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Suguru watches, hand still clasped loosely in the other boy’s approximation of a youthful greeting--cocked head and sleazy grin, loose shoulder and limp wrist crooked to the point of trained perfection--as the distilled lavender syrup tone of his iris dissipates, radially peeling to expose a brilliant, striated cyan. There’s a hot pulse travelling from the cording of his neck to his temple, a loosening of the sinew that makes his shoulders sag and eyelid twitch, oh.
“Huh?” The other boy blinks hard, lashes fluttering like down and eyebrows knitting before his features smooth, mouth rounding into an O. He releases his hand and, without thought, without hesitation, reaches forward to wrap long fingers about Suguru’s cheeks, sliding the pads of his index fingers back to settle behind his ears with a chill that sends a shiver fritzing up the length of his spine. “Oh, you’re…”
Suguru turns his head--can’t stand it, to stare into that eye that used to be his, probing and knowing, his own silhouette shadowed in the pupil. Glances to the mirror, skirting his form and meeting his own gaze when he dares slip loose the eyepatch to feel the veins in his temple writhing beneath the skin: now estranged. His fantasy, of soft voice and wanting hands: fulfilled.
There is a fatal sense of shame, dropping his stomach to splatter wetly through his feet, staggering his breath.
“Nice to meet you. My name is Getou Suguru. I look forward to working with you.” He rushes the words, feels them knock against each other, bulbous and unwieldy in his mouth, fracturing the attempt at normalcy. His lip glances the pad of the other boy’s palm as he speaks, and he can feel a flush traveling up his collar. He misses it already, the lopsided hyper awareness that had tickled his skull for so long.
The other boy uses his thumb to flip up Suguru’s eyepatch. Suguru can’t place the speed with which he does it: ease, or entitlement? He feels stiff, even as the other traces the rim of where his lower lashes rest, smile broadening before cracking into a giggle.
“You’re pretty!” He laughs, the curl of his thumbs turned teasingly fond, an eyelash glueing to the pad of his thumb and feathering along the pit of his under eye.
Suguru starts, a crack in the porcelain set of his demeanor, and draws back with a half-suppressed snort and a wrinkle of the nose, “That’s not a very good introduction.”
The fantasy is, perhaps, unfulfilled.
“I’m not really into being told what to do,” Satoru sneers, turning from Suguru and brushing the other’s palm from his shoulder with the backs of his fingertips, minimized contact. Still, a spark, white-hot in the suspended space of their palms. “Especially not by some bullshit like that.”
“That’s a lot to hear from you, Satoru Gojou,” Suguru scoffs, giving his offended hand a quick brush against his chin, “of the Limitless technique. User of the Six Eyes.” It’s petty, a low blow, Satoru still seemingly tender at the points of contact whereupon he was bound to his clan duties, gracelessly edging around his sheltered upbringing and making up for lack of convention in sheer, obvious flamboyance, but something about him brings Getou--of all facets, in all forms, at his best and his worst and the point in which these two selves are exactly the same--to the surface. His left temple throbs, the phantom echo of the Six Eyes still rattling in his skull. Ah, something.
Satoru snickers, gives his head a little shake and slips his hands into his pockets, “Doesn’t it make more sense that way, Suguru?” He shrugs as he folds his arms overhead, the shake of his head evolving into full rolls on the tops of his shoulders, lazy with the aid of his forearms. There is mirth in the creases at his eyelids, prodding the edge of some chasm he has no real interest in, if only to see Suguru slip on the cliff’s edge, “Sorcery’s always been like that, don’t you think it’s better to choose things where you still can?”
Suguru scratches his head; He follows, but is lost somewhere in the rationale, still untrained in the exact implied premises Satoru grants to his own existence, in which he’s privileged above others in even the most inane of regards simply by virtue of birth.
Too, he recognizes the cruelty Satoru seems to be putting forth in this, the leverage he seems to want to bait Suguru with. Somehow, though, he can tell that’s not how he means it, and excuses his clumsiness to treasure the offered gem of earnestness.
He licks his lips, “I don’t know if you ever make sense, Satoru.”
Gojou’s lids lift, eyebrows jumping to his hairline as a grin teases apart the corners of his mouth, splitting his maw. He stills the rollick of his shoulders, simply leaves his head at angle and links his gaze to the middle distance where Suguru’s own seems to fall off.
“Honestly, it’s kind of selfish of you to justify the things that benefit you and reject those you don’t understand, if it’s all cosmic bullshit anyway. It’s not as if you can change the material...” Getou mutters, fingers fluttering at his hips as he contemplates, before trailing off as he meets Satoru’s smile. His gaze is bright to the point of rawness, the impression of flayed skin and exposed nerves.
“...What?” His face scrunches further, lips curling in distaste at the untempered glee twisting Satoru’s lips.
“You used my given name!” Satoru says, mouth stretched so wide it borders a grimace. His cheek pulls away to expose his molars at one side, glinting with saliva, and Suguru watches them twinkle, bone rising from the tender flesh of his gums, monument to creation. Everywhere, Satoru seems to refract light.
“Well, I mean, you are my…” He flushes, snaps his gaze away, at which Satoru snickers. Ease, or entitlement? If this is rejection, why does Satoru reach for him the way he does, toeing at the soft overlap of his uniform pants while the gap of unmarked skin and gentle curve of ankle between Satoru’s own slacks and loafers seemingly flickers lambent, just for Suguru?
“Your… your…?” Satoru prompts as he rights himself, brows waggling, mouth gone liquid where it wavers in delight.
He snorts, and uses Satoru’s lopsided posture to knock him loose with a hard palm on his elbow, “Hm, well, weren’t you the one who wanted to pick, Satoru?”
Satoru pouts, parting the soft seam of his lips to contest before a roar echoes from the far end of the hall, followed by the juddering clatter of a door slammed into the opposing wall at the end of its track.
“What time is it?” Suguru whispers, eyes narrowing.
Satoru shrugs, giving Suguru a returning shove--both hands, full-palms, like a defibrillator to the chest--before bolting in the opposite direction. Only the pale sliver of his calf as he turns heel, the click of his dress shoes.
“My? My damn problem, seems like,” he teeters on his heels before striking after him.
“This is great! I should’ve done this sooner!” Suguru’s hair is whipping hard and fast about his head, eyes flickering beneath the snapping of his bang in the wind, and he tips his head back and laughs, free and open. Gojou wants to crawl down his throat, find the gentle, windswept place inside of Getou where that laugh seems to come from. He thinks he could stay there forever.
“Suguru,” he gasps, and the other turns his head, irises catching, the wine tones shot through with color like amethyst held to the light. Behind him, a tendril of the curse they’re settled on writhes, landing against his back to curl beneath his ear with a wet smear of something ungodly. He doesn’t flinch.
“I think I’m in love with you.” Satoru says.
“Huh?” he barks, brings a hand up to clear his face of free strands, brushing back the curse’s appendage with a single sweep of the wrist.
“I love you!” Satoru yelps, cupping his hands to amplify the swoop of his voice against the wind as it rushes them.
“Huh? I love you, too!” Suguru yells back reflexively, lifting the corner of his mouth in a loose grin. Satoru’s heart swells, straining between the knitting of his ribs, twisting them together painfully at the fulcrum.
Suguru’s face drops. “I mean, uh...” Suguru’s mouth is moving, but the din is too much, and the Six Eyes is starting to throb in the hollows of his skull, eyelashes fluttering in conflict of desire: to watch the panicked twist of Suguru’s expression, or to retreat to the cool reprieve of beneath his eyelids.
He slides forward on his knees by just a few inches, leans up and wraps his hands around Suguru’s face, activating Infinity. It’s quiet, and he tucks his head against Suguru’s collar, the rest of the world drifting away in the few inches of buffer, only the acrid scent of Suguru’s residuals singing his nostrils, the neutral florals of his shampoo and the salt of his skin. Getou Suguru, his first home, his first comfort. His…
“I didn’t realize you could do that to other people.” Suguru noses into Satoru’s hair, hands hovering in the air before settling to slide along the peaks of his shoulder blades, bony and svelte beneath the fabric of his uniform. In the thump of his palms, relief.
“I didn’t realize I was in love with you,” Satoru counters, lifting from the dip of Suguru’s clavicle, feeling the heat radiate from Suguru’s face as his cheeks pinken. He is unashamed of his own flush, especially for the way it makes Suguru’s gaze slip, catching on the wet part of his mouth. Again, on the glint of his teeth.
“Hey, say it again,” he mutters, reaching forward to brush the words on the cartilage ribbing Suguru’s esophagus.
“Wh…” He turns his head, understanding what’s asked of him, and Satoru reaches up to trace the vague shape over his left-eye, the remnants of an uneven tan-line left by fifteen years of compulsory accessorizing. That, too, is Satoru’s now.
“Please?” Satoru kisses the joint of his jaw. It’s unnecessary, greedy on Satoru’s part, but he’s helpless to it, lost again in the face of something greater--and yet, perfectly suited, the buds of the strongest sorcerers needing no less than the weight of the cosmos guiding their coupling.
“I love you, too.” Suguru says. From beneath him, the curse writhes, dragging tendrils up his backside to expose a slice of skin to the winds of high altitude, down where Satoru’s infinity doesn’t touch him. He shivers.
(After Getou goes limp in his arms, small with arms and legs thrown haphazard--yet somehow, slotting perfectly, finding the heat-printed spaces where Riko had bled through his uniform--he stands before the mirror, watching the swirl of his iris. He stands, and he waits, waits for Suguru to return to him in the only way he can; he cups the right side of his head, watches the way his pupils quiver.
He wants to watch the color spill, like broken skin, red on blue until it settles to ripe plum, to the color of a day old bruise. Like freedom, the snip of the strings that keep his hands suspended forever in the cycle of Limitless, forever a fundamental node of the Jujutsu world. In some depraved part of him, he looks forward to cradling the wound, the void of lost awareness; fitting, for the loss of his soulmate.
It never comes.)
(Shoko reaches up, uses her thumb and forefinger to frame Gojou’s face, settling coldly against the high ridge of his cheekbone. “They’re still…” She mutters, sympathy under the guise of cool, medical fascination.
Gojou laughs weakly, the sound limp and suffocated in the air, pulled from the murky depths of his lungs to writhe in an environment ill-fitting, “I’m Satoru Gojou.”
Of the Limitless technique. User of the Six Eyes.
The strongest.)