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Chapter Text

Shoko catches him after his shower looking like death warmed over, takes one good look at his face, lingering at the dark smudges under his eyes and says without any preempt, "The school needs to offer therapy sessions."

He blinks slowly as he tries to register her words, individually then as a whole, and once it makes sense he snorts in derision, nearly tempted to roll his eyes if he weren’t filled to the brim with apathy, "As if they care enough to mandate that."

"They will if they don't wanna lose all of their promising students to something as avoidable as mental burnout," she says with something like a threat in her tone.

He shrugs, "Might be too late for some."

Suguru thinks of Haibara who's dead and stored away in the morgue waiting for cremation, only half of his body retrieved back from that disaster of a mission that went beyond simple misclassification and went into full-on negligence. He thinks of Nanami who'd decided to transfer out at the end of the school year to a normal high school to complete the rest of his education rather than stay around at a place where the ghost of his dead friend haunts the hallways and their classrooms. Too late for his kouhais that didn't even get to finish halfway into their second year of being at Jujutsu High.

He thinks of himself and his own decline, not sure if there's any amount of talking that would be enough to repair the damage that the Sorcerer Killer carved into his psyche as surely as they did into his body. The scar across his chest aches at the memory but his heart hurts more when he thinks of Riko's dead body and Satoru's dead eyes looking back at him across the growing chasm between them.

"It's never too late," Shoko says, stern and sounding like she's ready to throw hands over it.

Suguru's not so sure about that but doesn't bother mentioning it out loud. Despite this, he has an inkling Shoko already knows what he's feeling, what he's thinking.

She offers him a cigarette, a kind of peace offering, and he wills himself to take it.

---

Suguru only knew something was wrong when he doesn't see Satoru for several days in a row, maybe even nearly two weeks since he last properly talked to him, maybe a month since he last saw Satoru smile even though it’s a small thing, a sardonic curl to his lips. Not even a glimpse of white hair or blue eyes.

He hasn’t heard him give a proper laugh since Okinawa nearly a year ago by this point, a fading memory of Satoru running through the rising tide and splashing water at Riko.

He's got a mission to go to later all the way out in the countryside at least half a day's worth of train rides and connections and a whole lot of walking to get to. He thinks he'll have to come back to find him afterwards when he's done with it but there's a pinched look on Shoko's face that's uncharacteristic enough that it makes him pause on the way out.

"You haven't seen him." She repeats after he answers her question on Satoru's whereabouts, and the tense look on her face makes the bags under her eyes darken considerably. "How long ago?"

He shrugs, tries not to feel guilty over it since they were both busy with solo missions, still trying to make up for that disaster of an escort mission and the loss of one student, no gaps in their schedules to line up for something as simple as a greeting. If Satoru wanted to find him then he would've, missions and schedules be damned. "I don't know, maybe over two weeks ago by this point."

Somehow, her expression gets even more strained as she tells him, "I haven't seen him for a month. They've been giving him back-to-back missions without rest for basically that entire time and I haven't seen hide nor hair of that stupid idiot."

He shrugs again, indifferent to it when he's forced to wear the same shoes. "Satoru is strong; he can handle it."

"He's not a god!" She snaps, "You said so yourself. He's just a kid like us."

Suguru bites back just as hard, angry and indignant, "Yeah, sent out to die during some godforsaken mission for some god-forsaken monkeys in this god-forsaken world!"

He stuns Shoko, and he stuns himself with his own words. He turns away from her, feeling regret but not enough to apologize for it, not when he knows the world will only take that apology and spit it right back in his face. He feels remorse. For himself, for Satoru, for Shoko, but he doesn't think he has much more to give to a place like this that only knows how to take and take and leave nothing behind.

When the silence between them stretches on for too long, enough to make him start to itch under her direct stare, he starts to walk away towards the torii gates. He's got a mission to get to and if he leaves now he might arrive with just enough daylight left to take care of the curse terrorizing the small village.

"Please help me find him, before you go," she pleads to his turned back and it's not often that Shoko asks for help. He can't recall her ever asking for help in the entire time they've been students here, never once in their years together as classmates. "I went to Yaga-sensei but he said he hasn't seen him in a while; they've mostly communicated via text and it pisses me off so much that our sensei isn't doing jack about it."

"Have you tried his room?" He suggests, not quite willing to lend a hand for something as simple as playing hide and seek with Satoru. "Or the kitchen? The lounge? The vending machines?"

"I have. Either I keep missing him or he's avoiding me. I'm starting to think it's the latter and I figured we could double our chances if we're both looking for him."

Suguru lifts his hand up to his face and presses his thumb down hard into the middle of his forehead.

"Have you considered that maybe he's not back yet?" He tries and immediately feels guilt-ridden over it; Shoko is an expert in Reverse Cursed Technique and can pick out individual signatures of every person even if they stood together in a tight pack. Despite her expertise, the current downside to her technique is that while she's good at dealing broad strokes, she's not yet good enough to do things with total accuracy. So he knows that she knows enough about Satoru's cursed energy to figure out that he's in the school grounds but not enough to pinpoint exactly where.

He drops his hand and forces himself to apologize for it, making an offer as penitence, "Sorry. Why don't you try talking to Yaga-sensei again? I'll look around for him."

At this point, he's going to end up arriving in the dead of night in some village in the middle of nowhere. He can still take down the curse although it'll be slightly more of a nuisance without any light, especially when tonight is supposed to be a new moon. In a village that small and that far away from any major cities, the night would be pure and dark.

There's no noise behind him but it takes a while for him to pick out a shuffle of clothing as she gets ready to run off to find their sensei to perhaps yell at them. "Text me when you find him," she tells him and doesn't wait for a reply before she's turning heel and hurrying off.

He starts off at the vending machines since it's the closest one to him right now. There's nobody there and he can't tell how empty or how full the machines are from the outside; if the stuff Satoru normally buys are a little bit less than usual or has been recently refilled, so he moves on.

The lounge is empty when he gets there, no empty candy wrappers or chip packets in sight. Not even a single crumb on the cushions. There's a thin layer of dust over the low table that even he's surprised by. The three of them used to come here every day or so, heckling at whatever's on TV and munching away on some snacks but it's been over a month since then; all of them too caught up with their own personal problems to spend as much time together as they used to.

As soon as he sees that the kitchen is empty he moves on from there too, choosing not to linger when there's no point to it.

He heads over to Satoru's room and pauses down the hallway just before rounding the corner when he smells the thick stench of blood in the air and feels himself go cold and still at the memory of the last time he smelled this much blood at the school grounds outside of the damn morgue. He suddenly bursts out into a dead run, feet crashing hard into the floor in an attempt to propel himself forward faster and faster until he reaches the room and yanks the door open hard enough that it crashes into the opposite wall in a hard splinter and he has to hold out a hand to stop it from slamming back at him.

Satoru's lying on the floor in a mess of his own blood, a knife gripped tight in his hand and he feels static buzzing in his mind.

"Satoru!" He yells as he stumbles inside and lands hard on his knees beside him, one hand going under his shoulders to pull him up from the blood-stained floor and the other hand up to staunch the bleeding even though there doesn't seem to be any fresh blood seeping out of his wounds. His heart lurches as he tries to feel for a heartbeat, tries to hear him breathing, tries to feel anything beyond the cold, tacky feeling of blood soaked into clothing and into white hair. "Satoru!"

A groan, and then a hoarse voice telling him to, "Shut up."

Relief floods him temporarily, letting him take a breath before he's shaking his head and trying to get his other arm under Satoru's legs to pick him up and take him to Shoko.

It gets a reaction and Satoru struggles hard enough that Suguru has no choice but to drop his legs and stop trying to lift him up.

"What are you doing?! Stop it!" Suguru shouts and tries again with worse results than before as Satoru pushes him away roughly and scrambles backwards until his back hits the edge of the bed hard enough to knock it away a couple of inches, getting bloodstains onto the sheets and furniture. It's then Suguru notices the bloody knife still clutched tightly in his hand held up in the space between them and the sight of it makes his heart stop and tremble.

He recognizes it. As viscerally as the cross-shaped scar on his chest. He thought it'd been stored away in the Cursed Warehouse.

His mind whirls - was it stolen? Was Satoru assigned the mission to retrieve it only to get badly hurt in the process? He thinks it’s horribly unfair that he’s forced to face the thing that ripped into him but at least it’s back within the school grounds.

"Give me the knife, please."

"I can't."

There's something in the tone of Satoru's voice but Suguru doesn't focus on it as he opens his palms out to placate him even though they're covered in blood that's starting to get tacky and cold. "Yeah, you can. You're okay, you're in Jujutsu High; you're safe here," he says as softly and as calmly as he can manage while still running high on adrenaline, "Come on, just pass it to me, okay?" He doesn’t want Satoru to have to touch the tool that cut into him.

Suguru watches Satoru's grip tightens over the handle, fresh blood dripping off the end. "No, I need it."

"There's no one here that will hurt you, I promise," he tells him as he tries inching closer on his knees but he sees the way bright blue eyes widen in agitation and Suguru forces himself to stop.

"I need it," he says again and it's then that Suguru picks up on it, or the lack of it, and it reminds him horribly of that day he came crashing in through the doors to see Satoru holding up Riko's dead body after stealing her back from the Time Vessel Association. He can't help the anguish he feels at the dull tone of Satoru's voice, gone is the lilt and cheeky laughter, replaced with a shadow and a pale imitation of his best friend.

It doesn't make sense. Nothing gets past Infinity these days. The last time anything did was the day they lost Riko and even then, Satoru's never needed to resort to using weapons to give his enemies a beatdown when his fists and Six Eyes techniques are more than enough.

"W-what do you need it for?" He asks, hoping to talk him down from a bad situation, hoping to get the both of them to a place where neither of them are in fight or flight mode.

"It's the only way I know I can feel anything anymore."

"What...?" His hands start to shake even harder, in fear and panic at the idea that Satoru did this to himself, not that he somehow teleported here from a mission gone bad.

Satoru's face is startlingly blank as he repeats, "I can't feel anything, Suguru; I haven't been able to since Riko died."

Suguru freezes, and it's then he notices the pattern of the blood stains, the way the clothing has been ripped apart from the top where it meets his neck down to his hip. It's a near match from what he remembers of that day and it makes Suguru want to throw up at the thought that Satoru hurt himself in this way.

"...Why?" He says in a hush, his voice failing him as he stares at the knife and the ripped edges of his uniform. "Why would you do this, Satoru?"

"I should've died."

He feels like his soul is cracking down the middle at the hopelessness of his friend's voice, but nothing could prepare him for the pain of listening to Satoru whisper guiltily under his breath.

"I don't know why I'm alive."

---

Suguru signs the paper that Shoko gives him when he seeks her out some days later. A petition to say he wants therapy as part of the care the school is supposed to provide to them and watches as Satoru does absolutely nothing.

---

In the end, there's nothing Shoko can do. Satoru had already healed up the damage on his body before Suguru even crashed through his doors but left a whole lot of blood behind, enough that it would take days to clean up not just the sight of it but the smell from his room, too. Shoko is visibly upset but she keeps her tone placid as she tells Satoru that he'd probably be assigned a new room somewhere else on the campus.

Suguru watches Satoru, watches how he doesn't react at all. Not to the idea of moving into a different room, not to the sight of his ripped uniform being placed into a trash bag to be tossed out, not to the smell of his own blood permeating the air and drowning their lungs in it.

Satoru is shirtless but there really isn't anything left on his body to heal, no wounds to stitch up, nothing to let scar over. The bedsheets are a goner from where he's sitting on it and Suguru doesn't know what to do, not when he feels just as bad as Satoru looks.

"Go wash up, Satoru," she orders and they both watch him blink slowly but eventually get up and walk out of the room as is, bloody and shirtless and without his portable shower caddy.

The both of them are quiet and still as they listen to his footsteps drag and fade down the hallway. It feels like the ringing in his ears grow louder to compensate for the silence and he wants for someone, anyone, to break it.

"You should get cleaned up, too," she adds and Suguru finally looks down at his own body where smears of blood cover the top half of his uniform and dried puddles of it form around his knees from where he'd knelt down in Satoru's blood. His arms and hands are the worst off, looking as if he'd dipped them both into a river of it.

The knife is on the floor by Shoko's feet but he knows she'll eventually take it and toss it right back into the Cursed Warehouse. He hopes she throws it as far away inside the building as possible, never to see the light of day ever again.

He lets out a quiet breath but doesn't say anything else as he picks up Satoru's things and goes back into his room to grab a change of clothes and items before heading to the showers.
He can hear the water running when he steps in through the doors, and the faintest hints of steam from the hot water. He doesn't let himself look as he slides Satoru's stuff on the floor within easy reaching distance except…

Except Satoru's still got his shoes on, and his trousers. He's still clothed, just standing under the spray of scalding hot water with his head down and his posture looking like he's one touch away from toppling over. The water is hot enough to turn his pale skin pink and Suguru reaches to adjust the heat a little bit, never minding his sleeves getting wet as he does so, the water staining pink from it from the blood washing away from his hand.

"Hey," he starts off quietly, "Don't tell me you forgot how you're supposed to take showers," he tries to joke but knows it lands absolutely flat as he gets no reaction from Satoru. He doesn't even look like he's breathing.

There's something utterly desolate about seeing Satoru this way. Especially when he's supposed to be the strongest. Especially because he is the strongest. Except how can anyone see a god when he looks like this. How can anyone see anything else but a kid floundering to figure out what their role in this world is supposed to be.

"Satoru," he tries again and watches as pale fingers slowly reach up to unbuckle the belt around his hips, a jagged bit that's been cut by the knife catching on the hoops of his trousers but it eventually gets freed and dropped on the tiled floor with a loud clatter. Suguru turns away when fingers start to unbutton and unzip, choosing to go into the next stall, stripping away his own uniform to land in a pile under the showerhead so he can at least try to get some of the blood out to throw into the wash later. He tucks his shoes off to the side, but not before giving it a quick rinse to clean it up a bit first.

His own shower doesn't take long; it took longer to get his clothes to stop leaching pink out into the water, to make them come out clear. He slides them all to the side to wring them as dry as he can get them later, making a mental note to himself to bring a bucket for his and Satoru's clothes to transport and dump into the washing machine afterwards.

He's got a towel around his hips and another toweling his hair dry when he notices that Satoru's shower is still running even though it's been long enough that he ought to be done by now. He looks over his shoulder and his eyes drop down to see Satoru sitting on the tiled floor, his clothes haphazardly tossed aside and his shoes collecting water.
He swallows at the sight of his friend looking like this, as if he's trying to make himself smaller, as if he can no longer hold the world's burdens on his shoulders. Suguru makes himself go to him, crouching down until he can touch his shoulder, hot and pink from the water.

"Satoru--"

"You said it's important."

He makes himself stop and listen, wills his fingers not to squeeze in surprise or in encouragement, keeping himself still in case the smallest thing, the smallest gesture makes Satoru stop talking.

After a while, he continues speaking, "You said it's important for us. To find meaning. To have meaning."

Suguru swallows what he wants to say, all the bile that wants to rise up from his gut, wants to burst out of his throat. He feels himself shaking and inadvertently tightens his hand over Satoru's shoulder.

"What if it's not enough anymore?" He asks, voice quiet and dead. "What if I don't want it anymore?"

It hurts. How can he help carry Satoru when he can hardly carry himself anymore?

He squeezes his shoulder, an apology and despair all in one gesture. "...I don't know, Satoru."

---

He leaves Satoru outside on a bench under the cloudy sky, bundled up in Suguru's clothes while he himself walks towards where their rooms are in just a towel. He pauses when he nears, eyeing the boxes outside Satoru's room and looks up when he sees Shoko bringing out a basket filled with manga and odd ends and knick-knacks.

Shoko sees him and barely blinks an eye at his attire or lack thereof as she settles the basket on top of the boxes and tells him, "Go pack your stuff."

His hair drips onto his shoulder, trailing cold streams along his skin and disappearing into his towel wrapped around his waist. "...Why?"

"You're being assigned the same room as Satoru."

He doesn't shiver but he feels something tremble inside of him anyway. "What for." His room isn't the one bathed in blood, and even though he can smell it, at least he doesn't have to see it; he can find a way to deal with it.

"You know why."

He doesn't say anything and watches as Shoko eyes him for a moment longer before going back inside Satoru's room to keep packing his things away.

Suguru, for want to busy himself despite the buzz in his head, goes into his room and dresses himself in a spare set of uniforms because he still has a mission to take care of later but at this rate, he thinks he'd be better off leaving first thing in the morning rather than try and get there tonight. He pauses in the middle of pulling on his shirt and opts not to wear the school's jacket, leaving himself in just a plain white short-sleeved button-up.

He exits just as Shoko starts another pile of boxes next to the first tower. He thinks about whether or not he should help her when she opens her mouth to him.

"You know why we're bunking you with him, right?"

He eyes the boxes. He didn't think Satoru had accumulated so much stuff over the years but a part of him isn't really surprised with the amount of souvenirs he brings back after every single mission. "Not really."

She cuts to the chase. "He's basically on suicide watch."

He slides his eyes to her and sees the way she's trying to be loose but isn't quite able to hide the tension in her shoulder, or in the corners of her eyes. "I don't think he was trying to kill himself."

She raises an unimpressed eyebrow at him, "You sure about that?"

He wants to say he knows Satoru well enough to know he's not the kind of person to do something like that but their last joint mission took a toll on both of them, more than either one of them were willing to pay for, more than either of them thought they would lose. They thought they could handle it and, in a way, they did. In another way, they lost.

"How much before he takes it too far? How much before he decides he's done? How much before he--"

"Enough!"

The ringing in his ears grow to unfathomable levels and he wants something to break it. He needs it to pop, to give in, to explode.

"Don't lie to me, Suguru," she says, her tone soft and too sympathetic for how jaded they've all become and grown in the last year alone. "Most of all, don't lie to yourself."

---

Their new room is only a little bit bigger than their old rooms but not by much. There's only enough space between their two beds to cram in a bedside table and that's it. The room might be longer but it's not much wider than their old space. It's almost claustrophobic.

Satoru is listlessly and haphazardly putting away his clothes into the dresser at the foot of Suguru's chosen bed, uncaring for how they're going to wrinkle as he tosses them in even though it's almost a given that there will be complaints for the next time he decides to wear one of his graphic tees on his days off. Suguru doesn't make himself watch for too long, turning his attention instead to the study tables that have been placed side by side, hardly any space left behind the chairs if someone wants to walk behind to get in or out.

He tries to remember the order of how he'd placed his course books in his old room, not sure if he went by height, or alphabetically, or by thickness or some combination of them or in no particular order at all. In the end, he just stacks them up and slides them until they touch the wall, leaves them to be a problem for another day when he needs it.

He'd already put his clothes away earlier while Satoru laid on his bed, staring unblinkingly at the ceiling with his head in the clouds and a million miles away, only getting up when Suguru had slid the drawers shut to move onto hanging up some more clothes in the shared closet. He’d set aside a couple hangers free for his uniforms for they're done in the wash but leaves the rest for Satoru even though he knows the other owns even less than Suguru does, more often than not choosing to pilfer a jacket or a sweater or a shirt from Suguru's wardrobe than go out and buy something to add to his own. Even now, Satoru is wearing something of Suguru's even though he was the one to offer it after the showers.

"You were supposed to go on a mission today, weren't you?" Satoru asks listlessly and Suguru slides his eyes over to him and sees the haphazardly folded shirt in the other's hand, a familiar one that Suguru thought he'd thrown away after one of the sleeves got torn off during a rough training session a few months ago. He can see it still, the rips, and it doesn't make sense that Satoru would keep something as tattered as that around.

He pauses and thinks about it, wonders if Satoru did what he did today because he thought no one would be around to check on him, thought Suguru would be halfway across Honshu to take care of his given mission, thought he'd have enough time to come around and clean up and pretend like nothing was wrong with him.

He grits his teeth and feels angry at Satoru, at Shoko, at Yaga-sensei, but most of all, at himself for not noticing sooner. They were supposed to be the strongest together but here they are, falling apart.

"Yeah," he says plainly.

Satoru huffs humourlessly, "Damn."

Suguru snaps, "You thought you could get away with doing stupid shit like this?"

"I get away with doing stupid shit all the time."

"That's not the same!"

"Isn't it?" He tilts his head down a bit, turning enough that Suguru is able to meet dull blue eyes and he doesn't expect his visceral reaction to it when he crosses the room and grabs Satoru by the front of his clothes, crashing him into the dresser and forcing the drawers to snap shut under the force of the impact.

"It's not!"

His heart is racing in his chest, like he's in the middle of running a marathon, the kind of marathon where at the end of the finish line is not the feeling of victory but the sight of dead shamans piled up high.

He can see it; Haibara's body waiting for them.

One of Satoru's hand is loose around his wrist while the other is still holding onto that ripped shirt he'd thrown out months ago, except now he can see it, see the ripped sleeve haphazardly stitched up and sloppily repaired. It breaks something inside of him, at the idea of Satoru trying to fix something he accidentally tore up, careful hands trying to mend the edges and put things back to rights. It's not the same as it used to be, won't sit as nicely on the shoulders anymore, will probably be a little lopsided from the bad job of it all but he'd tried his best. Satoru tried, and Suguru doesn't know why he's not trying anymore.

"What are you doing?" He asks breathlessly and hates himself for feeling touched by the gesture, hates himself for the sting he can feel in his eyes, for the growing shake in his limbs and in his soul. He pushes his fists hard into Satoru's body, trying to stop the shaking but knows how little it's working. "What are you doing, Satoru? Why did you do that? Why did you try to kill yourself like that?"

"I wasn't--"

"Don't lie to me," he whispers harshly, feels the first drip of tears slip from his eyes and tightens his fists when he sees the bare widening of Satoru's own. "Don't lie to me."

"I--"

He feels fingers tighten over his wrist, hiding their own imperceptible shake.

"I don't know..." he says softly, like he can't make himself say the words any louder.

Suguru grits his teeth and keeps pushing, squeezing his eyes shut as if he can stop the tears from spilling out, stop his head from seeing the image of Satoru lying in the middle of his bedroom floor surrounded by his own blood. He feels lost and he doesn't know how he's supposed to help Satoru when he doesn't know how to help himself.

"...I think I hate myself," Satoru whispers quietly into the stillness of their shared room and Suguru lets himself drop his head onto his friend's shoulder and cry because he knows Satoru won't, or can't.

---

In light of what happened, Yaga-sensei gives them a few days to settle into their new rooms and to take a break from the constant missions they were doing. Their sensei tells them that neither the principal nor the higher-ups know the details about what happened with Satoru and he hopes to keep it that way.

Suguru snorts and decides he's not surprised; the members of the headquarters aren't exactly quiet about their dislike of Satoru's attitude so he doubts they'd push for any details. The less human Satoru is to them, the easier it is for them to keep up pretenses of believing they know what's best for him.

It means that, for several days, neither of them do anything more than just lounge around trying to figure out their new dynamics between each other, trying to heal around the hurts, see what they can deal with on their own and what absolutely sets them off into something borderline self-destructive.

He caught Satoru holding a crafting pen-knife to his thigh once before, his expression terrifyingly blank as he stared out of the window and unnoticing of the blood seeping out from the cut on his pants and darkening the material.

Suguru's first instinct, at the time, had been to shout but he'd forced himself to bite his tongue, opting instead to set his things aside first before approaching Satoru, hands careful as he reached out for fingers tightly curled around the tool.

"That's not what pen-knives are for," he had said, gentle, as he pried fingers apart until he could pull the blade from Satoru's skin. This close, he could see multiple rips and splashes of blood on his leg and Suguru quelled the growing shake in his body as he carefully cut the fabric apart to better see the damage done to his body.

Except there was no mark left behind, no open wound, no healing scabs, not a single bruise or blemish. Satoru had already healed up the damage but it hadn’t erased the evidence of his hurt and trauma from his clothes.

He remembers breathing out quietly, remembers forcing up a smile as he pocketed the pen-knife to throw as far away as possible later when he could and told Satoru, "Let's get you cleaned up, huh?"

Satoru stopped him with a hand to his shirt, fabric stretched tight and pulled him close.

"If I can't lie to you, then you can't lie to me, either," Satoru told him, eyes stared deep into his soul, saw the cracks and the rips and the tears of his psyche and decided he was still okay, still someone worth being around and spending time with. His blue eyes filled with a quiet kind of despair that he had hoped Suguru still thought the same of him.

He does, of course he does.

"If I asked you, if I begged you to stop, will you listen to me?" He asked, laid it out on the line for Satoru to crush and hoped that he wouldn't.

Silence passed between them, blue eyes on his, before he nodded and answered with the same conviction, "I will."

"Then please stop," he begged and wasn't ashamed by the tremble in his voice as he said this.

"Okay."

He helped Satoru wipe the blood away after that, careful with each other and quietly thankful that none of it spilled onto his bedsheets, that the sweatpants were the only casualty of this horrible endeavor. That, and the pen-knife.

Even though the bed is just a single, somehow they made their bodies fit on top of it, curled up together and holding on tight, hoping for this melancholia to harmlessly pass them by and leave them be.

---

The small village sends them another request, this time with enough urgency that not even Yaga-sensei can dismiss it and he looks apologetic as he hands Suguru the mission folder, not much thicker than the last time except the sleeve packet's been replaced by a red one instead of the usual plain brown.

"I've already handed off as many missions to the Kyoto school as I could but even I can't just give everything over to them."

Suguru looks down at the folder, eyes unseeing, trying to think, trying to make a decision.

Where he stands with Satoru now is still at a tentative place and he knows this mission could take over a day to complete, maybe even two if luck's not on his side and with the way things are going, it feels like it'll only get worse from here. He doesn't want to leave Satoru too long if it means accidentally resetting the progress they've made so far.

He has a moral obligation to take care of curses for the school, as per his studies and for his future career as a shaman except…

Except the school has no moral obligation to him. He knows that now, has known for a while, has known since only half of Haibara's body came back to be buried and the school didn't mourn for it for even a single day, just another name to be scratched off, another name to be forgotten about in the annals of shaman history.

"I'm sorry, Yaga-sensei," he says with real regret as he puts down the folder back onto the table and slides it back towards him, "I can't do it." He knows it's not his sensei's fault, but even he can't stop the hint of bitterness inside of him at the idea that they're just here to be used and abused by those in a position much higher than theirs.

"You can't do it?" Yaga-sensei repeats, his tone surprised and bordering on incredulous.

It's a simple semi-grade 1 mission, nothing he can't handle himself, except he's scared of what he might come back to after being gone for several days. He doesn't want to come back to their shared room and see that Satoru's gone and broken his promise and died because his Reverse Cursed Technique wasn't enough anymore to keep him from the brink.

He doesn't want to come back to blood-stained sheets and blood-stained clothes, a knife in a slack hand, wounds deep and body cold.

"I don't wanna do solo missions anymore."

It's been well over a year since he and Satoru had been partnered together for what was supposed to be a simple escort mission and they'd both nearly died from it. The chances of them dying during solo missions is exponentially higher.

Haibara hadn't been alone when he'd died but at least Nanami was able to bring him back. What he could, in any case.

"You're a Special Grade shaman with more than a decent record of successful missions under your belt and you're telling me you don't wanna do solo missions? That's not something I can just overlook, especially for someone like you."

He shrugs, not willing to use up any more energy for this. He's already said his piece and laid his cards on the table. It's up to Yaga-sensei to deal with the fallout. After all, he wasn't there when Riko got shot right in front of his eyes, when Suguru saw the Sorcerer Killer coming out of the shadows and he got told by smirking lips that Satoru was dead, when he wasted all of his best curses only to get cut up and beat up and thrown down into the ground, unable to get up by his own power.

Yaga-sensei must see something on his face because he eventually sighs and pulls the folder back towards him. "Fine. I'll requisition the funds so both you and Gojo can go together."

It's a compromise, not a huge one by any concession but it's better than nothing, better than what he was expecting.

"Thank you, sensei," he says, and feels something bubble up inside of him at the possibility that maybe his luck is turning around after all.

---

Satoru looks better. Not the same as he was before but Suguru doubts the both of them would be able to go back to the way they were, to heal and recover fully, to go back to something pristine as if nothing ever broke in the first place. It's a new equilibrium and they're still trying to get used to this new balance with tentative steps.

Suguru's trying to read through his course books because even though they've been given time off from missions and classes, it doesn't mean he can slack off, even if he doesn't currently have any homework to complete and hand in. Satoru, of course, doesn't care and keeps reading manga while laying across his desk, sucking on a stick because he's too lazy to toss it into the bin now that the lollipop is gone.

"Hey," Satoru says to grab his attention and he sounds so much like the boy from Okinawa that he can't stop the images of them at the beach coming up unbidden, the laughter and the teasing and the feeling of peace and hope.

"Yeah?" He pulls himself from the memories almost dragging him under, sliding his eyes over to Satoru who's watching him with the same kind of intensity, as if he’s fighting against his own memories trying to yank the carpet out from under his feet.

"Do you remember what they say about me?"

Suguru raises his eyebrow in question, feeling like he'd accidentally flipped a few pages too many in his book and landed himself in the middle of a new topic that he's not quite yet familiar with.

"What did who say about you?"

There's a smirk now on Satoru's lips but there's an alarming blankness in his eyes that tells Suguru to be careful about how to tread this conversation.

"They call me a god."

Suguru thinks fast. He can argue otherwise and say Satoru isn't and they can devolve from there and maybe be one step forward, a hundred steps back or he can ignore it and refuse to humour Satoru's line of thinking. He tries to think what he said before, those years ago when they'd just met, when Satoru took the words other people said about him and proclaimed himself their god.

They're barely 17; neither of them are gods.

Suguru tries to be casual about it as he snorts, rolling his eyes and the motion makes Satoru break out into a grin, something genuine shining in his eyes.

"They call me a god," he repeats as he pulls out the stick from his mouth, sitting up as he eyes Suguru with something that almost borders on desperate, "But you've always made me feel human."

He doesn't realize he was holding his breath until he lets it all out in a rush, closing his book as he turns in his chair to stare at his friend. "You're not a god, Satoru," he remembers seeing the blade sticking out of his body, the spill of blood on the ground and knows this to be the irrefutable truth.

"No," he says, hand reaching out to hold onto Suguru's wrist, thumb pressing down on his pulse point and feeling it thump under his skin. "I'm your equal."

He wonders if Satoru can feel how hard his heart is beating inside his chest and he thinks, from the way pale pink lips are turned up at the corners in a genuine smile, Satoru must know.

It almost feels like a confession.

---

It's a five and a half hour train ride to Yanaizu if they make their connections, maybe six if they don't. Then it's another half an hour to walk from the station to the little village that only has a population of maybe a hundred compared to the population of Yanaizu that's at least in the thousands. It doesn't break over four digits but at least it's more than a measly three.

He doesn't know why people have to live so rurally, why they'd rather stay in the mountains than come down and just join up with the rest of the towns and cities.

What can a village of a hundred people even do in the mountains anyway? There's no school, there's no fields to tend, no temples or shrines to upkeep, nothing even remotely useful to make it a worthwhile place to consider going to. It's the kind of podunk place where people who are born there also die there.

Maybe they like the seclusion, maybe they like their community as it is.

Suguru thinks he'd go crazy if he was born into a place that small.

"This is literally the middle of nowhere," Satoru whines, a bit of his petulant personality coming through at the chore of having to come all the way out here to take care of one stupid curse that's not even strong enough to warrant one of them to come here, let alone two.

They've both shed their jackets from the heat, wrapped around their waists to keep their hands free as they keep traversing through the trees.

"Sorry," he apologizes without feeling, dodging the kick his friend aims for his shoe in order to trip him up. "I told Yaga-sensei that I was either gonna do it with you or not at all."

"Your fault," he pouts and tries to get another kick in but Suguru can see the pleased lines on his body and the way his eyes shine just a little bit brighter than it has in some time. "Would've saved us so much time if I'd known where to go in the first place. Why couldn't it be Aomori? We could've gotten some apples to bring back."

"Would you even eat it as is? Or drench them in sugar first?"

Satoru makes a face at him, "Duh, don't ask stupid questions."

He laughs and feels better than he has in a while, feels like they're back on track, feels like this could be their new normal.

He feels it then. The slither of cursed energy just in the trees maybe a few hundred yards away from where they're stumbling through the bush-covered dirt path trying to find their way towards the people that asked for their help. He sobers up immediately, looking at Satoru who's already got his eyes locked onto the curse and is following it unerringly.

There's an almost frenzied look to those blue eyes and Suguru can feel it mirrored in his limbs, the quiet shake of anticipation in his guts.

He exhales through his nose and then cocks his eyebrow at Satoru. "Bet? First one to take it down gets their pick of where to go for dinner and the loser has to treat them."

Satoru smirks, eyes never leaving the curse, "School's paying for the trip and all of our expenses."

Suguru returns the look, "Then no reason not to take up on it, right?"

"You're on," he says and the both of them burst out into a dead run.

---

There's a cage.

There's a cage with two little girls in them. Whimpering and trembling little shadows, hurt and despair and anguish in bodies too small and souls too young.

He feels himself snap as he brings a hand up to his forehead to press down hard, the thumb digging into the skin and doing little to help him from the deep hole and dark thoughts he finds himself tumbling into. He hates it here. Hate the stench of blood and fear, of the fact that there's piss and defecation in the corner of the cage because there's no damn toilet or sink or even anywhere for the children to sleep.

This is worse than a prison and he feels angry that it took him this long to go on this mission. Days of abuse he could've helped the girls avoid if only he'd just used his brain instead of his bleeding heart.

Stupid monkeys, he thinks viciously and he sees Satoru cut his eyes at him as if he could hear his thoughts.

Suguru pastes on a fake smile as he turns to the monkeys behind them and says as calmly as he can, "Come outside with me for a second."

The girls will be safe with Satoru but first he has business to take care of. It's only a village of a hundred people, nobody will miss them, nobody will care. It's literally in the middle of nowhere with Yanaizu being the closest town. It would take days or even weeks for anybody to notice anything and by then he'd be long gone before anybody would sense something's gone amiss.

What's the point of having morals when nobody else seems to have any.

He makes to follow them out but barely gets a step towards them when fingers wrap tightly around his forearm and squeezes in warning.

He tries to tamp down the seething feeling inside of it, the anger that’s building up and nearly boiling over. "Let me go, Satoru," he tells him lowly, body coiled tight.

One step forward, a hundred steps back, one for every dead villager he's about to murder.

"Why."

"Why what," he damn near hisses and he catches the girls startling in the corner of their cages like frightened animals. He tells himself to calm down but he's shaking, his whole body is shaking and he's so ready to break something.

"You wouldn't let me kill those star cult assholes. You told me there'd be no meaning in that. So why do you get to have this and I don't?"

Suguru wrenches his arm back from Satoru and walks away from him, his curses on the ready to unleash hell on those stupid monkeys but stops himself at the threshold, thinks about the dead look on Satoru's face as he held Riko's body, thinks about how lucky he'd been that he didn't have to bury his best friend that day, too.

But is it luck? Or bad karma.

He wonders if he's not still actually dying and bleeding out from the wounds on his chest because this sure as hell doesn't feel at all like survival.

He’s angry. He’s so angry, but he still feels like he owes Satoru an explanation. "I didn't want to lose you." Suguru finally admits.

"But I get to lose you instead?" Satoru snaps, "Is this you deciding for me? I'm too good to kill those non-shamans but you're not good enough? Is that it?"

"No."

"Don't walk out that door, Suguru."

He wants to. He wants to go outside and hurt them, kill them all; let his curses run on a rampage and gut them all without mercy. He thinks he can do it, make them scream, just go back on everything he thought was moral and virtuous because when he looks at Satoru and those hurt girls he realizes the world truly can't be as simply defined, isn't as white or black, right or wrong. In the end, there is no justice found save for the ones you can serve yourself.

But he can still feel Satoru's warmth on his skin and he thinks it would be easy, so easy to walk out that door and make the streets run red with blood, but he thinks back to that day when Satoru asked if he could kill them and Suguru told him there was no meaning in that.

There wouldn't be any meaning found here either, but he's finding it harder and harder to convince himself of this.

He finds himself on the precipice and wonders if this was what Satoru felt that day, weighed down by Riko's body and the chain Suguru had inadvertently wrapped around his throat.

It's only fair then, he thinks, if he lets Satoru do the same to him.

Suguru grits his teeth with enough force that his jaw starts to hurt. "...What would you have me do, Satoru?"

"Leave. We'll just leave," he starts, desperate, the same kind of desperation that took over Suguru the day he found Satoru in his bedroom bearing wounds of self-mutilation. "Take the girls and get out of here. We've already solved their stupid curse problem; we'll take them with us since they think they're the cause of it and kill two birds with one stone."

The girls whimper and Suguru whips to stare incredulously at Satoru as he immediately winces and says, "Wrong choice of words. Sorry, I just meant, we'll take them away from this place."

"Please don't hurt us," one of the girls beg them in a hushed voice, voice trembling with their bodies.

"We're not here to hurt you," Suguru says to the children, even as he's still glaring at the other boy next to him with a reprimanding look, "Satoru's just an idiot. He didn't mean to say it like that."

"Yeah. I'm...uh, an idiot. I just meant that--I..."

Any other time he would find it utterly hilarious to see Satoru floundering so badly. Suguru would laugh if it was any other time but there's no room for that here. Not now, not with two girls scared beyond belief and not with himself still feeling like he's scraped raw from the inside. Instead he simply says, "Satoru, shut up."

"Shutting up," he says with an unnecessary zipping gesture.

Sighing, trying to will himself to calm down, he steps away from the door and approaches the cage, eyes the lock briefly before closing his hand around it and snapping it off with plain brute strength, the metal digging into his skin and cutting into his palm, drawing blood. It gets a whistle of appreciation from Satoru, something to ease the tension, and for a moment it works but dissipates again just as quickly as he pulls the cage open and crouches down to their level, holding out his other hand to them, keeping the other one in a closed fist to hide that fact that he'd gone and made himself bleed.

The smell is even worse now that he's inside the cage, closer to that disgusting corner, and he fights to tamp down his murderous feelings, fights to soften his gaze, tries to be genuine with his smile. "You wanna come with us? We'll take you away from here. Those monkeys won't hurt you ever again, promise."

The girls are huddled together in the back corner, faces bruised and clothes ripped and darkened in some places smudged with dried blood. It hurts to see them this way, so small and so pitiful, but he tells himself not to rush, not to hurry, not to frighten them more than they already are.

"...Promise?" One of the girls say, and the voice is so quietly hopeful, so ready to be broken that it renews the urge in him to want to go outside and break something in retribution.

He feels Satoru come up behind him, a steadying hand on his shoulder and the other one held out in a pinky promise as he crouches next to Suguru. "Pinky promise," he says, the corner of his lip quirking up in a small smile as he squeezes Suguru's shoulder in solidarity, "From both of us."

He huffs out a tiny laugh but doesn't fight it as he closes his hand and holds out a pinky instead.

Carefully, molasses slow, the girls approach and they each curl their tiny pinkies around both Suguru's and Satoru's. He knows it took a lot of trust, a huge leap of faith, for the girls to place their hopes and lives onto them, nobody but total strangers. It makes something warm bloom in his chest as the girls allow them to fold their jackets over their cold, shivering bodies and pick them up from the floor, carrying them in their arms, too small and too light by far.

"Let's get out of here, huh? Let's leave this place behind," Satoru says, voice quiet and gentle, and it reminds Suguru of Okinawa and Riko and how, at one point, she'd been like a little sister to them.

He closes his eyes when he feels Satoru's arm reach around his waist and pull him in tighter, the girls protected between their arms and held close to their bodies.

"Okay."

They disappear, leaving behind the nightmares and the stench of monkeys.

---

He doesn't have the first clue on how to look after children, especially ones as hurt and as traumatized as Mimiko and Nanako. When he looks at Satoru, he sees the same sentiment reflected back in his blue eyes, the same bewildered feeling. Neither of them have a single clue between the both of them but he thinks that as long as Satoru is by his side, they'll make something work. They'll figure something out.

---

The girls have their own room next door to theirs but neither of them want to sleep anywhere else other than in Suguru's and Satoru’s room, tearful at the idea of separation even if it's just through a single wall. So they both end up letting the girls sleep in one of their beds while the both of them bunk up together in the other, watching over the kids while they're sitting on the mattress with their backs up against the wall and blanket across their laps. It's nothing new, nothing they haven't done before, but it's different when there's now a shared responsibility between the both of them as they watch the kids breathe quietly in their sleep, still trying to heal even though Shoko did her best.

Some wounds can't be healed. Suguru would know.

Yaga-sensei was understandably upset upon seeing the state of the girls when they'd arrived back at the school grounds. They'd all followed Shoko to the infirmary and both he and Yaga-sensei had to stay within full view of the girl because they began to cry as soon as it seemed like Suguru was going to leave them behind. In the end, Yaga-sensei had no choice but to listen to Suguru’s verbal report in the middle of the infirmary, tonelessly telling him what happened from the minute they got on the first train out of Tokyo until the moment they stepped foot inside that godforsaken room.

"The windows should've done a better job--" Yaga-sensei had cut himself off before Suguru could do it for him. It wasn't just about the windows missing something as big as the abuse of child shamans. It cut much deeper than that. Suguru would know; he'd lived through that neglect although to a much lesser extent. "Take the next week off. I'll field off whatever missions you both get to the Kyoto sister school."

Shoko chuckled, darkly amused, "Principal Gakuganji is gonna hate you for that."

Yaga-sensei had merely shrugged, "No more than he already does."

Now, they're already day four of their one week-long break and it both feels like it's going by too fast and too slow.

The first day had been hard. The second day had been worse. The third day was no better but today feels like they can both finally draw in a breath between the two of them.

He doesn't know what they're gonna end up doing when their break is over. He doesn't know how he and Satoru are gonna take care of missions if Yaga-sensei decides he has no choice but to assign it to them after all. He asks himself if they're going to end up doing solo missions again, trading off so that one of them is always at the school to look after the girls. He hasn't been able to stop thinking about it for the last couple of days.

Satoru flicks at the side of his head and Suguru retaliates with a hard elbow. "There are better ways of getting my attention, you know," he says, snippy, as he rubs the side of his head even though it doesn't actually hurt.

"I've been calling your name for the last 5 minutes, asshole."

"Watch your mouth."

"They're sleeping."

"Watch your mouth anyway."

Satoru sticks out his tongue in childish retort and Suguru can't help the fond shake of his head as he nudges his friend in silent question which gets countered with a head of white hair on his shoulder, dangerously close to his nose and mouth. They have to adjust a little bit, to compensate for the fact that Satoru is a little bit taller than him now, but Suguru is much broader and just a touch bonier. He feels the other settle his cheek on the ball of his shoulder, huffing a little bit as he keeps adjusting until he finds a comfortable spot to lay on.

Eventually, Satoru sighs and he feels his breath travel across his body and down his arm. "How are you?"

He wants to laugh, "You're asking me?"

"Yeah, I'm asking you," he says as he peers up at Suguru, his hair doing very little to hide the brilliance of his blue eyes.

He takes in a deep breath and holds it in his lungs, thinking about it. He's worried, and nervous, a little unsure but more than certain that he doesn't want to give the girls over to some kind of foster care even though neither of them really have the means nor the capability to look after two young and very traumatized children. If he were to do that, he might as well have left them back at that monkey village or killed them himself.

He lets out a breath and tries not to feel exhausted beyond his 17 years.

"I don't know," he tells him honestly, "I just know that I wanna keep them around."

"Then we'll keep them around," Satoru tells him, like it's as simple as that, like it's that easy. Like if Satoru wills it to happen then there’s no reason why it can’t.

He huffs out a quiet laugh, feeling oddly happy as he rests his cheek on top of Satoru's head and lets himself breathe in the clean smell of shampoo that Suguru recognizes as his own.

“Sounds good,” he says quietly and lets himself believe they can keep this.

---

Between one blink and the next, a month has passed them by and if asked to recall any particular moment of the last four or so weeks, Suguru wouldn’t be able to give a definitive answer beyond doing school work, looking after the girls and keeping an eye on Satoru just as surely as Satoru is keeping an eye on him.

He’s in the middle of sorting out their combined laundry to get to the wash while Satoru cleans up the copy papers the girls have been scribbling on, the girls conked out in Suguru’s old bed for their afternoon nap. The twins have definitely opened up to the both of them but are still deeply mistrustful of anybody else with a minor exception to Shoko who’d, as Satoru likes to tell it, ‘healed their boo-boo’s’.

The piles of separated laundry get bigger and bigger and it’s then he realizes they’d left it for too long, at least a week too long, the both of them too busy trying to juggle their studies, keeping the girls fed, checking in on each other, everything, and accidentally leaving simple things like laundry fall on the wayside.

When Satoru nearly trips over the building tower of dark clothing that’s when he decides to finally say something about it.

"We should probably consider moving into an apartment or something. This room isn't big enough for the four of us." And he highly doubts there are any rooms on the campus that would suit their needs, too.

The girls have their own room but some of their meager belongings have already started to migrate over into Suguru's and Satoru's closet. It's only been a little over four weeks but he doesn't even bat an eyelid anymore when he finds a kid's t-shirt in amongst his own, or when he's looking for a spare hair tie on the dresser and finds a couple of small hair pins and a flower embroidered handkerchief cluttered on top of it. The girls have been living off hand-me-downs from Yaga-sensei that the older man doesn't clarify how or where he got them from. It’s working out so far but he knows it won’t be long until they grow out of them.

He thinks they could probably make it work. He gets a salary from exorcizing curses while studying to become a sorcerer and he barely spends any of it save for some food or the occasional shirt or jeans or sweater he likes but most of it gets saved away for no particular reason. He's glad now that he has some money to fall back on, some reason to use it. With Satoru's on top of it, they could probably afford something fairly decent.

"Or we could get a house."

Suguru wants to slap him as he incredulously stares down at Satoru who’s straightening up the papers in his hand to add to the growing collection of pen drawings the girls have made. "With what money."

"Mine," Satoru grins as he cheekily returns the glare with a wink that makes Suguru roll his eyes as he tosses the last of the clothes into its designated pile.

"It's not your money. And I highly doubt your family would just let you spend millions on a goddamn house for some rejects."

"I'm gonna be clan head one day, and then it's gonna be my money. Believe it."

"Shut up; you're not a protagonist in anybody's story here," he scoffs as he picks up a random pile of clothes to take to the laundry room before the other notices him growing pink in embarrassment and doesn't quite manage to dodge the arms that quickly wrap around his waist to keep him near.

"Liar," he sings and squeezes harder, hard enough to make Suguru wheeze a little bit and go with the motion, dropping the whole stack on the floor as he’s pulled close to stand nearly toe to toe with Satoru, glaring at the smug look on his friend's face.

"You're a menace. Honestly and utterly," he hisses out as he grips Satoru's arms, squeezing hard enough to get a tiny twitch of discomfort on his face before lightening up on the hold, mindful of the quiet noise and movement on the other bed as one of the girls shuffle into a new sleeping position.

He sighs and lets himself close his eyes as he tries to settle back into himself. He can still feel Satoru's hand around his waist, the other arm wrapped around the small of his back and rubbing circles into the fabric of his clothes, letting himself return the same gesture.

"You're not rejects," Satoru tells him quietly.

Suguru turns his head and rolls his eyes to the ceiling, sighing. He's not in the mood to humor anybody right now, still feeling a little raw from the last few weeks, the last few months, but he always makes an exception for Satoru. "What would you call us, then?" He mutters into the still air above him, not able to make himself meet blue eyes.

He feels Satoru shrug and the hands on his waist tighten just fractionally, "I don't know."

He huffs ruefully, "If it looks like one and talks like one and--"

"If you're a reject then so am I."

Suguru frowns as he brings his head back down and makes himself stop looking away to see the scowl on Satoru's face, the gloom and melancholy obvious in the tightness around his eyes, still fighting his own demons, still holding on for survival.

He wants to refute it but he barely gets to open his mouth before Satoru's eyes are sliding away, looking at something over his shoulder, eyes blue and unseeing, like he's diving into memories of his past. "They tell me I'm a god. All my childhood and all my life that's what they tell me," he says and the dullness of his voice makes Suguru squeeze his hands around Satoru's arms to bring him back. "They tell me they'll love me for it, and my enemies would hate me for it, that I'll be surrounded by people who worship and revere and fear me."

There's an imperceptible shake in Satoru's body that would've gone unnoticed if not for the fact that they're standing so close to each other, if not for how Satoru's arms are around his waist, if not for Suguru's own fingers wrapped around him in return. And it burns him that Satoru lets himself hurt this quietly, lets himself be unobtrusive and inconsequential as if he could be anything but bright and brilliant.

Satoru breathes out, his voice coming down to a hush, "As a child, something like that seemed like a dream, but as I am now, it's nothing but a goddamn nightmare."

"Satoru..."

Blue eyes shift to look into his and there are tears in his eyes, through the anguish and the pain and the sorrow and fraught loneliness. "They tell me I'm a god, but I've never felt like more of a fraud."

Suguru tightens his hold and wants to pull him close but Satoru's arms are locked tight, grip shaking in place like he's fighting everything inside him to keep that distance between them.

"They say I'm supposed to be the strongest," he whispers. "But I can't be strong without you."

He wants to tell Satoru that he's not strong, that he's barely able to hold himself up and everyday he feels like he's drowning, taking in more water, choking against the saltiness and the sting. Suguru watches a tear spill from the corner of Satoru's eyes and feels intimately like he knows what they taste like.

"And if that makes me a reject, then so be it," Satoru says quietly into the space between them, body slack as though all the strings that were holding him together and upright have suddenly been cut loose.

Carefully, Suguru pushes Satoru until they’re lying on the bed, side by side, travels his hands up along Satoru's arms until they reach his elbows, until they're wrapping behind his biceps, until one is held between the shoulder blades and the other is at the small of his back, and pulls. He keeps pulling until the distance is reduced to nothing between them, until he can feel the thudding of his heart echoed in Satoru's chest as well as his own, when he can feel answering tears on his own cheeks as he rests his forehead on Satoru's, their hair blending together and their noses touching, quietly breathing in each other's air.

They fall asleep like that.

---

He doesn't know how much time passes when he next wakes up but it's dark outside the window and neither of the girls are in the room. He would panic if not for the fact that there's a note tucked right between them telling him that they're in the kitchen cooking dinner and if they wanna eat then they better join them there because Shoko doesn't do room service.

He chuckles but lets himself keep resting, feeling more rested than he has in a decent while, feeling warm from Satoru's arms around him, the soft little breaths fluttering across his mouth and cheeks.

Suguru Isn't dumb, and he's done pretending that what he feels for Satoru is just normal friendship. He's had plenty of friends before but nothing as deep as this, nothing as real.

If it comes down to it, if he's forced to make a choice over it, he knows he'd choose Satoru over and over again. He also knows, without a doubt, that Satoru would choose him, too.

So no, he's not dumb, nor is he blind. There's already an ethereal kind of beauty to Satoru but right here in his arms, he's suddenly so much more than that.

White eyelashes flutter open, bleary with sleep and Suguru feels like he forgets how to breathe at the pleased look on Satoru's face, how at peace he seems and that alone decides it for him.

"Hey," he starts and waits for him to finish his yawn before continuing, "I'm gonna be upfront with you. I'm not into the whole pining scene, especially when our line of work means we're gonna bite the dust sooner rather than later, so..." he pauses, suddenly hesitating.

A cheeky look comes over Satoru's face as he presses his nose against Suguru and the gesture somehow gets a blush of pink to dust over his cheeks over something as small and simple as that. "So...?" He nudges him and then gives him a little smirk, sleepy blue eyes suddenly looking wide awake. "Is this you trying to confess to me, Suguru?"

He lets out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding and decides to roll with it. "Yeah."

The straightforward answer actually stuns Satoru, as if he wasn't actually expecting him to own up to it, not without a bit more teasing and harmless ribbing, but for the first time in a while Suguru catches Satoru off guard and savors it.

"Yeah, I am."

Blue eyes blink at him in shock, a dusting of pink covering his own cheeks in surprise.

Suguru forges on while he's got Satoru tongue-tied, willing himself to keep going before he runs out of steam. "We match up well, and we obviously have chemistry and I like you, in every sense of the word."

Satoru blinks at him again, eyes widening just a fraction more, enough that it makes him backtrack a little bit, easing off to allow the other some room to breathe, room to think.

"If you're not interested we can drop it and--"

"What happens if I say no?" Satoru asks and it's not exactly a rejection, just a question borne out of curiosity.

He shrugs, trying to stay nonchalant even though he knows that Satoru can feel the rapid beating of his heart just as surely as he can feel his own. "Nothing changes; we go back to how we are."

"And if I say yes?"

It's not an acceptance either so he simply shrugs again. "We try dating. Be more to each other than we are now and see where we go from there."

"Huh..."

Suguru doesn't quite know what to make of that noise but he lets his words sink in between them where he's laid out his heart and soul bare, all that he is and all that he can offer. It's not a lot, and it comes with a whole heap of baggage that he has trouble carrying some days but he has a feeling that Satoru is the same as him and he thinks their shared burdens would be easier to carry between the two of them together as opposed to apart.

He thinks he can still make it work regardless but he still wants the chance to try, a chance to see, a chance to be.

"Okay."

He blinks at Satoru and sees the way Satoru is fighting the corners of his lips from turning up into a smile.

"Okay?"

"Yup. Where are you gonna take me on our first date?" He asks, giving into the smile as he tangles his feet with Suguru's.

He hums, feeling relief and enjoying the feel of their entangled legs even if Satoru's feet are obnoxiously cold.

"Dinner at the five-star kitchen of Jujutsu High?"

Satoru clicks his tongue in distaste, "Cheapskate."

He laughs and pulls Satoru off the bed with him, holding hands as they make their way to where Shoko and the twins are.

---

There’s only so much Yaga-sensei can hold off before he has no choice but to assign Suguru and Satoru missions again. It’s a small one for their level and won’t even take much more than a few hours, just a handful of grade 3s and a smattering of grade 2s. Too much for Nanami to take on by himself but definitely overkill to send out two Special Grade sorcerers for it which Yaga-sensei is all too aware of.

"Will you reconsider solo missions, seeing as those girls are attached to your hips, I doubt it'll be a good idea to send you both out together and leave them behind."

He sucks in a breath through his teeth, knowing that Yaga-sensei isn't wrong but he's not willing to give in, knowing full well that if he gives an inch, they'll want to take a whole mile. He knows Yaga-sensei wouldn't try it but he wouldn't put it past the principal to push a bigger workload onto him and Satoru on a more individual basis.

He can't wait for that decrepit old man to retire so Yaga-sensei can take over, even though he doubts Yaga-sensei wouldn't eventually fold under the pressure the higher-ups will inevitably exert on him but he'd do his damn best to hold out as long as he can before then.

Suguru turns his eyes over to Satoru, trying to get a gauge of his feelings and sees nothing past the cool look in his blue eyes hidden behind the lenses of his blackout glasses but reads everything in the lines of his body anyway. He's not happy, either.

The girls are waiting outside the door for them to be done with this meeting and he doesn't want to keep them waiting any longer than necessary but he's running out of ways to find a compromise and the options he has are not the ones he wants.

Yaga-sensei sighs into the silence of the room when neither of them speak, looking a little weary that Suguru would feel sympathy for if he was in a more forgiving mood.

"Okay then...how about this; Getou and Nanami go take care of the mission, and Gojo stays behind to be with the kids."

"What?" He says, a little dumbfounded.

"A mentor system. Nanami can participate and learn more about hunting curses while being partnered with either one of you during the mission. This way you both get support and he gets to learn from his senpais."

"You're kidding me," Satoru says as he leans forward in his seat, a gleam in his eyes as he stares down hard at Yaga-sensei.

"I've been thinking about it," he sighs as he tucks his hands under his glasses to rub at his eyes before readjusting them to sit normally back on his face. "Haibara wouldn't have died if one of you had gone on that mission with him. It was a misclassified curse, yes, but it was also an avoidable death. I regretted how things went and I'm trying to implement some changes."

"Nanami's transferring out at the end of the school year. What then?" Suguru pushes and knows this to be a short-term solution at best.

"I'm hoping to get some new intakes this year. I've requested for more windows to be on the lookout for people with potential, big or small. I'm also hoping for Nanami to change his mind but I won't push it if he doesn't want to stay."

Satoru huffs as he leans back in his chair, folding his arms and crossing one leg over the other, eyes focused on their sensei that look like they could cut.

"Well? This is the best compromise I can come up with for now, please consider it."

Suguru looks over at Yaga-sensei and decides this is probably the best option either of them are gonna get. He figures that as long as he's not alone and as long as one of them is with the girls, both of his requests are basically fulfilled and he can't straight-up reject it without another damn good reason.

He reaches out for the folder and is surprised when Satoru grabs his wrists and stops him with a resounding, "No."

"Excuse me?" Yaga-sensei looks like he's visibly trying not to blow his lid and it gets a smug look on Satoru's face as he lets go of Suguru's wrist and picks up the folder for himself.

"Nanami and I will go. Suguru can stay behind and spend time with the girls."

"What?" He grinds out between clenched teeth. He's not someone to be coddled; he can handle some grade 3s and grade 2s on his own if he has to. The only reason he doesn't want to is because of Satoru and now Satoru's taking the mission out from right under his nose and he doesn't know if he should be offended and pissed about it or pleased that he gets to stay at the school and help ease the girls into this new lifestyle that’s barely more than a month old.

"It's for selfish reasons, Suguru," he says, eyes growing a little dull as he rubs the edges of the mission details between his fingers.

"...What?" He asks again, softening his tone to open up room for dialogue between them.

He huffs out a shaky breath, "I want to check in on Nanami. I've been too caught up with my own shit to even give my kouhais more than a passing thought the last year or so and...well, what kind of senpai does that make me?" He asks rhetorically with a rueful smirk.

"Human," Suguru answers him and he knows it's the right thing to say when Satoru looks at him and there's something like gratefulness in his eyes, something like hope. "It makes you human, Satoru."

For the first time in a while, it really feels like they're taking one step forward and staying there, staying in place, braced for the possibility of getting pushed backward but there's nothing there to land that blow against them. They're holding up, holding strong, and he's hoping they get to keep this momentum going, hoping he gets to keep this life they're only just starting to get used to.

Yaga-sensei clears his throat and pretends like he didn't just witness another confession happen right in the middle of his office. "That's settled then. Here's the card with the requisitioned funds - do not buy souvenirs on this," he says in warning as he holds out the school's card to Satoru, almost looking like he's regretting it when it gets snatched right out from between his fingers.

"No promises!" He jeers good-naturedly and Suguru can't help but smile at the obviously put-upon sigh from their sensei at their antics.

---

They trade off; one of them will always do missions with either Nanami or with Shoko on an even rotation basis so that nobody gets burnt out. Shoko isn't exactly a combat-based sorcerer but she's far from useless and she's handy to have around at the end of it especially when he's got a nasty gash on his arm and on his side for a miscalculated feint.

The mission this time wasn't difficult, although it turned out to be a grade 2 and a semi-grade 1 as opposed to two grade 2s. It's not enough to call it another misclassified mission but it's enough still to get him pissed off about it. He'd rather curses be overestimated by the windows than be underestimated. To underestimate something is to invite the potential of death and he's still deeply hurt and deeply sour over Haibara.

"Stop tensing up so much," Shoko scolds him as she tries to fix up his ripped skin, the blood having already stopped by her Reverse Cursed Technique.

He lets out a long breath and tries to be thankful for the fact that the mission's over, and all that there's left to do is to write up a report and hand it in, then he can take a shower, get some food, spend some time with the girls then get knocked out in bed until the morning comes. Between here and there is still a one hour train ride and pick-up from the station back to school.

"Sorry," he mutters as he watches her move from his arm over to his side, watching her take turns between both wounds to give them each careful attention, not letting either one of them sit for too long.

The both of them are quiet while Shoko works, Suguru's mind zeroing in on the feeling of his skin prickling over from her cursed energy and watches with mild fascination as the exposed meat of his waist closes up more and more as Shoko heals him. There's a mild stinging pain under the warmth of her hands and it makes him think longingly of a nice long shower and a nice warm bed.

"Hey."

"Hmm?" He hums and wonders if there's anything nearby worth buying as a souvenir.

He kind of doubts it though, since this area is just an abandoned and closed down port, having run out of business due to competition from a bigger port just a few miles down the coast.

"I'm still working on it," she tells him, something like guilt in her voice even as she works with confidence over his wounds.

"Working on what?" He asks, thinking she's probably talking about something else that isn't his skin slowly and painstakingly knitting itself back together. Shoko is good, and she got to him early enough that he won't even scar, not like the ones on his chest, left too long to bake under the sun until help finally arrived for him before he bled out.

"Therapy. The mental health stuff," she frowns a little as she moves on from his waist onto his arm.

"Oh..." He'd forgotten about it, amongst all the things that were happening, too many to keep track of and keep up with, and that was before the addition of two dependents. He doesn't shrug because he knows it'll piss Shoko off and he knows better than to piss off the healer. "Don't worry about it; I know you're trying."

"The principal is a stupid traditionalist, and don't even get me started on the higher-ups," she scoffs as she pours more of her cursed energy into her technique, upset but still carefully in control of herself. "Yaga-sensei thinks it's a good idea but even he can't do anything to change the principal's old ass stupid brain."

He laughs and it jostles his arm in Shoko's hand but she doesn't cut him a look since it was her fault she made him laugh in the first place.

"Yaga-sensei's gonna be taking over soon enough. He'll make it happen with or without the higher-ups' approval."

"Oh?" Shoko looks at him briefly, curiosity in her brown eyes as she continues her work, "Where did this sudden faith in Yaga-sensei come from?"

He thinks about the meeting from that day, the one where sensei said he was trying to make some changes. There hasn't been much to show for it yet but he trusts him to keep his word, and to keep trying. If not for himself then for his students, the ones who've passed and the ones still alive.

"You hated him before," Shoko continues as she leans back on her heels, finally done, although he's still covered in his own blood. "What changed?"

"I didn't hate him," he denies and tries to put into words what he felt for his sensei before. The kind of hopeless feeling whenever he was around him after Riko died, the feeling that if asked, they won't be able to come help him and Suguru had to learn to stand on his own. "I was indifferent."

"So what changed?" She presses as she finally digs out some wet wipes from her pack of supplies and hands him a couple pieces to take and clean himself up with.

"He said he regrets it. And that he's trying. And I believe him," he tells her stiltedly and hopes that his faith isn't misplaced, can't bear the thought that Yaga-sensei only said it to get them to cooperate with them with no intention of going through with it. He refuses to let doubt cloud over his judgment, to let hesitation step in when he'd worked too hard for too long to tamp it down. "I want to believe him."

"Okay," she nods and gets up, nudging his shoe with hers to get him moving again. "Come on, there's a beach nearby; bet we can find some nice seashells to bring back for the girls."

Suguru huffs out a little laugh as he gets up to follow her and after a short walk and the both of them bent over with their hands digging through the sands, they make their way back to the school with pockets full of seashells and sea glass as souvenirs.

---

The hallway to Satoru's room is oddly long and it feels like it takes twice as many steps to get there than usual but before he has time to really think about it his hand is already curling around the door knob and twisting it open.

"Satoru, Shoko's looking for--"

Satoru's bleeding again.

He's got his hands on a knife again.

Cutting himself neck to hip, neck to hip over and over again. Blood spilling endlessly, pouring out of him, drenching his uniform, ripped ends becoming more and more frayed.

Suguru's feet are stuck to the floor even as he yells at Satoru to stop but it's like his voice isn't working at all, like Satoru doesn't hear him at all.

He lurches forward and it feels like miles separating them, feels like he's going molasses slow even as his feet close the distance, arms and hands stretched out to stop him.

"Satoru, stop!" He screams, guttural, even as he watches blue eyes fading, steadily losing its brightness.

He can't grab the knife from him, can't make him stop, can't get close enough to touch, his fingers crashing into nothing and he can't remember the last time Satoru kept Infinity up between them, keeping him completely and utterly locked out.

"Satoru!"

He's helpless but to keep watching him cut himself then heal himself over and over again until he's suddenly stopping, suddenly falling backwards in his old bedroom, crashing onto the floor and bleeding out in front of Suguru's eyes.

It's exactly the same.

Satoru's eyes stare lifelessly into the middle distance and this time he knows without a doubt that Satoru is dead and it tears a scream right out of his lungs even as he crashes to his knees and holds his head in his hands hard enough that it starts to hurt.

He screams and it feels like the sound of his voice echoes all around him, reverberating around him, condensing and collapsing and shaking to pieces with enough force that it jolts him.

Jolts him right back into being awake and he sees Satoru leaned over above him, Satoru's fingers gripping tight over his shoulders, Satoru's lips compressed into a thin line, Satoru's eyes looking scared and anguished, wet and looking near to brimming over with unshed tears.

Suguru’s breathing hard and wonders if he actually screamed or not with how hoarse his throat feels.

Sometimes he hates sleeping.

"You--stupid jerk. Why'd you have to scare us like that?" Satoru mutters out, something too raw in his voice.

"Huh?" And it's then he remembers they're not alone in this bedroom of theirs.

Suguru turns his head and meets the eyes of two very scared little girls holding tightly onto each other and it reminds him so viscerally of that horrid night that he finds himself pushing Satoru away and clambering off the bed to make the one step it takes to reach theirs.

"Hey, hey, it's okay. It was just a bad dream. Just a bad dream," he finds himself repeating endlessly to Mimiko and Nanako, hands shaky over their shoulders as he tries to convince them of it and convince himself, too. "I'm sorry if I scared you."

"...It's okay," Mimiko says shakily after a little while, "We get nightmares, too, Suguru-nii-chan."

It doesn't take a genius to know what their nightmares are about and it devastates him to realize that it'll be a long time before they'll heal from it, and maybe even then it won't fully leave them just as surely as the memory of Satoru lying in a puddle of his own blood won’t leave his.

"Yeah," he mumbles uselessly as he tries to rub soothingly over their small backs.

Suguru feels the bed dip behind him, enough to make him shift his center of gravity so he's not toppling over into Satoru as he situates himself until they're making a lopsided little circle on the tiny singles bed.

"You girls wanna go to the kitchen and get some warm milk? Might help a little bit," Satoru offers with a quiet smile and there's still a little shine and wetness in his eyes but they don't look like they're threatening to spill over anymore. "Maybe we can add a bit of honey into it, too."

Nanako seems to perk up at the suggestion and starts crawling her way to Satoru, seeking warmth and affection as she lets herself get swept up into his arms.

Suguru does the same for Mimiko and feels tentative fingers gripping the neckline of his sleep clothes and lets Satoru lead them out of their bedroom, slippers shuffling along the floor as they make their quiet way towards the kitchen.

It's the dead of night and he doubts that even Shoko would be awake at this hour as they fill up a small pot with enough milk for four people to heat over the stove, waiting for it to start steaming just a little bit before adding in dollops of honey.

The smell of it starts to permeate throughout the room and when he turns to look, the girls are blinking sleepily and yawning quietly while sitting on the kitchen table, feet swinging back and forth as they wait. It makes him smile and makes something inside of him settle at the sight, that despite what he saw and dreamt of, none of it was real but this is.

He doesn't let the milk get too hot, just hot enough to melt and mix the honey in before he's pouring out four cups and passing it along.

Neither Mimiko nor Nanako have ever had warm milk and honey before so this feels like a nice treat and a novelty to them both, sipping away and letting out some pleased but sleepy sighs and tired giggles.

Satoru finishes his drink first and helps when Mimiko starts to drift off while holding onto her cup, watching her fondly as he takes the cup from her while Suguru picks her up from where she's sitting on the table to cuddle up in his lap instead. Nanako just barely manages to finish hers, licking her lips clean of the milky froth as she hands back the cup to Suguru.

"Sit with them for a bit, I'll take care of the dishes," Satoru says softly into his hair as he gets up and goes over to the sink with the four empty cups dangling from his fingers.

Nanako is staring at Mimiko and then at his lap and he's fighting the urge to laugh when she finally decides there's enough space for her too as she motions for him to pick her up as well. They're both bundled up against his chest and he feels much calmer now than he did before when his heart felt like it was about to burst out of his chest with stress and fear and horror at what his mind conjured up for him.

He shakes away the thought, listening to the soft clatter of dishes being washed and dried and put away behind him. It doesn't take long but the warmth he feels in his stomach and from the twins make him drowsy, his eyes slipping shut in contentment.

"Hey, don't fall asleep just yet," Satoru admonishes with a light poke to the side of his head before gesturing for him to relinquish one of the girls so they can head back to bed.

The kids go down easily, tucked away in bed and Suguru finds himself just watching them breathing softly, evenly, for minutes before he feels another gentle tug at his sleeves, pulling him over to their own bed.

He settles into the bedsheets under the covers, legs intertwined with Satoru's and arms wrapped around waists, barely any space left between them. Blue eyes are looking into his own, looking for something, and he feels a hand leave his waist, coming up to his face to drag the back of a finger along his jaw.

"What did you dream about?" Satoru finally asks as he rests the flat of his knuckles on his neck, thumb rubbing circles along his pulse point.

He swallows and knows Satoru can feel the motion of it but blue eyes watch him patiently, quietly waiting for an answer. He draws in a deep breath and lets it all out in a rush as he says, "You."

Satoru blinks at him in surprise, "Me?"

He closes his eyes briefly, his nightmare playing out from behind his lids and forces them open again. He doesn't want to delve into the memory of seeing blue eyes go dull then lifeless in front of him. "...Yeah."

"What did I do?" He asks, curious as he tilts his head a little bit on the pillow, ruffling up his hair, the white strands blending with his black ones.

"It was--" He swallows again, and feels Satoru's palm open up against his neck, fingers sinking into his hair and scratching lightly at his nape. He tries again, "It was that day I found you in your bedroom, except worse."

It doesn't take much for Satoru to put it together, eyes widening a little bit in understanding even as a soft little, "Oh..." escapes him.

Suguru tries to focus on the fingers around his waist, in his hair, the warmth of their legs tangled together, the feel of Satoru's body against his own, alive and unhurt.

"You begged me to stop, so I have. I won't do that to you again, Suguru."

"I-I know. It's just..."

Satoru huffs out a small laugh, almost pained, "Our brains won't give us a break, huh?"

He sighs, "Yeah..."

"Go to sleep," Satoru murmurs as he nudges forward until their foreheads touch. "I'm here for you."

Suguru closes his eyes and lets his hands drift until one is laying over the small of Satoru's back and the other clenched into the fabric of his sleep clothes, feeling the thud of his heartbeat against his knuckles, alive and unhurt.

"Goodnight, Satoru."

"Sleep well, Suguru."