Chapter Text
"Can we talk about Kazu, Suguru?" Satoru speaks, the words rolling off his tongue with a gentleness that Suguru wasn't aware his friend was capable of.
He stops dead in his tracks, and the silence is the only thing that echoes through the gym.
Geto turns to look at him, too focused on the sound of the basketball, quickening just as his heart was to realise whether Gojo was speaking. He stared at him, glasses hanging lazily off his nose, furrowed brows perfectly matching the curious and somewhat confused blue eyes peeking behind them.
"What…is there to talk about?"
He finally speaks, but he knows, and while he fails to admit it, the conversation Satoru had so mindlessly initiated just now had been eating him up inside for a while now. He had imagined a million ways this could end, but never once did it start like this.
"You know." Satoru murmurs. Flustered.
Suguru did know. And he hated it.
"I just assumed since the two of you have been training a lot together-"
"We haven't for a while."
A short and unfamiliar silence between the two of them follows.
A harshness in Suguru's tone was generally nothing unusual, but this one was defensive and impulsive, a bitterness that Satoru wasn't aware his friend was capable of.
"I've just," Gojo pauses again, unsure how to phrase his following words, now much more aware of how serious this had turned out to be.
During his silence, Suguru wonders if he regrets bringing it up now if he had played out this conversation in his head just as much as he did and how it ended in Satoru's mind.
"...lately, I've found myself wanting to be closer to her, you know? But I don't know if you, I mean... you know ?"
It had always been more complicated for Satoru to put his emotions into words, which is why he avoided doing so much, but right now, he was trying, and it was pretty strange to listen to.
Geto wondered where all this vulnerability came from, and he couldn't help but ask himself if it stemmed from the same place that put the gentleness into the way he'd say your name.
Suguru only kind of looks at him, at the button on his shirt, the little mole on his left cheek, the scar on his ear, the loose strand of his unruly white hair sticking up, but never once does he meet his eyes.
He blames it on the unexplainable aching right underneath his ribcage, accompanied by a taste in his mouth that rivals one of a thousand curses; his hands are stiff, and his throat is dry, stinging with every breath he takes. He tries not to focus on the sound of his heart or the mind-numbing high-pitched noise that-
"So, I just wanted to say that I don't want to do anything if you are… you know. If you and her are like…"
He was surprised that Satoru was still going, though, with his tendency to ramble on and on, he should have expected this.
"You know…?"
He has heard these words so much today they don't even sound like actual words anymore. It's all he's able to focus on. Like an endless loop, it rings in Suguru's ears and in a twisted, ironic way, the sound of these words summarised the part of their friendship that Suguru had dreaded to face.
He found it unfair, the innocent question taunting him: how come he was always left to fill the gaps of Gojo Satoru's inability to say what he means?
How come he gets to start the conversation when he can't even finish a sentence.
Of course, Suguru knew, he knew how he felt, and he knew how Satoru felt, and deep down, locked away in a part of his heart he wasn't ready to open, he also had an idea about how you felt.
"I…," the voices in his head had finally stopped talking all over each other as soon as he opened his mouth, screaming only one thing right now, in unison: to be selfish. To give in to that humane desire that he had in him, let himself hold onto this wanting he had developed and be greedy for once. It was never easy to be Satoru's friend and he tried to reason that this was what he was owed.
"It's not my fault, is it?"
Suguru wondered, but he knew better than that.
As always, he knew better than Satoru.
And so Suguru, as he is destined to do, collects these words on the tip of his tongue, savours the sweetness of the fantasy he had hoped to indulge in just a little longer, one in which he could have something that Satoru couldn't have, and swallows them down with one gulp.
They're bitter, and they hurt, scratching the inside of his throat open, a taste dissimilar to the rotten and sour one he's accustomed to, though arguably just as bad.
He forced himself to speak, finally looking Satoru in his eyes.
He smiled and shrugged.
"To be honest, Satoru, I don't have any feelings for her like that at all."
That was the first and last time Suguru had lied to him.