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The first person that dies under Shoko’s hands is a six year old kid.
Suguru and Satoru bring him to her wrapped in Suguru’s uniform jacket, blood already seeping through the thick fabric. She can hear hurried footsteps from upstairs, the sound of urgent voices, and imagines Yaga on his way, too.
“What happened?” she asks, though she doesn’t really need to know—a quick peel back of the jacket reveals a bloody mess in the kid’s stomach, the clear tang of curses in the air around him. His eyes half-flutter open at her voice, but something dark in Shoko knows that, even as she sets him down on her table, hiking his mangled shirt up to get a better look at the wound, that there’s nothing she can do.
Still, Satoru is adamant. “You better fucking save him,” he says, rough-edged and harsh. His guilt is scrawled messily on his face, lip captured between teeth as he watches her. Suguru glares, but the admonishment is short-lived; in an instant his gaze returns to the boy under Shoko’s hands, eyes wide.
It’s the first time a mission has turned out for them like this, too, a civilian caught in the crossfire. When the boy’s breathing stops, Shoko turns away from them.
“What the fuck,” Satoru whispers, tone ugly. He just needs a target for this, for the feelings he doesn’t understand, so unaccustomed to giving a shit about anyone other than himself, and though she knows this, her head still swims with anger, all the same.
But she will not stoop to his level. She could say cruel, cruel things, turn the finger of blame back on the both of them, but there’s no sense in it. Their misery isn’t more righteous if it’s communal, intertwined. It’ll just sting all the more. Even as the shock floods her system, hands jellified as she reaches for a pen, a death report, she can still logic her way through this.
This is why she’s good at this job. She knows this.
She strips off her bloodied lab coat, tosses it in the laundry bin in the corner of the room along with Suguru’s soiled jacket, and speaks as calmly as she can. “Get out.”
And they do.
She meets Utahime the same place she meets everyone these days: in the basement, sterile lights flickering above them. Mei Mei lays on one of the tables before her, blue hair matted with blood. Her skin is grisly pale, looking more like the corpses in the morgue than a living, breathing human, but she’s stable. She’ll live. A few days in the infirmary and she’ll be back to missions in no time. As Shoko strips off her gloves, the familiar itch comes to her hands: half-residual cursed energy, half-a permanent stain, a film of stickiness no amount of time under the spray of the skin can resolve.
God knows she tries, though, and she’ll get to trying again as soon as she gets the other sorcerer, Mei Mei’s partner out of here.
“She’ll be okay,” Shoko says matter-of-factly, stripping off stained gloves and dropping them in their allotted trash can—she has specific ones for specific things, dotted strategically around the room that’s rapidly becoming her office, her lab. The order, the meticulousness of it all, it helps, she’s found. Gives her a sense of control she so rarely has, matters of life and death dealt with easily by the distinction of a trash can for gloves versus a trash can for bandage wrappers.
Utahime is a third-year who Shoko has run into a few times since arriving at Jujutsu High, but so far only in passing. Typically, the girl is nice, calm, flashes of anger only reserved for Satoru when he’s being particularly insolent, particularly shitty. Now, though, her eyes are wide, unblinking, an unasked question trapped behind them. Shoko sighs.
“She’ll be fine, really.” She plucks a set of incident reports from her desk, hands the student copy to Utahime, who takes it with unsteady fingers. “It’s all superficial injury—a few days in the infirmary and she’ll be back on her feet. You did the right thing, bringing her here as soon as you did.”
Utahime nods once, slowly, her gaze flickering between Mei Mei’s unconscious body and Shoko. “Thanks,” she says finally, swallowing. “Thank you.”
Shoko waves a hand. “It’s my job, no need to thank me. Are you okay? Anything you want me to take a look at?”
Wordless, Utahime rolls up her sleeve, revealing a nasty-looking gash stretching the length of her shoulder. Shoko frowns. Was she going to walk away with that if she hadn’t said anything?
“Sit,” she instructs aloud, nodding at an empty chair. “I’m still in the recharge state of my technique, unfortunately, but I can bandage that up for now and take a look at it tomorrow, how about that?”
Utahime nods. “Really, it’s fine if you don’t—”
“It’s my job,” Shoko repeats, snapping on a pair of gloves. “Let me take a look.”
She caves in silence, allowing Shoko to dab at the wound with water-soaked cotton that turns pink before getting set aside. She hisses a bit when Shoko moves onto the antiseptic, free hand gripping the arm of her chair, but other than that she’s silent, leveling none of the protests Shoko has grown used to from Satoru, Suguru, too, sometimes.
“Thank you,” she says again as Shoko finishes up the bandaging, a stretch of crisp white that runs from her elbow up. She turns her hand over, flexing her fingers as if to make sure the muscles still work, and when her assessment proves successful, apparently, turns to Shoko to give her a small smile. “I think the school is really lucky to have you, you know.”
The compliment washes over Shoko, making her feel odd and fuzzy at the edges. She’s always been inclined to hate those sorts of things, useless platitudes that mostly serve to make the other person feel better about themselves, not her. But Utahime’s eyes flash in the basement gloom, an earnestness that leaves Shoko’s cheeks feeling warm.
“Thanks.” It’s her turn to say that, coupled with an abrupt stand, not realizing until now how close her and Utahime’s faces have grown. “I appreciate that a lot.”
Satoru had told her once, smile shaped with his special brand of joking-cruelty, that spending so much time in the morgue was impacting her social skills. “After all,” he’d said, grinning up at her—he’d been lying on her bed, of course, the nerve. “All you do is sit around and hang out with dead people. I think it’s making you act weird.”
She’d dismissed the idea—she gets out plenty, and even if she didn’t, it’s besides the point. Now, though, as her own words roll out awkwardly from her lips, a mouthful of marbles that clatter to the stone floor below them, she’s almost inclined to agree with him.
“We should hang out more,” Utahime offers when she’s at the door, jacket slung over her good shoulder. “I feel bad for you, always being stuck with those idiots. It must be nightmarish.”
“It’s not so bad, honestly,” Shoko says, and then realizes that’s not the part of the sentence that deserves her attention. With a duck of her head, cheeks still running hot, she adds, “we should, though. I’m done early tomorrow—lunch?”
Utahime smiles, and Shoko feels the gesture deep in her chest. “Sounds good. It’s a date.”
“It’s a date,” she echoes, and the door shuts with a click.
She’s not so calm, though, when it’s Utahime on the table, though. Mei Mei is nowhere to be seen; Satoru, instead, stands at her shoulder, entirely silent for the first time ever.
She doesn’t know the details. She doesn’t even know the bare bones of what happened—she doesn’t care. What good does knowing the intricate hows and whys when Utahime lies there, the right side of her face gouged open, a mean, bloody mark that snarls up at Shoko as she rests shaking hands on each side of the girl’s face.
“Fuck,” she whispers. The wound—a big, triangular-looking gash that snakes down from the bridge of her nose to the base of her jaw. It glints in the light, and for a second Shoko wonders if she sees bone, her stomach shrinking to a pinprick.
The edges of the injury begin to knit themselves together, but it’s not fast enough, the seal isn’t clean. Shoko’s hands shake as she ramps up the output, straining so hard she’s starting to see stars. Utahime will not die from this—logically, this is a fact Shoko knows—but the panic doesn’t abate regardless. Bone, blood, a mass of tissue: it all blurs together until she can’t recognize a thing around the fear clogging her throat.
“It’s sealed,” says a voice behind her—Satoru—and Shoko realizes with a start that is. The skin left behind is an angry red, hot to the touch when she grazes her fingers over it. Maybe repeat sessions will help fade the scar, but nothing Shoko can do will erase it completely.
She strips off her gloves finger by finger, the motion practiced. She tosses them in the trash; then, all-too aware of Satoru’s uncharacteristically silent gaze on her, picks them back up, folds them neatly and repeats the discarding. The urge to do it a third time rips through her, but Utahime’s been encouraging her to break out of these cycles lately, her ever-watchful eye noticing them in a matter of days; and Shoko would be a real asshole if she didn’t honor those wishes now of all times, wouldn’t she be?
“She’s fine,” Satoru says helpfully, perched on one leg, his free foot kicking nervously at his calf. “I mean, she’ll live. Right?”
She will, and the scar will bother her, and she won’t even take her frustration out on Shoko, which is perhaps the worst part of this. She’s not self-effacing; she doesn’t believe she deserves undue punishment, or any punishment at all, but there’s still something sickening about her hands being the final reserve that doesn’t even have a perfect success rate. Something deserving of critique.
“She’s fine,” Satoru repeats, and now he’s walking over to stand by her, big blue eyes watching as she rolls her sleeves up and turns on the sink, beginning the methodical process of getting clean. “Seriously. Stop that.”
It’s perfect irony, in some ways, that Satoru is blessed with the observational skills he has only for them to be paired with his total lack of tact. It’s cosmic, even, almost enough to make her smile.
“Knock it off,” is all she says, eyeing his fingers that threaten to flick, his odd, awkward version of holding her back from her odd, awkward ledge.
“Your hands are going to get all gross,” he says, frowning, a petulant child. “Besides, doing this all the time is kind of freaky. Don’t they make you see a shrink for shit like this?”
If Shoko wasn’t otherwise occupied, she’d sock him in the stomach, Infinity be damned. Instead, she just fixes him with her most withering stare, relishing silently in the way his shock-white eyebrows raise, haphazard nervousness flashing across his face.
“I said knock it off,” she bites out.
Satoru sighs, jerking his chin at her hands. “What is this supposed to do, anyways?”
Shoko doesn’t want to know what he means by that. She rinses the suds off, reapplies her soap, and begins the process again.
It often goes like this: Suguru is kneeling on her bathroom floor, vomit dribbling down his chin. His hair is plastered to his forehead in sweaty strands, re-sticking with stubbornness each time Shoko tries to comb them back. The sound of his retching has been going on for quite some time now, but still she winces with each gag.
The inside of the toilet bowl is stained an unsightly grayish-black when Suguru finally kneels back, scrubbing at his mouth. He spits once more, and Shoko sees blood for a split second before he flushes, sending it spinning down the drain in a whorl.
The rest of his injuries from the mission are unsubstantial, but Shoko won’t let him stand up until she’s fixed them. So they sit in silence, watching as the bruising on his side, the swollen red of a wrenched wrist fade in tandem with each other. There’s some damage to his face as well—a cut under his eye, a welt running down the length of his chin—and Shoko reaches up to apply her touch to that, too.
Suguru relaxes his head into her palm, cheek squishing. “Your hands are always so fucking cold,” he mumbles through brusied lips.
“Try spending sixty hours a week in a morgue and then come talk to me,” she quips. She brushes her finger over the cut but doesn’t heal it, not yet.
“Sorry for throwing up everywhere,” Suguru whispers. His voice is hoarse, scratchy. Even the residuals of Shoko’s cursed energy still coursing through him, he looks exhausted, wrung dry. He’s injured in ways she can’t touch, and the wounds seem to be getting worse each time she sees him like this.
Her palms prickle with inaction, and Shoko gets the urge to stand and turn her attention to the sink, but Suguru seems to be relishing in her hand still cupping his cheek, so she bites it back. “You didn’t throw up everywhere. You were actually quite tidy this time.”
That earns her a snort. The last time Suguru had come to her after a mission, he hadn’t been able to make it to the bathroom, upending the contents of his stomach all over her hallway carpet, instead. “Yeah.” He swallows, hollow of his throat shifting. “Still. Sorry.”
Shoko wants to shake him until he really realizes that she doesn’t care; she’d rather he puke his guts up all over her most expensive possessions every day than confine himself to the silence of his own apartment, slowly killing himself with his own solitude. Instead, she thumbs his cut again, this time watching as the edges seal themselves together, the redness slowly disappearing. “You know I don’t care.”
“Can’t I still be sorry?”
“No.” But he will be regardless, and they both know this. He wears his guilt like a second skeleton, integral to the structure of his being. Not even Shoko’s expert hands could extract it from him at this point, not without sending the whole frame toppling.
“Well.” He sniffs. “I am.”
“It will get better,” she says because she doesn’t know what else to offer him. Unable to fight back the urge anymore, she stands and turns on the sink, rubbing icy palms together as the water heats up. “I really do believe that, Suguru.”
He watches her. “Scared I’m dirty, Shoko?” he asks, voice just shy of mean, self-directed cruelty blowing outwards.
Pressure crowds her throat. She has to exhale once, twice, three times before it alleviates. Then, ignoring the ache it induces, she shuts the tap off and turns to Suguru, drying her hands on the front of her shirt.
“Don’t flatter yourself. I don’t want your puke on my hands, is all.”
At her feet, Suguru closes his eyes, the fight long-gone out of him. Sometimes, Shoko looks at him and feels an unprecedented dread, as if something bad is about to spill over at their feet, staining the ground irreparably. In this instance, though, it’s fondness, not fear, that squeezes her chest.
“Let’s go watch some TV,” she says. “I’ll order takeout.”
Suguru barely keeps his food down these days, and undeniably the night will have them back in here again, Shoko wordlessly rubbing his back, silently pushing cursed energy into him with the feeble hope that this time it will be enough to help. Still, he offers her a small smile from the floor before standing.
“Okay,” he says. “Thanks.”
When Riko died, Shoko had expected hysterics. What she got was total silence, pooling from Suguru in waves as he’d stood there, knuckles white around the fabric that encased the girl’s body.
Maybe she hadn’t expected hysterics, in all honesty. Maybe none of what happened surprised her, and that’s the terrible part: not only does the death not scare her anymore,—and did it ever, really?—but it doesn’t even feel novel. She’s ready for it every time there’s a knock at her door, a face poking around the corner. There is no room for surprise anymore, even, no space allotted for it in her carefully-constructed routine. Her hands are steady this time as she removes the girl from Suguru’s grasp and sets her down on the table.
Though she is young, Riko is. Awfully young. A life half-lived—barely even that—cut short, deposited in a cold, bloody mess at her feet.
Shoko doesn’t look at the hole in her temple. Calmly, she lowers the sheet back over her face and turns to Suguru.
“You can go,” she says, surprised when her voice comes out a whisper. She’d already attended to his wounds, deep, ugly gashes forming a tidy criss-cross on his chest she had done a very good job of seeming unphased by. The truth was that Toji could’ve killed him if he wanted to. The other truth was that Toji did kill Satoru, functionally, and she can feel this fact inside her, almost, an extra rib growing in wrong.
He didn’t though. Satoru is alive. Suguru is alive. The world is as kind as it is cruel.
“Suguru,” she says, and forces herself to stand in front of him, looking at him squarely in the eyes. “You can go. I can handle it from here.”
He doesn’t move, doesn’t even blink. His uniform is ragged with tears where Toji’s spear cut through him and soaked with blood that leaves a metallic tang in the air around him. He’ll have to give that to her before he leaves to avoid concerns of cross-contamination or infection—she guesses that it’s not just one person’s blood there, and she very rarely guesses wrong. But she makes no move to take it from him, no move at all.
“Suguru,” she says again, “go.”
Finally, he meets her gaze. The look in his eyes is like nothing she’s ever seen before. Shoko wants desperately to say that she’s sorry, but doesn’t. She wants, even more so, to use her technique for things like these, too, injuries the eye can’t discern.
But she doesn’t. Can’t.
Without a word, Suguru ducks his head once and leaves.
She tries for six hours to save Haibara Yu, pumping cursed energy into his body even after his vitals have gone flat, his breathing indiscernible, his face ashy. It’s only when she brushes his arm on accident and feels the telltale stiffness setting in that she finally drops her hands, a sick feeling pooling in her stomach.
Shoko is not a stranger to death. She lives it, breathes it, lines her home away from home with remnants of it. The bodies in the morgue are books on a shelf: each has a story, an unshakable history trapped inside them, but she is no librarian. Perhaps the night watchman, the custodian, a kid on an outing with her parents. Perhaps she is just a simple passerby.
But when she fills out Yu’s death form, she can’t deny the tightness to her throat. Last night, he’d been warm and alive, excitement radiating off him in licks of flame as she and Suguru had bid him goodbye, Kento already waiting outside the school gates. Now he sits on her table, the light extinguished.
She tries to clean him up as best as she can, but the injuries are serious enough that her ministrations have little effect. By the time a knock sounds at the door, Yu’s already bled through the sheet she’d lowered over him minutes before, an ugly mass of red forming where she knows the hole to his stomach hides.
Kento looks awful. Dried blood crusts on his lip, around his temple, and there’s a nasty bruise forming under his left eye. His hair is matted with dirt and sweat, his uniform stained darker than black, the bloodied beds of his nails glaring up at her. She doesn’t want to think about how many times he’s washed his hands since bringing her Yu’s half-alive body. Wordlessly, she just passes him a warm towel.
“He’s dead,” Kento croaks, twisting the towel around in shaking hands Shoko does her best not to look at.
There’s no question for her to answer, no glimmer of hope in the second-year’s eyes. He knows as well as she knows what the reality at their feet is.
Again, she has to fight down an awful surge of emotion that threatens to overwhelm her for a second, and it’s with a voice that’s rougher around the edges than she’d like that she speaks. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I’m so sorry, Nanami.”
His chin trembles. The towel constricts around his wrists now, skin whitening where it presses down.
“I did everything I could,” she says, and he meets her gaze just for a second.
“I know.”
Shoko wonders if he does, if he believes it. She must be an easy target for his rage, standing here with her proof of failure splattered all over the lab coat she forgot to change before letting him in. But the look in his eyes is sincere, scrubbed raw and bleeding, and somehow, that makes it worse.
“I’ll let you have some time alone with him,” she murmurs. “I’ll be outside.”
Not waiting for Kento’s response, Shoko brushes past him, and steps out into the fuzzy June heat to have her first cigarette in four months.
When Utahime comes over, Shoko is in the bathroom washing her hands.
“Hey.”
Shoko hears her before she sees her, a soft voice that floods the room around them better than any light ever could—those things, she has neglected to turn on, preferring to complete her ritual of shame in the dark, her own face composed of nothing but shadows in the mirror before her.
And Utahime knows this, which is why she makes no move for the light switch. Instead, she rests a hand on Shoko’s forearm from behind. Her touch is warm, which Shoko always appreciates; sometimes, she worries that the basement gloom has seeped into her, too, staining her internal body temperature with a miserable cold she can’t scrub out.
Though she does try, steady hands reaching out to add another dollop of soap to her palms. She’s not sure how long she’s been doing this, but it’s long enough that the soft skin of her knuckles has begun to crack, fissures of red splitting open the skin. On her forearm, Utahime’s fingers twitch, as if suppressing the urge to reach out and stop her.
The spray of the tap stings as Shoko sticks her hands back under. Her poor water bill will suffer terribly this month.
“I heard,” Utahime says into the silence. Yu’s name hangs over the two of them, a phantom not even speaking into existence could dispel. Shoko would rather he just be dead and gone; this half-life he’s adopted, his memory following her wherever she turns is simply painful, cruel.
“Yeah,” Shoko says to the basin, her voice adorned with the same tiny cracks as her hands, a foundation that creaks. Only around Utahime does she allow herself such displays, and even then, embarrassment courses through her, leaving her too warm, tense. What does she have to lament, anyways? She’s not the one who’s dead.
Utahime rests her chin on Shoko’s shoulder, hair tickling the side of her face. She breathes in deep the smell of yuzu and jasmine and her hands still in their scrubbing, just a bit.
“Do you want me to turn the tap off?” Utahime whispers, nose buried in the side of Shoko’s neck. Such care should be reserved for those who are truly in need of it, she thinks privately, but she’s weak now, unable to stop herself from nodding.
The spray slows to a drip, then stops. Shoko holds her bleeding hands over the porcelain, eyes fixed resolutely on them as Utahime procures a towel and guides her back until she’s sitting on the toilet.
“I can do it myself,” Shoko says as Utahime kneels, taking her hands in the towel. The fabric stings against the cracks, and she sucks in a tiny breath through teeth.
“I’m sorry,” Utahime murmurs at her noise of pain, dabbing at the water with unprecedented gentleness. Shoko’s throat fogs for a moment, unexpectedly. “And I know you can.”
“Really. You don’t have to.”
“Let me.”
Shoko does.
When she hears about Suguru’s defection, she doesn’t cry.
As she sets the phone down, Yaga’s news still running circles in her head, she wonders for a moment if her lack of emotion is perhaps indicative of some deep-set mental deficiency on her part—psychopathy, maybe. Sociopathy. Perhaps this job has truly broken her, and all that’s left now is to find some sort of psychiatric ward to check herself into.
But when Utahime calls, less than five minutes later, it’s all she can do to keep her voice steady as she offers up a greeting. “Hey.”
“I heard,” her voice says over the receiver, and Shoko can’t help it: a hysterical laugh emerges from her. Just weeks ago, they were having the very same conversation, weren’t they? Yu, now Suguru—though Suguru isn’t dead, just gone. Somehow, that’s worse.
“Are you okay?” Utahime’s voice is thick with concern, and Shoko wants to peel her skin off, strip by strip. “I know that’s a stupid question, but—”
“I need to use your car,” she interrupts, not even entirely sure what for, and the rest of Utahime’s sentence dies on her tongue.
“Okay.”
Shoko drives around for a bit before she realizes she’s parking in the student lot outside school. Then she gets out and walks for a bit until she realizes, again, that it’s Suguru’s dorm door she’s facing, all of a sudden. He had been the last one to remain on campus, dragging his heels on finding an apartment of his own despite all the cajoling he received. Satoru had even offered to convert his spare room into somewhere he could sleep and go half-and-half on the rent with him, but Suguru had refused with a listless wave of his hand.
Perhaps the worst part of this whole ordeal is not that it happened, but that Shoko isn’t even all that surprised that it did. She looks for the place where cold, hard shock would bloom in her stomach, a tangible piece of evidence that this wasn’t a reality she or anyone else had seen coming, and finds nothing but empty space.
And she opens the door to Suguru’s dorm and finds nothing but Satoru, sitting at the foot of the bed.
“He didn’t take his shit,” Satoru says by means of greeting, gaze fixed blankly at the opposite wall. “Forgot it all.”
This is evident by the amount of shit still around them—Suguru’s whole life, mockingly left on display for the two of them to look at. Shoko finds she can’t, suddenly, and averts her eyes.
“He’ll—” she starts, but then stops, dread sour in the back of her throat. What will Suguru do? Not come back, that’s for sure. He’s dead to this school, and this school is dead to him. The snake has found its own tail and now, it bites to bone.
“I have to kill him,” Satoru says suddenly, and Shoko has just a few seconds to stare at him before he hunches over, suddenly, glasses pushed up on his face as he presses the heels of his hands into squeezed-shut eyes.
He’s crying. It’s so sudden that she doesn’t believe it for a second, but he is; she hears it in the hitch of his breath, the too-smooth exhales. His shoulders twitch once, twice, and it’s perhaps a testament to the awfulness surrounding him that he doesn’t even snap at her for openly staring, doesn’t even acknowledge it at all, just sits there in his attempt at silence. The great Satoru Gojo, the Honored One unraveling at her fingertips. Men would pay money for sights like this, and dimly Shoko’s aware that she’s witnessing a prized, precious thing here.
All it does, though, is make her feel impossibly sad.
“Come here,” she whispers, and crosses the room, kicking off her shoes as she goes. Satoru’s already shaken off his uniform jacket and button up, clad now in a simple t-shirt and a pair of pants, and Shoko shakes off her own coat, too. He moves as she guides him, laying him carefully down across the pillows before slotting herself in behind him, back to the wall. Their arms tangle together, and to her muted surprise, Satoru doesn’t shake her off. Instead, he allows himself to be wrapped up, damp cheeks pressing into her forearms, shoulders still shaking.
This is not the death Shoko has grown accustomed to like a missing leg, the bad dog that snaps at her heels wherever she moves. Suguru may be gone, but he’s still alive, at least for now. Maybe that’s why this stings so bad—he’s still there, somewhere. Inaccessible, unreachable, a traitor and a murderer. But alive.
Alive and, judging by the jerk to Satoru’s breath as he lays there pressing himself against Shoko’s frame and the own tightness in her throat, loved. Despite it all, loved.
“I know,” she says into Satoru’s hair, because she doesn’t want to say I’m sorry. “I know.”
They fall asleep like that, and Shoko’s dreams are filled with black hair and blood.
“Don’t ever let this shit happen again,” she’s saying, pacing up and down the floor of her lab teeth ground together. “You hear me? Never fucking again.”
“Shoko,” says Utahime, resting a hand on her arm as she passes, and she knows: she’s being loud, unprofessional, hysterical enough to incite grounds for mandatory suspension, forced time off. Two minutes ago, she’d thrown her clipboard across the room, watched as it smacked against the wall just a few feet above Kento’s shoulder where he lies, now-reconstructed leg stretched out in front of him, still bloodstained and swollen.
It had been touch and go for a long time; he’d lost a lot of blood before even arriving in her lab. When he’d finally opened his eyes, gaze foggy, uncomprehending, Shoko had almost thought she was imagining things.
And maybe that’s why she can’t stop herself, hot panic crawling up her throat, forcing her mouth open. “What you did was stupid, dangerous—entirely selfish, Nanami, you must be—”
“I’m sorry,” Kento says, eyes on his lap, but he doesn’t look it. He doesn’t look much of anything but hollowed-out these days, skin clinging tightly to gaunt cheeks, far older than his eighteen years of age.
“Don’t give me that.” And Shoko’s hands itch, horribly. She wants to throw something again. She wants to scrub them raw. “I don’t care if you’re sorry. I am not putting you in one of these bags, Kento, I’m not.”
“I know.”
“I will not watch you die.” Her own breath rattles unsteadily in her throat. Utahime’s grip on her forearm tightens. “Any more of you. Do you understand me? Quit. Run away. Become a curse user for all I fucking care. But you’re not dying. Don’t ever do that shit again.”
“I’m sorry,” he mumbles again, and Shoko turns away.
On the one year anniversary of Suguru’s defection, Shoko and Satoru go out to a bar.
“You don’t like drinking,” she reminds him as he turns his sights to his third yuzu sour. These days, he sports a clean white blindfold more than the sunglasses, but he’s reverted to them now, the things balanced precariously on the tip of his flushed nose as he knocks back a mouthful with a grimace.
“You’re right,” he says, swiping at his mouth. His movements are broad, sweeping, unrestrained in a way she hasn’t seen in—well, in a year. “But what else am I supposed to do?”
She has no witty rebuttal for that. With Suguru’s phantom at her shoulder, so close she can almost feel where his breath would be against the back of her neck, Shoko knocks the rims of their glasses together and sips deeply.
“I wonder how long they’ll let you get away with it,” she says as she sets her drink down. “You not killing him.”
It’s perhaps not the right thing to say, but Shoko’s tongue is loose, on fire, her own drinks coursing through her system. Suguru had gotten like this, too, towards the end, always saying things she’d been surprised that he’d even thought of, much less put to words. She smirks at that—how nice, then, that he has someone to follow in his footsteps. How proud he must be.
Though Shoko would never kill, not en masse like that. She understands, maybe not as abstractly as she’d like, what his intentions were, the noble thought process behind the violence, but still, it feels futile to her. Raging against a system is just embarrassing if it doesn’t do anything, and for all his self-assuredness—most of which isn’t misplaced, honestly—Suguru will not rid the world of non-sorcerers. He just won’t.
“Asshole,” Satoru says, but he’s smiling a stupid grin, already more drunk than he should be. “What will the higher-ups do if I don’t? Kill me?”
“Maybe they’d take someone as leverage,” Shoko says with a snort, the sound echoing around her glass held up to her face again. “Me, maybe.”
“This damn school would go under in five minutes if you weren’t here,” Satoru says, taking another clumsy swig of his own drink. “They’d be fucking morons to do something like that.”
“Don’t kiss my ass,” she laughs. Her chest feels light, swimming. She doesn’t like the look Satoru fixes her with all of a sudden, too somber for the brightness of the bar around them.
“I—” He starts, stops, jaw clamping shut. Shoko sets her drink down with a faint thunk. “Shoko.”
“Satoru.” Regretting her choice already, she picks the glass back up, knocks back another mouthful.
His laugh is a little bitter. “This sucks.”
“Does it?” Their food arrives—a bowl of edamame and some pork skewers. Shoko slides the food over to Satoru without touching it. God knows he’ll need something in his stomach to soak up all those damn yuzu sours, not unless he wants to foot the cleaning bill after he throws up in the cab he’ll take home. “I don’t think it’s all bad.”
Behind her, Suguru’s memory nips at her neck. Memory. She almost laughs. Like he’s already dead, or something.
Before her, Satoru’s mood is shifting fast, gaze downcast as he stares at the plates in front of him. With a grimace, Shoko remembers that this is exactly why they don’t go out drinking ever. In the past, Suguru had been able to snap Satoru out of it, keeping his spirits up even as he got strange and sappy. Now, though, it’s just her.
So she digs into him with the delicacy she might afford a particularly beaten-up corpse, scalpel quick and succinct. “I don’t think he would want us to sit around feeling sorry for ourselves. It’d embarrass him.”
“Yeah,” Satoru says. “I think—I think he wants me to kill him.”
“Oh?” There’s a finality with which he speaks that makes Shoko wonder, for a moment, if the two of them have been in contact, talking to each other behind turned backs. She wouldn’t be surprised if they did—honestly, it would shock her more if they’d both made it this long without reaching out, not even once.
Satoru nods, chin on his hand. “I think this is all some—thing, y’know? Some elaborate thing to—I dunno, get under my skin. Make me remember him. Make me sad I didn’t follow.”
God, he really is drunk. Shoko catches the eye of a passing waitress, mouths water at her as subtly as she can. To Satoru, she says, “I think that’s a little dramatic. Not everything is about you.”
She means it to be gentle, teasing, even, but Satoru’s gaze remains clouded. “You’re right,” he mumbles. “I get my feelings and his mixed up sometimes.”
He doesn’t elaborate as to what he means by that and Shoko, pointedly, does not ask.
Kento leaves. The night of, Shoko’s up working until four in the morning.
“You need to take more time off,” Utahime says at around two, her own voice sluggish with the sleep Shoko knows she’s so desperately fighting off. She’s told her several times now to head home; they’ll see each other in the morning, after all, but Utahime has remained stubbornly in the lab, stifling yawns into her hand and eyeing Shoko in a way that makes her skin crawl.
“I don’t,” she says in flat response, not taking her eyes off the pages of her own notes she’s midway through deciphering.
“You do,” Utahime counters, and it’s childish, stupid, made all the more so by the fact that they are not children anymore, not anywhere close. Shoko’s age is beginning to spell itself out on her face, and Utahime is turning twenty-six next month. “It’s not healthy, all this working.”
That makes her laugh. An unhealthy doctor. Like a lawyer who hates public speaking, a chef who can’t eat.
“I’m being serious,” Utahime says, a note of irritation in her voice. She gets snappy when she gets tired, sometimes. Shoko breathes in deep.
“I know. But the work needs to get done.” She offers her a small smile, the gesture feeling cold, out of practice. “Who else is gonna do it?”
Utahime has nothing to say in response.
“You could get in trouble hanging out with me, you know.”
Suguru says this every time they see each other, usually paired with some sort of shit-eating smirk, the same one he fixes her with over the top of his latte now. Like this whole situation is so unbearably funny he just can’t contain himself. Maybe it is, in a weird way. Tokyo’s most famous curse-user, out for coffee with Jujutsu High’s head doctor.
She would be in trouble if someone caught them, though Suguru always ensures that’s not a chance, his tone vague enough for Shoko to know probing questions won’t reveal anything she particularly wants to know. Firing her would be letting her off easy. Executing her might be the more likely outcome.
But the coffee is good, and the proof of life helps, in some ways.
“You threatening me?” Shoko sips her drink, arching an eyebrow. “Pretty bold of you.”
“Never.” Suguru’s smile is warm. He looks good, good in a way Shoko forgot he could look, all her memories of him still grimy with the film of their last year in school, all baggy-eyed and hollow-cheeked. His hair is longer, now, and he flicks some of it back with a practiced move of his head.
“Nanami quit,” Shoko says abruptly, because it’s true, he did. A while ago, but it’ll be news to Suguru.
And it is. His eyebrows arch too, surprise scrawled across his features. “Really? Why?”
“Why?” Shoko echoes, and Suguru’s lips flatten.
“What is he doing now?” he amends.
“Who fucking knows.” Shoko reaches into her pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. “Finance, I think. Some horrible job he’ll probably hate even more than being a sorcerer. You want one?”
To her surprise, Suguru shakes his head. “I’m good,” he says. “Trying to quit.”
“That’s what they all say.” She takes one of the thin cylinders out, balancing it between her lips. “What’s with the change? You smoked like a chimney, even more than me.”
He rubs the back of his neck, and for a second, Shoko detects a faint air of embarrassment to him. She leans in, exhaling above their heads. Now she’s really interested.
“The girls,” he says, and Shoko has to remind herself that he has those, girls. Protégés. Daughters. Whatever he calls them. “They came down with a pretty bad cough a few weeks ago. It was—well, like I said, pretty bad.” He frowns. “I hate to use services like that, but I almost brought them to a hospital. It wasn’t pretty. Thought if I stopped smoking, maybe that would help.”
“What am I, chopped liver?” Though she’s not sure how she would’ve responded, really, if Suguru had come to her for medical advice. She’d probably have laughed.
“I didn’t want to bother.”
“Bullshit.” She takes another drag. “You cut up a hundred people over those kids. I don’t think your limit is at not wanting to bother me.”
“Can I not have principles?” Suguru says, mildly. He runs a nail along the rim of his cup, and Shoko pretends not to notice that they’re painted a soft, clumsy pink that clashes horribly with the rest of his outfit. “I’m telling the truth. I didn't want to bother you.”
“Alright,” she says, because she doesn’t want to argue with him on the one day out of the next two years that she’ll see him.
“It feels cruel,” he continues, “coming to you when I need something. A part of me kind of feels like I lost that privilege when—you know.” He waves a hand. “When I left. I assume that outside of these moments you want nothing to do with me. It’s probably safer that way, anyhow. Plus, that damn school gives you enough work as it is.”
“If I cared about safety, do you seriously think I’d be sitting here in the first place?” Shoko sniffs, ignoring the last part of his sentence. “Why half-ass things?”
“I don’t know.” Suguru shrugs. “Maybe it’s nicer to keep our contact to moments like these. Makes pretending none of what took place actually happened.”
“Suguru,” she says seriously, “you’re an idiot if you think I believe that either of us are capable of doing that for even a split second.”
“Touché,” Suguru says, and laughs into his coffee.
“You should stop smoking.”
Shoko looks up from her phone, idly scrolling through the latest updates from Satoru on his mission halfway across the country in Tomaya, to see Utahime regarding her, chin propped up on her hand. An absent-minded finger runs over the lines of the now-fading scar on her face, one of her unconscious habits.
“Huh?” she says, but she heard Utahime perfectly well the first time. Feeling a little embarrassed all of a sudden, she removes the cigarette from her lips and hides it under the table.
It’s a see-through gesture, and Utahime snorts. “You should quit,” she says, nodding at where Shoko’s hand is hidden.
“You think it’s gross?” Shoko tips her head, the breeze ruffling strands that have come loose from her half-hearted ponytail—it’s one of her rare days off, and she’s barely up for crawling outside to smoke, much less doing her hair as she usually would. The summer air doesn’t help, too; Shoko watches Utahime through a fog, heat sapping her usual edge. The thought of a cold shower is heavenly right now; the thought of a cold shower with the girl sitting in front of her is nearly enough to reduce Shoko to tears of joy.
Then she remembers she’s being scolded, and snaps back to reality in time to hear Utahime’s huff. She’s fanning herself lazily with her book now, pages rustling. “I mean, I don’t think it’s the sexiest thing ever—”
“No?” Feeling brave, Shoko takes another drag, blowing the smoke above them. “Not even a little chic? Artisan?”
She wiggles her eyebrows, and Utahime snorts again. “Definitely not when you do that.”
“Rude.” Shoko ashes the cigarette in the ashtray between them, letting it sit there smoking for a moment. “A lot of people would think it’s sexy. Maybe I should go talk to them instead.”
That earns her a flick on the wrist, but Utahime laughing kills the severity of the gesture somewhat. “You’re impossible,” she says. Then, suddenly, “I just worry about you.”
Shoko blinks once, twice. “Why? Because of the smoking?”
Utahime shrugs. Her cheeks look a little pink, edges of her scar darkening a little, but maybe that’s just the sun. “What about lung cancer, I don’t know?”
“I really don’t think cancer is going to be one of my problems in later life.” Making it to later life to begin with will be a battle in and of itself.
“You never know.” Utahime drags a nail along the groove of the table. She and Shoko had painted theirs the night before, giggling like the schoolgirls Shoko pretends so often they aren’t. “I’d hate it if something happened to you, is all.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me, really.” But Shoko leaves the cigarette untouched, opting instead to flash a half-smile at Utahime. “I promise.”
Another flick. “Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Promise.” Her gaze is somber, all of a sudden. “You’re tempting fate saying that crap.”
“Fate?” Shoko arches an eyebrow. “I didn't have you pegged for a spiritualist, Utahime.”
“I’m serious,” she responds, and she looks it, so Shoko wipes the smile off her face. “It’s a dangerous job, being a sorcerer, I don’t know. You never know what’ll happen.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” Shoko protests. “I just sit in a basement all day playing with dead people.”
But Utahime just shakes her head. “You have the hardest job out of everyone, I think,” she says softly.
And Shoko says nothing back, simply stubs out the cigarette and flicks it off the porch.
“I’m going to quit smoking,” she says, a lit cigarette glowing between her knuckles.
From his placer at her side, overlooking the late-night training session of the new first-years, Satoru barks a laugh. His blindfold flaps in the wind.
“No, you won’t.”
Shoko laughs, too. “No, I won’t.”
Maki Zenin tries to refuse treatment the first time she’s hurt on a mission.
“How old are you?” she asks after the Okkotsu kid is sent away, his insistence that Maki be taken care of at once more of a hindrance than a help.
It’s so blunt that Shoko can’t bite back a laugh, delighted. There’s too much ass-kissing at this school, as far as she’s concerned. Formalities only get under her skin.
“Twenty-seven.” she says, which is a bizarre thing to admit aloud. “You?”
The girl’s eyes flash. Her ponytail is matted with dirt, hanging limply over the left shoulder Shoko can tell she’s trying not to move. It’s a simple injury, really, a dislocated joint that had already been popped back into place by the time she’d arrived in Shoko’s lab. But the swelling won’t subside for at least a few more weeks, and neither will the pain.
“Fifteen.”
“Seems an awfully young age to lose functionality in one of your shoulders, no?” Shoko stands, busying herself with tidying up the area around them, re-stacking papers where they belong, sweeping trash into its allotted cans. “You’ve got a long career ahead of you, Maki. Let me make it easier for you.”
“I can heal just fine on my own,” Maki says, which is the same retort she’s been giving since Yuta bundled her in here fifteen minutes ago. Her voice is full to bursting with stubbornness that’s all childishness. But Maki actually is a child, though, so Shoko lets it slide. Besides, she has no idea what the Zenin Clan is like, but she’d bet good money that they’re more than a little responsible for this.
“I’m sure you can,” Shoko says. She tries to sound calm, but not too gentle. On a worse day, she would’ve simply disregarded Maki’s protests and healed her already; she’s trying, though, and mostly succeeding at being understanding, now. “But I’ll tell you now that if you think you’ll be able to train through the pain, you’re wrong.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Gojo does,” she says, moving to the sink and then moving away instantly, as if repelled by magnetic force. She sits in her chair again, opposite Maki. “Which I think is your primary issue here, not me.”
That’s not totally true—Shoko has final say on who’s cleared for missions and who isn’t, except in cases of extenuating emergency. If it gets the girl on her side, though, she’ll say whatever.
“That idiot,” Maki mutters, but finally surrenders her grip on her injured shoulder, movements slow and punctuated by more than a few winces Shoko pretends not to see.
“There you go,” she says when she’s done, stepping back to watch as Maki rotates her shoulder around, rubbing at it with her free hand. “All better.”
“Thanks,” Maki mumbles.
“I’d like to think that the school employs me for a reason.” There’d been other injuries she’d noticed on Maki as she’d attended to the girl’s shoulder, half-healed cuts and bruises dating what seemed like weeks, months into the past. “When you’re hurt, come to me. There’s no sense in suffering through it when you don’t have to.”
Truth is, the compulsive self-reliance makes Shoko nervous. She’s seen it before, and it didn’t end pretty. For anyone.
Maki just eyes her in silence. “It’s good practice,” she says finally, “for when you won’t be here.”
Shoko could protest, but she’s not immortal. Will she be gunned down in battle like half the sorcerers at this school will at some point? Not likely, no. Utahime’s anxieties on that front are unfounded. But it is true that she won’t live forever. This, she knows.
Still, Shoko shakes her head at the first-year with a huff. “Tell you what, in fifty years, you can come worrying about that to me. For now, let me treat you when you get injured instead of hiding it for weeks, okay?”
Maki watches her for a second more, so intent Shoko can almost hear the gears in her head grinding together. Finally, she looks down, and nods once. “Alright,” she says. “Thank you, Ieiri-senpai.”
Always with the formalities. “See you later, Maki,” she says. What she doesn’t: not for a long time. Please.
He’s planning something, Suguru. A parade. A war. It’s a ruse, of course; he just wants Okkotsu’s curse, Rika. It’s so painfully transparent Shoko wonders why they aren’t all admitting it outright. His subtly has slipped in recent years, perhaps intentionally. He’s grown more brazen in his attacks, more callous. They haven’t gotten coffee for quite some time.
“Would you do it?”
Suguru’s voice sounds suddenly. He’s sitting on the edge of one of the cots in her lab, towel draped over his face, obscuring his eyes. Shoko looks up from her paperwork to frown at him.
“Do what?”
“Kill him.”
Suguru’s name goes unsaid, but Satoru might as well have shouted it in her ear for how clearly she reads him now. “If I were you, do you mean?”
He shrugs. “If you were me, if you were you. If you were anyone else. I don’t know.”
“Well, those all have different answers.”
“Do they?” The towel remains where it was, but Shoko feels his gaze through it all the same. “It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?”
“Maybe. But there’s a reason why the higher-ups don’t want me to do it. Or anyone else here, for the matter.”
“‘Cause they wanna send me a message?” Satoru scoffs. “Jesus.”
“I think you’re the only one who can,” she says, and it’s the miserable, hard truth.
“Fuck.”
“Fuck,” she echoes, and turns back to her paperwork.
“Don’t die.”
Shoko’s voice is soft enough to be drowned out by the water from the shower head above them when she speaks. Tomorrow, Suguru attacks, and Utahime will be on the front lines in Kyoto. Shoko will be where she always is: in the basement, waiting.
She blinks water out of her eyes as Utahime huffs a laugh, wiping at her mouth. She’s probably upset that Shoko’s stopped making out with her to say the same thing she’s already said three times now, but if she is, she doesn’t show it.
“I won’t die,” Utahime says, and presses a kiss to Shoko’s cheek, her neck, the corner of her collarbone, lips lingering just enough to make Shoko’s gut roll, heat unfurling in it.
“Please,” she whispers, uncertain as to what she’s begging for, and this time Utahime kisses lower, lingering on the slope of her chest, grinning against her. She takes a nipple in her mouth, teeth grazing gently, and even as Shoko's knees start to go weak, she's saying it again, unable to stop herself. “Don’t die.”
“I won’t die,” Utahime repeats, straightening up. Her gaze is solemn as she looks at her, scar glittering in the low light. A flush pools down from her cheeks to her chest. “I won’t die.”
“Promise?”
“Who’s the spiritualist now?” Utahime kisses her again, deep and desperate, fingers curling in the hair at the base of Shoko's neck, tugging once, twice, earning a gasp that forces itself out of Shoko without her permission.
"Fuck," she mumbles, and Utahime presses lips to her neck, smiling once more.
"Yeah?"
This feels awfully like a goodbye. Utahime's train is in a few hours, after all. There is a very real possibilty Shoko will never see her alive again.
“Please.” Shoko would get on her hands and knees if she had to, if that’s what it took. “Promise me.”
“I promise.” Another kiss, tender, soft. Shoko’s heart squeezes. “I promise.”
It’s cruel, in the end, that it’s her that has to be the one to write Suguru’s death report.
Anyone else could do it, anyone. It’s the higher-ups matter, after all, so logically, it should be in their hands till the end. Maybe they’re trying to send her a message. Maybe the message is to Satoru. Maybe there’s no message at all, and they are just sick, evil people.
Maybe, maybe. Yuta won’t get out of her lab. Maki nearly died. Inumaki and Panda are okay, but wounded. His own reverse cursed energy keeps him on his feet, though, bobbing around her every few minutes when he can’t stand by his friends’ unconscious bodies any longer.
“Can I help with anything?” he asks for a second time, his wide-eyed gaze on the body bag in front of her, the one Shoko has pointedly not touched. “Can—”
“Please,” she says, trying not to scream. The ink from her pen blots messily on the report, and with sharper movements than necessary, Shoko rips it out of the notebook and tosses it aside. The skin on her hands creaks with the gesture—raw, bleeding. How unhygienic of her, really. “Okkotsu.”
She can’t say anything more than that, not trusting herself to get out full sentences. Yuta blinks at her, then steps back.
“I’ll come by again later,” he mumbles, and heads out the door.
And then it’s her, her and Suguru.
She needs a cigarette. She needs a drink. She needs a do-over—this life, this version of it, is not right. It has been damaged beyond repair.
What she needs, really, is to do her job: open the zipper and take Suguru out. She needs to clean the body, prepare it, ready it for cremation. She needs to swap places with him, maybe. She needs to strip off her skin, throw it away in an airtight bag to prevent contamination. The death that surrounds her is catching. It’s contagious.
She does none of this, of course. It feels stupid, futile; her job will not cease to exist just because she’d rather it didn’t. Soon, more will be down here, the dead she will dispose of and the half-dead she will try to save and say nothing, nothing when she fails. They need her. The school needs her. Suguru—
Well, he needed, past tense. She has arrived late at the scene once again, too slow to do anything but stare. The wounds he bears now are unfixable, scored so deep they might as well touch his soul. The death does not stop being a death just because she wants it to be. She’s known this since her first day here.
A knock at the door, and Shoko nearly throws something. She feels bad; the Okkotsu kid is kind and sweet and clearly holds himself responsible for any bad thing that happens in all of Japan, never mind what transpired today, but she can’t. She really, really can’t.
When Satoru opens the door, the oxygen count in the room halves. There is no room for her to breathe, all of a sudden, but she still tries, the sound rattling, raspy.
“Shoko,” Satoru says, and the hands at his side are caked red.
“Satoru,” she whispers.
“Don’t burn him.”
It’s a simple request, not cushioned by any sort of pretense, any justification. When he looks at her, his gaze is raw, bleeding, cracked enough to rival her own knuckles. They all have their vices, all of them. Another wound her technique cannot fix.
“Don’t burn him,” Satoru repeats, the first signs of life stirring under his voice as he speaks, suddenly, with urgency. “Please.”
She doesn’t.
Instead, they take the Suguru to Okinawa.
Shoko feels like an imposter the whole trip, a stain on the horizon of Satoru’s grief. She never experienced Okinawa or the whole grisly fallout, simply watched it from the sidelines. This city never held significance to her. The beach they arrive at means nothing, nor does the ocean.
Though Satoru does, so that’s something. Suguru does, too, but now he’s dead.
“You go,” Shoko says, voice cracking from lack of use. The last time she’d spoken had been in the hotel room the previous night when Satoru had finally made her get out of the shower after forty-five minutes in there, scrubbing furiously at her skin. She’d almost managed not to yell at him for it, almost, and when she did, he’d sat there in silence and taken it.
In the present, he shakes his head, wordless until he whispers, finally, “hold on.”
She does, fingers curling around his wrist. With Suguru in his arms, Satoru activates Infinity, and they walk out across the water.
The sunrise is beautiful as Suguru sinks beneath the waves. Shoko does not look when she hears the half-stifled hitch of Satoru’s breathing at her side, his sobs muted, stifled. Her own eyes burn, throat tightening, and she can’t help herself: she reaches out, grabs his hand, squeezes.
After a while, he squeezes back.
“Have you ever lost anyone?”
The wound to Maki’s leg is not deep, but it is ugly, crimson staining the sheets as Shoko dabs at it with cotton pads, trying to get a better look at the damage. The girl, of course, is unfazed, simply sitting there with her hands folded in her lap, unimpressed despite the blood.
After the baseball game, a bout of shouting had erupted between her and Mai, her sister from the Kyoto school. Shoko hadn’t stayed long enough to discern the details, abandoning the match during the eighth inning to go smoke outside the lab, and she doesn’t ask now. Though she wouldn’t be entirely surprised if Mai was responsible, somehow, for the injury Shoko looks at now.
“In what sense?” she asks, and lays a gloved palm flat on Maki’s thigh, right above where the top of the gash starts. With an almost-imperceptible hissing, the torn skin slowly begins to seal itself back up.
“Any sense.” Maki exhales low under her breath, her bluntness only accentuated by the pain.
Names and faces flash through Shoko’s mind, the laundry list of bagged bodies she’s acquired in fifteen long years of doing this. The six year old boy. Four old ladies who’d followed soon after. Five separate prospective students, the youngest one twelve. Two of Yaga’s cursed corpses. Half the residents of an apartment complex. A first year whose name she can’t remember now, face even less so. Two second years, shipped over from Kyoto on their last breaths. Idatori Yuji, almost. Fushiguro, almost more than once. Yu. Suguru.
Shoko has learned to live with death. She’s opened her arms to it, opened her home, made a seat for it on her couch and patted it as if to say: come here. Rest a while. She’s a liar when she says it doesn’t phase her ever, and maybe that’s a good thing. She can’t get too cynical, after all. The only reason she’s still doing this job is because of love, after all. Lose that, and it’s over.
With a half-smile, Shoko removes her hand, the wound on Maki’s leg fully sealed. The girl looks up at her, gaze prompting.
“I have,” Shoko says, and she’s surprised at how easily the acknowledgement still comes, even after all these years for the guilt to fester.
“Do you miss them?”
Shoko thinks about the pain of Suguru’s defection, the impossible gray-area he’d camped out in: not dead, but not here. Alive, but gone. A phantom in every corner of the room with no gravestone to mourn at, not yet. Sometimes, losing the people who are still alive is the hardest thing.
Maki’s gaze has turned uncertain, and Shoko feels an unusual rush of fondness for the girl. Unbidden, she reaches out and rests a hand against her shoulder, squeezes once.
“All the time,” she says. “The feeling never goes away, honestly. But you grow around it. You learn to live and be happy.”
“You think?” But Maki’s tone is somber, not skeptical.
Shoko gives her shoulder a final, firm squeeze before dropping her hands—dirty, always, but livable. You grow around it. “I do,” she says, and gives her a smile, as real as she can manage. “I really do.”