Archive of Our Own ^beta

Rest feels like a stranger, now.

Suguru is always moving, always running and retching and racing to keep up with the paradoxical chaos of normalcy. When he looks up from the path he’s walked for years, the porcelain bone cobblestone stretches for miles, overtaking the red-orange smear of the horizon. There is no end. There is no turning back. There is only pavement, worn down from thousands of feet yet still sharp, bloody, and relentless.

This road is familiar. It is good. It is all he’s ever known.

Naturally, there are obstacles to be faced on top of the already treacherous trek forward.

A girl. A gunshot. Jeers of laughter echoing in his head days after, thumping against his skull in a perpetual headache.

But the road is good. It is good. It is good. The road is good because it cannot not be good. Suguru repeats this like a mantra, a prayer to a higher power to bestow meaning upon his actions. But under the flimsy veil of pretense, the truth is all too clear. There is no higher power, only him.

Satoru doesn’t see what he sees. Satoru has his eyes to the sky, chasing curses as if the solution to their problems doesn’t tremble in his palms: strength and undefinable ability.

Satoru Gojo is a hangnail that rips the world in two, a pain in the ass that's too powerful for his own good. The world worships him with horrible piety, witnesses him in radiant blue, robed in buzzing electric divinity. Deep down, Suguru knows that Satoru is like him, just a boy. This does not erase the truth of Satoru’s might.

Satoru has known pain, but he will never know torture or experience the regular agony of Suguru’s curse swallowing. He lives in a different plane of existence, unable to comprehend Suguru’s reality. When the world crumbles into ash at the hands of non-sorcerers, he will be on the wrong side, helping it disintegrate. This is why they’re falling apart at the seams, no longer maintaining equilibrium.

Still, Suguru is holding on. He continues to tread on dirt and bone and blood and sacrifice himself for the weak and useless. He endures the path, maybe for Satoru, maybe for personal sanity.

Suguru’s days function as a carousel of robotic movement, the same eight steps looping around and around until they consume his mind.

1. Wake up.
2. Eat a substantial breakfast (you won’t be able to stomach anything later).
3. Defeat a curse, usually of a high grade.
4. Swallow the remains, that swirling orb of purple energy.
5. Ignore the burn in your throat, the stinging tears in your eyes.
6. Scrub your body raw under the weak water pressure of the school’s showers.
7. Collapse in your bed, sleeping in wet hair and waking up with it sticking in wild directions.
8. Tie it up and begin again.

Today, the hot water lasts longer than usual, so he lingers under the spray until the final traces of warmth disappear. By the time he steps on the bath mat to dry himself off, his muscles are loose and tension in his shoulders has dissolved. He leaves the bathroom carelessly toweling off his dripping wet hair and blindly opens his bedroom door with the towel obscuring his vision.

“Hey,” a voice greets him.

Suguru pulls the towel off his head to see Satoru sitting on his bed, legs sprawled out and filling up most of the empty space. The sun is dying in the window behind him, and glints of gold shine through the cracks of the shutters, shimmering against the white of his hair. Light dances across his face in slivers, splintering his gilded features into a half-painted portrait. Satoru is a vision, one so comfortingly familiar that Suguru smiles in spite of himself.

“Hey,” he replies, terribly fond.

“Been a while,” Satoru says. “I felt like we should hang out.”

“Sure.” Suguru closes the door behind him and sits next to Satoru on the bed. “I have to leave early tomorrow for a mission, but it’d be nice to catch up.”

Satoru pouts. “Aww, fine. Tell me when you want me gone, but I’m staying as long as I can.”

“So needy,” Suguru chastises playfully. Still, he can’t deny the excitement that thrums in his chest, fatigue and exhaustion wiped away at the mere sight of Satoru.

“Don’t act like you aren’t happy to see me,” Satoru teases. “What have you been up to recently?”

Suguru winces. It wasn’t long ago when they didn’t have to ask about each other’s lives, always joined at the hip and overly familiar. It’s not either of their faults, this separation. Time slips away. People change. But maybe he could’ve tried harder. Maybe Satoru could have tried harder.

“Nothing much,” he says. “Just a lot of missions.”

“Same. It’s like they never end.”

They lapse into a clumsy silence. There are things they both need to acknowledge, words they stubbornly refuse to let escape the tongue.

“Your hair is dripping,” Satoru cuts through the stagnation.

“That happens a lot. I’m always too lazy to blow dry it,” he jokes. The task of drying hair has become a chore recently, a battle against the gravity that spitefully presses down on his exhaustion leaden arms.

“Lazy? Never thought I’d see the day.”

He gestures weakly. “Yeah, well…”

“Why don’t you dry it now? You did bring a towel.”

“I mean, it’s dry enough, isn’t it?”

Satoru sighs. “And you act like I’m the messy one. Give me the towel, I’ll do it myself.”

Bewildered, Suguru tosses the towel to Satoru, who gracefully snatches it out of the air. Satoru sits up on his knees and positions himself behind Suguru. With gentle movements, he divides a section of hair and presses it between both sides of the towel, carefully blotting it dry. They’re close enough for his breath to ghost the tip of Suguru’s ear. The tips of his fingers lightly drag against Suguru’s scalp as he takes up another piece of hair.

Suguru welcomes the teases of touch, letting the suggestion of skin against skin abate his hunger for physical contact. A yearning for more gnaws at his ribs, craving catharsis. He pushes it down.

Satoru tosses the towel to the chair on the other side of the room and picks up a hairbrush. He brushes it through Suguru’s tresses, detangling as he goes.

“You should come by my room more,” Satoru says. “It feels like we never see each other.”

“I’m just busy all the time,” Suguru sighs. “I wish they’d ease off on the missions sometimes.”

“I guess. But if it isn’t us being sent out, then who else?”

“Hmm. Isn’t that the problem though?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” Suguru shakes his head. “Just saying stuff.”

“Sure,” Satoru accepts. “But I get what you mean. Even if it’s impossible, it would be nice to have a break once in a while. I never know what’s happening in your life.”

“That probably won’t end,” Suguru says bitterly. “At least not until there aren’t as many assignments. And not as many curses.”

“I feel like,” Satoru hesitates. “I just- I kind of feel like we’re both changing, and by the end of this, I won’t know you anymore.”

Suguru remains mute. The chasm between them is already half-formed. They’ve been losing sight of each other for a while, growing farther apart with every mission, every curse sucked down. What good does it do to acknowledge this?

“Whatever,” Satoru blurts after the silence stretches a beat too long. “That’s just like, a dumb thought I had.”

“It is dumb,” Suguru lies.

“Rude,” Satoru chuckles, regaining composure.

“We’re maturing, not changing. It’s not like I’m a completely different person.”

“That’s true. You still use two in one shampoo. I can tell,” Satoru tugs at a lock of hair.

Suguru bats at his hand and scowls. “Shut up, it works the same.”

Satoru laughs and sits back, putting the hairbrush on the bedside table. Suguru readjusts to face Satoru. They sit cross-legged, knees a whisper away from touching. The two of them are parallel lines, running side by side but unable to bridge the gap and converge into each other.

The final traces of light from the setting sun paint the dark evening sky with pinks and purples, casting miniature shadows across Satoru’s brow bone, eyelashes, nose. He’s beautiful and Suguru is bleeding blue. He will remember this moment forever, he thinks. If memory is a mosaic of broken mirrors, distorted reflections of a person's peaks and plummets, tonight’s shard will be stained glass— dyed by the cobalt pouring from his open wounds.

“You know,” Suguru continues quietly. He takes a quivering breath in. “It doesn’t matter if we don’t see each other that often. Nobody will ever know me the way you do.”

This is, perhaps, the most honest he’s been in a while. Even with the changing tides rushing over their bodies, eroding the shape of their souls, their truth cannot be swallowed by the cruelty of nature.

Satoru is a tableau, frozen in time. He stares at Suguru, searching his face for something unreadable.

“What?” Suguru asks, voice barely a murmur.

Satoru shakes his head and looks away. Suguru grabs the sides of his face, feeling the sharpness of Satoru’s jaw against the pad of his thumb. He forces their eyes to meet, a silent plea for transparency.

“What is it?” He asks insistently.

Satoru remains stone for a few seconds more before smiling helplessly and leaning forward, pressing their lips together. Suguru reacts without thinking, muscle memory of an unprecedented pattern ingrained in the fibers of his being. He wraps his hands around the curve of Satoru's waist and feels Satoru’s fingers tangle in his hair.

Satoru kisses him like he needs it. Suguru kisses him back like the point at which their lips meet is the only thing keeping him afloat.

Hands gripping tighter, fingers digging deeper. Satoru pushes them closer, closer, until their bodies are flushed together and they’re still parallel lines, but teetering on the precipice of fusing into some abomination of flesh, bone, and cursed energy. Yet, despite it all, the distance between them holds its place, sitting heavy against his sternum.

It isn’t pleasant, not what Suguru fantasized about during nights alone. Satoru licks into his mouth and traces a sour path of desperation along his teeth. His lips are sugary sweet, but Suguru tastes bitterness, the overpowering remnants of countless swallowed curses that can never be scrubbed away.

This is wrong, he understands faintly, everything about this is wrong. But Satoru moans softly and he can’t let go, need tightening its noose around his neck. Satoru’s touch radiates blistering heat and Suguru burns in infrared, vermillion blazing against his closed eyelids.

He feels wetness on the side of his nose.

Slowly, reluctantly, Suguru breaks away. Smudged silver tears glisten under the blue of Satoru’s eyes, mercurial in moonlight. Satoru quickly wipes them away, but acute awareness of the depth of their emotions thickens in the air between them, suffocating in its density. Satoru looks away, refusing to admit vulnerability.

Silence blankets the void of Suguru’s dorm. Satoru clears his throat and stands abruptly. “Uh, it’s… getting late. I’ll let you rest. Good luck on your mission tomorrow.”

Suguru nods. He lets him leave.

This, like everything else, is left unfinished. He’s coming to realize the impossibility of a satisfying conclusion.

There might be a million reasons their relationship has collapsed into this fragile, lonely thing, but faced with the sight of Satoru’s retreating back, Suguru shoulders the entirety of the blame. It is a choice, to not keep Satoru there. To not fix things.

Maybe Suguru from months ago would make a different decision. Maybe he would wrap himself in plastic and sweat out his sins, apologize for tasting salt, for being the boy that he is. Now, they’re both too far gone.

Now, Suguru recognizes the change that Satoru fears.

Look at the world around us. Look at the people around us. Everything is changing. Everyone is shedding their skin and evolving and here we are, clinging on to a life that belongs in the past. Change is inevitable and out of our control. Take this pill and shove it down your throat. Bite down, relish in the astringent tang if you need to.

I am strong, strong enough to live life the way I want.

He’s choosing to let go. He’s choosing to move on.

Watch change, this inconspicuous tear in the fabric of our existence, see it slowly but surely gorge on its own emptiness to form a gaping hole. When will you stop pressing your fingers over fraying threads and instead begin to tear them into a pattern of your own making?

Suguru knows the way forward.

Look at me, Satoru. Witness me dig my claws into the bleeding gunshot wound of vulnerability and mold it into something new. See me discard futility in the face of greatness.

No, he is not afraid.

I’m sorry, Satoru. But I will not apologize. All that's left to do is embrace this trajectory.

He is the maker of his own destiny.