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He finds Satoru’s message etched into the ruin.
Well. Etched into the blood of whichever poor motherfucker Suguru is ankle-deep in. Not in ink, not in script, but in intent—stitched into the spill of blood across shattered stone, in the precise curve of entrails unraveling across what used to be a library.
It takes him a moment to see it. To feel the shape of Satoru’s mind pressed into the scene like a thumbprint in wax. It unfolds in texture: the pattern of ash scattered on the floor, the way a beam splits down the middle like a cracked smile, the deliberate spatter of arterial spray fanned out like the petals of a chrysanthemum. Suguru crouches low, sandals squelching in blood gone sticky, and smiles despite himself.
Feudal Japan has always been one of his favorite stops. The sharp swords, strong tea, the way silence carries meaning here, but the air burns in his lungs, thick with soot and grief.
Dirt caked beneath his nails, Suguru crouches to the ground, balancing on the balls of his feet atop unstable rock, and methodically scratches away at flakes of rusted blood, feeling the shape of a thought pulse beneath the surface. Of course, he thinks wryly, licking his thumb clean. It couldn't have been just in rock. Satoru is macabre, that way.
The first time had been the pattern of open sores on an old woman dying of leprosy. The second, a flock of birds dropping dead from the sky, their limp forms curving into the shape of a laugh.
He never knows when or where Satoru’s messages will surface. Only that they will, a call dropped into the ocean, reaching him years too early—or lifetimes too late. Still, he answers.
Suguru can't tell whose blood stains his teeth. He scrunches his nose at the chalky feeling of dirt settling on his tongue, mixed with the syrupy, metallic substance, but there isn't anything to be done about it. Satoru just likes fucking with him. He can practically see him now, hear his lilting voice and feel the smile pressed against his skin.
They were walking back from the convenience store, Suguru’s plastic bag swinging in time with his steps, filled with nothing more exciting than instant coffee, two packs of chips, and a few overpriced apples. Satoru hadn’t bought anything at all, which meant, inevitably, he was going to steal Suguru’s snacks the moment they made it back to their dorm.
The sun was dipping behind the school buildings, casting long shadows over the cracked sidewalk, painting Satoru’s hair with threads of gold. He walked a little too close, hands tucked behind his head, bumping shoulders with Suguru on every third step.
“I’m just saying,” Satoru said with the tone that always meant something terrible was about to follow, “if we fought right now, like really went all out, I’d win.”
“You’re delusional,” Suguru replied, not even looking at him. “If I dropped you into a Grade Two cursed warehouse, you’d cry.”
“Pfft.” Satoru leaned closer, eyes gleaming with mischief behind his glasses. “You think you’re scary, but you’re not. You’re soft. I bet if a cursed spirit so much as looked at you wrong, you’d try to reason with it. Offer it tea. Maybe braid its hair.”
Suguru didn’t answer. He had long ago learned that feeding into Satoru’s chaos only made it worse. So he kept walking, deliberately silent.
Satoru pressed on. “You know I only keep you around for your hair, right?” he said, voice light and sing-song. “It’s the only thing you’ve got going for you. The moment you get a bad haircut, I’m dumping you for Nanami.”
Suguru’s eyes narrowed faintly, his grip tightening on the plastic bag, but still, he said nothing.
“Wow,” Satoru gasped, all exaggerated shock. “That one really got to you, huh? Well, I mean,” he grinned, teeth glinting in the sun. “He does have that strong, silent thing going for him—””
“I'm actually going to deck you.”
With all the stealth of a toddler trying to sneak cookies, Satoru hooked an arm over Suguru’s shoulders and practically draped himself across his back like a weighted blanket.
“I say one little thing and suddenly I’m a pariah. What happened to friendship? Brotherhood? Loyalty?”
“Down the drain,” Suguru said dryly, “the moment you declared your undying love for Nanami’s side part.” Without warning, he jabbed a finger in Satoru’s side, right into the soft spot above his hip. Satoru let out a sound halfway between a squawk and a gasp, jerking so hard he nearly lost his balance.
Satoru scowled like a kicked puppy, rubbing at his side. “You’re heartless.”
Suguru shook his head, that faint smile still tugging at his mouth, and thought—not for the first time—that no matter how obnoxious Satoru could be, he was always going to fall for him like this. Effortlessly. Repeatedly.
The way Satoru thinks is all angles and momentum, a wind that flattens cities. But when he speaks to Suguru, it slows, softens, distorts. He’s always been theatrical, but this—this is almost tender. A letter left centuries before Suguru would be born, timed perfectly to the moment he’d arrive. As if Satoru had bent the ribs of the world just to whisper into his ear.
It’s art, really.
And Suguru’s always been his most ardent critic.
-
That’s Hirohito’s great-great-great-great—times-one-thousand—grandad you're tasting. Do notes of facism and looney-bin run in the family? That’s my master plan, convert you back to my side by making your life—lives?—as miserable as they can get. Don't give me that look, I'm joking. I'd make you miserable just for the hell of it.
Sorry. I'm kind of nervous, you know. You gave me a gnarly tummy-ache last time with that tapeworm and now I feel like I have to show off.
I’m imagining you now, Suguru. Blood painting your teeth like lacquer, glistening at the corners of your mouth. You don't like to admit it, but I know that you enjoy it. The sweet thickness of it, metallic and all wrong. You like that it’s wrong. I bet you've been eyeing the digestive tract that I so sweetly cut open for you.
Happy birthday, Suguru. I hope it settles warm in your belly—like I’m really there with you. Like it’s me you’re consuming, piece by piece. I want to be with you, Suguru. Not scattered across centuries, not sending scraps of myself in blood and breath and broken things. With you. Which means you've got to stop this mess and come home. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you've got no hope left. Give up. You must.
With lots and lots and lots of love, Satoru.
-
In what used to be South Sudan, somewhere in a future not yet carved clean, the sky hangs matte-black, overcast with what used to be satellites, drifting like vultures above a city that hums underfoot—pulsing, buried, feral. Machines lie half-swallowed by soil, their steel bones twitching softly in the heat. Buildings bloom upward from spores, curved and glistening, grown from glassy fungus and repurposed rot. The air crackles with static and strange sweetness—rust, ozone, crushed mint, and something vaguely medicinal.
Satoru’s standing on the outskirts of a marketplace, letting himself be nudged forward by the flow of foot-traffic. The crowd parts around him like water—quiet, unfazed, faces half-covered or pixelated out entirely. Over the murmurs and mechanical chatter, he can just barely catch the warble of drones sweeping overhead, the cicada-like whine of solar panels dying slow deaths in the heat.
He’d come here chasing a rumor: a rift that blinked open in the shape of Suguru’s name. He's here, officially, on a mission sanctioned by the higher-ups. He’s dangerous, they hiss. Finish this.
It makes Satoru laugh, at first. Then ache.
Abandoning his outermost layer to be swept up by the crowd, Satoru shoves his hands in his pockets and weaves through the stalls, flashing a blinding smile to anyone who meets his gaze—not that many do. Nobody really gives a fuck about anything anymore. It’s delightful. Suguru would probably turn up his nose, griping about etiquette and decorum and all kinds of old-world nonsense that Satoru’s never bothered with. All that talk of rules and table manners, yet Suguru’s the idiot who regularly settles himself in rickety huts and back-alley dumps—before the invention of air conditioning—where Satoru can't find him.
So fucking pretentious, he thinks, almost unbearably fond.
He pauses at a corner stall that sells memory-keys—little metal slivers shaped like teeth, each one coded with a sensory imprint: laughter in a bathhouse, the weight of a mother’s hand, the first time someone said stay.
Next to them, half-buried in dust, is a different kind of trinket.
It’s a glass cicada. No bigger than his thumb. Blown by hand, from the look of it, with wings so thin they ripple in the wind. A faint blue shimmer lives in its belly—just enough to catch the light when it moves. It’s delicate in that way Suguru always liked. Beautiful, but not practical. Finicky. Utterly useless.
The tulip garden’s gift shop was jam-packed with people, pressed up against one another like sardines, and Satoru wanted to leave immediately. Shoko and Suguru dragged him inside, flanking his sides like bodyguards. Really shitty ones, evidently, as they both disappeared from his side almost immediately.
He found Shoko by a wall of keychains. They were stupid, adorable little things—smiling animals in flower crowns, pressed resin filled with glitter and actual dried petals.
“Oh my god,” Shoko muttered, pulling down one shaped like a frog holding a sunflower. “This one’s you.”
“What the hell? I am way more majestic than a frog.”
“Nope,” she said, eyes scanning the display. “You are an amphibian in a sunhat, and I stand by that.”
Satoru snorted, glancing up when someone nudged into him. Instinctively, he looked for Suguru. It didn’t take long to spot him. His fat head stuck out from over a shelf just a few aisles over, in the corner where the more fragile, delicate things were arranged—jewelry, porcelain, tiny glass figurines under bell jars. Suguru was standing with his hands folded loosely behind his back, head tilted slightly forward, dark hair catching what little sunlight filtered in through the dusty shop windows. He was looking down at something small and wooden on the shelf, brows pulled together. There was something soft about his expression. Curious. Almost childlike.
Satoru circled closer and caught a glimpse of it. A music box, smooth oak carved into the shape of a flower bloom. Tiny roses wrapped around the lid in a swirling pattern, petals etched so finely he imagined you could catch a fingertip on them if you pressed too hard.
Suguru glanced up, noticing him. He stepped back from the display a little, like he’d been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to. “It’s pointless,” he said with a casual shrug. “Just takes up space.”
“Pointless is half the fun,” he said, pretending not to watch Suguru pretend not to want it. “Besides, you like it.”
“Do not.”
“Do too.”
Satoru’s hand drifts toward it instinctively. He can already hear the dry amusement in Suguru’s voice. What is it supposed to do, Satoru? Sing? Dance? Bite? And then softer, almost reluctant: It’s pretty.
He lingers by the stall a little too long. The vendor doesn't notice—he's too busy arguing with a customer over whether the taste of first love is worth two credits more than secondhand grief—but Satoru can’t look away.
Sure, he could hide it in a crater. Bury it in the stomach of a whale. Encode it in the orbit of some cold little moon and hope Suguru passes by, but he can’t press it into his palm. Can’t see the small, surprised twist of Suguru’s smile. Can’t say this reminded me of you and mean fragile, beautiful, strange.
Mine.
Nonetheless, Satoru finds himself reaching for it, letting the weight of it settle in his palm as he holds it up to the light, and—
“Oh,” he breathes. “You asshole.”
-
You forget, Satoru; I know you. I know you as intimately as my own heartbeat, as surely as the scent of my own blood. And I know it goes both ways. You're nothing if not predictable. Does that irritate you? I doubt it. I think you're probably laughing right now, clutching the cicada to your chest because you're a sentimental fool. No amount of time nor distance could change that.
Despite your delusions, this isn't your victory. As you read this, our operatives have already silenced the uprising. All it took were four clean shots, and no one will ever know the difference.
By now, I imagine, you're finally angry.
I've heard about your students. Before you wreak havoc on our agents for some perceived threat, I'll remind you that I keep quite a bit of information to myself. You're welcome.
One day I'll poach Okkotsu from you. That, at least, you can be sure of.
The thought of you simmering in betrayal sparks something cruel and rotten and gleeful in me. You’d have to explain how you knew, wouldn’t you? Admit you were compromised. Oh, what I would give to see their faces. Their best operative—their strongest—corresponding with the enemy? Good grief. Yaga would faint, I think.
Alas, I know you won't risk the kids. It’s a shame, Satoru. We could be great. You call what we do ‘scraps’ as if we haven't left pieces of ourselves in places brimming with life, too. In the small, stubborn moments of grace we carve out of this brutal world.
Thank you for the birthday wishes. I spent the day burying the dead and mourning mechanical plumbing, so the sentiment brightened my final hours in Heian-Kyō.
Of course I feel you here with me, Satoru. I always do. You know where to find me.
Best regards, Suguru.
-
Even beneath the generous shade of his wide-brimmed sun hat, Suguru’s face is beginning to blister, the relentless desert heat searing into his skin. He trudges steadily along, shifting his bag higher up his body in an effort to stave off what's going to be killer back pain by the time he's through with this. Around him, his colleagues fare no better—scholars more accustomed to sterile labs and data sheets than the brutal demands of fieldwork. Suguru doesn’t blame them. He wouldn't be here either, if he had any real choice, but the job had required a “genuine enthusiasm for geology,” so for the past two years, that’s what he’s carefully cultivated: a slow-growing, convincing affection for rocks, minerals, and the ancient secrets buried beneath their feet.
At the end of this grueling hike, they’ll arrive at the shifting sand dunes, where one of their team is expected to uncover a nearly extinct species of lichen. A modest scientific triumph. Unbeknownst to them, their very expedition inadvertently sparks two world wars and leads to the erasure of six NATO countries from the map. Suguru’s handlers wouldn’t bat an eye at the carnage if it weren’t for the inconvenient fact that all three of their operational bases were wiped out in the fallout.
Thus, Suguru had learned to love rocks.
He’s here to take the lichen for himself and raze the others to the ground while he's at it. Two of them will be scooped up by the higher-ups, repurposed into obedient little agents before they even realize what’s happening. The other three just have shit luck. Suguru’s kept his distance, deliberately, methodically, the way you’d hold back from petting a stray you know you’ll have to put down. He walks with them, eats with them, listens to their small talk about funding and fieldwork like he’s one of them. But he already knows that by nightfall, he’ll be scrubbing their blood from under his fingernails—slowly, thoroughly, like he's not already tainted to his very bones.
Satoru would disagree, but Satoru isn't here right now.
Suguru lifts his water bottle with a weary hand, unscrewing the cap with fingers made stiff by heat and dust. The plastic creaks faintly in his grip, sun-warped and warm to the touch. He tilts it back, lips parched, tongue sticking slightly to the roof of his mouth, and takes a slow, measured sip, just enough to wet his throat. The liquid is lukewarm, almost sour from the heat, but it slips down like salvation. He drinks again, more greedily this time, then stops himself and peers inside. What’s left is pitiful: two inches of water clinging to the bottom, sloshing weakly as he tilts the bottle from side to side.
The fan was ancient. Loud as hell, clunky in its rotations, and so weak it only barely nudged the air around them, but it was better than nothing, and Suguru wasn’t above laying prone on the tatami floor like a dying man if it meant catching the occasional breath of lukewarm breeze.
Satoru was sprawled beside him, gangly limbs everywhere, one sock on and a melting popsicle stick held lazily between two fingers. The room was small—technically Satoru’s, though they blurred those lines often—and humid enough to soak through Suguru’s shirt and cling to his spine. Neither of them were talking, just lying there in a shared fugue state of heat-induced suffering.
The fan sputtered again.
Suguru groaned softly. He could feel the last bit of cold soda drain down his throat, already beginning to warm the second it hit his stomach. The can gave a sad, empty clunk when he tipped it again just to make sure. “Shit. That was the last one.”
“Blasphemy,” Satoru said without moving.
“I'm serious,”
“So am I. This is a state of emergency. You realize what this means?”
Suguru cracked one eye open, glaring sidelong. “No cold drinks. That’s what it means.”
“No,” Satoru said, already beginning to sit up with the air of someone planning a military operation. “It means we need to make the noble pilgrimage to the vending machines across campus. We have no choice. Fate demands it.”
“You’re out of your mind. We’ll die before we even reach the gate.”
“Then we’ll die hydrated.”
Suguru groaned again, dragging a hand over his eyes. He hated how much sense that made. Or maybe he just hated how easily Satoru could make the worst ideas sound like brilliant ones. “It’s almost midnight.”
“All the better. Fewer people to witness our demise.”
“We’re going to get eaten alive by bugs.”
“I'll protect you, Suguru.”
Suguru rolled his head to the side, staring at him now—disheveled and a little sweaty, popsicle syrup drying on his wrist, and grinning like a fool. There was no reason to be here, to stay in this room where the walls felt sticky and the air refused to move. But Suguru wasn’t getting up to leave.
“You’re an idiot,” he muttered.
Satoru beamed. “And you’re still here. That makes two of us.”
Suguru didn’t answer. Just nudged Satoru’s leg with his own and said, “Get your shoes. I’m not carrying you back if you melt.”
He exhales through his nose and caps it tightly. No point wasting more.
There’s a flicker of temptation, brief and shameful, to ask someone if they have extra. But he knows better. The others are already buckling under the weight of their own burdens, sweat painting dark patches across the backs of their shirts, breath coming hard and uneven. They’re not built for this, not like he is. Suguru may not want to be here, but he can endure, and he won't take from them, even if they aren't making it through the night.
That’s always been his edge: endurance. So he shifts his pack again, the straps carving a deeper groove into his shoulders, and keeps moving. Step by step, sand shifting beneath his boots, horizon shimmering in the haze like a mirage too cruel to hope for.
A voice pitched high with disbelief cuts through the dry air, tugging his focus up and over to the rest of the group.
“I see something! Over there—just past the ridge!”
The group slows, stumbles, eyes lifting as one. Suguru squints toward the place she’s pointing, vision blurred by sun glare and a thin veil of exhaustion. At first, it looks like nothing. Just the same endless stretch of pale, rippling sand, until his eyes finally focus.
Suguru stares.
Not just one or two, but a line of water bottles—dozens, maybe more, standing upright in the sand like gleaming beacons. They sparkle in the sunlight, clear plastic catching the rays and scattering them like tiny prisms. The heat makes them waver, as if they might vanish with a blink. He hears questioning murmurs, voices wavering with hope and disbelief all at once, but Suguru knows they're real, and he knows exactly who left them.
A faint smile tugs at the corner of his cracked lips.
Suguru doesn’t say anything to the others, doesn’t acknowledge the relief blossoming in his chest. He just keeps walking, one step after another, toward the glinting line of bottles. The desert stretches on around them, but now it feels just a little less hostile. One by one, they each collect four bottles, the last three set aside with a wordless agreement to divide them later. Suguru turns his own over in his hand, thumb brushing across the chilled plastic, slick with condensation. The label is plain, nondescript—so ordinary it almost feels mocking. He doesn’t bother wondering how closely Satoru must be watching him to time this so perfectly. He doesn’t want to know—but he also doesn't really give a fuck. It makes his stomach swoop, and isn't that just pathetic? God. Suguru used to have a backbone.
He flicks the cap off and drinks.
-
How fucking good am I? Save your breath, we both know I'm the best. Tactics? Genius. Combat? Untouchable. Style? Please. You should be impressed. You used to be impressed. Don’t pretend you didn’t once describe me as “disgustingly competent” when you thought I wasn’t listening.
Anyways. I’ve been mopping up what you left behind—again—and it’s getting harder to convince the higher-ups that you’re just going through a phase. A genocidal maniac phase spanning centuries, but still. They’re frothing at the mouth, Suguru, and I mean that genuinely. They want you dead. They want me to be the one to do it.
Come home, Suguru. This is me begging. If that’s what you wanted all along, you've finally got it. You weren’t meant to become this—this myth of a man leaving devastation in his wake like it’s the only thing that proves he’s real.
You're real to me.
Even when you’re monstrous. Even when you make it impossible. I know you think you’ve passed some point of no return, that there’s nothing left in you but fire and ruin, but I know better. You trust me, don't you?
I can't do this without you.
Satoru
-
By the time Satoru registers the blade buried between his ribs, his vision is already stuttering, black dots blooming at the edges like ink spilled across paper. He stares at the corpses before him; three curse users lie crumpled at his feet, their bodies grotesquely ruined. Limbs bent the wrong way, spines snapped like brittle branches. Their chests have been split open with surgical precision, innards slithering out in a steaming, glistening mess that soaks into the dirt and into Satoru’s shoes.
Wind claws at the hem of his torn coat, hot and dry, dragging grit across the scorched concrete where the fight just ended. The skyline in the distance wavers behind heat shimmer, buildings nothing more than trembling silhouettes against a sky bruised orange and red. Vultures circle above, lazy and unbothered, like they’re already scouting out the best place to land when the next body drops.
Smoke curls from the mouths of shattered windows, mixing with the iron-heavy smell of fresh blood that clings to his skin, his clothes, his lungs . Satoru wrinkles his nose at the thickness of the stench. One hand presses against the wound at his side, fingers slick with warmth. It’ll heal, sure, but it burns. A white-hot throb, pulsing in time with his heartbeat.
He doesn't know what the fuck Suguru is thinking. Such a blatant taunt? Such a half-assed counter attack? It’s like he wants to die, like he’s daring Satoru to do it. Daring him to follow orders, to end it, to be the one standing over him with blood on his hands and nothing left behind his eyes.
The higher ups are breathing down his fucking neck, whispers turned to sharp commands, their patience worn thin by Suguru’s chaos. They want his head on a spike. They want Satoru to bring it to them. You’re the only one who can do it, they say. Like it’s a compliment. An honor, even.
He doesn’t feel honored. He feels like he’s rotting from the inside out.
Satoru glances up, eyes scanning the distant rooftops, the alleys filled with shadow. If Suguru was ever here at all, he’s long gone now. Slipped through Satoru’s fingers again like smoke, a thousand forgotten dreams and a thousand more to come. Still, Satoru loves him, raw and ugly and threaded with grief so old it’s fossilized. It lives behind his ribs, nested in the hollowness Suguru left behind. Every time he thinks he can seal that place up, Suguru tears it open again, just to remind him that he still feels . Centuries can pass by— have passed by—and Satoru thinks his love has only gotten stronger.
This can't last forever. He feels it in the way the boardrooms have grown colder, quieter, more lethal. In the sudden silence after he says Suguru’s name, like everyone’s collectively holding their breath and praying one of them finally croaks. It'd be beneficial to them if it was Suguru, of course, but Satoru isn’t naïve. He knows the way they glance at him now. Too measured, too calculating. He’s been dragging his feet too long, and their patience is thinning.
The higher-ups have begun to roll out contingency protocols—black-budget projects whispered about in the dark corridors of the jujutsu council, the kind that don’t officially exist. Plans that reek of desperation and cruelty dressed up as tactical precision.
A kilometer-wide web of quantum barrier fields, capable of slicing through cursed energy signatures like glass through flesh. It syncs to Satoru’s Six Eyes in real time, turning him into the node of a living trap. If Suguru so much as breathes near one of their strongholds, he’ll trigger a cascade of pressure-sealed binding curtains, powered by energy harvested from cursed spirits in perpetual torment. No more room for theatrics. No more running.
A line of autonomous counter-sorcerer units built with artificially spliced techniques stolen from former allies. Flesh grafted to machine. Human nervous systems strung through silver alloy. Satoru’s seen the prototypes: blank-eyed and twitching, shaped like people but with none of the mercy. They're designed to hunt Suguru’s ideology like a virus. Designed to learn him.
Satoru knows how this ends and it terrifies him. They'll follow him until the ends of the earth as many times as it takes, and when that happens, when the last trace of him has been scraped away like rust from a blade, there won’t be anyone left who remembers why any of it mattered. Why he mattered. Why they did.
If it has to be this way, Satoru will raze the sorcerers to the ground before letting them touch Suguru. If this is the hill they want to die on, he’ll make damn sure it’s their last.
Satoru glances down at the hilt jutting from his side. It’s buried to the crossguard, slick with blood so dark it looks black in the fading light. The pain feels distant, muted, like it belongs to someone else entirely. His fingers are numb. His breath comes shallow. His limbs feel too long, disconnected from the rest of him. A puppet cut from its strings.
He can't tell if it’s the adrenaline fading or if he's finally lost it.
Satoru drops to a crouch anyway, his coat dragging through pooled blood without a second thought, hands moving mechanically as he rifles through the first corpse’s clothes; jacket torn down the middle, ribs jutting out like splintered cage bars. No ID. No phone. Just a strip of prayer beads melted into the skin of his palm. Satoru wrinkles his nose and moves on.
The second is worse. A woman, younger than the others, her face caved in where a blast of cursed energy had caught her point-blank. There’s nothing useful on her—just some loose bills, a cracked pack of cigarettes, and a small photograph tucked into her belt: a dog, grinning with a pink bandana, someone’s handwritten mandarin on the back. He doesn’t read it. He doesn’t want to know her name.
The third body yields more. A slim man with a neat beard and the stiff posture of military training, now twisted at the waist like a snapped tree limb. Satoru searches his coat pockets, then the lining, and then finally the inner vest—
—there it is. A red-bean dumpling, wrapped carefully in pristine parchment paper, miraculously unscathed by the carnage. Satoru sighs, rolling his eyes like this isn't the most Suguru thing imaginable. The paper unfurls in his hand, now grease-stained and curled at the corners as Satoru plucks its contents up, holding the dumpling up to the light.
They had just left a small cafe nestled between two shrines, a narrow slip of a place with cramped wooden booths and the scent of roasted barley and caramelized sugar hanging heavy in the air. Classes had ended, the sun was low and bruising the sky with gold and lavender, and Satoru, ever unprepared, hadn’t brought a jacket.
Now he was shivering violently, arms crossed over his chest and long legs tangling up with Suguru’s as they walked side by side down the uneven stone path.
“I’m going to die,” Satoru had whined, his voice pitched dramatically. “My fingers are going to snap off and rattle down the street like little popsicle bones. You wouldn’t let your best friend freeze to death, would you?”
With a long-suffering sigh, Suguru reached up and unzipped his jacket. “Here. Just take it before you give yourself hypothermia out of spite.”
Satoru blinked at him. “Are you messing with me?”
“Don't make it weird.”
“I’m not—!” But a flush was already spreading rapidly over his cheeks, mouth parted in surprise. Suguru didn’t let him wallow in it; he shoved the jacket into Satoru’s arms, and while Satoru was still fumbling to put it on, sleeves far too long, Suguru calmly plucked the red-bean dumpling out of his hand and took a bite.
The sound Satoru made was strangled. “That was mine!”
Suguru just looked at him, unbothered. “You’re wearing my jacket. We’re even.”
Satoru had huffed, cheeks redder than the bean paste, but he'd smiled the whole walk home, unable to stop himself from stealing glances at Suguru out of the corner of his eye.
“Goddamn you,” Satoru mutters, and pops the dumpling into his mouth.
-
I thought you'd skip breakfast. It’s from the cafe down the street from JT, the one you got us kicked out of. The old man didn't recognize me. You'd think the earrings would make me more memorable, no?
I won't lie to you, Satoru, I do like the sound of your desperation. It’d be vicious of me, perhaps, if I didn't know you’d feel the same.
I think some part of you still believes we’re just one good conversation away from fixing everything. You say I wasn’t meant to become this; you're right. This is some fucked up timeline, the universe where everything went wrong. The universe where my deck isn't fully stacked. I'll admit that, but you know what? Neither were you. You weren’t meant to be their hound, their executioner, their precious little miracle so devoted to a world that hates anything it can’t control. It makes me sick.
You can’t do this without me? You’re the strongest, remember? The brightest, the boldest, the blinding fucking god of sorcery with the sparkling teeth and the six eyes and the messiah complex. If anyone can do this alone, it’s you.
You were made to lead. To teach. You walk into a room and children look up. Not because you’re the strongest, but because you make them want to be better. You make them believe they can be. I watch them, sometimes, from a distance. The way they move around you like planets orbiting a sun they trust not to burn them.
For what it’s worth, I'm sorry I've put you in this position. I truly am. For all that I bemoan your sense of righteous duty, I admire it just as much. We were both doomed from the moment we started believing we could fix a broken world with half-measures and good intentions. You're just the one still trying to do it with your hands clean.
It’s commendable. You always have been, even at your most insufferable.
Just so you're aware, you absolutely were meant to hear “disgustingly competent.” You blush when you're flustered.
Yours always, Suguru
-
The soil is slightly damp from the morning rain. Suguru presses his palms into it, letting the grit grind beneath his fingernails as he settles the last of the seedlings into their little carved beds. Tomatoes, eggplants, a handful of spring onions wrapped in old newspaper. Nothing extravagant. He had bought them from a tiny stall in the village market, manned by a woman with cataracts and sun-worn skin who smiled at him like she knew him from a different life. He likes that. He likes the anonymity, the smallness of things.
No cursed energy, no high-frequency urban buzz, just the murmuring hush of Ecuador’s countryside. He’s been here nearly three years, and for the first time in recent memory, his bones don’t ache when he wakes up.
“I’m getting old,” Satoru had whined, arms thrown dramatically over his eyes. He was flopped over Suguru’s bed like a ragdoll, sprawled across the length of it. “You don’t understand, Suguru. I’m practically ancient. This is how it starts. First my back, then my knees, then I’m crawling into the grave like a putrid old man.”
Suguru had looked up from his book and stared at him, unimpressed. “You’re eighteen.”
“Eighteen and deteriorating.”
Suguru had tried to be annoyed, genuinely tried, but the irritation dissolved before it ever reached his throat. Instead, something else had curled up in his chest. Something warm and dangerous. A beginning he didn’t have a name for yet.
“If you’re going to die that dramatically,” Suguru had muttered, folding his page and setting the book down, “at least do it somewhere I don’t have to trip over your corpse.”
Satoru had cracked a grin beneath his arm. “You’d miss me too much.”
Suguru hadn't answered. He's not sure who he thought he was fooling.
He straightens slowly, brushing soil from his knees, and turns toward the covered porch where he left his tea and a small bag of dried fruit. Something catches his eye—a sharp spot of color, impossible to miss against the brown wood of the railing. A single rose, red as arterial blood, in full bloom. Perfect. Untouched. Placed with care. A pale strip of white silk ties it to the post, fluttering faintly in the wind.
Suguru stills.
The rose looks real. Feels real, too, when Suguru brushes his fingertips over the petals—velvety and delicate. Too delicate. His wrist shifts just slightly as he plucks it free from the railing, hissing quietly as he pricks his skin, the tiniest drop of blood rising from the pad of his thumb.
His pulse flutters. He frowns, pressing the wound to his mouth instinctively, but there’s a bitter, metallic tang rising up from his throat that doesn’t belong to blood. It spreads quickly—too quickly. The dizziness isn’t gentle. It slams into him like a wave breaking against rock, dragging his balance out from under him. He stumbles back, catching himself against the porch railing. Suguru's vision flickers, the flower dropping soundlessly from his hand.
He breathes, slow and shallow, trying to think. Poison. Of course. How long has it been since he’s trained himself to detect it in a cursed meal, a cursed drink? But this is different. This is targeted, intimate . He knew Suguru won’t resist a sentimental touch. He knew this would work.
Knees folding beneath him, Suguru sinks down to the flaking planks of wood, chest stuttering. For a moment, there’s no rage. Just disbelief. Cold and clean.
Satoru. Satoru?
All those fucking memories folded into origami and left behind like breadcrumbs. Was it all manipulation? Or worse, is this mercy?
His stomach turns. No, no, no. Not like this. Not after everything. Not when Suguru has bled for this new world. Not when he’s carved it out with his hands, his grief, his faith. And Satoru—Satoru knows. Knows what he’s endured, what he’s built, how close he’s come to turning their unachievable dream into reality. For him to choose this, to lace a rose with poison like it’s some final love letter.
“Coward,” Suguru breathes, voice slurred. His body is collapsing by degrees now, muscles locking, lungs tightening. “You fucking coward."
There’s sweat cooling on his brow even as fever blooms beneath his skin, and the world has lost its edges. Everything is slow, drifting, softened. Distant bird calls echo through the hills like they’re underwater.
It would be beautiful, if it weren’t so goddamn cruel.
His fingers twitch weakly around the crushed rose clutched to his chest. He can’t feel the thorns anymore. Can’t feel much of anything except the thick, cloying ache that’s settled into his gut—an ache not of poison, but of grief. He didn’t think this would be how it ended. Alone. Not on some battlefield, not in a blaze of conviction, but like this. Lying on sun-warmed wood while the garden he planted hours ago drinks up the light.
At the very least, he expected Satoru to show his fucking face. He wants him here, wants to see that ridiculous white hair blown wild by the wind, wants to hear that laugh, wants those long fingers gripping his wrist, anchoring him to the world. He wants to scream, to demand an explanation, and it's—it’s not fair. Even now, Suguru knows it isn't fair. He's the reason why Satoru had to—but still. Still.
God, he misses him.
Suguru blinks slowly, lashes heavy with sweat, eyes struggling to focus on the horizon. Everything is humming and golden, distant and fragile. The garden sways gently in the wind, and for a moment, it feels like the world is tilting.
And then he sees him.
White hair catching in the sun like spun glass. A long shadow cutting across the vegetables still rooting themselves in the soil, sunglasses glinting, pushed back onto his head. Satoru, taller than memory, realer than a dream, striding toward him with something unspeakably gentle on his face.
Suguru chokes on a laugh, breath rasping raw through his throat.
Hallucinations. Of all the fucking things.
Satoru kneels beside him on the porch like it's the most natural thing in the world, like the decades haven’t built a chasm between them. He doesn't say a damn word. Just sits down, shoulder pressed gently against Suguru’s, body warm and steady and real.
The contact sends a bolt through Suguru’s chest. A shudder. His fingers twitch helplessly, brushing the fabric of Satoru’s sleeve.
“You’re really here,” he breathes. He can’t stop staring. Can’t stop drinking him in. “Fuck. You’re—older. You're actually older.”
Satoru huffs a laugh, low and shaky. “So are you, dumbass.”
Suguru doesn’t remember how to breathe around the weight of him. Everything he thought he’d say, all the rage and bitter betrayal, has been stripped clean away. He looks at Satoru now and all he feels is awe, an aching, bone-deep ache, like looking at a holy relic.
There are lines in his face. Actual lines creasing the skin beneath his eyes—his eyes. They stare into Suguru's, glimmering with mirth. The blue of his irises reflects the sky above.
“You—” Suguru cuts himself off, a smile stretching over his lips, unbidden. He's giddy , like a schoolgirl with a crush, feeling every point of contact like a furnace burning beneath his skin. “Wish we could’ve done this under better circumstances. Tea, maybe, or a really fancy funeral. Did you ever visit Tana Toraja?”
“No,” Satoru replies, amused. He sounds a little breathless, eyes flicking over every inch of Suguru’s face. “But you told me about them. Whose funeral?”
Suguru smiles faintly. “Depends how long this poison decides to take.”
Satoru’s fingers brush his first—soft, testing—and then slide between his own like they belong there. As if nothing has changed in the decade they've been apart. Suguru’s hand is shaking, clammy from sweat and adrenaline, but Satoru doesn’t seem to care. He squeezes gently, grounding him. The pulse in his thumb matches Suguru’s, and it’s that, more than anything, that makes Suguru’s throat tighten.
Slow, warm, and filled with something ancient and unguarded, Satoru smiles. It makes Suguru feel like someone’s cracked his ribs open and poured sunlight into the very core of his being.
God help him, he’s falling in love all over again. Right here, half-dead, dirt in his hair, rose poison curling through his bloodstream. None of it matters. With Satoru beside him, none of it fucking matters.
“I didn't think you'd come,” he admits, the words rushing out of him before he can think better. Satoru blinks at him, his face completely blank, before crumpling in mock offense.
“What— really? After all this time, that’s what you think of me? That I’d just let you keel over alone in a cabbage patch?”
“You're busy,” Suguru says, eyes fluttering shut for a moment, too heavy with dizziness to hold open. “With the end of the world. With orders. With people who don't try to kill you every six months.”
“You never try to kill me,” Satoru retorts. It sounds like an argument he's had before.
“No,” Suguru agrees dryly. “Just everyone you work with.”
“Because you know I don't care about them. You'd never hurt Shoko or Nanami or my students.”
“I didn't realize you had any trust left in me.”
He lifts their joined hands and presses the back of Suguru’s knuckles to his mouth. “Ouch.”
Suguru forces his eyes open again. He looks at Satoru, at the faint crinkle at the corners of his eyes, at the ghost of worry he tries to hide behind teasing. And he can’t meet that gaze for long. His heart is cracking. Splintering in his chest like thin glass.
“I was scared,” he says quietly, voice hushed, barely audible. “Not of dying. Just… of dying alone.”
Satoru shifts closer, his thigh flush to his. One hand still tangled in Suguru’s, the other coming up to brush gently along his cheek, brushing back hair stuck to his damp skin. He’s not smiling anymore. He’s just looking at him like he’s trying to memorize every inch.
Even if this is the end, even if his heart gives out in the next hour, it won’t have been alone. It’ll have been with him.
“Always dramatic,” Suguru breathes out, barely holding back the waver in his voice. “You should’ve brought a fan and some music. Really sell the deathbed scene.”
Satoru snorts. “Too late. I already kissed your hand. This is a whole stage play now.”
Suguru huffs a laugh that sounds too much like a sob, and lets his head fall to the side, pressing his nose to Satoru’s shoulder. “Don't leave,” he whispers.
Satoru is quiet for a beat too long. There’s something flickering at the edge of Satoru’s expression, subtle and off-kilter. A tilt in the smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, like he’s bracing for something Suguru hasn't caught up to yet.
“Not a chance.”
Then, softer—Suguru might be imagining it, or maybe dreaming it entirely—Satoru leans in close, brushing his lips just above Suguru’s ear.
“I’ll be here when you wake up.”