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1.
It’s perhaps not a surprise that they don’t get along for a while, him and Suguru. Shoko theorizes about it, mostly idly, as she mills about his room a few weeks after the start of school, picking up everything on his desk and shelves, studying it, and then placing it back down.
“You like to be liked,” she tells a snow globe with a little Mount Fuji trapped inside, a souvenir from their trip to Yamanashi just a few days prior. “And he doesn’t like you. I think that’s the problem.”
“I don’t care about being liked.” Satoru’s laying on his bed, keeping a careful eye on Shoko as she sets the snow globe down and turns to a stack of notebooks he has balanced on the corner of his chair. “Don’t touch those.”
Her hand retracts, and she smirks. “You like to be respected,” she amends. “You’re used to it.”
Satoru has nothing to say in response, so he just stares at the ceiling.
It’s true that being the Gojo clan’s famed offspring comes with its fair share of head-ducking and groveling, from shamans and non-sorcerers alike, and it’s equally true that Suguru is insufferably impermeable to that all—he’s above it, really . Looking down his nose at Satoru, eyes narrowed, unimpressed by his eyes, his Infinity. What really is the salt in the wound is that Suguru has a leg to stand on with his own haughtiness: he’s powerful. Powerful in a way that electrifies Satoru, hairs on his arms standing up, mouth watering with the taste of a challenge. Cursed spirit manipulation itself is a formidable technique; wielded by Suguru’s maddeningly expert hands, though, and it’s enough to rival Satoru’s.
“Maybe you’re just jealous.” Shoko says, an evil glint to her eye, and Satoru points to the door.
The tension doesn’t come to a head for a while, though; where Satoru is brash, loud, openly rude in his arrogance, Suguru is clean-cut and refined, his self-confidence contained to knowing glances and razor-sharp smirks. He’s hard to get a real rise out of, simply smiling off attacks that would have others at Satoru’s throat with a snarl. That, perhaps, is the most annoying thing of all: he won’t even dignify Satoru by being an outright asshole to him. It’s like he’s just any other normal student at the school to Suguru, unimpressive and unimportant. It makes his skin itch. It makes his face burn.
It—well, it makes him feel some other things, too, things that are too amorphous and shrouded in shadow to put words to, so he doesn’t bother. He converts the vague feelings to irritation, anger, and runs with it.
And keeps running until one day, mid-September, when Yaga unceremoniously shepherds them to the training ring at the edge of campus, takes his place in the stands, and says with a grin, “have at it.”
It’s not until the punch hits Satoru square in the stomach that he realizes Suguru means business. He’s knocked back, dust scattering as he smacks into the floor with a groan, and at once the black-haired boy is above him, eyes narrowing. The air behind him shimmers, pockets of energy opening up as the eyes of the curses waiting become visible, and Satoru grins, wild. So that’s how he wants to do it.
“Try that again,” he says, rising to his feet, a ball of Red materializing at the tip of two extended fingers, a gun he aims right at Suguru’s chest. “I’ll make you cry like a little kid.”
“So arrogant,” Suguru says, barely a scoff, and the curse lunges in time with him.
Ten minutes in, and Satoru’s shirt is splattered with blood. His mouth feels raw, throbbing in time with his heart from where Suguru smacked him cleanly across the face. His ribs ache, too, another blow that he’d absorbed with them, sent staggering back across the clearing blinking sweat out of his eyes. He aims shots of Red at Suguru, but to his credit, he’s light on his feet, evasive, dodging them easily, curses absorbing the brunt of the impact. Satoru’s managed to mess him up, though, still; blood streaks the side of his face, an angry welt on his temple that glares at Satoru from across the dirt. The bridge of his nose is darkening with a bruise, too—Satoru had gotten a blow in there, felt under his hands the sick, satisfying crunch of bone that meant a break, blood pouring down onto his own rumpled uniform shirt. A trip to Shoko after, then. Satoru evades another flyhead, and his side screams in protest—for the both of them, then.
“Come on,” he grits out, half to himself. “This all you got, Suguru?”
Suguru bows, spits blood into the dust. When he straightens, his teeth are outlined in red, a grisly mouth of headstones. Satoru wants to knock them in. He wants to see how hard this guy can bite, really.
“So arrogant,” Suguru repeats, wiping his lips. “You’re not looking too good yourself, you know.”
“Fuck you,” Satoru spits, and aims a swirl of Red right at Suguru’s chest.
He evades yet again, slamming into Satoru’s stomach with his shoulder, sending them both flying. Satoru flips onto his side, gasping in a lungful of air that isn’t there, and swings blindly, grinning as his fists make sick, satisfying connection with the soft underside of Suguru’s ribs. He feels a kick to the shin, a knee in his calf, and with blind hands Satoru grabs a shirt collar and swings, throwing Suguru’s body back down to the dirt with a grunt. He ends up on top, one hand flattened against Suguru’s chest, the other holding a palm of Red right at his temple.
“Told you I’d make you cry,” Satoru heaves out. The inside of his mouth tastes metallic, iron-filled. “Fucking dick.”
“Do I look like I’m crying?” Suguru pants, fresh blood trickling from his nose down the side of his cheek, pooling lazily in the dust below them. “You’re so full of yourself it’s— ah— humiliating.”
“Watch it,” Satoru levels out, bringing the Red closer to Suguru’s face, watching as his eyes flutter shut just for a second. “Don’t forget who you’re mouthing off to.”
“You’re ridiculous.” Suguru’s voice comes out a rasp, dark eyes dancing in the light the Red emanates. “Your name couldn’t mean less to me. I don’t give a shit who— hah —who you are, Satoru.”
He sneers out the last part, and something formless rears its head in Satoru’s stomach. A blow of Red this close to his body would kill him, leave him certifiably brain-dead if it didn’t, and Satoru toys with the idea for a second, turning it over with bruised hands in his mind. This would be the instruction of his family, wouldn’t it? Show them who you are. Send a message. They’d want him to leave Suguru here bleeding out of his mouth and burnt to a crisp, and he entirely could. Judging by the way Suguru’s gaze falters just for a second as Satoru’s hand edges closer, closer, he knows he could, too.
“Go on then,” he says, blood-soaked smile plastered back on with relish. “Make me cry, Satoru.”
He’s being goaded, Satoru realizes. Anyone else would be snot-nosed, sobbing, begging for their lives. They’d be nervous, at least, silent and watching, waiting for his next move. But Suguru, he goads. He teases. He laughs at him. The bastard.
Satoru extinguishes the Red, palm prickling, and stands. “Same time tomorrow, eh?” he says, tipping his head.
The thrill of a challenge, a competition. An equal. For the first time in his life, an equal.
Suguru’s smile shifts from hard-edged and mocking to something else, something more, and he laughs.
“Sure. Tomorrow.”
2.
The last mission they ever go on together ends up with Suguru suspended from the ceiling, blood pouring from his nose, talking in a voice that doesn’t sound like his.
“What will you do now?” Suguru says, head tipped eerily to the side. Outside, night has fallen, and the basement they’d tracked the curse into is dimly lit, sending shadows sprawling across the walls, twisting and contorting as if they, too, want to escape.
Except Satoru doesn’t want to escape, really. He mostly just wants this curse to stop possessing his friend.
He calls up twin spheres of Blue in his hands, cursed energy crackling up and down his arms, and Suguru—the curse—lets out an awful, grating laugh that makes the hairs on the back of Satoru’s neck stand up.
“I think we both know you won’t fire that,” curse-Suguru says, eyes flashing. “You wouldn’t want to hurt him, now, would you?”
“Too scared to fight us on your own?” Satoru says in lieu of responding. The curse isn’t wrong, necessarily; he doesn’t want to fire at Suguru’s body, doesn’t want to think of what might or might not happen as a consequence. “That’s pretty pathetic, even coming from you. I thought you were supposed to be hot shit, too?”
Curse-Suguru laughs again, and Satoru has to grit his teeth around the sound. Suguru’s normal laugh is soft, sweet, a breeze that never ends on a hot summer’s day. More than once, Satoru has thought, somewhat delirious with a fondness he’s grown accustomed to, about finding a way to bottle the sound up, tie it around his neck like a piece of jewelry to be carried with him whenever he goes. This laugh, though, this is awful. Satoru thinks about Suguru, the real Suguru, trapped helplessly in his own body, unable to wrestle back control from the curse, and real rage bubbles up in his stomach.
“Coward,” he says, and watches as black flames crackle around curse-Suguru’s fingertips. “Get out of his body and fight me properly. I don’t like to half-ass this shit, you know.”
“Why would I do that? You seem to be the scared one here.” Curse-Suguru tips his head, smile menacing. “Go one, fire. Hurt him.”
Satoru takes a step forward, but the Blue remains in his hands, only half-heartedly trained at the curse before him.
“Get out of his body,” he repeats, useless. There should be no mercy, no one spared at the expense of himself, of doing his job. People die in the world of jujutsu, even people he cares about, abstractly, loves.
Does he love Suguru? He thinks about Toji, the weeks prior, waking up with his own blood in his mouth and the assassin nowhere to be seen, the cold spike of dread that split him open worse than any inverted spear ever could when he realized what this meant: that Suguru was next. Suguru, very possibly, was already dead by now.
Any mission could be failed, any bounty lost, any vessel decimated, shot dead at his feet. Suguru, though, that was unthinkable, impossible. There wasn’t a world where that happened and Satoru was left standing, head held high.
“I can hear him, you know,” the curse says suddenly, and Satoru’s heart plummets. “Inside of me. Talking to me. Asking me not to hurt you. It’s cute.”
“Shut up,” Satoru hisses, and he’s dropping all attempts at cocky pretense now. The Blue sits heavy in his hands, a demand waiting, but he doesn’t move—couldn’t, even if he wanted to. “Shut up and fight me.”
“You fight me.” The scowl looks familiar, a distant cousin of an expression the real Suguru might have given him over stolen snacks, sweet-sick breath breathed down his neck in an apology. But there is no light here, nothing but Suguru’s body suspended in air, face twitching as he and the curse wrestle for control. When it speaks again, its voice sounds hoarse, crackly. “Oh, he’s begging me, really. Can’t bear the thought of him being responsible for anything that happens to you—isn’t that sweet?” Curse-Suguru tips his head, bang flopping to the side. “I think he really likes you, Satoru.”
“Shut up,” he whispers again.
“Loves, even, maybe. He loves you.” The curse’s smile turns dangerous, an ugly contortion on what usually is such a kind face. It makes Satoru’s stomach cramp, painfully, a gasp threatening to work its way out of his mouth. “Aw, he loves you, Satoru. Does that make you happy? Do you love him? You must, eh? Why else won’t you just fire and—”
But the rest of the tirade is cut off by the walls around him exploding as Satoru does, in fact, fire: twin white-hot balls of blue that slam right into the curse’s chest, sending him spiraling through the air before smacking against the floor with a sick thwack . Blood roaring dizzyingly in his own ears, Satoru fires once more with hands that move of their own accord; Suguru’s body jerks, washed in light, and a groan rips from his lips that sounds familiar and human. It’s all Satoru can do not to fall on his face as he sprints around debris, knees slamming into smoldering wood as he leans over Suguru, cupping his face.
His skin is cold under Satoru’s touch, but that means nothing. It can’t mean anything. He’s just unconscious. He’s breathing, he must be, he has to be—
“Suguru,” Satoru whispers, voice nearly drowned out by the creaking of the house around them, the dull roar of fire. He tries again, louder. “Suguru.”
Nothing. Suguru’s skin looks gray. Satoru’s heart has disappeared, and the cave that yawns in its absence makes his stomach invert, curl in on itself like a dead bug. He pats Suguru’s face, first gently, then with more insistence.
“Wake up,” he says, and his voice sounds thick to his own ears. The unthinkable, the impossible. “Fucking wake up, you asshole.”
He breathes in broken glass, the insides of his throat tearing. Something in his mouth burns, the taste metallic and sour, and he can’t make himself stop smacking Suguru’s face, even after brown eyes crack open, lashes fluttering.
“Ow,” mumbles Suguru, then raises a bloodied hand to ward off Satoru’s attacks. “Hurts.”
“You’re such a fucking asshole,” Satoru says, a hysterical laugh bubbling up inside him. “I thought I killed you.”
Suguru smiles, though the expression is guarded. A lazy trail of blood escapes from the corner of his lip, tracing a path down his cheek, and Satoru brushes it away with his thumb. Then keeps his hand there, cupped gently against Suguru’s still-cold jaw.
“Not yet,” he rasps. “Though one day you will, probably.”
“Shut up.” The backs of Satoru’s nose prickles, all of a sudden. “Let’s go home, okay? Get you fixed up?”
With a groan, Suguru drops his head so his face is pressed clean into Satoru’s palm. Slowly, his eyes flutter shut. “Yeah,” he whispers, voice half-muffled. “Let’s.”
3.
The first time they see each other after the defection is an accident.
In his worst moments—of which there were plenty, these days—Satoru had thought about calling Suguru’s number, arranging some sort of meeting. Acquiring closure. The conversation outside the KFC—if it could even be called a conversation; that seemed to imply some sort of delicacy and compassion which, in Satoru’s memory of the whole thing, there was very little of—had left him with more questions than answers, and if there’s anything Satoru really hates, it’s being in the dark.
Well, if there’s anything Satoru really, truly hates, it’s a Suguru he can’t access anymore, can’t see or speak to. It’s a Suguru who’s gone.
It’s a Suguru he has to kill.
But thinking about that presents complications, more than a few, so he frames it as being left in the dark in his mind. In a way, he has been. In a way, he understands everything Suguru did with crystal-clear perfection. It’s a messy situation.
It’s messy, and he doesn’t call, so of course the mess keeps growing and growing until one day, suddenly, it upends at his feet one year later, spilling all over the sun-baked pavement outside his favorite sweet shop as he stares first into the wide-eyed gaze of two little girls and then into the even wider one of none other than Suguru.
“Um,” he says, blinking at the trio. There are several more responses that come to mind— what the fuck being a prominent one, and fuck you being another—but his brain-to-mouth connection has short circuited; all he can do is stare, open-mouthed and stupid, as Suguru rests his hands on the girls’ backs and nudges them towards the door.
“Go inside,” he says, ducking his head down to them. “Don’t steal anything.”
“Is this that—” The girl with the lighter hair squints up at him, brows furrowed, but before she can get the rest of her sentence out, her sister takes hold of her arm and drags her inside. The door swings shut behind them with a faint ding of a bell.
“Satoru.” Suguru ducks his head once, a low bow that feels more mocking than anything. When he straightens up, though, his gaze is deadly sincere. “Good to see you.”
Good to see him, more like. This is not the Getou Suguru Satoru had grown accustomed to during their final year together—his skin is tan, healthy, the perpetual bags clinging to the skin under his eyes a thing of the past, it seems. His hair is sleek and well-groomed, falling over his shoulder in a neat, shining wave. The smile he gives Satoru is tight, but not hostile; the look in his eyes is cautious, but not angry.
Well, that makes one of them, then. That’s good.
“I could kill you, you know.” Satoru’s voice sounds conversational to his own ears, which is good, he supposes. No need for hysterics so early on in the exchange. “Per the higher-ups, I’m supposed to.”
An empty threat. Satoru has not once done something because the higher-ups told him to. Where Suguru’s retort, a calm revealing of this fact once would’ve sat is nothing but a faint sigh, then a shrug.
“Okay,” he says. “Are you going to?”
Satoru wants to hit him. He wants to knock his stupid face in. He wants to kiss him and take him home and keep him there forever.
Instead, he feels himself grin. “Want me to?”
His hands twitch at his side, thumb half-curling around to rest atop middle and ring finger. It’s a weak gesture; Satoru wouldn’t do it here, not now. It has to be right, doesn’t it? Cosmic? Devastating enough to undo the damage Suguru has left in his wake, the deaths that trail around him wherever he goes?
The excuses are as hollow as they are humiliating. Still, Satoru drops the Hollow Purple gesture, and Suguru’s lips twitch. Not a smile, not a grimace. Something amorphous in the middle.
Isn’t that what they’re best at, anyways?
“I’m supposed to kill you,” Satoru repeats, and now Suguru does smile, one corner of his mouth pulling upwards.
“Are you warning me?”
“Are those the girls from the village?”
The question surprises Satoru as much as it does Suguru. The latter’s eyebrows raise and, just for a second, something dark flits through his eyes. The wound still aches, then, good. Satoru half-wants to reach out and press down on it, make this ugly and mean. Yeah, the village. The night you killed a hundred innocent people. The night you killed your parents. The night you left, that one. I remember it.
Do you?
“Yes,” Suguru says, tone as even as ever. Forget the wound, Satoru wants to take Suguru’s voice and destroy it, leave it cracking, shaky, raspy, begging for relief. In more ways than one.
Jesus Christ. Satoru almost laughs, a hysterical noise that threatens to rip its way out of him. He feels stretched thin, a rubber band gearing towards snapping. But Suguru is as calm as ever, and what really pisses Satoru off is that he knows Suguru isn’t calm. He isn’t composed. He isn’t level-headed and serene and mature. He’s as every bit nasty and mean and messy as Satoru is, and in their years at school, the damn act had finally fallen at his feet. But now he has the nerve to reinstate it—what, as if it meant nothing? Any part of it—any part of them?
He sounds hysterical even to himself—ever the jealous girlfriend. This time he really does laugh, a shaky sounding thing.
“How are they doing?”
Suguru frowns, suspicion etched into every feature of his face. “Fine,” he says, then blinks. “Better.”
“Huh.” Satoru pushes his glasses up off his nose to rub at his eyes, still grinning a little wildly. “Well, that’s good. And you?”
The suspicion shifts into something much more open-ended. There’s a squint to Suguru’s gaze that makes it look like pain, almost, loss.
“I’m alright,” he says, pressing his lips together.
“Really.”
That earns him a shrug. “I’ve made my bed,” he says simply. “And now I sleep in it. Not really a surprising turn of events.”
“You could come back,” Satoru blurts before he can think twice, and now it’s Suguru’s turn to laugh.
“You really think that? I have a feeling the higher-ups might disagree on one or two of the finer points, there.”
“Who gives a shit.” Satoru waves a hand at the girls still inside the store, tiny hands pressed up against the boxes of candies as they peer inside. “They can’t say no to me.”
“The strongest, eh?” Suguru’s smile turns a little bitter. “Even if I could come back, I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“You say that like it’s a simple question.”
“Isn’t it?” Satoru rubs at his eyes some more. They’ve been getting more and more sensitive lately, and looking at Suguru now is like staring into the sun. He can feel a headache building up behind them, two live-wires of pain.
“I don’t agree with what the school is doing.” Suguru says finally. He shrugs, gaze flitting between Satoru’s shoulder and the girls still idling around the candy. “It’s not a simple fix. I can’t just walk back in like nothing’s happened.”
“You won’t.” Satoru swallows. “That’s what you mean.”
Suguru huffs. “Sure. I won’t.”
Satoru bites the inside of his cheek hard, hard enough to draw blood. The image of Suguru before him fuzzes at the edges, swimming in time with his own head, and he has to force himself to breathe deep, swallow one more.
“Next time I see you,” he says, voice slow and shaky, “I’m going to kill you.”
For a moment, Suguru is silent, gaze searching. At his side, Satoru’s hand twitches, the Hollow Purple hand sign coming to life once more, and he watches Suguru’s eyes track it, gaze unreadable.
It makes Satoru want to scream, how far apart they are now. How the man standing before him looks like Suguru but feels like a stranger, except in all the ways that he doesn’t, not at all—and that, really, that’s even worse. That he’s still the same and yet still, Satoru can’t reach him.
“I look forward to it.” Suguru’s voice is a low hum. He keeps his gaze trained on Satoru’s hand as he ducks his head once more. “Until then, Satoru.”
He moves to the door. Appetite in a miserable heap at his own feet, Satoru spins on his heel and stalks off down the street.
4.
Slowly, the meetings become less accidental and more frequent. Satoru assumes this is some element of cowardice on his part, his own inability to let go of what already left him years ago. What he let leave—it was mutual, after all. Mutual and ugly and messy, made no cleaner by their half-chance encounters.
But they’re okay, sometimes, the meetings. When they manage to circumvent the number of sensitive subjects between them—Suguru’s defection, Suguru’s cult, Satoru’s job, Riko and Misato, Jujutsu High, jujutsu in general, the higher-ups, non-sorcerers, mass murder, regular-sized murder; the list goes on—they’re actually quite pleasant. They leave Satoru selfish, desperately searching for reasons to keep Suguru where he can see him, even as he has one foot already out the door. Sometimes he starts a fight. Sometimes he begs. Mostly, though, he says nothing, simply adjusts the folds of his newly-donned blindfold and watches Suguru watch him as he leaves, over and over again.
Satoru keeps waiting for it to hurt less. At some point, it will. The human brain cannot grieve forever. The punishment will end one day, surely.
Though that day is not today, because today, they are standing at opposite ends of Suguru’s living room, and Satoru is shouting.
“You think I’m going to let you just fucking walk around and do this?” Satoru’s arms are windmilling, voice pitching upwards in a way that should be embarrassing, probably would be if he was thinking that far ahead with things. He isn’t, though. All his thoughts are concentrated in this here moment: Suguru before him, lips pressing into a thin line, still-drying blood staining the folds of his robes, angry and red.
An anti-sorcerer vigilante group, one of the more prominent in Tokyo. The two hundred-odd bodies of every single member had been found earlier that day, most mutilated past the point of recognition. Even as he breathes in the yuzu and sandalwood smell of Suguru’s living room, the reek of blood still clings to the inside of Satoru’s nose, and his stomach churns.
So he waves another hand, he yells. He does whatever he can to turn Suguru into an enemy, a dangerous, apathetic killer who stares calmly at him now, arms folded. They are not seventeen anymore. Satoru can’t remember the last time he thought of the man before him without a bad taste in the back of his mouth.
“You have an execution order on your head.” Satoru’s jaw aches from the force with which he grits his teeth. “You can’t seriously be this stupid. You’re going to get yourself fucking killed.”
Suguru tips his chin up, just a fraction. “So, execute me, then.”
“Jesus Christ, Suguru, it’s not that simple—”
“No?” The corner of Suguru’s lip twitches. He steps forward and, before Satoru can keep distance with him, wraps cold fingers around his wrist and raises it.
His hands are clean, at least. Scrubbed raw and new. With a steady grip, Suguru molds Satoru’s fingers into the Hollow Purple hand sign and holds it up to his neck, bracketing the sides of his own throat with Satoru’s index and pinky fingers.
And Satoru, he does nothing, says nothing. His breath stops somewhere in his stomach, and helpless, he leaves it there.
He should kill him, Suguru. The man before him is a killer, and he’ll keep killing until someone puts a stop to it—until Satoru puts a stop to it.
This isn’t his friend. Suguru hasn’t been his friend in years.
But no cursed energy comes out of his hands, not even a whisper. Around Suguru’s throat, his fingers twitch.
“Do it.” Suguru blinks once at him, gaze unreadable. “You want to kill me, kill me.”
“I will,” Satoru rasps, but makes no move to act on the promise, just simply presses his knuckles harder against the hollow of Suguru’s throat, syncs his own breathing with the hammering pulse he tracks through his index finger.
“You never did follow orders well, huh?” A faint smile flashes across Suguru’s lips. The hand he still has around Satoru’s wrist tightens, ever so slightly. “Though I guess I thought a part of you would want to do this of your own accord.”
That stings, almost enough for Satoru to draw back. Through gritted teeth, he holds his ground. “Do you actually think I want to kill you?” He allows his voice to grow petulant, childish in its sadness just for a second. “Is that seriously what your opinion of me is?”
“Don’t you?” For a second, the look in Suguru’s eyes turns pained. “I know you hate me for leaving.”
He does, he doesn’t. He loves Suguru, he doesn’t. He wants to move continents, put oceans of distance between the two of them so that Satoru never ends up like this again, heart crumpling miserably in his chest, and he wants to fuse himself to the carpet they stand on, a permanent fixture of Suguru’s life until the end of time. He wants to kill Suguru, and he wants him to come home.
He wants, really, more than anything, to be seventeen again, to have the world at his feet, to get a do-over. To kill Toji before he ever got the chance to lay his hands on Suguru and Riko. To notice Suguru slipping before it was too late. To kill everyone in the village, to take the blame, to spare Suguru the life he’s created for himself.
“I know you hate me for not noticing,” he fires back, and like a hot coal, Suguru drops his wrist.
“You’ll do it one day,” Suguru says into the silence. His smile is sad. “I know you will.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“I know you.”
Satoru can’t find anything to say in response that won’t feel like ripping his heart out and the bloody mess into Suguru’s hands, so he drops his own hand, finally, and steps back.
Another failed mission. Satoru has become extraordinarily good at those, these days.
“Don’t let me catch you again,” he says, and before Suguru can say anything else, he turns on his heel and leaves.
He’s become extraordinarily good at that, too.
5.
“I’m thinking ‘bout teaching.”
The words are a mistake as soon as he says it, but the Sunday-morning calm is hypnotizing, loosening Satoru’s tongue dangerously. The trading of personal updates is rare: these days, their encounters end in arguments more often than not, the occasional trading of blows when Satoru is feeling particularly guilty, or angry, or a terrible combination of the two. And when Satoru sneaks into Suguru’s apartment late at night, their activities consist of very little conversation and much more of sex that feels, too often, like saying goodbye, over and over again. Usually, Satoru leaves before the sun’s up.
Usually, but not always. He likes to be selfish, sometimes, to close his eyes against the warmth of Suguru’s bare shoulder, to pretend that the man beside him isn’t a murderer, that in all these years, Satoru’s only unfinished task has been killing him.
But the deceptive calm cannot hold against this. At his side, Suguru stops lazily trailing his fingers up and down Satoru’s chest, frame tense.
Finally, he snorts, the sound loud and derisive. “Teach?” he echoes, and instantly the mood is soured.
With a scowl, Satoru shrugs him off, sitting up so he’s propped against the headboard, sheets tangled messily in his lap. Suguru eyes him but doesn’t move, his smile a little mean around the edges.
“Teach?” he repeats, snorting once more, and Satoru’s palms prickle.
“I’m being serious,” he says, teeth clenched.
Suguru props his head up on one hand, cheek squished against his palm. He looks strangely young, all of a sudden, and if Satoru squints, he can imagine they’re sprawled out across a slightly-bigger version of Suguru’s dorm room bed, back in Jujutsu High, young and silently in love.
They aren’t, though. Satoru is twenty-four and Suguru is a killer and right now, he’s laughing at him, grin knowing in a way that makes Satoru want to wipe it off his face with some cruel, cruel words of his own.
“And why do you want to teach?” Suguru tips his head. His grin is playful, almost. “Don’t tell me you’re having aspirations of changing things for the better, now.”
His tone drips with sardonicism, staining the sheets between them. Satoru grinds teeth until the sound of grating enamel fills his ears. “So what if I am? We can’t all be sadistic cynics like you.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m a sadist.” Suguru’s lips quirk. “More of a realist.”
“Right, sure.” Satoru presses fingertips into his eyes, the beginning whispers of a headache beginning to build up behind them. He misses his blindfold all of a sudden, feels exposed down to the bone without it. “A realist who—”
“I just don’t see what you think you’re going to change, is all.” Suguru cuts him off, half-shrugging. “It feels futile. But whatever.”
“Because you’re changing so much, aren’t you?” Satoru glares at him, feeling a lick of satisfaction burn through him when Suguru’s face twitches in surprise, just a bit. “All those innocent people you’re killing. Really making all of our lives easier.”
“So damn egocentric,” Suguru says, voice buoyed by a note of something dark coursing beneath it. “Who said I do any of this for your sake?”
No one. But Satoru likes to be selfish. He likes to pretend this is all out of love, a trick to soften the sting.
“I don’t want to hear anything about fucking futility coming from you,” is all he says. “Even if your plan wasn’t sadistic—because yes, Suguru, yes it fucking is—it won’t work. Never has, never will.” He punctuates the last part with a thump of the mattress between them; Suguru watches the spot where his hand rests before looking back up, eyebrows creeping towards his hairline.
“And since when have you ever been one to care about morals?” His smile, this time, is dangerous. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you were the one who was ready to wipe out the Star Religious Group at the drop of a hat.”
“And you—” Satoru jabs at him, letting fingers linger on Suguru’s chest before pulling back. “—were the one who actually went and wiped out an entire fucking village. And then, what, how many other people? All for what, exactly?”
“For the same reason you want to teach, I guess.” Once again, Suguru shrugs. “It’s the right thing to do.”
Satoru leans back, letting his head hit the wood of the headboard with a thunk. “You’re fucking crazy,” he says, and he almost laughs. Something threatens to bubble out of him, a hysterical feeling that rises in his chest at breakneck pace, “if you think those are the same thing, Suguru.”
“Both acts of futility.” Finally, Suguru sits up, shoulder almost pressing against Satoru’s. He stares off into the room around them, the early morning glow lighting everything up a soft gray. It’s too early to fight, too early to feel this scrubbed raw already. Satoru wants to pull Suguru in, bundle them up under the covers and fall back asleep, keeping the world around them at bay with locked doors and silenced phones. He wants to blow a hole in Suguru’s face, he wants to kiss him senseless.
He hasn’t known what he’s wanted in a long, long time.
“You won’t change anything,” Suguru continues. “The system will continue to fail the people it claims so ardently to protect, and the blood will just be on your hands now.”
“Don’t give me that shit,” Satoru snaps. “You wanna talk about being guilty?”
“You won’t stop there from being another Riko.” Suguru’s mouth twists all of a sudden, the expression ugly. “Or another Haibara. The school will keep finding kids and working them until there’s nothing left. And then they’ll throw them away and find someone new.”
“Fuck you,” Satoru snaps. “I’ll save the fucking word. Just you watch.”
Suguru says nothing, just looks over at him, expression sad. It’s worse than the fighting, than the maniacal rants, the blood-soaked robes and red-crusted nails. It’s worse than that times a million.
And the problem is that Satoru knows what he wants, really. The problem is he can’t have it. He can sleep with it, wake up with its hair in his mouth and his clothes on his floor; he can find it and fight it and aim killing blows he doesn’t have the guts to fire at its head, and he’ll still never have it.
“I wish it was different,” he whispers, staring down at his hands in his lap. “I wish you had stayed.”
Suguru takes a long, slow breath beside him. “I couldn’t. You know that.”
“I wish I could’ve made you.”
For a second, Suguru brushes their shoulders together, and no one is a killer. “You couldn’t. You know that, too."
.1
“You’re late again, as usual, Satoru.”
The first thing Satoru notices is the blood. The alley Suguru’s tucked himself into is shrouded in shadow, made worse by the setting sun around them, but there’s enough of it that he can’t miss it, couldn’t if he tried.
And try he does. His insides ache with the strain of it, but no amount of squinting in the right light will transform the scene before him. There is no more room to delay the inevitable. There is nowhere left for either of them to run.
“To think you’d be the one here at my end.” Suguru licks his lips, teeth bared for a second. “ Are you going to make sure my family is safe?”
Satoru thinks of the two girls, of Miguel and Manami, of the home Suguru had built up from the ground for them. You were my family, once , is what he wants to say, desperate and cruel. That was supposed to be me.
What he says instead: “Every last one of them managed to escape,” and pretends that the relief that etches through Suguru’s face, just for a second, does not hurt nearly as much as it does.
Suguru opens his mouth as if to speak, then closes it, a hiss on his breath. Blood trickles down from the side of his face, ugly red gashes that seal one of his eyes shut in a painful mass of torn skin.
“The ones in Kyoto,” Satoru hears himself say, and he’s happy, at least, that his voice comes out steady, that he isn’t hysterical, screaming, on his knees begging whatever deity will give him the time of day to turn back the clocks, to swap their places, to make Satoru anyone else, anyone but the man who has to finish Suguru off. “They were under your command?”
Suguru tips his head back against the brick behind him, grim working its way across his face. He grips his wounded shoulder with his good hand, knuckles white against his skin, and Satoru, for a moment, has the idea to call Shoko, to have her fix Suguru up, send him on his way.
To prolong this, selfishly, just a moment more.
“Yes,” Suguru rasps. “They all were.” He shifts against the brick some more, blinking up at the sky above them, the beautiful mesh of pinks and blues, cotton-candy clouds that make Satoru want to scream at the irony of it all. “I’m a kind person. Unlike you, Satoru.”
And it hurts. It hurts in a way Satoru did not think it could, an aching yawn in his chest that swallows everything inside him. He bites down on the inside of his cheek, hard enough to draw blood. A pale comparison to the man before him. A cheap attempt at placing them on par, one final time. The strongest—together again, at last.
Suguru relaxes back against the brick with another groan. "You sent those two assuming that I'd defeat them,” he says into the silence, “didn't you?” A single eye cracks open, passes Satoru a knowing glance before shutting once more. “To set Okkotsu off.”
“I trusted you’d be yourself.” The words feel ashy in Satoru’s mouth. “Trusted that a man as principled as you wouldn’t kill off young sorcerers without a reason.”
Suguru lets out a shaky laugh. “You wanna talk about trust?” he asks, but there's no fire to the words now. He sounds exhausted, and it hurts, it hurts and it hasn't stopped hurting, not since the day outside the KFC. God, what is he going to do? What the fuck is he going to do with all this? “I didn’t think I had any of that left in me, after everything I’ve been through.”
Satoru says nothing, just watches as Suguru’s eyes flutter shut, a grimace twisting across his lips. With a half-stifled groan, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small white card, flicks it across the cobblestone to him. “Return this for me, will you?”
The face of Yuta looks up at Satoru through the laminated plastic, a nervous smile embedded across his face. He looks so young.
Satoru feels young, too. He feels young and old all at once, every single one of his twenty eight years and then some, and yet still hopelessly, bitterly seventeen, too.
“Was the elementary school your doing, too?”
He’s not sure why he asks it; he doesn’t care, in all honesty. Suguru was right—he’s never cared about morals. His interests have always been selfish.
“It was.”
“I can’t believe you.”
And maybe this all was an act of love, in a way, everything Suguru did. Maybe this was the only way he knew how to do it.
“You have any last words?” Satoru whispers. They are out of time, and Satoru has none left he can steal. His throat closes, dangerously, and Suguru stirs against the brick once more.
“No matter what anyone tells you,” he rasps, “I hate those monkeys. But I never held any hatred for those at Jujutsu High. I just couldn't wear a heartfelt smile while living in this world.”
The problem is not that Satoru has never known what he wants. The problem is that he had discovered too late, when the emptiness had already taken root, when the killing was merely an act of mercy, an aborted sort of kindness.
A gesture of love. All of this, it’s all love. Maybe that’s the worst part.
“Suguru,” Satoru says, letting his voice hitch, splinter around the edges. There’s no point in pretenses now, anyways, no reason why he should stop himself from walking forward, crouching down until he’s eye level with Suguru, close enough to reach out and touch him, brush blood-matted hair out of those stupid, beautiful eyes one last time.
So he does. Suguru turns his head to meet him, and for a second, his smile is all softness, no pain.
What he wants to say: I’m sorry.
What he says instead: “I love you.”
No point in pretenses. No point in running. The secret can die with them, at least. And it’ll be one less regret on Satoru’s list, one less mistake that keeps him up at night, strangling his vocal cords, working its way out of his eyes in silent, useless tears. The only thing Satoru had ever found the worth in crying over, and he’ll be the one to kill it. The least he can do is tell the truth before, really.
And it is the truth. It’s the truest thing Satoru knows, a reality he has grown up with, working it so deep into his skin it might as well be a new organ, an extra set of ribs. He loves Suguru. Sometimes, it’s the only truth he believes.
For a moment, Suguru is silent, uninjured eye wide, searching. The expression on his face is sickeningly hopeful, and Satoru is selfish: for a second, he closes his eyes against it.
All the cursed energy in the word, all the Six Eyes, the laudations of the Honored One, and there is no power he could possess that would make him able to face this.
When Suguru laughs, the sound is soft. His cheeks are a little pink when Satoru opens his eyes again, a fond smile stretching across his face. “Least you could do is curse me a little at the end,” he says, and slowly, Satoru raises his hand.
The call sign comes without having to think about it. They’ve done this dance so many times it feels second nature, almost. Though that will never be enough to stop the pit in his stomach, the endless ache, the burn in the back of his throat. Crying might make this better almost, but for once, the tears do not come.
What he wants to do: turn back the clock. Give Suguru another chance, give them both another chance. Try again.
What he does instead: fires.