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Sometimes, Satoru observes Megumi and Tsumiki like two specimens behind plexiglass in a zoo. He perches somewhere in the apartment and hides it behind his blackout sunglasses - although he’s sure they must know. Suguru tells him that the Six Eyes feel a little like being stalked by a walking microscope. But if they do notice, they don’t say anything.
He just finds them sort of… fascinating. He didn’t interact much with other children in the clan, and his own childhood was hardly typical; this is uncharted territory. He likes to take mental snapshots: Tsumiki kneeling in the genkan to tie Megumi’s shoelaces, Megumi lying on his stomach etching out purple frogs with a crayon, both of them eating Satoru’s blueberry pancakes with the finesse of baby giraffes. When he wipes all the syrup off the table, he thinks, I’m not angry. Why had his minders at the clan always been angry?
Their apartment in Sendai has 2.5 bedrooms. The kids share the second one, and Shoko sleeps in the box-room spare when she comes to visit. They wanted to limit the amount of empty space, satiate those final pangs of loneliness. Megumi and Tsumiki are like fixtures - the apartment is not complete without them.
He knows children don’t exist to heal adult woes, but does it matter if it’s a happy coincidence? Slowly but surely, the trenches inside of him are being filled. Caring for them seems to make being cared for easier to swallow. Like paying penance for needing so much.
(That’s not better, Satoru, a disembodied voice that sounds unnervingly like Shoko says. It’s just toxic codependence.)
They wait until the spring of 2009 to hunt down Toji’s trump card. Satoru pays off a particularly slimy Zen’in to tell him which shadows they’ve been watching from, triangulates, and finds Megumi Fushiguro in a dank corner of Yokohama. He looks weedy and scruffy but strangely clean for a prematurely emancipated six-year-old. This, he learns later, is all thanks to Tsumiki. She pokes her head of neatly combed hair over the wooden railing of their apato, the flyaways clipped back with broken butterfly clips, and Satoru only sees an extra bed, an extra placemat; an add-on package that comes with Megumi. Just a stepsister. It’s dehumanising and callous, but in his experience, children are assets and their worth determined by what they can contribute. In terms of jujutsu, Tsumiki Fushiguro can contribute very little.
He’s wrong.
She isn’t an add-on, nor is she just a stepsister. She will not be so easily categorised. Tsumiki is exceptional in her own right - in a way that precedes Megumi, in fact, because without her, Megumi would be nothing and no one. Tsumiki gifts him moments he’s not sure he deserves, tiny instants where time pauses and Satoru is reduced to something person-shaped. His skin feels sufficient enough to contain him, his near bottomless vat of power nothing more than a magnetic hum.
(She paints his nails sky blue and then holds them up to his eyes. Says, Pretty Satoru, and it feels like a revelation when it shouldn’t, because he had thought he already knew that.)
Megumi is far more difficult to connect with. They have too much in common and yet not enough at the same time. It’s a lethal combination. He refuses to call him Satoru, even after a year of cohabitation (and every time Gojo leaves his mouth a part of him shrivels up and dies), has zero respect for his authority (he recognises finding fault with this is hypocrisy), and gives him the cold shoulder over the most trivial things (maybe Satoru should have just let his seven-year-old ward have coffee, to save himself the grief). The thing is, Satoru has saved him from a fate he, himself, is painfully familiar with - but Megumi is not privy to this, and perhaps he shouldn’t expect his gratitude even if he were.
Suguru, however. His word is gospel; Megumi often stares at him with something akin to idolatry. He even prefers Suguru’s subpar cooking, and this hurts the most, because at some point along the way, cooking became a love language for Satoru. The manju buns that defined their months in Hokkaido. Zaru soba on the nights when Suguru’s eyes are purpled by anxiety. The tteokbokki he learned to make from scratch after Shoko fell in love with it on a trip to Korea.
An act of service that doesn’t hurt him.
He so desperately wants a kindred spirit in Megumi, but this is not a gift he is granted, nor is it one he is owed. Regardless, Satoru can be bitter, and he can be selfish. If pain isn’t keeping him awake, it’s the effort expended to strangle these monstrous parts of himself.
(One evening, Satoru returns from a mission to find Megumi curled up on Suguru’s lap, both sleeping, frowns smoothed out by the honeyed lamplight. He warps away again immediately afterwards, hurtling himself straight into tomorrow’s schedule, and later faces Shoko’s wrath and a blister packet of naproxen.)
He supposes he can be too loud. Annoying. Occasionally unhinged. He’s never cared too much about these things before, but Megumi’s rejection is a particularly brutal beast, and Satoru is unfairly irritated, because beasts have always bowed down to him. This should be no exception. But it is, and his desperate attempts to change Megumi’s mind only serve to make things worse.
(A new set of crayons in a rainbow of sixty-four? Untouched. A nightlight in the shape of a spaceship, to keep the dark at bay? Unplugged. Ginger and yuzu soda? Gone flat. He’s had to start using Suguru as a middleman just to get him to accept the offerings - the Shinto priest at the Megumi shrine.)
But not even Suguru can convince Megumi to unpack his rucksack. It stays hidden at the bottom of the wardrobe, black, zip broken. Ready for running.
Satoru can understand that, too.
“We need to show him that we aren’t going to up and leave,” he whispers to Suguru’s turned back one night, knowing from the rhythm of his breathing that he, too, is awake. Without his sleep mask, he can see every stroke of emulsion on the ceiling, every imperfection in the dado rails. It’s bothersome, but he doesn’t mind. Not when there’s so much comfort to be found in the two sleepy shapes of cursed energy glowing through the bedroom wall.
“That’s more difficult than it sounds,” Suguru mumbles back, and then rolls over to face him. Satoru adores him like this, eyes lidded with that healthy kind of drowsiness that comes from a productive day at work, a routine evening swim. Fine woodwork suits him; Suguru, always so good at building things to love and to last. Like their headboard - engraved with tiny cranes and dragonflies, sweet and secretive; like their incense holder in the shape of a persimmon, sanded smooth and lacquered orange. (Like Suguru, who has worked so hard, who is damaged but still sterling gold despite everything.) He reaches across the bedspread to run his thumb over the fledgling calluses on his palms. “What would you suggest?”
“I’m trying to think how you and Shoko made me want to stay.”
A gentle touch circles the scar on his hip. “So sappy, Satoru.”
“I know. You’ve both turned me into something alien and horrifying.” And he’s grateful.
“So?” he asks, scooching closer on the pillow. “How did we do it? Make you want to stay.”
“You let me have mochi,” he trills, and the corners of Suguru’s mouth tick up. “And ice cream, and melon soda -”
“We didn’t let you, you’re not a child -”
“Ah, ah!” Satoru shakes his head. “That’s not what Shoko says.”
“Be serious,” he scolds, nudging his shoulder. “What did we actually do?”
Satoru turns onto his side so that their noses are only a centimetre apart. Suguru’s breath smells like the tea tree toothpaste he likes, and Satoru wants to kiss him so badly, but if he starts he won’t stop, so he settles for twisting up the silky end of his braid. It’s comforting. “I don’t know. Small things. Like how you always invited me to movie night even though I kept saying no. And shared notes with me even when I was being an asshole.”
“God, yeah. You were unbearable at first.”
“Suguru.”
His laugh is soft as a whisper. So considerate, so aware of the children asleep next door. “Sorry, sorry. I’m listening.”
“You held my hand once, when Shoko was giving me stitches.” He curls their hands together now, tightens his grip into something steady and firm. “Like this.”
The Six Eyes can see the berry-flush that floods Suguru’s face, even in the dark. “Oh. I remember that.”
“I don’t think you even liked me yet.”
“Mm. Maybe a little.”
“The glasses,” he murmurs next. “Shoko got me the glasses.”
“You used to squint.” And then he leans over to press a kiss to each of his eyelids. Finally bridging the distance, pressing them flush, the pulse at his jugular a metronome beneath the shell of Satoru’s ear. “It won’t work that way. Not for Megumi.”
He squirms a little, because he knows. These acts that he cherishes, these subtleties, are unlikely to register in a cynical seven-year-old’s brain. He knows that if he had been shown kindness at that age, it would have been perceived as a threat. Or patronising. “So, what? You’re better at this than me, Suguru. You’ve done it before.”
He hums, brow creasing. “Time, I think.”
“Time? How much time?”
“As much time as it takes.” Tsumiki’s wilder cursed energy retracts like a tide at sunset, soothed, calm. A nice dream? He hopes so. “He needs definitive proof. Ongoing proof. You can’t know if someone will stay unless they keep staying. A long-haul litmus test.”
A litmus test. It makes sense. Megumi is practical, he works in observations and evidence, cause and effect - Satoru has seen him test the limits of their compassion more than once. He pushes back because he wants to know what breaks them, what makes them reactive. So far, his tantrums and aloofness have had nothing on the savagery of curses; they’ve both felt more helpless than angry in the face of them. But they’re not perfect. Satoru only has to be overstimulated enough, hurting enough to grow volatile, and he’ll undo whatever progress they’ve made.
(If they’ve made any progress at all.)
“Suguru,” he whispers next, and for the first time throughout this conversation, he feels truly fragile. “Did you always know you’d pass my litmus test?”
He doesn’t say anything for a while. Satoru wishes he could see his face, his contemplative frown, his soft eyes. He also wishes to be tucked up against Suguru forever and never let go. This is how he comes to know the ache of the answer, seconds before it’s given to him.
“Sometimes,” he says, “when you wake up in the mornings, your eyes jump to me like you’re checking I’m still here. Like you don’t trust the Six Eyes to tell you whether it’s really me, or a residual.” Satoru bites his lip so hard he can feel the flesh give way, taste the very beginnings of blood. “I don’t blame you,” Suguru continues. “You need ongoing proof. You can’t know if someone will stay unless they keep staying.”
Will you stay until it’s over? he remembers saying once, into the imperfect darkness behind Shoko’s curtains and a blindfold, folded up just like this, the pressure of Suguru’s knuckles at the top of his spine. He doesn’t remember if Suguru replied. Feels his stomach twist even now, knowing he might not have.
“Oh,” Satoru breathes. He hates being scared. Hates when someone has to tell him he’s scared even more, because it hits like a hammer then, a stalker he hadn’t noticed striking from behind. He should know himself better by now. He’s been humbled enough times. And yet he’s still here believing himself impervious, invincible.
“Will you stay?” he asks into the edge of sternum peeking out above the collar of Suguru’s shirt. Doesn’t even realise the question is being asked until he’s asked it. The fog of embarrassment creeps in. He shouldn’t need the reminder. His partner demonstrates the infinities of his devotion every single day.
But he answers anyway. “Yes,” he says between the strands of his feather-white hair, so good, so kind, and Satoru is so relieved he didn’t fall asleep before hearing it this time.
Even in the summer, Shoko is careful not to overstrain Satoru. She keeps missions off his radar that he should be assigned to - curses that would take just one of him, but are instead exorcised by whole teams of sorcerers - and resolutely ignores all of his antsy complaining. It’s tough love via an absolution he has never once been given, not even to himself.
Still, the workload near doubles, as is customary at this time of year. He must have adapted to the clemency at some point, because he tires easily under the completely reasonable, completely normal overtime that’s asked of him, and it’s frustrating. The Strongest doesn’t falter (false), he doesn’t even stumble (false), but Satoru… Satoru does.
Hokkaido had been revealing (overwhelming, jarring, devastating). It had been a lesson long-coming, and though he had never been the most disciplined student, he had learnt it. He had beaten and beaten and beaten against the reality of his situation, and eventually it had battered him back. You don’t crawl up from rock-bottom stupid. You crawl up jaded, wisened, with grit in your mouth.
He is still sort of stupid, though. Because here he is, in a café on Sunaoshi River, staring Shoko down over a stack of manila files and an ichigo sando.
He’s mostly picking at the strawberries in an act of poorly disguised aggravation. The sun is practically radioactive, his milk tea is too much tea and not enough milk, and the maritime noises floating over from Sendai Port are setting his teeth on edge. At least Shoko isn’t smoking, even though they’re sitting outside - her nails are bitten raw around the edges, and she’s clinging to her black coffee like it’s the holy grail. Trying to quit, then.
“I want the special-grade in Maebashi.”
She scoffs. A strand of her hair sticks to the sweat gathering along her collarbone. “You’re so fucking predictable.”
His fork guts a strawberry and it bleeds pink into the shokupan. “I’ve already scouted it out, Shoko. It’d be easy. Why are you holding out on me?”
“That one’s being watched carefully by the higher-ups. We’ve managed not to piss them off so far, so let’s not poke the bear.” She takes a scalding gulp of coffee. Taps an abused fingertip against the rim of the mug. “Besides. It’s a curse borne of physical trauma.”
“And?”
The cup clatters loudly into its saucer. “Don’t make me angry, Satoru.”
He leans back with a huff. The sun cream Suguru makes him wear is sticky on his bare calves, but it’s moments like these that he’s grateful not to be trussed up in a dark school uniform. Exorcising curses in cargo shorts and high-top trainers is far more suave, in Satoru’s admittedly inexpert opinion.
(Money doth not equal style, Shoko had said back in their first year, regarding his Digimon tee with disgust.)
“I could just do it anyway,” he grumbles. “You can’t stop me.”
“No,” she agrees. “But I could snitch on you to Suguru.”
“Shit, Shoko. You play dirty.”
She smirks. “Always.”
Her obstinacy is irrelevant, in the end, because two sorcerers die and another is gravely wounded, and that’s enough for Yaga to call him in. His voice is edged with panic and he can hear Shoko protesting in the background, but it’s never been a question of Can you, Satoru, or Please would you, Satoru, because the answer is always unequivocally yes.
(Gods aren’t bound by mortal rules, but Satoru knows now that he never was one. That this illusion was just another way to keep him leashed.)
He arrives at Gunma University Hospital after a short pitstop in Fukushima and is pleasantly surprised to find Ijichi there. Still as pale and nervous as he remembers, but with glasses that frame his face far better and an ill-fitting suit indicative of an assistant supervisor. What a relief. He appears right behind him like the asshole he is, and Ijichi’s soul practically ejects itself from his body. When he finally takes in Satoru’s unexpected, unsanctioned, and uncustomary appearance, his cheeks hollow out like he’s witnessed a resurrection.
“Gojo?”
“Yo! Looking dapper, Ijichi.” He closes in to brush imaginary dust off both of his shoulders, and the guy flinches, which is a little offensive. He hadn’t been that bad at school, surely?
(Quit being a sorcerer. You’re more useless than shit. Summer, 2007. A scarce vending machine, a can of lukewarm Emerald Mountain. Satoru, fatigued and irritable, looming over his trembling underclassman. If you say no, I’ll slap the shit out of you.)
Ah, well. Perhaps he could have phrased that better.
“I thought…” Ijichi shuffles on his feet. Drops his voice to a whisper. “Why are you here?”
He pouts. “What, not pleased to see me?” (Unlikely.) “I’m hurt.”
“Ieiri said… she implied -”
“That I’m working off-grid? Correct. Keep this a secret, won’t you?”
His lips thin out so flat he wonders if Ijichi will ever open his mouth again.
So far, each of his exorcisms has been registered under ‘Tokyo Jujutsu Tech’, the payouts siphoned from the school fund to Satoru, and the higher-ups placated by the knowledge that his rates are far lower this way. It would be naive to assume that they don’t know - if anything, his newfound avoidance of collateral pleases them, and Shoko’s infallible reputation acts as a scarecrow standing between Satoru and any repercussions.
This is the first time he’s been overseen by an assistant manager since going freelance, though. It could be the higher-ups, their averted eyes rolling back to watch. But it’s Ijichi, which means it’s more likely Shoko. She trusts him; has probably sent him specifically. A failsafe.
Behind them, the building shudders. Rancid, treacle-like cursed energy unfurls as if a chrysalis, sudden and palpable, tripled since his recon four days ago. The Six Eyes pick up a long, centipede-like shape; he lifts his blindfold and turns just as it slithers across the roof, a mammoth, black spinal column and thousands of spindled protrusions, each ending in a gnarled human hand.
Its voice is gargled glass. Tension licks up Satoru’s spine with the grace of a bottle rocket.
“It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.”
“Holy shit.” He looks over his shoulder at Ijichi. He’s sweating so profusely that his glasses have slicked down his nose. Satoru tries very, very hard not to betray his own unease. “Let’s see that curtain, yeah?”
It’s impeccable work. The curtain pours over them with the fluidity of water but the opacity of crude oil. Neat, imbued perfectly with Ijichi’s cursed energy, and without a single aperture. It cuts off most of the visual noise intruding from the surrounding city, and Satoru takes a measured breath, letting the Six Eyes reclock.
It would be an understatement to say that the curse is monumental. It spans the full length of the roof, eclipsing the remaining muffled August sunlight. It chatters and wails with a thousand agonies, but amongst them, Satoru can hear one very clearly.
“Help. Help. Please, help, Suguru, help.”
Rage. Rage, unlike anything he’s ever felt. His fingers cramp with it, his blood acid hot; he tears the blindfold from his face completely, tosses it into the crackling shockwaves of his technique.
Allowing weakness into his life, coming to terms with it, is one thing. Having his hurts echoed back at him, hearing this thing mimic that fragile version of himself, is entirely another.
For Satoru, pain is private. It is a fist-sized, young creature that lives inside his bones. He only lets the ones he loves most, trusts most, see it. Only they can take this creature in their hands and soothe it, keep it warm.
The curse fixes its eyes on him, and a resounding throb ripples through Toji’s ruthless sigil. It’s supposed to hinder him; it doesn’t. Everything sharpens with the swelling fury. Each hairline fracture on the curse’s back is alight, each withered hair on its legs distinguished from the next, and the more he hurts, the keener it all becomes.
The hospital has long been evacuated, but that doesn’t mean he can be careless. People are lying and bleeping in the corridors at St. Luke’s International and Tokyo Medical University Hospital, so Hollow Purple is out of the question, and any grand displays of Red or Blue are equally ill-advised. It doesn’t matter. Satoru has turned special grades inside-out with less. And he has every intention of being thorough; this curse won’t be exorcised, it will be evanesced. Like it never existed in the first place.
It opens its mouth again. “No! No, no, Shoko don’t -”
All of its cervical legs promptly crumple beneath Limitless. A rattling scream - the curse this time, not a facsimile of Satoru - and its underside hits the roof in an eruption of cement and dust.
He warps back to the car park and drags the behemoth with him. The windows on the top floor shatter and the pavement buckles under the strain, the curse left writhing in a meteoric crater. He appears above it and twists the legs along its thoracic vertebrae like wet rags; uses the lumbar spine as leverage to pluck those ones clean off; and the remaining limbs along its sacrum and coccyx fold out of existence in an abrupt explosion of violet blood. It’s a worm, now, a creaking bone maggot. Satoru watches it activate RCT, its legs beginning to regrow, tumour-like - but not fast enough.
“Domain expansion.” He curls and crosses his fingers. “Infinite Void.”
Within his domain, the curse stills. Sags, as if falling asleep. He observes it for a long while, circling like a vulture, predatory. Pays no heed to Limitless sapping away his cursed energy. He’s got time. He has nothing to do, nowhere to be.
Sometimes, the most efficient end is not satisfactory. Sometimes, an artistic approach is preferred.
A standard piece of paper can be folded no more than seven times. Satoru starts there, and then keeps going, exponentially. A gravitational collapse, a black hole. The curse’s mass is contracted and erased until it leaves behind just a fraction; inconceivably dense and the shape of a rabbit skull. Only then does he dispel his domain.
At the centre of the crater, he stares down at what remains. Something so huge, so eldritch, an amalgamation of the most human of sufferings, nothing but an eyeless face beneath him. It should feel symbolic. It does. But his victory is quickly hollowed when the curse, despite its near-complete annihilation, unsticks its toothless maw for a final time.
“Will you stay until it’s over?”
“Fuck you,” Satoru spits, and crushes it under his heel.
The next day, he aches. It’s not unlike overextension, but he thinks perhaps the curse has something to do with it - a latent technique. Still, he’s awake at 6:00 AM to wash and soak the rice for tamago kake gohan, thinly slicing spring onion with a mechanicality he attempts to find peace in. He lays out four lotus kobachi for the pickled daikon and watches the steam pour from the rice cooker in a bleary sort of haze. The pour-over coffee has just finished dripping when Suguru shuffles in, hair damp from a shower and dressed for the workshop. His eyes crinkle up when he yawns, and Satoru wishes he had more dexterity right now so that he might jump and wrap his legs around him, cling like an octopus, crawl into his chest cavity and curl up permanently inside.
“You okay?”
“Mm. Just sore.” He lays his hands flat on the counter and bends at the waist, stretching out with a groan. “It’s manageable.”
Suguru pinches the back of his neck and adds grounding pressure. It’s nice. “Will you tell me if that changes?”
“Yes.” It isn’t a lie. He tries not to do that anymore. In part because he’s not as good at it as he thought he was. Suguru and Shoko are familiar with his tells, and he’s tired, frankly, of trying (and failing) to dodge their concern. He’s learning, slowly, that accepting help is a greater kindness than offering it.
“Suguru?” Tsumiki, from the bedroom doorway, already dressed in her school uniform. “Will you braid my hair?”
“Step into my salon,” his partner proclaims, so serious, and shuffles over to the sofa. She sits on the floor between his legs, criss-cross, and sighs as he brushes the tangles out. He parts her hair with such gentleness and care; he doesn’t rush, he doesn’t tug. Satoru thinks the Fushiguro kids have allowed Suguru to remember his true nature, after three years of thinking himself a villain.
He pours both of their coffees. A dash of soya milk for Suguru. He blinks down at his own and decides to only sweeten it halfway, feeling a little queasy.
Megumi stomps out with far less decorum twenty minutes later, just as Satoru is dishing up breakfast. The collar of his shirt is askew. When he bends down to flatten it, Megumi bares his teeth like he might bite. “Such an evil little urchin,” he teases, and is summarily ignored. The boy follows him to the table, crawling up onto his chair.
He likes a very specific set of chopsticks (blue-handled, ridged at the end). Satoru lays them out neatly and pours him half a cup of yuzu juice with a glug of cold water. Everything perfect, everything safe. But just as everyone else has begun to eat, Megumi stares down at his tamago kake gohan, and announces: “I don’t like eggs.”
Of course. “But you ate eggs yesterday,” Suguru says.
“I don’t like eggs.”
Satoru sighs. “At least eat your daikon.”
“No.”
He closes his eyes, but it doesn’t help. He can still see the scowling outlines of Megumi’s face. Somewhere, Tsumiki is scolding her little brother, but it’s muffled, indistinct. Satoru is unable to process much beyond the building power of his headache, the scorching pain shooting along his torso. He pushes his own breakfast away from himself, suddenly unable to stand the smell. Maybe he doesn’t like eggs, either.
A hand lands squarely between his shoulder blades. Firm, but not too heavy. “Hey,” Suguru murmurs, leaning down to speak into his ear. “Go lie down. Okay?”
When he opens his eyes again, Megumi is watching him warily. It’s well-masked, but there’s anxiety there, his shoulders tense and bracing for impact. Satoru has to try very hard not to kick something. Or cry. “Okay,” he says, standing carefully. Repeats it, once, twice, like he’s giving himself permission. “Okay, okay.”
Suguru comes to check on him before he leaves. Slips a hot water bottle under his shirt and rests a cold flannel over his eyes. “I’ll take the kids to school before I head to work,” he tells him, massaging the muscles in his thigh. “If you need me, call.”
“I will,” he rasps, pressing the flannel to his face harder. Suguru hums appreciatively.
“Get some sleep,” he says, but Satoru is already halfway there. The last thing he remembers is Megumi’s cursed energy, pausing for far too long in genkan, looking back. The image stays imprinted on the backs of his eyelids as he dreams.
Suguru returns during his lunch break, around 1:00. He shakes him awake, not harsh, but slow, and waits patiently for him to come to completely. Satoru can smell barley tea and hiyajiru. He unsticks his thirsty tongue from the roof of his mouth.
The headache is mostly gone, but now that fatigue has dragged him under, it’s difficult to deny it. His eyes feel gummy when he peels them open. Suguru is leaning over him, his expression, in some measure, worry; the rest, gentle adoration.
“There you are,” he says. “I made lunch.”
He turns his face into the pillow. “Not hungry.”
“Yeah, no. Try again.” Satoru whines. He’s twenty, now. An official adult. Why does he still let this man order him about? “Come on. Up.”
He does it under his own steam, and his hands are steady enough to hold the bowl, so he doesn’t have to withstand the abject humiliation of being fed. Still, Suguru hands him the glass of barley tea like he can’t reach for the bedside table himself, and he has to force himself to swallow the indignation. This isn’t about him. It’s about Suguru feeling useful, feeling accepted. He’ll allow it.
(And if the cold miso soup makes him feel better, he refuses to admit it.)
“Did they get to school okay?” he asks partway through the bowl, nervous. He hadn’t meant to seem exasperated this morning, or impatient. But he had, honestly, been both of those things. “Did ‘Gumi at least eat something?”
“I made him some toast. But he also picked all the furikake off his rice.”
“What a little freak.”
He nods sagely. “Truly.”
The silence settles for a bit, broken only by the clink of a spoon against china. His life now is defined by so many of these silences. Companionable, peaceful. Room to breathe. It’s so unlike the turbulence of 2007. He could fall back to sleep like this, sitting up and hunched over. But then Suguru speaks. “I think he’s sorry.”
There’s a perilla leaf between Satoru’s teeth when he stops chewing. He sucks it back and swallows, a little bewildered, a lot doubtful. “What makes you say that?”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small, crocheted rabbit. When they had first moved the kids to Sendai, Suguru had made them both something small to self-soothe with when they were at school. A peach parakeet for Tsumiki, with floppy string legs. And for Megumi, a white rabbit with a set of ruby button eyes. It’s clearly done its duty; some of the wool on its left ear is nearly completely worn away, and one of the buttons is a little loose. Satoru reaches out and touches his forefinger to its tiny snout.
“He gave this to me at the gate,” Suguru tells him. “Looked very constipated when he said it was for you.”
He barks a laugh. “Sounds about right.” He takes the rabbit into both hands and squeezes it. It’s soft in places, coarse in others. A wonky, precious face peeks out at him from between his thumbs. Maybe not an olive branch; it can’t be that easy. But something. The first word in a conversation. A shuffling step forward.
Satoru drags Suguru forward by his shirt, pressing their noses together. Breathes in the labdanum oil and wood polish. “You can kiss me now.”
He rolls his eyes. “Oh? Can I?”
“It’s an honour. Be grateful.”
This kiss is soft and tastes like miso. His hold tightens, and he presses in harder, licking into Suguru’s mouth. His partner seems content to humour him, at least for a while. Pulling away is an injustice, and Satoru chases him when it’s over, nearly spilling the soup in his lap. “Happy?” Suguru asks.
“No.” He tugs him forward again. “Come back.”
Suguru smiles, and then he does.
That weekend, Shoko comes to visit. She isn’t invited (she never is); she just lets herself in with her spare key (the only one, complete with a lighter sleeve keyring), kicks her shoes into their designated place and throws her duffel on the bed (her bed).
By the time Satoru gets back from his mission in Osaka, Shoko has powered through two Orion Drafts already and is nursing a third. She’s on their balcony in one of the kids’ camping chairs with her feet kicked up on the railing, head tipped up at the sky so that her long hair trails the floor. Satoru knocks on the doorframe before dragging a second camping chair outside - also kid-size, and in the shape of a butterfly - and sits heavily, metal frame creaking under his weight. He looks comically large, legs bent acutely at the knee and shoulders up by his ears, and Shoko snorts so abruptly that beer foams from her nose.
Victory.
“Stupid fucking beanpole,” she mutters, mopping at her upper lip with her wrist. She looks tired today, but she’s so artful about it, all dusky eye bags and smudged lipstick. He wishes he could look that good tired. He’s been told multiple times over the last three years that exhaustion makes him look hypothermic and underfed. Luckily, he makes up for it by looking drop-dead and ethereal the rest of the time.
“Where’s the rest of the gang?” Satoru asks, glossing over what has clearly been a torturous week for Shoko and diving headfirst into solving it. He can trust her to talk if she needs to. She’s smart like that.
“Getting dinner. The kids wanted Sichuan.” He gives her a look. “Okay, I wanted Sichuan. Suguru just fed ‘Miki her lines.”
He grins. “He’s manipulative like that.”
Shoko swills her beer and groans. “It’s fucking hot today. Would you be offended if I said I only came here for your air-con?”
“No. Because you’d be lying.” He stretches a long arm across the balcony to twiddle with her hair. “Ugh. You have dead-ends.”
She slaps him away. “Oh my god. You’re such a bitch.”
“It’s okay, we’ll pamper you,” he says, patting her head. “You’re lucky I have this weekend off.”
She stares at him like he’s an idiot. “I’m in charge of your rota, Satoru. You’re lucky you have this weekend off.”
“Uh huh.” He reaches for her beer. “Can I have some?”
“What the fuck? No.” She holds it out of his reach, and his chair tips perilously to the left. “Satoru!”
“Aw, come on -”
She throws an empty can straight at his head. He deactivates Infinity and lets it hit with a hollow thunk, because she deserves the satisfaction.
(What he doesn’t anticipate is overbalancing and landing in an inelegant heap on the floor. But it gets him a real laugh. The type that makes her wheeze and clutch her stomach like it might fall out. It feeds him.)
They get the chabudai out for dinner and eat close to a pedestal fan, lit solely by fairy lights and the melting summer sun. Tsumiki pokes at the dry-fried green beans with suspicion whilst Megumi eats the mapo tofu with a reverence Satoru had thought him incapable of. There’s something a little surreal about watching a seven-year-old eat heavily-spiced food until he looks badly sunburnt. A glutton for punishment, just like Shoko.
A full belly seems to be piecing her back together, because she lets Tsumiki paint her nails a claggy lime green with an expression of hard-won contentment. Satoru packs the rest of her dan dan noodles away and vows to make her curry bread tomorrow.
(He’ll also treat her to their expensive coffee, even if she can’t taste the difference. Then Suguru will trim the ends of her hair, and Tsumiki will give her an excerpt of girlhood, something Shoko rarely got to indulge in as a child.)
For now, they take turns playing Koi-Koi with Suguru’s beloved set of hanafuda. Satoru isn’t allowed to play (the Six Eyes make him a perpetual cheater), so he spends several rounds surreptitiously nudging Megumi in the right direction when no one is looking. Tsumiki seems to be the only one aware, but she just purses her lips and links her fingers like she’s an accomplice to something important, something special.
They put the kids to bed at nine. Shoko is the one to tuck them in. Satoru knows that, sometimes, she needs to cherish a living thing; to pull sheets over people who will wake up tomorrow. To ruffle a little boy's hair and hear a little girl say, “Goodnight, Auntie Sho.” These things are steadying. Keep her hard when she needs to be, soft when she doesn’t.
Lamps flicker on. Suguru and Shoko split a bottle of sake, and Satoru relishes an electric melon soda, complete with ice cream, cherry, and curly straw. Simon & Garfunkel are playing, one of Suguru’s favourites, even if he doesn’t speak a lick of English. Not that he needs to - Satoru translates all of his favourite songs for him.
“This one is just about feeling groovy,” he says, like he’s conducting a seminar. “That’s what ‘doot-in’ doo-doo’ means.”
Shoko blinks. “What?”
“Groovy. You know, like…” He waggles his fingers. “Like that.”
“As the designated sober one, you should not be this incoherent.”
Suguru snickers, face flushed and hair coming loose. Shoko has plucked the straw from Satoru’s drink and now holds it between two of her fingers, like a makeshift cigarette. He feels himself absorb the moment; feels that thing inside of him get impossibly bigger. One day, he will explode deliciously, and everyone will know what he was really made of.
“I’ll be back next week,” Shoko tells them just before bed. A congregation before the sink, all of them collecting their nighttime water. The stove-light casts her face half in shadow, half in tangerine. “On Thursday, maybe.”
“Okay,” Suguru says. “I’ll wash the sheets.”
These are the bright days. There is no pleasure too great, too small.
In September, for the first time in over three years, Suguru agrees to visit his parents in Higashinaruse.
This is a big deal. Since that night - the stopping point, when they chose to run to Hokkaido - he’s not seen them once. Hasn’t even entertained it. It’s been as immovable a creed as his refutation of jujutsu. Just as Satoru promised, his days of curse-swallowing ended the moment he asked them to. Just as Satoru promised, they left.
What he hadn’t agreed to was the isolation. It had nearly killed him in that shitty Sapporo apartment, and so he knows, with gut-wrenching surety, that if Suguru continues to deny himself the people he loves, it will eventually turn him inside out.
(Hating things is easy. Shoko, blurry, haloed, above him. You know what takes guts? Being happy.)
But for Suguru, it’s not hatred. It’s guilt. The palpable kind; it shrouds him in a way that Satoru can almost taste. His inability to be brave, to be undamaged, to be certain… This is what haunts him on his bad days. And when they creep in, it doesn’t matter what Satoru says. Even if he were better with words, had more tact - the illusion of these failings will always be louder.
Suguru didn’t do an evil thing. He dreamed an evil thing. He dreamed it and then ran to Satoru, looking sick with fear.
He has never been particularly concerned with dogmas or ethics. He’s a law unto himself. Egoism, personified. Which means he can’t ever know, not in any real way, what Suguru is going through. So he just holds him through the worst of it. Smooths a thumb across his brow and pictures a ball of yarn being dutifully untangled in his partner’s head.
And then, last year, on Christmas Eve. Suguru’s mother called, just like she had done the year before. Just like she had done every month since her son’s radio silence. She called, and it nearly rang itself into silence, but Suguru answered before it did, even if he couldn’t bring the phone up to his ear.
(They did it together. Satoru’s hand cupping Suguru’s hand, Suguru’s hand cupping the phone; the warbled euphoria in his mother’s voice so loud that they could both feel it humming in their palms.)
He answered the second time, too. Not the third, but definitely the fourth, and after the fifth he forgot to tell her he loved her, so he called her back to do so. At first, he talked to her alone in their bedroom. Eventually, Satoru got to listen in, then to join in, and by April, she was calling him ume. Plum blossom. He likes this a lot better than Rikugan. Both a talisman against evil, but only one singular to Satoru.
He offers to go to Higashinaruse with Suguru. He’s always wanted to meet his parents, to see the house with the blue roof where he learned to walk and read and make the perfect sencha tea. He thinks he’d like the Aiko tomatoes his father grows, even if he doesn’t like tomatoes at all. And it might sting, to know what life could have offered him if he’d been born someone else, something else, but knowing what you missed isn’t always bad. Sometimes, it’s an education sorely needed.
Suguru insists, though, that he takes this next step alone. It makes Satoru nervous, but maybe this is the sort of vulnerability one can only show to a parent. He wouldn’t know. “Will you come next time?” Suguru asks him, though, and Satoru is forced to pinch his earlobes and tell him not to ask stupid questions.
In the week leading up to the visit, Suguru has awful night terrors. He doesn’t remember them, but the aftertaste is familiar enough for him to guess at their theme. He sobs in great heaves, covered in a cold sweat, shivering. They curl up in the yubune together, Satoru washing him with warm water until the trembling stops. Neither of them gets much sleep. He can tell Suguru feels horrible about it, so he lays easy kisses over every inch of his face and on each of his fingers; tangles their legs together and presses them completely flush, even in this dwindling summer heat. That way, he will know how much Satoru likes to stay awake with him, to stand guard over the most brittle of his parts.
(For five consecutive breakfasts, he slices figs and nashi pears and sunomono, traditional, seasonal food that Suguru loves. It’s important that the day starts differently to how the night before ended.)
All three of them walk him to the train station to see him off. Honestly, Satoru feels a little choked up. Tsumiki’s grip on his right hand and Megumi’s fist twisted into his trousers keep him tethered, though. That night they watch Ponyo and eat Pocky and senbei rice crackers and -
Satoru wakes up on the floor.
For a second, he’s not sure where he is. But it smells like cedar incense, and Limitless appears at ease, so he must be home. Visual input is unreliable. One eye is a kaleidoscope and the other keeps filling up with stinging salt water. He tries to blink it away, but the room spins itself into a merry-go-round, so he quickly squeezes them both shut.
“Gojo.”
Oh, Megumi is here. He looks so tiny like this, crouched up, bug-eyed, hair a dark wilderness on his head. Such a grumpy face. Why so grumpy?
“Your head is bleeding.”
It gives a particularly vicious throb, right on cue. “Huh?”
“Your head is bleeding. You’re ruining the carpet.”
Sure enough, his hair feels tacky and gloopy and gross where it meets the floor. That’s not… ideal. He’s sort of attached to their carpet; Suguru cut and laid it all on his own. It’s pebble gray and their tabula rasa. It’s also the perfect cave for his aching eyes to hide in. “‘Gumi. C’n you… uh.” His tongue is swimming in saliva, gluey and acrid. Is this impending doom? “Shoko. Call Shoko.”
“Where’s your phone?”
Where is his phone? “Pocket?” he guesses. “M’ybe… bedroom?”
It’s in his pocket.
He lets the haze descend again because he’d rather not be aware of time inching by him, without him, despite him. His head is pounding and his stomach is churning but there’s also a hand gummed onto his elbow, small and sticky. Awkward, but attentive. Megumi shouldn’t be privy to this, but he’s here, and that’s nice, because Satoru doesn’t like to suffer in silence anymore. It’s lonely.
The next thing he’s truly aware of is the scent of wax and star anise. Shoko is knitting his scalp back together. The migraine abates minimally, but he’ll take what he can get. She taps him lightly on the shoulder. “Satoru. You with me?”
“Mmn.” She pulls his left eye open and he flinches hard, because fuck, that’s so cruel. Shoko is faceless and swimmy. She relinquishes him after a few seconds, and the torture ends.
“Your pupil’s blown.” Well, obviously, he can feel it eating up the light with gaping maw. “Do you remember what happened?”
“Not r’lly.” He assumes he must have clipped his head on the way down, but he doesn’t know what sent him down in the first place. Actually, the whole morning is a blank. He doesn’t even remember getting out of bed.
(Or getting into bed.)
“Just your head?” Shoko asks next. “Or a full house?”
“Arm’s numb,” he supplies shortly, and then decides he’s done talking. If he opens his mouth again he might be sick.
“Okay. We can work with that.” He hears her shuffle back. “Nanami, help me get him up.”
Nanami? What the fuck? is the last thing he thinks before the world is whirling violently on its axis. He’s sure they’re being gentle but it doesn’t feel that way. The vertigo is sucking up his soul and spitting it back out upside down. This is so shit. He’ll never get used to how shit this is.
There are only a few steps between the scene of the crime and the sofa, but each time his feet make contact with the floor it echoes up his legs, along his spine and into the base of his skull like a quake. Nanami is doing most of the work, Shoko more of a crutch on his left, but they get him prone pretty quickly, propping one pillow behind his head and another under his knees. The world stills a little, less spinning top and more orbital satellite.
“You w’re fast,” he mumbles idly whilst Shoko busies herself around him, the Six Eyes drawn automatically to her carmine cursed energy. Nanami’s is less familiar now, angular and chartreuse (and stifled, like a clipped bird in a cage). But then behind them both, a signature he has cultivated near-unmatched attunement to - indigo and small, but thrumming with yet untamed power. Megumi is still here. Knelt behind the coffee table, next to that patch of blood, forgotten but watching them with stony apprehension.
“I was halfway here. We made plans last night.” She doesn’t ask him if he remembers them. Which is good, because he doesn’t. “And, luckily, Nanami lives in Sendai, because there was no way I was getting your gangly ass off the floor by myself.”
He understands enough of that sentence to be mildly offended. Processes the rest with high latency and decides he’ll review the insecurity that arises from being thoroughly snubbed by Nanami at a later date. (They share a city - why didn’t he know that? Why didn’t he tell them?) There are more pressing questions. Like:
“Time?” Is his tongue even in his mouth? Maybe not. Whatever. Shoko is fluent in all of his dialects.
Yet, it’s Nanami who answers. “Around five.”
“PM?” He nearly flings himself from the sofa. Shoko and the scorching nausea keep him down in a valiant combined effort. If it’s Saturday, which he thinks (hopes) it is, then Tsumiki is at the aquarium with her class. He can’t remember when he’s meant to be picking her up. Wonders how on earth he dropped her off in this state without a single person noticing. Maybe he shouldn’t be left alone with the kids - not if he’s unable to stay present, stay conscious. “Shoko,” he bites out through a crippling coalescence of suffering and shame, “‘Miki, she’s -”
“I know, her teacher called. She’s going to stay with her until Nanami can pick her up.” She squeezes his shoulder. “You’re good, Satoru.”
He’s good. Okay.
Shoko carefully lifts his head, and the Six Eyes are further numbed by his blindfold. A wrapped ice-pack is placed on his crown soon after, and the sofa might as well be made of butter with the way he melts into it. The bliss, however, is brutally cut short by a wrenching pain behind his right eye, like a tendon tearing, a limb dislocating, the meat of his brain bloating and consuming all available space. A broken and pitchy noise climbs his throat before he can stifle it, and he grinds the heel of his working hand deep into the socket, digging for even the smallest degree of relief. Shoko tugs it back quickly, entwining their fingers instead.
Her hand is birdlike. Dwarfed completely by his. But it feels as if, in this moment, she could easily carry all six foot three of him in the centre of her palm. “Nanami, get my bag. Breathe, Satoru.” She taps a rhythm on his knuckles. “That’s it. Good job. I’m going to give you some pills, okay?” A water glass pries at his lips, followed by something oblong and chalky. “Might make you sleepy. Just let it happen.”
The next time he comes to, night is falling. The migraine is still there, but smothered by chemical salvation. Reality filters in more smoothly - digestible, rather than thrust at him in large, unswallowable chunks. It’s not perfect, but it never is.
Then it registers. Weight, at his side. A tiny, clammy hand wrapped around his thumb. He lifts his blindfold to find Megumi curled up by his hip, cheek pillowed on Satoru’s stomach. He wriggles a bit, snuffles, and then further affirms his place by pressing even closer.
His jaw drops. Oh my god.
Further down, Tsumiki sits on the armrest. She pats his foot and gives him a smile that screams mischief. It reminds him a little of Suguru. Deceptively sweet, eyes half-mast. “Don’t worry,” she whispers. “Auntie Sho took a picture.”
The day is dying behind her, in shades of peach and crimson. It sets her aglow, makes her hair look like spun sugar. “Hey, ‘Miki.”
“Hi, ‘Toru. Are you feeling better?”
“I am now that you’re here.” She giggles, sliding down to lift his legs onto her lap. She rubs his calves back and forth, like she’s trying to warm them up, or channel magic. “How was the aquarium?”
Tsumiki lifts a finger and nods seriously. “Many fish.”
Has she always been this funny? Or had they taught her that? He thinks back to last spring, to two children in a grimy side street. Pale, young faces, weathered by disappointment. Maybe it had always been inside of them, waiting to be nurtured. Inner worlds flowering at their own pace, now that they’ve been repotted, watered, and placed under the sun.
(Is it selfish to want to be part of what makes a person?)
“Welcome back,” Shoko calls from the kitchen. Behind her, Nanami is stirring something on the stove, shirt sleeves rolled up and wearing the pink frilled apron Suguru bought him as a joke last year (a joke that immediately backfired when Satoru put it on and Suguru flushed vermillion, choking on his own spit). “Nanami’s enamoured with your kitchen.”
“It’s tidy and well-equipped,” he says without turning around. “Even your mandolin is sharpened.”
His voice is just as Satoru remembers: level, without inflection. Worldly-wise. “You flatter me, Nanamin.”
“Shoko tells me that you are the chef of the household.”
“I’m full of surprises,” he croaks. It comes out colder than he intends it to. “What are you making?”
“Zōsui.”
His stomach swoops. “Uh.”
“I just need you to eat a little bit,” Shoko says. “Unless you don’t want more painkillers.”
She brings bottled water and a blister pack of pills to the coffee table. It’s stained a faded rose in one corner; blood, his blood, refusing to be scrubbed away. They’ll need to buy a new one. Maybe have the carpet cleaned professionally, too. “Did you talk to Suguru?”
“Yeah.”
He visibly tenses. He can’t interrupt this visit with his parents. It’s too important, and not just for Suguru - for Satoru, too. He wants so desperately for his partner to reclaim this fragment of himself; knows that when he does, it will stitch a vast, persisting wound. (The scar will always remain, but that is the most human part of healing. A lesson. A memory.) “What did he say?”
“He’s not coming home, if that’s what you’re worried about. He trusts me to take care of it.” She hands him the water. “And he trusts you, too. To tell him if you need him.”
Satoru will always need him. But he’s honest now about how much of that need he can withstand before it’s overwhelming. He hadn’t anticipated it to mean so much - this growth being recognised. He feels so much more at twenty than he did at seventeen, newly awakened and invincible. So much less, too.
(And that’s okay.)
“He does want you to call him later,” Shoko adds, as if he didn’t have every intention. “That’s non-negotiable.”
Megumi shifts then, peeling one emerald eye open. Their gazes meet, but he doesn’t blink, doesn’t turn his head. Just regards him glassily, indomitable. Unphased by the Six Eyes’ full scrutiny. Although he supposes it never worked on him, anyway.
“I’m glad you didn’t die,” Megumi declares suddenly, with feeling, and then slides from the sofa and totters away.
The words resound for the rest of the evening. When he manages more of the zōsui than he expects; when he speaks to Suguru and to his mother and father, both of them calling him ume so softly and so easily, like it doesn’t mean everything; when Nanami helps him to bed and Shoko presses a chaste kiss to his aching temple. I’m glad you didn’t die.
He matches his breathing to the kids' cursed energy, twin pulses through the wall that divides them. Thinks of blue nail polish (Pretty, Satoru). Of crocheted white rabbits (I’m glad you didn’t die). Five people around a chabudai, playing with well-worn flower cards.
Today, he learns that love can look like - and sound like - many, many things.
A week later, Satoru goes to hang up Megumi’s laundry and finds the battered rucksack at the bottom of the wardrobe completely empty. Its contents - an ill-fitting set of clothes, threadbare gloves, a musty box of granola bars - are unpacked and put away.
He crouches where he stands. The clean shirt he’s holding, black with green stitching, is one Megumi picked out for himself just last week. Satoru had been the one to take him shopping. When they stopped for ice cream, Megumi finally told him his favourite flavour.
Red bean. “Like your manju buns,” he’d said.
Satoru brings the shirt to his face and cries. Not because he’s been forced, but because he deserves to. Because it is well-earned, and it is wise.