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On a Tuesday in June, Suguru forgets the exact date because it wasn’t all that important at the time, and Satoru gets a headache. He blows a raspberry in response.
“Damn~,” he groans, stretching out the word and his arms, “whoever invented headaches should be killed.”
Suguru doesn’t look up from his book as he tosses Satoru a bottle of painkillers that rattle around uselessly until Satoru chucks the bottle aside without grabbing any pills.
“A violent, terrible death.”
“You want tea?” Suguru flips a page
Satoru pauses to consider. “Sure.”
“Make it yourself.”
Satoru throws a handful of dirt at his head and they end up in the infirmary after rolling down the hill and giving each other bloody noses. Shoko slaps bandages everywhere but on their faces and shoos them away.
“If you want it healed, do it yourself.”
Satoru scoffs, “How? With your shitty explanation—“
He gets kicked on his way out.
They laugh and bicker and talk to the gym back to Suguru’s room— because Satoru’s room is a pigsty even if he’ll violently fight anyone who declares that fact— where Satoru throws grapes at Suguru in an attempt to get him to catch them in his mouth, but he keeps purposely throwing them at Suguru’s forehead instead of his mouth.
“Sorry, I have shitty aim.”
“No, you do not, you're good at—“ another grape hits his head and Suguru snatches it out of the air before it can hit the floor, throwing it back at Satoru, “everything.”
It smacks against the lens of his glasses and falls in his lap. Satoru laughs wildly and tosses the grape in his mouth, smiling around the fruit like an idiot.
“I love it when you say I’m good at things,” Satoru drawls with a smile that he should not have.
Suguru rolls his eyes and spins around back to his computer, ignoring Satoru who hates being ignored more than losing.
“Suguru.”
He opens a chat room where people are debating something about a band in English that Suguru can’t read. He still makes a point of slowly scrolling through the page as if he could.
“Su~gu~ru-“
They go through this routine all the time, all he needs to do is outlast Satoru’s abysmal patience and then he’ll have won—
A grape hits the back of his head and explodes on impact. He turns and glares at Satoru who’s laughing so hard his face is bright red. Suguru should be upset, he’ll have to clean his hair and he just washed it that morning. Satoru’s wasteful with food and insufferable and a nuisance when all Suguru wants to do is relax.
He sighs and grins to himself instead. Leans back in his seat and waits for the laughter to trail off, then meets Satoru’s questioning gaze, glasses having slid up his head to his hairline. It doesn’t feel like he’s being looked into like their first meeting at the school gates a few months ago, being sized up by a boy god who can't even drive. Satoru is waiting, watching, seeing Suguru, and still smiling.
“How’s your head feeling?” Suguru asks after a moment, maybe too long of staring into Satoru’s eyes and being stared at in return.
“Oh,” Satoru rolls his neck and pushes out his lips to make a face of mild dissatisfaction, “still hurts.”
Suguru rolls his eyes and gets to his feet, reheating an old cup of tea in his microwave and sliding it into Satoru’s lap.
“Ew,” Satoru complains, wrinkling his nose.
“Just drink it.”
He complies, not without a lot of grumbling and bitter looks, and sips slowly on the drink that’s probably only 2 days old... max. Suguru rolls the chair to the edge of the bed and props his head up, resting his elbow on the mattress and trying not to watch him too intently.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
Satoru shrugs. “Just a headache,” he mumbles into the cup, then smirks, “didn’t realize you loved me so~”
Suguru pushes his face back into the mug and hums over the snickering that echoes around the ceramic.
“It’s not just a headache though. Not to me.” Not if it’s you.
A sentence Suguru would never say aloud, so he swallows the words so they sit beside the curses in his belly, pure and untouched, and waits for the Satoru-typical response. Roll of his eyes, a smile, a challenge, a joke.
It doesn’t come. Satoru freezes under Suguru’s touch that lingers on the back of his head. The bit of his eyes that he can see over the mug are… they’re still seeing, reflecting the tea faintly so there’s only the impression of a whirlpool in his irises. But there’s something far that’s caught in them, that won’t let him go, and when Satoru slowly drags his gaze up, Suguru sees nothing at all. Suguru draws his hand back slowly, and Satoru opens his mouth.
“M-my head is…” he swallows hard and squeezes his eyes shut tight, “it’s killing me.”
Suguru looks at his palm. “Ok,” he wipes it anxiously on his pants, “ok.”
Satoru doesn’t finish his tea, he puts it aside when Suguru comes back in the room after a few minutes of searching for a stronger blend. They end up cocooned in Suguru’s lightest sheets, the summer heat a bit too much, with the windows opened and lights off. Back to back, Suguru feels the rise and fall of Satoru’s even breaths and counts each one. He’s facing the window, with a view of the forest that hides the mountains just outside the school. Satoru never likes facing the window, something about his eyes that Suguru still doesn’t get. He inhales.
Halcyon. Rose and pale yellow colored days, deep blue and purple nights. Suguru’s tempted to turn to Satoru, wondering if the other boy would turn to face him too. Probably not, with the sly grins and ceaseless teasing and ribbing and physical fights. But, there’s this cocoon and grapes, and not if it’s you.
Maybe so.
The headache should go away. It doesn’t.
Satoru wakes up the next morning cranky and still gripping his head while glaring at Suguru, accusing his tea of being poisoned. Suguru throws a pillow at him as another assassination attempt. He tries to drag him to Shoko but Satoru suddenly remembers a cool new trick he’s learned “It’s called warping watch this” Then proceeds to sprint out of the room at top speed and Suguru doesn’t have the energy or will to try and chase, so he settles outside Satoru’s door with an offering of dorayaki and milk like some sort of insane Santa with a god-complex that’s not a complex if it’s justified, is it?
When Satoru appears, creeping towards the plate with a gleam in his eyes, Suguru takes the opportunity to whack his head with a pillow, sending his glasses flying and his face crashing against the doorframe harder than intended. Later, they both end up kneeling on Shoko’s floor as she heals them and draws stupid, crude things on their faces with what they later find out is permanent marker— that she assured them was dry erase.
Satoru laughs, so Suguru laughs, and the summer days of their first year plow on.
The headache stays.
Suguru doesn’t notice at first, at all really. Satoru’s always wearing those glasses and when he isn’t, his face is contorted in the most expressive ways that make it hard to react in any other way than scoffing it off. After class, he either drags Suguru to blow money on sweets or disappears into his room, only to emerge a few hours later with a dumbass idea that Suguru goes along with. So he doesn’t notice, and that’s his fault he knows, until catches Satoru one day after class.
Sitting beside the window, bathed in sunlight, eyes squeezed shut so hard Suguru thinks he might be trying not to cry. But he doesn’t, no tears fall and Suguru’s glad, he doesn’t know what he’d do if Satoru started crying, he hates that he doesn’t.
Fingertips knead his hairline, white hair draped over a pale, sweaty forehead. Lips move soundlessly as his other hand traces shaky patterns in the wood. Satoru is—
(Untouchable, beyond comprehension, on the cusp of being more than human, infinite)
—sitting with a headache in an empty classroom, on the verge of something that’s not tears. Suguru steps. Satoru turns.
The prickle of wrongness runs over the skin of Suguru’s arms, the tension of being under watch pulling tight in his chest, a coil of energy screaming to be released, to turn heel and run. Satoru tracks him and Suguru forgets to breathe, until he remembers, until Satoru blinks and his eyes almost dim and he’s just a boy in a classroom again and not…
“Hey,” Suguru greets, pulling up a seat backward to sit in, wrapping his arms around the back.
Satoru grins a little, off-kilter as if Suguru had said something especially clever. “Wasn’t expecting you.” He grimaces and smooths out his expression to something brittle. “I uh, I don’t—“
“Don’t worry about it,” Suguru interrupts softly, trying his hardest to be something he doesn’t think anyone’s ever been with Satoru, trying to be gentle, “still that headache?”
Satoru blinks, a bit put out. His lips quirking genuinely this time. “Yea, it’s… it’s a fucking persistent one.” He lowers his head and tucks it into the crook of his arm flat on the desk, exhaling noisily. “This sucks. Why are you here?”
“Because you are.”
“Missed me?”
Suguru scoffs but doesn’t deny it. He flicks a piece of Satoru’s hair that stands up. “Anything I can do?” Suguru asks.
“You know there isn’t.”
“I still wish there was.”
Satoru lifts his head and blinks. He furrows his eyebrows and squints one eye, staring Suguru down until he cracks and admits to lying if he doesn’t. And Satoru’s expression shifts from suspicious to—
The air shifts. Freezes and superheats. The short distance between his and Satoru’s hand is now infinite and his face is blank until he smiles, until his lips curl in an imitation of a smile and he’s older, so much older, and going to eat Suguru alive.
“Do you believe in predestination?” Satoru asks, voice slinking maliciously between teasing and questioning.
Suguru feels ice slide down his back. He has to answer if he wants to live he has to if he— “Fate?”
“Sure.”
Suguru draws his hand back. “I don’t like to.”
Satoru snatches his wrist before it’s out of reach and his touch burns. “But that might not make it any less real.”
Suguru grits his teeth against the pressure behind his ears. “Is there a point to this, or are you trying to give me a headache too?”
Satoru laughs, sharp, unlike his usual roundness. He rubs his eyes, keeps his palm over one, and opens the other. He tightens his grip on Suguru, laces their fingers together, traps his hand, and smiles. “I like to think some things are meant to be.”
“Like?”
“Us. This. Don’t you?”
Doesn’t he? This is what Suguru wants, he thinks and knows. Their fingers feel right like this, they’re close, they’re… Satoru is…
(God.)
Desperate. Satoru’s hand trembles. Suguru bites down the taste of unease and squeezes.
“I do,” he lies.
Satoru’s smile turns real— that’s what it was— and he releases a shaky breath.
“Sorry. Thanks,” Satoru whispers. Suguru isn’t sure he wants to know what he’s apologizing for.
The conversation is brushed aside by Satoru’s apathy and Suguru’s urge to forget it. The headache stays.
There are more conversations facing each other in the dead of night, Suguru develops a habit of keeping sweets somewhere in his person and whenever he asks Satoru if he keeps restocking Suguru’s hair supplies, he gets a shrug and a poor attempt at misdirection as an answer. Satoru wears his hoodies and holds them hostage in return for increasingly absurd requests. A million dollars, a bike ride, a pack of soda, a hug, a kiss on the cheek.
Suguru puts his hand on Satoru’s forehead and kisses the back of his hand, pulling away to see Satoru’s face bright red and laughing. Satoru only sleeps in Suguru’s room, Suguru only feels better after missions when he’s with Satoru.
They endure a summer apart and resume the usual in their second year. Satoru sometimes stares at Suguru like he’s seen a ghost. He hasn’t gotten a headache in months.
They’re assigned a mission: Riko Amanai.
“Do you want to kill them all?”
There are many things left unsaid.
“There’s no meaning to that.”
Yes is one of them.
Suguru spends exactly three weeks haunting the empty halls of the school, with no missions or any sign of one being assigned soon, feeling the walls slowly close in an attempt to eat him whole, when he sees Satoru for the first time since—
He’s sitting in a chair in an otherwise empty room, head lolled and sleeping. Suguru pauses at the door, hand on the frame and twitching. A splinter digs into the skin between his fingers.
“Yo,” Satoru says, rolling his head and pushing up his glasses to rub his eyes, glowing, “Suguru.”
Suguru freezes. Cotton plugging his ears, drowning out everything but the sound of blood rushing from his head and heart. The sunlight behind Satoru is blinding, so he’s just a silhouette against the window, dark and darker and Suguru can’t breathe. He stops himself from taking a step back, from running, from the fear that’s got a hold of his heart from taking control of his head. It’s Satoru, he tells himself.
…is it?
“Something wrong?” Satoru asks, leaning forward and raising an eyebrow, familiar (and not).
Suguru stamps everything down and shakes his head. “No. Just, wrong room.”
Satoru hums obnoxiously and stands, stretching. “Been forever since I saw you last.” He rakes his gaze over Suguru and it isn’t warm or flustering. It makes Suguru’s heart stop. “You look like shit.”
Suguru snorts and takes a step back, running a hand through his oily hair. “Yea.” Understatement.
“Thinking about mass murder yet?”
What. “What?”
Satoru laughs flippantly and walks over to lightly punch Suguru’s shoulder. His fist makes actual contact with the fabric of his uniform.
He notices Suguru's shock. “Hm?”
“What happened to Infinity?”
“Oh.” Satoru rolls his wrist. “I don’t need it when I’m with you.”
He has it up all the time, Shoko tells him, he’s figured out how to keep it constantly running, how to be untouchable. When I’m with you. Satoru’s eyes are bright. His shoulders slouch with exhaustion. He pats Suguru’s arm as he passes him out the door to leave
Suguru blinks from being stunned and spins to him. “Where are you going?”
“Mission.”
“You… You’re still being assigned?”
Satoru flattens his lips and scratches his cheek. His skin is pale, clammy, dull. “Oh. Yea. This is my fifth one this week.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
“Is it? See ya around!”
Satoru’s gone before Suguru can call him back, leaving him in the room, at the school, alone.
There’s a knock at his door that night, and it opens before Suguru can convince himself to move from the position he’s been curled up in under his sheets for the past 10 hours, unsleeping but so tired. Weight shifts onto his bed, followed by the smell of grapes and strawberries, and the dim glow of Satoru’s eyes on his face. He stares at the ceiling until he turns his gaze to the side. Satoru’s hand hovers over his chest. His eyes are red. He closes them and lets his hand fall.
Satoru sleeps facing the window, facing Suguru. Suguru watches the light on his ceiling shift from midnight to dawn.
The missions start up again. A short-lived break from nothing to continue rotting. Exorcise, swallow, vomit, repeat.
Water drips down his hair, and back, and he imagines the gray tiles of the shower splattered with blood.
Haibara hands him a drink. “You look like you could use it.”
He could use a lot more, but Suguru accepts it regardless. It’s overly sweet and drowns out the horrible lingering taste of the last curse he ate. He chugs the whole can, crushes it, and drinks the second more slowly. His nose scrunches at the taste. Haibara laughs.
“Yea, might want to take your time.”
Satoru blinks into existence, by the front gate of the school, hands casually in his pockets as he waits. For who is answered quickly as the rev of a motorcycle precedes a woman with long blonde hair hopping off the bike and offering her hand to shake, to which Satoru scowls. She rolls her eyes, they talk, then she glances over his shoulder and waves at the two of them. Haibara waves back with gusto. Suguru raises a hand. Satoru spins and grins at him, then ushers her away.
Later, he’ll meet her.
“Geto Suguru,” he introduces blandly.
“So you’re the boy Gojo is hellbent on keeping me away from.” She eyes him closely and smirks like she knows something he doesn’t. “What kind of guy is your type?”
Classes are usually just him and Shoko these days. Yaga teaches them something they both have known for far longer than they should, then ends the class with a resigned sigh as Shoko strolls out of the classroom and Suguru stays in his seat until Yaga gives up and leaves. He’ll stay sitting with his textbook open on his desk, not reading the words until it’s too dark to stay with an excuse. He slips his hand under the book, going to close the book when it’s forced open.
“Shaman and non-shaman relations,” Satoru reads with ice in his voice. “Interesting topic.”
His voice lilts up at the end as if it were a question or a challenge. Suguru blinks sluggishly.
“When’s the last time you ate?”
“When’s the last time you stopped?” Suguru snaps. He slams the book shut and stands, his seat screeching along the floor when he stands. “When’s the last time I mattered?”
Satoru wraps his hand into the crook of Suguru’s, pressing his chest against his arm. “Always. Let’s eat together.”
At the end of it all, two number 7s sit between them on the table, one half eaten and the other untouched. Satoru sips loudly on his empty drink, shakes it until the ice is spraying droplets out the straw hole, and opens the top to peek inside as he might suddenly find it full. He wraps his hand around the top of the second soda.
“You gonna drink this?” He asks, not waiting for a response before he grabs it and starts sipping.
Suguru rubs his forehead. “Satoru—“
A loud smack of lips. “Damn, this is good. You know, you picked a great spot for a date, nice going.”
Suguru’s eyebrow twitches. “This isn’t a date.”
Satoru tilts his head. “Isn’t it?”
He slams his palm on the table too hard. It rattles, and nearby monkeys turn their heads to look at him.
“Satoru.”
The name drips from Suguru’s tongue, venom that he’s surprised doesn’t melt the table. Satoru doesn’t smile, doesn’t blink as he peers over his black lenses straight into Suguru’s soul. Blue, red-rimmed, and watery.
“Sit down,” Satoru whispers, clears his throat, and adds with a tooth-achingly sugary smile that makes Suguru clench his fist to stop them from shaking, “Please ~?”
He drags out the last syllable as an apology, then a command. Sorry, he says, hiding his eyes again and smoothing out his cracking tone, his trembling hands, sorry.
Suguru sits down, the sickness that’d been clawing at his stomach for months crawling up his throat and settling in his tongue. Satoru claps once and keeps eating.
“Honey, are you ok? You’ve hardly touched your KFC-exclusive Digimon figure?”
Suguru clasps his hands on the table. “What are you trying to do.”
Satoru rolls his eyes. “I’m trying to get you to get you to lighten up.”
And Suguru wants to kill him. The desire to do so has never been stronger. He wants to strangle him, watch the light fade from his eyes, listen to Satoru draw his last breath, put a bullet through the side of his head, and watch him fall—
Suguru grabs his hair and blinks in fives, breathes in and out, five more blinks.
“You need to leave.”
He unfurls and manages to look at Satoru without getting sick. Satoru’s lips twitch.
“You need to leave the school.”
Suguru squints. “What?”
“I have a mission soon, I’m going to need your help.”
He swallows. “I—“
“There are two little girls, don’t worry they’re shamans not… what is it you call them?” Satoru snaps. “Monkeys!”
Suguru’s stomach falls. “How’d you—“
“Anyway, I need someone to take care of them and I’ve already got my hands full and I can’t put them in an orphanage so—“
“What the fuck are you talking about.”
Satoru stops mid-sentence as if he weren’t expecting the interruption. His face twists, in pain. He has a habit now, of rubbing his forehead that Suguru thought he’d gotten from him. But it’s self-soothing, he realizes. For a headache that never went away.
“In another… time,” Satoru starts, “you left.”
Suguru isn’t getting it. “You just told me—“
“You left me,” Satoru hisses, sounding so betrayed that Suguru reels back, “in front of a KFC too, you ass. So I’m asking you now, to leave the school, and not to leave me.”
“…you don’t need me.”
Satoru smiles and says around a fry. “Suguru? Do me a favor. Never say that again.”
They sit in the booth in silence until Satoru finishes both meals and Suguru excuses himself to the bathroom to dry heave into the toilet. Satoru holds his hair back. They don’t speak the rest of the week.
He finds out about the mission after he finds Nanami curled over Haibara’s unconscious body on a bed in the infirmary, blood soaking the sheets and his uniform. Unconscious, not dead. Likely to wake up, not soon, but he will wake up Shoko tells him. Nanami has a death grip on one of Haibara’s hands and watches Suguru grab the other.
“Satoru will take the mission from here,” Suguru mumbles, alternating his gaze from Haibara’s injury-littered face and his body that’s wrapped in quickly darkening bandages.
“He was already there, that’s the only reason—“ Nanami cuts himself off with a stifled sound of pain.
Satoru was already there, when he had another mission that day, when he had two the day before and before and before. When he’s done them all alone, came back alone, and knocks on Suguru’s door every night but never comes in.
“…can’t we just leave everything to him from now on?”
Suguru steps outside and looks straight into the sun until it burns a hole in his vision. The way he used to catch Satoru doing it.
No one comes to throw hands over his eyes, so he does it himself.
There are two little girls, Mimiko and Nanako flanking his sides. Yaga takes them in, Suguru’s all-black outfit he’s been wearing for the three days before Satoru dropped these girls off this morning, his uncombed hair, and the grip the girls have on each hand. Yaga crouches to their height and offers them lollipops that they snatch quickly and eat without a thank you.
“I’m dropping out,” Suguru says.
Yaga nods. “Ok. Let me help. Please.”
The three of them get set up in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in the city, right next to a primary school. Their neighbors are a lonely old lady who takes one look at the twins and the ‘cousin’ that’s taken them in and decides to pseudo-adopt them, and a salaryman who always gives Suguru whatever coupons he cuts out of magazines. The girls take to Suguru quickly and take to having a house well after being street kids for who knows how long.
He puts them to sleep at 9 every night and sits in the living room nursing at least three glasses of whiskey and trying not to sleep. He needs a job, to enroll in a school, to do something but he can’t stand being around those monkeys, who saw two girls on the streets and did nothing to help them, who stared at them with suspicion and disgust, who deserved to…
He calls Satoru on those nights when he completes that sentence. There are knocks on their apartment door and Satoru is there in casual clothes and no glasses, face tight and tense. He forces a smile.
“Come home with me.”
Satoru’s apartment is huge, really a lot bigger than it needs to be for one teenager. Suguru doesn’t remember him mentioning buying this place; last he heard Satoru either lived on campus or went back to the Gojo estate when school wasn’t in session.
“How long have you been living here?” He asks as he follows Satoru past the sparsely decorated living room down the hallway of mirrors.
Satoru shrugs, eyes steadily trained forward. “Since last summer.”
His room is clinical. There is a bed and a desk with papers and books on seals and folktales stacked atop and nothing else. A fine layer of dust coats the top cover of his bed, the same as his dorm bed. There is a spot on the carpet in front of the window that looks worn down from repeated pacing. His broken glasses sit on the nightstand, looking crushed. Suguru picks up one arm, barely hanging onto a lens.
“When’d you break these?”
Satoru shrugs, flipping furiously through a book and paying little attention. “I don’t remember. I opened my hand and they were like that.”
Suguru stares at the back of his head, his shoulders up by his ears and cursed energy coiled in a tight ball. It hurts to look at, like the dust that’s floating into Suguru’s nose from his bed and the sharp glass digging into his palm. He steps closer.
“Satoru—“
He turns. Cocks his head. His eyes are glowing, have been for the past year and Suguru is only now noticing. Only now seeing how Satoru is as pale as the room. His eyes look brighter than the dark circles under them. The contrast is sharp, jarring, makes Suguru's head hurt.
“Yea?”
“What happened to you?”
Satoru hums. “You know. You. You were there.”
You, he said. The ground opens up beneath his feet. Suguru tries to step forward.
“I needed you,” Satoru continues looking at the ceiling without enthusiasm, voice flat. “And you left. I don’t blame you, we didn’t talk much before you did, I should’ve known something was wrong—“
Suguru frowns. “Satoru—“
“I should’ve done something, anything. I mean, what kind of god lets a little girl die like that?” Satoru laughs. “What kind of god can’t see what’s wrong right in front of him? Hm? What do you say?”
Suguru shakes his head as the pit grows and grows. He doesn’t understand what happened to the Satoru he knows, his Satoru, the one who makes stupid immature jokes and is insufferable and pompous and an ass and warm and tactile and always making him laugh. Something is wearing his face with uncanny accuracy and fear gnaws at the borders of Suguru’s sanity.
He doesn’t look down, he knows it’s only darkness, and if he looks he won’t be able to see anything else. He shakes his head harder. “You aren’t making sense.”
“Ten years,” Satoru holds up his pointer finger and makes a zero with his other hand. “Ten. Kill you, you told me, that’d have meaning. Kill him, they told me, he’s a threat. Kill him, I told myself. And I did. I killed you and it had no meaning. You died in an alleyway with one arm and you would’ve died either way. I killed you and something else took your body and nothing had any meaning so tell me, Suguru, am I doing enough?”
His palms are splayed, fingers wide and facing up, pleading, voice bordering on desperate and begging and it’s all in contrast to the wide-eyed plastic smile that stays fixed on his face. He is looking at Suguru. He won’t look anywhere else, as if there’s nothing else. Suguru swallows bile.
“You aren’t god,” he whispers.
“No, no I am, I’m not.” Satoru sighs and rubs his forehead. “I’m the strongest, I’m Gojo Satoru. I’m Gojo Satoru, I’m the strongest. The Honored One. Me alone.”
It’s a confirmation of everything Suguru has known for the past year. Given willingly, spoken as though it were a long-known fact Satoru has been repeating like a mantra, like reassurance to himself, like a reminder of something that he needs to be true so he can keep flashing teeth and calling it a smile, keep releasing air from his lungs and calling it laughter, so he doesn’t slaughter everyone and feel nothing.
It is confirmation enough for Suguru to leave, but the cavern beneath their feet has consumed the entire apartment and a thousand curses are rearing their heads in glee and delight and ravenous hunger.
“Should I kill you, Suguru?”
He asks the question gently, face open and curious. He’s leaning casually on the armrest of his chair, computer off behind him. It’s absurd, Suguru wishes he had grapes to throw. He feels like laughing until he stops breathing.
Would it have meaning? Does anything have meaning anymore?
Satoru is bleeding, there’s a row of bloody crescents in his palm open on his lap that’s dropping red onto his blue sweater. It turns the fabric dark. Suguru wonders about color theory.
He sits on the floor by the chair, grabbing Satoru’s palm and dabbing at it with some tissues he grabbed from the nightstand, watching the blood bloom. Red on white on red on red.
“No,” Suguru says instead of yes, “that… wouldn’t be what you want,” instead of it’d have meaning.
He turns his gaze up. Satoru’s face is sheet white, too close. Unblinking and unseeing.
“What do you want, Satoru?”
“You.” He touches Suguru’s face, tracing his eyebrows, and pressing his bloody palm to his cheek. “Only you. Stay.”
Suguru closes his eyes and nods. “I’ll. Stay.”
He doesn’t look down, doesn’t fall into the pit, lets the fear keep clawing, lets whoever this Satoru is hold him together. Suguru bites his lip, still tasting rotting grapes on his tongue.