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Suguru’s parents still live in Okinawa where he grew up. They live in his maternal grandmother’s home, a one-story building tucked away in the shadow of a mountain. It’s a traditional old house that still smells a little bit like his grandmother’s favorite brand of cigarettes even now, years after her passing.
His key still works, and he has time to stop off in his childhood bedroom to drop off the twins.
The room is still the same as it was the last time he was home, a little time capsule devoted to his childhood. There’s a little dust on the shelves and the alarm clock isn’t plugged in, but everything else is the same and mostly clean. He tucks Nanako and Mimiko in under a blanket that still smells like the detergent his mother uses, smiling at the sight of their little heads pressed together underneath the X-Japan poster he’d gotten when he was just a little bit older than the girls are now. However, his smile fades when he thinks of the hell he’d rescued them from.
Instead of lingering like he wants to - like he should - Suguru gets to his feet and then heads out. He shuts and seals the door behind him, trusting that even if the girls wake up, they won’t be able to break the lock out of curiosity.
His mother meets him when he’s halfway down the hallway. If Suguru gets his height from his father, he gets his looks from his mother. Barely shoulder height to him in her bare feet, Suguru’s mother is small and soft. She has a kind of classic beauty that’s never changed over the years and that supposedly caused Suguru’s father to walk into traffic because he was so distracted by her on their first meeting.
“Suguru,” she says, voice soft but filled with a clear delight. “What are you doing home? Are you on break?” She doesn’t know much about jujutsu – the school didn’t tell his parents anything and Suguru certainly doesn’t plan on telling them at this point in his life - but she has always greedily drank up the little drops of his life that Suguru has told her across the past few years. “Is Gojo-kun with you?”
Ah.
That… that hurts. He’d forgotten that he’d told his parents about Satoru, that on their one trip to Tokyo the winter of his first year, that they’d met (and liked) him.
Suguru reaches up and absently rubs at his chest where there’s a pang right above his heart. He shakes his head.
“No,” he says, his own voice soft. “Satoru didn’t come with me.”
Suguru’s mother frowns, her thin eyebrows drawing together with concern. She glances down the dark hallway at where he knows that she can probably, just barely, feel his cursed energy radiating from his childhood bedroom. “Did you – did you two have a fight?”
Satoru wants to laugh.
He wants to cry.
“Not yet,” Suguru says, throat tight. He thinks about what he has waiting for him in Tokyo if - no, when - he returns. Satoru will probably kill him, he thinks. He’ll probably have to. “But, Ma – I don’t think we’re best friends anymore.”
Suguru feels his face crumple, sees the expression matched in his mother’s face, and then she’s there, a gentle touch to his cheek before she reaches for his hand. It’s been so long since Suguru has held his mother’s hand, and the sensation of her soft fingers nearly undoes him entirely.
“Come now,” Suguru’s mother says, as gentle as anything. “Let’s get you some tea and we can talk. Your father will know what to do.”
It’s late at night, and Suguru’s father is a deep sleeper, so his mother decides to settle him at the kitchen table before going to wake her husband.
“Let’s just spend a little time chatting before I get the old bear up,” his mother says with a mischievous smile that makes her dark eyes twinkle. “I haven’t seen you in so long, Suguru.”
It’s been months. It’d been winter the last time he visited his parents. The winter before the spring that changed everything. He remembers taking them out to dinner at a local restaurant a short drive away from home, using his first big paycheck to treat them to expensive yakiniku.
Suguru feels a faint smile tug at the corners of his mouth. “I missed you,” Suguru says softly, gaze locked on to his mother’s small frame as she putters around the kitchen putting together tea and some light snacks. “It’s been – Well, a lot has happened.”
His mother sets the tea down first, a cup of tea with a tea bag floating conspicuously in the steaming water. At the look Suguru gives her, his mother laughs quietly and slaps playfully at his shoulder.
“Your aunt sent over a box from England,” she says, defending herself with a smile. “I have to use it up at some point, don’t I?” Her fingers skate up from Suguru’s shoulder to where his hair falls, loose and tangled around his shoulders. “When did you start growing your hair out, Suguru? It’s so much longer than it used to be.”
How does Suguru walk his mother through over a year of turmoil in his mind? He’d described his cursed technique to her once, the sensation of swallowing metaphysical toxic waste and taking that darkness into himself. She’d cried in his arms and asked, “Are you sure you have to do this?” in a trembling voice.
How can he tell her something far worse?
How does he explain that he watched a girl – years younger than his only cousins - murdered right in front of him because he was too weak to protect her? How does he talk to her about the hallucinations? About how he thought about killing himself every night for months after? About how he once spent two weeks between missions laying in filth in his bedroom? How does he tell her about the village that he wiped out? About the girls sleeping in his childhood bedroom because the adults who were supposed to protect them chose to torment them instead?
He shouldn’t.
He can’t.
Instead, Suguru shakes his head.
“I’m trying something new,” he says instead of the words that want to pour out of his throat like the vomit he fights back every single time that he swallows a curse – and half the time when he tries to eat food. “Does it – does it look alright?”
Suguru’s mother, ever insightful, combs her fingers through his hair.
“It’s a little dry,” she says softly. “Do you want me to help?” She scratches Suguru’s scalp a little, nails sending a delightful buzz up and down his spine, and then continues speaking. “Let me go get your father up. I can get the oil and trim your split ends after.”
Suguru’s father is a broad tree of a man with shoulder-length black hair gone gray at the temples.
Even taller than Suguru, Suguru’s father has to dip his head so that he doesn’t bang his forehead as he enters the tiny kitchen and watches his wife comb her fingers through their son’s hair. He offers Suguru a tight, close-lipped smile and then takes a seat across from him.
“You’re here late,” the old man says, deep voice a warm rumble.
“I was in the area,” Suguru says with a shrug.
His father frowns, but doesn’t call Suguru out on the obvious lie. A two-hour flight from Tokyo isn’t exactly convenient and they all know it.
“Are you finished with school?”
There’s that familiar pang in Suguru’s chest. This time, he doesn’t rub at his heart, choosing instead to pick up his tea and sip at it slowly. “I think so,” Suguru murmurs after a moment. “I mean… I don’t think I’m going back.”
Neither of Suguru’s parents are well-versed in the minutia of jujutsu society, but Suguru’s father is his guardian. He knows more than most people do, and that’s enough for him to accept Suguru’s words.
“Are you planning to stay here,” Suguru’s father asks.
Suguru shakes his head. “I’m going back to Tokyo soon,” he says. “I just wanted to stop by before I did.”
Suguru’s father dips his head in a nod as if he understands.
“What are you planning to do,” he says, the faintest frown twisting at his mouth before it’s smoothed away. “You know you can always come back here and finish school, right?”
If only Suguru could.
“I think… I think I need to start over,” Suguru says. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
Suguru talks to his parents for another hour. They talk about everything in their quiet countryside lives, careful not to bring up what they fear might be happening in Suguru’s life. But as the night stretches on, they get tired.
His father goes to bed first, squeezing Suguru’s shoulder as he passes by. His mother lingers a little longer, playing with his hair before she puts it in a half-up, half-down style that she’s delighted to do now that his hair is longer.
“Wake me up before you go,” she says, peering down at Suguru’s face as if she can see right through him. “I’ll make you something for the road.”
Suguru presses his lips together, offering his mother a close-mouthed smile.
“I will,” he says, before impulsively saying, “I love you, Ma.”
She blinks down at him, her eyes wide with surprise. Then she smiles, a little softer than before with her eyes surprisingly damp-looking, and leans down to kiss his forehead.
“I love you too,” she says, gently. “Sleep well.”
Suguru sits in the kitchen for another hour or two, until he knows his parents are asleep. His thoughts are racing a mile a minute, as he tries to figure out if what he’s doing is really for the best.
He knows he could leave. He can go and get the girls and take them back to Tokyo. His parents would be alive, they’d be fine –
Until the other sorcerers got to them.
“I’m doing this for them,” Suguru says aloud in a desperate attempt to convince himself that he’s doing the right thing. He stares down at the cold cup of tea before him for a few more minutes and then pushes himself up to stand.
The hallway that leads to his parents’ bedroom feels extra long as he walks down the polished wood flooring. Maybe he’s taking slower steps than usual, but the walk has never felt this long before. The closer he gets, the more he imagines he can hear his father’s snoring or his mother’s gentle puffs of breath.
The pain in his chest is back and it just feels like it gets worse the closer he comes to the door. By the time he curls his fingers around the handle, he’s trembling hard enough that he’s afraid that he’ll wake them.
But, eventually, he opens the door slowly enough to muffle the sound and –
When he’s finished the task that brought him all the way to Okinawa, Suguru goes outside to sit on the steps on the other side of the house from his parent’s bedroom.
Even though he’s outside in the fresh air, every breath that Suguru takes still smells and tastes like iron. He can still hear the last noises that his parents made, simultaneous shocked inhales before their breath rushed out from their chests in a final exhale.
Fuck.
Suguru tries to pull out his lighter and a half-crushed box of cigarettes from his pockets, but his hands shake too much to do that. Even if he did manage to get the cigarettes out, he probably wouldn’t be able to light them.
This was necessary, Suguru tells himself as he stares down at his trembling fingers. He didn’t have a choice. He loved – loves – his parents too much to welcome them into the world that he wants to build. They wouldn’t be safe, but most of all? They wouldn’t be happy with him.
Looking up at the suddenly blurry sky, Suguru finds himself thinking that it’s fitting that tonight of all nights would be a rainy one.
He ignores the fact that the sky was clear just a few hours before.