Chapter 2:
The walk from the checkpoint to the center of Shibuya took eleven minutes.
Ren counted. He always counted things when he was nervous, because counting gave his brain something to do that wasn't panic.
Eleven minutes. Roughly eight hundred meters through rubble and fog and the particular silence of a place where a lot of people had died badly. His Last Rites technique was humming the whole way not activating, just aware. Like it could feel the imprints in the ground beneath his feet and was politely informing him they were there.
He already knew they were there. Shibuya was basically one giant death-imprint at this point.
He kept walking.
The figure came into view slowly through the fog. First just a shape â€" tall, dark coat, completely still. Then more detail. Hands in pockets. Head tilted slightly upward, like he was looking at something only he could see.
Ren stopped about thirty meters away.
The figure didn't turn around.
"You've been standing there for like twenty seconds," the figure said. Conversational. Unbothered. The exact tone of someone who had been waiting for a bus and it had finally shown up. "It's kind of awkward."
Ren's jaw tightened. "Gojo Satoru."
"In the flesh." He still hadn't turned around. "Mostly."
"Mostly."
"It's a figure of speech."
"It's a weird thing to say when you're supposed to be dead."
That made him turn around.
Ren had seen photographs â€" old ones, from before the Incident, from Jujutsu Tech records that had survived mostly by accident. He'd known what to expect. Tall, white hair, the blindfold. The kind of person who looked like they'd been designed specifically to be the most striking thing in any room.
None of that had prepared him for the actual presence. The cursed energy coming off Gojo Satoru was â€" it wasn't like anything Ren had felt before. Most sorcerers had energy that felt like a fire. Different sizes, different intensities, but fundamentally the same thing. This was something else entirely. It was like standing next to a star and trying to compare it to a candle.
Gojo smiled. It was an easy smile, like everything was slightly funny to him.
"So," he said. "You're the one who talks to dead people."
"I don't talk to them. I feel what they felt."
"Right, right." He waved a hand. "Last Rites. I know."
Ren went still. "How do you know what my technique is called?"
"I've been in Shibuya for two days." Gojo tilted his head. "I had time to do research."
"There's no internet in Shibuya."
"There's also no electricity and no running water, and yet here we both are." He said it like it was charming. "I'm resourceful."
Ren stared at him. Fourteen months of surviving in a broken world had given him a very good instinct for threats, and every single one of those instincts was screaming right now â€" not the danger kind of screaming, which he was used to, but a different kind. The kind that said: this person is going to make your life significantly more complicated.
"Where were you?" Ren asked. "After Shibuya. After â€" everyone said you were dead."
Gojo's smile didn't change, exactly. But something behind it did.
"Somewhere between," he said.
"That's not an answer."
"No," he agreed, "it's not."
â"â"â"â"â"â"â"â"â"â"â"â"â"â"â"â"â"â"â"â"â"
They stood in silence for a moment. The fog moved around them. Somewhere in the distance, something made a sound that Ren didn't want to think about.
"Higuruma sent you," Gojo said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes."
"Because of the signal."
"Yes."
"And he wants to know if I'm a threat."
"He wants to know what you are," Ren said. "Whether you're a threat is sort of implied."
Gojo laughed. It was a genuine laugh â€" surprised out of him, like Ren had said something actually funny instead of slightly hostile. "I like you," he said. "You don't do the thing where people are scared of me and try to hide it."
"I'm not scared of you."
"You're a little scared of me."
"I'm cautious of you. There's a difference."
"Sure there is."
Ren opened his mouth to say something else â€" he wasn't sure what, probably something he'd regret â€" when his technique spiked.
Not the low background hum of old death-imprints. Something fresh. Something close.
He moved without thinking, hand going to the short blade at his hip, cursed energy flooding into it from his reserves. The boy from Route 6. Sharp, clean fear â€" good fuel for a fast strike.
The Cursed Spirit came from the left. Big one. Grade 2 at least, maybe higher â€" Ren had gotten good at estimating quickly. It had too many arms and moved wrong, the way they all moved wrong, like something that had learned locomotion from a description instead of experience.
He was already calculating angles, exit routes, how much energy he had, how much damage he could take, when â€"
It stopped.
Not slowed. Not reacted. Stopped â€" mid-lunge, all those wrong-moving arms just frozen â€" like someone had pressed pause on it.
Ren looked at Gojo.
Gojo had one hand raised, index finger extended, expression bored.
"You were going to handle it," he said. "I could tell. Sorry for interrupting."
The Cursed Spirit â€" still frozen, still suspended in mid-air â€" began, slowly, to come apart. Not violently. It just... dissolved. Like it had decided existing was more effort than it was worth.
"What did you do?" Ren asked.
"Infinity." Gojo lowered his hand. "I just â€" redirected it a little. Internally." He glanced at where the Spirit had been. "It's hard to explain."
Ren thought about what Infinity meant. What it actually meant â€" a technique that placed an infinite series of subdivisions between Gojo and anything that came at him. He'd read about it. He hadn't fully believed it until right now.
"You didn't even look at it," Ren said.
"I didn't need to."
"You felt it coming?"
"I feel everything coming." He said it simply, like it was nothing. "All the time. Everything moving toward me, everything moving away. It's â€"" He paused. Just briefly. "It's very loud, sometimes."
Something in Ren shifted. Just slightly.
He knew about techniques that cost you something. He knew about carrying things that didn't have an off switch. He wasn't going to make assumptions â€" he didn't know this man, didn't trust this man â€" but he recognized that particular kind of tired. The kind that had nothing to do with sleep.
"We should move," Ren said. "Where there's one there's usually more."
"Agreed." Gojo fell into step beside him like they'd been walking together for years. Like this was normal. Like none of this was deeply, fundamentally strange.
They walked in silence for about two minutes.
Then Gojo said, casually, like it was nothing: "I wasn't waiting for Sector 4 to find me, you know."
Ren kept walking. "I know."
"I was waiting for you specifically."
"I figured."
"You figured."
"You said my technique's name. You'd done research specifically on me." Ren didn't look at him. "So yeah. I figured."
Another silence.
"You're not going to ask why?" Gojo said.
"I'm going to ask why," Ren said. "I'm just waiting until we're somewhere that isn't about to be swarmed by Cursed Spirits."
Gojo smiled again. Ren could hear it in his voice even without looking.
"Fair enough," he said.
They kept walking. The fog closed in behind them. Somewhere back in the ruins of Shibuya, the last traces of the Cursed Spirit finished dissolving, and the district went quiet again â€" the specific quiet of a place with too much history and not enough living left in it.
Ren's technique hummed. The dead, everywhere, just beneath the surface.
And next to him, close enough to touch, walked someone who should have been one of them.
A/N (Author's Note):
Okay so Gojo is HERE and I am not okay about it either
If you made it to the end thank you so much, genuinely. This story means a lot to me and knowing someone actually read it makes the whole thing worth it.
If you're enjoying Last Rites so far, a kudos or a comment would honestly make my entire week. Even just "I liked this" â€" I read every single one.
See you in Chapter Three.