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“Any last words?”
Suguru steals the words from Satoru’s mouth.
“Don’t you think you’re on the wrong side of this… to be asking questions like that?” Satoru asks. There’s no trace of malice to his tone, no judgment— he’s not even inclined to point out what this is, nor what being on Suguru’s side of it means. At their best and at their worst, they’ve left words unspoken, understanding hanging light in the air between them.
“Nah,” Suguru answers. He sounds like himself, Satoru thinks— looks like himself. A soft, easy smile rests upon his face, and though something sorrowful colors the darkness of Suguru’s eyes as they’re affixed to the paved ground below him, Satoru knows better than to look past it.
Suguru’s smile is as painful as it is infectious. Satoru can’t bring himself to return it, but one corner of his mouth twitches almost as if he might.
“But this is the end of an era, isn’t it?” Suguru continues. Satoru doesn’t need to prompt him. Even after everything, after nearly a decade’s worth of separation, they accommodate each other as if their brains have been wired together. They know when to speak and when not to, when they’re operating off of turns and basic social etiquette and when they’re primed to gripe over each other’s words, the meaning of their statements muddled in the noise.
Suguru speaks. Satoru doesn’t.
In the back of his mind, Satoru lets himself humor the thought that maybe this could have saved them, had they done it sooner.
“No more idle hopes of reconciliation,” Suguru says, and there’s something bitter to it. It’s an acquired taste, one Suguru’s always been more familiar with than himself. Still, he’s never spoken it. Suguru’s not a bitter person— wasn’t a bitter person, not back in school, not with Satoru. To hear him speak in this tone is foreign, as if his dialogue is meant for someone else— and maybe it is. Maybe the Gojo Satoru that Suguru’s speaking to is one of his own fabrication, someone easier to loathe.
Or maybe Satoru’s appeasing himself with the thought. Maybe this is what they are now, what they’ve been for a long time. Maybe Suguru really does hate him.
It feels wrong to think. For as much as it might pain him to consider it, most of the disquiet comes with what feels like an insult to Suguru himself. Satoru’s always had faith in him. Trust. And, self-serving as the appeasement may be, he thinks he does trust Suguru enough not to have abandoned them in full.
“No longer will you be terrorized by the curse known as Getou Suguru. No longer will you—”
“Man, can you not, like, villain monologue about it?” Satoru’s interjection is equal parts intentional and not. Maybe he doesn’t quite mean to speak at all, but the diction he hand-selects in the instant it takes him to open his mouth certainly doesn’t betray his genuine feelings. He knows Suguru’s melodrama is just that— melodrama, some exaggeration of a character he’s playing for no reason in particular. He’s satirizing himself.
Satoru doesn’t want it. Suguru’s dying. Suguru deserves to die as himself.
Suguru huffs out a laugh, quiet and humorless. It’s labored as his breaths are, coming in shakier and shallower, and Satoru momentarily curses his inability to blur the sight of Suguru’s chest twitching and remaining shoulder trembling as he half-gasps for air.
“Okay,” Suguru agrees simply. He sounds like himself again. The disturbance in the force settles, the dissonance between Suguru then and Suguru now quiets. Satoru sees him in one piece again, a visage much more familiar than the translucent layers of stranger upon stranger upon friend he’s had to make do with thus far.
“What are you getting at, Suguru?”
“You’re closing a chapter, aren’t you? Moving on. You’re the one writing the rest of the story, you know— it’s only fair that you pick the words that’ll send you off into it.”
“Eh?” Irritation isn’t quite what colors Satoru’s tone, but it never really was. There’s something to it just on the side of vexed, some lighthearted approximation of mild incense. “What’s with the purple prose? That’s never been my style, you know.”
“I know.”
“You’re kinda forcing it. You want this to be so poetic…”
“Satoru,” Suguru breathes through another laugh, softer.
“Your life isn’t a movie, Suguru. You’re sitting here all like, ‘oh, man, I bet this is gonna be cinematic,’ but it’s really kind of cringe.”
“Satoru.”
“I mean, they’re not gonna be my last words. It’s harder for people to get me to shut up than it is for people to get me to—”
“Satoru.”
Satoru quiets.
“Just say what’s on your mind,” Suguru says, easy. “I know there’s something.”
Of course he does. Satoru’s prone to feeling borderline omniscient sometimes, loathe as he is to admit it. It’s a character flaw, maybe, or a feature of the technique— and frankly, he’s rarely ever wrong about it. He sees in possibilities, in hypotheticals laid atop hypotheticals. It’s difficult to catch him off guard or find a question to ask him that he can’t at least answer in theory. He’s used to being the one who knows things just because he knows them, and, well, everyone around him has come to expect it from him.
Gojo Satoru knows Getou Suguru in a different way. Satoru’s always pulled gut instinct from reason, intuition from fact. The calculations come first, the feelings second,— but it’s different with Suguru. Thinking is different with Suguru. He could gauge Suguru’s presence a mile away from the feeling of it alone, cursed energy and residuals be damned. He could recognize Suguru’s voice just from hearing the breath he takes before speaking. He knows Suguru like he knows nothing and no one else.
And Suguru knows him back.
“So.” Suguru tilts his head back, lets it rest against the cold brick of the building he sits against. It’s too much work for him to keep upright now. “Any last words?”
Satoru rests his hands in his pockets. His thumb runs over the bandages still curled loosely around his palm, over and over again, feeling every bump of the thing’s thin strings where they weave and overlap. He regards Suguru with a gaze that’s almost resigned.
And he takes a step forward. Watches as Suguru’s eyes shift, his head tilting ever so slightly toward the movement.
Satoru lets out a huff as he slumps down beside Suguru where he sits, leaning his back against the outer wall of the adjacent building just the same and stretching his legs out in front of himself, loosely crossing one ankle over the other.
“What did it?” Satoru asks.
“Mm?”
“The… straw that broke the camel’s back. The big— the thing, you know?”
Suguru, head still tilted back, stares distantly for just a fraction long enough to worry Satoru. He can see the rise and fall of Suguru’s chest, the slow blink of his eyelids, the empty twitch of his fingers as he recalls something or another that Satoru can’t access. He knows Suguru’s alive; he thinks he’d feel it, too, if Suguru died in front of him, as if it were the warmth of his own body seeping out into the cold.
Satoru stays quiet, tries to will himself into enjoying what brief seconds of peace they have together, here.
“There was no big thing. At that point, it could have been anything. I would have found some reason to leave no matter what,” Suguru says, and it only sounds half-honest. “It’s just that in this world… I couldn’t truly be happy from the bottom of my heart.”
Satoru raises a knee to his chest, letting his elbow rest atop it. It gives him ample space to bend his head forward ever so slightly, running his hand idly through his hair— not quite a nervous tic, but not quite not. It’s almost juvenile, how it looks.
“Ahh,” he breathes out, somewhat placating. There’s no argument to make. He doesn’t know whether or not he’d have one, if he thought about it; he only knows that he doesn’t feel terribly compelled to think about it. There’s no point wasting time like that, mustering up some way to convince Suguru that he never should have left. Even he’d answer that with a so what?
Suguru left. There’s no changing it.
“I guess,” Satoru starts, “that makes sense.”
“You guess, huh?”
“It was empty once you were gone.”
Suguru’s jaw clicks shut, near-silent but noticeable nonetheless. It’s uncomfortable how little Satoru can read him, now; the gestures are all the same, the expressions familiar, the looseness of his shoulders and thoughtful furrow of his brows a sight he’s witnessed thousands of times in their time spent together. He should know what it means.
He doesn’t. The feeling is all the same, but the specifics are lost on him.
He wonders, briefly, how long it’s been since he’d been able to get an accurate read on Suguru. He wonders if he ever saw the picture in full, or if this had been festering from the beginning unbeknownst to either of them.
“It was empty when you were gone, too,” Suguru finally settles on.
And it clicks. In an instant, it clicks.
It feels like a thousand years in Satoru’s head.
There’s nothing accusatory to Suguru’s tone, nothing but some semblance of quiet mournfulness. Satoru had never left, not like Suguru did. Not so blatantly, not with the intent of pure severance. He never left.
He just didn’t come home.
And maybe it wouldn’t have clicked so easily, had it not been on his mind before. He remembers distinctly the years following the death of Amanai Riko. He remembers every moment of it— the way he’d chased the elation of that day, the power. He’d wanted to be the strongest. He wanted it. He wants it even now, knowing the loneliness of it tied like a weight to his wrists with every move he makes. He’d taken every mission offered to him, spent every spare moment pushing himself, never stopping, never able. An object in motion, and all.
It had been exciting. He’d been excited.
Suguru had known, hadn’t he? It’s not as if Satoru had made any effort to hide it. On the occasions that he’d have a breakthrough, Suguru was the first person he’d call. It could be ten at night, one, five, and Suguru would answer the phone before its third ring. He’d even tried not to most nights, never wanting to interrupt rest when he knew, he knew that everyone back home must have been at least a little bit as tired as he was.
But Suguru was his best friend, some— some trusted overflow bin for his thoughts when they were too much to fully handle on his own, like their minds were tied together with string and pulled taut. He couldn’t help himself.
He’d call. Suguru would answer. Suguru would listen with baited breath, hanging onto every word of Satoru’s rambling nonsense— Satoru’s not even certain he comprehended half of it, not because he doubted Suguru’s ability overall, but because of how quickly he’d talk, how scattered he’d be in his long-winded explanations. Did you hear that, Suguru? Did you catch that? It’s like Achilles and the Tortoise, Zeno’s paradox— you’ve heard this before— but that’s just the basics, that’s just what you saw, and it’s so much more than that, it’s the categorization of objects according to cursed energy, according to other traits, did you know that? The energy signature is different from aspect to aspect, different circumstances breed different categories of cursed spirits, yes, but those cursed spirits have uniquely tailored forms of cursed energy, and so objects imbued with similar negative emotions— Are you listening, Suguru? Did you catch that?
Mmhm, he’d hear in response. Always tired, always some mumbled affirmation. On better nights, Suguru would even paraphrase him, repeating his own concepts back to him in simpler words as evidence of his effort.
Every time he called, Suguru would answer. Every time, the conversation went the same.
And every time Satoru came home, Suguru would be there at the train station, waiting with a bag of gummy bears or package of mochi or— or anything, anything, but always something.
Satoru’s not ignorant. He’d known something was wrong. He’d watched Suguru’s slow decline, prompted him for answers that he’d never received. It had always felt better not to push, to take what little time they had and make the most of it. He’d only ever be home for a few days between missions, if even that, and to bog the whole visit down with something as ugly and raw as a forced confession of anything seemed distasteful.
Suguru would speak when he was ready, right? It was only a matter of time. It wasn’t like Suguru to keep him in the dark.
It was only supposed to be a matter of time.
And it was, Satoru guesses— he’d just been mistaken about what the timer was ticking down to.
The isolation that followed had been suffocating. Walking past Suguru’s empty dorm was painful enough; entering his own was a different kind of hell. Nowhere on campus was safe, really, untouched by Suguru’s influence. They’d been everywhere together, everywhere, and Satoru’s overactive mind and vivid imagination hesitated little when it came to supplying the imagery of Suguru still lingering where he wasn’t anymore. It was haunting in a way few things are.
He remembers how it felt to lay in bed alone, Shoko stuck working buildings away, Nanami out more often than he was in— difficult to drag out of his dorm regardless after Haibara’s death. He remembers the quiet— crushing, miserable.
And an image, however brief, crosses his mind of Suguru doing the same. Laying in bed, staring at the ceiling with his phone clutched to his chest, a familiar number still in his contacts that he’d never press ‘call’ on.
Suguru had closed the door between them.
But maybe it had only been open a fraction at that point, the wind of circumstance having done most of the heavy lifting between the two of them, gently pushing the damned thing so close to closed that the vision of anything past it was obscured entirely.
Satoru sits with the thought. He sits with the thought for a lifetime.
Yet it’s only moments after Suguru’s admission that Satoru speaks:
“Huh.”
“That’s how you’re ending this? ’Huh?’,” Suguru asks, and a not insignificant chunk of the sorrowful sentimentality of the moment is shed with that minute antagonism alone.
“You’re not even letting me finish,” Satoru gripes, petulant.
“Go ahead.”
Satoru “tch”s, slumping a fraction further against the wall. For all his talk about being interrupted, he finds he doesn’t have much to say at all— rather, there’s too much to say, too much attached to the smallest tidbit of new information he’d managed to pull from Suguru after all this time.
It’s a paralyzing everything, something Satoru feels he should be better at handling, now. But this is always how it goes with Suguru these days, isn’t it? There’s no easy task when it comes to Suguru. There’s no easy task when it comes to The Suguru Situation, Satoru corrects himself. It’s frustrating how easy Suguru himself is, especially now of all times.
Why did it have to be now?
The answer is obvious. There’s no point to true antagonism so close to one’s death, especially when Suguru’s all out of cards to play. Satoru sees it, how empty he is— there’s not a single cursed spirit left in his body. Still, it’s agonizing to see Suguru like this for a number of reasons, an infinite number of reasons.
It hurts to know he’s still capable of it. This gentleness. And maybe it would be just as painful, if not more so, to see a version of Suguru wholly divorced from it, absent of all kindness, truly bankrupt of everything that made Suguru, Suguru.
But that knowledge doesn’t make this hurt any less.
“I,” Satoru starts, and even he doesn’t know quite where he’s going.
It’s Suguru’s turn to maintain the silence, though his ragged breathing cuts through it in spite of his efforts, a stark contrast to Satoru’s deathly quiet from moments before. Suguru turns his head in full, now, takes in the sight of Satoru like he hadn’t been doing properly before. It’s almost uncomfortable, the extent to which Satoru feels seen— but he finds it’s almost like feeling the warmth of Suguru’s body beside his again after so long without it.
He’s desperate for it. It feels foreign and not, now. The discomfort comes with both the distance between them and its closing.
“I was going to take you guys to this cafe,” Satoru finishes, and the absurdity of the simple sentiment startles another laugh out of Suguru, a brighter laugh. Satoru’s chest clenches.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’d— It was one of those times that I was home, but you weren’t. And Shoko was busy, right? So I went out on my own to, like, scout for places. And it was… mid-summer, I think, of ‘09. And this new cafe had opened up—”
“… Hold on. In Shibuya Mark City?”
“Yeah! Yeah. And I—” Satoru laughs, then, too, his posture straightening ever so slightly as he speaks. “Man, I was gonna take you two— you, especially, ‘cause I knew you’d like the—”
“The arcade cabinets. They had arcade cabinets in the back.”
“Right.”
Satoru takes a deep breath, lets it out on a slow exhale. His excitement is brief; he slumps back down, the whole of him dropping again like a dead weight against the wall.
“So… You know the place,” he says.
“Yeah,” Suguru answers. “I used to do the same thing.”
Satoru’s “oh,” says all it needs to.
There’s not much else to say. Satoru wishes there was. Even now, he’s only really buying time, some part of him deep inside wondering if this is the same as all the other encounters they’ve had. Wondering if he can find some way to walk away from this without touching a hair on Suguru’s head.
But he knows better. There’s only so much he can do.
It’s 2009 again, December 24, and his phone is clutched to his chest with a cursor hovering over Suguru’s name in his contact list. He’s not pressing ‘call.’
Whatever this is now, whatever words they might speak to each other… Suguru’s not the only one in his death throes. What they were— are— together is dying here, too. Slowly. Desperate not to.
“And— hold on, let me show you…” Satoru starts, already wracking his brain for something, anything else he could bullshit a few more minutes of this for. He picks his phone from his pocket, turns the thing on, wonders idly if there’s anything in his gallery Suguru might like to see. Any stupid pictures of stupid birds on stupid sidewalks, any funny signs he’d walked past, any restaurant he’d snapped a picture of with the hopes of returning to it sometime in the future. Anything. Anything. Anything.
“Did you… change your lock screen?” Suguru asks, his voice softer now. Almost murmured. If Satoru didn’t know better, he’d say it were a choice, but it doesn’t take the Six Eyes to see just how much blood has pooled on the pavement beside them.
Satoru tears his eyes away from it. Nods. The movement is jerky, anxious.
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s— Uh, it’s Nana Komatsu. From Bakuman, you know?”
“Guess I didn’t catch that one.”
“It’s good. Yeah, it’s… You should—”
“Hah.”
“… Right.”
Suguru shifts. It takes everything in Satoru not to reach out for him, to settle him, to wordlessly keep him from moving too much lest he— what, bleed to death right here? God forbid. God forbid Getou Suguru dies today.
“Satoru?” Suguru calls his name, gentle.
“Suguru,” Satoru answers the same.
Suguru nods his head toward the phone.
“It’s getting late,” he says.
“It’s not that late,” Satoru argues.
“The sun’s almost set.”
“But it hasn’t yet.”
“Satoru.”
“Suguru.”
Their eyes meet. Suguru’s right. Satoru knows he’s right. And he hates it, hates when Suguru does that, hates when he— when he knows better, when he is better, when he sits there like he has every stupid answer to every stupid question in the universe. Satoru hates the borderline reprimanding, the feeling of being wrong.
The petulant child in him wants to plug his ears and lalala his way out of hearing whatever it is coming next. He doesn’t. He’s better than that— not much better, but better.
“It’s okay,” Suguru says, and nothing Satoru’s ever seen or heard has made something go from maybe, possibly, potentially okay to not okay in the slightest more quickly than those two words alone. “Go ahead,” Suguru continues, breaking his own record not moments after it’s set.
Satoru stops, stares. His brows knit together, his eyes ever so slightly widened. He opens his mouth to speak, closes it again; he knows, he knows, he knows this is it. This is it.
He raises his hand. It’s not a smooth motion; he can’t quite decide what comes next, what’s best for the both of them here. He can’t decide. He’s so far gone in the mess of choice paralysis that he’s practically spinning a wheel in his head as Suguru quietly heaves beside him.
It’s cruel to drag this out.
He knows. He knows what comes next.
“Domain expansion,” he breathes out, curling his middle finger around his index. “Unlimited void.”
Satoru doesn’t move.
It’s been a thousandth of a second. It feels as if an eternity has passed.
He’s not quite sure where the ground is, here; he thinks, sometimes, that it exists in this place solely because he wills it to, because if everything exists in this place, then goddamn it, some semblance of a floor can, too. Whatever it is— wherever it is— Suguru’s body is slumped just the same as it was moments before.
And that’s really the crux of it, Satoru thinks. No time at all has passed, here. Maybe they’re both falling now, into whatever infinity this is, and it’s just so slow that the effect of it is imperceptible.
He can see the light tremble of his hand, though. The slight waver of Suguru’s robes as something akin to a breeze passes along the fabric. It’s as bright here as it is dark, as still as it is in motion, as familiar as it is foreign. It’s everything, all at once, and maybe that’s the point.
They can’t make up for lost time anymore, not in any way that matters.
But they can have this little eternity. This one moment of forever.
The deafening silence, or the cacophonous array of white noise— Satoru’s never been able to tell the difference here— is cut by one sharp syllable.
“So.”
Satoru’s head snaps to the side, his eyes wide. He’s cast his domain weakly at times for the sake of proving a point; he’s weakened his own barrier to prolong the period of time a cursed spirit could linger, as he did with Jogo. He’s fully capable of it when it comes to teaching opportunities and potential bouts of quiet sadism. He’s no stranger to having that level of control over this.
But this was supposed to be a nearly instant brain death. This was supposed to be his domain to its fullest extent. This was supposed to be merciful.
No one’s ever been able to speak like this in Satoru’s domain, not cast like this.
And then he sees it.
The residuals of over six thousand cursed spirits— not whole entities, but fragments, shards of souls still clinging to Suguru’s in some twisted expression of loyalty. Suguru’s near-corpse wears them like living armor, beautifully, their tendrils and eyes and arms and legs and wings and beaks and mist curling around him like a fluid fortress. The domain is killing them first, burning them away first; the irony isn’t lost on Satoru that this feels almost like Suguru’s own little infinity. The full effects of Satoru’s domain can’t reach him yet.
Though he’s already feeling it to some extent, clearly— his body is still, paralyzed at the sight of the unlimited void alone. It’s always the sight that does you in, Satoru’s found. It’s always the visual that’s most paralyzing.
Still. Suguru’s alive. Even in death at the cataclysmic end of their story, with all walls broken down and all inhibitions hung at the door, Suguru’s body fights to survive. His technique fights to protect him.
He tilts his head ever so slightly further upwards, as if the void above him looks any different from the void ahead of him, below him, all around him. It’s a byproduct of his humanity, Satoru thinks, of all his years spent looking up at the sky when told to look at the stars. It’s common enough in this domain; no one ever thinks to look down.
“This is it?” Suguru asks, quiet. Even the hiss of cursed spirits surrounding him has gone silent, now, their presence around him having faded. “This is what the world’s looked like to you… all this time?”
After an infinite number of moments of silence, disbelief, grief— Satoru answers.
“This is it. More or less.”
“No wonder you were always so tired.”
Satoru laughs. He can’t help but laugh. It comes out shocked and sad, wet with what he thinks might be the beginnings of tears. He didn’t think he’d cry. He’s never been much of a crier.
“Hey— Suguru?”
Suguru turns away from all the stars in the endless space around them. His gaze focuses on Satoru, stays on Satoru.
Satoru blinks away the wetness prickling at the backs of his eyes, takes in a shaky breath. This is it. This is it. This is it.
“You’re my best friend, you know. My one and only.”
Suguru is as still now as he was before he’d first spoken, here— silent. There are no breaths to move his chest. There is no memory to pull forth the twitch of his fingers. He doesn’t laugh or scold or sigh. He doesn’t speak Satoru’s name.
“Suguru?”
He doesn’t speak Satoru’s name.