Work Text:
His footsteps down the hallway echoed. It was oddly quiet, maybe because it was so early in the morning.
Hands in his pockets, he stopped near the shuttered window he was told to stand and wait at. The surrounding area smelled sterile and the lights were blinding even to somebody with normal vision.
Raising his hand to adjust the dark sunglasses on his face, the white bracelet on his wrist caught on his jacket sleeve and he adjusted it with his other hand so it slipped back down inside. He wasn’t a patient, though the three day long migraine and matching pit in his stomach could have had him committed.
He saw a nurse down the hallway slip into a room. He saw a patient on the sixth floor fall asleep to a late night talkshow. He saw a mother say goodbye to her son on the first floor in the emergency room, a horrific car crash taking his life. He saw an older gentleman ask for more pain meds on the 4th floor. Outside, he saw two coworkers on their smoke break.
Yet, he couldn’t see into the room in front of him.
He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to face what was going to stare back at him. Maybe it really was the one thing that could scare him, terrify him, put him on edge. Something so diabolical, so evil and wrapped in a veil of secrecy.
He thought maybe it made him a bad person. He’d seen a lot of things, done a lot of things, killed a lot of things. And nothing had brought him the dread, the feeling that slowly worked its way up his throat quite like that.
It was his fault. All of it was his fault. He knew that. Everyone knew that. Maybe this was what would take Satoru Gojo out.
He chuckled quietly to himself. Hilarious, he thought. Of course he would be the maker of his own end.
His hands went down to the large plastic guard that ran along hospital walls and squeezed it tightly, arching himself into it a bit. He stretched his back out, tilting his neck forward, cracking it.
He stood back though, feet flat on the white tile floor. He was good at accepting things. He was great at accepting things. The past, the present, the inevitable future of his life and the expansion of everything he knew and saw. He could hold that, he could breathe that in and taste it and trust it. He could squeeze it, stretch it out; he could name it, the guilt and anguish he held in his heart, in his lungs, in the pit of his stomach that just kept growing and growing.
He let out the breath, the gasp of air he was holding in. He usually didn’t feel guilt. It wasn’t something he had given himself time to consider. Guilt was a useless emotion for his line of work. It didn’t help or save anyone.
But there, then, it crawled its way up from the depths of his core and spun its way around his organs, clenching them and squeezing them until they convulsed. It made the bile rise up his throat and he had to swallow back the taste of the rest of his life. It made his nose flair and he smelled the death and destruction that would come for him.
He couldn’t see into the damn room in front of him. His hands burned with pure energy and he quickly shoved them into his pockets. His finger caught a loose string that he played with to distract himself. His eyes darted to every corner of the plain window and light green curtain that sat in front of it. Nothing.
He saw an emergency surgery finish a floor below him, the person okay. He saw two nurses sharing a bag of chips in the break room, waiting for their third cup of tea to brew. He saw a sleeping child connected to their machines, their hairless head tucked under a warm beanie pressed up against the pillow.
Everything all at once crept up onto him and the pressure in his chest only got worse. He couldn’t see inside the room, and everything in between him and the window was infinity and also nothing. He could reach out and touch the cool glass, and he could clench his entire body and compress himself into a tiny little ball and roll down the hallway until he’s gone forever.
He saw his one and only lying back in a hospital bed. The lights were dim, he’d been too tired to get up, too tired to speak, too tired to breathe any harder than he had to. They’d both shared looks with each other. They both knew it was bad.
He saw him lying still, chest rising slowly up and down. His long black hair laid beautifully across the white pillow and bedsheets.
He saw him.
He saw the light green curtain shuffle and a pair of gloved hands was pulling it aside until the light filtered from the room out into the hallway. Satoru ducked his head in so he could see inside. It was a mess of people and tables that were on wheels as to make it easier to move them. It was a lot of blue, and gray, and even if he could see, it was all so much.
He took another breath to steady himself and a small woman came back up in front of the window. She was short, hair tied back with white gloves and a blue see through smock over her backwards, the ties done up in the back. She wore a white face mask that tied behind her head and she nodded her head once to Satoru in the hallway. Her mouth wasn’t visible but he could tell she was smiling the way her cheeks scrunched up into her eyes.
She waved at him. He nodded to her. She pointed just out of view from the window before stepping over there and he nodded again.
The guilt swirled its way downward this time, his stomach and intestines twisting, seizing up. He had to open his mouth and breathe through it. He had to see. He had to look.
Everything, and nothing, all at once. The weight on his chest, on his neck and his shoulders and his back expanded ten fold, and he felt like the heaviest person in the world. All of it weighed down on him, sinking him down, down through the floors until he was buried deep in the earth. He could feel the worms wrap around his fingers and reclaim him.
The nurse came back into view suddenly and it shocked his system, his body arched up yet still hunched over to look into the window. She pulled a cart with a clear dome over the top of it. Another nurse behind her walked along side. She also waved out the window, dressed the same. They all wore protective gear. Satoru felt like he should be wearing a mask, or gloves, or something too even with all that separated them.
He watched the cart stop in front of the window view and he looked down into it.
He finally saw.
The small tubes coming out of her nose was what he noticed first.
He looked at her, and he took her in.
He saw all of her, everything she could or would be. Anything she could be.
Her nose and lips, they belonged to her other father. The way she wrinkled her eyebrows and her hands came up to try and bat everything away from her face. Her legs curled, and he could see she was crying out. It was all him.
She was shushed gently, Satoru saw it all.
He wouldn’t think she was his except he could see hair peeking out from underneath the yellow hat on her head. It was white as snow, and it was him. She was him, too.
The curse that had ripped him apart just a few minutes prior had started slowly sewing him back up, one stitch at a time. The bile and the guilt was swallowed, settling deep down from the hole it came from. From the tips of his toes, he’d felt the warmth slowly embrace him. He could touch the idea that the unknown wasn’t all that bad. He thought about all the unknown he faces everyday with work.
He also thought about the good unknown. The joy, the giddy excitement that came with anticipation of what is to come. Satoru didn’t really get to enjoy anticipation, but he could understand why somebody would let themself fall into that feeling. The way their chest would flutter, and limbs would tingle.
He looked over her again. Her little body curled up only for the nurse to stretch her out a bit as they checked something. The nurse stepped away again, and her little arms raised above her head before she hit herself in the eye and cried out.
Satoru chuckled. She was him, and she was her other father, and she was the both of them together in something unknown. Something wrapped together and stitched with the thread of their genes, and their curses, and their energy, and all of their existence into the fabric of another human.
Was she truly human?
Satoru wasn’t sure. Neither of them knew what she was. What she would be. When Suguru was pregnant with her, she acted like an other human child. But she was encased, safe, within the womb. And then, she was free. And they were no longer safe from her.
In that moment though, Satoru rubbed his finger tips over his chin and moved them up over his lips. They smiled a little bit watching her wiggle around. She fought like hell to get away from hands, and the machines she sadly had to be connected to. She was in the NICU, after all. She had come out small, and a bit sick, and her entrance into this world was traumatic and the first in a long list of curses she would bring upon her parents.
Until the end, though, Satoru thought. She was them and they, her.
Satoru looked up to his left when he heard the click of a door.
“Mr. Gojo?” A nurse asked him from behind her mask. She’d taken off her blue gloves.
“Yes,” he nodded once.
“You are free to come in, we’ve got her settled now,” the nurse said to him. “She is doing better now we’ve got her in her breathing treatment.”
“Perfect,” he said before taking steps closer to the door the nurse had come out of. She turned and lead him back into the door, the door clicking closed behind them.