Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The immediate aftermath of the Star Plasma Vessel mission is utter chaos. The campus is a mess, the barriers are a mess, everyone is a mess; the smell of blood is so potent he can taste it on his tongue; people are running or screaming or running and screaming; all his Six Eyes strain themselves to keep track off even the tiniest movement, looking for signs of the Sorcerer Killer trying to finish the job he started.

Satoru still feels the imprint of his cursed tool in his throat, down his torso, in his skull. His wounds pound as if someone is using a sledgehammer to drive the point home that he bleeds red, too.

A part of him knows the Sorcerer Killer isn’t coming back. A part of him wants that asshole to come back so he can use this power roiling under his skin like the universe before the big bang. His cursed energy is packed so tightly inside of him that even the air in his lungs has nowhere left to go, heat coursing through his veins evaporating everything else except the need for more.

Riko lives, a bullet bouncing around in her skull until Shoko manages to extract it, and Satoru lives, and Suguru lives — but there’s so much blood in the courtyard and the assistant managers and the staff are talking about how much blood there is in the Tombs of the Stars — but Suguru’s hurt, with a pair of cuts on his chest oozing warm liquid despite the emergency treatment.

Satoru would be lying if he said he wasn’t happy about not having to fight Tengen, but this is not the happy ending he wanted, either. This is not the ending he has imagined.

This isn’t right.

The place he has come to care for more than his own home is a collection of debris, his best friend can barely stand by himself, Satoru feels his blood under his hands, red, red, red, skin feverish under his touch, the fabric of his uniform wet and heavy — something ugly stirs inside of him, peels back all the layers he keeps himself wrapped in so he doesn’t show any real bite until he’s strong enough. It demands retribution for the destruction he sees. For Riko. For Suguru. For everyone who could have died to the Sorcerer Killer.

His anger has always been a terrible thing, especially with so much cursed energy he commands out of necessity, restraint biting into him like collars on born and bred attack dogs frothing at the mouth. It’s akin to the righteous wrath of a god, the kind that would gladly level entire nations just to kill one man — it bursts out of him so potent, so poisoned, that curbing it is almost an impossibility — and, deep down, he has to admit that he doesn’t really have any intentions of controlling it, because—

“Satoru,” Suguru says, squinting against the glare of the sun as he glances up at him. “What’s wrong?”

Everything, he wants to say but the word gets stuck behind his teeth, too big to just vomit it out. You almost died because I couldn’t protect you. Riko almost died because I couldn’t protect her. I almost died.

What comes out of his mouth, though, is a very tactful, “you look like shit.” No one has ever claimed that his emotional intelligence measured up to his combat sense before, and Satoru is certainly beginning to understand why.

His best friend snorts — coughs, then swallows down the cough in a desperate attempt to keep his chest from moving too much. Fresh blood trickles from his wounds, and he presses the one hand that isn’t wrapped around Satoru against the cuts. It does nothing.

“At least my hair didn’t change color,” Suguru mutters when he finds his voice again, nodding harshly towards him.

He doesn’t even try for a laugh. “My hair’s fine.” Shoko’s probably going to kill them anyway for showing up half-dead in front of her again. This time, she might be justified in doing so.

The other boy stares at him, dark eyes endless enough that Satoru falls headfirst into them and doesn’t even try to climb back out.

“Your hair,” Suguru says gravely, “is red.” Something else slips out of him, much less tangible than the stream of red sneaking past his fingers. It takes his addled brain, hazy with the battle-high and the adrenaline and the buzz of excess energy, a long moment to realize it’s concern, and that it’s as sharp as the smugness would be, if they’d fucked up in a way that only meant property damage. “How much blood did you lose?”

“Uh,” he says, tries not to look back at the center of the crater where he laid, everything red, red, red. “A lot?”

Suguru stares at him as if he knows the underestimation for what it is. (His stomach ties itself in knots at the sight; this is perhaps the first time Suguru’s been genuinely angry with him. Makes him want to throw up.)

All of a sudden, Satoru feels vulnerable under his best friend’s gaze, when, a moment ago, taking on the world seemed so easy — it lands on his throat, on his chest, on his forehead, on the blood in his hair, on the blood on his uniform.

His Six Eyes are all too happy to provide him with all the information he was blissfully ignorant of before: There’s a tightness to the other boy’s mouth, tension to his shoulders; his hands curl in the scraps of his uniform, grip white-knuckled; his black hair is a mess, the usually so strict bun undone in bits and pieces, sticky with dust and blood and debris and curse remains; his left ankle is sprained, a bone in his right arm broken — and yet, all Suguru seems to care about is him, gaze so intense that Satoru squirms under it. (He’s not used to anyone looking at him like this. Not used to anyone caring this much about all the shit he survives.)

“The Sorcerer Killer,” his best friends begins, stops, opens his mouth, tries again and fails. “He told me he had killed you.” His eyes search his face for something he isn’t sure he can give him.

So, without any idea what else to do, Satoru laughs. Nervously, heart fluttering in his chest like it’s been replaced with a hummingbird trapped behind the cage of his ribs. “But he didn’t,” he returns, when he finds the words again. “I’m right here.”

For a long moment, Suguru says nothing. Then, he sucks in a breath so deep, it has him wincing from the pain, and admits, “I believed him.”

And something inside Satoru — something he cannot name, something that he has never felt as keenly as in this moment — gives away at the softness in his voice. It hollows out the spot it occupied before, makes room for something new. Makes him feel like the ground opened up into a yawning chasm beneath him and he’s falling, falling, falling, never going to hit the ground.

“But he didn’t kill me,” he repeats. It sounds like a lie. But he doesn’t know what else to say, except that when he thought he was breathing his last, he was thinking about how the Sorcerer Killer was going after Suguru next and there was nothing he could do to stop him.

Suguru stares at him, hair sticking to his forehead, collar sticking to his throat. “Satoru,” he says, breath wet from what sounds an awful lot like a lung injury, “I believed him.”

(He’s not sure why that’s such a big thing. Yeah, he’d have believed the guy if he’d been down in the Tomb with Riko. Yeah, he’d have flown into a murderous rage. Yeah, it would’ve felt like that asshole single-handedly ruined his entire world. But everyone would’ve done that, right?)

Anyway, the sight of even more blood on his best friend who is already covered in it makes him panic. “Hey, uh, maybe, don’t speak for a bit—”

But he doesn’t listen. Instead, he raises his hand, the movement so sluggish Satoru could avoid it easily if he wanted to, his palm stained with red so fresh it glistens in the sunlight—

And he thinks he should flinch away, because he must look even worse—

Fingers gingerly brush away his hair, trace the edge of the stab wound on his forehead, drop to his throat, trace where the blade went through him.

Satoru swallows, almost chokes on his own saliva. Now, he’s all too aware of the callouses catching against his skin and the frantic drumming of his heartbeat and the muscle that nervously flutters in his throat — Suguru probably feels all of this — unbidden, his Six Eyes rally every single synapse in his brain to figure out how his best friend is reacting to the fact that he’s honest-to-all-gods touching him—

“I thought,” Suguru says, staring at the scar on his throat, “that you were dead.” He sounds like he’s about to cry and that’s — that’s not something he’s prepared to handle. On any level.

“Hey,” Satoru mutters, slips an arm around the other boy to steady him. “I’m not actually dead, you know. And now I’m never going to die. So everything’s fine. Right?”

A little too late, he becomes aware of the fact that there’s really not a lot of space left between them, and that there’s a hand clutching his uniform and a hand on his throat and he has one arm around Suguru and he’s flailing with the other like a man drowning and there are only a handful of inches separating their faces from each other and he’s starting to think that, hey, maybe he could kiss him and maybe that would make everything better—

Wait, what?

Faithfully, his brain repeats: Maybe he could kiss Suguru and—

What. Satoru barely hears his own thoughts over the blood rushing in his ears. Because — because he has never wanted to kiss any of his other three (four?) friends before. And — it’s not like he’s ignorant, he’s had crushes before and he’s found people pretty and he’s read romance manga — but that still means he has a crush on his best friend. And, well, the thing is: He finds people pretty, but what about Suguru? He’s from a town so far out in the sticks, the backwater has backwater. And they’ve always just been friends until now, so jumping from that to boyfriends is like leaping forward an entire fucking light year.

“What’s wrong?” Suguru is asking now, worry etched into every line of his face.

Satoru stutters. Shifts. Gets a little twitchy. Because. The thing with emotions is, when you inherit two essentially extinct cursed techniques, you don’t get a childhood. You get raised as a human weapon. So, feelings? Not something he’s been ever taught to handle. All emotional intelligence he has has been painstakingly learned with his own meager efforts.

His best friend squints, studies him closer, one hand still so tenderly against his throat, he’s positive the rabid beating of his heart will give him away any moment now and—

Then Suguru is swaying, and Satoru has him wrapped up in his arms to keep both of them on their feet.

“Blood loss,” the other boy is muttering into the hollow between his collarbones that lies fully exposed thanks to someone trying to cleave him in two. “Makes me dizzy.”

“Uh-huh,” Satoru returns, pulls him closer for entirely selfish reasons, not because he isn’t trusting his own sense of balance right now. “Just — just hang in there for a little longer, alright? Shoko will be here any moment now.”

Suguru makes a vaguely agreeing sound in the back of his throat, breath brushing against his bare skin. Satoru forgets to breathe until his body very helpfully reminds him that he needs to breathe right fucking now, or they’ll both keel over like a pair of wet sacks of rice.

The fact that he is in love with his best friend is something he’ll think about later. Probably.

Consciousness returns to him in the same as a basketball pitched with great velocity at the back of his head.

His entire body feels like it’s burning, the heat beset by tingling and itching, a heaviness in his limbs that he can’t explain until he remembers how much blood he lost and that someone needed to carry him up from the Tombs.

Breath rattles around his lungs like a disease, just waiting for a chance to escape — he’s sitting, back pressed against one of the pillars that once formed a building, a warm weight against his side.

He drags his eyes open, despite how leaden his lids feel; the sun blinds him; but all he can think of is Satoru, because he remembers — the Sorcerer Killer and the gun and the sword and that shit-eating grin—

But the warm weight against his side is Satoru, alright. White hair blood-stained and an awful cut dragging all the way from his throat down his chest, skin having taken on a particularly pale shade. There’s a depth to the blue of his eyes that he has never seen before, like the sky and the ocean and the universe all rolled into one, the color so vivid he remembers the feeling of silk under his fingers when they weren’t calloused yet.

Just as Suguru’s getting lost in his best friend’s eyes, he remembers the last time he did. Remembers that he was telling him he believed that shithead, and when he looked at him, felt the scars under his hands, saw all that blood … a part of him did think that Satoru died, or that something inside of him died, and the grief of that almost hurt more than being cut into four neat pieces like meat on a butcher’s block.

Not one of his proudest moments, if he’s being honest. Not that there’s been much to be proud of in this mission.

Now, the rest of his senses come back to him, one after another, similar to the way you pick the petals of a flower in a game of ‘does he love me, does he not’: He tastes blood in his mouth, metallic and bitter; he hears the buzz of activity all around him; he smells the blood, both human and curse; he feels the familiar weight of his idiot best friend he’s been in love with for an embarrassingly long amount of time, feels his cursed energy wrapped around the two of them.

Blinking, he fights against the tiredness that threatens to consume him whole, and looks up, only to be caught by these blue eyes again that have spelled his doom the first time they focused on him. There’s something endless about Satoru — the desire to explore every inch of said eternity that has been living under his skin for the last eighteen months in the form of the most ill-advised, and most stubborn, crush he has had in his life.

“Hey there,” the bane of his existence mutters, eyes fluttering shut, each of his perfectly white lashes catching the sunlight akin to glass. “Why do you weigh more than I do?”

“I … what?” Suguru’s voice rasps in his throat, hoarse from disuse and screaming both. He tries not to think about the fact that all that screaming was done thinking Satoru was dead. Because, well, he’s not. (But he could have been, the chorus of voices in the back of his head whispers. The curses buzz inside his guts like flies over roadkill in the summer.)

“You’re heavy,” his best friend bemoans with only a faint trace of his usual theatrics. “Why do you weigh so much more than me?”

Suguru stares at the the boy and wonders why he sometimes daydreams about something romantic coming out of that mouth, when he knows Satoru uses up all his intelligence on making other people’s lives hell on earth. All he manages to choke out is, “muscle mass.”

“Huh?”

“I have more muscle mass than you.”

His best friend stares at him like that’s the most outlandish thing he has said in his entire life but then his gaze veers past him, focused on something Suguru will never be able to see, brain running itself ragged again analyzing every little piece of information it can find. He’s not quite here, mentally, then.

Suguru studies the miraculously healed wound on his throat, evidence of how close he came to dying. The Sorcerer Killer described it well, when he taunted him with how easily his blade cut through the Six Eyes’ Infinity and embedded itself in him — and before he knows, Suguru is already reaching for it, dragging his fingers against it, feeling the heat of the pink flesh, how padded and uneven its borders are.

Satoru startles, looks at him, with all of his eyes.

Suddenly, he feels as if he has burned himself. “Sorry,” he murmurs, jerking back—

“It’s alright,” Satoru assures him a little too quickly, snatching his hand out of the air and settling it back against the hollow of his throat. “I just … forgot this thing was there.”

That doesn’t sound right.

Frowning, he gingerly thumbs along the scar and asks him, “you forgot?” When he receives no reply, he adds, “Satoru. Where are you?”

“You know,” his best friend mutters, blue eyes falling to his shoulder, to his arm. “There.” He nods his head towards the entrance of the campus, where he has left only debris and hundreds of dead fly-heads in his wake. At the epicenter of the destruction lies a crater splattered with so much blood, Suguru can’t help but think that Satoru really did die and come back, more god than human, a little wrong. (Something about that thought makes him physically ill.)

“Don’t go there,” he finds himself saying, voice still rough and each breath agony. “Stay here. With me.”

The other boy looks at him, the two eyes set in his skull brighter than they have any right being, infused with so much cursed energy that he should be able to see every fiber of his being.

The moment stretches like chewing gum, endless in the same way that Infinity is endless — and then his best friend sags against him, buries his head in the crook of his shoulder.

Suguru’s heart takes that about as well as a cardiac arrest. But it’s fine. He’s had eighteen months to get used to this kind of thing.

“Yes,” Satoru is now muttering into the collar of his ruined uniform. “I’ll stay with you.”

Swallowing around the lump suddenly appearing in his throat, he says the only reasonable thing he can think of in this situation: “Shoko will be here soon. She’ll fix us.” He isn’t sure who exactly he’s trying to reassure, though.

An eternity seems to have passed when their classmate appears. She’s running, her short hair whipping in the wind as furiously as her lab coat, and before Suguru can comprehend that their situation is so bad that Shoko is running, she’s already scraping her knees dropping to the ground in front of them.

The shadows under her eyes look like bruises, black and blue and violet; her expression is strangely open, vulnerable, something wild and lost and scared to it that Suguru finds mirrored in his own gaze.

“Yo,” Satoru says and tries for his signature smile that’s ruined by all of the blood on his face and in his hair and the scar on his throat and the fact that he would’ve keeled over if he didn’t cling to Suguru’s shoulder like a man drowning.

“Don’t,” Shoko says, digging her nails into the dirt until they splinter. “Don’t say anything.” Her next breath wrenches itself violent from her throat, a terrible sound that he has never heard her make—

“You’re crying,” Suguru murmurs in surprise. “Why are you crying? We’ve gotten hurt before.”

Shoko stares at him. “That was in the field,” she returns. There’s no heat to her voice, though her eyes burn like a bonfire. “This is our front yard.” Her whole body shake again, the noise she would have made kept as stubbornly inside of her.

Gingerly, Satoru extends his hand to pat her shoulder in what is probably the most awkward attempt at comfort anyone has ever made.

“And,” Shoko continues, something dark and ugly and cold rising through her, “if this guy didn’t leave, there would’ve been nothing I could have done.” She looks at them, blinks, asks, “what good are all these reverse cursed techniques when I’ll only get to see your corpses?”

Suguru … really doesn’t know what to say to that.

“Hey, hey,” Satoru mutters, groans as he leans forward and strains something inside of his body. “Come on, Shoko — this isn’t going to happen again, I promise. It’ll be fine. We’ll be fine.”

“So what?” she snaps. “Sure, it might never again happen to you. But what about Nanami? Haibara? Any other sorcerer?”

“Uh,” Satoru mutters unintelligently.

She drops her head with a sigh, an earthquake contained within her form. “I can’t do this anymore,” she says, and there’s far too much resignation in it.

Unsure what else to do, Satoru continues patting her shoulder, giving her the only form of encouragement he can offer without a second thought.

All too late, Suguru realizes he isn’t frozen in because the exhaustion has hit him like a bullet train but because he’s thinking about how any of them could, very easily, die. Have died, in Satoru’s case. Can still die … all of them can die, because they’re sent on a mission they can’t handle, because they’re children, and — something inside of him snags, like a cog jumping out of its place. (He doesn’t think he can ever put that piece back. Doesn’t think he can ever go back to mission-after-mission-after-mission, carrying the whole weight of the world on his shoulders at only sixteen. Doesn’t think any of them can ever go back.)

Then, Shoko sits up with a jolt, combs her hair back behind her ears, straighten her lab coat. She still looks wild and lost and scared but she pulls herself together all the same, jaw set, the model picture of composure, if it weren’t for the trembling of her hands.

“Suguru first,” Satoru says to the unspoken question hanging in the air, nudging his shoulder. “I’m fine. I figured out this whole ‘reverse technique’ thing.”

Suguru glances at his best friend, notes the tenderness in his voice that sounds like the cuts on his chest feel.

Their classmate turns her discerning eye onto the scars on Satoru’s throat, studying the result of his work with an expression so blank, it could belong to a news’ anchor. After a moment, she rasps, “you did it wrong. I — I have to open it all up again.”

Satoru’s expression slips. “How can a reverse cursed technique heal someone wrong?” he asks, plays up his nervousness with a little laugh, but for the first time since that very early mission that went from bad to shit, he hears genuine fear in his voice.

An equally manic laugh tears itself from Shoko’s throat. “Why did you assume it wouldn’t?” she asks. “Did you think I was studying anatomy books back to back because I had nothing better to do?”

“I thought you liked all that medical stuff,” he whines. “You’re always going on about proper meals and proper warm-up stretches and proper sleep and proper whatever.”

Shoko rolls her eyes far enough back that she’s gazing at the sky for a long moment before she’s throwing him a look that says, can you believe this?

Suguru snickers, and something about it sends the other two into fits of equally mad giggles, like they’re all at the verge of one death or another, about to tumble over the edge if no one catches them.

Shoko heals him first, her cursed energy flowing into him with the tang of mint and cigarette smoke and lavender. Flesh and muscle and tissue knit themselves back together under her hands, the relief from the pain so stark, he passes out for a solid minute.

Satoru is next and he grits his teeth in preparation for the pain with a familiarity that is concerning.

She starts with the cut on his forehead — it doesn’t bleed that much but it takes the better part of an hour to treat. Something about the brain, and sorcerer brains specifically, and Satoru having fried his, but Suguru is drifting in and out of consciousness frequently enough that all his mental capacities are used on the fact that he has to hold his best friend still.

The wounds on his throat and chest bleed much more, and Suguru has to clamp his hands around Satoru’s neck so that the temporarily shattered vertebrate of his spine don’t collapse into themselves (and snap his neck), has to feel the hot blood of the boy he’s helplessly in love with flow over his hands while he chokes on it, has to wait agonizingly long minutes as Shoko works herself to the brink of exhaustion.

(All of a sudden, Suguru understands all to well why she’s always tired. He’s starting to feel it, too, this tiredness that never leaves.)

When she’s done, she says, “make some room, will you?”

It takes Satoru and him all the energy they have left to shuffle apart far enough that she can collapse right between them.

A pile of three miserable students is how Yaga finds them — or how he finds Satoru, at least. Suguru and Shoko both have since passed out, securely wrapped up in his Infinity when his arms weren’t enough. They’re snoring softly on each other’s shoulders while he keeps watch, like he was trained to do. (The title of the strongest, his parents and his Clan and literally everyone has taught him, comes with duties and obligations and the responsibility to push yourself beyond what your body can endure. That’s what it means to have Infinity and Limitless at your disposal. That’s what it means to be Gojo Satoru.)

Their teacher looks weary, like he has aged a decade a day in the week they haven’t seen him, storming across the open space with three of his cursed dolls in tow as if he can single-handedly change the past.

It’s a nice thought. It comforts him when he remembers the blade going into his skull and through his throat, all the way down his chest to his hip. When he remember the gleeful joy with which the Sorcerer Killer ripped him open. When he remembers the anxious look on Shoko’s face when she had to open all of it back up.

Said comfort lasts until the man becomes to a halt before them, eyes widening behind his pair of shades. He’s out of breath, which begs the question of just how far he’s had to run to get here.

Satoru’s newfound cognitive abilities are happy to tell him there’s sweat dripping down his sensei’s back, that he holds his cursed energy close, that all the dolls he’s brought are specialized for combat — that Yaga looks at the three of them in varying states of consciousness, leaning against a pillar that once upheld a building on the campus like they have been through hell, and that all he sees is that he couldn’t protect anything. Again.

Ugh, no one told him that awakening the Six Eyes to their full potential would be this creepy.

To spend less time thinking about that, he mutters, “hey, sensei. Everything’s fine.” The words slur in his mouth as he purposefully drags them out until he can think of something else to say. “The danger’s over.”

“Yes,” Yaga says but he looks like he wishes the Sorcerer Killer would spontaneously materialize out of thin air just so he can beat the man into a pulp himself. “Well done.”

“You don’t sound very happy,” he returns, watches his teacher over the rim of his own shades. “Is it because of Riko—”

“No,” he says, shakes his head — takes off his own glasses to wipe the back of his hand across his eyes, before he crouches down. “No, it’s not because of Riko. You did will with her, too.” He smiles but it’s far too fragile for a man who can put Suguru and him into the dirt of the training field without moving.

“Then?”

He doesn’t reply for a long moment, gaze roaming over them, bloodied and bruised, scarred. His breathing grows labored, as if this is all his fault and he could have prevented every single second of this if he had just been … a Special Grade sorcerer himself, like that’s something one can achieve just by trying hard enough.

Then, sensei says, “you shouldn’t have had to do this.”

Satoru stares at him, waiting for the punchline that usually follows any sense of concern aimed at him by an adult. To both his surprise and horror, it doesn’t come. (He doesn’t know what to do about that; no one has ever prepared him for a situation where an adult might, well, act like an adult and take responsibility for something that has been shoved onto him solely because he is the Six Eyes and the Gojo Clan heir and Gojo Satoru, whose birth was akin to a force of nature or an act of god.)

Out loud, he says, “we are the strongest,” but there’s no bite to it, nothing of the cocky assurance and bold grin he’d have thrown Yaga’s way just a week ago. “If we can’t handle this, who else can?”

Yaga sighs, opens his mouth — for a moment, Satoru thinks he’ll say, but you couldn’t handle it, tighten the noose that sits wrapped around their necks — but he only shakes his head and swallows whatever was on the tip of his tongue. “You are children,” he replies after a beat, like anyone’s ever given a rat’s ass about that. “It doesn’t matter if you’re the strongest. You shouldn’t have to—” He gestures to what remains of the front yard, the fly-heads. “Die.”

“It’s part of the job description, sensei,” he returns mechanically. “We all knew that before we set foot in here.”

Said sensei stares at him with the same kind of hopeless resignation he has in his eyes when he asks him a simply question about Japanese literature, except now it’s much, much worse. (There’s no going back to the carefree days in the classroom.)

“That doesn’t make it right, Satoru,” Yaga tells him softly, too grand a revelation to be spoken any louder. “What has our world come to, that we need to send children to their deaths just because we’re too cowardly to take their place?”

“You’re not coward,” Satoru blurts out, because no one who stands up to the higher-ups is. “Is that what the elders said — that we should die in their stead?” It’d be just like them, sure. But these old fucks usually don’t have the courage to say something that could be used against them, so.

His teacher smiles sadly. “Not in as many words.”

Distantly, Satoru remembers that one of his dolls mutated recently, became a flesh-and-bone (or stuffing-and-seam?) person. Panda. Whatever. His point being, for all that he knows, Yaga just became a father and might be having second thoughts about this whole ‘sending children out into a world of literal monsters, criminals, and assholes who kill indiscriminately’ thing.

Mistaking his silence for something else, Yaga adds, “you know Geto-kun has been a thorn in their side for a while now.”

“As every strong sorcerer from a non-sorcerer family who refuses to marry into one is,” Satoru murmurs. He hates that the answer is so obvious to him, that he knows every dirty little secret that the Big Sorcerer Families get up to and all the shit the higher-ups pull when they feel threatened by the new generation.

Sensei gives him a humorless smile.

He tries to ignore the ugly thing that belatedly rears its ugly head at the thought of Suguru marrying into a shitty family like the Zen’in, or the Kamo, or even the Inumaki. At the thought of Suguru leaving him for anyone else. At the thought that the bond they share is not as unbreakable as he always assumed it was.

Yaga looks at him like he can read every single of his thoughts on his features. Instead of acknowledging them however, he says, “I’ve been thinking that you — all of you — should do something nice during the rest of the summer break.”

Given the previous topic of their conversation and the fact that the man before him didn’t become principle of the Tokyo’s Jujutsu High just because he’s really good at his job, Satoru narrows his eyes in suspicion.

“We’ll need a few things to clean things up here,” he continues, “and Geto-kun and you need to recover before school starts again. And with the fuss the higher-ups will be kicking up, I imagine you’ll find little rest here.”

Well, he gets the gist of it. But: “I’m not going back home.”

His teacher huffs out something like a laugh. “Wasn’t asking you to, boy.”

Satoru rolls his eyes and pretends it doesn’t take him an embarrassing amount of effort to do so. “What about Suguru?”

“Was going to ask him whether he had somewhere to go for the summer,” the man replies patiently, something of that age-old wisdom stealing across his face that makes him look ancient. “I’m not sure if he’d want to go back to his parents.”

He glances at his best friend (with whom he might have been in love for for an undetermined amount of time, but he can’t deal with that and the aftermath of the Star Plasma Vessel mission simultaneously) and — he doesn’t know what that emotion rebounding through his chest is or what his brain is doing with all these pieces of information he has been given like breadcrumbs.

Nothing, apparently. Just a yawning emptiness that he hasn’t experienced since that one time he tried to explain how his thoughts worked.

Yaga waits for another moment before he speaks again. “Ask Geto if you can come with him. I think that’d be good for both of you.”

Satoru opens his mouth to argue, because he has a crush on his best friend and sticking to his side like a highly intelligent (and very pretty) leech isn’t exactly going to help with that, but the words just won’t come out. Instead, he asks, “what about Shoko?”

“I’ll ask Tsukumo to take her on a trip to Europe,” sensei returns with a faint smile that looks like he’s carrying the entirety of Tokyo on his shoulders and the city’s weight is breaking his back. “I hear it’s pretty nice, this time of year.”

When Satoru gives a reluctant nod that could be interpreted as agreement, the man stands with a groan and says, “come on. Let’s get all of you cleaned up.”

Despite being as prickly as usually about being woken from her sleep, Shoko seems to have no issues whatsoever with letting a cursed doll swoop her up in her arms. Seeing as she falls right asleep again, head nuzzled against the unnecessarily fuzzy chest of a grizzly bear, he isn’t all that sure whether she was actually awake in the first place.

Suguru, in contrast, outright refuses to leave Satoru’s side. He sinks his hands into his ruined uniform, even though he’s barely conscious and can’t string together more than two words without nodding off where he sits.

Sensei looks strangely exasperated, like he has absolutely expected this but still finds the result of his prediction utterly annoying. Pulling together his last dregs of patience, he says, “you can’t walk all the way back to the dorms like this, Geto.”

Suguru makes the same reluctant sound Satoru made when he realized just how far they were from their rooms and how unnecessarily large the school grounds are. But his fingers remain closed in a vice around him.

In the end, the only way the two of them are leaving their spot is together, so Yaga summons another doll, larger and stranger than the rest, and off they finally go.

When their sensei’s creation drops them off at the threshold to the dorms and lumbers away, Satoru realizes that it’s quiet here. His ears are still trained to listen for the noises of battle and the thrum of cursed energy and the buzz of activity that was in the courtyard earlier — but now there’s none of that. Just his own breathing and his heart hammering away in his chest. Just Suguru’s short breaths. Just the birds in the trees and the insects in the air.

Just his best friend leaning against him, half-conscious and stubborn about it, like something bad could happen to the both of them the moment he closes his eyes.

Just the world shrunken down to this, the weight of Suguru in his arms and the sight of the skin scabbed over on his shoulders and the knowledge that there is never as much separating a sorcerer from their death as one would like to think.

Satoru’s pretty sure he’d also be exhausted to the bone if he hadn’t have had to come back from the brink of death regularly since the age of six. Bone-deep exhaustion is just something he’s had to get used to, if he wanted to live a little longer. It’s not his fault that he just happened to be born with two techniques that, in combination, make a person the closest thing to a god a human can be. It’s not his fault that his sole existence upsets the natural balance of things, but, eh, you learn to live with it.

And. He’s truly, truly fine with it. His whole life has been a hunt for him, something he has only come out of alive because he’s just that good, but Suguru knows nothing of that — Suguru isn’t familiar with death like it’s an old friend he regularly flips off if they cross paths. Death is still inevitable to him, an entity that could claim either of them if they’re not careful.

Maybe that’s why he keeps holding onto him like this, fingers dug into his uniform with no intention of letting go. And maybe that’s why this sight of the boy whom Satoru thought as invincible as himself makes his stomach roil. It’s as much possessiveness as it is protectiveness, a need that wasn’t there before but that now bares its teeth all the same. It demands that he finds the Sorcerer Killer and rips him into many, many little pieces. Repeatedly.

“Satoru,” Suguru is saying, cutting through the haze of his thoughts as expertly as he usually does.

In response, he makes a sound in the back of his throat that could be interpreted as agreement. With a lot of optimism and creativity.

“Satoru,” his best friend repeats with insistence. The gloom of the dormitory building makes him look like he’s wrought from moving shades, with his black hair and his black eyes and all thee shadow spilling across the form, remnants of the leaves swaying in the wind but distorted, much in the same way a curse is a distorted emotion — in Suguru’s eyes, he sees something deep and dark and done, a sharpness that is usually reserved for the heat of battle or the moments before he kicks his ass during a sparring session, a thoughtfulness that almost promises that there is a secret the other boy can figure out.

Something about being the subject of such intense study causes the fine hairs in the nape of his neck to rise in anticipation; a giddy thrill races through his veins while he waits for what the other boy will do next.

When nothing happens, however, Satoru does him the favor of asking, “what?”

Silently, Suguru continues to study him, eyes lingering on his forehead, gaze skipping to his face and eyes and mouth and throat and chest — back to his forehead, back to his lips, where they stay for so long, he’s starting to wonder if he’d gravely misread the situation if he leaned in for a kiss now.

He means — well, he’s never asked — besides, he’s not sure if Suguru likes him enough to even consider blurring the lines between friendship and romance. If he likes anyone enough for that. And he’d make things really weird if he did kiss Suguru and the other boy pushed him away, right? And Satoru would kind of hate himself if he ruined this thing they have, because there are only so many bonds you’re allowed to forge when you’re the strongest sorcerer of your generation and no one measures up to you until you attend this one weird school and meet someone else with whom you suddenly have to share your title, and it’s so special, he doesn’t know what he’d do if he lost it solely because he was being an idiot—

Suguru inhales, about to say something, but his breath stutters and his heartbeat halts and instead of speaking whatever he intended to, he only worries his bottom lip with his teeth, and Satoru realizes even the newly awakened Six Eyes and all the analytical capabilities he has developed from an early age don’t do shit in helping him figure out what his best friend is thinking right now.

In the end, the other boy settles for, “don’t do that again.”

He laughs, breathless for reasons he’d rather not examine all that closely. “Don’t worry about it, Suguru,” he says lightly, voice snagging at the sound of his best friend’s name like he speaks it for the first time and the knife’s still stuck in his throat and all that comes out is his own blood, wet and hot like blasphemy wrought at the altar of gods he’s never believed in. “Next time I meet that guy, I’ll turn him into dust.”

Suguru stares at him, something unreadable twisting his expression. It stings like disappointment. “I’m not talking about the Sorcerer Killer,” he tells him, eyes still so deep and dark and done that he might just get lost inside them trying to figure out if they’re truly black or just a very dark brown. “I’m talking about — everything.”

Satoru swallows. “You mean the part where I died?” Technically, he was toeing the line, but—

“Yes,” the other boy says, breath rattling around his lungs like there are still holes in them. “I’m talking about the part where you fucking died.” He inhales, teetering on an unnamed edge. (He just wishes Suguru would reach out to snag his sleeve so the two of them can fall together.) “I don’t want you to die, Satoru.”

“I’m never going to,” he murmurs, tightening his grip on his best friend’s shoulder. It’s a promise and a threat both.

“You could,” he returns, and Satoru doesn’t have it in himself to tell him that the thing with being so close to a god is that you’re essentially immortal — not that he really believes it, given the fact that all previous wielders of the Six Eyes and the Limitless technique died pretty young from assassinations and the like. The ones that did survive might have lived a normal human lifespan, but they all went out like a star: with a big fucking explosion that leveled a country or two.

He swallows around the lump in his throat, promises him, “I won’t,” though he doesn’t know where the certainty for that comes from.

Suguru looks at him like there’s something else he wants from him — but whatever that might be, he doesn’t say, and all his Six Eyes offer no explanation.

The moment sticks, drags out, and then his best friend mutters, “alright.”

Relief cuts through him akin to a knife, severing his tendons so he collapses into himself.

Suguru eyes him suspiciously. “If you forget, I’m kicking your ass.”

“Uh-huh,” Satoru says. “Sure.” He sounds about as convinced as anyone in his current situation would be, but he’s playing it up so he doesn’t have to think about the fact that he knows exactly why he doesn’t demand the same kind of promise in turn. (To no one’s surprise but Gojo Satoru’s own, it’s because he’ll never let himself be separated from Suguru again. The fact that he may be in love with him notwithstanding.)

The other boy stares back at him still, eyes going through him in a way that tells him Suguru isn’t really here right now. Physically, sure, he’s present. Mentally? Not so much.

And for a long minutes, he finds himself dumbstruck by the realization that he may have never been looked at for so long before, that this might be the first time in his entire life that someone has devoted so much of their time to observe him — and he’s unable to look away, unable to pretend he doesn’t lap up the attention with the desperation of a starved dog.

The hallways around them are utterly deserted, the sun hidden away behind walls and trees and the wood of the building, filtering paper-thin through the screen doors, the quiet intimacy of their company greater than before. The physical distance between them seems to shrink until it’s non-existent, just a distant memory of a time where Satoru wasn’t aware of the fact that he’s in love with the one person who matters so much to him that he’s constantly trying not to fuck it up; something goes unspoken in this silence, and nothing in the world could help him parse it.

Then, his mouth gets the better of him and he asks, “let’s shower?”

“I can go alone.”

Pointedly raising his eyebrows, Satoru takes his hands off him.

His best friend staggers, despite his valiant attempts to remain on his feet. But instead of being grateful for the fact that he settles his arms around his shoulders again, he continues to prove that he’s a stubborn ass and a prideful little shit with an ego big enough to rival Satoru’s own, Suguru shoots him a dirty look. It’d be a whole lot more effective if he wasn’t clinging to his shirt.

It’s — his first instinct is to make fun of him but there’s nothing funny about this. (There has never been anything funny about this, but laughing is easier than thinking. Because that’ll only make him mad. And he’s learned early that showing any sliver of genuine emotion is not a good thing for a sorcerer with as much cursed energy as he him.)

Awkwardly, he clears his throat. “Come on,” he says then, something in his voice softening, because he hates being vulnerable enough himself that he’d rather crawl out of his own skin than be seen by anyone like, well, that. But it’s different with Suguru. Suguru’s already seen him like that, known him like that. And Suguru knows what it’s like to live under the burden of being hailed as someone special, as having his power be the shackle that forever binds you to having to live up to the expectations of it, burden and responsibility and duty and a thousand things worse. Underneath the veneer of power, the two of them are still human. “It’ll be like that time we went swimming in Okinawa.”

“That,” his best friend says in a low growl that does funny things to the distribution of blood throughout his whole body, “is not helping.”

Satoru lifts his shoulders in the universal gesture for, I wasn’t trying to be helpful, though.

Suguru continues glaring at him as if doing so for long enough will eventually burn a hole through his skull.

“You think you can stand for long enough to get all that gore out of your hair?” he asks then, voice still so soft that it’s just a whisper, even though he wants nothing more than to snap back and gripe and tease him; that’d be normal.

To his surprise, the other boy doesn’t reply right away. When he does, it’s this: “I’m pretty sure I heard Shoko telling you you’re not supposed to lift your arms over your head. Or strain your neck by turning it.”

Satoru gasps in offense, half of it true. “I thought you were passed out for most of that!”

That, for reasons known only to Suguru himself, elicits laughter from him, tenderly pearling out of his mouth, a quiet gentleness to it that has Satoru wondering how he’s supposed to take any more of this when he already feels ready to melt into a nice little puddle full of feelings he has never considered articulating in his life.

Pretending that thought has never happened, he slings his arm around his best friend’s shoulders and grins. “Come on,” he says again, “this will be fun!”

This is not fun. The trip to the beach back in Okinawa already wasn’t fun for his sanity, given the embodiment of a terrible idea that having a crush on Gojo Satoru is and the fact that said boy considers personal space to be more of a suggestion than a line he shouldn’t cross. In their current situation, Suguru positively dreads having to stand in the same shower booth as the bane of his existence. After all, he remembers the unobstructed view he had of the pale marble of his skin, the white of his hair, the impossible blue of his eyes that will always remind him of the summer sky and the summer sea, endless enough that he will get lost in them like a man without a parachute or a life jacket.

If someone had told him in these three days that the boy he’d been in love with for months was made out of clear waters and sea foam and a breath of air and cursed energy that sparkles like starlight galaxies, Suguru would have gladly believed them.

Today, for better or worse, however, has proven that Satoru is as much flesh and blood as the rest of them, that his skin tears and that he bleeds red and that he can die. (That he can, much like Suguru, be killed by some fucking monkey who doesn’t even have a shred of cursed energy in his body, disgusts him so much he wants to vomit until the acid of his stomach has washed the bitter taste of the truth from his mouth. He wants to pull out all the parts in which he shares similarities with the Sorcerer Killer because he hates that man and he hates himself and he hates the fact that he cannot be Satoru’s partner, that his innate technique isn’t enough, like nothing has ever been enough.)

(He hates himself for being half-composed of the things that will eventually kill all of them in their line of work, if other people don’t. He hates himself for being weak. He hates himself for not being enough. He hates himself for being unable to live up to the expectations everyone has placed on his shoulders. He hates himself for being unable to protect Riko, or Satoru, or anyone who’d matter. Because, if he has strength, and if he can’t use it right, then what the fuck is it for?)

The disgust inside of him swims, a sickness that is going to devour him from the inside out. It has been alive for a very long time and only lain dormant inside of him in preparation for this day — it is, almost, as if he has always hated himself for all the things he can’t control, under his skin and in his bones and in his blood.

Despite wallowing in his own despair, Satoru is moving the two of them ever closer into the dorms, towards the showers at the back of the building. Suguru notices that his best friend is leaning much more heavily upon him now than he did when they began — not as invulnerable to exhaustion as he pretends to be, then.

If either of them collapsed now, they’d drag the other down with them. (He isn’t sure if there isn’t some kind of prophecy in this, a premonition about the future.)

The hallway that seemed to stretch on forever finally ends and they stumble from the hardwood floors onto the tile, almost slip, as they kick off their shoes, and then stumble some more as they peel their ruined uniforms off their frames.

“Oh shit,” Satoru says then, staring at him with these wide, blue eyes Suguru would be content just looking into for the rest of eternity. “We didn’t bring any clothes to change into.”

“Ah,” he says. He casts a look down the corridor, the distance to their rooms immeasurable when all his limb are clamoring for the sweet release of his mattress and the blissful quiet of unconsciousness. “Shit.”

His best friend follows his gaze, a nervous twitch to his brows, before he turns back to look at him, not asking, in as many words, what do we do now?

For a moment, he envies their sensei and his innate technique, which essentially allows him to never run an errand himself. Which, technicality, is a feat Suguru is capable of achieving himself, but he has little trust in the intelligence of his curses. Not to mention that he knows for a fact that the broad majority of them lack the opposable thumbs necessary to open doors without ripping them apart.

So he grits his teeth and says, “we’ll manage.”

He counts his blessings when they finally make it into the showers on their own two feet. They’re still clinging to each other as if they need the other like the air in their lungs, but they made it. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?

Suguru then takes preventive measures and pushes his best friend onto the wooden chair before Satoru can even think about protesting.

Somberly, the other boy peers up at him out of his blue, blue eyes, framed so delicate by the white of his lashes, lips parted slightly as he studies him in-depth.

“You look worse than me,” he announces then, cracking a smile as he leans his head back far enough to rest it against his stomach. His hair tickles against his skin, soft where it isn’t lined with dried red, the weight of him resting so casually against his body that Suguru is glad he lost most of his own blood back in the Tomb.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to get back up if I sit down now,” he says then, swallows around the lump in his throat that tastes like curses do (a cloth that’s been used to wipe up shit and vomit).

“Oh,” his best friend murmurs, all cheer wiped from his face. His hair falls back to reveal the fresh scar on his forehead, pale-pink and padded — and he can’t help but trace it with his thumb, take note of its sharp trajectory, the rise of it, the knowledge of how hot his blood poured over his hands when he held him.

He can’t help the way his hand drops to Satoru’s throat either, feeling for the scar hidden by the outline of his jaw, suddenly all too aware of how the other boy’s breaths come in short plumes, eyes widening as if he has never seen him before, as if, with such a simple, careless gesture, Suguru has changed something, although an intimacy like this has always been a thing of careless mistakes and reckless abandon.

For a long moment, he fears Satoru will pull away — this is a line crossed, something heedlessly tossed across a chasm they can never cross a second time — but then he only glances at him, a little nervous, a little insecure, a little vulnerable, and something inside of Suguru that has made him hate himself so much for the same kind of thing just twenty minutes ago gives away to something tender and warm.

“It’s alright,” he murmurs softly, to the one hailed as the strongest in all of Japan at only three months older than Suguru himself, mapping his scars against his skin like the memory of this can override the vivid imagine of a fucking monkey slaughtering him like livestock. “He’s gone. You’re safe. No one can hurt you anymore.” Not without stepping over my dead body, he means.

Satoru makes a strangled noise.

Suguru pulls his head flush against his stomach, follows the curve of the scar down to his chest where he feels his pulse flutter nervously under his touch. “It’s alright,” he echoes, though he isn’t exactly sure whom he’s trying to reassure here. “It’s just me.”

“Yes,” his best friend says, voice so quiet it snags on something inside of him, because — because Gojo Satoru should never sound like this, this weak — but here he is, blood-soaked and scarred, and a little worse off than he was before, in his arms and so very, very human that Suguru almost goes mad with the desire to tear down the whole world so this one person can be safe.

“Yeah,” the other boy says this time and palaces his hand above his own, looking up to him with these eyes where infinity lies trapped. “You’re here. It can only be alright from here on out.”

Suguru isn’t sure what his own heart is doing right now, but he’s pretty sure it can’t be good for his health.

He starts by scrubbing the blood out of his hair. The water runs red, red, red; he scrubs until his fingers are raw and aching and tender.

The water is still running red. In the gloom of the showers, the window glass fogged over by the steam, Satoru’s white hair looks dull, tainted, just another reminder of his mortality. (Inside Suguru, the ugly thing that speaks with the Sorcerer Killer’s voice rears its head to tell him, did you see how you’re his weakness — how your own weakness makes him weak, too?)

A noise like a sob breaks out of his chest. It makes everything worse.

“Suguru?” his best friend asks, craning his head to look back at him. “What’s wrong?”

He wrestles down another sob, because he knows if he starts now, it’ll never stop, and says, “it doesn’t come out.”

“What?”

“The blood,” he whispers, because he doesn’t trust his voice enough to speak any louder than this. Inside of him, there is a riot, an ache and this feeling of wrongness and this ugly thing and the nausea warring with one another under the guise of his cursed energy, forcing him to relent control over his own body, making him only a bystander to the tragedy that waits around the corner. “It’s not coming out.”

The water runs red, red, red, evidence of the violence. Evidence of how Satoru died. Evidence of how Suguru couldn’t do anything to stop it. Fuel for the rage and inadequacy and the grief until it hollows him out, hallows him, until it makes him something he’s never wanted to be.

“Ah,” Satoru says. A rare, guarded expression flickers over his features before he manages a smile that lacks the life that usually bursts from him like a supernova. “It — it’s alright, Suguru, it just stains really bad. Don’t worry. It’ll come off eventually.”

The appropriate response to this isn’t screaming, but he wants to do it anyway. Scream and pull out his teeth and singe his tongue, something, anything, to make all of this stop. “How can you be so casual about this?” he asks instead.

Satoru shrugs. “It’s been happening since I was six,” he says, so gods-damned casual. “People trying to kill me, I mean. It kind of gets old after the first dozen attempts.”

Suguru stares at him.

His best friend stares back, doesn’t even wince as the fingers in his hair turn claw-like, despite his usual emphasis on how sensitive he is. “Sorry,” he mutters then, though he has done nothing wrong in all of this, his smile so fragile Suguru feels the splinters of it. “I forget that you — all of you — aren’t used to this. It must’ve been pretty scary, right?”

“It is pretty scary,” he mutters numbly, afraid that his legs will all but give in under him. Against his better judgment, he takes half a step forward, braces himself against his best friend’s shoulder.

“Sorry,” the other boy returns, reaching up to gingerly thumb over the back of his hands. It’s clumsy and he projects the air of someone who has not the slightest idea what he’s doing, but he’s genuine in his affections.

He allows himself the indulgence, for the moment. Who knows how many of these they have left?

The blood does come off, eventually. But there’s more on his back, from where the blade—

Suguru grabs the soap and forces himself to think about literally everything else, such as the fact that his dorm room is in desperate need of vacuuming and that he doesn’t know if he remembered to take his clothes out of the washing machine before they left for—

When he’s finally done, Satoru stands, pops some joints back into place with a series of stretches that can’t be healthy for anyone’s back, and presses him into the chair instead before Suguru has any chance to fight back. With his best friend’s hands on his shoulders, he’s pretty sure all the strength he might have had would have fled him anyway.

The other boy is as gentle with his hair like he has always been — cards his fingers through the black, thick and heavy with water, to comb out all the things stuck in it. Makes sure he doesn’t pull, makes sure to massage his scalp, makes sure to braid the parts he’s done with, so they don’t get tangled again.

If it hadn’t already happened more than once, Suguru would be embarrassed to admit he dozes off. (The first time it happened, Shoko had asked if she could do something fun with his hair and he had agreed easily, not thinking much of it. That she’d invite their other classmate, the all-glorious Gojo Satoru, to join and that she’d teach him how do all these fancy hairstyles neither of them could wear themselves was … unexpected, but not unwelcome. He remembers the first few heartbeats of utter silence, then the awed touch of Satoru’s fingers against his hair, in his hair.)

Even now, when exhaustion is gnawing at their bones like a starved beast, Satoru is nothing but gentle, cautious. Treats him as if he is valuable, with a reverence that he’d find burdensome, if he hadn’t long understood that the ‘strongest sorcerer of this century, the wielder of the Six Eyes’ is an illusion in face of the world who feels nothing for the lives it snuffs out.

“I’m sorry,” Suguru says, all of a sudden. “About being upset earlier.”

His best friend pauses, hands threaded into his hair as if they have always belonged there. “Nothing to apologize for,” he murmurs, so quietly. “I know that — it’s a Clan thing, these assassination attempts. I didn’t even realize there was something off about it until you got upset.” He laughs nervously. “Not that I want you to be upset, it’s just—”

“I know,” Suguru cuts in.

They wrap themselves in the last two dry towels before they toe back into the corridor. Satoru’s room is closer, and Suguru regards the few more steps leading to his own like the distance suddenly measures a hundred kilometers to walk.

But his clothes are there and his bed is there and even if his best friend is as clingy as a cat with separation anxiety and abandonment issues, it’s always been Suguru’s bed he’s climbed into after tough missions or rough nights. Everything else feels like another chasm they can never cross again, a step in a direction whose existence they have stubbornly ignored until now.

His best friend grabs the hem of his towel and tugs until Suguru looks at him. “Mine?” he asks, a flush rising from his chest all the way to his cheeks that has no business looking as adorable as it does.

Unable to fight off the heat burning on his own features, he simply nods.

With a sense of acute betrayal bubbling under his skin when he catches a glimpse of bow frankly meticulously organized inside of his best friend’s closet is, especially compared to the state of his remaining room, Suguru is absolutely blindsided by the change of clothes hitting him in the face.

He manages to snatch them out of the air, though, before they dramatically slide down on his body and land on the floor. He also manages to pretend he doesn’t see how red Satoru’s ears are when he turns around to put on clothes from his best friend’s closet that smell exactly like him.

Satoru does his best to towel-dry his hair, which takes forever and is incredibly inconvenient, but it’s nice and calming and grounding, and that’s more than either of them can ask for, right now.

If he falls asleep more than once, only to be awoken by the gentle scrap of fingers against his scalp, well, it’s nothing to be embarrassed about.

He’s half-sure he’s still dreaming when he realizes that his best friend has just finished braiding his hair and is closing his arms around him in a vice when he pulls him up into the bed, as if he could just disappear.

Like always, Satoru with his longs limbs and his above average height lies squished between him and the wall. Sleepily, Suguru presses his head against his chest until the frantic stutter of his heartbeat tells him that this is, very much, not a dream.

Still, he mutters, “don’t leave,” ignores the roil of the curses in his stomach.

Satoru’s breath hitches in his throat. “Only if you don’t leave me either.”

“Idiot,” he murmurs, fondly, almost. “Why would I ever leave you?”

“Because you over-think all this ‘morals’ stuff,” the other boy returns like he has just been waiting to say this. “You’re so concerned with what’s right and what’s wrong and all that.”

Despite himself, Suguru laughs. Laughs into his shirt, laughs into the mattress, laughs until his stomach hurts. “I don’t know about all of this anymore,” he says softly. “What point is there in any of this, when some monkey with a blade can just cut you to pieces?”

“You tell me,” he returns, just as softly. “You’re the guy who was so adamant all these ‘monkeys’ needed saving before. That we were right to keeps them in the dark. That there was meaning in all of this. In us.”

“There’s only meaning if we’re alive,” he mutters, his breaths as ragged as his best friend’s heartbeat. “And you heard what Shoko said: She can’t do this anymore.”

“Don’t think I can either,” Satoru says. “Think you can? If not, let’s just all stop. I’m so tired.”

“Then sleep,” Suguru replies, tangling himself further into his arms and the sheets and the bed. “Just … just stay, alright?” There’s meaning in that, he’s sure. There must be. In Satoru being alive, in the two of them being here. In this.

“Alright,” the other boy says, “I’ll stay,” and wraps him up in his arms and his Infinity and the last thought Suguru is aware of is, I could do this for the rest of my life.

Chapter Text

By the time sleep leaves him, a spill of liquid gold drips across the floor. The sunlight falls through the gaps in the wooden shutters Satoru has never bothered closing because he’s spent most mornings in Suguru’s bed, for reasons that seem a little easier to comprehend now, given his recent epiphany.

He watches the dust dance in the air, illuminated by the wash of colors the new day comes in, and all he can think of is the fact that it was sunny, too, when they were protecting Riko from curse users.

(And even though he knows she survived the bullet ricocheting around her skull like a bounce house, something inside of him still rears its ugly head, so convinced that, somehow, Riko is dead and they have failed and they will break themselves upon the blade that is the reminder of how there will never be any point to their power if they can’t make use of it.)

(Something inside of him is convinced that Riko is dead and so is their future.)

But the girl lives. And yet, the world has come crumbling down, left nothing behind except for rumble he must sift through.

Whatever meaning there is in this, Suguru will have to say. Satoru can’t see it, has never been able to see it — all the purpose he has ever known was to be the strongest. He lives to exterminate curses, and he lives to fight curse users, and he lives to spite the laws of natures by simply breathing. He lives to work himself to the bone in the full knowledge that the godhood he’s been promised is just a sham. Because, if people could become gods, and that was a good thing, Tengen would’ve long done that and Vessels like Riko could just go to school and the movies and the beach without a pair of Special Grade sorcerers keeping an eye on her.

None of that is here or there, though. There are things in the world he cannot change, no matter how hard he might try. Generally, he’s pretty good in dealing with that. Generally, however, he doesn’t wake up after getting his inside opened in increasingly creative ways to find his best friend cut apart like a piece of meat.

The memories are vivid inside his mind, coming alive with a vengeance, his Six Eyes happily supplying him with every detail of how—

Satoru blinks, staring into the sterile emptiness of his room he never rectified because he’s always bullying his way into Suguru’s, or Shoko’s on the rare occasion his best friend and him have been on separation missions. He’s never liked the loneliness, is all. It forces him to confront the fact that he has no fucking idea how to be anything else but the good little soldier the Gojo Clan always wanted him to be.

Watching the little differences in texture stemming from several layers of paint on his walls, acutely aware of how he’s laying in his own bed and how Suguru is curling into his arms, he suddenly understands that the feeling of a hot, stabbing pain in the pit of his stomach is not a flashback to meeting the wrong end of the Sorcerer Killer’s weapon arsenal. It’s the realization that he has relied on the strength of his best friend for so long that he has neglected to consider the fact that Suguru isn’t any more invincible than Satoru is himself.

The thought buzzes restlessly under his skin, fueled by the screech of his cursed energy looking for an outlet, pent up like he’s forgotten how to use it; his Six Eyes spin into motion, cataloging every little piece of information they can wring out of his surroundings, feeding it back to his brain so that it can run itself ragged processing it, as if there’s a meaning to be divined from all these patterns.

He wasn’t sure he believed in religion and gods and stuff until he met one Geto Suguru, who was like a gift from the heavens. To him, Suguru has always been someone who just had to cross his path, an inevitability in his life that he could never escape, no matter how far he might run from it. To him, Suguru has been the first person to meet him unafraid, capable of putting him into the dirt in the training yard, quick to refute his arguments with enough bite to sting—

He remembers washing the blood and gore out of his black hair, the clumps of dust and debris, the matted tangles. He remembers the scars on his chest, so deep his survival is a miracle in and of itself. He remembers thinking Suguru was—

His best friend makes a soft sound under his breath and curls closer, in an attempt to escape the brightness of dawn. Or to disappear. Satoru’s not really sure. He’s just sure that Suguru looks sixteen, that both of them are too young to even legally buy alcohol or cigarettes or get their fucking driver’s license, and yet the whole Jujutsu society expects them to do shit people twice their age can’t do.

When the anger inside of him threatens to bubble over, his best friend stirs again, another reluctant sound caught short in the back of his throat. His forehead wrinkles in concentration, as his hands dig into the fabric of his shirt like he did yesterday, in the courtyard.

Taking steady, trained breaths, Satoru calms his raging cursed energy and pries, with a considerable amount of effort, his hand off Suguru’s back so he can sooth it over his hair. It has long dried by now, some strings slipped loose from the braid he put it in, framing his face like a dark halo. These stupid bangs fall into his face.

He brushes them back, tugs them behind his ear. They stay in place for approximately two seconds. Makes him wonder if that haircut isn’t just a resignation rather than a conscious choice.

Absentmindedly, he thumbs along his best friend’s brows until the seize between them disappears. Then, he trails his index finger down the bridge of his nose, along his cheekbones, his chin — hesitates at the corners of his mouth. That’d be a little weird, wouldn’t it? Even if he has a crush? He means, if Suguru woke up while he was doing that, Satoru is pretty sure he’d dig a six foot hole and prematurely bury himself.

The other boy exhales a soft breath against his shirt. “Satoru,” he murmurs, apparently not that deeply asleep after all.

Naturally, his brain stutters to a screeching halt as spectacular as the fireworks during the Sumida River Festival. After a few moments of struggling to remember a single word, he says, “I’m here.”

Suguru only presses his head against his chest once more. “Satoru.”

“Yes?”

His best friend falls quiet for a beat, his grip on him no longer as desperate, a peacefulness easing over his features that he hasn’t seen in months. “Don’t run off on your own again. Don’t let me go.”

“Whoa, slow down there, Suguru,” he replies and laughs, because — what are you supposed to say in response to that. “Who said anything about leaving you?” His voice cracks. As much as he’d like blaming that on disuse, that’d be a lie.

“I couldn’t leave you if I tried,” he adds, words falling out of his mouth like rotten fruit. “You are — my moral compass, my consciousness, my common sense. You are the only one who doesn’t give a shit about my innate technique or Clan politics or all that fuckery that’s going on in the background. You just want to save people.” His voice keeps cracking up; his eyes sting like acid; the veneer of his arrogance and ego and strength break open like an egg, and he’s coming at it with the gentleness of a child with anger issues swinging a baseball bat.

Clearing his throat, he continues, “you want to make the world better, Suguru. You’re not doing this for the money or the power or because you have no other choice or because someone made you think this was your duty.” Satoru lets out a laugh that sounds an awful lot like a sob. “You are the best sorcerer I have ever met. I’m not going anywhere. I promise you.”

He peers down at his best friend — and realizes with a start that he’s soundly asleep. So he’s just had a conversation. With himself.

A furious flush races through him, covers his face and ears and chest. Urgently, he raises one hand to cover his mouth so he doesn’t spontaneously start screaming in embarrassment, because, how the fuck, did he miss this glaringly obvious fact? What are his Six Eyes doing?

The thing is, Satoru always thought people were exaggerating when they said love made fools out of them. He also thought all these romantic gestures were corny. Now, however, he’s beginning to realize love is just so grand an emotion it changes you, makes you want to do all the things you have scoffed at before, all the things you were so sure you’d never do.

Love is far too grand an emotion to be described by any of the words he knows. It’s all-consuming, over-arching, infinite in the same sense that his technique is but unlike with cursed energy, he cannot control the warmth that spills so recklessly through him.

The sun climbs high enough that birdsong accompanies it, leaving him alone with the spill of gold and the distant noises on campus and his best friend’s soft breathing and the frantic beating of his own heart and the question of whether there has ever been a moment where he has not loved Suguru.

After barely half an hour, Satoru breaks the silence. He takes great care peel his best friend’s hands off his shirt and free his long legs from whatever weird judo move the other boy had them trapped in.

In his defense, he needs to pee, badly, and for all the quality of life changes sorcerers have made, emptying their bladders with a snap of their fingers isn’t among them.

And when he’s coming out of the bathroom, he hears the chime of the rice cooker from the kitchen, and it’s just down the corridor, and his stomach responds to the smell of food with a rumble so violent, he’s certain Suguru would kill him if he went back to bed.

He isn’t surprised to find Shoko sitting in one of the bar chairs, the whole traditional breakfast spread laid out in front of her and the wide selection of side dishes complimented by a very impressive cup of coffee (why do all of his fellow students drink this awful thing), a glass of freshly pressed orange juice (the effort that takes, damn), a self-made smoothie (way too little sugar, for his tastes), as well a bowl of plain yogurt topped with the granola Nanami made two weeks ago (why are all his fellow students allergic to convenience store food) and fresh fruits, neatly cut up (the effort).

He is even less surprised to find Shoko pouring over her study notes, idly chewing on the onigiri she’s holding in her other hand. There’s a reason the top spot for all theory classes goes to her each semester.

“Morning, sleeping beauty,” she says as she glances up, finishes her onigiri, and washes it down with a sip of miso soup.

For a moment, he allows himself to marvel once more at the fact that she cares so much about a healthy breakfast, only to cancel out whatever good she’s doing her body with it with her post-breakfast smoke. And her post-lunch smoke. And her post-dinner smoke. And all the break-smokes in between.

“Morning,” he mutters in reply before he helps himself to a bowl from a top shelf and the obnoxiously sweet cereal no one else in this school seems willing to even touch. Haibara said it gives him caries just looking at it. Which is bullshit, by the way, because Satoru’s been inhaling this brand specifically for the last year and his teeth are perfectly fine.

Pouring himself a generous amount, he throws a lighthearted look over his shoulder. “What’s with the obscure European fairy tale reference?” The fake cheer in his voice dies halfway through the sentence when he realizes she’s staring at the injuries she had to re-open.

A beat too late to be casual, Shoko returns her attention to her soup and says, “it’s hardly an obscure reference. The animated movie came out, like, forty years ago.”

He blinks.

“And you have been asleep for two days,” she informs him, setting down her bowl with a clack before she spears a piece of fish on her chopsticks.

“Oh,” Satoru says, tongue uselessly twisting around words he wants to say but can’t. “Uh. I’m — I’m sorry?”

Shoko now picks up a piece of egg, only to listlessly drop it onto her plate. Sighing, she rubs her hands over her face, her neutral expression changing into … a different kind. Rougher, truer, displaying more emotion than he has seen on her face for most of the time he’s known her.

“It’s not your fault,” she tells him then, head still buried in her hands. “Didn’t mean to snap at you. Sorry.”

“Eh,” he says, “happens to the best of us.” He sets down the cereal. “And with the best of us, I mean me. And Suguru. And you.”

She snorts out something close enough to a laugh that Satoru feels confident enough to prowl through the well-stoked fridge in search of milk. He finds the really expensive almond milk that gives him hives, the fat-reduced option that Mei drinks ‘for her figure’ and — ah, there it is. Ordinary whole milk. Finally.

He screws open the lid, pours it generously into his bowl, puts it back into the fridge. After, he proceeds to hunt down a spoon in an odd cabinet that definitely didn’t contain any cutlery last time he checked. Casually, he leans against the counter top, bowl in hand, and watches Shoko, shoveling cereal in his mouth with far less enthusiasm than usually.

Shoko watches him in turn, the silence incomplete with their breathing and the clinking of his spoon in the bowl and her pushing that piece of egg around on her plate with her chopsticks and the humming of the fridge and the electricity chasing from the cord into the open rice cooker and the hiss of the coffee dripping through the filter.

The thing is, Suguru and her get along like a house on fire. Satoru and her … well, they trade barbs and sarcasm and digs they never really mean. They don’t do the whole small talk or emotional vulnerability thing.

So, when the silence gets too much and he can’t stand still and his thoughts are roiling through his head like a hurricane, he asks, “Nanami and Haibara get back safe?”

She hums, hunts down a few prickled carrots, meticulously arranges it on top of her egg, and drops the whole thing into her mouth.

Unresponsive. Ugh, that’s not good.

“Things been alright?” he hedges then, shoving another mouthful of cereal into his mouth so he stops talking before he makes it any worse. Milk drips down his lips, his chin. Better than all the things he’s learned about Suguru and himself in the few hours between Shoko fixing them and the two of them falling asleep in Satoru’s bed sitting under his skin like a sinner’s confession spilling out of him, at least.

“Things been hectic,” she mutters, drinks from her soup. “Sensei has been hounding the Elders and the Council about missions. And stuff.”

He raises both eyebrows. “Yaga,” he repeats, like their school has more than one teacher, “has been hounding. These old fucks. And the Council. About stuff.”

“Uh-huh,” she hums, with the ghost of a smile. “He’s been — not angry, I think. Not any more.” She drops her spoon back into her bowl. Miso soup splashes on her placement mat. “Just … tired and disappointed and resigned, it seems.”

“Really,” he echoes, a funny feeling turning his stomach upside-down and preparing to knot a noose out of intestines. “What’s in it for him?”

Shoko blinks. “He doesn’t have to oversee the funerals of his students?”

You think he’s outliving us? Satoru wants to ask but thinks better of it when he remembers her tears, his blood on her hands, the vacant stare she gave him like the whole world could go up in flames and it’d be a fucking improvement.

She takes his silence for something, and says, “sensei’s planning to send us all away for the summer.” There’s a note of curiosity to it, paper-thin.

“Yeah,” he says, shovels more cereal into his mouth. It tastes like raw sugar with a crunchy consistency that’s gradually worn away by the milk and the slightest note of artificial fruit flavor he wouldn’t be able to identify as anything in particular if there wasn’t a helpfully graphic on the back of the package. Satoru’s loved it the moment he discovered it — back home, no one would let him have industrially processed foods. One of the major reasons why his Clan sucks so much.

Shoko narrows her eyes at him in suspicion.

“He told me,” he blurts out like it’s a terrible secret. “When Suguru and you were passed out.”

She narrows her eyes further.

“Yaga told you who he wants to play babysitter for you?”

“Babysitter,” she echoes.

Satoru shrugs.

“I’m older than you.”

“Yeah, but I can kick your ass,” he retorts without missing a beat.

“You can kick everyone’s ass,” she returns mildly, like that isn’t an achievement to be proud off.

While he gives her his best pout in response, she picks a sheet of nori from one of these many, many small plates strewn around her and nibbles at it, letting him sulk for a bit, before she says, “Yuki-san arrives last night.”

“That’s fast,” he murmurs around a mouthful of cereal.

“She was in the area,” Shoko says, not elaborating on what that means, when Tsukumo is famous for being everywhere except in Japan. “Nanami and Haibara are going back to their parents.”

“Figured,” he says, scraps at the bottom of his bowl. His stomach continues rumbling like a herd of deer thundering through the underwood. With a scowl, he pours another serving of cereal on top of the milk. Then, he shoots her a look, wiggles his eyebrows, wiggles his head, wiggles his hands, holds up his bowl with Infinity.

Unimpressed, Shoko stares at him.

He continues wiggling. When thirty more seconds pass and she still doesn’t do the thing he wants her to do, he sighs dramatically and drapes himself equally over the counter like his legs alone can’t support his weight anymore. “You’re not curious where I’m going?”

“No?” she replies, looks at him like he’s denser than a neutron star. “You’re going wherever Suguru’s going, and Suguru’s going back to his parents.”

Satoru whines. “You’re no fun, Shoko.”

“But I’m right,” she says impartially, sips her coffee without batting a single eyelash, and goes back to studying her notes.

He’s emptied the entire box of cereals and is now looking through the interestingly organized cabinets in search of anything that might satisfy the cravings he still has when his Six Eyes warn him of an incoming Special Grade.

Sorcerer, not curse, mind you. But it’s not Suguru.

Must be Yuki then. She’s coming down the opposite way he entered — there’s a hallway across the actual dining room portion of the kitchen that connects to a walkway that, in turn, connects to another building but no one’s using that one unless they want to run into Yaga and the other staff.

Satoru’s falling into a combat stance before he knows what he’s doing; the cursed energy approaching Shoko and him bears far too many similarities to Riko’s for him not to be skeptical, and the thing with Special Grades is that they’re a bit messed up in the head, due to all this cursed energy buzzing under their skin with the stability of a bunch of random components trapped inside a glass. The world they see and hear and feel is so different from the world that, say, First grade sorcerers perceive that they might as well be a different kind of species.

In his case, he’s been taught that ‘massive amounts of cursed energy’ mean ‘threat’. Whether human or not. So. Combat stance before he’s actively made a decision; something not quite a combat stance when he realizes what he’s doing. Doesn’t get all the aggression and all that wariness out of his limbs but it is what it is. He’s been raised for war. This will stay with him until he dies.

Heeled boots clack against the hardwood floor; a paper door slides open; Satoru’s halfway through mumbling a greeting around the spoon he’s stuck between his tongue and the roof of his mouth—

“What kind of girls do you like?” Yuki, Special Grade sorcerer, asks the moment she lays eyes on him.

He opens his mouth. The spoon noisily clatters to the ground. He closes his mouth. Stares. Realizes the woman has the exact same constitution as Riko (what the fuck?), she’s just asked him about his type in girls instead of greeting him (alright?), and he has no idea how to answer a question like that (can he blame that on his near death experience?).

“This is Yuki-san, Satoru,” Shoko says in the way of introduction, only acknowledging his confusion with a smile so faint, he’d have missed it, if his Six Eyes hadn’t so helpfully informed him of every single visual clue in his immediate vicinity.

“Uh,” he says unintelligently, when he realizes that time escapes him like something he has to hunt down and kill to make it stay still. “I — I also like boys.” (In what kind of universe is that a proper answer? What the fuck, Satoru?)

“Well,” the woman says without missing a beat, “what kind of girls and boys do you like? Don’t be shy now.” Her grin is akin to the sun split in two; the length of her hair is brilliant in the light filtering in through the windows; she’s blinding but he can’t look away.

“No one has ever called me shy before,” he tells her with a nervous laugh (what the fuck, Satoru), all that arrogance that he usually uses as a form of self-defense nowhere to be found.

Suddenly, he’s made of glass and Yuki sees right through him; he’s given her a piece of truth he’s never said as plainly as that before and it almost … feels like he’s unraveling at the seams, no longer flawless. No longer whole.

Continuing to be on the receiving end of two utterly unimpressed stares, Satoru stutters his way (rather embarrassingly) through a reply. “I — I like attitude,” he says and cringes, because, wow, that’s pretentious. “And smarts. Strength. Long, black hair.” He swallows, thinks— “I like people who are passionate. Kind. Smug.”

Shoko lowers her coffee cup and mouths, that sounds exactly like Suguru.

That sounds like none of your business, he frantically mouths back, prays to gods he doesn’t believe in that his face isn’t as red as it feels, and gives her the stink eye. It’s only when she grins so widely he’s worried about her tearing a muscle in her face that he realizes he isn’t wearing his glasses. Which. Is weird.

Yuki laughs loudly enough to distract him from that train of thought. “That’s the most detailed response I’ve gotten so far!” she declares cheerfully, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “Good! Means you’ve put a lot of thought into this.”

“Uh-huh,” he says intelligently and goes back to digging through the pantry, mainly so he can hide the furious blush on his face.

Suguru stumbles into the kitchen an undetermined amount of time later, barefoot and bleary-eyed, braid having come halfway undone. Black hair falls over his shoulders, curls along his collarbones, cascades into an even worse state of disarray when he scratches the new scars on his stomach.

With a start, he realizes the other boy’s wearing a shirt and pair of sweatpants that came out of Satoru’s closet, because, wow, he doesn’t think he’s ever seen Suguru choose this form-fitting pants before. Like, ever. And he’s not sure why, because it looks really good on him.

That thought dies a very quick death when his best friend’s gaze lands on him and the world seems to shrink down to just the six feet of space between them.

“You left,” Suguru rasps, the accusation so miserable in his voice these two words are akin to a knife stuck through his throat.

“I needed to pee,” Satoru informs him, before his mouth decides to run off on him again.

The other boy looks him up and down with the cold calculation of someone who has never lost an argument in his life. “You’re not peeing right now.”

Shoko snorts into her orange juice. Yuki, on the other hand, keeps a straight face.

Suguru pays neither of them any mind; he only raises an eyebrow at him when he doesn’t provide any explanation of why he didn’t come back to bed like they’ve been married for thirty years and have been on the verge of divorce due to each other’s sleeping habits for the past six months.

While he isn’t sure what he has done to deserve this, Satoru takes a deep breath and prepares for his inevitable loss. “I was hungry,” he says lamely, staring down at the sad piece of sliced bread that is the result of his vicious hunt through the pantry. “And I’m pretty sure you’d have killed me if I came back with my stomach rumbling like crazy.”

Something in his best friend’s expression softens. “I could never kill you,” he says with a tenderness that might as well be a noose around his neck. A moment later, he crosses the distance between them and plucks the piece of bread Satoru’s been holding onto like a lifeline out of his hands. Suguru sets it aside, pulls butter and milk from the fridge, cinnamon and sugar from a cupboard, like a con artist pulling cards from his sleeve.

His best friend is halfway through making french toast before he realizes they’re not actually alone in the kitchen. Ducking his head between his shoulder, he shoots their mutual classmate an apologetic, “morning, Shoko.”

“Morning,” she returns, not offended at all. “You feeling better?”

Suguru blinks.

“We’ve been out for two days,” Satoru adds helpfully. “Apparently.”

“Ah,” the the boy mutters, glances at him, glances back at Shoko. “Sorry for worrying you.”

“It’s alright,” she says, softer than she was with him, but Satoru’s never done well with softness.

As Suguru turns to look at the last person present in the room—

“So,” Yuki asks with a grin as easy and as carefree as the rising sun, “what kind of girls do you like?”

His best friend stares at her like he regrets every single decision that has lead up to this very moment. Making a strangled noise in the back of his throat, he chokes out, “I’m gay.”

Satoru’s just glad he’s not holding anything right now. If he had, he’d dropped it hard enough to shatter Tengen’s barriers.

Yuki seems wholly unimpressive, though. “Well, what kind of boys do you like then?”

Suguru continues staring at her, evidently still regretting every single decision that has resulted in whatever this is, before he shifts the weight of his attention over to Satoru.

Suddenly, he’s trying to remember how this whole breathing thing works for long enough to actually do it.

Then, the other boy says, “pretty.” A smile softens his features, his dark gaze still trained on him. “And a little dumb.”

Wow. Way to crush his heart before he’s even had the chance to process the fact that he’s in love with him. Because — because, the thing is — Satoru’s been called every variant of ‘pretty’ you can think of, so he’s confident in his looks — but no one has ever called him ‘stupid’ before.

Helplessly, he glances at Shoko, but she’s busy wiping orange juice from her nose, shoulders shaking with silent laughter, so he goes out on a limb and looks to Yuki for help, but the woman is only sagely nodding at Suguru like he’s just shared an ancient piece of wisdom.

Oh, shit. Satoru’s fucking doomed.

The french toast Suguru makes him is good, though. But it always is. Everything Suguru makes is just so good. (He’s trying very hard not to think about the fact that he’s not the type of boy his best friend likes. He’s also trying very hard to tell himself that that’s totally, absolutely, utterly fine.)

The other boy helps himself to a bowl of miso soup and the rest of the onigiri and the steamed vegetables and the rolled egg and all of the reasonable breakfast foods. Satoru can’t quite forgive him for the bowl of warm rice he eats with nothing but a splash of soy sauce and a raw egg, though. (It’s a miracle and a half Suguru’s even hungry to begin with, so he won’t say shit, but he’s had enough traditional Japanese breakfasts himself for the rest of his life, thanks.)

Suguru sees Riko across the courtyard and freezes — a gun, the blood, her limp body, something ugly and insidious inside of him, the rage, white-hot and blinding and all-consuming, the fear, the single thought cutting through the haze of his mind with the same clarity with which the blade cut through him later, the ah, this is where it all ends, this is all I can do, this is what we have been fighting for so desperately.

The Sorcerer Killer might as well have gutted him. It would’ve hurt less.

But, the thing is, he freezes when he sees the girl he couldn’t protect. Satoru misses half a step and then grins so wide that the skin by the corners of his mouth tears. Riko charges at them with a speed that would put First Grade sorcerers to shame so she can tackle them in a hug.

Suguru’s still frozen by the time her arms come around his best friend and him and she’s sobbing into their uniforms like she just came back from attending their funerals. Still thinking about the gunshot and the blood and her lifeless body and the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, all the curses he has swallowed mocking him. Calling him weak. Useless. Reminding him that the world is unjust and that there will always be people dying and that he will be never to stop that.

He manages to put an arm around Riko a moment later.

It’s only now that he notices how stiff Satoru is next to him, familiar with the motions of comforting someone, but wholly unfamiliar with such genuine displays of affection being directed at him. Knowing his family, Suguru is hardly surprised.

What surprises him, though, is the fact that the now indisputably strongest sorcerer alive looks to him for help, stares at him out of his wide, blue eyes that reflect the infinity laying at the core of the universe, every inch of his body language screaming help me so clearly everyone in Tokyo must hear him.

Suguru feels something inside of him give away, a dam breaking down and dissolving into nothingness, a softness so gentle, it eases his paralyzed limbs.

Watch, he mouths and raises the arm he had gingerly wrapped around Riko’s shoulders to pat the top of her head. The smile comes all by itself, no need to fake it; the girl sobbing her heart out like they’ve known each other for more than a whole week seems so small, all of a sudden. So vulnerable. (He tries not to think about vulnerability.)

Satoru stares at him for a moment longer, each of his Six Eyes cataloging every minuscule movement of his muscles, as if his best friend needs to commit every second of him being alive to memory.

It takes another impossibly long moment before the other boy shifts his attention back to Riko, placing a hand on her shoulder with great care, like he fears he could shatter her, pets her like he pets the stray cats that sometimes come slinking around campus. But his other hand digs into the back of Suguru’s uniform akin to a lifeline.

Suguru wraps his free arm around his best friend, touches his ribs, thumbs along their outline he can feel through his shirt; Satoru is all long limbs and a wiry built and height, too thin for all the things expected of him, and now his breath rattles inside in his lungs, like something got knocked loose.

He taps a rhythm against his ribs until it’s gone.

Neither of them looks at the scarring the bullet left behind when it entered Riko’s skull.

The girl’s entourage — Kuroi, Nanami, and Haibara — reach them long before she stops crying, but the three of them stop at a respectable distance, waiting. Offering her time and space. It doesn’t seems to matter that Satoru and him failed so horribly at protecting her; it doesn’t seem to matter that she almost died because of them. It doesn’t seem to matter that in this world, the title of the strongest seems to mean nothing at all.

Suguru wonders if he’d cry, too, if he had any tears left to give. But the rage he felt when he saw her collapse like she’s always been just a rag doll has burned him out, hollowed him out when this fucking monkey told him he’d killed Satoru, left him with nothing but the shallow emptiness that governs him now.

It’s kinder, in a way. It’s just as cruel, in the same breath, because if this is all there is to it, ashes and coals and the dust that seeps into his lungs to turn them black, what is there that still matters?

“I thought,” Riko says between sobs that still shake her, eyes red and puffy when she stares up at the two of them like she still can’t believe they’re real and that she’s real. “I thought you — died.” The word wrecks her. Her arms remain closed around the two of them in a vice; she seems to fear they’ll disappear the moment she takes her eyes off them.

Suguru winces, ducks his head between his shoulders, doesn’t manage to apologize, because they all lost something to the Sorcerer Killer, and he isn’t so sure they’re getting anything back.

“Eh,” Satoru says with a grin that’s a little too wide, “didn’t stick.” His sunglasses ride up the bridge of his nose, hide the fact that his expression doesn’t match the look in his eyes. In it, Suguru sees the resignation he feels in his chest like an acid burn: That all their training and tactics and techniques, that all of the effort they put in and all the hopes they have placed on their duties has meant nothing at all in the face of Fushiguro Toji.

“That’s not funny,” Riko retorts, doing her best to muster a glare. She’d have managed it, if not for the sniff and the traitorous wetness spilling from her eyes.

Satoru stares at her, panics, and pets her back a little harder in an attempt to make up for his careless comment. “I mean,” he says, glances at Suguru for help — but Suguru can only lift his shoulders to a shrug, because they can’t lie any better to her than they can tell her the truth. “I — I’m sorry, Riko.”

The words have them stopping dead in their tracks, because when’s the last time Gojo Satoru apologized?

“We were meant to protect you,” the boy continues, his voice quiet, a far cry from his usually cheerful, boastful tone. “But we couldn’t — couldn’t do it right. And you got hurt. Because of us.”

Riko stares, like the rest of them do. Then, she manages a smile. “It’s alright. That guy was really strong, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Satoru admits, “but we’re supposed to be the strongest.” He pinches her cheek. “It shouldn’t matter whether some weird guy is strong or not when we’re on the same job.”

She swats away his hand to rub her cheek. “What are you, fifteen?”

“Sixteen,” Satoru bites back, like it makes a difference. “And what are you, twelve?”

She sticks out her tongue at him.

In another life, Suguru imagines, these two would make the most obnoxious of siblings, and they’d secretly love every moment of it. In this life, he says out loud, “I think what Riko means is that we are too young for this.” He swallows; his own voice sounds so strange from his mouth; he feels as if someone else is operating his body and he’s just watching from afar, going through the motions like they’re answers to a pop quiz. “We lack experience that sorcerers older than us would have, and we can’t substitute that with strength.”

The girl nods eagerly. “That’s what Yaga-san said,” she adds.

Satoru’s expression becomes complicated, an open book in the same way that his eyes aren’t.

“I think he feels guilty,” Riko continues. “Because — because all of us could have … died.”

In a way, Suguru wants to say, we all have died. Luckily, he snatches back control over his body before he can open his mouth. “It’ll be better now, Riko-chan,” he says instead. This time, he has to fake his smile.

He doesn’t actually believe it’ll get better. When he thinks of the future, he just sees things to dread, he just fears that everything will just get worse and worse and worse, afraid that the next time they run into the Sorcerer Killer, no reverse cursed technique can save them. (Better than swallowing curse after curse, a small voice says in the back of his head. He tries to breathe past the nausea but it goes nowhere, like the curses he has digested.)

Satoru looks at him. Suguru doesn’t look back.

He watches the sunset stream through the paper doors that separate the engawa from the principal’s office, the beams of light crimson like blood — like Riko’s, like Satoru’s, like his own — and thinks of the water running red, red, red in the shower.

Yaga-sensei is late, but the couch is comfortable enough, even though it’s far too small for the two of them. Satoru got bored five minutes into waiting, got equally bored of messing around after ten minutes of it, and then pouted before fell asleep.

Now, the bane of his existence who is blissfully unaware of his crush on him snores peacefully with his head laid in his lap.

It’s not … bad. In general, he means. He likes the quiet and the secure comfort of sensei’s new office and the cicadas outside and the familiar thrum of cursed energy all around him that pushes back against the angry coil in the pit of his stomach, all these half-digested curses rising from his intestines like undead rising from their graves. It’s just a bit bad for his blood pressure because he’s sixteen and hormones are one hell of a drug.

But then his gaze falls to the scar on Satoru’s forehead and all thoughts he’s had before flee his head. Gingerly, he thumbs along the raised, padded edges, can’t bring himself to look away. Can’t bring himself to think about anything except for how the Sorcerer Killer’s blade must have cut into him, the scar on his throat, on his chest. The bullet wound on Riko’s skull. The scars on his own chest. The water running red, red, red. The death, the tiredness, the way Shoko had looked at them as if she had anticipated their dead bodies instead. The looks Haibara and Nanami have given them. The way Satoru clings to him now as if separation means dying. The way Suguru clings to his best friend, afraid that letting go of him will result in Satoru’s lifeless body.

The sun disappears entirely, plunging the room into utter darkness, when the sliding door hisses open.

“I’m sorry, my talk with Yuki—” Yaga-sensei stops mid-sentence, apology hanging as haggardly off his frame as his glasses off the bridge of his nose.

Satoru stirs at the sudden noise, rolls onto his back, to his side, buries his head in the plane of Suguru’s stomach, and only relaxes when he sinks his hands into his uniform again, like it’s a lifeline and they’re all drowning.

Swallowing harshly, he combs a hand through his best friend’s hair and pretends the night pouring into the room is enough to hide the fact that his cheeks burn very hot, all of a sudden.

Their teacher is silent for a moment too long to fake any kind of natural reaction, before he says, “I’ll be quiet.” His voice is softened by an emotion that is only rarely mirrored on his features as he carefully slides the door shut behind himself. “Thank you for waiting,” he adds when he settles on the couch opposite from the small coffee table between them, the memory of a smile crossing his face.

“No need to thank me,” Suguru returns.

The man nods curtly, looks at him as if someone has put the weight of the world on his shoulders in the three days he hasn’t seen the man, and then takes off his glasses. The shadows under his eyes are terrible things, coming alive.

“How are you feeling, Geto?” his sensei asks then. His voice is strange, too, and it throws him off, because Yaga Masamichi is a lot of things — but he’s never been soft. (A jujutsu sorcerer can’t be soft. Mustn’t be soft. Not when they need to be all hard edges and sharp angles, weapons to be wielded against their enemies.)

After a moment of deliberation, Suguru says, “I’m fine,” with that smile people want to see accompanying that kind of statement.

“You’re not,” Yaga returns, leaving him no room to argue. “No one is fine after … that. Now, tell me the truth: How are you feeling?”

He chews on the inside of his cheek, suddenly all too aware of the scar on Satoru’s forehead. His best friend, whom he loves a lot more than is probably wise in a business such as theirs, curls closer, as if he wishes for nothing more than to disappear.

“I,” he begins. Swallows. Stops. Tries again. “I’m not sure what point there is in continuing.” His voice is threadbare, like the rest of him, his existence stretched so thin he wonders if everyone can see through him. “I dread going to bed tonight because I know I’ll wake up tomorrow and have to keep doing all of this. Because this is as good as it gets. Because there will always be another mission that goes wrong and — how often can we keep doing this before we actually die, sensei?”

Yaga looks at him, eyes deep and dark and done, and he doesn’t speak for so long Suguru fears this was just another elaborate test he’s failed spectacularly because there’s something wrong with him. He’s done his best at hiding it, but there’s no going back now, and surely they’ll—

“I don’t know,” the man admits, breath heavy in his lungs. “It’s alright, Suguru. It’ll be alright. I’ll make sure there … isn’t a next time.”

He blinks. “I’m not sure I understand,” he says, afraid this means that he did fail a test he didn’t even know he was taking. “Sensei.”

Flashing him a smile with too many teeth, Yaga says, “there are people who don’t want consequences.” His smile varnishes like a trick of light. “There are a lot of people like that, truthfully. They want the two of you back in the field and back on missions and pretend that this … that almost dying doesn’t change anything.”

Suguru laughs, almost. “We’re the strongest,” he echoes hollowly, even though that strength means nothing now. “Of course we should go back.”

“No,” the man retorts with such an insistence that he cannot think of a single counter-argument. “You should not go back. You’re sixteen, and you’re hurt, and, above all, you’re my students.” The certainty with which he speaks feels as hard won as his own morality was, before that fucking monkey cut it into a thousand pieces and left him buried in the remains of it like his convictions and beliefs and purpose are a jigsaw puzzle made out of someone else’s insides.

“You are not going back to the field tomorrow, Suguru,” his sensei continues. “And that’s final.”

He frowns. “Summer is the busiest season for sorcerers,” he finds himself saying, the strings of his body directed by someone else again. “It is only right that we do our part, considering the powers we have.” (Inside of him, one part is begging him to say ‘yes’, begging him to agree, because if he has to swallow another curse, he’s going to rip his own fucking guts out so he doesn’t have to digest it.)

Yaga watches him, wary of the fake concern on his features. “Do you truly believe that?”

Suguru says nothing.

“Thought so,” the man mutters, a wry smile tugging up the corners of his mouth. “Listen, boy — you’re are far too young for the things the higher-ups have been trying to saddle you with solely because Gojo and you have ridiculously strong innate techniques. And, yes, it’s right that those with powers like you two have a certain responsibility, and it’s right that we’re always working ourselves to the bone in summer, but—” He pauses, air snatched from his lungs. “You nearly died out there.”

Guilt, Suguru realizes. Yaga’s feeling guilty.

“And I can guarantee you,” said man adds, heedless of his sudden realization, “the moment you’re back in the field, you’ll be in danger again. You’ll be at risk of dying. Can you handle that?”

“It’s part of the job,” he murmurs. The words are a curse from his mouth, shit and vomit.

“This job,” his teacher says with the eerie calm of battle, “has cost the lives of a hundred people like you already. Their blood is on the hands of all of Jujutsu society. Is that right?”

“No,” Suguru breathes, jolts himself back into control of his own body. “It’s not right. It has never been—”

“No,” Yaga says softly. “It has never been right.” He pauses, watches him. “It needs to stop.”

“But unless we can prevent curses from forming—” I’ll have to fucking eat them.

“Let that be my problem,” his teacher cuts in. “And Yuki-san’s problem. You go heal your wounds.”

“Sensei—”

“It’s not an order,” Yaga returns, raising his hands in defense of himself. “But things around here will be — ugly, for a while. There’s some, ah, trash I need to take out.”

Suguru stares at him, feels the scar on Satoru’s forehead under his fingertips. Thinks about the way Shoko looked at them. About Riko. About Haibara and Nanami. About the third-years he hasn’t seen in months. About himself. About how dead-tired he is, how he wants to fall asleep and wake up a month from now to a world miraculously better than this.

He can’t keep doing this. He can’t — he’s tried and he can keep trying and he can bend and break and beg and it won’t change anything. He can do the impossible and it’s still not enough, he’s still not enough.

He can keep doing this. But he thinks he’d rather have taken a bullet to the head.

“Alright,” Suguru says, in lack of all the anger and righteousness and everything else that burned so brightly inside of him, before. “Please don’t forget to take care of yourself as well, sensei.”

“Brat,” Yaga calls him but his smile and the look in his eyes gives him away.

What do you think about staying with your parents? his teacher had asked him.

Suguru had very pointedly not thought about the fact that he hasn’t contacted them since he arrived in Tokyo.

The thing is, his parents have always worked late and come home late. It’s been like this ever since he could remember. And it’s been fine; he understood early that his family didn’t have as much money as others, and that his parents didn’t work close to home, so they had a long commute.

It is fine, he knows not everyone is lucky to be well-off. Even if you have more money than you could spend in a hundred lifetimes, you might have a shit family, like Satoru.

So what Suguru does, in his consideration for his parents who might have just gotten home, and who might be very tired, is send a text message instead of outright calling them. He doesn’t want to alarm them, this isn’t — this isn’t an emergency. This can wait a day or two. They’re safe now, on campus. All of them are safe.

Probably.

His heart is in his throat while he stares at the slow-blinking cursor, thumb hovering over the ‘send’ button. He’s typed it up nice and concise, mulled it over for an hour to make it sound like it’s just a son catching up after too long a time without contact.

(Deep down, he knows the only way he won’t make his parents worry is by never sending this message at all.)

He looks at his mother’s name on the top of his screen and thinks about how her hands must hurt right now, and how much worse his father’s eyesight must have gotten; he thinks about the summers back when he didn’t yet know he could swallow curses and when he didn’t understand that he was different and when he didn’t think there was something wrong with him. When all he knew was wonder and love and a world so wide, he could not wait to see it all. When all he knew was laughter and sun-warmed fruits and the cotton yukata his mother made and the little projects his father had him do on his days off.

When he didn’t think about blood or death or dying, when he didn’t hate the idea of going to sleep knowing he’d have to wake up again, when he didn’t remember having to hold his best friend’s throat together. When he wasn’t in love with Satoru yet, when he wasn’t at home halfway across the country among people like him. When he hadn’t realized that they could all die, be slaughtered by some fucking monkey who’d kick their dead bodies and laugh about how easily he cut down a kid half his age.

Suguru swallows around the lump in his throat, heartbeat racing, and his ‘send’ before he can change his mind. (In the immediate aftermath, he wants to chug his phone across the room so he’ll never have to see his parents’ reply. He hopes they just … forget to text back. He hopes time will wash this clean. It’s shameful, and it makes him a terrible son, and he feels bad that his parents don’t have a better child than him, but this is all he is.)

(As a child, he loved the premise of having superpowers and being a hero and protecting the world. As a teenager, living through what felt like an unobtainable fantasy, he isn’t sure there’s anything left to love about this.)

(Except Satoru, of course. Except Shoko and Haibara and Nanami. He’ll always love the people. But this love is burning him out, hollowing him out to pour the grief and the despair into him like molten rocks, and he doesn’t see any way to stop it.)

It’s half past ten when his mother texts him back. He doesn’t know why the notification sound he hasn’t heard in over a year surprises him so much, when he set it specifically for his parents’ numbers.

He’s in Satoru’s dorm room, staring at the ceiling because he can’t sleep and he’s too afraid of the things he’ll see when he closes his eyes, arms wrapped round his best friend sprawled out on top of him like a cat with abandonment issues and no concept of personal space. Suguru’s pretending he isn’t pouring metaphorical kerosene into the metaphorical fire with this. (What they have isn’t romantic, exactly, but they’ve long moved past an ordinary friendship and all he can think about is that this might be the last time he gets to hold Satoru like this, that he won’t survive bringing him home, that neither of them will survive—)

His phone is laying on the small nightstand crammed with a broken lamp, Satoru’s sunglasses, candy wrappers, water bottles, small trinkets, ginger extracts and whatever else Riko and Shoko and Haibara and Nanami had thrown at them this afternoon so that they’d get better soon. The screen lights up briefly, indicating a message, but he’s frozen again, staring at his body from a distance as someone else maneuvers it. He can’t reach for it, knowing it’s a message from his mother, but he can’t also not-not reach for it, for the very same reasons.

The screen stops glowing, plunging the room back into a darkness that seems eternal in the same way it seems timeless, trapping him.

Satoru stirs, making a reluctant sound in the back of his throat as he raises his head from where he had buried it in the crook of his neck. He blinks at him from his vivid blue eyes, the sea and the sky in equal amounts, a question forming in the furrow of his brows.

Startled back into control over his own body, Suguru grabs his phone from the nightstand. He tightens his grip on his best friend, as if Satoru could just slip away if he didn’t hold him this tightly, and he tightens his grip on his phone, afraid it’ll slip out of his hands just as easily.

If you’re still awake, the preview reads. His heart clenches like someone drove a knife through it.

He sits up, wiggling out from under the other boy and leaning against the headboard.

Petty as he is, his best friend crawls up just so he can tug his head back into the crook of his shoulder, sprawl out all over his chest and stomach, blearily blinking at him from his blue, blue eyes that hold the answer to every question ever asked, if you speak a million languages that’ll turn to dust from your lips.

Satoru’s pout has no business looking this good, but it’s the color of his eyes farmed by the white of his long lashes and the paleness of his skin that does all the work for him, really. He’s always seemed untouchable, like a statue made from ivory and hand-painted with great care, but Suguru can no longer look at him and not think about the scar hidden beneath the strands of his hair, the collar of his shirt.

And yet, with his phone in one hand and the boy he has been in love with for so long in the other, he feels grounded against the tide his thoughts.

“My parents,” Suguru bites out, even though no one demanded an explanation of him. “I asked them when it’d be convenient to call.”

For a long moment, his best friend only continues staring at him before his gaze slides over to the digital clock on his nightstand. “It’s pretty late,” he announces then, words slurred from the lack of effort he puts into being awake.

“Yeah,” he says. His throat constricts, jaw closing around nothing; the prospect of talking to his parents is frightening, more so than the specter of the Sorcerer Killer clinging to him. The thing is, Suguru has never been afraid of his parents. Only ever of himself. Afraid that the love he has for them has rotted, that he will see them and realize they are not the same people they were when he left for Tokyo, that he has been moving on and growing while they have aged and become stagnant. Afraid that he still has so much more to lose.

“If they’re fine with it, you can call them right now,” Satoru mutters, letting his eyes fall shut as he rests his head on his chest. “I don’t mind.”

He swallows. “Sorry for waking you.”

His best friend huffs, squeezes him like an octopus, all long limbs that don’t fit anywhere else, and gives no other reply. (They both know sleep will only come to either of them in the early morning hours, before the first light, when the exhaustion is greatest, or when they’re dozing off in each other’s company during the day.)

Suguru supposes that’s as good an encouragement as he’s going to get. Again, he swallows but it feels like there is a curse sitting at the back of his throat that has gotten stuck.

He sucks in a breath he knows won’t help him steel himself for what is to come, unlocks his phone.

If you’re still awake, his mother’s message reads, we can talk right now. Your father and I were only watching the news. We just want to know if you’re alright, Suguru. (He fights back the sob that threatens to tear itself out of his chest like a wild beast. No, he wants to tell him, hundreds of kilometers between his childhood home and Tokyo, I’m not alright. I don’t think I have been in a year.)

Satoru squeezes him again.

“Thanks,” he manages to choke out, hates how wet his voice sounds. Hates that all he can do is cry and go quiet and want to bury himself in an unmarked grave when he feels emotions as intense as he does right now; they seem all-composing, all-consuming, all-powerful, like that Special Grade curse he ran into during his first mission, like the Sorcerer Killer. In face of these forces of nature, he’s small and insignificant and powerless. (And next to his best friend, he’s so very mortal.)

He hits ‘call’ before he can think of an excuse to postpone it.

The line connects after exactly one ring.

“Suguru?” his mother asks. With the static crackling through the connection, she sounds like a stranger. “Is that you?”

“Yes, oka-san,” he returns, surprised that his voice holds out. It’s a little quiet and he has to clear his throat and it’s only then that he realizes his free hand has found its way back into Satoru’s hair and that his best friend is watching him through one opened eye, his stare so intense, Suguru can hardly form a coherent thought. “It’s me.”

“Good,” his mother breathes.

“Son,” his father greets him, gruff like he’s always been.

“Oto-san,” Suguru says in return, soothes his thumb over the scar on his the other boy’s forehead. (He feels like falling, falling, falling. But when he thinks he’s hit the ground screaming, he remembers the feeling of Satoru’s arms around him.)

“Did something happen, love?” his mother asks, anxiety gnawing through her like the curses gnaw through his stomach. “You usually don’t call like this.” There’s no accusation in her voice, just the silent acknowledgment of I know you’ve been busy but it hurts all the same because — because he should have called. He should have visited. He should have been a better son.

“I—” He begins, stops himself, caught in these eyes that hold infinity.

The truth is, Suguru can lie to himself and he can lie to his friends and to some extent he can lie to his parents. He’s done it for years at this point. He’s masqueraded as the well-collected young boy who knows what he’s doing and isn’t half a step away from utter despair every time he wakes up to a world that hasn’t ended yet.

But he can’t lie to Satoru. Not now, at least. Not like this. Not when all distance there was between them before they took this mission has evaporated in the aftermath of it. Not when the other boy extends a hand to brush a string of his still slightly wet, dark hair behind his ear and mouths, it’ll be alright. I’m here.

Suguru isn’t sure whether that’s true but if there’s one person who can make such ridiculous claims and find equally ridiculous ways to keep them, it is Gojo Satoru.

“Suguru?”

He closes his eyes, feels his best friend’s thumb against his cheek, his palm against his jaw.

“I—” His voice leaves him for a moment. “Something has happened, yes.”

On the other end of the line, there’s a sound that he hopes to all gods he knows isn’t a sob. “Are you alright?” mother presses. “Do you need us to come down there and pick you up?” Like when he was eight and the sickest he has ever been in his life and threw up on his way to school but didn’t tell anyone until he threw up in class again and the teacher made the nurse call his parents, even though he was full on crying and sobbing and begging them not to, because his parents had to work and they couldn’t effort to miss a day due to something like this.

“We — I’m fine now,” Suguru says. The lie is acid in his mouth. His new scars itch and ache and pull; he remembers the blade cutting through him like butter. He remembers the time when he was crying so hard he couldn’t breathe, hysteric all the way home, unable to articulate the fact that he understood that they were poor and that he felt sorry for imposing and that he was just trying to be a good son.

Satoru blinks, two impossibly blue eyes focusing on him, framed by the white of his lashes.

“Someone,” he continues, tastes the static on the other end of the line on his tongue, fizzy, “uh, broke into our school. There — there’s a lot of damage. It’s been … chaotic.”

“But you’re alright?” his father asks, in that hard tone of voice he used to fear as a child before he understood that his father didn’t know how to make his voice do anything else.

“I’m alright now,” Suguru repeats, because it’s the only thing he can say. How can he tell them, when they’re so far away and even more powerless than he is, that he nearly died, again, and that someone nearly separated him into four neat pieces and that he thought the girl he was supposed to protect died in front of him and that he thought the boy he’s been in love with also died? (How can he tell them that when he woke up this morning and didn’t see Satoru, he assumed for a horribly long moment that the Sorcerer Killer really did slaughter him? That he wished, in that awful little moment, that he’d died with him? That, even though none of them are actually dead, Fushiguro Toji killed something inside each of them and that there’s no fucking meaning to any of this anymore?)

“Good,” his father says, and Suguru still can’t say whether he appreciates the lack of emotional response. “It’s good, as long as you’re fine. Everything else can be fixed.”

But what if everything else is broken? he wants to ask. What if the first thing that broke was me?

Out loud, he says, “yes.” Clears his throat. Stares at the ceiling, stares at Satoru, stares at his phone and the call’s timer ticking relentlessly. What is he even doing here? “Sensei was hoping he could get us all off campus for the rest of the summer while they — ah — clean things up around here.”

“The damage must be pretty bad,” his father remarks with a grunt.

“Yeah.”

There’s a beat of silence, as deafening as a collapsing building.

“Do you — have somewhere to go?” his mother asks. Careful, almost, as if she’s afraid of his answer.

His heart seizes with a sudden burst of homesickness when he realizes he was going to go the rest of his life without ever seeing his childhood home again, because, if he went back, he isn’t sure he could leave.

“I — well, sensei — he suggested — I thought—”

His best friend thumbs along his cheek before he drops his hand, crosses his arms over his chest, and shifts his weight until there are forty out of seventy kilogram of Gojo Satoru pressing down on him, forcing him to suck a breath into his lungs.

“Sensei,” Suguru continues, fighting for air and a coherent thought, “said it might be good to go back home.”

The quiet on the other end of the line is so damning, he wishes he’d said nothing at all.

Satoru nudges him, resumes his previous clingy-cat-position, and blinks blearily at him.

The next words fall from his mouth before Suguru knows what he’s doing. “You don’t have to take time off work,” he assures his parents, like they wouldn’t immediately try to take all their vacation days if he told him what he’s really been through. “We can handle ourselves. Oba-san’s patch of field still needs to be tended to, doesn’t it? And you haven’t gotten around isolating the roof either, have you? We can do the grocery shopping and the laundry and the cleaning. I can cook. It’ll be fine.”

“Love,” his mother says, voice so thin he isn’t sure if she’s about to cry or just thinking of the best way to scold him, “that’s not how you should be spending your summer. I’m sure you can find something fun to do in Tokyo.”

“Tokyo,” he says, the words still rushing out of him now that this ugly thing inside of him that tells him there’s something wrong with him and that his parents deserve better than whatever they’ve gotten rears its head, “is awful. It’s all steel and concrete and glass, all fumes and smog and smoke. The lights hurt when I look at them for too long and the night is such a strange, frightful experience without the stars. There’s always a siren going off somewhere, and the rush of traffic is never-ending, and the advertisements are at every corner, and I feel like I’m suffocating when I’m down in the street, surrounded by all these people.” The cursed energy disgusts me. I have to eat the curses spawning from that filthy place. I hate it. I hate all of this.

It’s so pathetic he wants to laugh. He’s so pathetic he wants to laugh.

But to his surprise, the next thing he hears is his father saying, “alright.”

“Darling—”

“Listen to our boy,” his father continues, his voice softer than Suguru has ever heard it. “Let him come home.”

His mother sighs. “Only if he wants to,” she mutters. “Do you want to, love — come home?”

“Yes,” he whispers, almost sobs with relief.

After a beat, father asks, “who are you bringing?”

“What?”

“You said ‘we’ earlier,” he replies. “So, you’re bringing someone. Right?”

“Right,” Suguru mutters, swallows around the lump in his throat that has returned. “I’m bringing — a friend.”

“A friend,” his mother murmurs.

“Yes,” he says, staring right into Satoru’s eyes. “My best friend.”

Chapter Text

Shoko clears them for travel two days later. Satoru’s pretty sure that decision is less informed by medical aspects and more by Yuki booking a flight to Europe for the same day Suguru and him are miraculously discharged.

Knowing his classmate, he suspects she’d love to shut herself in the infirmary with the two of them for about a week and go through whatever the proper procedure is for cases like this. It’s what she did after their first mission went to shit, but that’s a story for a different time, like the fact that all other users of reverse cursed techniques have fucked off to who-knows-where after Shoko showed up, dumping all their responsibilities on a fifteen-year-old girl.

Yeah, he doesn’t know why that pisses him off so much. Might have to do with being raised as a weapon and kind of hating yourself for being exactly what you were made into before you knew what choice was and refusing to stand by while others are treated the same way you were treated.

Anyway, all is to say, when he strolls out of the dorms at the ungodly hour that is seven in the morning with a travel bag slung over his shoulder and sunglasses knocked askew on his nose by a wayward yawn, his best friend trailing next to him like walking is already giving him motion sickness, he’s not expecting send-off.

But there’s a send-off, and the sight makes something inside of himself give away, silencing the last insidious voice insisting he must’ve done something wrong again. That this is just a fever dream and he might still be in the courtyard, bleeding out. That Suguru might be dying right now and that there’s nothing he can do.

Satoru didn’t realize he was still there, in his head. In the first fight against the Sorcerer Killer, which he lost.

Yaga threatens them to enjoy their time off under the thinly veiled disguise of a speech and reminds them to not forget what they’ve learned in school before he clasps their shoulders in his strong grip like he’s trying to send them right back to Shoko.

Riko and Kuroi say their farewells to everyone with tears in their eyes; the girl tries hugging them to death, which is an adorable attempt, until her elbow ends up between his ribs with such deadly precision that Satoru seriously considers never deactivating his Infinity ever again, while her caretaker bows so much that he’s starting to feel self-conscious about just standing there.

Nanami and Haibara relay their goodbyes and well wishes for the next few weeks in a much more civil manner before they jog over to a pair of assistant managers.

Shoko and Yuki, for better or worse, accompany them on the long way down.

The other Special Grade sorcerer tosses her blond hair carelessly over her shoulder as they reach the bottom of the stairs and leans against her (extremely) cool motorcycle.

“Surprised you’re not letting an assistant manager drive you, too,” she says as she crosses her arms, studying them with an expression he finds difficult to read, even with the aid of his Six Eyes.

“It’s a seven hour trip either way,” Suguru replies with a casual shrug. “Besides, traveling by train is faster, if you take traffic, gas stops, and breaks into account.”

It’s only when his sleep-deprived and sugar-deficient brain processes the phrase ‘seven hour trip’ that he realizes there was an ulterior motive in Yaga suggesting he should go back home with Suguru. Seven hours get him pretty much to the other end of the country, and the other side of the country is very, very far away from the Gojo Clan.

Eying his best friend skeptically, Satoru asks, “how many transfers do we need to make?”

“Six or seven,” the other boy mutters, gesturing vaguely. “Depends on whether anything’s changed since I last made the journey.”

He gapes in shock but doesn’t really put effort into it because Suguru stole a shirt out of his closet this morning in retaliation for Satoru snagging one of his pants yesterday, and it looks far too good on him for Satoru to be mad about anything right now.

“You’re in for a long day if you get onto the wrong train,” Shoko points out dryly, cigarette lazily dangling from the corner of her mouth. “Be careful, yeah?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Satoru gripes. “We can read, you know.”

She blinks, even less impressed by his bullshit now than she was back when they first met. “Your sense of direction is awful,” she tells him then, like it’s the most basic of observations and he’s borderline stupid for not knowing that about himself. “Your attention span is non-existent. You can’t read a map to save your life. You don’t even know how to follow directions.”

Yuki snort as she pulls a second helmet from under the seat of her motorcycle.

Satoru makes a fittingly indignant expression.

“And,” Shoko adds, softer, “you don’t like crowds.”

“Eh,” he returns, “the crowds are fine. It’s just a bit too much information.” He tabs his forehead, index finger slipping on the scar that Fushiguro left him.

“You’re frying your brain trying to process all of it,” she says, as she takes a long drag from her cigarette, staring at said scar like she was the one who caused it.

“Yeah, but I can heal it now.”

Shoko huffs the smoke out of her nose. “You’re still frying your brain,” she says. “The thing with reverse cursed techniques is that they only heal physical damage. They don’t heal mental damage.”

When he blankly stares at her, she sighs.

“We all have a set amount of processes in us,” she tells him. “Usually, it’s a matter of how many our body can withstand before we wear it out and it needs rest. You might be able to combat that, and I might be able to make your nerves as new as they were when you were born, but your brain will eventually hit that upper limit — and there’s nothing neither you or I can do about it.”

He continues staring at her. After a long moment, he announces, “I don’t get it.”

Suguru shares a long-suffering look with Shoko before he touches a hand to his elbow.

“She means,” his best friend begins, voice lined with an exhaustion that seems to stem from the marrow of his bones, “that you might walk away with a healthy body but your mind will rot, because you aren’t getting healed. Just the mechanical part of being alive that keeps you breathing and eating and sleeping. Not the part that makes you, well, you.”

Shoko hums, the corners of her mouth tugging up almost far enough to form an actual smile. “That’s why I like you better, Suguru,” she says, smile disappearing as quickly as it has come. “The same goes for you though, you know? You’re fine, physically.” But not mentally, she means.

His best friend swallows, tightening his grip around his elbow. There’s something hard in his gaze that’s neither fear nor anger nor shame; it’s but something worse. His cursed energy roils like a black hole expanding to consume the whole universe.

Satoru still isn’t sure he gets what the problem is. His family did their best to make sure he has as little sense of self as possible, and, boy, would they love it if he fried his brain enough that he lost all the personality he has clawed from their cold, dead hands.

And, well, if he puts it like that—

Giving the two of them a stern look, Shoko lifts the stub of the cigarette from her mouth and tilts her head back to exhale a long plume of smoke towards the tree branch bowing over her as if it means to provide shade specifically for her and no one else.

“Just,” she says, stops, looks at them, raises her cigarette, lowers it, “take care of yourselves, alright? I don’t want to,” she gestures towards them, “do that ever again.”

“Sorry,” Satoru says on reflex.

“Of course,” his best friend says immediately after and gives her the polite smile he never means. “We’ll be careful.”

Shoko sneers. “Stop lying, Suguru,” she retorts but there’s no heat to it. “Satoru, make an honest man out of him, won’t you?”

“Uh,” he says unintelligently and stares at his best friend with whom he must have been hopelessly in love with for much longer than he’ll ever care to admit, “don’t know how to tell you this, Shoko, but you’re the responsible one out of us.”

She gives him a look, as if to say, really? while she lifts her cigarette to her mouth again.

Satoru, naturally, does the only reasonable thing and pouts.

Suguru needs a moment longer to come out of whatever state he’s fallen in but when he does, he pats his back in slow, deliberate movements to console him about losing this argument so badly.

Belatedly, he remembers that his best friend isn’t exactly a friend of crowds either, for reasons they never explicitly discussed under the thin veneer of privacy, even though the reason for that is pretty apparent. A glance at the boy in question doesn’t exactly tell him if he dreads the excursion into Tokyo while the sticky summer heat is trapped between the buildings and the many people moving through the city; his expression is difficult to read, his true feeling tugged away behind a mask, the sharp edges of his emotion softened by a smile that is pretense, because it doesn’t reach his eyes.

It’s worrying, how often he’s seen this exact look on Suguru’s face the last few days.

So, he pokes his side. When he doesn’t look, he does it again and again, jabbing his fingers between his ribs with deadly precision.

“Hey, Suguru,” he says, unnecessarily, when the other boy finally looks at him, swatting away his hand with a look filled with so much utter annoyance that Satoru wonders whether he deserves a reward for evoking such a strong emotional reaction in someone who was very content not showing any until a moment ago. (Personally, he thinks he deserves all the rewards.)

“What,” Suguru returns, fixing him with an increasingly withering glare as he continues poking his side like this is a game and he needs to exceed some previously set record in half the time.

“You don’t like crowds either, right?” he asks, finds that the cheer in his voice is dampened by something softer, something that he couldn’t name until a few days ago but that has always consumed his mind. “Think you’ll be fine? It’s hot and sticky and everyone will be on the move, with all that tourism.”

Suguru goes a little pale in the face — and Satoru hesitates, wonders if he should maybe apologize for bringing it up — but then his best friend snatches his hand out of the air.

“I’ll be fine, Satoru,” he says, voice dropped to a low, conspiratorial murmur, the image complete with that smug smile tugging at his lips. “After all, I have you, haven’t I?” He speaks with an ease that is difficult to fake for someone usually so distrustful of the world, who sees the bad everywhere he turns, despite his insistence that something as rotten as this is still worth protecting.

Worse, Suguru speaks with an unshakable trust, a belief that could level mountains if tested, a faith that is placed in him not because he is the strongest but because he is his partner.

“Uh,” he returns. “Yeah, sure.” He swallows, tries not to think about the fact that he doesn’t deserve this kind of thing because he nearly fucking died and Suguru nearly fucking died because of him and that Riko nearly fucking died because of him. His strength is an illusion, a bunch of words a bunch of old fools throw around for emphasis. In face of someone like Fushiguro Toji, it means no-fucking-thing.

Suguru huffs out something like a laugh. “You don’t need to protect me from other people,” he says, thumbs over the back of his hand with a tenderness that makes all the neural signals inside his brain come to a screeching halt. “You just need to be there, Satoru.”

He blinks. “I mean,” he says, looking the other boy up and down. “You’re small enough that you can hide behind me—”

His thoughtful suggestion earns him an elbow into the kidney that has him double over with a wheeze. When Satoru comes out of it, his best friend (whom he still loves very much, but ouch) is sharing a look with Shoko that says, do you see what I’m dealing with?

In reply to that, she only lifts her shoulders, meaning, that’s on you.

Gods, Satoru loves his friends, even when they’re insufferable.

“Anyway,” Suguru says, returning his attention to Yuki with an air of reluctance and curiosity both, “where are you going?”

“Berlin,” the woman responds with a grin and waves two airplane tickets in front of them.

“Sixteen-hour flight,” Shoko adds in resignation.

Satoru winces in sympathy. Last time he got all three of them suspended, Shoko stared at the ceiling for a prolonged amount of time until she eventually announced that the boredom would kill her, and he’s never felt like he understood her as much as he did in that very moment.

“We have a layover in Vienna,” Yuki is saying, like she’s done this a million times. “Beautiful city, especially in summer. Have you ever been?”

Simultaneously, Suguru and him shake their heads.

If Satoru is a little jealous of her freedom, that’s just between him and the part of his brain that’s imagining how therapeutic it’d be to tell all of the higher-ups to fuck off, or else. (A small voice whispers to him, if you did that, you could have that freedom, too. But then he’d have to leave Suguru behind.)

“A shame,” the woman murmurs. She inhales, as if she wants to continue, but in the end, the air just rushes uselessly out of her lungs again and she says nothing at all.

They lapse into silence again, their goodbye so close that he can taste it, but none of them seems quite ready for it.

The morning sun burns through the canopy of leaves shading them from the glare of its light, mighty branches reaching over the walls that separate their campus from the rest of the world, at the edge of Tengen’s barriers. Birdsong and the buzz of the city, traffic and people and electronics, fill the air, most of the latter pollution of the natural state of the world, as Suguru once described it when Shoko had asked him what he thought of Tokyo as a kid from the countryside.

The cursed energy roils all around them like an ocean, coming and going endlessly, always different. The press of it settles in his veins with a vengeance, reminds him that the powers he wields are made for combat, that his sole purpose is to fight whatever will be born out of humanity’s negative emotions.

His Six Eyes focus on every flickering shade, every leaf swaying in the wind, every beam of the sun glinting off something, every changing picture on a screen, every piece of information they can scourge up from the bowls of the earth like they’ve been starved for it.

The vertigo from it is worse than before — the world spins and spins and spins — time slips through his fingers like sand until he can’t tell anymore how much of it has passed — his cursed energy inside of him is expanding, expanding, expanding, searching for the end of the known universe — he is a thing of pattern recognition and information — he is driven by his innate technique.

The good thing is, Satoru recognizes when this stuff is getting to him. Like right now. The bad thing, there’s nothing he can really do about it.

He gravitates towards Suguru, whose cursed energy curls beneath his skin, dark enough that the comparison with a black hole doesn’t seem all that strange, something born of gluttony and digesting, endless and hungry and never-ending. To him, it’s always been a source of comfort, because his own cursed energy is the violent death of a star, a thing of destruction that wouldn’t know when to stop even if he had turned the whole world to rubble.

With Suguru, he’s the death of a star in stasis, pulled in by his gravity so the elements he’s made out of can stabilize. It’s only when they’re apart that he starts falling apart again, death resuming in all its savage beauty.

Satoru inches closer to his best friend, hands still linked since neither of them ever thought about letting go.

The other boy glances at him, brows furrowed. When he figures him out, his expression soothes into something softer, gentler, and he squeezes his hand.

“Boys,” Yuki is saying, surprisingly somber. There is a gentleness to her features that borders on vulnerability, a reminder that she, too, puts on an act before the rest of the world so it cannot hurt her true self. (He wonders if that’s a trait all Special Grade sorcerers share.)

She works her throat, unable to speak for a long moment. Then, she says, “thank you for what you did for Riko.”

“Riko?” Suguru echoes, surprise widening his eyes before he narrows them. “We only did what we was right, Tsukumo-san.”

For a split second, the woman freezes. “Of course,” she says, a little too late to pretend that remark didn’t utterly catch her off guard.

“Anyone else would have done the same,” Satoru says with an easy shrug, though that’s not true. There are far too many sorcerers who would have dragged the girl, kicking and screaming, to Tengen at the first sign of danger. No one would’ve gone out of their way to let her go to school, to rescue Kuroi, to spend time with her in Okinawa. Some, he’s sure, wouldn’t even have treated her as a person.

Yuki smiles ruefully. “Maybe,” she says. She looks like the two of them have single-handedly lifted a weight off her shoulders that she would have carried with herself until her dying breaths. “Still. I’m grateful that you were there for her, and I’m grateful that all of you are alright.” She smiles again but the cheer she usually shows is missing from it. “When you come back, everything’s going to be better. I promise.”

They catch their train from Tokyo to Shinjuku with a minute to spare. There’s barely enough space in the carriage to squeeze themselves in; they stand pressed between the other passengers and the doors, the city rushing by in silhouettes of bright blue lines, light reflecting off all that glass, the sun a blade across the river.

The smell of sweat and perfume, new clothes and old clothes, people and artificial creations by human hand, make Satoru sick to his stomach. Might also be caused by the rattle of the carriage across the tracks that he feels in his bones, each cell of his body hyper-aware of what is happening.

He’s clinging to the railing above his head for dear life, holding onto Suguru’s hand like it’s his lifeline and he’ll drown in the crowds the second they’re separated.

Meanwhile, his best friend is pressing a hand over his mouth like he’s trying to stop himself from throwing up.

“You alright?” Satoru asks in a low murmur, leans in close, whispers between the announcements and the roaring of the train and the hushed conversations around them. The world is filled with noise and the press of bodies and it’s only in the space between them, blocked off by his own long limbs and Suguru’s broad figure, that they have something to themselves.

Suguru looks at him for a long moment. To both their surprise, he says, “no.” Swallows. Charges on with a confidence that looks good on him, even in moments like these. “The cursed energy here — it’s disgusting. Don’t you smell it?”

“Nah,” he replies, far too preoccupied with the fact that the boy he’s in love with is clutching his hand like he’s going to break every single bone in it. It’s endearing. “I can see it though.” Wait, does he still have—

“Give me a moment,” he mutters, lets go of the rail above his head. Infinity slides into place around them, saves them from the very embarrassing fate of losing their balance on public transportation. It’s not that the people dirty, or anything; it’s just that the two of them have a couple issues with sensations and being touched and crowded places. For different reasons.

He digs through the pockets of his bag one-handed, which is highly inconvenient and seems to take forever, and— ah, there it is.

Grinning in triumph, he crinkles the plastic, pulls, and offers it to Suguru like it’s a winning lottery ticket.

“A face mask,” his best friend says. There’s this uncertain note in his voice that’s only there when he hasn’t yet decided whether he wants to be impressed or a little offended.

“So my thing is that too much visual clutter is making my brain try to eat itself,” Satoru says, words falling from his mouth like there’s a deadline and he’ll have to shut up for the rest of his life if he doesn’t make it, “and you’re really sensitive to smells and tastes, so I figured the same thing that works for me might work for you.” He pauses, frets for a split second when Suguru’s expression grows blank that he might’ve done something wrong. “Maybe? I mean, you don’t have to, but it’s the one thing we haven’t tried yet and we’ll have to ride a lot of—”

“It’s fine,” the other boy says, voice so soft it might just give out any moment. “I get it. It’s … it’s a good idea. Let’s try it.” His smile is as unsteady as his voice, but it’s genuine, reaches all the way to his eyes and causes laugh lines to appear on his features and — god-fucking-damn it, if he wasn’t already helplessly in love with him, he’d fall for him right now.

But Satoru does the reasonable thing, shoves these feelings back to where they came from until he’s ready to deal with them (which is probably never) and asks, “let go of my hand so I can give it to you?”

His best friend raises his head ever so slightly that they’re eye-level and gives him the most insulted glare he’s ever given a living being. Again, endlessly endearing, but he’s starting to realize that they have a bit of problem, if they’re acting like either of them can disappear into the void unless they’re (metaphorically) glued together.

Chewing on the inside of his cheek, Satoru tentatively suggests, “help me put it on you?”

The moment the words get through to the other boy, he goes a very lovely shade of red, from under his hand all the way up to his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose and his ears. Still, he nods.

This is fine, he assures himself. This is fine this is fine this is fine. He’s not exactly sure why the rest of his body decides that this is, in fact, not fine.

He swallows harshly, offers the wrapped mask to his best friend, and lets him peel the packing open with one hand. He hooks one calloused fingers round the elastic, pulls the cloth free.

Satoru crinkles the empty plastic with a determination that he only knows from life-or-death situation (to be fair, this is a life-or-death situation for his composure) and shoves it carelessly into one of his pockets. Then, he pulls at the other elastic and carefully guides it over Suguru’s ear. He’s mindful of his hair, of his piercing; his fingers are trembling like he’s defusing a bomb and one wrong move could blow up the whole country but he’s just touching Suguru’s bare skin after realizing that he must have been in love with him.

It’s not a big deal at all. (It’s a huge fucking deal, gods protect him.)

The moment he gingerly withdraws his hand, Suguru quickly stops covering his face and secures his mask over his other ear before he takes two desperate breaths.

Temporarily possessed by a courage he usually can only muster when dealing with people he utterly despises, he tugs the thin fabric properly over his best friend’s mouth, his chin, hand lingering like it’s going to slip off without his support.

“Better?” he asks nervously, so close that there is barely an inch left between their faces. Their breaths would hit each other’s skin, if the mask wasn’t there. (Satoru is both eternally grateful and eternally resentful of his idea.)

“Better,” Suguru says and smiles, judging by the laugh lines around his eyes and the unending warmth inside of them. “Thank you.”

They have some time to kill before their train departs from Shinjuku, so he drags the other boy across half the station to where the food stalls are. Their hands remains linked, and it’s only when people stare at them that Satoru realizes that they must look curious, the way they stumble through the crowds like the rest of the world doesn’t exist, wearing what are so obviously each other’s clothes.

A part of his brain tries to convince him that this is fine and normal and that the people staring can get fucked. Another part of his brain is still stuck on the fact that they have been holding hands for over thirty minutes.

When they reach the stalls, Satoru nudges his best friend towards an older lady who sells waffles with a smile that has something unmistakably grandmotherly, despite the fact that his own grandmother is a mean woman who would’ve beat him with a stick for his improper posture, hadn’t he been the wielder of the Six Eyes and the Limitless technique.

Disregarding that, the two of them wait politely in line (though not many people seem to think that they’re polite but Suguru’s too tired to care and Satoru — well, Satoru just never gives a shit about strangers). By the time they make it to the front, he’s already bored out of his mind, so he orders an oolong tea as well as a fish-shaped waffle with red bean filling with a naturalness that should not be as second nature to him as the manipulation of cursed energy.

Suguru, equally calmly, asks the lady running the stall for the drink with the highest sugar content and then proceeds to request an utter abomination: chocolate pieces in the dough, chocolate spread on the waffle once it’s fried, whipped cream, ice cream, more chocolate sauce, strawberries, and cookie crumbles.

It’s only when the nice old lady hands them their respective orders that the two of them realize they should’ve probably clarified they weren’t ordering for themselves.

(The first time Yaga sent their class into Tokyo for some ‘bonding exercise’, Suguru and him debated the pros and cons of every menu item for so long, Shoko got sick of their bullshit and got the three of them a pastry both of them hated, because it was disgustingly bitter. In retaliation, they got her a cup of black coffee, only to discover that she liked the taste. Things kinda got out of hand after that.)

They’re not holding hands anymore when they’re sitting on a bench by the tracks, too busy eating, but it’s not like any physical distance between them, so he doesn’t mind.

Satoru opens his mouth, closes it, almost, but he’s not fast enough to stop the next words from rolling across his tongue. “Wanna try mine?” he asks. The sugar must be doing truly magnificent things to his brain if it’s now jumping through all the hoops that spell out ‘make Gojo Satoru’s life a little more difficult than it already is’.

Suguru, blessedly, doesn’t reply right away. He looks at him, at the waffle in his hand, at him again, and then lifts his shoulders to a shrug that draws his attention to his ears, which are still faintly red.

“Sure,” he says then. “Why not?”

Satoru does his best not to grin like a maniac as he eagerly tears offs piece of waffle (very fluffy and moist), scoops a bit of ice cream of it (nice, contrasting flavor), forces a piece of strawberry on top (Suguru likes fresh produce, and this strawberry is the epitome of that), and holds it towards his best friend like he’s offering him world peace.

In return, the other boy just holds his fish-shaped waffle towards him, like they’re always been sharing food. “Just take a bite,” Suguru tells him, and he sounds so unbelievably smug that Satoru forgets to protest.

The train from Shinjuku takes them to another station whose name he doesn’t bother to remember. He just remembers that their hands are linked.

They buy some food at the nearby convenience store for the longest, consecutive section of their trip at three hours.

Suguru picks candied apples for him, a pair of sandwiches, four small doughnuts, a family pack of cookies, and a soft drink with enough sugar to send a normal human being into immediate cardiac arrest.

Satoru picks his best friend a barley tea, a selection of onigiri, a travel-sized bag of different nuts, cut and peeled fruit wrapped in enough plastic it couldn’t go bad if it tried, and a curry bun.

On the train, they sit squeezed next to each other, a refuge from the rest of the world in their dark uniforms and the dark shadows under their eyes, nursing their drinks and idly chewing away at their food as the landscape rushes by.

There are only a handful of other passengers in the carriage, given the fact that it’s barely ten in the morning on a weekday in August and everyone’s either on holiday or working like every other day of the year.

The staff is nice enough to check on them whenever they walk past them, seeing nothing other than a pair of teenagers a little too young and tired to be without supervision, and — it’s nice, kind of, to realize these adults genuinely care about their well-being.

Suguru dozes off a little, and he gently wraps the two of them up in his Infinity.

The next transfer in Omagari Station (halfway across the country, holy shit; he didn’t know Japan had that efficient an infrastructure) has them killing some time. During that forty-five-minute-wait, both Nanami and Haibara let them know through the group chat that they have made it home safely.

“Look,” Satoru whines and dramatically drapes himself across his best friend’s shoulders, to the amusement of the other passengers stuck here, “they traveled three hours and they’re home.”

“Their parents don’t live at the other end of the Japan,” Suguru informs him, tugging at his mask. The irritation, as much a facade as his polite smiles usually are, melts then, though. “It’s not that bad, is it?”

Satoru stares at him and thinks about he hasn’t experienced a headache, or eye strain, or shortness of breath, or restlessness since they left Shinjuku. Thinks about how clean the air is here and how the sun burns differently and how the cursed energy moves differently and how the lack of visual cues is actually doing wonderful things for him.

“Yeah,” he mutters, tugs his chin into the crook of the other boy’s shoulder. “This is good. We should do it more often.”

About an hour later, they transfer to their last train, and if he were a lesser man, Satoru would have sobbed in relief, because he has never spent so many hours of a day sitting.

It’s only when they’re exiting onto the most rural of train stations he has ever seen in his life (only one track!), people gawking at them like they’re either celebrities or curses, that he realizes Suguru hasn’t yet announced their arrival. When he carefully inquires about this, his best friend tells him, “we still have fifteen minutes of waiting, a short bus ride to the temple, and another thirty minutes of walking left to do.”

“Why.”

Suguru raises an eyebrow at him but there’s nothing smug about it. “Because my parents’ house is out there?” He nods his head into the general direction of what Satoru confidently identifies as ‘so far out in the sticks, the backwater has backwater’.

“Why,” he corrects himself, “isn’t there infrastructure. Why does it take so long. Why do we have to walk.”

This time, the other boy smiles, dark eyes crinkling with amusement. “There is infrastructure,” he informs him, like the weird combination of train-bus-walking for more than half an hour each qualifies as such. “We’ll just miss the scheduled bus, and since they run attuned to nearby town’s school hours, they’re out in the summer.” He pauses, tilts his head to think. “I think they’re on a different schedule during August, but unless they changed something, there’s only one bus in the mornings and one in the evenings.”

Four in the afternoon, he supposes, doesn’t qualify as ‘evening’.

“The countryside fucking sucks,” Satoru declares without any heat in his voice, as he kicks a pebble down the street.

Suguru just laughs at him.

When they exit the bus, his best friend tugs him close, hands intervened like being apart from one another is a terrible torture and will see them ruined one of these days.

“When we meet my parents,” he begins, peeling the mask off his face like it takes considerable effort, “be nice to them. Please.”

Whatever witty comeback there was on the tip of his tongue dies a very quick, painless death when he notices the vulnerability Suguru is giving off, like there’s something going on here that Satoru will never understand because he hates all his blood relatives.

“Of course I’ll be nice,” he says, soft enough that his voice cracks into a cadence previously unknown to himself.

Reluctantly, Suguru smiles.

If someone once told him he’d make a career out of killing literal monsters born from humanity’s worst emotions and that he’d survive fighting a man known by a moniker that implies that he murders sorcerers for a living and that he’d still dread going back to his parents’ house much more than either of the aforementioned things … he would have probably believed them.

It’s not that he’s afraid, no. He’s not. It’s just that mortal dangerous are very simply, in his experience. Either you fight and win, or you fight and die.

With his parents, there’s no fighting. There’s just the passage of time and change and all these thoughts clogging up his head until he can’t hear himself think anymore. Now, he knows they’re just his insecurities talking: There’s this insidious little voice that convinced him there was something wrong with him when he realized that he was different from other children, and there are all these things he’s never spoken with his parents about, and stuff like that stacks up, becomes a wall you think you can’t cross.

Somewhere, there’s meaning buried in all the things they’ve never said to one another and meaning in the things they’ve forgotten and meaning in the things they’ve done. But talking to his parents is like speaking to people from the other end of the world; they never understand one another.

(He wanted to ask them, do you still love me even if I’m different and gay and can see curses, but he preferred crying alone in his room over hearing the answer to that. Not that he knows what his parents would say. He just feared they’d say no, and that fear kept him from asking.)

Satoru glances at him, white lashes fluttering as he blinks and studies him over the rim of his glasses.

After a moment, his best friend asks, “something wrong?”

Suguru doesn’t look at him, at first, observes the roadside, the hill that rolls into the village where their destination lies. The sun is dipping towards the horizon, getting closer and closer to what he always thought was the edge of the world, and it bathes the boy by his side in a light so brilliant, he’d think him a mirage, if he didn’t feel the press of his hand in his own.

“Nothing,” he replies, belatedly.

Satoru gives him a very judgmental stare, pulling down his sunglasses over the bridge of his nose for full dramatic effect.

“I’m fine,” Suguru says, out of habit.

“Are you?” the other boy murmurs, leaning towards him until Suguru pushes him away. If he hadn’t, the two of them would have tumbled into the ditch, and he isn’t sure he would’ve managed to get up.

“Nothing is wrong,” he says, shooting his best friend a slightly unjustified glare, “and I am fine. It’s just … that I haven’t been back home since I came to Tokyo. And it’s — strange.”

“Yeah?” Satoru asks. His eyes are so vivid in the stark nothingness that is the Japanese countryside — a lack of screens and noises and advertisements and lights, shrouded in every color imaginable. Just the earth and the grass and the sky and the white of Satoru’s hair and the blue of his eyes and the breeze rustling through the fields, the soft smells from the fruit trees, the dirt path under their feet, the cicadas. The frantic beating of his own heart and the quickness of his breath. “I haven’t been back home since then, either.”

“Your entire Clan is full of pretentious and obnoxious sorcerers who think they’re better than everyone else just because they’re born in the right family,” Suguru retorts with far too much vitriol for someone who has only met, like, five of said relatives.

To his surprise, Satoru just laughs. The sound is beautiful, crystal-clear, so wonderful to the backdrop of the fields he has known since he was a child that he forgets to breathe. (This is who you’re in love with, a part of him whispers. Hopelessly in love with, another adds, as if that needs any repeating.)

Wheezing, Satoru says, “you know, I was also born a Gojo.”

“But you are better than everyone else,” Suguru returns with a little frown, the truth so painfully obvious he doesn’t know why the boy who acts like he already owns the world wouldn’t admit that. “Just not because you’re a Gojo. You’re better than everyone else because you’re you.”

His blue eyes go wide behind his glasses and he stumbles over his stupidly long legs, like he suddenly forgot how to walk. “That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” he announces when he pulls him to a stop so abrupt, the two of them nearly do end up in the ditch anyway.

He’s breathtaking under the late afternoon sun with his expensive shirt tugged halfheartedly into a pair of his own pants that aren’t as baggy on him as they’re supposed to be and — there’s just something to him that wasn’t there before, in Tokyo, and Suguru thinks if he tried to uproot this love from inside of himself, he’d just pull out all of his organs.

The thing is, Satoru isn’t just pretty. He’s beautiful. The most beautiful boy he’s ever seen in his entire life, and he did use his Internet access intensively in an attempt to disprove that notion.

So, Suguru stares at him and Satoru stares back, speechless for what might be the second time in his life (the first time was when Suguru defeated him during hand-to-hand combat), and then Suguru says, his brain rattling around his skull like he’s never formed a coherent thought, “I need to tell Shoko no one’s ever given you a genuine compliment before.”

Satoru’s expression rapidly flickers between emotions. After a moment, he lets out an indignant squawk, followed by the whine in the back of his throat.

A small smile tugs at the corners of Suguru’s mouth as he wonders what he’d do without this idiot.

When they set into motion again, the late afternoon sun warm and the air sticky and the breeze far too gentle for the heat dwelling under his skin, Satoru probes him with curious looks and his index fingers until Suguru relents.

“I don’t hate my parents,” he offers in explanation, “but—” The truth is … complicated. “I know you don’t understand, because your parents are … the way they are, but—”

“You don’t know whether you love them?” his best friend asks, his face uncharacteristically serious.

“Yeah,” he mutters, tries not to let his surprise show, but there was a split second where the reply caught him off-guard and that was probably when he lost every opportunity to claim ignorance about his own feelings. “I know they love me,” or so he thinks, at least, “and I know they’ve always wanted what’s best for me.” He pauses, draws air into his lungs, lets it sit there there until he feels like he can stand it no more. “I just … don’t know.” He gives a laugh, and it’s almost genuine, in the desperation of it. “I don’t know what to make of them, or what I make of myself.”

Satoru hums, studies him for a moment so long, he feels like he has just pried open his rib cage to reveal his beating, vulnerable heart. “Haibara told me that most people actually just have an alright relationship with their parents.”

“Haibara has the nicest parents I have reeve met,” Suguru retorts.

His best friend shrugs, like that fact is utterly irrelevant to their argument. It might be.

“I guess,” Suguru says and swallows around the lump in his throat, “I’m just afraid.” Of what, he can’t say.

“Eh,” Satoru says and flashes him the kind of grin he grew used to within a week of knowing him, “it’ll be fine.”

Suguru would’ve believe him, hadn’t the edge of nervousness in his voice betrayed the other boy’s own insecurities.

The thing about late afternoons on a weekday in the countryside is that most people are either still at work or too busy with their chores to bother with what happens out in the street. That’s a good thing; you never want attention when your family is already deviating from the unspoken rules that every citizen should adhere to. Even less so when there’s already something wrong with you and you’re noticeably different.

Except, in a village with a statistically high average age, there are always the nosy retirees who simply must know every little thing that goes on in this place. So, Suguru’s sure, by eight o’clock tomorrow morning, everyone will already know that he’s back and that he brought another boy with him and that they’re holding hands. (He wonders whether he should let go now, as a form of damage control, to conform like he always did in the past, but to his surprise, he finds himself quite unwilling to sacrifice his own comfort for the sake of others. When have the others ever sacrificed their comfort for his?)

He knows kids can be fucking brutal when they find something to bully you about, and there is only so far martial arts and beating up your bullies gets you, but Suguru’s so tired of hiding who he is. So tired of pretending he’s nice and well-adjusted and doesn’t have to put any effort into living by all of these spoken and unspoken rules of society.

In a way, his year in Tokyo has taught him that conformity is the reason curses exist, and that, if you meet the right people, being different suddenly becomes a strength, rather than a weakness.

A winding path leads up the hill to where his parents’ house stands. Originally, the land and the building on it belonged to his maternal grandmother, but his father and mother moved in when she was dying to take care of her, her hands so swollen and arthritic from all the work she had done that she could barely move them. (When he’d left for Tokyo, Suguru had noticed that his mother was showing signs of arthritis, too, from all the sewing.)

By his side, Satoru is staring at their surroundings like he sees many of these sights for the very first time — the gradually darkening sky washing through the world to cast warm light and long shadows both, the plants, the buildings, the smell of the land and the fields and the river somewhere in the distance. The domesticity of it all.

Meanwhile, Suguru feels cold sweat run down his back when the silhouettes of his parents come into view, their silhouettes distorted across the hill, taking shape and form like a curse coming to life. (He doesn’t fear them and he doesn’t hate them but he doesn’t know if he loves them, either. He just thinks there’s something wrong with him, and there’s been something wrong with him for a long time. It’s not anyone’s fault except his own.)

Before he has any more time to dwell on this, they’ve reached the top of the hill. His parents stand in the driveway, his father having wrapped an arm around his mother, who looks a little nervous, and Suguru feels the nausea churn in the pit of his stomach. He tastes the shit and vomit in his mouth.

Maybe he really should’ve let go of Satoru’s hand, but his palm is so sweaty now, he’s sure it’d make a noise as loud as a gunshot if he did so.

He grows hot, and then cold, and then hot again. Something in him shakes, unsteady and uncomfortable, coils and coils and coils in his gut until he feels like there’s a black hole trapped under his skin. He thinks, I shouldn’t be there, and the thought takes root and it rots him and it makes him think he should have never been here.

The absurdity of that startles him back into control of his own body, instead of watching from afar how a stranger pilots his limbs and moves his mouth and does it all wrong.

Slipping his hand out of the other boy’s, he steps forward, feels Satoru’s absence like the earth would feel the absence of the sun, and comes to a halt before his parents. He reads worry in his mother’s gaze, nothing he can name in his father’s; he looks at them and knows they’ve been afraid for him since he left for Tokyo and if he ever does tell them the truth, all their worst fears will have come true already.

He’s been afraid of that, yes. But does it matter now, when the Sorcerer Killer’s blade cut through him so easily? Does it matter, when he was bleeding the same red blood as the monkey who almost killed Satoru and him? Does it matter, when there’s no meaning to his strength? (It disgusts him, something about this. He tries to swallow past it, like he always does. It works about as well as it always does.)

Bowing his head, he murmurs, “oka-san, oto-san, I’m back.” He sucks in a breath; it stings in his lungs all of a sudden; he remembers too late that every of his organs is simultaneously boiling and freezing; he looks back to Satoru, who is swinging back and forth on the balls of his feet, looking as nervous as Suguru feels.

His best friend waves. The shyness doesn’t suit him.

“This,” Suguru begins, swallows, mouth so dry his tongue is sticking to the roof of his mouth, “is my best friend, Gojo Satoru.” There’s a tenderness in his tone that probably gives him away and there’s a tenderness in his eyes that probably gives him away and a part of him wishes he could just say that he loves him but that’s something he can’t admit to Satoru’s face, much less to his parents’. They already get grief from most people in this village for having a son who’s ‘different’; they don’t need any more grief for a son who’s gay.

Satoru looks momentarily starstruck, stares at him like Suguru’s just confessed the fact that he’s been in love with him since the first time he’s seen him. Then, he sets into motion with a jolt, long limbs awkward as he crosses the distance between them with a long stride, before he comes to a halt next to him, as if everything else is utterly unthinkable. He fidgets nervously, shifts his weight — and drops into a bow low enough to greet the emperor, posture so flawless, it could come from an instruction manual.

“What the fuck,” Suguru murmurs, remembering only too late that he perhaps shouldn’t swear in front of his parents.

His best friend comes up from his bow swinging, like he’s about to grapple him; there’s something in his gaze but it’s gone before he can pinpoint it. “You told me to be nice,” he hisses, leveling an accusing look at him over the rim of his sunglasses.

“Nice,” he echoes, unsure whether he wants to laugh or be irritated. “That doesn’t mean you need to act like we’re visiting the emperor.”

Satoru sneers. “I don’t give a shit about the emperor,” he retorts, a little too quickly not to give away the anxiety that bubbles under his skin like the restlessness. “Your parents, on the other hand—”

Before Suguru can say something ill-advised such as, you don’t give a shit about your own parents, though, his mother steps forward, extends her arms towards them like she’s welcoming both her children back home.

It’s only when he meets her halfway like he has done for the last sixteen years of his life that he realizes she’s always left the decision up to him, whether he wants what she offers or not. It breaks something inside of him, a little bit. He doesn’t know what; he just knows that something breaks and nothing will ever be the same as it was.

His mother exchanges one of these looks he can’t quite interpret with him, before she returns her attention to Satoru. “It’s quite alright, Gojo-san,” she says with a kindness that has been often mistaken for nativity and a sternness that Suguru himself still strives to achieve. “But there is no need for such excess, is there?”

His best friend winces. “Satoru’s fine,” he murmurs. “Gojo-san is my father.”

Which you haven’t spoken to in five years, Suguru wants to say, to free Satoru from the pretense that his family is nice and proper, like any other.

His mother studies the other boy for a long moment, as if she might catch on, but in the end, she only says, “very well, Satoru-san.” She extends her hand towards him, and to the surprise of everyone involved, the strongest sorcerer of their current generation lets her pat his head, even making himself smaller so she has an easier time doing it. “I can tell you’re a good child.”

Satoru flushes a nice shade of red as if he is secretly hoping the ground will open up under him.

“Now, come inside, you two,” his mother continues with a smile that tells him she’s not disapproving of him, at least. “We’ve prepared dinner.”

“You didn’t have to,” Suguru protests weakly, knowing that neither she nor his father will hear it.

He enters his childhood home, which he hasn’t visited in over a year, and suddenly he understands why his parents just had to leave work early and why they had to cook dinner and why they had to wait for them in the driveway.

Suguru smells his favorite dishes and his favorite blend of tea; he catches a glimpse of the good plates and bowls in the dining room; the curtains are freshly washed; there’s a shine to the floors like they’ve been scrubbed. The house looks no different than it was when he left and yet time has taken its toll on the old building, on his parents.

His parents had to do this because they love him. That he doesn’t know how to accept that love is his problem — all space he had for feelings like that inside of him seems to have shriveled up and died these last few months. Standing in his parents’ house just makes it all worse, because here, he’s being haunted by the ghost of himself that exists in his mother’s and father’s memories, the boy who loved so much that he didn’t understand why everyone else didn’t feel the same way as he did, since being without love for the world was incomprehensible to him.

Next to him, his mother asks, “is there anything I can get you to drink, Satoru-san?” Her voice is gentle but firm, in the kind of way that indicates she’s not going to take ‘no’ for an answer.

Promptly, these blue eyes turn to him in search of help, no hesitation whatsoever.

Something warm and pleasant drips through his veins at that, softens the edges of his awareness, eases the weight he now carries onto his shoulders as he lifts them to a shrug.

Shifting his gaze back to his mother, Satoru mumbles, “anything’s fine, really.” He scratches the back of his head, sways on his feet, suddenly doesn’t seem content with standing still anymore.

Mother smiles, warm and welcoming. “Do you want to come and look?” she offers, inclining her head towards the kitchen.

Satoru hesitates, looks back at him — Suguru hums in response to the unasked question — and then nods, obediently trudging after her like a rowdy child defeated by a calm smile and genuine words.

He closes his hand around empty air and wonders when the few feet of distance between them will start to feel like a chasm that can never be crossed, because surely the strongest sorcerer is going to realize that Suguru is just dragging him down and that he wouldn’t have lost to the damned monkey if he didn’t have more people to protect than strictly necessary.

“You said you were bringing your best friend,” his father says, startles him back into reality, where he’s still standing in the entryway to his childhood home like he hasn’t yet decided whether he wants to stay or flee.

“Yes,” Suguru replies, turns his attention to the man next to him.

Father makes a sound in the back of his throat that could be agreement. The last year hasn’t been any nicer to him than the factory fumes and the hard work— there’s a new slant to his shoulders, a misalignment of his hips. The limp in his legs has gotten worse. His left pinkie and ring finger spasm, where he lost the first joint during his time in the military overseas. Age spots show on his face; his hair has gone entirely gray, thin.

Looking at him, he realizes the day where he might have to bury his parents is coming much faster than he assumed it would, and he realizes that his parents wouldn’t even tell him they were dying, as not to bother him. Existential dread washes over him like a torrent, drags him down into its depths where he wants to beg the gods he doesn’t quite believe in to make this moment eternal, to make his parents eternal. To make fools of all who came before.

“I see,” father says now, the words labored as if his lungs can barely hold enough air for him to speak. “Is he nice to you?”

Suguru opens his mouth, closes it. Opens it again. The words still don’t come. It’s like asking him to explain quantum physics, or the intricate workings of the Six Eyes. It’s like asking him to explain why he has all this love and why he still doesn’t know what to do with it.

In the end, he says, “he tries to be.” Swallowing harshly, he adds, “Satoru isn’t — really used to other people. He doesn’t know what to do with them, doesn’t know what to do with himself.” At first, he tried to drive Shoko and him off by being an utter asshole but Shoko and him just resolved themselves to be utter assholes in retaliation and stuck around. Satoru eventually just had to accept that. “But he tries, oto-san. He always tries.”

“That’s good,” his father grunts.

What’s that supposed to mean, he wants to ask but is saved from actually having to do that by his best friend emerging from the kitchen, grinning. He’s holding what looks like the strawberry tea he crammed into the back of the cupboard two years ago when he discovered that, suddenly, there was a ‘too sweet’.

A smile softens his own features as he looks at the boy he’s so helplessly in love with brandishing his drink like it’s a hard-won trophy; Satoru may be many things, but in the last few days, Suguru has been consumed by the thought that he’s a star, like the sun the earth orbits, impossibly bright and impossibly far away, the infinity that lies between the two of them impossible to overcome.

(But he loves him all the same. He would give him a world where he doesn’t have to fight, where the title of the strongest doesn’t become a curse that shackles him. He would give him a world where he can be happy, and where he can be free, and it wouldn’t matter if Suguru had to take on all these fights and all these burdens in his stead.)

Having set down their bags by the door, they settle around the dining table. The dark wood has been kept in good shape since his grandmother bought it, but it’s clearly not made for people with his best friend’s height. As they sit next to each other, their shoulders and elbows and knees bump against one another’s, like they have never eaten together before, never sat on the ground around an array of shared plates and bowls.

There’s something new here, an intimacy that didn’t exist before.

Dinner is an awkward affair, though Satoru makes for an exemplary guest, despite the fact that he normally wouldn’t know manners if they hit him in the face.

Oka-san adores him, he knows. It’s hard not to — Suguru got his appreciation for beauty from her, and his best friend is a work of art, with his white hair and pale skin and the sliver of his impossibly blue eyes you occasionally catch from behind his sunglasses.

The thing is just that they make conversation. It’s well-meant, of course, but there’s only so much Satoru and him can say about school without divulging the fact that they’re training to kill, that they have already faced people who wanted to kill them, that they’ll fight a war until their dying breaths and that no one will ever know.

“Have you been eating well, love?” his mother asks when he drinks the last of his soup. “You look like you’ve lost weight.”

“It’s just the summer heat,” he murmurs, shoves rice into his mouth before he can say more, because it’s never just the summer heat. “And I don’t think Tokyo agrees with me.” Nor does the constant travel nor the stress of being responsible for so many lives at the ripe age of sixteen nor the fact that curses taste like shit and vomit. (But he can’t tell them that. He can’t even tell Satoru. Or Shoko. Or sensei. Or anyone, really, because whenever he thinks about his innate technique, inadequacy and jealousy burn through him like acid.)

Mother’s features soften, as if she know he’s not telling the truth. “You know you can always come back home, Suguru, if Tokyo’s too harsh on you.” She offers him an alternative but he’d be a coward if he took it.

“I know,” he says, rice sticky in his throat, threatening to choke him. “Thank you.” (If he came back, he’d have to live with the knowledge that there are people dying out there because he ran away.)

As night sinks over the world, blanketing the room in a wash of darkness that brings a refreshing breeze, the house only illuminated by the old, bare light-bulb over the table, Satoru shoves his glasses from his face with an air of relief.

There’s a beat of quiet, a silence Suguru feels in his bones, barely aware of the fact that his best friend is shoveling food onto his plate with more enthusiasm than he’s shoveling it onto his own.

“Your eyes,” his father says then.

The boy in question pauses, curiously looks up, white lashes fluttering and framing the vivid blue of his irises like delicate brush strokes. “Yeah?” he asks, morbidly interested in the topic. “What about them?” The edge of a smile tugs at the corners of his mouth.

“Is there something wrong with them?” oto-san asks, with his usual gruffness that makes him sound like’s perpetually trying to start an argument.

Satoru laughs a little, the sound bright and clear like glass. “There’s nothing really wrong with them,” he replies, so casual half the elders in the Clan Council would’ve keeled over for a second time after hearing someone ask the inheritor of the most coveted technique in the world if there’s something wrong with his eyes. (They’d say something about monkeys, Suguru thinks. But his parents aren’t monkeys.) “It's a genetic thing — comes with sensitivity to light and movements and colors and all that.”

“I see,” father says, studies him.

His best friend studies him right back, tracking every minuscule movement, every trace of cursed energy that every human being carries from birth.

Then, the two of them seem to come to an agreement.

The silence stretches like chewing gum, becomes to uncomfortable for him that he wants the ground to open up beneath him and swallow him whole.

To his relief, his mother says, “they are very pretty. Your eyes, I mean.”

“Thanks,” the boy mutters, gnawing at the temple tips of his glasses as if he hasn’t noticed yet they are no piece of sliced cucumber. Usually, he is impervious to such things, but there’s a tenderness to him here, in his parents’ house, that Suguru understands, though that doesn’t mean he knows what to do with it.

He only knows that he extends his hand under the table and reaches for his best friend’s, heart leaping in his throat like he’s committing a crime — but he’s rewarded for his courage the moment Satoru’s fingers close around his own, calm with sweat and trembling just as badly.

“I do mean it,” oka-san murmurs, smile soft. “They have a wonderful color. It reminds me of that one scarf I did years ago — it’s one of my favorite works.”

“Ah,” Suguru muses, “that one.” Vividly, he recalls the blue fabric, the feeling of slippery silk in his hands, how he held his breath when he traced the delicate embroidery, the sharp threads of silver, the white dye dabbed so carefully onto it.

Satoru glances at him in question but he doesn’t know how to explain to him that, in the moment he held that scarf, he understood why his mother fought her own parents so bitterly for the freedom to pursue what she wanted, that he understood that his mother was a creator in her own right, divine in the way she could take things that were so unremarkable on their own and spin them into wonders. It was then he understood that there were things in this world whose value could never be determined in money, that there were things one could only make with love in their heart.

He doesn’t know how to explain to him that it’s something you’ll only properly understand when you fall in love with something, or someone, and know you want to create wonders for them, too.

Suguru tries to help with the dishes but his mother gently (yet very firmly) chases him out of the kitchen, instead sending Satoru and him to get his childhood bedroom ready for the night.

“I hope you don’t mind sharing,” she says with an apologetic smile.

“Oh, that’s fine,” his best friend says, fidgeting in the stillness of the countryside much like he fidgets in the buzz of Tokyo. “We share rooms all the time.”

“Is the dorm that small?” oka-san asks, worried.

“Nah,” Satoru returns and then flinches when he realizes he might be a little too casual. “Suguru’s room just has a better view of the stars at night.”

“Excuse me?” he mutters, because he’d remember if his best friend snuck into his room to look at the stars.

“What?” Satoru returns, arching both his eyebrows as he fixes him under his stare, an unsure smirk curling along his lips. “There’s this big-ass tree right in front of my window, you know.”

All of a sudden, Suguru finds himself contemplating why all of the choices in his life have lead him to this idiot, whom he wouldn’t want to trade for the world. “Your room,” he says, out loud, “is right next to mine.”

“Yeah,” Satoru returns, looks at him like he’s the one being dense. “So? Your room has you in it.”

Suguru opens his mouth, closes it. Gives up trying to come up with a response for that before he’s even tried because, what the fuck is he supposed to say?

The bed doesn’t fit them, despite their best attempts. Satoru’s just too tall and Suguru’s gotten substantially more muscular since he last slept in it, so he digs out the futon from the closet and rolls it out on the floor.

Neither of them mind, staring at each other as they fall asleep.

Chapter Text

The dreams have gotten worse ever since he awakened his innate technique: hyper-realistic but still surreal, memories so expertly blended with nightmares that his only way of telling fiction apart from reality is paying attention to the cursed energy. It’s not there, if it isn’t real.

When he wakes, his brain gets stuck trying to analyze and understand and compartmentalize everything he’s just seen — the products of his unconsciousness come back to haunt him, distorted like like the cursed energy of non-sorcerers is distorted. (He wonders what a curse born from him would have looked like, if he had died in the school’s courtyard. He wonders if Suguru would’ve swallowed him. He wonders if he would have remembered his best friend, with whom he is apparently in love with, for long enough not to rend him into tiny, tiny pieces.)

This dream starts with the Sorcerer Killer standing over Suguru’s lifeless body and Satoru being unable to do anything because he’s too busy bleeding out.

It ends with him startling awake to find the boy he’s apparently in love with inches from him, stirring before he reaches across the futons with deadly precision, grabs his collar, and yanks him back down, until their faces are close enough that each other’s breath tickles on their skin.

“It’s alright,” Suguru murmurs, more asleep than awake, which makes the feat of locating him all the more impressive. “I’m here. You’re here. We’re alive.”

After a moment, Satoru remembers to breath, eases into the futon, curls up next to him. Another moment passes, and then another, and his head is still filled with far too many thoughts, and then he gingerly extends a hand into the tiny space between them, brushing a string of black hair from his best friend’s face with a reverence that doesn’t quite match the state of their relationship. Again, he is overcome by the desire to kiss him and again he resists the urge by the skin of his teeth, because he doesn’t want to lose the most meaningful connection he has made in his life (sorry, Shoko).

The next time he wakes, the floorboards quietly grown. The cicadas are buzzing in the meadows and fields, the noise thick through the open window like someone wove a blanket out of the poor insects and is shaking it right outside the house. The summer is sticky, both simultaneously worse than heat clinging to Tokyo’s buildings and yet much, much better than the stale air of the capital.

Satoru blinks the sleep from his eyes as he stares at Suguru, who must have gotten up when he wasn’t looking, illuminated by the pale light of the first rays of dawn. The other boy stretches, pulls his hair into a messy bun, the loose fabric of his shirt riding up to expose the tight plane of his stomach, his scrunched shorts revealing the toned outline of his legs, the muscles in his arms flexing so clearly, Satoru only has to speed-run about three decades of art classes before he can recreate the sight in excruciating detail.

The worn digital clock on the nightstand tells him it’s four in the morning, which might explain why his best friend is giving him this soft, pitying, tender look.

“Need to start breakfast,” he murmurs, as if that explains anything. “You can go back to sleep.” Hesitation crosses his features, muddles them. “If you want.”

Satoru makes a noise in the back of his throat that could mean anything, really. Expecting someone to form a coherent thought at this time of day should be punishable by law. “Why breakfast?”

Suguru pauses, barefoot on the wooden floor, light slowly climbing up his frame, falling so neatly into all the grooves and edges that Satoru wants to trace with his fingertips. “It’s for my parents,” he says, like he hasn’t realized until this moment that it’s not as natural as he makes it sound. “They need to be up so early for work, they usually don’t bother eating. Their first meal usually is lunch.”

Hiding a yawn behind his outstretched hand, he mutters, “filial.” He doesn’t mean it as an insult but it still sounds like one. Satoru cringes, peels himself out from under the sheets, and stalks across the room to start pulling clothes out of his bag.

His best friend watches, an amused smirk curling his lips in a way that he hasn’t yet decided whether he finds it infuriating or attractive.

When Satoru realizes halfway through that it’s actually Suguru’s bag, he keeps the shirt (fits nice and loose, all cotton) and tosses the pants at the other boy (too short).

To his great annoyance, his best friend catches them with ease. He works his jaw, studies him, studies the ceiling like it holds the answers to all questions of the universe. “Someone has to take care of them, you know,” he says then, shrugs. “They won’t take care of themselves.”

“Same can be said about you,” Satoru mutters under his breath.

When they toe down into the kitchen, he wraps them up in his Infinity.

Suguru moves around the small space like he has never been gone: washes the rice and puts it into the rice cooker that looks like it survived at least three generations, measures the coffee and sets it to brew in a machine that looks as ancient as all other electronics here. He fries some fish, rolls scrambled eggs, cuts up the vegetables, boils some miso soup in a pot, eases the tofu into another layer of the steamer, murmuring something about grocery shopping.

Satoru himself is just happy to be here, for the most part. His best friend directs him with the efficiency he’s used to seeing either in the training yard or out in the field — it’s easy to fall into this familiar rhythm, despite the fact that they have never really done ‘domestic’ before.

When breakfast is taken care off, Suguru motions him to quietly follow him around the house, to open up all the windows, sweep the front porch, light the mosquito coil, clean up the very minimal clutter from last night, put away the dried dishes.

Having never done so many chores in his life before, Satoru marvels at the simplicity of it all, the repetitive but purposeful motions, the work that goes into maintaining a house and a family.

It’s a close to five when Suguru’s parents come downstairs. His friend doesn’t notice right away, fussing with the stove and all these different pots and pans.

Satoru does notice, though, and fiddles with the collar of his shirt, hoping it’s high enough to cover that ugly scar on his throat. He’s also positive that both Suguru’s parents realize that the piece of clothing he’s consonantly tugging in and out of place is their son’s. And that sharing clothes is really … not a thing you do with your friends. Because he sure as hell isn’t sharing clothes with Shoko. Or Haibara.

Before that becomes a question he actually has to answer, Satoru says, “good morning.”

“Good morning, Satoru-san,” Suguru’s mother returns with a small, gentle smile that’s genuine in the softness it conveys. Then, her attention shifts to her son, expression burdened by the minute slip of worry that, according to the in-depth pattern recognition he can pull off, means she’s keenly aware of the fact that Suguru’s keeping secrets from her.

His best friend’s father, on the other hand, gives off a steady calm that you could mistake for a lack of an emotional response, if you didn’t have the Six Eyes and didn’t realize that the man just has this bottomless trust in his child.

“How long have you been at it?” Geto-oto-sama asks.

“An hour,” Satoru replies without missing a beat, shrugs, when he feels the weight of their attention on him. “Suguru’s a mother hen.” When the couple’s gazes change to something outright concerned, he adds, voice a pitch higher than usually, “no offense?” (Why’s that a question. That wasn’t supposed to be a question!)

Geto-oka-sama murmurs, “he has always been very concerned with what is right and proper, our son.” She gives him a fleeting smile. “He places a great emphasis on duty and responsibilities, and while there is nothing wrong with it …” She sighs as she trails off, her dark eyes flickering back to Suguru. With a shake of her head, she moves forward, gingerly squeezes Satoru’s arm in passing, and helps her son set the table.

After a beat, his best friend’s father says, “our boy cares a great deal about others, you see.”

“I do see,” Satoru responds dryly. “It’d help if he cared about himself, too.” (What. Why are you saying that to his father.)

Caught up in the assumption that he has just ruined every chance he’s ever had at winning over his theoretical in-laws, he doesn’t really register that the man in front of him is moving. So, when there’s suddenly a heavy hand on his shoulder, he’s very surprised.

“That’s what Suguru has you for, no?” Geto-oto-sama says.

Satoru stares at him and wonders if leaving someone speechless with cuttingly raw statements is a hereditary trait.

His best friend is the last to take a seat at the table, though he has to kind of bully his parents into sitting down before him. The reason for that becomes apparent as soon as Suguru hands him a plate of what are the best-looking pancakes he’s seen in his life, and his Clan had renowned chefs make his fucking baby food.

Wide-eyed and so much in love he wants to scream it to the whole world, Satoru looks up. “When did you—”

“When you were distracted, obviously,” the other boy returns with that awful, awful smirk that does awful, awful things to his heart.

“Thanks,” he chokes out, eyes a little wet.

Suguru’s parents leave for work at quarter to six. They watch their cars speed down the road until they have disappeared into the bright morning.

They set to cleaning up after, collecting the dishes and washing and drying them, working so effortlessly in tandem, they might have never done anything else.

They leave for grocery shopping half past seven, dressed more appropriately for what Suguru has assured him will be a ‘trip’, the house cleaned up and shutters closed tight against the heat he can already feel coming down on them, a steamroller trying to flatten them against the concrete.

Even with his glasses on, the cloudless sky is too bright and the sun burning up low on the horizon is too bright and every color around him is too bright, as if something in Tokyo has swallowed the vividness of life, spitting it back out a little duller than before.

It’s only as they’re making their way through the village, residential building after residential building lining the streets, that he realizes he’s seen not a single store.

“Hey, Suguru,” he says to his best friend, pretending that it’s absolutely necessary for him to sling his arm around his shoulder to talk to him, “so, I’ve been wondering. How far, exactly, do we have to go to buy groceries?”

The other boy looks up from where he has been studying the ground beneath his feet, blinking. “The next town over,” he says, features softening into a smile that makes it hard to be mad at him. “You realize that not every countryside village has a store, right? And even if it does, that store doesn’t carry everything?”

“I’m well aware, thanks,” Satoru replies, because, technically, he knows basic things like this. Technically, he’s also spent the broad majority of his life in Tokyo, where you can find everything you’d ever need and more. “And how do we get to the next town over?” He watches the other boy over the rim of his glasses while trying not to think about how hopelessly in love he is with him because he’s not exactly great at dealing with his emotions and he’s pretty sure this is going to spill out of him before long.

Wholly unimpressed with his antics, Suguru nods his head towards the single bus station his hometown has to offer.

“Ah,” Satoru mutters, tries not to let the unease show, because there’s a reason sorcerers (especially powerful sorcerers) avoid public transport. A lot of cursed energy condensed into a small space is the quickest recipe for a sensory overload, especially if your innate techniques are tied to one of your senses or change the way your brain handles input.

“Don’t like it?” Suguru returns, voice low.

“Not any more than you, I imagine,” he replies with a shrug, vaguely gesturing towards his best friend’s mouth, not covered by a mask yet, and his own eyes, hidden by the sunglasses. “But I think I’ll manage, with you.” He did in Tokyo, when they stood crammed in the carriage, squeezed so closely against each other that all he could see and hear and smell and feel and taste was Suguru, a mirage for a man dying of thirst. Or, in his case, a terrible crush and sensory overload. (He remembers that they stood so close the air in their lungs was the same and he remembers that, for the first time since his fight against Fushiguro Toji, that he could focus all his attention on a singular point of interest and only feel relief flooding through his veins like he’d just been given a divine revelation.)

“Idiot,” Suguru chides him but there’s a reddish tint to the tips of his ears that can’t be sunburn. “There’s nothing I can do when your brain decides to fry itself again by trying to process every piece of information in existence.”

“Hey, it usually doesn’t do that,” Satoru retorts and grins, because that’s much easier than coming up with a way to articulate the fact that Suguru is his anchor, his gravity, his center of focus, in this chaotic world where he’s just a collection of broken parts held together by spite. “Just when I get bored, or when I focus too hard, or when things happen, or—”

The other boy huffs out something that could have been a laugh and elbows him without any real intent behind it. “Be honest,” he says, as if Suguru’s ever been honest about the fact that swallowing curses is akin to an eating disorder. “I can’t really do anything for you when your brain runs off, can I?”

“You do so much more than you can imagine,” Satoru murmurs and only realizes he’s said it out loud when Suguru stumbles, nearly causing the two of them to trip headfirst into the dirt like a pair of fucking idiots. “I mean — look, Suguru — I’m dead serious when I say you’re helping me. No, don’t look at me like that, I—” love you, he says, almost.

“I know,” Suguru muses, choked, voice unnaturally thin. “I — I know what you mean. Thanks.”

He swallows around the lump in his throat and wonders how people do it, all this pining and all this unrequited love, without spontaneously imploding. It took ages for them to admit that they didn’t actually hate each other in their first year, so he’s not sure how deep they have to dig the grave they’ll have to chug their rivalry into to bury it so that there’s any chance of them being more than friends.

He sprawls out on the small bench at the bus stop as Suguru studies the table of departures and arrivals. His brows furrow like the task requires intense concentration, a mathematic equation one can solve by frowning enough.

Satoru leaves him to it and lets his gaze wander around the village in the meantime, down the street, up the street, staring at the bright blue sky, wisps of white clouds trailing along it like they slipped off a truck transporting them. Golden sunlight washes through the alleys, climbs the buildings, brilliant and warm in the way it never is inside Tokyo.

There’s still a slight chill in the air, the morning fresh and crisp, a break from the sweltering heat that will come back soon enough. He tugs at the collar of his jacket, thinks about the ugly scar on his throat that will always remind him of the Sorcerer Killer and his closest brush with death yet. (Whenever his fingers touch it, a weakness comes over him that is entirely unfamiliar to him — it feels like all his muscles suddenly disappear and his tendons are cut and his cursed energy bleeds out of him. It feels like he becomes no different from a normal person.)

He’s being watched. Eyes from windows, from balconies, from the gardens, from corners and alleyway, following him like he’s a rare zoo animal, exotic and dangerous. Given that he’s been feeling watched since he can remember, this should be nothing for him. But the truth is that the stares of villagers this far out in the countryside carry a whole new level unease that the Three Big Sorcerer Clans and their rustic ideals can’t measure up to — back home, people watch him because his birth has upset the natural order of the world. Here, people watch him because he’s next to Suguru.

When the watching continues for what feels like eternity but probably is only another minute in reality, he stretches his legs as far as they’ll go, cushions his head with his hands against the wall, and complains, quite loudly, “I feel watched.”

Suguru glances up from his study of the departure times like there is more than one line and more than three buses each day. “Places like this are nosy,” he muses with a note of apology in his voice.

Sliding his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose, he pointedly rolls his eyes at his best friend. “And I’m far too pretty for my own good, yes, I know.”

“Well,” Suguru says, returning his attention to the schedule with a surprising amount of effort, “you are pretty. I’d stare, too.”

All at once, Satoru wonders if the other boy can hear how his brain implodes. It sounds an awful lot like the motor of a space shuttle catching on fire.

“I’m sorry,” he says, fumbling with his glasses badly enough that he nearly drops them, “did you just say you think I’m pretty?” He grins, wide and unrestrained, because if this isn’t one of the most joyous moments of his life, he doesn’t know what else is. Besides, he wouldn’t be able to stop grinning if he tried.

His best friend gives him a slightly sour, annoyed look. “I did,” he returns, words muffled. “It’s an universally acknowledged truth, isn’t it? The sun rises in the east, the moon doesn’t glow by itself, and Gojo Satoru is the prettiest boy in the whole world.”

Oh, damn, having your brain shut down on you twice within a minute isn’t good, is it? He’s heard some of the assistant managers say it’s really bad if one of the computers gets interrupted during booting, and he figures that’s exactly what’s happening to him right now.

His heart is doing funny things in his chest, disregarding any need for a rhythm, pumping blood through his veins like it’s water. His breathing is alternating between short, shallow, hyperventilating, and deep enough that he forgets he needs to exhale again. In fact, his whole body is currently emulating the onset of a panic attack, except the thing he feels is the utter opposite of panic.

Suguru observes him, dark eyes resting on his form with the comforting weight of the memories from last night, stilling the fidgeting of his limbs. It feels as if the other boy can look right through him, as if his skin has suddenly become translucent and his mind has opened up to reveal every single emotion coursing through him.

Satoru thinks there’s something he’s supposed to say in response to that, especially if he wants to maintain a veneer of composure, but all he can do is stare in wonder and hope this never ends. (The memory of Suguru saying his name and the word ‘pretty’ in the same sentence is forever seared into him; there’s no forgetting this, no matter what happens.)

After another moment, the other boy sighs, rubs his hand over his face, tugs a few strands of hair behind his ears that have slipped loose from the bun he keeps it in. Then, he abandons his spot by the schedules and crosses over to where Satoru’s been sitting, motioning him to scoot over.

Without any sense for moderation, he squeezes himself against the wall to make room, unsure whether he’d spontaneously ignite if they touched now.

Suguru gives him the kind of flat stare that he always gives him when he thinks he’s being way too dramatic. “Why are you always fishing for compliments when you can’t handle them?”

“Excuse me?” he asks but there’s no heat to it.

“Look at you,” his best friend murmurs, voice low enough that it’s reminiscent of a purr, “you can’t take a compliment. You act like you are the most perfect person in the whole world, and yet when someone actually says something nice about you, you freeze up like no one’s ever done that before.”

Satoru wonders if there’s any way to salvage his pride in this but decides that there’s not. So, he says, “most people don’t really mean it when they compliment me.” With a shrug, he shoves his glasses so violently back up the bridge of his nose that he nearly hits himself. “And when people do mean it, like you … it’s just different, alright?”

“Different,” Suguru echoes. “You realize a compliment is only really a compliment when you’re honest about it, right?”

Crossing his arms, he puts on his best pout. “No,” he says. “I know I’m perfect because that’s how I was raised to be. I don’t need people telling me that. And it’s all just smoke and mirrors anyway, the way we think of ourselves and the way we can manipulate other people into thinking of us what we want them to think. The thing is, the human mind is quick to lean into the delusions we built up around ourselves.” Sucking air into his lungs like he forgot that he needed to breathe, he adds, “it’s how the Clans do their business, Suguru. Their words don’t mean shit, for the most part. Yours, though? Yours are different.”

His best friend blinks, dark eyes catching the sunlight in a way that makes them look like impossibly warm amber. “Maybe,” he replies, a little hesitant, a faint red tinging his face as he reluctantly scoots closer, wraps an arm around his shoulders as if he, this eloquent boy, doesn’t know how else to comfort him. “But the thing you said about human minds — does that apply to yours, too?”

The concept of Suguru initiating physical affection is a novel one, and Satoru will thrive of this high for the rest of his life. Where he treats personal space more like a suggestion, his best friend has always treated it like something holy, something to be respected. Something he’d invade, with actions like that, unless he had a grand, moral reason to justify it. (Personally, Satoru doesn’t think there’s any such reason right now, but he thanks his lucky stars all the same.)

Clearing his throat, he mutters, “especially mine.” He swallows but the lump in his throat stays. “I mean, look at me—”

“I am,” Suguru says softly, extending his free hand towards his face to gently lift his glasses from the bridge of his nose. “I am always looking at you, Satoru.”

Whatever else he meant to say dies a swift death and disappears into oblivion.

The world is simultaneously too bright and loud and empty, stuffed with little pieces of information at the edge of his awareness that his brain would usually go crazy about but his focus narrows down on Suguru and Suguru only, the feel of his cursed energy beneath his skin like a black hole with a gravity of its own, his dark eyes meeting his with a warmth he doesn’t dare to name, the strings of sleek, black hair framing his face, the sharpness of his features that got progressively more pronounced over the last year, his muscular frame pressed against his, the weight of his arm around his shoulders like the strongest sorcerer needs the comfort, his other hand hover in the space between them, both an invitation and a question.

Suguru considers him so intensely that goosebumps rise across his arms and a shiver dances down his spine, all air in his lungs unraveled into singular atoms.

A calm unlike any other washes over him, softening the sharp edges of his consciousness, slowing his racing thoughts; right now, he is nothing more than a helpless star pulled into the orbit of his best friend, and he has no illusions about fighting it, despite knowing he’ll eventually disappear into him. The notion is strangely relieving, in truth.

They are so close, a careless movement would have them kiss. Satoru wonders what it’d be like. He’s never kissed anyone before.

But before his mind can take this particular train of thought and run off with it, a strangled noise tears itself out him and he buries his head in the crook of Suguru’s shoulder.

Awkwardly, the other boy pats the top of his head.

It turns out rural transportation involves a lot of waiting for your connection, if you’re too early. Which, Satoru guesses, is fine and normal but borderline torture to him, even with Suguru right next to him on the bench and all the time in the world to study how breathtaking his best friend looks in the morning light of his hometown, ethereal like a vision and otherworldly like a dream.

Unfortunately, other people join them at the sole station in the village. Said people eye the pair of them with varying degrees of interest; the elderly greet Suguru politely but a perverse curiosity hides in their cursed energy that’s sometimes so tinged with disgust that Satoru wonders if it’d be justified with he bit them, like the dog he is.

Considering that that’s probably a crime by jujutsu- and non-jujutsu standards, he limits himself to giving these people the most lethal stares he can manage with his glasses on.

When the bus finally rolls in and puts an end to his miserable twenty minutes of having absolutely nothing to do, he digs another face mask out of his pocket and hands it to Suguru, who takes it with a muttered word of thanks.

The stares change, the cursed energy pressing up against his skin, probing and forceful. One Gojo Satoru might be immune to the social pressure to conform by the virtue of being strong enough that most rules of any kind don’t mean shit to him, but he knows his best friend is not — can see he’s not by the way tension clawing its way up his spine, the way he glances at him in search of reassurance, the way he clenches his hands into fists and shoves them into his pockets to hide the anger that bubbles beneath his calm exterior.

Satoru slings his arm around him as if he wants to impart a secret but his mouth won’t open. He can’t think of anything to say; he sees the revolting emotions in the people around them and he knows Suguru sees them, too, but he doesn’t know where they stem from. In Tokyo, people care about conformity in the same sense they care about the billboard ads, and he knows that the countryside is different, but it’s not just that.

Yet, even though he says nothing at all, Suguru hums, glances at him, and smiles genuinely enough that it reaches his eyes.

As the bus rattles along the road, the two of them stand like they did yesterday, close enough that they can talk in low voices without being overheard, which is the main reason they haven’t picked a seat. The other major reason is that sitting still for too long makes him lose focus and start fidgeting. Standing for too long isn’t exactly better for all the same reasons, but he does have to keep his balance like this and it scratches some of the constant itches his brain has.

“You usually don’t mind people staring,” Suguru says to him, slightly tilts his head back to look at him. The sun filters through the trees by the roadside, alternating between making his eyes look like shadows and crystallized amber.

“Well, yeah,” Satoru mutters, fiddles his way around the words until they make sense. “I don’t mind people staring. You do, though. Especially here.” Back home, he means, but he fears calling this place he’s known for less than a day home will do funny things to his perception of it.

His best friend blinks. “Ah,” he says, voice dropped to a low murmur. “Yes, I find … it a little excessive.”

Satoru wants to ask him if he knows why people look at him like he murdered their children in front of them but a strange feeling tells him that this isn’t the kind of question he should ask in a crowded bus. Instead, he says, “and I want people to know we belong together.”

“Believe me,” the other boy returns dryly, “they can tell by looking at how you literally hang off me.”

He shrugs, because that’s probably true, but it’s not enough to satisfy this need that has arisen in him since their last mission, its almost-catastrophic failure, and the nightmares that have been haunting him since. Quietly, he admits, “it’s not enough.”

Suguru raises a skeptical eyebrow at him.

“I mean,” Satoru says, possible explanations for the thing he can’t just name rushing through his head with the speed of a bullet train, “I don’t just want to be next to you, right? I want to … I want to be your partner. For all of this stuff.” Missions, grocery shopping, traveling to his hometown, the nights where neither of them can really sleep — all of it. “And I want to be more than that, because what I am right now isn’t enough. Fushiguro—”

“You are enough,” Suguru cuts in, gaze dark as they’re passing through a forest speckled with sunlight that touches his best friend’s hair and brows and nose and cheek, but not his eyes. “You’ve always been enough, Satoru. The fact that this,” he swallows around a word he means to say but doesn’t want to say, “Sorcerer Killer got the better of us only means he was stronger than us.”

He makes a face. “It also means we can still get stronger,” Satoru returns. “I can still get stronger, so next time, I can protect you.”

Suguru goes stiff, like he put him in a freezer. “I can protect myself, next time.”

Staring at him, Satoru tries to think of a way to tell him that he really doesn’t care whether he can protect himself because his desire to protect him wasn’t ever going to disappear, even if Suguru literally became the strongest person in all of existence. In the end, he settles on: “I’d still want to protect you.”

His best friend stares at him for so long, he’s starting to think he’s done something wrong. Then, Suguru says, “I want to protect you next time, Satoru. I don’t — want you to always save me.”

“Oh,” he mutters, feels all the blood rush up his throat and face so that everyone in a ten kilometer radius knows that he’s both extremely embarrassed and extremely flattered. “I — uh — I see. I mean—”

The boy he’s so hopelessly in love with smiles just as they exit the forest and the sun is so warm on his features that whatever else he meant to say evaporates into non-existence.

“I mean,” Satoru finishes lamely, voice hoarse for reasons he’d rather not examine too closely, “I’d like that. No one’s ever protected me before.”

“It’s not an awful feeling,” Suguru tells him, smile lingering as if it’s never going to disappear.

When they reach the next town over, they exit at the central station and his best friend links his hand with his own like it’s crucial for their survival that they stay together while he navigates the time tables and the station and the bus and tram lines like he has never left this place at all.

Satoru spends his time watching the outline of Suguru’s back, wondering if he could convince the other boy to run away with him, to where neither curses nor the jujutsu world nor the responsibilities they carry will find them. He wonders if they’d manage that, to live without the fight and the battle. He wonders if it’d be better for them.

They spend the rest of the morning hunting down an electronics store that does deliveries. Once they find one, Suguru peruses the displays with the same ruthlessness he put down the curse users that were after Riko and grills the clerk who happily offered her help with his questions like Yaga does when he interrogates them on who forgot to put up the Curtain again.

After the better part of an hour, which Satoru spends watching his best friend probe at fridge-freezers as well as wash-dryers as if it’s a thing of life and death, he casually intrudes into Suguru’s personal space by wrapping an arm around his shoulders. To his surprise, the other boy only bats away his hand when he tests his luck by trying to ruffle his hair.

“So,” Satoru murmurs, just loud enough that the clerk might hear him, “do your parents know you’re buying them new electronics?”

Suguru gives him a sour look. He’s still wearing his face mask that conceals most of his expression and makes him look a lot meaner than he usually does with his heart-winning, polite smile that he has perfected so throughly, no one can tell when he fakes it. Swallowing, he says, “no.”

“Are they gonna be mad?” Satoru asks, because he never learns to keep his mouth shut or display empathy in an appropriate way. “I bet they’re gonna be mad.”

“Probably,” the other boy replies. “But they’ve had their current fridge since before I was born and it’s been leaking for almost two years now. And their washing machine has been on its last leg since I’ve been in elementary school.” He lets out a breath that sounds constrained, like he kept it trapped inside his lungs. “I’m surprised neither has broken yet.”

Satoru hums thoughtfully.

“And I’ve sent them money,” Suguru continues as if that helps his argument in any way, shape, or form. “I don’t understand why they haven’t used it.”

Again, Satoru hums, though this one is more noncommittal. He’s only met his parents for a handful of hours but he’s pretty sure he knows exactly why they haven’t used the money Suguru gave him. Not that he’s going to tell his best friend that; he’s never won an argument against him anyhow, and he’s pretty sure it isn’t his place either to explain to someone who comes from little money that the more you have it, the more you hold power over someone, whether you want to or not. In things like this, Suguru is surprisingly naive. Satoru, by the virtue of being a Gojo and having had his own cult from the age of three, is not.

Besides, Nanami once told him he had the subtlety of a jackhammer going off in a neighborhood at seven in the morning when it comes to stuff like that. And the annoying thing about Nanami is that he’s always right.

In the end, Satoru settles on, “you’re fine with them being mad? Because, well, I don’t really mind but they’re not my parents, so …”

Suguru avoids his gaze for a moment, surveys the store as if he can find an answer to the moral dilemma he is in somewhere between the smell of new plastic and new electronics and the whir of the air conditioning and the sticky heat creeping in every time the front door opens. “I know,” he says, “but this is better for them. They’ll come around.”

Satoru isn’t sure he agrees with that line of reasoning.

After his best friend finally settles on a pair of appliances, handles the down payment, and takes the buyer’s contract, they head to another store that does deliveries. Here, he sets his parents up for a yearly supply of bottled water, rice, and seaweed, looking intimidating enough that no one in this store questions either if he’s even old enough to put his signature on a legally binding document

When they travel back to the city center by foot, they see a curse. It’s the first one they’ve come across since they’ve left Tokyo and its presence is so startling, the two of them stop dead in their tracks.

It’s a small thing, about the size of a tanuki and the approximate shape of one, if you discount the overly long neck, the second set of arms and legs sprouting from its back likes someone sowed two of them together, the discolored tongue hanging from its mouth, and the whip-like tail swishing in the hair behind it.

He looks at Suguru and his best friend looks at him and it’s like they’re simultaneously thinking, oh, right, we’re sorcerers. We need to exorcise it.

Yet, for a long moment, neither of them move. Another moment passes and they still don’t move and another passes and his best friend gets pale as he swallows harshly and — that’s really all Satoru needs to exorcise the curse. It’s just a Grade Four anyway, nothing to write home about.

The other boy looks at him like he just gifted him the whole world and still put its weight onto his shoulders.

Squirming under Suguru’s gaze, he says, “your mother was worried about whether you’re eating enough. And you never have an appetite after you swallow a curse.”

His best friend continues staring at him. A second later, he says, “still, I do need to consume curses.” He sounds hollow, like he did after their last mission, like someone drained all the life from him and only left behind an empty shell. “That’s what my technique’s about.”

“You’re strong enough,” Satoru counters out of habit. “And, I mean, isn’t it better to make the discomfort — you know, worth it, by just eating strong ones?”

They’re both aware that the higher-ups don’t think the same way and that they want a Special Grade sorcerer on par with Gojo Satoru in case unforeseen circumstances happen. Such as a defection. Or worse. They’re both also aware that a lot of things the higher-ups say is bullshit.

“Still,” Suguru murmurs. “I can continuously grow stronger. The discomfort is just the price for it.”

“It’s really not,” Satoru mutters. “I’ve seen a lot of people with innate techniques and most of them time, they’re not causing them distress like yours.”

The other boy shrugs. “That’s just how it is,” he says, hollow still, gaze somehow going past him without even really recognizing he’s there. “I’ll just have to deal with it.”

“You don’t have to,” he returns, a little sharper than he meant to be, but the edge to his voice at least manages to snap his best friend out of whatever state he was in. “The only thing you really need to do as a sorcerer is deal with the curses. That’s it.” He laughs a little, unsure whether he should continue or not. “Everyone but you and Haibara isn’t in it to save the world, Suguru. We’re doing it because we’re after money like Mei or we’re so fed up with the normal life like Nanami or we have no better choice like Shoko or it’s because of tradition like Urahime.”

His best friend frowns. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to save the world,” he says, pouts, almost, and Satoru kind of regrets giving him that mask because he’s never seen him pout. Sighing, he shakes his head, tugs some strings of his hair back behind his ears, touches his piercings. “We have a rare power, Satoru. It’s only right we use it to make the world better.”

“Is it?”

Throwing him a heated glare, Suguru argues, “it is.” Something settles in his gaze. It looks an awful lot like resignation. “I know you don’t think people are worth protecting—”

“I don’t think people, in general, are worth protecting,” Satoru cuts in, raising one eyebrow over the rim of his glasses. “Because people, in general, fucking suck. But,” he draws in a breath like this is a very important revelation, “it doesn’t really matter. There’ll always be people that don’t suck. And people that are, in fact, pretty alright. And all we have to do is to protect everyone for the sake of these few people we really, really like, right?”

His best friend blinks. “You never said that before,” he muses, manages to make it kind of sound like an accusation. “But … maybe you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right, Suguru,” he returns, grins, and leans against his best friend. “When am I ever wrong?”

The boy snorts. “Remember that one time—”

“No.”

“Or that other time—”

“Nope!”

“Remember three weeks ago—”

Satoru opens his mouth to reply with another negative but before the word can make it out of his mouth, Suguru elbows him with deadly precision, so the only noise he makes is a very indignant, wheezing squawk.

“That’s the thanks I get for trying to be emotionally supportive?” Satoru muses, rubbing his side with exaggerated movements until the pain subsides.

“Thanks,” Suguru says, demurely inclining his head in agreement. “I do appreciate it. I just don’t really know … what I’m doing.”

“No one really does,” he agrees, grins, and slides his glasses back up. “Come on, what are you so worried about? We’re on vacation right now and even after this is over, you’re not going anywhere. We’re a team, right?”

Again, his best friend swallows but gravitates closer to him all the same. “Yes,” he says and manages a smile that reaches his eyes. “We’re a team. And I don’t want to go anywhere without you.”

Excitedly, he claps his hands, startling the few pedestrians that weren’t already startled by his loud demeanor. “That’s decided then.”

Suguru huffs out a breath that could have been a laugh, had he tried for one. “Sure,” he says, the sarcasm notable. “It’s as easy as that.”

“It can be,” Satoru returns somberly.

The other boy regards him for a long moment, eyes dark in the shadow of the alley they haven’t moved from but warm in the same way the mattress of his bed in the dorms is warm in the afternoon, after the sun has shone on it for the entire day. “Alright,” he relents. “Let’s just stay — like this. Together.”

If not for the curse, Suguru would’ve forgotten about the grim reality of the world they live in and the fact that this (what they have right here, what Satoru and him have so close to his hometown) is just temporary. After the summer ends, they’ll be back in Tokyo and they will be back to the grueling schedule of mission after mission after mission, exorcism after exorcism after exorcism, curse after curse after curse.

If there’s a hell, it must look like that.

(There’s the faint hope that the ax or two Yaga-sensei has to grind with the higher-ups will result in something that makes the life which has become so unbearable bearable again but he feels like all his hope died when the Sorcerer Killer left him to bleed out with a sneer like he was just a piece of meat on a butcher block.)

(Something did died that day, Suguru knows. He just hasn’t been able to decide what.)

He tries to push that thought from his mind but it sticks, like the blood did. Like Satoru’s blood did. Like Shoko’s cursed energy did. Like the memories did, running red, red, red. He waits for the moment they turn pink and then clear but much like with the future he sees ahead of himself in the world of jujutsu and sorcerers and curses, he feels as it’ll take eons for the water to run clean, like it did in the showers.

As they wander the streets, he thinks about the way his best friend exorcised the Grade Four curse without wasting any thought on it and he wonders just how large that chasm of power is between the two of them that Satoru can just … do that while he himself has to first fight down the reluctance to make a move. (Inside of him rises the fear that one Gojo Satoru will eventually come to realize that having him around is just making him vulnerable to people like Fushiguro and that he’ll be better off on his own. Sure, he might have promised him differently but this is now and that is then and time, as he has learned, changes things.)

The notion turns bitter in his mouth, eats through his tongue and teeth like acid, etches himself into his very being like rot.

Back home, in cities he knows from the backseats of his parents’ cars and buses and the rare walks they took here together, the cursed energy isn’t as dense as it is in Tokyo. It doesn’t clog his nose, doesn’t settle in his mouth with a heavy note of lead — but it’s there nonetheless, seeping into his pores, a parasite upon him. (He wonders, in moments like these, if he can peel back all his skin and open up the cavity of himself, find the things that make him a sorcerer, and tear them out. He wonders if it would make all of this stop. If he could sleep then. If he could look at the people he loves and not imagine how they’d die.)

They exit one of the back alleys that’s still a shortcut to the center of the city and step into the familiar buzz of activity at noon, office workers and students working their summer jobs looking to grab a quick bite. (You’d be among them, a small voice says to him. Suguru can scarce imagine it.)

And the thing is, once confronted with all these people and all this noise and all the traffic, the two of them freeze — it’s only for a split second and they recover much quicker than they did with the curse, but they still know and it’s still wrong, because they could walk all through Tokyo and be bathed in all the lights and noises and activity around them and they could delight in it like a pair of children getting into the stash of sweets hidden specifically from them.

Now, they just edge towards each other for comfort, aware that they’re doing it but too ashamed to admit that they rely on each other for things they’d have laughed at their future selves for three weeks ago, when they hadn’t known a defeat so crushing, it has fundamentally changed them.

“I think I get why everyone wants to move to the countryside,” Satoru says next to him.

“Do you,” Suguru repeats, fights down the inexplicable urge to laugh, because there’s nothing funny about this. “I always figured it was the rent and the movies that made the countryside so appealing.”

His best friend gives him a questioning look over the rim of his glasses. “You are from the countryside.”

Suguru shrugs. “It’s not as good as people make it out to be,” he says and gestures to the signs of aging on the buildings, the full streets, the way the city seems pressing down on them instead of towering like the bigger metropolises do. “It’s quieter, calmer. Slower, sometimes. But living here … it highlights the problems we have, as a whole.”

Satoru stares at him like he did back at the bus stop back home, as if he can read the thoughts of everyone around them. After a moment, he says, “well, yeah,” scratches the back of his head, and shoots him a curious looks. “But I think I like it here.” With you, he says, almost, so clearly that Suguru can hear it without having any enhanced cognitive abilities himself.

He tries to fight down the smile but fails, feels like it tugs at the corners of his mouth until it must show around his eyes, in the same way his mother’s smile shows around her eyes when it is genuine. “It’s nice,” Suguru manages to get out when he looks away. “Having you around like this.” He swallows quickly, in an attempt to speak before the weight of his words sinks in or he can scold himself for opening his mouth when he really shouldn’t have. “Anyway, I don’t think I’m hungry anymore.”

Satoru continues watching him for a long moment. “Really?” he asks him then. “I think I can manage at least two servings if we find a nice, cozy place.”

The rumble in his stomach agrees but it lurches with nausea the next second, and he’s long since been unsure whether his body is still sending the right signals to the right places or if it has gotten some wires crossed along the way. On days like this, it feels like there’s something ugly sitting beneath his skin with too many teeth and an endless appetite for his own suffering.

Yet, Suguru scans the stalls and the shops, looks what they offer, considers his best friend’s preferences. Considering what might be easiest to stomach. Thinks about his childhood and the few good memories he has of the city. When his brain snags on a particular one, he casually slips his hand into Satoru’s to get his attention, glances at him, and gingerly tugs him forward.

Suguru smiles to himself as they come around the corner of a quiet alley and the udon place he’s requested his parents and him go to on his last birthday he spent here is still there.

“Oh,” his best friend says excitedly, “I haven’t had udon in ages!”

The narrow entrance leads down a short flight of stairs. Beyond, the rooms sprawl into a shadowed basement, tables scattered against the walls and beyond the counter.

The two of them pick a seat close to the door, in case they need to secure an exit during purely hypothetical fighting. It helps that the secluded location wards them against the attention of the other patrons. The thing is, in Tokyo people look at them funny because they’re dressed a little strangely. In a remote town such as these, they look at them funny because they seem like they’re fishing for every idol agency within the next twenty kilometers to offer them a contract.

They order three bowls: yaki udon, kake udon, and mentaikko udon. The last few times they’ve eaten together, they’ve shared their food pretty liberally, despite the fact that neither of them really liked sharing things before they met each other.

The moment the waitress sets the tea Suguru ordered and the bottle of whatever the sweetest drink they had in stock in front of Satoru and unloads their bowls from her tray, he has to remember the disaster that was the first time Yaga-sensei kicked their whole class out of the campus to ‘go bonding’.

“Thinking what I’m thinking?” Satoru asks from across the surprisingly small table, now that he’s sharing it with a boy whose limbs are so long, they should classify as a tripping hazard.

“That we should never let Shoko order food for us again?” he murmurs.

His reply is a solemn nod and a fearful shudder. “I still can’t believe she didn’t just invent the things she got back then to torture us.”

Suguru huffs. “Shoko isn’t that cruel. She has just … interesting tastes.”

“Hey,” his best friend says and (lightly) kicks his foot under the table, “you know it’s unfair to play favorites, right?”

“If I’m ‘playing favorites’,” Suguru echoes with a sneer, “you’ll be at the top of the list, so stop complaining. You’re just upset that I’m not taking your side for once.”

“When’s the last time you’ve ever taken my side?” the other boy returns, crosses his arms, and pouts so aggressively, Suguru is overcome by the sudden desire to either laugh or pinch his cheeks.

Neatly folding his hands in front of his bowl, he does neither. “Would you like the abridged or the detailed summary?”

Satoru takes off his glasses to roll his eyes at him, grinning like a maniac with anger problems and a bad idea on the tip of his tongue.

Under the pretends of being casual, his best friend shoves a piece of cod roe into his bowl. In revenge, Suguru deposits a bite of chicken in his. After that has happened twice more, they just switch bowls all together.

They’re working their way through the bowl of kake udon when he notices that the other boy has been starring at him for a long time without doing anything.

Slowly, he raises an eyebrow in question.

Slowly, Satoru raises one eyebrow himself.

Suguru simply arches his further, with the small furrow he knows his best friend cannot pull off.

With a sigh, Satoru supports the weight of his head with his hand, still staring at him, but now there’s a smile tugging at the corners of his mouths gain that doesn’t seem to disappear.

“Seen anything good?” Suguru asks him.

“Nah,” he returns. “Just realizing that your eyes look real nice when the sunlight hits them.”

Naturally, Suguru chokes on his next breath.

When it’s time to settle the bill, Satoru casually pulls his credit card from his wallet. The poor waitress stares at it for a painfully long moment before she says, “I’m sorry, but we only take cash.”

The first thing Suguru does is laugh at his best friend until his stomach hurts. Then, he pays (in cash, obviously).

A trip to the nearest ATM later, Satoru spots a donut shop and drags him into it. Suguru doesn’t even have it in himself to be surprised, knowing that his best friend can devour his body weight in sugar like he’s eating air.

And, well, there’s the fact that Satoru is happily bouncing on his feet all the way down to the street like this is the greatest day of his life which warms his heart so much, the heat of the city pales in comparison.

They must make for a funny picture standing at the register, with their trays stacked so differently: True to this habit they have developed, Suguru has filled his with several different, cream-filled donuts layered with generous amounts of either sugar or glaze on top, because there is no such thing as ‘too sweet’ for the boy he’s so helplessly in love with. Satoru, in turn, has picked only two for him — one donut handled similarly to a savory sandwich, and a simple, glazed donut.

This time, Satoru pays, grinning at him while he brandishes his yen notes as if doing so gives him a great sense of achievement. Suguru lets him have his moment of victory; it looks good on him.

While Suguru carefully makes his way through his food, unsure if the rumble in his stomach is his hunger ebbing away or something else, Satoru is giving him a review so detailed of each donut that he feels no need to try them himself.

The unease gnawing at the edge of his consciousness takes a while to settle in — his chewing grows mechanical as he tries to figure out why his thoughts keep snagging on something.

It hits him after a moment: the people. Where the udon place had a reserved, quiet air about it due to the cool, shadowed basement, this shop seems poppy and loud, with music bouncing from the speakers akin to pebbles skipped over a lake. With the more modern interior come much younger patrons … and with much younger patrons come girls who repeatedly look at the pair of them and giggle before they whisper to each other.

Following his line of sight without even having to turn his head, Satoru tells him through a mouthful of food, “ignore them.”

“I’m trying,” Suguru informs him dryly, averting his gaze from the girls in the hope that they’ll lose interest.

“You just have to stop giving a fuck,” his best friend informs him. “Like me.” He grins, licks his fingers clean, and descends upon the next donut like he has a personal vendetta against it.

Suguru stares at him, hoping his point will make itself clear without him having to say a single word. Unfortunately, he doesn’t suddenly develop telepathic abilities. “Your attitude,” he says, “is why you don’t have any other friends besides Shoko and me.”

“And Haibara!” Satoru protests more out of habit than any real desire to win this argument.

“Haibara is friends with everyone.”

The other boy rolls his eyes so dramatically, he can see it despite his sunglasses. “He still counts,” Satoru retorts, setting down his half-devoured donut to wipe off his hands on a napkin. “Anyway, you wanna,” there’s the tell-tale spike in his cursed energy that promises a bad idea, “have me take care of them?”

Suguru settles this with a perfectly blank stare of disapproval. For added benefit, he kicks his best friend under the table. “They’re civilians,” he hisses. “They’re harmless.”

And — and it’s true. They’re just a group of girls doing things most girls their age do when they meet someone they find attractive and it’s not like he isn’t used to it. It’s just that he’s an only child and a son and there have always been certain expectations attached to facts like that when you’re from a rural area. But since he’s gay, they’ve always been a noose around his neck, filial duties a source of anxiety, because there’s no way he can fulfill them. Especially not when he’s sitting inches from this boy, only just falling and falling and falling deeper in love with him, wondering when he’ll hit the ground.

Satoru is staring at him again, sliding his stupid glasses down the bridge of his nose. “I’m not going to kill them,” he mutters, pouts for a split second before his expression returns to the perfect image of concern and seriousness. “Just… you know. Scare them a little.”

“No need,” Suguru says.

“But they’re bothering you,” his best friend returns as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I can scare a couple of brats if it makes you feel better.”

“They’re the same age as us,” Suguru points out, swallows around the lump in his throat he could have sworn wasn’t there a moment ago. There’s something about the offer that makes him feel all warm and fuzzy inside; there was no hesitation to it, and it means much more than he can currently articulate.

“They’re brats,” Satoru gripes, smile tugging at the corners of his mouth until it becomes real and true, brilliant like the sun, brilliant like he has always been. “And I’d still do it, you know?” Quickly, he adds, “if you want me to. You have some weird ideas about what’s right and proper.”

“I do know,” he returns, voice coming out softer than it was supposed to. “Thank you.”

Satoru brushes off his gratitude with a lazy wave of his hand, grin taking on a sharp turn like he’s about to dive headfirst into a battle without a care in the world, free and unrestrained as if he has never known anything else. Suguru likes him best like this, overflowing with enough confidence that he thinks he can skim off some for himself, for the days where he feels like a stranger in his own skin.

Like right now. Other people’s attention never really bothers him, it’s just that he’s gay and that you can’t tell people that in the countryside and that having girls look at him like this feels especially burdensome now that he is back home and knows everyone expects him to do what is right and proper as the only child of his parents, except that he can’t fucking do it. Can never fucking do it, because he’s already lived screaming on the inside, pretending to be something he’s not, just to get through all of this and he thinks if he’ll have to keep doing this, he’s going to kill someone. Maybe himself.

Silence settles between them; the pause in their conversation stretches; the buzz of the shop descends on them and Suguru knows he needs to get out of here in the foreseeable future before the music and the people and the smells and everything becomes too much.

His best friend watches him, his plate a mess of several dozen donuts half-eaten, the focus of his Six Eyes so sharp, he feels transparent once more, like all his thoughts are projected onto a blinking neon sign that tells everything here just what is wrong with him.

Drawing air into his lungs that feels as sticky as the afternoon heat outside, he considers what it’d be like, to tell the truth. To tell Satoru the truth. In his imagination, it’s easy, because Riko is still alive and the two of them are still alive and Tokyo is so far away that this feels like a dream where there is no such thing as consequence. In his imagination, Suguru goes through with it, tells him the truth, and his best friend nods sagely, watches him for a moment longer, and returns to devouring his donuts in order from least tasty to tastiest.

In reality, the other boy asks him, “is it because you’re a sorcerer?”

“What.”

“Why the girls,” Satoru tilts his head to the right, where the group of teenagers sits, “make you uncomfortable.”

“What,” Suguru repeats because he’s not grasping that leap in logic nor is he grasping the correlation between the two.

His best friend glares at him over the rim of his glasses.

He feels his thoughts sputter out like a dying car engine before they roar back to life like the waves in Okinawa. It’s true that he likes boys who are a little dense, and it’s true that he likes Satoru, but this is … an entirely different beast, he fears.

“No,” he chokes out, when his best friend’s skeptical look intensifies even further. “It’s — it’s not because of that.” He gasps for air, vaguely gestures into the space between them, to the girls who are blissfully unaware of their conversation right now. “It’s — I don’t—” His newfound bravery leaves him just in time for the old fear to come rushing back in again, filling his head with memories of the last few times this happened, the last few times he admitted in public that he didn’t like girls in the way it’s expected. He knows things have changed since then, he knows that he’s not going to get beaten up for it because, one, he took up martial arts years ago, and, two, Satoru isn’t a bully with a brain the size of a pea, but the violence never really bothered him all that much anyway. It’s always been the disgust and the disappointment he feared more, the probing questions and the nosy attitude, like he’s suddenly become an animal in a zoo and it’s alright to treat him like a rare specimen in a mad scientist’s lab.

“Ah,” Satoru says then, expression impossible to read. “Eh,” he continues with a shrug, “what other people think doesn’t matter, Suguru. I mean, I like girls and boys, and no one ever gives me shit about it. Who’s gonna give you shit?”

He blinks. Opens his mouth. Closes it. Blinks again. Tries to fit the idea of his crush on one Gojo Satoru not being as hopeless as he thought it might be into his brain. Fails. Tries again. Fails again, because — oh, fuck — how has he known this boy for over a year and never thought to ask this? (And why the fuck are they having this kind of conversation in a donut shop?)

Eloquently, he settles on, “what.”

Satoru takes off his glasses in one swift move, confusion written all over his features, but all Suguru can think of is how he’s lost in the vivid blue of his eyes again, how he sees the infinity that lies within them, how he wishes he could stare into them endlessly.

“It’s easy, isn’t it?” his best friend says, startling him from his own thoughts. “Other people can talk all they want — at the end of the day, all that matters is that you’re happy with the people you love, right?”

Suguru swallows a laugh and fails halfway, feels it burst out of his chest like a mad giggle. “I don’t know why I was expecting you to say anything else,” he muses, feels a smile tug at the corners of his mouth until he loses all will to fight against it. “Maybe you’re right.”

Staring at him with his best impression of a serious face, Satoru tells him, “Suguru, I’m always right.”

He just throws his napkin at him instead of bothering with a verbal response.

By the time he returns from the restroom, he’d have all but forgetting about the teenage girls, hadn’t he found the group standing around Satoru. Something intense and white-hot sparks inside of him and it’s only when his cursed energy boils under his skin and that the curses inside his belly claw at the stomach lining that he realizes it’s jealousy. It’s an ugly, terrible thing, something with too many teeth and too many eyes, something with paralyzed hands; it wants to share everything it has with Satoru but it doesn’t want to share Satoru with anyone else; it doesn’t want to lose its guiding light, its north star, its way-marker that leads it through this dark, dark world.

Rationally speaking, Suguru is well aware that there’s literally no reason to feel jealous. Because — because they’re just friends, and they don’t belong to each other, and they’re not going to give up each other for someone they’ve just met. (Still, the fear remains. Still, the fear sinks its teeth into him, hungry as if it has never been fed.)

He tries to settle his breathing as he approaches the group. The girls have done nothing to deserve his anger, except produce minuscule amounts of cursed energy that might eventually turn into one of these disgusting things he has to eat and that cost sorcerers their lives. (Like your parents, a nasty voice thats sound an awful lot like the Sorcerer Killer’s whispers in the back of his head.)

Satoru notices him right away, extends an arm, grins, and waves at him like they haven’t seen each other in five years instead of five minutes. “Yo, Suguru!” he calls, expression reminiscent of the one he wore the first time they fought a Special Grade curse together and it nearly killed them. “Nice of you to join us. They were just asking for your number.”

One of the girls flushes so red, he wonders whether the lack of blood in the rest of her body is going to cause any health issues.

Sighing when he comes to a halt next to his best friend, who shoves his hands into the pockets of his pants and glances up at him like he’s expecting praise, Suguru puts on his most polite smile. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance that it reflects his mental state. And his mental state is very, very strained right now.

“I’m sorry if he was rude to you,” he says to the girls, casually petting the top of Satoru’s head. “He doesn’t have the best, ah, personality.”

The other boy pouts and proceeds to lean so far back in his chair that he’s in danger of toppling over, all long limbs and wiry built and neither fat or muscle showing on him, watching him out of his blue, blue eyes.

“No, it’s alright,” one of the girls says, posture rigid. She looks to be the oldest of the group. “We were probably being rude first.” She smiles politely, but it’s as fake as his own.

“I mean,” Satoru begins, leaning back even further until the backrest of his chair knocks against Suguru, who would’ve died inside at least a bit two weeks ago where such a public display of physical affection is concerned, “Suguru’s real pretty, right?”

The poor girl whose blood circulation must already be an utter mess flushes even redder.

“You should see him when he’s not wearing baggy clothes,” the bane of his existence continues, glancing up at him in the full expectation of him handing out a compliment for whatever this is.

“Satoru,” he says, voice dropped low in warning as he pinches the bridge of his nose, “you do realize that you do not need to voice every thought that goes through your head, yes?” Despite his best attempts, he’s starting to sympathize with the girl whose cheeks are colored in the same red as a ripe tomato. Heat burns through his chest, desperate to spill out of him because it has nowhere else to go.

“Aw, come on,” his best friend protests. “I’m just voicing the ones that are true.”

What the fuck, Suguru wants to say but bites his tongue before he can. Is this your idea of flirting with me or are you just the densest human being on this planet.

The oldest girl in the group awkwardly clears her throat. “I am so sorry,” she says as she bows in apology, which is only making him feel worse. “We didn’t realize you were,” her smile is fleeting but genuine, “a thing.” Once more, she bows. “Again, I’m terrible sorry. We’re terribly sorry.” When she comes up, she shoots the other girls a stern look. “Right?”

“Right,” the other girls echo, bow, and leave.

Suguru swallows. His throat is dry all of a sudden, sugar sticky on his lips although he washed his mouth. “Do we really seem like a couple?”

“I am literally wearing your shirt,” Satoru points out.

“My shirt,” Suguru says, wrestles with his composure like it’s a thing of life and death, “that I’d like back, by the way.” Still, he cannot help reaching for the other boy’s hair and combing his fingers through it, the white strands soft against his skin. “Thanks.”

“Hey, I never said I’d give it back,” Satoru gripes but his wide grin utterly ruins his protest. “Just take one of mine and call it quits.”

“I wasn’t thanking you for something you haven’t done yet,” he murmurs.

Grocery shopping, despite being an exhausting affair due to the lights that are just a little too bright and the other customers who are just a little too loud and the air condition that’s just a little too cold, goes by surprisingly fast.

With Satoru’s help, they work through the list he wrote this morning in record time. Suguru throws a few snacks he knows his best friend will like into the cart, sunscreen. A couple of treats. A few products he needs, new cotton pillow and duvet covers, a spare blanket, even though the two of them will look for every excuse under the sun to sleep as closely together as physically possible.

Satoru insists on paying for the overpriced, imported sweets out of his own pocket, while Suguru pays for the rest of their purchase, before they haul the bags down to the station. There, they collapse onto an empty bench, staring at the one hour wait in resignation.

“Seriously,” the other boy says, “why’s public transportation so irregular around here?”

He gives him a funny look. “It is regular,” he returns, because that fact is painfully obvious to all who look. “You’re just used to a much higher frequency of connections.”

Satoru stares at him for a long moment, considers whether this is an argument worth having, and then decides it’s not.

Shoko texts them that she’s just woken up from the worst nap ever, and Suguru digs out a pair of wired earphones from his pocket. He plucks them into his phone, offers one end to Satoru. Taking it, the two of them huddle closely together, trying to ignore the noise of the traffic and the pedestrians and the city around them to the best of their ability as he hits ‘call’.

“Hey there,” their classmate mutters. Her voice breaks through the static, muffled and distorted.

“Hey, Shoko,” they echo.

“How was the flight?” Satoru asks, resting his head on his shoulder with a faint smile.

“Boring,” she replies without a second thought. “And exhausting.”

His best friend laughs a little. “What time is it over there?” he asks then, expression softer than Suguru has ever seen it. “It’s afternoon here, all clear skies and sunshine and heat.”

There’s some shuffling at the other end of the line and Shoko groans, before she says, “seven. In the morning. And it’s cold.”

Suguru bites the inside of his cheek so he doesn’t laugh at how utterly defeated she sounds. “On the bright side,” he remarks, “you might finally be able to fix your sleeping schedule.”

His response comes in the form of bright, boisterous laughter in the background that he’d ascribe to Yuki-san.

Shoko makes a disgusted noise. “Your sleeping schedule’s weird,” she gripes, “so you shut up, Suguru.”

His best friend grins at him like he had a personal stake in this argument.

“And you stop smiling, Satoru,” Shoko continues. “Nothing inside your body knows what a schedule even is.”

Suguru bites the inside of his cheek harder to stop himself from laughing.

“Anyway,” their classmate and friend continues, sighs. Her voice has taken on that flat tone one might mistake for disinterest, but even through the bad connection, he can tell there’s a lightness to it that he hasn’t heard since the first day they met. “It’s so weird. We got on the plane at noon in Tokyo, right? And then we flew for sixteen hours, had a layover, and then we got here, and it was ten at night.”

“Yeah, international flights are rough,” Satoru mutters, body language so casual, Suguru wonders where his muscles find the strength to even hold him up. “Time zones always mess me up, too.”

“You’ve been abroad?” Suguru questions. Judging by the sound Shoko makes, she was about to ask the same thing.

“Sure,” his best friend returns, shrugs. “Just a few times, as a kid. The Clan thought it’d be better to get me out. It wasn’t better, though.” He says that like it’s just a funny story to tell at a party, but Suguru’s pretty sure he heard the wielder of the Six Eyes has never been allowed to leave Japan, so the Gojo family must’ve smuggled him out of the fucking country as a kid. “How’s Berlin anyhow? I’ve never been.”

“Ugly,” Shoko shoots back, to the backdrop of more laughter. When she speaks again, she is even harder to understand. “It’s true, Yuki-san. All we saw last night were government buildings and skyscrapers. The entire skyline was concrete and glass and steel, like in Tokyo, except without the neon lights and with less a sense of aesthetic.”

That seems to make the other woman laugh only harder, however.

“What’s she saying?” Satoru presses, grinning to himself like he did in the candy aisle half an hour ago.

Their mutual friend sighs again. “That we — sorry, that I need to go look at the pretty parts of Berlin,” she returns. “But it’s cold, and we need to meet people today, and I’m starting to miss the morgue already. No one ever wanted to talk to me in there.”

Suguru snorts. “If people start talking to you in the morgue, there’s a good chance they’re not actually dead.”

“Or they’re a curse!” Satoru exclaims happily, to the bewilderment of the elderly couple choosing to walk by them in this exact moment.

“Stop being witty,” Shoko tells him. “I’m too tired for all of this.”

“No coffee in this hotel of yours?” Satoru teases her.

“I’ve been informed that it’s potentially harmful to drink more than four shots of espresso a day as a minor.”

Suguru, despite the fact that he hasn’t gotten around the taste of that particularity brew yet, sympathized with her. There is a special kind of tiredness that you can’t get out, a kind of exhaustion that sinks into the marrow of your bones. It comes to stay, and you eventually get so used to it, that you don’t even remember when the last time was you woke up well-rested.

“Enough about this,” Shoko mutters then, like she’s laying face-down in her pillow. “How’s the countryside?”

Exchanging the look, Satoru and him start summarizing.

“You did not pretend to be a couple to get out of that,” she says. She’s not quite laughing, because her tolerance for bullshit like this is far too great to catch her off-guard, but it’s close enough.

“We didn’t pretend,” Suguru mutters. Wonders why something inside him snags.

“Yeah,” Satoru chimes in, looking a little miffed himself, “they reached that assumption on their own.”

Shoko makes a thoughtful noise. “I’m surprised they didn’t ask for your number either, Satoru. Usually, girls go crazy over you.”

“Until he opens his mouth,” Suguru points out.

Next to him, his best friend pulls his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose just so he can roll his eyes at him. “What, you wouldn’t have asked for my number if you’d seen me in a shop?”

God, Suguru hopes the blood rushing through his veins like it’s preparing him for fighting Fushiguro Toji again isn’t showing on his face. “I don’t need to ask for your number, Satoru. I already have it.”

The other boy sticks out his tongue at him. “We’re talking hypothetical here, alright? So, if we assume you didn’t know me, and saw me in a shop, and obviously thought I was pretty, would you—”

“Only if you didn’t open your mouth,” Suguru cuts in. “Your personality’s kind of shit.”

“That’s true,” Shoko cuts in.

Satoru looks at him like he just gutted him. “I thought you liked me.”

“I do like you,” he returns, swallows. “I just—” I’d always fall in love with you at first sight and I’d never know what to do with myself, he wants to say but he’s pretty sure Shoko would never let him live that down.

“We’re just conspiring against you,” their classmate cuts in. “Teasing you is funny, Satoru.”

“You’re so mean,” the other boy retorts with a pout.

As their conversation winds down, Suguru asks, “aren’t international calls ridiculously expensive?”

“Uh,” Satoru says unintelligently.

“I guess?” Shoko mutters.

“Right,” he says, sucking in a breath. “So, who’s paying for this one?”

For a moment, neither of his two friends says anything.

Then, Shoko murmurs, “Yuki-san reasons that, since our phones are school-issued, the school probably has to pay for it.”

“Eh, if they don’t, they can just put it on my tab,” Satoru adds, lazily stretching and wrapping his arms around his waist in his best imitation of a cat with abandonment issues. “Don’t worry about it, Shoko. We want to keep hearing from you.”

“Why do you have a tab with the school anyway?” Suguru asks, when he finds his voice again.

“Property damage,” his best friend mutters, innocently blinking at him out of his blue, blue eyes.

It’s only when they’re riding the bus back with all their grocery bags at their feet and his best friend dramatically sagging against him that Suguru realizes that Satoru, who loves complaining about the smallest inconveniences, never asked him whether they could use one of his digested curses to make their trip a little easier.