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2021-02-08
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1/1
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liminal

Summary:

He’s right. Shoko would say so.

There’s no point in trying to heal someone whose cursed energy is the only thing keeping them alive. 

“This is what I want,” Suguru says. His fingers move to Satoru’s hand, squeezes it the way he did that night, minutes before he died. “Please, Satoru.”

He can’t. He can’t.

He’s losing Suguru all over again. 

 

In a subway station in Shibuya, it's December 24th all over again.

Notes:

Happy satosugu week everyone!

Enjoy!

Work Text:

Love, lay me down under grass & sunlight,

and touch me [right here] and here and here,

where the ache & hurt have gone to nest.

 

 

The first time Satoru died, it was easy. His body went into shock as he lay bleeding out on the ground, his heart gave out in his chest, and if it weren't for the cursed energy he ended up using to bring himself back to life, that would have been it—for him, and the rest of the jujutsu world. 

Things are a little different this time around. 

Prison Realm is not like anything he's ever seen before; he doesn't know how it works or where it's been all the time, but neither cursed energy or time exists here and that tells him everything he needs to know. 

Ah, geez. I'm gonna have to die again, aren't I?

Not really. He could just—wait for the sorcerers to finish up and win outside, wait for his students to save the world without him, but—

Get a move on, Gojou. Your kids need you.

The second time Satoru dies, he stops his own heart. 

It's painful. It's terrifying. There's nothing to ground him in the darkness, no way to tell where the sensation of his body shutting down ends and where Prison Realm begins, and there's no guarantee he'll come back this time. And in one last moment of selfishness, he prays that it's the last heartbeat Prison Realm looks for and not the last firing neuron. 

With the last shreds of his ability to think, he thinks about his students. He thinks about his best friend; memory lane in Shinjuku and last year's Christmas Eve.

He thinks to himself, I've never been strong. 

The darkness swallows him, and he drowns. 

 

 

Dying is easy. Dying has always been easy.

It's the coming back that's hard. 

It's not a station Satoru finds when he drags himself out of Prison Realm with the last shreds of life clinging to him, but a graveyard. A wasteland of dust and rubble, and emptiness that feels a lot like the fabric of his own domain; limitless but no longer void, fuzziness instead of clarity as his cursed energy returns to him in bits. 

Everything he can see is muted. It's impossible to tell which way is up, and there's a high-pitched whining in his ears. The world spins beneath his feet and he wonders, past the sluggishness of the blood returning to his veins and his heartbeat evening out, where?

Where is everyone?

He opens all six of his eyes, marking the fuzzy patches of cursed energy everywhere in the corners of his vision, working backwards and expanding his awareness to encompass the entire station to trace them. And what he feels, instead of the cursed flow unique to every student and sorcerer, is nothingness. A void. 

He can't sense his students at all. 

(Fuck. He really messed up this time.

The elders are gonna love this.)

It's fine though. He has faith in everyone; they've all gotten stronger. Not to the point he'd been trying to get them to, but strong enough to make it out of this alive. They'll be fine. They'll be fine. 

He repeats this over and over again, like saying enough times will make it true. It doesn't occur to him that he might be wrong—that maybe, he really underestimated just how stupidly strong these undocumented curses really are—because he can't be. Because being wrong means admitting defeat, another failure to add to the list, more weight in the fear that everything he did, everything he's tried to do to make these kids as strong as him, was all for nothing. 

Satoru keeps moving, pulling with his arms and not his legs as he goes, fingers grabbing the edge of the fissures working deep into the platform tiles and anything else they can grip onto. He doesn't see any bodies, none that belong to the sorcerers, or civilians, or even curses, but that's okay, they're fine.

The station fades to nondescript colors, monochrome in the dust and shitty lighting. They're fine.

They'll all be fine.

He reaches the end of the platform, just barely able to stand. He stumbles around the corner and—

It's the hair he sees first, dark against the wall and matted in places it shouldn't be. Then the hands, and then the cursed energy, like the still water of a lake. 

The flow of Suguru's cursed energy had always been smoother than his. 

He stares. And stares. And stares.

In his mind's eye, Prison Realm is closing over him all over again. 

Whatever precarious balance that's been keeping him up this whole time collapses. His knees hit the floor, again and again, but he can't feel the sting because it's nothing compared to the canyon in his chest, ripped apart by grief and set on fire by rage. Suguru's cursed energy is down to embers, he can feel it when he grabs onto Suguru's shoulder, but it's lied to him before. That curse user, who wore his best friend's body like a costume and fucking paraded it around, has lied to him before. 

If that abomination is still in there, still controlling Suguru's body like a puppet, Satoru's going to—

(Kill him.

Exorcise him. 

Tear him into ten thousand bloody pieces and destroy every last one of them before he becomes another Sukuna, even if it kills him in the process.)

He's going to—

Suguru stirs. Satoru freezes, ice-cold against the fire in his veins. 

His pulse thuds once, twice. Suguru opens his eyes, blinking once, twice in rapid succession, and when they find Satoru, Suguru smiles as if the whole damn world didn't go to pieces in the past few hours. 

(It's Suguru. He doesn't need his six eyes to be sure.

He knows it in his soul.)

"Heh." Laughing too. This guy, really. "Late again, Satoru."

"Shut up." He doesn't care about how ragged he sounds. His hands travel down Suguru's clothes, stop right over where his heart is and press in, looking for a pulse. 

There isn't one. 

"Satoru—"

"I said shut up," he snaps.

His hands are shaking. 

Using reversed curse techniques uses up a lot of cursed energy. It's hard to do on himself. It's hard to do on another person. The fact that Satoru's mastered this since that time a certain asshole nearly killed him doesn't matter when there's not enough cursed energy to work with.

Though, that technically also doesn't matter.

His hands keep pressing over Suguru's heart. They keep shaking until Suguru grabs his wrist. 

"Satoru—"

"Goddammit, how many times—"

“Listen to me.” Suguru’s fingers are vice-grips. “There’s no point.”

He’s right. Shoko would say so.

There’s no point in trying to heal someone whose cursed energy is the only thing keeping them alive. 

“This is what I want,” Suguru says. His fingers move to Satoru’s hand, squeezes it the way he did that night, minutes before he died. “Please, Satoru.”

He can’t. He can’t.

He’s losing Suguru all over again. 

Please, Satoru. 

He forces himself to breathe. In and out, three times. And on the last exhale, he takes his hands away from Suguru's heart. 

(He's never been able to deny him anything, anyway.)

"Suguru." His voice almost, almost cracks. "I'm sorry."

Suguru watches him for a long moment. And then he laughs, a warm puff of air against Satoru's cheek. "Don't be stupid, Satoru."

The embers are almost gone, the flow of cursed energy almost nonexistent. Suguru reaches up for him, brushing away his hair, brushing against the corners of his eyes.

"Hey," he murmurs. The backs of his fingers brush against Satoru's cheek. "Let me go this time, okay?"

Satoru catches Suguru's hand before it can fall and presses it to his cheek. Holds it there, and holds on tight while he can. 

"Yeah."

It's the least he can do. 

Suguru's smile rips him open from the inside out. 

He holds on. Suguru's hand gets heavier and heavier, the flow of his cursed energy stuttering and slowing and stopping. It's quiet when Suguru dies, with nothing to mark it but by the way his hand goes completely lax and the life leaves his eyes. 

It's peaceful, all things considered. 

Suguru's body is heavy when Satoru gathers him into his arms and starts, on wobbling legs, towards the exit. To the edges of the receded curtain, and the silence of a war-torn city. There are no tears left in him, no more ability for heartache.

Only grief, and last year's December wind, blowing through him and wailing.