Work Text:
Maybe he should have known they’d be doomed to fail.
Masamichi is no optimist, but he’s not a pessimist, either. Maybe there’s a reason that statement is something of the hindsight rather than the fore. Although, he thinks, watching Satoru lean against the hallway’s large windows, twirling an unlit cigarette between his fingers, maybe he’d never bothered to think about it, because he hadn’t wanted them to.
His footsteps are loud in the silence as he approaches, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses where Satoru’s are clear. They never lift to look at him, seemingly stuck on some invisible point on the opposite wall. He doesn’t move, though, and so Masamichi takes the invitation for what it is, settling beside where his student loiters without a care.
For a while, they don’t speak. He watches that plain, white cigarette spin around, and around, and around in nimble fingers, given plenty of time to think on the statement he’s seemed to have conjured for himself. Should he have known? They’d been like oil and flame, after all, except oil lamps never burned down a house unless tipped, and hadn’t they been?
“...I don’t think you’ll get any nicotine out of it doing that,” Masamichi finally murmurs, when the silence feels like too much, and his thoughts get a little too large. Satoru breathes out slightly harsher, though it’s nothing close to a laugh. He gives the cigarette another fancy twirl- spinning it between his fingers, over his knuckles, along the back of his thumb.
“I don’t have a lighter,” he says, nothing to it save the simple shrug of his shoulders. He sounds quiet, serious. It’s not like him. “Suguru took it.”
Masamichi can’t help how his lips thin, how his teeth tighten against the pain of the melancholy when it hits. Should he have known, he wonders? Had they been doomed from the start? Or is he just a sad old man, looking for excuses for why a piece of their life has fallen apart?
Without a word, he digs a hand in his pocket, fumbling until his knuckles brush metal and the guilty little secret he can’t help but occasionally indulge in. Masamichi holds out the lighter, flicking the lid open with practiced fingers and striking the spark until a little flame pops up.
He watches Satoru’s face rather than his motions, catching the dull edge to his eyes as he stares, the surprise buried under the pain. Silently, he swallows, and lips slanting in the movement Masamichi’s long since learned to mean they’re being bitten from the inside, he holds out the cigarette.
It catches quickly, oil to a flame, and once it starts to funnel up a line of smoke, he snaps the lighter shut again. Satoru only stares at the cigarette instead of lifting it to take a drag, eyes frozen on the lit end where it faintly glows, an already fading ember. The metal is slipped back into his pocket, after a moment of indecision where his hand hovers, frozen. He’s never had any real use for it outside of a bad habit, though as much as he’d like to give it to Satoru to have since Suguru took theirs, he has no need for a new one.
He doesn’t move when the weight hits him; when Satoru falls to his left, and careens none too gently into his shoulder. He only raises an arm to tug him a little closer as the cigarette is finally drawn up to twisted lips, a shaky drag the only noise in the silence of the mountainside.
It hadn’t always been so quiet.
“Suguru!” He can still hear, an echo of a shout as Satoru had stood along the walkway far below them, buoyant and bright and waving excitedly. “Suguru! Tell me how your mission went!”
“Quit yelling,” he’d always scoffed, after finally getting close enough to shove at some part of Satoru’s face. “I’ll tell you later. Tell me how yours went.” And then they’d be lit again, a lamp burning bright, stuck together at the hip as they’d ramble away at all the things they’d missed when apart.
Masamichi had used to find a sort of pride in it, how they’d seemed to be two pieces of the same puzzle. He’d had what they had too, once, and for the first few years, it had seemed like they’d do better than him.
“...Hey, Yaga?” Satoru asks, slumped against his shoulder, one of the rarest moments of weakness he’s seen yet.
“Hm?” He tones, pretending not to hear the fragility in the sound of his spoken name, pretending like he doesn’t smell the smoke of a burning cigarette.
“What was it like to be married?” Satoru wonders, his words a little roughened from the single inhale of nicotine he’d managed to get down, and Masamichi sighs. He lifts the hand curled around skinny waist to settle on snowy head, instead, unable to resist the temptation of setting his own on the crown of Satoru’s. Some days, he feels so heavy, like he might finally cave in.
“A lot of things,” he murmurs, thinking of twin laughter trickling out of a dorm room down the hall hours after the end of class; how sometimes, he used to sit in the living room of it while he graded just so it could fill his ears instead of the stifling silence of his home.
“It felt like standing in an ocean,” he starts, remembering inside jokes constantly being whispered back and forth when he’d be trying to teach; how one could never be seen without the other. “The tide trying to pull you out.” Days where they’d both step out of an assistant’s car bloodied and bruised; how they’d hobble together to the small clinic, arms over shoulders and weight leaned against weight. “Knowing it’d never get you, because someone was always there to keep you from being swept out.” Moments where he’d see a small, fond smile, hidden or blatant, and how for every single one he’d ever caught, they’d always matched each other.
He hadn’t been stupid enough to ask why Satoru hadn’t killed Suguru in Shinjuku. He knows love well enough to recognize it when he sees it, and he knows loss well enough to keep quiet when it matters.
Satoru remains silent, the curdling smoke of the cigarette drifting up past his face, still slumped on his shoulder. Maybe he should have known they’d fail, but how could he have guessed? They’d loved each other, even if they’d never said it in so many words. Masamichi had seen it in every scrunched smile, each simple touch, all the impossible ways they’d found to be close.
“...What’s it like to not be, anymore?” Satoru asks again, the small words tired. The cigarette still smokes, but in the space it takes him to answer, Masamichi watches it begin to slowly die. He lets his hand fall from Satoru’s hair, elbow twinging in old discomfort as he snakes calloused fingers down to ones that don’t have any at all- not when they exist as limber and long and untouchable.
Despite it, he’s able to wind his own around them.
He lifts the cigarette back up to Satoru’s mouth, eyeing for a moment how blue stares at it as if nothing else exists. As he looks away, he speaks, something hollow where his heart beats. He’d wanted them to do better than him, not worse. Should he have known? He should have known. How could he have known?
“It tastes like nicotine,” he says, and feels the tug of the paper moving as perfect white teeth bite into soft filter. He stares at the wall as Satoru exhales a breath of smoke, and waits to let go until the drag of the second.
The end glows, beating in time with each breath breathed into it, and unwittingly, Masamichi finds the movement of his own hand falling in tune. Up and down he ends up petting, creasing and wrinkling the back of Satoru’s plain shirt. He should have known. There’s nothing he can do now.
“Yaga, tell him he’s got his own closet,” Suguru had complained once, pointing to Satoru as they’d stood in the dorms one afternoon, nothing but kids and nothing but unaware.
“Tattling to Mommy already?” Satoru had teased, glasses slipping down his nose, and Masamichi couldn’t have separated them if he tried.
“You think you’re clever, huh?” Suguru had retorted as they’d scuffled in the hallway, hands shoving at faces and pulling at hair; no real force behind any of their blows more so than an aggressive sort of playfulness.
“I think I’m very clever- Su- Suguru!” Masamichi had sipped at his coffee and watched, uninterested, as Satoru’s face had twisted up into a contorted smile. He’d shrieked, yelled this and that and thrashed where he’d been caged in Suguru’s arms, but had never once put any space between them as wiggling fingers had found a weakness in the ticklish dip of his neck.
Shoko had swept past him, a textbook under her arm and a snide look on her face to cover the mirth. “Gross,” she’d muttered, and even back then Masamichi had disagreed, though he hadn’t said so out loud.
‘They looked happy,’ he thinks, remembering the smile spanning Suguru’s face; the grin full of teeth and audible joy on Satoru’s. How they’d been so close all of the time that they’d never been able to see each other in their entirety. How when the lamp tipped, neither of them had been able to get far away enough to keep the flame from the oil.
Utterly doused in it now, Satoru leans against him, smoking a cigarette through to its end. They’d been happy, though it hadn’t ended that way. How it got there, he doesn’t quite know as much as he’s certain that he does- there’s a middle to every story after all, and a tide to every ocean. How it caught Suguru’s ankles enough to break him into a fall belongs only to Satoru, and the filter bitten between his teeth.
“He took the lighter,” Masamichi finds himself asking, staring at the wall as his nose burns from a very familiar scent. He wanted them to be better than him. “Did he take the packs, too?”
Satoru snorts finally, sardonic and bitter, and exhales as harsh of a breath as he can. “No,” he mutters. “They’re all still in the drawer.” Masamichi hums, eyes sliding to the side to peer over the edge of his glasses. He doesn’t have to look far to see the side of Satoru’s face, not when he’s almost as tall now.
“Will you give them to me?” He asks, letting his hand still between sharpened shoulder blades, wondering when the last time Satoru ate was but refusing to ask. If he does, even less will be eaten by the time he thinks to ask again.
Two blue eyes flicker up to meet his own, sharpened and angry. ‘Good,’ Masamichi thinks, ‘anything is better than dull.’
“Why?” Satoru spits. “Am I not allowed to start a new addiction?”
“Not until you kick the one you’ve already got,” he refutes, and only gets a scoff.
“I’ll just heal whatever cells I ruin. It’s not like I can get cancer. There’s no risk,” Satoru protests, though his heart isn’t in it more so than the fact that he’s just bitter. Hurting, angry, and bitter.
“That isn’t the point,” Masamichi says, tracing the pad of his thumb over the line of one edged angel’s wing, bony to the point he can feel it through fabric.
“Don’t tell me you’re getting worried now,” Satoru mutters, the words sort of torn out where they seek to be tearing. “I can take a useless fucking cigarette.”
“You can,” Masamichi agrees, feeling the slightest tense below his palm as much as he sees it on pale face, “but you don’t need to.” Satoru looks away too suddenly, and he can’t help but miss the weight when it’s gone from his shoulder.
“You two really get on my nerves, you know that?” He mumbles, and it’s too watery to be any sort of snappish. Masamichi only raises his hand, grateful when Satoru lets him tug his head back down.
“Sorry,” he offers, even though it doesn’t sound like an apology in the slightest, and says nothing when Satoru stubs the lit butt of the cigarette into the side of his leg. It sizzles against Limitless, fading out into ash and smoke, and though he’ll clean it up later when it falls to the floor, this is more important.
“I know you don’t want to hear it,” he starts, his beard dragging against the soft strands of Satoru’s hair as he finally tugs him close, “but he said that for a reason, too.” He feels the nod against his sternum, the creasing of his button-up in fisted hands.
Getou Suguru had never once wanted to hurt Gojo Satoru, but like oil to flame, he hadn’t been able to stop the fire once the lamp had tipped. Masamichi knows love, and he recognizes just how much of it still had to linger for Suguru to melt out of that crowd that day for a goodbye.
He doesn’t say that it’ll be okay, or that it’ll get better, because it’s been a decade he’s walked around with the taste of a cigarette on his tongue. He keeps silent, and he keeps steady, because he won’t lie and spill more oil on the fire. There’s a sort of mourning he has that would keep him from it regardless of his feelings about placations, because he’ll never sit on that dorm couch again, listening to weightless laughter trickling out of a room down the hall.
Satoru will never walk down the front pathway arm in arm again, a flurry of brightness matching the softness he’d always seen in dark eyes and a dimpled smile.
Maybe he should have known. Despite it, he can’t help hoping that the both of them will look happy again, someday.