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Attachment wounds: that’s what the therapist said. Awful term, Satoru never liked it. When he tries to picture it, he thinks about a wound that comes from a bond breaking, the flesh rupturing as a limb is torn away, some vital organ. But Satoru doesn’t think he’s ever been attached to anything. Anyone.
When he pictures himself in his mind, all he sees is a blank surface, clean and smooth. Something no one’s touched at all.
—
He loved Suguru, is the thing.
Years later, when the mess is mostly resolved and he’s seeing—at Yaga’s insistence, of all people—a therapist, he’ll watch a video on a long summer night in his apartment, the kind that just burns and burns, and he’ll learn about pottery. How the side of the pot needs to be scored and wet, and the handle needs to be scored and wet where it meets the pot, and if the surface is smooth and untroubled it all falls apart. Nothing sticks.
Ah, he thinks, and lowers another gummy worm into his mouth. The acid sugar at the back of his mouth, like swallowing a curse.
—
It’s awfully intimate, seeing Suguru again. His face broader, his eyes half-lidded and serene, his mouth half-closed too, a touch of pink shining. Suguru has always given the wonderful impression of being open even when he’s closed; close, even when he’s inaccessible.
Unlike Satoru, who’s always been more honest.
“Yo,” he says, raising his hand. Suguru tilts his head slightly, the faintest acknowledgment. With Satoru’s eyes covered, he seems a little unsettled. Nowhere to look, no surface to cling to, no scores wanting touch.
As Satoru said: honest.
“A pleasure to see you again,” Suguru says, clever glance settling, after a quick negotiation, on the place where Satoru’s eyes would be.
“Is it?” he asks, grinning.
Suguru purses his lips.
“You know it is,” he says.
Stunning, how much the years have changed him. He’s still the rough shape of Satoru’s best friend, his best love, but the kindness in his face is gone, his mouth too stiff, with a sharpness in his eyes that feels unpleasant. Idly hungry, the way a serpent is hungry. Dark hair spilling down his back like ink knocked over, irrevocable.
“A pleasure so wonderful you’ve spent ten years avoiding it,” Satoru muses.
“Nine,” he corrects. The pedant.
“I believe you’re allowed to round up for these things,” Satoru says, kicking at a pebble on the ground. “Tragic deaths. Great loves. National disasters. That sort of thing.”
Suguru looks a little thrown before he smirks.
“And which am I?” he asks, hands hidden in his sleeves.
“Eh,” Satoru says. “Administrative error.”
It’s the cruelest thing he’s ever said to Suguru. Even the last time they fought he hadn’t been cruel, only helpless, furious. He wants to take it back but there’s something caught in his throat. And if Suguru seemed half-open before, he’s sealed now, like a wall.
“I’m not the only one with the ability to walk, you know,” he says coldly. “Nine years—or ten, take your pick—and you could have found me at any time. I didn’t make myself hard to find.”
No, Satoru thinks, you just made yourself hard to see. It’s unbearable to be so near to Suguru when he’s so changed, the ugliness in him. It’s not physical; it’s something sunk deeper, a spiritual wound.
Is it an attachment wound? Maybe. Probably, in the purest sense. Suguru had been joined to him, to all of them, and then he’d torn himself off. And then the wound started festering, sick with rot.
Unlike Satoru, who was fine. Really. He’d never let anyone get close enough to score the surface. Of course, he mused, studying Suguru’s cold face, maybe that was the problem. Maybe the only reason Suguru could tear himself away was because he knew he wouldn’t be taking a piece of Satoru with him.
Because if you do—say, for example—get torn from your parents at age three, you do internalize, maybe, the lesson that you can lose anyone at any time, so why fight it? Why change it? It can’t be changed. You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved; you can’t stop someone who’s walking away. Pointless.
And as close as he used to be with Suguru, he never once asked for what he needed. Why ask, awful and exposing, when it opens you up to not getting it? Calculated risks, he told his therapist. Nothing personal, just methodology.
“You’re here for the weapon, yes?”
“Mm?” Satoru asks, rubbing the back of his neck. “Oh. Yeah.”
—
He follows Suguru deep into the temple, all dark corridors and incense and disinfectant. It’s a disorientating mix: heady, sterile. Behind his altar, those idiotic slogans hung on the walls in black and white, like everything is so clean, so simple, Suguru kneels beside a small lockbox keyed to match his cursed energy residuals.
“Nifty,” Satoru remarks.
Suguru hums, noncommittal. The skirts of his kesa pool under him.
For whatever reason—dumb, capricious—Satoru thinks about the first time they sparred. Summer heat, Suguru’s pink flushed face, those dark pants billowing around him as he swung his kick. He squints a little, trying to sharpen the memory or dispel it, and Suguru glances up at him. His eyes narrow too.
“Whatever you may think of us, we didn’t take it,” he says. He’s talking about the blade, the one Satoru has come to retrieve. “As soon as it came into our possession I recognized that it belonged to the school and established contact.”
Established contact. Satoru hates the way he says that, like Jujutsu High and everyone in it was some alien species lodged on the moon.
“Again,” Satoru says, “you could have just, you know. Walked.”
“Geto-sama!” a high voice calls, then another.
He knew about the girls, abstractly. For a long time, in a way even he recognized was irrational, he resented them. They were the last splinter, a crack in a structure that had been teetering for months, if not longer; they were the ones who had taken his Suguru away. But now that they’re here, small and brightly chattering, they’re the ones bringing Suguru back. The shape of his face changes, soft and tender. There’s a warmth in his eyes Satoru thought was extinguished.
Probably if Satoru’s parents had loved him, cradled him at night and told him stories and kissed his scraped knees, made it clear to him that he was more than a legend or a family name, he could’ve had that. If he hadn’t pulled away, let himself vanish deeper and deeper into Infinity, it might’ve been something Suguru had given him too. Maybe he had and Satoru didn’t even notice, because everything that touched him always glanced off.
“Just a moment,” Suguru tells them gently. “We’ll be done in a few minutes.”
Why does that hurt so much? The tenderness, the minutes, the idea of being done? The light from the altar is shining on Suguru, golden, and his smile is small and peaceful, the way it used to be, and as the girls dart away, Satoru chokes on his own throat.
“Satoru?” Suguru asks, not yet changed back, his voice soft with concern.
“I’m fine,” he says, pounding on his chest. “Something went down the wrong windpipe. Must be all the ambient weedkiller in this place.”
“Hmm.” Suguru’s head is tilted subtly, studying him with those honeyed eyes, and Satoru is studying him back, and as he unlatches the box he makes a satisfied little noise. “There we are.” He holds it out to Satoru like an offering.
Is it? Is that what all of this has been? Satoru isn’t an idiot; Suguru could have kept up a nine-year track record and dispatched someone else to hand over the weapon, or refused to set up the exchange with Suguru on the end, or even—fuck it, with all the chaos at Jujutsu High, how long would it even have taken them to realize someone had stolen a mid-range weapon from the armory? Another ten years? Twenty?
So this is an offering, steel gleaming like liquid in the light, and as Suguru cranes to look up at him, the hollow of his neck is exposed, delicate white.
Satoru thumbs his blindfold down.
They look at each other for a while, really look, arrested. He can see the breath moving under Suguru’s skin, his chapped pink lips, the way his pupils bloom like ink drops as he gazes up at Satoru, wide then wider. He can see Suguru’s lovely face, his ugly thoughts, the tired creases under his eyes, the cut on his left hand just beginning to heal. Vaguely he wonders if it’ll scar.
“You’re exactly like you always were,” Suguru says, with a little wonder. Five minutes ago Satoru would have taken it as an insult. Now it just makes him feel unbelievably sad.
“You can be too,” Satoru says stubbornly. “You can be whatever you want to, Suguru.”
Suguru laughs softly, that wheeze he loves.
“I mean it,” Satoru presses. “And I can—I can change. I already have.”
“How have you changed?” he challenges. His smile is wry. “Tell me.”
And there’s so much Satoru wants to say, none of it coherent.
I’ve been seeing someone but don’t get jealous, she’s a therapist, he would say.
I keep dreaming about high school and everything’s the same except I’m kissing you stupid against the vending machines, he would say.
There are these pots, he would say. And if you don’t score them, nothing holds, but you could score me now. If you touched me you would break skin.
He takes the blade from Suguru’s open palms, hands softer than they’ve ever been.
“Easier to show you, I think,” he says.