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There is a certain balancing act to visiting the House of the Children of the Star. Arrive too often and you are turned away, arrive during ceremonies and you are turned away with prejudice, teleport in and it won't end in anything but a fight. Weekday evenings are a solid enough bet. Satoru wouldn't put money on it, but on average it works out better than weekends.
"Your hair looks particularly shiny today, Manami," Satoru says when the door opens. He takes a step before she can close it again. "Is it a new conditioner?"
It is, he's seen the hair care subscription on her credit card statements. Should she really be using the cult's business card for personal expenses? Ah, not his business.
"Follow me, please," she only says.
Satoru could take this path in his sleep. Passes the double doors to the congregation room, two meeting rooms, the IT closet where Miguel is fiddling with some wires. Satoru waves without turning his head. In the break room, Mimiko and Nanako are playing badminton. Their glares are adorable. Satoru throws a pack of chocolates to the nearest one, ignoring Manami's grumble. He's tried hating them for their role in Suguru's defection, but they're just too cute. The chocolates aren't thrown back at him, which means that the poor kids aren't being plied with sugar enough here. He hopes Suguru isn't becoming a health nut. There's only so much that Satoru can take.
Past the courtyard, past the small gate, past the front door of the small house on the cult's grounds in which Suguru resides. Satoru pats himself on the back. His timing is perfect. Suguru is eating dinner.
"Suguru! You haven't been responding to my texts," Satoru says, settling in across from him at the table. Behind him, Manami vanishes somewhere, already forgotten.
Suguru sets his rice down on the table. "I changed my number."
"I've been texting the new one."
"Have you?" Suguru hums.
Is there a newer one? Satoru must be getting lax in his stalking. "I saw Larue on the way in. Have you replaced me with a newer model? I could wear heart-shaped nipple pasties for you."
"I'd prefer you didn't. It looks bad enough on him." Suguru leaves for a moment, then returns with a second bowl and chopsticks that he passes to Satoru. "And how have you been spending your time?"
"I have a fascinating new student," Satoru says as way of peacekeeping.
It's always easier to get Suguru to let him stay when Suguru thinks he's getting information out of him. Satoru starts with the important business, such as Yuuta's taste in ice cream, before continuing on to his high hopes for this year's students. It's nothing confidential. Just as Satoru has spies in the cult, so does Suguru in jujutsu society. Satoru's got two of the council members pinged as cultists. He likes to blackmail them about it occasionally just to keep them on their toes.
Suguru in turn tells him about Mimiko and Nanako. He keeps the cult shit to a minimum, only three tangents about monkeys that Satoru tunes out with the ease of long experience.
Satoru kisses him before he can get too caught up in it, pulling Suguru in from across the table. Suguru allows it. Nice. He tastes like his terrible tea, which is less pleasant, but it's not long before Satoru kisses the taste out of his mouth, until it's just them.
It's always nice when it's just them.
Later, when night has fallen and so have Suguru's usual reservations, and they're in bed together, Satoru thinks as he frequently does: I could kidnap you. Spirit you away to a Gojo clan property. Set up a barrier. He doesn't fool himself into thinking that he'd be able to keep Suguru, not forever, but a few days together would be nice. Suguru is a beast in bed when he's angry. And he usually is, beneath that fake smile.
"What would you say is the height of stupidity?" Satoru asks idly. His bedmate isn't asleep yet. They're in that nebulous stage between first and second rounds, when Suguru's pretending they won't go again.
"Hundred nighty centimeters," Suguru replies. "And a half."
"Wrong."
"Are you including your hair in your height these days?" Suguru tugs lightly at Satoru's hair for emphasis. "You haven't grown taller in five years."
"Have you been secretly measuring me?"
"Against myself, perhaps."
"Feeling me up in my sleep with a tape measure?"
"I don't know where you get these ideas from."
I would do it to you, Satoru thinks, absurdly. If the dimensions of your neck and skull would help me understand your twisty little brain, I would do it.
There was a period three or four years ago when Satoru gave marriage the old college try. Everything else had failed. It's not like he had anything to lose. He measured Suguru's ring finger with a spare piece of ribbon while Suguru slept. Satoru knew even as he did it that it wouldn't work, but it was a lark, dragging Shoko to a jewelry store and getting her opinion on them all. The salesman thought at first that the ring was for her. Satoru happily spent the next twenty minutes disabusing him of that notion with a highly redacted version of his and Suguru's grand love affair. In his tale, they were high school sweethearts who were cruelly torn apart by scheming parents, and now they worked at their parents' rival laundromats and met only under the full moon light. He and Shoko went out for drinks afterwards.
"Are we putting this down under masochism or sadism?" Shoko said at the time.
Gojo sipped at his cocktail. "Half and half. It'll be funny. Are you sure you don't want to be there for the proposal?"
"You couldn't pay me." Before Satoru could argue, and he would argue his point well, she added, "You really couldn't. I get secondhand embarrassment."
"You get secondhand amusement."
"Not about this," Shoko said. "Is this really how it's going to be the rest of our lives?"
"You know I don't believe in long-term plans. Aside from the big one." One stops believing in plans when one's best friend defects from society in the most public of ways. Very tragic stuff. "I'll invite you to the wedding."
Anyway, there wasn't a wedding, is the point. Who has the time for weddings these days? All that wedding planning, choosing flowers and tablecloths and getting overly sentimental in your vows and whatever the hell people do. And there's the fact that Suguru threw the back ring at him and they yelled at each other about how they're both so misunderstood and wah-wah and it was likely picked up off the ground the next day by some cult member. Maybe it was pawned or maybe it was reused for someone else's proposal. Satoru would have enjoyed dramatically throwing it into the sea, but if some cultists must find happiness on the back of his misfortune, then he'll begrudgingly allow it. Probably bad form to stalk every cult member until they cough it up. Suguru gets all overdramatic when Satoru makes his stalking too overt, as though he doesn't do the same in turn. He should have stuck a tracker inside the ring. Suguru's hair might have stood up in anger, all sexy-like.
Here and now, Suguru asks, "Are you reconsidering our arrangement?"
"What are you talking about?"
Suguru's voice is too even. "You visit less these days. I understand the position that you're in. You have a range of conflicting responsibilities. The teaching duties that you're so fond of already put a strain on your exorcisms. It wouldn't be unreasonable for things to come to an end."
Satoru rolls over onto his side to face him. Suguru doesn't do the same, continuing to stare up at the ceiling. That's fine; Satoru sees it all. "You turn me away half the times I visit. You can't expect me to knock every day like I did when we were seventeen. I don't have the stamina. Take pity."
"I don't want you to come every day," Suguru says in turn.
Satoru can't help it, the fondness. He reaches for Suguru, runs a hand along his arm, tugs at Suguru's fingers. Lingers only the briefest moment on his bare ring finger. I can't have you distracting me from the cause, Suguru once told him, closing the door on his face, and Satoru sees it as the highest of compliments. Only Satoru is a distraction for the fearsome curse user Getou Suguru. Likely, Suguru would allow his visits more frequently if Satoru didn't argue with him each time, but that's a lost cause. Only the bed is a neutral zone.
"You don't want me on a schedule," Satoru says. "I've tried to optimize for the best chance I have of being allowed in, after a long stretch of trial and error mind you. I'll adjust it if you tell me how to make you happy."
Suguru stays quiet. Satoru wasn't expecting an answer anyway. He stretches an arm around his chest, kisses his shoulder, then his nape. Give it another few years and they'll have been doing this for more than half their lives. It's a miracle, one he doesn't take for granted, not with how much Suguru makes him work for it. It's what he gets for falling in love with someone who's at all times only a hop and a skip away from throwing the rest of his sanity out with the bathwater. At least Suguru makes it fun.
"I'll come more often," Satoru says. Maybe he'll try experimenting with different days of the week again. Maybe Wednesdays are the key.
It won't make Suguru happy. Underneath all that anger and megalomania, there's not much that can, really. He assumes Suguru knows this. Or maybe he's too in denial for it. Or maybe Suguru's found the path to happiness and he walks it when Satoru isn't watching him. Unlikely, that one.
"The cause is more important than personal happiness," Suguru says eventually, his fingers carding through Satoru's hair.
Satoru pouts even if Suguru won't appreciate his cute expression, still not looking at him properly. "No cult talk in bed. We agreed to this. It's either cult talk or blowjobs, you only get one."
"You don't enforce it. I assume you're similarly lax with your students. All sweets and no discipline."
"Maybe I want them to join my cult. We could have rival cults. We'll set up our headquarters across the street from yours like a rival fast food chain." Actually, now there's an idea…
"You're impossible."
"Limitless. Impossible. Same difference." Ah, Suguru might kick him out of bed for this, but, "It's not too late to—"
A hand closes over his mouth. It doesn't leave, not even when Satoru nips at his skin. At least Suguru's looking at him now.
Come on, run away with me, Satoru thinks, and he's seventeen again. In some ways he'll always be seventeen. Youthful spirit. Perfect looks. Banging on the cult's door because teleporting in without invitation means that Suguru won't see him. Ditch this place. Ditch the whole society. What do our ambitions amount to at the end of the day? It's all a bunch of nonsense.
"You're always like this," Suguru starts.
Satoru lifts Suguru's hand from his mouth only long enough to reply, "You could wear me out some more."
Suguru doesn't answer immediately. When he does, there's something weary in his tone. He takes his hand away, but not his gaze. "Don't you get tired of this?"
"No."
"No?"
Satoru sighs, all put-upon. "I don't know what you want me to say. No, I don't get tired of you. I never have. I'll be back again sooner next time. I've let you get too complacent. It's my fault, darling. You've been feeling underappreciated."
Ah, there's that expression. He's thinking about smothering me with a pillow, Satoru thinks, delighted. Sometimes Suguru even acts on the impulse. It's very cute, very high school.
Worse than being smothered: Suguru moves over onto his side, facing away from Satoru. It's too far. Immediately pressing up against his back, Satoru settles his chin on Suguru's shoulder and watches him reach for something in the top drawer of his bedside table.
It's a ring. Ah, maybe kidnapping is still on the table. A romantic kidnapping. "You kept it."
"Of course I kept it."
Is this an of course type situation? Maybe it is. Maybe he's supposed to have known Suguru likes useless knickknacks. "I love you. Beyond reason."
"I know."
"Don't Han Solo me. He's not as cool as me. He doesn't even have a cursed technique."
Suguru turns the ring over a few times before slipping it on. "There is very little in this world that is beautiful. You have always been the shining exception. I love you, Satoru."
But not beyond reason, Satoru thinks. It's alright. Well, not quite, but the lightness in his chest when he sees the ring on Suguru's finger is enough. Satoru kisses him about it, from his lips down to that ring that he thought he'd never see Suguru wear. It's a perfect fit.
When Satoru next sees him, Suguru is still wearing it.
"I won't do a ceremony," Suguru warns.
"That's fine. I'll have one without you. I'll send you pictures."
"Don't you dare cast someone else as my body double," his lover grumbles, but he kisses him, too.
Satoru doesn't get himself a ring. He goes back to the shop, tries on a dozen, buys a necklace to tease Utahime with. All of the rings fit wrong, he tells Shoko, trying to make her choose for him until he gets them both kicked out of the jeweler's. It's a good thing one arrives in the mail for him.