Experience Tumblr Like Never Before
The Brightest Lie :
Everyone said Gojo Satoru was the strongest.
They said it like a blessing, like a curse, like a song.
Satoru knew the words by heart. Had known them before he even knew himself.
He thought — if he had a grave someday — they would carve that phrase into the stone before they ever remembered his name.
The Strongest.
The Brightest.
The Untouchable.
(And if he shattered under it — well, that wasn’t anyone's business.)
-----
It was winter when he met her.
Snow clung to the stone sidewalks like stubborn ghosts.
He had slipped out of the school that night with nothing but his jacket and a vague, gnawing ache he couldn’t name.
Tokyo was a graveyard at midnight.
Only vending machines and stray cats witnessed him.
He found her by accident — in the empty park near the bridge.
She was sitting on a bench with a cane resting against her knee, her head tilted up like she was listening for something beyond human ears.
For a moment, he thought she was a ghost.
Tokyo was full of them, after all.
But then she smiled — small, real — and he realized she was just... living.
“Cold night,” she said, voice soft.
He blinked behind his glasses. “Yeah.”
She didn’t flinch at his voice. Didn’t bow, didn’t whisper, didn’t freeze.
Just turned her face toward him with a polite kind of curiosity.
“You lost?” she asked.
Satoru laughed under his breath.
Lost.
If only it was that simple.
“Nah. Just walking,” he said, slipping his hands into his pockets.
She hummed, brushing snow off the bench beside her.
An invitation.
For reasons he couldn’t explain — not even to himself — he sat down.
-----
Minutes passed.
The snow kept falling in slow, weightless drifts.
He kept waiting for her to ask.
For the inevitable flicker of realization.
For the fear, the reverence, the edge.
It didn’t come.
Instead, she asked, “You have a name?”
He hesitated. Then said, “Satoru.”
She nodded like it meant nothing and everything.
“Nice to meet you, Satoru. I’m Aki.”
(He realized, distantly, she was blind.)
The idea bloomed in his chest like a strange, painful flower:
She doesn’t know.
She didn’t see the white hair that marked him like a warning.
She didn’t see the height, the swagger, the way space bent politely away from him.
She didn’t see the "Strongest Sorcerer" at all.
Just a man with cold hands and tired shoulders.
-----
"You always walk alone?" she asked after a while.
"Yeah," he said, shrugging. "Better that way."
She tilted her head, thoughtful.
"You sound lonely."
He almost laughed.
Almost told her about centuries of history tying themselves into nooses around his throat.
Almost told her about dying friends and dying enemies and the way his students looked at him sometimes — like he was a god and a monster and a brother and a curse, all in the same breath.
Instead, he said, "Maybe."
Aki smiled a little. "Lonely isn’t always bad. Means you’re still waiting for someone."
"Maybe," he said again, softer.
---
They sat like that until the streetlights buzzed and flickered.
Until the sky turned a bruised, electric purple.
Until Satoru forgot for one brief, staggering moment that he was supposed to be anything other than human.
When he finally stood to leave, she smiled up at him — clear and unburdened.
"Thanks for keeping me company, Satoru," she said.
He wanted to say something back.
Something stupid and raw and real,
like no one’s thanked me in years or stay blind a little longer, please.
Instead, he just shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and said, "Yeah. You too."
Then he walked away, leaving only footprints behind him.
-----
Later, standing at the top of the bridge, he looked back once.
She was still sitting there — small and bright and terribly, terribly human.
And Gojo Satoru — The Strongest — felt something splinter in his chest.
Something old.
Something breakable.
He pressed a hand against his heart like he could hold it still.
Like he could hold himself still.
You’re not meant to want things, a cruel voice inside him said.
You’re not meant to need.
But under the falling snow, for just a moment, he let himself wonder:
If someone could love him — not the title, not the strength, not the salvation he was supposed to be —
just him—
would he even recognize it?
Would he be able to stay?
Or would he run, the way he'd always run — bright and blinding and lonely —
until even the stars forgot how to find him?
-----
The city swallowed him up.
The night closed behind him like a door.
And Gojo Satoru — myth, weapon, miracle —
kept walking.
Kept pretending.
Kept being the brightest lie the world had ever told.
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