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He was eating curses. One, after another, after another, after another, after another, like there was no end to them, like this was some kind of nightmarish buffet with no cost, no limit, his hands fumbled messily and he felt his palm mash against his teeth, sometimes a spare dripping or tendril would lash acidly against his cheek or burn a line down his chin, and still he kept eating and eating and eating, nauseous with the grease of swallowed blood, and it took him a long time, too long, to realize this was not some terrible dream, or an exaggerated memory, or even hell. He was simply still alive.
“There we go,” he heard his voice chuckle as his hands finally managed to roll polish a writhing curse into a neat, smooth sphere. “That’s not so hard.”
Don’t, Suguru found himself thinking. Amazing, that he could think, despite whatever it was that he was now. But the curse shuddered still, and was too large, needed to be passed from hand to mouth with both palms; and once jammed there his throat protested, strained, refused. His body choked — the curse squished — a molar punctured its feeble spooling and it unraveled in a gush of slime clotted and gritty with rolling eyes and shards of bone.
His body spat and gagged. And then it licked its lips, and raised its dripping hands, and tried again.
:::
Not even when Suguru had been alive had he managed this level of gluttony. And he did not trust it.
At night, when the thief was asleep with his body, Suguru ventured, carefully — tried to recall the once thoughtless act of manipulating his fingers and toes — he attempted to slow his breathing, even stop it. Nothing worked; he might as well have been a balloon, tied and weakly bobbing in every exhale. He could do nothing but follow and watch, gathering information, seeking an explanation.
Why am I still here?
His body. The whistling dregs of his soul. At the end, at the very end, the idea of death had come as a strange, heavy relief. No more foul tastes, no more scrubbing the blood from his fingernails, no more marching to keep out of the long shadow that followed him wherever he went, a cold and relentless darkness that suggested he never again would ever really rest.
Instead, here he was, still. Rolling up curses, walking through the stinking jungle of Tokyo streets, as if searching for…something.
But what?
There were not many hints. Whoever was here was fastidious; they had perhaps not merely wanted a body, but the specific identity of Getou Suguru. They did not change much of anything, not his clothing and not his hairstyle and not even his toothpaste, which was a mild relief, as it was the only brand he’d found that could effectively clean his mouth from the spoor of his unusual diet. The only alteration was the taut line threaded across his forehead, which Suguru tried and failed to examine closely during daily shaves, a habit the thief performed with practiced expertise.
One morning, the shave was interrupted near its end by a knock on the door. The thief rinsed, toweled dry, re-examined themselves in the mirror, moved a strand of hair carefully into place; and then took up the razor, and held it secretly in his sleeve as they moved to the entryway.
The door opened to reveal two girls.
No, Suguru thought. He had been wondering what had become of them, and hoped their absence meant they were far away and safe, rather than dead. His body’s fingers smoothed over the razor even as he felt a squeeze of warmth in his stolen chest. It seemed that even without the guidance of its original occupant, his body still had some memory of its previous ownership: the sight of the children he had raised like daughters was a balm, even with them both glaring balefully.
Suguru’s mouth stretched, to make a smile far wider than any he had ever made when his body was his own.
“Good morning. It’s been a while. I thought you’d given up.”
“Give him back,” Nanako said.
“We have a plan,” Mimiko continued. “You’ll regret it if you don’t.”
Suguru felt his hand tighten on the razor. For once, Suguru tried it — reached, with all his might — even if the thief found him and exorcised him it would be worth saving Nanako and Mimiko one last time.
But his intention was weaker than a passing thought. Not a single hair shifted. The razor flashed — Nanako cried out, barring her arms in front of she and Mimiko — but the blade wasn’t aimed at them. His body posed it at the the wrist of his opposite arm, and dragged. Mimiko shrieked.
“Stop! Stop that!”
“Such a waste,” Suguru’s voice said mildly, carving a scarlet line all the way to his elbow. “For a perfectly healthy body to be disfigured this way.”
“Stop,” Nanako murmured. Her voice was low and unsteady. “We get it. Stop.”
The thief flipped the razor playfully into the air and caught it again before pocketing it.
“Come in and fix me up,” they ordered, striding back inside the apartment. Nanako and Mimiko obeyed, hurriedly tip-toeing over the drops of blood left in the hall, retrieving the first-aid kit from its cabinet, washing and winding his arm with a bandage. The two of them did it with as much care as they ever had in the days before, even with shaking hands. Mimiko held their bags, her knuckles pale; she jumped when Suguru’s body pointed at a flyer crammed messily into an outside mesh pocket.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing,” Mimiko managed.
“Trash,” Nanako muttered.
“Give it to me.”
After an exchange of glances, Mimiko handed the paper over to the thief’s blood-stained fingers. It was indeed just trash — a flyer, the kind that too-pushy advertisers on the street would rap on the shoulders of passerby until it was taken and pocketed. In this case, the flyer was about the opening of a new cafe in Harajuku, specializing in a type of waffle caped around a truly impressive amount of ice cream.
“Done,” Nanako said through gritted teeth. His body turned away from the flyer, to examine the girls’ work.
“Good enough,” the thief said. “Now, listen, girls.”
The thief set the flyer aside, and then faced Nanako and Mimiko, elbows on knees, as of a teacher giving a gentle but firm lecture.
“It hurts me as much as it hurts you, to see this poor body suffer.” The thief frowned, and rubbed Suguru’s chest.
The frown was exaggerated but — it did hurt, Suguru realized. He couldn’t manipulate a single muscle but his body was reacting again, just as it had when it opened the door; this time, emanating a deep soreness when it observed Mimiko fail to stop a furious tear from slipping down her cheek. If the thief felt anything themselves, however, it didn’t show in their next words, spoken with nothing but coldness.
“I’d rather not resort to more serious measures. Do you understand?”
Nanako’s fist quivered. In the end, she and Mimiko said it together: “Yes.”
“Wonderful.” His body beamed. “Now, get out of my sight.”
Sensing their release, they fled, without so much as a backward glance or farewell or any other indication they suspected Suguru was still present, somehow, some way. All they had truly wanted was his body, so much that a little show with a razor was enough to scare them.
Don’t, Suguru thought, weakly. None of this was worth the dumb prize of the meat whose only significance was that Suguru had, for some brief period, fully occupied it. He should have taught them something about that. Now he couldn’t even watch them go, because the thief was turning his eyes were turning back to the flyer. Lifting it. Feeling another reaction in his body, a pinpoint sting in the left side of his chest, and meeting it this time not with coldness but curiosity. Something about this had caught this body’s attention. Snagged the corner of its eye like a sterling fly to a fish.
Suguru had no body with which to hold his breath. All he could do was watch as his eyes read over the flyer information: flavors, the shop address, the opening date, which was today. The thief set the flyer down again, thoughtful.
He thought it, once more: Don’t.
It had never worked before, and it didn’t now. The thief rolled his sleeve down over the bandages, and left.
:::
The thief was practiced — they knew what they were doing — they sat back with ease, let Suguru’s body pilot itself as if in a dream through stations brimming with monkeys, and then further, to a street in Harajuku lined with dessert shops. Before, Suguru had taken pains to be here only rarely, only if Nanako and Mimiko wanted to try something new — and even without Suguru at the helm, his body’s motions stilted accordingly, paused beneath the main street’s LED-covered archway and would not proceed.
The thief took control back, and looked around, for why. Suguru’s eyes caught on the dessert shops, and —
And in his abyss, Suguru gasped as the thief — reached, with casual effort — stirred some deep core and began sifting and picking, coming finally across a long-buried memory that they hefted and held to the light: a calm day, with a blue sky and an exorcism, easy but celebrated nevertheless with the largest crepe that could be found, overflowing with strawberries and whipped cream.
“I really don’t understand why you eat that stuff. One day when I dispose of your body I’m going to find that your veins don’t have any blood in them, just sugar water.”
“Firstly, you’ll never dispose of my body, because I’ll never die. Secondly, I’d never let you tear apart my body. You’d be way too sad.”
“I would not.”
“You would! Wouldn’t she, Suguru?”
Presently, Suguru’s eyes dragged over the low wall on which they’d sat, which was obscured by racks of clothing dragged out into the street. Satoru had been in such a good mood; he’d made noisy compliments about every strawberry he ate while Suguru and Shoko smoked placidly. In the end, Shoko had refused every repeatedly offered bite, and Suguru had finally relented, with a sigh. He leaned sideways and opened his mouth, and Satoru pushed it in with one finger. The way he did it was messy — his fingertip pressed against Suguru’s tongue, for an instant, and then was gone.
“Sweet, right?”
A simple and uneventful day. The kind that was painfully plain to actually live through, and whose virtues were only clear in hindsight, when reflecting on whether anything in his life had ever brought him close to any real happiness. The thief squinted in, and saw everything Suguru had quietly stored — the whisk of Satoru’s hair in the breeze — the wrinkle of his nose as the cigarette smoke drifted his direction — the errant smear of cream in the corner of his mouth, which he swiped with his own thumb and licked away.
His body huffed out a light laugh.
“Interesting,” the thief said, blinking. “I didn’t realize it was like that.”
Like what? Suguru demanded, silently. So I once knew Gojo Satoru. It’s not a secret. So what?
So strange to feel things even without his body — to think Who cares, why does it matter, and not feel any accompanying sweat in his hands, not even a tension in his throat. His body’s eyes narrowed with thought as the thief continued walking to the address on the flyer, as they continued to look around and peruse the memories that sprouted at every sight along the way.
There — the too-high-end place where Satoru had bought his darkened glasses, for a price so absurdly high that it had been burned into Suguru’s memory.
There — a dessert shop, this one with parfaits, one of the half-dozen he and Satoru had visited in a single day, chasing yet another of Satoru’s capricious whims.
There — an open-faced restaurant so busy that people were spilling out into the street, a place where Suguru did not have any particular memories, but which he found some part of himself noting automatically as a good place to camouflage.
“Really,” the thief murmured. ”Camouflage? Even with his six eyes?”
It wasn’t like some kind of cloak of invisibility, but Satoru was exposed to plenty of things constantly, and besides that mostly concerned himself with…himself. Given enough distractions, given that he wasn’t expecting any danger and no one was making any sudden movements or emanating killing intent, it wasn’t impossible to sneak up on him, or even to find some uncommon interstice where he could be observed silently for minutes at a time, a sucker pouched in his left cheek while he lied in bed searching for shiny Pokèmon.
“I see,” the thief said, as if this were a conversation, and not a blood-curdling violation. Suguru seethed. His body was one thing, but — this —
How more often than not Satoru ended up falling asleep that way, console screen down on his chest and still making noises, sprawled dead-center on Suguru’s bed, with the sucker leaving a sticky trail on the pillow. How his leaden body refused to be moved and even after Suguru kicked him awake he would make such a fuss it was easier to just leave him but at least demand a fair share of blankets, which was conceded about half the time.
Not even Shoko knew about that. Or, if she did, she had the sense and decency to not to pry and plow and shovel like a rabid dog in a garden. Clawing through dark glasses removed and set aside on the bedside table that had become their nightly resting place. Gnawing into the first time Suguru had landed a punch on him and Satoru’s eyes had glimmered like the surface of a still pond after a rock was thrown in. Chewing through summer nights smoking and drinking cold tea from a vending machine, winter days skipping class to read comics under a kotatsu, spring mornings waiting in line for cherry blossom-themed dessert specials before they sold out.
The thief looked down at the crumpled flyer, comparing the address to the building they stood before, which already had a line forming outside. This sort of promotion was exactly what Satoru would like, was the kind of thing that a Suguru from a past life would have kept to give to him later, and the impulse to do so had never faded, even after nine years, even after death.
You’ll be disappointed, Suguru thought, as his body searched for a good hiding place and settled on one inside a bustling convenience store across the street. The thief opened up a magazine and flipped through it, keeping an eye on the growing queue.
It’s a school day, Suguru continued.
As if that had ever stopped him. After some minutes there was a flurry in the line, chatter and heads lifting as a group arrived, comprised of three students, a panda, and a pale-haired man with a dark blindfold, who appeared to be asking everyone in line if he could cut ahead.
Don’t, Suguru thought, weakly. An old compulsion: a single glimpse was not worth meeting as enemies. But now he had no say in it, because the thief was turning his eyes to watch, brazen. Setting the magazine down. Feeling another reaction in his body, a pinpoint sting in the left side of his chest that unfurled into a marrow-deep ache, and meeting it this time not with curiosity but excitement. The thief had found what they wanted, almost. They touched Suguru’s hand to his forehead, as if in thought, and plunged again, searching, searching.
The time Satoru plucked the cigarette out of Suguru’s mouth and put it in his own and inhaled, only to dissolve into a fit of coughing. The time they got into a fight about something Suguru couldn’t remember, but was stupid enough that Shoko refused to tend to them and so they had done it themselves, hissing and grumbling over burning ointment and uneven bandages. The time during a heatwave when they’d collapsed on a floor strewn with popsicle wrappers, the time they’d visited a pet store and Satoru had charmed the attendants into letting them hold a couple squirmy puppies, the time Satoru asked to try tying Suguru’s hair up and failed utterly, the time they’d all had a drinking party and Suguru had woken up with Shoko gone and an arm draped over his neck, and a soft, deep exhaling rustling his hair and smelling faintly of fruit juice.
Months, in the space of seconds. Simple and uneventful days, nevertheless sorted through greedily, until there, in the center of them all, was one last memory. The very last one.
Satoru, approaching.
Every step slow, but even, like the ticking of a clock.
Reaching.
Setting his hand on Suguru’s chest, as gently as he once had.
And then not so gently.
Before Suguru’s vision blackened, it had blurred. Just his animal body, reacting with tears to the marrow-deep ache that erupted into something that stabbed like a knife. He heard one last whisper: those final words, repeated, private syllables, meant for only them. He tasted one last thing: something soft, and too sweet to be blood.
It was happening again: salt and water, clouding his eyes. If it were still his body, Suguru would have trembled, with fury. If it were still his, he would have at least wiped away the tear that streaked nakedly down his cheek, which the thief seemed to not have noticed, at all. They were too busy, occupied. Laughing with delight.
They found it.