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Shoko has lunch alone the night Gojo and Geto go on their super important mission.
She doesn't mind too much; not exactly the first time. Sometimes it's because they have some strongest-sorcerers shit going on, sometimes it's because she gets stuck healing someone for long hours. To be fair, she could probably do it quicker if her knowledge of human anatomy wasn't so basic, but apparently she can't go to med school until she has all twelve years of education.
Bullshit.
She goes to smoke out of the classroom window when she's done with her bento box. Since it faces the door directly, she can just turn her back on it and flick the butt out with ease should anyone see her. Perfect spot, she owes the architects a big one.
She is on her third drag when her phone rings. The cigarette is smashed into the wall seconds later.
Running is normally awful, it makes her legs and her chest burn and it tires her out beyond comprehension. But right now, running is all that matters.
It can't be.
She rushes outside, her heels clanking against the pavement of the path connecting the buildings. It can't be, right? Their mission couldn't have gone that south. They had to be okay. He had to be okay. He had to be okay.
Okay, okay, okay, let him be okay.
She can make it okay. She's not as powerful as them, but she can heal anything, right? So far she's healed everyone she's come across. Which can only mean she will heal him too, right?
Why is the college campus so big? She's so slow. Even though she pushes forward, she's still not fast enough. For every second she gets delayed by her own stupid weakness, it's another second he doesn't have.
Yaga meets her outside the infirmary and stops her from running inside. His grasp on her shoulders is gentle, but it feels like a cruel iron grip imprisoning her.
"Let me in," she says ferociously.
"Ieiri, be careful," he warns her. "He's in very bad shape—"
She desperately tries to wriggle away from him. "That's exactly why I have to see him, let me in."
"Keep your head straight." He still doesn't let go. "You are not going to be of any use to him if you just lose it when you see him. It's a grotesque view. We're sorry to have to ask you to see it—"
"Yaga-sensei, let me in."
She must be nearly crying because he releases her softly and nudges her towards the door. "Go, child. Be strong. I'll wait for you here."
Child is not the appropriate word, but she forgets about it soon enough.
Blood.
Blood, blood, blood, blood. So much blood. Everywhere. The metallic stench fills up the room they put his body in.
No, not his body. Not yet. The room they put him in.
She can barely bring herself to assess the damage. It's too much. He shouldn't be alive, it's humanly impossible but right now, she thanks whoever is up there for making him so fucking tough.
Oh, she'll have his head for this, she will. But first, she has to make sure he lives to make it up to her.
Her hands sink into the tender tissue of his stomach. Her fingers graze his guts. She holds back a gag and pours all of her Cursed Energy into him, every last bit she has.
He is not dying here tonight. Tomorrow he might, out in some battlefield she can't go into, but not tonight. Not tonight.
Tonight, he lives.
She is terribly cold now that his blood on her hands has dried. It had kept her warm for some time after they had forcefully pulled her away from him. Apparently, she'd been on the verge of collapsing.
Bullshit. She had been fine, and he had been dying.
Now, he is alive, they at least had the decency to tell her. Unconscious, but very much alive, and she breathes again for the first time.
She's been fucking up in life for a long time. School wasn't her forte, cheating was. Combat is not her forte, standing back and letting others take the brunt of the fight while she patiently waited for their unavoidable injuries is. She only needs the fingers of one hand to count all the times she's been truly honest to someone.
But at least she'd done one good thing, and right now, that is all that matters.
They finally let her see him after two excruciating hours of waiting alone, curled up in a ball in the hallway.
He sits on the hospital bed, all stiff and dumbfounded. His chest is covered in bandages, a pointless precaution, since she'd made sure all the wounds had been closed. She's not an amateur, come on.
She holds her horses at the door. He's still out of it, she can tell. Not really the best moment to sprint up to him and crash her lips against his, as much as she wants to.
The idiot. He just had to go and get himself half killed.
"Hi," she calls out to him, her voice hoarse.
Slowly, like he's a puppet on a string, he turns to look at her. "Shoko?"
"Yes."
"I couldn't save her."
She runs to him and cries with her nose buried in the crook of his neck.
His shaky fingers stroke her hair after a few minutes. "Shoko?"
"If you ever pull more shit like this, I will rip off your head and feed it to the starving cat that lives behind the library."
A beat. Another. "I couldn't save her," he repeats, this time more quietly than before. "I thought I could, because I'm strong, but I wasn't strong enough."
She pulls a little back to look at him. His face is sepulchral pale, his eyes glassy and his usual smirk gone, erased and banished to the ends of the Earth for all she knows. Cupping his face with one hand, she presses a kiss to the spot between his eyebrows.
"You're alive," she whispers, "you'll save others."
Perhaps not the most comforting thing to say, but she's a seventeen year old girl who's as lost as he is, what is to be expected of her?
He doesn't stay for long. Soon he's out of bed and goes looking for Gojo. She stays back when she learns he doesn't need her help as well. As awful as it sounds, it's not her business. What happened during their mission concerned them and only them.
Instead, she walks back to her dorm room alone. Yaga offers to accompany her, but she declines. She needs a smoke and he wouldn't approve.
They have always felt away from her, despite being right by her side. They are just too powerful, too out of her league. She hung with them only by happenstance. And now they've gone even farther away. She doubts she'll ever get them back, if she ever had them in the first place.
Her cigarette tastes like ashes. It always does, but tonight she doesn't find it at all relieving. Maybe she should listen to Utahime and quit.
And she was right, of course she was right, she doesn't get them back. Gojo disappears in his delusions of grandeur (although they've started to feel a lot more like reality than delusions lately). It's okay, it was meant to happen at some point.
She hates never getting Geto back more. He replaces his smug smiles with pained looks and dead eyes. She hates it.
He stops asking to hold her and kiss her. She would be lying if she said she didn't miss that too, but really, the absence she feels the most is him as himself instead of whatever the hell that shallow husk of a person is.
She's been branded as the caretaker of the Jujutsu community, and nothing is further from the truth. She's a healer at best, she doesn't care for them. And she can't care for him, as much as she wishes she could.
There's a point after which pain no longer hurts. It's just this weird dull ache that you can forget about given a good enough distraction.
Thankfully, there are plenty of good enough distractions in her life. Cheating through med school is nice, and so is going shopping with Utahime and occasionally Mei. And it's okay, it really is. Better than hurting, that's for sure.
It's a relief and also a disappointment when she realizes she hasn't given him a single thought for the past month. People like Geto Suguru are not meant to be forgotten, they weren't made to become sad memories tucked away in a box hidden under a bed.
But it hurts to let him be more than that. It hurts to the point she can't breathe and relief seems a strange fantasy from a far off land.
So she forgets about him. Again, it's better than hurting.