Chapter Text
It had always been you.
You, who could reach through the chaos and quiet the noise clawing at his mind. You, who steadied the sickness that threatened to consume him.
And in your absence, humanity was nothing more than a cage of shrieking monkeys.
✦ ✦ ✦
Suguru Geto had wanted nothing more than to be normal.
He swallowed cursed spirits more often than he cared to count, feeling their hatred claw beneath his skin like maggots, their screams echoing through the hollow of his ribs. The sickness twisting deep in his gut each time they hit his core, the taste of them rancid and chemical, proof of everything rotten in this world. Each one of them left a stain that never quite washed away. Sometimes, he swore he could feel them moving inside him still.
Satoru suspected nothing, of course. The strongest man alive couldn’t see what festered right beside him. He moved through life like a god, untouched by grief and doubt, and Suguru followed in his wake, smiling, nodding, killing when told. Saving people who would never know his name. Saving humans. Once, that had meant something. Once, he’d believed it was noble. Now, he wasn’t so sure.
The shower beat against his back, scalding hot water biting into his skin until it bordered on pain. Steam filled his lungs until breathing hurt; his hand pressed to the cold tile for balance. His hair hung loose around his face, an onyx curtain plastered to his cheeks, heavy with water, dripping into his lashes until everything blurred.
Exorcise. Absorb. Repeat.
He mouthed the words like a prayer. No, a curse. What would happen if he stopped? If he simply walked away? Gojo would never allow it. They were closer than brothers—bonded by shared battles, curses, corpses, and a youth spent chasing ghosts. But lately, Suguru wanted something else. He needed something else.
The water seared him until his skin bloomed red. He shut it off when the silence became unbearable, the towel scraped across raw flesh as he dried himself, detached and mechanical. He dressed in loose black pants and a plain shirt. He didn’t bother tying his hair back; he let the damp strands cling to his neck and darken the fabric of his shoulders.
He walked the halls of Jujustu High and heard his name called by his students in passing. None of them saw the rot behind his eyes, or that each step he took was one step further from caring. The only person who may have noticed was away on a mission. Gojo was the only one who would stop him, question him, and demand he follow. It was a blessing that he was free to think and to wander, to chase the edge of something that had been calling to him for months. A blessing, and a curse.
Would it hurt, he wondered, if he let a curse devour him instead? Would he taste as foul to them as they did to him—like a rag steeped in filth and decay? Would it choke him slowly, or would he vanish in an instant, as another nameless stain in a world already saturated with blood?
Would he scream? Or would he welcome it? Death, as an old friend, finally come to collect what was owed.
By the time he reached the city, it glowed like a living organism, veins of neon pulsing beneath a sky thick with smog. The wet pavement shimmered under fluorescent lights from earlier rain, each reflection warped and distorted, beautiful in its ugliness. The scent of fried chicken drifted from a KFC to his right, mingling with exhaust fumes and the faint sweetness of rain-soaked asphalt.
People flowed around him in an endless current. Salarymen in suits, students laughing into their phones, a mother tugging her child across the street. All of them alive in their small, fragile ways. Their chatter rose and fell, meaningless and ceaseless. Suguru stood still amid it all, rooted to the spot, a stone in a river filled with minnows. They streamed past him without a glance, unaware that they brushed shoulders with something that could unmake them.
He towered over most of them, the crowd thinning and bending around him instinctively. Their eyes slid past him, as though some primitive part of their minds knew he was dangerous, even if he looked anything more than ordinary. If he wished, he could summon a dozen curses right there in the street, beautiful, grotesque things that would tear through flesh, obeying him in every sense of the word. The people wouldn’t even have time to scream. They would blink once, and the world would end. No one would know his name or the reason. The streets would be slick with blood, and the sky would reflect red instead of neon, and it still wouldn’t change anything.
Suguru’s fingers twitched at his side. For a single, breathless moment, he imagined it: the release, the silence that would follow, the satisfaction of erasing the noise. But the thought passed, like every other fleeting temptation.
He exhaled slowly and looked up at the skyline, searching for traces of cursed energy. Finding none, he began to climb a commercial building’s open stairwell, ascending with the easy grace of a sorcerer until he reached the roof.
The air was cool and damp, the city stretching endlessly beneath him. He strode to the ledge and stepped up onto it in one fluid motion, his shoes hanging over the drop. From this height, the people below were nothing but shifting points of color, ants crawling over each other in the glow of streetlights and signage, utterly unaware of how thin the thread of their existence was.
He stood there for a moment, unmoving, as thousands of lives converged and parted without meaning. No one here deserved salvation. They lived, oblivious, building their hollow little lives atop the corpses of the forgotten. They were blind to the curses feeding on their pain, blind to the people who bled to protect them. Blind to him. And yet, a part of him knew that they would mourn him if he fell. They would call him tragic and lost. They would never understand that he was already dead, and that what stood above them was only the echo of something that once cared.
Yuki’s voice echoed in his mind as he teetered on the edge, slowly rebalancing the weight onto his toes.
“Tell me, Geto, do you hate non-sorcerers?”
The word had felt too simple for the knot inside him, even now.
“Looking down on them, denying it; both are only possibilities you’re considering. The choice is yours, Suguru. You’ll decide which one becomes the truth.”
Perhaps the way out of these thoughts was simpler than he imagined.
The wind pressed against his back, urging him forward. What would it feel like to fall? To have the air tear past him, to feel weightless for the first and last time—
“If you’re going to jump,” a voice interrupted, dry and unimpressed, “can you at least wait until I’ve finished my work break? I only get so much time, you know.”
For a second, he thought he’d imagined it. The voice was so ordinary, mundane in a way that didn’t belong here. He turned sharply, disoriented by the sound of it, his thoughts scrambling to reconcile anyone else’s presence on this rooftop. His brow furrowed as he took in your figure perched on the ledge, legs swinging freely over the drop, a sandwich in your hand. The sight didn’t make sense. You didn’t belong here, not in the abyss of his thoughts, not even in his presence.
“Sorry?” he managed, startled, redistributing the weight back onto his heels.
You lift an eyebrow, entirely unbothered. “It’d be a real inconvenience if you jumped.”
For a heartbeat, he simply stared, too stunned to react. His mind was trained to read cursed energy, to sense hostility, fear, or deceit, and it found nothing. You were empty of all of it. Just a human. Soft and fragile, utterly aware of what you were talking to. It was almost…insulting.
“You’re incredibly rude,” Suguru muttered, the words slipping out before he could stop them. It was disbelief rather than anger, a kind of bewildered irritation that someone so insignificant had managed to interrupt the quiet ritual he’d been seconds from committing to.
You smirk, eyes glinting with strange amusement. “Want to talk about it?”
He blinked, caught off guard again. “You don’t even know me,” he said, the edge of caution creeping into his tone, perhaps mixed with curiosity. He wasn’t used to being addressed like this. Not as a sorcerer, not as a teacher, or a monster, just someone standing on a ledge.
You pat the concrete beside you, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Suguru hesitated, his instincts screaming that this was absurd, that he had no reason to comply. But something in your calmness disarmed him. You weren’t afraid or even pretending to be brave. Your survival instinct non-existent.
He didn’t know what drove his legs forward, only that suddenly he was moving, and the distance was closed in a handful of steps. Before he could think better of it, he was lowering himself beside you, legs dangling into empty space. The city’s wind caught at his loose hair, tugging it across his face. He stared ahead, not daring to look at you directly, afraid that he would be drawn into the gravity of something ordinary, something he’d long forgotten how to exist within.
“Why are you up here?” He asked at last, his voice low. He turned his head slightly, studying you out of the corner of his eye. No cursed energy. You weren’t a sorcerer. You weren’t even a local.
“I like taking my breaks up here,” you said lightly, swinging one booted foot as if to prove your point. “It’s peaceful. And you?”
“Taking a break,” he echoed dryly.
You grin and take another bite of your sandwich before offering him the other half. The gesture was so casual that it stunned him. There was no hesitation, just a simple offer, as if this was something you did every day: share food with a stranger perched on a rooftop.
He frowned. “No, thank you.”
“Go on,” you said, rolling your eyes as if he were being impossibly difficult. “I didn’t poison it. It’s good.”
It should have been easy to refuse again. He had swallowed worse things than food, consumed curses that shrieked and clawed down his throat, filled his stomach with their hatred until it felt bottomless. But somehow, refusing you felt harder than that. Reluctantly, he took it from your hand, fingers brushing yours, a small, meaningless thing, yet human warmth rushed into him. The faint heat of someone alive and untainted.
“You’re not from here,” he said after a pause, in quiet observation.
“I was an exchange student in college,” you replied, eyes fixed on the skyline. “And I ended up staying.”
Your voice was deeper than he expected. Warm and rich with an accent he couldn’t quite place. Something about the cadence of it lingered, curling around him, even in the silence that followed. Suguru looked down at the sandwich half, inspecting it, before taking a hesitant bite. He blinked, chewing slowly. Something so simple shouldn’t have tasted this good.
He’d forgotten what it was like to eat something made for pleasure rather than survival. Forgotten what it felt like to want to taste something. For a brief, unsettling moment, the act of chewing tethered him back to the world he had nearly stepped away from.
When he looked at you again, your gaze was turned towards the horizon. The lights of Tokyo shimmered in your eyes, making them seem almost celestial. Otherworldly, but not in the way sorcerers were. He didn’t know what to make of the aura that was so vivid and distinctly alive.
An alarm sounded beside you, sharp and jarring in the quiet. You startled, glancing down at the phone perched dangerously close to the edge. With a sigh, you silenced it and stuffed the last bite of your sandwich into your mouth, brushing the crumbs off your shirt with the back of your hand.
“Break’s over, pal,” you muttered through a mouthful of food. You swung your legs back over the ledge and stood, the movement easy. The wind tugged at your hair as you tucked a loose strand behind your ear.
For a moment, you just looked at him. The stranger with the dark hair clinging to his jaw, eyes shadowed and hollowed by something haunted. Suguru couldn’t tell if it was pity in your gaze, your face carefully blank as you regarded him.
“If it counts for anything,” you said, tone gentler now, “whatever you’re going through…it gets better. I’m sure the people around you aren’t done loving you yet. You should stay.”
You said it like a truth you had decided to believe in, even if you didn’t know him. As though the world, for all its cruelty, still had something worth clinging to. And then you shrugged, as if your words carried no weight at all, as if talking people down from ledges was something you did every other night. Then, you began to turn away, to return to a life Suguru had no place in.
“What’s your name?” He called out after you. The question escaped him without thought, a reflex. He wasn’t even sure why he asked. Maybe he wanted to keep you tethered to this moment so it wouldn’t dissolve into the fog of everything he had lost.
You turned, walking backward towards the stairwell, grinning in a half smile as though his question amused you. “If I told you, you wouldn’t have an excuse to stick around. And that wouldn’t be nearly as fun, would it?”
Suguru watched as you disappeared down the steps, your footsteps fading into the low hum of the city below.
For a long moment, he didn’t move. The half sandwich sat limp in his fingers, a ridiculous, fragile thing that somehow felt heavier than the lives he had taken. You had trusted a stranger, spoken to him as if he were human, and not a weapon.
You thought he needed saving when, in truth, you were one of the very people he was meant to save.
Would someone like you recoil if you knew what he carried? If you saw what he’d done, the blood, the curse residue, the child whose laughter still echoed in his nightmares? Riko’s face flickered behind his eyes, wide and bright and gone all too soon. He saw again the blood seeping into the stone, spreading in soft red threads beneath her small body. The sound of her laugh before the silence.
He pressed his thumb into a nail sticking out from the concrete beside him, pushing until it split the skin. The pain barely grounded him, but even that began to fade.
He stayed there long after you left, the wind curling through his hair, the neon glow of nearby billboards staining his skin. The city lights reflected in his dark eyes, even as he lifted the sandwich to his lips again, taking small, deliberate bites. As though prolonging the memory of your presence could delay the inevitable.
He wondered if he would ever see you again.
Would you remember him?
In all his cursed thoughts, would he remember you?