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It’s not the first time Gojo Satoru has come back from a mission that’s snowballed into a days-long chase and needed Ieiri Shoko’s reverse curse technique to help stitch him up a bit (though these instances are becoming rare and rarer still, as Satoru rapidly advances his abilities). Not the first time she has had to endure Satoru’s whining over various annoyances that pesky curses have been making for him here and there, covering matters both serious and unserious as she replenishes his energy. And it’s definitely not the first time she’s had to bear witness to complaints about the increasing number of solo missions both he and Geto Suguru have been assigned to lately, as they gain strength in leaps and bounds.
“It’s just so inefficient if you really think about it. There’s no support,” Satoru gripes.
Shoko had cleared him nearly forty minutes ago, yet he’s followed her out and continues to loiter around her, nonsensically subjecting himself to the proclaimed-detestable carcinogens that hover around her like a well-timed cloud; it’s known that this hour of the afternoon will find Ieiri Shoko catching a smoke break more often than not.
She spares a glance at the mop of white hair next to her once the cigarette between her teeth catches a light, and gives him credit for looking as if he isn’t counting down to the hour they expect a certain dark-haired companion of theirs to get back from his own assignment. Shoko listens to Satoru chatter, settling into the comfort of his presence and her little stick of nicotine, humming sympathetically along when appropriate, and mindful of the direction of the breeze when she lets it catch and carry the smoke from her mouth.
“And I’ve talked to Yaga about this already, but he seems intent on keeping us separate on missions,” Satoru gesticulates with his long limbs and carries his pitch low in imitation. “He said ‘Gojo, if you’re getting lonely, I’ll send an underclassman with you on your next mission and you can teach them a thing or two about teamwork.’ As if that’ll help anyone! There’s a reason it’s Suguru and I on missions, you know. Who else could keep up? Can’t replicate it. Suguru’s my one and only. Anyways, as I was saying about the mission-”
He loses her there a little bit, as her mind catches on that phrase. My one and only. He had said it with such levity just now, but it’s not the first time she’s heard Satoru use those words to describe Suguru.
The cigarette balances comfortably between her deft fingers as she taps it lightly, a sprinkling of ash falling to the grey asphalt beneath them. Shoko weighs a thought. She looks up at Gojo sideways from behind the curtain of pin-straight hair and feels the air shift around her. Something anticipatory. Maybe its the feeling of summer slowly creeping toward its end that has gotten her feeling so pensive. And bold. Something’s got to give somewhere down the line. Summer days won’t stretch forever.
“Dude,” a look passes over her face, conflicted but quick. Satoru had promptly halted mid-speech with a questioning lilt, so she keeps on going, slow and articulate, as if talking to a small child in a second language. “You know that’s not normal, right?”
Satoru merely blinks at her. She takes a drag of her cigarette.
“You mean, the way the curse was able to regenerate like that despite not bearing any other high-level markers? Yeah, I know.”
She looks at him as if she wants to swallow and choke on smoke and just die there rather than deal with this. With him. Fucking hell, what did I expect, bringing it up first. Slow exhale. See it through, Ieiri, you started it.
“No,” she reaches for the reserves of her patience, needing Satoru to understand what she’s saying. “I mean that phrase you said earlier. My one and only,” she waves her hand as if the smoke could catch shapes in the air and curl into animated figures that’d illustrate her point. Faintly, the particles circle and sway in a dance, positive and negative space taking vague form, the highest degree of resolution it can manage, a mere gesture of a sweeping embrace before it all dissipates.
“It’s not normal. It’s not something anyone would say about a friend,” she says, looking at him meaningfully.
Saturo is not following. He is so smart and so fucking stupid, and she can see he is not following.
“Well, I get that,” he doesn’t, “but Suguru isn’t just a friend, he’s my best friend. My one and only.”
“That’s a contradiction,” she rebuts, daring to press on this for once. “Best friend implies the presence of other friends. Therefore that’s not a ‘one and only’.” Shoko is getting real worked up now, “And if there weren’t other friends, he’d be your one friend OR your only friend. Which is different from saying he’s your One and Only.“
“You’re not making sense right now.” A slight frown tugs on his lips. “Aren’t we saying the same thing? He’s my one and only. Friend. My one-and-only-friend...”
There’s something to be said about the way it isn’t rolling out quite right. Something to be said about the wrinkle in his brow that makes Shoko hope and pray that he’s hearing himself, how it doesn’t sound so much like he’s trying to convince her, as much as himself. On the surface though, she is incensed that he just said all that out loud and it’s still not clicking, all while insulting her and her friendship in the process.
And the twat is still talking, testing iterations and trying in vain to find the right emphasis.
“… my one. and only best friend. My-”
“What am I, then? A houseplant?” Shoko asks. Demands. Think, oblivious fucker.
Gojo pauses. They stare at each other, unblinking. And then,
“Shoko is Shoko.”
Her eyes roll so hard she can almost see the back of her skull. Kill me, or Kill him, is what the writing in there said. She didn’t get a good enough look to tell which.
“You’re ridiculous.” She puffs at him.
She would’ve pressed further, if he had only said something else. Said Shoko was his friend too, or that it wasn’t quite the same with her. She’d try to ask leading questions about why that is and what sets this apart from that and iterated the semantic differences of any scramble of the words only, one, and. Even if he threw snark back at her, she would’ve grilled his attempts at evasion, ask why he’s getting so defensive. But he said, Shoko is Shoko. So genuine. So simple. So fucking clueless. A part of her is endeared despite herself. Somehow Satoru is still cute even when he’s dense beyond belief. Maybe that’s why Suguru hasn’t lost his shit on him yet. That, or the fact that he’s on the same damn boat.
“Oh come on, Sho. Don’t sulk. You know I think you’re the best.”
“I know.”
She knows. Because she’s his friend, and Suguru is his one and only. Shoko is Shoko and the sky is blue and Satoru is Suguru’s and Suguru is his too.
She understands why he can’t see it. She really does. They’ve been friends for a while now and are deeply bonded by their experiences, a trio of best friends, you could argue. But somewhere down the line, imperceptibly, it became something different between Satoru and Suguru. She gets how he can’t see something that’s become so obvious to her — it’s so natural between them after all. If something is always in sight you no longer really see it, because you’re far too used to it to notice it anymore. It’s just like how your eyes always see the tip of your nose. It’s constant, but your mind doesn’t register it.
Or, maybe it’s more like one of those optical illusions, black and white figure drawings, a single image that’s both a vase and a pair of faces, depending how you look at it.
Look here, what do you see? Do you see the vase? Or do you see faces? There’s two, they’re facing each other. Do you see? Be honest now. Focus on the figures.
Focus on the black. It’s a vase. White. Two faces.
Black. Vase.
White. Faces.
Black, vase; vessel. White, faces opposite.
Black, friends. White, lovers.
Black, one. White, only.
Fuck. She exhales deeply and lets grey smoke with its figureless particles fill her vision. She wants the smoke to occlude her sight so she can stop looking at black and white everyday and wonder why they won’t let themselves be together in the way they want. She wants the smoke to coagulate and crystallize into form in front of her so she can grab the metaphorical vase from the metaphorical picture and break it over the towering snowy-white head next to her. Maybe that’ll knock some sense into it.
But Shoko is Shoko, and so she doesn’t push it. Especially when dealing with the willfully blind, to the sixth power. Maybe it’s enough that she decided to finally say something. Maybe her words will sink into Satoru’s subconscious where it can grow and bloom until it floats up to the surface of his conscious mind. If he ever stops running himself far too busy becoming the strongest to let it. There are far more concerning things she thinks he hasn’t been noticing lately. But she’s only a friend, so what does she know?
“Let’s go get some ice cream,” she suggests, not wanting to spiral down that rabbit hole of thought. Save it for another day when the black white grey particles aren’t stinging her eyes in this summer heat.
So they go. She orders dark chocolate, because they make it like midnight here, more bitter than sweet, and Satoru orders cookie butter with heaping toppings of candy crisps and chocolate chips so full it nearly overflows. They sit at their favorite spot by the window, spooning mouthfuls as they twist on the bar-height swivel chairs, the taste of dark chocolate coating over the nicotine on her tongue, Satoru catching falling candies with his mouth as they’re dislodged with every scoop. She badgers him about getting a blood test so he can monitor his sugar levels. He dives into a theory about his technique and loose correlation with managing sugar, and they debate about the extent to which their jujutsu protects their bodies in the case of health and non-injuries, in the case of afflictions such as juvenile diabetes.
And if Satoru buys another scoop (this time, matcha, with a simple mochi topping) to take back home to Suguru, says he just wants to test the bounds of his Limitless technique in keeping the heat out, keeping it from melting the whole walk back to campus where the cicadas sing loudest, Shoko says nothing more of it that summer day.
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