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The taste of a cursed spirit that no one else knows.
Early, Suguru learns to hold his tongue. The metaphor is apt, grotesque organ bound in the clutch of his rounded teeth, writhing and supplicating and oozing pink with an impulse beyond his understanding, but quickly--by necessity--within his control.
He is seven, and he holds: pickled kombu that leaches saliva from the corners of his mouth, intense in a way that draws the tissue of his cheek tight, regardless of the soothing waft of rice he packs against his teeth. He eases his nausea with the clumsy press of flattened fingers to the bridge of his nose, applies the same flattened quality to his stare when his mother turns toward him with a quiet look; not inquisition, only a momentary appraisal, subsequent decision. He pants. He swallows, swallows to ease the frenzy pitch that outcompetes the very nausea he'd set to quell. Look, it's fine, I can--
In the years to come, he can hardly remember the source of his aversion, texture or taste or smell or the other, and when offered, he simply nods, lends a shrug and a genial sure .
He is thirteen, and he holds: the weight of polished stone, something so painstakingly smoothed it makes his heart ache with empathy. They are so much alike, refinement imposed on the intrinsically grotesque.
He had grappled this one, small and wheezing through bulbous not-lungs, popping the filmy bubbles of liquid that gathered at the lopsided slit of its mouth on each outbreath. “Sorry, sorry,” he’d panted, ribs furling and squeezing in the ungraceful struggle. This is another reality he confronts, there is no choreography, no duck and parry and flowing redirect, only the-- entity --trying to assail him with a desperate, animal compulsion. He has to, has to--
He brings the sphere to his mouth, brushes it against his lip and stretches the canvassing of his cheek to guide it to the base of his tongue. The taste of bile, oily on his tongue and slipping tendrils of seizing disgust past his throat to ratchet his gut with incremental tension, the subsequent fold of each of the being’s wicked fingers dropping to his bicep-- one, two, three . Still, it’s something he can endure, with fingers tensing and eyes, pricked with tears and squeezed shut.
He follows his own compulsion, follows it until it leads him to black sedans with tinted windows, to a large hand wrapped gingerly around his in greeting; to justice.
He is fifteen, and he holds: the haven of his mouth, the cage of his teeth and the weapon of his tongue. The other boy holds, too, something in the overfull space beyond his eyes, lineage pulling his lashes high and his grin lazy. Strands of white spun in the contained universe of his iris, curling gently around Suguru’s wrists when he reaches forward. Beckoning, commanding, caging, like the tendrils of black that spiral into his palms with the use of his cursed technique. We’re the strongest.
(Too, on his first sly retort with disdainfully wrinkled nose, Satoru slugs him hard enough to loosen his jaw. Punches free that delicate stitching that crosses the threshold of his teeth, the pop-pop-pop of loosened sutures as Suguru gloriously takes him to dirt.)
In these days, the sun is nothing but white, small enough to hold in their palms. Small enough to swallow, to sit in the dilating center of Satoru’s pupil when he turns to Suguru with a vicious laugh curling the handsome slants of his face. When unconsumed, simply propped at the threshold of his mouth, he keeps it captured casually between rows of white teeth, leaving vague imprints.
Thousands more rows beyond, clawing and spitting and hissing in a sick anticipation that echoes through his body on every recall, with every surge of his cursed energy. Knocking between extremities with the plink of radar, there is nothing to do but curl his tongue about the base of that anodyne white orb and breathe himself empty, Satoru’s head propped against his shoulder.
Shoko offers him a cigarette, and the chains of the drawbridge lower, every curse sitting in the hollow pit of his body festering in the scent of the smoke. There is solace in the bitterness, an expectation set and succinctly fulfilled that eases the tightness at his neck and the strain winding at the base of his spine. He rolls it to his molars, slides the filter to brush at the raised ridge of gum in the far corner of his mouth, eyes closed. He takes a deep inhale.
Shoko huffs a laugh, husky and warm, “That good?” Her eyes are creased and her mouth is closed and her hair shafts over her shoulder, bang slipping dark over the pale expanse of her forehead, and Suguru shrinks in his skin, wrenched back from his occupying station at the forefront of consciousness.
I’m lucky to know you. You’re beautiful. I wish we could be made of the same things. Bottled, kept. Smoke, acrid, sinking into the receptacle of his gut, finding him in the recesses of his body.
Instead, “Let me light yours,” and she throws her head back, brushing those glossy locks of hair once more across the slight, vulnerable slope of her shoulder, lids lowered in ambivalent mirth as he cranes his neck to press the cherry of his cigarette to her own.
Satoru is smiling, mouth parted on a grin as he leans across the table to do that which he does best--be a nuisance, of course. Suguru’s face slackens around a mouthful of broth, the slant of his cheek slipping down the neat furrow of his knuckles, and he lets his gaze flicker upwards in that quiet, instantaneous way that he knows pulls at Satoru’s flailing attentions; always hungry, seemingly, to find the quiet static that rests between them, to slip into it with an easy smile and an offered hand. Suguru’s lips part. Satoru’s eyes stay closed. He twitches in pain, fingers snagging on the seawater film of reality.
Waking is the ugly squelch of a length of butcher’s wire spearing him from ear to ear, vision fracturing as if the yolk of his iris is split lengthwise, atom by atom on the fine edge of a surgical blade, rotting and dark and festering with sick. Below the bloodied tableau of crooked nose, swollen lip, he pants, open static. Entirely null. Toji’s-- the monkey’s --foot against his temple. Shoko’s hands in a distantly fond frenzy to right his rattled skull. Satoru--surely Satoru, the… his , fuck! --eyes open, almost breathtakingly so, with white lashes crossing the distant tundra sweep of his iris, narrowly gleaming in their curl, the very gossamer of the Fates. With face scuffed and pleading, he is somehow distant, unbroachable. Suguru wants to vomit at the thought that resounds in his head: beautiful . Beautiful in a way his grotesquery cannot contact.
Riko, dead and beyond.
The knot he ties of his tongue, tethered to the good, is tight enough to cut circulation, and it is a quiet, indulgent prayer that wishes for the deoxygenated pallor of his skin to take on some shade even palely approximating the glinting shades of Satoru’s universe.
“We,” Suguru heaves, letting--letting, he furrows his brow and prays that the feeling knifing his intestines apart is a let , prays again that his prayer will make it so--cursed energy spill and curl, winding up the damp backs of his calves in tandem with the steam that unfurls from the ajar shower stall. “ We ,” the thousands of orbiting teeth circling the chasm of his throat chitter. A flyhead loops lazily at his back, kicking digitigrade legs against his nape, the mimicry of affection that pulls his shoulder blades tight, muscle spasming despite the smothering heat. The sticky wrap of a tongue about his ankle. The sky blinks up at him from his bare feet and he watches the water drip from the ends of his hair, updown. He’s dizzy.
“We’re doing okay,” he says, to no one at all, to anyone, everyone. “Settle down,” voice wafting like smoke, echoing recursively, infinite space. “I just,” bated breath, the flyhead buzzes and whines, and in a singular, violent motion, he reaches back to crush it in his hand. Still, without cursed energy licking at the shallows of his palm, its head only caves, spills malleable flesh past his balled fist. It kicks weakly against him once more, babbles in a broken language he’s sure resides somewhere at the tip of his own tongue as well.
I just hate … He hears. He says. He tastes vomit with each of the hundred mouths that line his innards. The sky is blinking up at him between the grout of the tile and each eyelash, brushing against his toes with the delicacy of a moth in flight, reverberates through his body like the sound of shattering glass, the groan of warping steel. Like wrenching open; like twisting irrevocably shut.
He is ascending adulthood, hand-over-fist on the rigging, clenching the rope with his teeth until the veins at his temples are bulging with want to burst. He is holding. There is no break in the clouds, no landing at which the cool, sweet air of the aether sweeps the sweat from his brow and the mania from his twisted mouth. It is with a single-minded purpose that he advances, burned into the cording of each muscle that drives him forth, intransigence crafted and scaffolded with the years as they pass. With reflexive ease: he says the right things, lets the speech swell and lilt in his mouth, lithe and intuitive in a way his body has never felt.
In quiet company, his mouth wilts, sugar soft and molded to fit loosely around the hair tie he presses between his lips, hands trained in the art of lifting against Nanako’s nape as he gathers the loose waves of hair in hand. Too, in the art of pressing kisses to sleepily bobbing temples, brushing lips to the knuckles of joined hands offered in holy desperation. The grace of good night and I love you both and yes, equally, of course and you will obey me.
The arts to which he is most suited, to which he exerts the most of his craft, and those swept in the unrelenting current of the muse. All of it, at an almost ecstatic ease, with a near-shivering, nausea-inducing pleasure.
"It's good, isn't it?" Nanako hums around a mouthful of sugar, rocking on her heels with the tetchy frivolity of a girl her age to knock a shoulder into Mimiko, who hums her own assent. Suguru smiles, eases the tension in his shoulder with a deliberate outbreath.
With hands cradling the last bites of his own crepe; masticated, swallowed, tucked away before he can contemplate anything of the humble farmer’s hands oozing bitterness in the form of cursed energy, he turns in affirmation to settle his sight upon the twins who had ushered him forward. For a brief, consumptive moment, he flinches.
He shifts his gaze from the slip of cardinal resting against Nanako’s gum, strawberry flesh marbled a glossy red and white like rent skin. Stifles the swell of noxious air in his gut at the residual taste, sugar curdling against his palate into the hollow, dulcet tone of his own voice, spitting declarations of war. He doesn’t care to place his trepidation, instead steps forward to draw young heads to his clavicle. With a broad palm soothing either skull, he lends the lopsided edge of his smile to either crown in a quick kiss. The girls laugh, laughing even harder when he ducks forward to snag a bite of crepe, translucent syrup and whipped cream smearing past his lip. Glossy red and white. Like rent skin. Curdling.
He swallows with an assured resolve, the gaiety at his eyes true, true in a way indivisible; neither fanaticism nor measured conviction.
Submerged and sinking, saturated and leaden, Suguru feels for every ugly, traitorous sinew, the gummy tendon where wrist meets forearm and the webbing between that bridges to each quivering knuckle, each trembling joint. Drawbridge, hollow, loosened stitch, bloodied mouth, tightened knot, beckon-call-capture--
Suguru, are you going to let yourself get used like that?
Having lent the instrument of his mouth to the tinkle of the occupant’s bell, he wants nothing more than to drive the curl of his thumb through the soft stretch of skin and fascia that obscures the submental gap, to reach death-laden index and forefinger through the seal of his lips. Wants nothing more than to grip and wrench the obedient, Pavlovian animal of his tongue free.