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Getou raises his head, and the little living darkness taken residence in his peripheral vision moves with it, as if gummed beneath the eyelid. He feels it stretch up in sprawling fibrils, up beneath the lining of his skull, fancies it to be throbbing, feels it ebb; Shoko is walking toward him, dressed in civilian wear, and scowling. The boughs overheads are bright and paralleloid, and the sunlight flushing through carries a verdigris scent that festers on the stonework; he feels very fond of her, he nearly smiles to see her.
His knuckles are red, painful, he finds his hands difficult to move as he raises one to her, wearing that smile of his that makes her eyes narrow; She walks through him, their mouths meshing and the narrow of her shoulders fitting lopsidedly in his proprietary emptiness.
It inspires no sensation. He blinks twice, cranes his neck over his shoulder.
“Shoko!”
He can see the uniform paleness of her forearms, her sleeves rolled to the elbows—in this weather? The glossy uniformity of her hair doesn’t disrupt at his plaint. He takes a sharp breath and follows after her.
She stops by a surly, eternal Yaga, in his dark glasses and an embarrassing sleeveless ensemble, made of the same dark, slightly shiny material as is standard. Too, by two boy-children he knows very well, yet nearly not at all, and watches how she refuses to greet them—before him, and in his mind, feeling the transparent film of memory overwritten by this experiencing, outside of himself.
He hadn't known his face was so round at such an age. Knowing eyes with their girlish taper, and his smile slightly grim beneath its curt formality, a sort of latent reason and congruity to these features. He feels his own face—this one—shocked to find a puddling of heat on it, settled just under his eyes and in near the bridge of his nose, slinking over his face as if it had been poured from above.
Satoru's face is rounder, too, very delightfully, and his insincere vacillations—surly, boyish, mocking—shine very sweetly on the full face he bears. His eyes are glittering, as if on the verge of tears, very Madonna, which stretches Suguru's mouth into pleasured rictus.
And now Suguru, aged fifteen, will bow for him, with warm ears and cool throat. He watches the dip of his head; watches Satoru watch the loose pooling of his hair create a tension that highlights his nape; watches Satoru shock him into a Western handshake with a wheedling, mean-spirited grin. Satoru blows on his hand, as if to clean it, and Suguru absorbs this insult with a look of vague, puzzled consternation. He circles the scene in a slow pattern of predation; of being preyed upon by some leviathan.
His heart putters, starting up something steaming and wasteful deep inside him. With insubstantial hand, he reaches toward the boy in a gesture of total loyalty. He wishes to stroke the downy white hair, to brush against the flushed cheek with a curled finger, to pinch his earlobe, some clean and unambiguous gesture that can answer to his innocence.
There is a sudden access of humiliation; his gaze flickers—it is a completely insane gesture, but he has been the boy who sees demons for all his life. Satoru's eyes, as if on the verge of tears, engage his, close in on him like a physical clasp, a Western handshake. Suguru stalls—he balls up his fist and swings right through the tableau.
It was a good bet—he strikes Satoru's chest—a little higher and he would've hit his throat, but this Satoru is taller than him. He's barely shocked by the contact, though he is pleased. Satoru spits out pained laughter, and it sounds great, sublime, really, aweing Suguru into silence for as long as it threads through the stagnant, springtime air, though the impact makes his frozen hands burn.
Then he’s chuckling, whining, wheedling in his fashion, as if unchanged, "Hey, hey, what was that, huh? Heeey, what was—!"
Suguru, smiling, lays a hand flat over his mouth, which Satoru tries to speak against, his tongue wet, though not warm. His breath is, though.
"You were a cute kid, weren't you?” He won’t turn down the compliment. “Come on, be fair to me.”
Satoru bats his fingers away, revealing his grinning mouth, hehehe . The character of his lips changes, then, primed to speak—and the world is an upwards wash of color.
They are following him home: he, too, is them , padding out gently from behind the dark sedan, watching the vernal light scatter from the tinted window. Yet his loyalty lies elsewhere, somewhere between his selves, a knot half-tied in limpid air. His feet make shushing sounds on the sidewalk, and his posture is slinking. To cast a shadow in this state would be a redundancy.
“Hey, kid.” He walks faster. Longer-legged, and more intent, Suguru outpaces either of them, though he must remember that he is not here, not really. Still, his hands fall through the boy’s shoulders, and he can’t get a good look at his own face.
“Hey.” He insists, and Satoru answers him with a scrutinizing look. Then, passing through his body, he’s overcome by those thin, ambiguous looking men in black suits, wearing officious and funereal looks, the kind of looks a child doesn’t know how to refuse.
“What’s this?” Satoru asks, his voice vaulting overhead, above this all-swallowing sinkhole, just as Suguru slips down the collapsing rim of it: he’s walked on, and he is being pursued, and now he’s stalling, Satoru meeting him at the lip of that burrow and peering down into it, as if he is a curiosity, or the fly in the water glass.
“This is, uh, just before I got—they…” Goddamnit, what’s wrong with him?
He turns to look at Satoru, daring to give the boy a chance, to read a thing in the light on his eyes, the slight crimp at the corner of his nostril, the slackness of his mouth, the dull, light-absorbing quality of his skin, read from somewhere the thing that he cannot understand or articulate in himself; he wants Satoru to solve it before he does, but instead is met with that strange upwash of color, the dull grey of the sidewalk and its greenish smear of meager vegetation coming to meet the throbbing darkness beneath his eyelids.
Satoru Gojou, eyes cold, bright, and arid, perhaps no older than thirteen years old is eating a twin popsicle, shaving at it with his incisors with total lack of self consciousness. Satoru Gojou, of another order of youth, puts a warm hand on Suguru’s nape, causing him to startle.
A thin, translucent stream of blue fluid trails from the corner of his mouth, beading beneath his jaw, then drips into darkness—and it had been so pale before—when it contacts the silken material that lines his yukata. The watching—the angle, and the utter unknowing of their object of attention—is slightly perverse. He wonders if he is alone; if they are.
“What’s going on?” He says, his breath on Suguru’s ear, and then the very tips of his hair are brushing against it as well, as if a bird in flight had dived just left of his head, leaving its wake and impression in a prickling and a change in the quality of the air, in something too quick to produce sound.
“It’s probably—the technique.” His tongue knots with his own ineloquence; Satoru, at all times, even this age, would know it better than he. He takes a stilted breath, “We’ll—we’ll be alright.”
“Of course.” Satoru replies, a smile in his voice, and, in a friendly gesture, his hand braces the center of Suguru’s back with only the faintest touch. And Satoru looks up.
Suguru might be seven—he can read ages easily enough, but on himself, it’s a different matter. Children are children, and there’s no need to mince. Abstractly, he looks rather cute, in a crisp white shirt and black slacks, this playing at professionalism as the class undertakes, very seriously, arts and crafts.
He’s sitting next to a girl, whose face and posture brings to him no recognition, but he can place her as the object of a semantic memory: he had wanted to impress her. Her skinny elbow spreads into his workspace, scattering his neatly-aligned colored pencils in a smooth clatter, though none of them fall.
Surely he’s seven. Quickly past that age, he had entered a social limbo, and would not be able to fraternize quite so easily with his peers—and for a period just shortly following, not at all. He smiles very slightly—a wan smile, with pain in it—to see this little scene before him.Satoru comes up beside him slowly, quietly, and Suguru leans towards him, their knees turned inwards, though their faces set towards the murmur of the classroom.
"She never gave that eraser back," Suguru whispers, with a nonchalant lean of the head, saying less than he feels, and keeping the color of it from his voice. He is seized by an irresistible impulse: he turns to his face—and he is slightly afraid, sure that this will trigger another nauseating displacing—and yet Satoru looks at him with a fond, idiot grin, of total noncomprehension.
This is what he had wanted. There's a sensation of curling—some new vacuum in Suguru’s body, and the collapsing of his flesh to fill it, near his stomach or behind his ribs. Totally repulsive and fixed completely to that expression Satoru flashed in the indiscriminate brightness of his eyes—unreal, television colors. His returning smile is errant, senseless, violent, and Satoru can read it completely. He makes no gesture of rejection, however, and claps him up on the shoulder. Again with this.
He initiates this time, clutching Satoru’s wrist with the kind of airless urgency that does not permit doubt, something like fear, or classical terror. It shocks him enough to disquiet his stomach that for their first instant of contact, the flesh is bulkier than he had imagined it being, thicker, more substantial, and this feels like a betrayal. He is angry with both of them for this.
When Satoru closes his fist, he can feel the tendons above the wrist bunch, the texture of the muscle beneath changing to accommodate an increased tension, just below the point of trembling—his motor control is sublime. His anger dissipates totally.
“What’s wrong?” Had Satoru’s voice always been so thin, so diaphanous?
“What’s wrong , jackass?” Suguru whispers, cocking his head down the long path, at the end of which the texture of reality is thinly rent, and reconstructed, as if in elision. Brooding, wondrous, inhuman with agelessness, is one Toji Zen’in.
His jaw is slightly coarse, his eyes are intensely vacant, and invoking something stranger than sympathy, more sensitive than kinship. Suguru diverts the strange, diluvial course of this feeling with a concerted effort; he converts him into an imperfect object of fury.
“I figured you wouldn’t notice.” Satoru shrugs, his shoulder rising in partial occlusion. Suguru bares his teeth.
“Because I--” He hears the thread of petulance, and snaps it with the closing of his mouth. Fury was the wrong emotion to invoke, and the bleed of it makes Satoru bristle, in that peculiar and irresponsible way of his, in which he denies it.
“Well, it doesn’t matter, does it?” Satoru seems to have taken up that petulance, knowing it much closer to complementary on his own pallor. He folds his arms up, and the expression on his face is a deliberately casual projection of hurt. He’s clothed himself in it, immersive, translucent, the young master’s image.
What could Suguru possibly say to that?
He must be here, but he doesn’t want to look for him. Instead, he looks down at his own hands as if they are totally foreign objects, at the bare feet above which he is suspended, at the smooth varnish of what must be a child’s bedroom, himself set in this great complex, older than reason, much like an errant screw becomes encased in poured concrete. In many ways, this childhood could be his own. He blames Satoru for this, in only the way people with a totality of trust between them can.
All unnatural. The screw, the concrete. The fly, the glass of water. All of it symptoms. This encroaching darkness is as welcoming, as familiar as derangement. He breathes through a boy’s lungs, and there is the arid vastness of an unseen world bracing him, with promise, with displacement.
Satoru passes through the screen door, in the pale blue yukata, and heavily, almost as if he is real, Suguru lowers himself to the floor, his lean legs folding up against his breast clunkily. Satoru, with a hand jauntily on his knee, follows him down, his head snaking until he can snag Suguru’s averted gaze.
Suguru waits for him to say something stupid:
“Does it end?” Satoru says, with a totality of trust. He exhibits fear, which, with this full-moon face, is less like the laying of affection, and more like responsibility.
“Didn’t it already?” The words are true, but the mind, the embed of it in the boy’s body, gives him that lurching, astringent sensation of doubtfulness. It makes him restless. He draws up tighter against himself. Satoru shuffles closer on the hardwood, intentful by the projection of his body but, by the slightly supplicant look on his face, vacant of mind. Totally trusting.
One more time.
They come to in long, supine, well-fed bodies, their heads resting on either of Shoko’s hard knees, her skirt hiked up around her hips and pooling hugely. She’s leaning down over them, “God, that took forever. What the hell happened?”
Her nails press shallowly into their temples. Her voice unstrained, but her posture tense, and, beyond that, tired. Her thick stockings are cold, slightly damp, and grainy with bitumen, and he knows the flesh is warm underneath. Suguru feels a dull sort of coolness of his own, the inward emanation of ennui at equilibrium with the draining plugs with which he has been injected.
That vague intuition of cursed energy inside of himself seems to lie flat and pool low, like stagnant water, in which breeds mosquitoes, though he can feel a loose, warbling circuit of it between the three of them--between himself and Shoko most strongly, though Satoru’s particular reek colors every contour of it.
He closes his eyes, unliking of the grey, cloudless expanse above him. Satoru reaches over to card a cold hand through his hair, not bothering to remove himself from Shoko’s lap. When he manages to crack them again, his head has rolled to the side, down deeper into the faintly scented cradle of Shoko’s lap.
Satoru’s temple brushes his, and he’s too close to make out with any sense of intelligibility, but Suguru knows him; he smiles like he knows something Suguru doesn’t--which is, of course, impossible to believe. That Satoru would lie to him, even in such a noncommittal way as the cast of his face, is even harder to believe. The darkness beneath his eyelid throbs, ebbs, and, that, too, is incredible.
Spread about them is the sooty, starburst stain of an exorcised curse, steeped in its own reek. Suguru, in noncomprehension, and with desire of sciention, thinks it a waste.