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There’s a forgotten phone sitting on the table — it has been there for a while. It’s an iPhone X, judging by the looks of it, the phone case is black and the edges of the screen protector are slightly chipped away, but even so the thing looks pristine, almost as if out of the store weren’t it for the layer of dust coating it.
Nobody has really touched the phone, not that Yuuji remembers. The thing has been moving from place to place as if it didn’t have any particular owner, always appearing in random places as if several people had been trying to use it. Yuuji knows it must belong to someone, though, because he remembers seeing it before.
Before Shibuya, before Shinjuku, before the merger. His mind supplies him with the remnants of a memory, of calloused fingers tapping the screen with nimble movements, hands bigger than his own.
(“ Sensei, we don’t need you to take this many pictures of us.”
“You kids will regret not having many memories to choose from, though. Megumi, scoot closer, you’re out of frame! ”)
He shakes the memory away, wonders if it’s that same phone. He remembers the flash, the model-like pose Nobara was trying to pull off, the awkward stance Megumi was helpless in, his own cheeks hurting from smiling a little too long —a feeling he misses, he misses so very deeply—, and Gojo’s attentive gaze even underneath the blindfold taking the picture for the three of them.
He never asked to be included, not really. Yuuji remembers asking him to hop in frame whenever they took a selfie, not only out of consideration, he wanted to include him. It didn’t really feel important then, Gojo’s fond grin and his signature pose doing the ‘peace’ sign with his fingers. It surely feels important now, Yuuji thinks.
Someone must have retrieved the phone. Was it left behind in the first place, and if so, when? When did its rightful owner let go of it, only to never touch it again?
It’s been days since Shinjuku, almost three whole weeks. Grief is still dragging down his shoulders despite the victories, the reencounters, the passage of time that is always so unforgiving and cruel. Yuuji is not lonely, not anymore, and he sure as hell is no longer fighting. His friends are back with him — but there are still too much people missing, people he never wanted to lose.
Yuuji takes the abandoned phone on his hands. It’s cold as the dead and it sends a shiver down his spine. Gone freezing from disuse. The screen lights up only to signal that there is a 2% of battery left, and for some reason he hates that. He hates that the phone has been unused and uncharged for long enough that it’s almost going to surrender to oblivion as well. His knuckles tighten around the device tightly, but discouraged enough that the thing never breaks.
It takes an insurmountable amount of willpower to let go of the thing, of one of the few things remaining of the man who gave him a chance at life, of the phantom warmth of a buzzing screen that must hold so many memories. A mere object that screams: yes, this person lived, they are trascendental in whatever little ways they can be.
But Yuuji adds his own grain of salt, puts his name on the list of people who might have taken the phone for however briefly over the course of the last few weeks, and looks for a compatible charger in the school’s break room. The screen lights up almost in contentment when he plugs the thing in, the battery the only thing surviving the massacre, and Yuuji leaves the room.
The bitter taste of memories and mourning makes his throat feel tight as he exists the room.
Nobara has been confined to the bed for months now, and as much as she didn’t mind waltzing around the school campus, now it’s the thing she looks forward to most. Ever since things calmed down she has never felt lonely, not really, with her friends always keeping her company throughout her healing process and accompanying her on frequent walks.
As she plops down on the bed, even though she has no one around her, she decides that things may finally start to look up after all. Normality finally setting in, a bright future waiting around the corner. There’s sunlight coming from the window to her room, bleeding through the curtains and providing an amicable but never-invasive warmth.
She takes a few minutes of her day to scroll down on Instagram, like she’s used to do. Lately, posts revolve around news as to how Tokyo is being rebuilt, or how the country is doing after the disaster. He scrolls them faster, not wanting to relieve anything of the sort. If she scrolls further down, old posts of people she follows start popping up, and those usually give her more peace of mind.
Usually.
For amidst the outfit inspirations, lovely scenery and an occasional meme on what once was a hot topic — there’s that account. She started following it in late August, kinda as a joke. It’s always fun to look up your teachers on social media and see what they are up to. Gojo didn’t have many followers nor any picture of himself up — it was just sweets.
(“ You seriously have an account just to take pictures of your food,” she had asked him with judgement present in her stare.
The man had laughed, airy and yet loud.
“I don’t want to clog my camera roll, alright? So I post those there. Secret’s out.” )
She never unfollowed him. It was almost like an inside joke, a secret between just the two of them. He never followed her back, and told her it was because it was probably embarrassing for her to have her teacher following her. He was right, at the time, it was. She regrets that now, if only a little.
Now, she stares at the picture of a soft-served ice cream on her feed. There’s never a caption on the posts, but she remembers his bright smile when he took that exact picture, and the knowing smirk he sent just at her, letting her know where that picture was going.
How many pictures of sweets lay abandoned in his camera roll, how many did he never manage to post?
None of the adults take them out for sweets or food anymore. Not many did, back then, mostly Gojo. He said it was a reward for a job well done after a mission, but he did it even when they struggled, or simply when they asked for it. No complaints whatsoever, though everyone was aware he was the one who liked to indulge in those habits the most.
She thinks it was nice, being a part of someone’s quirky habits like that. She wonders if when he posted that picture he thought of them, too. Did he know she would see it, at some point? Did he ever tell Megumi or Yuuji their little secret?
Nobara guesses there’s no use in wondering about that stuff, because suddenly her chest feels awfully tight, but she still clicks on the username to check the account. She remembers most pics, some she has never seen nor was she there to witness. Nobara wonders when they were taken, what mission preceded them, were they sugary enough or just aesthetically pretty?
The last post dates of only about a month ago, and a shiver runs down her spine when she sees it. It’s a piece of strawberry shortcake, with two long since blown out candles spelling out ‘29’. In the background she distinguishes Ijichi’s hands and Shoko’s frame. The lightning is dim.
Nobara stares at it for a solid minute. The caption is an emoji with a party hat and distantly, she wonders if as he typed that he thought that could be the last birthday he could ever celebrate. She had yet to wake up from his comatose state by then, but she was told he came to visit during that month every now and then.
In another world maybe she could have replied to that post with a birthday wish, but alas, as her fingers shake over the screen of her phone she realizes that there’s no use in doing so anymore. What good is a comment if there is no one there to read it?
Nobara likes the post, anyway, and logs out for the day. Maybe another walk outside will do her good.
Megumi has gotten clumsier lately, easily distracted. He notices when he starts to zone out mid-conversation with Yuuta-senpai, his body half-leaning on the table as he listens to him tell an anecdote of his time in Africa. He appreciates it, of course he does, because he respects him, but after everything he’s witnessed in the span of a few weeks, his brain is still struggling to catch up with everything.
He takes the cup of tea in his hands, it’s still pleasantly warm. It’s the kind of tea Tsumiki used to prepare for him, ginger and honey, and he’s trying very hard not to think about how now he’s the one to prepare his own tea, stripped of the care of his older sister. His hands shake.
To be fair, he doesn’t know if it’s out of hurt or just an after-effect of the fight in Shinjuku. Lately, he cannot distinguish grief from his physical sequels and he’s not eager to find out where they bleed into one another. What he does know is that it always spurs that kind of reaction in people like Yuuta-senpai.
“Here, Fushiguro, I’ll help—“ he tries, standing up to aid him in a task as simple as drinking some tea.
Megumi doesn’t like being coddled, so he quickly retracts his hand holding the mug as if it burnt, defensive — the liquid spills all over the table, soaks a few papers that nobody cares about, and soaks up a very familiar phone. Megumi gulps. Who the Hell left it there?
Seizing the momentum, Megumi lets go of the cup and takes the damaged phone in his hands. He pats it dry with his shirt, a stupid effort, and hopes to everything above he hasn’t just damaged the only thing he has left of him .
Fortunately, the screen lights up when he brushes his fingers against it. It’s almost fully charged, because someone else is dead set on keeping the phone running even though nobody is really gonna use it, nobody can. He stares at his reflection on the default-set wallpaper as he wipes away drops of tea from the device.
It’s only then that, for some reason, the phone is unblocked. Megumi stares at the home-screen almost in shock, not really sure of what has just happened. He hasn’t been asked the password nor would he have a decent guess as to what it is, but—
“You must have triggered the Face ID,” Yuuta-senpai supplies by his side.
His eyes are sparkling with a mix of joy and nostalgia that gives him this air of melancholy Megumi doesn’t want to think about. Apparently, Gojo set up the Face ID for him, and he now remembers the scene he had never paid attention to.
(“Just in case,” Gojo had said, shoving the phone before his face. “There we go.”
“Idiot, don’t just go doing that.”
“It’s just so someone can unlock my phone, Megumi. It doesn’t detect me with the blindfold on…”
Megumi rolled his eyes. “Who would have guessed?”)
“Are you okay, Fushiguro?”
No. Not really, and for a variety of reasons, but he doesn’t say that out loud. He only gives a curt nod in response, hoping it will suffice, and keeps his gaze plastered on the phone.
It almost feels wrong to invade on someone’s privacy like this, never mind that Gojo once trusted him with it. Megumi stares at the Digimon-themed wallpaper and realizes his fingers are frozen, he couldn’t tap on any of the apps even if he tried to. Maybe it’s because he knows exactly what he would find.
Maybe it’s because he knows how many pictures he took of his students and that must be there on his camera roll, alongside a myriad of retrieved pictures of him and Tsumiki from years ago that Megumi is still not ready to see. Maybe it’s because he knows the last texts he would have sent Ijichi, something clearly inconsequential like picking him up after a mission, but that now feels odd and unsettling. Maybe it’s because, after so many years, he knows the man enough not to need the phone to remember him.
But he wants to keep it, he wants to keep the phone of the man to whom he owned his life, the man whose life he took away. He wants to keep it as remembrance that what others tell him it’s true: he’s not to blame, Gojo knew what he was getting into, he was not the one that killed him.
Still, he is the one left to mourn his absence.
“Are you gonna look into it?” his upperclassman asks by his side, voice soft and patient as it usually is, but it breaks at the very end.
He thinks Yuuta must miss the man, too.
Megumi wants to say many things then, fluttering his eyelashes when he feels the pressure inside his chest become overwhelming. He wants to say he’s sorry for being so ungrateful back then, for not appreciating him enough, for never unlocking his phone for him and seize the fact that he was trusted by the only person who bet on him since the very beginning.
But it hurts to do so, and this he knows it’s grief, a feeling not exclusive just to him. Megumi simply shakes his head.
“I’m just glad the phone is fine,” he says, in lieu of a response, and sets him down on the dry end of the table, carefully. “I’ll clean this up now.”
“Oh. Let me help you with it.”
Shoko doesn’t know the password.
This is something that she has been thinking about since Shinjuku, since her closest friend placed the phone in her hand and told her to “please hold on to it for me” before marching into battle. Before he smiled at her and his students with the most genuine smile she had seen of him in years, eyes sparkling with mirth, and turned his back to them all.
The next time she saw him, his intestines pooled over the stretcher at the morgue. The last time she saw him, was when his body was disposed of. Nothing more, nothing else.
Shoko has never been one to hold onto the dead, not in her line of work. But something about completely letting go of Gojo felt incredibly wrong — because everyone had left, Suguru had, Nanami had at some point. But Gojo had always been around, and now his absence felt like relearning how to breathe.
The phone was now almost a piece of a memorial, some kind of hand-me-down that belonged to no one in particular. Everyone took care of the phone in their own ways, but nobody ever used it, they simply move it around from room to room, leave it up for charging, and keep it going in whatever way possible.
Perhaps, that way, it’s almost as if Gojo was still around — just forgetting his phone in the oddest of places after a day of use.
Shoko knows that’s not the case, though. She cannot handle impermanence. It is when every student has gotten their hands on the device for the time being that she takes it with her, remembering how he last held it out for her to take, and tries to figure out the password. She knows Gojo wouldn’t be mad about it, because she and Geto used to snoop around his room all the time, and she knows his office at the school like the back of her hand after so many years.
Because she knew him, right? She was there. And even though she could easily ask Ijichi to somehow unlock the damn phone, she wants to prove to herself that she knew the man she considered her closest friend, and so she tries.
She tries his birthday, she tries Suguru’s birthday, the date of their graduation, the date of Suguru’s death anniversary. She remembers the exact date he told her he wanted to become a teacher, and the first day they both started officially working at the school, two young kins who could barely be considered adults trying to make something, anything.
A groan leaves her mouth yet another night. She’s sitting at her usual drinking spot and, to be fair, she’s been alone here before. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t think of Gojo whenever her eyes dart to the ‘kinds menu’ section of the menu.
(“ A melon soda for the lightweight, boss.”
“You treat me like a kid, Shoko.”
“Well, you’re just a big kid, aren’t you?”)
He was. They both were, whether they joked about it or not. Shoko never thought she would get older without Satoru following suit, exactly one month later, yet here she is, counting the days in which she’s alone because her loyal companion is gone for good. Oh, how ironic.
The bar is very empty tonight. It would be the kind of night where she would drag Satoru into every drinking spot despite his complains. She used to call him boring, because he never got drunk, he was a non-alcoholic — still, now she misses his wacky yet interesting conversation topics, the way he could make fluid any conversation about anything, lighthearted as if nothing was ever important.
Maybe Shoko should have listened more attentively. She should have nodded her head when he said that he didn’t like that new show on HBO, or refuted him when he wrongly corrected Ijichi on the name of a football player, or laughed at him when he said that his favorite holiday was something as bleak as February 15th.
Shoko hums to herself, takes a sip of her beer, and taps the numbers on the phone. Almost immediately, the device grants her permission to access anything she likes. And she does, because she can’t bear seeing this old phone being the only memory left of someone, not when it’s plagued by something more inside.
The last message sent to Yaga (“Maybe a field trip for the students around Christmas, I’ll think of something!”), the last jacket he ordered on Amazon (“Does this color look good, Shoko…? No, I’ll stick to black, it goes with everything.”) the last picture he took that Shoko cannot bear to see anymore.
His phone is ringing with messages warning that the number will soon go out of commission, that he has yet to renew his Spotify subscription, that there’s a new show on Netflix he might have liked but will never get to see.
Shoko ignores it as she scrolls down his camera roll. Pictures of his students, of random things he got at the store, of announcements of events that he wanted to go to but she knows damn well she didn’t attend either because he was too busy or worse yet, alone.
(“Gojo, I’m busy, stop pestering me.”)
A knot is pooling at the bottom of her stomach, and she knows it’s not the alcohol. She thinks of printing out some of the pictures, because his students may appreciate the things he did for them, and thinks it’s a shame that Satoru never asked to be included in the frame. She thinks they would like it better if he were there, but knows at the time that never seemed too important.
Just like she knows that old picture of Suguru lacked any importance before he left, but still can be found in Satoru’s camera roll over a decade later. Just like she sees her own young face immortalized in that screen, trying on those dark sunglasses that had always fascinated her.
Just like she sees herself, merely months ago, holding a beer in her hand with a small smile behind her cigarette. Satoru has his arm wrapped around her, his tall figure contrasting against her own, holding a can of coke. If she scrolls down a few pictures, whomever took the picture captured the exact moment when she blew out the smoke in his face and he grimaced in disgust, the disapproval present behind his opaque shades. Shoko can almost hear his voice right now, scolding her for smoking, telling her it’s gross and poisonous.
She laughs, and it almost sounds like a sob.
“Don’t worry, you idiot. I’ve finally quit.”
And if a single teardrop makes it onto the screen, Shoko pretends not to see it before shoving the thing in her pocket. She drinks in silence, and finds out that now she hates it.