zarin

Shoko first—small, silent, blue around the lips. Her mother would later tell her she hadn’t cried, not even once. She just blinked up at the ceiling, like she’d already seen too much of the world. You had come days after—red-faced and furious, shrieking like you’d already been wronged.

Balance, their clanhead called it. One to make, one to unmake.

They grew up in a quiet prefecture, tucked between the mountains, where fog collected on windows in the morning and everything smelled like pine and old rain. Their family was not a traditional jujutsu clan—not in the way the Zenins or the Gojos were—but they still had blood that remembered power, blood that ran strangely cold.

Shoko discovered her technique early—reversed cursed energy, delicate and warm, the ability to stitch together what others could only destroy. It made her quiet, made her thoughtful, made her feel too responsible for things she didn’t understand. You, on the other hand, were all forward motion and fury, manifesting offensive cursed techniques with raw instinct and terrifying precision.

You burned. Shoko cooled. A soldier and a healer.

It wasn't rivalry. It wasn't even contrast, really. It was rhythm—two halves of a heart, orbiting each other, moving through childhood in tandem. You protected her from bullies, from curses, from the dark under the bed. Shoko bandaged your scraped knees, held your hair back with her small hands when you threw up after manifesting your cursed technique for the first time, whispered questions into your shoulder late at night about whether they’d ever be normal.

Neither of you wanted normal. Not really.

So when your mothers had suggested both of you for Jujutsu Tech—you didn’t hesitate. It is the slight chill that Spring of 2005 that Shoko remembers most. Fifteen years old, uniforms they’d taken customized to their liking just a month before—Shoko, with her wide turtleneck and midi skirt. You, in a well-tailored blazer, and much to your mother’s disapproval—a short skirt.

Even after the arguments and bickering, their mothers had cried. Their fathers had barely nodded at them. The train took them away to Tokyo with petals sticking to the window, and their only belongings in duffle bags at their feet. Shoko’s hands were cold where they held yours softly.

She was afraid. You weren’t.

You had always loved the idea of being chosen, and Shoko just didn’t want to be left behind.

And maybe that’s how it all began—not with power, or fate, or bloodlines. Just two girls stepping onto a train together, one chasing strength, the other running away from a world she’d one day have to hold together with her hands.

ii. april, 2005

Jujutsu Tech was nothing like Shoko expected.

She thought it would be colder, older, more like the hospitals she’d passed on the train—tall and sterile and gray. But it was… softer. Vines curling around wooden buildings, laundry strung between windows, the hum of cicadas already testing their voices in the trees. it smelled like dirt and chalk and something faintly sweet, like sakura or summer air caught in the stairwells.

She didn’t talk much those first couple of days. Neither did Suguru Geto.

They met on their first day of class, standing awkwardly apart. Shoko was pressed against the wall, you beside her like a shield, when she noticed him—black hair long just at his shoulder, eyes unreadable, hands folded neatly behind his back like he was waiting for something more important than small talk. He caught her looking, and they didn’t smile, but something passed between them anyway. A kind of shared silence.

Then came Gojo.

She had heard of him before, of course. the honored one, the destined boy of the Gojo Clan. He arrived like a storm—messy white hair, too-tall frame stuffed into the uniform like it didn’t quite belong to him. He talked too much, laughed too loud, tripped over his own shoes, and still managed to radiate something untouchable. He was awkward, undeniably gifted, and absolutely convinced he had nothing to learn from anyone.

Shoko didn’t really like him.

You despised him worse, found him amusing. You would say he was infuriating, sure—but interesting.

“He thinks he’s better than everyone,” you whispered one night, grimacing into your pillow. “But his ears turn red every time I catch him staring.”

Shoko rolled her eyes, gave you a half smile. “He’s insufferable.”

“You're just mad that he said you would look better if you grew out your hair.” you teased.

“That's not true. I like my hair.”

“I like it too.”

“Then why does it matter to me what he thinks?”

But slowly—so slowly it almost escaped her notice—he changed. He started making jokes with them. And regrettably, Shoko would sometimes laugh at something he said. He started sitting with them at lunch. Picked up Suguru’s habit of folding napkins into strange little birds. Borrowed Shoko’s pens and returned them. Awkwardly, with both hands. always with a muttered thanks.

He began learning them. Their rhythms. Their silences.

It was the end of summer when it started to feel like something real.

Missions were few and far between in those first months. They trained hard, sweat and bruises under the cherry blossoms, sparring on grass that still held morning dew. Shoko hated sparring. She wasn’t built for it—not the way you were, with your reckless cursed technique and even more reckless joy.

But she tried. Because she had to. Because she wouldn’t let herself be the weak link.

And Gojo—he always held back when they fought. Even then, before he understood how to be gentle, he understood that she needed to win sometimes. Needed to prove that she could. He let her land hits, not because she needed help, but because he saw the way she looked at herself compared to the rest of them. She knew that Gojo—the freak of nature he was with those blazing blue eyes—saw her beneath her dry sarcasm and grins and tired eyes.

Suguru, on the other hand, never let her win. But he gave her pointers after. Explained why she slipped, what her stance betrayed. His feedback was quiet, clinical, never cruel. Always gave her a nod and a smile. Shoko trusted him for it.

Those were their blue springs—their youth washed in cloudless skies and laughter and rain-soaked uniforms drying on sun-warmed rocks. Those were the days of early friendships, of discovering who they were becoming.

They took the train into Tokyo for missions, packed into cars half-asleep, heads knocking against windows. You would always take the window seat. with your far too expensive mp3 player and ratty wired earbuds, you’d hum under your breath, fingers tapping a beat on your thigh. Gojo sprawled across two seats, his head inevitably ending up in someone’s lap. Suguru read novels and pretended not to notice you and Gojo’s helpless bickering.

❀

The first storm of the summer comes sudden, like most things that mattered back then. Sheets of water turning the courtyard into a lake, petals plastered to the stones.

Gojo didn’t run for cover. Of course he didn't. He stood in the middle of it all like some idiot, arms outstretched, hair plastered white against his forehead, laughing so loud it made the rain sound shy.

“You'll catch a cold,” Suguru called from the walkway, voice dry as the towel slung around his shoulders.

“Colds are a myth,” Gojo shot back, spinning in a circle, water flying from his sleeves. It wasn't rare back then for Gojo to turn off his infinity, especially for rain storms he used to practically bathe in.

Shoko watched from the step, dry under and an awning with a cigarette between her fingers. Smoking was a new habit she’d picked up, in spite of the protests from her friends, in spite of the distaste and the mini interventions and scoldings you’d given her. All these years later, she can’t really remember where it started from.

You had taken the cigarette from her fingers that day and threw it in the rain, leaving her a little frustrated. Then she watched as you tried not to smile, and bolted straight into the storm after Gojo, shoes kicking up water like wings.

The both of you were soaked in seconds—shrieking, colliding, their uniforms clinging like second skin. Grinning too bright for the gray sky above them.

❀

They went on their first mission as a full team in late October.

A cursed spirit in a temple in the countryside—nothing particularly dangerous, but big enough to warrant the four of them. The four of you, as it turned out, had garnered somewhat of a reputation in the Jujutsu world by this point, even though it had only been a couple months into your first year. There was Gojo, being who he was, and then there were you and Geto, two special-grade hopefuls, and then Shoko, with her reverse cursed technique abilities. It was hard not to hear the excitement, the chatter from your seniors and teachers and higher-ups and worse, the curses, as they marveled at what potential the four of you possessed.

On their first mission together they took the train, bundled in thin jackets, feet tangled under the seats. You sat next to Gojo this time, their knees knocking occasionally as the train curved through the mountains. They didn’t talk much, just passed a packet of rice crackers back and forth, you opening them with your teeth and Gojo laughing, soft, like he couldn’t help it.

Suguru fell asleep with his head against the window. Shoko watched the landscape blur, temples and fields dissolving into dusk.

She remembers that October day clearly — because the first time they saw a body together was on a bridge, the river swollen black beneath it, the cold gnawing at their ankles. The mission shouldn’t have had civilian casualties. It wasn’t supposed to be anything. Yet their world didn’t care about supposed to.

Shoko stood back as Suguru exorcised the curse, her hands clenching the strap of her med kit, heart banging against her ribs like it wanted out. When it was over, the corpse of the victim lay sprawled against the guardrail, mouth full of frozen air. A little girl—her hair so matted in blood Shoko couldn’t tell what color it was anymore.

Gojo tried to crack a joke, to distill the buzzing in the air—something stupid about ghosts haunting bridges—but no one laughed, not even him. You touched Shoko's arm, light as breath, and for the first time Shoko wondered if maybe they weren’t weapons at all. Maybe they were just kids with blood under their nails and no way out.

It's that night she remembers all these years later, coming home from the mission. They stayed up talking until sunrise. They lay on futons in someone’s dorm room, the windows open, moths circling the lights.

“Do you ever think,” you had asked, staring at the ceiling. “That we’re not meant to survive this?”

There's a quiet that fills the room, uncomfortable, like understanding the inevitable.

“Don't say that depressing shit,” Gojo said sharply, but his voice still held a hint of something that could’ve been mistaken for vulnerability.

“I'm serious. We're weapons. Tools. They'll use us until we break.”

“Then we don’t break,” Suguru said quietly.

“Or we break together.”  Shoko said, so softly no one answered.

That first year, they were just kids. Cursed kids, sure. But kids.

And even though Shoko knew better—even though she could already see the shape of blood and bodies and burials in the future—she let herself believe in nights like those. The four of them sprawled on the floor, laughing at someone’s expense, playing cards and cheap candy wrappers littered on the floor.

In the way Gojo looked at you when he thought no one else saw.

In the way Suguru never raised his voice, but always listened.

In the way you gave your heart like the world hadn’t hurt you yet.

In the way they all leaned on each other like scaffolding, like maybe if they held tight enough, they wouldn’t fall.

iii. june, 2006

Summer in Tokyo hit different when you were sixteen and almost certain you’d die before twenty. 

They weren’t supposed to go out—they had curfews, missions stacked like bones at the start of their second year—curses growing restless, schools asking for protection, strange whispers threading through reports about ancient prisons and shifting power balances. Still, they trained. Still, they laughed. Still, they stole naps on rooftops and dared each other to eat expired convenience store pudding.

Still, they were kids.

Gojo whined until Suguru sighed and gave in, and you had tugged Shoko by the wrist before she could protest.

The festival was a crush of lantern light and smoke, sweet batter curling through the air, fireworks cracking open the dark. You darted ahead, yukata swaying, hair pinned up with something glittering like starlight. Gojo stuck by your side, wolfing down skewers two at a time, Suguru following at a distance with his hands tucked in his sleeves, gaze flicking toward the crowd like a man always counting exits, but still roaring in laughter as Gojo almost chokes on his third kebab.

“Try this,” Gojo said, shoving a stick of candied fruit under Shoko's nose.

“I don’t want your leftovers,” she muttered, unimpressed. But after a bit of nagging she took it anyway, quietly unwrapping it and biting through the sugar shell and pretending it wasn’t good—just to spite him.

Fireworks bloomed overhead—white, then red, then a scatter of gold that turned every face strange and beautiful. For a moment, Shoko saw them like strangers: Suguru haloed in crimson, Gojo’s grin carved bright in the dark, and you tilting your head back to watch the sky like it would never fall.

The boom of the next firework swallowed her thoughts, and she let it.

❀

Shoko always thought the end would come like a firework—loud, blinding, impossible to ignore.

But it hadn’t. It came instead like fog. Slow, creeping, impossible to trace where it started.

By the time they noticed it was already over, the fog of it had already filled the room.

She thinks she can trace every lamentable moment of her life back to that August of 2006. 

Gojo, Geto, you and the star plasma vessel mission she hadn’t been a part of. When she thinks back on it, she can’t exactly understand what happened in that week to have changed the course of their entire lives. Was it before Gojo died in a bloody mess? Was it after he came back, blood-stained, eyes dark, buzzing with an energy that she acknowledged—with bated breath—had finally crossed to godhood?

Gojo was stronger. Far stronger. Six eyes sharp as knives, his cursed technique threading into infinity like it had always been waiting for him to catch up. The elders watched him now—not as a student, but as a threat. You noticed it too. Started staying closer to him, stepping between him and the higher-ups during briefings.

“They're grooming him,” you told Shoko once. “not for leadership. for war.”

Shoko looked at you—at the calluses on your hands, the scar on your jaw you hadn’t let Shoko heal.

“They're grooming all of us.”

You didn’t deny it anymore.

❀

There are softer things that year, where Shoko can’t remember the exact moment things changed.

Only that something had slowed, gone hazy. Like the last layer of frost on a windowpane, melting so gently it almost went unnoticed.

It felt like fall had come early. The leaves on the tech’s old trees went gold and red like they’d been waiting to burn. There were still wounds to be tended to, and there were still things they couldn’t talk about from the end of that summer.

But Gojo had grown taller over the summer, like his body had finally remembered he came from giants. His hair had grown shaggier, uniform didn’t fit right anymore, and he refused to ask for a new one. Shoko watched him adjust his cuffs every morning like it was some kind of ritual, then pretend not to notice when you offered him your spare hair tie for his sleeves. He took it without meeting your eyes, and wore it like armor.

Shoko noticed the shift in the air. Maybe it was the way that you had started lingering after training, towel around your neck, laughter caught in your throat like a secret. Or the way Gojo stood straighter when you walked into a room, blinking too slow, like he hadn’t meant to look. Maybe it was how the two of you had stopped fighting in that way you used to—loud, fast, like lightning cracking open the sky—and started teasing instead. Light, easy, ridiculous. Like you didn’t know how else to be near each other.

Shoko noticed it in the quiet, in the pauses between conversations, and in the way you touched your own wrist absentmindedly whenever Gojo spoke, like grounding yourself. She noticed how Gojo—always so proud of his attention span—started forgetting what he was saying mid-sentence if you laughed too loud.

“You're obvious,” Shoko told you one evening, as you stood in front of her dorm mirror brushing your teeth. It was practically your dorm now, too.

You spat into the sink. “He’s worse.”

“You're both insufferable.”

“He’s insufferable. I'm charming.”

“He told Nanami you punched him in the throat during training.”

“I did, so what? He totally deserved it.”

“I just can’t believe he let you in the first place.” Shoko shook her head, and thought of the infinity around Gojo, the invisible barrier between him and humanity. The thing that put him closer to godliness. A smile curling at her lips despite herself, understanding the implications of Gojo turning it off around you. “And yet you still gave him your last Milkis at lunch.”

“It was strawberry-flavored.” a shrug. “I don't like strawberry.”

Shoko didn’t say anything else. Didn’t point out the way you lingered when Gojo wasn’t around, or how your voice got quieter when you talked about him. Didn’t say that she’d seen Gojo staring out windows when he thought no one was watching, fingers tapping the rhythm of your laugh on his thigh.

There was something sacred about their closeness. Something fragile and half-formed, still soft at the edges. Shoko didn’t want to break it by naming it too soon.

She just watched. Just remembered.

Suguru was the only one who never commented.

He saw it too—of course he did—but he never overtly teased, only gave a knowing smile quietly to Gojo who would glare back, but never really poked at the obvious tension between the two. Maybe because he understood it, or maybe because he was the kind of person who noticed things and let them be.

He grew quieter that fall, but not in a way that worried her yet. It was more like he was watching, gathering. She felt like something was shifting behind his eyes, too slow and too early to name yet. He still joked with Gojo, still helped Haibara with his footwork, still spent long evenings reading next to Shoko in the common room without saying a word.

But he didn’t smile as easily. And sometimes, when he thought no one was looking, he would close his eyes like the world was too loud.

Shoko didn’t ask. She didn’t know how.

Maybe she should have.

❀

It's late November and the mission went fine.

They exorcised the spirit, cleansed the space, burned the remains. but it was what happened after that stuck.

They stayed overnight in a small inn at the base of the mountain, just two rooms—boys in one, girls in the other. The floors were tatami, and the air smelled like cedar and sulfur from the hot springs nearby. it should’ve been peaceful.

But Shoko couldn’t sleep.

You lay on your side, back to Shoko, eyes open in the dark. She listened to the wind outside, the drip of water from a leaky faucet, the quiet hum of something that felt like change.

And then, sometime past midnight, you slipped out of bed.

Shoko didn’t move, just watched the shadow cross the room, slide the door open, and vanish into the hallway.

It wasn't long before Gojo left too.

You weren’t subtle. Maybe you didn’t want to be.

Shoko waited a full minute before getting up. Her feet were cold on the floor. She didn’t know what she expected—to interrupt them, to tease them. She heard echoes in the hallway, but couldn’t make out a word. Just the shuffling of feet, and the wind blowing against the door.

But when she found the two of you — you weren’t touching.

You were standing in the snow-dusted garden outside the inn, facing each other, breathing visible in the cold. Your arms were folded tight across your chest. Gojo's hands were shoved deep into his coat pockets.

You weren’t saying anything, but she felt this air around you two. In your distance, in the heavy breathing and puffs of smoke between your lips, like you had run out of words to say.

Now, you were just looking.

And maybe that was worse. More intimate, somehow.

Shoko didn’t move. She stayed hidden by the shadows, her breath caught somewhere in her throat.

Then you reached forward.

Your hands touching Gojo’s cheek, just barely.

He flinched.

Not away. Not exactly. Just — startled. Like he hadn’t expected you to be real.

Shoko could see it then—how scared he was. Not of you, but of what it meant to want something in a world like theirs.

“You don’t have to say anything,” you said quietly.

Gojo looked at you. “I should.”

“You never say anything you don’t mean.”

“I don’t know how to mean this.”

A pause. Your breath hitched.

“Just don’t look away.”

He didn’t.

And she watched as you leaned in, closing your eyes for your first kiss. How his lashes had brushed against your cheek as he let you pull him in, his hand finding its way to hold your waist. 

Shoko had left after that — witnessing a moment so intimate she felt shivers just watching it, intruding in it. Or maybe it was the cold that got her. But, she waited to sleep until you went back inside. Waited until you crawled into bed beside her again, colder than before, but smiling softly into the dark.

Neither of you said a word.

Shoko stared at the ceiling and tried not to think about how everything had already started to change.

❀

The next few weeks felt warmer, somehow. Like something had opened in their group that wasn’t there before. Not just between Gojo and you—but all of them.

They trained harder. Laughed more. She wanted to believe they were healing the cracks from that August, that the feeling of finality sinking into her wasn’t real.

Even Suguru seemed lighter again. He stopped frowning at the radio when the news came on. Started humming again while he read. He taught Haibara about a complicated binding technique in the training yard one afternoon and let out a laugh when Haibara tried it himself. There was a moment—a brief, impossible moment—where Shoko almost believed in forever.

They sat on the school rooftop one evening, all four of them, sky streaked violet and pink and gold. Someone had brought a speaker, and someone else had brought a bottles of various soda. Music played low. She noticed that you had rested your head on Gojo's shoulder, and he didn’t move, just leaned into it like gravity.

Suguru was telling a story about a curse he saw shaped like a crab. Shoko laughed. The wind was cool and sweet. The world didn’t feel like it was ending yet.

“You ever think we’ll get out of this?” Suguru asked, voice low, cigarette between his lip.

“Out of what?” you asked.

“This. Jujutsu. Destruction and death and chaos—whatever it is.”

Gojo stared at the sky. “No.”

“Maybe,” Shoko took the cigarette from Geto’s lips, and took a puff. “but not whole.”

They sat in silence for a long time after that.

The sun set, and Shoko watched the light disappear behind Gojo’s glasses, behind your smile, behind the quiet curve of Suguru's mouth.

It felt like a beginning.

But all she could think about was how beautiful things always seemed, right before they broke.

iv. march, 2007

It’s cruel to her, how the missions only seemed to get worse after that.

Higher-ranked, more volatile, more death. More nights in strange towns with blood on their hands. They started seeing each other less and less. In the aftermath of Riko Amani’s death, after last August, that Gojo had been assigned onto more missions alone—acknowledged for the first time in finality as the strongest. Started carrying all the mission files himself, memorizing them down to the street corners. Shoko started collecting more tools, more supplies, more sutures for the clinic at the tech, where she stayed more often than not now. She stopped wearing earrings because they got in the way of her face mask. You had learned how to kill without hesitation.

And she swore Suguru never complained about the missions he went on alone. But now he flinched when they passed playgrounds. Tensed when civilians asked for help. The curses he swallowed grew sharper, crueler. nastier, he had once told her late one night, the word leaving his tongue like he had coughed up bile.

“Don't let them suffer,” he said once, without blinking. “Fast is better.”

Shoko nodded.

She didn’t ask what he meant.

❀

The last mission they took together was in the early spring of 2007, before the start of their third year. 

A cult in Hiraizumi—dark rituals, civilian disappearances, cursed users hiding behind holy symbols and incense. They traveled light, only the four of them. It felt like the early days again, for a moment—suitcases and jokes and Gojo making dumb puns as they checked into a cheap ryokan.

But the mission itself was ugly.

Children locked in closets. Blood on the temple floors. Curses formed from fear and starvation, clinging to walls like rot.

Suguru lost control halfway through.

Not of his technique. Not of his mind. But of his restraint.

He killed too quickly. Didn’t wait for surrender, and didn’t leave the last cursed user breathing long enough to answer questions.

Gojo grabbed him by the collar after.

“What the hell was that?”

“They were killing kids.”

“They were running away.”

“And they would’ve kept going.” 

Gojo's hand tightened. his voice dropped. “We follow orders.”

“Do we?”

Suguru's eyes burned—hotter than Shoko had ever seen. “Whose orders, Satoru?”

Shoko watched you step between them. A hand on Gojo's chest. Your voice low. “Not here.”

Gojo dropped his hand, and Suguru had turned and walked away, scoffing.

The two of them didn’t speak again the rest of the trip.

❀

Haibara died not long after.

He had been bright—sun-bright, laughter-bright, too-young-to-fall-bright. He said “good morning” like it mattered. He addressed them all formally even when they told him to stop. He sparred with you like he was dancing, ate lunch with his mouth full, had dreams about being a sorcerer who saved people and meant it.

The mission was supposed to be simple.

Shoko remembers the call. A cursed womb, grade 3, nothing extraordinary. She remembers you saying, “they’re strong. Nanami'll be with him. they’ll be fine.”

They weren’t.

What came back wasn’t a body, not really. It was a mess of limbs and red and something too silent to be the Haibara she had known.

Nanami carried him. Wouldn’t let go, even as his uniform soaked a darker shade from the blood.

Shoko stitched Haibara's body together with shaking hands—not to save him. Just so his mother could recognize his face.

You threw up in the courtyard after the funeral. Gojo didn’t speak. Suguru didn’t cry.

Grief had finally split the group like glass under pressure—fracture lines running between them, invisible until the light hit just right.

Gojo got louder. More obnoxious, more ridiculous. He made jokes during meetings, fell asleep in class, tripped over his own feet just to make you laugh.

And you did laugh. Loud and real and reckless. But there was something sharp underneath it. A glint in your voice. A kind of defiance.

Suguru got even quieter.

Not the peaceful kind of quiet. Not the kind that meant calm or ease.

This was the kind that clung to him. That narrowed his eyes when he passed civilians on the street. That curled his lip when they reported to elders who hadn’t lifted a hand in battle in years. That made him look at Haibara’s photo like it was a question that would never be answered.

Shoko felt it most at night.

Suguru used to accidentally fall asleep reading in the common room, head tilted back, glasses slipping. Now, he sat up long after everyone else had gone to bed, staring at nothing, fingers curled like he was still gripping a weapon.

She said something once. Tried to, at least.

“Are you okay?” she asked quietly, as they stood in the hall one night. She can’t recall why, or where, but she remembers this moment because there has never been a part of her that hadn’t wished she had pushed back harder.

Suguru looked at her.

His smile was soft, fake. “Yeah.”

By then she knew he was gone.

❀

A couple weeks later, in the midst of an August heatwave — Suguru Geto disappears.

He left a note on the dorm kitchen table and a photo of the four of them.

Just one sentence: I can't do this anymore.

The rest was silence.

Shoko found it first. She read it twice, then sat down at the table and stared at the handwriting until you walked in and asked where everyone was.

Gojo didn’t say anything after meeting with Yaga. Didn’t come out of his room for the rest of the morning.

Though it’s the last time she sees Suguru, she understands this is it.

She had heard, just a little after reading his final note, what he’d done. A town massacred, burned to the ground and cursed residuals that couldn’t have been anyone’s but the man next to her — his own mother and father killed by their only son’s hands. 

Yet here he was, lighting her cigarette for her and laughing. At least she could pretend for a moment that this didn’t have to be over.

She gives Gojo a call and waits with Suguru for his best friend to arrive and she wonders if Gojo could change the outcome of this. If Gojo Satoru could save Suguru Geto from himself. But another glance up at him, long hair disheveled, the purpled skin under his eyes deeper than she’s ever seen, and the emptiness behind his smile, that she realizes she doesn’t know the man next to her. Not anymore. Maybe not at all.

So he waves goodbye, and she nods and lets the smoke cloud her lungs.

And she never spoke to him again.

❀

That winter, the sky felt heavier. The air full of ghosts.

You stopped wearing bright colors. Started sleeping in your uniform, like you expected to be called into battle at any second. Gojo trained until his hands bled, and didn’t let Shoko bandage them.

“What if he’s right?” he asked her once. His voice barely audible. “What if we’re just killing things to delay the inevitable?”

Shoko didn’t answer, because she didn’t know. (Because something in her still wanted to believe.)

But by the end of that year she had found herself alone more often.

In the morgue. On the roof. In the silence between patrols. She smoked less, not because she wanted to live longer. Just because it didn’t feel worth the taste anymore.

You had stopped talking about the future.

Gojo stopped calling himself the strongest.

They were eighteen then. Too young to have seen so much. Too old to unsee any of it.

v. 2008

The years felt blurry after.

Like the sky after a firework show, after the beauty of it wears and you are left with the remains. Of the sky billowed in smoke, and the ground covered in ash. Shoko remembers the firework show during the summer festival in their second year, how she had watched the lights change your faces. How when she thinks of Suguru, she remembers him back then, hair in a half bun, wearing a yukata, his profile cast under the red glow of fireworks.

Mission after mission. Report after report. Half-empty dorm rooms. Birthdays that passed unnoticed. Names that became numbers. More curses. More blood. Fewer friends.

By then she had stopped smoking entirely, not because she wanted to live. But because you had always hated the smell.

And for a long time after Suguru left, Shoko couldn’t sleep without dreaming of the morgue.

The lights were always too bright. The steel trays too cold. Her gloves slick with blood that would never dry. In the dream, you always walked in first—whole, alive, laughing. And Shoko would reach for you. Call your name. But you would just smile, step onto the autopsy table, and lie down.

“You're early,” Shoko would whisper.

“I know.” you would say.

Then the door would swing open, and Suguru would walk in next. But his face would be hollowed out, eyes dark like tunnels. He'd sit beside your body, light a cigarette, and say nothing at all.

Shoko always woke up with her hands clenched tight around the sheets, fingers aching.

❀

Gojo never talked about Suguru.

Not once.

Not even on that day all those years ago when he came back from the confrontation in Shinjuku with blood in his nails and grief in his eyes.

He got stronger. Faster. Untouchable.

The elders stopped looking at him like a student and started looking at him like their greatest tool. He didn’t flinch, just started smiling bigger, make louder jokes, wore sunglasses indoors, and flirted and teased and deflected.

Shoko could see it, thought. In the slump of his shoulders, or the way his laugh caught wrong in his throat.

He was grieving like a dam breaking. Slowly and inevitably.

But never where anyone could see.

You stayed close to him after that. Stopped being fire and became gravity. Quiet and steady. The only thing that could bring him back when he started spinning too fast. You were the one who waited outside meetings. The one who kicked open his door and pulled him out of bed on the days he refused to get up, muttering, “If you don’t move, I'll set your curtains on fire.”

He always moved. Shoko thinks that it’s less because he believed in your vague threats, and more because he just believed in you.

Shoko watched it all from the edge.

The way you stopped waiting for him to say how he felt. The way you just stood there—open, unwavering—until he stopped running.

The two of you never made it official. Not with labels. Not with grand declarations or anything, But Gojo started showing up late to meetings because he walked you home.

Shoko didn’t know if it was healing, but for a while, it was peace.

vi. april, 2009

Around this time, the Fushiguro’s arrived.

Megumi. Six years old. Too serious. too quiet. walked around everyone like he was ready to hit, or be hit. His older sister, Tsumiki. Not older by much, just eight years old, but she was sunshine, warm and motherly beyond her years. Shoko saw that you took to her instantly, buying her hair clips and braiding her hair — showing her how to throw a punch if she ever needed to.

Gojo brought them to the school with a box of takeout and a stubborn glint in his eye. "Don't say anything weird,” he told you and shook. “He already thinks I’m an idiot.”

“He's not wrong,” you smiled, and Gojo pouted at you.

Shoko bent down to meet the boy’s eyes, unsure of what to say. “Hmm. What’s something you like?”

He shrugged, and gave her an unimpressed look. “I like dogs.”

“Me too,” she said. “They’re honest.”

That night, they all sat in the common room eating cold noodles. Gojo told a story about a cursed tanuki that stole his left shoe. Megumi didn’t laugh, but he leaned into his sister when she did. Shoko watched as he leaned by Gojo's side as the lights went out.

You and Gojo had opened your arms and made space for the two of them.

Or maybe you had filled in the spaces left behind.

❀

Gojo cooked more, and wasn't great on his first try, surprisingly. Shoko had to supervise so he didn’t poison anyone, and you would’ve eaten anything Gojo cooked, regardless.

Shoko watched as the four of them fell into something like a rhythm. Not a family. Not quite.

But something softer than she had become used to.

The kids brought color back to the halls when they came to visit. Laughter that didn’t feel borrowed. It wasn't like before—but nothing ever was.

Gojo had bought an apartment for Megumi and Tsumiki, and the two of you stopped by almost everyday that year. You and Gojo made bento boxes. You went on grocery runs. You argued over what show to watch on Saturday nights. When Shoko would come over, Tsumiki would beg to paint Shoko’s nails, and once she had given in with her nails painted badly in rainbow and glitter, and you and Gojo had made fun of her for weeks when Shoko didn’t wipe it off.

You stopped wearing your uniform outside missions. Started wearing sweaters with loose sleeves, earrings again, mismatched socks.

You started reading books and magazines and things that weren’t just mission reports. Bought a plant for their windowsill. Put post-it notes on the fridge.

Shoko found one once that said, “Satoru, if you forget to buy me dorayaki again, I swear to God.”

He forgot anyway, but he came back late that night with flowers.

Shoko watched from the couch as you opened the door, just to see you blinking down at the bouquet like it had grown a second head.

“They didn’t have dorayaki,” he said, sheepish. “But they had these.”

You didn’t speak—just grabbed the collar of his coat and stepped into the apartment hallway with him, shutting the door without looking.

Shoko looked away, and gave them the evening. She hung out with the kids, because they were cooler, and let them sleep on the couch watching movies.

It’s after they had fallen asleep, and you and Gojo were nowhere to be seen, that she sat on the balcony and watched the city lights flicker, listening to the hum of traffic into the night.

For the first time in months, she felt… full.

Not happy. Not yet healed.

But full, like maybe all her pieces had stopped rattling.

Just for now.

❀

She still worked long hours, because the clinic never slept.

New students. New injuries. New names she tried not to memorize.

She stitched and cut and stabilized and cleaned. Practiced her technique until it no longer felt like a gift but a reflex.

She stopped praying, though she had never been good at it anyway.

But every time a body came in, not yet cold, not yet gone, she held her breath.

Please, not them.

❀

They didn’t talk about the past. At least not often.

But sometimes, when you had already fallen asleep and the wind whistled through the hallways, Gojo would sit next to her on the balcony and say things in a tone older than his twenty years.

“He liked soba more than ramen. I never knew that.”

And Shoko would nod.

“He read faster than anyone,” she’d add. “even me.”

“He believed in this more than we did.”

“Yeah.”

Then silence.

Then the night.

Then the world turning, regardless.

❀

Shoko isn’t sure what time it is now, but it feels like a bit past midnight. In here, it’s just the two of you on the couch with the weight of exhaustion like a second blanket. The balcony door is half-open, and the September chill is blowing in softly. There’s a glass of wine balanced precariously on the edge of the coffee table, that she keeps forgetting to drink, and you’ve got your legs tucked underneath you, hair damp from a shower, wearing one of those shirts that’s probably his — though neither of you ever acknowledges it out loud.

Shoko tips her head against the back of the couch, eyes tracing the ceiling like it’ll tell her the future, and mutters, “I feel so old.”

You laugh, soft, incredulous. “We’re twenty-one.”

“Exactly. And yet my back feels like I’m fifty.” You give her a side glance, smiling.

“My back feels perfectly fine, granny.”

“That’s because you have two little minions who give you back massages whenever you ask. And they can’t say no because you house and feed them.”

You nudge her knee with your own, half-amused, half-affectionate. “They’d starve if it wasn’t for us.”

“They’d at least learn how to cook instant ramen properly,” she fires back, though her tone is fond. She knows it as well as you do—how Megumi sometimes falls asleep at the kitchen table with his homework still out, how Tsumiki always insists on washing the dishes even when her fingers are pruned from her bath. How the apartment has begun to feel not just like a place to sleep, but like the kind of home you were never supposed to have.

It makes her chest ache.

She glances at you again, more carefully this time. “You’re happy, right?”

You blink at her, then tilt your head like you don’t quite understand the weight of the question. “Happy?”

“You know what I mean.” Shoko shrugs, too casual. “With all this — and with him.”

There it is. Not accusatory, just curious, like she’s been holding this thought in her mouth for months, letting it turn over until it smoothed into something she could say without breaking it.

You’re quiet for a moment, your gaze lowering to the glass of wine you still haven’t touched. “It’s not simple.”

“Nothing ever is with him.” She huffs a small laugh, but she doesn’t look away from you.

“Sometimes,” you admit, your voice softer, “it feels like we’re still kids, sneaking out after curfew, daring each other to jump rooftops. And then sometimes I look at him and I feel like—” You break off, shaking your head as though it’s too fragile to name.

“Like what?”

You exhale slowly. “Like he already belongs to the world, and I’m just borrowing him for a while.”

That hits Shoko harder than she expects. She shifts on the couch, watching the way your fingers worry at the hem of your sleeve. There’s something unguarded in the way you say it, something that makes her throat tighten.

Shoko leans her head against the couch cushion, her glass dangling loosely from her fingers. “You talk like he’s a library book or something. Checked out, due back in three weeks.”

You laugh, though it’s small and tired. “Maybe that’s all love really is. Borrowing someone for as long as they’ll let you keep them.”

“Morbid.”

“Honest.” You glance at her, and your smile is crooked, fond. “You know him. He’s… a hurricane in human form. Everyone wants a piece of him, and half the time I feel like I’m just holding on, hoping he doesn’t blow past me.”

Shoko hums, noncommittal, but her eyes are sharp. “And yet you’ve been holding on for who knows how long. Most people can’t even last five minutes with him in a room.”

“Don’t remind me,” you mutter, though your lips curve. “He still leaves his socks everywhere. Still eats candy for breakfast if I don’t stop him. And he—” You pause, and the softness of your voice betrays you. “He still looks at me the same way he did when we were sixteen. Like he can’t believe I’m real.”

Shoko conceals her smile, and masks it with a sip of wine. “He’d be an idiot not to.”

“I think about it sometimes,” you admit. “If we hadn’t met so young. If we hadn’t been thrown together in that pressure cooker of a school — would it have still been him? Would he have still found me?”

Shoko stretches her legs out, her gaze slipping toward the ceiling. “I think he was always going to be yours, you know. Some things just… fix themselves in place before you even notice.”

You fall quiet, staring at the wine in your glass, watching the way the light fractures against it. When you speak again, it’s hushed. “I’m scared, Shoko. I– I think I’m scared of losing him. Of the day the world asks for more than he can give, and I have to watch him walk toward it anyway.”

Shoko doesn’t answer right away. She looks at you — really looks — the girl who grew up at her side, who always chose kindness even when it cost you. You, who Gojo has loved since he was growing into his height, awkward and half-feral with grief and brilliance. You, who still look at him like he’s worth the trouble.

Finally, she says, “You know, when we were teenagers, I used to wonder if you’d grow tired of him. If one day you’d realize it was too much.”

You blink at her, startled. “And now?”

Shoko shrugs, her expression softening. “Now I think — if anyone was ever built to love him, it was you. Stubborn, patient, stupidly brave. He’s impossible, but you’ve always made the impossible look easy.”

Your laugh catches in your throat, trembling somewhere between joy and sorrow. “Don’t make me cry, Shoko.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” She lifts her glass in a lazy toast. “To you and him. To sixteen and twenty-one, and however long you can keep borrowing each other.”

You tap your glass gently against hers, the sound ringing low and warm. “To growing older.”

Shoko watches the way your face lights up at the thought, and takes a long sip from her glass. She tries for levity, though it comes out a little rough. “Well, if he breaks your heart, I get to kill him. That’s the rule.”

You laugh—really laugh this time, the kind that crinkles your eyes and warms the air between you. “You’d have to fight him first.”

“Please,” she scoffs. “He’s all bark. I’d win.”

“You’re funny, Shoko.” You smile a little sleepily, and lean your head against her shoulder, the way you used to when you were girls hiding from the elders in the back hallways of the clan compound. She doesn’t move, just lets you settle there, the weight of you a reminder that some things never change.

There’s a long stretch of silence, broken only by the city hum outside. Then, almost shyly, Shoko says, “Well, I hope he loves growing old with you as much as I loved growing up with you.”

You still against her, then let out a breath that sounds dangerously close to a sob. She doesn’t look at you, doesn’t push. That’s never been your language. Instead, she reaches for her wine, takes another sip, and adds, almost casually, “And if he doesn’t, then screw him. You’ll still have me.”

You laugh again, watery this time, and lean closer. “Always.”

❀

In the mornings, she drank coffee alone.

In the evenings, she liked to come to your apartment to the sound of laughter, and nonsense on the TV. To the smell of your cooking, which had gotten better than Gojo’s after a couple months. to Tsumiki and her hands that grabbed Shoko’s wrists and led her to the dining table. To Megumi, who Gojo tried so hard to make smile at his awful jokes.

Sometimes, she let herself believe it could last.

Sometimes, she let herself want more.

That was enough.

vii. 1997

When they were seven, you and Shoko built a grave for a bird.

They’d found it after a storm — a small thing, all bones and feathers, collapsed in the mud beneath a persimmon tree in the compound’s garden. You crouched beside it, poked it with a stick. “Is it sleeping?”

“No,” shoko said. “It's dead.”

“How do you know?”

“Its chest isn’t moving.”

“How do you know?”

Shoko didn’t answer. Just knelt down, tiny hands damp with soil, and began to dig.

They buried it beneath a square stone, lined the edges with pebbles. You picked wildflowers and bundled it with twine from the kitchen. Shoko pressed her fingers to the earth and whispered something she didn’t really understand — a wish, maybe, or a prayer.

They sat there until the wind died down, until your mother called them in, until the sky turned the color of ash.

“We should’ve saved it,” you whispered, wiping your nose with your sleeve.

Shoko didn’t say it, but she knew it then: sometimes you’re too late.

❀

january, 2014

The call comes at 2:19 in the afternoon, a higher-up’s voice, clipped and formal.

“She’s been recovered. We’re bringing you the body now.”

The world doesn’t spin, it just stills. Though Shoko sits at her desk for a long time after, the phone silent in her lap, her hands empty.

Shoko doesn’t ask whose, because there’s only one person left.

She's already standing.

Her coat’s already on.

Her tea’s gone cold. The light in the infirmary has gone muddled and slanted, painting long shadows over everything like a warning.

Her hands move automatically. Clipboard.Pen. Gloves.

The air starts to feel static.

The mission was supposed to be easy. “A clean-up.” A second sweep.She repeats, and repeats. Yet how many other times has she thought this?

You weren’t supposed to go alone, but someone backed out last minute, and you were never one to wait around.

Grade one curse. Warehouse District.

Shoko remembers the briefing because she was in the room. Because you had smiled — tilted your head, chewing gum, loose-limbed and tired. “I’ll be home quick.”

❀

Shoko gets a morbid sense of déjà vu when she sees you laid out on the table, covered with a sheet pulled too high. 

But when she sees the body, it doesn’t feel like you.

Not you. Born five days apart. The soldier to her healer. Balance, the clanheads had once called them. One to make and unmake.

Not the same girl who used to share her shampoo, or talk in her sleep. Not the girl who burned bright and reckless and kissed Gojo Satoru like it was the only truth left in the world.

The word balance keeps running through her head as she stares at your face. So still.

No, it wasn’t you. This body is cold, and broken in ways Shoko doesn’t have the words for.

Her gloves are on. Her cursed energy thrums at her fingertips.

But it’s all useless.

The wounds are clean. Carved into you like declarations. Chest collapsed, Ribs fractured inward. Shoko's already cataloging the report in her head. Trachea crushed. Internal hemorrhaging. Cursed lacerations across the sternum.

Then she moves.

Like a surgeon. like a healer with something to prove, even if there’s no one left to prove it to.

She doesn’t try to bring you back. Not really. She's seen too many bodies to believe in resurrection.

She stitches muscle back together like it’ll matter. Seals split skin. Brushes blood from your scalp. A ritual, maybe. or penance. And as she runs her fingers through the ends of your hair, she thinks of being five years old when you had taught her how to braid it.

When she feels her vision blur she whispers, “don’t be stupid,” just like you used to.

Her voice doesn’t tremble until the end.

Too late, she thinks, and she sees a dead bird cupped in your small hands. Wildflowers wrapped in twine.

Too late, too late, too late.

She writes the report with mechanical precision.

Her handwriting doesn’t shake.

She signs it, and place it on top of the clipboard.

Then folds your arms across your chest, straightens your uniform collar, uses a towel to wipe a smudge from your chin, and the drawer of the morgue clicks shut with a hollow finality.

And she finally lets herself cry.

Just once.

Quietly.

Like a confession.

❀

Shoko takes the train without really knowing why she’s chosen this route over the school car. After she explained what she was doing, Ijichi had told her he could drive her with a solemn look in his eyes, always so insistent. She had declined, so now she sits by the window, forehead pressed to the cold glass, the tunnel lights strobing against her reflection until her own face starts to look like a stranger’s.

She's still in her work clothes, still smells faintly of antiseptic and smoke, and the folder in her lap feels heavier than it should. She keeps one hand pressed flat to its cover like she’s holding a wound closed.

People filter in and out of the train at each stop, their chatter muted, just faint shapes moving through her periphery.

She doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes. The only thing she lets herself look at is the glass, and the snow on the other side of it—each flake blurring against the motion of the city, small and perfect and already gone.

Yaga had told her, after, that Satoru wasn’t told yet, but she wonders if he already knows. If some part of him—whatever raw, uncanny instinct makes him the strongest—registered it the moment your heart stopped. Maybe he felt it like an earthquake deep in his bones, the sudden, wrong absence in the air. Maybe he was sitting on their couch, turning toward the door without knowing why.

Her mind drifts, unspooling memory:

Summer afternoons, the four of them sitting on the roof with drinks to cool the sweat on them. Your hair tangled from the wind. Gojo leaning back on his palms, his sunglasses pushed to the top of his head so she could clearly see the way his gaze snagged on you like he didn’t even notice he was staring. The quiet shift over months from banter to something slower, gentler, like they’d started speaking a language that Shoko didn’t know but could still recognize in the spaces between words.

A late night after a mission, all of them exhausted, half asleep in the common room. Shoko had woken to see them leaning together on the couch, your head on his shoulder, his hand resting loosely on yours. The kind of touch that wasn’t accidental.

There had been other moments—quieter, private ones she hadn’t meant to see—that told her this was the thing that had changed him. He'd always been brilliant, unbearable, untouchable. but with you, his edges softened. He laughed differently. He listened.

Now she wonders how much of that she’s about to take from him in a single sentence.

The train slows into her stop, brakes screeching. She rises, folder in hand. She doesn’t know why she carries the hardcopy—maybe it makes it feel more real, more final, more like evidence of something she already failed to prevent.

She had stopped by a gas station and bought a pack of cigarettes and a small black lighter for the first time in almost six years. There’s now a cigarette clamped between her teeth, though she hasn’t lit it.

Snow is falling.

It catches in her hair, her sleeves, her lashes.

When she reaches their apartment building, she stops at the bottom of the stairs and thinks about turning around. But she doesn’t. She climbs each step like she’s approaching a grave.

The light’s on under the door.

She raises her hand.

And knocks.

❀

The door opens almost immediately.

And for a second — just one, flickering, incandescent second — Shoko sees the look on his face.

Gojo Satoru opens the door like he expects you to be behind it. Not Shoko. Not grief incarnate. But you. The woman he loves. The only thing in the world that could quiet his mind and hold his entire future in her palms.

He opens the door like someone in love. Like someone relieved. Like someone who still dares to hope.

And then he sees Shoko.

And everything stops.

His face doesn’t fall.

It freezes.

She watches the hope die in his expression. It doesn’t vanish — it dies. Like something physically collapsing inside of him. A structure caving in, silently, under its own weight.

His shoulders lock, and she watches his jaw tense. He doesn’t move aside to let her in, doesn’t say a word.

Just stares.

He looks at her like he had known this would be how it ended all along, but still — still, deep down, some piece of him had been holding on. Had left the light on. Had made her side of the bed. Had waited.

Shoko clears her throat.

The words don’t want to come.

"I’m sorry—she’s gone.”

That's all it takes.

Gojo doesn’t flinch.

But she sees it in the way his hand clenches around the edge of the door. The way his breath leaves him — sharp, shallow, wrong. The way he looks past her, like he’s trying to reframe the hallway, the scene, the moment.

Like maybe he can rewind it.

Undo it.

See you behind her, scolding her for delivering bad news so bluntly.

But Shoko is alone, and the silence is loud.

He steps back, and turns.

Walks into the apartment like everything inside was knocked over.

Shoko follows and shuts the door behind her.

The apartment is dim. Bathed in soft warm light. The heater hums gently in the corner, and there are two mugs on the table, one empty and one half-drunk. Your sweater is still hanging over the back of the couch, sleeves inside out. Your boots are by the door. The windows are covered by sheer white curtains, but the shade of blue that appears just after sunset peeks through, framing the room the same color as melancholy.

Shoko wants to scream.

Instead, she places the folder on the table.

Neither of them look at it.

She taps the folder once, not to push him, but to make its presence undeniable.

“Are you going to read it?”

His back is still to her. She can see the angle of his spine through the thin cotton of his shirt, every muscle tight, like he’s bracing for impact.

With no hesitation, “No.”

Shoko expected that answer, but she still feels something drop in her chest.

“You sure? It’s not… it’s not just medical jargon. I kept it clean. No gore.”

He turns his head just enough for her to see one sharp eye over his shoulder.

“You want me to read the autopsy for the love of my life?”

She pauses, feeling herself hold her breath.

“I want you to know what happened,” she says, voice level. “Exactly what happened. Without the stories you’ll tell yourself later.”

He scoffs—a sound halfway between disbelief and exhaustion—and shakes his head.

“The story I want is that you’re lying.”

Silence.

He pushes away from the counter, crosses to the table. His height makes the space between them smaller without him even trying. He puts a hand on the folder like he might open it—thumb brushing the edge, fingers curling.

And then he just… freezes.

Shoko watches him, and for the first time she sees it—not the usual walls, the sarcasm, the easy dismissal. This is different. This is a man standing at the edge of a cliff, staring down, knowing there’s nothing but rocks and cold water below.

“I can't,” he says finally, and it’s not defiance. It's quiet. almost gentle.

“Why?”

he swallows, eyes still on the folder.

“Because the second I read it, it’s over. She's gone in ink. In numbers. In your handwriting.” he glances up at her, and there’s no shield in his expression now. “If I don't read it, she’s just… late coming home.”

Shoko's throat tightens.

For a moment, she wants to tell him she understands. That she’s done the same—taken certain pages out because the words make her feel sick. But she doesn’t. She just nods, takes the folder back, tucks it under her arm again.

He exhales like he’s been holding his breath the whole time.

He’s not moving.

Not breathing, maybe.

His hand rests on the counter like it’s the only thing keeping him upright and she watches his shoulders shake.

Once.

Then still again.

His face is unreadable.

But his eyes — god, his eyes.

Shoko has known him for more than a decade, has seen him bloodied and laughing and blind with pain and victory. But she has never seen him like this.

Not even after Suguru.

Not even after Toji.

This isn’t rage.

This isn’t despair.

This is something else.

Something jagged. Something bottomless.

He looks at her like she’s the executioner. Like she didn’t just bring the news — but she made it true. But maybe, in some way, he’s right to feel that way.

“You’re sure that she’s—?” he asks, voice quiet. She could’ve mistaken his tone for desperation.

Shoko nods.

That's when it happens.

He laughs.

Short, ugly, and bitter.

An instinct, like flinching.

He runs a hand through his hair. Leans back against the counter.

The quiet settles like dust.

Shoko sits down on the couch. something crackles beneath her — one of your notebooks. She picks it up, flips it open without thinking.

The last page is filled with sketches. a little cartoon version of Gojo, grinning, speech bubble saying “have you seen my honey?”

Her throat tightens.

She doesn’t speak.

“I thought I had more time,” he says. Shoko doesn’t have it in her to speak.

“I wanted to take her to Okinawa again. Not for a mission this time. Just because.”

He closes his eyes.

“She never got to see it in winter. She would’ve liked the cold.”

And she stays the night on their couch. Like old times, except there is no wine and no laughter and your warmth isn’t beside her. Shoko never really registered that she’ll never see you again. Even now, it feels like you’ll call her at any moment and ask her if she wants a drink.

But that first night without you, she doesn’t think she could really fall asleep.

And he doesn’t really cry.

But in the morning, he makes coffee with hands that won’t stop shaking.

She drinks hers cold, and so does he. But she watches him press your mug to his lips and set it down again, like it burned him.

❀

august, 2014

Gojo is twenty four, and he’s older than he was meant to be. More tired than he lets on, and somehow still waiting for something that already ended.

Sometimes, when it’s late, and the city is loud, and the stars don’t show themselves—Shoko catches him leaning against the doorway of his apartment balcony, looking at the buildings and cars and passerbys like he’s trying to remember the shape of your face.

And that, she thinks, is love.

Not flowers.

Not vows.

Not even the waiting.

But the remembering.

The carrying.

The way his world stopped. The way he never quite leaves the doorway, just in case you might still come home to him.

viii. 2015

Grief, when it lingers long enough, becomes routine.

Shoko wakes the same way every morning: early, cold. the city a dull hum outside her window. The kettle clicks on. She measures out coffee. Drinks it black, because that’s how you liked it, and then cooks konnyaku because you hated it.

The irony keeps her company.

The mornings are always quiet now. The kind of quiet that settles into your bones and stays.

And Nanami leaves the Jujutsu world around that time.

Quietly. Respectfully. Without fuss.

He came to her clinic on a Tuesday, knocked once, sat down across from her, and said, "I'm leaving.”

She didn’t ask why, because she felt like she already knew.

He was twenty three and already looked like he’d seen the end of the world twice.

“You'll be good,” she said softly. “Too good for this place.”

Nanami looked away. “I just want to live like a person.”

She envied him for thinking it was still possible.

Before he left, he placed a small paper-wrapped gift on her desk.

Inside was a lighter, clean, silver, unused.

She held it in her palm for a long time that night.

But she didn’t smoke.

Not yet.

❀

She sees Gojo more often these days.

Not because they talk more, and not because they seek each other out. Just because there’s no one else left.

They don’t need to make plans anymore. They just end up in the same places. The clinic. The faculty room. The convenience store on that street with the broken traffic light.

Sometimes he brings her canned coffee. Never says anything when he hands it to her.

She drinks it anyway.

It’s the only thing he offers that she can still take.

And he laughs a little more now, but it’s not the same.

When he does, it’s wrong. Jagged. Like something trying to escape from under his skin. It reminds her that he’s still grieving, even when he tells her “he’s over it.”

The students adore him. Still think he’s invincible, and think the blindfolds and wit and charm are who he really is.

 But Shoko knows better.

❀

december, 2017

Suguru's death didn’t come like she expected, though to her, Suguru Geto had died the August they were seventeen.

From the outside, he went out in flame and fury.

But then again, it feels like he went out quietly. Gently. By Gojo’s own hands.

Because, in the end, that was the only way it could’ve happened.

Not in hatred or vengeance, but in recognition of what they’d been. Of what they’d lost. Of the thin line between who you are and who you become when the world stops making sense.

“It was quick,” Gojo told her afterward, his voice steady, eyes blown wide with something far beyond pain.

Shoko believed him. Not because she trusted the words, but because she trusted the silence between them.

❀

She thinks of Suguru now more than she admits.

Remembers how he used to hum under his breath while taking notes. How he’d hand her highlighters during meetings without looking. How he used to let them braid his hair on missions just to make them smile.

Remembers the way he stood the last time she saw him, on the night of the cursed parade—back straight, curses curling around him like smoke, eyes tired in a way that made her want to scream. 

He broke long before he died.

Shoko knows this.

She also knows he would’ve been a wonderful teacher.

If the world had been kinder, and if someone had stopped to tell him that softness wasn’t weakness. That wanting to save people didn’t make him naïve.

That watching them die wasn’t his fault.

❀

Gojo comes to dinner sometimes.

Not often or predictably. Sometimes he just knocks, steps inside, doesn’t take his shoes off properly, and drops onto her couch like he owns the place.

She used to yell at him for that, but now she just lets him.

He eats whatever she makes. Doesn’t complain, even when it’s instant ramen or cold rice or nothing at all.

They don’t talk much during those nights.

But sometimes, he falls asleep.

And sometimes, she covers him with the old blanket you used to use when you were over — just because. Just to remember what it felt like to care for someone who was still breathing.

There's one night that she remembers, after a long day of treating a couple injured sorcerers in the midst of a mission, that she finds him already waiting.

In the kitchen, cutting vegetables.

“What are you doing?” she asks, flatly.

“Trying to give you a break,” he says.

“By mutilating my carrots?”

“They fought back.”

She puffs a breath from her nose and smiles.

It’s the closest she’s come to laughing in days.

He makes curry. It's too spicy. The rice is slightly undercooked — but it’s not half bad.

She eats every bite, and doesn’t thank him for showing up.

They’re not close, not in the way people imagine. They don’t tell each other secrets. They don’t hug. They don’t reminisce out loud. Their bond lies in the memory of what it meant to be sixteen and still whole. Of how it felt watching the strongest boy in the room slowly learn how to be gentle. Of seeing him break and build and break again.

Of surviving the wreckage together.

He keeps her from vanishing. She keeps him from shattering.

They exist near each other.

Orbiting.

Keeping each other tethered.

❀

Shoko's the only one who doesn’t have a grave.

Not really.

Haibara's is now marked in a clean Kyoto cemetery. Suguru's ashes were never recovered, but there’s a stone for him outside his old temple. You have a simple plaque under the oak tree they used to study beneath.

Shoko visits them all, but she doesn’t linger.

Because it’s not the places that hold them.

It’s the way she still turns her head when someone says “Geto” in a briefing. It’s the way she keeps chopsticks in her drawer for four, not one. It's the way she wakes from a dream, disoriented and reaching for an image of herself, of when her hair was cut to her chin and she is surrounded by people who were once her home — before she remembers that no one’s coming.

Though, there's a new photo on her desk now.

Four teenagers. Uniforms on and grins wide.

Gojo has his eyes closed. Suguru is pretending to look annoyed. You’re flipping off the camera. Shoko is mid-laugh, mouth open, eyes crinkled.

She doesn’t remember who took it.

Doesn’t remember what they were laughing at.

But she leaves it there.

Next to the medical files and the pills and the list of new students.

It’s a reminder — not of who they were, but that they were. That at one point in time, the four of them had existed together. That at some point, that was all that mattered.

ix. december 24, 2018

The first snow falls unceremoniously. No warning and no wind to carry it.

Just flakes, slow and fat, drifting sideways over the rooftops of Shinjuku like ash from something that’s already burned.

Shoko watches it from the roof.

She doesn’t move.

Not yet.

It's the holidays, and she hates this time of year. There’s too much pretending, too many bright windows, too many mouths grinning like the world hasn’t ended five times already.

This year, the snow comes early.

And with it—him.

She thinks the city is strange under snow. Not soft. Not pretty. Just muffled, hollowed out. Sirens echo longer. Footsteps vanish quicker. The skyline dissolves behind a white veil, lights blurring like bruises.

She walks through it alone. Past vending machines glazed in frost and power lines sagging beneath the weight. There are paper lanterns swaying over shuttered storefronts, their glow smudged and dim.

Her boots crunch the snow like something brittle and alive. She isn’t wearing gloves. She likes the cold biting at her skin. It feels honest.

She finds him in the square.

Tall. Unmovable. Eyes like winter distilled into glass.

He's facing Sukuna, and there’s no backup. No panic. No speeches or horns sounding in the dark. Just two gods standing where no man should be.

She doesn’t call his name or break the silence. Only stands at the edge of it all, smoke slipping from her mouth, her eyes dry as bone.

He knows she’s there.

He doesn’t turn.

But he tilts his chin, barely, like a gesture carved out of stone.

And she understands, like she did all those years ago in August, when Suguru Geto had lit her cigarette. When he smiled and waved and she had turned away, for the last time.

That this is the end.

Not just of him. Not just of this fight.

But of everything that tethered them to a time when living felt possible.

Springtime in Jujutsu Tech. Sunlight tangled in white hair. You, singing too loudly, Suguru sighing like the world rested in his lungs. Sandos split in half. Train cars rattling at dusk. Leaves falling as soft as promises they never kept.

All of it.

Ending here.

Under a sky in a city stripped down to bone.

He burns too bright, even now. Bends space like a god, cuts air like a blade, shoulders the infinite and makes it look like art. And still—Sukuna is cruel. patient. inevitable.

Shoko watches as it begins: sharp, merciless, a brilliance that blinds and dies just as quickly.

She sees him hold and hold and hold—until he doesn’t.

He doesn’t scream.

He just folds.

Quietly.

Finally.

And the moment he hits the ground, the world doesn’t shatter.

But something in her does.

Everything slows.

The air thickens. Her breath fogs in front of her. Her hands are shaking, not from fear, but because she’s remembering. Nostalgia has always had its way of killing her, of creeping up on her and leaving her feeling sick. There is nothing left to reminisce now, as the last remaining part of her youth lies split in half in the show.

❀

The lab smells like steel and antiseptic, like every failure she’s ever catalogued. Fluorescent lights hum above her, sickly and bright, making her want to tear them out of the ceiling. She doesn’t. She just sets the instruments in place, lines up scalpels with the precision of someone who cannot afford to think.

Yuta lies unconscious on the table, his chest rising shallow, his pulse steady under her fingers. Now, she moves over to the drawer, where she placed Satoru’s body after stitching it back together. When she pulls back the sheets, she touches his hair once, brushes it off his forehead the way she remembers you used to when he was too stubborn to sleep.

Now she stands over him, and for the first time in years, her hands shake.

Not from inexperience. Not from fear of failure.

But from knowing that if she succeeds, it won’t really be him. And if she fails, she will have killed the last piece of her friend’s legacy with her own two hands.

Her cursed technique hums, steady, inexorable. Flesh unravels, rewrites. Neurons glimmer under her touch like constellations in a dark sky. She threads them carefully, patient as a weaver, until she feels something spark. Until she feels him.

Not Yuta, not exactly.

But not Satoru either.

Something between.

A gasp, sharp and wet, tears through the air. fingers twitch. The body arches against restraints she swore she wouldn’t use, but had to.

And then—eyes.

Too blue. Too familiar.

Her knees nearly buckle.

Because for an instant it feels like the dorms again and being a teenager. Then for an instant, she is twenty two again, and she watches Gojo lean down to talk to Tsumiki and Megumi, to give them reassurance, to protect their youth.

But then the boy blinks, coughs, chokes on his first words, staring at his hands. and Yuta is suddenly speaking to her, from Satoru Gojo’s lips.

And it’s not him.

It’s not him.

She forces her hands steady, swallows down the tremor in her throat. “Well, it worked.” She says, clinical, detached. Like she didn’t just carve open time and stitch it into something monstrous.

The snow keeps falling outside.

❀

Later, they ask her what happened. after transferring Yuta back to his own body, after dismantling Satoru, pieces lying on a table in her clinic — while Yuta walks, unscathed.

She gives them the facts. stripped bare, like bone. No softness. No poetry.

“Gojo fought. He fell. He's dead.”

Nothing more, because she refuses to let them dress it in glory, refuses to let them write a hymn where there was only silence.

He was tired.

He died.

And there’s nothing beautiful about that.

❀

She cremates him herself. In the same furnace that once took you. Her gloves are soaked by the end of it, dark and slick, but she doesn’t take them off. Doesn’t cry either. Not this time.

x. 青春

Tokyo feels different after. Like the city is holding its breath, waiting for something that will never come.

That evening, she stops beneath a streetlamp outside the school. Cigarette trembling faintly between gloved fingers. Snow catching in her hair, turning her into something ghostlike. Embers glow like memories in the dark.

For the first time in forever, she speaks. Not to anyone. Just to the cold, to the shadows that linger in her bones.

“You win.” she whispers.

The lamp above her flickers once, then dies.

And Shoko stands alone in the dark. Utterly. Finally. Completely.

Yet that night, she finds herself dreaming in color that she thought had left her vision over a decade ago now.

Dreams not of blood. Not of battle, or of bodies in a morgue, or the harsh December air.

But of summer. The old apartment bathed in sunlight. Then, you’re next to her, seated cross-legged, fingers deftly braiding Tsumiki’s hair. Gojo at the table, laughing, trying to pry the cap off a bottle of soda with his teeth while Suguru shakes his head, pretending not to smile at him. Somewhere on your balcony, Haibara’s voice rings out, bright with Nanami’s deeper murmur tucked inside it.

Shoko feels a weight in her hands, and forces herself to look down for just a moment just to see that she is holding a camera. She lifts it. Frames them in her viewfinder — her whole heart in one room. Click.

A still life. A stolen moment that no one else notices.

They’re too busy being alive.

(終わり) END.

When August comes, I don’t count the days Transitory views from the subway train How strange, when life unfolds this way In the drift less zone, sky’s prone to stay off-gray Clouds are omens too, fading at the rate That most pleasant memories do

mae's note. first chapter of "of love & lesson plans" out tomorrow, and i pinky promise it won't be this sad </3 likes + reposts are appreciated, thank you soso much for reading