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i.
finally, i can admit:
i dream of care that has nothing to do with survival.
Shoko gets forty eight hours with him.
She tried, really she did, hasn’t begged for anything as much in her life that even Ijichi looked a little uncomfortable at her open desperation. Please, she pleaded, I can’t I can’t I can’t. Even the static from the flimsy internet connection wasn’t able to drown out the slight hitch in her voice towards the end, the nervous glint in her eyes as she stared straight down at Yaga; trying to channel some of that fondness he knew he reserved for her. He did waver a little, then, a small shred of hope slithering its way through her when she saw him do a double-take, assessing the request again, eyes flickering briefly to the higher-ups peering over his back.
Only someone—one of Gakuganji’s grandsons, Utahime tells her later—coughs very pointedly. Yaga turned to her then, his own brand of pleading projecting its way through her laptop screen wordlessly.
Shoko was running out of options. “S-Sensei,” she manages to rasp, weakly, voice almost going out from weeks of misuse in her isolation. “Sensei, please. My condition—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Yaga cuts her off, as gently as he could. From their side of Tokyo she could see the lights flickering and more voices in the background growing agitated. Even the connection was starting to taper off. “He asked for you, Shoko. Just you.”
Shoko considers this. “He’ll be safer there.”
“I-It’s okay, Ieiri-san,” Ijichi manages to inch his way to the screen, half his face showing. “He’s still good to travel as far as we're able to tell. We should be able to get him to you by tomorrow morning.”
Shoko is still breathing unevenly, trying to get her nerves under control. She’s thankful only the top half of her face was showing, otherwise the tremors wracking through her hands and shoulders are the easiest tell they’d know just how far she’d withered since they exiled her. Consecutively maxing out your cursed energy for days on end without giving your body a chance to gain back its reserves will do that to you. It’s half the reason she was forced to go under hiding to recuperate in the first place.
“I can’t be responsible—”
Yaga is quick to end that line of thought as soon as it came. “You’re willed in, Shoko,” he says, making a point to look at her directly when he said so. “Like I said, it doesn’t matter. He bound it with cursed energy it's practically a binding contract.”
Shoko counts to three in her head. “I was his witness,” she manages to get out evenly, trying for logic. “Won’t that—I don’t know—complicate things?”
“No,” Yaga shakes his head, knowing where she was going. “Otherwise any of our healers here would have been able to start working on him as soon as he got unsealed.”
Shoko blinks at the screen, stuck.
She doesn’t think anyone was getting the gravity of what they were really asking of her: that Gojo, so sure his end would be as brutal as it would be, willed her into his will to make sure she’d be the last point of contact before he was cleared for battle. She had said yes when he asked then, forever ago when Megumi was just shy of finishing grade school and Gojo was starting to take guardianship seriously, after hours at their favourite izakaya: Oi, he said, You don’t mind being my last healer right? Kinda like a last-ditch effort to save me or something? She just scoffed at him, high on the victory of saving her first transfigured human that day and feeling like she could take on the world. Ha! she said. Do your worst.
No one ever counted on her starting to develop permanent nerve damage in her hands from excessive cursed energy usage at 28. Twenty-eight. For a doctor, this is career suicide. For an RCT user, she might as well have let her patients bleed out on her operating table.
“He asked for you at death’s door,” Yaga brings her back, a note of finality in his voice. “The least you can do is grant a man his dying wish.”
✶
Ijichi is the one to drop him off the next morning.
No sooner than the car rolls in by the empty parking garage in one of their abandoned safety houses, the passenger door shoots open in a loud clang and she hears footsteps thundering their way across the stone path.
Shoko rushes out the door no sooner.
A flash of white hair and blue eyes. He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive.
“Gojo,” Shoko calls out, putting a hand out to stop him. “I can’t save you.”
Only whatever she was expecting to see after weeks of no contact with anyone—least of all Gojo—it wasn’t this.
Twenty days might as well have been twenty years, all the good time graced Gojo with in concealment, and good it did: he was taller, leaner, bulkier somehow. The already wide span of his shoulders tapered out narrowly at the waist, giving the impression he’d just come back from a weightlifting competition and not proverbial hell. His hair was slightly longer at the edges, wilder. Even the set of his jaw morphed into something more mature looking, like an early glimpse into how he’d grow into his 30s if he ever made it. Even his uniform changed. This war had weathered them all somehow, but Gojo annoyingly took the best parts of it.
“What the fuck,” is all she can say, disoriented and feeling like his 18-year-old verbal sparring partner again. “Have you been working out?”
The tension in the air immediately evaporates. Gojo, who halted midstep as soon as he heard her voice, breaks off the stunned expression on his face into something more familiar, warmer; the corners of his mouth tugging up in amusement. Shoko feels a screw in her soul unbound a little at seeing it again.
Gojo takes the last few steps to her slowly, almost a little hesitantly. He stops just a foot away, still sporting the same shit-eating grin. “Miss me?”
“No, you idiot,” Shoko punches his shoulder. He doesn’t even budge. “Annoyed is more like it. You willed me in?”
Gojo shrugs casually, the folds of his white yukata moving along like silk against his frame. “Had to make sure you’d agree somehow.”
“You couldn’t have asked like a normal person?” Shoko glares up at him, annoyed. “I’m one of five on your medical team. You didn’t think I’d check on you either way?”
“Would you have?” Gojo puts his arms on her shoulders, guiding them back inside the house. He looked back briefly to give Ijichi a thumbs up. “You wouldn’t have pawned off my potential life-altering treatment plan to the first four?”
“I can’t save you,” Shoko repeats, trying to glance at him from her shoulder.
“So you’ve said,” Gojo hums, assessing the rest of the house. “How long have you been here?”
Shoko looks dicey at the question, moves out from under him to place more distance between them again. “I don’t know,” she mumbles. “Three weeks, give or take.”
Gojo raises a brow at the timing. “Same time I was sealed?”
Shoko just shrugs, still looking anywhere but at him.
Gojo was given the footnotes on everything that’s happened since he was sealed, despite Yaga initially worrying he’d be overwhelmed with the information. There are harder pills to swallow that he still feels lodged against his throat—Sukuna and Megumi, Nanami and Nobara—that he can’t look straight at for too long otherwise the ground would start crumbling, and hasn’t he failed everyone enough that he needs to pick it up back again? Some other inconveniences: the Zen’in being their usual entitled and narcissistic selves, Maki and Mai, and Yuuta; all very important and crushing and apocalypse-inducing. Yaga finished the spiel slightly winded and breathless, the tone of the room expectant.
But Gojo had only been half-listening, making a mental list of everything he’d wanted to know about as soon as he got out. When he meets Yaga’s eyes and it’s made clear he was done and there was no more to follow, and he was simply waiting for Gojo to digest; Gojo does anything but.
Because, because—
“And Shoko?” he summoned enough bravery to ask, giving himself a five-second lead to brace himself for whatever answer he’d get. “How is she?”
Yaga looked relieved at the question, if not a little confused. “Fine,” he manages to say, but there’s distance to it, something to prod against. “She can’t do RCT right now, but otherwise she’s fine. We’re keeping her in an undisclosed location until further notice.”
This had disoriented Gojo more than anything. “What do you mean?”
Yaga seemed to have been internally calculating just how much he wanted to reveal, but one look from Gojo was all it took to realize he was going to walk away with all the answers even if it meant prying it out from him. Gojo was already a stickler for not following enough rules, but where some people were concerned, law didn't even exist altogether.
“The day you got sealed,” Yaga explained carefully, wrily. “She was cornered in Shinjuku. Mahito’s creatures were gaining on her so she had to convert most of them on the spot, used up a little too much of her energy at once and was unconscious for a week after. RCT is fickle, as you know.”
“Transfigured humans?” Gojo asked, confused. “But that’s her specialty.”
Yaga only shrugged, letting loose some of the tension in his shoulders at having someone to finally volley his concerns with. Gojo remembered then, how little of a circle they were running at that point; how really, at the end of the day, what little survived of them.
“Everyone has a breaking point," he surmised darkly. "Things got less stable when you were declared sealed."
And as Gojo stares on, at Shoko so obviously down a few sizes and an uneasy gait to her normally calm demeanor, and sees then: how the war has eaten her too.
✶
It takes Shoko three tries to click the penlight on, and only after Gojo gently guides her hand steady, for her to start peering into his eyes.
“Sorry,” she says after a while, prodding at his eyelids. “It’s been a while.”
Gojo just hums, still holding onto her elbow. “Take your time.”
He can almost see the exact moment Shoko slips into that clinician role, feel the then unsure lines of her shoulders morph into its usual rigidness as duty that’s been bound into muscle memory takes hold. It’s still there, Gojo thinks, that knee-jerk reaction to save. Peering up into her face, he sees her features sharpen into that tell-tale precision of assessing and monitoring and documenting. A knife to a hilt. He wonders briefly if she needs this more than he did.
“Oi,” Gojo breaks the silence, if anything out of boredom. “You should tell Yaga if you’re running out of food here.”
Shoko manages to scribble down a few notes on his patient file before glancing back down at him. “Sorry, what?”
Gojo squeezes the flesh on her elbow. “Food. Here. If you’re running low, I’m sure he won’t mind sending someone over to replenish your supplies. We could be feasting here right now!”
For a moment, Shoko just looks confused. She still has one arm hovering just a few inches from his face, and he’s trying hard not to think too much about how less than an hour into his check-up, he can already feel the muscles in her arm trembling just so. She could usually last hours and days and even weeks; but maybe, he thinks, noting how his fingers can engulf her bony hand so easily, that maybe that was the problem. That she ever had to.
“What do you mean?” Shoko puts down the penlight, gesturing to the pantry by the hallway. “This is a safehouse. This will always have enough food for an army.”
Gojo traces her line of vision to a small door just outside the kitchen, slightly ajar and obviously bursting with so much food he doesn’t know how he didn’t notice in the first place. He zeroed in on how flimsy Shoko’s sweater engulfed her and how papery her hand felt in his and that was it.
“So then what is it?” he asks instead, facing up at her. Why are you letting your body break down?
“What is what?” Shoko’s brows furrow even more. “Listen, are you hungry? Cause I can—”
Gojo stands up abruptly, waving her off. He can feel her growing agitated and the tell-tale need to slip into that savior complex again. “No, sorry,” he says. “Forget I asked.”
Shoko was still looking at him weirdly. A little guarded. Her body was the first to go after Getou, hadn’t it? Gojo was too drunk in his grief to do anything about it then; but hadn’t hell himself spat him back out this time around? He’d been searching for the reason all this time, not exactly knowing why.
But maybe:
“Anything else you need from me?” Gojo turns to look at her, trying to force a casual smile. “Blood? Saliva? A lock of my hair for cloning purposes?”
The guarded look on Shoko’s face doesn’t let up completely so, but her usual exasperation at his sarcasm at least still lives.
“Lay down on your back,” Shoko tells him, arranging the living room couch into something of a makeshift bed. “We have to make sure your muscles aren’t atrophying.”
ii.
you can put your strength down.
i'm sitting here with you at your kitchen table.
you don't need to say anything.
After, when the tests have been done and samples have been taken and Gojo has managed to coax at least one smile out of her and Shoko has stopped threatening him with bodily violence every half hour, they’re in the kitchen finishing the last few bites of their dinner in silence. Gojo cut up the ingredients, Shoko cooked, and somehow they managed not to burn the entire house down. A second pot of tea was brewing in the kettle and they hear the goisagi make their nightly rounds of lullabies in the forest, this side of the world moonlit and calm and peaceful. Uneaten.
Shoko, surprisingly, breaks the silence first.
“Were you scared?”
Gojo moves around his hands to get warmer in the mug. “Yes.”
Shoko hums in agreement, looking past the open window. “More than Okinawa?”
Gojo considers this a moment, staring down at the tea leaves in the mug. Strands of hibiscus floating merrily around a muddy stream of water. “No,” he finally lands on, leaning back into his chair. “Okinawa was scarier.”
“Okinawa was really scary,” Shoko pats his shoulder gently. “Sorry.”
Gojo just shrugs, picking up her feet to place on his lap. He starts idly massaging them before asking, “How about you? Were you scared?”
Shoko looks at the way his long fingers knead through her Achilles heel for a few seconds. “No, not really.”
“Liar,” Gojo teases.
“Between the two of us,” Shoko points out. “Who is it that refuses to watch horror movies alone?”
“Anyone who can watch any horror movie alone is a psychopath,” Gojo huffs, pinching and releasing her toes. “You have to be truly messed up in the head to enjoy that kind of torture.”
“Are you saying Megumi is psychotic?” Shoko muses, reclining further back into her chair no more a few inches from his. The side of her shoulder touching his body so.
“Well,” Gojo turns, smiling fondly. “He grew up under my roof didn’t he?”
Shoko returns the smile slightly. “I think he grew up okay all things considered.”
The smile on Gojo’s face falls a little. “Listen,” he starts. “Speaking of Megumi—”
He can feel Shoko’s legs tense up from his hold right away. “No,” she says, urgently, meaning to draw her knees back. “I’m sorry, Gojo, but—”
“Okay, alright, sorry,” Gojo is quick to amend, gently disentangling her arms from under her knees and guiding them back down his lap again. “Another day then.”
Shoko still looks torn. “Why me?” she asks, a little breathless, a little desperate. “Why not Yaga?”
“Megumi trusts you,” Gojo supplies matter-of-factly.
“He doesn’t know what trust is,” Shoko parrots right back.
Gojo laughs, an airy thing. “True,” he relents. “Think we should have sent him to therapy instead of a jujutsu highschool?”
But Shoko doesn’t bite. He can still feel her eyes drinking him in, assessing and tracking and documenting, dissecting his words with that knife-like precision. Megumi was always a touchy subject, and he knows Shoko never knew what kind of role to slip into his life when he gained legal guardianship: big sister? teacher? doctor?
Instead she settled on, like she always did, simply with: “I’ll take care of him.”
Gojo meets her eyes and sees some of that indecisiveness thaw, and knows how monumental a step it is, her acknowledging there will be an after after this where she’ll have to take care of him. An after after this where maybe he can’t anymore. In case something happens. In case he’ll be in a situation where something could happen. He’s at death’s door now, isn’t he? And hadn’t he heard Yaga say something about granting men their dying wish?
“Thank you, Shoko.”
✶
“So were you ever going to tell me?”
It’s the second day of his comprehensive medical check-up, and Shoko currently has both her hands guiding his bicep to do a rotation and keeping an eye on the muscle movement there. He’d already been cleared by a physical therapist for field combat, but apparently that bit of information didn’t make it’s way over their side of the world. Gojo has changed into sweats, but somehow, somehow; the chill of her fingers douses him in kerosene.
“What?” asks Shoko distractedly, eyes tracking the line of his shoulder.
“Your hands,” Gojo looks down at the tiny fingers holding unto his upper arm. He can feel them gripping harder than usual to offset the tremors, almost unconsciously. “How permanent are we talking here?”
Shoko immediately withdraws contact, bunching her fists together as she hides them behind his patient file.
“I told you as soon as you got here,” Shoko wrings out of her, with some effort to look him in the eye. “I can’t save you. And like I keep telling you, if you’re this worried about it, then any of the hundred doctors in Tokyo can easily do this without shaking.”
Gojo tries to level with her. “None of them are in my will.”
He thinks he can hear her swear under her breath something like this fucking will, before righting herself. “Just—” she says, already slipping into a savior, stepping closer to him again. “Just leave it, Gojo. It’s fine. I’m not the one being examined for a physical.”
Gojo eyes her still. “But it’s not like you’re retiring or anything?” he asks. “Right?”
Shoko doesn’t answer, just starts probing his arm again.
Gojo swivels to look at her properly, trying to catch her eye. “Right.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Gojo,” Shoko surrenders, exasperated. “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. Staying out of the danger zone isn’t so bad as I’ve come to realize these past few weeks. Less blood on your hands, less guilt to throw up your lunch over.”
“But..” Gojo shakes his head, confused. “But you’re a healer. An RCT user. A jujutsu sorcerer.”
“All the good that does,” Shoko almost hisses at him, a small layer of shine pooling at the corner of her eyes. She seemed so papery, then. “When you have about a hundred teenagers in your clinic all bleeding to death but you only have 2 hands to work with. All the good that does: when you’re called in the middle of all this only to be told your last friend from highschool just got sealed into an impenetrable fortress and no one can get him out and it’s likely he’ll never get out.”
Gojo is stunned out of replying.
Shoko was the best at compartmentalizing out of all of them. And for her to unravel all of this so openly, so desperately—
“I’m sorry,” he says, reaching out to grab one of her hands and trying not to wince at how hard the tremors have gotten since her spiel. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, massaging her tremors. “I’m sorry,” he says, quieter this time, coming up to hold her shuddering form against him and feel her just fall apart right then and there.
Gojo was right. Shoko needed this more than he did.
iii.
i will fold the clean clothes.
i will wash the dishes.
i will never again dream of having the whole world.
The morning he’s scheduled to leave, they take their breakfast out to the small rock garden by the backyard and bask in the early morning warmth. Little sakura petals grace the tatami, flowing with every step of their foot on the mat and following them all the way to the floorboard as they settle themselves just outside the sliding door.
Gojo is the first to break the silence this time.
“Megumi. College. Thoughts?”
Shoko swallows an edamame before replying. “Non-issue,” she says. “He’s going.”
"Maa," Gojo hums his agreement. “Exactly what I thought.”
The sprawling forest in Mt. Kobo is unusually chipper this morning, birds filtering about with the sky so open and blue. Even the wind feels a little cleaner, less heavier to lug around. Gojo leans back on his palms, breathing in as much as can and closing his eyes to let the sunlight filter in through his eyelids.
“We could do it you know,” Shoko says quietly. “Just stay here and grow old.”
When he doesn’t reply right away, he can feel her placing a hand on top of his. Then a voice, soft like liquid silk: “You’ve given enough, Gojo.”
And there it is, as still as a riverpond in the summer, the ghost of a smile on his face.
“Just a little more, Shoko,” he says. “I promise.”
Shoko withdraws her hand hesitantly.
Gojo cracks one eye open to peer down at her. “You wanna do it here then?”
“Why not?” Shoko shrugs. “The forest has clean water. We’ll never run out of logs for when it gets cold at night. If we run out of food, we can always catch fish.”
“No can do,” Gojo closes his eyes again, waving her off. “I enjoy meat too much.”
Shoko laughs, a little bell of a sound. “You’ll live.”
Gojo opens both eyes to find her looking up at the sky, a little more unmoored now, less set in the apocalypse she just braved through; now with just the same sheen of oceanwater sky mirrored back into her eyes. So clean, so light, so uneaten.
“I’ll try my best,” Gojo tells her.
Shoko turns to face him slowly. “You’ll—” she starts, unsure. “You’ll be okay after this? Out there?”
Gojo feels the wind lap against his skin and sees a single sakura petal weave it's way into Shoko's hair as he smiles down at her.
“I’m okay here now.”