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When Gojo steps into Shoko’s underground office, it is late evening but she’s still buried nose-deep in her reports, undisturbed by the overwhelming smell of antiseptic flooding the air. He doesn't wrinkle his nose or comment on it like before; he is too numb to operate under a false sense of normalcy.
Before he even opens his mouth, without looking up, she waves a dismissive hand at him.
“Did you ‘lose’ him again?” she asks.
“He’s dead, Shoko.”
She visibly startles at that, a strand of curse energy already in her hand as she turns around. Their eyes meet, brown-to-blue for the first time in ten years, and all she can say is, “Oh.”
“I killed him.”
The “I killed him,” is spoken on the opposite end of the spectrum from, “I’ll be right there,” and both sounds like bones rattling.
Wordlessly, she abandons her place amongst the stack and moves toward the water cooler in even-measured steps. It makes a gurgle as it comes to life, so rarely used as it is.
“Is there something wrong with your hand? They’re shaking,” she points out. Extending her own, she waits to see if he will show her.
He doesn’t.
“I’m fine,” he says, taking the paper cup she offers with one hand and shoves the other down his pockets, digging for something.
With one jerky movement he pulls out a piece of wrinkled paper.
She takes it and scans through the document wearily.
It is Geto's death certificate.
Her eyes unwillingly linger on the causes of death. The list seems nearly too long for someone as powerful as him.
“What are the elders going to do?”
If Gojo really was the one who killed Geto, there is no way he would have left his body behind. But right now, Geto’s passing is solely evidenced by the paper in her grasp and nothing else. What a bleak picture it paints.
“I don’t know,” Gojo answers flatly. There is a minute tic in his jaws, but she doubts he realizes how hard he’s clenching down.
He does not drink from his cup; just stares down with glassy eyes, seeking answers in its cardboard rims. “They said they’ll deal with his body. They--”
“--couldn’t trust me to deal with the body?”
Gojo nods silently, the mercurial state of his emotions tucked behind a wooden expression, but betrayed by how hard his hands are shaking.
Shoko carefully thinks through her next words.
There is a boundary--a wall--both of them built after Geto left. Each was ten years’ worth of self-reflection, but she had a feeling they built vastly different walls.
She sneaks a glance at him now, fractured and leaking static electricity into the air; it is not hard to tell what Gojo is thinking. His walls are crumbling, its brittle structures--already so permeable in the first place--removed stone by stone. It feels like she is looking at a phantom of the past, except here the phantom was, ten years later, or maybe it never left in the first place.
If Geto's body is on her operation table with Gojo pleading for leniency behind it, would it be possible that she also moves by instinct and not reason?
She is glad she doesn’t have to find out.
Unconsciously, she starts twirling a strand of her hair as something tugs at her memories, something she cannot quite pinpoint. It feels like Gojo is hiding something from her. She has no conclusive evidence, but…
Gojo sits before her, fragile and deadly silent.
It is only a hunch.
But she can’t risk it. Whatever is simmering in the air is more than just grief. There is a secret with him that he has yet has to reveal, and she doubts it is insignificant. Nothing ever is between those two.
She is the first to break the silence.
“Did he change much?”
“Not at all,” he shrugs, keeping his expression carefully translucent. “Still the same old Suguru. Had the audacity to tell me to curse him more.” He downs the water in his cup--forcefully--likely to cut himself off and prevent her from asking questions.
Shoko respects his efforts, but Gojo’s evasiveness had always been the weakest out of the three. It feels like she’s getting closer, but there’s a fine line between getting lost in the waves of Gojo’s misery versus gaining insight into what he is hiding. There’s an obvious side she'd rather not touch.
She turns back to the certificate in her hands. Is about to hand it back to him, until the small bolded letters at the bottom catch her attention. Her eyes narrow marginally.
In the section where there was a long list of injuries, “lethal impact to trachea” was printed neatly, below “major blood loss” as the reason for death.
What is there for Gojo Satoru left to hide--something that he feels guilty enough to send him scrambling to her specifically?
What would injure his hands enough that he didn't want her to see?
Was it even an injury?
An idea jolts through her, one so harebrained and banal and utterly ridiculous (a small voice wonders, ‘Or is it?’) that she nearly hesitates. Against her better judgment, she goes for it anyway.
“Gojo,” she asks, one hand gripping hard around the back of her chair without even realizing it, “What were you trying to do with Geto?”
For a split second, she sees panic in his eyes. That is enough of a confirmation. It sends her heart ricocheting into her throat, and she is up on her feet faster than she can register the movement, her chair slamming back with a bang that makes them both jump. The paper stacks on her desk wobble precariously and Geto’s death certificate slips onto the floor, but her attention is fixated on one thing, and one thing only.
The emotions she has safeguarded for ten years and counting--once directionless--bursts like an open dam with a target right in front of her.
"You didn't use your curse technique." It comes out as an accusation and a statement, two things rolled into one sentence, delivered succinctly in the span of a second.
She watches in fascination, in horror, as Gojo's facade slips and cracks, breaking into fragments before her. There is a great weight on her chest, and she knows it's not all anger. But she sees Gojo in front of her, one hand clenched tightly to his chest and all she can think is, ‘He should’ve known better.’
“Did you miss him that bad?” slips out before she can think twice.
“What do you mean, do you miss him that bad? He is--he is--”
“He was our friend,” Shoko says slowly, “And you should’ve allowed him the dignity of dying without being cursed.”
“What do you know,” he says dismissively. The mockery in his tone sets her blood boiling at a low freeze.
“What don’t I know,” she retorts, jaws clenched too tight, “I’ve spent two years with the both of you, and another ten watching.”
Then, more quietly, “Geto was my friend too.”
Gojo sucks in a deep breath, and the pause separates them like the walls they’ve built, with only the whirlpools of nostalgia between them and little else.
"Being loved is just as much of a curse as falling in love. I'm not jealous of you two," she says finally, resolutely sinking back into her chair. She picks up the fallen certificate while he stares at her in deliberation.
“When did you become a philosopher?”
“A long time ago,” Shoko replies. Folding the certificate with practiced ease, her fingers trace the name on it one last time. She turns it over in her hands, then looks toward Gojo with a broken little smile, sharp and jagged around the edges. “Are you surprised I gave it so much thought?”
He winces, but Shoko is unmoving. It has been so long, and so many people have forgotten, but once it was more than just Satoru and Suguru. It had been Satoru, Suguru, and Shoko.
“I don’t know,” is what he says. “It’s--we never talked about it. After. You know.”
He struggles to find the right words, opting to give up, letting his effort linger in the room like leftover apologies gone stale.
She gives him an unamused look as she hands the paper back. Watches as he carefully tucks it into his pocket with a gentleness he’s never demonstrated for any document, ever. Shoko leans back in her chair with a weary sigh.
“For all it’s worth, I’m sorry it went down like this.”
Gojo makes a soundless, breathless laugh. The cup in his hands crumples, and he canters, like his vision is wavering before him. He doesn’t apologize, but she never expected him to. Instead, she numbly accompanies him as he shakes apart in her office, with the acerbic tang of antiseptics and a missing third person who only exists in their memories as the backdrops to their grief.
It's almost too much to bear.
His gasps are too loud in her tiny office. Gojo brings in a bigger baggage neither of them are equipped to handle, but they make do with the knowledge that here is the only place they can do anything about it. As soon as he steps outside these four walls of her office, he becomes Special Grade Gojo Satoru, but here, he is just Gojo, just another person who built a wall that couldn’t protect him from a past that overwhelms all that it touches.
Her gaze lands on the shelves behind him, a glass cabinet filled with gauze and medical equipment; half a lifespan’s worth of time spent on fixing, juxtaposed by the boy-now-man she was never able to save. The remaining one of many.
What she does is this--
Reaches for Gojo’s hand (but not the one that killed Geto) and holds it in her bloodless ones. Despite the lung-rattling sobs that echo throughout his frame, the fine tremors of his hand feel distinct and separate in her grip.
He is drowning, and she holds on tightly, as only a person who has remained in the shallows of the river called sorrow can. It is hard--maybe impossible--to relate. Nonetheless, she holds on.
She is not like Gojo, who only sinks upon the weight of grief. She runs, and in this enclosed office with nowhere left to hide, she is as much of a tether for him as he is for her.
In the corner of her vision is the form of Gojo, struggling with his inability to triumph over badly suppressed sobs. Her own head feels like it has been filled with water. He could be sitting right beside her or two rooms away; she would not have noticed the difference.
When she digs her fingernails into her palm, the slight pain just barely registers in the back of her mind.
Focus.
The lights in her office are too bright. It has never bothered her before, but it does now.
She squeezes her eyes shut.
Please, focus.
There is no further offer of physical comfort beyond that.
When the crying slows, she tells him to drink some water while keeping her voice as level as possible.
When the crying stops, she finds herself lingering on Gojo’s left hand. A hand which represents the unacknowledged truth, soaked in an intangible intent that lacks potency but makes it up for it in the spades through sheer desperation...
Shoko is unfamiliar with the concept.
She looks down at her own free hand; flexes it experimentally. They are unscarred and thin, reflective of a career spent in the labs rather than on the field.
They are a healer's hands, but of the two people here, they can help neither.
At some point, Shoko can feel Gojo forcing himself to take a breath, one after another, forcing himself into a rhythm until it is unconscious again.
His hands slip out of hers easily, and without waiting for a response, she pushes a new waiting cup into his hand.
She takes a sip from her own before asking, “Well?”
He looks at her with swollen eyes and ten years younger, freshly out of Shinjuku. She was not there for that breakdown, nor did she want to be. Perhaps this was her penance for not being there for them that day.
“Did it work?”
Gojo gives a broken laugh at her question and his mouth opens and closes, hinges of a closet filled with holes. Nothing comes out.
His breathing is loud--too loud--and he holds his left hand close to his chest again as if he is about to crumple inward like a star collapsing into a black hole. In the back of her mind, Shoko files that away as a potential self-soothing mechanism.
He is not discrete--never has been and never will be. It’s something to address next time she sees him again, if he doesn’t want the elders finding out this little secret. She wishes she could sigh, but that would only be taken as insensitive.
Patiently, she waits.
"I tried," he finally whispers, words coming out like a leaky faucet.
He makes a motion with his hand. It is grotesque, but Shoko does not look away. This too, is her burden to share.
"I killed him," he repeats, voice dull yet breaking. "Of all the people who were looking, I was the one who found him. Is that good luck or bad?"
‘It’s tragic,’ she wants to say. But she says nothing, and her silence seems to urge him on.
Gojo’s breath hitch as new sobs escape. That, and Shoko's heartbeat pounding in her ears are the only signs of life. The two form a rhythm, separating his confession into moments framed by stillness and abject waiting.
"His skin was so cold. Clammy,” he recounts, “He was dying, and there was nothing else I could do."
Gojo’s own chest heaves like he is the one dying, and whatever anger left within her perishes.
An image of what transpired builds itself into existence inside her head, and it serves no purpose except to make the shrivelled remains of her empathy twitch on the cold, hard floor of her office.
It is so painfully Gojo, such a him thing to do, that Shoko wonders why no one else saw it coming.
"Bit off more than you could chew this time," she forces out wryly. She doesn’t know which one between the three of them that applies to.
When the last residues of hiccups disappear, they make a toast with their empty cups.
“To certain fucked up assholes," she says, much more calmly than she feels. They share a smile like scattering the ashes of a memory long-gone. It is as close to reconciling as they can get.
“Cheers.”
There is no tinkling of expensive glassware here. Just two old scuffed cups that's seen too much, worn-out and faulty.
When he gets up to leave, he turns to her with a long, assessing look. "If I bought him here today, what would you have done?"
She smiles mirthlessly in response. “Who knows?”
There is power in words, and she doesn't feel like accidentally cursing herself today.