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Satoru lets himself in uninvited.
That’s hardly his fault. Suguru left him little choice— what with the way he’s been camped out in their shared washroom for the last hour, neither emerging nor making a single sound that could be construed as ‘washing up.’
Satoru let him be, at least for a while. He knows the mission went poorly. There were lives on the line, and sometimes you can’t do enough. Sometimes you arrive too late. Sometimes you can’t save anyone— you’re just there to clean up the mess.
He knows that Suguru probably just wants his space. He’s gathering himself, making sense of the senselessness of loss. Putting the thoughts away into neat little containers— jars labeled ‘disappointments’ and ‘deficiencies,’ ‘setbacks,’ and maybe ‘failures’— so that, after sorting, he can get up again tomorrow for more of the same.
Between the mental sorting and any attempts at washing the reek of death off his skin, perhaps when he had only just begun, Suguru sat down and never got back up again. Satoru knows that for a fact because that’s where he sits right now:
On a washroom bench.
Leaning against the wall, his head tipped back.
Staring at the wall.
“Suguru?”
There’s a needling grin in the sound of his voice, cooing each sultry syllable of the name. Satoru doesn’t feel like smiling, not in truth, but that hardly matters. He wants Suguru to feel like smiling— even if that means annoying him, as a starting point, and thereby backing him into it.
Any reaction will do, really. Just not this vacant stare.
For a long moment, it hardly seems like Suguru even heard him— despite the valiant attempt to push his buttons. When he does react, it’s merely a tightening around his eyes, a small sign of dismay.
Better than nothing. Satoru presses on:
“You planning to sleep in here or what?”
He watches Suguru’s jaw flex. He imagines the tension that jaw holds as he bites down on whatever he’d been even half-inclined to say. Something like, I’ll be fine. Or, I just need to sleep it off. Or maybe, if he’s in an honest kind of mood, Leave me to be miserable in peace.
But the words never make it past Suguru’s lips. Not before Satoru plows ahead, telling him, “Get in the bath.”
Suguru frowns in confusion, then there’s a whiff of the annoyance Satoru was looking for.
“I won’t look at your pee-pee.” Satoru rolls his eyes. “It’s nothing I haven’t seen.”
Suguru scoffs. “You are such a child.”
Maybe so. Not that Satoru is willing to cop to it. Besides, his behavior isn’t the issue here. “Just— c’mon. It’ll help. I know what I’m talking about.”
Suguru looks skeptical, like he doubts that could be true. When has anyone ever seen Satoru need to scrape himself off the washroom tile after losing a civilian to a violent curse? The truth is no one has. Not that Satoru hasn’t ever lost people that he meant to save— that he certainly has— but to Satoru’s mind, their deaths were unavoidable, fates sealed before he arrived, and he accepted that.
Suguru has yet to make up his mind about that. What he does decide, however reluctantly, is to prepare himself to bathe.
To Satoru, it doesn’t feel like winning the argument. It’s not victory, knowing his friend just doesn’t have the fight in him today. And you know what? That’s okay. That’s alright.
Satoru’s here now. He’ll take care of the rest.
“Get in the bath,” Suguru hears, and obeys in the vain hope of satisfying Satoru so that he will leave him be.
He just wants to be left alone. He can’t shake the thought— the ugly way that those people died. The grin of the curse that slaughtered them. The way the curse tasted going down, acrid with fresh kills on its soul.
Were they innocent? The curse belonged to them, in a way; it was their cursed energy, leaking and pooling like tar, destroying them slowly for years and then all at once. These people couldn’t help it. They couldn’t stop it. But they were the reason.
Was it them that Suguru tasted, then, when he used his technique? Their suffering, their misery, leaving its bitter mark on the world. Better not to think it. Better not to linger on what that would mean. But whenever Suguru allows his mind to drift, it takes him right back there… tasting. And wondering.
Suguru undresses mechanically. While he rinses himself off, Satoru tops up the bathwater, checking that it’s still plenty hot. He’s still there when Suguru approaches the steaming tub.
“You don’t have to supervise.”
Satoru clicks his tongue, digging through Suguru’s toiletries. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
Indignance isn’t strong enough. Suguru is hit with a hot lash of rage— for how dare Satoru presume to know what he needs? When what he needs is something he can control. Something, anything, he can implicitly trust to hold his weight. He’s always held his own weight.
He should give Satoru a piece of his mind. He would, if he weren’t terribly afraid of what would come out, a hot, raw spill of ugliness—and right then and there, Suguru’s protest collapses like a pillar of sand.
Can he truly trust his own mind? Not today. Not when curses taste like victims and he hates both, just for existing at all.
Suguru gets into the bath, although he makes sure to do so as disagreeably as possible. He hears the tub slosh. He doesn’t care.
“Okay. I’m in. Happy?”
“Not with that attitude.” Satoru pops the top on a shampoo bottle and sniffs it, refusing to acknowledge their standoff. Childish. Infuriating. Satoru sits down on a low stool by the head of the tub and that’s the last straw.
“You can leave now,” Suguru growls over his shoulder.
“Well, then who is gonna wash the guts out of your hair?”
Suguru falters. There isn’t gore on his person— in his hair or otherwise. Even if it feels like there is. Even if he feels marked by it, he knows he isn’t. It isn’t real.
The words get stuck in his throat. Satoru takes the opening and gathers up his wet hair to drape over the rim of the tub. The glancing touch tingles over his skin.
“Me,” Suguru says eventually. “I— it’s fine. I mean, it’s my hair, Satoru. I’m used to tending to it.”
“Not this time.”
“Why are you—”
“Suguru. Would it kill you to let me help you out, just this once?”
It just might. But he doesn’t say anything, and Satoru takes that as permission. Of course he does. When has it ever been anything else?
Satoru lathers shampoo between his hands before he starts working it into the long strands. It’s an odd experience, allowing someone else to wash his hair. Satoru’s fingers move differently than his would. He uses more soap than Suguru would use. He takes more care with the task than he had known to expect from Satoru.
Careful, thorough. Patient— which is unlike Satoru, but perhaps it isn’t patience at all. Perhaps he’s lost in it, too. Perhaps the scalp-tingling rush of it translates somewhat to Satoru’s fingertips, so it leaves him exploring, luxuriating in the feeling. Somehow that’s easier to believe, that there’s something in this for him, too.
Suguru sighs a heavy breath and then wishes he hadn’t. It feels exposing. His skin is too thin right now for Satoru’s teasing... but the taunt he expects never comes.
Satoru reaches for the handshower. The motion restarts Suguru’s brain.
“You’ll get soap in the bath.”
“Who cares? The day’s over.”
“But your clothes, you’ll get soaked—”
“I said, who cares?” Satoru answers. “I don’t. Let it go.”
It’s harder than it should be, letting go. It feels messy. Suguru tries relentlessly not to be a messy person, insofar as he can help it. The world is messy enough.
The rush of the shower spray tingles his scalp, the effect not unlike the rush of blood in his ears. It’s a dizzy sound. It’s distorted, like the laughter of curses. The blood on the floor. Ugly death, ugly taste, all of it so, so— pointless.
It was pointless. It would always be pointless.
“You’re upset,” Satoru says after turning off the spray. Such an obvious thing to say, but he’s embarrassing like that. Suguru shouldn’t expect any different. “You know you can talk to me.”
“To what end?” Suguru demands. Pointless.
“Just to get it off your chest? Just try, for me.”
Satoru isn’t about to let it go. He knows he never will, and at length Suguru gives in. He gives him what he wants, and that feels good in a sick sort of way. He talks—messy words, bitter words. Words that grate and chafe and burn. It comes on like a hurricane, a torrent without restraint or relief. Satoru massages conditioner through the whole length of Suguru’s hair, to the roots, and all the while, he listens.
“Sometimes I hate them,” Suguru says with a vicious quiet. There’s a dangerous calm in the room with them now, like the eye of the storm. Suguru is the storm. “What if I truly hate them? What then?”
Behind him, Satoru’s fingers twist and tug through his conditioned hair, gently detangling. Satoru makes a small, noncommittal sound, grasping for an answer.
“Is it their fault?”
Yes. No. Suguru shrinks down into the tub until his head rests on the rim. “I don’t know.”
“Come on, you know they can’t help it.” Satoru turns on the spray again, rinsing product from his hair— and with it, some of the agitation from his brain. No, they can’t help it, Suguru knows. Of course they can’t. They couldn’t if they tried.
Putting the handshower away, Satoru says, “We knew this life would be thankless.”
He can’t argue with that. He wants to anyway, but that would be pointless, too.
“They’ll never know the messes they make,” Suguru sighs. “The messes we cleanse from the world. They’ll never thank us for what we do. But it’s right that I should do it.”
They have a responsibility, because of their abilities, their strength. It’s simply how the world works.
“Do you have to swallow them?” Satoru asks as he gently coils and wrings out his hair, squeezing the full length of it in a bath towel.
“What?” Suguru struggles to parse his meaning. Because he can’t possibly mean—
“Well, do you? Do you have to swallow the curses?”
“It’s my technique.”
“There are other options. Other ways of exorcizing them.” Satoru starts talking faster, making a list. “You could use a cursed object and dispel loads of curses that way! Heck, half of what we deal with you could take out with a mean flick, with just your base strength.”
That isn’t true, but Suguru is somewhat used to Satoru’s attempts at buttering him up.
“Satoru,” he says, scolding now. “It’s my technique.”
“So?”
“Every curse that I consume makes me stronger.”
“Do you need to be? Stronger?”
Silence. Deep down, he is very much offended. Satoru never questions whether he should get stronger, whether Gojo Satoru should reach for new heights. It’s a given for him. Does he think so much less of others— of Suguru, even?
“You’re really arrogant, you know.”
“How so?”
Suguru will not dignify that with a response. Satoru knows perfectly well how he is. Silence falls over them. Satoru continues teasing the tangles from his hair— less purposeful now, more fidgeting.
“If you hate it,” Satoru suggests, “then couldn’t you just… not? Or only swallow the really important ones? I mean, who needs more grade three’s, and four’s, and shitty flyheads, God— certainly not you. You are leagues beyond that!”
Suguru’s mouth flaps open and then closed. He doesn’t have an answer for him. Or not one that Satoru will understand.
“It’s just—” Suguru swallows. “It’s what we do.”
“So, do something else.”
Suguru scoffs. He’s so irritating, completely bull-headed. Even if he has a point. Especially when he has a point.
“You always were too used to playing by the book, Suguru. Just… think about it, will you? I- worry. I worry about you.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“You can. But I want to help.” Then, quieter, Satoru asks, “Would it kill you to let me help?”
It just might, Suguru thinks. He hears an echo in this exchange of words. This is what they do now, what their friendship has become: ’round and ’round they go, rehashing the same tired arguments. He’s quiet for a long moment, contemplating the truth like it comes with a warning. In case of fire, break glass. Every time he does, he can’t put it back.
“I’m afraid to stop,” Suguru says.
Satoru’s hands go still. “Why?”
“If I stop. If I… hesitate. I think I’ll never swallow another curse again.”
Satoru leans around his shoulder to meet his eyes. It’s a bit too close for comfort. They could bump noses at any moment. He can almost feel his breath. Maybe that is why Suguru can’t breathe.
His eyes shine ever so slightly, that piercing ice blue, but the feeling is warmer than it has any right to be. As embracing as a summer breeze.
Satoru asks, “Would that really be so bad?”
“Yes.” Suguru rises from the bath, forcing Satoru back in the process. He needs the space to fill his lungs, to find his center. He shouldn’t be saying any of this. “It would be the end of everything.”
“Everything you know now, maybe,” Satoru rolls his eyes, but there’s a smile there, hidden in the smallest creases. “But then there’s everything you don’t know and, no offense, there’s plenty of that.”
Suguru scoffs. “You are very rude.”
“It’s part of my charm.”
Satoru peels himself out of his clothes now that he allowed them to get all wet, just as Suguru predicted. He averts his eyes until Satoru reaches for a towel to wrap around his hips. He generally tries not to look too interested. Satoru’s ego doesn’t need the help, and Suguru’s pride would not withstand another hit. Not today.
They bicker over Satoru leaving puddles carelessly. They tussle over Suguru’s toothpaste—Satoru has his own, for chrissakes, but he’s too lazy to get it.
“Don’t push me,” Suguru snaps. “You’re always so pushy, Satoru.”
Satoru hums. Of course he doesn’t deny it. How could he?
It’s all almost normal again. Suguru can almost just fake it. But in the silence, he’s right back where he started. With the rush of the faucet, he’s thinking of death. With the rustle of his toothbrush tracing familiar paths around his mouth, there’s a phantom taste he can’t ignore.
Must it all be… pointless?
There are only so many paths he can choose. The one he’s on now— if he leaves it behind, there’s no telling where that leads.
“There’s an ugliness in me. A bitterness that grows with every taste.” Suguru speaks into their shared silence, low like a guttering flame. Satoru looks up, surprised, ready to object, but Suguru isn’t finished. “But it’s a part of me, do you understand? There’s no me without this, without them.”
“How do you mean?”
“Sometimes I’m the ocean. Sometimes I’m just drowning.” He looks at Satoru. “Wouldn’t you rather be the ocean?”
Satoru frowns. “Maybe. Maybe I… I’d rather be just a man. A man who is doing his best.”
“That’s a strange thing to hear you say.” Suguru gives him a hard look. “The Gojo clan’s heir, the limitless, the Six Eyes— just a man?”
“Maybe that’s why I want it.”
Suguru doesn’t know how to answer that. These are the cards they’ve been dealt in this life. He could wish all he wants and in the end none of that would change. He doesn’t have it in him to try. It’s easier to accept what is.
“I’m not going to stop using my technique.”
“I know,” Satoru sighs.
“At least then, there’s a purpose. I just… have to hold back the tide.”
Satoru considers this. Considers him. Then he closes the distance, one hand reaching out to graze the line of his jaw. His hand settles solidly at the nape of Suguru’s neck, over the damp of his hair.
“Then I’ll help you.” He doesn’t have to say the rest; Suguru hears it anyway.
Whether you want me to or not.