Work Text:
The thing about rot is that it never leaves. Once it’s in you, the black silt and stench, it becomes you. And even having cleansed himself—having committed, in fact, the greatest act of cleansing in the last hundred years—Suguru doesn’t feel clean.
So the empty hours, the lost time. Scrubbing the walls of his bedroom, sweeping the floors, standing in the shower until his skin burns in the right way, burns like it’s new. Something about pain feels clean to him.
He holds himself differently at the kitchen table, keeping himself too upright, inches from the back of the chair. Beneath his kesa the skin’s weeping.
“Geto-sama?” the girls ask, and Suguru smiles reassuringly, lips closed, because he’s convinced his teeth must be black with it now, dark as a secret.
“Eat your breakfast,” he says gently. “Don’t worry about me. As long as I’m here, you never have to worry again.”
—
The men make sense, after that. It’s a clean line from the sting in his back to the sense of purity, from purity to punishment—do you understand?
Long evenings cuffed to the wall, whips lashing his skin, arms outstretched and burning. Men with faces he won’t remember tugging at his hair, small precise points of pain, dazzling, like fireworks. Bruises dug into his back, his legs, his neck; finally his neck. They kick him in the stomach, strangle him until the world goes bright and purple and he staggers home half-blind, throwing up in some pointless alley. He feels ecstatic.
For months he worries about scaring the girls and then he doesn’t worry about anything at all. He drifts in brutalized rapture through his days, smiling with his broken jaw, so full of tender regard for the world he can hardly bear it. He comes home violated with his fingers crushed and bleeding and it’s nearly enough. He doesn’t eat and he barely sleeps and he is finally (almost) genuinely (sort of) clean.
He comes home giddy one night, mouth full of blood dark as syrup, and the girls cry as he spits into the sink.
“Don’t worry,” he says, a broken tooth in his hand. “I’ll be fixed soon. Everything will be fixed.” He can feel the crack with his tongue, immense inside his head, like it opens to the size of everything.
—
There’s more to it, when he’s honest with himself; in the little slivers of moments when he recognizes honesty. He’s done something wrong, is something bad, and he deserves to be punished. He deserves to be punished even though he can’t figure out any other way to live. Something feels right when there are fingerprints on his neck, plum-dark, and boots driven into his back. The hiss of pain is a hiss of recognition. He needs this. He owes it.
Who he owes it to is a question Suguru tries not to answer. River-blue eyes, a sly crooked smile.
—
He doesn’t expect to see Satoru but then he never expects to see Satoru, cockeyed shadow, leaning against his door. The silence is new. Suguru tilts his head, studying him.
Satoru doesn’t quite meet his eyes; they slide off Suguru’s face, swollen beyond recognition, trace the cut through his lip that sings and sings. His fingers settle on Suguru’s jaw.
“So it’s true,” Satoru says softly. “Who do I kill?”
And he doesn’t know how to explain it, how the violence makes it better. He’s full of rot and guilt, indistinguishable from each other, and he’d rather be full of bruises, blood in his mouth. That tender feeling, easier than other tender feelings he’s known. Easier than looking at Satoru now, his soft mouth.
“I can’t talk to you about this,” he says finally.
Satoru tenses, like he’s ready to argue, and something passes through him. He rakes his hand through his mess of white hair. “Okay,” he says. “So don’t talk.”
Then he takes Suguru in his arms, chin tucked over his shoulder, and just holds him, touch familiar still.
“Satoru,” he chokes.
“Shh,” Satoru says. “Don’t talk.”
His arms are soft around Suguru’s waist, his breathing steady, and he smells like late nights and Shoko’s cigarettes. Infinity is down, like Suguru is still someone he can trust; like Suguru is still anyone at all.
It makes him feel so strange, occupying this space that doesn’t fit him anymore. So much lost trust. So much lost skin. He’s skinny and raw in Satoru’s arms, breathing in the smell of his detergent, and he starts to cry.
“Satoru—”
“Don’t talk,” Satoru murmurs, and kisses the soft place behind his ear.
—
“You’re crazy, aren’t you?” Satoru says. He’s holding Suguru in bed, lips pressed to his messy hair, and Suguru won’t let himself hold Satoru back, but he also can’t resist being held. “I was so mad at you for your stupid ideas,” Satoru is saying, his voice cracking. “I thought you didn’t love me enough if you could leave me for ideas. But they weren’t ideas at all, were they? You were sick.”
Are they ideas? Impulses, fixations, dreams. When men grab him by the throat, that’s an idea too: something holding him, animal and urgent, until his breath is gone. He presses his face into Satoru’s shoulder, bone pushing sharp into his eye. “I need it to stop,” he whispers.
“Hm?”
“The rot,” he says plainly.
Satoru’s hand is soft between his shoulder blades, warm, like Suguru isn’t slowly being consumed by poison; like there’s no urgency, really, no pain. Just the two of them, one mostly broken.
“I just have to beat it out of me,” Suguru says. “It’s going to be okay, I just have to beat it out of me and then I can beat it out of the world.” He smiles at Satoru, encouraging, but Satoru doesn’t smile back. His face is blank as an unwritten letter.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry you got so sick and I never knew. I’m sorry you’re sick still.” He kisses the top of Suguru’s head once, twice. Sexless, that kind of kiss. Tender, resigned.
It was never like this before. The two of them, slender and teenaged, mouthing at each other in bed—the salty hollow of Satoru’s collarbone, thumbs hooking desperately in Suguru’s waistband, their shaky childish breaths. They needed each other so bad back then, like they’d die if they couldn’t touch. And now Satoru touches him like it’s not safe to touch at all.
“I won’t be sick once it’s gone,” Suguru insists, a little desperate, and he can feel Satoru’s fingers twitch.
“You don’t have to talk about it, Suguru,” he says, voice rough. “In fact it’s probably easier if you don’t.”
Suguru chokes.
“You treat me like I’m gone when I’m right here,” he says. “You hate what I am so much, it’s easier for you when I’m just a memory.”
Satoru drops his arms, looking stunned.
“That’s not—”
“You only want to help me when it looks like help to you,” Suguru presses. “You’re always so selfish. You don’t want to do any of the things that would really help me.”
“What would help you?” he says.
“Beat me,” Suguru says. “Skin me. Tear me open.”
His smile is faint, full of longing. Satoru stares back at him with those enormous eyes, big and blue as a summer day.
“Right,” Satoru says, after a moment. “The things that would really help you.”
They’re sitting crosslegged on the bed, like teenagers, and what Suguru wants is Satoru’s mouth slipping down his neck, teeth catching on his skin, tearing. He’s been so thin for so long, he thinks it wouldn’t take much: one good bite and he’d rip open, soft as paper. He wants more than that, Satoru grinding his boot into his hands, kicking him in the belly, crushing every finger. He wants Satoru to rip him open so the work can begin.
“I need it,” he says softly, insistent.
“You love using me to punish you,” Satoru says. “I don’t think you’d ever stopped to consider what that does to me every fucking time.”
“It’s not about you, Satoru.”
“Yeah, you’ve made that pretty fucking clear.” He wipes at his face, eyes burning, and then he swears. “Jesus fuck.” He takes Suguru back into his arms, squeezing him too tightly, breathing fast and shallow. This is the kind of love Suguru still knows how to recognize, bruising, real. “Please don’t talk about it,” he says. “I don’t want to fight and I don’t want to leave. I just want to get to hold you tonight.”
“You can hold me,” Suguru says, fingers settling over his, and Satoru’s face breaks.
“I can’t, though,” he says, sounding haunted. “I can’t, baby. You’re not here.”
—
But in the morning he’s there, not sleeping but prone next to Suguru, quiet like he’s been struck. Suguru lays on his side and stares at him, studying the soft shape of his back.
For a moment he can imagine it, quiet mornings like this laid end to end for the rest of his life, morning to morning to morning. The light seeping through the window is lemon-yellow, lemon-sharp, and it makes Satoru’s white hair shine. He’s never wanted anyone so much as he wants Satoru now.
Satoru rolls over, hand slipping into his.
“Did you sleep all right?”
Suguru shakes his head.
“Mmm,” Satoru says. “C’mere.”
He sits up, shifting Suguru’s head tenderly into his lap, like Suguru is damaged, and Suguru breathes in the smell of him, the plainness of his detergent and the echo of Suguru’s own cigarettes on his clothes, and holds that breath for a long time, cradling it.
“You remember doing this?” Satoru says, long fingers tracing patterns in Suguru’s scalp.
Of course he remembers this: long afternoons with his head pillowed on Satoru’s thigh, listening to him talk. He liked the way Satoru could carry a conversation and Suguru could carry the quiet; could exist, and be, and not need to do anything at all to justify himself. And Satoru massaging his head with the same tender fingers.
By now he’d forgotten that he could feel anything short of a sting, that softness could still register for him at all.
“You deserve to be treated well,” Satoru is saying. “You have always deserved to be treated well. And I should have treated you better.”
“You did,” he mumbles into Satoru’s thigh. “The best. Better than anyone.”
“It was a low fucking bar.” Satoru is tense, all his soft angles gone straight, and then he’s calm again, fingers playing with the wisps at the nape of Suguru’s neck. “You don’t have to treat yourself so bad. You know that? You didn’t have to back then and you don’t have to now, even after the—” Satoru’s hand twitches slightly—”you know. Everything.”
“Everything,” Suguru echoes after a moment.
“You were sick,” he says. “You were so sick, Suguru, and I didn’t even see it. I got mad at you like you could control it.” He chokes. “And I should have been better then, but I can be better now.” His hand drifts lower, settling firmly on the curve of Suguru’s back. “I’m not going to leave until you stop hurting yourself.”
Suguru stiffens. He’s been here before—in Satoru’s arms, under Satoru’s thumb. The casual condescension of always being strongest, the control it brings, permanent veto power. He can’t go back to that place. He doesn’t want to lose himself. On some level he knows he’s already lost himself, but he can’t lose what’s left.
“You can’t just—”
“I want to make sure you shower,” Satoru says. “I want to make sure you eat. If I have to feed you myself I will. If you need me here to fall asleep, like the old days...”
“It’s not the old days,” Suguru says flatly. “And you’re not my keeper.”
“I know that,” he says. “I know that, or I would have kept you.” He touches Suguru’s bruised face delicately, like it isn’t swollen with rot. “I don’t want to see people treat you like this, Suguru. Even when you’re the one doing it.”
“I won’t let you treat me like a child,” he hisses.
Satoru smiles a little, but the smile is sad. His thumb keeps tracing the shape of Suguru’s cheek. Don’t touch me that way, Suguru wants to say, but his throat is thick with longing, and his mouth still remembers the salt on Satoru’s collarbone, the thud of Satoru’s heart under his lips.
“Oh sweetheart.” Satoru kisses the corner of his mouth, unbearably tender. “I’m not treating you like a child,” he says. “I’m treating you like I love you.”
But Suguru doesn’t know what that means anymore.
He’s starting to.