Achilles, Come Down
“Satoru?” The word rings, fuzzy in his ears as it whines like tinnitus, familiar and heart stopping.
‘I’m dead.’ He can’t even hear his own thoughts over the loudness of the world, staggering where he stands, eyes still fixated on the sky, on the sun. ‘I’m dead, I died, I felt my heart stop, this can’t be, it can’t-’
“Hey,” it comes again, a little more urgent than before, a little closer, another hammer to his ears and all the noise shrieking behind his eyes. He recoils hard enough to go stumbling as a hand reaches for him, covered in flesh rather than empty bone, tan and recognizable. Unbelievable.
There’s something wet trickling from his nose. Bile stings on the back of his tongue. The words dissolve into the rest of the white noise as he stares up at the blue of the sky, and tries to remember if he’d ever had a hallucination as bright as this.
‘I have to be dead,’ he thinks. Somehow, he isn’t.
Or: Gojo Satoru goes back in time. He makes a couple of changes for the better.