Work Text:
1.
At the ripe old age of fifteen, Satoru doesn’t shy away from admitting that he had no friends as a kid.
Suguru and Shoko would say it’s the personality. And maybe it is now, but even back then, when he’d first started creeping into teenagehood, tongue sharp but not loose like it is around Suguru, his maids remained the only people he regularly talked to.
The Gojo clan didn’t have many children around his age, and the few ones that were skirted around him in an amusing combination of envy and scared absolutely shitless of his power.
It is pretty funny, Satoru would think now. A kid, swaddled in yukata, eyes bright and light enough to just edge on unnatural, and all adults are immediately tripping over themselves trying to unlock and tuck his power under their palms. They put a distance between him and themselves that, when he was three, didn't really make him feel like a three-year-old at all, but rather like something closer to a god. He was subjected to a peculiar mix of coddled and entirely neglected, and… well. He turned out okay, didn’t he?
So he was close to constantly alone growing up. So he's not used to spending time with his—classmates? Friends? Are Suguru and Shoko even that yet? They didn’t really get a chance to decide if they had wanted to befriend him, what with there being a grand total of three people including himself in their class, but. Regardless. So he’s not used to spending time with people, so it probably messed with how he interacts with others in general now, but who cares? He’s never minded it much, being alone, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it anyway.
Shortly after learning how to activate Infinity, throwing his invisible barrier up became close to an instinct. Something he becomes used to alongside the silence constantly accompanying him. Alone and untouched. That’s how Satoru was raised. Or, how he raised himself. Casual physical contact wasn’t a norm in the world he grew up in.
Which is why he’s reeling now, pressed against the ground, Getou Suguru’s smirking face grinning down at him. Satoru is breathless in a combination of surprise and exertion, a distinctly loose feeling in his chest. Suguru’s forearm is thrown lazily over his throat to keep him down, the rest of his body propped up over Satoru’s, a strand of hair that has slipped from its bun tickling Satoru’s cheek.
They had been sparring, an exercise without using cursed techniques to loosen up their bodies. And while Satoru isn’t physically weak by any means, he can admit that maybe he’s grown a little too comfortable with his inborn Infinity.
Suguru had tripped him, because Suguru plays dirty — though he always says there’s no such thing as playing dirty, especially when lives are at stake, but no lives are being staked now, are there, Suguru? — and Satoru went down like the fucking Titanic.
“Hm,” Suguru says, his tone mock-considering. Something flares up at the very center of Satoru’s chest. “I didn’t expect the Gojo Satoru to be this easy.”
“Shut up,” Satoru mutters at him. His ankle is throbbing. He thinks that this must be what hell feels like. “Get off me.”
Suguru releases him easier than Satoru had expected and rises lightly to his feet, brushing invisible dust off his clothes. And then goes as far as to offer him a mocking hand. Each and every line of his body reads that he’s having way too much fun. Satoru slaps his hand away irritably and gets up himself, lips pressed together to bite back the hiss of pain as he tests his ankle gingerly against the ground.
“You want ice for that?” Suguru offers.
Satoru glares at him. “No. I’ll go to Shoko. Might as well give her a chance to practice her reversed cursed technique.”
“Alright.” He shrugs and starts heading in the direction of the infirmary.
Satoru follows after him, wishing that his cursed technique was the ability to shoot lasers from his eyes out of pure hatred instead of whatever the fuck the tortoise thing is that he’s got going on.
(He’s joking. Mostly. The tortoise thing makes him (literally!) untouchable and it’s great, sometimes. Not so great, other times.)
Suguru is waiting at the mouth of the staircase down to the infirmary as Satoru somewhat pathetically limps his way over. He’s leaning with his waist against the handrail, thumbs tucked into his pockets and looking so incredibly cocky that it sparks an entirely instinctive hostile reaction in Satoru. He shudders as Suguru’s eyes trail purposefully down to his ankle and lets the side of his mouth curl up in a smirk.
“Want me to kiss it better?”
“Fuck you.” Satoru glares harder, and once again curses the upper power that had decided to grant him Infinity and Six Eyes instead of Light Getou Suguru’s Ass On Fire Eyes.
“Come here,” Suguru continues, unphased, and pushes lightly off the railing. Beckons him over, and Satoru goes, weary.
“What.”
“What, what?” Suguru slides an arm around his back, supporting his weight. “You want me to beg to help you out?”
Satoru scowls and attempts to wriggle out of Suguru’s hold, but with an ankle out of commission, he fails. Miserably. “Keep your hands to yourself,” he complains. “I didn’t ask for your help.”
Suguru grins at him. “But you’re taking it anyway.” He presses his thumb into the small of Satoru’s back, where he’d landed. Satoru dodges away and nearly falls again as Suguru’s hand catches around his waist.
“Shit,” Satoru hisses and digs his elbow into Suguru’s side. “Asshole.”
Suguru laughs. Feeling vaguely defeated, Satoru mutters expletives incomprehensibly under his breath until they reach the infirmary.
“Shoko-chan!” he sings immediately when he sets foot into the room. He hops on one leg past the rows of jarred organs and throws himself onto one of the beds, decisively not thinking about the weight of Suguru’s hand against the small of his back and the heat of his bare skin through Satoru’s shirt. “Suguru’s bullying me,” he says to her. “He plays dirty.”
“Liar,” Suguru says, as Shoko humors, “Of course he does.”
Satoru sulks.
“Let’s have a look, then,” Shoko prompts, and Satoru props his leg up onto a stool. She puts her phone away and pokes at Satoru’s ankle, smiling a little bit when he bats her hand away.
“Sadist,” he accuses.
“Masochist,” she shoots back easily. “No, seriously. What made you think that it’d be a good idea to go hand-to-hand with Getou? Without Infinity too?”
Satoru scowls. “I can take him.”
“Oh, for sure,” she replies, and cursed energy flares as she clicks his ankle back into place.
2.
Satoru wakes up one day in the middle of the night to seemingly nothing. The alarm clock next to his bed glows 2:48 and he feels oddly lucid. The wooden floorboards are cool against his bare feet as he slides open his door and finds the light to the bathroom down the hall on.
The familiar bitterness of Suguru’s cursed energy leaks from it and Satoru, like a moth drawn to flame, walks towards it. Suguru is bent over the toilet bowl, pale, and if Satoru were to press the back of his hand to his skin, it’d be cold with sweat.
He crouches down next to him and silently gathers the hair that Suguru is haphazardly holding at the back of his head. Automatically, he pats at his wrists, looking for the spare hair tie usually looped around his arm, but it must’ve fallen off during his sleep.
“Do you need me to wake Shoko?”
“Don’t bother. She can’t help with this,” he says roughly. “It’s just something that I have to deal with. The cough drops are in my room. Hair ties should be in that cupboard.”
He tucks Suguru’s hair into the back of his shirt and stands. A hand subconsciously goes up to wipe away the sweat beaded at Suguru’s hairline. He sees himself in the mirror when he reaches for the hair ties. His eyes are stark blue against his face. Sixteen years into living with these eyes, and still he gets startled by them. He looks—confused. Lost. It’s not a feeling he’s accustomed to, what with his technique being the overload of information, but when it comes to Suguru, it has always felt like dipping his fingers into fog.
Suguru’s hair is soft, and Satoru runs his fingers through a tangled section before he secures his hair into a bun and leaves. He finds an almost empty bottle of lemon and honey cough drops on Suguru’s desk and memorizes the brand. He can make out the sound of Suguru dry retching in the background and rattles the bottle in his hand. The candies bouncing against the plastic aren’t nearly loud enough to drown out Suguru sounding like he’s trying to vomit up a lung a hallway down.
When Satoru’s back inside the bathroom, he waits until Suguru stops heaving before he unscrews the bottle and offers him a cough drop. It’s round, amber, powdered with something to prevent it from sticking. He tips another into Suguru’s palm and nods when Suguru thanks him because Suguru likes being polite sometimes.
The clack of Suguru rolling the candy against his teeth bounces off the porcelain tiles of the bathroom. Satoru screws the cap back on and sets it onto the marble sink top. He stares at the hair sticking to the back of Suguru’s neck. Opens his mouth before he can think twice.
“Don't you feel like it's not worth it sometimes?”
“Seriously? This again?” Suguru gives him a considering look. Satoru knows the answer that he will be given even before Suguru says it. He’s not sure why he still asked anyway. “No. I don’t.”
There it is.
“But it hurts you.” Satoru gestures vaguely. It’s a weak argument, and he knows it. “And they all don’t even know. They’re all clueless. Dumb little brainless things wandering around and—” you rip your throat raw saving those useless lives “—y’know. We tire ourselves out protecting them.”
Suguru looks at him like he knows what Satoru had to bite back. “That’s just how society is. The strong protect the weak. We’re strong. They’re weak and it’s not their fault, so we protect them.”
“Yeah, yeah, obviously I get that it’s right, whatever the fuck that should mean, but so what? We’re strong so—” you “—we have to suffer because of them? Why the fuck should we even care about being right?”
“That’s the price for power. Equal exchange. Don’t think too hard about it, Satoru.”
“How can I not think so much when it gets you like this?”
Suguru pauses. Frowns up at him. “Why do you care?”
“I don’t—“
“No really, Satoru. What is this about?”
Satoru stares at him. His tongue suddenly has no words to form. Suguru stands up abruptly, hand on the sink top over his bottle of cough drops, looking like he has only realized what he just said. The silence in the bathroom rings loud.
“Nevermind,” he says, ducking past Satoru and out the bathroom doorway. “Ignore that, I didn’t mean anything by it. Goodnight.”
Satoru’s hit with a sudden, inexplicable wave of frustration. “No, wait. It's okay, stay. I’ll tell you.”
Suguru turns back and from the darkness of the hallway, the bathroom’s white light casts harsh shadows against his face. He doesn’t even know what he wants to tell him, but Satoru opens his mouth anyway, and words come spilling out like he’s been holding them back for years.
“I don’t like it when you get hurt. I don’t like it when you hurt, at all.” Satoru stops suddenly.
The expression on Suguru’s says that he’s expecting more, but as Satoru casts about for the words that were on the tip of his tongue, his mouth closes around nothing. He doesn’t know how to explain the desperation he feels. Maybe it can’t be explained at all, and Satoru’s too tired to try now.
“O...kay?” Suguru tilts his head, and a crease begins to form between his eyebrows. “And? What, I’m supposed to stop everything because you don’t like me hurt? I need protecting, or something?”
“That’s not what I said, Suguru,” Satoru snaps at him, patience unraveling.
“That’s what it sounded like to me.”
“Well, have you ever considered that maybe it’s your fucking problem then?”
Suguru’s eyebrow twitches, and for a second, Satoru thinks he’s about to hit him. Instead, he just looks at him long and hard, the silence between them stretching tight and thin. And eventually, a sigh slipping past his teeth, he goes back to his room and leaves Satoru standing in the bathroom aching for something he doesn’t understand.
3.
One downside to having enough power to vaporize an entire army with barely a flick of your finger is that sometimes the power gets too big for your mind. Sometimes it just wants out, as it does now. Dutifully, Satoru’s vision goes white as the pressure inside his head puts a hand around his mind and squeezes. The blood pounding in his ears is loud enough for him to count each contract then release of his heart.
“Shit,” he hisses, pressing fingers into his temples, hyper-aware of the air slipping in and out of his lungs like cold liquid, the gravel beneath his shoes.
There’s a tug at the bottom of his shirt and Satoru stops as he senses Suguru turn to look at his face.
“I have—” Suguru sticks his hand into his pocket and pulls out a tube of a clear liquid. “I don’t know what this thing is called. My mom gave it to me. It’s mint extract or something. For headaches. Here, you rub it into your temples, it helps.”
Satoru pushes his eyes closed. “Careful, Suguru,” he bites out. “I’ll really start to think you care if you continue acting like that.”
“Don’t be fucking annoying.” Suguru rolls his eyes and leans over himself. “Hold still.” Uncaps the tube and rolls it just over his right eye. Satoru isn’t sure if it’s the coolness of the mint or the pressure of Suguru’s hand on his cheek that lessens the force on his mind.
Suguru moves to apply it to the other side, hands gentle and careful in a way that simultaneously feels too Suguru and not Suguru enough. Suguru puts his fingertips along the edge of his left jaw, pushing his face to the side for easier access applying the ointment and Satoru bites back a sigh. He tries not to lean too hard into the tilt of Suguru’s palm, but his skin is warm, and there’s a familiarity in it that should be entirely nonexistent because they don’t make a habit of putting their hands on each other’s faces.
“Feel better?” Suguru asks, drawing back.
Satoru turns his head away from him, trying to clear his head. The pressure around his mind feels a bit more like an overzealous koala and a lot less like a python coiled around prey. “I—yeah. Feels better.”
“Take it.”
“What?”
The tube flies at his head and bounces off directly into his open palm.
“No need to thank me.”
“Oh.” Satoru stares at the little bottle of blessing in his head. It’s very slightly warm from being held in Suguru’s hand and the liquid inside looks almost unused. Is this what it feels like to be taken care of?
As a child, while he didn't have to deal with the usual scraped knees and bloodied elbows like the other kids his age, Satoru was just as susceptible as the rest to the flu. Whenever his throat started to itch with coughs and his nose with snot, he remembers being given a bottle of medicine on a little platter alongside a glass of water, but no instructions.
The first time, he took too much by accident and threw it all up an hour later along with his dinner from the night before. The times after that, he learned, and drank just enough for his weight, sweating and shuddering underneath his blankets until the fever passed. Fuck being murdered by bounty hunters, he could have choked to death on his own vomit in his room and no one would have found out until at least a day later.
Satoru wonders how different it would have been if he had someone taking care of him back then. He wouldn’t have needed much. Hourly check-ins would have been enough. More than enough.
Satoru lifts his head, a sudden tight feeling in his chest. He exhales. And holds his lungs still like that until his chest starts hurting, then takes a deep, slow breath through his nose, feeling the spring-cool air hit the back of his throat. He shoves the tube deep into his pocket and when he runs to catch up with Suguru, he purposefully bumps his shoulder into him.
“What d’you want for dinner?” Satoru asks, fingers still around the bottle, nails running along the hard plastic.
Suguru turns knowing eyes on him. “You need to ask?”
Satoru huffs a little unimpressed breath but doesn’t bother to deny it. Trying to deny something undeniable with Suguru, even just for the sake of his pride, is like arguing with a brick wall.
“I’ll meet you at seven?”
“So that’ll be seven ten with you, yeah?”
“Fuck off,” Satoru says now, but later, ten minutes past seven, he’s opening his bedroom door to an exasperated Suguru.
“Shut up,” he says before Suguru can even open his mouth. “Not a word. Let’s go.”
There’s a ten-minute line when they arrive at the soba place. They play a round of Chopsticks that just keeps looping until Suguru commits in-game suicide and calls it a “tactical retreat.” The chef barks at them to take their seats at the counter and they order. The food arrives fast. A strand of hair slips free from Suguru’s bun and Satoru reaches forward to tuck it behind his ear before he realizes what he’s doing.
Satoru snaps his hand back like he’s been caught doing something he’s not supposed to do. Maybe he has. Suguru raises one eyebrow at him. Satoru’s eyes dart back down to his noodles. The piece of hair stays curled up in front of Suguru’s ear like it’s mocking him. They both continue eating. No one brings it up.
Ten minutes later, after Satoru has slid money across the counter, they’re standing back in the autumn-tinged, street lamp-lit air. The same piece of hair falls over his face when Suguru throws an arm around Satoru’s shoulders, leaning slightly into his side.
Satoru lets him settle against him for a moment, then turns, and quickly, like he can’t afford to get caught, lifts a hand and pushes the strand behind Suguru’s ear. His fingers linger against the hollow where Suguru’s ear and neck meet before he brings his arm back down, fingertips warm.
Suguru’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly. Smiles at him, small and sure.
“Shoko’s birthday is in less than a month,” Suguru tells him. “Have you thought about what you’re getting for her yet?”
“Ah, fuck,” says Satoru. He hasn’t. He’s forgetful, and he’s not used to celebrating birthdays. “What do you even get for someone like her? A fucking scalpel? Pack of cigarettes?”
“Sure, if you want her to return that scalpel by putting it right back through your forehead. But not cigarettes. She’s trying to quit, remember?”
“I saw her smoking outside on the balcony this morning. Before she left for the mission.”
“Oh. Guess that’s not going well.”
“Maybe nicotine patches then,” Satoru muses. Ahead, the steps to Jujutsu High are starting to come into view, the passageway dark and winding beneath sparse street lamps. “Are you sure she’s expecting something from us?”
“Probably not,” Suguru answers. “From you, definitely not. But I think it’s nice to get her something anyway. For her last year before she becomes an adult.”
“Hey, how ‘bout me, Suguru?” he dislodges Suguru's arm from his shoulders to stretch his arms over his head. “My birthday’s coming up soon too.”
“You’re easy to shop for. Too easy. Zero planning ahead needed.”
“Whaaat? How come?”
Suguru blinks at him. Satoru thinks. It’s hard to tell in the dark, but he knows Suguru well enough to predict his actions. “There’s still some leftover mochi that I bought from the last mission in the fridge,” he says out of nowhere. “It’s strawberry. Or red bean, I don’t really remember.”
Satoru brightens. “I hope it’s red bean. My—”
“—your favorite, I know,” Suguru finishes.
Satoru grins at him. “What’s this got to do with—? Oh.”
“Oh,” Suguru imitates. “There’s your answer.”
Satoru doesn’t have anything to say to that, so he doesn’t, and for the next few minutes, they walk in silence, thinking.
Satoru breaks the quiet. “You too.”
“What?”
“You’re easy to shop for too,” he says. “Easier than me, I bet.”
The smile Suguru shoots back is sharp along the edges. (He thinks. It’s still dark.) “Yeah? I guess we’ll see. I bet you’ll forget about getting me shit entirely, by the time my birthday comes.”
“I will not,” Satoru argues. “It’s you—your birthday. I won’t forget something like that.”
Next to him, Suguru makes a noise like he’s surprised, caught off guard. The entrance to Jujutsu High is a couple of steps away, and their dorms a while behind that.
“Okay,” Suguru says when they’re within the front door of the dorms, the seven-minute walk feeling like two. “You won’t forget. I’ll hold you to it,” he adds, and turns away to his room.
It’s easy, Satoru realizes, lying in bed later that night, it’s so damn easy to get lost in this. And it’s good for him. It’s easy and it’s right, and he would probably give up the world to feel like this forever, and not regret it one bit.
4.
“Hey, you have that spare hair tie?”
“Oh, yeah. Here.” He slides the black band off his wrist and into Suguru’s waiting palm.
He freezes as he watches Suguru pull back his hair, his fingers sliding easily and so unsuspectingly through the strands. He fixes his hair into a neat bun, fingers weaving deftly over the elastic. The bottom of his T-shirt rises with his movements and Satoru can’t help but let his eyes drop to where Suguru’s lower stomach is exposed. His skin is tan and smooth, the waistband of his pants sitting barely over the dip of his hip bones, stomach defined in a way that kind of makes Satoru want to run his palm over him.
Oh.
Fuck.
He yanks his eyes back up to Suguru’s face, ears hot. Which, heart flying into his throat, Satoru quickly realizes is a mistake on his part because Suguru’s eyes are glittering, gold-tinted, and he looks delighted.
Like the cat that got the cream. Or got the canary, or whatever the fuck the saying is, but it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day because—Satoru’s point is. His point is that Suguru’s eyes are curved in that satisfied, placid way, the tops of his cheeks casually flushed from the heat, and it really, really should not be that ridiculously, unfairly, devastatingly attractive to him.
But. It’s… fine? Yeah. Fine. Satoru will have to work on being resolute. Everything's A-Okay. Just peachy. Fantastic, even.
God.
He is so, so fucked.
Suguru unlocks the door to their dorm and lets out a pleased noise as cold air rushes out. The hum of the air conditioning is loud, crowding over Satoru’s thoughts in his head. Then, because Satoru can never catch a fucking break, he walks straight into the door frame like the idiot he is. And the kicker is this—he’s so distracted (and from what? Care for a reminder? Suguru? The guy he sees every-fucking-day? Satoru is mortified.) that he didn’t even have the spare brain power to think of activating Infinity.
Suguru lets out one startled laugh as blood starts to pour from his lip. It’s split, the skin cracked open from the impact of his bottom teeth against the door frame, and the taste of iron fills his mouth as he runs an annoyed tongue over the wound.
“Fuck,” Satoru says, with feeling. The embarrassment overrides the pain, makes it barely a shadow at the back of his mind. He raises a hand to his mouth and wipes impatiently at it. It comes back streaked with much more red than a lip wound should have.
“Shit, you’re bleeding a lot.” Suguru steps closer, hand coming up to hold Satoru’s chin. This close, Satoru holds his breath, fixing his eyes to the top of Suguru’s forehead and noticing with quiet glee that Suguru is very slightly shorter than him. “You want Shoko for this?” he continues, looking amused.
“No,” Satoru says, and maybe it comes out more sullen than he meant because Suguru laughs again and tries to clean more blood away. It doesn’t work out very well, and Satoru wonders if it’s his body making up for his general lack of open wound injuries. That would be the most feasible explanation, as opposed to him walking into the door hard enough to make his lip gush blood like a goddamned waterfall.
“Wait here,” Suguru says and disappears down the hall. Satoru sits down on top of the dining table and waits. And if he sulks a bit, there’s no one else around to laugh at him for it, is there?
Holding a hand glumly to his chin to catch stray droplets of blood, Satoru takes the time alone to run over and review the previous occurrences inside his head. Suguru had asked for a hair tie to put up his hair. Check. Suguru had looked attractive when using said hair tie to put up his hair. Check.
(Here, Satoru stops. He knows Suguru is attractive. He knew. Past tense. Like calls to like and what-not. But he had made the mistake of never considering whether he personally found Suguru attractive or not.
Well. Now he knew. Isn’t that great. Is seventeen an appropriate age to be having a revelation like this? Satoru isn’t sure either. Moving on.)
Suguru had caught him gawking like a fucking idiot. Check. Suguru had looked… pleased. Check. Double-check for how fucking amused that smirk was, actually. And here comes the difficult part. Satoru had walked into the door. Check. Which promptly set off blood to come pouring out from his lip like one of those chocolate fountains he sees in western movies. Check.
Then, a tight flicker in his chest. Check. Is he…?
He’s interrupted by Suguru returning with a tub of ointment.
“Stopped bleeding yet?” he asks, as Satoru twists around to look at him.
Satoru looks at the dried splotches of blood on his palm, then licks at his lip tentatively.
“Think so.”
“Stop licking it,” Suguru says, and comes around the table so Satoru can stop straining his back to keep his eyes on him.
“I’m not licking,” he replies, licking. The tang of blood is heavy on his tongue.
Suguru scrunches his nose and lobs the tub of ointment at him.
“Do it yourself, if you’re going to continue being so gross.”
Normally, Satoru would probably whine at him a bit, demand Suguru to do it for him out of reflexive assholery, but he thinks that having Suguru’s hands away from his face for a while should do him good. He unscrews the tub and dips a finger in, then prods haphazardly at his lip, hopefully smearing the cream over the wound. Suguru watches him with a faint smirk, leaning back against the kitchen counter, gaze steadily held on him.
There’s a strange nervousness simmering at the bottom of his stomach, feeling Suguru’s eyes on him, as he wipes the leftover ointment into his forearm.
“Satoru,” he says, and Satoru’s attention gathers on him immediately. Damn it. “You missed it entirely.”
He steps closer. Doesn’t hold Satoru’s face like he had last time, just leans in closer, a finger coming up to swipe against his lips. Satoru’s cheeks start to flush, entirely unbidden. He doesn’t even know when Suguru managed to coat his finger with the cream, but his fingers are warm and smooth on his lips.
Suguru’s fingers are on his lips. Satoru feels the blush spread all the way down to his fucking toes and promptly breaks through the layers of denial that he has worked so hard to build up over the past year and a half. Suguru isn’t even bothering to be particularly gentle, the pain a dull ache as he presses cream over the wound, but butterflies begin to form at the very bottom of Satoru’s stomach anyway.
He should’ve stayed in denial.
Suguru steps away with a faint smile, and it makes Satoru’s chest hurt in all the right ways. God, he really should’ve stayed in denial. So fucking what he’s in love with his best friend? His body has to get the memo that there’s no need to freak out over every little thing that Suguru does.
Satoru is about to slide off the table when Suguru presses the pads of his fingers against his cheek. Instinctively, Satoru jolts back, not expecting the touch. For a moment, Suguru’s hand hovers awkwardly in mid-air as he lifts one eyebrow at him, waiting for Satoru to, almost sheepishly, move back into his touch. Suguru finishes casually wiping off residual cream against Satoru’s face like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“Hey,” says Satoru, “I’m not your personal handkerchief.”
“No, you’re not,” agrees Suguru, and gives his cheek one last pat for good measure before retracting his hand. He caps the tub of ointment and heads back to his room without looking back.
Satoru lies back over the table, and if Suguru were still here, he’d get told off for it, but Suguru isn’t, so Satoru lies back and stares into the ceiling.
“Whatever,” Satoru says to the ceiling. He has more worrying things to think about. Probably.
He thinks about falling irrevocably in love with his best friend anyway. It’s a more comforting thought than Satoru had anticipated. A rightness to it that he can’t help but bask in. Nothing’s going to change between them. At least, Satoru doesn’t think so. Though—he won’t exactly be against Suguru being a bit more generous with his touching.
What can he say? Satoru’s not going to pretend that he’s entirely unaffected by Suguru’s touch anymore.
“Alright,” he tells the ceiling, quietly, because Suguru has weirdly good hearing. “I’ll knock him off his fucking feet.” He sits up and stares at the corridor leading to Suguru’s room.
“This is so stupid,” he says, this time to the wall across from him, and stays a bit more, for appearance’s sake, then follows Suguru back to his room.
5.
Satoru stares at the unread messages on his phone.
(19:12) hey hey me n shoko want to get hotpot when r u gonna be back
(19:12) do u hv any requests otherwise we r just gettin the usual
(19:28) r u still dealing w those curses??
(19:33) suguru?
(20:02) ?????
It’s been a month since Amanai Riko was killed. A month since the block to his power was shattered by a blade through his throat and a path opened up in front of him like a yawn. A month since talking to Suguru began feeling increasingly like trying to cup water between his hands.
When Suguru comes back that night, he’s dripping with cursed energy and blood. It’s near midnight and Satoru’s sitting cross-legged on Suguru’s bed, eyes on the perfect roundness of the moon, his Six Eyes tuned to pick up the first traces of Suguru’s cursed energy. The tang of metal when Suguru opens the door to his room spills almost uncontrollably over Satoru’s senses.
“Hey.” Satoru stops in front of him. “You’re getting blood all over the place.”
“Oh,” Suguru says, “sorry. I didn’t notice.”
“You didn’t notice,” echoes Satoru, and suddenly, his temper spikes. “You didn’t notice a fucking gash down your arm?”
Suguru blinks at him and recoils belatedly. The recoil makes him take a step outside the doorway and Satoru is in. It feels inexplicably symbolic. The rift between them tears and grows.
“What the fuck? Who pissed you off this morning? It doesn’t hurt, so I didn’t notice. It’s no big deal. I’ll clean up the blood and have Shoko check on it later, okay?”
YOU, Satoru wants to yell, it’s fucking YOU, I messaged—I was worried—but Suguru picks absentmindedly at the dried blood gathered between the fold on his elbow and it flakes off in pieces as his nail moves closer to the still-wet wound.
“I haven’t seen you—” he starts instead, wondering if he sounds as defeated as he feels. “—you haven’t gotten hurt in a while.” He wants to peel Suguru’s hand off his arm where it’s stained watery red with blood, his fingers patting at the gash like he’s trying to hold the torn edges of his skin together. “I was just. Surprised, I guess,” he finishes, insufficiently.
“Yeah,” says Suguru after a pause. “I was just caught off guard. It’s no big deal,” he says again.
“Okay.” And Satoru thinks he’s just grasping at straws now. “Go wait in the infirmary. I’ll wake Shoko.”
Suguru leaves wordlessly.
The simmer of Shoko’s cursed energy as she sleeps feels too gentle to Satoru’s eyes.
“Shoko.” He shakes her once, twice. “Hey, Shoko. Shoko. Get up. Shoko, please.”
He thinks that it’s the please that wakes her up. Satoru can count the number of times he’s seriously, genuinely said “please” on one hand. It’s not that he’s above pleading, it’s that he’s never needed to.
But there’s this sudden visceral need to—what?
It’s that Satoru doesn’t even know. He knows that he needs to do something, but what? Suguru isn’t dying, but somehow it still feels like he’s slipping away like the moon when dawn approaches.
“Shoko.” His nails are leaving small crescents in her skin now as she blinks, bleary, a hand shoving at his.
“Getou’s back?”
“Yeah.” He looks at the marks and tries to feel guilty. “He’s downstairs. Can you—“ he swallows hard, the click of his throat audible. When he speaks again, it’s a near whisper. “There’s something wrong with him. Shoko. Please, can you fix him?” And maybe he’s asking like a child, but he doesn’t know what to do.
She looks at him long and hard. “I can’t always fix everything, you know?”
Satoru wants to throw something and cry WHY but instead, he just says, “I know. Just. Please?” Like because he never pleads, if he begs now, it’ll change everything.
Suguru is sitting on the edge of one of the medical beds when they walk down. His legs are swinging like a kid and the tips of his fingers are dip-dyed red.
“Okay, Getou,” Shoko says, snapping on a pair of gloves. “Hit me with it.”
Suguru has the decency to look a little guilty as peels off the tattered sleeve of his uniform barely clinging to his arm. He doesn’t flinch even as it pulls at the raw opening of the wound.
“Grade 1 curse. It just caught me off guard. I mean, I can still feel my fingers,” he wiggles them, “so that’s good, I guess?”
“Why don’t you let the up-and-coming medic decide, hm?” Shoko says.
As it turns out, the wounds are, as Suguru so casually put it, good. Shoko cleans them of dirt and Suguru finally winces as she picks out a shard of glass, clicking her tongue. The three of them watch in fascination as his flesh seals itself back together under Shoko’s watchful eyes and leaves barely a scar on his skin.
Shoko pats him on the shoulder. “Good as new,” she announces and runs a quick eye over the rest of him to check for other injuries. A frown creases her forehead as she settles two fingers over his wrist, but she ends up saying nothing.
When she leaves to go back to bed, her hand comes up to close around Satoru’s wrist as she passes by him, a warning, maybe. A reminder, more likely.
You’re the medic here, Satoru wants to tell her, as her fingers slide off. What the fuck can I do?
“Night,” comes Shoko’s voice from the doorway, almost eerily loud in the dead silence of the night. Her fingers are curled around the door frame like she’s waiting for something, but she just sends Satoru one last long look. Vanishes down the hallway with not even a whisper, and doesn’t ask why neither of them have moved from their places.
Suguru inspects the blood under his nails blithely, slowly, almost lazily, cleaning them out. His hair is loose over his shoulders, and it makes him look younger than he is. Satoru wants to put it up for him, feel the solid, tangible strands beneath his fingers. The cold feels colder than before, and Satoru wonders why Suguru’s not shivering in his mangled uniform.
I don’t want to lose you, he wants to say, but he can imagine what Suguru will say back. You’re not losing me, with a tilt of his head, or a raise of his eyebrow. Maybe, probably, both. And it’ll piss Satoru off, because anger rises too easily when Suguru is being purposefully obtuse and difficult like that, and they’ll fight, and he will accomplish nothing at all. In the end, he doesn’t say anything.
He itches to hold Suguru’s hand. Instead, he curls his fingers into his palms and attempts to sink his nails past infinity to curb the urge. Instead, he leans against the bed opposite to Suguru and trains his eyes on the jars of fluid and organs that Shoko keeps.
Instead, with his eyes away from Suguru, he says, “You are such an asshole.”
+ 1.
Suguru is leaning against a wall, his hand holding the gaping wound where his arm once was, blood leaking past his fingers like a broken faucet. Satoru stops two meters away and doesn’t move closer. The tangible hurt in his chest is long gone now and all he feels is a bone-deep hollowness that somehow hurts even more. He thinks that if he moves any closer it’d be too much.
This is what true helplessness feels like. It’s his best friend becoming a fucking traitor and washing his hands in blood and somehow still looking like he’s happier than he ever was by Satoru’s side. His feet are glued to the ground. Hot glue, super glue, the type that Suguru had bought for Satoru’s fifth pair of broken glasses. He’s out of chances. They’ve been falling out like stars and now all he’s got left is a starless night sky.
Somehow, he manages to make Suguru laugh in the last minutes of his life. It’s the small mercies in life.
He nears. The pooling blood twists and turns to get away from his Infinity. Somewhere, he’s holding his heart out between naked palms and begging for someone to do something with it, but—nobody takes it. He’s not surprised. Just retracts his arms, saying, okay, okay then. Drops that heart to his feet and listens to its sick thud against the red-drenched floor. Cursed energy cloaks his hand and makes blood crawl down the cobblestoned path.
Satoru lifts a hand and presses fingertips to his cheek. When he looks down, they’re stained red, wet. Suguru’s body tilts, and Satoru lets it hit the ground with a thump. He stays with him until his body has run cold and his skin has grayed.
When he returns to the school, the closed door at the end of the third-year dorms glares at him. Satoru hasn’t seen the insides of it in years. It’s probably best for everyone if it remained like that.
“You can cry, you know?” says Shoko.
“Who wouldn’t have gone fucking insane in circumstances like that?” says Meimei.
“Satoru, you did the right thing,” says Yaga.
Hours later, the sound of his cursed energy tearing through skin still rings loud in his head. He lies spread-eagle over the covers on his bed. His open window lets in moonlight and the trill of cicadas chirping. His eyes are uncovered, aching, and so dry that it would probably hurt to blink, but he can’t bear to close them.
Because if he does, Suguru’s dead body will be waiting for him. Dead, blood turning purple, lifeless, dead. Dead. Suguru shouldn’t be dead, and Satoru shouldn’t have been the one that made him dead. Shouldn’t have been the one to slip cursed energy around his fist and bury it into Suguru’s throat. It’s all wrong. He shouldn’t have.
Cold, cold resentment rises in him. Then it boils down into despair and he’s left not knowing what to do other than just. Bear it. Bite his tongue and keep his eyes always, always open, and save who he can from now on.
Yuta’s student ID is still in his pocket, hard against his thigh. When he takes it out and holds it up against the pale light of the moon, he can taste Suguru’s cursed energy curling off it. It makes him want to throw up.
He puts the card back in his pocket and hopes that he remembers to return it to Yuta. He deserves an explanation. It’s the least he can do, after everything.
Overhead, a cloud moves over the moon and he’s plunged into darkness. The cicadas quieten like they know an end has come. Satoru, wishfully, hopes for a dreamless night, but he knows it’s futile. The dreams will get worse, now that he knows what Suguru’s dead body looks like.
He turns over and tries to go to sleep anyway.