Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

He comes to with a dull throb in his temple, limbs feeling like cotton. He’s laid sideways on something soft and fuzzy. Lead coats his eyelids as he pries them open, possessed by inexplicable urgency, and it takes a few beats long to decipher his surroundings. A moving car, streetlights cutting through the night, partially illuminating the driver’s hair, catching buttercup-gold on its edges. The light ignites sharp sparks of pain behind Suguru’s eyes despite their relative dimness.

He groans.

The car veers so abruptly he almost chokes, biting his cheek so hard it almost cuts the flesh. It’s such a sudden movement: the steep turn, the scream of tires skidding against pavement, the vehicle’s fullybody jerk as it slams into full break—hitting the curb in the process, judging by the metal crash.

“G’ morning!” Tsukumo Yuki grins at him, body twisted to look at him from the driver’s seat. The grin splits her face like a sickle. “I was almost starting to worry I got the dosage wrong!”

“What?” And it’s only then, when he tries to sit up, that he realizes the awkwardness of his position. The ache around his wrists, ankles, that raw irritation of the skin. It’s because he’s bound. His brain feels like an ill-oiled machine. His last memory, what’s his last memory—“Dosage?”

Memories shift through his mind in fast succession, brief images and bright splotches of emotion. Tsukumo by the motorcycle, gold and black under the summer sun, one hand on the seat, head slightly tilted; Say, Getō-kun, do you wanna come with me? The shake of his head, his rejection; ...but thank you very much for the offer.

She must have read something in his face, then, with the way her eyes narrowed even as her smile continued unfaltering and her body didn’t shift from its lax slope. There’s nothing I could possibly say that’d change your mind? His confirmation. Then—then—what? A blur of motion, his startled alarm, the sharp stab of pain against his neck.

No fucking way, he thinks, incredulous.

“Why,” he manages, pulling himself upright, glancing at the binds around his wrists, cursed energy seals, “am I bound?”

“’Cause,” Tsukumo answers easily, all bright and casual under the burnt streetlights hitting half her face, “if you weren’t, you’d try t’ leave or attack or both!”

Right, okay. He sucks in a deep breath, air stuttering uneasily in his lungs. He has to keep calm, keep his voice steady, maintain the appearance of reason. He doesn’t want to deal with this. “And you did this, why?”

“Hmm, what do you think?”

“Because I rejected your invitation,” Suguru says, “you…” he doesn’t know, “want something with me.”

“Wow, vague!”

He grits his teeth.

“You realize,” Suguru says, tugging lightly his binding, the seals suppressing his cursed energy, and he can only just barely keep the molten frustration on his tongue from burning the flat silk of his voice, “that this is a kidnapping.”

“So harsh!” Tsukumo laughs, “Think of it as a dubiously consensual internship! Fully paid, 'promise!”

He glares, jaw setting. “Let me go.”

“Sure,” she agrees, “if you promise not to try anything.”

He stays quiet.

“Hah! Thought so.” Her grin is still right there, infuriatingly flippant. Her clothing is different from when he last saw her, he realizes; a black denim jacket over a high-collar flower-print shirt. “It’d be no use to attempt something, though.”

He arches a brow, something mean slipping into his voice. Not sarcastic, exactly, but somewhat mocking. “Oh, really?”

“Yep! We’re all the way in Italy, y’know?”

Suguru freezes. Italy? It doesn’t feel like she’s lying. Fuck, how long has he been unconscious?

“Shit,” he says.

Tsukumo’s eyes glint. There’s something like victory, there. An unbidden thought surfaces: he rips them from her skull and bites them between his teeth. “I haven’t eaten all day,” she says, “wanna get something t’ eat?”

He stares for a moment. “Seriously?”

“C’mon,” she protests, “it’s a nice bar! I’ll unbind you.”

“Unbind me?” This soon? This easily? “You’re not worried I’ll...”

“You won’t,” she answers, and her smile doesn’t fall so much as be discarded, no longer the right face; he knows the movement, “you’re in a foreign country without proper documentation. You don’t speak the language, you don’t have any connections, and you don’t know the land. Your phone doesn’t have service and you can’t contact support. You’re being kept by a special-grade seven years your senior and in much better condition besides. You don’t have any option but to go along with my whims, Getō-kun!”

There’s a certain sort of whiplash between her cheer and the cold analytics she’s just given him. It’s not untrue.

“And let me guess,” he says, dry humor, because it’s easier to play along, “no one knows where I am?”

“Of course! I’m not sloppy.”

He figured. “...Fine,” he bites, “we’ll go. Just unbind me.”

Tsukumo beams. She gets out of the car and comes round his side, opens his door. When he holds out his wrists expectantly, she cuts cleanly through the binds with the blade of a swiss army knife. Before he knows it, the same has been done to the ones around his ankles.

“No thank you?” There’s something teasing on her face, even as she steps away from the door, further into a narrow street.

He scoffs, swinging out from his seat, shoe hitting on solid ground. “No, you—”

The world goes dark, vision splotching black. He staggers over the abrupt lack of balance, head spinning, a sudden vertigo. His body is too light and too heavy, and its all he can do to stumble a step, two, and catch himself on the hood of a neighboring car. His ears are ringing so loud, a high pitched line of white noise that momentarily eclipses all other sound.

He waits.

Sight bleeds back in segments of static purple, sharpening gradually. He recovers balance before vision, stomach settling in place, nausea lingering only in phantom visage. His orientation solidifies, world becoming once more tangible. One second, two, three, four. He straightens himself. Waits for the last of his vision to return; five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.

His ears won’t shut up already—!

Tsukumo is peering curiously at him, features soft in the warm streetlight. “Are you okay? Did I overdo the dosage?”

“It’s fine.” He grimaces, voice sounding oddly grating layered against the ringing, sharp and steady, in his head. It’d be so much easier to be dead. “It’s normal. This happens all the time.”

“Ohhhh,” she says, “really.”

Something defensive pricks down his skin. “Aren’t we going to a bar, or whatever?”

A beat. Somewhere in the distance, through this winding maze of closely-pressed two-story stone buildings and cracked asphalt roads, a police siren cries. The air smells oddly of ocean and roast coffee, of cigarette smoke and melted cheese. Dry heat kisses over Suguru’s skin, bloats humid under his rumpled school uniform. There’s still the lingering scent of chemical laundry detergent; saccharine lavender.

“Yeah,” Tsukumo agrees, easily, “we are.”

-

It takes five minutes to get there by foot. They take two turns, twist into a narrow road that really resembles more an alley, and duck into a shady place with no windows. By the time they settle into their barstools, Suguru has only just regained normal hearing.

Tsukumo abruptly slaps him on the back, and she greets the nonshaman-bartender in bright, cheerful English. Hello! From there, the conversation is almost entirely lost to Suguru. He can pick out pieces from Tsukumo’s side, but the nonshaman speaks with an accent, and Suguru can’t understand a word he says.

He wishes they had gotten takeout or gone to a supermarket, or something. Being so close to nonshamans makes his skin crawl. Bile in the back of his throat. What the fuck is wrong with him.

“...How,” he asks, finally, after they’re done “did we even get here? Security on international travel isn’t that loose.”

“Oh, easy!” Tsukumo’s nails clack against the glass of her wine. “I’ve got some connections to the mafia here—it’s really useful having a lot of friends.”

She can’t be fucking serious. “The mafia.”

“Yeah, useful for smuggling.”

He studies her, the slope of her shoulders, tilt of her head, movement of her wrist. Burnt light from a bulb that seems in need of replacement casts her in shades of gold-orange. She’s got this lazy smile on her face, a little amused, somewhat expectant. Oh, she’s serious. Okay.

“How extreme.”

“Risky for sure,” she agrees.

He scoffs. “As if a nonshaman mafia could pose a danger to you in the slightest. They’re nonshamans.”

She shrugs. “A gun is a gun.”

Static breaks in Suguru’s head. The shot rung out with the sound of cracking stone; Amanai Riko’s brain matter against the stone, blood and bone and cranial fluid. The ugly state of her skull. That split second of disbelief, of noncomprehension, before registering Fushiguro Tōji. The gun in his hand, sleek and black. His shark-grin, ugly and rugged. It all happened so fast. A gun is a gun.

I know, he wants to fucking scream, I KNOW.

An image surfaces unwillingly: he is ripping Tsukumo’s heart from her chest and peeling her apart down an autopsy line. The image changes, and he is in her place. He wants to bite his teeth. Stop.

“But yeah,” Tsukumo is saying, “in this case, they weren’t a threat.”

Something acidic or painfully polite or both in the same hovers on his tongue and never gets the chance to slip off. Their food comes. It’s some creamy pasta dish with western-style noodles. Two lemon slices on the side as a garnish. Looks heavy on the stomach. Some revulsion curdles on the back of his tongue.

“I still don’t understand what you gain by this,” he forces himself to say, because he has to be useful.

“Hmm.” She twists her noodles into yarn around the prongs of her fork, and there’s something incredibly cold in her eyes. Her posture doesn’t change at all, maintains its flippancy. Tsukumo swallows, and grins. “You remind me of myself, I guess? Third year was pretty rough for me! I asked you if you hate nonshamans because that’s something I asked myself.”

There’s something in her tone, though, in the curve of her smile. The way her eyes analyze his own posture. It’s somewhat vague, somewhat specific, but most of all, it’s just so convenient.

“Bullshit,” he says, because he only knows how to recognize himself in his worst reflected pieces, “stop lying to me.”

She doesn’t blink, but she does lean back. There’s no flicker of surprise, but there is an odd blankness, and then: “...Hah! You could tell!”

Suguru’s lips press thin. “...You’re a good liar.”

“Oh I know,” she says, then hums, contemplative. Tsukumo’s gaze pricks cold on his skin, feels indifferent and unfeeling; analytical. Feels like she’s dissecting him alive. Can she see the rot that festers under his skin, molds in his stomach and pollutes his head? The grotesque thoughts that just won’t leave no matter how unwelcome they are? How awful Suguru feels about having them at all?

“What?”

Something flicks across her face. When she speaks, it’s with an odd tone, a little surprised, but not unpleasantly so. Impartial, maybe. As though she’s stumbled across something interesting. “...You like sincere people, hm.”

Suguru bites his tongue between his canines, hard enough to hurt. “Everyone likes sincere people.”

“You’d be surprised!”

“You aren’t making sense.”

“Right right,” she laughs, hand waving to the side. “’Doesn’t matter. You want the truth, yeah?”

“Are you gonna give it to me?”

“You’ve got red flags plastered all over you. You’re a ticking time bomb; that much became obvious after ten minutes...” her nails tap against the glass of her wine, and her eyes glint pale-gold in the light. “You’re standing on the edge of a cliff and instead of pulling you back, I rationalized why you should step off. That’s something I need to take responsibility for, you know?”

Shame burns his skin. It’s overwhelming, the tide of self loathing that engulfs him, clots in his lungs, makes his head hurt. Has has too—focus, focus on something else. His lips thin. “There’s more.”

“Mhm! I’m the only high profile shaman looking to eradicate curses from the root. It’s not even common knowledge that shamans don’t produce curses, for some godawful reason.” She rolls her eyes. “Had you stepped off that ledge with my goal in your mouth, it’d be so sorely obvious who you took inspiration from. I really don’t wanna deal with that mess, especially given who your best friend is.”

And Suguru doesn’t know what to say. It makes sense, that she wouldn’t want to be associated with him. He doesn’t wanna be associated with himself. He picks at the lemon slice, severs a crystal of flesh, and slips it past his teeth. It bursts sour in his mouth.

On the far wall, a chalkboard menu is written in roman script he barely recognizes and can’t read. The bartender is European, as are the three other people here; one at the opposite end of the bartop, two at a table in the corner. Some foreign song wafts from the radio, slow and sweet and sung in a language Suguru doesn’t know.

He’s so far from home.

-

They sleep in the car. Or rather, Tsukumo sleeps. These times are the worst, when the world is still, and Suguru is alone with his thoughts.

He doesn’t wanna think about Satoru so he tries to think about his situation and that loops right back to why Tsukumo took him in the first place, ticking time bomb, red flags, and then he just hates himself. Feels disgusting. What if we just killed them all? Why did he say that? Except he knows why, because—

—fucking monkeys—

Suguru bites his cheek so hard it bleeds. The low hatred that’s been stewing in his stomach for god knows how long simmers. It’s always simmering.

Sometimes, Suguru feels that he is bursting. His heart picks up in his chest, beats against the bars of his ribcage, pulses so fast he can feel it in his neck. His skin starts to feel hot and molten and he lays replaying memories and moments in his mind, thinking and thinking, ‘till he’s sure his face must be red, it’s so hot. His palms go sweaty, nails digging into the skin, and there’s a hive of locusts in his stomach. It surfaces at inconvenient times, this feeling, and when breath catches in his lungs and his heart skips an angry beat in his chest, he has to bite his tongue to keep from saying something stupid. That is the depth of his wanting.

There’s a difference, subtle but significant, between ‘to love’ and ‘to be in love’. Similarly, Suguru thinks, there is a difference between ‘to hate’ and ‘to be in hate’.

He goes to sleep in hate and he wakes up in hate. It strings him along the orbit of a black hole, makes itself his sun and his moon and his stars to guide his dead-heart towards a reason to beat. It fills him with a certain sort of pining, makes him want himself dead and them dead and the whole entire world dead, makes him want and want and want want want want until the enormity of his desire swallows him alive. He is left daydreaming through car-rides, fantasizing through nights, cheeks hot, heart fast; I will kill your family and make you watch, I will pull out your entrails and stuff them down your throat, I will make you pay in pain. The face of his victim never settles, changes as light refracts through sharp-cut gemstone turned under bright show lights; it never matters. It’s that sort of hatred.

He digs his nails into his palm, and leans against the car door, temple pressing against lukewarm glass that offers no relief, and glares into the night.

-

They’re on some back-road running past sunlit vineyards and Suguru watches the world run by: green fields, blue skies, pale gold buildings. Tsukumo is driving, and the car radio sings some upbeat Italian pop that’s probably terribly overplayed here but Suguru has never heard in his life. Its cheer grates on his ears.

“Turn it off.” One palm is holding the side of his face, the other closed tight in his lap. He doesn’t look at her when he says it. His jaw hurts, he’s been clenching it so hard.

“You’re so moody!” But the radio cuts off, sharp into silence.

-

Three days in, Tsukumo asks: “What do you wanna eat?”

They’re in the green sprawl of Naples, where buildings are packed less densely and the air bloats somewhat with greenery. He can taste it in the air, leaves and flowers and grass. He shifts uncomfortably on the grumbling stone wall they’ve say themselves, pressing his heel into a small rock that’s found its way into his shoes.

“I’m fine with anything.”

“Nah,” Tsukumo says, “you haven’t been eating. I’m not blind.”

If he bites his cheek, it shows visually. He bites his tongue. It’s been—he’s not sure how long, since he ate a curse, actually. He’d eaten one the day he talked to Tsukumo, but nothing high-grade since. A couple grade fours at the gas station, cafe, beach, just on habit. By now, he shouldn’t have any issue with eating real food. It’s habit, though, or something like it.

“...I like all foods.” Which isn’t untrue, not exactly. He does.

Some irrational compulsion, maybe: if he’s morally obligated to eat curses, then maybe he doesn’t want to eat at all. Like some misdirected rebellion. It feels childish, when he frames it like that, feels stupid.

“Alright,” Tsukumo says, “then what’s easiest?”

How does she manage to see through him like that?

Things he doesn’t have to chew much are the easiest. He’s developed a habit, over the last year, of downing food quickly as he can; there are rarely moments when the taste of the last curse he’s eaten doesn’t pervade his senses. But eating fast means eating clumsy, means not chewing much, means choking or having to force food down, and then he just wants to die. It’s too similar.

And that feels so personal.

“...”

“C’mon,” Tsukumo says, uncrossing her legs from where one was over the other, touching to the ground, and making towards the car. Her head twists back to look at him. “Your body is a tool; you have to eat.”

Here’s the thing: when Suguru isn’t burning alive, he’s rotting. He’s made of mold, a skeleton corpse dragging itself along. He doesn’t want to answer, but doesn’t want to argue, either.

“Smoothies are fine.”

So they go to a smoothie bar down near the ocean and drink under the bright august sun. Salty breeze clots in his hair, and strawberry lingers on his tongue. It sort of makes him sick.

-

His thoughts are worst when he’s alone on the train back to Jujutsu Tech, when he’s crashing in his dorm room, when he’s exorcising and ingesting and exorcising an ingesting and exorcising and ingesting and—when he’s walking the same road in circles. Cycles.

And here’s the thing about traveling with Tsukumo, actually: he never has time truly alone.

On the fifth day, when Tsukumo is picking snacks off the shelves of some grocery store—crackers and cherries and sparkling lemon water—and Suguru is carrying the basket, he realizes: oh, I don’t hate this. He’s immediately stuck by an enormous guilt. He should be home, in Japan, exorcising curses and saving monkeysnonshamans, because that’s his duty to do.

Some nonshaman-mother with her nonshaman-children brushes his shoulder on their way through the aisle. He grimaces unwillingly.

(Dammit.)

-

Six days in, Tsukumo runs low on money. They’re in some Romanian motel—somehow, Tsukumo attained his travel papers and documentation, the real ones, god knows how—, and Tsukumo’s sitting cross-legged on the floor while Suguru sits cross-legged on the bed, playing Tetris on his phone and trying to stop thinking about nonshamans. Click click click.

“Looks like,” Tsukumo says, voice airy in the dry heat, “we’ll have to take a job!”

He glances at her, pieces piling up on his screen. “A job.”

“They’re not hard to find so long as you know where to look,” Tsukumo says, “there are more than enough curses. It makes easy money.”

Easy. For a special grade, it is supposed to be easy. He doesn’t continue the inquiry and the following day, they’re putting up a curtain at the docks. It doesn’t take long for the curse to reveal itself; a second grade. Tsukumo has it down in barely a minute, and Suguru pulls it into a sphere before she can exorcise it.

He swallows it on the edge of the dock, and when he forces it down, gagging even in its departure, he imagines throwing himself off and onto the sharp rocks below. His skull cracking open against the stone, waves washing his blood clean.

Afterwards, they get smoothies. It’s okay.

-

Tsukumo is sleeping. It’s the first time she’s gone to sleep before Suguru. Her breath is quiet as sand, but Suguru listens, and listens, and listens. He lays on his side, eyes open. The room is dark bar streetlight filtering in from outside, and it casts the bedside landline in dim contrast. Suguru has no cell service, but this phone…

He could make an international call, if he wanted. He knows Satoru’s number. He knows Jujutsu Tech’s number. Outside, a car passes.

He doesn’t extract himself from bed and attempt a call. It’d be pointless anyway, he tells himself; Tsukumo would wake up, and even if she didn’t, they’d move locations before it’d even matter.

-

August turns page to September. They’re outside some winery in France, a distant scent of plums and strawberries wafting on the breeze. Suguru has just downed a curse that he spotted on the winery’s steps, and feels somewhat sick. It’ll pass in a few more minutes. Tsukumo is looking at him, though, head slightly tilted, unblinking.

“You eat to many curses,” she says.

He wants to scowl, but plasters a smile. His uniform feels sticky on his skin. He’s been wearing it this entire time. “I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean?”

“That curse you just ate,” she says, “what grade was it?”

His smile sags. “Grade four, maybe? Does it matter?”

“Why’d you eat it?”

“...To use later?”

“How do you know it’ll be useful later? Does it even have a technique?”

“It could have had a technique,” Suguru says, because the moment he actually devoured it into himself, he knew that it didn’t.

“But it didn’t,” Tsukumo says. “You keep eating nearly every curse you find. It clearly impacts you negatively. You’re not balancing your factors at all.”

This time, he really does scowl. His hand curls in the grass. There’s a half eaten breadloaf between them. “I can’t just stop eating curses.”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Tsukumo says, voice measured and patient in a way that makes him want to bash her head against a curb, “I’m saying to only eat useful ones. You’re way beyond needing grade fours.”

It’s not like she doesn’t have a point, not exactly. But... “It’s useful to have a wide-array of things. Just in case.”

“If you have to rely on a vague ‘just in case’ for eating a curse then don’t eat it,” Tsukumo says, then: “Maybe we can build your other skills. Hmm.. You’re good with hand-to-hand, right? How about cursed tools?”

His pride tells him to disagree. He can take it, he can. The effects of eating curses—they’re all psychological. When it is physical, that’s usually just the psychological element reflecting psychically. He should be able to do it, to eat curse after curse. It’s his own weakness if he can’t.

Although he doesn’t want to. He really, really just—

(It’s all their fucking fault, those fucking monkeys, monkeys, monkeys—)

“Okay,” he concedes, half to derail himself. “Like what?”

Tsukumo grins, legs stretching out over the grass. “There’s a pretty large market for cursed objects,” she says, “and unlike almost everything big to do with Jujutsu, the largest center is located outside Japan. It has to be; Japan’s shaman world is too closely watched and regulated for an independent cursed object market like that. But...”

He frowns. “But what?”

“There’s no way we can go with you wearing that,” she says.

It takes a moment for Suguru to understand. He pulls on the sleeve of his top. “My uniform?”

“It’s internationally recognized,” Tsukumo nods. “Jujutsu Tech is part of the Japanese Jujutsu authorities, who are notorious for trying to claim exclusive hold of so many cursed objects as they can get ahold of. It’d make people distrustful at best and incite panic at worst.”

“...Yeah,” Suguru says, and his tone is oddly blank. He’s never been one for sentimentality. “Alright. That makes sense.”

-

He doesn’t actually need to get rid of his school uniform, not exactly. He could, hypothetically, just pack it away into a bag and carry it around. That’s stupid, though, an inefficient use of space; they travel light. So Suguru buys cargo pants and a loose T-shirt—always loose, cause nothing else is comfortable—and switches his clothes out. Then he sits on the cigarette-burned floor of their motel room, and thinks.

White light casts Suguru’s uniform in sharp contrast. There’s a discolored patch on the left elbow that’d been sewn in place during second year in the infirmary while anxiously waiting for Nanami to regain consciousness I’m supposed to be a better senpai than this, how could I let him get hurt; a line of blue-stringed stitching down the right pantleg when he’d repaired it outside some konbini in the middle of nowhere during first year, Satoru complaining the whole while, jeez you’re taking so long we can just order a new uniform when we get back ugh why do you even know how to sew anyway I just throw away everything that gets ruined who cares right up until Suguru threatened to poke his eyes out with the needle; a bloodstain he never quite managed to wash out on the collar, and which only shows when you really look for it.

Perhaps the most conspicuous mar on this uniform, though, is the repair work that’s been done in a diagonal cross across the chest. Shoulder to hip on each side. It’s been concealed well, but Suguru sees. His chest aches, pricks, itches. Shoulder to hip.

This uniform has been his for three years; it carries a lot of history.

Suguru breathes in, out, and closes his eyes. Presses his palm to the rough carpet. He’ll find it a new owner tomorrow morning, he decides, give it to someone who needs it more. From there, it’s no longer his business. Before that, though…

He carefully removes the golden, swirl-patterned button from its top, crosses his legs, and sews a replacement. With the button, he strings a thick woven chord, hangs it round his neck, and tucks it under the collar of his shirt. The metal burns cold against Suguru’s skin.

Satoru would laugh at him, he thinks; he just resolved not to be sentimental, after all. 

Chapter Text

The largest market for cursed objects, as Suguru learns, lies in Morocco and structures itself as a souk. A sort of bustling street market.

They enter through the arched gate in early morning, sun already bright in the sky. September, apparently, is not even Marrakesh's hottest month, but Suguru just isn’t used to this sort of dry heat. He isn’t used to any of this at all, actually.

The first thing that strikes him, and also the most familiar, is the taste: cursed energy. It’s so thick he could choke on it, could chew it between his teeth, and he almost feels that he will suffocate. He’s sensitive to it, after all. The second thing is—

Barely three steps into the market, Suguru sees what must be a customer heatedly arguing with a seller and they’re doing it in Japanese—why are they speaking in Japanese?—and nearly has a heart attack, he’s so scandalized. Tsukumo takes one look at the expression on his face and laughs at him. Explains that it’s normal, that it’s just what you do at places like this. So—so that makes sense. What doesn’t make sense—

“Why are so many of them speaking Japanese?”

“Japanese is the most common language spoken among shamans, debatably second only to English,” Tsukumo answers, “most people that deal with the shaman world in any capacity try to learn at least a little of it. And since this market is a cursed object market...”

And it makes Suguru a little embarrassed, really, because in retrospect, it’s obvious. He could’ve puzzled it himself.

“Right,” he says.

It’s a lot of visual noise; sunlight filtering through the slatted roof shades above and hitting on bright fabric and brass, illuminating dust motes. Along each wall of the enclosed road are so many stands and stalls and sellers Suguru can barely tell one from the other until he looks closer. It’s so colorful he’ll get a headache.

They pass boxes that carry more cargo than their mass should indicate, protective charms meant to ward curses, raw ore to craft into more detailed form and fabrics that almost shimmer in the light—imbued with some illusionary curse, maybe—before reaching the weapons section. And there’s so much. Western swords and curved blades that Suguru can’t name and knives and guns with cursed ammo…

Something catches his eye, sharp and white, tinted almost blue. His breath catches briefly in his throat, and he halts. Under his shirt, the metal of his uniform’s button presses against his sternum.

It’s a switchblade, knife out for display. Long and somewhat thin, sharp only on one edge. It’s some light metal, silver, or maybe steel, reflecting bright blazing white under a shaft of sunlight. Cursed energy is what produces the slight blue tone, light and bright as the tail of a comet.

It resembles Satoru’s eyes in the heat of battle, when his irises, usually so dark and deep, night sky encapsulated in full, are briefly eclipsed with the light of falling stars.

“See something you want?” Tsukumo’s eyes follow his gaze, and he doesn’t need to answer for her to say: “Hmm… Looks good!”

Before he knows it, Tsukumo has pressed her hand to his shoulder and lead him forwards. So here he is right in front of the seller—a dark man with laughter lines that show even through his thick beard and the shadow of his turban—and Tsukumo is asking Do you speak Japanese? And Laughter-Lines is answering a little but enough and… Suguru is being expected to speak.

“How much is this one?” He taps the knife’s blade, not letting his voice show hesitancy, because he’s fine with improvisation and pretending to be calm when he’s totally out of his depth. He’s fine! He’s great at this!

“Oh that one,” Laughter-Lines hums, “three hundred USD in either USD, yen, Emirati or Moroccan dirhams.”

Three hundred USD to yen, Suguru calculates in his head—isn’t that… oh. He almost balks at the price. It is a cursed weapon, and those aren’t exactly common, though, so maybe it’s understandable. Even still…

“Sorry,” he apologizes, “I don’t have enough. Thank you very much for your time.”

But Tsukumo and Laughter-Lines are looking at him so strangely.

“Oh,” he realizes, “right.”

“Start at fifty percent,” Tsukumo advises. “Maybe forty, actually.”

Forty percent the selling price? Suguru feels sick just thinking about it. The sheer audacity! Cultural differences, he reminds himself, cultural differences. This is normal here. It’s what you’re supposed to do. So he opens his mouth to propose buying it for half the initial price, but the words just won’t come.

“Oh you poor thing,” Tsukumo says, amusement dripping. Then, to the seller: “Sorry, he’s shy. Forty percent.”

I am not shy, Suguru wants to protest, because he isn’t. Satoru used to say that in first year especially, when he’d get embarrassed on Satoru’s behalf. What, can’t take it? ‘You shy? He’s not shy he just has basic manners ingrained into him. (They’ve been slipping this year. It’s so rude to look at someone in the face and think monkey.)

“I see,” Laughter-Lines nods, then moves on: “Forty percent! You want me not to eat!”

“Fifty,” Tsukumo amends, “you’re running a scam here.”

“Now I may not be one of your type,” Laughter-Lines says, and what’s that supposed to mean?—“but I know the value of my wares. Scam? You talk to me about scams while trying to get this only for a hundred fifty? It’s laughable!”

“Don’t be like that,” Tsukumo says, all sweet and agreeable, and Suguru watches with something almost like awe but closer to curiosity as they argue for the next five minutes, voices clear above the surrounding chatter. They settle on sixty five percent the original price.

The knife is cold metal in his hands, cursed energy humming against his skin. The blade flashes when he folds it in and tucks the contraption away.

“What did he mean when he said he wasn’t one of our type?” Suguru asks, because it’s been bothering him.

“Probably that he isn’t a shaman,” Tsukumo answers, easy and flippant, and Suguru freezes. She stops a step ahead of him, twisting around to look, brow rising.

“A nonshaman,” he manages, and suddenly he’s just so much less comfortable. (What is wrong with him. He imagines: prying his ribs apart like cardboard, cracking them like dry rice paper and just dying. Shut up.) Are there more around? “Selling cursed tools? Knowing what they are?”

“Japan is one of the most heavily segregated nations in relation to shamans and nonshamans,” Tsukumo says, “outside Japan, the ‘world of shamanism’ tends to be much more fluid in its participants. Plenty of both the buyers and sellers here aren’t shamans.”

She says it just like that, easy and simple. Like it doesn’t crack Suguru’s world, just a little. He doesn’t know how to decipher this molten well of emotion that’s swelled within him, angry or hurt or disgusted or something like that. In his head, he breaks her jaw. Even just trying to untangle it makes him both sink deeper in that rot and recoil with a certain sort of self-hatred.

“That makes sense,” Suguru lies.

-

Night brings with it pleasant temperatures that aren’t quite cool, but are a relief next to daytime temperatures. Faint breeze wafts in through the open window of their small room. Tsukumo’s sitting on floor examining a host of cursed items—though for what, Suguru doesn’t know—and Suguru is thinking. Specifically, he’s thinking—

“There should be more curses,” he says, furrow tugging at his brows. “I know shamans frequent this city, but even Kyoto, the Jujutsu holyland itself, is full of curses.”

He has seen them, he has, in the window of a building, the shades of a street, the step of a doorway. And, doubtless, even more were hiding in partial or non-manifestation, only drawn out in specific cases. But even so…

“If this were Japan, sure,” Tsukumo agrees, setting down the blue-glazed pottery she’d been handling. Her honey-gold eyes glint. “But people outside Japan tend to have less cursed energy, in general. Both shamans and nonshamans.”

Suguru falters. “Really?”

“Yep!” Tsukumo gestures him over, and he leaves the window, shutters open, breeze tugging at his tied and tangled hair. He should brush it soon. She taps the clay of her pottery. “Run your cursed energy through this.”

So he does, touching his index and sending a pulse. It’s… “Thin?”

“Yep, the cursed energy is thin. The less cursed energy you have, the harder it is to infuse dense amounts of it into a material. As a result, foreign cursed object makers can tend to include more material to infuse in the first place. It shows—”

If foreign nonshaman populaces tend to have less cursed energy, Suguru suddenly thinks, then does that mean their lives are worth more than Japanese nonshamans? That it’d be more imperative to kill—

no no no that’s so fucking gross. In the first place, she said foreign not non-Japanese which could indicate an environmental factor not genetic one and it’s about inevitability they all need to go not just the worst of them and—stop thinking about killing people, dammit! Shut up! He’s so fucking—

Suguru breathes in, and out. Spices. Incense. Old fabric and sand. His heart feels so heavy in his chest. Tsukumo is still talking.

With her gold hair and gold eyes and wavering candlelight shading her in warm, honeyed hues, she looks—not like a shelf-buddha, no, but like something grand. Something bright and glimmering. She’s going on about environmental factors, and cursed energy, and theories about their disparities, and Suguru realizes—

Oh, Suguru thinks, she’s a revolutionary.

Not like he’s always imagined them: grand speeches, public sway, words that burn, meaning and morality and proclamations on their imperatives. No, this is quieter, patient, research and observation and experimentation; less a blazing fire and more a snake in the grass. It’s new, though, and its ramifications are so, so large; it’s change.

Change has meaning.

Okay, he thinks to himself, for the first real time, I’ll stay.

-

Although he doesn’t tell her, Tsukumo seem somehow to sense that change in his resolve. For the first time since his abduction, Tsukumo tells him she’s going out for the night. Says:

“I’ll be back in the morning. Sleep well, Getō-kun!”

“...Okay,” he says. Feels the metal of his necklace press into his skin. Wants to thumb it. “Where are you going?”

Tsukumo doesn’t answer immediately. Eventually, though: “What’s your type of woman?”

What? How does that relate at all? He squints, wonders if she’s fucking with him. Tsukumo is still in the open doorway, night sky hazed gray behind her, cold draft strong enough to tickle the hairs of his neck.

“What?”

“Still no answer?” Tsukumo sighs, all dramatic and put-out. “Boring.”

He doesn’t even have one. “I don’t see how that’s relevant at all—”

“Big tits and a nice voice,” Tsukumo interrupts, “that’s my type of woman! And I managed to find a lesbian bar, so don’t expect me back tonight at all!”

It takes a moment, just a moment, to process that. Oh. A lesbian bar. Girls. She—

“You swing that way?” That’s not the right thing to say! Suguru hurries to rectify himself. “I mean—cool. Have fun. I’m happy that you decided to you could trust me with that knowledge. I don’t have any problem with your lifestyle choices. Not to imply it’s a choice, of course! I understand that—”

Tsukumo snickers. Something hot and flustered crawls Suguru’s skin, tinted dark with worry. Maybe that wasn’t the right thing to say, after all. Maybe he shouldn’t have made any deal of it at all, except isn’t it important to made his views clear? Leave no room for confusion?

“Nothing nothing,” Tsukumo says, amusement in her voice, because something must show on his face. “It’s just cute, that’s all.”

He resists the urge to play with the lobe of his ear. Feel the amethyst beneath his thumb. “...Right. Anyway, see you tomorrow.”

“’See you, Getō-kun!”

-

They’re leaving some mountain village where ‘shaman’ is a recognized social class and they came in because the local shamans couldn’t handle the threat. Suguru used his knife the first time—(it glinted in the moonlight and Suguru almost felt not-alone)—and exorcised the curse.

There are footsteps running down the path behind them, and Suguru pauses in his step, twists around. It’s a girl, out of breath and panting, hands on her knees and sweat on her brow by the time she reaches him. He doesn’t have time to ask why she’s come.

“Thank you,” she tells him, and her accent it so thick Suguru almost doesn’t understand; she clearly doesn’t speak the language. Probably asked someone who does to tell her what to say. “A lot. Thank you a lot.”

It’s a clumsy thanks. It’s so clumsy. It’s heartfelt, though, and how long has it been since Suguru has been thanked for an exorcism? By a nonshaman? Who understand what a curse is?

Something pinches in his chest; he pinches the cold metal of his necklace’s button between his thumb and index finger, and smiles.

-

They’re in some New York high rise and Suguru’s on the balcony of their hotel room. His arms are rested against the cool metal railing and a cold breeze kisses his skin, slips through his hair and the fabric of his sweater, making him shiver. Here, October nights are cold.

“Yo,” Tsukumo says, the stretch of her shadow signifying her arrival before her voice. “’Thinking?”

There are a lot of answers: what else would I be doing? or Why?—even just a hum would suffice. But—“...They’re disgusting.”

Tsukumo tilts her head at him. “Hm?”

He shifts on his feet, twists himself half around. He can still see the city spanning out below him, bright and loud and brimming with nonshamans. Curses, too. It’s full with them. They congregate, fester and fester and fester.

“That’s what I think when I see them,” he says, self-consciousness pricking down his skin, “that’s what I feel when I see them.”

“Oooo,” she says, in that same even, slightly amused tone she says many things; in his head, he pushes her off the railing, “dangerous.”

A sequence surfaces: he steps off the balcony’s ledge and splatters on the concrete below. His blood is a vivid, vermilion red, and his bones shine white to the world. His body is heavy and warm and dead.

“Hey.” but there’s no heat to his tone.

“I’m being serious,” she says, and that amusement leaves her voice in favor of something lax but serious. “Disgust one of the most dangerous reactions. More so than fear or loathing, maybe. It takes out the ‘person’ element, makes it clinical. The natural reaction to something disgusting is to wanna ‘clean it up’. Eradicate it.”

His stomach churns, and he bites his tongue. “...I know it isn’t good.”

“Knowing is half the battle!”

She’s really just so—clean. She’s so clean and it makes Suguru feel just that much more disgusting in comparison. When he said maybe..we should just kill them all, it wasn’t a solely rational preposition. It was born of hatred and disgust, not of careful consideration. Not like Tsukumo’s approach to these issues at all. And here she is, with her casual posture and borderline playful tone, as if, as if—

Suguru exhales a long breath, briefly closing his eyes, somewhere between amused and exasperated. “That’s all you have to say?”

It’s rhetorical, of course, and instead of real answer, Tsukumo knocks her knee against his.

-

New York becomes Mexico becomes Brazil becomes Zimbabwe becomes Mali becomes Spain. It’s in some Spanish cathedral—empty bar them, because technically they’re inside after open hours which is probably some sort of illegal but honestly Suguru can’t bring himself to care—when he finally asks: “Why are are our stays so short?”

He voice echoes, both bounces loud and feels so, so small against the cathedral’s quiet. Tsukumo peers at him curiously, all shadows and silvery golds in the moonlight that slips from stained glass windows far above them.

“Hm?”

“In countries,” he clarifies. “Our sleep schedules haven’t settled even once. We’ve barely stayed longer than a week in any one country.” Some of them only for a couple days. “It doesn’t make sense—wouldn’t you have an easier time with your research if we stayed in one place? So why...”

“Oh,” she says, “it’s ‘cause of you.”

He frowns, brows furrowing. His shoe squeaks against the polished ground. “Me?”

“You’re the type of person that hates stagnancy,” she says, then smiles, “I can’t say I don’t share the feeling.”

“Oh.” That’s a way to put it, he supposes. Stagnancy, like his home town, his childhood, like Jujustu Tech, eventually. Stagnation means a lack of progress on something that must be followed, though. Eventually, hopefully, maybe, in some distant world… “There’s a difference between peace and stagnation.”

Small pause. Everything tastes like stone dust.

“Do you wanna stay somewhere for a bit longer?”

He shifts weight between his feet. Feels the cord of his necklace around his neck. “I don’t care. It’s fine.”

“Alright,” Tsukumo says, “our next stop will be longer, then.”

-

Their next stop is, as it turns out, is a family-run, Indian mango farm. There’s a nest of curses, speculated by Tsukumo to be mostly first and second grades, perhaps caused by religious tension. Everything is going according to formula right up until Tsukumo waves him away to deal with the nest by himself, with the family’s eldest son as guide.

Suguru doesn’t wanna go exorcise it all alone with a nonshaman guide. He accepts out of politeness.

Suguru’s English has improved measurably even in just the last couple months outside Japan, but it’s still not enough to make their talk go smoothly. While the eldest son, Muhammad, speaks the best English of his family, that isn’t nearly enough to compensate for their differing accents nor both their lack of fluency. It’s a lot of charades and embarrassing repeating of words.

And maybe that shared difficulty softens Suguru’s barriers, just a little. He doesn’t want to have them up in the first place.

“Suguru is a nice name,” Muhammad (nonshaman!) says, slowly, as so Suguru can understand. “Is it that it is common?”

“No,” Suguru says, “not much.”

To that, Muhammad (nonshaman!) says some exclamation that Suguru doesn’t understand. His expression is bright under the midday sun, and their steps scruff on packed earth. “Lucky! Myself I am a lot of places, I have two cousins and a man that is the husband of my aunt that is also Muhammad.”

Distantly, Suguru wonders if that’s an okay name to complain about holding. Maybe he should ask but—no, he holds his tongue. It’s not his name, not his business.

He’s a friendly person, this nonshaman. And Suguru—he’s not bad with that, with friendly people. He is a friendly person, or at least, he tries to be. He’s good with making friends, it’s so easy, but it’s frequently an unequal perception; Suguru is good with becoming the friend of someone, not with considering others his friends. He’s the friend of someone before they’re his. The only exception to this was Satoru.

He’s been talking to so few people lately, he’s almost forgotten the quiet discomfort of unequal perceptions like this.

-

Nonshaman-Muhammad is the eldest son, but is really the only son, and has four sisters, the youngest of which is currently up in the canopy of a mango tree, wiggling the branches and shifting its shadows. She’s only seven, and Suguru is, admittedly…

He squints, holding back a frown. “Is she going to be okay?”

“She does it all of days,” Nonshaman-Muhammad dismisses, then his face cracks with a grin. “The most large bad is that...” and he can’t find the word, so he takes the hem of his shirt and mimics a ripping motion. “It happens a lot. My mother is tired, she says it...will be! Will be a trouble when my sister has a hijab. Myself I think my sister will be okay.”

Obviously, it’s not Suguru who has lived here his whole life, not Suguru who can speak on the girl’s climbing capabilities. But even still—he always wanted little sisters, and there’s this protective urge inside him. Yesterday, that girl brought him candied, spicy mango.

He’s about to acquiesce, but he maybe he couldn’t quite keep the concern from his face, because—

“She goes in the trees so much, and all the things that she can go up on, that we used to called her,” and Nonshaman-Muhammad must not know the word here, too, because he walks a couple steps to the packed dirt road and draws with a stick in the earth.

The image comes together in barely a minute. The four limbs, long tail, human-like features. It’s not a bad drawing. Suguru recognizes it before its even complete. The word that the nonshaman was forgetting—

“Monkey,” he says, and he says it like 猿, Saru, and it feels so sickeningly familiar on his tongue. Feels awful, like rancid oil and gutter sludge and curses. That word tastes like curses. He bites his tongue, searches for the word, and—“monkey,” he says, in English. “That is the word in English.”

Muhammad-who-is-a-nonshaman-and-not-a-monkey brightens. “Yeah! Our little monkey, that is it. She’s our little monkey.”

And he says it so fondly. It’s entirely a term of endearment, in this context. Somehow, that’s so overwhelming. He breathes in, and out; the air tastes like cut grass and mangoes. Fragment. There’s a small breeze tickling the hairs on the back of his neck. He’s only heard it spoken in two ways: factual, or derogatory. Some book on Jujutsu history, the smirking lips of a Zen’in, monkey like disgusting like parasitic like lesser-than. But this is—monkey like sister like rascal like precious.

How does he deal with that? God, he wants to bleed out in a gully under the midsummer sun and never wake up. He’d be laid out against the soft emerald moss like a carcass, ribs open to the air, stomach ripped wide, organs spilling out.

“You draw good,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say. It’s a clumsy deflection; he could really do better.

Muhammad-not-Monkey nods. “I like it. To draw is my hobby.”

Suguru hums, shifting weight to his heel and digging into the back of his sandal. “That’s nice.”

“It is! Do you have one?”

Suguru tilts his head, not understanding. “One of what?”

“A hobby,” Muhammad-not-Monkey elaborates, “do you have one?”

A hobby. A hobby. Like a solitary action for entertainment—something like that. ホビー. Suguru… Hobby hobby hobby. Reading? Not-quite; he doesn’t read for fun, exactly. Talking with people? Is that a hobby? Playing games? Maybe that works, except, no. No, he’s only ever played games with people. Only even ever touched video games because of Satoru’s influence. Passively playing Tetris at the train station doesn’t count. He..

“...No,” Suguru says, and maybe it startles both of them, “I don’t think I have any.”

-

October gives way to November, and they’ve spent a little over two weeks at the farm when they depart. Suguru doesn’t mind. It was a—pleasant stop, actually—but with they way they’ve been going, much longer and he would’ve gotten antsy. He was getting sick of mangoes, besides.

The first week of November finds them in Thailand. He’s turning the bend of a sharp corner, bag of dried figs in one hand, and suddenly there’s a weight on his shoulder and something smacking his face and hands scampering down his arms and—there goes his figs.

The monkey settles on the street’s side, barely three steps away, snacking on his figs. She makes a striking image, with her snow-white hair and wide eyes, a certain playfulness to each of her movements.

Tsukumo whistles. “An albino. Cute kid.”

She is rather small, Suguru reflects, still taken aback. Cute, maybe, too. (Monkey, like precious.) There’s this odd feeling washing over him, one that blurs the world, makes the bustle of busy crowds a distant hum, redistributes everything to his periphery. The white hair, odd eyes, playfulness, sheer audacity to eat his sweets right in front of him just after snatching them from his hand…

It reminds him, abstractly, of Satoru. Something tilts, small and subtle, and monkey (猿, Saru) shifts in color.

-

There’s radio static in his head. That’s the easiest way of putting it. There are multiple frequencies in his head, all garbled and all clashing, I hate them I hate them I hate them they should all die die die die; what the fuck is wrong with you; gross gross gross; it’s correct for them to die and they deserve it; I hate you; it’s a hard truth to face, but it’s the truth; shut up! Whenever he tries to make sense of them they get caught on a screeching feedback loop: I wanna die I wanna die I wanna die I wanna die—

He doesn’t mean it, not really. Or maybe he does. It doesn’t matter; he won’t do it.

He keeps thinking about monkey like precious, and it shouldn’t bother him so much—why does it bother him so much? God—and he keeps thinking about monkey like nonshaman, which bothers him even more. He keeps thinking of nonshamans.

There’s a pair of nonshamans here, too. They’re walking the ruins of an old fortress, the lines of stone in the ground, and Suguru can hear them laughing.

“You know,” Tsukumo says, just after he’s looked in their direction and grimaced, “if you can’t face it in your head, then you can argue with me.”

He stops. There’s a pebble in his shoe, and he presses his heel into it. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You’re thinking about it again,” she says, and this cloudy day washes her in tones of gray, “and you’re getting no where. So argue it with me instead of yourself. C’mon, sit.”

Tsukumo places herself on the ledge just like that. Pats the ground beside her. Suguru swallows, feeling just a little lost, feeling off-balance. It’s not a good feeling to harbor on the edge of a cliff.

One step to the right, and the land cuts harshly down, sea crashing against a stark cliff-face below. It’s be so easy to take that step; the image of his body broken on the stones won’t leave. He isn’t afraid; if he stepped off, he could catch himself easily with a curse, and maybe that’s why he isn’t scared, or maybe not.

(It doesn’t matter, he won’t do it.

Maybe he wants to die, but he doesn’t want to kill himself.)

He sits.

“I still don’t understand what you mean.”

“Shamans should protect nonshamans,” Tsukumo says, and smiles at him. “Contradict me.”

Oh.

Suguru draws breath. Wind cards through his hair, bound tightly behind him, kisses salt to his skin. Salt on his tongue and his teeth; the lingering taste of chemical strawberry flavor. Hard stone presses against his thighs, and he places a palm to the ground, and digs his fingers into cold moss.

His mind forms an argument to support her: when one has the power to prevent suffering, and they have this in a capacity that the majority of others don’t, it’s obligatory to exercise it. But that isn’t what he’s supposed to be arguing.

“Because,” he says, more shaky than he’d like, “they’re the ones who produce curses in the first place. It’s wrong for shamans to be their shields from problems that are their fault and it’s disgusting and honestly if they really wanted curses gone maybe they should just—”

He bites his tongue. Shut up!

In his head: he cuts out his tongue and swallows it whole and chokes on the blood. He digs his fingers around his adam’s apple, pierces the skin, encircles the voice box, pulls, and slowly tears his throat from his neck. This one is his favorite fantasy.

Tsukumo watches him, and he can’t read the expression on her face. It makes him so self conscious. In his head: he kicks her off the ledge and she doesn’t catch herself.

“It can’t even be said to be their fault,” Tsukumo says, “because fault implies agency in circumstance.”

It goes on a while like this. Tsukumo states a point; Suguru argues it. But Suguru—half the time he can’t even force the words from his mouth, and the other half, they come out in a jumbled, incoherent mess. He wishes for the confidence he had back when he first met her, that barely contemplated sentence: Then… we should just kill all nonshamans.

No, maybe he wishes for Tsukumo’s confidence when she responded: That’s a decent plan. Or rather: that’s the easiest way to do it.

Tsukumo keeps switching between arguing practicalities and moralities. Obligation, consistency, imperative. And Suguru keeps just thinking—

I could argue it better!

It’s frustrating, knowing he could argue the moral side better. Wanting to jump in on the opposite side where he can barely force himself to speak his own position. And, of course, Tsukumo notices.

“Something wrong?”

“It’s about obligation and imperative,” Suguru says. “You’re not—you’re not weighing rights. Where does right to self preservation submit to obligation of help—you’re not—”

Her laugh interrupts him. Were it sunny, he thinks her eyes would glint.

“You’re right,” she agrees, “I’m not great abstract ethics in that way. You’re probably better at it.”

She’s like Satoru, he thinks: focused on what can be held. Thoughts devoted to the tangible. Mind of a scientist. It’s such a clean way of thinking of things, not right, necessarily, but clean.

“Well!” It’s only when she claps her hands that he realizes he’s gone too long without answering. “This isn’t going anywhere. You aren’t making any coherent points because you’re too busy hesitating on making any points at all. Nothing can be deconstructed till it’s built in the first place, y’know? You can barely even argue your own position without seeming like you wanna sink into the ground, hah!”

He scowls. “I know. So sorry for not wanting to argue for genocide, my bad!”

“No need to be like that!” One of her legs crosses over the other, both dangling into the open drop, and she leans back against her palms. The smile is discarded, and something more serious takes her face. “Let’s switch roles.”

“...Switch roles?”

“In order to eliminate curses and secure a peaceful future for shamans, nonshamans should be mass killed.”

Tsukumo says it flatly, says it with a certain sort of confidence Suguru hasn’t been able to embody since that very first suggestion: we should just kill them all. Something large hardens in his throat, and he swallows around it. Hesitates.

Okay, alright.

“That’s completely ignoring the suffering involved in the process,” Suguru says, shifting, digging the back of his shoe into a ridge along the cliff-face, “and it’s ignoring that shamans can birth nonshaman children.”

It goes on. They don’t settle on one conclusion, and decide to make a schedule of it. They will, they decide, argue this on trains, in car rides and hotel rooms, until, eventually, Suguru reaches a conclusion.

-

He moves his uniform’s button from his chest to his ear. It’s not that hard, to find someone to carefully drill a hole through his left gauge, and then string the metal symbol through it, so it dangles just below his ear, hitting against the side of his neck when jostled. Decentered. 

Chapter Text

In Germany, he meets a man-who-is-a-woman. It’s not like it’s the first time he’s gone to queer spaces to clean curses from them, but it’s the first time he’s done so under the guidance of queers themselves. Hadn’t even really met one until Tsukumo. And Suguru just—

“Not a crossdresser,” he checks again, just to be sure. “It’s not crossdressing.”

“It isn’t,” he-she confirms. “Because crossdresser means dressing as the opposite gender, and it’s not that I’m dressing as the opposite gender, it’s that I am a woman.”

—doesn’t understand. Suguru just doesn’t understand. He leans back his seat, resists the urge to fiddle with his earlobe. He watches the night-lit city pass through the windshield. Tries to recall everything he knows about drag queens and onē and newhalves. It isn’t much; the first fourteen years of his life were spent in some small countryside town, and Jujutsu Tech has kept him busy since then.

Transgender, he chews the word in his mouth, toransujendā. He’s heard that term, maybe. Heard it in passing, during some routine trip to clean Ni-chōme alongside nyūhāfu, perhaps. All those things that were so distant from his own world, so far on his periphery, that to him, they didn't exist at all. Still—

that’s a thing? 

“Can you,” he hesitates, presses through, “can you tell me more? If it’s okay.”

She does. And, because Suguru doesn’t know much about this, and she does, he listens. He doesn’t like not understanding things, and tries to wrap his mind around this. It’s not just women-of-the-heart, it’s men-of-the-heart, and people that are neither, too.

It’s inexplicably comfortable, that knowledge. Just a little. Suguru trails the bump of his Adam's apple with the pad of his index finger, and doesn’t know why.

-

December in Greenland is beautiful. Daylight lasts only a few scarce hours, but snow acts mirror to the moon, and the entire land appears glowing with it, stark against the night. Even so, tonight is especially bright.

A canvas of cool-white stars paint the sky, blue so dark it melds black, a boundless void, deep and dark. It’s made of so many hues, shifting galaxies and glimmering constellations. And closer than any of these—so close it almost feels as though he could stretch up a hand and grasp them—are searing ribbons of blue, searing light along their centers, white-bright as the edge of a blade.

“Hey,” Tsukumo’s voice comes, and it almost feels swallowed by the cold. “Wa’cha doing out here? Eugh, it’s cold.”

Suguru doesn’t adjust his head to look at her, but she enters his field of vision anyways. A sigh puffs white from his mouth. The ground feels like it will swallow him whole, and he doesn’t mind.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

Tsukumo’s gaze flicks to the sky, and she hums. She’s cast in shades of blue and white, coloring her hair almost platinum. Made of shadows and reflections. “They’re pretty,” she agrees. “You’ve been out here for hours, though.”

Suguru feels made of stone and lead. He’s laid in the snow, bundled in layers and layers of insulation, form entirely obscured by it. Even so, he’s not warm. A faint cold seeps through his clothing where it’s pressed into the ground. A pleasant coolness envelops him.

“...It reminds me of Satoru’s eyes,” he says, on what feels like a whim. Everything feels just a little distant, somewhat surreal. His head is quiet in a way it rarely is. He could just float away.

Tsukumo hums. “Six-Eyes are like the starry sky, right? I’ve seen pictures.”

Suguru scoffs; it grounds him. A description like that—it isn’t enough. “A picture couldn’t possibly capture it.”

“Oh yeah? Tell me.”

“They move,” Suguru says, and that’s not enough, either. Each minute movement of those irises uncovers a new fracture of sky, a new constellation, new stretch of darkness, new hue of blue and black. It’s all of the night all at once, each iris-line converging at his pupil, a starless void so dark and deep it swallows light itself. Above, the aurora borealis glimmers. “They flash blue-white when he channels large amounts of cursed energy.”

Something on Tsukumo’s face shifts, shadows adjusting, eyes glinting. A smile slips onto her lips. “Do they. That’s interesting. You spent a lot of time looking deeply into his eyes, hmm. Tell me more?”

It’s a mix of unsubtle, ungrounded teasing and scientific curiosity, neither of which Suguru wants to entertain. Even so, when he scowls and lifts an arm to bat at her legs, it’s unmistakably playful. “Get out.”

Tsukumo laughs, stepping away and out of his vision, footsteps sounding softly away. “Don’t fall asleep in the snow! I don’t wanna drag your hypothermic body inside!”

He doesn’t dignify that with a response. There’s a slight discomfort along the edges of his face, where snowflakes have melted into a wetness on his hairline. Even that, though, he barely minds. It’s comfortable; he’s comfortable.

He’d like to die like this, Suguru realizes. He doesn’t want to die, but if he had to, he’d want die thusly: Satoru above him, a hole through Suguru’s torso, blood seeping into the snow as his body’s functions slow to a stop. Satoru would keep him company, would talk to him, voice carrying him softly into unthinking.

Tears pick at Suguru’s eyes, and he doesn’t know why. A death like that sounds so kind, is so, so much more gentle than his other fantasies; he doesn’t deserve it.

He stays there a while.

-

They don’t finish December in Greenland. December is still cold in south Uzbekistan, still snowy, but it’s far warmer than Greenland, and there’s more to do. They’re walking down a white-dusted street, two sticks of warm-gold navat each, and Suguru has finished his first. His ungloved fingers are going numb, skin flushed pink with winter-night chill.

“You gonna eat that?” Tsukumo gestures to his second stick.

Sweetness clings to his tongue and his teeth. He rolls the stick between the pads of his thumb and index finger. And maybe it’s the northern lights playing behind his lids, or the night sky above, but—

“...Yeah,” he musters, not even looking at her, “of course.”

A small laugh, which Suguru recognizes easily as a well-practiced—habitual—performance for levity. (He’s good at recognizing reflections of his falsities.) “Real convincing.”

Maybe it’s just that he left Japan early-August, and now it’s mid-December, and that’s four months. Dammit, that’s four months. The flip phone in his pocket feels so heavy. He can feel it through the fabric, jostling against his thigh. There’s half a hundred emails in his inbox and he hasn’t responded to any of them. No missed calls, though—no one at Jujutsu Tech has known his location well enough to actually get any through, and most of the time, he doesn’t have cell service at all.

He hums noncommittally.

“Do you not like it?”

“No. I like it.”

He does. He likes all foods, all flavors that aren’t curses. He likes it, but—

Satoru would also like it, he thinks. For all Suguru was always chastising him for eating too much sugar, they were always splitting sweets. He can hear it already: you ate all these cool foreign sweets without sending any to me? No fair! Jerk! Mean mean mean mean you’re so mean!

(Why  haven’t  you answer ed  any of my emails? Why haven’t you called?)

His fingers tighten around the stick of his hard candy, and decides to buy more. That night, while Tsukumo is busy at some bar feeding that alcohol inclination of hers and finding some woman to sleep with, Suguru visits the post office.

Uzbekistan to Japan. Suguru pays the fee, and sends along his package. The note inside reads: I thought you might like them. Make sure to share with the others, if they want any. Haibara especially—he was always kind enough to get me souvenirs. I’m sending this late, but happy birthday, Satoru.

-

The morning of Christmas Eve, he settles himself into the chair of a tattoo parlor and finalizes a design with the artists. He gets it that very same day, holding himself stone-still for three hours as they ink over the skin slightly left of his sternum, right over his heart.

It’s painful. The skin is left red and raw-feeling. That night, after finding a local sweet to mail Satoru—that’s something he’s started doing, now—he returns to his and Tsukumo’s motel room. She must be out with someone, though, because it’s empty.

He lifts the hem of his shirt and observes. Even through its layer of clear ointment and transparent bandaging, the tattoo shows clearly:

It’s an eye. Simplified and minimalist, stylized and done only in black, but clearly recognizable nonetheless. The eye’s shape is an incomplete infinity symbol, outline done in thin black and left hollow at its thickest parts. Most distinctive, though, is the iris: the night sky inked across it, and the black-hole pupil at its center.

Suguru trails a fingertips across the clear plastic bandaging, and wonders, odd feeling in his chest, if he can later excuse this as a moment of mania.

-

Sometimes, it’s just overwhelming.

Radio static and clashing frequencies knock around his skull and it’s the dead of night and he hates the world and he hates them, and most of all, he hates himself. His self loathing eats him alive, swallows him, and he lies in bed being digested from the inside out.

Moonlight filters through the window and casts everything in faint silver: the floor, the bedside table, the fucking phone. Suguru’s knees are drawn up, folded as he lies on his side. He clenches his jaw, and his teeth bite further into his index finger. Much harder, and he’ll break skin. A tear slips from his lashes, hits the bridge of his nose, and sinks from there.

And he hates this, he hates this so much, and all he wants is to be not-here, but here is himself and—

He tries to focus on Tsukumo’s breath, steady and rhythmic behind him, on the bed’s other half. And the impulse suddenly rises, blooms heavy in his chest, to turn towards her. Within seconds, he’s following that impulse—instinct, maybe, some desperate thread of self-preservation—and climbing across the bed.

“...Suguru?” Tsukumo mumbles, eyes opening blearily when his weight dips the mattress. He stills in place, best he can when he’s still shaking like this, and Tsukumo’s brows furrow just a moment before—“Oh,” she says, then: “Do you wanna talk about it?”

I hate myself so much, he thinks, because he’s a horrible friend that ghosts everyone he’s ever known for months and months, and a horrible person, too. He still hasn’t fully discarded the idea of genocide. He still hasn’t rid himself of that hatred and disgust.

He opens his mouth, tries to say no, but it catches on a lump and Suguru knows intrinsically that if he breaks that dam all that’ll come is a choking sob.

He shakes his head.

“Okay,” Tsukumo says, and nothing in her face softens, but her hand snakes around his back, presses him close into her side. She’s lying on her back; Suguru’s head settles onto her arm, his tears soaking into the fabric of her shirt, and—

It’s warm.

He doesn’t know how long they stay like that: Suguru rested against her side, occasional sound of a car passing outside, both wide awake. He wants to brutalize himself; he wants to stab her through the stomach and prove his own self image. Eventually, Suguru’s tears dry on his face, making the skin tight and uncomfortable.

It’s January now. Besides himself, she’s been the only constant in his life since August, and aside from the rocky start, in that time, she’s been… considerate, maybe. Good company, for sure. Interesting to talk to, fun to banter with. And he realizes, now, in the dark of this room, ear pressed against the flat stretch of pectoral above her breast, listening to the steady thump of her heartbeat, that—

she’s a friend. He considers her a friend.

It’s the first time in his life that he’s acknowledged someone as a friend before he knows if the other considers him one. That—bothers him, maybe.

“...Hey.”

“Hm?”

“Do you,” he hesitates; his voice sounds odd, “do you consider me a friend?”

Tsukumo shifts, just a little, and fabric rustles between them. If he really concentrates, he can hear the air through her lungs. Suguru presses his tongue to his canine, feels something hot prick down his skin, ashamed and embarrassed.

“I guess,” Tsukumo says, after a moment, “sure.”

What sort of noncommittal response is that? If Suguru were Satoru, he’d kick up a fuss. He’s not, though. Friend is a relative term, is hard to define, means trust or companionship, or maybe neither of those at all, and it’s okay… this is okay.

Suguru closes his eyes, exhales, and quietly falls asleep.

-

It happens just after sunrise, when the air is at it’s coldest, and the world is only just shaking the depth of nighttime chill. He and Tsukumo are buying coffee at some gas station and the tired cashier behind the register says:

“Will that be all, miss?”

Tsukumo is over by the door. She’s talking to him, he realizes, and it’s so odd. His proficiency with English has gotten much better over the last months, but even before all this, he recognized miss as a feminine address.

Suguru is borrowing Tsukumo's trench coat, clothing tailored for a woman. A thick scarf obscures his jawline, and his hair is loosely spilling over his shoulders. That must be why. It makes sense, but—

Miss, he thinks. Miss, in reference to him.

Suguru feels a sudden, inexplicable urge to play along. To...not correct her. To pitch his voice high and sweet and feminine. He could do it, he could. He’s good with his voice, with speaking soft and silky, velvet, a snake in the grass. He could do feminine, too.

How stupid, he thinks. Why is he even considering it?

“Yes,” he says, giving a nod, “that’ll be all, thank you.”

It takes her a half moment to realize her mistake, and Suguru sees the exact moment the realization settles. Her hand falters as he takes his and Tsukumo’s coffee cups, and bare embarrassment flushes her face.

“O-oh! Sorry, I didn’t realize—”

“It’s alright,” he interrupts. “I didn’t mind.”

That’s the end of that. Or at least, it should be. Tsukumo raises a brow at him, teasing and curious and entirely non-malicious, when they step out, you didn’t mind, hm? he door rings shut behind them, and there’s this...lingering feeling in his chest. Internal recoil, like the aftershock of a firework, a bright spark: I like that! The memory chews in his head, miss.

If his body is a tool, he suddenly thinks, does it have a gender?

-

There’s a man who meets his gaze in the mirror, and half the time, Suguru barely recognizes him.

He hasn’t recognized himself since Star Plasma, not really. First were the scars: the jagged lines running shoulder to hip on each side, left by Fushiguro Tōji’s blade, where the skin was pink and smooth and tender. Every time they ached, pricked, stretched in the wrong way, every time he caught their reflection in the mirror—he’d want to rip them back open. He still does, honestly, wants to take his bright switchblade and cut those silver lines down to the bone.

After the scars were the dark circles under his eyes, skin growing pallor, body thinning. And...and he’s recovered, since then. The circles have lightened, his skin has regained color, and he’s recovered weight in both muscle and fat, but—

There’s a man looking back at him from the mirror.

His hair is long and wet, dripping water down the column of his neck. His skin is flushed pink from the shower’s heat. He’s tall, his chest flat and muscular. He’s such a handsome man, well-defined features, prominent Adam’s apple, sharp jawline.

Suguru turns eighteen next month. At the same time he lost himself, he lost his baby fat, lost his boyishness, lost those soft, rounded edges. His voice has settled. His body has settled.

This body is a tool, that is the reality that Suguru accepted. It’s why Suguru tries to sleep sufficiently, eats even when he doesn’t want to. It’s why he’s now more selective with the curses he takes in; it’s okay to neglect himself, but there’s no use in neglecting a tool.

And here’s the thing: a knife is a knife, a gun is a gun, and a body is a tool is a tool.

The thing in the mirror isn’t a man, it’s a tool. Is that right?

-

Early February sees them in some coastal Lebanese town. Tsukumo’s idea.

“Lemons are an important part of Lebanese culture,” she’s saying, “and they’re available all year round here. Wanna hit of a lemonade stand? It should be easy enough to find a cake, and—”

“A cake?” He frowns, brows furrowing. It feels like he’s missing something; Tsukumo is saying all this like he’s supposed to care. “Why would we get a cake?”

Tsukumo pauses in her step, and looks at him. Not-blinking. “You don’t know?”

“What?”

“Today’s date,” she says, and finally blinks, maybe a beat late, “you don’t know?”

“No, I know. It’s February—” he falters—oh, right, right—“third.”

And Tsukumo must read something on his face, because she huffs a laugh and rolls her eyes, flicks the side of his forehead. “Yeah.”

Suguru bats her hand away. “What does my birthday have to do with lemons?”

His birthday. Suguru was born at dawn; it’s currently mid-morning. God, he’s eighteen. It doesn’t feel real. His reflection catches in the slightly dusted window of a roadside building, and he looks away. Focuses on how, when he looks beyond the sharp edge of a stone building, and through the gaps of some citrus, he can see the blue glitter of coastal water. The image surfaces: he enters the water and feels it bloat in his lungs until he stops struggling and soundlessly sinks to the ocean floor.

Maybe it’s just that, that he hasn’t particularly wanted to keep his birthday in mind. Forgot about it the same way he forgets about his email inbox.

“They’re one of your favorites, right?” Tsukumo tilts her head. “It was the first thing you ate after meeting me. A lemon garnish.”

Somehow, even though he’s the same, her observational skills still manage to catch him off guard. “Yeah,” he says, trying not to let that startlement into his voice, “they’re my favorite fruit. My mother used to make fun of me for eating them like oranges. They have a vibrant taste.”

(They taste alive. It’s so different from a curse.)

He can taste citrus on the breeze, almost. Citrus and coastline.

“Pssch,” Tsukumo says, “weirdo.”

Suguru steps on her foot.

From there, they do some sightseeing. Pick up cups of lemonade and walk the empty beach with bare feet, despite the February chill. And it is chilly; the sky remains half-clouded and the entire day, threatening rain; the whole town is cast in shades of clouded gray, dimming orange pyramid roofs, dulling golden stone. Suguru’s feet go numb and cramping when they walk the edge of the Mediterranean, freezing water lapping at his heels, toes sinking into silt.

Even so, there’s a faint ocean draft, and when it brushes his cheeks, it almost feels warm. It’s that fleeting sort, gentle as the winter sun.

They get food. Real food. Tabbouleh and pitas with hummus. They get sweets, too. Or rather, Suguru reminds himself that his body is a tool and he really shouldn’t eat too many, and Tsukumo just keeps buying them for him. She does it right in front of the makers, so that he’s socially obligated to accept them.

You’re a fox, Suguru tells her.

We’re a pair of them, she corrects, don’t say you wouldn’t do the same. He rolls his eyes instead of answering, because she’s right.

Tsukumo chats several people up. So does Suguru, in fairness. It’s becoming more of a habit, now—or rather, he’s regaining the habit—to talk amiably with strangers.

They do find a cake, eventually. A semolina one, soaked with lemon-rose syrup. One thing leads to another, and if Suguru eats half a crate of the maker’s most sour lemons, he’ll get the whole cake for free, plus some. Suguru accepts the challenge.

Thirty-something lemons disappear into Suguru’s stomach. Halfway through, Tsukumo accuses him of cheating with his technique, which doesn’t even make sense, and he tells her so much. Towards the end, he’s feeling so sick that someone else has to start peeling them for him. Afterwards, he blows out eighteen candles, and still eats cake.

“Now that you’re eighteen,” Tsukumo says, all bright and teasing, “we can pick people up at bars together, hm?”

He kicks her shin. “No way. I’m not interested in that sort of thing, and if I see you flirting someone up with real intent to bed them… just no.”

“You’re going to die sad and alone without ever having had sex in your whole life,” Tsukumo tells him.

“What a tragedy.”

“For-real!”

Today wasn’t bad, not really. One of his better birthdays, honestly. Not so overwhelmingly happy as his sixteenth—spent at Jujutsu tech with real friends for the first time in his life—nor so childishly wondrous as his traditional-fifth—wearing his first hakama and haori for Shichi-Go-San, eating thousand year candy with one hand and holding Otōsan’s with the other—but…

Suguru excuses himself from the building, slipping out the door, closing his eyes, and slumping against the stone wall. Eighteen. A man. Not an adult, not yet, not until he’s twenty, but a man. A sudden burst of homesickness hits him all at once. He hasn’t seen his parents in, what, two years? They’ve missed this, they’ve missed the sharpening of his jaw and growth of his Adam’s apple, his body settling mold.

He wants to spend his twentieth birthday with his parents, he realizes. He wants to become an adult in the house of his childhood, eating Okaasan’s zaru soba and listening to Otōsan’s humming. And at the same time—

He’s glad they’re not here for this one. He presses his bare heel into the packed earth. He doesn’t want them to see him like this, isn’t ready for it, maybe. To see him with his sharp jaw and defined muscles and Adam’s apple, to see him as this thing, this man which he isn’t—

isn’t?

Suguru stops.

That’s an odd thought. That’s so odd. That’s so weird. That isn’t normal, he thinks, is it? That isn’t normal. His body is a tool is a tool is a not-man, but that’s just his body, not him. He is one. But—but he recalls, suddenly, those transgenders he met in Germany. Men-who-are-not-men and women-who-are-not-women. Thinks of ripping out his throat. Recalls being called miss. And—

oh.

-

Suguru can’t fall asleep, that night. He’s too busy collecting memories, compiling evidence in his head, examining each one: the divorce between how he conceptualizes himself and his body, the comfort that comes with clothes that fit loosely, dressing up so pretty for Obon that he appeared androgynous.

He thinks and he thinks and he thinks and thinks and he just can’t sleep, he’s so anxious, giddy. He keeps turning in the cot, feeling it dip with each shift of weight, blankets twisting tight around him. Butterflies in the stomach; beehive in the stomach. Standing on the edge of a cliff. Suguru’s stomach churns, twists itself into knots, and eventually, as that sensation blots into real pain—

oh, he needs to vomit.

He tries to be quiet, he really does, but Tsukumo finds him outside retching into a patch of grass, acid on his tongue, tears in his eyes.

“If you’re going to stare,” he snaps, with more upset than he really feels, “then at least get me water.”

“Touchy,” Tsukumo says, but gets him the water. He takes it with shaky fingers, grip slick with cold sweat and saliva from when he jammed his fingers to the back of his throat and induced vomiting.

“Thanks.”

Tsukumo shrugs, moonlight catching the movement. Her lips are turn upward when he downs half the jar. “’Regret eating all those lemons?”

A breeze blows hair into Suguru’s face, and he grimaces. Opens his mouth to reply, but—

Suguru doubles over, retching. Warm hands hold back his hair, this time. It’s over in maybe fifteen seconds, with the mild, bitter taste of bile greeting his tongue like an old friend. His throat burns. Even still—

“No.” He wipes his jaw with the back of his palm.

Because… this is a different sort of vomiting than his usual—what used to be his usual. It’s not the result of psychological nausea brought on by eating a-curse-too-many and inducing physical vomiting in a desperate attempt to clear himself from that rot. It’s not the result of having gone too-long without eating and accidentally shocking his system with too much food, either. No, this is—

well. It’s the result of eating too many lemons for some stupid bet. It happened because he spent the day eating sweets then ate thirty-something fucking lemons in the span of an hour and topped it off with cake. Understandably, that must’ve created a total disaster in his stomach that the body needed to remove.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” he confirms, and his feelings settle comfortably. He smirks, playful and confident. “I’d do it again.”

Because, god, it was fun. It was fun eating that many sweets and laughing over cake and it was fun impressing a room of people with his ability to eat. He used to do that sort of thing more often, he suddenly recalls; in first year, he drank a full bottle of ghost pepper hot sauce then cackled at Satoru when he tried to do the same and started actually crying after one spoon.

“Weirdo,” Tsukumo says.

God, Suguru’s feeling a little giddy. He can feel some stupid grin on his face. “It was fun!”

“When life gives you lemons, huh...”

He downs the rest of the water, then tilts his head at her. “What?”

“English proverb,” she explains, making some vague gesture. “’Doesn’t matter.”

-

On their last day in Lebanon, after Suguru has finished mailing a souvenir for Satoru, he goes to a tattoo parlor. His second tattoo becomes the branch of a lemon tree, one fruit still attached. It sits near the divide between torso and leg, tracing the dip of skin created by the slight, slight, bulge of his hipbone.

Later, when he’s examining it in the mirror, he can’t help but think about it again. He hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it for days.

He stacks evidence in his head, places some on one bowl of a scale, with counter-evidence on the other. Weighs it, back and forth, again and again. And—

maybe that’s not how this works, he realizes. Maybe it isn’t a scale, weighing evidence to decide if he’s a man or a woman or neither at all or something else. Maybe that’s not how this works.

Maybe all he needs is the knowledge that it’s so much more comfortable considering himself outside the boundaries of being a man and strictly a man. Maybe he doesn’t need to decide to consider himself differently.

Chapter Text

It happens on the sixth of March, nearing the day’s eclipse, when sunset is fading and making way for deep blue and sparkling stars. His phone starts ringing in his pocket, which never happens anymore, and when Suguru digs it out, the screen displays Satoru’s caller ID.

The whole world slows.

Right, Suguru distantly thinks, I sent suncakes to Satoru the first day here, and Taiwan is covered in Jujutsu Tech’s international roaming reach.

The call rings again. Once, twice, thrice, until it’s almost on the edge of ending, and Suguru is seized by a sudden panic. She fumbles with her phone, hands shaking, and clicks answer.

It picks up. The line spills static against the quiet, and Suguru presses their tongue to their canine hard enough to hurt.

“...Suguru?”

Inhale, exhale. God, he hasn’t heard Satoru’s voice in six months. It’s full with static and filtered through an ocean, but it’s Satoru’s voice.

“Yeah,” they say, “I’m here.”

A beat. Suguru digs nails into their palm. Stretching ahead of them is a lake, dark and inky and reflecting the dying embers of sunlight. He’s sat alone on a cinder block only a couple steps away from it.

“You asshole,” Satoru’s voice finally breaks, and it’s that harsh, biting voice that sometimes appears when he’s doing everything not to cry. “You fucking asshole. You couldn’t even reply to an email?”

“I wasn’t checking my inbox,” Suguru says, which isn’t technically a lie, but is still bullshit, and a horrible way to start this.

“Fuck you,” Satoru spits. “God—just—fuck you. You know that thing you sent me? The stupid fucking birthday present? It arrived way after my birthday, just so you know. Like, months late. And I thought you were, I don’t know, dead or something, for months and you didn’t even send a resignation email and you didn’t respond to anyone and I couldn’t even call you cause no one had any idea where you were and I didn’t have the stupid fucking country calling code and—”

“That reminds me,” Suguru interrupts, because if she has to listen to anymore of this she might just die, “if you’re calling me, the suncakes must’ve arrived. You identified where I’d have to be to send those, and found the country calling code from that, right? Anyway—did you like them?”

A beat.

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad.”

Another beat.

“Stop changing the subject,” Satoru says, “god, I can imagine the stupid smile on your face. That grossly polite one. Aren’t you gonna apologize?”

Suguru’s chest clenches painfully.

“Yeah,” he says, concentrating on the cinder block’s hard dig against his thigh. “Yeah, of course. I’m sorry, Satoru.”

“Apologize better,” he says, and it’d almost be childish in some less serious context. “That’s not good enough. Do it better.”

Suguru sucks in a breath. The air tastes like blooming plum trees and lakeside growth. Smells like it, too. Nighttime chill kisses goosebumps up his bare arms, brushes against his exposed collar bones. Words chew in their mouth.

He hesitates, but Satoru is waiting. Is expectant on the line.

“...I’m really sorry,” he finally says. “I’m not sorry for not coming back, and I’m not sorry for disappearing, but I am sorry for not staying in contact. For not sending any word at all. I know it must’ve hurt everyone back at Jujutsu Tech, especially you and Shōko. I know it must have caused a lot of anxiety and worry, and I wish I hadn’t put you through that. I shouldn’t have done that, I know. I’m sorry.”

“...Hmph.” A beat, two, three. Suguru listens to Satoru’s breath over the line. “I just—” and Satoru’s voice falters, “I don’t get it. Why?”

Of course he doesn’t get it. How could he? He’s never been—depressed. Not like Suguru, at least. Not when he had people to keep in contact with. How does Suguru explain it? The apprehension at contact, the guilt that just kept building and building the longer he went without replying, the…

She doesn’t even know how to express it to herself.

“I...” Suguru bites his lip. “I don’t know how to adequately explain. I’ll talk about it some other time, okay?”

“...Promise?” And maybe for the first time since this call started, Satoru’s voice is openly vulnerable. It’s not intentional, Suguru knows.

He swallows. Breathes in deep. “Promise.”

“...Okay,” Satoru says. “Fine. Whatever. What happened that made you leave anyway?”

Ah. Suguru shifts. Sticks a hand in their pocket, feels the hard plastic of their hotel card. Tsukumo has already excused herself with the night, telling Suguru she’ll be back sometime tomorrow morning.

“...I didn’t so much leave,” Suguru says, slowly, “as.. hmm...”

“What? Hurry up.”

“I was kidnapped,” Suguru sighs, after a moment. There’s really no good way to phrase it without lying, and they don’t want to lie to Satoru.

“...Uhhuh,” Satoru says. “Right.”

“I’m not joking!”

A small beat. “Wait, for-real?”

“For-real.”

Another half beat, and Satoru is laughing. He’s laughing at them. This asshole! “Y-you, seriously? Oh my g-od—”

“Shut up!”

“You can’t say something like that and expect me not to laugh!”

“If I were there you’d be so punched right now.”

“Yeah right, nu-uh! C’mon, c’mon, you, kidnapped? You have to at least elaborate a little—”

“Tsukumo Yuki,” Suguru provides, hesitates. She saw my red flags. What you didn’t see. I still feel so much revulsion of nonshamans. I don’t think killing them all is a great idea, not really, not anymore, although I haven’t totally discarded it, but—“She invited me to work with her; I said no; she kidnapped me. After like a month or two or something, I decided to stay on my own. Happy now?”

“...Well,” Satoru says, “if—”

but Suguru isn’t quite listening anymore. The remaining charge of his phone caught his eye, and…

“Hey,” Suguru interrupts. “Sorry, my phone’s about to die. In like, a minute or something. I gotta go.”

A beat, two.

“Oh,” Satoru says, “okay. See you.”

“Yeah. See you.” And they’re about to hang up, but—

“Wait!” their finger pauses. Satoru sounds oddly breathless. “Before you go—I can’t keep up with your location. So you have to call me. It doesn’t matter what phone you use; I’ll pick up all calls to my personal number. So...you have to call me, okay?” And his voice is so small, when, after Suguru doesn’t reply, he repeats: “You have to call me.”

“...Yeah,” Suguru finally answers. “Okay. I will. ‘Promise.”

-

Not even three hours later, Shōko’s call comes. Suguru has returned to the hotel room, has his phone plugged into the wall. After a few seconds of hesitation, he picks up.

“Oh hey,” Shōko says, sounding somewhat surprised, tone mild and drab in a way that’s typical to her, “it works.”

“Satoru told you?”

“Yep.” She almost sounds bored, but Suguru knows that’s just how she always sounds. “I don’t have long, but hi.”

They shift on the edge of the mattress, drawing their legs up, crossing them. “Hi.”

“It’s nice to hear your voice.”

...Is that a jab at how long he’s gone without contacting them? Maybe. Shōko can be passive aggressive, if she’s really upset about something. It’s hard to tell, without reading her body language cues. “Sorry.”

“Nah,” she says. “It’s okay. I get it.”

Somewhere in the room, there’s air conditioner running. Constant whirring. “Oh.”

“It’s whatever” Shōko says. “Just call later. I gotta go now. New thing to dissect, woo.”

“Have fun,” he says, dry.

“Thanks,” she replies, equally dry, and the line cuts off.

-

Suguru keeps their word, or at least, they try. He establishes a new routine: every time he enters a new country, if there’s a phone he can use, he calls Satoru, and then Shōko. Every day he’s scheduled to leave a country, he calls them, too. They talk, sometimes only for minutes, sometimes for hours.

She tries.

-

“Say, Suguru...” Tsukumo says, splayed leonine over the couch, looking up at him from an awkward angle, “have you ever eaten a vengeful spirit?”

It takes them guard; it’s such a curve-ball from what she’d been previously ranting on about. It’s one-something in the morning and she’s been complaining for the last two hours about how bisexual bars should exist because, what if I wanna flirt with both pretty women and hot men tonight, huh!? I can’t go flirt with men gay bar or straight women in a straight bar..! Suguru had gone off to the kitchenette, had made herself a peanut butter sandwich and checked to make sure they still had ginseng.

Now they come back and Tsukumo asks them a question like that?

They frown. “...No.”

“Hmmm,” she nods, one arm over the couch’s edge, absently toying with the lid to a beer bottle. “Makes sense. They’re not too common. Most shamans know to kill themselves with cursed energy rather than risk becoming a vengeful spirit, hmm...”

A spark of disgust ignites in Suguru’s stomach. That isn’t a bad thing. It’s a good reaction to the description of something horrific. It’s horrific that shamans are taught to kill themselves in situations of sure-death. Horrific that the world is such that it’s a necessary measure. So the disgust is warranted. The problem—

the problem is that they think about why shamans are put into situations like that, fighting curses, and they think fucking nonshamans, and they think of a curse in their mouth—that uniquely disgusting sensation, that rot produced only by nonshamans, that negativity—and they just—

“Why do you ask?”

“Mm...” Tsukumo’s eye gleams with something playful. “You’ll see.”

-

Suguru was a serious child. In some ways, he hasn’t changed since then; Suguru is Suguru at six at sixteen at eighteen. He’s a linear existence, with drops and highs and changes, but no empty gaps between one Suguru and the next.

Their parents didn’t believe in gilding truths or hiding reality. Suguru learned the word kill at three, slavery at four, atomic bomb at five, massacre and terrorism at six, rape and war crime at seven, genocide at eight. His picture books were watercolor illustrations of tragedy, of survivors straggling to rivers and dying on the banks, burning alive. He read Hiroshima no Pika cover-to-cover twenty times. He learned, too, of Imperial Japan and Nanjing and massacres of prisoners and British colonization of India and systemic starving and—

They know, carefully picking quicksilver-steps across unstable stone, that hundreds of thousands died in the construction of this wall.

The vengeful spirit long haired and skeletal, robes shifting and shimmering like freshly falling blood. One of China’s oldest special grades. Her name has been lost to time, but the story goes: her brother was a convict and used as slave labor in building Jiankou. He plummeted to his death. Learning of this, she killed herself; her vengeful spirit haunts the wall.

She’s not an easy fight. She’s not hard, either. Challenging, but not life-threatening.

It takes an hour to finally draw her into his hand, her blank hair and blood-robes melting into spherical darkness. She’s heavy on his palm.

“Woo,” Tsukumo says, “nice fight.”

She’s been on the sidelines this whole time. Currently, she’s sat atop the wall’s crumbled edge. How stupid; Jiankou is famously dangerous for its disrepaired stat.

Suguru hums noncommittally. Their heart’s still beating in their neck, adrenaline in the veins, skin hot against the air. The curtain’s blackness encapsulates them in a cold dome, world dim beneath its cover.

“’You gonna eat it?”

He shifts weight between his heels. Special grades are always so revolting to take in. “Won’t that trap her soul?”

“Just release her afterwards,” Tsukumo says, “she’s been trapped this long. She can take a little longer.”

“...Alright,” they concede, because obviously Tsukumo wants them to do this, and they don’t quite understand why, but they’ve learned to trust her judgment.

At the same time that he brings the sphere’s surface to his lips, the curtain collapses around them. The temperature rises all at once, from frosty to early-April cold. The world lightens, spreads far around them in a landscape of mountaintops and valleys and forest.

He curses presses past his teeth, and—

oh god.

It’s putrid, pungent. Smushy and hard. Vomit and rotten cherries. Rancid oil. He tilts his head back, works it down, past his gag reflex, tries not to choke. In his throat, it becomes a hive of locusts, a squirming ball of worms, and it’s so hard. It’s so hard; his body rejects it, and it rejects him, and he has to bear through anyway.

Down his throat, his euphonious. They can feel it in their body, molten ice against their flesh as it slides down to their stomach, can feel it melt into their stomach, meld into their technique, join their cursed energy, their core. And then comes the worst part; he braces himself in the length of a heartbeat—

the enormity of her griefhatredloathing hits them all at once with a bout of nausea and vertigo so strong they stagger, knock against the crumbling sidewalls and double over. Heave over the edge, acid tears pricking their eyes.

Suguru’s whole body feels drenched in sewage, inside and out. It clogs her arteries, courses her veins, pools in her stomach and bubbles in her throat, right up to her ears. Her palms are sweaty against the crumbling sidewall, fingers failing to locate proper grasp as she clutches on hard, trying to keep her shaky legs from capsizing her over the edge. It’s fucking disgusting, this negativity that’s now resides within him. It’s—

disgusting.

“Oh,” they choke, voice unrecognizable. That’s it.

This unique product that he thought only nonshamans capable of, this distinct kind of rot. This disgusting thing. These disgusting things. Curses are…

honest. Curses are honest. Curses are so painfully honest. Rawly sincere. Like skinning someone alive, cracking open their ribcage, and peering into the worst of their heart. Eating a curse is taking that heart into your hand and shoving it into your own chest.

Intimately, he feels the equivalence of humanity. Shaman curses are nonshaman curses are shamans are nonshamans; within the forced sincerity of his technique, there’s no difference between them.

Something hot escapes his lashes, and he realizes only as it plummets the wall’s height into the steep ridged stone and budding forest below, that it’s a tear. Harsh wind blows through his hair, carries the nauseatingly sweet scent of peach blossoms.

The weight of what they could’ve, would’ve done hits them with staggering might. That they would’ve—on feelings so falsely based—

He hates humans, Suguru realizes, and the revelation tilts his world on its axis. He hates humans.

-

That night, they cook Tsukumo a meal. It’s the first time they’ve tried their hand at cooking in—ever, actually, because they’ve always been content to buy from konbini or vending machines or just eat unprocessed ingredients. But they pick out a Japanese cookbook, settle themselves into the kitchenette, and make a noodle stir fry. It’s easy enough.

“Ooo,” Tsukumo says, when she steps back into their hotel suite. It’s early evening, sun cresting the horizon, molten light filtering through large floor-to-ceiling windows and casting everything in warm shades. “What’s the occasion?”

“A thank you,” Suguru answers, digging cups from the cabinet and taking Asian pear juice from the fridge. He sets it all on the small table.

“For what?”

It’s a little hard to explain—for all of this—so they shrug instead. Begin plating the stir fry. “Doesn’t matter. You should eat something before you go out drinking tonight.”

“You,” Tsukumo says, tint of drama to her voice as she plops herself down into a seat, “have no idea how to have fun.”

She dropped the subject, Suguru notes, somewhat relieved despite themself. Instead of answer, they roll their eyes and serve dinner. Sit themself opposite her at the table.

Truthfully they don’t wanna eat. She’s released the vengeful spirit by now—or rather, exorcised—but the phantom sensation of it in her mouth, throat, stomach, cursed energy—that lingers. As does the taste. All of it. The very thought of chewing and swallowing something brings an acute sickness to her.

Their body is a tool, though, they remind themself. They have to keep it in good condition.

It isn’t the worst meal they’ve ever eaten. For a first attempt at cooking, it turned out well.

-

Morality is measured in intent. Or rather, it’s measured in agency.

There was an earthquake in China a couple days ago. Exact casualties are still being counted, but it left tens of thousands dead. Some days before that, there was a Cyclone in Myanmar. Suguru heard over a hundred thousand people died.

Typical curses are natural disasters. Not exactly, not in the details, but in the sense that they have no intent. There’s no agency to their destruction. Right down to the root, there’s no intent. Nonshamans have no agency in their creation of curses.

They can’t be held responsible in a moral sense. Because morality is measured in intent.

Suguru—

Suguru had intent, has agency. He had agency in his disgust and agency in his hatred and intent in the words he spoke, the ideas he contemplated: we should just kill all nonshamans.

-

Suguru’s sitting on the metal rail of a train track, bare feet dug into the center-gravel. Under his palm, the metal is slightly cold. Here, May fluctuates wildly between bloated heat and crawling chill. Today is the later.

It’s early-morning. They’ve been sitting here since pink-blushing dawn, and the world still sparkles silver with dew. They want to bite off their fucking fingers. Want to be eaten alive by a curse and slowly melt in the acid of its stomach, becoming flesh then bone then nothing at all.

Gravel grates behind them. “This is an active railroad, y’know.”

Suguru doesn’t turn around to look. Hums non noncommittally. He knows.

Tsukumo settles on the stretch of metal railing beside them, legs stretching languidly across the track. Morning casts her sharply, all hard edges, the stark black of her clothing against the paled-gold of her hair. Morning washes it all out. “Thinking about something?”

What he could’ve, would’ve done. Those ugly thoughts that polluted his mind, that he took to his chest. The disgust and the hatred and the intent. They have no excuses; they weren’t raised to view others that way. It was all Suguru.

(What the fuck is wrong with him.)

“’You think if someone got hit by a train, here, they’d die nice? Lie center on the tracks and stare at the sky as the numbly die.”

“No way.” Tsukumo shakes her head. “It wouldn’t go numb. It wouldn’t work like that. It’d be much more painful.”

Well, he figured. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, though. In a moral sense. Karma, justice, balance the scales. Suguru believes that individuals can deserve suffering that isn’t strictly necessary. Satoru doesn’t, they know; or rather, Satoru just doesn’t see the point. All efficiency, with him.

“You want it to happen?” Tsukumo tilts her head. She sounds unconcerned.

He shrugs. “Want is a strong word.”

It’s a fantasy, that’s all. An idle daydream. There’s no intent to it.

They press their foot into the gravel, angular rocks grating, digging into the tough skin of his heel. Morning casts everything sharply: sharp shadows against bright dew. His palm is wet against the metal.

A beat, two, three. This part of the track is situated on the outskirts of some town, is within view of the place they’ve been staying. He can see, on the side they’re facing a stretch of field, and beyond that, the town. Behind, there’s the steady rise of a forest. Birds have been twittering nonstop the whole morning. Light and ringing as a chime.

“Aaa,” she says, “it’s totally eating you alive, huh?”

Suguru’s just—

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You dropped the prejudice towards nonshamans and you dropped the idea of killing them all,” Tsukumo says, “and now you’re thinking about how you ever held those thoughts in the first place.”

It’s really just—awful, being known. Since the very start, when Tsukumo had looked at him and said, Getō-kun, do you hate nonshamans? said, neither; you’re not at that stage yet. You who looks down on nonshamans, and you who rejects that idea… these are just possibilities you’ve found.

“Sure,” he says, and wants to rip his throat out, “yeah. I guess.”

“How useless,” she says, and it’s airy, said with some hint of a sigh. “There’s really no use in dwelling on it, you know?”

“I can’t just—” he falters, “it’d feel wrong not to.”

“So? ‘Doesn’t matter.”

“What?” Indignation sparks in their chest, hot and iron. That’s not how this works; that’s not how this sort of thing should work. Just forget about it? What a fucking joke. “It’s not just that it’d feel wrong; it’d be wrong. It’s wrong, for someone to just—”

“I’ve never felt remorse in my life,” Tsukumo cuts, and it’s sudden and abrupt and takes Suguru entirely off guard. Her voice is perfectly mild, clear and even. She hums, shakes her head. “Well—no, maybe in my early childhood, but I don’t remember.”

“You’re exaggerating,” he says, “it doesn’t—”

“Nope!” Tsukumo grins briefly. “I’ve never felt guilty for something. Regret, sure, sort of. I wouldn’t do it again, and, I wish I hadn’t done that, that kind of thought. I’ve wished I hadn’t hurt people but not felt guilty over it.”

And here’s the thing—she sounds serious. Tsukumo likes to joke, kidds around frequently, even in what should be a serious situation, but this isn’t that. No…

“...For real?” He narrows his eyes.

“For real! And I did plenty of awful shit when I was younger, really. I wouldn’t do them again, and I know intellectually that they were wrong, but I don’t feel anything for it.” She leans back on the railing, her palms touching on the gravel behind her. “I prefer it like this, though. I’m glad I have this condition—being like you would be miserable.”

It’s a dig at Suguru, maybe. At their stubborn refusal of her words, at their insistence, at their self-cannibalization. Or maybe it’s not a dig, but Suguru prickles anyway, sharp needles irritating down his skin, up his throat.

They run their tongue along their teeth, hard enough to hurt. Ignore it.

“Condition?” Is what they focus on, instead, because it’s easier.

“Yep!” She pulls up, hands settling back on the railing, knee folding in front of her. She gives him a grin, and there’s a playful note to her voice when she says—“I’ve got a form of ASPD!”

Suguru has the feeling that they’re supposed to have...some kind of reaction. All they can really do is stare blankly. They don’t know the acronym.

“Anti-social personality disorder,” Tsukumo elaborates.

Suguru’s mind, once again, turns up blank. Anti-social personality disorder… It doesn’t make sense. Suguru’s brows knit, this time, face furrowing. “You seem really social to me, though?”

A long beat. Tsukumo blinks, a beat late, seems almost exasperated—disappointed?—then laughs. It’s breathy, a sound from her chest that crinkles up to her honey-gold eyes.

Suguru flusters, hot wash of embarrassment crashing over them. Feels tight in their collared button-up. The cold metal of their earring tickles against their neck, and they have to resist the urge to fiddle with their lobe.

“What?” It comes out maybe a bit sharper than intended.

“Nothing,” she says, but there’s amusement in the twist of her lip. “Maybe you’d better recognize it as sociopathy.”

Oh. That one clicks. “Oh.”

“It’s not a medical term, though,” Tsukumo says, “and lots of its associations are just wildly inaccurate and, you know.”

“Oh,” he says, and despite the situation, he recognizes this as a gift. Not in the traditional sense, no, but trust is a gift, too. It’s not as though they’re unused to receiving trust, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s always, always precious. They take it quietly, let it settle gently in their glass-ribbed chest. Inhale. “Alright,” they say, “but—even so. You’re different, whatever. For me it still feels wrong not to...”

“I wouldn’t,” Tsukumo says.

Suguru squares their shoulders. Presses the pads of their fingers against the railing’s bottom, against that hard metal ridge. His fingertips are going numb. “That’s a false equivalence; you can’t. It’s completely unfair, wrong, to expect something from someone who’s unable to do it, but that changes for someone who can.”

Tsukumo just hums, fingers threading in front of her, leaning somewhat forward. Looking like she’s thinking.

“...Let me rephrase,” she finally says, “I don’t care whether it’s wrong or right for you to feel remorse over it. I truly don’t. I have my own opinions, but what I’m saying is that it’s useless.”

A beat. Suguru doesn’t say anything, stands their ground, feels almost close to glaring.

“Tell me,” she presses, “how is this wallowing useful in the slightest?”

“That’s not the point,” he bites. Suguru’s pride is ethics. If they feel they’re right in something, they’ll do anything for it. It’s their very method of being. An attack on their ethics is—more than an attack on themself. More.

Tsukumo looks at him flatly. “It is.”

“You can’t just—”

“Suguru,” she says, and his words lodge on his tongue. Tsukumo sighs, eyes looking to the sky, then back to them. “Your greatest fear is not being a good person, yeah?”

“It’s a good fear to have,” Suguru says, “it’s the most important fear to have.”

“It’s not like I want to be a bad person either,” Tsukumo says. “That’s why I try to do good. And here’s the thing—I don’t believe in altruism. In a literal sense, I don’t believe it’s possible for anyone to act selflessly. Even the most moral acts can be boiled down to the self-interest, even if that interest in question is so simple, innocent, as ‘I don’t want to be a bad person’ or ‘I want to be a good person’. It’s selfish.”

“You’re an egoist,” he says.

“Only in the psychological sense,” Tsukumo says. “I don’t have any particular metaethical framework. I don’t care where morality comes from; all I’m saying is that our actions within it are motivated by self interest.” Suguru must have some sort of odd expression on his face, because she laughs. Says: “Does it feel wrong?”

“Awful.”

“That’s expected,” Tsukumo says. “Some people disagree, but to me it’s just an obvious truth, no matter how it feels.”

Egoism; altruism. They’ve only ever delved into it from a metaethical perspective, and egoism has always just felt gross, but if they aren’t talking metaethics—maybe it doesn’t even matter on any level but that. Really, all this… Suguru—

“What’s the point of this?” They run their tongue against their teeth, hard enough to hurt. Feel wet morning mist brush against their skin.

“I’m saying,” Tsukumo says, voice slow, but not condescendingly so, “that regardless of how a truth feels, it remains a truth. It’s a truth that there just isn’t any use in beating yourself up like you are.”

“I only work in moral truths,” Suguru says.

Tsukumo pauses. The birdsong has somewhat died from the background. He can now hear, too, the rustle of leave in wind. Across the field, the town is beginning to buzz. He presses his heel into the gravel, feels the dig of sharp stone.

“Alright then,” Tsukumo says. “We can agree that it’s preferable to do moral goods, yeah? And it’s your perspective that due to your position as a special grade shaman, you have an even larger obligation.”

“Of course.”

“Of course,” Tsukumo echoes. “Except, instead of doing these things that your position demands you, you’re paralyzing yourself with self-loathing. Isn’t that wrong?”

Ah.

“You’re mean,” they say.

“I’m just saying,” Tsukumo says, and there’s a smile in the pink slant of her lips, victory in the glint of her eyes, “isn’t it a little selfish?”

Suguru elbows her lightly, knocks his shoulder against hers, knocks their knees. Feels the impact of it in his bones. There’s this feeling in their chest, light and heavy, sinking down and down, and it’s not unpleasant. Is a relief, almost. Like something bleeding away.

“You don’t even believe what you’re saying,” he accuses.

“Does it matter?”

“Well,” they concede, “probably not.”

Tsukumo flashes him a grin. A moment later, her expression flattens into something more serious. “It’s a problem, you know, this tendency of yours. Getting so focused on loathing yourself for thinking or having thought things that you don’t work through them properly. It’s all left to fester, neither accepted nor properly cast aside. At that point, all it takes is an outside factor to impulsively force the decision in you, and then there’s no going back.”

And—well.

She isn’t wrong.

A wave of self loathing churns in his stomach, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? That’s the problem. He breathes in, out. Tastes like wilderness. The scent of wildflowers and old oil.

“Yeah,” he admits.

“Mm,” Tsukumo glances down the track, stretches her arms above her head. “We should get off the tracks, babe. At this rate we’re gonna miss the whole day!”

It’s an abrupt change of subject, except it’s not really a change of subject at all, is it?

They close their eyes, briefly, and let out this amused little huff. “Fine.”

So he releases his white-knuckle grip on the rail, and swing to a stand. Feels the gravel dig. They step onto a crosstie, feels the partly rotten, cracked wood dig into the arch of their feet. Tsukumo is short to follow.

Above, the sun rises.

Chapter Text

They’re shopping for new clothes, when it happens. Tsukumo’s over in the dress section, which is odd enough already, because she doesn’t even wear them, and then she gestures him over. Takes the dress from its hanger and holds it to his chest, lining up the collar.

Suguru pushes her hand away. “What?”

Tsukumo glances critically at the dress. “I’m thinking you’d look good in it.”

They hesitate. “I don’t care how I look.”

That’s wrong; Suguru does care how she looks. Like everything else to do with their body, the way they present it is a tool. Clothing is a language. Masculine presentation is a tool; street wear is a tool; formal wear is a tool; all of it is a tool. Suguru straddles the line between their own comfort, the aesthetic impression they want to give, and convenience.

There’s no use in wearing a dress, not really.

“Sure sure,” Tsukumo says, “but it’s pretty hot out, y’know! This looks breathable.”

It’s a sundress. Loose and linen. Plain brown down to the knees. Built in a way that it won’t feel or look terribly awkward even with his lack of a bust. It is hot out. Today is a rare dry day in the Philippines, too.

They hesitate.

“Okay,” Suguru finally concedes. “Maybe.”

(He does end up wearing it. It does end up having good ventilation.

It’s not unpleasant.)

-

Each part of Suguru’s body has it’s own utility:

hair for aesthetics. Ears for keeping gifts. Skin for keeping reminders. Muscles for strength, for protecting themself and others. Height—all hundred ninety centimeters of it—for spotting things in crowds and further reach. Flat chest for easier economy of movement. Cock for convenient urination. Voice for charming. Thyroid cartilage to protect their vocal chords.

(It’s something they never quite realized, before, that the bulge of their throat was not some arbitrary signal of masculinity, but rather, a biological construct present in both sexes. Its purpose is to protect the voice box; the larger the larynx, the larger the Adam’s apple.)

Suguru likes their voice, maybe. Are proud of it, even. Of how they’ve trained it into all the tones they need. They wouldn’t change it even if given the choice. It’s good, having that protection for it.

They haven’t quite rationalized the use of their sharp jaw, not yet, but…

And they don’t love these pieces of themself, their cock, their prominent thyroid cartilage, not even their flat chest, which they’d truly hate to have anything else in place of. But it’s—

better. Easier, when they think of it like this. You don’t need to love a tool, only not-hate it.

-

It’s early June when Shōko hands him off to Haibara. Apparently, he’s finally well enough for it. So they talk, a little. Hellos, such and such. Eventually—

“Are you,” Haibara pauses over the line, sounds almost hesitant, “happy?”

It takes Suguru off guard. She presses a palm to the rough concrete of the flat roof she’s sitting on. Feels night-cold slip down his skin. How to answer that? Is he…

“Yeah,” he decides, finally, and something on his face relaxes. He feels it in the muscles. “I think so.” Not so happy as he could be, not so happy as he has been in the past, but—

“That’s good!”

“Mhmm,” Suguru hums. Twists the topic. “And you? How are you doing?”

“Okay!” Haibara’s voice is cheery across the static-line. “Physical therapy is going well! I managed to take a step, yesterday.”

It happened shortly after Suguru left. The curse. Haibara. The frantic attempt to heal his near-bisected body and the ensuing months of comatose. He’d only just barely woken up when Suguru got back into contact with Shōko and Satoru. In the same way it’d taken a while to find out about Satoru’s adoption—if barely in any sense but legal—of four children, Suguru hadn’t even known.

“That’s wonderful,” they murmur, inhaling deeply, to try and steady the anxious hatred in their chest. The desperate fear. He truly hates this world. “I’m glad.”

“Uhhuh! Shōko-senpai says I’ll probably regain totally normal function in...a year? Two? Reverse Cursed Technique is seriously amazing.”

“It is,” Suguru passively agrees, runs their tongue over their teeth. “Afterwards, do you...”

“I’ll probably go back to exorcisms,” Haibara admits, and there’s something inexplicably bashful in his voice. Not embarrassed, not quite, but sheepish.

Something hot and cold and wretched curls in Suguru’s chest. This is his kōhai, dammit. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Maybe not,” Haibara says, “but I want to.”

Dammit.

You are going to die, Suguru wants to say, but that’s just mean. I think if I stayed and you had died, I would have died, too. A part of my soul, maybe. I would have made you a symbol in my heart. You might be one anyway. But that one just makes no sense, is ripe for misinterpretation; Suguru is thinking of their tendency towards narrativizing events, nothing more.

It’s just—awful that it happened in the first place, regardless of whether Haibara actually died.

Suguru clicks his tongue against his teeth. “Please be careful.”

A beat. Suguru’s voice feels too-small, feels swallowed by the vast city sprawling out around them, bright against the night.

“Do you remember what we talked about before you left?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s good to do something I can do,” Haibara says, and Suguru wants to scream. Don’t be naive! But Haibara would know the dangers better than anyone, and even before this, he wasn’t naive. Barely a month into his first year, he forbade his little sister from ever attending Jujutsu Tech. “But it’s not just that, not really. I think I understand it better now. The thing is—I like people, you know? I like people! It’s like that.”

And maybe that’s it, maybe that’s the damning difference of this conversation. Suguru…

“Hah,” he says, and closes his eyes. Lets himself relax. “I don’t understand you at all.”

“That’s fine!” Haibara laughs. “It doesn’t have to make sense to you. Just to me.”

-

“However I look at it,” Suguru says one day, abrupt and sudden, “humans are rotten to me.”

Tsukumo pauses in the bathroom’s doorway, hair wet, collar glistening. Towel drawn around her. She hums. “Really? Humans are fundamentally good, I think. Usually someone’s immoral positions can be defeated by consistently applying their own morality.”

Suguru’s eyes wander the dull brown walls. Feels the plastic motel blankets, uncomfortable against his thighs. There are cigarette burns on the carpet; it smells like lingering smoke. Acrid, slightly sour, chemical.

They stay silent maybe a beat too long, because Tsukumo cocks her head.

“Doesn’t the fact that humans are capable of so much good, typically hold such good values,” they say, turning the words over in their mouth, “only make it more immoral when they choose against it?”

“Are you talking about all humans?” And she means shamans, too?

“All of them.”

“Yeah.”

“Hm,” Tsukumo says, then: “do you hate humans, Suguru?”

His skin prickles. The fabric of his clothing is sticking uncomfortably tight. He needs a shower. “...Does it matter?”

“That depends on you,” Tsukumo answers easily, “will you make it matter?”

As in: are you going to act on that hatred? Does it have a direction? An outcome?

“I’m sure I could bullshit something,” Suguru says. Digs his brain, turns over arguments in his head, pieces points together. Smiles, close-eyed and thin-lipped. And, just for fun: “If a position of power exists, it’ll inevitably be abused, yeah? Depending how you rationalize it, humanity itself can be abstracted as a position of power, and it’s good to get rid of positions that’ll be abused.”

“Are you saying that in a practical way?”

A beat. It’s not tense, not exactly. Suguru’s heart is steady in their chest, and they exhale. Feel curses churn in their cursed energy, their stomach. Shake their head. Let out a small huff that’s closer to a sigh. “Nah, not like you could kill the whole globe. Morality aside, there’s no practical route.”

“Alright,” Tsukumo says, and shrugs. Any veil of concern falls when her attention shifts to finding a comb, her hair coloring orange in this dim lighting. She isn’t even looking at him when she says: “Then it probably doesn’t matter.”

Something settles comfortably in his chest. Feels like relief, or validation. He doesn’t want to analyze it, attempt to derive justification. This hatred feels intensely personal, feels intrinsically tied to an experience that’s his and only his, that no one else in the whole world can understand. Feels like something that belongs to him, that he can keep in his chest and under his tongue, cradle in his hands. It’s ugly and negative but it’s a safe indulgence, too, when he lets it sit in his stomach, heavy and warm.

-

He’s been learning to cook, make stir fries and soups and roasts. Dress and steam. They learn which flavors go well together, to put the harder vegetables in first, how much oil is too much oil. Learns how to cook in a kitchen and at a campfire, with too-little tools or so many he doesn’t even know the name of half of them. No, the oil should NOT pop before you put anything in it, oh my god, Suguru. They’re learning.

At some point—

it becomes something they just do, without need of occasion. They make food and share it. Make small snacks, sometimes, too, and don’t share those at all. It’s nice. It’s fun. It’s—

and he remembers Mohammad in India, their mutual startlement at the realization that Suguru didn’t have a hobby at all. Maybe this is his hobby. He doesn’t mind.

-

His third tattoo is the largest by far. It stretches serpentine across his upper back, a two headed dragon, each end peeking over his shoulders, teeth bared. Only a choice few of its scales are colored—the red ones. Vermilion like blood.

Maybe most people wouldn’t want a symbol of misfortune, of disaster, permanently inked on their skin. Suguru does, though. Lets the tragedy of that day rest on his skin, taking the shape of the rainbow dragon he lost that day.

(Skin for reminders.)

-

They’re in the aisles of a Jewelry shop, and something in the window display catches their eye. The pair of gauges are a deep golden amber, refracting bright July sunlight. He pauses, traces its diameter with his index finger. It’s slightly larger than their current gauges.

“’Pretty,” Tsukumo says. “You want ‘em?”

Suguru takes a moment to answer, finger lingering in the warm sunlight before retracting. They shake their head, and the metal button strung through their current gauges knocks against their neck, tickles the skin. “Nah.”

“Oh?”

“Mhmm,” he confirms, and smiles. It feels warm on their face, the softening of their muscles, crinkle at their eyes. It’s a fond expression, Suguru is sure. He reaches a hand up to his lobe, traces the smooth amethyst lodged in their ear. “I’ll keep my current ones. They were given to me by someone special.”

Tsukumo does this sharp exhale of amusement. “You’re so unsubtle.”

“Yeah,” Suguru agrees, thinks of Satoru, “maybe.”

-

In the same way that Suguru never smoked in any context but social, he doesn’t drink without company. He’s drunk, now, so heavy and weightless with this cotton-candy feeling that he can’t even walk straight. Suguru presses their head into the junction of Tsukumo’s shoulder as she adjusts their position on her back. Legs on her hips. He hasn’t been carried like this in…

Suguru doesn’t shut his eyes. Listens to Tsukumo’s steps splash. It only stopped raining half an hour ago. Dim building-light illuminates their warm reflection in road puddles, and Suguru watches them pass from one frame to another. He is thinking about home.

“...I think,” Suguru says, warmth of Tsukumo’s body seeping even through the damp fabric of her shirt, “I want to go back to Japan soon.”

A beat. Tsukumo doesn’t stop moving. He wishes, distantly, that he could see her expression. “You really wanna?”

“Do you remember who I was talking to back at the bar?”

“You were talking to a lot of people.”

It’s true, he was. And gods, it was so fun. He hasn’t put himself out like that, hasn’t truly socialized with that many people just for the sake of it in… and you meet so many interesting people that way. Tonight, he met one of Nigeria’s best shamans just by chance.

Miguel is only a few years older than Suguru. Is funny and smart and nice to laugh with. Miguel is also planning to visit Japan later this summer, and stay there for months on end. Suguru had to hold themself back from offering to show him around and help him out when he goes.

“Nevermind,” Suguru mumbles, tongue feeling thick in his mouth. A moment passes, and they change their mind with uncharacteristic indecisiveness. “I just—it’d be nice. I think.”

It’s been a while. If Miguel finds another family in Japan, will he also find another home? Is that possible, to have multiple homes? Suguru feels all floaty.

“Well,” Tsukumo says, and there’s something teasing or flippant or amused in her voice. Or maybe none of those at all? “It’s about time. ‘You wanna stay there, too?”

The movement of Tsukumo’s body keeps a steady rhythm beneath him. Up and down. Step step. Suguru is floating, but her body is an anchor. Solid and tangible as sun-warmed rock.

“...No,” he says, then, stronger, “I don’t think so. No. No.”

Tsukumo hums. Maybe it’s their imagination, but Suguru feels that they can feel it beneath their arm, where it’s hooked around her upper body. “Yeah?”

“Do you think...” homes, families; Satoru Shōko Haibara Nanami, their parents; Jujutsu Tech and the house of their childhood… “do you think I should?”

“I think that’s up to you.”

“Okay,” he says, and he hates that, except not really. Suguru wouldn’t have it any other way. They loath having their decisions made for them. Suguru just—

what do they want?

They can’t imagine a future with themself in it, they truly can’t. Suguru lost that ability sometime in third year, and it hasn’t come back. Their mind draws a total blank. A complete void. They can’t imagine much of a future at all, in general.

Tsukumo walks a steady rhythm beneath them. Air smells like after-rain. Tastes damp. Warm light filtering out from streetside buildings. Puddles. Other late-night wanders. It’s some smaller Nigerian city.

Suguru closes his eyes, and presses his cheek into the warmth of Tsukumo’s shoulder.

“Let’s go next month,” they finally decide.

It’s possible to have multiple homes, they think. Japan was...is their home, is cursed-filled and riddled with issues but their home nonetheless. Jujutsu Tech was, is a home just as the house of their childhood is(!) a home, and maybe this can be a home, too. Maybe the road can be a home. Maybe home just means a comfortable place to be.

Maybe Suguru can be a home, too.

Chapter Text

On the ninth day of August, when the sun is only just up and the runway sparkles with dew, Suguru arrives at the port of Tōkyō-Narita. From there, it’s several trains to the town of his childhood.

By the time he reaches the door, it’s early evening. The windows are warm-lit. Both his parents are inside, he knows. The door is right there, wood and glass. Suguru stands there for ten minutes, alone, muggy August air clotting in their loose hair, before finally knocking.

It doesn’t take long to hear the footsteps on the other side. He braces himself.

The door slides open.

Her hair is tied up, graying on the edges. Loose trousers and an oversized t-shirt. The beginnings of crows-feet by her warm brown eyes, wide in surprise. Disbelief.

“Hey Kaa-san,” Suguru says, somewhat sheepish, self consciousness running down his skin, along with a wash of summer heat.

“Suguru,” she chokes.

“I’m sorry it’s been so long. I’m so sorry.”

Kaasan doesn’t respond immediately. Just stands there, in the doorway, backlit by burnt orange light from the genkan’s old bulb. Finally, eventually: “I’m not going to say it’s okay, because it isn’t, and I’m expecting an explanation, but...” she moves, opening room for them to slip inside. “That can happen tomorrow. I’m happy you’re safe.”

Something loosens in Suguru’s chest.

“Thank you.”

“Your father and I were making dinner,” she says. “Is you favorite still zaru soba?”

He swallows. Nods. “Can I—help?”

And it’s then, then that something softens on their mother’s face. “Of course you can, Suguru-kun. Now come in.”

So Suguru does. He crosses the threshold of his childhood home, stepping quietly into the genkan and lining his sandals neatly against the wall. The door clunks shut behind them. He breathes deep.

It smells so nostalgic, like boiled rice and tatami mats and the lingering burn of sandalwood incense. Air tastes faintly of dashi and summer-must.

“Our son is home,” Kaasan tells Tousan, when they reach the kitchen.

It hurts less than they thought it might, to hear their mother call them her son. Barely even pricks, although they don’t know why. Maybe it’s because they haven’t indicated anything otherwise. It doesn’t matter, in the end because even if it did, Suguru wouldn’t out themself here. Not tonight and not tomorrow and not this year. Maybe eventually, but not now.

(He hasn’t even told Tsukumo, though perhaps she can tell.)

“Hey, Tou-san,” Suguru says.

So they make dinner together. Boil the soba and chill it in ice water and plate it on bamboo mats. Tousan makes miso broth. Suguru sets the chabudai. When they all sit down around it, their knees bump in a way that’s unfamiliar, because the last time Suguru sat at this table with them, he was fifteen and still just a boy.

(Suguru visited in second year, too, but he brought along Shōko and Satoru and the chabudai was much too small to accommodate everyone, so they forewent it entirely.)

Dinner goes fine, goes good. The clack of chopsticks against the tsuyu bowl. It’s towards the end, when Suguru has lifted his bowl to his lips and is drinking down the last of his broth, that Tousan asks:

“How long are you staying?”

Suguru pauses, places down his bowl carefully, its thud against the table almost inaudible. Swallows.

How long are they staying?

Outside, in town, Tsukumo is staying in the local ryokan. Suguru is eighteen, now, is his own person in every way that matters; he could leave tonight, if he wanted. Could avoid the heavy awkwardness of two years of estrangement from their parents, first from overwork, then their own fucked up inability to think of their nonshaman parents without feeling bitter anger so strong it burnt their tongue, then their year overseas. They never called.

In reality, though, didn’t this estrangement start even before that? Start when they were fifteen, and boarding the Tōkyō train?

They exhale. Warmth pools and settles in their stomach. Miso broth on their tongue.

“I’m staying through Obon,” Suguru says, because this is something precious and they want it back, dammit, “if that’s alright with you.”

“Of course,” Tousan says, and grins, “we’ll have to get you new yukata, though. None of your old ones fit, you’ve grown so much.”

(Suguru wants to spent his twentieth birthday with them.)

-

Suguru sleeps that night in the bedroom of his childhood, where his old collection of omamori still hangs on thumbtacks to the wall, until summer-cicada song carries him into waking. They explain themself over breakfast. Introduce Tsukumo as a friend. The streets of their childhood call to them like an old lover, and they traverse on memory so deeply ingrained it’s almost instinct. Eat dango from the little shop near the temple.

Their parents gasp when they undress themself at the onsen, see the dragon across their shoulders and lemon branch along their hip and eye over their heart. They supported Suguru when he grew out his hair, and turned his grandmother’s gift into gauges that he wore a full forty nine days in remembrance, but long hair and piercings are one thing in the way of social noncompliance, and tattoos are another. Tattoos do more than get you in violation of school dress code, they get you kicked out of establishments.

It turns out okay, though. The family who owns the onsen is an old family friend in the same way a lot of people in towns like these are old family friends, and Suguru was an endearing child. It turns out alright.

Obon comes. Tsukumo leaves to who-knows-where so that Suguru can spend the whole holiday with his family. They clean the family gravestones and make the alters and hang a chochin lantern from the edge of the front door’s overhang. Perform the mukae-bon.

They don’t end up buying Suguru a new yukata; he uses one of his father’s. It’s old and it’s worn, but Suguru doesn’t mind. It serves just well when they dance their hometown’s bon-odori and walk the dark-swathed streets, each hand taken. Heart beating warm and steady, taiko drums.

On the third day, they set their lanterns down the river. Several for the family, and...maybe it’s late, and maybe it’s improper, but they set a lantern to water for Amanai and Kuroi, too. Suguru doesn’t explain, and their parents don’t ask.

Obon means family means remembrance means remembering from which you came and of whom you still have and of whom you lost. Suguru is from a nonshaman family, not a single drop of shaman blood until his birth, and maybe it doesn’t matter because Suguru will always amputate the limb and cauterize the wound if that’s what must be done, but it isn’t and it won’t ever be. That’s the truth they decided on. They don’t hate this. Those are their true feelings.

Each morning feels like coming home.

-

August seventeenth sees Suguru stepping onto the platform of a Tōkyō train station, Tsukumo just behind. Evening washes the station in bruised hues of purple and burnt orange. Across the shadow-darkened concrete, only six steps away, light glints silver off the edge of Satoru’s glasses and Shōko’s soda.

Quiet presses around them like a physical force.

Suguru is aware of how they look, of how different they look from the boy that left a year ago; taller, shoulders broader, edges full and firm. Loose yellow blouse tucked into the hem of their black cargo pants, inked horns of their rainbow dragon barely showing above the collar. Hair half tied up. Old Jujutsu Tech button relegated to a sidepiece on their ear.

Suguru’s so different now.

A beat.

Satoru closes the distance in an instant, in a blur of white and black. It’s fast, he’s fast, but Suguru’s fast, too. They read the movement in it’s beginning stages, see it bright the draw of Satoru’s arm; they can avoid it—

Suguru doesn’t step back, and Satoru’s first connects hard to their right cheek. God, he didn’t hold back. Suguru gasps, staggers back—

Then there’s a hand around their shoulder, an arm around their back, and Satoru’s pulled forward into something warm. Crushing pressure all against their torso. Soft hair against his cheek, forehead. Satoru’s head on their shoulder.

Oh.

They were expecting the punch. Not—not—

“’Missed you too,” Suguru mutters, arms wrapping around Satoru’s back.

“Asshole,” Satoru grumbles. When he finally lets go and steps back, his glasses have slipped down his nose, and the stars in his eyes are restlessly spinning an asymmetric rotation around his black-hole pupils.

Something soft and fond unfurls in Suguru’s chest. Blooms bright and giddy, so large and full it’s like his chest will burst. Shōko picks her way across the platform lazily, downing the rest of her soda and sighing.

“Yo,” she says, tossing the can to a nearby trashbin with pinpoint accuracy, “it’s the kidnapper and the kidnappee.”

Suguru smiles weakly. Is about to answer, that’s us, and nice to see you, but—

“Yo!” When Suguru twists on their sandals to look at her, Tsukumo is grinning wide. Posture all lax and casual. “What kind of woman is you type?”

Shōko blinks. “Me?”

“You!”

“Oh,” says Shōko, in that flat tone of hers that really doesn’t mean much because it’s the same whether she’s irritated or amused or bemused. She looks at Suguru, though, which means she is genuinely a little taken aback, so they shrug. Her gaze shifts back to Tsukumo. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“It’s a personality test!” Tsukumo cheerily answers, shifts her attention to Satoru. “’You?”

Satoru huffs, pressing himself into Suguru’s side, hips knocking, arm laid across Suguru’s shoulder. Satoru leans forward, pupils dilating, and sticks out his tongue childishly. “Not-you!”

Shōko breathes a quiet laugh, and rolls her eyes at them before Satoru can continue with his provocations. “C’mon, the others are waiting on campus. It’s getting late.”

From there, it’s another train, then the long walk up Mount Mushiro. The familiar journey up a couple thousand steps. His legs don’t even ache by the end, when Nanami and Haibara and Yaga and Ijichi and—so many more people than Suguru expected to care care about his return at all, actually—greet him at the top. The night is lost to laughter and chilled udon in the main kitchen.

-

Dawn has barely began to color the horizon when Suguru finally finishes their preparations, and quietly picks their way through the cluttered common room. Satoru is exactly where they left him, asleep sideways on the couch, body slouched awkwardly over itself, collapsed halfway into the void that Suguru’s body left when they extracted themself from the couch only an hour earlier.

“Satoru,” he whispers, quiet as not to wake the others, strewn sleeping over pillows on the carpet and the other couch. They bend down, dress tickling at their legs. Nudge Satoru’s brow lightly, too close to his precious eyes for total comfort, and watch him come alive.

He groans, lids slipping groggily open. When his eyes land on Suguru, they widen, pupils dilating, black void expanding outward. He opens his mouth—

Suguru shoves a hand against it. Doesn’t mind the saliva, or the scowl. Raises a finger to his lips. After a moment, Satoru shuts up, nods, and slips his glasses on. When Suguru stretches out a hand, he takes it and is careful to make no noise with his steps. They pick their way from the common room like a pair of thieves, carefully avoiding dirty plates and empty bottles and sleeping bodies. Satoru slips on his sneakers; Suguru straps on his sandals.

What, Suguru wonders, when they finally exit the building, was Satoru going to say? Could have been: what time is it? or, what is it? or, what are you wearing?

It’s only when they’re fully outside the building, morning air kissing humidity to Suguru’s skin, that Satoru squints at the pink sky and asks, “What time is ti?”

“Five in the morning,” Suguru answers, “or so.”

Satoru’s face scrunches. “Ew.”

Suguru rolls his eyes. “Deal with it.”

“Dude I went to sleep at two in the morning.”

“And I woke up at four,” Suguru deadpans.

“You’re like, a masochist, or something.”

“No,” they say, “I just have something to show you.”

“Fine,” Satoru says, after a moments, jogging a step to catch up. It jostles his glasses, bobs his snowy hair. Then: “Why are you wearing a dress?”

There’s no buildup, no tact. It’s all abrupt, blunt. The only way Suguru’s really ever known Satoru to be. Somehow, that’s a comfort.

“Because it’s August,” they answer, resisting the urge to fiddle with their lobe, “it’s hot out and gonna get hotter. It’s good summer clothing.”

Suguru’s wearing a sundress, loose and cotton, ending just below the knees. Pale blue and patterned with dragonflies. It’s comfortable summer clothing, has that use, but also—

like any good tool, clothing has multiple utilities. There’s the practicalities: this fabric is durable, this fabric is breathable, but they can also carry a message. Formal to signify class, right-over-left for death, so on so on. Here, the symbol of this dress is…

vulnerability.

“Ohhh,” Satoru says, shrugs. “’Guess that makes sense.”

Something releases in Suguru’s chest, light and heavy and warm. Steady heart. It grows around his chest, lungs, shoulders, burgeons up his throat, and before he knows it, he’s laughing. Feels it crinkle on his face, around his eyes.

“What!?” Satoru sort of—puffs up, or bristles. Huffs, crosses his arms. “It’s not like I’m gonna go all like,” and he pitches his voice all high and mocking, his typical impersonation of clan shamans, “eww, grossss, no way men can wear dresses wear proper clothes.”

“I know I know,” Suguru says, amusement sugar-sweet on their tongue, voice mild and sunlit, “of course you wouldn’t. I’m not a man, though.”

This one, this one gives Satoru a visible pause. His step falters. His brows furrow and his lips indent downward. “Because you’re not twenty?”

“No.”

“Eh?”

“I’m not a man,” Suguru repeats.

A beat. Even this early in the morning, sun barely over the mountains, melting the clouds into its colors, the cicadas have already started their incessant hum. It’s so loud in Suguru’s ears, and they dig their heel into their sandal. Their loose hair traps heat around their shoulders. They should tie it up.

“Oh,” Satoru finally says. “Okay.”

Suguru startles. Satoru, though he may not act like it, hates not understanding things. Will pick things apart piece by piece, dissect every bit of its theory, before being satisfied.

“That—” Suguru falters, “that easily?”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Satoru says, “but whatever. I trust you.”

I trust you.

Love hits Suguru all at once, kicks his stomach, breaks every one of their ribs, heart knocking against its cage. That feeling in his chest burgeons, bundles and pulses and tightens, so large it feels like it’ll pop his whole chest. They feel it in their stomach, throat, in the slacking of their facial muscles.

I love you.

It’s overwhelming, this tidal wave of affection. Too lush and full to encapsulate. Suguru really, really—

Satoru, I love you. I love you I love you I love you I love you!

“What the hell,” they manage, “you’re so embarrassing.”

“Hey—!”

His heart is steady in his chest when he grasps Satoru’s hand and starts running. They sprint down the stone staircase of Mount Ushiro, taking steps three at a time, nearly tripping over each other’s feet. Satoru breaks free from Suguru’s grip and declares a race to the bottom; they hit the last step in a tangled mess of limbs and soon-to-be-bruises, cursed energy reinforcement the only thing preventing them both from concussions.

By the time they reach the train station Satoru has only just barely shut up complaining about his scrapes. You’re so lucky my glasses didn’t break! It’s then, too, when he asks:

“Where are we going, anyway?” Satoru makes a face at his ticket. “I hate Kyōto.”

“You’ll find out,” Suguru says. “It’s not too bad, suck it up.”

The train ride is three hours. Landscape passes outside the window, dawn fading from the sky, being replaced by hazy grays and distant blues. It’s a cloudy day, but barely colder for it. They get tokoroten at some konbini and Suguru fails to persuade Satoru out of buying kakigori. By the time they step off another train at Arashiyama station, Satoru is only just beginning to understand where they’re going.

Sagano Bamboo Forest is just as it was the last time they were here together, back in first year, two boys who truly couldn’t stand each other sent to exorcise a special grade terrorizing the grove’s many paths.

“This is where...”

Suguru nods.

They break from the packed-earth path soon enough, climbing over the dried grass fencing that lines both sides. Their feet hit the ground with twin noise. The crunch of dried leaves, snap of twigs. Around them stretches an endless forest, bamoboo stalk after bamboo stalk, extending far above them. It all looks...roughly the same.

Suguru hesitates.

Satoru notices, of course. “It’s this way,” he says, “follow me.”

So they switch places, Suguru taking step behind Satoru. He delivers on his word—he always does. The clearing that Satoru brings them to is mossy and open. There are some small bamboo stalks growing upwards, spring-green, practically newborn. This place must only just be recovering from the damage done to it back then.

Suguru takes a deep breath, tastes damp forest, exhales. Sits himself on the boulder, presses the pads of his fingers into the stone. If they really try, they can imagine the exact pattern Satoru’s blood splattered on its surface. “How’d you find it?”

“There’s still some residuals,” Satoru says, carelessly sitting on the ground, legs crossing, leaning back on his palms. His glasses are knocked out of place, and his gaze slides up to Suguru. “Why are we here, anyway?”

There are a lot of ways Suguru could answer. I wanted us to be alone; I like this place; I didn’t know where else to go; I—

“I swore I’d carry the weight of the world with you that night,” Suguru says, pauses, braces themself. They aren’t used to dissecting themselves for viewing; they’re used to being pried apart and wrestling the skin back into place. “Back then….I don’t know how I conceptualized that. It doesn’t matter. It was stupid and naive. I only started realizing that after Star Plasma.”

Satoru shifts on the ground. Pushes his glasses up. “And that’s part of why you...”

“I thought—” and this is the hard part, this is the hard part, “—do you know why Yuki decided it was better for me to come with her than stay in Japan, and why I ended up agreeing?”

“...No,” Satoru says. Huffs. “You didn’t tell me.”

Suguru opens his mouth, but the words won’t leave his tongue, keep caged behind his teeth. An inexplicable lightness rattles in their arms, their stomach, core, makes them feel all shaky and unbalanced. This is the hard part.

Bite the bullet. That’s how you do these things. Rip off the bandaid.

“I was considering genocide,” Suguru hears themself say, “of nonshamans, I mean. I hated them. I hated them, Satoru. Think Zen’in clan bullshit but worse. I probably would’ve—” and he can’t say it.

“Oh,” Satoru says. Sounds oddly blank.

“Oh?”

“I mean,” he says, “what do you want me to say?”

“I just felt like I should explain.”

Around them, the forest groans. Creaks and creaks, bamboo stalks swaying in light breeze that brushes Suguru’s hair against their neck. Cicadas and rustling leaves. Rattling, almost, with the drop of sticks and clack of stalks against one another.

These are the same sounds that surrounded them that night in first year, moonlight filtering through the leaves, blood on the ground, residuals thick enough to choke on. The silver realization that Satoru was a kind person, someone worthy of respect.

I am going to carry this world with you.

“No,” Satoru says, after a moment, “it’s not just that. You have something else to say, right?”

“Yeah,” Suguru says. Breathes in—damp forest and mountain air—and out. “I… I thought that if I can’t carry this world with you, then I could get rid of it entirely. That I could erase this world as it is. I still think that. I can’t do that from the college, though.”

“You’re saying we won’t be together anymore.”

“...Something like that,” Suguru admits. Feels an ache in their chest. “I want—I want you to be in my life, though. If you want me.”

“Of course I do,” Satoru says, not even a moment of hesitation. “You’re my best friend.”

“Oh.”

“Idiot.” Satoru pulls abruptly to his feet, rolling his shoulders, stepping forward, closer. “Like I’d ever say anything else.”

It’s not—it’s not that Suguru expected anything else, not really, just… Their perception of themself—improved though it may be—still colors their perception of other’s perceptions of them. That’s all.

“Okay.”

“Alright!” Satoru’s face splits with a grin, bright and a little challenging, somewhat cocky. Above, the sun emerges from behind a cloud; every shadow sharpens on the ground. Sunlight filters bright through the bamboo leaves, shifting in patterns on the moss. “I’m gonna swear something, too! Suguru—”

there’s cursed energy gathering, Suguru realizes, with some horror. It’s tightening in the air, thick with promise.

“Wait—!”

“—I am going to erase this world with you.”

The cursed energy twists into a knot, completes its binding, and goes silent. It’s done. There’s no taking those words back, not ever. And Satoru is smiling so blindingly, all childishly cheeky.

“What the hell,” Suguru manages, words choking in his throat. “What the hell—you can’t just—a binding vow? Are you stupid?”

“There’s no point telling me it’s stupid now.” Satoru rolls his eyes, still grinning. “It’s not like I can take it back!”

“I can’t believe you,” Suguru says, still in shock, chest like a garden, “I can’t believe you, what the hell.”

“It’s fine,” Satoru says. He comes right over, gets all in Suguru’s face, takes their palm in his. His pulse is steady, eyes calm. The galaxies in his iris are spinning a lazy pace, a pulsing rotation, inward, outward, blinking to and from existence. When it’s like this, they look like fireflies, like luminescent fish swimming an abyss. “I won’t regret it.”

Something settles comfortably in their chest, and Suguru believes him.

-

That night, Suguru finds himself on one of Jujutsu Tech’s many tiled roofs. It’d been an easy climb from the window to the edge to the slanted surface. They can feel, through the hardened clay, vibrations from the room below. Can hear, although muffled, the speakers blasting some hit single.

“Suguru!” Tsukumo’s voice sounds, and Suguru peers over the ledge. She’s sticking her torso out the window, peering right back at him. “Wacha doing up there?”

“Just looking at campus,” he says. “I’ll be back in in a moment.”

“Mm, hold thisfor a moment; I’m coming up.” She stretches out an arm to hand him her sake, and he takes it, metal can cool under his palm. It takes her barely three seconds to grasp the ledge and hoist herself up. Tsukumo snatches back the bottle. “Thanks babe.”

They cast her a judgmental look, tilting their head pointedly at the alcohol, then the ledge. “You sure that’s a good idea?”

“Oh c’mon, my tolerance is higher than that! I’m not even tipsy.”

“Uhhuh.”

She leans back on her palms, legs hanging off the edge, matching his position. “They're gonna start karaoke in ten minutes or so. ‘You gonna be in?”

Ten minutes….that sounds fun. Suguru wasn’t planning on spending all that long out here, anyway. They just needed a—breather, maybe. Something like that. A quiet moment to themself, where they can overlook the place that made itself their home for two years, that may become a home again. It’s not that they like Jujutsu Tech, because they don’t, they despise it, but…

Suguru could’ve lost this, that’s all.

“Hey Tsukumo?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

Small beat. She looks at him, blinks. Moonlight colors her golds pale. “For what?”

Suguru has visited more countries than they can easily count, now. They’ve met shamans integrated into nonshaman communities and nonshamans integrated into shaman ones. They know how to write their name in several languages and like to cook when they’re hungry. Suguru has become a person they don’t hate being. That, maybe, they even like being.

Tsukumo helped Suguru become a home.

It’s hard to summarize the enormity of that.

“Thanks for everything.”

It feels inadequate, small against the vastness of this night. Tsukumo just laughs, though, shoulders short and loud. Her gaze settles on their face, an unblinking stare, and it’s okay. They’re a little used to it. Still, though...

“What?”

“Nothing,” Tsukumo says. Taps her nails against the can and shrugs, gaze shifting to the cloudless, starry sky. “Just thinking. I picked you up ‘cause, you know, but I ended up getting unexpectedly attached.”

Something warm and contented pools in his chest, but he musters a tone of offense. “Oi, you make it sound like I’m some stray cat.”

“Ehh? You’re not?”

Suguru shoves her with their knee. “Shut up.”

There’s no bite to their tone, and Tsukumo just smirks. He rolls his eyes, and closes them. Thinks. They still can’t...still can’t imagine their future, not really. Will they be abroad? In Japan? Starting organizations? Satoru swore to help erase this world with them, but what does that mean? How does it work? Suguru…

“Oi!” Someone—Shōko—shouts from the window. “Karaoke! Get in!”

Below, everyone is waiting for them: Nanami and Haibara, Satoru and Shōko, Yaga and the Kyōto crew. The room is full with too-loud music and dumb cardgames and hot pot that’s way out of season. An empty bowl that used to contain a soup so spicy Shōko cried when she taste tested it, and called him a freak when he ate it all without changing expression. Laughter filters up.

They’ll think about the future tomorrow, Suguru decides; they have a tomorrow, now.