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There is blood in his hands and Gojo isn’t slowing down.
There was usually never so much of it, this blood, thinks Shoko: and almost entirely never his own. She's already doing a quick scan of his entire body—so tightly wound up, jaw tight and mouth set in a harsh line—but there was nothing that clued her in on the ichor. Not a single open wound, so much a scar. Alarms are going off in her head, watching him stalk closer and closer in an almost possessed haze. His uniform was sullied and torn at the edges. His hands, smudged with dark blotches, lie dead at his side. Bloodied.
“Wait.” Shoko puts a hand out. “Tell me what happened first—”
"Shoko.” Gojo hisses lowly, eyes manic and voice pained. He tugs on his blindfold harshly and lets it fall to the floor. “Don’t.”
Something's wrong, Shoko thinks. Gojo could be rough, aggressive, maybe even a little violent sometimes: but never so.. hungry. She feels frozen in place, heeding his cold command in fear of reprisal. He’d never hurt her, she knows this; but he also never turned up at her apartment in the middle of the night so obviously still reeling in the adrenaline from a mission and wearing its soils. He at least always had the decency to clean up beforehand. But she got the hint: not today.
“Are you..” Shoko steps closer to him carefully. “Are you hurt anywhere?”
Gojo shakes his head. “No.”
Shoko stops just a few paces away and looks over him nonetheless. He lets her, he always lets her.
God, there really was so much blood. Too much of it even for him. Where is all this from? Gojo rarely ever let the spoils of battle touch him. A point of pride it was for most of them: Utahime’s gash a constant reminder of surviving her first special grade kill, Yaga’s chest scars a badge of armour. And Shoko: Shoko and the burn in her lungs, for breathing life in despite all forces that tested her not to. Gojo gets none of this, doesn’t want the spoil, the artificial scarring. He always had to be in control.
And so for all this—all this open bloodshed—she had to ask: “Gojo.”
But he was already closing in on her, dipping his head low. “Enough foreplay.”
He doesn’t wait for a reply, eager hands reaching for the seams of her yukata and tugging violently. Shoko can smell the sulfuric tang of blood in his clothes and tries not to think too much of who was lubricating the bloodlust tonight. He always got a little intense after any trying mission. And Shoko would know: having been at the receiving end for most of it. It was his weird version of a power trip, she thought, needing to offset the violence somehow. He’d always be a little high on the post-mission rush, but never so disoriented.
“If you would just tell me,” Shoko tries meeting his eye, still dilated and blown out too wide the cerulean was glowing under the moonlight. “Was it—was it that bad?”
Gojo doesn’t answer. He doesn’t so much as break eye contact, then, when his fingers grasp the button on his shirt and slowly start to tug it free.
Ah, Shoko thought. So you have killed a man again.
☽
Shoko gets it. This close to him when he got like this: she could practically feel the heat smouldering into his skin, like lava belching off the face of the earth. Only she was the only audience, and everyone knows what happened to Icarus when he flew too close to the sun.
☾
Gojo was rougher than usual tonight.
The bed dips under their weight, and Shoko waits for the trickle of excitement to filter in. The panic, that comes after.
Once Gojo had her on the bed, he didn’t waste a single breath on conversation. His kisses are hot and wet and quick; moving down from her jaw, to her throat and down her neck, until they reach the dip between the folds of her robe. Gojo cursed under his breath, breathing her in on top of it. The fabric of her yukata incensed him, she knew, lighting the fuse for his impatience and sparking a sudden shift in his pace.
Now his movements grew more hurried, more brusque. Desperate.
“Gojo,” Shoko tries again, pushing at his chest. “Gojo.”
"No.”
Shoko stills. There’s an odd rawness to his voice then, an undertone of almost pleading. It was so different from his usual mischievous nature, the playful lilt in his voice almost always present. That was all the confirmation she needed that he wasn't okay.
Because Shoko gets rough.
She knows he prefers it on the days he has a kill list too long to fill with all the love in his heart still. Softer, more patient and tender: on the days he feels he needs to be reminded it’s not a sin to be kind.
Only there’s nothing gentle now in the way he spreads apart her yukata or gropes her breasts. Nor is she misled by the kisses that trail down the centreline of her torso all the way to the tips of her fingers. Shoko is struggling to keep up like she usually did, hands trying to find purchase on his shoulders that never stilled.
In an attempt to escape the growing sensation in her gut that something was wrong, Shoko squirms, wriggling away from his hot breath beating against her skin. Everything was suddenly moving too fast.
“Wait,” Shoko gasps, breathless. “Hold on. I need a minute.”
Gojo stops completely, hands gripping the flesh on her hips hard. His fingers were indenting into her skin, and Shoko couldn’t control the pained whimper she let out. His head immediately snaps up.
“I—” Gojo searches her eyes. “Did I—?”
“No, it’s fine,” Shoko says hurriedly, and it’s not, not really: but it seemed like he wasn’t in a place to be denied. He was suffocating her, and she usually let him, but something about this didn’t seem okay. He was never the type to bruise. But she’s never had to tell him no. “I'm — I'm just trying to catch my breath.”
Only then did Gojo marginally loosen his grip.
“Sorry,” Gojo whispers, recognizing for the first time he was hurting her. He lowers his head again and ghosts kisses all over her stomach, fingers kneading lazy patterns around her hips with suddenly more grace. He’s humming impassively as he does, but she can’t shake the feeling he was only doing it to distract himself from something. His thoughts, otherwise, his grief.
Something about the tenderness of it all panics her. Gojo was never a gentle lover.
Only her phone starts ringing then.
Shoko only barely manages to make out the caller ID, before Gojo suddenly reaches out to fling it off to the side. She hears her phone drop to the floor in a violent clang.
December 24, 2017. 10:30PM. Masamichi Yaga calling.
Shoko looks up at him, brows furrowed. “What—”
And that’s when Gojo’s mouth crashes down on hers.
☽
It’s not a love thing, what they’re doing: it is shared grief and no one left to split it with. It is Shoko being paged on the eve of Christmas and told to play God in the lives of so much people, but thinks Shoko: responsibility she never asked for. It is Gojo, for the first and last time, seeing things spiral out of control in a way no one prepared him for. It’s submitting yourself to someone she knew needed to control everything again, if only to feel something. And Shoko: bleeding heart, lets him.
She always lets him.
So it’s not a love thing.
But maybe:
☾
“Why don’t you ever let me kiss you?” Gojo asks.
It’s the 24th of December somewhere in Roppongi, years after, and Gojo is somewhere between her legs. He purposely booked them a hotel far from the school because Ijichi was looking at them weirdly and Gojo only barely managed to control himself from leaving a love bite all over her neck all of summer. Nanami offered his jacket one day and Gojo just about lost it.
Shoko looks down at him. “Because you killed my best friend and fucked me after.”