Archive of Our Own

Everything orbits around the sun — whether they want to or not.

The sun is the center of the universe. It doesn't change for you; you change for it. Whether it burns you, scars your flesh and soul and leaves you withering in its wake — that is not the sun's fault. That is yours.

(Why would the sun ever choose you? No one stands next to the sun without being consumed.)

Satoru Gojo was the sun of jujutsu society.

Everything had centered around him since his birth. The first of his kind in four hundred years — the world tilted on its axis the moment he drew breath, and it never tilted back. You did not argue with gravity. You simply fell.

Suguru Geto was from a non-sorcerer family. Nothing about him had ever invited spectacle. Nothing about him was remarkable when held against the blinding fact of Satoru Gojo. He had always understood this the way you understand the distance between yourself and something incandescent — intellectually, safely, from far enough away that it doesn't blister.

(He'd just never thought he'd be the one left standing in the ash.)

His head tips back toward the sky, pale and bleeding out at the horizon. Somewhere distant, cicadas drone on like a dirge that doesn't know it's a dirge. A fly lands on his cheek. Then another. He doesn't move. There's something almost funny about it — the way carrion creatures always know. The way rot announces itself before you can even smell it.

Exorcise.

Absorb.

His body has been doing the math without him. Ribs where there weren't before. His reflection grown angular, hollowed out — not thinned but excavated, like something has been quietly taking up residence in the space his appetite used to occupy. Because something has. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Foul and writhing and wrong in ways that don't translate to language, and he swallows them down regardless, and they sit in him, and he carries them, and he keeps walking.

Exorcise.

Absorb.

(Is there a reason anymore?)

He can still hear it if he lets himself — the applause. That obscene, celebratory percussion, hands meeting hands meeting hands, echoing off marble floors as a young girl's body cooled. He can still feel the temperature of that room. The specific quality of its emptiness. Satoru's face had been a closed door, and Suguru had stood outside it holding something he didn't have the words to name, and the clapping had gone on and on and on.

"No. There's no point."

His own words. He'd said them like they were already true, like belief was just a matter of saying the thing out loud with enough conviction. A flimsy excuse dressed up as a conclusion. He knows that now. He'd been regurgitating doctrine — swallowing it down the same way he swallows the curses, hoping it would digest into something that felt like certainty.

It hasn't.

Does he hate non-sorcerers?

The question returns every day. Sharpens a little more each time, the way a blade sharpens — by having something taken from it.

***

"Suguru."

He doesn't look up.

He has been staring at the same bowl of rice for twenty minutes. Bland, cooling, completely untouched. He is aware of this the way he is aware of most things lately — distantly, from behind glass, like the information is reaching him with a slight delay and he can't quite locate the part of himself that's supposed to care.

"Suguru."

Still nothing. A cold press against his forehead — a can, aluminum, probably something Satoru grabbed from the vending machine on the way here. The shock of the temperature travels across his skin and stops there. It doesn't reach anything. Satoru holds it there a moment longer than necessary, which is the only indication he gives that he's worried.

He isn't fooling anyone. But Suguru doesn't have the energy to say so.

When the can doesn't work, Satoru drops into the seat beside him at the table. No announcement. No joke, which is almost stranger than anything else. The common room stretches out around them, emptier than it used to be — or maybe Suguru is just never here when it isn't. He's been keeping strange hours. Keeping to himself. Orbiting the edges of shared spaces without ever quite entering them.

(An eclipse, then — the two of them in the same room at the same time. Something celestial briefly interrupted. Something that bends the light.)

Satoru doesn't leave.

This is the first thing Suguru registers, in that slow, underwater way he registers most things now. He'd expected him to — had constructed a quiet prediction of it without realizing, the way you brace for a door to shut. Satoru arrives like weather. Loud and total and then gone. That is the natural order of things.

He stays, though. Drops his bag somewhere behind him without looking. Pulls out a manga and falls open to somewhere in the middle, spine already cracked from where he's clearly bent it back one too many times. The pages are soft at the corners. He reads the way he does everything — like it belongs to him, like the silence belongs to him too.

Suguru looks back at his rice.

It's fully cold now. He's known this for a while. The knowing doesn't do anything.

"So," Satoru says, without looking up from the page, with the energy of someone who has decided to be casual about something, "you've just been in here?"

"Yes."

"For how long?"

Suguru considers this. "A while."

Satoru makes a noise that isn't quite a response. He turns a page. Suguru watches him from his periphery — the practiced ease of him, the way he takes up space like it has always been allocated specifically for his use. It probably has. It probably always will be.

(The sun doesn't wonder if it's welcome. It simply rises.)

The rice is starting to smell. Or maybe that's the curses. He can't always tell anymore, where one ends and the other begins — the foulness that lives in him and the foulness outside of him. His body has stopped distinguishing. His body has stopped doing a lot of things.

"Are you okay?"

It comes out sideways, slipped between one moment and the next like Satoru is trying to sneak it past both of them. His eyes are still on the manga when he asks it. His thumb holds his place on the page.

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

"I'm tired," Suguru says.

Technically true. He is tired in a way that sleep doesn't touch, tired in a way that has started to feel geological — like something that has been accumulating in layers long before he had the awareness to notice. But that is not what Satoru is asking, and they both know it, and neither of them says so.

"Okay," Satoru says.

He turns the page.

He accepts it. Of course he does. Suguru had given him an answer and Satoru had taken it and now they can both go back to pretending the question was a small one. This is how it works. This is how it has always worked, between people — you ask, they answer, you move on. No one is obligated to dig.

(No one should have to.)

Satoru doesn't turn the next page for a long time.

Suguru doesn't notice.

He's looking at the rice again, at the way the surface has gone stiff and slightly translucent at the edges. It looks like something already grieved over. He wonders, distantly, if he should just throw it away. He wonders if he'll be hungry later. He hasn't been hungry in — he does the math slowly, finds he can't quite finish it.

Satoru stays for another twenty minutes. He doesn't ask anything else. He turns pages at irregular intervals, too slow for someone actually reading, and at some point stops pretending altogether, the manga left open and face-down on the table in a way that will ruin the spine further. He just sits instead, which is somehow worse, though Suguru couldn't explain why.

When he leaves, he says, "Get some sleep, Suguru."

"Mm."

The door doesn't quite shut all the way behind him. Suguru stares at the thin line of light in the gap for a long moment.

Then he looks back at the rice.

He still isn't hungry.

***

(What I witnessed wasn't uncommon.)

Clap. Clap. Clap.

The hands of grinning fools, meeting over and over in that cold white room, celebratory and endless, like they would never stop. Like they had done this before and would do it again and had never once lost sleep over any of it.

(I understood the ugliness of the masses, and still chose to be a jujutsu sorcerer who saves others.)

"Suguru, should we kill these guys?"

He can still hear it exactly. The flatness of it. He can still see Satoru's face — that particular blankness, the one that isn't emptiness but something worse, something that has looked at the situation and made its calculations and arrived at a place beyond feeling. Those eyes, crystal and cold and burning all at once, the only real color in an otherwise colorless room. Illuminating nothing. Warming nothing.

(Don't waver.)

"No," Suguru had said. "There's no point."

His own eyes hadn't moved from her hand. Just her hand — the only part of her that the sheet hadn't claimed, tumbled loose when Satoru carried her, and somehow that small uncovered thing had lodged itself in him like a splinter. Everything else about that room he can reconstruct only in pieces. The words that came out of his mouth afterward he remembers the shape of more than the substance — correct words, morally sound words, words that traced the right outline and meant almost nothing. Words he was already trying to convince himself of as he said them.

(Fulfill your duty as a strong jujutsu sorcerer.)

"No point, huh?"

Satoru had moved past him by then. Suguru hadn't watched him go. He couldn't see his face, only heard his voice somewhere behind him, and not knowing what expression it carried was its own specific kind of unbearable.

"Does there really need to be any point to it?"

His fingernails break into his palms. He doesn't register it at first — only the pressure, then the sting, then the slow awareness that he has been holding his fists like this for longer than he realized.

"It's very important that there is," he had said. "Especially for a jujutsu sorcerer."

(Don't waver.)

The words had been right. He knows they were right. He has repeated them enough times now that they should have worn grooves into something, should have become true through sheer repetition, the way a path forms where enough feet have walked.

(Don't waver.)

They haven't.

***

He is sitting outside on the steps of the school, staring up at the sun as it dips toward the horizon. He doesn't look away. He allows his eyes to water, allows the light to become something sharp and punishing, and stares until his body forces him to stop — until the burning is too much and his vision swims white at the edges and his eyes slam shut on their own. Then he waits. Then he does it again.

It is not so different from anything else he does.

(Exorcise. Absorb.)

The sun doesn't care that he's looking at it. That's almost the point. He burns and it simply continues existing, indifferent and total, and there is something clarifying about that — about choosing something that will hurt you and being hurt by it on a schedule you control. His eyes stream. He doesn't wipe them. The tears track cold down his face and he lets them go, lets his body do its small, stupid acts of self-preservation without him, because his body still bothers with those even when he can't quite remember why.

By the time it finally drops below the horizon his vision is wrecked, the ghost of the sun smeared across everything he looks at, a pale burn-shaped wound floating through his field of sight wherever he turns. He stares at the absence of it. The sky goes pink, then the deep ugly purple of a bruise spreading, then nothing. Just dark.

Night does not feel welcoming.

(It doesn't feel like anything at all.)

"You're outside."

Satoru. Suguru doesn't turn. He hears footsteps, a bag, and then Satoru sits down beside him with the absolute certainty of someone who has never once considered that he might not be wanted somewhere. Something warm presses against Suguru's arm. Takeout, by the smell of it. Something greasy and hot and nauseating.

"I got food," Satoru says. "You should eat it."

"I'm not hungry."

"I didn't ask."

He starts eating his own, talking between bites — something about a disagreement in town, some minor irritation he's already half-laughing about, his voice filling the dark the way it always fills everything, like silence is a problem he feels personally obligated to fix. Suguru listens from a long way away. The warmth of the bag against his arm is a distant fact. The voice is a distant fact. Everything is a distant fact, arriving slightly delayed, like sound traveling across water.

But there is something. Some small, stupid thing. The knot in his chest that has been pulled tight for so long he's forgotten what it felt like untightened — it shifts, barely. Just the warmth. Just the voice moving through something meaningless. Just Satoru, sitting down like it was obvious, like there was nowhere else.

Suguru is so tired.

He tilts. Just slightly. Just a few degrees toward that warmth, that solid, infuriating, familiar presence —

Infinity.

It doesn't hurt. That's the worst part. It doesn't do anything dramatic — no force, no sound, just the simple, automated fact of it. The boundary asserting itself the way a boundary does. Impartial. Impersonal. A thing that does not know what it has just done and would not care if it did.

And then Suguru is just — elsewhere. The warmth is still there but it is no longer his. The voice is still going but the words have stopped meaning anything. He is looking at the takeout bag without seeing it. He is sitting on the steps without being on them. Somewhere behind his sternum something folds quietly in on itself, and then there is nothing, just the clean, empty static of not feeling anything, which is different from peace but at least it doesn't bleed.

Infinity had always let him in before.

He stands up.

"I'm going in."

"You didn't eat —"

"I'll eat later."

He is already moving. The door, the corridor, the flat white light. His feet carry him the way they always do — one in front of the other, automatic, his body still bothering with locomotion even when the rest of him has gone somewhere else entirely. The ghost of the sun drifts across his vision, pale and stubborn, a burn that won't resolve no matter how many times he blinks.

He doesn't go back.

(Don't waver.)

He keeps walking.

***

Is he suicidal?

Suguru considers this the way he considers most things now — at a remove, clinically, like the question belongs to someone else and he is simply the most qualified person in the room to answer it.

No. He doesn't think so.

He has thought about the methods, the way you think about anything you have access to. He knows which curses would do it quickly. He knows the exact arithmetic of his own body, what it can absorb before it stops absorbing, the precise threshold between surviving and not. He has never been ignorant of these things. He has simply never moved toward them.

If he wanted to die, he would be dead. He is nothing if not efficient.

(Does there really need to be any point to it?)

That's the thing. That has always been the thing. Suguru has never been able to do anything without a reason for it — not a justification, not an excuse, but a reason, a clean load-bearing thing that makes the structure stand. He cannot eat without a reason lately. He cannot sleep. He cannot make himself do most things that require intention, because intention requires believing the action matters, and he is finding that belief harder and harder to locate.

He would not give his death a meaningless reason. He refuses to. There is still that much pride left in him, or something that used to be pride and has since become something harder and less nameable.

So no. He is not suicidal.

But.

If something were to find him — if some curse, some mission, some ordinary bad luck were to reach into the space where he is standing and simply end it — he thinks he would let it. More than let it. He thinks he would feel something close to relief, the way you feel relief when a sound you've stopped noticing finally goes quiet. He would open his arms to it. He would lean into it the way he used to lean into his mother after a long day, when he was small enough that she could hold all of him at once, when she would pull him in so tight he could feel his own heartbeat pressed back against his chest. He remembers thinking that was what safety felt like. The pressure of being held by something that wanted to hold you.

He would not go looking for it.

But he would not close the door either.

He sits with this for a moment. Examines it. There is no horror in it for him, which is perhaps the most honest measure of where he is — that this thought sits in him quietly, neatly, taking up no more space than anything else.

(Don't waver.)

He is not wavering.

He is simply leaving the door open.

***

Winter comes. The end of 2006 is here, and he cannot remember anything past August, really. In the aftermath of the Star Plasma Vessel mission, everything had gotten swallowed up — not gradually, not in pieces, but all at once, the way a body of water swallows something dropped into it. August is there, and then there is nothing coherent after it, just a long smear of days he has been moving through without quite inhabiting.

Everyone is leaving for winter break.

Suguru does not plan to go home.

His mother would know something was wrong within the first hour. She has always been able to read him, which used to feel like being loved and now feels like a liability. She would sit him down at the kitchen table and she would look at him with that particular expression — the one that means she is prepared to hold whatever he puts down — and he would have nothing to give her. Nothing she could hold. Nothing that would translate across the distance between her world and his, because she is a non-sorcerer and she has never seen what his world actually looks like, and he would have to watch her try to understand and fail, and he thinks that would be the worst thing. Worse than the silence. Worse than being here.

(No one could ever understand.)

So he made an excuse. A simple one. She bought it without much resistance, which he'd expected and which should have felt like relief and didn't feel like anything. He has noticed this lately — that people buy his excuses with less and less friction the less and less effort he puts into them. He has been wondering, in a distant, uninvested way, whether they can tell. Whether the people around him have looked at whatever is happening to Suguru Geto and quietly decided that the effort of it outweighs the return.

He finds he cannot blame them, if so.

The school empties gradually and then all at once. Footsteps in corridors, voices, the particular noise of bags being dragged down stairs, and then less, and then almost nothing. Suguru watches it happen from the periphery of it, present enough to observe and removed enough that none of it touches him. By the time the last of it settles, the building has taken on that specific quality of silence that only very large, very empty spaces have — thick, almost textured, like it has weight.

He is sitting in the hallway when the snow starts. He hadn't planned to sit here specifically. His body had simply stopped moving and this had been the place it stopped. Through the fogging window the snow comes down in that first, tentative way it has — not yet committed, individual flakes visible, the world outside going soft at the edges. He watches it without watching it. His own reflection floats in the glass over the top of it, pale and slightly translucent, and he looks through himself at the snow.

"You're still here."

Satoru. Suguru doesn't turn from the window.

"So are you," he says.

The sound of Satoru dropping down beside him — not sitting, dropping, the full graceless weight of him hitting the floor like the concept of sitting down elegantly has never once occurred to him. He stretches his legs out. His shoulder is almost touching Suguru's.

"My train's tomorrow," Satoru says.

"Mm."

A pause. Outside, the snow is beginning to commit to itself, flakes thickening, the ground outside starting to hold it.

"When's yours?"

Suguru says nothing for a moment. "I'm not going home this year."

He can feel Satoru go still beside him, the particular quality of stillness that isn't relaxation but its opposite — attention, focused suddenly, the way a current changes direction underwater where you can't quite see it.

"How come?"

"I'm busy."

"With what."

It isn't really a question. Suguru looks at his own reflection in the glass. "Things."

Satoru makes a noise that means he has clocked the non-answer and filed it somewhere. Then he says, with the exaggerated casualness of someone who has made a decision and is pretending he hasn't yet: "I'll stay too, then."

Suguru turns to look at him for the first time. Satoru is looking at the window, chin tipped up slightly, the expression on his face one of profound unconcern, which means nothing with Satoru and has never meant anything.

"You don't have to do that," Suguru says.

"I know."

"Your family will —"

"My family," Satoru says, "will be fine without me. They're always fine without me." Something in his voice is very flat when he says it, and then isn't — the flatness gone as quickly as it came, his tone lifting back into something easy. "Besides, someone has to make sure you eat something. Clearly you're not managing that on your own."

Suguru looks back at the window. "You'd get in trouble."

"Probably." Satoru shrugs with his whole body, loose and total. "Worth it."

He says it like it's nothing. Like it's obvious. Like the arithmetic of it — Suguru, here, alone, days of this particular silence — had produced a self-evident answer that required no deliberation. Suguru looks at his own reflection again, at the faint translucent shape of himself hovering over the snow.

He wants to say: you don't have to do this. He wants to say: I'm fine, go home, I'll be fine. He has the words ready, has been carrying them around for months now, deploying them whenever necessary, and they have always worked before because people have always been willing to be convinced.

He looks at Satoru's reflection beside his in the glass. Satoru is still looking out at the snow, jaw set, the portrait of someone who has already made up his mind.

"Okay," Suguru says.

Satoru doesn't smile. Doesn't make a joke of it. He just nods once, like it's settled, and leans back against the wall, and they sit together in the empty school while the snow outside finally decides what it's doing and everything goes white and quiet and still.

Suguru watches it.

(No one could ever understand.)

He watches the snow cover the ground and he does not think about August, and Satoru's shoulder is almost touching his, and it is the closest thing to warmth he has felt in a long time, which is the most frightening thing he has thought all day.

He doesn't examine it.

He watches the snow.

***

He's sure Satoru understands very quickly that staying behind was a mistake.

Suguru is boring now. He is aware of this the way he is aware of most things — distantly, without particular feeling about it. He sleeps. He showers when his body makes it impossible to ignore any longer. He eats when the alternative becomes its own kind of loud, standing in the kitchen and consuming whatever requires the least preparation, tasting approximately nothing, and then returning to his room. That is the full architecture of his days. He has stopped finding this alarming, which is maybe its own kind of alarm, but he doesn't follow that thought anywhere.

Winter makes the sleeping easier. There is less light, which means less evidence of time passing, which means he can lie in bed for six hours and have it feel like one or feel like twenty and either way it doesn't matter because there is nowhere to be and nothing that needs doing and his body is so heavy, so extraordinarily heavy, like something has been quietly filling it with wet concrete while he wasn't paying attention.

Satoru catches him a few times. In the hallway, in the kitchen, once on the steps where the snow has been accumulating undisturbed because no one is clearing it. He tries — Suguru can see him trying, can see the moment Satoru decides to aim a conversation at him like something that might stick. It never sticks. Suguru answers in the minimum number of words the situation requires and then returns to his room and sleeps for another six hours, and he tells himself this is fine, this is just how he is right now, this will pass, and he does not examine whether he believes that.

It has been a week of this.

A week is apparently enough for Satoru, because he is knocking on Suguru's door.

Suguru is awake. He has been awake for approximately forty minutes, which is not enough time to have done anything with, so he hasn't. He is lying on his back with one arm over his eyes, doing nothing, which he has become very accomplished at.

"I'm sleeping," he says.

"No you're not, you just talked to me."

Suguru moves his arm off his face and stares at the ceiling. "Go away, Satoru."

"I'm bored."

"Read something."

"I've read everything." A pause, brief and unconvincing. "Suguru. I will stand here for an actually insane amount of time. You know I will."

He does know. He has seen Satoru outlast people through sheer immovable cheerfulness in ways that violate basic social contract. He conducts a brief internal accounting of his own resources — the energy it would take to keep saying no against the energy it would take to just open the door — and finds both columns are running low, which means the path of least resistance wins.

He gets up. This takes longer than it should. He opens the door.

Satoru looks at him for a moment — a quick, comprehensive look, the kind that takes inventory — and says nothing about whatever the inventory returned. He looks past Suguru into the room instead, and something in his expression shifts in a way Suguru doesn't have the energy to interpret.

"Can I come in?"

"You're already coming in," Suguru says, because Satoru is already coming in.

He steps aside. Satoru moves past him and stops in the middle of the room, turning slowly, and Suguru sees it through his eyes for a moment, which he hasn't done before because looking at things requires a kind of investment he hasn't had. It is bad. He is aware, distantly, that it is bad. Clothes on the floor because putting them away required decisions he couldn't make. Empty cups on the desk because returning them to the kitchen required a trip he couldn't justify. The bed a archaeology of blankets, the curtains shut against the grey winter light, a general texture of accumulated neglect that has been building so gradually he stopped seeing it weeks ago.

Satoru looks at all of it. He doesn't say anything for a long moment.

Then he takes his jacket off and hangs it on the back of the desk chair.

"What are you doing," Suguru says.

"What does it look like."

He picks up a cup from the desk. Then another. He stacks them with the efficient, purposeful energy of someone who has decided to do a thing and intends to finish it, and Suguru stands near the door and watches this happen and doesn't know what to do with any of it. There is something happening in his chest that he doesn't have a word for — not warmth exactly, not relief exactly, something more uncomfortable than either of those things, something that wants him to look away.

"You don't have to —" Suguru starts.

"I know," Satoru says. He's already moved on to the clothes, picking them up off the floor with a total absence of commentary, folding some of them, setting others aside. "Where does this go."

"Satoru —"

"Where does it go, Suguru."

Suguru tells him where it goes.

He ends up sitting on the edge of the bed because standing started to cost too much, watching Satoru move through his room with that same quality he brings to everything — total, unhesitating, like the task is obvious and the only question is execution. He doesn't make it into anything. He doesn't say: this is bad, you should have said something, look at yourself. He just picks things up and puts them where they go, and gradually the room starts to look like something that belongs to a person again, and Suguru sits on the edge of the bed and feels the unnamed thing in his chest getting worse.

"There," Satoru says, eventually. He looks around, apparently satisfied, then drops into the desk chair and spins it once to face Suguru. "We're watching a movie."

Suguru looks at him. "I'm tired."

"You're always tired. You can be tired and watch a movie, those aren't mutually exclusive. What do you want to watch."

"I don't care."

"Great, means I get to pick." He says this like it's a prize he's won. "Get back in bed, you look like you're going to fall over."

Suguru gets back in bed. He didn't notice he'd gotten up. This is easier than arguing, and he is so tired of spending energy on things that don't matter, and Satoru is — Satoru is here, in his cleaned room, spinning idly in his desk chair like this is normal, like this is just a thing they do, and the unnamed thing in Suguru's chest has become very loud and he is not going to look at it.

Satoru pulls the chair over toward the television. Starts going through the small stack of CDs on Suguru's desk, flipping through them with the focused energy of someone doing a very important task.

"You have terrible taste," he says, which is a lie, and they both know it.

"Those are yours," Suguru says. "You left them here."

"I have terrible taste." He holds one up, apparently satisfied, and puts it in. The television hums to life, flooding the dark room with pale light, and Satoru drops back into the chair and drags it closer to the bed with one foot, the legs scraping loud against the floor.

It's a bad angle from where Suguru is lying. He doesn't say anything about this.

The movie starts — something Suguru doesn't recognize, something with action in it, which is very Satoru. He lies on his side facing the television and he watches it without really watching it, tracking the movement and light without connecting to any of it, and this is fine, this is the same as everything else, except that Satoru is in the chair beside him making quiet comments at the screen in that way he has, half to himself, half to Suguru, not requiring a response but not quite a monologue either.

At some point Suguru's eyes close.

He doesn't mean them to. He becomes aware of it only after the fact, aware that the movie sounds are still going and that Satoru has gone quieter, and he should probably say something, should probably apologize for falling asleep, but his body has already made the decision and is not consulting him.

The last thing he is aware of is that Satoru hasn't left.

(Don't waver.)

He sleeps.

***

It becomes a routine. Suguru had not wanted a routine. He had been managing perfectly well with his existing routine, which was sleeping, and sleeping, and sleeping some more, and Satoru had looked at this routine and found it personally offensive and inserted himself into it anyway, and now here they are.

(It's uncomfortable. But he doesn't mind.)

He doesn't examine that.

Satoru comes every evening that week. Sometimes with food, which he will present with the energy of someone doing Suguru a tremendous favor, and then will proceed to be so aggressively annoying about the eating of it that it becomes easier to eat than to continue not eating. Suguru recognizes this tactic. He doesn't say so. He eats whatever portion of it his body will accept and then lies back down, and Satoru puts a film on, and Suguru falls asleep somewhere in the first half and wakes up after Satoru has gone, the television off, the room quiet.

He never remembers the films. He rarely remembers what Satoru says. It comes in and goes out like weather, like distant sound, and mostly what he registers is the blue light of the television against the dark and the fact of Satoru in the chair beside him, solid and loud and very much present. That much gets through. That much lands.

He doesn't know how Satoru finds any of this worthwhile. He has tried, in a dim and uninvested way, to see himself from the outside — what it must look like, sitting with someone who falls asleep on you, who gives back nothing, who has become approximately as responsive as furniture. He cannot imagine choosing this. He cannot imagine what Satoru is getting from it.

But then.

Satoru has become the strongest. That is simply the fact of it now, settled and immovable, rearranged in the wake of the mission like furniture after an earthquake — everything in the same room, nothing in the same place. The strongest, singular, a category of one. Suguru had known this was coming the way you know a season is changing — intellectually, abstractly, right up until the morning you step outside and feel it in your lungs and understand that it has already happened.

There is no strong together anymore. There is just Satoru, who is strong, and Suguru, who is standing somewhere in the long shadow he casts without quite meaning to, trying to remember what the light felt like.

He doesn't say this.

(He never says anything.)

If Satoru is bothered by the one-sidedness of it, he doesn't make it known. He just keeps coming. Every evening, reliable as something Suguru doesn't have a word for, and Suguru keeps letting him in because turning him away costs more than it saves, and somewhere underneath all of that, in a place he is not going to look at —

It is the only part of his day that feels like anything.

He doesn't examine that either.

***

On the last day of them being alone in the school, because tomorrow everyone will return and the halls will not be theirs anymore, Satoru has decided to talk about it.

Suguru had been dreading this. He had known it was coming the way you know a headache is coming — a pressure behind the eyes, a slow accumulation, the understanding that your body has already decided and is simply waiting for you to catch up. It had been a slow crawl toward this conversation from the very beginning, from the moment Satoru sat down beside him and said I'll stay too, then, and Suguru had let him, and now here they are at the end of it with nowhere left to crawl.

Satoru is in the chair. Suguru is in the bed. The television is off. That should have been the first warning — Satoru arrived tonight without anything, without the usual infrastructure of avoidance, and sat down, and looked at Suguru with those eyes that are doing the thing they do when Satoru has decided something.

"So," Satoru says.

"No," Suguru says.

"I haven't said anything yet."

"You were going to say something I don't want to hear."

"Probably," Satoru agrees. He leans forward, elbows on his knees. "Something's wrong with you."

The phrasing is so blunt and so graceless that Suguru almost laughs. Almost. "Thank you for that."

"I'm serious."

"I know you are." Suguru looks at the ceiling. "I'm fine."

"You've said that every time I've asked and it hasn't been true once." There's an edge in Satoru's voice now, something that has been sitting under the surface of days of films and takeout and careful, deliberate nothing. "You sleep all day. You don't eat unless I make you. You look at me sometimes and I can tell you're not actually seeing me and I —" he stops. "I'm not going to pretend I haven't noticed anymore."

Suguru says nothing.

"Talk to me."

"There's nothing to talk about."

"Suguru —"

"I said there's nothing —"

"What happened?" The question is direct, the way Satoru is direct when he's through being patient. "At the mission. What actually happened to you, because something did, and you've been like this since August, and everyone is just — no one is saying anything, and I have been sitting here every night watching you —" his jaw tightens. "Talk to me. I'm right here."

The thing about Satoru, Suguru thinks, is that he is like water finding a crack. Patient in the specific way that isn't really patience but inevitability. Suguru has been plastering over the cracks for months and Satoru has just been quietly, persistently locating new ones, and the plaster is gone, and Suguru is so tired.

"You want to know what happened," he says.

"Yes."

"They clapped." His voice is very even. "She was dead. Riko was dead, and they were clapping. Laughing. She was fourteen years old and she had just decided — she had just told me she didn't want to merge, she had chosen, and she was smiling, Satoru, she was —" something snags in his throat. He pushes through it. "She was smiling and then she was dead and they were clapping for it, and you know what the worst part is. It wasn't even surprising. That is what they are. That is exactly what they are, and it wasn't even —"

"Suguru —"

"She was smiling." His voice cracks on it, just slightly, just enough. "That's the thing I can't — she had finally made her choice, she was free of it, she was happy and she didn't even get a full minute of it before —" he stops. Starts again, from somewhere harder. "And I walked into that room and you asked me — you said, should we kill these guys, and I said no, I said there's no point, and I —" his hands are shaking. He looks at them like they belong to someone else. "I didn't believe it. I said it because it was the right thing to say and I didn't believe a single word of it."

Satoru is very still.

"And you —" Suguru's voice is changing now, taking on something with heat in it, something that has been cold for so long the warmth of it is almost unrecognizable. "You've been fine. Since August you have been completely fine. Better than fine — you're stronger than you were before, you can do things now that you couldn't, every mission you come back from and you're — and I am doing the same thing I have always done, over and over, exorcise and absorb and exorcise and absorb, for people who would stand in that room and clap —"

"That's not fair —"

"I know it's not fair." The words come out raw. "I know. I know it's not fair and I can't stop, I can't stop thinking about it, I can't stop thinking about her hand, there was a sheet over her and her hand had slipped out and I just — I kept looking at it and I couldn't —" he exhales, hard. "Non-sorcerers. We bleed for them. We carry the curses that are born from their fear, their hatred, their ugliness, and we swallow them down and we protect them and they —" his voice fractures. "They are never going to be worth it. I think they were never going to be worth it. And I have been trying not to think that, I have been telling myself not to think that, and I can't anymore, I can't —"

"Not all of them are —"

"Enough of them are." Suguru sits up. He can feel something happening behind his eyes now, something hot and building that he does not want, that he refuses. "Enough of them are exactly what I saw in that room. Enough of them would do exactly what they did and feel nothing, and I am supposed to keep going, keep absorbing, keep letting this eat me alive for —"

"Suguru, I hear you, but you can't just —"

"You don't need me anymore."

Silence.

"What?" Satoru says.

"You heard me." His voice is very careful now, which is what he does when something is too close. "You're the strongest. You've always been going to be the strongest, I knew that, I accepted that, but now you are and you don't — there's nothing I can do that you can't do better and faster and without the cost and I am —" he stops. "I am standing in the dark. That's where I am. And you don't notice because why would you, you're the sun, you don't notice what your shadow does to the things around you —"

"That's not —" Satoru starts, something urgent in his voice now.

"There was a moment," Suguru says. He doesn't know why he's saying this. He cannot stop saying it. "Outside. On the steps. You were there and I was so tired and I just —" his jaw tightens. "I tried to lean on you."

Satoru goes very still.

"Infinity stopped me." The words are flat. Factual. "It stopped me the way it stops everything else. Automatically. Like I was —" he exhales. "It has never done that before. Not with me. Every other time it has always —" 

"I didn't notice," Satoru says. Quietly. Something in his face is doing something Suguru doesn't want to look at directly.

"I know."

"Suguru, I didn't — I keep it up automatically now, I don't even think about it, I didn't know that I —" he stops. "I'm sorry."

"It doesn't matter —"

"It does." Satoru's voice is uncharacteristically stripped of everything. No performance, no deflection. Just the words, plain and unhappy. "It matters. I'm sorry."

And that is when Suguru starts crying.

He doesn't mean to. He becomes aware of it the way you become aware of something your body has been doing without permission — the wet heat tracking down his face, his vision going unsteady, his breath coming out wrong. He reaches up and presses the back of his hand hard against his face like he can physically reverse it, and his breath fractures anyway, and months of mechanical, behind-glass, careful nothing finds the seam all at once and comes through it.

"Don't —" he manages. "Don't look at me —"

Satoru looks at him. Of course he does.

"I hate them," Suguru says, and it comes out like something that has been stored under enormous pressure for a very long time, something that has been slowly deforming the container it was in. "I hate them, I hate what they did to her, I hate that we just stood there, I hate that I said there was no point when there should have been a point, there should have been — she deserved for there to be a point —" his voice breaks cleanly. He puts his hand over his mouth. He is not going to do this. He has held this since August, he can keep holding it —

The bed dips.

Satoru sits down beside him. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't reach for him, doesn't try to arrange his face into something equal to the moment. He just sits, close enough that his shoulder is against Suguru's, and stays there, and Suguru comes apart anyway.

It isn't dramatic. It's just his breath going in wrong and coming out worse, his hand still pressed over his mouth, the specific ugly exhausting reality of crying when you have been not crying for months. It goes on for a while. Satoru's shoulder stays against his the entire time, solid and warm and not going anywhere, and at some point Suguru stops trying to stop it and just lets it happen because he is so tired, he is so tired of managing everything, he is so tired of holding things closed.

Eventually the worst of it passes. Not because anything is resolved. Just because the body runs out.

Suguru sits with his eyes closed in the aftermath. Wrung out. The particular hollow emptiness of having expelled something that had been taking up a great deal of room.

"I don't know what I am anymore," he says. His voice is wrecked. "I don't know if I can keep going like this. I don't know if there's still a reason."

Satoru is quiet for a moment.

"I know," he says. Not it'll be fine. Not don't say that. Just the two words, clean and plain, an acknowledgment with no agenda attached.

"You can't know," Suguru says, without heat. "You're —" he gestures vaguely. Satoru. The sun. All of that.

"No." Satoru's voice is steady. "I don't understand it the same way. I know I don't." A pause. "But I understand that you've been drowning since August and you've been doing it completely alone, and I've been sitting here every night and I didn't —" something moves through his expression. "You should have told me."

"What would you have done."

"Something." He sounds almost frustrated, which for Satoru means he is very frustrated. "I don't know what, but something, Suguru. I wouldn't have just — you sat there every night and let me put films on while you were —" he stops. "I didn't know how bad it was. I knew something was wrong and I didn't know how bad."

"I didn't want to burden you."

The silence that follows is a very specific kind.

"You're an idiot," Satoru says.

Suguru laughs. It comes out broken and surprised and slightly wet, but it is a laugh, the first real one in months, and it hurts a little in the way that using a muscle you've forgotten hurts.

Satoru looks at him when he does it. Something in his face shifts into something softer and more serious, something that sits underneath all the noise Satoru usually makes and doesn't often surface.

"I love you," he says.

It lands simply. No performance, no decoration. The way Satoru says the things he means absolutely — stripped of everything unnecessary, no escape route built in. Suguru goes very still.

"Satoru —"

"I'm not finished." He shifts to face him more fully, and his eyes are very clear, very direct. "I love you, and I should have pushed harder, and I'm sorry about Infinity, I'm sorry I didn't notice, I'm sorry I've been —" he exhales. "I know I'm not easy to stand next to. I know what it costs. I'm not —" for a moment he looks like something rare and brief, which is Satoru Gojo genuinely uncertain. "I don't want you to be standing in the dark. I didn't know you were. And I know that's not good enough but I need you to —" he stops. Starts again. "Let me in. I want to understand it. I want you to stop carrying it alone."

Suguru looks at his hands.

He is so tired. He has been so tired for so long that he has forgotten what the absence of it feels like, the same way you forget what it feels like to breathe through both nostrils until suddenly you can again. The weight has been his entire weather for months. He doesn't know who he is without it. He doesn't know if there's anything left underneath it.

But.

Satoru's shoulder is against his. Satoru is looking at him, right at him, not through him and not past him, and he said I love you like it was simply true and had been true and would continue being true regardless of what Suguru did with it.

Suguru doesn't want to carry it alone anymore.

He doesn't say this. He can't. The words are too large and he is too emptied out and his voice is still wrecked.

"Okay," he says instead.

Satoru waits.

"Okay," Suguru says again. Quieter. Something is setting itself down. Just for now — he is not fixed, nothing about this is fixed, the hatred is still in him like a splinter he can feel when he moves wrong, and Riko is still dead, and the curses are still waiting, and none of that has changed. But he is so tired of holding the door closed. He is so tired of the effort of it. "I'll — okay. I'll try."

Satoru doesn't make it into anything. Doesn't push, doesn't perform relief, doesn't ask him to define what trying means. He just nods once, and leans back against the wall, and Suguru leans back beside him, and the room settles around them.

Outside the window the snow is coming down again, pale and indifferent and very quiet.

Tomorrow everyone comes back. The school fills again. Whatever this suspended, strange, empty winter has been — just the two of them, the empty halls, the films, the routine built out of Satoru's stubbornness and Suguru's inability to keep saying no — it will become something that happened. Something they carry forward.

Suguru looks at the snow.

(Don't waver.)

The words sit differently. He is not sure he believes them yet. He is not sure he believes much of anything yet. But Satoru's shoulder is warm against his, and this time there is no Infinity between them, and Suguru is still here, which is not nothing.

He closes his eyes.

He is still here.