Chapter Text
Gojo Satoru loved Lord of the Rings. It was no Digimon, of course, but still a solid classic.
When he was younger and Suguru wasn't evil or dead he'd imagine himself there. He'd still be the strongest, obviously, but he'd go through the potential scenarios.
Could a well-placed Blue smash Sauron? Could he crush the One Ring between his fingers with infinity, and watch the adoring (and perhaps a little terrified) faces of an ever-changing array of iconic characters as the biggest threat they've ever faced goes poof, gone, just like that, in the hands of someone who is just. That. Strong. Or would the magic of Sauron beat out Limitless? Would he have to struggle?
(By the time he could teleport and bring convergence and divergence together in multiplying paradoxes, fantasies like those were a thing of the past.)
He had liked to imagine himself something like Gandalf, but better. Throwing down with the Balrog, plunging the depths of Moria for the closest thing to a special grade curse that world had to offer. Rejecting the tempting song of the Ring (would infinity keep it at bay?), keeping the fellowship together and crushing all opposition, leading the way straight into the mountain and fighting Sauron himself in the sky above Mordor, until Frodo could chuck his silly little bit of jewellery into the lava.
In his more indulgent moments he'd put himself in Galadriel's place, actually taking the ring and becoming a King so dreadful not even Sauron or Isildur's heir could stand in his way, reshaping Middle Earth in his own image.
He never read the books, not to mention the extra books he knew existed only because Suguru read all of them.
(Six Eyes made books really fucking boring. Why would you focus on text when you can see the shape of colours refracting through cursed energy, infinitely broken apart by the streaming shifts of the atmosphere itself? Who would care about black words on a yellow page with textures that scratch the back of the eyes when endless auroras light up the sky? And the Lord of the Rings weren’t just books, they were long books.)
Films were so much better. More sensory info meant it could actually hold his attention. Mostly.
Also. Aragorn? Hot. Sue him.
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As bizarre as his life got at times, he had never thought he'd end up there.
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Sanáro, son of Áratinde, daughter of Alcarindin, son of Aglahad, is of the blood of Númenor, or so his aunt would always say.
His father was an Angel, his mother claimed in her more lucid moments.
Bastard, is his legal definition.
Long before he reached his full height, he was taller than most in their small coastal town. He towered above them, with pale white hair and pale eyes and pale skin, where they leant tanned, dark haired and dark eyed, and supposedly on the shorter side, for Men. His mother looked more like him, but not enough to not be more alike the people around them. Her own mother had come from the town, and her father from somewhere else, far away by boat, and Sanáro sometimes dreamt of leaving for there as a child.
He was clearly and elf, or at least partway one, the townspeople who had never seen one would say. (He’d never seen one either, but eternal serenity and one-ness with the world wasn't something he felt. But maybe only old elves got that? Whatever. Point is, he was different from the others.)
When he was four years old Mother told him to stop looking at her and cried as she shoved a beautifully painted porcelain pot over his head.
That was how they found out he could see just fine anyway, and Mother cursed his supposedly divine father for leaving her with a child that could see her soul (he tried to ask her what a soul looks like, because he didn't know if he could, but wouldn't that be spectacular?) and then he went to live with his aunt and cousins instead.
(They’d had to smash the very, very old heirloom pot to get him out of it.)
When he was fourteen, they sent him with an official Envoy far, far, and further still, to a place called Dol Amroth, where his uncle lived. It was supposed to be a place where people like him lived, the place he’d thought he could find belonging and adventure, as a little boy. It didn't take long to learn that they weren't akin to him at all, and that he wasn't like them, either. But many of them were taller than the people where he came from, and with more varied colours, so he stood out a little less. He was a ward of the Prince now, and set to become someone important.
He was fourteen and leaving his home town for the first time, in a shared ship’s cabin with the Envoy, when he laid eyes upon it.
Dark fire, eating up the horizon and beyond, visible through the wood of the ship and through the dark of night and through heavy clouds and an impossible distance away. The view woke him in a cold sweat and with deep, primal fear. It wasn’t just wrong, it was malice.
Something about it sang of familiarity, ringing tones of despair and hatred looking like the flavour of blood, wept from the darkest corners of humanity.
He learned of Mordor after they arrived, and it explained everything and nothing. The Darkness is greater that-a-way, but held somewhat at bay by the cities of Men.
He wanted to sink his teeth into that negative fire and tear it apart and he wanted to rip into it with the power of dying stars. (If he could only figure out how to grasp it.)
The numbers learned from tutors weren't enough, limited in scope and imagination, and he was a frustrated student. It felt as if he was forced to re-tread ground that should have been long since broken. He couldn't explain to his teachers why it made him so angry, to have to correct and build on the pathetically limited offerings they brought in the form of obscenely valuable books, but it was driving him mad.
At least they decided he was more than knowledgeable enough, when they couldn't teach him anything more of mathematics, the quacks, and he was allowed to move on to more entertaining pursuits.
At fifteen he learned that his whole family was always important, it was not just great uncle Prince Adrahil and his son, uncle Imrahil. Sanáro would have been heir to the ruling family back in that town, as the only male of his generation, if they hadn't sent him away. Their haste to be rid of him made a little more sense, knowing that.
He never cared about the loss of station anyway - Gondor a was far more interesting country (he decided with the fervour of one denied other options). More people and more happenings and more things to do and see, not to mention the abundance of art and science (and for the first time in his life, he had something like friends).
Him just being there apparently supported trade and diplomatic relations too, with his birth family's town and country, so he was obviously helping. Helping by getting to be somewhere else that wasn’t filled the townspeople’s awed looks and reverent whispers, that wasn’t tinged with the stain of Mother’s madness.
It was also at fifteen he finally decided to grow up, and stopped sleeping in cousin Elphir’s room to get any rest at all.
It was hard, with the burning Shadow that covered the sky and permeated the sea and dripped over the land itself always in view, and always so loud. But Elphir was the heir to the heir to the throne, and it was silly for him to coddle a cousin nearly a man grown himself.
At sixteen, uncle Imrahil (who technically really was some kind of cousin) gave Sanáro eyeglasses fashioned out of dark, smoky quarts, to help with how the glint of sun off the waves and the glaring hum of the weeds in the cracks of the streets and the blinding edges of voices of too many people always made his head hurt, sometimes to a crippling degree.
The spectacles came from a far-off land, as far as he’d travelled to get to Dol Amroth and more, but over ground instead of by sea. East of Harad, uncle Imrahil said, and Sanáro wondered if, when he got older, he could be an envoy to there just to see what it was like, somewhere else just as different again.
With his eyes shielded the overwhelm was not as debilitating, but it was also easier to see the shapes of the world as the Shadow bent around them.
He got used to it.
He was sixteen when Mereno said he was like the stars themselves, one of the lights in the sky come down to bless the world with his presence. And that even that paled next to how he was everything Mereno could ever have wanted in a friend.
They kissed behind the hedgerow by the tavern, where music still rang in the night, and the Shadow caressed Mereno’s face almost as tenderly as Sanáro’s hands ran through his auburn hair.
-
He is seventeen when he remembers the name Gojo Satoru, as he's bleeding and broken and standing over the dying remains of his best and closest friend in this life.
They were drafted into service like all other young men, as the Shadow grew and orcs became more plentiful outside the confines of their rotten lands.
They still laughed and lived, and had been so sure that they'd come out the other end of their years of service all the stronger for it, ready to lead, noble boys that they were.
This was supposed to be a scouting expedition, maybe a little bit of a hunt, with the minions of Evil their prey, if they found any at all. Not a battle.
Gojo Satoru is seventeen for the second time when an orc's blade strikes him over the back, as he shields Mereno’s failing body, and the rusty, jagged spike doesn't pierce through the maille he wears. He reaches for something he knows he can touch, sees the swing of the cloth of the world and draws on impossible distance in the infinity between zero and one and the weapon near halts.
He shrouds himself in everything approaching nothing, and he can see the shape of the power he always had and never knew what to do with.
But a moment later it falters, and he doesn’t know why. He lifts his hand and brings rejection and attraction and space into one singular impossibility and hollow purple should blossom at his fingertips, but in the next beat it’s gone, as if the laws of physics decided to twist out from underneath him and he lives in impossibility, how could this happen.
The creatures of darkness encroach and Satoru that is Sanáro, almost thirty and seventeen both at once, scrambles backwards as he tries to find infinity in a world that will not obey. Then he settles, breath suddenly sure. He doesn’t need to know the world; he only needs to know himself, and he does.
His Domain expands and Infinite Void wraps like a lover’s caress over Satoru’s reality. All the orcs freeze, as more of everything than their little minds can process crowds in, and their link to the evil that keeps them tethered with purpose is severed.
The creatures were greater in number and better equipped and more thoroughly organised than they should have been.
Still, they all drop dead at Gojo Satoru’s feet.
Sanáro who is Satoru stands stock still, the sole survivor of his party and the band of attackers both, lost and reeling and the strongest. Alone.
He'd rather have Mereno back alive and no memory of who he once was, and Gojo Satoru returned to the peace of blissful death.
He sinks to his knees with crippling fatigue. Reverse cursed technique should work just as well as Infinite Void but it doesn’t. It scatters in his grasp as if his understanding of his own composition is wrong.
-
He buries his comrades in arms who are- who were his friends and Mereno who was more. They are laid to rest in a grove of trees, just north of the rolling hills of Lower Lebennin, rivers and the sea visible to Six Eyes in the ever-reaching distance. Satoru uses the shovel they only hours before dug a latrine with.
Mereno would have loved the view from there.
Satoru doesn’t.
It’s too close to the place where they died, and reminds him of people long lost. And it is empty, with no one nearby to care for them.
Suguru would have liked it, too. At least the Suguru who Satoru knew before they parted on diverging trajectories. Nanami would have been overjoyed, probably, no clocks or cars or endless professional grind in sight. Shoko would have joined Satoru in his dislike, he has no doubt at all. Yuuji and Megumi and Nobara, Yuuta, Maki and Tsumiki and – he lets the thoughts of the kids fall to the side. They would have been happy, as long as they were together.
He hopes the rest of his friends would be pleased with the place, in pieces of bloodless flesh beneath the earth. He didn’t know them well enough to have talked of such things. He'd thought they had time.
Satoru who is Sanáro sits and breathes and wants to fold space around him and just leave. His eyes sting and his glasses are broken and lost. He has a token from each of his comrades, collected to bring back to their families.
He tries, and teleportation doesn’t work either. Something is off to a degree so great it will not obey him, even though Six Eyes sees all and Limitless is right there at his beck and call. Maybe the planet is the wrong size, or gravity is off, or perhaps there is some other interference. The Shadow is there, always, closer still and heavier here than in Dol Amroth, but it warps and settles much like cursed energy did, and he can’t see a reason for why it would not work the same.
He tries again, brute forcing calculations and choosing a spot just two steps away. He can see everything about it, it is just over there.
It works, but not right. He moves, but the shift rings in his vision like a gong, skitters in his head like a note out of tune, looks like a flash of light and something breaking in his mind. Satoru ends up on his knees holding his head, stomach emptying on the grass, where even covering Mereno’s beloved face with dirt had not brought him so low.
Hands shaking and breath stuttering, he pulls himself together.
Then he walks, looking back with Six Eyes even as he faces forward, toward the places that will be empty shells without the people he is leaving behind to rot in the ground.
There is not even mochi to pick up on the way.
Ridiculous.
-
He outlived Suguru, once. He can outlive this. He’s going to fight the greatest evil fiction has ever seen, and when he's done here and Sauron is gone, then he can rest again, maybe.
He’d be lying if he said there wasn’t a frighteningly large part of his new self that is laughing at the absurd flukes of infinite possibility, and the sure knowledge that, sooner or later, he will figure out why the world is not obeying. Then he will bring the strongest of two realms into inevitable orbit, and see who breaks the other first.
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