Work Text:
it’s a quiet love
(stars in an infinitely expanding universe)
spilling between the gaps of my fingers.
-Tatsuya Kitani, "Ao no Sumika"
---
There’s a levity to Gojo’s steps that she knows by sound after so many years. A kind of suggested transience, as if he won’t be anywhere for long; not where he’s going, not where he’s coming from, not where he’s staying. Always moving, always traveling, always. Even when he’s standing still—an asymptote curving infinitely towards zero and never reaching.
She always knows what to expect when he visits. This time is no different. He drops the wrapped body on one of the embalming tables, grins at her and salutes with two fingers to his forehead, then spins back out, hands in his pockets.
Always with his hands in his pockets.
Shoko peels the corner back. Traces features that she’s known for just as long as she’s known Gojo’s ephemerality. His skin is still warm beneath her fingertips. Lips curved in a joke. Lids closed.
He could be sleeping. He could be dreaming.
Drawing the cover back over him, Shoko climbs up the stairs. Rummages through her desk drawer for the packs of cigarettes she holds onto just in case. When she exits, she thaws immediately beneath the winter sunlight.
Behind her, Geto lies still, a particle now frozen forever in time. Ahead of her, Gojo, a pinpoint slowly disappearing into the distance.
And Shoko, an ever-changing coordinate moving from one end of their line to the other, sometimes nearer to one, sometimes perfectly balanced.
But always bounded by their endpoints.
Always between them.
---
You should see more sunlight! Gojo says everytime, carrying another body in his arms. Another boiling curse turned inside out.
I do.
Always the smell of antiseptic, always the snap of latex over her hands, scalpel gleaming under ugly fluorescents.
Always a singular look up, gaze meeting bandaged eyes. Are you going to watch?
He never does.
---
Butter gold light washes over her when she navigates Tokyo. She only does house calls for one person.
“How’s Satoru?”
Shoko flicks the syringe, watching the air bubbles rise and pop. Then she squeezes the needle, waiting for the spurt of liquid. Geto holds his arm out, turns his wrist up, reveals spider webs of blue and purple spun out from two puncture wounds and the cut connecting them.
“Same as always. Give that a minute.”
“What’s Gojo’s ‘always?’”
Her fingers come to rest around his forearm, thumb bracketing the double dots, the space between her digits immense and uncanvassable. “The variable.”
Geto grins. “What about me?”
Her energy begins to work through him, sewing up parted flesh. “The constant.”
“Flattering.”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
“I’m the solution and he’s the unknown. What’s that make you?”
She drops his arm and stands. He swings his feet and smiles. “Whatever makes up the rest of the equation.”
His laughter follows her out.
---
When it happens, I want to be there.
Gojo pauses on the first step up, head turning slightly back. Shoko catches just enough of his face to know he’s grinning. He shakes his head as he leaves her with the body.
When she tells Geto the same thing, he asks, “When what happens?” already grinning.
“When you two meet again.”
He laughs the same as Gojo but to her face, white of his teeth glaring blue beneath the sliver of light cutting through the alley.
The cut on his face heals. Shoko leaves a scar.
---
To exist as the stretch and shrink between two people. The give and take. The push and pull. Not caught in the middle, but being every atom that makes it up.
Between the sun and the moon, she is the sky.
---
“A teacher?”
“Mhm.”
“Ha.”
“You don’t think he can swing it?”
“Of course he can.”
She glances up from the pressure cuff.
“He’s Gojo Satoru.”
It isn’t hope, but it’s not despair either. It’s a dimmer, sadder echo of the emotion she remembers reading on him from that first, bright blue day long ago, the very moment she realized she’d always be the one on the outside looking in.
---
Her grandparents had raised her, sole offspring to a woman who had died tragically before she’d turned three and a man too busy to look after her. No siblings. No other extended family.
Fed and cleaned and doted on. The kind of child allowed to do as she pleased, trusted and left to her own devices. Never quite connecting, never quite following any path but her own. Content to leave loose ends hanging.
Spoiled, her teachers would say. Self-possessed, she’d argue later.
On the way to the funeral in the morning, she glimpses a familiar robe around the corner of a Tokyo alley. A familiar shock of ink black hair.
At night, another body on her embalming table.
Lonely, she’d whisper now.
---
Nanami leaves to be a salaryman. Utahime returns to her family shrine after she scars her face. Mei Mei disappears into the underground. Haibara grows flowers.
Outside the gate, Shoko watches the moon. Cigarette smoke smells like home to her now.
The stars are still in the sky, but she wonders how quickly they race apart from each other up close.
---
Exam answers pass through her hands. Study drugs and boozy late night binges. Benders. Two years of life stuck on a spin-cycle.
Non-sorcerers, she finds, make great friends. When existential dread is an intermission always followed by crises—not the unbroken, uninterrupted background hum she knows it to be in the world she comes from—there is time in between for living.
For two years, she is nothing but her self. Not a space, nor a distance. Not a line between two points. Disappointment washes out of her, cascades over her, slippery and viscous, leaving rainbows at her feet. The only grief she knows is splitting morning headaches and stubbing her toes on unconscious, snoring bodies and table legs.
She doesn’t go to her graduation, but she feels the shadow linger by her apartment window the morning of. When the moon is a hole punch in the sky, electric blue follows her across the bar she meets her friends at.
She wakes up in a stranger’s bed, slips out in the cool of morning, and returns to a role she never asked for, but doesn’t know how she could ever escape.
---
Sometimes she thinks she sees Geto in Tokyo: a flash of gold, a blur of black, a wash of navy. In the stretched lobes of a stranger or in the open mouths of restaurant-goers, eating to their hearts’ content.
Gojo always slows. Always smiles. Always holds his hands in his pockets tightly and asks, wanna get ice cream?
She’d always rather have beer, but that’s what it’s like now. Tightropes and eggshells and compromises.
Holding the same secret from two different people in both palms of her hands, but making sure never to clap.
---
Sometimes she dreams of family.
A mother, a father. A grandmother and grandfather, neither ill, both smiling. Four younger brothers and two older sisters. A house big enough to hold them all.
And her. In the middle.
Sometimes she wakes with tears in her eyes. Blinks at the ceiling in sleepy disorientation and feels them slip down the sides of her face, wetting the pillow beneath her, filling her ears. Draws herself up and digs out the packs from her nightstand.
When she moves out, she makes sure to flip the nicotine-stained tiles above the space where her bed used to be.
---
Sometimes she doesn’t know why she chooses any of this.
---
“Need a light?”
---
“Shoko!”
Gojo, pristine and beaming, hand in the air. Half-covered in blood.
“I’m going to see Haibara. You coming?”
His smile slips a cinch, but he nods, falling into step beside her. At the entrance to the morgue, Geto steps out.
“I took care of the body. Nothing to see anymore.”
Shoko frowns, head turning to follow Geto as he continues on. When she looks at Gojo, he’s smiling tightly, staring down the dark corridor, fists clenched in his pockets.
---
With the onset of Gojo’s full power, she becomes necessary only to Geto. He sits much stiller than Gojo ever did.
He doesn’t need either of us.
I know.
Why do you stay?
Same reason as you.
We both know that’s not true.
Shoko smiles up at him. All done.
You left a scar.
Gotta make sure you don’t forget me, too.
She leaves Geto sitting under the cherry tree with a sorry look on his face.
---
“Did you two fight?”
Gojo flinches, looking at her with irritation over the cloth-bound body in his arms. “Why would we fight?”
“Well, I don’t see him with you, do I?”
He grits his teeth, fingers digging into the sheets. “Not everything’s a joke, Shoko.”
She studies the tension in his shoulders. The crystal blue of his cold, avoidant gaze. The whites of his knuckles. She takes a step back, leveling him with an equally as cool stare.
“Who said I was joking?”
Then she turns and leaves.
---
Planets are named after gods in certain cultures, and if Gojo and Geto are as good as gods, then perhaps they also have the same weight and density of planets. It certainly seems so, the way the world revolves around them and their capabilities.
“Must be nice,” she sighs over her phone. “I want to go to Okinawa too.”
“Don’t worry, Shoko! We’ll take you one day! Soon as we get Riko where she needs to go. Right, Suguru? Suguru’s nodding.”
“Promise?”
“Pinky!”
He hangs up first, and Shoko wonders if she’ll ever get used to being the fabric they warp time and space on.
---
Summer hangs over them like a plastic bag, trapping in the heat and humidity.
“We’re like a family!” Gojo crows. He says it all the time. Right after a fight with Geto or standing in line waiting for ice cream like they are right now. “I’m the oldest.”
“Isn’t Shoko technically the oldest?” Geto asks like he always does. He pokes at the glass of the display, finger pressing at the mint chocolate chip.
This is an age-old conversation. It runs and reruns the same every time. Shoko smiles sleepily and shakes her head when the attendant asks for her order.
“But she’s the most helpless,” Gojo whines. “Oldest has to be the protector. I’m protecting our little family.”
“And I’m not?”
“I mean, if you want the truth, in terms of power-scaling, I’m more of a Naruto than Naruto even was—”
“Dial it back, nerd.” Geto shoots a shit-eating grin at Gojo, who returns it.
“I’m just saying, I was literally born this way. Can you say that?”
“All that means is you have a greater responsibility—”
“Ugh, this again? Power’s the only thing—”
Shoko steps out of the ice cream parlor, kicking back against the brick and plucking the cigarette from between her lips. The smoke curls and drifts to join the clouds. Another minute later, Gojo steps out with three scoops in a waffle cone. Geto follows close after, cardboard cup and plastic spoon in hand.
“Not fighting anymore?”
“You disappeared!”
Gojo’s ice cream drips over his fingers and Geto hands him a heap of napkins with a heavy sigh. Shoko smiles, lips curling around her cigarette.
But as always, they fight again in another week, leaving earthquakes and fires in their wake, and she’s left to inhale the smoke alone.
---
Where one goes, the other always accompanies.
They lay in shade and stand in heat together, backs of their hands always hovering inches from the other, elbows always digging into ribs, shoulders always being shoved and snickering to follow, words exchanged under cupped hands and raucous laughter after. Slick looks and inside jokes Shoko only sometimes has the honor of standing on the cusp of.
Always wandering campus, one with his hands in his pockets, the other with his hands behind his back. Always passing under her dorm window and not stopping to peek in. Always lost in a world only they understand, walking a path with no crossroads in sight.
They’re not the family Gojo constantly jokes at, not the brothers she’d hoped for. Certainly not the brothers they sometimes appear to be to anybody else looking through the glass.
The two of them are something more, but also not quite.
It makes her ache.
---
The first fight comes as no surprise, the tension between them finally boiling over two weeks in. From there, it happens over and over, always bigger than the last one, always more explosive. They always speak over her. Always shout. Always turn her into a vacancy.
What is a surprise is the way Shoko finally throws herself between them without a second thought.
“Stop it!” she snaps, slapping a palm to both their chests. “We’re supposed to be a team! You’re both being idiots!”
Gojo throws her off the same way he throws her opinions aside—Geto’s expression grows hard at his carelessness—knuckles popping as he grins with all his teeth. “Stay out of it, Shoko.”
Geto’s hand wraps around her wrist, warm, and Shoko looks to him for backup, but he’s returning Gojo’s mania with a fervor of his own. “Wait on the bench, Ieri.”
“Are you serious?”
“This has nothing to do with you.”
Shoko flinches at the sound of both their voices at once, breath catching in her throat. Stinging behind her eyes.
“Fine.”
She steps back. Lets it go.
An hour later, they join her on the bench, Geto on her left, Gojo on her right. She feels their contrite stares on her. Sees the blood on their knuckles. Smells the energy dripping off their skin.
“We’re sorry.” Geto says.
Shoko rises, tapping the ash off her cigarette, then dropping the stub anyway. She crushes it under her heel. “It’s fine.” Then she leaves.
At least now she knows exactly where she stands.
---
The sky is the color of her classmate’s eyes today.
“Hope he’s stronger than me,” he whines, hunched against a bollard with his hands in his pockets.
Shoko peers at him in surprise. “Why?”
He pouts. “‘Cause I’m bored. Think that’s him?” He jerks his head towards the stairs.
Her eyes meet the stranger’s. He breaks into a jog, smiling as he arrives at Shoko’s feet and shakes her hand. He’s huge. Nearly as tall as Gojo.
“Geto Suguru.”
Polite. Shoko returns his easy grin. “Ieri Shoko.”
Then he turns to Gojo, and they both falter.
From between them, Shoko sees the epiphany in both their eyes. The recognition—and the resignation. She feels the ground beneath her feet shift, sees every star in the universe align.
She sees it all and understands.
---
This ending has already written itself. Shoko will learn that the only thing she can hope for is to be enough for two stars falling into each other’s orbits, creating their own binary system. She will learn to be the vacuum in which they spin, as she waits with bated breath for the black hole or the neutron star, always knowing either only follows a collapse.
When it happens, she will be blinded by it. The feeling in her fingertips will vanish, the skin will melt from her bones. The space between her ears will ring, a one note choir of curses. But all she’ll be able to do is squint into the light and breathe in the heat, wishing it could have been her. Wishing for whatever it is that puts the light in Gojo’s eyes and prompts the curve of Geto’s smile. Wishing for the way they look at each other.
Wishing for another universe where she isn’t empty space or the line between two points, but the gravity that holds the stars together. An infinity that might be reached.
Right now, though, infinity is only the sky above their heads, bright and blue as they wait to come together as three.