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Death is strange.
As a Jujutsu Sorcerer, you don’t tend to think too hard when it comes to it. Curses aren’t human, after all. They’re barely even ghosts. The only thing human about them is that they’re born from the negative emotions of them. It isn’t like it’s murder. It’s an exorcism.
But it’s when those Curses begin to involve humans that it becomes something ambivalent.
There’s a little less than two gallons of blood within the average human body, and a few over two hundred bones. Sixty thousand miles of blood vessels, six hundred muscles, nearly eighty organs, thirty-two teeth, ten fingers, ten toes— humans are so, so fragile. They die so easily, and even easier if someone or something else happens to be the cause. In their own hands, hesitation at least exists, if just for a moment.
But death caused by a Cursed Spirit is messy. It’s tactless. It’s instinct. Because suddenly there’s human remains everywhere, and now someone has to clean it up. So isn’t it ironic that even though they’ve been “blessed” with higher intelligence, it’s still just mindless killing?
Suguru used to stand above the scenes where this thoughtlessness took place. The body, or sometimes, bodies, had already been recovered, so at least he didn’t have to see them. Most of the time, anyhow. Like staring at a black dot in front of a white background at one of Tokyo’s libraries’ computer labs, and then looking away— the unfortunate times that one of his missions either began or ended with some human dying also ended up with the image of their bodies imprinted behind his eyelids.
For a while, he’d been lucky not to be forced into those chance opportunities too often. But even if only once, it’s one time too many. It’s usually just the investigation, maybe a little “cleanup” if that Cursed Spirit decided to stick around.
Death is strange.
And maybe for the longest time, him not “thinking much about death” was the problem. It’s why it built up like some bomb, finally exploding from within the blood vessels buried beneath his flesh by the end of his second year. It’s why it drove him away from any semblance of a peaceful rationality.
Did Cursed Spirits consider their own deaths? Those with enough of a consciousness did, perhaps, though it wasn’t for a fear of death, itself. Most definitely, they feared powerlessness; Suguru remembers like a recent memory, the amount of Curses who’d scramble to escape him and his power, because they hadn’t been able to face him, because they faced the same mortality they shared with the humans they’d been borne from.
Death is strange.
And it’s odd that he can’t find himself as angry as he thought he would. Shouldn’t he be angry that his plans were never fully fleshed out? Or angry that he’d never gotten his hands on that Special Grade Curse he’d desired? Or angry that he never got the chance to—
As much as a wraith like him can, Suguru freezes. The space around him feels ambiguously full, and yet, he perceives nothing through his eyes. The space is empty, and he free floats within it, eyes open and processing absolutely nothing and everything at once. It’s frustrating not being able to use any of his five senses, nor even detect Cursed energy. Such a loss of control, a loss of power, he’d only experienced it once or twice, and only back when he was still a child. It’d been different. He’d held so much in the palms of his hands, and now, quite literally, he has nothing. All around him— nothing.
The flesh behind his ear suddenly aches. In the nothingness, Suguru jolts, limbs swimming through a peerless black sea. Were his senses returning to him? It wasn’t a painful sensation, but after experiencing a loss of touch, it’d been startlingly foreign.
Raising a hand to where he’d pinpointed the sharp pain, he rubs it, and warmth swims through his fingertips, rippling down through his forearm and past his elbow and into his chest, into his apparently twisting gut and chilled toes. Even without any experience in death, he knows this sensation to be wrong; simply, incorrect. He shouldn’t feel warmth.
Despite the darkness of nothing around him looking to be an infinite space, with his physical sensation returning to him, he learns it’d only been behind his closed eyes, like he’d been asleep. With much difficulty, they flinch a thread’s width open— light from the other side of his skin filters in and sends a pulsing ache through his irises and to the back of his head.
Light? he thinks gratefully, only to wince, suddenly able to “hear” his own thoughts. And so, he tests his voice, too, a murmur escaping past dried lips; the taste of blood follows quickly along, and Suguru grimaces.
The one sensation that has yet to return, the most frustrating of them: his ability to sense Cursed energy. The light around him is mostly white, and blinding enough that Suguru finds his bloodied sleeve curtaining his vision.; it takes time, but eventually, the white fades into familiar scenery. And, if he weren’t already dead, the sight alone would stop his heart.
Death is strange.
Because whether or not the concepts of Heaven and Hell exist in a physical, material sense, it didn’t really matter. Suguru’s first instinct had been to dub that dark, nothing space as Purgatory; whatever gods or higher powers existed, they were busy making a determination on his soul and stuck him there. It didn’t take much to convince him that what scene laid before him was truly of Hell. He’d already been condemned; finally figuring out how to see again was his subconscious acceptance of it.
No, in Hell, there’s a matching living room set, the lacquered coffee table with trash strewn across it; an area rug with crumbs set deep into each space of mesh and yarn; a kitchen with counters full of dirty, moulding dishes, at least a week’s worth; empty liquor bottles; a seven-foot-tall half-decorated plastic pine tree—
Maybe this is my personal Hell, Suguru wonders, head turning slowly to take in the familiarity of the apartment before him. But why is it so familiar?
A choked noise alerts him; Suguru spins one-hundred-and-eighty degree mid-air, feet unable to touch the floor and hovering several inches above it. It’s impossible for him to be winded, but a feeling of trepidation rests heavy atop his lungs. Because this must be his personal Hell— if the grief-shrunken woman were anyone else, he might not have thought so. But it isn’t.
Suguru crouches before you, lips parted and hand outstretched to brush a finger along your cheek— instinct. That’s what it is. His instinct to comfort you begets the truth of his death, and a gasp escapes him when his fingers simply pass through your face.
Calling out your name does nothing, he learns. You suddenly stir, but not for the reason Suguru had hoped. Flexing your fingers, it looks like your arm had gone numb from where it’d been tucked and curled against your chest. He calls for you once more. Nothing.
You let out a soundless breath, and Suguru frowns, desiring nothing more than to hear your voice once more. His teeth grit in sudden determination, and he reaches for you again.
“Get up,” Suguru insists of you. Please. His hand, meant to rouse you as he’d pleaded with a shake to your shoulder, only passes through your bicep; you shiver, and tuck into yourself even further.
This hellish scene makes sense now. The dirty dishes, the garbage everywhere, and even you, sitting before him, with your makeup only partially removed. Black cradles the soft skin beneath your eyes, and even stains the inner corners of them.
They’re open, at least, Suguru thinks, relieved. If he can’t hear you, at least he can look into your eyes.
Even in death, his chest aches. With guilt, with anxiety, with that same frustration from before— he’d accepted defeat so easily, and ended up being put down. Suguru wonders if you know what Satoru did. Knowing him, he wouldn’t have mentioned it.
But Suguru knows you too well. Knew you. With everything that’s gone on, everything that she’s seen in spite of Suguru’s efforts to keep you away from certain truths of the Jujutsu world— you’ve always been a “clever girl”. Even if you don’t have much Cursed energy yourself, even if you can’t see Curses too clearly, the walk of humanity’s ignorance and that of a Jujutsu Sorcerer’s duty is one across a rotting wooden bridge.
You’d insisted. Both he and Satoru knew early on how difficult it would end up being to say no to their friend. You insisted, and so, you learned— perhaps, a little too much. To take in the amount of horror that lay behind a thin, “magical” veil, had been a lot. Once, Suguru thought it a mistake to even bother. But if not you, then who? Who would have been the one to insist on having their arms wrapped around him at nearly all waking moments?
While there’d been an attempt at giving him advice and guidance from those within the Jujutsu community, despite your knowledge of it, you’d yet to experience anything it could throw your way; all along, your Jujutsu Sorcerer friends had done well to ensure that stayed the case— no Curses would touch you, not even a single hair on your body.
And so, as an outsider with an outsider’s perspective, as Suguru began to spiral, you did your damnedest to distract him, to pull him away from the thoughts that filtered into his head. What he would whittle out at you, either absentmindedly or purposefully, quite frankly, frightened you. For humanity’s sake, and, for his.
That was not the Suguru you remember coming to know. Whatever had happened in between your first meeting, and during that escort mission from ten years back of his and Satoru’s, had been enough to send him so askew as to defect from being a simple Jujutsu Sorcerer, and to become a mass murderer. All those thoughts lingered and festered like the curdling inside an abscess until it popped in a most horrifying way.
It… didn’t improve. Ten years had been quick to pass. The contact between you and Suguru and you and Satoru and your other friends made through the college persisted. It’d been difficult not to say anything about the other to them, and you made sure not to let a single word out, no “Suguru said”’s or “Satoru told me”’s whatsoever.
Of course, they knew. They could sense each other’s Cursed energy on you each time. It was a bitter sting, and you, a sweet reminder.
It hurt. For years, it hurt. It hurt when you would, on your bi-annual, month-long visits, spend half of the time with Satoru and those at the college, and the other half with Suguru, minding your steps and your entire being, really, when you’d been under the same roof as his fellow Curse Users (who, if not for the threat of Suguru’s presence, perhaps had half a mind to take care of the “little monkey” that had shown up).
Oh, but the pain, the stress, the fear and the anguish, none of it spent over the past decade, even the past nearly thirty years, could even begin to compare to this. Never to this.
How long had she spent out here? Suguru had been quick to float through the rest of your apartment— some spots remained untouched, while the rest were scathed and scorned by neglect. Upon closer examination, some of those dishes had begun to mold. Your bedroom door was shut, and quite obviously slammed shut by the way the latch piece suddenly overlaps the wooden frame. It hasn’t been budged, not even once, the splinters still in place.
How many days has it been since he’d passed? Suguru recalls the calendar hooked on an up-curved nail next to the desk in your bedroom, and moves to grab the handle, only to sigh when his hand passes through the door entirely. Right.
It’s a strange sensation, to pass through a solid object as a ghost. A ghost? Somehow, it’s even stranger to call himself as such. But he slips in easily; a depressing thought.
Your room is different than how you typically leaves it. The duvet’s been shoved to the foot of the bed as if in a hurry, slippers flung almost six feet from the other; something’s broken near the entrance to your bathroom, where the light had been left on— oh, it’s the toothbrush cup. Something pinches in Suguru’s still heart when he sees his toothbrush lying next to yours.
Suguru suddenly understands why the door had been so aggressively shut from the outside, as if the dozens of photos of the two of you that litter the walls wouldn’t have brought him to a much faster conclusion. Even if he’d noticed how, atop that same skewed duvet, even more photos sat, these ones framed behind glass, some shattered and some having survived being thrown there. The disarray and discord shut tight behind the broken door, out of sight and barely out of mind, was to put him out of your mind. His death out of your mind.
The twenty-fifth of December has been circled almost too enthusiastically, by several circles of red and green; even a couple of glossy, gold adhesive stars had been place around the date. Christmas. As opposed to its box, that of the twenty-fourth, and the rest of the last week of the month, every other day had been crossed out, already lived through. The Night Parade of a Hundred Demons was set for the twenty-fourth, the same date Suguru had been bested by a fifteen-year-old; the same date Satoru ended his life.
Anguished, Suguru is quick to shift back into the hallway, thoughts racing while he raced back to you. You haven’t budged in your settee, no less a part of the furniture surrounding you. How long had she been sitting there? He feared to learn the answer. Assumedly, you’d only gotten up to use the washroom. Unfortunately, by the state of you, it hadn’t looked like you’d managed to make it into the shower for a couple of days, at least.
So then, it’s been at least that long, Suguru decides, swiping a hand down his face. It curls to the back of his neck to massage away the phantom tension built there.
If he had a say in this, in any of it, you’d be sitting in his lap right now. His arms would be wrapped tight around you, or he’d be smoothing a large hand along your muscles, and your favourite blanket would be draped across your body. He’d be speaking softly, you’d be trying to listen without dissociating.
He wouldn’t be deceased, is his point.
There’s few things Suguru can find himself regretting right now. But you, having to leave you, is his biggest regret.
When your cell phone rings, he startles. The ring itself is loud, but the rattling of the vibration against the coffee table is drilling. He turns to see who’s calling, bent and crouched on his haunches, and finds the screen lit up with a photo of yours’ and Satoru’s faces. He’s pinching your cheek between his thumb and forefinger, expression amused by your challenge where your own fingers had sunken into his thick white hair to pull it from its roots.
The quality of the photo isn’t so perfect— if Suguru had to guess, he’d say it might’ve been taken a good almost ten years ago. They look younger, after all. It isn’t difficult to guess that the photographer of the scene had been Shoko, what with the smoke floating past the lens when the shot was taken. And despite the scene captured, they looked happy. You look happy. Happy enough. A stark contrast to your currently sunken visage.
Either way, seeing it irks him.
You barely look to your phone long enough to register the name on the screen; your blurred, untrained gaze only allows you to see that someone is calling, and leaves it at that. The calling screen fades to your locked screen’s screensaver, and it’s a rather flattering photo of Suguru, himself, despite being one taken candidly. He remembers he’d lightly scolded you for it, and insisted that you take one of the both of them. Suguru’s sneaking suspicion now is that you’d set that photo as your home screen, instead.
It’s only a moment or two later than it begins to rings once again— Satoru, of course.
The noise you make is choked. It’s a mixture of frustration and detest, but you make it, all the way up until you reach through Suguru and grabs it. There’s a moment of hesitation, but you press the button to answer, lifts the phone to your ear, and listens, wordless.
Suguru rises onto a single knee and shifts closer to eavesdrop. Mostly, it’s Satoru speaking. This is the first time in the six days since the event that you’d answered your phone, apparently, meaning that the current date must be the thirtieth, or the thirty-first. He asks if you’d eaten, if you’d bathed, if you’d called any of your family back home (since you hadn’t contacted anyone from the school). He asks why you won’t speak, why you won’t answer his questions. There’s a gentle four-tone knock at the door that pairs with the four sharp sounds that echo from Satoru’s side of the line, and you flinch— somehow, Suguru’s finds relief in your reaction.
His voice calls opposite the front door, and the phone. “Open up.”
You stir, but not enough to satisfy Suguru.
Both he and Satoru chorus your name. He swallows, and watches your expression shift between the phone and the door with a trembling lip. More frustration? Or is she about to cry?
“Go open the door,” Suguru pleads. “Let him help you. Please.”
He reaches for you again, for the hand gripping your phone, and suddenly, you jolt with a gasp, drawing your hand into your chest, tired eyes widened—
“Are you okay?” Satoru calls.
The phone slips through your fingers, sliding off your lap when you go to catch it, only for it to clatter onto the floor.
With a frantic shout of your name, the door suddenly bursts open, making both you and the incorporeal, non-physical man next to you, jump. In the doorway, Satoru huffs, clearly anxious by the downturned lilt of his lips. He’s quick to slip out of his shoes, minding the bags ruffling in his hands when he moves toward the kitchen, pausing to take in the sight of it through the wrappings over his eyes, and whatever words he’d been about to say, dies in his throat at the look on your face.
It’s akin to lividity; your feelings have only been strangling you since hearing Satoru’s voice. Rage fuels your adrenaline. The tears streaming down your flushed cheeks do not accompany the sound of your grief, and instead, drowns it. You’d been avoiding Satoru on purpose; this, of course, neither he nor Suguru knew, and Satoru only thought you were avoiding everyone.
The gangly man crosses into the living room in only few steps. You bristle like a cat, your shoulders rising and arms wrapping around yourself as if shying and shielding away from Satoru. He pauses once more, lips parting as if to speak, but they firmly shut a moment later.
Instead, he sets the bags down — some are filled with easy-made non-perishables, and the others, pre-made bentos and a bag of melon pan — and moves toward the bathroom with a broom in hand. The sound of rushing water fills the apartment, accompanied by the clattering of porcelain into the dustbin. Suguru watches from afar as Satoru then begins his search for a towel and a facecloth, finding it in the hallway cupboard just a door down, and sets them on the counter next to the sink before moving back into the living room. In an attempt to regale you, he tears the blanket covering up to your knees away, draping it across the back of the cushion, but it only worsens your fury.
Suguru presses his chin into his palm, floating midair a few feet away to watch the scene unfold. He should know better than to do something that stupid.
Your attempt at keeping out of Satoru’s hold quickly and easily fails. Once the blanket came off, you’d been an easy target, all four limbs exposed and easy to seize, thanks to your lethargy. His movements are simple, but quick— he’s got an arm around your waist like you weigh nothing, keeping you dangling by your middle on his way back to the washroom. Depositing you on the closed toilet seat, he then crosses his arms.
Nose upturned and crinkled, he regards you from up high. “You stink.”
You stare at him, gaze lidded by fatigue. It doesn’t take you long to realize what he’s just said— nor would you have to speak the same language to understand it. The look on his face says it all, anyway. You smell.
Six days since you’ve left the house, six days since you’ve showered, six days since you’ve eaten anything remotely healthy, if anything at all. The past week’s been such a blur, you can’t even remember when you’d brushed your teeth last, though a quick swipe of your tongue across them becomes an easy tell.
The morning of the twenty-fifth was quite possibly the most terrible day of your life. Not only were you told that Suguru passed away, you had to hear it twice— first from Satoru. Then, from Nanako and Mimiko. You’d only wished the whiplash their very different reactions gave you had been enough to numb your mind, but you felt everything. It wasn’t until you’d been alone in your apartment again, phone battery dead, that you’d been able to register what they’d said.
“He’s gone.” “Master Geto is dead!”
You don’t remember charging your phone. You don’t remember using the bathroom, let alone getting up off of that couch on your own. Sensations only came rushing back midway through this last phone call with Satoru, and then hit you with full-force, as he’d done with your front door. Now, you find yourself in front of your bathroom mirror, regarding your emaciated self, the only thing likely ingested besides alcohol being the bit of water you’d forced yourself to drink each day, but you hadn’t touched any food.
Hand over your abdomen, you wait a moment to tell if it feels properly empty enough to stomach a few bites. Maybe. For now, you’ll brush your teeth until the coating disappears from them, and take care of any matts in your hair. You’ll strip out of the clothing you’d last put on since slamming your bedroom door shut, and avoid Satoru’s gaze amidst all of this until you begin tugging off your flannel pajamas, where he shuts the door behind you.
Sparing Satoru a glance as he passes, Suguru pokes his head through the bathroom door. In spite of your obvious beauty, the longing that he stares at you with is one being the simple desire to stand beside you. To be the one to help undo a particularly nasty knot of hair found at the back of your hair, to have even drawn the bath for you himself and to help you lower yourself down into the water and to sit tub-side to keep you company. Seeing you in such a state has distracted him from the frustrations of not seeing his plans to fruition; that’d stopped being important from the moment he recognized your apartment.
You don’t move once you’ve lowered yourself into the bathtub. Head tilted back, your legs extend as far as the length of the tub allows for, and you shut your eyes. The heaving breath you take through your nose is held for a few extra moments until you release it with a cough and a massage to your throat.
Suguru’s gut twists when you’d yet to turn off the water, and he sticks his head out the bathroom door to find Satoru sat on the floor with his back against it, face pressed into his palms.
“Seeing you like this…” It shocks the man to hear him suddenly chuckle. “And yet I still can’t bring myself to curse you, Suguru,” he murmurs.
When Satoru still hears the bath running after it being few minutes later, he’s glad he doesn’t find himself having to break another one of your doors, and manages to turn off the faucet a few centimetres before it would overflow.
He calls for you again, eyes trained away from you. In your ears, the sound is dull. You opens your eyes, staring at where the bottoms of your feet press up against the end of the tub. “Can you sit up?”
With a little help, you do, Satoru having sat himself down on the toilet lid to push you into a ninety-degree angle. Finding yourself uncomfortable with the position, you gather your legs into your chest and rests your chin on your knees.
Satoru doesn’t ask for permission when he begins sudsing up your hair with vanilla-scented shampoo. At the rate of things, he’d easily suspected not getting a proper response from you, anyway. You’d be in here all night if he hadn’t decided to intervene.
Your feelings are still fresh. It hasn’t been a full week yet, not that there’s a limit on how long one is supposed to grieve. The last thing he wants to do is impose when it’s quite obvious that his presence isn’t entirely welcome. Deep in your subconscious, you know he knows you know that him being here might be the only thing to keep you out of the hole you’re unwittingly digging yourself into. If not him, then maybe Shoko or Nanamin— at the very least, someone would be here.
And certainly, it would’ve been more appropriate for Shoko to do this, to be helping you to bathe, but her time isn’t her own, nor are her hands. Even now, she’s still tending to the wounded. And with Nanamin assisting with the clean up out there, it’d only made sense for Satoru to be the next person to check up on you— it made more sense, considering whose hand it was that turned the restless tides into a tsunami.
Carefully, Satoru cradles the back of your head and carries it into the water, only up to your hairline, and begins to rinse. The process gets repeated for your conditioner, but when it comes time to soap up the face cloth, his body seems to stutter. Mostly dissociated, you still sense the change in Satoru’s rhythm. Glancing slightly over your shoulder, you note the cloth in his hand.
The relief that floods him is overwhelming when you raise your arm to stick your hand out for it. Suddenly a little more self-conscious of your position, Satoru averts his eyes, swivelling himself to face the opposite direction of the bath. Probably the first time in days, if he can recall correctly, but the smile that appears on him is genuine. The relief is knowing his friend still has the will to go on.
You finish quickly. When Satoru asks if you’d want to stay in the bath a little longer, maybe make it into a bubble bath, you supply him with the smallest of shakes of your head.
The water was warm. The soap smelled nice. The sound of rushing water, pleasing. Even hearing Satoru’s voice, despite your obvious reservations, soothes and mends one of the many cracks in your heart. A large part of you had been content to grieve into your couch for a long while more, even with Satoru breaking your door down.
How much… did you know? You became aware of Suguru’s plan thanks to the twins blurting it out, and spent the entirety of the twenty-fourth spun into a panic, no updates, no word from the girls, from Suguru, nothing, until Christmas Day. The build-up, the lack of contact, knowing how dangerous Suguru’s plan would be and what it could result in, even with the little knowledge you had on the Jujutsu world, learning that his plan failed, learned that Suguru was killed, it was just too much, too much, too much, too much—
The water around you sloshes violently against the sides of the tub, spilling over the sides and soaking Satoru’s pant leg. He jerks in place, quick to grab your biceps to keep you from slipping any further.
“Don’t touch me!” you suddenly spit at him, angrily twisting and contorting yourself to get out of his grip. He barely flinches — he’d expected it eventually, anyhow — and pulls you upright onto your feet. Suguru, however, is quick to float between them, instinct carrying his will to intervene.
“You’ll fall,” both he, and Suguru with his hand outstretched, tell you. A large stone settles in his throat when you shudder, his fingertips having already passed through your flesh when he’d caught himself, and he retracts his translucent hand away from her.
This is the second time she’s reacted to me like that, Suguru notes with a frown. He backs away into the corner of the bathroom, floating cross-legged over the sink, and watches as your struggling dies down into protestant whining and trembling. Sorry. I’m sorry.
Satoru waits until you’re calm and still enough before he starts helping dry you with a fluffy green towel, ruffling the ends of your hair and patting down your body with the least amount of jostling, before wrapping it snugly around you. Once more, he sits you on the toilet lid and begins combing tending to your hair. When he’s finished, you surprise him by taking the comb from his hands, to fiddle with the thin, plastic teeth of it on the pads of your fingers, gaze seemingly locked onto the repeated gesture.
Tone hushed, gentle, he speaks your name. You sniffle.
“I… really loved doing his hair,” you whisper. You lowers the comb. “He had… the softest hair.”
Satoru chuckles, and gently takes the comb away from you to return it to the drawer.
“Remember when it was short, that one time?” he asks. You adjust the tightness of the towel wrapped over your chest, nodding.
“I told him I’d never forgive him for letting it get cut off like that,” you answer. “Even… if it wasn’t his fault… I’m glad it grew back.”
“Mhm.” He steps away from you to squeeze a line of toothpaste on your brush before handing it to you. “Here.”
You hum, a dry, single toned note that expresses your disinterest, but you take it from him anyway, and wet the head of it under the tap.
It would be easy for Suguru to deny it, to look at your situation and see you to remain as lost as you’d looked when he’d first appeared in your apartment— he hadn’t been wrong to fear the worst and assume you might not be able to pull yourself out of it, but he had been incorrect to not think that the others wouldn’t try their hardest to keep you out of it, themselves. Knowing Satoru, well, he probably decided he owes it to you. Not just because they’re friends, either.
He doesn’t lead you toward your bed once you’re finally finished, figuring that you seeing all those photos still laying there wouldn’t do you much good, and instead guides you to the larger of your two couches, sitting you down once more and propping your back against a couple of throw pillows.
“I’m going to make you food, okay?” he tells you. The promise of it clearly comes with the fact that he’d have to wash your dishes first, but he doesn’t bother to tell you the obvious. Despite his speediness, you manage to fall asleep in record time, slumped into the back of the couch cushion and the pillows and snoring softly.
Suguru leans away from you, floating upward from where he’d been kneeling at your side. He could, very easily, watch you sleep for hours, has watched you sleep for hours. But the more his conscious and subconscious intermingled with each other, the more the notion of your eventual recovery had turned fact. You would move on. Eventually. More than anyone, Suguru could understand how healing takes time; he’d experienced it for himself, seen it happen for Mimiko and Nanako, and for his allies. You would have help, have your friends with you to help you mend.
“Satoru.” The white haired man lowers a freshly washed ceramic bowl into the dish rack right of the sink. Eyes trained on a bead of water sliding down the neck of the tap, he finally sighs when it drops back into the sink, and braces himself against the counter with his forearms. “Satoru.”
“Suguru.” He flinches. “I’ll take care of her.”
Despite already floating, Suguru suddenly feels much lighter; his body already so translucent, he watches his hands start to fade with his acceptance. You would be alright. You’d survive this. You won’t be alone.
And, dead or alive, he would always be with you.