Work Text
OCTOBER 31ST 2018 - 10:00PM
Gojo Satoru is in the prison realm for a timely sum of-
To be honest, he hasn’t the slightest idea. It’s a difficult admission to commit to, especially for someone accustomed to seeing- and by extension, being brought under the expectation of knowing
all
. His very identity is so often made synonymous with this functional omnipresence, though he far prefers the addition of the precluding humbling descriptor-
nigh
. After all, he’s well aware of his own limitations and his thankfully diminished number of blind spots. Regardless, Six-Eyes has always granted him that luxury; it is what allows him to wear pride upon his breast in lieu of something more acceptably modest.
The bonds fasten around him like a toothless, crushing maw. They clamp down eagerly, too tight and too hungry. Alabaster Shibuya disappears, brilliant enamel corroding in an instant, its thorough putrefaction compressed into a heartbeat.
His entry is akin to being dragged into a mass grave and the darkness welcomes him to lie amongst the remains of his predecessors. It is only through blind groping that he realises what they
are
, an interlocking mesh woven of fraying ligament and bone, which might so easily have been mistaken for a thicket of bare branches to a less discerning (or wilfully ignorant) soul. Their bones crack beneath his weight, the older and more brittle amongst them giving way and falling into a crude mess of desiccated splinters and dried marrow. He’s suddenly endlessly grateful for his uniform, what with how little skin it allows bare.
Time, which generally presides over all other aspects of reality, perishes upon entry. It persists only in his recent memory, and existence proceeds to stubbornly refuse to present itself in any tangible measure of chronology or succession. Hence- a few seconds, five minutes, three hundred years- it all blends together into an indistinguishable singularity, an unfathomable fraction of eternity.
There is no time nor living presence- microbial or otherwise within this six-walled confinement. Yet, the skeletons are proof enough of his initial hypothesis. It becomes abundantly and helpfully clear that the Prison Realm is
alive.
Perhaps not living, breathing and comprehending in the most conventional manner, but undeniably adroit in the steady erosion and digestion of both the mind and body of any unfortunate enough to fall into its hold.
He takes a moment to gather himself, already grateful for the bonds which have since slackened. There is after all, no use for physical restraint when he has already been subsumed into the inescapable.
‘It’ll be fine’- is what he utters quietly to himself. This mantra is one shaped in a mouth dry with suppressed horror and disbelief, repeated softly into the sightless void in the hopes that habit might wear a believable groove into his rapidly fraying psyche. The timeless pressure builds and builds, crushing and bereaving him of air. The fleeting memory of light taunts him like a parasite crawling beneath his skin.
Satoru holds out for as long as he can, consoling himself in the only way he knows how. He builds up his shell and tugs uselessly at his infinity, trying to muster any barrier (
any sort at all)
like he’s walling off an abscess.
But he is only human in the end. Every living thing fears the dark for reasons spanning countless millennia and even the title of ‘the strongest’ holds no power in the face of
that
. His willpower invariably tapers, every pinprick of focus converging on a perilous ledge, a final point of contention which he teeters precariously upon before he-
snaps
.
It crashes down on him, gentle and unceremonious in his solitude like a spring bud unfurling too early into the final biting dregs of the winter’s frost. He gulps for breath, seized by primal instinct that catches and ignites like iron wool in the musk of decomposition that floods his every sense. The bones groan in dissatisfaction, subject to the brunt of his outburst as he kicks out and reaches blindly in his panic. Heedless of his frantic struggling, the skeletons only seem to creep closer, drawn to movement like flies to slaughter. The decay brackets him on all sides, his clothing snagging on emaciated digits, some of which have- he realises, not yet been entirely stripped of flesh. He feels as if he is unravelling, the very fibre of his being coming loose and haemorrhaging.
He pushes himself onto his knees in a bid to rise, willing to kneel if only it will grant him some form of reprieve. He promptly commits to a meaningless scramble for purchase, chasing some nebulous notion of freedom. He tries to pull himself upright, his left heel perforating the ribcage of a nameless victim as he kicks out in search of a floor that he cannot see, the fingers of his right hand evacuating an eye-socket of its putrid contents.
The vacuum greets him with nonchalant apathy. It’s this lack of inertia, sacrilege in its own right-
every action ought to corroborate an equivalent reaction-
this
nonsensicality
which saps and exerts him. Never in his life has Satoru ever failed to garner a reciprocation that is anything short of impressive. He falls back gasping, head spinning but far from winded. The choice becomes clear to him in this paltry lapse. If he should give in to the urge to lounge amongst all that which foreshadows his own end, he knows he will never find it in himself to get up again. So rather than lay down, he swallows and grinds his jaw to dispel the creeping migraine which threatens to debilitate him. He cannot allow himself to become complacent now.
He traps what can only be described as half-groan and half-chuckle between his teeth like a bit, clambering to his feet again. These are certainly extenuating circumstances and he has to give credit to the imposter where it is due. Admittedly, it's been a very long time since he’s been brought so close to exertion. The field of skeletons extend as far as the eye can see, flaunting their brittle angles like pale lilies blooming into an abyss. He wonders what might transpire if he should choose to walk into their indeterminate notion of a horizon. Rather perhaps, he ought to dig downwards and find himself entangled in a depthless spiral of mummified limbs.
It’s in this cyclical, unproductive fashion that he ponders his options, rubbing the point of his chin and idly shifting his weight from one heel to the next. He reaches out and feels through the velvety darkness, lands a hand on what he assumes to be the curvature of a cranium to tilt it back and forth. He can feel coarse hair between his fingers, and a leathery scalp that allows waxy bone to emerge shyly in sparse, thready patches. Satoru smooths his fingers across to define wordless, grinning enamel; he drives his thumbs deep to ogle sockets that have long been debrided of nervous tissue.
Two-hundred-and-seventy degrees counterclockwise, he squats and gouges his fingers into the saponified fat that still clings to the insides of what he thinks is a ribcage. He picks the greasy remnants from beneath his clipped nails and promptly begins to wonder whether one might happen across a similar scenario upon dissecting a reanimated corpse.
Change is impossible without the concept of time to guide it. If he should persist in any one action in any attempt to bring about variation, it would mean nothing. The prison realm functions reliably to return him to a single instance of time, a Polaroid snapshot of an eternity that he cannot escape. He fixates on his glossary of impossible situations. This is only yet another in a long line, or so he tells himself.
Reverse cursed technique might be wholly beyond his reach now, but he figures that the act of healing is in itself defined as some instance of change; if not a shift in its entirety, surely it entails a change in
state
. In this static Tartarus, he wonders if his body would still function to heal him if he bruises, and whether his platelets might still aggregate in the event of a laceration. Under the assumption that change is no longer possible, perhaps he would bleed to death from a papercut alone.
Therein lies an inherent contradiction. His mind functions as it should (or so he
assumes
), within the reasonable bounds of what he has known it to embody before. He is able to move, able to think and reason and wonder.
More or less. Again, this is only what he can
assume
.
He has already registered shifts within himself, first forced laconicism then panic, horror- What of the decay which surrounds him? What of his recent maddened scramble for freedom? What should herald his inevitable exit but madness? Will he emerge a changed man from being encased in stillness, or will he emerge untouched, reversed to that iteration of himself which last stood living in the waking world? He grinds the heels of his palms into his eyes, rubs hard and wonders which will give out first. Like a predator seizing upon struggling prey, prison realm will not relinquish its hold on the living; by extension, for all its supposed mystery it cannot grasp what is not alive.
He’s done this before. Granted, the last time he’d dared to dangle before death’s snatching maw, he’d only returned because he’d managed to preserve enough of himself to reverse what would otherwise have been fatal. But his understanding promises him this- that there will be a fleeting instant between his dying and his prompt emergence where he is technically unchanged. An instant where it becomes permissive to entry
and
exit, an instant- a
snapshot
within which he must revive himself and struggle free.
He also knows that he will have to contend with whatever state he inflicts upon himself on his emergence. Hence, on the spectrum which spans from alive to dead- dead, dying, on the brink of death- he must land himself to straddle the narrow margin of in-between. His exit will open and shutter closed like an aperture. Whichever variation of himself it captures will be that which remains.
He’s never been much of a photographer. Regardless, Satoru Gojo sucks in a final lonely breath and prepares himself to die.
NOVEMBER 1ST 2018 - 2:00AM
In the end, Shoko finds him on the tiled floors of Shibuya station, a prone spectre which has apparently managed to drag itself from the unknowable depths of B5 in an odd-defying and unfathomable act of escape.
The battles which have raged through most of the night are guttering like embers smothered by a blanket knit of fatigue. Yet, the dead and dying continue to present themselves in a morbid and unceasing wave, corpses half-torn asunder carried to her by the desperate and begging, others barely worth saving as she becomes increasingly aware of her own limitations.
Triage strips her patients of humanity, renders them little more than a series of arbitrary labels and eases her conscience when she turns from the moribund in favour of the barely living. There are so many bodies. When she’s boiled the introspective soup of the night down to the bare bones, she realises that this is really no different from any other day she’s lived in the past eight years; just another frame in a constant cycle of anabolism and catabolism which she has entertained since her cursed technique had begun to show promise.
She thinks back to that fleeting adolescent metamorphosis, a phase of her life defined by making headway. That growth which had afforded her an instant of unmatched pride and glee had too quickly turned to stale derision.
Beneath a calm demeanour constructed beneath the scaffolds of time and gritted teeth, her rage continues to demand a scapegoat. Unfortunately, the staunch truth still stands- that the higher-ups perch high above any wishful plot of overhaul or refurbishment that her imagination might afford her. Shoko is of value, no doubt, but value does not come with the promise of power.
Which is why the body which she stumbles across is of so much value. Shoko pauses in her stride, discarding her cigarette in lieu of rushing to him, curled on his side. Her knees fit into the curve of his stomach as she leans over him, her heart hammering, her hands suspended and trembling. The two of them are messy jigsaw pieces forced into some brutish manner of cohesion, the pure
wrongness
of it jars her to the bone.
She tilts his head back and checks his pulse. As she does so, her gaze flits from the pale curve of Gojo Satoru’s lifeless cheek to the shaded hollows of his shut eyes. Even in this state does he carry the title of the strongest. He was always the one amongst the rest of them who she’d bet on, who amongst them bore the greatest chance of living to see the next wretched day.
The strongest. And yet- it is he who is laid so prone amongst the innumerable bodies- those poor souls left transfigured, disfigured and everything in between. There are so many and death proves itself a reliable haemostat applied to clot and clog the narrow tunnels with brutalised flesh and sticky, cloying blood.
A sluggish flutter finally greets her searching fingertips and her ribs ache as she exhales in relief. She welcomes the pragmatism her mind immediately resorts to; perhaps too eagerly, as if the descriptors of ‘bradycardic’, ‘hypovolemic’ and ‘systemic shock’ are anywhere near sufficient to rationalise the situation.
Yet, his physical state is only a testament to his nature, seemingly equal parts god and man if the impossibility of his survival is anything to go off of. To bear witness to his vulnerability is simply an act of indeterminable sacrilege all in itself.
He is no god, he is no man. Neither are satisfactory to accurately illustrate the boy Shoko has known since her early teens. Both titles are much too unfeeling to accurately depict that which she remembers- gangly-limbed with a penchant for pressing his nose up to freezer doors in convenience stores, covered in blood and practically oscillating with the fervour of battle and triumph, red-faced and pouting in the aftermath of a well-deserved lecture, wrapped in an old
Doraemon
quilt and sprawled across the couch.
Such a division is plainly too candid, much too clinical even for her. Satoru Gojo is only human. Flesh, blood and bone, a frail body pulsing with a feeble heartbeat, sodden lungs thudding against a cage of broken ribs which dip beneath her questioning fingers. That is the stark and unembellished truth, the only one which has and ever will make sense.
Again she triangulates her fracturing focus and convinces herself that
triage
is all she knows. It is far simpler and more appealing than the alternative; that is, considering all the intricacies of what-ifs and what-thens, perusing all the endlessly sprawling pathways of an already uncertain future. She chews her lip and shrugs off her cardigan. It suffices as she uses it to bind his torso tightly enough to deter all which threatens to exsanguinate.
His blood rings him like a rosette, stark and proud against blanched skin as she pulls his jacket away to triage the physical damage. She’s greeted by the gaping mouth of a chasm, the sight of it steals the breath from her lungs. The tissue damage is immense, the blood loss impossible to quantify. He
should
be dead and if it has not taken him yet, it is most certainly fast approaching.
At least, that is what she tells herself. But Gojo Satoru has cheated death before.
She pulls at the fabric tersely, trying to ignore the way her hands grow slick in turn. She’s shaking. Her fingers slip and dig into organ meat that is too-fragile even beneath her slender fingers and she recoils as if she’s been burned. His innards are macerated beyond function, intricate biological miracles of engineering twisted and crushed, all wrapped in the brusque layers of her ruined clothing. It’s wrong. It’s all so wrong. But it’s all she can do to keep pressing forwards. The strength with which she drags him up by the armpits is surprising, considering her unassuming size and the stark contrast of his own limp form.
She drags him from the cemetery of Shibuya with all the elegance of a wounded animal trying to play off a broken leg. It’s tedious, it’s exhausting, but it’s necessary. This is how she’s always understood her own suffering. Nothing more, nothing less. If she’s hurting at all, she doesn’t show it. Considering his oblivion, it seems only fitting that she joins him in his silence.
She is rewarded with cell service once her Sisyphean ordeal of staggering to B1 comes to an end. Only there, standing between the dented, shattered teeth of the subway gates does she finally call Yaga, her voice shaking through ten years of self-imposed restraint as she pleads in the voice of a child.
NOVEMBER 3RD 2018 - 6:15AM
Satoru sleeps for the better part of three days.
Shoko tends to him in the meanwhile, maintains a fluid line and dresses his wounds. She’d have given five years off her already truncated lifespan for a little more medical equipment- a proper bedside heart rate monitor, some way to place a drain, access to some kind of imaging modality, or even a semi-sterile theatre which might permit a laparotomy.
As it stands, what she has is this- a quiet flat that Yaga assures her is safe. It’s a charming two bedroom with no balcony, glazed nightly by the glow of the neon signs of the bar opposite and most importantly, concealed from the prying eyes of the higher ups and who might take a chance at a legend brought low.
She sleeps on the couch. It just doesn’t seem fair to partake in luxury even as mundane as this whilst Satoru remains in such dire condition. She shuffles into his room one morning, swaying on her feet from gathered exhaustion. She feels his gaze before she sees it.
The doorway traps her like a curtain and she stalls, halting in her step, body frozen. She’d since been prepared to be met with a corpse, long readied herself for the task of tending Gojo Satoru’s mortal shell for the indefinite duration of a coma. A coma which seems intent on dragging itself out for as long as the universe will allow.
“Hey.”
He’s risen somewhat, still gasping with his torso leaning against the bedpost, pale as an apparition and an honest parody of the fourteen year old who’d once been fond of breathing infuriatingly loudly as she’d taken a calculus test sat to his right. The IV line which had taken her close to half an hour to set up thanks to his impressive blood loss is still taped to the back of his hand and draped over his forearm, clear and smooth as a rivulet of water.
He watches her expectantly. Shoko catches herself staring and manages a weak- “Hey.”
She thinks that she might have preferred to have said something snarky instead; that she might instead have chided him for standing when she’d practically lectured his unconscious self with an adamant repertoire on his continued bedrest. Satoru has never been academically driven- gifted certainly, but never with the outward motivation to match his talent. But Yaga isn’t here to reprimand him, and neither is Suguru here to cut him back into line.
Shoko gestures at the bed in lieu of making a comment.
He obliges her quietly. This uncharacteristic lack of obstinacy might have been welcome under any other circumstance. Gojo Satoru is fated to be vexatious. He staunchly denies her the amusement she thinks she rightfully deserves, and instead commits her to the way he slumps heavily as his hold on the railing gives out, the thin mattress bowing beneath him like a sodden deck beneath a sailor’s weary feet.
Despite the tired smile he offers her as remittance for her troubles, the glassy eyed gaze he levels at her is dulled as a result of a heady combination of pain, exhaustion and intravenous pharmaceuticals (opioids, ketamine- whatever the hell she could find to possibly dull what she can only imagine is inhumane
agony
). Shoko finds herself propping his head against her shoulder as she presses the flat of her stethoscope to his sternum, then slips it down his back. Even her trained ear must be put to listening closely as the wet shudder and crackle of his breathing superimposes the mild quality of his pulse lapping at her fingertips, poised over his left carotid.
“What year is it?” Though he cedes to the gentle guidance of her hands and lays down, the flat stare he earns is nothing short of unimpressed. He rolls his eyes when he gleans no answer. “What time, what day?”
“November third. Six-fifteen in the morning.” He watches expectantly until she supplies, enunciating as if she were speaking to a child. “Two-thousand-eighteen.”
He breathes a near-instantaneous sigh, and she feels his eyes trace the very curvatures of her soul. It makes her spine prickle with familiar unease. “I would’ve only been a
little
disappointed if your cursed energy hadn’t changed in a thousand years. The complexion though- whew, now that would’ve been impressive. I-”
He breaks abruptly into a heaving, throaty fit of coughing and eventually flops back with his eyes watering, his teeth flecked with blood and his nose running profusely. Shoko checks his temperature. The wet, muffled quality of his coughing and the high reading quickly put pneumonia back onto her list of problems to deal with. She makes a mental note to restock on antibiotics, running calculations on the course that she’d like to employ.
He’s still watching her. She hastily tabulates her conclusions and looks to the next immediate progression, if only to shift the crushing pressure of his pervading attention. She does not flinch, even if she feels like an aluminum can pinned beneath the weight of a sea.
Breakfast.
He sticks his tongue out in response to the bowl of okayu she manages to conjure, seeming to disapprove of the very soup spoon clicking against the edges of the bowl as she stirs. The white mass bobs with slivers of scallion and a few scanty islands of flaked sardine. He pulls a face at the offered bite, though evidently sees no qualm in being spoon-fed even at the tender age of twenty-eight.
“Shoko-o. I’m not hungry, I
swear
.” He whines, then grumbles unhappily around the spoon. “Your cooking’s still shit, by the way.”
“Tough.” the packet crinkles between her fingers as she shakes it in line of sight. “Unless you want a hole in your stomach, you’ll need to eat before you take any of these.”
He turns his head, evidently offset by the blandness of the dish. “I’ll take my chances.”
“It’ll hurt.” She warns halfheartedly, in no mood to babysit. “You’ll puke.”
“Y’know.” He starts slowly, his irises straying just briefly from the pale moon of her cheeks, blanched from lack of sunlight. “I’d
like
to think that you’d save me from drowning in my own vomit.”
Lighthearted as the proposition is, the way he watches her is anything but. Satoru was born on an altar to embody both the worshiped deity and the sacrificial lamb. The road he walks is one paved and littered with gifts. But if there is any truth to the extravagant abundance which is his signature, it is that he has become utterly deprived of trust, turned near craven from starvation. Shoko has little doubt that he has already come to detest the notion of it as much as he does physical touch.
She thinks of chastising him, thinks of screaming, of pouring every scrap and detail of loss and toil upon his broken body in that one instant. How dare he show flippancy to the bitterness within her that is so unfathomable? Anguish so deep and cloying that she’s convinced that she’ll never manage to shed it, that grief which settles on her like a second skin.
But that’s exactly what he expects of her… isn’t it?
Shoko knows his habit better than most. Gojo Satoru’s bible states this- to be aggravating is to become isolated; to achieve distance which allows one to stack the odds at arms-length in one’s own favour. All attachments are temporary, stitched with promises of momentary comfort which only leave gaping wounds in their wake.
Indeed, to be isolated is to be safe, a remarkable strategy which too keeps
others
safe in reducing collateral.
Satoru has loaded the gun, and her hands tremble as she wavers with indecision, considering the option to cock and fire it.
“Couldn’t let all my hard work go to waste.” Is what she murmurs at last, subdued in her resignation. Let him think her cruel, she will not indulge him. She is not the weaker here.
He regards her with skepticism before the hardened angles of his frame visibly soften. They lapse into silence and Shoko stays until the porcelain curve of the spoon scrapes the worn bottom of an emptied bowl.
NOVEMBER 10TH 2018 - 5:45 PM
Yaga is dead. The Culling Games have begun. Thousands of civilians and sorcerers alike are dead.
She promptly registers their immediate danger following the news of Yaga’s demise. Unfortunately, Gojo is too delirious to give her any heed. Shoko barricades the door alone and lives with her hackles raised, body stiff with dried sweat and anxiety. But three days pass, then seven and still they are both left breathing in their lonely little corner of the world.
There is no word from any of the students. Shoko derives the happenings of the outside world solely from what Utahime tells her, sketching an approximation of the universe beyond from hints given over hasty texts and phone calls made curt out of urgency.
They may need a healer but she cannot be spared. Rather than spend her sleepless nights weaving through a labyrinth of cots and bedside monitors, Shoko stands at the windowsill and swallows down bitter sips of cheap lager, breathes in the fumes of the city and chokes on the acrid comfort of her cigarettes. She tries not to fixate on the columns of smoke rising distantly from the crematoriums.
There are nights instead where she stands in the shaft of light in the open doorway, a resentful part of her privately set to wondering just how many lives Gojo Satoru is worth.
It’s too quiet for their bubble of supposed safety to be trusted and the lack of danger leaves her wary. There’s nothing left to do but presume that the outside world has dissolved into such dysfunctional chaos that he- even Gojo Satoru himself has been rendered a non-crucial player or target.
As for the Suguru Geto conundrum
-
Gojo rasps his recount to her in between sips of warm water sweetened with electrolytes. Though he still sleeps far more than any normal person ought, his periods of wakefulness are restless, occupied by bouts of delirium and fever where lucidity becomes a rare luxury. Shoko assesses the pallor of his skin and the unceasing shiver in his limbs while she holds him upright, steadying him as he engages in an earnest effort to upturn all the meager contents of his stomach into a repurposed cooking pot.
They speak only when he is able. Much of the time, Shoko finds herself left alone to the cruel mercy of her own thoughts. There is no guarantee of Satoru’s recovery, no guarantee of safety for either of them, nor the continued persistence of the world beyond the doorstep. Detached as she is from it all, she knows the information she receives is bound to be outdated. Indeed, at best it is skewed and incomplete.
Tonight, the sidebar on her messages app disappointingly supplies that Utahime has not been online since the early hours of November 8th. The clipped texts she’d sent that morning, Satoru burning with another bout of fever-
[TO: HIME] : how are things?
The next comes two hours later, when the longing for connection had struck her over a depressingly average meal of instant ramen.
[TO: HIME] : hope you’re ok
Both are still listed as unread. Shoko’s fingers hover over the keyboard and ache, her eyes stinging. The sutures which she’d patterned painstakingly down his sides are failing. She’ll have to take them out- implement a paltry version of sedation in lieu of proper anesthesia, then debride them once again- she feels like a clumsy seamstress doggedly patching a garment made of wet paper.
[TO: HIME] : can I do anything to help?
The message appears in the send bar before she can even register it. She stares down at the innocuous query for a moment that stretches out for too long before she hurriedly attenuates the backspace key with a disproportionate amount of force.
The phone clatters to the floor and she lets it skid beneath the sofa. Its all feels so
hopeless
. This absence of relief is a vacuum which corrodes the stilts relied on by her rapidly fraying resolve. She scrubs furiously at her eyes and wonders whether those on the outside have dictated a filter over her narrow window of the world, a screen over the mouth of the well she is trapped in for the purpose of sparing her feelings. Her lips twist in bitter amusement. Maybe they have intended this orchestration of her reality as a twisted form of approbation in return for the survival of one of their keystones of success.
It seems almost too farfetched to be true. In the end, she swallows half a lukewarm bottle of water and curls up on the couch to sleep. If her years of supposedly unlicensed doctoring have taught her anything, it is that blurred sight and shaking hands are of no use in a surgical field.
NOVEMBER 11TH 2018 - 3:05AM
“Hey.” Someone’s patting his cheek. Satoru moans in protest, every conceivable inch of him yearning to lapse back into unconsciousness.
“Gojo.”
Louder this time. The gentle pressure on his shoulder becomes a little more insistent. He catches the tail end of a disembodied mutter that sounds like-
‘-or christ’s sake’,
before his eyelids are being brushed open.
He glimpses Shoko’s blurry silhouette out one eye, then the other. Her demure features and petit frame are reduced to a hazy inkblot, insignificant against the backdrop of a world that blazes like a solar flare.
It’s pretty disconcerting how he lacks the strength to even flinch properly. Unable to seek comfort on his own, his eyes ache into the cool relief of a wet towel laid across them, courtesy of her kindness.
He’s almost certainly been drugged. He feels weightless despite the honest give of the mattress around him. That said, his limbs may as well have been formed from lead and he registers their voluntary movement as an intangible possibility.
He tries to speak her name, but his throat sears with the inaudible rasp which escapes him in lieu of words. The clarity of his vision waxes and wanes, sharpening and blurring in cycles of interminable length. Satoru registers her expression dazedly, her eyes look strangely dark and alien, her mouth wrought into an unhappy slant as she speaks again.
“Don’t. I-” A sharp inhale. “I’ll be as quick as can be.”
There’s movement around him, peeling back the thin sheets, rattling a metal tray. She’s lifting his hand, and there’s a cold and stinging rush of something seeping under his skin. Gojo lets out a reedy whine that sounds more like an off-tune exhale, the sound of an instrument broken and still forced to play.
“Don’t fight it.” She pleads. The mole beneath her eye bleeds and swirls. The darkness of her irises seem to blossom like wilting flowers. It hurts. He tries to suck in a breath to speak. It-
NOVEMBER 11TH 2018 - 12:04 PM
“Suguru.” He whispers weakly. Though his body remains largely still, his voice wavers. “Suguru.”
Shoko shuts the door.
NOVEMBER 12TH 2018 - 4:13 AM
The decay of the Prison Realm rots him from the inside out.
“Wrong snapshot.” Is all he manages when she brings it up, strained and grinning through bloody teeth. Like so, much of what he says is incomprehensible, his phrases are lacking in context, his vague and scattered comments sprinkled with unfamiliar references.
Shoko spills water onto the parched mosaic of his tongue and watches it dribble, red-tinged over his lower lip.
“I think I got most of it out.” She reports after a long pause, her lips pressed tightly together.
“‘s what you said last time.” Satoru murmurs, plopping his head into her lap as guilt chews her core. What she’d been forced to do could only have been considered a mockery of surgical practice. Clumsy work with blades too-large and a non-sterile field, Satoru gasping and crying out weakly as the limited dosage of what little drug she could spare had begun to wear off.
“I know.”
The eyes which shift to peer at her seem almost gray.
Utahime has yet to respond. Shoko had stopped texting and begun to devote her energy to waiting for a new anonymous number to make contact. She’s perfectly happy to wait, but she’s not the only player in this game. While human interaction is one resource they’re both sorely lacking in, its importance pales when juxtaposed to the far more pressing reality that they’re running low on medical supplies.
She tries not to jostle him and rummages through the bedside drawer. Her efforts produce a small ziploc of paracetamol, one foil sheet yet unmarred, and a handful of bottles- mainly of the anti-inflammatory or painkiller variety, some of which are empty.
She says nothing, but his eyes scan her face knowingly.
“That bad, huh.”
“It’s not.” She mutters, dispiritedly. “We’ll- I’ll figure this out.”
Her lie is unconvincing at best. Satoru sighs, shuffling upright and growing heavy against her shoulder.
“There’s nothing keeping you here, you know?”
Her head snaps around, and her heated glare bores into him. Undeterred, he continues.
“What did Yaga tell you?” His lips pull into a terse, grim smile. “I’m sure they’re taking the opportunity to make sure I’m gone for good. Great timing too- I think we both know that I’m not going to be playing the saviour for a while.”
He sinks and drapes over her far slighter frame. “Not that I have to. Those kids are strong, they’ll pull through-“
“Yaga’s dead.” She blurts, unable to help herself. Satoru freezes. “The whole Zen’in clan slaughtered by Maki, Nobara’s on the brink, Nanami…” The names catch in her throat, each barbed and cutting, each a poignant hindrance to her continued confession.
There’s no response for a long while.
“… that bad, huh.”
It’s her turn to fall silent.
“You…” She presses her hands down into her lap to stop them from shaking. “You owe me some optimism. Especially when I’m the one pulling all-nighters to save your sorry ass.”
The way he sags is the equivalent of his laying himself across her altar, an improbable god made flesh offering to pass on.
“My body maybe… huh.” He trails off. The subsequent colloquialism in his tone is forced and he doesn’t meet her eyes.
“Funny you should say that, that reminds me.” An index finger rises to tap a jerky rhythm against his temple. “I’ve been thinking. All this talk about the body and the soul- heh, none of it’s new.”
“What the hell are you going on about?”
“You know about kotsuage- all that stuff about keeping the body upright? Well, it supposedly ensures that there aren’t any cursed residuals left in the ashes.” He scissors his index and middle fingers in demonstration. “We had all sorts of weird shit lying around. Some Zen’in’s left pinky, my great grandfather’s nodobotoke, there’s a mummified tongue somewhere that might have had the Inumaki sigil on...”
“Get to the point.” She snaps, stiffening beneath his weight, already sensing the uncomfortable trajectory of his rumination.
“Hell, Prison Realm itself! Bet you didn’t know they were the remains of some old geezer. You ever heard about Sokushinbutsu? Talk about nasty.”
He watches her expectantly. It is only when her diffidence persists that he finally sighs with all the patronizing air of a teacher facing an uncomprehending room of schoolchildren.
“The strength of the seal depends on those it has consumed. You stay in there for long enough and it eats away at you, making it harder to get out. You get weaker, it gets stronger, really not the
greatest
arrangement.”
Shoko snorts, willing to indulge the morbid line of thought. “Sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me. Pack you away and make sure you don’t come back raring for a fight- if at all. Not to mention that it’d double up the strength of that seal for the next poor soul to cross their path.”
“You get it.” The slant of his mouth morphs into a faint grin. “Then what? Let me out and feed whatever’s left of me to Sukuna to broker another deal? I’d rather it be you really, or Yuuta, Itadori, Megumi- think I’d be pretty fucking tasty if you ask me.”
She thins her lips to form a pale scar of a line. It’s easy to derive what he’s implying, and she knows too well what this long-winded recitation will ultimately amount to.
His smile is gone; it all happens much too quickly, and he interjects rudely before she is able to speak.
“They need you. They don’t need me- not like this. ”
She shoves at him with newfound vigor and he falls away so easily that she’s almost immediately regretful.
“No. Fuck you.” She insists, hissing down at where he’s sunk into the bedding, infuriated by the very suggestion. That he continues to speak is a cruelty all in itself. She forces herself to keep from flinching as he unwittingly lends his voice to the uncertainties which still run rampant in her head.
“Sure, I'm the strongest. Just… you can’t tell me that you can guarantee that I ever
will
be again. Every day you spend here trying to make this right is taking you away from everyone else who needs you.”
He speaks lightly as if he isn’t proposing the very act of his own murder; speaks as if he is doing her a favour and not putting upon her shoulders the responsibility of his death in simple exchange for that of his life.
Nevertheless, he seems as unperturbed as ever by her emotional toil. His shoulders heft slowly in a wordless shrug. “Fixing my body and fixing my control of cursed energy… it‘s not as simple as it seems, huh? I’m just being practical, there are other ways-“
“Other ways to
what
?” Her words escape her in an cold rush, fingers stiffening in the sheets as she pictures them encircling his throat instead- anything to cut off his self-righteous, sacrificial spiel-
“To make use of me.” Satoru says simply. “Lots in fact. But you’ll lose all that potential once I’m dead.”
The bandages which clothe the distance spanning his waist to his rib cage are a poor attempt at covering up all which lies beneath. Shoko can see dark blood smeared across the bottom curve of his ribcage; that aside, there is so much of him turned from pale porcelain to the ugly colour of a bruise. He sprawls limply in the nest of blankets, his eyes glossy, his voice almost a whisper. It feels like a particularly insidious form of subterfuge.
“I think I’m dying, Shoko.”
His confession closes like a stricture around the cyclical rigmarole of her own reasoning. She has grown used to self-justification, made a habit of running mental laps and terming it logical deduction. Through her weeks of rumination she has stubbornly forced complete surrender (and his euthanasia by proxy)- the easiest of all her viable options from her repertoire. Yet she still finds herself fighting the daily resurgence of such an inclination like she is doggedly emptying a shore into its adjacent ocean.
She wavers, the timbre of her own voice spider-webbing rapidly like struck glass as breath catches in her throat. Secondhand guilt forms the point of impact, homing in on her own longing to let go and be done with it all.
It would be so much easier to give up, but she simply
cannot
.
So why should he- ever blessed with a congenital abundance of fortune and infallibility be allowed to slip into the recesses of vulnerability? Whatever has the great Satoru Gojo done to deserve that portion of respite which she craves?
“You’re pathetic.” She snaps in accusation, considering immediately that her conduct is far from fair. “You’re pathetic, you’re selfish, and- and you’re giving up.”
“Am I, Shoko?” He wields his voice at her like he’s brandishing the honed edge of a blade, dancing around her with all the experimental joviality of someone self-assured of their own victory. “Or are you the one letting your emotions hold you back?”
She meets his hooded eyes with teeth gritted in lieu of a proper shield, refusing to rise to the bait. “That’s not fair.” The pressure builds in her ears, like she’s being dragged too quickly, too deep into a bottomless pit- ocean-
void
. Her breath catches. “It’s
not
fair.”
“Nothing is.”
“You’re a brat.”
It’s stupid. It’s unfair. It’s unjustified and irrational. She feels heated emotion seep insidiously into the delicate circuit-boards of her reasoning, yet cannot find the strength to chastise herself for it.
She’s exhausted.
It feels natural to force cold sterility to the forefront as her voice threatens to crack and splinter. He has no claim to strength in such a state; so the responsibility to fill the void left in his figurative absence yet again falls to her. Shoko manhandles a fistful of medicine and a packet of unopened syringes from the open drawer.
She thinks of letting him go and thinks of watching him dragged back into death’s arms by his personal Eurydice. Geto Suguru suits the role admirably; once-dead, damned and lobotomized, a lure poised for the unwitting protagonist.
Six months to full recovery is what she tells him. What she dwells on instead is the prospect of a length of indeterminate resignation; not because she doubts her own abilities or Gojo’s annoying talent at conjuring miracles, but because this is the only way she knows how to truly save him.
She cannot let him die the same way she cannot allow
them
to kill him. It would be inhumane to leave the moribund to pass without comfort, to race a horse with a fractured leg, to rehabilitate a deer only to set it loose in a forest swarming with hungry wolves.
So she balances on this uncomfortable boundary, neither able to resign herself to neglect him nor invest herself in his salvation. She will be responsible for his death in any case. Yet she still rejects the notion, her spirit threatening to break over the thought of it like a surf over a jagged shore.
Turning her back to him feels like the only option when his very presence is inflammatory. Thankfully, the practiced motions of drawing up his medication occupy her sufficiently to further augment her fury. Regardless, it still takes her a moment to collect herself. When she speaks again, it is only under the superficial pretense of being composed. Her skin feels paper thin, an ineffectual barrier straining against searing veins which bubble like rivers of molten lava.
“But… you don’t want me to get better, do you?
It would probably have been prudent to say something, to have chosen any alternative to falling silent so that in doing so she might have mercifully provided herself the building blocks to erect a preliminary facade, futile as the gesture was.
The moment stretches from a second, to half a minute, to half a century. Her mouth is dry and difficult to commandeer. “You
are
getting better.”
“Not as quickly-” He says pointedly, calmly. “- As I should be.”
There’s not a trace of accusation in his expression or tone. What he says is purely genuine, the unadulterated truth and nothing more.
“You’re not dying.” She corrects firmly, finally, leaving no room for further debate. She knows how childish it sounds, but there is simply no point in reaching for an alternative where there is none. “You can’t leave me.”
Yet, the full unyielding intensity of Six Eyes immediately trains itself upon her and she has to immediately stop herself from flinching.
“Whatever you say.” Satoru finally concedes and damn him- closes his eyes in unceremonious defeat. It’s a hollow victory, the bittersweet flavour of which she lingers on nonetheless.
She deserves nothing better.
DECEMBER 14TH 2018 - 7:30 PM
The curtains obscure the proceedings of the Culling Games. But all else which occurs outside of these barriers prove accessible to anyone choosing to spectate on this droning apocalypse, a leisurely catastrophe which seems to enshrine all the passage of time in some cosmic substance as thick as molasses.
She peers through the upturned slats of the blinds like an aristocrat in a private viewing box, gratefully consuming Utahime’s updates like she’s watching a particularly riveting opera. This performance is one full of traitors and twists, a nighttime rhapsody of twisted politics and puppet strings. Henceforth she recounts the narrative to Satoru, letting her grim enumerations of the world predominate within their microcosm in a miserable game of
telephone
laden only with pessimism.
As if in solidarity with her decision to brood, a storm besets their corner of the world. She gazes out at a rolling expanse of the sky wrought with thick, dark clouds. The rain drives downwards in heavy sheets, breaking on concrete and streaming over ridges of corrugated iron, pooling in narrow gutters plugged with wads of sodden leaves.
It’s not morning, but the urge strikes her nonetheless.
She draws out the prosaic exercise of brewing coffee. Necessity dictates that she commits to a grocery run, and she mulls over her list of items as she fills two mugs with the stuff- dark, bitter and aromatic.
She draws on her childhood to deposit a handful of sugar cubes and a generous dash of milk into one mug, then takes her own black. Satoru looks up at her with bleary eyes when she approaches, his irises nearly the color of the pervading city haze. A smile pulls at his drawn expression when she passes him the mug and informs him of her departure, and he drawls at her through pale lips as their fingers touch in exchange.
“You sure, doc’? I seem to recall you telling me that I had a weak stomach.”
“Shut up.” Shoko grumbles in turn, content to leave him sat on the couch. “We could always go back to white rice and boiled chicken.”
“Always looking out for me.”
Each of their exchanges is a testy engagement as she debates what to say and what to omit- a pantomime on thin ice. Somewhere out on that moonlit stage, Suguru Geto’s body is being further desecrated. For that matter, she’s chosen- whether subconsciously or deliberately she still can’t quite ascertain- not to mention his name in their conversations. Rather ‘
Kenjaku’
slowly becomes a household iteration, like some kind of cockroach scurrying just out of reach, annoyingly adept at evading its warranted demise.
All the while, what is left of Jujutsu society chases false leads and claws at itself in a desperate bid to rid itself of this parasite. There is no doubt in her mind that it is doubling back on itself in its frenzy, lunging to catch its own tail in a fang-toothed maw in a mad scramble which is sure to result in some form of lethal intussusception.
Indeed, she derives that this is exactly what Kenjaku has intended. It’s understandable and strategic- to have them conveniently depose themselves and in turn relieve their burden of having to get involved.
Even witnessing this downfall, she finds herself merely unhappy, not surprised. She cannot say that she had not already long come to terms with the likelihood of their failure, yet she allows herself to be led on by the hope of a tide turned in their favour.
But that foreign moon which has produced the peaceful lap of waves they have enjoyed for years is slumped across a ratty couch in a downtrodden flat and peering through a small foggy window, taking tentative sips of a cup of oversweet coffee. He has always favoured vantage points; always preferred to stand alone at the apices of the world. Perhaps because doing so offers an edge as much as it does security.
She leaves him to it.
The trip to the store is a silent affair. Lonely. She drags herself through the aisles accompanied solely by the glow of her screen, manages to fill two plastic bags worth of food. After a moment's worth of consideration, she adds an extra pack of cigarettes at the cash register.
She curls the fingers of her left hand numbly through the plastic handles of the two bags and departs, feeling the distended fragility of the cheap material sag and threaten to tear. Moody as she is, being considerate doesn’t come easily. Yet, a loaf of shokupan for Satoru is all that she carries underarm, soft and sweet, kindness that she is too exhausted to properly express.
She stops by the nearest konbini to buy a new phone card. The strain of both bags hanging from her arm forces her to pause. She plops down on a bench and switches out her SIM card, registering dully that she’s grown weaker. The streets have long been emptied of their usual droves of pedestrians. In their place, the pavements have become congealed with the skeletons of abandoned vehicles and the wind triumphantly parades the urban jungle daily, trailing apparel of litter and items of discard.
Utahime texts her thirty minutes after her phone blinks back cheerfully awake. As such, she returns from the grocery store with two bags worth of food and news of upheaval in the Kamo clan.
Again, the ignominy which colors their unorthodox pilgrimage and hoods their version of sanctuary are difficult to shake. Each moment spent in hiding is acerbic, each a poignant reminder of her inadequacy.
She unpacks sluggishly, setting aside each of the necessary ingredients for hot-pot. She’d dug out an old tabletop stove and its corresponding vessel just two days ago. With the weather getting colder and with Satoru on the gradual mend, it seems only fitting.
Indeed, it’s in these docile moments of indolence that she is left wanting for some occupation that
isn’t
Gojo Satoru. In caring for him she is reminded of her long-standing distaste for her career. She peels apart a pack of thin sliced beef- fresh and scarlet, trying to quantify to herself how much she
hates
her job. She’s since grown acquainted with that weary disgust; of meat, wet and cold beneath her fingertips.
With the majority of the raw ingredients dealt with, she manoeuvres herself towards the sink and scrubs at her hands with all the vigour of a surgeon preparing to enter an operating theatre. Try as she might, she cannot stop. There is a road paved ahead of her that she must traverse, and she is helpless as a train magnetised to its fated tracks.
Her pursuit of self improvement (whether for the benefit of herself or others, neither conceit nor altruism ever mattered in the end) had quickly become synonymous with abiding by the whims of those who saw herself and her cohort- not as impressionable children, but only as faceless cogs. Their lives and deaths of equal unimportance outside of the former being set to the fulfilment of selfish machinations. The version of academia offered to them merely a gilded whetstone, a grinding surface against which blades were honed, these impressionable years painted with deceit and polished with the fluid of hollow accolades, thin as quicksilver in abject disparity to the thickness of their spilled blood.
It leaves the hard-earned fruits of her labour tasting of rancid grief, leaves her spitting and hacking in disgust as she turns to the putrid rancour of cigarette ash and cheap beer, that which has become comparatively palatable.
She knows she could have left. If she’s to be entirely honest with herself, she’d known that she
ought
to have stepped out and abandoned any inclination to so much as glance back after Haibara had died; after Suguru had run off; after she’d graduated. But she’d told herself at every fork in the road to wait- that it would be better the next time, if only that choosing to stay might make a margin of difference.
She nurtures this hatred like it is a child, nurtures it because she cannot neglect it and because she has no choice. While her abilities (her body and self notably excluded, it’s important to discriminate function from
form
) are considered invaluable to the higher ups, it would be unfair to forget the way she is of equivalent value to the only ones who’d ever been worth her sacrifice. Indeed, this is precisely that which shackles her.
This is why she persists, set on a surefire path of self destruction the only way any of them know how and runs herself ragged, not because she feels any sort of commitment or obligation to the ones who orchestrate this hell of faux heroism, but because she couldn’t possibly stomach another lethal shot fired from a gun with a trigger formed of her own wilful negligence.
She hates that keeping those she cares about alive is a goal which runs adjacent to bending the knee, to falling neatly into the role expected of her. But she has never been a sycophant, was not born into the Great Clans, servile to the bow-backed and wizened autocracy of Jujutsu society. Satoru on the other hand wears their collar, one of the many blessings he shoulders- all courtesies of being a Gojo.
But for all the pleasure she gleans from dancing on the tightrope of uncertainty, she knows she will heal him because she cannot stomach the alternative. Let Satoru die- let him know
peace
and she will clear the board of one of their most poignant chess pieces.
She will save him, there is no question in
that
. What she falters on is what will come after.
A pack of soybean rolls crackle like worm-eaten talismans as she shakes them out onto a plate, halfheartedly arranging them into a haphazard pile. She sees him perk with interest out of the corner of her eye and abandons her contemplation to finish preparations.
He’s healed considerably. She tallies their victories as she sets the table and steers him to the only other empty seat (one of a meagre two). A wide soup pot bubbles between them in an abrupt interjection of mundanity, fishballs bobbing invitingly in the rolling broth.
He’s sluggish but mobile. Clear-headed albeit the sporadic bout of rolling mental fog. Not
quite
Satoru Gojo and rather more a shadow of his former self at this current point in time. It’s a sobering reminder.
“No raw fish? Aw, you remembered!”
She watches this iteration of his modern-day Orpheus from across the table; he’s a specter in the sterile ceiling light, eyes windows into a dove-grey empyrean, with pale complexion and a mop of overgrown hair like starlight as brilliant as sun on snow.
“Are those pork dumplings? Oh, pass me the surimi would you?”
Shoko bites back a cry, flinching back as hot water splatters her knuckles. Gojo grins back at her in weak apology, a congealed raft of meat half submerged in the water as proof of his efforts.
“Shoko.” He says knowingly anyways. “It’s rude to sulk at the dinner table.”
She scowls. “I’ll stop sulking if you decide to eat properly for once.”
“I have been!”
She jabs at him with her chopsticks, but her expression softens briefly. “Don’t think I haven’t seen you pouring your leftovers into the toilet.”
As if to prove his point, his sound of denial is muffled conveniently around a mouthful of beef doused in sesame paste. In response, she skewers a fishball and rolls it in soy sauce, pretending to ignore him as she gnaws at it like it’s an apple whilst still muttering, albeit
somewhat
good-naturedly.
“You know, you’ve been posing inconvenience after inconvenience for me ever since you’ve managed to find your feet.”
“Sounds like you’re growing sick of me.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Is too.”
She dumps a trio of sodden dumplings into his bowl and pointedly ignores his cry of dismay. “I’ve been sick of you since the day we met.” This, spoken crossly, though her words carry no heat. “I think I hit peak levels years ago.”
“Well.” He blinks and clicks his chopsticks over his bowl. “Good on you for sticking it out. Lucky me, huh?”
She’s mollified enough by this form of surrender that she doesn’t berate him. She takes a swig of her sake instead, hot and smooth as sarcasm on her tongue. “Go on, flatter me. Maybe I’ll take you out for walkies.”
“That’d be nice. But then I might refuse to come back.”
“Good riddance.”
They eat in silence. Normalcy is a luxury that neither of them have been privy to in years. Somewhere in the back of her mind she recalls a similar instance: three of them hunched around a pot after a particularly harrowing mission, more engrossed in their food than one another.
These moments where she finds herself yearning for earlier days have been growing more frequent. Pathetic in her yearning, snatching at the cotton-wool wisps of a life lived and lost.
“We can’t win can we?” This realisation has settled upon her so intimately that she wears it like a second skin. It’s overly salient, an irreparable tear, demanding of attention as a starving infant.
“I never thought you’d be such a pessimist.”
She laughs because it is the truth. The sound is contained and her smile doesn’t quite reach the corners of her mouth.
“Just kidding.” He snickers anyway, weary. “You’ve always been a massive bummer.” A lapse for a breath. “So I guess… it kind of depends on what you’re expecting.”
“Do you think we’ll be happy?” She says.
Satoru purses his lips. “No.”
“And
I’m
the pessimist.”
I’m being realistic.” He says evenly. Her proposition is a dream, and though she cradles it, she knows it is an unviable one. Shoko heaves a sigh, concealing her dismay behind a veil of exasperation.
“Can’t we just be happy? Like this?”
The tips of his chopsticks tap out a rhythm along the inside of his bowl in lieu of a response. Then slowly in tones not quite censorious and somewhat unsuccessfully trying for contemplation. “What do you think?”
It’s a question which she cannot- will not oblige. To speak the answer which she knows dearly will only serve to reinforce its tangibility, to give steel to the figurative bullet hurtling towards both their skulls.
“Just for a little longer.” She whispers instead, conveying a plea and a demand all at once.
He doesn’t respond.
The indicator light on the stove blinks red when he reaches over to indent the power switch.