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one.
The first time Suguru calls Satoru by his name, it’s entirely unintentional.
Shoko had been the first to insist that they call her by her first name, several months after they’d first become classmates—in a way that’s entirely Shoko, cigarette hanging loosely from her lips and speaking with such a casual ease that it had seemed almost unnatural after to not call her by her given name. And so Suguru had complied.
For Gojo, however, there is a frightening sort of naturalness to addressing him by the family name. It is the name that everyone knows, after all, the name that had clung to his shoulders both a blessing and a curse from the moment he had been born. The name that fitted godhood over his shoulders like a jacket to his skin, Suguru thinks, the same name that leaves the lips of sorcerers twice their age with as much reverence as one would hear in an ode to divinity.
Gojo. Gojo. Gojo. He is not a god—this Suguru knows, has come to know in the months of being by Gojo’s side, but sometimes he forgets. Sometimes, when Gojo is fighting curses, Suguru thinks that maybe he is a god after all. Power that erupts from his fingertips, blue like an endless summer sky, blue like the glare in his eyes, turning all in his path to ash and dust; Gojo is untouchable when he wants to be, skin unstained and clothes mercifully free from even overhead rain. Gojo who grins at them in the last vestiges of a curse’s grotesque existence, crowned in settling halo-light and the smell of leftover smoke, looking every bit like the young god everyone had made him out to be, divinity in the clothes of a teenage boy. And despite himself, Suguru finds himself half-believing it, sometimes.
At times like those, it is easier to fall back on the familiarity of his family name—stop showing off, Gojo, let’s hurry back before sensei starts getting worried—until the fight has left Gojo’s eyes, until he steps into the shared hallways of their dorm hair wet from the shower, until the lines have blurred and he begins to look more like a boy in oversized nightwear and sleepy eyes. It is only then that Suguru finds it easier to call him by his first name in his mind, much like the way he calls Shoko by hers aloud, when the young god returns to being human.
So, the first time Suguru calls Satoru by his name, it is on an entirely ordinary day. They’d finished another mission a couple of days back, and with enough wheedling, Gojo had managed to convince their teacher to give them a short break from exorcising curses. Normal high school kids get holidays, he had pointed out persuasively, and Shoko had chimed in with agreement of her own, though Suguru suspects that she was only keen on staying away from the campus because an instructor had caught her smoking the other day.
They are walking through Sendai, where their most recent mission had been; they are ducking through the crowded streets, and Gojo is complaining at the top of his lungs about the lack of dessert stores in the area. In typical Gojo fashion, he does not care for the bemused looks that others shoot him as they walk by.
Suguru shakes his head, a smile curling at his lips. There are plenty of stores around, but he has known Gojo for long enough now to know what he really means is that there aren’t enough stores around to cater to his tastes—he’s always had a tendency to crave nauseatingly sweet foods, a craving that only seemed to get stronger after every completed mission.
And like this, whining like a child and kicking up a fuss over a thing as minor as sweets, it is easy to see Gojo for who he is. Gods don’t stroll through the streets with their hands behind their heads, and gods don’t talk incessantly about Digimon, and gods certainly don’t throw a tantrum like a spoilt brat at the sight of the queue at a mochi stall being seven people too long.
He reaches out, fingers tightening easily around the hood of Gojo’s jacket. Outside of missions, he’s dressed casually, a plain hoodie thrown over a dark shirt, and if not for his shock of white hair and eyes the colour of the sky, he might have been as unassuming as every other citizen on the street.
Only that he’s not—he sticks out like a sore thumb from appearance alone, and if that’s not enough, the constant stream of words from his mouth certainly is. He moves and talks in a way that can only be described as a particular brand of Gojo Satoru, and Suguru rolls his eyes as he yanks Gojo to a halt.
“Hey!” Gojo yelps, interrupted mid-way through an overly-impassioned rant about the latest episode of Digimon Adventure. “You could have just asked me to stop if you wanted me to!”
Suguru snorts. “Would you have stopped if I had?” It’s not posed as a rhetorical question but it may as well have been, and he gets his answer in the form of Gojo letting out a huff and turning his head to the side. “... There you go.”
“At least be gentler next time,” Gojo gripes, and Suguru is quick to reply.
“Maybe stop acting like so much of a child next time, then, Satoru.”
For a moment, Gojo goes uncharacteristically quiet, gaze flickering from where it had been sheepishly fixed on the pavement back up to Suguru. The dark-haired sorcerer raises his eyebrows at the look on Gojo’s face, wide-eyed and crackling with a rare kind of slow delight.
“What is it?” he asks. The afternoon sun spills like liquid gold down his spine and feels impossibly warm under the full force of Gojo’s stare, unrelenting and unexplained.
And then Gojo beams at him so brightly he thinks he could have burst into flames. “Satoru,” he repeats, “you called me Satoru.”
The first time Suguru calls Satoru by his name, he doesn’t even notice.
His cheeks colour, and he swears it’s the heat of the sun. “Oh,” he responds, and then pauses, because he doesn’t know what to say. “Can I call you that?”
Gojo hums a soft, approving sound, looking so impossibly pleased that Suguru begins to wonder why he hadn’t called Gojo that earlier. “Only if I can call you Suguru, too,” Gojo answers, though Suguru thinks that he would have done so anyway even without asking for permission.
Gojo does not step aside as strangers brush past, impossibly close to the fabric of his sleeves but never quite touching, and Suguru becomes acutely aware of two things: first, that they’re standing still in the middle of a crowded street, and second, that Gojo has his Infinity up again, untouchable to each and every person who sidesteps them.
His fingers curl around phantom touches—soft fabric, the warmth of Gojo’s neck, the thrum of his indignance as he protested against being halted. Suguru blinks, wondering if Gojo intentionally kept his Infinity up every time he walked through a crowd, wondering if he’d sensed Suguru’s movement from behind him before his fingers even closed around the hood, wondering if he’d let his impenetrable barrier down just for him.
The sunlight paints Satoru’s eyes a shade of endless summer blue, vivid and daring as he challenges every passer-by who looks at the two of them with a click of their tongue with a snicker and a smirk, and under the burning heat, Suguru sees him for what he is.
A god to them, Suguru thinks, watching as a lady and her child attempt to jostle past. The two of them are repelled back by an invisible force, so miniscule it’s unnoticeable to them, one that Suguru notices all the same.
But, Suguru realises, not a god to him.
He reaches out and grabs hold of Satoru by the sleeve. “Let’s start heading back,” he says. “We’ve been out for long enough, and I think sensei brought back some dango yesterday that we can have.”
And Satoru lets him.
two.
After Amanai Riko’s death, everything changes.
Satoru is not quite Satoru anymore, and Suguru does not know if he is even like himself anymore, either. He finds himself thinking a lot more, mulling over all this—everything—finds himself waking up in the middle of the night with icy, blistering heat all through him like the sun is burning him up from the inside out, head impossibly filled with the visage of an innocent girl, smile plastered on her face and blood spurting from the gunshot straight through her brain.
Satoru wears his godhood tighter around himself now, and the lines have blurred again, fitting his form like a set of tailor-made clothes rather than just a mask made to be pried away by gentle hands. Suguru does not know whether it is fear or power that makes Satoru’s godhood cling so tightly to him. Perhaps both. It had been different from the moment Satoru died and came back to life, the moment the sorcerer-killer told him of Satoru’s death and he watched him walk through the doors wearing ashes like a broken and burnt halo.
Suguru is sitting at the foot of his bed, clothes hanging off his frame and a text from Shoko on his phone reminding him to eat. It’s too late in the morning for breakfast now, the sun hanging boldly in the sky, but he will go down to the cafeteria for lunch. It has been three weeks since the mission ended. He will act as he always has, reaching for every shred of normalcy that he can, and soon everything will go back to normal soon. And perhaps then all of his troubles will become easier to digest, like they can be rolled into opaque black spheres and swallowed whole until they are forgotten entirely, called to mind only when he wants them to be.
It has been three weeks since the mission ended, and he is scared, for a long, horrible moment, that nothing will ever be the same again.
He has not seen Satoru in five days. While he keeps his grief in check with sealed smiles and ruminating behind closed doors, Satoru is much more open with his, leaving traces of it behind in every mission he embarks on, every curse that he exorcises, rougher and more destructive in his ways.
Five days, three missions, all back-to-back. He keeps count, because he can’t help it. The hallways feel empty without him, even with the first-years a few corridors down. Nanami Kento’s presence is comforting in all its stoicism and careful consideration, and Haibara Yu is infectious in all that he does, so bright on some days that Suguru wonders what it must feel like to burn with the sun.
And yet, for all that they are, they maintain a respectful distance from him, and they do not share what they think are silly first-year troubles with him. They play the part of the perfect juniors, texting him sometimes to tell him they’d left delicacies from their most recent mission in the fridge, reaching out to Shoko—behind his back, but he can tell anyway—out of concern when they notice he has not left his room for the entire day.
They don’t burst through his door unannounced, hair still wet from the shower and dripping water all over his floorboards. They don’t sprawl across his bed unceremoniously like it’s their own, depositing snacks he hadn’t even asked for in his room before launching into a ceaseless list of complaints about the weather, the curse that was so grotesque it crossed the boundary of being a mere eyesore, the lady at the bakery who insisted the custard pastries were out of stock no matter how many times they pleaded, and so nicely, too.
They are not Satoru, and Suguru knows that they would never be.
And it is funny how the world works sometimes, Suguru muses, midway through a text to Shoko asking if she would want to grab lunch together later, for he can sense Satoru from the moment he steps foot in the hallways; almost as if the thought of him alone was enough to summon him. His presence is unmistakable, thrumming with every step he takes.
The door to Suguru’s room flings open without warning and without permission, and this is another strand of normalcy that Suguru reaches for with open arms.
“I’m back,” Satoru announces. His clothes are spotless, as always, as though he’d never gone for the mission at all. But Suguru knows that he is always like this now—his impenetrable barrier has become even more perfect in the weeks following Riko’s passing, ever-present and altogether inviolable. “I brought sakuramochi. From Osaka.”
He doesn’t hide the smile that passes over his lips. “You didn’t have to,” he says, watching as Satoru places it down on his desk. He knows that Satoru will regardless, and for that he is grateful. Pleased. “I was about to ask Shoko if she wanted to head down for lunch. Care to join us?”
Satoru peers at him through long lashes and dark shades, a grin planted across his face. It’s genuine this time, Suguru notes, and there is no edge to his tone the way there is when he’s found something new to gripe about. “Nope! That can wait,” he says, crossing whatever distance there is between them and wrapping his hand around Suguru’s wrist. “Come with me.”
Satoru, in typical Satoru fashion, doesn’t tell him where, or what, or why. He just tugs Suguru along, expecting him to comply, and he does.
In the blink of an eye, they’re on a rocky ledge overlooking the school. Suguru grimaces and Satoru’s laughter sounds out by his ear, warm breath tickling the skin of his neck. “Queasy?” Satoru teases, letting go of Suguru’s wrist, and Suguru folds his arms over his chest.
“No,” he says. Satoru laughs harder.
“You’re a bad liar.”
Satoru can read him just as easily as he can read Satoru. This, too, has not changed, and Suguru finds himself clinging to it with an overwhelming sort of relief. He turns his head to Satoru, watches as the sunlight paints his eyes shades of watercolour gold. “Why did you bring me here?”
“Because I wanted to show you something,” Satoru replies simply. “Summon your cursed spirit. The one that can fly.”
He doesn’t tell him why, or what for, or where. “I have multiple,” Suguru points out.
“One that can carry both of us.”
He complies with this, too, calling forth a cursed spirit that vaguely takes the form of a stingray. Suguru takes a seat and Satoru slots himself in next to him; and then they are taking flight, even though Satoru has yet to say a word, because Suguru understands anyway.
They are midway through the clouds before Satoru leans in closer, half-yelling over the sound of the wind. “Dispel your cursed spirit!”
Again, Satoru does not bother with the why or what or how.
Suguru listens anyway.
They are free-falling through the air, hurtling through with a velocity Suguru is certain will have them dead before they reach the ground if they do not do something about it soon. And then Satoru’s arms are snaking around his waist and holding him close, and he can feel Satoru’s heartbeat against his back, loud and fast and thrilled. They’re falling, but Satoru is laughing in his ear and Satoru’s arms are tight around his waist and he trusts him.
So they’re falling, and the sky around them is blossoming into noon, and for a long, yet infinitesimally brief moment, Suguru feels his heart in his throat and Satoru’s right behind him. And so they’re falling, and now they are both laughing, and Suguru cannot tell where they end and where infinity begins.
And then, just like that, they are flying, afloat amidst a carpet of clouds and so close to the sun that Suguru thinks this is what it must be like to burn with it.
“I learned this the other day,” Satoru tells him softly, still holding him close, and he does not need to elaborate for Suguru to know he means the day three weeks back, when he died and came back to life. “And I thought I’d show you.”
“Satoru—” Suguru says his name earnestly, ardently, like there are flames in his ribcage and threatening to burst forth from his throat.
Because up here, like this, with nothing but the golden sky around them, Satoru looks ever the god they had painted him out to be, serene and unfettered in his realm of divinity. But up here, like this, Suguru is in his arms, enveloped in this shared godhood, skin burning with the sun that he swears they could touch if they just tried.
And in a way, Suguru thinks that this is normalcy, too.
Not a god, Satoru’s warmth against his back reminds him, not your god. To them, maybe, the sorcerers he’d never met who whisper his last name and his titles with cautious veneration, or to the higher-ups who eye him like a caged animal ready to strike, a boy born into the world with six eyes and the power of the divine in his palms.
Their god, their god.
Satoru’s grip loosens around his waist, head coming to rest against Suguru’s shoulder. Not yours, the silence says, and Suguru drinks in everything around him, the golden sky and Satoru’s hair brushing his cheek and this moment, so silent and still and achingly, divinely peaceful.
To you, I’m just—
“Satoru,” he breathes, reaching up to take one of Satoru’s hands in his. Satoru allows him to pull his hand from his waist to intertwine their fingers, and he feels Satoru lower his head, lips curled into the shape of a smile against his shoulder. “Thank you.”
(Many, many weeks later, after they are confronted with news of Haibara Yu’s death, Suguru remembers that they are not gods.
When the boy who smiles as brightly as the sun dies, Suguru reaches out in desperation, and he knows Satoru does too—like they are in a golden sky again, reaching out to the sun itself.
He is the first to burn.)
three.
It plays out like something from a movie lost to time, an old scene emblazoned in the back of his mind and no one else’s.
There they are in the middle of a crowded street again, Suguru thinks, just like they had been in Sendai, frozen still as though time itself had rewound itself on its axis to hold them in place. But now they are in Shinjuku, and now they are a year or two older, and now there are wounds that they don’t know how to speak of that weren’t there before. The girl who didn’t deserve to die. The sorcerer-killer. The boy who didn’t deserve to die. The blond junior of theirs, always so stoic, who weeps and weeps when he thinks no one is listening. Suguru’s body is light, too light, and his already-baggy clothes hang off him like winter-wear on a child’s clothing rack. Satoru’s hands are heavy with the lives he couldn’t save and heavier still with the silence he’s met with when he reaches them out.
Satoru comes to him on a crowded street in the later part of the day, where the sun is beginning to sink across the city and burning it a cruel shade of darkened gold. Satoru comes to him without warning the same way he comes to his door in the dorms, and Suguru can sense him before he arrives the same way he does when Satoru first steps foot in the hallways.
This time, unlike in Sendai, Satoru is the one stopping him in his tracks. This time, unlike in Sendai, they are a distance apart and entirely out of each other’s reach. And this time, like in Sendai, Satoru has his Infinity up, shielding himself from everyone who walks by.
Suguru wonders, in passing, if Satoru would still let him through now.
Satoru calls his name. Demands an explanation. He’s shouting, like he did in the classrooms and the gymnasium whenever they were arguing over some silly thing. He’s shouting over the blur of noise, like it’s just the two of them, like he did over the wind while looking over the noon sky. No one lifts their head or bothers to click their tongue as they walk by, like they’re some kind of spectacle that isn’t worth paying attention to anymore.
Suguru knows that Satoru already knows. That he’d heard it all from Shoko before he’d rushed here. So he doesn’t turn his back, doesn’t meet Satoru’s gaze. He keeps it resolutely trained to the pavement, and then to the buildings that lie in the distance, crowned by the light of the late afternoon sun.
Something burns in his throat and he forces it down. He speaks softly, not shouting above the crowd, scared that Satoru may catch the crack in his voice if he does. Like a scene from a movie, the crowd parts around them. Footsteps hurry past, like they are some kind of show that didn’t live up to its name, abandoned in search of better replacements. Everyone hurries away from them and Suguru knows that Satoru can hear him.
Satoru yells at him and calls his ideals impossible. He keeps his eyes trained to the ground and calls Satoru arrogant. He doesn’t turn around, because he’s too afraid that something may break if he did—traitorously and unfailingly—into pieces and into Satoru’s waiting palms.
Like that day in Sendai, when he called Satoru by his name for the first time.
“You could do it, couldn’t you?” he asks. Hesitance passes through his lips and comes out in the form of an exhale: “Satoru.”
Satoru lets out an exasperated shout—in that same way that he does when he doesn’t understand something in class, or when there isn’t anyone free to drive them and they have to take the train to their next mission, or when the small mochi store he frequents closes down for a week because the owners went on holiday. In that same way that reminds Suguru, achingly, of the fact that he is just a teenage boy in god’s robes, a boy he’d spent his youth with, a boy who he knew—knows—like no other.
Suguru fixes his sight on the sun. The dappled light is marvellous, and his skin feels like it is being set on fire from the inside out.
He hears his name again, leaving Satoru’s lips. A plea.
He turns around.
Satoru’s eyes are wide, outraged, the colour of an endless summer sky. Gold pours into them, a realm of divinity in its own right, and they glower at him so devastatingly he almost breaks.
“Are you the strongest because you’re Gojo Satoru?” It’s been a long time since he’s referred to him like that, by his full name. Like he’s talking about a half-stranger the same way everyone else does: The young god. The Six Eyes. Gojo Satoru. “Or are you Gojo Satoru because you are the strongest?”
Like he doesn’t know him, like he’s nothing more than his last name and the godhood he wraps around his frame. Like he isn’t his Satoru, the one who bursts through his door in the dead of the night and leaves sweets strewn across his desk and chatters and complains for hours until both of them are fast asleep. The one who wraps his arms around him wordlessly, the one who holds him by the elbow when it’s raining so that they’re both untouchable, the one who laughs with him in the sky swathed with gold and promises in the silence that settles that everything will be okay.
Satoru, Satoru, Satoru.
Suguru’s chest aches with a phantom pain he does not know how to explain.
“If I were to become you…” Satoru stares at him unwavering. He almost wavers, almost doesn’t want to finish his sentence, almost doesn’t want to cross the point of no return. But he does anyway, and he watches as Satoru’s expression morphs into anger, resentment, despair.
“I’ve decided how I’ll live my life,” he tells Satoru, a moment after.
He says it plainly, like it is a fact: blood is red, grass is green, and he is leaving.
And then the look on Satoru’s face changes into a quieter kind of rage, burning still, but softer now, begging Suguru to stay. So he turns away, because he thinks that if Satoru continued standing there like that, Infinity up for everyone but him and begging him to stay, he might.
Suguru’s words line his throat like ash and he tries not to choke on them. When he begins walking, he can sense the way Satoru’s cursed energy flickers to life, not unlike how it does when he is preparing for battle. The familiarity stings, and he fights the urge to embrace it.
“You can kill me, if you want,” he offers. He knows Satoru won’t.
The spike of cursed energy dissipates. The sun burns brightly along the horizon and he follows it. He used to think they were like that, the two of them, but now he thinks that maybe this scene was always meant to play out. They’d burnt so brightly together they’d forgotten what it was like with everyone else below the golden sky—the girl bleeding from her head, the boy with a body in the morgue and an eternal smile on his face, his own heart tearing apart at the seams—and now he thinks perhaps he doesn’t know what it’s like to touch something without setting it on fire.
It’s not worth it, is it? Suguru thinks, standing in the ashes of it all: his ideals, his dreams, them. Satoru has gone silent, and Suguru thinks that maybe he can sense it too, the futility of it all.
“Satoru,” he wants to say, one last time. But he doesn’t. He’s been out for too long now, and it’s time to go.
Suguru leaves, never looking back.
And Satoru lets him.
Much later, when he is sitting in a chair with a book over his lap, a girl—Nanako—asks him about Gojo Satoru. She is combing carefully through his hair while her twin rests by his side, movements tender. Suguru thinks that no one has treated him with this much care since he had been a child in his mother’s lap, for Shoko had always merely laughed at the fact that his hair was longer than hers, and Satoru had, while entirely loving in his actions, combed through his hair with as much grace as a novice on a tightrope, grumbling when the comb got stuck at the ends.
The only one I had, Suguru decides to respond, as truthfully as he can, and his heart seizes in his chest with a slow-burning ache.
Satoru.
Sometimes, Suguru thinks that if he just calls for him again, just like that, he would come barrelling through the door, a grin on his face and a bag of the latest desserts clutched proudly in hand. But he doesn’t, won’t, can’t.
So Suguru settles for watching as the morning sun spreads gold over the city, gentle fingers carding through his hair, and finding the reminder of him there.
And he wonders, sometimes, if Satoru still sits amongst the clouds in the golden sky every now and then, and searches for the reminder of him there.
He wonders if it burns.
four.
Bright, bright, burning eyes.
The sun is setting, but even with the dimming light and the blood thick on his face, it is easy to recognise the man standing before him. Like breathing, Suguru thinks, like muscle memory. He remembers the man’s presence, feels him before he sees him.
Like every other time before, Suguru knows that Satoru is coming before he actually arrives.
I called for you, he wants to say, even though he doesn’t. His thoughts had inadvertently slipped away during his fight with Okkotsu Yuta to the young sorcerer’s mentor. Of course it had. That had come naturally to him, too.
And just like every other time before, Satoru arrives before him—a hallucination that takes physical form, a manifestation of every dream and nightmare he’s had since he left one decade ago. But he’s not smiling, and he’s not carrying a packet of sweets to lay on Suguru’s desk, and this isn’t Suguru’s room at all. He’s leaned against a wall, and there’s blood in his mouth, and he’s dying.
So instead he settles on, “You’re late, Satoru.”
Satoru stares at him with an expression so out-of-place on his face that Suguru is tempted to chuckle, endless summer skies clouded over into piercing winter blue. Satoru.
Suguru is glad to see him. “To think you’d be the one here at my end,” he muses aloud to Satoru, though a part of him thinks that perhaps it was always meant to end this way. Two souls, always flying too close to the sun—and he’d tried to change the world, play the role of a god, but he’d forgotten that divinity was only ever his when he was with Satoru.
And now this is the price he has to pay, he surmises, although he doesn’t really mind. Grand ambitions don’t always have grand outcomes, and while this isn’t the grandest of endings, Suguru thinks that having it by Satoru’s side would make it the best one.
He asks about his family, because he knows that Satoru will understand who he is referring to. Satoru does, and he answers in the affirmative. His voice is like ice, and Suguru doesn’t blame him. He had been the one to leave, after all, believing that he could burn this whole system down to the ground—like the sun, so steadfast, so untouchable.
But one person—even multiple, even with the family he’d found over the years—is a cloud easily washed away with the onset of precipitation, trapped in an endless cycle. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat.
With him, maybe, Suguru thinks. The smile doesn’t leave his face and neither does Satoru’s gaze, fixed on him so vividly under the sad, sad sun. With him, they could have touched the sun, but it’s all too late for that now.
The pain is spiralling to his head, and he leans further back against the wall. He talks openly about his plans, about the young sorcerer he’d fought. He is dying, and he is with Satoru. There is nothing left to hide.
“I trusted you,” Satoru says, and his words slice like a knife through the hazy fog of Suguru’s consciousness. “You wouldn’t kill off young sorcerers without a reason.”
Once, Suguru prided himself on the fact that he knew Satoru best. Out of everyone in the world.
He forgets, sometimes, that out of everyone in the world, Satoru always knew him best, too.
It catches him off-guard, and his smile lifts. Sendai streets and sakuramochi. Complaints pouring out in waves like a little kid. Shoko stealing his sunglasses, raucous laughter. Basketball and golden skies and the sound of his name on his lips. Satoru. Leaving.
“I didn’t think I had any of that left,” he comments hoarsely. The blood pools against his lips and he lets it spill. “Your trust.”
He slips a card free from his pocket. Okkotsu’s. He hands it to Satoru, feels the slight tremor of his hand as he accepts it, feels the brush of skin on warm skin, feels his heart explode in his chest.
And for a moment—for the briefest, most fleeting of moments—everything is right as it used to be. Just them, the sound of Satoru’s voice drowning out every other noise, and the untouchable, impenetrable barrier down and discarded.
Just them, one standing, one sitting, eyes fixed on each other. Not a god, and not a pseudo-god—two boys who grew up too fast, now twenty-seven and twenty-eight with wounds that hadn’t healed from when they were sixteen. Just them, like this, talking to each other like they would in Suguru’s room after night fell and Satoru came by with freshly-washed hair and a towel thrown over his shoulders.
But Satoru has his guard up and Suguru is dying, so he knows it’s not the same. When Satoru asks him for his last words, though, he finds again that he doesn’t quite mind.
“It was nice,” he thinks he would have told Satoru if he dared, “to start it and end it all with you.”
He doesn’t, because he knows Satoru the best out of everyone in the world, and he can see the way he’s wavering. How the harsh lines on his features have set themselves into something softer, more uncertain, as though he might hesitate to kill Suguru when the time finally came for it.
He says something else instead, watches the way the cold melts from Satoru’s eyes, the sternness leaves his jaw and crumbles into something quieter, sadder, and infinitely more devastating. Blue, like an endless summer sky, the last one that they’d spent together. The sun is setting beyond the horizon and Suguru commits it all to memory.
“Suguru.”
Satoru calls his name softly, tenderly. He kneels in front of him and Suguru watches. He is whispering now, like he did when they were seventeen. Suguru thinks back to golden skies, Satoru’s arms around his waist, Satoru’s lips against the skin of his shoulder.
Satoru kneels in front of him, all man and no god, so close that Suguru can almost feel his warmth. His Infinity is still not up. Not when he’s with him, Suguru knows, not when he’s with him. Never when he’s with him.
“Satoru.” The last time he says his name, it comes out a plea. Soft, unexpected, and instinctive, like that day in Sendai. “I’m glad that you’re here to see me to my end.”
Because who else would it be? the unsaid says. Who else but you, my one and only?
And Satoru responds in kind: that he was the only one he ever had.
It makes Suguru laugh, because all along he thought he’d ruined it all, that he’d turned everything to ashes the day he left to chase after the burning sun. He had been wrong, and he is glad of it. “You should at least curse me a little at the very end,” he mutters out. His tone is light, less like he’s dying and more like he’s joking. Satoru doesn’t respond. Suguru doesn’t miss the way his shoulders shake.
The sun bleeds away, and Satoru shifts his weight from his knees. Suguru reaches out, halting him in his tracks, fingers curling around Satoru’s sleeve. Satoru lets him. He brings Satoru closer, clings on to his warmth in the dying embers of the setting sun, and Satoru lets him. He brushes the tears from Satoru’s eyes with shaking fingers, plants a kiss to his shoulder with a bloodied mouth.
No why, or what, or anything in between. Satoru doesn’t ask, and he doesn’t tell.
It is a fitting end, Suguru thinks, watching as the final vestiges of sunlight seep beyond the city and fade. Suguru hears the blade before he registers the pain, rapid and sharp, soothed immediately by a warmth that surrounds him and seeps through the fabric of his clothes.
Satoru is merciful enough to make his death a quick one, and even more merciful yet to weep for the duty he’d done. He weeps and wails where no one can hear him, and Suguru would reach up to wipe the tears from his face if he could, let his name fall softly from his lips, lay his head in his lap until night falls fully and all is quiet.
Dying in the arms of the one he loves the most is a little like falling into a long dream, Suguru thinks. He closes his eyes and it plays out in front of him in bits and pieces, like ending credits to an old movie. They are teenagers again, and Satoru’s arms are circling his waist. Kuroi is braiding Riko’s hair, and Haibara Yu is grinning and welcoming them home. The scenery spills forth before them, an endless summer, and the sun is warm on their skin but not scorching. He touches a hand to the corner of his lips and traces smooth skin. No blood, no ashes.
“Come,” Haibara says, so bright and so eager, seventeen years old and unbroken. “We can wait for the rest of them there.”
Suguru turns, and he notices that he is standing alone now, twenty-seven years old and with no one else by his side. But Satoru’s warmth stays, burning imprints against his skin, shoulder, soul, and Suguru carries it with him like a sacred emblem.
Haibara walks forward, the sky swathed in gold with every step he takes. “You will meet again,” he promises, voice tender.
And Suguru follows.
five.
“Satoru.”
When Suguru calls his name again, it’s not what he’d imagined.
He’s imagined it in a multitude of ways. He’d imagined it on nights he lay exhausted in his room, back flat against the mattress, slipping half in and half out of consciousness, enough so to envisage Suguru in his room again, fingers carding softly through his hair in soothing mannerisms that Satoru finds he isn’t able to replicate in return. Or on the rare, rare occasions that Shoko managed to coerce him into drinking, stumbling down the hallways to Suguru’s room and throwing the door open as if expecting to hear the sound of laughter and his name.
Satoru is not a man who keeps many things close to him. He has a propensity for destruction, like white-hot, ever-hungry flame—as is his birthright—and anyone who wanders too near always ends up in the crossfire, somehow. So he’s learned to keep everything at a distance, well-hidden behind easy chatter and walls of oversaturated humour.
He does keep things close, though, for he is only human and there is no man who can survive with purely nothing to call his own. He keeps things close, not people, things in the shape of a person. He keeps the old polaroids Suguru had left up in his old, abandoned room—smiling faces of him, of them, with Shoko, and even one with Nanami and Haibara—and keeps the oversized sweater he’d stolen from Suguru one day at the bottom of his drawer. He keeps the sunglasses Suguru had bought him for his seventeenth birthday by his bedside table, too precious to wear into combat, and he keeps the barriers he’d let down only for Suguru up.
Above all, he keeps close to him what he has no choice but to keep: Suguru’s final words, that stupid smile on his face under the sadly setting sun, the blood that had soaked through his shirt from Suguru’s lips. The sound of his final breath, the sound of a man wailing after—a man he belatedly realised was himself—and the sound of Suguru calling his name, echoing sharply through his memory and dulling the pain.
Satoru.
He’s imagined it many times. In his dreams, in his drunken stupors, in contemplations of his death, where Suguru would be waiting for him, waiting to take him by the hand and lead him to a place where they can rest. Talk about everything that had happened since the day Suguru died. Watch the sun sink over the city or the boundless plains. Hear Suguru call his name, sweet and soft, offer him kikufuku mochi from Sendai on the palm of his hand.
But this is no hallucination, Satoru recognises, eyes wide and yet unseeing. His name from Suguru’s lips, but it’s not the same.
This is no hallucination, and yet it’s worse than any frenzied, hopeless dream or nightmare he could have had.
He turns, and comes face to face with Suguru’s body. A smile that sits crooked on his face, a degree or two off the mark. A jagged scar that cuts across his forehead, blemishing skin that once ran smooth to the touch. A name that falls from parted lips, his, but it doesn’t sound like his.
Satoru. Satoru. Satoru.
It’s not him.
Satoru knows this. Satoru knows this, because he knows Suguru. He sees the man standing before him, dark hair and dark eyes, and suddenly he is sixteen again, meeting Suguru for the first time in the small classroom of three students. He is sixteen again, walking the streets of Sendai under the blistering sun.
He is standing face to face with Suguru in a crowd of blurred, faded faces, but it is not the same.
This is not him. Satoru knows this, from some visceral part of his soul.
He is sixteen again. There is blood in his throat, and in moments Riko will be dead. He thinks he will die, and he closes his eyes and prays to a god he doesn’t believe in that Suguru will be safe. He is sixteen, and alive, walking towards Suguru with the body of a dead girl in his arms, and it is from here that everything changes.
The cursed energy of the body before him ripples and dances like Suguru’s had when Satoru first came back from the dead, eyes stronger than ever and soul lingering somewhere along the cusp of divinity. Satoru wants to rip these same eyes out now, crush them beneath his feet, bury them under the weight of a thousand blindfolds. Suguru’s body, Suguru’s energy.
It’s not him.
And he tells this man—this imposter—this, shouts at him like he did in Shinjuku. The crowd stirs, lowers their heads, falls silent. It is all playing back like a movie embedded in time, but the cast is different now. Actors—a twenty-eight year old oscillating between sixteen, seventeen, eighteen; and a stranger in the body of a dead man, smiling cruelly, speaking kindly. He calls Satoru’s name in Suguru’s voice and it’s not nearly the same and yet it’s nearly close enough.
And then the stitches come undone, skin peeled back to reveal a brain, a grotesque addition to a body he should have laid to rest. Should have burned, Satoru realises with acid in his mouth, but how could he have?
So this is the price to pay. Satoru feels the bindings come up against his wrists, fastening themselves against his skin, and they scorch at him through his clothes. Hungry, like fire, and Satoru realises he had let his guard down. Let himself become a man, not a god, wide-eyed and hopeful. The barriers had come down when he’d heard his name leave Suguru’s lips—like breathing, Satoru thinks, like muscle memory.
They are back up now, and it is too late. The smile never leaves Suguru’s face, and it looks so wrong and so out-of-place, all harsh lines and jarring features and nothing like Suguru. A sharp laughter rings out, not-Suguru’s, and Satoru feels as though he is being set on fire.
Golden skies, summer haze. Warmth encases Satoru from top to bottom, binding him in place; he calls Suguru’s name, watches as his hand shoots out, holds himself by the throat. Suguru responds to Satoru’s calling of his name as viscerally as Satoru had responded to his, and Satoru smiles.
The movement had come easy. Like breathing, Suguru would have said, like muscle memory. And Satoru doesn’t ask why, or what, or how—because Suguru is supposed to be dead—but that’s how it was always meant to be.
He watches as his field of vision grows darker, the Prison Realm slowly beginning to swallow him whole. It closes in on him, blocking out that horrible scar on Suguru’s head, and the last thing Satoru sees is the smile on Suguru’s face.
Like this, if he just tries hard enough, he can imagine Suguru’s lips softening into its usual curve, eyes crinkling by the corners and laughing with him like they’re teenagers again. Like there’s no blood in his mouth and even less on his hands. Like he’s standing in front of him now, two faces in a Shibuya crowd, a hand against a sleeve and gentle with promises of something sweet.
There is no sun in the Prison Realm. There are no golden skies, no dessert shops, no bustling cities. There are only skeletons here, and the air is rife with the scent of smoke and ashes. Satoru is left only with the sound of Suguru’s voice in his head calling his name and an echo against the walls that follows him with every movement that he makes.
And like a movie that has been watched too many times before, Satoru knows how this will unfold. The way it always does, in new beginnings and old ends. Burning, ashes, rebirth. He will meet Suguru in the middle of a city street, months from now, in the darkened glow of the daylight.
Satoru. This is how Suguru will greet him when they meet again, and this is how everything will begin again. And this is how it will end, too, with him. Always with him.
It is not a bad thing, Satoru contends as he slots his blindfold over his eyes, although he thinks that maybe this time, he should properly lay Suguru’s body to rest.
And Satoru knows, too, that when one of them burns, the other must, too. But he is ready for it—it is not a bad thing to be laid to rest next to the one who knows him the best out of everyone in the world. It is a good ending, he concedes. A little like coming home.
Maybe this time, he thinks, they will touch the sun.