Work Text:
Can I drag you through me, just to feel?
Can't I be allowed to need you, too?
KATIE FORD
支
It's past midnight when they finally get in.
This late the moon has sprung itself free and nestled closer to the tops of the ginko trees, lighting down the stone path on the way to their dorms a little more translucent and frail. It felt hazy, along with the lazy drags of November wind purring in every now and then that Shoko had to grip her jacket closer to her. Gojo was idling beside her with his hands in his pockets, mindlessly kicking rocks around as he stared at the ground and nothing in particular. He, too, felt papery: mind so far displaced from where they were he might as well not have been there at all.
It was an easy enough mission, thought Shoko: a cookie cutter exorcise this curse and kill that demon type of field day. The train ride to Kawagoe took far longer.
But, and at this she couldn’t help but stare down at her own feet and fought the urge to curse at its inept ability to move like quicksilver: it was clear how out of shape they were as a two-man cell. Gojo had been violent out there, almost obscenely and aggressively so. He attacked things with such a carnal disposition it had ever been a wonder he was jovial outside of it. Savagery is built into the jujutsu system by default, this they all knew in great detail, that sometimes Shoko forgot Gojo knew it best among the best and was maybe even conditioned for it that he had to teach himself softness in turn.
She forgot, then, all that he forced himself to unlearn: the tight lines of his body unused to accommodating another presence at his side, because he knew he had to consider her, because she was someone to be considered but muscle memory taught him he never had to look twice all those years with Getou. The annoyance he knew he shouldn’t direct at her for not being able to keep up, ire she didn’t deserve and a line of a brow on his face that spoke of restraint not to let her know exactly how irritated he was.
It was almost like their bodies weren't fit to hold each other in combat, as if something so elemental inside of them refused to yield to the other because they each took up space in each other’s lives reserved for someone else.
All the well, thought Shoko, Maybe she had to unlearn a few things too.
⊹
It takes her tripping on her third rock for him to speak up.
"Want me to carry you?" Gojo offers.
It's a disruption in the ether of silence, thinks Shoko, his voice. Gravel with hours of misuse but confident, assured, weighty. His request wasn't tinged with it's usual teasing lilt, nor concern, really, now that she took a pause to think about it. What it was was muscle memory. If his body didn’t recognize her as a worthy soldier in arms by his side, his mouth would at least always remember to be kind.
Shoko thinks on it for a second more. "Yeah, what the hell."
It's a familiar dance. She sets her bag down but it never meets the ground, not the first time he offered or all the countless times since, because he just swoops it over his shoulder as easily as he arranges himself in front of her. Bends once, twice, testing the limits of where she could meet him halfway. It takes two more adjustments for her body to line up with his comfortably, and Shoko knows his delicacy is owed to a lifetime of swearings he's hoping to avoid if Yaga hears wind of her fracturing in any way, because she wasn't supposed to— Her body wasn't built— Not a single one of them could ever—
"Okay?" asks Gojo.
She feels the cool slide of his fingers beneath her knees, the tilt of his head an inch to the side appraising her. This close he blended with the moon and smelled like the old mining town they just visited: historic and here.
"Okay," she says, and fastens her arms around his neck. "Thanks."
It's a familiar walk. It's familiar trees. Everything about what they're doing is a dance they've waltzed in and out of countless times over the years. Walking home late from a mission, her on his back with her body just ransacked through, him a wall bolting her against the wind and the world and then some.
The single break in routine: Gojo is silent for the most part. Contemplative, she thinks as she peers down at his snow lashes, and it scares her. She doesn't think Gojo is someone who should live inside his own head for too long. He was built for the world and it already had a hard time containing him.
"Okay?" tries Shoko.
He doesn't reply right away. She doesn't even think he heard her. But their steps crunch on the stone silently, the cicadas begin their nightly lullabies, and the moon stands audience waiting with baited breath on their sadness. She feels him squeeze the flesh of her thighs once, twice.
"Okay," he says, and they keep walking.
⊹
Gojo takes off for the mountains in a few hours.
It’s been a few days since their last joint mission. Individual ones have mostly kept them apart, Shoko being dispatched on a field medic capacity in glaring demand and Gojo being siphoned off to play heir diplomat more times than he cared to count. Outside his room, a rain shower slowly pelts down, soft sounds of rain meeting the ground in a steady rhythm. His luggage was sprawled out in his bed, flaps open and different articles of clothing haphazardly thrown about. Shoko was folding some of his sweatshirts into neat squares because he wouldn't and someone needed to, as more sounds of Gojo rustling about his bathroom filled the space.
"Razor," Shoko reminds.
More ransacking.
"Extra body wash."
A pause. "But—"
"You won't like the ones they have."
A whisper of curtain cloth, a drawer being opened. Heavy footsteps.
"Your mint chocolate toothpaste."
Heavier footsteps, now, pointed and directed. A flash of silver on the doorway, an upturned boyish expression she hasn’t seen in a while. "I did ask if you wanted to go."
Shoko doesn't even bother looking up. "Floss," she continues. "You always end up needing them even if you say you don’t. My hair isn't gonna be readily available as a substitute this time."
Footsteps coming near her. A knee crouching down by her legs, pale arms coming up to cushion themselves on top of her legs. "Come with me."
"Books?" Shoko frowns when he peers into his luggage and finds none. "They probably have those, right? Parchment as well?"
Gojo rolls his eyes, flicks panda fur off her knees. "It's the 20th century," he argues. "They have pen and paper."
Shoko arches an eyebrow at him. "You don't know that."
"I don't know anything, you're right, I'm hopeless," Gojo latches on and makes his weight known to her legs. "I need a handler."
"I'm a medic."
"An emotional support friend then."
"Still a student, too."
Gojo hangs his head on her lap. "I still don't see the point of going," he says, voice muffled into the folds of her skirt. "School’s just gonna get bulldozed again if it wants to."
He was probably right.
Ancient scribe writing, it was, that Yaga signed him up for. A few months away on the isolated mountains of Rishiri Fuji training under retired scribe sorcerers. The wards of the school haven't been breached in a hundred years and it panicked the elders that an emancipated and practically curseless Zen’in was able to with the snap of a finger. A hundred years it was, then, untouched: the same length of time it took for a special grade to spawn and build them back up again. Gojo had never been the plan until he became the only plan.
Outside the rain is happening, existing, begging to be heard. But suspended in this moment is this picture: a frame of two maybe friends on their way to a long farewell, nestled in grief and anger and maybe something else. Something else neither of them will talk about first and perhaps might not want to. Perhaps they would like to reserve this pocket of stillness for what it is, a suspension of belief that outside the four corners of his room existed the world: a world that is scary, has bad people with bad intentions, has scheming people with good ones but poor execution.
Because they can happen just here, for now and right now.
Gojo slides his head just a fraction to peek up at her, just enough to see the rain reflected in the river of his eyes, and she feels the weight of his palm closing gently over her ankle. "I'll see you then."
⊹
Her notebooks have been missing for a week.
Shoko wasn’t the type to panic, but multiple emergency surgeries where she didn't have access to her patient files and had to do memory recollection on the spot was starting to grate on her. She rounded about the hallway, about to belch lava off her mouth and grind someone’s ears about it again—probably poor Ijichi—when:
"You were right," Gojo mused, standing like a golden boy in the April sun leaning outside her room, holding up something familiar and leathery. "Quill and parchment. The fifth time I broke through their Bible thin paper and the monk refused to cut down another tree, they finally agreed to let me bring out the Pilot and Muji."
Shoko was aghast, marching right over to him and reaching up to rip away her notebook from his grasp: only to gasp in horror at the mutilation he'd done. Multiple scribbles of ancient Chinese characters assaulted her very detailed, very important, very life-altering information on her patients. She couldn't see them now they were so buried under depressed ink that bled through almost all the pages.
She shot Gojo an angry, scathing look. "This was my favorite notebook, asshole. You knew that. You know I bring this with me everywhere!”
“Missed ‘ya too,” Gojo was still just smiling like the goddamn sun, leaning down to ruffle her hair. "Very useful, by the way. Paper held up even against all the humidity."
"When did you even manage to take these?" Shoko groaned, still looking petrifyingly down at her ruined notes. "I saw your bag. I packed your bag."
"I have my ways," mused Gojo.
"Ijichi," said Shoko.
"Ijichi," replied Gojo.
Another groan. Another hand coming down on her shoulder. Lighter, this time, she thought; like he considered his weight on top of hers and realized, maybe for the first time, how heavy he had always been. "Catch me up then?"
Shoko was still riffling distractedly through her notes and damn near whimpering. "Whatever."
Gojo steered them outside and along the sakura petal-covered courtyard. The cherry blossoms in full spring. The sprint in his step and the spite in her voice and the song in his heart chanting—
Tadaima.
⊹
('You have a cursed notebook,' says Utahime, some years into the future, where they pay taxes and schedule izakaya nights. 'Did you know that?'
'This old thing?' clarifies Shoko, looking at her well-worn and war-weathered leather notebook she couldn't depart from. A remnant of youth, otherwise, she thought: her own version of a will and legacy.
'Kyoto runes,' notes Utahime. 'And done well, actually. Cleanest I've ever seen them.'
'Runes?' asks Shoko knowingly, annoyingly, a string of past misfortunes creeping up. 'Like a hex?'
Utahime takes a longer moment to observe the notebook. 'No,' she concedes. ‘Protection scribes with the Gojo clan symbol. He never told you back then?'
'Gojo doesn't tell me anything,' says Shoko.
'He used to,' says Utahime. 'He still does, I just think you don’t let him, but—anyway so—these scribes are strong, you know. Special grade strong. You really haven’t noticed?’
‘I don’t care,’ says Shoko.
A beat.
History has unearthed a lot of things for them as adults, but now, now Shoko thought: in a frame so like before but with the moving parts shifted just slightly so is a picture that painted this: Gojo still suspended at seventeen in a way, stubborn and self-sacrificial and idiotic. Shoko, though, has run out of patience to unlearn him. She, too, could be stubborn. They rearranged themselves to hold each other and now fractured again; forever, though, she secretly hoped not. Because he was her emotional support friend too and it didn’t matter if he forgot he was hers.
‘I think you should,’ says Utahime, appraising her more closely, maybe a little sadly. 'Because you haven't been sick since you were seventeen, Shoko, and I think you at least owe him a thanks for that.')