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“You know it’s not going to work, right?”
They’re walking, walking through the crowd, nearly touching, and as long as they’re walking it’s okay, because Suguru isn’t walking away.
“Like, leaving aside the morality,” Satoru continues, waving his hand, as if the morality is nothing. “Leaving aside the intrinsic logic. It’s just not going to work, Suguru.”
“It’s going to work,” he says quietly.
This is what unnerves Satoru the most about all of it, this cool certainty. They’re walking together and it’s an ordinary day, late summer and blindingly hot, and Suguru is dressed in black and his hair is swept back and he is utterly certain.
“Hey. Listen to me.”
“I’m done listening.”
Satoru stops him, his hand barely touching Suguru’s shoulder. It’s a gamble—Suguru could shove him off, could keep walking, but he doesn’t. He just stands there, a black silhouette. This close Satoru can tell he doesn’t even smell like himself anymore, just pain and unwashed hair and the raw copper reek of blood under his nails. The person he loved is gone, or going.
“It’s doomed, Suguru,” he says, speaking the name so carefully, like an incantation, a spell he needs to get just right. “Think it through. You’d need to kill them all at once, instantaneously, painlessly. Otherwise more curses would just—”
Suguru’s hands are trembling.
“Stop.”
“—they would generate instantly,” he says. “Can you even imagine the power and size of them, from a massacre like that? And then the fear from the rest of them, the ones who know it’s coming—”
“Satoru,” his friend says, and there’s an edge in his voice, not a threat but something threatening to fall apart.
“No, let me finish,” Satoru says. “Let me finish what you started.” He drops his hand to Suguru’s, takes his dirty fingers. They shake in his, cold, like a corpse wearing his friend’s face.
“Do you know what happened in that village, after you were done?” he asks. “Did you even see it? Like a storm cloud over the countryside. We had to send three students out—”
He stops himself, because one of Suguru’s shoulders has fallen, his whole body listing and slumped, like a ship that’s cracked in half.
“Suguru,” he says softly. “Suguru, please. Come here.”
He doesn’t move, but he doesn’t resist when Satoru holds him, hands slipping up his arms and then tugging him into an embrace. He’s absurdly skinny, his skin is like ash, and Satoru, Satoru the Six Eyes, Satoru who sees absolutely everything, has no idea how he missed the fact that his best friend was falling apart.
He holds Suguru closer, kissing his temples. The right, then the left. Something about balance.
“There’s no point,” Suguru rasps. “There was—if there was no point—”
“Sometimes there isn’t a p—”
“I need one,” Suguru snarls, shoving him back. He’s weak, starving—Satoru catches his wrists easily. Suguru looks at him like he’s not even seeing him, dark eyes shining, shining. “All this misery,” he says. “All this senseless death. And I’m part of the cycle of senselessness, and I don’t know how to—”
He chokes, like he’s choking on blood.
“I should take myself out of it,” he says, eyes full of need. “I should take myself—Satoru—”
He looks insane. Satoru knows it, the people around them stopping to stare at this lopsided man, unkempt, uncared for. Satoru didn’t take care of him.
“Suguru,” he murmurs. “Let’s keep talking. Not here, let’s find some privacy.”
“There’s no point in talking,” Suguru spits. “What’s done is done. What’s done is—is irreversible, and I’m—”
Satoru touches his shoulder again, preparing to steer. Willing, still.
“You’re going to keep talking,” he says. “With me.”
—
Suguru’s apartment is a fourth-floor walkup, dark and filthy, the rooms covered in trash. Crumpled papers, half-finished bags of chips, soiled napkins, discarded cans. The windows are shut and covered, everything permeated with blue darkness. The wiring has been torn from the kitchen lights and Satoru is afraid to ask. When he flips the switch there’s a little glitter of electricity.
He’s been here before. It was never like this.
He clears off the couch and leads Suguru there, still holding his hand like a child. Like Suguru is the child, fragile and small; like Satoru is the child, clinging to someone he trusts, someone he’s afraid to lose.
“Are you going to execute me?” Suguru asks, emotionless.
He doesn’t know what to say. He should, probably. He’s supposed to. He’s furious with Suguru, Suguru with the lank black silk of his hair hanging down, Suguru with his sharply angled face, Suguru who’s become unrecognizable to them both. He sits silently, head bowed, picking at his skin.
Satoru stops his hands, stops the wound.
“I don’t think I could ever hurt you,” he says. “Not as bad as you’ve hurt me.”
Suguru nods.
“Yes,” he says. “I’m sure that’s true.”
The last time they were here together, they watched old movies, terrible ones. Satoru kept making incredulous comments and Suguru kept shushing him, laughing, eyes full of mischief. They had gone to his parents’ for lunch.
“I’m going to brush your hair,” Satoru says, getting up. “It’s a mess.”
Nightmares are like this, the way everything is familiar but distorted, poorly remembered. The books Suguru loved on the floor, their spines broken. He finds Suguru’s comb discarded on the bathroom floor. The mirror is broken, a little blood on the glass. It matches the scrapes on Suguru’s knuckles.
“You should take better care of yourself,” he says, settling behind Suguru again. The way his body is bent, his shoulder blades too sharp—he’s like a broken doll. Satoru straightens him up, half-worried that his head will fall off. That happened in nightmares all the time. “You shouldn’t let it get this bad.”
“You’re one to talk,” Suguru says quietly.
Satoru smiles a little.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, parting Suguru’s hair down the middle. It’s knotted and oily, but the oil helps work through the knots. He can’t imagine getting to this point. Cannot begin to imagine the massacre, when he can’t imagine the hair.
“There’s more than one solution, you know,” he says. “Like in math. Once you reach the higher-order problems—”
“Like me,” Suguru says. “The higher-order problem.”
Satoru kills a noise in his throat.
“Suguru,” he says. “You’re a person. You’re not a problem.”
His friend shrugs.
“I don’t really think I’m a person,” he says.
And they’ll need to get to that, will need to address the awful enormity of it, the sickness and wrongness in every inch of Suguru’s body, but they can’t do it now. Satoru is the strongest, but not right now.
“I’m talking about the problem you’re trying to solve,” he says. “The curses.”
“And I’m talking about the problem you’re trying to solve,” Suguru says mildly, “which is me.”
“At the moment I’m just trying to solve your hair.”
The apartment is so muted, so quiet, not even the whine of a buzzing light, only the sound of their breathing and the soft noises of the comb working through Suguru’s hair. Satoru can’t remember the last time they had a quiet moment together. Three months ago? Five?
“It’s not worth the trouble,” Suguru says, not talking about his hair.
Satoru puts the comb down.
“The thing is,” he says, wrapping his arms around Suguru, “the thing is, you’re always going to be worth the trouble.” He hates that he’s crying into Suguru’s dirty shirt, hates that Suguru has a dirty shirt, hates that anything bad has ever happened to the two of them but would settle for nothing ever happening to Suguru, if he had to. Unfortunately Suguru has happened to Suguru.
“You’re worth the trouble,” he says again, face resting on the broken curve of Suguru’s back.
—
Afterwards, when Satoru has soaped his back and washed his hair; when he’s made them bowls of ramen Suguru has barely touched, except to tug the yoke from the jammy egg like he’s removing an eye; when he’s bagged most of the garbage and cracked the windows open; when the television is playing with the sound off and the blue light makes Suguru look like a ghost, Satoru tugs the blanket over them both and thinks for a while, breathing in the smell of his Suguru, someone who’s almost his Suguru, the brightness of the yuzu shampoo cutting through the stench of the room. They could be happy here, if they never had to leave the blanket.
If Satoru could do anything he wanted, he would take Suguru back with him. Get an apartment in the suburbs, maybe in another city, even. Change their names, falsify papers, take him to therapy. They would probably lock Suguru away in a little padded room, if that was a thing they were still doing, or feed him drugs until he couldn’t think anymore, which might be a good thing, considering the kinds of things he was thinking. Probably they would do both.
Looking back, Satoru doesn’t know that he ever felt scared before, really scared, until the moment Yaga told him what Suguru had done. Because for the first time in his life he didn’t know what to do. He’s stronger than Suguru but Suguru has made him helpless.
“We could tell them just part of it,” he thinks out loud, running soft fingertips up and down the inside of Suguru’s arm. “Not the whole—not all the death. But thoughts about it. The fact that you think about it. Not enough for them to take you away.”
Suguru is silent, breathing shallow.
“Because the things you’re thinking don’t make any sense,” Satoru continues. “The things you want—I can’t imagine what it’s like to live with those thoughts.”
“I don’t want to,” he says, and Satoru knows what he means: not that he doesn’t want to have those thoughts, but that he doesn’t want to live. “I can’t fix it,” he says, listless. “I made it worse. So it would be better if you just—”
“But you don’t have to fix it,” Satoru says urgently. “Suguru, no one said you had to fix it and no one said you had to fix it on your own. Fixing mankind on your own? That would be insane.”
“I’m insane,” he says simply.
“So fucking what?” Satoru snaps. “You think I’m not crazy? We’re both crazy. That’s why we’re in this together.”
He adjusts his grip, brings Suguru closer until he’s settled with his cheek on Satoru’s chest, ear against his heart. Satoru kisses the top of his head.
“I’m a murderer,” Suguru says, muffled. His voice is still dull, emotionless, but Satoru’s sweatshirt is getting damp.
“You’re mine,” he says. “You’re always going to be mine, no matter what fucked up shit you do.”
“I’m a murderer,” Suguru repeats, “and you made me ramen.”
“And I’ll do it again,” he says fiercely. “Deal with it.”
Suguru’s hand is twitching uncontrollably. Satoru steadies it, kissing his wet face.
“You’ll tell them part of the story,” he says, “the part of the story they can understand. And we’ll get you help, sweetheart. We’ll get you better.”
“I’m not worth your time,” Suguru weeps, fingers digging into Satoru’s sweatshirt. “I’ve caused so much pain. I can’t move past it.”
Some part of Satoru wonders if he ever can either. When he thinks about it, the pain is like a towering black wall, the sides slick, blotting out the sun. But the pain is more than he can even imagine, and the pain isn’t human, and Suguru is human, real, tangible, curled in his arms and smelling like citrus.
“Not on your own,” he says, still holding on.