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Death is a frequent acquaintance. When Shoko glides along the riverbank, she grazes it, a touch cool but not unwelcome. It tails her from the godhood in a rural town to the humility in a high school in Tokyo, never crossing the entrance to the morgue. Both within arms reach, and far beyond the door.
Shoko does not fear Death, nor welcome it. It is only there, as with all things.
Satoru is the last of the students to visit the morgue. He'd gone straight from his previous mission to exorcise the curse out in the sticks, newly reevaluated as a special grade.
By the time he's arrived, Shoko's already finished most of the paperwork the undertaker had passed onto her. All that's left is the hand-off of Haibara's body to prepare for the burial rites. When it comes to jujutsu sorcerers, it's all about haste. Shoko thinks they could stand to slow down and relax. She takes a drag of her cigarette.
Shoko would like to say that it's a contest between her and Satoru on who's the most accustomed to it, but she clears him easily. Satoru is tense, and Shoko is languid. She taps the pen in her other hand on the table. There should be some cheap beer stashed in the medicine cabinet back at the clinic. Haibara would always laugh good-naturedly when Shoko would unearth another one of her alcohol reserves.
The school had refused to give Shoko permission to study the cadaver, beyond the autopsy carried out by the undertaker. Haibara would've been glad to offer, she thinks, as morbid as it is. To be able to use reverse cursed technique to heal more than flesh wounds, she would have to have a better understanding of the damage inflicted by high grade curses. The higher ups call it a desecration—they're reluctant as is to sanction autopsies when the cause of death is known. They're cowardly.
Satoru breaks the silence, drawing her attention. “Hey, Shoko.” Satoru's eyes remain obscured behind his sunglasses, as always. Shoko, never able to discern the emotions of her closest friends. Shoko, who would prefer not to, lest they act too much like a window. “Will you die?”
“Who doesn't?” The nicotine doesn't take effect as it normally does. She takes another drag.
“Before me, then.” Satoru's lips don't quirk into a smile the way they usually do. Shoko looks away, exhaling the smoke.
“Of course not,” she responds. Dry, factual, the way she always enunciates her words. As if Satoru is the one being absurd, like he always is. “I'll always be here.” She juts out her cigarette in the direction of Haibara’s shrouded body.
“Then neither of us will ever die.”
Shoko doesn't know if Satoru believes it, but she does. Satoru is the strongest, and Shoko has no intention of joining him out there. So she says, “Sure.”
Shoko draws on a pair of disposable gloves, and pulls a face mask across her face. It’s only a cursory autopsy, so the work had been passed onto Shoko. If it were up to her, she'd just write the cause down as ‘one of Geto Suguru’s curses’ and be done with it. There remains no one from that village to file a complaint about a low-effort job, and it's only the persistence of the higher ups and a misplaced sense of seeing things through (that she must've inherited from the curse in question) that brings her to the morgue.
She lazily writes down ‘residuals of Geto Suguru detected on the corpse’ on the file.
Yaga slumps on one of the chairs pushed against the wall to the morgue. “I presume there's no chance that it was an accident.”
Shoko strips off what remains of the victim's shirt, and replies, “None at all.”
“God dammit!” He bangs his fist against the cracked tiling on the wall, then brings his arm across to cover his face. “Satoru will be back soon. What do I tell him?”
It’s rhetorical, and the doctor doesn't answer. She makes a cursory scan of the corpse, and notes the damage. Burns. A first grade curse or higher, though it’s out of Shoko’s pay grade to remember which. From the investigative reports that Shoko had glanced through, the detectives had come to the conclusion that Suguru had acted in retaliation for the persecution of sorcerers in that town. Shoko finds him ridiculous. Humans and sorcerers are all the same; a cadaver like every one she's seen before.
“Did you see it coming?”
Shoko does glance at the principal at that, tilting her head fractionally. “Geto-kun's defection?”
Yaga scoffs, looking ready to bang his fist against the wall again. “If you can call it that.”
“Of course not,” Shoko says easily. After all, she's never made an effort to understand other people's psyches. Suguru had acted strange, it's true. Shoko didn't bother to delve deeper into it. Neither did Satoru, for that matter—they were each too preoccupied with their own lives.
Maybe Satoru would resent himself for it. Shoko doesn't.
The doctor signs off the form when it’s complete and slips it into an envelope, walking over to hand it to Yaga. She tells him, “You deal with the disposal. I need a smoke.”
She’s itching for a cigarette in her hands right about now. Existing in the present is too stifling. Yaga doesn't even give her his usual disapproving look, just waves her away.
She only sees Satoru when he slams open the door to her dorm room, as she’s halfway through a bottle of soju. From where she sits cross-legged on the floor, Shoko glances up from her medical textbook to meet his eyes, sunglasses slipping down his nose.
“Is it true?” he breathes heavily. Satoru is far more emotional than Shoko—at least when it comes to Suguru. Shoko doesn’t envy it. He cares too much.
Shoko doesn’t answer questions that don’t need one, so she asks, out of nothing more than a genuine curiosity: “Are you going to look for him?”
Satoru slumps against the door, energy suddenly lost. “What do you think?”
She hums, then holds out the bottle of soju towards Satoru. “Want some?”
Her classmate scrunches up his nose, then steps into Shoko’s room to grab it from her hand anyway. He tips what must be half the bottle into his mouth, to Shoko’s mild amusement.
“Fuck,” he hisses, and Shoko can’t tell if it’s because of what has happened or the alcohol, which for sure exceeds his tolerance. He trods over to Shoko’s bed and flops onto it, dirty clothes and empty bottle and all. It sparks a twinge of irritation, but she puts the thought out of her mind as a problem for tomorrow.
Even when he's drunk, Satoru says nothing of meaning to Shoko, only pestering her as she studies for the medical exams. She’s glad for it, not having to deal with his complex feelings towards their defected classmate. Sympathy is rare from Shoko, but she thinks she can at least decipher how Satoru must be feeling from the years of knowing him, even if she doesn't feel the same. So if Satoru's way of dealing with things is pestering Shoko at three in the morning, she'll play along. There's nothing for her to offer in the way of comfort, but this—bantering with a friend like on any other night, making a case for RCT's ability to prevent lung cancer even though she doesn't actually believe her own words—it's doable.
She's less glad when she has to watch over Satoru as he vomits into the toilet of her ensuite, pitifully passing him a bottle of water and some aspirin from her drawers.
“You can't just RCT the hangover?” Shoko asks, as her friend gulps down the water like he's been deprived for days. Which is possible, in all fairness.
“Can you?” Satoru retorts, glowering at her as he wipes his mouth.
“I don't get hungover,” she points out dryly, "Because I actually have a tolerance. One sip of soju has you like this?"
“I basically drank the entire bottle,” Satoru argues petulantly, remarkably clear despite his sorry state. At the least, he seems to have forgotten the events which had led him to this point.
“You drank half,” Shoko corrects. “I drank the other.”
He passes out on the takami mat half an hour later, and Shoko considers dropping him off in his own dorm room, but he’s way too heavy and she’s tired. So she reluctantly loads him onto her bed (Satoru could probably heal any soreness from sleeping on the floor, but she’s fairly convinced he’s not had a proper night’s sleep in days) and crawls into bed next to him.
When she’s woken up by her alarm in the morning, Satoru’s already left, and she hears from Yaga that he’d been scheduled for another mission.
They don’t talk about that night after the fact. It’s more accurate to say that they hardly talk at all, with the strongest sorcerer (singular, alone) always on missions and the only healer jailed at Jujutsu High. When Shoko gets out of the mountains and encounters Suguru at the bus stop, all she thinks is, how foolish this all is.
Shoko spends the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons (a ridiculous name by a ridiculous person) tending to the wounded in a makeshift ward, picking up the chain-smoking habit she’d dropped five years ago.
She finds the packet of cigarettes she’d swiped from a corner shop emptied by the time the last corpse is brought into Jujutsu High’s morgue, and she desperately needs another.
“Gojo-kun,” she says slowly, fingers twitching as they twirl her hair, “You can’t be serious.”
“Please, Shoko.”
Satoru doesn’t beg like this. Sincere, desperate. Vulnerable. Only when it’s Suguru.
“And if someone gets ahold of his corpse?” Shoko’s words are clinical, harsh, even as she listens to them from her own mouth. “Would it still be for Geto-kun?”
“It’s Suguru. I can’t—” He grapples with his words as he tears the bandages off his face in frustration. “He has kids.”
Suguru’s body is pristine, preserved like he was never killed at all. Slain with love, or something poetic like that.
It would be easier if she felt nothing at all, even if she’s convinced herself otherwise.
Fuck, she would kill for a smoke. Or even better, something stronger. Her hand reaches for a scalpel to twirl instead.
If she claimed to believe that Satoru, or more accurately, the kids he wanted to pass the burden onto would handle the corpse appropriately, she’d be lying. But sentiment pricks at her mind—it doesn’t penetrate, but it bothers.
This is Satoru’s idea of consideration. It isn’t Shoko’s, it’s foolish and self-centred and absurd because it’s the one time in his life he’s chosen to concern himself over others.
Satoru holds out a sealed pack of cigarettes like a lousy attempt at a bribe. Like he’d predicted that she’d break her sobriety, though he must’ve heard from Mei Mei. Shoko takes it mutely, and methodically lights a smoke.
Satoru waits. She inhales the fresh smell of ash. Blunts the light only when Satoru’s impatient fidgeting intrudes on her senses.
The smell of smoke and ash lingers.
Shoko covers Geto Suguru’s corpse in a burial shroud. “If the consequences catch up to you—”
“It'll be my mess to clean,” Satoru finishes. He smiles, as false as ever. “I’ll take responsibility. Don’t worry. I'm the strongest.”
“Sure,” she responds, for lack of anything better to say.
Nanami dies, and then Yaga does. Death comes to sweep them up in its arms, and Shoko observes, as she observes all things.
Shoko is indifferent to loss. It is, after all, a necessity. So even if Haibara and Suguru and Nanami and Yaga are gone, she will continue to live as she always does, Because it is Shoko (and Satoru) alone who cannot die. She is not blind to the fact that it takes blood that's more alcohol than haemoglobin and lungs that are more smoke than air, but she is indifferent to that, too. There is nobody left to chide her for it.
Unlike other sorcerers, she doesn't feel Satoru's disappearance that keenly, either. Her job remains unchanged, and the same applies to Shoko herself. Whatever inhabits Suguru's body has left them a mess to clean up, so she must heal the sorcerers that go out to deal with them.
If Satoru were to witness everything like Shoko has, she wonders if he would be able to do the same. Satoru's indifference is not like Shoko's. It’s learned. Satoru compartmentalises, but Shoko doesn't think she's capable of caring at all.
In the darkness of the hospital, she considers the body of Kugisaki Nobara held in stasis in front of her.
When Yuji Itadori had died, that indifference had broken. At the time, Shoko had never expected it, not when she had been the one to witness its construction, brick and mortar. From the slow desensitisation to Death’s gentle hand to the re-alienation of the honoured one following Suguru’s defection, which she’d deigned a turning point. She supposes, then, that she hadn’t understood Gojo Satoru at all.
Does she now, then? Yuta Okkotsu, Yuji Itadori, Kugisaki Nobara. Satoru saves them all, the kind of greed only afforded to the strongest man. Shoko had mistakenly thought that that compassion was only bestowed upon Suguru.
Or maybe she’s once again mistaken. It was never compassion, and all greed. Self-centred and magnanimous.
Shoko turns back to examine the results of the latest medical examinations. There’s something off-putting about the way the tracer maps out the contamination to the flesh, and when it comes to the brain—
The experimental radiotherapy treatment to target purely the soul-damaged regions appears to be having the desired effect, at least. The damage to it wasn’t fatal, rot on the frontal and temporal lobes, but even with the body suspended in ice it spread. It had taken longer to carry out the prerequisite trials than would’ve been ideal, Shoko muses, parsing the images of the older scans.
Kugisaki is lucky. It discredits the strength of her soul, and other such statements, but it’s the truth. The success of the radiotherapy was beyond what Shoko could have anticipated, with reverse cursed technique having no effect on soul-damage.
Shoko mindlessly twirls her pen stylus, and says to the empty space, “I wonder if you’ll come out the same after your soul was twisted.”
If nothing else, she will prove a valuable research subject.
There are few chances for conversation between the two of them in the month leading up to the final conflict. At most, they see each other at the strategy meetings, with small acknowledgements between the two of them.
Shoko is one thing, healing injuries from training in between meetings. But since his unsealing, Satoru has had little to no rest at all. Brain constantly frying and regenerating. Six Eyes always uncovered and monitoring the slightest shifts. Making preparations for Sukuna and then more preparations, planning for the conflict and beyond that.
The thing about Satoru is that with Suguru gone, he thinks of himself as utterly alone at the top. While Shoko remembers that meaningless pledge that they had made after Haibara's death, talking about how neither of them would ever die, Satoru must have all but forgotten about it.
They're similar. Shoko is mutely aware of it, even if Satoru isn't. They both maintain distance between themselves and others, if for different reasons; Satoru is sincerely convinced that he must be alone, while Shoko had made the deliberate choice to be, albeit at what must've been her birth.
Maybe Shoko should reach out. Say something thoughtlessly sentimental like, you swore to never die. It would get a laugh out of them both, but no further.
It is the first time either of them have to confront the very real possibility of Satoru's death, and Shoko finds herself unable to close the distance at all.
“Yo, Shoko.” Satoru waves her over after one of their strategy meetings, only a week before the promised time.
Shoko’s hum of acknowledgement is the only courtesy before Satoru has pulled out a pair of envelopes from his yukata sleeves. Shoko doesn’t react, but she does twirl an unlit cigarette between her fingers. Satoru says, “If I die, I want you to give these to Nobara and Megumi.”
It’s so thoughtlessly straightforward that Shoko has to huff a laugh. “Sure,” she replies, because that’s just how it goes. She takes the letters from his hands and stows them in the pocket of her lab coat, careful not to bend them. “Anything else?”
Satoru grins. “I'm trusting you to handle things if I die. Take care of the kids, and deal with my corpse properly once you’re done with it.”
Trust. It's a strange thought. Shoko had trusted Satoru not to die. Whether or not it falls flat, it’ll be the last time she does.
“Who do you think I am?” Shoko responds, as she flicks open her lighter, ignoring Satoru’s reproachful look. “I won't make the same mistake.” She cocks her head with a wry half-smile, the cigarette burning between her fingers. “The study of your cadaver will be the apotheosis of my career.”
She pauses briefly. ‘I won’t make the same mistake’ isn’t quite right, is it? If Satoru's defeat comes to pass, then his fate is a mirror of their old friend’s.
“Glad to be of use,” Satoru tells her, which hardly lessens the sinking feeling.
He does look a little put-out about it, and for no clear reason, Shoko feels the need to prod. Obligation, perhaps. She exhales smoke to the side. “What’re your regrets?” Shoko asks off-handedly, deliberate in the phrasing.
The more they discuss Satoru’s death, the more it seems an inevitability.
“What's this?” Satoru teases.
“A confessional,” is her dry reply.
Satoru waves away the smoke very intentionally blown in his face, even though infinity would never let it reach him in the first place. As he contemplates his answer, Shoko adds, “I'll take them to my grave.”
“What’re you implying?” Satoru complains.
Shoko shrugs nonchalantly. It will fall onto Shoko to bear the memory of those high school years alone, and it will tail her, as with death, until it is her body in the furnace. It’s a little bothersome, but she doesn’t mind. It’s no worse than anything else she’s had to deal with.
Even if no one else does, Shoko will remember Gojo Satoru.
Satoru leans back, white yukata pressing against the dusty wall, though it’ll resurface spotless. “Well, I'd like to have seen my dream realised.”
“You did murder all the higher ups,” Shoko says blandly. “It'll take a while for society to recover.”
“I did,” Satoru agrees, “but I'm sure the students can do it.”
Shoko tilts her head, lifting the cigarette from her lips. “How cruel. Is that all?”
“You’re really putting me on the spot here,” Satoru whines. “It's not a bad way to go. It’s Sukuna, the king of curses, you know? To be honest, I've always wanted to fight him at his full power. I'd never imagined I'd be able to relive the exhilaration from fighting an equal.”
“You really are a freak.”
“So are you.”
Shoko chooses not to deign that with any further response. The best—correct—thing to do is to end the conversation here, send Satoru off to his death rituals and go attend her makeshift clinic. Shoko is logical, detached, and Shoko also asks, “Don’t you want to live?”
Satoru blinks at her, and he must’ve expected the question as much as she did. Which is to say, not at all. Something relaxes, though, and Satoru replies, “Who doesn’t?”
The cigarette is barely longer than the fingers lifting it now. She lets it burn. seeing the lack of response, Satoru continues, “That’s why I will win.”
Maybe it’s unfair. Satoru is utterly alone, and yet he has to tread that lonely path to his demise.
To Shoko, Death is a close comrade. Its cool embrace, its warm withdrawal. So if Satoru crosses the river, Shoko will watch it from the riverbank, as she always does.
The observation of Gojo Satoru’s life and death. Shoko doesn’t make promises, but she will hold up the only one she has.
Satoru holds out a fist, and with the briefest hesistance Shoko bumps it with her own.
“I'll see you around,” he waves back at her as he’s leaving.
Shoko lights another cigarette, letting the butt off the previous one fall to the floor.
Kugisaki emerges from her cocoon whole. She will need long-term rehabilitation, as prescribed to any patient recovering from a traumatic brain injury, but she’s Kugisaki all the same. Shoko notes it down in the empty space left behind.
Death is that which Shoko is closest to, the only constant presence in her life. If Shoko were to trust, she would only afford it to Death.
A private clinic in the ruins of off-limits Tokyo. Hardly sanitary, but Satoru doesn't deserve any better.
Shoko has maintained a comfortable habit of eliminating any possibility of sentiment for others over the past decade. Inexorably, Gojo Satoru somehow carved himself the exception; the only person other than herself that could never possibly die. Shoko had inadvertently deigned him a constant, something to hold onto as she leaned across the riverbank and let her fingers skim the currents. And he threw it back in her face, which in retrospect had, more than anything else, sparked a muted irritation.
She's been sober for too long, she thinks. Her last cigarette had been burned days ago, and she hasn't been able to secure any more since she ran off with Satoru's body. (She had paid a hefty sum to Mei Mei, so that her brother would transport the corpse away.)
She pulls on her disposable gloves, more as habit than anything else, and peers down at Satoru's body lying in the freezer, sutured together across the midriff and the forehead. She had, of course, not afforded him the honour of his modesty, because she's already doing more than enough for him.
She holds her hand over his heart, and voices the binding vow:
“In exchange for mine and Gojo Satoru's cursed techniques, and cursed energy, I will use reverse cursed energy to restore Gojo Satoru's body to a point prior to his death.”
Shoko had heard discussions about the body and soul. Shoko also does not care. If it is convenient, then the body and the soul are one, and restoring Gojo Satoru's body will restore his soul. Whether Satoru chooses to go north or south does not matter to Shoko, because she doesn’t believe in either. He will return, because Shoko is tired of being alone and of dying alone.
No matter how selfless a martyr Satoru had resigned himself to becoming, Shoko will match it with the only selfishness either of them will ever hold in their hands.
Giving up her technique here means that lives that could have been saved will be lost in the future.
Shoko is a doctor. Unlike Suguru or Satoru, all she has ever cared about was acting out her duty as such. She had no interest in Suguru's preaching about some greater ideology, nor Satoru's dream of a better jujutsu society. She has always had her purpose, and never sought a greater one.
Here once again, they’re similar in outcome but differ in cause. Shoko is a tool who has entirely submitted to the purpose designated for her, without argument. She doesn’t hold any particularly strong feelings regarding it, neither resentment nor gratitude. She will bend and be used for whatever needs her.
Satoru is entirely able to pull apart the box designating him as one; he reduces himself to a tool for a sake of the dreams he’d made for himself. Shoko considers it self-centred. Perhaps she should consider it selfish, that Satoru would leave her the sole survivor, but she couldn’t before and neither can she now.
Gojo Satoru is human, and so is Ieiri Shoko. Neither of them had confronted that fact in life, and so now they must do so in Death's embrace. Compartmentalisation does not erase, and instead it builds until it bursts. In the end, they're more fundamentally alike than Shoko is willing to believe.
So Shoko watches as, for the last time, reverse cursed energy pulses from her palm and washes through Satoru's body, twisting his veins and his guts and the brain that has been fumbled with ever so tenderly.
She does not mourn her cursed technique when she lifts her hand and feels her soul missing from her body. Nor does she feel relieved by the knowledge that she'll never stitch together a half-dead sorcerer again. It is, as with all things, indifference, along with the morbid curiosity as to what is contained in Gojo Satoru's newly beating heart. This is the magnum opus of her study of the jujutsu sorcerer's body, after all: the resurrection of the strongest sorcerer.
“I'll be annoyed if it's not you in there, Satoru,” Shoko says mildly as the body opens its eyes. First-name basis, because the distance that Shoko maintains has been closed already, and she's not so foolish as to treat things as normal. “Because it'll mean that my hypothesis has failed.”
Not that there was much of a valid hypothesis in the first place. It is a miracle, she supposes, that Gojo Satoru's body sits up in his frozen coffin.
She steps away from the freezer. Perhaps there is relief, or joy. Shoko doesn't notice any, so it must have been buried like normal.
“I'm alive.” It's the same relaxed and self-assured voice that Shoko has always known. Her composure tenses.
Her choices were made regardless of Satoru’s own wishes. For Ryoumen Sukuna, defeat was equivalent to death. Even if Satoru had differed up until then, as a man who had known defeat twice before, he had walked up to the final battle matching that notion. So there again, Satoru now is a tool to fulfill Shoko’s own selfish desires. With all her observation of the strongest sorcerer, she can’t know how he’ll feel.
“So it seems,” Shoko responds, her voice with the same nonchalance it always has.
Gojo Satoru turns to Shoko with the same wide grin that had somehow etched itself into her mind, and vaults over his coffin with a languid ease, like nothing has changed.
“Shoko.”
He doesn’t ask why.
The doctor grimaces, and tosses a probably-used medical robe to him. “Welcome back,” she says off-handedly.
He beams and holds up a hand and Shoko knows it truly, really worked.
Shoko was never as close to Satoru as Suguru was. She doesn't know the troughs of the calluses on his hands or the pattern of his breathing.
And said Geto Suguru had once asked Gojo Satoru something along the lines of, ‘Who are you if not the strongest’ ? The two identities were fundamentally inseparable, such that one beget the other. Both Suguru and Shoko were mistaken, then, because it absolutely couldn't be anyone else; Shoko has studied him for a decade, and she knows.
Nobody else would be able to replicate it. The confidence that Satoru has from being the strongest since birth, the optimism he’s somehow carried during the years as said strongest, and the composure he’s maintained despite dying as it. Not Okkotsu Yuta, nor Ryoumen Sukuna.
She huffs a laugh, a smile mirroring Satoru’s, and high-fives her old friend. There’s none of the simmering infinity, only a warmth which strikes Shoko with an awareness of how cold it had been in the clinic.
Relief is alien. Shoko has never been relieved when a sorcerer was saved by her technique, because they'll only return to the forefront and be sent back again, and again, and again, until they’re more Shoko’s cursed energy than their own, a living Ship of Theseus. But when Gojo Satoru stands in front of her, heart pulsing warm blood through his body and nothing more, it couldn't be anything else that washes over her.
He's too bright even without a speck of cursed energy, so Shoko almost doesn’t catch it when he says, “I'm home.”