such a nice son.
...
Dressing up in traditional clothes and walking around with a shamisen in the middle of the night in random abandoned or deserted places tend to start rumors.
Some say ghost. Some say cosplayer. Some say a wandering old forgotten god. Some say random guy with a weird hobby.
Online conspiracy theorist forums are wild with guesses.
They have no idea how true the last option was but here Suguru is, playing a random old song from his memories in a random alleyway. His lilting voice of a song long forgetten by time echoes quite well for a rainy night.
Every once in a while, he'd get random stragglers doing the zombie walk through the alley do a double take when they see him. Not much people goes through here. Drunks, homeless people looking for a dry place to stay, runaway brats, crooks. They all do a double take when they see him. Some leaves some change onto the little bamboo cup he has in front of him. Some try to not look at him in the eye. Some try to bother him.
Ah, well, they used to.
The weird thing about being reborn in this new life is that, well, since Suigetsu is still somehow in hollowied form, that also means Suguru can access at some form his hollowfied powers.
His zanpaktou scoffs at the thought of using his powers for a split second jumpscare for the annoying ones who can't take a hint leave him well alone. Suigestu thinks that they should just simply eat their pathetic souls and be done with it.
Suguru thinks that he needs a cigarrette for the inconvenience.
...
Mimiko and Nanako wouldn't leave him alone after he rescued them from that cult of monkeys.
Soon enough, he has another pair of sweetlings to call as his children. Suguru tries to ignore the ache of missing his son and husband. Gin was quite the feral little thing that grew to a slightly society accepted man that he's proud to say he raised. Daughters are a different matter. Shinji and him didn't exactly adopt anymore children after Gin but then again, they didn't exactly adopted Gin in the first place either. The kid fell into their laps all on his own and Aizen had already emotionally adopted him the second the kid asked Aizen to teach him how to play shamisen after stalking him all day and even following him into the red light district just to find out what he was up to.
Gin was a good kid. Troublesome brat with sticky fingers who didn't know fear, but a good kid
Suguru was a bit disappointed that Gin and Shinji would never meet their new sisters/daughters.
He misses them so much.
He needs a smoke.
....
Burdened by hundeeds of years of horror he had to experience and witness within the streets of Rukon to the deep seated corruption of Seireitei, Suguru doesn't think anything he's doing is wrong.
He's seen way worse. He's going to make it less worse. Hell, he wished he hasn't seen worse.
No matter what you do, it's impossible to understand the minds of sick reprehensible people and for the sake of your own sanity, you shouldn't try to understand either.
Aizen, bless his heart, TRIED to do the villian act, as his destiny, but really, no performane, no true act of low and depravaty he has ever done can ever match the things people sick in the head does and think right. There are horrors Aizen, whom had been elbows deep into the insides of a fellow shinigami, doing live experiments while they were alive and awake to feel then, would vomit the entire contents of his stomach to. He doesn't really know how to fix things. He just knows how to make a bigger fire to distract others from another fire until the whole world burns.
He didn't know what he was doing as Aizen. Heck, be didn't even know what he was doing as the person he was before that! Now Suguru knows even less what to do with his life.
He sometimes wish he never remembered his past memories but then he wouldn't remember how to survive in the streets. He wouldn't remember how to raise feral bloodthirsty children. He wouldn't remember Suigetsu. He wouldn't remember how to harness the itching hungry power he has under his skin. He wouldn't remember the skills and instincts of a leiutenant for hundreds of years. He wouldn't know how easy it is to end a pathetic life of a pathetic monkey. He wouldn't know how to weave his webs spread out and elaborate and subtle. Wouldn't know how to manipulate people into... persuasion. He wouldn't remember the casual confidence of someone so close to being a god. He wouldn't remember how he can help these people he meets.
And that's exactly what he's doing all this for.
To help people.
These people don't deserve it. No. No. Neither did those cruel people in the streets of Rukon he woke up into. But they don't deserve the raging big fuck off monsters all on top of whatever the fuck these shitty people already has going on for them. These kids and those in rukon didn't deserve to starve everyday of their undeath in that literal scam of an afterlife.
They don't deserve it.
But that's none of his damned business. He's no saint. Despite what the stories tell people of Soumu-san. He can't do much as one person. He just wanders around and hunting down curses that he encounters. Just like what he did as Aizen. Up to the point where, just like the people of Rukon connected the dots, people started to notice his actions too. Until rumors started flying about how the shamisen playing ghost can heal strange sicknesses when you encounter him. Slower than those in Rukon but sure enough, the rumors spread.
How monsters that only you could see can be vanquished by Soumu-san.
Although, unlike Rukon who are sharp as a blade and cuts deep when threatened, people here are sheeps who are well too willing to follow blindly. It's disappointing and quite honestly disturbing for someone used to the ruthless survivalist mentality of outer rukon.
They almost seem... boring.
But that doesn't matter. What matters is that being a travelling 'spirit' doesn't feed a guy like him.
When someone burnt food in front of his churning stomach as an offering, he decided that enough is enough. He has two daughters now too. He can't just live off on pennies.
So, well, Aizen- no. Suguru turns back to one of the things he's good at.
Stealing money from the rich.
Aizen has lived long enough until the rise of modern technology and while Soul Society didn't exactly followed along with the development, the putrid stagnant water that it is, Aizen made a point of... well, polishing some skills as he'd like to call it.
He never really had to use those skills since Soul Society uses an outdated currency but with two new daughters and a newly independent gig of sorts, he has plenty of excuses to practice and well, rich people hardly recognize that they're being stolen from you fleece off some... pocket money from their accounts.
And, it brings Suguru great joy to steal from the rich again to fund the poor.
It gives Suguru a very special delight in stealing from the Gojo clan. Even more when he steals from Satoru's personal account, knowing how nonchalant his old friend would be about money. He often wonders what would Satoru's reaction to him regularly stealing money from his personal accounts. Did he even notice? Does Suguru want him to notice? Would anyone even believe Satoru that he's been stealing heaps of money from his bank?
...
He starts with something small.
He starts with Nanako and Mimiko.
He initially wanted to give them over to a more secure guardians but none could fill his criteria nor are safe so he ended up keeping them. That, and they won't let him leave without them. Co-dependency. A little bit of imprinting on their saviour. He really isn't that much but he tries his best to live up to the image while not hiding the more sharper, darker parts of himself. Almost as if testing them for their reactions to the inhuman thing within him.
A fourth rodeo was never supposed to be in his cards with how the stronger a soul, the more likely they'd disrupt the cycle of reincarnation. That's the entire reason why Aizen was so confident and assured when he started doing fucked up experiments on himself, knowing that consequences won't follow him after death.
Which, as evidenced by Suguru now struggling to keep his hollowfied insticts at bay demonstrates, was a wildly incorrect hypothesis apparently.
(Suguru's feeble human body is not built for such a heavy soul.)
While the girls flinch and back away from him, they are stubborn sweet thingswho still try their best to reach out despite the fear. Suguru doesn't know wheter to be relieved or be disappointed. In any case, he continues to feed them, dress them, shelter them, teach them what he knows. They follow along him so much that there are rumors of the shamisen playing ghost being now accompanied by young ghosts in schoolgirl uniforms. One playing a flute and another plays another shamisen. They wear cute uniforms though so they're obviously recently deceased ghosts who now follows this shamisen ghost.
Conspiracy theorists had a field day with that.
The girls were strangely intent on revenge and killing and well, Suguru is not at all unfamiliar with blood thirsty feral children. He already killed off the cult that had them and used Suigetsu to make it look like they never existed in the first place. Everything they ever stood for, all the 'artifacts' and 'sacrifices' and 'rich histories', buried. Useless and insignificant, like the insect they all were.
He offered the girls to remove their memories of that cult so they could live a normal life. They refused but Suguru knew that even if they didn't, that with their cursed energy and unique cursed technique, it wouldn't be that long before a jujutsu sorcerer would smell something fishy and take them away like Suguru was taken away.
Nanako and Mimiko were insistent on following him around even as they complain about walking and how boring it is until Suguru started teaching them how to play instruments. He even bought them some good quality flute and shamisen coming from a generous donation straight from Zen'in wallets. He taught them jujutsu techniques paired with skme shinigami ones that tranlates well enough into that cursed energy business.
He still feels the buzz of something feral and strange and dark within his soul that sit uncomfortably in him. Hollow instincts. Suguru didn't expect to miss his hollow packmates nor did he expect to miss their annual scheduled all out brawl.
Suguru tries to ease these instincts as letting go of his hollow side more when fighting curses.
(Unknowing of the rumors spreading across the jujutsu society of a powerful humanoid curse suddenly appearing all around Japan but for the life of them can't find nor track down.)
Now that he didn't have the jujutsu society breathing down his neck to consume curses, he laid low on eating curses and only consumes those he finds something interesting enough or powerful enough to keep. Now that he remembers past memories, for some inexplicable reason, curses started to... taste delicious.
He thought he was going crazy but it was real. Suguru, he thought hysterically, is developing a... taste for these damned things.
If he didn't let his cursed technique compress them into a marble for consumption- If he somehow chewed on the teared flesh of curses in their full forms, they taste... they taste! No more of that dirty rag of vomit and shit! The feral act almost animalistic with his hollow insticts on the forefront of his brain.
The need to consume.
(This method doesn't give his access to the curse for later use though, so disguisting dirty rag marbles still visits his dead pallate for time to time still.)
Along the way, he accumulates some strays and with that, something of a cult. Considering that more that half are convinced Suguru is some kind of benevolent yet tricky spirit who would solve your problems with the right offering.
He didn't know when it happened but suddenly Soumu-san has a following once more.
The devotion is suffocating.
How did Aizen handle such a thing? How did Satoru survive such a thing?
Suguru need another damned smoke.
...
"Suguru."
"Satoru."
"What's goin' on, Suguru."
"Don't worry about it."
"The hell I would!"
His best friend sighed, "It's just how Fate goes, Satoru. I will once more be the villian the world wants me to be."
"You're not making any sense! What about what you want to be?!"
"It's complicated. I wouldn't expect you to understand."
"Then help me understand!"
"There's no use of doing that now. This is goodbye. This is bigger than you and bigger than me. I am not the Suguru you knew anymore."
"Then I wanna know the Suguru you are now. Is that so wrong?"
"Yes." He replied with a wry smile, apathetic and merciless.
...
The first time Satoru met him, he genuinely thought the boy was a humanoid curse.
There isn't much of them but they sure do exist.
He smiles without anything in them. His words on honor and protecting the weak and other childish bullshit are just as empty. But there is something in those ever smiling eyes that feels sharp and predatory. Something under that boy's skin that feels all how familliar with the same creatures he was raised to erase. Something almost... primordal.
It was one of the reasons why he was so antagonistic over the guy so much because how the hell can they not feel this? His curse energy is so close to being an actual curse that he might as well be. There is something heavy and biting within him. Something under that boy's skin that almost seem to look back at Satoru, staring holes through his soul almost hungry. When Satoru found out about the boy's cursed technique, he had a little 'a-ha!' moment. As if that explains everything. And for a while, it did. He let it be.
But his Six Eyes burn in his sockets. Telling him to never let his guard down. Like an eternally cornered prey, hissing and biting.
But that just doesn't make sense, does it?
But then this random civillian born from some mountain some fucking nowhere looked directly into his eyes and did not flinched, did not shy away, did not run scared. This boy looked at him. And held it.
Never once did Geto Suguru not look at Satoru in the eyes whenever he speaks to him. Even Shoko called his eyes creepy and tends to look just below his eyes when she talks to him. He doesn't mind. He's used to it
Yet... yet... what exactly makes Geto Suguru different?
That fateful day as they fought over their shared designs of uniforms, (Satoru just didn't want to waste time thinking of a modification and this random kid's design was kinda cool. Suguru didn't have to make a big deal about it sheesh-) Satoru decided that this boy would have the honor of being his partner.
And every day after that, Suguru proved exactly why. Meeting Satoru blow after blow. Fist after fist. The teen keeps up with Satoru so well that he can't help but feel shivers in delight of finally having an equal.
But when that... that mission happened, everything falls apart.
They failed.
They failed and the failure is heavy on both of them. Heavier than Satoru expected to carry.
Riko Amanai died and Tengen's old crusty body wasn't able to get a new vessel.
Satoru was reborn as a god and for one horrifying moment, he worries that in his ascention to godhood, he left his best friend behind in mortality.
He thinks that 'Ah this is the limit. The line that ends where he can follow me. I'm all alone now. Again.'
After all, Suguru is just a man.
But then the missions piled up and suddenly Suguru, his partner and best friend is missing.
...
Last known location was clean even while it made his Six Eyes twitch in wrongness of it all. But Satoru for the life of him can't tell what.
Anyone he asks tells him no clues on what could possibly in here. No curses or anything related to it. The mission request was shifty too. Why would they send Suguru to this random place where nothing happens?
His Six eyes tells him to look further but there is nothing to look. Nothing to see. Nothing to hear.
Satoru looks for Suguru's old house reluctantly ignoring the irritated buzz of his Six Eyes under his skin.
...
"I didn't know you play."
He hummed and snorts like he just said a funny joke,
"There are lifetimes of things you don't know about me, Satoru."
"You... you really have a shitty personality, don't you?" Satoru feels pathetic even before the words left his mouth.
"Oh? Pot. Kettle."
...
There is something... heavy to Suguru's presence. Something old and wary and so so tired. Heavier and older since he last saw him. He's looking at him as if...
Satoru doesn't like that.
He wants his best friend back.
...
"What did the flowers ever do to you?" Shoko walks in.
"Shoko, what flowers are these to you?" Satoru demanded, squatting over the flower bed beside the dorms.
"Hm? Sunflowers? Are your screws more loose today?" She lights a smoke and ignores his quick scolding on her smoking habit with a middle finger.
Satoru continued to glare at the obviously tulip flowers.
"And what color are they?" He urged impatiently.
"Uh, yellow? What else is there?"
That's the thing.
Satoru doesn't know.
His Six Eyes doesn't know.
...
There's a new god in town and Satoru doesn't like it one bit.
Who is this new god and why do they feel oh so damningly familliar? Why does he feel like he knows him? Why is Six-Eyes screaming at him whenever he sees him?
Who is he?
...
"Hello, Yuuta-kun."
"Soumu-san?"
"There will be a time when someone from jujutsu society will come and try to kill you and Rika-chan for being dangerous. When that happens, look—"
"For you?" He asked, desperately hopeful. To which Soumu-san only smiled. The spirit leaned down eye level to Yuuta and patted his head softly.
"When that happens," he repeats, "Look for Gojo Satoru."
"Who is he?"
"An old friend."