Chapter Text
ORESTES: This was always going to happen. She's been dead since the beginning.
— aeschylus, the oresteia
Shoko feels an itch beneath her skin.
She hasn’t spoken to a single soul in three days. Her mouth is dry, her clothes are soiled, her soul is all but plundered. There are maggots in the walls and they've begun speaking to her, she thinks, hissing and whispering like the voices inside her head. The muscles around her body were slowly atrophying from the lack of use, her voice jagged from how often she was screaming herself raw.
She wasn’t built to be unproductive like this: a healer’s body was constantly moving, shifting, evolving. It was never meant to be still.
The walls of her room are thin, and she hears footsteps loitering about every hour until well into midnight. There are people stationed outside the door and she can hear them talking sometimes: Which one is this again? one of them asks. The medic, the healer, the friend. Some doctor she was, she thinks, staring blindly into rotten nails she'd bit through enough to draw blood and the papery skin around it fraying around the edges. Her fingers were itching to feel the sharp edge of a scalpel, feel around for the cool metal and ground herself in its familiarity when the world doused her underwater like this.
Is it a punishment somehow, she thinks bitterly, For so often playing God?
Her captors aren’t unkind, but they’re not exactly welcoming either.
Twice a day, the small opening to her dingy cell opens to someone dropping off a plate of day old bread and cold tea. She didn’t touch any of them, doesn't even think to. She gets a beating every time she refuses, someone on the other end able to physically bruise and edge her towards an inch of her life without getting an inch near her.
But sometimes they go in and do it themselves.
That skin to skin contact is the only corporeal interaction she felt these days. In a way it was grounding, to be relentlessly pounded into herself, a reminder she still existed in the same plane and had a body that while brittle was still able to bleed. To feel. To bruise. To remember. A part of her face was now so badly swollen she couldn't even swallow her spit properly, her jaw numb to the touch along with the rest of her body. She doesn’t know which method of torture she prefers, only that she’s grown to expect it. These are powerful people, she thinks, who have her life in the palm of their hands.
But Shoko didn’t care. She was being a problem?
Good then, she thought, Let her be everyone’s problem.
She doesn't even get a window. She has no way of telling what time of day it was, how much time had passed, or whether it was even passing at all. All she knew from the way the cement bit into her skin at night when she curled up into a ball at the corner of the room where the gravel seemed warmest, was that winter was coming. And soon.
But with the way things were going and how the chill seemed so deeply etched into the marrow of her bones, now; that she might not even make it until then.
"Oi."
A voice, gravelly, came from the other side of the door. She hasn't spoken to a single soul in over three days, and she was beginning to wonder why.
"You still alive over there?"
Another one, a little hesitant and pitched higher, like the contours of its mouth wasn't used to sounding assertive.
"Do you yield now?"
Shoko flinched reflexively at the memory, the cuts on her skin from the previous night still burning through every brush of fabric on her clothes. She spat at the food they gave her. They dragged her by the hair around the room for half an hour, all the while trying to force food down her throat and laughing at her needless pleas to stop.
"Fuck off," Shoko manages to say, raspy.
They douse the entire room in pitch black. She doesn't see light for another week.
❍
Shoko did a quick catalog of the events that brought her here, if only to keep reminding herself it was all real and that it happened she was still alive, alive, alive: it had been an uneventful Tuesday evening. The moonlight spun streaks into her room and a light breeze was passing through. She opened the door to her office expecting to see Gojo, instead staring directly into the eyes of a foreign face she thought was only vaguely familiar in a general way. The girl was crying, lost, looking for her mother and all at once impatiently clutching at her arm to help her.
Impossible, Shoko thought, They don't take in sorcerers this young. They stopped taking in anyone at all.
The last thing she remembers before she was being forcibly guided down the steps was the girl’s bottomless eyes turning to her, grinning; a sliver of teeth slipping through.
Then it was the back of an SUV van, a cloth wrapped around her mouth and eyes, her hands and legs bound. She woke up in this room a few hours or a few days after, to this shell of a living space, next to a threadbare blanket and a wooden pail they called a toilet.
And she still has no idea who took her.
❍
That first night, Shoko banged tirelessly on the door.
Her fingers scraped against the walls, leaving behind trails of blood. She yelled and screamed and threw around what little she saw, sending cursed energy to each punch and grovel. But they did something, she thought, they did something to the air or the room or whichever. She couldn’t channel enough strength to walk the length of the room, let alone cursed energy to make any difference in her pleas. Every word out of her was an exertion, every raise of her hand a death sentence to her dwindling energy.
The walls were eating her alive from the bone.
“Open the door,” Shoko rasped bitterly.
The guards outside just laughed.
“What do you want from me," she demanded weakly.
No answer.
Fuck.
Shoko wracked her brain for anyone who could have an agenda against her. She knows her skill is invaluable even against a generation of special grades, but she couldn’t discount the possibility that this could be tied to Gojo. They had to quietly take care of at least 3 attempts on his life just this year alone. Yaga and the board were even more protective of them both than usual, arguing her nearly-perfected RCT and his eyes were the pinnacle of jujutsu sorcery and to stick together as much as possible.
Only she was a non-combatant out of choice.
She’d seen what the spoils of battle could do to even the most heartiest of men, and maybe Gojo did have the stomach for it, the bloodlust and the high and the awakening. But Shoko putting her friends into body bags was her own kind of awakening.
They’d argue about it profusely and endlessly.
Gojo insisted he teach her at least a few defensive techniques on the off chance she was in a situation she needed it. But she read between his lines: You need to be able to protect yourself when I’m not here. It was the right move, Shoko knew even then, but she was eighteen too and had just lost her best friend and refused to believe she could lose the other one. It was a decision rooted in stubbornness more than any real defiance to his reasoning. And as Shoko looks at her bleeding fingers and the cuts on her arms and the bruising on her soul, learns to really, really regret it.
But in the end none of it mattered.
Because when she finds out why they were keeping her, Shoko decides she'd rather skin herself alive and eat the world raw.
❍
Shoko spends the rest of her days staring blankly at the cement ceiling above her, laying on nothing more than the thin strip of sheet as she felt herself slowly sink deeper and deeper into madness.
If she tried hard enough, she can trick herself into thinking she was back in school, resting on the cardboard box for a bed they provided, that made sleeping a nightly terror she found herself sneaking into Gojo's room to sleep on his foam bed—provided by an overinvolved clan—more often than not. Getou was guaranteed to follow after a few hours.
If she swallowed down the bile rising in her throat at how far all of them had fallen, at how unfair it was they were ever put in positions to fall, Shoko can shake her head of the memory away and instead just think about the easy rise and fall of Gojo's chest as they slept next to each other, or the seamless way Getou slipped into their tangle of limbs until it felt like puzzle pieces slotting in place. A lock to a key.
But today wasn't one of those good days.
Instead when she stares at the ceiling, she just finds it staring back at her with bloodhound eyes leaking pus all around.
The maggots were shifting in her skin, burrowing itself into each open wound and metastasizing into something uglier and meaner and rougher.
She feels roots slithering its way up her sides, like snakes peppering love bites all over her skin until they make it past her chest and then starts squeezing, pinching, suffocating; until all that's left of her was the skeleton she'd someday be.
What a pity, Shoko thought, I thought I'd live longer than this.
Ignoring the snakes and the vines and the worms, Shoko rolls over onto her side. She counts the cracks in the cement wall. She pictures each one opening up wide and far enough for her to slip through them. She pictures them opening up enough for her to pass through, lingering enough for it to close up and trap her mid-scream.
What a pity, Shoko thought, Do I even want to live after this?
❍
The door rattles in the middle of the night sometimes.
Shoko instinctively feels her shackles rise, her guard rising, waiting in bated breath as she feels her lungs arrest inside her.
She takes a quick survey of whatever weapons are available to her in the room, and curses internally when virtually nothing is there apart from the flimsy sheet or the bucket that couldn't hurt a fly let alone someone with far more cursed energy input than her. Her stats are at a critical low, the energy in the room shifting and growing bolder as it took more and more out of her every single day. She could barely summon enough as it was to tuck further into herself, vainly trying to warm her hands by breathing air into them, however futile. Every single breath she takes comes out chilly. Every single movement of her limbs shifting the bones inside her like granite. The room was cold, her fingers were cold, her entire body might as well be doused in ice.
The door rattles again. Louder, more insistent this time.
Shoko lets out an involuntary hiss, swearing at whoever it was behind the door. She thinks if she really needed to, if she was desperate enough, throwing her body around would do. She still had that at least, however limp and useless it's become. If push comes to shove, they had just better be prepared to scrape her brain matter off the wall and rid the room of her ghoulish stench.
Then, miraculously, as if the person on the other end knew: the jiggling stops.
Shoko counts to three minutes in head, vibrating with the effort to stay still the entire time, before she carefully and slowly makes the short distance to the door. She crouches down and puts her ear to it, making out the faint sound of footsteps walking away.
❍
When Shoko dreams, she dreams of red.
Slippery wet slobs of carnage slipping from her fingers, so much of it on so many of them: Meimei, Yaga, Ijichi. Even her own blood. She saw it all dancing around the lids of her eyes when she slept, spraying her insides raw and bleeding her out empty from the inside.
But the most damning of all, she thinks, the one she can't quite shake off no matter how much she pushed it down and down: Nanami.
The way he slumped in her arms, the sounds of terror ringing throughout the school and Gojo beside her screaming in her ear, nearly begging, to let him go and leave now. She had been running out of options and the world just kept getting louder and louder, never stilling enough for her to get her heartbeat to settle and think. Yaga had half an arm and so many more students were in need of so much more of her help.
But she swore an oath hadn’t she?
She couldn't cast out the sickly pallor that bit into Nanami's skin as soon as rigor mortis sunk in, but she could at least do something. To ease the pain. To stop the bleeding. To push his insides back into himself. And so Shoko dug as deep as she's ever dug on her last barrels of cursed energy, trying to summon enough, just at least enough energy to pump blood on his veins one more time, nearly choking on her desperation in the process. The bombs going off in the distance were loud, but her desperation was louder.
Shoko never considered herself to be particularly religious, but she prayed for a miracle then. She prayed harder than she’s ever had to in her life. For some god or diety or pagan spirit or the devil himself for all she cared by that point, having lost nearly everything, just something.
She received none.
All she remembers was Gojo violently ripping her out from the ground, her hands still slick with Nanami’s blood all over her hands and coat, hissing into her ear as tears streamed down his eyes. There was a bite to his voice that was as angry as it was pained.
Leave it, he half wailed, half begged. Just — just leave him, Shoko.
Shoko wakes up in a bed of her own sweat and tears and blood. Her throat ran through from screaming in her sleep. Her nails biting into the cement for purchase. When she looks down, they are torn and bitten and bruised. Just like her.
❍
Shoko estimates two weeks have passed since the doors to her room opened.
A week ago, they decided to starve her into submission by giving her only the barest morsels of food to survive on, that they had also started watching over her to make sure she actually ate them. In retaliation, she decided to give up eating altogether.
"Yield," one of them demanded, a butter knife to her neck drawing blood.
"Over my dead body," she snarled, meaning it.
She was bedridden at this point. Weak, sick with hunger, drowning in grief. It's been days since her last beating when she refused to talk, resulting in one of them smacking her head to the wall. She thinks she heard something crack, the telltale trickle of liquid trailing down her neck after confirming as much.
She couldn't see who it was that had their hands on her, the delirium and delusion spinning out in the room prevented her to; but whoever it was had been strong, almost monstrously so. They were always strong in that oddly supernatural way even she wasn't used to, dealing with curses and transfigured humans and everything else.
Nothing about the way they moved was familiar to her at all, just the violence. She doesn't think it was entirely human hands that had been dragging her around and bashing her head in and taunting her to surrender; instead their grip was something firmer to the touch, a texture like sandpaper on rocks. She doesn’t know if it’s the deprivation, but she thought she detected a faint smell of roses.
Just when she thinks she's on the brink of death, waiting for that final punch to the gut that will surely finally end her, one of them always manages to pull back just enough to spit in her face and hiss angrily: You're lucky he wants you alive.
She used to cry about it.
About everything she lost and was always in danger of losing. At how defenseless she's become and hopeless at the cause they were fighting for. At how little of them stood a fighting chance and how insurmountable it seemed, defending the last legs of their cause and questioning if it even matters when all they had left to show for it was a few dozen sorcerers left with too many gravestones.
Shoko used to cry.
Now she figures all her tears have dried up.
That’s when the door opens slightly, a creaking sound in its wake.
Shoko blinks out the disorientation from her eyes, not used to seeing actual light for the first time in weeks. She can't remember it ever being this harsh, this accosting, nor was the almost knee-jerk reaction to seeing something so mundane. Light like the sun. Light like it means to be alive. She swallows all of it down in an attempt to get her bearings, willing her eyes to sharpen.
It’s a girl.
Maybe the same girl, maybe older, maybe younger; Shoko can’t even begin to start recalling, the lines of her vision fading from the room chipping away at her energy every night. She barely makes out their footsteps as they guide her to a seating position, tilting her head and before she can fight the intrusion, before she can even summon enough energy to: cool, fresh liquid makes its way down her throat. Water. Immediately it's dousing, electric, a balm to her starched soul.
Shoko comes alive enough to snap her eyes open and see—she was right—exactly the same girl.
The lights pouring in from the hallway illuminate her face in familiarity.
And suddenly Shoko is very, very scared.
Because it’s not just the girl, she remembers, but the girl. Then a voice, the first real one Shoko has heard in weeks that resembled something remotely human: a slow, deliberate cadence that drew out each syllable in an almost reverent fashion.
“Getou-sama will see you now.”