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Shoko thinks, with no small amount of grief, how unfortunate it is for her to love not one but two dead men.
Carnage of one—
He waved at her from across the street with the same smile, same posture of indifference, and the same lilt of voice. He offered her a light, like he’d always done before, always careful but now with a tint of penance, with the way he gripped the small metal with two steady hands, or maybe he’s beholden, for her classic indifference. She didn’t really know, she didn’t even want to know at that point.
Because what else could she offer him when her hands are dyed with the same blood as his?
When she knew that with every body bag he placed on her table, every corpse she dissected—was the same number of steps he had taken away from her. Or that with every glance he sent her, the same amount of exhaustion evident under both of their eyes, was a silent I’m sorry and It’s not your fault.
He told her about his dream and she tried to think of herself living in his dreams, it’s a bloodbath. Yet, she couldn’t help but think— no more body bags.
It’s insane, both his dreams and him. But she knew everyone is, when they live long enough and see more than enough in their field of work. She knew how terrible misery feels when it clung on your skin like a second set of clothes.
And even if it ended up with him walking away and leaving a not-quite but close enough human-shaped hole in his midst, she didn’t stop him.
She doesn’t blame him, not for the death of a whole village nor for the murder of his parents.
She knew Suguru died along with them.
Death of two—
Here’s what death feels like.
It’s countless dismembered limbs lying on the cold metal table in her office, some deformed, some incomplete, some severed from joints, and it’s like looking at bodies of soldiers from war. Everyone uninvolved would think it’s honorable and tell praises on a nearly empty tomb, while she thinks it’s just lonely, to not even die in peace and whole.
It’s the smell of decay and blood filling up her senses until she can’t remember what fresh air smells like, it’s only her, smoke and smell of burning flesh on the pyre. And with her every inhale—is a breath someone else didn’t get to have. So she forces herself to breathe, even when air makes her throat burn, makes her insides flare with acid and leaves her retching on the floor. She breathes even when it feels like she’ll die breathing.
But sometimes death comes in the form of eyes that hold the skies.
He had always been a bringer of death for millions of entities, and that with his existence comes the price of miles of graveyards for the weak and a platform with a stone. He had always looked so particularly fit with the gore of a battlefield, bathing in purple out of petulant arrogance, or spotless even in the middle of violence. He had always looked so in place with realms she wandered in but never understood, he was something beyond her after all, beyond everything and everyone else.
He lived and broke for power, died and then defied death like death was nothing but a moral concept to man and not the end of all things. She should’ve known not even death could kill him, not when he was Gojo Satoru—human but also unbelievably inhuman.
And yet, on the eve of Christmas—a decade after a dead man walking waved at her across the streets.
They both wander the realms of death.
She thought that if there was anything that represented death through grief, they would be it, him even more so.
Here’s what death feels like.
It’s clear skies being clouded with a torment like no other.
Satoru was no longer alive as well.
Grief of three—
She thinks back to memories of a summer long past gone, the not-quite clandestine meetings on stairs that proved witness to every tragedy they painted, and the night sky above that twinkled with stars until wisps of lingering smoke get lost in the morning fog.
She thinks of how foolish it is to love dead men when it meant dying herself, thinks of how meaningless that notion is when she’s drenched in death and blood anyway.
They used to fit like a needle in a hole, pinpricked and all. Where Suguru was always easy to rile up using his beliefs against him, Satoru spitting bullshit ten miles per second, and Shoko watching—a thoroughly amused and a little bit obsessed audience. She liked watching them, liked being with them to haul them by their ears when they’ve gone a little too far, liked to be just with them and simply be.
There had always been something interesting about Suguru and Satoru—the strongest. An incessant charm that both of them held, yet did not know they had. The world saw them as a threat, Shoko saw them as something lovely with all the fractures and bruises that made them up. The world saw them as something bigger than the universe, and Shoko—Shoko saw how small they are and how smaller they had become, caged in the confines of power and responsibility. They broke and molded and formed fractured golds and broke again. They were never whole, not if they weren’t together, and Shoko was too captivated to resist their pull.
Suguru and Satoru had always fit together like a puzzle piece to another, and Shoko wished and prayed and hoped that she would watch them become whole and paint over a coat to shield them both from coming apart.
But Shoko was a healer of dismembered limbs and gaping wounds—you can’t heal a grief too large for your ribcage.
They all tumbled down and broke like glass.
But she had loved them and then loved them some more, she knew she wouldn’t ever stop, until all three of them were nothing but three corpses on their feet.
Shoko dies with them.
Shoko thinks, with no small amount of glee, how fortunate she is to have loved them at all.