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There is still a faint smile on Gojo’s face as he lies in the morgue.
He is lying unattended. Other people who are still alive and in need of urgent care were prioritized by Shoko. Or she is just postponing taking care of him, postponing looking at him.
Ijichi is also here, helping her carry injured bodies. He is intentionally not looking at Gojo’s body.
"He said he trusted me the most," he murmurs in a voice only Shoko can hear, after a while.
"And?" Shoko asks without looking. It is an obvious truth, something that not needed to be said out loud, or voiced at all. There were only a few people Gojo trusted, and of course, Ijichi was one of them.
"I never knew," he mutters under his breath. He is an idiot. Shoko chooses not to comment on it while watching the rush at the door.
She sees Rika bring Yuuta’s split body. "Help me here," Shoko orders Ijichi.
How many split bodies does Shoko have to witness before her own death…
Shoko has to start now. She needs to touch Gojo; she needs to sew him back together. After learning to use RCT, she no longer needed to tend to him; Gojo never get injured again, and he could handle his small ones himself. She had not touched him for a long time, except for the times Gojo had to deactivate his Infinity so Shoko could smack him. But now he is lying on a wheeled bed in front of her, waiting to be treated, waiting to be touched freely, with his technique no longer forbidding people from touching him.
He seems unaware of the horrors awaiting him, or what his student will do while lying down beside Yuuta.
But Shoko knows Gojo knew.
He knew, and he accepted his fate—or rather, his body’s fate. He agreed to be used as a weapon; he even found the idea of his body being used like in a mecha anime amusing. He entertained the idea until Shoko and Utahime told him to shut the fuck up two nights before. Not that they thought his body would ever actually be used like that. Never in his life did Gojo think he would lose. But there is someone else who never thought it, never considered it for a second, never believed it: Shoko Ieiri. Shoko would never admit it to his face, but she sometimes understands why Getou founded a cult to cherish the strongest. Shoko believed that Gojo never even needed this backup plan. She trusted him with every cell of her body.
After he was freed from the Prison Realm, Shoko scolded him. Yaga was no longer with them; Nanami had also left. Only Shoko could reach Gojo her voice, so she scolded him good for not allowing her to take care of Getou’s body. Gojo listened quietly, was looking at his own feet. They were in this morgue; he was sitting on a wheeled bed, and Shoko was standing. Maybe he was sitting on the same bed he is lying on now.
"What did you think when you saw the bodies of Haibara and Nanami?" Gojo asked quietly.
Their bodies were split in half, each missing one part. At least she could see Haibara's face; the only thing that remained of Nanami was his beige trousers. Shoko did not answer.
"Suguru was smiling. He was the coldest he could ever be, but smiling. I guess I didn't want you to remember him like that," Gojo continued.
She can understand what he was trying to say now, because Gojo himself is fucking smiling as well. He was always a copycat; he had been jealous of Getou’s natural charisma forever, so of course he would mimic him in his dying moments.
A smiling face with open eyes—not activated by Infinity, so no glowing blue but ridiculously beautiful calm eyes—is the cruelest sight of all. Because of his smiling face, she expects Gojo to wake up, wink at her, and say his handsome face will be ruined because of her. He will imply she must be jealous of him, so she is ruining him.
She would ruin him good; she would even stub out her cigarette on his face if he wakes up.
But he is unmoving. Lying still while Shoko finishes sewing him.
Then, Shoko takes the scalpel in her hand, moving it toward Gojo’s tended face, the faded color of his eyes, his long eyelashes, his eery but soft white hairs. She hopes she can forgive herself later for what she will do to him; she hopes the scalpel will not disturb his peace in afterlife. She hopes that her touch will feel warm against his skin.
When she opens his skull, she sees his brain. The brain of Gojo Satoru. His remarkable, brilliant brain, never missing anything, never late to reflect or react. His ridiculous brain, full of bullshit and jokes. Can Shoko see those, the roots of all his lunacy or extravagance, if she looks at his brain hard enough?
“Take good care of my brain, at least,” he had told Shoko the day before. “Don’t give it to someone else, especially Yuuji. He might try to eat it.”
Itadori was there; he groaned at Gojo’s joke, only to be scruffed by his hair a moment later.
Behind her, Yuuta puts on his ring one last time for the showdown, as Mei Mei had called it in the broadcast. Shoko knows he will carry the burden of wearing his teacher’s skin until his dying day. And that would be the best possible outcome. The worse one would be that he would die in Gojo’s body, and the worst of all is that he will live in Gojo’s body for the rest of his life.
Thus both classmates, her best friends, become victims of the same technique. Their bodies are scarred at their foreheads.
Gojo Satoru is hit by his own Hollow Purple for the first time in his life. Yet he was powered up by the final Black Flash he had landed on his foe, the King of Curses, Ryomen Sukuna. With this power-up, his reverse cursed technique regenerated as well, and the injuries and burns that appeared on his face and body heal quickly.
He does not take his eyes off his foe, so he never sees what the scars on his body look like. He only assumes they are similar to the ones he inflicted years ago on Fushiguro Toji, the father of the boy he is facing right now. At least, the body once belonged to the boy; Satoru watched him grow, watched him get taller year by year, his body toning month by month.
The conversation he had earlier about giving his all against the boy was not the whole truth. He told Sukuna that it would not be a problem for him to go against the boy because the boy looks like his father, because his father once killed him and ruined Satoru’s life altogether. But this is not the case. Year by year, Satoru comes to the realization that Megumi is his own person.
Sukuna stands before him now, visibly desperate. While wearing Megumi’s face, he almost looks like the neglected child Gojo had first encountered in that alley years ago.
No ordinary human would ever survive his Hollow Purple, but Sukuna is not an ordinary human. It is a good thing, because it means Megumi still has a chance to survive. But there are always risks when it comes to Sukuna.
In that moment, feeling his injuries tending to themselves, tingling like little pinches, Gojo Satoru is certain of one thing: he has won!
He stands tall as the strongest, not just of today but of all time, because he has defeated the strongest in history. He wears his most prized grin, showing all of Japan, everyone watching the broadcast, especially his students, who the winner is. He was prepared to die here, even excited by the possibility; he hasn’t been touched since the boy’s father, but he no longer needs to die. There is still so much left for him to do, so many left for him to save. He has defeated Ryomen Sukuna.
Suddenly he remembers a movie he saw alone in theaters: Troy. He had not started at Jujutsu High yet, so he had no friends then. He rewatched it many times with Shoko and Suguru in the common room at Jujutsu High, but it was always crowded and noisy during their movie nights. The only time Satoru ever watched the movie while truly trying to understand it was the first time.
Satoru was raised in a very traditional clan in Kyoto, the old capital. Everything, even the air, felt old in his house; everything was Japanese and only Japanese. Coming across Western myths was impossible for him, so he never even considered that there was such a thing as Western myths. So Troy was an eye-opener for him. He could see it was not the best movie, but it was like an introductory course. Why is he remembering it now? Why is he remembering Paris, the arrow shot at the left heel of Achilles?
It is alarming. What is he missing? Where is his heel? Where did he get hit before? Only in his own hollow purple, his domain tug-of-war, and his own brain frying and…
His arm.
He has just lost his arm before applying RCT to it, his arm severed at his elbow, the cut from Mahoraga just before it was exorcised by Gojo. How did it do it? How did Mahoraga manage to cut his arm? His Infinity was active at the time. Gojo Satoru is sure he has won; he is the victor. He—
He feels the cut across his torso. It is almost painless, like a paper cut: seamless, swift, and without pain.
Sukuna must have cut it; the grin on his face is victorious, same with the one Gojo sported a moment before. He must have cut the world in two, otherwise it would never be possible to reach Gojo; he must have taken the example from Mahoraga. Everything in the path of his attack must have absolute damage, and Satoru was not only in the way, but he was the main target. It is an honor to be targeted with a newly developed technique only for himself by the great Ryomen Sukuna, he thinks to himself. Oh, these are his final thoughts, such a samurai way to die by thinking all of these!
He lies down in Shinjuku split in half.
He feels death. Death rests on him like a blanket. Death on his abdomen, death on his torso. Death on his heart. Death in the earth beneath him.
He looks at the sky; it is a sunny day despite being December. He has always liked December because he was born then. Until last year. Until he lost Suguru on a December evening. Evening hours are no time for dying, yet Suguru gave his last breath while the sun was setting. He had never thought about the hour of his own death before. He was sealed around nine p.m., so he guessed his dying hour must be around then. But now it is only the afternoon. At least it is the same day he is dying with Suguru. The same chilly air fills his lungs at the final moment of both.
His eyes can no longer see the sky; after that, there will be only darkness. He always thought he would be alone, utterly alone in the darkness after death.
Darkness and loneliness.
Everyone dies alone.
Not even two people can share a solitude in death.
Yet now his eyes rest on the inside of an airport terminal instead of the darkness. He knows his physical body lies unmoving, yet here he can see his friends. Oh, his dead friends. Because he is also dead, but he is not alone.
He told lies to Megumi; one does not die alone.
This is a relief. He left his students behind to go on living; he meets his friends in death.
He meets Suguru once again. At least death is gentle enough to let them meet again.
Gojo Satoru slouches back in his seat, knowing that his students will succeed and hoping, above all, that he will not see them here anytime soon.
He is here now, carrying no regrets in death. He feels peaceful at last, having entrusted his body to the care of Yuuta and Shoko. He knows the scalpels will not feel cold against his flesh when the hands holding them belong to her.