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The first thought Geto Suguru has is: I’m alive. The second is: That’s not right.
And the third is not really a complete thought, but a drastic awareness of suffering. He doesn't think of pain, it becomes him. It envelops him as his lungs inflate with a rush of air, as his nerves fire off simultaneously, his limbs jerking as his body returns under his possession once more.
But something’s wrong.
He feels every single inch of skin on his body, uncomfortable and unable to move accurately, the fabric of his robes resting on his skin pounds heavier than they ever have been. For a moment, he wonders if he's underwater, if he's drowning with the way he can’t quite figure out how to breathe and the way his limbs are leaden. But the way his head feels like it's splitting like something is trying to force its way out of his orifices says otherwise.
He tries to move an arm to hold onto his head, but a surge of electrifying pain shoots up into his left shoulder and he loses his train of thought, interrupted by what he thinks is his hoarse voice groaning. He feels something on his face, and somehow, more panic creeps up his aching spine. He needs to see what it is, but his eyes aren't opening, he's trying but they’re not. He’s trying to remember how—
“Suguru.”
For a disorienting second, he thinks that he’s said his own name in his delirium, but no, that’s not his voice. No, that's—
“Suguru,” louder this time, and then again. “Suguru.”
He opens his eyes.
One twitches as liquid leaks into it, his vision partially stained vermillion.
The world is blinding, and Suguru has to strain his eyes to see, but slowly, it all comes into focus. Strangers are watching him, some with wide, disbelieving eyes and others with a more damning expression, but kneeling in front of him, both hands on Suguru’s face, is Gojo Satoru.
“It’s you,” he hears him say, quietly, softly, in an unusual way for Satoru.
It’s the last thing Suguru sees and hears before reality swirls to nothing.
The world comes back to him in two muddied voices speaking as a migraine claims the entire backside of his skull. When he opens his eyes, Suguru’s greeted by a sterile world, the opaque white plastic cover of the thin, tubular fluorescent light above him doing little to ease his nightmare of a headache.
“Fuck,” he groans, and the voices go silent.
He hears the clackclackclack of a heeled shoe near him and turns his face to see Ieiri Shoko by his bedside, a hand on his arm and the other touching his face. Her mouth is moving, but Suguru fails to make out the fuzzy words.
“I can’t,” he tries to say, his mouth parched. “I can’t understand you.”
Shoko nods and lifts the hand from his arm to cup his face with both hands. Something cumbersome unlatches itself in his chest as the nostalgic, cool sensation of her healing him washes over his senses, but he ushers it away as quickly as it appears. The world clears like he’s been pulled out from water, and instantly, he feels the ache of living. He squeezes his eyes shut, breathes in deeply, and counts to three.
When he looks again, Shoko is watching him with an impressively objective expression, and behind her, feet away is Satoru. He looks older in front of him, even though the last time Suguru had seen him had just been a year ago, though that’s not really true, not anymore.
It’s almost comedic how jarring the sight of him is, how Suguru is frankly staring though Shoko is still saying something to him. But as his throat burns with an anxious acidic slurry of something akin to relief and shame, he decides that no, it’s not funny.
It’s pathetic.
It’s pathetic because Satoru seems to share none of Suguru’s sentiments. His expression is blank. There isn’t a fragment of a reaction to Suguru.
Satoru just stares at him, and Suguru at him.
“I’m leaving,” he blurts when the silence is too much.
Shoko’s expression cracks, “What?”
He winces when he pushes himself up abruptly, looking around to see if he’s tethered to some sort of IV cart. He is, and he moves forward to pull out the PVC tubing in the crook of his right arm, but nothing happens.
Nothing reacts in his body, no limb moves.
Suguru looks away, to his left arm, and sees that it’s gone, his shoulder dressed in layers of white gauze.
“Lay back down, Suguru,” Satoru’s grave voice demands.
He doesn’t listen. He holds his arm up as close as he possibly can to his mouth to pull the needle out of his vein. Shoko steps back as he does, and Satoru’s already stepping forward in her place when Suguru swings his legs over the mattress to try and stand. Suguru shoves him away, pushing against his chest once Satoru’s close enough. Satoru stumbles backward, his back knocking into a medical tray cart. Something metallic clatters to the floor and something else shatters, and Shoko’s had enough.
“Are you two serious right now?” she spits, frigid.
Suguru doesn’t have anything to say. He just stares at her, hand clenched into a fist by his side. There’s blood dripping down his arm, and already, he can feel the slow pulse of a bruise coagulating where he tore the IV out.
“I’m not dealing with this right now,” Shoko continues, and when Satoru’s mouth opens to say something, god knows what, she turns her face towards him.
“Don’t. You two aren’t the only patients I have, and I would rather be attending someone else right now.”
“Just go, I can deal with him,” Satoru says, and Suguru grinds his teeth.
“The him in question is right here,” he says, and Satoru looks over at him, mouth tightened into a line.
“I know,” he says. “I said what I said.”
“You’re so—”
The door slams and Suguru closes his mouth. Freshly torn from the grave and Satoru is already assuming he has some type of rarity or special quality that marks the distance between them different than that between Suguru and Shoko. He hates it. He hates it because Satoru is arrogant and he hates it because Satoru is right.
“Why are you so angry?” he asks, and Suguru stops breathing altogether.
He leers up at him.
“Why am I what?”
Satoru’s mouth doesn’t bend. It doesn’t dip into a frown, doesn’t bow into a scowl.
“Why,” he repeats, “are you so angry? I should be angry.”
“You’re right, you should be.”
Satoru’s expression doesn’t falter, “What else do you want, Suguru? You’re alive.”
Suguru shakes his head, “That’s just it.”
Now, Satoru’s expression fractures, and Suguru pries into the breakage, digging his teeth in and tearing at the innards.
“What if I don’t want that, Satoru?” he mocks. “It’s not like I had a say in the matter.”
“You want to die?”
Suguru snorts, “Is there a difference between that and wishing I stayed dead?”
Satoru frowns, “That doesn’t—”
“You killed me. It was good. It was done, it made sense. Being dead made sense. But this, ” he grips onto the abrupt end of his shoulder, squeezing until it hurts. “This doesn’t make sense.”
Satoru doesn’t respond, and Suguru’s tongue swells with the disquiet that lingers between them, sopping it up to make room to speak again.
“I thought it was over,” he says, the words slow, revealing themselves to Suguru as he speaks them. “I didn’t want to do this again.”
“It’s not the same as before.”
He rolls his eyes, “Yeah, right. As if I won’t be executed again.”
“I don’t care,” Satoru contends. “I won’t do it.”
“They’d just get someone else.”
“I won’t let them.”
Suguru fails to find Satoru’s rapid-fire responses endearing. His impulsiveness grates against him until a lesion forms.
“You’re being absurd,” he responds, volume staggering into shouting. “You’re acting like a child.”
Something changes then in Satoru’s demeanor, a weight draping itself over his upright, rigid shoulders.
“That’s hilarious coming from you.”
“Satoru—”
“No,” he waves a hand, frustrated. “Shut up.”
Satoru inhales and exhales. Suguru’s gaze drops to his hands.
They’re shaking.
“You died,” Satoru says. “I killed you. You made me kill you."
His words are sturdy, but encumbered with wretched grief, swayed by indignation. Suguru is immobilized, a silent witness to the veracity that Satoru is sharing.
“And then your body was taken by an ancient asshole who puts me in a box while society goes to hell. My students got me out, we got him out of you, and you survived. And you still want to be dead, but I’m the absurd one?”
Suguru’s mind is blank.
“Screw you, Suguru. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to call me the child.”
Satoru’s waiting, he’s expectantly watching him, and when Suguru doesn’t deliver a response, he shakes his head.
“Figures. I’m getting Shoko back here to check on you.”
Suguru wishes he had the decency to scream at him, or to at least slam the door shut, but Satoru doesn’t. He leaves quietly, and Shoko comes back after a few minutes. She whistles lowly as she plops down on her chair.
“I have to say, you’re still a jackass.”
He runs his hand down his face, “I thought you had another patient?”
She shrugs, “Maybe. Maybe not. I was down the hall in case one of you fools did something stupid.”
“I don’t understand what he wants.”
She searches through her lab coat’s pocket to pull out a lighter, a cigarette ready in her other hand, “I don’t think that’s the issue here.”
He assumes Satoru is avoiding him.
He doesn’t keep track of the days, it’s more effort than it’s worth in the end, but he’s fallen asleep multiple times and woke up to Shoko wearing a different set of clothes. Plus, the few times he observes himself in the bathroom mirror, he sees that stubble is starting to come in by his chin.
So, he comes to the conclusion that time is in fact passing, and he has yet to see Satoru again.
Suguru tries to pretend it doesn’t bother him.
But it feels selfish of Satoru to keep him here like some neglected pet that’s being taken care of by Shoko, so despite his pretending, he becomes angry.
Still, he doesn’t ask Shoko where Satoru is. He makes it a point not to. Anytime he gets the urge to, he bites his tongue instead. And maybe Satoru was right that Suguru was being childish with the vindictive way he hopes that Satoru is asking Shoko about him.
But when Shoko is gone and the clothes she’s lent Suguru to wear that are too large for him bunch up uncomfortably and he can’t seem to fall asleep, he thinks of Satoru. He thinks of him when he’s too anxious to sleep, hesitance blooming from the fear that if he dreams, he’ll lose himself again. He thinks of him on the rare occasion that he does fall asleep, his eyelids helplessly heavy as he grapples with whether or not he hopes to not slip underneath death again.
It’s a shock when he finally comes to see him.
Suguru glances towards the door when he hears it open and expects to see Shoko, but instead, Satoru is standing there in a black hoodie and matching sweatpants.
Awkwardly, he shakes a bag of fast food in front of him, “Let’s eat.”
“Oh,” Suguru says. “Okay?”
He follows Satoru’s lead silently as they make their way to an emergency exit door that doesn’t ring when Satoru shoves it open, despite the spray-painted DO NOT OPEN on it. The rusted metal stairs scaling the side of the building they take to the roof creak underneath each of their steps, and Suguru looks over to see the city.
He’s not sure where they are, but it’s a metropolitan area, though it’s anything but inhabited. When they make it to the rooftop and he really gets to look out from each direction, he thinks it must have been a colony with the dispersed destroyed buildings and craters in the ground.
He frowns, frustrated.
He barely has a grip on their physical setting. Even after roaming the halls inside on his own, despite the muscles in his calves aching and his breath growing short alarmingly quickly, he had no idea if the building was meant to be a hospital, community center, or a mix of both. When he asked Shoko where they were once, she infuriatingly avoided his question. When he asked why she was avoiding answering, she smiled, tapped her clipboard, and said “ You sort of deserve it.”
“I know you’re settling in again but we have to talk about a plan.”
He blinks and looks to his right to see Satoru standing near an air conditioner unit, bag of food resting on top.
Suguru raises a brow, “For what?”
Satoru starts to rummage through the bag, pulling out a carton of french fries. Suguru struggles to imagine a restaurant open nearby.
“For you not getting executed, hunted, or murdered the moment some people see you.”
Satoru motions towards the bag and Suguru steps forward to look into it. He’s not hungry, but there’s an order of fries for him, too.
He huffs, “I thought you said you’d just kill them.”
“A plan would be easier.”
“Would it?” he questions, rolling up the end of the bag, fries still inside.
“Hm,” Satoru says before craning his head side to side, “But still.”
Suguru leans his back against the air conditioner unit, careful to keep space between them.
“But you still want a plan.”
“I do.”
Suguru shakes his head, “I don’t.”
Satoru flicks a fry away from them, past the ledge.
“Honestly Suguru, I don’t care if you don’t.”
Suguru laughs, “Then why even bring it up? Just figure it out on your own.”
“You’re too stubborn,” Satoru says, looking over at him. “If you’re not interested you’re not going to be a part of it.”
“I’d say I’m independent.”
“I’d say you’re selfish.”
Suguru smacks his lips, “Are you projecting?”
Satoru doesn’t take the bait. He turns completely towards him, resting his hip against the unit.
“The plan is to cut the bullshit from before. Help people on our side. I don’t mean the school—”
Suguru opens his mouth but Satoru continues.
“Miguel is already helping. We could find the rest of your family left.”
His family.
An inkling of guilt grips him, but it’s overtaken by a sense of responsibility. Even if he hadn’t thought of them since coming back from the dead, he still has an obligation to protect them.
Suguru shakes his head, “No. They won’t want to.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know them,” he insists. “They wouldn’t—”
“Larue is with Tsukumo Yuki,” Satoru interrupts. “Remember her?”
Suguru does and doesn’t. He remembers speaking to her in front of a group of blurry figures, formations of jagged ice around them, but that never happened. Not to him, really.
“And Miguel spent time with Yuta helping civilians after everything. If the ones left heard you were alive—”
Now it’s Suguru’s turn to interrupt him.
“They don’t know?”
Satoru reaches to feed himself another fry, “No, but I’m sure they think something is up with the colonies gone, given who enacted them.”
“Why haven’t you told them?”
Satoru waves a hand, salt dusting his fingertips. “Is this situation not complicated enough, as is?”
He’s not wrong, but it bothers Suguru regardless. Satoru’s reason is logical, but if a member of his family was dead, he’d want to know immediately.
It dawns on him, then, a spectacularly dreadful sort of epiphany.
“Satoru,” he says, slowly. “What did you mean by the rest of my family left?”
Satoru’s expression doesn’t falter, impassive despite the change in his body language that Suguru doesn’t miss.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
The world starts to narrow as Satoru hesitates.
“Who,” Suguru urges.
“Mimiko and Nanako Hasaba.”
Suguru’s ears start to ring so loudly he can’t hear himself ask how, but he must have because Satoru answers the question.
“Realistically?” Satoru's voice rings. “Most likely Sukuna at Shibuya from what I’ve been told.”
Suguru can’t tell what his body wants to do. He doesn’t know what to register the heavy sensation congesting his lungs as and doesn’t know how to describe the sudden weight his knees must carry though all of his bones have just become so brittle.
Mimiko and Nanako are dead.
They were most likely dead when he woke up, dead when he failed to rest, dead when he was wandering the halls of this place, dead as Satoru led him up the stairs, knowing the whole while. They could have been dead for days, weeks, and he hadn’t known. He was alive and didn’t know.
Satoru hadn’t told him.
Distorted rage boils then, at Satoru, at himself.
Would they have died if he hadn’t stolen them from their village?
No.
Not stolen, saved. He had saved them from those narrow-minded, non-sorcerer animals, but what worth did salvation have if it led to martyrdom?
But they weren’t martyrs, were they?
They were two girls, two teenage girls who had posters on their walls of celebrities he didn’t recognize and insisted on visiting pop-up shops to take pictures and took care of one another and who looked at him like a fa—
He turns to his side and starts to heave.
“You haven’t eaten much,” Satoru says, callously. “Don’t puke.”
Suguru whips his head around, “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Satoru just stares, “What?”
“You just told me that Nanako and Mimiko are—”
He retches, though he vomits nothing. He just feels saliva collect in his mouth as his throat burns and his stomach aches.
“You getting sick or hurting yourself isn’t going to bring them back.”
Suguru doesn’t know who the man standing by him is. Maybe he hadn’t for a while now. Perhaps he had died while he was dead, too.
“Screw you,” Suguru says, wiping at his mouth. He looks around the rooftop, disoriented. “I’m leaving, I’m leaving —”
“No, you’re not,” Satoru cuts, before reconsidering and offering, “I’m sorry about those two. But the reality is we need a plan. Maybe not today—”
“Shut up,” Suguru exclaims. “Shut up about a plan.”
“Why?” Satoru questions and Suguru knows from the edge of his tone that this is the start of a spiraling argument. At least the recognition in itself carries a malicious familiarity between them still. “Why, Suguru? Are you just going to go back to your old ways? You saw how well that worked out for you last time.”
“If you had disposed of my body—” he spouts, breathless.
Though he doesn’t miss Satoru’s wince, it’s not enough to stop.
“If it wasn’t for you,” he carries on, possessed. “Kenjaku would have never taken my body. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be dead. If it wasn’t for you, it would have worked out.”
Satoru doesn’t say anything else after that. His gaze lingers on Suguru for a moment, and then it’s gone, his head turned away to face the urban horizon. Suguru, in turn, doesn’t know what to do with himself. Rage boils over into grief, and grief thickens into regret and the process starts all over again within what feels like seconds. He starts rubbing his face, pressing and massaging his fingertips into his closed eyes until he sees shapes. Satoru remains silent through it all, the only sound letting Suguru know that he’s still there the faint rustling of his clothes in the rooftop breeze.
“Haven’t I given enough?” he mutters mostly to himself, easing the pressure on his eyes.
When he opens them, Satoru’s mouth is pursed, like he ate something rancid.
Suguru narrows his eyes, “Is there something you want to say?”
Satoru looks over at him, “There’s a difference between giving something and having it taken from you.”
The laugh that scales Suguru’s throat is an arid thing, leaving his mouth parched, his tongue puckered against his teeth.
“Satoru,” he says, slowly. “They were—”
“Your daughters?” he jabs. “Don’t act like you did it all for them. It was for you.”
The sky above plummets. Vertigo shoves its fist down his throat, and Suguru’s stomach flips once, twice.
“What?” he manages to force out.
“You murdered your own parents, and then acted like theirs,” Satoru explains. “Did they know that? Did you ever tell them that?”
Suguru’s body jerks.
He moves towards Satoru quickly, swinging a fist towards him, but it stops an inch, maybe two, away.
It's not fair.
“Did you ever tell them that you killed the children of the village, too? Did they see?”
Suguru breathes, light-headed, but it sounds like a gasp.
“Tell me,” Satoru continues, relentless. “Did they know you murdered your parents?”
Suguru snarls and swings again. He must look pathetic like this, trying to wound the impossibility of Satoru’s infinity between them.
“Answer me,” Satoru demands again, his tone finally edging away from apathy to resentment. Suguru tries to hit him in the mouth.
Of course, it doesn’t land.
“Shut up,” he requests, seeking some form of charity he knows Satoru will not offer. Suguru has taken too much already, nails breaking off as he scrapes at a dry well. Infinity ripples along his knuckles, cold rivulets keeping him at bay.
It's not fair.
“I guess it doesn’t matter now, huh?”
He wishes Satoru sounded like anyone else, like Shoko or maybe Yaga, but it’s Satoru, it’s the reason he’s even alive right now.
He tries to hit him again.
“Shut up—”
Infinity ripples and Suguru is forced to take a step back when Satoru steps forward.
“You had me meet them,” Satoru carries on. “Do you remember that? You had me meet your parents, Suguru. Over summer break before our second year.”
The world constricts to only them two, the sky is already gone, and now the building gives way, engulfed by the earth. Suguru can only hear Satoru’s voice and his own ragged breathing.
“I do,” he confesses.
“Did you remember when you did it?”
A fragment of Suguru remembers Kenjaku the way one remembers touch, remembers the way it felt to have his memories plucked apart by deft, curious hands. Kenjaku had kneaded the blood-soaked memory of his parents’ deaths until it was distorted beyond recognition before tossing it aside.
Dramatic, they had mused. But not very useful.
“Did you think about what you were doing?”
Suguru can’t breathe.
“Stop,” he gasps.
“Were they caught off guard? Or did you let them see you?”
Suguru’s body begs him to remember. It begs in the way he can no longer hear Satoru, begs in the complete, physical reaction to his question. His entire frame shudders and his head splits until only memory seeps out instead of thought.
And perhaps they are muddied by death, perhaps they’re blurred by rediscovery through rebirth, or perhaps Suguru had truly repressed them during his first life for his grand death-dealing purpose, but he does not remember.
The exigency is there, the urge to remember and feel and grasp recollection in his pliant palms and hold are all there, but it’s all hollow.
The memories are just gone.
Suguru doesn’t remember his mother’s voice before it was screaming, does not recall the whole of his father’s face, just the flesh that was left behind, jawless and closer to a body than a father.
The only memory that remains is death.
And this, this is what finally breaks Geto Suguru.
This realization that he has kept at bay since his rebirth is what lodges its teeth into his chest and rips him open underneath the marbled sky. He does not remember a time before now, before this. He can barely recall moments spent with a teenage Satoru. All the details, all the aspects of what makes a memory a memory, are diluted into emotions, done away with specifics until they are just obscure descriptions of them.
He feels in abstracts, and yet the displaced memories feel so concrete in his body, the concepts of his mother and father and Mimiko and Nanako seizing him, inhabiting any available space between organ and bone.
He feels it all, feels the world implode and leave him without foundation, without a before. Just an overcast sky above him, and a man who he cannot reach in front of him.
Suguru blinks, and he is kneeling on the rooftop, bits of loose concrete digging into the stretch of his pants over his knees.
Satoru isn’t saying anything, but he’s crouching in front of him. When Suguru eases the rigidity of his spine and rests his weight back, Satoru sighs and mimics the motion, sitting back onto the ground fully.
Suguru doesn’t dare say anything either. He’s not sure how long he was gone, and beyond not knowing what to say, he’s not entirely sure that his voice won’t give way to the dry heaving that had overwhelmed him earlier. When he looks at Satoru, he sees him with his head thrown back, staring at the sky, but he feels something resting against his knee. When he glances down, he sees that it’s Satoru’s outstretched foot, the rubber of his shoe meeting the fabric of Suguru’s pants.
“Satoru.”
“I’m not apologizing for what I said.”
Suguru thinks of touching his shoe, of touching where the shoelaces overlap into a loose knot.
Instead, he says, “I know.”
Satoru doesn’t look at him, so Suguru joins him in watching the sky. The clouds dusted by graphite pass over them leisurely, and Suguru swallows down the lump in his throat.
“I don’t know what to do,” he confesses, to himself, to Satoru, to the sky blissfully unaware of his existence.
“Well,” Satoru says. “That makes two of us.”
The more he’s alive, the more apparent it is that he’s forgotten how to be.
His arm isn’t used to the responsibility of two, and more often than not, starts to ache and throb after tedious, simple movements and actions. The rest of his body fares no better. Though he is alive, though Shoko has checked over each inch of his body and found no injury, there is something broken. At times, his limbs will not respond to him though he tries to move his jaw to chew or move his leg to sit on the edge of his mattress or stand from a chair.
“We can try some physical therapy,” Shoko suggests once when one of Suguru’s knees locks and he stumbles forward, reaching out to hold onto the wall to prevent his fall. She helps him move towards his bed, his weight resting against her side.
“Can’t you just heal it?”
Once he’s sitting, she touches his knee with her fingertips.
“It’s not that type of injury,” she explains. “It’s not an injury at all.”
“It’s my body,” Suguru murmurs, more to himself than her.
“It is,” she confirms, moving her hand away. “But you have to remember how to use it.”
When he laughs, she doesn’t.
Their sessions exhaust him.
When Shoko had explained the process to him, shown him diagrams and steps of the exercises she would guide him through, he had scoffed. The illustrations were either of geriatric men and women bending their knees towards their bodies and stretching out their arms or of skinny, frail genderless figures holding onto two bars as they walked in between.
But his pride dissolves as his calves cramp and his arm trembles as it pulls against a series of elastic resistance bands.
Eventually, Satoru starts to visit him during some of his sessions.
Suguru hadn’t noticed when he had entered the room the first time, but when Shoko told him he could take a break and he leaned forward to stretch his neck, he had seen shoes by the door and looked up to see him.
They didn’t say anything to each other.
Satoru would watch him, sometimes go on his phone, and Suguru would go through with his routine with Shoko, stubbornly keeping his attention solely on her.
“You two are ridiculous,” she says after one of his sessions centered on strengthening his shoulders came to an end. The silence that swelled between the three of them had become tacky, sticking to Suguru’s throbbing left shoulder and Satoru’s lack of an expression.
When he leaves, Shoko groans and rubs the bridge of her nose.
The streak of silent visits is why when Suguru pushes the door open to the room he and Shoko typically meet for their sessions and sees Satoru leaning down, poking one of the machines used to apply pressure to the resistance bands, he’s surprised.
“Where’s Shoko?”
Satoru whips his head around to look at him, “Not here today.”
Suguru doesn’t let go of the door handle, “What?”
Satoru stands upright, “She’ll be back later, just handling some stuff.”
Suguru frowns, “I was supposed to have a session today with her.”
“Congratulations,” Satoru replies, empty of the elation the word typically carries, “it’s a rest day.”
Suguru has half a mind to go back to his room, to start searching for Shoko in the building to see if Satoru is even saying the truth, but he chooses to let the door close behind him as he steps into the room. Satoru doesn’t say anything as Suguru moves to sit on one of the cushioned beds, tying up the loose sleeve of his shirt underneath his shoulder. He can do some of the exercises on his own, but alone without Shoko’s observation or guidance, he feels idiotic outstretching his arm above his head and leaning to each side to warm up.
Maybe it’s the fact that Satoru is obviously trying not to look at him.
He’s sitting on the rolling chair Shoko typically used, the springs complaining each time he eases his weight back, pushing against the side of the counter with the bottom of his shoes.
When Suguru’s about to start warming up his legs, Satoru sits forward abruptly.
“Do you want to go to the roof again?”
Suguru blinks.
“Why?”
Satoru shrugs, “To talk.”
“To talk, ” Suguru parrots.
“I’m not forcing you,” Satoru says.
“I didn’t say you were.”
Satoru reaches to rub the back of his neck, and Suguru pushes himself off to stand.
“Let’s just go.”
The rooftop is the same; the air conditioner unit is the same, the patches of eroded concrete are the same, and the stairs that lead them up creak the same, if not more.
But the sky is different.
The sky is a never-ending sheet of cloudless baby blue. At this height, Suguru can see it for miles. He can see where the baby blue darkens along the horizon into navy, wisps of a cotton sky unfurling far away.
He doesn’t follow Satoru this time when he goes to lean against the AC unit again. He stands by the railing of the stairs, holding onto them with his hand.
“I don’t care if you’re angry at me,” Satoru says, a little loud because of the distance. “But we need a plan.”
Suguru looks toward him and thinks the tufts of his hair look like a cloud.
“Okay,” he says.
Satoru leans his head down slightly, eyeing him over the brim of his glasses.
“Okay?” he repeats. “Just like that?”
It’s not just like that.
Suguru doesn’t think a plan matters. Suguru thinks that Satoru doesn’t know what he’s doing, that this is going to blow up in their faces like everything else in their lives, that when he's executed again he needs to beg Shoko to cremate the remains, that ultimately Satoru just needs to learn to let go because he never truly did, but the sky is blue today.
The sky is blue, and Suguru is tired.
“Just like that,” he answers, after a beat.
There are no words to describe how it felt to lose his arm, but Suguru tries to rationalize the experience to himself regardless. He imagines what it would have felt like to have the limb torn off by some wild animal, or possibly blown off by some type of unnoticed land mine, but he comes to a blank. His arm had just started to unravel before him when he fought for consciousness, his skin peeling away bloodlessly and disintegrating into the air and seeping into the ground like ash.
At least, that’s how Satoru describes it.
Suguru didn’t see it, he just felt it.
He figures Kenjaku was trying to undo everything he had fixed, including the blast from Satoru in his chest and even his stolen brain, but Suguru had gained full control in time.
Or Satoru had forced him out just in time, he's not sure.
He just knows it wasn't in time to keep his left arm.
His body sometimes seems to forget that.
Some days, the pain is continuous. It’ll feel like his arm is throbbing, cramping, but Suguru’s hand will only hold onto his shoulder, where his arm should be. Other days, it comes and goes. On select days, it just feels like the ghostly limb is still attached to him.
In his personal opinion, those are the worst.
The phantom pains are a physical experience; sweat will curl the baby hairs on the nape of his neck and he’ll bite his shirt to keep from mewling, but at least he’s familiar with pain. He isn’t familiar with feeling a sudden itch from an arm that isn’t there, or a tickling sensation by a hand that’s nonexistent. Seeking shelter in what used to be his body, but won’t quite ever fully be his again is complicated enough. There were things done by his missing bones and said by his mouth that will never truly be his to keep, but he has to swallow them down all the same.
Some things never change.
“I can try to ease the pain,” Shoko says, as the metallic taste of blood coats Suguru’s tongue after he nearly tore into his bottom lip in reaction to a sudden stabbing pain. “There are parts of your spinal cord and brain that contribute to it, I can null them.”
Suguru rests his head back against the wall, “Why bother?”
It’s not a no, so Shoko scoots forward and reaches for his shoulder. The stale white light above his bed washes her out with a hint of a green hue.
“I’m a doctor, right?” she says, and it takes Suguru a moment to remember that he had posed a question. “Honor code and all that.”
Suguru snorts, “Yeah, right.”
When Shoko squeezes his shoulder, it isn’t with malice.
He nearly falls asleep under her touch as she starts to hum, the sensation of her technique unwinding his body soothing, but he stirs fully awake when she pulls away a minute later. He stretches his neck after, sighing.
“There are some painkillers you can take,” she suggests. “Also some antidepressants.”
“No,” he says, evenly. “I don’t want to take anything.”
She makes a face, “Don’t be a hardass about it, the antidepressants are for any pain caused by damaged nerves.”
“It’s not that,” he replies. “I just don’t want to take anything.”
“Suit yourself,” she says as she turns around.
She steps over to the counter in Suguru’s room and pulls out the vanilla folder she’s been keeping on him from the file organizer on it. His is the only one in the three slots.
Suguru stares at her back as she sinks down into the rolling chair by it, watching her shoulder rise when she moves to pull open a drawer to find a pen and drop as she shuts it.
“Do you wish,” he prompts, and her shoulder stills. “Things had gone differently?”
“Different doesn’t mean better.”
Whatever she’s writing down doesn’t take long to finish, and once she’s done and the solitary folder is put away once more, she stands and looks over at him.
“Do you wish things had been different?”
He meets her gaze.
“I don’t know,” he answers. “If Satoru had gotten sealed some other way, and it wasn’t my body…I don’t know.”
“Well,” she says. “Some things are pointless to think about.”
“Yeah,” he concedes. “Yeah, they are.”
He knows they’re not keeping him on remote school grounds. Or at least, he assumes they aren’t. Unless the infirmary and medical rooms had a major renovation during his time away, the entire format of the hospital-like building Suguru dwells in is different from the rooms haunted by his adolescent blood and broken bones.
But if he isn’t on campus, he fails to understand why Satoru or Shoko would be here so often. Perhaps it was some type of new cursed technique deceiving him and he was just too weak to notice.
But no, that didn’t make sense, either.
Still, he hasn’t seen any staff or even students.
The corridors are empty, and when Suguru walks to and fro to either get some air or sit around Shoko, he’s alone. It just doesn't make sense to him; Shoko, at least to his knowledge, is one of the only sorcerers that can actually use reversed cursed technique to heal others consistently, and there was no possible way that none of the students were getting harmed right now. Especially after the fallout of the Culling games.
“Where are your students?” he asks, when Satoru is midchew of a sandwich.
They’re not on the roof for once. Instead, Satoru had Suguru walk with him for a while, sandwich bag in hand. They had to stop once Suguru grew too tired, and the small outdoor patio Satoru had found to rest felt outright apocalyptic with turned-over tables, broken glass, and scattered chairs.
Satoru raises a brow at his question and swallows, “Why do you care?”
“I haven’t seen any of them,” Suguru says. “I’ve been here for almost a month now, right?”
Satoru hums, “What, you’re curious?”
Suguru frowns, “Maybe I am, but fine, don’t answer.”
Satoru watches him for a second, then reconsiders.
“I mean, I’m technically still excommunicated. Yuji hasn’t come back, so Megumi hasn’t either. Not that I blame them, there isn’t much to come back to.”
“You’re what?”
Satoru blinks, “Did I not tell you?”
Suguru could punch him.
“How, why? ”
Satoru wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, “You know, political corruption. The same thing as always. We’ll sort it out.”
“Do your students know?”
Satoru nods, “Mhm.”
“So, where are the rest?”
“I’m not about to list where everyone is, Suguru,” Satoru replies briskly. “The majority dislike you, plus I don’t even know about some. No one’s even heard from Maki.”
Suguru has to think for a moment, has to try to put a face to a name, and then he remembers. His left shoulder pulses.
“The Zenin clan girl?”
Satoru takes another bite of his sandwich, “Surprised you're not calling her something worse.”
“She's your student. I doubt you'd want to hear it.”
Satoru nods sagely, “You’re right, I don’t. Either way, not like there’s much of a clan now.”
“What?”
Satoru waves a hand in the air, “She slaughtered the whole clan, except her sister and Megumi.”
Suguru remembers the imprudent girl. He remembers her childish cheeks and the hate that simmered in her stubbornly brazen eyes when he degraded her.
“Where’s her sister?” he asks.
Satoru raps his knuckles against the round cafe table, “Dead.”
Suguru blinks, “Oh.”
“Yeah,” Satoru sighs. “Last I heard the Gojo and Kamo clans were trying to petition to remove them from the three main families.”
The Gojo clan, Suguru notes. As if he isn’t in it.
“Of course they are,” he replies.
“Yeah.”
Above them somewhere, the fluttering of bird wings pervades the air as a startled group flies off the ledge of the building they’re sitting in front of. Suguru casts his gaze skyward, glancing at the empty ledge.
He asks, “What do you think about it?”
Satoru sucks on his teeth for a moment.
“I think what I think of what happened to Maki and what she did after doesn't matter,” he says, pausing before adding, “I also think she lost the most important person in her life.”
Not for the first time, Suguru is reminded of Satoru’s age. He had thought of Satoru during their time apart, during the years of grace he provided Suguru to exist, but he had not truly thought of Satoru. He became something nostalgic, something his mind would summon up for his consideration and then just as quickly push away.
But Satoru had changed.
He had changed often, more than once, and now, sitting across from him with his right leg crossed over the other as he unenthusiastically poked the last bit of crust of his sandwich, Suguru thinks he had changed again while inside prison realm.
He gains a leisurely, amused smirk and says, “You know, she might want to kill you, too. Don’t know if I could protect you from that.”
Suguru half laughs, “Could or should?”
Satoru shrugs in return.
“Let her then,” Suguru says. “Would make your plan easier.”
Satoru makes a sound teetering halfway between a huff and a grunt, “Were you always this suicidal?”
Now, Suguru laughs outright. He feels the skin of his cheeks pull as he does, his mouth wide for just one, unfiltered moment.
“Suicidal?” he repeats, marveling. The word is so grandiose, so delightfully logical for what he could possibly be. Suicidal.
Soo · uh · sai ·dl.
It sounded strange on his tongue, sounded pointless.
It didn’t sound much better on Satoru’s, either.
“Who knows,” Suguru says, and Satoru doesn’t question him.
Suguru’s having a hard time focusing on reading the open book on his lap. He’s read over the same two sentences now at least five times and has even resorted to following the text along with a fingertip pressed against the page. If he’s being honest, the book is boring. He’s eight chapters in and there’s no resemblance of plot, and even worse, he still can’t keep track of the fantastical character names.
But Satoru brought him the book.
Suguru had complained about his boredom given that despite his agreement to “be on Satoru’s side,” he still wasn’t allowed to leave anywhere.
“It’s more like we don’t have a place for you yet,” Satoru had said when Suguru complained about that, too. Suguru thinks he hadn’t really thought about how miserable his statement was, but it didn’t matter, not really.
But it’s how, or more so why, Satoru showed up today with a bag filled with seven different books. He had dumped the bag on Suguru’s lap and plopped onto his mattress, stretching out his legs as his shoes hung off the edge. When Suguru started looking through the bag, he frowned. Satoru hadn’t even made sure to see if the books were in chronological order if they were from the same series, and most were the final release of a series or a sequel to an original.
It’s a strangely Satoru thing to do, to dismiss the origin of a story and jump right away into the climax or even the resolution. If Suguru was Suguru that woke up weeks ago, he might have been pissed off, maybe even thrown the books at Satoru and prodded him until he said something venomous back. But present Suguru had searched through the books, managed to find one that was a stand-alone story, and sat down on the starchy armchair in the room. The thin, wooden sides to rest his arm wasn’t the most comfortable, but he settled in regardless.
Now, he sort of regrets not picking one of the other books.
He looks away from the printed words, fully knowing it meant he most likely would not ever return to them, and glances towards Satoru. Though his eyes are shut and his breathing is even as he’s strewn out on the bed, Suguru knows he isn’t asleep.
“Hey,” Suguru says, and Satoru opens an eye to peer over at him. “Do me a favor.”
He rolls onto his side, “What?”
Suguru nods towards the bag of books on his bedside table, “Bring me the bag.”
Satoru seems to consider it for a moment, static, but then he swings his legs over the mattress and stands. Suguru’s about to say thank you when he offers him the bag when he hears a sniff above him and looks up to see Satoru leaning in closer than usual, upper half slightly bent towards the top of his head.
“Oh,” Satoru says with a scrunched nose, and Suguru frowns.
Suguru eyes him, “What?”
Satoru straightens his back, “Your hair kind of smells.”
His face warms and his cheeks flush as he shoves Satoru away.
“What the fuck, Satoru?”
“I’m just saying,” he says as if it isn’t something mortifying. “Have you showered?”
Suguru has to look away from him, “Can you stop?”
He wishes he had a hair tie or something to pull his hair back.
“I’m just asking—”
“Well, stop,” Suguru interrupts, whipping his head around to look at him again. “You’re seriously going to nag me, for this?”
Satoru flattens his mouth, and Suguru raises his hand to tug on a split end of his hair.
He’s tried showering. He doesn’t like feeling disgusting, but the hot water and steam make him feel light-headed and the cold water feels uncomfortable and makes him shiver and twitch, knocking bottles onto the soapy floor, and when he tries to untangle his hair after he can’t manage to well and it’s just so much all the time for him to just be clean.
“I can help you,” Satoru finally says, and Suguru’s eyes widen.
“That’s even worse,” he replies, and Satoru looks almost annoyed.
“Why?” he says. “It doesn’t have to be. I’ve already seen you naked.”
Suguru can’t tell if he means the shared showers in their dormitories and Satoru’s complete and utter lack of acknowledging personal space back then, or if he means his body pre-Kenjaku. He still hadn’t asked about that, but he assumes the lack of autopsy scars is a small, selfish mercy.
Satoru’s stubbornly waiting for some sort of answer, and Suguru sighs, ushering him away with a hand.
“Shit, Satoru. Maybe, okay? Let me think about it.”
Two days later, when Suguru’s shoulder aches and his hair feels slicked with oil and he yearns to wash it all away, Satoru helps him shower.
The hospital bathroom doesn’t have a division between sections, the sink and mirror are on the wall closest to the heavy door, the toilet is furthest, and the shower is in between. There’s a drain underneath the plastic bath chair Suguru is sitting on, and one in the center of the bathroom. Everything is two colors, alternating between off-white tile and soft blue.
Satoru is in the middle of it all, standing behind him, the front of his shirt still wet from when he turned on the showerhead too early. It’s all nauseatingly sterile. The brandless soap smells almost like baby powder, and the shampoo that he sniffed before Satoru moved the minuscule bottle closer to him is borderline scentless, as is the matching conditioner. It’s what Suguru imagined he would experience one day with his parents, the unavoidable certainty of age promising that one would become childlike again one day.
But Suguru doesn’t feel like a child as Satoru sweeps his hair back gently and lets warm water run down his back.
He feels like a body, in every clinical sense of the word. He tallies wherever Satoru touches either with his hands or frothy sponge, the word back floating to the surface of his mind when Satoru begins to wash it, followed by the word arm, then shoulder, then neck. He’s never thought of himself as parts in this way, like some sort of cattle, but now there are borders provided to guide him. There is a violent, puckered crown encircling the section of his body where his original flesh meets the unnatural arm Kenjaku regrew. There is also a scar where Satoru blew him open, but Suguru doesn’t find that ugly. Though Kenjaku wretchedly healed the gaping wound, this purplish, garnet remnant of gathered collagen comes from Satoru, his final gift to Suguru.
But Satoru doesn’t touch it.
When he brushes the sponge over it, the action is plagued by uncertainty, hesitance withholding the tendons in his hand. Suguru thinks that indecision has never suited him, and it doesn’t now, but he leaves it be.
A hiss does escape him when Satoru tugs on a particularly rough knot in his hair once he starts to wash it, and Satoru freezes, hand and brush still in his hair.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
Satoru moves again, and Suguru closes his eyes. The water feels nice. It does, but the exhaustion that claims him is bone-deep, and not even Satoru’s aid eases it. It’s the worst part of all of this, the most harrowing. There is no cure. There is no fix. No pill Suguru can take, no mission he can go on, no cursed spirit he can swallow. There is nothing to fix what he has been and what he is now.
Some things help, little things and moments he collects and hoards like a boy collecting cracked stones from a river bed in hopes of finding hidden gems and crystals inside. But with each little thing, it feels like he’s packing a grave rather than emptying one.
When Satoru steps further into the shower to shut off the water, he takes care to not glance at Suguru.
“I’m done,” he says, and Suguru nods.
He glances down to see strands of his dark hair collecting by the drain, in between the legs of the plastic chair he’s on. Satoru steps out quietly, though Suguru can hear him grab a towel to dry his arms.
Before he can finish, Suguru croaks, “Satoru—”
The sound of the towel rustling stops.
“Why?” Suguru eventually adds but then stops. He licks his lips, feeling the cracks in the chapped skin. Satoru is patient as ever, silent.
“What do you want from me?” Suguru finally says. “I don’t know what you want me to do.”
He turns his head to look at him, and Satoru is watching him, still holding onto the damp towel in his hands.
“I don’t want you to do anything,” he replies, and Suguru shuts his eyes momentarily as he shakes his head gently.
“That’s a lie.”
“It’s not,” Satoru replies. “It’s not you.”
Suguru laughs at the cliche, but it’s a contained sound.
“It’s true,” Satoru says, placing the towel down. “You were dead.”
Suguru swallows.
“Everything reached an end,” Satoru continues, leaning against the counter. “The waiting, the knowing. It was over. And then it was back, and now you’re here, and this is…” his voice trails off, and Suguru watches him tense his hands.
“It’s difficult, Suguru,” Satoru finally says. “It’s hard having you be alive.”
Suguru knows it’s true. It’s been true since before his death, since before his rebirth. Geto Suguru has only worsened Satoru’s life for over a decade now.
But it stings just the same to hear its confirmation, to hear Satoru confess this in the cramped, humid bathroom, his reflection a blur on the foggy mirror.
“Then why?” he exhales.
“Because why not, Suguru?” Satoru replies, weary. “Everything went to hell with you dead anyway, why not try having you alive?”
Suguru tilts his head, “Wow.”
“Ask stupid questions, get stupid answers.
“Can I ask another then?”
Satoru huffs, “You’re asking for permission?”
There’s a moment where he wants to grin, where his mouth wants to curve into a smirk and taunt Satoru, but when he speaks, he’s cheated by the malleability of his tone.
“Do you want me alive?”
Satoru notices, and though he has the right to dismiss Suguru, to righteously scorn him, he replies quietly, his voice low, yet another bruising kindness bestowed onto him.
“It's not like I wanted to kill you,” Satoru says.
Goosebumps bloom over Suguru’s shoulders and extend to his arm, though he blames the fact that he’s getting cold sitting here naked and still wet.
“Oh,” he manages to say, and Satoru scoffs.
“‘Oh’ he says,” Satoru mocks, and they’re back to before, unsure of where to progress. But Satoru takes the lead, as always as of late, and makes way to leave.
“Your clothes are on the sink,” he tacks on in place of a goodbye and then opens the door.
He dreams of Kenjaku.
Though labeling the subconscious experiences as dreams feels deceitful. No, they’re more like memories—memories of a life lived in his skin, but absent of association, of experience. In these memories smeared with a dreamlike haze or nauseating realism, Suguru will say what Kenjaku said; he’ll do what he did, he’ll see it all, a voiceless witness to cruel acts and deception. For all the blood that Suguru has felt slick his hands and spilled onto the world around him, the suffering that Kenjaku devilishly entertained themself by leaves Suguru shaken.
He doesn’t really sleep anymore. Rather, he naps. He naps while he’s left alone, in-between visits from Shoko and Satoru. When Satoru wakes him up once, opening the door briskly, Suguru jerks up, blearily staring at Satoru sluggishly.
“Keep sleeping,” Satoru says evenly. “I’ll come back later.”
“No, it’s fine,” Suguru replies, but Satoru stubbornly doesn’t listen. He closes the door and leaves, and Suguru stares after him before grunting as he lies back down.
This whole time, he hasn’t seen a soul beside Shoko and Satoru.
This whole time.
A lifetime ago, Suguru thought he had known what loneliness was. Each time, it had felt finite, certain in definition; a dorm room hidden from afternoon sunlight, empty except for his lump of a body strewn out on a desk chair; a teenage Satoru standing in front of him, mouth cracked into a grin as blessing after blessing collected on his shoulders, blooming into infinity between them; a lonesome but soul-stirring, night, two battered girls holding onto his bloodied sides.
But this is, this is—
It’s hard having you be alive.
He doesn’t stop dreaming of Kenjaku.
He doesn’t stop remembering them inspecting his memories, stalling on some Suguru would have not thought of as valuable, not in the same sense the word held value for Kenjaku. But he recalls how they prodded one memory when Mimiko and Nanako were sick and he was in the living room before he had met any of their mismatched family. Suguru was hunched over his laptop, searching for home remedies because the medicine he had bought, according to Nanako, tasted horrible and if she wailed one more time about taking it he didn’t know what he’d do, and he remembers, he remembers because Kenjaku gazing through a memory is the same as living it again and again, and he remembers how he had picked up his phone and thoughtlessly pressed the number on his mother’s contact information—
“The number you are trying to reach is out of service—”
He threw the phone away from him, heard it shatter against the wall, and scatter across the floor.
It was the first time he felt he had killed his parents.
“Ah, regret,” Kenjaku had hummed, coddling the memory with an amused, nipping grasp. “How sad.”
The temptation to cut his hair arises shortly after.
It isn’t a jarring realization that Suguru sort of wants to do it, he’s thought about it before as a teenager and later on as an adult, but it’s different now. He stalls in front of the square mirror sullied with smudges in the bathroom one day and stares.
He hasn’t looked at himself often since he woke up.
Suguru’s face is slim, his dull and patchy skin drapes over his cheekbones and nose in an unlovely way, the way hunger demands attention. Merlot bruises imbued with dark indigo discolor the bags under his eyes, and when he raises a hand to his hair and rubs strands of it between his fingers, dry, brittle ends break off lifelessly.
Kenjaku hadn’t bothered to maintain his body beyond what was necessary to appear alive.
As he thinks this, a small, but clear voice in the back of his mind says, are you blaming someone else again?
He frowns and then hears the door open.
“Suguru?” Satoru’s voice calls from the hospital room, and Suguru turns away from the mirror to peek out of the bathroom.
“I thought you weren’t coming today—”
His words clot in his mouth instantly, expanding and obstructing his throat. There, behind Satoru, stands Larue. Larue, who he had called family. Larue, who had helped him with the girls when they fussed over clothing brands and skincare routines and boys. Larue, who he had not thought of once this entire time.
He swallows.
I should be dead.
“Oh,” Larue murmurs like he’s relieved, like he’s wading through grief. “Oh, Suguru.”
He steps towards Suguru immediately, though his footfall is hushed, cautious in approaching him. Larue touches him easily, kindly cupping Suguru’s face and saying nothing, eventually dropping his hand to press benevolent fingertips against Suguru’s neck, right where his pulse is.
Suguru doesn’t know what to do or where to look.
Satoru had silently left them alone in the room, and now Suguru finds himself staring at the handle of the shut door, dazed. Larue touches him doubtlessly, with such familiarity, that Suguru’s chest feels like it's punched in.
“Larue,” he implores.
His hand stalls and Suguru can see his eyes avoiding the stretch of healing skin on his forehead.
Suguru wets his chapped lips and swallows.
His voice is hushed when he says, “I’m sorry.”
Larue leans in and speaks with nauseating empathy, “What?”
“I said I’m sorry,” Suguru fumbles through. “I’m apologizing.”
Larue finally stops touching him, but his lips quiver and Suguru lets him pretend that he doesn’t notice.
“It’s not your place to apologize.”
Suguru shuts his eyes, and shakes his head.
“Suguru, it isn’t—” Larue persists.
He doesn’t want to do this. He cares for Larue. He does, but he doesn’t want to do this, he doesn’t, he can’t —
It’s hard having you be alive.
“It’s not your fault,” he interrupts, hurried as if he’ll lose the momentum of the words. “It’s mine.”
His brows crease, “Stop—”
Suguru reaches for Larue’s hand and squeezes his wrist lightly. Larue becomes silent.
“It is,” Suguru continues, slowly expelling the words from his mouth, determined to taste each reprehensible constant and vowel. “It’s my fault.”
Larue visits more after.
At first, Satoru would bring him in quietly, and though Suguru found no malice in his actions, there was a slight bitterness to the visits, as it meant he would see Satoru less often. Suguru questioned if there was some agreed-upon trade set in place without his consent, but ultimately it doesn’t matter, because eventually, Larue starts to come on his own.
Some visits, Larue brings Suguru food under the veil as gifts. Everything offered to him is cooked at home, plastic tupperware with scratches and some discoloration holding thick, fragrant stews and cool wheat noodles interlaced with thinly sliced vegetables and meat. Suguru knows, knows with how Larue will skittishly ask if he’s eaten, if he enjoyed the meal he brought days ago, knows that each meal comes from a place of concern and not charity, but it doesn’t make it easier.
He hadn’t even realized he had lost that much weight until Larue reached for the shirt hanging off his shoulder, exposing his collarbone, and fixed the sleeve to rest on top again.
“Do you need me to bring you new clothes?” he had asked, and Suguru’s cheeks flushed.
Their conversations are nearly entirely one-sided. Suguru won’t place the blame on Larue for the lulls in between words or the mismatched pace, he just has so little to add or to mention. Larue talks, and talks, and talks, Suguru can only listen or question. At first, he feared it would be too much. After all, him and Satoru could barely keep a conversation going without it derailing into something annoyingly miserable, but Larue speaks with a doting timbre and Suguru selfishly lets his voice envelop him in stories of a life gone by.
“I met Tsukumo Yuki shortly after,” Larue explains once, and Suguru wonders if the woman knows he’s alive or if Satoru has kept her curiosity at bay.
“She understood your initial motivations,” Larue continues, though a cautious inflection unusual for him edges into his voice. “Though she disagreed with your…methods.”
“My methods?” Suguru repeats before a gutless laugh comes out of him. “Do you mean murder?”
Larue doesn’t laugh.
“You’ve never called what we did murder before,” he says, plainly.
Suguru purses his mouth.
“We can still seek to create a world for us,” he continues to say, reaching to touch Suguru’s shoulder. “One where sacrifices won’t be needed for—”
Suguru shoves his hand off, “Did Satoru put you up to this?”
Larue’s dismissed hand curls around nothing.
“What?”
“I already told him I’d—”
“Suguru,” Larue interrupts and Suguru realizes he had raised his voice with an inkling of embarrassment. “This has nothing to do with Gojo. I’m speaking with you.”
Hesitantly, he places his hand on top of Suguru’s, his fingertips resting on his wrist.
“You’re alive,” he says softly like he might be proven wrong still. “But for a while, you weren’t. We had to adapt. Each member of our family chose how to honor you, and I chose this, but you have another chance.”
He moves his hand to slip it underneath Suguru’s.
Suguru’s gaze drops to their hands, to Larue’s warm skin touching his, touching this thing, this dead thing that now is not.
“It doesn’t have to end the same,” he says, and Suguru pulls his hand away.
Suguru had always thought that hunger hurts.
That it results in a bone-deep ache.
That the starving feel blissful relief flooding their senses once they’re given sustenance, but Suguru has learned that once you’ve been hungry for so long, you forget.
You forget that you are starved.
Suguru is ravenous, but with each step taken forward with Satoru, with each word shared with Shoko, and each visit with Larue, he gets sicker, sicker, and sicker.
And isn’t that fitting, to be given what he has hoped for, what he needs, but to be too nauseated by what has lived inside him for so long?
The sickness becomes too much when Larue visits later in the evening, sitting beside Suguru on his mattress. Though their conversations lately have finally bordered on casual, this one led to them speaking about Mimiko and Nanako. It wasn’t fair how death even corrupted the past, eroding the joy gathered in memories with inflections of this is how it was and this will never be again.
“I haven’t cried,” Suguru confesses when Larue had paused in retelling the story of the girls sneaking out one evening to see some non-sorcerer musician Suguru had not been told of, but Larue had.
Larue sighs, and their brows dip as they smile sadly.
“They’d understand.”
Suguru smiles too.
He smiles, and when the expression fractures and his mouth widens to make room for needy laughter, Larue leans against him. When the laughter gives away and suddenly Suguru’s shoulders are trembling and he’s slumping forward to hide his face, Larue loops an arm around to hold him.
He curls his fingers into his brittle hairline and tugs until his scalp throbs, but tears never swell.
The rectangular slabs of dark, nearly onyx marble look like lightning struck them with the internal webbing of off-white that spans them. Suguru cranes his head up to look at where the marble edge meets the concrete of the chosen Shibuya station entryway still standing.
“Don’t know when the government had the time to enact this,” Satoru says to his right. “Or the funds, honestly.”
Suguru peers over at him and sees that he’s standing in front of an ornate flower arrangement with petals that are starting to wither, a series of framed photographs underneath it illuminated by pillar candles.
The Shibuya Incident Memorial is a well-kept, adorned artifact. Hundreds of flower arrangements and bouquets rest against the marble, accompanied by framed photographs or collages of the deceased, lit by the wavering light of real and battery-powered candles left by the living.
Suguru looks away from Satoru and back to the marble, his gaze resting on the first etched name, all in capitals.
“Are these all the names?”
Satoru takes a side step towards him, “Names of people identified, also names submitted by loved ones of the people who went missing here but weren’t identified.”
“There’s only one memorial?”
Satoru sighs, “Nope. There’s another by the crater.”
Suguru swallows.
“I can help you search.”
“No,” Suguru replies speedily. “I’ll do it.”
Satoru doesn’t argue, and Suguru doesn’t know where he goes when he starts searching for Mimiko and Nanako’s names, but he isn’t near him while he looks. Suguru’s thankful for his absence, for this allowance of privacy. It takes time, and Suguru wonders if he’ll find another familiar name carved into the marble as he searches but he doesn’t, he reads dozens and dozens and dozens of complete strangers’ names until he finds two, together even in death.
Hasaba Nanako
Hasaba Mimiko
Swiftly, though not surprisingly, the enormity of eternity settles, the permanence of these two names forever in marble here for him to see, for others to have already seen, for them to remain once he is gone, again.
The slow, final stop of something awfully at rest is soundless.
He raises his hand, and though he hesitates, he touches the names. As he feels the cool grooves in the marble underneath his fingertips, their names are torn into opposing directions, carried by grief, by reality, by regret.
He drops his gaze to the floor, and sees that there are also flowers and more electronic candles lining the wall underneath the section with their names, though there’s no discernable marking or framed photograph indicating that any belong to Nanako or Mimiko.
They’re the same as the rest named in stone in death.
He hears footsteps and picks up his head to catch Satoru walking towards him. The expression on his face must give away that Suguru found the girls because Satoru stops and just looks at him.
“There’s a stall out front we passed,” he offers, after a moment. “With candles. We can light two.”
It comes to his attention that the memorial is remarkably well kept. Most of the bouquets are alive, and there are nearly no extinguished candles.
What a miserable job it must be, Suguru thinks, to be the one to pick up the blown-out grief from the living.
“I’d like that,” he eventually says, and Satoru leans his head in the right direction before stepping towards it.
As they make their way towards it, something recomposes itself within Suguru, settling in the hollowness of his stomach.
It’s an awareness of what has been lost, but the impossibility of remembering its weight, its scent, its voice. This, Suguru thinks as Satoru starts speaking to the poor soul attending the stand, this is how Kenjaku robs. Though he cannot recall physicality, he knows, feels it ache along the underside of bone and flow in his blood, that when Kenjaku recalled memories, when he tasted them like one does extravagant tea and wine, letting flashes of a lifetime dribble past his lips and stain his chin and neck, Suguru relived them.
He knows he did, but now, even now with the permanency of marble in front of him, he cannot recall beyond. With Kenjaku gone, so are the remnants of Suguru to himself. Satoru, Shoko, Larue—those left who remembered him from before, they each owned and maintained their translations of him now, a privately kept reproduction within each of their souls that Suguru desperately wanted to experience, wanted to devour until he felt something other than gaping.
Something rots on their way back.
He knows he shouldn’t be angry at Satoru, he knows that the hushed fury that’s slowly boiled over since visiting the mass grave should not be directed to him, but he can’t stop. His dull, bitten nails scrape against the concrete ledge of the roof as he curls his hands into fists. Satoru isn’t even saying anything, he’s feet away from him, standing on the ledge while Suguru sits.
He imagines falling, imagines the wind slicing through his hair, battering it into knots and windswept strands just in time for his skull to crack against concrete.
But Satoru wouldn’t allow that, and Suguru shouldn’t be thinking of such selfish things, not after visiting the ugly, marble monument that serves as not only Nanako and Mimiko’s graves, but of thousands of others, all nameless and so unimportant to him, sharing the same tomb.
He shuts his eyes.
All this—all this surviving — just because Suguru failed to hear Nanako and Mimiko’s voices speaking with Kenjaku a lifetime ago, failed to hear any of his family’s voices.
He only heard Satoru, despite it all.
He opens his eyes to see a slate sky beckoning, tufts of ashen clouds rolling in as a storm Shoko had warned them of earlier nears.
“What is so special about you?” he says, still staring skyward. “Why did I react to you and not—”
This isn’t Satoru’s fault. He knows this. He swears he does. He thought he was better than this. But the urgency in his chest to expel something stuck, to push out something that’s contaminating every single one of his cells, beseeching him to do something, to be someone else—Suguru doesn’t know, he doesn’t know.
So, he begins at the genesis of it all.
“It could have been different,” he continues, low. He knows Satoru can hear. “I spent years with them. I raised them. And my family, I spent more time with them than I ever did you.”
The muscles lining his ribs contract, and Suguru, of all wondrous things his throbbing body can produce right now, hears himself laugh.
“Why,” he laughs, the sound receding into a sigh, spoken privately for the rumbling thunder to not hear. “Why is it always you?”
“I don’t have an answer for that.”
Suguru looks over at him, and Satoru is staring straight ahead, glasses folded into his shirt.
If it were to start raining, if the heavens were to split apart and weep, he wonders if Satoru would reach out, if he’d dive towards Suguru to touch his shoulder, his arm maybe, to drape infinity onto him.
But it doesn’t start raining, and Satoru doesn’t move, his hair and jacket rustled by wind.
For a few moments, Suguru just looks.
He looks at Satoru; looks at his face, at the few strands of cotton hair tucked behind his ear, at the nape of his neck where his undercut has grown, at the worn collar of his jacket. Like this, so far removed from the world on the hospital’s rooftop, Suguru thinks that in the face of Satoru’s reversed cursed technique, in the face of his impossibility, he looks older.
He looks tired.
“Do you think,” he says, and though Satoru doesn’t look he does lean his head towards him. “Do you think if you were me and I were you, that you’d wake up?”
Satoru steps off the ledge onto the roof, only to sit on it.
“Realistically,” he says. “Would any answer I give be enough for you?”
Suguru doesn’t stop staring, “Maybe.”
“Then, I do,” Satoru admits, and Suguru’s eyes widen. “I think I’d wake up and never sleep again.”
He decides to cut his hair.
He starts at the split, dead ends, awkwardly maneuvering the scissors he stole from Shoko earlier against his damp hair. But as he cuts, compulsion thrums along his grip and he continues, cutting more and more, on his left side first and then right.
But then it’s uneven, so he has to keep going.
By the time his hair is haphazardly reaching his earlobes, it looks weird.
So he keeps going, and going, until the only way to truly trim it for it to look decent without straining his wrist further is if he takes a buzzer to it.
Which, he had also stolen from one of Shoko’s cabinets.
He pauses after he plugs it into the outlet by the bathroom sink, holding the cold, lightweight contraption in his hand.
If he does this, others will see. Yes, they’d see his horribly shortened hair and the different directions mismatched tufts of it now stick out in, but buzzing it would leave him without any of it.
He turns on the buzzer, its droning sound echoing in the bathroom.
Should he mention it to them, even if they could see the change? Should he say I cut my hair, look. I cut my hair. I cut it.
When he lifts it to his head, above his left ear, and starts to haul the buzzer along his scalp, he decides not to mention it.
The next day, when Shoko steps into his room and sees him, her footsteps come to a stop. Suguru sheepishly rubs at his neck.
“Does it look that bad?” he says, and Shoko tilts her head.
“It could look better,” she says, before frowning. “Wait, did you steal my buzzer?”
“It’s in the bathroom,” Suguru replies, and grins lazily as Shoko rolls her eyes while walking past him to get it.
Later, Satoru walks in as Shoko is halfway cleaning up Suguru’s butchered hair, bits of it tickling his neck. He stops in the doorway, and for a moment, Suguru wonders if he should remind him that it’s him despite it all , but then Satoru walks up, leans in towards him as his mouth slides into a frown and finally says, “I don’t like it.”
Suguru blurts out a laugh, and Shoko whacks his shoulder before reminding him to keep his head still.
Pallid, flickering white light illuminates a narrow slit of the hospital room as sleep starts to weigh Suguru’s head down, his eyes drifting close only to open again a few seconds later. The only light in the room spills from the television hanging on the corner, turned towards his bed. No sound plays; Suguru had muted it hours ago when he decided he should try to sleep. The closed captioning is too small to read from this far, but Suguru’s eyes close to the image of a man trying out some at-home-gym-equipment, and open to the door creaking open.
He knows it’s Satoru before he steps in.
Groggily, Suguru whispers, “It’s three in the morning.”
Satoru stands by the door, but shrugs.
“Can’t sleep,” Satoru whispers back.
From the corner of his eye, Suguru thinks the infomercial has changed to a blender, splashes of color from fruit dyeing the bone-white light in the room to faint orange and then yellow. When Satoru moves to sit on the bed, it transitions back to white.
Suguru is sleepy. He’s having a hard time keeping his eyes open to look at Satoru sitting by his leg, his weight on top of the blanket pulling on the fabric of his sweatpants, keeping his leg confined. Satoru seems transfixed by the television, staring up at it silently. The way the light falls on his hair makes it look glowing.
Suguru’s eyes drift close.
“It smelled, you know.”
They open again, and Suguru purses his lips, furrows his brow. Did he miss something? There’s no way he was asleep for that long.
“Mm,” he hums, confused. “What did?”
Satoru shifts, turning to face Suguru.
“Prison realm. It reeked.”
That wasn’t what he expected.
“Really?”
Satoru nods, leaning to stretch his arms out on the bed, hands splayed against the bland, beige fitted sheets as two deep cracks pop from his spine. Suguru tries to imagine his long, sturdy limbs bent and folded to fit inside of a box.
“Yep,” Satoru confirms. “It smelled gross. Some skeletons still had some skin on them.”
Suguru wishes the candle that gave him headaches that Shoko sometimes kept lit on her desk while she worked was still lit.
“Oh.”
Satoru stays stretched out, his head hanging in between his arms. Suguru finally sits up, adjusting against the pillows.
“Satoru?”
“Hm?”
“Are you okay?”
Satoru keeps a watch on his right wrist now. He taps a finger against his elbow or his foot against the ground when he’s still for too long. He stretches more, moves around more, makes use of the space his limbs can invade around him. It took a while for Suguru to notice, but once he did he wasn't able to unsee it. He reminds him of an antsy dog kept in its crate for too long.
Satoru sits upright, and in the dim light, Suguru can make out his raised brows and taut mouth. He can see him thinking earnestly, and Suguru almost laughs. Of course, he hadn’t considered the possibility that he wasn’t alright.
At least, not in this sense.
“Nah,” he says. “Not really. What else is new?”
Now, now Suguru does laugh. He has to cover his face to muffle the sound and he feels the distribution of weight on the bed shift as Satoru leans towards him, careful not to touch him.
“What’s so funny, huh?”
Suguru shakes his head, “I mean, it’s not funny.”
“Then why are you laughing?”
Suguru drops his hand, “Because we’re a mess. This is ridiculous.”
Satoru stares at him, and slowly, starts to laugh, too. It’s a quiet thing, but it’s the most honest sound Suguru had heard from him since he woke up.
“It is ridiculous,” Satoru repeats, and something shifts in the tone of his voice. He’s quiet still—they both are whispering, after all—but Suguru gulps, nervous. Satoru is too, because he stops talking, though his voice is cut off by himself, trailing off to a consideration.
“But?” Suguru prompts. The light from the television flickers to black when a commercial ends, and another takes a moment to start.
“It’s ridiculous,” Satoru tries again. “But you’re back.”
Satoru isn’t wrong. Despite everything, despite the death and the grief and the regret and the revival, Suguru is back. It’s just the truth: Geto Suguru is alive.
He inhales shakily, and it’s the first real breath he’s taken since he died.
“Yeah,” he says, softly. “But I’m back.”
And what is there to say after? What other simple truth is there to divulge or explore between them? Suguru’s eyes drift to the bed sheets pooled by his waist, Satoru sitting by his leg blurry beyond where his vision is focused.
He gets an idea then, and practices the movement of the words he has to say with his tongue, tests the syllables in do you want to, do you want to —
“Do you want to sleep here?”
He knows Satoru is looking at him.
“Here?” he replies, and Suguru nods.
“If you want,” he adds.
Satoru doesn’t outright reject him, which is good, but he does shift his weight. He checks the watch on his wrist and scratches the back of his head, fidgeting.
“Nah,” he finally says. “I’m good.”
“Are you going to sleep?”
Satoru shrugs, “Eh, maybe. I don’t know. Do you want some coffee?”
“Might as well,” Suguru says, the end of well swallowed by a yawn.
Satoru stands up, “No cream?”
“Actually, yeah.”
Satoru whistles, “Wow, what? I guess you really have changed.”
Suguru rolls his eyes.
“Do you want anything on it?” Satoru continues, teasing. “Whip cream? Some caramel drizzle? Maybe you want some soy milk—”
“Stop it, just go get us coffee before I go back to sleep.”
“I’ll wake you up,” Satoru warns.
Suguru waves him off, “I bet you will.”