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Shoko could feel them on either side of her. She always woke up first, since both idiots slept like the dead. Maybe because they knew even in sleep nothing could touch them. Shoko did not have such luxuries. She woke easily; at the slightest rustle, at a loud bird call, at a splatter of footsteps in the hallway. She didn't know what got her this time. It could have been all of the above, but by the time she realized she was awake at all, the noise had disappeared. The extra limbs she seemed to have grown during her nap, however, did not.
She was used to this by now. They always forced her in the middle and she grumbled and complained while they settled, but in actuality Shoko didn't mind. She didn't mind the warm and comfortable weight of Gojo's arm around her middle, legs carelessly splayed out across the bed. His other arm was above her, fingers buried somewhere in Getou's hair. Getou's arm, plush and soft when the muscles weren't in use, was under her head. A pillow because Satoru always hogged the extra ones. She could never blame him. He never talked about growing up, but Shoko had a feeling it was even more lonely than her upbringing, which was marked by a single mother who preferred to drink than remember she had a child. She did occasionally. Remember, that is. But usually only around holidays where they had to go to relatives' houses and she could beg for money, using Shoko as an excuse. She hadn't spoken to her mother since coming to Tokyo.
But even that had bred some social behaviors. She had tucked her mother in after long nights. She had cleaned sludge and slime from toilets and sinks after her mother's binges. She washed her mother's clothes and kept her own house tidy. Unlike Satoru, Shoko didn't have maids or wealth. She learned empathy and sacrifice. Gojo never had to learn that. She thought he was learning now, making progress the more time he spent around her and Suguru. Like in the way he would offer her some of his food where he never did before, or in the way he would automatically press the button for black coffee before his own sugary concoction at the vending machine, knowing it was her favorite.
Though Shoko couldn't take most of the credit. In actuality, it was probably more because of Suguru, whose strict morals were starting to rub off on Satoru. (She knew they were more than friends. But she didn't know. So she kept her mouth shut.) Whether it was actually rubbing off or beaten into his thick skull had yet to be seen. Either way, it seemed to be doing wonders on Satoru's ability to be human. It helped that Suguru was raised by people without any jujutsu in them. Not wealthy, not poor. Probably the most normal childhood of the three of them. He still spoke to his parents once a week, and she heard his soft tones through the walls, the loud laughs he gave when talking to them. It was mostly lies, she knew, but it was sweet nonetheless.
Gojo's arm tightened around her middle. Shoko smiled, curling up into his warmth. Getou moved closer to her back, draping his other arm just over her chest, fingers curling over her shoulder. Gojo's hand snaked over her waist, rucking up her shirt to expose the small of her back. He placed the palm of his hand there, his own fingers splayed over the skin. This happened to all of them at some point or another. Satoru had very little physical contact when he was a child. Now, he craved it. He always had an arm slung around Suguru, a hand placed somewhere on Shoko's body, skin fused to theirs in ways that Shoko knew meant he loved them. She was never sure if Gojo could really feel love–not in the way that she did. If he had enough feeling for it at all But there had been times where he disproved her own hypothesis. If he had never felt it before, he was learning to, and trusting her enough to be this close was something like an act of it.
Not that she could ever love him in that way. She's not sure he could either. His love slept on the other side of her, inseparable since day one. She had been the last to arrive in Tokyo. They picked her up at the train station, two looming men in the sea of business suits. Girls swooned them on every corner, down every street, sending jealous stares or even mean snarls her way for something she wanted no part in. Shoko had never been scared of them. Not really. But she had been nervous. It had dissipated when Gojo said something stupid and Getou whacked him for it. It left her bones completely when they went out to dinner, an Indian place that opened somewhere close to campus, and she confessed mango lassis were some of her favorite things, but they weren't common where she lived. It felt stupid that she was ever nervous of them when the two came back from a mission and plopped down one in front of her, saying they saw a place boasting about it.
Suguru's arm stretched out, his hand flopping somewhere onto Gojo. He brought his head closer to hers, cheek resting on the top of her scalp. She could feel the soft exhale of his breaths across her hair. His hair tickled her neck. Sometimes she wondered if she should grow her hair out like that. Something to be more feminine that she was, but Shoko was not in the business of performing for others. She barely even cared about her studies. Getou was top of the class. With three people, two who were too lazy to do the homework in the first place, it wasn't a hard thing to achieve. Still, there were days where he acted like an old schoolmarm and forced them all to study.
She remembers the day that Satoru helped her with her math homework. Getou was across the table, working diligently on some English translations, a cute furrow in between his brows. Shoko sat alone, biting the end of her pen because she stubbornly refused to do any of it in pencil. A bit of her mother coming through, she supposed. Other parts of her mother came through, too. Like how she staved off the need to drink with cigarettes Suguru often picked up for her. Or how she knew that it was futile, and one day Gojo would come home with two six packs and get tipsy after half of one, and nearly under the table after two, while Shoko sat nursing her fifth and enjoyed the slight buzz under her skin.
She crossed out an error and chewed on the pen cap. "Gross habit," Satoru said, coming to sit behind her. Not next to her, but behind, shoving his too-gangly body that hadn't grown into itself yet on the same bench, pushing her near the edge of the seat as she felt him get comfortable. He plastered his front to her back, his arms stretching out father than hers, his chin sitting comfortably on her head. Shoko dropped the pen cap.
"Watch it!" she yelled, but the heat beneath it couldn't even melt ice. She had grown used to such sitting positions. She reached up and grabbed Gojo's glasses, putting them on her own face with ease. They looked too big on her small nose, but it alleviated the sun for just a few moments. She thought maybe looking at the problem through the famous sunglasses would give her some of Gojo's affinity for numbers. No such luck. She still had no idea where she went wrong.
Suguru looked up at them, snorted, and then went back to his work. He had also become used to their antics. Even though they were the same age, he often acted like the oldest. The most responsible. That same night with the six packs, Suguru would be drinking his second bottle of water, and would eventually drag them all into bed, carefully placing blankets over them and making sure both Shoko and Gojo slept on their stomachs.
Satoru pointed to a part of her problem and underlined it with his finger. "You're supposed to do multiplication here, not division." She could feel his chin shift on her head. He was careful not to put too much weight on it. Even though he was constantly bumbling around, he was always so desperately careful, like one wrong move would tear them down the middle. Would make him untouchable in the ways that he feared.
Shoko reluctantly gave him the pen. "Show me, idiot," she huffed, shoving the glasses back up her nose.
"So you can cheat off me again?"
"What else?"
Gojo laughed and started scribbling anyway. This was child's play for him. His entire technique was made up of nothing short of quantum physics. He could do high school math in his sleep, and as he scratched languidly over the paper, Shoko figured that this was something akin to laying by a pool or reading at a picnic. Leisurely.
She was startled back to reality when Suguru let out a soft snore, near directly in her ear. Shoko smiled, moving her hand down to place over his own, the one on her shoulder. His thumb swiped over her joint and she leaned into it. They were all still in their uniforms. She got it the same day Satoru and Suguru got their new ones.
When she met them at the office to retrieve their new clothes, she raised her eyebrows at them. "Fire curse on our last mission," Getou said, shrugging his shoulders. They were still new to each other then. "Maybe next time, with you, it won't be so bad." He was trying to make her feel better, but he must not have known her technique yet.
Gojo did. She would find out he knew as soon as he laid eyes on her. Maybe even before. But he chose not to say anything. It wasn't long until Getou knew too. The higher ups never sent Shoko out on missions. She trained with them of course, even if what she could do couldn't touch their physique, but she was too precious, they told her. Reverse curse technique was rare. Invaluable. She fancied herself indestructible. Especially on days when Gojo would come crawling into her dorm, glasses shoved into his pocket and eyes shut tightly, and beg for some relief from his terrible migraines. On days when Nanami would pout when he cracked a knuckle from punching too hard before learning how to protect himself. On days when Getou would present her with a new carton and they would smoke on the windowsill together while she touched up some cuts and bruises. She thought herself someone important.
It wasn't until she was called to the morgue did she swallow those ideas. No one else on campus knew her technique, but that didn't stop her from being taught by the mortician already at the school. Satoru and Suguru knew to avoid her Friday afternoons after her lessons. After crawling out of the basements just for the moon to greet her. They saw dead bodies often. That was the curse of life at Jujutsu Tech. They did not open them up to examine the cursed energy left in their organs, stretched over their skin, ghosts in their blood. They did not know the scent of flesh burning intimately or why Shoko nearly retched the next time Suguru made pork belly. They did not know the Y cut or how to suture it back together. The force you needed to put behind a bone cutter to crack open the ribs. That was Shoko's speciality. The day she pulled back the sheet and stared down at Yuu Haibara's face was the day she knew of her own insignificance.
She wasn't anyone. She faced the aftermath. She faced the things left behind. She never had to deal with the monsters up close. Not like her classmates, her friends, her cohorts. Gojo and Getou often came back bruised and battered and waiting like eager puppies for the help Shoko so readily gave. The old shits in charge of their placement considered her precious cargo. They would never risk her technique just to rid the world of a few curses. But they sent children in their stead. It didn't matter if Gojo and Getou were special grades already. They were kids. Haibara was a child. And Nanami, who sobbed into her shoulder the next time she went to heal him, was a teenager so lost in his grief he couldn't come back from it. When he left, despite the grumblings of the higher ups, Shoko was happy for him. She resigned herself to their shadows–to a life of quiet insignificance. Compared to them, she thought this was a good life.
Shoko groaned and stretched, her knee knocking into Gojo's calf. The other opened his eye lazily, the blue just as piercing the thousandth time as it was the first. "Five more minutes," he yawned, curling Shoko closer to him.
"I'll cook dinner if you let me up to pee," she said, kneeing him more intently.
"Yeah, but you're a vegetarian now. No fun." His tone was all mocking and playfulness. Not even Gojo knew why Shoko had become a vegetarian in the past couple months. She's not sure she wanted him to.
"Satoru, let Ieiri go. I like her cooking."
"But Suguruuuu," Gojo whined, not letting up in the slightest, "I really wanted teriyaki chicken tonight."
"I'll make teriyaki tofu," Shoko said, though at this point it was mostly into Gojo's chest.
The air simmered, a warning that Suguru was getting annoyed. "Satoru." Just that one word, filled to the brim with heat and sleepy exasperation, made Gojo let go. Shoko patted Getou's shoulder in a silent thank you and climbed over him to get to the bathroom. They were in his room, which was always the cleanest. And if Shoko heard quiet whispers between them as she shut the door, the soft sound of lips on lips, she didn't say anything about it.
***
In the coming years, things would change between them. She would walk into Gojo's room unannounced and find Getou there with him, naked and napping under the sheets. She would laugh, loudly, and walk quickly out of the room before the pillow Gojo hurled at her could reach her head. She would endure the awkward conversation later when they begged her to keep it a secret so the higher ups wouldn't know, and she would pretend to blackmail them for it, even if they learned long ago to press the button for her coffee first at the vending machines.
She would train harshly with Haibara and Nanami, and then Getou and Gojo, and would come out the loser every time. Satoru barely knew the meaning of holding back, and she found herself liking training with him the most. He wouldn't pretend she was strong. He wouldn't pretend she was a survivor. He knew exactly what she was: someone to protect, and not someone who could do it themselves. And he would protect her. Everyone would.
She would face the death of Haibara Yuu and understand what it meant to be useless. She would see the remnants of Satoru's death, spread out on the tile of Jujutsu Tech's grounds, and pretend she didn't vomit. She would see the change after that. The way Satoru grew weary of touch. How he never pat her too hard or sat behind her anymore. How he slept closest to the wall now. How he would pretend, ever pretend, that nothing had changed even when she slapped him on the shoulder and found she couldn't touch him at all. She thought of his hindbrain. Did it hurt? Its constant death and regeneration? Did it ever stop, the pain? How could Shoko have ever thought herself important?
Eventually, she would face the news of Suguru, and would know that the signs were inevitable. Yaga had told her first, knew she would have a calmer reaction. She thought of the picture of his parents in his dorm. The one he meticulously dusted every week. She thought of the laughs he used to give them, and how long had it been since they spoke? She couldn't remember right then. She couldn't remember anything except his tired expression. But they didn't use that on the memo they sent out to sorcerers around Japan. They used an official photo where was happy and Satoru had been teasing him behind the camera while Shoko was eating a quick sandwich before her turn. They used a photo where Suguru was still just a boy and not a special grade curse user.
She thought of that photo when he crawled into her apartment several months after she had graduated and in her first week of medical school. Satoru had helped her cheat to get in, as he always did. She didn't think of how he sat across from her while she worked on practicing for her exams. She didn't think of the empty air between them. She didn't think of how he had replaced his glasses with a blindfold, and she felt Infinity stopping her from toying with it.
"You're bleeding on my carpet," she said, the light from the Tokyo sky outlining his face. Her phone was in the other room.
"Nice to see you too, Shoko."
"Last names again, Getou?" she asked, already getting up to help him in, to shoulder his weight as he crumbled on her. She didn't know where he was coming from or what sort of fight could wound him so badly. She also didn't ask. The less she knew, the less she had to turn in. And she knew that was wrong. Getou was hurting innocent people–the same people he had once sworn to protect. But she thought of those nights smoking in the windowsill, the afternoons spent in comfortable silence while he braided her hair, the mornings he spent cooking breakfast. All of it built up when she saw the gash, deep and angry, across his forehead.
She dumped him in the chair next to her bed. "Wait here. I need to get my supplies." She could heal the cut but the blood wouldn't disappear. It was true her medical kit was in the other room. Coincidentally the same room as her phone. She grabbed it when she grabbed her kit, sending a quick text to Gojo. She figured it gave her about five minutes.
When she came back, he was slouching a bit more. It didn't take long to treat him, just a minute or two, and then she swiped some solution and gauze over the blood, mopping up what she could. "I'll send you money for the carpet," he said, and he even smiled at her. She wanted to stop herself from tilting her lips up. She couldn't.
"Shut up," she grumbled, because she couldn't think of anything else to say. How could she? This was Suguru but it wasn't Suguru, and when he would come here three more times before the Night Parade, she could feel a little bit of Suguru slip out every time, and it made her want to bite off her tongue and swallow it.
"Thank you, Ieiri," he said, and then he was gone, and Gojo was there, and they spent the night watching movies in silence. They didn't have to say it between them. They knew. And when Gojo Satoru killed Getou Suguru, they didn't have to say anything between them. They knew.
***
Shoko dreamed of all these moments. The feel of Suguru's hair tickling her arm. The warmth of Satoru's hand on her back. The memories of everyone together when the biggest problem was school yard tumbles and fighting easy curses. When she heard that Satoru Gojo had been sealed, Yaga told her how the prison realm worked, and she could not blame him. She would have failed, too.
When news drifted that Getou Suguru's body had been inhabited by a curse itself, she felt her knees go weak, but instead smoked a quick cigarette and pretended she could still hear the sound of another exhale across from hers, and that the cold glass of the window pressed against her shoulder.
When some underclassmen had run Nobara Kugisaki to her and told her Nanami Kento was dead, she pretended that the same tears he shed for Haibara did not clog her throat. She instead healed the girl in front of her best she could and moved on to Inumaki Toge and his missing arm.
When she entered her third day on no sleep and less food, her body seconds or hours from giving out because there was so much left to heal and she was the only one who could do it, Shoko Ieiri knew that significance was a curse, and one she wished she could bear.