Intrinsic Warmth

by thatdesklamp

Summary:

“So stay with me. Forever.”

You make a weak stab at a joke. “For Infinity, you mean?”

“Yeah.” Satoru turns to look at you and your heart jumps at the clear expression on his face. There’s not a hint of humour: for once, he’s fully and completely serious. “For the rest of my life, and for all the lives after.”

-

You meet Satoru on 7th September, 1996.

Some time later, you realise you love him.

Chapter 1: 1996

Notes:

The concept behind David Nicholls’ book, 'One Day', is that each chapter covers the lives of the protagonists on 15th July, for only one day of the year. The first chapter takes place on 15th July, 1988. The second chapter takes place on 15th July, 1989. This continues for twenty years.

I have shamelessly stolen that concept.

Saturday 7th September, 1996

When you were about five years old, you nearly killed your mother.

You don’t remember the event all that well. Mostly, your memory of it comes from your other relatives, who remind you of it every time you seem to be unhappy with your current position. It mainly comes from your father (I’m ensuring you don’t try to kill any more innocent people) and your grandmother (child, don’t be forgetting which of us was almost a murderer), and sometimes you find yourself wishing that you nearly killed one of them, instead.

You know it’s pretty morbid for a six-year-old to think, but still.

It was an accident, of course. You would never have wanted to hurt your mother, especially not before everything changed for you, so you don’t understand why everyone keeps bringing it up. There wasn’t any permanent damage, and your mother is fine now, and yet your family insists on their ‘preventative measures’ that you can’t stand.

Well, you dislike some of them; the gloves, thick and black and reaching to your mid-forearm, are understandable, but you wish that your hands didn’t have to be bound so tightly behind your back. The rope is coarse and uncomfortable, and you have an itch on your elbow you really wish you could scratch. You shift where you’re standing, trying to rub it against your back, but your father shoots you a glare and you stop immediately.

Your grandmother, who apparently didn’t notice you move, continues talking. “It’s interesting that the Zenins decided to show up.”

“Really?” Your father returns to ignoring you and turns back to your grandmother. “I’d assumed they would. If they hadn’t, they’d have been incredibly foolish.”

“But the Zenins also incredibly proud, and I don’t think the they know the difference between the two.”

“Oh, they know enough,” your father says, absently.

“Not nearly. You know, Jin, if any of us had made the same comments that they made last time, none of us would be standing here right now.”

“I’m sure of it. It’s incredible what power and status can do, mother.”

“It’s improper. I don’t know how they have the nerve to return here, acting like nothing happened.”

“And yet, here they are. How fascinating.”

“I don’t appreciate your tone.”

“And I apologise sincerely. But, please, mother, I know you don’t like them, but you have to admit that they’re not idiots.”

Your grandmother tuts in response.

It’s not clear exactly which of the many families around you are the ‘Zenins’. You don’t know much about them, but none of your family likes them much, so you know they can’t be very nice people. There are about twenty or so little clusters of people, varying greatly in size from dozens to just one or two, and you look around curiously, trying to figure out who is who.

There are a lot more children than you would have thought; nearly every family has at least one with them, but most are so quiet and reserved they almost look like the adults.

None of their hands are bound, you notice.

So maybe the Zenins are group in the centre of the room, the ones smiling and shaking hands and drawing the attention of many. That group has been making short speeches for a while now, with the rest of the families milling around and only half-listening, spending most of their time whispering to themselves about what has just been said. The group (who seem to be leading this gathering, whatever it is) don’t seem to mind, though, and you’ve watched them send each other satisfied grins with every round of scattered applause that follows one of their speeches.

Or, the Zenins could also be those two adults in the corner, who are both wearing a mask that covers over half of their face. There’s a fleeting spark of familiarity that quickly dies; maybe their cursed technique means they have to cover up, like you… but then one of the mask-wearers shakes his head, absently tapping his partner’s elbow with an ungloved hand, and you know it’s not the same.

One thing you’re sure of, though, is that those ‘Zenins’ have nothing to do with the young boy, who stands separate to the people, and watches.

You’re not sure why you single him out. He’s about your age, you think, and you watch him as he leans back against the wall with his hands shoved into his pockets. With his hair (a silvery colour that you think is kind of cool) flopping in his face, you wouldn’t think that he’d be able to make out anything in the room, but he has an unnerving alertness about him, like he’s aware of everyone in the room at all times. That might be why you keep your eyes trained on him; he’s pulling your attention like a magnetic force. He’s probably the most interesting person here, even without doing anything.

You grow bored after a minute. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that the boy (his intrigue lessening by the second) will do anything more than slouch and watch. You’ve been standing with your family for ages now, and nothing’s happened. Your elbow starts to itch again, and you’re in the middle of debating whether it’s worth risking your father’s anger to try and scratch it again when your grandmother asks the question that’s been bugging you all day:

“Jin, I’m not confident you made the right decision in bringing the child along.”

Your father sighs, as if he’s had this conversation many times before. Knowing your grandmother, it’s likely that he has. “Mother.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself.”

“I don’t think it can class as repeating yourself if you’ve never actually given me an answer.”

“Mother, please.”

“I just don’t see why it was necessary to leave Mieko at home and still tote the child around. It’s like you want to draw attention to your mistakes, Jin. It makes very little sense.”

“It would be even more conspicuous to leave her at home. I would have thought it was obvious.”

“More conspicuous that parading her around, showing all of your superiors just how unsuccessful you’ve been in producing any kind of heir? No—Jin, I am going to start on this, because just by bringing the child along, you’ve made us a subject of mockery, I’m certain—”

“Mother.” Your father’s voice is low but incredibly harsh, and you try to stop yourself from flinching. You’re not supposed to be listening in, so you force an expression of calm passivity and continue looking around the waiting room, your eyes hazing.

Your grandmother pulls herself up, looking affronted, but before she can begin to lecture him, your father cuts in:

“Please, don’t insult me by pretending you’re ignorant about things that are so obvious. We both know that bringing the child here was an unfortunate necessity, but a necessity nonetheless.”

“I don’t see—”

“I would be making more of a statement by withholding her than I am by bringing her along. Now, more so than ever, with our present company in our minds.”

“Well.” Your grandmother purses her lips with a huff. “I don’t see what the Gojo child has to do with any of this.”

“Then you must remain unaware,” your father says, looking pointedly towards the main group, who has begun another of their speeches.

Your grandmother pinches her lips together, and then sighs. “You’re too much like your father, sometimes.”

Your father laughs. “Thank you very much. But look, your dearest Naobito is making a speech. I’m sure it will be enthralling. Let’s indulge him, shall we?”

Holding her by the crook of her elbow, your father walks your grandmother towards where the main group has congregated. Surprisingly, she lets him, but you can see her bow her head towards him, probably berating him for his disrespect.

You find yourself standing alone. For a moment, you consider following them, but you quickly decide against it. If he’d have wanted you, your father would have made it clear he expected you to trail after him, and it’s not like you get many chances like these. You spot a door at the back of the room standing slightly ajar, and hesitate. Even if he didn’t want you to follow him, he probably would have expected you to stay put and wait for him to return. After another moment’s deliberation you dismiss the thought entirely and make your way to the back of the room. This opportunity is too golden to miss out on—if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to hide out in an empty room until the whole party is over.

Fortunately, no-one pays much attention to a solemn-faced six-year-old, and you walk through the crowds completely unbothered. You exit the room and choose another to enter at random. You repeat this several more times, making a mental note of your path so you can retrace your steps later as you wander through new room after new room, drinking in the beautiful decorations in each new sight.

After a walking for a while, you settle in a comfortable, enclosed room, quite small and simple compared to those that had preceded it. Its utterly silent. You can’t even hear your footsteps, muffled against the soft luxury of woven carpet.

There are a couple chairs scattered about the place but you sink down to the floor, your head leaning back against the wall. Your hands press painfully into your back and you shift around until you find the position that won’t cut off the blood flow to your fingers. Your palms are already tingling uncomfortably and you squeeze them into loose fists on instinct. Your eyes flutter closed and you let out a deep sigh, red light blooming softly through your eyelids. The air tastes fresh, bright, nothing like the bitter heaviness of the room you’d left. You don’t think you like crowds; too many people, too many hands. In the quiet, your mind begins to wander. A smile pulls at your lips, and for once you let it. Silence, this time on your own, is precious.

“Why are you sitting like that?”

And your moment of serenity shatters.

Your eyes fly open and you see that boy, from earlier, the one with the untidy hair. He’s standing a couple metres away from you with his hands clasped behind his back, rocking up and down on his toes and grinning. You stare at him, not sure what to say.

He grins even wider and shrugs his shoulders, turning around and showing you how he’s standing. He’s holding his hands together behind his back like they’re stuck together, and then wiggles his fingers at you like he’s saying hello. He turns around again, facing you, and smiles at you expectantly. You blink. It takes you a second too long to realise he’s mimicking your restraints.

“Oh.” You clear your throat and stare back at him awkwardly. “I can’t take them off.” You shrug and look away from the boy, hoping he takes that as a cue to leave you alone.

“Why not?” He walks a bit closer to you, peering over your shoulder to have a look at your wrists. “That rope, or something? Doesn’t look that strong. I could cut it off for you if you want.”

“No, thanks.”

The boy hums. “Didn’t think so. You walked through loads of rooms with weapons on your way here, but you didn’t even look at them. I saw you.”

“I’m not allowed,” you say, shuffling slightly away from him. The boy doesn’t seem to notice and sits himself down next to you, lounging against the wall and fiddling with a thread on his shirt.

“Says who?”

“My father.”

“And you listen to him?”

“Yes.” The boy frowns a little at this, and you do too, considering. That might have been a little untrue. You correct yourself: “Well. Sometimes, I do.”

“Sometimes?” His face lights up. “When don’t you?”

You shrug. “Now, I guess. He probably didn’t want me to leave the main room, but I did. He’s going to be angry.”

“Don’t you care about that?”

“What?”

“If your dad’s going to be angry. You don’t look like you care.” He stares at you, and you suddenly notice how bright his eyes are: a clear, vibrant blue that doesn’t seem entirely natural. They’re a bit weird, and you frown a little. It’s not exactly a nice feeling, having the boy look at you with that much attention. You’re not sure whether your discomfort could be attributed to his eyes’ startling colour, or the intensity of his gaze.

So, you shrug again. “He’s angry a lot. You kind of get used to it. I mean… not really. You don’t get used to it, but, I mean, I just have to guess when it’s going to be a good choice or not. Overall. I think he’s going to be really mad, yeah, but I didn’t want to be in the room anymore, so I’m just going to deal with it later. A lot of the time, though, it’s overall a bad choice not to do what he says.”

The boy seems to consider this, and you have the strange sense that you’re being weighed up, like you’ve just been interviewed for something really important. You can’t bring yourself to care that much, the reminder of your father’s imminent anger already filling you with a cold dread.

“What’s your name?” The boy shuffles a bit closer and you immediately shrink away, keeping over a foot of distance between the two of you.

You pause just for a moment, deciding whether you should continue this conversation or just stand up and find a more solitary room. You glance over at him, at his open, attentive face, and decide against it. “Hebi,” you say. “Hello.”

The boy’s face contorts. “That’s not your name.”

You’re affronted; you don’t make a habit out of lying. “It is. My name is Hebi.”

“Hebi. Right, but that’s your family name.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“So tell me your first name, then.”

The boy brushes a strand of hair from his forehead and looks at you expectantly. It’s your turn to frown, annoyed by how easily he’s waiting for your response, like he already knows you’re going to reply.

“No,” you say, if only to deny him something.

His mouth pinches together. “No?”

“No,” you repeat, stoically.

He blinks several times, and you imagine him having to re-focus on you, like something’s exploded in his head. It’s quite a funny mental image, and you hold back a smile.

“Why?” he says, his voice verging on something like a whine. You wonder how many people have ever said no to him, and feel quite proud of yourself.

“No-one calls me by my first name,” you answer honestly. You’re pretty sure that they used to when you were younger, but ever since your accident you’ve only ever been referred to as ‘the child’, very obviously, very much in front of you. Even nearly a year after it happened, you family still thinks of you as a half-being, something to be hauled around when necessary and otherwise ignored. No-one calls you by your first name, not anymore.

“I could be the exception!” He claps his hands together, smiling again. “It would be special!”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

At your reply, the boy slumps back against the wall, burying his head in his hands and letting out a wail. His performance is probably a bit over-the-top, but you can’t help but enjoy his dramatics. After all, it’s certainly more interesting than standing around and listening to whatever your father and grandmother would be talking about. You feel a sudden spike of pride that you’ve found yourself here, mildly entertained by this strange boy, instead of staying put with the two of them.

“Well,” you begin, and the boy shoots up eagerly, “I don’t know your name, either. Not even your surname. It’d be unfair.”

His eyes narrow. All childish pretences leave him as he cocks his head to the side, examining you. It’s slightly jarring how quickly his demeanour changes. “You don’t know my name?”

You shake your head. “I just said I didn’t.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

A slight smile appears on his face, which quickly turns into a wide grin.

“My name’s Satoru Gojo. Nice to meet you, Hebi-Something.”

You blink up at him, registering. Your grandmother’s words flicker before you: I don’t see what the Gojo child has to do with any of this. So he’s that child, then? You don’t know much about the Gojo clan, but your parents have been talking about their new heir for some time now. Apparently, he’s incredibly powerful. Set out to be one of the strongest sorcerers ever, your father says. Someone to be watched, carefully.

Gojo jumps up and dips into a low bow, and you watch how his hair falls into his eyes. He looks up at you and shakes the loose strands from his face, his eyes scrunching up with his smile. You’re not sure how genuine it is; he keeps jumping from serious to spirited so quickly it’s kind of difficult to keep track.

Still playing at the gentleman, he reaches forward to grasp your shoulder as if to help you stand up. Fear flares up in you, rising all at once, and you push yourself away from him, legs kicking out. In your panic, your head hits the wall with a dull thud, pain splintering up you skull. The rope is digging into your wrists so much it hurts. You know it’ll draw blood. Slowly, you raise yourself to a standing position, keeping your back flat to the wall. And still, your eyes don’t waver from his outstretched hand, mere centimetres away from your arm.

He nearly touched you.

You take a step away from him, and then another to be safe. Gojo is staring at you, his face unreadable, and once more you get the feeling of being scrutinised. You shift your weight from foot-to-foot, fighting to keep eye contact.

Your father would be furious if he knew what had nearly happened, and you have a sick weight in your chest just thinking about it.

“Don’t… I… People can’t touch me,” you manage, after a torturous silence. Your voice is shaking awfully. Something rough sticks in your throat, making it impossible to swallow. “When they do… Then people get hurt.”

Gojo is quiet for a moment. His eyes dart between your own, and then flick to your gloved hands, to your rope, to the distance between you two. “Because of your cursed technique?”

You start, shocked. “Yes,” you say, and then stop, not trusting yourself to say anything more.

“But it’s just your hands that are the problem?” He points to them and then looks back up to you. He seems calm, like he’s just asking you a casual question. It helps you to compose yourself, and you try to fix your breathing, so it doesn’t come out too ragged and uneven.

“Just my hands that… that hurt people, yeah.”

“Which is why you wear those gloves?”

You swallow, and nod. “So, uhm,” you say, “don’t touch me. Not just on the hands, anywhere. I can’t have people touching me. I’m not allowed, and I—I just can’t. So… don’t. Ever.”

A second passes, and for a moment you have no idea what he’s going to say. You hope he doesn’t press it; you don’t want to explain your mother’s accident to a stranger, even a nice one. Then, suddenly, Gojo jumps back into an upright position, stretching his arms behind his back and sending you a wide grin.

“For real? I guess I’ll have to stand as far away from you as I can!” To show this, he backs away from you until he’s right against the opposite wall. He splays his arms out and tilts his head to the side, sighing wistfully. His gaze flits back to you subtly, as if to check your reaction. Slightly alarmed, you keep your face as impassive as you can. You’re not sure exactly how serious he’s being, and you don’t know how to keep up with all of these changes in his attitude.

“No! No, no, no, I couldn’t manage it.” Gojo pushes himself off from the wall and saunters forward. “Maybe if I do this?” He pulls himself onto one of the nearby chairs and stands on it triumphantly, making a pose like he’d just reached the top of a mountain. Again, he glances back at you, and at the sight of your unchanged face he jumps back down, undeterred.

“Or maybe none of those,” he says regretfully, and takes two long strides towards you. He plants himself about a metre away and lifts up his arms, reaching out to you. There’s considerable space between you and the tips of his fingers. Even when he leans forward a little, he can’t touch you.

You look down at his hands, no longer threatening now they’re a safe distance away, and he wiggles his fingers at you. It’s kind of amusing, and you give him a small wave back. He sticks his tongue out, pulling a face, and you smile at it, just a little.

This seems to be what he was looking for, and he lets out a hearty cackle that almost startles you.

“Then this is what it’ll be!” Gojo says, triumphantly. “C’mon, try it. I’ll keep it like this even if you run at me.”

Intrigued, you take a step forward. Sure enough, Gojo jumps back, leaving you two the exact same distance apart that you were before. You take a step back, and he steps forward. You step right, and he follows you.

Narrowing your eyes slightly, you feint backwards and then quickly jump to the side, and you smile again as you see Gojo follow you within a millimetre’s precision. You’re about to really test his claim and make a run at him when you hear the strike of a gong, its ring echoing loudly through the room and into the next.

You look up, confused.

“They’re finished,” Gojo mutters, his gaze fixed on the door that you both entered through.

“With what?”

“All the clans. They’ve decided on whatever they needed to.” At your frown, he continues: “They meet up every couple of years when something changes that they need to talk about.”

“Why did they meet up this time?”

“I’ve got no idea.” He takes another long look at the door, and then shakes his head like a wet dog. He turns to face you, any solemnity suddenly replaced with an amused playfulness. “I guess we’d better get back!”

There’s a sinking feeling in your chest as you follow Gojo out of the room. You don’t need to imagine what your father’s going to be like when you get back, and your stomach lurches at the thought. He hates it when he doesn’t know exactly where you are—it was a stupid idea, sneaking off like this, stupid, stupid, stupid.

“Hey, Hebi-Something?”

“What?”

“You shouldn’t be worrying about what people’ll think when you get back.”

Right. Yes, you decide, it is frightening how perceptive he is. Carefully, you say: “You don’t know my father.”

“He’s the one who makes you keep your hands tied up?”

“Yeah.”

“The one who tells you what to do all the time?”

“Mmhm.”

“Nah, don’t be worried about him!” Gojo looks back at you, his grin wide and bright on his face. “If you walk in with me, then no-one’ll bother you.”

You stare back at him.

Gojo’s smile widens. “Trust me,” he says, clasping his hands together like a man in prayer. His eyes glint as he looks up at you. “Don’t worry. I’m special.”

--

Your father and grandmother are standing in the corner of the room.

Your grandmother’s face is craned up to him, and there’s a small smile on her face that you’ve never seen her wear when she’s with you. She looks happy, talking to him. Sometimes, you forget that he’s her son.

As soon as you enter, your father looks right up, like he could sense you coming in. His gaze glances off you and fixes on Gojo, and it stays trained on him as you walk through the parting crowd.

“Hello! Are you Hebi’s family?”

Your father looks down at him. He observes Gojo, his bright smile, the way you’re standing about a meter apart—and, finally, he looks at you. Chewing on the inside of your cheek, you try to meet his gaze and look suitably solemn.

After a moment, you father says: “Yes. I’m Jin Hebi, the representative for my family, and this is my mother, Tsuru Hebi. It’s our honour to meet you, Gojo-san, but… I see you are already acquainted with my child.”

Your father’s voice is low and controlled, and you’re somewhat surprised at how formally he’s speaking to Gojo. This, most of all, shows that he is definitely someone important; your father would never be so overtly respectful to anyone if he didn’t know for certain they were his superior.

Gojo preens at your father’s deference. “Yeah, we met earlier today. Good of you to let her leave the main room earlier, too—I wanted to go ages before, but Hebi was a bit more hesitant. I told her that you’d have no problem if I accompanied her.” He looks up at your father, and you can see a dangerous challenge in his eyes. “Right?”

“Of course,” your father says levelly, and Gojo beams.

“Great! Well, I’m going to go back now. It’s very tiring, being my clan’s representative. Lots of pressure, but I manage—right, Hebi-san?” Gojo quirks a smile and bows to you and your family, who stand there mutely, slightly shocked. As he strides away, he turns back and calls: “I’ll see you soon, Hebi-Something!”

You nod, even though you don’t believe him. It’s doubtful you’ll ever see him again; your father’s reaction has solidified what had been itching at you ever since you found out who he was; despite everything, Gojo is a person much too important for someone as low-status as you. More than likely, he’ll forget about you just as swiftly as he changed from serious to playful back in the quiet room.

“Come, child,” your grandmother hisses, and you follow her dutifully from the room.

The thought isn’t all that pleasant, but it’s hardly depressing, either. The world is comprised of facts, and this is just one more of them. In truth, Gojo is more valuable to your society than you will ever be, and that’s that. You decide to not let it bother you, and resign yourself to one last look over your shoulder before you’re ushered out of the room.

There. That’s the last time you’ll ever see him.

Oh well.

At least he was nice to speak to for a bit. He made you smile, which was kind of cool. And he stopped you from getting in trouble with your father, which was nice. Overall, talking to him was a good choice.

You get into to the car (the door held open by your father, who doesn’t look at you) and you begin the drive home in silence. The journey back home is a long one, and you find yourself resting your head against the door and watching as the condensation blooms and races sideways across the window. Your breath fogs up the glass in little puffs of air that grow and fade, grow and fade.

The only thing your father says is: “You spoke with the Gojo heir, child?”

You’re not sure what else to say other than: “Yes,” which doesn’t seem to satisfy him. Your grandmother whispers something to him that you can’t make out, but your father responds lowly under his breath, and she squints out of the window, thinking. After that, no-one speaks.

The sky is an inky black when you finally arrive at your house. The key in the lock makes a quiet click, but in the silence it echoes loudly, and you wish it to quieten down. You don’t know what your father’s thinking about, but if he’s angry you’d prefer it if he’d just shout, get it over with. You hate this oppressive quiet, like he’s waiting furiously for you to make a mistake.

Your grandmother branches off to her room, on the lower floor of your house, and you follow your father upstairs. On the landing, he pauses for a while and you wait, a cold wash of dread grating at your bones.

“Child,” he begins, but then breaks off. He looks to the side, through the door to his room, and you follow his gaze. There, in the silver moonlight, sits your mother. She’s awake, her eyes focused attentively on the window. It’s nearly impossible to see her as she was last year, healthy and happy and laughing, but in the soft glow of the night her face seems less gaunt, more substantial, the sharp planes of her face softening into something almost lovely.

A year ago, you tried to hold your mother’s hand, and you nearly killed her.

It’s unknown if her current condition was brought about by your cursed touch, or her inability to accept that her only child was an abomination. You secretly think it’s the latter. Though you’ve never been explicitly told much about cursed energy or the abilities that come with it, you know from your father that your power is weak and limited. It isn’t strong enough to do what’s been done to your mother.

You look up to your father, and see that his face has hardened. He doesn’t look down at you. He refuses to.

“I’ll speak with you tomorrow,” he says, and enters his room, separate to your mother’s. He shuts the door behind him.

You’re left alone.

Notes:

1996
Six years old

-

I’ve been steadily working away on this for ages now, and I’ve got about 60k words already written, which is about halfway through everything I’ve planned out? It’s been a while since I’d actually read this chapter, so after tidying a few sentences up here and there it was just very interesting to look back and remember where everyone started. This fic is going to work through their lives right up until they’re 28, around the place where the anime’s left off. This means that there will be major manga spoilers for any ‘prequel’ arcs (Gojo’s Past and Cursed Child!), so be warned!

Tags/warnings will be updated, with the heavier stuff mainly kicking in as they get older. The rating will (very eventually) be bumped up to Explicit. Thanks for reading!

Chapter 2: 1997

Sunday 7th September, 1997

You stand on one leg in the centre of the room, eyes squeezed shut. You pinch the inside of your cheek between your teeth and take a steadying breath. It’s hard to block out the shouting.

Your balance has never been that great in the first place, and you’re sure that having your hands bound behind your back can’t exactly help. In your life, there are many things you would like to improve upon, but improving your balance is the quietest, and is therefore best suited for the mornings, when your parents’ days haven’t really started yet.

It’s difficult, seeing other children your age have access to equipment and tutors and anything they could dream of, whilst, at the same time, you’re stuck in your bedroom, trying to train yourself to be better solely because you can’t think of anything else to do. Your room is empty; a bed, a wardrobe, a handful of outfits. There’s a corner where the floorboards sag and groan, and you’re very afraid that it would collapse underneath you if you ever stepped on it too hard. The walls are beige. It’s really, really ugly.

“And don’t even think about denying it, Jin, because—because I swear to fucking god, if you say that one more time—”

Well, maybe you’re being too bitter. You don’t like feeling sorry for yourself—and things definitely could be worse. Besides: the child you know isn’t a representative of the whole. He’s just one. Just himself.

You wobble, just a little, but it’s enough to send you crashing to the floor. Your elbow scrapes hard against it as you fall and sharp prick of pain jumps under your skin.

You wince. Stupid. That’s irresponsible, allowing yourself to be injured, even if it’s just a small graze. A trickle of blood runs down your forearm and drips off at your wrist. You watch it puddle on the floor, holding together for a split-second before it sinks into the wood. Staining it, probably permanently. You chew on your bottom lip. Maybe if you just look at it instead, you won’t have to leave your room.

The bathroom’s downstairs, and your floor’s dirty and probably filled with countless germs. You need to clean the cut, but you really, really don’t want to go downstairs.

“Mieko, you’re being selfish and you know it.”

“Me? Selfish? God, Jin, you could write the fucking book. Do you know how many times—"

If you think their voices are loud through the floorboards, you definitely don’t want to experience it in person.

You take the steps carefully, missing every second one and shuffling around when you know that you’re about to step on one that creaks. Over the years, you’ve optimised the path that makes the least amount of noise, that’s least likely to alert your parents of your presence. Your descent is always the same: first-third-fifth-sixth-and-go-to-the-left-eight-ten-to-the-right-twelve-and-down.

“You don’t get to talk about loyalty to those bastards, not anymore.”

“If you hadn’t noticed, those ‘bastards’ are my family, and it’s not like I’m given much choice in any of this—”

Your mother’s voice rings through the landing. It’s a little like a siren, unending and wailing and very headache-inducing. “Yes, yes, yes, I know you’re suffering and I know it’s awful for you, because being the head of the family must be so difficult, Jin, I know it, don’t fucking remind me again, because I’ve heard it a million times.”

“And yet you clearly haven’t been paying any attention to me at all, have you, or else I wouldn’t have to say everything so many times! So for once in your life, Mieko, listen to me, just once—”

You pad silently past them, into the bathroom. They don’t notice you. Your parents have been having this argument for about four days straight now. Sometimes, you think it would be interesting to keep a log of this type of stuff, to catalogue how long they spend arguing each day, and how many times they change the subject. It might give you something else to do, other than your stupid attempts at practising. You don’t even know what you’re practising for, just that you probably should be doing something.

If it gets to the point that you start wishing your grandmother was back, you might just take off your gloves and finish the both of them off right where they stand. Even if she can sometimes make the arguments better, she’s always horrible to you, so you’re very glad that she’s trooped herself off on a solo holiday for the next couple weeks.

Thankfully, though, it hasn’t got that far just yet, but you can feel the temptation to miss her pulling at you—especially when they start arguing before 6am. That, you think, is just rude.

Deciding you needn’t bother with trying to be quiet, you push the cold water tap on with your shoulder and stick your elbow under it. Your gaze drifts to the door, where about half of your mother’s visible. Her arms are flying around like they tend to when she gets angry, and they whip in and out of your line of sight in a way that’s almost humorous. She’s pacing up and down the living room with more energy than you thought she possessed. Her health seems to come and go in waves, recently. Sometimes she’s too weary to leave her bed, and sometimes she’s fit enough to argue with your father for nearly the full day. You’re not sure exactly how that works.

Hopefully, they’ll be finished with this little skirmish in a couple hours as you really don’t want to have to miss lunch again today. Since you can’t make it yourself (not being able to use your hands severely limits your choice of activities) you’re reliant on one of your parents remembering you’re still in need of feeding. It’s easy to forget, you know, but you would like them to remember this time.

“It’s not easy for me, either! I know your mother blames me for what happened with the kid! Can you imagine what it’s like for me, day in and day out, living with that all the time?”

“Don’t bring her into this—Jesus, Mieko, that’s too—”

“Bring her into this? You’re a bastard! Such a fucking—god, every time I look at her I can see your face looking right back at me. It’s fucking awful, but you just don’t realise it!”

Oh, no. They’re talking about you again, and you cringe, silently.

“You know that her—thing, whatever it is, you know that none of us blame you! Don’t try and change it back, like you’re the victim here or something.”

“I’ve heard you!” your mother screams, a hysterical laugh bubbling out of her. You wonder how long they’ll be carrying on with this—you’d really like to get back to your room. “You and your mother, whispering together like you do, like you’re some pair, talking about how—how I’m the one who messed the technique up, like my fucking genes messed it up or something, I—”

“Mieko, you’re making this up—”

“Don’t you fucking dare—”

Ring. Ring-ring.

Huh. It’s the phone.

Your parents stop talking immediately. You hear your father walk over to the phone and slowly pick it up. It makes a soft click that seems to reverberate off the walls in the sudden silence.

“Hello, Hebi residence. Yes, that’s me. My—Excuse me, may I ask what you’re calling for? Oh, you’re from—my mistake, of course, yes, I should have known. I’ll fetch her right away, she’ll be over as soon as possible. Thank you very much, yes, I’ll pass that on. Good-day, thank you.”

Your father pauses for a moment, staring at the phone in his hands. You remain still, hovering just inside the bathroom doorway, altogether unsure whether you should make your way upstairs or just stay put.

Fortunately, your question is answered right away: your father, having put the phone back down almost reverently, walks to the base of the stairs and shouts out your name. It takes you a second to realise that it’s your real name, your given name, not some variation of “child” or “you!”. This change, sudden and seemingly unwarranted, makes you slightly uneasy.

Instead of trying to pretend you weren’t listening to your parents’ whole argument, you step out of the doorway and make yourself visible. Your mother spots you. She jumps, a little, like you startled her.

“Ah, child, you’re here,” your father says. Neither of them have the decency to look ashamed. “You’ve been summoned to the Gojo household. Set off at once, and make sure you look presentable.”

“The Gojo household?” your mother echoes, turning to your father, their past disagreements momentarily forgotten. “Again? Is this a regular thing, now?” She turns to you, and you realise that she’s asking you a genuine question.

Why would you know the answer to that? Still, you don’t want to leave it hanging in the air, so you just shrug. She doesn’t look too happy about your non-committal answer, and you shift uncomfortably.

“Maybe,” you remedy, “I’m not sure.”

Your mother brightens at this, standing up straighter and beaming at your father. He, too, looks relieved at your answer.

“Child, if it is more than those one-offs, if you can make it a permanent fixture—you know what that would mean for us, don’t you?” Your father’s eyes gleam at the prospect of such close proximity to power. “The Gojo clan… for our daughter to be close with their only heir…”

He trails off. You try to refrain from making a face. All this attention is making you uncomfortable; sure, it’s not great when they ignore you all the time, but it means you’re not used to it when they decide that you do have some worth after all.

“I’ll try my best,” you say lamely, but even those hollow words make your parents’ smiles grow wider. You know it should make you feel proud, but all you can feel is an emptiness, an unworthiness, and a steady, creeping feeling of ice.

--

The building is ridiculously big.

You know that even if you visited the Gojo household every single day, you’d never get over just how massive it was. It’s not even a singular building, really, but loads of different houses; more of a village that revolves solely around their one leader, who is currently leaning out of the uppermost window, waving his hand around madly and calling out your name.

“Hebi! Hebi! Hebi-Hebi, can you see me? I’m up here, look!”

You crane your neck up, squinting against the sun, and spot Gojo, stark against the warm tones of the house’s exterior. You tilt your head in simple acknowledgement, feeling slightly foolish, and he grins so widely you can see it clearly even from the ground. He disappears, and you can nearly hear him bounding down the stairs, taking them two at a time like you think he’s prone to whenever he’s particularly excited about something.

It takes him less than a minute to travel about three storeys, and he throws the door open wide with a slightly unnecessary flourish.

“Hebi! You’re here!” Gojo jumps back, leaving you enough space to walk in comfortably. You slide out of your shoes, trying not to seem too in-awe about how huge his house is. A servant, steps forward and removes them, bowing deeply to the both of you and exiting.

“Of course I am.”

“Huh?” Gojo starts making his way up the stairs and you follow him, following the familiar road back to his room. “Did you miss me that much?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“I think it is.”

“It’s not.”

“I’m pretty sure you missed me.”

“Then you’re wrong.”

“I’m never wrong, Hebi!”

“That’s immature of you to assume,” you say, feeling very articulate. The handrail is a smooth, polished acacia, and you long to run your hands along it, just to see what it would feel like under your touch. “It’s not about you at all, really. Me, coming here.”

“Oh.” Gojo nods knowingly, looking down at you as he walks up the stairs backwards. “Did your parents say something, then?”

“Yeah.”

He wrinkes his nose. “That’s so annoying. Why do they have to spoil everything?”

“They’re the main reason I come here.”

“But not the only reason, obviously?”

“Why else would I be here?”

“Well, for my amazing company!”

You’ve made it to his room. He opens the door and walks inside, scuffing his feet on the floor as he enters. You glance at some of the other servants, standing almost like bodyguards outside each room on the landing. None of them look at you, but you can feel their attention, painful and oppressive.

Gojo turns to you and beckons. “What did they say to you this time?”

“The same stuff. They want me to become close to you so our family can have more influence in society.” You step into his room and immediately gravitate towards the bookshelf, where you hover for a second, looking. “The Hebi family isn’t powerful at all, so if I could be friends with you, then we could at least have some power by association. That’s what my father probably wants.”

Instead of looking put-out, Gojo just seems thoughtful. He’s not at all offended that your family would like to use him for their own personal gain, and doesn’t even seem annoyed that you told him. He appears to take it all in his stride, accepting it and moving on to bigger things remarkably quicky.

You feel an unexpected spark of happiness. You’d forgotten that you actually like him quite a bit.

“But there’s not much that you could do,” he says, considering it, “even if we were the best of best of friends. I’m the most powerful Jujutsu sorcerer of all time, but—”

“No, you’re not,” you interrupt him.

Gojo looks taken aback. “Yes, I am!”

“No.”

“Hebi!”

“No. You’re seven.”

“Hebi,” he starts, “just because you’re jealous—”

“I’m not jealous,” you say, “but you shouldn’t say things that aren’t true. You’re not the most powerful Jujustu sorcerer of all time.” Gojo looks like he’s about to say something else, so you add: “Yet. You have the potential, but you’re not there right now.”

Gojo ponders this for a moment, and then sees the look on your face and quells himself a bit. “Ugh. Okay. I was going to say, even though I’m going to be the most powerful Jujustu sorcerer of all time, there’s not much that I would be able to do for someone else’s family, even if we were the bestest of best friends.”

“But just having me there would be an advantage.”

“So? What would you do?”

“If I was a secret spy for my family?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Hmm.” You think about it for a second. “Firstly, I wouldn’t talk about being a secret spy for my family, even in pretend.”

Gojo nods, as if he approves.

“I’d probably get to be the best friends with you as I could, and then I’d start listening to what some of the higher-ups said around you, and then get you to tell me the things they told you. Oh, also, if you did any practising for your cursed technique, I’d want to be there, to report on how you’re progressing. Even just the way your house is run would be a valuable piece of information.”

“Yeah,” Gojo agrees, lolling back on his bed. “Y’know, Yahaba really didn’t want me to invite you over today. I think it was for that reason.”

“Because I could be a spy for my family?”

Gojo hums, and scratches his nose. “Yep.”

“Yahaba-san’s let me come here before, though.”

“It is never one’s first impression that is the most important, Gojo-san, but one’s twelfth,” Gojo says, in a bad imitation of Yahaba’s calming voice. “Or something like that. She thinks you’re drawing me in, and then soon,”—he jumps up, striking a pose like some kid’s book villain—“you’ll betray me, or kill me, or sell all my family secrets to the yakuza!”

“Wouldn’t that still be betraying you?”

“Sure. Maybe. Not that you’d be able to kill me, anyway.” Gojo gestures to your hands, and then to himself.

You don’t doubt it. You haven’t seen much of his cursed technique at all; your visits to his house are rare, and mainly consist of wandering around his house and spending time together, definitely not anything that would resemble fighting. Despite that, you’re more than certain that his power is greater than yours by tenfold. Fortunately, you’re quite pleased to find that you don’t really care.

“I guess it’s good that I don’t want to.”

“You don’t want to kill me?”

“Not really,” you say, politely.

“You wouldn’t be able to, even if you wanted to.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“You know why?”

“No.”

“You do! It’s because I’m the—“

“Wait.” You stand up straight, looking around you. No-one’s disturbed you yet: none of the servants have made any move to enter Gojo’s room. “Be quiet.”

Gojo makes a face, his eyebrows scrunching up. “What? Why? I was saying—”

“I’m concentrating. Don’t talk.”

Hopefully, it’ll work.

You focus on your hands. They’re tied with quite a bit of slack behind your back, more so than usual, so you can move them quite far up and away from yourself with no trouble at all. You’ve been practising this move for ages up in your room, and have landed it maybe three-quarters of the time. If you can get your balance just right, and jump high enough…

Gojo keeps talking (obviously) but you push it into the background, like white noise. It doesn’t exactly work, so you try to ignore him altogether.

You bend your knees, checking yourself so your centre of balance is right between your feet, and take a short, steadying breath. If you don’t manage this, you’ll look like a proper idiot, and you really don’t want to deal with Gojo’s teasing for the rest of the day.

And, strangely, it’s this thought that gives you the final boost of courage to try: you jump, as high as you can, flying up into the air and tucking your knees right up under your chin. Quick, you whip your arms underneath your legs, bringing them around and up and close to your chest just in time. Gravity pulls you down sooner than you’d like and you land awkwardly, stumbling over and falling on your back. A sharp pain shoots up your spine, and you let out a groan, but then you realise—you did it.

You stand up at once, a bright smile breaking out over your face as you stare at your hands, still tied together and clothed in your gloves, but in front of you, right there, and you can see them, beneath your eyes. A laugh escapes you, and then another.

“Hebi!” Gojo pushes himself off the bed, staring at you. “What was that?”

“I’ve been practising. I can do it, so I thought I should.”

“But you did that all on your own!”

“Yes.” There’s not much else to say, since you’re too busy being pleased with yourself to concentrate on sating Gojo’s eagerness. “That was the point.”

“Why didn’t you say anything? You could have had me do something—I could’ve just cut the rope, I’ll ask a servant for a knife or something, wait there—”

“No,” you cut in, “don’t. I don’t want someone else’s help.”

Gojo pouts. “You don’t want my help? But I’m very good at helping.”

“I don’t want to have to rely on someone else,” you say, dragging your foot against the floor. “Like, what if there’s no one else there? Or if there’s not a knife around? I need to be able to do things myself, otherwise I’ll never be able to do anything.”

You’re not really sure what to do—in your anticipation and excitement, you’d almost forgotten that Gojo would be able to see everything. A cloud of wariness passes over you, and you add: “You’re not allowed to say anything. To anyone.”

“For sure, yeah,” he says, but he waves his hand about, flippant. He’s not interested in the restrictions, and you can tell he’s buzzing to talk more about the trick you just performed.

You need to be certain about this. “No, I’m serious.”

“Sure, so am I. Hebi—”

“No.” You say it harshly, with enough force that he stops his bobbing about and pauses. “If anyone finds out, even a servant, then they could tell my father. I’m forbidden from doing anything like that—”

“But you just did!”

“Yes, I—I know.” You waver, unable to explain what you mean. “I just—I know it’s different for you, because you’re… but your situation, with everything, is different. You’re allowed to break the rules, but I’m not, because you… whatever. Right?”

Gojo blinks at you, and then cocks his head to the side, like he’s doing an impression of a confused rooster. “You’re saying I’m special?”

“No!” You bury your head into your shoulder, and then realise that you don’t have to just do that, and push it into your hands. It’s a weird feeling. “You’re not getting it—”

“Yes, I am,” Gojo says, but his voice is a lot more solid than it was before, like he’s actually being serious for the first time. “I’m not going to tell your dad. That’d be stupid, because then you’d have to stop coming over here, wouldn’t you?”

Now it’s your turn to blink at him, slightly embarrassed. “Erm. I guess.”

“Then I won’t tell anyone! And no-one’s allowed in my room anyway, so. It’s all fixed!” He bows, as if to an audience, and looks up at you like he’s expecting a wave of praise.

You don’t want to give him the satisfaction, but your smile grows, very slightly. “Thanks.”

“Ah! Hebi! I’m blushing!” He throws an arm over his forehead and pretends to swoon. “You’re flattering me too much!”

“Don’t do that,” you say gruffly, and resist the urge to kick at him.

“Oh, so you’re embarrassed!”

“No!”

“You are! Oh, I’m so pleased! Let’s both be embarrassed together!”

“I…No. I don’t—I’m not—"

“Oh, Hebi-Hebi!”

Gojo moves forward, like he’s about to throw his arms around you, and you jolt back, all humour suddenly and forcefully gone.

He leans away from you, changing the movement into a dramatic sweeping gesture, so smoothly it almost seems like it was what he’d meant to do all along. He continues his monologue, not at all drawing attention to the fact that he’d been within inches of touching you. You don’t think it was on purpose—he’s never done anything similar before, and it was almost definitely an accidental slip in the moment, but still. Your heart pounds.

You’ve met Gojo only a handful of times in total, but he’s probably the closest thing you have to a friend, ever. And yet the thought of him touching you makes your skin crawl, like millions of insects scampering over you, so heavy and crowded you can hardly breathe. You don’t want to feel like that, to know that your parents have had this much of an impact on you, but—but sometimes, it’s impossible to drown everything out. This, you half-fear, half-know, is one of those exceptions.

A rule that cannot be broken: you must not be touched. Ever.

--

Dinner at the Gojo household is very different to dinner at the Hebi’s. You haven’t eaten here before, and hadn’t known what to expect. It would have been nice of Gojo to warn you, but you realise, as you eat your dessert as quietly as you can, you don’t think he’d know any different.

For one, you’re surrounded by people; servants, mainly, standing at attention by the walls. They keep their eyes trained ahead, so still they could nearly be carved out of stone, but as soon as you or Gojo even hint at wanting anything they spring into action, bringing forward seconds or thirds or fourths from a seemingly bottomless supply of food.

It’s disconcerting—you feel the pinpricks of their eyes on you whenever you try to eat, your hands shaking as you duck your head from their view. You’re used to being sat in a corner, to eating silently and trying not to disturb your grandmother, who gets very particular about the environment in which her food is eaten.

Your hands, and the uncomfortable procedure they’d required, had made you feel even more watched. You’d done your trick again but in reverse, making your way down to dinner with your wrists tied safely behind your back. You’d suspected that your father had made arrangements with Yahaba, the head servant of the household, and had been proven right; faceless maids had taken you by the elbows and carefully cut you free of your ropes, their solemn faces telling you to keep your hands by your sides at all times.

You’d agreed, because what else were you to do? Honestly, everyone was acting a bit stupid—it wasn’t like you were new to this whole ritual. The way it works: hands freed three times a day (if your parents remembered) for thirty minutes at a time. Elbows tucked in, stay in your seat, no sudden movements. Like you were a wild animal, or something worse.

Seriously, if they don’t stop looking at you like that, you’ll start thinking you were. Maybe you should bark at them, just to give them a fright.

Gojo cuts off your thought. “The food is really good, isn’t it?”

Conversation had been stilted all meal. You hadn’t been able to get more than a couple sentences out, too intimidated by the mass of people who could hear your every word. Gojo hadn’t seemed to notice, and for that you were thankful. He never seemed to care what other people thought of him. Maybe this was where he learnt it.

You nod back at him, your throat lumpy and dry.

“It’s all made here. Have you seen the kitchen? Didn’t I show you? It’s really big, with loads of people all rushing around and stuff. It’s all for me, as well, so every day I just have to say what I want and it’s done! Cool, right?”

Just him. No parents, you notice. He’d never spoken about them. You’ve never asked. You can’t see how it’s any of your business.

“I asked that you’d come over ages ago. Think everyone in the kitchens went into a mad rush when I told them there’d be someone else there. Especially since I hadn’t decided when you’d be over. Yahaba kept going on and on… like I told you, you know? That you couldn’t come, that I wasn’t really allowed, and stuff. But I insisted, and so she had to say yes.”

Gojo giggles to himself. He takes a bite of his dessert and grins, his eyes closing as he savours the taste.

“Nice, right? Really nice. Do you have this stuff at yours?”

“Erm.” You manage to force a couple sounds out, and take a glance around you. You know you’re being overly paranoid, but the sheer amount of people has your heart pounding. Gojo’s face falls, just a little, and you push through, trying to be a somewhat decent guest: “Not… really.”

Gojo latches onto your response (which is significantly more than what you’d said in the last hour in total). “No? What’s it like, then?”

“More…” You hesitate. “More, erm, more alone, I guess. Less… people.”

“Yeah,” Gojo says, a lot darker than he’d been just before. “I hate them too.”

You jolt. He was allowed to say that, right in front of them?

“I’m trying to get rid of them. It’s annoying, right? If you want to eat your food on your own?”

Suddenly, he stands, pushing his plate forwards and stretching. He jumps a little, like he’s warming up for a fight, before looking back at you expectantly.

“Come on, then. We’ll leave.”

You stand. “I haven’t finished.”

“Do you want to?”

“No,” you say quickly, “but I thought…”

“I can do what I want,” he says. “And so can you, when you’re with me.”

His familiarity brings heat to your cheeks, and you look away from him.

A servant rushes forward. She’s young, with dark hair tied tightly behind her in a bun. She looks afraid to even talk. “Gojo-san, I’m very sorry to bother you, but we must request that Hebi-san secure her hands before she leaves—”

Your heart sinks.

“I don’t think—” Gojo starts, but you step forward, offering your hands and shooting him a quick look. The servant ties them back, a little looser than usual, and within moments you’re set.

“C’mon,” you mutter, making your way outside before he could say anything.

The hallway is just as large, but it’s darker now, and shadows make the corners seem wider. You watch the outside through the frosted window around the door. It’s very quiet. You feel a rush of emptiness, overwhelming and complete, and you shudder. If it’s a lack of emotion, why is it still cold?

“That’s not fair.”

Gojo stands next to you. You can feel the warmth radiating off him, even from standing over a metre away, like he’s some kind of personal heater.

You shrug. “It is what it is.”

“It shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t have to be.” He turns to you, and you turn to him. He seems angry, his eyes blazing, and he pushes his hair off his forehead with a taught, locked wrist. You’re not sure who his anger is directed towards, but you’re glad that it’s not you. Instead, he stands next to you, almost in solidarity.

It’s kind of nice, you realise.

“My parents think it’s right.” You sigh. “I guess it’s understandable.”

“But it’s not! It’s not right, and it’s not understandable, and it’s—you shouldn’t do that, just brush it away. Why do you do what they tell you to do?”

“They?”

Gojo gestures around him, waving left and right with his hand. “Them! The higher-ups, the grown-ups! The adults, the people older than us! The ones who make the rules, who say you have to… have to keep your gloves on, and your hands back, and all of those stupid things!”

You think about it for a second. “You know why I have to keep my gloves on.”

“Sure, the gloves, but not being treated like… like you’re diseased, or you’re rabid, or something!

“Maybe,” you say. “Maybe. Yes, maybe.”

It’s not like you hadn’t thought about it. It had been horrible, at dinner, and your life would be so much easier if you could keep your hands in front of you. For one, it’s the most obvious trait to distinguish you from everyone else; strangers look at you like you’re a criminal, eyes following you and then dropping as soon as you look back. It’s isolating, and Gojo has been the only person to even try to know you. You’re not friends, hardly even acquaintances, but he’s still the only person in the world who doesn’t have to be near you, but still is. He’s the only person you know who’s chosen to be with you, however fleeting these choices are.

You look at him, and at his wild eyes, trained on you, desperation bordering on madness. You wonder how many people have wanted to know him, chosen him like he keeps choosing you. Is his life similar to yours, even slightly?

“Maybe,” you say. “Yeah, maybe.”

Notes:

1997
Seven years old

-

Happy holidays to everyone!

Chapter 3: 1998

Monday 7th September, 1998

Days are cold.

You hadn’t realised that avoiding people’s touch would make you so empty. It's difficult to think about any consequences in the long-term, when all you've been concerned with was your mother’s deadened eyes, your father’s hissed warnings, and, eventually, your own revulsion at every point of contact. Even the thought of someone touching you would make you heave, a creeping and growing pressure that would make you run away as fast as you could. You’d forced yourself to work through days, walking through your life steadily and holding yourself back from pain, and then you’d stopped and realised that the days had been years, and that you were cold.

The cold hadn’t been expected. It had crept up on you slowly, you not suspecting anything, slowly consuming your days. It’s the worst at home, where no-one speaks anymore. Everyone avoids everyone, and you feel on edge all the time, like at any moment you could make a mistake and send everything that had been balancing so precariously tumbling down to the floor.

It had been over three years since you've touched anyone, felt anything warm beneath your fingers, and you miss it. You can’t bear the feeling of skin under your hands, but at the same time you don’t want to live your life without it. It doesn’t make sense. The sun is kind, pleasant and warm on your skin, but you’re still cold. And it’s everywhere, and it’s nowhere, and you don’t understand it, but there’s emptiness. That, you’ve come to realise, is what emptiness really is: a lack of warmth, overwhelming and insidiously subtle cold.

Days are cold, but your best friend makes it better.

“Hebi!” Gojo calls, running over to you. He’s holding two crêpes in one hand and is pointing at them with the other, his face split into a proud grin. “Look what I’ve got!”

As he gets closer, you spot what fillings they have—one, clearly his, is full of whipped cream and strawberries and chocolate sauce. It’s very hot today, and the heat has made the sauce drip runnily down his wrist. Your crêpe, in contrast, is kind of plain, with a light sprinkling of sugar.

“Thank you,” you say, raising your eyebrows just a little, “but how am I supposed to hold that?”

Gojo groans. “Hebiiiiiiii. You’re so boring. Take them off, them! There’s no-one here, no-one’ll see!”

You look around at the market. You and Gojo are far off to the side—he’d tried to convince you to venture into the thick of it, the bustling, laughing crowd, but you’d recognised how quickly everything could go wrong and had vehemently objected. There’s about a hundred people, probably more: hundreds of hands, hundreds of opportunities for touch. You raise your eyebrows at him.

“No-one important!” Gojo remedies hastily. “They’re all normal people, so even if they do see you with your hands free it wouldn’t matter. None of them are important!”

A woman passing by purses her lips.

You shrug, and start walking forwards, keeping yourself to the very edge of the crowd. “That’s not very nice of you.”

“I don’t care.”

“Are you saying that just because they’re not sorcerers—”

“No,” he says, scorned. “No I’m not. Course I wouldn’t say that.”

“It sounds kind of elitist, Gojo.”

“I’m not elitist!”

“I can’t believe you’re elitist,” you say, solemnly. “You’ve been elitist before, but that’s your usual ‘I’m better than everyone else’-elitism.”

“But I am—”

“It’s very disappointing that you think mortals are stupid, idiot people in comparison to us amazing, superior sorcerers. I’m ashamed of you.” You shake your head, pinching your lips together in the best pretend-disappointment you can manage.

“Don’t try and—” Gojo spots your face, and he cackles. “You’re evil!”

A smile breaks out on your face and you let out a tiny giggle.

“I’m so hurt! I knew you didn’t think I was like one of those grown-ups.” Gojo holds his hands to his heart, faking extreme sorrow, and then looks down, confused. His shirt is now stained a warm brown of chocolate sauce, wiped from where it had been dripping down his forearm. Gojo blinks. “Oh.”

He ducks his head down to try and lick some of it off, but it proves useless—he looks back up at you to reveal his chin, now similarly covered in the chocolate sauce. You snort, and he pouts, rubbing at his chin sulkily. This makes you laugh even more, and you walk away from him, enjoying the sound of his footsteps as he runs to catch you up.

“Don’t make fun of me,” he says, airily, and you smile to yourself.

“I’m not,” you say. “You just look stupid, that’s all.”

Gojo chuckles, still dabbing at the stain with his elbow. “Are you gonna get rid of them, then?”

“Yeah, yeah,” you say, ignoring how the thin rope around your wrists feel suddenly a little too tight. “I’ll get out of them when we’re in the woods. There’s less people there.”

Gojo hmphs. “No-one here cares.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Why don’t you just take them off now?”

“Don’t want to.”

“Yes you do,” he complains. “And it’s really weird talking to you when your hands are like that.”

You purse your lips. “Oh no,” you say, “that’s so difficult for you.”

“It really is, yeah.” Gojo puffs out his cheeks, rocking up onto his toes. “Come on, this is so boring.”

“No.”

“C’mon!”

“No.”

“Even though I asked really nicely?”

You raise your eyebrows. “You didn’t ask nicely. You told me to do something, and I said no.”

“That’s so mean. You’re mean. I can’t believe I’m spending time with someone so mean.” He looks down at the crêpes in his hands, mournfully. “I’ll eat yours, then, if you don’t want it.”

“Sure.”

“Got your favourite, too,” he mumbles sadly. “I’m so amazing.”

You shake your head at him, holding back a smile. In fact, it was your favourite—a dusting of sugar with a little squeeze of lemon. Gojo’s is the complete opposite, and you make a face at him as he takes a big bite of it. He grins at you, and you roll your eyes. You can’t remember exactly when you told him that it was your favourite, and it fills you with a silly warmth that he remembered—or maybe he just realised that you always ordered the same thing. Either way, it’s sweet.

Days are cold, but you can try to forget about it whenever you’re with Gojo.

Chomping happily on your crêpes, Gojo pushes his glasses up on his nose with his shoulder. This is something you’re actually quite pleased about; you’d forced him to buy new ones, and you think that this pair is an incredible improvement to those he’d been wearing before. It’d been a real pain to get them (your father had only conceded the money when you’d told him that it was going to better your relationship with the Gojo heir), but, looking at them now, perched proudly on his nose, you think the hassle was definitely worth it. You’d bought him the new ones a couple months ago, telling him staunchly that they were an ‘advanced birthday present’.

This is a point of pride for you, you think, since the pair he’s got now isn’t half as horrible as the ones he’d been wearing before. They had been awful; big and clunky and in a style your parents would’ve found cool when they were younger.

“Very eighties,” you’d told him, examining them with an unobstructed dislike.

“Are they?” Gojo’d said, peering closer to you to get a better look. “I thought they were cool.”

“They’re awful. You can’t wear them, it’d just be wrong.”

“Yahaba gave them to me. She said they’re something everyone in my family has to wear eventually.”

“Why?”

“Six eyes. Stops eye strain, or something.” He’d leant back, resting his chin in his hand and pulling a face. “She explained it all, but it was really boring. I kind of tuned her out half way through.”

“Hmm.” You’d shook your head and handed them back to him, not wanting to look at the ugly things any longer. “You don’t have to wear those specific ones, do you?”

“Nah, don’t think so. Yahaba only gave me them because they were my dad’s. Think he wore them before he—”

And then Gojo had mimed a rather gruesome decapitation.

You’d sniffed. You liked Yahaba quite a bit, but you couldn’t speak for her fashion sense. “Makes sense. Like I said: very eighties.”

The memory makes you smile, and powers your steps as you both begin the walk from the market and towards the woods. It’s actually a really nice day today, sunlight glimmering off blades of grass at your feet, clouds drifting across the sky. Your mother had commented on it this morning, looking out the window with something lacking in her gaze.

No-one had said anything in response, which you think she’d been expecting. She hadn’t said anything else after that, but she had made you breakfast, which was contributing much more than anything your father’s done recently.

After walking in comfortable silence for a couple of minutes, you say: “You should pay more attention to what Yahaba-san says to you.”

“What?” Gojo squints up at you, ducking his head against the sun. “Where did that come from?”

“I was thinking.” You step cleanly over a particularly worrisome-looking rock, which has made you stumble countless times before. “You don’t seem to care much.”

“Course I care,” he says, standing on the rock for a second and then walking over it like it was no trouble at all. “You just don’t see me in the lessons.”

You sigh. “I don’t need to see you in those lessons to know what kind of student you’d be.”

“You always think the worst of me. Maybe I’m very conscientious.”

“What does that mean?”

“That I’m extremely no-nonsense about my studies.”

You snort.

“Hey! I am—mostly.” Gojo shakes his head. “It’s hard being so naturally amazing. I don’t have to work at anything. I’m just brilliant.”

“Shut up,” you say, and Gojo chuckles.

A little more seriously, he remarks: “I do work hard at the stuff I think is important. When I need to.”

You consider it, humming. “You are putting effort into the colour thing.”

“Exactly!” Gojo jabs a finger at the sky, moving his whole body into a dramatic pose. “I’m putting effort into my cursed technique! That’s a good one, that is. I’d forgotten about that.”

“Hmm. You wouldn’t like my lessons,” you say, after a moment’s pause, and Gojo laughs heartily.

Your lessons: even their title is a joke, by its very nature. They consist of the rare lecture from your father (whenever he decides that he should have been a teacher in a past life, you think), and whatever information you can scrounge from the books Gojo sneaks you from his house. It’s pitiful in comparison to the stuff he’s taught; countless tutors, all experts in their field, education in academics and martial arts and the theory of your world, and you’re stuck making sure you can read properly. You’d never admit this to Gojo—he likes to make fun of them endlessly, but you’re quite proud of the work you’ve managed to do without alerting your parents. Secretly, you think it’s setting you up for Jujutsu High just nicely.

“I think I’d be great, if you were the one teaching me,” he says, once you reach the top of the hill you’re climbing. You’re panting just a little, but he seems just as energised as he did at the bottom. “Would you be a kind teacher?”

“I’d be very strict,” you say, between breaths, “and I wouldn’t let you mess about.”

“I’ve never messed about in my life.”

“And I wouldn’t let you lie so obviously, either.”

Gojo pretends to be hurt for a couple seconds, but soon enough he straightens back up, seemingly getting bored of the conversation. “C’mon, Hebi-Hebi. The ending is in sight!”

It only kind of is.

The woods hadn’t been your idea, but Gojo had been wanting to go for weeks now, and you’d finally given in. Standing here now, you can’t really blame him; sunlight streams through the leaves, making them glow a soft orange. They cast pretty outlines on the dry floor, flickering green and red and deep yellow. A large brown leaf beckons you, and you jump on it, giggling at the satisfying crunch.

“This is cool,” you say, digging up some moss with the toe of your shoe and marvelling at how easily it falls from the roots of the tree.

You glance over at Gojo to find him with his face turned up to the sky. His eyes are closed, and you register that his glasses have slipped down again. It’s nice to see them again, even if the blue of his irises isn’t visible, and you tilt your head to the side, fighting back another smile. A warm wave of affection rushes over you, with an intensity that nearly makes you jolt.

Gojo seems to sense your eyes on him, and he looks around to you, grinning toothily.

You start, a bit embarrassed to have been caught staring, and blurt out: “You still have chocolate sauce on your chin.”

“Good!” He lolls his tongue out like a dog, flicking it over his chin to try to get the remaining few drops.

You wrinkle up your nose. “That’s disgusting.”

“Blaah.”

“Ew.”

“Blaaaaah. But come on, come on, follow me! I want to get right to the middle of the woods.”

You purse your lips and trail after him, looking around at your surroundings. The bark of the trees are ragged, torn, and dead pinecones litter the floor. You step on one, accidentally, and it snaps loudly underfoot. A gust of wind whistles past and you shiver, suddenly cold. Gooseflesh pepper your exposed arms, fine hairs standing up.

“Hey, Hebi, so when are you going to get out of your—”

You begin to walk again, but Gojo stops, suddenly. You jump back, making sure not to collide with him, and glare at him. “What was that for?”

He doesn’t reply. His eyes are wide open now, and they’re flicking rapidly from side-to-side. He doesn’t even look at you.

You still. Something’s wrong.

The wind whips past you, loud, much too loud. You head jerks on your neck and you turn, gaze darting from leaf to tree to branch to insect. You step backwards and get the sudden, immediate desire to free your hands.

Yes, yes, you need to. Right now. With a pressing urgency, you jump, the practised motion as easy to you as breathing. It’s a manoeuvre that takes a second, maybe less, but the time stretches out horribly as a sick feeling starts to build in your stomach. Your muscles are tightening, legs cramping, and they’re pushing you into the air. Your knees are raising, tucking neatly against your chest, and you feel the familiar press against your ribcage as you suck in a pained breath. Your hands are moving, your restraints are digging into your wrists, and you’re moving to pull your arms in front of you—and you don’t. You’re whipped backwards, banging your head against something hard and foreign and solid, and the world disappears.

The wind is shrill and roaring and something tight and cold is wrapping around your chest. You gasp for breath, and one heartbeat later you realise that you can’t; the air is moving too fast past your lips, too much for you to even choke out a scream.

A deep pressure cuts into your stomach and you gag, your neck rolling around uncontrollably. You try to bring your hands up to fight against who—what—has you in its grasp, but you find with a hopeless sob that they’re still trapped behind your back, completely and utterly useless to you.

The one time, the only one time you would have wanted them free, when you could have actually used your technique, used it intentionally and not fled from the thought of touch, and it’s stolen away from you. You’d cry if you could summon any breath.

Your mind begins to fog, and you realise that you’re going to black out if you don’t get any oxygen soon. You still don’t know what’s going on, whether the thing grabbed Gojo too, or whether you’re completely alone, but if you don’t get yourself free you don’t know if you’ll ever find out.

Sweat is pouring down your temple, and the back of your head is throbbing painfully, but you try to flex your fingers, see if you can still feel them. A brilliant rush of relief lets you know that you can. Now determined, and desperate to do something before you slip into unconsciousness, you tug on your left glove with your right hand, and feel it slip down. It’s not enough. Your vision blurs, and you don’t know if it’s from tears or from the dizziness that’s pounding in your skull. You ignore it, as best as you can. You pull again.

One centimetre. Two. Your fingers cramp, and you can feel blackness swimming at the edge of your vision, but you choke on the nothingness of air and pull. Three centimetres. Your thumb falls lose, and it’s stung by the air, new to the world. Your index, middle, ring, little, one-by-one your fingers escape, and then your glove is ripped from your hand, nearly tearing your skin off with the sheer force.

You’d take a breath if you could.

Before you can think about it, before you can even consider what you’re about to do, you press your hand, fingers splayed, flat against the bulk of whatever it is that has you in its grasp.

It’s ecstatic. A surge of power blooms through your body, rushing around you, rushing out of you, at this one minuscule point of contact. You feel freer than you have in your life, like a pressing weight has suddenly been lifted from your chest, and you can breathe clean air for the first time ever.

It’s terrifying. An alien hiss of pain rushes against your ears, and you collapse into yourself. Something bumps and writhes beneath your skin, undulating sickeningly, but you grip onto the leathery flesh as tight as you can. Waves of energy surge from you, and you can feel the strength pouring from your limbs, dissipating from your muscles with every millisecond that passes by. You’re so close to blacking out, darkness crawling over the corners of your vision, but you hold tight, trying desperately to inflict some damage onto whatever this beast is.

Air freezes. You can breathe. You gasp, choking and spluttering, the panting of the nearly-drowned. And then you let out a scream of pain, as the pressure cut across your stomach lifts, and your hazy eyes make out thousands of tiny spikes, covered in your red blood. Thousands of tiny incisions, splitting you in half, and you can feel blood pooling, pouring, gushing out of them and you scream again.

“Bouuuntttyyy…”

A reptilian voice hisses above you, and you force your eyes open, force your legs to hold you up as you stumble away, hating yourself for not freeing your arms before. If you can find just a second, just one spare moment, you could get them in front of you, but they’re still tied traitorously behind your back, of no use to you at all.

The thing—a curse, it’s a curse, you realise too late—is thick and squelching, with long, tentacle-like arms stretching out from its centre. A flash of bone-white, and you see the endless needlepoints that cover every limb. They’re gut-wrenchingly sharp, and your chest blooms again in white-hot pain. Its face is contorted, with a beak-like mouth split into gruesome, shattered fragments that twist and curl into its flesh as it speaks. One of its limbs is dripping red, and there’s a charred, black mark on its torso.

“Bouuuntttyyy…” it repeats, its voice like grating fingernails, and you feel again the hopeless cold that shudders up your limbs, rattling your bones and pushing you to the floor.

It shakes off its limb and blood flies everywhere, staining the leaves and floor and splattering across your face, coating your eyelashes, pushing past your lips and filling your mouth. The world turns scarlet, and you taste iron. You gag.

There’s no-one here. You take a shuddering gasp. You’re on your own. The thought nearly brings your mind to a shuddering halt, because you don’t know how this works, you don’t know anything, you don’t know how to do anything, but your gaze focuses on the charred scar on its skin. You blink, and you realise you’ve been wasting seconds, seconds, and that seconds are far too valuable to waste. You push yourself to your feet, and you immediately stumble, vision blurring. The curse’s limb flies at you and you cry out, tripping to the side. The burn, on its skin. That was you, you try to remind yourself. If you can wound it enough for you to get away, maybe meet up with someone else, then you can both try to exorcise it. You can survive this. You must.

Trying to ignore the agony on your stomach, you right yourself, finding your centre of balance instinctively. This is something you’ve done before, you tell yourself, this is something you’ve practised.

A tentacle whips out and you jump back, barely missing the tiny daggers that whistle as they cut the air above you. Another one careers out of nowhere and you dodge again. The next one strikes a tree beside you, and you watch in horror as it’s fully uprooted, swaying for a sickening second before, with a world-shaking rumble, it begins to fall. You sprint to the side and manage to avoid the main weight of it, but the knife-like branches tear the skin of your leg and you cry out.

You stumble behind a tree, refusing to look at your leg. Before you can fix your breath, another limb lashes around and you fall to the floor. The curse’s tentacle latches onto the tree and you stare helplessly up at it, panting. The spikes, the ones that had dug so awfully into your stomach, lie only on the underside of the limb, its other side smooth, leathery flesh. They curl in circular patterns, like the suction cups of an octopus’ arm, undulating teeth eager to bite. It whips back, so fast it’s a blur, but you can feel the beginning of an idea start to flicker in your mind.

You can’t win. The curse is too strong and you are too weak, too injured to keep running forever. You know you can’t keep doing this for much longer. Your shirt is damp with your blood. The only, only thing you’ve got is your depleting physical fitness and your hands, twitching and shaking from the exertion of using your cursed technique.

For the first time you think of Gojo, whether he’s fighting a curse of his own. Jerking out of the way of another attack, you give a silent prayer that he’s safe, and is coping a little better than you.

Your breath rattles in your ears, and you bite your lip hard enough that blood spills over your tongue. The pain distracts you for a split-second, and gives you just enough time to steel your nerves for what you’re about to do.

Another tentacle flies at you, glistening and awful and terrifying, but you don’t dodge. You keep your ground, refusing to move, a statue in the face of horror. Your arms are still behind your back, and you pull your other glove off as you stare the curse down, counting down, waiting, making sure your timing is perfect and then you—

Leap!

—right over the curse’s limb, tucking your legs into your chest and pulling your hands in front of you in a trick you’ve practised more times than you’ve breathed. It’s perfect, so easy, exactly as you’ve always done it, and then you’re falling, your hands rising to your chest, and you land, exact, on the flesh of the curse’s limb. Your palms press down, powerful, with a conviction that’s nearing sadistic.

Terrible noise rips through the air, a scream of anguish and suffering. You don’t let go, even when your fingernails rip and tear from your skin, leaving bloody wounds in their wake. The end of the tentacle writhes and lurches forwards in an attempt to cut you down but you spring away, running along its uneven surface towards the curse’s main body. It doesn’t have eyes, but its beak mouth contorts in something like fear. You pounce on the flesh of its face and, with one final burst of determination, you hold tight. All of your remaining energy pours out of you through your two hands, welded forever to the curse’s thrashing form.

You’re triumphant, but you can feel yourself fading. This feeling is familiar; you register it, a faint memory reappearing in your delirium. A child, clinging to her mother’s dying arm, crying and screaming. Confusion, fear, the child’s touch decaying and burning. Hands pulling on you, trying to tear you away. Fingers circling around your forearms, nails digging in, drawing blood. Power draining from your hands. Your heart beginning to slow.

Your grip loosens, and something cold tears across your chest, and you fall.

You’re about to die, you realise distantly, because you weren’t strong enough. What an awful reason to go.

A roar echoes across the wood, and the pressure of the curse’s touch is again ripped from you. Your back arches from the ground and you scream. Ardently, even as you feel the life draining from your body, you force your eyes to stay open. Your wrists have been rubbed raw, hot blood flowing in a fountain of red, but you pull yourself across the ground, away from the curse.

You don’t want to die like this. You don’t want to die.

It shrieks, and you force yourself to look away. And then you see him.

Gojo.

He’s running forward, his arms stretched out, a wild grin spread wide on his face. He stops up short, lowering his glasses, and you see his eyes flit over you, taking in the battered trees, your broken form, and, finally, the curse.

“Bouuuntttyyy!” it says, and seems to come anew, twitching and convulsing with excitement. “Bouuuntttyyy! Bouuuntttyyy!”

“That’s me,” Gojo says, his voice loud and clear. There’s something manic in his eye, and you feel an irrational burst of relief that he’s on your side. Gojo lowers his head, trapping the curse under his gaze. And, his lips curling wickedly, he says: “Why don’t you come and get me?”

The curse rears up, tentacles whipping around in a frenzy, and you shout out an indecipherable warning. The urge to help him flares up and you try to push yourself up, but your arms collapse before you can even try. The best you can do without blacking out is stay put—and, you realise, you’d be nothing more than a hindrance to him. There’s something about the way that Gojo’s eyes are gleaming that makes you think he may not need your help, after all.

And you’re right.

His hands take on a luminescence, an enrapturing blue glow that sends fear rushing down your spine. The curse lurches forward, but Gojo gets there first—he punches it, right in the stomach, exactly where you had first wounded it. But the curse flies towards him, soaring into the air like it had been hit with a force much larger than Gojo could have possibly summoned. Lumps of squelching flesh tear off from its sides, ripping apart from the outside-in. It careens in an arc, and then it’s plummeting down, and Gojo’s standing beneath it, hands raised above him, and blue splinters your vision, breaking it into shards. A fierce push of wind rolls you onto your side, burying your face in bloody dirt.

You choke, pushing yourself upright, and gape in horror at the sight before you; the curse, torn into chunks, splattered everywhere. A shard of its beak is lodged into a tree, weeping black blood.

Gojo appraises the scene. “That’s the first time I’ve been able to use the Blue twice in a row,” he says to the curse’s squelching remains. “Thanks.”

“You killed it,” you breathe shakily, and Gojo turns back to you. You can feel the adrenaline seeping out of you, agony taking its place. Gojo’s eyes flicker, and then he’s next to you, face nearer to yours than it’s ever been.

“Hey, Hebi? Hebi!” His voice is frantic, and you let out a shaky laugh that turns into a hacking cough.

“What? I’m fine,” you manage. Your voice sounds ragged, and you can admit that you probably don’t look the best; from just a quick look down you can see that your shirt is soaked in your own blood, the skin on your leg peeling and split in ribbons. “Ew.”

“No you’re not. You’re not, I—Hebi, look, can you stand up? You need to get out of here, right now, or you’re going to—” Gojo’s voice is less composed than you’ve ever heard it, and you wince. He’s really not giving you much hope for a miraculous recovery.

“Eugh. I don’t—don’t think so. My leg—ew, ew, that’s so gross.” You squeeze your eyes shut, opening them only when you’re sure that your leg’s out of sight. You’re instead confronted with Gojo’s eyes, blinking down at you. His glasses are shoved up in his hair, pushing it away from his forehead and making everything stick up. It looks funny.

“Okay. Okay, look at what I’m doing, alright?” Gojo springs up and snatches some long leaves from a nearby plant. He folds them into smaller little pockets, and sits one in each palm, shoving them in front of you insistently. “Hebi, look, I’m going to have to help you up—”

You recoil instinctively, but Gojo presses on:

“But I’m not going to touch you, not really. It’ll just be like there’s a barrier, the leaves, okay? I’m not touching you. I’d use your gloves, but…”

Oh, right. Both of your gazes find your hands at the same time, and you realise that this is the first time Gojo’s seen you without them. It’s also the first time anyone has seen you without them in about three years.

You choke back your fear, and wiggle your fingers at him. “Funny, right?” you say, weakly.

Gojo smiles back at you, and you return it, thankful.

“I think I can get us back to my house, if I concentrate,” he says, “so I’m going to hold onto your arms now, okay?”

You nod.

He nods back, and then all at once his hands are on your shoulders, and you’re squeezing your eyes shut, pushing your chin into your collarbone and trying desperately to focus on the pain in your stomach, and not the sickening pressure on your arms, the pressure just like the curse’s torturous limbs, its fatal touch, deadly, cold, and you can no longer hold back the scream. It bubbles up your throat, pouring from your mouth—but you can hardly hear it, fighting against every impulse in your body to remain still so Gojo can take you back home.

There’s a rushing in your ears. And then it stops.

You push yourself away from Gojo, exhausted. You’re suddenly so tired, so ready to slip into the unconsciousness that’s been pulling at you for what feels like hours, but you manage one final effort to keep your eyes open. And, yes, the familiar mansion of the Gojo household is right in front of you, and you think you see a door being thrown open, and maybe you hear a shout, a scream, and then there’s nothing.

--

You wake up, and fall asleep.

--

You whisper something to Gojo some time later. His hair is pale against the flush of his cheeks. You sleep, but the pain is gone. You’re just tired.

--

“Hey, Hebi. Hebi-Hebi. C’mon, stop being lazy. Hebi! Really, you’re all good now. Pleaseeee, you’re being so boring—”

“Gojo-san! Out! Right now!”

“Aw, come on, Yahaba! You know she’s just doing it on purpose now—"

“Gojo-san, I swear—"

--

It’s still bright when you wake up. Sunlight glimmers through a wide window, refracting off the glass and shining a warm rainbow across your bedsheets. You blink, frowning confusedly at the glimpse of the sky. How long were you sleeping? It couldn’t have been more than a few hours, you realise, and you allow yourself a small smile. You should’ve known that the Gojo household wouldn’t dare employ any second-rate healers. Nothing but the best for their perfect heir. And, you think happily, how useful it is that they let you tag along. Tentatively, you stretch. Incredible. There’s nothing more than the slightest tightness around your stomach. Everything’s gone.

A servant starts at your movement, and you glance over at her. You offer a weary smile and she bows, hurrying out of the room. You’re pretty sure you know her name, but your mind’s still a little fuzzy. There’s an itch at the base of your spine, and you start to twist your body to scratch it—and then you realise that your hands are unbound, ungloved.

You hold them out in front of you, almost in awe. It’s been years since you’ve been able to do this—since you’ve allowed yourself to remove your gloves, even in private. A faint feeling of apprehension washes over you, and your eyes flick to the door, checking that no-one’s watching. Carefully, you bring your hands nearer to your face, examining them. Your hands: your poison touch.

They look so normal. You squint a little closer, and let out a small laugh. There’s a faint line where your gloves normally end, right around your wrist. Above it, the skin’s turned ever-so-slightly ashy, from where the sunlight has failed to reach. It’s not paler, exactly, just… grey, all the warmth stripped away.

“Hebi!” Gojo bursts into your room, bounding over to your side with a volume that makes you wince.

“Quiet,” you croak, but he just laughs. It’s clear and bright, like the sun streaming through the window, and you find yourself chuckling along with him. He crouches down to your bed and peers over at you, his glasses perched on his nose again.

“I knew you were just pretending to be asleep,” he says, grinning widely. “Lazy-lazy.”

“I nearly died,” you remind him. “Pretty sure that’s not being lazy.”

“Nah,” he says, “you couldn’t do that. Anyway, we’ve got great doctors and Jujustu healers and stuff over here. No chance of you dying, Hebi-Hebi.”

“Even if I tried?”

“Exactly!”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. No risk, not at all.” He grins. “Don’t know what you were getting so worked up about. You really were a bit of a scaredy-cat back there.”

“Was not,” you say, stubbornly. “And I thought I was going to die.”

“But you didn’t.”

“That’s not the point. And,” you add, leaning back and sinking into the softness of the pillows, “you were scared, too. You thought I was going to die.”

“No I didn’t,” Gojo says, waving his hand carelessly in the air.

“You did.”

“I didn’t! I’m never scared. I’m too cool to be scared.”

“Liar,” you say, without much bite.

Gojo stretches out his legs, splaying them out onto the floor. “I’m so cool. Wow.”

“No, you’re not.”

“So cool. And special, and talented, and strong,” he says, tapping a finger on his knee with every word, “and—”

“Shut up.”

“Oh! So rude!”

“Just honest.”

Gojo sighs contentedly, and you find yourself relaxing, too. You look down, and startle at the sight of your hands still out in the open. You push them under the covers, the sheets smooth and unfamiliar, and the tightness in your chest dissipates.

You glance up at him, and pause. Gojo’s gaze is latched onto the spot where your hands had just been, his face devoid of the mirth of just a few moments ago. His hand stokes over his neck and he leans back in his chair, his expression cold and harsh.

“You’re not going to have them tied back anymore.”

Something dark flickers behind Gojo’s eyes, and you can almost feel the remnants of how he was in the woods; calmly powerful, like he had ultimate control over everything around him. You’d been thankful for it, when he’d saved you then, and you find that you still are, now.

“Don’t know if you can do that,” you mumble, tucking your hands under your legs. The fabric of your nightwear is soft, but it’s uncomfortable, strange. You want your gloves back—you know how they feel, how the world’s supposed to feel.

“I can,” Gojo says, as if it’s that easy. For him, it might be. “They could’ve killed you. If you hadn’t been able to get out of them, you’d be dead.”

You swallow. “I know,” you say, hesitantly, “but still—”

“I’ll tell them.” Gojo nods, like he’s talking to himself. “And they’ll do what I want them to do. That’s it.” He glances up at you. “I’ll send someone back to try and find your gloves, though.”

Something twists in your stomach, but you find yourself smiling at him. “Thanks.”

There’s a lull in your conversation, a comfortable quiet settling over the two of you.

And then Gojo seems to want to hear his own voice again: “Talked to your mother, too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” Gojo rolls his shoulders back, stretching his arms out above his head. “I called up your house when you were asleep and told them what happened, and your mother picked up the phone.”

“Right.”

“Had a real long conversation.”

“Ah.”

“She seemed really worried.”

You look at him. You tilt your chin back slightly, raising your eyebrows. “No, she didn’t.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Gojo grins at you, pushing his glasses down his nose and cocking his head in an exaggerated wink. “But she did ask if you were staying the night.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“That you are.”

“Oh. That’s nice. Thanks for letting me know.”

“No problem, Hebi-Hebi.”

You smile, and he smiles back, his nose bunching up like it does when he’s pleased with himself.

“Teleported us back, too,” Gojo says, after a minute.

“Cool.”

“I know. I knew I could do it, because obviously, I’m me, but still!”

“It’s cool.”

“Yeah. Yeah! I really was, wasn’t I?”

You hum.

There’s a knock at the door, and you both look up. In the corner of your eye, you see Gojo roll his eyes.

“Gojo-san, I must insist—” Yahaba starts, her voice hushed. Then, she seems to see that you’re awake, and she scowls. “Did you wake her up?”

“Yahaba!” Gojo gasps. “I would never!”

“Somehow, I find that hard to believe,” Yahaba says dryly, and turns to you. “Hebi-san, I apologise.”

“It’s okay, Yahaba-san,” you say. “We were just talking.”

Yahaba purses her lips. Her hair’s pulled back into a tight bun—you always think it must be so painful for her, to keep it so neat and orderly all the time. But maybe it’s something she’s used to. Besides, she’s kind of old, you think, maybe twenty or thirty or forty or something.

“Regardless.” She raises her eyes at Gojo. “Gojo-san, your presence has been requested.”

“Already?”

“Already,” Yahaba says curtly. “So please get moving. It should only take about a half hour, so I’m sure you and Hebi-san will find lots to talk about after that.”

Gojo groans, but stands up with a faux-weariness. “I’m being summoned. It’s such a burden, being so popular and well-liked.”

“Idiot.”

He grins at you. “Thirty minutes, Hebi-Hebi! Stay awake until then, right?”

You nod, sleepily. You absolutely will not fall asleep.

Gojo’s ushered out of the room, and before he leaves he takes one last look at you, sticking out his tongue over his shoulder.

You smile. And then you yawn. Widely.

Thirty minutes, then. You will not fall asleep.

You will definitely not ever fall asleep.

You will not.

Notes:

1998
Eight years old

-

And the warnings begin to make a bit more sense now! Whoo! Expect later chapters to be similarly (...if not more so) grim.

But still, the friendship in the friends-to-lovers has begun, so we can also look forward to that! I hope everyone had a lovely holiday season, and let's raise a tentative glass to the prospect of a decent 2022? Fingers crossed.

Chapter 4: 1999

Tuesday 7th September, 1999

There’s a stitch in your side, and you’re pretty sure it’s splitting you in half.

You clutch at it with both hands, squeezing the traitorous thing so hard you think your nails might pierce through your gloves. Clutching at it doesn’t help, only exacerbating the pain along your ribs, so you pat your sides down, slowly getting more forceful until you’re nearly punching your stitch out of your body with sheer brute force.

“Good effort today, Hebi.”

You raise your head to give Iori a half-hearted nod, still panting. She’s dug her staff into the ground and leans against it jauntily, surveying you as you try to recover. Her hair’s down again—she must have removed it from its tight bun whilst you were midway through the five-kilometre run.

“Thanks, Iori-sensei,” you manage, after twenty heartbeats. Another fifteen pass by, with Iori picking up her jacket (bleached denim, oversized, so cool) and starting to pack her things away. There’s a surprising lack of stuff—you’ve only ever seen her with a backpack, water bottle, and staff—seeing as the seams of her bag bulge close to tearing with the number of things she’s forced in there.

After another ten heartbeats, you’re close to normal, even if your legs still feel like they’re made of plasticine. You arch your back, hearing the bones crack up your spine. Sweat has pooled at your temples, and you can feel your hair sticking to the back of your neck. Gross.

Iori, of course, doesn’t look tired at all. She pulls a jacket over her shoulders (and just lets it rest there, cape-esque: so, so cool) and gives you a small smile. “Tomorrow, I think we’ll start with an introduction to weaponry.”

You blink at her. “What?”

“Weaponry. Only the basics, at the beginning.”

“Oh,” you say, trying to hide just how exciting the prospect is. “Cool. Why?”

“Your fitness is good enough to start. We’ll begin with some more basic weapons, and work our way up to blades once you develop your control.” Iori slings her bag over her back and begins her walk out of the garden.

“Cool!” You suddenly feel a lot lighter, and stumble in your haste to catch up with her. You trail at her side, pulling at the hem of your gloves. “So what kind of weapons? What stuff will we be doing? Anything dangerous? But—am I really allowed?”

“I started my training with a staff,” Iori says, surveying the horizon as she walks, “and I suppose I never stopped. You will, too: staffs are excellent weapons to begin with. They teach a person balance and technique, whilst still being safer than working with blades.” She considers. “Well. Somewhat.”

“Somewhat?”

Iori smiles, wry. “A staff can hurt a man just as easily as a sword, Hebi. It’s dependent only on the wielder; in the right hands, one’s weapon is inconsequential.”

“Right,” you say, slowly. Secretly, you don’t understand how anyone would prefer to go into a fight holding a long stick against someone holding a battle-axe, but Iori’s very wise and clever, so you have to agree with her.

“You mustn’t underestimate your weaponry, either. With enough strength or skill, you can kill anyone with anything.” Iori hums. “You should know this more than anyone. You can kill with just a touch; this means you mustn’t underestimate yourself any more than the blade you’re holding.”

You glance at the floor, chewing at the inside of your cheek. “I don’t. Underestimate it, I mean. I don’t.”

“That,” Iori says, “is not exactly what I said.”

“What—”

You hear a crack of thunder and you both glance up at the sky; it’s dark and thunderous, clouds rippling across the sky like waves. You can’t feel any rain yet, but way the it’s all looking means it’s practically guarenteed. Iori frowns. “That’s my signal to go, I suppose. Please apologise to your father that I had to see myself out.”

“Oh. Okay, of course, thanks, Iori-sensei.”

“Yes,” she says, absently, “another short notice call. It’s the Geto family again, requesting my lessons with only a few hours’ warning. The non-native sorcerer families are often similarly bothersome. Interesting boy. I believe that you’ll be in the same year in Jujustu High, assuming you attend the same branch. Actually—would you be thinking about Tokyo or Kyoto?”

You look to the floor, embarrassed. Iori always speaks about you attending Jujustu High with sure absolute certainty, even if it’s such a slim possibility you’d ever get there. Still, she’s never liked self-doubt, so you mutter: “I’m not sure yet. Gojo says Tokyo, and I’d want to stick with him, I think.”

Iori considers this. “That’s understandable. I still wouldn’t discount Kyoto; my brother and I both had a very satisfying time there. I know Tokyo’s exciting and new, but Kyoto’s rich with culture. It was a fascinating learning environment.”

“My father wants me to go to Kyoto,” you say. “He likes the tradition.”

“Your father’s right about that,” Iori says. “And my niece is hoping to go to Kyoto. She’d be your upperclassman, but she’s very friendly to those younger than her. I’m sure it’d be nice to have someone you know. Anyway: we can discuss this tomorrow. Goodbye for now, Hebi.”

She inclines her head at you, turns, and walks away. You stand there for a second, not sure what to do, and then you suddenly remember that tomorrow you’ll be dealing with weapons and you let out a cackle so loud you half-convince yourself it’s thunder. Then, you feel the tell-tale splat of rain against your outstretched arms and make a run for your door, shoving your hands into your trouser pockets so your gloves don’t get wet.

The house is warm, and you’re immediately met with a delicious smell of something cooking. You push your shoes into the corner as tidily as you can and wander into the kitchen, following your nose.

It’s Sara, of course. She’s got her back to you, but she’s darting around the kitchen, where she seems to be making about three separate meals on the go.

Her hair is tied back, loose, and it’s curling in a nice way, bouncing slightly as she jumps from tabletop to tabletop.

“Hi, Sara-san,” you say, and she jumps a little.

“Oh, hello!” Sara says brightly, her hand tapping against her heart. “Goodness, you scared me! Are you done with your lessons, then? Did Jin see Iori-san out?”

You shake your head. “She had to leave quite quickly. Someone from the Geto family requested her.”

“Geto family?” Sara’s brow twists a little, one hand still stirring a pot, the other resting on her stomach. “Ooh. I don’t think I’ve heard of them. Which clan are they, sweetheart, remind me?”

“They’re not a clan. It’s just the kid: he’s a cursed spirit manipulator.”

Sara’s lips purse, and she glances back at the stove. “A cursed—?”

“Eating curses and stuff.” You wander to the side of the kitchen and prop yourself up on the countertop. “The kid’s the same age as me. He’s, like, super-strong.”

“Oh, right. Yes, of course, I’m sure your father mentioned him.” She turns back to her cooking, shaking her head. “There’s so many of them to remember, I can hardly keep track!”

“Right.”

“It’s the Getos and the Gojos I get mixed up between, I think. Really, do they both have to have powerful sons? At the same time, too?” Sara chuckles to herself, lowering the gas. “I don’t think I’ll ever remember it all. Geto, non-sorcerer, Gojo, sorcerer. Geto, non-sorcerer…”

She leans towards you, reaching for a bottle of mirin, and you slide backwards out of her way. You don’t miss the hurt that flashes over her face, but you look away, deliberately ignoring it.

When your father met her, you know that he would’ve told her all about you—what had happened, how you’ve got to be treated, the reason you always wear gloves around the house, so you’ve got very little sympathy for any upset feelings she might have, seeing as they’re all a result of your father’s decisions. After all—it is, you think, quite a bit worse for you than for her.

But you like Sara, and she’s a much nicer addition to your home than your mother ever was, so you try to give her a small smile, which she happily returns.

“Speaking of,” she says, propping her hand on her hip. “Are you going over to Satoru’s to play?”

Sara is the only person you know who calls Gojo by his first name. You don’t think she knows it’s not the right thing to do—even you don’t call him Satoru, and you’ve known him for absolutely ages. You’ve decided it isn’t the biggest deal in the world and have endeavoured to warn her the next time he comes over—you don’t want a repeat of the first time he met her, where his jaw had nearly dropped straight to the floor. You think he’d been shocked that anyone had even had the nerve to dare.

The thought makes you grin wickedly, before you remember with a sharp jolt that you’re supposed to be mad at him, and you scowl.

“No,” you say, moodily. “He’s annoyed me.”

“Oh no,” she says. “Why?”

“He’s just annoying.”

“But he’s such a sweet boy.”

“He’s super annoying, and I’m never talking to him again, ever.” You kick your feet up and take a bit of pleasure in the thump they make against the counter.

Sara gasps. “Never ever?”

“Well,” you say, retreating a little. “If he apologises, maybe.”

“Ah,” Sara says, knowingly. “I see.”

“You do?”

“I do.” The corner of her mouth has quirked up, and you frown at it, confused.

“What?”

“I think,” she says, “I know more than you think I do.”

“Huh? Wait, I don’t get it.”

Sara laughs, covering her mouth with her wrist. “Oh, don’t worry. You know, lovers’ tiffs happen all the time. I think it’s sweet!”

You face contorts and you reel away from her, disgusted.

This is one of the few things you really don’t like about Sara; she keeps pretending that you and Gojo aren’t just best friends, like you’re ever going to be more than just best friends. It’s gross and disgusting, and you retch a little. Maybe a little more than was necessary, but you think the dramatics are incredibly important in order to show Sara exactly what you think of the idea.

Fleetingly, it crosses your mind that Gojo would probably find you very funny, but you remember again that you don’t like him now and glower even more at the thought.

She just laughs, and you scowl at her. You both know that you don’t actually mean it—Sara’s nice, loads nicer than your mother. If it was her who was here right now and not Sara, you know she probably would’ve been pushing all these romantic ideas, even more than Sara is.  

You know that any kind of partnership between your family and Gojo’s would be extremely advantageous to the Noble Clan of Hebis, and it was always something your parents would disagree on; though they both wanted the family to get stronger, your mother wanted to work outwards, extend the connections with greater and more powerful families, and your father wanted to focus inwards, on his own.

You glance at Sara, fiddling with her apron unconsciously. Her presence is proof that your father got his way, like he always does. You sigh. You can forgive Sara for joking about Gojo—you think she’s probably just young.

How young, you’re not actually sure. You know she’s younger than your mother, and that she’s much younger than your father; she looks younger than Yahaba, who’s turning twenty-five this month, so you’d guess she’s maybe early-twenties at the most. If she told you she was twenty, bang-on twenty, you don’t think you’d be surprised.

You’d ask, but the last time you mentioned her age your grandmother had shouted at you for days, and you don’t think it’s worth the risk.

“No,” you spit out. “Ew. Never ever.”

“You should never say never,” she chuckles, pouring the contents of one pan into another.

“I don’t care.” You pick up an onion, bored, and put it back before Sara can notice. “We’re friends.” You consider it. “Yeah, we’re still friends. He’s just annoyed me.”

Sara laughs. “Even if—”

“I didn’t hear you come in, child,” your father says. You slide quickly to the floor, and press yourself against the counter wall. He walks by and you tense, but he passes you, pressing a chaste kiss to Sara’s cheek.

You look away. It’s kind of awkward; he never did anything like that to your mother. Not that she would have wanted it, but it’s still weird to see.

“Iori-sensei finished early,” you say, side-stepping around them and moving to the door. “I’ll just go to my room.”

“You don’t have to,” Sara says, smiling at your father and turning around to you. “Are you sure?”

You nod, making sure to keep your gaze close to the floor. “I’ll be upstairs.”

“Actually,” you father says in, and you freeze on the spot.

“Yes?”

“You had a call, when you were working with Iori.”

“Oh. Who was it?”

“I’ve no idea.” Your father turns away from you, to Sara, who’s standing there somewhat uncomfortably. His hand is around her waist, his thumb brushing against her stomach. “Ask your grandmother. She’s the one who answered.”

You’re dismissed.

You cross your arms over your chest, tightly. Whenever you’re with your father, your hands keep migrating to rest above your tailbone, palms up, the way they were always kept when you had them bound.

It’s just instinct, your mind playing tricks on you, but you can’t seem to stop it. It’s frustrating—like you don’t have control over your own body. Like you’re not the one leading, just forced into second place by this cold, commanding, unstoppable force.

Your grandmother’s even less welcoming. She’s never liked you disturbing her, and since you’ve had a freer reign of the house now that Sara’s moved in, she’s been even more irritable.

“Grandmother,” you call quietly, and she stiffens, looking up at you shrewdly. “Father said that someone had called for me?”

Her face loosens a little. “Yes. The Gojo boy asked to speak to you.” She spots your grimace, and says: “Don’t you scowl at me, girl. Call him back, right away.”

“Yes, Grandmother,” you say.

“And get that sullen look off your face. I don’t want you upsetting the Gojo boy with this foul mood you’re in, understand?”

“Yes, Grandmother.”

You’re dismissed.

And then because you have to, you walk over to the phone and dial in Gojo’s number. He got a mobile phone a couple weeks ago and you have the number memorised; you’d think it was really cool if you weren’t (as you stubbornly remind yourself) still very annoyed with him.

It rings, and you steel yourself. It’s always difficult to stay mad at Gojo, but this time you’re determined to try. Gojo doesn’t understand consequences yet, and you’re one of the few people who would actually be able to demonstrate them to him. If anything, it’d at least show him that he’s not allowed to be so infuriating all the time.

“Heya!”

“I heard you called me,” you say, stoically. Holding the phone close to your ear, you peek over your shoulder, checking that no-one can hear, and then hiss: “What do you want?”

“Hebi-chan!” Gojo’s voice is bright and chirpy, and you hear him let out a small oomph as he sits down. “How are you?”

“What?” You frown at the phone. “I’m fine. Shut up.”

“I should shut up? Why?” There’s a rustle of static; his hair falling over the phone. “You just called me, and you’re telling me to shut up?”

“You know why you should shut up,” you say. “Don’t pretend, you sound like an idiot.”

“Oh, Hebi-chan, you’re not still angry, are you?” He’s grinning, you just know it, and your eyes narrow.

“Yes,” you say, rather loftily. “I am.”

“Hebi-chaaan,” Gojo whines, “that’s so dull. Please don’t be so boring!”

“I’m not being boring, Gojo, I’m sticking to my principles.”

“Principles? What principles?”

“Principles that I shouldn’t let you steal my stuff.”

“I’ve never heard of these principles before! This is very exciting. What other principles do you have?”

“Well,” you say, “One of them is not being friends with people who steal my stuff.”

Gojo hmphs. “I didn’t steal it!”

“You stole my magazine—” your finger twists in the phone’s spiral cord, pulling at it, “—and then you lost it. That’s theft, Gojo. You’re a thief.”

“That’s hurtful.”

“Stealing my stuff was more hurtful.”

You can hear him groan, and there’s whoosh of bedsheets as he falls back onto his bed. It’s obvious, even if you can’t see him, what he’s doing; one hand on the phone, the other pulling at his hair (he got a haircut recently, and you both think it’s much too short: he keeps fiddling with it when he thinks you’re not looking), contorting his face into an over-the-top ‘wounded’ expression.

The image makes your mouth twist up—he’s so stupid—and you chuckle, despite yourself.

“It was just a magazine, Hebi-chan!”

“It was not just a magazine. It was Vogue.”

Gojo snorts.

“It’s the first publication! And you know I’d been waiting ages for it, and it was the launch! You stole it, and then you lost it!”

“I was going to be really funny,” Gojo says. “I was going to cut out all the pictures of the models and make one big monster-model.”

“With my magazine?”

“I’d give the monster-model to you, once I’d made it! I’m very creative.”

You sigh. “It was the launch,” you repeat, a little mournfully.

“Look, I’ve apologised loads of times—”

“No you haven’t,” you cut in, but your voice has lost its harshness. Instead, you’re fighting back a fond smile. “You literally haven’t apologised once.”

There’s silence on the end of the line.

“Oh my gosh,” you say, exasperated. “You’re not going to? Not even once?”

“I shouldn’t have to! If you’re truly my friend—”

“Don’t be so—”

“Then I shouldn’t have to apologise!” You can tell he’s pouting. You don’t know whether you want to give him a hug or gouge his eyes out. “Are you really still annoyed, Hebi-chan?”

“Whatever,” you mutter. “You know, just replace it, or something, and it’ll be fine.”

Plus, if you were being completely honest, these past two Gojo-less days have been absolutely awful. When you haven’t been training, you’ve spent most of your time in your room, trying to avoid everyone except for Sara. It’d reminded you of the time before you met him, when your mother was still around, and when you’d had your hands bound. Days upon days of nothing, of staying in your room and watching the ceiling, shivering.

Honestly, you weren’t even that mad to begin with; even if it was Vogue’s first publication in Japan, you’d seen loads and load of copies selling on the street. It’d just been the principle, you’d told yourself, but those principles are looking incredibly thin now that you’re actually talking to him again.

“If that’s all it’d take for us to be best friends again,” Gojo says, “then I would buy you ten million magazines.”

“Don’t be so stupid,” you say, kicking at the floor. “That’d be a waste of money. If wanna get me something more useful you can buy me the October one—or,” you add, your face lighting up, “you can trade your Mewtwo for my Vaporeon. I’ll forgive you then.”

“Yeah,” he says, “no.”

“You’re so annoying,” you complain. “I thought you wanted me to forgive you!’

“Anyway.” Gojo coughs importantly, like a presenter on a television show. “There’s something else I wanted to talk about.”

“Oh, cool.”

“I want to show you something. Somewhere, I mean. Okay, so  I’ve found this really cool place for us, right? Like, a place.”

“A place?” You pull at the phone cord. “What’s a place?”

“A place that’s cool, and it’s really close by both of us, too. You’re not doing anything with the Big Hebis today, are you?”

“Nope. I think Sara’s cooking a big meal or something, though.”

“That doesn’t matter!” His immediate dismissal makes you smile; whilst you actually quite liked Sara, Gojo had never taken to her. “Being with me is much more important. I can be there in exactly nine seconds, okay?”

Your lips purse. “Mm. I thought it was ten.”

“Ten? Pshh!” Gojo scoffs. “Ten seconds is yesterday’s news, Hebi-chan.”

“Since when?”

“Since ages. I’m super-strong now, even better than I was before.”

“Wow. You can zip yourself in nine whole seconds. Congratulations.”

“Don’t call it zipping! That’s so uncool. Call it the proper name.”

“Oh, right,” you say, biting back a smile, “I forgot. You can teleport yourself in nine whole seconds. Congratulations.”

“Well, well, I am amazing.”

“Shut up.”

Gojo laughs. “You wanna see the new place or what?”

You lean back to glance out of a nearby window. “Sure. It’s raining like crazy, though. Just so you know.”

“Is it?” There’s a sound of shuffling, and Gojo sighs. “Ah, well. That’ll add to the excitement, I suppose.”

“I suppose.” You roll your eyes at him. “I’ll see you in nine seconds. Bring an umbrella.”

--

The rain gets only heavier. It’s as if the weather is trying to spite you for attempting to spend time with your friend, and you stick your tongue out at the sky in protest, before you inhale about fifty raindrops and nearly choke.

You and Gojo have matching raincoats; his is blue, yours a pretty green, both of them gifts from Yahaba.

She’d forced them on you after you’d both spent a day trekking through a snowstorm in nothing but a flimsy t-shirt and shorts. As a result, you’d both been stuck in bed with a miserable cold for the next few days, sniffling and sneezing, bored out of your minds.

It’d been quite amusing to find out that even the Famous Satoru Gojo was not immune to the common cold (you’d made sure to remind him hourly of how stupid he looked with tissue stuck to his nose), but Yahaba had sworn that you two were too much trouble sick, and had forbid you from being so idiotic again. She’d kitted you out with a wardrobe of essentials, your matching coats included. You tug your raincoat a little tighter against you, pleased with the warmth it provides.

“Thank Yahaba-san for these,” you shout over the rain, stumbling a little as you make your way uphill.

“Thank her yourself,” Gojo shouts back. Even though you’re sure you look like a drenched dog, the rain has made his hair fall in loose waves along his forehead, twining around his glasses in uniform curls. “You wanna stay over tonight?”

“Sure.” You nearly slip on some mud, flailing your arms in the air and skidding two metres to the left before you right yourself. “If we escape this rain, that is!”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Hebi-chan!”

“Me? Dramatic?” Droplets of rain have collected on your eyelashes and you shake your head, pulling your hood further over your eyes. “That’s funny.”

“Exactly, yeah. Good you agree. Anyway, come on, we’re nearly there!”

You follow Gojo, mumbling ignored complaints all the while, over to a large cluster of rocks, shining wet from the downpour. In one smooth motion, Gojo lifts himself up and over them, as if utterly undeterred by the lack of grip. You eye the rocks warily, and look up to see him smiling.

He offers you his arm, fingers tucked tight fist, and you take it. Your gloved hand reaches out and grasps his sleeve, holding it from the outside, and with a slight lurch of effort you’re pulled upwards. Your feet scramble to find purchase and you land unevenly, with a lot less grace than Gojo—but you both made it, and he’s standing up tall, pulling down his hood and looking around.

It’s a secluded place, about the size of Gojo’s room; a careful cut-out hollow from a greater wall of rock. It’s a cave, really, with its walls and ceiling curving in clean lines around you. There’s a growth of a tree to your left, at the cave’s entrance, which slopes away from the rest. It stands both on its own and alongside the rocks, leaves sighing with the weight of the rainwater.

As you step inside, the noise of the rain fades into a quiet white noise. It’s dry in here, and your footsteps make dark imprints on the smooth floor. You trail your fingers over the wall, trying to feel the texture of the rock, but your gloves bar you from discerning any of its subtlety or detail, and you let your hand fall.

“I found it a couple days ago.”

You turn to Gojo. He’s wide-eyed, staring at you with his hands clasped in front of his mouth, rocking up on his toes and back down again, buzzing. He raises his eyebrows at you, almost nervous—he looks like he’s awaiting your opinion, not ready to commit himself until you praise him for this extraordinary find.

Your chest warms with an overwhelming rush of affection for him, for the way he can never stand still, for the way his glasses are crooked on his nose, for the way he’s still waiting for your response, and you offer a small smile. His grin grows exponentially.

“It’s cool,” you say, and your whisper carries itself throughout the room, reverberating from the walls. “Whoa.”

“I know!” And then he jumps into action, darting from wall to floor to corner to you, pointing out all of the exciting details. “I’ve been thinking about this. We could bring stuff up here, like blankets and rugs and stuff, so we don’t have to sit on the floor all the time, right? And then lights would be really cool, waterproof ones, we can find them somewhere, I think. And then we can have pictures, or tapestries, or something, you know the ones we have at mine? To show that this is our spot, no-one else’s, just ours! So for you, for the Hebis, we’d have a picture of a snake, right, a big scaly snake, since that’s your family’s thing, mascot, thing, or something. Or we could carve it! Into the rock, we could carve the drawings in, like cavemen! Yeah—and then for the Gojos, for me, we’d have, like, eyes. Or an infinity thing, a sideways eight, maybe, I don’t know yet. We can figure that out soon, you know, but that’s all going to be really awesome, right! This whole thing is going to be the best, I can see it in my head right now, because it’s going to be so cool, Hebi-Hebi-chan, I can tell!”

Gojo finishes his speech with another stretch of his toes, twisting around in a pirouette and running his fingers through his hair. It’s darker, with the rain, and the water’s made it a little longer. You’re reminded of the day he’d had it cut, when he’d arrived at your house at seven in the morning, half to tears, nearly sobbing at how ugly he looked.

It had taken you longer than it should’ve done to calm him down and, regrettably, to inflate his ego back to its ridiculous height. And although you know that he likes it at its current length now (because who is your best friend if he doesn’t love himself over all else), seeing his silvery hair fall past his cheek again evokes a strange kind of nostalgia in you, and you blink at him, fuzzy.

“That sounds really cool,” you say. “I mean, really really cool.”

Gojo beams. “It does, doesn’t it? I’m so good at ideas, aren’t I?”

“You had a good one this time,” you say. “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“Oh, don’t be such a buzzkill, Hebi-chan.” Gojo surveys the room, his hands on his hips, adopting a mock-professional stance. “We both have a lot of work ahead of us!” he proclaims, his voice an overly pronounced imitation of Yahaba.

“Yeah.” You shrug off your raincoat and fold it on the floor, squatting down and gesturing for Gojo to join you. He does. “Not much we can do about it when it’s raining like this, though.”

Gojo stretches out, crossing his legs at the ankles and yawning. You copy him, and notice that your feet just don’t reach as far as his do. Ew. Since when was he taller than you?

“I’ll teleport us back home in a second,” he says. “We can bring stuff up like that.”

You glance at him. “Why’d we travel all this way up, then? I’m soaked.”

“The suspense, Hebi-chan!” He smirks at you, very pleased with himself. Looking over at him, you can see that his eyes have closed behind his glasses, like he’s settling down for a mid-afternoon nap. “It added to the excitement of the final reveal, didn’t it?”

“Trekking through a muddy field for hours wasn’t exciting, Gojo.”

“But the wait created suspense!” He shuffles further down and you purse your lips, unimpressed. His face crinkles with unsuppressed happiness. “Don’t look at me like that, Hebi-chan, you know I’m right! And it wasn’t hours, don’t be so dramatic.”

“How am I the dramatic one?”

“You’re very dramatic. Anyway, we won’t bother with the walk next time. You’re kind of right, I guess, that it is too long. I’ll teleport us here, don’t worry.”

“No,” you say, almost on instinct.

“No?”

You frown a little, mulling over why you disagreed. “No, I’d like to keep the walk. You don’t have to zip us.”

“Teleport, Hebi-chan.” Gojo cracks one eye open, and you stare impassively into the blue of his iris. “And why no?” He raises his eyebrows. “Is this one of those times when you’re disagreeing with me just to make me annoyed?”

You pause for a second—you hadn’t realised that he knows you do that on purpose, oops—but you shake your head, fighting back a smile that would certainly dull your point. “No, not one of those times.”

“Why, then? Alright, the walk was a bit boring, you’re right. Having me teleport us would be easier.”

“I like the journey.” You shrug, and then rectify: “I’ll like the journey when it’s a nicer day. But I like having worked hard to get up here, because it means that being here would be a reward, or something. That’s nice.”

You also don’t mention that Gojo’s teleporting takes nine seconds, and that walking up here with him would take much longer. You can’t talk to each other when he’s teleporting, and, even if you’d never admit it, you like spending time with him. A lot.

“Weird.” Gojo closes his eyes again, and you let your gaze wander around the cave, spotting all of its potentials and hopefuls, trying to imagine how it would look once you and Gojo have made it your own.

In the ceiling, there’s a slight gap in the rock, from a storm or accident back years and years ago. It’s created the tiniest crack, where fragments of light have managed to push through to trace the walls. There’s a congregation of rainwater below it, a miniature lake, a small puddle, and in it you can see a sliver of silver sky reflected from above.

“Gojo,” you say, and he hums beside you. “Iori-sensei said we’re going to start training with weapons tomorrow.”

“Ooh!” Gojo lets out an excited little squeal, his eyes flicking open. “That’s so fun!”

“Yeah,” you agree, and the eagerness you’d felt this morning returns, “it is, isn’t it?”

“This means you’ll be able to go against me, soon! Like, actual fighting, not just pretend-sparring with trainers!”

“I know. This means I’m actually going to be able to fight curses, and if I can fight them, I can defend myself against them. I’ll actually be able to contribute to everything else, Gojo. Won’t that be amazing?”

“Yeah. And you can fight me!”

“Yes, yes, that too,” you say with a slight laugh. “That’s the most important, obviously.”

“You won’t be able to beat me,” Gojo says. “I’m very good.”

“I know.”

“I’m really amazing.”

“You’re certainly talented.”

“I’m the best fighter in the world.”

“You’re above average for your age.”

Gojo opens his mouth to continue, but then pauses, his face turning more pensive.

“What?”

“What are you going to do when you need to actually fight someone?” Gojo props himself up on his elbows and stares at you, serious. “How are you going to fight someone without touching them at all?”

He gestures to the two of you; sat near each other, very much so, but still with a significant, pronounced gap between you. It would have been nothing notable to a stranger, just two friends talking and laughing, but to you it’s an unbreachable chasm, keeping you miles away from anyone, anyone.

You look down. It’s not like you hadn’t considered it, but everything had always been so far in the hypothetical; you’re going to train with someone, you’re going to get better, you’re going to try to get into Jujustu High. You’ve never had to properly consider the in-betweens to those steps, or actually think about how you’re going to cope.

Jujustu High.

It’s a place you’ve never even seen, but to you it’s a magical haven, far away from the emptiness and isolation of your home; a place where you can take the very best of your current life and leave everything else behind, moving to a new world of serenity and happiness and peace, where you get to make the decisions, where no-one else controls your life but you.

Or, it’s a place of hard work and toil and pain—and even if it’s awful, you know it can’t be worse than what you’d leave behind. Your home’s full of nothingness, the empty abyss, the cold that you sometimes find creeping at your corners, threatening to overwhelm you entirely.

You know it’s naïve of you, to expect to skim off the cream of your life, taking everything you want to keep and leaving the cold, but the dream’s still hazy, as of yet unrealised, and you allow yourself to hope.

There’s still half a decade for you here, waiting for your hope to arrive, and until then you must make do with where you are now. You have your family, but you have Gojo; he will have Jujustu High, and you may, or you may not.

If you wish to have it, you must learn to overcome.

And so the answer is obvious.

“I’ll have to,” you whisper, your words only for him. “I don’t know how. I’ll just have to.”

You think of the curse from about a year ago, how its limbs had wrapped around you, how it had nearly strangled you with the same cold that has been consuming you for years. You think of the cool tint of a blade, of kicking someone to the ground, or of wrapping your hands around someone’s head to snap their neck. There’s no warmth there, none of the warmth that you feel from a person’s touch, and you can conjure none of the revulsion of skin on skin, flesh on flesh.

“I don’t think it’ll be so bad,” you say, and find yourself at least half-truthful. “Not so bad.”

Gojo is silent, and so you look back at him. His eyes are focused on yours, and you feel the pressing feeling of vulnerability, like he’s able to see all the way through you, like he can tell exactly what’s going on in your head, right now.

Well, you think, slightly deliriously, if there’s going to be anyone who can read your mind, you’d want it to be him.

“You’ll get stronger,” he says. It’s part a command and part a promise, but it’s so certain that you smile at him, slightly watery.

And then you’re rubbing at your eyes, feeling both sentimental and utterly foolish. You haven’t cried in basically years, and you don’t want to start anytime soon.

“I know I’ll get stronger, idiot,” you mutter, and you hear Gojo laugh. “Don’t be stupid.”

“I could never be stupid,” he says, a lot louder, and it breaks whatever melancholic mood you’d set with your almost-nearly-tears. “I’m a genius. Smartest of my generation, Hebi-chan.”

“And can you stop with that name,” you say, turning a weak laugh into a cough. “It sounds so lame.”

“What does?”

“Hebi-chan,” you say, rubbing at your nose with the back of your sleeve and smiling. “It’s like you’re one of those guys from the romance shows on TV.”

“It does not!” Gojo cackles, and you giggle along with him. “It’s a term of my dear affection for you!”

“You sound like a shojo love interest.”

“I don’t! You’re so mean to me—I don’t call anyone Hebi-chan, no-one at all!”

“I should hope not,” you say, bringing your legs up to your chest and resting your cheek on your knees, watching him as he splutters and shakes his head.

“You know what I mean,” Gojo says, pouting. “You should see it as an honour.”

“It makes me sound like a kid.”

“So? You are!”

“And so are you! It doesn’t mean I’m going to go around calling you Gojo-chan, do I?”

 Gojo lets out a breathy little laugh. “Would you?”

“Would I? What—No, you idiot!” You learn forward and flick water from your raincoat onto his face. He lets out a strangled shriek, which echoes again and again, mingling with your high-pitched laughter. “Hebi-chan! You’re so horrible!”

“I’m your comeuppance,” you say. “You had a trade-off when you were born.”

Gojo wipes at his face with his shirt sleeve and chuckles. “A trade-off? So, what? I get my incredible, fantastic strength and power, but in return—”

“I must haunt you for all your days,” you confirm solemnly. “It’s only fair.”

“All my days?” he repeats, combing his hair from his face and settling back down.

“Yep,” you say.

“For ever and ever?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Nah,” he says, his feet tapping an uneven rhythm on the stone floor, “that’s a good thing, for me. You can haunt me for infinity, Hebi-chan, and I won’t mind. Promise.”

Notes:

1999
Nine years old

-

I wish I could be like one of those mystical Ao3 authors, where they say things like: 'hey guys, sorry for the lack of updates, my whole house burnt down and I lost all my worldly possessions and all my family's been murdered and I'm actually on the run from the police haha, but I'll try and have the next chapter up soon, see you soon!'

Instead I'm stuck with the (comparatively) boring excuse of: sorry, exams, lol. Anyway, I hope you're all doing good, and we'll be back on a more regular track now. Have a lovely day! <3

Chapter 5: 2000

Thursday 7th September, 2000

“Yahaba told me to be less arrogant today.”

You sit up, rubbing at your eyes with the heel of your palm and blinking up at your ceiling. It’s a nondescript beige, peeling in the corners, the endless sea of plaster interrupted by one solitary light. Your eyelids are still sagging under the weight of immense tiredness—it’s far too early for this.

“I don’t see the problem,” you yawn, feeling the sides of your mouth stretch with disuse.

“That’s so mean!” Satoru’s voice crackles a bit, and you give you phone a thump. Something rattles inside, but when you return it to your ear the line is a lot clearer.

“What? Say that again, I missed it.”

“I was calling you a horrible friend.”

“Oh no.” You yawn again. “I’m sure I’d be a much nicer friend if it wasn’t, like, six in the morning.”

“Don’t be so dramatic!” You’re not certain of it, but you’re pretty sure that Satoru’s whine isn’t quite as high-pitched as it usually is. Huh—it’s too early, even for him. “Do you think I’m actually arrogant?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.”

Satoru sighs. “Maybe it’s true, then. But I don’t think I’m wrong, either.”

“Gojo, has there ever been an arrogant person who didn’t think they were justified in their arrogance?”

“There might have been!” Satoru lets out a little huff. “But have you considered that I’m—”

“That you’re different? Special, even?”

“Yes! Exactly!”

“You’re kidding.”

“Am I?” Satoru asks, serenely. “I think I am pretty special. You’re so wise, dearest dearest friend.”

“Arrogant. Arrogant, arrogant, arrogant.”

“Hey!”

You trade jibes for a couple more minutes as your brains begin to turn on. It’s something so familiar, that you can do it mindlessly—Satoru says something conceited, and you tell him he’s an idiot, and he finds it incredibly amusing, and you repeat, repeat, repeat.

“Hmph,” you say, and then, after a moment’s thought, rather matter-of-factly: “Well. Maybe some aspects are justified. Of the arrogance thing, I mean.”

Satoru cackles. “Really?” he says, half-surprised. “That’s nice of you to say.”

“Not particularly.” You fiddle with the telephone cord, wrapping it around your finger mindlessly. You’re sat against your wall, phone stuck against your ear with the main bulk of the box propped in your lap.

Although you dislike Satoru waking you up at this hour, the conversation is nice distraction from whatever is going on downstairs. And from what will be going on this evening; something you are most certainly not looking forward to.

“No?” Satoru says, and you can just feel how his lips are curling into a smile.

“Just the truth, really. Like, if you’re talking about being powerful, or something, then I completely get it. Go be arrogant, it’s fine.” You trace a fingertip over the crack on your phone’s number 2. Through your gloves, you can only guess at the location of the indent, can hardly feel how your finger jumps the gap that cuts the 2 in half.

Satoru broke it, ages ago. You can’t really remember how it happened, but whenever you see it, there’s a certain warmth that swishes around you in the haze of memory.

“I’m never letting you forget that you said that.”

You laugh. “I’m being serious! If arrogance is warranted, then I’ll allow it.” You consider it for a second, and add: “But Yahaba is right. You’re still too arrogant.”

“Hey! I thought you were being nice to me!” Satoru complains, and you tut, amused.

“Be as arrogant as you like about being strong,” you say, conclusively. “Strong, like, in pretty much everything Jujustu-related. Obviously. That’s a given, really, that you’re going to be good in that.”

Satoru goes to cheer, and you swiftly continue:

“But,” you say, “in everything else? No. You can’t be saying you’re the best at—I don’t know, making conversation, or dressing up. That’s arrogant, Gojo.”

There’s a pause. “Everything else?” he says, quietly.

You groan. “Yes, everything else.” You fight to keep any inkling of your endeared grin out of your voice. “Don’t be stupid.”

“I could never be stupid,” he says automatically, which makes you chuckle. “You coming to the Chapel tonight?”

“Sure. Once the dinner thing’s over, yeah.” You cross your legs over each other, and then unfold them and do it again the other way, before stopping and sighing.

It’s a very Satoru thing to do; he’s always fidgeting with something, never able to stop moving. Once, you found it a little annoying—there was always something happening in your peripheral vision, no matter what, and you often wanted to hit him over the head and tell him to sit still—but you’d had to let the frustration go as soon as you realised that you’d picked up several of his habits yourself.

As a matter of principle, you refuse to be annoyed at yourself, and so you’ve found yourself liking Satoru’s fidgeting very much indeed.

“Hey,” Satoru says, breaking your phone’s staticky white noise. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Yo.”

“Hello.”

“Hey. How long do you think it’d take me to beat you, in a fight?”

You tilt your head to the side, pondering. After a few seconds, you say: “One and a half minutes.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” you say, “wait, no. Are we talking, like, complete decimation, or a regular ‘somewhat serious trip to a healer’?”

“Hmm. The fully dead one.”

“Ah.” You nod. “Then two minutes. Give or take about fifteen seconds, depending on how I’m feeling on that day.”

Satoru considers this. “So you think it’d take me another thirty seconds to get you from hospitalisation to death? Aren’t you being a bit generous?”

“Nah,” you say, “not if I’ve got a weapon on me. I’m getting quite good with the bladed ones, you know. If it’s close combat, I think I could keep up.”

“Fair enough.” Satoru makes a lets out a heavy breath, far too dramatically. “And while we’re talking about—”

Your door blows open.

It bangs against your wall, loud enough to make you drop the phone. It thumps, heavy and loud, on the ground. Your room is silent, bar Satoru’s muffled, near-inaudible voice, still chattering from the telephone.

Your grandmother stands right in the middle of the doorframe. She’s hunched over, her face pallid and lined. There’s miles of empty space around her that makes you realise, amidst your panic, that she’s much smaller than she used to be.

It doesn’t change anything.

She slaps her fist against your wall and you flinch. “Put that phone down,” she says, voice a low hiss, “and get downstairs. Your step-mother needs your help.”

You nod, quickly. “Yes, grandmother. I was just talking to—”

“Do you think I care who you were talking to?” she glares down at you, skin pouching around her eyebrows, bringing her face down into a perpetual frown. “Well? Do I?”

“No, grandmother.”

“Exactly.” She sniffs, but you see her hand stuck to the wall, how it tenses to keep her standing. “Now get downstairs and stop wasting your father’s money.”

“Yes, grandmother.” You put the phone down, cutting Satoru off, and stand, slowly. He’ll know what will have happened—your grandmother’s been testier with you, recently, much to his disgust—but as you watch the hunched back walk carefully down the stairs, one tremulous step at a time, you make a rude hand gesture at her and stick out your tongue. It does little to quell the burning dislike.

To calm yourself, you imagine her slipping down the stairs and dying. It’s a pleasant enough daydream.

There’s a sound of a baby crying, coming from the kitchen. You roll your shoulders back, uncomfortable, but make your way towards it. You’re aware of your hands clasping and unclasping behind your back, and you bring them sharply to your sides. It’s a habit that your father has criticised you for countless times, and you want today to go smoothly, without his temper being tested.

“Hey, hey, shh-shh. Hey! Hey! Aw, lovely, lovely lovely Haru, please don’t be crying, please—”

Sara spots you and sends you a frantic little smile, your brother bundled up in her arms.

“Hello, love. You’re up early!”

You nod, aware of your grandmother’s presence only one room over. Sara looks overwhelmed; her hair, usually pressed down into a neat style, is frizzing at the edges, and her eyes have the startled look usually seen in a hunted animal. You feel your heart pull, and you make your way over to the stove, where there’s about five things cooking at once.

“I’ll do something,” you say to her, “I can cook.”

“No!” Sara props your brother on her hip and hurries over to you. You move over. “No, no, that’d be rude! I’m the one in charge of—damn!”

She wipes furiously at some white vomit trickling from your brother’s mouth. It’s landed on her shirt, staining it an ugly beige.

You take up a knife without speaking and continue chopping some peppers. There’s a small dusting of flour next to the stove, and the counter surface gleams with spilt oil.

“No, honestly—”

“I don’t mind.” You tap the knife on the cutting board. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Sweetheart, you—”

“It’s okay,” you say. “Honestly.”

Sara sighs out a chuckle. “I—well, if you insist. Thank you.”

You shrug. “Yeah. Well. You’re busy.”

“Nothing I can’t manage!” she says, patting baby Haru on the back as he burps. “But I do appreciate the help. If you can stir this, then I can make a start on the vegetables.”

“Sure.”

“Lovely, lovely.” Sara reaches up to root through one of the cupboards. “So much to do, so much do to. Your dad wants it to be so perfect, and I just—well. It means there’s so much to do!”

Your hands still. “Why don’t you ask my father to help as well,” you say, quietly. “It’s not like you’re the only one moving house. We all are.”

Sara laughs uncomfortably. “That’d be silly.”

“Why?” You keep your voice low, in case your grandmother hears. “It’s true.”

“No, it’s not.” Sara runs her spare hand through her hair. “He’s been working extremely hard, and the move has been extremely stressful on him. On all of us, I know, but on him especially. He’s the one paying for everything, and—no, no, Haru—and this is the least I can do for him.” She smiles at you: slightly weary, but kind. “You’re a bit young to understand, love. Ask me the same thing when you’re older, and I’ll be able to explain it better.”

Frustration twinges in your chest. “I’m old now,” you say, stubbornly. “And he takes advantage.”

“I can handle myself,” Sara teases, tapping on the counter next to you. She does this often; you guess it’s her replacement for patting you on the shoulder, or giving you a hug. It’s nice. It’s something unique to her, something no-one else does, and you give her the smallest smile in return.

You duck your head and shrug. “Shouldn’t have to.”

Sara sighs. “I love your father very much, and he loves me too. Life’s different, once you get to be an adult. Not everything’s perfect, but we make it through, and that’s what counts, alright? Good. Now, let’s get started: if you’re going to be stubborn, you can make a start on the dining room, and leave me with the food. The table’s got your father’s work things all over it, so be a dear and move those for me, alright?”

You hesitate, but concede once she gives you a stern look. “Sure,” you say, and Sara’s face breaks out into a wide smile.

“Thanks, lovely,” she says, turning back to tonight’s dinner. “You’re a star.”

 

--

 

There’s five people who you’d think would count as family.

Once, when you got really bored, you ranked them, in order of most-to-least favourite. Just mentally (you heart stills when you think what your father would do if he ever found it written down), but you’ve recited it to Satoru before, who found it quite funny. You think about the list, now, as you’re marched around every corner of house, tidying for tonight’s dinner. The Last Night in your current house, before you’re all moved out and gone.

1. Sara
2. Your brother
3. Your mother
4. Your father
5. Your grandmother

You’ll admit that it’s kind of depressing that your mother, who you haven’t seen in, like, two years, ranks higher than your father or grandmother.

You don’t know where she is, your mother, but you’re certain that whoever she’s spending time with now, she’s happier. You doubt you’ll ever see her again; she never made any effort to contact you in the months after your parents split, and if she didn’t then, she’s not likely to, now.

Every so often, your father and grandmother’s ranking will swap. Sometimes, you’ll remember that it was his idea to keep your hands bound, and he was the one who put you in the gloves. You’ll realise that, since the beginning of this year, you’ve spent more of your life without the warmth of others than with it—you’re turning eleven next month, with five years of happiness, six years of unfathomable cold. He’s the reason you don’t go to school. He's the reason you can’t sleep without your hands behind your back. He’s the reason you can’t hug your only friend. Your father is the one who has kept you cold all these years, and you hate him for it.

But then your grandmother will speak, and you’ll remember you hate her even more.

You don’t think you’re being unfair, because at least your father is capable of pretending that he cares for you, in front of Sara. Your grandmother has always loathed you, and you despise that you must keep your similar feelings locked away.

There’s a memory of your grandmother that you’ve never forgotten:

She’s standing, her neck craned up to your father, her finger pressing into his chest. She’s shouting, telling him how much of a disgrace you and your technique (which, to her, are one and the same) are to your family, how despicable it is that you didn’t inherit the family’s instead of your abomination, how much shame that you’ve brought her. You have tears rolling down your cheeks, and your arms are hurting. You don’t like the way she’s tied them back—you want your hands to be free. You want to ask when she’ll let you take these painful restraints off, but you want to be invisible even more. She’s noticing you, standing in the corner of the room. She’s breaking off, staring down at you with disgust. She hates you.

You’re five.

Your mother is sick in her bed, and you don’t know if she’ll be able to move again.

You don’t understand the things you’re hearing. You don’t know what you’ve done wrong.

And so you tidy the chairs. You clean the floors. Everything must look perfect, or you’ll be to blame. And then you think about seeing Satoru tonight, once everything’s tidied away, and you keep working at it. Get through tonight, and you can laugh with him later. It’ll be easy.

 

--

 

The table is silent.

Well, it’s not, but it properly feels like it. The adults are silent; your father eats noiselessly, your grandmother making no sound other than her slight shallow breaths. Even Sara has been keeping quiet, and is currently struggling to keep Haru under control. He’s gurgling quite happily but keeps shoving his food away from him, more interested in tugging on his mother’s hair than eating with the rest of the family.

This was supposed to be a celebration, you remember, as you keep your head down and eat. The last meal in your house before you all move: how exciting.

Your brother hiccups and laughs, thumping his little fists on the table. Sara glances back to your father and snaps her head back, sharp. His face is lined and impatient, and he stares disdainfully at her fruitless efforts.

Sara must notice. She pushes Haru’s food towards him with an increased urgency. She looks close to tears.

And she’d worked so hard on this.

Anger flares up in your chest. Sara had put so much effort into this stupid, inconsequential meal, and no-one in your family cares even to pretend they’re enjoying themselves.

You sit up straight and clear your throat. All eyes fly to you, and your stomach lurches, your entire life’s instincts screaming at you to stop attracting attention, to keep your head down and not to speak up. You ignore them, as much as you can. Your hands tremble, pressed against your lap, but you ignore them, too.

“Iori-sensei told me I’ve gotten to a good level with bladed weapons,” you say. It’s difficult to keep eye contact with anyone, so you don’t. Instead, you stare at the peppers, still lying on your plate, limp.

“That’s… that’s really good!” Sara manages a smile, and it’s genuine enough to allow you to continue.

“Yeah. Yeah, she said it was.” You try to swallow, but your throat’s too dry, and you end up making a strange choking sound that you rush to cover up: “I’ve been practising with staffs for quite a bit, so I’m already good with them, but I’m really liking using blades.”

“What type of blades has she been training you in?” Your father says it quietly, but his eyes flick to meet yours. You stumble with your response, in your surprise.

“Uhm. I started with—with the tachi, because it’s about as big as the staff that I’d been using before. It’s the same size. But, you know. It’s a sword. Not a staff.”

“You started with a tachi?” your father asks, frowning.

“Yeah.” You blink at him, unsure of what to say. “Iori-sensei thought it was a good idea.”

Your grandmother tuts, but when you look to her, she’s silent; still looking down at you as if waiting for you to continue.

“And once I was good enough then, we went on to using a katana, and then I’ve put some time into the tantō and the kama, the, uh, the knife-sword and the little sickle, since they’re both short-range weapons, and—”

“The knife-sword?” your grandmother repeats. “The little sickle? What is Iori-sensei teaching you, child?”

“I—”

“And how are you progressing with those?” your father continues, leaning forward. He’s opposite you on the table, but you lean back instinctively.

“Alright, I guess,” you say, your voice cracking.

 “Have you started on long-range weaponry?”

“Not—not yet, no.”

“So you’re still on longswords?” This time it’s your grandmother who speaks, cutting across your father and glaring at you. “After all this time training, you’re still not good enough to progress?”

“I—” You falter, hating yourself for ever saying anything. “I’m trying—”

“You’ve made attempts,” she says, dismissively. “Unsuccessful attempts. When your father was your age, he had mastered six weapons, all of them from different styles of combat. How many have you mastered, child?”

“I’ve—I don’t know if I’ve mastered—”

“You don’t know?” She scoffs. “You don’t know. Really.”

“I mean—I’m pretty good with the tachi, I think, since—”

“Oh, well, if she’s pretty good, then our family is saved!” your grandmother says, derisively. “I would have thought she’d prioritise her combat, since her technique is such a disgrace, but the child’s clearly got more important things to be doing with her time. What’s more important than preserving your family’s pride, child? What is it?”

“I—I don’t—”

“Not that we’ve got any left, after your mother’s failure.” Your grandmother sets down her chopsticks and straightens in her chair—the air hisses, snake-like. “I’ve never hoped that you’d be an asset to this family, child, but I have allowed myself to wonder if you’d ever be more than a hindrance. That was dreaming too high, it seems.”

“Now, come on, please,” Sara says falteringly.

“No, it’s okay,” you say, turning to her, trying to explain everything without words. “Please don’t—”

“But,” Sara says, “but you’re not—”

“Oh, don’t you start with me, Sara,” you grandmother seethes, rounding on her with a vengeance. “You shouldn’t try to defend that child when yours is still yet to prove itself.”

Sara chokes. “Please don’t—”

“Mother,” your father says, calmly, speaking up for the first time. Traitorously, your gaze flies to him—and he’s facing your grandmother, his eyebrows slightly raised. He looks almost bored.

“Don’t even try it, Jin.” Your grandmother glares at him. “Don’t even try. I commend you for starting afresh, you know I do, but we’re both aware that this family can’t afford to have birthed two successive failures.” She turns to Sara, a cruel fire burning alight in her eyes. “You had better pray that this one inherits the family’s scales. Jin’s first brat certainly didn’t, and look what happened then. Disgraceful.”

Your eyes could burn a hole in the table. You don’t move, don’t even speak, praying that your grandmother doesn’t decide to show her hatred of you any more.

The family’s scales. The Hebi’s cursed technique. Transforming one’s flesh into hardened scales, overlapping like a snake’s. Your father’s are particularly strong; if their edges sever skin, they secrete a poison that will burn their opponent’s blood from within.

The cut areas turn a charred, burnt black.

You don’t know how inheritance of cursed technique works, but if a mutation is possible, you could see how your technique could be some sick, warped version of your father’s.

“Mother.”

Your father’s voice commands the room, and you find yourself compelled to stare up at him. Just at the look in his eyes, you can feel your shoulders hunch, your body contract. You push yourself away from him, as far as you can go in your chair, and turn your face away like you’re expecting a physical blow.

You can’t stop shaking. Your hands are twisting and twisting and twisting the fabric of your clothes, but you still can’t tear your eyes from the scene. Horrible. It’s horrible. Your heart drums so loudly you almost can’t hear what he says over the incessant beating, pounding.

You want to escape, you want to run, but you’re trapped, here, unable to move.

“I’d request that you refrain from speaking ill of my wife,” he says, resting his forearms on the table and looking carefully at your grandmother. “Or of my son. I appreciate your wisdom on the matter, even though we’re clearly at disagreement.” His voice, steady and low, drips with sarcasm. “Therefore—I ask for your silence. Would that be agreeable to you?”

Even your grandmother quells. “Jin—” she begins, but is silenced when holds up his hand.

“No. I’ve—” he breaks off, sighing. He rubs his temples with his one hand, eyes closed. “We’ve discussed this. Haven’t we, mother?”

Your grandmother purses her lips, and then nods, if a little irritably.

“Thank you,” your father says, and they share a small smile, mother and son. Fleeting, but there. “Now. No more of this.”

His searing gaze turns, sharply, to you. Fear grips your heart. “Child. Let’s move this onto more agreeable matters. Pour me the tea, please. It’s to your left.”

You nod, and nearly jump out of your chair. You could have stayed seated, but it’s as good an excuse as any to stand, to relieve yourself at least somewhat of the oppressive, claustrophobic pressure the table’s atmosphere has gained.

Your hands are still shaking. Even more so, and you can feel all of the table’s eyes scorching you. It’s like they’re branding you with the butts of cigarettes, all over your arms, and even as you pick it up, you can see the sheen of the water break as your hands tremble beneath it. You wince; even the teapot’s hot, heat passing through the porcelain and through your gloves, burning your hands.

It’s so difficult, leaning forward, towards your father, towards the layers and layers of fear and hatred and anger. You want to leave, you want to leave, you want to leave.

“Now,” he snaps, words cutting through your concentration with a razor-sharp impatience.

The words are harsh and sudden and the tendon-wracking tenseness in your limbs makes you jump, and the teapot, boiling-hot, filled right to the top, tips.

Burning liquid splashes all over your wrist, spilling onto your hand from your thumb all the way to your elbow. You let out a gasp as pain sears up your arm, and it’s like your skin’s bubbling, like your flesh is swelling and popping under the awful, piercing agony. You rub at it, frantically, but as tears blister at the corners of your eyes you realise that—

“Shit, shit, wait, let me help—"

It’s hurting even more as the boiling water binds to the material in your gloves, forming a layer of heat that burns more and more, and it won’t go away, and you’re crying, tugging at your gloves, not even caring that you’re forbidden from removing them because you need to stop your skin from burning—

“Sweetheart, wait, stop, your gloves—”

Sara jumps forward. One hand closes around your shoulder. One hand closes around your wrist.

You lose control.

Your limbs strike out, colliding with whatever they can get closest to, all of the burning dulling into a torturous backdrop as your head fills with water, as hands close around your throat and choke you. There’s something burning on your wrist, and there’s something cutting into your stomach, and you’re being ripped through the air and you can’t breathe, and you’re so frightened, and you’re going to die, and there’s two spots on your body that are pure agony.

Because it’s not just the heat of the burn, but it’s the repulsive, disgusting, abominable searing touch of a human, of someone else touching you, of someone’s skin pressing against yours.

Gasps shudder against your ears, and you realise that they’re yours. Something hurts, and you realise it’s your spine. You’re on the floor, a dull ache blossoming in your knuckles. You look around you; a plate’s broken on the floor, smashed in two; tea drips onto the wooden floorboards, covering the table and most dishes around it; Sara’s bent on the floor, a bruise blooming on her cheekbone.

You choke back a sob. The ache in your knuckles is nothing compared to the bubbling flesh on your arm, but it’s suddenly all you can think about.

In a daze, you push yourself to the floor. You don’t look at your father, don’t spare a glance for your grandmother. You can’t even force out a whisper of an apology before you’re gone, racing out of the room.

All the doors are open, and you push through the final one with a gasp. Your feet pound on the road as you run, disjointed thoughts flickering through your mind as you force yourself through the familiar track, making your way towards the only place—the only person—you could ever think of, could ever begin to trust.

 

--

 

The Chapel.

Satoru chose its name just after you’d finished decorating it; you’d lay there, side-by-side, looking up at the smooth rock of the ceiling. You’d brought a torch from your room, making it the only source of light at the time, and you’d shone it around the walls, lazily observing all the crevices and cracks you could see.

“The Chapel is a place for a god,” Satoru had said, “so that’s what we should call it. Because it’s a place for me.”

You can’t remember what had prompted him to say it, but you do remember propping yourself and staring at him, your mouth wide open.

“Oh my god,” you’d said, “I can’t believe I’m friends with you.”

You’d thrown a pillow at him, or something; you were tired, and the memories are sweet but hazy. You’d laughed at him, and told him never to say that again.

The name had stuck, though.

The Chapel.

It’s stiflingly hot and dry, your throat like tree bark as you pull yourself up the rocks and grass, oxygen sticking in your lungs. You stumble, and a burst of blood gushes from your palm. It stings, the pain mingling with the throbbing burn on your wrist. The injured hand’s gloveless: your other glove’s lying somewhere, on the floor of your home. You gasp and push sweat from your eyes. You can’t think about it.

It usually takes you forty minutes to get from your house to the Chapel. You’ve made it here in twenty-five—and your chest is heaving, the heavy air choking you.

You haven’t considered what you’ll do if he’s not there. The thought seizes you for a second, and you panic, and you can hardly breathe, but you force yourself to keep steady breaths, to keep your heartbeat steady.

You pull yourself up the final summit, and you’re there.

And so is Satoru.

He’s lying down, feet propped on the wall at a right angle to his body, holding his Game Boy Colour over his head. There’s a box of sweets at his side, unopened. He’s humming along to the Pokémon background music, and the scene is so familiar, so comforting, that you let out a soft, watery chuckle.

Satoru glances up at you. For the briefest second, his face lights up—his mouth begins to form the first syllable of your name before it freezes, the excited look replaced suddenly with something shocked, dark, unfamiliar.

“What is it?” he says, his voice low. He’s standing, making his way over to you, pulling up a half-metre away. His hands twitch at his side. “What happened?”

For a split second, you consider lying, or downplaying what happened. Satoru seems to guess that, and he steps forward, pushing up his glasses into his hair.

“Tell me,” he says. “What happened?”

“I burnt my hand,” you say, steadily. Even if he knows that you want to play it down, you still don’t want to act irrationally. Your time to panic was spent on your way here; now you’ve arrived, you need to focus. “And then I hit Sara. She tried to help me, but she was touching me, and—I hit her. It was an accident, but, I still hit her. I didn’t apologise. I just ran away.” You walk in and slide down the wall. You pull your legs up to your chest and sigh.

Satoru’s still. He turns to you, slowly, and presses his hands together so tightly they look white. “Why?”

“Why did I hit her?” You stare at him. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Why did you burn your hand?” Satoru cuts in, his voice very level.

“Oh.” You look down. “I was getting nervous and I dropped hot tea on it. It was my fault.”

Satoru’s silent. It’s weird, him not talking, and you frown.

“Gojo,” you urge, “don’t.”

“It was them.”

“Gojo—”

“It was, Hebi, wasn’t it?” He begins pacing, clasping and unclasping your hands. “It was—I shouldn’t have let you stay with them, I’m going to do something about this, believe me—”

“Gojo.”

“I’m doing something. I can. This isn’t a good life, Hebi, no-one deserves—”

“Gojo.”

“—to live like—stop it, I’m being serious here, I can talk to the higher-ups, I’ll make them—”

“Gojo, shut up!” You scowl up at him and pull your knees under your chin, pressed tightly against your chest. “Just shut up, please.”

“No!” Satoru protests, “I won’t shut up! I’m being serious!”

“So am I!”

“And which one of us is right?” Satoru glares at you, gesturing wildly with his hands. “Which one of us actually cares about how you live?”

“I care! I care, god, do you think I don’t?” Your words come out too loudly, too close to a shout, and you wince. You bury your face into your knees, trying to block out the world, your racing thoughts.

The moment passes. Your breath is heavy and uneven, and you focus on slowing it down. There’s a ringing pain in your temples, and you tilt your head against the cool rock of the walls. When you next speak, your voice is quieter. “Of course I care. Of course I do.”

You don’t look at Satoru, but you can see in your peripheral vision that he’s stopped pacing. “So do I, Hebi-Hebi,” he says, just as quiet. “I do too.”

“Good. We agree.” You sigh. “I don’t want to talk like this, okay?”

There’s a pause, and you glance back at him. Satoru’s tilted up on the balls of his feet, hands fiddling in front of him. He rocks up and down. He doesn’t agree with you, and he’s debating whether to press it. You groan.

“Gojo,” you say, firmly, “we’re not arguing. We’re just not, not today. Understand?”

After a silence that’s much too long, Satoru seems to relent. “Okay. Okay, sure, okay. Got it.”

You let out a long exhale, staring up at the ceiling. “Thanks.” You blink. “Because my arm really hurts, and I need you to help me with it.”

“Sure, Hebi, course. I’ll get some, uhm…” There’s the sound of movement, like Satoru’s walking around, or looking in the little boxes strewn around the floor. “Tomorrow I’ll take you to mine, okay? We’ll get a Jujustu healer on it.”

You smile at him, grateful that he doesn’t need to ask if you’re staying, and that he just knows you will. He already knows that you won’t want to see the healer today; that you’re prepared to sleep through the pain tonight if it means you don’t have to see any more people.

Satoru knows that he’s the only one you can be relaxed with. He’s the only one who actually knows you, even. The thought makes you chuckle, weakly: that must make him feel so special. At least you know it’s the same, with him for you.

“Wrap this around it, loosely.” Satoru bends down in front of you and places some gauze in your lap, dropping it from about twenty centimetres above. “You should run it under cold water, but…”

“But the Chapel doesn’t have effective plumbing.”

Satoru laughs. “Yeah, exactly. I’ll sort that out tomorrow.”

“Sounds good.” You circle the gauze around your arm, and ignore the jolts of pain that flare up every other second. “I’m kinda good at this, you know.”

“Amazing, amazing.”

Your heartbeat’s slowly returned to normal. Maybe telling Satoru off is what finally calmed you down—bringing him back from his too-wild ideas and antics is somewhat of a developed habit of yours. Perhaps the familiarity helped right your mind, in some strange way.

Something shuffles beside you, and then Satoru’s sitting on the ground next to you, pulling a blanket over you both. It dips in the middle, highlighting the space between you two, but you shuffle into it, grateful for the warmth. The familiar sound of Pokémon Silver hums to life, and you smile into the darkness.

Satoru’s warm, too, you notice; you’ve always thought he was like a personal heater, sending off waves and waves like it’s flooding out of him. Sometimes, you’d joke that he was born with so much cursed energy, the only way it knows to escape is in the form of heat. Satoru always liked it when you say that, so you whisper it to him, in the quiet, and he chuckles.

“Ah, I’m amazing,” he says, softly. “And did you see? I bought us some sweets, look!”

He scoops up the box and offers it to you, smiling.

“Thanks,” you say, fighting the heat that stings the back of your eyes. “That’s nice of you.”

“There’s lemon flavour,” he says, shaking the box under your nose. “Yummy-yummy lemon flavour.”

You reach forward, Satoru’s grin widening, and select one yellow sweet, wrapped in a delicate translucent foil.

“Yummy-yummy lemon!” Satoru says, and you laugh. “I’m amazing. I’m really amazing, aren’t I?”

“Sure,” you admit. “Sometimes, yeah.”

“So sweet of Hebi-Hebi.”

“Just the truth.”

You tilt your head, and watch him, silently. You’ve never really paid attention to how he looks, before, since you’ve never had a need to—what’s always been more important is how he talks, how excited he is to find a new place to explore, how easily he can make you smile.

Now, though, you realise that he actually looks kind of nice. It’s a weird thought, and it makes you feel somewhat squiggly inside, but you don’t look away from him.

His hair looks soft, you notice, and you watch with a small, contained smile as his glasses slowly slide down the top of his head to land on the bridge of his nose. Satoru makes a surprised sort of huff, and fixes them with an absent-minded shrug of his arm.

His hair really does look nice.

You’re caught with the sudden urge to reach out and touch it. You want to know how it feels beneath your fingers—whether it’d be soft, silky, coarse. You’ve never touched someone else’s hair before, especially not without your gloves, and so you don’t have any idea what it’s supposed to feel like, really. But you want to know—you want to know what it’s like, with Satoru's.

It takes you by surprise, and you look away, quickly. An uncomfortable, guilty feeling settles in your stomach and you pull your shoulders up, strangely uneasy. You’ve never wanted to touch anyone before. You shove your ungloved hand further away from Satoru, as if it would stop that strange idea that just crossed your mind; as if you’d ever actually do it.

Along with that new, unfamiliar impulse, there is again the overwhelming revulsion of the thought of skin on skin, and your hand prickles. You lean away from Satoru, unconsciously.

He notices. “I’ll move, Hebi-Hebi,” Satoru says, “I need to level up my Mewtwo anyway,” and he shuffles even further away, taking his warmth with him.

You miss it, immediately.

Without Satoru—Satoru, your own personal heater—you’re cold again, and the thoughts of his soft hair and crinkled smiles and infectious laugh freeze at their edges, turning black, crumbling away. You don’t show him this: you smile at him, like you’re thankful, because that’s what you should do. He thought you wanted him to move away, and so he did, and even in your regretful state you can’t help but feel grateful to him.

His face is flushed with a faint white glow, the light from his screen bathing his features in a calming way. If you squint, you can make out the reflection of the game on the surface of his glasses.

You’re not too far away, really. You slide a little further down the wall, picking up a pillow and hugging it in your arms. A small yawn escapes you, and you gaze down at Satoru’s little avatar, blinking to keep yourself awake. The little Satoru is walking around Blackthorn City, passing by trees and buildings that you’ve visited before as well. For a second, you contemplate asking for Satoru’s to play on it, but there’s a strange tug in your stomach at the look of contentment on his face, and you decide against it just as quickly.

The screen shifts, slightly. It tilts the tiniest amount in your direction, so you can see the full gameplay better, even though you’re not sitting as close. You keep your eyes trained on the screen, but you can feel Satoru’s gaze on you, and can practically see his smile.

You don’t say anything, but you incline your head towards him, very slightly.

If you were someone else, you’d lean your head on his shoulder, shift towards him and curl into his side, try to show him that he was your favourite person, try to thank him for being your friend in more than just half-whispered words.

You want that; you want him to know that he’s the only thing that keeps you going, and that without him you don’t know what you’d do. You want to keep his warmth, and keep it close, to stay with you forever. You never want to feel the horrible emptiness of loneliness that creeps towards you whenever you let yourself remember it.

It returns, now, and even with him by your side you can feel it. Cold hands gripping your heart and squeezing, the slow decay of a life.

You want to tell him; you want isolation; you want touch.

You get nothing.

Notes:

2000
Ten years old

-

Whoo! 2000's, baby!

I've got the next chapter all written up--I just need to edit it one last time and then I'm posting it straight away, so watch this space! <3

Chapter 6: 2001

Friday 7th September, 2001

There is a knife strapped to your back, and you can feel your sickle clink in your bag as you walk. You tested it this morning—it’s sharpened so cleanly that it sliced through paper like it was air. It’s remarkably easy to imagine how smoothly it could cut someone’s flesh, or through someone’s bone.

It’s an excellent day to make friends.

“When my worlds collide, Hebi-Hebi!” Satoru says, sighing wistfully. “It’s like different dimensions, joining together, and I’m the one who brings you two close! Ah! I’m such a good friend. I’m so cool!”

You grunt in reply. You’ve found nothing appealing about this day, and it had taken Satoru about two weeks to convince you to agree. You pull your new coat a little tighter around yourself; the street around you is quiet and chilly, and you watch as families pass by, all of their chins tucked into their shoulders like birds.

Satoru got you the coat last Tuesday. It was an obvious bribe, but a welcome one—after you saw it in a shop window last month, you hadn’t been able to stop pining after it, and now it’s in your possession you don’t think you’ll ever be taking it off. It’s a very flattering shade for your skin tone. You’d read that in a magazine, somewhere.

“I don’t want to do this,” you complain. “Why would I want to do this?”

“Don’t be a spoil-sport,” Satoru says. He scratches at his nose, grinning. “I’m excited!”

“Of course you are,” you say. “But I’m not.”

Satoru makes an incomprehensible whining noise. “You said you would. Can’t back out now!”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” You huff, and readjust the blade on your back.

You’d considered keeping them at home, but had decided against it. It’s a public place, where you’re meeting Satoru’s friend (ew), and ever since the curse attack years ago you’ve never been able to feel safe outdoors without having some way to protect yourself. Trading in a huge feeling of security for a few shocked stares is a very welcome exchange.

“I’m just saying,” you continue, jabbing your thumb in Satoru’s direction, “you’re the only one who’s going to enjoy yourself here.”

“You will! And Ieiri will, too! He told me he’s excited,” Satoru says happily, placing a hand on his heart. “And so am I!”

“Why would he be excited about seeing me?” You say it sourly, but your point is still valid. “If you quite like him, he’s pretty much set. There’s not much I can offer him.”

“You’re so cynical about these things.”

“Tch. So are you, idiot, don’t pretend you’re not.”

“I see the world with nothing but optimism and love.”

“Yeah, that’s funny, that is. But I’m right, though, aren’t it? I mean, look: I’m the worst of two siblings in a mildly powerful household, and you’re Satoru Gojo. There’s a difference. If you’re his friend—” you stifle a yawn, “—then he’s set for life. That’s what his parents’ll be thinking.”

“Is that what you think?” Satoru asks, slyly.

“What? Oh, yeah, of course. I’ve just been using you for your connections, for all these years, haven’t you noticed?”

“Not really,” he says, and you chuckle.

“Good on me, then. I’m more subtle than I thought I was.”

“Sure. But you still don’t get why he’s excited to meet you, Hebi-Hebi!”

“You’re exactly right, I don’t.”

“Ah…” Satoru rolls his shoulders back extravagantly, puffing out his chest like he’s a host of a game show. His backpack clinks, and you supress a grin: he’s equipped with weapons, too. Of course. “Well, let’s see! Why-oh-why would he be excited to meet you?”

“That’s a good question.”

“It is a good question! A question that is very very very difficult to answer. Possibility one: Could it be… your family’s prestige?”

You give him a deadpan look. “Not likely.”

“Correct!” Satoru gives you a mini round of applause, and you roll your eyes at him, amused. “Next possibility. Could it be… he’s incredibly lonely and wants to make new friends ever so badly?”

“That’s grim.”

Satoru juts out his jaw, impatient. “Your answer?”

“Sure, yeah. He’s incredibly depressed.”

“Wrong!” Satoru shakes his head at you, very over-the-top: if he did it with any more fervour it’d fly off. “Next possibility. Could it be… he’s pretending to look forward to meeting you, when really he’s just getting on my good side so his family can be more powerful?”

“You know, that’s probably what it—”

“Incorrect! One last go!”

“No, I was saying, he’s just pretending to—”

Satoru claps his hands together, and you fall silent, tutting. “One more go! Get it right this time, come on.”

He looks at you expectantly, silently urging you to play along. Satoru’s lips have pursed into the tiniest pout and you groan. He probably does know that his ‘sad puppy’ look makes it frustratingly impossible for you to refuse. Hating that you actually like him, you nod, with only a sliver of sarcasm.

“Excellent! Then could it be… he’s excited to see you, because I’ve talked about you loads and told him basically everything about you, and so he knows how cool and awesome and funny you are since you’re my best friend in the entire world, and so he really wants to meet you, because—because obviously he does.”

You blink at him. You try to swallow, but your mouth’s suddenly as dry as sandpaper. “Uhm.”

Satoru laughs, high and pealing but genuine, his nose scrunching up with his smile. Tiny little wrinkles crease around the edges of his eyes, the only parts not obscured by his glasses. “True or false, Hebi-Hebi?”

“Er,” you say, eloquently. You can feel your face burning, and you look away from him, scuffing your feet on the floor. It’s incredibly difficult to resist the temptation to hide your face in your hands. “Whatever. True, or something.”

“Ding ding ding ding! You’ve won! Jackpot!” Satoru hops over to where you’re furiously staring at, crouching himself down so he meets your eyes over his glasses. He grins, and it takes over his whole face, lighting up everything around him. “Congratulations!”

You glare at him, because it’s so obvious that he said it just to embarrass you, and Satoru cackles again.

Your face warms, and his eyes take on a slightly softer sheen. A golden glow of sunrise blooms around him, and you stare. “Are you gonna be happy today, then?” he asks, both playful and gentle. “Don’t be moody, today. You know she didn’t mean it.”

You break your gaze away. Satoru sees, and stands, crossing his arms in front of him.

“Come on.” Satoru ducks his head down to your height and, with some effort, you look back to him. “Be excited. I’m excited, so you should be excited. And if you’re not, you can just pretend you are, okay?”

You chuckle, against your better judgement. Satoru seems pleased.

“Plus, even if she did mean it, who cares?” Satoru reaches out and grabs your coat sleeve, pinching it between his index finger and thumb and tugging on it gently. “She’s just a boring grown-up.”

“She’s my step-mother,” you say, without much conviction.

He’s right, of course. You don’t want to waste the day out with him just because Sara upset you, especially when it’s getting more difficult to find time to spend together. When you had first become friends, it wasn’t uncommon to spend every day together, morning to night, finding newer and more exciting places to explore. Recently, with Satoru’s private tutors and your training sessions increasing in time and difficulty, it’s surprising if you manage to meet up for a couple hours a day.

“Whatever,” Satoru says. “Doesn’t mean that what she says matters. Hey, look, he’s here already!”

And then he takes off, bounding down a narrow street to where you can spot a boy-shaped figure standing at its end. Satoru leaps over a large wooden crate and it wobbles dangerously—you mutter a hasty curse under your breath and sprint after him, jumping over the crate and wincing as your feet catch on its top. There’s a crash behind you, but you put your head down and throw yourself into the chase, heart pounding.

“Cheater!” you shout at him, and Satoru throws his head back and laughs, weaving out of the way of a bewildered pedestrian. You give them a much wider berth, maybe one, two arm’s lengths, and plough through the street, running at full pelt; you stumble over pebbles and cracks with nearly every step, but you don’t tire, and within seconds you’ve caught up to him—and then you’re racing head-to-head, engaged in a silent, furious battle to see who gets to there first.

You win—just. Satoru runs smoother, with no near-falls or tumbles, but you’re faster. Speed is one of the key elements of your training, because if you can’t kill a curse right away, you’ll need to be able to outrun it. Satoru hates it: he’s always been a sore loser, but you have no issue reminding him that he can win against you in literally everything else, which always seems to cheer him up.

Both of you skid to a halt in front of the bewildered stranger and you nearly topple over, a stitch bursting at your side, your hands digging into your knees. You gasp for breath, wheezing.

“Heya, Ieiri-kun!” Satoru says brightly. It figures: his voice is completely steady, unlike your heavy panting. You roll your eyes and stand up, wiping a bit of perspiration from your forehead with the front of your forearm.

“Hi!” the boy says, blinking at you. “I’m Ieiri. Kouji Ieiri, hi!”

“Nice to meet you,” you say, pulling yourself up. You look him up and down—shorter than Satoru, wiry, straight brown hair. Smiling. His front tooth is missing. Overall, nothing interesting. “Pleasure.”

“You’re Hebi-san, right? Gojo-san’s told me loads about you!”

“Sure,” you say noncommittally. You try to work up the energy to care about the kid. “And Hebi’s fine on its own, thanks.”

You glance at Satoru, but he continues beaming at you both, his gaze switching from one to the other every few seconds. You shove down a smirk—you suppose he’s staying as Gojo-san, then. Of course.

“Okay, if that’s alright with you!” the boy says, nodding his head up and down so vigorously it could fly off. “Hebi. Hebi. Hebi. Oh—you can call me Ieiri if you want, I don’t mind. So you’re really Hebi, then? That’s so cool! Honestly? You don’t look like how I thought you would at all! So different! Weird!”

You blink at him.

“Right,” you say dryly, and turn resolutely away from him to admire your surroundings.

The buildings around you are an ocean of acacia: warm orange-brown roofs stacked on top of cream walls that strangely remind you of a cottage fireplace. They’re shops, but it looks more like a village than anything, and you half-expect to see someone in old-fashioned clothes strolling down the street with a baby in their arms.

There’s not many people, which is a huge relief—mostly, Satoru remembers that you can’t deal with crowds, but he’s forgotten too many times for you to be fully confident in him.

Above every door there’s some kind of plaque announcing what the shop sells, which seems to suit the product perfectly—the bookstore’s sign is carved into a deep, mellow wood, and the clothes shop’s is fashioned from a bright neon sign that glows slightly in the morning sun. Ieiri found the place, apparently; you like it immediately, and you suppose that means you’d have to like him, too, by some way of connection. You dislike the idea.

You look at Satoru, and cut off the boy’s chattering. “So what is it that we’re actually doing?”

“Shopping!” Satoru says, spreading his hands wide. “Exploring! And Yahaba made us some food, so we don’t need to worry about that. Didn’t I tell you?”

“No. You refused to. Multiple times. You liked the surprise.”

“Oops!” Satoru winks at the boy, who laughs. There’s a prick in your chest, and you scowl. Satoru shouldn’t like this kid, when he’s obviously so boring and stupid.

“I love Yahaba-san’s food,” the boy says wistfully, as Satoru sets off to look around the shops. Both of you go to follow him immediately, and you watch the boy disdainfully as he falls naturally to Satoru’s side. “She’s such a good cook. You’re so lucky that you have such cool servants, Gojo-san.”

“I know,” Satoru agrees. “It’s great, isn’t it?”

“So great!” Ieiri enthuses, and you roll your eyes.

Satoru preens under the boy’s attention, and the conversation devolves into him bragging about all of his many talents and gifts—some, amazingly, he was just born with, but some, whoa!, he’s cultivated over years of training and hard work. Ieiri, for his part, plays an excellent audience; he nods and smiles and ahhs in all the right places, ensuring Satoru’s ego is floating into the stratosphere by the time you’ve walked around the next few stores.

You disapprove, but don’t intervene. There’s only so much harm that the boy can do for Satoru’s inflated pride, and you’re more than willing to hold the burden of knocking it back down when you’re on your own.

Even if you thought that Satoru was one of the best people in the world (which, if you’re actually being honest, you nearly do), you’d never dream of telling him. If you did, he’d probably explode. The thought makes you smile, overtaking your annoyance with Ieiri and filling your chest with the soft haze of affection.

The ‘no-talking’ policy seems to be working until you realise that you’ve gotten through nearly all the shops without you saying a word. Your comfortable silence ends when Satoru, looking decidedly at you, decides to excuse himself.

“I’m going to find a toilet,” he says, pointing to a vague area on the opposite side of the road. “Hold my bag, Hebi-Hebi?”

He slips his backpack off his shoulders and plops it in your arms. “Try to talk, maybe?” he whispers, bugging his eyes out so he looks ridiculous. “You’re acting like you did when we first met! Be more like my Hebi-Hebi, okay?”

“You’re impossible,” you whisper back, feeling your cheeks heat up. “Go to the toilet, idiot.”

Satoru smirks and gives you an elaborate wink, tipping a pretend hat at Ieiri, who’s looking rather confused. And then he’s strolling off, leaving you with your arms laden with both your bags.

You drop his immediately and rifle through it. You ignore the various knives and other weapons (you’re carrying even more since you’re at a new place—you’re not as ignorant as you were when you were eight) and find what you were looking for: chocolate-covered strawberries. They’re a delicacy you only get at Satoru’s, and you seize them and chomp on them happily.  

The boy stares at you. You stare back at him, and make no effort to talk. He’s maybe the same height as you: if Satoru is about half a head taller than Ieiri, then he’s also about half a head taller than you. It’s unclear whether Ieiri’s exceptionally short, or if Satoru’s exceptionally tall.

Now that you’re thinking about it, Satoru has shot up recently. You’ve got a makeshift height chart in the Chapel, and within the last few months he’s been steadily growing taller and taller, like he’s a weedy little beansprout. It’s been the subject of a myriad of teasings.

“So,” he says, awkwardly. “So. What type of stuff do you like to do?”

You look at him, mouth full of strawberries. Swallowing them down, you shrug. “Stuff.”

Ieiri laughs breathily, and your eyes narrow, slightly. “I mean, specifically?” he says. “I only know what Gojo-san’s said about you.”

“Depends on what he’s said,” you say, but Satoru’s parting words tug at you and you relax, a little. You don’t have to like the boy, but this way you can at least say that you made an effort. “I don’t know—Pokémon. I play it with Gojo. I like collecting the cards best, and he likes playing the game. And I like clothes, sometimes. I got a new coat.” You gesture to it half-heartedly, and sigh. “Mostly training for Jujutsu High, though.”

“You want to go there? Me too!” The boy lights up, and your heart sinks. “What branch?”

“Tokyo.”

“Aw! I’m going to Kyoto!” The boy pouts in a very Satoru-esque way. You wonder if he’d picked it up from him—and that makes you wonder if you’ve picked anything up from him. The thought makes you feel slightly fuzzy. “It’s okay, though,” he continues, “because I’ve got a cousin who wants to go to the Tokyo branch! She’s really cool—a bit like you, all quiet and mysterious!”

“Lovely.”

“I can introduce you, if you’d like. Shoko Ieiri, she is—she’ll be in your year, too, so that’ll be even better. It’d be good to know people in your class, wouldn’t it?”

“It’d be amazing,” you deadpan, and silently swear to never contact this mysterious Shoko Ieiri if you can ever help it. If she’s anything like her cousin, you can bet you won’t get along.

“Cool!” Ieiri grins at you, and you wonder when Satoru will decide to come back. It’s obvious he isn’t actually going to the toilet, just leaving so you and Ieiri are forced to communicate, so hopefully he’ll come back with some decent souvenirs from a store he visited on his way back.

You make a noncommittal noise and admire the pebbles by your feet.

“So, Hebi,” the boy continues, and you hold back a groan, “how long have you and Gojo-san been friends?”

The question takes you aback, and you frown up at him. “Why do you ask?”

“I was wondering.” The boy laughs awkwardly. “You both seem really close, I guess.”

“Yeah,” you say cautiously, “we are.” You purse your lips together and think about the question. “I guess we’ve actually been friends for… a bit over three years? Since I was eight, or just before, actually.”

Ieiri gives you a funny look.

“What?”

“Nothing. I mean—” He grins in an inelegant way and rubs the back of his neck. “Just—that’s different from what Gojo-san said. But either way, it’s crazy that you’ve been his friend for that long, right? I’d be so intimidated! He’s so strong, you know, and really powerful! I’d just find myself getting embarrassed all the time.”

“I’m not intimidated by him. I’m strong enough on my own.” You recite the words automatically—they’re truthful, but you’ve said them so often they come out robotic. “What did he say about it?”

“Oh! Oh, nothing, really!” The boy blinks quickly, seemingly trying to right himself. “Really not that different to what you said!”

“What did he say?” You lean closer to him, and Ieiri jumps back, eyes wide. Right. You’d guessed as much—so Satoru had warned him (and warned him extensively, by the look on the boy’s face) to keep a wide physical distance from you. And due to his evident fear of getting on Satoru’s bad side, the kid seems to be a little afraid of you, too. “It’s not a big deal,” you say, casually, making a smile that only seems to freak him out more, “honestly. So what did he say?”

“Just that—erm. Well, Gojo-san said that you’d been friends for five years, not three.” Ieiri leans a little further away from you, almost going on his tiptoes. “So—since you were six, not eight.”

You scowl up at him, trying to ignore how your heart’s whizzing around in your chest. “That’s what he said? Friends, since we were six?”

“Yes—Yes, of course he did!” Ieiri looks affronted, and you almost want to cheer—it’s the first time he’s shown any kind of backbone at all. “I’m not lying to you.”

“Just checking. Six, huh?”

You’ve known each other since you were six, sure, but you weren’t friends. Satoru just saw you as something interesting, one of the first people to hold anything back from him. You weren’t friends—you weren’t even close. It’d been years later before he’d actually begun to see you as an equal.

Or, maybe that’s just what you’ve been thinking. Maybe you’re wrong. According to Satoru, you’ve been friends since you first met, all those years ago in that jujutsu family gathering.

You don’t remember many details of your first meeting: it was so long ago, and you hadn’t ever thought that you’d meet him again, so you’d never made any effort to keep it in your memory. Still, you remember that your grandmother had yelled at you before the clan meeting, and that you’d been feeling horrible all day, and that you’d probably taken it out on him. It’s not a nice first meeting, and isn’t something you look back on with any fondness.

It’s the second time you met that you remember. Three months after your first meeting, and he’d gotten Yahaba to call up your house to arrange you having dinner at his. The phone’s ringing had nearly been lost in the noise (this still being the time when your parents actually shouted at each other, rather than pretending each other didn’t exist with an icy hostility that had eventually forced your mother out of the door), but you don’t think you could forget how your father had gaped at the receiver when he heard who was asking for you.

Looking back, the situation was almost comical, but back then it had been terrifying—you’d been drilled with so many instructions you could hardly focus, and your parents had argued over whether they should remove your restraints. It had been a brief argument, since they both wanted you to keep them on. You think they’d just been mad for the sake of it, honestly.

But Satoru had thought you were friends, even before then?

What had you done, in that first meeting, that had made such an impact on him? You’d been sullen with him, just as you were being sullen with Ieiri (because, yes, you have enough self-awareness to recognise that Satoru was right about that), but he’d clearly liked you enough then to have wanted to see you again.

Satoru had liked you, even when you were at your most horrible. Even before he’d known you for the years he has now, he’d liked you.

“So what are we talking about?”

You shove your face into your shoulder, hiding what must be a dead give-away to current feelings. Satoru, returning and now chatting happily with a bewildered Ieiri, doesn’t press it.  You’re glad: even if you tried, it’d be impossible to hide your overwhelming elation that’s surely shining on your face even as you stomp away from the two of them. You cover your mouth with a shaking hand and try to pull your smile into something more palatable.

Can human beings float? You keep hold of your backpack, hoping it’ll weigh you down. You feel like you could fly all over the world, twice, three times, and still make it back for dinner at Satoru’s.

Satoru. He liked you. He likes you. You want to dance.

But this isn’t what you should be acting like, and you try to remind yourself that you’re not supposed to be thinking these kind of things any more. Something too obvious and you know that Satoru would figure it out, and it’s this that makes you straighten up, and head back over to the two of them.

If Satoru notices how you’re a little happier on your way around the shops, he doesn’t mention it.

 

--

 

“That was so fun, Hebi-Hebi,” Satoru sighs. His feet drag behind him, making a long, drawn-out scratching on the concrete. He’s weighed down with shopping bags, and looks up at you with a half-pout. “My arms hurt.”

“Oh no.” You stride ahead up the stairs “I told you not to buy so many things.”

“Don’t say I told you so, I can’t take it!” Satoru takes another pitiful step towards you. “It’s too painful, help meee—”

You know he’s being dramatic, and that he’s more than capable of carrying twice the weight twice as far, but you’re already smiling, and Satoru brightens at once. You reach forward and he hands you half of his bags—you haul them onto your shoulders and chuckle.

“These aren’t heavy at all, you idiot,” you say, waiting for him as he stands back up.

“They’re heavy on my heart,” Satoru says, and you scoff. “Eh? What?”

“That’s such a stupid thing to say.”

“I’m not stupid!”

“I didn’t say you are. Just the way you speak.” You consider. “Maybe you are a bit stupid, actually.”

“Cruelty! Cruelty and spite!” Satoru staggers up the stairs beside you, hauling the remaining bags over his shoulders. “My pride will never survive!”

“Good. It shouldn’t.”

“Gah!”

You raise your eyebrows, and then transfer your bags to one arm and hold out a hand. “Gimme the other ones, then.”

Satoru beams at you, and your heart flip-flops and does a somersault.  

“You’re so lovely! So kind to my poor, poor arms!” Satoru leaps up two steps at a time, overtaking you. “They couldn’t take it. I was sure that any moment I was going to collapse! Drop everything and fall backwards, and then I’d be dead! That’d be so sad, wouldn’t it? If I died, wouldn’t you be sad?”

“I’d be shocked, first of all.”

“Would you?”

“Sure. If anything’s going to take you out, Gojo, I don’t think it’s going to be shopping bags.”

“That’s right.” Satoru hums, content. “I’m incredibly powerful.”

“Right.”

“I’m going to live forever. I’ve just decided.”

“Wow.”

“Will you live forever with me, if I ask you to?”

“That’d be nice, Gojo, but I don’t think I’ll have a choice,” you say, yawning and rubbing at your eyes. This level of social interaction has tired you out—you plod up the steps, trying to delay the point when you’ll have to get home. “I mean, you’re definitely going to outlive me, aren’t you?”

The clouds shift, and a ray of sunlight breaks over your face. You squint, turning your eyes away from the light. There’s the faint sound of crickets in the distance.

It takes you a moment to realise that Satoru’s stopped moving.

You look around, and see him paused in place, motionless. His face is upturned to yours, open, and you have the feeling of being out of place, that you shouldn’t be watching him right now—because he looks vulnerable, almost, if Satoru could ever be vulnerable. His mouth quivers, slightly. In his cheek, a muscle twitches, twitches, and then it falls still.

You’re reminded, viscerally, of blood-stained trees and of Satoru’s panicked voice, of peeling flesh and of frightened, blue eyes.

“Are you—What is it?”

You drop the bags and they clatter to the floor—jars of lemon curd, bought as presents for Yahaba and Sara, shatter and break—as you hurry down to him, nearly falling, landing with a jolt just one step above his.

He’s still standing, and turns his whole body away from you as you reach him. You catch a glimpse of silver eyelashes, barely visible over the darkness of his glasses.

There’s the thrum of a heartbeat in your throat, a solid weight.

Your hands itch to hold his, to take off his glasses and stroke the pads of your thumbs against his cheeks, just to make sure he’s okay, to ask if he’s okay, to comfort him in more ways than words could. You want him to sit down, and you want to lean against him, and you want so much more than you’ve ever realised.

And the intensity of it all startles you, makes your breath catch in your lungs. There’s the rising feeling of dread again—something almost breaking the surface, despite the years you’ve been trying to hold it at bay. With a vindictive resentment, you push it aside, tilting your head closer to his.

“What is it?” You try to make your voice soft, but it comes out strained. A brief lurch of panic ensnares you—nothing like this has ever happened before. Satoru’s usually so happy, so pleased with himself, or he’s quiet and calm and decisive. Never silent. He never looks away from you. Is it you? Have you made a mistake? Did you say something wrong, or—?

He goes to speak, but he cuts himself off. His mouth opens and closes, and he presses his lips together, pink turning white. You hesitate, hands twisting behind your back, and lower yourself to the floor, slowly. You shift to the side, making some room for him.

“Sit down.” You pat the empty space next to you, and Satoru stares at it. He doesn’t move. You swallow, and you can feel a lump worry sitting in your throat. Its grip tightens, but you ignore it. “Come on, sit down.” There’s a pause. “Satoru?”

His name. His first name.

It’s the first time you’ve ever said it to him.

He’s said your name, your first name, before—but it’s always felt so strange, so foreign to the way the two of you communicate, that you’ll always ask him not to. Satoru doesn’t have any similar trepidations, but it’s still… so familiar, so intimate, that it’s too embarrassing to use in common conversation.  

You’ve said it before, of course; at home, at night, working your tongue around the syllables. It’s a lovely name, you’ve always thought. Pretty. You like the way it makes your lips purse at the end, like you’re pouting the way Satoru pouts, or like you’re blowing someone a kiss.

His head flicks to you, like a serpent’s, and after a heavy second he concedes.

Satoru sits on the same step as you, tucking his chin into his legs. He rests his cheek on one side of his knees and stares at you, silent.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong?” you ask, voice a half-murmur. “So I try to can help?”

“I…” he begins, and then shakes his head.

“If you can just—”

“Did you mean it?” he says, suddenly, and you pause. “Do you… did you mean it?”

“Mean… what? What did I say?”

Satoru reaches up and pushes his glasses into his hair. There’s a depth to his eyes that you’ve never noticed before, and you watch him as he watches you, neither of you willing to look away.

Shades of blue shimmer like the ocean—a myriad of depths with a myriad of lifeforms. The ring of cerulean around his pupils is the lightest shade of all. Icy, in its hue, but somehow still unfathomably warm. He rubs his fingers into the corners of his eyes and lets out a heavy breath. You, with no protest at all, are utterly transfixed.

“I guess you are going to die before me,” he says, quietly. “I didn’t know you’d thought about it as well.”

 “Oh,” you say, and bring your hands into your lap. Your thumbs cross over each other, the softness of your gloves familar. “Sure I have. I mean, I’m friends with you, so I guess I’ve kinda got to.”

Satoru makes a sort of muffled noise. There’s an indent in his cheek, like he’s chewing at it. “I should’ve guessed. You think about a lot more things than I realise you do.”

“Really?” You manage a smile, even if it feels forced. “It’s a shock that I think about things?”

“But you agree, then.” Satoru continues like you hadn’t spoken, and you fall silent. You look down—trying to lighten the mood isn’t a good idea. “You’re going to die first. Before me.”

“It’s sort of undeniable, isn’t it?” It’s an honest thought, but it’s not a good thought, because you don’t want to die. You also don’t want to live in a world where Satoru isn’t there. “I’m… It’s just going to happen.”

“Why do you accept it?”

You bite the inside of your cheek. “Accept what?”

“I—Everything! Everything that happens, you just accept it!” Satoru glares at you, anger blazing in his eyes in an intensity you’ve never seen before. When Satoru is angry, it’s restrained, cold and deliberate, but this is burning, red-hot, fierce. “Why don’t you try to change things? Or, or make anything different, anything that matters? Because you’ll be stuck like this, if nothing changes, and I don’t get why you don’t do anything about it!”

He breaks off, breathing heavily, and looks away from you. His back heaves, up-down, up-down.

You want to speak, but there’s something telling you to wait—to not just snap back at him, but to let him think everything through. So, you tilt your face to the sky, holding onto the thought.

“There’s so many things you could change,” Satoru whispers. “You’re going to die before me, and you’re fine with that. And your family, and those gloves, and you’re fine with that, too? Why don’t you do something? You’ve got to make things change, or nothing else will.”

The afternoon sky is hazy and orange, wisps of fog streaming around your legs. After many minutes’ silence, you respond. “I change what I can. And what I can’t, I learn to live with.”

Satoru turns to you incredulously, but you hold up your hand to stop him.

“No, listen to me.” You hold his gaze until he closes his mouth, nodding reluctantly. “I’m not like you. I’ll never be like you. I’m not a miracle, or a prodigy, or someone who can change our whole world if I felt like it. I’m not the strongest. That’s you, or—that’s who you’re going to be, someday. And I’m not like that. No-one else is going to be like that.”

Satoru’s eyes have turned hazy. Two of his lower eyelashes have twisted together, and when he blinks they flutter, a half-beat later than the others.

“And so there’s stuff I can’t do, that you can do easily.” You hold out your hands to him, and Satoru looks down at them, incredibly still. “I can’t take these off. If I touched anyone, I’d kill them. I nearly did, with my—” Your voice chokes, but you set your jaw and watch your hands clench into a fist. “I can’t touch anyone. I can’t—I can’t have people touching me. You know that it’s not because of, I mean, just because of my technique, not anymore. It used to be, when it was just my parents’ rules, to stop me from hurting anyone else, but now… now it's so painful, and I’m so scared, all the time, just thinking about what would happen if someone touched—or if they—and I couldn’t—”

You shudder. Satoru’s eyes have turned misty.

“So,” you say, trying and failing to clear your throat. “I just can’t have people touching me, even if I wanted to. That’s not something I can just get over, or just choose to not think about. And you—you can’t just tell me to get over it, and think that’ll work. Nothing about this is that simple. I don’t know how I’m going to, but… it’s not like that. I just… I can’t. Yet, maybe, but I can’t.”

“But—” he tries to say, and you shake your head.

“But I’m still trying,” you say, lines forming on your brow as you work through what you’re thinking. “I’m training. I’m going to get into Jujutsu High, not because I was all that great to start, but because I worked hard. I’m going to become a sorcerer and I’m going to save people, and I’m going to make the world better, even if the world just ends up being one person. I’m not going to be the strongest, but I can still be strong.” You smile at him, and this time it feels effortless, just as easy as it always is with Satoru. “And, honestly. Do you really think I’m planning to die before I’m eighty, at least? I’ve got a long, happy life ahead of me. Don’t you be thinking you’re getting off that easy, eh?”

Satoru lets out a small chuckle, and you join him. A warm breeze carries down the steps and cradles your back, holding you in a moment’s embrace. You stay like that, in the warmth of silence and the sun, wishing you’ll never leave this one, peaceful moment. But then his face saddens, slowly, and you know it’s not alright. The wind breaks, quietly.

“I don’t want you to die.” Satoru murmurs it so softly you almost don’t hear it, but when he looks up it’s clear that you didn’t imagine it. There’s a crease on his face, where the fullness of his cheek meets his eye, and you think it might be from crying. “I don’t want to be alone,” he whispers, and you think you can feel something break inside you.

“You won’t be, when I’m here,” you promise, even though you know that it can’t be enough. “And when I’m…” You trail off, knowing that anything you say won’t help. How can you swear against something you know is inevitable?

“There’ll be more people,” you say, finally. “More people that you’ll get to know. When we’re all old and wrinkled, like, when we’re thirty—” Satoru chuckles at this, and you smile, “—then you’ll find more people. The next generation of people like us, right? You’ll find them.”

It’s the way that Satoru looks at you then, as if you were the only person left in the world, like you were the best thing he could have ever witnessed, like you were there and like he was seeing every part of you and was still amazed; that’s what makes you realise.

And maybe you’ve known for a while, but it’s the way he laughs, and stands, and calls your name with his head tilted to the side, such warmth and affection and joy overwhelming his face, that makes you wholly unable to deny it.

There’s something different, completely different, and it’s something you can’t ever tell him about. Something has changed, in the way you see him, and you realise you can no longer try to pretend it hasn’t.

You don’t think you can formulate the words—because maybe you don’t even know them yourself—but you think about how you looked at him all those years ago, and how you look at him now, and how there could never be anything more different, and there’s nothing more to be said.  

Notes:

2001
Eleven years old

-

Have been bedridden with Covid for the last few days, and, along with the sufficient antibodies, I have also been developing about 5k words of a soulmate-y-ish Iwaoi fic. So--that's in the works, for some distant point in the future.

Either way--updates over here, as well! We had the swap to 'Satoru' last chapter, and now the '-to-lovers' bit is starting to become a little more clear! But do not fear, I have the 'Slow Burn' tag in a chokehold, and I'm not letting go.

See ya!

Chapter 7: 2002

Saturday, 7th September 2002

The cat rubs her nose against your leg, mewling. Keeping your eyes on your book, you reach down and stroke her back, feeling the soft vibrations of her purrs . She meows again, clearly wanting attention, and you chuckle.

“Idiot cat,” you say, but you put your book down and heave yourself onto the floor. “Needy cat. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

She wraps her tail around your hand in response. You rub your thumb against her cheek and she nuzzles it, eyes drooping closed.

There’s a warmth to her. You smile, subconsciously, as she tilts her body towards you, and you push down the urge to take her up in your arms and squeeze her in a hug. You’d tried it about a year ago and she’d scratched you half to death—you were delighted, probably, to have found a type of warmth that you enjoy. You still are.

“Hi-hi! Hi-hi!”

A toddler waddles into your room: Haru, your step-brother, now two-and-a-half years old and too nosey for his own good. You stand, and the cat meows disgruntledly. She glances at Haru, and his chubby, grabby hands, and stalks away.

“Cat’s gone! Come back cat!”

You eye your brother warily. He’s rocking up on his toes, fiddling with his fingers, but otherwise he doesn’t look upset at all. You’re still on edge from yesterday, and carefully put some more distance between the two of you.

Your brother frowns as the cat’s tail disappears behind the door, and juts out his jaw in a sulk. The cat adores you, but it’s never seemed to take to Haru.

“Where’s your mother, Haru?” you ask, and he blinks dozily up at you.

“Looking for me,” he says seriously, and toddles over to your discarded book. “What it say?”

“It’s about the impact of the Second World War on Western fashion.” You roll your eyes at Haru’s vacant expression. “It’s good. You should read it when you grow up.”

“I’m gonna,” he nods. He tries to turn a page, but ends up pushing about twenty, clumped together. For a few seconds, he refuses to accept that he lacks the dexterity needed to read an actual book, before he gives up and throws it to the side.

“Don’t mess up my stuff,” you say, frowning at him. “If you want to be in my room you can keep your hands to yourself.”

“My room now!”

“It is not!” You pick up your book and hold it tightly to your chest. “It’s my stuff. If you can’t behave I’ll send you out.”

“No!”

“Don’t test me,” you say. “I’m being serious.”

“Serious! You look serious!” He giggles, like he’s just been told the funniest joke he’s ever heard. “Don’t look serious! Look happy!”

You soften, tilting your head to the side and smiling. “I’m very serious, Haru.”

Haru reaches out to you, hands making little grabby fists. “I’m very serious! Me too! You come here!”

“No, you’re not.” You place the book back on its shelf, and sigh. “And I can’t, Haru.”

“Why?”

You rub the bridge of your nose. “It’s complicated.”

“Why?”

“Because—because you’ve got to stay over there, a bit away from me, alright?”

“Why?”

“I told you yesterday. You nearly found out yesterday, for god’s sake.”

“Why?”

“Why did I tell you, or why did you find out?”

“Yeah.”

“For—ugh.” You glance down at your brother, fiddling with your bedsheets and kicking his feet into the air. He looks up at you and grins widely. There’s a small gap in his front teeth—he’d knocked it out trying to copy your katana training. “You’re such an idiot,” you say, shaking your head affectionately. “I’m gonna sell you one day.”

“Haru?” Sara calls, and then there’s thumping on the stairs and she’s bursting into your room, the door blown wide. “Haru!”

She scoops him up in her arms and buries her face in his neck, clutching him tightly. Haru squirms and whines at her to put him down—Sara refuses. Her knuckles are white against his back. She looks up at you.

“I kept him away,” you say quickly, gesturing to where Haru had been standing, some few feet away from you. “I didn’t let him get close again, I promise.”

Haru’s obscuring half of her face, but the half you can see is broken up, panic and fear clear in her eyes. You pull your hands behind your back, a lump lodging itself in your throat.

“I’m sorry,” you mutter. “I tried to tell him, but… but he wanted to come in.”

“I told you—I told you not to be with him on your own again.” Sara slowly puts Haru down. He tries to pull out of her grip but she pulls him behind her. Protecting him with her body. Like you’re some wild, dangerous animal: a threat to her son.

The lump grows heavier, and you try to swallow. “I didn’t mean to, I just… I didn’t want to stop him from going into my room.”

“Until I can be sure, that he’s…” Sara hesitates, and her lined face crumples. She looks down, and you can see something like regret, just briefly. “Until I can be sure that he’s safe with you, I don’t want you to be alone with him.”

“But—no, but that’s not fair, Sara—”

“I’m going to make sure that he’s okay,” she continues, like you hadn’t spoken. “And if that means you have to stay away from him, then—”

“But I’m fine, normally!” You look up at her, pleadingly, but she refuses to meet your eye. “It’s just if he catches me when I don’t know he’s there, like it was—”

“This isn’t up for discussion.” Sara’s face twists, and you feel a heavy heat settling over you’re the back of your neck, anger swirling in the pit of your stomach. “You really scared him yesterday.”

“I didn’t mean to,” you bite back. “You know it was an accident.”

“An accident—” Sara swallows, but continues steadily, “—that I can’t have happening again. Or getting worse.”

“My gloves were on!” you say, and your voice rises. “He’s okay now! I just—if he hadn’t come running at me like that, I’d have known, and—”

“He’s a child!” Sara glares at the floor next to your feet, but she’s getting closer to shouting, her voice blaring into your ears. “Of course he’s going to do that, of course, he’s just a child!”

“So am I!” You turn to her, anger blazing up at you, and all of a sudden you hate her, ferociously, viciously. “So am I! I don’t want to be like this, of course I don’t, so why can’t you just try to help me, at all?”

Sara’s jaw tenses, and she looks frozen in place, but you’re shouting now, words spilling out of you, unstoppable.

“I was—I was just three years older than him when I got my technique! Three years: that’s nothing!” You stare at her, your face heating up. “You weren’t even there when it was bad. You don’t know what it was like.”

Sara’s eyes are beginning to water. You can’t even begin to care.

“And what if it was him? What if he has the same technique as I do?” You glare, glare, and you want to make her understand because she doesn’t, and it’s not fair, and you hate it. “Are you going to—are you going to lock him up, chain his hands up like mine were? Are you?”

You take a step forward, and Sara grabs at Haru—clutches at him in a panic, like you’re about to attack them.

You hold up your hands (gloved, like they always are) and step back. Your eyes burn, and your voice escapes you hoarse. “I didn’t—”

“I know,” Sara says, and her voice is so quiet that you can feel the anger dying out of you, seeping from your skin like a poison. “And I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I have to do this. Please, I am.” She takes in a slow, shaking breath. “But Haru comes first.”

There’s a heavy weight pounding against your temple, and you blink fiercely, once, twice, lips pressing together.

“I’m sorry, but… he’s my son. My son. And your grandmother suggested… but Haru’s my top priority right now. Please understand.”

Sara looks up at you, pleading, but now you’re the one who’s keeping your gaze trained to the floor. Bile rises in the back of your throat.

“If grandmother suggested, then of course,” you say, hatefully. “She can’t even look at me anymore, you know? But of course she’s going to prioritise Haru. He’s the real heir, isn’t he?”

“That’s not fair,” Sara says, tears pooling. You shake your head, unaffected. “No, please. Your father agreed too, and he said—"

“Of course he has,” you say, the words a serpent’s hiss. You glare at her, at her lined face, her tired eyes, her tight death grip on your brother. “That’s just like him. You know by now, right?”

“Look—” Sara starts, but you cut her off.

“I don’t care. I don’t—I don’t care. Leave me alone.” You pull a bag from the floor and shove some clothes into it, not even caring what you grab.

“Sweetheart—”

“Don’t.” You pull your scythe from its place, resting against your wardrobe, and turn to her. “Move. I’m going to Satoru’s.”

Sara must see something in your expression, and so she picks up Haru and moves out of your way. As you walk past her, she looks down, pressing Haru’s face into her neck.

You scoff. You don’t let her see your face.

--

Satoru reaches his hand up to the sun; it’s gold and glimmering in his palm, and his fingers twist around it, closing delicately, as if he’s trying to hold it himself. Light breaks through the gaps between his fingers and they cast long lines on his face, orange and yellow and glowing.  

The flower in your hand is a light bluebottle, and its petals fan out in the slight breeze. You raise your head upwards and feel the warmth caress your skin. The last few fleeting days of summer: beautiful.

“Life,” Satoru is saying, “is actually quite fun.”

“Hmm?”

He looks back at you, laughing, an arm reaching down let his fingertips brush the top of the grass. “I’m complimenting life! This world! Our world!”

“Why?” You stumble after him, drawing the flower up and behind your ear. You can feel its slight unevenness, not uncomfortable but still very present.

“It’s a great day. It’s a great time! I’m here, and so are you, and it’s a great day!” Satoru throws his arms out and shouts to the wide expanse of nature; his voice echoes down the yellow field, further than you can see, until it’s enveloped by a smooth haze of silver, glistening and bright.

You catch him up and stand by his side, drinking in the view together. “You’re in a good mood today.”

“An excellent mood!” Satoru glances to you, smirking. “Aren’t I always?”

You huff out a laugh. “Not really. It’s kind of surprising, really.”

“It shouldn’t be!” Satoru says this to the hills, tilting his chin so it’s parallel with the horizon. “Don’t you feel it? It’s a world of opportunity!”

“I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,” you say, but you don’t take your eyes from him. The sunlight draws out the faint lilac in his hair, only visible if you stare attentively, and you watch as it flutters over the back of his neck, silent.

You’d told him that you didn’t want to talk about this morning, and he’d nodded and asked if you wanted to visit a meadow with him instead.

“Today is a great day,” he repeats. “You’re staying in the Chapel tonight, right? Or do you wanna stay over at mine?”

“Chapel,” you say, holding out your hands and splaying your fingers, watching how the sun highlights the frays in the thick material of your gloves.

“Yahaba’s getting the cooks to make us some food,” Satoru says, “but she said that we only get to eat it if we have the full meal back at my house.”

You hum. “Why can’t we just take it back to the Chapel?”

“She doesn’t like me going off on my own, or something,” he says, and shrugs. “Doesn’t really matter. I’ll teleport back and steal all the desserts before she can notice.”

“Cool.”

“I know.” He sends you a look. “You’re not seeing Shoko today?”

“Hmm? No, don’t think so.”

It’s still strange to think of Shoko as the cousin of the weird Kouji kid, the one you’d met all that time ago. You’ve haven’t seen him in ages—Satoru apparently got tired of him, a thought which brings you a mean pleasure—but you’d found out that you and Shoko share the same trainer when Iori had invited her to one of your sessions about a year ago. You’d been initially reluctant, knowing how well you’d gotten along with her relative, but upon finding out Shoko Ieiri is the furthest thing from her cousin as humanly possible, you’d quickly become something like friends.

Shoko’s quiet but sharp, ruthless in the way she talks about people but so subtle about it that it’s sometimes difficult to realise what she’s trying to insult. On the days when you don’t train together, you usually go on walks, spending most of the time in peaceful silence. You’d invited Satoru on one of them a couple of months ago, but it had been such a disaster that you’d sworn to never repeat the attempt; Satoru, apparently hating all forms of serenity, hadn’t stopped talking for the whole hour-and-a-half. Shoko had not been amused.

And you’ve come to appreciate the differences between them, too: Satoru doesn’t understand the appeal of Shoko’s company, and hadn’t appreciated your suggestion that, sometimes, you’d want to be around someone who doesn’t worship the sound of their own voice. But you like Shoko, and even if you’re not all that close, you like having someone who’s as asocial as you are.

“No Shoko, just Satoru,” he says, swinging his arms at his sides. You squint at your gloves, trying to spot the imperfection that’s been driving you mad all day. “Good!” Satoru says, “Good, good, good!”

“Good?” There’s a loose thread, a tiny one, right between your thumb and your index finger. You rub at it with your other hand, and it disappears.

“Good!” Satoru laughs, an endearing mix between a cackle and a giggle. “You’re staying here forever!” He jumps around, seemingly composing a song on the spot: “More time,” he sings, tunelessly, “with Gojo and Hebi, Hebi and Gojo, best friends! Standing in a field, Gojo and Hebi, best friends! Oooh-hey, best friends, Gojo! Gojo! Gojo! Satoru Gojo—”

“And me—”

“And lovely Hebi of courseee…” Satoru’s voice scratches low, and you attempt to join the note, but just end up coughing and rubbing at your throat.

“Ow,” you mutter, and Satoru laughs his manic cackle again. You hide your smile with your wrist.

“Look over there!” Satoru shouts, pointing wildly to a small cluster of trees about a kilometre away. “The trees!”

“Trees!”

“We’re going to climb them, Hebi-Hebi!”

“If you say so,” you say, feigning a poor show of reluctance as you join Satoru’s march forwards.

“Best friends, best friends, ooh-oh, bestest bestest…” Satoru hums, drumming his fingers on his chest. “With Satoru Gojo, ooh-ooh, the coolest person ever, ever…”

There’s a sharpness to his words—unintentional, but still forcibly there, and you try not to let it bother you. Instead, you push it back to where you’ve also been keeping this morning’s encounter: a place that’s locked away, not thought about, somewhere in the dark corners of your memory. When you’d dropped your bags off at the chapel, and you’d seen how bubbly Satoru was, you’d promised yourself that you wouldn’t let anything else upset you any more than they already had, and yet…

And yet it’s another reminder of the fundamental gap between you and Satoru; not in experience, or in your friendship, but in that tangible incongruence that you’ve sworn to yourself you will never voice aloud.

You can think about it, though, and the thought rings through your ears like a bell, pealing discordantly as its incessant reminder that you… like Satoru, in a way that he doesn’t like you.

It’s obvious, now, after months of panicking and painstaking deliberation, and you wonder how you could have missed it. He’s still singing away, juggling syllables and melodies together with the expertise of a toddler, but his voice is smooth, gentle, and you couldn’t shape a word of dissent if you tried.

A lock of hair, shining like silk in the golden light, has fallen over his eyes. He brushes it away, sweeping it to one side with a practised ease. It’s a motion you’ve seen repeated thousands of times, but your eyes are continually drawn to it, watching as he tucks the strand behind his ear, places it carefully back where it should be, like he’s fixing the final mistake of a beautiful painting.

Satoru’s got a scar, on the very bottom of his jaw, paper-thin and white from age, so tiny that you’d miss it if you didn’t know exactly where it was.

He’d been trying to test his Infinity, urging you to throw various items from his pencil case at him just so he could show off by deflecting them. You’d thrown the pencil a little too fast, or a little too hard, and it had carved a miniscule gash on his right cheek, bouncing off onto his jaw. You’d both stood there for a second, frozen, before Satoru had burst out laughing, clutching the bleeding wound as he cackled with joy.

The scar’s faded, now, to a faint whisper of what it used to be, but it moves as he talks, pulling and stretching like water lapping at a riverbed. It’s silver against his pale skin, and if you catch it from exactly the right angle you can see the smallest indentation, falling inwards by a fraction of a millimetre. Sometimes, you wonder what it would be like to hold your thumb against it, that small indentation, and then you wonder what Satoru would say.

But you know you can’t. And you know he wouldn’t let you.

Because he’s your friend. And he’s one of the only friends you have. And he’s too important.

And so you push the thoughts away, close your ears to the pealing bell, and hurry to catch up to his side.

He’s standing at the base of the trees, squinting up to the very top where fragments of sunlight are glowing through the leaves. You scout around the branches; they’re good enough on the two trees that stand side-by-side.

You say this: “Good enough for climbing, those two,” and Satoru nods eagerly.

“And they look about the same,” he continues, trying to shake the nearest tree to absolutely no avail.

“Pretty much.”

He turns to you, a devious smile growing on his face that you try very hard to not return.

“Wanna race me?”

You snort. Satoru pouts, somewhat offended.

“We’re just as fast as each other, Hebi-Hebi!” he says, sticking out his bottom lip in a mock-mournful way. “It’s not like that!”

“You just want to show off,” you say, decisively, and stalk around the opposite side of the tree so he’s out of your eyeline.

“I do not!” Satoru’s voice whines from around the tree, and then, a beat later, a little less extravagantly: “Okay, but only a little! And you never care, so what’s the problem?”

Satoru makes an attempt to catch you from around the tree, but you dart the other way. You can hear a slight huff, and you snicker.

“I can’t help it, Hebi-Hebi,” he says, still faceless behind the large trunk of the tree, “I’m just naturally amazing! Even existing is showing off, so why should I try and hide it?”

“I wasn’t aware you ever did try to hide it.”

“I’m a very selfless person,” he says seriously, and you catch a glimpse of his face before you sprint to the other side of the tree. “I am! And stop running away from me!”

His voice rises, and he reminds you so much of your brother when he’s having a tantrum that you can’t help but laugh. Satoru catches up to you and you nearly collide, but he grabs onto the trunk at the last second and topples back onto the floor, landing on his back with a soft thump.

You laugh at this: and then at Satoru’s face (wide, goldfish mouth with eyebrows raised right up to his hairline) you laugh some more. Satoru scrunches up his nose in an overwhelmingly adorable way—something you’d never thought to describe him as before, only now realising how accurate it is—and you clutch your sides, wheezing.

“You’re being very cruel, Hebi-Hebi,” Satoru says, crossing his arms and grinning up at you. “Look how badly you’re treating me! Poor, innocent, defenceless me, all—”

“Oh, shut up,” you manage, and rub at your eyes as a reason to stop looking at him. “But I’ll race you up there if we don’t use cursed techniques. We’ll be pretty even then.”

“My life is so hard.” Satoru jumps up and brushes himself down, turning around like a dog chasing its tail. “But I accept your conditions. It’d be fun, though, if we could use them, don’t you think? Make it more exciting?”

“You’d just, like,”—you raise your eyebrows as Satoru picks a piece of twig from his hair—“like, Limitless your way up to the top, or something. Or do your teleporting thing, y’know, cheating.”

“It’s not cheating if it’s natural!” Satoru protests, readying himself at the base of his tree, standing about five metres from yours. “It’s like you saying I can’t use my leg, or something. My technique is just as much a part of me as a limb! Just because mine is infinitely more powerful than yours—”

“Oh, shut up.”

“And because you’re clearly so jealous—”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“It doesn’t mean you couldn’t use yours, too.” Satoru grins. “Then it’d be equal: both of us using our techniques, right?”

You chuckle. “What would I even do, though? Grab onto the tree and rot away the wood or something?”

“Poison it all up! Get rid of it!”

“It’d probably just go a bit charred, Gojo. No, it wouldn’t, would it? Doesn’t work on non-humans, I don’t…” You trail off, and then smile at him, and he beams, even if he still doesn’t properly get your technique. It doesn’t bother you—your parents never seemed to put much effort into learning about it themselves, and it’s not like you use it all that frequently, so you’ve just got a moderately general idea about it all. How it increases in intensity with more contact with your hands, but how the area of poison touch ends exactly at the curve of your wrist.

Technically, anything below there is free to touch. You wouldn’t hurt anyone if someone brushed their fingers against your arm, or patted you on your back. Technically, it would be fine.

Of course, your mind doesn’t understand the technicalities, and the thought of hands touching you anywhere nearly makes you pass out.

“Oh, well!” Satoru leans against the trunk, and then pushes himself off immediately, jumping into a crouch. “Get ready to race!”

You mimic his position, adrenaline already pumping through your blood. “I was born ready.”

He cackles. “When I say go, go!”

The wind brushes his hair into his eyes, and he scrapes it back impatiently. Wow. Satoru’s so pretty. How have you never noticed it before? Silvery hair, dimpled smile, eyes as blue as the sky in summertime.

No. Wait.

You can’t get distracted like this You force your eyes to return to your course, and map out your route to try to make up for the lost seconds.

“I’m gonna win, Hebi-Hebi!”

“Just start already. And no, you’re not.”

“Hah! Lies!”

“You’re really not.”

“I don’t care what you say! I’m not listening! Ready? Yeah? And—GO!”

You both take off, jumping up to the first branch and swinging to the second. Satoru’s image immediately falls from your peripheral vision as you surround yourself with the foliage, shades of green and orange and brown consuming your view.

The tree’s tall, and soon you’re far enough from the ground to know that if you fell, if you made one mistake, one error in momentum or calculation, you’d be properly, seriously hurt.

You grab onto a branch about a metre away and lock your legs around it, tensing the muscles of your abdomen as you twist and reach for the next one, just close enough for you to grab onto.

Holding your weight fully on your arms, you free your legs, and for a moment you’re suspended, feet kicking in mid-air, the roughness of the tree bark scratching even through your gloves. You pull yourself up and feel the familiar burn of muscles aching as you haul your body weight onto the next branch, a long arm-like extension of the trunk.

You glance down. Oh, oh, it’s high, okay. You’re half-way there, you reassure yourself: but if you want to beat Satoru, you’ll need to go faster.

A thrilling wave of competitiveness rising up in you, you make a hair-like leap to the next branch and nearly miss, landing precariously close to the edge. Your fingers scramble for purchase and you right yourself, before immediately searching for the next foothold.

This high up, the branches have begun to thin, and you find yourself darting between them, not staying on any to give them enough time to break underneath you.

Then your foot slips, and your heart lurches—you twist as fast as you can to find a foothold that looks remotely stable and find one, just in time, your heart pounding painfully. You’re not dead, so you count yourself lucky.

And then you look up and you’re almost there, so close to the bright sky and clouds and sunshine, and you forget about falling and heights and fear, and you pull yourself just the tiniest bit higher, take one final jump, one push of your legs and—

And the sun welcomes you with the embrace of an old friend, and you’re staring at the view around you. It’s so beautiful, wide and just stunning, and you wrap your arms around the tree and gaze around at you, unable to speak.

“It’s great, right?” Satoru says, from only a few feet away from you. “I only just got here, but—wow.”

There’s a river, something you’ve never noticed before, maybe three or four kilometres away. The sunlight reflects off its surface, making the water look white, breaking the light into a multicolour haze that shimmers over the rest of the hills. There’s countless species of wildflowers swaying in the breeze, nodding their little heads to the melody of nature.

Satoru moves in the corner of your eye, and you look to him—and that’s something you can’t forget. The tip of the tree trunk, which is hardly any more substantial than its branches, is wrapped in the crook of his left arm, but his right is stretched out on the wind, fingers moving as if conducting the current of air. His mouth is half-open, smiling crookedly, and he seems to glow in the warm afternoon sun, so brightly it almost blinds you.

“This was a good idea,” you whisper to him, voice breathy. “It’s beautiful.”

“Thanks,” Satoru whispers back, entranced in the view of the hills. “I think so too.”

Notes:

2002
Twelve years old

-

I get that it's been a hot minute since I've updated here (my bad, y’all), but I promise I haven't been wholly inactive--next Friday/Saturday, I'll be posting the final chapter for that soulmate-Iwaoi fic I talked about last chapter. I get that the crossover for target audiences between a JJK x reader fic and a Haikyuu ship fic may be… slightly different, but take this as a little bit of confirmation that I’ve still been busy busy busy doing writing-esque deeds.

Also! I think (?) I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ve got a good few chapters of this fic written in advance (I’ve written up to, like, when they’re ~20, and all of the later chapters are averaging around 10,000 words T_T), and the most up-to-date version has surpassed 100k words! Very exciting >:)

See ya!

Chapter 8: 2003

Wednesday, 7th September, 2003

Your dress really is ugly.

It’s plain, black, with a straight A-line silhouette that makes you feel incredibly drab. You’d been given it a size too big, and you have to keep pulling up the sleeves to keep them from falling far past your wrist. You rarely have clothes that fit—either too small, never going to be replaced, or too big, to grow into. As if you’ll want to re-wear this: it’s hideous. There’s that, and then there’s the memories it’ll bring. Not really bad, but not altogether pleasant.

You hike up your sleeves again. You hadn’t had the heart to object when you’d first seen it, and you’re only slightly regretting that brief moment of kindness.

“Maybe you could accessorise,” Shoko says, voice crackly from your phone. You turn, trying to look it from different angles—each more boring than the other. “Are you allowed to accessorise?”

“No. I asked.” You pull at the waistline and it falls back into place, about five centimetres too low.

“You could ask again.”

“I could, but…”

Shoko hums. “Yeah. Your dad wouldn’t care.”

“You’re right.” You sigh, and pointedly walk away from your mirror to where your shoes are laid out on your bed: black, with neat little buckles on each side. Never-worn, new for today. They pinch. “Still pretty depressing right now.”

“Exactly. It’s the dress that’s depressing.” You can hear Shoko yawn. “Absolutely nothing else.”

“Sure.”

You’re both quiet for a bit, as you start to organise your bag for today. Your father had wanted you to take something a little more discreet, but you make it a point to never go outside without some kind of weapon, and the small bag he’d suggested wouldn’t fit everything you need.

You remove your scythe from your wall and place it gently in the black cotton handbag that’s become your default. It’s a good size, and can fit over your shoulder without getting in the way of anything. Also, you like to think that black goes with everything.

Even with more black.

“Is your house usually this quiet?” Shoko asks, breaking your mutual silence.

“Hmm?”

“There’s no-one talking. At all. It’s weird.” In the background from Shoko’s side, you can faintly hear the sound of two people having an intense, wild conversation, their voices rising and falling with a passion you never get at yours. “Listen. In my house no-one shuts up.”

“I think that’d be nice,” you say. “It’d bring some personality to a family.”

“Maybe,” Shoko remarks, sounding unconvinced. “I think I’d prefer your situation, though. Even if it is silent as death.”

There’s a pause, where you stiffen, and Shoko clears her throat uncomfortably.

“Maybe that was inappropriate,” she says, slowly.

After a moment’s hesitation you laugh, genuinely, even if it is a little weak around the edges. “Nah. It’s fine. Honestly.”

“Right.” Shoko clears her throat again. “And I am sorry I can’t come.”

“What? Oh, no, don’t worry about it.”

“I would have liked to, though.”

“Would you? Would you really?” You smile, softly, and pat yourself down to make sure you’ve got everything. “You didn’t even know her.”

“But it would still be nice,” Shoko says, “so you wouldn’t be on your own like that.”

You pause, touched. “That’s kind of you. But Satoru’s going to be there, I think, so I won’t be on by own.”

“Satoru?” You can practically hear Shoko’s lips curling wickedly. “I thought Gojo was going to be there?”

“That’s what I said.” You glance at your watch, and purse your lips. “Got to go now, Shoko. Thanks for talking with me.”

“It’s no problem. Good luck, I guess.” Shoko clicks her tongue against her mouth. “Will you text me when it’s over?”

“I promise. See you.”

“Bye.”

You flip your phone shut and drop it into a zipped compartment of your bag. For a moment, you take a long look at yourself in the mirror. You truly look dismal—everything’s black, without even the smallest hint of colour to liven things up. Not you’d really want to ‘liven things up’ but, still.

Your gloves are elbow-length, today; less practical, less suitable for combat, but sensible for the occasion.

You nod at yourself, grab your bag, and walk out of your room.

The scythe clinks. Its head rests on your shoulder, in the familiar indent between your shoulder bones. The metal is cool and comforting, a promise of safety.

Your father stands in the middle of his room. Its door is slightly ajar, and you stand in the meagre opening, looking at him. He’s looking at himself in the mirror, adjusting his tie. Yesterday, he shaved the thin layer of stubble that had become a constant for the past few weeks, and although he looks much more professional, more stable, there’s still something slightly unkempt about him. His hair is neat, his suit fitting perfectly, but there’s a shadow, somewhere; something you can’t properly recognise, but something that’s almost tangible, almost there.

His eyes meet yours in the mirror.

Your father turns, slowly, and you straighten up, forcing your chin to be parallel to the ground.

“Child,” he says, and his voice cracks.

“We’re leaving soon,” you say. You’re not cold, in the way he’s always been cold—you’re removed from the situation. You’ve ascended, so detached and uncaring that you’re almost kind.

You figured out the trick ages ago. If you don’t care, he can’t hurt you. When you see him, when you see him crying, you just decide that you don’t care.

“You look like her,” your father croaks. His hands leave his tie and twist at his blazer buttons, like he’s trying to pull them off. “Your—have I ever said that? That you look like her?”

“No,” you tell him. “You never noticed.”

“I should have,” he says, “I should have said. I should have—you don’t look like your mother. You look like us.”

It itches. The way he talks about it, the way he makes it seem like a gift, that you could have any resemblance to the people you despise. You should tell him that you hate that he says it. You should remind him how often they rejected you from their family, how quick they were to love your brother over you. You should spit at his feet. You can’t muster the energy.

He steps forward, stumbling slightly, and then he brings his arms up to fall around your shoulders.

You jerk back, breath whistling through your teeth. He flinches like you’ve struck him. His arms shake.

“What are you doing?” you hiss, your shoulders hunching forward, your chest rises and falls, blood already roaring.

“I just—”

“What was that?” You walk back, and your back bumps against the doorframe. “What the hell was that?”

Your father raises a hand to run through his hair, covering his face with a shaking palm. In the break between his fingers, his eyes stare at you, haunted.

“I’m sorry,” he says, quietly, his voice shuddering and crumbling the ends. “Shit. Shit.”

You stare at him, half-frightened, half-disgusted. “What are you even trying to do? You know you can’t do that. You know more than anyone.”

“I know. I know.” He turns, cradling his head in his hands. “Today, it’s all—”

“I don’t care.” You clutch the doorhandle in a tight fist, so strongly it hurts you. “Fix yourself up. Get ready.” You only hesitate for a half-second before you say, vindictively: “You’re the only one who’ll actually miss her, so make sure you’re in better condition than this.”

“How dare you say—” he starts, but you cut him off with a sharp raise of your hand.

“Stop being pathetic,” you say, with a weighted finality that you both recognise. Your father’s lips part, and then seal.

In your eyes, you know he sees himself.

There has been a point of no return, passed years ago, and this is where your paths have branched to. You and Satoru often amuse yourselves with Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, and you’re reminded vividly of the time when you both realised that your failure in the first few choices had led to the horrible death of one of your favourite characters.

This, you think, looking at your father with a palpable disdain, is his choices. This is where it’s got him. This is his problem.

“Go see your mother,” he says, voice muffled. “Get in the car.”

The moment stays like that, silent but for the shaking of your father’s breath.

And then you go. And he’s left alone.

 

--

 

The car ride is awful. As would be expected.

You’re in the back, with Haru kicking his feet against his chair in the seat next to you. He looks cute, in a little suit and tie, but you can’t look at him for too long without feeling a strange emptiness, and you have to keep looking away. No-one talks, and you’re grateful that the car journey isn’t too long.

Sara smiles at you when you get out of the car, and your heart turns again. Her hair is scraped back, too tight for comfort, and she’s wearing a dress as dull and drab as yours. She’s accessorised it with a tiny snake charm hanging on a gold necklace, resting daintily on her sternum.

“Boring clothes, aren’t they?” she whispers to you as she fiddles with Haru’s seatbelt. “I know you’d want something better, right?”

You beam at her, nodding. She chuckles, if a little tiredly.

It’s not much, and not as much as she might have done when she first married your father, but it’s much more than you’d been expecting, these days. You can feel your chest getting lighter already.

You walk in: a family, united against all troubles.

There’s a few people already there, talking quietly to themselves in the corners. Distant family members, vague cousins and aunts you’ve never before met. Sara had mentioned that it won’t be a huge event, but the masses of people are already stirring a faint panic up in you, and you shrink to the edge of the room.

No-one reacts to you walking in, and for a second you’re surprised (surely more people would want to talk to your father, give him their condolences?) but then you spot him, right in the centre of the room, and it makes sense.

“Hebi! You’re here!” Satoru leaps up from where he was leaning on one of the rows of chairs, walking past the startled man he was apparently talking to. His voice echoes over the near-silent muttering of the other guests, and everyone tries very hard to pretend like they weren’t all staring at him before. You see a middle-aged woman look from Satoru, to you, back to Satoru, and then whisper something to a man standing at her side.

“Hello,” you say, fighting back a smile. “I didn’t know if you’d come.”

“Course I did! Wouldn’t miss it, not if you didn’t want me to! How’s it going?” he asks, jovially. He glances at your father, and to Sara, and gives them a swift nod before turning his attention back to you. “I’ve found us a good seat, so we’ve got the best view. I’ve been standing there for ages, trying to buffet people away. So many people want to sit by me, but I keep telling them, I’m sitting next to Hebi, and that’s all.” He glances again at your father. “My Hebi, that is. It doesn’t matter where you sit.”

“We had planned for the family to sit at the front, Gojo-san,” your father says stiffly. He’s always tried to hide it, but you know that he dislikes Satoru. He dislikes how easily he took to you, how brash he is with the higher-ups, how you’ve never tried to gain any wealth or status from him. Ironically, both you and your father would like your relationship with Satoru to push beyond friendship, if for slightly different reasons.

“Guess I’ll be joining you, then!” Satoru says. His mouth twists into a bright grin, but everywhere else is frozen: it’s a look that most people read as innocent, childish delight, but you know him too well to even consider Satoru not having some kind of ulterior motive to his actions. You turn your face to the floor, to keep your smile from being too conspicuous.

“We had planned for it to be a family-only row, as I’m sure you’ll understand.”

“Being flexible about our planning is a very important skill,” Satoru says. He cracks his back and raises himself up from his faint slouch—he’s shot up in height recently, and he’s nearly as tall as your father, just about. Regardless, he seems much taller; exuding confidence and the hints of the cold, refined power that he wields like a deadly blade.

“I suppose, Gojo-san,” your father says, his jaw locked in place, “but seeing as it’s my own mother’s funeral, I would prefer to only have my personal family with me. Meaning no disrespect, I’m sure.”

“Of course you don’t,” Satoru assures him, calm anger glinting in his eyes, “but still. If you’re really going by your family, I don’t think there should be anyone left with you there. Certainly not my Hebi—you’ve made it clear you don’t see her as your daughter. Why’d you care now?”

If you were a nicer person, you’d probably be sympathertic to your father. Getting lambasted by two thirteen-year-olds, on separate occasions, on the same day? It must chip at his pride.

It’s brilliant. Times like these—these glorious moments—are why you adore Satoru.

“Keep your son with you. He likes you, for some reason. But everyone else…” He trails off, staring up at your furious father with a wicked smirk curling his features. “Ah, but it looks better, when you’ve got more people grieving with you, doesn’t it? No, I get it. I understand—I’ll be up front with you. Because, well… it would be shocking to have the only heir to the Gojo clan, pushed in the back of the room like some lowly commoner?” He drops his voice to a whisper, words drenched in mockery and scorn. “People would talk. People like the Zenins!”

Satoru gestures to the new arrivals—a small group of people, standing close together by the door with the general appearance of not wanting to be there at all. A man, tall with hair sprinkled with grey, steps forward and makes a neat bow to Satoru, who returns it.

“Young Satoru Gojo. Hello again.”

Satoru nods at him, his eyes quick and attentive. “it’s good to see you, Old Naobito Zenin.”

Naobito bares his teeth into a grin. “Charming.” He turns to your father, who clears his throat and bows. Naobito looks down at him, his disinterest plain.

“Our pleasure to meet you again, Zenin-san,” your father says, and Naobito hums.

“Indeed.” He sniffs. “I liked your mother. She was an interesting woman. It really is a shame she’s no longer with us. My brother sends his apologies for his absence, but he’s sent his wife in his stead.”

Naobito gestures to a small, attractive woman to his side. She’s fussing over a small child, whose face is all tiny and scrunched up in a silent wail. No—two, you realise: one swathed in blankets in her arms, and one in a little pushchair, happily asleep. Almost in unison, you and Satoru straighten up and step away from the grownups. You both wander over to the babies, leaving the adults to their pointless sparring.

Satoru smiles up at the woman (the wife), who notices him and does a slight double-take. It’s a reaction that you’ve become accustomed to, but Satoru preens in your peripheral vision. You tut affectionately.

The woman glances at Naobito, a quick look there-and-back so rapid that you could have missed it. And then she smiles at you, tugging her hair back into a smoother style as she rocks the pushchair baby back, forth, back, forth.

She reminds you of Sara.

“What are their names?” Satoru asks, reaching forwards to tickle the grumpy baby on its cheek. It sneezes, cutely, and Satoru looks up at its mother, delighted.

“This is Maki,” she says, holding up her (now confusedly blinking) baby to Satoru’s eager inspection, “and the one in the chair is Mai. They’re twins.”

“Cool,” Satoru says, softly. “Twins are cool.”

“It’s so tiny,” you whisper to him. “It’s like how Haru was, and now look at him. So weird.”

“She,” the woman says, laughing delicately. “We were this size at one point, weren’t we?”

“I was never this small,” Satoru protests, ruffling baby Maki’s dark olive hair, fluffing up in little tufts at the top of her rounded head. Maki reaches out, hands stretching, and makes a little fist around Satoru’s index finger.

He seems to melt, beaming down at the baby with eager joy radiating in waves from him. Satoru’s transfixed, and you smile at him, heart flipping and growing until it nearly bursts from your chest in a glittering rainbow of adoration. And then you remember where you are, and you want to strangle yourself for being so embarrassing.

“You were this small,” you say, and Satoru’s eyes shine as he looks up at you. “I remember you being this small.” You look him up and down, and purse your lips together, feigning irritation. “I remember when I was taller than you.”

“The tragedies of maturing,” Satoru says, and the woman laughs. He stretches himself up onto his tiptoes, raising his arms up so he towers over the baby in the pushchair, who gurgles. “You’re never gonna catch up to me, Hebi-Hebi. I’m set to be over 190cm when I stop growing, Yahaba said.”

“Yahaba-san’s being wrong before,” you say, half-heartedly, and Satoru smirks. You glance at the rest of the room—it’s been filling whilst you’ve been talking, and you guess that most people are already here.

“I’m gonna reclaim my seat,” Satoru says, jerking his head towards the front few rows. “Come on. Thanks for letting us meet your kids, Zenin-san.”

You smile at him as you walk over to the chairs. “That was nice.”

“What?”

“Zenin-san. Very respectful.”

Satoru raises his eyebrows. “Why’s that surprising?”

“Don’t be an idiot. I’m saying, it’s nice.”

“Course it’s nice. I’m nice. I’m amazing, right, Hebi-Hebi?”

“Somewhat.”

“I’m amazing,” he says, to himself, contentedly. He slumps down on the seat, legs splaying out in front of him. His head tips back to rest on the top of the chair, and you look away from him quickly.

The service begins soon after. Your father takes his place at the front, a few seats to the right of where you and Satoru are sitting, and you don’t miss the grave look he sends your way. You stare at him, unflinching, until he looks away. A little flicker of satisfaction coils up in your stomach.

A priest says some words, chants something you can’t understand. Your father stands and begins to read a long speech from a cream-coloured piece of paper he delicately removes from the inside of his suit. You tune out his words, letting your mind wander.

Satoru is incredibly bored. Other than your father’s voice, the hall is silent, but one look at him tells you everything. His fingers jump from the buttons on his jacket to the collar of his shirt to the rim of his glasses to the back of his neck, never staying in one place for more than a couple seconds. You make eye contact, and he scrunches up his nose at you, so slightly it’d be imperceptible to anyone else. You stick your tongue out at him. He grins.

Your father’s talking about your grandmother’s great life achievements. You really don’t care.

The sea of black takes on many faces. You watch them, shifting your body around very slowly so you can have a good look at who turned up. Some people you recognise; a few members of well-known families, a few more of those much less powerful, and then some from yours, about as mediocre as you could get.

It’s a lot of families. A father sat beside a mother, a child or more by their side. The fathers wear solemn faces, chins tilted high as they listen to your father speak. The mothers wear lines; young faces gone grey, pretty faces weeping as they age double each second.

There’s Sara. And you spot her again, and again, and you see her face in every young, pretty mother whose hair is stripped back, whose husband’s severe stare is directed to the front of the room, whose hands are clutching at their children’s, no space to hold anything of their own.  

And, all at once, you have a fierce and overwhelming hatred for your adults, for the higher-ups who are supposed to help you and the Satorus and the Saras of your world. There’s the children, the twins Maki and Mai, and there’s their mother, who can’t be more than twenty. You spot Naobito Zenin, who surely has a nameless, pretty, discardable Sara of his own, and you find such a powerful, palpable fury for him, for the world he maintains, for the system he upholds, that you have to look away just as quickly.

Sara was nineteen when she’d married your father.

You’d found this out recently—she’d said it, offhandedly, and had seemed shocked when you’d looked up, horrified. The thought sickens you. It’s only now that you think about it that you realise it’s six years older than you: six years to be married and to have had a child, and to have dealt with your father and your grandmother and you, all in just six years?

It shocks you, this anger: you’re used to passivity, to a calm half-apathy from yourself that you can easily control. But it rages in you, the realisations of the normality of Sara’s life making your head ring painfully loud.

Usually it’s Satoru who gets passionate, who has the ideas as to how to change the world, and you’re the one helping to keep him in reality. The waves of panic and anger and pain crash over you, drowning you under their force. Your head is pushed below the surface and you choke, and you can feel hot tears brimming in your eyes, heat burning the back of your throat.

Fingers grasp on your sleeve. You jump, snapping your head around to whoever was stupid enough to try and touch you, but it’s Satoru—he stares at you intently, and doesn’t remove his hand.

You try to pull away, but Satoru’s fingers clamp down.

You look up at him, wild, but he shakes his head. Calm you down, he mouths.

What? And then it hits you—he noticed your panic (was it that obvious?) and he thinks that he’s helping you, but the awful proximity of his hand next to yours only makes it worse. He’s close, close, his hand, close—warmth of flesh, crawling and creeping and so close, just a muscle’s spasm away from pressing against your skin, sick and revolting.

Instead of focusing on his hand, just millimetres away from yours, so close if you shivered you’d be touching, and—instead, instead, you look into his eyes.

Satoru smiles. The faint scar on his jaw lengthens. His hair is combed and clean, and you’re near enough that you can tell it smells of lavender.

You focus on him, not his hand. And, even if it is to get his hand away from yours, you force your breathing to slow.

No-one seems to have noticed what happened. No-one noticed you apart from Satoru.

 He releases you, and you immediately cross your arms, shoving your hands towards yourself tightly. Your thumb digs into the flesh of your palm so hard that you can feel it through the thin material of your glove.

Satoru looks pleased. He winks at you, and you force yourself to smile back, flitting your eyes from him and the front of your room. You flex your shoulder blades back, and the skin pulls. Your father places the paper back in his jacket’s pocket and sits down. The windows of the hall are brilliantly clean, and you can see bone-white clouds obscuring grey sky.

In unison, the congregation stands. You join them a beat late.

People start to file out, getting into their cars to head to the funeral meal. Your father and Sara step forward, getting closer to the casket. They add an envelope to a small pile of gifts; envelopes, sealed with black and white string. Outside the hall, there’s a loud rush of wind, a deep rumbling that tells you a storm will hit tonight.

“Wanna get out of here?” Satoru leans over to you, whispering it even though there’s hardly anyone around to hear him. You jolt at the sound of his voice, bringing you sharply out of a haze you’d been slowly sinking into.

“My father’s gonna be furious,” you say. “Sure.”

Everyone else has been filing out of the main exit; large oak double-doors with twisting vines engraved into their sides, like an archway. You and Satoru walk out the opposite way.

You expect to follow him through a winding mess of corridors and doorways, but soon enough you’ve made it outside—the back of the building, with a large dustbin and loose cans scattered on the floor.

Grey-green weeds sprout between the cracks in concrete, stubbornly raising their heads to the dim sunlight.

“Let’s go on a walk,” Satoru says, and you nod.

You’re immensely grateful for him—even in that last short moment, you were suffocating in that room, and you don’t think you could have spent another minute in there, with their faceless wives and their sour, harsh husbands. You inhale, deeply. The air’s cold, biting, but you hold your arms out to it anyway. You shiver.

Satoru keeps you company. He talks, and you listen.

He tells you about his lessons; what he did this morning; how developing his Infinity is making him crave white chocolate; how he’s getting really good wielding a katana; how he could take you on in a fight if you weren’t using cursed techniques; how easily he’d win; how cool he thinks you look when you’re training with a scythe; how cool he thinks he looks when he’s using Infinity; if you think he should get new glasses; his opinion on apples.

You smile at him. All of these things, he does instinctively; he doesn’t need to ask to know if you’re frightened, or need to leave a room, or need him to talk and let you think. You don’t even know if he does it consciously—and so that whole thing, where he held your sleeve, you can’t blame him for not getting something right, once.

If everything else, everything, is always so perfect, so absolutely correct for exactly what you wanted, then one mistake is nearly meaningless in the wide ocean of good.

His eyes flick to yours, and he seems to notice that you’re paying more attention.

“I think I like funerals,” Satoru says, swinging his arms by his side.

You choke a little. “You what?”

“Funerals. I like them.” He loosens his tie and then takes it off fully, wrapping it around his head like a weird bandanna. “It shows how the world’s changing. The evolution of society: new replacing the old!”

“I can’t take you seriously if you look like that,” you say, grinning. “You’re ridiculous.”

Satoru pulls his tie down so it covers his eyes, forming the stupidest-looking blindfold you could imagine. He staggers about and waves his arms around in a caricature of a zombie. Laughing, you skirt out of the way of his flailing limbs, running about ten meters away.

“Hebi-Hebi! Where’ve you gone?” Satoru straightens up, still pretending that he’s blinded himself. “You’ve abandoned me!”

“You’re an idiot,” you call out, crossing your arms and starting to walk away. “If you don’t want to talk to me about your future plans, then…”

“No, no I do! Wait, come back!”

Satoru reaches your side in about a millisecond. He shoves his ‘blindfold’ off his eyes, up over his forehead again—it makes his hair stick up wildly, standing up so tall it’s basically defying gravity. It’s a somewhat strange look, but it’s also really cute, and you have to look away before you start saying anything ridiculous, like a compliment. He laughs, bright.

You walk in silence for a little while, aimless other than enjoying each other’s company. You kick at a pebble on the street and watch as it flies fifteen feet in the air, looping and then falling to the floor with a clink! as it shatters into pieces.

“We’re going to be amazing, you and me,” Satoru says, “because we’re going to change the world.”

“We are?”

“Mmhm. Make everything better for the next generation—get rid of the old, tired leaders, all the higher-ups who don’t know anything about anything anymore, and hand it all over to us. We’re the young ones, aren’t we? We’re gonna make the change.”

You nod. “I’d like that. Changing people’s lives for the better.”

Satoru laughs: clear, hearty, quiet—the laugh he reserves for you. “You focus on changing people’s lives. I’m sure they’d be really grateful for that, all of them would. However, I’ve got ambitions a little grander than that.”

“I’m sure you have.”

“Of course I do! See, you can change people’s lives all you like, Hebi-Hebi: but I’m going to change everything.”

“Everything?”

Satoru’s eyes glimmer. “Everything.”

Notes:

2003
Thirteen years old

-

Yo.

I am not dead! This is not abandoned! I pinkie promise that this will never be scrapped (I have never broken a pinkie promise, so you can trust me on that). Just a head's-up.

Also, hahahaha. Love me a good funeral. When I was planning this chapter out, I was debating whether to kill off Grandmother Hebi or kill off Sara, buuuut I have decided that (as a feminist), I can't end Sara like that, especially after lumping her with such a shite life up until this point--I genuinely just felt too bad for her lol, so she's still with us.

<3

Chapter 9: 2004

Tuesday 7th September, 2004

The ceiling isn’t really a ceiling anymore: over the years, it’s been weathered down by the rain (and by Satoru’s disastrous attempts to show off his cursed technique), so fragments of the smooth rock have gently crumbled away. Golden light shines through the slices that are big enough for you to see through, and you stare up at them, watching as clouds drift slowly in and out of your vision. Hints of sakura sway in the corner of one of the windows, floating pink and soft, and if the warm breeze picks up enough you’ll see some petals be plucked from their brethren, flutter down, twisting like a dancer along the wind’s current.

So far, none of them have found their way into your hand, but you keep it outstretched anyway, grasping lazily at the sweet-tasting air.

Satoru groans, and shifts over onto his back. His head lolls to the side, pressing against the floor as he arches his spine to wake himself up. Yawning, he rubs his knuckles into his eyes and they blink open, parting half-way before squinting closed against the light.

“Good morning,” he says drowsily, slurring his words. “It’s very bright, isn’t it?”

“Mmm,” you say, leaning back against the soft pillow, feeling your head sink into it. “Not really morning, though.”

“It’s not? Feels like morning.”

“Yeah.” You remember what you’d wanted him to do now he’s awake. “Hey, Gojo.”

“Ngh.”

“Gojo.”

“Mrnh.”

“Gojo…” you say, drawing his name out like you would with your cat. “Gojoo, wake upp…”

Satoru covers his eyes with his wrist and gives you a lethargic glare. “Still sleepy,” he says, pouting. You smile at him, completely and utterly enamoured.

“Can you reach something for me,” you whisper, words lilting and warm. “I don’t think I can move.”

“Me neither,” he protests. “Just woke up… you reach it.”

You don’t say anything for a second, and then (just like you thought it would) his curiosity gets the better of him.

Satoru rolls to his side, grimacing. “What even is it?”

“The calendar,” you say sadly, pointing to the offending item some few meters away. It’s open to the September page, with five red crosses on the first five days. “I’m too tired to move.”

“Lazy-lazy Hebi-Hebi,” Satoru yawns.

“Sure,” you say, your eyes flicking to the way his cheeks puff out. It’s entirely too adorable. “But I’m allowed to be lazy just this once, right? And I really don’t want to get it.”

“I don’t want to move, either.”

“Just use Blue on it.”

“Really?” Satoru eyes you suspiciously. “I thought I wasn’t allowed to use Limitless ever since I blew up the ceiling.”

You glance up to the slices of light above you. Winters in the Chapel really have never been the same.

“Maybe not, then…” you say, letting out a great sigh as you pull yourself up to standing. Honestly, you’d known that you’d have to be the one to get up first (you definitely don’t want a repeat of the last time Satoru tried to show off his technique), and with some contended acceptance you pad over to the calendar, pick up the pen hanging by its side and strike a big ‘X’ through Monday 6^th September, 2004.

“One more day closer to Jujustu High,” you tell him, as you do every day.

“One more day closer to running the world,” Satoru responds, as he always does. “What’s the time, by the way?”

“Definitely not morning.” You stretch out your back and check your watch. “About four.”

Satoru yawns again. It takes up his entire face, scrunching up his eyes and highlighting the slight creases over his cheeks. Little indentations, dimples, that keep you attention whenever he smiles—they’re from smiling too much, he’d told you once, whilst smiling. I’m going wrinkly. All your fault. You make me smile too much.

“Four?” Satoru repeats, bringing his knuckles to his temples and stretching his shoulders back. He points his toes, his limbs shuddering as they begin to reawaken. “It’s been two hours. You said you’d wake me up, Hebi-Hebi.”

“You’re impossible when you’re sleeping,” you say, playing with the corner of Satoru’s discarded pillow. “Just like you’re impossible when you’re awake. I could throw you down the stairs and you still wouldn’t wake up if you didn’t want to.”

“Just take off your gloves and give me a little tap,” Satoru says, his hair falling over his eyes, tangling with his eyelashes. “That’d wake me up.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m—I’m serious,” he yawns. His eyes slide closed again. “Must’ve been really boring, though, without me awake. Tell me—next time—”

“Hey, hey, don’t fall asleep again—!”

You chuck the pillow at him and it lands right over his face. Satoru splutters, shoving the pillow off of him and, after blinking wildly for a few seconds, throwing it straight back at you. It hits you squarely in the chest and you wheeze, your giggles cut off by a hacking cough.

You’d never tell him the real reason you didn’t wake him up. Of course, Satoru being the world’s deepest sleeper is nothing new: he can sleep anywhere, provided he’s given an hour or two to stop his brain from “whizzing” (his words, not yours). Once he’s out, though, he’s out for good. Nothing on this earth can wake up Satoru Gojo from a nap, especially not the poor, mortal attempts of his best friend.

Annoyingly, he’s also an extremely restless sleeper: he’s unable to stay still, even when asleep, and is constantly moving himself around, tossing and turning like he’s in the middle of a fight. You have to sit about a meter and a half away from him whenever he sleeps, since it’s very likely that a rogue limb will fly out of nowhere and attempt to hit you in the stomach.

But, much to your private mortification, Satoru’s sleeping habits aren’t the only reason you let him sleep.

You’d devoted the day to spending time with each other in the Chapel—Yahaba had packed you some food which you’d picked at throughout the day, but other than that it had just been you two, content with doing absolutely nothing other than existing near each other. It’s a gorgeous day, with warmth that wraps around you like a soft blanket, and it hadn’t been a surprise when Satoru, his eyes already fluttering closed, had told you to wake him in about half an hour.

You hadn’t.

When he sleeps, Satoru’s face… softens, almost. A lot of how he acts is a pretence, something you know very well by know, but sometimes it’s easy to forget. It’s never bothered you (all sides of him are real, just different aspects of the full picture—and you really like the full picture, so why should there be an issue?) but you love moments like this, where you can see another part of him that’s usually hidden under mountains of narcissism and childishness.

When he sleeps, Satoru’s hair covers his eyes, and his slow, regular breaths make the loose strands float from side-to-side in a way that he’d be very annoyed with if awake. His eyebrows twitch, forming a little wrinkle above his nose that’s so perfect it makes you nearly explode. The nose-wrinkle—adorable, adorable, stupid and ridiculous and adorable—never appears when he’s awake. You think it’s because his face is so expressive when he talks, a different expression flicking over it every other second. The nose-wrinkle is a sign of serenity, and Satoru is the least serene person you can think of. You smile, burying your burning face in your hands.

“What’s up, Hebi-Hebi-Hebi?” Satoru says, propping himself up on his elbows. They’re grazed, from when he’d tripped over a rock this morning and had landed badly on the ground. He’d laughed, shocked to see himself bleeding, and probably would have stayed like that if you hadn’t forced him to sit down and clean them.

“I’m not a baby, Hebi,” he’d said, lounging out on the tree stump. “And you don’t have to treat me like one.”

You’d tutted, having crouched down to the left of him, busying yourself with the little first aid kit you’d picked up from the Chapel. “I’ll stop treating you like a baby if you stop acting like one.”

“You sound like Yahaba, only more mean—OW!” Satoru jerked his elbow back, pouting. “That hurt.”

“It’s an alcohol wipe, Satoru. If that hurts, then you really are a baby. C’mon, give me your arm back.”

Satoru had made a big display of debating his choices. “I don’t know if I can trust you, now that you’re deliberately hurting me.”

“I’m preventing you from getting an infection, idiot.”

“Now, when you say mean things like that, it just makes me more reluctant to trust you.”

You’d hidden your amusement with a scowl. “Oh lovely Gojo, may you pretty-pretty-please stop being such a baby and give me your arm before I actually end your existence.”

Satoru had chuckled. “I’d really like to see you try.”

You’d ignored him. There hadn’t been any professional bandages, but the injuries were hardly that serious, so you’d rooted around in the box to try to find something more suitable. Finally, you’d procured two Pokémon plasters, one for each elbow. About a year ago, Satoru had found them in a shopping centre and bought them as a joke—but, holding them up for his inspection, you hadn’t missed the way his eyes lit up with excitement.

All ideas of resistance behind him, he’d held his elbows up happily. You’d rolled your eyes, but had dutifully peeled off the plasters’ paper backings and shifted forwards to gain access at a better angle. Slowly, you’d smoothed the plaster over the graze on his elbow; it’d been difficult, making sure there was always the cushioned layer of the plaster between your fingers and Satoru’s skin—especially because you’d been so close to him it’d been distracting, far too distracting—but your thumb had slid over the first, and then the second, and then you were done. You’d leaned back immediately, pretending to tidy up the first aid box.

Satoru had beamed at you. “Brilliant job! You’re actually amazing at this stuff!”

You pushed the box into his arms, looking at the ground furiously. “Whatever. Be more careful next time.”

Satoru follows your gaze and sits up, twisting his arms in front of you and showing off the two plasters; a red Pikachu-themed one on his left, and a blue one with a wide-eyed Eevee on his right.

“I feel very cool,” he boasts, wiggling his elbows at you. The edge of his Eevee plaster dangles off and Satoru lets out a dramatic gasp as soon as he notices, nearly jumping out of his seat to fix it back on.

Satoru presses the pad of his thumb against it tenderly, smoothing it down and giving it a little pat once it’s stuck back down.

The gesture fills you with such warmth, such adoration and care for him that you genuinely think you might have a heart attack.

Your chest tightens and you rage against the overwhelming urge to throw your arms around him, right then and there. The other part of your brain recoils at the thought, instantly, but the more delirious half revels at the thought of holding him, having him close, seeing him smile down at you with a hand on the back of your neck. You think about how his thumb smoothed down the plaster, and you think about how he might smooth down your hair; softly, gently, smiling.

“One day closer to Jujustu High,” you repeat instead, gesturing to the calendar still in your hands.

Satoru grins. “One day closer to freedom!” he says, throwing his hands into the air. “I absolutely cannot wait.”

“Me neither.” You talk about this all the time, but the conversation never seems to dry up, so you launch back into it. “Dorms, though! Living on the school property like we’re adults!”

“Apparently the teachers live in rooms next to you,” Satoru says, “like, we’re in one block, and they’re in another one right beside us.”

“Really?” you say, amazed. “If they do, that’s kinda awesome. It really shows dedication, doesn’t it? I think anyone who teaches at that school must be some of the coolest people in the world.”

“For sure,” Satoru agrees. “But we would be like adults, wouldn’t we? Living on our own, independently.”

Your gaze drifts around the Chapel; the Pokémon posters on the wall that Satoru had found for ¥50 each and had called you up in a mad frenzy of excitement; the ridiculously bad drawings you’d done of each other whilst blindfolded, all scribbled lines and overlapping shapes; the broken shards of Satoru’s first pair of glasses, shattered when he’d decided to hang upside-down on a tree branch fifteen feet in the air; three copies of Vogue Japan-September 1999 with tissue paper hearts stuck around the edges; the notes Satoru writes to you when bored in his lessons, now displayed on the wall at your bashful insistence; two engravings, worn over by time, of an infinity symbol and a snake.

This is your childhood. There’s the memories of your life surrounding you, and then there’s the reminder of your adolescence: the two acceptance letters, both printed onto the same ivory paper, both telling you the same thing.

“We’re basically grown-ups now,” you say, even though you know that the very word makes you sound childish. You correct yourself: “Adults.”

“I don’t feel like an adult,” Satoru says. He sits with his legs crossed together, leaning with his elbows on his knees. Noticing your judgemental gaze, he sticks his tongue out.

You laugh. “Obviously. You’re immature and childish, Gojo. You’re not an adult.”

“I’m an adult. I’m a man,” he says, probably just to make you giggle again.

“You won’t be a man for, like…” You stretch out your arms above your head. “I don’t know. Years.”

“I’m a man,” Satoru insists. “I feel like a man. I act like a man. I look like a man.”

You spare him a glance, and then purse your lips and look at him properly. Your first instinct is to deny it, like you normally do—take his ego down a peg, save yourself the bother of dealing with an even-more-narcissistic Satoru—but his statement actually holds some weight.

It’s not as if he’s stopped growing. Satoru’s still slightly lanky from his recent growth spurts, not quite proportionate in the way you think he’ll grow to be. Still, you can’t deny that he’s changed in the past few months—physically, at least.

His voice getting deeper has been the most amusing change; every so often, his voice will go all trembly and squeaky, completely out of nowhere. He gets so annoyed when you laugh at him, but it’s very difficult to find someone intimidating when they have a voice that sounds like a cartoon character.

There’s other things. He’s tall, now. He can reach things you can’t, and your stomach always flips when he leans against doorframe of his room back at the Gojo household, arms braced and sleeves falling to expose his forearms. His jaw has gotten sharper, you think, and maybe his shoulders have gotten broader. It’s difficult to tell, since you see him practically every day, but looking at him now makes it clear.

The thought makes your face feel uncomfortably warm, and you tear your glance away from him and fiddle with your gloves instead. There’s hardly anything you can’t talk about with Satoru, but this feels different, somehow.

You’re aware, suddenly, that Satoru isn’t a girl.

It’s confusing. You stretch your fingers in your gloves. Of course you know that Satoru isn’t a girl. It’s not like you haven’t noticed. But… it’s never really been something that needed to be noticed—and now you’re getting older, things have changed, and you’re noticing it more and more.

You like his hair. You like his eyes. You like the way he talks to you, when he smiles and his cheeks dimple and his lips purse. You like that he likes you, and you like that you’re his favourite.

You like his arms. You like the breadth of his shoulders. You like that his training has made him lean, muscular, and strong. You like the way he looks after you’ve sparred together, hair damp with sweat, shirt sticking to his back, cheeks flushed with a wicked look in his eye. You like to look when he stretches, catch glimpses of pale skin and hipbones and the smooth lines of his stomach.

There’s a tight feeling in your stomach, and you clear your throat. You shouldn’t think about things like that.

“You have the personality of a cow,” you say instead, closing the conversation down. You cock your head to the side. “Hey.”

“Hey-hey, Hebi-Hebi.”

You smile. “Do you think… will you miss it?”

“Hmm?”

“This. All of this, I mean, our homes. When we go to school.”

“I think so.” Satoru hums. “You won’t, though.”

“What, my home? Nah, not at all.” You sometimes feel guilty, leaving Sara and Haru all on their own, in that big empty house with your father. You want to help them, because the years in that house have taught you how to survive it, at least—but then you remember the scratch of rope against the skin of your wrists, and you feel the rising need to escape all over again, and you know you’ve made the right decision.

“Still. It’ll be weird.” Satoru cocks his head to the side. “Yeah. It’ll be weird not having Yahaba all the time.”

You snort. “You’ll be shocked at what life’s like when you’re not surrounded by billions of servants, Gojo. Life’s going to be very different for you.”

“Nah,” Satoru says, shaking his head. The fairest strands catch the orange afternoon light and glimmer like fine strands of gold. “I’m really self-sufficient, you know. I can do loads of stuff by myself—”

“But you just happen to get the servants to do everything?”

“Why not?” Satoru smiles crookedly. “If they really want to serve me, then why shou—oof!”

You’d thrown another pillow at him.

“Leave off the pillows,” he mutters, straightening his hair.

“Get better at your Infinity, then.”

“That’s not an excuse,” he says, darkly. “I’ll sue you for abuse.”

Chuckling, you humph down on the floor, flopping your legs down into a wide V-shape. Satoru shuffles over and mimics your posture, sitting opposite you, creating a diamond with your legs. It places your feet a hair’s breadth away from his.

He notices a little after you do.

Satoru seems to hesitate, and then slowly straightens his foot into a point. You pull back at once—you tuck your knees into your chest, wrapping your arms around your legs. You both look at each other.

He almost touched you. Through your shoes, not skin-on-skin, but touch. Satoru had tried to touch you. Your hands shake. You curl further in on yourself, to hide it.

Satoru leans back, contemplative.  

“So what is it?” he says, resting his weight on one arm and gesturing at you. “What’s the idea behind it all?”

“What?” you mumble, resting your chin into your knees. “The idea behind what?”

“The no-touching thing. Wait, no,” he says hastily, as you begin to withdraw, “hold on a second. I don’t think I’ve asked, not properly.”

“You have.”

“I haven’t!”

“You have,” you say, obstinately, glaring at him over the tops of your knees, “you’ve just forgotten. I’ve told you loads of times.”

“Tell me again.”

“I shouldn’t have to,” you say. “You should just remember. That’s what friends do.”

“Remind me.” Satoru’s eyes are wide and innocent, and it cracks away at your defiance. “Please?”

You furrow your eyebrows together, and sigh. “It’s complicated. I don’t get why you care so much.”

“It’s because I care about you, Hebi-Hebi,” he says, as if it’s obvious. “And it’s rubbish to see you get so stressed out just because—” he points to your shoes, white rubber peeking out from underneath your furled-up legs, “—just because my shoe nearly touched yours. It’s not like it’s skin-on-skin, is it? Just… shoe-on-shoe.”

You know that what he’s saying makes sense. It’s everything that makes sense—exactly what you were thinking before. But it was instinctual, something you’ve carved into yourself for over half your life, and Satoru’s logic can’t get rid of that, however reasonable it appears to your brain.

“So you do remember,” you mutter instead, reluctantly unfurling from your defensive position. “Skin-on-skin, right? You do remember.”

Satoru grins faux-guiltily. “Not really.”

“Gojo.”

“I… agh, fine, fine! I thought…” He considers it, pursing his lips like he’s chewing the words. “I thought if you explained it, then you’d realise that it doesn’t make any sense. There’s nothing wrong with, like, me holding onto your arm, right? Like, I get why you’d be weird about your hands, but that’s different.” He shrugs. “You’ve got to realise at some point. I just wanted to help you along.”

“That’s not how it works,” you say. It’s difficult to find the words—how can you explain something, make someone sympathise, when you don’t even have any genuine sympathy for yourself? You know that you should change, and you wish you could, but you also know that you just can’t.

“But if you know that your brain’s wrong—”

“It doesn’t mean I can change how it reacts.” You look down at your hands—you’re more familiar with the colour of your gloves than the colour of your skin beneath them. “It’s like… there’s two parts of me, right? Like there’s two sides of my brain. And there’s the logical side, that understands that it won’t actually be bad if I touch anyone… but then there’s the other side, the side that makes me so scared of everything all the time, and that’s the side that controls everything.”

It controls you. It’s the side that makes your hands shake, your pulse race, your head begin to swim whenever you think of flesh against yours. It’s the side that reminds you that you almost caused your own mother’s death. It’s the side that speaks with your father’s voice. It’s the side that bears his disdain.

“Just make the logical side bigger,” Satoru says, as if it’s that simple. “Just focus on the right side, the side that feels like you, and then you’ll get better.”

You knaw on your lip, desperate to find a way to explain it. “But—but that’s not—”

Satoru cuts you off with a smile.

“I know. I know that’s not how it works.” He tilts his head down and looks up at you, silver eyelashes obscuring your view of his eyes. It takes a lot of willpower to stay still, to stare at him straight-on. Satoru’s lips twitch, and he looks at you with such affection you feel light-headed. “I just care about you, that’s all.”

Your face heats up, and you go to grab another pillow. You weren’t intending to use it, but Satoru has apparently had enough of being thrown at and you’re pushed back two or three meters by this strong, magnetic force repelling you from him.

Scrambling to your feet, you glare at him. He grins up at you innocently.

“No cursed techniques in the Chapel,” you say, fighting back laughter as he blinks up at you, mouth parted in an awful façade of innocence.

“But—”

“Limitless counts as a cursed technique, Gojo. You don’t see me, all… all… just whipping off my gloves and holding onto any living thing I can find, do you?”

“You could, if you wanted to,” Satoru says, and you roll your eyes, not bothering to continue the subject.

“Well, I don’t, and neither can you.” You press your lips together in an expression you hope conveys severity, and not concealed amusement.

Satoru pouts, his eyes glistening like a baby animal’s, and you do end up laughing this time. He smiles in a proud way.

“I don’t like rules,” he says, pulling at a loose thread in the rug he’s sitting on.

“I know.” You sit down next to him, and he turns his head your way, smiling. “You’re going to hate school.”

“I am not! I’m going to be the best student Jujutsu High’s ever seen!”

“I’m not saying you won’t. But you’ll hate it all the same. Rules, Gojo, rules. School’s full of them.”

“I just won’t listen to the rules,” Satoru sighs. He props his glasses on the very end of his nose and then slides them back up, before repeating the motion absent-mindedly. “If I don’t listen to the rules, will you not listen to the rules with me? We can just not listen to the rules together?”

“I’m going to listen to all of the rules. I’ve got to be a model student.” You look at your acceptance letters, stuck proudly to the wall. You’ve read through yours so many times you could recite it wearing Satoru’s glasses, but you think back to the most important aspect of the letters—the reason for admission. Gojo’s had read: Enrolment method…Family Lineage. Yours had differed: Enrolment method…Exceptional Aptitude.

It’d left you slightly annoyed, even amidst the joy of knowing you were actually, actually going to Jujutsu High. Your abilities were hardly exceptional—above average, certainly, but that was merely a result of the intensive training you’d been participating in for years. Compared to Satoru (though you recognise that the comparison is far from a fair one), you’d argue you’re rather mediocre.

Your father and grandmother both went to Jujutsu High, but they’re not the Gojos, or the Zenins, or the Kamos, or any other prestigious family. It doesn’t bother you, exactly, but the words Exceptional Aptitude serve as a fresh reminder of how far you still have to go.

“You’re boring,” Satoru groans, and you chuckle.

“Model student. The best grades of any in the class, I’m hoping for. Or maybe second-best,” you say, after a second’s consideration. “Shoko’s really smart. Did I tell you she wants to be a doctor?”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Cool, right?” You nod along with Satoru. “But being a sorcerer is going to be just as cool, I think.”

“Whatever I do will be inherently cool,” Satoru says, waggling his index finger at you. You giggle. “Maybe I’ll be a sorcerer. Maybe I’ll be a doctor. Maybe I’ll be one of those cool teachers, you know, like the ones who live on the school grounds.”

You try to imagine Satoru teaching anyone anything, and you snort. And then you look at him, and you remember him showing you how to first use a katana. This was years ago, before you were comfortable enough with Iori to ask for more specific lessons, but the memory resurfaces easily, as if it was just the other day.

Satoru blinks up at you, and you wonder how it’s possible for a human to be so lovely and so mind-meltingly frustrating and still so beautiful, all at the same time.

“Remember when you taught me how to use a sword?” you say, gently, and Satoru squints his eyes, trying to remember.

“I think so,” he starts, and the something clears in his eyes and he says, brightly: “Yes! I do! That was so fun—I forgot about that.”

“You kept telling me I had bad form,” you say.

“You did have bad form,” Satoru says, matter-of-fact. “I was doing you a favour.”

You laugh. “You were really annoying, actually. I just wanted to fight with a weapon, but you kept telling me how to balance my weight, or something.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Satoru says, yawning. Your eyes fix on the movement in his throat as he laughs. “Your form’s excellent now, though. Almost—almost as good as mine.”

“You’re so narcissistic,” you say, softly.

Satoru nods. “But you don’t care, do you?”

“I don’t,” you agree, your voice far too tender than you’d intended it.

“You’re so kind to me,” Satoru says, falling back onto the floor and clutching his pillow. “So amazing. You’re the best. Have I told you that? You really are the best.”

And then of course you want to throw your arms around him. You restrain yourself. Obviously.

“Your hair’s messed up,” you say instead, pointing to how half is standing up on one side of his head, probably from him sleeping on his side.

“It is?” he says, aghast, and shuffles over to a mirror you’d hung up on the wall a couple years ago. Satoru shakes his head, lips pursed, and tugs at his hair in a pointless attempt to tame it.

“I’ll have some product somewhere,” you say, heaving yourself from the floor and ferreting around the many bags shoved to the sides of the floor. “Remember, you brought some up when slept over here the first time? You said you didn’t want me to see you with bedhead.”

Satoru smiles, still grooming himself in the mirror. “Ah, how times change. You know what, Hebi-Hebi, don’t bother getting anything. I’m alright with this.”

“You are?” you say, raising an eyebrow. “I’m allowed to see you with messy hair?”

“Course you are. The only person who can never see me with this hair is Ei-chan.” Satoru tilts his head to the side and sighs dopily. “My beautiful Ei-chan.”

And there it is. You’ve been hearing about this ‘beautiful Ei-chan’ for a couple weeks now, and it’s some miracle that Satoru hasn’t mentioned her yet today. Ei-chan is a girl in Satoru’s Foreign Languages lessons; Ei-chan sits next to Satoru in class; Ei-chan is lovely, incredible, stunning, and is also the new girl Satoru’s in love with.

Ei-chan isn’t the first of his infatuations. Satoru had spoken to you, stars in his eyes, obsessed with this girl he met in the market today who was unimaginably funny and who shared her bag of caramels with him and whose lips are heart-shaped and red—and it had affected you.

There’s only so much that you can allow yourself to feel, in terms of jealousy and upset, whilst you’re still keeping everything a secret from Satoru. You don’t think it’s fair, for him, if you let your personal feelings impact him. If you’re keeping quiet, which, of course, you have to—then you can hold everything in. And you can forget about it. Most of the time.

You were just getting used to him talking about the caramel girl, until it was the next week and he was in love with the girl who’d fixed his glasses, and then the next week was the girl who’d laughed at his jokes about video games, and the next… and this went on and on until you had learnt to not let it bother you.

But even if the girl changes every week, it’s still painful for you to hear about them. It hurts you with a physical, real pain, right in the center of your chest, digging deep and wrenching your bones out of you one-by-one, splitting skin and muscle and tendon as you watch Satoru enthuse about their eyes or legs or hair or laugh, watch him recount all of the things that you have noticed about him. You watch him fall in love again and again, constantly ignoring that you love those things about him, that you’ve always loved him.

You blink. Satoru keeps talking about his Ei-chan. You blink again.

Oh.

Oh.

You love him.

Because of course you do. You love him. And the realisation isn’t momentous; it’s not waves of knowledge suddenly crashing down on you, and you’re not left gasping and clutching at the air like you have been in the past… because of course you love him. The realisation is soft, gentle, smiling; it’s opening your window and watching light rush into your room, it’s warm water lapping at your feet, sand beneath your toes, rays of sunlight embracing your skin.

Because you love him, because of course you do.

It’s always been there. You spend time with him, and it’s easy. You don’t know anyone else whose company you find so easy, so simple. You love him. In a different way, he loves you back. Satoru’s love for you has always been there—since you know he loves you, even if it’s not in the way you want him to—and it’s been a constant in your life for more time than it hasn’t.

But you love him. He loves you, but you love him.

You almost can’t remember what it’d been like when he wasn’t there, when you hadn’t been able to rely on him with absolute and unwavering certainty. It’s been infinite how a circle is infinite: complete yet unending, with no clear beginning. As far back as you can remember, he’s always been there. You love him, and he loves you. And you love him again, differently.

But that’s okay. You smile down at him: Satoru, gesturing wildly with his hands, eyes brilliantly wide and blue, glancing to you every few seconds to make sure you’re paying attention to him. This—this life, right here, this is love. And you’re happy, with this life, you’re happy with him.

You’re leaving your childhood behind, and you’re doing it happily—because the only good thing about it is coming with you. You’ll enter this new life together, side-by-side, and you’re content: because you love him, because of course.

Notes:

2004
Fourteen years old

-

This might be one of my favourite chapters yet. Honestly, I was reading it back and just smiling like a little idiot--it's a lovely little insight into a boring, normal day, and I absolutely love it.

I didn't exactly mean for this chapter to come out just a few hours after Queen Lizzy's news broke, but hey ho. Tis a bit strange--I think there was a bit of me that thought the gal was immortal. Still, if we don't get some time off over here I'll be seething.

Ta-ta and cheerio!

Chapter 10: 2005

Wednesday 7th September, 2005

When you wake up, it takes a moment for you to remember why you’re nearly crying.

And then you do remember, and everything crashes down on you, all over again. There’s a ringing in your ears, high-pitched and incessant. The intensity wanes throughout the day, but you’ve not been free of it for weeks.

Your eyelids ache. Your sleeping’s been getting worse recently. Not that it’s ever been that great, but still—your nights now consist of hours and hours spent staring at the ceiling, willing yourself to fall asleep.

You pull yourself out of your bed and get changed in silence. When you’d first arrived at school, you’d briefly worried that you’d be forced to share a room with someone else. It’s fortunate that you’ve been allowed to keep your privacy. You consider yourself an only child, basically—Haru was born too late in your life for you to consider him a significant part of your childhood. It means that the thought of having to share your space with someone else breaks you out in a sweat.

The letter’s still sitting on your desk, discarded from where you’d left it last night. Curled in the middle, half-open.

It stares up at you, dark ink on white paper, berating you for your cowardice. You stare at it for another minute, and then pick it up with trembling fingers. In the early morning, everything you touch feels cold.

It’s short:

Hello.

I thought I should let you know that I’ve got a job. It’s in an office, and it doesn’t pay lots. But I’ve got a job now, and I thought you should know. Haru’s having a babysitter, he’ll be fine. It’s only a few days a week. Your father will be more comfortable with it later because it’s only a few days a week, I’ll be fine. 

Sorry for not telling you when you were here on your holiday, but your father didn’t know yet. I didn’t want to tell you before I told him. 

I should have asked you how you were the last few days as well, you seemed down? But I felt awkward asking. Sorry. Hope you’re okay. 

Give Satoru my love,

Sara

Your eyes latch on the final lines, as they did last night, and the shrill ringing intensifies.

There’s the feeling of being underwater, with the pressure pushing against your eardrums so tightly you can’t hear anything anymore. The world transforms into dull sounds and mouthed words.

Your eyes sting. You’ve resolved not to cry about it. It’s been nearly three weeks, and you’ve decided that it’s time to move forwards. Wallowing is pointless, and feeling sorry for yourself is just rubbish—things are what they are, and you’ll move on. You need to forget about it.

And then your mind drifts to the feeling of sunlight on your bare palm, to the sobbing, the gasping noises you hadn’t recognised as your own, and to how broken Satoru had looked yesterday. And the day before. And every day, for nearly three weeks.

Anger tears at you, slicing your torso with sharp, white-hot claws. You fall back to it like it’s a soft bed after a long night: with comfort, relief. Anger dispels everything else, and you gladly let it consume you.

There’s a knock on your door.

“Go away,” you tell it, picking up your backpack and shoving your books into it.

You glare at the picture of the newest Vogue model on your wall—the woman’s done nothing wrong except be the cover girl twice this year, but she’s in your eyeline and you hate her.

You shift your focus to zipping up your bag, and you glance at your hands. You pull your gloves on, revolted at the sight of your ashy skin. Your mind is cruel to you, and you remember the pressure on your wrist—your open, ungloved wrist—and you want to cry again.

“I’m not Gojo!” the voice says, quickly. “You can open the door, Hebi.”

You recognise it, and you exhale sharply. This isn’t the morning you’d planned to deal with all of this. You walk over to the door and throw it open, revealing Geto, smiling lazily down at you.

His hair’s been tied into a loose bun at the top of his head, the way he usually has it before class, and wisps are already beginning to fall out. When you’d first started at school, Satoru had teased him mercilessly about his inability to tie it back properly. Geto hadn’t taken offence, but had kept his hair unruly and messy. It had seemed to annoy Satoru in a way he’d liked—once again, he’d found someone who would push back against him. It was why he’d first taken to you, back when you were children. The memory reignites the flame of anger inside of you.

You like Geto. He’s calm and hard-working, if a little smug. He fits with Satoru well—the first week of school, you’d been taken aback at how smoothly their personalities slotted together. You’d even found yourself somewhat jealous, as if Geto was coaxing Satoru away from you.

It’s different now. Your heart cracks. Geto can have him.

“What.” You stare at him, completely deadpan, and his smile wilts a little.

He recovers in an instant. “I’m here to escort you to class. You seem a little lonely lately, and I thought—”

“I’m not speaking to Gojo,” you say, cutting him off.

“I never said you would,” Geto says, taking your bluntness in his stride. “I’m just here to walk to class with you.”

“I don’t want to hear what he has to say.”

“I’m sure you don’t. Want to walk to class?” He sticks his hands in his pockets and smiles. “You can hear about the dream I had last night. Can’t stop thinking about it.”

Your resolve flickers. You’re trying to keep yourself wary, but—you haven’t woken up properly. Everything exhausts you, recently. You spend your weeks walking around, deathly tired. His smile is winning you over.

“Is it so hard to believe that I’m here from the kindness of my heart?”

“…Yes.”

Geto laughs. “You’ll just have to trust me, then. I promise, no ulterior motives. You’ve got your bag packed and everything, right?”

You gesture to it, abandoned next to your bed.

“Great. We’ve got theory first today, so we should head out now if we’re going to make it on time.”

You check your watch, and look back up at Geto’s glinting eyes. It’s a complete lie and you both know it—you’ve got thirty minutes before you’ve got to be in class, and the walk only takes about ten. For a second, you consider being stubborn and staying in your room out of pure spite, but that would benefit nothing except the fleeting desire to irritate him, and for what?

Geto’s nice. You like him—and you’re definitely being too harsh on him.

“Yeah. Yeah, sorry, Geto.” You rub at your eyes, sighing. “That’d be great. Thanks.”

“I live to serve.”

You manage a little smile. “Thank you. I…I properly appreciate it, thanks.”

He chuckles, claps his hands together in a motion that’s just so Satoru your chest caves in on itself.

Geto walks faster than you do, and you have to go at double time to keep up with him. You’ve been spending too much time with Shoko, the slowest walker to grace this earth.

The grounds are a misty sage. Leaves and grass and flowers are turning grey at their tips, wilting under the pressure of the morning fog. The air is dewy with the chill of an early September day. Clouds overwhelm the sky with a thin haze of white. You pull your gloves higher up your arm, shivering.

Geto seems to be comfortable with the silence, every so often interjecting his opinions on a multitude of disjointed topics.

“My dream was shit last night,” he says, his breath misting into fog. “A nightmare, you know? I was really thirsty, so I kept drinking water from this tiny little glass I had—don’t remember where I was, but it was the only thing there—and I remember thinking, ‘what happens when I run out of water? I’m so thirsty, I’ll dehydrate’, and then something happened, and then I woke up in the middle of the night. I’m pretty sure I woke up when I dehydrated and died.”

“Grim.”

He laughs. “Do you remember your dreams?”

“Sometimes. Not most of the time.”

“Ah.” Geto nods, scratching at the back of his neck. “Lucky you. It would’ve been nice if I didn’t remember mine—dying really hurts, if you’re wondering.”

“I can’t say I was.” You glance over at him. Geto’s staring at the sky with an expression you can’t read. “Are you actually upset by it?”

“It just seems strange,” he says. “Like a bad omen. What do you think?”

It’s disconcerting, the number of questions he asks. You try to meld your voice into something reassuring-sounding. “I think you shouldn’t be superstitious. Dream omens don’t exist.”

Your dreams have been full of colour recently—blacks and reds and blues, oceans of fire you’ve been drowning in. You don’t mention it.

Geto shrugs. “Yeah. I’ll get over it.”

There’s a harshness to the sound of your feet against the cold floor. Your footsteps are irregular with Geto’s, the uneven sounds grating against your ears.

You both stop outside the classroom. The door’s ajar, but you can only hear quiet murmurs of conversation from the room behind it. This is the moment you despise, going into the first lesson of the day and trying to pretend as if everything’s alright.

“Don’t worry,” Geto says, and you blink at him. His smile seems to be genuine, and you return it briefly, pretending you were listening to what he was saying.

 You mutter something vague and watch as he pushes the door open and strolls in, like it’s that easy. You’re stuck in place for a moment too long before you steel yourself and follow him in. Bravery, you remind yourself.

There’s only four people in your year—a result of Jujutsu High’s difficult recruitment process and the lack of sorcerers reaching a child-rearing age—but during your first term you’d never found it an issue. The classroom is small, four desks lined next to each other, stationed in front of Yaga’s desk.

Satoru is slumped against his, his cheek pressed against his book, mumbling something to Shoko. He looks almost like he’s sleeping, with his glasses discarded on Shoko’s desk and his chest rising and falling in regular intervals. You know better, and hate that you do. It’s obvious, to you, that Satoru’s awake: he’s ever-so-slightly tapping his foot against the floor, and he breathes much slower when he’s asleep.

Shoko’s posture is very different: she’s got her feet up, checking her nails, nodding along to whatever Satoru’s saying. At the sound of the door, Satoru’s eyes flick up. He raises his chin at Geto in a friendly acknowledgement, but then his eyes land on you.

Satoru jerks up, so suddenly it startles Shoko out of her early-morning daze, and he pushes his glasses onto his face. They’re crooked. You’ve told him so many times to be more careful with them.

His chair scrapes against the floor, but he pays it no attention. He’s standing, now, staring at you like he hasn’t seen you for years, as if he’s waiting for you to say something. You don’t: just as you didn’t say anything yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that.

“Hi—” he starts, but you snap your head away from him, sitting down quickly in your seat next to Shoko. She doesn’t glance at you either—for the first week she’d pelted you with questions about what happened, what did Satoru do, why won’t you talk with him anymore, but once she’d recognised that you weren’t going to tell her anything she’d given up. She slides you the magazine she’d borrowed from you, and you take it in silence.

“Another day of joy, then,” Geto says to no-one in particular. Shoko breathes out a restrained laugh. Geto sighs heartily, and then chokes as Satoru punches him square in the stomach.

They grapple with each other, tussling like kids; Shoko’s focus slides back to her cuticles. You’ve seen Satoru and Geto fight, fight properly, and so it’s obvious that this is just something playful. You wonder if it was deliberate, from Geto; whether he’d been obstinate so Satoru would have an excuse to think about something else. It’s something you would have done for him, before.

Satoru’s losing energy, and even though you tell yourself to look away, look down at your desk, anywhere from him and the reminders of what he did, it’s like you’re transfixed. It’s impossible to draw your eyes from watching, noticing. And you notice: he’s lagging behind, not picking on Geto with half of the determination he could.

Satoru glances back at you, and you realise that he’s trying to catch your eye. He wants to know if you’re watching him. The moment breaks and you turn to Shoko, ignoring how his jaw tenses. Consequences, you remind yourself: this is all his fault.

The piercing pain of your headache returns, and you massage your temples with a small sigh.

Drown yourself in your studies. Block out everything else. Including him.

 

--

 

“Have you ever thought about taking off your gloves?” Satoru says, resting his head on the cool wall of the Chapel.

“Quit asking me,” you say, and watch as his lithe fingers twist the collar of his shirt. They’re never tight, his shirts, always with loose gaps between the sleeve and the elegant turn of his wrist. The fabric is thin and silken, and it moves like the churning of seafoam. 

“You should, Hebi-Hebi,” he says, and your lips quirk up. “See? You should.”

“I’ve told you…”

“It’d be good for you.” Satoru flexes his fingers in front of your face, and you squeal. You’re both laughing. 

“Maybe someday,” you say, when you both remember what you were talking about. You smile. “Just gloves off. Nothing else, but… I’d like to feel the warmth, I think. I’d like to feel the sun.”

 

--

 

Shoko dislikes combat. She reminds you, as she always does, when you knock her to the floor.

You’re beginning to tire of it, but you clamp down the irritation and offer the hilt of your scythe to help her up.

“Sorry,” you say. Shoko grabs the handle, heaving herself onto her feet. She pulls a disgruntled expression.

“Don’t apologise.” She prods at her leg and grimaces. “Ouch. That’s going to kill in the morning. You could just go easier on me, you know.”

You’ve heard this before. “No, Shoko, I—you’re a doctor, remember?”

“Exactly. I don’t want to kill people. That’s literally the opposite of what I want to do.”

“Come on,” you begin, holding back a sigh. “Stop complaining. You know you’re going to be in combat all the time.”

“I’ll complain all I want,” she grumbles, and you manage a laugh. “And I won’t be in combat if I work hard enough. Just experiments and cadavers, thank you very much.”

“You still need to be able to defend yourself,” you remind her. You can feel the heat of someone’s stare on the back of your neck—you don’t want him to see you struggling to spar with someone, even if Shoko is notorious for disliking practical lessons.

“I should be fine with what I’ve got,” Shoko says. She glares at the blade in her hand.  “I just want to get back to theory. This stuff’s useless.”

“But—”

“Even though you disagree, yes, I know.”

“I’m just saying.” You smile at her, and surprise yourself when you realise it’s genuine. “You need to be prepared for everything, Shoko.”

“I’ll be prepared for emergency surgeries, and—” she yawns, “—and maybe one or two dissections, if I’m lucky. Right now I just want to go to sleep.”

You bite your tongue. Your headache pounds. Sleep. Funny.

Tutting, you roll your eyes and lean back into your opening stance. “I’ll go easier on you.”

Shoko groans.

The wooden handle of your scythe is slowly becoming more familiar—you’d told Jujutsu High that you’d like to focus your training on weapon-based combat rather than utilising your technique, and they’d provided you with something more powerful than anything Iori could have given you. It hums, in your hand, like it’s ready to strike.

Shoko gestures for you to go again. You roll your shoulders back and attack. Stepping out of your opening position, you lunge forward in a sideways sweeping motion, the blade curling towards you as Shoko jumps backwards, swearing. You dodge her feeble counterattack easily, leaning backwards and feeling her sword whistle as it cuts the air in front of your chest.

The sun is soft, warm. Your hands are free. You laugh, joyous—you don’t feel cold anymore. 

A grey mist consumes your brain. This is easy. You’ve been training for this since you were a child, and you’ve fought things much worse than Shoko. You can see everything laid out in front of you, and it’s just one step in front of the other, following a dance that only you can see. How is this so easy?

Satoru laughs. You love him, you love him, and he’s right, of course he’s right. You should have listened to him years ago. Your eyes fall closed. The warmth—the warmth. 

Restless energy bursts out of your limbs. Satoru. You told yourself you wouldn’t think of Satoru. And it’s one step forward, and your blade clashes against Shoko’s. Dirt flies through the air as you drive her backwards. Everyone else is fighting. Satoru. The handle of your scythe rises, and you knock Shoko’s sword to the side. It clatters on the frozen floor.

His fingers are manacles. Your stomach heaves. 

Satoru. Satoru. He promised. He lied. 

“Wait—Stop! Stop!”

You stumble back, blinking. You look across at Shoko, and see that the edge of your scythe has the smallest stain of red.

“What—”

“Fuck’s sake, Hebi!” she cries, jolting back. She flicks her hand away from her, and you see a thin line of blood escape and fly through the air in droplets. “What did I say about going easier?”

“I’m—wait, what?”

“You nearly fucking sliced me, holy shit!” Shoko rubs her palm against her uniform. Darkness blooms. Panic flares through you, and you gasp.

“Shoko, I—” You slap your hands to your temples; a flash of pain shoots through your skull, but it does nothing to clear the haze surrounding you. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I—I’m so sorry, I don’t know what happened.”

“This is ridiculous,” she says. “You almost hurt me.”

“I—I wasn’t thinking, I’m so—”

Shoko swears again. She kicks at the ground, venomous. “I hate this. It’s you. You’re acting reckless.”

You wheel around to her, shocked. “Me? I’m not reckless.”

“You are. You’re not thinking, and you’re reckless.” Shoko brings her hand to her mouth and sucks away at the blood, shaking her head. “You’re never here, not since you came back from the break. I don’t care, I honestly don’t, but you’re still not thinking when you’ve got a huge weapon in your hand!”

You try to say something, but hesitate.

Shoko lets out a heavy groan of frustration. “If you’re not going to concentrate when you’re holding a metre-long weapon—”

“I am concentrating!” you protest. “I’m doing everything I should!”

“You’re in training,” she snaps, “and you were acting like you wanted to kill me. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“I’d never hurt you,” you say, stubbornly, even though that wasn’t what she was asking at all. “I’ll get used to it, Shoko, I promise I will.”

Shoko stares at you, lips pressed together, and you look to your hands, gripping the unfamiliarly powerful scythe. Guilt tugs at your chest.

You press your forehead into your palms. “I—I’m sorry, Shoko,” you say. The ground is brown and cold beneath you. Autumn. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” Shoko says. Her eyes are wide and tired. She sighs. “I’m gonna train with the second-years today.”

You consider calling after her, but as soon as you come up with the thought she’s already walking away. The words weigh heavy on your tongue. They close up the space at the back of your throat, choking you. You try to inhale; cool air rushes into your lungs, your chest rises, your throat stings with the cold. And still, somehow, you feel like you can’t breathe.  

None of this is your fault. You didn’t ask for Satoru to hurt you like that, and you didn’t ask for it to affect you the way it has. You’re suddenly spiteful, and in a burst of anger you throw your weapon down to the floor with as much force as you can.

It crashes down and rebounds, turning over in the air. It doesn’t break, and for some reason the sight of it, lying there all smug, is incensing.

When it falls you kick at it, sending it spinning a pitiful metre away from you. The blade snags on a weed. It looks ridiculous.

You feel like a child, throwing a tantrum because you don’t want your friend to be angry at you. Your head pounds, and your neck burns, and now you’re remembering that everyone else can see you. Stupid, idiot child. Before you can embarrass yourself any further, like you always, always do, you turn on your heel and pace away from the practice.

The training grounds are near the woods, stone steps carving a wound through the trees—like the woods near your house, and you’re remembering the first time Satoru had shown you the Chapel. You hadn’t known that it would be so important… and it wasn’t even called the Chapel back then, was it? He’d named it, of course he had, and you’d laughed at him. The memory’s hazy and stark-clear at the same time.  

It’s not fair. It’s not fair. You want to cry, but you’ve refused, and you can’t, not anymore. You just want to be left alone, but you want people to stay with you, to never leave you. How does that make sense? You’re being childish, but you still feel like a child. You should be grown up, old and mature and able to survive on your own, but you feel lonelier than ever.

You push your palms over your eyes and you hate how comforting your gloves are—your one constant, the only thing that stays the same in your life. Friends leave, parents leave, but this, your gloves, they’re melded to your flesh, inescapable, inevitable.   

“Hebi!” he calls, and your heart sinks even more. Not now. Not anytime, not at all, but especially not now.

You should know better than to try to ignore him. Never, in the near decade that you’ve known him, has he ever accepted being ignored. He craves attention, lives and breathes it, and depriving him from his form of sustenance only makes him need it more.

“Hebi!” Satoru says, again and again. “Hebi! Wait, Hebi! Wait! Talk to me, okay?”

“Go away,” you hiss, pulling yourself up a high step and striding further into the woods. The sound of training is distant, muffled by the trees, but his voice consumes everything that would have been peaceful.

He reaches you, jumping up to land by your side, raising his hands—instinctively, you jerk away from him. Manacles. They felt like manacles. He takes a step back, hurt flashing over his face.

“I won’t do anything,” he says, “but you’ve got to let me talk to you. Please?”

The wounded expression on his face pulls at you. It’s Satoru. He looks so dejected: lonely, just like you. Sympathy and fear urge you to forget the feeling of his flesh melding with yours, how he hadn’t let go even when you’d sobbed—but his words add fuel to the fierce anger, blazing up a fire.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” you say, with as much contempt as you can manage, “and I’ve not got to do anything. Now leave me alone.”

Satoru sprints after you, taking two steps at a time. “I’m not going to! I’m not leaving you alone, and you’re going to have to talk to me. So… so deal with it, alright?”

You grit your teeth. “Go away.”

“No,” he says, viciously stubborn. “I’m not leaving until you talk to me. You’ve been avoiding me for weeks, and it’s stopping right now. I don’t care what you think about it, but you’ve got to hear me out with this.”

“Fine.” You turn on him, chewing on the sour words. Satoru nearly stumbles backwards; he seems shocked you’re actually listening to him. You glare at him, furious, no time for his surprise. “Talk. Explain yourself. Now. I’m listening.”

“You are?” Satoru’s eyes are wide. He’s pushed down his glasses so you can see the clear blue of his irises. Is it accidental, or does he know that you like to see his eyes? Does he know that he seems more genuine like that? Was it deliberate? Does that count as manipulative, or is he just being smart?

“I said I’m listening.” You’re frustrated: he doesn’t seem convinced. “Just talk, Gojo.”

Satoru takes a breath, seems to steady himself, and when he speaks again his voice is calmer, more controlled. “I know you wanted to be alone, but Suguru’s been telling me to talk to you for ages now and so I promised I would. But you’ll listen to me, won’t you? Actually listen?”

You don’t trust yourself to speak—instead, you gesture wordlessly at your closed lips, pinched tight together.

“Okay. Okay—I was trying to help you.” Satoru pauses to offer you a half-smile. “There’s studies on it, exposure therapy, where you need to experience what scares you in order to combat it. Before, in the Chapel, when I—well, I was going to explain it all to you, but you ran off before I could say anything, and now you won’t talk to me—”

The path has lead you to a clearing, where forest meets wide, open space. Wind, no longer barricaded by trees, stings your face. Satoru’s hair billows around him, and your mouth opens, but words fail.

You stare at him.

“You… you were trying to help?” You say it slowly, shakily, but you need to be certain. Rage bubbles at your surface, but you clamp it down, not ready for it to boil over until you’re absolutely sure. “That was… that was your idea of help? Was it?”

“Yes! Satoru says. “That’s exactly what it was.” And he looks relieved. Your breath escapes you in a heady little gasp. Satoru smiles at you.

Your hands are free, but his fingers are manacles, chains around your wrists. You try to pull away, gasping, crying. You say his name, again, again, but for a moment he holds on. 

Panic blares in your brain, your lungs restrict, airways close. Your stomach sloshes. Nausea makes your vision swim. His fingers burn you, too hot, as hot as your tears—when he lets go, you’re still crying. Sobs escape you in gasps. 

You hear him say something. Your breathing is so ragged, your blood thumping so loud, you can’t understand him. Your heart hurts so much you think, truly, that you’re going to die. 

“How… how could you think that would help?” Your voice is slow, steady, despite how weak the question is. You don’t understand. How could Satoru think that touching you—after he said he wouldn’t after he promised you that you could take off your gloves around him—would help anything?

Your chest is as cold as the air around you. Wind tugs at your hair. Grey clouds slide over the sky, and Satoru’s face turns ashy. 

“I—” he begins, but you silence him with one look.

“No. No. You thought that would help.” Your hands clench into fists and you keep them in front of you, steadying. “You actually thought that would help.”

“I—yes, I did.”

“Gojo—”

“Because you’re too scared to!” His voice rises, and something breaks within you. No. Satoru doesn’t get to shout first—Satoru doesn’t get to be angry first. “You haven’t done anything about it.”

“Don’t you—”

“Look,” he says, the syllable snapping against his tongue, “I didn’t want this to happen, at all, but I was right. If you’re not going to do anything to help yourself, then I’m going to have to. That’s not my fault—you can’t blame me for that.”

You breath shakes in your lungs. It’s painful, as it stretches the muscle in your windpipe nearly to snapping.

“Exposure therapy,” you say, repeating him, incredulous. “That’s what you said, right? Exposure therapy.”

“Yeah, yeah, exposure therapy.”

“You idiot,” you seethe. “You idiot. That’s not what that is. That’s… not at all what it is.”

“I looked it up—”

“You looked it up on the internet?” Your voice is cold, mocking. “For what, about five minutes? If you actually wanted to help me with it, you should have fucking told me what you were going to do beforehand, if you were actually trying to help me with it. Did you? Did you tell me anything, or did you just want to make everything about you?”

He has the audacity to look offended. “I was trying to help.”

“And you terrified me,” you spit. “You don’t understand the first thing about this… this thing that I have, you—”

“It’s a phobia,” Satoru interjects, like he’s trying to spin everything all around to make himself the clever one again. This is what he’s always like—trying to make himself seem amazing, trying to impress, trying to boost his ego even higher than it already is. This is the first time that you’ve truly loathed it.

Your roll your shoulders back and scoff. “Yes. I know.”

“But you don’t—”

“Does it create severe limitations on your life? Does it lead to avoidance or extreme distress? Does it create an excess, unreasonable fear?” You recite it bitterly, glaring as Satoru’s face slowly tightens. “I know what it is. There’s… The school has a computer. I did research, too.”

Countless hours spent staring at Jujutsu High’s communal computer, tears spilling form your eyes as you read everything that you’ve been feeling for years. For the first time in your life, you were able to put an actual word to the net of emotions you’ve been navigating.

There are books that you can find in the school library. You’re familiar with the names of the few psychologists who recognise the severity of a fear of human touch. There were people in the world who understand what you’ve been going through. You had realised that you weren’t alone—and then Satoru had showed you that people could never understand, never comprehend, because if your best and only friend would try to hurt you, then who wouldn’t?

“But that’s good!” Relief splinters through Satoru’s expression of confusion. “Because you recognise it’s unreasonable, then?  “If you know it doesn’t make any sense, then you’ll be able to get away from it sooner, won’t you?”

Something like “Oh, shut up, Gojo.”

Satoru startles.

“You’re not listening to me. I don’t—I don’t know what to do.” Something aches behind your eyes, and it’s an agony just to keep them open. “I’m so tired, and you—I’m so tired of all of this, and I wanted you to help me with it, not make it worse, and you’re acting like this, and you’re just being so mean—"

“No, c’mon, listen,” he says, “I’m not stupid. No, listen, listen to me. I know you’re not happy with what I did, and I didn’t think you would be. But it makes sense, doesn’t it? I don’t want you to be hurt, but I was trying to make you… hurt less, in the long run. Think of the future, Hebi.” And he leans forward, a half-smile playing on his lips. “I mean, something’s got to change, right? You can’t go on like this forever. I’m helping you out here, I’m—”

“Shut up.” Your fists clench, so tight that you can feel your nails digging into your palms. “Shut up. Shut up.”

“What?” Satoru blinks at you, a crease forming in-between his eyebrows.

“You don’t get to say that,” you mutter, choking pain pressing on your heart. “You don’t get to say that at all, Gojo, not at all.”

“That doesn’t make sense. What do you mean I can’t—”

“You don’t have the right—!” The words spill out of you in a yell, so loud that you can feel the leaves on the trees around you rustle. You stand there, facing him and the shocked ‘o’ of his mouth, your chest heaving. It’s like you’ve ran a cross-country race, fierce energy spiking through your body. “You don’t get to—You don’t have the right to talk to me like that.”

“The… right?” Satoru looks at you aghast. “Why—”

“You tried to touch me, Gojo. You don’t get to say things like that.” Revulsion, sick, twisted revulsion worms its way up in you. “You don’t get to talk about the future. You don’t get to say that you were thinking about me. You don’t get to decide these things for me, like I’m some idiot who doesn’t understand anything about the world!

The memory flares up with the intensity of the present—remembering of his fingers around your wrist is just as sickening as the actual occurrence. For a moment you truly hate him, hate him for making you feel like this, for not even caring enough to pretend he’s sorry.

“I’ve explained myself—”

“That’s not enough, not at all.”

“You know what I—”

“Even when you still don’t care about what you did!”

“I don’t! You know what, I don’t!” Satoru raises his hands and brings them to the back of his head—his voice rises with yours. There’s a horrible pleasure in him getting angry, like it’s a form of retribution. “You’re just not listening to me, Hebi!”

“Oh, I’m listening, Gojo, you just haven’t got anything good to say.”

“I’ve done everything you want me to do!” Satoru lets out a strained laugh, his breath shaking his chest. “I don’t know what else you want me to do. I’ve explained myself, I’ve apologised, I’ve done everything. Now it’s up to you, I—”

Your head whips up. “You’ve never apologised.”

“What? I have. I’ve apologised loads of times.”

“No, you haven’t.” Your gaze pins him down like a butterfly against a board. “Apologise. Right now. Right now, Gojo, tell me what you’re sorry for.”

He glares at you, stubborn, his bottom lip jutting out. It’s an expression you’ve seen so many times, loved so many times, but now it’s like a slap in the face. “You shouldn’t be upset.”

You shake your head, clenching your fists. “I’m… oh my god—”

Something bobs in his throat. “I don’t get what else you want—”

“Oh my god!” You press your hand over your mouth, incredulous. “You can’t do it, can you? You really can’t do it!”

“I can—”

“Because you still don’t think you’ve done anything wrong.” You sound hysterical, but you can’t begin to care—Satoru twists his head in a grimace. “You don’t, do you? You actually believe that you’re in the right!”

“I can’t help that I—”

“What the hell, Gojo? I can’t believe you, I can’t believe that this hasn’t gotten through to you!”

“I’m not going to apologise for trying to help you! I’m not going to apologise for trying to make your life better, Hebi—I’m not going to apologise for caring about—"

“You didn’t care at all!” you shout, and your voice echoes over the trees, harsh and pained. “Didn’t you think, for one second, about what I’d feel? About, about the actual reason why I don’t touch people? You didn’t pay me any consideration, did you?”

“That’s what I just said!” Satoru says, bewildered. “I just said, I did it for you!”

“You did it for yourself.” You glare at him, and he reels back.

“I did not—”

“You did it for yourself, Gojo. If you’d been thinking about me, you would have thought about why I can’t… I can’t touch people, not just because of my technique, but because of everything else!”

“Hebi—”

“I nearly killed my mother! My own mother!” Tears prick at your eyes, but you blink them back angrily. “I was a kid, and I nearly killed her, and I’ve spent the rest of my life suffering because of it! You don’t—you don’t know what it’s like, and it’s awful, because I thought you did—” Something lodges in your throat, something pinches at your eyes. “But you wanted to make yourself feel good.”

“That’s not true.”

“You wanted to prove to yourself that you could… fix it?” You shudder, wrap your arms around yourself. “That you could be the one who made everything better, or something? That you could be a person who does both—who kills curses and also puts sorcerers back together? That you can do anything you like, without anyone telling you no? You didn’t even think about what it would be like for me. You just thought about how you would feel.”

“This isn’t right,” Satoru says, his eyes glinting sharply. “I get that you’re upset, and I didn’t want you to be, I didn’t think you would be—”

“How?” Your voice escapes you piercing, bordering on hysterical. “How could you possibly think I wouldn’t be upset?”

“That was—okay, yes, I knew you’d be upset, but I didn’t think you’d react like this!” Satoru runs his hand over his face, frustration dripping from every pore. “I thought you’d be able to see what I was trying to do. I really was trying to—”

“You really don’t get it.” Your voice fractures, like a delicate ceramic pot: one crack running down its centre, damaged beyond repair. The anger bleeds out from you and you slump down to the floor, holding your head in your shaking hands. “You really don’t get it.”

You can hear him breathe out.

“I don’t.” Satoru crouches down in front of you, but you flinch away from him, hands spasming. “You still need to—but, but you can’t just… just throw everything away like this.”  

You laugh, cold and dry, and tilt your stinging face up to the sky. “I’m not doing that. God, I wouldn’t—I can’t—but you don’t even feel bad about it. That’s what I can’t understand. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, Satoru, like I was going to die, and you still can’t admit that you might’ve been wrong.”

Despite yourself, you wait for him to say something. Even now, you still think he could be different.

He stays silent. It’s an admission: he’s never going to apologise.

You wish you could think the way he does. Satoru’s mind swerves between the present and the future so easily, never considering the past, never getting weighed down by everything he’s been through before now. You’re the opposite; the future is distant, unreachable, but the past is tangible and real and the only thing you can try to rely on.

You’ve tried to change. You’ve tried to get better, because you know that your future self will be just as cold as you are if you don’t. This is what Satoru was thinking about, and the sentiment is echoed by part of your heart that sings for him. You should try even more. You should try to get better, even when nothing changes, even when you can tell it’s pointless.

But it’s so hard. And it hurts so much. And you don’t know how to do it on your own.

You sigh, and any fight seeps out of you, buffeted away in the cold air. To the clouds, you say: “You need to be the best, all the time, and it’s fucking exhausting sometimes.”

Tears slip from your eyes, catching on your eyelashes. It feels like rain: little droplets of salt. You watch the sky, unseeing.

“You shouldn’t call me that,” he whispers, blinking hard. His voice breaks, shatters. “You’ve only called me Satoru when you like me, when I can really tell that you like me. Don’t—you can’t change that now, I won’t let you—"

You don’t know how to respond to that. Instead, you bring your legs into your chest, hug yourself as tightly as you can, and cry.

Your throat aches, sore and torn-up, but wordless noises keep escaping from you in half-sobs and hiccups, so many you can’t escape them. You press your forehead into your knees, just so you could feel the dull ache of pain, if it distracts from everything decaying inside of you.

When you were younger, you used to sit like this all the time—you’d wrap your arms around yourself and pretend it was someone else embracing you instead, as if you could trick your brain into thinking you were truly being held. It never worked, but sometimes you’ll brush a thumb over the sides of your cheek, the back of your neck, the turn of your collarbone, always pretending it was someone else.

But your pretence has never worked. It’s always just been you, and your lonely, poisoned hands. You can’t touch anyone, and so no-one can touch you.

Gojo’s silent beside you. Your lips part.

“You were the only person who I thought I could trust with it.” The words pull at the blanket of silence surrounding the two of you. They rid you of the warmth, the temporary reprieve, but they char your throat when they escape and you realise that they had to be said. They would have burnt you, otherwise, burning from the inside-out.

“And I wish you hadn’t done it,” you whisper. “I really, really wish you hadn’t done it.”

“I don’t,” Gojo says, darkly. He shifts, sitting up. “I was right.”

You try to hold back another sob.

“You hated it when my family would make me cry,” you say to the ground, to the soil wet with shed tears. “You’ve always hated it, Gojo.”

Gojo lets out a shaking breath. You continue, staring at a blurry nothingness in the distance.

“So I don’t… I don’t get it. Maybe I’ve never really understood you. You’re so…” and you trail off, because even now you know that he burns, a rich orange flame, blazing like a star. He’s so unlike you, so much better and stronger and full of life.

If your life is cold, then Gojo is warmth; but he blazes so hot that he scorches you, sometimes. And he hurts you.

Your tears are icy.

“You were the only person I could trust,” you repeat. The words blur together. “The only person. You were the only one. That’s why it hurts so much: because you’re the only person I could ever trust with it, and now I know I can’t.” You cut yourself off, rubbing at the tender skin under your eyes. Your gloves come away damp. “I don’t have anyone else.”

“That’s not true,” Gojo says, his voice muffled. There’s a pull for you to look at him even now, for you to lean over and whisper that everything’s okay—but you stay motionless. He speaks again, in that choked, quiet voice: “There’s Shoko, and Suguru. I’m not the only person.”

“They’re not you.” Tears are falling, now, and you hiccup them away. “You know that. You know how important you are.”

You would never normally say this. you’ve always thought—he thinks so highly of hiself anyway, he doesn’t need your compliments. It’s cruel, the way he’s only managed to coax the admittance from you, now.

 “You’re the only one I’ve got,” you say, “and you’ve taken that away from me. You’ve taken you away from me.”

“I haven’t. No, I haven’t—I’d never go away from you. Don’t you get it?” Gojo inhales once, twice, tiny little breathy things like his lungs can’t be filled. “I want to stay. We stay together, right? It’s just… it’s us, isn’t it? Us versus everything else?”

You voice breaks into a sob.

You want to refute him. You want to be strong, to challenge him, to act like he doesn’t have such a tight grip on your heart. You want to pretend that you don’t love him, still, more than you’ve ever loved anyone.

When you speak, your voice is weak and wet from tears. “Say sorry. Just say you’re sorry. Please.”

It’s a quiet confession; it’s pathetic and true and honest, and you wish you were more grown up.  

“Please,” you say again, when he doesn’t respond. You just need to know that he understands. You just need one thing, one tiny thing from him, and you can cope with the rest of it. You still hate what he did—but he’s your best friend. You need him. You don’t know how to live without him.

Gojo presses his lips together, white with pressure. Slowly, with great effort, he shakes his head.

“I was right,” he says, venomous into the cold air. “You’re wrong. I was right.”

 “Oh.” In the cold, you shiver. “Oh.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Right.”

“I was right.”

“Oh.”

Doubt. You’re so tired. Maybe he is right.

You don’t know what any relationship is supposed to look like. Your parents hated each other, your parents hated you. The only good thing in your life has only ever been Gojo. He’s the person whose love you could rely on; he’s the person who you would unequivocally trust. You don’t have anyone else like that. Maybe he is right. You don’t know anything else to make sure.

You think of happiness, and you think of him. You think of days in the Chapel, of the thin scar on his jaw, of matching raincoats. You think of sakura, floating through the natural skylight of a cave. You think of the first person you’ve ever loved. You think of the only person who’s ever loved you back.

But.

But he hurt you. He’s made you cry.

He won’t say sorry.

“Do you regret it?” The voice that leaves you is hard, foreign. You stare into his eyes, willing him to refute you. “Do you?”

He says nothing. His lips part, quiver, and then close again. He stares back at you.

“Right,” you say. Fallen leaves twist across your vision, orange and green and yellow. “That’s it, then.”

The wind picks up, and it makes Gojo’s hair part around his face, pulling on the strands of white so he looks like a spirit; pale, alone, loitering in a desolate space next to you.

“We’re friends,” he says, harsh. You wince—the words cut you, deep. “We’re best friends. Aren’t we?”

Your chest aches. “I thought so,” you say, quietly.

A breath of wind. With that, he seems to realise you’ve decided.

A numbness begins, or maybe it returns; a cold numbness that infects and spreads silently, so quietly you hadn’t even noticed it until now. You can’t even bring yourself to be angry at him again, even though you’re sure it’ll resurface eventually. Right now, it’s just… nothing.

Longing, but there’s always longing when Gojo’s there, and you’re not even sure what you’re longing for, now.

You don’t speak. Neither does he. The wind sings shrill.

Notes:

2005
Fifteen years old

-

...

Hear me out.

I've mentioned before that the inspiration for this fic was 'One Day' by David Nicholls. The reason I took to that book so much was because of how unrelentingly realistic it was, and I want to capture some of that essence with this fic. So, uh... there are going to be problems. And this one was planned, too--if you look back through the past few chapters you'll be able to catch a few snippets of it, gently simmering in the background. And I'm sure you guys are aware that Geto is going to be going through it soon, and that's definitely going to impact the rest of them. Lol. :D

Also: thoughts? Our two characters disagree--who's right? I'm interested to hear people's opinions; I definitely have mine, but I really want to know what you guys think.

As one final thing, I will say that I'm not lying in any of the tags. I've read fics that have some form of 'happy ending' tag that just end... in an incredibly depressing way? Which is mildly traumatic, if I'm being honest. Rest assured that I am not that diabolical, and that all of the things I have tagged will happen.

At some point.

Thanks for reading!

Chapter 11: 2006

Thursday 7th September, 2006

You scramble to your feet, nearly tripping over yourself in your frenzied rush to escape. You can feel it, right behind you, cold wind whipping across the skin of your neck. It hollers a shrieking screech and you feel your ears pop, the delicate folds in them tearing and splitting. It reaches for you and you dodge—a tree ahead of you is torn from its roots.

The call stops, and the only noise you can hear is your heavy panting, mingling with the alien whirring of a curse on a hunt.

“Shit,” you hiss as you make a half-jump over a fallen tree. You push hanging branches out of your face and veer to the side, skidding on the slick mud below you. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Where are they? Frantically, your eyes flit around your surroundings, but you see nothing more than dense green foliage, trees looming over you, arms stretching out. Where are they? This thing is a Grade 2, maybe even higher—you’ve never exorcised one on your own. They should be here, right now!

But they’re not. You allow yourself one more moment of blind panic before you force your brain back into action.

Fine, then. Help isn’t coming. You’ve got to finish it on your own.

Taking a winding run-up, you jump up and grip onto a strong-looking branch above you. It creaks, and you pull yourself up and onto the first branch, holding yourself in a tightly-coiled crouch. You’re only about two metres from the floor, but it allows you enough space (a second, two seconds) to take a breath and think through your options.

The curse: five seconds away. Hulking and fast, a mass of squelching flesh and crunching bones. It could be a spider, if a spider’s skin had melted off, peeling and dragging on the floor and collecting mud and leaves and branches. But its limbs are what make it huge—skittering along the floor, the trees, the sky, dry hairs protruding in gruesome bunches.

Your situation: alone, crouched on a tree branch, your scythe strapped to your back. Shoko and Geto are supposed to be here, they told you they’d be here—and you have no-one to help you kill this thing.

Positivity, you think, a hand on your scythe. At least this’ll earn me lots of points. I’ll be winning against Shoko, if I survive.

The curse ricochets off the trees, colliding with them and using the force to careen itself forward. Its eyes—too many to count—blend together as it surges towards you. Right before its elongated teeth can snap around your torso, you leap into the air, pulling your scythe from its restraint on your back and slicing across one of its legs in a clean arc. You land cleanly, rolling to the side to avoid contact with the grotesque limb.

It howls, a sound so shrill and piercing that you stagger back. The curse rears back, shaking with fury, and barrels towards you. Taking a quick breath, you push the point of your scythe into the ground and use the momentum to propel yourself over the curse’s flailing legs and over to its centre, where its head rests.

You raise your scythe, but before you can lodge its blade into the curse’s skull you’re hit with an agonising blow to the stomach—you’re sent flying, and you only just manage to flip yourself in the air so you don’t break your spine on the ground. It still hurts like hell, and you feel the warmth of blood congregating on your temple. You wipe at it with your sleeve.

So it’s intelligent. You should’ve guessed it—Geto had said that it was high-ranking, and you shouldn’t have tried to pull two similar tricks in a row. You taste iron and spit out blood onto the floor, shifting your stance back into the defensive even as your chest screams in pain. The curse’s blow was from one of its many legs: it curls back towards its centre, and you grimace at the splatters of your own blood that decorate its tip.

You want to shout at yourself, but you’re far too winded—you’d underestimated it, just because it doesn’t have speech. Your mind flickers back to the curse from when you were a kid, how it had hissed for a bounty.

This curse is so much more dangerous than that one: the blistering pain drawing up your stomach tells you as much. You risk a glance down and bite your lip to hold yourself back from throwing up. Even now, white dots are appearing over your wound, growing and pulsating to the beating of your heart.

If you had to guess at a name, you’d say they were eggs—currently laying nest in your flesh. You gag, choking.

Its leg soars out, and another, and you lurch back, slicing down at anything that gets too close. Each time your scythe makes contact the curse releases another ear-splitting screech, and soon enough a high-pitched ringing invades your ears, making concentrating even more difficult.

You’re deadly careful to keep a clear distance from you and its skin—even the slightest contact could release more of its eggs, and you need your energy levels to remain as high as they can be if you’re going to survive this. You can already feel how your stomach’s started throbbing a sick, heavy rhythm, tangibly feel your strength depleting.

And then you look at the curse in its many, swivelling eyes, and something twists in your heart.

If you’re going to stay alive, then you can either kill it and hope that its death removes its eggs from your system, or you can kill it and hope that its eggs don’t kill you before Shoko can arrive to heal you. Anything else leads to your death, and that’s not an option.

This curse’s touch is poison, just like yours. And you’re going to kill it.

You charge—and then drop to the floor, dodging out of the way of its limbs as you slide cleanly beneath its body. Branches and stones tear up your back but you grip your scythe and plunge the blade up, striking it on its smooth underbelly with as much force as you can muster.

A wailing scream fills your ears, but you keep the weapon digging in as you pull the handle up, breaking apart flesh and tissue and sinew with one great slice. Your scythe rips outwards and you stagger back, just quick enough to avoid its flailing limbs as it reaches towards you.

You attack again with a vengeance, ducking around its legs to reach its body where you gouge glistening lacerations into the mounds of muscle at its centre. Every time its legs almost reach you, you’re able to break away at the last minute before circling back to continue your onslaught.

It breaks after an eternity—a shudder that wracks its entire body, froth forming at its beak. It spasms, stuttering around on the few legs that you’ve haven’t yet severed, and then falls to the floor, limbs thrashing.

This is your moment, and with a marksman’s precision you take a running jump at the thing, landing down with your blade first, slashing down against its dark, terrified eyes. You blind it, and its head breaks apart, skull shattering inside its flesh, thick blood spilling from its hundreds of wounds.

It convulses. It screams. And then, finally, it stills.

You stagger away from it before slumping down against a tree. Your head lolls back and you take a painful gasp. Your ribs ache, and you bring a trembling hand to feel for damage. You wince, pain splintering up your sides.

You stay there for one breath, then two. Its shriek still rings in your ears, and when you press your palms against them it only gets worse. The ground is wet from the morning rain, and you vaguely wonder how you’re going to get the stain out of your uniform. Shoko had advised you against the skirt, but you’d thought that it’d be pretty. You chuckle.

With a sigh, you rub your hands on your thighs and take a reluctant look down at your stomach. It’s as disgusting as you would have expected, all blood and skin and nesting eggs. You force your mind to concentrate on the sensation of it all, and release a haggard breath once you realise that the curse’s eggs aren’t moving anymore. They’re still there, still stuck inside you, but they’re dead.

They’ll have to be removed. That’s going to hurt.

It does.

As soon as you scrape your gloved fingers against your wound you nearly pass out, gritting your teeth as tears prick at your eyes. Your breath comes in rapid pants, each stretch of your chest pulling at your bruised ribs. You let out a low whimper, and then steel yourself, refusing to act so pathetic. This is just pain—you’ve survived pain before.

Your hand, shaking, returns to your stomach, almost of its own volition. Your fingers grasp at one of the many, pale-white eggs and you pull. As it tugs free it makes a gruesome suctioning noise, blood spurting out in a feeble little spray. You bite down on your lip to keep from crying out and you immediately taste iron. Your legs dig helplessly into the floor and you squeeze your eyes shut, unable to look down as you root around for the next parasite.

It’s torturous. You don’t know how long it takes—too long, probably, as you can still feel the weak pumping of your blood as it spills out from inside you. Each egg is smaller than a fingernail, and so slick that you keep losing grip. Your skin around the cut is serrated, like it had been hacked apart with a breadknife.

Once, you think you slip out of consciousness. You jerk yourself awake, heart racing painfully, and force yourself to concentrate. If you pass out, any other curse could find you, kill you. It’s nothing but the fear of further agony that keeps you awake.  

It takes even longer for you to check. That’s so much worse, pressing and prodding agonisingly to ensure with one hundred percent certainty that your body is yours, and yours alone.

When you’re done, you rip your overshirt off and wrap it as tight as you can around your stomach. The cold air bites at your exposed arms, but it’s nothing to the excruciating pain in your torso. Finally satisfied, you tear your gloves off and hold your face in your trembling hands, fingers fisting in your hair.

You give yourself ten seconds, and then you start moving.

You move gradually at first, since you’re not quite stubborn enough to forget that you’re injured. Regardless, sitting here like this makes you an ideal target for any more curses, and you’re really not in the right state to have another battle yet.

You pick your gloves up from the floor and, after hesitating for a moment, push them into your trouser pockets. You’re not exactly sure why, but you just know that you can’t wear them now. The thought of the fabric encaging your hands brings a sick feeling to the bottom of your stomach. You sigh. Slowly, you ease yourself up the tree and test your weight on your legs, relieved when you find that they hold you well.

For the first time, you genuinely stop to wonder where Shoko is—she and Geto had promised you that they’d be right behind you, so you could all exorcise the curse together. Shoko had been so confident, too, laughing at you when you’d told her she was basically treating you like live bait. “Yes, exactly,” she’d said, smiling in her quiet little way, “now go and bait away—we’ll kill it before it even knows what’s happening.”

Gojo had disappeared as soon as you’d been let loose. Geto hadn’t seemed surprised—you’d seen them talking, before the event started, laughing with each other about how many curses they were going to kill.

Where are they? You bend down, groaning, and pick up your scythe from the floor. You slide it into its sheath around your shoulder blades (it’s much too heavy and cumbersome for you to be walking around with it) and slowly begin your way through the rest of the woods, stopping every few moments to catch your breath. Where are they?

A cold drop of fear trickles down the back of your neck. What if they’re not okay? You only entertain the thought for a moment before banishing it immediately. They’ll be okay—Geto’s one of the strongest sorcerers you know, and if you can take down that curse then who knows what he’s capable of.

Something moves.

You still.

It’s the slightest slimmer of colour in-between the darkness of the leaves, and it freezes at the same time as you do. Hardly even daring to move, you slowly reach behind you to grasp the hilt of your blade, the feeling of smooth, clean wood foreign to your bare hand. You swallow—you’d counted on Shoko being able to heal you before you encountered another curse. You can barely walk, let alone fight. Shit.

Slowly, you shift your head to the side, squinting to try to make out the anomaly in the trees. It’s gone. Or maybe it was never there—you let out a heavy breath through your nose, berating yourself for being so paranoid. You shiver, rubbing at your arms.

A pressure on the back of your neck—burning, forceful, fingers: a hand, a hand grasping your neck.

Crying out. Panic. Fear.

Heart pounding, a wild slash in the air. Blade reaching nothing.

A low chuckle. A man’s. A metre behind you.

You whirl around, white knuckles gripping your scythe. You’re in a half-crouch, almost hyperventilating, adrenaline pumping through your blood and making every hair stand on end.

And then you see the cat-like eyes staring back at you, and disgust swoops low in your stomach.

“It really is entertaining,” Naoya Zenin says, still laughing to himself, “when you see how much you react to something so simple. I hardly grazed you! But look at you now.”

He leans back, hands tucked into his uniform’s pockets, surveying you. He seems to acknowledge your alarm, and cracks a smile. He finds it funny.

Heat rises in your cheeks, half in embarrassment that he got such a reaction out of you, and half in pure fury.

“You’ve gotta get that under control, little Hebi,” he smirks, raising his eyebrows in faux concern. He reaches his hand out. You tense automatically, and he waggles his fingers mockingly. “Don’t you wanna shake my hand? C’mon.”

“No, thanks,” you say as coldly as you can, hating how out of breath you sound. You desperately try to get control of your heartbeat, but it’s thumping loud and quick in your ears.

Naoya laughs. His eyes glint. “Pathetic.”

Hatred rises in your throat like bile. “What are you even doing here, Zenin?” you ask, straightening up.

The bastard shrugs. “I was wondering how you were coping all on your own.” He looks you up and down leisurely. “Clearly not very well, judging from that wound there.”

“I’m doing well enough,” you say, “or I was, before you decided to visit. If you’re trying to sabotage me then I’d rather you just get over with it, honestly.”

“You think I care about this little rivalry?” Naoya raises his eyebrows, as if you’re a child. “I thought you knew me better than that, lovely little Hebi.”

You jut out your jaw, irritated. You care about this little rivalry: it’s not like the Tokyo-Kyoto Goodwill Event has been going on for that many years, but as soon as you heard that Naoya Zenin was one of the Kyoto first years being allowed to participate, it had been cemented.

You refuse to let him win—and now you’ve got this far, with days invested into this stupid challenge, nearly getting killed countless times, and you couldn’t stomach seeing him win.

The actual victory is something you’re apathetic towards (the Goodwill Event is just another one of those things the school orchestrates to make its students stronger, and you take it exactly as it comes) but you know how much it’d kill any Zenin to lose at something.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Someone’s going to teach you a lesson, someday,” Naoya says. “You shouldn’t disrespect your betters like this. The same idea for your Gojo, hmm? He has no idea how things work, either.”

“He knows a hell of a lot more than you.”

“That’s a funny thought—Satoru Gojo, the wise. Powerful, sure, I won’t deny him that, but raw power will burn itself out eventually. I’m sure he’ll learn someday, though.” Naoya looks at you with a frosted smile. “Soon as he’s found a suitable wife to breed. Someone pretty to give him lots of powerful little heirs.”

Revulsion flares in your gut. “You’re despicable.”

“It’s the truth,” Naoya says. “Someone from good stock, but compliant enough to not ask questions. That can be hard to find.” He leans forward and you step back in disgust. Naoya winks, and whispers, as if telling you a secret in confidence: “That’s why you’ve got to find them young. Maybe you’re just the right age, Hebi-Hebi—or maybe your Gojo should look for someone a little younger, if he’s already tired of you?”

“Don’t you dare—”

Naoya’s smile is arrogant and wicked. Anger blazes through your blood like fire. “And, if they’re lucky, they’ll spend their whole life in ignorance, the only thing on their mind is how to support their husband. A simple life, but it’d be a good one, if they’d accept it.

“The only time they’d have trouble,” Naoya continues, mock-completive as you seethe, “is if their little heirs came back in boxes. If their breeding wasn’t strong enough, then their offspring might not survive through their infancy. Strength is important for a sorcerer, and sometimes you’ve got to weed out the weak.”

You hate him. You hate him. You’ve dealt with him before—you’ve despised Naoya since the first time you met him. About a year and a half ago, at one of those clan meetings you and Gojo had met at. The two of you had snuck away from the main meeting to entertain yourselves—and Naoya had invaded your privacy like a forest fire, destroying anything and everything in the way.

Then, it had been Gojo who had wanted to kill him, and it had been you holding him back. Even with Naoya here, even though you’re more angry than you’ve been in months, a thin shard of regret pierces your heart. It would be nice to have Gojo here. You never really know what to do with yourself when he’s not.

You clench your trembling hands into fists, trying your very hardest to stop yourself from punching him, and you notice that Naoya eyes your hands with the slightest hint of trepidation. He’s never seen them without gloves.

Attempting to calm your blazing temper, you chuckle mirthlessly. “What? Scared of these things, Zenin?”

“Little Hebi, you’ll never be powerful enough to scare me,” Naoya says lazily, but you don’t miss how he’s shifted backwards, ever so slightly.

With a bitter vengeance, you pounce onto the show of weakness. “I’m not wearing any gloves,” you say, flexing your fingers apathetically. “One touch is all it’d take. You know that.”

“As if I’d let you get that close.”

“It wouldn’t even need to be for that long. You heard about what happened to my mother?”

“Of course I did. Everyone did. And we all heard what an abomination you are.” Naoya’s eyes are slits. “I always thought your hands were disfigured. Everyone does—we all think, with such a disgusting technique, what must her hands look like?”

“The ability to kill you, contained in my little finger,” you continue, undeterred by his deflections. You raise it, your little finger, and both of you stare at it. “You sure you don’t want to try it out?”

Naoya’s jaw tightens.

“No? Not so interested in getting any closer, then?”

His face twists. “Bitch.”

“Very clever.”

“You self-righteous bitch.”

All of a sudden he rushes forwards, towards you, anger contorting his face—and you jolt back, blood pumping, throwing your hands up in front of you. Naoya pulls up, skidding to a halt, eyes fixed on your poisonous palms.

Your heat pounds. Neither of you move: you stand at an impasse, Naoya with a murderous rage clear on his face, you with your gloves still tucked into your trouser pocket.

And it’s only then that you see the small knife, gripped tightly in his right hand. It’s small, small enough to be hidden in his palm. His eyes flick down to it, and back.

“You piece of shit.” Your chest trembles, the ache in your stomach pulsing in tandem with your heart. “You fucking piece of shit, you—"

Naoya opens his mouth to cut you off, but suddenly stops before he can get any words out. You hear it just after he does—there’s something rushing, incredibly fast, trampling through the forest, far too heavy for a human.

You’re just reaching for your scythe when the monster bursts through the trees, sending branches and twigs scattering from the sky. You turn, shielding your head from the chaos, and sprint out of the way of the falling debris. Your scythe tugs free. Something catches your back and you grunt in pain, rolling to the side to avoid any more damage. You look to where you and Naoya were just standing, but he’s gone. Completely disappeared—and he’s left you with this.

“Hebi!”

You spin around, and nearly cry out with relief at the sight of people you know: Shoko and Geto, barrelling through the trees on the back of a curse you recognise—a great, flying snake-like creature, one of Geto’s puppets.

“Hebi!” Shoko calls again, and you suddenly notice the panic on her face. “Get on! We’ve got something on our trail—” A great roar echoes from behind them, and Shoko winces. She tugs at Geto, who’s seemingly trying to pilot his curse. He nods, and the curse rears its head and heads straight for you.

Shoko grabs onto Geto’s arm and leans towards the ground, towards you, her arm outstretched. “Grab on!” she pleads, “I’ll get you up!”

You don’t have enough time to panic—you’re already pulling your gloves over your hands, shoving your scythe in its holster over your shoulders, refusing to let your mind catch up onto what you’re going to do. And Shoko’s there already, and you’re taking a running leap and throwing yourself into the air, your hand reaching out to grab hers.

Fingers circle around your wrist, forearm, everywhere around you, and they’re pulling you up, up, up onto the curse’s back, but even before you feel the solidness of ground you’re kicking away, fighting to escape—manacles, chains, blistering heat encircling your skin, nausea, dizziness, and you don’t know whether it’s from your reaction to Shoko’s touch or from blood loss.

Shoko says something, but you can’t hear it over the roaring of the wind and the curse and your mind. Kind Shoko, the searing impressions of her fingertips. You give her a gesture, something to let her know you’re here even if you really aren’t. Right after you’re touched, you can never concentrate. Your head whistles and spins and shrinks and grows and you can’t think of anything else. But you have to concentrate, even just now, even if you just delay the panic by a few minutes.

You grasp your hysteria with both hands and squeeze it, condensing it into a tightly-packed cube that you can lock away, at least for now. You take a deep, trembling breath.

“Where the hell,” you say, “have you guys been?”

The wind whips past your face, stinging. Shoko glances to Geto. He doesn’t look back, a hint of anger clear on his face, and she sighs.

“We got caught up,” she explains, “everything came out of nowhere. There were so many curses. We got overwhelmed.”

You make a weak noise of protest.

“I wanted to help you, but there were too many. We genuinely couldn’t, I promise.”

“Shoko,” you sigh. “I—”

“It’s the truth!” Shoko frowns down at her hands, both of them covered in a crusted layer of blood.

“I nearly died, Shoko,” you say, but there’s no bite it. It’s like that brief conversation with Naoya Zenin has drained you of all your anger, and now all that’s left is the pitiful relief that your friends are alive.

“So did we,” Geto spits back. His spine’s rigid and his fingers are bone white, pulling roughly on the scales of whatever curse this is that you’re flying.

You exchange a look with Shoko, who shrugs.

“Okay,” you say, a little irritated. “I’m glad you’re not dead, too.”

You look behind you, audibly wincing as the motion tugs on the scars on your stomach. The curse, whatever it was that was chasing them, has gone.

“Where’s—”

“We outran it,” Geto says stiffly. “That was easy enough, at least.”

You frown. “But it was about to get you two, just before you picked me up.”

“Exactly.” He shakes his head, pushing a loose strand of hair to the side. “Shoko kept insisting we needed to get you. So I slowed us down, enough to look out for you and also to avoid getting eaten by that Grade 2.”

“But you didn’t kill it.”

“So?”

“So, you don’t get any of the points. I thought you and Gojo were having another one of your competitions.”

Finally, Geto looks back and offers you a smile, a familiar twist of his lips that you recognise, and you send one back, comforted by the return of his usually easy manner.

Geto tilts his head towards you: “I’m not letting the school take one of our own from us.”

“Thanks,” you say dryly, and Geto smirks.

“Hebi.”

You turn back to Shoko, who’s staring at your stomach with a look that fills you with dread.

“Yeah?”

Shoko’s brow creases. “You’ve hurt yourself. Badly.”

“I have?” you try to joke, but the words come out weak.

“It looks painful.” Shoko’s already sitting up, reaching into her pockets and snapping nylon gloves onto her hands.

“Right.” Your heartbeat picks up again, thrumming a deadly rhythm. “Yeah, I was waiting for a good time to say—”

“Is that a shirt?” She squints at the reddening fabric wrapped around your stomach. “That’s so unsanitary. Take it off.”

“I—C’mon, I don’t really—”

“Take off that shirt.” She raises her eyebrows. “Well?”

You swallow. “Don’t really want to strip down when I’ve got an audience…”

Geto laughs, but Shoko looks firm. “Don’t be deliberately stupid, Hebi. You sound like Gojo.”

Your face burns. “Don’t lump me in with—”

“You’ve wrapped your overshirt around your stomach. To stop the bleeding, right? Right. So take that off and lift up your vest and let me try and help you. Or am I supposed to let you bleed out in front of me?”

You hesitate. Shoko is a healer: you’ve been injured enough times to know that she’s good at her job. After she’s helped someone recover, they’re always in excellent shape, able to walk around like nothing ever happened.

But Shoko has to touch people to heal them.

You know you need to keep your heart rate down. The faster it thumps, the more blood you’re losing. You can feel it draining from you, even as you’re talking. You don’t want to act irresponsible, and it’s the stupidest thing in the world to refuse healing just because you’ve got some personal shit with how it’s carried out, but—

“I’ll avert my eyes,” Geto says good-naturedly. “If you’re worried about your modesty, I don’t have to look.”

It takes your mind off the sight of Shoko’s outstretched palms, and you chuckle weakly.

“That’d be great, thanks.”

“Hey.” He looks at you, lips twitching into a smirk. “I’m a gentleman.”

“Sure you are.”

“Though I can’t say I’m all that interested.”

“You’re not?”

“No offense.” Geto looks back to the sky in front of him. “Sickly and haemorrhaging aren’t the sexiest qualities I can think of.”

You laugh, which quickly turns into a choked cough. “Appreciate the honesty, Geto.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Hebi.”

Damn. Damn Shoko, and her care for your life. You squeeze your eyes shut, reality flooding back in.

“Yeah. I know.”

You pull at the shirt still tied at your waist and it falls with a gruesome splat, sodden with blood. Wincing, you strip off your undershirt. Some of the fabric has stuck to your skin, tearing off the very first layer of healing your body had attempted, and this time you can’t hide your pained grimace.

For all his joking, you really don’t care if Geto sees you without a shirt on. You’ve spent too long with him, seen each other in too many grim situations for you to start caring about modesty.

A few days ago, he’d gotten badly injured from a curse fight gone wrong—you’d been separated from Shoko, and a curse had speared him through the shoulder with a horn longer than your arm. With help from Geto’s curses, you’d managed to kill it, but Geto had been in pain for hours afterwards.

It had been awful. There wasn’t much you could do other than wipe the spittle from the corners of his lips and wait for Shoko to find you. You’d dragged him to a nearby stream, but the water had been too murky and polluted to drink. After you’ve seen someone vomit over their own face, dangerously dehydrated and delirious from blood loss, you’re pretty much family.

“Just get it over with,” Geto says. His uniform still has the puncture wound. You wonder if he finds it cold. “You’ve done it before, Hebi. You’ll be fine.”

Shoko shuffles forward, raising her hands to your stomach, but you jerk away, teeth digging into your lip. She pulls up, as if unsure whether to press.

“I just—Can’t you just—” You dig your nails into your palm, the fabric doing nothing to soften the flare of pain.  “I mean. You can’t do it without touching me, can you?”

The question isn’t even a question. You know the answer even before Shoko shakes her head. She looks apologetic, but doesn’t move away. You bite down on the inside of your cheek, tasting iron.

“Fair enough.” You nod, looking over at Geto. He’s right: this has happened before—you’ve gotten into worse situations, and Shoko’s always come through for you. You trust her to make this as quick as she can. “You wanna distract me for a bit, Geto?”

He barks a sharp laugh, detaching his eyes from the horizon and turning round to face you. “Sure. How am I distracting you?”

“Don’t know. Tell me something, or ask me—”

Shoko’s hands press to your stomach, and you squeeze your eyes shut tight, with so much force it hurts. Reversed curse technique is always painful, like you’re having yourself unravelled and seamed back together all at once, but it’s the burning weight of her fingers that pulls tears from your eyes. But—don’t think about it. You can deal with it. You’ve done it before, you can do it again.

“Ask me,” you continue, voice forcibly controlled, “ask me something. Get my mind off—off everything. Please.”

“Sure.” Geto hums. “How’d you get injured like that? Seems pretty dangerous.”

You give him a strained smile you hope he sees. “It was. I mean—agh—nothing I can’t handle. It almost was, but—it wasn’t. Does that make sense?”

“Not really.”

“Ngh. Sorry.” Deep breath in, out. “Nearly killed me, but it didn’t, so I’m glad about that.”

“For sure. I prefer my friends to stay alive, too.”

“Thanks. And so I exorcised it, but before I did, that’s—when it nearly killed me, that is, it diced me up like this. You saw it, that big spider thing. Fucking massive. Really—yep, no, it’s fine, just get it done with—really hurt, too.”

“And…I’m pretty sure I saw Naoya Zenin with you before we got there, right?”

“Bastard.” You scowl, and you’re pretty sure you can make out Shoko’s giggle.

“You really don’t like him, Hebi,” she says, her speech breathy, the way it goes when she really concentrates on something.

“Why should I—shit, no, no, I’m okay—but he’ll have escaped from you lot as soon as he recognised who you were. Think he just wanted to mess with me, really. Or kill me. Not sure. I mean, he kept trying to rile me up. Spoke about—stuff, really, talking about Gojo, too.”

“What’d he say?” Geto’s voice asks.

“I don’t even remember—something about how Gojo’s going to have loads of sorcerer babies or something.”

Someone chuckles. It’s not clear who. Their voices are mingling, blending into incomprehensibleness. Your mind swims: you’re fading in and out of consciousness. Delirium and tiredness and panic make a horrible combination.

“Speaking of Gojo—where is the local idiot?”

“He told me he was going to get more points than me this morning and left. That’s the last time I heard from him.”

“Of course he did. We should assume he’s alive, right?”

“He’ll be fine.”

“Do you think?”

“Satoru will have gotten bored of easy wins hours ago. He’ll be at the checkpoint before us, I can assure you.”

“Gojo. Should’ve left him in the tent this morning.”

“He still would’ve beaten us in points.”

“No—he’d have lost to you, surely.”

“Well. You would hope, Shoko. Yeah.”

“Hebi—hey, hey, Hebi, don’t pass out, I’m nearly done, I promise.”

You flop your hand loosely in her direction. You’ve got a pounding headache, and the only thing you want now is to slip into unconsciousness.

When everything’s numb, you won’t have to remember how Shoko’s hands pressed, kept, stayed against your skin. Her hands scald you. You don’t want this. How is it that you only seem to get a good night’s sleep when you’ve just been attacked?

“And—okay, okay, I’m done. Can you sit up?”

Tiredness overwhelms you. Why can’t you just sleep?

“Don’t pass out, honestly. If anyone’s sleeping, it’s going to be me—I’m exhausted. Hebi. Up. I—get yourself up or I’ll do it for you, right now.”

Your eyes flicker open. The world is tinted in a luminescent blue, and you blink a couple of times for your eyes to adjust.

“I’m up. I’m up, Shoko, don’t come near me, I swear.” You push yourself up with your knuckles, running a tentative finger over the smooth skin of your stomach. “This is good work. Thank you.”

Shoko shrugs. “That’s my contribution.”

The sunlight is warm, but now you’re sitting up you can appreciate the coldness of the wind as it rushes past your exposed skin. Gooseflesh pepper your arms, and you pull your undershirt back over your head.

You rub at your temples, banishing any lethargy far away. You’ve got a full day ahead of you.

“Are we nearly at the checkpoint, Geto?” you ask, hauling yourself back into the conversation.

He scans the line of trees beneath you, squinting. “I think so. What did they say, a round circle of—what?”

“Round circle of yellow,” you recite, “the fourth day’s checkpoint. Nice of them to give us a break, at least.”

“It’s more of a break for them, if anything,” Geto mutters. “If they’re monitoring us at all.”

“Which they’re probably not.” You shuffle over to the other side of the curse, joining Geto in his search for the checkpoint. It’s the area where the school has promised you’ll be free of curses—for today, at least, until you continue the event tomorrow.

You have no idea how long the teams section of the course is supposed to take. It’s a dreadful thought.

“Honestly,” you say, conversationally, “if one of us died in this, I can’t really see them caring. Can you?”

“No. I actually can’t.” Geto seems to surprise himself, blinking down at his hands. “I can’t believe it. They wouldn’t, would they?”

You snort. “Not like they’ve done much to protect us, either. Ridiculous, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“Yeah.” You stretch out on your back, fiddling with the collar of your undershirt. “The new generation of sorcerers, and they treat us like this. You’d have thought they’d give us a bit of special treatment, before they try to kill us off again tomorrow.”

“Do you think they’ll give us a bed tonight?” Shoko asks, and you sigh.

“I wish. Maybe it’ll be like the second night. That was luxurious as anything—actual sleeping bags!” You reminisce with a smile. “I’d settle for a change of clothes, though. Or a shower.”

Shoko hums. “Or a pillow.”

“Or a pillow,” you agree. “How about you, Geto? What do you want for tonight?”

“I don’t care,” he says.

You yawn. “That’s a shit answer. I’m sticking with a pillow.”

“That’s probably good,” Geto says. His voice trails into silence.

You all stay like that, scanning the view for a yellow ring of trees. The problem is that in the waning sunlight, everything looks yellow—a pool of molten gold, poured over the leaves and soil and branches in a paper-thin layer. It’s almost translucent, a hint of the original colour seeping through the gold and making it glimmer with a beautiful sheen. You’re reminded of how the sun used to seep through the cracks in Chapel’s ceiling, when you and Gojo would go there nearly every day. 

Yes—you’re reminded of warmth.

“I’ve found the bastard!”

You whirl around—Shoko, with a tired sort of glee, pointing to a tiny figure on a ground. By whatever mind-control he uses to puppet the curses, Geto sets you all into a steep descent, and the figure grows, dancing and waving its arms in the very centre of a yellow circle of trees.

“I can’t believe he found it first,” Shoko mutters, but she raises her arm to wave back at the figure, who’s now cackling and making a rude hand gesture at Geto.

You watch the exchange, with the beginnings of a smile curling on your lips. Sure—you can believe it.

 

--

 

The firelight flickers peacefully. It’s fading into a deep red, a sunset glowing in the leaves. With every breath of wind the embers drift into the air, twisting and curling around your blanketed legs.

It’s late. One of your upperclassmen had leant you his jacket, and you wrap it tighter around your shoulders, shivering in the cold.

The Tokyo branch had arrived slowly, flocking through the barrier for the next few hours in various states of disarray. Shoko, one of the only people who could consistently use reversed cursed technique, had wandered around and helped as many students as could. She’d passed out an hour ago, curling up in front of one of the fires. You’ve let her sleep.

There wasn’t anything more she could do. There’d been one girl, a fourth year, who had been seriously hurt. When she’d staggered through the barrier, clutching to her screaming friend, you’d been able to glimpse how her leg was twisted horribly, the pale white of bone piercing her skin.

Shoko had helped all she could, but now the girl lies unconscious, her limp hand gripped tightly in her friend’s. It was almost worst to see his reaction—he’d been muttering her name, over and over, telling anyone who’d listen how the curse had come out of nowhere, how neither of them had seen it coming, how it was his fault she was like this.

You’d stood, walked away from them. You hadn’t wanted to listen to any more of it.

You crane your head back, seeking the two of them out in the half-darkness. They’re silhouetted against the trees, a body and a shaking figure kneeling at its side. You blink, and look away. You shouldn’t think that—thinking that the girl’s a body, not someone alive. Maybe it just seems inevitable: maybe you’re just being realistic. You tug your legs closer to your chest, resting your chin on your knees and staring into the fire.

“Hey.”

You don’t need to look back to know who the voice belongs to. “Good evening,” you tell him, reaching behind you to offer him a blanket.

“Is it?—thanks—but I don’t know if everyone’d agree with that.”

You keep your eyes on the fire. “Have you come here to make me depressed, Gojo?”

Gojo laughs, a little huff of air from his nose. “Nah. No, you can go to Suguru for that. As soon as Sami-san came in here, and everyone saw her leg… it set him off, really. He’s been talking to himself for hours, now, and it’s impossible to get any sleep next to. He’s awful when he gets like that, so, here I am.”

“And you came over to me? Because you knew I’d be quieter?”

His smile tilts up his voice. “Sure. Well, out of the two of us, you’re not really the more talkative, are you?”

You shrug. Tilting your head downwards, you focus your attention on your thumb, gazing at the intricate woven fibres that make up the fabric of your gloves. You can feel Gojo’s eyes on you. You sigh. “Sami. Is that her name? The girl?”

“Yeah. Sami-san and Ito-san. They’ve known each other for—” Gojo hesitates. “Doesn’t matter. They’re really close.”

You close your eyes, but the firelight blooms red through your eyelids. “Shit.”

“Yeah. Fucking sucks.”

You don’t say anything. You let the moment rest between you, half-comfortable, half-awkward.

Before, you would’ve told him to leave. You could do it now, and it’d be easy. He’d leave you alone, and you’d have peace for the rest of the evening.

But after today… after nearly dying, day after day, after your conversation with Naoya about young wives and dead children, after seeing the fourth-year girl’s friend nearly collapse under the weight of her convulsing body—there’s only so much energy you have.

Gojo shuffles with his blanket and tugs it further down, letting it rest around his hips, his feet peeking out the other end.

“I don’t even need this blanket,” he says, “it’s warm enough already with the fire.”

“Only you would say that.” You pull your blanket closer to you. “It’s freezing.”

“Not for me. I’m better than everyone else, I guess.”

“You need to put on more layers.”

“Gross. Ha, you sound like Yahaba.”

“I do not,” you say, lying.

“Yeah, you do.”

“Well, just because you’re a freak of nature who can’t feel the cold, it doesn’t mean you’re not going to get hypothermia.”

“A freak of nature? So rude. You mean I’m special?”

“I mean your immune system is just the same as mine, even if you are a human space heater.”

When you were younger, you’d called him your personal heater. You couldn’t call him that now—it seems so intimate, too infantile, naïve.

“Maybe you’re just cold-blooded.” Gojo lilts his voice up into a familiar drawl. “So cold to me, Hebi-Hebi.”

The conversation, so familiar and well-practiced, falls. The tentative ease, both of you shifting back to your habitual talking points, shatters. Like a balloon, slowly filling and expanding with air, it suddenly pops, sending you both plummeting back to earth.

It’s that nickname. You can’t get over it.

You don’t know whether to mourn that you and Gojo never got back to normal. You can’t even remember when you’d accepted it; one day, you’d looked at him and realised that you just couldn’t go back to the way things were.

It wasn’t anything impressive. More like a slow corrosion of the foundations of a building, until one day you’d looked back and realised that he’d gone. Maybe you were counting on him chasing after you, that someday enough time would pass and you’d finally forgive him. Maybe he’d given up on you, or maybe he’d realised the reality of your situation sooner than you.

You’d stopped following him, and he’d stopped asking for you. And you’d both let it happen.

Besides, you weren’t alone—you have Shoko, and Gojo has Geto, and that’s that. The four of you can exist around each other: even enjoy yourselves, sometimes. You’ve gotten closer to Geto because you can stand to be around Gojo.

It’s pleasant, you want to think. You and Gojo, you’d see each other in class, talk about homework, complain about Yaga… and you’d smile awkwardly when you were left alone for too long, and silences would extend for minutes, and it’s just not the same.

And you’d go to your dormitory at night, and you’d stare at your ceiling, and you’d know that you missed him. And it doesn’t matter that you couldn’t have kept it the same after he’d touched you. Despite the logic of it, you miss him more than anything in the world.

And then Gojo and Geto had returned from their out-of-school assignment. It had taken longer than it was supposed to have done, and they’d come back different. It was the first time you weren’t told what they were doing—and neither of them had told you. For the first time in years, you had seen Gojo look afraid. For the first time in years, you had wanted to protect him.

He'd knocked on your door, way past midnight, and he’d just asked you.

Your arms were bare, pyjama shorts riding up your thighs. The night was humid and heavy, the late-August heat sticking your clothes to your skin. When you’d opened the door, you had been too addled with sleepiness that you hadn’t thought to put on your gloves.

“Oh,” you’d said. “What—”

“Let’s be friends again,” Gojo had said. It hadn’t sounded like a question, too blunt and straight-forward to be anything but a statement—but for a second, his eyes had flashed with desperation, something wild and unconfined. 

That had been the only thing that had made you stay. Because his eyes had looked grey—focused, alert, and yet completely distracted. Far away from you, and still locking you down under his gaze. 

You knew him. You knew that Gojo never let himself look like that. You knew that his mind must have been so frenzied for him to forget his façade in front of you.

“Please,” he’d said, and you had wondered, later, if he knew that that would make you melt for him. “Let’s just try. Please.”

“I…” You hadn’t known what to say. You had been aware of his freshly-cut hair, the dip of collarbone exposed from his shirt’s loose collar, the sharp gashes of his cheekbones like he hadn’t been eating. 

“And I’m sorry.” Softly, slowly. And you couldn’t read him as well as you used to be able to, and you hated that you couldn’t, but he seemed genuine. He actually, actually—

“Why now?” you’d said. You couldn’t ask him what had changed his mind. You couldn’t ask him about the purple bruises under his eyes, or the jagged scar on his chest that you’d noticed when you had sparred with him. It had borne the white casing of reverse cursed technique, but you knew that scarring can’t be prevented, sometimes. 

The wound had looked fresh enough to still be painful. 

“I miss you,” Gojo had said, simply. And then, with a tilt to his head: “Don’t tell me you haven’t missed me too.”

You couldn’t tell if his smile was honest or not. You couldn’t tell if he was trying to make you laugh, or if he truly couldn’t stand to hear you say that. 

His smile had wilted, and you’d realised that you must’ve looked unsure. You were surprised, of course, but you couldn’t hesitate. Not with him. 

“Let’s just try,” he’d said. 

You’d said yes.

It isn’t that easy, you’ve found, to start it up again. Gojo will make references that you don’t understand, and when you ask him about them he’ll stop, frown a little, and then cheerfully explain that it was something he’d done with Geto, not you.

Or sometimes you’ll say something a little too harsh, and he’ll look surprised, like you’d gone a step too far, or like you’re not allowed to make so many jokes at his expense anymore.

You used to be able to read his every movement, opening up a little window into his head and peering inside. You can’t, anymore. You have to concentrate on what his specific movements mean, relearning him. You remind yourself that he claps to himself when he’s nervous, that he smiles wickedly when he’s actually proud of himself, that a muscle twitches in his jaw when he’s trying to pretend to be someone he’s not.

There are so many things you don’t know about him. It’d be easy to be resentful of Geto, who seems to understand Gojo innately, at a soul’s level. Secretly, you fear that you’ve reached the extent of your friendship: you’ve known each other for a long time, and so of course you’d be close. Putting the expanse of time aside, are you actually special for each other?

And yet you miss him. Your heart aches when he’s not with you. And Gojo had wanted to rekindle your relationship. He had overcome his pride, and he had apologised—and you know that he never would have done that before he went away on that mission with Geto. Something had changed him, and you’re willing to see how much.

You want to cross the chasm between the two of you. You’re willing to try; but the distance has been bridged with twine, and sometimes you’re frightened to cross it.

The childhood nickname stings, but you don’t let it show.

You’re trying; both of you are. Even though you know with absolute certainty that you needed the separation to occur, you’ve still missed him.

And—you look over at him, see how the firelight highlights the smooth curves of his face, how it softens the sharp lines of his cheekbones and jaw, how it makes him seem almost ethereal when he smiles at you.

Heat churns in your stomach, and you push aside the images that flicker in your subconscious every night. Gojo, breath catching, eyes half-lidded, your name on his lips, and then more. When you allow yourself, you’ll think of his hands on your chest, your waist, your thighs.

So. There’s that, too. That’s still there.

And it’s gotten worse, if that was possible. You didn’t think about him like that when you were thirteen.

It leaves you guilty, when you catch yourself. Your emotions feel sordid, like you’ve done something wrong. You try to remember him as your childhood friend, and when that doesn’t work, you think of the person who had made you so bitterly angry last year. That doesn’t work, either: it’s him, Satoru, that you’re thinking about. It’s him in his entirety.

“You’re shivering,” you tell him, gesturing to the slight tremor going through his fingers.

They’re curled on his lap, tapping absent-mindedly on his knee, but you still notice how they’re getting slightly pink with the cold. Gojo’s so pale that any kind of flush shows up easily, and you can see the tip of his nose turning a light rose. You push another blanket towards him.

Gojo scoffs, making a show of reluctantly taking the blanket with you. It’s like he’s playing up for an audience that doesn’t exist: rolling his eyes, over-exaggerating his movements, sighing heavily. It reminds you a little of how he’d been when you’d first become friends—eager to make you laugh, quick to act childishly.

“I don’t get cold,” he says, bringing the blanket up to his chin and tucking his legs underneath it. His head sticks out from the vast ocean of fluffy wool. You roll your eyes. “I don’t! No, come on, I don’t, you know that.”

“Remember when you got us sick for a full week, just because you wanted to go camping in a storm?”

Gojo laughs. “It was really cool, though. All dark and rainy and mysterious, thundering all through the night. And when the lightning started?”

“That was cool,” you admit, brushing your thumb over your bottom lip to hide your smile. “God, Yahaba-san was so angry! And she’d only told us we could spend a couple hours outside, right? And we came back, like, a day later, soaked to the bone, ill as anything.”

“It was awesome,” he says, proudly.

“It was not, oh my—we were bed-ridden for weeks!”

“A couple days, come on.”

“It was a solid week. I remember, because Yahaba-san didn’t even let me go back home, just forced me to stay in bed. It was so dull.”

“No it wasn’t!” Gojo thumbs the top of his blanket, grinning affectionately. “I was the best company ever. My charisma knows no bounds.”

“Sure.” You shake your head, very amused, and then slow the movement as a thought crosses your mind. “Do you think she did that on purpose?”

“What?”

“Yahaba-san. When she made me stay at yours. Did she do it on purpose?”

Gojo’s expression doesn’t change, still as pleasant and entertained as it was, but he hums, slightly, and you understand that he’s thinking. Taking it seriously, even if he’s still pretending he isn’t. Letting you know, with the slightest movement, that he’s listening.

“Probably,” he says, jauntily. “I mean, she knew, didn’t she? And there’s only so much she was able to do. So I guess if she could do something, she would’ve. She’s not an idiot.”

You sit with the words for a bit. “I didn’t realise.”

“That was probably the point.”

“No, I mean—” You sigh, trying to figure out how to explain yourself. Yahaba, who had always taken such a background role in your childhood—the closest thing Gojo had ever had to a parent, and she’d taken that role with you, too, in her own way. Chiding you both for staying out late, serving you meals, buying you clothes your parents wouldn’t.

She was only, what, twenty-three or twenty-four when you and Gojo had gotten close? Even younger when his parents had died. It’s only as you get older that you realise how young everyone else is.

You shrug. “I didn’t realise that she could get it. I genuinely thought I was hiding it well, you know.”

Gojo actually snorts, and you follow him, smiling balefully.  

“Did you really?” he says, cocking his head to the side and grinning at you. “Wait—what did you think was happening?”

“I don’t know, I—I have no idea.” You roll your eyes. “I just kind of hoped that people wouldn’t ask questions about… well, about everything, honestly.” Gojo opens his mouth to interject, but you press on, now fully immersed in your memory. “No, no, but can you imagine what a state we looked—just, one kid with those dark glasses on, and the other, skulking away from people, these stupid things covering her hands… god, that’s ridiculous.”

“Strangers probably thought we were in a cult.”

You laugh. “Shit, probably.”

“And don’t you remember when they had your hands tied up for about three years? Tied up with rope, behind your back?”

“Oh my god,” you whisper, blinking at him. “Yeah. What… Oh my god, I’d forgotten about that. Just… pretended it didn’t happen, I guess, but… I can’t believe that. And I thought that was okay!”

“Did you?”

“Basically!” You stare at your hands, dumbfounded. “I mean, I knew it wasn’t nice, but I think I just—I always accepted it, you know? I just thought that… I mean, I just thought it was the way it had to be. I guess I thought I deserved it, a bit? Wow. That’s so weird!” 

“You thought you deserved it?” Gojo asks. A crease forms between his eyebrows, and his mouth pinches into the most tentative pout. It’s absolutely adorable, and you have to stop yourself from staring.

“I—I guess so, yeah. I mean, wouldn’t you?”

“No.” He says it like it’s obvious, which, you suppose, it should be. Of course Satoru wouldn’t have blamed himself. He’s not the type to, and he never has been.

“I guess you wouldn’t. But I did.” You shrug, and then wince.

It’s your shoulder: it plays up sometimes, aching the most at night, or when you’re cold. You’ve spoken to Shoko about it, but she can only guess that it’s a long-standing injury, something that cursed energy can’t cure.

You’re reminded of the years you spent with your arms tied behind your back—you think of how much your body grew with your arms permanently contorted. Even the thought is painful.

You massage your shoulder, like you’re apologising to it.

“I mean,” you continue, “my mother was bedridden for years because of me, and all I ever heard about it was that it was my fault. I was the one that nearly killed her, and it was because I didn’t inherit the proper family technique, and that was my fault as well, again and again…”

Gojo’s still in your peripheral vision. You try to chase the right words.

“And it stuck,” you say, simply. “I guess it got lodged in my brain, and it never went out. So it makes sense why I didn’t question it, in a way. Deep down, I must’ve expected a lot worse.”

The fire crackles, and spits sparks at your feet. You jump and shuffle backwards—you’d like to be warm, but you don’t want to be set alight.

“Anyway.” You press your fingers to your forehead. “Ugh. Sorry.”

Gojo huffs out a laugh. He cocks his head to the side—maybe amused, maybe something completely different. “You shouldn’t—”

He pauses. You look over at him, slightly embarrassed.

And then he grins. “Hey, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you apologise.”

“Oh, shut up,” you say, and this time he laughs properly, hearty and full. “You’re so—that’s an absolute lie, you little—”

“I haven’t!”

“You absolutely have. You have. Don’t try to be annoying.”

“I’m never annoying,” Satoru says immediately. “I’m a saint.”

“That’s another lie. I don’t think lying is very saintly.”

“Ah, maybe I’m not a saint, then.”

“Exactly—”

Gojo waggles his eyebrows. “I’ve always thought of myself as a god, really.”

You roll your eyes, and have to work your mouth to keep yourself from smiling even more. This is something you’d missed—the ease of it all, how quickly you can move on from conversations you dislike. No need to linger, no need to waste time—Satoru’s always ready to move on, and you love that about him.

After a while of the two of you talking aimlessly, the conversation finds a natural lull. You watch the firelight without speaking, and feel the warmth radiating from his body.

You glance over to Gojo. When he sees you’re looking at him, his expression changes into his standard smile, winking at you and settling down into his blanket. He yawns and stretches, rolling his head on his neck.

You’re all warm and fuzzy, and so you allow your eyes to take in the way his Adam’s apple creates the gentle slope of his throat, noticing how his sleeves ride up to expose the smooth skin of his forearm, the pale blue veins at his wrist. He looks back at you, and you return your gaze to his glasses, to at least give the impression of retaining eye contact.

Gojo pats his lips together, peering over the area around him to look for some water. You pass him your bottle, wordlessly, and he chuckles.

“Thanks.”

“Sure.”

Gojo looks at the water bottle in his hands, and then he looks back at you with something hidden, something you can’t place. He pushes his glasses up his nose, and takes a swig of the water, shaking his head.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he says, his voice surprisingly warm. “Nothing.”

Notes:

2006
Sixteen years old

-

Apologies for the pain last chapter folks. Luckily, we've caught the gang in a neat halfway point--Geto hasn't quite gone all coo coo murder-y yet, but there are the little tricklings of it in a post–star plasma vessel world. Who knows what will have happened between 2006 and 2007 for us to catch up with next chapter ! ! ! :0000 :DDD hahaha

If you can't tell, I'm very excited.

Also, I asked a silly little question in my chapter notes last update, and you guys fully responded and then some. I've never wanted to be a beg of an Ao3 writer, but (in the most cliché thing an Ao3 writer could say) comments are truly my lifeforce and I cherish each and every one. Comment away! I'm interested in what you guys think of their "resolution"--do we buy it? Is it the right decision, or will they just repeat themselves all over again? Or maybe that's too bloody pessimistic, and they'll be absolutely fine, thank you very much. Either way: gimme your thoughts. <3

See ya next update!

Chapter 12: 2007

Friday 7th September, 2007

No-one knows what to do.

You carry on.

The morning sun is weak through the frosted window. It’s warm on your arms, even if it does look like an insipid pastel. You’ve been getting into your colours, recently, figuring out who’s cool-toned and warm-toned, giving them colour palettes to work with. You’ve already told Satoru that he’s cool-toned: he works with lavenders, ice blues, deep purples.

He’d seemed to already know. I wear blue to bring out my eyes, he’d said, when you’d told him about it.

You’d reminded him that people never see his eyes, anymore. He’d smiled and lowered his glasses, giving you a playful wink. You’d had to look away.

You’re managing. Honestly, you’re not really thinking about it. One day, one day.

You lean up on your tiptoes and shut the window. Metal scrapes against metal and you wince, but it leaves the room without the intermittent gusts of cold air. You check your watch—about ten minutes until you’re due to set off. Dread coils in your stomach.

But you remember you’re not letting yourself be worried about today, and so you prop your leg on a chair and untie and retie your laces. They’re tight enough that you can feel your heartbeat, and you flex your toes automatically. The hopelessness of the day hasn’t left, and so you slip your scythe off your shoulder and fiddle with it: menial, time-wasting labour.

Your eyes ache, either from lack of sleep or lack of tears.

Yaga enters, and you straighten up immediately. He’s got those dark glasses on, still—when Satoru saw them last week, he’d said that Yaga was copying his style. Later, you and Shoko had quietly agreed that it was probably to hide the dark bruises under his eyes, the evidence of sleepless nights. At least he’s trying to keep it together for you all, even if it’s not working.

But maybe you’re just being too unforgiving, too cynical. Yaga’s trying to appear strong, and even if it doesn’t help you, it’s seemed to help the second-year, the one whose friend died.

Nanami, you tell yourself. Nanami, who lost Haibara. If you start distancing yourself from their names… well, you won’t. Nanami, who lost Haibara.

And you, who lost Geto. All of you. All of you lost him. Shit, your head’s a mess. But you’ll manage. Yaga. Yaga’s here. You can talk to Yaga.

He glances at you, and you pretend you don’t see him. The last thing you want at the moment is for him to try and sit down and talk things through—if you haven’t done that with Satoru, then you’re certainly not doing it with him.

You and Shoko have talked, though, in your own way. Lightly, carefully, and then all at once. It was mainly her, working through everything she’d been thinking, how angry and afraid and guilty she was, all bubbling up beneath her skin.

You didn’t say anything. A part of you hates it, but you know that you want to talk to Satoru first. Despite everything, he knows you best, wholly and utterly. 

“Hebi.” 

Your knuckles clench on the handle of your scythe. The hilt is a warm umber, just a few shades removed from the deep black of your gloves. The wood used to be smoothly polished, but from the countless fights it’s lost the attractive sheen you used to covet so much. It’s rough, chipped in some areas, but you honestly can’t bring yourself to care. It’s not like you can tell, if you always have your gloves on.  

You swing the scythe over your shoulder, looking back at the window. “What?” 

There’s a moment of silence, in which Yaga seems to mull over his words, and then he says: “You should be careful today.” 

“I always am.”

“You are.” Yaga’s voice is low and scratchy. “But Gojo isn’t. That’s who I’m talking about.”

You turn to him. “What? What are you talking about?”

“This is his first mission out of school in many months. We don’t know what to expect.”

You click your tongue. “He’ll be fine.”

“I want you to ensure that.”

“Of course.” You pause. “Wait, you mean, you don’t think he will be? You don’t think he’s going to be fine? You think he’s going to be in danger?”

You’re not sure if you should be irritated that Yaga’s bringing it up, or worried that he felt the need to ask you for help.

“He can handle himself out there,” you say. “It’s not like I’m going to be protecting him from anything.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.” Yaga pushes his glasses up his nose. They dig deep into his wrinkled skin. “I’m not concerned with Gojo’s physical strength.”

“What, then? And why are you asking me?” You roll your shoulders back, feeling a little defensive.

Yaga eyes you carefully—or, at least, he seems to. His expression is unreadable behind his glasses, and it makes you squirm.

“Hebi,” he says again.

You wait for him to say something else. He doesn’t. You bite down on the inside of your cheek, and wonder when Satoru will decide to turn up.

“Yes?” you say, finally, after the silence drags on into awkwardness.

A crease forms between Yaga’s eyebrows. “We both know why you’re going with him today, don’t we?”

Yes. Yes, of course you know—there’s only one reason that you, out of all the more powerful forth-years, would’ve been chosen to accompany Satoru on his first out-of-school mission since Geto left.

“Yeah.”

“Good.” He clenches his palms together, so tightly they go white. “You need to make sure Satoru is still safe and reliable, even…” His expression darkens, and you look to the ground. “Even if Geto isn’t here, he’ll need to be able to function as a sorcerer.” 

“He’ll be safe, sir. He’s not an idiot.” 

“I know. But it doesn’t matter. Until proven otherwise, he’s a liability.” You glare up at him, but Yaga doesn’t flinch. “Unfortunately, that’s the truth. Satoru still cares about Suguru. So does Shoko, and so do you.” 

“I do not—” 

“And it makes him unpredictable.” Yaga exhales in one quick, sharp breath. “I don’t know how he’s going to react, and so it’s your job to make sure he stays sane.” 

You stare at him. “Stays sane?”

“I mean it.” Yaga keeps your gaze until you’re forced to look away. He sighs. “Look… losing a friend, especially in the way you all did—” 

“Don’t.” 

“It manifests in different ways for different people. You know this firsthand.” His voice hardens. “For rest of the day, Gojo is your responsibility. All you have to do is keep watch over him. You can leave him to fight the curse if you need to, it doesn’t matter, just make sure that he doesn’t get out of control. Do you understand?” 

You swallow. “I—” 

“Hello!” 

The door bursts open and you jump, whirling around to see Satoru bounding into the room, beaming at you. 

“Are you all ready to go? This is going to be so cool!” Satoru claps Yaga on the back, winking. “My first expedition with Hebi-Hebi! I’ve hardly slept, I’ve been so excited. You got all your weapons?” 

“Sure,” you mutter, gesturing to the scythe slung over your shoulders, to the knives strapped to your waist, your calf, hidden in your boots.  

“Excellent!” Satoru hops from foot-to-foot, aflame with energy. You don’t let yourself look at Yaga. You don’t want to know what he’s thinking. “And Yaga, we have your permission to leave the school grounds?” 

“Not that you’ve ever needed it, Gojo,” Yaga says seriously. Satoru laughs.

“Great! We’ll head out, then?” He doesn’t give Yaga time to reply. “Awesome! C’mon. It’s the return of Gojo and Hebi, dynamic duo!”  

Satoru strides out of the room, bouncing with every step. You follow him, trying not to think about what Yaga had said. It isn’t right, the insinuation that Satoru would lose control of himself just because of Geto. But, still—you’re carrying on, and you’re moving forward, but it doesn’t mean you’re okay. No-one is. Nobody’s fine, but you still have to carry on.

As you make your way through the building, Satoru fills any silence with a constant, low-level chatter, remarking on the weather (very nice for early autumn!), what he thought about yesterday’s dinner (much too dry, wasn’t it?), how excited he is to go on a mission with you (really, really, really excited!). The final point tugs at the corners of your lips, very gently. Satoru notices, and sighs contentedly.  

“This is going to be so fun! We haven’t exorcised a curse together in way too long. Don’t you think?

“Yeah,” you say, hoarse. You glance up at Satoru. Even as he smiles, a muscle’s pinched in his cheek. It’s just slightly too tight to be normal, too strained to be natural. You know what he looks like when he’s happy, and this isn’t it.  

A heavy weight falls in your stomach, and you think you’re going to be sick. 

“This is going to be awesome,” he repeats cheerfully. His voice lilts up at the end, almost so minutely it’s undetectable, and some hidden part of you can’t help but feel like he’s asking you a question, hoping for an answer. Like he wants your reassurance, maybe.  

But you’re probably reading it wrong. Satoru’s been more difficult to understand lately, and you’ve been forced to fill in the gaps with guesses, approximations, your own feelings. You can’t assume what he’s thinking, especially not now. Pushing how you feel onto him is the beginnings of a disaster, and yet—

“I think so too,” you say, giving his shirt sleeve the lightest tug.

It’s loose and the material cuts off just above his wrists—skin, skin, touch, flesh—but you try to ignore the usual burst of dread. There’s still a part of you that fears getting so close to him, even now. You know it’s cruel and unforgiving of you, and you try to push the thought out of your mind. You hope Satoru doesn’t recognise it, the way your body still remembers the feeling of his fingers around your wrist.

There’s another side of you, the one that you try to lead with, that’s been blazing strong for years and years and years. It’s kinder, most of the time. 

Swallowing heavily, you knock your elbow against Satoru’s. Only for the briefest of seconds, hardly even a touch. Layers of fabric separate skin. You repeat this to yourself as the frantic part of your brain starts screaming and shouting.

You move away from him, quickly. Hesitant, you glance up at him to check for his reaction, almost embarrassed.  

“I think so too,” he echoes, and the muscle twitches in his cheek. “Ahh, we’re going to do so well! If we manage to kill the curse quick enough, we can have a walk around the city. Maybe we can do some shopping! Pick something up for Shoko, as a happy surprise! Oh, that’s such a good idea, isn’t it? I’m so generous with my time, such a good classmate, hmm?” 

“Don’t be conceited,” you manage, and Satoru laughs. Something horrible twists in your chest. You both pretend like nothing’s there. 

 

-- 

 

You find the body before you find the curse.

A child, curled in on itself on the floor, a deep bloody gash where its stomach should have been. Its head is blown open, but you can’t see its brain. It’s just a gaping red-black hole. You look at it, and turn away.

You find the body’s liver five minutes later. 

Satoru doesn’t say anything. Neither do you. 

The curse would be human-like if it wasn’t for the twisting horns rising from every inch of exposed skin. Crusted dark red that’s stained its teeth. Pink jelly has stuck to its mouth, and you think it might have chewed on the child’s brain.

Even as you kill it, Satoru doesn’t say anything. Neither do you. 

At one point, the curse rushes at you. You cut it with your scythe and burn it with your fingertips.

Your gloves fall to the floor, rotting leaves floating from tree branches.  You char the monster’s skin, charcoal beneath your hands. You hate it, you hate it, you hate it.  

Satoru finishes it. You hardly have to do anything, in the end. It’s easy. 

As you stand over its evaporating corpse, you notice that your arm’s bleeding. Satoru hands you some gauze. 

The two of you work together well.  

You know it’s not the same.  

 

-- 

 

You’re standing in a public bathroom, washing the blood from your skin. It’s a disgusting place; flickering lights casting a green hue over damp tiles, rot eating at the bathroom stalls, a dark yellow fungus growing in the corners of the floor. The mirror is chipped and blackened, the reflection distorted and wavy, but the taps have running water, and it seems clean enough.

You’ve put your gloves on the side of the sink, placed one on top of the other, and you’re trying to remember how you got so much blood on all the different places on your body. You dip your hands under the running water and splash some on your collarbone, rubbing at the dried red. It flakes off, then dissolves into the water and dribbles down your neck in a dusty orange.

Satoru’s scrubbing at his fingernails. You keep glancing at him, trying to figure out when would be the best time to say something.

Maybe Yaga was right. Not necessarily about how Satoru would react, on his first mission outside the school since Geto left, but for how he’s feeling. You’re not stupid—you know he’s hurting, but there’s this unbreachable gap between you two that you’re afraid you can’t cross.

It aches, a dull pain right over your heart, but you try to think about how Geto would act. Not the Geto he is now, the one who orchestrated a massacre. He’s the same person, but you can’t yet think of him as the Geto you know. Not your Geto; not Satoru’s.

“We work well together,” you say, looking at Satoru through the mirror. His reflection pauses, and then tilts its head up to look you in the eye.

“Course we do.” The reflection’s lips pull. “Best friends.”

“I’m glad we are,” you say.

How long has it been—two years? Maybe two years means something to the both of you; it took you two years for your friendship to grow for the first time, and then it took you two years for it to heal after it tore you apart. You’re not going to let Geto ruin what you have with Satoru now.

And so, you tell him: “You know I love you, right?”

Satoru doesn’t reply. It’s okay.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever actually said,” you say, honest. Your words are truthful, but you’re painfully aware of how much you’re leaving unsaid. Even now, you’re not telling him everything. “I just figured… you should know. Because you’re my best friend, Satoru. The best one I’ve ever had.”

You can hear his breathing, slow and steady.

You nod. You’ve said what you feel like you should have. The bathroom has some grotty hand dryers, and you step away from the sink and shake the water droplets from your hands.

Satoru stands up, to his full height, and you jolt, his body blocking your way. You look up at him, eyes wide, unsure of what he’s thinking. Satoru watches you, and you feel like he can see everything, like he’s drinking in every slight movement of your expression, reading and understanding you to your very core.

“Are you okay?” he asks, low and careful. He sounds different, any remnants of his cheerful façade wiped clean away. His voice catches on the final syllable and breaks.

You stare at him. Your first impulse is to nod, smile tightly, look down and move on. Because you’re doing fine—you’re getting through the days, you’ve got enough. Besides, you weren’t as close to Geto as Satoru was; for nearly a whole year, it was Shoko and you, Satoru and Suguru. Even the teachers know. Yaga knew that Satoru would be affected. Everyone assumed that you’d be fine. You’ll be fine. You’ll be okay.

You will be okay. You’re not, now.

Your lips part.

“I—” you whisper, “I just—”

His phone blares.

You jolt, and Satoru blinks. He glances down at the screen, and his face widens into a grin.

“Kei-chan,” he tells you, and clicks it. “Hello!”

There’s a muffled voice: bright, chirpy, female.

Satoru laughs, shaking his head with amusement. “No, no. Yes. For sure! No, I’m just here with Hebi, nothing important.” Satoru jerks his head to the door, and whispers: “She’s just outside. Got me to text her our location a bit ago. So cute!”

You move around him to get to the hand dryers. He steps aside, gaze far away from you.

“We’re just inside!” His eyes crinkle, and he laughs again. “Yeah, that one. I know. I know! Okay. Okay, love you too. Bye!”

He clicks off the phone, and you press the button for the hand dryer. The machine makes a pathetic hum, but doesn’t turn on. You tut, and wipe your hands on your shirt.

Satoru lets out a long sigh, smiling to himself. “She’s so cute.”

“I know.”

“And she’s just outside. Waiting for me!”

“I heard.”

“So cute. Sweet.”

You slot your hands back in the gloves and flex them. The fabric feels a touch too tight. “You want to see her, then?”

“Of course!” Satoru beams at you. “Leave your weapons in here, I’ll just say hello and then we can go back to school. Ah—she’s so sweet, isn’t she?”

The muscle twitches in his cheek. You don’t comment on it—you never do.

Keiko’s waiting outside. She’s dressed for the weather, a warm blue scarf wrapped around her neck, her nose pink from the cold. She dances a little, as she stands, shifting her weight from foot to foot in little hops.

When she sees Satoru, her face lights up, waving over at him enthusiastically. You don’t look at Satoru’s face, but you can’t miss the way he speeds over to her, takes her face in his two hands, whispers something that makes her eyes shine, and kisses her.

You follow him, a couple steps behind.

Keiko’s fingers twine in his hair, the soft, downy strands on his neck. Her nails are painted with purple flowers that pull out the lilac undertones of Satoru’s white hair. Satoru’s never shy about kissing Keiko, something you’ve never quite gotten used to.

Apparently, Keiko hasn’t either; when he brings his lips back from hers, you see that her face is bright pink, and she lets out an embarrassed, pleased little giggle. She makes eye contact with you and swats Satoru on the arm.

“Hiya,” she says, a little breathily. “Um—how are you?”

“Great, thanks,” you say. “How’s your day been?”

“Wonderful,” she enthuses, holding onto Satoru’s arm and smiling up at him. “I heard you two were on one of your school’s field trips and I just had to say hi. It’s so weird, how your school does it! You were just on your own?”

“On a field trip.”

She beams. “It’s so strange. Not that I’m complaining! It’s more time with Satoru, I guess—I mean, well—” Keiko flushes even darker, seemingly embarrassed.

“Exactly,” Satoru says, winking at her.

“Anyway, it’s still nice to meet up with you two. I haven’t seen you in ages, Hebi-chan, have I?”

“No, not in a while.”

“We’ll have to meet up soon, though!”

“Yeah, we will.” You nod at the two of them. “I’ll leave you two, then.”

“Oh, you don’t have to—” Keiko protests, her lips forming a soft little pout. “Honestly, please don’t leave just because of me!”

Briefly, you glance at Satoru. His eyes are fixed on Keiko, winding his arm around her waist. Your heart lurches.

“No,” you say, “that’s okay. I’ve got to get back now, anyway.”

“But—”

“I promised Yaga-san I’d be back before dinner.” You shrug at her, gesturing to Satoru. “He knows, too.”

Keiko turns to Satoru, looking up at him. The top of her head is level with his shoulder. She nudges him.

“Satoru, if you need to leave—”  

“Tell Yaga I’ll be a couple hours,” Satoru says, fingers threading through Keiko’s silky hair. “I’ll probably miss the food. I’ll get some with Kei-chan.”

You sigh, trying to ignore the sting of the two of them together. “He won’t like that.”

“He’ll live.”

“Gojo.”

Satoru laughs, and spares you a condescending glance. “C’mon, Hebi-Hebi, you’re not my mother. I’m allowed to spend time without you.”

Your mouth feels dry. You raise your eyebrows and cross your arms, the picture of platonic disapproval. “Fine—your funeral. I’ll tell Yaga you were being stubborn.”

“You do that. See you!”

“Right. Yeah. Bye.”

 

--

 

You’ve tried very hard to dislike Keiko.

She’s not the first girlfriend Satoru’s had, and she’s not even the one he seems to like the most. The problem is that she’s too damn nice—offering to spend time with you, encouraging Satoru to invite you on their dates, never getting jealous that Satoru’s got a close female friend.

He’s had relationships before where they’d clearly be uncomfortable around you, sometimes straight-up asking if you and Satoru had ever… you know…? Not that it’d bother them, if it was in the past, but… still… 

And you’ve thought about trying to date someone. You’ve had years to cope with Satoru not feeling the same about you, and you’d be lying if you said you hadn’t considered ‘moving on’ in a more concrete way.

A couple months ago, there’d even been a guy who you think you could have liked—you’d certainly found him attractive, all dark hair and thin fingers and broad shoulders, and you’d spent a surprisingly enjoyable few minutes with him when you were waiting for Shoko to finish scouting the area for curses.

He’d kept leaning forward, smirking in a way that made your heart skip, allowing you a very clear look at the dip of his collarbone and the sharpness of his jaw. He was self-assured, maybe a bit conceited, but confident in a decidedly attractive way. A bit longer, and you might have been tempted to give him your number, just to try it out.

And then you’d said something he’d found particularly funny, and he’d clapped his hands together, lips curling up in amusement, and you’d been so viscerally reminded of Satoru it had nearly taken your breath away.

And then you’d remembered that he was a guy your age, and that you could never make your partner happy in a relationship. And you’d thought about guys your age, and what they’d want from relationships, and how you would never be able to provide that.

You’d remembered that at some point, it’s likely he’d want to sleep with you. You hadn’t been able to think of anything worse. He would want sex, and you would probably never be able to hold his hand. Discomfort had twisted in your gut, and you’d excused yourself before the guy could say another word.

You can’t exactly pinpoint when Satoru’s woeful yearnings turned into successful relationships, but around the time you’d started to spend some more time with him, you’d realised that Satoru had a girlfriend. And then he’d had another one. You’d hated how it had hurt—you hadn’t thought you had the right to want him, back then. You were still so conflicted about him, and you’d hated yourself for feeling jealous.

You still hate it now; you hate how helpless it makes you feel, like some useless kid pining from the sidelines.

But you’ve had years to cope with Satoru loving everyone else apart from you, and you can survive. You’re friends again, good friends, and that helps.

Keiko makes him happy. That’s all you can ask for.

You’re sitting in Shoko’s room, your feet resting on her pillow. You thumb through her magazines, mindlessly absorbing the prettiest pictures. Shoko’s cross-legged on the floor, playing with her new anatomy set. She’d tried to explain it when she’d first got it, pointing out the different organs and sets of ribs and all thing you couldn’t begin to understand. You’d shook your head, baffled and still quite amused.

Shoko’s taking it harder than you are. It’s not really that she was closer to Geto, but she definitely liked him more than you did. Shit—you sound awful. No, no, because you liked him, you properly liked him, but Shoko liked him more than you, and Satoru liked him more than Shoko, and—

There’s two Sugurus in your mind. The first: your friend. Suguru had helped you, one of the more reasonable people out of your group. He’d lent you his hair ties. He’d washed your gloves for you. He’d given you letters from Satoru, and had been kind to you even when you and Satoru were fighting. He’d made your life warmer, an escape from the cold, cold, cold of your fingertips.

And then Suguru massacred a village. He killed innocent people. Children. Just after Yaga had told you, you’d called home, asked Sara to put Haru on the phone. Geto had killed people younger than him. You can’t connect the two of them, those two sides of him.

Your parents are both sorcerers. The Hebis aren’t a wealthy or powerful family, but you’re still pure. Geto would leave your parents to thrive as he slaughters millions. Out of your family, Sara would be the one he would condemn. Little Haru, motherless. Your father, the only influence on his life. That’s the world that Geto wants.

It seems selfish to miss him. Are you allowed to mourn the friend who still lives? What would he be doing now? Does he have someone to stand beside as he washes the blood from his hands, looking at himself in the mirror and smiling at the incarnation of justice? Does he regret it? Does he think of the space in the classroom meant for him, the piercing absence he’s left behind?

It's exhausting. You let the magazine drop over your eyes, blocking out the light. Shoko’s humming, quietly. You wish you could touch her, but your insides convulse and you think you might be sick. It’s pointless—your stomach’s empty. You hadn’t had much of an appetite at dinner.

There’s a quick knock at the door. It’s familiar. You sit up.

Shoko seems to recognise it as well, and her hands still on her anatomy set. She doesn’t look up, and when she feels your feet touch the floor she gets back to work right away.

“It’s Satoru,” you tell her, even though she knows.

She doesn’t say anything. The silence is killing you.

You open the door—Satoru, glasses tucked into his hair, leaning on the doorframe with a wry smile.

“What?” You don’t mean to sound so tired, but you can’t muster the energy to remedy it. “You alright?”

“Sure, of course. Just wanted to go for a walk with my Hebi-Hebi,” Satoru says. He leans forward and gives Shoko a wave. “Heya, Shoko.”

Shoko doesn’t react. The muscle twitches in Satoru’s cheek, but his grin widens.

“You gonna walk with me?” Satoru’s feet scuff on the floor, and you tut. He chuckles.

“Sure,” you say, without any power to resist. “Sure.”

You’re about to make your way out the door when Satoru holds up his arm. It tugs at your heart as you notice that he keeps it a good distance away from you, so there wasn’t any danger of you colliding with him. You raise an eyebrow at him.

“What?”

Satoru mimics your tut. “It’s cold out there,” he says, chiding. It’s another one of his jokes, but you’re losing the patience needed to humour them. “You should wrap up warm.”

“You sound like someone’s mother.”

“Don’t be so rude!”

“Yeah. Someone’s angry mother.”

“You’re such a grump.”

You pause, and then roll up your magazine and give Shoko a little tap on the shoulder. She’s silent. You glance up at Satoru, and when he notices your gaze he contorts his face into a wide smile. There’s a hole in your chest. You don’t know whose strategy is worse.

The halls are quiet.

It’s a conspicuous reminder that there’s two fewer students than there used to be. You remind yourself to check on the second-year, the kid, Nanami. Out of you three remaining, you’re the only one who’s likely to.

“I broke up with Kei-chan,” Satoru says, matter-of-fact. He jumps up and taps his hands against the ceiling, very obviously avoiding your eyes.

“Oh.” You look at him. He’s smiling. That means nothing. “Why?”

“Just couldn’t. You know.”

“Right.” You hesitate. “I thought you liked her.”

“I did.” Satoru’s runs a hand over his jaw, and you notice the small pale-white scar blemishing his skin. It’s the one you caused: was it a pencil you’d thrown at him? A stapler? “I mean, she was nice, wasn’t she?”

“Really nice.”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t go out with someone if they weren’t nice.”

“Makes sense.” You turn a corner and find a small bench carved into the wall. Smooth granite, in a deserted space. You sit down, but Satoru stands, leaning his head against the wall and studying the space just above your ear.

“What do you think about it?” Satoru still isn’t looking at you, and it stokes the hot coals inside you. You try to fan them, desperate to feel something rise up.

“Think about what?”

“Me and Kei-chan. Keiko. Us breaking up.”

You frown at him. “What are you talking about?”

Satoru rolls his eyes, that stupid smile still stuck to his face. “Are you sad? Angry? Exasperated? Pleased?”

“Why would I be pleased?” You bite your tongue, and shove another sentence out with the same level of defensiveness: “Or sad, or anything? Why would it matter to me what you do with your relationships?”

Satoru laughs, but there’s a level of bitterness beneath the pretence of humour. “I thought you might have an opinion. Care about it, maybe?”

“Of course I care,” you say. “It’s just not my business, that’s all. I have an opinion, obviously.”

“Which is?”

“I—” You look around, trying to find the words. “That she made you happy? That you seemed to get along with her? I don’t—that she didn’t mind me?”

Satoru leans forward, hands slapping on his knees jovially. “So strange.”

“Right.”

“You’re so funny, Hebi-Hebi.” Satoru tilts his head forwards and scrunches up his nose.

“Great.”

“And so wise! You really do have such good ideas, so smart! Not as smart as me, of course, but still very clever!”—and then that fucking muscle twitches, and you can’t put up with it anymore.

“Stop it.”

He laughs, again, again. “I’m not going to stop telling you the truth, Hebi-Hebi, that I’m so much more—”

“Stop it, Satoru!” you say, dangerously loud. “Just—just stop it, right now.”

Satoru blinks. “What—”

“This!” You gesture at him wildly, at the playful tilt of his head, his fading smile. “All of this!”

And you’re shouting, shit, but you think—fuck it, it doesn’t matter, he needs to hear this. You get to shout. You deserve this.

“You know—I can deal with you hiding it with the laughing, and the acting like a kid, and everything like that, because that’s you, that’s just how you’ve always been! I get that, I get that, but this? This is different, and you know it is, and I can’t stand it!”

“You’re not making any—” Satoru starts, but you cut him off.

“It’s the pretending. Okay? It’s the—it’s pretending that everyone’s okay when we’re clearly not, and then thinking you’re fooling anyone! Because you’re not. You’re not fooling anyone, and you’re definitely not fooling me. I just—not anymore, okay? I—Yaga’s a mess, Shoko’s hardly speaking, and you’re acting like you used to when you were six!”

Satoru’s face is a mask, twisted. “I don’t know what you mean,” he starts, but you glare at him viciously, fisting your hands in your hair.

“You do. You do. So don’t act like I don’t know you, don’t try to fool me like you’re doing with everyone else, because it won’t work.”

“Who says I’m trying to fool anyone?” Satoru reels around, sweeping his arm in a jerking motion. “Who says any of this is pretending? Maybe I’m fine.”

“I know what you look like when you’re actually happy, Gojo. This isn’t it.”

“Maybe I’ve changed,” he says. “That’s understandable. Maybe I—Maybe I’ve changed the way I process things. Did you think of that?”

It stings, the implication that he’s changed so much in the few years you weren’t speaking, but you keep your face impassive. “Not this much.”

“You don’t know if I’ve worked through it all.”

“Right,” you say, “right. You’ve worked through it just like Shoko has, then? Or like Yaga has? Or me? Because we’re all doing so well, aren’t we?”

“You don’t have to be fine,” Satoru spits. “You’re allowed to not be okay. It’s different for me.”

“It’s not—”

“It is. It’s different.” Satoru sneers at you, and you stare back, not willing to back down. “I’m different. Yaga’s allowed to fall apart. Shoko’s allowed, you’re allowed, but am I?”

“Gojo—”

“So I’m fine. And I’m fine. And I’m always going to be fine.”

You take in a shuddering breath. Every impulse in your body is itching to retort, to explain to him in excruciating detail why you’re right, because Satoru doesn’t understand what you’re trying to say, he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand that you’re not telling him to stop pretending, but that you’re giving him a space where he doesn’t need to.

You press your fingertips to your hairline and wait. You hold your breath, and release it in a slow exhale. You need to be more rational about this.

“I’m not,” you tell him, staring at the ground. “I’m really not. But I don’t expect you to be, either.”

“You don’t get to make that decision.”

“Hey.” You look up at him sharply, and he blinks at you. “Listen to me. I’m not talking about everyone else. I’m talking about me. This is what I expect, not anything about anyone else.” You sigh. “I don’t know what everyone else thinks, and I don’t know how you’re going to be acting in front of them—but I know me, and I know you. Us. And I’m saying that you don’t have to pretend with me.”

Satoru doesn’t reply.

“Even if,” you say, looking around wildly, “you just think it’s because I’ve known you for the longest, or because I saw you when you weren’t as good at hiding it. You can think it’s a stupid, detached reason if you want to, but I know you and I care about you and I know that neither of us is fine. I know when you’re pretending, Gojo, so please don’t insult me by acting like I don’t.”

Heat pricks at your eyes.

“Because I’m not,” you whisper, all fight dissipating. “And if I’m not, then you’re not, either. And… and I need my friend back. Please.”

You need him. Because you don’t just need a friend—if it was that simple, you’d be crying for Shoko, who understands how you’re feeling better than Satoru. You and Shoko, you’re both feeling the same. You and Satoru… it’s different. You know it’s different.

Geto and you, and Geto and Satoru: two friendships that were worlds apart.

Geto was the first person to ever challenge Satoru. You can only do so much, and you’ve never tried to pretend you’re any more powerful than you actually are. Geto was something unique, and Satoru will probably never get that again. And then he was so much more, more than a stupid rival, so much that you will never comprehend.

Neither you or Satoru are alright, but Satoru is still so much worse.

You don’t just need a friend. You need him. Satoru, who makes you smile, who makes you feel warm, who’s saved your life so many times in so many ways. He’s your friend, and you love him, and you miss him. You miss him more than anything, but especially when he’s standing so close to you. There’s no way you can explain everything to him, but you can try.

“I need you,” you say, simply. Your voice breaks, and you run a hand over your eyes. “And I just can’t. I can’t have you pretending, not like this.”

He’s quiet. It’s rare, these few times you can make him pause. If it was any other time, you’d probably be proud.

Satoru lets out a small laugh. It’s more of an exhale of breath than anything, so different to the forced chirping you’ve been hearing recently that you almost cry with relief.

“I always forget how much you notice,” he mutters. Satoru slides onto the bench next to you and rests his cheek on his palm, looking at you softly. “There’s nothing about me that you miss, is there?”

You shrug, hardly aware of what you’re doing.

“No.” Satoru shifts. “You know so much. It’s almost frightening, how much you can figure out.”

You look at him, and he chuckles.

“I… Suguru noticed stuff, most of the time.” You can feel your shoulders tense, and Satoru swallows. “He’d make sure I slept. Properly pick me up and move me around, sometimes, if I let him. You remember?”

“Course I do,” you say, hoarse.

“But you notice everything,” Satoru’s voice hitches. “It’s crazy.”

The air shifts between you two, calm and gentle. Your hands feel heavy in your lap.

“It’s why I broke up with Keiko,” he says, “I couldn’t pretend anymore. Just couldn’t. I figured… there’s no use trying, is there? When you know it’s not going to work. Do you know what I mean?”

Your brow furrows and you try ardently to reach him, but you shake your head. “Not really.”

He nods. “Yeah. I didn’t think so.”  

You both let the moment rest like that. It’s the comfort of years, where even your silence is familiar.

“How did you know?” he asks, softly enough it almost seems like he’s curious. “About me… doing what you said?”

You let out a gentle laugh—Satoru, wanting to know how to perfect his craft.

“There’s a muscle in your cheek,” you say, letting your finger hover a couple centimetres away from it. “When you’re acting all fake-happy, it twitches.”

Satoru rubs at it with his thumb. “Huh.”

“Don’t even try.”

He starts. “What?”

“You’re working out how to stop it. So I won’t be able to figure out when you’re not okay. Right?”

Satoru smiles guiltily. “…No.”

“It won’t work,” you chuckle. “Unfortunately, I know you too well. I’ll just figure something new out. Or maybe I know you so well I won’t have to.”

“What, you can just read my mind now?”

“Yep,” you say, feeling like you’re a kid again. “I’m a genius.”

Satoru laughs, weak. “That’s my line,” he says. His voice trembles.

You move your foot and let the toe of your shoe press against Satoru’s heel. Heart steadily beating, you wait for the fear. It comes. You don’t move. It’s always been strange to you, how emotions can transform into pain that physically hurts. There’s a weight on your limbs preventing you from pushing further, but Satoru’s lips part, and he smiles, and you realise it’s also preventing you from pulling away.

The light’s low in this corridor. When he blinks, it sends a ripple of shadow down his face, silken in its fluidity. 

“I love you too,” he says. Silent, you let the words drift into your memory, swirling where they’ll stay forever. “I didn’t say, before. But I do. I really do.”

“Satoru—”

“So much. So much it scares me. Because if you ever… if I ever…”

He turns. He offers his face to you, eyes glistening, pale light highlighting the wetness on his cheeks. How does he think you know everything, when he surprises you every second? Can he really think you notice everything when his thoughts remain so hidden? You want to know what he’s thinking, now, now. 

“Don’t leave,” he pleads, nothing but a whisper. “Don’t leave me alone. Please. Always stay.”

Tears. You can feel yourself crying. You ache to touch, to soothe. “You’ve asked me this before,” you say, choking up. “And what did I say last time?”

“Everything’s changed since then. Everything.” Satoru’s mouth twitches, like he’s saying silent words, but you understand. You don’t need him to say anything more. 

“I know,” you say. He nods, relieved. 

“So stay with me. Forever.”

You make a weak stab at a joke. “For infinity, you mean?”

“Yeah.” Satoru turns to look at you and your heart jumps at the clear expression on his face. There’s not a hint of humour: for once, he’s fully and completely serious. “For the rest of my life, and for all the lives after.”

Your lips part, breath catching in your throat. 

“That’s what I mean by infinity,” he says. Satoru’s eyes are molten, shining. “With everyone else, it keeps me away, alone, but with you… I understand what infinity can mean, when I’m with you.”

He blinks again, his eyes never leaving yours, and now there’s only a thin ring of blue, encasing an endless pool of black. You know your eyes must look the same, pupils wide, dilated. It’s the light: adjusting to the darkness.

You sniff.

“Shit, Satoru,” you say, rubbing furiously at your eyes, “you can’t say stuff like that to me. It’s too goddamn sappy.”

He lets out a watery laugh. “Sorry. I thought I was supposed to be honest.”

“Honest?” You catch yourself on another sniffle. “You’re being such a sap.”

“You’re the one telling me to open up, and now you’re criticising me for it? I’m getting mixed signals here, Hebi-Hebi.”

“It’s embarrassing.” You give up and let your hands drop to your lap, resigning yourself to the tears pooling in the corners of your eyes. “I don’t know how to say anything half as cool as that.”

“You should start developing your articulation skills.”

“Shut up. You’re so annoying.” You can’t push the smile from your face. “I think you like making me cry for no reason.”

Satoru chuckles. “There’s a reason for everything. That what Yahaba always said.”

“And do you believe that?”

The smile falls from his lips. “No. Not at all.”

You rub your thumbs against the palms of your hands. You remember Shoko, before everything had changed, sitting on her bedroom floor and running through her anatomy books. You were sat beside her, listening to her mumbled little phrases as she flicked through huge textbooks. 

She had told you about the muscles; the extrinsic muscle groups, running along your forearm, and the intrinsic, all located inside your hand. You flex your fingers, one at a time, and wonder what’s contracting under your skin right now. Your hand curls into a fist, and you feel lucky to be alive. 

“Toji Fushiguro had a son,” Satoru says. “He told me to look for him. Before I killed him, that’s what he told me.”

You know about what happened, that failed Star Plasma Vessel mission last year. Satoru told you a few months ago, just before Geto left. This is the first time you’ve heard about a child.

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I’ve been looking for him. Toji said that the kid was going to be sold off in the next year or two.”

You frown. “Sold off to who?”

“The Zenins.” 

You straighten instantly, memories of the Zenin clan flickering in your mind. “But they’re—” 

“Yeah. Yeah, I know. That’s why I’ve been trying to find him.”  

“Well,” you say, carefully, “I can help you.”

Satoru looks at you. “What?”

“I’ll help. I—of course I’ll help. You’ve been doing this on your own?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, Satoru.” A moment, to collect yourself. “Yes, I’ll help. We’ll find him, before the Zenins do, and…” You watch his eyes shimmer. “And we’ll give him a good childhood.”

That’s what he was thinking about. It’s obvious, the way he breathes out, rests his head in his hands, smiles tiredly. He’s thinking about you both; a child locked away in a remote fortress, a child with ropes binding their wrists. 

“What’s his name? The kid?”

“Megumi,” Satoru says. “Megumi Fushiguro.”

You memorise it. You’ll find this kid, wherever he is. Both of you.

“He’ll be okay,” you tell him. “We’ll make sure he’s okay.”

Satoru is warm beside you. The air thrums into silence. Your thoughts return to Suguru.

Is it selfish, to miss him? When so many people have been hurt, are you allowed to still care? Or does it matter? Should you even bother caring about what you’re allowed to be thinking? 

Something alights within you. There’s a purpose, now, an end to strive towards—to save this faceless child from the Zenins. You remember Noaya Zenin, the men at your grandmother’s funeral, the tired face of the baby twins’ mother. Whoever this kid is, you don’t want him to grow up around that. 

You have Satoru. Satoru has you. Later, you can think about what it all means. And you will. But not today. 

Today, you allow yourself to mourn. 

Notes:

2007
Seventeen years old

-

Exam season had befallen me. I am now out the other end, and I've celebrated with this! whooo

There's a lot going on this chapter, but we all knew it was coming. Comment away your thoughts, they are my lifeforce. I'll let you guys know that next chapter is 'beach episode'-esque, so there's definitely some lightness to offset the grimness of the past few chapters. It's just as much of a relief for me as it is for you guys--this chapter has left me broody and emo. I'm going to go and make myself some hot chocolate with marshmallows. Love to you all <333333

Chapter 13: 2008

Sunday 7th September, 2008

Time wanes on. 

You take up embroidery, and Satoru decides on rectangular lenses to his glasses. Shoko stops hiding her smoking. You can’t stand the smell. Nanami sways between the fourth- and second-years, unsure where he’s supposed to fit.

You spend time at Satoru’s in the holidays, and watch your brother grow up from a distance. Sara’s working as a receptionist, but your father doesn’t approve. You try to convince her not to care.

On a lethargic Saturday afternoon, you offer the suggestion up to the ether, and Satoru snatches at it. And so, it’s decided.

The beach: a soft reprieve. 

 

--

 

“This is so cool!”

Satoru bounds forwards, jumping wildly onto the sand and turning back to the three of you with a beaming grin.

“This was a mistake,” you say to Shoko, reluctantly following Satoru with a slightly less eager pace. She hums, hauling a beach chair over her shoulder.

Satoru hops on one leg and attempts to pull off his sandals, before nearly toppling to the side and giving up. He gestures at you, arms flailing, trying to get you to join him. You refuse to let yourself smile, but Satoru seems to catch something in your expression and sends you a very unsubtle wink. 

“Don’t try to hide it, Hebi-Hebi,” he calls, succeeding in removing his shoes and bounding back over to you. “You’re excited!”

“Marginally,” you say, “not really.”

“You’re so excited,” Satoru affirms. “The beach is the best. Isn’t the beach the best?” 

You shove a pile of towels into his arms. “Carry some stuff.”

“With pleasure!” Satoru scoops up your bags with ease and strides forwards towards the beach. “This is so cool! This is so cool!”

Shaking your head, you push your sunglasses further up your nose and survey the beach. You’re all lucky it’s such nice weather—for a while, Shoko had been convinced that it was going to suddenly rain, ruining the plans that you and Satoru had laid out for today. 

When you’d pitched the idea to Satoru, you hadn’t expected it to actually happen. So many things could have gone wrong, that it’s surprising they didn’t. But Satoru had adored the idea, and had taken over practically all of the planning—without his influence, you’re sure you wouldn’t have been able to take Nanami with you. 

It’s nice, really, seeing Satoru get so excited about something. His excitement hasn’t been genuine for a long time, and you’ve learnt to savour the brief flashes of genuine emotion whenever you can. 

You glance up at the newest member to the party—Nanami, looking very uncomfortable with the masses of beach-things laden in his arms. Satoru had insisted you bring them all, you hadn’t had the energy to refuse. The kid is also very obviously irritated with Satoru’s glasses that are perched on the top of his head.

“You can give them to me,” you say, gesturing to Satoru’s glasses with a sigh. 

Satoru had thought it was very funny, burying them in Nanami’s hair all through the car journey here. It’d probably been your mistake to sit them together in the back seat—you’d realised within the first ten minutes that Satoru loved annoying Nanami more than anything and, from your position of authority from the passenger seat in the front, you’d told them that Shoto would be swapping seats with Satoru for the journey back, no questions. 

Shoko had shrugged (“less driving for me, sure”), and Satoru had feigned immense disappointment (“but Kento-kun will be so lonely without me!”). You’d ignored him, and he’d giggled. 

“Seriously,” you say to him, shrugging. “It’s fine. He won’t annoy me if I’ve got them.”

Nanami eyes you for a second, and then carefully removes the glasses from his head and passes them over. He holds them tentatively with only his index and thumb, the rest of his fingers splayed away from you.

Your heart sinks, but you flash him an appreciative look as you tuck them onto the neckline of your shirt. 

You can’t blame the kid. That was Satoru’s doing: more than likely, he’d cornered Nanami before you’d left, casual and light as he explained the direst consequences as to what would happen if anyone accidentally touches you. 

You watch Satoru move over the sand in great strides, scouting out the best place to settle your things, and sigh, only barely remembering to disguise the affection seeping through. 

“Have you been to the beach before?” you ask, as you make your way closer to the sea. You were the one who suggested Nanami come with you today—the least you can do is try to make him feel comfortable. 

“Yes,” Nanami says.

“That’s nice.”

“It was.”

“Great.”

“Mm.”

You nod, slightly awkward. “How old were you?”

“What?”

“How old were you?”

“Oh. When?”

“When you went to the beach.”

“Er. I went more than once.”

“Ah.”

“When I was younger.”

“Of course.” You shift the grip of the bag you’re carrying. “Right.”

Nanami coughs. “Yeah.”

After a second’s deliberation, you give up. 

You’ll try again later, but you can’t just stand dithering there with him—two people who don’t really want to talk to each other, making forced awkward conversation. And though you feel an obligation to make sure he’s alright, Nanami’s never made it easy for you, even last year, when…

You hadn’t noticed him much in school, in your second or third. You were too preoccupied with your own problems to think about other people’s. You were still aware of him, though; you’d been in enough shared classes to recognise he’s never been the most outgoing person. 

But after Haibara had been killed, Nanami had retreated from the world. He’d refused to interact with anyone, spent all his time alone. And you’d wanted, even when you were reeling from everything that happened last year, to help him. You know what it’s like to feel alone. You know what it’s like to push everyone away. 

Haibara’s death was over a year ago. Just a few months before... but you’d had your own problems to deal with at the time. Still, you’d tried to make an effort, even if it was the least you could do.

Shoko had seemed generally apathetic to Nanami tagging along to the beach trip, but Satoru had been wickedly excited. You’d hoped Nanami would enjoy himself, even a little; no-one else is willing to make sure he’s keeping afloat, and the responsibility has since fallen to you. A beach trip, for the third- and fourth-years. It should be an enjoyable experience for all parties. So far, it hasn’t really been going well.

“Hey,” you say, walking over to Satoru and dumping the bags on the sand.

“Hey!” Satoru grabs a beach towel and rolls it out onto the floor. “This is so cool.”

“I think you’ve mentioned.” You crouch down and begin to unpack, chucking the rest of the towels in Satoru’s direction so he can lay them out. 

“I should say it again, though. In case you forget.”

“I see.”

“Are you going to say it, then?”

“Say what?”

“That this is cool!”

You roll your eyes. “Probably not, no.”

“You’re such a grump!” Satoru groans, splaying himself out on a towel and squinting up at you, fingers blocking the sun from his face. “C’mon. Admit that this is fun. Just say it.”

“It’s getting less fun the more you remind me of it.”

“That’s a lie,” Satoru says. “My company’s delightful.”

“Right.”

“Is that a yes?”

“You can pretend it is.”

Satoru sits up, crossing his legs and leaning towards you. He doesn’t say anything. You raise your eyebrows.

“Say it.”

“No.”

“Say it.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“You’re insufferable.”

“Oh, come on!” Satoru’s face crumples comically, and he buries his face in his hands. You laugh, and he peeks up at you through his fingers, grinning. “You’re having fun,” he says with a smile, more like a statement than a question.

You purse your lips, hiding a grin. “Think what you want to think,” you tell him. 

“Nah, I don’t have to.” He gestures to your smile, which you quickly wipe from your face. “You’re having fun. I can tell. Good.”

Satoru stretches, looking around the beach lazily. It’s not as crowded as you’d thought it’d be; when you were looking for prospective spots, you and Satoru had made sure to stay away from the more popular areas, that’d be so full of tourists you’d be hardly able to breathe. 

You don’t like crowds. You’ve gotten better with them, since you were a kid, but there’s still the horrible fear of someone bumping into you, of a rogue arm pressing against you, that makes you firmly avoid all busy areas. 

This beach is a nice compromise; not so isolated that it’d be impossible to get to, so there’s still a good level of other people scattered around, but still far enough away for you to feel comfortable.

Satoru blinks at the horizon, his eyes squinted. He frowns a little, and then taps the bridge of his nose curiously, looking around where he’s sitting and patting the space around him. 

“Hey, Hebi-Hebi, have you seen my—“ He stops, his eyes latching on the exposed skin of your collarbone. You look at him for a second, and then glance down, checking if you’ve spilt anything on your shirt—and then you laugh, a little, and pluck his sunglasses out from where they’re folded on the neckline.

“Forgot about these,” you say, sliding them onto your nose. 

You tilt your chin up to look at him through them, and then scoff, shaking your head. It’s absolutely pitch black, of course. 

“Gah,” you say, “I’ve got no clue how you see through that.” You look at him over the tops of the frame and sending him an exaggerated wink. “Unless you’re the world’s best sorcerer, of course.”

Satoru’s mouth closes, and his eyebrows lower, slightly. He swallows. 

You remove the glasses awkwardly, feeling a little self-conscious. “Okay,” you say, mentally retreating a little, “you could at least humour me. Have them back, then.”

Just like that, Satoru snaps back to life. His nose scrunches up into a bright laugh, and he makes grabby hands for his glasses, grinning.

“Hebi-Hebi, your jokes are improving! One day, you’ll almost be as funny as me!”

“Right, nice,” you say, dropping the glasses in his hands. “Really genuine.”

“It was!”

“Sure. What, are we saying that you’re the only one who can make the stupid jokes, then?”

Satoru smiles at the ground. “I think your stupid jokes are very funny. Even if they are very poor imitations of my ones.”

“I was pretending to be you. Did you like it?”

“I did! Your comedic timing needs some work, though—not quite as good as mine, but you’re getting there!” Satoru turns solidly to the sea, planting his feet firmly in the sand. His glasses are askew on his nose, and he looks so childishly determined that your heart could explode. “So.”

“So?”

“So. Are we doing this?”

“Doing what?”

Satoru sighs. “Swimming!” 

Oh.

Ah.

You take a tentative step back. “I—I didn’t think you were serious about that.”

“Of course he’s serious,” Shoko says. She drops her bags next to your towel and sits down. “Haven’t you met anyone more serious than that man-child?”

“Hebi-Hebi,” Satoru says, dropping his voice low and deep, twisting his face into something ridiculously sombre, “I am always serious.”

It’s enough to make you chuckle, even with your heart thrumming. 

“Besides,” he continues, “there’s nothing to worry about. Loads of free space, nice weather, waves are absolutely tiny… and you’ve got an incredible swimming instructor to hand, just in case you need any additional assistance. You’ll be like a dolphin in no time, I promise!”

“A dolphin,” you say. “Right.”

“Come on,” he pleads, fisting his hands in his hair and giving you an anguished expression, “I’ve been really looking forward to it!”

“I haven’t.”

“Don’t you want to make me happy?”

“Not particularly.”

“You’re so cruel to me!”

“And you just want to prove you’re better than me at swimming.”

“Yes! Obviously!” He sighs. “Well, it’s not like it’s hard to do, but still. I—what? I’m just naturally talented at everything, I can’t help it—oh, look, I was joking—no, come on!” He puckers his lips into a pout and looks like he’s making a great effort to chew the words around in his mouth, before he finally manages: “Please?”

You feel something flip in your chest and, completely embarrassingly, have to look away.

You disguise it like you’re surveying the sea, figuring out whether you want to test out the ocean waves. Glowering at the beautiful weather, you bite on the inside of your cheek, thinking. 

You don’t know how to swim. You were never taught. Of course your parents never bothered to teach you, and by the time you were even allowed to take off your hand bindings, you had been set on avoiding them as much as possible. Maybe Sara had suggested it at some point, but you never knew about it. 

Satoru wants you to learn how to swim. You sigh.

A problem of momentous proportion: have Satoru teach you how to swim, Satoru, in swimming trunks, wet hair, shirtless, teaching you how to swim—or you figure out how to say no to him when he says ‘please’. 

“And,” he says, “it’s not just for me. It’s an important life skill—what will you do if a helpless child is being attacked by a curse in the wide, wide ocean? You gonna leave them to drown?”

“I’m probably not going to cling to their flailing body and swim them to shore, if that’s what you’re thinking,” you say.

“Oh, yeah. But—”

“And I don’t think that swimming is all that high on my list of priorities.” You take a longing glance at a spot of open sand a few metres away. “I was planning on getting some work done, actually.”

“No!” Satoru claps his hands together. “That’s much too boring for a beach day! You’re sounding like Kento-kun!”

“That’d probably be a good thing. I think Nanami’s got some more sense than you.” The Kento-kun in question lowers his head and pointedly looks away, pretending to ignore you both. 

“I don’t care,” Satoru proclaims. “I’m going swimming, and you’re going as well.” He looks you in the eye, raising a brow. “For me?”

The collar of his shirt shifts, exposing for the briefest second the clean dip of his shoulder. The skin below his where his shirt ends is even paler than the rest of him, smooth, clear, perfect. 

And for a wild second, your mind blurs, frantic with the thought of how it would feel beneath your tongue, how your teeth could catch on his collarbone, the throaty gasps he’d make as you’d latch your mouth to his neck—

You wheel you brain back in. 

Holy shit. Absolutely not.

You don’t do that. You do not think about that. You never let yourself think about that, not normally. But Satoru’s so close to you, and his clothes are so loose, and you keep catching glimpses of bare skin, and you keep thinking about it.

Which you know you can’t do. You can’t do that, for so many reasons.  

“For the hypothetically drowning children,” you say, relieved that your voice is even. 

Satoru whoops. “For the drowning children!”

“Not for you.”

“And for me!” 

“I—shut up.”

Satoru laughs, and wobbles on one leg to take off his shoes. He chatters to you about how good of a swimmer he is, and how reasonable you’re going to be after taking his guidelines, and how you all should have come to the beach sooner because it’s so warm and nice, and for autumn, too, it’s like the god of beaches personally wants him to have a good day. 

And watch him as you slip out of your sandals, undoing the straps and placing them neatly to the side of your bags, feeling utterly smitten. 

“Shoko,” you say, and she looks up at you, headphones still around her ears. You raise your eyebrows, and she reluctantly removes them. “Will you look after the stuff? Me and Satoru are going swimming, apparently.”

She wrinkles up her nose. “You give in too easily.”

“I do not.”

“He asked you twice, and you said yes. You’re a pushover.”

“Hebi-Hebi’s not a pushover!” Satoru interjects. “She just cares deeply for the happiness of her dear dear friend. That’s kindness, Shoko. Think about that.”

Shoko hums, uninterested. 

“Look after the stuff?” you ask again, trying to ignore him. 

“Yeah, yeah.” Shoko spares you an amused smirk before sliding the headphones over her ears and clicking a button on her MP3, tuning you out. “Go have fun.”

“I won’t,” you complain lamely, but she just gestures to her ears and wafts you away. I can’t hear you, so stop complaining. You chuckle, prodding her leg with your toe and turning away from her. 

Which was probably a mistake. Still smiling, you look up to see Satoru stepping out of his trousers, clad only in the black swimming trucks he’d changed into this morning. He arches his back, and you press your lips together. His stomach tenses, and oh, he’s all lean muscle, and sharp hipbones, and bare, naked skin. 

Your rationality evaporates.

Satoru looks like he’s been carved out of alabaster; every corner of his body is honed and whetted, from his ribs, to the cut of his waist, to the strong muscle that flexes beautifully when he turns towards you. 

He’s pale, of course, Satoru’s always been pale, but his bare chest is a half-shade lighter than the rest of him—it makes you feel giddy, delusional, like you’re getting to see a part of him that no-one else can. 

It’s not true, of course, but your gaze is already trailing down, and you’re seeing that the skin around his hips is even lighter, and you want to find the part of him that no-one else has seen, somewhere just for the two of you, and you want to feel it underneath your fingers. 

Which can’t happen. Which you know can’t happen. But you tell yourself this, and you still can’t stop looking. 

He’s got a few scars lacing the skin of his chest, back from when he couldn’t control his Infinity well enough—and then one, long gash along his sternum, from where Toji Fushiguro had nearly killed him two years ago. On anyone else, it’d be frightening, but Satoru bears his scars with a confidence you will never comprehend. 

A nearby woman about your age, shaded under a parasol and dressed in a nice-looking purple bikini, eyes him appreciatively. Satoru, never one to miss praise, notices the attention and flashes her a lazy grin. 

He takes a step closer to the sea and as he does so, the hem of his swimming trunks rides up slightly. You stare at his thighs, strong and rippling with power, and the pale, untouched skin. 

He waves you over, a smug look still about his features. Impulsively, you glance again at the woman under the parasol. She smiles and winks at you before returning to her book. Heat rises to your cheeks, and you look away.

“I can’t believe you don’t know how to swim,” Satoru says, oblivious to your inner turmoil. “It’s so weird.”

“When would I have learnt?” You focus on his face, trying to make out his eyes behind his glasses. It’s a distraction, but you’re struggling to focus on anything when he’s right there, half-naked, lips curling from the attention of other women’s interested gazes.  

Blue, you try to think. His eyes are blue. Look at his eyes, you idiot.  

“Don’t know,” he says, and stretches again. You look at the sea instead. “But still, it’s so weird to know that you can’t do that. It’s like if I just found out that you can’t walk, or something.”

“I can walk,” you remind him, and he laughs.

“Sure, sure. But you can’t swim! How come I didn’t know you can’t swim?”

“I’m a mystery to the world.”

“You are not,” he says. “But it is strange, right?”

“Nope.”

“It’s not?”

“Not really. If you’d have used some common sense, you could’ve realised ages ago.”

Satoru groans. “How?”

“Well,” you say, dryly, chancing a look back at him, “how was I supposed to swim with my gloves? Who’d teach me? Who would have taken me swimming? My father?”

“But I could’ve!” Satoru pouts, running a thumb over his jawline distractingly. You move your gaze back to his eyes after a moment of weakness. “I used to go to the beach all the time in the summer, when I was a lot younger.”

You frown. “We never went to the beach.”

“Yeah,” he says, as if it’s obvious, “because I stopped going once we were friends. Once I was with you, I had better things to do. And you wouldn’t have liked it in beach season, and that was the only time that Yahaba would let us go.”

“You’re probably right,” you say. “Too crowded.”

“Mmhm.” Satoru looks out at the sea for a second, letting the moment stretch out. You follow his gaze, which seems to linger on a man and his son, running away from the tide together. You smile.

“So?”

You look back to him. Satoru has his eyebrows raised: he’s amused. 

You blink. “So? What?”

Satoru snorts. “So, are you going to go swimming in your day clothes, or what?”

“Oh.” You look down at what you’re wearing, a little surprised—in all your flurry about Satoru being in a swim suit, it’d slipped your mind that you’d have to get changed, too. 

You’d told everyone to wear their bathing suits underneath their dry clothes, so you wouldn’t have to get changed in a dingy beachside bathroom. You’ve followed your own advice: the straps have been digging into your shoulders for hours as a reminder. You’re hit, now, with a sudden wave of nervousness. 

Satoru looks at you expectantly. “I’m waiting?”

“Shut up.” You glare at him. “Now you’ve made it weird.”

“What’s weird?” 

“It’s—you’re—you’re watching me!” 

“I am,” Satoru says, not even bothering to stifle his grin. “Am I not allowed to do that?”

“Not really,” you mumble. You feel a bit ridiculous. “It’s like you’re looking at me.”

Satoru laughs out loud at this. “But I am looking at you! You sound very silly, Hebi-Hebi. Besides,” he continues with a sigh, “I resent the implication that I am anything less than a gentleman.”

“Gentleman?” you ask, and now it’s your turn you laugh. “C’mon, Gojo, you’re really not.”

Satoru presses a hand to his chest in mock-offense. He flashes you a wry grin. 

Your neck feels hot. “Shut up,” you say again, glowering at the sand. You’re sure he’s thinking of that time a few weeks ago; you’d found a half-empty box of condoms—Ribbed and Dotted for Extra Pleasure—in his bedside draw when looking for a magazine he’d stolen from you. 

You had been absolutely horrified: Satoru had been thrilled. You remember chucking them at him in disgusted and Satoru, amidst wheezing laughter, had reminded you what happens when two people love each other very much—

“If I turn around, will it make you feel better?”

“Maybe,” you say. “I don’t know. I don’t want to feel like I’m stripping off. I’m not like you.”

“And that’s most unfortunate.”

“Gojo—”

“I’m moving! I’m moving,” he says, facing the sea with a chuckle. “You know, if anything, you’re the weird one. I mean, I’m still going to see you in a swim suit. Or are you, like, incredibly self-conscious? It’s okay if you are, you know. I promise not to make fun of you much.”

“You’re an idiot.” You pull your shirt over your head and resist the temptation to throw it at him. 

“Aiko-chan was really insecure, I remember,” he continues, as if you hadn’t spoken. You roll your eyes. “It was really sad. She was really pretty, remember? But I guess everyone’s a little insecure, when they’re around me. I mean, imagine trying to compete with someone as handsome as I am! It’s just impossible. Right, Hebi-Hebi?”

“You’re incredibly ugly.”

“You’re so sweet. Are you nearly done? I want to go swimming!”

“Hold on a second—” You fiddle with the straps to your sandals for a second before finally managing to take them off. You jog over to where Nanami and Shoko are sitting and, after a moment’s hesitation, place your gloves on the same pile as your clothes. 

You were right before—you can’t go swimming in your gloves, no matter how strange it still feels to have them off. Crossing your arms over your chest, you make your way back over to where Satoru’s still standing, whistling to himself. 

You pause, wondering what’s the best way you can grab his attention without making it awkward. Maybe it wouldn’t have been awkward if you hadn’t said anything to begin with. Knowing Satoru, it probably wouldn’t have been. Shit. 

Then you should stop being awkward with it. 

Shrugging, you tell him: “Okay, ready,” and stride past him before he can make any kind of stupid comment.

The back of your neck feels uncomfortably warm, but you don’t slow yourself down, doing your best to walk as normally as possible. For a panicked moment, it seems like he’s not following you, like you’re walking off to the sea on your own—but then you hear the sound of Satoru’s high-pitched laughter, and you relax.

“That’s such a boring colour, Hebi-Hebi!” He bounds over to your side, joining you in-tandem as you stroll towards the water. “I thought you’d be, you know—pushing the boundaries of fashion, all like that!”

You look down at what you’re wearing—a plain two-piece, the only one you could find on short-notice. “It’s a swimming costume, Gojo.”

“I know,” he says, his eyes on the sea. He’s pushed his glasses back up into his hair, and you try to ignore the swooping feeling you get every time you can see his eyes clearly. “Still.”

The sand is impossibly warm beneath your feet—it’s almost liquid, molten and shifting with every step you take. As you get closer to the water, it turns from a light gold to a deeper, darker taupe, the miniscule granules burrowing around your toes. The first wave almost takes you by surprise; it’s not as cold as you were expecting, and it makes the sand swirl around your heels, moving about in the cool water. 

You kick at the water, and let out a laugh as you watch the droplets soar into the air, sending thousands of tiny ripples billowing out from where they fall down. Taking another few steps forward, you reach down to swipe at the ocean’s surface. Hundreds of tiny waves ripple from the light touch, scattering the light and reflecting onto your hands. 

Normally more pallid from lack of sunlight, your skin appears warm and healthy, like you’ve never had to wear your gloves at all. You marvel at the sight, lips parted. You look normal. Your hands look normal, like any other person’s. 

You catch your bottom lip between your teeth, holding back a wide grin. 

You turn, holding your hands up to Satoru to show him, only to find him already watching you. He’s got his head tilted to the side, just slightly, his eyes soft. He’s wearing the same expression as when he looks at the Zenin twins, whenever you remember to visit them; affectionate, but also slightly sad. 

You frown at him, flicking some water over that lands on his knees. 

“What?” you say, straightening up. “You alright?”

Satoru looks to the side. “Yeah. Yeah.” 

Your skin prickles. He’s lying, of course, but—

He shakes his head like a wet dog, like he’s getting water out of his ears, and nods at you with a renewed energy. “Yes! Course I am. Swimming! Come on!”

Satoru bounds forward—or, attempts to, only managing to make an awkward trudging movement that makes him look like a penguin. You brush off the worry and follow him into the water, laughing. You catch up to him soon enough, the water level rising to brush your hips. 

A wave pushes past, and the cool water skims the bare skin above the top of your bathing costume, and you suck in a sharp breath, gooseflesh breaking out over your stomach. 

“Cold,” you mutter, running your hands over your arms. “Cold cold cold cold.”

“You need to get warmed up! Start moving about!” Satoru takes a few steps back to where it’s deeper and, without any warning, plunges his head underwater. You gasp, because surely he’d be absolutely freezing—before he springs back out, throwing his wet hair back like a shampoo model, his glasses clutched in his hand. “Nearly lost these! Oops.”

“Oh, you idiot.”

He cracks a grin. Satoru wades over to you, glistening from the water and the sun, and offers you his glasses reverently. 

“You’re less likely to lose them,” he says, after you give him an unimpressed look. “Keep them safe for me, alright?”

“Hey, just because you forgot to leave them with Shoko, it doesn’t mean you get to pawn them off with me. I’m not a walking wardrobe.”

“But you’re so much more responsible than me. I don’t want them to disappear into the ocean, Hebi-Hebi.”

“That’s not my problem.” You’re struggling to keep up with the conversation, because Satoru has just submerged himself and now he’s just dripping water. He’s dripping. Satoru is lean and strong and the water is tugging your gaze to his chest, his muscle, and your willpower is faltering by the second. 

“Fine.” Satoru’s saying. “Fine, fine. If you really don’t want to, I’ll just keep a hold of them myself if—”

“No,” you interject, quickly. You said that far too fast, and so you lean back a little, trying to appear just a little nonchalant. “I’ll keep them. You’ll just lose them, anyway.”

You’ll never forgive yourself if his glasses end up getting lost in the sea, and he complains to you for the entire journey back. And also—for another reason, that makes your heart flip. 

It’s childish, and stupid, and you’re too old to be delusional like this, but you like taking care of his things. You like knowing that Satoru trusts you. 

You slide the glasses into your hair, similar to how you’ve seen Satoru do it so many times. The corners of his lips quirk up.

“You look cool,” Satoru says. “They suit you.” 

His hair’s darkened by the water, shining a rich silver instead of its usual snow-white. Droplets of water cover him everywhere, but you follow one as it races down the shell of his ear, curving across his neck, and laying to rest in the dip of his collarbone. 

Back to his face. Idiot. 

And in the warm sunlight, you see the faint scar, years old, formed when you were both kids. It’s the only imperfection you can find on him. It curves along his jaw, shining more brightly when he smiles. But even so—can it be classed as an imperfection, if you think it only makes him more complete? 

God, he looks beautiful. 

You look beautiful. Would it be difficult to say? Your lips part, already forming the words. It’s the truth—he’s beautiful, so beautiful, so much so that it takes your breath away. It’s incredible how you’re still surprised by it; so many years, and yet you always forget, always remember. 

You like that scar. It’s a symbol, a permanent reminder, of your friendship. Whenever it catches the light, so faint and almost translucent by now, it’s a reminder that you were there. You’ve always been there. No matter what happens, your history will never fade. 

“Thanks,” you say, your gaze not breaking from his face. 

Satoru looks from his glasses, to your eyes, and back again. “You should get your own pair, Hebi-Hebi. You look good in them.”

“Nah, I don’t think so.” You grin, fiddling with the end that curves around your left ear. “I don’t know if they’re flattering for my face shape.”

Satoru scoffs, bemused. “That stuff doesn’t matter.”

“Not for you, maybe.” You open your mouth to say something else, but you stop yourself. You groan, and look away from him. “Okay, don’t—”  

“Not for me?” Satoru repeats, and it’s obvious he’s smirking just from his voice. “Not for me? Well—why do you say that?”

“I don’t,” you say, “I didn’t say anything.”

“Why doesn’t it matter what’s flattering for me? That’s so strange—I wonder? What could that mean?”

“Gojo.”

“I think,” he proclaims, “that lovely Hebi means that I’m just too handsome to care about such trivial matters as face shapes.”

“I don’t mean that.”

“Do I just look good in anything? Are you saying I’m that good-looking?”

“No, you’re a troll.”

“I can’t believe you think I’m a supermodel.”

“You act like a troll, too.”

“Maybe I should go into modelling, if Hebi-Hebi thinks I’m that attractive.”

“You’re a troll in the body of a post-pubescent teenager.”

“A very good-looking post-pubescent teenager, excuse you.”

You have to look away from him, but he catches your snort of amusement before you can hide it. You share a look, and immediately you both devolve into a shared fit of laughter, Satoru giggling like a maniac, you wheezing like a seventy-year-old man. 

When he laughs, he forgets to try to look pretty; his nose scrunches up, his eyes squeezing shut, dimples pulling his cheeks inwards like they’re imploding. The sight of it only furthers your joy, and it’s a few minutes before you’re both able to look at each other without immediately cracking up.

You lean back into the water, still chuckling, and marvel at how buoyant it makes you feel. You keep your legs planted firmly on the sandy floor, but you let your arms wave out, feeling the rippling of the water as it passes through your fingertips.

“Watch out for jellyfish,” Satoru says, voice hoarse. 

“Eh?”

“Jellyfish. Your hands.” He hesitates, chewing down another smile. “Try not to accidentally kill any sea life.”

“Pfft—” you splash him with water, and he blusters out an exclamation of protest. “You’re such an idiot.”

“I’m telling the truth! It’s—eugh, that’s so salty!”

“It’s saltwater.”

“And it’s excessively salty. Much too salty. I don’t like it this salty.”

“It’s saltwater.”

“And I don’t like it.”

“It’s saltwater.”

“Repeating it won’t change what’s inside my heart.”

You snort. “You’re impossible.”

“Your impossible.”

“What?” 

“Your impossible.” Satoru yawns. “Not ‘you-are’—the impossible belonging to you. The possessional form of the word.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your impossible. You’re impossible. There’s a difference.”

“You—no, I think you’ve lost it,” you say gravely. “I’m afraid there’s no cure for absolute idiocy.”

“Forget it,” he says. “It’s much too clever for you, anyway.”

You hold back a smile.

 

--

 

You don’t end up learning how to swim. 

You and Satoru are too content to float and chat aimlessly, looking up at the warm blue of the midday sky and commenting on whatever crosses your minds. After a while, you hear a shout from closer to shore, and hold back a smile at the sight of the swimsuit-clad Shoko and Nanami, attempting to set up a net for a game of water volleyball. You’d forgotten that Shoko had packed it, the set getting lost in the many bags the you both had managed to bring. 

The two gesture you over (Nanami visibly less enthused than Shoko, who’s seemed to come alive at the prospect of the game) and, after exchanging an affectionate look with Satoru, you wade over to where the pair are standing. 

With your help, the net’s pulled up in minutes. Satoru gets bored halfway through, dipping into the water and swimming a graceful backstroke around the three of you. Shoko yells at him and you exchange an awkward nod with Nanami, who’s clearly irritated by Satoru’s antics but seems to be too polite to address it. 

“You know, you don’t have to be respectful, Nanami,” you say, struggling to tie the net around one of the poles. “Honestly, he doesn’t deserve it.”

Nanami eyes you warily. “He’s my senior.” 

“Yeah, I know,” you say, “but Gojo’s an exception. Don’t worry about that with him.” 

“What do you mean?”

You shrug, pulling the net taught. “I mean, everyone else treats him differently. I think you’re allowed to let him know when he’s being an idiot.”

“It’s not convention.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes convention’s not the best.” You blink, and laugh. “Ew. Sorry. I sound like Gojo.”

“A little.”

“Oh, no.” You press your fingertips to the bridge of your nose. “Forgive me.”

Nanami doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t look as uncomfortable as he did when the trip stated, so you count it as a win. He looks at you, in the eye, and you frown up at him—and then you go back to tussling with the net, and you see his gaze move with your hands. 

You exhale, sharp, out of your nose.

“It’s alright to keep your distance,” you say, a little more sharp. “I won’t be offended.”

Nanami starts. “Oh—I wasn’t—”

“Sure.” Your chin lifts, slightly. Your fingers still on the net. “It’s okay. You don’t have to be embarrassed.”

Nanami looks away.

“Seriously.” You bite back a small laugh. “People have said worse things about it. Trust me.”

You wait for him to respond, ducking down to make sure the pole is secure enough. Your travel your fingers against the sand on the floor, digging the base into the soft shingle, pushing at some loose rocks to cover it. 

When you stand, Nanami’s looking back at you. “Why do they let you take your gloves off?”

The question takes a second to sink in, and you look back at him, slowly straightening up. “What?”

“Your gloves. Why do they let you take them off?”

You frown. “They don’t let me take them off. I choose to.”

“You choose?”

“Yeah,” you say, “yeah, I guess. I don’t take them off often. But—Gojo had wanted to go swimming, and—”

“But you could hurt someone.” Nanami swallows, hesitates, and then his expression betrays the slightest drop of frustration as he says: “Don’t they care? That you could hurt someone?”

“I—I’m sure they do,” you say slowly. You can feel your heart rate start to pick up, and you choose your words carefully. You don’t like this line of questioning. You don’t like what Nanami’s implying. “Like I said, I hardly take them off. Nanami, you—”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Nanami interrupts. “You’re telling me that the higher-ups have never told you to keep your gloves on? It’s your decision? They’ve never ordered you to keep other people safe?”

“I do that anyway.” You turn to him fully, crossing your arms over your chest. “Nanami, have you ever seen me without my gloves off before today?”

“No.”

“There you go. I don’t really take them off.”

“But that’s your decision. Not theirs.”

“Yes. Yes, exactly.”

“No, I don’t mean that—” Nanami’s lips press together, turning white. “Have they never asked you? Even once? Has anyone from that school ever told you to keep them on?”

“That school?” you echo. “And—no, not really.”

“And you don’t see how dangerous that is?” 

“Dangerous?”

“Because they don’t know what could happen,” he says, his voice low and hard. “And you’ve never been told about it, not even advised?”

You jaw tenses. “What do you mean, they don’t know what could happen?”

“They don’t know if they can trust you,” Nanami says blankly. “Not anymore. So why do they?” 

He says it without inflection, like objective fact. Your body stills. Your fingers twitch.

You don’t want to be reminded of this. You’d thought—over a year has passed, over a year, and you’d thought that you’d be able to escape him by now. Or just for one day, without a reminder of him.

You just want one day. That’s it. 

“What are you trying to say?” You know you’re being too cold; you know that he’s asking reasonable questions, and he’s still suffering from last year. You should get control of your emotions, not be so immediately defensive.

But you just wanted one day. You need Nanami to know that he can’t just bring up Geto like this, out of nowhere. 

That’s not how you’ve been coping. You don’t mention him in passing like this; in casual conversation, you pretend he never existed. You talk about him later, when you’re prepared to remember him. you’ve prepared yourself to remember him. Not like this. 

It’s hard enough then. You can’t deal with it now. You just can’t.

“You could hurt someone.” Nanami doesn’t understand. He barrels on, not unkind, but not aware enough to recognise what he’s doing. “Not on purpose, necessarily, but just accidentally—it doesn’t matter how.”

“I think it does,” you say, cold.

“I don’t mean… because… they didn’t care to make sure, did they?”

“You don’t—”

“That’s what I’m saying. The higher-ups, they didn’t think about it. They don’t care.” 

Nanami looks down at his hands, muscles working in his jaw. His gaze is dark but, when you force yourself to look closer, you realise that it’s also sad. 

He’s not trying to argue with you. He’s not trying to punish you with memories of Geto. 

He’s trying to get you to sympathise. 

Oh. You’re such an idiot. 

Nanami’s friend died a few months before Geto left. His friend died, most likely, because he was pushed into a fight he wasn’t prepared for: all at the negligence of the higher-ups in power. Nanami thinks that’s what happened with Geto.

“No,” you sigh, your eyes flicking down to your naked hands. “No, I don’t think they do.”

Nanami’s brow tightens. His mouth closes, like he was going to say something but stopped. 

“It’s not good,” you say. You shake your head and return to the net, tugging at the knots to check them. “I’ve got my own problems with them, completely ignoring everything that happened last year.”

Sara, the mother of the Zenin twins, blank-faced women staring forwards. 

Your father, your little brother Haru, everyone who saw your bound hands and did nothing. 

“There’s nothing I can do about it.” The knots are fine. You try to tighten them some more, but when you pull your hands back they come away red and stinging. “Not yet.”

“You can do something?” Nanami asks the question quietly, and for the first time you’re hit with an overwhelming wave of protectiveness for him. It’s not the draining obligation you usually feel; it reminds you of how you feel around Sara, or Haru. 

“I can try,” you shrug. You offer him a tired smile. “Gojo always says I can. He’s an idiot most of the time, but… it’s something. I’m going to try, either way.”

Nanami doesn’t respond. He seems to be thinking deeply about something you’re not privy to, and you leave him with his thoughts, not wanting to intrude. 

You pretend to fix the net for a little while, giving him some space.

“Hello, children!” 

You look to the side to see Satoru’s face breaking the surface of the water, his legs kicking gently to propel himself closer to you. 

“Gojo—”

“Are we ready to engage in recreational aquatic sports?” he asks, puffing his lips out into a pout and putting on a posh, reedy accent. “I’ve heard it’s very good for the brain.”

“No-one finds you funny,” you say, with affection.

“I find myself extremely funny.”

“You have very poor taste.” 

Satoru stands up, taking far too long to wipe droplets of water from his glistening torso whilst also (for a completely unrelated reason, you’re sure) glancing around to check if anyone’s watching him. 

“Gojo?”

“Hm?”

You laugh. “Can you stop being a narcissist for one second and actually focus?”

“What?” He looks back at you, batting his eyelashes. “I’m sorry, what did you say? Kento-kun, what did she say? I wasn’t paying attention.”

Nanami doesn’t respond. You claim it as a win. 

 

--

 

The sun’s starting to sink further down the sky, but the air feels just as warm as it was when you got here. You, Satoru and Nanami have migrated to the shore (leaving Shoko in the water—she’d wanted some time alone “without any distractions, thanks”), and you take a second to let your gaze drift over the sun-dappled waves, tasting the salt in the air. 

You’d like to focus on the rhythmic washing of the water against the sand, sealine retreating and pushing forward with a calming predictability—but the experience is ruined by the light snoring of the stupid man lying beside you.

You chuck a bottle of sunscreen at Satoru’s back. 

To no-one’s surprise, it hits the invisible wall of Infinity and bounces off, landing in the sand a half-metre away from him. Satoru jerks awake and looks around, pushing himself off of his stomach and onto his side. He rubs at his eyes and pats the sand around him for his glasses.

“Hey,” you say, unimpressed. 

“Hello,” he responds, stifling a yawn. “Did I fall asleep?”

“Yeah, somehow. I thought that inhaling sand might have woken you up, but apparently not.”

“That’s a shame,” he says, stretching his arms right above his head. Very determinedly, you stalk back over to where the sunscreen had fallen and pick it up. You stand over him, hands on your hips, the sun hot on your back. 

“Hebi,” Satoru groans, “can you move? You’re blocking the sun.”

You throw the sunscreen at him again. This time, he catches it. 

Satoru squints up at you, pouting. “What are you doing?”

“Put it on,” you say. 

“Huh?”

“Put it on, Gojo. You’re going to burn.”

He stares at it, wrinkling his nose slightly. “This isn’t my bottle.”

“Guess not.”

“Whose is it?”

“Shoko’s, maybe?” You try to look back at your cluster of towels, to find whose sunscreen is missing, but then you turn back to him and sigh sharply. “Oh, stop it.”

“Stop what?” Satoru says, offended.

“What you’re thinking.”

“Hebi-Hebi—” 

“No, I’m not going back there to get your stupid branded one, because Shoko’s one will work just as well, because normal-people products are perfectly fine, even if you’re not spending a small fortune on them.”

Satoru snickers. “I want to purchase the best quality products. Is that a crime?”

“Spending 6000 yen for a handful of product is practically theft, so, yeah.”

“Fifty millilitres is more than a handful. And I’m willing to spend money on what I believe is a good investment. And this—” he gestures to his face, “—is a good investment.”

“You’re only willing to spend money because you’re disgustingly rich.”

“Disgustingly rich, disgustingly handsome…”

“Or just plain disgusting.” You tut at him, and then point to the bottle again. “No disagreements, now. I’m not having you complaining about sunburns all the way back.”

Satoru lets out a gust of breath much too dramatically. “Fine, fine.” He sits up. “You know, sometimes you sound so much like Yahaba it’s crazy.”

“Thanks.”

“Hmm. Yeah, no problem.” Satoru flicks open the bottle, and then pauses. He squints at you, the side of his lip quirking up into a smirk. He goes to say something, but cuts himself off with his own giggle, and has to restart. “Hey,” he says, in a quivering voice that seems to be seconds away from laughter. He snorts. “Your gloves are off, right?”

You cross your arms. “Yeah.”

“So,” Satoru says, clearly mere moments from laughter, “do you wanna give me a hand with the sunscreen?”

Your eyebrows raise. “Excuse me?”

“The sunscreen.” Satoru’s smile widens. “Don’t you think it’d be so nice, for the two of us?” 

“No.” You press your lips together to hide your smile. “I would rather die. And you, actually, would die. So.”

“I think—I think it’d be a bonding experience.”

“You dying would be a bonding experience?”

“Mmhm.” Satoru’s mouth works around his smile. “And—very romantic.”

“Oh, shut up.” You kick some sand at his face and it rebounds back onto you. Satoru cackles with laughter, and you purse your lips, holding back your amusement. “You’re so stupid.”

“No!”

“I’m leaving.” You scoop your gloves off the floor and pull them back on, glaring at him fondly.

“Ah, you’re so boring!” Satoru props himself on one arm, beaming at you. “Hey—don’t walk away from me!”

You turn back around. “I’m getting us something to drink. Do you want anything, before I go?”

“I want—”

“Gojo.”

Satoru opens his mouth in disbelief, and then waves a hand at you in an attempt to sulk. “Fine! I’ll get someone else to seductively rub sunscreen into my back!”

“Still disgusting!” you call back, before turning abruptly away from him and stalking away. 

The back of your neck is uncomfortably warm. You stubbornly ignore it and blame it on the heat. 

There’s a little café to the side of the beach—white walls and an eggshell blue roof, and when you push open the door you hear a soft jingle of a bell. There’s some tables and chairs, most of them empty. 

There’s bored-looking guy about your age manning the register. As you walk in, he looks your way and seems to perk up a little. He offers you a genuine-looking smile, and you return it awkwardly. 

“These, thanks,” you say, picking up four bottles of water and putting them onto the desk. 

“Sure,” he says. “Just water?”

“Oh. No, actually, uhm…” You scan the menu board suspended behind him. “Do you have something cold, that’s also extremely sugary? Like, death by sugar. Sickly and disgusting and everything. Is there anything like that?”

The guy chuckles. “I think I can manage that. What, a milkshake, or something?”

“Yeah? Strawberry, if you’ve got it.”

“Nice.” He taps onto the till and thrums his fingers on the counter, waiting. “Just takes a second.”

You nod.

“Right, yeah,” he says, still waiting for the till to load. He stares at it for a few more seconds. “Sorry, it’s just…”

“No, don’t worry.”

“Yeah,” he laughs awkwardly. “It’s always—oh, okay, that’ll be 900 yen total.”

You nod again, and fumble around in your purse before inserting your card into the reader. 

“Thanks. Thanks, great, that’s all gone through. I’ll start on the drink, it’ll be a few minutes. Is that okay?”

“Sure.”

You watch as he messes with the register for a couple more seconds, sorting out your receipt which he immediately bins, before he walks a few steps to the side to fiddle with a complicated-looking machine. 

The hem of your sticks uncomfortably to your skin, and you tug at it, wishing you’d dried everything properly before you’d put it back on. You’ve put your gloves back on, and everything feels so much easier—it’s not just that you feel safer with them on, but it’s easier to do your daily tasks with them. 

Your bare skin isn’t used to holding, gripping, zipping up your purse, and it’s an immediate relief now that you’ve got them back on.

“You’ve got a sweet tooth, then?”

You look up, blinking at the guy again. He’s half-focused on the machine, stirring a jug around a long metal wire, and is smiling at you good-naturedly.

“Oh.” You hadn’t realised the conversation was continuing. “No. No, uhm, I mean, it’s for my friend.”

“Cool. That’s nice of you, that you’re getting something for them.”

“Not really.” Despite yourself, you smile. “He’d just complain if I didn’t get him anything. He’s like a child, really. With the complaining and the love of sweets, I guess.”

Honestly, you’re probably doing Satoru a bit of a disservice—even if he would gripe about how much you’re forgetting about him by not treating him extra special, he won’t actually be expecting anything. 

It’s so sweet. Whenever you surprise him, even if it’s something small like this, it takes him the tiniest millisecond to genuinely process it before he falls back into his normal routine—either spewing about his undying adoration for you, or your undying adoration for him. 

You love that brief moment, where he’s realising that you’ve done something simple and nice for him. You’ve decided that you’re going to keep doing it until he’s no longer surprised; until he just understands that it’s something you like doing for him, because you care about him. 

You’ve been trying to do it more, recently. When you were younger, he’d expect those kinds of things from you, you think. But now it’s the opposite—you want him to expect it from you, but he doesn’t, yet. You think it’s to do with getting older, you think—Satoru used to expect everything, all the time, with anything less than that being an insult. 

Now he’s older, he’s mellowed out. To a casual observer, it would probably seem like the opposite, like Satoru’s gotten more obnoxious, more attention-seeking. But you know he understands people more, is more aware of the intricacies within those other than himself. 

Satoru’s learnt to not expect anything more than he has to. 

So you like to surprise him, anytime you can. In your small way, you can prove he can still expect the best from you. 

“He sounds interesting.” The guy laughs, and, taking a second to really look at him, you notice that he’s attractive. 

Huh.

He’s got very light brown eyes, and nose is covered with warm ochre freckles. When he smiles, you spot that his front tooth is slightly chipped. It reminds you of some of the more confrontational students back at school, but it somehow suits him.

“He is,” you say, dryly, and the guy laughs again. 

He laughs a lot, you think. But it doesn’t seem forced. You take another second to think about that.

“Did you come here with him?” he asks, shifting his weight so he can face you easier. You shrug, and amble a little closer to the counter, so he doesn’t have to hold himself awkwardly. 

“It’s a friends-trip,” you say, “I organised it, with the interesting friend. Well. It was my idea, and he took over, really.”

The guy eyes you, the corner of his lip quirking up. “You sound surprised?”

“I—yeah, I guess I was.” You laugh, and the guy laughs with you. “He’s not normally organised. Pleasantly surprised, I guess.”

“Nice. So, are you local? Wait, no.” The guy holds up a hand to stop you before you can answer. He grins. “I know you’re not. I would’ve noticed you before.”

He would have? You’re tempted to ask him to clarify, because the idea of that doesn’t really make much sense in a town as big as this one, but you hold yourself back. 

“I’m not,” you say. “This is supposed to be a holiday. We drove for hours to get here, but the interesting friend had planned it, so I couldn’t really object.”

“That’s nice of you,” the guy says. 

“Oh. Well. Not really.”

He chuckles. 

“It’s because he’s been here before,” you try to explain. It wasn’t nice of you, not particularly—the compliment feels out of place, and you don’t understand it. “When he was a kid, he used to come here, so he insisted. And my other friends didn’t care, so I didn’t say anything about it.” 

“It is a good spot.” The guy lets his hand rest on the machine and props his other on the counter, where you’re leaning. “My parents live five minutes down the road, so I basically grew up here.”

“A beach nearby must’ve been nice.” 

“Exactly,” he grins, chipped front tooth on display. “Every day, I’d make my way up here, surfboard in hand and ready to face another day. Even when it was cold, I’d be right here, learning from Nakamura how to make coffees. That’s my manager,” the guy explains. “Been here as long as I’ve been alive.”

“Strange.”

“Guess so. But cool as well, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” you say, honestly. This guy’s life sounds so normal, so easy. You don’t know whether you’re jealous or not. “I’d like the beach in winter,” you say. “It’d be quieter, I suppose.”

“You not a fan of crowds, then?”

You offer him a close-lipped smile. “Not exactly.”

“Fair enough.” He swirls a silver jug under the machine, but his eyes are on you. “ That’s why you and your friends came here out of beach season?” 

The attention’s a bit unusual—when you’re walking around with Satoru, it’s never you who’s the recipient of stares. You’ve never minded—because, honestly, you’d be the same—but it’s still strange to have the situations reversed. 

“Kind of. It was the only time we could get off from school, too.” You fiddle with a sugar packet. “It’s a strange boarding school. They’re pretty strict.”

“Damn, okay,” he says, chuckling. “So what university do you go to?” 

“Oh,” you say. “I’m still in high school.”

The guy’s hand jerks. The mug he was holding tips, and Satoru’s strawberry milkshake spills with a clatter on the floor. 

“Shit!” 

He grabs at it, placing the mug back on the counter and bending down to mop up the spillage with a paper towel. 

He freezes, and then looks up at you, alarmed. “I—shit, fuck, I—sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Shouldn’t swear in front of a customer, I—damn it.”

The corners of your lips quirk up. “It’s okay,” you say, not sure whether you should be concerned or bemused, “I’ll survive.”

He laughs again, but it sounds completely different, much too robotic and forced. He starts to make the milkshake again, smiling tightly and otherwise avoiding eye contact. 

You shift your weight, uncertain if you’ve said something wrong. 

“Why,” you ask, after the silence drags on, “are you, uhm, in university?”

“Yes,” he says. 

You wait for him to respond. 

“Oh,” you say, a few moments later. “Cool.”

You try to catch his eye, but he seems immersed in making the drink again. 

“What year are you in?” 

“Second year.”

You nod. “Great. I’m in fourth year,” you add, very confused by the change in his attitude. 

The guy looks back around at you. “What?”

“Fourth year. It’s a weird thing in our school. We have four years, instead of three.”

“You do?”

“Yeah,” you say, a bit awkward. “Like I said, it’s a strange boarding school. They do things differently.”

“Oh. Wait, so you’re…?”

“Nineteen next October,” you say, just to be helpful.

For some reason, this seems to relax him completely. He blinks a few times, scratching behind his neck and grinning awkwardly. 

“I’m just in the year above you, then,” he says. “Turning twenty in January. That’s a weird fucking school. Four years? Why?”

“It’s a private academy. They make up their own rules.”

“Private academy?” He raises his eyebrows. “Rich girl, huh?”

“Not really,” you say. “A lot of other people are, though.”

“Such as… no, don’t tell me it’s the interesting sugar guy again?” 

Damn, this guy’s all over the place. One moment he’s friendly, the next he’s cold and withdrawn, and now he’s really interested in you again. You’ve no idea what to make of him.

“The milkshake one, yeah.” You crane your neck to see if you can spot Satoru through the café’s windows. “He spent 6000 yen on this tiny bottle of sun cream yesterday, and didn’t even realise it was expensive.”

“Wow.” The guy’s cheeks puff out comically. “That’s… I don’t know whether to be impressed or annoyed.”

“Yeah, that’s basically him,” you say, unable to keep the affection from seeping through. 

The guy goes to say something, and then looks back to the machine. He looks back at you. “So, you came here with your friends?”

“Yeah.”

“So, he’s your friend?”

“Yes,” you say, a little confused.

“Not a…” He juts out his jaw. “Boyfriend, or anything?”

For a second, you panic: is it really that obvious, that you like Satoru much more than friends do? After so many years, you’d like to think that you’re somewhat subtle about it. 

But then you think about it for a second longer, and your train of thought slams to a halt. 

Ah. 

No, you’re being an idiot: the guy’s flirting with you.

Huh.

This is… an interesting direction. You certainly didn’t expect it, and it’s not like you’re that used to it. You feel like an inexperienced teenager, fumbling through social interactions with the opposite sex; even though that’s exactly what you are, and you’re such an idiot. Can’t you tell when someone’s flirting with you? Are you really that dense?

Being at Jujustu High has kept your social circle compact. It hasn’t allowed you to have a normal teenage experience. Part of it is because you never had a normal childhood, and that its abnormality had bled into your current life. 

The other part, you know, is because you’re kept clustered up in your school, forbidden from venturing off on your own. Whilst Satoru can come and go from the school whenever he wants, you have to have verbal consent from Yaga to take a supervised outing. 

Other than the few people in school, you don’t know anyone; even out of the few people in school, you’re only friends with a few. 

Your pitiful ‘friends-trip’ consists of a close friend, an underclassman you’re trying to help out, and someone you’ve been secretly in love with since you were a kid. 

And those are your friends. That’s it. No wonder you couldn’t get a read on this guy. 

With a jolt, you realise that this might be the first person to ever display an explicit romantic interest in you. You’re flattered, a little. You survey the guy: nice, friendly, smiling. He seems pleasant enough, from the short conversation you’ve had with him. Why not?

For a wild moment, you seriously consider it. 

Why not?

So much of your life has been intertwined with Satoru’s. Most of the time, you haven’t minded it, because you know it’s the same for him; you can’t imagine a life in which he was never present, and you know he wouldn’t be able to imagine one without you in it, either. You’ve grown up with each other, and you’re an immutable part of each other’s lives. 

The problem arises with the difference between you two: you’re in love with him, and he’s not in love with you. 

How long are you supposed to wait for him, if you’re just waiting for something that will never happen? Is this what your whole life is supposed to be like, devoting yourself to someone who’ll never love you the way you want them to? 

You can’t live like that. You can’t pour so much love into someone, knowing with dead certainty that they can’t offer up enough to replace it. Satoru loves you, but not in the way you want him to. It’s something you’ll have to accept. 

Someday, you’ll have to push him away. 

So—why not? Why not lean forwards, smile, scribble your number on the back of a napkin? Why not?

And then you fix the hemline of your shirt again, and the guy’s gaze drops, and your heart sinks.

That’s why not.

That’s one of the many reasons why not—why you just can’t. You’ve spent years working on keeping your thoughts inside, fighting down any impulse to act on what you want. You want so many things, and you’ve learnt how to supress them. You can’t say you’re happy without touch, because you want, you want, you don’t think you’ll stop wanting, but you can force yourself cope without it. 

Other people, though? How can you expect other people to accommodate for you, when you can hardly accommodate for yourself? 

You don’t want to blame yourself for this, for being unable to touch people, because you know that your cursed technique and your upbringing isn’t your fault. It’s so hard, though, to distinguish where your childhood and your current self should split. When should you start to take accountability for yourself? When are your problems unequivocally your fault?

You know that other people will want touch, because you want it. You want it, desperately, but you’ve resigned yourself to a life without it. To be with someone, for someone to want you, that would mean resigning someone else to the same fate. That would be selfish. That would be your fault. 

Dryly, you think of Satoru, and his many girlfriends; he touches them, holds them, kisses, sleeps with them. That’s what people expect, and it’s what people want. It’s what you want, too—you think of innocent touches, romantic embraces, long nights with the person you love. 

And sex. Sex, too. 

Even more things that you want, but can’t help but be afraid of. So much touch, exposed flesh, hot breath, and that awful feeling of insects burrowing beneath your skin, and you hate it, and the thought makes you nauseous: but you want it. The quieter side of you, the side that hates the feeling of your gloves, reminds you that you want it. 

Is that it, then? That you’ll never be with someone? It’s a horrible thought, but it’s a certainty, that someone will never want to endure your worst alongside you, just for the menial pleasure of your presence. Who’d want to be in a relationship with someone who would be repulsed by touching them?

And then, on the other side of the argument: Satoru. 

Could you even be in a relationship with someone else when you know with your whole heart that you love him? Isn’t that just cruel, to you and to the person you’d be with? 

You look at the guy standing in front of, at his freckles, brown eyes, crooked smile. You will yourself to like him, to feel something stirring inside you, a spark. 

You want your skin to ignite the way it does when Satoru calls your name, the way it twists upwards with his smile, or when he offers you his quiet laugh that no-one else gets to hear. 

The guy’s nice. He’s sweet. 

He’s not Satoru.

At some point, you’ll accept it. You know that you can’t continue like this, pushing people away for someone you’ll never have, because you’ll be sacrificing your whole life, and you hope you value yourself more than that. There needs to come a point where you give him up, wholly, no returns. 

Not today, though. You like Satoru too much to walk away. Not today. 

“Oh,” you say, and you lean back. “No, not a boyfriend. But still.” You press your lips together, and shrug.

The guy’s head tilts to the side. “But still?”

“Yeah, exactly.” 

The bell jingles: you glance back, and see that a cluster of ten laughing teenagers have stepped inside. The small café has shrunken, and you whip your head around. The empty space around you feels far too sparse. You swallow. 

You snap back your focus the guy, who’s staring at you. Satoru’s milkshake is on the counter. “Is that everything, then?”

“I—Sure, yeah, I mean—”

“Awesome, thanks.” You scoop the water bottles into your arm and clutch at the plastic cup of the milkshake. 

The group’s laughing, pointing at the price board and loudly discussing what they’re going to choose. 

Your tongue darts out to moisten your lips. They’re blocking the door.

You wind your way around the tables. You keep a clear distance between yourself and the other customers.  

When you get to the door, you mutter something apologetic to one of the teenagers, who blinks at you. She leans forward and props the door open for you, still chatting to one of her friends; you duck under her arm, your heart thumping.

You turn back to say thank you, but she’s already talking with another of her friends. He’s tall, his dark hair pulled back into a bun, and—

You stagger back. A bottle of water slips from your grip and lands on the floor. No. You scramble for the bottle and struggle to pick it up with your shaking fingers. You pull yourself to your feet and look back, trying to find him in the crowd of the teenagers again. He can’t be here. It can’t be him, that wouldn’t, it can’t be him.

It can’t be. Of course, it isn’t.

The teenager is younger than Geto. His hair is a few shades lighter, and isn’t as long. He holds himself differently, too anxious and fidgety. He’s not Geto. 

You’re so stupid. You’re so stupid, to even think—stupid. Stupid. 

It feels like there are more people on the beach. You know that’s not true. Right?

But it’s full of people. No, no, there are so many more, everyone talking and laughing and shaking hands, and you can’t make out a clear way through, a path through the crowd that wouldn’t have you touching people, without someone bumping into you, grabbing onto your wrist, fingers coiling. 

Your legs feel slack, but you force yourself to move. You know your mind is lying to you. you know that you’re the one in the wrong. You hate yourself when you get like this. 

Still.

You take the long way back. It has fewer people. 

It’s safer. 

 

--

 

The clouds are deep hues of pink, violet, orange, floating languidly across a sun-streaked sky. Your feet are propped up on the dashboard, sand still glinting along the stretches of your bare legs. You’d tried to brush it all off before you’d gotten into Satoru’s car, but he’d just laughed and told you to not bother. 

Your gaze tips over to him; the sun still manages to illuminate his hair, shining like a lilac halo around his head. 

The music’s playing at a low hum. It’s Shoko’s stuff, a soft winding tune that makes your whole body want to start swaying. Satoru had wanted to put his favourite pop on, but you’d threatened to throw the CDs out of the car, and he’d quietened down. The empty plastic cup rattles in the car’s cupholder, the last dregs of strawberry milkshake still swirling at the bottom. 

“You going to finish that?” you ask, your voice quiet and crackly. 

Satoru shrugs, yawning, his fingertips drumming on the steering wheel. “Nah. You have it.”

“Ew. I don’t want your germs.”

“I don’t have germs.”

“That’s medically impossible.”

“I’m a medical wonder.” He glances up in the rear-view mirror and grins. “Kento-kun’s asleep.”

You look back—he’s right. Nanami’s forehead is pressed against the window, his breath making his hair float upwards every few seconds. His eyes are sloping downwards, more pronounced than when he’s awake. Your look over at Shoko, sitting next to Nanami, who makes eye contact with you. Her earbuds are still in, and she waves sleepily before nestling further into the corner.

“It’s sweet,” you say. 

Satoru’s lips curl upwards. “Yeah. We’re good upperclassmen.”

“Yeah. We’ll be leaving him alright. Hopefully.”

It’s a strange thought—just a few more months, and then your time at Jujustu High is over. You think back to when you were younger, when you imagined it as wonderful safe haven away from your family, closer to a fairy-tale palace than a real school. 

In a way, you’d had the right idea—your family has such a small presence in your life now, it’s still hard to place yourself back as the person you’d been in as a kid. 

You don’t really live at home anymore, when you’re at school for most of the year. Even then, you know Yahaba well enough to stay at Satoru’s throughout most of the holidays. She’s never asked to you explain why you were missing from Satoru’s life throughout most of your first and second years. 

Yahaba: the housekeeper of the Gojo household. She’s firm, but kind. She’s probably the closest thing to a mother you’ve got. You feel you’ve taken her for granted, as a presence in your life you would always have. Distant as she feels right now, you can’t even think of going back to Satoru’s house without her there. It wouldn’t survive without her, you don’t think.

Now you’re older, you can notice how young everyone else is. Yahaba’s only about ten years older than you. Sara, even less so. Sara, who married your father when she was a few months older than you are now. She’s young enough to be your sister. 

You can’t imagine doing anything like that. Marrying someone, having a child of your own in a year or two. You never want to live in that house again, but you know she lives in it every day. 

When you leave school, you’ll be finding your own place. You’ve never considered asking your father for money, and you doubt he’s considered giving you any. All of his funds will be concentrated on Haru, his true heir, who’s inherited the family’s technique and is flourishing. 

You’re lucky that Jujustu work pays well, even if it’s probably because there’s so few sorcerers left that the bigger families can afford to splurge on the funds. It’s a decent incentive, anyway, and you’re graded high enough to earn a decent wage once you graduate. 

And that’ll be you. Your mission, complete. You’ll be a Jujutsu sorcerer forever, until it kills you. This is what your life has been leading up to. It feels surreal, how close it is. 

The roads pass by, the comfortable silence filling the air around you, a soft pillow. 

“Wanna play eye-spy?”

You snort, shuffling in your seat so you’re facing him. “Eye-spy?”

“Sure.” Satoru’s pinkie fingers rise from the wheel and wave at you. “Like when we were kids.”

“We never played eye-spy when we were kids.”

“We absolutely did.” Satoru scrunches his nose, and tilts his head towards you. 

“I don’t remember that.”

“You don’t remember loads of stuff, though.” He yawns. “For ages, you couldn’t remember my birthday. Remember? It was actual years before you’d remember when I’d ask you.”

“I always got you a present.” Your brow creases softly, in memory. “I got you your first pair of glasses. Before, you’d had those god-awful ones, from your parents. They were practically a historic relic.”

“For sure,” Satoru says. He turns the music down even further, so it’s an almost-silent sigh from the speaker. “I remember more stuff than you, though. Even now.”

“That’s not true.” The dashboard of the car is digging into your calves and you shift, pulling your legs underneath you. They crinkle, the sand shifting, probably falling onto the smooth leather seats. 

“You want to know something I remember, that you don’t?”

“Go for it,” you drawl. “What is it?”

“I remember,” Satoru says, and you manage a sleepy nod, “when we first met.”

“Oh, that’s not fair.” You shuffle into a more upwards position and send him an annoyed look, which makes him laugh. “I don’t not remember.”

“Yeah, but you don’t actually-properly remember, do you?”

Your lips purse, and Satoru smirks. “Well, no,” you say, “but that’s just because I remember important things. That was ages ago, anyway.”

“I’m hurt,” Satoru says. “I remember you, when we first met.”

“I remember you later,” you say, leaning back against the window. “Once I knew you actually had an interest in me, I think.”

Your memory works in a strange way; like learning theory for class, you could recite on rote the key details from your first meeting with Satoru. 

It was a clan meeting; he saw you in a hall; you spoke in a weaponry room; he walked back with you to your parents. You only know these things because Satoru likes to tease you with the details you’ve forgotten. If you have any memories of the first time you met him, they’re so closely intertwined with Satoru’s that you can’t tell what’s genuine and what’s his. Everything you think you remember, you remember from him.

Your actual memories begin later; when he first invited you to his house, when you first met Yahaba, when you first had dinner at his, and you showed him how you could escape your bindings. 

That’s what your subconscious has deemed important, rather than that brief, inconsequential first meeting.

You remember the feeling, though. The detached, careful enjoyment, back before you’d yet allowed yourself to trust in others’ friendship. 

You remember that you hadn’t thought yourself important enough for him to go back for, still so caught up in what your grandmother used to say about your family, and then about his. It’d taken you a long time to separate Gojo from The Gojo Clan, or to recognise how Satoru Gojo and your Satoru were different. 

Satoru glances at you, a crease forming between his eyebrows, above his nose. The muscle twitches in his cheek, and you eye him carefully, paying attention. 

What had you said? Once I knew you had an interest in me. You shuffle further down in your seat, making yourself comfortable. Satoru’s thinking, and you’ve never been bothered by his silences. 

“Okay,” Satoru says, after the road fades from a motorway to an inky city street. 

“Okay?” 

“Yeah.” He flips down the sun visor, careful fingers holding its corner with a gentle reverence, and shadow blooms across his face.  

You examine him, scanning his features for evidence of supressed emotion, of walls being built up that you’ll have to find your way through, but you don’t find anything. Satoru seems content: the deliberation, the recognition, the conclusion, it’s all genuine.

“You didn’t think I was interested in you?” 

You shake your head. “Not at that time. Not when I was seven, no.”

“But you were just a kid when you thought like that.” Satoru’s fingers drag along the steering wheel as he turns the car. The indicator light blinks on-off, on-off, and then disappears. 

“Of course.”

“And so,” Satoru says, choosing his words carefully, “you still don’t…”

You laugh, a quiet exhale of breath through your nose. 

He glances back at you, smiling in an almost bashful manner. “Don’t laugh at me, Hebi.”

“I… no, I’m not laughing. I’m not, It’s just… Obviously not. Honestly, Gojo, of course I don’t think that now,” you say, your voice soft through your smile. 

“I was just checking.”

“You’re so…” You shake your head, looking out the window. “Of course I don’t think that. I don’t think you could stick around someone you don’t like for more than a half hour, let alone… what, ten years? Eleven?” 

“Twelve,” Satoru says. “Twelve years. Six years old, to eighteen. Wow.”

“Wow,” you echo. And then, a moment later: “No, we were seven when we met.”

“We were six.”

“Seven.”

“Six. I’m right, Hebi-Hebi.”

“Seven. What, because you’re always right?”

“Six. Mm-hmm, exactly, always and forever, never ever wrong.”

“Seven.” You rest your head against the crook between window and the car door and sigh, filling your lungs with the last remnants of sea air. “You know, that’s what I used to think about you, for a little while. I believed everything they’d say about you—all powerful, and incredible, and above everyone else.”

“Did you?” Satoru raises his eyebrows, smirking. “You never gave that impression.”

“No, I tried not to. I was consciously trying to keep your ego in check.”

“I’m afraid to say you have not been successful.”

“We’ll see. I’ve not stopped yet.” You yawn, and grin at him half-heartedly. “I only thought it for about a week, though. Once I met you it all disappeared.”

“It did? And what do you think now?”

You hum. “Well. I know now that you’re just a normal, incredibly annoying person. Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything special about you at all, Gojo.”

“Ah.” The corner of his lips quirk up, and his grip on the steering wheel relaxes. “I guess you’re right. Nothing special at all. Of course.”

 

Notes:

2008
Eighteen years old

-

Right, here's about thirteen thousand words to make up for lost time, lmao. There's a lot of things brought up in this chapter (because, no, I cannot just have a sweet-fluffy chapter and be done with it). A Geto-less life, the grown-up sorcerer world beyond Jujustu High, future relationships (or the lack of them), and the two of them right in the middle of it. I always adore to hear what you guys have to say, especially with all the different topics we've got going here! You're all amazing and have my eternal devotion <3

Also, side note: I've finally gotten round to watching Alice in Borderland (loved it), and I'm fuming at their lack of ao3 fanfics. Have any of you guys watched it, or would anyone be interested in me tossing my hat into the ring? I've got a few ideas zipping around my head (...it's all Chishiya-centric, I'm sorry, it's true), so I'm just putting out feelers to see if anyone'd fancy some more of his fics.

Loads of love to you all, and I'll see you next time!! <33

—

Update as of March-ish: Just to let you guys know, it’s the lead up to final exam szn over on my end and so, until summertime, I should say that updates may be lacking. Rip :(

As a positive, I have also written about 30-odd-thousand words of the above-mentioned chishiya ff! This will be published soon-ish? It’s three chapters, each released weekly, for those interested, and then I’ll be turning my full attention back here!

However I do have to ask for your patience in the upcoming months, until I am free to truly thrive and survive forever (post-exams) T_T Hope everyone’s doing well!! <3

Chapter 14: 2009

Notes:

CW: Child neglect. No neglect occurs "on-screen" in the chapter, but there are discussions of its consequences, behavioural and physical.

Monday 7th September, 2009

Smoke coils from your lips. 

It’s Shoko’s fault. She’d caught you fighting sleep, texting you a banal question at 3am that you’d been stupid enough to respond to. Apparently, she’s allowed to stay awake at night, but you’re not. 

“I’m sorry I can’t do anything about it,” she’d said, leaning on the cold metal railing of your balcony, the slim watch on her wrist reading 03:47. “You know.”

“Yeah.” You’d rubbed your shoulder and had tried to ignore the dull throb of pain. “Well. Don’t worry about it.”

“Still.” She gestured to the Tokyo skyline with her lit cigarette. It burned yellow patterns into your retinas, hypnotic. “It makes me feel like shit.”

“It does?” You laughed, quietly. “You’re not the one in pain, Shoko.”

“Sure.”

“And it’s not like I blame you or anything.”

“I know.” She took a drag of her cigarette. “But, just. It’s shit.”

Shoko rolled her bottom lip between her teeth, her eyes hazy, focused on something in the distance. A memory. You looked away from her, back out at the skyline. You could never read her as well as you can read Satoru. You sometimes think she resents you for it. 

“It doesn’t make you a bad healer,” you offered instead, nudging her very briefly with your good arm. 

She sent you a wry smile. “I don’t know if that’s true.”

“Sure it is. You’re just a first aid person, not a physical therapist. You’re specialised.”

“Specialised?”

“I—yeah. That’s what it’s called, right?” You duck your head at her laugh. “Gojo’s got me watching one of those medical dramas, so don’t blame me if I use the wrong terminology.”

Shoko shook her head. She looked more amused, which you were grateful for. Ash collected at the tip of the cigarette, burning the white paper grey. She tapped it into the ash tray, the one you’d bought for her when you first moved in. 

She caught your gaze watching the cigarette’s lazy orange glow. Wordlessly, she offered it to you. 

You took it, without really thinking about it. Shoko had started smoking when Geto left, and she’d always said it relaxed her. Gave her something to do, on the days when she couldn’t think of anything else. The smoke was hot in your mouth, and when you inhaled it choked you, burning your throat, and you bent over the railing, hacking. Shoko had chuckled and exhaled grey smoke. 

She’d lit another, and let you continue with the half-smoked one. You’d spent the next few minutes in silence, listening to the sound of the cars and people from far below you. Then she’d muttered something about an indirect kiss, and how she wasn’t interested, and you’d laughed and almost elbowed her in the side. 

You think about it now, as you sit here, cross-legged on the balcony. The early morning mist makes the same winding patterns as the cigarette smoke, but it’s dewy and wet on your bare arms, and it makes you shiver.  

You’ve been awake for hours, waiting for the day to begin. When you wake up in the middle of the night, you don’t even bother trying to fall asleep again. You sometimes manage it, for another meagre few hours before your shoulder wakes you up again. Even then, it’s rare that you do. 

Most likely, you just stare up at the ceiling, at the slowly-growing patch of damp in the corner, and then at the dark purple of the backs of your eyelids. It’s nicer to watch the sunrise, so you give up on sleeping altogether. 

Your eyes feel heavy. You take another drag. You like the heat in your chest, how you feel the smoke burn through your lungs. 

With your free hand, you press down against where your heart is. Even harder. 

Your nails dig into your skin. You push down, fingers splayed, trying to feel your heartbeat. It’s like you want to reassure yourself it’s still there. If you could feel the organ beat against your fingers, or you could open up your chest to see it working, you might rid yourself of this creeping feeling that’s got a hold of it. 

You want to hold your pulsing heart in your hand and squeeze, feel the muscle, feel the heat. 

You let out a pained gasp. You look down, and realise that your nails have broken the skin. You blink, as a small droplet of blood pools, and then starts to slide viscously down your chest. You pull up your shirt, suddenly embarrassed. 

It’s been like this recently. You’re watching the movement of the sunlight through the milky clouds, and then you're understanding how many other people are in your city, and how small you are. And then you’re shivering from the cold, hairs standing on end, and you’re trying to find the energy to move. 

And then you’re startled back into your own body, and you look down at your watch to see that you’ve been silent and still for hours, and you hadn’t even noticed. 

It worries you. 

It doesn’t help that your apartment is so quiet. You’re used to dorms in Jujustu High—someone knocking on your door every hour, first-years cackling as they race down the hallways, chatter during dinners with people you know. You open your fridge and peel the lid off the half-eaten yogurt. When you close the fridge’s door, its quiet mechanical hum is shut off into silence. 

There’s no-one that you live with, so there’s no-one to talk to. Your neighbours are polite and quiet. It’s not as if you’d want them to be loud, not really. Shoko’s suggested you get a roommate, even though you don’t really need one, not with the pay you get from being a sorcerer. 

You check your watch—it’s just past seven. You thumb through the messages, and see that you’ve been assigned a case in an old factory district, for as soon as you can get there. You scrape the yogurt into a clean bowl, think about it for a second, then root around your cupboards for some carbohydrates you can add to it. You settle on some oats and grains, add some flavour with a chopped banana. 

It makes you realise that you’ve become old and boring already. Fuck, you’re only nineteen. 

The sound of your phone ringing makes you jump. You check the caller ID before you answer, and smile despite yourself: ‘Satoru <333 ;))))’, the name he’d chosen himself, that you haven’t had the heart to change. 

“Hello?”

“Hebi-Hebi!”  Satoru’s voice rings through the phone, clear and bright, but it doesn’t drown out the loud sound of shouting and thumping. 

“Gojo, you—what’s going on?”

“Huh? What do you mean, what’s going on? Why would anything be going on?” 

You hear the distinctive sound of crockery shattering. 

“Why else would you call me?”

Satoru gasps. “You’re saying I can’t just call you up? Maybe I’ve missed the sound of your voice!”

“I doubt it,” you say. “What’s that in the background? What do you need?”

“I don’t need anything!”  Someone’s starting to wail, loudly “Wait, no. I only need to hear your voice, Hebi-Hebi!”

“Smooth.”

“You think?”

“Mm. Not your finest, but, hey.”

“Ah, you’re generous. So lovely to me.”  Satoru breaks off, and you hear, more muffled: “Megumi! Stop it!” 

You put your spoon back down and sigh. “Gojo.”

“You know, while I have you on the phone, I was just wondering—” 

“Gojo.”

“It’s nothing bad!”  he says, hurriedly, and you bite back a smile at how panicked he sounds. “Don’t worry, don’t worry. I was just wondering if you knew where Megumi left his school shoes. He’s lost—hey, hey, Megumi—Yahaba, could you—”

“Did he not put them by the front door?”

“Yahaba says she’s looked.”

You rock back on your chair, trying to remember from yesterday afternoon. “We came in late because Tsumiki wanted ice cream, and then Megumi was getting antsy so I said we could go on a walk outside, and he—have you checked by the back patio doors?”

“I haven’t!”  There’s the sound of scuffling, like Satoru’s darting through the rooms. “Hey, Megumi, I think Hebi’s found your shoes!”

“Don’t, Gojo,” you say, with a sigh, “not if I’m wrong, then—”

“I’ve found your shoes! Megumi, I’ve found your shoes!” 

You put the phone down onto the table and start eating your yogurt. Then you pick it up again. “Is Tsumiki okay? If Megumi’s shouting again, have you—” 

“Yahaba’s got her,”  Satoru says, warmly. “I told you not to worry.”

“I know. I just—even I forget sometimes, but…”

“Nah, it’s alright. Isn’t it all alright, Megumi? Ah, he just stuck his tongue out at me. You’re so cute, Megumi!”

You smile into your yogurt. If Megumi’s calming down enough to be rude to Satoru, he can’t have been too far into his tantrum. Good. You’re sure you read somewhere that it’s best for children to go to school happy. You’re pretty sure that sounds right. 

“He knows he’s cute. Yahaba decided on something new for breakfast and they loved it! Tsumiki can’t get enough of the cooking here!”

“I bet Yahaba’s pleased,” you say. She always liked it when you stayed over at Satoru’s—Yahaba, the housekeeper of the Gojo household, and the only really stable adult figure you had growing up. 

She’s confided in you that she’s enjoying having children in the house again—that it’s felt quiet without you and Satoru here, even after all these years. 

It’s still strange that she’s been talking to you like you’re an adult, even if you know that you are, technically. There’s something about her stern gaze that makes you feel eight years old again, even if Satoru doesn’t seem to have that issue.  

“For sure, for sure. You’re coming over tonight, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Ha-ha! Good. Good good good.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t?”

“Ahh, I never know! You’re mysterious, Hebi-Hebi.”

You scoff. You’ve been spending nearly every evening at Satoru’s since you left school. It doesn’t quite replicate the proximity of living a few feet from each other, but you’re dealing with it alright. It’s not as if you two haven’t lived in different houses before. 

“Well,” you say, through a mouthful of oat-y yogurt, “I guess you’ll have to keep guessing then.”

“Tut, tut. You’re not being a very good wife right now, you know. What will I tell the children?”

“God, Gojo—” 

He pretends to sob. “I’ll be better for you, my darling! Please don’t take the kids!”

“Okay, I’ve divorced you,” you say. You glare at the phone, feeling a little warm around the ears. Satoru finds it hilarious to pretend that you’re all one big nuclear family, which includes the two of you being happily married, husband and wife. The first time he mentioned it, you’d frozen, awfully conspicuous, and he’d grinned at the wide-eyed look on your face. 

“No, my wife! Divorce should never be considered, not when we’ve got such a strong backbone of—” 

“I’m hanging up.”

“No no, wait! We can talk this through!” 

“I’ve got to go to work,” you say. “I’ll see you later, Gojo.”

You hear him laugh through the phone, so genuine it makes your heart ache. “See you tonight!”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Satoru hangs up, and feel a tinge of warmth that wasn’t there this morning. You look around your apartment, and, okay, maybe it’s not so bad. Most of the furniture is second- or third-hand, but it’s not big enough for it to feel too empty. You’re probably just a bit tired—that’s why you’ve been feeling so weird lately. Besides, you’d spent most of your money on securing a decent car, and so you can’t complain. 

You’d attempted public transport exactly once, years ago, and you’ve never tried it again—last time, you’d had to run off, heart racing, nearly hyperventilating, head filled with how close and near everyone was. 

You’ve invested all your wages you’re your own car—small, fourth-hand, with a dark stain on the passenger seat, but completely private and completely yours. Satoru complains that it’s ugly, but you love it. 

You go through the motions of getting ready. Before you get dressed, you pick up your gloves from where they’re laid on the bedside table. You pull them on, and flex your fingers in them. They feel like a second skin. 

You’ve not been wearing them at home, not since your realised that you don’t recognise your hands without them. 

The thought had scared you almost as much as the way you feel so often these days. Just… cold, like an abandoned room in an empty house, left alone and noiseless. It’s the way your apartment feels sometimes, or the way it was before you’d moved in properly, open, vacant, so clean and so sterile. 

Or like when you had first seen it, when the realtors had left the windows open. You still remember the creeping chill of standing in the middle of the room, the monotonous rushes of the wind raising the hairs on your arms. You don’t think you’ve yet gotten rid of the chill.

You push the feeling away, as you feel it creeping back. You don’t think about it, because you’ve got other things to thing about. Like your work. You’re still not yet used to your work, either.

 

--

 

You’ve just jammed your blade into the chest cavity of one particularly horrific curse when you hear the familiar beep-beep beep-beep of your ringtone. 

You pull your scythe out of the curse and ignore its gruesome gurgle as it starts to die. What—Satoru, again? He knows not to call you at work. You shove your hand into your uniform pocket and stare at the caller ID, an unregistered number. 

No. It’s not Satoru. 

You’re actually amazed. You’ve been trying to get in touch with her for weeks and—and, of course she decides to answer you when you’re in the middle of a job. 

And for curses that hunt via sound. You’re in the middle of an abandoned factory, and every step echoes menacingly against the stories-tall ceilings, everything old and metal and industrial. You kick the dying curse in frustration, and it chitters disgustingly. 

Before she can back out of the call, you accept it.

“Hello?”

“Hi—”  the voice—female, good—says, “hi, am I talking to Hebi-san?”

“Speaking.” You jab the curse beneath you with the butt end of your scythe and it retracts its pincer-like paws from where they’d been creeping around your feet. “Who is this?”

“Ah, right, it’s—I’m Cho Fushiguro, hi. Uhm—Tsumiki’s aunt? I think you’ve been trying to contact me, maybe?”

You take the phone away from your face and groan heavily. Because you can’t deal with its slow death any longer, you slice the curse’s abdomen into two and watch it disappear into a cloud of ash.

With a patience you usually reserve only for Satoru, you bring the phone back to your ear and say, politely: “Yes, I have. For over a month now, actually. I didn’t think you’d call back.”

“Oh, ha-ha,”  Cho Fushiguro’s voice sounds unusually quiet, as if she’s holding the phone a little too far away from her mouth. “Time slips away! My mistake!”

“Time slips away?” you repeat, coolly, surveying the factory you’ve been sent to investigate. 

You don’t think it’s anything too special—one of the easier jobs you’ve had to do so far, just exorcising a handful of Grade Threes that have been loitering around. If you were to guess, you think you’ve destroyed all but one of the remaining curses. There’s a lingering residue of cursed energy, just out of reach. You turn your attention back to the woman at the end of the phone call. “You do know where Tsumiki’s been living, don’t you?”

“Ah. Well. Yes, I’m sure you’ve mentioned—not that I’m not interested, but I haven’t exactly been keeping—or, she’s never made herself known to me, if you—”

“Do you really think,” you say, stepping over the remains of the curse and striding towards a half-open door, “that a seven-year-old girl is going to know where you are if you’ve never spoken to her before?”

“I—”

“Tsumiki has been living on her own, taking care of her brother by herself, for almost a year. Did you know that?”

“A year?”  Tsumiki’s aunt sounds aghast. “No, Chiyoko—my sister—she wouldn’t do that to—”

“After being abandoned by your sister,” you continue, ducking through the metal door to reveal a series of dark, rusted corridors. “She’s a very resourceful child, your niece. If it wasn’t for her, she and her brother probably would’ve starved.”

“No, but—she wouldn’t—”

“And,” you say, hot anger welling up inside you—at this stupid woman, this woman who has been evading your calls for over a month because she doesn’t want to hear about the gross negligence committed by her sister, because she doesn’t want to recognise that she could have been the one to end it, to help those children, to take over from her stupid sister when she couldn’t do it herself, “it’s a good thing she enrolled them both in school. That was the only meal they were getting, even before your sister left; a school lunch each, one for each child, once per day. They were starving. And you didn’t think to call?” 

“I can’t believe that—”

“Did your sister ever visit you?” you ask, suddenly, and Cho Fushiguro quiets immediately. You let the silence draw out, your footsteps slapping against the damp metal floor. 

She replies, shakily, after a long pause. “I haven’t seen her since—in ages, I haven’t seen her.”

You scoff. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I haven’t, I—”

“Before Tsumiki’s mother left her,” you say, cutting them off, “she told the children that she would be visiting you for a few days. Tsumiki said she thought it was strange, since her mother had never actually told her where you live. After about a month, she realised why.” 

You can hear the sound of the woman’s breathing on the end of the line. It’s short, ragged. Your lip curls, remorseless.

“She…”  Tsumiki’s aunt says, “she told me she needed a break. It was too much, for her. I—She stayed at mine for a few nights, and then she left. I haven’t seen her since. I swear.”

“And when you were lying in bed the next night,” you say, choosing a door to head down at random and strolling through, “when you were lying in your comfortable bed, what were you thinking? Did you even consider that you should check up on them? Just to see if they were doing okay? Did the thought even cross your mind?”

“I—I assumed she’d gone back to them,”  the woman says quietly, almost inaudible. 

The declaration makes you laugh, harsh and loud. “You’d assumed? Of course. What a good excuse you have there.”

The woman’s breath rattles against the phone. You drag your scythe against the ground, the sound of metal-on-metal grating against your ears.

“It wasn’t just her!”  Tsumiki’s aunt says, all at once. “It takes two people to have a child! Toji married her, didn’t he? And he never took care of his kid, either, his son. Why can’t he be responsible for the two of them? Why are you blaming us, when—”

“Toji’s been dead for years,” you say, which shuts her up. “I’d assumed that your sister had mentioned it. Did she not?”

“I—what?”  she whispers. “Oh my—dead? She never once said anything. Are you—how do you know?”

“You shouldn’t concern yourself with it. It’s none of your business, really.”

“But—no, I have a right to—”

“I would say you don’t have a right to all that much, right about now.”

“Don’t you—she’s my sister, and I—”

“And Tsumiki’s your niece,” you say, simply. “But you never cared much about that, did you?” 

Cho Fushiguro draws a breath; quivering, long, painful. “That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it? Please, let me know just how unfair it is.”

“I—Look. She was my older sister, by a lot. I’m not even thirty. I don’t have any children of my own, I’m not married, I don’t have any way of supporting them. I would’ve been a useless parent. I just couldn’t do it. You can’t blame me, just because—because I couldn’t. It wouldn’t have been fair on Tsumiki—on, on her and Toji’s son. You see? I just couldn’t.”

“Sure.” You squint at the ground, and slowly draw yourself back up as you see the shifting trail of cursed energy, heading forwards into a darkened corner of the longest corridor. “Whatever.”

“You—whatever? You can’t say—not when I’ve—”

“Honestly, Fushiguro-san,” you say, stepping to the side of the corridor and pressing yourself against the wall, “I just don’t care. You’ve got your excuses, which we both know are shallow, but still. Well, I’m glad you admitted that. It’s made my life exceptionally easier.”

“Easier? But—I thought you were going to ask me to take Tsumiki in?”

You stop in your tracks, furious. “Why would I ever let you within a ten mile radius of that child? Why would I ever let her live with somebody who clearly can’t be bothered to even check if she’s still alive?”

“Listen, that’s not—”

“I do not care,” you say, each word enunciated and viciously clear. If, by some miracle, you’ve suddenly decided that you want to be a part of her life, you’ve got my number. But I’m going to make one thing clear—” 

Your chin lifts, and you stare down at the phone gripped in your hand, the fabric of your gloves straining. “I couldn’t give a single shit that you’re her last blood relation. Genuinely. It means absolutely nothing to me. If you’d called me up, explained the situation and you’d begged me for you to be her guardian, I might’ve considered it. But I know that she’s infinitely safer where she’s living now, and not with whoever just happens to be related to her. Do you get that, Fushiguro-san?”

“I—but—”

“Great. Bye.”

You hang up, and swear loudly into the darkness.

What a disgusting woman. You run your hands over your face, trying to calm down. How foul—how could she think you’d allow her control over Tsumiki’s life when she’s never shown any care to the girl in her life? 

It doesn’t matter if she’s her relative. It doesn’t matter who Tsumiki’s blood family is. You bite down on your bottom lip so hard you taste blood. You know more than anyone—you know more than anyone that family doesn’t mean anything. Not if they don’t care about you. 

This place is a fucking dump. You hate exorcisms in places like this—places of historical misery, that generated enough hatred that they still manage to spawn a few weak curses. 

It might not have been wholly fair to place all of the blame on Tsumiki’s aunt. You know that children can completely change your life—it’s happening to you right now, and you’re sharing the responsibility with countless other people. But, still. Not even checking to see if they were alive? 

With the thought of the kids on your mind, you check your watch, and curse. You’ll have to finish up here, soon, if you’re going to get back to their school in time to collect them. Right. 

You follow the trail of cursed energy, undulating and shifting as you step alongside it. You know that different sorcerers can perceive it in slightly different ways, the way one person sees a colour as blue when another sees it as green. To you, the cursed energy has always taken the form of fog; cold, clammy, winding around your ankles as you get closer to its source. 

You used to be afraid of it, try to hold your breath in fear of drawing it inside you, despite knowing how irrational the thought was. Now, you pass through it without any reservations. You don’t know if Megumi’s seeing cursed energy yet. Satoru says he’s gifted, and you don’t have keen enough senses to check. 

 You slip your gloves into the inside pocket of your jacket, curling a bare fist around the long stem of your scythe. The wood is smooth under your uncovered palm. You fight the feeling of foreignness. 

The cursed energy begins to swell, blooming around a dark corner. You hold your breath. Something large, very large, clicks. Thousands and thousands of insectoid legs scuttling against the metal floor. You press your body against the wall. Very slowly, you look around the corner.

The curse is a mammoth centipede, skittering and chattering, legs clacking disjointedly, too many of them for the curse to control. It’s got parts of its body wrapped around itself into knots, snake-like, but its black legs keep it in constant motion. Along its long body, which must be over five metres, scaled sections trip over themselves and careen to the floor. They leave behind a thick, mucous-like substance. You see the liquid also dribbles from its mandibles, hanging viscously like a rabid dog’s saliva. 

Grade three, clearly. You can tell that much; if not by its aura emanating around its mangled body, but because you don’t think the higher-ups would trust you with something much stronger than that.

You keep yourself still. Its antennae are twitching, whirling through the air, and then they suddenly point straight towards you. Shit. You hold your breath, even as your blood pumps loudly in your ears. The curse’s head twitches and every segment of its body follows as it uncoils itself uncoils from its own knots, long and slimy, then rears onto its fifty hind legs—and, screeching an ear-splitting shriek, it darts forward. 

It’s fast. You’ve dealt with fast ones before; things so light and quick they blur with your vision as you scan the room looking for them. It’s okay: you can deal with this. 

You sidestep, noting how slick the floor is, and plant yourself solidly on two feet. The thing skids, its segmented body writhing as it struggles to turn swiftly. 

Fast, but not agile. You slash at its exposed abdomen, pulling your scythe down in a strong arc, and the blade makes smooth contact. Deep purple blood spurts from the wound, splattering the floor around you, and you dodge the spray. 

You don’t want a single drop to land on you—if the blood’s toxic, the curse could be a lot deadlier than you thought. And you’ve had enough experience with toxic blood that you don’t dare to get complacent. 

Unlike Tsumiki’s aunt: complacent. That’s the word for it. She thought she was fine to pretend like everything was okay, to wait out her own niece’s suffering. 

One more hit should probably do it; the curse trips over itself, the many legs entangling, and takes a second to stand back up again. With the way you’ve got it shaking, it’s clearly weakened, and you made a strong enough blow to its core that you can get it immobile with another good cut. 

You toss your scythe to your other hand and back, spinning it so fast it blurs. It’s one of the reasons you like the weapon so much—it’s long enough to act as a staff, and sharp enough to cut. You can’t perform as many intricate details with it as you would like to, with the heavy weight of the blade pulling off the balance, but you’ve gotten excellent at using it these past years, and you can hardly tell the difference these days. 

Maybe the insect can sense your confidence. You’ve seen curses feel fear before, but something this low-power probably can’t feel emotion on a level more intricate than the animal from which it’s stolen its form. 

It charges, again, and you raise your scythe in a defensive position, placing a foot backwards to brace against the incoming blow. Instead of just running at you like last time, the curse jumps, into the air, jaw clicking with the slick mucous pouring from its mouth.

On its downwards motion, it collides with your scythe. You shove it off, but not before its legs get hold of you; they scrabble against your arms and stomach and legs, tearing at the fabric of your uniform—you push, hard, against its torso, and it falls to the floor, segments rippling, screeching in panic. 

You bring your scythe above your head, the metal blade glinting in the cold half-light, and you force it down, slicing through the air, ready to break the curse’s skin apart with one strike—and the end of the curse’s body whips up and collides in a white-hot arc with the bones at the top of your back. 

Crack.

You gasp, pain searing up your arms, bones, muscles, burning into a blazing fire at your shoulder—your shoulder. It hit your arm—to the side of your arm, where it hurts the most—the joint of your shoulder blade—your shoulder.

Your bad shoulder.

The blow sends you tumbling to the floor, scythe flying from your hand, your body shuddering and completely out of your control. Your shoulder pulses and nearly has you screaming. It was such a weak thing—if it was anywhere else, you would have been okay—but you’re face down on the floor, and the water is soaking into the fabric of your uniform. 

You gag, the rotting water splashing against your bare skin. There’s hardly any light in this place, as it is, and the curse is dark, blending into the shadows of the room, and you can hardly make it out, hardly even see. 

With a great surge of effort, you try to push yourself up, but your shoulder gives way and you fall back to the floor, face-first, into the stagnant water. It fills your nostrils, mouth, airways, and you choke, hacking up the dirt and mould of the decades-old floor. 

The curse chatters—excitement?—and you roll to the side, narrowly avoiding being crushed as it slams its body onto the concrete right next to you. Your shoulder pulsates with agony, but you swear, try to ignore the pain, and raise your shaking hands to the air. 

Your hands are bare for a reason. 

This time, when the curse throws itself onto your broken form, you grit your teeth and hold your damn position—it lands onto your palms, dead-on. White bursts of pain explode in front of our eyes as the curse, just like you, opens its broken jaw in what could only be a screech of absolute anguish.

You feel your cursed energy, feel it ripping and tearing inside you, and force it out—through your hands, through your palms, through the raw and bleeding pads of your fingertips, you summon as much of it as you can muster and push. 

And then, the way it always feels; because you don’t have to try anymore. Power surges from your hands and it makes you feel jubilant. The algae and muck and dirt have finally cleared from the river, and it rushes free with a blissful joy. You’re holding onto the curse, pouring your cursed energy into its unaccepting body, and yet you feel giddy, almost drunk. Your lips have curled of their own volition into a hazy smile. 

You never use your power outside of exorcisms. This is one of the only parts of your job you enjoy. This moment—the briefest second, when you feel in control. 

The curse’s body curls and contorts, charred black spreading from the point of contact, rippling away from you in a great outburst of energy. Its scream snaps you back from your transient euphoria. You hold onto it until the ash has consumed its entire body, until you can feel you’ve drained its life force away, and then you let go. 

It dissolves into the moist air, particulates of smoke and soot suspended, like fog. Then, they drift, gently, to the floor. You’ve pressed your lips together to avoid choking on the curse’s remains. Before long, even the dust disappears, leaving you only with the sound of your own breath, and the awful throbbing in your shoulder.

The pain’s nothing new, but you’re not yet used to how concentrated it is when you hurt it in this specific joint. Trying not to move your arms, you sit up and stand, testing its range of motion, which is limited. You can roll it forwards, but any attempt at moving it backwards makes you cry out.

Shit. Probably popped out of its socket again. 

You sigh, both from pain and from annoyance, and shuffle over to a wall. You press your head against the cool metal, and slowly, painfully, reach to the back of your neck with your bad arm. You tip-toe your fingers towards the opposite shoulder and, gritting your teeth, you push sharply and feel the joint snap back into place. 

“Ow,” you say, rolling your shoulders back and feeling the bones slide over each other painfully. “Ow, ow, ow.”

You check your watch, and wince. You would have liked to pick up a coffee after the job, or maybe have a quick smoke, but at this point you’ll hardly have time to change into your casual clothes before you have to pick Megumi and Tsumiki up from school.  

Damn your job. It’s inconsistent and painful, and not at all the glamourous occupation you once thought being a sorcerer would be. It’s fine being someone like Satoru, who has the pick of whatever missions he wants. You get the disgusting jobs, the ones no-one wants to do. You pick up the litter of the line of curses, because someone has to. 

And it doesn’t stop. You never achieve anything, because they keep coming back. You can’t shake the cold feeling that this is all your life ever will be: abandoned factories and aching shoulders and a mouth that tastes of mould. 

You hate them. Curses. It’s not some new revelation, for a sorcerer to dislike curses, of course. And yet, even at the slight hint of hatred, your first instinct is to clamp it down. You haven’t told anyone about how you feel, or about how you’ve not been enjoying your job half as much as you thought you would. 

You especially haven’t told Satoru. How could you? If you start muttering about your hatred of curses, or the monotony of exorcising them, or how you feel like your life as a sorcerer is bordering on pointless… well, he wouldn’t be thinking about you anymore. No-one would. Because you don’t want to sound like—like Geto.

You’re not like him. You never could be—you’re still so afraid of what he wants to do. 

And it’s why you can’t tell anyone. Let alone Satoru. He understands you so well, but he’s immersed in a different society to the one that engulfs you. His experiences are not your own. He wouldn’t understand. 

But you’re not like him. Geto. Suguru. You’re not like him.

You’ve exorcised all the curses here: the cursed energy’s dissipated. You pull on your gloves and pick up your scythe, and make your way back. And then, because why the fuck not, you light yourself a cigarette. You fingers scrape the edges of the box—you’re almost out. You’ll pick up another pack on the way to the kids’ school. 

 

--

 

You stand leaning against your car, absent-mindedly massaging your shoulder as you wait for the kids to arrive. 

You’ve learnt to ignore the other parents’ stares—it’s markedly clear that you’re much younger than they are, and you think they’ve assumed you’re an irresponsible delinquent of a teen mother. You don’t care enough to attempt to correct them, and have fallen into the comfortable routine of ignoring them all, and then glaring pointedly at anyone cocky enough to approach you.

Tsumiki always leads the way, always one hand clasped around Megumi’s wrist, which he always struggles to get out of—sometimes she’s dragging him out, and sometimes they’re walking side-by-side, talking privately to each other. When it’s the latter, you think it means that Megumi’s had a bad day; he’s only been at this school for a few weeks, and you’ve already had countless phone calls about bad behaviour and problems with the other children. 

For the moment, you’ve decided not to pursue them. For a typical child, starting a new school would be hard enough—for Tsumiki and Megumi, they’re doing all of that as well as trying to recover from the last few years of Toji’s shit parenting. Or, rather, his lack of parenting: they’ve been on their own for years. Of course it’d manifest in bad behaviour, of all things. You’ve been reading a book about fostering, and there’s a chapter about neglect that you keep coming back to. You’re more than willing to cut the kids some slack.

When you finally spot them in the crowd of children, you’re taken aback. Sure, Tsumiki’s got Megumi’s hand clutched tight in hers, as you’d expect—but, in Megumi’s other hand, there is a tiny white puppy. 

He’s staring down at it with poorly disguised awe. The puppy licks at his cheek, and Megumi blinks. His lips part slightly, like he’s amazed at it.   

“Hello, Hebi-san!” Tsumiki says, as she and Megumi reach your car. She opens up the door and clambers in, shuffling over the seats so Megumi can sit diagonal to the driver’s seat.

“Hello,” you say slowly. You’re still staring at the white dog in Megumi’s arms—because, surely Satoru would have told you if Megumi had adopted a pet this morning? Right? “Uh—Megumi, what’s—?”

“It’s nothing,” Megumi mumbles. He sits down and slams the door shut. 

You stare at him through the car window for a second. He’s hugging the dog closely, his small little fingers winding through its white fur. Tsumiki leans over to pet it, and Megumi shuffles away from her. You can’t hear what Tsumiki says to him, but when she pouts and tries to stroke it again, Megumi lets her. 

“Okay.” You nod to yourself. “Okay, sure.”

And then you realise—of course. Satoru has been talking about Megumi’s cursed technique manifesting for a while now, and whilst he hadn’t been able to predict what it was, he’d known that Megumi’s mother was a shikigami user: she’d had the Ten Shadows Technique. Satoru had assumed Megumi would have it as well. 

Well. Seemingly, he was right. 

You open your door and catch Tsumiki’s eye in the rear view mirror. “Okay, you two. Got your bags? Water bottles?” 

“I’ve got our bags, and water bottles, and lunch boxes. Mine and Megumi’s!” Tsumiki holds up the red lunch boxes with pride. “I took care of them, don’t worry!”

“Excellent job, Tsumiki. Seatbelts. Megumi, help your sister with her seatbelt.”

“Oops! No, I’ve done mine. Have you done yours, Megumi?” 

“Mhm.”

You check you’re not about to run over any children, and slowly pull out of the school lot.

You really don’t know what the best thing to do is, now that Megumi’s actually summoned a shikigami. Is it better or worse that it happened without you or Satoru to supervise? 

As you turn the steering wheel, you grit your teeth—your shoulder. Hurting, again. Shit. It’s another sign that ignoring your injuries can’t be a good idea, but you didn’t have any time to get it checked before you had to pick up the kids, and you’d rather suffer through the drive back than leave them waiting at the school gates. 

You’ll sort it later—you’re not going to burden them by complaining about your injuries. You take a deep breath in, and continue. 

“So,” you say, hoping your question isn’t too pointed, “how was your day?” 

“Brilliant!” Tsumiki enthuses, sliding her bag over the backs of their seats into the boot. “It’s cultural eating week today, so we had paella! It was really tasty, I think.”

“It was gross.”

“Megumi didn’t like it,” Tsumiki says promptly.

“He didn’t?” You frown. “Megumi, what did you have for lunch instead?”

Megumi buries his face in the dog’s fur, and when he speaks, his voice comes out muffled. “I had the paella.”

“You had the school food?”

“Yeah.”

“But you didn’t like it?”

Megumi huffs out a sigh. “Whatever. I’m still gonna eat it.”

“And the doggy had paella too!” Tsumiki says, as she starts to undo her braids. They’re perfectly neat and still intact, and you suspect they’re Yahaba’s handiwork, rather than Satoru’s. “He had school food, and he thought it was really nice.”

In the mirror, you spot Megumi shooting a wide-eyed glare at his sister. Tsumiki frowns at him. 

“What?” she whispers, leaning her head closer to him. 

Megumi hisses something that you can’t quite catch, and then points at the puppy, who pants contentedly. 

“Oh,” Tsumiki says, nodding fervently. She turns back to you, her cheeks pink. “I forgot, Hebi-san. Megumi’s doggy didn’t eat anything. He didn’t eat any lunch at all.”

You raise your eyebrows, and Tsumiki flushes even darker. “He didn’t? Are you sure?”

“Yes, yes, I’m very very very sure. Megumi… uhm, Megumi found him after lunchtime. Didn’t you, Megumi?”

Megumi grunts.

“Yes. Megumi found him, and he didn’t eat anything he shouldn’t. Because we found him after lunch.” Tsumiki smiles, tight-lipped.

“Do you think,” you say, with your tone as even and friendly as you can make it, “I’ll be getting any phone calls this evening? Anything from school?”

You don’t miss the guilty glance they exchange. It was probably supposed to be subtle, but Tsumiki hasn’t yet figured out how to keep surprise off her face the way her brother has. 

You sigh. You’ve already heard words from Megumi’s teachers that he’s disruptive in class; according to them, he’s asocial and taciturn, too uncommunicative to make friends with the other children, and prone to severe temper tantrums when something doesn’t go his way. 

At the first few phone calls, you tried to press for more details—you found that Megumi only lashed out when teachers criticised him, or when a schooltime routine was disrupted, or when they another child teased him for eating so much food at lunchtime. You tried to explain Megumi’s background, about his and Tsumiki’s years alone, but none of the teachers seemed to care. 

Tsumiki, trying so desperately to take care of him, has promised you that Megumi’s not a bully. You and Satoru agree with her wholeheartedly, despite what his teachers have tried to insinuate.

If Megumi stole someone’s lunch today—which is what you’re almost certain has happened—then you trust the kid enough to know that he did it for a good enough reason. Probably. Megumi and Tsumiki are scrawny kids with sallow skin, still working past the malnutrition from their years alone. Tsumiki’s tall and sociable enough to avoid teasing, but with Megumi’s perpetual scowl and his weedy physique, he’s a prime target for bullies. 

You’re happy for him to learn how to fight back. You didn’t get a chance, when you were younger. 

You pull up at a red light, and turn in your seat to smile at them. “I don’t mind,” you say. “As long as everyone’s got enough food, I’m happy.”

Tsumiki’s eyes widen and she beams. “Really?”

“For sure,” you say. “You two keep eating all your school lunches.”

“And Megumi’s doggy too?”

“Yes, well.” Your gaze flits between Megumi and Tsumiki. “I’ll have to talk to school about the doggy. What did your teachers say when you found him, Megumi?”

Megumi hesitates. He tightens his hold on the dog. 

“We’re not going to take him away from you,” you say softly. “He’s your dog now. Has Gojo talked to you about what it means, all the cursed technique… stuff?”

Slowly, Megumi nods. 

“Good. That’s good. So you know that he’s… he’s a dog with superpowers, isn’t he? He’s not a normal dog, he’s even better.”

Tsumiki nudges Megumi. “That’s what I told you!”

“Did not,” Megumi mumbles.

Tsumiki looks hurt. “I did! I did! Hebi-san, I did!”

“I’m sure you did,” you say hurriedly. The light turns, and you focus your attention back on the road. Still, you glance back at the kids through the rear view mirror. “But does that make sense, Megumi? I don’t think anyone could take away your doggy, even if they wanted to.”

Megumi blinks very hard. “Really?”

“Really.” You flash him a quick thumbs-up, and then grimace at the immediate flash of pain. You roll your shoulder back on its joint, trying to be inconspicuous. “I’ll have to have a talk with school about what we can do with him in lessons, though, so—”

“But you said you wouldn’t take him away!” Megumi’s voice rises, and you hear Tsumiki take in a sharp breath. “You said I could keep him!”

“I know. I know, but we’re not allowed to take pets to school when everyone else can see.” Megumi starts to shift in his seat, clearly getting panicked, and so you say: “So, instead, how about we find somewhere we can put him in the school day?”

“I don’t want to put him anywhere. You said I could keep him!”

“You can,” you say, “if you want to. You can decide to let him stay at home with Yahaba and your home friends if you want to, or you can put him in a shadow space, like the place you got him from. Do you remember how you found him?”

Megumi’s breath is shaky. “I got him from—from a shadow in the playground.” 

“That’s so clever!” You smile, and hope it comes through your voice. “That can be where you keep him during school, if you want it to. Or, you can pick any shadow you like, and keep him there. That way, he’ll stay with you when you’re at school, and then you can find him as soon as you get back home. How does that sound?”

“I think,” Tsumiki says, softly, “it sounds really cool, Megumi.”

Megumi hesitates, and when he speaks, his voice is so quiet and vulnerable it makes your heart ache. “It does?”

“I think so,” you say. “I think you’re really cool for learning how to find your dog, Megumi.”

“So cool,” Tsumiki enthuses. “I wish I could do it.”

Oh, you wish you could hug her. “You can be just as cool, Tsumiki. You don’t need to use cursed techniques.”

“But Megumi’s the cool one.”

“You’re both cool.” You send her a smile in the car mirror, and she blushes again. “Remember what your registration teacher said about your handwriting? She said it was like calligraphy.”

“Megumi’s teacher says he’s good at reading, too.”

“Well, then,” you say, blowing out an impressed breath. “I guess our whole car is full of geniuses, then. Aren’t I lucky to know you both?”

Tsumiki giggles, and even Megumi allows himself a small, pleased smile.

“And you know what you geniuses get on Mondays? Do you remember?”

“Ice cream!” 

“Exactly!” You do a little dance, as much as you can in the driver’s seat, and Tsumiki laughs. “It’s Ice Cream Monday.”

“Is it ice cream every Monday?” Megumi asks, quietly. “Actually every Monday?”

“Every single one,” you promise. “Mondays are the best when you can have ice cream with them.”

“Can I still have ice cream even if my handwriting gets really bad, and I do bad in school, and my teachers say it doesn’t look like calligraphy anymore?” Tsumiki blurts out the question, and then pushes herself back into her seat, looking down at her lap. 

“Oh, Tsumiki. Yes, of course you can.”

“And what if one time Megumi forgets to put his doggy in the shadows?”

“It’s still Ice Cream Monday.”

“And what if you don’t pick us up on Monday?”

“Then you’ll have ice cream with Gojo,” you say. “And maybe he’ll even give you two flavours.” 

“Whoa,” Tsumiki says. “I’d be able to get chocolate and bubblegum at the same time.”

“What an event that would be,” you say, seriously. “But, until that wonderful day comes—what flavour do you want to have today?”

 

--

 

“My day,” Satoru says, as he vaults over the couch arm and splays out on the cushions, “has been amazing. Has yours been amazing? Because mine was a-mazing.”

“So amazing you had to mispronounce a word,” you say, feigning awe. 

“A-mazing. A-mazing. Does that bother you, Hebi-Hebi? A-mazing, my day was a-mazing, don’t you know it was a-mazing—hey!” 

You chuckle as the small pillow bounces off Satoru’s infinity. He turns to you, shocked, and then grabs another pillow. 

“Ah, no no! Not when there’s—there’s glass around.” You hold your hands up in front of you and, coming and going in a flash, your shoulder bursts out in hot pain. Your voice wavers, but you push through before Satoru can notice anything. “Don’t break anything. I’m not cleaning it up this time.”

Satoru waves a hand in the air. “I’ll get someone to do it for you.”

“Gojo.”

“What?” He blinks at you innocently. “That’s the point of being rich, you know. You can get other people to do the boring things that you don’t want to do.”

“Incredible.”

“I know,” he yawns. “You should try being rich, Hebi-Hebi. It’s great.”

You eye your surroundings with pursed lips. You’re back in Satoru’s old house, after dropping them off and spending some time with them in the evening. You’ve made sure they’re in bed, and are rewarding yourself with some rest and Satoru’s company. 

“Maybe I’ll be born into wealth in my next life,” you say, picking at the expensive leather of the sofa. 

“Or,” Satoru says, leaning forward. “You could marry into wealth.”

He sends you a wink, and you groan. 

“Not this again.”

“I don’t know why you’re rebelling against it! You’d be lucky to have me as a husband, don’t you think?”

Yes.  “You’re ridiculous.”

“I am marriage material.” Satoru waggles his eyebrows. 

You snort. “Once you realise how to date someone for longer than two weeks, then maybe.”

“That’s not the point!”

“It isn’t?”

“No!” Satoru grins, and relaxes further into the plush cushions. “I… okay, maybe just a little bit. But I get bored easily! You know I do. You can’t blame me.”

“I absolutely can.”

“It’s in my genes, or something. I’ve got a short attention span when it comes to love.”

And even though it’s as blatant of a lie as could be possible, you let it go. You don’t need Satoru to be honest all the time, not if he doesn’t want to.

“I think,” Satoru continues, looking at you very wisely, “I’m more suited to short bursts of passion, than anything long and committed.”

“Or perhaps you’re just a nineteen-year-old guy.” 

He laughs. “Yeah. Nearly twenty, though!”

“Eugh.” Now that makes you grimace. “Shut up. I’m still a teenager: don’t take that away from me.”

“Ageing is beautiful and natural, Hebi-Hebi.”

“Remind yourself of that when you spot wrinkles on that perfect little face of yours.”

“You really think my face is perfect?”

“Oh, shut—Tsumiki?” 

You’re standing up as soon as you see her, Satoru following immediately. She freezes as soon as you call her name and something slips from her hands—there’s a loud crash, a shattering of glass, and then she’s staring down at the floor with blank eyes, her hand dripping red blood.

“Tsumiki!” You move forward, trying not to step on the broken glass that’s covering the floor at the foot of the stairs. “Tsumiki, I thought you were in bed. What are you…?”

“I was hungry,” she says quietly. “Sorry. I’ll go back to bed.”

“Wait—no, Tsumiki, your hand—”

“Hey, hey, Tsu-Tsu!” Satoru approaches her with a smile, bending down to look her in the eye. “Careful about where you step, kiddo. There’s broken glass everywhere.”

“I’m sorry,” Tsumiki repeats.

“Nah, it’s okay.” As Satoru talks, in a soft, soothing voice you only ever hear with the children, he steps closer and closer to her. As his feet touch the floor, you see the glass glide out of his way, like opposite poles of a magnet. “I’ll buy another jar, easy. Did you want to take some snacks to Megumi?”

Tsumiki shakes her head. “I was hungry.”

You bite down hard on your lip. The kids have been eating everything they’ve been offered, leaving nothing to waste. They’ve been having three hearty meals a day for weeks now. Tsumiki shouldn’t have been hungry, not hungry enough to try to steal food without thinking she could ask you or Satoru.

And, yet. This is still so, so new. Why would Tsumiki’s brain let her trust the stability you’re offering her now, not after years of hunger? Why would your brain let you touch someone, after years of being told it was forbidden and dangerous?

“Ah, you’re always allowed to have something to eat if you’re hungry!” Satoru reaches her, kneels beside her, ruffles her hair. “Do you want to have something now?”

Tsumiki nods wordlessly. 

Without Satoru needing to say anything, you slip out of the room. You don’t need to walk far at all to find one of the servants, getting her things ready to head home. You ask her, quietly, if she could find Yahaba, and give her a brief summary of what’s happened with Tsumiki. The woman’s face falls with sympathy and, giving you a small bow, hurries away. 

It’s been a long time since there were children in the Gojo household. 

When you return, the dullness in Tsumiki’s eyes has lessened. Satoru’s waggling his fingers over her injured palm, and they watch together as the skin begins to reknit itself and heal. Tsumiki’s mouth is open—she’s never seen Satoru use reversed cursed technique before. 

Satoru’s crouched down beside her, but Tsumiki’s still smaller than him. She stares at her palm in awe, and then beams up at Satoru, whispering something to him. It makes him smile, and he pinches her cheek as he whispers something back. 

“Fushiguro-san.”

Tsumiki looks up, and her smile broadens even more. “Yahaba!”

“I was told that—oh, hello, yes, Fushiguro-san.” Yahaba sets down the bag she was holding and pats Tsumiki’s head, from where Tsumiki’s grappled her tightly around her waist. 

“I missed you, Yahaba!” Tsumiki says, into Yahaba’s shirt. 

“I put you to bed only an hour ago, Fushiguro-san.” Yahaba’s tone is firm, but gentler than usual, and she looks up to you and Satoru with raised eyebrows. “Does she want more food? I can send for some from the kitchens.”

Satoru cracks a grin. “I think she’s good.”

“Hmm. Is that true? Are you?” Yahaba taps at Tsumiki’s forehead, and Tsumiki nods. 

“I’m okay,” she says. “I was just hungry. But I’m okay now.”

“I see.” Yahaba allows Tsumiki to keep squeezing her with the affectionate resignation you remember from your own childhood. You’re hit with a feeling of intense deja-vu; Yahaba, much younger, pressing a raincoat into your arms and reminding you that she doesn’t approve of children getting ill when it is so easily preventable. 

You smile to yourself, feeling slightly nostalgic, and when you catch Satoru’s eye, it’s clear he’s thinking the same thing. 

“Right. You must go to sleep, Fushiguro-san.” Yahaba gives Tsumiki a firm squeeze on the shoulder and Tsumiki loosens her grip, nodding again. Her eyelids are drooping, and she yawns. 

“Okay, Yahaba.”

“Thank you.” Yahaba takes Tsumiki’s hand and leads her to the stairs. You notice that all the glass has been cleared away. Over her shoulder, Yahaba says: “Fushiguro-san, you are much better behaved than Gojo-san was when he was your age. Have I told you the story of when he tried to jump off the roof?”

Tsumiki giggles sleepily, and Satoru tuts. 

“She’s trying to poison them against me,” he mutters to you, as you both watch them ascend the stairs. “They’ll never respect me after this.”

“I don’t think they ever respected you, Gojo.” And if you could, you would lean your head on his shoulder, because there is nothing more you could want to do in this moment. Instead, you give him a small smile, which he returns, and you move back to the couch. 

“They could have,” Satoru says. You resume your original positions: him, splayed out starfish-like, you, perched on the opposite corner with your feet flat against the floor. It’s only been a few months out of school, but you already have your routine. Work in the day, take care of the kids in the afternoon, and spend the evening together. You even sit in the same places on the sofa every night. 

You know there’s a part of Satoru that’s desperate to rebel against the routine, but he’s never complained. You think he knows that it soothes you. 

“What have you done today, then?” you ask, settling carefully down, mindful of your shoulder. It throbs uncomfortably, and you berate yourself for not finding the time to get it fixed.

“Oh, loads,” Satoru says, stretching out even more so his joints pop. You grimace. “I’ve had a more exciting day than you, I bet.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“For sure! You get it. I exorcised a few Grade Twos, saved a small town in Ainokura from complete ruin. Got sushi. Scored a pretty girl’s number, but—” he pulls out a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and examines it, “—I don’t think I’ll do anything with it.”

“Poor woman,” you say dryly. “However will she cope?”

“I don’t know.” Satoru sighs dramatically. “Either way, I only spoke to her for, what, ten minutes? That’s my fault for taking the Metro. I’m too handsome for public transport.”

“Your life’s a tragedy. Why didn’t you just take a taxi? I thought you hated the Metro.”

“I do.” Satoru looks sadly at the piece of paper, and then stuffs it back in his pocket. “But I was kinda covered with blood. I didn’t think a taxi would take me.”

You stare at him, genuinely amazed. “You got a girl’s number, even when you were covered in blood like some crazy person?”

“I know! I don’t know how I do it, either.” Satoru shrugs. “How about you. Anything interesting on your end?

“Not really. I shouted at Tsumiki’s aunt for a bit. Blew off some steam.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. I nearly made her cry, I think.”

“That’s nice.” Satoru glances over at you. “I thought we were trying to convince her to take Tsumiki in?”

“Ah.” You frown, slightly guilty. “Well. About that.”

Satoru snorts.

“I mean, she clearly doesn’t want her,” you say. “I don’t want to have to convince someone to take in a kid, only to send them into a home where they’re not wanted. I don’t want to do that to Tsumiki.”

“I know you don’t.”

“Well, exactly, then. I’m not doing that to a kid her age. It sucks.” 

“I’ll have to trust you on that,” Satoru says. “I’ve always been adored, wherever I go.”

You smile. “Stop being so narcissistic and pay attention. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”

“For sure.” Satoru stretches out on the sofa and tilts his head against a cushion, staring up at the ceiling. “It doesn’t bother me, either way. Megumi’s the important one, after all, and he’ll owe me more if we keep his sister around.”

Your brow creases, and you look at him, carefully. “Gojo.”

He returns your gaze. “What?”

“Stop it.” 

“Why?” Satoru says, shrugging. “It’s the truth.”

“He’s a kid.”

Satoru lets out a low tsk. “He’s the son of Toji Fushiguro. He’s got Zenin blood. That kid’s going to be powerful.” 

“He’s six years old, Gojo.”

“Which is why I’m talking about the future.”

“The future, sure,” you say, “but the future’s changing the way you’re looking at him now. As in, him as a six-year-old. You’ve hardly known him a month, and you’re already sizing him up for how useful he’ll be to you.”

“Partly,” Satoru acquiesces. “Sure, partly. I don’t think that’s so bad.”

“Seriously?”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?”

Your expression pinches. “The biggest thing on his mind should be whether his teacher liked his handwriting in school, not how he’s going to repay his life debt.”

“Obviously,” Satoru says, shrugging. “And I agree, that’s how it should be. I’m not going to enlist an elementary schooler to go fight for me. C’mon, Hebi-Hebi, you know I’m not talking about now.”

“But you’re thinking about it.”

“Of course I am.” He looks at you. “Don’t tell me you haven’t considered it.”

“I—No, I haven’t, actually.” Consider Megumi, the scrawny kid with a penchant for punching fourth-graders, as a weathered adult sorcerer for you to rely on as an ally? It’s nearly impossible to reconcile the two images, especially since you hardly even know him yet. “But you have.”

“Yeah. The life he’s got now, that life we’re working to give him, that’s not going to last forever. You can’t shelter him from the world.”

“I’m not trying to,” you say. “I’m trying to make sure he can stay a kid as long as he can.”

“And I’m not?” Satoru raises his eyebrows. “I’m talking about what’ll happen in ten, fifteen years’ time—when he’s our age. Am I taking his childhood away by telling him to fight then? Am I?”

“That’s not what I said.” 

“It’ll be when he’s old enough,” Satoru says, “but still older than we were, I’ll need him. It might be a little more complicated than that, but the point stands.”

“I can’t even think about them like that,” you admit. “How they’ll be when they’ve grown up. I mean… Megumi, Tsumiki, at our age? Going through everything we’ve gone through?”

“I don’t want him to,” he says, simply. “They shouldn’t have to.” Satoru gestures upstairs, where Megumi and Tsumiki’s beds lie. “But they’re going to grow up. People are going to die, and they won’t, and they’ll just have to keep going.”

“I know.” You sigh. “Jesus, Gojo, you don’t have to tell me what I already know.”

“So you agree with me?”

“I agree that Megumi’s going to suffer, sure,” you say. “More than Tsumiki will, at least. I don’t think you have to talk about him… I don’t know, the way you do.”

“How do I talk about him?” Satoru asks, propping a hand under his chin. It appears a show of faux interest; to someone else, it’d seem mocking, but you look at him more closely, and spot how his eyes flick over yours behind his glasses, taking in your every expression, how he doesn’t waver when you stare right back at him, and you know it’s a genuine question. As genuine as Satoru can be on demand, at least. 

“I just…” You frown. “I don’t like talking about him like he’s some resource to be mined. Like he’s pointless now, like we’re just biding time, waiting for him to get stronger. He’s worth something now, at his weakest, no matter what the higher-ups say. I’m not going to pretend like I don’t think that. He—he’s still worth something. That’s what I think.”

Satoru lets the silence move forward, unbroken, for a long time. You don’t break his gaze—you’re not letting yourself back down, not on something like this.

“Huh,” Satoru says, finally. “I guess so.”

You stare at him. “So…?”

“I get what you mean, Hebi-Hebi,” Satoru says, rolling his head around on his neck. “But you get what I mean, as well, don’t you?”

You pause, and then, truthfully: “I do. Somewhat.”

Megumi’s going to suffer: Satoru’s right, there’s no preventing that. The kid’s going to see his friends die, or, worse, leave him. And, eventually, he’s going to turn into one of Satoru’s strongest allies. All of these things you know as fact. All of these things, no matter how bitter they taste, are true.

Satoru chuckles. “Somewhat. I can deal with somewhat. So!” He claps his hands together, sudden and loud, and you nearly jump with shock. “Now our brains are all warmed up—are you going to say anything about that injury of yours, or are you going to go to sleep with a dislocated shoulder?”

Your lips part. Then you press them together, feeling caught.

It’s not like you didn’t expect him to notice. Thinking about it, of course he would have. But, still. This is the first chance you’ve had all day to relax—and you’ve had a long day, a really long and difficult day—and you really don’t want to complicate it any more than it already has been. You sigh.

“It’s not dislocated,” you say, as if that makes it any better.

“It looks pretty disgusting,” he says, eyeing it distastefully. “I’m not Shoko, but it’s definitely banged-up somewhere.”

“Yeah, yeah.” You shrug, and wince in pain. “Whatever.”

“Look at you! You’re so stubborn, it’s stupid!” 

“You can talk.”

“I can,” he says, proudly, “and I will. I can talk all day long, you know.”

“Ha-ha.”

“And I can talk about how gross that shoulder looks—eugh, that’s so disgusting! I can’t believe no-one said anything, it’s so bleh!” Satoru sticks his tongue out and crosses his eyes. “I think I just threw up in my mouth, my gross-gross Hebi-Hebi.”

“Thanks,” you say, “I appreciate it.” 

You move so you’re sitting cross-legged, your body facing him. You gesture to your shoulder with your good arm, raising your eyebrows. “So?”

Satoru stops his teasing. “So?”

“So,” you say, working through the words before you can scare yourself off, “are you going to insult me all night, or do you want to make yourself useful and help me out?”

A slow smirk twists Satoru’s lips. “You need my help, Hebi-Hebi? You want me to help you out? You want me to be super powerful and strong and amazing, and I’ll sort it all out for you? Is that what you want?”

“Yeah, actually,” you say, meeting his gaze coolly. “I’d quite like your help, thanks.”

Satoru blinks. He grins. “Really?”

“Oh—” You look away. “Shut up.”

“I will never shut up!”

“Kill me.”

“Never, never-never,” he sing-songs. “You know I’m never letting that happen.”

You go to retort, but the words catch in the back of your throat. Instead, you move backwards, tucking one leg beneath yourself. It’s so Satoru can move closer to you: you try not to think of the implications, whatever they could be. 

As you shift back, Satoru sits up on his knees, and waits for you patiently. You stare up at him, at his eyes behind the darkness of his glasses, and he focuses on a point on your sternum. 

“You’ll need to move for me.” Satoru’s lips twitch, and he raises his hand to hover inches away from your shoulder. “I can’t reach you from here.”

“Sure.” You tilt further backwards, almost lying down. Satoru pushes his glasses up into his hair, and now his face is unobstructed, and there’s nothing you can do to pretend that he isn’t beautiful.

When he shifts to lean over you, your breath catches in your throat. Satoru’s close, but he won’t touch you—and it’s this knowledge that makes the hairs on your arms rise, your mouth dry. His shirt, a simple cotton slip of a thing, hangs down around the neckline, and you pretend that you don’t see how it accentuates his bare neck. 

Distracting. You want to feel his pulse under your lips. 

No. No, It’s not, and you don’t.

Instinctively, you try to shuffle backwards, but the arm of the couch presses against your back, preventing your movement. Satoru braces himself above you, his forearm leaning by the side of your neck. His hair falls across his cheeks and you look up at him with wide, unblinking eyes, like you’re trying to remember everything about this. 

You never see him from this angle: Satoru, practically above you, practically obscene. Even if—even if he doesn’t think so, because his gaze is focused on your shoulder, like a professional, the way it should be. 

You look away, but can still feel the heat of his body radiating through the thin material of his shirt. Your fingers have been digging into the cushions beneath you but now they go slack by your sides, with nothing to distract you from the sound of Satoru breathing so close to you, or the goosebumps that rise when you feel his breath on your skin. 

He doesn’t have to be this close. Surely he doesn’t have to be this close. You resist the urge to close your eyes, tilt your head back and expose your neck, some instinct emerging from deep within you that you don’t even know how to subdue. Instead you fix your gaze to the ceiling, with the white of Satoru’s hair only a blur in your peripheral vision. 

“Stay still,” he murmurs, and you have to repress a shudder. Surely, surely his mouth doesn’t have to be that close to your ear.

“I’m as still as a corpse.” You swallow, even though your mouth is dry. 

“Not funny.”

“I wasn’t—trying to be funny.” You look back at him, and suddenly wish you hadn’t. His pupils are blown, only the faintest ring of blue around a great sea of black. There’s red tingeing his cheeks, and when he meets your eye he smiles—smirks, he smirks. 

Satoru’s reverse cursed technique has always felt intrinsically different to Shoko’s; hers is deliberate, controlled, the restitching of flesh, Satoru’s is warm water spreading over your wounds, drawing blood to the surface and helping it pool through its vessels. Comfort diffuses from your shoulder and through your body, and as Satoru teases the pain from the joint you can’t help the quiet sigh of relief that escapes you. 

And he doesn’t have to touch you. He has to be close, but he doesn’t have to touch you. 

Satoru can tell from your face that it’s worked. He scans your expression one final time and, seemingly appeased, leans back. He moves slowly, so as not to risk touching you. Even as he lounges back on his side of the sofa, as your heart rate starts to fall to its resting rhythm, you feel the sudden emptiness you feel every morning and night. The cold, like the loss of Satoru’s body heat. 

“All better?” he asks, and then clears his throat. His voice was more hoarse than usual. 

“Yeah.” You  move your arm around, testing the repaired joint. Perfect—not even the slightest ache. “It feels good. Really good, Gojo.”

“That’s what I’m here for.” Satoru waves his hand in the air and looks away from you. “All of that stuff. Talk to Shoko about it.”

You bite the inside of your cheek. “I have.”

“Oh.” He looks back. “And? Good news?”

“Not really. You know. It’s not exactly a curse-induced injury.”

Shoko’s focus has always been on the immediate, necessary in life-or-death moments for sorcery fights. She’s not good with long-term injuries like yours. 

Maybe if you’d gotten it checked out sooner, when you were much younger, someone could’ve done something before you sustained this level of irreparable damage. Because it is irreparable. This is a chronic, recurring injury. But it’s not like you knew, when you were younger, what would happen. 

You shoulder first started playing up at the beginning of this year—you were still in school, fourth year, and you had been out on an easy exorcism with Satoru. He didn’t need you there, but as the only other fourth year prepped in melee combat, you’d been assigned the role of ‘babysitter’, to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid. 

It was a curved, metal bridge, high above a dark river, where it happened. You remember. The air was heavy with fog. 

The fight had started out normal enough; Satoru was having fun with the creature, a Semi-Grade One that spewed hordes of legless Grade Fours from a gash in its stomach. You were cleaning up any stragglers of the smaller minions, any of the ones Satoru missed. One moment, everything was fine—and then one of the curses had made a scramble for you—you’d killed it, closed your bare fist around its head and forced it to disintegrate, but you hadn’t stopped it from latching your arm and pulling. 

And it shouldn’t have been anything. It’s why you hadn’t cared to be careful. The tiny curse didn’t have the strength to do any harm, and there was hardly any force behind the strike at all. 

There was nothing that would have made your body react the way you did, but the next thing you remember, pain was splintering down your arm and your spine and up your neck, and your shoulder was aflame with agony, and you were stumbling, tripping backwards, and your back was hitting the metal railing of the bridge and you were falling through the air. 

You caught yourself, in time, holding tight to the brittle flooring of the bridge, but in that moment you couldn’t fathom a sense of fear, or even relief; your arm was holding your entire weight, the only thing stopping you from falling, and it was pulsating so hatefully it was torture.

It was Satoru who saved you. Your grip was loosening, and the clammy air was making your fingers slip around the railing. You remember the noises you had made, completely involuntary: the cries of an injured animal, not a sorcerer. He’d exorcised the curse, killed all its remnants, and had you lying safe against the floor in under ten seconds, and you hadn’t had the breath to thank him. 

Neither of you had understood what had happened—you’d survived worse injuries in training, going up against the first years, and yet you’d felt like your tendons were being severed, strip by strip, by a sharp, white-hot blade. 

The reason, you later realised, dates back to your childhood. For years upon years, your hands had been behind your back, immovable.  

Some form of muscular weakening, a result of minimal movement in your developmental years. Because of your household’s rules, because you were such a danger to your family as a child, your body developed incorrectly. You are malformed. It’s harder for the shoulder muscles to contract, and ultimately they are more susceptible to damage in combat. 

Shoko says it would have revealed itself at some point: it was pure chance that the curse’s attack triggered the first tear, which then exacerbated the underlying problem so that your shoulder always hurts, now, no matter what. Sometimes you can treat it with some ibuprofen, and sometimes, mostly, you can’t. 

Satoru’s healing helps, but it’s a temporary measure. It does nothing to cut the problem at its root.

It's almost funny. At least, now, you don’t have to worry that you’re being too sensitive about your childhood—now you have physical injuries to think about, as well as mental. Concrete proof that something was wrong, that you weren’t treated right, that you can cite as well as your aversion to touch.

The line of thought, as always, brings you back to your stepmother.

Sara. Still in that house. Still sheltering her son from your father. Haru. Three years older than Megumi, two years older than Tsumiki, and you haven’t seen him since he was seven. You don’t know how they are. God, you need to call her. 

It’s hard—because with Sara comes your father, and with your father comes everything you want to have left behind. You haven’t seen him in years, completely of your own volition. You stayed with Satoru when you were in school, and now you’re paying for everything on your own, with the meagre salary of a Semi-Grade Two teenager. You shiver.

“Here.”

You look up, startled out of your thoughts, to see Satoru—standing, his eyebrows raised, a beer offered in an outstretched hand. 

“I—what?”

“Drink. Quit thinking, you’re making me tired just watching.” He shakes it at you, and you slowly reach up to take it. Even through your gloves, you can tell it’s cold. 

“You—I mean—thanks.” You take a swig, and grimace. “Jesus, that’s awful, Gojo.”

“Is it?” Satoru shrugs, scratching his jaw. “Blame Yahaba, not me. I don’t know what all the brands mean, but this one’s logo looked the nicest.”

You smile, pressing your cheek next to the cool glass of the bottle. “It tastes disgusting. Super bitter—like cow piss. You want to try?”

“No. I’m generous enough to leave you with the cow piss.”

“Saint-like.”

“Mm. Drink up, Hebi-Hebi.”

You take another sip. “This is actually awful, you know that?”

“Why are you acting like that’s my fault?” Satoru raises his hands, like he’s on trial. “I am innocent! You’re the one who likes beer, not me!”

“I don’t like this one.” You wince through the sour aftertaste. “Jesus, I need a smoke. Do you mind?”

Satoru raises his eyebrows and looks away. “Sure,” he says, overly polite, in the tone he takes when he’s barely trying to conceal his disapproval.

“Don’t be a priss.”

“I’m not,” he says. “I’m just dignified. I don’t know how Shoko convinced you to try one of those.”

You light the cigarette and inhale gratefully. “You’re less dignified than the cow piss, and that’s saying something.”

“I just respect my lungs.”

You chuckle. “Yeah, sure. You tried this, though, and this is disgusting,” you say, as you wince through the beer’s sour aftertaste. “You’ll have to help me finish this, though. I’ve still got to drive back.”

Satoru clicks his tongue. “I’ll drive you, don’t be silly.”

“Oh, you don’t—”

“Trust me,” he says, faux-seriously. “I don’t want to go anywhere near that apartment block—I think I got syphilis last time I visited there, and that was standing outside.”

“It’s not so bad,” you say. “Just because it’s not a five star hotel, doesn’t mean—”

“It’s so unhygienic, it’s off the scales of stars. It’s rated as minus three supernovas.”

“Okay, that’s exaggerating. I like it there.” You roll your eyes, and set down the beer on the floor. “And my building is perfectly hygienic. The people are decent. My neighbour adopts kittens. It’s fine.”

“You hate your neighbour!”

“That’s the other one. The kitten one is lovely.”

“You hate fifty percent of your neighbours.”

“Not fifty percent,” you remind him. “There’s upstairs and downstairs too.”

Satoru’s nose wrinkles attractively. “I’ll repeat what I said earlier. Marry into wealth, Hebi-Hebi, and you’ll never have to live in an apartment block again.”

“Oh—Gojo!” You bite your lip to hold back your laugh. “You live in an apartment block!”

“I live in a luxury high rise building,” Satoru corrects. “With a doorman and key cards. We have a private gym and a pool. You have mould on your stairwell.”

“It’s a good place to live. It’s fine.”

“It doesn’t have to be.” 

“It’s perfectly—”

“I’m serious.” Satoru’s tone makes you freeze, your words dying on your lips. “It doesn’t have to be.”

You swallow. To give yourself time to answer, you take a long drag on your cigarette, your eyes downcast. 

“Hebi,” he says. “It’s a good idea.”

You know it is. He’s suggested it before, and each time you reject it, it worms even closer to your heart. 

You sigh. “Gojo—”

“If you say it isn’t, you’re making excuses.” Satoru waves his hand in front of your face, searching for your attention, and you reluctantly slide your gaze back to him. “Just move in with me, and you won’t have to deal with any of that stuff! I don’t get why you won’t.”

“I’ve told you before.”

“Yeah, and it never makes any sense!” Satoru cuts you off before you can reply. “Yeah, I know you want your own space, and you think I’d be a bad roommate, and all over again. But you’d have your own space, we’d find a place big enough. And I wouldn’t be a bad roommate, not for you. Come on, Hebi, I really think this could be a good idea!”

You roll your lips into your mouth, not trusting yourself to speak. 

“And I’ve been missing you,” Satoru says. His voice cuts you with its honesty: you don’t understand that, how Satoru can so quickly turn from playful to achingly genuine in mere milliseconds. “Don’t tell me you haven’t been missing me.”

You don’t have it in you to lie. “Of course I have,” you say, quietly, “but it’s… it’s not as easy as that. I do want my own space. Something on my own.” 

This, honestly, is just as much of a truth as it is a lie.

A truth: You’ve decided that this natural progression (the gradual way that life is leading you two in separate directions; still close, but not together, always, like you used to be) might be a way for you to get a fresh start. Maybe—though even the thought makes you laugh—learn how to move on from him, though that in itself is nothing short of a fantasy. But you can still try, still hope, that even this smallest space of distance could be something positive, in the end.

A lie: Life away from Satoru is something new and grey and grating, and you vehemently dislike it. Your lives have been kept close together for so many years, two stems growing around the same support, only now beginning to flower apart. Even your roots have intertwined; from the lowest level, you’ve kept together, and now you’ve been split down the center, and you’re having to figure out how to survive without each other always being there.

You can’t have him close by when your mornings turn so cold you can’t move. You can’t have him close by when you come home from work, too exhausted to shower, when you collapse in an armchair and stare out of your balcony window for hours on end. You can’t have him close by when you cry, on your own, because you’ve realised that the job you’ve spent your whole life training for is only leaving you hollow and angry.

“Live with me,” Satoru insists. “Live with me.”

You run your hands over your face. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do.”

“You don’t want me as a roommate.”

“I do. It’d be—” Satoru’s eyes flick across the room, searching for the word. “It’d be—fun.”

You choke out a laugh. “Fun?”

Even he winces. Then he nods, standing his ground, so stubborn and petulant you want to kiss him. “Yeah. Fun.”

“It wouldn’t be fun.”

“It would be!” Satoru sits up higher on the sofa, his arms spread out like he’s designing the blueprints to his ideal life. “Come on, wife. We’ve got the kids. Why not?”

“Gojo—”

“It’d be like we’re back in school. You know, when it was fun.” Satoru grins at you, urging you to remember. “It’d be just like school, except, you know. This time we’ve graduated and we’re raising Tsumiki and Megumi and we’re married.”

You snort. You didn’t think he was this ready to give it up—verging into ridiculousness like that, so shallowly comical. “Yeah, right.”

Satoru blinks. His silver eyelashes flutter. “Well,” he says, after a moment’s pause. “Why not?”

You stare at him. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“No, you’re kidding.” If you say it to him, like fact, then it’ll be true. 

“I’m not, actually.” Satoru seems surprised with himself—it’s clear, both to you and him, that he hadn’t been planning this. He hadn’t been planning to—what, to propose? “It’s a good idea, now I say it.”

“No,” you say. You shake your head, trying to remind him of something sensible, something that makes actual sense, not this, not whatever trick he’s trying to pull on you. “Gojo. Satoru. I—You don’t want to get married.”

“I didn’t want to,” Satoru corrects.

“You don’t believe in marriage.” He doesn’t. He’s told you. 

“Well, no.” Satoru’s fingers are pulling at the loose threads in the sofa cushions. He offers you a smile—earnest, almost shy, if Satoru could be shy. “But it’d be different with you. Everything’s different with you.”

Your heart has picked up again. You can feel the blood pumping through your ears. 

You’re glad you’re sitting down. If you weren’t, you might have been close to collapsing.

“Fuck.” Your eyes are wide, and you blink at him, slowly. “Fuck, you’re serious.”

Satoru shrugs, like he hasn’t just upended your world. He shrugs, like it’s the most casual thing he could do. “Sure,” he says. Sure, he says, to marrying you. Sure. 

“Sure?” you repeat, incredulous.

“Yeah.” He grins that earnest grin again, something so boyish you hardly recognise it. “Yeah, I’d marry you.”

A pause. A long, long pause, in which you try with earnest to actually realise what the fuck is going on.

“I mean.” Satoru’s fingers keep working at the threads in the cushions, like a cat scratching at a rug. He looks you in the eye, then looks away, then looks back. “It’d be good for both of us, when you think about it. I know you care about what your father thinks about you, even though I’ve told you that you shouldn’t. And if you married me, he’d never be able to bother you again, would he? Hey, remember when we were younger, and he’d try to coach you into stealing all my family secrets?”

You laugh, shallowly.

“It’d be just like that, except you wouldn’t be stealing anything.” His smile widens, and the muscle twitches in his cheek—why? “And you’d be married, so the higher-ups would stop pestering you about when you’re, you know, going to get all pregnant and start churning out little sorcerer babies. I know you hate it when they ask you about that.”

“I do hate it,” you say, your voice barely more than a whisper.

Satoru’s eyes widen. It’s like he wasn’t expecting you to agree with him. 

“Yeah,” he says quickly. “Yeah. And for me, I’d stop hearing all the boring lectures from the higher-ups about getting married and producing an heir, blah blah blah. It’s—you know me, Hebi-Hebi, it’s a burden when your family’s so strong and powerful and long-lasting.”

“How pitiful.” You’re saying this on autopilot, so used to conversation with Satoru that the responses come without conscious thought. “You poor thing.”

“My life is full of woe, Hebi-Hebi.” Satoru responds just as easily: automatic for him, too. He smiles again, close-lipped. The faint scar on his jaw stretches. His lips part, and then he forces a beaming smile. You’re blinded by the effort—he doesn’t usually try this hard, anymore, not when he knows you can see through it all. 

“And, well.” Satoru swallows, and his fake smile splits across his face. “I know there’s people who’d expect it of us. Don’t you think?”

And this is what knocks the breath from your lungs. More than anything else, this is what finally hits you. This is the first time, the first time, that Satoru has alluded to anything between you. The first time in your life that he’s acknowledged the thought, the possibility, of anything romantic passing between you two. It’s recognising that strangers would assume you were together: you know, you know it means nothing. But you’re floored, because he has never said anything like this before. 

And the muscle keeps twitching in his cheek, and you don’t understand why. 

“You don’t really date, do you?” The forced joviality to his voice, even though he knows you see through it. 

“Not particularly,” you manage, your voice hoarse. You’ve never dated anyone in your life. 

“So,” he says. “You wouldn’t really…”

He trails off, then seems to realise he’s pretending, and he snaps the smile back on. 

“You wouldn’t want me as a roommate,” you say, and you say it again because you don’t know what else to say, because what could you say? Aren’t you supposed to be his friend—his best friend? Why don’t you understand him when he’s like this?

“I absolutely do!” Satoru says, shuffling upwards so he’s sitting up straight. “Just think how cool it’d be—we’d have breakfast together, early in the morning, and I’d have the finest of fruits imported in, so we could have a really nice meal, first thing. And we’d get on with our day—I’d save thousands, and you’d maybe save one or two—and when we reconvene in the evening we’d talk like this, for hours and hours and hours. And you’d be able to finish your drink without worrying about driving home, because you’d already be there.”

“And on the weekends?” you ask, feeling weak—the idea, the image that he’s describing, so tantalisingly close to that which you’ve never been able to banish from your mind. “What about on the weekends, when you get sick of me?”

“I’ve never gotten sick of you, not once,” Satoru says promptly. “And on the weekends? It’d be us. We’d spend time with each other. We’ll talk. We’ll be in the same place, all the time. We—I’ll buy you sweets, and I’ll eat most of them myself. Or I’ll talk all the time, and you’ll be incredibly rude and tell me to be quiet, and then I’ll ignore you, and it’ll go again. Or we’ll spend time with each other, and that can be it. Don’t you think that sounds nice?”

Yes. Yes, yes, yes, that sounds so much more than nice. 

God, please, he’s beautiful (tell him, say it, he looks beautiful, you look beautiful, just want to say it, just once) and you want more than anything to agree, to live the life Satoru describes, with him, together. 

Satoru inhales. He looks away from you. “Wouldn’t you want that?” he asks, a careful edge to his voice. He’s not looking at you anymore: you can’t read him when he’s not looking at you. 

“Satoru,” you say shakily, even though he doesn’t turn his head. “Satoru. You… you don’t want to marry me.”

“But I would.” He says it so simply. “I would marry you.”

And all of a sudden, cold anger surges up inside you. Satoru doesn’t want this—he doesn’t want this, the way you want this. He would marry you, and he’d be fine to marry you, and sure, yeah, he’d do it. He’s thought of it minutes ago and he’s already proposed. 

After years of loving him, this is how it’s supposed to happen? You’re supposed to accept the half-arsed request, because he can’t think of anyone else that would suit him better, and because he would do it, even though he never once said he wanted to.

“I’m not marrying you, Gojo,” you snap, “and I’m not living with you either. Drop it.”

Your blood pulses in your ears again, wild and blistering. You’re half tempted to stand up, throw something, leave. You don’t know—you don’t know where the urge is coming from, and you’re half-frightened of it, but you’re too overwhelmingly angry to care. 

You glance at him, and choke out a laugh. “Fuck, are you actually offended?”

“No,” Satoru says, lying, so obviously. 

“You need to learn how to take rejection.”

“I will when I understand why I’m being rejected!” For a moment, Satoru’s blue eyes blaze, and you think he might lose control of himself—and then he’s got it under control again, and the smile is stapled on. “Am I allowed to ask why?”

And, all of a sudden, you know why you’re angry. 

Because he’s offering a half-life. A life where you eat fresh fruit in the mornings, together, and watch as a red-faced girl exits his room with her heels clasped in her hand. 

“What are you going to do when you want to bring a girl back?” you ask, an icy weight on your chest. “You can’t sleep with random women if they’re coming back to a house with me in it.”

Satoru’s face contorts, and he goes to say something, but you cut him off this time.

“You can’t date someone if you’re living with me, can you? Let alone if you’re—fuck, Gojo, if you’re married .What about the girl from the Metro, whose number you got today?”

“I told you I wasn’t going to call her—”

“Except you will. Except you—you kept her number, Gojo.” You run your free hand through your hair—your cigarette is burned down to ash, and you stub it out into the nearby tray with malice. “Or—you’ll get someone else’s number, and you’ll call them. You’ll come home tomorrow talking about the new object of your fantasies, or whatever it is. You’ll be dating someone new every week, and I’d just get in the way of that. Gojo, it’s just… who you are. It’s been like that since we were teenagers.” You voice is rich with bitterness, and it’s obvious even to you. “Trust me, I noticed.”

“You did?” Satoru meets your eye, finally, and you hold his gaze. 

“You’ve never made any effort to hide it,” you say dryly. 

Satoru sighs, sharp, impatient. “Yes, but—”

“But nothing. You’re not thinking straight.”

“Sex isn’t that important,” Satoru says, finally with some fire behind his words. “You’re talking about me like I’m some animal. I’m not, Hebi. I’m—”

“So you’re telling me you’d go celibate?” You scan his face, and see it falter. “Would you? Seriously?”

Silence.

“Yeah.” And you’re not pleased, of course you’re not, because it’s just another reason it couldn’t work. It’s just another reminder that Satoru will be fine, and you will stay alone. Fuck. “That’s what I thought.”

“No,” Satoru snaps back, and maybe he misinterpreted some triumph from your words, maybe you’ve just pissed him off. “Why can’t I have both?”

“What?”

“You’re making it sound like I—like I have to have one or the other. You, or, or seeing someone else.” 

He sounds impetuous, resentful. The boyish shyness has devolved into immaturity. 

“Gojo—”

“Why can’t I have both?” His questions are childish, stupid. His eyes are as wild as an animal’s. “Why can’t I have you, and them?”

“Of course you can have both,” you spit. “Of course you can have both. You’ve been having both since we were sixteen. You didn’t care about it then, and you shouldn’t care about it now.”

Satoru opens his mouth to retort, and then his jaw tenses shut. He glares at you, and then stands up, with a loud push off of the couch. He walks to the other side of the room, not even bothering to look back at you. 

No. No, of course it’s not that. God, he’s just angry.

You’re making each other angry. You sigh.

As you breathe out, you feel any remaining bitterness leave you. You massage your temple with shaking hands, and feel the desperate need for another cigarette. 

“I’m sorry,” you say. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to fight about this.”

When you glance up, Satoru’s turned around. The wild look in his eye has softened. 

“I don’t want to fight at all,” he offers. You laugh, weakly.

“Come on.” You pat his side of the sofa, and he smiles. He gets closer, and you see that it’s a relaxed smile: no muscle twitching in his cheek, not anymore. 

He sits down again and, after a moment of hesitation, relaxes. You tilt your head and rest it against the back of the sofa, watching him. 

“Sorry,” you say again.

“Nah.” He leans back against the sofa too, mirroring your position. You’re facing each other, eyes perfectly level. “Don’t be.”

You don’t have to examine him to know he’s being genuine. He sends you a smile, and it’s clear that he wants you to know that he’s okay. You smile back, softly.

“I just…” His blue eyes are looking on you, but they seem to drift in and out of focus, like he’s concentrating on a memory. “I don’t know. It’s weird not living near you all the time.”

You nod. You were thinking the exact same thing this morning. “I know.”

Satoru seems surprised, and then pleased that you admit it. “Right? Like… everything’s so weird now. It all feels so… off, doesn’t it?”

It does. It is off: everything is the way it’s supposed to be, and yet nothing is right. It’s quiet, and cold, and you’re not supposed to be thinking about this when Satoru is here. You fight it away, but Satoru keeps it at bay. He always has. 

You have the feeling, from a voice that isn’t yours, that you should leave. Just to go home. You don’t think of anything when you’re home. Nothing about your father, or Sara, or the irreparable shoulder injury, or about Geto. At least, when it’s home, you don’t feel like you want him so badly it hurts. It doesn’t hurt when you’re alone. It doesn’t feel much like anything. It’s just… quiet. 

“I’ve just…” he says, and his voice snaps you back to the present. He speaks as if he’s realising it for the first time. “I’ve missed you.”

Your first instinct is to deflect, and the second to urge Satoru to tell you more. You succumb to both. “Aw, really?”

“Yeah,” he admits. 

“Oh,” you say. “Me too.”

“It’s weird.” Satoru’s face twists, comically childlike, and it teases a laugh from you. “I’ve missed you. Is it weird that I miss you when you’re not around? Like, when you’re not in the same room as me, I miss you.”

Your cheeks warm, and you try to hide it by looking at your lap. It’s the way he makes you feel, and he doesn’t even know. “Yeah.”

“Yeah, you think it’s weird?”

“No,” you say, laughing softly. “Yeah, as in: yeah, I know what you mean.”

“Oh.” Satoru thinks to himself, about something you could never think to guess at, and then he nods. When he smiles at you, you think he looks relieved. “That’s okay then. Good. Good good good.”

There’s a pause, where you don’t know what to say. “Dumbass,” you finally manage, with affection.

“Yeah, yeah.” Satoru purses his lips, and then, with a great heave, stands up. “Do you want me to drive you back? I’m getting pretty tired.”

“Oh. Oh, sure.” You were going to light another cigarette. But you pick your drink up instead, a little confused. Glass clinks against polished wood. “I’ll get my things.”

“Gotcha.” 

You place the bottle on the table, on a coaster, because you’re setting a good example for the kids, because of course you have to.

“Hey,” you say, after a pause, and he turns. “Are you doing anything tomorrow? After I drop the kids off, I mean.”

“Not got any immediate plans, no,” he says, with a faint smile. 

“Cool.”

“Cool?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” He chuckles. “Cool.”

“Yeah.” You nod, and go to leave the room, before pausing and twisting back around. “So I’ll stop by your house tomorrow, then? Just checking—we’re on the same page, and all?”

Satoru’s face breaks out into a wide grin—faint lines, creasing the corners of his eyes, the bridge of his nose, the curve of his cheeks. When he laughs, the sound is rich, like dark, melted chocolate.

“Yeah,” he says, shaking his head, his voice tinged bright with his smile. “Yeah, I’d guessed that much. I’ll be seeing you tomorrow, my lovely, lovely idiot. Really, Hebi-Hebi, to think that you could spend a day without me! Come on. Go get your coat.” 
 

Notes:

2009
Nineteen years old

-

Whoo boy. It's 3am here. Forgive me for any egregious SPaG mistakes, I'll fix it in the morning, pinkie promise my lovelies, but I am so sleepy I am struggling to see. Also, this took so much longer than I thought it would, omg—usually in my editing once-over I just fix a couple sentences here and there, but for this one I have rewritten about half of it, and then added in an extra, like 5k words total. In short: so so sleepy bros. I’m so happy to be back.
Omg. And who's excited for S2. FINALLY. So much is dropping in July. This is it, folks. Hells yeah.

Exams are over! I'm so happy to be back. Thank you all so so much for your patience, I love you all and you're all brilliant. Here's a whopper of a chapter as a thank-you for waiting so long T_T No, but your comments truly kept me sane, and I treasure each and every one. You're all fab <3 mwah mwah mwah <333

Chapter 15: 2010

Tuesday, 7th September 2010

Nanami’s gone. 

He left in March. That’s another one gone. Who will be next?

He was never a part of your ‘group’, back at school, even if you tried to include him. You were the closest with him, out of everyone, once Haibara died. But you were the only one to try; it wasn’t as if he liked you, or anything. You were the only one who put in any effort. 

And he left anyway. 

Your phone weighs heavy in your pocket. You should’ve left it in the car, but you’ve been rushing all day and you barely had the chance to remove your gloves before the curse rammed into the side of the vehicle and almost toppled it over. 

This is supposed to be your day off. But with the meeting this evening, everyone’s busy preparing. Of course you’re the one picking up the stragglers. Satoru gets time off—of course he does, he’s Satoru. You’re not important enough to get a break.

Your eyes glaze over as the curse tries to kill you. You didn’t get enough sleep last night, and you’re running on caffeine and cigarettes and the power nap you had at lunchtime. You’d fallen asleep when you finally sat down to eat, and only woke when your phone rang, telling you to get to the local university campus to exorcise the curse that’s been endangering the students.  

In the middle of the day. They’d sent Ijichi with you, because you don’t know how to put up a Jujutsu Curtain on your own. You’d felt stupid and incompetent: you remember Ijichi from school, and he’s two years your junior. He’s a fourth year, still in school. It was like the higher-ups were explicitly reminding you of your lack of talent, how pitifully average you are. 

Not as if you disagree. Grade Two sorcerer: average. Can’t create a Curtain: average. Many skilled sorcerers can’t. Many unskilled sorcerers can, but only weak ones. 

Ijichi hadn’t noticed your bitterness; he’d been too nervous, apparently still not used to leaving school on missions. When the curse attacked, you’d left him in the car. Half because you didn’t want him getting himself killed, half because you didn’t want to deal with him any longer. 

You just want the curse dead. 

It’s even worse today. You’d found the curse hunched over two teenage bodies, scampering around them and gnawing at their collarbones. Sometimes, you can save people, but it’s rare. It’s more common to find corpses before you find the curse. 

You want this over with. You don’t want to do this anymore. If you can make it back to Satoru’s in the next few hours, you’ll have enough time to get ready for the meeting. You’d have liked the whole day, but at least you’ll be able to have a shower, or something. You won’t feel disgusting, at least not physically. 

“Just die.” You speak through gritted teeth as the curse whips through the air, once again dodging your blade. It chitters in excitement: not intelligent enough to speak, but with enough brains to understand that you’re trying to harm it. It’s taking joy in taunting you. Whether it understands the concept of death or not, it’s pissing you off. 

You strike out at it, and it dodges. You try to grab it, and it darts out of your reach. It flips over your head, leaving thin scratches on your face. You swear at it—damn it! You’re going to be bleeding. 

Your watch says 14:30. You just need to kill this fucking thing, and then you can leave. You don’t think about tomorrow, which is the exact same thing all over again. Or the next day, or the day after that. 

With a frustrated sigh, you try to smack the stupid curse out of the air. It buzzes away at the last second like a fly you just want to swat. Like a child throwing a tantrum, you surge into a great strike into the air; just to the side of the curse, miscalculating, overshooting your turn like a first-year. 

The curse yelps, alien-like, and tries to dodge—only to impale itself on your scythe and evaporate instantly into dust. 

You stare at it. How anti-climactic. 

If you had the humour to laugh, it’d be funny. Only when you make a mistake are you finally able to kill it. 

From the car, Ijichi claps for you, obnoxiously. You want to tell him to shut up, because he’s not fooling anyone; he’s shadowed much better sorcerers than you, and you’ve just put on a decidedly pathetic show of talent. 

Or, maybe, just average. 

“Sorry it took so long,” you say as you step back into the car and pull your gloves back on.

Ijichi refutes the idea. He tries to praise you, but when you shoot him a tired look he just falls silent. 

“Do you need me to drop you off at school?” you ask, praying he’ll say no.

“Thank you!” Ijichi says. “You’re kind, Hebi-san!”

Your eyes flutter closed, and you wish you’d never said anything. You run the numbers in your head. Two-thirty now. An hour to Jujustu High. An hour and a half to Satoru’s. You need to be at the Zenin household by seven, and it takes forty-five minutes to get there. 

An hour and fifteen minutes, not including traffic. You need to do your makeup, and you wanted to do something with your hair. You look at yourself in your rear-view mirror, and dissatisfaction coils in your stomach. 

Twenty minutes into your drive, your phone buzzes. 

You ask Ijichi to read it for you, and he does: 

“It’s from Mei-san,” he says. 

Your heart sinks. No. Surely—not when you’ve just exorcised a curse. Please, not another one. 

“She says… Hebi-san, reports of a Grade Three curse in the Shinjuku district, exorcise immediately, Curtain unnecessary—is that me? Is she talking about me?”

“Yes,” you say. You want to cry. “What else?”

“Sorry. Uh, she’s given an address. Should I read it out?”

“No. I’ll put it in the Sat Nav.” You pull up by the side of the road, trying to hold back the cold crushing feeling that threatens to overwhelm you. Ijichi fiddles with his fingers. 

He picks at his cuticles. Your eye twitches. Does he have to be so loud about it? You can hear his breathing, heavy and through the mouth. You have to take off a glove to use the touchscreen—you hate touchscreen. Why is everything touchscreen nowadays? You can’t use any of it with gloves on, and it makes you feel even more handicapped than you already are. 

Ijichi breathes loudly again, and you let out an exasperated sigh and turn to face him. He straightens up immediately. 

“Can you make your way back to school?” You try to look at him and input the address at the same time. 

“Me? Oh. I don’t know?”

“You don’t know?” you mutter, stabbing at the Sat Nav with you index finger. What is the point of touchscreen if it doesn’t even work—why even use it? 

“Sorry. No, I do.”

“Great. So can you?”

“Uh. No.” 

You hold back from screaming, or maybe crying, or maybe both. You want to slam your head on the steering wheel. You want to go to Satoru’s without having to exorcise another curse. You don’t want to see anyone else tonight, and you just want to be able to sleep without dreaming of the demonic laughter of curses or being woken by the painful ache of your shoulder. You can’t remember the last time you got more than six hours straight of sleep.

You’re so short-tempered these days. You’re irritable and frustrated, and you can’t see how you’re nice to be around. It’s just so difficult to keep your patience with people when you’re always so tired. Isn’t it easier, just to go back to your clean and quiet apartment, to not see anyone? Sometimes you think so.

No. No, you can’t be thinking like that. If you let yourself think like that, you’ll never leave your building. You’ll work, and then go home. That will be your life. You can’t think like that. 

It’s easy to, though. Think like that. 

Or want it. Sometimes you want it. 

No. 

“I’m sorry,” you say, and you realise your tone is still cold and harsh when Ijichi cowers even more into the corner of his seat. You feel like shit. You feel like a horrible person. “Hey, I’m sorry. Listen. Do you—I don’t know, do you have money for a cab?”

Ijichi visibly thinks about it, and takes thirty long seconds to check his pockets. You try so hard to remain patient with him, and remind yourself that you were his age only a couple of years ago. 

“No,” he admits, finally.

“Okay,” you say. “Okay.”

You find enough cash in your purse to send him back to school—you take his immense gratitude with an exhausted smile and nothing else, knowing that he’s only eighteen and that he’s not going to pay you back, no matter what he says—and then you try to stick the Sat Nav to your windscreen. It falls off. You lick your thumb and smear your saliva on its suction cup and try again. It falls off. You try again, and this time it sticks. 

An hour and thirteen minutes, accounting for traffic. And then you have to find it and exorcise it. The backs of your eyes are burning; from tiredness or suppressed tears, you’re not sure.

You send a text to Satoru. At least your phone isn’t all touchscreen. It still has buttons.

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

I’m going to be late. Will you pick up the kids? 

 

He responds instantly. 

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

NOOOOOOOO

lololololol

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

Please? Mei Mei just texted me. Another exorcism. I don’t know how long it will take.

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

R u going to be back for the meeting? 

I NEED YOU THERE

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

Yes. I know I can’t miss another one. Will you pick up the kids? 

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

Chillaxxxxx

Yeyeyeyeyey

 

You look down at your phone, and are unable to conjure the usual warmth that comes with talking to Satoru. It is, you tell yourself, likely that you’re just over-tired and over-stressed. You just need to see him. You’ll feel better when you see him.

Looking through your text message history is depressing. Satoru, of course. Shoko, less so. Then Mei Mei, who acts as a spokesperson for Jujustu High higher-ups, even though it’s clear she’s going to divorce herself from them soon. Satoru’s sure of it. Until then, she’s responsible for telling you the details of your jobs. Missions, you’re supposed to call it. Like that makes it exciting—as if you’re back at school, desperate for a chance to see the outside world, to prove yourself there. 

And that’s it. That’s everyone who texts you regularly. 

Depressing. 

Even more so when you scroll down, and see Nanami’s last text to you, dated the 26^th March 2010. 

From Kento Nanami (Jujustu High) 

I will be leaving Jujutsu Society. It is likely you will never see me again, and I would prefer to keep it this way. Thank you for your past support. 

In the first few months after he’d left, you’d tried to find out where he’s been living. Your efforts had been fruitless, ultimately, and after a while you’d given up. It’s not like you and Nanami were ever particularly close, and you hadn’t kept in touch after you’d graduated, but you do feel a certain protectiveness over him, still.

“He’ll be back,” Satoru had said, when you’d been told by Yaga that Nanami had left. “Trust me.”

If Satoru recognises the similarities—two sorcerers leaving Jujutsu society, both disillusioned, neither willing to ever return—then he hasn’t let on. Or maybe he has. Maybe his casual insistence that Nanami will eventually come back is his own way of coping. 

Maybe Nanami will come back. Geto won’t, though. 

Why does it always come back to him? When someone leaves, you think about him. When you’re afraid of leaving, or your afraid of your growing desire to leave, you think about him. It’s a tantalising fantasy, being able to walk away from your job, from the monotony and pointlessness of exorcisms. And it’s hateful, because you promised yourself, back when you were seventeen and still hopeful about your life, that you would never be like him.

You start the car. You’ve got an hour and thirteen minutes in the car, which is more than enough time to torture yourself with your fading memories of Suguru Geto.

 

--

 

“You’re late,” Shoko says, as you almost collapse against the wall. “Gojo’s been asking for you.”

“He’s here?” you gasp, a stitch burning in your side. You’d had an awful time parking, and had given up and dumped your car outside a nearby field and just ran the rest of the way. “Shit. Where is he?”

Shoko shrugs. “He’s socialising. Everyone wants to talk to him. I haven’t spoken to him since he got here.”

“Course not. Damn it.”

“Your shoulder?”

“What? I—no, no, it’s been fine today.” You pick up a champagne glass from a server and try to make out your appearance in your reflection. Your face looks distorted, proportions blown. “Do I look okay?”

Shoko examines you with heavy-lidded eyes. You feel less like a friend, and more like a cadaver in her morgue. “You’ve got some blood on your cheek,” she states, and then looks at your champagne. “Are you going to have that?”

“Oh—no, I—do I really have blood on my cheek?”

“Mm-hmm.” Shoko scoops up your drink and takes an elegant sip, then knocks her head back and drains it. “Left cheekbone. Here.”

You take the compact mirror she offers you. Your fingers never brush. Shoko holds it flat in her pale palm, and your fingers seal around its rim with surgical precision. 

“I wanted to look nice,” you admit, with a tinge of childishness to your voice. “I wanted to have time to—I don’t know, do my hair, or something.”

Shoko doesn’t reply. 

“I didn’t have time to do anything.” You rub furiously at the dash of red on your cheekbone, and it smudges and blends with your foundation. “Shit. Fuck.”

Horrifyingly, you voice wavers. You choke back the impulse to burst into tears. 

“You smell floral.” Shoko’s lips press into a thin line, and you can’t read her well enough to tell if it’s approval or distaste. 

“My perfume,” you say with a watery laugh. “Sprayed it everywhere because I was so scared I’d smell of curses.”

Or corpses. You’d been greeted with four when you found the second curse, and spent another fifteen minutes comforting a hysterical woman who was trying to rationalise how she’d nearly been eaten by a giant monster, and how she’d survived when all her friends hadn’t. 

She’d made you late, and you’re still trying to tell yourself that she’s the reason you do this. Your job is to save people like her—innocents. You just wish you could have saved more. 

Whenever you raise your arm, the neckline of your dress shifts. The long skirt flutters, and the smell of rotting flesh rises from your skin. It’s imprinted on you—not just from today, but from every day. You can’t escape it. It’s the rancid scent of the people you failed to save, and you’re always reminded of them. 

“You just smell like flowers,” Shoko says. Not comfortingly, more like an objective fact. 

You choke back words, and instead nod. You want to close your eyes and leave. 

You hate things like this. 

The families are just as divided as you remember. 

It’s taking a step back in time; it’s been nearly fourteen years since you last attended one of these meetings, where members of Jujutsu society are intended to socialise and mingle. This is where you met Satoru for the first time—you were both just children, both unwilling heirs to your family name. Your father hadn’t yet married Sara and produced your brother, Haru, as his true heir. And Satoru didn’t know you. 

You had no idea how he would change your life. You had no idea what your life could be like, outside of your family. 

You hadn’t liked the great meeting when you were six, and you don’t like it now. 

It’s a way of breaking down inter-clan conflicts and prejudices, allegedly. Instead, everyone stands and talks and tries to pretend that they’re not planning how to destroy the family standing to their left.

Everything feels more stifling than it did when you were six. The ceilings aren’t as insanely high as you remember, and the ceremonial weapons decorating the walls just remind you of school, not of mystical Edo-period warfare. It might be that you now realise how political the clan meetings are, through the sly glances and muttered exchanges, or maybe it’s because your aversion to touch is more forceful than it was when you were that young. When you were a kid, it began as a rule imposed by your parents. Now, it’s a rule imposed by your own mind.

“Hebi-Hebi!” 

You turn at Satoru’s call, and see him pushing his way through the crowd of people. He must have been talking to them all, or they were surrounding him, or anything like that, but he’s got sight of you and his smile is broad and dazzling. 

God, he looks good. You let your eyes wander. 

Satoru’s dressed in a suit, sharp and black, fitted exactly to his body. His hands glance about his tie, straightening it as he navigates through the crowd. As he approaches, you allow yourself a lengthy few seconds to admire just how attractive he is, in a way you never allow yourself otherwise. 

The blindfold is new. You’re not sure how you feel about it—Satoru had been complaining about how sore his eyes were getting from wearing the glasses, even though the lenses are completely opaque. It makes his hair look so strange; you’re used to it lying flat, but the blindfold makes it stick up ridiculously. It makes him look even taller, so he appears to tower over everyone else in the hall. 

Satoru never wears suits. He should, you decide, much more often. You know that he’s tall, but the pressed trousers just accentuate his height, making his legs seem ever longer and more lithe. They’re tailored, and are slightly tight around his thighs—intentional, surely, because why wouldn’t Satoru want to draw attention to the strong muscle there?

The sleeves of his jacket cut off at his wrist, and you can spy the tiniest sliver of pale skin before it’s obscured by ink-black gloves. He pulls at them, tightening the thin fabric around his fingers. He’d promised you that he’d wear them, but you hadn’t been sure he would—he said, before, he didn’t want to you to feel uncomfortable, standing out as the only person wearing gloves. You’d wanted to kiss him, when he’d said that. You hadn’t. 

Satoru’s hands. You can’t even see them, through the gloves, but you want to; he takes such care over his hands, in a way you haven’t seen from other men his age. When you make conversation in the late nights at his family house, he’ll sometimes start filing his nails as he talks, curving the glass file in clean, methodical flicks. Then he’ll stretch his arm out, stretch his fingers, and examine them to check if he’s done it evenly. Just like everything with Satoru, his fingers are long and thin. 

Sanity reappears, and you blink hastily. Your lengthy few seconds are definitely up. 

“Hey, hey, Hebi-Hebi,” Satoru says, tightening the knot of his tie and grinning. “Oh, Shoko. Hey!”

“Hello,” Shoko says. She looks at Satoru’s hands disparagingly. “You don’t have any champagne with you?”

“Nah.” He sends her a smile, and then looks back to you. Now you can’t see his eyes, it’s harder to read him. It’s disconcerting. “I’ve already had two, and I’m de-finitely feeling it.”

“Gojo,” you chastise. 

He waves his hand in the air. “Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s why I’m not going to have any more—but Hebi-Hebi, you’ve gotta come with me, I need you to introduce you to everyone!” 

“Uh.” You press your back against the wall. “You want me to walk through these crowds?” 

His nose scrunches. “It’s—I mean, I can sort something out—” 

“Can you?”

“For sure!” When Satoru turns to you, his lips press into a dissatisfied pout. Wait—were you too harsh? You’re always too harsh nowadays, and it’s even worse when it’s with Satoru. You’re so bad-tempered, it bleeds into your conversations. 

You try to rectify it. “I just don’t know how I could… navigate it, without them touching me, and…”

“I’m going,” Shoko announces. 

You turn to her. “You are?”

“Sure.” And she’s already leaving, looking around the room. “Gonna find a place to smoke.”

“I’ll join you later—” you try to say, but she just shrugs and doesn’t turn back. It makes you feel off, but you don’t know how to rectify it. Have you done something? Have you annoyed her, in some way? 

Irritation sparks in your stomach. She could have said something, if you had. Maybe you shouldn’t have sought her out—you should have just kept to yourself, if she was going to act like that.

You immediately feel bad. You’re just jumping to conclusions, aren’t you?

You look up at Satoru, whose brow, beneath the blindfold, is furrowed in concentration. 

“What are you doing?” you ask, to distract yourself. You just need to be around him. It distracts you from yourself, sometimes. 

He claps his hands together. “Done. Hey, check this out.” 

Originating from Satoru, you feel a sudden, dizzying wave of motion pass over you. Like some sort of magnetism, the feeling of pushing two like poles together, the tension and resistance and eventual relief when their sides are forced to touch. It’s completely alien to you, and it passes through your body—your muscles, bones, organs, all the way out the other side. 

You shudder, but Satoru only laughs. “Feels weird, right?”

“Yeah.” You try to look around, to see whatever force that was, but it’s invisible. “What was that?”

Satoru smirks. He bends down, leaning closer to you, so close that his lips barely brush the shell of your ear. You can feel his breath, and you supress a shudder. “This,” he whispers, so only you can hear, “is my Infinity.”

You blink. “What?”

“Infinity.” He leans back, so he’s face-to-face with you. His hands brace on his knees. You would make eye contact, if you could see his eyes. “It’s my Infinity. I’ve been experimenting with it.”

“You moved it?” Your eyes widen in panic. “But, Gojo, you need it around you—you can’t move it from you, you’ve got to—”

“Pfft, I’ve still got it around me.” He shakes his head, but he’s so close to you that your noses almost touch. “Don’t worry, Hebi-Hebi, I’m too smart for that. I’ve just also got it around you, too.”

“Me?”

“Yeah.” His smirk returns. “You. Come on, let’s go.”

Satoru straightens, fixes his tie again, and strides into the throngs of people. The idea makes your throat tighten, your stomach flip, but you curl your hands into fists and promise yourself that you can trust him. Satoru wouldn’t trick you. Satoru wouldn’t. He’s not a kid anymore. 

After a moment of hesitation, you follow him. 

The feeling of relief is staggering. This is how Satoru feels, all the time. Whenever someone stumbles into your way, or gestures to vigorously, Satoru’s infinity repels it. People look up, startled, and when they catch sight of you or Satoru they immediately look away. Oh, you don’t care. 

You can’t be touched. You can walk through a crowd, and you can’t be touched. 

And Satoru let you in his Infinity. He expanded it to include you. Shared it with you. And he’s not protected from you, right now, the way he is from everyone else. The display of trust—even if it’s stupid and obvious, because of course you’re not going to hurt him, of course you’re not—is staggering.

“Get closer,” Satoru says to you, turning around and frowning when he sees you lagging behind. “It works better when you get closer.”

“It does?” You can’t see a reason why he’d lie, and so you step closer to him. He pauses to allow you to catch up, and just smiles down at you, arms crosses across his chest. It makes his muscles stretch, unintentionally flexing, and you blink for a millisecond, distracted.  

Satoru nods. You step even nearer, and his smile broadens. You want to ask if this is allowed—if you’re allowed to be almost chest-to-chest with him, at an event as formal and traditional as this, but you know that Satoru wouldn’t care either way. 

“I—” you say, and then break off. Your mouth is dry, and you want to look anywhere but his face, his jaw, his lips. You can’t see his eyes, and his lips are the next best thing. Unfair. Unfair of him to draw your focus like this.

“Turn around,” Satoru says. It doesn’t sound like a request, or a suggestion or a command: all of them, mixed together. You’re in public. You’re being observed by too many people for your heart to be beating this fast. 

You turn. Through your dress—backless, because you’re stupid, because now through the bare skin of your back can feel how the air moves as he shifts closer. 

“Look at them all,” Satoru murmurs, his body so close to engulfing yours. Shit. “Are you looking?”

“Mm.” You don’t trust yourself to speak. You try to keep your expression blank, because you know that people will be watching you, as the one girl Satoru is consistently found in the company of. 

“That,” Satoru says, his breath warm against the side of your face, “is Ryuunosuke Kamo, who’s currently leading the Kamo clan. He hates me.”

You follow where Satoru’s pointing—reaching to the side of you, not touching you but so close, so close that you override any instinct and wish that he would—and see a tall man in his mid-sixties making conversation with a small, pretty woman. 

“He hates you?” 

“For sure.” Satoru’s voice is low, so no-one else can hear your conversation. The Infinity surrounding you, his distracting proximity, all create the illusion of intimacy. “And that—to his left, if you see—that’s Naobito Zenin. He hates me, too.”

“Naoya Zenin’s father.”

“That’s him.” You can’t see Satoru’s expression, but you can tell from his voice that his lip has curled. “Old Naobito’s just like his son.”

“We shouldn’t talk to him,” you say, and when Satoru laughs, soft and quiet against your skin, goosebumps erupt along your arms. 

He talks you through the room, slowly introducing everyone of importance, and you simply stand and feel him. He keeps his head ducked down, so he can murmur words quietly into your ear, and you try not to shudder when his fingers barely skim your waist. 

Satoru is sure to never touch you. He never does. But he gets so close, sometimes, and you want nothing more than to tip your head back onto his shoulder and have him kiss you.

And you hate that you want it. You hate it when Satoru does this; whenever he pulls away, because he always pulls away, always, you’re left with the awful ache of loneliness and quiet that you feel so often now. He gives attention so easily, and yet when he deigns to take it away, its loss is so extreme you feel it viscerally. 

It’s like he’s taunting you with everything you can’t have. Unintentionally, he steps closer to you, and he shows you the briefest glimpse of a life you’ve been craving for so long. You want him, but you cannot have him in these meagre glimpses. It hurts. It hurts you. 

But you accept it. Your heart races when his lips almost touch you. There’s something addictive to him, and you cannot give him up. 

Even if it would be better for you. Because, if you gave him up, you wouldn’t hurt like this. Not the way you’ve been hurting for him all your life—the pain of rejection, of not being enough, of being his best and most favourite friend and nothing more. 

Satoru’s murmurs stop, suddenly. You jolt out of your haze, feeling dizzy. 

“Turn around,” he says, and his speaking voice is jarring, contrasted with the low, seductive whispers. “Come on. We need to talk to the Kamos.”

“What?” You try to look around at the gathering of people, look more closely to see whatever Satoru had noticed, but he’s straightening and moving in front of you and blocking your view. “Gojo?”

“Come on.” There’s an edge of urgency to his tone, and you crane your neck around him, rising up on your toes. 

“You hate the Kamos,” you tell him, confusion bleeding with frustration. “What is it?”

“It’s nothing. Come on, come over here—follow me, we need to—”

He stops talking. He can see on your face that you’ve seen them. 

Age has shrunken your father. Your father’s hair is streaked with grey, and has thinned into wires that he still styles traditionally, military-esque. The wrinkles around his cheeks and lips have become more defined. The thinness of his lips, the displeased set of his jaw, is all terrifyingly familiar. His eyes are thick-lidded and snake-like, darting across every face and examining every possible target.

Your father doesn’t wear gloves. His wrists are adorned with twisting bangles, gold serpents with eyes of jade. Many rings embellish his fingers, gaudy and intentionally expensive-looking. His liver spotted-hand grasps tightly onto a small, thin arm. 

Sara.  Barely thirty, her beautiful face has become waxen and vacant. She is weighed down by jewellery; a heavy stone set into the hollow of her neck is attached to a thick golden chain, which looks like a leash. 

You don’t see Haru. Your brother, your step-brother, who you haven’t seen for years, who would be nearing eleven. You haven’t seen any of them for years.  

You feel sick. Sara is at your father’s side, his prized possession, and Haru must be elsewhere, sent off to politicise, to prove himself as your family’s true heir. Haru, your baby brother, has been awarded the freedom to leave your father’s side. When you had last been here, your father had wished he could have left you home. He kept you behind him, like some misbehaving dog, your arms bound behind your back and head bowed in subservience. 

Guilt crushes you. There it is: the downturn of Sara’s mouth, the premature lines about her eyes, the carved-out hollows of her cheekbones. All of it, your fault. In a bid to be free of that house, you left her alone, with no one else for your father to relieve his cruelty onto. 

It was conscious—you are the only one to be blamed. You knew what would happen, when you fled your family to the alleged haven of Jujustu High, or when you spent every holiday at Satoru’s, never returning. You knew who you would be leaving, and you did it anyway, because you were selfish and scared and just a child who didn’t know where else to go. 

Sara was the same. She was a child when your father married her. She was young enough to think he loved her, surely, and too young to know better. And you deserted her, when she, unlike you, had no-one to run to.

You turn. You can’t look at them anymore. You had thought you could avoid them, if you saw them here—or maybe you had known you would react this way, and you were punishing yourself with witnessing the consequences of your own crime. 

“Hebi.” Satoru’s trying to speak to you: calm you down, comfort you, reassure you, but you want none of it. You cannot have him, now—you cannot have the complexity of everything he brings. You must be alone, you need your brain to stop sparking, you need everything to be quiet and just stop.

“Don’t,” you warn him, too mean, too vicious, when he tries to follow you. “Don’t follow. Leave me alone.”

You force yourself through the crowd, and suddenly feel the Infinity slip from you. It pulls at your skin, and you break through it too fast, tripping, almost falling. The loss of the intimacy, the comfort, is horrifying. You panic, and wheel around, trying to look for Satoru, to apologise, but there are too many people—too many hands, and too many bodies—you need to get away from them, you need to be alone—

Heart hammering, you stumble backwards. Your wrists burn, like the tearing of skin under rope. Your father is only metres away from you. You need to—leave, you need to get away from all of these people. Why are there so many people?

Like the red sea, they part around you. You feel like you’re in a bubble that they cannot breach, and even as bodies step away from you, you feel trapped. You catch their eyes, and they look away, or they stare more intently, gaze puncturing holes into your body like bullets. They look at you like a scientific specimen on display, and avoid your gaze because they fear Satoru’s fury—surely, they know, they know about your mental malformities, this aversion to touch that you cannot overcome. 

Gossip spreads like a disease, and you are always going to be seen as your gloves, first, and then as Satoru’s companion, and then as what you are—a sorcerer, an average sorcerer, who can’t put up a Curtain or save more than one person from a curse or walk through a crowd without feeling sick. 

Your back presses against the wall—cold, cold against your bare skin—and you try to exhale. Your breath is coming shaky and fast. 

Satoru didn’t follow you. Of course he didn’t, because you told him not to. Still, it hurts, in some stupid way. 

You don’t want to panic anymore. You don’t want to feel this. You want your mind to slip from you, the way it does at home, when you stare at the skyline and can barely feel the cold wind rip through your body.

There will be more rooms. This room is too small to hold everyone, and the Zenins would want to show off their mansion. 

Steadying yourself, you keep one hand on the wall. If you were about to fall, you would crumple into a corner, and no-one would touch you. No-one would help you, would they?

You were right. There’s a door, held ajar, that opens into another wide room. It’s less crowded, with fewer people, and you enter it. 

You would like some air. Maybe you should have joined Shoko, smoked together. Unless she was lying to you. You hadn’t thought about that. Maybe she was lying to you, and just wanted to leave you. 

You sink down onto a chair; dark wood, carved intricately, perhaps centuries old. There are a few scattered around the room. Left out for guests to recline on, a subtle display of the wealth and influence of the Zenin clan. You press your gloved hands to your temple, not caring if you rub away your foundation. Your eyes flutter closed.

There are murmurs. No-one talks loudly at these meetings; everything is clandestine, secret, with quick looks and knowing glances. Will people be looking at you? Perhaps. But if you do not look at them, you are less frightened. 

Instead you pretend you are back home. You feel the monotonous thump-thump of your heartbeat. There is pulsing in your fingertips, a buzzing feeling. And then there’s nothing, and you inhale. 

Your thoughts fade. It is quiet. It is lonely, but you cannot bear to look at your family, or to imagine what you should have done, or even to feel Satoru’s breath on your neck. 

You wish, now, that you hadn’t given in. If you had stepped away from him, refused to have him so close to you, perhaps you would have been able to handle seeing your father, Sara. If Satoru’s presence hadn’t made every nerve come alight, made your brain slow and accelerate all at once, perhaps you would have been numbed to it. 

And you know what you’re missing, more so than before. It makes your body feel empty now he’s drawn away. It’s like he teased you with the feeling of completion only to steal it back from you, cruel. It’s unintentional of course. And you will never tell him to stop. You cannot.   

Time slips away. You don’t know how long you spend in this room, but you are conscious for every second of it, even as you feel your body slowly become more insensate, unfeeling.

“Are you Hebi-san?”

Your eyes open. There is a woman. Her hair is short, grey. She looks fifty, maybe. 

You nod. 

The woman returns it, brisk. “Good. Hebi-san, may I be impolite?”

You blink up at her. You shrug.

“A yes or no, please.” 

Your voice crackles when you speak. “Sure.”

“Good.” The woman gestures for you to stand, and you do not. Her lined lips purse. “If I may, I would like to ask you about your relationship with Satoru Gojo.”

“You do, huh?”

“Yes.” She looks down at you. You notice some thin markings around her mouth, a pattern you recognise. “Are you romantically involved with Satoru Gojo?”

You laugh. 

Her eyebrows raise. “A yes or no will be suitable, Hebi-san.”

“Sure it will.” You cover your eyes with your hands and wish you could be left alone. “No. I’m not romantically involved with him.”

“I am glad to hear it.”

You take your hands away. “Yeah?”

“Yes.” She nods again. You don’t know who she is, this strange woman. You would like to laugh at her with Satoru, but you remember that you asked Satoru not to follow you, and this, time away from him, was what you wanted, anyway. 

You sit back in your chair. Cannot find the energy to ask her why. “Well, that’s incredible.”

“Hebi-san.” The woman calls for you again, so sharp and pointed, and you stare back up at her. “My name is Yuka Inumaki.”

She continues to talk, but you fall out of focus. Ah. That explains the markings, even if they are ceremonial at best. Satoru had explained the Inumaki clan—once powerful, the family became destitute after its leader squandered its already-marginal wealth. Have been trying to rise back ever since. Yuka Inumaki: wife of the leader of the family, mother of seven children. Few inherited the family technique. You guessed she wanted to maximise her chances of producing a viable heir. Or maybe her husband wanted that, and she was his wife, and so did her duty. 

“What do you want, Inumaki-san?” Because she must know that you’re not interested in whatever politics she would like to tie you into. You know what this is: you are close to Satoru, and therefore you have influence over the most powerful man in the world. 

Yuka Inumaki’s eyes flash. “My son,” she says. “He would like to meet you.”

She bows, and walks away. You watch her leave, and tap on the arm of a tall, grey-haired man. Oh. Perhaps that explains Yuka’s hair; perhaps she’s younger than you think. The man has the same markings around his mouth as his mother. 

This is a cursed speech user. This is a play for your families to mix—Yuka Inumaki is not subtle. She wishes to pass along her family technique, with you as a mother. 

Perhaps he’d be a good husband, you think, as the two approach you once again. You could live without him talking to you. That might even be quite nice. 

Once again, a life without Satoru. You really are experiencing it all. Maybe you should try, the way you’ve never seriously tried before. You look at the Inumaki man. He isn’t unattractive, really. 

He approaches, and stops a foot away from you. There is a chair next to you, empty. Maybe you are supposed to gesture for him to sit, but you don’t.

“I won’t shake your hand,” you say. “Obvious reasons.”

You expect him to smile, at least. Most cursed speech users attempt to emote more vividly, to display their thoughts. 

“I understand,” the Inumaki man says, as he sits down on the chair opposite you. “I won’t hold it against you, Hebi-san.”

You could laugh. You look up at his mother, who fixes you with a steely gaze, as if challenging. The Inumaki man waits patiently for your response, and you want to kick yourself for how stupid you’ve been.

He isn’t a cursed speech user. Of course not. The Inumaki clan would not waste one of those on someone whose technique is as poor as yours. You already mutated your family’s technique—really, who’s to say you wouldn’t do that for theirs?

The have sent you the runt of the litter. They want to marry the unnecessary children off, off to unimportant people so they can be forgotten in peace. This is who they have deemed you worthy of. A nobody; someone unable to pass on the true family technique; someone just like you. 

“If you would allow me, Hebi-san,” interjects Yuka Inumaki, still so prim and poised. “How old are you?”

You keep your eyes fixed on the Inumaki man. “Twenty. Almost twenty-one.”

“I see.” She clicks her tongue. “You are old, Hebi-san, if you are to be pregnant soon.”

The Inumaki man doesn’t look embarrassed by his mother’s comments. It’s likely he agrees with her. 

“I suppose so,” you say. 

“I am glad you agree. We all must do our duty for the future generation, Hebi-san. I believe Satoru Gojo has been heard sharing this philosophy.”

You break your stare from the Inumaki man. “Yeah, he has.”

She inclines her head. “This is ours. The next generation cannot exist without women creating them.”

And then she leaves. Her words itch at you, but you don’t know what you find wrong with them.

Conversation is banal. Uninteresting. Better conversation than it would’ve been if he was a cursed speech user, but not by much. During the conversation, he leans forward, his elbows on his knees. It’s clearly intended to be attractive, maybe show off his arms, but you’re too tired to care about it. 

You want to ask him what he thinks of you. How he sees you. The friend of Satoru Gojo, or the embarrassment of the Hebi family, or a womb to hold his children, or just you. Just you. Whatever that is, you’re not sure you like it.

The Inumaki man’s eyes flicker. He looks at something behind you. You turn. 

“Hebi-Hebi!” Satoru’s hand clamps down onto the back of your chair. You look up at him. His mouth is twisted into a cruel smile. Even through his blindfold, you can feel his stare piercing the man beside you. “And who are you?”

The Inumaki man rises. “Norio Inumaki. I’m—”

Satoru laughs, loudly. “Never mind. I don’t care.”

The Inumaki man blanches. It’s more emotion he’s shown all evening. 

“Hebi-Hebi,” Satoru says, as he walks around your chair with his attention sealed tight to the Inumaki man. Satoru has to tilt his chin to look down at him. “I could do with some air. Everything’s so stifling in here. Don’t you think?”

You are surprised when you take a beat to answer. Because—you’d been entertaining your life without Satoru. And now he’s here, it’s like your brain has been turned on again. Impulses are firing through your nerves, and everything has sharpened, including how deeply you feel. Satoru is here, and he has brought with him colour and life, and the love you hold for him and the pain he causes just by being here. 

But you can’t say no to him. 

“I think so,” you say, a smile tugging at your lips for what seems like the first time in hours. You stand, follow him, and don’t give the Inumaki man a second glance. 

 

--

 

“He was flirting with you,” Satoru says, as he pushes open a door into another twisting corridor. “He was flirting with you, Hebi-Hebi. That’s what flirting looks like. Did you realise?”

“I did.”

“Really?” Satoru pulls at his tie, loosens it, and works at undoing the top button of his shirt. “I didn’t think you knew what flirting was.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m not!” Satoru grins. “It’s just that, when you’re so rarely flirted with, I know things can go pretty stale… unlike me, who is always flirted with. You know why?”

“I have no idea.”

“Maybe it’s my good looks,” he muses. “Or my winning personality. Either way, I’m surprised you could even tell that he was flirting with you. I’m proud of you, Hebi-Hebi!”

“I did,” you say, without knowing if you’re annoyed or amused. “Of course I did.”

“It’s not of course,” Satoru says, pulling a face. “How would I know if you’re familiar with the art of male seduction?” 

“Ew.” You grimace. 

“Exactly!” Satoru points at you, as if you’re proving his argument. “That’s what I mean. You’re all so prudish about that kind of thing, that’s all.”

“I’m not prudish,” you say, looking down at your gloved hands. “I just keep to myself.”

“And that’s not being prudish?” Satoru grins at you, and then puts his hands up in the air. “Hey, you know I’m right! It’s okay, I get it. You’re just not into that kind of stuff.”

You blink at him. “What?”

“I,” Satoru says, smug, “have read about it. On the internet. Don’t worry, Hebi-Hebi, it’s very normal and natural and you don’t have to feel bad about yourself.”

“But you think that’s me?” Your stomach sinks. This is just mean. “You think that’s like me?”

Satoru looks back at you quizzically. “Yeah? Course I do. I mean, it’s right, isn’t it?” His mouth opens comically wide. “Wait, have I just led to a revelation about yourself? Didn’t you know? Oh, Hebi-Hebi, I’m sorry, I just know you too well! Isn’t that funny? I know everything about you, even before you know it yourself, and—”

“But It’s not true,” you say. 

Satoru pauses. “Huh?”

“It’s not true,” you repeat, defensiveness darkening your voice. “That I don’t like people. Romantically, I mean. I do.”

Satoru stops walking, now. His mouth closes and, without any warning, he reaches and pulls his blindfold down from his eyes. God, his eyes are gorgeous. But they’re narrowed, searching, and maybe even hurt. 

“Really?” he asks, as his gaze darts across every inch of your face. Maybe he, just like you with him, knows how to tell if you’re lying. 

“Yes.” You set your jaw, and try to hide how painful this is. You’ve loved him, and only him, for so long. And you’ve kept it so secret that Satoru doesn’t realise you even have the ability to love anyone. “Yes, it is.”

That indeterminate hurt flickers in his eyes again. “Wait,” he says, “no. But. You’ve never mentioned it.”

“No.”

“But you’ve never liked anyone,” Satoru says, like he’s trying to convince you. “You’ve never mentioned wanting to date anyone, ever, or—”

“Yeah, well.” You shrug, too apathetic to be convincing to anyone. “I wouldn’t talk to you about it, if I did.”

“You wouldn’t?” Satoru’s eyes are wide, and he sounds like a boy. Like you’ve cursed him, hurt him, and he’s blinking back tears. 

You feel callous, and you don’t know why. “I mean,” you say, trying to double-back. “I don’t know. Maybe I thought you would’ve guessed.”

“Well, clearly I haven’t.” Satoru’s jaw tenses. The muscle twitches. “But you’ve liked people in the past?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” He isn’t looking at you anymore. His gaze is somewhere you can’t see—he’s thinking about things you have no idea about. “Someone like that Inumaki guy?” 

You try to figure out what Satoru’s thinking. This is one of those rare times when you can’t get a grasp on him, and you dislike it. “No,” you say, finally “Not like him.”

“Good,” Satoru says, with some vindictiveness. “I didn’t like him.”

“Neither did I,” you admit. Satoru glances at you, and something seems to change in him. Your words, for whatever reason, sate what seems to be his anger. Just a little—or, enough for him to plaster on a smile and turn to you with a new façade of childish excitement. 

“Great!” Satoru beams at you, and then jumps up to try to hit the wooden posts holding up the ceiling. “Because whoever you end up with, Hebi-Hebi, I’m going to be spending a lot of time with. So I basically should get a say in all future dalliances.”

“Dalliances?” 

“Yep. Everyone should have dalliances.”

“Don’t say that again.”

“What? Dalliances?”

You groan. “It makes you sound middle-aged.”

“Well, at least I don’t look middle-aged,” Satoru says, preening himself. He pushes through another door and looks around. “Huh. I thought we’d be here by now.”

“Gojo.” For a moment, you wonder how it’s so easy to fall into your natural routine. You don’t have to think, when you talk with him like this. It’s one of the first things you formed with your friendship, and it’s the most long-lasting. “Are you sure we’re going the right way?”

Satoru grins. “Yes and no.”

“What?”

“Yes for me, no for you. So: kinda.”

“We’re kinda going the right way?” You raise your eyebrows at him, and his grin widens. “Listen, if you’ve got us lost, I’m going to kill you.”

“We’re not lost!” Satoru clicks his tongue, as if you’re the one who’s crazy. “I’m taking us to somewhere that’s not exactly where you think we’re going, but I’m going there intentionally.”

“You what?”

He sighs. “Just trust me. If we do get lost—which we won’t—then I’ll just follow someone’s cursed energy back to the main gathering hall.” He taps on his blindfold and flashes you a smirk. “Infra-red vision.”

“Oh, wow.” You trail your fingers along the wall as you walk. “I’m so glad we can rely on your Jujustu bloodhound abilities. That makes me feel so much better.”

“I’m not a dog, Hebi-Hebi.”

“And yet you’re not intelligent enough to be a human, are you?”

“Agh! So cruel!”

You chuckle, and Satoru beams at you. 

You continue in comfortable silence for a little while longer, as you ascend through what appears to be a Greco-Roman-inspired stairway. The Zenins, you think, are far too wealthy. Seriously: you’ve always thought that Satoru could have used some money issues in his life, just to give him some humility, but at least he’s nothing like this. The exuberance, the lavish way the clan has spent so much money—it brings a sour taste to your mouth.

“Please tell me your bloodhound abilities are still working,” you say, after climbing five flights of stairs. “I was working today, Gojo. I’m exhausted.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that now,” Satoru says, and, with a flourish, pushes open the door.

You step out onto the rooftop, and your breath catches: it’s beautiful. 

Everything is tinged with blue, as if it’s being observed through a cool-tone camera filter, and there’s long stretches of silver moonlight that dapple the smooth stone of the roof. Even the railing is romantic, inviting you to stand and stare at the beauty of the Zenin estate. You’re surrounded by acres of land, and the countryside looks glorious at night; trees swaying in time with the quiet chirpings of crickets, fireflies like glowing fairy lights, darting between the leaves.

If you listen closely, there even seems to be a winding river some distance away; you see it, through the blue of the night, two sides of the meander slowly drawing closer, the loop of an oxbow lake soon approaching. You wonder how many decades it’ll be until the distance finally breaks: when the river cuts through the curve, and the two sides meet after centuries apart.

“Good, isn’t it?”

You look back, and the sight that’s greeting you is infinitely more beautiful than any landscape. 

Satoru wraps the dark fabric around his palm, grinning at you. He truly is like moonlight; it’s almost impossible to distinguish between the silken strands of his hair and the draping of starlight. He slides out of his blazer and lets it drop to the floor, strips his hands of his gloves, shakes his head back and blinks. God, he’s fucking beautiful. 

Satoru raises his eyebrows. “Well?”

“Huh?” you say, eloquently. 

He laughs, and the back of your neck flushes with heat.

“This,” he says, gesturing to the sky. “It’s good, isn’t it?”

“Oh.” You stumble over your words, too encapsulated with how truly magnificent Satoru is. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

“I used to come up here all the time,” Satoru says. He walks closer to you, and then passes you by—he slips his hands into his pockets and gazes out into the night sky, walking until he’s a metre away from the rooftop edge. “They used to have so many of these meetings, you know? And I went to them all.”

You step closer to him. “You did?”

“Every one.” Satoru stares out across the beautiful views of nature, and you watch him with pure love. “I’d try to sneak off every time, though. Especially once it was just Yahaba and the staff taking care of me.”

“And you’d come here.”

“Yeah.” Satoru smiles, softly. “It was nice to have a place, you know? A spot. An area of my own. You know what I mean?”

“I do.” You raise your eyebrows at him, and he looks back at you, questioning. “Come on, Gojo. You can’t have forgotten the Chapel.”

His eyes widen at the memory, and he laughs. “The Chapel! I remember the Chapel. We haven’t been there in ages.”

“And yet we used to go there every day.” You shiver in the cold, rub your hands up and down your arms. “That was our place.”

“And it was ours.”

“Yeah. I liked that.”

He smiles at you. “You did?”

“Maybe.” You shrug, and Satoru laughs again. “I don’t know. It was nice to have something with you, that we shared.”

“I get that.” 

“Really?” 

“Sure.” Satoru runs a hand through his hair. “I always liked it when you let me share things with you. I felt—like it was this accomplishment, right?”

You stare up at him, perplexed. “But you had everything. Gojo, you had everything you could ever want, anything material. I was happy when you shared with me.”

“You were?”

“Of course I was!” You shake your head, not understanding how he wouldn’t get it. “You had everything, and you still wanted to spend time with me. I… it made me feel special, just a little bit. And I never felt special. You were the only one who ever…”

You trail off. Your face feels too warm for this. Your confession borders too closely to the present day, when, again, you are aware of how average you are. As a child, it hurts when you don’t think you’re special or different. As an adult, you accept it as fact, and ignore how it hurts just the same. 

Satoru stares at you like he’s seeing you for the first time. “No. No, I don’t accept that.”

“No?” You smile hesitatingly, unsure where he’s going with this. “What do you mean, no?”

“I mean exactly what I said.” In one sweeping movement, he jumps back from the edge of the roof. He steps backwards at a bouncing walk, gesturing grandly and wildly. “I’m not going to let that happen. I refuse!” 

“Gojo?”

“I refuse!” He shouts it out, out to the rolling fields and the trees and the meandering river. He turns to you, shaking a finger at you. “No. Hebi-Hebi, no! I’m not letting that happen.”

To your surprise, you find yourself choking out a laugh. “You’re not? I—I don’t think this is about you, Gojo.”

“You’ll be impressed,” Satoru says, “at how talented I am at making things about me.” To add to the effect, he winks. You laugh, this time from genuine amusement.

“That’s nothing new,” you say, propping your chin on your palm and observing him, trying to figure out his angle. “But I still don’t see—?”

“So, let me show you.” Satoru holds out a hand in front of him, like he’s raising a toast to your honour. “Dance with me.”

You blink. You make sure your jaw doesn’t drop. 

“You—what?” Your breath does a weak wheeze that you think might be an attempt at a derisive laugh. “Are you kidding me?”

“Not at all.” Satoru smiles, and you hate how weak it makes you. “I’m serious.”

“Shut up.”

“I never will. C’mon, you know that by now.” 

He’s still got his hand out. What, does he expect you to take it?

“I—Yeah, I know, but—” you say, still kind of malfunctioning, caught up in the giddiness of Satoru’s company and how intense your want is for him, to be with him, to be able to do something as simple as dance with him. “Gojo, I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Okay,” Satoru says. “Okay. Let me explain it to you.”

“I—yes, please do.”

“Okay.” Satoru smiles wanly, the corner of his lip pinching. “You, Hebi-Hebi, are too good of a person to only have had me making you think you’re special. It’s ridiculous! I won’t allow it. That is what I refuse.”

“I—” Your heartbeat flutters. “Gojo, I—”

“And you’re going to fall in love,” he says. Satoru’s smile softens, and he looks at you with so much love, so much tenderness. It’s dazing, the way he’s looking at you, because it feels so much like how you’ve always felt about him. “You’re going to fall in love, and you’re going to be happy, and you’re going to be with someone else who’s going to tell you you’re special.”

You find yourself blinking back tears. 

“And so,” Satoru says, his fingers stretching out for your hand. “You’re going to need to learn how to dance. It’s the first step of falling in love. Ask anyone.”

“Ask any romantic comedy?”

“Sure.” Satoru shrugs. His hand is still waiting for yours. “Same difference.”

“No. No way.” You look around, wildly, like you’re trying to find a reason to disagree. “This is the Zenin household, Gojo.”

His eyes glimmer. “It sure is.”

“You want to dance… on the roof of the Zenin estate?” 

“It’s not anything scandalous, Hebi-Hebi,” he says, grinning. “You don’t have to look so affronted.”

“I’m not—I mean—but, Gojo, you know that I can’t—” 

 Satoru tilts his head forward, and turns his palm up to face the sky. He’s beckoning you. Without a thought, you step closer. “Trust me. Hold my hand.”

Ice races up your spine, and you straighten up, eyes wide. “No,” you say, automatically. 

“Trust me,” Satoru repeats, his voice low and reassuring. You’re lucky that he’s in the light of the moon—you can see him, see his expression, and know he’s trying to be kind. “You can trust me with this.”

You remember when he was fifteen. When you were lying side-by-side in the chapel, admiring the warmth of the sun on the bare skin of your hands. You remember him explaining, in those awful moments after, how he was trying to help. You remember the feeling of your gloves afterwards: hateful comfort, horrific and just like home. 

That was years ago. You were kids, back then. You trust him, all over again. 

Slowly, you raise your hand. It moves through the air, shaking, and you feel your heart clench as you slide it towards his. The palm moves closer—you try to remind yourself that you won’t touch him, that you’ve got the barrier of your gloves, that there won’t be any contact, but you can already feel the panic rising, heart rate accelerating, chest convulsing—

A barrier. The repelling force of a magnet, North meeting South. You feel your hand slow, against your control, and it stops, resting in the air an inch away from Satoru’s hand.

Limitless. Satoru’s infinity. 

A laugh bubbles in your chest, and you look up at him, eyes gleaming. You look back at your hand, and back up at him, and your smile widens. You try to push forward with your hand and close your fingers around his, but Satoru raises his eyebrows and just doesn’t let you. 

“You—I—” You’re lost for words. You can feel every nerve impulse zipping through your body, with the millions and millions of electrical signals whooping and hollering because you’re close to touching him and you’re basically touching him, this is like you’re holding his hand, and you’re not scared, not at all. You’re safe. You’re with Satoru. You’re not going to touch him, but you’re so close, and that’s exhilarating.

Is this what being close to someone is supposed to feel like? You’re not terrified of the potentials, the prospects, what someone could do—you’re excited. 

“I told you,” he says, and you roll your eyes in a joyous exasperation.

“Don’t you dare say I told you so,” you say, pinching your lips together and trying desperately to clamp down on your smile. “Not when you’re talking about my very-serious-and-important-phobia-thing.”

“Even if I did tell you so?” 

“I—you can just pretend you didn’t, okay?”

“But then where will I get the acknowledgement? I deserve praise for this, Hebi-Hebi.”

“Maybe later,” you say, light and giddy and absolutely in love. “Just—maybe later.”

“And for right now…” Satoru’s arm, the one that’s not centimetres away from your hand, slowly slides around your back. You can feel the pressure of his Infinity against your waist—his reassurance, that it’s not going anywhere. 

You shift to the right, testing it, and find with a burst of delight that you can’t make a full range of motion with the Infinity keeping you in place. As he works to keep you on your own, you’re kept in your own personal bubble that’s just a few centimetres wide. It feels like you’re the one with Infinity, not Satoru; that you’re the one creating and sustaining this physical boundary between the two of you, like you’re the one who’s in control of it.

Infinity’s soft. You know it’s essentially the power to stop, and the power to slow; Satoru’s dividing the space between you infinitely, even though it only feels like the most meagre of distances. You’ve never really considered how it would feel for a sustained period of time, but for some reason you’re not surprised. 

Just like Satoru, it’s solid and structured and precise, but you can lean into it, feel some form of give. Like the luxury of a firm pillow before a long night’s sleep—unimaginable warmth and comfort, security and safety. 

Through Limitless, you hold Satoru’s hand in yours, and rest the other on the curve of his shoulder. You tap your index finger on the Infinity, and he chuckles.

“Wait,” you say. “Wait. Before we—can I try—?”

“You can do anything,” Satoru admits, in one exhale of breath. The honesty in his voice nearly breaks you. 

Slowly, you step back, and the Infinity from Satoru’s hands falls from you. 

You keep your hand on his shoulder—you keep it there, fingers spread apart, marvelling at how close it is to touching him. It doesn’t feel the same, but it’s something under your palm, under your fingers. There is a pressure, and it isn’t frightening or cold, and you are in awe. 

You swallow, and move your fingers from Satoru’s shoulder. You run them down his arms, along the swell of his arms that you were admiring earlier tonight. 

You half-touch his neck, then move your fingertips down his collarbone, then his chest. You want to keep your hands there, right over his heart. You press down harder, and although the Infinity resists, you think you can feel his heartbeat. 

There’s so much more. You want to touch—this half-touch, whatever you would call this—everywhere. You reach up to his hair, and smile when you actually manage to run your gloved fingers through it. Limitless works, you suppose, on every individual strand. 

And then you’re moving your hands to his face, Satoru’s, cupping his jaw in your palms and running a thumb across the silver scar he’s had for years. You touch the soft area of his cheek that twitches when he lies, and you wish you could kiss it for him. You’re still smiling when you look up to meet his eyes. 

He’s staring at you. His pupils are wide, and he’s staring at you with an emotion that you don’t even know how to interpret or describe.

“Gojo.” You hesitate, and then, because you have to know: “Can you feel it?” you ask. “When I—?”

“Yes,” Satoru breathes. 

You struggle to inhale, forget to exhale. His voice breaks, and it sounds like he hasn’t spoken for days. Usually so smooth, it’s low, raspy, and your breath hitches as he speaks. 

“Really?” You tighten your gentle hold of his jaw, just to see—the distance doesn’t change, you still keep away from him, but his Adam’s apple bobs in his throat, and you try not to latch onto it, try not to stare. “What does it feel like?”

Satoru’s eyelashes flutter as he blinks at you, and he cracks a grin that you notice isn’t wholly confident. 

“Like you’re touching me,” Satoru says. “It feels like you’re touching me.”

“Oh.” Your lips part, and you break his gaze and stare at the sky, deep and navy-blue and scattered with stars, over his shoulder. “Does that feel… okay?”

Satoru laughs. “Yeah. Yeah, Hebi. Sure it does.”

“Okay. Cool.”

“Okay? Cool?” Satoru clicks his tongue, and you smile. “That’s all you’ve got to say?”

“I—” You’re not used to him being this close. You’re not used to him being this close, and you actually liking it. You’re having trouble focusing. “That’s it. Sorry. Just cool.”

“I’m glad I can make that much of an impact.”

“Just give me a second to get used to it,” you say, shifting your weight and trying very hard not to look at him in the eye. “You forget that I’ve never done this before.”

“I’ll try to remember.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Does that mean I have to stay still, while you figure yourself out?”

“Shut up.”

“I thought we’d established—”

“Please learn the beauty of silence, Gojo, just for a few minutes.”

Satoru chuckles, and you join in. The atmosphere feels weighted, volatile—like you could light a match and the air between you would catch fire. 

And then, achingly slow, you feel the pressure of his Infinity at your waist. Your hands are pushed gently from his face by that magnetic force you’re trying to become familiar with. He holds one in his hand, and guides the other to his shoulder. 

Satoru winks at you. 

And gradually, and then all at once, you begin to move. 

You’re dancing.

It’s stilted at first, and you feel as if Satoru’s Infinity is buffeting you in a padded room, rather than allowing him to lead in a dance. The steps aren’t complex, and it’s more of a gradual swaying rather than any intricate routine that you could associate with slow dances, but you soon pick up the rhythm he’s establishing, even without music to guide you. 

It's like a fight between sorcerers, the fights that are done for fun, when no-one really wants it to end—it’s how it ebbs and flows between attack and defence, parrying and charging, mowing forward and falling back. 

This is much more gentle, though, and you feel yourself stepping in-time with Satoru in a way that you could never manage when you would spar with him. Whenever you fight, it’s so clear that he’s going to be the victor, but the way you’re moving now, it’s clear that neither of you have any intention of trying to win. 

You’re close together, his hand hovering around yours, around the curve of your back, Infinity pressing against the base of your spine, making your back arch, and you’re equals. 

It’s so rare, when you feel like his equal, these days. In conversation, in your personal time together, sure—but to the world, he’s elevated leagues above heights you could only dream of reaching. You’re meeting each other together, gloved-hand-in-infinite-space, and you’re the same.

You twist, under the moonlight, and the fabric of your dress makes a swish that sounds as soft as the wind. Satoru steps backwards, and you step forward to fill the space, already intoxicated with the feeling of his closeness. 

“Can you feel it?” he asks, as the Infinity curves around you and holds you both close and apart. “I’ve never figured out whether people can feel it, or not.”

“I can feel it,” you say, smiling. Satoru raises his hand and moves you, with the gentle pressure of Infinity, in a clean turn under his arm. 

“What does it feel like?” Satoru brings you back to him, and you return to your swaying as he keeps time to the symphony only he can hear.

“Like… like you’ve taped magnets with the opposite poles next to each other, and that’s what keeps us apart. That type of gentle repulsion, I think.” You feel warmth rising to your cheeks. The explanation is truthful, sure, but you can’t escape the feel of intimacy that it draws, no matter how strange you know you must sound.

Satoru smiles. “That’s pretty neat.”

“I think so too.”

A step to the side. A step closer. You wonder, in a Satoru-addled haze, just when it was that he’d grown up so handsome. 

“Did you just admit that my technique is cool?” Satoru’s lips twist into a pretence of a cocky grin as he looks over at you, his gaze not once leaving yours. 

You would have thought that near-decades of friendship might have nulled the overwhelming effect that Satoru’s eyes have on you, but they’re as dazzling as ever. With the blindfold, you’ve been seeing them less and less, and you drink in the sight of them staring at you, like it’s been killing you not to have seen his beauty in its entirety.   

“I did not,” you protest, and he shakes his head in what must, must, surely, be love. 

“You so did,” he says, tender and endeared, because you’re not being presumptuous by recognising those emotions, are you? It’s okay for you to recognise that he likes you, surely. By this point, you must have earnt at least that. 

“Ah,” you say, pretending to grapple with the egregious situation, tossing and turning your head as you sway under the stars, “maybe, maybe… I guess we’ll never truly know for sure…”

“You could say.” Satoru shrugs, playful, and you supress your tell-tale expression of pure, unfettered adoration. “You could just tell me.”

“But my whole job is to keep your ego in check,” you say, and he tuts. “No, seriously! I’m supposed to be the reasonable one, and you’re supposed to be the one who’s incredibly self-absorbed.”

“You’re so kind.”

“There we go!” You widen your eyes in an expression of mock surprise. “I just did it, without even realising!”

“Crazy,” he says, chuckling. “You’re very talented at that.”

“Years of practise.”

“I can tell.” He chuckles, and then looks at you more carefully, and your pulse stumbles. “But seriously. Was that a compliment?”

“Maybe,” you say, to see how he reacts.

It’s a good reaction. The tip of his nose and the tops of his cheekbones darken in a childish blush, and your stomach flips as you watch his smile shake.

“Well,” he says, cocking a brow in a way that’s so forced it’s laughable, “do you think you could give me another one? Just so I actually remember it, this time.”

“That’s a big ask,” you say, playing along, trying to disguise how fast your heart’s racing. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to manage it.”

“I’m sure you can,” Satoru says. “I believe in you. And you hardly ever give me compliments, right? This can be a special occasion. A treat, for surviving a shitty clan gathering.” 

“Well… Maybe just this once,” you say, taking a breath and pretending to struggle. It makes Satoru laugh, and your world glows just a little brighter.

“I’ll savour it,” he promises. You don’t succeed in hiding your smile, and he notices.

“Okay, then.” With the softest and most sincere tone you can manage, you say: “Just this once—I think you’re absolutely incredible, Satoru. I think you’re brilliant.”

Satoru’s lips part. He breathes something out that sounds like: “You—?”, and he’s so completely adorable and incredible and brilliant and you can’t stand it anymore.

You laugh, high and rich with affection. Your head tilts forward to rest against his shoulder—Satoru’s Infinity, as you knew it would, holds you up. Your eyes flutter closed and you just laugh, giddy with love and Satoru’s existence.

You pull yourself back only when you remember how much you love looking at him, and you beam at him, enamoured. 

“You’re magnificent,” you say, because he’s right, because you don’t tell him enough, because he deserves to know how wonderful he is every single hour of every single day and, in your final attempt to allow him to understand, you say: “You’re just magnificent, Satoru. You’re smart, and you make me laugh, even when I try to hide it. You make me feel—everything. It’s like my world is sharper and better whenever you’re in it. And you’re good. You’re a good person. You are such good person.”

The change is sudden, subtle, and then utterly overwhelming. 

Satoru is shocked. His lips part. The curves of his cheekbones are dusted with a light pink—when you were young, you would tease him for how easily he’d flush, with how pale he is, and you now adore it, because you never see him like this, and you love it. He’s staring at you in a way he’s never looked at you before—as if it’s just you, only you, as if you’re the only person he could ever look at. 

In the darkest corners of your mind, a voice whispers: what if? 

What if it’s true? What if he looks at you like that, and you haven’t misunderstood? Is that a possibility? Because the widening of his eyes, the glistening of his irises, the flush of his cheeks, surely..?

And then the voice is dashed.

Of course it is. It always is. And you never learn.

Satoru steps away—jerks away, more like, as if you’ve just burnt him. His absence leaves you tilting forward, like you’re trying to replace the gaping hole he’s just left in his wake. He’s pressing a shaking hand to his mouth and he’s still staring, still staring—but it’s not soft, kind, loving. 

It’s fear. 

“Shit,” he breathes, in a half-murmur that sounds like it’s for himself more than it’s for you.

He takes another step back. “Shit,” he repeats. “No—shit, I—” 

“Satoru?” You take a step forward, trying to reach out to him, and he just jerks back. He shakes his head, his eyes fixed somewhere else, somewhere you can’t reach him.

“I’m—” he mutters, running a hand over his face and then staring at you, imploringly. “Really? I’m—but—you’re—shit.”

“You’re what?” You swallow, no longer moving forward. You stay rooted to the ground, and it’s terrifying, being so clueless as to what he’s thinking. It’s—if you could think of anything, it would be the look he gets when he understands a complicated problem, that wide-eyed look of realisation. “What are you—I mean, what—are you okay?”

“Yes,” he says at once, nodding his head and still seemingly unable to look away from you, to tear his gaze from yours. “Fine. Great! I just realised—I, yeah, no, I didn’t.”

“What is it?” you ask cautiously, like he’s some wild animal. He looks like it—fingers twitching, pupils dilated, breathing shallow. 

“Nothing,” he lies, so obviously. “Nothing! I just remembered something. Stupid, really. Not a big—yeah. No, it’s great, we’re fine, yeah.”

You raise your hands, unsure of what you could even do, and he seems to snap instantly out of his reverie and he turns away, quickly, so his back is to you.

“It’s nothing!” he says, cheerfully, his face completely obscured. “I just remembered I’d left the iron on at the house. Yahaba will’ve fixed it. No need for you to worry.” He nods, and you can’t see his face anymore—you were so close to him, and you were even thinking—you’d thought, just for a second—

“Gojo?” With a horrific recognition, you find that you’re close to tears. All the built-up emotion, that joy and love that you’d been releasing, that you’d stopped caging for some goddamned reason, has poured out of you. You gave it to him, and now—you try to walk over to him, but Satoru hears and holds out his hand, shaking his head, stopping you from even getting closer to him. 

You feel sick with panic. All of those emotions rush out of you, and you feel horribly empty and alone, staring at the shoulders of someone you love, who doesn’t even want to look at you.

“Yeah, Hebi-Hebi?” He sounds casual. Is he casual? Is this casual, to him?

“I—What happened?” You’re trying not to sound like a child. You’re—you’re acting pathetic, getting so overwhelmed like this. You’re—

“Nothing. Nothing!” He nods, to himself, and the back of his head moves in a two-part jerking motion. “I’m going to go now. Bye!”

“You—what? Wait—” You step forward, trying to block his path, but Satoru’s always been better than you, and he evades you like your attempts are nothing. “Wait, please—”

“I’ve got to go!” he’s saying, and you’re panicking, now, truly panicking, because he can’t go, because what happened, because—

“Please, Gojo, just—Did I—” The words condense and solidify in your mouth and you stumble around them, but Satoru’s at the door, and he’s leaving, and you don’t know what happened, and you, you: “Did I—Did I do something wrong?”

He pauses at the door. His shoulders, the only thing you can even see of him, are tense.

When he speaks, it’s with a laugh. “You’ve not done anything wrong,” he says, and you can tell, somehow, that he’s telling you the truth. Then he forces joviality into his voice, and he laughs again. “Of course you haven’t! I just realised something. About me. The iron! Stupid me, right? Stupid.” His hand tightens on the door handle. “Stupid.”

“Gojo—”

“Bye!”

And he’s gone.

You stand there. Without Satoru here, it’s deadly silent—even the wind can sense that you’ve been abandoned.

What are you doing? What are you doing up here? You take a shaking breath in, and cover your mouth with your hands. You’re back at your apartment, looking out at the skyline, and the wind is cruel and cold. 

You—you shouldn’t even be reacting like this—because Satoru hasn’t done anything wrong, you know this, you know this. He was just laughing, and he was just looking at you, and you could’ve sworn that he was looking at you in the way that you’ve been looking at him for years. There was something, right? Was there? Why did he leave—leave you, alone?

Your eyes burn. Maybe that’s it—that you allowed yourself a spark of hope, against everything you’ve been telling yourself for all of these years. You let yourself think, indulge, and you find yourself choking back tears, isolated on a rooftop on a cold autumn night. 

And then you realise: oh. You’re not just choking back tears. 

They freeze against your skin. They turn to ice. 

He’s left you alone.

 

--

 

The corridors of the Gojo household are kinder than the Zenin’s. Maybe it’s because you grew up here, and you only have cold memories of that other place, but you think it’s as simple as the kindness in the curves of the wood. They slope gently as they reach up to support the ceilings, and you remember when Satoru would jump so high, trying to reach the highest peak. 

You left your shoes by the door, and you walk barefoot to their bedrooms. You just want to see them, asleep, warm and safe in their beds. Megumi and Tsumiki are something yet untouched by the world of Jujutsu. No matter what will happen when they’re older, you still have them now. 

When you approach their rooms and see Megumi there, you almost cry again. He’s leaning against the door, fast asleep, his dark hair falling into his face and ruffling in time with his breathing.

You move to close to him, and crouch down. You watch him, how he doesn’t frown when he’s asleep. He looks like a child, the way a child should be; not scarred from his parents, not scared of the world. But sleeping, and happy, and keeping guard outside his big sister’s room.

Megumi mumbles something, his little body shuffling around as he tries to get more comfortable. He’s leaning against Tsumiki’s door. 

He had been the one to ask for separate rooms. And, here he is. He’s a little brother, wanting to be near his big sister. 

“He reminds me of Gojo, you know.”

You look up. It’s Yahaba, smiling fondly down at Megumi. She’s in a t-shirt and jeans, and her long hair is down. 

“It’s what he used to do, all the time.” She chuckles as she looks at Megumi, and shakes her head. “Whenever you’d sleep over. I’d find him outside your room in the middle of the night, like he was trying to protect you from danger.”

You don’t want to hear about Satoru right now. You’d left the meeting without him, and you hadn’t looked back. 

You’ll see him tomorrow. He will pretend that nothing happened. You will try to ask, but he will not admit to anything, and you will give up feeling even worse than you feel now.

This is what happens, with Satoru. You sigh. Something must change.

Instead, you look up at Yahaba. “Are you leaving?” you ask, keeping your voice low, so as not to startle Megumi. 

“I am,” she says. “I was just heading out. I’m using some of my holiday days. Did Gojo tell you?”

You can’t remember. “Maybe.”

“He likely didn’t.” Yahaba’s lips twitch up. “If we both know him, he likely didn’t.”

“No.” 

“I would imagine not.” She sighs out a laugh. “You’ll be fine. My boyfriend and I are travelling abroad for a few days. I’ll be back before you notice I’m gone.”

“You have a boyfriend?” You feel guilty, in a way that is unkind and deserved. You have never thought of what Yahaba does outside of her work. 

She looks at you, as if she knows exactly what you’re thinking. “I do. I do.”

You both seem to think it over, and then you look back to Megumi. His cheek is pressed against Tsumiki’s door, and he’s mumbling to himself in his sleep.

You reach over and, tentatively, run your fingers over Megumi’s hair. You wait for the fear, the panic, but it doesn’t come. Whether you’re too tired, too drained from your tears, you’re not sure. 

Megumi’s little mouth opens in a yawn. 

“You need to sleep in your own bed, Megumi,” you whisper to him. 

Stubbornly, he shakes his head under your touch. So, not fully asleep. You pull your hand back, in case he didn’t want you touching him, and Megumi’s eyebrows draw together in an adorably petulant way. With his eyes still squeezed shut, he nuzzles back into your palm, just like a fearful kitten. 

You look up at Yahaba. You’re crying, again, and you can’t stop it.

“Come here, Fushiguro-san.” Yahaba grasps at Megumi’s sides and lifts him onto her hip. His face nuzzles into her shoulder, eyelashes fluttering as he tries to fight off sleep. 

“No,” Megumi tries to mumble. “Don’t want…”

“I know,” Yahaba says. “But you should try. And you can see Tsumiki in the morning.”

Megumi wraps his arms around her neck. “Mm.”

“As I thought.” Yahaba looks to you, and her eyes are full of sympathy. “You should sleep too, Hebi-san.”

You shake your head, rubbing at your tears. “I’ll be fine.”

“There is always a room here for you,” she says. You know it’s true. You know there always is.

“Thank you. But…” You breathe in, try to calm yourself. You don’t want Megumi to hear you crying. “I don’t want to be here in the morning. Satoru’s taking them to school, anyway.”

“Gojo’s not coming back tonight?” Megumi asks, so quiet that you almost miss it. “But… he said he would.”

“Oh.” Tears threaten to spill again. You’re grateful, immensely so, that Megumi cannot see you. “Probably not, kiddo. He’ll be there tomorrow.”

“Mm-m.” Megumi nods into Yahaba’s shoulder, his head drooping.

Yahaba sighs. She rubs small circles onto his back, and she smiles sadly at you. You realise, like a child, that Yahaba might know everything. 

“I’ll take him to bed,” she says.

You nod. “Okay. Thank you.”

“Of course, Hebi-san.” Her eyes wrinkle. 

You don’t watch her walk away. You’re crying again, and you turn away, in case Megumi opens his eyes. You move from the landing, because you can’t have your tears waking Tsumiki up, either.

Finally a safe distance away, you sink to the floor and tuck your knees to your chest. You hold your face in your hands and sob, for the day, for today, and for the rest of your life.

Notes:

2010
Twenty years old

-

...I'm sorry.

Sorry! I'm sorry. But I'm once again up until 4am for this fic--I'm spending the next two weeks at a summer camp being a camp counsellor, lord help me, and I really wanted this up before I went away. There are comments I have yet to reply to, and I am so so sorry but I am so so so sleepy. And if I am horribly late at responding to comments, it'll be because I'm in the middle of the British countryside and I have no wi-fi. Agh.

ALSO. Help, please.

I would really like to change the description to this fic (I think it's just a bit not great--I wrote it two years ago, it's okay, I can admit it's bad--and it doesn't work as a good introduction to what this fic actually includes?). But I don't know what to change it *to*!

I am but the author, and most of the time I have no clue how you guys perceive this shit. Thank you for everyone who comments, because you guys are saving me fr. If you have ideas... please, I would be so grateful. Either to vibes for a description, or a scene/few lines from this fic that really summarise it? Or accurately depict what new readers would be signing up for? You know how some cool ao3 fics have a few lines from the fic as a quote, and then a '---' and then an actual description (and you look at it and think, hell yeah, this is going to be fire)? That's what I'm looking for. Probably. Maybe. Help pls ty

Thank you all again. Since last chapter the increase in interaction with this fic has been insane (thank you season two, oml), so to new and old readers I want to say a *huge* thank you *so much* for reading and getting this far and just being awesome. You guys are the best. Love you loads xx

Chapter 16: 2011

Wednesday, 7th September 2011

You shouldn’t be here. 

It’s not a surprise. You knew that you wouldn’t like it the moment you agreed, but Satoru was already smiling and laughing and talking about something else, and you couldn’t find the energy to go back on your word.

He’d been talking about how he misses you, when he and his friends go out in the evening. Like a neglected dog looking for praise, that hopeful part of yourself had perked its ears up, tail wagging, racing after the casual words. He missed you. And so, you had followed after him. 

You aren’t sure if he knows what it does to you—the simple things, the thoughtless sentences that you never let yourself forget. “I miss you when you’re not there,” he’ll say, grinning to himself as he fixes the collar of his shirt. “Just this once? Come on, for me?”

And, like an idiot, you always give in. It’s been too long for you to forgive yourself for things like this—for the moments when you get so weak for him that you can’t think of anything else. You even forget about yourself, which is inexcusable. You didn’t think you’d become someone who would sacrifice their own comfort just for a small smile from the person they love. 

The bar is too crowded, and you feel the stench of alcohol wrap around your mouth like a gag. You choke on it, eyes pricking, and push yourself further against the wall as drunken twenty-somethings cackle and holler. You can’t remember what you ordered, but the liquid is thick and clear, and you circle your glass in your hand, watching as some of it sloshes over the rim of the glass. It drips down over your fingers, probably soaking the odour into your gloves, and lands with a splat onto the wooden floor. 

You lick at the overflow, and then tip your head back and drain it. You thought you’d remembered it being sweeter, but it’s bitter and dry. But this isn’t the first drink you’ve had, you remind yourself. You’re probably thinking of the one before. 

No, the one before was different. Was it? You shake your head, trying to clear it, but all that happens is that your vision goes blurry and you struggle to focus on the glass in front of you. Where are your hands? You need to make sure you don’t spill your drink. You tighten your grip on the underside of the table, because you don’t think you’re drunk enough to fall out of your seat, but you don’t want to take that risk. 

You’ve definitely had a sweet drink. Definitely.

Or maybe you’re thinking of Satoru. He can’t handle alcohol at all, and refuses to try anything if it’s not packed with about fifty grams of sugar. You drank from his glass when you first got here, and the taste of cranberry syrup is still thick on your tongue. 

“Try it,” he’d said, flashing a smile at the bartender and swivelling round to wave the drink under your nose. You were already getting nervous at the crowds, even though you’d gotten there early enough to greatly precede the peak. Satoru must have noticed, and he’d nudged your chin with the cool rim of the glass to catch your attention.

“It’s disgusting,” you’d said.

“It’s delicious,” he’d said.

Then you’d said something that you can’t really remember. The words are fuzzy, but they’d made Satoru throw his head back and laugh. He’d caught the eye of half the people in the room, something you’ve never truly gotten used to, but when he’d looked back at you with such focus, such clear affection, you’d forgotten about it. Like you were the most important person in the room. You weren’t, not to him. But it was nice to pretend.

The next thing you vividly remember was that you’d rolled your eyes and put up a decent pretence at annoyed reluctance, and Satoru had gently helped you take a sip.

He’d held the glass at the base and at the top, and you’d pinched your nose like Megumi sometimes used to when he didn’t want to eat vegetables. You could tell that Satoru had caught the reference, because his lips had twitched into a lopsided smirk, and it was nearly enough to distract you from opening your mouth to drink.

You’d stretched your neck out, tilting your chin upwards. Satoru’s fingertips had tightened on the glass. You’d looked down at them, at the long nail beds and white flecks that Yahaba had assured him were due to a lack of dairy, but they were so close to your eyes that they’d seemed blurred. You’d looked at him instead, at pink lips and sharp cheekbones and two rings of cobalt blue around blown pupils. 

He’d said something to you, murmured, but it had been lost to the noise of the bar and the noise of people. You’d remembered to part your lips, and the liquid had fizzed over your tongue, effervescing a giddy reaction across your tastebuds. You’d savoured the sweetness of the cranberry, and detected a hint of orange as you swallowed.

“It’s good,” you’d said. Your voice had crackled like a broadcast from an old radio. Your throat had been lined with something sugar-sweet. 

You try to find Satoru in the crowd now. It’s difficult, from where you’re sitting. You’re wedged between two walls, square in the corner. It leaves a metre’s berth between you and anyone else asocial enough to find this nook. There’s not much opportunity for watching the crowd, mainly because you’re so removed from it. 

For a moment, you think you catch a glimpse of him. Someone shouts something unintelligible, and he stumbles backwards. He’s got his glasses pushed into his hair, and it looks the same way it usually does when he has his blindfold on. Even across the room, you can see that his eyes are wild. There’s a faint hickey beginning to blossom underneath his jaw. 

Satoru’s always been a lightweight. 

The bar isn’t as full as it would have been if it were a Friday. That’s one of the benefits of being a sorcerer: your pleasure isn’t constrained to the weekends. 

The thought makes you laugh, and you try to lick at a few remaining drops from the rim.

Maybe Satoru will come and find you again, get you another drink. That’s what he’d promised he’d do, when you told him you were going to stay in the corner.

“Too many people,” you’d said.

He’d nodded, waving over your shoulder at someone he must have recognised. “Yeah, course. Talk to you in a second, I’m just going to—hey, hey!”

And so, you’re in a corner. You’re waiting for him, whilst he’s forgotten about you. 

You might feel better if you could actually leave. You’d really, really like to leave—not even to head back to your home, where everything is clean and quiet and cold but familiar, but just to be somewhere on your own—but there’s a great wall of people blocking your way, a chasm between you and the door. You guess that this is it for the night; sitting and staring and feeling sorry for yourself. 

Revulsion curls in your stomach. You’re acting pathetically. Still, unless you move, you’re stuck circling around in your own head, and you can’t move without being swarmed by bodies and limbs and the suffocating stale breath of happy young adults. 

The only reason you’d agreed to come out tonight was because Shoko was supposed to be here, but she’d left before the first half hour. You haven’t yet asked her about the attractive woman she’d left with: the one who Shoko has been spending more and more time with, lately. 

The woman looks to be a few years older than you, with warm brown skin and hair dyed a faint pastel pink, as if it had once been more vibrant but had faded after months of washes. It suits her, though, this woman. When they had left, Shoko had placed a hand on her back, and she had smiled quietly across at her, with more happiness than you have seen in years. 

The woman’s lips are always painted a soft rose—she likes pink, this woman, you have noticed—and you keep wanting to ask her where she gets her lipstick from. You have seen her occasionally, but consistently, over the past six months. Seven months ago, you noticed a streak of rose pink on Shoko’s neck, beneath her jaw. You hadn’t said, or asked her, because…

You’re not sure if Shoko would approve of you trying to reach out, especially since she hasn’t explicitly told you about the relationship between her and the woman. You’re not sure if she ever will. 

It’s not something you can confide in Satoru about, in case he hasn’t noticed, and you also don’t want to talk behind Shoko’s back about something so private. And, apart from those two, there’s no-one else you really know. 

The thought would be sobering if you weren’t quite so drunk.

You want to forget this morning, too. Not just now, sitting on your own in a bar that you hate, abandoned by both Shoko and Satoru, trapped in a cage with bars made of skin and flesh and bodies. 

Skin and flesh and bodies. 

Like the curse you had fought today. Burrowing inside of its victims’ innards, animating them, forcing them to stagger around like half-dead remnants of the people they once were. 

The space had been littered with bodies, echoing with the agonised moans and whimpers of those that hadn’t been yet dead when the curse had opened up their torsos. Blood had pooled from every orifice, their eyes leaking, their ears, mouths. 

A woman had choked on her own tongue and the curse, piloting her body without any grace or delicacy, had forced her to bite it off. Her screams still ring through your ears, and you drink heavily from your glass.

Maybe you’re a lightweight, too. You don’t think you’re as bad as Satoru, but you think back to how much you’ve actually had to drink tonight, and you hum. Well. Maybe you are. And maybe you’re not actually drunk. Tipsy, definitely. You blink and you can feel all of the eye muscles it uses. Wait. Yes, drunk. You’re not really sure. 

You shouldn’t be drinking, not in an environment that scares you so much. It’s dangerous for you, and you should have thought about it before you ordered the last couple times. Probably.

With the alcohol buzzing through your blood, you’re surprisingly less afraid. You still wouldn’t be able to—walk through it, not straight through. You’re still stuck here. But a room full of loud, intoxicated people less than a few metres away from you is certainly less terrifying than it would be if you were sober. 

You shift in your seat, and the crumpled-up piece of paper digs into your hip. You remember—you’d closed your hand into a fist, when the man had given it to you. It’d made him laugh. Kazuo. He’d smiled when you’d slipped it into your pocket, like the action had sealed an oath.

Two fingers digging into the slight pocket of your shorts, you extract the cream paper. His name, his number, a smiley-face. It would be endearing, if you were someone else. 

“Is anyone sitting here?” he’d asked, offering two drinks and a tentative smile. 

You’d stared, too long, until the smile began to fade. As the upward turn of his lips drooped, you’d shrugged, shuffled backwards and gestured to the spare seat. The table, round, had tilted as he set the twin drinks down.

“I’m Mochizuki,” he’d said.

“Hebi,” you’d returned. 

His laugh was breathy, through his nose, a curious little huff. “Just Hebi? Is that all I get?”

“That’s all you get.”

“Not even a first name?” His smile was boyish, cute. “Here: I’m Kazuo Mochizuki. What’s your full name?”

“For now it’s just Hebi.”

He’d raised his eyebrows, and had taken a sip of his drink, his eyes not leaving yours as he stared at you over the curved rim. It’d been like he’d found you impressive, as if you were trying to be coy. 

You weren’t, but it’d been a long time since a man had approached you like this. It was flattering, and you wondered how long it would be until he’d retreat. There were some men who would stumble back at the first sign that you weren’t attractive, and there were some who would take every rejection like a victory: glory in their perseverance.  

It might be interesting to see if this man would fit into the two types. How honest would you be, until he revealed himself?

“Are you here with anyone else?” he’d asked, after many minutes of pitiful question-and-answer. You’d not pushed him away, because it was better to talk to someone than to be left alone with your thoughts, nowadays.

“My friends,” you’d said. You’d pointed towards where you’d thought they were, but your finger drooped like a wilting flower; Satoru, and the people he’d brought with him, were gone. “Oh.”

“Are—are they not there?” the man had asked, glancing up.

“I can’t see them.”

And you couldn’t. Your heart had begun to thrum in a painful one-two-one-two. You’d been relying on Satoru to help you leave. 

“You can’t?”

“I can’t,” you’d said, quiet. “They said they’d wait for me.”

“But they wouldn’t have left you alone, right?” The man had looked at you, leaning around to survey the bar. “What did they look like?”

You’d snorted into your drink. “Don’t ask me that. I don’t know most of them.”

“If they’re your friends—” He’d hesitated, and had scratched the shell of his ear. You’d stared at it: he’d on kept doing it, when you were talking. You’d guessed it was a nervous tick. It’d made you something close to pleased, the emotion encased in layers of apathy, to know that you’d made him nervous.

“They’re not my friends,” you’d said. “Not really. I lied.”

“But you came here with them?”

“Only one of them is my friend.” You’d closed your eyes for a second, the memory of cranberry syrup on your tongue. 

“But if he’s left—”

“He wouldn’t have,” you’d said, surprising yourself with your conviction. “He wouldn’t have left me alone. He’s not fifteen again, is he?”

“But—sorry, I don’t—”

“Exactly.” You’d nodded, and slumped back down in your chair. “Don’t worry about it. He’ll remember about me eventually.”

The man’s Adam’s apple had bobbed. It had been bulbous, masculine, in stark contrast with the boyishness of his face. 

“I told you not to worry,” you’d said, harshly. “Don’t.”

“I—Sorry, okay, I won’t.” He’d sat there for a second, and then had taken another swig of the drink.

You’d copied him, and found yourself craving something a little more alcoholic. Either this man had a very low tolerance, or he’d bought the drink with the lowest percentage to share with you. Maybe you should find that attractive, that he wasn’t interested in getting you drunk, but you just wanted to sink into blankness. It was already proving to be shit.  

You were caught at that moment in-between, just on the cusp of sober to shoulder the pre-emptive regrets, and just drunk enough to have your stomach slosh and churn like the ocean. Your eyesight was fuzzy, but not fuzzy enough to be funny. You took another sip, and frowned down at yourself, feeling if you drank much more you’d be in danger of vomiting. But you would do it, anyway. 

You wanted your blood to bubble with alcohol, to get so free that you could forget about tonight. What a failure. You hadn’t been drunk like this in months, and nothing had happened to really warrant it: more a slow culmination of everything, everything, everything. 

“Do you—” he’d said, and then had looked back down at the table. It was like he was expecting you to shout at him, and you felt a sudden twinge of pity. How cold had you been acting, to make this guy so tentative around you?

“Do I what?” you’d said, looking up at him. You hadn’t had the energy to try to smile—you hadn’t had the energy to smile all night, it felt like. But he seemed to appreciate it. He’d offered another smile, and you’d noticed that he had a small beauty mark above his cupid’s bow. 

His lips were full and parted. You could see how his tongue had slid over his teeth when he’d noticed you looking. You’d noticed.

“Do you—I mean,” he’d begun, and then had broken off before being able to continue. You tilted your head, potentially encouraging, potentially curious. “Will you be okay to get home? You don’t have to—you know, tell me where you live, I don’t mean that. But do you want me to call you a cab? I’ve got a number, if you don’t—”

“No.” You’d leaned forward, fingertips circling around the base of the glass. “You don’t need to do that.”

He’d smiled, then, more genuine than you’d seen all night. “It’d make me feel better. If your friends aren’t here, then—you know. It’s safer.”

That was nice. It’d been nice, and you’d been surprised that it was. It wasn’t something you were used to, someone thinking about you like that—with Satoru, it was a given that you wouldn’t be going home together. He would walk you to the bus stop, if he wasn’t already busy with a beautiful woman. 

You didn’t need to be taken care of. Even drunk, you’d been confident that you’d be able to subdue every person in the bar, barring Satoru. And Satoru knows that, which is why he doesn’t bother you with the typical things that you’ve seen guys do with girls they care about. You don’t want to be wrapped in cotton wool, and he’s never pretended that you’re any less capable than you are. He's also never pretended that you’re any more capable. Satoru knows you better than anyone else, and if he thinks you’re alright, then you’d trust your life that you would be.

There hasn’t been a time in your life that you’ve been taken care of. You can’t think of a person who would think of you as someone to be taken care of, helped. 

As you always do when you’re drunk and reminiscing, you think of Sara. You’ll never escape the guilt that surrounds you whenever you remember her and your younger brother. But you remember why you had hated your childhood, and you feel sick, now, thinking about it. You had been a child, and you’d felt protective of her, like you were supposed to help her.  

That hadn’t been your job. You shouldn’t have been thinking that. And even if she’d wanted to protect you, she hadn’t succeeded. Sure, she had been better than your mother—but, fuck, that hadn’t been hard to do. For all the relief she’d brought you, she hadn’t saved you. 

You’re still like this. Aren’t you? Trapped in a crowded, noisy bar, gloves on your hands, a crumpled-up piece of paper in your pocket. 

Oh. Yeah, you’d been thinking of Kazuo.

“I’m safe enough here,” you’d said to the man, and had raised a finger as he started to protest. “It’s okay. I’m not going anywhere until this crowd clears.”

He’d scratched at his ear again, and you’d smiled. Very faint, but your muscles had tightened, like you weren’t used to the sensation. You hadn’t smiled for a few hours. Maybe that was it.

“Do you want me to stay with you?” he’d asked. Again, you’d been surprised—he wasn’t leaning forward, pressing himself into your space. The question wasn’t a command, but an offer. Even if you had no idea about him, you had the hesitant impression that he was a good person.

“No,” you’d said, and in the corner of your eye you’d caught a flash of silver, some red-painted nails tangled and tugging at his hair. Satoru was kissing someone on the neck, and the dead weight clamped across your ribs. “No. If you’re going, you can go.”

“I don’t want to press,” he’d said, “but are you sure you don’t want—”

“Are you trying to have sex with me?” you’d asked, sharp. You’d been unable to focus back on him—not because you were drunk, you weren’t that drunk yet—but because of the image of red lips against pale collarbone flashing against the back of your eyes. 

The man had reeled back, eyes wide, beauty mark above cupid’s bow stretched out. He’d kept blinking, and had scratched at his ear so much that you’d thought it would bleed.

“No,” he’d said, quickly, “no, I’m not.”

“Really?” 

“Really.” His eyebrows had twitched, and it had been the first display of irritation that you’d seen from him. “You’re drunk. Aren’t you?”

“I am,” you’d said. “A little.”

“So. Of course I’m not.” He’d seemed offended, and it had impressed you, a little.

“Good,” you’d said, swallowing down your drink until it was half empty. “You wouldn’t have, by the way.”

“I wouldn’t have what?”

“Gotten to sleep with me.” You’d stared at him, impassive, as his cheeks began to colour. 

“I—okay, sure.” He’d cleared his throat. He’d been embarrassed.

“It’s not you,” you’d said, finally looking away. “Don’t worry about that.”

“I wasn’t—I don’t want you to think that I was—”

“It’s me,” you’d said, sighing. “Do you want me to tell you?”

“I—”

“I’ll tell you. I’ve got an extreme phobia of human touch because I was abused as a child. That’s why I’m sitting here. It’s why I wouldn’t have gone home with you.” You’d sipped your drink again. “Sorry.”

“You shouldn’t—okay, I mean, do you really?”

“Yeah. It’s why I’ve got those gloves on. Weren’t you wondering about that?”

“Oh. Well. Yes. But… that’s not nice, for you.”

You’d laughed, then. He’d looked embarrassed again, clearly not intending it as a joke.

“Sorry,” you say again, trying not to be unkind. “It’s not.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“No, but—are you serious?”

“Deadly.” You’d shrugged again, and curled your mouth into a smile. It had amused you, how horrified he’d looked, but you’d tried to make your smile seem a little softer. 

You’d spoken some more, after that. Better conversation, even though you couldn’t quite force yourself to be pleasant. And you look down now, at the number creased in the lines of your palm. He hadn’t offered it immediately, but you’d laughed at how he’d pushed it across the table, conspicuously avoiding touching your hands. 

“For when you’re sober,” he’d said, and when he stood up you noticed how he had a second beauty mark, on the lobe of his ear where you have yours pierced. It’s the ear he’d been scratching at whenever he was nervous. 

You look at it now. You fold up the number in half, scoring the fold with your nail, and then you encase the paper in your fist. You put it back in your pocket. For when you’re sober, you decide. 

You’ve had more to drink since then. Much more: whilst you’d been sentient enough to carry a conversation like normal, you wonder if the man would even have approached you now. The room seems to move, and then you realise you’re swaying in your seat. It had been early in the night, when he’d spoken to you, and it’s hours later.

Satoru’s checked on you. Just after the man left—Kazuo, his name was, which he’s written next to his number. You should probably remember that now. Or maybe you shouldn’t—maybe you’ll remember it in the morning when you see the number, memories flickering back intermittently. 

Satoru checked on you. He slumped down in the chair next to you, his hair damp with sweat. The heat of the bar, the noise, the push of bodies. He leant his head against the wall and looked up at you, over his glasses, and smiled. 

“You okay?” he asked. “Sorry I’m leaving you alone—it’s Enkai’s birthday, and we’re all—one second!” 

Someone was calling him over, and Satoru just laughed and waved them off. 

“But they’ll be done soon,” he said, still laughing as he looked back to you. “And we can—get a drink together, or head off, or whatever. I know this isn’t your scene, Hebi-Hebi.” He pushed up his glasses: they had fallen down his nose. “I’m glad you came here with me.”

And you had grown warm, and you had hated yourself for it. Satoru had thrown you a bone: that was what it felt like. 

“Sure,” you’d said.

“Yeah.” Satoru stood, stretched, waved off a man who was beckoning him back to their table. “I’ll just—” He walked away, and then paused, half-turned back. “One thing—” 

“What?”

“You…” Satoru gestured towards you, and then the seat he just vacated. He grinned, childishly. Anyone would have been able to tell it was fake: not even just you. 

You raised your eyebrows. “What?”

“The guy who was here,” Satoru said. “I saw, he just left.”

“Oh.” You looked down, placed a hand over the crumpled-up paper. “Yeah. What was his name?”

“You knew his name?”

“He told me.” You extract the paper. “Kazuo Mochizuki.”

Satoru’s nose wrinkled. “I don’t know any Mochizukis. He’s not a sorcerer.”

“I wouldn’t imagine so. He didn’t know who I was.” 

“Right.” Satoru looked back to his group of friends. His face was less pleased, now; dour, and sullen. You had been confused, you remember.

“Gojo?” you asked. “All okay? He was just asking for my number—no, sorry, he gave me his number. The other… the other way around, you know.”

“The other way around,” Satoru repeated. “You’ve got his number?”

You showed it to him, because he asked. “He gave it to me.”

“Sure. Yeah, cool.” Satoru flashed you another false grin, and then gestured behind him. “Yeah, cool. I’ve got to get back to—”

“Of course,” you muttered to yourself. And then, louder: “Enjoy yourself, Gojo.”

You can’t get rid of the way you feel. If it was something that could fade without reciprocation, it would have dissolved a decade ago. You’ve tried time, you’ve kind of tried distance. That time when you were fifteen, sixteen, when you had spent time apart. Though that wasn’t really distance, not really. You saw him every day. And it hurt, every day.

But it doesn’t mean you’ve not tried. You’ve worked with so much, and you’ve tried so hard.

Love shouldn’t hurt like this. That’s what you try to tell yourself, as if it would do anything to remind yourself. You wish you knew what it should feel like, love—what it should look like. You’ve got no idea: your mother and father aren’t a good example, and neither are your father and Sara. 

You’ve barely got good examples of love, point blank. Sara’s love for Haru, your brother. Friendships? Potentially, though you’ve not got many of those anymore. How long can you string yourself along before you become a waste of a person? 

Satoru, Satoru, Satoru, your brain hums. Your heart thrums his name, your tongue curls around the syllables. You love him, and you’ve loved him for so long that you don’t know what life is like without it. A world without Satoru is impossible. 

You wonder if he thinks of you like this. You wonder if his chest aches for you, if he has ever bubbled with joy after spending the day with you. You wonder if he cried over you, back when you tried to convince yourself that you could hate him, back when you were a stupid teenager. You know he cares for you, you know he loves you. You know he has never loved you enough.

He loves you in the centimetres of distance he keeps between you, in the wry smiles when you indulge in his jokes, in the sweet things he shares with no-one else. And he’s never afraid of showing his love, and that’s how you know. He hides parts of himself, all the time, but he has never hidden his love. Of the two, Satoru is the one who loves in his excess, who showers you with everything he can muster. 

You have seen his love in abundance, and so you see its extent.

And still, you manage to surpass it. Yourself, in your love for him. In that quiet, mournful way you love him now, you take what he will give you and still desire more. As Satoru knows you better than any other soul, you know him: you see him in his entirety and love him, and you therefore know how much love he has to give. You crave him in ways he has never craved you.

You tip your head back, cold wall pressing against your hair. You don’t know what to do. You don’t know what to do, to make yourself happy. Because you’re not happy now. 

The chair next to you creaks, and he scrapes it against the floor to tilt it closer to you. 

“Hey, Hebi-Hebi.”

And your heart is beating again. And you can feel your blood rush in your veins, like a cadaver returning to life. You hate how helpless his existence makes you, sometimes. It’s pathetic, and you hate yourself for it. You feel simultaneously whole and a half of one greater something, with Satoru. 

“Hello,” you manage, peeling your head off the wall and raising your eyebrows at him. “You been having fun?”

Satoru laughs, waving his hand in the air flippantly. “Not really.”

“Oh, shame.” You try to peer at where Satoru had come from. “She looked pretty, from what I saw of her. She was pretty, wasn’t she?”

“She was,” Satoru says, staring at a spot just above your head. He smiles at something you don’t understand, and cracks a genuine smile. “Nah, but she was nothing compared to you, Hebi-Hebi.”

You choke on your drink. Both embarrassed and bewildered, you cough, feeling the back of your neck begin to warm. “What was that?” you splutter, one hand on your heart.

“She was gorgeous,” Satoru says loudly, leaning back in his chair and nodding, “but you’re even more gorgeous. Gorgeous-er. Ignore that. I know it’s not a word.”

“Oh,” you say, head buzzing with alcohol and you’re even more gorgeous. “You’re drunk out of your mind, Gojo.”

“Yep,” he says, and pouts. “Hey! But so are you.”

“I know,” you say, “but you’re actually drunk enough to forget how to talk. That’s so weird.”

“You’re weird.”

“You sound,” you say, and then think about it. “You sound like a teenager.”

He sighs. “I’m not a teenager anymore. Isn’t that crazy? We’re adults.”

“Adults,” you say, rolling the word on your tongue. “We’re adults. You don’t act like an adult.”

“You act like an adult,” he complains, running a hand through his hair. You don’t have the strength to hold back from watching it—long fingers, raking through strands that look almost lilac in the hazy light of the bar. “You’ve got a house, and you pay rent, and you’ve got a job, and you’re so responsible that it’s boring.”

“You’re just rich,” you remind him, jabbing a finger in the air. “That’s why you don’t act like an adult. You’re rich and weird and you don’t act like an adult.”

“So mean,” Satoru says, sticking his tongue out, quick and pink and wet. “I’m fine. We’re fine.”

“We’re fine,” you hum. Someone shouts from where Satoru’s just come from, even louder than the music, and you flinch. “No, we’re not. Shit.”

“We’re not?”

“I’m not. Sorry. I want to leave.” You look at him, fingers tightening on the tacky table. “I’m sorry. Can you—? Just so I can get outside. Then you can go back.”

Satoru cocks his head to the side. You wonder if he’s being analytical, or if he’s trying to be funny. “I don’t want to go back,” he says. “Why’d you think I want to go back?”

“Because.” Of course. “You and that woman. And—the woman before her. And the women.”

“The women,” Satoru scoffs, waving his hand and standing. “Forget about the women. I always do. Don’t you notice?”

“I can never forget about the women,” you say.

He doesn’t seem to hear you. After a second, you do. 

Idiot.

Satoru’s a foot taller than everyone else in the bar. Some people glance up at him and step aside automatically. Some others admire him, and position their bodies towards him. His Infinity slides over you, now so familiar, that magnetic hum that pulls your muscles and attention and heart. You trail behind him as he parts the crowd, keeping close.

“Follow me,” you hear him say. 

“Of course,” you reply. It’s the truth. You’re never going to be able to change it. “Obviously.”

 

--

 

“How many women have you even…” Satoru mumbles, and then pauses. “What?”

“What?” You stumble over to him, and trip on the pavement and curse. Drunk, drunk, drunk. “What were you saying?”

“You’re cold.”

“I’m not cold.”

“You’re—you’re so cold,” he says, and points to your bared arms. They’re peppered with gooseflesh. You remember thinking it was cold, when you first went out. You’re not cold anymore, even though you think you should be. Alcohol makes you warm, you think happily. You should drink more.

“It’s too late to be cold,” you say, holding your arms out in front of you and blowing on them. “I’m not cold, not in my head.”

“But you’re shivering.” Satoru tugs at his blazer—tight-fitting, casual, a light blue that pulls out the flush in his cheeks. “Hey, hey, you should—you should take this.”

“Take what?”

“Take this,” he insists, taking the blazer off and bundling it up. He thrusts it at you, and then drops it on the floor. “Take it.”

You grimace, and scrunch up your nose. It makes him chuckle. “I’m not picking it up. You pick it up.”

“But I dropped it for you.”

“You dropped it.”

“For you.”

“For me?”

“For you,” Satoru says, crouching down to retrieve it. “So I wouldn’t touch you, when you, you know. When I give it to you, so I don’t touch you. Isn’t that—what I should do?”

Satoru looks genuinely curious, genuinely put-out, and his lips begin to pull into a pout. It’s absolutely hilarious, and you hiccup out a laugh. 

“You’re so—oh, shit, no,” you backtrack, giggling. “No you’re not. I didn’t say that.”

“What were you going to say?”

You pick up his blazer from his outstretched hands and throw it over your shoulder, striding forward across the deserted street. “I didn’t say anything!” 

“What were you saying?” Satoru steps forward to catch up with you, sidestepping so he’s fully facing you as you continue to walk. “You were going to say something. About me.”

“You were saying something,” you counteract, raising your eyebrows in a pointed way. “You said something about women. Not me-women. Other women.”

“I did?”

“How many women, you said.”

“Oh, right,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “Yeah.”

“You remember?”

“I think so. I said, how many women—have you even—” Satoru punctuates the breaks in his sentences by twisting his body into a different dance position each time, and talks to you with his hands above his head in a dramatic flourish, “—seen me with tonight?”

Satoru bats his eyelashes, and you cackle with laughter. A man in a duffel coat veers out of your way, giving the two of you a tired glare. 

“How many—how many have I seen you with?” You wheeze, trying to contain your laughter. It’s so difficult tonight, when everything is fuzzy and glowing and inherently ridiculous. Drunk! You’re not drunk. “Loads!”

“No!” Satoru shouts, grabbing onto a lamp post and spinning around it. “You haven’t! I promise, you haven’t!”

“I have,” you insist, tripping after him. “I have, I have.”

“You haven’t, you haven’t…”

“Then what’s that?” you say, pointing a floppy hand at a pink bruise at his collarbone. 

Satoru grins sheepishly, like a kid caught out in a lie. “That was just from one of them.”

“One of them?” You slap your hands over your face and groan. “That sounds—honestly, Gojo, that makes you sound so—”

“But it was just one!” he protests, stepping in front of you and offering his hands to the sky. “Just one! Not loads, just one.”

“It’s never just one with you, Gojo.”

“It sometimes is. Like tonight.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“If I promise you?” Satoru tries to seem amused. It’s a very convincing impression, you’ve got admit. He’s been getting better at it, recently. You struggle to remember why you’re talking about this. “That there was just one?”

“Tonight?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“One.”

“I promise.”

“Why?” You feel the word drip off your tongue. 

The syllable elongates. Your jaw drops open. 

“Why do I promise?” 

It’s the same with Satoru. The vowels of the first words blur together, the consonants going missing under the faint slur to his words. 

“No,” you say. “Yes. Wait.” You slow to a halt outside an office building: the doors are made from a sleek blend of glass and metal, its windows frosted with the company’s logo. It’s too dark to be able to read what it says, but it feels cold against your back as you lean against it. 

It’s a cold night. The streets are empty, save for a lone car that passes by. Your arms are bare, and you can see every breath you take as it frosts the air in front of you. You exhale deeply, blowing the mist at Satoru like a smoker. Which you are. He laughs, and mimics holding a cigarette. You join in, and for a moment you both pretend to smoke, puffing the silver air back-and-forth. You want a cigarette, now, but you didn’t bring any with you. And Satoru doesn’t like it when you smoke, and he’d groaned at you to leave them at home when he’d called you earlier. 

Finding yourself shivering, you look down at your arms again. You remember with a twinge of pleasure that you’ve still got Satoru’s jacket over your shoulders—you slip into it, and the silk of the lining slides against your skin like water. 

“You said she was gorgeous,” you sigh, tipping your head back and watching him. “That’s what you said.”

Satoru hums, but his lips twist upwards in amusement. It’s the smile that’s meant to look seductive and in-control, but it actually shows you that he’s buying time so he can consider what to say next. When he smiles like this, the corners of his mouth disappear into a dark line, and his lips press together at the center. 

“I don’t even remember what she looked like,” Satoru says, laughing in a way that tells you he’s being honest. “She might have been. I never remember.”

“Poor woman.” The words come out in a jumble, and you have to repeat yourself before Satoru can understand it. You try to pretend that it’s just your drunken slurring—you don’t trust yourself to ask him if he remembers calling you gorgeous. 

Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous, your brain supplies. You want to hear him say it again. 

“How’s she poor? Poor woman?”

“Poor woman.”

“Poor woman?”

“Poor—shut up—poor woman. Because—she would’ve thought she’d be going home with you. You know.” You nod knowingly and drop your voice to a whisper. Satoru leans closer to try to catch your words. His hair drops down around his eyes, and it’s as if the blue irises glow, shining through the silver strands. 

He’s careful not to let his skin touch yours, but you can feel the warmth of his breath against your neck as he tilts his ear closer to your mouth. Your back is pressed against the wall of the office building; you’ve gone from casually resting on it to gripping it for as much purchase as you can find. It’s cool even through your clothes: Satoru is burning hot.  

“What do I know?” Satoru murmurs. You hold yourself back from gasping. He smells like alcohol and sugar, and it’s intoxicating. 

You breathe out a laugh. It’s shaky, and your voice catches on itself as you try to talk again. “You know what I mean. Don’t—you don’t have to make me say it.”

“I have no idea,” he says, and moves his mouth away from your neck. As he shifts, you feel him exhale, hot against your dry skin. You rise with him as he leaves your space, your body compelling you to keep as close to him as you can. Satoru still hasn’t touched you. “I’m very innocent. You’ve got to let me know what you’re implying.”

Against your better judgement (that is still there, somehow, screaming at you across a glacial lake), you grin. Satoru catches the shift in your expression and shouts triumphantly, laughing as you smile. You shush him, glancing around to see if anyone heard. No-one lives here, and there’s no-one in sight; his voice reverberates along the street, echoing in the lack of a crowd’s insulation. 

“You know what I mean,” you say, hiding your face in your shoulder and pretending to glare at him. “You’re—you’re so annoying.”

“You’re more annoying.” 

You shake your head. “I’m not.”

“You are. With the guy.” Satoru’s fingers slide along the folded neckline of his blazer, the blazer you’re wearing. Close to your throat. 

You swallow. “What?”

“The guy you were talking to,” Satoru repeats, his eyebrows lowering in an expression of dislike. “You talked to him for ages.”

You snort. “You noticed?”

“I noticed when he walked up to you. And I noticed when he stayed with you, and when he kept staying with you, and that you were talking to him. And I noticed when he walked away.” Satoru fixes his gaze on the blazer, his blazer, your blazer? His body is still close to yours, and you blink slowly at him, working through everything he’s saying. 

“I thought you were—” You forget what you were saying, and then you remember again. “That you were occupied. Preoccupied. With the woman.”

“What woman?”

“The woman you kissed.”

“Oh.” Satoru shrugs, distracted. “I wasn’t. C’mon… I mean, come on.”

“Come on, come on what?”

Satoru finds the repetition funny. “Come on come on. That’s it, that you, didn’t you see the way he looked at you?”

“Yeah. Ooh. Yep.” 

“You did?” 

“Yeah. I think he liked me,” you whisper drunkenly.

Satoru’s eyes narrow. “I know. That’s what I mean. Annoying.”

“I’m annoying that he liked me?”

“You don’t get it.” Satoru leans his head back and looks up at the sky, and then lets out a loud, long sigh. “I’m not… I’m not sober. Sober. Sober.” He rolls the word around in his mouth. “Sober. Weird… fucking word, sober.”

“No.” You push yourself a bit further up the wall. You’d slid down it, accidentally. “No, I don’t think—I am, either.”

“I shouldn’t be saying this,” Satoru mutters. “Stupid.”

“You’re not stupid.”

“Stupid!” Satoru shouts it up to the sky, like a war cry, like he’s calling out to some god, and you cover your face with your hands, stifling a giggle.

At your laugh, Satoru looks back to you. His face is lit up, and he’s smiling. “You think I’m funny?” he asks, and then he hiccups. 

“You’re not stupid.” 

“No,” he says, lips moving slowly around the words. “Maybe. Maybe, sometimes.”

Satoru still hasn’t touched you. He’s gotten so close, but he hasn’t. 

“You look nice,” Satoru says, suddenly. “In this.” 

He points at his blazer, and when you meet his eye you see a silent question. Your lips part, and you shrug, the fabric moving with you—an attempt to appear casual, an attempt you both know he can see through.

It’s in these moments that you’re grateful you know Satoru so well. You can’t tell what’s going through his mind, not when he’s trying so hard to keep it all from you, but you know what he’s asking of you.

His finger runs across the lapel. His nail catches on the fabric as he trails it upwards. At this, he chuckles. You don’t dare to breathe. 

“Is that okay?” Satoru mumbles. He sounds drunk—but, oh, so are you, and you press your palms against the wall to try to find some stability. Your legs feel weak, and you cannot find strength to refuse.

“Yeah,” you say. “It’s okay.”

Satoru slides his middle finger underneath the hem. His hand is now so near to your face that you can’t see it without craning your neck down—but you can feel the pressure, feather-light, as he rubs along the smooth fabric. 

He pulls at it, just an inch, and you feel a prickle of cold as the outside air brushes your skin. You inhale, and Satoru’s eyes flick up to yours.

“Good.” Satoru isn’t smiling; he seems intent, searching, the way he’s looking at you now. Then his eyes flicker with something pleased, amused, and his lips twitch into a smile. “Because, you know. I like this on you.”

“This?” you echo, managing the words a half-beat too late. 

“My clothes,” Satoru admits, with a grin. “I like it… when you, you should wear my clothes more often. You think?”

“They’d be a bit too big for me,” you say. “You’re—tall.”

Satoru’s nose crinkles with his smirk and, god, it’s adorable. “Yeah. That’s… yeah. Still look good in them, I think. You’d look… really good, I think.”

And he still hasn’t touched you.  You know that he won’t, not in the way that people have done before. You glance down at his hands again, and try to remember them as the hands that had made you cry when you were a child. 

They’re different. They’re the same long fingers, pale skin, grey-blue veins. You don’t recognise them, and yet they haven’t changed. 

It’s the same conflict with Satoru. You feel safe, secure and familiar, in the presence of the boy you’ve known your entire life. You feel electric, every inch of your body alive and waiting, every nerve anticipating the pressure that you’ve been craving and hating for decades. 

You want him to touch you. Your body revolts against the thought. You want him to touch you, and your mind begins to blare its warnings. 

Danger, it says. You say back: I love him.

“That’s what you said before,” you breathe. “Something like that. That I looked…” It slips out before you can stop it: the reminder of gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. You moisten your lips. Satoru watches. 

“I did,” Satoru says, after a pause. The hesitation is long, almost palpable in the air. You’ve said it, now: and now you’ve said it, you seem to have broken the unspoken agreement between the two of you that’s been continuing for years. 

Satoru, when he’s drunk, or when you’re too in love with him to care… there are moments. They’ve been happening for years, and you’re not blind to them. He’ll say something, or you’ll be just a little too honest, and it’ll shift the dynamic between you two ever so slightly. It hints at something, and though it’s something that you know could never happen, they’re still hints.

You have always elected to ignore them. They exist, and they happen, but if you indulge in them then you’ll never escape the half-life. Your life would be full of memories, nothing real or substantial. Just dreams and falsities and illusions of something more, and you cannot do that to yourself.

You are so cruel to yourself sometimes, indulging yourself with Satoru, and you hate yourself for it. It breaks your heart over and over, every time. Something has to change. You have been telling yourself this for the better part of five years. And still, you coward, you do nothing. 

But you cannot pretend this much. You know that life happens, and you know the situation between the two of you. Neither of you reference the moments. That’s how you know that they should be left alone.

But you’re drunk. You forget. So you remind him, stupidly.

Satoru blinks. His eyelashes move in a flutter, like butterfly wings, and they brush along his hair, choppy as it hangs against his forehead. 

“I did say that,” Satoru repeats, slowly. He smiles—it’s uneven, one side rising more than the other. He wants to seem cocky, but he’s apprehensive. 

“Did you mean it?” you say, because if you’re stepping over the line, you may as well do it with intent. You can’t bear to ask if he’d say it again, but you want to. You want him to.

Satoru doesn’t reply. He licks at his lips: his tongue slides across his bottom lip, leaving a sheen of saliva behind. You feel out of control, like you’re not the one in charge of your body—you don’t have the willpower not to look, to stare, to admire the dip of his cupid’s bow and the blush-red colour and the way his mouth is parted and open and so tempting. 

“You should reply when someone asks you a question,” you mutter, a pretence of haughtiness. “It’s—rude.”

Satoru also pretends to laugh. It does nothing break the thick fog of tension between the two of you. Still, you appreciate it. 

“I can be rude when I’m with you,” Satoru says. His voice is low and breathy, so uncertain that it makes you want to cup his face in your hands. He goes for a joke, just like you did—and, just like you, it’s obvious he doesn’t mean it. “You can’t judge me.”

Satoru’s still holding the lapel of his blazer, pinched between two fingers. As you inhale, you can see how he holds his hand upwards, avoiding any contact between his fingers and your chest. 

“I always judge you.” 

“You love me,” Satoru says, his cheeks dimpling as he smiles.

He leans closer. Your noses almost touch. 

You’re unable to think, and for a moment all you can feel is the overwhelming panic of your instincts pulling at you to recoil. With an intense effort, you stay still—you have the feeling that this is a test, even if you can’t tell what of. But Satoru has that wicked look in his eye, the type that he usually tries to keep hidden; when he’s playing with a curse, probing the higher-ups, testing a wooden staff just to see how much force would make it snap. 

You tilt your head up, like you’re acting defiant. His hair is soft against your cheek. The movement brings your lips closer together, and yet you’re unable to consider the magnitude of it all, of what this means, of what this could mean. All you know is here, now, how cold this night is, how warm Satoru feels.

Just as his lips part to say something else, you duck your head. Satoru immediately moves away, as if on impulse, and you use the opportunity to shift to the side; you take a step out of his hold, towards the road, and are immediately hit with a rush of cold air as you’re removed from the warmth of his body heat. 

You grip onto a nearby lamp post and spin around it, tripping as your momentum gets the better of you. Giggling, you spot Satoru’s wide eyes and surprised expression and cover your mouth with your free hand, overjoyed.

“You,” you say, still smiling, making a show of wagging your finger at him, “just want praise.” 

Satoru pauses, smiles, and steps forward, almost pushing himself off the wall to move closer to you. The sight gives you a glorious rush of excitement; you don’t walk away, but you hang off the lamp post, shifting from foot to foot as he closes the gap between you. 

“Of course I do.” When he smiles, it creases the corners of his eyes. The lines are deeper than they were when he was younger: it makes him look regal. His voice is low. Endeared. Silken. “I like it when you compliment me. You’re the best at it.”

You’re done hiding your smile. Satoru makes you happy, and you don’t want to pretend that he doesn’t. You giggle again, drunk on his company, and rise up on the balls of your feet. “You’re egotistical. You’re so—everything. You’re egotistical.”

“Mm-hmm,” Satoru says. As you move, he does too; you spin again around the lamp post, and Satoru moves around to follow you, almost chasing you around. The force of your motion is more than you can properly control, and you almost fall to the floor before looping your arm around the post and having it rest in the crook of your elbow. “You—watch out, Hebi-Hebi,” he says, light and jovial and so happy you could almost pretend he’s in love.

 “You’re disgusting,” you smile, and Satoru laughs. 

You stumble forward, and then twist around, suddenly facing the opposite direction. Satoru trips to a halt, almost colliding with you, but he doesn’t, and you’re not even afraid anymore, not in this moment, because everything’s so brilliant and wonderful already, because you love him, you love him, and he thinks you’re gorgeous, and you love him.

The air pricks at your neck, like a kiss. You’re moving towards him, and then you stumble, laughing so joyously. Satoru reaches out, Infinity around his hand, to catch you.

You don’t know, between the two of you, who moves first.

Maybe it’s him, already swooping down to look you in the eye, head tilted towards your mouth so he can hear try to decipher what you’re saying—it’s loud, and cars are travelling past, and he’d never learnt that he should just stop growing—and his hand is already resting by the air around your hip, so much that you can feel the comfortable, familiar pressure of Infinity shifting your clothes.

Maybe it’s you, laughing, smiling, staring up at him with a golden tint to your vision—the low light? The alcohol? You’re not sure, but it’s wonderful—because you’re curling around him already, your forehead so close you could press it against his shoulder, if you wanted to, and it’s such a dazzling idea that you almost forget that it’s frightening. 

And then, you realise that you almost forgot that it’s frightening, and it just makes you want to laugh again, and so you’re smiling and laughing, and that makes him laugh, and you love him so much because his laugh is so beautiful, and so maybe it’s him, or maybe it’s you, or—

Or maybe it’s both of you, and maybe it’s neither, because you don’t know who moves first because you’re both in motion, at the same time, in a wonderful synchronisation. At one point in time, you’re apart and laughing as cold air freezes your exposed arms and cars drive past so loud you can’t hear your own heartbeat; and then, in the next, the next clear moment, you’re together.

Satoru’s lips move slowly at first, as if he’s surprised. 

Seconds pass before he seems to register what’s happened. Your face is tilted up towards his, and your eyes have fluttered shut so all you can tell is what you can feel, which isn’t much; the only point of contact is your lips, with the way you’re holding the rest of your body away from him. 

A kiss. And, seconds pass, and he kisses you back. Properly.

He moves with such a rush of force that it’s overwhelming. With the absence of touch, of hands and fingers and holding, he presses his lips against yours with a recklessness you’ve only seen from him when he’s fighting a curse—when he’s not sure if he’s going to survive the attack. Satoru’s lips slot against yours, his tongue swiping along the gap between yours, and you gasp.

Your mouth opens for him, and he groans. Satoru’s teeth graze your lip, his tongue sliding against yours. You try to breathe through your nose, try to focus on breathing at all, but you can taste his mouth, feel how his lips part against yours, and it’s impossible. 

Satoru licks into your mouth. It’s wet, desperate, and you feel your thighs squeeze together as heat sparks in your stomach. Your eyes are squeezed shut, now intentionally so—if you looked at him, or if you did anything else, you’d collapse. Satoru catches your bottom lip between his teeth and pulls, gentle but unimaginably eager, and you hear something close to a whine escape your throat. 

Your cheeks begin to burn, and everything is so hot, hot, burning: Satoru’s breath, rapid and shaking as he takes a second to pull away. You follow his lips, unwilling to lose the sensation, and he mutters something low and undecipherable to himself.

“What?” you manage, and almost cringe at how out of breath you sound. It’s not even a word, just an exhalation of air, but you cover the embarrassment by leaning up and pressing your lips together again.

Satoru tries to speak, in the half-moments when you break apart, but you’re falling far too quickly to think about stopping. You make out words, low and cracked.

“Touch,” Satoru croaks, kissing you to punctuate each syllable. “What can I—can I—touch, what can I touch, if I can—” 

It’s impossible for you to think about it properly. Your mind screams: no skin, no skin, no skin. But you want him, you want him, and you need his hands on you with an intensity you have never felt before. 

Hedonistic thoughts of Satoru flood your mind; of Satoru, of his long fingers and his wet tongue, of the breathy noise he makes when you kiss him harder. The images don’t drown out your fear, because nothing could—but you can only think of so many things at once, and you’re too impatient to experience more of this that you quickly become reckless.

“Hair,” you say, breathing against his lips. “Not skin, but… my hair, I just—”

Satoru doesn’t wait for you to finish. His hands fist in your hair, his nails dig into your scalp. 

He holds you so tightly it almost hurts, the way he pulls on your hair, making you gasp into his mouth. Satoru can’t seem to stop moving, his fingers pressing against your temple and tangling in your hair and tilting your head up to reach him better. You don’t know if this touch frightens you or not. You’re so overwhelmed by sensation, everything new and dazzling, and you’re not able to sort through all of this emotion to try and get to the root of what scares you. 

When one hand moves down your body, even with the pressure of Infinity keeping him apart from you, you hear yourself gasp against his mouth. Satoru’s hand finds your waist and he pulls you closer, pressing your body against his chest. He is firm, solid, all corded muscle and strength, and you want to touch.

“Satoru—” you gasp out, when he moves closer, his Infinity tighter. Satoru lets out a pained noise, but his hold on you only gets stronger, and your head spins with the encouragement.

“Fuck,” he murmurs against your lips. “Fuck. You don’t know—”

He breaks off, like he can’t think of the words, like he can’t take the time to speak. 

You cannot get close enough to him: and Satoru kisses you like he feels the same. Satoru kisses you like he’s been desperate for it. You reach up, hands skimming the Infinity of his chest and his shoulders, and then they curl into his hair, tugging him down back to you when he breaks apart to pant against your mouth, catch his breath. 

You cannot have him pause, or stop to consider what he’s doing—you cannot let yourself consider it, not when it feels so good for his lips to capture yours. 

The alcohol thrums through your veins, and you don’t care that it’s not letting you think clearly. This—all of this, all of Satoru and this—wouldn’t have happened without it. You don’t care that it wouldn’t have. You don’t care that this might be the only reason it’s happening. 

You don’t care that you’re the second woman that Satoru has kissed tonight, and that, when you pull away to tilt your head, you can see a flash the dark bruise at his collarbone the first woman had left only hours ago. 

There’s another one. It’s one that you hadn’t spotted before, and it’s at the base of his throat. Satoru leans down and begins to kiss at your jaw, your neck, and it’s almost good enough that you can forget about the other woman. 

Your head tips back, and your eyes flutter. Quick, breathy sounds have been escaping you, but they’re nothing to the throaty groan that Satoru makes when you fist your hands in his hair and tug him back to your lips, impatient. 

You think about if the first woman did this. If she drew these sounds from him, when she got Satoru to bare his throat to her.

Your stomach turns. You blame the alcohol.

The alcohol. 

You’re still drunk. Satoru, even more so. Satoru has returned to your neck. He mouths there, and leaves a wet trail that cools almost painfully in the late evening breeze. Your eyes glaze over.

You were right before. This wouldn’t have happened without alcohol. You would never have let it get this far. You’re not thinking straight. Neither of you are.

What’s going on? You blink up at the harsh white light of the lamp post, your eyes refocusing in the stark change in light. You’re kissing Satoru. Why are you kissing Satoru? Neither of you have discussed this. Neither of you have talked about what this means. You’re just going along with it, just because you’re not thinking things through.

This will have consequences. The thought trickles down your spine like ice water, and this time it’s not enough to be distracted by Satoru’s warm lips against your skin. 

He focuses on one spot, somewhere close to your pulse point that you didn’t even know was sensitive. He coaxes more sounds from you, and even now there is a part of you that just wants to tip back your head and indulge. 

Indulge . Just like you were warning yourself against, before. You hate yourself when you do this—when you pretend, when you hope. This will have consequences. You can’t kiss your best friend of over a decade and expect nothing to change. 

And—oh, Satoru doesn’t know how you feel. You’re acting like this, and you haven’t even told him how you feel. You’re both approaching this from two, very different, standpoints. It makes you feel—guilt, curdling in your stomach. He doesn’t know. Of course you’re willing to do this, but him? He thinks—what? What does he think? Why is he doing this?

You think of the woman earlier tonight, with her hands on his chest and her hips pressed against his. You think of the women, of all the times you’ve seen him in the morning with fresh stains on the pale skin of his neck. You think that he will have kissed them the way he is kissing you now. 

You think of the way that you’ve never been kissed before. Satoru is your first kiss.

It’s different for you. There’s never been anyone but him. You have never tried, or pretended to try. You have never been able to distract yourself with anybody else.

Satoru doesn’t think that way. Satoru doesn’t value you the same way you value him.

And you’re back to where you’ve always been. This is it, then? Even when you’re so close, so close to being happy, you can never enjoy it. Even with Satoru’s lips on your lips, his hands in your hair, on your body, you know you can never have what you want. 

Satoru takes a second to stare at you, before he starts at it again. His breath is coming heavy and ragged. In the brief moment that you can meet his eye, you try to search, read him, see something, something you recognise—it’s all unfamiliar. 

It’s lust, the way he’s looking at you. With dilated pupils, flushed cheeks, hair damp with sweat. Lust. He doesn’t want something more. You look into his eyes, and you don’t see love. 

It hurts. Once again, it hurts. You keep—you keep doing this to yourself. You get closer, and closer, to what you truly want, and Satoru keeps pushing and pushing and pushing and you still can’t be happy. 

You don’t think it’ll ever stop hurting, not when you keep holding on, when you keep patiently waiting for a change that will never happen. You have to accept it, please, you beg yourself, you have to accept it. 

And when you’ve gotten so far. This—it can’t be anything else, you’ve got to see sense, finally, please—must be the final push for you. When you’ve pretended that he could possibly love you, and when you’ve deluded yourself so much that you’ve gotten this far. You’re acting like some fool—stupid, stupid idiot.

Satoru doesn’t love you, not like that. Right now, he’s drunk, and he’s confused, and you’re someone familiar and you’re someone with breasts. You’re someone that he cares about, but you’re someone who interrupted his time with the first woman because you couldn’t walk a bar without his help. You know it’s pathetic, and, secretly, so does he. 

You think of the way he’d described you. For the first woman, she was gorgeous—she was stunning, beautiful, exactly his type. But you just look nice. You’re sweet. Good. Pleasant. A good friend, who might also help him out and maybe get him off. 

That dark thing curls inside you. The cold feeling, the hatred and disgust that reminds you of curses and your shitty silent apartment and the way your shoulder still aches with agony in the biting mornings. 

You don’t blame him. You’re drunk, too. Neither of you would dare do this when you were sober. It’s even more unforgivable for you—at least you know about the differences between the two of you. Satoru probably thinks he’s on an equal level to you. He probably thinks that whatever he’s feeling is reciprocated. 

Instead, you’re left tagging along with all those stupid emotions, in a way you’ve been holding him to you since you were kids. 

“What is it?” Satoru murmurs against your lips. You realise that you’ve stopped moving, stopped making the soft noises you suppose he was taking as encouragement. 

You open your mouth to say something, but realise you don’t know what you’d say. 

Satoru leans back gently, and his eyebrows scrunch together. “Are you okay?” he asks, so softly you want to cry. “Did you—wait, are you okay? Did I—?” 

Satoru removes his hands from your hair. His gaze flicks across your face. He’s scared that he’s touched you; he’s scared that you could be afraid of him; he’s never usually this open with his expression. The wishful part of yourself wants to believe that he’s forgotten to—somehow, that he’s suddenly so in love with you that he’s forgotten to don his façade. 

You want to seize the wishful voice and burn it. 

“I’m fine,” you say, hoarse. “I’m fine.”

Satoru chokes out a laugh. “Oh. Good. Just because—shit, Hebi-Hebi, you’ve got to warn me if you’re going to space out like that.” He raises his eyebrows and attempts a smirk. “What, are you not impressed? You can let me know how I’m doing. C’mon, tell me how amazing I am. Hmm?”

It’s so familiar. Satoru sounds the same, like he hasn’t just spent the last minute of his life with his tongue down your throat. It doesn’t make sense. 

He tries to laugh again, a little more strained this time: you’re not playing along. You should say something dry and unamused. You’re decent, you’d say, I suppose. I expected better. And then, if you let yourself indulge for just a few more moments, you’d probably laugh, giving up the charade, and kiss him again. 

You don’t. You don’t let yourself. You know it’s just going to hurt even more when you let go.

Let go. You should let go. 

“Gojo,” you say, slow. You don’t make eye contact: instead, you tilt your head to the side, away from him. You inhale. “You’re drunk.”

“No,” he says, immediately, like he could even try to deny it. “No, no, I’m not.”

“It’s okay. I am. You are, we’re drunk,” you continue, pushing yourself up and taking a shaky step away.

“Don’t say that.” Satoru steps after you, quick, sharp. There is a wild look on his face, and you can’t look at him. You can’t cry after him, even as the fear in his eyes makes your own prick. You have cried after him too much. You can’t, anymore.

“You… we don’t know what we’re doing…” 

He shakes his hand, right in front of his face, speaking over you: “Don’t. Don’t say that. You don’t—say that, not after—”

“And you’ll forget about it in the morning,” you say, with finality. “You don’t need to say anything. I get it.”

“I won’t. Fuck. Fuck, listen, I won’t!” Satoru’s voice rises to a shout. He stares at you, stumbles back, and then twists around. “Fuck!”

His hands cover his face. Satoru hunches over, and a thought flutters through your mind that he might be about to vomit. 

Something has to change.  You see it, now. This really will have been the final straw. You’ve done it all, now: Satoru’s lips have burnt against your own, and you still feel close to tears. 

“I need to leave,” you hear yourself say. “I… can’t do this anymore.”

Satoru turns. He shakes his head, frantic, manic. “You—what? What do you mean?”

You’re realising it, as you’re saying it. “I’m not happy. I haven’t been happy for… years, maybe.”

“You’re—Hebi, you’re not making any sense, here—”

“I need to leave.” You take a step back, your eyes hazy. “Just… be on my own for a while, maybe.”

“For a while?” Satoru steps right back after you, following you, not letting you get away. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t know,” you admit to him, even as you hold yourself back from looking into his eyes. “But something has to change. I can’t keep feeling like this.”

“Like—what? You’re not—”

“It keeps happening,” you say, and you hate that your voice quivers. “Again and again, and I keep letting it happen. And I’m not happy. I hate my life, sometimes. I really hate it. I need… I need to leave, whatever that means.”

You look up at him. Satoru’s expression is contorted, a mask and a picture of earth-shaking vulnerability. Your heart breaks for him, all over again, but you take the pain and use it to foster your resolve. 

“Don’t follow me,” you say, seriously, as you step away from him again. “Please, Gojo. I—” 

“Don’t do this.” 

“I need to—”

“Don’t do this.” Satoru says it fierce, even as his voice fractures and shakes. “Don’t… don’t do this again.”

Again? You falter, then echo the words.

Satoru’s eyes glint, with anger, or with the fresh tears threatening to spill. “Don’t run away again.”

The words scratch at you, painful. Indignation? Anger? 

No. Resentment.

You swallow back a foul retort. Instead, strained, you say: “I’m not running away.”

“Yes, you are.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I understand enough,” Satoru says, voice picking up, “that you’re—that you’re leaving? Running away, just like you did before.”

“You don’t get to say that to me, Gojo.”

“I think I fucking do.” Satoru moves closer, again, and your heart thrums an irregular beat. “I think—what are you trying to do, huh? Why? Why are you doing this to me, Hebi?”

“Me?” you repeat, your voice rising to match his. Shrill, bordering on hysterical. “Me? You think I’m doing something?” 

“Yeah, I do. Whatever this—” he gestures to you, to the blazer still warm around your shoulders. “Whatever this is, or you suddenly telling me you’re leaving—?”

You look down at it, his blazer. Anger flares up inside you, sudden and venomous, and you pull it off like it had burned you. 

All of the hurt and misery and anguish you’ve felt in the past few years, you feel it compress and sear through you, boiling through your veins all right here, now, all leading up until this moment.

“Have it,” you spit, shoving it at him. 

Satoru blinks, his face twisting. 

“What, you didn’t want it back?” 

He glares at you. “No. You keep it.”

You look nice in it.

Your eyes sting. “Fine.” You take it and crumple it up into a ball. You dig your fingers into it, hateful, and spin on your heel and walk away. You cannot let him see your face. You can’t—

Satoru calls after you, and you freeze. “Is that it?” Through the cold air, the mist and the smoke of pollution. “You really are just running away?”

You whip back, furious. “Go to hell, Gojo.”

“You are, huh?” Satoru’s hand cuts through the air, gesturing wildly. He looks at you so hatefully, and the part of you that aches after him crumbles. “Really?”

“You don’t get it,” you bite out, sharp and cruel. “So shut up, Gojo, about things you don’t understand.”

“I understand well enough. You’re—you’re scared, just like you were before, you’re scared of something changing, and you—”

“This is nothing like that time.” You wheel on him, so furious you can’t see straight. “You don’t know anything.”

“I know that you’re saying you’re leaving me,” Satoru says. His jaw trembles.

You falter, and then hate yourself for being so easily brought down. “No. No, you don’t get to—” 

“After you promised?” And now it’s Satoru who looks like he’s close to tears, not you. “Remember? You promised to stay.”

What is this day—everything you’ve been through together, brought up, rehashed, infected. Your first real fight, back when you were fifteen; and the evening after Geto left, when you swore you would never leave each other alone. 

Something has to change. Something has changed, from when you when you were seventeen. 

You grew up. 

You hold a hand up. You stumble back, and when he tries to follow after you, you just shake your head. 

“No,” you say, and repeat yourself: “No, no. Don’t.”

“Hebi.” Satoru rubs furiously at his eyes. “You promised.”

“I know.” 

“You promised.”

“And I stayed.” You say it in one final exhale, one final goodbye. Satoru’s lips quiver, on the cusp of saying something more, words seeming to die in his throat. “I stayed,” you tell him, as you fight back tears. No more crying, not another night of crying. “And I stayed with you, always. You have had me, Satoru. I’ve always been here. You’ve always had me. Anything you would’ve wanted, I would’ve given you.”

Satoru’s expression crumples.

You just look at him. “And I can’t do it anymore.”

Satoru doesn’t say anything. His face glimmers in the artificial light of the lamp posts, reflecting off his pale skin like ice. You want to say something to him, something more, but you find that you don’t have any words left for him. You just smile, sadly, and turn away. 

 

Notes:

2011
Twenty-one years old

-

Kudos to everyone who clocked what direction this was going in. It's been great to read your comments, see predictions, and all things like that. I apologise for the sadness, but, hey. I tried to hint to it, in the last few chapters at least.

And thank you to all who suggested updates for the description--it made me realise which parts of this fic are deemed as " more significant" over others, which has been super useful. Cheers!!!

But yes--I'm back from camp counselling (spoiler alert, folks: kids are fucking hilarious and are just great, bless them) and since then I've been writing nearly non-stop. I wrote about 18k words before I had to force myself away from the new stuff to come back and edit/post this one. But I cannot lie: I've been looking forward to seeing your reactions to this one, lol. It's a doozy, hey!

Thanks to you all, again, for reading, interacting, and enjoying this fic. This is such a wanky cliche to say, but it is genuinely so heart-warming to think that there are people who are regularly coming back to this fic, and that there are people that actually do enjoy it. Wanky cliche #2: I do truly read every comment ever, and I try very very hard to reply to them all (because I too am an ao3 reader!!), and some of your comments on the last chapter nearly made me tear up. You guys are properly lovely and sweet and I feel so so grateful for y'all. Anyway. Wanky cliches over.

Until next time! Thank you for reading, mwah mwah <333

P.S. -- THIS FIC IS ON FIC RECS! This is insane to me. To everyone who came here because it was recommended, whether via word-of-mouth or from an actual Official Fic Rec; wth?? This is so wild and so cool. I feel so professional and boujie. Ha-ha!!!

Chapter 17: 2012

Notes:

CW:
CW related to sex. Contains *spoilers*. Please see end notes if this could affect you.

Friday 7th September, 2012

This is your favourite café.

You’ve never been here after eleven, because that’s when they start selling food, and it gets busy enough that you struggle to leave.

You smile, cringe a little, at the memory of the first time you’d arrived: you’d been talking together, forming a routine that you hadn’t yet known would stick, and had gotten so engrossed in the conversation that you hadn’t noticed how crowded the shop had gotten. You’d been stuck there for… what, hours? All because you couldn’t chance someone bumping into you on your way to the door. 

Ah, well. You haven’t made that mistake again. And so you just avoid the rush of people, and sit here in the pleasant hum of quiet.

It’s quiet at this time, because it doesn’t sell food—just coffee, only coffee, not even tea. Your cup is fresh and hot on your table, and you’re waiting for it to cool so you can sip it. You pat your lips together as you wait, redistributing the layer of lipstick that you’d put on before you walked down.

And it has been a nice day for a walk, so temperate and clear-skied. It’s your day off, too, and you don’t have enough days off that you can squander them by sleeping in. You’d woken up with too much energy, anyway. Maybe it’s because you slept—you slept all the way through the night, last night, for the first time in about three months—that you’re buzzing so much. You feel like you could do anything. 

It's just coffee though. You’re just having coffee with him. It’ll be nice. But—it’s your day off!! They’re rare, but you love them. You haven’t had a day off from work in so long, so long, and you’re planning on using it as efficiently as possible. You have chores you need to do, errands that you never have the energy or time for nowadays; fix the door latch in the bathroom, deep-clean the kitchen, ring the electrician back about installing that new light system you’ve been meaning to get. 

You’re excited to get that done. It’s your day off! You take a celebratory drink of your coffee, and smile. Your order—medium latte, whole milk, decaf, no sugar—has been the same for years. 

Your day off. Yes. You blow air over the surface of the latte, watch it ripple. It’s all fine. This is why a day off from work is so fundamental; you have one day to reset, readjust, brace for the manic storm that will be hitting you when you return. But it doesn’t matter about tomorrow, and it doesn’t matter about yesterday, when…

What else can you do? You think, with more determination, forcing yourself not to stray. Don’t think about things like that. Yesterday doesn’t matter. Besides, it was to be expected. You exorcised the curse, in the end. Nothing else… matters. It’s your day off. Don’t spoil this day for yourself, the way you always seen to nowadays. 

You’re on the post-school shift with the kids this week, so you might take them out somewhere. You make a mental note to message Yahaba after you’re done with the coffee. And that’d work, actually, because Tsumiki had told you yesterday that she’d gotten into the school council. She’d been so pleased with herself, and you’d made sure you told her that you thought the same. You could see what she wants to do. Her treat. You, her, and Megumi. You’d like that.

You look out of the large glass window, observe the few streams of people strolling past. Couples, hand-in-hand. 

You go back to your coffee. The staff had given you a small biscuit to go with the drink, and you nibble on it. You rub your gloves along your bare knees to get rid of the crumbs, and then chance another sip of the coffee. 

You think that you’ll order another one, since you’re waiting for him. You really hope he’s not too late. You don’t want this to take up your whole day, but you’re confident you can sort it all out. Besides, the coffee’s nice.   

Your phone rings. A growing bell through the quiet of the café, you feel the pinpricks of everyone’s stares at you, judging, reminding you to turn it off. You have stilled, in your seat. Your body is shaking, every muscle tense. You don’t want to look at it. 

You look at the caller ID. 

Your stomach twists, painfully, and you feel the sharp stab of stress right above your heart. The weight, the weight that you’ve been trying to ignore, presses down on your chest. You take in a long breath, but it does nothing to calm you. You don’t want to answer. You don’t—

“Hello?”

“You’re free?” a voice asks. “It’s urgent.”

You could cry. You look back down at your coffee, at the unoccupied seat opposite you. 

“Hebi?”

“It’s urgent?” you echo, quietly.

You hope they can’t hear how your breath wobbles in your exhale, as you squeeze your eyes shut to hold back tears. You sound like a petulant child, you know, but you’ve planned this. And you can’t cancel again—not when you’d assured him that you’d have a day off, that work wouldn’t call. You’d been looking forward to your day. 

It was your day off. 

“It’s urgent.” The voice isn’t amused. You swallow back the aching lump in your throat. “You’re free?”

A beat. You don’t want to. You really don’t want to. It’s not fair—not when you’d been promised a break, when you haven’t been given an uninterrupted day off since last February. And you’d been so excited.

But you don’t have a choice.

“Yes,” you say, pushing your chair away from the table and flinching at the awful grating noise. You pull your purse to your body, check it swiftly, ensuring you’ve got everything. “Yes, I’m free. What do you need?”

“Where are you?” The voice is sharp—they’re one of the faculty at the Tokyo branch of Jujutsu High, someone you don’t recognise. “Are you near your house?”

“Yes. I’m five minutes away—that’s where my car is.”

“Travel urgently to the Gojo residence.”

You freeze. Your blood goes cold. “What?”

“Gojo’s house. Satoru Gojo. His family house. The address is—”

“I know where it is,” you snap. Fuck. Fuck. “What’s happened?”

The voice doesn’t care to answer your question. “How soon will it take you to get there?”

“I—half an hour, maybe. Shit. What’s happened?” That’s Satoru’s childhood home. That’s where you spent half of your childhood. 

That’s where Megumi and Tsumiki live. That’s where you drop them off, every day, after school. You know the path, you know the rooms, you know everyone there. The staff—Yahaba. She’s there. 

The voice’s cold tone is making your heart pound. You stumble out of the shop, catch your foot on an uneven pavement slab, almost trip, stop yourself. Panic is gripping you with a strength you haven’t felt in years. That’s Satoru’s childhood home. 

You try to remind yourself. The house is protected. It’s a school day, the kids won’t be home. The kids, at least, have to be safe. And even if—but there’s so many staff there. Yahaba’s there, the woman who’d raised you better than your own parents. She wouldn’t let something happen to the children. You can’t let something happen to the children.

“A Semi-Grade One has been detected near the family home of Satoru Gojo,” the voice says monotonously, without any inflection or care for the words that are piercing your skin. Oh, god. You’re a Grade Two sorcerer—you can’t— “It could be a Grade One. You’re the closest sorcerer with the potential to exorcise it. You will receive help from the servants of the household. We’ve sent more to aid in the aftermath, but they won’t be there soon enough. Prioritise the safety of Megumi Fushiguro.”

And Tsumiki , you want to say, but the words are feeble, and you And Yahaba. And the household of your childhood. They all deserve protection.

You’re already racing towards your apartment. You turn a corner, and your shoulder collides with a pedestrian, looking down at his phone. Pain and chasing fear courses through you, and you fall to the ground, gasping. The man glares, swears some abuse that you cannot understand. He—touched—

The phone. You scramble for the phone, press it to your ear. You assure the voice you’re going to be there as soon as you can. You hang up. You do not give yourself enough time to give in to your mind’s panic. 

You have a car of your own. It’s at your apartment, but your apartment’s only five minutes away. It can get you to Satoru’s house fast, as far as the roads lead, and you can run the rest of the way, through the isolated countryside. You take off on a sprint, already cursing what you’re wearing—impractical, pretty, designed for a warm early morning date at a coffee shop. 

It’s your day off. You’re not supposed to be called in. You’re wearing lipstick, and you shaved your legs this morning. You’re wearing a dress. It’s not like you can walk around in your work uniform all the time, on the off chance that you’ll be summoned, but you feel the tendrils of guilt begin to tug at you anyway. 

Fortunately, you’re prepared enough. You slam your car door and shove your keys into the ignition, pressing your foot down on the accelerator, skipping second gear in your haste and wincing at the sharp grinding sound. 

The drive is tense, even with no-one else in the car. With one hand on the wheel, you root around the passenger side for your trainers; they’re much more practical than the one-inch heels you’d chosen for today. They get thrown onto the passenger seat, and then when the traffic slows you down, you try to crane your neck to double-check you’ve packed enough weaponry. You spot the silver curve of a blade; it’s partially covered by a black blanket you must have thrown over it to cover it from prying eyes, but you breathe out shakily with the promise that you have something, at least. 

Your technique would be fine on its own against something lower-level, but not against a Grade One. Your hands shake on the wheel, and you tighten your grip. They should have asked Satoru, you think, in your fear. He’d have no issue with a Grade One. You’ve fought a few before, and hardly survived each encounter. Your brain supplies you with the logic of the situation: you’re the closest person who has a chance of protecting them, and Satoru’s probably facing something a lot worse. 

Prioritise the safety of Megumi Fushiguro . Prioritise the safety of a kid who won’t even be in the house. You’ve been told, implicitly, to make sure that the prospective sorcerer is the first to survive. The other lives are important, but decidedly less so. You press your foot further down on the accelerator, and watch the needle on the speedometer climb higher. 

Once you’re ten minutes away, you abandon your car on an empty side road. The process of getting ready for a battle is as natural to you as waking up; your trainers slip on with ease, your gloves are removed, your weapons sliding into your hands and crackling with cursed energy as you make contact. Two twin daggers—impractical in their reach, but useful if they needed to be thrown. 

Adrenaline thumps through your veins. You have never experienced the moment of calm before a fight, the way Satoru used to describe. This is something with consequences, and you could die. Everyone else could die. It’s your responsibility, no-one else’s.

There should be a veil around Satoru’s house. He’s the one who maintains it—it’s always been there, since you were kids, even before you had learnt to recognise them. Simple. They keep curses out. 

Your feet pound against the gravel road that leads up to Satoru’s house. You’re racing towards the place it should be, and you try to spot the shimmer of the veil, the white swirl of cursed energy. You pass through the area it’s always been. You feel nothing. 

Sweat makes your bare palms slick. The veil is gone. You imagine you’re close to dropping your weapon, but you know by now that it’s just an illusion. 

It’s his house. It appears as you get closer, hot acid building up in your legs as you sprint; clusters of smaller buildings, a community of acacia and white brick. His home—you inhale. You remember it well, as an initial sanctuary from your family. It’s where he chose to raise Tsumiki and Megumi. It’s twisted, the way you now have to protect it. 

Your one relief: the children won’t be home. They’re at school now. You don’t have to worry about keeping them alive. 

There’s everyone else. They matter. Yahaba, all the other staff. Your orders were to keep Megumi alive, but you don’t want anyone else to die. No. You shake away the tentative thought: you won’t let anyone else die. You’re a sorcerer. No-one has to die.

You haven’t stopped running. You pull up outside the main building, which is most often occupied. You’re panting, and your chest is burning, each breath piercing through your lungs with white-hot relief, but you don’t allow yourself any time to rest.  

The door is locked. You test it, throw your weight against it, but it doesn’t even creak. Even though it will steal more seconds from you, you’re almost grateful: it shows that the curse hasn’t entered yet, maybe. Most curses would feel the movement of humans, the shifting of energy centred around doorways, and burst through immediately. Even a Grade One, which would be intelligent enough to observe, should have noticed the easiest way to enter a household. 

You scout around the side of the building, looking for a window you could reach easily. There’s one that leads into a drawing room—you’d hidden from Satoru there once, playing a childish game. 

It had been winter, and the white sunlight had sunk into the wooden floor like water. The window was frosted with ice, and you remember scratching a smile onto it with your fingertip. It had gone numb, encased in the material of your gloves, but it had made Satoru laugh when he’d found you. 

The window is shattered, and stained with blood.

Glass covers the floor outside, and it crunches underfoot as you step closer. It sounds like snow—the snow of the winter day with Satoru. With the handle of your dagger, you clear the remnants of it from the windowsill. The blade comes away scarlet. You have turned silent, now, even as your heartbeat thumps loud in your ears. You are listening for the sound of the dying. 

Quiet, you tuck your daggers under your arm and pull yourself up into the room. Your toes touch the floor first, tentatively, and you know that something has gone terribly wrong. You step down into a pool of blood, and you meet the dead eyes of a servant you recognise from your childhood. 

Her name escapes you. Satoru’s servants were always there, but always in the background, nameless and silent. It was only when you were older that you properly realised they were real people, with real lives and real families and problems and desires just like yourself. You have spoken with her. You cannot remember her name. 

The woman’s throat has been slit. The cut isn’t clean; it’s jagged, deep, the edges of her flesh curling and serrated. Blood slides down her throat and lands in fat droplets onto the floor. Her mouth is open, and it makes the gurgling sound of lungs filling with liquid. You check her pulse. She’s dead, but her skin is warm—she was alive minutes ago. 

A cold chill runs down your spine. Minutes. Just minutes.

The curse.

You straighten, trying to think clearly about what to do. Should you call out for someone—to find the survivors, or would that just attract the curse? If it’s a high enough grade, you don’t want to give it a surprise attack on you, but you still don’t want to leave everyone else to die, right? 

You pass by. There are more bodies. There are so many bodies, and your vision has started to darken. You had made the promise to yourself, just before, that you would not let anyone die. 

You keep silent, the way you’ve learnt how over so many years, but you prioritise speed. You scan every room within seconds, but all you see is blood and death and faces that you might even recognise. One boy’s stomach had been torn open, and you see his lungs twitching beneath her ribs.

A whimper. 

You freeze. Your head jerks up, eyes fixed on the ceiling above you.

The floorboards creak. Something growls up above. Blood drips from the corpse of a teenage girl, limbs contorted, a foot away from you.

Slow. You force yourself to be slow. Your feet slide along the floor, achingly timid, trying not to alert the curse upstairs of where you are. 

There is a person up there with it. Not everyone is dead. Not yet. You plead silently with them to have some sense—don’t provoke it, keep still and try to flee when you find an opportunity. Hide, if they have to, and don’t fight. 

You pray especially that you misheard, that you’re wrong, because a sick voice inside your brain whispers of recognition. It’s not possible: you couldn’t know the voice that let out such a stifled, terrified noise. That would be—

Your daggers are still in your hands. They thrum with energy: the house is so quiet, you can almost hear them. You swallow down oxygen, so careful not to inhale too loudly. 

The girl’s blood beads from her fingertips. Her chest doesn’t move. You stretch, slowly, to the banister. 

In a deafening scream of wood and metal, the ceiling cracks and shatters. Debris tumbles through a chasm in the ceiling, furniture and plaster spilling through the gap and falling over you. You sprint to the side, colliding with the stairs, and scramble upwards—the room behind you is collapsing as the upstairs floor descends onto it, covering the countless corpses you’ve left behind. 

Pipes burst. You’re hit with a burst of stale water and you throw your fists in front of your face. 

You twist on the stairs, righting yourself so your feet are on the floor again, and you run: up the stairs, two, three at a time, missing out the broken steps and disregarding any chance of a surprise attack. 

Your path is blocked by a gaping hole—it’s only a floor above where you just were, and the house is still crumbling. The floors are falling apart, and you can’t get around this one without jumping the chasm. The place you’d been standing just seconds ago is now ploughed-down by a twisted metal pipe, twice as long as your body, heavy enough to dent the mountain of debris beneath it. 

You try to place your weight on the last remnants of the floor that you can see, but it splinters beneath you and falls through to the floor beneath it. The chasm is widened, and you let out a hiss of frustration. You scan the area around you for some hint, sign, any indication of who is still here. The curse, or a person—someone, something, is still in this house. 

Torch-holders scatter the walls, placed at regular intervals. They’re old-fashioned, expensive, and haven’t been used to generate light for decades. Tradition keeps them from being pried off and discarded. 

You sheath your daggers by your sides, and wrap your fingers around one and tug, as hard as you can. It doesn’t move. It seems stable enough, and you don’t give it any extra thought: holding on tight, you push off the stairway and hold yourself, suspended, over the scene of devastation below you.

After the explosion—if that’s what it was, you can’t even begin to think—the house has imploded. Water bubbles sickeningly from the pipes, and the house’s foundations creak and groan. You strain to hear something else, to convince yourself that you didn’t recognise the voice from before. 

The torch-holder jumps in your hand, pulling from the wall with a jolt. You transfer your weight onto one hand and reach out, core muscles straining, to grab the next. It’s a foot away and your fingertips brush it, horribly close, and then you push yourself off the wall by the balls of your feet and just manage to reach it. Your shoulder burns. You keep the momentum and swing to the next—your feet brush the supports of the floor beneath you—and take one final jump to land on the doorway to a spare room, never used. 

You teeter for a gut-wrenching second, but stabilise yourself. Biting your tongue, you crane your neck to try to catch a glimpse of the thing that destroyed a whole floor. There are three rooms left standing, including the one you’re partway in, at least that you can see.

The air is thick with dust, still rising from the devastation below. You try to take a steadying breath, but nearly choke—you’re inhaling particulates of plaster and chips of wood. 

You take out your daggers, tighten your grip, and hold yourself steady. 

“Is someone there?” you call out, hating yourself even as the words spill from your lips. Your voice is muffled from the oppressive smoke of debris, but it carries in the near-silence of the area. 

Immediately, you sense something shift. The house seems to inhale with you, holding its breath. 

A naked man—not a man, but almost—appears in the doorway opposite you. His form would be humanlike, if his neck wasn’t twisted, curled, like someone had pulled his neck a full circle around on its joint. You’re reminded of the owls that can rotate their head 270 degrees—this thing has managed a full 360. 

It shifts, bones cracking, and you see through the dust that all of its limbs are similarly contorted; its arms, legs, elbows, ankles, all horrifically misshapen and distorted. The thing’s skin has piled up on itself, pulled taught around the joints and rolling together in areas of relief.

What would be its head is nothing but a block of flesh, upon which there is an awful distortion of human features—a mouth cuts a bloody gash across its skin, a nose that appears to have been carved with a butcher’s knife. Its eyes are mounds of flesh, one horizontal cut along each oozing yellow pus.  

The head drops to the side, nearly resting on its shoulder, as if in confusion. Its fingertips shake—the skin has been pulled back to reveal knife-sharp bone. It raises its index finger and, quivering, points to you. 

You raise your twin daggers. A curse at this level is capable of communication and understanding. I’m prepared, your movement says. I’m not like the innocents you slaughtered before. I can kill you.

But it’s injured: very injured. It doesn’t stop shaking, even as the wound of its mouth widens into a smile. There are long, shallow strokes of red along its torso that look like they came from a bladed weapon—and there are chunks torn from its torso, far too similar to canine bite marks. 

“Are we alone?” you ask it, even though you dread the answer. The curse doesn’t supply you with one—too injured, or just unwilling, you can’t tell. 

You want to look back. You need to check, to need to make sure, that you’re alone in this house. Because if you heard him—

“You’re going to be exorcised,” you say. Your voice is loud, clear and steady. “You’re going to die.”

The curse burbles an incomprehensible noise from the back of its throat. Its fingers twitch. Its contorted arms rise in front of itself. You tense. 

“No!” 

A child’s voice. A child’s voice you know. 

Megumi—Megumi, no, why, Megumi—braces himself against the doorway of the final room. He’s bleeding, hard, a head wound. His eyes are bright and afraid, and they’re stuck directly on you.

“Run,”  he whispers. His little hands reach out for you—

—and the curse strikes.   

Its twisted limbs stretch from its torso like plasticine, and it screeches an awful scream of agony as it surges towards Megumi. Its neck elongates horrifically, its wound of a mouth elongating and curling, reaching for the child who shouldn’t even be here—

You leap forward: it’s mad, trying to jump over the crumbling floor beneath you, but you can’t see reason, not now. Megumi is staring at the curse in terror, and he stumbles backwards, throwing his arms above his face to try to shield himself from the curse.

“Move!” you shout, and Megumi seems to hear you—he throws himself out of the way.

You land on its arm and almost fall—it’s moving, far too fast for you to stop it, and you bring your dagger down onto its limb in a powerful arc. The cursed tool slices through the thing’s skin, and the arm spurts blood as it’s severed from the curse’s body. You propel yourself off, kicking at it for the momentum, and you land in the doorway that Megumi had nearly been killed in.

The curse howls, animalistic and feral. Its face rises above you, neck metres long, and flesh seems to be melting from it. Skin drips and splatters on your exposed skin—it sizzles, and a moment later you register the agony of its searing hot flesh landing on you. 

Disregard. Ignore. Your wrist swells and burns.

Megumi is crying behind you—quiet, terrified sobs that he’s trying to hold back. You risk a second’s glance backwards; he’s buried his face into the neck of a great white dog, twice his size. You recognise it as one of his Shikigami. 

“Keep behind me,” you tell him, not able to spare another moment on making sure he’s okay. “It’s going to be okay, Megumi. You’re going to be okay. Stay behind me.” You swallow down, the debris sticking in your throat. “Are you on your own? Is Tsumiki here? Is—”

“She’s at school,” you hear Megumi say. “She’s… I ran away… she’s not here, I want her here, Hebi-san, please…”

“It’s going to be okay. Don’t—” You slice at a tendril from the curse’s torso as it tries to force its way through you—it’s trying to reach Megumi. Tsumiki’s safe. “Don’t move, Megumi, I’ll—” 

The curse is getting desperate. The areas where your daggers touch it are spitting and hissing, like they’re coated in poison. You sever more and more of its limbs, and it doesn’t seem to be able to grow them back. 

Finish it. You can—it’s been injured enough before you got here. Who had fought it? Who had injured it? Shouting one final instruction to Megumi to stay there, stay behind me, you push yourself off from the safety of the doorway and catch the curse on its grotesque, contorted neck. 

It screams—your ears burst, begin to bleed. Your bare hands burn, pressing into the acid of the curse’s skin, bubbling and blistering. Your cursed energy floods from you, the dam of isolation suddenly bursting, and you hold tight as your palms scream with agony. The flesh melts and drips and curdles under your touch and—

You’re falling. You pull your body inwards and roll as soon as you hit the floor. Pain splinters up your side, agony splices up your shoulder, your bad shoulder, and then… quiet. For a second, all you can hear is your own breathing, shallow and pained as you inhale ash. 

“Megumi?” you croak, pushing yourself up as your body screams in protest. “Megumi?” Stronger. Louder. “Megumi!”

“I’m here.” Upstairs again. He’s quiet. His voice shakes. “Are you—is it—”

The curse has disappeared, and your sweat-stricken face is plastered with its remnants: dust. 

“It’s gone. Wait there, Megumi, I’m coming to get you.”

It takes you longer to make your way upstairs. As the adrenaline begins to seep from your system, you can register even more the effort it takes for you to move. 

You encourage Megumi to jump over the chasm between the floors on the back of his Shikigami. It’s only once he reaches you, and you watch him walk slowly down the broken stairs that you notice the matted, red fur around his Shikigami’s muzzle.

You remember the bitemarks on the curse’s torso. You don’t want to know how long Megumi had to survive on his own. 

“What are you doing here?” you ask, softly, once you’ve walked him out of the house. 

Megumi slides off his Shikigami, who nuzzles him softly and licks at his cheek. Megumi pats it, staring, unfocused, on the burnt grass beneath him. You crouch down and Megumi flinches—he tucks his chin into his neck, his bottom lip quivering. 

“Megumi?” you whisper, leaning further down to try to look at the wound on his forehead. “You don’t have to answer, but… can I bandage that up? It’s bleeding.”

He shakes his head, fingers twisting around the fur of his Shikigami. 

“Does it hurt?” you ask, and, slowly, he nods. “Okay. Okay. I can try to stop it hurting, okay? Can I try to help?”

Megumi’s eyes water. He shakes his head again.

Your heart aches. You don’t know what to do—you can’t let him bleed out, you’ve got to treat his injury, but you don’t know what you could do to help him. You don’t know how children are supposed to be comforted. 

“I need to make sure your injury doesn’t get worse,” you say, finally. Megumi’s always been more objective and logical than his sister. “To keep you safe.”

“I—” Megumi mumbles, and then rubs viciously at his eyes as tears start to fall. “I shouldn’t—you shouldn’t—”

You wait for him to speak. 

“You shouldn’t take care of me,” he whispers, choking out the words. “I’m the reason they all died. It was after me.”

You don’t try to lie to him. It’s true, that the curse wanted him—any denial would just patronise him. Instead, you say the truth, the truth he needs to hear: “It’s not your fault, Megumi. They didn’t—”

“They all tried to protect me.” Megumi keeps shaking his head, keeps twisting the blood-stained fur of his Shikigami. “They kept trying to fight it, they kept telling me to hide. I—I should’ve just—if I’d just died, at the start, then they wouldn’t—”

“No,” you say, cutting him off. “No. Don’t say that, Megumi.”

“But it’s true! They—they protected me, they all did, and they all died, just because—because I’m stupid—”

“Megumi, you—”

“I ran away,” Megumi whispers, like a plea. His face is upturned and wet, and it’s the most emotion you’ve seen him display in the years you’ve known him. “From school. Because Tsumiki—she shouted at me, and I said that I hated her, and I ran away to here. If I didn’t—if I didn’t come home, than Yahaba and everyone wouldn’t have died. They wouldn’t.”

Yahaba.

Yahaba.

You didn’t see her body.

She is dead. 

“If you hadn’t come home, the curse would have attacked you at school,” you say, words coming automatically from a place you don’t recognise. Megumi’s fingers twist and twist the dog’s fur. It’s contorted, like the limbs of the curse. Yahaba. Yahaba is dead. “Or it would have waited for you and Tsumiki to come home. It’s not your fault, Megumi.”

“It is,” Megumi says hollowly. “You don’t understand.”

“It’s not your fault.” Yahaba, Yahaba, killed while you were stuck in traffic. Your fault—your fault, you, the sorcerer. Megumi, forced to defend himself. A child, blaming himself when he should be blaming you. “It’s not your fault, Megumi.”

Megumi’s breathing is shaky. You turn to him, and survey his injuries with hazy eyes. 

“Your head,” you murmur. “I need to help.”

He swallows. “You should—”

“Don’t, Megumi,” you say softly. “I’m helping you. Stay there.” You say it to his Shikigami as much as to him. “I’m going to look for some water. Stay here. Will you stay?”

He nods. Only then do you leave him. As soon as you stand, pain strikes through your body like a lightning bolt, searing your muscles like sizzling meat. You have to ignore it, for Megumi. If he sees you wince, he will remember it forever. You have to be strong, even when you have been so weak.

Inside the house, you find a stack of burst bottles. They must have been kept in the cupboard, for the children. You find one that hadn’t been opened, that still has sterile water in it, and walk back to Megumi.

He’s sat with his Shikigami. He’s holding onto its neck. He is so young. 

You tear off the end of your dress in one, clean motion. The movement sparks pain up your shoulder, but you ignore it. Your head aches, and feels full of smoke, fog. You cannot think, and you recognise what you’re doing only seconds after you’ve done them.

You empty half of the water over the strip of fabric and motion Megumi to sit closer. He shuffles upwards, and his fingers twist, twist, twist. 

“A cold compress,” you say, smiling. He doesn’t return it. “Until more people arrive.”

Just before you place it against his wound, he jerks back, eyes wide. “Your hands,” he says, as you give him a questioning look. “You can’t—”

“It’s not dangerous if there’s something in-between our skin,” you say, gently. “Just try not to move too much, alright? You’re safe.”

“No,” Megumi says. He looks at you as if you’ve gone mad. “But you can’t touch people. Don’t… don’t touch me, you don’t like it, Hebi-san.”

It takes effort, you realise, to hold your expression kind and gentle, and not to cry, right in front of him. You remind yourself that you’re the adult, that it’s your fault his whole household died, that the woman who raised you better than anyone has died, and that you cannot burden him with any more misery. 

“I’m fine, Megumi,” you say, and, when he still looks so concerned for you, you say: “I promise. I’m not stupid about these things.”

“Are you sure?”

The comment coaxes a small laugh from you. Yahaba. Dead. Your smile falters. “I’m sure. Besides,” you say, pressing the fabric against his skin and applying enough pressure to ease the bleeding, “hasn’t Gojo told you I’ve got a boyfriend? I’m better with touching people now.” You’re lying to him, because you’re not better, not at all, but you need to help him.

“Ew,” Megumi says, half-heartedly. 

Your heart cracks as you try to laugh again. “There we go. Ew, exactly.”

You talk the most, as you wait for the second wave of sorcerers to arrive. You stay with Megumi, keeping him distracted from the house he can’t help but look back at. Whenever you catch him turning around, you say something else—and it works, mostly.

It doesn’t distract you. As you speak, you feel your thoughts moving away from the conversation, blown with the breeze, and laying rest at the doorway of Gojo’s childhood home. 

Blooded corpses. Yahaba’s body, somewhere, somewhere you couldn’t see. Scarlet soaking into wood. The curse’s writhing neck. Yahaba. Too late. Your fault. Your fault—too late. 

You remember the matching raincoats. You remember the way she’d aged. You remember the dozens of other servants, whose names you’d never bothered to learn. All dead. All dead because of you.

You’re supposed to be in charge. You’re supposed to be in control of it all. This is everything you’re supposed to prevent. 

You don’t know if she suffered. If she thought she’d survive. What she thought, before she was murdered, if she had been afraid. 

Of course she had been afraid. The curse had killed her. It had killed with sadism, lacerating throats, wrenching out innards and shattering ribs. 

She would have died in pain. The first girl’s body had been warm. You were minutes too late. You could have saved her. If you had been faster. You think of everyone else who’d died before you could show up.

Megumi had to defend himself. How could he trust you, when you say you can help him, when you couldn’t even save one person?

You saved him. You saved him, and no-one else. You killed a curse that was injured already. You hardly did anything.

When the other sorcerers arrive, you are quiet. You are sitting on the dry grass, your eyes on Megumi. You scrape the dried blood from your fingers, peeling off layer after layer. Your nail catches on skin, but it doesn’t hurt. Your mind is numb, your fingers are numb. You only feel the familiar agony of your shoulder, pulsing in time with your heartbeat. 

You stand, when they arrive. You confirm with them what happened, still watching Megumi twist, twist, twist, white-red fur staining his fingertips. 

You tell them that Megumi should move away from the house, and they exchange glances. You tell them again, and your voice comes out so cruel, so hard, so savagely protective of Megumi that they visibly falter. They agree, then, only when you are unkind.

You encourage Megumi to move. He doesn’t want to, but you convince him. He is too tall, now, to keep hold of his white dog as he walks, but he leans down to keep hold of its fur. Your arms fall loosely at your side. You want to comfort him, the way a parent would, with an embrace and touch and holding him close to you. 

You also know that touch would destroy you, now. Even the thought of it makes you nauseous. Your joints lock, revolted, and you disguise it poorly. 

They tell you that Gojo has been informed, that he will be here soon. You don’t know if you should feel relieved. You don’t… feel it, exactly.

You recognise, distantly, that this has happened before. You forget how to feel, for a few days, after something traumatic. It’ll get better soon, because you’ve done this before.

Of course, Satoru has always been there to help you. When he’s not there, these things take longer.

You wonder how long it will be, now, for you to be okay again. 

You ask who will pick Tsumiki up from school. The sorcerers exchange confused glances, as if they’d forgotten who she was. You remind them of her existence, and one of them leaves to make a phone call. Another tells you that you can leave, if you would want to, because he knows it was supposed to be your day off.

“I’m not leaving Megumi with you.” You glare, and your words are hissed, so Megumi doesn’t hear you. He is a foot from you, his cheek pressed against the neck of his white dog. You are standing in front of him, like you did before, when you shielded him from the curse with your body.

They do not ask you to leave again.

The higher-ups don’t like you getting attached to the children. They think the same with Satoru, but no-one has ever been able to control him. They don’t like that you want to raise Tsumiki and Megumi the same; they don’t like the way you care for children that aren’t your own.

You’ve been asked, by the people who assign you your missions, when you’re planning on having more children. It’s a subtle expectation, to continue the bloodline of sorcerers. You’re a dying breed, and though there are some who don’t like the idea of polluting the gene pool with non-sorcerers, there are more who recognise that children are needed now, and fast, and soon. 

You’ve never been able to give them an answer that they like. At least your technique isn’t very powerful—no-one really wants you, the mutation of your family, to produce as many offspring. Still, it’s your role. It’s your responsibility, to help cleanse the world of curses—produce more sorcerers. Uphold the next generation. The next generation you can only barely protect.

Your fault. Your fault. Yahaba.

You answer more questions. Some sorcerers have been going in and out of the crumbling house, and you see bodies being pulled from the wreckage. You make sure Megumi is turned away, and you sit with him again, and you wait. Your eyes haze. They ache.

“Megumi!” 

Tsumiki is running towards you. Megumi rises, and you hear his shake of an inhale. She collides with him, almost knocking him to the floor. She holds him tight, buries her face into his shoulder. She is taller than him, almost by a foot. Megumi’s hands reach around her, grasp feebly, as he accepts his sister’s hug. 

Tsumiki is whispering, her voice high and panicked, about how scared she was, and how glad she is that he’s safe, and how he must never run away again. Megumi doesn’t say anything. His Shikigami presses its body against Tsumiki’s legs, tail low. 

You should stop Tsumiki from acting like Megumi’s mother. She isn’t: she is a child, too. She is older than him, but by only one year. You want to hold that burden, that responsibility, but… 

Yahaba. Dead. Died, before you could get there. She was your responsibility. You as good as killed her. You let her die. 

You let everyone die. With the curse’s twisting flesh, the crunch of bones. Your shoulder feels close to snapping. You could have saved her. You should have saved everyone.

Satoru. There is Satoru just metres behind Tsumiki. He picked her up, then. He drove her here. 

Your longing for him, which awakens and tries to thrash in the grey numbness of your mind, is as familiar and painful as the ache in your shoulder. You see his white hair, his lips, the tension deep-set in his jaw. You do not see his eyes: Satoru has his blindfold on, as he always did, whenever he wasn’t with you.

Satoru does not say anything as he watches the wreckage of his childhood home. He then turns to you.

“Is everyone dead?” 

“Yes.”

Nothing is said. You look at him, blinking away the darkness creeping in from the corners of your vision. Even now, when you do not speak to him, when you haven’t been speaking, when your contact is limited to the time when you have to exchange responsibility of the kids to the other, even now, you can feel the thin and brittle bond between the two of you. Satoru sees. 

“I arrived too late.” You say it quiet, so quiet you cannot hear your own voice. But Satoru hears you, even still.

“That’s not your fault.”

The reassurance hurts you, because you know it’s false. It feels too intimate, and you hate him for it.

You do not dispute him. Not because you agree: but because you know Satoru would insist, and so would you have to, and you would argue in front of the children, and you cannot cope with failing them any more than you already have.

Yahaba. Oh. Your fault, all of it, all of it. 

Satoru is saying something. You forget how to listen, how to hear, for a second. The world buzzes, but you think your mind blocks it out. You try to feel again, maybe.

“…should stay with us. Okay?”

You look at him. You cannot see his eyes, but he seems pained, looking at you. It makes sense. Yahaba is dead. You could not save her. 

“What?” you ask, crudely, bluntly. 

Satoru’s lips press together. He clears his throat. “I… I don’t know.”

He hesitates. 

Then: “I’m taking Tsumiki and Megumi back to mine. My place, my personal place.” You know. You have been there, but you have not gone inside in a year’s time. “You should come with—us, you should… Hebi, you look like you’re going to pass out, do you need to—”

“No.” You’re already withdrawing. You do not stay with Satoru. You do not think he would make you better. You want him, but you cannot have him. You chose this. 

Satoru, the muscle in his cheek. “You shouldn’t drive. You need someone with you, Hebi-Hebi—” You twitch, at the name, and Satoru falters. “I… Are you okay? I want to—or, or you should let someone else help you, Hebi, if you don’t want… Please, c’mon, let me make sure you’re okay.”

You don’t like him like this, worried and attentive and second-guessing himself. It isn’t like him. You shake your head, which just hurts, which you think you’re stupid for doing. 

You tell him you need to go home. Home, you say. It is a place that doesn’t include him, and Satoru knows it. And you think that, and you see the twist of his face as he tries to pretend like he doesn’t care, and you want to scream and crumble into the dirt and tear out your heart from your chest. It was supposed to be better—you were supposed to be better, without him, without everything Satoru brought with him. You hate yourself for hurting him—does he hate himself, too, for the way he hurt you?

You think about this on the way home. You think about it all. Your hands are bare and blistering on the steering wheel.

The sky is darkening when you finally arrive. You move on autopilot, forgetting to log your experiences into your memories until you’re standing outside your apartment door, not really able to remember how you got there. 

For a moment, you wait. You try to collect yourself, before you walk in. Putting off entering, because you’re nearly certain who you’ll have to deal with once you do, you check your phone.

It’s a mistake. You’ve got missed calls and missed texts—different people. You look at Satoru’s. Most are from earlier this week, banal and casual remarks that you sometimes respond to banally and casually. The last text he sent you was from an hour ago.

I’ve got the kids at mine,  he’s said. 

A second later, he’s written: I’ve fed them!!

Your exhale hurts your ribs. Shit, you should get that checked out. Tomorrow: you don’t think you could cope explaining yourself.

What would you even say? Yahaba, Yahaba, Yahaba. Explain—it’s your fault, and Megumi’s blaming himself but it’s your fault, yours, yours.

I’m glad , you send off. Tell them I’ll see them soon.

Instantly, you see three dots appear that tell you he’s typing. You feel like you’re about to throw up. Quickly, you press the ‘off’ button and slide your phone into your bag. Oh. You’d forgotten you’d brought it with you. How had you managed to forget something like that?

It takes a long time for you to get your key in the lock. Your hands are shaking.

Your fault. Your fault for not being good enough. Anyone else would have saved them. Your fault.

Megumi. Megumi, crying. You’ve never seen him cry before. It’s your fault he was crying. It’s your fault he blames himself.

You flick on the light as you enter.

Your apartment is fine. It is neat, and organised. That’s mainly because you don’t have many things. Other than the bare necessities, you stay away from clutter. Your place is cold, quiet, sterile. Just like home. 

You enter your flat as you always do. You are always tired, and numb. You haven’t had a day off in half a year. In half a year, you yet haven’t returned home feeling happy. 

The naïve optimism of this morning feels separate, so distant from you now that you do not recognise it. How could you think you would be okay? Have you not learnt that there is no time for rest, as a sorcerer? Your work is unrelenting, and sickening. You always arrive too late, and you leave nothing but pain behind you. And you carry that pain, with you, and it never leaves. It weighs down on you, crushing your ribs, compressing your heart.

You want to sleep. You want to fall onto your bed and sleep, and forget, and wake up tomorrow and forget about it. You can sometimes force yourself to forget and move on, but you can’t today. It only works later. You can try, and try, but it never works. You want to sleep.

Kazuo is eating cereal from your bowl. He’s using your spoon. He’s just stolen thirty yen from you, with that cereal. Pittance, but you never see it back. 

You gave him the spare key about a month ago, because he was asking about meeting your family. It’s a temporary solution, but you don’t know how to solve yourself. 

The key is better, but you wish you hadn’t given it to him. It’s only made it worse. He doesn’t understand why you are like this in the evenings. He wants more from you.

“Hello,” he says, and you feel waves of exhaustion crashing down onto your shoulders. Sleep. Forget. You know you won’t get any of it. “Are you—”

“Fine.” You walk across the room and into your bedroom. You own a box of nylon gloves that you keep in a bedside table. “One second.”

Your bed. Sleep. Your fault.

Your bed is a double bed. You’re so tired.

You shower, in your bathroom, with is joined with your bedroom as an ensuite. You twist the shower on, strip, and watch as the grey ash melts into the water. The puddle by your feet goes brown, black, then red, as you wash the blood from your hands. 

You dry yourself. You change into a shirt and loose trousers. You put the nylon gloves on, and flex your fingers in them, unfeeling.

“Right,” you say as you walk back in. 

Kazuo eyes the gloves. You don’t have the energy to explain why it’s not what he thinks.

He eats another spoonful of cereal. It’s something you found endearing when you first got together. Now, you don’t know if you still do. Your fault. Megumi. You shake your head, try to snap back your focus.

“I—you weren’t there today,” Kazuo begins, like you knew he would. “In the café. We arranged it ages ago. You weren’t there.”

“I know.” You move past him to the kitchen, where you take a glass from a cupboard and fill it with water. You have to use two hands to open the tap, your fingers are shaking so badly. “It was work.”

“You told me you had a day off.” 

“I did.”

He waits for you to offer something else. When you don’t, he lets out a sharp sigh of frustration. 

“So were you at work?” He points your own spoon at you. When Kazuo is mad at you, his voice gets breathy, as if he’s recovering from running a marathon. “Or… what? What were you doing?”

“I told you. Work.”

“Work?” He’s trying to keep calm, to talk things through with you. “Were you?”

“Yes,” you say, simply.

He’s trying to keep calm, and you just want him to leave. 

You like him. You know you do. But he doesn’t understand.

There’s no way that you can tell a non-sorcerer about what you’ve been doing, not at this point. This is the issue with being in a relationship with one: it’s founded on secrecy. 

You could be kinder. He’s completely justified, and you could be kinder. Megumi. Yahaba. Your fault. 

You’re too exhausted to try. 

“Work. Fu—come on, were you really?” He stands up now. He doesn’t like swearing in front of you when he’s angry. His last girlfriend found it unforgivable when he swore at her, and he’s trained himself out of it. “At least try to pretend that—what’s going on?”

Your vision is blurry. Not from tears. You’re struggling to focus. You just want to sleep, and you don’t want to deal with him.

“I got a call from work,” you say. “They needed me in.”

“And you didn’t let me know?” Kazuo voices it like a question. He’s not accusing you, he just wants to know. He’s nice. That’s why you chose him to try and change you. 

“I didn’t. I… No, I’m sorry.” If you’re more genuine, maybe he’ll leave you alone. “It was an emergency.”

He doesn’t believe it.

“It was,” you say. You step forward. “I promise, it was. I’m sorry.”

His lip quivers. “Just let me know. We’ve talked about this.”

“I know we have.”

“That’s all you need to do. I was worried, I—”

“I’m sorry. I should have.”

“But you still didn’t?” He’s remembered that he’s angry. You think of him, at the café, waiting for you, sending you those questioning texts you saw a few minutes ago. “I—You’ve got to remember me, Jesus—”

“I know.”

His anger dissipates. He was never really angry, not in the way you know people can be. 

This is a bad night for you. You never have energy for arguments, after work, and it is always after work that he wants to have arguments. But it is usually, sometimes, better. When he sees you before your work, you can be good. Afterwards, you are like this, and he doesn’t like you like this. 

He leans back, and looks at you more closely.

“You’ve got dust in your hair.” Kazuo says it with a smile. Without thought, he runs his thumb over your cheek.

This is when you know. Your heart drops. 

You try not to convulse at his touch—you play pretend, the idea of the broken girl that he’s helped to put back together. He likes it when you show that you’re getting better. 

You’re not sure, yet, if it’s because he wants you to be happier, or because he likes the thought of him being able to help. And you remember that he’d met you when you were drunk, depressed and abandoned at a bar, and he’d given you his number. What had been attractive about you, then, other than some failure of a person he would have wanted to fix?

Not like he’s the sole person to fix you—Kazuo isn’t as egotistical as that. He’s a nice, normal person who likes to help. He likes to help you. So you pretend he does. It’s one of the sacrifices you’ve heard that people make in relationships. 

You told him, when you first got together, about the limits of your fear of touch. You told him how you think people can touch your hair. You don’t think about how you know that. 

Kazuo strokes his palm over your hair. He rests it on the back of your head, where your skull meets your nape. Your hair flattens. 

“You worried me,” he whispers. You can feel his breath against your lips. It tastes like milk. 

“I’m sorry.” 

He chuckles a soft laugh. “I’m sorry for shouting. Let me make it up to you?”

You hum. Then, because you know he’d want to hear it, you murmur a quiet yes. It is one of the things you like most about him, if you have to think about it. He still remembers from when you first got together. He told you he would always ask, first, and he still always does. 

Kazuo kisses you. He kisses you again. You kiss him back. 

You think about how stupid it is that he thought he was shouting. He does this a lot—he’ll be angry, and then he’ll apologise for it later. You’re not sure who, out of the two of you, is really wrong here. You’d like to tell him to stop with the apologies; if he’s going to be angry, he should be truly angry. You can survive anger. You’ve survived a lot worse than his anger. 

He moves his lips to your neck. 

You think about Satoru. You think about the cold evening air, and the sound of cars far away in the distance, and the way he’d breathed against you and asked you where he could touch.

Instantly, you snap yourself back to the present. You hate this. You hate thinking about Satoru with Kazuo. It’s not fair, and it’s cruel. You hate thinking about Satoru at all, these days. 

Kazuo has started breathing heavier. You walk backwards into your bedroom. A double bed. 

After that, it all goes along like normal. It’s a routine—you figured it out months ago. Kazuo had never said anything about wanting sex, but you knew it was something he thought about. Wanted. And you knew he was beginning to resent you for denying him it. 

You had never lied about it during the start of your relationship: you’d made sure of that. If he wanted to be with you, then he would have to understand. Sex would probably never be an option. Not because you didn’t want it, but because you couldn’t have it. You asked him if he understood.

He said he did. You don’t think he really registered it at the beginning. You could tell, after a while, that he was holding himself back from asking about it. He made references that were pointed, but also subtle, because he didn’t want you to have ammunition on him if it made you angry. 

But he wanted to know if you’d changed your mind. He had believed you would, you had realised. You had told him never, and he had heard not yet.

He had never been more overt than those references. So, it wasn’t like you needed to. He had never asked you to, and he never would have. You weren’t talking about it. But you knew it was something he wanted, regardless of how much he had tried to hide it. If he had tried. You think he had tried, probably.

Finally, you decided you would. You’re not a good girlfriend. You miss dates, you lie, you refuse to tell him anything personal about yourself at all. You don’t have enough friends for him to meet, not now, not any friends these days, and you’re still trying to get over someone who’s had a piece of your heart for as long as you can remember. This, you decided, was something you could do for him. 

He takes off your clothes, and then removes his. You take off your bra, because he always snaps the band against your skin, and you’re still hurting from the fight with the curse.

Your fault. Oh. Blood. Everyone dead. The whole household. Everyone. Your fault. Blisters on your hands. Yahaba, dead. Yahaba. Your hands. Your fault.

When you sleep with him, you keep your gloves on. They’re disposable: nylon. The only reason you have them. He’d thought you were joking when you first suggested it. He still doesn’t know why he can’t touch your hands.

And then you have sex.

It never takes that long. God, you’re tired.

You don’t think you’ll ever be able to have him bracing himself over you. That, truly, is too much danger all at once—too much skin, too much sweat, the chance of him leaning down and pressing his chest against yours, and it’s touch and skin and flesh and blood and snapping bones and revulsion and you want to cry at the thought. It’s not a possibility, too much, too much, your fault, and so you’ve settled for this. 

He lies down, and you sit yourself above him, body straight and taught. He enters you, and it doesn’t feel like much, and you try to force your mind to go quiet.

You don’t actually have to do much. You just rock your hips a bit, and it always seems to suit him well. You used to try to chase an orgasm, earlier, when you first started sleeping together. But you only managed it a few times, and Kazuo usually doesn’t last long enough to get you off. Which is fine, especially when you’re just looking forward to falling asleep right now. 

You can feel his thighs pressed against yours. This is the worst thing about it, but you’re getting used to it. Maybe Satoru was right, all those years ago. Exposure therapy—that was what he’d called it. You know that it’s not how that works, but for some reason you might have proven everyone else wrong. It’s not better, exactly—you still feel your lungs shake, your skin curl, the spot of skin on skin begin to boil and sizzle like frying meat on a cooker, but you can work through it. Soon enough, you think you can make yourself forget about it. 

He's making noises, which is usually a good sign. You move your hips some more, and he groans out your name. It sounds disgusting, said like that. 

You’re quiet. You focus on breathing, and not on his slick skin touching yours. The sound of skin slapping is comical, sometimes, but tonight it just makes you feel ill.

After a while, Kazuo finishes inside of you. He likes it—he doesn’t like wearing a condom. He says it makes him feel closer to you. When you’d discussed it, you weren’t sure what it would feel like.

You don’t really mind it. It’s sticky and uncomfortable, but he really, really likes it. You’ve had worse experiences, you remind yourself. And anyway, you’re on birth control, and it’s not like either of you are sleeping with anyone else.

After you’re sure he’s done, you roll off him. His chest is peppered with sweat. There’s a trail of hair between his pectorals that he doesn’t shave. 

“Did you…” he says, out of breath. You didn’t realise he was giving it so much energy. Should you pretend that it tired you out, too? If you do, maybe you can go to sleep sooner. “I mean. Did you, uh…”

“Yeah,” you say. You stifle a yawn. “I’m going to the toilet.”

He looks worried, or maybe a little offended. You kiss him, not touching him anywhere else. His lips are chapped. He should invest in some exfoliant.

You think of Satoru—how he swears by this one product, no matter how much you’d try to convince him it’s too expensive. 

“No cost is too high for beauty,” Satoru would say, pompously, and you’d smile at him.

“That’s what rich people say,” you’d respond, and he’d laugh, too.

No. You don’t think about Satoru. That’s not what you do anymore. 

Kazuo’s come is dribbling down your thighs. You sit on the toilet and wait for it to slide down. You drum your fingers on the toilet seat, and your head falls onto your knees. As you breathe, you feel your bones crack.

Megumi. Yahaba. Tears. Contorted joints. Pus dribbling from gouged eye sockets.

Fuck. No, you don’t think about it. 

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” you call weakly. You don’t sleep in the same bed as Kazuo. You keep thinking about how he could accidentally move closer to you in the night, how he could touch you even if he wasn’t aware of it. You keep thinking about waking up with his arm slung around your waist, and you feel like you’re going to be sick.

You hear a long, drawn-out sigh. This is something you disagree on. He wants to sleep in the same bed as his girlfriend. It’s a simple request, but you can’t provide it. 

Normal couples do that. Normal couples don’t have to think about it.

You shift on the toilet. You remember that you should pee. Last time you didn’t, your urine had been burning painfully for days. 

When you walk back into your room, he’s changed into the jogging bottoms that he keeps in a drawer here. They suit him well. In brief flashes like these, you find yourself attracted to him. 

It dissipates in his silence. He glances at you, and his gaze latches for a moment longer—you’re still naked. He lingers on your breasts, like he’s touching them with his eyes. You don’t move. Then he turns over and doesn’t spare you another look.

You’ve frustrated him. This relationship frustrates him. You wonder why he doesn’t leave.

You wonder how you would feel if he left. 

When it’s clear that he’s set on falling asleep in silence, you walk over to your chest of drawers and pull out a pair of pyjamas. Kazuo had once asked you if he should bring over his old t-shirts—apparently his ex had liked to wear his clothes—and when you’d shrugged he’d pinched his brows and walked off. You hadn’t spoken about it after, and so you just wear the silk pyjamas you’d spent your first real paycheck on. 

He still doesn’t want to talk to you. You wonder what, specifically, it is today that you’ve annoyed him about. 

And then, suddenly and viscerally, you loathe yourself—because all you can think about is that Satoru would have spoken his mind, would have told you what he thought; he’d never leave you with half a thought, he’d tell you everything and more, piling on hours of words to make sure you fully understood every little thing he wanted you to.

If he was angry, he would tell you why, and you would talk, or shout, but he would give you so much more than this nothingness, this lack of passion or connection. Satoru knows you, and he made you feel something. And you hated it in the end, but at least there was something—here, you are tired, and you want to leave, and you search your heart but find nothing but numbness and cold.

You button up your silk pyjamas, and your shoulder aches with the effort. You’ll see a healer tomorrow. Tomorrow, you’ll be better.

Notes:

2012
Twenty-two years old

-

SPOILERS
CW: Unenthusiastic sex. Everything is explicitly and verbally consensual, but the sex is tolerated and accepted rather than enjoyed. Described with a detached tone but is in-detail.
Begins at "This is when you know. Your heart drops.", ends at "He looks worried, or maybe a little offended."
SPOILERS

-

I don't really know what to say. I'm sorry, gang. I can’t imagine this is what would’ve been expected for when this fic was changed from mature to explicit, but I feel in good conscience I needed to bump it up. Goodbye, pretty orange ‘mature’ Intrinsic Warmth! Hello, edgy emo red Intrinsic Warmth.

Sorcerer society really fucking sucks. To tell you the truth, this specific chapter started to form in my head when I read that 2018 Megumi had known people to die outside of his classmates before his first year of high school. This is my contribution to what those deaths were. Y’all come be unhappy with me in the comments section (this is how I will cope with the anime adaptation of shibuya arc okay).

Also, update: I'm on tumblr! I am pretty inactive, mainly because it makes me feel like a grandma and I don't actually know what I'm doing there, but I do actually have a tumblr now, lmao. Username is the same as ao3, of course.

I hope you guys are doing really really well, though :) Loads of love to you all! <333

EDIT: manga reader? Me too! I’ve been posting some incredibly fluffy, satoru-pov one shots on my tumblr because I cannot stomach the angst at the moment. It’s all in IW canon set before this chapter with no manga spoilers <3

Chapter 18: 2013

Saturday 7th September, 2013

You have a routine. 

The coffee shop near your apartment does wonderful pastries. You know this, because buying one is a part of your routine. Before you leave your apartment, you pick up your scarf from the floor and wrap it around your neck, so tight it feels like a noose. You’ve checked the weather forecast, because that’s something that intelligent, responsible adults do, and you alter your wardrobe to accommodate. 

Every morning, you leave the house at five-thirty in the morning: you have been awake for hours already, and it’s the earliest you think is acceptable to be up. It’s just before the morning rush of commuters descend, filling the streets with cars and noise and smog. 

Your routine: you will sit in a bakery, and watch the outside air spin through the swirls of carbon particulates. You will watch the frantic, achingly normal lives of strangers. You will feel like an outsider as you warm your blood with green tea.

The stairs of your apartment block are clean. You descend them, and run a finger down the handrail and examine it to look for any residue of dirt. Your gloves are perfectly unblemished, and you take this as sign that today might be okay. 

Outside, the air is sharp. The heels of your shoes click against the pavement. One-two, one-two, a consistent rhythm, the thumping of a heart. You press your nose into the expensive wool that circles your neck. It had been a birthday present, from Kazuo. You hadn’t worn it to please him, which had, in turn, pleased you. It’s soft. Warm.

The yarn is twists of green and blue. It had reminded you of matching raincoats.

The clicking falters. You stumble, and resume your pace.

There’s no point pretending, or lying to yourself. You’ve resolved to be more honest with yourself. You’ve spent too long pretending, or trying to convince yourself of things that aren’t true. You’ve resolved to be more honest with yourself, because self-deception has left you hollow and empty. 

Green and blue. Yes. It had reminded you of matching raincoats, which had reminded you of the day you had discovered the Chapel; a blazing storm, laughter shouted out to be heard over the rain, the quiet wonder of discovering your second home together. 

It had reminded you of Satoru, and this is why you have kept it. 

If you kid yourself, you could say it smells of him. You haven’t seen Satoru in months, haven’t had the opportunity to catch the scent of his cologne. It used to stay on his clothes for hours after he’d sprayed it, and you’d find that your apartment started smelling of him, even though he hardly spent any time there. 

It was just that you spent time with him, and because he spent so much money on the stuff, so you would always smell like him whenever you moved close to him.

You are feeling sentimental today. You have stopped trying to push it away, or even welcome it or try to pursue it. With either, you find the feeling slips through your fingers like water. Instead, you allow any emotion to wash over you, leaving you shivering and raw and cold when it leaves. 

With the empty street and cold air, it is easy to remember how he’d kissed you. You remember that the scent of his cologne had clung to your skin like a lover, lingering for days. 

You had thought it torture: you didn’t know, then, that you would distance yourself from him. You’d promised yourself that it was temporary, reasoning that you couldn’t keep seeing him when you wanted so much that he couldn’t give. 

Back then, being in his presence had felt like the slice of a knife. You would see his smile and you would be reminded of him, and you would love him and hate him that he didn’t love you back. 

Now, you just want to see him. You’ve woken up, and you’ve realised that you don’t have anyone. 

You haven’t spoken to Satoru in months, nothing more than five sentences. You don’t know what’s happening with Shoko, who withdrew into herself after Geto left, who hasn’t quite been the same since. 

At least the children, Megumi and Tsumiki, you’ve tried to keep seeing. You keep your obligations, and you make sure they’re safe and cared for, but you miss the casual way you used to spend time with them. That was Satoru’s presence: he had made things so easy. He had made things so difficult. You miss knowing more about them than the strictest minimum, and yet you know that you can only blame yourself. 

And even before you moved away from him, you’d been feeling like this. 

You remember the emptiness you’d felt when Geto had left; the stillness from Shoko, the muscle twitching in Satoru’s cheek. You had tried to move on, ignore it, lean on Satoru. It had worked, to some extent. 

You remember the guilt you’d felt over Megumi and Tsumiki. You had wanted to give them a childhood that was better than yours, and you’d been so afraid that you weren’t exceeding. 

You remember Satoru leaving you on the rooftop of the Zenin household. You remember the faceless women that have haunted you since you were a child. You remember how otherworldly that night had been; how you had felt distant, like some ghost, untethered to the people around you. 

You remember the relentlessness of curses. You correct yourself: you know the relentlessness of curses, because they have not stopped, and they never will. Always new, never ceasing, always in need of your time. 

You had left school, naïve and hopeful, and had been burdened with a task you would never be able to complete. You had wanted to save people, but you hadn’t known the toll it would take on you. And you remember that it had affected you, the way it affects you now. 

Satoru was the last person who had been yours. You sometimes reminisce on the days when you didn’t need anyone else; you had been a child, and you had clung to each other to escape from the lives inside your homes. You find yourself missing the days in Jujutsu High; the brief time at the start of your first year, when you and Satoru were still talking, or the few happy months before Geto had left, when you had felt, for the first time, that you’d had more friends than just one. 

Geto had deserted you. Shoko had drifted away. Even Nanami, who you still remember as the withdrawn kid he’d been in school, had left the society altogether. You have no connection to your family. Satoru had been the only person left. 

What are you supposed to do? When you see him, it hurts. When you leave him, it’s numb. Your senses are dulled, the world monotonous. You’re achingly lonely, and yet you can’t summon the strength to change it. 

It frightens you. This apathy that consumes you, the cold you don’t have the energy to escape: it’s frightening. 

You don’t want to need him. You keep your focus on your goals, your life, your routine. When you were a child, you fantasised about Jujustu High, becoming a sorcerer, saving people. You think about her, your child self, and try to make her proud. 

Your routine sustains you. When you return home, unfeeling and shaking from a fight with a curse, you fall into your routine. You fear, more than anything, what your life would consist of without it. 

The pastries are overcooked today. 

 

--

 

“Did you ever love me?”

Despite yourself, you laugh.

God, if you think you’re dramatic, you’ve got nothing on Kazuo. It’s something he’s improved on recently; he can speak his mind a little more, but hasn’t learnt how to censor himself so he could be taken seriously. 

Did you ever love me?  What a joke. It reminds you of a scene from a soap opera, one of those shit ones that Satoru liked to watch. You always found them ridiculous, with the melodramatic plots and the awful acting. Satoru would try to get you into them—always at the end of the day, when you were both too tired to do anything but be in each other’s company, he’d make another start convincing you to start watching one. 

Kazuo keeps talking like he’s in a television show. As if he’s been convincing himself to confront you for the past three episodes, and the audience is watching eagerly to see how he’ll take you down now you’ve finally met. 

Maybe he thinks of himself like that, too. He’d summoned you to his apartment to show you how successful he is without you. There’s an empty laundry basket in the corner, hempen and expensive, to show you how much money he’s making. He’s cleaned his flat, more than he ever did when he lived with you. To show you how well he’s doing after you broke up. 

If you could count it as a break up. You two burnt out, more than anything. One night, you walked over to him and told him. We should break up. That was it. He had been hurt, and you hadn’t felt anything at all.

It had been cruel, letting him tag along. You’d rather keep to yourself these days. 

It’s a pathetic pretence, his apartment. Kazuo hates cleaning, and he never did laundry, and you’ve always made more than him. He had never lived with you, but had wanted to spend time at your apartment because his was a shitheap. It’s as if he thinks that a few weeks apart from you has erased his existence from your memory. Like you don’t remember what he was like when he tried to live with you?

“This isn’t funny,” he says. You try to school your expression back to solemnity. 

“I know.” You’re taking this very seriously. “I know.”

“I’m asking you a question here,” he tells you. He scratches the shell of his ear, and you look at the beauty mark on his lobe. You had found it cute. When his nervousness and insecurity had been novel, it had been endearing. 

“You’re asking me a—” You raise your eyebrows. You try keep your patience. “Okay. Okay. Did I ever love you?”

“Yes.”

“I—Are you really asking me that?” 

Surely it’s obvious to him, how ridiculous of a question it is. 

“I am!” Kazuo’s voice tilts up and it sounds like a question, more than an exclamation. He’s frustrated with you, but he’s never been good at staying angry. “Just answer, won’t you? I’m… You should just answer.”

“Right.” 

You take a deep breath and find your fingers itching for a drink. To waste some time, you massage the joint of your shoulder with your opposite hand. 

“You broke up with me,” he reminds you. “You owe me… you owe me an explanation. I just want to know.”

He’s repeating what his friends have told him. His friends will have assured him that you owe him an explanation, closure, something that he can move on from. His friends don’t know that your relationship was never happy, never successful, never loving. 

Kazuo may have loved you, but you never felt loved by him. You were with him for almost two years, and he was a presence in your life that you accepted at best. His friends don’t know that. 

“You want to know?” You pin him with an unflinching stare, too exhausted to pretend to be hesitant anymore. “Okay. No.”

He looks affronted. “You can’t just say no.”

“I can’t?” He seems to be making up the rules as he goes. You hold yourself back from making that comment out loud, because it seems too mean for the situation. 

“I told you,” he says, “I told you that you owe me an explanation. I… if you tell me you’re going to break up with me, you need to give closure to—”

“I just did,” you say. “I don’t think I ever loved you.”

A pause. And then hears you. 

His hand stills. He’d still been scratching at his ear. A nervous tick. It’s clear that he wasn’t expecting you to admit it so candidly. He was probably expecting your hesitance, and then denial, and then for you to sob and fall into his arms and plead for him to take you back. Say that you’d always loved him, still love him, that you’re willing to change. 

He still doesn’t say anything. You feel a stab of something empathetic, which is a surprise, and you sigh. 

“It’s not your fault,” you say as an attempt to lessen the blow. “In terms of me not really loving you. I just didn’t.”

More silence. God, if he cries, you’re leaving. You can’t cope with him crying, not today. 

“We’re not happy.” Some honesty. Unfiltered, but said in a voice softer than usual. The stab of something empathetic feels like a knife wound in your chest. “I haven’t been happy for a long time. That’s not… most of that is to do with me. Separate to you.” Lamely, you say: “My mental health. And everything.”

Should you explain more? You’ve always held back from discussions about your past. He doesn’t know anything about you, not really. 

“I haven’t been happy,” you say again, not sure of what else you can tell him. “Not for… not for a while. And—” 

He looks up to you. His eyes are wet.

“I didn’t make you happy?”

And he says it in such a quiet voice, so confused and unsure, that you have to hold yourself back from laughing. Or screaming. You do not have the energy to self-inspect. 

Kazuo doesn’t understand. He’s naïve in a way that is both frustrating and pitiable. You can easily be cruel to him, or distant, but it’s in these moments that you remember how little he actually knows. 

He deserves honesty. You’re not going to lie to him, the way you’ve lied to him for years. 

“No.” You tell him the truth. Perhaps this will give him the explanation he wants. 

The familiar irritation tugs at you. If he didn’t know that he didn’t make you happy, he’s an idiot. He’s stupid if he deluded himself into thinking you were happy with him. when he had to practically beg you to progress every step of the relationship, he should have figured it out. 

You’ve been miserable with him. He’s never made you happy. 

He’s distracted you. 

He has. 

At the beginning, it worked. You had wanted someone else’s presence, someone who wanted you, who wasn’t Satoru, and he had provided himself. He had kept you from being alone, and even if you didn’t love him, he had helped. 

He wasn’t to know. He doesn’t know what your job is. He’s never been convinced with your vague excuse of freelancing for a foreign company, but you’ve also never told him the truth. He doesn’t know the toll your work takes on you. 

Your work. The bone-breaking agony of your work. 

“Did I ever?” he asks. 

You shrug. “I don’t think so.”

He’s silent again. 

You’re not sure how long you’re supposed to stay here. You’re not sure what’s appropriate, before you leave, a carrier bag of your left-behind possessions in your gloved hands. You’re not sure if you’re going to see him again, and when you try to recapture that spark of passion you just felt for him, you find that you’ve already lost it again. 

 

--

 

You’re making yourself dinner when you get a phone call. 

“Are you free?” 

You put the knife down. You’re midway through dicing a sweet pepper. Onions are caramelising on the hob. 

You do not even register the disappointment anymore. Of course, you feel like there’s no point getting excited about anything in your life anymore. There is always the underlying risk that it will be disrupted by work.

This recipe is new, and the woman online who’d written it had stressed the importance of keeping to a strict time schedule. Don’t be tempted to let the broth simmer while you go and have a sit-down! she had teased in her blog’s palatable, sans-serif font. Walk yourself to the kitchen and get started on the other veggies. Let’s not be lazy, ladies!

This advice, of course, is pointless for you. You turn off the gas and then prop the phone between your shoulder and your ear. You leave the kitchen to go put your trainers on. 

“Yes.”

“There’s reports of a Grade Three about twenty minutes from you. I can text you the address.”

“Okay.”

You keep your weapons in your car for this reason. You walk into your bedroom and tuck a spare pair of gloves into your back pocket. You turn the lights off behind you when you leave, to save money on the electricity bills.

 

--

 

The outcome of the curse attack isn’t as bad as it could have been. People saved: two. People killed: one. 

It takes a long time, though. The sky is dark by the time you’re finished, and when one of the men left alive tries to thank you with an embrace, you have to step back, suddenly terrified. But because terror is an emotion, just like sentiment, or irritation, you do not try to run from it. At least it is something, after all. 

 

--

 

The trees are beginning to look familiar. You’ve been driving for a while. The sky has darkened around you, but you’ve lit yourself a cigarette, and it glows faintly in the evening light. You inhale the smoke with a relief you feel very rarely these days.

If you drive into the wilderness, somewhere unreachable, your work is less likely to call you for a mission. 

Curses spawn in populated areas, mostly. In the country, or in the forest, or in the deserted place you think your subconscious is taking you towards, they’re less likely to exist. 

Which means you won’t be called for work again today. Maybe. Hopefully.

So you’re running away. Or driving away. 

You’re not sure where you’re going. 

The road is paved well, but deserted. You’re taking each turn at random, just whatever seems right. Something instinctive within you has taken control. As the time passes, you slow down a little and watch as the speedometer dial eases away from the speeding limit. 

You’re watching the road with vacant eyes when you realise that you know where you are. 

 

--

 

You don’t want to stop, but you do. You’re careful not to get out of the car, and you tell yourself that you won’t linger for longer than a minute. 

The house is bigger than you remember. When you were a child, it had felt like a doll’s house—claustrophobic, trapping you there. Every corner held your father, grandmother, mother. You had learnt how to be silent, because you were aware of every sound you made. Like a wild prey, you had pressed yourselves into the corners and felt the walls pushing you in. 

Now you see it, it looks normal. Walls a shade between white and beige, with wooden support beams running along the house’s edges, holding up the multiple floors. It looks large. None of the cramped corridors or cages of rooms. The windows are closed against the cold, but they’re not barred. You seem to remember them being barred; although when you concentrate on the memory, it fades, and you don’t think it you are remembering it honestly after all. 

You won’t be able to see your room. It hadn’t had a window, just a solitary light in the middle. 

You take a drag. Your cigarette is burning down small. You almost wish your father could see you: he hated smoking. He hated you, too, so you suppose nothing would change there.

The house really is large. The thought tugs at you. You’d always assumed that, because you didn’t live in a mansion like Satoru’s, your family must have been poor. Now you look at it, you’re almost impressed. You’d never be able to afford something like that—you probably never will, even though your salary’s generous enough. 

You don’t think you remember many carpets or rugs. Your father had paid to heat a house that large, and he hadn’t had any attempt at insulation? From an objective outsider, which you almost are, and are definitely not, it appears to be a house built for the summer. Just thinking about the heating bill is extreme. How much would that have cost your father? Your family’s not particularly powerful, but they must have accumulated some decent inheritance for your father to be spending it like that. 

Satoru’s house is near. You haven’t been able to see it the same since Yahaba died .To keep Megumi safe, the higher-ups had worked on the best protection they could find. Replacing the wards, searching for the flaws. You’ve heard that they hired a sorcerer to work as one of his teachers at his school. 

It wouldn’t be the same for Tsumiki. She’s only lucky that she’s still in Megumi’s school. Next year, she’ll be in high school, and no-one but you or Satoru will care. It’s less likely that she’ll be attacked than Megumi, but some curses have high intelligence. You know this. You’ve encountered the types that would hurt Tsumiki to hurt Megumi, or hurt Satoru. 

You used to be able to walk to Satoru’s house. It would take you a long time, though, and you wonder how you were ever allowed to do it. You couldn’t bare to think of allowing Megumi or Tsumiki to make that walk on their own now, not now you’re the adult. And especially not when they were even younger. 

When you’d first found him, Megumi had been six. Tsumiki had been seven. By that age, you’d been walking to Satoru’s, on your own. You can’t think of them doing that, when they were so afraid and pale and thin. Young, just like you. 

If you got out the car, you could walk inside. You could knock on the door, gloved fingers wrapping around the shining handle. It had been scratched when you were a child, the thin layer of plated gold flaking off to reveal the copper beneath it. 

If you went inside, you could talk to Sara. You could apologise to her, for avoiding her and removing yourself from her life as soon as it was possible for you. You could talk to your father, see how he’s changed. You could see Haru, your brother, a stranger to you now. He shares your blood, but his isn’t cursed—he’s inherited the family technique. You were told this years ago. 

Perhaps this has saved him from your father. You try to reassure yourself. Perhaps his life has been different to yours. 

Your life. Your childhood. Your old house, so large and foreign. 

You drop your cigarette outside your car and watch its light fade and then go out. Blackness. You know where you’re going next.

 

--

 

The first day you had found the Chapel, it had been raining. The memory comes back to you as you retrace your steps, walking through the tangled grass. You step over a large rock, and remember that you’d had to scale it when you were a child. 

You and Satoru had been wearing raincoats—his had been blue. The rain had darkened his hair to silver before you’d convinced him to put his hood up. In the grey-green of the pathway to the Chapel, the blue coat had stood out like a shining beacon, and you remember focusing on it, following it. The rain had gotten more powerful, and you’d hardly been able to hear him over the noise, but every so often he’d turn around to you, smiling brilliantly, and you’d feel warm. 

This evening is peaceful. You’ve fled the chill of the city, and here, in the countryside, heat is tangible in the air. Sweat rolls down your back like tree sap. 

When you look around, you can see the distant twinkling of city lights in the distance; ugly edifices and apartment blocks intrude on the deep mauve of the skyline. They give the illusion of closeness, but you know from years of your childhood that you’re far from most civilisation. 

How many times have you walked this route? You’d meet him here every day in the years before you left for school. You would wake early, escape from your house and begin the upward climb. You’d arrive before him, if you hadn’t slept over at his the night before. 

Satoru, laughing. You’d tease him, when his voice was breaking, and he’d sulk and sit in a corner. He would get bored after just a few minutes, and shuffle back over to you, everything forgotten.

Could he do the same now?

Could he forgive you? You know that you’re older. Things are different when you’re older, when you don’t have the luxury of lazy, sprawling days. Satoru has other people to entertain him, now. 

Back then, you had thought yourself special, the way he’d kept coming back to you: but now you question it. Maybe you were special, but maybe you were just close by. You were convenient for him, and he must have known how much he meant to you. Perhaps even more so: perhaps, maybe, he’d known just how much you had loved him. Surely you couldn’t have been subtle. Maybe he knew, and he let you tag on anyway, to show himself how much people revered him, with you as the easiest and closest example.

Satoru had always enjoyed attention, and he craved it like an addict, even as a child. Perhaps that was all he wanted from you, and why he let you stick around him. It must have been flattering for him, being in the company of someone who adored him.

No. no, you tell yourself, that’s not what it was like. You hadn’t worshiped him as a child—you had been extremely careful never to. And he had loved you. He’d told you, and he’d shown you. You weren’t just convenient: you were his friend. 

You tell yourself this. You force yourself to remember, remember accurately—but the memories are hazy, intransient. They fade without new ones to sustain them. 

Like a video cassette of a favourite movie, memories of your childhood have become warped and distorted from overuse. Watch—rewind—pause, examine. What had he meant? What had he been thinking? And then, more recently: what had he said? What had been his exact words? Had he smiled, or looked away?

Another step. You would know your way blindfolded, but the way is carved out on the floor regardless. It’s desire path of your own making. And yet plants hang, drooping and weak, in your way. No-one has walked this path in many years, and nature has taken over. 

You pull yourself over a cluster of boulders. Your bare hands know where to find purchase. Your gloves are gone, left on the passenger seat of your car. The rough feel of granite is unfamiliar, but you’ve held these worn handles of the rock for years.

Pebbles bury themselves under your fingernails. Dirt has stained your nailbeds. Your legs are scratched with the bites of weeds and nettles.  

It’s still here.

A small cut-out of a greater expanse of rock. A secluded place. A cave, really. 

One step inside, and it embraces you. You remember sheltering here from the rain, Satoru by your side, both of you all lanky limbs and crooked smiles. You remember the soft spring afternoons, warm and lazy, content to do nothing but exist in each other’s presence. You remember claiming sanctuary here, fleeing from your home when everything got too much, safe with the knowledge that you had somewhere that no-one cruel could reach you. 

You take another step. 

And something lets out a shrill, reptilian hiss. 

A curse. A curse. A weak, pathetic curse—a deformed rodent, the size of a piglet, pressing its hairy nose against a pale blue pillow. Dribble slides from its open mouth. Its fat arms wrap around it. Its groin rubs and twitches against Satoru’s old pillow.

No.

No.  You can’t. You won’t allow it. Not here, not in the place you grew up, not here—you won’t allow this perversion of your childhood refuge, won’t allow it to taint the memories that are already fading. 

No. 

You won’t, you won’t.

And, shit, suddenly you’re screaming at it, seeing red, mind burning, rage exploding out at you, at this thing that thinks it can be here. It can’t! You can’t have it here, not like this, not here—you won’t let it, the bastard, the evil thing, no— 

It can’t, you’re not allowing it, not now, not when you thought—

When you thought you could have one thing, one thing that curses couldn’t—that they couldn’t—when you thought? You thought it was safe, you thought you were safe, and you’re not. This was supposed to be the one place you were safe. Your life is nothing but curses—they dominate your life completely—but the Chapel is your childhood, your innocence. You’re not letting it prove you wrong.

You’re not. How dare it. How dare it even think it could be here. How dare it think it has the right to be here!

I can’t have this?  You hear yourself saying—and you’re shouting, screaming, louder than the furious drumming in your ears. I can’t have this? I can’t even have this?

You’re grabbing at it, squeezing, digging your nails into its skin and tearing. You touch it and it begins to crumble. And it claws at your wrists and your arms and blood lurches from your veins but it’s already fading—

You’re already killing it, this thing, this thing that was attracted to the decade-old remnants of Satoru’s cursed energy.

Because it’s Satoru, and you miss him, and you know this—and of course you miss him, of course you would. Of course you’d miss your best friend, the only person who’s loved you, of course you’d miss him. You miss him, oh, oh, you miss him so much. 

You’ve sunken to the floor, hands fisting in ash. You reach out for a yellowed calendar—red crosses ending April 2005, your first day at school, so long ago—and you hold it, clutch it to your chest. Something cold drops onto your hands, and it’s tears, your tears, and you’re crying. 

And then you’re sobbing, your chest shaking, frantic gasps of breath that punctuate the awful convulses of tears. Your nose runs. You can’t see. You feel disgusting and pathetic and you’re crying.

Of course you miss him. Of course you do. But it’s everything else. Can’t you have this? Can’t you have the memory of your childhood without it being invaded by the worst of your adult life? Can’t you separate your life with Satoru and your life fighting curses—where you’re left weak, numb, exhausted every day. 

Of course you miss him. But you hate it, you hate your life now, and that’s not just him. 

You hate curses. You hate how you will never win, you hate how you’re nothing more than a weak technique. You hate this path that you’ve taken, you hate how you’ve questioned nothing all your life. You hate that you’ve let yourself be led. You hate where you’ve been led to.

You hate fighting curses. You hate feeling things burn under your touch. You hate that you have your technique at all, that you couldn’t just be normal, and that you were raised with a family that made you this wreck of a person. You hate that you can’t touch someone without being so scared. You hate that you feel like a curse when you exorcise them: that you only have to make contact with someone, and you are killing them. You hate that you’re just as bad as them. 

You hate seeing people die because you weren’t good enough. You hate being responsible for so many lives, and you hate knowing that you could have saved so many more. 

You hate curses with talons, with hands, intelligence, with bestial impulses, with squelching flesh, with rolling joints. You hate them all, and you hate that you have to be the one to kill them. You hate that the life of a sorcerer is draining and lonely, and you hate that your life isn’t the idyllic future you had thought it would be. 

You hate that so much of it is your fault. And you hate feeling so responsible, knowing that it’s all because of you. And you hate looking back at your life and seeing trails of bodies. And you hate that you’ve grown up. 

Tears run down your cheeks. You want a parent. You want a mother, or a father. You want someone older than you to tell you what to do. You don’t want to be in charge like this, because you have been in charge of your adulthood, and you have ruined it for yourself.

You want to be young again, and be able to blame everyone else, and have hope that you’ll be able to make your life a success. 

You want things to be simple again.

And you miss so many people. You miss Yahaba, whose death is your fault and was your responsibility. You feel her absence physically, a weight on you that won’t leave. When she died, so did the last person who made you feel safe—safe in that paternal, tender way, the feeling that stirs within you whenever you see Tsumiki or Megumi upset. She had been the last person in your life you could fall back on, and she’s dead. 

She’s been dead for a year. It’s the anniversary of her death, you remember. Today. This time last year, she had already been dead. 

Like a child, you curl in on yourself. You tuck your knees in close to your chest and let the old calendar fall to the floor. You wrap your arms around yourself. Your energy has been spent, and now you just shiver. 

It’s never been easy. You grew up an unwanted child with one friend, and you stayed that way for the first fifteen years of your life. You grew to associate touch with fear, and you’ve never really tried to work past it. 

You got older, and you replaced panic with numbness. You would balk at great disturbances, and force yourself to follow the easiest path, turning off your emotions when problems got too close. You have waded into a river and let the current lead you. 

It isn’t just Satoru. It’s him, of course, but it’s also everything else.  

It’s so complicated—you miss him, but you don’t miss the way you would feel around him, especially not at the end. You would ache for his love and get caught up in the whirlwind of loving him too much. Towards the end, you could only manage to be happy around him. 

At the time, you had thought it was because of your unrequited love. You had thought that your exhausting switching of emotions had been due to him, that you would love him and then be reminded that it was unrequited, turn from adoration to grief in seconds of his company. 

But it’s always been unrequited. This has been what you have realised, these past lonely and cold months, when you have nothing to do but think about the mess of your life. It’s always been unrequited. You’ve never known Satoru to love you back the way you’ve wanted him to. 

So—now you think, now you properly think, that it must have been something else. That maybe your feelings to him played a part, but that they weren’t the whole. Because you hadn’t—you hadn’t been happy, truly happy, for years. 

Something had changed, or it had slowly shifted, over the years. Something within you. Something had broken, and maybe Satoru had made some contribution, but there was nothing he could have done when you were not whole or happy on your own. You were not whole; even without him, you had felt empty. 

That’s the thing you fear the most. That it’s your fault.

You don’t want to be in charge, because you don’t like the life you’ve given yourself. You’re supposed to be old, and mature, but you feel achingly young. And at the same time, you feel withered, the inner dullness of experiencing the worst of life and knowing nothing will get better. 

And maybe it’s you. It was easy when you were younger, when you had everyone else to blame. Maybe that’s why you’ve been hiding from Satoru. Because you know that if you saw him again, spoke to him, heard him laugh, and you still felt like this? It would prove you right. You would be at fault. You couldn’t blame his absence: you could only blame yourself.

Face cold and stinging, you raise your head. You swallow down the phlegm and tears. 

Another thing you hate: your cold self-hatred. You feel pathetic, and feel even worse for feeling so. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, and you genuinely don’t know how to escape it. 

You pick up the calendar again. You remember circling when you and Satoru would leave for school; you remember crossing off the dates every morning. And here it still is, here, in your hands. The paper crinkles, stiff with age. It’s rough and weathered, and the once-red ink has faded to an insipid mauve, but it’s real. Tangible. The memory is a candle of warmth in an icy church hall, but it’s something.

Unless you’re just distracting yourself with memories? Is that right? Are you avoiding things again, remembering the past, or are you finally having something for yourself?

You want to see what else has lasted. 

A bubble of laughter escapes your lips. You almost expect to see Satoru here, climbing up the final steps and striding in the way he used to. Here, it’s awfully easy to forget he’s older than the child you would go to the Chapel with, the child who you would sit next to and play Pokémon with.

It feels strange, seeing everything unchanged. But you think—who would have cleared it away? You and Satoru would still visit the Chapel in the holidays, especially after Geto left. You think that remembering your childhood in that way must have eased the grief of his loss. 

And when you had left school, you had found your own place, and Satoru had found his. And then Megumi and Tsumiki had arrived, and you were so firmly adults that going back to your childhood hideaway had felt silly. It wasn’t even something to be considered. It was something in the past that you’d left behind.

So you would never have packed everything away. You try to remember the last time you were both here, but there was never any big departure, any final send-off. One day, you just decided you were too old for it, and you never came back. 

Like you, the Chapel is weary with age. Dust covers the floors, and once-vibrant pictures have peeled off the walls and fallen into puddles of murky rainwater on the cave floor. 

A copy of Vogue Japan is discarded on the floor, face-down. It looks trodden-on, an inhuman footprint having pressed it into the rock however long ago. 

You pick it up. Tissue paper hearts cling to the cover; when you move the magazine, a few of them flutter to the ground. Tenderly, you smooth out its creases and try to remember why you’d kept it for so long. What had it reminded you of, for you to hold on to it? You’d say it was Satoru’s idea, but something inside you disagrees. 

Engravings on the wall, an infinity symbol and a snake. Notes that Satoru used to write you in his classes; he was too brilliant for his tutors, back then, too brilliant and too easily bored. The sight of his handwriting softens you—he’d addressed the notes to Hebi; Hebi-Hebi; my amazing Hebi-Hebi; my glovey girl from the glassey boy; the cool and awesome and amazing Hebi-Hebi from your cooler and awesomer and amazinger friend Gojo. 

You run a fingertip over the fading ink and smile. Your lips part and you taste salt; it takes you a heartbeat to realise that you’re crying again. Tears, slow this time, sliding down your cheeks. You brush them away with the back of your hand, laughing thickly. 

“You idiot,” you whisper. The tears cool your skin like evening dew on lilies. 

Oh, oh. You idiot.

Notes:

2013
Twenty-three years old

-

It gets worse before it gets better gang, but it will get better. And soon! I promise. <3

I don't know what people were expecting with this chapter, but I don't know if this was it? But I don't know if I'm just talking out of my arse with that last statement either--even though I'm not up to 4am working this time (shock horror), I'm still very sleepy and brain tired and I may not be making a huge amount of sense rn. As is typical, etc etc etc.

Like I said last chapter, I'm now on Tumblr, and I’ve posted a good few Satoru-POV oneshots there if you fancy something to offset the angst, lol. Ha-ha, I sound like a proper ao3 author, look at me! ALSO—50k hits!! That’s so cool. You guys are sick as.

I hope everyone is doing well! Sorry for the slow updates gang, but uni is a bugger and I am a busy busy gal. But wishing everyone the best, and with lots of love, see you next chapter!! <33 :DDD

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Chapter 19: 2014

Notes:

CW:
CW related to panic attacks, and an incident stemming from Hebi's haphephobia (non-consensual touching). Contains *spoilers*. Please see end notes for more detail.

Sunday 7th September, 2014

You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t. You need to leave. 

It’s the door. It dwarfs you, staring you down, and it’s so tall and frightening that you want to leave again. You can’t leave—you’d be cowardly to leave, and you’d have to climb back down the stairs, face the doorman on your way out who you think already hates you, and that would be humiliating, and you can’t make this night any worse, you can’t go through that. 

And you can’t go back to your flat, to the empty rooms and the silence and the cold lonely bed, because you need to talk to someone, you need someone to make you calm down, because you still can’t take a whole breath in and it’s been hours, or it’s felt like hours, and so you can’t go downstairs. 

You don’t know why the doorman let you up. You’re a mess. Your makeup must be ruined, and you’re dressed skimpily, a short dress that bares your legs. You feel ugly, and you have to keep tugging it down. You’d known it didn’t fit, you’d known it was too short, but you were so desperate for something to happen tonight, you don’t even know, and it was your shortest dress, and it exposed the most flesh, and you’d hoped someone might make you feel something tonight. Desired? Wanted? If nothing else, you think you’d hoped for that something.

But that hadn’t worked. It had worked, but it hadn’t worked well, and now you’re here. And the doorman had nearly kicked you out, but you’d finally choked out your name, and then he’d told you the floor you were asking for. You’d been too out of it to ask for the door number, and then you were halfway up the stairs and nearly crying, and then you’d reached the floor and realised that you didn’t even need a number because Satoru’s apartment is the only one on this floor. 

Which should make sense, because he’s always been so fucking rich, and you should remember this, you should’ve remembered this because you’re supposed to be his best friend. You’re a shit best friend, that’s another thing you should’ve remembered, because you’re a shit best friend who he probably won’t even want to see, and there’s no point knocking because he deserves to be furious with you, he deserves to hate you, and he shouldn’t let you in. You shouldn’t give him the chance to let you in. 

You want to see him. You need someone. You don’t have anyone else. He’s the only one who knows you. It’s so late, and you can’t breathe, and your head is pounding from the crying. And. You want to see him.

The doorbell is silent. You don’t know if it’s rung. You hold it down for three seconds, in case it’s one of those that only rings when you press it. And then you let go, in case it’s one of those that rings when you click it and let go. 

You can’t hear if it’s gone off. You don’t know how long you should stand there. You don’t know if you should wait for him, or if you should knock on the door, or if you should ring it again. Would he think you’re being too much? What if he hasn’t heard?

This is a bad idea. Shit, this is such a bad idea.

He’s going to hate you. 

He should hate you. You haven’t spoken to him for years, and suddenly you turn up at his house, without any warning, without letting him know in advance. He should hate you. What are you expecting from this? Why should he do anything for you?

Of course he shouldn’t. You’ve been stupid for coming here. 

You back away from the door. The doorbell was silent: it probably didn’t ring. That’s good. That means he never has to know you were here. 

You’ve turned away. That’s good. Your head aches, you think, you think you should just go to sleep, even though the thought forces a new fresh wave of sobs from you. You never should have come here. You never should have expected anything from him. There’s the corridor. You should walk down it. Your blood is pounding in your ears, and you can’t hear your footsteps. 

Dread overtakes you, and you stumble. You bend over, trying to breathe, holding yourself up with your hands on your knees. You’re going to be alone tonight. You need to be able to accept that. You need to be able to deal with it. Deal with it. 

You force yourself to take another step. Remind yourself that this is better. Tell yourself that you’ll have to deal with it. You were stupid for coming here. 

“Hebi?”

Satoru. 

Satoru’s voice. His voice? You’ve missed his voice. Why are you hearing his voice? He’s seen you. 

You can’t see him. You can’t see him. Just his voice, though, the tiniest slip of him and it’s consuming you.

Consuming. Tonight. Today. You were going to be alone. You shouldn’t have come here—god, shit, you shouldn’t have come here, but now he’s seen you, and now you have to face him, and see him again, and you have to tell him you were going to leave, like a coward, you were going to leave. 

You turn around to him, and he’s so close to you. You’d hardly walked away—just a metre or two from the door, like you’d been pulling yourself back. 

He’s dressed for night, like he should be, because it’s gone midnight and he was probably asleep. White cotton shirt, deep blue sweatpants. His hair is down, and it’s longer than you remember it being. It falls past his ears, curls at the nape of his neck. One half sticks up, like he’d been sleeping on his side. He notices you notice it, and his hand flies up to pat it down. 

And he’s looking at you with more shock than you’ve ever seen on him. There is nothing marring Satoru’s expression; he doesn’t hide his shock from you. He doesn’t blink. He just stares at you, and you cringe into yourself under his gaze. You shrivel like a weed under a beating desert sun. 

“I’m sorry,” you gasp, after the heartbeat that slams past your ears. You hardly recognise your voice. It scratches against your ears, shaky and pathetic and soaked with tears. “I shouldn’t—I shouldn’t have—” 

“What are you doing here?” he asks. Whispers. Like he’s incredulous: like he can’t believe you’d have the audacity to come here. 

Tears cloud your vision. You shouldn’t have come. He doesn’t want you here—you were selfish, and stupid, and there’s no reason for him to do anything for you. 

Your lip quivers. You can’t talk, because you can’t stop shaking. The memories of tonight, still fresh, still painful, reinvade. Your flesh squirms. Tiny insects burrowed beneath your skin begin to shift and bite.

“No,” he says, quickly, eyes wide, “no, wait.” 

You hadn’t been walking away. Wait? You don’t understand.

“I’m sorry,” Satoru says, and he exhales something that sounds like a laugh. “I just… I didn’t expect you.”

Sorry? Why is he sorry? You can’t think. If you could stop shaking—

His eyes flit across your face, your hair, your dress. He sees the mess you’re in, mascara tear tracks dirtying your cheeks.

You try to pull your dress down, cover more of your legs. You remember the man from before, the way he’d looked at you, the way you’d liked it. Liked it? Wanted it, not liked it. The thought makes you choke, and your eyes sting. You tug your dress down again. 

“Hey,” he says. Quiet. Hesitant. He looks you in the eye, but it’s uncertain, like he’s approaching a wild animal. Your nose is running, and your eyes are burning, and you must look disgusting. 

“Do you want to come in?” he asks, slowly. “You look… cold.”

You cross your arms over your chest, and inhale at the temperature of your bare hands. You’d lost your gloves on the way to Satoru’s, felt too overwhelmed to keep them on. You look worse than cold. But Satoru’s right—you’re freezing. 

You sway in the doorway. You want to go in, but you don’t know if you should. You’ve no idea why he’s letting you in—he shouldn’t. He shouldn’t want you here. He should know that you don’t deserve a friend like him.

You want to wipe at your nose, but you have nothing other than the side of your bare wrist, and you don’t want to disgust him. 

But , something inside you says, a voice that you haven’t heard in years, but. Satoru’s not stupid. He knows what he wants. Don’t make decisions for him.

You look back up at him. Wary eyes. Blue. Oh, his eyes, they’re blue. 

He asked you to come in. If he’s letting you in, then. Then. 

And it’s his decision. Right?

And then you’re hit with an overwhelming surge of exhaustion, something that seizes up your muscles and then releases, all at once, until you have to grab hold of the doorframe to stop yourself from collapsing. 

You sag, defeated, all adrenaline and fear and panic from the night draining from you. You feel hollow. Tired. You cannot fight yourself anymore. 

“Yeah,” you say, quietly. “Yeah, I’d… I’ll come in.”

You slip your shoes off once you enter, and pad barefoot into his apartment. The heels of your feet have been scraped raw, and the loss of height makes you feel vulnerable.

The floor is cold beneath you. It looks marble, or something else that’s smooth and polished and stone. You have not been here in a long time, and his apartment has changed in your absence. 

Satoru’s apartment is always minimalistic, clean and stripped-back. The first room is an entrance room, something designed to show off to its guests; since the last time you were here, he’s hung some abstract art on the walls, tastefully placed a chaise lounge next to his cream-white sofa, and closed the wide expanse of a glass door that leads onto a balcony. Through the door, that stretches ceiling-to-floor, you can see the vibrant neon hues of Tokyo at night. 

Satoru moves behind you, and you jump. You clutch yourself tighter, arms circling yourself. 

“I’ll get you a blanket,” he says, and steps around you to pick one off of the chaise lounge. It’s the same cream colour, and you’d missed it before. Like it’d blended in. He offers it to you, leaning from a metre away.

You take it, wrap it around yourself. It’s soft. 

Satoru goes to say something, but stops himself. His mouth opens and closes, and then he looks away. You feel so many words piling up in your throat, but there are too many that you choke on them, and you are silent. There are so many things you could say, that you have to say, and you’re overwhelmed by the choices in front of you. 

You’re standing, still shivering, in the middle of Satoru’s apartment. 

“Do you want to sit down?” Satoru asks. He gestures to the sofa. It’s long, luxurious. New. It probably cost more than your entire flat. 

You look at it, afraid, like you’ll dirty it just by sitting down. “Am… I allowed?” 

Your gaze flicks back to him. Satoru’s lips twitch, like you’d made a joke. You want to smile back at him, but your muscles feel drawn, and you cannot.

“Yeah,” Satoru says. “Of course you’re allowed. It’s… it’s real comfortable, as well.”

You should say something, about how much he paid for it, something that would make him laugh. You can’t... you can’t find the words. 

You sit down on it, and then curl up in the corner, pulling your legs by your chest and resting your head on your knees. You keep the blanket around you, like a cocoon. 

“I…” you start, before your voice breaks off. “I’m…”

Satoru’s eyes widen, and he sits down next to you, in the middle of the couch. He keeps himself a metre away from you. It’s so kind, you want to cry. 

“Listen,” Satoru says. His hands clench and unclench on his lap. “Listen, you don’t have to… or, I mean, you shouldn’t feel like you…”

You let him trail off. Satoru bites down on his lip, hard, and it whitens. His eyes fall to his hands, in his lap, and he squeezes his eyes shut. 

You shake your head. “Satoru,” you breathe, “I’m… You’ve got to understand that I’m so… I’m so sorry, for everything, for—”

“No,” he says. He’s looking back at you: immediately, he looks back to you. “no. No, you don’t—”

“I do.” Your voice breaks. “I—I do, I’ve messed it all up—”

“You’ve—what?”

“I’m so sorry—”

“But you shouldn’t—”

“Please, let me apologise, just—”

“Why?”

You stutter to a halt. You stare at him, your vision blurry with tears. “Why?” you repeat, shakily. 

“Yeah,” Satoru says. His words are so soft, like an exhale, warm breath in winter. “Hebi. You’re not making any sense. You should… you should sleep, or something.”

“How am I not making sense?” you ask, hopeless. “Satoru, please, you shouldn’t let me be here before I say sorry—” 

“But,” he interjects, with as much care as he’s ever spoken with, “why are you apologising?”

“I—” You try to breathe in, but your throat feels raw. “Because—because of everything. Satoru. I need…” 

You don’t understand. Why isn’t he angry? Why isn’t he shouting at you?

Satoru can be angry. You’ve seen him angry—you want him angry—why isn’t he angry?

But he’s—he’s not? Why isn’t he? You try to read him, the way you always could, and you see nothing but honesty. He isn’t wearing his glasses, or his blindfold: his eyes are wide and open and truthful, and he isn’t angry. 

You take in another shuddering breath. You feel the panic from before, from earlier tonight, when you stumbled out of that bar with your stomach churning and your mascara running. 

Then Satoru shakes his head, like he’s thought of something that you can’t grasp. “No. It doesn’t matter,” he says, his voice quiet, like you’re a wild animal. Are you? “Don’t worry about it.”

“But—”

“It’s okay.” Satoru’s hands twitch on his thighs. His body angles towards you, and his arm moves up, just an inch—like he’s going to touch you. Before you can react, react to anything he would do, he leans back. Immediately. Like he’d remembered. 

You remember the last time he’d touched you. You remember the feeling of his fingers in your hair, his mouth on your throat, the heat of his lips against yours. And you hate yourself in the memory, for the memory, and you want nothing more for him to forget it. 

You do not know how to handle it, remembering it. Because you do not want that now. You do not want that emotion, that heat, the burning that has left you scarred. You want Satoru, and the comforting warmth of his smile, not the blistering heat of his kisses. 

Your gaze stays trained on his hands. Satoru must notice—of course he notices, it’s Satoru—and he laces his fingers together, unmoving from their position.

You sit in silence for a long time.

“Will you stay here?” Satoru asks, finally. When he speaks, his voice is hoarse. 

Your gaze whips up to his. “I can?”

“Of course,” he says, as if it’s obvious. Not like you’re stupid, but like he couldn’t imagine anything else. “Of course you can. You always can.”

You swallow, even though your throat is dry. “I… just for the night.”

“Yeah. If you’d want. You can stay as long as you need to.” Satoru’s eyes focus on you, and then flick away as soon as you notice. “Do you want me to call someone?”

“You—Satoru, who would you call?”

His jaw tenses. “Kazuo. If something’s happened, he’d probably want to know you’re… safe.”

“What?”

“I mean, I don’t know the guy, but. You know. I’d want to know.” He’s trying to make a joke. He doesn’t know.

“No.” The throbbing behind your eyes intensifies, and suddenly all you want to do is sleep. “Not Kazuo. God, no. We broke up a while ago. Ages ago.”

Satoru’s eyes go wide. “Oh.” 

It’s silent again. You’re not used to silences with Satoru that feel so pressing, so unintentional. It’s like neither of you know what to say. Guilt weighs painfully on your chest.

Satoru stands. The sudden movement makes you jump, curl in on yourself instinctively. When you look up at him, you see your own guilt mirrored right back at you. 

“Sorry,” he blurts out, so quick and embarrassed it sounds foreign. 

“It’s okay.”

“I—” Satoru breaks off, running a hand over his face. You watch him take in your bare hands, your shivering figure half-covered in the blanket, the thin straps of your top that loop over your exposed shoulders. 

You look down, ashamed.

“Hey. Hey, c’mon. Listen to me.” Satoru, every movement slow and controlled, kneels down in front of you. It reminds you, stupidly, of the way he talks to Tsumiki or Megumi when they get scared. Tsumiki doesn’t like loud noises. She remembers her time from before more than Megumi does. Satoru always knows how to soothe her. You feel like a child.

His lips twitch into a smile you recognise, and the familiarity aches more than anything. You want to see him smile again. You want to make him smile. 

“Listening,” you whisper, because you don’t trust your voice with more than a few syllables. 

His smile grows, so slightly no-one but you would have noticed. But you have spent your life learning about Satoru, and you understand him more than anything.

“Good. I like it when I’m listened to.” Satoru’s head tilts to the side, easing you into comfort. “Because… hey, I’m glad you came to me. You know that, right?”

You swallow, and shrug, feeling horribly young, and horribly unsure.

Something flashes across his face, something close to pain. You immediately want to take it back, whatever you did, and then you have the awful voice pushing you to run away from him again. You don’t want to cause him pain again. Anymore. 

“Hey. Well, I am. I’m really glad,” Satoru says. The corner of his mouth is quirking up, and it’s familiar. You recognise his smile again. “That you came to me, instead of… everyone else.”

You want to break your gaze from his. Quietly, you admit: “There isn’t anyone else.” You can’t bear to look at him, but you can’t bear to look away. “I don’t think I have any friends anymore.”

Satoru is well-trained at hiding his emotions. You are out of practise, but you still recognise when he is appalled.

“That’s okay.” He slides back into the role of gentle reassurance with such ease, it makes you question whether anything had changed. “You still came here. That other stuff doesn’t matter, not right now.”

You shrug again, hoping he knows how grateful you are. Your fingers fist in the blanket. 

“And.” Satoru’s eyes flicker, the muscles tightening. “And if something happened…” 

Then, he lowers his chin, so he can look at you better. You wish you could shrink away, never be seen again. 

“Something happened?” he asks, when you don’t say anything. 

You cannot speak. You nod.

“Okay.” That old muscle twitches, and he notices it himself: his smile widens but becomes even more forced, even more tight. His gaze fixes on your hands. “Okay. Don’t think about it right now. In the morning, I’ll deal with it. You can tell me who—”

“No,” you say quickly. No, he can’t think— “No, wait, it’s not like that.”

Eyes flick to yours. You recognise, deep beneath his efforts to keep you calm and make you feel safe, that wildness that you have only ever seen a few times. From when he loses himself, so angry, so fierce. Frightening to any enemy: to you, a fearful mixture of protectiveness and the loss of the man you know so well. 

Satoru takes a long breath. When he speaks, every word is forcefully slowed, so intensely hushed.

“Did someone hurt you?”

“Not like that,” you say. “Not the way… It was just my wrist. I promise. It was this guy, and he… he touched me on my wrist, just touched me, but I told him to let go, and—”

And he didn’t. 

Not until you tried to wrench your arm from his grasp, shouting out like he was burning you. In his shock, he had rounded on you, shouted, and people had stared, and you couldn’t say anything to stop him. 

You had walked into the bar in your shortest dress, with gloves that skimmed your wrists. You had ordered yourself a drink, and you had seen the man’s eyes on your legs, and you had swallowed your disgust and smiled. Pretty. 

You do not feel wanted very often. You have not been wanted. You feel wanted when someone stares at you like that. 

He was only touching you: just on your wrist. He was flirting with you. You’d been flirting with him. Your fault. You’d tried to make yourself feel something, to seize his attention like that, feel something when his eyes wandered to your breasts or thighs. 

He was only touching you. It was his fingers around your wrist. You have been touched before; when a man flirts with you at a bar, because they have done this before, because you had done this before, most will try to touch you. You clamp down on your revulsion and you endure. You hide it well. 

His fingers traced the fabric of your gloves. They were barely worn; they were stiff and coarse, and your fingers were twitching with confinement. The rough pad of his thumb pushed past the fabric, and you felt it press into your skin. 

He circled his fingers around your wrist and squeezed, tight enough that you could feel your own pulse, and when he leaned forward you could smell pungent alcohol on his breath. 

You flinched back. You pushed yourself away, and your chair clattered against the wooden floor. You stumbled into another man, another man talking to another woman, and your body collided with his and you felt that searing heat of skin through his clothes and your heart was beating, hard. The man you had wanted to make you feel wanted stood up, and you saw that he was taller than you, and bigger than you, and his face screwed up like he was going to scream at you. 

You stepped away. The man followed you. He was shouting at you, because you would not respond to him. You were on the street, and the cold was sudden and biting. The man followed you, even when you were trying to step away, but the street was full of revellers and drunks and happy pink-flushed people the same age as you, and one of them collided with you, laughed and called back an apology, but the impact was searing, and your arm was bare, and you clasped your hands over your mouth to hold yourself back from throwing up. 

The man, he reached out for you. He pulled you back, turned you around, one hand around your wrist, the other on your shoulder. His thick, coarse, bare skin gripped onto yours, and you told him to let you go, and you tried to pull away from him, and then you screamed at him, already crying, pleading. 

The man let you go. His hands went to the air. He looked around, laughing, afraid, muttering that you were a psycho bitch and that you could have your fucking time alone if you wanted it so bad. 

“I don’t know why it was different this time,” you say, half to yourself. “I’ve gotten better at it—normally, I can figure it out so it doesn’t bother me. I can deal with it, most of the time.”

“You can deal with it?” echoes Satoru. 

“Yeah. When they touch me… I don’t usually…” You cut yourself off, trying to explain. “They don’t like it when I react like that, the way I did, so mostly I can just—ignore it, or—” 

Satoru looks pained. You’re doing something wrong. “But you shouldn’t…”

“It’s normally fine,” you insist. You need him to know that this—whatever this is—it’s not normal. You can withstand it, endure, brace yourself against your mind’s reactions, almost all of the time. “I promise. I can handle it, normally, I just ignore it, or I pretend that I don’t care about it, and I’m good at hiding it. Usually. Sorry. I don’t know why it was different today, I just… I couldn’t deal with it.”

“And you came here?”

Your heart contracts. Guilt pulls at you again, and you try to justify yourself. He needs to know that you wouldn’t have come—you wouldn’t have burdened him otherwise, if something wasn’t wrong. “I was panicking. I think I must have had a panic attack, outside the bar.” You pull the soft blanket up to your chin. “And I came here. God. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“Don’t apologise.” Satoru’s repeating himself, his words automatic, only because you’re repeating yourself. He’s not looking at you properly, barely thinking about what he’s saying. You’re going over and over the same exact words, like you’re a broken cassette tape. Then the haze over Satoru’s eyes clears. He focuses back on you. “You know you can always come here. You know that, don’t you?”

“I…” 

Satoru must see it in your eyes. No, you don’t. You didn’t know that. 

You still don’t understand why he’s allowing you to stay. 

And he does see it. He realises, that you have never known you were allowed to stay, and that you have only come here because you truly thought you had no other choice. You didn’t know he was an option. 

He wasn’t. He shouldn’t have been. Satoru shouldn’t be letting you stay now, after everything you did to him. 

But you can see it on his face: Satoru realises, considers, then he decides. On something—you don’t know, you can’t tell. Have you forgotten how to read him? Satoru straightens on the sofa, and nods to himself. 

“Oh,” he says, with a well-practiced façade of ease, “that makes it easier, then. I’d thought—no, doesn’t matter. Hey, of course you can. You can always come back here.”

There is something unspoken. You don’t know if you’re pretending to hear it, that silent to me that hangs in the air. You meet Satoru’s eye, self-loathing escaping from every pore in your body, and you think, surely, surely that’s what he means.   

“But you need to sleep,” Satoru says. He stands, pushes himself up with his hands on his thighs, and looks down at you with his lips pursed in a maternal pout, the way Yahaba used to look at the you both whenever Satoru would sneak into your room at night, back when you were children. He must recognise the similarity himself, so he cocks a hip, extending the joke. “Now. Come on, you can use one of the spare rooms, or you can pass out on the couch here if you’d like.”

You open your mouth to protest, to question, but he waves your words away with a casual flick of his hand.  

“No, no,” he says. “Sleep now. We can talk in the morning.”

“We can?”

“For sure.” He sends you a wry smile. “You can apologise-for-no-reason all you want.”

You don’t know why, but it draws a wet bubble of laughter from your throat. 

“There we go.” Satoru’s lips curve, for the briefest second, into a smile that is not forced. “There we go.” He says it, again. Then he snaps back, and pulls himself back into the part of the agreeable host. “Spare room or couch? This is the world of dazzling opportunities, Hebi. So many options!”

“I’ll just take the couch,” you say, weakly, in one last bid to make yourself less of a burden on him.

“A choice has been made!” Satoru fluffs up a pillow from the other sofa and passes it to you. “Spare, if you want it.”

Your eyes prick. You do not want to cry any more tonight, and especially not in front of him. 

When he moves away from you, you feel your heart twist painfully in panic. For all your fears of not wanting him to see you this upset, you want him to leave you even less. You don’t want to be alone tonight—you can’t be alone, not in the quiet, not so similar to where you live, and you are already beginning to shiver from the cold—

Satoru turns back to you, and there’s another blanket in his hand. “I’m gonna stay here tonight. On the other couch. That okay?”

Awful guilt soothes the panic to its quiet, ever-present lull. No. As much as you want him to stay, you can’t let him, after everything. “Satoru, you can’t, not for—”

“Oh, good.” He drops himself on the cushions, legs splaying. “If you’d be uncomfortable, then I wouldn’t have. But if it’s just because of this new self-sacrificing thing you’re doing, then of course I’m staying. Don’t worry,” Satoru says, shuffling down so he can snuggle his cheek into the cream pillow, “we’ll sort all that out in the morning, Hebi-Hebi.”

The nickname is what breaks the last strain of your resolve. Hot tears begin to slide down your cheeks, fat and wet and slow. You can hear how shaky your breathing becomes. Your tears are so obvious. You turn over, away from him; you don’t want him to think you’re doing this for the attention—the opposite, you don’t want him to see you like this—but he can’t leave. You need another person, just in the room, after sleeping alone so much. Those days in the Chapel, falling asleep beside him, waking up at noon when the air was honey and the light was golden. Waking up beside him. 

You need your friend back. 

A soft weight hits your side. You look down. 

It’s a small, compact box of tissues. You recognise the brand. They have always been so expensive that you’ve never even touched a box before. 

Satoru’s grinning at you when you look back up at him. With a casualty you have never possessed, he says: “Use them all if you need to. It’s no problem. I’ve got loads for myself.”

Your mouth parts, but you say nothing. You would question if Satoru intended to reveal that, but you do not need to: of course he did. Of course he did. 

With the thought of Satoru’s tears heavy on your heart, you clutch the box close. You find that sleep comes much easier when, soft in the background, there is the familiar rhythm of breathing that you recognise and love.

 

-

 

The first thing you notice, when you wake up, is that your shoulder hurts. 

Did you hurt it last night? Your immediate instinct is to check, and when you sit up and rub at it with a bare hand, you barely notice the blanket slipping from around your chest. You do notice your headache, which makes you wince as you move. You press your fingertips to your skull, and fumble by the side of your bed for your gloves. 

Your gloves? They’re not there. 

You blink through sleep-blurred eyes at your bedside table. You always keep your gloves close by. You don’t go anywhere without them nowadays, not even your kitchen. 

The fabric feels foreign beneath your fingertips. It takes you a second longer to realise that it is. 

It’s Satoru’s.

You’re at Satoru’s.

All at once, the memories from the night before come crashing over you—the bar, the man’s hand around your wrist, stumbling into the night with tears streaming down your face. Gasping in cold air, begging the doorman to let you up, Satoru’s kind eyes, the way he told you that you didn’t have to be sorry.

Your face falls into your hands. He’d told you—whatever he’d told you, it doesn’t get rid of the last years. Even if he refuses to be angry, it doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be. He should be. Guilt, the guilt you’ve been feeling for years, makes your chest ache and your eyes sting.

“Shit,” you hear yourself murmur, to a silent room. 

Wait. 

You look up. 

You’re in his living room—or, whatever a living room is called when his apartment has about twenty. You’d thought of it as some entrance room last night, something he’d use to entertain guests if he was some 1920s elaborate party host. The thought’s humorous, but you can’t find the energy to laugh, not in your self-disgust. 

As you sit up, the blanket from around your shoulders slides to your waist. It pools with a second, something thicker and warmer than you remember from last night. At some point Satoru must have put another blanket over you, when you were sleeping, because you don’t remember having two. 

Where is he? Your eyes flick around the room cautiously, as if he’d be hiding in the corners like a curse. A curse. You shudder, and you remember that you haven’t checked your phone since yesterday afternoon. 

Your job. Your job. Curses don’t stop appearing just because you have a fucking mental breakdown. You stand, and swear quietly at the painful pulse in your temple. You’re not in your uniform—all of your weapons are at your house—but if you left now, you could get back soon enough, in case someone called—the way you’ve been living now, that’s all you have in your life, just waiting at home, on your own, waiting on a call to exorcise a curse—

And the kids. It’s not a school day—right? No, it’s a Sunday—but you still need to see them. You can’t abandon them just because you’re being pathetic. You need to go back to the Gojo household today, you need to see them. 

Go now. Home. Then the kids. Then home. Waiting. 

Satoru isn’t here. He must be out. 

It means you wouldn’t see him before you left. The thought makes you shudder. You want to see him. Childishly, selfishly, you want to see him again. You don’t know what it means, not after this long apart, not after you’ve ached for him for so long. But you want to see him again, if only just one more time.

Your eyes catch a white piece of paper on the coffee table near the couch. You step closer, bare feet cold on the wooden floor. It’s a piece of paper, a thin glass of water, and a couple of tablets. Your lips part when you recognise Satoru’s handwriting.

Drink if you need to! Some painkillers if your head hurts D: 

PLEASE DON’T LEAVE!!!!!!!!!   I’m just picking up some breakfast—how do pastries sound? I know: YUM! There’s a patisserie nearby that’s GREAT! Should be back sooooooon 

ALSO, T + M are at a sleepover, don’t worry! (And I KNOW, Megumi was actually really invited!!! I’ll tell you more later, funny story)

See you when I get back!                                                                             

Love, 

Satoru

P.S.

I’ve cashed (hahahaha!) a favour in with Mei Mei :P She’s going to assign any of your work to someone else for the next few days. Don’t be mad?? It’s in case you need some time off!! I’ll be back soon and we can talk about it more??? <3

P.P.S.

Please don’t leave 

Your throat seizes. You linger on his name, Satoru’s name, the stupid little drawings he loves, the ‘please don’t leave’, repeated twice. Twice. 

You swallow down a tablet with a practised ease, and then take another. Your shoulder aches, but it’s now just the chronic pain that you’re used to, steady and low-level, not as bad as it can get sometimes. 

You keep the blanket around you, as you walk away from the couch. You pad into the kitchen, adjacent to the living room, to refill your water. You didn’t drink too much last night, but your mouth is dry either way. You’d kill for a cigarette, just to take your mind off the pain of your shoulder, but you don’t imagine Satoru’s got any in his house. 

When you turn off the tap and lean against the countertop, elbows bracing your bodyweight on the cold marble, you notice another piece of paper. 

You blink at it, confused. Beside it, there’s a neatly-folded pile of clothes. And then, gloves, so similar to the ones you usually wear that, had they not been an inch too long around the wrists, you would have thought Satoru had found the pair you had lost last night. You pull the note closer. 

ALSO! 

In case you wanted to get changed. Realised you have all your spare pyjamas at the household! Not here. I’m a bad host, ahhhh!!! 

If you want a shower, the bathroom is here. Use anything you want to. Enjoy!!

Love,

Satoru 

P.S.

Gloves?? These fit you—I know which ones you usually like. Did you know the brand does this style as well? Now you have options!

P.P.S

Only if you want to wear them!

As well as the writing, Satoru’s sketched out a quick floorplan of his house, with a star and smiley face at where the bathroom is. 

It’s endearing. You try to muster the energy to smile. 

You’ve missed him. 

You try to remember what it had been like, before you’d pushed him away. It hadn’t just been him, you know this now. If it had just been him and your love for him that was making you unhappy, you’d have been fine in his absence. Your work plays a part: a big part. 

And yet it had been a long time since he’d made you wholly happy. There was always the ache of loving him, and the grief it caused you by the end. You try to remember what that was like, and you only feel the familiar cold emptiness, and the dull pang of regret. 

Your fingers run over the clothes. They’re both grey, a thin t-shirt and sweatpants. They must be Satoru’s. They’ll be too big for you. 

You look down at yourself. You’re cold in this dress. You do want a shower—it’s like alcohol’s seeping from your pores. You don’t want to change back into something dirty. 

Satoru’s bathroom is large and clean; modern, of course. You take a second to look around the shelves—minimalist, somehow Satoru has learnt how to be minimalist—and realise that you haven’t seen any evidence of company, in this big lonely home. You see no stray bottles of concealer, or boxes of tampons or pads, or even a hairbrush without the thin strands of Satoru’s silver hair. You haven’t seen anything, in the entire apartment. 

The shower is set to a temperature a touch too cold for you, and it reminds you of how Satoru’s always run warmer. What was it you used to call him? Your personal space heater, or something. A childish nickname, but accurate. 

You slip out of your clothes, and they fall to the floor. You adjust the temperature, and warm water runs down your body. You let your eyes close as the hot steam fills the air. 

The water’s like a pressure on your lungs, but it’s been so long since you’ve felt that pressure from heat, from noise. You part your lips and the water floods your mouth. It overflows, spilling down your chin, and you choke a little, gurgle and spit it out. It’s childish, but you realise it’s made you smile. 

You let the water stream down your arm and fly from a pointed finger, and you pretend that you’re summoning water like a superhero. It makes you laugh. 

You draw a heart on the fogged-up glass of the shower, and then a smiley face, like the one Satoru drew on his note to you. He’s not minimalist here: he’s got dozens of bottles in the shower; moisturising, purifying, anti-thinning, anti-breakage, for thick hair, for light hair, for men. When you pick up the latter, with something like amusement, you realise that it hasn’t even been used. 

It takes a while for you to feel clean. 

Even when your skin is rubbed raw and smarting, you feel the need to scrub it more. Like you want to peel the upper layer off, and then continue to strip it down, right to the bone. You can feel the grip of every person who has ever touched you in your life. 

You dry yourself—the towel, white and fluffy, like a hotel’s—and step into Satoru’s clothes. You smell clean, at least. You smell like him. 

Since you’re not certain when Satoru is going to be back, you pad around his house with your bundled-up clothes still in your arms. 

Then you circle back to the bathroom, remembering you saw a laundry basket. 

Then you stand looking at it, not willing to open it up, feeling like you’d be invading Satoru’s privacy if you did. You fold your clothes and put them on the top. You feel stupid. 

It's only when you finally find the courage to open a cupboard door does he return. 

Your stomach’s been hurting with hunger for a while, and you’re trying to find some food that you could eat that he also wouldn’t notice you’d have eaten. Other than some milk and an unopened box of cereal, there is hardly anything in his kitchen. You realise that, of course, Satoru wouldn’t cook for himself. 

“I’m home!” Satoru calls as the door slams shut. You jump at the loud noise, and your heartbeat immediately jumps into a sprint. You try to calm the instinctual panic, but you have gotten used to your own company and no-one else’s. You don’t think you know how to share someone’s space anymore. 

“Hebi-Hebi?” The sound of keys being slung onto a wooden countertop. Shoes sliding off feet, pushed to the wall. A beat. “Are—Hey, are you here?”

“In the kitchen,” you say, as soon as you hear his voice falter. You think again of the ‘please don’t leave’, and rush to reassure him. “I’m here.”

You try to brace yourself for seeing him again, through sober eyes, but you do not have enough time to prepare. Satoru strides into the kitchen, arms laden with brown paper bags, his glasses perched jauntily on his nose. 

The brown bags bring with them the intoxicating scent of freshly-cooked pastries. You notice first: his hair is down, the way you like it, and it looks softer than it did last night, as if he washed it before he left.

But—oh. Satoru’s arms strain lightly from carrying the food, and it makes the muscles—more, than you’re used to, he looks stronger—bulge with the weight. Even more defined, in the tight dress shirt he’s wearing, pastel blue, unbuttoned to show his sharp collarbones. 

You told him, years ago, that he is cool-toned. He is wearing, today, now, the colours you suggested for him. You were right about them suiting him. 

“I didn’t want to wake you up to ask you what you wanted,” Satoru says, as he drops the food onto the table and claps his hands together, “so I just got one of everything.”

You look up at him. “But—”

“Only the stuff I know you’d like!” Satoru grins, boyish and cheeky, and you realise with a jolt that he’s still pretending. “I haven’t forgotten that. But there’s a bag that’s only got chocolate ones, and that’s for me! You can have some of it, if you really want, but I don’t think you’ll want to—!”

There’s an urgency to his façade of joviality, now. A quickness, like a pressing need to do something, say something. You do not understand. 

Satoru whirls around the kitchen, producing plates and glasses and cutlery. You stand there, not knowing what you should do, until he turns and blinks above the rim of his glasses. 

“Sit down!” he urges, gesturing towards one of the stools tucked underneath the kitchen island. “Eat! Are you hungry?”

Your stomach cramps. You are. 

Satoru seems to read your expression, and his grin loosens. “Great. Eat, eat!” 

You stare at the table. Satoru leans down to catch your eye, and you blink at him, startled. 

“You looking for something else?” he asks, voice lilting. Like he’s teasing, and you don’t know why. You look at him, and Satoru chuckles and searches through another one of his bags. “I remembered which brand you go for this time. See, I’m not all bad. Here you go!”

From across the table, he slides theatrically a compact pack of cigarettes. He’s right: it’s the brand you buy. 

“You do still smoke, right?” 

You nod. You don’t know if you’re allowed to take them. It feels like some test you’re unsure on how to pass. 

“Ah, good. I mean, not good! It’s not good that you still smoke, is it!” Satoru makes a tutting sound as he finishes laying out the breakfast foods. He bundles the bags into one big ball and deposits them into a bin, which slides out from under the counter top when he nudges against it. “Yuck. I don’t know how you and Shoko stand it. Anyway, use the balcony if you want to, just so I don’t get the smell on the furniture.” Satoru wrinkles his nose. “Ooh, I sound like an old maid. Anyway. Eat! Eat, eat, eat. They’re really good—I go to this place, like, once a week. And for me, Hebi-Hebi, that’s so good.”

“Still hating a routine?” You sit tentatively, moving to the edge of the kitchen stool like you could slide off at any moment. You feel horribly on-edge. You expect him to look up and shout, to demand you leave him, like his kindness up until this point has been just a practical joke. 

Satoru laughs, and it makes your chest ache with how much you’ve missed it, being able to make him laugh. “Yeah. Yeah! You know me well, Hebi-Hebi.”

He throws himself down onto the kitchen stool with a great hrumph, and, without taking time to breathe, almost clambers onto the table to reach a croissant. He takes a bite and hums in pleasure before chocolate ganache spurts out the other end falls onto the kitchen table. Satoru’s eyes go wide with shock and he scrambles to scoop it up with his thumb, which he sticks into his mouth like a little kid. 

You watch him. 

“It’s clean! The table’s clean, I’m not that gross. Oooh, that’s so good. You’ve got to try some of this one—wait, no, try that one there, it’s my favourite! I had to really convince them to give me this much,” Satoru continues, pointing at you with the half-eaten croissant in his hand. “They didn’t want to! Said I was taking too much stock from them, or something. You know? But then I just went please please please please, and they know me, and so they just did it, in the end.”

He grins to himself, remembering some private joke. 

“I have to drive for ages to get there, as well.” Satoru just keeps talking, keeps gesturing for you to eat. He finishes the croissant, licks his fingers clean, and then rummages through the bag for another. “So they knew I was being a bit, you know. But I’m a regular—you’ll have to go there with me, some time, Hebi-Hebi. Once you try some—eat! It’s really good!” 

Obediently, you bring a pastry to your mouth and bite. 

“Nice, right? Yeah. But, yeah, once you try some, you’re gonna be ruined for any other place. Right? They’re that good, so I don’t mind the drive. I mean, mostly I don’t drive, but I wouldn’t have been able to teleport with all of this stuff. I hardly made it into the elevator.”

The pastry is sweet and tart, filled with a bitter lemon curd that balances the light dusting of sugar. Satoru’s right. It is good. You think about the bakery near to your apartment, and suddenly want to cry. 

“Satoru.” Your lace your fingers together and, with your bare hands visible, you feel naked and exposed. 

His voice falters, and when you look up at him, he closes his mouth and listens. 

There is something adult to the way he sets his jaw, now; gone, so smoothly, is the childishness of the morning. It is replaced by a maturity that you don’t think you’re familiar with, and you can only guess it’s something he has developed in the years of your absence. 

“I haven’t talked to you in years,” you begin. 

“I know.” Satoru allows his head to tilt so slightly to the side, as he watches you. 

“So, I can’t just turn up without an explanation. It’s been years.”

“Yeah. I noticed.” The corner of his lip twitches. “But you don’t need to say anything if you don’t want to.”

“Of course I do.”

“Nah.” Satoru leans back in his chair, wiping his hands on his thighs. “You don’t. The way I see it, you’re here. And I want you here.”

“You shouldn’t.”

His eyebrows raise. “Shouldn’t what?”

“Want me. Here.”

Satoru’s frowns, and then he grins, broad and amused. “But I do. So, easy.”

“But—” 

“The real question,” Satoru interjects, as he picks at another bit of pastry, “is whether you should want me here. Or, I guess, whether you’d want me here, with you. Not physically here, in my apartment. That’d be a bit awkward, don’t you think?”

You stare at him. “Whether… I want you here?”

“For sure.” Satoru nods, like he’s pleased you’re catching on. “I know you’re going to disagree with me, but you’ll figure out soon that I’m the real lucky one here.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“Nah, I am,” Satoru says, “you’re just not on my wavelength. You will be, so don’t worry about it, or anything. You’ve just got to know how happy I am that you’re here with me, Hebi-Hebi.”

Your heart aches. You’re not yet immune to that nickname, or how Satoru says it, with the vowels stretching his mouth into an involuntary smile, so familiar, so sweet. 

“You shouldn’t…”

“I didn’t know if I’d get the proper chance,” Satoru says, like this conversation is so easy to him, when it’s so impossible for you. “I held out hope, of course, because it’s you and me, isn’t it? But I kept thinking… nah. I thought I’d blown it.”

“You…” You can’t form the words. “You thought…”

“I’d blown it,” Satoru agrees. “Exactly. Or that you’d moved on. Damn, I wouldn’t blame you, the way I acted back then.” His tone shifts: he slips, in a way you cannot think is intentional, away from that casualness. There is something icy to the way he speaks, some shards that infect his words. “I kept thinking you’d moved on. I thought that was what you deserved.”

“You thought I deserved something else?” you echo, dazed, unable to comprehend Satoru’s thoughts, so alien to your own. “Something… someone that wasn’t you? And that would be better for me?”

Satoru laughs. It’s not self-pitying, but there is a force to it, directed at himself. “Just… if you’d moved on, then… Well.” He grins up at you, and shrugs. “I was just a friend.”

Just a friend?

The words revolt you. Just a friend. Satoru has never just been your friend—not when you were children, not when you first loved him, not when you fell in love with him. He has never, never, been just anything. He was everything to you. He has always been everything. 

“Satoru,” you say, your voice trembling with supressed emotion, “I don’t think you’ve ever been just a friend to me.”

He laughs again. He runs a hand through his hair. “A real good friend, then.”

Silence. You cannot say it. 

When you left, he was more than a good friend to you. You have not forgotten the longing, the wanting, the ache of your love for him. You cannot forget, not when you still feel the sparks of it, still hopeful, glowing orange-yellow despite the heavy smothering of your years of numbness. 

The silence stretches on. It is so conspicuous that you do not speak, and that you do not confirm it, but you cannot say anything else. You cannot lie to him, not anymore, but you do not have the strength to say any more. 

Satoru looks at you. There is something burning in his eyes. 

You feel something inside you break, and you tear your gaze from his. “I can’t do this,” you say, to yourself, to him. “Shit. You don’t understand—you don’t get it. You shouldn’t—Satoru, you shouldn’t let me be here.”

There is a moment of pause, in which his eyes still follow yours, and something flickers in his irises, and then Satoru is pulled back to the present, and he is with you. 

“You keep saying that,” he says, with a quirk of his lips, and, what, he’s casual again? You had forgotten how much his switches in personas confuse you, when you are not used to them. “But you haven’t explained why.”

“I—” You splutter. “You want to know why?”

“For sure.”

“It’s—Because.” You don’t know why he doesn’t get it—why, last night, he was confused, and then so dismissive, of your attempts to apologise. “You should be angry with me.”

“I should?” Satoru seems to find this, somehow, amusing. “Okay. Well, that’s a new one.”

“I—what?”

His mouth quirks into the beginnings of a smirk. “I’ve never thought you’d say that. In all the times I’ve played this conversation in my head, I’ve never figured that you’d want me to be angry with you.”

You freeze.

Satoru continues as ever: “It’s not that I haven’t included the concept of anger,” he says. “I’ve imagined you shouting a lot, and me saying sorry a lot, and then a lot of storming out and frantic apologies in the rain. It always gets dramatic towards the end, but…” Satoru chuckles to himself. “Hey, isn’t that just me? You need to tell me to stop being dramatic, or I’ll never stop.”

“You… you think that you’d be apologising?” Your hands tighten in their tight grip around each other. “Why…”

“Course I would be,” Satoru says, simply. “I should be apologising right now, but I don’t think you’ll let me. Not yet.”

“I—” You wouldn’t, of course you wouldn’t, because you should be apologising, he needs to know how sorry you are— “But I left you. I haven’t seen you in years, not really. Not properly. I just left.” Your eyes sting, and you will yourself not to cry. “I left, again. When I said I wouldn’t.”

“I shouldn’t have made you promise that,” Satoru says, and it’s so scathing it makes you flinch. “It was selfish.”

“What?” It wasn’t. You were children—you know exactly what he’s referring to, that time after Geto left, when he had pleaded through tears for you to never leave him. You were just children. Even now, an adult, who knows too much about what your future holds, you would have done anything to stop his tears. “It wasn’t. Of course you didn’t want me… that you didn’t want to be on your own. No-one wants that.”

“I knew better.” Satoru’s jaw has set, cold and assured. “I should’ve known that it would only make you feel bound to me.”

You shake your head. “What? No. No, Satoru, I’ve never felt that.”

“You haven’t?” When he looks at you, it’s appraising. Disbelieving. “You never felt that you were tied to me? That you couldn’t let go of me, even if you knew you should?”

“I—” You falter. Yes. Yes, you had—but not because he’d asked you to promise him, not for some frivolous vow you’d made as a teenager. It wasn’t because of some words he’d asked you to say—as if your love for him could be traced and bound back to that, as if it wasn’t something so much greater. Your life had been intertwined with his, just as his was with yours, and of course you’d felt like you couldn’t let him go. 

“It wasn’t like that,” you say weakly, unsure entirely how to articulate the churning of your mind. How can you explain to him that it was because you loved him, not because he had forced you to stay with him? “Not because of what you… Satoru, it wasn’t like that at all.”

“I made you stay with me. When you didn’t want to.”

“No.” You feel a surge of defensiveness, of anger, that he would try to mar your childhood with something so sinister. You had loved him—you love him. That had never been possession, or something twisted. 

Your love hadn’t hurt you. It was—everything else. The lack of reciprocation, the curses, the way you couldn’t say anything to him. That had hurt. But never your love.

“It wasn’t like that.” Your voice shakes, but you try to show him, force him to understand. 

Surely… no, he’s not like you. The way your memories of your childhood have begun to fester and curdle in your solitude. 

The way you have convinced yourself, in your worst hours, that Satoru never really loved you. Or cared. That you were some pet project, or a weakling kept around as assurance of his own power by comparison. 

You—you, yourself, not the cold voice in the back of your head—you know it’s not true. You know that you were friends, the best of friends, the closest anyone could be. Clinging to logic, you know what was real. 

And yet… but that couldn’t be happening with Satoru. No.

Not Satoru, who you have loved more than anything in this world. Satoru, who you have adored and cherished for your whole life. Leaving him, the time spent apart these past few years, that couldn’t change all of your past together, could it? 

He can’t think that your love for him has ever been so vapid, so labile and inconstant, that his certainty in it could be swayed by just a few years apart? Surely he still knows. He must know. He has to still know, surely. 

“I shouldn’t have left.” You know it, now. Right? You know that you should have stayed; you have learnt, in your time isolating yourself, that the root of your unhappiness has never been him. Not him, not wholly.

“You needed to.” Satoru’s face contorts, and you know, somehow, that there is a horrible anger twisting inside him. You know, too, that it is not directed towards you, and you do not yet know if this makes you feel better or worse. 

“Satoru,” you insist, even as your voice shakes. “You need to know how sorry I am.”

“You only reacted to me. I was a bastard to you. I didn’t mean to be, but I was.”

You feel the need to lean back. “No. No, you—"

“I’ve been disgusting,” Satoru says, and he looks up to face you. Words fall silent on your tongue. There is something so sad, so unimaginably sad, that you can do nothing but let him speak. “I’ve been a disgusting friend.”

Your lips quiver.

“And… and with everything else.” He smiles, fake and self-deprecating. “Y’know. But I… I don’t know about all that. I don’t even know… I don’t even think I know how to be a good friend to you. But you need that. A friend. I want—I need—I want to be your friend again.”

Your words, your unspoken words, echoed back to you. 

The desire for friendship. To have your friend back. Just Satoru, just him. Your Satoru. 

“I think back to myself a few years ago, the type of guy I was…” Satoru’s fingers circle around the glass, catching droplets of condensation as they bloom on the cold glass. “Like he’s a different person, you know? I keep remembering the shit he did, and—”

“Satoru…”

“I’d kill him,” Satoru says. “I’d kill him, for the way he treated you. If I could.”

Your ears ring. There is no hyperbole in his voice; in fact, it’s far too understated for what he’s saying. 

Satoru takes another sip of the water. “I figured out a long time ago that I can’t change the past. And I can’t stand regrets, even if I’m full of them.”

Honest . You have never seen Satoru so honest. 

“But still.” Satoru shrugs, and then offers you a wry grin. “It doesn’t make it any easier. I’ll apologise as much as you want me to, but—”

“No, you don’t need to—” 

“—I don’t think you know that I should, yet.” 

Your cheeks burn. He’s right—you recognise his words, as though watching a TV show. There is logic to what he’s saying, you know that, but there’s such a strong part of your mind that urges you to apologise instead. You do not know which voice is your own, not anymore. 

“So, I’m just going to make it up to you.” He finishes his glass, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “You don’t need to get it, yet.”

“I don’t,” you say. “I don’t understand. At all.”

“That’s okay,” Satoru says, with a familiar and easy grin. “I understand everything in the world, so I can do it all for you.”

Your cheeks pinch into a smile. The muscles ache from disuse. 

“I’m serious!” Satoru presses a hand to his chest, mock-offended. “I’m the world’s most intelligent person, ever. Ask me any question, and I know the answer.”

“You’re so stupid,” you whisper. Your voice crackles. 

Satoru laughs, bright and happy. “I am not! Hebi-Hebi, you should know better—I’m too amazing at everything for you to think I’m stupid.”

“Your ego’s gotten worse.”

“Pfft.” Satoru grins. “I thought that according to you, that was impossible.”

“I was wrong,” you say. “Clearly.”

“Well, I’m never wrong.” Satoru looks at you over his glasses, and you see that his eyes are shining. “Unless you say I am. Then I can be wrong.”

Your words stick in your throat. It is suddenly so difficult to talk.

“All I need,” he says, and once again that teasing tone slips away, “is you. That’s it.”

Your fingers are tightly wound, and the blood thumps through their veins. 

Satoru bares himself to you, and yet, even as you search for it, there is nothing in his expression that speaks of fear from doing so. 

“All I need is you to be around me,” Satoru says to you. “I can do everything else—I’ll deal with it. I’ll make it all up to you, and I’ll keep doing it, even when you realise that I should be doing loads more. You’re going to realise that you need to forgive me, and then I’m going to continue to earn it, if you let me. You don’t get it now, but you will, if… hey. But if you can just be near me, that’s enough.” He pauses. “Is that okay?”

“You’re really asking me that?” And, as you say it, you realise. 

You realise that, yes, he has to ask this. 

You had chosen to walk away from him. You must choose if you will allow him back.

You didn’t know it was your choice. You hadn’t known you had the right. You’ve been thinking yourself powerless, some weak offshoot of a branch pulled apart in a river current. But Satoru sees you, and he asks you, and he believes you have the leverage to decide.

All this time, it had been up to you? 

“Of course I am,” Satoru says, a mirror of your own revelation. 

“Oh.” You realise again, a second late, just how afraid he is of your answer. It makes the blood swirl through your veins. Satoru cares. Satoru wants to see you; no, even less than that. Satoru wants to be near you. It is all he wants. Satoru will have whatever you will give him. 

Sharp: the instinct to run. The urge to push him away again, retreat to the cold of the life alone. You shudder at the dark power of the craving, and try to gather your own untainted mind from its abuse. 

You—not this curling cold inside you, not the oppressive quiet that keeps you from the warmth of your companions’ touch—want him. Not the aching and awful way you had him before, however that was. You do not want that, but you want him. 

You do not want him to hurt you, because he did hurt you. You do not believe he meant to, not this Satoru, never, but you have known him to hurt you before. Hands on your arm, refusing to apologise or falter. He had wanted to help. 

He had hurt you, even in his ignorance. When your mind started to fail—whatever this is now, this thing you don’t understand, but that you recognise cannot be normal—he hadn’t recognised it. Right? He hadn’t. 

You have been a sorcerer for so long, and you have always hated it. Never have you enjoyed it. Never.

You had never told him, but when have you needed to, really? Isn’t so much of your friendship bound around that which remains unsaid? How well you can read every expression on his face, how easily he can understand what you mean when words fail. 

There was the expectation, then, you think. That he would understand what you could not say, in the way you did, always did, for him. 

And he is your friend. And you love him. And he has told you, without prompting, without you pleading for it, that he is sorry. 

He is asking for you to be near. You want him to be close. You cannot push him away, just to sate that cold impulse in the corner of your mind. Not now. You must not.

“Yes,” you say. “It’s okay.”

Satoru’s face breaks into an expression of pure relief. He slides his hands into his hair, curls his fingers, and then lets go and shakes his head, laughing, disbelieving. And then, as your lips begin to twitch, he remembers himself—he claps his hands together and stands, suddenly authoritative and purposeful. 

“Good!” he says, and straightens with his feet snapping together, a purposeful mockery of a military call to attention. “Good! I have a day!”

“You have a day?”

“A day planned!” Satoru nods, to himself, and then to you. His grin is still broad and incredulous, but his eyes are glinting. “A good day. The best day!” 

“I—.” You’re not sure what to make of that. “Sorry. I didn’t know—if you’d had plans, I’d have left earl—”

“No!” Satoru rolls his eyes, faux-exasperated. “I just told you, it’s the best day. Of course it includes you!” 

“Oh.”

“Yeah! I mean, it more than includes you. You’re the starring guest!” Satoru bounds around the room, clearing away the food with a passion you haven’t seen from a person in so long. “This is the Gojo-and-Hebi-Best-Day-Ever! But—” Satoru checks his watch and pouts. “We need to get started soon, because we’ve got to pick up the kids in five hours. So get ready, Hebi-Hebi!” 

“Ready?” You’re still reeling, dazed from his confession. Confession? Not a confession. No, you do not have the mental strength to think of it like that. Not right now, when you’re still so raw. 

“Yes, ready!” Satoru pauses for just a second, and when he smiles at you, he beams. “We’re spending the day together. I’m determined that you’ll enjoy it. Okay? Yes! So, we need to leave the house!”

You look down at yourself. “I… I’m wearing your clothes.”

Satoru swallows, and for a second his grin slips into something less composed. “Ah. I know. But!” The urgency, the rush, returns. “I need to change my shirt—this is a morning shirt, Hebi-Hebi, and I need to look nicer for the Gojo-and-Hebi-Best-Day-Ever plans! But you don’t need to worry, because shopping is first on the list—we will buy you lots of clothes, and you can talk to me about clothes, and—!” 

He disappears behind the couch and then, suddenly, reappears, holding a crumpled-up brown paper bag, and a thick glossy magazine that he slaps onto the kitchen island in front of you. 

“Here!” Satoru says triumphantly. “Vogue Japan! Remember?”

“I—” 

“I’ll remind you. Read it while I get changed! You’ll get ideas!”

Satoru takes in a deep breath. He smiles at you, and you realise that, even without you knowing, you had been smiling, too. 

“We leave in fifteen minutes,” Satoru promises. “This—I swear—will be a good day.”

 

--

 

Shopping is first, he’d said. 

It’s fine in Satoru’s car—more than fine, really. It’s so much more expensive than your one, and you stare with parted lips at the gadgets and colour-coordinated lights and the smooth lines of the dashboard that bleed with opulence. It’s fine in his car, and Satoru continues to talk at you, and then eases you into conversation. Even though you can only respond in short half-sentences, barely stringing syllables together, Satoru beams every time you speak, like you’ve just made his day all over again. 

But you step out of the car, and, like you’re being buffeted by the wind, you find yourself pushed towards the department store. Your heart lurches when you see other people, stomach pulsing with nausea. But Satoru only raises his eyebrows, and then asks: “Do you want—?”

Because you know what he’s asking, you pause, wavering by the store’s entrance. You have put your gloves on: you would never leave the house without them, nowadays. Then, looking back at the small cluster of people by the doorway, you say: “Yes.”

 

--

 

“The trick to buying good clothes,” Satoru says, as he appraises a golden rack of dresses with his hands stuck in his pockets, “is to go to the shops that don’t have any people in. Because—ooh, this one? Eugh, no, wait, it’s way too cheap—they always have the most expensive clothes. That’s a trick I’ve learnt.”

He doesn’t stray further than a metre from you, and yet never moves closer. You reach out to touch a silken dress, and the Infinity shrinks back around your hands, tight against the fabric of your gloves, protecting you by atoms instead of inches. You feel the fabric through your gloves: it is water-like, smooth and fluid.

“This is nice,” you say quietly. It has been a long time since you have surrounded yourself with so many pretty things. You remember how much you used to love clothes; you would think yourself a miniature fashion designer, critiquing Satoru’s glasses until you bought him a new pair, reading Vogue Japan. It was a phase that you grew out of, once you got older. 

“Looks like your size,” Satoru says in agreement. He peers at it over your shoulder. Normally, you would jump—but here, together in his Infinity, there is a oneness to your bodies that you cannot understand. You know where he is, even when he is silent. 

Your cheeks burn. “It’s so expensive,” you whisper, turning around to him like he’s your confidant. Satoru grins and ducks his head down, playing along. 

“Hey,” he says, voice also dropped low. “Guess what?”

“What?”

His eyes glimmer. “It doesn’t matter.”

 

--

 

“It’s a mid-morning snack,” Satoru assures you, as he coaxes you into another bakery. “I’m hungry! My brain’s working too hard, keeping up with everything.”

Guilt twists at you, and you shrink back into yourself. “But, you shouldn’t—I can deal with walking through a crowd without—normally, I’d be—” 

Satoru wheels around, and then his eyes flit upwards, like he’s replaying the last sentences of the conversation. Then his mouth pinches into a pout, and he grimaces. 

“No!” Satoru waves his hand through the air. “No, no. You mean me keeping up the Infinity? That’s easy. I could do that in my sleep—hey, did you know I can do it in my sleep?”

You swallow back another plea for him to leave you behind. “No,” you say instead. “I didn’t.”

“Well, I can!” Satoru looks at you expectantly, and then grins. “Agh! Do I need to work even harder to get praise from you, Hebi-Hebi?”

“That’s not my job.”

At that, he beams. “Exactly. Exactly! I’m glad you’re remembering.” He holds open the bakery door for you, and a bell rings prettily. “Don’t forget to shoot me down a few times, too. Tell me how ugly and stupid I am, blah blah blah.”

“You make me sound mean,” you say, but without, to your genuine surprise, any defensiveness or hurt. 

“Nah. You’re just—what did you call it?”

“Keeping your ego in check.” 

“Yes! Yes, that was it! You’re just doing what you have to, to keep me at a normal person’s level. Which is really hard, by the way. Y’know why?”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not a normal person. I’m better! Loads better.”

You bite your cheek. “Idiot.”

 

--

 

When Satoru leads you into another overpriced store, you try to protest, but he doesn’t hear any of it. 

“Pick something good,” he instructs you, pointing towards the athletics section. “Trainers! Something to go walking in.”

“We’re walking?”

“Hiking,” Satoru corrects. “Remember when we’d just go walking anywhere, all in fields and woods and anywhere? And it felt like—that we could do anything, us two together, no matter what? We’re doing that.”

“Oh.” You turn away from him. You don’t want him to see your expression, because, you’re certain, Satoru can still read every intricacy that passes across your face. 

 

--

 

“And then we can even go by the river—c’mon, Hebi-Hebi, don’t look at me like that!”

“I can’t get these clothes wet. Or these shoes.”

“Don’t be crazy! Of course you can!”

“They cost more than five months of work.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Damn.”

“I know, Satoru.”

“For sure. I mean, that’s insane!”

“Yes, it is.”

“Yeah, ‘cause… how are you really paid that little? I need to talk to the higher-ups about that—but you’re Grade Two! How aren’t you earning more than that?”

“You… Satoru, that’s not the point.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“I—you’re so—”

“What?”

“You—oh, don’t laugh—!”

 

--

 

Satoru wants to have a picnic when you go hiking, but: “I don’t cook, Hebi-Hebi!” Aghast, he stares at you, slack-jawed. “Who do you think I am?”

There is an independent food store that he takes you to, and it is full of finger sandwiches, intricately-cut fruit carvings, golden deep-fried chicken in panko breadcrumbs. It is decadent, and everything is beautiful, and you can only ghost your fingers over the glass and stare. 

The woman behind the counter has honey-blonde hair, tied back into a low bun. She is tall and pretty, and notices Satoru as soon as he walks into the store. 

She looks at him admiringly, as everyone always does, and you feel that familiar sinking feeling in your chest. Satoru, despite everything, craves attention. You slow your footsteps and look away, because you do not want to see Satoru preen, as he always does. 

“Do you think we can take the eggs?” 

Satoru’s voice comes from behind you. When you look up to him, startled, you see his gaze is intently focused on you, gauging your reaction. 

“What?”

“The eggs,” he repeats. “For the picnic. I just said!” 

“You—did?”

Satoru cracks a grin, and does his mock-offended routine. “Hebi-Hebi! I can’t believe you haven’t been listening to me!”

“You talk too much,” you say, automatically. “And—of course we can’t take eggs on a picnic. It’s too hot. They’ll smell.”

Satoru nods wisely. “I thought so too. No eggs!”

He glares at the refrigerated eggs, childish, and then glances back at you to see if you’re smiling. 

You are, you realise. And then you look back to the woman with honey-blonde hair. She sends you a friendly, conspiratorial smile, and then turns to help another customer. 

 

--

 

The sky splits into pastels, a watercolour picture come to life. The sun bursts through silver clouds, jubilant, and you tilt your head up to reach it. 

The food is beautiful. The grass beneath your fingertips is damp, and it soaks through your gloves. The dew of the afternoon is the same as it would have been yesterday, and the day before, and the day before, but it is just as beautiful today. 

“It’s never this nice in September,” you say, half to yourself.

“Sure it is,” Satoru says. “You just don’t go outside, that’s all.”

The comment, ridiculous and untrue, makes you laugh. You cover your mouth with the back of your hand, turning your face away.

“Don’t.”

You glance back at him. With the attention of your gaze, Satoru flushes, suddenly. 

“What?” you ask, when he doesn’t give you an explanation. 

“Nothing.” His expression contorts. “Nothing! I just… I…”

“Don’t tell me you’re struggling for words,” you tease, and then almost balk at your nerve. And then you question, for another long second, why it is so simple to return to ease with Satoru. 

Satoru doesn’t take offense: he grins. “I’m just saying. You know.”

“I don’t know,” you say, honestly.

“Agh.” He runs a hand through his hair, the smile—real, not fake—still not leaving his lips. “I just haven’t seen you laugh in a long time. I’ve missed it. I just don’t want you to hide it from me, that’s all.” Satoru shrugs, the smile playing across his lips. “You look beautiful when you’re smiling.”

“Oh,” you say. 

This is not easy. This is not familiar. 

You do not know how to deal with this. 

It sends a wrench in the carefully-constructed day, and you feel your insides shudder to a halt. You aren’t used to him saying that. You don’t know if you want him to—because then it’s too much for today. Too much.

You had wanted your friend back; you had wanted a friend. 

You have kissed Satoru. He kissed you, and when you think of it, you can still feel the heat of him, his fingers curling in your hair, the pressure of his lips at your throat, and you can see the shattered look in his eye when you stepped back. 

You have not spoken of it.

There is hardly enough room in your mind for yourself. You do not know how to take care of yourself these days, not when you have so many thoughts, and when you do not know which is your own. 

You fight too hard to extricate yourself from the cold voices of your childhood, or the ever-present urges to keep yourself alone. You like the familiarity of this day; you have slipped into a routine that makes you happy, and you have not been happy in a long time. You want Satoru, as the Satoru you knew, the Satoru that made you happy. 

And you cannot take care of yourself. You could not begin to nurture something new and unknown. You, now, the way you are, do not have the room for something more than a friend.

Satoru sucks in air through his teeth. “Too much?” he asks, and you notice that his smile is not forced, and that he is still not hiding himself from you. 

“Maybe,” you say.

“Yeah, probably.” Satoru fixes his glasses, pushes them a little more up his nose. “C’mon, then. If we can finish eating soon, we’ll have enough time to go to the river before we leave for the kids!”

 

--

 

“Hebi-san!” shrieks Tsumiki, when she sees you step out of Satoru’s car. She races up to you, skidding to a halt before gazing up at you. “You’re here!”

“I am,” you say, as Megumi trails behind her. He offers you an awkward wave, which is the way he has been greeting you for the past three months—a fad, you’ve often thought, that you haven’t had the heart to pull him up on. 

“But it’s a Sunday,” Tsumiki says, like it’s obvious. “You don’t see us on Sundays.”

“Maybe Hebi-Hebi’s missed you loads and loads,” Satoru says knowingly, winking down at Tsumiki. 

Tsumiki shakes her head, a frown beginning to crease between her eyebrows. Satoru, seeing this, starts at her and scuffs at her hair. Tsumiki giggles, distracted, and ducks from his hand, darting around behind Megumi and using him as a human shield. 

“Don’t!” Tsumiki says, hiding behind her brother. “Please, please, because Sakiko braided my hair this morning!”

Megumi cringes as Satoru affixes his eyes on him. 

“Megumi,” Satoru says, advancing on him. “Did Sakiko-chan braid your hair this morning?”

“Satoru,” you chide, weakly. “Don’t.”

“Hmm?” Satoru pulls his hands back at the last second. He hovers just inches away from messing with Megumi’s hair. “What?”

Megumi’s fingers twitch. In the corner of your eye, you see a shadow begin to warp and lengthen. 

Tsumiki’s arm slides into his, joining them together, and Megumi startles. “You can’t,” she whispers loudly, her lips pinching with amusement. “Not in front of everyone. I told you!” 

Megumi grimaces. “Don’t touch my hair,” he mumbles to Satoru, who just smiles with unabashed affection. 

 

--

 

The guard to the Gojo household looks at you for a beat too long. He notices you, the children, and your proximity to Satoru, as you hand him your ID cards. 

If he has registered that you are entering the household with Satoru—for the first time in years, you must think—then soon, everyone will know. No-one in the Jujutsu world would admit to enjoying gossip; they would call it rumours, or insight, or pivotal information that must not be dispersed outside of their clan. 

You look back at him, and you feel the weight of his stare. The man meets your eye and, caught and guilty, ducks his head. 

 

--

 

Servants—you do not recognise them from your childhood, but you know them from the last couple of years—line every wall. There are more than there were, before the attack. 

Even before the attack, they were trained well. Neither you nor Satoru were stupid, and the higher-ups would not have allowed the Satoru or Megumi to grow up in a place that was not protected. 

Still, something slipped by. You heard the servants whisper that rules on outside patrols had slackened. You do not want to blame Yahaba for her own death, and so you will not believe it.

But regulations have been tightened. The staff has been replaced, vetted, and trained. Guards are stationed by the hard curtain that surrounds the estate. 

At least the kids still get to go to school—meet with children their age, make friends, have an excuse to leave this prison. You never did: neither did Satoru. 

 

--

 

The food is good. You cannot eat it, but it is good. 

“Saiko said that we should wear matching hairbands tomorrow,” says Tsumiki, as she takes a big, hungry bite of her food. “And I thought, yeah! That sounds so cool. And so I said we should wear blue, but she said green, or yellow. Hebi-san, what do you think?”

Your food is good, but your stomach has shrunken. You push a piece of diced beef to the other side of your bowl. 

It would taste nice, you know this, but now it looks beige with oily fat, thick chewy white stripes running through its centre that make your jaw ache just looking at it. You think you see it leak yellow juices when you press it against the side of the bowl, circles of oil making your stomach turn. 

You feel nauseous. 

“Hebi-Hebi?”

You look up. “Sorry. Yes?”

Satoru’s eyes are keen over his glasses. “Tsumiki’s question. Blue or green or yellow, or anything else?”

But Tsumiki only looks up at you. She does not smile, but she is intent, unwavering in her question. You feel a flash of guilt, and then pity, that she still wants to know your opinion. When you have done nothing good for her, Tsumiki still tries to keep you involved in her life.

“Green,” you say. You clear your throat. “Dark green. You suit autumnal colours, Tsumiki.”

“Really?” Tsumiki looks down at her clothes—her school uniform, still, which is cream and burgundy. “Oh, good.”

Megumi had changed out of his as soon as he got home. He has not yet spoken, and now sits hunched, his plate cleared, his hands fisted in the fur of the white dog that lays by his legs.

 

--

 

On Friday, you had gotten a phone call from Megumi’s school. Both you and Satoru are listed as his guardians, but your name is female and, though you and Megumi do not share a surname, you are seen as the closest thing to a mother he has. So you are always called, and you are always told first. 

You have told them you work. The faculty continue to speak frostily to you, whenever you miss their calls. 

Megumi had gotten into another fight. You had picked him up early, and had let him choose which radio station you would listen in the car. 

“We don’t have to go home yet,” you’d said. “If you don’t want to. We can just drive.”

Megumi’s forehead was pressed against the window. In his reflection, you could see his downcast eyes, and the purple bruise beginning to form on his cheekbone. 

“Sure,” he’d said. “If we’re back in time to get Tsumiki.”

 

--

 

Before desert is served, Tsumiki stands, suddenly. Satoru, who had been talking to Megumi, falters. 

“Sorry,” Tsumiki says. She is glaring down at the table, furiously refusing to make eye contact with anyone. You try to look at her closely, and you realise with a sinking feeling that her eyes are shining. “Can I be excused, please?”

“Of course,” you murmur, and Tsumiki nods, hides her face in her hair and races out of the room. You hear her footsteps on the staircase, light and quick, and then the creak and click of her door. 

Silence. You stare at her empty seat. You do not understand what has just happened. 

Then, you remember that Satoru is here. Satoru is never here when you need help with the children. You have, for so many years, had to learn to soothe two children with one adult.

Megumi pushes his plate away from him and stands up. The chair groans as it scrapes against the wood. 

“Megumi—” 

“I’m gonna go do some work,” Megumi says. Then he leaves through the exit that leads through to the gardens, his meal half-eaten. The white dog pads behind him, its footsteps making no noise. 

You look to Satoru. There is a new crease on his forehead when he frowns. Satoru pushes his glasses further up his nose, so they cover his eyes. “Let me talk to Megumi,” he says, as he stands. “You check on Tsumiki.” A beat, and then Satoru looks back at you. More carefully, he says: “Is that okay?”

“Of course,” you say. “Of course it is.”

You will always take care of the children. It doesn’t matter how you feel—you have been taking care of them for all these past years, when you have not been yourself, and when you have pushed aside everything to make sure they don’t know how much you have suffered. You do not think it is any great sacrifice. They’re children. It is your duty, for them. You will always do for them that which was not done for you. 

You appreciate Satoru’s gentleness, but when it comes to looking after the children, you have never needed it. 

“Go,” you urge him. Satoru seems to understand, and he does.

When you follow Tsumiki, you find her in her room, curled up on her bed, her face in her hands. She hears you come in, and she curls up even tighter. 

“Please don’t,” she mumbles, through her hands. 

“Tsumiki.”

“It’s not serious.” Tsumiki rolls over to face you, and she wipes at her eyes with her sleeve. They are puffy and red, and her face crumples as she sees you notice. “I promise,” she says, shakily. 

“Tsumiki,” you murmur, as you kneel down beside her bed, your voice soft, gentle. She sniffles. You reach up and brush a strand of hair away from her face, and then cord your fingers through her hair. “What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

“It’s nothing.”

“It doesn’t look like nothing,” you say, stroking her hair. “//

“I’m being so stupid.” Tsumiki squeezes her eyes together, almost angry. “I hate it.”

“I can help, if you tell me what’s wrong.”

“There’s nothing wrong, though!” Tsumiki shuffles onto her back, displacing your hand. She glares up at the ceiling, even as fresh tears bead at the corners of her eyes. “There’s nothing wrong. I’m just acting like a child.”

“But that’s okay.” You settle your hands on the corner of the bed. “That’s okay, Tsumiki. You’re allowed to.”

She looks at you. Her gaze is bleary, watery, and you wish, as you have wished before, that you had the power to take away her tears, and her pain, and anyone in her life that has caused her harm. She keeps growing up, but you do not think she will ever stop being that small child you brought into your lives, all those years ago. She looks at you with the same wide, brown eyes.

“Promise you’re not going to hate me,” Tsumiki whispers.

“I promise,” you say. “I’d pinkie promise, but… I don’t think I’d be the best at pinkie promises, would I?

She chokes back a giggle at this. You smile. 

Tsumiki looks back up at the ceiling, her face falling. Her eyes close again. 

“When Chiyoko married Toji, I never saw them.” You are confused for a half-second, before you remember—Chiyoko, the name of Tsumiki’s mother. Tsumiki had always called her by her first name. “They kept leaving me with Megumi, and I’d take care of him, but I didn’t know how to most of the time. He was this baby, and he kept on crying. I wasn’t doing it right.”

You stay quiet. Neither Tsumiki or Megumi talk much about their time before you and Satoru found them; you know that Megumi cannot even remember his father, but Tsumiki was older, and you know she remembers more. 

“I didn’t mind!” Tsumiki says it quickly, and urgently. “I promise. I would’ve done it anyway, but… I wasn’t good enough at it. But Chiyoko and Toji were married, and I knew they wanted to be together more than they wanted to take care of us, and so…”

Tsumiki trails off. It is the most you’ve ever heard her say about her mother. You have never liked her mother, or Megumi’s father: you hate them. 

You leave Tsumiki room to say more, but she just rolls over to the side again, facing the wall. Her dark hair streams out behind her, like water. You watch the movement of her back, her breathing, as realisation slowly washes over you. 

“Tsumiki,” you whisper. “Is that what you’re afraid of?” You hesitate, then say: “Of that happening again? Now—now you’ve seen me with Gojo again?”

Tsumiki freezes, and then she moves further into herself, wrapping her arms around her knees. 

“Oh, sweetheart.” It is the first time you have been with Satoru in front of the kids in years; all Tsumiki knows about relationships, if that is what she thinks is happening between you and Satoru, is that, when they are formed, adults leave her alone. 

You know you had been close with Satoru and the children before you left him, but this is a change, for Tsumiki, a change from the norm that she has grown used to. Change is difficult for any child; Tsumiki has experienced far worse than most children.

You search for the words—but what can you say to her, when you know so little yourself? You can only say the truth, whatever that is. 

“Nothing’s going to change for you,” you say. “Gojo and I had a falling-out, like I said a while ago. But I think we might be friends again. It’s like when you and Saiko had a falling-out last month. Only, when you became her friend again, it didn’t mean you saw any less of your other friends, did it?”

Tsumiki hesitates, and then shakes her head into her pillow. 

“It’s just like that. I promise you that neither of us are going anywhere. Is that what you were worried about?”

“It’s just…” Tsumiki drags a finger against the wall, and then pushes her thumb against it, hard. “I just don’t want Megumi to be on his own again. He likes it here, more than he did back at the other place.”

“That’s a good thing, then,” you say. “Because you get to stay here forever, if you want to. Until you go off to university, which you’re allowed to do, even though Gojo and I are both going to cry buckets with how much we miss you.”

You poke her in the back of the head, and she giggles. 

Her laughter fades. You lean against the mattress, watching her fingertips press against the wall, and wait for her to speak again.

 

--

 

Tsumiki tugs at Satoru’s arm when a servant tries to usher them to bed.

“Gojo-san,” she says, and then looks around surreptitiously. She spots you, watching the two of them, and her eyes go wide. She tugs Satoru down to her height, and he leans down.

Tsumiki is like Satoru, the way she treats emotions. Once the evidence of her tears had faded, she was downstairs, looking for Megumi, already wanting to make certain that he wasn’t upset by her leaving. You don’t know how to stop her from taking on so much. You try to help, but you don’t know if you’re doing enough.

Tsumiki whispers something in Satoru’s ear, her cheeks pink. When he hears, Satoru lets out a small laugh, and straightens up and plucks on her braid. 

Tsumiki pinches him, looks back at you deliberately, and then looks up at him. Only then does Satoru crinkle his nose and bend down again. He cups his hands around his mouth and whispers something back that makes Tsumiki brighten. She rolls her eyes—just like he does, you notice with a lurch—and tugs on his hand to bring him to a more secret, private room. She glances back at you, flushes, and giggles into Satoru’s side. 

Satoru follows her dutifully, but not before he looks back to send you a wink. He ducks his head when he goes through the doorway, because when the household was being reformed after the curse attack, the ceilings were built too low for him. 

 

--

 

“Hey,” you say, just before Megumi starts to ascend the staircase to his room. “Megumi.”

He looks back, silent. 

You have been expecting to see distrust in the kids’ eyes. You have never abandoned them, and you have never removed yourself from their lives, but you have never been with them when Satoru has been there, for any long period of time like today. It has restricted your time with them. 

And perhaps you haven’t wanted them to see how unhappy you have been, these few years. You have feared, perhaps, that you would infect them, these children who have already been through so much. 

And you search his expression for anything like that: signs that he holds himself back from you, more than he would have normally, at least. You do not see it, and it makes you want to cry. 

“School,” you say. “Something’s going on.”

You think back to the phone calls. Megumi, unwilling to talk about his day. He, too, had not finished his dinner.

You’re right: Megumi’s eyebrows tighten, and he looks down at his feet. 

“What is it?” you ask. Soothe him, without touching. You remember his bloodstained fingers, curling through the white fur of his shikigami dog. 

He shakes his head. “Nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

“It is.” Megumi scuffs at something on the ground. “Just stupid.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re wrong then.”

“Maybe,” you say. “But tell me anyway.”

Megumi heaves out a sigh, and crosses his arms. Even if he means for you to be, you are not swayed by the beginnings of adolescent resistance. 

He bites down hard on his bottom lip and then, still staring hard at the floor, he says: “Jujustu High’s good, isn’t it?”

You startle. You were not expecting this. “I…” You frown, slightly. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

“Really?”

From your tone of voice, Megumi can tell you’re unconvinced. “Just… it is, isn’t it?”

“It is challenging,” you say carefully. “But I enjoyed spending time with others, when I could.”

“Other sorcerers?” Megumi says it quickly, and then tucks his head downwards, hiding back into himself. “You mean… other sorcerers?”

You hadn’t meant that. “I suppose.” You pause. “Why?”

He shrugs. “I mean… but it’s true, isn’t it? It’s easier at Jujustu High for people like us, than regular school.”

“I never went to regular school,” you answer honestly, and you can see the flash of surprise across Megumi’s features. Then, an altered truth, because Megumi doesn’t need to know the hardships of your homelife yet. “I was taught at home, by my family.”

“Oh.” He looks disappointed. “So you wouldn’t know.”

“I can imagine,” you say, and he perks up, “that it would be easier, when everyone understands.”

“That’s what I was thinking. If everyone else gets it, then… it’s not that they pick on me, I don’t let them.”

“No-one should be bullying you, Megumi,” you say softly, and feel familiar guilt that you have not done him justice, in some way. 

“They don’t.” Megumi’s jaw goes taught. “Promise. I don’t let them—they’re scared of me now.” And then it untightens, and he looks suddenly his age: too young. “But that won’t happen at Jujustu High, will it?”

“I do not think anyone would try to bully you just for having a cursed technique,” you say. You wish—you wish you knew what to say.

“No, they wouldn’t. I’ll be better there. When people know about curses, and I get to learn about them. I’ll be normal there.” Megumi seems to regret it as soon as he says it, and flushes dark. He glowers at his feet. “Or something. Whatever.”

Your lips part. “Normal?” 

“Or something,” Megumi repeats vehemently. “It doesn’t matter.”

He turns quickly and walks up the staircase without saying goodbye. You watch his back as he disappears up the stairs, and look down, a lump in your throat.

Normal . It’ll be better there.

God, it’s exactly the same. 

You look up at Megumi, and you see yourself mirrored back at you; your determination, stubbornness, your blind optimism about leaving your home, going to the school that, surely, at least had to be better than the place you were leaving. 

“Hebi-san?”

You look back. Megumi, at the top of the stairs. Hovering there, visibly fighting himself.

“Yes?”

Megumi hesitates. Then: “Is it better?”

There is a vulnerability in his question, and you want more than anything to be able to hold him close and make everything better for him. Megumi should never have to suffer—nor Tsumiki, nor any of these sweet, innocent children. 

You feel a sudden, burning hatred for his father, for Tsumiki’s parents, for their families: who had seen this beautiful, perfect children, these innocent children and who had hurt them, had knowingly hurt them. These children should not have to suffer the way you did. 

Your thoughts turn, for a split-second, venomously, to your father. How could—you cannot imagine it—how could any grown man treat any young child the way you were treated?

“…It’s better,” you say, finally.

“Oh.” He is relieved. “Good.”

He goes to walk away.

“But,” you call up, and Megumi looks back, eager. “It is also just a school.”

And you say this, because you never had an adult to tell you. It is just a school: it is not a miracle. You were not healed, just by stepping into Jujustu High. It was just a school, but it was better than your home.

“Okay.” Megumi’s brow creases again, in thought, and then he grimaces. “Sure. Thanks.”

He turns, again.

“Goodnight, Megumi,” you call.

“Yeah,” he says. “Goodnight, Hebi-san. Thank you.”

 

--

 

You do not linger at the Gojo household in the evenings, not the way you used to. 

You think Satoru knows that you do not want to be there. You realise that, of course, you have never spoken together about the attack on the household two years ago; the attack that you barely prevented from killing Megumi; the attack that killed Yahaba, and all the other servants that you grew up with.

He must have thought of it. You think of the guilt that you carry with you; that you did not get there earlier, that you could not save more, that you have never been good enough to do the one thing you have ever wanted to do. 

And then you think of his guilt. What does Satoru blame himself for, all these years later?

 

--

 

Even with the blue light of the film casting blue shadows along Satoru’s face, you keep needing to steal glances of him. It’s as if you need to reaffirm to yourself that, yes, he is still here. He has not left: he wants you here. 

This is the sofa that you slept on last night, but someone has cleaned the house when you’ve been out, as it smells of nothing but fresh lavender and lemon cleaning fluid. You have been looking at him for too long, and you drag your gaze back to the television, on which a ruggedly-attractive man is trying to scale a building, or something. You haven’t been paying attention.

You pretend to, though, for the next several minutes, before you decide that you’re allowed to look back at Satoru again. 

His glasses are off—on the table somewhere—and you admire the darkness of his pupils, the hundred swirls of blue in his irises. You would not be able to name all of those shades, but you know that they all suit him, accentuate and highlight all of his best features, just as cool tones suit him and autumnal colours suit Tsumiki. 

You have always liked him without his glasses on, and only now do you question why that actually is. It’s undeniable that you could read him better when you could see his eyes—it’s why you dislike that blindfold so much, the one he was so partial to before you left. With his eyes visible, you feel that your self-appointed task of knowing Satoru is less of a burden, less of a pressure. It’s easier, and you are more accurate, and you are good at it. Especially now: you are so out of practice. 

Or something else, you think, as your gaze skims his high cheekbones—and yet, the slight roundness to his cheek, which is lean but does not curve inward in an unattractively hollow way—and then drifts to his lips—fuller than most men’s, and pale in a way that compliments the light shades of his features—and to his jawline—smooth, still sharp, drawing his chin into a subtle but handsome ‘V’—and then, finally, to the secret place on that jaw that you always looked to, and still do look to, when you wanted to gauge Satoru’s emotions. 

If you had thought Satoru’s looks would have changed, you had been mistaken. And yet you think of him now, and superimpose that image onto him even five years ago, and you can see the differences begin to bloom.

Yes. Something else, maybe.

You do not want to interrupt this moment. You want, more than anything, to be able to sink into a routine like today, and to then extend today for forever. Unthinking, unfeeling, both pretending like the past few years have never happened. 

You do not think, though, that Satoru would like that. And you would not like it either. Not when you have work tomorrow morning, and when just the thought of it makes tiredness beat against your skull like a war drum. 

“Satoru.” You say it, and realise you don’t know what else to say, or how to begin. But Satoru’s posture immediately tenses, then relaxes, and he turns the TV off—not pausing, turning it off—and shifts to look at you. 

He cracks a smile. “There’s another thing. I kept meaning to ask you about it, but…”

“Ask me about it?”

“Sure.”

“About what?”

“Satoru,” says Satoru, in a slow, sombre voice that you realise is his impression of yours. “It’s what you’ve been calling me all day.”

You’re embarrassed. “Sorry.”

“Nah, don’t be.” Satoru’s lips quirk up. “It’s nice. You know that I’ve always liked it.”

“It feels too casual,” you say, carefully, as you pick at a stray piece of lint on your dress. “I don’t know why I’ve been doing it today.”

“Too casual? Because we’re not close enough, you mean?” Satoru laughs, and you even find yourself seeing some of the humour in it. “Jeez, Hebi-Hebi, you say some weird things sometimes.”

You shuffle up. “Yeah, but you call me by my surname.”

“That’s different!”

“How?”

“It’s a nickname,” Satoru says, promptly. “No-one else calls you Hebi-Hebi.”

“It’s so childish.”

“It’s cute.” 

“I…” You trail off. “I don’t know. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologise,” Satoru says. 

You cast your gaze down. When you speak, it is quiet and hesitant. “Aren’t you angry at me?” you ask. “Because I left?”

“No.” He says it with as much confidence as he had before, and it makes your head spin. “Not at all.”

“Will you be angry at me?” As this, this is the more important question—not him now, perhaps giddy at your return, but him in the future. “When you get used to me being here. Are you going to remember to be angry at me?” 

“I don’t think so.”

You shake your head. “I don’t understand that. You should be angry at me.”

“Sure. Okay, I see why you’d think so,” Satoru concedes, as he smooths down the cream blanket you’d used last night. “But I don’t think I am. No. I don’t think—I know I’m not, and I know I won’t be.”

“But why?”

He laughs, a quiet thing. “I guess I’m too glad that you’re back to be angry. I told you. I don’t care about anything else.”

“But you should.” You need to impress this upon him: he needs to know. “You can’t just—have me. I can’t be the only thing…”

You cut yourself off at the look on Satoru’s face. It’s unimaginably fond, too warm and caring and affectionate. 

“Don’t,” you say. “You don’t get it.”

“Sure I do.”

“No. Not if you’re talking like th—”

“Oh, Hebi.” Satoru is firm now, and you break off. “I’m not stupid. You know I’m not.”

“I—yes, but—”

“You are the most important person in my life,” Satoru tells you. “Out of anyone, it’s you. And it will be, forever. But just because that’s the truth, it doesn’t mean that I don’t have other things. Don’t worry about me like that.” 

He clicks his tongue, and it’s both endeared and exasperated. 

“You… do?”

Satoru tips his head back and laughs. “Yes! I mean, sure, there’s not much, but that’s just because I’m me. You get why.” 

He doesn’t have to elaborate: you hate to think of him this way, but it’s true. To all else, he is Satoru Gojo, sole heir to his clan, possessor of the Six Eyes and Limitless, the strongest. By his nature, he is destined to stand alone. 

“There’s my students—I like my students, you know I do—” Satoru lists them on his fingers, counting each point. “And then there are the kids—Megumi and Tsumiki, those kids—and yeah, I like my job. And I’ve kept in touch with some people from school—I’ve got friends who aren’t you, you know. They’re not you, but they’re still people.”

You hear what he is saying, but you cannot—it doesn’t seem right. There is something rotten inside you and you cannot believe him.

“So, nah.” Satoru looks at you with his eyebrows quirked, smile playing across his lips. “I’m not angry. Sure, maybe I should be, maybe I shouldn’t be—but I don’t care about any of that. It doesn’t matter what should happen, just what does. And I’m not angry.”

The words cut you, harsher than he surely would have thought they would.

He had said that last night, so much, and you still don’t understand it at all. Too glad that you’re back? It doesn’t matter how much he’s missed you—not when you were so, so awful to him. 

Satoru should be furious at you—he should be so angry. You should be apologising, more than this, much more than this. 

Why? Why aren’t you—because you’ve never known him to be self-sacrificing, pretending that you’re innocent here just to make you feel better, or something stupid like that. 

You stand, suddenly. You cannot have this conversation sitting. You need to stand, pace, and have the freedom to turn away from him. 

Satoru reacts: he leans backwards, straightens up. 

“I’m sorry for what I said,” you tell him, direct. “For everything.”

For a reason you cannot understand, Satoru only smiles. “I’ve told you. You don’t need to be sorry.”

“I am.” You shift, wanting to flee from him, wanting to stay. “I still am.”

“You were walking away from me and I’d already forgiven you,” Satoru says. Again, with the vulnerability from honesty that you are so unfamiliar with, from him. “Don’t apologise to me. You don’t have to.”

You shake your head. “No. Satoru—Gojo—shit, whatever, you should be angry at me.”

“And yet I’m not! So you—”

“But you should be!” Against your will, your voice rises. You try to clamp it down, but it is slipping out of your control, emotion bleeding through. “You should be. I’ve been—I left. For years!”

“I still saw you,” Satoru offers. “We made conversation. When you’d pick up the kids, for example.”

“You count—these past few years, you’ve been counting them as conversations?” You stare at him, as your heartbeat picks up. “I never let them be conversations. You didn’t know anything about me, because I didn’t let you.”

“I still knew you.” Satoru says it like a dismissal, like he’s trying to keep you calm, but it only makes your blood spike. 

“You didn’t know I’d broken up with Kazuo. I didn’t tell you.”

He bites something back. “It doesn’t—”

“It does matter!” Your hand sweeps through the air: black, gloved. “We broke up years ago, Satoru! Of course it does! And it’s why—no matter what you say, it doesn’t make sense that you ‘aren’t angry’, or whatever!” 

“Can’t you just believe me? That I’m not?”

“That would make you stupid. You’re not stupid, Satoru.”

His eyes flash. “Thanks.”

“It’s not crazy of me to expect it,” you challenge, wheeling around to him, a new attempt. “We were friends. Are friends. You remember, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

“Friends don’t do that.” 

Satoru raises his eyebrows. “You needed to leave.” 

“And leave you alone? I didn’t need to do that.”

“You told me you did.”

You blanch, and then glare, furious. “That doesn’t count.”

“It does.” Satoru—so calm, steady. “Hebi, you told me that you needed time on your own. You needed it. Of course I would give it to you.”

“You’re—you’re making it sound so noble. It wasn’t—”

“Wasn’t like that?” Satoru dares to smile at you, smile at you kindly, like he’s not driving you insane with his placidity. “Really?”

“I—no, it—fuck!” 

You want to throw something. Hit something. You cover your face with your hands and scream. 

“I don’t get it!” You twist back to him. “You need to hate me for what I did to you!”

“I could never hate you.”

“That’s stupid,” you spit out. God, you just want him to shout—yell at you, the way you deserve.  

Satoru only shrugs. “Maybe.”

“So you admit it?”

“I think I understand why you’d think it was.” Then he laughs to himself, at his own little joke, and you’re close to screaming all over again. 

“What if—” You break off, then, summoning all courage and fury: “What if I want you to be angry at me?” You throw your hands in the air. “What then?”

His blue eyes splinter. “Why would you want that?”

“Because!” You hate that he doesn’t see—that he doesn’t understand why he should hate you. “Because—because I left!” 

“I’ve told you—"

“And we were friends!” You’re shouting—pleading. “We were best friends! I left you!”

“I was a bad friend,” Satoru says, quietly. It cuts through your hysteria like a burning knife. 

You raise a shaking hand. “No. You didn’t run away from us. I did.”

“You needed to leave. You told me that.”

“None of that matters! None of that should have mattered!” 

“I’m not in control of your life,” Satoru says. There is something bitter there, and you want to pry it from him, send it right back at you. “I shouldn’t be, either. But I still didn’t know enough to help… Hebi, you told me you were unhappy. The first time I realised how unhappy you’d gotten, you were telling me and you were walking away. That was the first time!”

You were unhappy. You had told him, and he’d been shocked. You rally to his defence. “I didn’t say anything before then. I acted like I blamed you, but I’d never said—”

“You shouldn’t have had to!” Satoru’s voice, louder than it has been all night. You see regret, instantaneous, and you want to burn it from him. 

“I never told you,” you spit. You’re being cruel and harsh, and you want to stoke the fire of his anger because you need him to be worse to you. “I kept it all to myself. I had been running away for years before I actually left.”

“And I didn’t—!” Satoru bites down hard on his lip. “Shit.”

“What?” you provoke. “Tell me. What is it?”

He shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does.” You glare up at him, suddenly furious, suddenly so afraid of the resentment that bubbles through your veins, viscous and hot. “Satoru—”

“I didn’t notice!” Satoru stands, just as you did, and pushes himself away from you. Then, just as quick, he turns back. “I didn’t notice. You were my best friend, and I didn’t notice how fucking miserable you were!” 

You take a step back. “You… Satoru, you…”

It’s his face: his voice. You had wanted anger, something quick and volatile, but this—

“I look back now,” Satoru says, fisting his hands in his hair, “and I see everything I could’ve done differently. Everything. It—it kills me, looking back.”

“I never told you,” you say, weak. “I told you everything. You wouldn’t have known…”

“You knew me,” Satoru bites out. “I never told you shit, about me, and you knew me anyway.”

“That’s not true, Satoru—”

“I failed you.” Satoru says it like an admission, a confession, baring up to the sky his last profession of guilt. “You were the most important person in my life—you are—and I didn’t see it.”

“You—"

“And I think—” Satoru’s face twists, violent and viscous. “It means I didn’t learn anything, from him.”

Your breath catches. 

“Not if I let you feel like you had to leave.” And Satoru looks heartbroken, so anguished and desperate that you are only now realising what he is implying, and what you have done to him, too late, the mistake made years ago.  “Out of everyone… it was you, Hebi. And I didn’t realise. Just like before, I didn’t…” 

Cold seeps over you. 

You know what he is talking about, and still, Satoru cannot see that it is all your fault. Satoru blames himself but, just like it was back then, back at school, it was only the fault of the person who chose to leave.  

This—your final, and most awful, crime. 

“I left…” Your voice, shaking. Shit, tears, you can’t cry. “And I—I know what it feels like, when someone leaves you behind. I know what it can do.”

Satoru’s jaw tenses. That muscle twitches. And you inhale shakily, the whole apartment silent but for the sound of your quivering breath, and you know that you are both thinking of Suguru Geto.

“You shouldn’t have gone through that again,” you say, as your chest spasms with the effort of holding back tears. Your voice is hoarse, low, thick and round. “Oh, god. I shouldn’t—"

“No. No, you’re not—”

“I kept thinking like him,” you say, the words spilling out of you. How much like him have you been? How much have you heart Satoru, in ways you have not even realised? “Before I left. I kept—I hated my job, I never liked it. I kept thinking it was pointless, and I kept wishing I didn’t have to do it. That was what he thought, wasn’t it?” 

You press your hands over your heart, fingers biting into fabric, and then biting into your skin. “I was so—so resentful of them all. I was so scared I was becoming like him, and I never said anything, but—but I left. I left you, and I walked away, and you—Satoru, you didn’t deserve that. You deserved so much better—"

“It was different.” Satoru’s shaking his head, and his silver hair moves and part with the motion. “I shouldn’t have said… you don’t understand. I’m sorry. Suguru and me, you and me… don’t think it was like what he did. It’s different.”

The accusation is harsh, and it hurts. 

You wipe at your tears, ashamed. You say: “I know I’ll never be like him. I’m—not what he was to you, and…”

“What?” Satoru breathes out a laugh, so incredulous. You don’t understand. “No. Wait, no, you don’t get it.”

“I left you,” you say. “Like he did.”

“You are nothing like him.” Satoru has stepped towards you, and his face is stripped of all facades: he is desperate, desperate for you to understand something that you cannot comprehend. “And I am glad. I’m so glad that you’re not.”

You shake your head. “No, no, I’m…”

“You are everything to me,” Satoru says fervently, ardently, as his voice shakes with effort and passion and—his eyes, shining— “You’re not Suguru. Please—don’t think you’re like him. I don’t want you to be like him.”

“But he left you,” you whisper, hot tears streaming down your face. “And I left you. And—and I kept thinking—I wanted to leave everything, like he did, but I couldn’t—”

“You came back,” Satoru says. He stands just a metre away from you. His hands fist at his sides. “That’s the difference. That’s what you can remember.”

“I left,” you repeat, over and over. “I left you, Satoru, when… and that was so cruel, that I…”

“And you came back.” Satoru’s face is open, so open, and you choke on your tears. “You did. That’s why I can’t be angry.”

“But—”

“And that’s the difference between you two. That’s the biggest difference.” Satoru looks so pained, so hurt. “You’re here. You’re right here, in front of me. You came back. And I know—I’ve always known, that with Suguru—"

And Satoru breaks off, sudden. He looks away, up at the ceiling, and you are terrified to see tears pooling in his eyes. 

“Satoru—”

He blinks them away. “I knew that Suguru,” he says, more firm, even when you feel like you’re falling, “wasn’t coming back. He isn’t. But you did.”

“You can’t have known that I would.” This is it: this is the flaw, with everything he’s saying. “Satoru, you can’t have known that I would come back. I didn’t know. I hated—every time I thought of coming back to you, I hated myself even more, because I knew I didn’t deserve it.”

“Of course you deserved it—” 

“You’re not listening.” You step closer to him, pleading with him to understand. “You can’t have known. I was like him, for all the years I was gone. I left you, and I didn’t think I would ever come back.”

“I hoped you would,” Satoru says, simply. “Even through everything, I knew Suguru would never come back. But I hoped that you would, Hebi. I hoped you’d want to see me again.”

Your heart breaks. He doesn’t understand: you always wanted to see him. You wanted him every day, and that was why you could not return. 

“That’s why you’re different,” he says, this time with a smile so trembling it makes your tears fall faster, hotter. Satoru rubs at his own eyes, swears, and laughs. “I still let myself hope for you to come back. It’s us, isn’t it? We go away, and then we come back together. You needed to leave. We both know you needed to, and I’m sorry that I didn’t realise. But that’s why. That’s why you’re different to him.” 

You feel ashamed, crying like some child, and you rub at your eyes worthlessly. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I want you to be different. C’mon, you’ve got to understand, I don’t want you to be like him. I’m happy you’re not like him. You’re you.”

“You should—”

“It’s why I can’t be angry at you.” So calm, so patient. You don’t deserve it. “You’re just you. Please. You are the most—the most important—” 

Satoru breaks off at your choked sob. You’re pathetic. 

“I’m not angry,” Satoru says, soft. “I love you, remember? Believe me, please.”

You want to stop crying. You should never have started, because—because you fear, you fear you will never stop. You do not want to cry, even though Satoru has seen you cry so many times—but you don’t want to, and you fight against it, as your head begins to throb painfully. 

“I can’t.” A realisation. You don’t believe him. And suddenly, panic. You can’t believe him. But Satoru—he’s telling the truth. 

His face, open. He isn’t lying. You know when he’s lying. 

“Sorry.” You say it, repeat it. “Sorry. Sorry.”

“Don’t—apologise.”

“I can’t believe it.” Why? Why can’t—like it’s a physical impossibility, you cannot believe him—something does not let you, allow you—

Your hands have found your heart, and they squeeze down. You fist the fabric there, and your breathing feels tight, too short, too shallow. 

“I can’t believe that,” you have to say, in a gasp that sounds like a sob. And it’s this realisation—that you cannot, that you truly can’t—that makes your head begin to spin, your chest begin to close—

You say, continue saying: “I don’t—I don’t know why. But there’s something stuck in me, and I can’t believe it—that you’d not hate me. I can’t believe it, I can’t let myself.”

Satoru shifts. You hold your hand up, pleading silently for him to not come any closer. 

“I’m sorry,” you choke out. “I’m so sorry—but I can’t, I can’t—” 

You hear him saying something. It’s okay. It’s okay. 

You shake your head. “It’s not—it’s—” Shit, your face is wet—you try to take a breath— “It’s not okay—I’m so sorry—”

You don’t have to be—please, let me—

“It’s here.” You clutch the flesh above your heart, the thrumming muscle, where the breathless pressure is coming from. “There’s something wrong with me—I know, I know I love you, that you—don’t you—?”

 “I’ve got you,” Satoru is saying.  He’s—“Come on, Hebi-Hebi.  I’ve got you, it’s okay.”

“—And I still can’t feel it.” You rub at your tears, rub your face raw. Your gloves feel wet with tears, and you want to smack yourself, give yourself something to cry about—and the thought terrifies you, and you gasp on your tears, wanting to run away from your own mind. 

“I’ll keep telling you.” Satoru’s voice is smooth and soothing, an anchor. Your ears pound, underwater, everything dulled, everything loud. “Listen to me. Listen, Hebi-Hebi.”

“I—I don’t know—there’s something in me, and I don’t know—please, yes, sorry, I’ll listen—I—”

“I’ve got you,” Satoru keeps telling you, repeating himself. “I love you, okay? I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere. Not if you don’t want me to.”

“I—don’t—are you really?—but you shouldn’t—” Your words catch in your throat, smother you. Phlegm chokes you, builds up and you almost retch, feeling disgusting. “You shouldn’t. Not—”

“I’m here,” Satoru says. “Always. Forever. Hebi, it’s okay.”

Vision a blur, you try to find him. You stumble forwards, hands shaking and still latched onto your pitiful heart. Your temple throbs, so painful, your shoulder spikes with phantom agony, and you can’t—breathe—

“Remember what we used to do?” Satoru soothes, his hands out, palms-up. Instinctive, you flinch away—guilt, then, immediate, but Satoru’s face is open and he doesn’t look hurt—you should be better, still, you should be an adult, not terrified of someone’s skin. 

Your head shakes. 

“With my Infinity? Try to remember.” 

Satoru’s Infinity? Like this morning—he’d shielded you from everyone, too kind, too much, shouldn’t have—

—and what he used to do, the way you learnt to touch him—

—his Infinity, moonlight, the way he’d looked at you before he’d left. He’d left you. The night on the Zenin estate, when he’d asked you to dance, and he’d left you.

“You left,” you gasp. “—left me, you—” 

Then you wrap your hands around your mouth, aghast—suddenly, you’re revolted with yourself. How could you—? Satoru—you’re in his house, and you’re blaming him, even when he left you—you had cried, back then, when he’d left you alone—

“I’m not leaving now.” Satoru’s voice, his outstretched hands, the now-visible shimmer of Infinity. “I promise to you. I’m never leaving. I’m staying right here.”

“You—are?”

“I promise. Forever.” Satoru’s hands aren’t shaking like yours, the way your whole body is shaking, like something fragile and vulnerable, the way you feel. He is stronger than you. “Do you remember? Come on. It’s okay.”

You take a step forward. Another. He does not flinch from you—the way Kazuo would, at the end, because he knew he would never get to touch you the way he wanted to. 

“I don’t think—it’s not—” 

“Come here,” Satoru says. You see his hands, and your brain has split; one half tells you that they’re the worst thing you could imagine, and it makes your heartbeat pick up even more, your blood pump, your head swim with nausea and revulsion; and the other, the other half, you want someone to hold onto you, and you want someone strong to lean on, and you think that could be him. 

Another step. You’re close enough that you can feel—that you can tell he is warm. 

And that is all it takes: you stumble forwards, into him, and your head meets his chest and you are sobbing, ribs shaking with every breath, and his arms are tight around you, and his hand is in your hair, and the Infinity is keeping him and your mind at bay. 

You cry loudly, like a baby, but every time you try to quiet them down you just find yourself gasping for air, breathless, and Satoru is murmuring into your hair, that you need to breathe, for me, just focus on breathing, breathe with me, okay? Breathe with me.

The movement of his chest. His heartbeat, so much slower and steadier than yours. 

Your fingers have curled by your head, and you have enclosed yourself in his arms, your whole body shuddering. Satoru rubs small circles into your hair, the only place where he lets his Infinity up. You are against its soft resistance everywhere else—even if he can feel you, the way he said he could—you do not fear him. It. Touch. You do not have energy left in your body to fear it. 

Your emotions flood from you, first forced out, like from some outside source of pressure. Now they spill, as your chest shakes with effort to keep on breathing, as you stay, in Satoru’s arms. 

You stay. 

He stays. 

“It’s okay,” he says, murmurs to you, his breath warm against your hair. He keeps saying it, as your sobs turn to quick little gasps, as your tears become viscous and slow.

When you speak, your voice is haggard and broken. “It’s not,” you fight to say. Your heart picks up as you realise what you’re saying, what you’re admitting, and Satoru hushes you with a gentleness you have only seen him take with the children. You hate to feel so weak, vulnerable, but you cannot push him away when you would fall to the floor without him. 

“What is it?” he asks you. Like you’re making conversation, like you’re normal. 

“It’s not,” you say. “It’s not okay. I’m sorry. But… but it’s not.”

Satoru’s hold on your head, the curve of the back of your scalp, tightens. 

“I’m so… I’ve been so unhappy.” For all your tears, his shirt is dry. Infinity. You confess to him, in the quiet of his home, that which you have been hating in yourself for years. “I hate my job,” you whisper. “I hate what I do, I… I hate it all.”

Satoru takes in a ragged breath.

“I never said anything.” Your skin is pinched and aching from crying, but still, tears fall. “And I never said anything, because…”

“I know,” Satoru says. His lips brush your hairline. Not your skin, but it’s so close, so kind and intimate, that you break under his hold. “I know. I know. I’ll fix it.”

“You can’t. Not something like this.” You want to stay here, before he moves apart from you, forever. You feel closer to him than you have in years. “Not… not when I feel like this. I couldn’t do anything else.”

Satoru laughs, watery. “C’mon, Hebi-Hebi,” he says, and his voice is thick, just like yours. “You’re forgetting one important thing.”

You breathe, in, out. “I am?”

“Sure.” Satoru’s weak smile bleeds into his voice. “I’m special. I can do whatever I want.”

A laugh of your own bubbles in your throat, and bursts. 

“Don’t… don’t laugh at me,” Satoru says, and you press your forehead to the Infinity around his shoulder, your face hidden. “I’m telling the truth. I’ll fix it.”

“Satoru…” 

“I will.” And, oh, you have to look at him. You tilt your chin up to him, your body held so tight in his arms, and see him looking down at you with a face shining with determination. “I’ll do it,” Satoru says. “I promise. I’m going to make it better for you.”

His hand moves from your head to your nape, Infinity keeping him from you, but he holds you there, regardless. You look up at him, lips parted, tears cooling on your cheeks. 

“If you’ll let me,” Satoru says. Without his blindfold, or his glasses, he looks so like the boy you met when you were a child. “If… I know it’s difficult.”

“I’m staying.” It is only when you say the words aloud, that you realise their truth. Satoru’s eyelashes flutter as he blinks. “I want to stay.”

“With me?” Satoru asks, and you know, you can see, branching out in the infinite space between you, that the question is not as simple as if you will stay one more night.

Because… you think of it, now. You allow yourself to remember, without the guilt or the shame, that Satoru had kissed you. 

You do not understand it all. You do not know what, in your memories of it, is real, and what is corrupted by the aching cold that bleeds self-hatred into even your sweetest of memories. 

And yet he kissed you. And Satoru, the Satoru who you have loved and wanted and loved for all of your life, would not be so cruel to kiss you without reason.

You know what the other is thinking, always, and now it’s as if there is a string taught between your hearts, your minds, and you can read the other’s better than you can your own. You know what he thinks, and what he wants. 

You. 

Satoru kissed you, those years ago. 

You had thought then, that it was a mistake, that you were another nameless girl whose lips he chased for the sake of heat and lust. But you cannot have been. You have never been someone like that, not to him. 

And in Satoru’s eyes, shining from the tears that were shed for you; and you know that all that you have felt for him, for the years you have loved him, there is something; that there is something there reflected to you. 

You were not wrong, before. You cannot take on everything that he feels, not now. You came to him because you needed a friend; the friend he was, the friend you fell in love with. Before anything else, you were his friend, and he was yours. 

Even if you cannot think that this is wholly unrequited, because there is something, something there for you, you cannot know the totality of it, and you cannot bring yourself to.  

You know this, you know this now, and you are cradled in his arms with the barrier of his cursed technique between your bodies. Exhausted, so weak that you cannot hold yourself up, you could not have him touch you. 

You cannot stay at his home tonight. You cannot hide with him, and pretend that everything else is still not so wrong. There is a reason you felt like you had to leave, and you cannot fall back into that old life. You cannot let yourself. He says he will fix it, but you both know that change cannot begin with anyone but you.

“I’m staying,” you say, simply. “It’s us.”

And, even though you do not even truly know what it is you’ve said, Satoru seems to understand. 

“I don’t think we could spend our lives away from each other,” Satoru admits, and you laugh, quietly. 

“I don’t think so, either.”

“Yeah?”

You nod, so tired. “Yeah. I think it’s us, forever.”

“Always and forever and ever and ever,” he says. 

For Infinity . Something unsaid, that doesn’t need to be said, between you. 

And you know that, just as you can still read him, he knows it, all that you cannot do. And he knows that, not really, it is not a rejection—not so casual, not so harsh or cruel. 

Because he knows that you see in him, the ache that you think you recognise from your own heart, and that even though there is more that you know, you are asking him, you suppose, to wait. Because you cannot, now. You do not think he can, either. You do not have the room in your mind for what you see in him, not now. 

He knows, he doesn’t hold it against you. Not like Kazuo, and you are so grateful—you are so grateful that, after all of this, he doesn’t expect anything more. You need Satoru as a friend before you can think of anything else. You need a friend: you need him, as your friend, as the friend you had loved before anything. 

Notes:

2014
Twenty-four years old

-

SPOILERS
CW: Haphephobia incident. In a bar, a man touches Hebi's wrist, triggering the beginnings of a panic attack. She leaves the bar and the man follows her angrily, holds her back and then lets her go when he loudly verbally protests. The tail end of the panic attack is present throughout the first section until "And it's his decision. Right?", and the flashback to the incident begins at "And he didn't" and ends at "[...] if you wanted it so bad."
A second depiction of a panic attack between "His face, open. He isn’t lying." and "When you speak, your voice is haggard and broken.". Hebi realises that she is unable to believe Satoru isn't angry at her and he comforts her, using Infinity to prevent them from touching.
SPOILERS

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HAPPY CHRISTMAS EVE! This has been a long, long time incoming and oh my goodness am I glad that it's finally here. I figured we'd want some hurt/comfort (with comfort and then some comfort) on the xmas eve anniversary (haha).

This one took me so, so long to write, and I really hope it lives up to your expectations. I also hope you're not too mad at the ending--I will happily talk about all of my thought processes and why it is Necessary to anyone interested, but I hope I've managed to translate some of it just in the text, at least, lol. But it's the longest chapter yet, whoo boy, and yet I'm looking at the chapters coming up and jeez guys it's not really getting much shorter. I remember when all my chapters averaged ~5k. I giggle.

Have a lovely Christmas for all that celebrate! I've been busy-busy still (I've made over 100 mince pies and 2 huge yule logs and I don't think I can look at shortcrust pastry the same again. I shudder still.

See you guys around! Loads of love and kisses to everyone, mwah mwah mwah mwah <333
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Edit: not dead! Just taking a cheeky break because of course I am. Latest post on Tumblr explains it lols. See you guys soon!

Chapter 20: 2015

Notes:

CW:
CW related to panic attacks; see end notes for details; contains mild spoilers.

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(Also: I know Gege said something about curses only populating Japan, or whatever. I think that idea is dumb. Onwards!)

Monday 7th September, 2015

You've crossed your legs at the ankles.

It’s better for your back than crossing them one over the other, which means it might be better for your shoulder. You think. You're not seeing a physiotherapist; just a regular doctor that signs off on your pain meds. This has been working okay so far, but admittedly it also goes against what Endou has been suggesting recently. Still, she understands that you’re not ready to move so far forward yet. You’re waiting until you are, and until then, you’re pretty sure the logic of your ankle-shoulder thing works. 

One ankle digs into the other. The small point of contact is a source of slight warmth; the room is too cold for you. The first time you came here, you’d had to hold yourself back from shivering all throughout your meeting. There’s no central heating, none at all, because that's apparently too modern; or, like Satoru says, too much of convenience for the poor souls forced to attend meetings here. You'd told him that he doesn't count as a poor soul, but he had just laughed and disagreed flippantly, which had made you laugh, and then forget what you were talking about. He's right about the need for central heating, though, and to make things worse, the windows of the office are currently wide open. A cold breeze tugs your hairs up. You shift. In the air there is the first taste of winter. 

You have prepared yourself, though, for another visit to Yaga’s office. You re-cross your legs—at the ankles—and run your gloved hands over your legs. You have invested in fleeced tights.  

“Hebi,” says Yaga, with a sharp sigh. He leans forwards, resting his forearms on his knees. “I know you’re more reasonable than Gojo is. You’ve been doing well, this past year.”

You keep your face impassive, awaiting the next sentence. 

“And I remember when you were in one of my classes. You were a bright student, but your potential was great. You changed a lot, in the four years. I was proud of you.”

“Thank you.”

“You don’t need to flatter the girl,” Gakuganji cuts in. “She’s shrewd enough to see through that.”

Yaga’s jaw tenses. “I do not—”

“It’s alright,” you say. You bow your head to Gakugangi, who affixes you with his steely eyes. You look back at him, unblinking. “It’s true. You don’t need to flatter me.”

“Hebi,” Yaga says again. “You have to understand. There are certain… aspects, of this school, that can’t change.”

“Exactly. Jujustu High lives because it stays strong, and it stays strong because it stays the same.”

“…Partly, yes.”

Gakugangi seems displeased by Yaga’s indecisiveness. His voice is thin and reedy, but razor-sharp. “That is the exact reason. We are an ancient institution, girl. We have not survived on pure luck.”

“Of course not,” you say. 

“And so.” Yaga again, playing the stone-faced diplomat. “You should know that we can’t do all of these things. There’s a reason we’ve stayed safe, all these years, and this…”

Yaga looks down again, to your neatly-organised stacks of papers, the files laid out on the table. He runs his hand over his mouth. 

“I can’t see any of these being accepted, let alone being implemented,” he says, with something of finality. “I’m sorry.”

You tilt your head to the side, and take the two of them in. It’s clear that Yaga’s trying his best; of the two principals, you like him the best. There’s some morality to him, and you genuinely think he wants to do the best for his students. And you’re not naïve, or wilfully ignorant enough to see the world so black-and-white that you think Gakugangi’s some evil old traditionalist, either. He wouldn’t have become principal if he didn’t want to keep his students safe, either. He cares about the kids, too. 

Except his methods are wrong. There may be merit to following the old ways, and thinking about tradition, but that has never served you well. It didn’t help you as a child, or as a teenager growing up in Jujustu High. And you can’t feel that much sympathy for Yaga, either, with his acceptance of the higher-ups’ mindsets. He’s acquiesced to their systems so easily, believing that whatever slight change he can make would be enough.  

It won’t be. Megumi starts school in a few years. You’re going to make sure it’s different, for him. 

And, shit, they scare you. These two men, sitting across from you. You feel so aware of their height and breadth, their power, their authority. 

But you’ve got some authority of your own. People either respect you, you tell yourself, hearing Satoru’s voice, or they think you’re kind of scary. Intimidating. You don’t believe it, not fully, but he does. You hold onto his faith in you, emboldened by its steadfastness. 

You sit up straighter. Your spine moves from the back of the chair, and you lean forwards, gloved hands resting on the table. 

“I’m afraid,” you say, tilting your head towards the men, “that’s unacceptable.” 

Yaga’s expression doesn’t change—you weren’t expecting it to—but Gakugangi’s nostrils flare. 

You raise your eyebrows. “You disagree?”

“It’s not that I disagree, Hebi, but these things take time, and—” 

“I understand.” To Yaga’s disbelief, Gakugangi’s supressed anger, you say: “I really do. I’m not pretending we’re going to become a new school overnight—and I wouldn’t want us to.”

“To accept all of this—” Gakugangi waves a shrivelled hand over your stacks of paper, the different projects you plan on setting up in the near future. “It would be insanity. We cannot change the fundamentals of our school, just to suit some girl’s ideas.”

 “We’re not changing the fundamentals of our school,” you say, with a small smile. “I hope you haven’t misunderstood.”

He bristles. You can push him, but not too far—you should retreat, hold back. 

“Gakugangi-san, I agree with you.” You keep yourself reserved; you should look more reasonable, more understanding. “And as I explained, these aren’t all my ideas. Actually, barely any of them are. I’ve just spoken to the Jujustu sorcerers that are working now, and I asked them a few questions, and they gave me suggestions. That’s—” you gesture to the many different stacks of paper, “—what all of these ideas are. And I’d suggest we’d carry them out gradually, just one at a time. I know that if change is too sudden, it can be overwhelming. Especially for the students.”

Gakugangi eyes you. “That seems more reasonable. Although, I still—” 

“I’ve laid out my suggestions in this folder.” You tap it with a glove-covered finger. “Of timings, and insurance plans, and an overarching five-year plan. You’ll find the statements and suggestions from working sorcerers cited in the folder you’re holding, Yaga-san.”

“Your attention to detail is valued, but—” 

“How many fatalities did you have at this exchange event?” You ask it briskly, matter-of-fact, and do not react when you see the men falter. “It happened a few weeks ago, didn’t it?”

Gakugangi takes in a sharp breath. Your gaze flicks to him, and you’re shocked—pleased, you remind yourself to be—to see a hint of fear in his heavy-lidded eyes. 

“How many?” you press, still ensuring you remain calm. In control. You won’t get anything done if you just shout at them, or lecture them. 

You remember the way you survive your parents: you would be perfect, and serene, and demure, and you would press slightly so you could try to get what you want. It had kept you alive, but it hadn’t gotten you what you’d wanted. You can do more than press just slightly, now. 

You recognise your father in Gakugangi. He thrives on respect, and sincerity, and yet he responds best to subtle displays of power. 

Still, you are not Satoru. You do not command the same strength that he does.

You remember again, when you were younger. You didn’t care that Satoru was strong, stronger than you: you were strong in your own way. You were strong enough. 

You remind yourself, in a voice that sounds like Endou. You are strong enough. 

“One.”

Yaga admits it, finally, after you let the silence stretch and seep through the air. 

You nod. “Injuries?”

“Irrelevant.”

“The Principal of the Madrid branch wanted to know.” You pick up the first stack of papers and rifle through it, looking for the right page. “Ah, here. She was wondering when the Tokyo and Kyoto branches were intending to implement the Madrid style of exchange events. She didn’t tell me all of the details, but gave me recommendations for safety features.”

“You are forbidden from—”

“From revealing secrets about the Japanese Jujustu Highs to other countries’ representatives,” you finish, with a hint of impatience. “Yes, I know.”

“You couldn’t—”

“I’m aware of what I can and can’t say.” You push the papers towards them again, pointedly. “I’ve documented all my online correspondence with her, and I didn’t give any more details in person. You can check, if you’d like to, but you don’t need to worry.” You lean forward, staring at them both, not backing down. “I care about this school, Yaga, Gakugangi. I’m not going to make it any more vulnerable than it already is.”

They’re wary you broke your oath, the one you’d made when you were first tentatively offered this job. To keep Jujutsu High’s secrets, to correspond with the Principals of other countries, to ensure diplomacy between the world branches. 

Because of every branch’s knee-jerk reaction about secrecy, there has never been anyone who has attempted to improve communication between them. There are rules about what can be shared, and what can’t be, all in favour of improving diplomacy and sorcerer safety; and yet worldwide, the Jujustu leaders seem to disregard them, all in favour of pushing any outsiders away. 

The schools are supposed to be unified. They are all, technically, all descendants of one great school; all the branches that are supposed to join back to a strong trunk, holding everything together. But over the centuries, the millennia, the wood between the branches have rotted with distrust and isolationism. 

Everything has turned so insular. Secrecy has become a fatal disease: until a few decades ago, other countries didn’t even know when curse threats would become world-threatening. There is the unsteady recognition that curses exist in every country; that curses are a threat in every country; that their sorcerers will always defeat them. No-one even knew about special-grade sorcerers being born unless it was within their country’s boundaries.

Until Satoru.  

You hadn’t realised how much Satoru’s birth had affected your society; not just in your own home country, but in everyone’s. Wherever you go, wherever in the world you go, every Jujutsu sorcerer knows of Satoru Gojo.

It was him who gave you this idea—a transfer, to something within Jujutsu society, that wouldn’t require you to stay as a sorcerer. 

Satoru brings you confectionary and gifts from other countries after he’s visited them. Satoru visits other countries to exorcises curses they cannot. Satoru complains, often, that everyone’s always so tense and sketchy whenever he visits them, all because they don’t trust anyone outside of their country. 

It’s why, you think, the Principal of the Madrid branch was first willing to speak with you. To open communications with Satoru Gojo’s home country, to advise the school that he was educated at, would be a very good political move. 

You’re aware of the need for improved security, and so was she, Principal of one of the two Jujustu sorcery schools in Spain. You’d flown out there a few weeks ago; to your higher-ups, it was supposed to be a simple, introductory meeting between the two schools; to you, it was a chance for you to finally understand how you could actually make Jujustu High safer. Better. Better for the students. 

Even now, you’re not sure the exact reason the Principal had been willing to help. Perhaps it was simply Satoru’s anonymous influence—to win his favour, and also, to learn about the one sorcerer who has his ear. Perhaps it was because you’d been speaking to her for months in advance, and that she had gotten to know you: respected you. Perhaps it was because you were the first person to try to bridge the gap between your countries. Perhaps she could tell you genuinely cared. 

You didn’t know. And yet, you’d found it didn’t matter. You had gotten what you wanted. You had left feeling, for the first time in too long, that you had done well at something.  

This is your job, almost. 

Because, technically, you’re only supposed to facilitate communication between branches. You’re supposed to make things easier for the higher-ups to assist in international curse threats. 

You also know the primary reason the higher-ups gave you this job; so you could act as their spy, infiltrating other countries’ branches and reporting back on crucial information. Politics. You guess that they’d been craving an excuse to investigate the other branches for years: you had handed yourself to them willingly. 

But you have no intention of helping the higher-ups. You haven’t exorcised a curse in almost a year, but regardless, you remember vividly what it was like to be a sorcerer. The relentlessness, the pain, the awful and absolute absence of any regulation or any support.

You’re not supposed to be using your international contacts to suggest ways in which the Japanese branch can change itself. You’re not supposed to be doing what you are now: presenting your own plan for improvements, instead of intelligence from the Spanish branches. You swallow down the terror that rises up in you, that familiar panic that still clutches your heart. You breathe through it, the way Endou has told you to. 

A year ago, you wouldn’t have dared do this. 

 

--

 

“It’s just because I’m friends with you,” you had said, this morning, as you stared at yourself glumly in the mirror. You brushed down your dress; it was dark and professional-looking, and it also collected a lot of lint. 

“What?” Satoru was in the kitchen, investigating your cupboards. “What did you say? Also, do you have a breakfast bar, or something? I forgot to eat.”

You gave yourself a final once-over, and walked out of your bathroom. “I have cereal.”

“Is it cereal, or is it muesli?” Satoru stuck out his tongue. “There’s a difference.”

“I’ve got both.” You reached around him to pull out the cereal box from your cupboard; Satoru stepped away to give you room. “Is that alright?”

Satoru took it from you, then flipped it over to read the ingredients. “I mean… Hebi-Hebi, this has, like, a minus-zero-percent sugar content.”

“To normal people, that’s a good thing.”

“I can’t believe you,” Satoru groaned, but he busied himself around your kitchen regardless, picking up your sugar bowl and waving it at you. “Anyway. What were you saying? Couldn’t hear.”

“What? Oh. Nothing.”

“Pfft. Not allowed. What were you saying?”

You bit down on your lip. Satoru’s eyebrows waggled, and you relented. “I just said… it’s only because I know you. That they’d take me seriously.”

“Why’d you say that?”

“Because it’s true.” You pulled up a chair and sat on it, bringing your knees up to your chin. Then your shoulder gave a painful throb, and you sighed and lowered your legs, sitting with your ankles crossed. “You know. It just is.”

“I don’t know.”

“You—do, I—”

“I really don’t.”

“Satoru. You’re being obtuse.”

“I,” Satoru said, pouring a glass of water, “am doing a really cool, therapy-approved technique called: getting Hebi to talk about her feelings. It’ll work, I swear, just give me another minute.”

You glared at him. Then your look had softened, because Satoru had held out the water to you, a packet of painkillers in his other hand. You took both, and sent him a small, appreciative smile. 

“It’s just…” You cleared your throat, feeling the pills sinking down your throat. “I know it’s the only reason they’d listen to me. The only reason I’m someone of status is because I’m associated with you. So what’s the point of trying to dress up, or convince them when I know they’re not going to think I’ve got anything good to say?” You looked to the floor, lamely finishing: “Or something.”

Satoru hummed. You cast your gaze back up, to see that he had his hands on his hips, his lips pursed in thought. 

“I think,” Satoru said, “you’re not as self-aware as you think you are.”

You stared at him. 

“Seriously! I think you think that you know about how people see you, and that you’re really good at knowing what other people are thinking, just because you’re good at knowing what I’m thinking. But even then!” Satoru sent you one of his boyish grins. “You’re not really a mind-reader, are you?”

You felt your cheeks warm. You fiddled again with the hem of your dress. 

“So I think you underestimate the way people see you. That’s why I think you’re going to be fine later.” Satoru drew up another chair and sat opposite you, mirroring your posture. “You get me?”

“Not really.”

“Listen,” Satoru said. “You think you’re just some… I don’t know, some famous-by-association person, whose only relevance in the Jujustu world is your relation to me. And so then you think that everyone thinks you have no personality outside of that, or that you’re using me, or that you’ve tricked me with your impressive womanly wiles. Hmm?”

You worked on holding back your laughter. Satoru’s eyes sparkled: he could tell. 

“Something like that,” you said. “Maybe less of the womanly wiles. Anyone who’s met me can tell I’d be hopeless at that.”

“But that’s the point! That’s what I mean, about how you don’t know how people see you!”

“What?”

“Anyone who’s met you would know that’s rubbish!” Satoru gestured at you, from your feet to the top of your head. “All of it! I swear, sometimes I wish you could transport yourself into my head, just so you could figure out that half the things you think about yourself are things you’ve made up!”

“Endou says I’m self-critical,” you admitted.

“Needlessly self-critical,” Satoru agreed. “Your real self is too amazing, Hebi-Hebi, so your brain can’t take it. You’ve got to make fun of yourself to balance it out.”

“I’m… not sure Endou would agree with that.” 

“She wouldn’t? Huh. Maybe not.” Satoru scratched a spot on his jaw. “Dunno. I thought it sounded clever.”

You rolled your eyes, and you caught him grinning. 

You huffed out a breath, bringing him back to the actual topic. “All of that’s nice, but. I mean. Aren’t you just…” You swallowed, and directed your attention to the ceiling. “I don’t know. Biased?”

Satoru chuckled. “Maybe a little. But biased can’t get rid of the fact that Ijichi texted me basically begging me to let you supervise him on exorcisms back when he was a student. He thought you were mysterious and assertive and interesting. Just so cool, were the exact words, if memory serves.”

You frowned. “I was always so short with Ijichi.”

“You were nice to him.” Satoru shrugged. “That goes far, Hebi-Hebi. You’re a pretty intimidating person when you want to be. People either respect you like mad, or they think you’re kind of scary. Intimidating! It works with the vibe you’ve got going for you.”

You have a vibe? Intimidating? It doesn’t at all correlate with the way you see yourself, but you don’t question it, because Satoru’s started on a monologue, and he’s clearly enjoying himself.

“And you were Nanami’s favourite too, remember? Did you know you were the only person he told, when he left Jujustu society? You were amazing to him, after everything that happened—you invited him to our fourth-year beach trip! He thought you were the best out of all of us.”

“It was just the right thing to do,” you said awkwardly. 

“You were the one who made sure Tsumiki got to stay with Megumi,” Satoru said. “You shouted at her aunt until she got scared and never spoke to us again!”

“She barely wanted to speak to us in the first place, I hardly—” 

“Shush. Listen. You have this… quality about you,” Satoru enthused. “It’s like… you’re serious, but you’re also calm and in control. And you’re responsible, but you can also be funny when you need to be. And you’re selfless, always. That’s how people see you. Anyone who knows you sees you like that. I promise.”

You bit down on the inside of your cheek. You still weren’t immune to Satoru’s new brand of compliments: said seriously, so you didn’t have any chance of mistaking them for anything but sincere. He’d said before that all of his compliments are sincere, but that you just think he’s joking. If you took the time to properly think that through, you’d likely combust, and so you don’t, and he’s relegated himself to these serious-sincere ones. 

“It’s why they let you take this job to begin with. Because of the reputation you have. You’re seen as cool, and it’s nothing to do with me.” Satoru wrinkled his nose. “It’s probably in spite of me, actually. Did you know a lot of people think I’m annoying? They think you’re the reasonable one of our little duo. I don’t get it, but, hey.”

“Satoru,” you said, and he flicked his gaze to you, grinning. “You know Yaga only signed off on my transfer because you told them to. They can’t say no to you. C’mon.”

“Not true! Do you think they’d do it with anyone?” Satoru clasped a hand against his chest, aghast. “Even my influence only goes so far. And that’s me being humble, so you know I’m right.”

“Satoru…”

“Do you think they’d let Ijichi talk to the presidents of other countries’ branches?” Satoru gave you a deadpan look. “Seriously?”

You pursed your lips. “That’s… I mean, no, but you shouldn’t say things like that about—” 

“Exactly! And look, I’m being mean, and you’re trying to stop me. Kind! That’s another thing about you.”

“Shut up,” you mumble, but you can’t hide the pleased smile that’s threatening to curl around your lips. “I should go. I don’t want to be late.”

Satoru sprung up. He’d insisted he drive you to your presentation. So then I can talk to you about it afterwards, Hebi-Hebi! I want to be supportive. I’m being supportive, aren’t I? 

You brushed at your dress again. When you looked up, you saw that Satoru had offered out his hand. To help you up. 

You stared at it. 

Then you remembered the worksheet you’ve still got to fill out—the slanted cursive of Endou’s handwriting, hands as trigger, this week?—and you slowly reached out and wrapped your fingers around his wrist. 

You felt your whole body shudder, but you tightened your grip, biting back the swell of nausea. You pulled yourself up to standing with Satoru’s help; and then, even up, even when his grip loosened, you held on. You breathed through it. 

Avoidance doesn’t work, you had repeated to yourself. Breathe through it, and show your brain that you’re okay. You’re safe. You’re in your kitchen, with Satoru, and you’re okay. 

Your ears clicked, like you were on an ascending plane. The nausea swelled, peaked, and then, much too slowly, began to subside. You rolled your shoulders back, ignoring that ever-present pain. You let go. 

“You okay?” Satoru had murmured.

“Yeah.” You looked up to him, and offered him a tight, but genuine, smile. “Yeah. Come on.” 

 

--

 

“So,” you say, as you watch both Yaga and Gakugangi flick through your printed-out emails, “how many was it? When I ask for injuries, I mean anything they wouldn’t have been able to cure themselves. Anything that would have led to death on a battlefield.”

For the second time, Yaga hesitates. 

Then, in a low, slow voice, he says: “Seven.”

A beat. “And how many students participated this year?”

“Thirteen.” Gakugangi’s voice is a rasp, like his old larynx is grinding against his windpipe. 

Your heart is loud and persistent in your ears. There’s the sudden urge to abandon professionalism—because you know those kids. Of the thirteen children participating in the exchange event, you know personally nine of their parents, three of their siblings. And one. 

Of the thirteen children participating in the exchange event, one is your brother. Haru. Who you haven’t seen in years. 

Seven out of thirteen. Over half. It is more likely than not that Haru was one of those injured—sustaining an injury that, had his life not been saved in the last-minute dash that is still typical and expected of the exchange events, would have killed him. You do not need to imagine the pain of that kind of injury. You know it, firsthand. 

A lump has formed, thick and painful in your throat. You want desperately to ask. You can’t, because that would be fucking unprofessional. 

Responsible , Satoru had said. Intimidating. 

If that’s true, and that’s the way they see you, then as much as you’re desperate to ask about Haru you have to maintain that image. He’s not the one child dead—Satoru had assured you. Though Haru is in the Kyoto branch, but Satoru has made an effort to watch out for him. Satoru knows him. Knows him more than you do. You feel sick. 

You can’t think of this right now. You need to concentrate. Your shoulder pulses with pain. You should’ve taken stronger painkillers. 

Professional. Responsible. Intimidating. 

Focus. 

You can tell that Yaga is ashamed. You would feel pity for him, you really would—but you can’t let yourself, not when he has had the opportunity and power to change this in all the years he’s been the Principal. He has allowed the higher-ups to beat him into submission, and has trained himself to accept small changes, as if that’s all that could possibly happen. 

You train your gaze on Gakugangi, and he meets it. For only a second. And then he lowers his eyes, looks back to the papers. His skin looks as thin as tissue, with blue veins protruding like rotten wood in murky water. He does not look up from the papers. So. There is guilt there, too. 

“You were right, Yaga.” Silently, you urge him to look up at you. You wait. Finally, he does. “I remember when I was at school, too. I remember my first exchange event, when I was sixteen. Do you?”

Yaga pushes his glasses closer towards his eyes. “Yes.”

“That’s good. I know you weren’t Principal then, so I wasn’t sure.”

“I remember.” 

Of course you do , you want to say. It was Geto’s last exchange event before he left. He was nearly killed. We all were. 

“It was set over multiple days,” you say, as you watch the tension build in deep-set lines around his mouth. “And we didn’t know when it would end—we weren’t told. A girl died on the fifth day. Shoko blamed herself, because she couldn’t save her. Shoko was a child.”

“I remember.” 

“As do I.” Gakugangi’s knuckles whiten as he grips the stack of papers. “We all remember, girl. We were all—”

“Hebi.”

His eyes flash. “What did you say?”

“Hebi. That’s my name. Please don’t call me ‘girl’.” Then you scale back. You smile: polite, respectful. Responsible.

“Yes.” Gakugangi looks like he’s chewing something sour over in his mouth. “Hebi. You seem to think that we don’t have compassion for these losses of lives—these deaths. We do.” It doesn’t seem to be anger within him anymore, more some righteous passion, and you are surprised to find that you believe him. “We care for these students. I work to keep them safe. But you are a sorcerer—or, you were.”

You keep your smile, and ignore the ugly tinge of condescension in his words. 

“You know that death is an unfortunate consequence in our field. We cannot stop it, and that means, sometimes, our students will face it. It’s impossible to fight. You—”

“It’s not,” you say, simply. 

Yaga opens his hands, still so stoic, clearly aiming for diplomacy. “Why don’t we—” 

“Of course it is,” Gakugangi interrupts, dismissive. “I’ve been a sorcerer for longer than you’ve been alive. I know more than you will ever know, about raising these students.”

“I’m sure you’re an excellent teacher,” you say. “But you’re incorrect, by saying that the students’ deaths are inevitable.”

“To expose them to—”

“Turn to page twelve,” you say, speaking over him. Yaga does so, immediately, and after a moment—in which he clearly works through whether he can risk refusing you—Gakugangi follows. 

“What is this, Hebi?” Yaga asks, slowly.

“The percentage of deaths and injuries in the last fifteen years of the Madrid/Seville exchange event, amongst a few other things. The Spanish schools run it differently to the way we do.” You shrug: pain sparks up your shoulder again. You rub at it, hide your wince, and the two men pour over the page of data. “The statistics look different, right?”

Gakugangi shakes his head. “This is the Western way of doing things. We are different for a reason. We—”

“Zero percent,” Yaga mutters. It’s almost reverent, the way he says it; Yaga is normally so impassive, so serious, and yet his fingers run over the inked words with care that you have barely seen from him before. “Zero deaths in the last fifteen years.” His head raises. He looks at you. “Is this real?”

“Yes.” You release your shoulder, pushing through the pulse of pain. Just get through this. You can take more pain meds later. You’ve packed them in your bag—you take them everywhere with you. “I discussed it with the President of the Madrid branch when I met with her. That was the primary objective of our meeting: to discuss the activities of our respective exchange events, and to work together towards making the events safer for students. For zero deaths.”

His mouth opens, and then he reaches up to take off his glasses. You work on holding back your surprise, as he sets them down on the table with an almost-steady hand; his eyes are so lined, so much older and more tired than they were when you were at school. 

Yaga turns to Gakugangi, the papers tight in his hands. “Zero deaths,” he says, again. 

Gakugangi has turned cold. He does not look at you; his eyes are darkened with shadow, and he rubs his thumb over the flesh of his other hand.

“That is…” His voice curdles, trailing off into a rasp. He clears his throat. “Convincing. What else do you have, Hebi?”

 

--

 

You make it outside of their office. You make it down the corridor. You do not make it further. 

Your hands tremble as they brace your weight against the tall wooden walls, and from your lips hisses a long, quivering breath. You feel, immediately, like you’re going to collapse. You almost do, and you shift your weight to catch yourself just before you fall. You push your hands harder against the cold wood, forcing it to hold yourself up. 

You did it. You did it. Right?

Shit, they scared you. You were trying to keep it together, and keep thinking about the kids, and what Satoru had said, but you were shit scared. You feel like a fraud, pretending to be all confident and assertive when in reality you just want to run away and hide. 

You press your gloved palm to your chest and feel your heart racing, like you’ve just fallen from a sprint. You want to collapse here. You feel drained, your body limp; you’ve left all your energy back in that meeting room. You’re used to battles of life and death, and you feel like you’ve just clawed the most desperate and fleeting win. 

Was it a win? Your head pounds, like you’re dehydrated, like you’re nauseous. Your shoulder hasn’t stopped pulsating, agonising, since you arrived here. 

You reach into your bag that’s still digging into your shoulder. Fumbling around, you try to find more painkillers. You feel the outline of your phone, your perfume, your makeup, and nearly strike your knuckles against the thick wad of paper that you used to make your case. You swear, and hate that you sound so breathless. 

You’re supposed to wait outside. For Satoru. He said he’d meet you outside the building, in the parking lot, to talk with you, drop you back home, see how the meeting went—he said he’d pick you up, before his afternoon lessons started. You’re supposed to wait for him, and suddenly feel too weak to move.

Maybe you should sit down. You lift your head up, but even that makes your shoulder start to burn. You scan for an empty room, and find one a few paces ahead of you. You stumble towards it, try to pull open the door, but pain sears through your arm and you gasp and your hand seizes and you lose your grip. 

You tell yourself you’re okay, because you are, and you’ve had meetings with Yaga and Gakuganji before, it’s not new—but that was the first time anything had meant anything, with this job that’s still so new and fragile—and that’s Yaga, your old teacher, who you still can’t help but want to impress, and Gakugangi, who’d scared you more than anything else when you’d done those exchange events back at school. Gakugangi, who’d been Principal when Naoya Zenin was at Kyoto, who’d looked at you with such disdain, like you were nothing.  

You replay the conversation, looking for holes, for where you’d inevitably faltered, trying to pick it apart. Your head rests against the unopened door, your breath loud and shaky. You were suggesting something so serious—the first time you’ve used international connections to actually try to make change in your school. Up to now, it’s been about communication, to encourage communication, different countries, low-level sorcerers and the higher-ups, but you have never had the gall to try to make change. 

You feel sick. You feel stupid. 

Why did you think you could? Shit. You need to—you’re okay—but why did you think you had the right to suggest anything? 

You think of the grief on Yaga’s face, when you had reminded him about your exchange event. 

You remember that it was barely a year after Satoru had touched you, when you were still trying to forgive him for that—for touching you, touch, revulsion. 

You feel the blistering heat on your wrists, like rope behind your back, and you’re a child, crying from the pain, the burn of your restraints—

Your breathing has gotten shallow. No, no, no. You’re supposed to be—getting better at this. You are. You’re supposed to be better. Getting better. 

Think about something else. You fumble through your bag, sling it off your shoulder and root through with both hands. 

You are better. What would Endou say? You know what to do—you know what to do. Your breathing is still frantic, but you’re hyperventilating, and you’re—just outside the classroom, they can probably hear you, you’re falling into a panic attack and you’re right outside the meeting room, you can’t even keep it together long enough to—you’re okay, you’re okay, you’ve found somewhere quiet, safe, somewhere safe.

The empty room—yes. Open the door.

Fingers seizing at the handle, this time using your good arm. The door is old, creaking painfully as you push at it—and you overshoot opening it, nearly trip. Your legs shake and threaten to give out. You stumble past the door, and fear seizes you again, at the thought of falling to the floor here, where anyone could see, could see that you’re not better, that nothing’s changed, that—that you’re okay, you can let this pass, you need somewhere quiet.

“Okay,” you say to yourself, as you step into the quiet of the room, the emptiness, the quiet, as you reach back and shut yourself in. “Okay. I’m okay. I’m okay.”

Talk yourself—through. You’re okay. 

You close your eyes, even though when blackness fills your vision you’re gripped with a sudden throb of true panic, at the darkness, that you can’t see, at the humiliation you’re sure is just about to happen, when someone sees—you put your hand below the bottom of your ribs, at the softness of your upper stomach. Where the bone stops, and your torso is unprotected, and where you feel human. 

One long breath—one, just one: “I’m okay,” you tell yourself out loud. “It—it’s just gonna—go, it’ll pass, I’m okay,”—through your nose, and you can feel your hand rise. 

One long breath out, through your mouth, escaping in a pained hiss, and you feel your hand fall. 

Another one. It’ll pass. You’re okay. 

Another breath, deep and long. You’re okay. You want to distract yourself, run away, pretend nothing is happening, but you instead sink into it, the way Endou tells you to. Your hand rises, falls. Rises, falls. 

You think about the meeting again and your heart squeezes. But that’s okay too, because heart palpitations are a normal symptom of anxiety, you tell yourself. 

You can feel the decades-old give of the wooden floor, the way it sags slightly when you shift on it; you hear the planks creak. You can hear the low hum of the wind outside the window. You can even smell the winter air, the sharpness of it, the cold. Cold. No, not that type of cold. Another breath. Another one. You’re okay. 

You’re okay. 

You breathe through it. When you do, it doesn’t take you as long to recover. You’re more used to it, now, and you know now how to ride out attacks like that. Endou helps you. 

“Negative thought cycle,” you murmur to yourself, leaning your head against the wall. You keep your eyes closed, collecting the physical strength needed to stand and walk. “Bad. Bad, bad.”

You laugh, to yourself, at your own self-chastisement. You’re okay. You were just—you haven’t been through something so high-stakes in a while. It feels wrong, when you recognise this jittery feeling in your limbs, this huge swoop of an adrenaline high and the sudden drop, and yet you don’t have anything you need to kill. You’re just a normal person, trying to get through a meeting. 

You did well. You think—no, no, you know you did well. You gave the correct information, which you researched and delivered well. Right? Yes. Yes, you did. 

And you like your job. If your suggestions actually go through, which you think they will, then you’ll have done something you’ve wanted to do since you were a kid. You’ll have changed things. This can be your job. And you like it. 

You remind yourself of the reasons. Cycling through the list, your lips moving rapidly around the words. You like that you get to travel, to see other countries’ Jujustu branches, to understand how they operate. You’ve been learning English, a common language, and you like that you’re actually good at it, that you can pick it up better than you’d thought you’d been able to. You think this is what it’s like to have a natural talent for something; y ou’ve never had a natural talent for anything before, but according to Satoru you do, and you can only trust him, now. You’re good at it. You’re actually good at it.

You like going on a plane, and being able to go on a plane without being terrified the security would request you to be pat down, or be randomly searched. That fear, along with the relentless and unceasing nature of being a Jujustu sorcerer, had stopped you from ever leaving the country, before you quit.

You can wake up without the weight on your chest. When you look at your ceiling, at night, you do not dread your day ahead. 

And you are so afraid, so often so scared, and you are learning how to be strong again. 

 

--

 

From Toyo (Inu.)

yoooo u free tomorrow? 

for food

dinner?

 

To Toyo (Inu.)

I can do a brunch. I’m flying to Seoul tomorrow evening and Satoru wanted to see me off. 

 

From Toyo (Inu.)

he’s so thirstyy

 

To Toyo (Inu.)

:/

 

From Toyo (Inu.)

nooo i can’t even 

he’s stealing u from mee

 

To Toyo (Inu.)

Ha ha ha.

 

From Toyo (Inu.)

lmfao

jk brunch sounds good

OMFG how did the meeting go??

did u punch gaku for me

 

To Toyo (Inu.)

No. But I might have made him reconsider some things?

Maybe. 

 

From Toyo (Inu.)

YASSSS!!!

that’s so cool

ik you did so good

can brunch be bottomless then

to celebrate?

 

To Toyo (Inu.)

It’s Monday!

I’m still reeling from Saturday.  I’m never drinking again.

 

From Toyo (Inu.)

hahahahahahah

 

From Toyo (Inu.)

I’m serious!

 

From Toyo (Inu.)

blah blah blah

boring boring then. i’ll round up ppl for brunch celebrations yh?

(sober brunch !!) 

 

To Toyo (Inu.)

Sounds good.

 

“Excuse me.”

You look up from your phone. You’re loitering in the parking lot after Satoru’s last text, ten minutes ago: WILL BE LATE SOZ / NEED TO EXORCISE CURSE IN OSAKA / DW WILL BE V V QUICK / DON’T MISS ME TOO MUCH ;))))).   

A man is standing slightly awkwardly in front of you, his phone held up in front of him. He’s tall, blond, and looks older than you, maybe mid-thirties. 

“Hi,” you say, slipping your phone into your pocket. “Can I help you?”

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” the man says. “I’ve got a meeting with—Masamichi Yaga and Yoshinobu Gakugangi. The directions said to arrive here, but I’m not sure as to where to go next.”

“Oh.” You take another look at him, immediately wary. You don’t recognise him. “Yeah,” you slowly continue, “for sure. They make it confusing on purpose, in case emails are intercepted.”

“I see.” The man’s thin lips press together, and he looks back down at his phone. “That is… inconvenient. The meeting starts in twenty minutes.”

“You’re early.”

“Of course.” He says it like it’s obvious.

“Right,” you say. “Well, you’re here with loads of time. If you’re worried about being late.”

“They should have told me this in the email,” the man says, with a sharp sigh. “I would have arrived earlier.”

Against your better judgement, your lips quirk up. “For sure.” You hesitate—and then shrug. “Look, I’m just waiting here, I can tell you the way.”

The man’s eyes meet yours. You smile at him, reassuring—and you’re not stupid, so you reach out with your cursed energy, the invisible ethereal hand that strengthens with concentration, and feel for what this man is. 

It doesn’t matter if he looks human. Even if you’re not a sorcerer anymore, you’re still responsible for protecting the school; you’re not going to bring someone or something unknown into the higher-ups’ workplace without ensuring its inhabitants’ safety. 

His cursed energy thrums around him, a thick blue fog. After a half-second to make sure, you allow yourself a moment of relief. At least you know he’s not a curse; his energy is too calm, and too restrained. Something tugs at you Your brow furrows, and you strengthen the sense. After another half-second, you realise that, even if you can’t place this man’s appearance, you recognise his cursed energy.

You pull yourself up, and draw back your senses. Just because he’s not a curse, just because he’s a sorcerer, it doesn’t mean he’s safe.

You study the man more closely, as he expresses his thanks to you, for the offer—he’s so phlegmatic, so moderate. Just like everything about this man; from his blond hair, close-cropped and neat, to his clothes, plain and casual, but expensive-looking. 

There’s something to the hard set of his jaw, or the thin slope of his eyes. It’s familiar, but you can’t quite place it.  

“Here.” The man shows his phone to you, and you reach to take it. Your gloved fingers brush his, and you swallow down the familiar nausea. In your work with Endou, hands have been the hardest thing to work through. You still struggle—very much, you struggle.

The phone is small and smart. One of those expensive business phones, a BlackBerry. He’s pulled up the email he’d mentioned, and you skim over it as you keep the man in your peripheral vision. 

It’s sent from Yaga’s email address—which tracks, because you know Gakugangi doesn’t have one, just because of how difficult it’s made your life this past year. 

And, you think, as your eyes flick over the email, it seems legitimate. There’s the same directions you’d been given when you’d first come here, for your first meeting with Yaga, back when you were still trying to convince the higher-ups that you could change your job. 

It's almost word-for-word, but the top bar drops down when you scroll up. The subject reads: ‘Transfer to Sorcerer Occupation’. 

You look up, questioning, but the man doesn’t meet your gaze: he stares, not at your face, but at your hands covered in your thin black gloves. 

The first instinct is knee-jerk, of immediate defiance. That you know what’s happening here, that this man is a sorcerer just recognising who you are. That he is thinking of you, and of your family, your connections to Satoru, your current work, still semi-undefined, and the mystery of who you really are. 

But your second instinct is to look a bit further; because there really is something else familiar to the man’s stare. 

Back to the email. Just on the brink, teetering on the edge of understanding, you look for the first time at the recipient’s name, at this man’s email. It reads:

Kento Nanami ( [email protected] )

“Hebi-san?” 

“Nanami!” You beam up at him, laughing in an utterly confused way. “Oh my—hi!”

Nanami’s eyes have widened, just slightly. “Ah. I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“I didn’t expect to see you at all!” You lean back, trying to take him all in. “You look so different! I can’t believe it—I mean… your hair, Nanami!”

“…Yes.” He brings a self-conscious hand to the side of his head, smoothing down the haircut that is much more orderly and commonplace than the way he’d had it in high school. 

Now you’re actually looking at him, and now you know it’s him, you search to properly take in everything that’s changed about him. The last you saw him would have been in school, when he was a third-year; Nanami was lanky, withdrawn, and had been sporting a messy flop of a fringe fresh out of the noughties emo trend. 

This Nanami is—you think, with a touch of humour—practically unrecognisable. He’s taller, and has actually grown into his height; his hair’s neater, trimmed and styled; and there’s something about him, some tangible quality. He still seems reserved, but he’s more… assertive, maybe. He stands straighter, doesn’t slouch. 

“How have you been?” you manage to say, realising that you’d let an awkward silence stretch out. “Where have you been? What are you doing here? Sorry, no, I don’t mean to overwhelm you. I’m surprised, that’s all.”

Nanami presses his lips together. “It’s alright. I understand it’s probably a shock to see me after so many years.”

“For sure,” you say. You’re still a little overwhelmed: Nanami looks so different! You feel a flash of affection for the way he was as a kid, all sullen and taciturn and introverted, as you try to place that old-Nanami with the person he is now. “It’s good to see you, Nanami. Nanami-san.” You hesitate. You’re not in school anymore, with the clearly-defined hierarchies. “I—would you prefer—”

Nanami inclines his head. “You’re still my senior, Hebi-san. I don’t have a preference.”

“I am not!” To your surprise, you laugh. “Nanami, I haven’t been your senior in half a decade. Please, you can drop the honorifics, at least.”

“It’d be impolite.”

“I promise you, it wouldn’t.” You cross your arms, bemused. “I’m good. Now—yeah, what have you been up to? Where have you been since you left school?”

“Up until last week, I was working as a financial advisor at Rakuten Securities,” Nanami says. He pauses. “Have you heard of us?”

You haven’t. “I don’t think so.”

“That’s understandable.” Nanami lets out a long-suffering sigh. “I hadn’t heard of it, before I applied.”

“Right. Yeah, sorry, I’m not familiar. What did you…?”

“I sold financial assets to investors, specialising in blue chip and defensive stocks,” Nanami recites. His voice is low and unchanging, like he’s recited the words thousands of times. He sees your uncertain expression, and adds: “I was a stockbroker. Essentially.”

“Okay.” You lean back, surveying him. “But… going from Jujustu High, to selling stocks and bonds, or…”

“Blue chip stocks,” he corrects. Nanami’s eyebrows then suddenly crease, in what you think may be embarrassment. “It doesn’t matter. Please continue.” 

“To selling blue chip stocks,” you repeat. “It’s just that it seems like a bit of a severe career change. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk about your passion for… blue chip stocks. Or financial assets.”

Nanami glances at you, and his eyes take on the slightest glint of humour. “You’re right. It wasn’t a job that sparked much joy.”

“I wouldn’t imagine so.” A smile flickers across your face. “So, is that what you’re doing here? Looking for joy?”

“Amongst other things.”

“Such as?”

“Fulfilment. Purpose.” Nanami raises a shoulder, and drops it. “A better uniform, perhaps.”

You snort out a laugh. To your curiosity, Nanami seems to be amused, too. 

“And how about you, Hebi-san?” Nanami asks. “I’m hoping to return as a sorcerer, but how have you been? I apologise, I haven’t been kept up-to-date with any recent developments.”

“I… well, I kind of left too,” you say. “I’m not a sorcerer anymore.” 

It’s usually awkward, telling people, because you feel like they would think you gave up, or just couldn’t hack it, like it was some personal weakness on your part. It’s hard enough thinking that yourself, let alone inferring that other people think that about you. 

But admitting it to Nanami doesn’t feel like that. Maybe it’s because he left as well; you see the flicker of recognition in his expression, and feel something link between you two. Solidarity, maybe. Understanding.

Nanami glances back, towards the general direction of the higher-ups’ offices. “Have you just resigned?” he asks. 

You laugh. “No! God, no. I’ve been in a meeting with the two principals, like you’re going to. I guess they’re scheduling all of their meetings for today, so they don’t have to get together again for a while.”

“A meeting?” 

“Yeah. Talking about the exchange event, essentially. I’m trying to make it a bit safer than it was when we did it.”

Nanami’s brow furrows. “You can do that?”

“I can try.” You give him a self-deprecating smile. “It’s one of the first things in the school I need to sort out. I think Gojo’s been trying for ages, but it seems to help when I bring actual facts and statistics, and stuff. I’ve been working on it for a while.”

“You’ve been working on it.” Nanami seems to chew over the words, and though it’s clear he’s thinking them through, you can’t tell his opinion on it. You push away the flicker of insecurity, and remind yourself that Nanami is a good, nice guy, and that he’s not going to tear you down for this. “How have you been working on it, if you’re no longer a sorcerer?”

“Oh!” You realise why he had looked so confused. “Oh. No, I’m still in Jujutsu society. I never left there.”

“I’m not understanding,” Nanami says. “I’m sorry. You haven’t left, but you also have left?”

“Yeah.” Your lips twitch. You realise, with a pleasant jolt, how much you’d missed Nanami. “I left my job as a sorcerer, but I didn’t leave the society; I’ve just got a different job. I basically made one up for myself, if I’m being honest.”

Nanami’s eyes widen again, and this time you think he looks pleased. “I didn’t think you could do that.”

“Neither did I, until I’d done it.”

“That’s impressive, Hebi-san. Hebi.”

“I…” You startle, a little self-conscious. “Thanks.” 

“What is it you do in this new job?”

You smile again. This is… nice. You haven’t spoken to Nanami since you were both teenagers, and it’s easier than you ever remember it. 

“I’m still figuring the finer details out,” you confess. Nanami’s lips twitch. “I’m supposed to be some middleman between the international Jujutsu branches, but I’ve also been working with some of us younger sorcerers, to help communication between the different generations within society. Trying to make sure work and salaries are distributed fairly, to make sure people actually get breaks and holidays and stuff. It involves a lot of admin, really, but I quite like it.” 

You shrug, absent-mindedly rubbing at your bad shoulder. Your medication’s kicking in, thank god. “And recently I’ve been trying to work on some improvements within Jujustu High, which Gojo’s been helping me with. I’ve been flying out to other branches to get their ideas, and to make sure we’re actually talking with each other instead of living all isolated, the way we have been up until now.”

You stop yourself, and then feel your cheeks warm. “Like I said,” you say, because you’re pretty sure you spoke for far too long about something far too mundane. “I’m still figuring it out.”

Nanami nods, and then hums. He contemplates your words for a few seconds too many for him to just be pretending. 

Then, he says: “So, you’re our HR rep?”

You blink at him. 

“You’re updating company policies, improving employee relations, and fostering a positive work environment.” Nanami looks at you, deadpan, but surprisingly sincere. “Amongst many other things, I’m sure.”

“I…” You think about it, actually think about it, and then you laugh. You laugh, with humour more genuine than anything you’ve felt all day. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I am.”

Nanami nods again. “That’s good. Human resources representatives are one of the few people I respect.”

You bite down on your lip to stop yourself from laughing again. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“Great. I mean, great. But why?”

“I realised it at the company I last worked at. With HR, it’s at least that their—excuse me, your—job is about others. It’s rooted in people, and it has tangible impacts.”

“But that’s what I think!” You grin up at him. “That’s what I wanted to do! I still wanted to help people, and make a difference, but… just, I couldn’t be a sorcerer anymore.”

“I understand,” Nanami says, sounding thoughtful. 

“Yeah. Well, it’s nice that you do.” 

“I agree.” Nanami makes a decisive head-bow. “I’m glad you’re going to be my HR rep, Hebi. You seem well-suited for the job.”

The compliment surprises you, and then, as another shock, so does your reaction to it: because you believe him. Maybe it’s because it’s Nanami, who is so straightforward that you can’t see him lying just to make you feel nice about yourself. 

Maybe you value his opinion, now he’s no longer a withdrawn and sullen teenager. Nanami is an adult, now, too. Even if it’s not much, you appreciate his acceptance of you, and his faith, after only such a short conversation.

There’s the sound of the crunching of gravel, and you turn to see Satoru pulling up in his car. You hadn’t heard the noise of the car’s approach; it’s new and half-electric and loads better for the environment, and for months he’s been talking anyone who’ll listen to him about how it’s new and half-electric and loads better for the environment. It’s essentially silent at low speeds. Because it’s new and half-electric and loads better for the environment.

Satoru sticks his head out the door and smirks at you, then waves his hand encouragingly, as if to say ‘keep going!’. Your lips press together, and you turn back. 

 Nanami clears his throat. “Am I interrupting…?”

“No! No, not at all.” You look back at Satoru and shoot him a half-heartedly annoyed look, but he’s just smiling to himself, now leaning against the seat and watching you. He’s got his sunglasses perched on his nose, and he lowers them to send you a conspicuous wink. You focus back on Nanami, quickly. “Gojo’s just picking me up, that’s all.”

“Do you not drive?”

“No, I do,” you say. “He just wanted to see me after my presentation. He’ll probably drop me off at home so I can pick up the kids from school later.”

Nanami’s eyes widen. “I see. I’m sorry, Hebi, I wasn’t aware. Congratulations to you both.”

“What?” Your words suddenly register, as do their implications, and you startle. “Wait—no!” You add on, hastily: “Not my kids! They’re not—or ours, either! They’re not our kids, we don’t—Gojo and I, we’re not—”

“I see,” says Nanami, who most definitely does not see.

“They’re not our kids,” you manage to say, “not biologically. We’re taking care of them. They’re Tsumiki and Megumi Fushiguro.”

You look for any recognition, but Nanami’s eyes are blank. 

“Megumi’s one of the Zenin clan descendants.” Your face feels inappropriately warm. “Gojo and I had to make sure they didn’t raise him, and we were the next best thing, so we’re in charge of him now.”

“Him and his… sister?”

“Tsumiki, yeah. She’s not a Zenin, but she’s his step-sister. We’re in charge of them both. Megumi’s not old enough to walk home on his own, so I’m be picking him and Tsumiki up in a few hours.”

You manage a smile, and to your surprise, Nanami returns it. It’s muted, but there, and you’re filled with another surge of affection for him. 

“Again,” Nanami says. “Admirable.”

“I—thank you.” You’ve been pulling at your gloves, and you stop yourself. “Yeah. They’re sweet.”

“Certainly.” Nanami looks over the top of your head, right to where Satoru was standing. “I should probably…”

“Of course!” You still feel a little off-kilter, embarrassed. “I don’t want to make you late.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Nanami says gravely. Then, with a dark tinge to his voice: “I’ll blame you if I fail the job transfer.”

“Oh.” You’re taken aback. “Okay. Sorry.”

Nanami looks down at his phone, and then up at you. After a second, he knots his eyebrows together and casts his gaze down again. “That was a joke,” he says. He pockets the phone without looking up at you. “I meant it as a joke. It didn’t come across well.”

“Ah!” You press your hand to your mouth to try to hide your smile. There it is—a flicker of the old Nanami, still just a little sullen and awkward. You bite down on your lip, endeared. “I didn’t realise.”

“Sorry, Hebi.”

“It’s okay. Sometimes my jokes don’t land very well, either.” You shrug, still trying to hold back your smile. 

Even though Nanami’s practically the same age as you, you recognise within yourself something like that same fondness that you feel for Tsumiki and Megumi: you remember how you had tried, as a teenager, to make sure he had felt included, that he was never alone at school. You had not done enough for him, you know now, but you had at least tried. It had been a pressing burden, but also your responsibility.

You’re on much more equal footing now—and, depending on his grade, he could even have seniority to you—but you can’t shake that long-ingrained affection that comes only from being someone’s upperclassman. 

“Before I leave—” Nanami makes a move as if he was going to walk away, but then hesitates, and turns his torso back to you. He pulls his phone from his pocket and shows it to you. “Could I get your number? Perhaps we could go for coffee, or get a drink.”

“Oh. Hey, sure!” You take the phone again, and then have to remove one of your gloves so you can use the touchscreen. 

It takes an extra few seconds, in which Nanami just sort of stands there, and you just sort of stand there, pulling up the contacts app. And then you hesitate mid-way through adding your number, glancing up at him. 

Because you realise a beat too late that, technically, Nanami has just asked for your number, which, technically, often has romantic subtext behind it. You try to think if he’s been flirting with you. The idea of it makes you feel a little ill. You don’t think he had been, but you’re also awful with anything involving romantic subtext, because you can never tell what flirting even is to begin with. 

You look up at him, awkward, with the question heavy in your mouth. 

“Nanami,” you say carefully. “I should say. I’m not really… in the position to…”

Nanami’s eyebrows shoot up, and it might be the most expressive he’s been all conversation. “Oh.” Nanami shakes his head and looks almost laughably uncomfortable. “No. I’m not. Either.”

“Good!” You let out an exhale, which Nanami seems to mirror. “That’s good. Just because, I’m not…”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I hope I didn’t come across…”

“No, you didn’t! I was making sure. I’ve… been trying to be more up-front these days.” 

“That’s understandable. No, I apologise. I should have prefaced.” Nanami takes back his phone, checks your contact name, and puts it back in his pocket. “I don’t mean to offend you, but I’m not interested in you romantically. I would like to be friends.”

“Yeah.” You give him an attempt at a friendly smile. God, you’re finding this unnecessarily difficult. “I mean, no I’m not offended. Me too.” 

“Good. Because… I don’t have many non-sorcerer friends. And you were always kind to me when I was younger, especially after Yuu’s passing.”

Your expression softens. “I… didn’t do that much, Nanami.”

“It was a difficult time for us all. I was grateful for the support.”

“It was just normal.” You don’t feel as if you deserve all the credit—you tried to help him, sure, but you rarely actually managed much.   “Customary.”

Nanami looks back to the building. “Perhaps now it is. I suppose that is what you’ve been trying to amend.”

You nod. “I’ve been trying.”

“Good.” He looks back at you. “Either way, Hebi. It would be nice to reconnect.”

“It would be nice.” You smile at him, hesitant but warm. “Thank you, Nanami.”

He inclines his head again. You pass him your phone, and he inputs his number. When he gives it to you back, you see that his contact name is just as you would have expected it: short, formal, to-the-point Kento Nanami (Jujutsu High Sorcerer), as if you wouldn’t remember where you knew him from. 

You grin, somehow comfortable in your mutual awkwardness, and say goodbye to him as he turns and leaves. You watch him go for a second, before you realise you never actually gave him the directions: that takes another few minutes, as you do your best to explain how to navigate the twisting corridors of the central office, and you share another clumsy goodbye as he leaves for the second time. 

You watch him go for a second, then realise you’re probably acting strange, and you twist on your heel and make your way towards Satoru’s car. 

Satoru gives you a big thumbs up as you approach. “Hey—Nanami’s back!” 

“I noticed.” You slide into the passenger’s seat and lay your bag by your feet. “You don’t seem surprised to see him.”

“Nah. He texted me yesterday afternoon about coming back, and I sent him Yaga’s email. Like the perfect, law-abiding rule-follower I am.”

“Right.” Your nose crinkles. “So Satoru, you knew about Nanami coming back?”

“Uh. I guess?”

“So why didn’t you tell me?”

Satoru starts the car and holds up one hand in the air, like he’s pleading for innocence. “I didn’t want to let you know over text, or stress you out before your presentation! I was going to tell you today!”

“Were you? Really?”

“Course I was!” Satoru pouts at you, and you tut loudly. “C’mon, don’t act like I wouldn’t. I know he was your little pet friend when we were—” 

“Satoru.” 

“—when we were at school, so who would I be to deny you from seeing little Kento-kun all grown up—”

“Satoru!”

“I’m kidding! Okay, okay, you know I’m kidding!” But Satoru sees that you’re holding back a smile, and he grins triumphantly. “Ah, you know. Stop messing with me, it’s all too much. My heart can’t take it.”

“You sound middle-aged.”

“Maybe I am,” Satoru says, sighing dramatically. “I’m a middle-aged man. Nearly, anyway. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

“Quite ridiculous,” you say, “seeing as you’re not middle-aged.”

“I could be.”

“Because you’re not going to live past fifty?”

“Maybe I’ll end it all before then,” Satoru proclaims. “I don’t think I could survive the ageing process. Do you think I’m going to get wrinkly?”

“I’d imagine so. But if you keep up your skincare routine, I’m sure you won’t see any signs until you’re solidly into your seventies.” You roll your eyes as Satoru, at your words, straightens up and smiles happily to himself. “Oh, Satoru. Please.”

“What?”

“I was making an attempt at sarcasm,” you say. “How many steps have you even got in your skincare routine?”

Satoru pouts. “Not that many! I’m just taking care of myself.”

“Your skin is probably so tender it could fall off. Like from that movie.”

“Huh?”

“Like from the movie we watched ages ago.”

“What movie?”

“You know.” You make a vague gesture with your hands. “The one with the skin falling off.”

“Oh, yeah!” Satoru nods. “Eugh. I didn’t like that one. Too creepy.”

“You kill literal evil monsters for a living,” you say with a yawn. “Nothing’s too creepy for you.” 

“I’m a sensitive man with a sensitive heart. And you know what is too creepy for me?”

“What?”

“Getting older.” Satoru shudders violently. “Wrinkles. Unsmooth skin.”

“At least I’m getting older with you,” you say, resting your head against the car’s headrest so you can look at him better. “You’ve got that to make you feel better.”

“It does make me feel better, actually. And you’re loads older than me.”

“Barely.”

“You’re still older!” Satoru grins at you, and his voice softens almost imperceptibly. “Not that you’re wrinkly, Hebi-Hebi. In fact, you’re…” A beat. Your skin pricks: Satoru catches himself. “…barely as wrinkly as most people in the mid-twenties!”

“Thank you.”

“Hey, that’s no problem. Anyway! I don’t want to talk about this any more, it’s making me depressed. What were you talking about with Nana-nana-mi?” 

You smile down to yourself. “Nothing, really. I was surprised that he was back, and then he told me I’m the Jujustu version of an HR manager.”

“HR? Is that some office thing?”

“Sure.” 

“Wow. I can’t believe Nanami’s an office worker. He looks so old, doesn’t he?”

“Does he?”

“Uh, yeah.” Satoru gestures to his eyes, mimicking wrinkles. Huh. Nanami had seemed older, you suppose, but that could’ve just been his newfound maturity. “Office air ages the skin. I saw that in one of your magazines.”

“I don’t know if that’s true, Satoru.”

“Pretty sure it is. It’s why I look so young—I’m outside all the time!”

“Apart from when you’re stuck in meetings, like me.”

“Well, I won’t turn up to those in the future. I don’t want to be getting any older—I need to show you a picture I found of us when we were teenagers, my skin was so much nicer. It’s crazy!”

“You’re shocked you looked younger when you were younger?”

Satoru stabs the air with his finger. “Yes! That’s what I was saying!”

“You’re stupid,” you say, with a small smile on your lips. “But I thought we weren’t supposed to be talking about ageing?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Satoru frowns, and shakes his head. He pulls up at a red light and drums his fingers on the steering wheel.  “What were we talking about?”

“Nanami, I think.”

“Nanami! Nana-nana-nana-mi! Nana-nana-nana-nana—” 

“Oh my goodness, please, Satoru.” You put your fingertips to your temple. “You’re so loud. It’s too early.”

Satoru cackles, and you send him a half-hearted glare. 

“It’s the middle of the day!” Satoru says, sing-song.

“It’s still too early to be around you.”

“Maybe you’re still hungover.”

“I’m not—” 

“I bet that’s it!” Satoru snaps his fingers in the air, and you stifle a groan. “Tut-tut. You should know better, Hebi-Hebi. No-one can keep up with Toyo, not even you.”

“I’m not hungover.”

“For sure.”

“That was two days ago. I’m fine.”

“I heard Toyo fell asleep on her bathroom floor.” 

“Ah. She might have mentioned that to me.” You concede the point, leaning further back in your seat, and Satoru laughs. 

“So what did Nanami actually ask you? I saw you give him your number.” Satoru sends you a thumbs-up as he flicks the indicator on, turning left. “You making friends?”

“Something like that.”

“Oooooh!” Satoru wobbles his voice the way Tsumiki likes to do, when she teases Megumi about having a crush. You roll your eyes and hide your smile. “Hebi-Hebi’s making friends!” 

“Shut up,” you say, instinctively. “I don’t know. I think we might meet up at some point.” You look back down at your phone, and bite back the tentative smile that threatens to show on your face. “He said he wanted to reconnect.”

You so rarely get the chance to meet new people; even in your work with Endou, which has been more helpful than you could have ever thought it would be, you still don’t feel whole again. You don’t feel normal, yet. Yet. She keeps telling you ‘yet’, and you have to keep believing her. 

Endou, your therapist, has talked to you about your potential issues with forming long-term relationships, and the roots of the reasons, which are almost always your childhood. At first, you’d resisted the implication: I’ve got Satoru, you’d said. That’s a long-term relationship. You hadn’t known how else to describe it, your relationship with Satoru: but you both know, mostly, and you still cannot move further. 

Endou had nodded. She’s not the first therapist you’d tried, but she was the first one you’d thought had understood you, just from your first session. She’s a second-cousin of a sorcerer from a minor family, so she’s aware of Jujustu society; which is very helpful, considering most of your self-described issues apparently stem from your childhood, which stems from the fact that Jujustu society exists to begin with.

You like her. She’s always straight-forward, direct, never condescending. She says things in such a gentle, matter-of-fact way that she feels twenty years your senior, even if she’s barely half that. 

“You do have Satoru,” she had said, in your conversation about sustained long-term relationships. Her head tilted to the side, and her hair, long and thin, folded on her shoulder. “Who else?”

You hadn’t been able to give a reply. There was no-one else apart from Satoru. He was the only one. 

“So do you think you will?” Satoru asks. 

“I might,” you say, with a shrug. “I’m not sure. Maybe Nanami’s trying to reconnect with everyone. It’d make sense. He hasn’t been around sorcerers in years.”

“That may be true,” Satoru says, “but also, it’s not true. I’m the one who got him the meeting today, but I have absolutely zero plans to meet with Nanamin any point in the future. And I’m me, the most sorcerer-y of all sorcerers!”

“Yes, but Nanami doesn’t really like you.”

Satoru gasps. “Don’t say that! Kento-kun loves me, I know he does. He just shows it in all the wrong ways.”

“Which include telling you he doesn’t like you?”

“Exactly. Reverse psychology. Endou would agree.”

“I doubt it.”

“Don’t be so cynical!” Satoru flashes you a grin. “Besides, you tell me all the time that you think I’m annoying, but you still hang around me.”

The back of your neck warms. “For some unknown reason.”

“It’s because I’m the coolest person in the world who also has zero flaws,” Satoru says. 

You snort. 

“But you’re probably right about Nanamin being a bit lonely,” Satoru adds. “You should introduce him to some of your sorcerer friends.”

“My sorcerer friends?”

“Yeah! Invite him to meet with Toyo and her gang!”

“I could bring him along to our next bottomless brunch.”

Satoru cackles. “You’ve got to! And then, Hebi-Hebi, you’ve got to film it all. Yes, yes, you’ve got to! I need to see Nanamin drunk.”

You wrinkle your nose. Already you’re reminded of teenage Satoru, desperate to rile Nanami up. “Perhaps not.”

“What? But it’d be so funny!”

“For you, probably, but not for anybody else.”

“Toyo would find it funny,” Satoru mutters.

“That may be the reason I can’t introduce them,” you say. “She’s too much like you. I doubt they’d get along.”

“I’m hurt!”

“Not as hurt as Nanami would be.” 

“Hmm.” Satoru dismisses the idea with a lackadaisical wave of his hand. “Moving on! When are you next seeing Toyo, anyway? Or Saori, or any of the usual gang?”

“Tomorrow, I think.”

“Before you fly out?”

“Mm.”

The usual gang: Toyo, and Toyo’s friends, who are slowly becoming your friends. You think. 

You had met her about nine months ago, after you had started working again—working your HR job, you think now—when she’d reached out to you in a glowingly informal email, congratulating you for being the first actual person to make my brother think he’s like, an actual person and not just some weirdo sorcerer, yk? ur sick! want to grab food some time?

You’d agreed, only after the encouragement of both Satoru and Endou, and had realised that grabbing food had meant meeting Toyo at her house, accompanying her to the grocery store, dedciding with her what she fancied cooking, driving back to her house, and helping her make the food she had just bought ingredients for. All the while, she filled the silences left by your hesitance and natural quietness with a pleasant low-level chatter; she had seemed more than content for you to interject with one- or two-word replies, the most you had been able to manage at that time. 

For the first time in years, you had felt genuinely comfortable being around someone who wasn’t Satoru, or who wasn’t paid to listen to you. You weren’t sure why she’d reached out to you, or why she’d suggested you get coffee with her the weekend after. You’d told Satoru about it, and he’d raised his eyebrows and said, with immense fondness: Yeah. She wants to be your friend. 

Over the next few months, you’d learnt a lot about her. Toyo had gone to the Kyoto branch of Jujustu High, apparently tradition for the women of her family, and hated Gakugangi with a passion. He’d never let me wear eyeliner in class, she’s said. What a shitstain. She’s as naturally charismatic as Satoru, but with a more approachable quality; she exists without the underlying threat of his presence that everyone but you is immune to. He gives me the heebie-jeebies, she’s said, on the rare occasions Satoru is brought up. Power to you, Hebi, but… yugh. 

Toyo’s also one of the seven Inumaki children. She has six siblings, four male, two female, with a decade and a half between the eldest and the youngest. Only two of the Inumaki kids inherited their cursed technique, and Toyo wasn’t one of them.

She doesn’t get along with her family. 

As soon as Toyo graduated, she’d divorced herself from Jujustu society, and now works for an interior design company. She makes patterns for curtains, lampshades, and cushions. 

You think she’s brilliant. 

This brilliance was showcased recently; one of her brothers had arrived on her doorstep, when you and Toyo were just finishing a meal she’d prepared for you both. She’d swung the door open, seen him, and groaned. 

“Ew!” Toyo had said, right to his face. She’d grimaced at him, then walked back into the kitchen. Her ground floor was open-plan, but she had to weave around her oddly-placed lamps to get there. “Go away. You need to tell the old bat to mind her own business.”

Her brother looked pained. His hair was the same dusty grey as hers, but while Toyo’s was cut sleek and glossy, his was military-style, coarse as reeds. He had the signature markings of the Inumaki clan around his mouth, which you had looked at closely, and had realised were actual tattoos. He was one of the two cursed speech users of the family. 

He had made deliberate eye contact with you, but you hadn’t let yourself be intimidated by him. You stared back, intrigued. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” Toyo had said, waving a wooden spoon in his direction. “Just tell her I’m not coming back. Easy!”

Her , you had later been told, was Toyo’s mother. The Inumaki matriarch was forever displeased with Toyo’s lack of care for Jujustu society, and would apparently send her children to Toyo’s regularly to attempt to convince her to return. 

“Agh, just go away. I’ve got a guest over!” Then Toyo cocked her head, placing both hands—one of which was still holding her spoon—on her hips. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m being a host. Go on, scram. I’ll call you later.”

He had soured. Toyo had chuckled. 

Afterwards, when he had left and when you were enjoying the last of your meal, you had asked her about it. 

“They’re a load of crackheads,” Toyo said, as she tucked one knee under her chin and pushed a noodle around the plate with her finger. “All that family. That’s the same deal as you, isn’t it?”

“Pretty much,” you said, thinking of your father, your mother, your grandmother. “I wouldn’t use that word, though.”

She laughed. “I know you wouldn’t! It’s why you’re fun. You’re so serious, but also you’re so chill. It’s cool.”

You had thought, at that moment, that perhaps you make good friends with people who are superfluous with compliments. You’re not good with them, but with both Satoru and Toyo and all of her friends, it had been hard not to spot a trend. 

“Anyway,” you said, trying to push the conversation back. “The crackhead family.”

“The once-great Inumaki clan!” Toyo gesticulated wildly in the air, and you watched her with amusement. “Agh, I can’t be bothered with them. Ma just wants to marry me off to some old rich bastard with a beer belly and a big house. They can all get lost, eh?”

“That does sound like a good plan,” you said. “And, besides. I’m sure the old bastard wouldn’t have nice curtains at all.”

“You’re right!” Toyo grinned at you. “Hell yeah. He’d not be going anywhere near my non-shaman stores, would he? Bet he wouldn’t even know what the internet was.”

Toyo had admired her own curtains with a self-satisfied grin.

It had started with just Toyo, but then once she had become your friend, suddenly you were being invited out to group events, and group coffee dates, and then you had a whole group of people who you were pretty sure were your friends, probably. Toyo’s friends, who seem to like you. Your friends?

There’s a group of you now, which is something very new. You’re not used to large groups of anything, with the many conversations and the loud and overlapping laughter. You sometimes find yourself fading into the background, but then someone will surprise you by noticing you, and you’ll find yourself tugged back into the present. You’ll be talking to them, and you’ll be in the group, and you’re not yet used to working the dynamic.

There’s Nichika, who’s neat and sharp, straight-forward in her speaking and so honest you adore her. Saori, the only active sorcerer of the group, whom you have never seen repeat an outfit, and who, when you asked her, actually seems to enjoy the job she completes. Miyu and Mayu, near-identical but somehow not related, who met each other in a club when they were twenty and have been best friends since. Kotona, quiet and contemplative, who buys top-line cigarettes and shares hers with you without any question. 

Even though you’ve been trying to quit. Megumi has recently procured a conspicuous, forceful cough that—curiously—only seems to trouble him when you head outside for a smoke break. And, as Tsumiki constantly reminds you, there is something very uncool about being twenty-five and still smoking. 

You’re working on it. You’re working on all of it.

You’re still hesitant, and careful, and as slow-to-trust as you’ve ever been. But Toyo is your friend, you think, or she’s getting there. And you have people you talk to, through her. 

“So what are your plans?” Satoru is asking. 

You look up at him, lips parted. “…What?”

He grins. “When you reconnect.”

“Uh.”

Satoru rolls his eyes. “Pay attention to me! I’m talking.”

“I’m sorry I’m not hanging off of your every word, Satoru.”

“Apology accepted.” Satoru glances over at you. “Listen to me, I’m talking about Nanami. And if you’re going to be a kind and generous soul and grace him with your presence so he doesn’t end up being a lonely hermit forevermore. And then what you’re planning on doing when you grace him with your presence. Et cetera.”

“You’re stupid.”

“Eh, sure. But actually?”

“Oh. Yeah. I think so.” You glance down at your phone, moving it between your fingers. “I think it’d be nice. Especially since he’s someone I know from a while back, even if we weren’t all that close. Do you think he’s a beer drinker?”

“Dunno. Why?”

“I was thinking of showing him that craft beer bar near mine.” You shrug and tuck your phone into your bag, pressing the clasp shut with a satisfying click. “It’s pretty fancy. I feel like he’d like it.”

Satoru leans back. “You’re getting a drink with him?”

“Or coffee. He said both, actually. Do you think he’d prefer coffee?”

“He asked you to get coffee?”

“Yeah, but the bar I’m thinking of is usually quieter than a coffee shop. Unless we went later in the day?” You purse your lips, thinking. “But I think that’d be a bit weird. The bar’s probably better.”

“You’re telling me Nanami asked you to get coffee with him?”

“Or a drink. So I’m thinking the beer place.”

“Hebi, he asked you out? To get a coffee with him—or, or a drink, a beer, or whatever?”

“Yeah.” You frown, and turn to glance at him. 

Satoru has his gaze fixed deliberately on the road, and his jaw is working so hard it’s like he’s biting down on a rock. Then, so quick he must have noticed you watching, he forcibly relaxes his jaw and grins. 

You narrow your eyes. 

“Are you alright, Satoru?”

“Yep!” Satoru presses his lips together and nods. “Yep, yep, all good. I mean, yeah, Hebi-Hebi, that sounds like a great idea! You should go for it.”

Huh.

“I was going to.” There’s a smile playing around your lips that you try very hard to supress. “It’s just a drink, after all.”

“For sure,” Satoru agrees, still not looking at you. “Just a drink between old friends. It’s good—that you’re, y’know, doing that! Making friends!”

“Putting myself out there?”

“Mm-hmm.” Satoru takes a big breath in and blows it out between his teeth. “I mean, hey, it’s a good think Nanami looks so old. You’d forget he’s younger than us, which he is.”

“I didn’t think he looked that old,” you say, lips definitely twitching. “Maybe… mature. It suited him, don’t you think? I’d say it’s quite attractive.”

Satoru turns a corner. His knuckles are white on the steering wheel.

“And he’s very tall,” you add. You lean back and watch as Satoru’s jaw does another vivid twitch. “He’s grown up a lot since I last saw him.”

“Yeah. Well. We all have. And he’s not that tall.”

“Do you not think?”

“Nah. He’s… like, tiny.” 

“He’s much taller than I am.”

“And yet he’s still shorter than me.” Satoru nods when he says it, a quick, jerky movement. You stifle a laugh. “He’s got to be at least 10 centimetres shorter than me. Probably more.”

“I wasn’t aware you were paying that much attention to his height.”

“It’s an instinctual thing,” Satoru says, and then coughs. “I notice it all the time. With men that are… shorter than me.”

“I see.” This time, you’re unable to stop yourself from grinning. “The way you talk about him, Satoru, I’d think you’re the one Nanami asked out.”

“But he didn’t ask you out, did he?” Satoru blurts. Then he flushes, and stares back at the road. 

You bite your lip, smiling at him.

“It’d be fine if he did,” Satoru says, to the stop sign he’s just pulled up at. “You know. If it’s not just coffee.”

“It’d be fine?” You raise your eyebrows. “Would it really?”

The pink tinge in Satoru’s cheeks deepens. Oh, and you’re unimaginably grateful for his pale skin; he blushes so easily. And also, there’s that pleased swirl low in your stomach. It’s because of you. 

You chuckle, and his gaze flicks over, making eye contact in the rearview mirror. As soon as he sees your expression, he wheels around, almost jumping out of his seat.

“Hebi!”

You let out a pearl of laughter, and bat at him to stay seated. “Satoru! Satoru, the road!”

“I—I don’t care about the road!”

“I do!” You giggle to yourself, giddy. “Pay attention!” 

Satoru slumps down and bangs the back of his head against the headrest. “Stop. Stop! Don’t do that again.”

“Do what?”

He groans at you, loudly. You snort.

“I’m serious.” Satoru takes his hand of the gearstick to run his fingers through his hair, blowing away a strand that had fallen into his eyes. “You gave me a heart attack. Agh! Imagine if that’s how I go out. How embarrassing.”

“That’s what concerns you?” Your cheeks hurt from smiling. “Your reputation?”

“That’s the main thing, yeah.” Satoru sends you a dirty look, but his eyes are scrunched and his lips are pouted, and it just makes you smile harder. Moodily, he says: “The world’s strongest sorcerer, dead at twenty-five because some woman—” 

“Excuse me, some woman?” 

“—decided it’d be funny to pretend she was going on a date with a guy who had a shitty fringe in high school.” Satoru shudders. “I’d never live it down.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t. But you’d also be dead, so it wouldn’t matter that much.” You perch your chin on your palm, looking at him with immense amusement. “Also, you had a fringe in high school.”

“That’s not the point!” 

“I—yeah, I know, I know.” You shake your head, still chuckling. “I’m sorry if I almost gave you a heart attack.”

“Hmph.”

“And you know it’s not a date. Right?”

Satoru glances over at you. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

“Good. Because it’s not.” You lean back, and then point over at him. “In fact, Nanami explicitly said that it wasn’t a date. So there’s not even the implication of one.”

“Okay.” Satoru exhales. “I mean, yeah, cool. That’s cool, Hebi-Hebi.”

You tut, amused, and look out of your side window. You fall into comfortable silence for a few moments, before you inhale, and then say: “Besides.”

In your peripheral vision, Satoru perks up. 

Your stomach does that pleasant swirl again. You sit up.

“Besides,” you say, “Nanami’s not exactly my type, either.”

You glance over at him. Satoru’s grinning, widely. 

“He’s not?” he asks casually.

“Not particularly.” You feel Satoru’s gaze on you, hot and attentive, and you look outside the window again. 

Satoru, though, is insistent. “Why’s that?”

“Hm?”

“That he’s not your type.”

“Oh.” You waft a hand in the air, still refusing to look at him. “A variety of reasons.”

“Great. Such as?”

Your lips purse. 

“C’mon, Hebi-Hebi.” Satoru’s voice lilts, teasing. “I won’t know until you say.”

“Satoru.”

“Yeah?”

You’re biting back another smile. You turn to look at him, trying very hard to stay deadpan. “He’s… blond.”

Satoru’s eyebrows raise. “Blond?”

“Too blond,” you say. 

“Are you not that into blond guys?”

“I—” Your thumb catches on a dent in the material of your gloves. “Not that type of blond.”

“He’s a bit too yellow-y for you?” 

You can hear Satoru’s grin in his voice, and you roll your eyes instinctively. He laughs, and it’s a beautiful, sincere sound. 

“You could say that. Yeah, that might be my issue.”

“So he’d just have to dye his hair, and you’d be sold?”

You eye him, but Satoru’s just smirking to himself. Heat rises up the back of your neck, and you try to scoff. 

“Probably,” you say. 

“Fantastic.” Satoru turns a corner, his fingers dancing over the steering wheel. “I’ll let Kento-kun know.” 

“Please do.” You bite your lip, hesitate, and then add: “And maybe give him some recommendations for purple shampoo.”

Satoru cackles, and you make eye contact with him, grinning. The air feels light around you, and you can hardly remember why you were so anxious about everything this morning. It’s a lovely autumnal day; the sky is a clear ice blue, the leaves are starting to fall, and everything feels crisp and cool around you. It’s the start of winter, and you’re looking forward to it. Another season. Another winter with Satoru. 

God, you’re acting like absolute teenagers, giggling along with each other. It’s moments like now that make you wonder if—because, you’re getting better, with your recovery, and everything. 

And maybe because you’ve got some life, with some people, and some job, and so maybe, because of that, you could—

Satoru’s phone rings. Your laughter dies down naturally, and he fishes it out of his pocket. He answers without looking, and then his face falls. 

He glances over at you. 

The pleasurable swirl in your stomach stagnates. 

And this is why. Because Satoru’s been called away for another mission. And that look of concern etched into his features isn’t for himself—it’s for you. 

Because he’s worried about you. About you being on your own, if you can take care of yourself, if you’ll be okay, if you can cope. 

And then you remember that just this morning, you’d had to hide in an empty classroom to ride out a panic attack that had hit just because you’d delivered a stressful presentation. That you have one, single friend other than Satoru, that you still don’t know whether you’re allowed to say you have more. 

That you still can’t touch people. That you’re working on it, but it’s so slow, so unbearably slow, and hands are still a problem and skin-to-skin is still a problem and everything still seems to be a problem and—

Satoru’s been so good about it. He’s been patient. He indulges in your tentative jokes, the allusions, and doesn’t ask for more. Because you’re waiting. Because you can’t. You can’t, not yet. 

“Yeah,” he says into the phone, still glancing at you. “Yeah, I can. Send me the address? I’m just outside Tokyo, I can be there in… yeah, okay.” 

He ends the call, and you sit there in silence for a long stetch of seconds. 

Satoru hesitates, and then says, guiltily: “There’s a bunch of cursed energy at a hospital nearby. I need to go check it out.”

You nod. “It’s okay.”

“I’m sorry,” Satoru says, but it’s a redundant apology, because there’s nothing he can do about it, and you both know it. You take a deep breath in, and turn to him, and try to clear your expression of anything marring it. You want Satoru to be able to properly understand what you’re saying; you don’t want anything misconstrued. 

“It’s okay,” you repeat, “honestly.”

“Yeah, but—”  

“You can drop me off at a Metro station,” you say, “or just on a street, and I’ll make my own way home. That way I can boast about it to Endou later. I’ll pick up the kids, I’ll sort it out. It’s okay.”

Satoru’s jaw tenses. 

“Satoru. I promise, I’m okay.” You want to reach forward, rub your fingers into the inside of his wrist. “I’d tell you if I wasn’t.”

Slowly, he nods. “Yeah. Yeah, but—I’m annoyed, too, Hebi-Hebi. I wanted to have a good day! We were gonna go get lunch.”

Affection slowly begins to seep through you, mingling with the dread, the frustration. You hold onto it, coax it further. 

“I can deal with lunch on my own,” you remind him. 

Satoru’s lips purse. “Yeah, but, still. It was going to be cool.” He plays up the childishness, in part, to hide the honesty; that he means what he says, and that he is frustrated about being called away. From you, a sly voice whispers, being called away from you. 

“You will,” you reassure him. “Go save the world, and if you’ve got time you can drop by the household tonight with the kids. You just let me know what’s going on, okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, yeah.” Satoru runs a hand across his jaw, thumb absently tracing the silver scar there. “Yeah, that makes sense. Oh, but shit, Hebi, I didn’t even ask you how your presentation went! I forgot to ask, with everything, but I should’ve—” 

“It was fine,” you say. “It was all good. We can talk about it more later, whenever you’re free.”

“Yeah, but…” Satoru glances out of his window and then pulls up by the side of the road. You’re right near a more rural area of the city, and sprawling out to your right is a beautiful inner-city park. Satoru steps out and you follow, and then he jumps to the pavement to be by your side. He crosses his arms and leans against the car hood, facing you. “Rapid-fire, before I head off. Highlights. How did it go, for real?”

“For real?”

“Yeah!”

You slide in next to him, leaning against the car. “It went okay. I was a bit shaky at the start, but they seemed to take me seriously enough, I think. I didn’t get through everything I wanted to, so we just ended up discussing the exchange event stuff, nothing about the sorcerer working standards that I’d been working on. But they liked the idea of the changes for the exchange event.”

“That’s great!” Satoru beams at you and claps his hands together. “Hebi, that’s awesome!”

“I… I mean, the other higher-ups still have to approve it.”

“They will,” Satoru says easily. “You said Yaga and Gakuganji both liked it?”

“Yeah.”

“Then the rest of them will be ea-sy. If you’ve got old Gaku convinced, you’ve got them all convinced.”

You look down, and then realise that you want to be looking at him, and so you look back up. Satoru’s smiling down at you; you cannot read his expression as anything other than pride. 

“I hope so,” you mumble, even as Satoru waves your concerns away. 

“I know so. You’ve got it sorted.” He checks his watch, then grimaces. “Eugh. I should probably head off. Sorry again, Hebi-Hebi.”

“You don’t need to worry about it.” You shrug at him. You’re telling the truth: you withdrew from life as a sorcerer, but Satoru didn’t. You had hated it for its unpredictability, lack of structure, thanklessness, but Satoru’s experiences and take-aways from it are so different. He thrives in spontaneity, abhors almost all routine. He’s Satoru Gojo, whereas you were a dime-a-dozen Grade Two. He likes his job. You’ll never find it within yourself to be frustrated when Satoru is himself, doing the work that makes him happy. 

His life is entwining with yours, slowly, once again. For that to happen, his life will intrude on, and affect yours, in every way. You want it to happen. And this is one of those ways. 

“I’ll get the Metro home,” you say, pushing at his shoe with your own. “Just text me any updates, so I know what to do about dinner.”

“Course I will.” He flashes you a sharp look. “You’re gonna be okay getting back?” 

You detect a hint of seriousness in his tone, and raise your eyebrows in response. 

“Yeah,” you say, amused. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“No reason! I’m just checking up on you, Hebi-Hebi.”

“Thanks.”

“For sure, for sure.” Satoru flashes you a smile, and turns to get back into his car. Then he pauses, checks his watch again, and turns. “Wait. Before I go.”

You frown. “Yeah? You alright?”

“I’m okay. Just…” Satoru makes a gesture to you, and then to him. “I don’t know what time I’ll get back.”

“Okay.”

“And.” Satoru looks at you, like you should know what he’s getting at. “And, you haven’t practised today, Hebi.”

Your heart stutters. “Oh. Oh, yeah. I forgot.”

Satoru throws his hands up in the air. “I’m not pushing! I am being very cooperative with your internal emotions right now. If you don’t want to, that’s all good.” His eyebrows furrow. “But I’m reminding you. Also so Endou thinks I’m cool.”

“She already thinks you’re cool.”

Satoru plasters on a grin. “As she should. But even more cool, then.” A beat. “Is that okay with you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. I forgot. I should.” You swallow, and then, suddenly, feel a surge of embarrassment. “Is that okay, here? Sorry—I did forget, but you’re right, and I don’t want to go the day without it, and—” 

“Yes!” Satoru cuts you off, holding his hands up and waving them in front of your face to calm you down. “Yes, yes! Yeah, you’re good. C’mon, you know by now.”

You do. 

Satoru’s been helping you ever since Endou suggested it: that you should start working on touching people. At first she had wanted to talk with you, in-depth, before you made any physical steps. To make sure you didn’t up and bolt from the therapy sessions, you think: or because, when you first started seeing her, you’d been so afraid that she was going to force you to touch someone’s skin, straight away, without any build-up or easing into it. She had wanted to reassure you that you could be helped slowly, slowly breaking your phobia down. She’d given you worksheets to fill out, and organised calendars of potential key dates, and you’d felt a little like you were back in school. You’re waiting for her to assign you a two thousand-word essay on haphephobia, or something. 

Ultimately, despite the talking therapy and the worksheets and the patience, you cannot overcome your phobia without touching people. She had suggested you practise on someone you trusted, someone who wouldn’t mind helping you. 

And who else, really, could you have asked? 

“Come here,” Satoru says. You look up quickly: he can tell you’re overthinking, with some skill of perception you’re never sure about. He’s sharp with recognising it, and you feel yourself warm, embarrassed and pleased with the attention. 

Satoru reaches out his arms, like any normal person offering a hug. You send him a tight smile and make sure your breathing is steady.

You can touch him now. Over clothes. No hands, no skin. Endou has helped you find those things as fear points; skin-on-skin, reminding you of how you hurt people with your technique; hands, reminding you of how you hurt your mother as a child. 

Easier for you: touch over clothes. Broader touches, more generalised. Easier. 

You’re working on it. Endou is helping. Satoru is helping. The people you keep around you are helping.

With a purposely steady step, you move closer to Satoru, closer, until your chest is next to his chest and you could lean your head on his shoulder. You feel your heartbeat pick up, and recognise it as your ingrained fear response, more than anything else. You can feel Satoru’s body heat and you try to reassure yourself that you are safe, that you’re not going to be hurt, that you’re in control. 

All you have to do is hold on for ten seconds. That’s all. Just ten seconds. 

You steady your breathing. You wrap your arms around him, and Satoru lets his Infinity touch you, and then, pass through you. 

The soft magnet charge, the intimacy and trust so physically familiar, and you feel the deep knots of tension leave you like a soothed exhale. You curl your fingers in Satoru’s shirt and make sure you’re touching him; you feel him under your hands, feel his chest under the embrace of your arms, feel his steady breathing as you tighten your hold around him. 

Ten seconds. Nine seconds. Eight seconds—eight—

Touching him. Touching someone, touching him. Oh. This frightens you; this is horrible, and you’re scared, and you hate it. You’re doing it. You’re holding onto him, his body against yours, and you sink into it, you don’t distract yourself, you sink into it. Eight seconds, seven seconds, six seconds. 

“You doing okay?” Satoru murmurs down to you. His hands are by his side; he never touches you when you’re not expecting it, or when you haven’t planned for him to. Endou wants you to get used to touching people yourself, rather than learning how to accept it when people force their touch onto you. 

You nod. “Yeah. One second.”

There’s another spike of fear, revulsion. Your heart seizes: what are you doing? You can’t touch someone—this is disgusting, you hate this—you can’t believe that you’re doing this—your flesh crawls, insects under your skin, burning burning heat—

“You sure?” 

Six seconds. Five seconds. You squeeze your eyes shut. Your arms tighten around him, and now you can feel the tension thick-set in Satoru’s spine. You move your thumb on his shoulder bone in small circles, because you have done this in the past, and you have learnt that he finds it comforting. You never knew that before. 

You focus on that fact. You have learnt something new about Satoru. You didn’t think you would learn anything new about him, ever, not after the decades you’ve known each other. Crazy, how opening up a whole new world with him would make you discover new things. You make yourself laugh, quiet, and with that, you know that your panic has passed. 

Two seconds. One. 

You lean back. Your hands move from his back, but linger by his sides; not what Endou has instructed, but instead your own instincts, trying to keep hold of him. The burning heat of his body has mollified, and now feels calm, soft, warm. 

“I’m okay,” you say. Satoru must see honesty in your expression, with how intently he’s scanning it, even behind his glasses. He relaxes, muscles in his face melting back to normal, and he grins. 

“You’re okay.”

“I’m okay.” Your mouth feels dry, your moisten your lips with your tongue. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.”

“Yeah, you are!” Satoru holds your gaze for another moment, and then breaks it, grinning stupidly. “I think you need to tell Endou that I’m coming for her job. Clearly, I’m an excellent therapist.” 

He lets you extricate yourself from him, and you hold your hands behind your back awkwardly, trying not to let this moment linger into anything more. 

“No, you’re not.”

“Haven’t I just proven I’m just as good as one?” Satoru’s hands fly to his heart, and he gasps loudly. “All that stands in my way of being a licensed therapist is—” 

“Being licenced?”

He sticks out his bottom lip in a pout. Your lips twitch. “I was going to say a university degree. But, sure, if you want to be technical with it.”

“I think you have to be technical with it. That’s kind of the whole point.”

“Pfft. Boring!” Satoru blows air through his lips and kicks at the ground. You bite down on the inside of your mouth to stop yourself from smiling: his gaze flicks up to you, checking if he’s made you laugh, and you look away from him. 

“Okay, okay. Now, actually, go.” You roll your eyes, and Satoru huffs out a laugh. “I’ll see you at home later.”

A wide grin breaks across Satoru’s expression. “Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway! I’ve got a mission—you’re distracting me, Hebi-Hebi, from my actual real job! You’re a bad influence.”

“I guess so,” you say.

“You really are. Tut-tut!” 

Your chest feels warm, affectionate. He’s so stupid. God, you love him. 

“I’ll see you later,” you tell him, more firm now, and you start to walk away. You give him a wave, which he returns quickly. Satoru sticks his tongue out and you shake your head to try to hide your smile. It doesn’t work, and Satoru beams at you before he gets back into his car. 

For all you said about leaving, you watch his car drive away with that smile still playing about your lips. Then you bite the inside of your cheek again, chastising yourself. 

You have rules, with Satoru. For how you are allowed to be, day-to-day. They are strict rules, and they are unspoken. 

You’re friends. You know you both, to some degree, think of each other as more than friends. You can allude to it; you cannot verbalise it. You act like friends, and know there’s something else, but that’s all it is: something. The something is vaporous, intangible. If you speak it into existence, it becomes real, and you have to deal with everything that comes with it. You can’t, not right now. 

Satoru has dropped you off at the park entrance. At this time of day, it is not busy, but there are still people. Lots of people. 

Most are mothers. Mothers with pushchairs, with young children sleeping or trailing by their sides. The children’s small legs are working double-time, trying to keep up with adult steps. The children are all younger than you have ever known Tsumiki or Megumi to be, probably just short of preschool age, but you watch them and their mothers with a strange tug on your chest. 

There are so many of them. 

Another reason for your unspoken rules. You do not like crowds, still. Before you returned to Satoru, you used to force yourself to wake up at 5am each morning, so you could arrive at your local coffee shop before the morning rush, the rush of bodies. Endou suggested otherwise. And so you sleep in, wake when other commuters wake, act normal; and you have bought an at-home coffee maker, because you still cannot stand the crowds. 

You are waiting until you can hold Satoru for more than ten seconds, or when you make it through a day without something triggering a panic attack, or when you can look at yourself and feel that something’s changed, really changed, unquestionably and irreversibly. 

Satoru waits with you. Anxiety fills you sometimes, the fear that he will be like Kazuo; that his patience will soon tarnish, be replaced by expectation, that you will have to concede, and that everything you’ve done so far will have been wasted. You know it’s not justified, that it’s just your fears overwhelming you. You try to tell yourself this. 

Satoru waits with you. He waits for you: you know this. 

It’s been strange, getting to this point in your life. With Satoru. You remember how adamant you used to be that you were solely at fault; that you couldn’t believe him, about how he wasn’t angry at you, that he had no resentment. Honestly, you haven’t stopped struggling with it, because now, with less of a dark tarnish on your view of things, you do still believe that you were at fault. But you can also look back and see that Satoru was, too. 

It doesn’t matter: if you had ever been angry, you had forgiven him by the time you’d come back to him. With the way he acts now, with his kindness and unending patience, you can’t allow yourself to hold on to mistakes from people made years ago. 

Although. You do remember that night; when he had apologised and you, for the first time, had accepted it. You had wanted to kiss him again. You hadn’t. 

Waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. 

You’re better. You’re not fixed. You’re not cured. Waiting, waiting. You wonder if you’ll know it when it comes.

You let it go. You raise your head to the sky and sigh. The air’s cool now, with nature preparing itself for winter. Seasons changing. Moving forward. Your skin pricks, but you welcome the cool breeze. Everything is so blisteringly hot, sometimes. Weather like this, you have learned to appreciate. 

“What the hell are you doing here?”

You eyes open, jolted out of a daze, and you look around. You do almost a full turn before you see the person who’d spoken: a teenage boy, just older than Megumi, probably fifteen or sixteen. His eyes are sharp and narrowed, and he’s got his arms crossed tight over his chest. 

He is wearing the dark uniform of a student of Jujustu High. 

Your eyebrows furrow, confused about what he wants. With the kid’s question, paired with that hostile posture, you feel like you’re on the wrong end of an interrogation. 

And there, brazenly displayed in his sharp eyes, a deep-set look of resentment. Incomprehensible, for someone you’ve never met before.  

You take in his age, his uniform, and then you see him, look at him closer, and it is only then that you realise how awful you have been. 

Here he is, right in front of you. You’re running into a lot of people from your past, today. God. How could you not notice him?

“Oh,” you say. “Oh.” Just the thought of him makes your eyes burn. 

Haru. Your brother. 

He’s in front of you. How is he? It’s your brother: your little brother, who you haven’t seen since he was a boy. Here he is. He’s all grown up. 

You remember him as a child: almost as young as the children that surround you in the park, with him crying for Sara as a baby, or trailing after you in your old horrid house, or later, as you withdrew from your family, as the child and heir your father wanted. 

Haru had inherited your family’s technique—skin that transforms into scales, scales that burn living beings in the same way as your mutated touch—and you had left him and his mother alone, so you could save yourself. 

Sara. Your eyes dart to look behind him. Sara is not with him. Immediately, there is relief that she is not here, that you do not have to confront your guilt with her; and then that guilt resurges, because you are clearly still wishing to avoid your problems, and you cannot resolve them, and you feel more like a child than you have in months. 

Haru. You drink in his appearance, desperate. 

He looks so similar to your father. Haru holds himself upright, back straight, with your father’s never-present aversion to taking up space. The narrow set of his eyes is identical to your father’s, and even the flecks of colour in his irises are familiar. 

You search for his mother, for evidence of Sara’s impression on him, but all you can see is your father, your father, your father. The set of Haru’s jaw, the sharpness of his cheekbones, the way he’s styled his hair. His hair is identical too in texture, in colour; but then you recognise it further, with a shock of familiarity. In the cool light of the early-winter sun, the shine of its undertones matches Sara, much more than it does your father. 

And once you have seen one trait, you can see more; the gentle slope of his nose, the width of his eyes, the line on his chin, the way his eyebrows curve. Looking at Haru, you feel yourself stepping back in time, remembering Sara’s features through his. Here: here is her son, tall and alive and healthy. 

You are not looking for it, but your gaze catches on one small feature that makes your heart tug. It is small, and so easily missed, but you recognise it, and you feel something heavy form in the back of your throat. 

Haru’s upper lip: his cupid’s-bow. It is just the same as yours. 

The slight curve, the shape of it, something that you had not seen mirrored as identically in either your mother or your father. 

You had never questioned it, not until now: but Haru’s is the same. It’s a hereditary trait—you realise it, right here, in this moment. It is not your father’s, not exactly, but both of his children share it. You, and Haru. It was passed down to you both.

Perhaps it is one of those traits that skip a generation; Haru may have even recognised it, looking at old photographs of your grandparents, in one of them. Because he would have been too young to know your grandmother, just as you were too young to know your grandfather. 

There is that similarity. You share that trait with him. You did not know you shared it with anyone, but you do. You look at him, your brother, Haru Hebi, all grown up.

And he’s taller than you are: his limbs are long, lanky, with a teenage stretched-out quality that reminds you of Satoru when he was the same age. Because Haru is fifteen, now; he turned fifteen earlier this year. He is in his first year of Jujustu High, and you know because he is not in the Tokyo branch, because he made the formal request to transfer his acceptance to Kyoto, instead. 

You tried to find out why, through Satoru, but you couldn’t learn anything more without meeting Haru and asking him yourself. And you didn’t, because you were too scared. 

Why did he transfer? You want to know. When he should have gone to Tokyo, like you did, and like your father did, and like every sorcerer Hebi had done in the past. 

To avoid the past, or to reclaim something new for his own? To spite your father, or to distance himself from you, who had walked the same halls less than a decade ago? 

You do not know. You want to ask him; but you take in the sharpness of Haru’s gaze, the antagonistic way he holds himself, and you only feel regret that you cannot. 

He’d asked you what you were doing here. The underlying truth: he doesn’t want you to be here.

“I’m just going home,” you say, a response to his question, finally. “I was getting the Metro.”

Haru’s lip twists into something horrible, like a sneer. “You’re telling me you didn’t know I was going to be here?” You stare at him for a moment, and then shake your head. Without further prompting, Haru says: “It’s my first mission out. It’s a big deal.”

“Oh. Of course it is.” You swallow back anything, anything that would make Haru want to stop talking to you. 

“My classmate’s in the bathroom. That’s why I’m on my own.” Haru cringes, and then just as suddenly works his expression into the abject hostility of a moment ago. “But we’re on a mission. It’s serious stuff. Our first one out. Are you stalking me?”

“I—stalking you?”

“You heard what I said. Are you?”

You flounder. “No,” you say.

Haru glares at you “Oh yeah? I don’t believe you.”

You’re not sure what to say to him. You don’t know what to say at all—you’re not good with this, with family, with teenagers, with anything. Tsumiki’s only barely a teenager herself, you’re still learning. 

“Why… not?”

Haru huffs out a breath. “Cause. There’s no reason you should be here. It’s my first mission. You would’ve heard about it. 

“I promise, I—” 

“I know you’ve been trying to stalk me.” Haru says it in a rush, like the words were hurled from him. He blinks, almost taken aback, and then glowers again. “Your—your—you got Satoru Gojo to investigate me! My first day at Kyoto, all I got were people telling me that Satoru Gojo knew who I was. He’d asked Principal Gakuganji about me. You did that, didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t trying to stalk you,” you say, helplessly. He’s talking so quickly. You can barely keep up—you’re still in shock, still trying to catch your place.  

“Then what the hell were you trying to do?”

You’re lost for words. You don’t know how to explain it to him—that you wanted to know if he was okay and safe, without being able to ask him yourself. The love for him, as your brother, that has been overshadowed for years by your own fear, guilt, and cowardice. 

“You should know,” Haru says, without waiting for you to answer. “I don’t care if Satoru Gojo thinks you’re cool, or if Kenta Inumaki in third year thinks you’re cool, or if you’ve somehow managed to convince everyone else that you’re not some—some fraud, or whatever. I don’t care. I don’t want you here.”

“I apologise,” you murmur. Then you inhale. Breathe through it. “I really was trying to get to the Metro, Haru. That’s all.”

“Don’t call me that.”

His words glance off your skin, barely cutting. “I’m just heading home. I’ll be out of your way, if you don’t want me here.” Breathe through it. Breathe. You remember the way Megumi used to be, as a young child; so quick to anger, so turbulent, only soothed by routine and explanation and kind words. “I especially don’t want to get in the way of your first mission. That’s a high honour, especially at this point in the school year.”

Haru’s shoulders tense, and then relax. His grimace wavers. Then he says, gruffly: “Yeah. It’s because I’m really good.”

“You must be.” You watch him carefully; his teenage, gangly limbs; his flickering scowl, the hairs falling lose from its sharp style. “Are you really unaccompanied?”

“Yeah,” Haru says. He turns and scans the crowd behind him, and then faces you again and shrugs. “It’s me and my classmate. We’re hunting this Grade Two that’s in the lake, apparently.”

“A Grade Two?” You let your expression relax into that of admiration. “Are you a Grade Two already?”

“Hell yeah I am!” Haru’s face splits into a wide, proud grin. It shows his teeth, and you notice that his canines aren’t straight, and that he has a wire of braces along his bottom teeth. Then, once again, he works to force himself back into a glower. “Just like you were, before you quit. Except you were a full adult, and I’m a first year. I’m going to be Grade One before I leave school, even better than you, or even my dad.” 

Dad . More than that: My dad.

You were never allowed to call your father anything as familiar as that. 

Haru’s pride, his desire to be like him.

“I…” The lump in your throat has returned, and even when you try to swallow it down, it remains, stubborn and painful. “That sounds achievable, if you work hard. Good luck on your mission. I don’t want to get in your way.”

You step back, turn from him. You bring a hand to your eyes, willing yourself to be okay, normal, to not do this right here.

“Can’t you drive?” you hear Haru call. 

You still. You look back, watch him hesitate before he takes another few paces towards you. 

“I… yes, I can drive,” you say.

“Then why aren’t you?” Haru gestures to the way you were going, in the direction of the Metro station. “Why’d you get the train if you can drive?”

The banality of the question shocks you more than anything. “I left my car at home. Satoru—Gojo, I mean, Satoru Gojo—he drove me into town this morning. But he had to leave early.”

Haru stares at you, and then digs the heel of his shoe into the dirt floor. “Why?”

“Why… what?”

“Why did Satoru Gojo have to leave?” Haru’s eyebrows furrow even closer together. “And you call him Satoru?”

“We’re friends,” you say, simply. “We’ve been friends since before you were born.”

Haru’s eye twitches. “Are you actually? Friends? Cause my dad says you’re just using him, for his money and power. He said he’s the reason you two ever met. He said—”

“Our father says a lot of things. Most of them are untrue, or unkind.”

Haru stares at you, his mouth open. You wonder if it’s the first time someone has spoken against your father in his presence. You wonder what Sara has been saying about him, how her influence has affected Haru. You see her in his appearance. 

You see her in his personality, too. For all of Haru’s brashness, his posture, the venom with which he glares at you, there is Sara. There is something there, between that pretence of your father. 

You see your father in the way he straightens himself up, but only as Haru’s imitation of him. Your father never smiled, not the way Haru did. There is too much Sara there, in that one brief flash of typical teenage pride, too much kindness, for it to be your father. Haru is not identical to your father, as you had thought at first. The way he acts; it is close, but it is not the same. 

Haru is fifteen. Just a few years older than Tsumiki, than Megumi. He’s still just a child, in a school uniform, trying to seem older than he really is. 

“Isn’t it true that you stole the Zenin’s heir, then?” Haru looks you in the eye brazenly. “The kid with the ten shadows technique. He was supposed to go to the Zenins, but you and Satoru Gojo stole him from them.”

“Satoru and I—” And it feels strange to call him Satoru to someone else, but you feel like you must, to prove yourself, to show Haru that your father’s derisiveness of your relationship is false, “—are raising Megumi Fushiguro, and his sister, Tsumiki. Megumi was going to be sold to the Zenins, but Satoru gave him a choice, and Megumi decided against it. That’s the truth of what happened.”

Haru blanches. Then he shakes his head, brows pinching together. “The Zenin heir doesn’t have a sister. Dad would’ve said—I would’ve heard about it, if she—”

“She’s not a sorcerer.” You watch Haru process this, understand it. Why he wouldn’t have been told. “To most people, this makes her irrelevant.”

“But…” Haru’s eyes narrow as he stares at you. “But you said…”

“To most people,” you repeat. “To me, no. She’s raised alongside her brother. They’re both in middle school now. Tsumiki’s just a year or so younger than you, in fact.”

“No, she’s not.” Haru juts out his jaw, obstinate. “I don’t believe you. If she was, then my dad would’ve—” 

“Ours,” you cut in. You say it so suddenly that for a second you’re unsure why you spoke at all. It’s so rare for you to acknowledge your father, let alone stake some claim on him, but you cannot stand for Haru to ignore this one, small bond you have. “He’s not just your father. He’s ours.”

Haru stares at you. Then he shakes his head, and pushes back his shoulders, forcing himself into better posture. It is the way your father would stand, before his voice would raise, before you would be subjected to his vile criticism. At this memory, you feel no fear, or even anything stronger than a vague recognition of the attempt. Haru is so young, compared to your father. Now you have spoken to him, you can see the weakness of his façade. 

“He’s not our father,” Haru says, with an injected harshness to his tone that, to you, comes across as more stubborn than cruel. “He told me that he rejects you as his daughter. I’m the only child he cares about.”

To your own surprise, you find a smile playing on your lips. Haru’s eyes widen, aghast. 

“I’m sure that’s true,” you say, breathing out a soft laugh. “Trust me, he made that clear enough when I lived with him.”

Haru looks taken aback. “He—did?” 

“Yes.” But then you stop yourself; because whatever relationship Haru has with your father, it is so different to the one you shared with him. And you do not want to deprive Haru of whatever it is he has. There are enough children without parents, you think. You could not bear it if you took a parent away from Haru. 

It’s his decision to make; when he’s older, with his mother’s help. You’re his sister, and you’re a stranger. 

“In his own way,” you say, which is the most you can do without lying. 

Haru eyes you, warily. You sigh. You look around, feeling the weight of this conversation, the unexpectedness of it, the animosity still present in Haru’s gaze.

But you can’t leave before you ask. You need to be brave. 

“Do you see your mother often?” you ask, turning around to meet Haru’s gaze. Shock ripples across his expression, fast and swift before he can school aggression back onto his features. 

“Yeah,” Haru says. The pitch of his voice quivers. He sounds defensive. And then his jaw juts out, and he’s pushing it back onto you: “What’s it to you?”

“I care about her.”

“You do?” Haru’s face twists. “Since when?”

This cuts deeper. “I always have. I just… haven’t been the best at showing it.”

“I’ll bet.” Haru scoffs. “I don’t care what she says—you’ve not spoken to her in years. I’ve had to take care of her, not you.”

Take care of her? 

“But… our father, is she not…” 

“Living with him? No.” Haru crosses his arms over his chest. “Hasn’t for a few years. Not that you’d know.”

“I didn’t,” you say. “Know. I didn’t know. When did she—” 

Haru’s glare hardens. “Why don’t you ask her yourself? Instead of making me messenger, or whatever. Huh?”

“I’d like to,” you say. As soon as the words leave your lips, your recognise that they’re the truth. “I’d like to talk to her.”

This seems to shock Haru, too. “You—wait, what?”

“Could you give me her address?”

“What?”

“Or her phone number. I’m not sure what she’d prefer, if I called, or if I texted, or sent a letter.” You’re talking faster, but the words spilling from you are words you should’ve said so long ago. They’re overdue. Years overdue. “I’d like to reach her, at some point. I think I’d like to.”

Haru blinks, quick and in succession. “You would? Why?”

“I saw a lot of her as a child, Haru.” His flinches when you use his name. You try not to let it affect you.  “We lived together, in the same house—I was there when she and our father married. It was all before I went to high school. I was younger than you.” You pause, awash in memory of that time, those awful years. 

Satoru had helped, more than anyone, but so had Sara. She was just a kid, only nineteen when your father had married her, but your life was so much better with her in it. Without her, your life at home would have been unrecognisable. 

“But I knew her for many years,” you continue. “I don’t know how much you remember of the time when I still lived with you. You were young, probably too young to remember much before I graduated school, but—

“I remember enough of it.” Your lips part. You stare at him, shocked. A beat passes before he speaks again. “Why should I? Help you.”

Your breath escapes you. 

Then, you offer him a tired shrug, and smile. “I used to help her out with cooking when she had to take care of you. Sara was really young when she first moved in with us—” Young, you think to yourself, young is an understatement. You’re twenty-five; Sara was nineteen. Six years younger than you are now. Six years. God. “—and she needed some help when you arrived, too. I always tried to, to help. So I guess I had a hand in raising you, kid.”

Haru’s lips are pressed together, so tightly it seeps the colour from them. His jaw works, and you think he’s biting the inside of his cheek, the way you do sometimes. Only, with you, it’s usually because you’re trying not to smile in front of Satoru. 

“I don’t like you,” Haru says, suddenly. “You’re not my real sister. You’re just a person I knew at home, back when I was a baby, okay?”

You wait for him to continue. You do not want this boy—your brother, this fifteen-year-old child—to hate you. But you also have to recognise that he does not know you. Haru knows more about you from your father than from his own memory, and you cannot trust your father to describe you kindly. 

A beat. Haru seems conflicted, wavering between two choices. His whole body vibrates, and he rocks up onto his toes as if he’s trying to seem taller. Then he shoves his hand into his pocket and pulls out his phone. 

“She’d want you to call,” Haru says, voice gruff, like he’s still attempting to sound tough. “I see her all the time. Course I do. She… talks about you a lot.” Haru pushes the phone at you. It’s Sara’s contact, and your gaze is pulled to her picture; Sara and Haru, probably a few years ago. Her arm is around him, and he’s leaning into her with a gap-toothed smile. 

She’s touching him. Haru, at least, was saved from that part of your childhood. 

“She talks about me?” You stare down at the picture. There is something very, very sad within you. You feel the corners of your eyes prick, and the lump in your throat grows more painful. 

Haru coughs, with such a conspicuous attempt to make it sound threatening that it comes off as more of a splutter. You look up to him.

“Copy in her number, then,” Haru mutters. “I need to go. I’m on a mission, remember? I can’t talk to strangers for hours, I’ll get in trouble.”

“Of course not,” you manage to say, quietly. You clear your throat, because you still know you cannot burden children with your tears. 

You take off a glove from one of your hands, and use it to extricate your phone from your bag. You copy Sara’s number into it, save the contact, and linger for a second too long on the blank picture, the grey auto-fill that means nothing, is nothing. 

When you offer Haru’s phone back, he’s staring at your gloveless hand. 

You look down at it too. “Don’t worry. It’s only dangerous if you make contact with my palm. It works the same way as the family technique, if you can think of it that way. Here.” You drop the phone into his hand, touch-free.

Haru shakes his head. His eyes have narrowed again, but this time, he reminds you less of your father, and more of something else entirely. Haru looks inquisitive, hesitant.

“They’re just… hands?” 

Your lips press together. “Oh. Yes, they are. Just my hands.”

“But…” Haru looks back to you, almost petulant. There’s something so viscerally Satoru about his expression that you have to stifle a laugh. “I thought they’d be all fucked-up.”

This does tease a laugh out of you. Haru is immediately offended and straightens, defensive. You extend a hand in a way you hope is placating.

“No,” you say, “no, sorry. I just… why? They’re only my hands.”

“Don’t laugh at me,” Haru says. For a moment, with his scowl and curious gaze, you’re almost endeared, entertained. Affection and deep, familial love surges from you, and you’re staggered by it, by its unfamiliarity, and by its strength.

“I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.” You say it genuinely, the same tone you use with Megumi when he used to balk at you. “I’m sorry.”

He glares at you, still way. 

“They really are just normal hands,” you say. You stretch your ungloved hand out in front of you, and admire it in the warm glow of the afternoon sun. You look to him, and see that he’s staring at it, eyes wide. “Just the same as yours. It’s my technique that’s different, but that’s just cursed energy, it’s not physical.” 

Haru blinks at you. There it is: that crease of his eyes that is undeniably your father’s, and then that sulkiness that is so similar to Satoru when he was a child, and then the brashness that reminds you of Megumi, and then, as Haru’s jaw works and he bites the inside of his cheek and he splutter-coughs again, there is something that you can’t draw back to anyone else. 

You realise that it is because that something is him: it is him, and he is unique, and you do not know him well enough to recognise his traits as wholly his own. 

“Call her, will you?” Haru says, as he pushes his phone back into his pocket and leans away from you, rolling back onto the heels of his feet. “She wanted me to ask about you when I got to school. If you were well, or whatever.”

“Sara wanted to know about me?” you echo.

“Sure.” Haru shrugs. The movement is sharp and jerky. “She gets sentimental like that.” He looks back up to you and his eyes flash. “I didn’t ask about you. In school. Didn’t need more reasons for people to connect me to you. The name’s bad enough.” 

You nod. “I’ll see you, Haru,” you say. 

Haru doesn’t respond. He grimaces, then hesitates, like he wanted to say something more, before he turns and paces away from you, towards the centre of the park. You watch him leave; his stride is brisk and purposeful, but, as he disappears into the crowd in the distance, you cannot help but notice the awkwardness ingrained in every step. 

He has that teenage ganglyness that you’d recognised in him before. Like he’d just recently gone through a growth spurt that the rest of his body hasn’t caught up with yet. You remember it yourself, your early teen years, the inelegance and embarrassment that was ingrained in you. It’s strange and bitter-sweet that you can recognise that in Haru. 

He is, you suppose, just like anyone at one point in their teens. Haru hasn’t yet grown into his height. That’s all. 

 

--

 

There is something warm about a routine. 

You pick the kids up from school. It’s a Monday, and you don’t need to remind them anymore about Ice Cream Monday, and the knowledge of this makes you smile. 

You take the kids home. They both prefer to go to their rooms; Tsumiki’s got more work to do these days, and Megumi seeks out privacy as soon as he can. You’ve knocked on his door before, worried that he’d just be lying on his bed staring at the ceiling or something, but when you’d opened the door he’d been at his desk reading. You’d let him be, but had reported back to Satoru, who’d just laughed and said Megumi was too smart for his age.

You smile at the memory. You get work done, too, in the downstairs office of the Gojo household. 

Dinner is quieter without Satoru, but you’re used to that, too; you and Tsumiki keep conversation, and Megumi offers his input occasionally. Tsumiki encourages him to talk in her kind, subtle way; she asks him questions casually, nodding and listening to what he has to say. She, like you, enjoys hearing Megumi talk. 

And you’re glad to have Tsumiki with you. She’s in her second year of middle school now, but last year had been the first time she and Megumi had attended different schools. You hadn’t liked it, the idea of her being on her own, unprotected. She’s safe at the Gojo household; with the wards being reapplied as stringently as they are nowadays, it’s probably safer than if she were at Jujustu High. But at her school, there’s barely anything. It hadn’t felt right—Satoru had agreed. You’re not sure how he arranged it, but he’s organised protection for her, some sorcerers now assigned to guard her, watch out for curse activity in her vicinity. It’s not as much as you’d like, but it’s better than what is was before. 

You don’t know why you hadn’t thought about it. Even after the Gojo household attack… Another reason you blame yourself. If something had happened to her, just because you were too focused on yourself to care for her properly, or… 

You distract yourself from the thought. It’s not healthy, or useful. You ask Tsumiki about her sleepover at her friend’s house yesterday, and she bursts into a lively anecdote. 

Satoru texts you midway through dinner, but you don’t look at it until afterwards, since you’re trying to instil a no-phone policy during mealtimes. After the kids have excused themselves, you see that it’s the update he’d promised you: he’d be back in an hour, and are you that tired yet, because if you’re not he’s brought back some sweets and he’d like to share them with you tonight, if you’re staying at the household?

You reply that you’ll stay. Satoru responds with a heart eyes emoji. You laugh to yourself. 

You remind the kids about the time they should be in bed for, but you know that they’re getting old enough that you don’t have to put them to bed anymore. You miss it, weirdly, even if you’re getting fewer and fewer responsibilities with them. 

Satoru arrives and presents you with a boutique box of full of small candied sweets. You share them, both of you sitting on either sides of the sofa. Satoru tells you about his day, the curse that took hours to track down, and he describes in elaborate detail how cool and crazy and awesome he was when he took it down. There is an excess of sound effects and hand gestures, and you rest your cheek on the back of the couch and you watch him talk. You are tired, and you are happy. 

You tell him about Haru. Satoru thinks it’s funny that Haru had thought your hands wouldn’t look like human hands. He tells you this is because you’ve got such a cool and scary reputation, but Haru was too embarrassed to say that in front of you. 

When he doesn’t make you smile, Satoru asks you about it more seriously. You talk it through, even though you’re still not sure how it made you feel. You tell him this, and Satoru shrugs, and says he figures that’s fine, so long as you’re not keeping it all to yourself. 

After a while, he drives you home. He walks you up to your apartment, and hangs on the door frame when you let yourself in. He keeps it light-hearted. He knows you’ll see him tomorrow. There is a part of you that wants him to kiss you on your doorstep when he says goodbye. You smile at him, wave, shut the door.

You have a therapy appointment tomorrow, and you wonder, as you get ready for bed, if Endou is going to ask you to take a further step with your therapy; your touch therapy, which has a real name, even if you can’t remember it. You have a worksheet to complete before the session, and you resolve to do it in the morning. 

You need to get to into bed as early as possible, because sleep is still something you struggle with, and it often takes hours for you to drift off. You’ve become intimately familiar with the contours of your ceiling. As you get into bed, there’s the sinking feeling of dread for the night ahead of you, that you’re going to be exhausted but still unable to sleep, that you’ll spend hours thinking over everything that has happened today, everything you’ve done wrong. 

Still, you get into your bed, as you always do. As you always do, you turn off the lights and try to sleep. 

Everything has moved so quickly, it feels like, sometimes. 

It still surprises you when you feel this—this easy contentedness, without any underlying anxiety of fear that you had become so familiar with in your years as a sorcerer. You hadn’t realised what an oppressive weight your job had become until it was gone; it had taken months until you had been able to truly understand that you were free from it. 

You feel like you’re waiting for something big, though. You feel better than you did before you asked Satoru for help. Of course you feel better: you had been at the worst you had ever been, and almost anything more than that would be better. But you’re not… right, either. 

There is warmth to your routine, and it is repetitive. You are waiting to be better: you are waiting to be whole. You are not normal yet, and though you do not know if you ever will be, you know you can improve from this. You are at the impasse, the in-between. And you didn’t think that getting better would take this long. 

You are waiting. There is warmth to your routine. These things take time, everyone says. You are better, and you are waiting to be better. 

 

Notes:

2015
Twenty-five years old

-

SPOILERS
CW: Panic attack. Anxious about being unsuccessful in the meeting, Hebi has a panic attack. Though she's initially panicked and self-critical, after finding privacy in an empty room she works through it in a healthy way, recalling self-soothing techniques taught to her by Endou, her therapist. Begins at: You make it outside of their office, ends at: "Negative thought cycle," you murmur to yourself.

-

And so the happiness begins!!!

Hello hello, gang. Lovely to be here again. I've been away for a bit, as I'm sure you've gathered (details on tumblr oui oui), but huzzah I am still here! I've been working through the unanswered comments, but I've still got some to respond to; if I haven't replied to your comment, please know that I have read it (I get an email every time I comment and read every single one), and will get to it asap. More writing will occur!! Nothing is going to stop me from finishing this fic, especially now that the pookies are on the up and up. Honestly, I'm just as done with the angst as you guys are. I'm ready for happiness and hashtag healing to begin!

Also, for those not on tumblr--as a thank-you for waiting for me to take my sweet time, I'm releasing the next chapter (ch21) in exactly a week! It's, like... oh, lordie, it's currently at I think 35,000 words, but I still need to write the latter half of the final scene, so honestly it really could get to 40k. Which is insanity. But also necessary (you'll see on Friday, dw). I also have gotten into the habit of writing as I watch the euros, and I edited this chapter when England were taking their penalties against Switzerland (!!!!!), so there may full well be little SPaG mistakes littered around. Twas to be expected, if y'all saw that game.

But onwards and upwards, folks! I'll see you guys in a week!! <333

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Chapter 21: 2016

Wednesday 7th September, 2016

“Nah, it’s not a worry,” Toyo says, as she helps you to lift your suitcase into the boot of her car. She throws open her door and slides in; you follow, and smile with some amusement as Toyo clicks the button on her car keys that makes the boot close automatically. Satoru’s got one just like it. You associate it with the general lackadaisicalness around wealth that Toyo and Satoru share; namely because, for Toyo, it’s still pretty new. She was promoted recently. You’d hosted a dinner last week to celebrate.

“Still,” you say, as you sit down in the passenger’s seat. “It’s kind of you.”

“Eh, I’m not making you pay all that for the parking!” Toyo sends a glower towards the long-stay car park, in which you can see a family of four looking despairingly at the list of prices. “They’re robbing you, I think. I saw a conspiracy theory on Instagram that they’re all made up by the rich CEOs in charge of the world. Or something.”

You laugh. “Or something?”

“Yeah yeah, it’s something like that,” Toyo says, swatting towards you in the air with both her hands and then jumping when the car behind her blares its horn. “Ay, shut up! I’m going, I’m going.”

Her car had begun to tilt into the centre of the road. You straighten up in your seat. You’ve long endeavoured to find Toyo’s driving an endearing trait of hers, rather than something concerning. There is a reason, you tell yourself, that she has survived all this long. She’s been driving since she was eighteen, and has never injured herself or anyone. Yet.

“But nah,” Toyo continues, “I’m working from home today, so it’s super easy to. No stress.”

“Are you allowed to take this much time out of your day if you’re supposed working from home?”

She grins. “Dunno. Haven’t asked yet, but they haven’t told me I can’t either, so.”

“You’re awful,” you say, fond.

“I’m saving myself from the rich CEOs. And you, too! This day’s a huge big ‘fuck you’ to the CEOs.”

“Is there an overlap between the CEOs that commander airport parking prices, and the CEOs that control the interior design business?”

“Probs.” Toyo barrels past a stop sign and ignores the uproar of honking from the surrounding cars. You hold onto your seat a little tighter. “Hey, how’d it go then? The trip?”

“It went well,” you say. “The finer details about the branch’s finances were a bit hard to grasp, but then I called Nanami up and got him to explain it to me, so it was alright in the end.”

“I bet he loved that.”

“I think he actually did. He didn’t even sigh at me, which is a good sign.”

“You’re, like, a miracle worker,” Toyo says. “He sighed at me all the time when we met last. He can’t stand me.”

“I’m sure he’ll grow to like you,” you say, without much hope.

“Doubt it,” Toyo says. “He spent all his time talking with Nichika. I was thinking, do you think we should set them up? They’d get along well. They’re all serious and stuff. Kind of like you, but you’ve got more of a woomph to you, you know what I mean? Zhoozh. Yeah? Zhoozh.”

“Vaguely.”

“It’s like—nah, I don’t know how to explain it.” Toyo glances at herself in the sun visor mirror. “We were talking about your trip. Good, even if the accountancy was a bit shit?”

“Good,” you agree. “They were pretty interested in what I had to share about how we do sorcerer salaries, and everything.”

“Sick. Your twelve hundred folders and shit went down well then?”

You smile. According to Toyo, you’re much too pedantic about how you organise your proposals; you think it’s useful to have everything cross-referenced and alphabetised, but Toyo thinks that you’d be fine with some standard colour-coding.

“It seems so. Although I was on the plane for far too long.” You shift in the car seat, pulling at your shirt. “I’m in desperate need of a shower. Everything’s tacky.”

Toyo takes her eyes off the road to give you an investigative sniff. “You smell nice, at least, Hebi. Is that a new perfume?”

You laugh to yourself (“Actually, yes, Satoru’s—”) then yelp for her to pay attention to the roadworks ahead of her.

“Eh? Oh, yeah.” Toyo eases the car slower, driving serenely past the white-faced construction workers. “They’re too sensitive! You know I’ve never even gotten a speeding ticket?”

You find this difficult to believe. “Sure.”

“It’s true, I fucking swear.”

“Maybe you have, but you’ve just never realised it.”

“Shit, and now I owe the government millions?” Toyo sends you a smirk. “They’ll never get me to pay. My life is a big fuck-you to the CEOs.”

“Those damned CEOs,” you say airily. You fiddle with the radio for a few minutes, before realising your phone’s already connected to the Bluetooth speakers. New car: you’re still getting used to it.

You put on a playlist Toyo had made for you a few months ago—according to her, your music taste is abominable, which you disagree with—and you listen to it in the background as you chat.

You and Toyo discuss her prospective holiday to somewhere in Europe, and which cities you’ve been to and would recommend. You disagree about whether she should redownload any dating apps.

You mention that you’re dying for a cigarette, and Toyo slaps her hand on the steering wheel and tells you to stay strong. You chew on some nicotine gum instead.

Toyo then goes in-detail about the latest developments in the drama she’s been having with her colleagues, which you’re always interested in hearing about. They’ve been in a month-long war based around their new cushion designs being released this December; the office has been split into two opposing sides, one campaigning for a Christmas theme, the other campaigning against. Toyo’s firmly on the latter side, and complains animatedly about how difficult it’s been to resist the others’ push for a green-and-red colour palette.

“And then they called up product manufacturing, and they were all like, oh no, everyone’s standing in our way, we need to put some more fucking tartan on the shelves!” Toyo gesticulates wildly and almost misses her turning. “Can you believe it?”

“Don’t you already have a tartan line on sale now?”

“That’s what I fucking told them!” Toyo groans, and gives you a morose glance. “Why the fuck they’d want to have double tartan—and then it won’t sell, and I’m going to be the one getting blamed for it all, I know it. You’ve got more sense than half of them, Hebi. Why can’t you come and work with me?”

“I’ll ask the higher-ups next time I have a meeting with them,” you say.

“Make sure to give Gakugangi my love.” Toyo grimaces. “And by love, I mean a huge uppercut to his chin.”

“I’ll do my best. It may result in my immediate execution, though. Is that alright?”

“Eh, sacrifices have to be made. Jokes. Hmph. Fucking tartan,” she mutters, half to herself. She drums her fingers along in time with the music, which is from some chill-sounding British band you’re not familiar with. “Oo, also, are you going to be in town this Saturday?”

“Huh.” You extricate your phone from your bag and pull out your calendar app. “Maybe.”

It’s a relief to be able to not have to take off your gloves anymore, which was getting to be much too frustrating; Satoru had worked some magic with the company you get your gloves from, and had procured three sets of touchscreen gloves, almost indistinguishable to those you normally wear.

You had thanked him profusely—which Satoru had lapped up with a pitiful attempt at faux-humility—but you hadn’t had the strength to ask him about how he actually managed it. You’ve assumed that it involved an immense amount of effort, plus an immense amount of money. The idea of how much money makes you feel slightly ill, so you’ve thought it best to concentrate instead on your now-completely diminished hatred for touchscreens.

“I’m over in Kyoto from Friday morning to midday Saturday,” you say, reading from your phone. “Some sorcerers based in the other branch want to talk stuff through. Which—I need to sort that out, too.” You make a note in your app to look back over their emails. “But from midday, I should be free-ish. Why?”

“It’s Mayu’s last minute pre-engagement dinner. She decided this morning and told me to spread the word.”

You stare at Toyo. “What? Mayu’s engaged? Since when?”

Toyo smirks again. “Technically, since never. But she’s convinced she’ll be wearing a ring before the year’s up, so she’s getting people together to celebrate.”

“To celebrate the chance of a possible engagement. Right,” you say, rolling your eyes. “That makes more sense. What time is it, and I’ll check with Gojo if he’s free to look after the kids.”

“Drinks at five, dinner at seven. But if you need to skip the drinks ‘cause of M and T then that’s cool.”

You smile at her, appreciative. You’re the only one out of your group of friends that actually has kids—or, well, you’re the only one who’s in charge of them—although Kotona’s married, and clearly Mayu may be on her way to joining her there. It’s a strange thing to explain to new people, though, how you’re simultaneously twenty-six and unmarried, and how you also hold responsibility for two children well into their teens.

“I’ll check with Satoru,” you say. “I don’t think he’s doing anything on Saturday, though, so it should be fine.”

“Awesome.” Toyo hums along to the music for another few minutes. Then, when she slows to a stop in front of a red light, she glances over at you.

You notice. “What’s up?”

“Eh?” Toyo realises you’ve noticed her staring, and grimaces. “Ah—I wanted to ask. Thinking about dinner plans and all. You never told me how your dinner with Sara went.”

You look out of your window. You understand Toyo’s apprehension; you’ve told her, in snippets over the years, about general details of your childhood, and she gets your complicated relationship with your family. But you’ve struggled for so long to verbalise it even to yourself, that it’s been difficult, even with your newer attempt at opening up to others, to verbalise it all to her.

You’d met with Sara again two weeks ago. You try to do so regularly, at Endou’s suggestion, even if it’s not often.

You’ve seen her many times since you first reached out, but you feel like you’re both figuring out what your dynamic is supposed to be like. Sara is, by law, your stepmother, but she’s only ten years older than you, and at thirty-five, she’s more your equal than any sort of parental figure. Sara seems more concerned with it than you are; you’ve found yourself to be the one reassuring her, that she doesn’t need to have responsibility for you, that you’re okay, and that you’re happy to just be in touch with her.

“It was good,” you say, watching the white lines on the road blur together beneath you. “Alright, actually. Easier than it used to be, I guess.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“I think it is.” You glance at Toyo, and then chuckle and tell her to focus on the road. She swears and centres the car in the lane again, pretending not to hear the blast of car horns. “Honestly. No, it was fine. Normal. Which I suppose is what’s best. Right?”

“There’s nothing wrong with normal,” Toyo says wisely. Then she glares at another driver and flips him off. “Fucking hell. Some people.”

“Some people,” you agree. Then you sigh. “I don’t know. She’s still trying to convince me she doesn’t need any help, which I get, because I’ve been there, you know, with Gojo, but it’s so… frustrating. I know how simple it’d be for us, to make her life easier, but she won’t accept it.”

Toyo hums, thoughtful. “She might think it’d be at some mad detriment to you, though. It’d mostly be Gojo’s money, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Like, have you said that to her?”

“Not exactly,” you say. “But I don’t know if that’d make it any better, or worse. She doesn’t know him. If she won’t accept money from me, why’d she accept it from him?”

You’ve had this conversation with Toyo countless times, and you’ve never been able to reach a satisfactory solution. This is because there isn’t one; this is a problem that you cannot fix, not really. But even if you can accept it, you can’t help but find it so infuriating.

Sara’s separated from your father, but not divorced; she’s admitted to you that she doesn’t have the money for a competent enough divorce lawyer. Your father had apparently accepted the separation, but had been strictly unwilling to undergo another divorce, and has threatened to drag out any legal proceedings if Sara attempted it, knowing she wouldn’t have the funds to sustain it. She’s in a decent financial position; she’s got a low-paying but satisfactory job that supports both her and Haru. She’s doing okay at the moment, but couldn’t afford a divorce.

You’ve tried to help her, but she always just smiles at you, grateful but reticent, and declines.

You don’t need to help me, sweetheart, she’d said, the last time you met with her.

You remember noticing just how similar her eyes were to Haru’s; the same shape, similar colouring, the same eyelashes.

It’s frustrating, when Satoru’s got all of his generations worth of money, that he’s already said he’d be more than happy to give to Sara; to pay for a divorce lawyer, to help her get a university degree, or just to support her and Haru, to alleviate her worries. You’re not as wealthy as Satoru, and your salary from the higher-ups is the same as any other Grade Two sorcerer’s—therefore, it’s not overly generous, but it’s enough to be happily financially stable—and so you could afford to give her money, too. But she won’t accept it.

You look down at your phone again, scrolling through your last text messages to get to your conversation with Sara. Yesterday evening, you’d asked her about book recommendations for Megumi, who’s a voracious reader, has ploughed through almost everything written for his age but refuses to accept book advice from his teachers. Haru was the same when he was Megumi’s age, according to Sara.

 

From Sara

I’ll ask some of the people in the office tomorrow. Lots of them have boys his age.

Which classics has he read?

 

You type out a response, frowning.

“Could be worth a shot though,” Toyo says. “Telling her it’s not all your money. Cause everyone knows that the Gojo clan’s rich, right? She’d know too, probably, even if she’s a non-shaman. Haru must’ve mentioned it loads.”

“I guess. Yeah. Yeah, I might do that. You’re right.”

“Worth a shot.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so too.” You shrug, and wince. “Shit.”

“Shoulder?” Toyo asks, her nose crinkling with concern.

“Yeah. I forgot to do my stretches on the plane.” You try to roll it back as much as you can underneath your seatbelt. “God, I can’t let Gojo know, he’ll be fuming.”

Toyo chuckles. “Just steal his wallet and bribe your physio with the money. Or, even better, actually send me your new physio’s number this time. I’ll bribe him.”

“Oh—”

“Bribe him, with my tits, specifically. Or my vagina. Or my—”

“No, you will not!”

“Eh?” Toyo’s cackling, and you’re hiding your smile. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m not letting you sleep with my physiotherapist, Toyo,” you groan. She’s been hinting at it ever since she found a picture of him on his website.

“Why not? He’s gorgeous.” Toyo sighs lustily. “We could make loads of gorgeous babies and all of them would have fucking fantastic cardiovascular health.”

“He’s not even attractive. Objectively.”

“He so is.” Toyo’s smirking again, and you chuckle at her. “You’re just blind to it. And he’s got to be making money, right, if Gojo’s the one who found him?”

This, you concede. “I haven’t asked what his salary is. I don’t think I want to know.”

“I do,” Toyo declares blatantly. “You can’t hog all the rich boys for yourself, Hebi. I want the trophy wife lifestyle.”

“You probably earn more than him,” you say, feeling a little warm.

“Eh, I’m fine with that too. He can be my beautiful little trophy wife.” You laugh, but then Toyo narrowly misses colliding with a lamppost, and the conversation is swiftly changed.

 

--

 

Chores: you have a lot of chores to do.

It’s strange, but you’ve realised that there’s something immensely satisfying about having a list of things to do, and then ticking your tasks off that list. You haven’t had a full day off in a while, and since you don’t have to be anywhere until Friday, you’re quite remarkably excited for all of the chores you’ll be able to complete this afternoon.

Before you start with anything too taxing, you pop a pill from your prescribed blister pack of medication and swallow it down with a glass of water. Since you’ve started seeing your physiotherapist—something that probably had taken too long for you to do, admittedly—you’ve been shuttled off to various doctors in an attempt treat your shoulder. This current prescription is your third try of painkillers; the first round hadn’t made any difference to your pain, and the second had made your shoulder pain practically disappear, but had also made you lethargic to the point of near-inactivity. When Endou had heard about that particular side-effect, she’d put her foot down and forced you to move on.

You’ve been on this prescription for about two weeks now, and you haven’t felt any significant changes other than a minor decrease in pain. Which you think is promising. You’ve got an appointment at the end of the month to check on your progress with it, anyway.

Just before you start the first task on the list—a deep-clean of the bathroom, very satisfying—you connect your phone to your new speaker. Whenever Satoru brings it up, you have to keep pretending that you don’t find it cool; he’d bought it for you as a surprise present a few months ago.  

Satoru’s gotten into the habit of giving you gifts, from when he’s wandering around department stores, or if he sees something interesting in a new location he’s exorcising a curse in. You find it secretly sweet, but as the gifts are beginning to increase in expensiveness, you’re trying to curb any excessively lavish spending.

Especially because you’re now very conscious of influencing the kids; Tsumiki’s been dating her boyfriend, Uke, for about a month now, and you don’t want Satoru’s ridiculous wealth to influence what she expects in a relationship. Even though the kids know that you and Satoru aren’t seeing each other… it could still complicate things, and you do not want them to grow up to be as out-of-touch as Satoru was before he met you.

Tsumiki’s boyfriend is sweet, though. You and Satoru find their relationship adorable. You’ve made an effort to not be patronising or overly coddling, even if it’s so cute you often struggle to function. You keep forgetting that, at fourteen, she’s an actual teenager now. She still seems so small and cute, but you think of how you’d felt at fourteen, and how much you had understood the depth of your love for Satoru, and this usually brings you down to earth a little.

But still. It’s her first relationship. You’re allowed to find it sweet! You pause in your cleaning, give your hands a quick wash, and then pull up your phone to text Satoru.

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

Back from airport. I just had a thought: should we invite Uke over for dinner this week?

(Uke = Tsumiki’s boyfriend.)

Is that a good thing to do?

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

ik who he is!!!

>:(

also

yessssss pleasseeeeee

need to see him in person

hahahahha can i give him a talk

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

Talk?

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

**THE** TALK

!!!!

I’LL BE ALL

>:((((( IF U MESS HER AROUND YOULL HAVE ME TO DEAL WITH

RAHHH

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

No! Satoru!!

That’s cruel.

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

no no u mean..

*funny*

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

I’m not letting you threaten him?!

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

:(

itd be funny

dad thing

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

It is?

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

yeye

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

Why?

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

protectiveness n stuff

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

Hm.

I’m not sure.

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

wahhhhhh

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

But do you think it’s a good idea?

To invite him?

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

yeyeyeyeeyeye

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

I’ll ask Tsumiki to ask him.

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

yeyeyeyeyeyyeyeyeyeye

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

Okay. I’ve got to get back to my chores. I’m ticking off the list!

I’m feeling very productive.

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

noiiiiice

well done hebi hebi ur so cool <333333

ye I’ve gtg 2, currently fighting a curse lol

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

Satoru?! What?

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

its fineeee, ur more interesting

its easy dw

just kicking it n texting at the same time chillax

YO

ALSO

DONT HATE ME BUT

DO U WANT AN AIR FRYER

????

HEBI HEBI

RESPOND

AIR FRYER?

I GOT U AN AIR FRYER

HEYYYYYYYYYYYY TALK TO ME

THE GUY IN THE STORE SAID ITS RLY GOOD FOR COOKING

AND U COOK

ITS PERFECT

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

Stop texting me! You’re at work!

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

:(

so meannnnn

but ye I got u an air fryer lol i think its gonna b sick

the guy in the store said he made a cake???? in the air fryer?? wtffff that’s so cool

will u make me an air fryer cake

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

I will if you stop texting me and concentrate on what you’re supposed to be doing!

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

boooooo

boring boring

i think an air fryer cake would be so fun

what even is an air fryer?

idk anyway you’ve got one

ill give it to u tonite

wait gtg think it’s trying to use domain expansion lmao gonna kill it now

byeee ur the besttttt <333333

 

You purse your lips. This is exactly what you’ve been trying to discourage.

The trouble is: although Satoru can absolutely never know, you would really like to have an air fryer. And—god, you hate him—you think it’s really, really lovely that he’d think of you. You glare at your phone. You don’t care how casual he tries to play it off as: it’s an irritatingly, frustratingly thoughtful gift.  

The gift-giving started with the matching pillowcase for your bed that you had kept forgetting to buy. You hadn’t realised that, for some reason, your new bed set had only come with a duvet cover, and had been meaning to get round to buying the pillowcases before Satoru had done it for you.

Then it was a ridiculously expensive hot water bottle cover, because you’d mentioned—once, so off-handedly you hardly remember it—that your current one had become a bit worn.

Then it was a new work shirt, because, yes, he was right you’d needed one, but you had no idea how he’d known. And then another tube of mascara from the brand you use, because you’d forgotten to buy a new one and had been waiting for it to go on sale. And then the speaker, because you’ve been hankering after a Bluetooth one for ages, even though you could have sworn you’d never told him. Satoru, because of course he knows that you disapprove, had presented you with this one with the already-prepared excuse that it was on sale, Hebi-Hebi! You can’t expect me not to get it if it’s on sale, come on!

And now an air fryer! You’re never going to tell him this, but you’ve read about them in a cooking magazine you’ve got a subscription to, and you think that having one would be extremely beneficial to any new recipes you’d like to try.

You’ve gotten more into cooking recently; when you were isolating yourself from everyone, before you reconnected with Satoru and actually started therapy, you saw cooking as another mindless chore. You had to cook, because you had to eat, and you’d cycle through one or two meals that you knew would sate but never satisfy you.

But you’ve been spending evenings at Toyo’s, who is a surprisingly good home chef, and she’ll talk to you passionately about the new ingredient and flavour combinations she’s been using; and then, at a dinner party, you and Mayu had a long conversation about how she and her boyfriend have been batch-cooking recently, and how useful they’ve found the whole thing.

Satoru doesn’t see the point in cooking, and prefers ordering in or going out for dinner, but you’ve realised that there’s something satisfying about making a big meal for you two and the kids and watching everyone eat and enjoy it. You’re building up a mental recipe book of the children’s favourite foods, and so when you implement the things you’ve learnt, like how Tsumiki doesn’t like as much spice as Megumi, or that Satoru loves it when you caramelise onions that are supposed to only be fried, there’s a warm sort of glow that you feel right in the middle of your chest.

It's oddly maternal, you realised, a few days ago. Which is an odd thought, but not an unwelcome one, you suppose. You’re not the children’s mother; you’re not a mother; you’re certain you wouldn’t be a good mother. But, still. You bite down on the inside of your cheek.

Satoru. God, Satoru.

Yes: Satoru’s right. You do like cooking. And an air fryer will be useful.

But you can’t have him buying you these things! You finish up cleaning the bathroom and, sending the now-sparkling toilet a satisfied smile, you put the cleaning supplies away—tick!—and start looking around for where you keep the batteries, because the ones in the smoke alarm need changing. It’s not right that he buys you things. Yes, you appreciate it, and yes, you understand that it’s not as if he’s going into any kind of financial distress from it, but you still feel slightly bad.

You’re wondering how you’re going to manage convincing him to stop when your phone rings. You almost miss it—you’ve started on vacuuming the living room—but you feel it buzzing in your pocket and stop.

You don’t recognise the caller ID. You frown, and then answer.

“Hello?”

“Good afternoon. I’m calling from Saitama Urami East Junior High. Is this Hebi-san?”

“Speaking,” you say. Oh, dear. It’s the kids’ school.

“Great. I’m sorry to call, but unfortunately your son Megumi was involved in an incident with another boy in his class, about a half an hour ago. We believe Megumi initiated a fight with the boy. They’ve both currently in discussion with the Principal.”

You supress a sigh. You’d thought that Megumi would have stopped this type of stuff when he went to junior high, but the phone calls from the school haven’t stopped. You don’t know what to do to stop it.

“I see,” you say, trying to be diplomatic.

“Yes. Well,” you hear the quick patter of a keyboard, and then the click of a mouse, “I’ve got it on the system that since this is a recurring issue, we’re going to be needing to have an in-person talk with Megumi’s guardians.”

“Right.” You purse your lips. “Okay, alright. I can do that. I—I should be free during the morning, tomorrow, I think.”

“Ah. Well, I apologise, but it’s school policy that the parent or guardian of the offending pupil will have to pick up their child from school, in person. Megumi isn’t able to go back to class, as he’s been suspended until next Monday.”

“He has?”

“Unfortunately so.”

Shit.

Thank god you’re back from your trip: but, still, you’re away on Friday. Now both of the kids are well into middle school, they don’t want you or Satoru to pick them up from school anymore—it’s apparently only uncool children whose parents still pick them up—and it’s been a secret blessing, now that you don’t have to coordinate your work around the school’s timetable. But, still, you’ll be working during the day, even if you’re not on a trip. You can’t leave Megumi on his own for the rest of the week, can you?

You’ve got to sort this out. “I see. So he’s got to be picked up right now? He’s been walking home all of this year, and he can’t just make his own way back?”

“It’s school policy that the parent or guardian escort him from school. If this was a one-time thing, it might be different. But, like I said, this is a recurring issue with Megumi.”

You sense the slightest touch of irritation in the secretary’s tone.

“Well, of course. If it’s school policy,” you say, trying to not get annoyed. “Yes, alright. I’ll be in as soon as I can.”

“Thank you, Hebi-san.”

Before you forget, you send a quick message to Satoru:

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

Megumi’s been suspended until Monday. He got in a fight again. I’m going up to the school now.

 

“Yeah, that’s alright,” you say, bringing your phone back to your ear. “I can be there in about forty minutes. How’s that?”

“Wonderful. I’ll let the office know they should be expecting you.”

“Brilliant.”

The line’s cut, and you swear into your half-vacuumed living room.

You rub at your temples with your fingertips. You’re only a third of your way through your list, and you stare at it, stuck with a magnet to your fridge, with a glum sort of longing.

Oh, well. Maybe you should get Megumi to help you with the cleaning when he gets back. Yes, you were looking forward to getting through your list, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. At least you’re called up on your day off, and not when you’re literally out of the country.

Suspended! Even for someone whose first experience of school was high school, you know that being suspended is far from ideal. Do you need to discipline him more? You don’t really know whether you ought to, or not—you don’t want to be like those naïve parents that delude themselves into thinking their bully of a child is actually a saint, but you know that Megumi’s not a mean child. You can’t believe that he’d ever intentionally be cruel, or hurt someone weaker than himself without reason.

You also know that he feels isolated at his school, that he is so withdrawn that he may not have any friends at all, that he is a prime target for bullies, and that he lashes out when he feels trapped.

You know that children often feel different to their peers. And that Megumi is different, fundamentally.

You keep getting phone calls about him. You don’t get phone calls about Tsumiki: she’s such a good girl, so sociable and charming and sweet, and you sometimes find yourself faltering in how much attention you give her opposed to Megumi. You know it’s not right, and you’re determined that Tsumiki should never feel like an afterthought to you. You have to try, with her, in a different way.

Still. Tsumiki isn’t the one punching other children at school.

You just want Megumi to be happy now; you don’t want him wasting these years, only getting by because he’s hoping it’ll be better when he’s fifteen. You want to make it all better for him, so Megumi never has to worry, and you want to do it now. You don’t know how to; it’s not as if there’s a step-by-step guidebook on how to raise sorcerer children in non-shaman schools. Even if you have read as many childcare books as you can.

You think that the greatest hope you have, as you put the vacuum away and look for your gloves, would be that they never feel the way you did, when you were a kid.

 

--

 

“Satoru?”

You stare at him, sat next to Megumi outside the Principal’s office. Satoru perks up at the sound of his name, and grins.

“Hey, Hebi-Hebi!”

“What are you doing here?” You glance back at the secretary who had just pointed them out to you; she’s paying very close attention to her laptop, clicking intently. You lower your voice. “Did they call you?”

“Nah,” Satoru says, patting the chair next to him. “But I saw your text, and I’m free the rest of the day, so why wouldn’t I come and give you a hand?” Satoru ruffles Megumi’s hair, and Megumi pushes him off. “We can all go and talk with the Principal together, how about that?”

Megumi shrugs.

You sit, slowly. You’d been rehearsing your one-on-one speech with Megumi all in the car ride up, without considering that Satoru would want to come into Megumi’s school with you. You feel a touch of guilt for assuming he wouldn’t; he cares about the kids just as much as you do.

“Megumi,” you say, leaning forward to get a better look at him. “Will you please tell me what’s going on?”

“He’s suspended,” Satoru supplies.

You send him a look. “Yes. Yes, the school told me that, Megumi, when they called me up less than an hour ago, telling me you’d gotten into another fight with a classmate? Who was it this time?”

Megumi shrugs. He’s hunched over, arms crossed and almost brushing his knees. His hair has fallen over his eyes, marring them from view. Building frustration blends with ever-present affection and a chiding desire to tell him to get a haircut.

“Megumi,” you hiss. “I could’ve been at work. I’ve driven all the way from my house because I’m about to have a long talk with your Principal—about you being suspended!—and I’m probably going to be in there doing my best to defend you, kiddo, so you’re going to tell me what’s happened before anyone else will. You understand? Right now.”

There’s a long, drawn-out pause, and then Megumi says: “It’s the same stuff. Fukui and everyone were coming at me and they got in my face. And then Fukui started saying stuff about me and about Tsumiki. And I told him to shut up. And he didn’t, so I made him shut up, and now he’s not gonna say that again.”

You lean back, and give Satoru a bewildered look. He’s wearing his blindfold, and you can’t see most of his expression, but he sends you a pinched smile. He waves his hand just above Megumi’s head, more like: don’t worry about it. Your eyes widen at him: of course I’m worrying about it!

“Fushiguro-san?”

The door behind you opens, and out walks a scowling boy around Megumi’s age, and a thin woman with her hand on the boy’s shoulder. She gives you a sharp nod and tightens her grip on the boy, who grimaces.

“Ah, here we are.”

The Principal’s a short, portly man; he’s built like a tree stump, with very little waist, just straight and blocky from his shoulders to his feet. He squints through browline glasses at you, and then Satoru, and then he focuses back on Megumi.

“Yes, yes, come on through,” he says, ushering the three of you into his office. There are two plastic chairs facing his desk, and before the Principal can pull up a third, Satoru picks one up from the stack at the side of the room and sets it down. “Yes, yes,” the man says again, “best idea to do so, best idea.”

Satoru smiles graciously. You wish you could mind-link with him to tell him to take that blindfold off. But then you look down at your gloves, which you’re wearing indoors on an averagely mild September, and you think better of it. Maybe the Principal just assumes you’re a family of wild sensory issues, or something like that.

“I have to say, thank you for coming in on late notice, Fushiguro-san,” the Principal says, directing his words to Satoru, whose lips purse into a pout. “I initially only called your wife, but it’s very useful when we can have both parents involved, very useful.”

Satoru grins. “Fushiguro? Nah, my surname’s not Fushiguro. My name’s Satoru Gojo!”

Out of the corner of your eye, Megumi’s face collapses into a scowl.

“I—oh, I see.” The Principal blusters, and turns his attention to you. “Apologies. I wasn’t aware you were remarried… Gojo-san?” Before you can answer, seeing your expression, he corrects himself: “Sorry, sorry. You must be Fushiguro-san.”

“Unfortunately not,” you say, dry.

“Oh. Apologies, I see, you’re…” The Principal begins to rifle through his papers, picking up speed. “Apologies, I assumed… I should have looked beforehand…”

“Our surnames are all different,” you say. “Mine’s Hebi. We’re Megumi’s guardians.”

The Principal’s mouth forms a little circle. “I see. I see.”

“And they’re not married, either,” Megumi adds sourly.

“That, too!” Satoru says, clapping once in faux-celebration. “It’s a huge mish-mash of people under our roof. Thank you, Megumi, for providing clarity to our very complicated situation.”

“…Right,” the Principal says, after a moment of hesitation. “I see. I see.”

You sigh. “Megumi’s suspension?”

“Yes!” The Principal fiddles with his glasses. You spare a second to check on Satoru, only to find him beaming. Less than ideal. “Yes, Fushiguro’s suspension. It’s a consequence—an unfortunate consequence, but a necessary one—of Fushiguro’s actions this morning. As my secretary told you on the phone, he was found to have been involved in a fight with another student this morning.”

“I wasn’t called,” Satoru says. His legs are spread in front of him, one of his feet taps on the side of the Principal’s desk. He looks around, like he’s looking for someone to correct him. “I wasn’t called, though. Why wasn’t I called?”

The Principal hesitates. “It’s… typically, we have more success calling the mother—or, erm, female guardian, in your case. We find the father—male guardian—is often busier with work.” He clears his throat. “Statistically, that is.”

“But we both work,” Satoru says. He gestures to himself, and then you. “Isn’t that on your file? I swear you guys know. Hebi’s told me loads of times”

“I do have that on file, yes,” the Principal says, as he checks. “But you’ll understand that it’s customary.”

“Customary? What ever could you mean?”

“It’s… it is just what is done. You’ll understand, surely?”

“Nah. I don’t get it.” Satoru’s grin widens. “Can’t you explain it to me?”

“That’s not necessary,” you say to the Principal, placatingly. You send Satoru a sharp look. “It’s fine.”

“But—”

“Can we please discuss Megumi’s suspension,” you say, to nobody in particular.

“Certainly!” The Principal touches his glasses again, and you look to Megumi. He’s adopted the same pose he was sitting in when outside the Principal’s office; hunched over, eyes cast down and shadowed by his hair. His right hand is on his knee, clenching and unclenching. “Here at Saitama Urami East,” the Principal continues, “we have a firm no-violence policy. It’s understandable, I’m sure. And it’s natural we discipline the students who break this policy. Hence Fushiguro’s suspension.”

“I get that,” you say. “But—suspension seems a little far. Doesn’t it?”

“If it was a first-time incident,” the Principal says, “then I’d agree with you. Or if it was just a quick tussle, then it’d be different. But Fushiguro—ah—”

You glance at Megumi again. His head sinks down further.

“—Fushiguro was very intent on fighting, this morning,” the Principal professes. “We had to separate the boys with force. To speak candidly.”

“With force?”

“With force?” Satoru echoes. He flicks Megumi on the side of his head, and Megumi ducks out of the way. “Like, how much force?”

“I—”

“You were really going for him, hey, Megumi?” Satoru taps him on the shoulder. “A burst of passion, or what?”

“I wouldn’t call it passion,” the Principal says weakly.

“Did they really have to separate you?” you ask. “Megumi. They had to… what, drag you two off each other?”

Megumi shrugs.

“You let the teachers get you off him?” Satoru taps Megumi again. “They got one over on you?”

“That’s not—”

“I gave up when the teachers got involved,” Megumi mutters. “Wasn’t worth it anymore. That’s why they got me off him.”

Satoru blows some air through his lips. “Phew! I was gonna say, Megumi. Would’ve surprised me if some teachers could actually beat you like that. Pretty embarrassing on my end, too, if you know what I mean.”

“Megumi takes karate class,” you say, to the Principal. “Which—obviously—is irrelevant. Right?”

Satoru pouts, and then sighs and says: “Yeah, yeah. Irrelevant.”

“Ah. I see. I see.” The Principal’s eyes flick between you and Satoru like he’s watching a tennis match. “And I’m sure he’s very talented at it. But, yes, yes, irrelevant. I was saying.”

“But isn’t it more normal to be suspended for a day or something?” Satoru adds, leaning back into his relaxed sitting position. “You’re suspending Megumi for basically three days. That’s pretty extreme, isn’t it?”

“I was going to say,” you say. “This is the first time Megumi’s been suspended. Three days?”

“And for some rough play,” Satoru remarks under his break. “Shouldn’t be—”

“Three days is customary. In accordance with our no-violence policy.” The Principal hesitates again. “And. Well. It may have been exacerbated by some other notes about Fushiguro’s behaviour.”

“Other notes?” You look up at him. “What do you mean, other notes? I though we were just here to talk about Megumi’s fighting.”

“It’s minor in comparison, but…” The Principal’s fingers go to the file in front of him, skin scratching against rough paper. “It’s a difficult one to discuss, but Fushiguro has reportedly been befriending some… wildlife?”

You stare at him. “Excuse me?”

“It’s against our policy for students to bring animals with them to school,” the Principal says. “Or, really, in Fushiguro’s case, to have them in school at all? As some students are especially sensitive to animals… you understand, children get scared of big animals…”

“Right,” you say, dreading where this conversation is going.

“And Fushiguro’s been seen on multiple occasions to be in the presence of… some dogs?” The Principal’s voice jumps up a few notes. Hurriedly, he adds: “Though we know he’s not coming in with them, so it’s not an issue on the home’s end. But we think he might be… well, we’re not exactly sure what he might be doing, but there’s enough reports of it that we know he’s doing something.”

“Huh.” Satoru shuffles in his seat so he’s facing Megumi head-on. He crosses his arms, lips pinched. “Funny. He didn’t mention that.”

Megumi’s head lowers even further.

“I can’t believe this!” Satoru stares at you through his blindfold, then at the Principal, and then at you again. “The dogs, Megumi? The dogs!”

“I know,” you say, “but Satoru—”

“What else have you been seeing?” Satoru asks, rounding on the Principal. “Huge toads? Gazillions of rabbits?”

“Not to my—”

“It’s not a big deal,” Megumi mumbles.

“It is a big deal!” Satoru’s hands are practically on his hips. “Okay, I can forgive the fighting, sure, whatever, but this is a whole different thing!”

There is, you can admit, a certain touch of humour to Satoru’s way of thinking—he has very little issue with Megumi fighting another student, but is personally affronted when Megumi’s seen using his cursed technique in school.

It’s not as if you’re that pleased, either. You’ve had countless conversations about Megumi’s use of his technique, and the decision has always been the same: when he’s training with Satoru or other sorcerers, he’s allowed. But when he’s in school—surrounded by non-shamans—he is absolutely not.

“I don’t think we really can forgive the fighting—” the Principal starts.

“I didn’t think people had noticed,” Megumi says, to the floor. “No-one pays attention to me most of the time. What do they care?”

“You know it’s not about that, Megumi,” you say. “Kiddo, you know this.”

“Didn’t think it mattered.” Megumi shrugs. “Dunno. Won’t do it again.”

“Should we get back to the fighting?” The Principal’s scratching at the papers again. It’s a rough sound, dry. “I feel we’ve gone off topic.”

“But the dogs—”

“Let’s get back to the fighting,” you say.

The Principal lets out a quick, shaky sigh. “Here, Fushiguro—I mean, Gojo-san, Hebi-san.” He leans forward, his hands clasped together. “The boy your son was involved in a fight with, he’s not exactly a model student. I understand that though Fushiguro here was the one to start the physical altercation, he was also provoked, which we are also investigating further.”

“Right.”

“And before you arrived, I was speaking to Fukui’s mother—the boy Fushiguro was interacting with this morning—to discuss Fukui’s suspension. I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know it’s considerably longer than Fushiguro’s. And we’ll be discussing long-term solutions once he’s back.”

“Right,” you repeat.

“This isn’t Fukui’s first suspension, you see, and it is Fushiguro’s…” The Principal clears his throat. “That being said, this isn’t the first incident Fushiguro’s been in, either. Which brings us to the main reason—other than the wildlife—that I wanted to have a chat.”

“A chat?” you repeat.

The Principal swallows. “A conversation,” he amends. “With everyone here.”

You stare at him.

“Yes. Well.” The Principal fiddles with his glasses once again. “The truth is, we understand that Fushiguro’s not always had the… best of luck, with his upbringing. We understand that is probably influencing his behaviour, hm, Fushiguro?” The Principal makes a weak, cajoling smile to Megumi. You tense. “And we want to respect that. It’s why Fushiguro’s welcome back here, after the weekend.”

Megumi stares hard at the floor. Your heart thuds. He’s not had the best of luck? It’s a damn feeble way of skirting around Megumi’s childhood, before you and Satoru took him in. But to say things like that in front of him? When Megumi’s clearly so on-edge?

Megumi’s whole body has gone taut, every muscle clenched. In your rush of anger, you don’t care whether you can deal with it or not: you reach forward and squeeze his knee, as comforting as you can make it. Megumi jolts, but after a second, he doesn’t move away.

You see him hesitate, and then he reaches around. His fingers, skinny and long and pale, grasp the sleeve of your shirt. You tighten your hold on him.

“I—”

“Megumi’s got a great home life.” Satoru crosses his arms and leans forward. “What are you trying to say?”

The Principal blinks. “I was only referring to—”

“I got that,” Satoru says. “I got what you were going for. But you don’t need to insult us out in the open. We’re here to talk about Megumi in school, aren’t we? Not about what he’s like out of it.”

“It provides context,” the Principal says, “for his behaviour.”

Megumi’s fingers tense on your shirt sleeve.

Satoru’s jaw tenses. “All it provides is—”

“Satoru,” you say, quietly.

He glances at you. You can see him working it over in his mind, weighing it up, all done in under a second. Then Satoru relaxes, sits back. He sends the Principal a broad grin.

“Megumi’s got a more interesting home life than anyone here,” Satoru says, waving his hand through the air. “He’s in a household with three times the average number of surnames. That’s pretty interesting, wouldn’t you say?”

You force out a laugh, to try to break the tension. The Principal follows suit.

Satoru’s got his hand on the centre of Megumi’s back, and Megumi lets it stay there. He doesn’t look up from the floor.

“Very interesting,” the Principal says. He can tell that he’s misstepped: his voice, never strong to begin with, has gotten leagues higher and reedier. “Very interesting. Yes. But that’s to say—we want to take Fushiguro’s case seriously. And carefully. Which is why we’re here to discuss the suspension.”

You stay in the office for another fifteen minutes; discussing Megumi’s past behaviour, the discipline systems in place in the school, what he’ll need to do in the future to avoid further suspensions. You nod and hum and try to keep the peace; after his initial burst of emotion, Satoru acts as a similarly good buffer between the Principal and Megumi.

After you’re dismissed—Satoru making some offhanded comment about nostalgia for Yaga’s office back in school, which somehow manages to make you laugh—you take the long way back to your car. Megumi doesn’t speak, unwilling to look up from the floor.

You glance at Satoru. He sees your look, nods, and stretches.

“Don’t want to get driving yet, do you?” Satoru says, his hands on his back. “Where’s the—hey, c’mon, you two! Let’s have a sit-down outside before we get in the car. I’m way too hyped up to get inside.”

Satoru bounds over to a bench just outside of the school grounds, and sits himself down, stretching out his long legs.

“Set yourself down,” Satoru says, when Megumi just stares at him. Satoru raises his eyebrows, and Megumi swallows and slowly lowers himself beside him. You sit, too; you, Megumi, Satoru.

Satoru leans back, tapping his heels against the floor. He hums a semi-familiar tune, and then starts talking with surprising gusto about the weather.

“It’s very autumn-y,” Satoru’s saying, “don’t you think? Or is that not the word? Autumn-y? Autumn-esque? Autumnal! Autumnal’s the word, I think, isn’t it? Or is it—”

“If you’re going to yell at me,” Megumi cuts in, “can you get it over with?” His tone isn’t aggressive, but he’s hunched over again, his elbows on his knees.

Satoru pauses. “Who says we’re going to yell at you?”

“It’s pretty obvious.”

“How so?”

Megumi shifts to send Satoru a glare. “You’re avoiding talking to me about how I got myself suspended. You don’t want to have a… difficult conversation with me.”

“A difficult conversation?” Satoru repeats jovially. “What makes you think—”

“It’s what he told me it was when he got me in his office. A difficult conversation.” Megumi turns his glare back to the floor. “And then he told me I was suspended. And that he was calling you guys in.”

“I was under the impression that your school only intended for Hebi to be called in,” Satoru says. “Which, I’ve got to say, is a real sexist move. Archaic! Did you see how I stood up for you, Hebi-Hebi? Feminism in action, right?”

Megumi jerks a hand in Satoru’s direction. “You see what I mean? Avoiding it.”

“I’m not—”

“Can you just yell at me?” Megumi looks up at you, through the dark strands of his hair. “Hebi-san?”

Your head drops to the side. “Kid. When have I every shouted at you?”

Megumi doesn’t answer.

“Have I ever? Has Gojo ever?” You are gripped with the sudden, not unfamiliar, urge to move closer to him. Megumi’s body looks so small, hunched up the way it is. His bony shoulders stick out from his school shirt, and his shins are scraped and bruised. From a fight, or from training with Satoru, you’re not sure. You don’t know why he didn’t choose to wear trousers today. You want to touch him, to hold him close and comfort him and hug him. But you do not trust yourself, in a situation as fragile as this, and so you do not. “C’mon. Have we?”

A beat. Megumi’s shoulders raise, and then drop.

“No. That’s not how we do things. Do you think that yelling’s going to solve anything?”

Another shrug: this time, with a half-second less of a delay.

“I don’t think so either. It’s not that simple.” You push some of your hair out of your face, looking out into the distance. You sigh. “What is it, kiddo? What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Megumi mutters.

“Well,” you say, letting out a half-laugh. “I’m not going to yell at you, but I’m certainly not going to accept ‘nothing’ as an answer.”

“It’s nothing.”

“It doesn’t look like it’s nothing.”

“It is though.”

“Hmm.” You glance at him. “Looks like you’re the one avoiding a difficult conversation now.”

Megumi huffs out an exasperated sigh. “I’m not—I’m not avoiding. I’m just saying. It’s not a big deal, or whatever.”

“I’ve heard that one before,” Satoru comments, leaning back and staring into the field. “From your sister. That’s what she’s always saying; that it’s not a big deal, or it doesn’t matter. Loads of odd phrases like that.”

Megumi’s shoulders tense. “I’m not Tsumiki.”

“And why’d you say that?”

“No reason.”

“You’ve both got a habit of deflecting all of your problems.” Satoru mimes it out in front of him, a casual hand sweeping air to the side, punctuating the syllables. “You show it in different ways, but I’d say it’s about the same when you get down to the root of it. You know Megumi, when you think about it, you and Tsumiki are actually pretty exactly alike—”

“We are not!” Megumi sits up straight, glaring viciously at Satoru. His voice echoes out over the grounds, carrying into the field. Back into the school. “We’re not alike. We’re not even—similar, shut up. Shut up!”

Satoru’s expression doesn’t change. “Huh. Why don’t you think you’re similar?”

“Because!” Megumi fists his fingers in the back of his hair, tugging. “Because. We’re just not. Just look at us. It’s obvious.”

“What’s obvious?” you ask, gently. Megumi looks over at you, and you see, in his dark slate eyes, something burning, something dying out.

“Everything.” Megumi blinks, hard. “Don’t—you don’t say that we’re the same. We’re not even close.” He breaks your gaze, and slumps down on the bench, crossing his arms tight. “Don’t do that to Tsumiki, saying we’re the same.”

Over the top of Megumi’s head, you feel Satoru looking at you. You cannot bring yourself to look at him, and for once, you’re grateful that you cannot see his eyes.

“Can you tell me what you mean, kiddo?” You lean down, so you’re closer to his level. Megumi doesn’t move away this time, only stares right ahead of himself, unwilling to look around. “What do you mean, we shouldn’t do that to Tsumiki?”

Megumi’s mouth works around the words. “Comparing us,” he says, finally, almost under his breath. “Makes her look bad, if you say she’s like me.”

You take a slow breath in, and hold yourself back from saying anything else.

After the silence has stretched on longer than he could find comfortable, Megumi’s face twitches.

“It’s not like she’s getting suspended,” he mumbles. “Or—fighting people, or whatever. She’s too busy being in the chess team, and debate club, and being class president, and doing the student council whatever stuff. And everything else. And hanging out with all of her friends, who are the ones who elected her for that stuff.”

“Is that what you’re worried about?” you ask, unsure. You see Satoru shift in your peripheral vision. “That Tsumiki’s… doing more than you?”

“No. I don’t care about clubs and societies or whatever.” Megumi’s fingers twitch. “It’s that—it’s that she’s elected for it. Right? People pick her for that. They chose her.”

The unsaid: that no-one would choose Megumi. That Tsumiki’s classmates like her, want to be her friend, would vote for her. And that nobody would vote for Megumi.

“It’s why you can’t say she’s like me,” Megumi says. “Because if she’s like me, then she wouldn’t be doing all of that stuff. She wouldn’t get to.”

“Megumi,” you say. “I know it must be hard to—”

“Yeah!” He turns his gaze, harsher than usual, straight to you. “Yeah, it is hard! And you, you don’t get it. You don’t know what it’s like!”

“What d’you mean?” Satoru asks. On the surface, his tone is conversational, but you know him too well to miss the hidden note of vigilance.

“Being like… like one of us, and having to pretend I’m not! And being me. And doing everything on my own, because Tsumiki’s not like me, and she doesn’t get it. Nobody gets it.”

“We don’t get it?” Satoru asks again: a prompt.

“You don’t get it.” Megumi’s glare flits between you both, one-two, one-two. “Neither of you do. Neither of you went to normal school. You were always surrounded by sorcerers, and people who, who got you. Nobody ever thought you were—a freak. Or whatever.”

You let his words sit with you, and don’t look to Satoru.

A freak, Megumi thinks. That’s what the other children think of him?

Megumi’s not like Tsumiki. Megumi’s not sociable, or outgoing, or likely to compromise himself in order to fit in. Megumi prefers to be brash and alone than compliant and with others. Or—or, you thought he did. Now, you don’t know.

Megumi’s not like Tsumiki: he’s a sorcerer. Megumi trains with Satoru multiple times a week. Megumi visits Jujutsu High and meets other shamans. Megumi can summon shikigami out of nothing but shadow, and manipulate the creatures to his will. Megumi has the potential to supersede Satoru, and it’s what he’s being trained for.

Megumi’s the only person in his household with his technique. And you think—how would you have felt, if you had gone to a school like Megumi’s?

How would you have survived, in his situation? What would you have done? Without Satoru. On your own.

It’s not the same. You’re not your father; Megumi’s loved, more than you ever were. He has Tsumiki. He has you, and he has Satoru.

You, and Satoru. You glance down at Megumi, and your heart lurches. You’re not his parents. Neither of you or Satoru live with him. You both leave, each night, to go to your separate houses. The kids sleep with servants, none of which they are overly familiar with, now Yahaba is dead.

Yes, you raise Megumi and Tsumiki, claim responsibility for them, but there is a distance that parents do not have with their children.

You were nineteen when you and Satoru first took them in. Nineteen is too young, for that responsibility. And with your health; the way you couldn’t even care for yourself. You’re not self-congratulating when you know that you’ve done the best for them, the best that you could have done.

But you’re also not hypercritical when you acknowledge that there are so many ways in which you could have been better.

A freak, Megumi had said. Different. And again: the only child in his house with his technique. The only person he knows alive with his technique.

You know, firsthand, how isolating that can feel.

“You don’t know much about what I was like, when I was a kid,” you say. You bring a leg up to your chest, rest your chin on your knee, look to Megumi. He glances up at you. “Younger than you are. Before I went to Jujutsu High.”

Megumi shrugs. His eyes aren’t flickering, the way they were before.

It’s true, what you’re saying. You haven’t told the kids about your childhood. They’ve never needed to know; unnecessary, you’d thought it. Unnecessarily upsetting. And now—

“My technique’s not the same as my family technique,” you tell him, slowly, picking through the words that you want to say. Not to censor, not to overindulge in details, to get the meaning across in the best way. “My hands, that it hurts people if I touch them with my palms, that’s not my family technique.”

Megumi’s eyelashes flutter when he blinks. He doesn’t say anything, but he also doesn’t interrupt.

“It’s actually a bit of a weird, weak twist on my family technique.” You smile faintly at him, a brief thing. “But the important thing is that it’s not the technique I was supposed to have. And that made my family… pretty angry with me. My relatives, the ones I’m blood related to? We don’t get along that well because of it.”

“Because of your technique?” Megumi echoes. He sits up a bit straighter, then coughs, and casts his eyes down. “You don’t talk to your dad, you always say. Is that why? Because he didn’t like your technique?”

“Essentially,” you say. Then you hesitate, for a moment. “My father didn’t treat me very well, Megumi. Because I didn’t have my family technique, and that was important to him. He had it, and his mother, my grandmother, had it. And I didn’t.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure,” you answer, honestly. “Sometimes sorcerers are born with the normal technique, and sometimes they’re born with a different technique, and sometimes they’re born with no technique at all. It’s less common, what happened with me, but I guess… it’s got to happen at some point.”

“Yeah,” Megumi says. He stares down at his shoes. “But even though it makes sense, and it’s not your fault, you still didn’t have the same one as your family? So you didn’t… like, fit in, and stuff?” Megumi’s fingers twitch again. “Is that the big moral of what you’re trying to say, or whatever?”

You laugh, softly. “Something like that.”

“Yeah.”

“But it’s more than just not fitting in,” you say, and Megumi’s head tilts up, listening. “Hey. Do you know my brother?”

Megumi nods. “Haru-kun.”

“Yeah.” Your lips twitch. Megumi’s met Haru, in one of his brief visits to Jujutsu High. “Yeah, Haru. He’s… Haru was born a few years after I was. Our mothers are different. My father didn’t like that I couldn’t pass on his family technique, and so he wanted another child to pass it on instead of me. And so he likes Haru more than he likes me.”

“And he treats Haru-kun better,” Megumi finishes. He looks up to you, brow furrowed, like he’s trying to solve the problem in his head. “All because of your technique. And because of… because he wanted… what?”

“An heir, really.” You shrug, like Megumi’s been doing, and a spark of pain flashes up the joint. You disguise the wince with a sigh. “It sounds old-fashioned, but that’s because it is. Lots of Jujustu families are.”

“Like the Zenins?”

“Yeah,” you say. “Like the Zenins. Cursed techniques are pretty important to big sorcerer families. And my family was never that big, but we were pretty traditional. If I’d have been like I was expected to be, with the right technique and everything else, then it would’ve been different for me. But it wasn’t, Megumi. Because I was different, even though everyone else was a sorcerer.”

Megumi nods, slowly. He shifts from side-to-side on the bench, his fingers clasped tightly together.

“Is that why you don’t like to touch people, Hebi-san?” Megumi asks. He seems just as careful as you; you’re reminded, again, how little the children know of your life before them. “Because you don’t like your technique?”

Your mind goes to ropes behind your back, the orders that could not be disobeyed, the fear you had felt, the cold complacency. The absolute lack of touch, first enforced on you, then enforced by you.

“In part,” you say, with tact. “And also because… I was pretty lonely, when I was a kid. I wasn’t allowed to touch people, and then it became more of a habit, and then I just couldn’t. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Megumi says, with an understanding that surprises you. How routine becomes rule, just with the passage of time. Then, with some hesitance: “You were lonely?”

You give a quick smile. “Sometimes. We all feel lonely, but I think I felt a bit lonelier than most people my age. Lonelier than I should have been.”

“But you had me.”

Satoru.

You look up to him, surprised. You see his frown through the blindfold, the flash of guilt, and then he slips into an easy, false, but gentle, grin.

“Sorry!” Satoru shuffles back, pushing the attention from himself. “Shouldn’t interrupt. Continue.”

You see the faint tension in his jaw, the lock of soft hair falling out from under the dark fabric, the pale-white scar against pale-white skin. All of him is so familiar, from years of being together.

Megumi’s looking at Satoru too. He then turns to you, and his voice is achingly hollow when he says: “He’s right, though. You had him. Didn’t you? Since forever.”

You breathe, careful and slow. You swallow. “Yeah. Yeah, I did. And it’s good, when you have someone who cares about you. It can… help, definitely. But it doesn’t mean you’re not going to be lonely.”

“It doesn’t?” Megumi’s voice comes quiet.

“Not always.” And this time, you do move closer to him. Just an inch, just barely. Your knees brush his, and Megumi doesn’t move away. “You can be… surrounded by people, and you can still feel lonely. And that’s not your fault. It’s okay to feel like that.”

Megumi’s doesn’t respond.

“But it helps to have people,” you say. Megumi shifts, and you watch him as he listens. “And you’ve got people. You’ve got people who care about you, and love you. Loads and loads and loads.”

Megumi makes a sort of a grunt, a sound of acknowledgement. He sits up, his head still bowed. “Yeah?” he asks. His voice crackles.

“Yeah,” you say. “Loads and loads and loads.”

Megumi swallows, and with what must be immense difficulty, says: “Like who?”

“Megumi,” you say, softly, barely more than a whisper. “Like us. Like me. You know that, don’t you?”

He shrugs, but it’s more of a deflection than any real uncertainty. This, at least, is reassuring.

“Yeah, you know we do!” Satoru pushes off from the side of the bench and wraps an arm around Megumi’s shoulders. He squeezes Megumi against him, ignoring Megumi’s groan and feeble, scrabbling efforts to push him off. “You’ve got us two looking out for you! And we love you and Tsumiki to the moon and back, isn’t that right?”

“Gettoff.”

“I’ve known you since you were about this tall,” Satoru continues, using his free hand to gesture about a foot from the floor. “And if that doesn’t show any kind of love or care, then I don’t know what—Megumi, stop trying to hit me, I’m showing you how much I love and care about you!”

“You’re so lame,” Megumi complains. He’s finally successful in shoving Satoru off him, and he buries his face in his hands. “This is so lame.”

“Nah, it’s not,” Satoru says, chuckling. “Talking about your feelings is good. It’s helpful. It heals the soul!”

“What he means,” you say over the top of him, fighting the urge to roll your eyes, “is that you’re never going to be out of people who love you. I love you, Gojo loves you—”

“I wish he wouldn’t.”

“Hey!”

“—in his own way, he cares.” You’re smiling, though, and you think you see a flicker of something on Megumi’s expression, too. “Tsumiki loves you. You’ve got a home base with us, kid. You’ve always got people to come back to.”

“Yeah,” Megumi says. He shrugs one final time, and then glances up at the sky. “Yeah. Thanks. I—thanks. Whatever. Can we go now? I never had lunch.”

Because of the suspension. This conversation isn’t enough; you’ll need to talk to him about the fighting. Why he can’t be doing it, why it’s wrong, figuring out things he can do instead.

But then you see Satoru. You catch a glimpse of him in the corner of your eye. You see the familiar turn of his mouth, that determined crease at the side of his lips.

And you know: not right now.

Later. You’ve got time. You don’t have to solve everything right now. Later.

 

--

 

“The children are pestering me about dinner,” Satoru says dramatically, as he strides into the kitchen. “Make them stop, please, oh great one of the culinary arts.”

You turn, and then laugh. Satoru’s hair is sticking up, all rumpled around his ears, like it looks when he wears he’s been wearing his blindfold all day. He tries to pat it down, but his movements are too casual, and you can tell he’s not all that self-conscious about it, like how he might have been when he was younger.

At your laugh, Satoru sticks out his bottom lip in an exaggerated pout. He bounds over to you, past your shining-new air fryer sitting next to your spice jars, and drapes himself over the kitchen counter in a bid for your attention.

“Nope. Don’t say anything,” Satoru says. “If you make fun of how my hair looks, Hebi-Hebi, I’ll burst into flames. You’re not allowed to.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

Satoru groans. “It’s because Tsumiki’s beating me,” he complains, after a second. He runs his fingers through his hair some more and manages to tame the more unruly strands. “I’m stressed about it, and now it’s taking effect in my appearance.”

“Have you decided on your move?” you ask, and Satoru hums despondently.

“Yeah,” he says, “pawn to G6. Just did it. But I absolutely have to beat her this time, so I’m overthinking everything. It’s a matter of pride now.” He puffs out his chest, then deflates.

You smile. “Surely overthinking everything is a good thing? Isn’t chess all about overthinking?”

“It’s mind games,” Satoru says. “Tsumiki’s more cunning than I am. She thinks about it less, and more. In the better ways.”

“Playing the person, not the game.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I was under the impression you could be pretty cunning, though.” You take your hand off the handle of the pan you’re working on, and gesture to his eyes, hidden behind his sunglasses. “Just use your family talents, Satoru. Wooo…”

“Agh. If chess involved curse-finding, then for sure. But it’s boring and non-sorcerer-y and so the only advantage I’ve got is my non-sorcerer-y mind.” Satoru sniffs. “Which is pretty extraordinarily brilliant, but still.”

It’s the family chess tournament: it started with Tsumiki making vice-president of her school’s chess society last April, and her cajoling Megumi into learning so she could practise against him. You had encouraged everyone else to learn, in an attempt to support Tsumiki’s hobbies, and Satoru had jumped at the chance for a wide-spread competition.

He’d made posters advertising the event, despite it only having four participants, which had ended up being plastered all around the house, and had created a round-robin style competition schedule. You’ve stuck the leaderboard poster on the fridge. Satoru is invested to no degree.

You and Megumi, as you’ve both realised, are hopeless at chess. Tsumiki practises with her club three times a week—plus lunchtimes—and has apparently skyrocketed in the ranking system they use, which you’ve tried to learn about and have explained with a mild degree of success to your friends. Satoru, of course, is a natural, and so it’s him and Tsumiki who have ended up in back-to-back chess matches, with you and Megumi taking the role of the impartial cheerleaders.

Satoru and Tsumiki’s current game has been going on for about five days. You secretly think that Satoru is the one stretching it out: Tsumiki confided in you yesterday that she’s got him beat, even if he doesn’t know it.

“Well, don’t stress too much about it. Soon your hair will start falling out,” you say, turning back to the stove. “It is already going grey.”

“My hair is not grey!” Satoru gasps. He roots around in the cutlery drawer to pull out a spoon, which he uses to scrutinise his appearance. “It’s not!”

“Sure it isn’t.”

“It isn’t! It’s a natural beautiful snowy white!”

“That sounds like an excuse.”

“Don’t say that to me,” Satoru says. He squints at his reflection and tugs on a strand of his hair. “My hair’s never going to change colour. It’s going to stay the same forever.”

“What happens when it begins to fall out?”

“It’s never going to fall out, either!”

“Have you been checking your hairline recently?” you ask in a deliberately airy manner.

“What?” Satoru pushes his glasses down to stare at you, horrified. “No! Why?”

“No reason.”

“What? Tell me! Do you think it’s moving?”

“Probably not.” You stir the sauce simmering in the pan, holding yourself back from showing any emotion other than a general impassiveness. “Although…”

“Although?” Satoru pushes himself off the counter to get closer to you. His eyes go extra wide. “Although? What? Although what?”

“Nothing really,” you say, still stirring. “I was only thinking about how your blindfold might be affecting your hairline. That’s all.”

“The blindfold?” Satoru brings his fingertips to his temple, shocked. “You think that could make me go bald?”

“It depends how tightly you’re wrapping it. To keep your hair up. Do you find it’s causing much tension?”

“I don’t know,” Satoru whispers. “I didn’t think about it.”

He runs his fingers through his hair, revealing a perfectly normal and unchanged hairline.

You smile to yourself.

“But I’m sure you’ll be fine. Besides,” you say, briskly, as Satoru mopes, “isn’t male balding all to do with testosterone levels, or something?”

“Yeah,” Satoru grumbles, “something like that.”

“Well, let’s hope your testosterone levels are low as can be.”

 “…Maybe that’s a bit far.”

“It is?” You laugh to yourself. “I don’t think so.”

“Nah, I’m still a guy.” Satoru puffs out his chest. “I still want loads of testosterone, ‘cause I’m a man. I’m a manly man. Don’t you think?”

“Hmm.”

“What’s that mean?” Satoru crosses his arms, a mix of indignation and unabashed amusement on his face. “Don’t you think I’m incredibly manly?”

“I…” You purse your lips to hide your smile. “I feel like this is a trap.”

“I have no idea what you mean, Hebi-Hebi. I’m interested to know what you think.”

“You are?”

“For sure.”

“Right.” You turn back to the stove, still fighting back your smile. “I think… it’s fair to say that you may not be the most masculine man to ever exist. Physically. It’s a science thing.”

“Excuse me!” Satoru presses a hand to his chest and gasps like you’d just shot him through the heart. “I’m offended! This is even worse than you threatening I’d go bald!”

“I wasn’t threatening—”

“Explain yourself!” he demands, theatrically. “What do you mean? I’m tall, aren’t I? That’s manly!”

“You are tall,” you say, “I’ll give you that.”

“And I’m muscly. That’s super manly.”

“You have muscle, because of your job.”

“That doesn’t take away from the fact that I have it.” Satoru flexes his biceps, waggling his eyebrows, and you actually laugh this time, and have to look away.

“God, don’t do that again. You look ridiculous.”

“I don’t look ridiculous. I look masculine.” Satoru puts his hands on his hips and stares at you. You stare back, entertained. “What else is there, huh? I’m making a good argument here. 1-0 to Satoru Gojo!”

“I’ll admit that you’re tall and have… decent musculature,” you say. “It’s just. Everything else, really.”

“What—!”

You set down your spoon and turn to face him, exasperated. “Firstly, you can’t grow facial hair, Satoru. I’ve never once seen you with anything more than very weak stubble.”

“That’s a personal choice! If I wanted to, I could—”

“You absolutely couldn’t.” You prod a finger in the centre of his chest, and Satoru grins. “Don’t forget, I was there when you hit puberty. I remember the ridiculous attempt at a moustache when you were fourteen.”

Satoru gasps. “That’s a low blow. You said you’d never bring that up again!

“You also have basically no body hair.”

“How would you know that?” An affronted pink flush rises to Satoru’s cheeks, and you laugh.

“I remember when we went to the beach,” you say, rolling your eyes. “You have absolutely no chest hair to speak of.”

“I—could’ve shaved it?”

You snort. “Your chest hair?”

“Yeah!” Satoru’s voice wavers and pitches up. “Yeah, I could’ve! You don’t know!”

“And it’s not as if you speak in this deep baritone, either.” You raise your eyebrows. “Case in point…”

“My voice isn’t high, Hebi-Hebi!”

“No,” you say, “but it’s not remarkably low, either.”

“I think it is.” Satoru rubs at his Adam’s apple. “Don’t you think it is? Wait, no, don’t answer that.”

“If you say so.”

“Wait, no, do answer it. Wait.” Satoru groans. “You’ve got me mixed up here.”

“Please accept my apologies for confusing you,” you say, smiling up at him. You get a clean spoon out of the drawer, dip it into the sauce, and offer it to him. “Here, try this.”

Satoru narrows his eyes, then pushes his glasses up his nose and looks away. “No.”

“Satoru.”

“No, you’ve hurt my feelings. You’ve turned me paranoid. I’m never going to be the same again.”

“Don’t be a baby.”

“I am not a baby!” Satoru gapes at you, aghast. “I am a person with feelings! Real-life feelings! And real-life fears and worries, about how I’m going to look when I’m old, and the fact that you don’t think I’m that much of a man, and now I think that you hate me.”

“This isn’t really helping your case that you’re uber-macho.”

“I don’t care,” Satoru says. “Nothing matters now that I know you hate me.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“No, I don’t think I will be,” Satoru says. He tilts his nose away from you, and you snort. “It’s no laughing matter, Hebi-Hebi! You’ve wounded me. I don’t think I’ll ever recover.”

“Fine. Fine. Firstly, I am sure,” you say, “you will be a very handsome old person.”

Satoru fiddles with a loose thread in his shirt. “Hmph.”

“And I don’t think it matters how masculine you are, because…” You press your lips together. “You…”

Satoru glances up at you, and you see a glimmer of pleasure in his eyes. “Yeah?”

“You probably haven’t found it to be… much of an issue, in your life.”

“Much of an issue?” Satoru blows out his cheeks in an overdramatic façade of confusion. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Much of an issue where?”

“Shut up.”

“No! I don’t know what you’re—”

“Right.” You roll your eyes at him, and you feel that familiar, warm squeezing feeling in your stomach when you catch Satoru’s lips twitching. “Alright. Listen. Your hair’s fine. It’s the same colour it’s always been. And your hairline’s fine, too, and it doesn’t matter how much testosterone you’ve got in your body because I’m sure you’ll be able to pull it off either way. How’s that?” You raise your eyebrows. “Are you still irrevocably wounded?”

Satoru clicks his tongue. “My hairline’s perfect,” he says, and then grins. “Thank you for admitting it.”

“Sure it is,” you say. You purse your lips, trying to hold back a smile yourself. “Now. Are you interested in trying the food, or are you just here to look for compliments?”

“I’m always looking for compliments,” Satoru says, “you know me.” But even as he says it, he’s bending down to taste the curry sauce on the spoon you’re holding up in the air. He claps his hands together in pleasure. “Beautiful!”

“Is it alright?”

“Ooh, it’s perfect!” Satoru cries, and then starts searching through the spice cupboard. He holds up the glass jar of cayenne pepper. “But it could use some of this.”

“So it’s not perfect?”

“It’s so close to perfect.”

“Just not quite there.”

“Nothing’s ever perfect,” Satoru says. He returns to leaning against the counter and watches you sprinkle in the spice. “Apart from—yeah, maybe a bit more—apart from me, of course.”

“Of course.” You stir it around, and look up at Satoru. There’s a warm affection settling over you; maybe it’s because this scene is so familiar, with you and Satoru in the kitchen, the kids in the other room, waiting for your dinner all together.

Now the kids are getting older, both of them definitively teenagers, as much as you don’t want to admit it, they’re spending less and less time with you. You don’t pick them up from school anymore, and even out of school hours, they’re mostly off in their rooms or at friends’ houses. Tsumiki’s got a hundred extracurricular clubs that she attends, and so on the weekends you act as a glorified taxi driver, escorting her from one activity to the next. And even though Megumi’s less sociable than her, he’ll vary between spending time on his own in his room, or shadowing Satoru on his missions, or training for Jujutsu High with Maki, the elder of the Zenin twins.

You know it’s normal that thirteen-to-fourteen-year-olds don’t want to spend all of their time with their parents—or guardians, or caregivers, or whatever you and Satoru are to the kids—but you still love them, and you and Satoru are both learning to value the time you’ve still got left with them.

After all, it’s only two years until Megumi’s boarding at Jujustu High, returning only on elective weekends and school holidays—and only four years until Tsumiki goes off to university, only coming back at the end of each term. They’ll be gone and moving away before you know what’s happened to them. Time has always gone by so quickly.

And so you try to make the moments count: the moments, which include dinner. Your cooking isn’t anything special—your meals are, as a rule, all completed in under thirty minutes, and you squeeze in as many vegetables and nutrients in whilst still keeping the prep time low—but you’re getting good at making food for four.

“You know,” you say, as Satoru looks up from fiddling with the loose button on his shirt, “I think you’d like cooking. It suits you.”

Satoru grimaces. “Eugh. Why do you say that?”

“It’s the type of thing you’d enjoy,” you say, shrugging. “I think you’d be good at it.”

“Are you forgetting the Great Gojo-Fushiguro Baking Disaster of Twenty-Fifteen?” Satoru presses a hand to his chest, aghast. “I’m forever traumatised by it.”

You laugh. A few months ago, Satoru had heard that the kids’ school was holding a bake sale, and had tried to out-do the other parents by sending them in with a three-tiered cake, despite having no baking experience whatsoever.

He’d employed the help of the kids, had almost destroyed the kitchen, and had rushed to the local supermarket to send them in with store-bought cupcakes instead. They’d all been under a vow of secrecy to not tell you until Tsumiki had let it slip last month.

“That’s not what I mean,” you say, looking back up to him with a smile playing around your lips. “Baking’s different to cooking. It’s like when I tried to make Megumi a birthday cake ages ago, and it went all flat and stodgy because I didn’t stir it enough, or whatever it was that happened. Baking’s all about rules and exact measurements and timings.”

“Yuck.”

“Yuck, exactly. That’s why it wouldn’t suit you.” You point your spoon at him. “But you’d like cooking. I know you would. There’s a lot more flexibility with it, and you can basically do what you want.”

“I do like doing what I want,” Satoru agrees. Then he bends down and takes a quick lick at the spoon. “Nice!”

You tut. “Satoru!”

“What?” Satoru wipes around his mouth, grinning. “I’m testing. Hey, isn’t this me co-cooking? You wanted me to start!”

“It’s not that I want you to start,” you say, dropping the spoon into the sink and getting a clean one, “it’s that I think you’d enjoy it. Seriously.”

“Why’d I bother cooking when we can just get someone else to cook for us? Like, professional chefs at super nice restaurants? That’s what my money’s there for.”

“Self-satisfaction,” you say. “That’s why. Joy of the process. A way to exercise some deep-hidden God complex you’ve still got knocking around.”

Satoru laughs. “How’d I manage to do that just by cooking?”

“You’d rule over your domain,” you say, gesturing to the stove. “All God-like. Except your domain is a few pots and pans and sauces and spices.”

“Sounds fantastical, Hebi-Hebi.”

“It would be.” You shrug. “I don’t know. I just think you’d be good at it.”

“Oh yeah?” Satoru’s lips curl into a smirk. “You think I’d be good at it? Tell me more.”

“Shut up.”

“Nah, I’m interested now.”

“You’re so conceited.”

“Why’d I be good at it? Tell me, tell me. C’mon.”

“For one,” you say, offering him another taste, “you’re better with the seasoning and spices than I am. How’s that?”

“I’ve simply got a more refined palette.” Satoru slides some sugar over to you. At your raised eyebrow, he says: “To balance out the bitterness! Trust me.”

“Sure,” you say. “And also, if you cooked more, you’d be allowed to buy your ridiculously expensive ingredients.”

“Now that does sound like a good idea.” Above his glasses, Satoru’s eyes crinkle with affection.

Since you’re the designated cook of the family, Satoru’s the one who organises and completes most of the shopping; you’ve forbidden him from buying any branded or extra-fancy products, just out of the principle of it. You think they’re a waste of money. Satoru thinks they’re a necessary expense.

“Exactly. All good ideas. Have another try. Do you think it needs anything else?”

Satoru tastes it again, and thinks. “Hmm. What type of milk did you use?”

“The normal one?”

He clicks his fingers in the air. “That’s what it is! You didn’t use the organic milk.”

“I most certainly did not,” you say. “It’s nearly double the price.”

“And yet, still worth it.” Satoru hums despondently. “I can taste the chemicals. Normal milk, yuck!”

“Now you’re just making things up.”

“I am not! The chemicals are going to infect me and I’m going to wake up like one of those genetically-modified monsters out of that movie!”

“What movie?”

“The movie we watched.”

“When was this?”

“Few months ago.”

“Oh, yeah.” You shake your head, laughing. “Oh well. I’m sure you’ll be fine. Those ice creams you like have more chemicals in one teaspoon than this milk does in the whole jug.”

“Don’t think so,” Satoru says. “You’re poisoning me.”

“I’m poisoning you with normal, semi-skimmed milk?”

“I—wait, it’s not whole milk?” Satoru’s eyes widen comedically, and you laugh again. He laughs too, and rubs a hand at the back of his neck. “I’m horrified. You really are trying to poison me,” he says, through a broad smile.

“You’ve caught me,” you say. “All this time, I’ve been undercover for the Zenins, plotting on your downfall.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Mm-hmm. It’s all come down to this. Forget all the other times I could’ve poisoned your food with, I don’t know, an actual poison—” Satoru laughs. “—I just thought it’d be best to bide my time and do you in with non-organic ingredients.”

Satoru smiles at you, glowing and affectionate. You return it, no longer caring to try to hide your fondness, and his smile grows.

Almost imperceptibly, he tilts his head down; it’s so he can look at you over his glasses. You press your lips together as your heart flips, the way it always has when you can look at Satoru’s eyes. You’ve never been able to get over this, the way he looks at you. He doesn’t look at anyone else like this. Just you.

You still remember the time when you had thought that your attraction to Satoru as the worst part of loving him. It had hurt the most; it had been the most unlikely thing, the least possible, the furthest from your reach. And then, once you had left, and then once you had come back, you had thought it might have gone somewhere. That, in your numbness and your desperate confusion, and your need for the help of a friend, you may have been able to remove yourself from it, from loving him in his entirety.

But you feel it now. Not sudden and burning the way it used to be; more so an ever-present candle flame, fanned in moments like this. Heat spreads through your body, liquid and thick. Satoru’s pale skin, his white-lavender hair covering his wide blue eyes; the smooth lines of his face, the scar at his jaw, the muscle he tenses that only you can recognise. You even see your own reflection, mirrored in his dark glasses. You smile at him, the way you’ve been smiling so much these days, and Satoru’s eyes glimmer. 

“See if it’s good enough,” you say. You fight to keep your voice steady, but you don’t think you’re quite successful. Satoru’s lips twitch.

Satoru swipes his finger across the surface of the sauce and sticks it in his mouth. You watch, and then look decidedly away, focusing on the upper half of his face and ignoring the uptick of your heartbeat. Satoru scrunches his face up and then relaxes it as he sighs.

“Perfect.”

“Really?”

“Really and truly,” he says. “A work of art. A creation of spectacular proportion!”

“It’s just chicken curry,” you say, feeling pleased.

“You are a god amongst women,” Satoru proclaims, and he presses a kiss to the side of your temple. “A chef to rival all other chefs!”

You laugh and turn back to the cooking. “Stupid.”

“I’m telling the truth! This is the tastiest thing I’ve ever tasted in the entire history of tasting!”

“Here,” you say, still warm all over, “help me give the food out.”

There’s a pause, in which Satoru doesn’t say anything.

“Satoru?”

You look up to him. Satoru’s turned away from you, towards the now-open cupboard where the crockery is stored. He’s taken some plates out and holds them in his hands, but is otherwise motionless, standing very still. Beneath the downy tufts of hair that curl around his nape, his skin has suddenly gotten very red.

He faces you, and pushes his glasses further up his nose with his elbow. His whole face is flushed, blood rushing to the surface. You’re reminded how easily Satoru blushes, with his pale, gossamer-thin skin.

“Sorry,” he says, sheepishly. Satoru sets down the plates on the counter and glances at you. There’s a bashful half-smile on his lips, slightly conspiratorial, slightly embarrassed.

You’re about to question the apology, but then it clicks into place that Satoru has just kissed you. Not passionately, not on the lips, but also not all that platonically. It feels affectionate and tender—domestic, in a way that just feels natural.

Natural. You realise that if Satoru hadn’t have drawn attention to it, you wouldn’t have realised he’d done something unusual at all.

The small spot along your hairline feels conspicuously hot.

You bite on your lip, but you can’t hold back the smile that slowly spreads across them. After a second, you shrug, glancing back up at Satoru. It’s with a kind of emotion you’re not exactly sure about, but then you see shock flicker across his expression, then understanding, and you feel suddenly and immensely grateful for him, for how he knows you.

“It’s okay,” you say, and you’re not surprised when you realise you’re telling the truth. Because—you still should say it, even if you’re pretty sure he knows.

“Yeah?” Satoru looks away from you, but you can see that he’s grinning, and is also trying to hide that he is. He pretends to busy himself with the meal, but then seems to realise he’s still holding the plates, and so sets them down on the counter and begins to unstack them.

“Yeah,” you repeat, and then, shaking your head with amusement, you reach over to stack the plates again. You hand them to him, and he grins wider. “Though it’s best to lay them out on the dinner table, don’t you think?”

“For sure!” Satoru runs a hand through his hair and exhales. “For sure, for sure. I’ll go get the kids.”

“You do that.”

“I will!” Satoru walks away with purpose, and you look down, trying to stop yourself from laughing. Then you hear him: “Children! Food is ready! The most decadent—gah, Megumi, I’m being trampled—the most decadent food you’ll ever try—”

A laugh escapes you, as you walk through to the dining room with the heavy pan in both hands. Megumi’s already sat down, and he perks up when he sees the meal.

“Chicken curry?” he asks, standing up to get a better look.

“Mm-hmm. Will you help me serve it?”

He nods, but you can see his eyes shining, and you smile to yourself. It’s his favourite meal: you’d had Tsumiki’s favourite yesterday, and you’d felt it’s only fair if he got his favourite today.

Maybe it doesn’t set the best precedent, giving him his favourite meal just after he’s gotten in trouble with school, but you’d already planned out the meals for the week, and Satoru’s doing the shop tomorrow, so there wasn’t anything else you could’ve had.

Oh, well. You like it too, so there’s no real harm done.

Soon after, Tsumiki’s walking into the room with Satoru, chatting with him about what Uke, her boyfriend, should act like when he comes over for dinner next week. Satoru’s already decided that he’s going to be really cool and progressive, Tsumiki, and that he’s only going to give him a hard time if he decides Uke isn’t good enough for her. Tsumiki laughs, and goes a little pink, and says that Uke’s actually really really sweet. Megumi cringes and says that Uke looks like a pig in a wig. Satoru swiftly diverts the topic of conversation to a mission he brought Megumi along to recently, and the kids are both suitably distracted.

It's not all that frequent that you get to eat dinner with Satoru at the table, and you appreciate it every time you get to. His schedule, as you know firsthand, is unpredictable and lengthy.

It’d be easy for you to get overwhelmed by the spontaneity of it all—after all, there have been times when you’d thought you’d be spending a whole meal with him, when he’d been called up halfway through and had had to leave—but you remind yourself every time to be grateful for the family time you get with him, rather than being resentful for the time you don’t.

You could never imagine Satoru with a job like your own: mostly regular hours, structured, organised and calming. He’d be bored within days, whilst you found the relentlessness of sorcery work to be just as draining. You’re just different people, and you have never wanted him to change what’s so innate within him. It makes him, him, and you love him for that.

Partway through the meal, Tsumiki shoots up in her chair. Her body seems to jolt up with sudden energy, like a live wire, and she blurts out a wish to be excused from the table. Bemused, you grant it, and she suddenly rushes out and into the living room. After a half-minute, she strides back in with a beaming grin.

“Rook takes,” she says, proud of herself in a way that makes you incredibly fond. Then she claps her hands together and says: “Ha-ha!” in a way that reminds you very much of Satoru. As she sits back down, you glance over to him; his lips are moving silently in a way that tells you he’s playing out the game in his head.

Satoru swears—you immediately chastise him, and Megumi snorts—and looks to you, almost pleading. You sigh, and waft him away. Satoru bounds up and races towards the living room, Tsumiki giggling as he goes. You hear Satoru swear again.

“He’ll take my rook with his knight,” she says, helping herself to some more food. “And then I’ll take his bishop with my queen. And then we’ll go on and on for some more, but it’s all defensive from him now.”

Satoru strides back in, arms crossed. He waggles his eyebrows at Tsumiki.

“Knight takes,” he says, with some pride. “You’re rookless now, Fushiguro.”

Tsumiki’s grin widens, and Satoru looks around at your knowing faces. “What?” he asks. “What?”

You and Megumi share a conspiratorial look, and now you’re in charge of changing the conversation.

“Tsumiki,” you say, leaning forwards, “I’ve just remembered. You haven’t told us how your geography presentation went!”

 

--

 

“Are you going tonight?” you hear Megumi asking Satoru, as both of them clean the dishes together. “With Hebi-san?”

You poke your head into the kitchen. “What’s this? Where are we going?”

“Nowhere,” Satoru says, and he elbows Megumi, who glowers at him.

“It’s not nowhere,” Megumi says, annoyed. “You told me it’s—”

“Yes! Megumi, yes, yes, you’re right. It’s technically not nowhere, because where is nowhere these days? It’s everywhere. And it’s also not everywhere, because nowhere doesn’t exist.” Satoru hums. “Fascinating. I was a philosopher in my past life. So. Yes.”

You frown. “Pardon?”

“You’re not supposed to know,” Satoru groans. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay,” you say, with growing amusement. “So nothing’s happening tonight? Because I’ve planned in an early morning, and I’d like to know if there’s anything that’ll be taking up my evening.”

“I…” Satoru trails off. “Maybe.”

“Maybe? Huh. This feels suspiciously vague, Satoru.”

“I—fine!” Satoru sends a pseudo-threatening glare at Megumi, who takes no notice of it. “Yeah, I’d like to take you somewhere tonight. But I can’t say! It’s a surprise.”

You lean against the door and raise your eyebrows. Satoru juts his chin into the air.

“Alright,” you say. “Do I need to bring anything?”

A grin breaks across Satoru’s face. “Nah. I mean—maybe, actually, yeah. Do you still have those trainers I bought you ages ago? The hiking ones?”

Yes—the ridiculously expensive shoes that had cost about a third of a year’s work back when you were a sorcerer. “I might have them around somewhere,” you say dryly.

“Great!” Satoru makes a flapping gesture with his hands. “Go find them! We’ll head off once I’ve cleaned up here, alright?”

“Sure.” You send Satoru a questioning look, but he’s turning back to the sink, whispering something you can’t hear to Megumi.

Deciding to humour him, and without the slightest idea of his plan, you make your way upstairs to where you’d kept the shoes. With how expensive they were, it feels sacrilegious to wear them, and you’ve mostly kept them stored away in a safe, clean box, out of fear of damaging them.

The few times you’ve worn them, you’ve been very aware that anyone with any know-how of expensive outdoors-y brands would be able to spot them without much difficulty.

That had actually happened when you’d joined Nanami for a countryside walk about a fortnight ago: you’ve been going walking together for a while now, ever since he’d suggested it a few months ago. You’d been reminded of how much time you used to spend outdoors when you were younger, and how much you’d enjoyed it, and so you’d agreed with quite a bit of enthusiasm. Endou had thought it was an excellent idea.

It had turned out that Nanami’s fond of hiking, and, like you, finds the city life quite stifling, so you’d both enjoyed yourself quite a bit. He had noticed your shoes, though; you’d thought it would lead to a conversation complaining about how rich Satoru is, but Nanami had only complimented your choice of brand, commenting on their reputation for good quality and length of wear. For a more expensive option, they were a practical choice, and he had approved.

Well. You pick the shoes up by the laces, and roll your eyes to yourself. If Nanami approves. Maybe you should tell Satoru: he’d love to know.

You meet Tsumiki on the stairs. To your surprise, her eyes flick to your shoes, and then immediately widen.

“Oh!” she says, as her expression brightens. “Oh! Hebi-san, is that—!” And then she clamps her lips shut, looking suddenly caught.

You laugh: clearly, Satoru’s plan for this evening, whatever it is, has been discussed with both of the children.

“Are you not allowed to say either?” you ask, as you walk down the stairs. You look back to Tsumiki, who’s hovering guiltily. She seems to be desperately trying to keep a smile off her face.

“It’s a secret,” Tsumiki admits, and darts down the rest of the stairs so she’s face-to-face with you. “But what’s Gojo-san told you? Has he said anything?”

“Just that I should get these shoes,” you say, “and that he’s going to take me somewhere. Everything else is a surprise.”

“Ooh!” Tsumiki beams at you, and clasps her hands together. Again, like Satoru. “Oh, that’s so exciting! I can’t wait for you to get back and tell me all about it.”

“I can’t wait to find out what it is.” You quirk a smile at her. “Any hints?”

“I… No, I’m not allowed to say.”

“Really?”

Tsumiki bites on her lip. “I’ll spoil the surprise. I promise, Hebi-san, it’ll be really cool! You’ll really like it. Gojo-san’s told me all about it, and he’s made it seem so cool, and I can’t wait to see it with you there, and—”

“Tsumiki!” Satoru strides into the room and posts himself next to her with his hands on his hips.

“Sorry!” Tsumiki lets out a surprised squeal, and then giggles. “I didn’t say anything! I promise!”

“I know nothing,” you say solemnly, as Satoru turns his questioning gaze towards you. “Honestly.”

“For sure,” Satoru says. He lowers his glasses to stare at Tsumiki, who just laughs and pushes him away. Satoru must lower his Infinity, because she makes impact, and he performs an exaggerated stumble backwards. “Damn, Tsumiki! You just Black Flash-ed me!”

“That’s so lame,” Megumi says, walking in from the kitchen and drying his hands on his shorts. “Tsumiki doesn’t even know what a Black Flash is.”

“I do,” Tsumiki says. “Don’t be rude!”

“You do not.”

“I do! You’re being immature!”

“I am not!”

“This is a conversation that you can sort out between yourselves!” Satoru points to you, and then the door. “Hebi-Hebi, it’s time you and I get going.”

“Alright.” You send a look to the kids. “Please don’t fight while we’re gone.”

“We’re fine!” Tsumiki sends you a big grin and throws her arm around Megumi’s shoulders. “I’ll take care of him, don’t worry!”

“Get off me!”

“Behave,” you try to say, but Satoru’s already shuttling you out of the house. You swat at him. “And call if anything goes wrong!”

“They’ll be fine,” Satoru says. He leads you out of the house and flashes a smile at one of the servants as he leaves. “You’d be heading back to your apartment at this time anyway. Nothing’s different.”

“I know. Still.” You glance back to the household, with an unknown feeling settling in your chest. Then you let out a sigh. “I don’t know. It’s fine. I think I’m just more conscious of them, after Megumi’s school thing this morning.”

“Oh, yeah. No, I get that.” Satoru tucks his hands into his pockets, shrugging. “I just think he’ll be fine. Maybe that’s what sorcerers are like in normal schools, we don’t know.”

“Do you think you’d have been getting into fights, if you grew up like he did?”

“Dunno!”

“Satoru.”

“I’m serious,” he says, grinning at you. “I don’t know. But I was always fighting someone when I was a kid—I’ve been in training since before I met you, with my technique and hand-to-hand. I can’t imagine how restless I would’ve been if I hadn’t been able to do that as much as I did.”

You remember how much energy Satoru had had as a child, and that had been with near-daily sparring sessions with his tutors. “I suppose so.”

“I’m not saying I’m happy that he’s doing it,” Satoru admits, and you glance at him, surprised at the honesty. “All the fighting, I mean. I don’t care if it’s against his school rules, or if that Principal guy doesn’t like it. Couldn’t give a shit about that. But it’s how he’s doing it that I don’t like.”

“What do you mean?”

Satoru sighs. He runs a hand over his jaw, staring over at the sun-dappled grounds of the household. “I get that he wants to fight, but he’s only starting fights he knows he can win. He’s making himself feel better about it by going after shitheads, or people who’d try to bully him, but at the end of the day he knows they’re weaker than him. It’s just sparring to him, or fighting someone just to make himself feel strong, because he knows he can beat whoever he’s going up against.”

“And that’s why he does it, do you think?” you ask. “Because he likes how it feels to be stronger than someone?”

Satoru glances to you with a wry flicker of a smile on his lips. “Why? Sound familiar?”

You breathe out a laugh. “I wasn’t going to say, but…”

“Nah, you can,” Satoru says, grinning. “For me, it was always about proving that I was the best—but with Megumi, I think he just wants to feel like he’s good at something. It’s not the exact same thing, but it’s weirdly similar, right?”

“Similar to you?”

“Sure. Or how I was when I was his age, maybe.” Satoru tugs at the collar of his shirt, thinking. “Eh, I’m not self-aware enough to figure if I still think like that. Who knows. Anyway, at least I can recognise it in him, and know that it’s not what he should be thinking.”

“Is he like that when he’s with you?” you ask, after a moment’s pause. “When you’re training him?”

“That’s what I was thinking about,” Satoru says. “Because he’s not, not at all. He’s like he is when he’s around us, all reserved and everything. He doesn’t push himself, which is why I figure he’s being complacent when he’s fighting the kids at school.”

You meet Satoru’s eyes; there’s an intense quality to him, after you’ve managed to strip a layer of his playful façade away.

“He doesn’t want to feel weak, so he doesn’t risk failing,” Satoru says, his blue eyes piercing. “It’s complacency, what he’s doing, and that’s what I don’t like about it. He doesn’t get how it feels to try, actually try hard, and to succeed.”

Then Satoru frowns, and breathes out.

“He’ll be fine,” Satoru says. His voice sounds a lot less rough, more controlled. “Honestly. I get what’s going through his head, so I’ll sort him out.”

“Satoru,” you say, “it’s not just you that has to…”

“Huh? Oh, no way, Hebi-Hebi, don’t think I’m trying to push you out of helping me here!” Satoru’s face breaks into another wide smile. “Nah, I’m just talking about the things I can help him with. The Jujutsu-related stuff: my specialty. I can’t do half the stuff you can.” He waves a hand through the air. “All the niceness and the vulnerability and everything. I can try, but you’re much better at it than I am.”

You feel warm. “That’s not true.”

“We both know it is,” Satoru says. His eyes crinkle at the corners. “Don’t worry about it, though. I’m not scheduled for anything tomorrow, so I’ll spend the day with him. We can talk about it, I’ll take him out to do some training with my students. I’ll probably up his training overall, to tire him out a bit; in a few months Maki Zenin’ll be in first year, and Megumi gets on with her.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you’ve said.”

“We can keep talking to him about it, but I think we just need to tire him out some more,” Satoru says. “Then he’ll stop. He could do with spending more time with sorcerers his age—I’m probably a bad influence on him, with how amazing and talented and strong I am. He’s intimidated by me, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” you say. “Yeah, I’m sure of it.”

Satoru hums, and puts his hands on his hips. “You’re not convinced. Not about the intimidated stuff, but everything else.”

“It’s not that,” you say, “It makes sense what you’re saying, but… I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe I’m worrying about nothing. You’re probably right.”

“I’m definitely right.”

“Satoru.”

“Joking! I just think…” Satoru glances up to the sky, which has slowly fallen into sunset in the time you’ve been in the household.

It’s now a soft blackcurrant colour, fading into a pale pink around the horizon. The sky is rich with clouds that look heavy with water, and when you stretch your hand out, you can feel the prickle of imminent rain.

“You never met Toji,” Satoru says, after a moment’s silence. You look up at him. “He was insane, but he was made to fight. Not because of the heavenly restriction, but because of everything about him, you know? You could just tell.” Satoru gestures to his glasses, still shadowing his eyes. “I didn’t need these to see it.”

“Are you saying Megumi’s like his father?”

“No,” Satoru says. Then he grimaces, and says: “I mean, yes. It’s not that easy: Toji and I never sat down for some deep conversation about his personality, or something. I know Megumi loads better than I ever knew him.”

There’s something more. “But…?”

Satoru runs a hand over his jaw and grins at you, knowing. “Yeah, yeah. But. But, it’s in the kid’s blood to be fighting. He’s a Zenin. You can trace the line back for centuries, and everyone before him will’ve been fighting curses basically from birth. Those school bullies could be the next best thing.”

You don’t like to admit it, but Satoru makes a good point. “So you think it’ll change? Once he’s at Jujustu High?”

“For sure,” Satoru assures you. “I’m certain that’s what it is. He’s getting antsy—it’s like how we felt before we went to Jujutsu High, only amplified, because he doesn’t get any of the freedom we had.”

“That’s because we care about his safety,” you say, but it’s with a wryness that only Satoru can tease out of you. “And also because he’s not the all-powerful divine chosen one, or whatever.”

“You’re calling me divine?” Satoru preens a little, and then shakes his head and laughs. “You flatter me, Hebi-Hebi. But, hey. Hey, Hebi-Hebi.”

“Yeah?”

“I was thinking. Sorry about earlier, back when you were talking to Megumi.”

“Sorry?” You frown up at him. “What are you sorry for?”

“Interrupting you. When you were talking about feeling alone when you were younger, and I was all, but you had me!” Satoru trails off, and offers you a bashful grin. “Just making it all about me. Again. Sorry.”

Your lips part, and you feel an unexpected flip in your chest. After a few moments, you say: “I did have you, though.”

Satoru glances at you.

“It’s hard to explain it all to Megumi,” you say. “It’s not the type of thing I can make him understand in one conversation. So if it seemed like I was understating how important you were for me, then—”

“It wasn’t—”

“You saved me, Satoru.” You stop walking, so you can make sure he understands this. “You saved me. Just… just by being my friend, you changed my whole life. I don’t know what kind of person I’d be if you hadn’t been there, but I wouldn’t be… me.”

Emotion rushes behind Satoru’s expression, fixed at a forced calm. “Oh.”

“Which you knew,” you say. “Right? You know that.”

Satoru lets out a deep, shaking breath. “Yeah. I do, I know.” He blinks, then runs a hand over his eyes. “It’s the same for you.”

“What?”

“If I didn’t have you.” Satoru glances at you, a quick, cautious look. “I wouldn’t like who I’d be.”

A warm smile breaks across your face, and you do not try to hold it back. “We were two lonely kids. We helped each other.”

“Yeah. Yeah, but it wouldn’t have worked if it’d been anyone else.” Satoru’s hands fall to his side, his fingers fidgeting with the fabric. The evening sun brings out the lilac in his hair, blending softly with the sky. “It had to be us, for us to work. Us two together.”

You laugh. “Do you think?”

“Don’t you?”

“I do.” You smile at him. “It’s just nice to hear you say it.”

And it’s the easiest thing in the world to step closer to him, your arms brushing against his, to lean up on your toes, rest your head on his shoulder. You’re not good with touch, not with everyone, but Satoru is different. He’s always been different, and here, now, is no exception. With touch, you’re the best with him; it’s always been the easiest with him. You don’t know if you’re ever going to be normal with everyone else, but with Satoru, you’re letting yourself hope.

Closeness. The warmth of his body. Finally, without anything building up within you.

“Thanks,” you say. You feel the words, the real words. They’re right there, ready for you to say.

Satoru doesn’t ask what you’re thanking him for. You don’t think he needs to.

You stay like that, for a sweet length of a moment.

“It’s going to start raining,” you mumble, into his shoulder, and Satoru laughs. You move away from him and duck your head.

You fall back into familiar patterns of conversation, as you always can do with Satoru. You remember how you used to wonder how you never ran out of things to talk about with him: even when you’d spend every day together, there would always be something fresh to discuss. But even once you’d exhausted a topic, you’d be happy to exist in peaceful silence with him, both of you content with nothing but each other’s presence.

You used to take that silence for granted, but now that you’ve spent time away from him, and now that you’ve learnt how awful and oppressive silences can be, you’re always going to be grateful for the safety you find in the quiet with Satoru.

Together, you walk through the grounds of the Gojo household, and then through the wildflower fields; the grass is long and dewy, and it dampens your trousers as you pass through it. It’s only minutes until you feel a cold droplet fall onto the bare skin of your arm. There’s another, and another, and soon the air is filled with the earthy, fresh smell of rainfall in nature.

“It’s raining,” you call to Satoru, who just grins back at you.

“Is it? I hadn’t noticed.”

“Shut up,” you mumble, making him laugh. “We need our raincoats.”

“Hah! I don’t think they’d fit anymore. How old were we when we got them? Nine?”

“Nine or ten.” You wipe the water from your eyes as the rainfall increases in fervour. The flowers in this field are bowing their heads to the rain, and you feel the urge to do the same, to duck your head away from it, but to look up at Satoru, at how ridiculously tall he is, you have to bare your face to it. “Satoru, are we just walking aimlessly, or do you actually have something in mind here?”

Satoru’s smile is so vibrant, the water seems to evaporate around it. You can almost hear its heated hiss. You’re reminded of the old nickname: my space heater, you used to call him. The brilliant, blistering heat of his skin. Your stomach flips, a pleasant feeling.

“You tell me, Hebi-Hebi,” Satoru says. He leans down, so his eyes are closer to yours, looking at you over the rims of his glasses. He doesn’t seem to care that the rainwater’s running down his face, tangling with his eyelashes. “I’m waiting for you to catch on.”

A droplet falls from his temple, and you watch it chase another down, curving inward to the elegant hollow of his cheek. Two of them linger at the very edge of his jaw, waiting, almost excitedly. Your gaze snaps back up to his: Satoru’s still watching you. Anticipating your understanding.

You look away from him, to the water-darkened fields, to the incline in the path ahead. Because it is a path: after the first few minutes of walking, the grass had bent away from your steps, leaving a small, well-worn trail for you and Satoru to follow. You raise your head to scan the fields you have already crossed; you can follow your path back to the Gojo household just with your eyes; and then, just a slight distance from where you’re standing now, you see another trail branching from it, travelling away to a different direction.

Or, as you look down this new path, as you blink away the rain that tries to blur your vision, perhaps it’s not branching off: perhaps the path is joining the main one, two tributaries from two sources, flowing into one river. Both of them desire paths, formed from years of retracing the same steps. A desire path, which you had noticed before, when…

“We’re going to the Chapel,” you murmur. And then you repeat it, louder, so Satoru can hear. You turn to him, and see his eyes shining. “And that’s the path I used to take from my house. This is where we’d meet.”

Satoru claps his hands in applause, bouncing up on the balls of his feet in excitement. “Perfection! You’ve got it, Hebi-Hebi! I can’t believe you didn’t realise it sooner—I mean, how many times did we walk this same way—”

Satoru’s already walking ahead, but you stumble up to him. You catch his arm with your gloved hand, and he looks back. The contact does not burn, but it is warm.

“But,” you say, “but the Chapel’s… Satoru, I told you about the last time I went there. It’s not…”

Your voice falls away, but you see understanding in Satoru’s expression. The Chapel will always hold your childhood memories, but it hasn’t been able to grow to adulthood with you. It was abandoned, by both of you, half-accident, half-intentional.

“I remember,” Satoru says. Then he ducks his head down to yours, and, carefully, reaches out to touch your arm. “Trust me, okay?”

Your eyelashes flutter. “Okay,” you say.

Of course.

“Great.” Satoru’s smile returns, broad and expectant. “Great! Now, c’mon, we’ve still got ages to go, and I’m getting drenched!”

He waits for you to start moving, so you’re a half-step ahead of him. Satoru runs his hands through his hair, which has turned its familiar deep silver from the rain. Water drips from the ends, and when he shakes his head, it sprays everywhere.

“Ah—Satoru!” You frown at him, without any malice, and he cackles.

“You’re already wet! Hey, don’t look at me like that. Water’s water!”

“Not when you’re acting like a wet dog.”

“I am not!”

“You are,” you say, “and especially because you don’t need to. If you’d put your Infinity up, at least one of us would be dry.”

Satoru closes his eyes and cranes his neck, exposing his face to the rainfall. You watch his profile with nothing short of adoration, and experience the now-enjoyable twisting sensation in your stomach.

“But then I’d be dry, and you wouldn’t be, and I’d basically be abandoning you to the elements,” he says, and then shouts out, to the sky: “Never! I will never abandon you in your time of need!”

“Satoru!”

He raises his fist to the sky, striking some dramatic pose. “I would rather drown myself in the rain than leave you to battle it yourself. What kind of man would I be—”

“I—oh, come on—”

“I couldn’t live with myself!” Satoru spins to you, jump-stepping in front and throwing his arms out. “I’d be a man with no honour. An honourless man. And an honourless man is one who—”

“You’re ridiculous,” you say, but you’re laughing, and at the first sound of it Satoru’s perking up, dropping the act and skipping towards you.

“I am? Am I really?” Satoru leans down and grins. “Am I really?”

“Shut up,” you manage, trying to stifle your laughter. “You’re so embarrassing.”

“You sound like Megumi when he’s trying to be cool.”

“Maybe Megumi sounds like me,” you say. “Tsumiki’s picked up your chess brain, and Megumi’s picked up my honesty and need to keep your ego from going sky-high.”

Satoru chuckles. “You’ve influenced him in the wrong direction. Where are my adoring disciples, huh?”

“Nowhere. Any adoring disciples of yours are entirely fictitious.”

“They didn’t have to be, the kids. Why do they have to be real people, Hebi-Hebi?”

“You mean, you’re disappointed that they’ve got free will and can think for themselves?”

“Pretty much,” Satoru says. His lips quirk. “Children, eh?”

You walk the well-known path side-by-side, and once you start the incline, Satoru reaches out his hand so it hovers just behind your back.

“In case you fall,” he says, when you ask. “So I catch you.”

You press your lips together to hide your smile, and look back to the trail.

It’s a heady, humid night, and even though the rain drenches you and sticks your clothes tight to your tacky skin, you don’t find yourself getting cold. The rain splatters against the rocks beneath your feet, unearthing the slight taste of salt to the air, which you find somehow comforting, maybe nostalgic.

After a few minutes, you realise it’s because it reminds you of the Chapel; nights spent clustered inside with Satoru, listening to the rain outside, safe together in your cave, the safe haven.

Your Chapel. Your Satoru. Your days with him, stretching on forever.

Carefree, if just for those long moments with him, when all you had to think about was him. You walk closer to it, to the Chapel.

And here’s the large cluster of rocks, the surface of which you could recognise blindfolded. Satoru goes up first, the way he always used to, and then he turns around, bends down. He offers you his arm.

There’s a smile on his lips: tender, and perhaps a little hopeful. You reach up to him, and grasp him by the forearm. Your other hand seeks out the handholds you used to use, finds them effortlessly, and with Satoru’s help, you lift yourself up. You land on your feet easily, brush rainwater from your vision, and stand.

Here it is.

A cut-out of a great expanse of rock. Sheltered from the elements, it’s a peaceful, secluded place. A cave, really. Your cave. The Chapel.

You’re walking forwards, but then you stop. You hesitate. You remember the last time you were here—you’d told Satoru about it, so long ago—and you don’t want to rehash all of those emotions. You were so fraught and fragile back then, and you were so, so alone. But seeing the Chapel the way you’d left it had made you even worse: it had confirmed everything you had been feeling, in a way. You had abandoned it, and you had felt abandoned. Rainwater, cold against your skin, drips down your neck.

Over the sound of rain, there’s a shuffle of clothing, and Satoru moves in your peripheral vision. He stands next to you, his arm brushing yours. “You okay?” he asks.

You take in his presence, right beside you; his body heat, which radiates through to you even though he’s barely touching you. You take in a deep breath, smelling the earth, the salt of rain, the outdoors. “Yeah,” you say. “Yeah. Are we heading in?”

You can hear Satoru’s smile in his words. “You first, Hebi-Hebi.”

You step into the Chapel, and the first thing you recognise is that it’s dark. It’s too dark: you look up to the ceiling, but you can’t find the large and uneven hole there, the one Satoru had accidentally created when he was showing off with his cursed technique as a child. Even though it had been a disaster for wintertime, when you’d spent most of the days shivering together whilst bunded up in blankets, you’d ended up relying on it as your main source of light. You squint, but you can’t see anything.

“Satoru, do you—”

“Shit!” You hear the scuffling of Satoru’s shoes against the stone floor, and then him fumbling with something plastic-sounding. “I forgotten I’d—okay, one second, one second… there!”

The Chapel is suddenly illuminated with light and you squeeze your eyes shut, blinded. White spots dance on the backs of your closed eyelids, and then you blink very heavily and wait for your eyes to adjust.

First, it’s just a warm haze of light. Then, slowly, details begin to come into focus.

You gasp.

The Chapel is brilliant: bursting with life. It is almost unrecognisable to the dour, neglected place it had been when you saw it last; now, as you turn slowly in place, your lips parted, you are greeted with vibrant colours, textures, patterns, lights. It overwhelms you, dazzles you. Everything is here. Everything. They’re signs of life.

Warm-tinted fairy lights span the walls, alighting every crevice and every corner. The shadows that they cast are multi-layered, and they appear to dance as you move around, your form creating pieces of art as you interact with the light.

You watch your shadow move along the floor, and then it finds a large carpet draped along the floor; it’s made of this threaded fabric that—you lean down, slip your gloves off—is soft to the touch.

More soft things: the masses of pillows, all different colours and shapes, that line the sides of the walls. They’re squeezed in next to each other and bunch up, rolls and creases forming in the fabric, like someone had been sitting on them and only just got up.

Blankets are piled between them in random intervals, forming tens of makeshift forts all around the Chapel. There is a wicker box against the wall that is full of what looks like stationary, with notebooks and pens and magazines.

The walls are covered, too, with textured tapestries and retro posters. There’s one that you recognise from the Megumi’s room, hanging pride of place in the centre of a wall, and there’s one with a noughties Pokémon design, and another made of what you think is a towel, cut up and draped in a complicated twining pattern along the ceiling.

You can barely begin to equate this to how it had been before—because you can only think, as heat begins to form at the backs of your eyes, that this is so much more similar to the way the Chapel had been when you were children.

Every time you turn around, the weighted mix of nostalgia and genuine, tangible memory gets stronger. You can see yourself, age fourteen, age twelve, ten; you can see Satoru, his uneven haircuts, his gangly limbs, his wide grins.

This is the Chapel when it was yours, your sanctuary, your safe haven, when you had filled it with pillows and blankets and posters and copies of Vogue Japan.

There are the things you recognise.

They do not overwhelm the space: in fact, it takes you time to notice them. But once you’ve seen one, and you know they’re there, the rest become easier and easier to find. You first see the engraving, the childish attempt at stone carving that you and Satoru had tried in your first year in the Chapel. It’s two symbols, side-by-side, of an infinity symbol and a snake. Satoru, and you. It’s the symbols of your families, but they’re both yours, as well.

You look up: the hole in the ceiling, which after years of neglect had left the Chapel water-sodden and smelling of rot, has been fixed. It’s covered by a green-blue tarp that, as you raise up onto your tiptoes to look at closer, has been fixed down on the outer side of the Chapel ceiling.

You laugh, amazed.

You can still see the evidence of Satoru’s childhood accidents—the tarp hasn’t covered it, or hidden it in any way—but it keeps out the water, providing instead the homely, quiet sound of rainfall against the waterproof sheet. A background patter-patter that you’d thought before had been the sound of your footfall.

Looking closer back at the walls, you see more. One of the posters on the walls, of the posters you’d thought of as just a retro style, is one you recognise from years ago—you and Satoru had bought it at some market, bargained the price down, all because it was a blow-up of your favourite Pokémon character.

There’s an old gaming console in the wicker basket, and when you lean down to look through it, you find stacks of your old Pokémon cards all kept together with rubber bands. Then, hidden amongst the magazines, a copy of Vogue Japan—the first one they’d published, the one you’d waited on for so long. It’s not your old copy, because that had been ripe with water damage and torn pages, but it’s the same edition. The exact same year, the same month.

You rise, and your breath catches in your throat. Here, here’s something that has been preserved. Your calendar, its edges ripped and crinkled, pages fragile and yellowed, rough like parchment; but still there, still here, still hanging where it always used to. It’s open on April 2005, just as you’d left it: the month you started Jujutsu High. The red ink you had used has faded with time, but it’s still vibrant against the paper. Its colour remains.

Tears have started to cloud your vision, and you turn to Satoru, unable to keep your emotions at bay. The intensity of everything around you—the restoration of your childhood place, the tender way the memories have been preserved, the vibrancy that has brought it back to life. All of it, it only strengthens when you look at him.

Satoru is looking at you with such unabashed adoration, such care. Love: he’s looking at you with love. His eyes are unobstructed, his glasses up in his hair, half-visible behind the soft white locks of his hair. You raise a shaking hand to cover your mouth and step towards him, and his expression breaks into a wide, beaming smile.

“Do you like it?” he asks, and even now, there’s a breathiness to his voice, nervousness.

You laugh, but it’s watery, barely more than breath. “Satoru…”

You shake your head and will yourself not to cry, not just yet, not before you can say something. You trail off, unable to continue. You can hardly speak. You can hardly say anything other than his name.

“The kids have been helping me,” Satoru says. There’s that smile of his: boyish, both shy and incredibly proud.

It reminds you of the first time you realised you knew him, when he smiled that same smile, and you knew he wanted your attention, or your appreciation, your compliments. You laugh again, completely out of control.

“It’s taken ages,” Satoru admits, now the one to walk around the space. His fingers run over the walls, and he points out things that you’d missed, that you hadn’t taken in enough the first time. The old memories, old scars that bring back reminders of laughter. “But I remembered when you told me about the time you came here, a few years ago, and I just… I felt so bad about how we’d left this place, because it was so special to us, you know?”

You nod, unable to speak.

“I started cleaning it out, just on my own,” Satoru says, “but then I mentioned it to Tsumiki, and she said she wanted to help. And then Megumi was helping too—I know! I know, but he’s been really enjoying it. He helped me with the games stuff from the noughties. Tsumiki helped with the decoration. They might’ve even come here on their own, just to hang out, and at first I was all tetchy about it, but… I mean, isn’t that what it’s for? I kept thinking—it’s like what we used to do.”

Sweet, you think, tears brimming. God, that’s so sweet.

“And they were so excited for you to see it. That’s why they were both jittery earlier—I mean, Tsumiki knew right away, that I was showing you today, of course she did, and then Megumi figured it out.” Satoru shakes his head, laughing softly. “They’ve been waiting for you to see it for months, but I kept putting it off until it was perfect, you know?”

Satoru, waiting. Satoru, taking his time, patient, content to wait until things were perfect. Satoru, waiting.

“I kept remembering more and more stuff.” Satoru’s got one hand beneath your old calendar, and you approach it with him. You slide your gloves back on, barely daring to touch it. It feels like it will disappear into ash if you handle it wrong, but Satoru holds it with confidence, with pride. “I think that’s half the reason the kids were helping me. I’d mention something, like that time we met the curse in the woods, right, and they’d look at me like I’d just said something insane. They had no idea. It’s crazy. I forget how much we haven’t told them—about us, or our life when we were their age, or younger.”

“I’ve hardly told them anything,” you whisper. Your voice breaks halfway through. You think about your life as a child: your parents’ neglect, your step-mother’s attempt at protection, your bindings, your gloves, Satoru. Your love of him. How he saved you, back when you knew nothing but your family. How he’d been the first one to love you. “I didn’t think they’d be interested.”

Satoru’s smile turns softer, so much more fond. “They’re desperate to know. They really love you, you know.”

“Satoru…”

“I’d say it’s obvious, but… hey.” His head tilts to the side. “I know you. You’ve got to be told it, sometimes.”

You love him. You love him, you love him, you love him. He knows you. He did this—he did all of this, all of this for you, and because he loves you, and he tells you that you’re loved, and he loves you, and—

And you believe it. Loved: you’re loved. You really are. You believe it. You know that he does, that the kids do, that you’re okay, and—

And you’re happy.

The realisation, all at once, the magnitude of it, it’s staggering. You’re happy. Here, right now, right here, Satoru has made you so happy. The posters and the fairy lights and the blankets and the pillows and the handmade calendar from over a decade ago, they’re here because he brough them here, brought them back. Satoru did it for you, because he knew it would make you happy. He’s smiling at you because he wants you to know—to know that you’re loved, and you are, and you love him, and you’re so happy.

But it’s not just now: this, here, this feeling right now, it’s not just what he’s done for you with the Chapel. It’s your whole day, every moment, every time you’ve felt like smiling today. It’s Toyo and her bad driving, and Sara’s message about Haru and whether Megumi’s read classics, and Megumi’s fingers at the sleeve of your shirt, and Tsumiki’s chess games, and Satoru with his blue shirts and cayenne pepper and forehead kisses and now this, because he knew you had wanted the Chapel to be warm again, because he knew it would make you happy.

And he’s made you happy.

He makes you happy.

And you’re—you’re not telling him this. It’s all kept up in your head. You’re still not telling him any of this.

You’re not saying anything to him, when he needs to know—because of how he knows you more than anyone, how he can read you better than anyone—how all of that is true, but—but even though it’s obvious, you’ve got to be told it sometimes, haven’t you? 

“Satoru,” you start to say, but you break off even then, half into a breath, and then half into a laugh. It spills from you, and now you can’t hold it back, and you don’t know how to tell him, but Satoru’s always been better with words than you, and even then, he’s never cared, and he’s stayed all the while, and he still loves you.

The rain beats down against the walls of the Chapel, but you’re sheltered from the storm outside. The wind whistles, high and pealing, and you can feel your heart in your throat and all of these words press on your tongue, words that you’ve been waiting to say for weeks now, months, years, really, years, over a decade, over your lifetime.

The warm fairy lights are gentle and soft but you remember how it felt when you first found the Chapel, how you’d hiked up in weather just like this, how Satoru’s hair had been just as water-silver as it is now, how the weather had been awful and how you’d been shivering and cold and near-miserable and yet had still wanted it, because it had meant you could spend more time with Satoru, who you had loved, and who you love now.

How even the weather couldn’t quench it, that burning love for him, that brilliant flame that refused to be quelled.

And you’re reaching for him, laughter falling from your lips like water, and Satoru’s eyes are wide and his cheeks are flushed and his lips are parted and he’s reaching for you as well, and you’re grasping onto his wrists and you’re pulling him to the mouth of the cave, out of the Chapel, into the rain.

You’re not wearing your matching raincoats—they’d be too small for you, much too small, they wouldn’t even fit Tsumiki or Megumi—and the water soaks into your clothes, right to your skin. You open your mouth and tilt your head to the sky and try to drink it in, this cold, beating rain.

Waterlogged, your clothes have shrank to your skin, and the wind makes your skin piercingly tender. You close your eyes and raise your hands to the rain—water plunges down your sleeves and you shudder with the intensity of the chill it brings. More, you want to shout out to it, more!

The salt rises from the rock around you, and it swirls with the sweet, pungent tang of ozone, and it’s raining, and this is probably one of the worst storms you’ve seen in years, and you crave it, just like it was when you were a child.

Because outside you’re cold now, and shivering, and aching and tender, and yet you open your eyes and look at Satoru, and you’re burning, blazing, and that same warmth rushes through you.

His eyelashes collect droplets of water that fall as he blinks, and his silver hair clings to the fine angles of his face, and his eyes are half-closed and squinted against the onslaught of the rain, and yet they’ve never looked so blue.

“I’m happy!” you shout, over the roar of the storm. Satoru stumbles towards you and you reach up to steady yourself, a hand going to his chest, another to the back of his neck. Two points of contact burn with their significance, and you can feel the outline of Satoru’s skin underneath his soaked-wet shirt, can feel him, touch him. Him, not his Infinity, but him. Satoru.

“I wanted you to be!” Satoru has to shout it back, ducking his head closer to you so his words aren’t caught up and lost by the storm.

But you’re laughing, shaking your head. “You don’t get it! It’s not just today, Satoru! It’s everything—it’s all of it! I’m happy!”

“I don’t understand—Hebi, I—”

“It’s okay!”

Satoru, his paper-thin jawline scar from childhood, the muscle in his cheek, the honest twitch of his lips when he smiles. Satoru, who has stayed, who has stayed for years, who has followed you into a storm because you wanted him to, because you didn’t have to ask, because he loves you.

The heat of him, your space heater, the warmth of fairy lights and the gentle sparks of hope and the teenage candlelight swooping in your chest when his lips brushed your temple, and still the brilliant fire of his kiss against a cold September evening, the way it lit you up, the way you’d never felt so alive.

You step back, and Satoru’s hands fall away from you, a practised and unspoken kindness, but no, you do not want him to step away, not when you’re like this, not when you not know that you can feel this heat, this warmth, even still, even now.

And, drenched, shivering, cold to the bone, and not caring about it in the slightest, you step back to the Chapel. Its comfort, its familiarity and brilliant novelty, welcomes you. Satoru runs his hands through his hair and huge droplets cascade down his neck, and it makes him shudder, but he doesn’t seem to care about it either, because he hasn’t stopped looking at you. And you realise that you’re still smiling, and that you haven’t stopped smiling, and that Satoru loves it when you smile.

“I just realised,” you’re saying, with your heartbeat racing, as you take in the handwritten notes and the posters and the cushions and the calendar. “My life is… good. It’s good.”

Satoru lets out a breathless laugh. “I’m glad that—”

“No.” You hold up a hand, shaking your head. “No, please. Please let me say this. I just… I need to get it out before I forget how to say it, or before I get too up in my head again, or I manage to convince myself that I’ve got this all wrong, or any of the things I’ve done before. I don’t know. I don’t know, but—”

“It’s okay,” Satoru says. “I’m listening.” And he brings a finger to his smiling lips, and you can see that he’s still blushing, and there’s another tumultuous surge of affection and love for him. For him, Satoru, the only person you’ve ever loved.

“It’s that I’m happy.” You look up at him, and something gives within you; some dam opens, and anything, anything, it’s here. “I realised. It’s cold, and it’s raining, and the weather is—just, awful, and I’m outside in the cold in a storm and yet, despite it all, I’m happy. I’m happy. I can feel the cold in my body, and I’m not pretending it’s not there, I’m accepting it, that it’s here, and yet I’m still happy. Do you understand?”

Satoru’s mouth opens. “Hebi…”

“Today has made me happy, Satoru. Today—even though it’s been such a normal, such a normal, normal, standard, normal day, and I’m still happy. And my days are good, and sometimes they’re shit, and most of the time they’re normal and boring, and through it all, I still get to be happy.”

Your life: it’s your life. You have so many people that you couldn’t possibly see them all in one day. Your life is full, with people and things and emotions. You have your group of friends, all of whom like you. Nanami, with his love of hiking, and his firm belief that you are a good person. Tsumiki, and her brilliant mind and her wide smile and her laughter. Megumi, and his quiet words and his need for reassurance and his fierce protectiveness of his sister.

Your work, which is frustrating and time-consuming and rewarding and fun, genuinely fun, and it lets you go home early to watch the kids eat dinner, and it gives you the people you can help, the young sorcerers whose lives you’re helping, that you’re actually helping, that you’re saving, in your own way.

And Satoru, who makes you happy, who has stayed with you, whose presence has saved you from yourself, these past few years, when no-one else could have, who has only wanted to stay with you.

Satoru stayed. You’ve gone through—so much, together, years and years and years of everything time could put you through. But he’s staying now. And you want him to stay.

And you’re happy.

“I don’t care that it’s raining,” you say to him. “I don’t care if I’m cold. I don’t care if I wake up sick and bedridden with the flu tomorrow, because I can deal with it, because I’m happy.” You take his hand and press his palm to your chest, right above the hummingbird thrum of your heart. “I feel that. I feel—alive. I’m happy to be alive, Satoru.”

At your last words, Satoru, clearly just about to say something, falters. He looks down to his hand against your skin, and you feel his fingers tremble. Satoru’s eyes are wide and shining. His eyelashes flutter as he blinks, as he moves closer to you, like he’s in a daze.

“You are?” he murmurs.

“I am.” Your heart racing, you take a step closer to him. His hand is burning hot through the fabric of your shirt. The words catch, but then—you’re being honest, and so you’ve got to tell him. “And it’s because of you. You know that, right? You’re the reason my life is like this.”

“I’m…” Satoru swallows, eyes still fixed on your hands. “That’s not… you’ve done more than me.”

“Nothing without you,” you say, as your eyes begin to burn. You’d fight it, but—that you haven’t cried yet, it’s more of a miracle than anything. “Satoru. Without you, I don’t recognise myself. You saved me.”

Satoru’s fingers twitch. He stands rigid, every muscle in his body tense, locked at the joints. His lips move in a wordless motion; then, with your pulse still so loud in your ears, you recognise that he’s whispering silently in time with your heartbeat.

Blue. His eyes flick across your face. Quick, rapid glances, always returning to your eyes. Satoru takes you in, and you feel elevated beneath his gaze; that he is seeing you, the way you see him, and that just as he has his tells, you too have yours. Satoru has that tell-tale muscle in his cheek; what is it that you have, which he knows with that same familiarity?

A breath escapes him, shaky and tender. Satoru recognises something in you, and you can see his muscles slacken, his jaw loosen, and his expression twist into something that resembles pain. He leans down, squeezes his eyes shut, presses his forehead against yours.

You tilt your head up to him, filled with a need to be close to him, to breathe him in, to exist as close to him as he would allow. And he would allow.

“Please,” Satoru whispers, his voice nothing more than a murmur. It breaks, elongating the word to two syllables. His breath is hot against your lips, mixing with your own. You stare at him, unable to look away, and he’s so close that your vision blurs.  “Let me say it. Please. I can’t… I’ll wait, I promise, as long as you want me to, but I need to say it. Please.”

You move closer, just a little closer; your forehead against his, unimaginably tender, an intimacy you hadn’t ever thought you could have; your lips part, a hair’s breadth away from his, and you can feel him take in a strangled breath.

“Satoru.” Your words carry between you two, somehow, with no thought to the storm, just to the feel of his breath when he exhales. You swallow, and reach up to cup his hand with your own, to lace his fingers with yours. Your chest, his hand, yours. You hold him to you: two points of contact. Gloves be damned, you can feel him through them: his body heat, every bone, every muscle. “Tell me.”

Satoru’s fingers fist into your shirt. Then a hand is at the back of your head, pressing firm against your hair, and Satoru’s leaned back only to look you straight in the eyes, his gaze fierce and frantic and wild.

“I’m in love with you,” Satoru says. There’s a desperation to him, and a strength, and the roar of the storm behind you is nothing to the force with which he proclaims it, or the coarseness to his voice, like he’s speaking for the first time in a decade. His words start slow, but then come in a rush, his voice clearing, melting. “I’m in love with you. I love you. And you don’t have to say anything—I know we’re waiting, and I understand, I do, and I swear to you that I’ll wait for you for as long as you ask me to, but I can’t just, just wait in silence any more. I’m sorry.”

“Satoru…”

“I’m in love with you. I’m—I—I love you. I love you.” Satoru’s hand cradles the back of your head, slides down to your nape. “I’ll tell you whenever you want me to. I’ll tell you whenever you let me. Because, shit, you don’t—I’ve loved you for years, and I’ve loved you for longer than I’ve even known what love is, and I could tell you so much about it, about why I love you and why I’ll take whatever you give me and how I can’t think of anyone or anything else but loving you, because I’m only myself when I’m loving you, because you’re a part of me, and I need you in my life, and I can say—so much better things, shit, I promise, I just—I can hardly think right now—”

Satoru brings his hand from your neck to the space in-between your bodies, and looks down at it, a weak laugh escaping him.

His hand is shaking. He flexes his fingers, and his whole body shudders.

“You see what you do to me?” Satoru flexes his hand again and then groans, runs his fingers through his hair, tilts his head to the Chapel ceiling. Still shaking, he laughs to himself; a bubble that rises through him. “You’ve got me like this, and you’re just telling me that you’re happy. Shit.”

His chest shakes with another laugh, familiar and self-deprecating. Your whole body is blistering hot.

“If you give me a few minutes I can think of something better to say,” Satoru says, as he covers his face with his free hand. “Something more romantic—I mean, do you remember what you said to me, when we were on the roof of the Zenin household, years ago? I do. Could probably recite it word for word if you wanted me to. Fuck.” Satoru looks back to you, his eyes crinkled and gaze tender. “I don’t even know if you meant it in that way, but I feel I’ve got something to live up to. Give me some time and I’ll come up with something even better, but—”

Satoru breaks off, shaking his head. “I couldn’t just… not say something. You’ve got me trembling, actually trembling, look. And I know I shouldn’t have—I really, really shouldn’t have said anything, shit, again, I’m really sorry.”

“Satoru,” you manage to say again, because that’s all you seem to be able to say, all you can—think to say. Just his name. This time, it breaks him from his verbosities. You pull him from himself, and he pauses.

He offers you a small grin: there, there’s that boyish smile you recognise. “That’s me. I—hey, before you… can I say something else? I’ll make it short.”

“…If you want to.” You’re still reeling. You want him to slow down, let you take everything in; you want him to say it all again, and to never stop saying it. It’s still playing in your head, on repeat. I love you, I love you, I love you. Even more than that: I’m in love with you. You remember when the most you could think to hope for was when he called you gorgeous. You want him to say it again. And again. And again.

“You have this way of saying my name,” Satoru says, that smile still playing on his lips. “My first name, I mean. It’s the way you say it, something with the vowels. It’s the best. It’s my favourite thing I ever hear you say.”

“You… your favourite?”

“Out of everything you’ve ever said.” Satoru’s lips, that perfect smile.

“I…” You take a deep, shuddering breath in. You swallow, and your throat feels lined with some viscous liquid, the way it does when you’re about to cry. “You know. That implies you’ve got a list. Of things that I say, that you like?"

“Sure I do,” Satoru says, as a warm rich laugh rumbles through him. “My name’s up at the top. Then my surname. Then you have this specific way of saying magenta—”

“Shut up.” You push weakly at his shoulder. You laugh, an echo of his, then your own. “That’s so stupid.”

“Yeah, well. It’s what happens to a guy in love.” And you’re looking back up at him. Your eyes are watery, and Satoru’s smile is small, but soft. “It doesn’t have to change anything, me telling you. I mean, I figured you knew, but we were waiting, and I shouldn’t have—I’m sorry.”

Your lips part. “You don’t have to apologise.”

“I don’t want you to think—I didn’t mean for this to happen, today.” Satoru gestures to the Chapel, the warm string lights and the cushions and the old Pokémon posters. “This wasn’t some insane ploy for me to—for you to—”

“I know.”

“You know.” He breathes out a long sigh. “Of course you know. Yeah. Just don’t think too bad of me, okay? I’ll be on my best behaviour from now on.”

You laugh, again: tentative, getting stronger, as what he’s been saying finally starts to sink in. That he loves you. That he’s in love with you. That he’s finally said it; that it’s not the hesitant fact that floats between you two, known but unspoken.

All of those years. All of those years that you’ve loved him, and he hadn’t loved you back. Was that even right? You’ve never asked. You’ve never asked when he changed, when he started thinking about you differently. When he fell in love with you.

Your unreciprocated love of Satoru had been, for almost all of your childhood, just a fact of life. You’d never questioned whether he may have loved you back. Or whether he may ever grow to love you, in the way you loved him.

But he’s said it. You’ve seen his love in his actions, in his kindness and in his patience, but now you’re hearing it. That he loves you. That he’s in love with you.

Satoru is in love with you. You’re in love with him, but he’s in love with you.

“Starting now,” Satoru is saying, looking away from you and stretching up onto his toes, “I’m shutting up. Wow, have you ever heard me say that before? I don’t think I’ve ever heard me say that before. Isn’t that crazy?”

He’s giving you an out, you realise. He’s trying to change the conversation away from his… confession. Confession. Satoru’s confession, in case you hadn’t wanted him to say it, he’s letting you know that you can move on from it, that it doesn’t have to affect what you have right now.

But you’re absolutely affected. Everything about you is affected. And you’re not letting him off that easy.

“Satoru,” you try to begin, but then colour creeps into his cheeks, and you remember what he’s said about his name being his favourite thing—and you knew he liked it, but you hadn’t thought—how long have you known he’s liked it? How long has it meant what it means now?—and you pull yourself up, swallowing again, collecting yourself. “Satoru. You’ve got to stop talking now.”

“What? Oh, okay.” Satoru takes a step back—you fight the urge to follow him, keep that closeness, because now you have it you don’t think you’ll ever let it go—and holds his hands up in the air. “Look at me, shutting up again. It’s a miracle. A September miracle. Does that exist? I think—”

You laugh, and Satoru trails off. “Satoru,” you say again, “you’re not hearing me.”

“I’m not?” And he’s still trying to play it off, to pull himself back; he still thinks he’s overstepped. Satoru quirks an eyebrow, and you’ve never felt such a strong rush of love and familiarity for him, because you know him, you know him so well. “I guess I’m not hearing you. Wait, what did you say?”

You just smile, waiting for it to click. “Listen. Actually listen, now.”

“I—” Satoru goes to make another joke, but falters. His eyelashes have tangled together; they’re so light in colour that you can only tell because you’re close to him, looking with so much care. “Okay. Okay, I’m listening.”

“Good.” You take a step closer to him, and his eyes flick between you own, to your shoes, back to you. “Because didn’t I tell you I’m happy?”

“You… might have mentioned it.”

That flicker of a smile. Beautiful.

“Yeah,” you say. “So, come on, Satoru. Don’t you get what I’m saying? It means I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” There’s a beat, and you feel his gaze on you, the intensity of it, the heat. “I can take it. It’s not too much anymore. I can hold it, now, and I want to.”

“Hebi…” You can hear Satoru’s breath, low and shallow, and your heart aches for him. You remember how it used to hurt so much, loving him; and here’s that similar ache again, that love for him that’s so strong it hurts; but you can barely recognise it. It’s the same, in intensity, but now: I’m in love with you. He loves you. He loves you. He loves you back.

“Here,” you say, and you reach forward to touch him. Your fingers curl around his wrist. The touch is feather-light, but Satoru’s breath jumps at it. He’s stopped shaking, now. “Look. Keep listening, alright?”

You pull gently at his wrist, and Satoru follows you without resistance. You step backwards, then almost trip on the carpet; Satoru’s grip tightens on you to prevent you from falling, and you laugh together at it, quiet and tentative and hopeful. You only have to move a few more paces, this time looking where you’re going, and then you’re beneath the gap in the Chapel ceiling.

There’s another rug beneath you, and you lower yourself until you’re lying down, back on the floor, staring up. You pat the soft fabric beside you, and Satoru’s lips twitch into a smile, and he lies down at your side.

Together, you stare up at the hole in the ceiling. The blue tarp that Satoru—or Tsumiki, or Megumi, or all of them working together—had pulled over the other side, it’s translucent, and you can see the splashes of raindrops falling onto it, water streaming down the side. The tarp is tied down tight, but a small puddle of rainwater has collected in the centre, pulling it down so it’s the slightest concave, with the slightest curve.

The sound of rainfall enters the Chapel from both directions; from above, and from the entrance, drifting in along with the salt smell of rain against rock. You wonder, if you turned all of the fairy lights off, whether the moonlight would shine through the material; if the Chapel would be swimming in blue, a coloured wash over everything beneath the sky.

Satoru goes to rest his hands on his chest, but you reach out to him. You link your fingers together, in that small gap of space between your bodies. Satoru’s eyes widen, but then his fingers twine with yours. He’s holding your hand. He grins at you, a little childish.

Your clothes are still soaked through, and you’re beginning to feel the cold settle on your skin, but it’s dry in the Chapel, and next to Satoru. Despite the storm still billowing outside, the air is warm around you. You cannot remember how many days were spent here, like this; lying next to each other, enjoying each other’s company, growing up together. You feel a surge of emotion: the privilege that you have had, to have been able to have a childhood spent with Satoru.

Then, your voice breaking the heavy quiet, you say:

“When I was gone…” Your lips move around the words, and you see Satoru shift in the corner of your eye, his head turning so he can look at you. You keep your eyes on the ceiling, the blue-tinted light, the rainfall. It’s important that you say this correctly, and if you looked at him again, even once, you might forget everything you were supposed to say.

You begin again. “Back when I was a sorcerer, and I wasn’t in contact with anyone, it was like I kept getting smaller. My life was getting heavier and heavier, and all I was doing was getting smaller, and weaker. I had to carry everything, on my own, but I wasn’t strong enough to. That’s what I meant, that I couldn’t hold it. When I can, now. I felt so small, I could only just carry myself, and all of my focus went on making sure I didn’t… atrophy away into nothingness. I couldn’t carry anything else.”

The patter of rain against the tarp. Winters in the Chapel. Satoru, right by your side. My space heater.

“But… since I came back…” Involuntary, you feel yourself begin to smile. “I feel stronger. Bigger. And so it doesn’t matter if my life gets heavier, because I can carry it, now. On my own, and with other people. Because I’m happy. And you make me happy. And I can hold more than just myself, Satoru.”

You take in a deep breath, and look away from the ceiling, to Satoru. “Do you get what I mean?”

His eyes are wide and blue, his expression open. Satoru’s not trying to hide from you; you see pure surprise, and then hope. His voice is a rasp. “I… Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

He’s returning your smile; the thought of it makes your cheeks warm, and you blink at him, feeling flushed. “I only just realised it now,” you say. “This—” You gesture to the Chapel, to the ceiling; the cold rainwater that has seeped through your clothes, which you can see, and feel, but which you are protected from. “—all of this, everything you’ve done here, it’s made me happy. And the thing is that you knew it would, because you know me, and because you’re a kind person.”

“Hebi…”

You shake your head, as much as you can do on the floor. Your eyes have started to burn again, but you push through it, not allowing yourself to falter when you’re so close to telling him what he needs to hear.

“And it doesn’t matter if I’m cold,” you say, “and soaking wet, and shivering because I’m soaking wet. And feeling—honestly, pretty stupid, because I was the one who got us all cold and soaking wet and shivering.” You both breathe out a laugh, together. “Because I can still hold it, even when it gets heavier. That’s what made me realise.”

Satoru smiles at you; it’s such a genuine, genuine smile that it threatens your already-watery eyes. You have to look away, back up to the ceiling, so you don’t start crying right there.

You clear your throat, blinking furiously.

“I’m sorry I made us go into the rain,” you say with a choked voice, if just to ensure you’re doing something other than bursting into tears.

“It was to prove a point,” Satoru says, and you can hear his smile without having to even see it. “I respect that.”

Your laugh is watery, and you squeeze tightly to Satoru’s hand.

“I guess so.” You use your free hand to rub furiously at your eyes, and let out a sharp sigh of frustration when you only succeed in lathering your face with more cold rainwater. Your gloves are sodden. “Oh, shit. Well, we’re cold now, so.”

“Hey! Hey, I can fix that!” You look over to Satoru, who leans himself up on his elbow. He untangles your fingers, and then raises his hands. He presses one to his chest, and then, once you realise what he’s doing and give him a soft look of appreciation, the other, gently, on your shoulder.

His reverse cursed technique feels similar to how his Infinity feels; slow, gradual, and steady, warm water flowing outwards from his singular point of contact. The warmth spreads through your body, and though it doesn’t take away the cold from your clothes, it still makes it better, as if it allows your body able to withstand the cold instead. You feel the cold, and then you feel Satoru’s technique, and it’s better.

You breathe in, and realise that even your shoulder feels lighter, looser; you hadn’t realised it had been hurting you before. You’re used to a constant low-level pain, but with Satoru’s reverse cursed technique, it’s healed, just for the moment. It’s not a permanent solution, but you’d forgotten how much of a relief it was.

Satoru slumps down, blowing a damp strand of hair out of his eyes. His glasses are still buried in his hair, but they seem to have gotten lost, or forgotten about.

“Much better,” Satoru congratulates himself. He reaches out and takes your hand again, and when you lock your fingers together, you feel a steady beat of warmth emanating from the joint touch.

You look down at it, and then back to Satoru, who’s grinning.

“I’ll just keep it going,” Satoru says, “at a lower level. It’s pretty easy nowadays, especially since I’m just using it to keep us warm.”

“I didn’t realise it could be used for things other than injuries,” you say, and your heart skips at Satoru’s pleased, if slightly bashful, expression.

“Not sure if everyone can,” he professes, shuffling a little closer to you like he’s telling you a secret. “But I can. Being cold is just a minor way of your body going wrong, right? Or something like that. Shoko was talking to me about it a few weeks ago and I kinda zoned out for most of it, but I got the general idea.”

“Satoru.”

He grins even wider. “Are you going to tell me how amazing I am, Hebi-Hebi?”

Your lips part to say something to him, to continue the joke, to make him smile even more; but Satoru’s eyes flick down to them, to your lips, and you find the words far too heavy on your tongue to say.

You shake your head.

Satoru looks back up to your eyes. He must see something there, something that you probably couldn’t word yourself, because his gaze drifts from your eyes, down, across your face, your nose and your cheeks and the shell of your ears, and then, again, to your mouth.

Your lips feel suddenly dry. Your tongue darts out to moisten them, but Satoru’s eyes follow its movement, and you see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows.

You rise, slowly, so you’re leaning on your side, your arm keeping your body up. A mirror of his pose from earlier; only Satoru’s back is flush to the floor, and his chin lifts as you lean up, so he can watch you as you move closer to him. His white hair is a still wet, and the water darkens it to silver, glinting in the faint light. Strands curl at his temple, around his cheekbones, at his jaw.

Satoru lets go of your hand, but before any of the warmth can leave you, he replaces the touch with his palm on your cheek. He cups your face, and you think, mind both hazy and alert, that this must have been the most tender way Satoru has ever touched you.

Your bodies are close, but you want to be even closer; you rest your weight fully on your arm now, and lean over him. Your hair gets in the way for a second, and Satoru laughs, and reaches up to brush it aside. You tilt even closer, so your chest brushes his ribs, so your nose brushes his. Satoru’s eyelashes are long, and silver, and tangled.

You cannot tell when he is breathing, and when it is you. Your chests rise at the same time, and you’re breathing in the same air, passing it between your lips. Your gaze is tugged towards Satoru’s; his mouth, his lips slightly pink, a subtle sheen to them from his wet tongue.

You know what he tastes like. Used to. There is a memory, years old. You want to know again. You want to know everything about Satoru; you cannot believe it, that there are somehow so many things that you still don’t know about him.

What he tastes like. What his lips feel like against yours. How he would kiss you, now he knows you love him. How it all compares, now you have something to compare it to, now you are older. He’s older. You’re both older, and neither of you has been kissed in a very long time.

Waiting. Waiting, for each other. You don’t want to wait any longer.

You lean down over him, your eyes fluttering closed. And then Satoru’s hand tightens on the side of your face, and your eyes open.

Satoru breathes in, a jagged rattle. His pupils are blown, and even in your confusion you have to take a moment to admire him. It shouldn’t be allowed, for him to be this beautiful, and for his words to still be echoing in your ears. I’m in love with you. This man, this beautiful man whom you love, he’s the one who said it to you first.

And you want to—god, finally—kiss him, and Satoru looks as if he’s on the verge of collapse, and he holds your head back.

Before you can question him, he shakes his head. His thumb brushes over your lips; he seems to intend it as a plea for you to be quiet, to let him speak, but your mind goes very suddenly very blank.

Your breathing falters as you zero in on his finger—Satoru’s, Satoru’s finger, okay—pressing against your mouth. The touch is gentle, but then Satoru moves his thumb down, until it’s dragging down on your bottom lip. You can feel the subtle roughness of his fingertip, calluses from repeated fights with curses, and there is a very real and alarming desire to open your mouth and feel that roughness with your tongue.

Which you—will not do, not before you’ve kissed him. But Satoru seems to realise his mistake, and he quickly shifts so all of his fingers are resolutely on one side of your face; but he squeezes his eyes shut, and keeps them shut for multiple seconds, as a red flush begins to bloom under his skin.

When Satoru’s eyes open, he’s looking at you with a wild mix of—you can barely tell, there’s so much—love, you’re sure, of desperation, and need, and love again, and so much more that it’s overwhelming, staggering.

“Before…” Satoru croaks, then flushes even darker and clears his throat. He sounds hoarse, but his eyes flash, resolute. Your stomach swoops dangerously. “I need to hear you say it to me.”

You blink at him, mind still reeling. Tentative, you try: “Satoru?”

“Nah. Not that.” Satoru’s lips twitch, distractingly, but he squeezes the side of your face, and you look back to him. “I mean, yeah, I like that, but it’s not what I want you to say.”

“What is it?”

“You know,” Satoru says. He frees his other hand, and it finds the back of your neck. Satoru strokes along your hairline, and you lean into his touch, trying to understand. “You can guess what I want to hear from you.”

You smile, unable to stop yourself, even if you’re still unsure what he’s trying to say. “I… I’m happy? You make me happy?”

Satoru’s laugh comes breathy and free. “More than that. C’mon, Hebi-Hebi.”

“More?” God, you want to kiss him. His touch is so gentle, close to reverent. There’s that familiar grin, the crinkle of his eyes, the unmoving tell-tale muscle in his cheek. All of him, you love. “You… I think you just want compliments.”

“Not this time,” Satoru whispers. He tilts his head up, so his lips are barely brushing yours. When you blink, it takes you twice as long to open your eyes. “I want to hear the truth.”

Oh. Oh, oh.

“Satoru—”

“You’ve got to tell me,” he says. Satoru tightens his hold on you, and you can only look into his eyes, that vibrant ring of ocean blue around his dark pupils. “I need to make sure you can say it, before anything happens.” A beat. Satoru swallows. Quieter, achingly honest: “I can’t do this if I don’t hear it.”

Your fingers find his hair, and you card them through those silver-white strands. You brush his hair from his face, from his temple, his cheekbones, his jaw. Satoru’s head tilts closer to your hand, and as he stares up at you, you have never been able to understand him more than you can, right now.

The moment holds.

“I love you,” you tell him. “Is that it?”

Slowly, a smile breaks across his face. And then he’s smiling up at you, and it’s broad and vibrant and dazzling, and you think it’s the most beautiful he’s ever looked.

You go to laugh, but it gets stuck in your throat. “Oh. Oh, Satoru. I love you. I love you, so much. You—” Your eyes scan over his face, taking in every detail of his expression. You will never forget this, how he looks right now. How he’s looking at you, like you’re the most important thing in the world. “—You have no clue how much I love you.”

Satoru goes to protest, but you shake your head, a half-bubble of laughter escaping you.

“No. No, you don’t,” you say.

Satoru’s smiling when he says: “I’m pretty sure I do. You’re the one who has no clue, Hebi-Hebi.”

“I… really doubt that.”

“We’ll agree to disagree.”

“Amicably,” you say, and Satoru laughs.

You watch him, the smile still playing about his lips. You’re the only one who can make him smile like this, you realise. This is what he looks like when he’s in love. I’m in love with you. You—you’re going to have to make him say it, again and again and again, until you’re tired of it. You don’t know if you’re ever going to be tired of it.

But then, haven’t you got the rest of your lives to remind each other of it? There’s nothing stopping you, now. You’ve got this, forever.

“Now,” Satoru says, his eyes flicking from yours to your lips. He clears his throat again.

“Now?”

“Mm. Now.” His gaze is fixed on your mouth. You feel your heart pulsing in your chest; throughout your body, you feel the heady, delicious feeling of anticipation. “Now,” Satoru says, “I want you to tell me what you want. Right now.”

Heat tears through you, but you just splutter out a laugh. “You—okay, you’re just being self-indulgent now.”

“Yeah,” Satoru agrees, still shamelessly staring at your lips, “but you should still say it, though. Just so we’re clear.”

“Oh, should I?”

“For sure. Spell it out for me,” he says, grin widening, “just make sure you say it in a real low, sultry voice, okay?” Satoru adopts a gravelly, sensuous tone. “Tell me what you want from me, Hebi-Hebi.”

You choke, and Satoru’s childish giggles make you laugh even harder.

“If you haven’t figured it out by now,” you manage, fighting to talk and have some semblance of control here, “then you’re way more dense than I thought you were.”

“Dense? Me?” Satoru’s eyes widen, ridiculously faux-innocent, and you have to look above his head to stifle your laughter. “I’ve absolutely no idea. You’ve got to tell me. I won’t know unless you tell me.”

“You’re so stupid.”

“Ooh, say more of that.”

“You’re so—” You look down at him again, and are unable to fight away that massive wave of affection that crashes down over you, when you see him just looking up to you, his face open as he’s laughing. You shake your head and don’t break your eyes from his. “I don’t even know why I tolerate you.”

“You more than tolerate me!” Satoru pinches at your cheek, and you half pull away from him, chuckling, but his hand on the back of your neck keeps you resolutely in place. You purse your lips to keep from smiling. “What was it you think of me? Say it again, won’t you? What was it?”

“I—I am absolutely not saying it again.” You roll your eyes, and Satoru’s eyes sparkle with laughter. “Satoru, honestly. You’ve already gotten one ridiculous confession of love out of me, and any more would—”

Whatever you were going to say is cut off. Satoru tilts his head up and presses his lips against yours.

At first the position is difficult to get right. You were surprised, and Satoru’s teeth bump into yours, and then you breathe out a laugh because a thought flashes through your mind, that: surely, Satoru should be better at kissing than to let your teeth clash? Then Satoru huffs impatiently, holds the side of your face and reangles you, and kisses into your mouth that’s still half-open in a laugh.

And, yes. Yes, yes, this is what you had wanted.

Your eyes have fluttered shut, and you close the distance between your bodies. His tongue swipes wet against the underside of your lip. Satoru tightens his hold on the back of your neck; his fingers move upwards to drag against your scalp and a shudder wracks your body, involuntary.

Just right after you feel Satoru’s lips twitch against yours, and your mind goes pleasantly fuzzy as you realise that you’re kissing his smile. One of his smiles: which one?

You press closer to him, to try to feel, but Satoru hums. It’s a low, honey-like sound from the back of his throat; a sound you have never heard before, one that you’ve drawn out of him. A giddy need fills you, to coax more of those sounds from him, and to find more, learn more about him.

And when he kisses you, you realise there’s something familiar to it. You don’t recognise the sensation of it, how he feels, how he sounds, the way his lips move against yours; but it’s still Satoru’s lips, and Satoru’s voice, and when you shift closer, close your fingers in the soft strands of his hair, it’s Satoru who you’re holding on to, and Satoru who holds you just the same.

You’d thought it had been good that first time, when he’s kissed you on the cold street, but this is something so different. Before, you’d been mad with desperation, all forceful mouthing and his fingers clenching painfully tight in your hair, uncertainty powering every action and every touch. You had never been kissed before; everything was new and frightening and unknown, and it was good because it was Satoru, but—

Now, Satoru cups your face with his palms and lifts up to meet your lips. He kisses you softly, but with determination, and holds you like you’re something delicate, something he doesn’t want to break. Important. Loved.

Emotion tugs at you, but you can only think of him, Satoru; you can only think of this beautiful pressure, how it’s been so long since he’s kissed you, since it’s better, so much better, because you know, now. It’s good because it’s Satoru, and because you want this.

Neither of you have done this in such a long time—waiting, god, you don’t want to wait anymore—and fall back into the rhythm of it, age falling away. Satoru’s lips cover yours, slotting above and below your top lip so his tongue can slip into your mouth and lick upwards.

Closer. More touch, more. You push off from your side so you’re not twisting awkwardly over him, and lean more of your weight on the arm that’s resting by the side of Satoru’s head; it gives you better access to him, and you curl the fingers of your free hand in his hair, twisting the not-yet-dry locks between your index finger and your thumb. The metal side of his glasses digs into your fingers, and you grasp at them and toss them to the side.

Satoru’s tongue dips further into your mouth and it’s hot and wet and slick, and you want to feel more of him: suddenly, you want to feel more, touch more, you want to touch him, and you trail your hand down from his hair to his jaw, to his neck.

You feel the sharpness of his collarbones and dig your fingers in to the softness just above the bone. The heel of your palm presses into his chest, and there’s a delicious lack of give; Satoru’s firm with muscle, lean but strong, and when you clench your fist there, pull your fingertips down his chest, you feel Satoru’s ribs jump underneath your touch and he inhales.

The movement of his lips falter, then he’s pressing up into you, pulling you down against him, kissing you harder.

Satoru catches your lip between your teeth and pulls it into his mouth—from the back of your throat, you hear yourself make something that sounds like a short: “Oh!”, and then a weak noise, almost embarrassing, that turns into something pitched-up and drawn-out.

“You love me,” Satoru whispers against your lips. Heat rushes through you at the sound of him; out of breath, hoarse, his voice low and gravelly. “So, just checking. Definitely as more than friends?”

“Fuck’s sake.” You sound breathless and impatient to the degree that you would find it mortifying, but you still feel weightless, floaty, and you’re needy from that last moment’s kiss, the suggestion passion of it, and fuck it, you’re impatient. “Satoru, I’m going to kill you.”

“That—” He presses a kiss against your lips, and you try to chase it, but he just leans down to move his mouth against your neck. Your mouth opens and you tilt your head back for more. “—That’s not an answer. Can I get something more definitive, or I’m just going to be thinking—”

You groan, and fist your fingers in his hair and drag his lips up to meet yours. Satoru responds with a mad enthusiasm as his hands move from your face to hold you closer and pull your body flush against his.

Thick, delicious heat follows his touch; his hand presses between your shoulder blades, then dips to the curve of your back. You arch against him and Satoru grasps at you.

His fingers scrabble for you to get closer and you’re powerless to resist—you don’t want to resist. Definitely as more than friends—stupid, stupid lovely Satoru—and to assuage any doubts you break the kiss and push off him. More than friends.

Satoru lets out a whine as he tries to find your lips again, but you laugh, heartbeat loud and rabbiting in your ears. You sling a leg over him and sit firmly in his lap, and Satoru inhales sharply. You take his face between your hands and kiss him, hard.

Satoru makes a pinched little noise that breaks as you deepen the kiss. You take it as confirmation. More than friends, you think. Idiot.

But it’s like he can hear you, because Satoru’s relentless; his hands flatten on the small of your back and he tugs you against him, your chest against his.

Hot pleasure fills you—a giddy form of delight—at how easily he moves you. Satoru’s strong, and you dig your fingers into his shoulders, his back, and feel the thick muscle flex underneath you. You scrape your gloved fingertips up through his hair and against his scalp and Satoru’s head falls back, his eyes squeezed shut.

You seize it, take advantage. Your lips skate across his jaw, and you kiss him everywhere you’ve dreamed of; a kiss to the peak of his cheekbone, a kiss to the tender muscle in his cheek, a kiss to the silver-white scar lacing his jaw. Your teeth pass across it and you feel the slight indent beneath your touch; and then you feel Satoru shake beneath you, completely.

Because you’re not how you used to be, when you kissed him last. For all that Satoru knows how to kiss, you know what you’re doing, too.

You press your lips to the underside of his jaw, and taste the slight salt to his skin. Satoru smells of rainwater and the outside, but when you concentrate harder, you can smell the faint scent of his cologne. It’s so familiar—so similar—that you breathe him in, his skin hot against your lips. Satoru holds you against him as you move your lips down the column of his throat; you find a spot that makes him shudder and linger there, wanting to feel more.

“Hebi—” It’s Satoru, his voice leaving him like a groan. “I—can you—”

As he talks, delicious vibrations move up his throat, rippling under your lips. You hum, returning them, and feel Satoru swallow. You move your lips there, curious, and suck.

“Talk to me,” Satoru struggles to say. “I want to hear you—I want to hear your voice.”

“Satoru,” you mumble, against his skin, and feel again how he inhales, sharp. “Satoru, Satoru, Satoru.”

“Fuck.”

His voice sends heat straight through you. It collects and churns in your stomach, bubbling with need and intensity, and it’s like it’s melting you.

Your lips find his again and you kiss him, again and again, escalating until you can hardly find time to breathe.

“Again,” Satoru gasps, against your lips. You try to speak, but he’s licking into your mouth and his tongue is curling upwards and skimming the back of your teeth, and you didn’t even know that you could be kissed like this. Satoru sucks hard on your lip and you open for him, desperate.

Satoru’s lips press to the corner of your mouth, then to your jaw, then to the soft and sensitive skin just below your ear. He catches your earlobe between his teeth and teases out another shaking gasp from you.

You say his name again, but you’re so breathless that his name elongates, shuddering two syllables into four. But Satoru’s got you: his hands are tight on your waist, holding you close. Your shirt’s starting to ride up, but—you can’t even think about that right now, because the feeling of him against you makes you delirious.

“Don’t think you’ll ever understand,” Satoru mutters, as he presses red-hot kisses down your jaw. Each kiss marks emphasis, and you hang onto his words, hang on to him. “Fuck, you’re so—so beautiful, you drive me crazy—don’t know how long I’ve wanted to—gorgeous, love you so much, want to—”

Shit. Your eyelids drop, pleading to close. Your body feels alive and electricity pulses through you in time with your heartbeat. Shit.

“Satoru,” you plead, breathless. He stares at you, with his wide, blue-rimmed pupils, with his mouth open, his lips kissed-red and slick with saliva. Satoru’s panting against you, and you say again, nothing more than a whisper: “Satoru, please.”

You can barely think. Satoru groans and drags his hands up to tug on your hair and you bare your neck to him, gasping. His lips latch onto the sensitive skin there, sucking into his mouth, soothing with his tongue. His teeth skim your pulse point and you hear, as if through water, the soft, high-pitched noises you’re making.

Your head spins. You tug at him and fist your fingers in his shirt, pulling him to you. Satoru’s lips leave a thin layer of saliva that cools as he moves on. The contrast—the sharp cold to the rolling heat of his breath—makes you shiver, squirm in his lap.

A groan rumbles through Satoru’s chest as you do and you realise that his hips are trembling, threatening to buck up against you: he’s hard, underneath you, and he’s trying not to move. Satoru’s hard, he’s—and you don’t even know what to do with that, because this is all happening—so quickly, it’s—

You try to stop your own hips from moving, because you don’t want to—you’re not sure what you want, exactly—

God, you can’t even think. Satoru’s lips are back on yours and he’s kissing you again, and it’s good, it’s so good. And with your frantic scrabbling at each other, your shirt had ridden up, and the skin on your back feels suddenly very cold, very open and exposed.

Satoru’s fingers—bare fingers, skin—are touching your shoulders, and then one hand’s moving down, tracing down your spine like he’s counting the divots, but the skin at your lower back doesn’t have any fabric covering it, and it’s not protected from his skin.

It's so much, and that was good, and that was what you’d wanted, but now the feelings keep rising. Bad feelings, and your heartbeat gets louder, and you try to distract yourself from Satoru’s palms slowly moving down to your bare skin but you can’t, because the only thing you can distract yourself is with more touch.

If it’s not his hands, it’s his lips, or his tongue, or his hips—he’s hard against you, even if he’s not trying to get you to do anything about it, he still is, and what if—or his chest that’s pressed so tightly against yours.

Everywhere there is touch, and hands, and skin, and you can’t get away from it, because it’s surrounding you, it’s everywhere, and it’s so much, too much.

You try to breathe through it, the way you’ve learnt how to do, but you can’t breathe with Satoru’s lips on yours. You try to inhale through your nose but there’s not enough air. You were breathless before—that was good, better than anything, and—but now your lungs are tight, painful. Seizing up. You squeeze your eyes shut and try to breathe through it and think through it and distract yourself and sink into it and you can’t even think, and you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing because you haven’t done this in so long, and never in a healthy way, and you don’t want to dissociate like you did before because it’s Satoru, and you want to enjoy this, but you don’t know how to.

It's that—you’ve never enjoyed yourself like this before, but even as you think that, you’re realising that you’re not letting yourself enjoy it anymore because you can’t stop thinking about the bare skin of your back and if Satoru’s going to touch you there and if you’ll be able to handle it.

And you don’t want to just pretend that you’re okay, the way you used to—Satoru wouldn’t want you to, you know this—but now your blood is roaring in your ears and that familiar nausea begins to swell in your stomach, and, shit, you can’t even think, you can’t even breathe.

You haven’t been paying attention to Satoru, but with a jolt you realise that he’s stopped kissing you. He’s leaned back, and you can’t look at him because you don’t think you can open your eyes, and he says in his rough gravel voice: “Hebi?”

You can’t answer. You’re trying to breathe through it, to not think about it, to stop yourself from ruining this when it was so good before, everything you’d wanted.

Satoru’s voice comes louder. More insistent. “What’s wrong? Are you—” His palm flattens on your back. The pad of his finger brushes your bare skin.

You push yourself off him, gasping. You hear Satoru swear, and then there’s a thump that you can’t place, but you gulp at the air, tugging your hands over your shaking head.

“Sorry,” you say, pushing the words out. “I’ll—be okay, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, one, one second.”

“It’s okay.” Satoru, his voice familiar, reassuring. “It’s okay, don’t apologise. You’re okay. You’re okay, it’s okay. I’m right here—”

You nod, and when you crack open your eyes, the first thing you see is him. Blue. His eyes are wide, and he scans your face, searching. Your breath comes jagged, but you keep your focus on him, on his eyes. Satoru’s blue eyes. You love his eyes. You love him.

“I’m okay,” you say, even as your chest jumps erratically. “I just—shit, sorry, I’ll be fine, I just need—I need—sorry—”

“Some space? You want some space?” Satoru finishes for you, and you offer him a desperate, tight smile. You remind yourself that Satoru’s been here with you before; back when this reaction was painfully common, when you couldn’t go a day without your breath freezing at the thought of touching someone.

You listen to his breath, and match it with yours. What sounds are there? Ground yourself.

His breath; the rain, on the plastic sheet above you; the storm, outside; the creaking of old trees, bending to the wind. You feel the material of your gloves, the rainwater soaked through, fabric sticking to your skin when you flex your fingers. Touching you—but Satoru’s not touching you anymore, he’s stopped, and he’s still right by you. He’s not going away, and you stare into his eyes.

You count his eyelashes, then recount. Silver, white, silver-white, grey. Some are still tangled together.

You count the different shades of blue in his irises. Name them. Try to find the differences between the patterns between his left and his right.

Satoru breathes with you, and you don’t run from it; you breathe through it, with him.

“Okay,” you say, and exhale. “Okay. Okay.”

When your breathing has slowed, smoothed out, Satoru asks, carefully: “…It got too much?”

“Yeah,” you say. You swallow, your mouth feeling dry. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologise,” Satoru says automatically. Like a reflex. Which it probably is. You smile, and he returns it.

“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Apology rescinded.” You blow air through your lips; it makes a faint, weak whistling noise. “Just… okay. Okay. Just hasn’t happened in a while.”

“I know.”

You look down. “Fuck. I’m sorry, I—I thought I was over the worst of it.”

“You are,” Satoru says, “over the worst of it. You are.”

“But—” You gesture to yourself, and then to him, and then back to your curled-up form, some half-foot away from him.

A weight drags down inside of you; after everything, why are you still forced to hold yourself back? Why aren’t you free to live the way you want to? You’ve been doing so much better—you’ve been so proud of yourself, for how well you’ve been doing. Touch hasn’t triggered you like that… not since last year, so long ago, you don’t think. Nothing that severe, where you’ve had to push yourself away, frightened, shaking.

You swear, under your breath. It comes out a hiss. “I hate this,” you admit, to him. “I thought I was good. I didn’t think I’d… shit.”

But Satoru shakes his head. A gentle smile passes over his lips; he’s not angry, like a small part of you thinks he should be. “It’s still all pretty new, though, right? With most touch-stuff, we’ve being doing the Endou-approved method recently, right? Slow and steady? And… well…”

You breathe out a laugh. “Yeah. But, still, I mean—”

“I’d be more surprised if you were completely fine with everything,” Satoru says. “You’ve also not done something like that in a pretty long time, Hebi-Hebi.”

You breathe out a laugh, and mumble: “You’re making me sound like some quivering virgin.”

Satoru chuckles. “I mean…”

“Shut up.”

“Joking!” Satoru grins lopsidedly at you. His lips are still a little too pink.

The thought sends a thrill of pleasure through you, which jolts your system awake, pleasant. You’d worked through your body’s response to touch quick enough, before it could escalate into a full-blown panic attack; your recovery time’s better, because of it. You feel better.

“I’m joking,” Satoru says, “I swear. But still. I mean, I should be the one saying sorry—I should’ve realised earlier it’d be too much, all that in one go.”

“It’s not your responsibility,” you say.

“Nah.” Satoru’s hand waves through the air, lax. “Doesn’t mean I’m going to stop thinking about you all the time, though. I should’ve figured, before it got too bad. I was just a bit…” Satoru trails off: there’s that boyish grin again. “Distracted?”

You purse your lips. “Distracted?”

“Can’t blame me, though.”

“Sure.”

Satoru glances over at you. “Exactly, for sure.” Then his head tilts to the side, and some of his joviality fades. “You feeling okay?”

You nod. You are. “Yeah,” you say, when he seems unconvinced. “I promise. Honestly. I just got—overwhelmed, or something. I’m okay now.”

There’s a beat in which Satoru assesses you, his eyes flicking over your expression, taking in whatever micro-movements he’s aware of and has catalogued over all of these years.

Then—clearly deciding you’re telling the truth, which you are—he lets out a long, dramatic sigh, and pretends to swoon. “I understand getting overwhelmed,” Satoru says. “It’s a great privilege, to be kissed by the great Satoru Gojo. Do you know how many men and women would fall head over feet just for a chance to kiss me?”

“Men and women?”

Satoru sniffs. “My beauty is so great it transcends convention. And general sexuality, too, if we’re being technical.”

“I’m glad your beauty is inclusive,” you say.

Satoru chuckles, and shuffles a little closer. Not enough to touch. It’s how he used to act, before he could touch you at all; move the slightest bit closer, so you know he’s thinking about you, that he cares, without needing to hold you at all.

But he can, now: hold you. You like it when he does. You want him to. You move closer yourself.

You take in another breath, and lean into his side. You rest your head on his shoulder, and are relieved when you feel no remnants of the panic. There’s only the familiarity of Satoru’s presence, the comfortable strength of him, the security you feel when he, slowly and carefully, shifts to wrap his arm around you.

A harder section of rock digs into your back, and you shift so you can glance back; there’s a pillow missing from the pile you’d seen lining the walls just before. You notice where it’s been moved to and cough out a laugh, and then crane your neck up to him: it’s now been moved rather conspicuously to cover Satoru’s lap.

Satoru notices your gaze: he groans, and plops his chin on your forehead so you can’t see his expression. “You’re not allowed to say anything,” he says, pained. “No comments can be made. Nothing smart or teasing right now, okay?”

“I wasn’t going to tease you.”

“Say absolutely nothing.” He tightens his arm around you, pulling you in closer. “I can tell you’re going to make fun of me, and my heart can’t take it.”

“I’m not going to make fun of you!”

“Yeah, right.” Satoru leans back, squinting down at you. He sees your face, and groans again. “You are!”

You close your eyes. “I’m not—”

“It’s been years, Hebi-Hebi, and I’m a guy! A man!” Satoru throws his free hand into the air and gestures out in front of you both. “I can’t help it!”

“I—”

And I get that it’s pretty sacrilegious, you know. Being literally in a Chapel, and everything.” Satoru giggles at his own joke. “Get it?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s funny,” he says. Amused. “That’s a funny joke I just made. Don’t you think? The Chapel? Sacrilegious? Right?”

“Hmm.”

“Tell me I’m funny, Hebi-Hebi, c’mon, c’mon, I’m funny…”

Satoru’s voice trails off into laughter, and you curl further into him. You can hear his heartbeat; whether it’s through his throat, or his chest, you’re not sure. Even in the newfound quiet, his words echo in your ears. It’s been years.

It has been for you, too. You hadn’t… expected, when you kissed Satoru, that anything would escalate. You think now, that if you hadn’t reacted so badly to his touch, and panicked the way you had… what would have happened? What would you have done?

You’ve slept with a man before. Multiple times. You’d made the wry comment about him thinking you were a quivering virgin, but both you and Satoru know it’s not true. You’ve had sex. The act of it, you’ve done before, and so has Satoru.

It must be different. With him.

You’ve slept with a man before, but you hadn’t enjoyed it. You’d… it had been an experience that you’d performed, and when it was over it had been over, and you hadn’t been able to care much for it in its presence or in its absence. You’ve not cared, in these years, that you haven’t had sex with anyone, because it had never done anything for you. It wasn’t anything to be missed.

That can’t be the same, with Satoru. He’s not the same as you; he never has been, even since you were teenagers. Satoru’s experience of sex has been so, so different to yours, and…

Does he expect it? Does he expect you to let him touch you, now, because of what had—almost happened, just minutes ago?

Even though your body had revolted against it. Even though it had been so much, and it had been too much, because you want him to hold you, and you want him to kiss you, and to love you, but you think of sex, real sex, good, enjoyable sex, and all of the bare skin and the dripping sweat and the flesh and the bodies and the limbs and everything pressed against you and you think—you don’t want to do that, not yet, you don’t think you could.

You could, probably, likely, you could get through it. The way you had before. Just push through and switch off your brain, go through the motions, escape from your mind and perform it to please him.

But do you want to get through it with Satoru? Perform, escape from yourself? When you could enjoy it, if you gave yourself more time?

You squeeze your eyes shut, bury your face into his shoulder. Closer to him; your body craves it, and it soothes you, just to be near him. You breathe him in, one long exhale, trying to remember him, this moment. You should—before you lose the courage, you should—

“Hebi?” Satoru squeezes you.

You look up at him.

“You’re thinking too hard,” Satoru says. “Something’s up?”

It’s a statement, but phrased as a question: his voice quirks up at the end. For all of your worries, you feel your heart swell.

“Satoru,” you say, and then hesitate. You don’t know how to word it. There’s a tug of guilt, for what you want to ask of him; because you’ve asked so much, already, and even now you want more.

The silence between you stretches out, and then Satoru, his eyebrows furrowing, breaks it.

“Hey. Hey, what is it?” Satoru repositions himself so he can see you more clearly. He keeps his arm around you, and your chest fills with gratitude, because you can’t let him go, not yet. You lean against him, stare up. His expression flickers with worry, but his words are gentle. “What’s going on?”

You swallow, and then grip yourself with a forcefulness you find when in meetings, when at your work, when you have to act braver than you really feel.

“I don’t want to have sex yet,” you say, pushing the words out into the open. Like you’d pressed your palm down onto a burning iron; that half-second of fearful anticipation before the blinding pain hits you.

There’s a beat in which Satoru is silent. Then: “Oh,” he says. “Wait. That’s it?”

You stare at him. “What?”

“Seriously, is that it?”

“What—do you mean, is that it?”

“I—” Then, to your pure surprise, Satoru bursts out laughing. His breath drags out of him in a rattling wheeze, and then he catches a glimpse of your expression and immediately tries to shut it down. “No! No, it’s good! I just figured it’d be something way more serious than that. Because… wait, no, never mind, ignore me. Shit. I didn’t say anything.”

“What?” You blink up at him, astonished. What is he talking about?

“No,” Satoru says. He laughs again, and covers his face with his hands. “No, it’s actually bad. I can’t.”

“Satoru!” His laughter is catching; you feel it bubbling from you, in your bewilderment. “Satoru, what is it?”

He peeks between his fingers. “I was just thinking… agh, just that, you know, the last time you started thinking really deeply and looked all sad after we kissed… I mean, well, it didn’t really turn out all that great for us.”

“Oh my—” You splutter out a response of fervent denial, but Satoru’s just giggling loudly and comically, and he’s not even angry, and that bead of pure happiness wriggles its way back into your heart. “Okay, yes, I understand that, but… Satoru, this is nothing like last time!”

“I know! I know it isn’t!” Satoru’s eyebrows fly into his hair. “I really do!”

“Alright then,” you say, “so—”

“It was just an impulse thought,” Satoru says. He reaches around and flicks your shoulder, amused.  “But seriously, is that all you were thinking about? That’s why you’re getting all in your head?”

Your lips part, and you shrug helplessly. “Kind of,” you admit.

“For real? Oh, then there’s nothing to worry about!” Satoru grins at you. “No sex yet! Cool. Sorted!”

“But,” you say, “but, isn’t that a big deal? To you?”

Satoru’s eyebrows furrow. “Why’d it be a big deal?”

“Because! Because, I’m asking you to… I don’t know when I’d even want to, Satoru. Not just weeks, but months, or… or ages, before I’m ready to, seriously, or…”

“Okay,” Satoru says. “Then it’ll be weeks or months or ages. Hebi, if you wanna wait, I’m chill with that.”

You blink up at him, a lump forming in the back of your throat. “But why?”

“Huh? Satoru frowns. “Why am I chill with it? You’re asking me why I’m not getting pissed at you that you want to wait to have sex?”

You don’t reply, thick heat weighing down the back of your neck.

“Jeez, Hebi-Hebi!” Satoru nudges you, playful. “I’m not with you ‘cause I want to fuck you! I mean,” Satoru immediately back-peddles, as your eyes flick straight up to his, “I do. I for sure do. But only when you want to, come on! And it’s not the reason I’m with you: everything else is the reason. You know this! And so if you don’t want to, then we won’t. Easy.”

“I…” There’s that bead of happiness, beginning to glow again. “But I’m asking you to wait, all over again.”

“Nah, you’re not,” Satoru says. “It’s not exactly waiting, is it?”

“It isn’t?”

“It’s so different,” he confirms. Satoru shrugs with his free shoulder. “We’re just… taking things slow. Not every couple jumps each other right away, you know.”

Couple. God, you’re ridiculous, the way it affects you.

“After all,” Satoru says, with an overexaggerated wink,” I’ve not even taken you out on a date yet! I’m not that easy, Hebi-Hebi. Think of my virtue!”

You’re fighting back a smile. “I guess,” you say, “but, still, I…”

“Agh, stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop,” Satoru says, grinning down at you, “trying to convince me that I should be annoyed at you. It’s not going to work, Hebi-Hebi!”

You let out a small laugh. “It’s not?”

“Nope.”

“Damn,” you mumble. “My plan’s been foiled.”

“Mm-hmm.” Satoru tucks you closer to him; he presses his lips to your temple, and your eyes flutter closed. Contentedness seeps through you, even if that part of yourself tries to fight it. Happiness overwhelms you. “That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it? Foiling your self-deprecating plans. You’re in charge of bursting my ego, and I’m in charge of making you remember how awesome you are.”

“Something like that.”

“Exactly.” Satoru’s words brush against your hairline. “Listen. I don’t care. We could do this for the rest of our lives, and I’d be happy. You get it? You could tell me that you never want to sleep with me, ever, and I’d be like, okay, sure. So long as I get to be with you, I don’t care.”

“Satoru…”

“I’ve been in love with you for years—like, years—and so long as I’m with you, I’m good. I’ve figured it out. So no more worrying, alright?” He squeezes you again. “Yeah?”

“Alright.” You listen to his breathing again, his heartbeat. Steady, constant, and familiar.

You stay like that, listening to each other, to the rain still beating down outside. You even recognise the shared silence, which you value so much with him. Your mind flashes through pieces of moments; Satoru’s lips on yours, or his hands in your hair, or the way his lips had moved when he’d told you he loved you.

Even more than that: Satoru had kissed you. Satoru wants to kiss you. Satoru loves you. You find yourself smiling, and then bury your face in his shoulder, so he can’t see. Satoru presses a kiss to the top of your head, and your hidden smile widens. You bring yourself to him. It’s Satoru.

“Love you,” you whisper, into his shoulder.

Satoru nudges you. You look up to him.

“I love you,” Satoru says. “More than anything.”

You bite down on your lip. “Lame,” you mumble, and then fight a smile at Satoru’s exasperated expression.

“Don’t call my undying and years-old love for you lame,” he says.

“It’s the way you say it. Sounds like a cliché.”

“It’s not a cliché! It’s an accurate and honest statement about my undying and years-old love for you!” Satoru digs his chin into the top of your head and you giggle. “And it comes from the heart.”

“You’re too dramatic.”

“I could never be too dramatic!”

“Dumbass.”

“What—since when? I thought you loved me!”

“I’m reconsidering.”

“You are not!” Satoru grabs you into his arms and you squeal. You try to wriggle away from him but he grapples you around the waist and you give up, ultimately settling to rest your head on his chest as he brushes your hair out of his face. “You’re not, are you?”

“No. I suppose I’m not,” you say. There’s an absolute lightness to you; you don’t know if it’s Satoru’s reverse cursed technique flooding through you again, or if it’s that pure happiness, but you feel light, light, like you could hold onto Satoru and float away. “Despite my best interests.”

That rush of love overwhelms you, tingling through your limbs, bursting out in sparks through your fingertips. It’s filling you up, bursting, tugging against your seams. Years, he’d said, you remember, with joy. Years of his life, he’s loved you.

You shift around and lean up. Satoru looks at you with surprise, and then you kiss him again, and he makes a surprised little noise that fits well with it all.

But you smile, and so does he, and he cradles your face with his free hand as he kisses you. You lean into his touch. It’s so solid, so strong; reliable, dependable. Satoru. No-one else thinks of him like that: just you. Just you, who knows him well enough.

You part, and you know that you’re looking at him with such a—such a ridiculous expression on your face, because you can’t hide from him how much you love him, not right now. You try to clamp down your smile, avert your shining eyes, hold back your laugh.

“Wait!” Satoru’s voice hitches up, breaking the tender quiet of the Chapel with a blast. You jolt, and look up to him again. He’s gaping at you, and you splutter out a laugh. “No way! No way!”

“Satoru?”

“That’s—that’s your face?”

You blink, bewildered. “It’s… always been my face, I’m pretty sure—”

“No!” Satoru’s pointing a finger at your facial features, and you follow it, your vision going slightly blurred. “Your ‘I like him’ face! As in, ‘I like him more than a friend’ face!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your expression! That one—or, the one you were just making. Before I started pointing at you.” Satoru flushes, again, laughing sheepishly. “You know what I mean.”

You smile, endeared. “Not really—”

“There it is again! That one! No way!”

“Satoru,” you say, “I really have no idea what you’re talking about—”

You shut up very quickly as Satoru kisses you. You’re surprised, but you can’t find it in yourself to complain about it.

“The reason,” Satoru says as you break apart, with a ridiculously dopey grin, “I never figured that you felt the same about me, was because I thought—if she started to feel the same, I’d be able to tell, right? She’d change her behaviour up, or she’d look at me differently. Because, yeah, I knew all of your looks, and so if you ever started doing anything different, I’d know! But the most I could ever get out of you was this one—”

“Which was my ‘I like him’ face,” you finish. Your heart beats double-time. “God, that’s so sappy.”

“It’s why I could never figure it out!” Satoru shakes his head, a little amazed. “That’s—agh, Hebi-Hebi, that’s so unfair! Because I always thought, that can’t be it! Because… yeah, because you’ve been looking at me like that for ages. Since we were kids, like, before high school! Since we were…”

“Twelve?” you supply. You look up at him with wide eyes, waiting for him to understand.

“Yeah!” Satoru says, clicking the fingers of his spare hand. “Yeah, so I always knew it couldn’t have been the case, so you couldn’t have liked me back, since you only started looking at me like that when… when we…”

Satoru trails off. His eyes have gone unfocused, staring at somewhere just above your ear.

“Oh,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” He blinks, eyelashes fluttering. “Oh. Wait, wait, really?”

“Twelve sounds about right,” you say, smiling.

Satoru’s jaw drops. “You’re kidding. Seriously. You’re kidding me.”

“I don’t think I am.”

“No way. No way! Since we were twelve?” Satoru stares at you, and then a look of horror passes over his face. He slumps down, bringing you shuffling along with him. “But… no way. I was going to hold it over you. I was going to win!”

You push yourself away, half-bracing yourself over him with a hand on the centre of his chest. Satoru looks to you, dejected.

You roll your eyes. “Win what?”

“The length of love game.” A lock of hair falls into Satoru’s eyes and he blows it away with a morose puff of air. “How long I’ve been in love with you for. It’s been so long for me. And you’ve still beat me!”

You’re still not really used to the word—love—being used by him, and so casually. Every time Satoru says it, it’s like your heart stumbles in its rhythm, and then hurries to catch up to pace. You wonder if it’s childish,

You wonder if it’s childish, to think like that—surely you should know you love each other by now—but then you disregard any trepidation. You’ve waited so long for this. You’re allowed to feel giddy when Satoru tells you he’s in love with you.

“I wasn’t exactly trying to beat you, Satoru,” you say. You watch as more hair spills over his eyes, and you reach over to move them away for him. Your finger catches on his eyebrow, and you smooth the hairs there into place.

“But we were kids,” Satoru whines, even as he tilts his head into your touch. “Even worse, we were tweens! Everything was changing back then. How was I supposed to know that some random change in the way you looked at me was my only big clue into realising you actually liked me back?”

“You sound like a tween,” you say, your thumb rubbing small circles at his temple. “Talking about liking me back, come on.”

“What you do want me to say? Realising that you ardently loved me? Because you do.” A beat. “Say it again.”

“You’re a narcissist.”

“Hmm. Yeah, but say it again.”

Your lips purse. “You’re a narcissist. Whom I love.”

Satoru grins wide again; he unravels from you and lays back against the Chapel floor, hands behind his head. “Ahh,” he says, “you smooth talker, you.” Then he glances up at you, frowning. “Can you keep doing that? Felt nice.”

You laugh, but you’re too pleased with everything to even think of saying anything but no. This time, you can’t feel bad about not being able to deny him. You resume your position from before, leaning your weight on one arm whilst you run your fingers slowly through Satoru’s hair. It’s dried, a little, and the tips have gone lavender-white and fuzzy.

Isn’t it wonderful, you think, how you can be like this, and still know that if you wanted to, you could lean over and kiss him? You could. But you can also do this; Satoru leaning into your touch, your fingers threading through his hair. So different, but there’s something reminiscent to your childhood here; lying next to each other in the Chapel, like you’re kids again.

“Hey,” you say, hand still in his hair.

“Hmm? What’s up?”

“I… well.” You bite down on the inside of your cheek; you’re embarrassed to even ask, but you tell yourself that Satoru wasn’t. Satoru wasn’t—isn’t—embarrassed to be brazen about what he wants. Say it again. “You said, before, about how you could tell me things. About me and you. What you’ve been… thinking about.”

“Oh yeah? Oh, okay.” Satoru giggles. “Oh-ho! Who’s the narcissist now?”

You tug lightly on a strand of his hair, and Satoru grins. “Still you. It’s equal exchange, or whatever. You know about when I first developed feelings—”

“—started ardently loving—”

“—developed feelings for you.” You grimace. “Eugh. There’s no non-teenage way to say that. Develop feelings? Ridiculous.”

“I think it’s perfectly normal,” Satoru says. “Develop feelings. Start crushing. Get your heart a-fluttering.”

“Shut up.”

“You’re not down for any of those?”

“So dumb.” You look down at him, holding back your smile. “But… but, yeah. Because I mean, honestly, Satoru, I feel like I know nothing. You say it’s been a while—years, you said—but, was there anything before I left? The first time we kissed, anything? Or did you realise in the time we weren’t seeing each other, and that’s why it’s been years, because—”

“Are you kidding?” Satoru stares at you, eyes wide. “You couldn’t tell? Ever?”

You frown. “I… no?”

“Jeez, Hebi-Hebi! I always figured I was so obvious!” Satoru lets out a laugh, now, something that jumps out of him involuntarily. “I was an absolute loser, the way I was so obvious about it! I… I’d tell you, all the time, how cool I thought you were and how amazing you were, because I couldn’t figure out a way for me to tell you I liked you without actually telling you, and fucking everything up, and stuff! I was so obvious, Hebi-Hebi, you can’t tell me I wasn’t.”

“You… what?” You stare at him, amazed. “You weren’t obvious?”

But Satoru’s shaking his head, propping himself up on his elbows. “No way. I so was. I’d start sulking whenever you talked with guys that were clearly into you, right, and you could tell that I was! And remember when we left school, and I kept asking you to move in with me? Why do you think I did that?

“And, I broke up with my girlfriend because of you. And I told you why I did! I literally told you. That’s more obvious than anything. And—And we went to the beach together, and I couldn’t stop staring at you because I’d never seen you in a bikini before, right? You must’ve known that. Holy shit, and when we were in school I’d have all these dreams about you, and I must’ve been so obvious about that, because I swear you figured it out, don’t you remember? Any time I’d be shifty around you after first year, that was probably why, and—”

“Back in school?” Your breath catches. “You’ve felt like this since… since school?”

Satoru’s lips quirk into that childish grin of his. “I’ve felt like this? Yeah. I’ve known I felt like this?” He releases an exhale in one big puff, then laughs. “Not at all. I was in denial for ages. Ages and ages and ages.”

“In… you were in denial about liking me?” You shake your head. “Developing feelings. I—whatever, you know what I mean.”

Satoru chuckles. “I don’t even know when it started, to be honest. I was just like… yeah, I know that I can’t see my life without you, and you’re the most important person in my life, and I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t with me, but that’s the way it’s always been, so it’s nothing different. Maybe that means I’ve always liked you. But then the liking shifted into loving, and I didn’t understand it for ages, because it was you, right? You’ve always been different. I just figured I was expected to feel that way about my favourite person.”

“I’m your favourite person,” you repeat. Your lips threaten to tug into a smile. “And you thought…?”

“I thought the way I felt was normal. For ages, since we were kids.” Satoru groans. “But then I fucked up and we had our fight, and I kept thinking how I hated not being around you, but that I just wanted to make your life better, and I didn’t get why you wouldn’t let me take care of you like that.” Satoru holds a hand up, cutting across his neck. “Not that I did the right thing! But I thought I did, back then, and I didn’t understand why I felt so…. sucky, all the time, when you weren’t with me. And being around—Suguru helped, I guess, since I definitely didn’t feel the same about him like I did with you. And I never dreamed about him like I did with you.”

“What do you mean, dreaming?”

“I,” Satoru says, squeezing his eyes shut and grimacing, “am not in the headspace to talk about that. Not right now.”

You laugh. “Satoru. Come on.”

“No way.”

“Now I really want to know.”

“I’m not saying anything.” Satoru squints up at you, raising his eyebrows. “Not unless you want me to get another pillow? The descriptions get pretty explicit.”

Both of your eyes flick to the pillow he’d been using to cover his lap. Heat rushes to your cheeks.

“Oh!” You blink very quickly, then look away. Those type of dreams. Satoru had… “Oh. Oh, okay. Never mind.”

“Yeah,” Satoru says, grimly. “I was seventeen, and I was suffering.”

You laugh, a little giddy. “Suffering? Should I feel offended?”

“You should feel very flattered,” Satoru says, “because I was seventeen and in denial and I was suffering because of how dumb and obsessed I was with you. Not that I’d admit it.”

“So when did you?” you ask. You’re feeling—extremely self-indulgent, yes, but you’re allowing yourself this. There’s a refreshing candidness to this conversation, and an openness that you’re desperate to savour. Whenever Satoru’s genuine with you, you feel like you have to accept it all, before he returns to his pretence; but, then, you don’t have anything to hide from each other any more. You don’t need to hold back from him. He doesn’t need to hold back from you.

Maybe this openness can stay.

“Hmm?”

“Admit it,” you say, curling a lock of his hair around your finger. “To yourself. When did you get out of your denial?”

Satoru hums, then smiles. “It came in stages. I figured that I had some form of crush on you when I was… eighteen, maybe? And then when we left school, it hit me again, but I was still trying to act normal, and pretend like it was something that would pass, right? And then… hey, do you remember that time we went to the Zenin estate? When we were together, on the rooftop.”

You do. “Yeah.”

“Fuck,” Satoru says, his voice mingling with the low thrum of rainfall. “You don’t know how crazy you made me feel then. You were just—you were saying all of these things to me, and you looked so beautiful, and it was just when I’d figured out how to use my Infinity so we could do the almost-touching thing, and so you were experimenting with it, touching me and stuff, but jeez, I could still feel you through Infinity, it’s just like, slightly muted or dulled or whatever, but I can still feel it, right, I could still feel you?

“And so…” Satoru shuffles further up, looking at you with a blazing intensity. “Imagine it. I know that I like you, and you’re standing in front of me in this fucking gorgeous dress—side note, but fuck, you looked so hot, Hebi-Hebi, I swear—and you’re running your hands all over me like you’re trying to kill me, and then I’m going from the most turned-on I’ve been in my whole fucking life, to the most absolutely in love I’ve ever been, because you’re saying these amazing things about me and you’re so amazing and I’m realising that you actually mean it, you know, that you actually think that I’m smart and funny and good, like, a real good person, and it’s making me go insane because all I can think about is how much I want to kiss you, and that’s like, all I can think about, and then I know that I’m in love with you. Boom. I just realise, right there.”

Satoru mimes an explosion with his hands. “And it’s not just that I’m in love with you, it’s that there’s nothing I can do about it, because there’s no hiding, no pretending, and that you’re literally the only person who I’ve ever felt like this about, all of these huge feelings that make me feel like I’m going to die, and I’m just like, holy shit, I’m in love with her. And then I’m like—oh, fuck, if I stay any longer then I’m going to do something I’ll regret, like, confess my undying love to you, or something. Because I don’t think you like me back, at this point, do I? And so I’m thinking, I’ve got to get out of here, and so I run away, like an absolute loser.”

He leans back, lips in a half-smile. “And from then on is history. Well, me being crazy in love with you, and also really trying to make sure you didn’t figure out I was. Which,” Satoru admits, “with hindsight, maybe wasn’t the best move.”

You stare at him. That night in the Zenin Estate… on the rooftop, dancing. Your overwhelming love for him, your almost-confession. The possibility, of what-if.

Satoru leaving you. On your own. In the cold.

“That…” Your lips move around unspoken words, and then you push your hesitance aside, say them. “That wasn’t how I experienced it.”

“It wasn’t?” Satoru stares at you, still with his half-smile. “I’m sorry, but… how? I mean, I was clearly over the moon for you. Wasn’t I?”  

“No,” you say, and Satoru’s expression shifts, slightly. More serious. “It was more like… back on the rooftop, that night, I think… I think it was that you left me. I wasn’t doing okay that day—or any of the other days, I guess—and then when you left, it was like I’d been so happy with you there, and then you were gone so suddenly, without any explanation, and I just…”

You breathe out a sigh, frustrated with you inarticulacy. You look at him, at his wide, open eyes, and feel a building rush of love for him. You smile; not sad now, but still present with the memory of those years of pain. “To me, Satoru, you didn’t love me. I’d been pining after you for almost a decade by that point. And it was everything all together; there was you not loving me, and there was being a sorcerer, and all of this shit that I went through having that job. It didn’t help that I was… that I was in a bad place, for most of those years. It was hard.”

Satoru reaches up to you; he holds the side of your face, brushes his thumb against your cheekbone. He notices, and you’re grateful for him.

“And,” you say, shaking yourself out of your sombre mood, “you were never single! You can’t say that you were obvious about it if you were never single!”

You look down at him, with mouth parted into a guilty, caught ‘o’, and you laugh tiredly. You shuffle closer, feel Satoru’s hand on you, your hand on him. You’re not upset: it was so long ago, but you find comfort in the reminder that this was all in the past, that it’s different now.

You’re remembering your side of it all: but this was just your side. You’re still learning Satoru’s. Your memories are true, but so are his.

“You,” you say, leaning closer to him and pressing a kiss to his forehead—and then, just because you can, his lips, “always had someone. You’d brag about flirting with all these people, and you’d hook up with so many women all the time, and you’d always been going on all these dates and picking up all of these numbers! Satoru!”

Satoru’s expression pinches. “The last time,” he says, tilting his chin to move closer to you, and then jolting up to sneak a kiss against your jaw, “I seriously dated someone, I was seventeen. Keiko, do you remember? And I broke up with her after you told me you loved me for the first time.”

You stare down at him, eyebrows raised.

“Don’t you remember?” Satoru asks.

“I do,” you say, finally. “Yeah, I remember. This was after—”

“After Suguru left, yeah.”

“We were so messed up, back then.”

“Yeah,” Satoru says. “And I was, especially. It got so lonely after he left. For a while, it was easier to pretend with Keiko than do anything else, right?” The pad of his thumb is both rough and soft; softer than you’d have thought it’d be, when he touches you like this. “But then you told me you loved me, and I knew that I loved you, and I also knew that… that I had these feelings, these huge feelings, for you, and I’d never had that with Keiko. Or with anyone else. And I was just like… it’s not going to work, with anyone else. So I quit pretending that I could date someone. I told you, back then, but I don’t think I explained it enough. I remember trying to tell you, but…”

“It was hard to say anything,” you remind him, gently. “Back then. I was worse than you, when it came to that.”

Satoru cracks a grin. “Maybe it’s not your best area.”

“Talking about my feelings? Probably not.”

“You’re better at it now than you were.”

“That’s not difficult,” you say. But you smile. “So what was it after that? After we were seventeen, I mean. You weren’t in relationships, I guess you’re right, but you’d go on dates. And other stuff.”

Satoru sighs. “Pretending? I guess? I still didn’t properly realise everything—I knew I couldn’t date, but I could… I don’t know, do other stuff? I hadn’t fully realised how I felt about you, I just knew that you were this huge part of my life that I didn’t want to let go of, but if I was on my own for too long then I’d start going crazy, I think. But it was… meaningless, all of it, just nothing.”

You look at him.

Satoru chuckles. “I know. I know, I know, but that’s all it was—pretending, or distraction. And me being selfish. Probably a lot of that. I liked it when people liked me, and that was the easiest way to get that feeling. I don’t know. I tried to block you out for ages, pretend it wasn’t there, how I really felt about you.” Satoru smiles, wry. “As I tend to do.”

“Yeah,” you say. You keep staring down at him, just admiring him. How he’s saying this, so contradictory to everything you’d thought. Years, Satoru had said. Years, and it had been right.  “God. Satoru, it’s all so… I can’t believe I never knew.”

“It’s stupid of me,” Satoru says, “but I always figured that you’d be able to tell. That I didn’t care about them, the way I cared about you.”

You smile, gaze flicking across his features. “Stupid,” you say, a low breath. You laugh to yourself. “And a bit sexist.”

Satoru gapes. “Huh?”

“Using women.”

“I—I’m not!” Satoru blinks very hard at you, mouth open. “I told you, I didn’t date! Not seriously! It was all consensual, Hebi, I wasn’t—”

“Leading them on?”

“Yes!”

“You just slept with them.” You nod, sagely. “And then never spoke to them again. How crude.”

Satoru pouts, and your heart jumps when you realise that he’s trying to hold back a smile. Like you. “I wouldn’t say crude,” he says, “more… well…”

“Manwhore,” you prompt.

Satoru snorts. “I guess—I—yeah, okay, I’ll take that. I deserve it.”

“Hmm.” You’re filled with an intense need to kiss him; which you’re allowed to do, now, so you do. Satoru smiles against your lips, and when you pull away, his face is split into a beaming grin. “I’ve fallen in love with a manwhore. Oh, dear.”

“That you have,” Satoru says, very pleased. “Though I haven’t been a manwhore for ages and ages, Hebi-Hebi. I’m a romantic, deep down.”

“You’ve transformed into a monogamist.”

“The world’s best monogamist, thank you.”

You laugh, and he does, too. “Satoru Gojo, the strongest monogamist.”

“It’s what I’m known by.” Satoru preens under your gaze, cat-like. “I’ve been redeemed.”

“From being a manwhore.”

“Precisely! Although,” Satoru adds, waggling his eyebrows, “my manwhorishness has had its benefits. I’m very good.”

You purse your lips. “Right.”

“I am!” Satoru glances at you, a quick check-up, and then grins. “Of course I am. I’m good at everything.”

“The narcissism’s arrived again,” you say, rolling your eyes. “Bring back the monogamist Satoru. He was much less conceited.”

“Ah, we’re all facets of the same person. And we’re all as good in bed as each other, which is the most significant part of this conversation.”

“I don’t trust you. Where did you hear this from, the five hundred women you’ve slept with?”

Satoru giggles. “I’m flattered you think it’s been five hundred. And also, yeah, maybe I did. Are they not a reliable source?”

Your arm’s getting numb, and you shift so you’re lying down next to him. Satoru rolls onto his side, resting his cheek on his palm. Amused, you look back at him. “I’m not interested in hearing about your sexual prowess from random people you’ve slept with, Satoru.”

“Wouldn’t it inform you about my prowess in a reliable, scientific kind of survey way?”

“It wouldn’t.” You raise your eyebrows. “Would you enjoy calling up Kazuo, and asking him what I was like to sleep with?”

Satoru pauses, then his eyebrows pinch together. He frowns. “No. I, personally, don’t want to think about that.”

“You see?” You reach out to curl a strand of his hair around your finger. “Now think about how I feel.”

Satoru smirks. “Oooh! Possessive Hebi-Hebi!”

You meet his gaze.

Satoru shivers, a little bit. His smirk falters. “Oh! Okay. That’s—yeah, I’m okay with that.”

You purse your lips. “Stop talking about other women, Satoru.”

“Yeah,” he says, “yeah, yeah, for sure.” Satoru blinks at you, and then grins. “That’s kind of hot, you know, you looking at me like that.”

“Shut up,” you say. You look away from him, even as the back of your neck begins to heat up.

“If you say so! Wow.” Satoru whistles. Then he shuffles a bit closer to you, cranes his neck so he can get you to look at him. “I’m joking, Hebi-Hebi. Yeah? I’m not being pressure-y, right?”

You swallow, smile. “You’re good.”

Satoru narrows his eyes—assessing you—and then breathes out. “Great.” Then he sends you a ridiculously provocative look, eyebrows waggling and lips pursing, which breaks into a glowing smile when he makes you laugh.

Then he surges up to kiss you, to kiss your laugh, and you can’t stop smiling. It makes the kiss very difficult, but neither of you seem to care. You thread your arms around him, his hair curling around your fingers.

Satoru pulls away after a long while, and you blink at him, like you’re walking out of a dark room to see the sun for the first time. Your eyes refocus.

“We can talk more tomorrow,” Satoru says, as the corners of his eyes crinkle, “about limits, and stuff. And what you’re good with doing, and what you don’t want to do.”

“Okay,” you whisper. “Thank you.”

Satoru just smiles. “I love you,” he says, and your heart soars.

“I love you too.” You lean over and kiss him, softly.

When Satoru breaks away, his cheeks are a beautiful pink. “So this is okay? I mean—for the moment, before we—”

“This is okay.”

Satoru smiles: an open smile, one which is growing more familiar by the second. “Good,” he says. His lips brush yours, and his fingers find the line of your jaw. He tilts your face further towards him, kisses you. You hold onto the fabric of his shirt.

“We should get home,” you say, against his lips. Satoru hums. “In a while. I don’t know what time it is.”

“I don’t either.”

“It’s late, I think.”

“Midnight soon.”

And you smile at each other, and both decide, together, that it doesn’t really matter what time it is. Neither of you can bring yourselves to care.

 

Notes:

2016
Twenty-six years old

-

BLOODY FINALLY

After way over 200,000 words, twenty IW years and far too many irl years, finally the main couple in the fanfiction has kissed and have it actually mean something. Folks, we're here!

I have been waiting for this point for so so sos os so long. Omg. It's insane. I really really hope you guys liked it. This is literally over 40k words which is INSANE (my first few chapters averaged 5k?!?!?!?), but when I was writing it I just kept thinking... bloody hell, I've been stretching this slowburn out so much, I owe it to you guys that I include as much as I can when it finally 'burns', right?? I could've cut this down, but fuck it, I don't want to. 40k words, utter BS, I hope you enjoy.

Please expect a thatdesklamp-typical delay after this chapter. Firstly, I'll be majorly off-the-grid for about a month as I'll be away working basically 24/7, and then I'll essentially be back at uni and back on the old slog. I'll be more active on tumblr (hopefully? I'm not sure lmao) but essentially, 1-update-a-week is not for me. I'm a sporadic updater at best, folks. BUT STILL -- only two chapters left?!!?!?! AGGHH!

Also--a little nudge-nudge-wink-wink for my tumblr people, when gojo was talking about his own personal slowburn. If you're interested in reading a few oneshots from his perspective about 'being seventeen and suffering', or just generally some stuff from his POV, I wrote some a few months ago. He he ha ha.

All in all, war is over, happiness has prevailed. To all of those who doubted my 'angst with a happy ending' tag... shame! Happy endings forever. See you guys later. Loads of love to you all <3

 

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Chapter 22: 2017

Thursday 7th September, 2017

Satoru must have gotten in late last night; the shower’s set to the temperature he prefers, and so you let out a sleepy little squeak when the water rains down onto you. You turn the dial and it immediately heats up to your perfect level. Warm, warm enough that it verges on slightly too hot. Your skin prickles pleasantly. You pop the cap of the body wash.

You sigh, and yawn, and inhale the pleasant aroma of lavender and vanilla: Satoru had picked up a new body wash in the shop last month, and the scent’s been making its way through your apartment like some invasive species, or something. You don’t mind, really—in fact, it’s quite nice. 

The pillows smell like lavender and vanilla; the sofas smell like lavender and vanilla; even the curtains do, though you don’t understand how. You had joked it implied that either you or Satoru had been rubbing yourselves up on them. 

Satoru had then tried to, when you were brushing your teeth in the en suite, and you’d laughed even harder and nearly fallen into the bath. The floor was still wet from your shower—your excuse—but it had spawned Satoru’s new favourite joke, that you’ve spent too much time out of action as a sorcerer, and so your bodily coordination is now equivalent to that of a concussed sloth. 

You wash yourself down and linger a few seconds longer than necessary in the shower; the warmth and heat fully encases you, and the lavender and vanilla smells like home. With immense reluctance, you turn off the water, and summon all willpower remaining in you to step out. The tiles are cold beneath your bare feet, and you hop from one foot to the other as you towel yourself down. Satoru had wanted to install underfloor heating, but you think it’ll be a waste of time and money, since—hopefully—you’re not going to be in this apartment for much longer. 

Because you know it’ll make him smile, you draw a heart in the shower’s condensation. Beads of water slip past your finger and race down the glass. 

You hang up your towel. You yawn again. You’d forgotten to dry your feet properly on the bath mat; you’ve left watery footprints on the bathroom floor, and, naked, you crouch down to mop them up. No more concussed sloth allegations: you’re determined. 

Concussed sloth. So stupid. You wipe down the mirror with your wrist and catch yourself smiling, and immediately school your expression into its usual neutral. It’s such a ridiculous line, but it consistently makes Satoru laugh, which then makes you smile, and so you can’t even convincingly pretend to dislike it. 

You’re not a concussed sloth—you’re just out of practice. You stare at yourself in the mirror again, as steam slowly builds to obscure you from yourself. You wipe at it again; there are three layers of condensation now, increasingly more hazy and less translucent. 

You look old. 

Older, not old. The thought is unwelcome, but not unfamiliar. You run a still-damp finger over your mouth and frown at the small lines that run around it—and then your frown deepens, and you try to smooth out those lines, too, the ones that pinch harshly between your eyebrows. Are your under eyes always that puffy, or is it just early in the morning? 

You’re thinking like Satoru, how he gets when he complains about balding. You resolutely push your vanity aside. 

Still. You’re older, and you’re going to keep getting older. You’re twenty-seven: twenty-eight in a month! Which is practically thirty, at your age. And Satoru’s right, it’s been a while since you’ve been a sorcerer. How long—two years? Three, almost. You take your work clothes off the bathroom wall, where you’d hung them up last night, and when you strap your bra around your chest you find yourself staring down at yourself. 

You’re not a sorcerer anymore—you haven’t been for years—and despite your best efforts to keep yourself active, your body’s changed. You remember how sprightly you were, back when you first started as a sorcerer, when you were nineteen—almost a decade ago, really?—with your body all taught and limber and athletic. 

You go to the gym regularly, and you eat well, and you’re probably healthier than most people your age. But, as you slip your bra around the right way, tuck your breasts in, step into your underwear, you know that you can’t deny that your lifestyle has changed you: you’ve gone from being—essentially—a near-athlete, and now you’re an office worker. 

With an uncharacteristic anxiety, your heart pinches. Does Satoru care? 

The thought is so ridiculous that it genuinely shocks you. You know the answer already—of course he doesn’t, obviously—but the pinch of worry only lessens instead of it leaving. 

Well. You’re not the only person in their late twenties to wish they looked younger, you suppose. 

You shaved everything yesterday evening, and the feeling of slippery smoothness of your skin against your clothes gives you some comfort—which, you know, Tsumiki would righteously remind you is anti-modern very-problematic thinking, but you decide you’re allowed a little bit of anti-modern very-problematic thinking, if only because it makes you feel better about being two years away from thirty. 

God, you’re thirty soon. 

Oh, well. 

You step into your slippers when you cross into your bedroom, and then dry your hands on your trousers before you put your gloves on. You hadn’t noticed Satoru’s presence in your bed when you’d woken up, but, now refreshed from the shower, you see him easily. He’s splayed out on his side, face-down, one arm above his heard and the other shoved against his cheek. His mouth is open and some of his hair has stuck to his lower lip. It's probably the least attractive he could possible look, and he looks both stupidly bedraggled and quite beautiful. 

You always wake up with lots of time to spare before work in the morning, so you can make yourself a hot breakfast. Now dressed and feeling more alert, you busy yourself at the stove. After a few minutes, you hear Satoru’s alarm blast through the walls all the way to the kitchen. It’s more like an fire truck siren than an alarm clock beep, and it blares and blares until it quiets. Then, three minutes later, its resounding bellow starts up again, before it’s quieted more swiftly this time. Three minutes later, it starts and stops again, and three minutes later, when you’re fiddling with the new fancy coffee maker, it starts and stops for the final time. You hear a resounding groan come from your bedroom, and then a thump, and a mumbled curse. 

You’re sat at the kitchen island scrolling through the news app on your phone when Satoru finally pads into the room. He’s raking his fingers through his hair and when he sees you he gives you a tired wave. He yawns, and then pouts sleepily when you laugh. 

“I’ve replaced the milk,” you say, gesturing with your mug towards the coffee machine. “If you wanted a latte.” 

Satoru’s eyebrows pinch, and then he smiles broadly as he presses his palms against his eyes. He’s got his blindfold slung over his shoulder, but he’s not in his sorcerer attire yet; his new go-to pyjama top is a joke t-shirt you’d bought him a while ago, pistachio green with ironed-on text, King of the Throne, and a clipart picture of a stick man on the toilet. You’d seen it on a popup ad and had bought it spontaneously; it was meant to be dumb and mildly ironic, but Satoru has decided it’s the most comfortable thing in existence and refuses to part with it. 

His sweatpants have rumpled down low on his hips. Your eyes flick admiringly across the fine muscle exposed there before you return to your phone. You purposefully do not acknowledge Satoru’s smug grin.

“Thank you,” Satoru says. His voice is low and croaky, as it always is in the morning, and the sound of it sends a pleasant wave through you. He yawns again and rubs sleep from his eyes. He starts the machine on making his latte, and leans against the countertop. “Best best ever.”

“Best best?”

“Mmm. Something like—that.” He mumbles the final few words, and then slaps his cheeks with his palms in an effort to wake himself up. “Ah! Ah. Morning, darling. Morning morning.”

“What time did you get in last night?”

He groans. “Late. Big bad curse in Germany. Maybe three? Four?”

“Oh, Satoru.” You frown consolingly. “No wonder you’re tired. I’m sorry.”

He waves a hand in the air. “All good. Need to get energised! Energy, energy, energy.” 

“Do you want some of my breakfast? I made too much.” 

“Nah, I’m good. Thanks.” Satoru piles demerara sugar into his coffee, humming. “Thanks for the milk, too. I forgot to do it yesterday.”

“That’s alright.” 

He takes a sip from his latte, winces at the temperature, then sighs. After a few minutes—it always takes him a while to wake up, which you attribute to him being such a deep sleeper—he mumbles, sounding slightly more alert: “And we need to get a new lightbulb for the living room lamp. One of the twisty ones. I noticed when I came in last night.”

“Oh, annoying. Pop it on the list.”

“Already have. D’you think you’ll have time to stop in at the shops today after work? I like my ambiance. Mood lighting, don’t you think? It’s a whole thing.” Satoru yawns. “Toyo told me, actually. Interior design.”

“Sure,” you say, amused. “Do we need anything else, while I’m there?”

Satoru pushes himself off the counter and checks the shopping list on the fridge. “Chicken stock cubes, and rapeseed oil, and one of those cleaning spray bottles. I think for the kitchen?”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, that’s all good, I’ll get them later.”

“And,” Satoru says, clicking his fingers, “we need a new water bottle for Megumi.”

“Really? Since when?”

“He lost his yesterday.”

“Did he lose it yesterday, or did he only tell you about it yesterday?”

Satoru glances over to you and grins. “Probably the second one.”

“Figures,” you say. “Also figures he’d tell you instead of me. That’s his third one this month, did you know?”

“I, in fact, did know. He told me to tell you not to be mad.”

“Of course he did.”

“And he also said it’s just him getting it all out before he goes to Jujutsu High.”

You snort. “Is he going to suddenly turn responsible, just because he’s there?”

“That’s what he’s decided. I think it’s admirable.”

“Sure it is,” you say, entertained and resigned, and you turn back to your breakfast. 

Satoru hums to himself as he sips on his coffee, and then leans over to wipe down the counter where you’d spilled a little of your drink. You watch him as he does it; his long fingers, his pale skin, the strong curve of his back. 

Sometimes it still startles you, that you get to have this, and that you get to have him. And sometimes it seems like the most natural thing in the world. 

Like now, when he turns, and when his lips flicker into a bashful smile when he sees you looking. 

“What are you feeling for today?” Satoru asks, as he does every morning. 

You purse your lips and consider it, as you do every morning. Before, when he first started asking, you’d shrug and say that you were fine, obviously, and that you’d just say if you weren’t. But Satoru wants you to actually think about it—to not let either of you assume that you’ll be okay, just because you were the morning before—and the kindness of the gesture overrules any momentary impatience you have for him to touch you, and so, every morning, you consider it. 

You woke up next to him, and you’re not frightened of that. Your hands aren’t bare, but Satoru’s are, and you’re not frightened of that. There is no nausea, no twisting within your chest; just a sheen of happiness and contentedness that layers itself over your skin in a gentle caress. Your arms feel empty, without the pressure of him between them. 

There are days when it’s worse, when your skin crawls at the brush of his hand against yours. But not today.

“I’m good,” you say. 

“Good-good?”

You roll your eyes. “Yes. Good-good.”

“Fantastic,” Satoru says, and crosses the kitchen to wrap his arms around you. You lean backwards into him, still sitting on the chair; one hand remains on your coffee, the other rises up to squeeze his arm. Satoru buries his nose in your hair and inhales, exhales, tightens his hold on you. 

“You okay?” 

Satoru mumbles something you can’t hear. You tap him gently, and he shifts his head so his cheek is pressed to the top of your head. “Tired,” he says. His voice rumbles softly down your spine. 

“I’m sorry,” you say, fingers running up and down his arm, the way he likes. 

“All good. That’s nice, keep doing that.”

“Your coffee’s going to go cold.”

“You want me to go get it?”

Your fingers circle around his arm. “No.”

“Then I don’t care.” 

“Okay,” you say, and you smile despite yourself. “And we’ve got the house viewing today, remember. That’s something to look forward to.”

“Yeah,” Satoru says. “Five-thirty, right?”

“Five-thirty.” You press your fingers to your lips, and then your fingers to his forearm. You watch as the fine silver hairs rise on their ends, goosebumps pebbling his skin. “Do you think you’ll make it?”

“Got my time booked off and everything,” Satoru says. “Check, check, and triple-check.”

“Incredible. You should get an award.”

“Don’t you think?”

“Mm.”

“Would you help me rehearse my acceptance speech?” Satoru clears his throat. “Thank you so much for this honour, I want to dedicate it to… erm. Huh. I don’t know. The kids?”

“You’re not dedicating it to me? Sorry, the award’s just been rescinded.”

Satoru squeezes you. He moves his lips to your ear, and says, very seriously: “I’ll dedicate my life to you, my love.”

You snort. “Ew.”

“Romance!”

“Gross.”

You shake your head, smiling. Satoru gives you a final squeeze, bites you on the top of your ear—you laugh and swat at him—and then lets go of you to get back to his coffee. You scroll through your phone for another few minutes, checking the news, checking your emails. Your estate agent’s sent through another few properties that you look at briefly. There’s one that looks mildly promising, but when you show it to Satoru he points out that it’s on a main road. You discard it—neither of you wants a house in an industrial area—but can’t ignore the twinge of disappointment. 

“Right,” you say, standing and putting your now-empty bowl in the dishwasher. “Heading off now.”

Satoru looks up and smiles at you. You’re used to it by now, but it still makes your heart flutter. “Okie-dokie,” he says. “You doing your presentation today?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Okie-dokie.”

“Okie-dokie.” 

“Dokie dokie dokie.”

“You sound like you’re doing the ASMR.”

“Hebi-Hebi! It’s just ASMR, there’s no the in front of it.” Then Satoru waves his hands in the air and clicks his tongue. “Do you think I’d be good at ASMR? Maybe I should do a career change.”

Satoru discovered ASMR last month and now watches it every night: if he gets to bed before you, you’re greeted with the sight of him with his earbuds in, face illuminated in a blue wash, tongue barely poking out of the side of his mouth. He’s become obsessed with this one middle-aged woman who gives head massages to mannequins with wigs. You don’t understand the appeal.

“Probably not.”

He pouts. “Why?”

“You wouldn’t have the patience for it.”

“I think I’d be really good.” 

“Well, maybe.”

“You don’t sound very sure,” he says. “I’m hurt.”

“I’m sure you’ll live.” You go to give him a peck, but Satoru slides out of his seat and takes your face in his hands and kisses you. 

It’s a lazy, early-morning kiss, and you wind your arms around him to draw him closer. When Satoru breaks apart from you, you lean up on your toes to kiss him again. You break away, wrinkling your nose.

“I need to brush my teeth,” you say. “Sorry.”

Satoru grins, and pats his lips together. “I gathered! Currently detecting the subtle flavours of coffee and morning muck.”

“Eugh. Right, go away, I’m going to chug some mouthwash.”

“Nooooo.” Satoru tugs at your shirt to hold you closer, but you swat at him, rolling your eyes. 

“I need to leave for work.” You check your watch. “Damn. Yeah, I really do. And so do you. Get changed.”

“I’m drinking my coffee,” Satoru protests, darting after you to try to kiss you again.

“Hm. This doesn’t look like drinking coffee.” 

But then he runs a hand down your back to twist you around to face him, and your willpower weakens.

“Pretty sure it is,” he says. Then he leans down to kiss you again, deeper this time, and the familiar heat trickles through you as you curve up to meet him. 

Satoru tastes of sugar and coffee and mint. He smells of lavender and vanilla. You thread your fingers through his hair, because he’s told you he likes it when you do that; his hand presses against the small of your back as he kisses you, because you’ve told him that you like it when he does that. 

Then, just as you’re deciding that maybe work can wait because maybe you should actually ask him now, before you lose your nerve, because this feels too nice to stop, Satoru pulls away. 

“You,” he says, “are going to be late.”

You purse your lips. A war wages within you. After a few seconds, rationality scrapes a reluctant victory. “Yeah. Yeah, I am. Woe is me.”

“Ha! You sound like me,” Satoru says. His eyes shine with happiness. 

“I certainly do not.”

“Yeah you do. Definitely-sometimes you do.”

“You’re delusional.”

“It’s alright,” Satoru says, shrugging. “I like it. It’s cute.”

You frown at him even as the back of your neck burns. “Shut up.”

“And she’s back!” Satoru gives you a peck on the forehead and pushes you away, grinning. “Go to work. I’ll see you later.”

“Mmm.” You cross to the living room and pick up your handbag from the seatee. You rifle through it half-heartedly, checking you’ve got the folders you need for your meeting today. You head back into the kitchen to get your lunch from the fridge, and you smile when you see that Satoru’s written a little note on it: Have an AMAZING DAY LOVE YOU LOTS MWAH MWAH <3 :) “That’s sweet.” You hold it up to him, and he grins. “I’ll see you, Satoru.”

“Yeah, yeah. And don’t forget about the shopping, okay?”

“I won’t. Have a nice day.”

“I love you!”

You smile at him. “Love you too.”

“Knew it,” he says, pleased with himself. “Agh, you’ve got to go before I’m forced into kissing you again. Begone, temptress, before you trap me here forevermore!”

“Heaven forbid.” You roll your eyes but cannot hide your amusement. “Love you.”

“And to you, but only, magnitudes more! My love for thee knows no bounds, and is only succeeded by the love I have for myself! For I alone am the fairest of all rogues and scoundrels—”

“Goodbye, Satoru,” you say resolutely, and you can hear him cackling even after you shut the door. 

You smile. And then you go to work. 

 

--

 

“Are you going to do something nice for your birthday?”  Sara asks, on the phone, as you sit on a bench outside of the office and eat your lunch.

“I think so,” you say. “Nothing big on the actual day, because it’s a school night. And it’s hard to sort something out for sure when Satoru’s always so busy, but I think he’s going to try to get some time off, assuming nothing comes up.”

“Touch wood.”

“Yeah, exactly. I’m going to have dinner with Toyo and Mayu and everyone on the weekend after, the Saturday evening, so that’s something definite. And I think the kids said they’ll make me a meal, which is nice of them.”

“Bless. And I’d guess that was Tsumiki’s idea, wasn’t it?”

“To be fair, Megumi’s been getting pretty good in the kitchen. I think he’s taking inspiration from Satoru.”

“Is he! A boy his age?”

“He finds it relaxing, apparently.”

“Well, isn’t that good? Doesn’t he find it too girly?”

“Cooking’s not girly.”

“I never said it was,” Sara says, a little affronted. You laugh. “Just that teenage boys think it’s girly. That’s a teenage boy attitude.”

Your lips purse. “Megumi’s not a teenage boy, not yet.”

“I thought he was. How old is he, now?”

“…Fourteen.”

“That’s unfortunately very teenage, sweetheart.”

“God, don’t remind me.”

Sara’s laugh is quiet, kind. “I know the feeling. And these years go by so quickly! It feels like I blinked, and now Haru’s almost eighteen. Well, maybe not almost, but I’ll only have to blink again and it’ll be his birthday.”

“Is he doing anything nice for it?” you ask.

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s too far away to plan. That being said, I’ll probably be hearing about it in the next few weeks, knowing him.”

“Maybe I can get Satoru to send him on an exclusive mission. That can be our present.”

“Only if it’s an exclusive, supervised mission. I don’t care if he’d be eighteen or eighty-seven, I still don’t like the thought of him going on his own.”

You think the same with Megumi. “Third years only have a certain number of solo missions. Plus there’s always a sorcerer on the sidelines. It’s only fourth years that go out on their own.”

“Really? Is that right?”

“Altered the regulations on it a few months ago,” you say through a mouthful of sandwich. “Gives them more experience in a safe, learning-conducive environment. There’s a bunch of studies written about it.”

“There are people who write studies about sorcery?”

“Well. Technically not. I used studies about firefighters. Or doctors. Can’t remember right now.” Your phone buzzes, and you pull it away from your ear to check. “One second.”

Your eyes scan over the message. Your heart sinks. 

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

im sorry

…

but ive been called up 

theres this curse just found in central singapore and its special grade

they already tried to exorcise it 

but it killed one of their ppl 

ive got to go asap :( 

+ bc of it i dont think im going to make the house viewing

:((((

im rly sorry ml

<33333333

 

“Fuck’s sake,” you say, under your breath. 

“Everything alright?”

“I—yeah. Yeah, it’s just—god, that’s so annoying. Sorry, I just need to reply to…” 

“It’s okay, sweetheart.”

You bite down on the inside of your cheek. You type out a response, hesitate, and then delete it. You rewrite. Your thumb hovers over the ‘send’ button.

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

That’s frustrating. 

But it can’t be helped.

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

ikik

but still

rly rly sorry 

i want to be there!!

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

I know. I want you to be there too. 

It’s okay.

Go save lives. Love you. 

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

love u too

loads

send me pix if its good!

 

To Satoru <333 ;))))

Will do. 

 

From Satoru <333 ;))))

<33333

33

 

You put your phone back to your ear, lips still pursed. “Sorry,” you say. “Sorry. It’s Satoru, he—” You sigh. “He can’t make the viewing today. We had a house viewing, and he’d booked time off, but he can’t make it because of this special grade curse.”

“Oh, dear. Can someone else not take it over for him? If he’d booked the time off?”

“Clearly not.” If it was anyone else, then time off would be final. But it’s not. Because it’s Satoru, and he’s not like anyone else. “Fuck’s sake. God—sorry, Sara, I don’t mean to swear.”

“Oh, I don’t mind. I’m not my mother.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” You let out a long, drawn-out sigh. “This is the fifth one he’s missed. I get it, and he can’t help it, it’s always work. But still.”

“It’s the life of a sorcerer. Oh, when your father was still full-time, he was in and out of the house all the time!”  Sara hums. “Have you gone to five viewings already? That’s so exciting!”

“What?” you mutter, distractedly. “Oh, yeah. More than five. Think it’s been nine, so far. Ten after this one.”

“Ten! That’s so many!”

“Guess so. We just know what we want.” You check your phone again, to see if Satoru’s texted anything else. He hasn’t: the only notification is an email about your upcoming flight that you need to respond to. “Look, I’m sorry, Sara, but I’ve got to get back to work. Sorry to be a downer.”

“It’s no problem at all. Thank you for calling, it’s always nice to talk to you.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you too.” 

You exchange pleasantries for another few moments—Sara’s not the best at hanging up from calls, and she remembers three more topics of conversation that you have to wean her off of before you say goodbye—but when you’re off the phone, you pocket it and stare at your sandwich crumbs. 

You brush down your skirt. 

You’ve seen nine houses. Ten, after the one this evening. And houses one, three and four have gone off the market. They weren’t right for you, but they were right for someone. 

You’ve not found the right house yet. You weren’t lying, on the phone: you and Satoru know what you want. You’ve got overlapping interests; away from traffic, not on a main road, large, close enough to the Gojo household for the kids, good garden space. 

But you’re willing to bend on different things. Whilst neither of you want to live within the city, Satoru’s liked the houses that are closer to urbanised areas, and you’ve preferred locations that are more rural. Satoru liked the fifth house you viewed because of its modern amenities, but you’d found it unhomely and clinical. 

You had loved the fourth house. It was large, with wide open windows that let light stream through them, and a sprawling field dotted with wildflowers instead of a garden. The floors creaked as you stepped through them, just like Satoru’s childhood home. 

Its front door was beautiful. A deep navy-blue, aged with scratches in its paint that revealed a beautiful champagne wood. Its handle was burnished copper, and was elaborately engraved with flowers and vines. You could feel its intricacies beneath your gloved fingers. You had thought it was the one. 

You’d gone on your own, the first time: this was the second viewing that Satoru hadn’t been able to attend. He’d gone separately, a few days later, and had come home ambivalent. He’d had none of your passion or excitement: to him, it hadn’t been the one. Your brightest memory had been of the copper door handle, and the navy-blue paint, and the champagne wood: you had missed the damp in the corners of the ceilings, and rotten wooden beams that sagged under the weight of the roof. 

It's best when you see the houses together. You can do it on your own, of course you can, but it’s better when he’s there with you. You see things the other doesn’t.

It’s not his fault. He doesn’t choose to be called up from work—he’s not creating the curses just so he can get out of house viewings. But you want to be there with him when it’s time, watch him brighten when you find… when you find the one, if you ever do. After nine-nearly-ten viewings, the prospect is beginning to dim. 

The fourth house, the house with the copper handle, is already off the market. Someone else—another couple—decided the damp and the rot in the wood and the sagging roof, all of the cons that Satoru had found, could be accepted, because they’d found the one. 

You’ll find it. It’ll just take time: that’s what everyone says. Still, it’d be easier if Satoru could see it with you. 

 

--

 

The tenth house isn’t the one. Your estate agent—a slim, long-faced woman in her mid-thirties with a phone constantly in her palm—gives you a clipped warning that it’s probably not going to be your liking. 

It’s sleek, and modern, and someone else would probably love it. But there’s a swimming pool carved into the garden that’s gone brown with disuse, and you can only think of the piles of dirt uphurled to make space for it. There’s no bathroom on the top floor, which means no en suite, which Satoru will hate. You try to open the window of the master bedroom by hand but realise that it requires a remote control. It’s a smart house, apparently. 

There’s enough bedrooms, at least: enough for you, and for the kids to each have their own room, and then some for guests. There’s more than enough for a two-person household. When you first started looking, you were half-concerned that it was an indulgence, only going for houses that were larger than your childhood home. Satoru had been insistent, and you’re splitting the deposit with respect to your incomes, so he’s putting the majority of the money towards it. You both can more than afford it. And after a year of living in Satoru’s penthouse apartment, you can’t deny that you’ve grown accustomed to a certain exuberant lifestyle.

When you and Satoru were asked for the house size you’d be looking for, there hadn’t been an option to just put ‘large’, or ‘big enough’. The option presented was ‘family-sized’. 

This house is family-sized. It’s built for parents and children. Of course, the kids will be staying over all the time: they need their space. But there’s space enough for Megumi and Tsumiki, and more. 

A family-sized house. It’s not that you and Satoru haven’t talked about it. Mostly. You probably could talk about it more. You’ve just been so busy, and there’s everything else you need to think about, and now you’re thinking about this evening, and—

But this house isn’t the one, regardless of the number of bedrooms it has. The front door is white. The handle is a lacquered steel. 

“I don’t think so,” you say, to your estate agent. “I mean, Satoru’s going to come some other time. Maybe he’ll like it?”

She raises her eyebrows. 

You sigh out a laugh. “Probably not.” You stare morosely at the remote-controlled window. “Once the novelty wears off, that’d drive him insane.”

 

--

 

You have to stop by Yaga’s office to drop off some paperwork, and then the shops, and so it’s about eight when you get to the Gojo household. You’re greeted to the enticing smell of something cooking, and when you let yourself in you hear a cheer come from the living room. 

“Hebi-san! Hebi-san, come look!”

“Tsumiki?” you call, bemused. You wander towards the sound of her voice, shrugging your coat off. “Everything alright?”

You walk into the living room to see the kids sprawled out on the floor, books filled with vinyl-wrapped pages encircling them. There are multiple sagging cardboard boxes scattered around them. When Tsumiki sees you, she screeches and waves you over. Her hand knocks over a pile of A5 pictures, and she emits another mini-shriek and busies herself building them back up again. 

“Megumi was looking in the loft for my old katana,” Satoru says, from the corner. He’s leaning on the wall, blindfold slung around his neck, cheeks flushed. 

He pushes off and walks over to you. In an apologetic, lowered voice, he murmurs: “I got back about an hour ago—I’ve had a stew going on the slow cooker. I’m so sorry about earlier.”

You offer a small smile. “I know.”

“I wish I could’ve been there,” Satoru says. In the low, warm light of the living room, his eyes shine. You can feel his frustration—not at you, but at the situation—bleed through his apology. “I really do. I don’t like leaving you to sort it yourself. It’s just—”

“When you’re needed, you’re needed,” you finish for him. Satoru grimaces, but you reach out to touch his arm. “I get it. Honestly. Sorry if I was short over text, I was just a bit annoyed. It can’t be helped, though.”

Satoru’s nose wrinkles. “Still.”

“Still.” You shrug. “It’s okay, Satoru. Don’t worry about it. And the stew smells really nice.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Satoru puffs up his chest and you laugh softly. “It’ll taste even better. C’mon, look what the kids have found. You’ll love it.”

His fingertips find the small of your back to steer you forward. Sparks dance on your skin.

“Hebi-san,” says Tsumiki promptly, as you lower yourself to the ground to join her. “Have you seen these? Gojo-san said you haven’t.”

“She definitely hasn’t,” Megumi says. He shoves a picture in your face. “You haven’t seen this one, have you?”

Tsumiki cackles with laughter—clearly, she’s familiar with this one. You narrow your eyes so it comes into focus. 

It’s an old photograph, slightly fuzzy, colours blown at the corners. But it’s of you and Satoru, when you were much younger. You’re in one of the bedrooms of the Gojo household, the room you and Satoru would share when you’d stay over and you wanted to pretend to have a ‘proper sleepover’. There’s two single beds in frame, and you’re each in one of them, sheets bundled up to your chin with only your little heads poking out. 

You can immediately see why the kids like the picture; you and Satoru look awful. You’re both horrifically ill, with sweat-damp hair and sickly skin. Satoru’s tongue is lolling out and your nose is shiny with snot.

 You push the photograph down and see that Megumi’s pinching his lips in the way that shows you he’s trying not to smile. Your heart warms at the sight of it. 

“Oh, god,” you groan, and Tsumiki lets out another stream of giggles. “When was that?”

“February 1999,” Megumi reads, from the back of the photo. He looks up to you. “That’s ages ago.”

“It was,” you say, smiling. “How old were we, then, Satoru?”

“Nine.” Satoru crouches down next to you and takes the photo in his hands. “This was when we got so ill Yahaba got us the matching raincoats.”

“Matching raincoats?” Tsumiki starts rifling through another pile. “I swear I’ve seen some of those. Are they green and blue?”

“Those are the ones.”

“So matching raincoats are 1999-plus,” Tsumiki mumbles to herself. “Not all of the photos have dates on them. We’ve been trying to put them in chronological order.”

You stare at the tens of dozens of piles. 

“You’ll have to help, Hebi-san,” Megumi says seriously. “We can try, but we can’t do it on our own. And Gojo-san’s useless at it.”

“I am not!”

“You are.” Megumi picks up a pile at random and starts laying it out on the ground. “We’re trying to get a timeline for everything but he’s getting focused on the wrong details.” Megumi sniffs. “Like sentiment.”

You and Tsumiki both laugh. 

“So what have you found so far?” you ask, rising to your feet and stepping carefully around the photographs. “Any favourites?”

“Well,” Tsumiki says, “Megumi likes the older ones, in the 90s, but there’s not as many of them.”

“It’s because both look like kids,” Megumi says. “It’s funny.”

Tsumiki purses her lips. “They look like kids because they were kids.”

“Yeah, I know that, stupid.”

“Don’t call me stupid!” 

“But you are.”

“You’re stupid.”

“Stop calling each other stupid,” you say. “You’re both very intelligent.”

“Anyway,” Tsumiki says, “Megumi’s trying to find the older ones—”

“Did you know you Gojo-san was shorter than you? For years? ‘Cause I’ve got photographic evidence that—”

“Stop interrupting me!” 

“Megumi, stop interrupting your sister.”

“You’re such a child, Megumi. Luckily, I forgive you. Because you’re young and silly.”

“Shut up.”

“Tsumiki—”

“What I was saying,” Tsumiki says, sending a holier-than-thou stare at Megumi, which he ignores, “is that I’m trying to find some of the older ones. Like, when you’re teenagers, or something. But so far we’ve only got before high school stuff.”

“There’s vintage pictures of the Chapel.” Megumi picks up one to show you: it looks like it was taken on a disposable camera, though you can’t remember when Satoru would have had one. But it’s a picture of you, sitting cross-legged in the Chapel, playing on Satoru’s Game Boy Colour, and he’s the only one who could have taken it. “Look.”

“When was this?”

Megumi shrugs. “Doesn’t say.”

“I’m hypothesising that it’s early noughties,” Satoru says. “Since the Chapel looks pretty nicely done-up, but we’re too young to go to school.”

“I guess so,” you say. You stare a little longer at the photograph; your old gloves, your drab clothes, your messy haircut. The faint blur to the photo gives it a nostalgic feel. You hadn’t even known these photographs existed—Yahaba must have had them developed without telling you, likely continuously throughout the years. Maybe she’d mentioned it to you, and you’d forgotten. Grief tugs at you, but you shift your focus to the present. Tsumiki and Megumi, methodically sorting and filing. Satoru, now approaching with a pile of pictures in his hands.

“This,” Satoru explains, grinning first at you and then at the kids, “is exactly what we’ve been looking for. Everyone: I have struck gold!” 

He drops the pile theatrically, and you catch a glimpse of white sand and blue sky before the pictures scatter on the floor. Half of them flip as they land, and Satoru picks one up at random and presents it to you all.

“It’s the teen years!” Satoru says. “Well, it’s the very-late-teen-years, and maybe-the-early-twenties. I think these are the oldest ones Yahaba printed.”

“Wow,” Tsumiki murmurs. “Wow! When was this?”

Megumi shuffles onto his knees and peers over her shoulder. “Hebi-san, you look cool.”

“You don’t need to sound surprised,” you say dryly, and examine the picture. You laugh. “That’s when we went to the beach. We were almost nineteen, I think. Fourth year. Look, that’s Shoko, and that’s Nanami, in the back.”

“That’s Nanami-san?” Megumi’s eyebrows shoot up. “No way.”

“I tried to tell him that his haircut was incredibly unstylish,” Satoru says. “But alas, he didn’t listen.”

“I can’t believe that’s Nanami-san. I mean, Shoko-san looks pretty similar, but Nanami-san. Is it seriously him?”

“I’m afraid it is.” You smile as Megumi’s lips threaten to tug into a grin. “Let’s try to find some more of him. Surely there’ll be a few here.”

There are more of the beach trip than you remember taking. It had probably been Satoru, with some new-fangled phone he’d been obsessed with. The first iPhone, maybe? The thought makes you laugh. 

There’s photographs of the beach trip; the journey there, and the journey back. Then you, Satoru and Shoko when you’d graduated high school: Satoru has an arm slung around Shoko’s shoulder, and you’re laughing at the two of them, your mouth hidden behind your gloves. 

Photos cataloguing the day you’d first moved into your new apartment; you and Satoru are both dressed casually, and he’s got a bandana around his head that you remember making fun of him for. 

The last picture you can find of the day is just of you: he’s captured you mid-sigh, your hands on your hips, lips just opening. The floor’s littered with unopened brown boxes, and your face is damp with sweat, and though it’s clearly the end of an exhausting day, you somehow manage to look quite pretty. You’re so young. Nineteen, young and beautiful. How was that—what, less than a decade ago?

There’s a resurgence of photographs when the kids arrive. Yahaba, emboldened by the return of life to the Gojo Household. 

It takes you by surprise to see the kids as they once were; so tiny, and skinny, with such wide sad eyes and frail limbs. You can hardly reconcile the images; the traumatised, malnourished children in the photographs, to the laughing—currently bickering, which Satoru hastily squashes—healthy children in front of you. 

“Whoa,” Tsumiki says softly, looking over at the picture that you’re holding. “That’s us.”

It’s of their first day at school. You and Satoru stand in the corner—your face is turned to the camera, focused just beyond it, presumably to Yahaba. Tsumiki and Megumi take focus, two skinny children with skinny legs and skinny arms and uniforms just a little too large. You’d gotten the smallest size possible, for the both of them, you remember, but the clothes had still gaped and sagged against their little frames.

“That’s you,” you say. “Before we all properly knew each other.”

There are photographs of the children all around the house; beaming Tsumikis holding trophies framed above the mantlepiece, scowling Megumis post-exorcisms filling the fridge. But none of them when they were this young, or this sick. 

You watch Tsumiki, carefully. She purses her lips, and her eyes flicker with thought. She glances up to you, seemingly absent-mindedly, and then her lips unfurl into a grin when she catches you watching. She raises her eyebrows. Her cheeks dimple. And you’re struck with the realisation that, without words, you know what she’s saying: I’m alright. Stop worrying.

You know these kids. Of course you know these kids. God, you love these kids.

“How old were you when you first took us in, Hebi-san?” Tsumiki asks, looking back down at the pictures. She leans over to pick up another—one of you and Satoru at the beach. She compares the two, her gaze flicking between them in a quick one-two. “You look basically the same age here.”

“I suppose we were,” you say carefully. “If we were in fourth year when we went to the beach, then we were nineteen when we found you guys. Just about, I think.”

“August, 2009,” Satoru says, with a nod. He stands up, mussing up Megumi’s hair—“gettoff”—and moves closer to see the pictures. “Yeah, we’d be nineteen-ish here.”

“Mmm. Nineteen, then.”

“Whoa,” Tsumiki says again. Then her nose crinkles, and she tilts her head back so she can look at Satoru upside-down. “You were really young.”

“Nineteen’s not young,” Megumi protests. “It’s way old. You can do loads of stuff when you’re nineteen.”

“It’s only four years older than me,” says Tsumiki, blinking, “which is nothing. I couldn’t… I couldn’t even imagine being in charge of anyone.” Tsumiki flushes. “Let alone… us.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Tsu-Tsu,” Satoru says. “You two were perfect angel children.”

Tsumiki giggles. In the corner of your eye, you see Megumi do one of his embarrassed scowls. 

“Well,” you say, holding back your smile, “it’s a good thing you won’t have to be in charge of any children any time soon. You’ve got school and university and your whole life ahead of you.”

“Yeah.” Tsumiki grimaces. “No offence—because, obviously, we’re very grateful for everything, of course—” 

“Oh, Tsumiki—” 

“—but I’m definitely not going to be in charge of any kids when I’m nineteen,” Tsumiki finishes. She shudders a little. “I mean, cool, but I’m going to university. And then I’m getting a masters degree, and then I’m getting a PhD.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” you say, “future Dr. Fushiguro.”

Tsumiki beams. 

You look up to Satoru. “Don’t you think we look young here?” 

Satoru doesn’t reply. He’s looking at a photograph. 

“…Satoru?”

He startles. His eyes jump to yours. “I—Yeah?”

You pause. Your lips part, hesitant to ask in front of the children. 

But Satoru can read you as well as you can read him, and he forces his jaw to relax, and gestures you over. “Look at this one.”

Tsumiki perks up. “Is it good?”

“Is it a young one? Gojo-san, are you shorter than Hebi-san?”

“Not quite,” Satoru says. There’s a touch of melancholy in his voice, and it’s only when you catch a glimpse of the photograph do you understand why. “It’s our first day of high school.”

There are four of you in the picture. Shoko, her hair cut short, arms crossed over her chest. You, gloves still on, a hesitant smile on your lips. Satoru, next to you, his old rounded glasses perched crookedly on his nose. And Geto. 

Geto’s holding the camera: he’s got his arm stretched out to hold it. You remember this picture being taken: Satoru had kept complaining about whether he looked good enough in each take, and you kept berating him for taking up too much of you time. 

It wasn’t a good first impression. Geto had told you so afterwards, as a joke to try to make you feel better when you and Satoru were fighting. Satoru had appeared disgustingly self-absorbed, and you had appeared snide, like you secretly hated him. Neither of you had seemed all that nice at all, or like you had the potential to become anything more to him than classmates. 

And then he’d had gotten to know you both.

“Who’s that?” Megumi asks, his finger tapping on Geto’s forehead. You glance to Satoru, ready to intervene, but you don’t see any of the familiar tension in his features. 

“Suguru Geto,” says Satoru. His voice is low: casual, tinged with sadness. 

Megumi’s eyes narrow. “Suguru Geto? But he’s…”

“Yep.” Satoru sets his shoulders back, then waves the paper in Megumi’s face. “Does it kinda freak you out, huh?”

“Who’s Suguru Geto?” Tsumiki whispers to Megumi, who nudges her with his elbow and makes a face. 

“I’ll tell you later,” he mutters. He looks back up to Satoru, and then to you. “I didn’t know you were all in the same class.”

Satoru gasps, mock-offended. “Don’t act as if I kept this a secret from you, Megumi! I told you that we both knew him, and that he’s the same age as us, and that—” 

“Yeah,” Megumi says, “yeah, I know. I guess I didn’t put it together, or something. That’s so weird.” He chews the words over in his mouth. “Was he… I mean…”

“Strange as a wild blind cat,” Satoru says flippantly. “He liked to chew grass and only answered by the title of Lord Ruler.”

Megumi glowers. “You’re not—”

“—taking your question seriously,” Satoru finishes, “yes, I know. I’m not.” He sighs. Then he sniffs, suddenly, and jumps to his feet. “And I will answer any questions you may have with the upmost honesty, Megumi, but I need to make sure the stew doesn’t overthicken. Can you imagine!”

“Right,” you say, “time to eat. Make all of this somewhat tidy, and we can return to it after dinner.”

“But—” Megumi says, even as he starts to arrange the photographs into neater piles. “But he didn’t answer my question.”

“I will.” Satoru bends down to scuff Megumi’s hair again, ignoring him when he squirms away, and grins. “But right now we’re going to eat the yummy tasty stew I made us. And then we’re going to talk about something more cheery as we eat the stew. But I’ll answer your questions later. I promise.”

Satoru pinches his cheek. Megumi shrugs him off, but shrugs. “Yeah, okay.”

“Fantastic! Tsumiki, will you help me serve out the food? Megumi, it’s your turn to lay the table.”

Megumi stands up, grumbling about how Tsumiki always gives herself the biggest portions, and heads to the dining room. You go to follow him—but for a moment, you linger on your own.

You look back down at the photograph. Geto’s hair, that he’d kept long; you remember how lovely you’d found it, dark and silken and shining. He’s got it tied away from his face, but in the evenings he’d undo it so it would fall loosely around his face. You would want to braid it, but as much as you would have liked to, you never asked, for fear of touching his skin. 

It shocks you how young he looks. How young you all look, really: everyone’s cheeks are still rounded, features unrefined, posture awkward and teenage. Not even Satoru has grown into himself yet, though you remember being fifteen and thinking he was the most beautiful person you’d ever seen. Now, you look at the group of you all, and you can only see children: teenagers, you suppose, all in your first year of high school. All Tsumiki’s age. 

Nowadays, Geto’s cheeks will have slimmed, his features will have refined, and his posture straightened gracefully. He’ll have aged as much as you and Satoru both have. How has he changed? Not only physically, but in himself. Could you even recognise him?

You don’t often think about him—you don’t like to think about what he’s doing nowadays. You don’t have to, fortunately, with your job. You might have had to before. 

You might have to again. Satoru’s confided in you that he thinks that Geto will be returning soon; that he’s sensed Geto’s cursed energy after attacks, so intense he likely missed him by mere hours. Curse attacks have been increasing gradually throughout the year, but have suddenly withdrawn in the past month. Like they’re building up for something. 

Satoru doesn’t know what, but it’s… something. You’re sure you’ll learn what it is soon. And then you can prepare for it. You’ll be okay. You and Satoru together, you’ll make sure that everyone is okay.  

 

--

 

“I think this one is my favourite,” says Satoru. “If you’re saying I’ve got to choose?”

“Mmm.”

“Then it’s this one.” He wafts the picture in front of your nose, and it makes a humorous wobble-wobble noise. Both you and Satoru chuckle. 

“Really?”

“Yep.”

You reach around him to see the photograph in a better light. You’re back at your apartment, the kids seen to bed, and you’re finishing off the night as you always do. Both of you on the couch, Satoru’s arm around your shoulders, your body curled against his, and a blanket draped over your legs. Satoru’s favourite medical drama plays blithely in the background, though neither of you pay much attention to it: it’s must be the fifth time you’ve each seen this episode, and you’re sure Satoru could recite it by rote. 

The photograph is one of the beach pictures. You presume that Nanami or Shoko took it, since it’s only you and Satoru in frame. You’re both smiling at the camera—Satoru’s doing a peace sign, you’re standing next to him and waving—and are wearing swimming costumes that are damp with seawater. Maybe it was taken after you’d come out of the sea, after Satoru had tried to teach you how to swim, or after your team water-volleyball match. 

Once again, you’re struck by how youthful you both look. Satoru, of course, is beautiful. You distinctly remember how much of a challenge that day had posed for you, if only because Satoru was half-naked the entire day. 

But you’re something, too. You’re in a simple two-piece bikini, and you’re glowing in the sun. Your smile seems genuine, which you remember it being, and it softens your features. 

You can imagine why Satoru would like it. But still, you shuffle a little closer to him—his arm tightens around you—and crane your neck so you can see him more clearly. “Why’s it your favourite?”

Satoru smiles at you. “I don’t know.” Immediately, he corrects himself: “Yes, I do. I think it’s… where we were, at this point.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well. By this point, we’re old enough that we’re not deluding ourselves about the world, because bad shit’s happened and everything. But it’d also been over a year after everything with Suguru, so I’m not feeling all crazy super depressed like I had been.”

“I guess.” Your lips flicker. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“What, Suguru?”

You nod. “With everything going on the past few months. And then seeing him in the photographs…”

“Hmm.” Satoru’s lips purse, and his gaze focuses on something in the distance. “I don’t think so. Not right now, at least.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” He kisses you on the forehead, and then on the side of your eye, which makes you swat at him and laugh. “Later, definitely. But I’m tired, right now. I don’t have the energy to get into it all. And it’s not like it’s urgent, within the next few days, or anything.”

He’s telling the truth. And you trust him. So you smile and turn back to the picture, warmth wrapping around you. “Okay. Tell me more about the beach picture.”

“Yes! Yes.” Satoru taps the photograph against his chin, then holds it out again so you can both see. “Yeah, that’s what I was saying. We know that life kind of sucks, so we’re not naïve or anything, but we’re also still at school, so we’re wide-eyed and hopeful and innocent. It’s a sweet balance, I think.”

“Innocent? Really?”

Satoru laughs. “Eh. Eh, maybe.”

“I don’t think you’ve ever been innocent,” you say against his chest. Satoru laughs again, and you feel it as a gentle rumble all up against your body. 

“You don’t think?”

“Not even. You were born with the devil inside you.” 

“Maybe that’s another reason I like the picture so much,” Satoru mumbles, against your temple. “Cause it’s got you in a bikini.”

You snort. “Oh, stop it.”

“I will not!” he protests. “You’re very sexy here, Hebi-Hebi.”

“I’m…” You squint up at the photograph. Yes, you were just thinking that you looked nicer than you remembered you did, but, still.   “Hmph. Well, now you appreciate it.”

“Oh, I appreciated it back then,” Satoru says lazily. “You just didn’t realise.”

“Shut up.” You hide your smile behind your fingers, but Satoru sees it regardless and smirks. He knows that it’s your weakness, him recounting the moments you missed, when he had reciprocated your feelings and you hadn’t understood. You’re yet to become immune to it, and you’re slowly realising that you may never be. Just like Satoru’s eyes, or his smile, or the lilt of his voice when he says your name… it’s an ever-growing list, really.

“Never,” Satoru says. “And I’m telling the truth! I thought you were super sexy back then. I was just also super clever and super good at hiding it.”

“You’re so lame.” 

“I remember,” he recounts, the smirk still playing on his features, “when you first suggested doing a beach trip. And you came up with all these clever reasons to convince Yaga, all about inter-year unity, and the importance of cultivating independence and self-discipline, and everything else. And, yeah, for sure, I cared about all of that. But I also kept thinking that if we went on a trip to the beach, I’d get to see you in a bikini. Which is basically just underwear. And that was pretty much the main motivator.”

“I—Satoru! Seriously?”

He shrugs, unashamed. “Kinda. By that point, I’d figured out that I liked you, at least. Why wouldn’t I want to see you in a bikini?”

You fight back another smile. “You’re so… oh, my god.”

“And I was not disappointed,” Satoru says. “I vividly remember this moment when I’d changed into my trunks, but you hadn’t yet, and I was just, like, waiting for you to. Cause I was so excited. And then you told me to turn around because you thought I’d be all teenage boy about it—" 

“Which,” you interrupt, “looking back, was a very reasonable assumption.”

“Indeed,” Satoru concedes. For a moment, his eyes flick to you, and he scans your face in a split second. Then he continues as blithely as before, but the gesture warms you: Satoru, checking if you were enjoying the conversation, or if your protests were hiding a genuine discomfort. Clearly, he’d recognised that it was the former. “Yeah, I guess that’s fair enough.”

“Maybe I had a premonition.”

Satoru grins. “Something like that. Anyway, I was turned around, and obviously I didn’t look because I am a gentleman before anything else—don’t laugh, Hebi-Hebi!—and then I’m just waiting there, and then all of a sudden you just stride in front of me, all bikini’d up, and you’re walking away like it’s no big deal at all!”

You raise your eyebrows. “I see.”

“And I freeze for, like, a solid five seconds, because—I mean, whoa.” Satoru taps at the picture again, and your cheeks warm. “But then I have to pretend like I don’t care at all, because I’m undercover at this point. So I think I make some dumb comment about what your wearing, or whatever.”

“When, in fact,” you say, dryly, “you were so blown away by my half-nude form, that you struggled to make complete sentences for five whole seconds.”

Satoru sniffs. “I don’t know why you’re joking.”

“I’m not. I’m not. It’s sweet, I suppose.”

“Really?” Satoru’s lips turn upwards. “Hell yeah.”

“Hell yeah,” you echo, still amused. You tuck your chin against his wrist, holding him closer, and Satoru’s fingers splay comfortably against your sternum. “Maybe we should go to the beach again. Take the kids.”

“That’d be fun,” Satoru agrees. “And then we could finally teach you how to swim!”

“Oh, god.” You let out a laugh at the memory. “I remember that. I wasn’t a very devoted pupil.”

“Not really. But I forgive you.”

“Thanks.” You purse your lips. “I should learn how to swim, shouldn’t I? I mean, I’m… twenty-seven? I’m almost thirty.”

“You’re not.”

“We’re almost thirty,” you insist. “And as someone who’s almost thirty, I should know how to swim.”

Satoru yawns. “Why don’t you how to swim, then. You could do lessons.”

“Adult swimming lessons?”

He shrugs. “Why not?”

“I’m not sure,” you say, playing around with the idea. But then your nose scrunches, and you shake your head. “I don’t think so. I’d be okay with the swimming aspect, but what happens if I start to drown? How’d I be rescued?”

“You wouldn’t be okay with someone touching you to get you out?”

“It wouldn’t really be touching though,” you say, “would it? I mean, if I’m drowning, I’ll already be panicking, and then what? Someone’s going to clasp me in their arms and drag me out of the water?” 

You shudder a little at the thought—bare skin, gasping for breath, so much touching—then tuck yourself closer to Satoru and shake the feeling off.

“I guess not.”

“No,” you say, resolutely. “Not where I’m at right now. It’s just… there’s so little clothes, and it’s so much skin, and… flailing limbs, and everything.” The thought tightens your chest. You shake your head again. “Nah. Not yet.”

“Okie-dokie,” Satoru says. 

He, too, knows when you’re being honest, and when not to push you. 

Satoru’s index finger traces the dip of your collarbone. Distractingly. You hone in on the sensation for a few moments; his long, thin fingers, the rough calluses at his fingertips, the softness with which he touches you. 

“Maybe the dream house will have a pool,” you say. You let your eyes close, and focus on the feeling of Satoru touching you. “So I can practise without the risk of drowning.”

Satoru chuckles softly. “I thought you didn’t like the idea of a pool.”

“I don’t know anymore,” you sigh, and you feel Satoru tense slightly, next to you. His body shifts so he can look at you more easily. “Maybe we just get somewhere with a pool, and we fill it in if we don’t like it. DIY and everything.”

“That sounds a lot like settling.”

You open your eyes, feel his gaze on you. Satoru’s blue eyes are wide, but you can read his hesitation in them, and maybe a touch of regret. 

You smile sadly. “Maybe we need to settle.”

“I don’t think so,” Satoru says immediately. 

“Maybe, though.” You tip your head so it lays more comfortably on his chest, and nestle closer to him. You can feel his body heat, even through the layers of your clothes. His arm around you is strong, firm, and comforting. “Maybe this is the point where we’re supposed to realise that the dream house doesn’t exist. You know. The One.”

“You think it doesn’t exist?”

“Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe we… compromise, or something, and make the best with an 80%-perfect house.”

“What about our 100%-perfect house?”

“Maybe 100%-perfect doesn’t exist. In the real world, and everything.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” Satoru says, gently, and nudges you to look up at him. When you do, he kisses you, which is a pleasant surprise. When you break apart, Satoru scrunches up his face and appears to come to a sudden realisation. “Yep! Yeah, Hebi-Hebi, that cannot be true.”

“You think?”

“I don’t just think,” Satoru says, pecking another kiss at your lips, “I’m certain! I know 100%-perfect already exists.”

Your head tilts. “It does?”

“For sure,” Satoru says. He grins at you, and his eyes glimmer. “And I know, because I’m looking right at it.”

You roll your eyes as Satoru cackles. “Oh, god. That’s so lame!”

“It’s not!” 

You try to push away from him, but Satoru scoops you up before you can get away. You put up some half-heated resistance, but before you know it, Satoru’s got you sat in his lap, his hands on either side of your hips. 

You squirm away from him, laughing, but when he leans up to kiss you, you sigh happily into it and return the kiss without any reluctance. 

“That,” you say, against his lips, “is an awful, awful line.”

“It’s not a line,” Satoru protests. “It’s the absolute truth!”

“It’s such a line.”

“I swear to you it’s not.”

“Sure.” But Satoru’s kissing you, and it’s an obvious attempt to stop you from retorting, but a welcome one. 

He eases your mouth open with a confident familiarity, that which has only come from practise and time. You lean closer to him and wrap your arms around his neck. When you scrape your gloved fingertips through the short hair at his scalp, you feel rather than hear Satoru’s pleased sigh. 

There’s a comfort that comes with being close to Satoru, in this way. You remember when you were younger, and you used to think that you would never get to be like this—comfortable with someone else’s presence so near you. And how you’d never even considered you would grow to enjoy it, or want it, or—or, really, simply grow comfortable with it. 

You wouldn’t be able to count the number of times you have kissed Satoru, now. Soft, quick kisses in the morning; light-hearted pecks to say hello; kisses that get long and lazy, both of you used to touching each other and wanting to continue; or, like now, when you start slow but build in intensity and eagerness. 

Satoru’s hands had settled at your hips, but when you tilt your head to the side, press yourself closer, urge him to do the same, his hands rise. He fists his fingers in the back of your shirt and the material tugs away from you. Cool air rushes up your back. 

His lips part yours and push your jaw open. Your arms tighten around his neck. At the same time, his tongue licks into your mouth in one long, intentional swipe that makes you shudder against him. 

Satoru knows what it is you like—how you like to be kissed, touched. He knows where to put pressure, where he needs to linger, how long he can linger before his focus switches so some other part of you. 

It’s not uncommon for him to kiss you like this, how he’s half needy, half in control. Satoru presses his lips to the side of your mouth, to your jaw, the underside of your jaw, your neck. You hum in appreciation, and Satoru huffs out a small laugh at the sound. 

You mind flashes—to Satoru, to his hot breath and quick tongue, to the way he’s kissed you in the past, then withdrawn. To the time last week, when you’d felt your craving for him so intensely, and found it didn’t need to overpower your fear, because your fear wasn’t there anymore. Your stomach flutters, but it’s just nerves, happy and normal nerves. You know your mind well enough to distinguish those from the cold stirrings of panic. 

Satoru. Satoru, who has never pushed. Satoru, who kisses you without expectation, who has waited without reproach, who has never made you feel guilty for asking him to. 

It’s been a long time. Since getting together, there’s been so many milestones, so many new experiences—and still, there’s been this. Maybe you could have, earlier, maybe you could have. But you haven’t. And he’s never pushed. He never has—and, maybe, you want to.

There’s pressure between your legs. You cord your fingers in his hair, pull his lips to yours. Satoru smiles into the kiss. Your heart burns with love for him. The pressure between your legs. You inhale through your nose, and then press yourself down against him.

The effect is instantaneous, and still so subtle you might not have noticed if you hadn’t been paying attention. Satoru’s breath catches—his lips falter just for a split-second against yours, before returning their attention to you in even greater intensity. Pleasure swells up inside you. Satoru, trying not to let you notice, holding himself back, trying not to let things progress. Normally, you appreciate it—love him for it. 

Today, you don’t want it. 

It’s when you roll your hips again, more deliberately this time, more obvious, that Satoru makes his reaction obvious. A hiss escapes him, loud and sudden. Satoru’s fingers twitch in your hair. Good. You go to move against him again, and Satoru inhales—quickly, he grips onto either side of your hips, holding you firmly in place. 

He pulls away from you, and a bashful smile flickers across his lips. “Sorry. I’m getting a bit—ahead of myself.”

“That’s okay.”

“No, I mean—” Satoru’s cheeks are flushed, but he’s still smiling, and he leans closer to kiss you, once, twice, before pulling away again. “You know what I mean. We might have to slow it down, though. Sorry, my bad, call me a dirty old man all you like, but—” 

“Satoru.”

“Hmm?”

“I—” You raise your eyebrows and will him to understand. “Satoru.” 

“Hebi-Hebi,” he says, lowering his voice and mimicking your tone. Satoru laughs at his own joke. “You alright?”

You smile despite yourself, and push off him in a mixture of amusement and exasperation. You turn the television off, and Satoru straightens. How is it that, sometimes, Satoru can practically read your mind from one minute shift in a microexpression, and sometimes he is so unfathomably unaware?

“Are you alright?” Satoru repeats. His eyebrows furrow.

“I’m fine,” you say, “I’m good. Honestly. I’m just… I’m trying to…”  

“…What?”

Your lips purse as you try to keep your face straight. God, for all that you’ve thought about this conversation, now you’ve actually got to say the words, you’re faltering. It’s not even difficult—it’s only Satoru, you tell yourself, it’s not a big deal—but when you open your mouth, the words don’t come. 

Satoru’s smile flickers. His eyes scan your face, taking everything in, reading you. “Is everything okay?” he asks, as he reaches over to you and brushes your hair out of your face. His touch is gentle and soft. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” you say. Satoru’s expression is both concerned and overwhelmingly loving, and you soften. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” he says instantly, naturally. 

“And I was thinking.” You could just say it. You’ll just say it. “I was thinking, and I’d like us to start sleeping with each other.”

“Oh! Oh, okay.” Satoru grins, and pecks a kiss on your lips. “Alright, then. If you’d like to, then I would too.”

You blink. “Right.”

“That’s the proper response, isn’t it? We’re still good, no pressure, everyone’s happy?”

“Yes,” you say slowly.

“Great!” Satoru kisses you again. “Ah, I love you. Did I tell you that you look beautiful in this shirt? Because you do. Agh, you’re amazing.”

“Satoru.”

“Yep.”

“I meant—having sex. I want us to start having sex.”

“For sure!” Satoru nods happily. “Yeah, that’s what I figured you meant, Hebi-Hebi, I’m not dumb. In fact, I’m remarkably intelligent.”

“Right,” you say, “just because…”

“What?”

Your mouth closes. “I don’t know. I guess I figured it’d be a bigger deal for you.”

“It can be a big deal,” Satoru says, as his thumb brushes absent-mindedly against your temple. “If you want it to be a big deal?”

“Not really.”

“Yeah. Cause in my head, it’s, you know, cool.” He shrugs. “You’re letting me know, and we can keep it in mind, and then at some point, then we’ll properly think about it, and then it can be a bigger deal. But right now, easy breezy!”

“Ah.” Ah. Despite yourself, you breathe out a small laugh. “Oh.”

“Easy breezy!” Satoru goes to kiss you again, but you pull back, covering your mouth with the back of your hand. Satoru stares at you. “What?”

You’re really struggling to hide your smile. “I—Satoru.”

“Yes,” Satoru says, narrowing his eyes to search your face once again. “Are we not easy breezy?”

You purse your lips.

“I feel I’m not getting something. What is it?”

“Satoru.”

“You’re giving me a weird look,” he says, “like I’ve maybe missed something and we’re maybe not easy breezy, so…”

“Satoru.”

“So… so…” Satoru trails off and his lips part. His face drops. “Oh.”

Laughter bursts out of you at Satoru’s stunned expression.

“So?” you ask. “…What do you think?”

“Not easy breezy,” he says quietly, and you laugh again. “Oh. You mean—now?”

“It can be easy breezy!” You take his hands in yours, still smiling. “You’re right, it doesn’t have to be a big deal, it’s, it’s fine, it’s—”

“No, no.” Satoru shakes his head, but you can already see the thoughts dancing behind his eyes, his brain speeding to catch up and rush ahead. “You want to have sex now? Like, right now.”

“I mean. Yeah.”

“Cause I thought you meant. Like, at some point. In the next few weeks, or something.”

“Right,” you say, “I guessed. I was thinking you were treating this very casually.”

Satoru groans and slumps down the couch. “I didn’t realise you meant right now!”

“But also, you should be treating this casually. I mean, it doesn’t matter, right? It’s us. There’s no pressure.”

“No pressure?” Satoru jumps up to his feet and claps his hands together, waving his clasped palms towards you. You watch him, incredibly amused. “Oh, Hebi-Hebi, you jest!”

“What are you—” 

Satoru falls to his knees in front of you. “Of course there is pressure,” he says, very seriously. “I, Satoru Gojo, must prove to you that you can have good sex!”

You roll your eyes. “Oh, you don’t—” 

“I absolutely do!” Satoru’s blue eyes are shining with laughter, but he furrows his eyebrows and adopts an expression of faux-severity. “You have expectations. I must live up to these expectations.” 

“I really don’t think so.” 

“I must!” Satoru pouts. “You know that I must, my love. With great experience—which I have—comes great responsibility. I think. That’s the saying, right?”

“Not quite. Satoru—” 

“I suppose the wording doesn’t matter. The point stands, though. I should devise a plan of action! A step-by-step plan to prove to you that—” 

“Satoru. Satoru, stop.” 

“I—”

You take his face in both of your hands and wait for him. The façade remains, lingers, and then melts away at your touch. His expression turns gentle, hesitant. There’s vulnerability, too, vulnerability only you could see. Satoru’s eyes still shine. His lips still smile. Here he is, real. 

“I don’t want you to pretend, with this,” you say. “I don’t want you to act differently because you think I want something that isn’t you. I want you.”

Satoru’s eyelashes flutter, and still his smile grows.

You return the smile. “I love you. I want to have sex with you. There’s no expectations. There’s no pressure. It’s us, just us.”

Tender, Satoru presses a kiss to your palm. “I want to have sex with you, too,” he says. His eyes do not leave yours. “If you’re sure?”

“I am.”                                                                                           

“Just me?” 

“Just you,” you say. “That’s all I want.”

“You…” 

And Satoru rises up on his knees, and brings his lips just millimetres from yours. 

Your legs part to make way for him. He hesitates, then smiles, and kisses you. You sigh into it, into him. 

Satoru’s lips are soft and familiar, and yours part when his part, and close when his close. You fall into the kiss; it’s long, open-mouthed, wet. Satoru breathes into your mouth and it’s warm and comfortable and you giggle at the sensation. 

He licks at your laughter eagerly, tongue swiping against yours and along the back of your teeth. 

At this angle, you have to lean down—just slightly—to kiss him, and you curl your fingers in his shirt to pull him upwards. God, he’s so beautiful. Even his shirt is lovely, an old blue button down he’s had for years, and you realise with a thrill of arousal that you want to see it on your bedroom floor. 

“Still want to make a plan,” Satoru mumbles. His lips trail down the side of your neck. “I wasn’t lying about that.”

“You don’t need to,” you begin to say, but then Satoru’s mouth latches to your pulse point, and the words die in your throat. 

“Want to.” His voice thrums up against your skin and your head dips back. You give him more room, more space, and Satoru understands and takes and draws himself up against you. “I want to make you feel good. Okay. Fuck. I’m going to make you feel good, so good, I swear. Is that okay?”

“Ah,” you say, incoherent. “Uhm.”

Satoru keeps muttering against you, pulls you right to the edge of the couch, closer. Your legs close around his waist, trapping him against you, and Satoru’s actions only increase in fervour.

“I want—” Satoru’s tongue darts along your throat and it feels so good you melt. “I want so much from you, I want—god, how do you smell so good?” 

“I… Satoru—” 

Satoru sucks your skin into his mouth and groans. “And you taste good. Shit. Hebi-Hebi, you’re sure? You’re really sure?”

“Yes,” you breathe. You tug at him and his lips find yours again. It’s rougher this time, messy. Your tongues slide against each other and you can hear the wet sound of it. Satoru can, too, and you can feel his shoulders shaking, his muscles going taught. From restraint, you realise, from holding himself back. 

“We’ll stop whenever you want.” Satoru’s breath stings against your slick lips. “If anything happens, we can stop, and I don’t want to you apologise for it.”

“I don’t want to stop.”

“You—” Satoru’s voice goes weak. “Fuck, okay. But I’m serious, if anything feels wrong, I want you to tell me. Straight away, I don’t care. Promise me.”

“Yeah, I promise.”

“And then if you start getting panicked—or if it all gets too much, like too much touching or whatever, that’s so fine and tell me and I’ll back off, so if—” 

You exhale and lean back, staring him down. Satoru blinks rapidly. “I am okay,” you say, ignoring how out-of-breath you already are. “I want this. And I want you. And I want you to stop fretting over me. And—” You talk over him, silencing his protests. “And I promise that if something doesn’t feel right, I will let you know. But you’ve got to trust that I will, Satoru. I trust you. You’ve got to trust me.”

“I trust you,” he says.

“Okay.” You nod, and he nods back. The childishness of the joint gesture makes you both smile, lessening the tension. “Okay. Because I swear, if you don’t—oh!”

But your voice catches into a surprised shout as Satoru grasps you by the hips and pulls you up. You’re lifted off the couch and up into the air, until you wrap your legs around Satoru’s waist and your arms around his neck. 

Satoru’s standing now, and is smirking at you like picking you up took him no effort at all. It probably didn’t—he’s strong, oh, fuck—and your face heats up at the thought of it. 

He’s holding onto you by the undersides of your thighs, but one of his hands raises to squeeze at your ass. You stifle a laugh at Satoru’s boyish grin, and find yourself desperate to kiss it off. 

And because you can, you do—Satoru hums as your lips find his again. You laugh again as you feel Satoru move, at how unprecise his steps are. Distracted. By you. Now your whole body is pressed up against him, and even through your clothes—too many clothes, you think—you can feel him. His strong chest, the thick muscle there, everything about him perfect and beautiful and yours.

Satoru takes another step, and then you hear a sharp thud as Satoru stumbles and collides with a coffee table. His grip on you slackens and you yelp, clinging onto him—and then there’s a bust of blue light and Satoru rights himself, blushing furiously. 

“I tripped,” Satoru says, before you can ask. He winces. “Sorry.”

You stare at him. “Did you just break the coffee table?”

“Uh.” Satoru glances down. His gaze darts back to yours. “No.”

“Oh my god.”

“I’ll fix it tomorrow,” he blurts, “or I’ll—buy a new one, or whatever. I’ll sort it. ‘Cause, I really, really do not care about a coffee table right now.” Satoru’s eyes go round. “Please don’t make me talk about the coffee table. Please.”

You press your lips together. Your heart feels like it’s about to burst. “You,” you say, “are so stupid—” 

“Yes yes yes.” Satoru hoists you up further and you shriek with laughter. “So so stupid. I’m the stupidest man alive. Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me.”

You don’t need him to ask. But it’s barely five seconds before Satoru’s walking backwards into your bedroom—your shared bedroom, where you live, together, god you love him—and twisting around until his feet hit the foot of the bed. You kiss him for a few seconds more, greedy and impatient, and then your back hits the mattress and you’re lying on your back looking up at him, your heart racing. He’s standing over you. 

You stare at him. Moisten your lips. Satoru’s positioned himself between your open legs, and your knees brush lightly against the outer sides of his calves. He looks—and you’ve thought this before, and you don’t think you’ll ever stop thinking it—so beautiful. 

His hair is pushed to one side, a result of your fingers carding through it, and the silver-white strands fall softly over his eyes. There are pretty pink splotches all over his cheekbones. The highest button on his shirt has come undone and it gives you a fleeting glimpse of sharp collarbones and corded muscle. 

You swallow.

Satoru’s eyes have gone dark—you don’t know when else you’ve seen his pupils so blown—and he stares at you and considers. 

You can feel the weight of his gaze as it travels down your body, so intense you feel a rush of self-consciousness. You make a weak attempt to close your legs—it doesn’t matter that you’re fully clothed, that you’re in an unequivocally unsexy work blouse and trouser set—but Satoru’s body, stood between them, prevents you from succeeding. At your movement, Satoru’s chest jumps up. You hear his breath catch. 

“What are you doing?” you ask, hesitant.

Satoru pauses. He rolls his bottom lip between his teeth and you fixate on the sight of it. “I’m deciding,” he says, finally. 

“On your plan of action?” you tease. 

Satoru’s eyes meet yours again, and he grins. “Yeah. Something like that. Now…” 

He leans over, bracing himself on the mattress and crawling in-between your legs. You hold your breath as he moves further and further up your body, until he’s holding himself above you, arms either side of your head, his eyes level with yours. 

“Hi,” you whisper.

“Hey.” Satoru’s eyes crinkle. So gently, he presses a feather-light kiss to your lips. “Is this okay?”

“I’d tell you if it wasn’t.”

“I know. I meant—this, how I’m lying.” Satoru glances down, at how your bodies can’t help but press against each other. “I’m touching you a lot.”

“I did assume there’d be a quite a lot of touching,” you say, with a touch of humour. Satoru chuckles breathily. “It’s kind of par for the course.”

“Sure. But there are other ways, if this isn’t—we can figure it out.”

Your lips quirk, and you tilt your head up to kiss him. Satoru returns it. “This is perfect.”

Satoru smiles. “You’re perfect.”

“Shut up.” You grimace and Satoru beams. “So sappy.”

“Mm.” And he kisses you again, deeper. “And,” he says, each word punctuated by a touch of his lips to yours, “you should also remember—because we’re going for a no-pressure mindset—that it’s been a seriously long time since I’ve done anything.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

“No, as in.” Satoru leans back and raises his eyebrows. “It’s been a long time. Yeah?”

“Right,” you say carefully, “I know. Me too.” You laugh as Satoru huffs in exasperation, and then gasp as he focuses on the sensitive area of your neck he’d kissed earlier. “Are you—are you saying you’ve gone rusty, or something?”

“Not quite.” Satoru bites playfully at your neck—which makes you laugh more than anything—and then leans back so he can look at you. “I’m saying that it’s been literal years since I’ve had sex with anyone, and so I’m going to last, like, two seconds. Seriously.”

“Oh!” You blink. “Oh, okay.”

At your expression, Satoru drops his face onto his forearm and wheezes out a laugh. “Don’t look at me like that!”

“I didn’t—I wasn’t—”

“I’m telling you the truth,” Satoru says, glancing back up at you and grinning. “Trying to be vulnerable, and everything. Isn’t that what you want from me, huh?”

“You’re so…” You purse your lips, but you’re smiling too. All you’ve been doing is smiling. God, you can’t stop. “What do you want me to say? Oh, fantastic? Lucky me?”

“No,” he splutters, “I’m just letting you know, now, so you don’t think I’m an absolute loser in case it happens.”

“I wouldn’t ever think you were a loser.” You eye him, and Satoru haughtily looks away. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Oh, so you’ll never call me a loser, but you’ll happily call me stupid—” 

“Of course I will.” When Satoru goes to protest, you tilt your head up and kiss him. “Oh, shush. You’re fine. Stop getting all stressed. It’s not a big deal.”

Satoru meets your gaze. “You sure?”

“I’m sure,” you say. He sighs happily, and then bites at your jaw, making you squeal. “I—Satoru! Satoru, I promise, even if you last a whole two seconds, I’m sure they’ll be a lovely whole two seconds.” 

“I’ll make sure of it.” And then his mouth softens, teeth replaced by lips, lips moving downwards, and you sigh. Clearly, he’s realised that’s the place to focus on when he wants to distract you. “And I’ve got other plans, anyway.”

“Your plans? This your big plan of action?”

“Mm.”

“So what do you… I mean, what are you…”

But Satoru’s succeeding in distracting you. He kisses you, deeper, and then kisses your bottom lip, the side of your mouth, your cupid’s bow. Satoru trails his lips along your jaw—you sigh and lean back into the mattress. 

It’s slow, careful, and you can tell that Satoru’s doing it on purpose. Every touch, kiss, brush of his lips is deliberately placed. When he finds the sensitive hollow of your neck, your hips cant up involuntarily, and Satoru chuckles. 

Eagerness mingles with frustration. Why do you still have all of your clothes on? Why does he? Satoru exhales, and his breath sends goosebumps shuddering up your arms. 

You squirm, trying to reach closer to him, trying to convey how he really should be taking that shirt off—but Satoru remains achingly slow. 

He takes your earlobe between his teeth. You squeeze your eyes shut and try desperately hard not to make a sound. You’re already hot all over, and your chest is pinching tight with anticipation. 

“Satoru…” Your voice is hopelessly breathy, but shit, you can’t control it. “Satoru, I…” 

His tongue slides from the base of your throat all the way up to your jaw, and you whine. God, that feels good. As soon as the noise escapes you, Satoru does it again, this time dragging his teeth against your skin and shit, that feels even better. Your hips jerk again. 

You curve upwards and wrap your arms around his chest, dig your fingertips into his back. You’re—you’re still wearing your day gloves, and you think for a short-lived moment that you need to change them, but then Satoru’s teeth catch on your jawbone and it wracks a shudder of sudden heat through you and oh fuck you can’t think of anything else. 

“Satoru,” you groan, half in warning, “Satoru, come on…” 

He doesn’t reply—just slides his cheek against yours so he can get better access to the soft edge of your jaw. The feeling of his lips there, and then his tongue, makes your breath come high-pitched and panting. Need fills you, an overwhelming need for him, right now, right now. 

“Satoru,” you try again, fisting your fingers in your shirt and yanking at it. “You are testing my fucking patience. Can you just—stop making me wait, please.”

“Sorry,” Satoru breathes, half in a laugh. He looks to you: his eyes are blown, and the sight nearly sends you under again. “Sorry. I’m just being a bit self-indulgent, I think.”

Your breath hitches. Self-indulgent? “What?”

“Just… this. You. Here.” Satoru’s smile turns from guilty to slightly smug, and then to something new entirely. “I just can’t get enough of it. If I just…” 

Carefully, Satoru leans down, covers a strip of your skin with his lips, and takes it between his teeth. You choke, and immediately squeeze your mouth closed to hold back your moan. 

“You’re so sensitive,” Satoru whispers. “I’m learning you, all over again. The noises you make—oh  my god. I could get off just by listening to you.”

“You—Satoru—”

“I tell nothing but the truth.” But he’s grinning, and he plants a kiss behind your ear—this time chaste—and you ignore the flush of heat that comes regardless. You smack him on the back and Satoru chuckles. He repositions his weight to the one arm, uses the other to brush stray hairs away from your temple. “Holy shit, I love you. So much.” Another kiss, to your lips. “So much you couldn’t believe.”

“I love you,” you say, and his grin widens. 

“And,” Satoru says, his eyes bright, “I really want to fuck you right now.”

You inhale. “Well. Get on with it, then.”

Satoru’s eyes shine. Then his free hand grabs you by the waist and tugs your whole body closer to him—so your hips press against his, and oh shit, you can feel him—before muttering a quick: “Come here—” and you think, finally!

And then it’s a scramble for clothing, both of you burning hot and desperate, your laughter mingling and filling the room. 

Satoru tries to one-handedly undo a button of your blouse but you snort and smack his hands away and work at your shirt on your own. You only manage a few before Satoru’s replacing your hands with his tongue, licking long stripes down your collarbone and drawing out more sighs and gasps and pants from you. 

You shake him away and reach for his shirt—so many buttons, why so many buttons—but the angle of him leaning over you cramps your arms, and you lean back your head and laugh, equally so frustrated and so in love. 

Satoru seizes the opportunity to kiss at your neck, and you tip back your head to give him better access. You grab at the bottom of his shirt and pull it upwards, exposing the skin of Satoru’s back. 

The front of the shirt catches at his stomach—you can’t see—but your attention is on touching, feeling, learning all the grooves and planes of Satoru’s skin that you’ve never been able to touch before, not like this. 

Muscle contracts beneath your palms, and you grab onto him, try to hold him there, perfect. 

 “I’ve still got my day gloves on.”

“You do.”

“I should—go change them.”

Satoru’s free hand pins you down by the waist. “You’re not going anywhere.” He kisses down your collarbone, tries again with the buttons, fumbles. “Fuck’s—your shirt’s too slippery. Can I rip it?”

“Absolutely not,” you say.

“Please? I’m trying to—get it off—”

“It’s a nice shirt!”

Satoru meets you with a playful, petulant stare. “What about me?” he whines, his voice pitching. “What about what I want in life?”

“That’s what you want in life? To see me without my shirt on?”

“Exactly! That’s exactly what I… oh. Oh, shit.”

“What?”

“Shit.” Satoru’s face has dropped. He stares blankly in front of him for a split-second, and then his eyes refocus back onto you. His eyebrows shoot up in mild panic. 

“Satoru?” you ask. “What is it?”

He hesitates, and bites down hard on his bottom lip. Very slowly, he says, in a low voice: “I don’t have any condoms.”

“…What?”

“Shit. Fuck.” Satoru blinks hard, then pushes himself onto his side on one arm, the other running over his face. “Hebi, I haven’t bought condoms in—literal years. I literally do not have any in the apartment. Shit!”

“I do,” you say. 

“You—” Satoru’s mouth drops. “You—what?”

Your lips quirk, almost shyly. “I bought some last week. They’re in the en suite, hidden under my tampons.”

“You…” Satoru surges forward to kiss you, and then jumps off you and sprints to the en suite. He disappears behind the door and you immediately hear the sound of frantic scrambling through the bathroom cupboards. 

You tilt your head back and laugh, and take the chance to right your heart rate. 

“And get my gloves, too!” you call, sitting up. 

“What? Where?”

“The top drawer. Next to the soap?”

More fumbling. “These plastic ones?”

“Yes!”

“Oh, Hebi-Hebi—you’re too prepared. Way too prepared. How long have you been planning this?” 

Satoru emerges from the en suite, a roll of condoms in one hand, a pack of your nylon gloves in the other. 

The image is humorous for exactly one second—and then you properly see him, and you have to take another moment to breathlessly admire him. The sight of him sends tremors through your pulse; his flushed cheeks, his half-open shirt, his untidy hair. Strands have been pushed out of place and sit messily, out of their normal order. 

A lock falls into Satoru’s eyes as he stands there, his chest heaving, and the impatiently huffs it away. And then your eyes flick down, and you see very clearly the prominent—very prominent, oh, oh—bulge in his trousers. You inhale sharply. 

“Don’t answer that,” Satoru says, still catching his breath. “If you do, I might actually come in my pants.”

You catch yourself in a laugh. “Wow,” you say. “Hot.”

“Aren’t I just.” Satoru casts the condoms to the side of the bed and tosses the gloves to you. As soon as you’ve got the new pair on, he practically jumps back onto you. “Right,” Satoru says, before enclosing your mouth with his. “No more moving. You’re staying right here.”

“Take your damn shirt off,” you say, groaning as his mouth makes its way down your neck, “and I’m not going anywhere.”

“You first,” he mutters against your skin. 

“No.”

“Yes.”

No way. 

“Satoru.” You tug on his hair so he looks at you again. Satoru’s breath hitches—his mouth drops open. Oh. Oh, okay, file that away for later. “Take your fucking shirt off. Now.”

Satoru’s lips part. His breathing seems to stop. “Yeah,” he whispers, voice hoarse. He nods faintly. “Yeah. Um. Yeah, yeah, okay.”

And you can barely even think to file that away for later—because Satoru’s sitting back on his heels and he’s working frantically at his shirt buttons. Within seconds he strips it off and tosses it to the side. 

You stare at his bare chest. You’ve—it’s not as if you haven’t seen Satoru shirtless before, because you have, countless times, but never like this. He’s just so beautiful. Every time you have marvelled at him, at how much you love him; alabaster skin, so pale, and gossamer-thin. 

Like the cool blue veins that lace the backs of his hands, you see the faintest outline of blue here, too. At the strip of skin just around his sharp hipbones, where the defined V points downwards. And the waistline of his trousers has hitched down, has crumpled and lined around his belt, and you see the beginning of a delicate trail of silver hair. 

You remember how often you’d wanted to have him here, like this, in front of you. Remember how much you’d wanted him to want you. And now: here, perfect, in front of you, wanting you. Just you. 

You reach out and your fingers hook on his belt; through the gloves, the backs of your fingernails brush against his skin. Satoru’s abdomen tenses. He’s holding his breath. Your hands move up, feeling him; his chest, his pectorals, his shoulders, collarbone, neck. These gloves are thin, and you marvel at how realistic the sensation of touch is, with them on. It’s almost as if you weren’t wearing the gloves at all. Almost, of course. But enough. 

You hold him by the side of his face and Satoru’s eyes close. He leans into your touch, and you feel his entire being beneath your palm. You are holding him in his entirety. 

“Come here,” you murmur, and pull him to you. 

Satoru’s eyes flutter open. His lips flicker into a smile. 

“Always,” he says. 

He reaches too, for the remaining buttons of your blouse, and within moments they’re undone. You lean up to pull the blouse off, drop it by the side of your bed. Satoru blinks. 

Ah, yes. You’d forgotten about this. 

“That’s not your normal bra,” he says, his voice going dry. 

“No, it’s not.”

“You wore it today? Because…?”

“You’re not the only one with a plan of action,” you say, teasing. 

Satoru lets out a long, low sigh. “You’re killing me,” he says, “I swear, you’re killing me.”

A kiss to your sternum, and a kiss there again, and then to your nipple covered by the lace of your bra. It’s not even all that fancy—but you suppose Satoru has only seen you in the overly comfortable, worn, nude pieces that you prefer for workdays. This is a nicer material, a nicer fit, but still plain—and yet he cups your breasts with shaking fingers, peels the strap off one of your shoulders and replaces it with his mouth. 

“Will you do something for me?” Satoru asks, quietly, his breath warming your skin. 

 After a slight delay, you say: “Yes.” 

“Tell me what you like.” Satoru’s lips brush against the hollow of your throat. “I want to know.”

“What… what I like?”

“What you’re into. What you like done to you.” Satoru pauses to lean up and kiss you. His eyes crinkle in his smile. “What turns you on? I’m reading off synonyms, here. You know what I mean.”

“I…” You drag your mind to the present with immense resistance. “I… don’t actually know.” 

“You don’t know?”

“Not really,” you say. It’s not as if you’re lying. You look to the side. “It’s not like I’ve had great sex before, or anything. Or that I’ve ever really… enjoyed it.”

A look passes behind Satoru’s eyes, and then he shakes it away. 

He nods slowly. “Right.” His tongue darts out to moisten his lips, and you try very hard not to watch. “Okay. So what about when you’re on your own? What do you do, or—what do you think about?”

Think about?

You feel warmth rising to your cheeks. “…You.”

Satoru grins. “Now we’re getting somewhere. And what do you think about me doing?”

“Anything,” you say, honestly.

Satoru’s eyes light up and he laughs, and then kisses you through it. 

When he breaks away, he huffs out a breath, endeared. “You know, you’re not exactly making this easy for me.”

“Sorry.”

“Agh,” Satoru groans. He ducks his head. “God. I’ll forgive you, just this once.”

“You will?”

“Mmm,” he mumbles, against the skin of your neck.

“Hey, I appreciate it.”

“You’re very welcome.”

And he’s kissing you. A proper kiss, this time, long and deep and wet. His fingers skate downwards, linger on the curve of your waist, dig in. Your back arches and Satoru pushes his hand between your shoulder blades and the mattress. 

He feels for the band of your bra and with a confident ease he undoes the clasp. You bite down on his lip and pull. Satoru grips hard onto you, then tugs your bra off your shoulders, casts the lace aside. 

Your breasts move with your frantic breath and Satoru stares down at you, bared beneath him. You see thoughts move through his mind lightning-quick, and then a determined crease appears between his eyebrows. 

Satoru’s eyes flick to yours, and in his eyes you see blazing blue fire. And, his heated gaze never once straying from yours, he tilts his head down and takes your nipple into his mouth.

You gasp. 

Satoru sucks and you feel his teeth skim your skin—and this makes you moan, loud and uninhibited. You buck your hips up. 

Pleasure sparks up your stomach as you grind against him, against the thick bulge in his pants. You press your hips up again and again, trying and failing to keep to a rhythm—Satoru’s palming at your other breast with his free hand and it’s making your mind go white. 

You dare to look back at him and feel your breath shudder through your parted lips: he’s still watching you. The realisation of why is sudden and staggering: he wants to watch you. He wants to see you—see how to respond. You’re so sensitive, he had said. I’m learning you, all over again.

His mouth is so hot, so slick. Satoru releases your nipple with a wet pop and licks languid circles around the other. His saliva cools rapidly against your burning skin. Your mouth has fallen open and small, desperate sounds are escaping you. It is all you can hear: yourself, and Satoru’s mouth licking and sucking your breasts. 

You try to rock your hips up again, craving friction, but falter when you feel Satoru’s palm slide down against your stomach. You take in a breath, about to question, and then nearly cry out when his fingers press hard between your legs. 

Satoru glances immediately to you. Permission, you realise, and concern. 

Is this okay?  his eyes ask. 

Yes yes yes yes , yours must say, because a pleased grin flashes across his lips. He shifts up to capture your lips in his, and then his fingers press against you again and you moan into his mouth. 

Even through layers of clothing you could swear you can feel the heat of his hand. Or maybe it’s you—your whole body is going hot, shaking. You dig your heels into the mattress and press your hips up into his hand, needy for more. Satoru’s fingers slide the seam of your trousers against your clit and your head tips back. Oh fuck, oh, fuck.

“How many times do you want to come?” Satoru whispers against your lips.

Holy shit, you almost do right there. Your mouth moves wordlessly. Satoru chuckles. He slows the movement of his hand against your crotch, if just to allow you the mental capacity to answer. 

“I—” You almost cringe at how broken your voice sounds. You clear your throat and stifle a whine as Satoru starts to trail lazy kisses down your neck again. “I—don’t really mind. You—you really don’t have to—” 

“Once?” Satoru scrapes his teeth against your collarbone then soothes it with his tongue. “Twice? Three times?”

“I—I don’t even need to—” 

“Four times? Five?” Satoru kisses the hollow of your neck, warmly. “I’m alright at this, Hebi-Hebi, but if we get any higher I think we might have to have a conversation about expectations.”

Deliriously, you laugh. “I—Once,” you breathe out. “Once is—is—once is good.”

“Once works for me,” he murmurs. “We’ll work up to five some other time.”

Before you can reply, Satoru slots his thigh in-between yours and grinds himself down. You swear, and he chuckles again. His voice is low and comes out a rumble—and his chest is so close to yours, pressed right against you, that you can feel the vibration that comes from him and through you. 

Satoru shifts his leg and you push your hips up to meet him and god, it feels so good. His thigh is thick and strong with muscle and the frantic thought crosses your mind that, shit, you could probably come from this. 

But Satoru—Satoru, Satoru, your Satoru—clearly has decided otherwise. You feel the searing heat of his touch slide down, down your figure. He undoes the buttons to your trousers with one hand—oh, so these buttons he’s fine with—and tugs down the small zip. 

You lift your hips and Satoru has to move off you to pull your trousers down and off your legs. And then you’re lying there, naked except for the thin fabric of your underwear. 

Self-consciousness rises against your will. You gaze up at him—at his perfect body, his lean and muscular figure, his smooth skin. The back of your neck heats. A small twinge of anxiety reminds you of your thoughts just this morning: you’re not nineteen anymore. You’re almost thirty. Not that you’re ugly, you don’t think you’re ugly, or even crazy old and wrinkled and shrivelled or anything, but Satoru has always been Satoru, and you’re not—

“Beautiful,” Satoru murmurs. 

His blue eyes are shining as they scan every inch of your body. He drinks you in, and you see everything in his expression. Love, you see, love, lust, desire, tenderness, fervour.

“God, you’re beautiful.” He’s saying it—more to himself, than to you, and he says it again and again, like he can’t stop. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, so gorgeous, perfect, so so beautiful. 

Satoru lowers himself down, and repositions himself so he’s just to your side instead of in-between your legs. You twist your neck to kiss him and he meets you with searing force, so strong and passionate you struggle to remember to breathe. 

Your hips jerk, grinding fruitlessly against the cold air, before Satoru presses his palm against your pelvis and pushes your hips down against the mattress. 

Achingly slow, he traces the seam of your underwear. Then his fingers dip down and slide against the damp fabric at your crotch. Both you and Satoru breathe in together—you hadn’t realised how wet you were already, and apparently neither had he. 

Satoru licks into your mouth. The heel of his palm grinds down against your clit, and now the layer of your trousers has been removed the sensation has been amplified tenfold. Pleasure sparks up your body and builds, burning hot, within your core.

You’re gripped with the need to touch him. Satoru’s fingers still tease you, and you push yourself up to meet them, like you could manage to make him touch you harder, less soft, less light. You need to pull him to you. You wrap your arms around him. Your hands skirt over his shoulders—now you can feel him, properly feel him—and he shivers and tenses. He’s receptive, so receptive, it makes you want to…

God, shouldn’t you be doing something? 

Satoru’s been so confident, so assured, that you’ve felt swept away by him. But you should be doing something, shouldn’t you? You don’t want to be—you don’t want this to be bad for him, or feel like a chore. You know what it’s like when sex is a chore, and you don’t want him to feel like…

Anxiety makes your gut tense. You clear your throat, and Satoru responds by moving to kiss down your neck. 

“Satoru,” you whisper, and he hums. You feel the sound in your bones. “Satoru, don’t you want me to be… I mean…”

Satoru hums again, this time moving his lips against your clavicle. You swallow hard.

“You don’t need to be doing all of this,” you say, trying to force your voice to sound just a bit stronger. “I—I’m okay, you don’t need to…” 

Reluctantly, he pulls off. Satoru frowns up at you. “Huh?”

Your neck warms. “I just… I want this to be good for you too. And I’m not even… doing anything.”

“But this is good for me,” Satoru says, confused. His eyes narrow, and his lips—shining, you notice, a beat later, shining from spit, from kissing you—purse. Then a slow smile creeps onto his features. “Oh. Oh, Hebi-Hebi, don’t you get it?”

You don’t.

“Y’know how I was asking you what you like? Because I want to know, yeah?” Satoru’s smile turns into a lopsided smirk. “This is what I like. I have—literally—dreamed about being the one who gets to see you like this. For years. And I can promise you that this is exactly what I’ve wanted to do for—a fucking decade now.”

“Oh,” you say, weakly. “But… I mean…”

Satoru quiets you with a small kiss. 

When he pulls away, his eyes are shimmering playfully. “Do you want me to prove it to you?”

You swallow again. “Yeah,” you breathe, “okay.”

Satoru’s hand moves, and his fingers circle loosely around your wrist. His gaze darts to yours, then down, and then back up to you. He kisses you languidly, carefree and open-mouthed. His grip tightens around your wrist, and then moves it, closer and closer to his body—so your hand presses right against his dick. 

Satoru’s lips don’t falter against yours, but you can only gasp—he’s rock hard, straining against his trousers and actually really fucking big. 

“This is how you make me feel,” Satoru murmurs against your open mouth. “I’ve barely done anything to you, and you’ve got me like this. Do you know how insane you make me? When I can touch you, and you want me to? That you want me to—” 

“I do.” The words spill from you. “I do. I want you to.” 

You’d swear you feel his dick twitch. Your mouth starts to water, and Satoru’s tongue darts along your bottom lip. You surge up to kiss him, and his tongue slides into your mouth. You suck on it, and Satoru groans deep and low. 

You shift your arm closer to him, wanting to touch him more, but barely have the chance to palm him once before he’s pulling your hand away and pinning it to the side of your head. He lets go in a split second, but only so his fingernails can trace down your ribs, over your waist.

Just as you begin to loose yourself in the kiss, Satoru pushes your underwear to the side and strokes his fingers in one long dragging motion up your pussy. 

Your back arches and you dig your heels into the mattress as he repeats the motion, gathering your wetness in his fingers but—fuck, still teasing, shit—never entering, never once pushing inside of you. 

His fingers rise. “Tell me when I’m in the right place,” you hear him say. You can’t think of the words to reply, because—because his touches are so slow, so deliberate, and you have never been touched like this by another person. You bite down on your lip to smother your whine as his fingertips pass just by, and you push your cunt into the air to try to let grind his fingers against your throbbing clit.

“There?” Satoru asks, and this time you can feel him whispering to you, mouth just below your ear. 

You feel the sudden and familiar urge to lie, for some reason, tell him it was there, but you push it away with a determined force. This is Satoru. Satoru wants you to enjoy this. You want to enjoy this. 

“Higher,” you manage, and Satoru hums his thanks. “Just up, just up—oh, fuck!”

“There we go.” Satoru’s almost purring. Oh, shit, shit. 

Your lips part in a wordless moan and your head tips back against the pillows. Satoru rubs small, delicious circles against you and pressure builds in thick waves, rolling up inside you. Your body radiates heat, heat that is only given back into your body from Satoru’s bare skin against yours. 

He strokes your clit upwards, then changes the motion, then changes it again. All of it is good, and you let your eyes close as pleasure courses through you at his touch. It occurs to you, the only thought you can manage, that he’s testing it out, seeing what you respond best to. I’m learning you, all over again. Then, when your back arches and your heels dig into the mattress, he repeats the slow circular motion he’d just discovered. 

Repeats it again. Again. Repeats it again, until you’re so wet it hurts, and you feel your cunt clench needily around the air. You want him inside of you. 

The thought sends another wave of pleasure coursing through you. You’ve never wanted a man inside of you before, not in a position like this. His fingers tease around your opening, then rise back to circle your clit. Satoru, Satoru, you want him.

He’s kissing your neck when he says, just slow enough that you can catch it: “Sometimes I get flashes where I think I’ve made all this up. You wanting me back.”

Your open your mouth to respond, but Satoru grinds two fingers down against your clit, and you moan. 

“Not in a bad way,” he says, as he sucks and nips at your throat. “I just catch myself, remembering how long I’ve wanted you for. It all feels too good to be true sometimes.”

You force your voice to work. “I—fuck—hope you can tell I’m pretty serious about you. If that—that helps.”

Satoru breathes out a laugh. His index finger keeps moving in tight circles, and the rest of his fingers move down, tracing against your folds. Sensation floods you, coming from every angle, and you can only barely focus enough to listen to him:

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” Satoru draws himself up, and his palm presses against your clit and you push your hips in the air, trying to catch him, trying to feel him inside of you, because—and you didn’t realise how much you could want this, how strong desire could be—but Satoru’s fingers are deliberate and teasing and he doesn’t give in. “Don’t worry, Hebi-Hebi, this isn’t me confessing I’m super insecure, or anything.”

“Have you—have you ever been?”

He chuckles. He draws his entire hand against you, rolling up in a way that’s so slow it makes your legs shake. “Probably not. But you want to know what makes me certain?”

Your eyes open, and you’re staring right into his. There’s a wicked glint there that sends gorgeous heat tearing through you. 

Your lips open in a question, and then he sinks two long fingers inside of you, curling them deliciously—and the heel of his hand grinds hand against your clit, and god, the combination of sensation almost makes you scream. His fingers are so long. You realise that if they weren’t, you wouldn’t be able to feel both, with such intensity, like this. 

You buck your hips to signal you want more, but Satoru is already giving it to you. He pushes his fingers inside you again, and they curl, and white-hot pleasure keeps building in your core, coiling up like a spring begging to be released. 

“Cocky—narcissist,” you gasp.

Satoru might even giggle.

What a little bastard. God, you love him so much. 

“You love me,” Satoru says, echoing your thoughts. And clearly, he knows that you do, because he doesn’t give you a chance to respond. He strokes his fingers inside of you, in and out, keeps steady pressure of his palm against your clit.

This time, he doesn’t need direction. Satoru strokes his fingers again, again and again, and you tip your head back and feel. 

You can feel the heat of Satoru’s gaze on you. You turn to him, and you see it. His pupils are blown, and yours must be too, because he lets out a quiet gasp when you look to him. You can hear his broken, shaking breath. He’s watching you so intently—learning you—and, just as you read him, he reads you. With every hitch of your breath, every moan, Satoru’s fingers gain confidence and finesse. 

And then his movements slow. Your lips part, but he kisses you once before you can ask him why. 

Against your lips, he asks: “Can I go down on you?”

You’d swallow, but your mouth has gone very dry. 

“Ah—yeah. Yes. I mean.”

“Yeah?”

You nod. “Yes.”

Satoru’s eyes flash with eagerness. God, it kills you how excited he looks. 

“But I’m not making you come yet, am I? No, I’m not,” he says, answering his question before you can reply. Anticipation starts to build in the breath he shares with you, his lips still so close to yours. “Just once, you said?”

“Uhm.”

“Not yet,” Satoru says. He kisses you again, and then grins. “I want you to come when I’m inside you, so I can feel it. That okay?”

A beat. You try to remember how to speak. “…Sure,” you say. Your voice breaks a little. “Yeah, that’s… that’s fine.”

Satoru’s chest shakes with his laughter, and you want to say something cleverer, something you’d normally say, but then he strokes his fingers into you again and the words die in your throat. And then when his lips latch onto the sensitive area of your neck, then move to the skin on your collarbone, then to your breasts, any desire for protest falls away. 

That white-hot pleasure starts to build again, sparked to greater intensity when Satoru drags his tongue down the hollow centre of your chest. You suck your stomach in at the feather-light sensation, and Satoru notices. 

His eyes flick to yours—you’re watching him, you couldn’t not be watching him—and his eyes crinkle. He kisses the curve of your stomach, just at your waistline, and then licks one long stripe there. 

“Shit,” you say, “shit. Satoru—” 

You can hear yourself panting, and Satoru does it again, and then he pushes his fingers even further into you and you moan. Your thighs quivering. You watch his mouth move down and down and down, past your belly button, your abdomen. 

Then, withdrawing his fingers, you feel more than see his mouth move down the sides of your thighs, to the sensitive skin just next to your cunt. You can feel the exhale of his breath brush your clit. He lingers at your thighs, kissing, sucking, licking. You can only feel this—you need him, you need to feel him. Your whole body is alight and burning and you want him, love him, need him so badly.

You whine. 

“Satoru,” you say again, barely more than a shaking breath. Your whole body feels clenched and tight, desperate for him to touch you. More, you keep wanting, more and more. More of him. “Satoru. Satoru, please.”

Satoru makes a weak, choked noise. You’re too desperate to register. 

“You’re so beautiful,” Satoru murmurs, shakily. His head between your legs, he stares up at you. The sight it, you almost break there. “You’ll never know—how much I want you. God, I want—I want—I want you to—” 

You reach down and fist your hands in his hair. “Come on,” you say, “I swear—” 

His mouth latches around your clit and he sucks. You moan, loud, as Satoru’s tongue flicks in quick motions against you. You’re shaking with the pleasure of it, with the slickness, the wetness. 

Satoru licks down, licks inside of your entrance, and you didn’t even know you could like the feeling of that but oh god you really, really do. He parts your folds with his fingers and your back arches as he uses the motion to delve deeper, move faster. 

And when he coaxes his fingers into your entrance once again, curls them the exact way you like, you feel your cunt clench around him. Satoru groans instantly—feeling it, he must be—and fervently licks and rolls his tongue against your clit. Satoru’s tongue follows the pattern of his fingers from before. Your mouth has gone dry from your open-mouthed panting.

You entwine your fingers in his hair, tug his face closer to your cunt, and Satoru grasps onto your thighs and digs his fingers in. 

He’s making sounds, too—the hot, indecent wet sounds of his tongue against you, but also small little gasps and shudders every time he tries to take a breath. Satoru likes this, you suddenly grasp: really, really likes this. 

Your thighs tighten around his head and Satoru groans. His tongue works you faster, so much that he steals the air from your chest and the words from your throat. You fall back against the mattress, losing even the strength to look down at him, and your eyes squeeze shut. Pleasure keeps building, more and more, with every lick of his tongue and twist of his fingers.

Keeps building. So much—god, you need him—it feels so good. 

So good, you realise that you’re achingly close to coming. Shit. There’s a split-second when you’re tempted to let yourself, to sink into it, let yourself go, and come on Satoru’s tongue. 

But—

He had asked you, and you had said once, and you want to feel him fully. And you’re so close, that another surge of need and anticipation wracks through your body as you tug at his hair again, trying to pull him away from you. 

Satoru pulls back, breathing heavily. His lips glisten. 

“I’m close,” you breathe, barely able to manage the few syllables. “Satoru—”

Satoru doesn’t seem like he can find speak either. He nods wordlessly, and runs the back of his hand over his mouth. 

You reach for him, and he sits up on his knees and fumbles with his belt. It’s gone in seconds, and then your hands find him as he rushes towards you, captures your lips with his and kisses you—sloppy, open-mouthed. 

Your body trembles. Satoru tries to shove down his trousers with one hand—his other arm is braced by your head, supporting his weight, keeping him on top of and close to you. 

The need to touch him fills you. You want to touch him and so you do. You grip onto him, dig your fingers into his back. 

Satoru throws his trousers to the side of the bed, then doubles back and reaches down for one of the condoms. His boxer shorts are white and designer brand-expensive. He’s painfully hard beneath them—his dick strains the fabric, and your dry mouth starts to water. 

The air in-between you crackles with electricity. Your chest heaves with your breath. So does Satoru’s.

His fingers slip on the elastic of his boxers. You want to take them off for him, but you can’t move. Then Satoru’s pulling them down, and he’s still holding himself above you so you can’t even see properly, but you can see enough. 

His cock is thick, flushed a deep colour that contrasts the soft white hair around its base. You could tell he was big from the outline of his dick in his trousers, but it’s obvious now—it makes sense, your hazy mind prompts, since he’s tall, it’s proportionate, or—but you bite hard on your lip to stifle your moan at the sight. 

You can feel your heartbeat in your cunt. Tremors of your almost-orgasm still pass through you, trebling now you can see him. 

But when, staring down at him, you reach down to take his dick in your hand, Satoru shakes his head urgently. 

“Don’t,” he rasps. Heat courses through you at the sound of him. “If you touch me, I’ll come.”

You force yourself to nod. Satoru mirrors the gesture, then grasps for the condom and tears wrapper open. He rolls it down on his dick. 

Then he surges down, and he’s kissing you again, and you’re wrapping your arms around his broad, strong back in a desperate attempt to hold him closer. Satoru pulls away by a hair’s breadth. His cheeks are flushed red, and his lips still brush yours as he breathes against you.  

“I love you,” Satoru says, suddenly. 

Had you not been able to speak before? You don’t know. These words are so easy to say.

“I love you,” you say back, say for the thousandth time. 

Satoru kisses you, presses his lips to yours. Then you break apart, and you feel his knuckles brush against your entrance as he positions himself at your cunt. 

“Look at me.”

His voice is so hoarse. Your eyelashes flutter as you blink, and then stare up at him, stare into the blue eyes of the man you’ve loved for years. 

The moment is suspended there, the two of you, so close, breath mingling between your lips. Satoru’s mouth quirks. 

And then, achingly slowly, he pushes inside of you.

The stretch burns, but deliciously so. A gasp is ripped from your chest as he enters you, and you inadvertently squeeze around him. Satoru’s responding groan is deep and unrestrained—he seems to be fighting to keep his eyes from falling shut. But he’s successful: his gaze flickers across your face, drinking you in, revelling in every slight shift in your expression.

You’re so wet and open that Satoru’s met with no resistance as he slides into you, and he bottoms out in that first thrust. Satoru’s chest presses against yours, and you feel his slow, deliberate exhale as his ribcage flattens. 

“Fuck,” Satoru chokes out. 

For some reason, you let out a breathy laugh. “You okay?” 

“Yeah,” he says immediately, then squeezes his eyes shut in one long blink before opening them again. His pupils are blown. There’s only a thin ring of blue, but even in that sliver you can count so many shades and hues. “Yeah. Shit, you feel insane. Fucking hell.” He drops his forehead to yours, but when you try to tilt your chin to kiss him, he pulls back an inch. “Are you okay?”

“I’m good.” You go to kiss him again, and this time he leans down and kisses you back. “Really good.”

“Can I move?”

“Please.” That small laugh escapes you again, and you feel rather than hear it fall from Satoru’s lips, too. “Because I was—am—am really close. So, please move. Please.”

He groans. “Don’t say that to me. Two seconds, remember?”

“I think it’s been more than two,” you remind him, fighting to keep your voice steady. “If that helps. You’re doing—really good so far.”

The red flush on Satoru’s cheeks darkens to scarlet. Your eyes widen. As if to hide his response, he ducks his head down—swiftly attaches his lips to the sensitive part of your neck he’d discovered before. You tip your head back to let him, allow yourself to get lost in the sensation. 

Satoru moves. He pulls back slightly, and then slides into you again. 

“Oh, god,” you keep saying. “Oh god. Fuck. Fuck, Satoru.” 

The motion feels good already, but then he reangles and thrusts up into you and you gasp. Satoru takes it as a good sign—it is—and pushes into you again, that same way. He finds that deep, soft spot inside of you, where his fingers had found just moments before, and focuses on it. 

Your whole body shakes. You feel the heat of pleasure reignite wickedly, and with every thrust, it grows hotter. Warm, intense pressure builds rapidly inside of you. You can hear yourself taking in short, shallow breaths. Your chest heaves. 

You hold onto him, needing to anchor yourself, and you drag your fingers down his back. Satoru’s mumbling whispered words against your lips, and you can make out your name, beautiful, feels so—, before he’s kissing you open-mouthed and frantic. 

Deeper. You want him in deeper. 

You wrap your legs around his waist, pull him down, matching his thrust with a buck of your hips. It sends sparks of heat through your core, and you feel yourself clench around him. Satoru’s own hips shudder, and his muttered words become more lucid.

“So good,” Satoru whispers drunkenly against your lips. “My Hebi-Hebi. I love you, love you so much.”

Pleasure builds, builds, and you’re teetering on the edge, gripping onto him as tightly as you can. Satoru’s hand skates down your body and finds your clit again, and you whine. 

He rubs at you in those tight circular motions he’d learned had made you squirm the most, and you do, you fall apart beneath him.

“Satoru.” You can hardly hear yourself. “Satoru, I’m—” 

“Yes. Yes, Hebi.”

Your back arches. Satoru’s fingers stroke you once, twice, and then your head tips back and you’re seeing white. 

You fist your hands in his hair as Satoru works you through your orgasm, as your muscle seize and clench and then release, all at once. 

Your cunt pulses with the pleasure of it. With the aftershocks, you try to catch your breath, as you realise that your eyes had closed, and you flutter them open to try to see Satoru. 

Your body has gone lax, and you thread your fingers slowly through his hair, catching on a damp curl and scraping gently against his scalp. Satoru’s buried his face in your neck—he’s gone so still, almost trembling, tense. 

You realise: this is your first time having sex without a condom, and you don’t know if he came or not. If you missed it—

“Satoru?” Your voice breaks at the final syllable. You give up on trying to speak properly, and whisper: “Satoru. Did you—?”

Satoru makes a strained, sharp hiss. “Not—not yet.” He inhales sharply. “Wanted to feel you. But I’m—I’m—”

You wrap your arms tightly around his broad back. Still bathed in the warm, gooey feeling of your orgasm, you tilt your head so you can breathe words against Satoru’s ear. 

“It’s okay,” you murmur, and he shudders. “C’mon, Satoru. C’mon, c’mon, it’s okay.”

You can hear him swallow, feel the jump of his Adam’s apple against your throat.

“Hebi,” he groans. 

“I know.” 

And you pull as lightly as you can on his hair, just so you can see him, the way he wanted to see you. Satoru resists, but barely, and then he’s holding himself up above you, his face flushed and damp with sweat. His lips are slick, kissed red. There’s the small, white scar on his jaw; there’s the muscle in his cheek, that tenses when he pretends. You kiss him, gently, coaxing his lips open.

Your breath brushes his lips. “Move, Satoru. It’s okay. Satoru, Satoru, I want you to.” 

Satoru’s hips jerk forwards and you sigh at the returned sensation. A deep crease forms between his eyebrows as he stares down at you, and then he squeezes his eyes shut as he thrusts into you shallowly. 

His rhythm picks up, and then, suddenly, you feel his restraint slip completely away—he fucks into you, sharp and hard and desperate. 

You bite your lip as waves of oversensitivity shudder through you, but you keep your hands on Satoru, keep both yourself and him grounded. He breathes hot against your lips, and you kiss him, his jaw, his cheek, his throat. 

It only takes moments until he’s gasping, and you feel his thrusts slip from their tight rhythm. Satoru’s head drops down to your neck again, and you let him rock into you, his movements getting slower and slower until his hips shudder to a halt. 

You lie there, one hand in his hair, the other stroking between his shoulder blades. Satoru’s barely holding himself up, but you like the feeling of his weight on top of you; the freedom it gives you, being able to explore his back. 

Your chests rise and fall together. You can feel him, all along your body, the weight of him. And inside you; you’re tingling and warm, and feel as if you’ve just sprinted a mile. You brush a strand of his hair to the side and kiss him wherever you can reach—it’s the top of his cheekbone, and you peck a kiss there, and then do it again. 

A low rumble of laughter passes through Satoru’s ribs to yours. 

“Fuck me,” Satoru says, heaving himself up to look at you. His eyes are brighter now, less hazy, but he’s still prettily flushed. 

“Other way around,” you say, because it’s the first thing you can think of to say, even if it’s so unclever you feel a bit embarrassed.

Still, Satoru chuckles. He grins down at you, and there’s that playful, boyish smile that you’re so fond of. 

You both hiss a little as he pulls out of you, which makes you both laugh again. Satoru rolls to the side, onto his back. You stare at the ceiling for a few seconds, trying to catch your breath, and make a weak attempt to cover yourself with the blanket that’d been pushed to the side when Satoru dropped you on the bed.

When you glance over to Satoru, he’s pulling the condom off himself, tying it off and dropping it in the bin he keeps by the side of his bed. You stare for another moment, feel for some reason like you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing, and stare resolutely at the ceiling. 

By the time you get over yourself, and summon the willpower to look back at him, Satoru’s lying on his back again, watching you. 

“Are you okay?” Satoru asks. His eyes scan your expression, attentive. “How are you feeling?”

“Good.” You turn to your side and try to pat your hair into place. Then you give up, and Satoru snorts. “Really good, actually.”

“Yeah?” 

“Mm.” Your lips purse, and Satoru’s gaze flicks lazily down to them, and back up. “A bit sweaty, though.”

“Gah, me too!” Satoru closes his eyes, clearly satisfied with your answer, now he knows you’re okay. “Might have a shower. Wait, no, don’t think I can be bothered. Ahgh. Give me a second, Hebi-Hebi, my brain’ll start working soon.”

He runs a hand through his hair and it falls back easily—it’s damp with sweat. Attractively so. Satoru has made no attempt to cover himself, and you indulge yourself and stare at him. You watch the rise and fall of his chest—admire the pale skin, blotched with pink, stretched over strong and powerful muscle.

Satoru’s eyes open and he turns to you, catches you looking. He waggles his eyebrows in an expression of faux-seduction. “Admiring my everlasting beauty, Hebi-Hebi?”

“Something like that,” you admit.

You smile, unfettered, and Satoru’s grin widens. The corners of his eyes crinkle.

Satoru shuffles to his side, then cups your face with one hand and kisses you. It’s soft, and tender, and you feel his love of you pour through it. Emotion fills you, suddenly, and you blink. 

You break away, smiling to yourself. “I’m gonna go… use the toilet.” 

“Come back soon, my love,” Satoru says. You roll your eyes, and he cackles. 

You stand and immediately have to brace yourself on the bedside table. Your legs have gone very weak, and you almost buckle over. You right yourself, try to stand with a little more grace. 

Then you realise that, like Satoru, you’re completely naked. 

You decide that it doesn’t make sense to feel self-conscious, since Satoru has literally had his dick inside of you. And that he also loves you and everything, too. 

Still, you sneak a glance back at him. Satoru’s gaze is fixed on your ass, and when he notices you looking at him he just grins at you, unabashed. 

You huff, pretending to be offended. Satoru snickers and you turn to hide your smile. 

Feeling a little less dignified than you would have liked, you pad into the en suite. You sit yourself down on the toilet and pee. No UTI, good for you. At least this is something you remember—you’re not that out of practice. 

You breathe. Slowly, you peel your gloves off, dispose of them in the bin. You stare at your bare hands. Flex your fingers. Wave at yourself. 

Oh, god. 

You just had sex.

Good sex. Actual good sex. Genuinely good sex. 

With Satoru! You just had sex with Satoru. And you really, really liked it. 

You giggle to yourself, softly, and then clamp a hand over your mouth to try to stifle it. God, you’re not a teenager. But your fingers linger on your lips, and you can’t help but smile even as you finish in the bathroom and wash your hands. You just had good sex. Really good sex! You and Satoru just had sex. 

You feel a sudden surge of pride at your good fortune, at your life right now. If you could tell yourself from—from ten years ago, five years, even. If you could have known what your life would look like, and how far you’d be able to come. 

When you re-enter your bedroom, you dart over to your chest of drawers to take out your nice pyjamas. When you step into his view, he shuffles up and grins at you again. Satoru’s got a pair of navy sweatpants on, sitting low on his hips—you know his habits well enough that you can tell it’s absolutely intentional, and you snort. 

“Well, hello,” Satoru says, lowering his voice to sound all suggestive and ridiculous. “I’m not used to seeing you walking around like that, Hebi-Hebi. If you’re trying to seduce me, you’ve got to give me a few more minutes.”

You laugh, pulling your shirt over your head. “A few more minutes? You’re twenty-seven, Satoru, not forty.”

“Just making sure you have realistic expectations.” He yawns. The pretty pink flush on his cheeks has gone down, you notice. Then you remember that you can bring it back whenever you want to. “I’m being pragmatic about it all. Two seconds, remember?”

“I counted more than two seconds,” you say, crawling back into bed and shuffling up beside him.

Satoru wraps an arm around you and kisses the top of your head. “Barely. And that’s me being honest and vulnerable, so you’re not allowed to laugh.”

“I wouldn’t laugh. I told you.”

“I know, Hebi-Hebi.”

Satoru’s bare chest radiates heat, and you curl into him. You hear his soft laugh and feel it brush against your temple. 

 “Hey, Hebi-Hebi,” Satoru whispers, after a few minutes have passed.

“Mm?”

“Answering me honestly.”

“Yeah?”

“Answering me honestly, on a scale of one to ten—no, don’t laugh—one to ten, how do you think you’d you rate my—”

Your chest is shaking with laughter. “Shut up!”

“I want to know!”

“I told you,” you protest.

“You didn’t!”

“I did.” You crane your neck to look at him. “And you know, anyway.”

“Tell me again?” 

“Shush.”

“No, c’mon.”

“No!”

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.”

“I—fine.”

“Just fine?” Satoru’s voice pitches up comically, and you laugh again.

“No! Oh, you’re so stupid.” You tilt up your head and kiss him, and Satoru kisses you back happily. You break apart, and you’re both smiling like idiots. You both laugh at each other, at each other’s expression. “I really enjoyed myself. It was very good, for me. You were very good.”

Satoru’s eyes sparkle. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” You peck a kiss to his lips again. “It appears that you haven’t been exaggerating. Fuck’s sake, Satoru, you could find something to be quite shit at.”

“I never will,” Satoru says, “because I am quite shit at nothing. I am brilliant at everything. I am amazing!”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Yeah. And so are you.”

“Oh, don’t.” You roll your eyes. “Seriously.”

“I’m being serious!” Satoru nods very solemnly. “That was, in my humble opinion, the hottest sex I’ve ever fucking had.”

 “Right.”

“The absolute hottest. Ever. No, Hebi-Hebi, you don’t get it. Holy shit.”

Your lips purse. “Better than your old sex dreams?”

Satoru’s face cracks into a grin. “So much better,” he says, and kisses you again. After a moment he leans away, in thought. “And remarkably accurate. In certain points, at least.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Isn’t that strange?” Satoru’s eyebrows furrow. “But then also, very different. And much better. Because you’re, like, real. And when I wake up, you’re still here.”

Your heart flips. 

Satoru’s lips brush your temple, and he shuffles down again. You lean closer into him and close your eyes, unable to fight the broad smile still playing on your lips. 

“I love you,” he says, after a moment.

“I love you too,” you say. 

“Think I’m—going to go to sleep now.”

“Okay.”

“That okay?”

“Mm-hmm. Night-night. Love you.” You breathe him in. Lavendar, vanilla, that fresh clean scent of his skin. “Do you need to listen to the ASMR?”

“ASMR, Hebi-Hebi, not the ASMR. There’s no ‘the’.”

“Mm.”

“And I’m—no, can’t be bothered to move.”

“Okay.”

“Ah. Oh, you’re so lovely. So perfect, my Hebi-Hebi. Love you lots.”

“Shut up.”

“Nah.”

“Please do.”

“Not until—”

“I love you too.”

Satoru breathes out a small laugh. “There we go. Goodnight, Hebi-Hebi.”

 

Notes:

2017
Twenty-seven years old

-

And, in our penultimate chapter, the 'Eventual Smut' tag is fulfilled! Finally!

This chapter has been so long in the making. It's so silly, but literally four years ago, when I was writing out all of the tags for this fic, I just sort of went, oh yeah, of course there'll be smut at some point when they get together. Anyway, I'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

The bridge was crossed today. A new experience for me! Hopefully it fulfilled expectations -- and hopefully some of you guys are pleasantly surprised, seeing as I've gotten so so many messages fully doubting whether they'd ever actually get to this point. They have! They're there. Huzzah!

Life's been a bit crazy frantic for me, but I'm glad to have this chapter out. Again, tried to make it a bit shorter, but seeing as I am apparently incapable of chapters <20k nowadays I should've known different.

Also! Since some people have been asking — I ‘umm’ed and ‘ahh’ed over how I wanted to handle Tsumiki’s fate, but ultimately decided that fuck canon, I like happy endings, she’s going to be fine. I’ve made reference to her having increased protection at school and other stuff to essentially retcon her falling into the coma. She is fine! She is amazing! Nothing bad is going to happen to her fuck Gege this is my story now. (This is the first of the few minor changes that I’ll be making to the jjk-verse canon, seeing as we’re getting into proper canon territory). (She says mysteriously, refusing to elaborate). (Ooh!)

We only have one more chapter to go! I'm kind of in disbelief. It's going to be genuinely a huge massive one--the 300k landmark is staring at me invitingly--so we will see how that goes in terms of timing. Either way, so glad to have everyone still coming back and reading and saying nice encouraging things. Lots of love to you all! See youuuu

 

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