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"The truth is, hell would freeze over...before I would fall in love with one of you two. But I was there. What do you mean you 'were alone'? Idiot."
A puff of smoke. Her hair auburn in the autumn breeze, it cups her face and the wind blows through it. She still looks like death incarnate, a decade later. She crosses her legs and sighs. Light pink, cherry lipgloss, and red noses and hands cracked and dry from the cold. Dark-eyed, frostbitten faced and bitter-hearted. If Ieiri Shoko is anything, she's the black-faced vulture who sits atop a lone, breaking and busted branch, watching those below her feet live their lives peacefully. But Suguru Geto and Satoru Gojo were everything but faces of peace.
The truth is, hell would freeze over...before I would fall in love with one of you two.
Oh, but it froze. It froze and it froze quick. Hell's sweltering inferno was quelled by the kisses of the face of winter, in all her glassy, and glum bitterness.
Ieiri Shoko. Autumn kissed, heart made of glass, with lips glossed and painted over with light pinks and scarlets, porcelain-faced, with cracking and creaking bones.
You're such a liar.
"Yo, Satoru! Long time no see!"
So you sit beside him, against your will. Call it a truce, a temporary non-aggression.
Winter-haired and marble-toothed, scarlet lips curl out of disgust.
Suguru hadn't changed. The way his midnight hair rests lightly over his shoulders. His face soft like he doesn't have a care in the world. He very well could be the man of fate, of destiny, his own god, his own deity. You can still very clearly see the marks of death’s teeth on his neck. Her wretched, pale hands wring.
And he smokes, and he smokes.
The bitter, blood- curdling smell of cigarettes and sour tobacco. The white-haired scrunches up his nose.
Shoko had smoked the same brand for...years. And so had he, apparently.
Your fingers twitch at that smell. Your fingers, white and red-knuckled, are shaking.
"A penny...for your thoughts?" The self-proclaimed god asks, but six-eyes was enough to know he was a human blinded by the pangs of cursed energy.
His void eyes bore into the young, child-faced, but this time he can't bring himself to be childish.
Your fists shake in your lap.
"What do you mean you 'were alone'? I was there. Idiot."
That voice, sweetened with silver-tongued arsenic, whose heart was turning rancid and sour. But sometimes you need rancid and sour to swallow the taste of sugar.
Your eyes lock onto that cigarette, its burning black, staining fingers that had once been dipped in crimson red.
"Do..." You can't get it out. The world's greatest sorcerer can't spit out the words stick in his throat. You tremble, and he recognizes that smell like he recognizes himself in the mirror. She was autumn-faced and tired.
Shoko didn't need six eyes to feel Suguru.
"Do you know...how long I've had to kiss her to make her forget how you taste?"
A puff of smoke, a shrug of the shoulders. He laughs softly. He laughs his little Suguru laugh, as if he were talking to a monkey.
"Who, Shoko?
He lets that name roll off his tongue as if he had any right to say her name with such a tone.
As if he had just...forgotten about her.
"...Who else?"
There's a bit of silence, and he decides to play Satoru's game.
"How long, hmmm?"
The midnight face meets the winter-eyed and glass-hearted, his nose turning red in the cold.
"Forever."
Six-eyes made of cracking ice stare into the soul of the wretched one.
"She smokes, because of you. Because she wants to forget about you.” His voice trembles, and it cracks, it cracks for her. Because Satoru Gojo was the last lifeline of Ieiri Shoko. The last lifeline, the lone thread that keeps her from snapping. Her best friend. “Do you know what that's like? What it's like to kiss someone so much your memory melts away? What it's like to wake up rotting every day, knowing your best friend left you for an ideal?"
Because he had truly been one of the privileged few to unwrap the ball of blankets she wraps herself up in the morning. To peel away at the walls of her soul. Because of her, Satoru smells like cigarettes, and because of Suguru, Shoko smokes cigarettes. Because of Suguru, Shoko rots and decays in her loneliness.
There is silence.
"I didn't think so."