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There is a burn on Suguru’s left hand, a small ugly red oval underneath his knuckles that’s easy to miss. He got in a stupid way, the end of the incense he was lighting barely touching his skin when the thin stick snapped in its holder. It had blistered, and Suguru had almost forgotten about it, but then it burst when the sleeve of his hoodie brushed against it. The pain was subtle and silent, and now Suguru is staring at the slight crater as Satoru’s voice drones on, overshadowed by that of the intercom.
He has his sunglasses pushed back into his hair as he stares at the variety of baking mixes, a thumb pressed onto his lip as he thinks.
“Satoru.”
“Just give me a second.”
“We’ve been here forever, and this is the last thing. Hurry up.”
Satoru picks two boxes out and presents them to Suguru: one for a chocolate cake, the other for some type of sponge cake. The woman who spoke on the intercom a moment ago repeats her message, and from somewhere in the grocery store a child starts to cry.
“Pick.”
“Just take both, you can afford it.”
Satoru turns the boxes towards himself, purses his lips, and then puts back the sponge cake mix.
“Also, for your information,” Satoru declares as he begins to walk ahead, Suguru trailing behind him with their shopping cart, “I’m trying to watch my sugar.”
Suguru tries to hit Satoru’s ankles with the front of the cart, and Satoru laughs as he steps out of the way, twisting his body to avoid the assault. Suguru hadn’t even wanted to go out today, Satoru had been the one to insist on it, pestering him until he gave in. Although, thinking back on it, it leaned more towards harassment.
“I don’t know, think of it as a zoo trip or something,” Satoru had said.
Suguru had blinked, surprised, and then angry, “Are you fucking serious?”
Satoru shrugged, “You’re the one that started calling people monkeys.”
He frowns to himself when he remembers, and at the register, Satoru disappears, mumbling something about forgetting chips, and Suguru is left unloading everything onto the conveyor belt. There’s a woman and her son in front of them, and Suguru pointedly ignores them, keeping to himself as he slides the plastic divider behind their groceries. When a bag of tangerines tumbles out of his hands and onto the ground, he feels a ball of anxiety lodge in his throat, the child bending over to pick them up for him.
“Thank you,” Suguru says, trying to muster a semblance of a smile, but the child simply stares at him. It’s strange though, when Suguru stands upright and places the tangerines back onto the belt, the child is still staring, at the space above his eyes, where he knows his skin is puckered in a horizontal line. He’s about to say something, when the child’s mother turns around, notices, and pulls him away, muttering a brief, insincere apology.
Satoru returns then, chucking two bags of chips on top of everything else. Suguru’s face must reflect the thoughts he’s sorting through, and Satoru leans in minimally.
“You okay?”
“Fine.”
When they’re in Satoru’s car, Suguru is looking at the burn at hand and picks at the raised, dried skin around it. Satoru, once he's done putting away the groceries and sits beside him, groaning when he closes the driver side’s door onto his seatbelt, looks over and notices.
“If you keep picking at it, it’ll leave a scar”
Suguru laughs, “I would hardly call it a scar”
Satoru opens the door and readjusts the seat belt. Suguru nearly misses what he says.
“Did something happen in the store?”
How does he begin to put to words how a child with morbid curiosity stared at the scar lining his forehead, where stitches that held his skull together were removed while he was still conscious because he wanted to ensure that it wasn’t him being removed, reminded him of his failures. Suguru can’t explain how the child’s faultless interest reminded him of Satoru, kneeled in front of his body, staring up at him and beckoning him, while he was the sole reason he was being sealed to begin with.
“Just some kid staring at my scar. Not a big deal.”
“Oh,” Satoru says.
Suguru shrugs, “Like I said not a big deal.”
“You could have Shoko get rid of it, you know”
“I know.”
Suguru Geto died through an act of compassionate violence and was brought back to life through malevolence. Now, he lives as an almost ordinary man. Sometimes, when his skin feels bound too tightly around his joints, he blames the monotony of house arrest as a reason why it’s so difficult to adjust. Suguru was part of the strongest; power still coursed through his veins and the echoes of strategic thoughts that did not belong to him but were spoken into creation with his voice still linger. He is used to violence, to sacrifice. He doesn’t know how to exist like this, plastic grocery bags hanging off his wrists as he waits for Satoru to unlock the door.
Satoru has called it a second chance before, described it as a chance of a life outside of the world Suguru seems to detest so much, but they both know it’s a farce. Even if his shackles are not physical, they are phantoms tethering him to Satoru, a punishment that he thinks bitterly is fitting for both of them. He knows Satoru doesn’t see it as such, insisting that Suguru is welcome in his home, in their home as he slips up and calls it sometimes, but Suguru knows better. The comfort that Satoru offers him is as welcoming as it is alienating and he doesn’t know how to articulate it to him without sounding ungrateful.
Sometimes, it feels like his heart is breaking. Every possible light in the room Satoru has let him occupy is on, and he holds onto his knees as he sits up on his bed, squeezing until his knuckles turn white. It hurts—his body aches, discomfort swelling behind his eyes and reaching down for his spine—but the sensations that keep him from sleep are not inherently physical. It isn't enough to cry, and it isn’t enough to scream. There is no gash or bruise to disinfect and heal, and in his near helplessness in handling his invisible affliction, he wants to reach out. He admits it to himself easily enough, but the stretch of bedroom between the bed and the door, and the steps it would take to find Satoru somewhere in the house, is too much to face.
He doesn’t sleep, on nights like these he’s just absent. Although he stays in bed, sheets pulled unbelievably close, he isn’t present. Suguru’s mind drifts somewhere, elsewhere, and when it returns the nighttime is replaced by morning, and his eyes are stinging. When he gets up, he sees Satoru in the kitchen. The tag of his shirt is curled upwards and out like a snake’s tongue by his neck, and as Satoru reaches up to grab something from a cupboard, Suguru fights back the urge to fix it. Such casual touches were lost to him now.
He imagines asking, “do you know where I go when I leave? ” but he doesn’t.
When Satoru turns around, cereal box in hand, there is caution in his ocean eyes, and something that feels like pity. It grates Suguru, and he wants to point it out, but then Satoru smiles.
“Good morning.”
“Morning.”
The bouts of arguments with Satoru are exhausting. They have no warning, no tell that gives away when they’ll begin, and Suguru hates how they’ll take place in the kitchen, or in the hallway, or even in the bathroom. They’re a hiccup in a routine he’s barely able to manage.
“Maybe if they see you cooperating they’ll ease up.”
This one is in the kitchen, Satoru’s back turned towards him as he scrubs away at dishes. Suguru stares at him, the mug of coffee between his hands slowly cooling.
“What has all this time been, then?” Suguru responds, squeezing the mug. “Have I not been cooperating the past few months?”
“I’m saying you should go, just once. Show them you’re not some boogie man hiding out in my house.”
“I don’t want to, Satoru. I don’t think it’ll be good for me.”
A dish clinks against the sink and Satoru’s shoulders rise in his shirt as he holds onto the edge of the counter.
“I don’t know, Suguru. The last time you thought something was good for you look where it got us.”
The words slice through him, and Suguru thinks finally, Satoru is embracing the resentment of offering a home to a traitor, of seeing him day in and day out and having to grace him with sanctuary. He inhales, ready to support him in this revelation, ready to spit out encouraging venom when Satoru shuts the sink off and turns to look at him.
“I didn’t mean that.”
He’s looking at Suguru pleadingly, searching his face for an ounce of anything, but Suguru fights to keep his expression composed. The ache that haunts him at night lingers, phantom sensations by his chest, and he casts his eyes to the mug.
“I can’t be there. I can’t be at the school.”
“Yes, you can.”
Suguru closes his eyes and squeezes the mug again, “No, Satoru. I can’t. I’m not ready.”
The world narrows after his confession to the now cold coffee in his mug, the frothed milk flat, a bubbly film of it clinging to the mug’s insides. Suguru has only ever once admitted incapability in his life, and it was in reaction to Satoru’s impossibility. When Satoru steps away from the sink and towards him, taking a seat across from him at the small kitchen table, Suguru doesn’t look at him. Satoru’s hands are blurry to him, just barely out of focus past the mug.
“You don’t have to be okay. No-one is asking you to be.”
God, Suguru thinks, he sounds like a fucking antidepressant commercial.
“Satoru, I don’t need to hear this.”
“I don’t care.”
When Suguru tilts his head to look at Satoru, there is a determination absent of a call to violence or survival that lines Satoru’s mouth and eyes.
“I’m not asking you to be okay,” he says. “But you can have a good day, you’re allowed to have good days. And you can have bad days, too. You can have horrible days, but don’t just—”
He curls his fingers inwards before outstretching them on the table.
“Don’t just pretend like it’s nothing, like you’re nothing.”
Suguru doesn’t know what to say. There are too many and no words at once.
“Okay,” he says.
Satoru pulls his hands away and onto his lap.
“Just okay?”
Suguru nods, “Yeah. Just okay.”
Suguru couldn’t describe the sorcerer that inhabited his body. He couldn’t describe him, couldn’t describe how the absence of him felt within Suguru. A soul has no room for two, and yet Suguru had shared his unwillingly, and now he was by himself again. He has no regrets, he owns his body fully and would have it no other way, but the absence of the sorcerer who had used him is present, like an air bubble trapped underneath his skin. Whenever Suguru thought he had scraped it away, it appeared elsewhere.
He sees him in his dreams sometimes.
He has no real life, no real body, but he’s present all the same, and when he addresses Suguru, in some dreams from across an endless concrete field and in others from the unlit end of an alley, his voice is stolen from him, and his hands turn on himself, wrapping around his throat.
When he wakes up from those dreams, Suguru’s hand is tight around his throat, constricting his wheezing breath. He guides himself to the bathroom out in the hall, a hand trailing along the wall, and splashes cold water onto his face, and breathes. When he looks up at the mirror, rivulets of water dribbling past the bridge of his nose and his brow, he fixates on the scar. With hesitance, he reaches for it with two fingers, tracing it across his forehead slowly.
He hears a rumbling sound from somewhere in the house and peers out of the bathroom to see that the lights are off in the kitchen and hall, but the flickering blue light from the television in the living room casts a haze that ebbs away into the darkness by the bathroom, where he stands. He follows it, and finds Satoru in the living room, strewn over the couch and watching some type of documentary. When he notices Suguru he leans his head to the side and rubs at the back of his neck.
“Sorry, did I wake you up? I didn’t realize the scene would be so loud.”
“You didn’t.”
He moves towards him and taps Satoru’s ankles for him to raise his legs, sitting down where they were. Satoru hesitates but rests his legs across Suguru’s lap, and returns to watching the screen.
“What about you, why are you up?”
Satoru moves one of his ankles in a circle and cracks it.
“Nightmare,” he says.
Suguru huffs, “Wow. We’re syncing up.”
The longer they watch the documentary together, the more boring Suguru finds it. He doesn’t know how Satoru is so attentive, his gaze unwavering. His own head is feeling heavy, drooping forward until Suguru realizes and sits upright again, sighing.
“Head to bed,” Satoru says. “You’re falling asleep.”
Maybe it’s because he is falling asleep, but he feels a swell of bravery.
“Come with me.”
The documentary lulls and they follow suit, a near-silent scene panning over a sea-side shore, where bioluminescent algae are gathered, glowing bright blue. It washes over the living room, and when Suguru turns to look at Satoru, he’s staring up at him with an unreadable expression. Come with me is as much of an invitation as it is a threat to the fragile union they have in place. Suguru won’t be angry if he’s rejected, but Satoru slides his legs off of him and stands, blocking the cerulean light with his frame.
“Alright,” he says.
It’s nerve-wracking, and when Suguru feels the bedsheets graze his skin he has to inhale to settle, each thread irritating and altogether too much. He thinks if Satou were to touch him now he would leave and this would be for nothing, but Satoru doesn’t. He lies down beside him but faces the other way. This is the part of a second chance Suguru thinks is too similar to mourning, the luxury of the domesticity that had existed easily between them years ago lifeless in the inches between them. Movements and words that were effortless to say are alien to him now.
“Suguru.”
“What?”
“Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Satoru.”
He agrees to visit the school with him over dinner, regardless of the choir of anxious and paranoid thoughts.
“The kids will be there,” Satoru reminds him. “Including Okkotsu’s group.”
“Are you trying to change my mind?”
He grins and steals a piece of meat from the curry on his plate.
“Me, try to change your mind? I know better, Suguru.”
He might as well be Satoru’s shadow. He lingers behind him, four steps behind. It’s almost a game, Suguru keeping count as Satoru sauntered through the campus easily, as if the man trailing along behind him belonged there.
He did, once, he reminds himself.
His introduction, and technically re-introduction, are far from easy. He had expected it, had practiced how to react to judgment and being chastised without anger, yet he was wholly unprepared.
Satoru is mid-sentence, waving his hands in the air as he speaks to one of his students, the vessel, when the upperclassmen join them. The Zenin girl he remembers insulting and beating years ago stops walking when she spots him, and the boy with the cursed speech technique stands beside her. The only one that actually greets him from their group is the Panda.
“What’s he doing here?” she asks.
Toji’s son—who god, looks too similar—looks over at her, frowning, as does the student standing beside him with an eyepatch, her hair cut short and buzzed on the side. Kugisaki, he thinks. Satoru had reminded him of all their names on the way to campus, but Suguru is struggling to remember. When they all turn to look at him and Satoru, he feels his throat constrict. He wants to leave, wants to never step foot in this place again.
“Acclimating,” Satoru says, waving a hand. “Can’t help teach if he’s stuck in the house all day, right?”
Suguru frowns. Satoru had thrown the idea of him helping him train his students the night before, in particular the vessel, but it wasn’t as if Suguru had agreed.
The girl laughs once, loud and sharp as she picks up the staff hanging from her back, twirls it, and aims it at him.
“I won’t train with a corpse.”
She turns around immediately and leaves, resting the staff on her shoulder. The cursed speech user joins her, while the Panda sighs, puts his paws together, and murmurs a quick apology before following. Satoru turns to look at him, and although there’s an easy smile on his mouth he can see the tension in his shoulders, ready to sprint if Suguru were to run.
The student with the eye-patch eyes him wearily, crossing her arms over her chest.
“What happened between you and Maki?”
Maki, that’s her name.
Toj— Megumi, he remembers, is cautious as well.
Satoru is about to say something, Suguru can tell, but he beats him to it.
“I called her a monkey, treated her like one, too.”
It’s definitely not what Satoru had wanted him to say, and he sighs, his blindfold scrunching up where his eyebrows would be.
“Huh?” the vessel says, and Suguru winces when he remembers his name, Yuji Itadori, spat as a taunt months ago by his mouth but not his soul.
The girl, which Suguru now remembers is Kugisaki, purses her lips.
“Why and when?” she asks, offering no room for error or doubt on his end.
“Before you were students, I think. When I attacked the school.”
Satoru shifts his weight from his left foot to his right, frowning. Itadori and Megumi glance at one another, sharing a look Suguru doesn’t understand. Kugisaki, however, steps closer to him, and Suguru peers down at her, expressionless. She reminds him of Satoru, in a way. He’s not sure what she’s looking for, but she observes him for a moment, scrutinizing him, before stepping back and sighing.
“I still don’t know what to think of you. You save our stupid teacher, but you get a point off for insulting Maki.”
Suguru chuckles, “Just one?”
It takes a moment for them to register the joke, Suguru can actually see their faces processing it, although Itadori takes the shortest time. He curls a finger by his chin and tilts his head.
“Kugisaki if you’re keeping points on everyone, how many do I have? Am I winning against Fushiguro?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Kugisaki and Megumi answer in unison.
He doesn’t train them, but he does watch the trio try to attack Satoru. He doesn’t have infinity on, but the results are the same as if he did. Itadori and Kugisaki are timing physical attacks well, bouncing back whenever Megumi sends in his own, inky shadows blotting underneath Satoru, and sometimes behind. At one point, he can see when Satoru is distracted. Either he’s enjoying himself too much or he’s distracted avoiding a swing from Kugisaki, but he’s unaware of Megumi reaching into a pool of darkness by his feet, pulling out a staff rapidly. When Satoru turns, the staff is already inches away from his face. Suguru expects it to hit, but the air ripples in front of it, and Satoru laughs, almost yelling.
Later, when Satoru asks if Suguru could return the weapons the kids used that day to the armory, Suguru squints at him.
“On my own?”
Satoru tilts his head, playing ignorance.
“Yeah, what? You want me to hold your hand?”
Suguru tries to step on one of his shoes, but Satoru steps out of the way.
“If someone sees me alone, aren’t they going to complain?”
Satoru groans, “It’s fine. Just go, I’m hungry.”
The armory is strangely nostalgic, and Suguru can’t tell if it’s apprehension or yearning when his chest aches. He steps inside, weapons in his arms, and places them down. He touches some of the ones on the wall, tracing the curve of a spear and the deadly lines of a black sword. The cursed energy haunting them reacts to his touch, and Suguru can almost taste it. He pulls his hand away when the door opens, and frowns when he sees that it’s Maki. In the dim light of the armory, the rough burn scars across the left side of her body look plum.
“Where’s Gojo?” she asks.
“Somewhere nearby, I’m guessing.”
Suguru picks up one of the weapons he has to put away and finds its residuals, strapping it back into place on the wall. She doesn’t move closer to him but watches him vigilantly, Suguru feeling her gaze as he finishes putting the other weapons away. Only when he’s done and stepping towards the door does she move, keeping a good amount of space in between them. Something is gnawing at him, and although guilt isn't the right word, it’s something similar to it, it's—
Regret.
I’ve forgotten what that feels like.
He tenses his jaw, swallowing back the sudden bile in his throat. He won’t be like him.
“I know an apology is pointless in our world,” he says, “but I do regret my treatment of you. You’re strong. Strong enough to lead your family.”
There is no response, and Suguru doesn’t have to turn to feel the eyes boring into the back of his head. When he takes another step to leave, he hears the click of a weapon put away on the wall.
“As you said,” Maki says. “Apologies are pointless.”
It’s one of the “bad days” as Satoru has taken to call them when he thinks of his parents. They’re cleaning the house, Satoru’s short hair tied up into a loose bun mimicking Suguru’s, though it’s been slowly coming apart. They’re in Suguru’s room when Satoru asks him about Nanako and Mimiko upfront. He feels disoriented at how easily their names flow from him now when months ago the sounds of them were something dreadful, something Suguru couldn’t bear to hear. They haunt the air as he speaks, but the wound is bearable. When he answers Satoru’s questions, ranging from what the girls enjoyed and where they lived when he had first saved them, Satoru takes a moment and plops down at the edge of his bed. He watches Suguru rearrange their altar, wiping down the wood of the table.
“I think you would have been a good dad.”
He can’t help but laugh, covering his mouth right after the sound slips out. There is something amusing in how Satoru phrased his words; declaring the possibility already in the past, something outside of the reality available to him although he is only 28. It’s fitting in a way, to come back to life and have other things die in response; a cruel equilibrium he had not asked for.
For some reason, he thinks of his parents.
“I don’t think that would have been right,” he says, wiping down the frame holding the photograph of him and the girls on the altar. “I murdered my own father and mother.”
The words sound insane and yet they exist as inarguable truths.
“Do you miss them?”
He sits beside Satoru, the bed dipping between them for a moment.
“I loved the girls. I have an altar for them, but I have nothing from my parents.”
Satoru doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move.
“I didn’t let myself take anything,” Suguru finds himself saying. He’s not sure what he’s feeling, or even what he’s thinking. The words leak out of him like a broken faucet. “I didn’t want to grieve. When I—”
He breathes, realizing that his hands are trembling on his lap. Satoru reaches over and places one of his own over them, loose and far from suffocating, enough for Suguru to know that he’s there, if needed.
“When I died,” he continues. “I thought they’d be the ones to send me off to hell.”
“Did you love them?” Satoru asks. There is no judgment, just attention. It’s almost unbearable, but then Satoru squeezes his hands once. Suguru remembers to take another breath.
“I want to say I did, but I don’t remember some days.”
“Are you ever angry with me that I didn’t stop you?”
Suguru looks at him then, turning his head towards him. Satoru is staring at the floor between his feet, his other hand clutching the sheets.
“Nothing you would have said would have stopped me. We were children, Satoru. You didn’t know what I was thinking and I didn’t let you.”
Satoru shakes his head minimally, if Suguru hadn’t been watching him he would have missed the minuscule motion.
“I mean, after. When you left, when you told me there was a meaning in killing you.”
It’s almost as if Satoru Gojo unravels next to him suddenly. All the cautious glances, all the carefully selected words that somehow managed to remain distant or even neutral despite their intimate situation, all the times Suguru thought Satoru had been holding something against him, resentment steadily brewing—it all becomes knowable in a single instant.
Suguru sees him for the first time since his rebirth.
Satoru feels guilty. Satoru Gojo feels guilty on behalf of Suguru, whose blood-stained hands touch everything he owns.
“Have you thought that?” Suguru says, almost breathless.
When Satoru doesn’t answer, Suguru’s chest aches. It’s a throbbing sensation halfway between disbelief and resentment.
“I felt anger that you didn’t understand,” he explains, his words callous and rushed. “I was angry that you wouldn’t say Riko’s name to me, or that you couldn’t see how fucked up it was that we just had to keep going, that the school treated you like a weapon, but I was never angry at you. I understood our roles when I walked away. I knew you’d be the one to kill me.”
Satoru winces, and Suguru twists his hands from underneath his and holds Satoru’s. His fingers feel searing as they intertwine with Suguru’s, and Satoru lets out a shutter of a breath.
“I accepted it, Satoru. I’m glad it was you, as selfish as it is. I’m not angry.”
Satoru doesn’t move his hand away but refuses to look at Suguru. When he feels Satoru’s hand shake, the motion mimicked by his shoulders trembling as he tries to hold back the tears Suguru can see welling in the ocean of his eyes, he doesn’t look away.
The next time he’s on campus, Maki finds him as he’s watching Satoru’s students train again. Satoru had left him as a pseudo-babysitter while he handled some “teacher business.” She smacks the bottom of the weapon she’s holding today against the ground, a spear with a secondary curved blade jutting out its main edge, to demand his attention.
“Hey, you.”
Suguru stands up from the stone step he was seated on and turns to her.
“Accepted my apology?”
She scoffs, the curve of her mouth arrogant.
“Apology? I would hardly call what you said an apology.”
Suguru isn’t exactly annoyed by her, but he isn’t enamored either.
“Why are you here then?”
She rolls her eyes and steps back, providing herself enough room to point the weapon at him. From the corner of his eye, he can see that Satoru’s trio has paused to watch.
“Isn’t it obvious? Sparring.”
“I think you mean training.”
“No,” she clarifies. “Sparring. Training would insinuate you have something to teach me, which,” she twirls the weapon away from him, “you don’t.”
“Is it genetic for all you Zenin to be so arrogant?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know? Now, do you agree to spar or no? You’re wasting my time here.”
“You’re not offering me much of an incentive to agree.”
Maki clicks her tongue, frowning.
“You’re just as bad as him, I swear. How about a bet?”
Suguru decides to ignore the comment, and the approaching footsteps from Itadori, Kugisaki, and Megumi who have collectively made the decision to stop training.
“Okay. What’s the bet?”
“If I win, I get to call you monkey.”
Suguru frowns, “Okay. And when I win?”
By now, the trio is with them, Itadori and Fushiguro pretending to offer them privacy but remaining in earshot while Kugisaki walks right up to Maki and loops an arm around her shoulder. Suguru thinks there should be a bat hanging from her hand to complete the picture.
“If you win,” Maki declares. “I accept your apology.”
He doesn’t even care that much, but the presentation of a challenge combined with the fact that he hasn’t sparred in months is too much of a temptation.
“You’re on.”
Itadori and Kugisaki’s excited commentary is muffled background noise to Suguru as he weaves around Maki’s attacks, skidding on the dirt for a moment. Maki notices and takes advantage and inverts the positioning of her hands on her spear, twirling it to try and hit Suguru directly with the blunt end. It nearly makes contact, but Suguru blocks in time with the wooden staff he’s using. They’ve been sparring for a few minutes now, the bun atop of Suguru’s head slowly coming undone, strands of his hair sticking to his now sweaty face. Maki is disheveled as well, her unmarred skin flush and chest heaving. He has to admit, she is strong, just not strong enough to beat him.
She steps away from him and tries a long-distance attack, but Suguru eliminates the space between them rapidly, moving in for a leg sweep. It almost works, but Maki jumps out of the way.
“That almost hit,” he comments. “You have to ensure you aren’t unprepared if your opponent rushes you when you open up space.”
“Shut up,” she hisses, coming at him with a barrage of fast blows. Some hit his arms and Suguru knows they’ll leave bruises, but it’s nothing serious. “I told you, this isn’t training.”
Despite her claim, throughout the fight Suguru has taken note to comment on her fighting style: at times, her grip and force are too directed and ruthless, and at other times her stance is too loose. He’s not sure if the critiques are from a place of concern or superiority, but he figures it doesn’t matter because Maki is listening to him regardless. He visibly sees her react to his advice, adjusting her stances and holding her weapon differently after he easily blocks an assault. She moves in suddenly, an attack that’s too direct and easy to dodge—
“Suguru!”
He’s caught off guard by Satoru’s sudden yell and stumbles for a moment, unwillingly creating an opening. Maki goes in for the hit, and for a moment Suguru can envision her actually stabbing him, but he manages to dodge in time with an instinctually sidestep, drop, and a leg sweep. When Maki falls back on the ground he can hear Kugisaki groan and Satoru whistle. She’s clearly frustrated, frowning as she sits up, and Suguru stretches his hand for her to take. She unsurprisingly doesn’t take it, but when she stands and huffs, dusting off the dirt from her clothes she glares at him.
“That’s one out of three. Next time I’m winning, same bet.”
Before he can think to respond, she’s walking away from him, an energetic Kugisaki materializing at her side almost comically. She’s waving her hands in the air and jutting out her arms, seemingly retelling the fight.
“Were you going easy on her?”
Suguru turns to see Satoru obnoxiously close, his chin nearly on Suguru’s shoulder. He pushes him away and fights the urge to smirk when Satoru frowns.
“No, we had a bet I didn’t want to lose.”
“Oh?” Satoru hums. “What was it?”
“If I win, she accepts my apology. If she wins, she can call me a monkey.”
Satoru stares at him, expressionless for a single second, and then breaks down into a fit of laughter, bent over and holding onto his stomach.
When he dreams of Nanami and Haibara, he doesn’t recognize them at first. He’s not sure if they’re phantoms or recreations from his imagination and memories, but they stand in front of him as they looked in high school, which Suguru thinks bitterly is the only way Haibara could look. They exist in light pink and white facets, and for a moment, Suguru thinks that he is dreaming within a cherry blossom tree. He moves towards him, his mouth open to speak, but he is both motionless and soundless, and Haibara smiles in response, unrestrained and overjoyed. It’s too much and he looks towards Nanami, who offers him a more reserved curve of the mouth.
“Don’t curse yourself,” is what Haibara says.
Nanami follows with, “You are not a dead man, Geto.”
He wakes up in his own bed, blankets tossed to the side and a hand covering his face. He’s still not sure if it was a dream or a visitation when he guides himself to the kitchen, Satoru cooking something that Suguru can’t tell smells good or bad yet. He steps towards him, and Satoru turns his head to look at him for a moment before looking back down at the pan.
“Not sure if we should order out yet, but wanted to try something. It looked easy at first.”
Suguru doesn’t answer, he takes another step forward, and then another, until he can loop his arms around Satoru’s waist, careful not to burn himself.
“You okay?” Satoru asks, the click from the stove knob being turned letting Suguru know his attempt at breakfast has been deemed a failure.
“I think so.”
“Alright then.”
“But hey, Satoru?”
He feels him lean his weight back onto him minimally, his hands resting over where Suguru’s are on his stomach.
“Hm?”
“Thank you.”