Chapter Text
His hands are raw and he won’t let Satoru get near him, but that’s okay; they can make it work. He spends most of his time alone, looking distantly out of the window, the light glazing his pretty face, but Satoru has always loved his contemplative expressions, his silences, the places where his own voice fits. He drops weight and Satoru finds him on his knees in the bathroom, gagging himself, but it’s not the end of the world.
There’s nothing wrong with Suguru really, he tells anyone who asks—he’s just Suguru, his Suguru, and if he’s strange and withdrawn and there’s blood on his hands—
Well, there’s blood on all of their hands, isn’t there?
—
He loves this boy, thin as a glance, propped up in the hospital bed. Suguru is picking at the paper band on his wrist, his dark hair unwashed, swept behind a pink ear Satoru longs to touch.
“Suguru,” he says, raising a hand, and his friend doesn’t look up. Satoru settles next to him on the bed, one knee dangling, the other hugged to his chest. The sheets are like paper too.
They had described everything in clinical terms, the kinds of words Satoru hated in textbooks, the ones that didn’t illustrate at all. Then they said breakdown, and Satoru hated that more. There was nothing wrong with Suguru. He didn’t break. Here he was, pale and lovely, whole.
“Remember when you got your DS?” Satoru asks. “We used to do this all the time.” He knocks into Suguru gently with his knee. “And then Shoko would get mad at us for not sleeping, and you told her smoking is probably worse. The look on her face!” He laughs softly, waiting for Suguru to smile back, to notice. “Well, someday she’ll be a pickled old woman and we’ll look twenty years younger and yawn a lot, I guess.”
There’s a jar of lotion by the bed; Satoru cracks it open, spreading a little into his hands. “Here,” he says, and when Suguru doesn’t answer Satoru takes his hands, pliant, and rubs lotion carefully into his chafed skin. It’s his palms and knuckles that are the worst, burned-looking. Satoru works slowly, humming to himself. “She’s probably right, though,” he says. “We should take better care of ourselves, yeah?” Suguru keeps his eyes averted, looking down at his lap like he’s seeing through it.
“Like it’s good to stay clean,” Satoru continues, obviously. “But you’re clean enough, I think. You don’t want to overdo it.” He turns Suguru’s hand to kiss it. “Don’t overdo it,” he says again, softer.
After a while there’s nothing left to do, just Suguru’s silence and Suguru’s hands in his, shining, so he traces a slow circle into the crease between his finger and thumb. He’s always a little mesmerized, touching Suguru.
They used to be closer; he knows that, he isn’t blind. Late nights playing games together, shoving each other for competitive advantage. The fencing matches they used to have with Pocky sticks. Packs of gummy worms Suguru used to leave on his pillow, all the flavors Satoru hated picked out. Sometimes he would lower one on Satoru’s face when he was sleeping, just to make him shriek.
Pictures snapped at unsuspecting moments and texted to the group chat. lol he’s so ugly, Satoru wrote, over an image of Suguru passed out at his desk, mouth sagging open. got a picture of toru, Suguru wrote, over a photo of a string bean. Lonely missions that wrapped in the early morning, both of them falling asleep in the backseat of the car, huddled together, a tangle—Satoru-and-Suguru, Suguru-and-Satoru. Somehow Suguru always ended up with the string of his sweatshirt in his mouth.
And now Suguru’s always on his own, throwing up, scrubbing his arms, looking away. There are shadows under his eyes like someone washed their hands in soot and dabbed a mark under each, two black thumbprints. He takes aimless walks in the rain and smells strange and covers his ears abruptly when no one is speaking, but he’s still Suguru. His Suguru. He has to be.
“I think visiting ends at 4,” Satoru says, “but we don’t have to do anything. We can just hang out, like old times.” Suguru doesn’t answer. “That’s okay too,” Satoru says. He leans drowsily into the crook of Suguru’s shoulder, where his head still fits.
—
When Suguru comes back he doesn’t have any missions. He’s silent still, not entirely but mostly, and the shape of his face is a little changed from the medication. There are bottles lined up on his dresser, which Satoru is too nosy not to read, even if he never asks about them. The names look made up. Aripiprazole. Clonazepam. Worse than English class. Sometimes Satoru sounds them out the way he sounds out foreign words, like this is another language he has to learn, a country to prepare for.
He spends almost all of his time in bed, bundled up in his sweatshirt, and when Satoru isn’t dispatching something ugly he’s sitting next to Suguru, talking idly, brushing the tangles out of his hair. At first he asks if there’s anything Suguru wants him to talk about, but he never really answers, and after a while Satoru accepts that he’ll have to talk about whatever he feels like talking about, which is basically what he usually does anyway. He talks about what they’re learning in class, the parts that annoy him, the parts that interest him, the things he’s realizing he can do and the things he’ll have to do later. Digimon.
It’s mostly the two of them, since Suguru feels so uneasy with other people in the room, so Satoru tries to keep things interesting. He brings candies, something new for Suguru to try every day, because his medications taste like bitter chalk. “I didn’t even know they made these,” Satoru says, shooting salmon-flavored Pez across the room like missiles. Once he borrows a few things from Shoko and paints Suguru’s nails electric blue. “Want me to blow on you?” he jokes, and Suguru smiles slightly but his smile is tired. Satoru decides that it counts.
Some days are worse than others. Sometimes he can smile at Satoru, really smile; sometimes it feels like he’s looking through Satoru, like there’s something else standing behind him but Suguru isn’t interested in that either. Sometimes he gets lost in the shower, learning heavily on the wall, vacant-eyed, and Satoru has to fish him out. “You’re not a carp,” he scolds mildly, rubbing Suguru’s hair dry.
On bad days Satoru helps him dress. He doesn’t have to ask; it’s the glaze on his eyes, the helpless way he looks at Satoru when he comes in. “Up you go,” Satoru says easily, easing him up until he’s seated. He feels so tender toward Suguru in those moments, holding him, the way he slumps in Satoru’s arms. The shape of his body has changed, softer from all the medication, sort of plump, and his clothes don’t really fit. Satoru knows he doesn’t feel like himself, even if he doesn’t say; even if he mostly doesn’t say anything at all. But Satoru thinks he’d recognize Suguru anywhere.
Satoru negotiates his arms through his sweatshirt and tries not to jostle him. “Good,” he murmurs, kissing Suguru’s forehead.
Afterwards he washes Suguru’s hair in the bathroom sink.
—
“You don’t have to talk about it,” he tells Suguru, but sometimes Suguru wants to. They’ll be curled in bed together, watching some dumb anime, and Suguru will start speaking, hesitantly, his voice a slow rasp. How he feels so full and empty all the time, starving for bland things—plain mochi, shokupan, chocolate milk. How it’s hard to think, like everything he knows is in his head somewhere, but the strings attached to them have rotted away. Satoru shivers, stroking his hand.
“Even if I act stupid,” Suguru says slowly, “I’m not stupid.”
Satoru makes a sound he didn’t know he could make.
“Suguru,” he says, holding his hand tighter. “I know you’re not stupid.”
How the medication is for voices, their silky purr, and he’s supposed to tell the doctor if they come back, but sometimes he’s afraid to, because he doesn’t want to take more pills, doesn’t want his body to change anymore. “But sometimes they tell me you hate me,” Suguru chokes, and Satoru grabs his hands, stricken.
“Nothing you do could ever make me hate you,” Satoru says. Suguru looks away.
“You don’t know all the things I could do,” he says.
—
Lying awake that night, hands propped behind his head, Satoru thinks about all the things he could have said. You don’t know all the things I could do either.
He knows Suguru thinks his attention is exhaustible, but he’s wrong. Suguru isn’t a cartoon he’ll get tired of, a pointless chore, a book he hates. There’s always been a point to Suguru; the point is Suguru.
If Suguru needed help, Satoru could help him forever. If Suguru got worse, he wouldn’t leave. He could help Suguru to the showers, run the water until it’s warm, tested on his skin like a baby bottle, with a mother’s tenderness. Set him on his stool, wash the long lines of his back. Carry him back to his room, if he needs to—it’s easy, Satoru is strong.
He could stay with Suguru at night, when his dreams are too evil. Wind their bodies close together, forehead to forehead, and stroke the small hairs at his temples, tucking them behind his ears. Satoru could stay awake until morning just talking with him, or watching for the things he’s afraid of so he could finally sleep. Rub lotion into his cracked hands every night, kissing it into place. It’s not the way lotion works, but that doesn’t matter to Satoru. It’s not consequential.
Sometimes he wishes Suguru would just tell him what he needed, so he could do it. Most of the time, really. He’s not as smart as Suguru thinks he is, not about people. Perceptive, drinking in the world all the time, quicker than thought, but he doesn’t always know what it means. If you want me to kiss you, I would kiss you, he thinks sometimes, most of the time, really, studying Suguru’s soft mouth. Pink and tender like peach blossoms, something out of a warm summer, or a dream. He would press his lips and nose to the places where Suguru’s cursed energy settles, smoky and intoxicating, like incense, and just hold him, hold him, like there's somewhere he'll go if Satoru doesn't hold on.
If Suguru doesn’t want to leave the room again, he doesn’t have to leave the room. If he doesn’t want to fight—why should he? Satoru will go back to the konbini and sweep the shelves, find the perfect candy so his mouth is never bitter again, tuck it into his cheek before he swallows his pills: Tokuno milk candy, Sakuma drops, Anrio rings. Brush the tangles from his hair and wrap his arms around his stomach and listen to the drowsy noises he makes when he’s just waking up, his warm heavy body next to Satoru’s, legs touching. Help him to the green stretch of window and keep him fed on sunlight, touch his pale hands to the glass.
And he never needs to leave the bed, even, not if he doesn’t want to, because Satoru can take care of him and defend him and keep the world away, and it’ll be just like before, even if everything is different. Suguru doesn’t have to do anything to be wonderful. He’s wonderful. Still; especially, even.
But he’s waiting for Suguru to tell him what he needs. He’s waiting.