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late into the afternoon seems to be ___’s contemplation time. she'll walk the hallways on the sore pads of her feet, trace the patterns and grooves in the trim of the wall, come to a stop at her room and debate if she should go in and think there, or continue walking. inevitably she will always choose the latter, and as she does this very thing, she turns on her heel and walks back the other way. she always finds herself doing this when nobody else is there to watch her; it feels as natural as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. for now, the sun will stay stationary — leaned westward — but ___ will walk until her legs give out.
this afternoon is only slightly different than usual. on a regular walk, ___ would have thought about her speech during class or training or missions, worrying over if she had scripted every conversation correctly or if she shouldn't have told ieiri that secret she was obviously put off by. she would wonder whether or not that patience in yaga’s eyes was real or if it was a facade because he [and everyone else] thought she should be “handled with care”, unlike the rest of her ‘normal peers’. she did not and does not need to be handled with care. she plays rough and dirty like anyone would in this profession. it is only natural.
however, on this walk, something is clearly off. ___ wishes she could not put her finger on it, wishes she didn’t know that it was herself that had been the issue. but, marvelously, it was, and that, still, is so. her mother would have said the same, harped the old “sit with your legs crossed, ___, that isn’t lady-like”. so, she wonders that, if she had done that — had kept her mouth shut and legs crossed, hands folded neatly in her lap, submissive and the least willing in the room to speak unless called — that she would have been proud of herself. or, perhaps, that was the issue itself. it isn’t like she knows the intricacies of her relationship [or lack thereof] with her mother.
act natural.
she wipes her hand off on her skirt, as one naturally does, and hums to herself. her voice is not as deep as she could have imagined, and perhaps that would have been something she would brush off; “it doesn’t matter to me,” she would say if ieiri asked why she was so uncomfortable with the natural chirp of her own voice. “why doesn’t it matter? don’t you hate it?” ieiri asks, and ___ replies without hesitance: “yes.”
she peers out at the sky through a dusty old windowpane, the atmosphere appearing almost as bright cerulean as her own irises. the clouds are just as puffy as any late spring's day, and the sun is tilted even more westward than before. how long has she spent pacing, an hour and a half? ___ does not bother to count after consideration. the sun will not count the time for her, and she will not reciprocate. fine by her. like clockwork, she turns on her heel and starts towards the dorms again.
act natural.
the only unnatural part of the cyclical pacing, stopping, cautiously walking and turning around is the way she hunches her shoulders without realizing it, takes broader steps and, eventually, phases out the heels in general. it feels so much better to walk on flat feet, so she carries her shoes for a little while until she drops them off in her dorm and resumes walking. this feels much more natural — natural, but purposeful. what would it be like to walk in sneakers? ___ ponders this for a couple of heartbeats, but she does not act on it. the grating sound of her mother’s voice, when she bothered to parent her in the moments she wasn’t merely a watcher, warns “that isn’t lady-like” in her head.
but, for just a little while, ___ paces the same corridor every afternoon, and sneaks out during the wee hours of morning to do the same. walking and talking and thinking all to herself is new, and new has never, ever felt so lovely to her until now. she always hated messing up her scripts and routines, but these events are scripted perfectly, so she follows them like an actor. er... actress. she’d never thought about changing the word before, much less autonomously. it feels natural.
no, it doesn’t. [what does act natural mean?]
but it feels good. ___ has never felt so nice referring to herself with a word that isn’t feminine before, so even if it isn’t natural or commendable, she wants to do it again. actor, actor, actor. mother would be furious, but ___ is elated. she tries out other words — what if she were a brother instead? what if she didn’t have to be ___ but kaito or hiroshi or some other basic male given name that, while not unique in the slightest, would make her feel like she knew how everything clicked better? perhaps then, she could finally act the way she’s meant to — open legs when she sits; loud, boisterous conversation; playfighting with other boys and tackling them to the ground like they’re all on the same biological level.
other boys?
weird.
★
but everything had gone as scripted, ___ laments, so why do i feel so weird?
she runs through her conversation with ieiri in her head. everything was correct. natural. she had softly, meekly approached her, calmly told her everything: that she didn’t know what it felt like to want to be a girl, or the general idea of one, and that she loved walking on flat feet instead of her bruising heels, and that she wistfully dreamt of being able to grapple with suguru in a way that let him use all of his energy instead of half and some substituted empathy; because he was afraid of hurting her, she imagines, but she isn’t delicate in the slightest so why does everyone think she is?
is that natural?
it must have been ieiri’s reply. “you don’t have to want to be a boy to do all of those things, gojo,” she had shrugged with the calmest look on her face, “i sit with my legs open ’cause i want to. you don’t have to follow anyone else’s rules.”
but what if wanting to be male was ___’s rebellion? what if that was her way of doing what she wants, because her mother isn’t here to tell her to act like a lady... what if she could tell her mother that’s how she felt, too? she furrows her brows and rests the back of her head against the wall. it would feel nice to get her way, but it would feel so much nicer to clear her cluttered brain, so maybe a walk will do. she lets out a sigh, gathers herself, and neatly steps down the hallway, but the click-clack of her heels pours incessantly into her ears, so she stops and sits right down on the wooden floor. ___ pulls her long legs up to her chest, wishing away the discomfort she feels when her knee pushes lightly against her breast. she flinches, but she doesn’t let it slip away.
___ feels tired. tired as in sleepy as in overworked, maybe, but tired mentally, as well. she’s tired of wishful thinking, tired of dreaming that she and suguru could be the same, tired of being gojo ___ and not, say, daichi or haruto or keiji. anything but ___, she would be okay with. her head hurts and her throat hurts, and she feels much like a worm wriggling underneath a thin layer of wet soil, freeing itself from the underground to experience the rain in all of its natural glory. none of this feels natural. it isn’t natural. it will never be natural.
what is natural for her, however, is the way she perks up when she hears the pad of a shoe around the corner, and soon, the tall shape of suguru poking his head out and succeeded by the rest of him. he seems a short-lived comfort until ___ is repeating this isn’t scripted, over and over and over and—
suguru blinks. “___?” he calls with a gentle tilt of his head. his voice is too soft and ___ is too distressed. yet, it would be rude [and unladylike, her mother would scoff] if she did not speak back, so she musters up a weak, pathetic wave. definitely the strongest, she thinks sarcastically.
“hey,” suguru crouches at ___’s eye level only a few feet away from her. he’s calm as always, face neutral and soft violet eyes laid upon ___ like she isn’t a freak of nature but his friend [well, technically rival, but she hasn’t the heart to care about their bickering right now]. she hates that he acts so normal around her; he has to be pretending for looks. there’s no way someone like suguru — responsible and humble, talented despite his inexperience in jujutsu fields, with his head set on straight — could ever want to speak casually with the girl [?] who can’t be around bright lights and scripts all of her conversations and talks nonstop about dumb stuff like digimon instead of the more important things in life. there isn’t a way at all he could ever want to sit here with her and hold her and tell her she’s not weird, and—
“do you think i’m weird?” she blurts.
suguru frowns. “depends on what your definition of ’weird’ is.”
that isn’t helpful, ___ thinks bitterly, nor is it scripted. she lifts her head from her knees and stares directly below his eye, at his cheek. his skin looks soft from here. “i mean, like... i’m not like you or ieiri. you both look so comfortable in your skin.” she lets the quiet simmer between them for a good ten seconds, then rubs her bare leg with her hand, her dainty fingers. she refuses to look at them.
“i’m pretty weird, too, you know,” suguru attempts at a joke, which, to his luck, does earn a huff from ___. it clearly isn’t enough, though, so she regresses back to her bummed-out state and traces the smoothness of her leg. she kind of wishes she hadn’t shaved it, but it’s too late for sentiments like that now. suguru, in turn, thoughtfully combs his fingers through his hair, twisting a curl around the digit with a sincerely unbothered expression. how he does it, ___ will never understand.
is this acting natural for him?
“that’s not what i meant,” she mutters, “i don’t... i don’t know who i am, suguru.”
”you’re ___, aren’t you? gojo ___.”
maybe a few weeks ago, she thinks. ___ traces the grooves in the floor between each plank of polished mahogany, imagining that her finger were an ant. fascinating. “i don’t think so,” she turns her finger upside down and runs the back of it along the groove, a soft quiver in her voice, “i’ve been feeling... disconnected. i don’t think i’m her. ___. that isn’t me.” suguru seems to be listening more intently now, letting his hair fall loose around his shoulders. he looks almost ready to reach out and touch her, but she glances at him as he lifts his hand [and though ___ will never admit it out loud, she is so jealous of how perceivably masculine a hand can be].
“what exactly are you saying?” suguru prods, resting the hand on his own knee. he seems to have shifted from empathetic joking to mild concern, and ___ wonders if he’ll panic when she tells him. would he hate her? would he just avoid her from then on?
would suguru hold her?
or would he hold him?
she discards that last thought. it would be one thing if she were a girl in a boy’s arms, but her head would be upon a spike in a day’s time if she were a boy in that situation. she loathes the idea of her mother ever knowing about suguru, so she quiets her swirling thoughts. “i don’t think this is what’s right for me, suguru,” she speaks carefully.
“i’m sorry?” suguru blurts, at the exact same time ___ blurts “i’m not a girl.”
oh. oh dear. was that really what she should have said? forget it, maybe it’ll slip his mind and he misheard her, or... well, is she really the right pronoun to use here?
“i’m sorry,” her voice cracks a little, “i can’t take this. i realized this a while- like, maybe a week or so ago, i dunno, but... i-i thought you’d hate me for it, that you wouldn’t want to- to be friends with me anymore because i’m not natural and i’m weird and i like walking on flat feet instead of my heels and—”
“hey, hey! slow down, slow down. one thing at a time,” suguru waves his hands all around to get ___ to calm down, and it works for the most part. “i’m sorry,” she apologizes, again, “i told ieiri before i told you, but she wasn’t very helpful. i can rely on her, though, but i was just scared shitless you’d do something stupid about this whole ordeal.”
is he even acting? doesn’t everyone act?
suguru frowns. it kind of looks the same as his smile, which is a weird comfort in the moment [so maybe neither of them are exactly natural...]. “i don’t hate you, i promise. i could never. i’m just a little confused... i’ve never really worked with something like this before. are you really sure?”
of course i’m sure, asshole, she curses in her thoughts. but instead of channelling that into the conversation, she opens her mouth, closes it, and fails to swallow the lump in her throat. her eyes water and she blinks a few times before rubbing her face to stop the tears from streaming down her too-round cheeks; all without fruition, of course, but she notices the utter patience suguru is currently harboring and that’s what really makes her crack. all of a sudden, before she really understands it, ___ knocks her head against suguru's shoulder and sobs into the cotton of his uniform. as if it were natural, her arm slips under his and she holds onto him like the pair were freefalling from a ten-story skyscraper.
the baffling part of it all is when suguru does lean in and hold her, hand resting amiably on her back and rubbing soothing circles into the fabric of her own uniform. “hey, hey, listen to me. it’s okay. you’re gonna be okay,” he tries, lowering his voice a smidge with that awkward smile-frown conundrum on his lips. she sniffles, solemnly wondering what mother would think.
“how do you know that?” ___ weeps, “how full are your words?”
any hint that it could have been more of a smile melts, and suguru looks a little... embarrassed? guilty? but why? isn’t he supposed to be acting natural? did he not script this? ___, bleary-eyed and clearly still upset, blinks up at him from her hunched-over position on the floor. if he wasn’t acting, then what could suguru possibly be feeling here? it couldn’t be true human empathy. mother said it would never be love for the strong, only worship.
“how long have you known?” he murmurs, deciding to leave that idea where it was born. ___ seriously wonders why he hasn’t called her a freak yet, but she keeps that thought to herself as she hiccups “a few weeks now, maybe a month or so.”
so, maybe, since she’d known suguru better than ieiri, she should have told him first. but at this point, they hadn’t known each other for even half of a normal kid’s school year, so is there really a point in the order? absolutely, there is, and that lies in the script. this was not scripted, and that is freaking her out worse than the prospect of suguru genuinely hating her, much to her dismay. she clutches a handful of uniform jacket in her trembling hand.
“i’m sorry i never told you. i wanted to be called something else, and never by the name you’re familiar with, and i was miserable knowing that you never knew about this part of me. i...” she squeezes him tight, “i just loved you too much to want to give up our friendship for myself. even if i still don’t know you very well.”
“you know i’d be a hypocrite if i hated you for wanting to be a boy, right?” he chuckles, which actually causes a reflexive ‘huh?’ from ___. she, much like him, tilts her head and stares directly into his eyes with an intensity that, evidently, he is scared of. or, at the least, unnerved by. she gets it. “so does that mean you’re... like me?” she asks, gesturing at her own body. he shakes his head maybe a little too fast, given the way ___ slouches, and adds “no, i’m just- y’know. i like boys. similar boat. doesn’t mean i can’t try to understand you, though.”
oh, alright. well, there goes that hope. but ___ had seriously never noticed anything was abnormal with suguru — if he even was abnormal or if that was simply another myth she’d absorbed as a child — so there wasn’t a reason for him and her to be so close unless there was that underlying connection. she lays her head on his shoulder, halfway into the crook of his neck, and mutters “that’s... yeah, okay. thank you.”
suguru pats ___’s head as a reflex. she, in turn, sniffles the last of her kiddie snot [hopefully forever] back up and wipes the straggling tears from her eyes. that may not have been lady-like, but it was natural, and if it was the latter then why care for the former? act natural and act lady-like in the same sentence is oxymoronic in her humble opinion.
“about, ah... names.” ___ glances at suguru when she straightens up, back leaned against the wall. she feels a little hum, a murmur, almost, in her skull as she clears out her mind, discarding her script for the moment. it’s clear suguru wasn’t raised on that, so she shouldn’t hope he knows how to follow. “names,” he repeats, letting his arms fall from her body and retract back to his own, hands rested politely in his lap. “like?”
“i dunno. give me a good boy name.” ___ tries her hardest to manually wipe the flush from her cheeks, but that only embarrasses her further. suguru scoots a few centimeters away, just to put distance between the two of them, which slows her stuttering heart for a few moments. this feels... better.
“mm... akira?”
“maybe. but it doesn’t sound the best with my surname.”
“haruki?”
“boring...”
“boring? i think it’s quite nice,” suguru snorts, flicking ___’s shoulder. she yelps and flicks his back [thankfully, with no power behind it]. he chuckles, the awkward smile/faux-frown/whatever it is painted back onto his face. “but, if you don’t like it, choose something that fits you better. it’s your name.”
she racks her brain for a moment. what would fit her? she’d never known of a name, much less a purpose, that would ever fit her. it wasn’t natural for things to fit her—
i'm sick of ‘natural’.
“satoru,” she whispers. it feels nice on her tongue, nicer so in her brain. she chews on the inside of her cheek, plays with her fingers, imagines the characters of the name — in all three alphabets — sifting through them like sand. “it sort of matches yours, though. kind of embarrassing.”
“ha!” suguru criss-crosses his legs like a child. “that it does. but isn’t that a good thing? now we can be, like, best friends. wait, that’s weird. is that weird?”
”not weird,” satoru chuckles, “you’re just... comfortable, i suppose. uncharacteristically cheerful, but you seem happy, so i suppose it’s okay.”
“you really do talk weird, though,” suguru comments, earning himself a playful smack to his chest paired with a glare that seems almost genuine. when calmed, satoru lets his head rest upon suguru's broad shoulder and stays quiet. he doesn’t feel like an outsider much anymore, even in comparison to easily the strangest boy he's ever known [geto suguru, first year classmate], and much less so that he relates to him in a way. similar workings of the brain, now similar identity. he finds he wouldn’t mind this softness for years to come if he could choose that.
“i still love you,” suguru murmurs, “you know, as a friend. think you're really the first gi— shoot. guy i’ve felt i can really be myself around in years. sorry, this is gonna take some getting used to.”
satoru flinches with that little slip-up, but he keeps his composure. it’s okay, he reassures himself, he’s trying. mistakes are always natural. “take all the time you need,” he offers, humbly. “it’s only natural to mess up. i don’t expect a full switch overnight, that’d be asking too much of you.”
“so, satoru... that’s who you are now, huh?”
“that’s me.”
suguru softens, “i’ll remember that.”