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As a doctor, she should know better.
But she doesn't, her nerves spiking up at her tips’ ends if she forgoes a hit of nicotine throughout the day. As if her eye bags don't make her look worn out enough. There's—generally speaking, 24 hours in a single day. Shoko lives through 24 of those hours being a walking contradiction.
The ceilings are high, the school way too understaffed to care about the clinging cobwebs. Shoko hardly goes here, especially when it's late at night and she has no obligations to entertain anybody, or answer to anyone's calls. How long has it been, again?
It reeks of tar, the rolled up cigarette between her dry and bitten lips. It's been like this for almost ten years. More, truly, if she's honest with herself. She always notices the signs, how she's inching closer and closer to unraveling herself. . .
Only to stop when it's just about to burst, the ugly worms that took claim of each nook and cranny in her heart wiggling just about strong enough.
She wouldn't let herself go that far. She's not like him —
One of the dark classroom's door slides open, compelling her to freeze. Shoko isn't avoiding anyone, she just needed a particularly quiet place to inhale the sweet, sweet tinge of nicotine. Alone.
Someone groggily comes out of the classroom, turning around just fast enough to catch Shoko’s eyes before she could pretend to don a friendly smile. The other person falls back a step in shock, even though there's absolutely no way he was shocked to see her.
He could've seen her coming from a mile away.
Well. Maybe Shoko is avoiding someone.
Her cigarette is still burning, the taste of smoke that is filling up the roof of her mouth thrumming, as her heart rate speeds. The other person isn't moving, his eyes free of bandage and his hair strawn everywhere. His blue eyes are not looking at Shoko. They don't need to. He knows she's there.
She doesn't speak. Doesn't know how to.
Each and every floorboard creak that Shoko registers in her mind as she walks past Gojo is painful, and if she were to have a more healthy relationship with her emotions—like Utahime, probably—she’d curse at herself and cringe. But she's not.
Something under her skin is burning up when she sees him. She registers it, again, in her mind; as the side-effects of running through her second pack of cigarettes today.
Not at all the unfair and blatant war that her mind is going through when she's eye to eye with Gojo Satoru.
There's an open balcony, thankfully. Shoko leans onto the frayed wooden railing. Nothing's changed since she was a student here almost a whole decade ago. Same old carvings (Gojo used to lie and say the carvings were genuine mantras), the same yellowed traditional wallpapers, wall paint that peeled off in the same exact spots.
She'd go here to escape the two rowdy men that had lodged themselves into a familiar stance in her life just because they were her classmates—unluckily.
Some days, they'd still manage to find her.
“That’s horrible for you,” Geto would say, not chastising, toeing the line of mockery. Shoko never seemed to figure out whether he was mocking her for being so beneath his more traditional standards, or if he was mocking all the adults that kept trying to get Shoko to lay off the cigs.
“If you die before you turn 30, it'll be so embarrassing. You should really live better, Shoko,” this is where he'd start playfully whining, and Shoko would've grinned at the nasty attempt of pleading. “You're our classmate, at the very least. What's it gonna say about us if we lose you to nicotine, out of everything?”
She never responded.
That's usually how she deals with the two of them, letting them run their mouths around her until they get bored of her. They usually tune out of their interest pretty fast, anything that doesn't have to do with strength and power turns them off faster than water to a flame.
Shoko has never been smart enough to garner their attention. She's never been strong enough to want it.
Content with the silence, she'd always tell herself. Today is no different.
The sky is too dark to be beautiful, and Shoko lacks enough hours of sleep since the egregious Night Parade to be able to see clearly. The tiny, barely-seen-stars aren't attracting her as much as the light coming from the city below them. The town looks peaceful like this, even though she knew the facts to be its exact opposite.
She zoned out long enough.
Someone's beside her, looking off into the distance instead of the floor. Gojo has his hands gripping the wooden railing as well, and the distance between the two of them can amount to one man.
One particular man.
Something stings the bottomline of Shoko’s lashes, warm, and getting harder to ignore. She was avoiding Gojo. She was avoiding extra hard that day.
The Headquarters called for a meeting, she had heard. After everything was settled, if it ever does. Shoko was busy during the night where everything hit the fan, literally flying on her two, tired legs to help every single sorcerer who was fighting with everything they had to remain breathing.
Her other classmate had almost become an international catastrophe.
Shoko’s eyes glance to her left, Gojo still unmoving on his chosen spot. She hasn't, either. No one else could've stopped the catastrophe other than him.
Gojo was summoned to the meeting. He didn't go.
Shoko doesn't know how it feels to admit that you've killed your best friend. She wonders how it tastes, did he retch when the word slips from his tongue? Did he even get to say it?
Where did Gojo go after?
Definitely not to her. Shoko knows she's barely a thought in his brain as everything goes down. She won't ever be as much of an assurance to him as Geto had been. Not even when it's practically procedure that Gojo came to her, with the body. She knows how to deal with it. She deals with mostly everyone else's corpse.
But does she? Is she a little bit glad that Gojo didn't. . .?
“So you've heard,” Gojo starts, the force of trying to speak sends his upper body forward a tiny bit, despite his voice sounding more stable than she'd expect.
This is another one of those times where she feels no specific need to say anything.
Shoko takes a long, timely drag as she nods. She doesn't trust her voice not to be shaky if she were to speak, and she has decided not to look at him again for the rest of tonight. If Shoko looks at Gojo right now, she can see the other one. A ghost of him, clinging to his best friend’s back like a young, fearful boy.
She's glad. She's glad that Gojo didn't bring him to her.
Twenty-seven years old, and she would not have a single clue how to deal with that grief while it's looking at her, dead in the eye. She would've done something stupid.
Maybe Gojo did something stupid.
They were stuck to each other by the hip, after all. Shoko didn't come from a very affectionate background, and she knows at least the man to her left doesn't either. She never asked whether Geto’s family was considered normal, harmonious–or if they were some brain-eating disorder like Shoko’s own family. Despite all that she doesn't know. . . they were close.
She was never envious—they were affectionate with her too, despite the obvious way that she refuses to accept most of it for the sake of her own boundaries. It wasn't that she hated them. She was mediocre with them, at best.
But they grew alongside each other.
That is something Shoko can not overlook, however hard she tries. She has walked past them when they were both pulling faces in front of the restroom’s mirror, speaking in garbled accents and snorting about how ugly they are, hitting their teenage-boy-depression phase rather late. She has skipped classes with them, when Gojo told his best friend that there's an uptight underclassmen that lost a deal with him, and now they're being daring and going down into town for a day off. Shoko tried to dive into smoking somewhere, all on her own, but Geto had caught her by the back of her uniform and dragged her along with Gojo and himself—and she was too polite to refuse.
And Geto; he had left both of them.
He was always some sort of buffer, between the dignified human overexertion that is Gojo and a living caterpillar personified; Shoko. Without him in between them, there's a riff that nothing pierce through. Silence.
Gojo doesn't look for Shoko. He has no necessity for her. Trust, perhaps. Trust that she knows her place and never betray him—since they grew up together and she's seen how much monstrous energy he'd been able to cultivate.
His trust in her is faith in himself.
Shoko couldn't blame him. What was there to say, between them? There was no common ground. She'd grown to accept it. Friends were. . . too loose of a term. Acquaintances. . . too cold.
Yet, here he is. Fighting a losing game of wanting to be cared for, not knowing how to ask for what he needs. Shoko doesn't have what he needs, and she wants to make sure he understands that.
Despite years of her standing beside Gojo’s best friend, she is not one. And she refuses to succumb herself to being one. If he loses another one, he will break.
Their teacher approached Gojo back in highschool, when he didn't manage to stop Geto. Or kill him. It concluded in nothing, Gojo was sulking all the way to next week because he felt like their teacher was blaming him.
Nobody asked Shoko why she didn't stop Geto when he approached her first. Nobody, other than—
Gojo’s body is suppressing the need to say something. Shoko can tell, even if they weren't close friends. He is trying to run away, trying to march right into the conversation, trying to find a humorous approach. None of it surfaces.
He looks like he is harboring enough strength to put a hole through his own guts. Shoko can tell, ‘cause he's squirming in a way he only does when he doesn't want to be punished alone for his troublemaking crimes in highschool.
Shoko flicks with her lighter a few times, eyes raking just enough to take in Gojo’s clenched hands. The tips have turned white, and there's a slight tremor in his being. She can feel Geto in between them. She's going crazy.
“Listen—” Shoko glances at him, sideways. I'm confused on how to go about this. You killed your best friend. Hell, I'm not saying you shouldn't have. But I can't congratulate you either. I don't know how to feel. I don't know how you feel. I've never talked to anyone who’s had the unlucky privilege of slashing down their other half. How should I go about this? Tell me?
“No,” Gojo exclaims, cutting her before she can go too far. Shoko stops massaging her temples to finally spare him a glance. He's never found her intriguing enough to shout at, before. “Just. . . don't. I don't need you to tell me that what I did was right. It doesn't feel right.”
Of course, Shoko thinks, and the wind chooses this exact moment to whirl itself around the both of them. It also won't feel better just because you’ve acknowledged it.
Shoko believes he understands her enough to know she won't say something like that. He's just a little shaken. Everyone would be, if you had to deliver a killing blow at your already dying best friend.
Or whatever they were.
Gojo stands there, half turned away, half nailed into place. He is tense with the need to be talked to, but he had just shot Shoko’s one single futile attempt down. And he knows, as much as she does—that she isn't going to try again. Not for him.
Something akin to regret is written across his back, Shoko realizes. That is, if a God came to know what regret feels like.
If it was something else, well, Shoko never claimed to understand the way of the Gods.
If it was Geto standing beside him right now, he’d call for his name. Soft, meticulous. He'd pry Gojo open with his words alone, assuring him that there's nothing to be scared of—talking about his issues with others doesn't mean burdening other people with its factual existence.
Unluckily enough, for the both of them now; the only way Shoko would ever pry Gojo open was if he were to die. He'll then lay atop her surgical table. . . and she. . . would run. She would leave the corpse behind, tumble outside into the hallway and retch into a nearby trash bin, emptying out her guts until her intestines detangle and merge within the content of her digestive system.
They'd need to bomb her entire workplace, because there's no way Shoko is going to be able to cremate him.
And it's not because she's close friends with either of them. How many times does she need to repeat it to believe it?
Gojo walks away, sparing her one last glance—the icy blue madness he calls irises both landing on Shoko’s entirely passive face. He's sniffling, he must've thought it was discreet.
If Geto were to see that, he'd start laughing at the white-haired man until he cries. And then he'd cling onto Gojo’s shoulder as they walk away into the distance, banter fueled with nothing but the sheer comfort of being in each other's presence.
But Gojo came to seek Shoko, as he had nowhere else to go.
Shoko is not Geto.
He is lost.
Shoko will never be Geto.
She blows a smoke to his direction, her eyes leaving his being first as she turns back to look onwards—the city providing her little to no warmth. Hugging herself, she leans more upon the railing than she did earlier.
The wind erases any and all trace of the man that stood beside her earlier.
And the space between them that he chose to leave behind.