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Suguru does not have brown eyes.
They’re a deep indigo, nearly black, the color of the sky just before midnight. Satoru knows this better than anyone, but when he stares into them for a moment too long, he sees warm chestnut peering back—a soft, sad gaze seeming to meet his eyes from impossibly far away. The sensation makes him want to crawl out of his skin. He would rather live in it forever than let go.
At first, Satoru doesn’t know what to make of it. He thinks, maybe, that it’s a trick of the Six Eyes. Something to do with the curses Suguru consumes interacting with his technique. It doesn’t happen with anyone else, but Suguru’s always been different. Special.
He scraps the theory when it stops being Suguru’s Eyes and becomes All Of Suguru that makes him ache. The Six Eyes are surely not responsible for the wave of nauseating nostalgia that washes over him when Suguru mindlessly tucks a long strand of hair behind his ear, or as he watches him eat breakfast every morning.
One hazy night, while Suguru is away, Satoru tells Shoko about his predicament after they’ve worked their way through half of a case of beer she’s snuck into their dorm. The words get tangled together in the back of his throat, and they come out a knotted mess. He knows, despite his clouded mind, that he hasn’t explained it in a way she’ll understand. It doesn’t get across the way Suguru’s eyes appear to him, or the burning familiarity of every one of his mannerisms, or the weight of it all against his chest. He’s not sure he could explain it, even sober, so Shoko is stuck with his disjointed ramblings about eyes and hands and eyes once again.
He realizes he’s talking in circles and shuts his mouth. The bitter taste of cheap beer lingers. He decides he doesn’t like it.
After a moment’s silence, Shoko looks down at him and laughs. He pouts, not sure what she finds so funny. When he questions this, she shrugs. “You’ll figure it out. Probably.”
He stares blankly at her.
“You can be kinda dumb, so I guess there’s a chance you won’t. Maybe you should think about his eyes some more.” She laughs again, and Satoru scowls.
He turns over to his back, lying flat against the floor of his dorm room. There is a collection of plastic glow-in-the-dark stars plastered onto the ceiling that he put up when he moved in. They glow softly, faint green light standing out in the dim room. A breeze blows in through the open window and he takes a deep breath in, tasting salty ocean air. He sits up, confused; they’re many miles away from the sea, but the briny scent is crystal clear. He takes another deep breath, and this time it’s accompanied by something heavier and more metallic. Blood, he realizes, the tangy odor filling his nostrils, mouth, and lungs. He can hardly breathe through the thickness of it. Before he’s aware of what he’s doing, he stumbles to his feet, swaying as he stands. He can feel Shoko’s piercing gaze on him as he half runs, half falls over to the open window and slams it shut with a force that makes both of them jump.
“What the hell was that for?” She asks, a twinge of annoyance in her voice.
“I-” He starts, but he still feels the blood coating his tongue, and it chokes him, and he can’t breathe, and now there’s bile rising in his throat, and-
He vomits into the trash can. The blood is gone and the faint, quickly fading smell of saline and sand is all that remains.
Shoko doesn’t sneak beer into the dorms again, and Satoru doesn’t ask her to.
-
He doesn’t know if Suguru experiences this feeling, this phenomenon too. He refuses to ask, refuses to talk about it all—there’s no need to risk running a repeat of last time (he had blamed it on the alcohol when asked, and was acutely aware he was lying). So he lets it stagnate and fester, hoping that ignoring it will make it go away.
It doesn’t.
If anything, it grows more intense—what was a creek before becomes a fast-moving river, violent rapids threatening to drag him under. It—it hurts, sometimes, when he looks at Suguru and all he can sense is some intangible feeling from lifetimes ago, as ancient and eternal as the phases of the moon. He still doesn’t know how to explain it.
Some days, it’s more of a dull longing than anything else. The ache in his chest is a stone’s throw away from pleasant. Today, they’re in a little music shop in the city because Suguru wanted to look for records, and the way he sifts through them with gentle fingers and careful, focused eyes sends warmth flowing through Satoru’s body. It’s still odd, an unfamiliar feeling that he recognizes for some reason, but it’s the kind of odd he could get used to. Learn to live in.
Once Suguru has finished perusing the boxes of records in the back of the shop, they head up to the front to pay. Satoru notices a violin sitting on a shelf in the corner, and he’s reminded of the lessons he was forced to take as a child. He had quit soon after he began, but he thinks he can recall a melody or two. He picks up the instrument and plays a soft song, fingers clumsily moving over the strings as he tries to recall the notes. They come to him eventually, and so he replays it, more skillfully the second time. Suguru’s not-brown eyes watch him carefully, picking apart every minuscule movement of his hands and the vibration of the strings as he plucks at them. Something inside of Satoru clicks into place under the influence of the soft song and Suguru’s gaze; it tells him ‘This is how it should be, forever,’ and, quieter, ‘It will, if you can keep it this time.’
He suddenly wants to crumple under the intensity of Suguru’s stare. He doesn’t let himself, of course, settling for a slightly-too-nervous giggle and a question instead.
“Whatcha staring for? My playing’s really that good, eh?”
“No, I mean yes, I mean—it wasn’t bad, I just. I don’t know.” Suguru stutters. “Something weird happened. Déjà vu, I guess, y’know?”
“Yeah,” Satoru says, uncharacteristically low. “I do.” He does.
-
“Let me braid your hair,” Satoru says one night without really knowing why. The three of them are watching a movie in Suguru’s room, spread out across his floor. Shoko quirks an eyebrow at Satoru before training her eyes back on the slightly grainy TV screen. Suguru just stares at him.
“You don’t know how,” he mumbles after a long moment, undoing his bun and moving closer to Satoru despite his words.
Satoru shrugs. “We’ll see,” he grins, shifting so he’s sitting cross-legged behind Suguru. He reaches up to comb his fingers through thick, sleek hair. It’s soft against the skin of his hands, and he lets himself brush through it longer than is strictly necessary to get the knots out.
He has to start braiding eventually. He was the one who asked to do it, after all. Satoru stares at the length of hair flowing down Suguru’s back and considers. You’re supposed to section it into three parts, he knows, so he starts there, but finds himself at a loss for what to do next. He twists two strands together haphazardly before trying to work in the third. What he’s left with when he reaches the ends of Suguru’s hair is certainly not a braid, even if it doesn’t completely fall apart when Satoru takes his hands away.
“Ta-da,” he says anyway, flicking Suguru’s hair over his shoulder so he can see.
Suguru looks down and laughs. Satoru knows it’s at his expense, but it’s such a bright and warm and infectious sound that he can’t help the giggle that escapes his lips.
Suguru runs a hand through his hair to undo Satoru’s ‘braid’ before shooting a pointed look in his direction. He takes a smaller section of his hair and divides it into three, nimble fingers deftly weaving the strands together in a practiced motion. Satoru watches intently as he finishes. When he’s done, he undoes the braid and flips his hair back behind him, a silent invitation to try again.
On his second attempt, Satoru gets it down to a T. He mimics Suguru’s motions, folding one part over another in a simple pattern. It’s a repetitive, comforting action. Familiar, too, Satoru thinks–although that can’t be right; he’s never braided anyone’s hair before.
There’s that nagging, aching feeling again. Some misplaced nostalgia for an experience or a lifetime he hasn’t known.
He shakes his head to clear it, drawing his attention back to Suguru’s hair in his hands and the low sound of the movie’s dialogue. Only a few inches remain loose, and Satoru quickly incorporates them into the braid before swinging it over Suguru’s shoulder again.
This time, when Suguru looks down, he doesn’t laugh. His gaze shifts from his hair to Satoru and back again, something unreadable in his expression. It feels like an eternity before he murmurs, “It’s passable. I guess.”
Satoru pouts and flicks him on the back of the head, and Suguru’s face breaks into a smile. He takes the hair tie from around his wrist and loops it around the end of the braid. Something light and airy blooms in Satoru’s chest, and it is enough to keep him from paying attention to any part of the movie for the remaining hour of runtime.
-
In the spring of their second year, Suguru kisses him in the shade under a cherry blossom tree. It’s awkward and inexperienced and he wouldn’t trade it for anything. Their teeth knock together and they laugh against each other’s lips on their first attempt, but they get it right on the second, and Satoru feels more than he ever has in his whole life.
The soreness he’s grown used to by now transforms into something else, something hot and molten that doesn’t burn him like he expects it to. Instead of reminiscing about something he doesn’t remember, it’s returning to a home he didn’t realize he had.
He’s not sure he’s ready to think about what that means.
So, instead of thinking, he lets the sensation trickle down from his chest and pool in his stomach, anchoring him to the ground. He never wants to leave this spot under the tree, and he never wants to break apart from Suguru.
In the end, it’s Suguru who pulls away, accompanied by light, airy laughter at the way Satoru tries to chase after his mouth.
“It can’t last forever,” Suguru says. “Let me breathe for a second.”
‘It can’t last forever’ replays in Satoru’s mind in a voice that is not Suguru’s and is not his own, either. He recognizes it, though, as the same one that spoke to him in the music shop and told him that it could. He wonders what has changed in the months since then, and why he doesn’t have the option to keep it now.
A cherry blossom falls from above them, landing in the dark waves of Suguru’s hair. More gently than he’s ever done anything before, Satoru reaches up and brushes it to the ground with the back of his hand.
Something must show on his face, an infinitesimal crack in his carefully practiced expression, or maybe it’s that Suguru knows him better than he knows himself, because there’s a shift in his warm gaze as he examines him. “Is everything okay?” Suguru asks, a thin line forming between his eyebrows.
“Yeah.” Satoru smiles and hopes it’s the truth. He looks at the ground, at where the petal from Suguru’s hair fell, where broken patches of sunlight dance after streaming through the branches of the tree. “I just got—I don’t know, distracted, I guess.”
Suguru laughs for the third time and kisses him for the second. Distantly, Satoru smells the ocean.
-
In the summer of their second year, Toji Fushiguro drives a blade through Satoru’s stomach and a bullet through Riko’s temple.
For weeks, the scent of blood hangs thick over Satoru. It stings his eyes and permeates his skin, and he spends every waking moment on the brink of heaving.
When he is not awake, he sleeps fitfully. Every night he dreams that he and Suguru are together on some faraway coast at an unknowable point in time, walking along rows of olive trees. Waves crash in the distance and the salty sea breeze runs its fingers through their hair. It’s always calm and tender for a few precious moments, and he stupidly lets himself bask in it each time.
And then, inevitably, he hears whispers of war and disease and death, and he tastes copper on his breath. He looks to the sea and finds it painted red and staining the shoreline deep crimson, and when he turns to Suguru to ask what’s going on, he realizes he’s been walking alone for miles, not a footprint of evidence in the sand that anyone was ever there beside him in the first place.
Satoru wakes up with clothes sticking to his skin and dread sticking in his throat. He stares at the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling and tries to reason with himself: It’s a dream. A chemical reaction in the brain to force you to process something. It doesn’t actually mean anything. You don’t believe in that psychic shit.
And he really, really doesn’t—the Six Eyes are about as close as you can get to anything remotely resembling clairvoyance, and he knows well enough by now what they are and are not capable of. But some remnant of the dream lingers, making a home under his skin, an itch unable to be scratched by logic. He doesn’t know if this will go away with time or if it’s another feeling he’s stuck with.
His bed is beginning to seem much too small for his body.
Without ever consciously deciding to, he’s unlocking the door to his room and starting down the hallway. It’s pitch black and shadowy at this time of night, without even a trace of moonlight shining through the windows. Not that the darkness matters to him anyway.
Satoru finds himself hesitating at the door to the balcony at the end of the hall. It overlooks the forest, and is usually abandoned—but he can tell that Suguru is there, can feel it. He’s not sure why this knowledge forms a pit in his gut as he reaches for the door handle, or why he feels the need to brace himself as he opens it.
Outside, Suguru is smoking. The smell of it is so thick it almost covers up the metallic blood scent that clings to him—almost, but not quite.
Suguru barely acknowledges him as he moves to lean against the balcony railing next to him, just a sideways glance and a nod. Something inside of Satoru sinks at the lack of greeting. They haven’t spoken much at all in the last few weeks. There’s some sort of yearning inside of him to simply look Suguru in the eye and talk, but he has no idea what he wants to talk about.
Well. That’s not true.
There are a million things he wants to say but that refuse to make it past his lips.
He wants to say “Are you all right?” and he wants to say “I’m not.” He wants to say “I’m not sleeping well,” and he wants to say “I dream about you every night.” He wants to say “It’s not your fault, but I’m scared it’s mine.” He wants to say “You haven’t kissed me in a long time.”
Instead, he says: “You don’t smoke.”
A tiny, humorless smile tugs at the corner of Suguru’s mouth. “A lot of things have changed, I guess.”
“Yeah,” Satoru breathes out, barely a whisper.
-
Satoru nearly laughs when Yaga tells him about Suguru.
Because, beneath the shock, he realizes he was right. Or rather, his stupid gut feeling of dread-colored nostalgia was. He’s back sitting under a cherry blossom tree, with the ghost of Suguru’s lips against his own and the echo of a distant voice whispering words he’d rather not hear in the back of his mind.
Yaga must read the look on his face as disbelief, because he says “Don’t make me repeat myself.”
He repeats himself anyway.
The second time Satoru hears it, the shock of laughter that had nearly bubbled out of him dies in his chest.
He confronts Suguru on a busy street in Shinjuku because there’s nothing else he can do. There are too many people, too many bodies, too many eyes around them for it to go in any satisfying direction.
For a moment, they are silent. Suguru stares at him, the bored expression on his face driving daggers into Satoru that hurt worse than any of Toji’s blades. Satoru desperately searches his eyes for a hint of something, and—it takes him a minute, but he finds it. A flash of chestnut. Warm and sad and doomed.
Almost instantly, it’s washed over with familiar indigo—because after all this time, Suguru still does not have brown eyes—but the damage is done. The horrible nostalgia smothers Satoru. A single flicker of inconsistent color and he is drowning in longing looks and olive trees and the smell of the sea.
Suguru stares on, face unchanging and unresponsive, completely ignorant of the way Satoru’s stomach is churning.
He chokes down the bile rising in his throat and forces out the only words his mouth will form. “Explain yourself,” he demands, and it does not cover the tiniest fraction of what he feels. The words taste like blood on his tongue.
Suguru speaks, but none of what he says sounds like an explanation. Most of it barely registers in Satoru’s brain; he feels a thousand years away. He hears himself arguing, senses the muscles in his mouth moving, but he won’t remember what he’s saying later. Before he realizes what’s happening, he’s watching Suguru walk away through the trembling fingers on his raised hand.
He wants to run. Towards Suguru or away from him, he’s not sure, but his legs burn with desire to move.
As it is, Satoru’s feet are glued to the pavement, and all he can do is watch as the flood of the crowd engulfs his best friend and he disappears in the current.
-
Nobody touches Suguru’s room after he leaves.
Satoru doesn’t know what he expected. Part of him was convinced that every trace of Suguru had disappeared as soon as he lost sight of him that day, that he had just vanished into thin air with no proof of existence. There one second and gone the next, just like in Satoru’s dreams.
It has been exactly one month to the day. The tour poster for some foreign band is peeling off the wall next to his bed in the same way it always peeled off the wall when Suguru still slept here. A pair of baggy jeans is hanging out of the laundry basket. There’s a stack of DVDs piled in front of the grainy-pictured TV.
Satoru’s eyes flit from one detail to the next, taking all of them in while forcing himself not to linger on any one in particular.
This is the first time he has set foot in this room since before. He had been telling himself he wasn’t avoiding it, but being in here now, he feels like he should stop lying to himself. Shoko’s residuals hang thick in the air. Though they are dimmer, he can sense Yaga’s, too. Something like guilt settles in Satoru’s bones.
He lies flat on his back on the bed, in the indent in the mattress where Suguru used to sleep every night. (He would never move while he slept. Satoru used to stay up and stare at him, waiting for him to roll over or turn his head or lift even a finger, but it never happened. Satoru found it fascinating.) From here, his line of sight is perfectly set on the single, fading glow-in-the-dark star on Suguru’s ceiling that Satoru had insisted on tacking up years ago. There wasn’t enough space for it on his own ceiling with the rest of the stars, he had claimed. Suguru grumbled, but never took it down, and here it remains to this day.
Satoru lets out a long, slow breath. He’s not sad. He doesn’t feel sad. He hasn’t cried. But there is—a certain emptiness that lives underneath his ribcage. It is as if he has been partially hollowed out. Some part of him is missing, and there is nowhere he can go to retrace his steps and find it again. He is cursed to live a life half full.
Someone is stumbling down the hallway outside the room. Shoko, his Eyes tell him, but the ability proves useless when she staggers through the door a moment later anyway, bringing the smell of cigarette smoke with her. She stares at Satoru for a long while before sitting on the ground next to the bed.
“Weird, isn’t it?” she slurs, alcohol strong on her breath.
He hums. She’s not talking about Suguru’s room, but he responds like she is. “It’s dusty.”
She gives a short bark of laughter. After a beat, she stands up and walks over to the window. The latches squeal as she unlocks it and pushes it open, inviting fresh air inside the stale room.
Satoru moves over on the bed as she walks back, giving her room to lie down next to him. The mattress dips as her weight settles on it. They are close enough that they would be touching if not for his Infinity. Eventually, Shoko closes her eyes as if having fallen asleep, but she is betrayed by her uneven breathing.
They stay very still for a while. Satoru and Shoko and the crease in the blankets where Suguru once slept. It takes the dim, gray light of dawn trickling in through the curtains for Satoru to realize how long they have been lying there motionless.
He yawns. A breeze blows in through the open window, and it carries on it the smell of blood.