Chapter Text
Calli’s phone screen glowed against the dark of her bedroom like a miniature sun. The final panel of Jujutsu Kaisen stared back at her — Gojo Satoru’s smile frozen mid-death, Sukuna standing triumphant, and the faint line of text that announced The End.
She blinked once. Twice.
And then the disbelief detonated.
“What the fuck.”
Her voice cracked through the silence. She stared down at the screen again, scrolling back up just to make sure she hadn’t hallucinated the ending out of sheer exhaustion. No. It was real. Gojo was dead. Kenjaku was still alive. The manga was finished.
“What the actual hell, Gege? You killed Gojo?”
She slapped her laptop shut, then opened it again, because her rage demanded witnesses. The community thread on X (because apparently Twitter had to die too, just like Gojo) was already trending: #JusticeForGojo. Thousands of posts screaming the same collective heartbreak, but none of them screamed quite loud enough for Calli.
She sprang up from bed, hair a tangled halo of righteous fury. “You build up the most world-breaking, internet-breaking, brain-melting fight between Gojo and Sukuna — and then what? You kill him off like a KitKat? He just snaps?”
The plushie of Gojo on her shelf stared at her in silent judgment, one plastic blue eye glinting mockingly. She pointed at it. “Don’t look at me like that, Satoru. I mourned you twice! And now you die because your creator woke up and chose violence?”
Calli paced the length of her tiny apartment, the wooden floor creaking under every indignant step. “Oh, but wait—” she jabbed at her phone again, opening the translated author interview she’d saved — “‘Gojo could have technically won the fight.’ Technically won? Technically? You are the author, Gege! You control the universe!”
She flung her free hand toward the ceiling as if the cosmos itself might provide an explanation. “What do you mean could have? You mean you looked at that beautiful white-haired menace, decided he deserved victory, and still killed him off? Because what, balance? Trauma? Petty bitch energy?”
Her voice bounced off the walls, wild and echoing. Somewhere in the building a dog barked; Calli didn’t care. She was already scrolling again, caught between despair and dark comedy.
“You’re telling me you created the strongest sorcerer alive, hyped the fight for months, and then ended it like—” she grabbed a random chocolate bar from her desk, snapped it cleanly in half, and held it up, deadpan, “—like this? KitKat edition Gojo?”
Her laughter broke midway through and turned into an incredulous scream. She dropped onto her bed, burying her face into a pillow before muffling a howl that was ninety percent heartbreak, ten percent caffeine withdrawal.
When she resurfaced, the pillow bore witness to mascara streaks and crumbs of potato chips. “I need therapy,” she muttered. “Actually, Gege needs therapy.”
She tried to calm herself by checking the news feed, hoping for solace in memes. Instead, an announcement headline glared up at her:
> New Spin-Off Confirmed — “Jujutsu Kaisen: Mojuro” to Follow the Grandchildren of Yuta Okkotsu and Maki Zenin!
For a second her pulse quickened in delight. “Oh my God, they ended up together! Finally something good!”
But the blurb beneath crushed that spark immediately: ‘Set in a new age where curses rise once more, the Mojuro generation faces trials eerily similar to those of their ancestors…’
She sat there, mouth open. “…So you’re telling me these poor idiots went through twenty-three arcs of emotional trauma just for their grandkids to suffer again?”
Her laugh came out brittle. “You ever heard of peace, Gege? Healing arcs? No? Of course not.”
Calli scrolled through the comments, her expression cycling through disbelief, humor, and cosmic despair. “They all died for this?” she whispered, then raised her voice again. “For this?! What’s the point of exorcising curses if you just respawn them like Pokémon?”
She threw her phone onto the bed, where it bounced once and landed screen-down. The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the low hum of her desktop’s fan.
“Forget it,” she muttered, sinking into her chair. “If I were in that world, I’d fix your damn writing myself.”
The words came out half as a joke, half as a prayer to whatever multiverse governed fandom suffering. She leaned back, arms crossed, glaring at her dark monitor. Somewhere deep in the city, thunder rumbled even though the forecast promised clear skies.
Calli didn’t notice. Her adrenaline was ebbing now, leaving behind the hollow fatigue of someone who’d burned through every emotion known to man. She rubbed her eyes. “God, I have to be at work tomorrow.”
A glance at the clock — 2:47 a.m.
“Perfect,” she sighed. “Tragic endings, unpaid overtime, and now insomnia. Thanks, Gege.”
She picked up her phone long enough to set an alarm, squinting at her reflection in the black screen: puffy-eyed, messy bun, defiance still smoldering behind the exhaustion. “You win this round, Akutami,” she murmured, tossing the phone onto her nightstand.
Pulling the blanket up to her chin, she closed her eyes, mumbling, “I’ll fix it myself someday…”
The apartment lights flickered once, twice — a faint current humming through the air. Her breathing slowed. Outside, thunder rolled again, closer this time.
Then the world went dark.
Not the gentle, sleepy kind of dark that came with dreams, but the absolute, swallowing void of something shifting out of alignment. The hum became a low vibration under her bed, beneath her skin, inside her chest.
Calli stirred but didn’t wake. Her last thought before the darkness consumed everything was simple, almost amused: Wouldn’t it be funny if I woke up in Jujutsu Kaisen?
The void answered with silence.
And the next moment, there was no apartment. No bed. No world that belonged to her at all.