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cigarettes, secrets, and carbon monoxide

Summary:

Shoko has a secret that really isn't one. It's just a particular, unexciting moment in her life.

Once upon a time on a bleak morning in April, Shouko met the Sorcerer Killer in a park, both breaking the law right in front of a NO-SMOKING sign.

Notes:

Merry Christmas! I hope you enjoy mindless ramblings of Shoko.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

 


 

“I got killed, you know,” says Satoru, with the intonation of someone talking about the weather. It’s a nice, sunny Tuesday, no Curses lurking around, and they just had lunch. Chinese food, oily and filling.

 

Shoko considers ignoring him for exactly one second. The cigarette is soft under her lips when she presses down. “What?”

 

“My Reverse Cursed Technique,” he answers with a smirk. “It’s because I got killed that I learned it. You know what they say, adrenaline does things to people.”

 

“You can’t produce adrenaline if you’re dead, idiot.” Where’s Suguru when the dolt needs a good whack to the head? Right, wherever he is hiding from the higher-ups. “Who could even kill you?”

 

“Hmm, I wonder.” He tilts his head like a bird, sunglasses slipping down to reveal inhumanely blue eyes. Fucker. 

 

“I don’t care,” Shoko tells him, blowing out smoke. It doesn’t matter, with Infinity withholding Satoru from the world. A god’s natural protection, or an angel’s protective halo. The smoke wreaths around white hair, a storm cloud gathering in the silence that ensues. Shoko wonders if it’ll rain anytime soon.

 

“Maybe you should,” whispers Satoru. His eyes, even blurred by the dissipating smoke, cut straight through into her own. The heat of his body is a stark reminder of his beating heart. “What if he’s still out there?”

 

“But he’s not, is he? Fushigoro Toji.” No surprise from either of them, which is… Shoko doesn’t know what made her hopes go up. “What, you think I don’t listen or read reports?”

 

“It’s no fun like that,” he complains, but there’s no pressure in the air. Shoko hadn’t even realised her fingers had been trembling until they stopped. The smoke has cleared, leaving the Strongest’s gaze fully trained onto her face. “You’d tell me if Suguru came around, won’t you? I told you who killed me.”

 

Shoko doesn’t point out that he didn’t name his killer, just asked if she knew. “Of course.” There’s no point in fretting over Suguru’s sudden visit last week. “I’d always tell you.” 

 

Satoru nods, as if that’s just what he needed. “Okay. I trust you, Shoko.”

 

“I don’t care,” Shoko repeats, as if that could drown out the thoughts wallowing in her head. 

 

Satoru smiles, and for a heartbeat she can’t tell what it means. “You could say it louder.”

 

Shoko watches him leave, her smoke burnt out. She spits it out, watching it fall onto the roadside. 

 

Yaga calls her in before dinner to break the news of Suguru’s defection.

 




Shoko lies without hesitation.

 

She always has. You pick up funny habits when your childhood is filled with hideous monsters. 

 

There’s not much to gain from being a Jujutsu Sorcerer when the only thing she can feasibly do is heal. She’s valuable, but that’s it—a treasure away from the frontlines and nothing else. She doesn’t think she’s even come face to face with anything beyond a second-grade curse before, and that was an accident.

 

Suguru swallowed it mere minutes later, anyhow. It’s not even got the grace to be a traumatic memory. 

 

The point is, she’s virtually nothing when it comes to the two muppets toting the title of Strongest. She’s no fool. Shoko knows that her skill and prowess in the arts of status recovery are but minty garnish on a five-star meal—all looks and no value.

 

Satoru asked her, once, how it felt to hang off their sleeves, lurking in their shadows. It was in good humour; Suguru had mock-yelled at him, Satoru had apologised, and Shoko had put on her best poker face saying that they’d get nowhere without her, really, but it was all a joke of bad taste anyway.

 

It’s nothing. Not worth even a ripple.

 

She always knew how to smoke, even before she entered the college, back when she was a wee middle schooler trying the fuck to get out of school. Delinquency had been… a thing. No gyaru stuff, nothing like that pretentious shit, but she’d learned to smoke.

 

She thought it would go away in the Jujutsu college. 

 

It didn’t.

 

On her sixth—or seventh, unimportant—year on this Earth, she learned how to lie about the monsters. On her thirteenth, she learned how to smoke, choking down ash in a flurry of jeering.

 

On the Saturday roughly a week after Suguru’s death sentence and Satoru’s mood swings and the palpable distance between her and them, Shoko learns how to drink with the isopropyl alcohol in the school’s basement. She’s the best healer the Jujutsu world’s got. Satoru doesn’t count, he can only use it on himself. If she can’t heal a little alcohol poisoning, nobody can.

 

Too bad curses don’t include metaphorical heartbreak.

 


 

“What kind of man do you like, kid?”

 

Shoko stares blankly at the woman with the dragonfly shikigami. “Huh?”

 

The special-grade smiles. “What kind of man do you like?”

 

Shoko stares at her, then at the morgue table and the corpse on it. “A living one, I guess.”

 

“Hmm, lacks enthusiasm.” Tsukumo clicks her tongue. “Why not one of those two boys? Or maybe you prefer the girls, I don’t mind.”

 

“No.” Shoko mimics her smile. “I don’t.”

 

“I see.” A flick, and there’s an open cig box in front of her, one of them poking out. “Want one?”

 


 

Shoko has a secret that really isn't one. It's just a particular, unexciting moment in her life.

 

Once upon a time on a bleak morning in April, Shouko met the Sorcerer Killer in a park, both breaking the law right in front of a NO-SMOKING sign.

 

It was before that dreadful mission with the Star Plasma Vessel. Or had it been during it?

 

Shoko had been bored, that’s what she remembers. Bored out of her mind, alone in the old-fashioned school again. Yaga was out on a meeting, the boys were… somewhere on a mission, and Shoko was left swinging her legs at an empty training field.

 

Obviously she’d left. 

 

She’d taken a taxi after walking outside, Shoko thinks. Off to Shinjuku, or was it Nakano? No matter.

 

After that, she’d bought some bubble tea (the flavour escapes her mind) and wandered around. Maybe she’d hoped to catch sight of the boys. Maybe she’d wanted to prove herself. Maybe she’d just had nothing to do.

 

Either way, her aimless walking had led her to some rundown park. There had been nobody around, and the giant signboard was just begging to be defied, so the cigarettes had been between her fingers before she knew it. 

 

She remembers that the park had a red slide. Two swings. Maybe a see-saw, or was it two? She had been standing on grass, near some railings. She remembers thinking that Satoru would’ve tried the slide if he were there.

 

She doesn’t remember how, but Shoko knows that some time after her first cig, there’s another man smoking, sitting with a leg crassly up on the see-saw. He’d had a caterpillar-like curse wrapped over his shoulder like some sort of feather boa, without the feathers.

 

Shoko thinks she might’ve felt fear, but honestly, there hadn’t been much going through her head back then. Just slight curiosity, apprehension, and… 

 

“What’s that for?” she’d asked. The exact wording escapes her mind, but she’s pretty sure she started with that. 

 

The man eyed her for a second, before pointing at his shoulders. “This guy?” When she nodded, he had smirked. Something wild, something prodding. “He’s just a pet. What’s a kid like you doing out here, smoking against the rules?”

 

“You’re smoking against the rules, too,” Shoko had pointed out. They didn’t really talk after, just focusing on their vices. Or had they? Shoko thinks they had conversed a bit, on idle topics like the clouds or the park, but it just doesn’t stand out. Just a stranger she met in a random park in Shinjuku, or Nakano.

 

She knows he was the Sorcerer Killer, of course. Deep down, she knew it back then as well.

 

But really, Shoko’s always been a good liar, even to herself. “You’re a weird guy, mister.”

 

“You’re not so normal yourself.”

 

She really isn’t, is she?

 

A normal person would’ve cried when their friend died. A normal person would’ve cried when their friend became a criminal. A normal girl wouldn’t be smoking in a park with an assassin. A normal girl wouldn’t be Ieiri Shoko.

 


 

“You’re always so serious now,” says Satoru, mouth slanted into a pout, just barely outside her space. He’s tense, she can tell. The elders must have pissed him off again. “You used to smile more.”

 

“I didn’t think you’d care,” she answers, taking a long drag. Maybe it’s the cold air sending her hair into knots and never touching his hair. Or the alcohol working its way through her system, even though she’d only drank half the can. Or the stars aligned, or the fact that it’s been a year since Suguru died. That’s probably it. Suguru’s death anniversary is in a few hours. Minutes. Whatever.

 

“You want a smoke?”

 

Satoru doesn’t respond for a lengthy moment. She thinks, if she listens hard enough, she can hear Suguru joking about how the Strongest is too sissy to try a flimsy cigarette. 

 

“You know I don’t like them.” 

 

“Maybe you will now.”

 

“I don’t know, Shoko,” his voice is calm, so calm. “Do I?”

 

Somehow, she doesn’t think they’re talking about cigarettes or smoking anymore.

 

“He died today,” Satoru laughs, as if he’s privy to a joke only he knows. “He’d give me a Christmas kiss before we sleep, sneak to my bed on that stupid manta curse. Climb in from the window, or from under the bed, the bastard.”

 

He reaches over, takes the can of beer, and drains it. Then he throws it to the training fields, where Shoko tries and fails to track its landing. It’s too dark. 

 

“Is it that time already?”

 

“Went past midnight long before you came out,” he confirms. “You didn’t check?”

 

Shoko shrugs. Her cigarette tapers off, the faint glow of embers disappearing.

 

“I know you met him, you know. It’s not that hard to figure out.” There’s a breath on her ear. “Merry Christmas, Shoko.” 

 

She stands there until dawn creeps in, pink-hued sunlight gazing upon the empty beer can amongst the grass.

 


 

Kugisaki has plain, short brown hair, prominent scowl. She stands out like grass on the roadside: she doesn’t. She’s loud, though.

 

Shoko smiles when the girl passes by. It’s the least she can do, knowing that her classmate lies cold and dead on her table, chest gone and into rigor mortis.

 

When Itadori revives, Shoko doesn’t think she’s ever felt more relieved.

 


 

Sometimes, Shoko wonders if the reason why she doesn’t step foot outside of the school campus these days is because she doesn’t want to get pulled into another plot. If she doesn’t want to meet another person destined to ruin her life.

 

It’s selfish to think that her life is the one being ruined. She’s never had any real consequence to her actions. Smoking, drinking, all vices she can heal herself from. She doesn’t kill, doesn’t die, and is even, at times, praised as a saviour.

 

Satoru changes his sunglasses to bandages to a blindfold. Suguru sheds his uniform for an old-fashioned get-up that screams of cult, to nothing, because he’s dead. Shoko lets her hair grow out.

 

She’s not blind, or uninformed. Maybe she was normal, a long time ago, but pushed it down with delinquency, with curses, with a bland smile over a bland countenance. 

 

Nobody knows.

 

Once, Satoru asked if she knew how important she was. She’s a good friend, he insists, kicking his legs like a child, “You’re all that’s left!” That had been before the second-years came, before he went to be a teacher. She reminds him of friendlier times. It’s nothing special, she tells herself.

 

This is what Shoko told him: “I don’t know. Am I?” And maybe that’s the first time she’s not lied . Not really.

 

Her eyebags are unhealable, merely a side effect of spending time better used sleeping for midnight smoking sessions, or bingeing medical shows (ironic, but who can call out on her?), or just. Reminiscing. She and Satoru aren’t that different. Lonely people masquerading as… what do they even try to be?

 

Shoko never knew that, even when she wasn’t a disillusioned girl. Was she ever not a disillusioned girl?

 

At least she used to smile, when the three of them spent spring together.

 




Notes:

Sorry I kinda baited with Toji, heh.