Work Text:
--
There are scant few axioms in life, and Shoko unfortunately thought that Gojo Satoru was one of them.
Given her aggressive pessimism, Shoko is not well-inured to unexpected crises; always expecting the worst, she is rarely caught off-guard. When she heard the news that Gojo was sealed, she fished out a cigarette from the first bewildered assistant she saw who smelled like ash and smoked it to a stub. Then she went in search of another. Then she was calm enough to do her job, at the minor cost of her five years clean going down the drain. It’s fine, she rationalizes: she may as well enjoy her vices if these days on Earth are her last, which will certainly be the case if they fail to retrieve Gojo from this fucking cube.
But she need not worry, because Gojo has raised a bright young group of monsters who are bent on raising hell to get him back. Shoko doesn’t need to lift a finger. In the meantime, she just does her job: she collects lives in one palm, and deaths in the other, weighing them out in equal measure.
--
An hour after Angel shoots up the Prison Realm with whatever purifying beam was supposed to free Gojo but instead causes the whole cube to disappear, Shoko gets a call from an unknown number.
“Hey,” says Gojo.
“Where are you?” Shoko asks, and then, to the crowd of bewildered students, “It’s Gojo. He sounds alive and sane.”
“I confirm that I am alive and sane,” Gojo says, though she can barely hear him over the din of the students cheering. “Not too sure where I am, though. I woke up at the bottom of the ocean. Ran into some weirdos with familiar faces. Now my ears won’t stop popping. Once I get my bearings I’ll know how to get back to you.”
“Okay, well, meet me in the infirmary when you can. We’re still based at Jujutsu Tech.” Shoko thinks about saying something sentimental. She doesn’t. Her chest does feel sort of warm, though. It’s nice to hear Gojo sounding alive and sane. “Come back soon.”
--
Shoko confirms with her own hands that Gojo is alive and discernibly sane. He listens quietly as Shoko quickly summarizes the way the world collapsed in his absence and enumerates the deaths. Only Nanami, which was a tough one for even Shoko to swallow, causes a flicker of reaction in his eyes.
“That’s what he gets for walking back his resignation,” he says, and then he moves on. “What else did I miss? Any more possessed teenagers I should know about?”
“So you met Megumi.”
“I certainly did.”
“And you’re going to fight him in a month?”
“I certainly am.”
“Will you kill Sukuna or save Megumi?”
“I’ll do both, obviously,” he says, and then he moves on. “What else did I miss?”
So much. Shoko doesn’t know why she’s the one tasked with disseminating information; she only ever collects it second-hand. “Um. Tsumiki,” she says, without thinking better of it. “She’s dead.”
And there’s the second reaction of the day. Gojo’s eyebrows knit together. “How?”
“She was incarnated in the Culling Games. Sukuna killed her in Megumi’s body to sink his soul.”
“I see.” The emotion washes off his face, a wave wiping clean the sand beneath it. Shoko wonders if something happened to him in that cube that has moved him even farther past human sentiment, or if she simply forgot that this is how he is.
“Well, there’s a lot to prepare for.” Gojo stands up. “Better get started.”
“Start with a shower,” Shoko informs him, “you smell like the bottom of the ocean.”
Gojo cracks a smile at that. For a half-second it feels like nothing has changed.
—
The first time Shoko hears Gojo mention his own death is when he hands her two letters and says:
“If I kick it, hand these out.”
“Isn’t it against your ethos to even consider losing?”
“It’s against my ethos to consider us losing. My bright young monsters will take over for me if I don’t make it. Anyway, I want your word, Shoko.”
“Yeah, fine.” She thumbs through the letters: one for Nobara, who’s still teetering between death and life, and one for Megumi. “What’s in these?”
“You can see for yourself.”
She reads the letters. She isn’t impressed. But maybe the kids will be moved.
“I don’t think Megumi gives a fuck about his dad,” she says. “Nor Nobara her mom.”
He shrugs. “Call it tying off loose ends. Anyway, there’s not much else to say.”
Spoken like Gojo speaks. In a way, it’s relieving. If those letters were sentimental on top of all this talk of dying, Shoko would start wondering if that body-hopper got ahold of him when he was stuck at the bottom of the ocean.
“And my will, too.” He hands her the unsealed envelope. “There’s stuff in there that pertains to you.”
“You only just now wrote your will?” The arrogance is stunning. But again, it’s very Gojo to never write a will, and it’s somewhat un-Gojo to write one on the cusp of this battle. “You’re starting to worry me.”
“Don’t think too much about it. Maybe I’m only now feeling like there are things I actually want to pass on.”
“Your little child army is certainly shaping up nicely to take on your legacy.”
“Don’t call them that, Shoko,” he snaps. He’s never liked her pointing out the hypocrisy in his ideals, which are admittedly mostly quite righteous. There’s only, like, ten percent evil in them. “I’m proud of them. I trust them.”
“How nice,” says Shoko. She, for one, has no legacy. There is no bright young troupe of healers who can only use the reversed technique and have no battle ability, rendering them bound to healing duties. How sad.
“Yuuta’s got this crazy plan if you die,” she says. It’s the first time she’s admitted the possibility; she’s caving into the influence of everyone else saying it. “Are you good with it?”
“Are you?”
Shoko shrugs. To be honest, she’s not thrilled about it. But she’s even less thrilled about this if you die nonsense. More than anything, she wants to fast-forward time so that she can just watch the cards fall. This isn’t her fight. As always, Shoko’s fight will come later, after the choices are made, after the battles are lost and won.
—
“You know,” says Shoko on the evening of December 23rd, because she can’t stand it anymore, “I was there all along.”
Gojo looks up from where he’s stretching methodically on the floor of the infirmary. He hasn’t worn his blindfold since he got out of the cube, and she’s still not used to the sight of his eyes. They still look more like gemstone facets than human flesh, gathering every streak of late-afternoon sun.
“What?”
“I was there. All along.”
“I know.”
But he doesn’t. He raised his whole little army so that he wouldn’t be alone. They are the ones meant to stand beside him. Shoko is meant to stand behind him, maybe, or she doesn’t have a place at all in his lineup.
“That’s not what I mean, Shoko,” he says quietly, reading her mind. “You know that.”
Shoko knows. She knows that to Gojo, it’s only strength that matters, because that’s what he used to rationalize his breakup with Geto all those years ago. It’s the only thing he understands enough to believe. But that doesn’t change the fact that Shoko has no place in his lineup, despite the fact that it’s here, in Shoko’s office, that Gojo is quietly preparing to stake his life. She’s a grown woman, a famously apathetic one at that, and she herself doesn’t know why she gives a crap about who gets to erase his loneliness or whatever. So she can’t expect Gojo to understand why it is that she feels so bitter about this fact.
“Don’t die tomorrow,” she finds herself saying. “I don’t want to burn your body.”
Gojo blinks at her. He rolls his shoulders, flexes his calves.
“I won’t,” he says, an empty promise, because they’ve already made all those fucking contingencies.
—
Gojo Satoru dies. Shoko thinks, hm, so it actually happened. Then, the contingency plan snaps into action and Shoko is up to her neck in things to do.
--
Dear fifteen-year-old Shoko, how’s it going? Just checking in from thirteen years in the future. You might be a little skeptical of the buttoned-up strangers who offered to pay for your livelihood after they saw you get gutted for stealing from your dealer, but turns out they’re just sending you to school. You’ll go along with it because there isn’t anything else interesting to do. And I know you won’t believe this, but you’ll actually make a couple friends. You’ll even go to medical school. But this next part is more believable. Those friends die, and the first one gets possessed by a body-hopper, and you’re going to do the same procedure on your other dead friend so that someone who is copying the body-hopper can hop into his body to kill this other guy who killed that body in the first place.
Shoko chuckles to herself. Yuuta stares up at her fearfully from where he’s strapped onto an operating table.
“Oh, don’t give me that look,” she says, approaching him with the anesthetic needle. “This will be just as fun as it sounds.”
She doesn’t need to knock Yuuta out just yet, but she’d rather have him asleep than whimpering and crying while she works on Gojo. So she waits a few seconds until he passes out and then pulls the cover off Gojo’s body. He still looks barely dead. She’d sealed all his injuries shut, including the slice that chopped him clean in two, as soon as she’d gotten her hands on him. So although she hadn’t managed to snatch his life before it dissipated, his body is in great condition. All she needs to do now is cut up his head.
Twenty-eight-year-old Shoko, what the everloving fuck has your life come to? she imagines fifteen-year-old Shoko saying. Great question, she answers herself, taking a medical drill to Gojo’s head. You are performing a craniotomy with no formal training. She never did a surgical rotation in medical school. She’s operating on a ten-minute Google search and vague recollections from exams she cheated on years ago. She has no assistants except for Nitta Arata, the Kyoto first-year who can’t do much more than hand her scalpels with trembling hands. And the reversed cursed technique is a useless advantage when her patient is dead: Gojo Satoru, whose soul is normally spitting and crackling cursed energy, is now nothing but a slab of mortal flesh.
Shoko saws open Gojo’s head. She has to move confidently or the cuts won’t be clean. She clears out the dura mater and lifts the top half of his skull out cleanly. She pauses for a moment to admire the brain of the greatest sorcerer once alive. After this point, she’s freestyling; no craniotomy how-to includes the removal and replacement of the brain. She cuts it out at the stem and transfers it to the buffer she’d cooked up like a real chemist, made to imitate the ionic environment of the brain to preserve its osmotic balance. She probably doesn’t need to preserve Gojo’s brain, but she’ll call it sentimentality.
Next, Yuuta: having practiced on her dead specimen, the live one goes smoothly as well. His curse, Rika, freaks out a whole lot and refuses to haunt Gojo’s body, but there’s not much she can do except cry and cradle Yuuta’s body. That’s probably for the better if Yuuta wants a hope of having a living body he can return to; otherwise, he’ll be stuck as the literal and figurative reincarnation of Gojo Satoru forever. Shoko wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
Removed from the anesthetic circulating his bloodstream, Yuta wakes up the moment she connects his brain stem to Gojo’s spinal cord with the reversed technique. The poor guy has to watch as Shoko sews his head back shut, but it’s all over soon enough. Within minutes, Gojo Satoru’s body sits up, alive and well.
Yuuuuuutaaaaaa, wails Rika. Dooon’t goooo.
“It seems she has a type,” Shoko says to Yuuta, but he’s already gone; he doesn’t have time to waste bantering with her.
Shoko turns to Rika. “And as for you, work hard if you want your boy back, okay?”
Shoko personally would rather not have to see Yuuta walking and talking in Gojo’s body for the rest of her life, either. She’s had enough possessed (repurposed? sustainably upcycled?) dead classmates for a lifetime.
--
Rika does work hard. And though Yuuta nearly makes Gojo’s body die a second time over, the pieces all fall very fortunately into place such that Shoko can reverse the procedure and stick Yuuta’s brain back in his body. Once he’s all settled and his curse-lover is cooing happily at him, Shoko contemplates the inconvenience of Gojo’s corpse. His brain is still sitting in her buffer.
Kid Shoko, would you like to become a mad scientist? Shoko asks herself. Unlike the other sorcerers fighting for their lives right now with their righteous little hearts and unwavering little morals, Shoko has no reason to keep doing this. Rather, she has no reason to do this anymore.
Old Shoko, you’re being dramatic. There’s still Utahime. There’s still the students. There’s still the money, and the passive, monotonous life of being the sorcerers’ doctor.
Gojo Satoru’s brain sits in what should be adequate preservation for her to experiment, to try her hand at some evil. To discover something. What was it that Kenjaku said? It just sounds fun. I want to see something I’ve never seen before. Or something like that. Shoko heard the speech secondhand, because she never gets to see the villains’ speeches. She only ever hears out the heroes.
The brain of the most interesting person to have ever lived sits in front of her. Shoko contemplates this for a few minutes. Then she fishes the brain out of her buffer and sits it back in Gojo’s skull. Shoko has no reason to heal people, but she also has no reason to do anything else. It doesn’t sound especially fun to know what’s inside Gojo’s brain. She honestly just wishes she could have asked him to his face. She thumbs his sliced-up forehead briefly.
“See you, Gojo,” she says, and then covers him and shelves him with the rest of the rows of bodies she will cremate when this is all over.
--
Megumi looks unsteady on his feet but otherwise surprisingly intact when he wanders into Shoko’s office. She heard that he woke up earlier that day, and knew he’d be here to discuss Gojo sooner rather than later. She nimbly takes the opportunity to conduct a medical exam on him.
“Oh, I’m fine,” he protests weakly as Shoko gestures for him to sit.
“You’re a medical wonder. Survived a half dozen hits of Unlimited Void and you’re still speaking sentences.”
“Soul-body separation or something like that.”
“Fascinating indeed. Now let me see if I can peer into your mind.”
Megumi cringes a bit. Shoko supposes he probably doesn’t want her to see what’s going on in his depressed teenager mind. Too bad she can already guess most of it. Shoko inspects the back of Megumi’s head, trying to understand the weird way his cursed energy flow has warped. It hovers more in his brain than it used to.
“I got the letter,” he says abruptly. “I’m surprised he thought he was likely enough to die to write it.”
“I was too. Maybe that’s why I did him the favor.”
“Do you know what was in it?”
“Yep. Pretty funny, if you ask me.”
Megumi’s mouth quirks up in a rare smile. “Yeah. After all these years, he thought I’d care.”
“I think he felt guilty about it.”
“Hm. Was he a bad person?”
“Who, Gojo?”
Megumi huffs, “I already know the answer to that.”
“Well, I didn’t know your dad, so I can’t say. He was a contract hitman. He beat Gojo once, in our second year. Only person who ever has.” Until now, she supposes. “It wasn’t a clean kill, but he got close enough that Gojo had to learn the reversed technique to heal. Then he blasted your dad with Purple. As Gojo describes it, he was standing there with a crater in his torso when he said he had a son, and told Gojo to do whatever.”
Megumi nods. Shoko wonders what this inane attempt at penance must sound like to a soul which has endured infinity five times over.
“Do you think that’s why he found me?” Megumi asks, just as Shoko thinks he’s disappeared into some distant corner of his mind.
“Who knows,” says Shoko, even though she does, or at least she has an idea. But she doesn’t know how to explain the complex tangle of egoism and selflessness, of vengeance and love, of grief and hope, that walked Gojo’s feet to Megumi’s doorstep so many years ago.
“Did he ever… beyond my technique. Beyond training me.” Megumi risks a glance at Shoko. “I never knew if I had any value beyond that. To him.”
“I’m not sure if I can answer that question. Gojo doesn’t understand other people. I’m not joking when I call his personality a little evil,” Shoko says bluntly. He’s not here to get offended by her, anyway. “He’s very selfish. But ultimate selfishness is ultimately selfless. I don’t think he even sees the line between your training and your upbringing. Raising a strong ally means raising a healthy child. He won’t shut up about you. I guess that’s the best answer I can give.”
“You’re talking about him like he’s still here.”
She hadn’t realized. Maybe she’s used to talking about dead friends in the present tense, given ten years and Geto. “Sorry. Force of habit.”
“What do you think will happen now, Ieiri-sensei? What will happen to us?”
Asking such naive questions, Megumi sounds like a child again. Well, he still is. But it’s hard to remember that when she’s seen him both as a six-year-old and as a sixteen-year-old who has endured infinity five times over.
“It’s up to you to decide,” she settles on saying. “I’m not the one who does the action around here.”
--
Gojo had enough foresight to write his students quippy little notes about their parents’ whereabouts, but not enough to arrange his own death rites. So, despite all the whining Shoko endured from Gojo in high school about how much he hated his family, it’s the Gojo clan that gets the rights to his body, the wake, and the funeral. In the most backwards wake Shoko has ever witnessed, the persons most distanced from the deceased sit in the front and conduct the rites, while the few people who truly knew him skirt around the back. Well, whatever. It would have been too much of a headache to concoct made-up family relations to carry out funeral rites best fitting Gojo. Who would have been his eldest son, Megumi? The poor boy is barely awake and already planning his sister’s burial.
Gojo’s will did specify a few things, though. It states that he is to be buried in Tokyo, at Jujutsu Tech’s graveyard for sorcerers without family graves, instead of in Kyoto at the Gojo estate. While the Gojo clan fortune is relinquished to the next head, his sizeable personal savings are bequeathed to Megumi, along with his apartment, belongings, and as he concluded hastily, “anything else I forgot to mention.” In a post-script, he added that Megumi is free to distribute these assets among “people I like and that you also like.”
“What if he doesn’t make it?” Shoko asked him back when Gojo was making all these death plans.
“Nah, won’t happen,” Gojo said, and that was that. Whether this was out of prescient foresight or simply because he couldn’t bear to consider the alternative, Shoko will never know. Well, Megumi lived and is now awake enough to read over Gojo’s will with growing confusion on his face.
“Why is it all mine?” he asks, as if saddled with a cranky pet or a defunct car instead of millions of yen.
“Who else is there?”
“Like, you. Or Itadori or Okkotsu-senpai. Or anyone less likely to have kicked the bucket in the past week, or definitely someone whose soul wasn’t sunk in a bath of evil when he wrote this.”
“Maybe it’s his way of showing favoritism,” Shoko says. Or hope. Or affection, or ugh, love. That would be expecting a bit too much from him, though. In all likelihood, Gojo probably figured that Shoko wouldn’t want his personal effects and that Megumi might be touched by the gesture. Maybe it’s Gojo’s haphazard way of trying to say, after all these years, look, you are family. She hopes Megumi is touched by the gesture, because it’s the last gesture he’s going to get.
The other item in the will is the matter of Gojo’s body. This is the personal effect Shoko does care about, and she made sure Gojo wrote it clearly: Ieiri Shoko is to handle my body during all death rites in place of any coroner, priest, or literally anyone else who has any reason to touch my body. So Shoko is the one who dresses the body in the ceremonial kimono insisted upon by the Gojo clan, tucks it into the casket, oversees its transfer to the temple, and carts it back to the Jujutsu Tech crematorium. Maybe this is her place in Gojo’s lineup: everyone else gets his life, and she gets his death.
She takes a long look at the body, all dolled up and serene. It hardly looks like Gojo anymore. If she looks at him for too much longer she’ll forget what he looked like with his wild grin, and with his tongue sticking out, and with his stupid pout, and with his whole face split open by his laughter.
“Okay, goodbye for real,” she tells him, and slides him into the furnace. She watches him burn up and collects the ashes herself, just to be absolutely sure she will never see this body walking and talking again. Then she hands off the ashes to a bunch of platinum-haired nobodies who will carry out the familial rites, while she goes home to drink and sleep it all off.
--
“Shoko!” As always, the sound of Utahime’s voice always brings an involuntary smile to Shoko’s face. “To what do I owe this immense pleasure?”
“Can’t I just call to call?”
“Well, you never do,” says Utahime, which is true. It’s just that Shoko rarely has things that she wants to say. “So what’s up?”
“That kid, Nitta Arata. He helped me out in Shibuya and Shinjuku. What… what’s he doing in Kyoto, anyway? Like, who’s teaching him?”
The other line is quiet for a moment, buzzing with static. “Well, no one, really. There’s no other non-combatants here.”
“I think he can pick up the reversed technique. He’s not bad.”
“You think? You want me to send him over to Tokyo?”
“Yeah, for a bit, maybe. You probably need him there.”
“We do, but I think the long-term benefit of you being able to teach him RCT would make it worthwhile. It might be hard to convince the principal, though.”
“Then let’s piss him off a bit. That idiot isn’t around to do it anymore, anyway.”
A startled laugh escapes Utahime’s mouth. “That’s true. This isn’t usually your role, Shoko.”
“What, taking initiative?”
“Taking interest. You tapped out a long time ago.”
Well, Shoko has been thinking about the future more these days, somewhat against her will. She hopes this doesn’t come back to bite her if everyone dies or she’s unable to fix anything or whatever. But if it does, then she can always retreat back into her carapace of apathy just like she did when she was sixteen.
“I’ll start calling more from now on, Uta,” she says by way of farewell. “Until then.”
--
Some of Gojo’s fierce optimism must have rubbed off on Shoko, because she froze Tsumiki’s body instead of cremating it with the rest of the Culling Games corpses. When she tells Megumi that they can do a full ceremony for her, he actually folds up in a deep bow.
“Thank you,” he says, and repeats it. “Thank you. Thank you.”
Thank you for keeping her, thank you for believing I’d come back. It’s not Shoko he should thank. She doesn’t believe that the dead’s ashes are doing anything except fertilizing some soil. She doesn’t believe in any reason for ritual except the meaning it imparts to those left behind.
When all is said and done with the funeral rites, Megumi and Shoko bury the urn with Tsumiki’s ashes together. They consider the grave together: the austere black headstone, the twin bunches of flowers Megumi hand-picked that morning. Megumi looks calm, at peace even. For a teenager who seems to have been depressed for most of his waking moments, Shoko is pleasantly surprised by his demeanor. Maybe his time in the Unlimited Void enlightened him.
It’s rare that Shoko spends time alone with Megumi, but she suspects it will become more common from now on. The one thing they share is the cutout of Gojo in their lives, the confusion he left behind for those few who remained in his orbit all these years. If Gojo was alive, would he have stood here with them? Would he crouch beside Megumi to add flowers to the grave? He might have just told them, lightly, I’ll leave it to you, and they wouldn’t be able to measure his grief to try to guess whether or not he cared. Shoko will never know. She never ended up being able to crack that brain, so complex, so contradictory. She’ll never know if he was unreachable by human understanding or if the right person just never came along.
“That idiot should’ve let me handle Geto’s body, too,” she comments, tasting cigarette smoke on the words. It’s that weakness, that kindness, after all, that led them to where they are now. Or maybe not. Maybe fate is a valley.
A faint smile appears on Megumi’s face. Shoko wonders at this transformative capacity of death, that has turned the most irritating person on Earth into a cherished soul. She heard that Megumi laughed aloud for the very first time in anyone’s memory when he read Gojo’s letter. She would’ve killed to see it.
“You can say that again,” he says.
Megumi heads off to some mission, to keep the cycle of curses churning or maybe to fix the system and save them all. Shoko’s not sure which one she believes anymore. She’s always ridiculed Gojo and his lofty ideals: she’s found the world to be incapable of change. The corpses turn up in her infirmary all the same. But the future is here; it’s here every time the sun rises.
Shoko tosses her cigarette into the trash can and on a whim chucks the whole damn thing. She’s quit before and failed. Maybe fate is a valley, and there is only one path to the hollow. Regardless, she should stop thinking of things as incapable of change.
--