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“Sometimes,” Satoru says with alcohol breath, legs intertwined with Shoko’s on a Christmas Eve. “I feel like I’m eating the world raw.”
He’s wrong, though. Shoko knows him well enough to know that the world is the one eating Satoru raw, not the other way around.
“Are you now?” she asks. Satoru doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t respond.
She quit smoking four years ago. They don’t know it yet, but Getou Suguru will be dead in six. Gojo Satoru, seven.
///
“After my fight with Sukuna,” Satoru tells her, white hair stained with blood and mud from whatever horrors he was trapped with in the Prison Realm, “I don’t really care what happens with my body.”
“Body,” Shoko echoes, pulling the cigarette away from her lips and wetting them with her tongue. She watches Satoru stretch, the same way he always did when he’s a little nervous, arms over his head and bending to the side. “What, not planning to get out alive?”
They’re silent for a while. Just Satoru and Shoko and the forever ghost of Suguru between the two of them, all three gathered in a simultaneously morgue and clinic the way they hadn’t been after Suguru’s death. She sent Ijichi out a while ago. He may be a survivor too, but no one survives like the graduating class of 2007 does.
Tilting his head to the side, Satoru leans forward with his hands braced on the sides of the cot. “Not particularly. You think I will?”
“Hmph.” She gives him another once-over, trailing from the tips of his white hair to the black flats of his shoes, and considers.
It’s not like he’s in top shape. The Prison Realm ate up his soul and lapped at it like a wound, and now even after it spit him out, he’s still not quite the same. No one expects him to be — that’s a lie. Shoko doesn’t expect him to be. And he’s not.
Satoru comes back to her changed. His eyes wilder, his expression pulled taut like a puppet on its last strings.
Still. Satoru has always come back from everything alive. Half-dead maybe, but alive.
“You’re the strongest, aren’t you?” she asks, in lieu of a response.
A grating laugh scrapes its way out of Satoru’s ragged throat, forcing itself out its mouth with its hands pulling at his lips. It’s not a happy one. “I guess I am.”
She feels as if she’s said something wrong. No apologies, though.
They’ve never done that and they’re not going to start doing it now. Being raised the spoiled prodigy he was, Satoru never once in his life found it necessary to do something as human as apologizing . Shoko, of course being the stubborn teen and woman she was, refused to apologize until he did, too.
But he never did. So, she never did either.
“Whatever you want me to do with your rotting corpse,” Shoko says, flicking her cigarette above the trashcan and letting it fall. “I’ll do it. I mean, I don’t particularly trust those student of yours to make rational decisions about it.”
Satoru raises an eyebrow. “Is that targeted?”
The ghost of Suguru lingers in between the two of them, corporeal as he always is. If he was really here, he’d be laughing. Cremation, or lack thereof, is another one of teenage Satoru’s many... rational decisions.
A smile pulls at the corner of her lips. “Well, that’s up to interpretation.”
“You’re so mean to me, Shokooo,” he whines, leaning further forward with his arms outstretched. Stepping into it, Shoko lets him wrap his arms around her shoulders.
It can be interpreted as playful, this faux-embrace, but the way Satoru’s gripping her like he’s afraid to let go, like he’s been alone for months, tells her otherwise.
Like her, Satoru is not one to speak his mind. He says things he doesn’t mean, mean without meaning, but he’s quiet when he needs to be heard the most and for some reason this feels like one of those quiet moments.
So, she quiets, and listens. This, at least, is something she can do. Shoko has never been a woman of many words. Even less so when Satoru, the man of words, also falls silent.
She exhales sharply when he nuzzles into the crook of her neck, mouthing at the side of her neck with cold lips as if attempting to suck the warmth out of her. It’s unsuccessful. She’s never run warm. It must be the product of all the hanging around corpses — it bleeds her dry until she’s a corpse on her feet herself.
At a quiet loss of what to do, she wraps her arms around him too.
“Sho’,” he whispers against her skin, vulnerable like he rarely is. It chills her to the core, despite the warmth of his breath.
“Yeah?” she prompts, when he doesn’t speak for a beat.
“When— If I die, promise to do anything to win, alright?”
When. Shoko hesitates, draws him closer. “You’re going to have to be more specific, Satoru.”
“If it comes down to it, do whatever freaky operation you have to do to transfer Six-Eyes.”
“Six-Eyes isn’t a transferrable technique,” she tells him, even though she has a feeling that he definitely already knows that. “It’s part of your body, Satoru.”
His head is still burrowed in the slope of her neck to her shoulders, muffled. She wonders if she’s just imagining the wet quality of his voice.
“I know,” he says. It comes down like a death sentence. Hers or Satoru’s, she can’t tell. Maybe both. “I’m still figuring it out, but I have an idea.”
She considers, a heavy swooping weight dropping in her stomach. This, in of itself, is a death sentence for Satoru. Because cocky, self-assured Gojo Satoru does not come up with elaborate back-up plans, especially ones taking place after his death, before heading into battle.
But then again. When has he truly fought a battle like this in past years? Against Suguru, they both knew rationally that Suguru loved Satoru far too much to do anything to that extent. Backup plans were made to try to delay Suguru’s execution post-battle, not to save Satoru’s skin. That is, at least, until Satoru realized that Suguru wasn’t planning to survive the night.
In Shibuya, Satoru hadn’t realized the extent of what he was facing. Maybe that in of itself was a cocky mistake, because look what that led to?
Them, the three of them: Shoko, Satoru, and Suguru’s phantom, standing here alone making post-death plans disguised as a twisted plan B, when all of them know that Gojo Satoru only ever made Plan As.
“Of course I will, Satoru,” is what she ends up saying. The last time she had gone along with Gojo’s words, they ended up here. Now, though, it feels different.
“I’ll sew your Six-Eyes into whatever unfortunate victim you choose,” she adds with a light, joking tone, but it does nothing to alleviate the growing pressure in her chest. It feels a little like heartbreak, although she’s certain that’s not it.
Even at times like this she’s lying to herself.
She must have said the wrong thing again, because although Satoru laughs along, he flinches and drags himself suddenly out of the embrace. His eyes wander away from hers, in a way she’s long deciphered as intentional in the years that she’s known him.
At the rejection, she too drops her gaze and doesn’t look at him.
“Yeah,” Satoru says, echoing her sentiment. “I know I can depend on you, Shoko.”
She rolls her eyes even though her hands are shaking and lights another cigarette.
“Don’t die, idiot, and I won’t have to bother getting my hands dirty.”
Satoru frowns playfully and punches her lightly. “Nothing about me is dirty. I’m the Strongest , you know. My blood would, like, hallow and consecrate your hands.”
Chewing on the end of her cigarette, she exhales her next words with a lungful of smoke. They’re tinged with bitterness even though they should just be fondly exasperated.
“Don’t be stupid,” she tells him. “You’re not Jesus or some shit. You’re human.”
They’ll all too well aware of the fact. That’s the reason they’re here making these plans in the first place. Why there’s a death sentence hanging over their heads like a shroud, the way Suguru’s piercing dead eyes are looking right at her while Satoru artfully refuses to.
“I’m much more than that,” Satoru boasts, laughing, but it falls flat.
She rolls her eyes, and pretends that she doesn’t so, so badly wish that it were true. That Satoru really was the type of superhuman the world devouring him whole expects him to be.
“Keep dreaming,” she drawls.
Please, keep dreaming. Maybe then, that dream would blend into reality until it’s true.
///
“You don’t like it?” Yuuta asks after rambling slightly about his plan, halting for a second in his step along the dim lit corridor.
His sensei doesn’t stop, though. “Nah, it’s fine. I don’t intend to lose.” He hesitates for a beat, before smiling. “Besides, who cares what happens to one’s corpse?”
There are a few reasons why one would care Yuuta can list off the top of his head, but he doesn’t. His sensei would probably just laugh at him if he did. Instead, he starts moving again and falls in pace right behind him.
“I’m kinda annoyed that Shoko wasn't against it when I joked about it, though,” Gojo-sensei says after a few more steps, scratching at the back of his neck and stretching slightly.
Yuuta glances at him through his periphery, feeling like he might be intruding on something he shouldn’t be hearing. The candles of the higherups’ hallway cast long shadows on his sensei’s face, and it digs into the corners of his usual self-assured smile until it looks more like a scowl.
Gojo-sensei mumbles to himself in a tone so low Yuuta can’t make out his words, and for a split-second there’s something conflicting in his expression. It’s gone as soon as it comes, though. So fast it might’ve just been a trick of the light.
They halt at the door leading to that familiar suffocating candle-lit chamber.
Gojo-sensei's good-natured demeanor dissipates as if it’s never been there at all, sucked dry by whatever laid behind that door.
“Stay behind,” he instructs Yuuta as he opens the door.
The shadows in the room swallow his sensei whole, a mouth opening and stomach rumbling, and Yuuta, despite his instincts, stays behind as Gojo Satoru is devoured.
///
This Okkotsu Yuuta kid is foolish just as his sensei is.
It was never supposed to come down to this, but now Shoko is fastening a seventeen-year-old boy’s limbs to the side of the makeshift cot, so he doesn’t roll off mid-procedure and damage some essential part of his brain that he absolutely needs to withstand the weight of the world that is Six-Eyes.
“This’ll hurt,” she warns, pulling a medical mask over her mouth and nose.
Okkotsu grunts in lieu of an answer. Of course he knows that. Shoko’s just worried Arata — one of Utahime’s RCT students — is going to do something risky like pass out at the screaming she’s about to draw out of the second strongest sorcerer’s mouth.
She’s kidding. There won’t be any screaming involved — if what Yuuta said about those five minutes were right, then, well, the boy would undergo enough screaming in his last five minutes of life.
When Yuuta’s eyes close, pulled under, Shoko wields a scalpel like an executioner and descends upon the most elevated part of Yuuta’s forehead. As she works, she uses a steady, trained weight to cut through skin and meat and bone.
Kenjaku must’ve felt like this, cutting open Shoko’s best friend and biggest regret of her entire life.
Not for long, though. Shoko thinks that by the time all this is over, her actions now, steady hands guided by a shaking soul, will become that regret. The lingering in her heart, the drop of her stomach.
No use thinking about that, though. She has work to do.
Yuuta’s soul is strong. That, or his ability. It speaks volumes of his loyalty and his heart, and under other circumstances maybe Shoko would’ve applauded it.
But now? Not so much.
Shoko has been killer, healer, and morgue technician. She is not looking forward to adding necromancer to that list despite the inevitability of it.
A brain is nothing she hasn’t seen before. Stitching that brain into that of her best friend’s emptied-out head? That’s something new, for sure. They don’t teach you that in med school.
Her hands don’t shake as she peels back Yuuta’s skull to reveal the pink-gray of his brain matter, ignoring the faint gasp that punches itself out of Arata’s mouth. She can’t afford her hands to shake. So they don’t.
Shoko is well-trained in self-control. More than most sorcerers, she can say confidently. Her body does what she wills it to, whether it be schooling her expression into one of nonchalant acceptance when her best friend leveled a death sentence against himself, or it be her nimble fingers carrying on the plan laid out in the wake of that said best friend’s death.
“Arata,” she instructs carefully. The blonde boy perks up immediately, although his face is drawn white with shock. “Clean up the mess on Okkotsu’s face as I take care of this.”
Her fingers twist and with a clean, sickly slice of the scalpel, dislodges Okkotsu’s brain from the cavity it had rested in for the last seventeen years.
Sorry , she wants to say but cannot. Arata already looks like he’s about to hurl, and anyways she doubts that Yuuta would appreciate hearing those words spill out of her mouth.
She shifts quicky to the second body laying opened on the second table, one that she is intimately familiar with. The torso bound tightly with its once severed legs, ones Shoko had nearly shed tears over trying to put back together, but by the grace of whatever god was still left out there, had eventually been put back together.
Satoru’s open brain welcomes Yuuta’s brain like it’s family. In a way, she guesses that’s not too far off.
It devours the new existence like it was born to be its vessel, a battle-worn tool all too happily welcoming the hand of a new user.
The comparison makes her ill. Gojo Satoru was her best friend. Not some tool.
But then again, he is. That’s the whole point of this, isn’t it? Hadn’t Shoko agreed to this, all those days ago? Isn’t she the final perpetuator, the last word? The executioner with her hand on her axe, the necromancer of someone too worn to ever really want to come back but too tired to argue otherwise.
Consent, she’s started to discover, is not really consent when it’s levied on one as a moral duty. And who else knows the burden of duty, other than Gojo Satoru?
It plagued him for years and now here it is devouring him whole. Even in death, Satoru cannot be laid to rest.
When her fingers go to sew together the split pieces of Satoru’s skull, they are steady once more.
She likes to think that her sutures are cleaner than Kenjaku’s. There’s love in it that Kenjaku’s must not have had, a careful and learned patience. That is her apology in a situation where words will not suffice.
This doesn’t suffice, either. But it’ll have to do.
Goodbye, Satoru . She wants to say. She can’t, so she presses her forehead to the sutures sewn by her own hands and closes her eyes.
Inhales. Exhales. A goodbye is written in that, somewhere.
When she opens her eyes and pulls back, Satoru’s eyes are open.
They’re not Satoru’s, though. She can tell. Okkotsu Yuuta’s eyes are something bigger, younger, but carrying that same unsettling weight that her best friend always had.
“Ieiri-san,” he starts, something shattered to pieces in his expression, but she schools her expression into something of a smile and waves him off. Self-control is something she excels at. And, after all, she is nearly ten years older than he is.
Goodbye, Satoru. That’s what she wants to say. But this isn’t Satoru, and now’s not the time for goodbyes.
“Good luck Yuuta-kun,” she says, instead, and turns away before she can see the boy’s expression of youthful grief distort Satoru’s face into something she has not seen there in years.
Ieiri Shoko. Healer. Killer. Morgue Technician. Necromancer.
It doesn’t have a ring to it. Charming things that stick around come in threes — Healer, killer, morgue technician. Satoru, Suguru, Shoko. Dead, dead, dying.
Her fingers are beginning to shake, again.
She needs a cigarette.
///
“What’s it like kissing Suguru? I mean, don’t the curses he consumes leave some type of aftertaste?”
Shoko watches in fascination as Satoru licks up the red deathly-sweet looking popsicle until it stains his lips red, swinging her feet off the edge of the school roof.
He pauses for a second, as if in thought, then grins infuriatingly.
“Jealous, Sho’?”
She scoffs. Typical. “As if, idiot.”
“I don’t think it bothers me,” Satoru says after another second, surprising her by actually answering her question seriously. “It’s not his fault he has to consume those awful things, you know. That’s the nature of it.”
He pauses, again, before continuing.
“I think it’s just about not letting it eat him, you know? Like, his technique. You shouldn’t let it swallow up your perception of him, right? Because despite all that he’s still just Suguru.”
When he finishes his spiel, he looks pleased with himself, and nods his head.
“You have so much to say when it comes to Suguru,” Shoko comments, throwing her empty can of cola off the roof and watching it bounce on the sidewalk.
Satoru shrugs, still grinning. “’Course I do. Have you seen him?”
Shoko makes a gagging noise, and sneaks another glance at her best friend. He’s overdramatic in the most annoying but also endearing of ways.
She thinks she gets what he means, though. Suguru is still Suguru, despite his technique. Satoru is still Satoru, despite being the strongest and all that bullshit. And Shoko... well, Shoko is Shoko. She’s always been, always will be.
“We all get eaten someway or another,” Shoko reflects after a few beats of silence. “It’s just about seeing past that.”
Satoru laughs. “I guess you can say it like that. Would you still love me if I was gnawed in half?”
“Tch.” They both know the answer. “I’d love you even if a cursed spirit gobbled you up and spit you out unrecognizable.”
“Awww,” Satoru fawns, overdramatic as usual, and drapes himself over Shoko.
At this point he still hasn’t developed perpetual infinity, yet. He hasn’t had the need to, yet. This was before any of that bad shit ever happened, before talks of all-consuming expectation and gnawing techniques ever seeped its way into reality.
“You’re an idiot,” she informs him, but doesn’t push him away.
They don’t know it yet, but Suguru’s technique has already started consuming him inside out. Satoru’s innocence is already being snapped up by the unwanted meddling of the higher-ups.
And Shoko, well. She’s been rotting for a long time. Lungs, smoke. Liver, beer.
There’s barely enough of her to eat. No one would want to, anyway.
She’ll quit smoking in two years. Pick it up again in twelve.
In that time, she’ll have had buried both of her best friend’s bodies. Watch empty husks of them be lowered into ground. Consumed a final time by the dirt.
Healer. Killer. Morgue Technician.
Necromancer.
Ieiri Shoko.