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“Oh,” comes a voice, light and cheery and only a couple steps behind her, “what a coincidence!”
Yuki freezes. Under her fingertips, the cold glass of her iced whiskey beads with condensation. Her grip slips, just a little. Slowly, she turns, shifting back on her bar stool, forearm resting on the counter top. She keeps her posture open, lax, casual.
Gojō stares right back at her, fold of black cloth laid over his eyes, lips tilted up, just a little. The bar’s dim, burnt lighting colors him in rusty shades of brown and orange.
“A coincidence,” she repeats, voice weaker than it should be. Not-quite flat, and a far call from the drawl it should’ve been. She’s in some no-name bar in the United States. “What chances.”
“Aw,” he says, slipping easily into the bar stool beside hers. Curse energy coils in her shoulders, through her forearms, and his smile stretches, showing teeth. His head cocks. “What’s wrong?” A childish note of dissatisfaction enters his tone, “You don’t look happy to see me! That’s very hurtful, you know!”
Can she just leave? No. Not possible. He’s called the strongest sorcerer for a reason. Fuck, this is gonna suck so much.
“No no,” she laughs, miscellaneously waving her hand in the air, “I was just surprised! You haven’t been seen in a while, after all.”
Two weeks, actually. But it turns out that when you’re Gojō Satoru, the strongest sorcerer in the whole globe, internationally demanded and perpetually needed, two weeks of complete radio silence is a lot.
Well. He did just kill his high school best friend, after all.
The same high school best friend who Yuki might have played a small role in turning genocidal. Haha.
Gojō sighs, it’s a long, exaggerated sound. “Don’t bother,” and his voice is playful, “you really should’ve told me if we were on bad terms! Though, I can’t imagine why we would be.”
“We aren’t,” she answers, studying the lines of his posture, the small curling of his cursed energy along the edges, “in fact, I’ll buy you a drink! Any request?”
“That’s a relief!” Gojō leans back, smile sharp. “Excluding my dear student, we are, after all, the only two remaining special grades.”
Yikes, they’re really doing this.
“Oh and,” he adds, after a moment, “I don’t drink. Sorry about that!”
“Rejecting a woman like me?” Cursed energy pricks on her skin, tingling, goosebumps running down her arms. “You’ve got no taste!”
Ice clinks in Yuki’s glass, sending small ripples in the amber liquid. Somewhere behind them, the radio is playing an erratic, jazzy tune. There are words, but the shapes of them blur together into an English mess that Yuki can’t find the motivation to decipher. In these late dragging hours, the bar is almost deserted.
“You know,” Gojō finally says, tone light and deliberate like the beginnings of a threat, “I’ve been reminiscing, in this last half month.”
“...Yeah?”
“Mhmm.” He hums, elbows settling on the bar top, fingers flexing. Yuki watches the movements closely, but they form no sign. “After Suguru left—September 2009—I upped my mission count a lot. I think I might’ve gone actual weeks without any sleep!” His laugh is like the edge of a knife. “Suguru killed 134 people by the end of the month. I had to compensate, you know. I had to match his kill count with exorcisms. So what if Suguru killed another three people? It would take at least twenty hours to track him down, and in that much time, I could kill enough curses to preemptively save at least ten. I made a whole spreadsheet of calculations and everything!”
Oh, he’s rambling.
Tonight was supposed to be a relaxed night to kick back and nurse a drink. It was supposed to be a nice little break from picking up all the stray pieces that Getō left haphazardly in his wake. It’s good that they’re so directionless, so stranded without their leader, because that makes it easier to collect them, but really, if she has to sit through another rant about dirty monkeys…
Getō was good, she thinks, he was useful, but—
“...The higher ups couldn’t argue with that. Hah. Honestly it was less for them than it was for me. Not for moral reasons, not really, I didn’t feel obligated to save more people than he could kill, and I didn’t feel responsible, either. It was just easier. Get any possible moral issues out of the way, all that. Make it so I never had to think about it. I didn’t have time to think about much of anything, actually.”
How is he still going?
“You sure like to talk,” Yuki muses, cutting through his speech. This is all just—
it’s exhausting.
Getō was useful, is useful still—in many circles, his name evokes the rosy visualization of a curseless world in a way that Yuki never quite managed to paint. He was an idealist and she’s a realist; his people ate his candied words in a way they never quite regarded Yuki’s dryer prepositions—and Yuki can’t quite bring herself to say that pushing him over the edge was a mistake, but it was…
His ideal had been far from what her own has become.
Gojō tilts his head at her, and then laughs. “I do have a very pretty voice.”
Yuki quirks her lips. “I see the rumors of your egoism aren’t unfounded.”
He gives an exaggerated sigh, rolling his shoulder blades. “Well, if you want me to hurry up so bad…” She gets the distinct impression that he’s rolling his eyes at her under that blindfold. “Fine!” Gojō’s smile is sardonic. “He mentioned you, back then, shortly before he left.”
Fuck.
“It slipped my mind for the longest time…”
It’s all going too fast. Yuki prefers to plan her encounters. It’s not that she can’t improvise, she can, but Gojō is a hard person to improvise against. This conversation hasn’t been in her control since the start, but it’s falling further out of grasp. She has too—
“I—”
Fingers press against her lips.
“Ah ah ah,” Gojō wags a finger on his free hand. “It’s not your turn to speak yet.” Cursed energy hums on her lips, and she realizes with a start—although it shouldn’t be surprising—that he isn’t touching her, not really. There’s a thin expanse of infinity between the pads of his fingers and her lips. The press lacks warmth. “Anyway, it’s funny. When I looked into your ideology, is was interestingly similar to Suguru’s. Less full of passion, but...” his hand drops, “similar.”
A long, dragging moment.
Oh, he’s waiting for her. And Yuki…
Abruptly, she realizes that she does not know what to say.
“Your turn,” he says, pointedly.
“It’s true,” she says, slowly, licking her lips, “that I talked to Getō before he became a curse user.”
“And?”
Well. What does she say? That it was accidental? She knew what she was doing when she said unfortunately, I’m not crazy enough, like a dare, a challenge. But are you? It was a risk to her, an experiment. Getō was a fledgling special grade with a power ceiling so high that she doesn’t think he really understood it at the time. And now…
I’m sorry how it turned out. That’s a lie, too.
“About a curseless world,” she continues, “neither of us wanted to continue the endless cycle of exorcisms.”
“Mhmm.”
It’s stupid, really. She should just lie about how it went down, but—Gojō already basically knows, and it feels—wrong, to deny him confirmation. She is coldly analytical in her pursuit of the ideal world, but her heart is why she yearns for that world in the first place. The crushing despair of her classmate’s blood slicking her skin, bodies cooling in her arms. The pointlessness of it all.
And now, in part because of her, this man beside her has killed his best friend. She still remembers the softening of Getō’s expression when Gojō was mentioned.
“I helped push him off the edge,” she finally says.
Gojō's fingers flex. He says nothing.
It’s something I regret, she could say, but she’d do it again in a heartbeat. Not for the same reasons as before, no longer as a risky experiment, but because the result is undeniable. Getō brought the concept of a curseless world into sorcerer discourse. He did it terribly, with bloodshed and prejudice, but he did. Getō thought with his heart and justified those emotional conclusions with his head. He didn’t follow proper methodology at all.
I’m sorry, she could say, but it would be marred with the following: but..
But she has to say something, so:
“I’m sorry it ended up hurting you both,” she finally offers. “He was a cute kid.”
Gojō snorts. “Wow.”
Let someone else take the risk, she had thought back then; it’s fine so long as she avoids the fallout.
The fallout might finally be catching up to her right now, wearing Gojō Satoru’s face.
“What,” she raises a brow, “you wanted me to lie to you?”
“Nah.”
“Then don’t complain.”
He makes a face at her. “I didn’t complain!”
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she takes a long sip from her whiskey. Even watered down, it burns her throat. The radio is playing something slower, now. She sort of wants to smash the damn thing. Making noise is it’s one job, but it can’t seem to fill the awkward stretch of silence between her and Gojō. Well. She’s always been a proactive person.
“So,” she drawls, and the nerves from earlier have calmed, “did you actually come here to do something?”
Gojō tilts his head towards her, then away. He slumps, just a little. “Maybe. I should hate you, I think.”
Oh? “You don’t?”
“Not really.”
“Huh.”
“I’m fucking tired.”
“Welcome to sorcererhood.”
A groan.
Yuki stares a moment before reaching out and patting the infinity over Gojō’s back. They both cringe. The motion is, somehow, even more awkward than she thought it’d be. Her hand retracts. A drop of condensation rolls from Yuki’s glass onto the polished bartop.
“Look,” Gojō says, “this is getting real boring. Are you gonna go all mass murder-y?”
“Seriously?”
“That’s a ‘yes, please kill me Gojō-sama’ unless you confirm otherwise.”
Yuki swallows an incredulous laugh. “Nah. ‘Don’t plan on it.”
“Great!” He abruptly shoves his bar stool back. It makes a horrible grating sound against the floor. “I’m done here. Nice chat. Suguru said he couldn’t laugh in a world like this, so good luck on the research. Whatever. I hope I never see your ugly face again.”
And then he’s walking away. She blinks after him, something like disbelief bubbling in her chest. The air is immediately lighter with Gojō's cursed energy further away, and the long breath that she exhales feels like relief.
It’d be a horrible shame if she died so soon after finally obtaining the resources to chase that ideal world in earnest.
The bar’s door closes with a slam and a jingle.
Belatedly, she realizes that she forgot to ask him his type.