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“I didn’t expect you to show,” Suguru tells Satoru softly, eyes glinting.
He looks healthier than he did the last time Satoru saw him. He hates to admit to himself that the religious cult leader thing is working for him, especially the way he lets his hair down now. He always did think it was a shame he used to keep it tied up all the time.
Still, at the same time, he doesn’t really look like… Suguru. Satoru had sensed a hint of that in Shinjuku, but the gap between this man and the boy Satoru loved has widened even more with the passage of time.
And yet, as if by muscle memory, his heart aches for him anyway. He’s already gone, and still Satoru wonders if he’ll ever let him go.
“I almost didn’t,” Satoru says. “I probably shouldn’t have.”
“Why not?” Suguru asks. “I’m technically giving you another shot, after all. You can do the right thing, make Yaga and the higher-ups proud —”
“Is that what you want?” Satoru cuts across, exasperated. “Is that why you asked me here?”
Suguru’s lips curl into a smirk. “Would you do it if it were?”
An acrid mixture of anger and hurt swirls into Satoru’s chest. “I’m such a fucking idiot,” he mutters, turning to leave. “I don’t know why I thought this would be anything but a stupid game.”
“I guess that’s a no,” Suguru laughs, and the familiar sound squeezes painfully around Satoru’s heart. “C’mon, Toru, don’t pout,” he calls after him. “It’s not like you to be so sensitive.”
“Don’t call me that,” Satoru snaps before he can stop himself. Then he turns to face him again, fighting to measure his tone, “Just tell me what you want, Suguru.”
“Nothing important,” Suguru answers him breezily. “I wasn’t sure you’d come, after all. But I heard about Haibara’s sister.”
A pang of grief rips through Satoru’s chest like a bullet. Yu Haibara had forbidden his little sister from attending Jujutsu Tech, but after his death she’d done so anyway. She’d told Satoru in her first year that she wanted to pick up where he left off — to protect people from curses, as he had done.
Now, both of the Haibaras’ children are dead.
“Okay,” Satoru says, still modulating his tone. “And?”
For the first time, Suguru’s smooth confidence falters, and there is a brief moment of silence before he speaks again.
“I just wondered how much his parents knew,” he says at last. “About… me. About why I wasn’t at her funeral.”
The question is so absurd that Satoru nearly bursts into laughter. It’s such a quintessential example of who this new Suguru is, this narcissism masquerading as compassion.
“You really must be delusional,” Satoru says, “if you think you even have the right to ask that.”
To Satoru’s surprise, Suguru doesn’t disagree with him. “Yeah, I thought you might say something like that,” he sighs. “I know you can’t exactly pass along my condolences, but…” For the first time, something like real compassion breaks through Suguru’s dispassionate facade. “I am sorry. That they had to go through that again.”
“Well, I’m sure your sympathy would just tickle them pink,” Satoru tells him past the bitter taste in his mouth. “ If I could do anything about it. Anything else?”
Suguru shakes his head. “That was it.” Malice glints in his eyes again. “Unless there was something you wanted?”
And of course there are things Satoru wants — about a million of them. Suguru’s invitation wouldn’t have been so hard to resist if there weren’t, and Suguru knows that.
“You know what I want,” Satoru says, voice hollow. “Just like I know you can’t give it to me.”
Suguru has enough humanity, at least, not to respond to that.
“Then I guess this is it,” he sighs instead. “Until we meet again.”
“Yeah,” Satoru says. “Guess it is.”
He turns to leave and wonders, as he emerges back into Tokyo’s bustle, if Suguru feels the same certainty that has settled over him like snow: the certainty that the next time they meet will also be the last.
The certainty that, the next time they meet, Satoru will finally kill him.