Archive of Our Own

The world did not change when Suguru Geto was born. It did change, however, when he met one Satoru Gojo. 

Not all at once, but slowly, languid enough that he did not take notice. 

“Ehh,” one fifteen-year-old Satoru squawks, eyebrows raised above his tinted glasses as he ogles Suguru. “You eat them? That’s gross.”

Suguru is absolutely ready to leap across the table and smack him, but he miraculously restrains himself. They had initially met hours ago when Ieiri and Gojo had met Suguru at the train station, the two of them easy to spot among the crowd in their entirely black outfits, and Gojo’s pearl hair. Now, they’re seated at a table waiting for their dinner, Suguru’s duffle bag taking up the fourth chair. Their teacher, Yaga, had suggested the outing but refused to attend, and Suguru thinks he understands why now. 

“Maybe you’re gross,” Suguru responds, before sipping from his water. The chimes dangling above the front door behind them sing as it swings open, and a host greets whoever just came in.

“How would you know?” Satoru says, mouth lopsided into a smirk. 

Suguru narrows his eyes, “I don’t have to know, I just know.”

Satoru smacks the table with his palm before pointing a finger at Suguru. The ice in their glasses clinks against the cups. 

“I call bullshit, I think I’d taste delightful.”

Just as a waiter steps towards their table, tray in hand, Ieiri sighs and leans back in her chair.

“You’d both taste like shit, are you done?”

They become one another’s worlds easily. It’s not a jarring realization, and Suguru actually finds it somewhat comforting. He is still his own person, but Satoru and Shoko become constants in his life effortlessly. It isn’t sensationalistic, at least Suguru doesn’t find it to be. It makes sense, their class is the size of their three bodies, and their dorms are spaced out with only an empty room in between each. To be unknown is just impossible; if Satoru is bored, he’ll saunter his way into Suguru’s dorm with some type of scheme in mind, and if Shoko is bored, she’ll shove his window open enough to ease out her hand, take a spot on the edge of his bed, and smoke. 

He learns what cigarettes she prefers just as she learns which nearby noodle shop is his favorite, and he learns which candies Satoru prefers, although it isn’t a difficult feat, with him enjoying anything that isn’t 1) too sour or 2) black licorice. 

But something bothers him about Satoru. Despite seeing one another almost daily, despite the joint missions, despite the impulsive trips to convenience stores past curfew, Suguru thinks he doesn't really know Satoru. 

Each time he learns something new and private about him—a preferred food, a favorite color, which movies will have him laughing out loud versus the ones that will have him complaining and on his phone, or the way he’ll always opt to sit in between him and Shoko rather than pick a side—he learns something outside of him, too. He becomes aware of something adjacent to the information Suguru has already hoarded about his friend that unnerves him. 

It makes everything spoken in the hallways of their dorms, in the showers when Satoru teases him over the length of his hair, in hushed tones when Shoko is asleep by them, feel trivial.  

Satoru Gojo is the first sorcerer to be born with both the Limitless and the Six Eyes in the last four hundred years—

The Six Eyes is a rare ocular jujutsu inherited within the Gojo family—

The Gojo Family descends from Michizane Sugawara, a legendary jujutsu sorcerer from the Heian Era who became one of the Three Great Vengeful Spirits of Japan after death—

The two Satoru's Suguru knows don’t sync up. The cataclysmically powerful Satoru Gojo cursed by curse users and resentful sorcerers alike, destined head of the Gojo clan with lineage soaked into the strokes of his hand and mouth, are misaligned. They can’t both be the same Satoru Suguru knows. The same he’s seen choke on food, a noodle dangling out of his nose grotesquely. 

Maybe this is a part of it. Maybe Satoru blurts out lies and random, thoughtless answers whenever he is asked questions about himself, maybe Suguru doesn’t know him at all for a reason.

He doesn’t tell Satoru this, or Shoko. He keeps it to himself, quiet and observant, awaiting to understand the intersection of Satoru Gojo, the boy who lives down the hall from him with an obnoxious poster of a bikini model taped onto his door, and Satoru Gojo, the man split into six, divine eyes. 

He observes him in his dorm one afternoon, the lights off and blinds pulled tight, the divisions between each glowing a faint white from where the sunlight tries to slip inside into the dim, cool room. Satoru is on Suguru’s bed, a pillow held over his head with an arm. Suguru is facing him from his desk, unmoving on his rolling chair. His chin rests on his arms crossed over the back, legs outstretched. 

“We can cancel tonight,” Suguru offers. “We can go out tomorrow.”

“I’m fine,” Satoru says, voice muffled. 

“Okay, then I’m going to turn on the light.”

“Fine, do it.”

Satoru frowns, “You can just say you’re tired. I don’t know how those eyes of yours work but I can’t imagine it’s easy." 

Satoru huffs, “Those eyes, huh?”

“What?”

Satoru shifts, moving the pillow as he turns his face to reveal a side of it. He looks at Suguru, and Suguru looks back. His eyes are drained, dewy as they stare at him unwaveringly.  Suguru thinks this is another aspect to Satoru that is not spoken of, that is not known to enemies or documented by historians; the arctic sky that can exist in his eyes, and the way they look in the muted light as they perceive Suguru.  

He tries not to think about it. He tries not to think about it when he catches Satoru staring at him during class, or watching him train, following each of his movements. He can barely understand Satoru alone as is, and can’t begin to comprehend him in relation to Suguru beyond the scope of we’re the strongest. 

“Nothing,” Satoru says then, placing the pillow over his face again. “Forget it. Don’t turn on the light.”

“This is my room you know.”

“I know.”

Suguru’s chair creeks as he readjusts his arms, “Are you going to nap?”

Satoru turns his body away from him, facing the wall.

“Yep.”

Suguru looks at his back, at the stretch of his exposed neck, and thinks of how many people, how many enemies, will never see this. He thinks of how if they did, they would view it as weakness, as something to exploit, and wonders what he thinks of it himself, of Satoru Gojo taking a nap in his dorm at 4:29 P.M. 

“I’ll wake you up in an hour,” Suguru says. 

“Mm.”

Suguru has just turned sixteen when he and Satoru are sent out on a mission to retrieve parts of a cursed corpse. The sweet taste of cake lingers in his mouth as he and Satoru take a staircase down that leads them to the walkway to an underground market where the curse user is reported to be. Satoru had bought a cake for Suguru for his birthday two days ago but failed to check on the serving size. Now, nearly half a cake is leftover in Suguru’s minifridge, much to Satoru’s delight. 

“Have you been here before?” Suguru asks, craning his neck up to look at the cavernous ceiling. Jagged, brown rock spirals towards them, the air that flows between the formations cold and humid, curling the hair by Suguru’s neck. Ahead, the path takes a left, and the rocky ceiling ends. 

“Nope,” Satoru responds. “Not my kind of vibe.”

When they reach the turn, Suguru is taken aback by the sudden change in setting; before, the stairs they had taken led them to a concrete passage lit by the sides that guided them through the cave, but now the caves were gone, the entryway to a bustling marketplace greeting them. Satoru continues where Suguru hesitates, but he follows after a beat, admittedly distracted. 

When they pass by a cart selling herbs and seasonings in colorful mounds, Suguru breathes in curry and paprika, although the aroma is soon replaced by that of resin and sandalwood, wisps of incense wafting from shop fronts cluttered with books, trinkets, and occult goods. He pauses in front of one shop, a series of religious figures for sale beside decks of divination and tarot cards aglow underneath red light. There is a crystal set on top of a reflective, circling plate that reflects the light onto him. 

“Suguru?”

He turns his head and sees that Satoru is steps ahead of him, eyeing him. 

He catches up to him sheepishly, rubbing at the back of his neck as people pass by them in the narrow, bustling walkway. 

“Sorry, got distracted.”

Satoru is thinking of something, Suguru can tell in the slight twist to his mouth and angle of his head. 

“What?” he asks. 

“If you want to look around, I can go pick up the stuff.”

Suguru frowns, “I know I was distracted but I’m fine—”

Satoru waves a hand, “I’m not saying it because of that, you just seem, I don’t know, interested in this kinda stuff. I won’t take that long, anyway.”

From somewhere to their left, food begins to cook, the scent of hot oil and batter frying erupting in the air. 

“Are you sure?” Suguru asks. 

Satoru nods before patting his shoulder, “Don’t get kidnapped, m’kay?”

Suguru snorts before shoving him off lightly, “Yeah, asshole. I’ll try.”

He doesn’t move until he’s unable to see Satoru’s white hair, and when he does, he drifts through the stalls and carts aimlessly, nodding along politely whenever a shopkeeper spoke to him, but never stopping. He passes two older men seated at a table wedged between two stalls playing a dice game and sees a shop front unlike the rest past them. Rather than having an exuberant amount of decor or goods on display, there is a glass counter with an elderly woman behind it, a single sign that reads PSYCHIC above her in thin, slanted neon blue lettering. 

The woman spots him the same time he does and waves at him, urging him to come. Suguru doesn’t consider himself a skeptic, but as he steps towards her, he feels doubtful. Although the entryway to her store beside the counter is blocked by a chair, he can see glimpses of the inside from behind her. Orange and pink lights are strung across the ceiling, some glowing bulbs hidden behind hanging tapestries with intricate designs. Suguru can’t tell if the store smells of tea, or if the woman who smiles at him once he stands directly in front of her does. 

“Hello,” she says, hands folded over one another. A series of ornate rings decorate her skeletal fingers, and Suguru half expects her to pull out a crystal ball, or some type of mirror to scry. 

Before he can reply, she continues. 

“It isn’t often that I see a boy of jade.”

Suguru knits his brows together, “What does that mean?”

The woman’s eyes crease as she smiles, the wrinkles that stretch past the horizon of her eyelids decades older than Suguru. 

“Let me read for you, to celebrate the occasion.”

Suguru shakes his head, “No, it’s fine, really. I was just passing through.”

It seems the woman chooses not to hear him as she turns and hunches over for a moment, disappearing behind the counter. When she resurfaces, the bracelets on her wrist slide down her slim arm as she spreads out a series of cards, shuffling them. 

“Is that a full deck?”

The woman hums, “No. Only what’s needed is here.” 

He decides asking questions is pointless, but stays regardless, stepping closer to get out of the way of others walking past. 

“Choose three cards,” she states, motioning towards the cards now splayed out face down on the glass. Suguru does as he’s told, and plucks two cards out from the left, and the second to last card from the right. As he turns them face up, he’s met with three images: a red tower broken in half by a flash of yellow lighting, a person with a fox mask dancing on a blob of red ink by a cliff, and a man hanging from one foot, his hands pressed together in prayer.

“Ah,” the woman coos, placing a hand against her face. Suguru notices that her nails are painted different colors, her pinky a vibrant green, her thumb a wine red. 

“What do they mean?”

She taps the card with the tower, “Have you ever seen lightning strike a tree?”

Suguru shakes his head, suspicion unfurling in the back of his mind slowly. 

“It doesn’t always burst into flames,” she continues. “Sometimes, it’ll burn from the inside out, and all you can do is embrace that blaze.”

An unreasonable part of him wants to argue this, wants to clarify that he is not burning, but then she taps the card with the dancing figure.

“You will either change from this fire or retreat into old safety from it. You cannot tell what lies ahead of the ash, you must only greet it. You cannot cross the chasm it leaves behind with steps, you must leap.”

Suguru does not speak. 

She moves onto the next card, placing all three beside one another. Suguru stares down at the man hanging by his foot, counting the black prayer beads tethered to his hands to distract himself from the strange dread slowly bubbling within him. 

“You must remember that you are temporary, boy,” she says. “As are the things of this world. Sacrifice is not always punishment, but remember when you sacrifice too much you will hang, and when you hang, you will hang alone.” 

He jumps when he feels an arm draped over his shoulder and twists his head to see Satoru looking at the woman, and then the cards. 

He whistles.

“I didn’t know you were actually into this kinda stuff,” he says. “It fits you, I guess.”

The woman smiles as she shuffles the cards once more, “Would you like a reading, as well?”

“Nah, I don’t believe in this stuff,” Satoru is quick to say. “No offense.”

“Of course,” she replies. “A boy of the stars does not need to concern himself with matters of the earth.” 

Suguru feels Satoru stiffen and shrugs his arm off.

“Let’s go,” he says, before glancing at the woman. He doesn’t say goodbye, and neither does she. Instead, she offers him one last close-eyed smile before turning around and disappearing into her shop. 

As they walk away, Satoru holding onto a case with what Suguru assumes are the cursed corpse parts, Satoru bumps his elbow into Suguru. 

“What’d that hag tell you?”

Suguru shrugs, “Nothing important.” 

The sun warms the skin of Suguru’s nape as he stares down at the water, curling his toes into the sand. He watches as the disrupted sand clouds the water, swirls of it dimming its translucency. Water sloshes by his waist, and he feels the fleeting touch of a small fish gliding against his side. He feels that his shoulders are sunburnt, feels the fire trapped underneath his tender ruby skin, but it’s painless. The discomfort, blisters and peeling skin will come later. 

“Suguru, check this out.” 

Suguru cranes his head to the side to see Satoru beaming at him, closer to the shore. He has his hands shoved into his bathing short’s pockets, the stroke of his back prideful as he waits for Suguru’s reaction. It takes him a moment, Suguru eyeing him warily, but then he realizes the lake water which would have reached Satoru's calves is absent, parted to either side of him surreally. Satoru sees when Suguru realizes, and laughs, joyous and triumphant.

 “I figured out I could do this,” he announces, pushing his lenses up the bridge of his nose with a finger. Suguru is awestruck. Satoru is monumental and casually celestial as the confused fish of the lake he’s disrupting swim towards an impossible barrier, bumping into it before bolting away. But Satoru is also 16, he is also sunburnt along his shoulders and chest from when they had fallen asleep on the dock together despite Shoko’s warnings, and his lips are stained vibrant cobalt from a slushie, left forgotten to melt on the shore.  

He steps closer to him, treading through the water as a strange current flows past his ankles, no doubt caused by the disordering of infinity. When he reaches its border, the muddy lake water clouded from the sand he unsettled sploshing onto it like glass, he wonders if he’ll be halted as well, but infinity closes around him as he steps closer to Satoru. Where Satoru is severance, Suguru is union. 

“Suguru, what’s your deal?”

You, he thinks, mouth loosened into a helpless smile.  

“You’re a menace to the wildlife,” he responds instead. “You’re going to mess up an ecosystem.”

“Don’t be overdramatic.”

When he shoves him, Satoru grips onto his arms to bring them down together, water surging up Suguru’s nose as they fall back. When he resurfaces he is caught between coughing and laughing, Satoru’s wet hair clinging to him like a dog. 

He decides the moment it was over for him was when he looked Satoru in the eyes.

He didn’t stand a chance, not with the way Satoru proved to be endearing despite his infuriating attitude, not with how an unbearable honesty leaked through his arrogance. Suguru knows, knows that this is love, that he has fallen stupidly, irresponsibly, irreversibly, in love with Satoru Gojo. He knows this and he fears it more than any curse he’s ever exorcised and ingested. 

Fear encompasses him, entangles itself within his thoughts, and drenches the words he refuses to say in arsenic and rotten, forlorn tastes. There’s a strange comfort in the revulsion, in the security of repression, and Suguru keeps it in his mouth until he’s gagging, until—

Satoru touches him. His tenacity trembles when Satoru touches his bruised knuckles, passing his smooth fingertips over the discolored skin in the car ride back from a mission. His resolve wavers when Satoru touches the shell of his ear as he brushes his bangs back one evening, and it dissolves when he touches his lips once, his thumb sliding across Suguru’s lower lip as if he is something to be idolized.

“You had something on your lip,” Satoru lied. 

“Sure,” he said, played along.  

They’re outstretched on the grass underneath the shade of one of the older oak trees of the school now, tucked away behind one of the less used buildings. Suguru’s head is by Satoru’s as they lay vertically from one another, a song faintly playing from the phone perched on Satoru’s chest. Suguru can barely hear the singer’s voice, only catching a few words at a time and some hints of a guitar. His mouth is parched from the candies they had shared on the way over, and Suguru sighs, closing his eyes as the leaves above them sway. He thinks they have another thirty minutes, maybe an hour, before they have to head to class.

“Suguru, why haven’t you kissed me yet?”

He opens his eyes, just as a leaf zig-zags in the air slowly onto him. 

“What?”

Suguru turns his head to look at him, but Satoru doesn’t turn his. He continues to stare up at the branches, glasses lowered on his nose. Suguru stares at his cheek, at the oval indents of the nose pads left behind on the bridge of his nose, and then, finally, his lips. 

He gulps. 

“I mean, you want to, right? So, why haven’t you?”

Frustration flares, as it seems to always do with Satoru’s arrogant performativity, but there is also a dizzying awareness spreading over him, and Suguru is unflinchingly aware of how Satoru has begun to topple their flimsy reliability over, the one Suguru so desperately held onto as a foundation. Suguru is slipping underneath the waves of his eyes, and he curses himself for believing that he could possibly hide from Satoru Gojo.

“Most people don’t kiss their friends,” he says, coolly.

Satoru snorts, “Are we most people?”

“Do you want me to kiss you?” 

The world pays them no mind; the leaves above them continue to sway and rustle in the breeze, and slivers of white from the cotton clouds above them continue along their course, but Satoru is motionless. Suguru is about to open his mouth, about to ease the tension Satoru has carelessly tossed between them, but then he turns his head to look at him. Blades of grass slip in between the legs of his glasses, curling against Satoru’s cheek. 

“Is that it?” Satoru says, “Do you need me to say yes?”

Suguru has faced hundreds if not, thousands of cursed spirits. He has fought for his life, has avoided hellish barbed tongues lashing at him hungrily and venomous, putrid claws reaching for his throat, but he has never felt as courageous as he did now, facing Satoru’s harrowing, openly craving eyes. 

“Maybe it is,” he replies, and Satoru laughs loudly, the soft sounds of the song playing swallowed up by his disruptive bliss. Suguru is an exposed wire, strung far too tight, bound to snap.  

“I want you to kiss me, Suguru.”

And so, he does. 

It’s far from poetic. The way they’re lying down means that they each have to scoot up towards one another, awkwardly kissing upside down. Still, Suguru finds it fitting for their adolescent bodies, for the controlled, clumsy manner in which Satoru’s limbs moved, for the hair length Suguru still isn’t sure he wants to cut short or grow. The kiss is intermediate, a transition to something Suguru isn’t sure of. 

When they each pull away, Satoru is grinning so wide Suguru can see his gums.

“Wow,” Satoru says. “We suck at kissing.”

Suguru’s cheeks flush, but he laughs.  

Nothing changes after the kiss. 

There is no euphoric realization, no epiphany in which the two realize that they’re fated lovers, or soul mates, or whatever other romantic trash is common in the movies Satoru makes him watch. The days pass, and Suguru tries to forget kissing Satoru. 

They never kiss again, and they never talk about it. 

Suguru tries to understand in an attempt to not grow resentful. Satoru is his best friend at the end of the day, it’s as simple as that, and yet he simmers. Satoru is as loose with his touch as before, his fingertips touching Suguru’s skin on occasion through the veil of flimsy excuses. During a horror movie in which they and Shoko are seated shoulder to shoulder on the floor underneath a blanket, Satoru reaches for Suguru’s hand, touches the grooves of his knuckles, and then retreats without a second thought. During a mission where they are two cities over from their school and Suguru is knocked back by the spirit Satoru promptly exorcises, he keeps his hand on Suguru for a moment longer than necessary to help him stand back up, his fingers circling Suguru’s wrist. 

The touches do not start as searing initially, but when Suguru finally thinks they'll be extinguished, Satoru ignites them with negligence by touching his arm, his hair, his knee. 

In the end, Suguru blames himself. He should have known better, Satoru is Satoru after all. Suguru had heard him talk about the girls who approached him with an acute awareness of their impermanence, never bothering to keep track of their names, and had seen him lose interest within a week, even a day, depending. His phone filtered through numbers easily, even if he didn’t outright date them. Suguru has no one to blame but himself for believing that he would be different. 

It was just a kiss, he tells himself once when he finds himself in the grip of a gnarly mood minutes before Satoru is supposed to meet him to sleep over. It’s a Friday night in their second year, and the school semester has come to end for the Summer. Shoko is visiting her family for two weeks before missions are due to arise, leaving the boys to their own devices. 

The sound of the door bursting open displaces him from his acidic thoughts and Suguru peeks his head out from his bathroom to see Satoru carrying a plastic bag with nothing but sweets in it, and another with savory snacks like chips and something microwavable Suguru can’t discern through the thin, white plastic. 

“Did you buy any actual food?” 

Satoru closes the door behind him with his foot and chucks the bags on top of the microwave. 

“There’s a granola bar in there somewhere. You like vanilla blueberry, right?” 

“Right.”

It’s actually some dark chocolate with cherry flavor, and Suguru chews through it despite the unpleasant taste for the sake of his stomach. It’s pointless as the hours pass by, his stomach reprimanding him for the outright trash he’s eating with cramps. By 2 AM, when Satoru has a half-empty bag of chips open by his knee as he focuses on the game they’re marathoning, Suguru decides to only drink water. He watches as Satoru dies again, gripping the controller against his forehead as the automated cutscene of his character dying plays before he’s prompted to press restart. 

“I hate horror games, they’re stupid. Why can’t I fight back?”

“You can,” Suguru corrects. “Just later. You have to hide for that part of the stage.”

Satoru glowers at him, “That’s stupid.”

“Maybe you’re stupid.”

“Fine, you play then.”

Suguru barely catches the controller in time when Satoru throws it at him, and he huffs as he moves closer to the screen, sitting beside him rather than by his bed. He can feel Satoru staring at the screen with a grave amount of concentration, and almost laughs at it. He plays through the stage well enough, having the player duck and roll underneath tables and behind walls when prompted to avoid detection. When he clears the stealth area, he pauses the game and tosses the controller back onto Satoru’s lap.

“See? Easy.”

“Yeah,” he huffs, unpausing the game. “Whatever.” 

Satoru’s patience for the game has clearly evaporated, with him losing nearly all his health to rush past fight scenes hurriedly. It doesn’t bother Suguru, with the night dragging on he’s becoming sleepier and finds himself nodding in and out of consciousness more than once. But when Satoru starts to skip through cutscenes, assaulting his controller’s buttons to have the characters on screen hiccup and clip through voice lines, Suguru starts to get annoyed. 

“What are you doing—”

What’s the point in playing the game if Satoru didn’t want to pay attention or care about the story? 

“Sorry if I scared you. I thought I was—”

Another burst of rapid button mashing and Suguru inhales through his nose. 

“It’s dangerous—”

He exhales. Why is this bothering him so much? He feels fidgety, his palms starting to itch. 

“Dangerous? You're kidding! The door was open—”

This cutscene is hellishly longer than the others, the woman’s speech broken up into multiple segments that Satoru tries to breeze past. Suguru feels uncomfortable, his neck is starting to bother him, and if Satoru doesn’t stop—

“I just love the theater, Travis —“

“I can't stop thinking about you, Travis. I want you—“

“Run off, the two of us. We could be so good—“ 

Suguru is ready to snap and grab the controller from Satoru’s hands when the final cutscene passes and he begins to move his character through an unlit hallway. All at once, his vexation seeps out of him, and he sighs, rubbing his thumb along the crease of his brows to smooth out the skin. 

“You alright?” Satoru asks. 

He nods, eyes closed.

“Yeah, just tired.”  

Their summer goes to shit.  

Or, a week of it does. It’s dreamlike, almost. Suguru and Satoru meet a girl they’re willing to alter their lives for, and in the same swoop, lose her. They lose her, her friend, and Satoru. 

But Satoru comes back. He becomes closer to a god than ever before. 

Suguru figures that’s where the dream feels like a dream and not some warped nightmare he’s stuck in. The world does not mourn for Riko Amanai or Misato Kuroi, and it does not have to for Satoru. Satoru, who Suguru believed to be dead, of all impossible things, is alive. 

Suguru isn’t sure that all of him came back. Maybe he had, but the division apparent between them now stopped Suguru from really knowing. It’s why he feels insane; two lives were butchered and two were altered but the days passed as if nothing had occurred at all. Once they repair the physical damage done from Satoru’s fight against Toji, there’s no physical proof to remind Suguru, to ground him. The slashes against his chest do not leave a scar, and although Suguru did not see the wounds inflicted onto Satoru, he catches him touching his forehead by his hairline sometimes, or tracing the bulb of his Adam's apple. Suguru wonders and imagines, but he does not ask. 

It’s another thing they won’t talk about, and Suguru swallows it down, digesting the grief that Satoru refuses to acknowledge; how did one mourn for the living? For the boy who slept in your bed, facing away from you? 

“I’m sorry.”

Suguru is startled and looks away from his ceiling where he had zoned out to the back of Satoru’s head beside him. His undercut is fresh, the buzz leading into the rest of his hair fuzzy and short. They’re timeless in Suguru’s dorm, untouchable by the humidity and cadence of the end of Summer outside. 

“Why?”

 Satoru rolls onto his back but doesn’t look at Suguru. The hand over his chest taps the thin bedsheet covering them both. 

“I’m not sure. I think because I’m supposed to be.”

Suguru frowns, “You aren’t supposed to be anything. Don’t apologize if you don’t mean it.”

Satoru’s eyes flicker to him. Suguru half expects them to glow in the darkness.

 “Do you want me to apologize?”

“There is nothing to apologize for.”

The air conditioning rattles to life, loud and intrusive for one, taut moment before mellowing out. 

“Amanai and Kuroi would say otherwise.”

Suguru stops breathing. It isn’t a conscious decision, but his lungs seize and he feels something massive try to push through his chest. He curls his hands against the mattress, raking the sheets. 

“Don’t,” he manages to speak. “Don’t, Satoru.”

Satoru doesn’t respond. He turns back around to face the wall, and Suguru turns to face the rest of the static dorm after. He falls asleep when dawn begins to rise from behind the school’s buildings and the slanted roofs of temples, the slate sky corroded by marigold and garnet. 

His hands tremble as they hold his phone to his sweaty ear, as he waits for one, two, three rings before Yaga answers him. The girls sitting on either side of him on the bus bench cling onto his shirt, and Suguru tries to ignore the red that smears onto the white fabric by their fingers. 

“Suguru?” 

That’s right, that’s who he is. That’s his name. Suguru Geto. 

“I—”

His voice catches in this throat, obstructed by the bile that resurfaces when he remembers why he is calling, what he was about to do, what he could still do. 

“Are you safe? What happened?” 

The girl to his left, with short black hair, begins to cry again, burying her face into his side. 

“I need help.”

He hears shuffling from the other side of the line, “Stay where you are.”

“Okay.”

It doesn’t take Satoru long to find him once he’s at the school. He figures Shoko had texted him, or maybe Yaga, but when he steps through the doors of the lab he’s still in oversized pajamas, and distantly, Suguru recognizes the shirt loose on his shoulders as his own. He glances down at himself and sees vermillion staining unbuttoned white, from when one of the girls had lashed out at one of the villagers following them out of the village, and his breath stutters. The man hadn’t died. Suguru had heard him scream but he was alive. 

Satoru steps towards him quickly, his hands jerking as if he were going to touch him, but then they remain by his side. 

“What happened?”

“I didn’t kill them.”

It isn’t what he wants to say, or what Satoru is asking, but it’s the only words Suguru can manage to articulate. He had envisioned the massacre, envisioned how it would look to see his spirits let loose on those animals, but he hadn’t done it. 

Satoru turns away from him to stare at Shoko and Yaga. 

“What happened?” 

“Suguru rescued two girls who are sorcerers,” Yaga explains. “Shoko put them to sleep for tonight so they could rest.”

“I didn’t kill them,” Suguru repeats, voice lowered. He feels a hand on his shoulder and looks up to see Yaga standing beside Satoru, a consoling bend to his mouth. 

“You did the right thing. We’ll sort this out.”

He hears himself blurt out, “You can’t take the girls away.”

That surprises Satoru for some reason, Suguru sees it in the way he leans his weight onto the foot away from him, his blue eyes wide and unsure. 

“We won’t. We have resources for this.”

He squeezes his shoulder, and Suguru feels the pressure ricochet from his shoulder blades to his neck and spine. Yaga leaves after, and Shoko excuses herself to check in on the girls. 

Satoru is utterly out of his depth. Suguru wants to point it out, wants to laugh at how fucking awkward he is just standing there, but he can’t. When Satoru sits beside him on the metal slab, his hand brushing against his, something splinters. He doesn’t cry, but tremors shake his body, and his breath hiccups, each loud inhale searing his lungs. He doesn’t fight off Satoru’s arm when it wraps around his waist. 

“I didn’t kill them,” he repeats.

“I know,” Satoru answers. “You did well.”

Suguru tries to even out his breathing, tries to calm himself down, but whatever splinters off is lost to him, and he only continues to break. He sobs, dryly. 

“I wanted to,” he admits, through broken breaths.

Satoru is silent. The veracity of his own words dawn on him, and Suguru hunches forward, curling his fingers into his hairline and tugging on his hair. 

“I wanted to, Satoru. I wanted to kill them. I didn’t care.” 

“But you didn’t,” he says. “You didn’t do it.”

Suguru doesn’t cry, but Satoru holds him all the same.     

A month before graduation, Satoru asks Suguru to take a walk with him. The request isn’t strange in itself, but what is strange is the ambivalent tone in Satoru’s voice, the cramped way he has his hands shoved into his pockets as he walks beside Suguru. Quietly, they follow a lone pathway that wraps around the perimeter of the school that leads into the looped, hillside streets by its outskirts.

“I haven’t been able to talk to you a lot lately,” Satoru says. It isn’t an accusation, but Suguru craves to morph it into one as they start to walk up an incline. 

“You haven’t, no.”

“What are you going to do after graduation?”

Suguru shrugs, “Whatever the school wants me to do, I guess.”

Satoru is unpleasantly quiet at this revelation. 

“Is there something wrong with that?” Suguru pries. 

Satoru shrugs. 

“I mean, no. But it just seems like that’s not what you want.” 

“What do I want then, Satoru?”

He peers over at him from the corner of his eyes, “I don’t know. You tell me.”

What does he want? 

He wants to forget how fresh blood tastes like putrid metal when it's smeared against your teeth and pooling in your mouth. He wants to forget how it feels to have a blade carve into you as if you’re a slab of meat. He wants to forget the revolting taste of curses, wants to forget about the horrors invisible to most, wants to erase from memory the way bruises could look so violet on a five-year-old’s skin. He wants to be able to be weak, to choose to be insignificant without a pang of overwhelming guilt attached as an afterthought, without a constant urgency under his skin to be more. He wants Satoru, he wants—

“I don’t know,” he replies. “I think a break, for now.” 

“Then take it,” Satoru says like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “Nanami took a break.”

“Nanami left. There’s a difference.”

Satoru scoffs, “You really think he won’t come back?” 

“I don’t know,” Suguru says. “He was different after Haibara.”

Another thing he wants: to forget the plastic sheet pulled up to Haibara’s chin, and the way it cascaded off the edge of his torso. 

“Would you come back,” Satoru asks, “if you took a break?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I wouldn’t blame you.”

Suguru stops walking, “Because that’s what matters, right? As long as you’re not upset with me, I can do whatever I want.”

Satoru blinks, “What?”

“Forget it.”

Satoru steps forward, waving a hand in between them. 

“No, screw that. You’ve been telling me to forget it for over a year now.”

He bites the inside of his cheek, “Drop it.”

“You can leave,” Satoru persists. “You don’t have to stay. I won’t make you stay.”

“Since when have you been this mature?” he spits, and suddenly he cannot stop, propelled forward by something tart on his tongue. “What makes you so sure Nanami will come back but not me?” 

Satoru doesn’t know how to handle it, it’s evident with how he’s watching him, gaze halfway between cautious and indignant. 

“Maybe I’m wrong about Nanami, that isn’t important—”

“We’re the strongest, right?” Suguru interrupts. “Right, Satoru? You love saying it, after all. If I leave, what does that make me? You’ll be the strongest, but what will I be?”

“Happy?”

Suguru laughs with a sudden appreciation of the absurdity of Satoru’s answer, at how ridiculous the notion is. Satoru stares at him, invulnerable as ever.

“How childish,” Suguru says, before turning back and leaving Satoru behind, alone. 

He doesn’t follow him. 

Suguru does leave. 

Satoru chooses to be a teacher, as laughable as the idea is to Suguru and Shoko, and Suguru picks up a server gig at a slightly bourgeois place in a popular shopping district. He lives in a simple, comfortable enough apartment, and when the girls visit over some weekends, he lets them take up his room while he sleeps on the couch in the living room. 

“You could afford a better place, you know,” Satoru says once when he visits. He frequents nearly as much as the girls, sometimes bringing them along with him. 

“I don’t need it.”

“If you ever want to live with the girls you will,” Satoru argues. 

“We’ll see.” 

Satoru is stretched out on Suguru’s couch, legs thrown over his lap. Suguru has an early morning shift tomorrow and has half a mind to kick out Satoru already when a cramped silence swells between them. Suguru sighs, knowingly.  

“What is it?” 

Satoru frowns before finally conceding, folding his arms behind his neck. 

“I found Toji’s kid.” 

“Oh.”

He rolls his ankle once, and Suguru feels the subtly wet crack on his thigh. 

“Yeah. I’m gonna help him and his sister out, brat’s not half bad.”

Suguru’s veins are frozen. 

“Why are you helping his kid?” 

“Don’t say it like that. He doesn’t even remember his dad,” Satoru argues. “And the Zenin want him, so I’ll be getting in the way of that.”

“Are you raising him?”

Satoru yawns, “Nah, not really. Just helping out.”

“Okay.”

He knocks his ankle into his stomach, and Suguru pinches the exposed skin above his sock. His veins warm again, bit by bit. 

“Do you have any snacks?”

“You’re unbearable.” 

He does get a better apartment eventually when the year lease runs out, a two-bedroom place where the girls pick their bedsheets and matching curtains. The sunlight that filters through the polka dot design leaves a series of multicolored flecks across the room, and slowly, the apartment is littered with toys and other homely trinkets. 

He starts to teach, too. Satoru is ecstatic but wary at the news, and Suguru lets him celebrate, despite his disquiet on campus. He cares for his students, tries his best to prepare them for whatever they may face, but he is careful to not allow himself to love them, mindful of the way they all face possible impermanence, death as common as the shadows cast by the sun. 

Satoru swears he’ll keep “the youth from losing their youth” but he doesn’t believe him. 

“We’re 20,” Suguru says once. “What about our youth?”

Satoru had said nothing. 

Now, on a Saturday, the tendons that tug underneath Satoru’s skin, moving against it as he taps his fingers along his soda bottle, lure Suguru’s distracted gaze. He watches the movement until his eyes trail to the knobs of Satoru’s wrists, to the rarely exposed pale skin of his arms, seemingly pistachio-colored veins visible as they fade out of view by his elbow. 

“We’re sorta like parents,” Satoru says, unprovoked. 

Ahead of them, laughter bursts into the air, and Suguru turns his head to see Mimiko and Nanako, both with drenched shirts, pointing at Megumi, whose expression is contorted into a prickly glare. Wet hair clings to his face as he wields a singular water balloon, a red oval that gets lunged at Mimiko shortly after, who narrowly avoids it.

“I would argue babysitters,” Suguru replies. “We don’t live with them.”

Satoru blows out a huff of disbelief, “You see the girls almost every day, they adore you.”

It is one thing to love and be loved, and another to be told you are. Suguru feels warmth bloom within his chest and sighs, trying to expel it before it shows.

“That doesn’t mean we’re their parents, Satoru.”

“I think I’d be a fantastic dad,” he says, leering at him. 

“Oh? And why’s that?”

Satoru leans away from him, but raises a hand in the air between them, holding up one finger. “Well, first. I’m super strong, so I can protect them.”

Suguru whacks his hand away, “Arguable.”

“Sh, no interrupting,” he holds up another finger. “I’m also rich, so we can spoil them. And I’m smart and funny. Just imagine the dad jokes.”

He tries to, he really does, but his mind stalls and stutters on we. 

“We,” he repeats. 

Satoru drops his hand and lolls his head over to glance at Suguru at an angle. 

“Well yeah,” he clarifies. “Megumi might not say it, but he likes spending time with the girls, and they like Tsumiki. If we’re parents, we can’t separate them, that’s just cruel.”

Suguru frowns, “Satoru, we are not—”

“I’m not saying we are, okay? Just that we’re kinda like them, geez. What’s with the freakout?”

Any tenderness that had invaded Suguru’s thoughts is immediately dragged out by Satoru so quickly that it’s almost impressive. 

“I’m not freaking out.”

Satoru squints, “Sure.”

He’s about to argue when the girls rush over to them, Mimiko’s arms folded behind her back. 

“What are you holding?” Suguru asks, pressing a hand along her arm once she’s close enough.

Mimiko and Nanako both answer in unison, “Nothing.”

Satoru watches them, an affectionate, close-lipped smile on his mouth as he holds his head up with a hand, his cheek squished against his glasses. The girls glance at one another, sharing a look in a language of their own before Mimiko reveals what she’s holding onto. 

“We made it for you,” Nanako explains, as Mimiko places a halo of small, yellow, and orange flowers interwoven into a crown with grass, onto Suguru’s head. 

Satoru pouts, “I don’t get one?”

Mimiko giggles, “We told ‘Gumi to make one but he said no.”

“Oh,” Satoru hums. “Is that so?”

Suguru doesn’t have time to stop Satoru from standing up and rushing after Megumi, who starts to yell and run away from Satoru’s assault when he notices. 

“Do you like it?” Mimiko asks as she takes Satoru’s place on the blanket. Her dress rides up slightly, revealing a series of colorful and cartoon bandages decorating her knees. Nanako has matching ones on her own.  

“I do,” he says. “I didn’t even notice you two making it.”

Nanako rubs a hand against her nose, “It’s because we’re sneaky.”

“Clearly,” he chuckles, before Satoru’s voice flares. 

“Why don’t you want to make a crown, huh?” he yells, as he manages to tackle Megumi down into the grass meters away, the two of them skidding across it. 

“I’ll start screaming!” Megumi threatens, and Suguru can’t hold back his laughter when he manages to nail a kick to Satoru’s groin. 

Each of Suguru’s senses is assaulted when he opens the door to his apartment. He is, admittedly, ready to chastise Satoru for sending him on an array of errands when he had left his apartment with the singular one, his phone seemingly sounding off with a new text message asking him to go pick up flowers for someone, to go get some groceries, to pick up his dry cleaning, every hour. 

It dawns on him why Satoru had badgered him so much when he sees the twins, Megumi, Tsumiki, Shoko, Nanami, and a grinning Satoru staring at him, each with a different cone party hat strapped onto their heads.

“Happy birthday!” they cheer, although, by Megumi and Nanami’s expression, Suguru can guess they simply spoke the words. 

Right. He’s 21. 

“What is all this?” he asks as he shuts the door behind him without turning, ensuring his tone is light. He reminds himself to grin, to have the corners of his mouth dig into his cheeks in search of his dimples. 

“We wanted to surprise you!” Mimiko shouts, before rushing over to him. Nanako is a step behind her. 

“We even got you presents,” she announces, and Suguru’s expression feels minimally more natural. 

“Who’s idea was this?” he asks, placing a hand on top of each of the girl’s heads, careful to not bonk Nanako with the plastic bags hanging off his wrists. 

“Do you really have to ask?” Shoko responds, tilting her head towards Satoru by a degree. He throws an arm around her shoulder in response. 

“It wasn’t just my idea, the kids wanted to do something too.” 

Mimiko turns to look at Satoru then, “Can we open presents now?”

“They’re my presents, right?” Suguru chides. “You sound so excited I’m thinking they might be yours.”

Nanako throws her head back to look at him, frowning. Suguru laughs and motions for them to rejoin everyone with a nudge. Later, when the kids are distracted, Shoko and Nanami attempting to orchestrate some form of order of distribution of the cake after they had sung Happy Birthday to Suguru, Satoru finds himself beside him. 

Suguru is leaning against the doorway to the kitchen, arms crossed in front of his chest as he watches the ordeal. 

“Did you forget?” Satoru asks, voice lowered as he leans in. 

“My own birthday? Please, Satoru.”

But it has never been like Satoru to yield, so he doesn’t. 

“Maybe you should take tomorrow off, treat yourself.”

One of the girls turns to look at him, and Suguru smiles as he responds. 

“It’s alright. Thank you for this.”

Satoru rubs at the back of his neck, “Can’t take all the credit, the girls kept hounding me over their gifts for you.”

Suguru hums, “That’s sweet.”

“Suguru, I really think you sh—”

“It’s fine. I’m fine.”

“You know how with couples,” Satoru says, words slurring together. “One is the moon sometimes, and the other is the sun?”

“We’re not a couple,” Suguru corrects. “But yeah, I get the gist.”

“Whatever,” Satoru groans. “It works for duos too. My point is, I don’t think it fits us.”

Suguru takes the bait, sighing.

“Why not?”

Satoru burps. It reeks of the sweet, fruity alcohol Suguru bought them hours ago. 

“I think we’re beyond that. I think, I think we’re stars.” 

In Suguru’s kitchen, with only one overhead light above them on, the only stars in the room are Satoru’s eyes, but Suguru won’t point it out to him. Instead, he swirls his drink once before finishing it off. Satoru watches him intently, waiting for an answer. 

Suguru doesn’t know where the words come from, but when he says them, he feels their sincerity in the way his throat constricts to form them.

“I actually think I’m a sun.”

Satoru listens. There must be something in Suguru’s tone undetectable to him, because Satoru is watching him like he’s the center of the world, and Suguru has to tear his eyes away to continue. 

“I think, I think I don’t know how to stop burning.”

Satoru sits up then and continues to stare at him. Suguru tries to laugh it off, shoving Satoru’s shoulder.

“What’s with the look?”

“I’m sorry you’re sad.”

Satoru’s eyelids droop, the typically hypervigilant blue crystalline eyes that watch Suguru are dilated, red veins forming a web against white. 

Suguru sighs.

“I’m not sad,” he says with solace. Satoru is nursing a now lukewarm cup of water, the condensation from the melted ice glistening where it meets his fingers. He shakes his head with untamed energy, his hair swaying back and forth wildly. 

“You are,” he argues. “You’re so sad sometimes, it makes me sad.”

Suguru’s chest hurts, and he frowns as he stares down at his hands, one holding onto his cup, the other resting against his knee. This conversation is so stupid. Sad. They weren’t children, Satoru is just drunk. 

His mouth splits unevenly into a laugh, trying to dispel whatever poetic haze Satoru has found himself under. 

“Yeah? I actually don’t think I’ve ever seen you sad.”

Satoru pouts and scoots closer to Suguru, the metal legs of his chair scraping against the wood floor. Suguru doesn’t protest when Satoru’s hands are suddenly on his face, squishing his cheeks together. 

“That isn’t true,” Satoru complains. “You’re so mean sometimes.”

Suguru covers Satoru’s hands with his own, pulling them away from his face. 

“You’re drunk, Satoru. You’re really drunk. Maybe you should head home.”

“I’ve been sad,” he continues, and Suguru sighs again. “I’ve been really sad. I was sad with Riko—”

Suguru’s chest plummets. Stop.

“—I was sad with you, too.” Satoru continues, relentless.

“Okay, Satoru. I believe you.”

“Do you?”

Suguru is relieved that the six eyes cannot spot lies. 

“I do, but c’mon. It’s late.”

Satoru drops his weight onto the island counter, resting his cheek against an outstretched arm. 

“Can I sleep here?”

“Sure, Satoru.”

Suguru’s chair creaks as he eases his weight off it, curling his toes against the cold floor. Satoru doesn’t immediately move, and Suguru can see his heavy eyes dulled by sleep and steps towards him. He bends down, kisses the top of Satoru’s head, and stills. 

He only realizes what he’s done thoughtlessly when Satoru looks up at him. Suguru has never thought of blue as a warm color, has never found it to be a color associated with melting, but that is what he is when Satoru looks at him terribly fondly. 

“See,” he says. “You’re sad.”

It’s too much. Maybe it always has been.

“Maybe I am,” Suguru answers, although there is no real question. 

One of his students dies. 

There is no body to dissect, grieve, or burn. Suguru can’t tell if it’s a blessing or another curse, but he takes another break regardless. 

He dreams of his student, of Riko and Haibara. He dreams of Mimiko and Nanako in Riko’s clothes, of Megumi in Haibara’s position on the metal slab. He dreams of them faceless, simply another series of bodies to burn, of ash to spread. He dreams of Satoru witnessing it all, his mouth peeled back into a grin. 

   I’ll protect them—

He wakes up gasping, holding onto his chest, and sees that the twins are peering through the door at him. 

“You should just move in at this rate,” he says the next morning when Satoru dumps a load of his laundry in Suguru’s washing machine. He’s in one of his shirts and a pair of boxers with a flamingo design, short hair pulled up into the small, pointy ponytail. When he’s done, he swirls around to steal a forkful of Suguru’s omelet. The late morning sun sets the kitchen aglow, the girls gone to school already. 

“Mm,” Satoru chews. “Maybe I should.”

Suguru pushes his plate closer to him, his fleeting appetite gone. 

“You’d have to split rent.”

“That isn’t a problem.”

Suguru blinks at him, “Wait, are you being serious?”

Satoru takes the plate and pushes himself up to sit on the kitchen counter. The washer starts its cycle in earnest, bumping against the floor. 

“If you are,” Satoru replies, before shoving another bite into his mouth. 

“I only have one bedroom, you know the other is for the girls.”

He swallows.

“That isn’t a problem.”

Suguru can’t tell if it’s a mistake, not yet at least. 

“Okay,” he says, mostly to himself. “Okay.”

Satoru is barely home, at least during the same time Suguru is. It doesn’t make much of a difference, and Suguru, like other things in his life, tries not to dwell on it. He doesn’t go back to the school. Satoru isn’t surprised when he tells him, but there is something left untouched about the topic, and Suguru pretends he doesn’t trip on it occasionally. If Satoru won’t touch it, neither will he. 

They mainly intersect at night now, when Suguru is home from the restaurant that rehired him and Satoru is either draped across the couch, a book he’s been failing to read for months open on his lap, or eating something in the kitchen, almost all the lights off. 

“You should get fewer shifts,” Satoru suggests one night when Suguru complains about a growing pain in his lower back. He massages the spot with one hand as he waits for a sock filled with rice to heat up in the microwave. 

“Yeah? And how am I supposed to pay rent?”

“I can cover more rent.”

The microwave beeps and Suguru sighs as he presses the sock against his skin. It’s almost too hot, but he welcomes the nearly intolerable sensation. 

“I’m not a charity case, Satoru.”

“That’s not, what? I’m just saying if you wanted some time off I can cover for you.”

“I don’t want time off, I’m fine.”

Satoru exhales, “You’re never home when I am. I barely see you.”

Suguru presses the sock further into his skin, the heat blooming.

“That isn’t my fault,” Suguru says. 

“Are you saying it’s mine?”

“I’m not saying anything.”

Suguru is in and out of sleep when the front door to his apartment opens. He grimaces at the damp, outside air seeping into the apartment quickly as Satoru steps inside, and yawns. Satoru isn’t due back until the next morning, but there he is, slipping off his shoes with a finger and flinging his blindfold somewhere to the left. The girls and Megumi are asleep on the couch with Suguru, Nanako tucked against his side while Mimiko and Megumi rest against one another, a pillow wedged between them and Suguru’s side. Satoru opens his mouth and Suguru shushes him before carefully slipping out from the kids. He scoops up the girls easily, and Satoru follows suit and picks up Megumi, although he grumbles about how much he weighs despite being so lanky. They take them to their beds, Megumi’s an inflatable in the girl’s room. 

They shut the door behind them quietly, and once they’re alone in their kitchen, Satoru throws himself over Suguru’s back, his arms dangling over his shoulders.

“I’m exhausted,” he whines. 

“You should sleep, then.”

Satoru knocks his head into him painlessly, “But we have the night to ourselves now.”

Suguru brushes him off and drifts towards the sink cluttered with dishes.

“Are you alright?” Satoru asks, following but leaning a hip against the counter by him.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

He gestures to nothing in particular, just swirling his hand in the air.

“I don’t know, you don’t seem okay. Did you fight with the kids?”

“No, I didn’t fight with the kids. I said I’m fine.”

“Technically you didn’t say that.”

Suguru drops a cup he was passing the sponge over in the sink and tries to catch it before it clunks loudly against the metal. The water pouring out of the faucet is slowly warming up. 

“Do you want me to not be alright?”

“Obviously not. What’s with you recently?”

Steam spirals into the air, and Suguru’s hands are becoming tender. 

“I don’t know, Satoru. I’m just tired.”

Satoru pushes himself off the counter, throwing a hand in the air. 

“You’re always tired, that’s always what you say.”

Suguru turns off the water, “Am I not allowed to be tired just because I’m not running around for the school?”

If this were Suguru a week ago, a month ago, maybe a year ago, he would have apologized. He would have backtracked on his words, tried to explain what was plowing into his shoulders without venom. 

“Wow,” Satoru remarks, and Suguru hates his tone, hates that he’s being antagonized. “Is that what’s bothering you? That I’m busy ?” 

“You’d love that, wouldn’t you?”

Satoru runs a hand down his face, squeezing the bridge of his nose. 

“Suguru, I can’t fix whatever I’m doing wrong if you don’t tell me what it is. Aren’t you tired of this?”

“You’re not doing anything wrong.”

“Clearly,” Satoru exclaims, his voice higher but still hushed as to not wake the kids, “that’s a lie.”

It’s pointless. They’re parallel lines, destined to not truly meet. No matter what words Suguru could possibly think to dump out into the plane between them, Satoru could never understand them, not in the way that is needed. 

“Just drop it, Satoru. It’s been a long week.”

The vexation from before drains from Satoru, leaving behind the frame of a pleading man. This is what Suguru hates about him the most. He hates the way he can strip himself so sincerely in front of Suguru without warning, without his say-so. 

When Satoru says, “Just tell me,” it is a helpless invocation.

Suguru tries. He is exhausted but he tries. 

“You always put your life on the line for them,” he begins. “And what do you get in return? Who do you do it for?”

“For us,” Satoru says. “For the kids, for the sorcerers we haven’t met yet.”

“What happens when you die?” Suguru counters. “Or when something happens to you? Who will protect them? You can’t burden the strongest missions and expect that to be a real change.”

“But I’m training them, I’m teaching them so they can be strong too.”

Suguru’s heart hurts. 

“To be the strongest?” he says, and Satoru’s eyes are lamentable, his posture reserved. Suguru can see their lines separating further and further apart. “How many ‘the strongest’ are you planning on making? What happens when there’s a stronger enemy? You’re thinking just like the higher-ups, you just want these kids to be stronger, that’s not the problem. That’s not the issue.” 

“I’m doing what I can,” Satoru insists. “Why is that never enough for you?”

There is no anger in the words, no hidden wrath for Suguru to excavate and fixate on. They are spoken plainly and candidly, but sorrow coils itself into the curve of Satoru’s mouth, and Suguru tastes it. 

He steps closer to him, outstretches his hand, and places it against Satoru’s cheek. His skin is cool against Suguru’s hand, and Suguru meets his eyes. 

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he admits, and it feels like freedom. 

Satoru touches his hand but doesn’t hold it. 

They break up a week before Suguru’s 23rd birthday. Although they’ve never said they’re together, have never crossed an official line like that, Suguru thinks it's the only way to describe what happens when he sits beside Satoru on the couch. Resolution drips into each of his thoughts, a detached sense of finality urging him forward, despite the devious throbbing in his chest. 

“You want to leave,” Satoru says. 

“I do,” he answers. 

It feels like a script. Suguru can imagine the cameras hidden away, a director watching them, ensuring that their lines are delivered with gusto, puncturing the audience on cue. He thinks they could win a Best Picture nomination, but doesn’t know if it would be for Drama or Comedy.

“Are you just leaving everyone?”

“I think it would be easier.”

“For you.”

“For everyone,” Suguru corrects. 

“What about the girls?”

When a Sun explodes, when it causes a supernova, entire solar systems are destroyed, evaporating within a moment. Suguru knows it's selfish, but he won’t go back. Not now. 

“They can decide for themselves, eventually.”

“They’ll go with you. You know that.”

Suguru is quiet.

“What will you do?” Satoru continues. 

Just let me go, he thinks. Just let go. 

“I don’t know, I don’t think it matters.”

“That’s stupid,” he spits, with a hint of venom. “Of course it does.”

“Does it?” Suguru counters. “Do you know what you’ll be doing a year from now, who you’ll be teaching, what you’ll be fighting?”

“That’s different.”

Suguru stands, “You’re full of yourself.”

“As if you aren’t?” 

Suguru shakes his head, “I don’t know why I’m trying to talk to you about this. I’m leaving, it’s happening.”

“Alright.”

That unsettles him. 

“Alright?” he repeats. “Just alright?”

He’s not even sure what he’s fighting for, what he’s hoping for, but he doesn’t have to imagine when Satoru stares at him blankly. 

“What else is it supposed to be?”

Suguru doesn’t answer. Instead, he starts to pack. He doesn’t expect Satoru to linger, to watch him decide what’s important and what’s not to take with him wherever he’s going, but he does. He’s a spiteful phantom, scrutinizing him. 

“The lease runs up in a week,” Suguru says. “You can keep the place if you want.”

Satoru laughs, before finally turning to leave, “Screw you.” 

He doesn’t cut off communication entirely, at least not to Mimiko and Nanako. They call, and he answers, and he doesn’t hear Satoru’s voice for four years. He takes care to delete any videos, any photographs. He knows it’s dramatic, knows it’s selfish too because he can’t imagine Satoru doing the same, but it’s what he needs to get by. He lives alone on the outskirts of a city, close enough that he can travel to and from work easily, but far enough that he can disappear to the countryside for days at a time. He breathes air that rustles through fields and has to close his windows tightly when thunderstorms roll past, the unbearable humidity that laps at sidewalks after vicious as it seeps through any cracks in his home. 

It’s enough. It’s enough and that’s what Suguru has always wanted. 

When the girls are 15 and Suguru is 27, they run away to him. He opens the door to the two of them huddled together one evening, defiant but hopeful glances directed at him as a streetlight washes over them. 

“You did not,” he says, although he’s elated, his chest ready to burst with something joyous and pining. 

The girls don’t answer, they tackle him, their arms tightly bound around him. 

He calls Yaga later, and he leaves them be. The girls watch him on the phone, nervous. 

“We can sort out you becoming their legal guardian,” Yaga says, and he sounds decades older. Worn. “ They’ll just run again if we don’t.”

“Alright,” Suguru answers. Just as he’s about to hang up, Yaga speaks again.

“And Suguru? ”

“Hm?”

“Hope you’re doing alright.”

“I am.”  

Both Mimiko and Nanako think he doesn’t hear them talking to Megumi. He’s not sure why they’re hesitant about telling him, but he lets it be. Some nights he’ll hear bursts of laughter through the thin walls, and other nights, when he passes their closed bedroom door to get a drink of water or head to the bathroom, he’ll hear hushed whispers, and sometimes even Megumi’s voice responding on speaker. 

One night, although he’s muffled and Megumi hangs up quickly, he hears Satoru. 

“Megumi, who are you talking to—”

It’s disorienting to be so suddenly adjacent yet so distant. Suguru’s body feels tight as he passes the girls’ room, and for one worrisome moment, he feels nauseated, his stomach-churning. 

But just as fast as he feels them, the sensations are dispelled. The world realigns, and Suguru is fine. The next time he hears the girls speaking to Megumi, he puts in earphones. 

“Are you sure you’ll be okay? I can still get a babysitter.”

Mimiko groans as she shoves Suguru past the doorway to their home, Nanako standing outside by a duffel bag she packed on his behalf.

“We’re 16,” Mimiko argues. “We’ll be fine, Papa.”

“How did you even afford this?” 

Nanako is the one to answer, “Our Summer jobs.” 

Suguru eyes her skeptically, “I wasn’t aware you were paid so much. Maybe I’ll make you help out with your phone bill.”

He snorts at how Nanako’s eyes widen, but Mimiko calls him out on his bluff, crossing her arms over her chest, “You wouldn’t.”

Once the taxi they called arrives, he picks up the duffle bag and slides it onto his shoulder, kisses the top of their heads, and leaves.  

The surprise is a weekend away at some rented house about 45 minutes further into the countryside, closer to the mountains. The girls had presented an envelope as well as an already packed bag to him when he had arrived from work the night before, and although Suguru had been wary, his suspicion was quickly evaporated by gratitude tainted with guilt. 

“I really can’t accept this,” he had argued.

The girls had frowned, “You’ve done a lot for us. This is just an early birthday present.” 

“My birthday is in February, it’s June.”

Nanako had rolled her eyes, “Exactly, we’re like, seven months ahead.” 

The street the taxi takes turns into a bumpy road slowly, and eventually, Suguru is told the taxi can’t go any further, but that his walk should be less than five minutes. The driver is right, and when Suguru arrives, he has to admit that the house looks a bit worn. Moss clings to the short steps that lead to the porch, and the dark wood used in its traditional paneling bends around the corners of its walls, no doubt from years of rain and humidity. Certain sliding windows seem to be locked into place, dust coating the glass. Still, when Suguru passes the threshold, it feels homely. Most of the furniture, although coated in a fine layer of dust, is craftily made of wood, and the tatami mats remind him of his childhood home. 

He dumps his bag by the unlit fireplace on the floor, when the door behind him slides open. He jerks his head to look, ready for an intruder, when he sees white hair held back by a thin black headband, and astounded blue eyes.

“Oh,” Satoru says, after five years. 

“They didn’t.” 

“I think they did.”

Suguru storms to the other side of the house, holes himself up in a bathroom and calls the girls, who pointedly do not answer. He types out “ You’re going to pay your phone bill for a month” in their group chat and presses send. 

Within a minute, he receives a reply from Nanako, including a picture of them with one Megumi who is looking away from the camera wedged in between. 

Of course, he was in on it too. 

There’s a knock on the door and Suguru sighs, puts his phone away and opens it. 

“What?”

Satoru is standing there, and although he is far from sheepish, he is guarded, keeping a good amount of space between them. 

“Are you leaving?” 

Suguru lifts a brow, “You’re not?”

He leans against the threshold, one leg crossed over the other.

“I mean, I don’t know about you but I rarely get a vacation. Might as well, right?” 

Suguru frowns. With that logic, Satoru does have a point. It was rare for him to have an entire weekend off, including Thursday, and if he were to leave, he’d have to call another Taxi and take the trip back, and it was already late afternoon. 

“I’ll stay tonight,” he proclaims. “It’ll be a hassle to head back today.”

When Satoru smirks at him, Suguru shoves him. 

It goes like this. 

Throughout the rest of the day and Thursday night, they spend their time picking up the house. Although not abandoned, the musty scent of time spent untouched clogs Suguru’s nose. He and Satoru split, each silently agreeing to handle opposite spectrums of the one-floor, three-bedroom home. As Suguru shakes the mats and rugs lining the floor by the doorways and dust flies, floating in the golden sunlight, he thinks it’s no wonder Megumi, Nanako and Mimiko could afford to rent this place. The logistics of how when all three were minors is another thing entirely. 

When he pricks one of his fingers against a miss screwed nail, both he and Satoru are surprised to find iodine in the bathroom vanity. Brown stains his skin, and Suguru frowns at the discomfort. 

“What if you get tetanus?” Satoru says. 

Suguru eyes him in the reflection of the dirty mirror, sees that he’s dead serious, and laughs. 

On Friday morning, Suguru is the first to wake up. 

There are no sounds of passing traffic, no voices from a television Nanako or Mimiko left on overnight; there is only his own breath, the sounds of a settling house, and distantly, snoring. 

Satoru’s snoring. 

He sits up, his overnight breath stale, and allows himself to think. Satoru is asleep in the room beside his, Satoru, who he had thought he’d go at least a few more years before seeing again. 

His stomach snarls and Suguru winces as he presses a hand against it. Waking up Satoru is an easy task, when Suguru slides open the door he jerks up, bleary-eyed as he focuses on Suguru. There’s a moment of nameless unrecognition that admittedly stings, but then it disappears, flooded by familiarity. 

They head to town for food, the songs of wind chimes hanging from shop’s roofs serenading them as loose stone and gravel crunches underneath the soles of their shoes. They don’t say much to one another, Suguru’s eyes diligently staring straight ahead whereas Satoru has his arms folded behind his head, walking in step but staring up at the sky. 

“Is there anything to do around here?” Satoru asks hours later when they’re sitting on either side of the fireplace. A cup of ramen still cooking sits beside him, the plastic case of the sandwich he ate sitting on top, flattening the paper lid. 

“There’s a lake. One of the townsfolk also said there’s a strawberry field we could hike to.”

The fish Suguru bought sizzles over the fireplace, and he turns the skewer he’s impaled it on. 

“Let’s go swimming when we’re done eating.”

“At night? In a lake we’ve never been in before?”

Satoru’s lips curl back with mischief, and Suguru knows he’s stepped into a trap.

“What,” Satoru chimes, “you scared?”

The water is frigid. Suguru feels his teeth clatter in his skull as he wades into it, unable to see where he’s stepping from the lack of light. The moon is bright but the lake is an endless swell of ink, swallowing any moonlight. The night is quiet, the cool air that rolls off the surface tasting of faint hope as Satoru steps deeper and deeper into the lake until Suguru can hear his arms stroking through the water, swimming. 

He tries not to choke and swims. 

Saturday brings colorless heat. Every window is cranked open, and both Suguru and Satoru opt for shorts and bare chests. They’re seated on the porch of the home aimlessly, Suguru fanning himself while Satoru holds onto an empty twisted water bottle he had squeezed out onto himself earlier.  

“Let’s go to the strawberry fields Sunday,” he suggests. 

Suguru shifts back when a mosquito buzzes by his face, urging it away with his fan.

“You can go without me.”

Satoru groans, “Where’s the fun in that?”

“Not sure how I’d make it fun.”

“Obviously you can nag at me.”

Suguru snorts, “Yeah? That’s fun for you?”

“It’s better than nothing.”

Suguru doesn’t touch the earnesty that Satoru spits out. He lets it sit between them, careful to not dip his hand into it when he pushes himself up to stand, when he leaves Satoru to see if they have any water bottles left in the fridge or if they have to head to town again. Satoru also doesn’t touch it; he doesn’t touch how Suguru fails to leave Thursday, Friday, and now Saturday, doesn’t touch how Suguru knows he must have looked watching Satoru obscured in the moonlight when they left the lake far too late, his white hair seemingly gray as it clung to his temples and caressed his shoulders. Satoru has let it grow, and Suguru wants to take note of what else has changed. 

He wants to expose the foundations of Satoru, wants to see if any of the frameworks Suguru had helplessly memorized is still standing, or if he’s completely unknown to him now. 

At night, the sweltering heat simmers down into something that resembles a livable temperature, although humidity runs rampant. Suguru’s shirt clings to him, kissing his lower back and the nooks of his arms. Satoru is still shirtless, but the two are inside, Satoru seated on a windowsill, one of his legs dangling out of the window as he selfishly blocked the breeze, and Suguru on the floor, by a fan. 

“Hey,” Satoru starts. “Do you remember that mission we had, I think, in our first year?”

“Have to be more specific than that.”

Satoru knocks his foot against the wall, “I don’t remember the city, but it was Summer, and Shoko was with us, and the air conditioner crapped out in the middle of the night. She woke us up to fix it.”

Suguru hums, watching the strips of paper attached to the fan writhe as it rotates. 

“I don’t remember,” Suguru admits. 

“What do you remember, then?” 

“That’s a loaded question.”

Satoru blows out a performative, exasperated breath. 

“Fine, tell me the first thing you remember then.”

It’s not the first in the series of mishaps in their lives, far from it, but it’s the first thing Suguru’s mind presents to him, the phantom sensation of grass along his neck and elbows beckoning him to speak. 

“Why did you tell me to kiss you, back then?”

The words morph the space between them, and Suguru looks up at him, and Satoru looks down from where he’s perched. 

“Because I wanted you to.”

“But nothing happened after. Nothing changed.”

Satoru swings his leg over and pushes himself off from the window.

“Why did something have to change?” he says.

 Suguru assumes he must look as puzzled as he feels.  

“I thought we were okay like that.” Satoru continues, “I didn’t want to change anything and not know how to change it back.”

“But you didn’t do anything. It felt like, it felt like you didn’t care. Like you had just been bored.”

Suguru dislikes the candor in his own voice. He has worked hard to not be seen, and now Satoru is observing him fully, without restraint. When he walks over to Suguru and sits down directly in front of him, Suguru waves him off.

“Forget it.”

“Don’t do that. You’re right.”

Suguru blinks, “I am?”

“I think so. We were what, 15, 16 when we kissed? I was scared shitless of you, Suguru.”

That gets him to laugh, “ What?” 

“Not like that,” Satoru grumbles. “What I mean is, you were Suguru. You were an asshole, sure, but you were also you. You were so sure of what you wanted and how you felt about things, and I wasn’t. It scared me when I realized I wanted to be like that with you. I don’t think I understood it.”

His heart is sore, but it throbs with something other than smothering restraint, and Suguru wishes to ignore it, to not feed into the eccentric reprieve that so desperately wants to course through his veins. 

“You never told me this,” he manages to voice. 

Satoru shrugs, “I thought it was too late when I figured it out.”

“We’re only 28.”

Satoru jabs a finger into Suguru’s chest, “I’m 29. You’re 28.”

Suguru huffs and pushes his hand away. When his remains on top of Satoru’s on the marred wooden floor, neither addresses it. 

“I wasn’t sure of anything,” Suguru corrects. “I didn’t know what I wanted either.”

Satoru’s hand twitches under his, “Do you know now?”

“I don’t think I’ll ever know.” 

“That’s fine,” Satoru says, quick. 

Suguru leans his head to the side, his vision obscured briefly as strands of his hair shift to drape his face. 

“Is it?”

Satoru doesn’t tuck back the fallen strands, but he does raise his other hand to them, letting the onyx filaments drape over his fingers. Suguru feels like a bruise, and is that not what they were? A series of persevering lesions marked upon one another? 

But Suguru isn’t gripped with pain, he isn’t stupefied in the way he is used to being when he is a witness to Satoru and Satoru to him. Instead, he is mending. He is a bruise when one is touched, when the numbing ache dilates and spreads, healing and fading from burgundy to sage and finally, sepia. 

“I think so,” Satoru replies. “People change. They get to try again.” 

When he turns over his hand to hold onto Suguru’s, their clammy fingers intertwining amateurishly, Suguru holds onto him. 

Sunday brings indigo skies moments before dawn, and Suguru feels the crust by the edge of his eyes when he opens them.

For once, love does not feel as if it were the end of the world. Suguru thinks that it’s fitting, as it never quite truly ended for him, despite his best attempts, but now it’s beside him once more, the light of day washing over it as it snores.

He turns to look at Satoru, rubs at his eyes, and chooses to sleep in. 

“They’re not going to be sweet.” 

“But I wanna try one, I’ve never had one fresh like this.” 

“Okay,” Suguru says, “but I’m telling you—” 

“I know, I know,” Satoru whines as he squats in between the rows of strawberry plants, his boots leaving a groove in the moist dirt. Suguru huffs but watches as he plucks two reddened strawberries from their vines, holding them out to him after. Suguru unscrews the lukewarm water bottle he’s been carrying and douses them in water, washing off clumps of dirt clinging to the grooves of seeds. When Satoru bites into one, he watches, brow raised. It takes Satoru a moment to register the taste, and when he does he scrunches his nose and narrows his eyes accusingly at the fissures his teeth left in the half-bitten fruit.

“So,” Suguru chimes, knowingly. “Does it taste good?”

Satoru smacks his lips together before reaching for Suguru’s bottle. “It’s almost sour? Ugh.”

He drinks hurriedly, droplets of water dribbling past his chin. Suguru motions for Satoru to give him the other berry he picked and laughs when he pouts as Suguru eats it. 

“What?”

“Now you’re going to taste like strawberries.” 

Suguru shakes his head and hopes the blush he feels on his cheeks can be blamed on the afternoon daze. Satoru’s troublesome, unrestrained grin argues otherwise, but when he stands upright and steps towards him, a hand outstretched to gingerly hold his chin, Suguru is shameless. The unabashed arch of his smile mimics Satoru’s as they kiss, the tart, faintly sweet taste of strawberries lingering on their lips when Suguru pulls away. Satoru’s cheeks are tinted sheer rose, his eyes half-lidded, ardent skies taking in Suguru.

“See,” he says, Satoru’s hand unmoving from his chin, “that wasn’t so bad.” 

“I guess it wasn’t.”