Morning again.
Gojo Satoru wakes to the same golden light crawling across the same ceiling.
For a heartbeat he doesn't move—just listens to the rainless hush beyond the dorm windows, half-hoping that this time, maybe, the birds will choose a different song.
They don't.
But something else does change.
A quiet scrape comes from outside the sliding door. When he opens it, a black-and-white cat sits neatly on the step, tail curled around its paws. Its fur is damp, as if it has walked through dew, and its blue eyes fix on him with an intensity that prickles the back of his neck.
"Well," he says softly, crouching, "you're new."
The cat blinks once—slow, deliberate. Then it steps forward and butts its head against his knee, purring. Gojo laughs despite himself. Finally, a living thing that likes me before breakfast.
When he reaches to scratch behind its ear, the air flickers. A faint halo of cursed energy shimmers along its whiskers—barely a trace, but there. The same residue that clung to Rin's notebook the night before the world folded.
Gojo freezes. "You remember, don't you?"
The cat tilts its head as if weighing the question. Then it meows—a rough, insistent sound—and pads past him into the room, leaping gracefully onto the bed that resets itself every loop.
He watches it knead the sheets. Its pawprints leave tiny blue sparks that fade after a second.
"Well," he murmurs, "looks like I've got a control subject."
The campus hums awake around eight. Gojo walks toward the main hall with the cat balanced on his shoulder like a fuzzy epaulet. Students point, whisper, and laugh.
"Sensei, since when do you have a pet?" Yuji grins as they pass.
"Since destiny decided to improve my image," Gojo answers.
Nobara squints. "That thing looks like it's judging me."
"It judges everyone. It's a cat."
Megumi folds his arms. "No animals in the dorms."
"Tell that to time itself," Gojo says cheerfully and keeps walking.
He names the cat Mukuro before the first class bell. The name slips out unplanned—"hollow," "remnant." It fits.
At lunch he finds Rin in the faculty garden, notebook open on her lap. The sun filters through bamboo leaves, sketching shifting patterns across her pages. She looks up when he arrives, eyes narrowing at the animal perched on his shoulder.
"Since when do you bring familiars to staff meetings?"
"Not a familiar," Gojo says. "More of a scientific collaborator."
"Mmh." She shuts the notebook. "Does your collaborator meow?"
"Frequently, but only profound things."
Rin gives the cat a skeptical glance. "What's its name?"
"Mukuro."
"That's morbid."
"Accurate," he replies, lowering his voice. "It remembers."
She stills. "You're certain?"
He lifts one sleeve to show a faint blue pawprint fading against the fabric. "It carried residue from the last loop. Proof that at least one living thing kept continuity."
Rin exhales. "That shouldn't be possible."
"Neither should infinite Mondays."
For a moment they stand in the filtered light, the cat purring between them. Gojo studies Rin's face—shadowed eyes, a faint ink mark on her wrist from late-night notes—and feels an unfamiliar steadiness in his chest. The loop is unraveling, but she's still here. He can work with that.
"Anything unusual on your sensors?" he asks.
She hesitates. "Yes. There's a low-frequency pulse just before each reset. Like the barrier inhales. And…" She opens the notebook to show a small sigil sketched in blue. "I drew this in my sleep, apparently. My handwriting, but I don't remember it."
The sigil looks like a spiral intersected by two lines—the same pattern Gojo carved on the charms that vanished. His stomach tightens.
"You're starting to retain pieces," he says quietly. "That's good. Means the boundary's thinning."
"Or that it's destabilizing completely," she says. "If the loop's accelerating, we might have less time."
Mukuro sneezes, startling them both. The tiny sparks around its whiskers flicker brighter for a second, then fade.
Gojo strokes its head. "Relax, partner. We'll figure it out."
Rin watches him, half amused. "You're talking to a cat about quantum time fractures."
He shrugs. "She listens better than most committees."
By mid-afternoon, small glitches ripple through the day.
A gust of wind repeats twice, scattering petals in identical arcs. The same joke echoes from two separate courtyards a heartbeat apart. Shoko texts him to ask why he cancelled a meeting he never scheduled.
Gojo pretends normalcy, teaching barrier theory to the trio. Every time he turns to the board, the chalk marks erase themselves and reappear, reversed, as if written by an invisible hand. The students don't react; to them, it's seamless.
Mukuro dozes on the windowsill, tail twitching. The sunlight slants across its fur, and for the briefest instant, Gojo sees two shadows where one should be.
When class ends, he pockets the chalk, more out of superstition than need. Rin finds him in the hallway, tablet in hand.
"Energy levels spiked again," she says. "Another pulse due around sunset."
"Then we prepare."
"How?"
He grins faintly. "By pretending we're not terrified."
She rolls her eyes. "Try honesty for once."
He looks at her—really looks—and the smirk fades. "I'm scared it'll erase you next."
Rin's expression softens. "Then let's make something it can't erase."
She presses the tablet into his hands. On the screen is a shared document titled Loop Log 01. Two columns: Time and Anomaly. A third column at the bottom: Memory trace confirmed Y/N.
"Write what you see," she says. "Every loop. If the data survives, we'll know we're close."
Gojo nods slowly. "Not bad, partner."
Mukuro meows in agreement.
That evening the sky burns orange. The pulse hits just as the sun touches the rooftops. Every sound—the wind, the cicadas, Rin's quiet breath—stretches into silence. The cat arches its back, fur bristling, blue light haloing its body.
Then the world snaps.
Colors invert; the garden dissolves into white. Gojo grabs Rin's wrist on instinct. Infinity flares between them, desperate and thin. For an instant he hears a heartbeat that isn't his—hers—and then everything falls away.
The world reforms in silence.
Gojo opens his eyes to the same ceiling, the same faint line of morning light—but his hand is still outstretched, curled as if holding someone's wrist. Empty air. The connection's gone.
He sits up fast. Mukuro lies at the foot of the bed, fur slightly singed, breathing shallow but steady. The cat's blue-tinted aura flickers weakly around it.
"Still here," Gojo whispers. "You made it."
He glances at his phone. MON 07:14 AM. Again. But his fingers tremble when he checks the loop log on the device Rin gave him—it's still there. The file exists. Loop Log 01 hasn't vanished.
Something held through the reset.
He exhales a shaky laugh. "Guess we're learning, huh, Mukuro?"
The cat opens one eye and meows as if to say of course.
Traces
Gojo moves through the morning like an actor repeating a scene he's finally memorized. The same greetings, same lessons—but under the surface, cracks show.
Shoko calls him "Gojo-kun" instead of "Satoru" for the first time in any loop. Yuji stumbles over his line in class, tripping where he never tripped before. Even the sunlight feels thicker, as if the loop's film is stretching.
At lunch, Rin finds him before he can go looking. She's holding the tablet.
"It's still here," she says, voice low but urgent. "The file didn't reset."
Gojo grins, genuine this time. "See? Mondays can learn."
"There's more," she says, scrolling. "Look at this timestamp."
The file recorded a line of text neither of them remembers typing:
00:12 — pulse intensity increasing. Remember the cat.
Rin looks up. "You didn't write that?"
He shakes his head. "You?"
"No." She bites her lip. "Then who did?"
Mukuro leaps onto the table, tail curling across the keys. The cursor moves on its own, blinking as though waiting for an answer.
Gojo chuckles, uneasy. "I think our collaborator's trying to join the conversation."
Deviation
By mid-afternoon, anomalies multiply.
A bell rings at the wrong hour. The clouds rearrange themselves backward. Gojo's reflection lags half a second behind in the staffroom mirror.
He catches Rin before she leaves the lab. "The loop's thinning. It's skipping beats now."
She glances around at the flickering lights. "If it collapses entirely—"
"—we either break free or get erased."
"Those aren't odds," she says. "That's a coin toss."
"Then let's cheat."
He pulls a folded charm from his sleeve and hands it to her. "Keep this with you when it resets. I've coded a trace of my cursed energy inside. It might help you remember."
Rin hesitates, then tucks it into her pocket. "And you?"
"I'll use Infinity as an anchor. Risky, but—"
"—you love risky," she finishes. "You think humor makes it less terrifying."
He smiles crookedly. "Only a little."
The air around them ripples again—one of the smaller resets, the kind that rewinds seconds. The pen in Rin's hand rolls off the table, hits the floor twice in the same motion.
She kneels to pick it up, whispering, "We don't have much time."
Gojo's expression softens. "Then we make what we have count."
The Vanishing
At dusk, the sky bruises violet. Gojo finds Mukuro waiting by the garden gate, staring into the sunset as if tracking invisible movement.
"You sense it too, huh?" he murmurs.
The cat meows once, tail twitching. Then it steps forward—and disappears mid-stride, dissolving into blue sparks that scatter like dust.
Gojo's breath catches. "No—no, no, no…"
He reaches out, but the air is empty. Only a faint warmth remains where it stood.
A moment later, Rin bursts out of the corridor, tablet in hand. "The pulse just jumped—energy spike off the charts."
He swallows hard. "It took the cat."
Her eyes widen. "Then the loop's claiming anything tied to previous memory."
Gojo clenches his fists. "It wants a clean slate."
"Then we have to dirty it," she says. "Leave a mark it can't erase."
The Plan
They retreat to the lab before the next pulse hits. The air hums with pressure. Equipment lights flicker red and blue.
Rin sketches sigils on the floor, arranging them in concentric circles. Gojo kneels opposite, pouring his energy into the lines until they glow like veins of fire.
"What's this supposed to do?" he asks.
"Bind memory to energy instead of matter. A shared imprint—yours and mine. If one of us forgets, the other can restore the pattern."
He grins. "Sounds romantic."
She rolls her eyes. "It's science."
"Sure," he says. "Science with hand-holding."
She hesitates, then extends her hand anyway. "Ready?"
He takes it. The contact sparks—literally. Cursed energy floods between them, weaving strands of blue and gold light that braid around their fingers. Infinity trembles but doesn't repel her. The warmth is startling.
"Now," Rin says softly, "think of something constant."
He closes his eyes. Not Infinity, not strength—those shift. He thinks of laughter echoing in hallways, of his students' bickering, of Shoko's dry humor, of the quiet steadiness in Rin's voice when the world resets. Something human. Something alive.
The sigil flares.
Collapse
The pulse hits seconds later. A deep hum shakes the air, pulling colors out of the walls. Rin's grip tightens. The floor dissolves into light; data screens melt into swirling digits.
Gojo feels the pull, the familiar drag of reality folding—but the light around their joined hands holds steady, defiant. He focuses every shred of cursed energy into that single point.
"Hold on!" he shouts.
Rin's voice cuts through the static. "Don't let go!"
Then everything shatters.
After
He wakes to quiet.
No birdsong. No sunlight through the curtains.
Just stillness.
He sits up slowly. The air feels…different. Heavy, but real. His phone screen is black, dead. For the first time, no Monday blinks back.
Outside the window, dawn is gray instead of gold. The rain he'd never seen fall is pattering softly on the eaves. He opens the door.
Mukuro is sitting there, tail curled, perfectly alive. It blinks at him, stretches, and pads inside as if nothing happened.
He exhales a laugh of relief—and freezes. On the bed lies Rin's tablet, screen glowing faintly though it shouldn't. Across it, in shimmering blue letters, one line of text pulses:
Loop Log 02 — Tuesday.
He stares until his vision blurs, then smiles, slow and fierce. "Guess we made it."
The cat jumps onto the windowsill and meows, a sound so ordinary it feels like salvation.