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They were kissing in the field, Satoru straddling him, petting the warm silk of his hair. Everything smelled like summer heat, the long grass and white flowers trampled underneath them, a broken perfume suffusing the air. And Suguru was happy, he thought. He rolled onto his side, tracing Satoru’s jaw with the pads of his fingers, then with his lips.
“Baby,” he murmured, and Satoru tipped his chin and grinned, lazy with love. Suguru buried his face in the crook of his neck.
“I almost believed it this time,” he said, and Suguru didn’t quite know what he meant. When he lifted his head Satoru was unraveling, thread by thread, until all that was left of him was his white hair, then white flowers.
Suguru kept lying quiet on his back in bed, the afterimage burning at his eyes.
—
Satoru had been gone for eight months, longer than any of them could have expected. For the first week Suguru had imagined him walking in any minute, cheerful and covered in blood, none of it his own. He’d dispatched some monster, human or otherwise, and was quick to tease them about their hysteria. “Who missed me the most?” he’d ask, tugging the younger students under his arm. “Don’t be shy! Nanami, tell me how you really feel.”
“Oppressed,” Nanami would say faintly from somewhere in his armpit.
But a week went by, then two, and as they broke into search parties and scoured the countryside for Satoru, they found no trace of him. The metallic taste of his cursed energy, a little like steel, a little like thunder, was cleared away, so thoroughly it was like Satoru had been erased. All of Suguru’s senses were telling him as much, even as his heart insisted otherwise. The soft rejection every time it beat: he’s here, he’s here, he’s somewhere still.
—
And then Suguru bolted upright in the early morning, something inside him shining like a beacon. He called Shoko with his fingers shaking, barely able to dial. “Satoru,” he said, and couldn’t get any other words out.
The astonished silence on the other end of the phone, the cicadas screaming at the window.
—
He was nothing like himself, the fragile shape thrown on the floor of the cellar, damp with blood. The twist of his body, deformed, mid-seizure; the frantic panting. His eyes were exposed like a wound.
“Suguru,” Shoko said, touching his arm. “Maybe you shouldn’t—”
He should, he should. That was his Satoru, twitching on the ground; that was his heart, tugged from his chest. Suguru knelt down next to him, softly petting his hair. Infinity was off. Everything was off. Only the whisper of his cursed energy, low and inconstant, like a candle going out.
“We shouldn’t move him until he’s stabilized,” Shoko said, checking his pulse. Satoru thrashed weakly under her touch. “For now, protect his head.” Suguru nodded, shifting Satoru delicately into his lap. The blood on his temples, his matted hair thick with it. The new scars Suguru could feel underneath, pink and raised.
He had so many questions, but it felt like time had stopped. There was only this place, this dim room that stank of suffering, the frail body in his arms. Satoru kept staring past them, like he’d gone blind. Like he didn’t understand what they were.
—
“They used his own cursed energy against him,” Yaga says. “That much is clear.” They’re gathered in the med bay, waiting for Shoko to finish her work. “How they did it, why they did it…” He shakes his head.
“We know why they did it,” Suguru says bitterly. Because people are animals; because the world is hateful. Because everyone has always treated Satoru as a weapon to disable instead of a person. Because even Satoru sees himself that way, or used to.
The damage is horrific. His hamstrings cut, so he couldn’t walk. Extensive bruising on his head, indents on his skull, like he’s been repeatedly kicked with a boot. Internal injuries, blood seeping from his mouth. Starvation, dehydration, delirium. And what Shoko recognizes as brain damage—the absent way he stares, the frequent seizures, all compounded by months of isolation, hallucinating in his cell. She’ll heal him as much as she can, but these are the injuries that are hardest to treat.
“We’ll have to be patient with him,” she says as she walks out, closing the door softly behind her. “Speak slowly and clearly. Avoid difficult vocabulary. If he’s forgotten you, don’t take it personally.” She eyes Suguru as she says this, which he pretends not to see.
“How much has he forgotten?” Nanami asks.
“Impossible to say,” she says. “He’s not speaking, for one—it’s not like we can ask him directly. I haven’t seen him looking at anyone like he recognizes us, but it’s all a little muddled. It could easily be damage to the optic nerves. We’ll have to wait and see.” She peels off her gloves, pink with Satoru’s blood. “I’d like to induce a coma for now, give his body a chance to rest and heal.”
“When you say his cursed energy was used against him,” Utahime says, trailing off.
“We found curses in the cell,” Suguru says quietly. “Low-grade curses that matched his residuals. I think they were using him to generate curses and deploying the same curses against him.”
“What’s the point?” Nanami asks, and from the fury in his voice Suguru knows they’ve come to the same conclusion. There’s no point. There never was.
“In the early months those curses would have been much more powerful,” Suguru says. “The way he is now, I think—” he clears his throat. “I think lately the curses have been significantly less powerful. And maybe that’s given him time to recover his energy, to heal.”
Unaddressed, as they look through the window of the operating chamber: how much worse it must have been, if this is what healing looks like.
—
He spends his nights at Satoru’s bedside, just stroking his hand. It’s thin and white, the color of a potato cut open, something sunlight’s never touched. His breathing is steady and shallow. Suguru kisses his fingers, one by one.
Even after the coma breaks he’s weak, confused. Suguru helps Shoko give him a sponge bath, finally wiping the blood from his hair, the filth from his nails. He still looks at Suguru blindly, sometimes crying in his sleep. Suguru climbs into bed next to him, cradling him, bodies made for each other, souls matching. He breathes in the sweet smell of Satoru’s skin, recites memories for him like they’re bedtime stories.
If he’s forgotten you—
Suguru knows he hasn’t forgotten by the way his breathing eases as Suguru touches him, how he stops thrashing when Suguru murmurs in his ear, kissing his swollen face. Touch is a language he still knows, because Suguru is the only one he’s ever let touch him, the only person he’s always let through Infinity easily, effortlessly. Even with his barriers broken, some part of Satoru seems to know that Suguru would be the only one holding him so gently, kissing his palms and caressing his thin back; failing that, he has to recognize that only someone he trusted would touch him this way. If he’s forgotten Suguru, he hasn’t entirely forgotten.
Suguru can work with that.
—
Remember when, the stories always start.
Remember when we cut class the first warm spring day of the year, how we rode our bikes down to the shore and I skidded out? How you teased me all afternoon and then on the way back the same curve got you too?
Remember when Haibara dressed up as you for Halloween and his costume was just a mop on his head? Remember the next year, when you’d had your growth spurt, so he wore the same thing but in heels?
Remember when we kissed for the first time, all covered in gore, and then we showered together when we got home past midnight, and when we kissed again you made a face and said, “Yeah, that does taste better”? And the next day you snuck your fingers into mine on the way to class.
Eventually he realizes it’s less of a question and more of a plea. Remember when, remember when. He nuzzles Satoru’s sleeping face.
Remember when I got us out of here. Remember when I wouldn’t let them hurt us anymore.
—
“If it could happen to him,” Nanami says, and doesn’t finish.
He departs a few weeks after that.
—
It’s almost impossible to get Satoru to talk.
Even as dazed as he is, as damaged, he knows something is wrong. He’s embarrassed. The words come out slurred or half-finished, sentences turned around. He clenches his fists like he’s in pain.
“You have to practice, Toru,” Shoko tells him flatly. “I know you want to be perfect at everything all the time, but that’s not how healing works. What’s your long game here? Pointing at what you want like a toddler?”
Satoru purses his lips, defiant.
Eating is like that too, trying to get the spoon to his mouth, chewing haphazardly on a dumpling. Once Suguru wipes the soup from his chin and Satoru makes a vicious little motion, like if he could he would bite Suguru’s hand off. He apologizes, backing off. “I forgot,” he says, and what did he forget? Satoru’s pride. An internal and external war between them: Satoru fighting his pride (to the extent he’s trying at all) and Suguru fighting his sympathy, teeming up inside him whenever he watches Satoru struggle.
Walking is easier, leaning heavily on Suguru’s arm as they practice slow turns in the hall, his face flushed with exertion and shame. Later the arm crutches, swinging the dead weight of his left leg, where all the tendons were crushed. Dissolved, Shoko said, from sheer repetitive violence. It’s the same hard work Satoru’s never shied from, physical, as much as he likes to complain about it.
But there’s something more exposing about not being able to speak the way he should. Suguru can tell he feels like an idiot. It hurts just seeing him think it.
“Hey,” he murmurs, bumping Satoru’s shoulder. “You’re brilliant, we know that. You’re still brilliant. Nothing you do or can’t do will make us think any less of you.”
Satoru shakes his head, a silent argument. He doesn’t want to make it with his mouth.
—
Sometimes Suguru imagines he’s talking, the way you see shadows sometimes, out of the corner of your eye.
In dreams he’s always talking, soft, absurd, deliberate. Every night Suguru hears his voice again.
—
“You have to let go of him, you know,” Shoko says. “This idea of him that you have.”
Another late night, smoking by the vending machines, Suguru rolling a bottle of green tea absently between his hands. Satoru always thought this brand tasted like shit. Bitter. When he was still bedbound, Suguru used to stick strawberry lollipops in his mouth, watching him smile around the sweetness.
“He’s not going to come back the same way,” she says, when he’s silent. “He’s not the exception to everything. You’re just going to hurt yourself thinking he will be.” After a moment she adds, softer: “I’ve had to stop myself too.”
Suguru takes in a drag, letting the smoke out slowly through his teeth. Maybe I just love him more than you do, a little voice in his head says, vicious. Maybe he can’t get better when you won’t believe in him.
“Thank you for doing what you can,” he says, tapping out his cigarette.
—
His body still feels the same, in all the important ways. Absurd, when so much has changed. But here they are, patiently kissing, the sharpness leaving his shoulders, the softness slowly returning to his hips. He still smells a little medicinal, but he smells like Suguru’s sheets too, his smoke. When they kiss he tastes like milk tea, late-night study sessions, artificial fruit.
“Satoru,” he whispers, hands drifting down the silky skin of his back, his skinny waist. “Satoru, Satoru.” He just wants that name in his mouth again, where it fits best.
—
The details come out slowly. Satoru’s body tells the story. Burned, beaten, cursed, scarred: an endless novel, one Suguru wishes they could close. He doesn’t want to think about Suguru starved and stranded on the cellar floor, sucking on his fingers to pretend he’s being fed, flinching against demons that blossom out of his chest. He could barely tell them apart, curses or hallucinations, nightmares or memories. The men with heavy boots who treated him like a dog. They made him crawl on hands and knees and howl.
He tells Suguru quietly, in slurred fragments, when they’re alone together. Suguru is the only person he trusts with his voice. Often he stops, looking lost. Late at night, his fingers threaded through Suguru’s, choking on memories.
—
Sometimes he has the dream again: long grass, white flowers, Satoru tucked under his arm. He wakes up and studies Satoru’s face. His thick lashes, his pink mouth. His hair growing back in uneven tufts around his scars. The color of moonlight, Suguru thinks, stroking it.
In a few months—two, three—he’ll start talking around people again, uneasily. They’ll take walks by the water again, the lights of the city glaring on the surface, Satoru’s left shoulder hitched over his cane. He talks less than he listens, but his face is animated, his gestures choppy and broad, and Suguru knows he’s there, the same person he ever was, manic, excitable. His cursed energy trickles quietly under his skin, like a stream. Something peaceful about it, diminished.
He always knew Satoru was the strongest, but he wonders if he ever really knew until now what strength meant.
The day he gets them both out of here is the strongest Suguru will ever have been.