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Gojou blinks and turns for a second to look at the face as it passes him by, before automatically dismissing it. Then his brain catches up and he does a double take, turning around completely.
“Wait, wait, hold on,” he says, weaving quickly through the crowd to catch up and grab their shoulder. He turns them around.
It’s Getou’s face.
Gojou stands rooted to the spot staring as something too powerful to name sweeps through him. Everything feels so surreal, too bright and twisting around him, it’s almost as if he’s drunk. He can feel his heart pounding in his ears, his breath. It looks just like Getou standing there, as if he never left. Only the telltale scars stand out on the forehead, down the arms, but it’s Getou’s face, Getou’s-
The unknown person in Getou’s body gives him a confused but polite smile, having already stepped away from his hand on their shoulder. “Yes? Can I help you?” The person then takes a closer look at Gojou’s face and blinks. “Ah- are you Gojou Satoru?”
It breaks him out of the moment, a reminder to school himself.
Gojou steps back and takes in a breath, taking a second to get composed. The sunglasses he normally wears to stay a bit under the radar are in his hand; he doesn’t know when he took them off. He’s still on a public street, and this is a stranger.
“Yes, I am,” he says after a moment. “Sorry about that. I just- knew the person who was in your body before.”
The person nods. “Of course. Now that I think about it, the two of you were friends, right?”
It’s hard for Gojou to keep looking at them and just as hard for him to look away. Every time he looks too closely it feels like a bucket of ice water inside him, and yet at the same time he’s feels like he’s drinking it in. He shakes his head and tries to focus on the conversation.
“Yeah…we were close.” Gojou finally looks away. “I didn’t realize Getou had put his body up for reuse. But knowing him, it makes sense, huh?” He chuckles weakly.
The person laughs. “I suppose that’s true.” They shift the cane they’re holding to their off hand to hold out their hand. “I’m Kenjaku.”
Gojou hesitates for a second, looking at the hand. He can’t see it but there’s a freckle he knows is by the wrist. He takes a breath and then forces himself to reach out and shake it.
It feels familiar and yet wrong. It’s warm. He shakes it just a moment too long and then drops his hand. Kenjaku must note his oddness, but he doesn’t say anything.
“What do you go by?”
Kenjaku smiles. “I’m a he.”
“Right.” Gojou nods. “Don’t want to assume with a transferee.”
“Oh, of course,” Kenjaku says. “I’ve been through a few bodies in my time.”
They’re still standing on the sidewalk, the crowd parting to flow through the narrow spaces around them. The morning sunlight reflecting off the buildings still feels just a bit too bright.
“Well,” Gojou says, swallowing. He feels his throat constricting but pushes the words out. “Sorry to bother you. Bet you’re just going about your business. I’ll be on my way.”
“No, it’s alright,” Kenjaku says gently. He tips his head slightly, looking at him. “I’ve never met someone who knew the previous occupant of my body, so I don’t mind talking. I imagine this must be hard for you, considering everything that happened with Getou.”
“Right.” Gojou rubs at his eyes. “Right, yeah.”
“Would you like to go somewhere else to talk?” Kenjaku asks.
There are reasons he should protest in Gojou’s mind, but they die in his mouth. In the end he can’t refuse.
“That’d be good.”
They end up at a small cafe down an alleyway off of the busy street. Kenjaku seems to know the owner; she nods at him when she sees him and takes them to an out of the way booth in the back.
After they’ve sat down and the owner has bustled away, Gojou blurts out the question that’s been rising in his mind as they walked here, now that the shock has started to wear off.
“Why did you choose Getou’s body? Most people wouldn’t want to reuse from…someone like him.”
Kenjaku pauses in where he’s setting down his cane next to the table. “Someone so infamous, you mean?”
Gojou chews at his lip. “Sure.”
“Just for that reason.” Kenjaku folds his hands on the table. “I thought that people would probably avoid transferring into his body because they didn’t want to be associated with as…violent of a figure as he was. I didn’t want it to go to waste, especially seeing as there aren’t enough as it is.”
“I see. That’s noble of you,” Gojou says after a moment. Getou would appreciate that, he thinks but doesn’t say, and pushes the thought down.
Kenjaku’s mannerisms- the way he sits, the way he talks- are different enough from Getou’s that Gojou is starting to calm down again, his heart rate slowing from where it was ever since he saw Kenjaku on the street. Somehow it both feels better to visibly see he isn’t Getou and at the same time it feels like something fundamentally wrong to see. The contradictions twist in his gut. Gojou suddenly regrets the coffee he ordered.
And then sometimes- sometimes Kenjaku turns his head and the light streaming in from the window catches his eyes just right, like a peaceful scene, and deja vu hits Gojou hard enough to stop him breathing for a second. And he knows it’s Kenjaku underneath, that a million things about it aren’t quite right, but for a second it’s like Getou looking at him the way Getou used to look at him, before everything.
“One caramel macchiato and one espresso,” the owner says brightly, reappearing. Gojou suppresses a jump. He taps his finger on the table as she sets down the two cups and leaves.
“I can’t say I don’t get reactions from people when they recognize my appearance. But the people I know are understanding,” Kenjaku continues after she’s gone.
Kenjaku carefully wraps his hand around his espresso cup and lifts it to his mouth, only shaking a bit. Gojou automatically follows suit; it’s his usual order, but it’s tasteless in his mouth. He barely notices it go down.
“In fact, I’ve long been curious about the prospect of meeting someone who knew the previous owner of a body I was in, but it’s never happened before. So I’m glad to have had the opportunity to meet you,” Kenjaku says.
Gojou frowns slightly. He doesn’t know what to say to that. “I suppose I agree.”
“I won’t claim to know what you’re feeling. I’m sure it’s hard to meet me, especially with the loss so recent,” Kenjaku says gently.
Gojou sighs. He suddenly feels tired. “Yeah. It’s a hard time for everyone.”
“I imagine. You have my condolences, both you and all the other people who knew Getou or his victims.”
Gojou’s hand tightens around his cup. “Right.”
Gojou changes the subject. “Well, you seem to be doing pretty well too considering it’s only been two months since transferring,” he says. “You don’t usually see people up and about this early.”
Kenjaku laughs slightly. “Of course, I forgot this would be your area of expertise.”
Gojou just shrugs.
Kenjaku nods at the cane next to their table. “I’m well enough now to start returning to my daily routine, just with some support. Perhaps it’s because I’ve gone through the process before, I recover quicker than average now.”
“That’s lucky,” Gojou says.
They stay like that for a bit, making absent conversation. Gojou’s coffee grows cold where it sits in front of him, untouched. He knows staying here talking to Kenjaku is futile, bordering on creepy. There’s no point to it and he can just hear Shouko telling him it’ll only make things worse and to stop bothering this guy. But then again, Kenjaku doesn’t seem like that normal of a guy either.
“Are you working right now?” Kenjaku asks later on.
Gojou exhales and sits back in his seat. “Yeah, I’m working on a couple projects. Transferral rates are at an all time high, so it’s busy right now.”
Kenjaku tips his head. “You wouldn’t be faulted for taking a break right now, you know.”
Gojou waves him off. “It’s fine. I have ongoing projects to finish. The company doesn’t do well without me, anyway.”
“Without the famous Gojou Satoru, I suppose,” Kenjaku returns. “It seems people are always waiting for some new invention from you.”
“Right, yeah.” Gojou rubs at the back of his neck. “I was about to announce something right before everything happened with Getou, actually. It’s just been delayed with everything since then.”
“That’s understandable,” Kenjaku says. “I was surprised to see you today, actually. Nobody’s seen much of you since everything with Getou.”
“Yeah. Hard to focus after that,” Gojou says. He stares out the window, at the shadows that are starting to slant as the day gets later. People rush by on the street outside, mouthing words he can’t hear.
“It’s just- I thought I knew him, you know? And then I guess I didn’t,” Gojou says suddenly. He doesn’t know why he’s telling Kenjaku this. “I guess nobody did. But I thought out of everybody, he could at least tell me things. But…” He trails off.
Kenjaku just nods. “You were close? I know you were friends.”
“Yeah,” Gojou says. And actually- he never told this to many people, but fuck it, who’s he going to tell now? What does it matter?
“We were dating, actually,” Gojou says. “For two years.”
Kenjaku’s eyebrows lift in surprise for a moment and then he covers it. “I see. I wasn’t aware of that.”
“Yeah. He wanted to keep it private. I’m used to the public attention, but he wasn’t.”
Kenjaku looks at him. “Well, I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks.” Gojou blows out a breath.
They keep talking about meaningless things. Finally, as the light grows redder outside, Gojou decides this has gone long enough.
“Well, thank you for talking to me,” he says, standing up. He picks up his still heavy coffee cup and turns to throw it away.
“Of course. I enjoyed it as well. You’re different than how you seem in the press.” Something in the tone of Kenjaku’s voice catches Gojou’s attention and he turns back. “In fact, I’d like to give you my number if I could,” Kenjaku says, holding out a card.
Gojou stares at him and catches the implication in the way Kenjaku is looking at him immediately. He feels two things.
First is the realization that no matter how creepy he’s being, Kenjaku is just as creepy, if not more so. It fills him with disgust.
But the second is that as he stares at Kenjaku, he can feel seeing Getou’s face and voice look at him like that again fuck with something deep inside his head. He hates it.
Gojou silently takes the card and shoves it inside his coat pocket, walking away without another word.
He’ll throw it away as soon as he gets the chance.
By the time Gojou walks back through the doors of Limitless, it’s already dark. Shouko just nods at him when he passes her desk to get to the lab; the others are used to him working at all hours of the day at this point.
Gojou doesn’t bother to turn on the lights for the time being, navigating the lab by the city light spilling from the window. He sits down at a workbench, picks up a piece of machinery and fiddles with it without really seeing it.
Limitless is doing fine. Transferral rates are up, so business is good. The execs still manage to be on his ass during a time like this, but they always are so it doesn’t matter. Not like his family’s company would be doing as well as they are right now if not for him anyway.
Gojou leans back and stares at the ceiling. Thirty years ago, back when Limitless was founded, death was still permanent. Then some hotshot figured out how to transfer a dead person’s nervous system from a body that didn’t work to one that did, and now here they all are. Gojou the prodigy face of the company because he wasn’t a total idiot at building machines. Transferral rates up. Business good.
They’re up because more and more people are dying. Can’t you acknowledge that? Just look at me.
Gojou brushes the memory aside. He just needs to keep working.
He’s got a few projects in the pipeline. A new anticoagulant to help bring reused bodies back up to speed after taking them out of cold storage. The finished project. He moves past that one.
His mind drifts to Kenjaku again. He’d seemed well off; if he’d recovered enough to be going about his daily life two months after transferral surgery, even with some lingering weakness, he must have been at a good hospital. Gojou wonders vaguely why he’d chosen to get a reused body instead of having a replica of his old body grown for him. He seemed like he’d have the money for it. Maybe he just had some kind of obsession.
Gojou closes his eyes. He shouldn’t be thinking about this again.
He just can’t get the image out of his head. Getou’s face with the telltale neural transfer scars- across the forehead, down the spine and limbs. It feels wrong, like pasting over an image that doesn’t fit. It doesn’t match what he remembers of Getou- what he wants to remember, anyway.
He’s sure that what other people remember of Getou is different.
He told Kenjaku that he didn’t see what happened with Getou coming, but maybe he should have. He remembers the long months this past year, as it felt like Getou started to slowly feel more and more distant.
Gojou never really understood Getou’s world, from the start. He grew up in the upper echelons of the city, used to people who transferred just to get out of disabilities and illnesses because they could afford to, who could pay for custom replica bodies to keep the same appearance. He met Getou right when he’d clawed his way up from the bad area of the city he’d come from to become a surgeon.
Getou didn’t really talk about his life before that all that much. He probably felt like Gojou wouldn’t fully understand; and honestly, he was probably right. But he let things drop from time to time. Talking about the rare bodies that died in good enough condition to reuse that had to be fought over by the majority who couldn’t pay for a replica, of people held dead in cryostasis for years on body waiting lists. How he’d had family members transfer into bodies with painful disabilities just to avoid death because it was all they could afford, at the same time that his new clients in the upper crust of the city were transferring out of bodies in the same condition.
Over time, the way he spoke started to become colored with anger. Gojou could see Getou slowly start to separate from him, a distance widening.
But he guesses he still didn’t see enough. Because somehow between one day and the next, everything changed. The Getou he knew left and a different one came back.
That Getou killed tens of people from the richest families in the city in the weeks before the police found him. And then just like that, he was gone.
Gojou stares at the ceiling and feels like the weight of the air around him is enough to crush him.
He takes a heavy breath in and out as he pushes his hands into his pockets absently and startles when he touches something. He pulls it out and sees Kenjaku’s card, by now crumpled. He forgot to throw it away earlier.
Kenjaku is a creep. But right now, he just needs to forget. He needs a Getou who doesn’t remind him of everything Getou’s been.
He flips the card in his hand to show the phone number.
Kenjaku doesn’t seem surprised to see Gojou, somehow.
Gojou doesn’t waste any time on it. He knows it’s not Getou. He knows it’s not. But it doesn’t matter. He tries to focus on that, sink into the idea of it.
But even when he tries, it doesn’t work. It’s burrowing up from underneath the whole time. Finally, he leaves.
He stumbles back into his apartment, already late into the night. He hunches over the kitchen counter and pours himself a drink, tossing it back in a second. It feels like there’s a buzzing filling his head, stuffed with insects.
I’m sorry. You have to understand.
“Shut up,” he mumbles. He pours himself another drink and sits down at the table with it in his hand, but he just stares into it.
Maybe Getou was always angry, he just didn’t know how to see it. Gojou never really understood the world he came from. The world he couldn’t be happy in, the world that was twisted enough by injustice that the only thing Getou could do was burn it all down. It didn’t matter who they were. Everyone was complicit and he had to rip it all out by the roots. When it came to the people at the top of the system, there-
-can’t be any exceptions if I’m going to do this.
Gojou stares at the air bubbles slowly moving inside his drink. The apartment, half dark, feels empty and silent and so, so big.
Kenjaku had talked about Getou’s victims. Ha, right.
After he made the decision, Getou came for Gojou first. In the way he walked through the door, the way he looked at him, Gojou already knew something was different.
“There can’t be any exceptions,” Getou said, and ripped out his life.
Didn’t quite finish the job. The guards got to him in time and Gojou was able to flee to another body, a replica grown just for him. Using the new method he’d designed right before- a new way, of growing the body around the old nervous system so that it was perfect with no scars. He never thought he’d be the first recipient.
Gojou holds up his arm in the half light, looking at the smooth skin. Guess he really is a genius.
By the time he woke up, everything was already over. And now Getou is dead. For some measure of dead when his image is still walking the streets. And Gojou is alive. For some measure of alive in this new body he haunts.
Gojou rubs at his eyes, and after a moment he downs the drink. He pushes his chair back and stands up, leaving the glass there.
Before he leaves the kitchen, he finally remembers to take Kenjaku’s card out of his jacket pocket where it’s still been. He crumples it in his hand and throws it away.
Some things aren’t as fixable as death.