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Okkotsu brought her here at her insistence. Teleported her to the battlefield along with him, so that he could focus on getting right of Mahoraga while she healed Gojo. He couldn’t do both at once. Taking a body apart was trivially easy. Putting it back together was an art that required precision—he couldn’t do that with the untamable shikigami rampaging across Shinjuku, bound to Sukuna’s whim and will. She would do it. His expertise was needed elsewhere.
Shoko trusted no hands but her own to work on him. The last of her classmates—of her friends.
Friend, bastard, classmate, ally, annoyance. Hope. Gojo.
She looks into his eyes—mystical universe blue, a glittering hope turquoise. They used to say blue was the color of the cosmos. Cosmic blue, ethereal, the universe reflected back at her. Their only hope, flat out on his back, choking up blood through a broken sternum. Dying. Shoko didn't even think something like this was possible, shaking hands covered in her best friend's blood as she weaves her technique through his tissues, trying to coax bone fragments out of his lungs. Mahoraga’s sword has practically pulped his sternum, ribs and the organs between. It's a miracle his heart was holding up so well against such an injury, traces of his own cursed energy threaded through his body as if it were making an attempt to protect itself; but it was not enough. And Mahoraga is just behind her, Okkotsu screaming through tears. Shoko can't move Gojo—not yet. She has to get him relatively stable first, so that he doesn't bleed out while she drags him to safety. A great arm sweeps upward, Shoko's hair wafting in the breeze it leaves in its wake.
The sword is coming down on her this time; and Okkotsu is screaming, screaming, screaming somewhere behind her, off to the side, a desperate chorus of; ”It's me you want, it's me!”
Shoko knows what she has to do—she falls on Satoru, body arched over his own. A human shield. He's always been a shield for others, always dripping in arrogance and attitude; but always the shield, always the first to get up and say, I'll do it. Her best friend. Shoko falls on top of Gojo and shields him. She has no Infinity to protect her, no Limitless to create infinite space between her and the sword. It will cut her, and it will hurt.
She feels the sword bite into the delicate meat of her side, feels something inside of her burst and she screams despite herself. Almost loses herself to the pain, her body spasming around the blade as she frantically grasps at mental straws to calm herself down. I have to stay calm, I have to stay calm—I can heal it, I can—shaky assurances she tells herself as Mahoraga suddenly stumbles, sword up and out of her as quickly as it came and now she's gushing, gushing; fingers going numb—she has to spare precious energy to send to her own wounds, stitch the organ shut and staunch the bleeding. She can do this. She can do this.
Somewhere in the distance, she can hear Okkotsu crying out in anguish. ”Shishou!” There’s another scream mixed in with his own, an enraged female wail—but not her own. Rika’s.
Shoko pushes herself up with shaking arms, a pained groan escaping from her lips while bile churns in her guts. Her side stings, the flesh and tissues slowly stitching themselves back together. It's rare that she has to use her technique on herself. She braces her side with one bloody hand for a brief moment, and then she gets back to work. Hands spread out across Gojo’s injured chest, their blood mixing on her hands as she pushes her cursed energy into his body, into his tissues and bones and organs, trying to un-rip and un-tear and un-shatter. Trying to will his broken body back together.
“Shhhh…” a bloodied arm rises from the ground, grasping her upper arm. “Sho—” a cough, wet and rough, “—Shoko—” and then he chokes, more blood bubbling at the sides of his mouth. “I—I saw Suguru and—” more coughing. More blood. There was so much blood—his body laying in it, his starspun hair stained with it. The human body can only lose so much of it, and there were limits even to her ability to forestall death. She has to be faster, she has to heal him faster—
“Shut the fuck up,” she snaps. “Save your strength. Focus on not dying.”
“‘Kay…” he sounds so weak, voice barely above a breathless whisper. His grip on her arm weakens, smearing blood down to her elbow where his hand comes to rest. “Vuh—very easy task t-to do…”
“Shhh…” she shushes, weaving energy and tissue. Bone coelestes beneath her fingers, melding and smoothing. The bone rights itself and Gojo groans as it takes its rightful place in front of his heart, as new ribs cage themselves around his tattered lungs. Shoko feels her hands shake, her whole body trembling already and there’s still so much she has to do, so much damage that needs to be fixed—
Thunder booms and lightning crackles overhead as another god comes to join the battle in place of the fallen.
She can just barely make out the conversation a few meters away, over the sound of Rika’s shrieks and her own blood pounding in her ears. ”... find Sukuna… help you… shikigami…”
“Wait…” that voice didn’t come from far away. Gojo’s hand leaves her elbow, gesturing vaguely at nothing. “I can—”
Shoko knows immediately what he’s referring to. “Gojo, no—”
“Just need to get it a little closer and—and I can—”
She doesn’t know how much more his body can take—the last attack he took practically cut him in half and dusted multiple bones in the process. Organs were pulped, turned to jelly and mush that she, even now, meticulously tries to stitch back together. The structures were coming together but he was still fragile, so fragile. Every time she rights something, another problem reveals itself. She was only keeping him on this side of the stars through sheer willpower.
“‘M guh—gonna do what you t-told me to, I promise, I just—I—” out of the corner of her eye, she can see his arm reach skyward, two fingers pointed up. He wants his swan song. Big, arrogant Gojo wants to be in the final act, even if it kills him. The kids are watching, and he still needs to look cool.
He was their hope. The cosmic shift meant to change the Jujutsu World, he said it himself. Gave himself over to Sukuna, to Jujutsu Society, to everyone; body and soul. His students were proof. Okkotsu and Itadori, saved from execution by his hand, were proof. He could change things. He was the cosmic force of change.
And yet—
”Shishou, look out!” It’s Okkotsu, his voice raw and cracking from all the yelling and screaming he’s been doing. Lightning dances in the sky above. She rips her eyes from Gojo, huffing and weak and still trembling from her own poorly-healed wounds to see the great shikigami coming towards her again; unable to organize her thoughts into any kind of coherent battle plan because she had no plan when she came out here, only that she was sick of being on the sidelines and sick of her own neutrality, sick of watching each of her friends die one after the other.
Now she kneels in the dirt to die with one. Or maybe not—vital as she was, so was Gojo. She bends over and wraps her arms around Gojo’s still-broken form, knowing her own body was hardly any sort of protection and yet—she’s desperate. She feels one of his arms wrap around her waist, the other extended upward and curiosity drives Shoko to glance over her shoulder just in time to witness the supernova-kaleidoscope of purple light. Everything disappears as the purple fades to blinding whiteness and Shoko is forced to close her eyes against the bright magnitude of a dying star. Still bright pink, light still filtered through the poor veil of her eyelids and then—
Blackness. But she was still awake. Shoko opens her eyes.
Gojo’s eyes are closed, face blank. The arm around her has gone slack and easily slides down her back and to the ground when she sits up. His chest moves, weakly. He’s alive.
Somewhere in the distance, Rika’s essence peels itself away from Okkotsu, wafting off in the breeze as she expends all of her time and cursed energy keeping him safe. Somewhere, Kashimo digs himself out of the rubble of a fallen building, having been thrown across Shinjuku by the blast. Somewhere, Mahoraga has turned to dust.
Shoko kneels here in the dust and ruin, two fingers pressed against Gojo’s jugular to make sure he didn’t slip away as she survails their surroundings. Nothing but ash and craters, mounds of broken concrete and twisted rebar. Okkotsu, his sword drawn; looking like a tiny living speck amongst all the destruction. Thunder rumbles overhead.
And then another speck. A bat out of hell. Itadori Yuji materializes on the battlefield amid the salt and smoke, crying out for Sukuna. ”Where are you? Come out and give him back, you bitch! Give Fushiguro back!”
Because it can never be that easy, can it? Mahoraga is gone, but not Sukuna. No, he was hiding—disappeared into some shadow while he let the shikigami do his dirty work. It’s dead now. Even if they get Fushiguro back, what would he have? His technique destroyed, his body in ruin. Months of recovery ahead of him if he survived being separated from Sukuna and his life would never be the same. His sister is dead. He would never be a sorcerer again.
”Come out here and fight!” Itadori screams, and Sukuna finally obliges. Shoko feels her breath catch in her throat. She still can’t move Gojo. His rib cage is stable but his organs were not—there was a litany of other injuries she had ignored in favor of fixing the most pressing ones; cracked bones, bruised organs, torn muscle. She kept his heart beating, his lungs breathing and bile from spilling into his abdominal cavity. Everything else had to wait its turn, but if Sukuna is here—
Itadori falls on Sukuna, screaming, fists windmilling, alight with strange bright energy. Shoko turns away as lightning falls, bringing with it Kashimo’s wild laughter. She tries to pull together a plan—she could take Gojo by his shoulders and drag him somewhere, but she wouldn’t be able to drag him far by herself, and she had to account for his injuries, her injuries—
“Shishou.” Okkotsu’s dirty, off-white sneakers enter her vision. He knelt down beside her, at Gojo’s head. “Let me help you, is he stable enough to—”
“—warp?” Okkotsu had taken her here courtesy of his copy technique—given enough exposure, he could copy pretty much any cursed technique, with few exceptions. His warp was one of the few that needed to be refined, similar to his application of reverse cursed technique—his teleports were rough and nauseating, and they had originally appeared further away than expected. Anywhere I’ve seen before, Gojo had explained it. Okkotsu hasn’t seen much of Shinjuku, and most of it was destroyed now. Where would he take them? “I’m not sure, your’s is a lot rougher than Gojo’s. Where would you take us?”
“I—I have an idea but you’re gonna have to trust me.” The kid looks exhausted. He drums his fingers nervously against his thigh and steals a glance down at his teacher. “I can help stabilize him—”
“Fine,” she agrees, “check his spine, I’m going to finish up on his heart and then I think we can take him.”
He nods, and they both shuffle around before they get to work. She taught him how to utilize his reverse cursed technique, how to refine it, the finesse required to heal certain parts of the body. He weaves his energy through Gojo’s body seamlessly and Shoko can’t help but feel proud of him.
Gojo’s heartbeat isn’t strong, but it can’t be helped. She heals the muscle as much as she can, carefully stitching the torn pericardium back together, reinforcing his lungs and rib cage with more cursed energy than necessary. He’s still so weak, so injured. She doesn’t know where Okkotsu is planning to drop them, and he needs to be able to survive the warp.
“Shishou—” she lifts her head from the body of her friend at the sound of Okkotsu’s voice, “—you’re bleeding. I-I could—”
“I’m fine, Okkotsu.” She tells him, remembering the wane look on his face. “Save your strength. Just get me and Gojo wherever you’re planning to take us and then get back to everyone else.”
He nods. “Okay…”
Shoko has a hand wrapped around Okkotsu’s arm and wraps her other arm around Gojo as carefully as she can. Okkotsu follows suit, keeping ahold of them both, lest they slip off into the strange void between points in space. Shoko vaguely recalls something Gojo ranted about once, some physics concept—the tesseract, the shortening of space between two points. A warp, he had said, it warps space. And he called his teleportation warping ever since.
Okkotsu does that now, space collapsing around them and Shoko feels an uncomfortable twisting within herself, her body fighting against some unseen force hellbent on bending her out of shape and then—they were somewhere else.
Okkotsu lets her go gently and her free palm meets soft, dewy grass. Her eyes adjust and she sees—buildings, intact. A school. They’re at—
“I brought you to Kyoto,” Okkotsu tells her, “I was worried if we disappeared, the first place they would look is Tokyo, but I’ve been here before so I figured I’d bring you here instead. Sorry if the infirmary isn’t the same, I just—I was a little paranoid—” he rubs the back of his neck, a nervous smile on his face. A little paranoid. The poor kid is practically a walking panic attack, sometimes.
“It’s fine, you did good, Okkotsu.” She assures him, looking down at Gojo, still atop the grass. Breathing, pulse weak but there. An infirmary nearby, help is within reach. All she has to do is get him there. “Before you go back, could you help me move him?”
Okkotsu nods, already moving to help as the words leave his mouth. “Of course.”
It takes them a few minutes—it had been some time since Shoko has navigated the Kyoto campus—but they get Gojo to the infirmary. The entire campus was still, unused and so was the infirmary. Everything abandoned in favor of the current crisis at hand. Shoko keeps the windows closed and the lights dimmed as much as possible, the door to the infirmary locked and barricaded. It made her feel better, to think maintaining the illusion that the school was unoccupied would give them another modicum of protection.
She gets to work immediately, hooking Gojo up to monitors, to wires and tubes. She rips off the remains of his shirt to place adhesive patches connected to more wires on his chest while Okkotsu sways in the corner, watching her and saying nothing.
“You can go back now,” she says, “they probably need all the help they can get out there.”
“Yeah I—I’ll—” but Okkotsu doesn’t get to finish whatever he was going to say. Instead, he turns a rather concerning shade of grey before he crumples to the floor.
”Shit.” Shoko curses under her breath. She doesn’t have enough hands.
Whatever was going on out in Shinjuku now was unknown to Shoko. The others probably don’t even know where they’ve gone—all they know is one second they were there, and the next they weren’t. Vanished into thin air.
Okkotsu is curled on his side on one of the spare beds, still pale-faced, but awake. There’s a slight tremor in his hands that Shoko notices when she plies him with water, before going back to monitor Gojo’s condition. Every so often, she presses her fingers to a part of her friend’s body and presses her technique beneath his skin, trying to bolster him. She’s reaching the limit of even her technique—all she can do is watch and wait.
Just like she had during Gojo’s bout with Sukuna. Watching and waiting in some dark room, safe and away from the battlefield, where it could only intrude through the use of Mei Mei’s crows on bright TV screens. Powerless to do anything to help him.
The last she saw of the battle had been the strange bright light from Itadori and Kashimo’s lightning. Would they win, she wonders. Would they lose?
Gojo had been unhappy when Itadori died, the first time. Dimmed, frustrated. Angry with the higher ups. If he died this time, Gojo would have no one to blame.
(except himself. except her. except okkotsu, who can barely stand.)
Shoko reaches into her pocket for her pack of cigarettes, disturbingly light already despite the fact that she had purchased it this morning. She opens the box and finds it empty.
Shoko drops into one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs sprinkled throughout the infirmary and begins to wait.
She wakes and Okkotsu is gone. She doesn’t even remember falling asleep, when did she—she had only closed her eyes for a second, she was sure of it and yet—
Gojo.
Her head swivels so hard her neck might snap. He's fine, none of the monitors are blinking or blaring. Pale, breathing in shallow huffs. Holding on by his fingertips, but alive. Shoko allows herself to relax for half a second before she remembers Okkotsu has gone missing.
Shoko pulls herself from the chair she fell asleep in and groans as her back pops, neck sore as she gently flexes it. Her side hurts—the one Mahoraga sliced open. It’s mostly healed now, thanks to her technique, but it still hurts, and the way she slept didn’t help.
Her search takes her everywhere in the infirmary. Under the beds, behind every curtain, the bathrooms, into the adjacent morgue. Okkotsu was nowhere to be found.
Did he warp back? She wonders as she chews on her thumbnail in lieu of a cigarette. He must have. Where else would he have gone?
All she does—all she can do—is sit and wait. She was blind to the current battle in Shinjuku, left alone in the infirmary of what she can only assume was the entirely empty Kyoto campus. Okkotsu was with the others, so they would know where they had gone, but she couldn't help but feel exposed. She gets up and checks the lock on the infirmary doors. She checks the morgue as well, just to be sure. She peeks out the window as carefully as she can, heart pounding away in her chest—afraid she would look out and see that someone was there, but there was nothing. Completely alone. It doesn’t make her feel any better. So she paces, the only sound in the room being Gojo’s breathing and the tap-tap-tap of her shoes against the tile floors.
She goes back to Gojo’s bed.
He’s asleep, and probably would be for some time. He lies inert, weak and pale; and Shoko hates it, she hates it so much. He’s never been quiet or still—not even in his sleep. He moved, skinny octopus limbs slung across his bed or partner or both. If he had his arms around you while he slept, rest assured if he turned over, he would take you with him. She had been the recipient of that several times, awakened in the middle of the night to find herself being taken along for a ride as Gojo rolls from right-to-left or vise-versa. He mumbled too. Nothing ever intelligible, but he mumbled. Now he does neither. Quiet and still. She wishes he’d open those stupid nebula-bright eyes and yell GOTCHA!, she sits on the side of his bed and tries to will it into existence, pretending that any second now, he was going to wake up. Maybe she looks away a few times, a watched pot never boils after all; but she always looks back, always hoping.
It’s too soon, she thinks to herself, stop being stupid. But she’s never wanted anything more in her entire stupid life. She wants him to be awake and to recover and to be fine, she wants it more than she wanted Suguru to come back.
(because he was being stupid. childish and stupid, lashing out in an attempt at… something. she never really figured that part out. he said it was just the beginning, to get rid of non-sorcerers, but that was such a dumb plan to begin with. there were far more non-sorcerers than sorcerers. far more of them than there ever would be, she wagered. a child throwing a tantrum, dark circles under his eyes spending far too much time in the bathroom, or the showers, and she never noticed.)
She wishes Gojo were awake so that he could distract her from her thoughts. There’s no alcohol in here—none that she could drink without bringing great harm on herself, at least—and she was out of cigarettes. There was nothing to take the edge off. Shoko resumes chewing on her thumbnail, staring down at Gojo as if his eyes were going to pop open any second now.
They won’t, there’s too much damage—there’s only so much the body can take at once. You’re lucky he’s not in shock, you’re lucky he’s breathing at all.
She doesn’t dare curl up against him. She just fixed him, she can’t risk breaking him again. Instead she plants a kiss on his forehead and begins once again to wait.
She is alone and then she is not.
They appear in the room like a lightning strike, once silent now suddenly alight with sound as several people now fill the space that was once empty. Okkotsu, face ashen, slumps to the floor and nearly takes Maki with him before she manages to right herself and keep him from banging his head against the tile flooring. Itadori with eyes wide and mouth bloodied, arms full of Fushiguro. A disheveled Kashimo and Hakari, beaming—was this everyone who had jumped to fight Sukuna when Gojo fell?
“The others are on their way,” Maki informs her, one of Okkotsu’s arms thrown over her shoulder. He’s exhausted but awake, and recovering rapidly with the aid of his own massive reserves of cursed energy. Shoko prescribes plenty of water and rest and sends them on their way. Maki promptly dumps him on the nearest bed and sits on him to keep him there.
Itadori keeps a white-knuckle grip on Fushiguro’s limp form, one of his hands missing at least two fingers—his pinkie and ring finger. The injury had been hastily wrapped with a scrap of red cloth and Shoko can put two-and-two together—Fushiguro’s missing fingers and Itadori’s bloody mouth. Poison from a snakebite, though she doesn’t know how. She heals Fushiguro’s hand and tries to gently pry him from Itadori’s grasp, but the kid wasn’t letting go of him for anything. Shoko can’t overpower him with brute strength, so she tries a different approach.
“Itadori, if you want me to help him I’m going to need you to let him go.” He eyes her wearily and then looks down at Fushiguro in his arms, eyes closed. He looked so small—small like he had been when she first met him all those years ago, when Gojo brought him to her for a twisted ankle.
If only this were a twisted ankle. She can see the boy was breathing, but only just. “Itadori, come on. Please?”
The kid says nothing, but eventually he relents. She lets him place Fushiguro on the bed and lets him stand vigil while she works. It takes hours as she searches out the hidden damage, applying her technique wherever she could but just like with Gojo, when she fixes one thing something else reveals itself. Itadori says nothing the whole time. Silent, like Gojo.
She hates that a lot, actually.
Hakari is strangely fine, but he informs her of a jackpot he hit with his domain; while Kashimo eyes her with detachment and stalks away. That’s fine with her, she’s not exactly fond of him either. The way he was talking about Gojo the whole fight, hoping he would lose—if he didn’t want her help, she wouldn’t give it. She would focus on keeping Fushiguro and Gojo alive.
Her work on Fushiguro ends with a tube down his throat to help him breathe and an innumerable amount of tubes and wires coming off of him, the same as Gojo—except Gojo could breathe on his own. Itadori sits by his bedside and holds his limp hand. She gives him something to wipe the blood off of his face and he looks so ill that Shoko is briefly afraid he’s going to be sick all over Kyoto’s infirmary. He doesn’t say anything the entire time, just cleans himself up, throws away the bloodied cloth and goes back to sitting with Fushiguro.
Just like her and Gojo. Poor kid.
Everyone else arrives soon after. Shoko is exhausted. Utahime tries to get her to leave the infirmary but she won’t budge—she’ll sleep on a spare bed or something, but she wasn’t going to leave. Her friend gives up, but tells her if she needs to talk or wants a place to sleep, she could come to the girl’s dormitory, where her own room was. Shoko mumbles something along the lines of I’ll think about it and Utahime leaves.
Some of the kids come by to see Gojo, so do Kusakabe and Ino. Ino leers at the man laying on the bed before him, as if he can’t believe it to be true—Kusakabe stares in laidback shock. The kids are angry and sad and confused and everything in-between. Shoko is exhausted. Itadori refuses to leave Fushiguro’s side. She makes him drink water with the threat of sticking him with an IV of his own if he didn’t and leaves him to his own devices. He doesn’t leave.
Shoko lays herself down in one of the spare beds and tries to sleep.
She wakes up and sees stars.
Not literally—but metaphorically. Cosmic blue, the color of the universe. Starspun hair and sun-bright eyes and a chorus of concern from the mouth of another, much younger person with soft petal-pink hair and wide bright brown eyes.
“Sensei, come back to bed, please—I don’t think you should be up like this, Ieiri-sensei isn’t gonna be happy—”
A familiar laugh, scratchy and tired. “Relax, Yuji. Look, she’s waking up now, we can ask her—”
Is this a dream? I have to be dreaming… It’s Gojo and Itadori one bed over, trading words like kids who were planning something they shouldn’t. Gojo has sat himself up, somehow, and was in the process of attempting to stand up, one leg already over the side of the bed when Shoko pushes herself up in her own.
A smile blooms across Gojo’s tired face. “Hey, Shoko—”
“Back.” She snaps, nearly a growl, and some vague ancient fear fills Gojo’s face. His leg goes back up onto the bed.
“Listen, Shoko—”
“Down.” She’s back on her feet now, arms crossed. Itadori shrinks back, leaving his sensei all alone to face her.
Gojo laughs, nervously, and he doesn’t lay down. “Are you mad at me?”
Shoko is many things. Exhausted even though she slept, a bone-deep exhaustion that clung to her in the wake of all of the fear she felt in that dark room. Scared he would never wake up again, that she would lose him—scared and aghast and pained. That she would lose everything today, or yesterday or however long it’s been, she doesn’t know anymore. It felt like forever. And yes, she was angry. At him, at Sukuna—at the world. At the fact that he didn’t want to kids to help—she knew they would’ve probably gotten in his way and yet—yet—
Maybe if he had the help he wouldn’t have almost died. And he’s not dead and yet she’s still so angry—
Her cheeks are wet. Shoko looks up, searching for a leak on the ceiling but her vision is so blurry she can’t really make anything out—
“Shoko, don’t—” another nervous laugh, “—don’t cry, please don’t cry—”
“I hate you so much,” she mumbles through tears, her voice shaking and thick; “you always stress me out. Did you—did you even know how worried I was, you ass? Just come back and try to leave me again?” She can hear the sound of shoes scuffling on tile. Itadori is standing next to her now, exhaustion shining in those big brown eyes of his. Exhaustion and concern. His heart is too big.
“Ieiri-sensei, do you…” his arms are open, and she allows him to hug her. She cries and he holds her and from the way he shakes she knows he cries too.
Once she finally starts to calm down, she pulls away from Itadori and faces Gojo once again. The kid furiously wipes at his eyes and Gojo, though he has the decency to look guilty, decides to crack a joke. “Geez, you’d think someone died or something.”
“One more word out of you and I’ll—” she’ll what, kill him? He knew what he was doing when he said that, the asshole. “I hate you so much.”
Gojo smiles. “No you don’t. You looooove me.”
“Don’t do that again, Gojo-sensei,” Itadori sniffles, “that sucked.”
“No promises, I’m afraid, but your concern is appreciated.” Gojo tells him, hands raised in brief surrender before he lowers them to his lap. “You did good, kid. Be proud.”
At Gojo’s words, Itadori’s eyes once again welled with tears and he began to cry anew. The kid stumbles forward to embrace his broken sense on the bed, trying to be mindful of all of the wires and tubes, gripping onto the man for dear life. Shoko wants to join him. Gojo pats the kid on the back and Shoko realizes something—she kissed his forehead, Itadori is hugging him. Gojo’s infinity hasn’t been up automatically all this time.
The implication scares her. She walks forward and joins Itadori and Gojo’s hug.
“You guys are crushing me.” Gojo wheezes.
“Shut up.” They both say in response.