Chapter 6: Gardens of Broken Time
The walk back to Jujutsu High was quieter. The lively market chaos faded into the background hum of the city, replaced by the softer sounds of their footsteps on the pavement and Shoko’s occasional, contented sigh. Gojo kept his hands shoved deep in his pockets, the ghost of Anne’s waist under his palms and the strange, fluttering sensation in his chest a persistent, irritating echo.
He could still see the way Suguru’s cursed technique had moved to shield her, an automatic, unthinking gesture. He could still feel the immediate, visceral pull that had drawn his own arm around her shoulders, claiming her space before the words were even out of the stranger’s mouth. Frivolous, Shoko had called it. The word didn’t sit right. It felt like a lie. What he’d felt was anything but frivolous; it was a deep, territorial current, cold and decisive, and it unnerved him.
Back at the dormitory, the group dissipated with muttered goodnights. Anne gave him one last, unreadable look, the ugly crowned bear tucked under her arm, before disappearing behind her door.
Gojo retreated to his own room. He didn’t turn on the light. He stood in the center of the darkened space, the neon from the city below painting shifting patterns on the walls. He tried to parse the noise in his head—the Six Eyes constantly processing the world’s cursed energy, the hum of the school’s barriers, the distant, sleepy pulses of his fellow students. And beneath it all, like a new, persistent frequency, the unique celestial hum of Anne’s presence, just a few walls away. He couldn’t tune it out. He’d never had to try before.
A soft knock at his balcony door made him turn.
She stood outside, a silhouette against the city’s glow, her long hair loose around her shoulders. She’d changed into soft pink slip dress. She held two cans of some vividly colored soda he didn’t recognize.
He waved a hand, and the lock clicked open. She slipped inside, the night air following her in a cool draft.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked, leaning against his desk.
“Could you?” she countered, holding out a can. The liquid inside fizzed a luminous, electric blue. “Star-Bloom Fizz. It’s non-alcoholic. Tastes like lightning and summer berries.”
He took it, his fingers brushing hers. The can was cold. “I don’t sleep much. Brain’s too busy.”
“Mine, too.” She popped her own can open with a quiet hiss and took a sip, looking around his sparse room. It was aggressively impersonal. A bed, a desk, a single shelf with a few books on cursed energy theory. No pictures. No clutter. “This is depressing,” she stated plainly.
“It’s efficient.”
“It’s a cell.” She walked over to the balcony door again and looked out. “Come with me.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere you don’t have to be efficient.” Her tone was light, but there was an undercurrent of something else—an invitation, a challenge.
He followed her back out onto the balcony. Instead of heading down, she walked to the very edge, where the railing met the solid wall of the building. She placed her palm flat against a patch of shadow between two bricks. A subtle, silvery light seeped from her skin, etching a complex, circular pattern into the mortar. The air shimmered, and the solid wall dissolved into a swirling vortex of mist and faint, pulsing starlight.
A hidden gate.
“After you,” she said, gesturing with her blue-fizz can.
Gojo stared at the portal. His Six Eyes analyzed it instantly: a stable, artificially constructed pocket dimension. Low-level ambient cursed energy, celestial in origin. No immediate threat signatures. But it was unknown. “You just carry these around in the school walls?”
“I get homesick,” she said simply. “It’s a little piece of home. A snapshot. No time passes out here while we’re inside. Well, almost none.”
He didn’t hesitate. Stepping into the unknown was what he did. He walked through the shimmering surface. The sensation was like passing through a curtain of cool, living water.
On the other side, the world dissolved and reformed.
The air was different—cleaner, sharper, charged with an ancient, whispering energy. They stood on a floating island of dark, mossy rock, suspended in a soft, perpetual twilight. Above, instead of a sky, was a kaleidoscope of swirling nebulae and slow-drifting star clusters, casting a gentle, multi-colored glow. Other islands drifted lazily in the distance, connected by narrow, arched bridges of woven light. The sound was a profound, resonant silence, broken only by the faint, melodic trickle of water from somewhere below.
“The Celestial Gardens,” Anne said softly, coming to stand beside him. “Or a memory of them, anyway. A echo my staff can project.”
Gojo looked down. At their feet, tiny flowers bloomed, their petals crystalline and translucent. Inside each blossom, miniature galaxies spun in silent, lazy orbits. He crouched, reaching out a finger. The flower didn’t wilt or react; it was like touching stained glass warmed by the sun. “Homesick, huh? This is a bit more than a snapshot.”
“It’s a memory I’m good at holding,” she said, sitting on the mossy ground, her legs dangling over the edge of the island into the abyss below. “It’s quiet here. The stars… they don’t judge. They just are.”
He sat beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. The Infinity between them felt thin here, like a worn cloth. “Your old man,” Gojo began, watching a small, fox-like creature made of condensed starlight dart between floating ferns. “Master Jian. He doesn’t like me much, does he?”
Anne took a long drink of her soda. “He’s cautious. He’s spent my entire life preparing me for… well, for being this.” She gestured vaguely at her own chest. “The Vessel. He sees you as a variable. A powerful one. Unpredictable.”
“I am predictable,” Gojo said, lying back on the soft moss to look up at the false nebula. “I’m predictably the strongest.”
“That’s what scares him.” Her voice was quiet. “Power attracts power. And the thing inside me… it’s not a pet. It’s a dormant god. It reacts to stimuli. To resonance.”
Gojo turned his head to look at her profile. The ethereal light painted her skin in shades of silver and violet. “And I’m a stimulus?”
She met his gaze, her brown eyes holding flecks of the swirling colors above. “You’re a supernova in human form, Gojo Satoru. Of course you are.”
He didn’t have a retort for that. For once, the arrogance felt hollow. He looked back at the sky. “What happens when it wakes up?”
“I become it. It becomes me. The separation ends.” She said it with a calm finality that chilled him. “It’s not possession. It’s a… merger. The Princess Anne part won’t die. It’ll just become part of a larger whole. Like a river joining the ocean.”
“Sounds like dying with extra steps.”
She laughed, a soft, sad sound. “Maybe. But it’s my purpose. It’s why I was born.”
A familiar, grinding sense of understanding settled in his gut. He knew about purpose as a cage. He knew about being the strongest, about being a symbol rather than a person. He’d just never met someone else in a cage so… gilded.
“You don’t seem too broken up about it,” he observed.
“I’ve had nineteen years to get used to the idea,” she said. “Some days it feels like a gift. Some days it feels like a life sentence. Today…” She trailed off, looking at him. “Today, with the market, and the bear, and the… the gyoza…” A faint blush returned to her cheeks. “Today felt like a reprieve.”
The air between them grew thick, charged with unspoken things. Gojo propped himself up on one elbow. “So this,” he said, his voice low, “me being here. It’s bad for your… merger schedule?”
Before she could answer, the very light of the garden shifted. The soft, multicolored glow sharpened, condensing into a single, focused beam that struck the center of their floating island. The mossy ground beneath them trembled.
The gentle starlight hardened into a single, harsh beam illuminating the floating island’s center. From that radiance, Master Jian coalesced into solidity, his gray robes materializing from the light itself, his carved staff striking the earth with a soft, definitive thud.
His wrinkled face was calm, but his raised eyebrows spoke volumes. He looked from Anne, who was still sitting close to Gojo, to Gojo himself, who hadn’t moved from his reclined position.
“Grand Master,” Anne said, her voice flattening into formality. She stood up, brushing moss from her dress.
“Princess,” Jian replied, his voice like dry leaves. His gaze remained fixed on Gojo. “You shouldn’t get too invested in attachments here.” He said it to her, but he was looking directly at Gojo.
Gojo turned his head slowly to look back at Anne, a lazy, defiant smirk spreading across his face. He said nothing. He didn’t have to.
Anne’s cheeks flushed a deep, warm pink. “Yes, yes, yes, I know,” she muttered, throwing her hands up. “I heard you the first thousand times, Jian.”
The old man shifted his focus fully to Gojo, his eyes like chips of flint. “Do you know what happens to her, Satoru Gojo, if she becomes too emotionally attached?”
“Don’t!” Anne interjected, stepping slightly in front of Gojo as if to shield him from the words. “He doesn’t need to hear that. You’ll scare off the first real friends I’ve made here.”
“Friends,” Jian repeated, the word sounding heavy and doubtful.
“I know I will dissolve into starlight anyway,” Anne said, her voice rising, edged with a raw frustration Gojo had never heard. “I know the merger is inevitable. But I feel human for now. So I want to make my own decisions while I still can. Is that so treasonous?”
Jian’s stern expression softened by a fraction, but his resolve didn’t waver. He looked past her, locking eyes with Gojo. “Your presence isn’t just a distraction. It’s a catalyst. Your immense energy, your very spirit… it resonates with the sealed constellation inside her. It stirs it awake.”
Gojo sat up slowly, the smirk gone. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying your proximity accelerates the process,” Jian stated, his tone devoid of malice, only a terrible gravity. “Every moment you spend near her, every… emotional fluctuation it creates, feeds the entity. It brings her closer to the end of her life as her. The merger date isn’t fixed. You are making it happen sooner.”
The peaceful garden air turned stifling. Gojo’s mind, so used to calculating infinite possibilities, fixated on one horrifying equation: his existence was killing her.
Anne shook her head, a sharp, jerky motion. “I’ve got it under control,” she insisted, though her voice trembled. “You don’t understand. I can manage it.”
“Child, you cannot ‘manage’ a tide,” Jian sighed, weary and ancient.
“Enough!” Anne snapped. She lifted her hand and clicked her fingers.
The sound was small, but the effect was instantaneous. The entire Celestial Gardens shuddered. From her fingertips erupted a violent burst of pure, liquid stars—not the gentle lights of before, but sharp, blinding shards of silver. They shot outwards in a silent explosion, cracking the sky-like mirror above them. The floating islands dissolved into mist. The woven-light bridges snapped like threads.
The beautiful illusion collapsed in on itself, melting away into nothingness like a chalk drawing in the rain.
They were back on Gojo’s dark dorm room balcony, the city’s familiar grumble replacing the garden’s silence. Master Jian stood before them, solid and real, his staff now just wood on concrete. He gave Anne one final, sorrowful look, then turned without another word. He walked through the closed balcony door as if it were air and vanished into the shadows of the hallway beyond.
The sudden quiet was deafening. Only the distant sirens and the hum of the traffic below filled the space between them.
Anne was breathing heavily, her fists clenched at her sides. She wouldn’t look at him. Finally, she let out a shaky breath and turned, her expression carefully schooled into something like resignation.
“Well,” she said, her voice too light, too casual. “You’ve heard it all now, Satoru. Well, the important bits.” She finally met his eyes, a defiant, wounded gleam in her own. “You can’t run away from me now, anyway. Not without feeling like a complete asshole.”
Gojo stared at her. He saw the faint tremor in her hands, the forced steadiness of her smile. He processed Jian’s words: you are making it happen sooner. The calculation was simple. The solution was simple. Leave. Sever the connection. Be the variable you remove.
He took a step toward her, closing the gap the collapsed garden had left. “Who said I wanted to run?”
The words left his mouth before he could filter them, blunt and honest. Anne’s carefully constructed composure shattered. Her eyes widened, the defiance melting into pure, unguarded shock. She blinked, her mouth slightly open, completely thrown.
He watched the understanding dawn on her, followed by a deeper, more complicated fear. He wasn't scared of her fate. He was walking right toward it.
The shock in her eyes held for one suspended second, then fractured into something softer and far more terrifying. She took a shaky step back, her shoulders hitting the cool glass of the balcony door. “You don’t get it,” she whispered, the words barely audible over the city’s hum. “It’s not a choice you can make.”
He didn’t move closer. He just stood there, a pale pillar in the dim light, hands still in his pockets. “Says who?”
“Says physics. Says destiny. Says the fucking stars, Satoru!” Her voice cracked, the composure she’d clung to all night finally splintering. She rubbed her palms over her face, smudging the lingering traces of silver from her earlier outburst. When she looked at him again, her expression was drained, practical. “Look. This… whatever this is. This friends-who-spend-alot- of- time-together-thing. I like it. I really do.”
She paused, gathering the pieces of herself with a visible, painful effort. “But Jian was right. Not about the attachments being bad,” she continued, her voice steadier now, an attempt at a clinical tone. “But about the effect. You’re a catalyst. My spirit reacts to yours. It’s like pouring jet fuel on a sleeping fire.”
A cold knot tightened in Gojo’s stomach, but his face remained impassive. “So we put a lid on it.”
“It’s not a campfire,” she said, a sad smile touching her lips. “You can’t smother a supernova. The more time we spend like this, the faster it wakes up.” She gestured vaguely between them. “The laughs, the teasing, you winning me that stupid bear, you holding me up in a crowd… it all feeds it.”
She finally pushed off from the door and walked past him, back into the sparse emptiness of his room. She stood in the center, playing with her hair, looking small against the barren walls. “So. We enjoy it. While we can.”
He followed her inside, the balcony door swinging shut behind him. “That’s your grand plan? Just wait for the clock to run out?”
“It’s the only plan,” she said, turning to face him. Her warmth was gone, replaced by a weary, regal acceptance that made her seem much older. “And when it does… when the merge happens and I can’t hold it anymore…”
She took a deep, fortifying breath. “If I implode, or if the release is too violent, you have to protect everyone. That’s your job. Jian would have told you that. Contain the Celestial Incident.” She said it like she was reciting a manual. “That’s all you have to do. Just be the strongest. Protect the people who can’t protect themselves from me.”
Gojo looked at her, at the princess who kicked his Infinity away like a nuisance, who blushed when he fed her, who carried a dying cosmos inside her chest. He felt that unfamiliar, fluttering thing in his ribs harden into a cold, sharp certainty.
“Of course,” he said, his voice light, almost bored. He shrugged, the picture of casual arrogance. “Easiest job in the world. Protecting people from things is what I do.”
Inside, his mind was already racing, tearing through every piece of jujutsu theory, every forbidden text he’d ever skimmed, every limit he’d ever challenged. A sealed god? A merger? An inevitable fate? They were just variables. And he was Gojo Satoru. He rewrote equations.
She studied his face, searching for a lie, and found only his usual, infuriating confidence. Some of the tension left her shoulders. “Good,” she murmured. “That’s good.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.
He took a single step forward, closing the distance again. He didn’t touch her. He just looked down at her, his blue eyes sharp in the dark. “So we’ve got time.”
“Some,” she agreed, her voice barely a whisper.
“Then I’m not going anywhere,” he stated, simple and final.
Anne’s breath hitched. For a moment, she just stared at him, her large brown eyes wide and shimmering. Then, a single, traitorous tear escaped, tracing a quiet path down her cheek. She quickly wiped it away, a flash of anger at her own weakness crossing her features.
“You’re an idiot,” she breathed, but the words held no heat.
“Probably,” he agreed.
He watched her, this gleaming princess who had shoved a dumpling in his mouth and talked back to ancient masters and brought a ridiculous, fluttering light into the static of his world. Everyone else saw a vessel, a princess, a problem to be managed. They’d all accepted her fate—Jian, the Celestial Court, even Anne herself.
He saw the girl who wanted to win an ugly bear.
He wasn’t going to let her go that easily.