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From far away, Satoru Gojo’s body looks like a stain.
There isn’t a cloud in the midday sky, and the sun is radiant above them as Suguru nears him, one slow, robotic step after another. He casts a shadow over Satoru as he stands over him, his hands resting by his side motionless as the two slashes crossing over his chest in an ‘X’ shape ache.
Satoru Gojo is not supposed to die. No coffin has been built long enough for his sixteen-year-old frame, no crematorium has temperatures high enough to rid the earth of his body, no hole in the ground was dug deep enough.
And yet, Suguru knows his best friend is dying. A shuttering wheeze blows past Satoru’s mouth through his teeth, and Suguru drops to the ground, the fabric of his pants soaking up the ichor pooling around Satoru. He doesn’t register the movement, doesn’t feel his muscles reacting, but he presses a hand against Satoru’s throat, and another on his forehead, covering the jagged wound on each. Satoru’s blood is everywhere and it takes only moments for Suguru’s hands to turn a violent, slick scarlet.
Satoru is watching him through glossy, half-lidded eyes, the black of his pupils erasing nearly all of the sky blue. Suguru opens his mouth to speak, but there are no words to say. He can hear himself begin to hyperventilate and presses on Satoru’s wounds to apply pressure, but his hands slip, and Satoru’s eyes drift close for a moment before opening again, only a sliver visible to Suguru. Somberly, he thinks he should say goodbye. He thinks he should beg, make some type of desperate trade with the universe, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t do anything.
Suguru Geto kneels silently beside Satoru as his soft wheezing and whistling gasps for air grow farther and farther apart until finally, Satoru’s chest stops. His eyes don’t close, and when Suguru brushes a palm over them, his eyelashes soft against his skin, blood smears on them.
It feels like an illusion. Maybe it is. He hopes that maybe his blood loss has resulted in this ridiculous fever dream, but minutes pass and Satoru is motionless.
All at once, Suguru doesn’t feel like Suguru.
He’s an open wound, listening to himself breathe in and out. It’s a strange sensation, he finds, to be aware you’re the only one breathing out of two. His eyes pass over Satoru, trying to discern the body beside him from the boy he had spoken to only an hour ago. It’s impossible that this could be the same Satoru, the one he knew, the one he knows.
He turns around suddenly, jerking his head left and right to see if anyone has found them. Where is Shoko? Where are the others? They had to have heard him, had to feel that Satoru had just died, and yet there is no-one, just the same well-kept shrines and stone pathways mocking him, taunting them in their undisturbed tranquility.
Satoru’s body moves suddenly, and Suguru’s stomach drops. He watches with wide eyes as it sinks away from him, swallowed by an expanding void rippling open in the ground underneath him. It’s large enough that only the outermost ring of Satoru’s blood is left, the void a strange mix of black and red at its edges.
Suguru doesn’t realize what he’s done until he hears an unearthly, pained groan. He turns his head to the side and retches. When he looks back, an eye emerges in the dark void, followed by another and another.
They’re all blue.
Suguru vomits this time, squeezing his eyes shut. The air around him is arctic and sharp, despite the sun above him, and Suguru doesn’t dare look at what he’s done. When he feels something clasp around his arm, he yanks it back and holds it to his chest.
“S-Suguru.”
“Stop it.”
“Suguru?” Satoru and not Satoru’s voice croaks out, the sound warped as if a choir was speaking grotesquely in grating disharmony.
He opens his eyes and inches away is a hooded apparition, its outer skin an endless white, the inner flaps dyed cosmos, stars, and what looks like moving, breathing galaxy systems spanning over every curve and nook. He, it, has no real legs, not in this ghastly form. Instead, where Suguru thought his torso would end, are white tendrils, coiled and draped like bloodless intestines, two reaching out towards him. There are two shining stars alight in the center of his hood like eyes and as Suguru stares at them, he realizes they are Satoru Gojo’s otherworldly eyes, entrapped forever in the embodiment of Suguru’s immortal selfishness.
He heaves again and feels it touch him roughly on his upper back.
“S-Suguru,” it says again, with a quiver of fear.
There are burning tears in Suguru’s eyes and he wants to claw them out. Satoru moves, draping himself over Suguru weightlessly. He cranes his neck to look over at Satoru, the two stars in the center of the hood watching him over his shoulder. He stares at them as they shimmer, and then turns to look at his hands, blue eyes scattered across the white, fleshy ringlets wrapped around his arms and wrists.
“Forgive me, Satoru.”
The sound that reverberates from the curse sounds like wailing.
“You really aren’t curious? You’re related to one of the vengeful spirits and you don’t care?”
Satoru groans, throwing his head back onto the pillow bent under his arm. They’re outstretched on Satoru’s bed, Suguru sitting with his legs crossed underneath him by the pillows at the head of the bed, while Satoru lies opposite, his head by the end as he loses interest in the movie playing. They’re both waiting for Shoko to finish up a medical exam to head out and grab some food.
“It doesn’t even matter at this point, right? I’m probably like, .3% related to it.”
“You don’t think it has anything to do with your technique?”
Satoru sits up, accidentally kicking Suguru as he untucked his feet from the pillow they were under.
“I guess? I don’t know, man. I just don’t care about it, why do you?”
Suguru reaches over for the pillow behind his back and throws it at Satoru, who catches it easily.
“You’re technically part curse, maybe half with the crazy shit you pull.”
Satoru laughs, “Don’t be dumb about it.”
He scowls, “It isn’t dumb. It’s dumb that you don’t care.”
Satoru waves a hand in the air, “What’s the point? I die, someone else down the line inherits the eyes if someone from my clan has kids because I sure as fuck am not, the world goes on.”
Suguru inhales suddenly, excited. Satoru eyes him strangely.
“What if you die, and the curse in your blood reacts?”
Satoru raises a brow, “Okay? You watch too many horror movies, I’m not turning into a curse. Also, stop trying to kill me off.”
Suguru laughs, “I’m not trying to, I’m just say—”
“What I’m trying to say,” Satoru interrupts. “I’m not turning into a curse when I die. I have enough control, and I won’t have anyone near me to curse me, so we’re good.”
“Oh?” Suguru questions. “You’re sure of that?”
Satoru shrugs, “Well, yeah. Sorcerers die alone.”
The words are said easily by the boy across from Suguru, and all he can do is stare, startled. Satoru notices and sighs, reaching over to shove one of Suguru’s knees. The touch feels like static and Suguru stretches out his half-asleep legs.
“It’s not that serious, c’mon,” Satoru continues. “If anything, if something does happen you can just eat me up.”
Suguru sticks his tongue out, “Gross, you’d taste bad.”
Satoru huffs, offended, and reaches for the pillow that Suguru had thrown at him before. Suguru grabs another in time to block his swing.
“I would not taste bad,” he protests, swinging again.
Suguru laughs before grunting when Satoru nails a hit, an absurd amount of strength behind his swing.
The smell of wet earth is almost indistinguishable from the cigarette held in Suguru’s hand, the faint orange glow from the burning tip illuminating one of Satoru’s unblinking eyes. They’re both waiting for Shoko to arrive, Suguru having sent her a text message with nothing more than a time and a location. Satoru is jittery, coiling and uncoiling around Suguru, drifting towards the edge of the grassy waterway to look at the canal passing by. In the dim light cast by the streetlamps above them, Satoru’s skin looks aged, a pale yellow rather than white.
When footsteps approaching them echo, Satoru coils around Suguru with his lower half, his upper unfolding and uncurling. Suguru hushes him as he turns around, running a hand over one of his extended limbs to calm him. He hears someone clear their throat and twists around to see Shoko a few feet away, quiet as she stares at him.
“Since when do you smoke?”
Suguru throws the cigarette onto the ground and snuffs it out with the tip of his shoe.
“It’s a recent development. Thanks for coming.”
“You know,” she says. “I wish I could hate you both.”
Both. Suguru narrows in on the word as he feels Satoru shutter behind him, distracted by the water yet again.
“You think of it as Satoru. That’s good.”
Shoko’s eyes coasts over to him, watching as Satoru nears the water before returning to Suguru once again, eyeing her when he notices her watching.
“I guess. Yeah, I just, fuck. You could have stayed, we could have helped you. I don’t know. We could have done research, something.”
Satoru takes interest in their conversation and glides towards her curiously and uneasily, before slinking back.
“Does he even know it’s me?” she asks.
Suguru has the decency to not point out the distress in her tone, but he does place a hand over Satoru again, who leans his weight into the touch.
“He knows me. He’ll say my name, some phrases, sometimes.”
Satoru whines then, as if on cue, and looks towards Shoko.
“Shoko,” he says, drawing out the last ‘o’. “Shoko, don’t hate me, don’t hate me.”
Suguru sees Shoko curling her hands into fists by her sides.
“Don’t do that,” she says. “That isn’t fair.”
They’re quiet. Suguru has no solace to offer her, and Shoko has no absolution in return. A grating, rasping sound emits from Satoru that Suguru has figured happens when he tries to speak, but the gash in his throat left behind from the wound prevents him.
“Why am I here, Geto? What do you want from me?”
He doesn’t blame her for her anger, she’s as faultless as he is guilty.
“Nothing, Shoko.”
“This is goodbye, isn’t it?”
Satoru repeats the word goodbye with the intonation of a question and drifts towards her, looping himself around the hand she hesitantly presents to him. She doesn’t turn away but doesn’t return the touch, and when she looks towards him, Suguru thinks it's the closest to crying she’s ever seen her.
“I’m sorry, Shoko.”
She reaches to touch Satoru earnestly, pressing her hand against the hood holding his starry eyes, and then turns and leaves.
A six-year-old Suguru peeks his head out from behind the bamboo divider to look into the living room. His mother is asleep on the small couch, snoring quietly with a blanket draped over her and pulled up to her chin. His father, working a night-time job, isn’t due back for a few more hours. Flickering light from the television in front of her blankets her in blue and white and Suguru gulps as he steps into the room carefully. Attached to his mother’s ankle is some sort of worm-like monster, a hand sprouting from its side and clutching onto her skin. Suguru had pointed it out two weeks ago when his mother had started to complain about a slight pain, but she had looked at him strangely and told him in a hushed tone to not tell the other townsfolk what he had thought he saw.
The monster turns its eye to gaze at him but remains attached to his mother, and Suguru gulps, clutching onto the hammer he’s holding behind his back. The plan is to grab it, rush outside, and deal with it, but the closer Suguru gets to it, the more afraid he feels. It begins to gurgle when he’s standing in front of his mother, and Suguru panics when she shifts, mumbling something in her sleep. Without thinking, he reaches for the thing, tearing it off his mother and rushing outside with it. It’s slimy in his hands and he bites his lip when it tries to attach itself to his hand, Suguru feeling the tiny pricks of what he assumes are teeth.
Outside, the shrill sounds of cicadas are a symphony to the monster’s execution. It tries to inch away from him, but Suguru holds it down and shuts his eyes as he hits it with a hammer, repeatedly. It screeches like an instinct the first few hits, and only when it’s silent does Suguru open his eyes.
There is purple blood splattered on the ground and himself, and Suguru scoots back away from it, panting. He sees something black swirling by his hand and holds it out in front of him, afraid. What’s left of the worm reacts to the movement, its bloody body parts swirling into a small, black ball in his hand.
Suguru doesn’t use Satoru to harm others.
When he hunts down the Star Religious Group, Satoru isn’t meant to spill blood. Suguru, however, is drenched in it. His hair is picked up as he watches the plethora of spirits he’s unleashed into the room with all of its officials and funders tear them apart. He knows this is a catalyst, that one day, he will be hunted down with mirth, but it doesn’t matter now.
He’s distracted by his thoughts and the squelching sounds of carnage resounding in the conference room and doesn’t notice the sorcerer who enters the stage behind him. He hears the swirling, warping sound of their attack, but it’s too late by the time he twists his body to defend himself.
There’s a sudden fwooosh, followed by a vacuum of sound, and Suguru blinks, Satoru uncurled fully by him, an arm outstretched covered with blue eyes. The sorcerer that was attacking him is nonexistent now, a hole scooped out of the building where they had stood, debris and drops of blood floating by its rim, weightless and surreal.
Satoru doesn’t fold back into his usual form, and Suguru watches as he turns towards the few humans still managing to stay alive, and the spirits attacking them. A scraping, horrid sound rings throughout the space from Satoru, and Suguru doesn’t have the time to stop him from raising his arm again and ravaging everyone in front of him. Human and cursed spirits alike are eradicated within a blink of the eye, and Suguru is dumbstruck. Suguru is not attached to him, but he can feel the heavy waves of vile pressure rolling off of him.
He doesn’t feel like Satoru.
Suguru reaches for him, and although Satoru vibrates underneath his touch, his flesh twitching and almost pulling away, he stays.
“Satoru, do you understand me?”
“I do.”
“I’m sorry you had to do that. Okay? I’ll be more careful. I’m sorry.”
Satoru reacts to his words by folding back into his hold, the eyes along his limbs closing.
“Okay, but if you weren’t a jujutsu sorcerer, what would you be?”
Shoko is lazily kicking her legs in the water, Suguru beside her in the pool, resting his arms on the warm tile edge.
“Hm,” she says, tilting her head left and then right. “A bookstore owner. No, no wait, something that makes money.”
Away from them on the other edge, Satoru laughs.
“Like a doctor? You’d still be a doctor?”
Shoko rolls her eyes, “There are other jobs that make money, like a lawyer.”
The three of them are in a pool of a hotel they’re staying at after the exchange event in Kyoto, relaxing before they’re due to return the next day. Satoru dives back into the water, Shoko turning away from the resulting splash. When he breaches the surface, shaking his head like a dog, Suguru turns to face him.
“What about you, Satoru?”
He huffs, twirling a hand by his face as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“I’m too pretty to work, I’d have to be a model, or maybe an actor.”
Both Suguru and Shoko groan, and when Satoru goes to splash them, Suguru pushes him away.
“What about you, Geto?” Shoko asks.
He shrugs, “Not sure. Honestly, just not something corporate? Can’t imagine having the same job for years and not getting anything out of it.”
Satoru drapes himself over his back after, the legs of the sunglasses he has pushed up into his hair digging into his cheek.
“We’re gonna be sorcerers until we die, isn’t that sorta the same?”
“Don’t be a pessimist,” Shoko says.
“I mean, he’s not wrong,” Suguru professes. “But at least we’re doing something here, protecting people.”
It’s Shoko and Satoru’s turn to groan, and Satoru pushes him away, nearly knocking him into the pool wall.
“You can be so lame sometimes,” he groans.
Suguru rolls his eyes, but when Satoru nears Shoko’s other side and shares a mischievous look with him, he smirks. Before Shoko has time to react, they both grip onto her and pull her in.
They’re in a motel room that reeks of cigarettes and the cheap perfume sprayed over the starchy comforter to cover it when Suguru thinks of the question.
“Should I have had a funeral for you?”
The air ripples beside him as soon as he speaks, a black void swirling as Satoru appears fluidly, cosmically slinking out of it. Suguru doesn’t control when he’s present, he doesn’t dismiss him like other spirits. Satoru chooses when to be his, and when to rest. It’s easier like this, Suguru thinks, more natural.
“Funerals are sad,” Satoru murmurs.
“An altar, maybe?” Suguru offers. “Not sure if you count as dead or not, honestly.”
“Mean,” Satoru growls, drifting away from Suguru to the window with see-through, beige curtains.
“Sorry,” Suguru says. “It’s my fault, anyway.”
The thought of murdering his parents should feel more convoluted, but it doesn’t. Suguru finds it a logical resolution, despite the way Satoru questions him, pressing against his chest when Suguru lets him know of his plan. It makes sense; Suguru is an unknown liability to his parents, they think he’s a devout religious teenager, off at a high school in the city. They could be kidnapped and interrogated for information on him, or even worse, told what he’s done.
It’s better this way, easier, even.
He stands in the hall when it happens, far enough that the blood splatter doesn’t reach him. He doesn’t use Satoru, he’s chosen not to be present for this, and the frail part of Suguru wishes he could join him. It’s fast, his mother's and father’s confused but welcoming glances are cut short before any trace of betrayal can set in. When it’s done, he turns and walks out of the house, Satoru appearing by him as he heads uphill to the bus station he had chosen prior for their escape. It’s the same dirt road he ran on as a child, and the same he said farewell to his parents on, bags packed and ears freshly pierced for the start of his adolescence. When Suguru walks past the station, Satoru doesn’t say anything.
He drops to a squat on the ground in between the light of two street lamps, holding his head in his hands in the sliver of unlit space.
Satoru doesn’t touch him.
Their time is running out.
Suguru knows it, and Satoru does too by extension. The bounty on Suguru’s head has only increased astronomically since the slaughter of the religious organization, and Satoru is deemed too dangerous of a cursed spirit to be in his control. Suguru figures they have another week, maybe, before they’re found. He reminds Satoru that they’ll have to fight their way through, that he might have to kill people they know if they’re sent their way, and Satoru sways.
“I’ll kill them,” he promises, looping over Suguru’s arms. “I’ll kill them for us.”
“Don’t say it so easily,” Suguru says, but Satoru ignores him.
He’s been doing that more often than not recently, and Suguru worries that he’s losing Satoru to whatever his greed has held onto in this world.
“Ugly.”
He looks up to see Satoru somewhat unraveled, elongated to peer at the painting hanging above Suguru in the museum hall. They’re mostly alone in the gallery, the civilians around them deterred from the cold pressure changes Satoru causes by merely existing.
“It’s surrealistic,” Suguru explains. “I think it’s meant to be a little ugly.”
It’s almost like a guessing game between them, Suguru stepping into a new gallery and mentally selecting which paintings Satoru will comment on. The one Satoru’s head is hovering by is one of the ones Suguru had selected, and he gives himself a point. The portraiture he’s gazing at is of a woman whose face is removed and floating to the left of her, dark bells on strings hanging in its place.
“That’s stupid,” Satoru grumbles.
Suguru laughs, “Maybe.”
When they move on to another gallery, a lone woman sitting in the center sketching on a small notebook looks up suddenly, before gathering her things and stepping out hurriedly. Satoru detaches from Suguru then and hovers by various paintings, and Suguru watches from the woman’s spot, crossing his leg over the other.
Towards the end of their first year, he remembers there was an art exhibit he wanted to see. He was drawn to ornate, technical galleries and art installations, perhaps as a result of his more rural upbringing, and told Satoru that they should go before it closed. Satoru had begrudgingly agreed, and the two had bought tickets for the final weekend when the organizer would host some honorary speech and Q&A with the artist.
They were given a mission the same weekend, and Satoru had promised Suguru they’d attend next time. He had put the tickets away in his nightstand and forgotten until now. He wonders if he were to ask Satoru, if he had forgotten, too.
He returns to him after a few minutes, head nestled on one of his shoulders and leaning against him. It’s become a preferred spot for Satoru, and Suguru lets his head rest against his.
“Suguru?” Satoru says, and it’s more of a question than a name.
“I’m okay,” Suguru replies. “Just thinking.”
He’s going to lose.
The fight had started with Suguru defending himself from three bounty hunters, an older man, woman, and her grandson, but it had escalated when a teal curtain had surrounded them, and a series of Grade 1 sorcerers had appeared. He can hear rather than see Satoru going ballistic somewhere, pieces of the ground and the surrounding buildings gone, carved out by a void. Suguru has spirits loose and attacking, but the number is far less than he would want as a result of Satoru’s outburst a year ago.
Pain blossoms from his left side and Suguru turns his head, coughing up blood, to see that a portion of his torso, including his arm, has been hacked off. He doesn’t recognize the student he’s fighting, nor does he understand why they had sent out a student to fight him, but he has no mercy. He raises an arm and directs an attack towards him. It’s easily deflected and Suguru feels another part of his body, a portion of his left thigh, be hit.
Satoru roars from elsewhere, and for one electrifying, dizzying moment, Suguru thinks he’s going to release his expansion. The sorcerers around them scatter, and Suguru breathes in through his teeth, the adrenaline barely enough to subdue his nerves. He doesn’t think it’ll be enough; if Suguru is killed, Satoru will be set loose and exorcised.
The thought of him dying twice, of Suguru failing him again, makes him scream and lurch forward, clutching onto his wounds. There has to be something he can do before he dies, something that will—
He moves reflexively when he has the epiphany. He doesn’t think, solely acts on instinct as he surges forward to grab the weapon left behind by one of the sorcerers Satoru had voided meters away from him. It slips in his grasp initially, but then Suguru tightens his grip around the handle and breathes.
There is a way to not abandon Satoru, to fix what was done years ago.
The last thing he sees before plunging the blade into the side of his head is Satoru’s domain expansion swallow them all, everything bleeding over into black.
TYPE OF INCIDENT: BIRTH OF SPECIAL GRADE VENGEFUL CURSED SPIRIT
DATE: OCTOBER 31, 2009
TIME: 1:26 PM
LOCATION: SHIBUYA CITY (SPECIAL WARD OF TOKYO, JAPAN)
CASUALTIES:
- GRADE 1 SORCERER: MEI MEI
- SUPREME GRADE 1 SORCERER: NAOBITO ZENIN
- 27 NON-SORCERER CIVILIANS
OVERVIEW
Curse user and ex-Tokyo Metropolitan Curse Technical College student, SUGURU GETO, was approached by three unidentified sorcerers unaffiliated with TMCTC and proceeded to enter combat with said individuals, completely manifesting the Special Grade Vengeful Cursed Spirit SATORU GOJO (previous TMCTC student). The closest Grade 1 and higher Sorcerers were dispatched to eliminate SUGURU GETO and SATORU GOJO. SATORU GOJO activated domain expansion, and during this incident, SUGURU GETO self-terminated. At this point in time, it is noted that SUGURU GETO was not terminated by cursed energy, and therefore manifested as a Special Grade Vengeful Cursed Spirit. The first recorded dual-domain expansion was recorded, causing the termination of Grade 1 sorcerer MEI MEI, Supreme Grade 1 sorcerer NAOBITO ZENIN, and 27 non-sorcerer civilians. Both Special Grades eluded capture.
FURTHER RECORD OF INCIDENT ON PAGE 2
Sometimes, bouquets are left by the rockier shore of Okinawa, far from the half-moon beaches where the water is translucent and the sands white, at a junction where the densely forested hills nearly meet the ocean. There are stories that the bouquets are left for two devoted lovers haunting the shore, some even believing in rumors that one had taken their own life to be with the other for eternity. The belief is that if lovers leave an offering, the spirits will grant them blessings. Spirit guides and paranormal investigators have conducted experiments and overnight stays to no avail, whereas sorcerers are rumored to reject any sort of missions or expeditions there. There have been alleged sightings of the lovers wrapped around one another, one described horrifically to be a ghastly humanoid figure, the flesh attached to its neck draped over its body like a cloak, ribbons of it looping and circling around them as they swayed. These sightings describe the phantom as having no eyes but an impossibly wide mouth that glowed gold. Despite the horrific descriptions, no encounter has been described as volatile or violent. Instead, the lovers have been reported to be at peace.