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every night i kill time
tripwires and neon lights
the world is less alone
when you find me, find me
can we try this again?
is it in my control?
before it even began,
i felt the wires coming close
coming close
At midnight the city roads belong to Gojo Satoru because he says they do. This is usually enough to make it gospel truth.
He drives one-handed, stupid effervescent grin plastered on his stupid effervescent face. His sunglasses are perched on the slope of his nose in spite of the late hour. At one intersection he leans his head out the window and flashes bright-whites and devil-may-care dimples at pedestrians and passersby and at anyone who will look at him.
Suguru has been tasked with the music. He takes this on with the grave solemnity that he does with most things. “Give us something punchy, Getou,” Satoru says, smacking his lips around a piece of hard candy. The radio hisses through stations until it catches on something exigent and ecstatic. Suguru stops it there because he’s feeling generous and because it’s Satoru’s favorite band.
“D’aww,” croons Satoru, “Asian Kung-Fu Generation. You adore me.”
Satoru is pleased and therefore so is the world as far as Suguru is concerned.
Shoko hums to the melody and Satoru occasionally sings along, off-key and discordant and loud, loud, loud. Neon lights paint the three of them in pastel ribbons from all angles through the dark glass, pink on Suguru’s knuckles where his hand hangs out the window, green on Shoko’s bruised knees, blue on Satoru’s mouth where he laughs at nothing and everything but mostly at his own jokes.
Satoru laughs more often then.
The sound spills out of him like loose change from a torn coin-purse. His laughter is a kind of contagion by virtue of its own insistence. It spreads to the corners of Shoko’s and Suguru’s helpless mouths and makes its home there by demand.
Shoko smokes with her head tilted back against the seat and lets the ash go wherever it may. Her miniskirt is ridden just high enough that the night air brushes over her thighs through the open sunroof like a lover’s kiss. Suguru watches the roadside lights flit by and multiply and vanish, and thinks of desire. How it unveils itself like those passing storefronts and streetlamps: in fickle intervals, in brief flashes, one second there and then absent in the next breath.
When he leans back between the two front seats to steal the cigarette from Shoko’s fingers, his fingers sidle along the bird-bone metacarpals on the back of her hand. She lets him keep it. At the next red light Satoru turns, takes the cigarette back from Suguru’s mouth, and for one brief second keeps his face too close to Suguru’s before leaning back to place it between Shoko’s lips. She smiles.
The smoke rises in a little spectral gray-blue plume and dissipates into nothing.
∞
They frequent arcades where the carpet is stained with spilled soft drinks and reeks of mildew, where the screens blink and shriek and fling their lurid little heavens into their faces.
Satoru, infuriating in all arenas, is unapologetically good at everything immediately and in turn is incredibly obnoxious about it. He claims the Six Eyes have nothing to do with his finesse. Wins must come from his own hands first and foremost. He finds a devilish sort of thrill in the conquering, in the empirical arithmetics of victory. Victory comes often enough to disrupt the bell curve. Ergo he is the best, because the best is Gojo Satoru.
“The math tracks,” he says, like his very existence isn’t also a rare anomaly in the cold calculus of the universe.
He attacks every arcade machine like it is a personal challenge until they yield to him like an exorcised curse. Even his losses come with style. Especially his losses. He gracefully accepts those with the saintly air of a monk. Suguru loves him more in those moments. It is more honest than the winning, he muses.
When Shoko bitches at the ease with which Satoru handily wins a two-player brawl, he says with a princely sort of insolence, “sounds like a skill issue.” Incredulous, she scoffs and pinches his side and he yelps like a scorned puppy.
Shoko wins at the games that require nerve and a steady, surgical hand, the ones where trigger-discipline and timing matters more than simple bravado. She stands with one hip cocked to the side, expression unimpressed and exacting, unconsciously chewing at her bottom lip such that Satoru keeps glancing away as though the game has incensed him more.
Suguru is more cerebral in his endeavors. He plays like he believes that these sorts of silly contests are nothing more than a character study. He is not interested in triumph unless it reveals something useful. He discovers it usually does.
He learns that Satoru becomes gentlest precisely when he is most certain of winning, learns that Shoko gets quieter the more delighted she is. He learns, too, how quickly Satoru can be knocked off-kilter by the sight of Shoko chuckling with her head turned away, delicate throat bared for a second under the arcade glare, or purely by Suguru rolling up his sleeves and exposing long forearms elegantly mapped and lined with gorgeous vascularity.
In a blind corner between two flickering screens, Shoko catches Satoru by the front of his shirt to stop him from crowing too obnoxiously over some ridiculous victory. He is still grinning when she kisses him, quickly and sharply, enough to interrupt him but not entirely to cow. When she shoves him away, Suguru is leaning against the change machine watching them with a smile too placid to be strictly innocent. Satoru recovers, points at him and says, “you saw nothing.”
To which Suguru replies, “of course not.”
Afterwards, Satoru keeps a few of their prize tickets folded in his wallet as souvenirs, reverential and careful with them. Months later one falls out between old receipts and expired train passes, and he looks at the cheap strip of printed paper like it is the molted skin shed from some smaller, more exotic creature they once all belonged to.
He tucks it back into the wallet and does not allow himself to think of Suguru.
∞
When they sneak into clubs they do it with the egos of small gods, wielding youth and beauty like easy currency. Satoru talks the door into ingress, voice smooth, pale eyelashes lowered over hypnotic blue irises. This is one of his more crude methods of seduction. Suguru stands just behind him with that mild expression that manages to make people feel that they have already conceded something. Shoko says almost nothing, which by default gives her final authority. Their combined charm is usually enough to bait some underpaid doorman into concession.
This night they succeed.
“Too easy~,” Satoru says, in that sing-song and sure way of his, as he saunters through the doorway like he is a king arriving to court fashionably late and all the more admired for the fact. Shoko says to Suguru that Satoru is more brat than regent, and he nods in tacit agreement.
Inside, bodies move in the dark in fluid waves. Bass travels through the ribcage in booming tremors, reverberating with each robust pulse. Coruscating light slides over glitter-kissed faces and tight, gossamer-clad bodies and provocatively bared skin, over glass rims, over the glossy sheen of mouths bent close. The dancefloor is all appetite and illicit powders and fleeting collisions.
In these places Satoru stops looking singular. Here everyone is also trying to be noticed. It amuses him. He leans down to shout things into the shell of Shoko’s ear that begin as mockery and end in euphemism. He places his hand at her waist to keep his mouth near enough to be heard over the din of the crowd. Shoko shivers.
He dims Infinity enough to root himself in this nocturnal jungle but keeps his sunglasses on to steal back some of the excess. He presses a drink into Suguru’s hand and forgets he has done it because someone with glitter at their throat says something foolish and so now he must immediately go dismantle it out of principle. Suguru watches him go with a smile that is nearly fraternal until it is not. Shoko catches the change and catches him catching her catching it. Between them passes one of those glances that contains enough meaningful data to act as a shared secret. The grin on his mouth sharpens and then recedes.
Later the dance floor crowds the three of them together as if to say: stop pretending that the touching is merely incidental, you fools.
Satoru comes back flushed, shirt glued to a chest damp with sweat. His grin is edged with manic overstimulation. He catches Shoko by the hip as he passes and leaves his hand there, thumb digging into the groove by her hipbone. Suguru steps in close behind her a little later, not pressing flush, just near enough that the heat radiating from his body enters her back through the slinky fabric of her dress.
Even here, among the swaying throngs, they belong solely to their own private ecology. For a few suspended beats the three of them move like something with a shared bloodstream, all tangled limbs and tangled hearts. Shoko finds the shared proximity heady and more than a little maddening. When she turns her head, Suguru is there. The kiss he steals from her is languid and long, almost decorous, nearly chaste. He tastes like cigarettes and straight liquor and remembered afternoons in the library. Satoru sees it and laughs once, astonished and then delighted, and drags Shoko toward him and takes his turn with all the showmanship he brings to everything, only to go unexpectedly soft the moment his mouth meets hers. He tastes like artificial sweetener and alcohol and spearmint. She is at once dizzy and so unbearably in love with the both of them it stings enough to keep her grounded and then enough to remain steady.
They end up in a locked bathroom, sharing cigarettes and a bottle of clear spirits no one remembers acquiring, while music pounds through the graffitied walls. Shoko has kicked off her heels and looks vaguely disgusted with herself for doing so. There are sticky stains of unknown origins on the tile.
Someone has scrawled: ’if you remember me, i don’t care who forgets’ next to a mirror laden with scratches and smears of lipstick on the glass.
Beneath it: ‘i haven’t forgotten your mother haha’
Satoru sits on the counter with his knees parted, head tipped back against the wall. He’s drunker than Suguru and Shoko both, which is not unusual. Something-something-his-cursed-technique. What normally takes Shoko five drinks takes Satoru two.
Speech just this side of slurred, Satoru petulantly complains, “people insist on mistaking me as nicer than I am.”
Shoko, now leaning against the sink, dryly answers, “it’s because you’re just too pretty. Your face is like a bear trap.” She reaches out and squeezes his cheek, perhaps a touch too hard. Satoru bats her hand away with an exaggerated whine.
Suguru is standing between the long lines of Satoru’s legs, hands cupped over his knees.
He laughs and says, “both of you misconstrue that attraction for insult. One day it will cost more.” But he says it with his mouth ready for the next drink, oversized sweater slipping down from his clavicle and shoulder, the first lines of his muscled chest visible. Satoru looks at him a beat too long.
When Suguru inches forward to take the bottle from Satoru’s hand, Satoru inclines his face up and instead reaches out to carefully tuck a sweat-damp tendril of inky hair behind Suguru's ear. His slender fingers then dance down along the contours of Suguru's jawline to hook beneath his chin. He gently draws him closer. Suguru follows.
Satoru's lips brush once against Suguru’s, ridiculously casual and thus absolutely not casual at all. Suguru shudders out a shaky little breath. Shoko feels a liquid warmth lick down her spine and goads them on further, to which they eagerly oblige.
∞
Bonfires are another of their favorite activities. Everyone looks less obfuscated in flame. Faces take on small gravities and the night beyond the ring of light is a restless creature edging for sleep. Their friends arrive overeager with too many bottles and an assortment of various junk foods and stories polished by repetition ready to be told and possibly ignored in turn.
There is Haibara, alive then and too earnest and too good for a world filled with curses and premature death, sunbeam cinnamon roll that he is, dancing and laughing, arm thrown around anyone’s shoulder that allows the contact (and they do); Nanami too grave and too serious and already too burdened by the weight of those harshities, watching Haibara with a palpable and yet unspoken affection; Utahime with a chip on her shoulder and probably already prepped to wield it against Satoru like a prison shank should he even briefly cross into her sightlines; Ijichi, sweet and shy and a little removed, politely cleaning up the aftermaths of their festivities and looking misguidedly apologetic for it, trying and failing not to notice how Shoko fits too seamlessly in between Satoru and Suguru for it to be anything as neat as platonic.
These are the rarely-beloved.
Sometimes there are friends of friends, too. They are usually Satoru and Suguru’s favorite victims to single out. One of these friends-of-a-friend brings a guitar and does not deserve it, according to Satoru, who absconds with the instrument and skips away like a deranged bard, strumming with [un]surprising skill. He is all flourish and aplomb. No one rushes to steal it back for the affronted because Satoru is in fact preferable to listen to, a fact that no one likes but everyone appreciates regardless.
Shoko will later think of Homer, very long after these nights have come and gone, when ghosts are her only companions and even cheap whiskey and incessant chainsmoking cannot soothe their wailing, that the long dead poet deserves begrudging ownership of the truth: they indeed would never be lovelier than they were then. Yes, everything is more beautiful when you are doomed. The rub is that it is typically only in retrospect. The details are minor until they are not.
Satoru, when drunk, becomes even more himself, which is to say he is either miracle or disaster or both depending on who has to suffer the breadth of his mercurial whims. His charm loosens, his cruelty sharpens, his loneliness bares its fangs. It makes itself known in the strange places: the overlong stare at the blue-black beyond the fire, the way his grin falters minutely when other people pair off without thinking; in the the brief hint of relief when Suguru drops into the sand at his side and says nothing at all, shoulder against shoulder, bare ankles lit in honey hues by fire, idle hands seeking purchase.
Suguru is a different beast. He grows quieter the more he drinks, like the liquor descends through him with a lamp and he is watching the rooms inside himself light up one by one. When he deigns to speak it is usually devastating and annoyingly well-phrased and appointed. He sees through lesser people’s flimsy veneers and whittles those small treacheries down to their scaffolding with characteristic ease. Satoru seems to relish an almost erotic kind of enjoyment in those moments, borderline sadistic, indulgent pride extended towards his one perceived equal. Together the two of them synthesize into a single breed of monster, and it thrills and frightens at once, though no one admits to that either, of course.
Shoko, who is often inaccurately accused of insouciance by people too dull to assess her properly, becomes nigh tender in these hours, though her tenderness should never be mistaken as a soft or plush thing. It possesses raw edges. It comes under the guise of a perfectly timed quip, as bored correction, as a hand at the scruff, steering someone away from a fight they will most certainly not win. Sometimes it is a soft pulse of RCT pouring into a cut or abrasion brought forth by a bout of unnecessary rough-housing, in which her prior warnings went pointedly unheeded.
One time, they travel an hour beyond Tokyo's boundaries to Yuigahama Beach. “For the change of scenery,” Satoru had said.
Embers gather around the flame and rise and vanish. Smoke gets into everything. Into eyes, into clothing fibers, beneath the flesh. Shoko sits on a piece of driftwood with her feet planted apart and a bottle balanced between her palms and concludes that inebriation is interesting only when it strips people down to one true, clarifying note. She finds most of them, more often than not, are disappointing and not worth further consideration.
She stands and kneels in the sand to relight Satoru’s cigarette because his hands are too unsteady with drink and laughter to manage, and he’s inhaling around nothing and it is therefore annoying in Shoko’s correct opinion. He looks up at her from that low angle, black pupils overblown in shattered-glass irises above the rim of his sunglasses, the shelf of his collarbones shadowed in sharp relief.
She kisses him then only because he is looking at her as if to say, I dare you. When she draws back, Suguru is watching from the other side of the fire, his dark intelligent eyes amused and limned in flameglow, forearms propped on his knees.
She plucks the cigarette from Satoru’s fingers, purses it between her lips, and lights it with a struck match. She returns it back to his mouth without fanfare. He looks a little dazed; frankly a little stupid.
She then walks over to Suguru with the same match still burning down between her nicotine-stained fingers. He takes it from her, drops it into the sand, and kisses her as if he has all the patience in the world, which is to say this is when he is at his most dangerous.
Satoru makes a ruined little sound of laughter and simply says, “that is so fucking hot.”
That same night, at the 3 am hour, the three of them end up down by the waterline where the noise from the others arrives muffled and delayed. Satoru is barefoot, sand caked in between his toes. Suguru has rolled the cuffs of his trousers just below his knees to stand in the shallow surf. Shoko passes the bottle between them and says, to no one and both of them and to all of the indifferent gods above, “this can’t possibly end well.”
The this that is them. The this that is uncomplicated happiness in a life that devours the young before they ever are bestowed the simple courtesy of forming a wrinkle.
Satoru answers at once and with false courage: “that’s never stopped us before.”
Silently, Suguru takes the bottle and drinks. No one says what all three are thinking, which is that endings have very little to do with preference or even fate or how much you push back against those endings. The bottle comes back to Shoko warm from both of their mouths. She drinks from the same place and savors the taste.
Not with a bang, but with a whimper, she thinks. That is how this will end.
∞
There are the smaller nights, too, which in hindsight will prove more affecting because they go spectacularly unnoticed in the contemporary. There are shitty fast food dinners eaten on curbs under the persistent hum of neon signs and chased down with cheap cans of alcoholic beverages burgled from the nearest 7-Eleven. Satoru steals food from both of them with the impudence of the chosen one. He dips the fries in ice cream because all things sugary are his greatest vice and thus outrageously and frequently overindulged. Shoko cringes with barely contained disgust.
Suguru reads bad lines out loud from fortune cookies and invents better ones, not all original and occasionally pulled from the broader catalogue of his reading habits.
“Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken,” he deadpans.
“Did you just rip that from Fight Club?” Satoru asks, chuckling. Suguru shrugs and crumples the slip of paper up into a tight little ball and flicks it at Satoru’s forehead.
Once, at the top of Tokyo Tower: Satoru steps up onto the rail that bifurcates the lower portion of the observation windows and braces against the glass, arms spread, looking like some kind of flightless idiotic bird in prorogate free-fall. He stares out into the blinking lights beyond and invites Shoko to join him. She declines because “absolutely fucking not”. Suguru does too but only because an employee is already moving towards them, mouth open mid-scold.
There is a night where Shoko is sprawled in the back seat on the drive back to Tokyo Jujutsu from something or another, half-asleep and listening to the two boys in front trade theories about power and beauty and whether those are merely different facades worn by the hungry. Inevitably it slips into matters theological and therefore becomes much less interesting to Shoko.
“People only worship what scares them,” Satoru says.
“No,” Suguru replies, eyes on the road this time because Satoru has finally surrendered the keys, “people worship what allows them to shirk those fears long enough to stay sane.”
Satoru hums in thought. Shoko, eyes still closed behind the stirrings of a hangover, mumbles: “you’re both a couple of pretentious dickheads.”
Neither of them deny the accusation.
∞
There are rooftops and cheap beer and stolen jackets and one impossible summer in which the hours seem less to pass than to tumble, one into another, bright and careless as beads dropping from a severed rosary. On one rooftop Satoru lies with his head cradled in Shoko’s lap because he claims, very gravely, that he is too drunk to sit upright, though his wry little smile gives the lie away. She cards her fingers through the soft messy shock of his white hair and allows him this vanity. Satoru practically purrs.
Suguru stretches out on the other side of Satoru and drapes one arm over his stomach to prevent him from rolling towards the ledge during a fit of uncontrolled laughter. Shoko looks down at the two of them and thinks that men become most dangerous when they are beautiful and think themselves temporary.
She traces the outside line of Satoru’s ear. Suguru’s hand tightens once where it rests over Satoru’s hip. Then Satoru lifts his face toward Suguru without opening his eyes, and Suguru, after the briefest of pauses, bends and kisses him with a tenderness that is nearly painful to witness and all the sweeter for its aftertaste. Shoko watches the kiss move through Satoru before it reaches his mouth and her heart gives a sharp little twist. After, he turns his head a fraction and captures her hand where it has come to rest on the side of his face, and kisses her knuckles with a sleepy kind of satisfaction. The three remain silent, suspended in the moment like dumb dust motes. They think they are accumulating memories. In truth they are exquisitely manufacturing future pain with the ignorant folly of the arrogantly young and beautiful.
They are, after all, Homer’s bespoke doomed.
The worst has not yet come to pass and so there is no need to firmly believe that it will. To the unordained and uncultured in grief, the world at their fingertips is only another way of saying the world has not yet closed its fist.
Satoru feels this in brief flashes that come and go, ugly little intuitions he outruns with irreverence and peels of laughter. Sometimes at a red light he will look in the rearview and find Shoko smoking with her mouth set in that dry line of hers, Suguru beside her with his head in the lee of her neck and his lashes dark against his cheeks, and love will course through him so abruptly it feels less like a feeling than a Black Flash to the sternum. He wants to take that love and bite it. To macerate it between his teeth. To swallow it down and leave it to the unnoticed processes of digestion. To make a lame joke over it. To spend it before it can become a debt insurmountable.
Suguru’s prescience registers in the quieter recesses of his mind. He senses the future in the way some people predict the start of a migraine. Not yet pain, but a slight alteration in the light, an encroaching wrongness at the borders of things, an aura of discomfort that makes brighter things more difficult to trust. And Shoko, who understands from the start that joy is never safest in the hands of those who deserve it most, watches the two of them with the unsentimental devotion of one already rehearsing and practicing grief and hating herself for it the while.
This is precisely why she stays. This is why she drinks with them and drives with them and bears them and humors them and follows them through the cracks in doorways they should not be peering into.
This is why she permits their bodies to find hers in the dark and finds theirs in return, hands drawn to impossible flesh, a bony knee against a bonier knee, jaw to shoulder and cheek to chest and in all other configurations; fingers scraping against Suguru’s scalp in the cage of her thighs as he draws her closer to a sweeter sort of oblivion; Satoru above her and all around her and inside of her and looking at her with an intensity that suggests he does not believe she will not simply cease to exist in the time of one thrust of hips to the next; when Suguru and Satoru enfold into one another and she watches, rather than participates, with the sickest kind of voyeuristic affection and want, as they bring each other to the brink and then plunge over it. She does this because she knows these precious hours and days and weeks and years are rare precisely in proportion to how damned they are.
∞
Close to dawn, after one of those long wandering nights that begins with controlled chaos and ends in near hush, they end up on a hill above the cityscape with cold takeout filled with sticky nuggets of meat and noodles and melting mochi between them and someone’s sweater under Shoko’s shoulders and back.
The sky ahead is lightening in a halting gradient, sun looming somewhere beneath. Satoru is lying on his back with one arm flung over his eyes, silent at last, shirt rumpled open, one pale strip of stomach bared, all hipbones and strong lean lines at the naval. Suguru sits with his knees drawn up to his chest, arms loose around them, gaze lowered as if he is spectator to some primeval thing stirring beneath the earth.
(No one has ever looked younger and no one has ever looked more condemned.)
Speech seems superfluous and so they do not speak for a time. After a while Suguru says, eyes still boring into the dirt, “do you ever think there is something wrong with us that can’t be fixed by being loved?”
Satoru’s arm drops from his eyes, suddenly aware. Shoko glances at Suguru briefly and then looks to the skyline.
“Obviously,” Shoko says.
Satoru lets out a breath that might also be a laugh and says: “yeah.”
Suguru nods as if some internal argument has been mollified and then cast aside.
Then Satoru adds after a beat, “doesn’t make the love less vital, though.”
He turns his head and looks at Suguru, then at Shoko. Whatever sits in his gaze then is too raw and too naked and too hungry to categorize cleanly. Suguru meets it with the old calm that could never really be calm. Shoko meets it unsmiling and her pulse steady only by practiced force.
They seem to collectively decide at once that there is no need to give further breath to feelings, especially not in the utterance of three paltry words, especially not when those words are compelled out of the ephemera of adolescent introspection. Nor is it the time for startled confessions when the answer is already married into the marrow of their teenaged bones and tidier when spoken through the language of flesh.
They are aware, with the stark kind of discernment that exists only while living inside of the thing, with all the bright and beautiful burdens and hungers of youth and all the shadows waiting just beyond them, that this collection of moments and memories and dreams that still burn under their skin is a triptych drawn in a way that will one day hurt the soul to remember. And so they sit and they lie and they stare and they touch and they eat and they taste and they choose to live inside of it until they cannot because one day it will be a bruise lovingly pressed but never and not before it has yet bloomed.
Satoru shifts closer to Shoko who shifts closer to Suguru who shifts closer to Satoru. The triangle closes.
They are gods and wolves and monsters all.