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When he wakes, it is with a scream. A scream for everything he has lived through, and what he hasn’t. An attempt to exhale the last remnants of that life. An inhale, after.
They should’ve let him die.
He doesn’t remember the conversation. Only a faint echo in his ears, the words he must have shouted, thumping in his head when he’s alone. He remembers turning, seeing that broken boy, their scars matching a little more now, complementary fractures.
Satoru is selfish enough to carve out a place for him in this new world. He is selfish enough to believe it, just for a second.
They move out to the country.
Satoru was tired, neither of them wanting to walk through the city only to be met with ghosts at every corner. And despite everything they went through, nothing had really changed. They were met with no resistance from any of the new higher-ups, and that was enough incentive to go somewhere far away.
When they arrived, the beach was grey, a slosh of sand and snow. The waves battered the shore, never ceasing their movement despite their small size.
Now, the beach is golden. He likes to take walks down its length, nothing in his head but the movement of a world that would remain untouched by his presence. Sometimes Satoru joins him, lacing their fingers together, the absence of words between them proof of his contentment. It reminds him of those days so many years ago, when he would have burned and ached just for a moment like this.
Sometimes, when he looks out to the water, he thinks he sees her. He hasn’t thought of her for so long. He wonders what she would think of them now.
He’s taken up painting as a hobby. Satoru said it would be good for him, and when he looked into those eyes he saw himself in their depths.
He tried to capture them once, to drown the canvas in blue, but no shade, no shape was ever right.
That was a bad day.
He wanted to try writing at first, to find the world in the words he enjoys reading, but his pen froze and his thoughts screamed and he almost coughed up that void inside him, laying empty since the end yet replete with the memory of human effluent.
When he picked up the brush for the first time, Satoru kissed him, and muttered something meant for the two of them alone.
So he captures the scenes he lives in, the scenes he is a part of, the world as flat and 2D, the inanimate mundanity of the kitchen and the garden and the living room. Maybe one day, he’ll try to paint the sea.
There is a second void inside of him, one that does not beg to be filled but weeps and cries every hour, some feeling now tied to his existence. Two stones in the backyard are the only proof that they ever existed, that the memories were not always confined to him.
There is another marker, for a girl he never knew, but whose absence he can recognise in Satoru. He never mentions her name, only cleans off the weeds and lichen that threaten to bring her back to the wild, out of the disjunction of humanity to become one with the world around them once more.
He never tells Satoru about his girls, either.
But he sits, and brings them flowers, and reads them stories, and he doesn't think it will ever be enough.
The village is startlingly dissimilar from the place where he grew up. When he went out the first time, he thought he would turn the corner and come full circle, some cruel destiny to end where he began. But it is different, different shops and different people, and he knows that this is a different life.
Now, when he goes out, he wears soft pants and long shirts. He wakes with Satoru’s hair tickling his nose, long strands of black intertwined with white on their pillows. The thought once crossed his mind, what it would look like when both their hair and the sheets and the walls are white. He doesn’t want to think that he will live to see that day.
Even still, when his walks across the beach bring him up narrow stairs, past houses desperately clinging to stable ground, through to the shops until even the sea breeze no longer trails behind him, he’ll see Satoru, waiting for him, holding water or sandwiches or ice creams. When he doesn’t finish his, Satoru will beg to do so for him, and he pretends to grumble but always acquiesces, and it is as much like them as it ever was.
They walk home, and he never looks at any of the shadows, anywhere the sun’s rays have been blocked from their destination. When he meets people, he never looks them in the eye.
When he was a kid, before he could have even imagined everything happening, he had a pet cat. A little plump, with a broken meow and a tail that always flicked sharply to the side whenever it saw someone. When it had run away, he’d been devastated.
Satoru offered to get him another one. He could tell the offer was not coming from a completely selfless place, but he declined anyway. He doesn’t think he could handle another thing missing.
“I won’t ever leave you,” Satoru said.
“I know,” he replied. He’d been the one to leave first.
He’d been happy, being dead. Death was a comfort promised to everyone, and he had been content to wait there for Satoru.
But Satoru was selfish. He should’ve remained dead, but it was not enough for Satoru to keep waking up alone, yet too much for himself to keep waking up to see another day.
Even now, he wanted to die. He always wanted to die, to return to that soulless place where they could exist without meaning.
But he didn’t, because it would mean bringing Satoru with him, and there was not a conceivable world in which he could do that.
When the world turns once more and the beach becomes a painting in shades of grey, he takes off Satoru’s glove, chasing after the warmth from his touch.
“Cold?” Satoru asks.
When he nods, he takes him under his arms, winds his scarf around his exposed neck.
“You shouldn’t give me warmth if it will make you feel cold,” he says.
“Then let me feel cold,” Satoru replies.
Emboldened by a wash of courage, he tugs him closer, and kisses him under the sky, kisses him hard, putting everything into that moment, chasing after the fire hidden between their lips, exhaled in the air they breathe until there is none left in their lungs.
Satoru tastes like intangible things, and it warms them both up.
“You’ve created quite the world for yourself,” Shoko says, leaning against the railing of the veranda. She’s smoking, a thin plume that trails off to dissipate within the atmosphere. Miniscule particles of soot float off the end, a glowing point in the night. It is brighter than even the country starscape.
She caught him looking, and offered him one.
“I don’t smoke,” he said.
“You used to.”
“I used to do a lot of things.”
She shrugged. “I suppose that’s true.”
She tells him things he doesn’t want to know. The new treaty put in place to protect them from future threats. She doesn’t mention that he was one such threat. Instead, she talks about the influx of sorcerers into the school, and the staggering heights they could reach, doing the same things they did more than a decade ago.
“It is not the world you wanted,” she laughs. “But I hope it can be a world you are happy to live in.”
“Are you happy, living in this world?” he asks, because he is curious.
“Could it be any other way?” Shoko counters, her voice soft, and they both know that this endless game of Jujutsu sorcery would continue far beyond living recollection of their names.
“I used to think so.”
She joined him, looking out at where the sea continues its timeless battle against the cliff.
“Suguru,” she says. “Do you think we are gods?”
When he does not respond, she replies, “We do not begrudge the water for wearing down the rocks. It has always done so and will always do so. Yet, we try to change the fate of those we care about, even if we will never meet them. One day, there will be another thing they will face, another big thing, and they will die.”
“I never thought I was a god,” he replies.
“I know.”
“I still believe what I did, back then.”
“I know,” Shoko repeats, a single breath lost to the night.
“Are you happy, now? Happier than you were back then?” she asks him.
“I have Satoru.” In that world he didn’t.
She looked at him, and nothing else needed to be said.
That morning, when he wakes, it is with a sigh. They are out of food, something that happens when Satoru is not around to remind him. He had left for the city, to attend someone’s wedding. They both knew it would not be right for them both to go.
So he wakes, with a sigh because they are out of food, and because Satoru is in the city for another day and a half and there are only so many sunrises he can live through before he forgets the life he lives.
He walked down to the shops in the clothes he slept in, hair hanging around his shoulders as it had been ever since elastic ties began giving him headaches. He enters and exits, the doors singing the same tune since the day they had been installed, and he forgets.
He looks up
up
to the shadows cast by the branches of an ancient ginkgo
and he sees
her.
White like falling snow, like Satoru’s hair. Teeth sharp, pointed. She could tear him apart.
She sees him, those yellow eyes watching him carefully, and in the bottomless iris
he sees-
himself.